The Missionary Imperative in the Orthodox Tradition

The Missionary Imperative in the Orthodox Tradition

by Alexander Schmemann

I

Until quite recently the Eastern Orthodox Church was regarded in the West as a nonmissionary church. It was an opinion commonly held that the great missionary movement which marked so deeply the Christian West during the last centuries by-passed somehow the “‘static” Christianity of the East. Today this view seems to have lost some of its strength: new historical research has made it quite clear that the Orthodox achievements in the field of mission, although somewhat different from those of the West, are nonetheless important and impressive.¹ Our purpose in this brief essay, however, is not to present a historical or statistical survey of the Orthodox missionary expansion. It is much more important to try to understand and to analyze, be it only tentatively and partially—the missionary imperative in the Orthodox tradition, or, in other terms, the relation in it between mission, on the one hand, and the faith, the life and the whole spiritual “vision” of Orthodoxy, on the other hand. A theology of mission is always the fruit of the total 251“being” of the Church and not a mere specialty for those who receive a particular missionary calling. But for the Orthodox Church there is a special need to reflect upon its basic missionary motivations, because its presumably nonmissionary character has been too often explained by, and ascribed to, the very essence, the “holy of holies” of Orthodoxy: its sacramental, liturgical, mystical ethos. Even now, as the study of Orthodox missions seems to correct the traditional view, there remains the temptation to explain these missions as a marginal “epiphenomenon” in the history of Orthodoxy, as something that happened in spite of its general tendencies and trends. This is why a theological clarification is necessary. Can a church whose life is centered almost exclusively on the liturgy and the sacraments, whose spirituality is primarily mystical and ascetical, be truly missionary? And if it is, where in its faith are the deepest motivations of the missionary zeal to be found? In somewhat simplified terms this is the question addressed, explicitly or implicitly, to the Orthodox Church by all those for whom “ecumenical” means necessarily and unescapably “missionary.”

II

It is without any doubt in Orthodox ecclesiology, i.e., in the doctrine and experience of the Church, that we find the basic elements of an answer. To formulate them, however, is not an easy task. It must be kept in mind that the Orthodox Church has never been challenged by an ecclesiological or doctrinal crisis comparable to the Reformation or Counter-Reformation. And because of this it had no compelling reason to reflect upon itself, upon the traditional structures of its life and doctrine. There was no theological elaboration of the doctrine of the Church, this doctrine having been never questioned or opposed. It was in the ecumenical encounter with the West, an encounter whose beginnings must be traced back to the early twenties (Stockholm, 1925 and Lausanne, 1927) that for the first time the Orthodox were requested not only to state their ecclesiological beliefs, but also to explain them, i.e., to express them in consistent theological terms. But at this point there appeared an additional difficulty which has remained ever since as the major difficulty of the Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement. A dialogue presupposes necessarily an agreement on the terms that are being used, a common language. Yet, from the Orthodox point of view it was precisely the rupture in theological 252understanding, the theological alienation of the West from the East that, first, made the “schism” so deep and, then, all attempts to heal it—from 1054 to the Council of Florence in 1438-1439—so hopelessly inadequate. Therefore, in the ecumenical encounter, the Orthodox Church had to face a Christian world with several centuries of “autonomous” theological and spiritual development behind it, with a mind and thought-forms radically different from those of the East. The questions it asked of the Orthodox were formulated in Western terms, were conditioned very often by specifically Western experience and developments. The Orthodox answers were classified according to Western patterns, “reduced” to categories familiar to the West, but hardly adequate to Orthodoxy. This situation, although years of contacts and conversations have no doubt improved it, is still far from being overcome completely. The “catholic language” has not yet been recovered. All this, in addition to basic dogmatical differences, explains the “agony” of Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement and constitutes a very real obstacle not only to an agreement, but to a simple understanding. One must remember this when trying to grasp the Orthodox approach to missions.

III

“Heaven on earth”: this formula familiar to every Orthodox expresses rather well the fundamental Orthodox experience of the Church. The Church is first of all and before everything else a Godcreated and God-given reality, the presence of Christ’s new life, the manifestation of the new “eon” of the Holy Spirit. An Orthodox in his contemplation of the Church sees it as the divine Gift before he thinks of the Church as human response to this gift. One can rightly describe the Church as an eschatological reality, for its essential function is to manifest and to actualize in this world the eschaton, the ultimate reality of salvation and redemption. In and through the Church the kingdom of God is made already present, is communicated to men. And it is this eschatological, God-given fullness of Church (not any juridical theory of mediation) that constitutes the root of the ecclesiological “absolutism” of Eastern Orthodoxy, absolutism which is so often misunderstood and misinterpreted by the Protestants. The Church as a whole is means of grace, the sacrament of the kingdom. Therefore its structure: hierarchical, sacramental, liturgical, has no other function but of 253making the Church ever capable of fulfilling itself as the body of Christ, as the temple of the Holy Spirit, to actualize its very nature as grace. For the God-given fullness of the Church, or rather the Church as fullness—and this is an essential aspect of Orthodox ecclesiology—cannot be manifested outside these ecclesiastical structures. There is no separation, no division, between the Church invisible (in statu patriae) and the visible Church (in statu viae), the latter being the expression and the actualization of the former, the sacramental sign of its reality. Hence the unique, the central, ecclesiological significance of the Eucharist, which is the all-embracing sacrament of the Church. In the Eucharist “the Church becomes what it is,” fulfills itself as the body of Christ, as the divine parousia—the presence and the communication of Christ and of his kingdom. Orthodox ecclesiology is indeed eucharistic ecclesiology. For in the Eucharist the Church accomplishes the passage from this world into the world to come, into the eschaton; participates in the Ascension of its Lord and in his messianic banquet, tastes of the “joy and peace” of the kingdom. “And Thou didst not cease to do ali things until thou hadst brought us back to heaven, and hadst endowed us with Thy kingdom….” (Eucharistic prayer in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom). Thus the whole life of the Church is rooted in the Eucharist, is the fruition of this eucharistic fullness in the time of this world whose “image passeth by….” This is indeed the mission of the Church.

The Church is also human response to the divine Gift, its acceptance and appropriation by man and humanity. If the order of the Church is shaped and conditioned by the eschatological fullness of the Gift, is its sacramental sign, it is the acceptance of the Gift and the growth into its fullness that is the purpose of the Christian community. The Church is fullness and the Church is also increase and growth in faith and love, knowledge and koinonia. This response has two aspects, neither of which can be separated from the other, because they condition each other and together constitute the dynamics of Christian life and action. The first one is God-centered: it is the sanctification, the growth in holiness, of both the Christian individual and the Christian community, the “acquisition by them of the Holy Spirit,” as the ultimate goal of Christian life was defined by one of the last and the greatest Orthodox saints, St. Seraphim of Sarov (d. 1836). It is the slow transformation of the old Adam in us into the new one, the restoration of the pristine beauty, which 254was lost in sin, the illumination with the noncreated light of Mount Tabor. It is also the slow victory over the demonic powers of the cosmos, the “joy and peace” which hinc et nunc make us partakers of the kingdom and of life eternal. The Orthodox spiritual tradition has always stressed the mystical nature of Christian life, as life “hidden with Christ in God.” And the great monastic movement which started in the fourth century after the Church was officially recognized by the Roman Empire, given a “status” in this world, was nothing else but a new expression of the early Christian eschatologism, the affirmation of Christianity as belonging ontologically to the life of the “world to come,” the negation of any permanent home and identification in this world.

The second aspect of the Church as response is man- or worldcentered. It is the understanding of the Church as being left in this world, in its time, space, and history, with a specific task or mission: “to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 Jn. 2:6). The Church is fullness and its home is in heaven. But this fullness is given to the world, sent into the world as its salvation and redemption. The eschatological nature of the Church is not the negation of the world, but, on the contrary, its affirmation and acceptance as the object of divine love. Or, in other terms, the whole “otherworldliness” of the Church is nothing but the sign and the reality of the love of God for this world, the very condition of the Church’s mission to the world. The Church thus is not a “self-centered” community but precisely a missionary community, salvation not from, but of, the world. In the Orthodox experience and faith it is the Church-sacrament that makes possible the Churchmission.:

IV

We can try now to formulate with more precision the various aspects of the “missionary imperative,” as implied in the Orthodox experience of the Church. This imperative is the essential expression of the Church as gift and fullness, its projection in time and space of this world. For if, on the one hand, nothing can be added to the Church—its fullness is that of Christ himself—the manifestation and the communication of this fullness constitute, on the other hand, the very life of the Church in this “eon.” On the day of Pentecost, when the fullness of the Church was realized once for all, began the time of the Church, the last and the crucial segment 255of the history of salvation. Ontologically the only newness and, therefore, the only soteriological content of this segment is precisely mission: the proclamation and the communication of the eschaton, which is already the being of the Church and indeed its only being. It is the Church as mission that gives to this time its real significance and to history its meaning. And it is mission that gives to the human response in the Church its validity, makes us real co-workers in the work of Christ.

Nothing reveals better the relation between the Church as fullness and the Church as mission than the Eucharist, the central act of the Church’s leiturgia, the sacrament of the Church itself. There are two complementary movements in the eucharistic rite: the movement of ascension and the movement of return. The Eucharist begins as an ascension toward the throne of God, toward the kingdom. “Let us put aside all earthly care” says the hymn of offertory, and we prepare ourselves to ascend into heaven with Christ and in Christ, and offer in him—his Eucharist. This first movement, which finds its fulfillment in the consecration of the elements, the sign of the acceptance by God of our Eucharist, is, to be sure, already an act of mission. The Eucharist is offered behalf of all and for all,” it is the fulfillment by the Church of its priestly function: the reconciliation of the whole creation with God, the sacrifice of the whole world to God, the intercession for the whole world before God. All this in Christ, the God-man, the Unique Priest of the new creation, the “One who offers and the One who is offered….” But this is accomplished by a total separation of the Church from the world (“The doors, the doors!” proclaims the deacon as the Eucharistic prayer begins), by its ascension to heaven, its entrance into the new “eon.” And then, precisely at the moment when this state of fullness has been reached and consummated at the table of the Lord in his kingdom, when “‘we have seen’ the true Light and partaken of the Holy Spirit,” the second movement begins—that of the return into the world. “Let us depart in peace” says the celebrant as he leaves the altar and leads the congregation outside the temple—and this is the last, the ultimate, commandment. The Eucharist is always the End, the sacrament of the parousia, and, yet, it is always the beginning, the starting point: now the mission begins. “We have seen the true Light, we have enjoyed life eternal” but this Life, this Light, are given us in order to “transform” us into Christ’s witnesses in this world. Without this 256ascension into the kingdom we would have had nothing to witness to; now, having once more become “his people and his inheritance,” we can do what Christ wants us to do: “you are witnesses of these things” (Lk. 24:48). The Eucharist, transforming “the Church into what it is’—transforms it into mission.

V

What are the objects, the goals, of mission? The Orthodox Church answers without hesitation: these objects are man and world. Not man alone, in an artificially “religious” isolation from the world, and not “world” as an entity of which man would be nothing but “part.” Man not only comes first, but is indeed the essential object of mission. And yet, the Orthodox idea of evangelism is free from individualistic and spiritualistic connotations. The Church, the sacrament of Christ, is not a “religious” society of converts, an organization to satisfy the “religious” needs of man. It is new life and redeems therefore the whole life, the total being of man. And this whole life of man is precisely the world in which and by which he lives. Through man the Church saves and redeems the world. One can say that “this world” is saved and redeemed every time a man responds to the divine Gift, accepts it and lives by it. This does not transform the world into the kingdom or the society into the Church. The ontological abyss between the old and the new remains unchanged and cannot be filled in this “eon.” The kingdom is yet to come and the Church is not of this world. And yet this kingdom to come is already present and the Church is fulfilled in this world. They are present not only as “proclamation,” but in their very reality, and through the divine agape, which is their fruit, they perform all the time the same sacramental transformation of the old into the new, they make possible a real action, a real “doing” in this world.

All this gives the mission of the Church a cosmical and a historical dimension that in the Orthodox tradition and experience are essential. State, society, culture, nature itself, are real objects of mission and not a neutral “milieu” in which the only task of the Church is to preserve its own inner freedom, to maintain its “religious life.” It would require a whole volume to tell the story of the Orthodox Church from this point of view: of its concrete participation in the societies and cultures, of which Orthodoxy became the total expression of their whole existence; of its identification with 257nations and peoples, yet without betrayal of its “otherworldliness,” of the eschatological communion with the heavenly Jerusalem. It would require a long theological analysis to express adequately the Orthodox idea of the Sanctification of matter, or precisely the cosmical aspect of its sacramental vision. Here we can only state that all this is the object of Christian mission, because all this is assumed and offered to God in the sacrament. In the world of in-

carnation nothing “neutral” remains, nothing can be taken away from the Son of Man.

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