Today
we’re facing another form of Iconoclasm: the pressure being exerted on
the Church by a secularized society to adapt to its measures and ideals,
so that the Church, too, will be secularized.
Secularization
presents a very great danger to the Church. Instead of the Church
helping the world to become like the Church, the world is attempting to
influence the Church and make it more like the world. So the Church will
retain its outward forms, but will lose its faith. It will suffer what
Papism has, concerning which Saint Nektarios wrote:
‘Through
the dogma of Infallibility, the Western Church lost its spiritual
freedom, lost its adornment, was shaken to its foundations, was deprived
of the beauty of the grace of the Holy Spirit, the presence of Christ.
From being spirit and soul, it has ended up as a breathless body’.
The
essence of secularization is anthropocentrism. The essence of the
Church, on the other hand, is theanthropocentrism. If the Church loses
or reduces its theanthropocentric nature, it declines into being a
religious foundation or one of the religions of the world.
Secular
people accept the Church as one of the religions of the world, but not
as the sole truth which saves people in Christ. To this end, they try to
equate our Orthodox Church with religions. This leads to a
Pan-religion, through the collaboration of all religions. The aim is not
the truth which saves, but peace in the world. Naturally, this ambition
serves the interests of the world powers of this age, who want people
to be subject to their domination and to be peaceful (i.e. repressed)
through the co-operation of religions.
For the
sake of peaceful co-existence, the Orthodox do not confess Christ at
inter-religious encounters. So we tolerate the Church being categorized
as a monotheistic religion, along with Judaism and Islam. Yet it is a
fundamental teaching of the New Testament and of the Holy Fathers that
anyone who does not believe in the Holy Trinity and in the incarnation
of God the Word is an atheist. ‘Those who do not honour the son, do not
honour the father who sent him’. ‘Those who do not believe in the son
will not see life, but the wrath of God will be upon them’. And
according to Saint Basil the Great: ‘Those who have not believed in the
Son, do not believe in the Father’.
Original text selection in cooperation with www.agiazoni.gr
This may
seem a rather extreme position on the part of the late Abbot George,
who was a formidably learned man and an excellent theologian, but
increasingly we see signs of his fears becoming true in the West.
Already there have been ‘testing the water’ court cases, where
Christians have been told that they may no longer follow their
conscience. In the words of Prime Minister David Cameron ‘Equality
trumps everything’. For the moment, we’re being allowed a certain
freedom, but what will we do when the occasion arises- as it most
certainly will- when secularists demand that we not merely acquiesce in,
but actively approve of their innovations. ‘Why should a same-sex
couple be deprived of the chance to have their love celebrated at a
beautiful Orthodox wedding? It’s just not fair’. This is not such an
outlandish scenario as it would have been not long ago, such is the
power of victimhood and ‘human rights’ in today’s world.
Speaking at a recent event in Athens (25 May 2016), Metropolitan Nikolaos of Mesogaia and Lavreotiki had this to say:
‘Today,
also, there’s talk- and it really is the way things are- about a
contemporary and very cunning persecution which the faith and the Church
are being subjected to. There are words that seem very sweet when you
hear them, but are really very insidious. Words such as
multiculturalism, multireligionism, human rights and antiracism. These
are words that give an impression of freedom, but in essence, behind
them, you can see that all the time we’re losing tolerance towards the
discourse of the Church and its witness. Instead of it we have what is
an initially discreet, but systematic, exclusion of it’.
And some years ago, Professor Vlasios Feidas, writing on the problems facing the Church in the 4th century, said: ‘Fourth, the complaisant or even compromising
attitude towards the Arian bishops on the part of certain Orthodox
bishops, either because they were afraid of the well-known, harsh
measures that the state might take against them, or because they were
unable to understand the theological profundity of the heretical
aberration of the Arians, or because of both of these. They therefore
tolerated common attendance or even concelebration between the Orthodox and Arians at the Orthodox liturgy and vice versa’. Substitute ‘Secularists’ for ‘Arians’ and, mutatis mutandis,
he’s describing a situation that may not be far off, unless, as Abbot
George suggests, we take a more robust stance in our defence of the
faith and our ecclesiology.
Source-Pemptousia.com
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