We believe Jesus is the Son of God and the Messiah, the Christ.
We believe we are mystically united in the invisible One Body of Christ which cannot be divided.
We believe in the sacramental life and in the same seven sacraments even while the Orthodox acknowledge a few more
It is common for Orthodox Christians and Catholic Christians to marry each other. It is believed that in the marriage bond the two become one.
In education: Orthodox Christians in America often send their children to Catholic schools where the children also receive Catholic religious education during the week and then at their own parish on Sundays; many Orthodox Christians also choose to be educated in Catholic Universities.
Greek Orthodox Christians in America adapt Catholic Christian ministry templates to fit their own ministry needs because we are the closest theologically.
Some Roman Catholic Parishes are embracing the use of Iconography.
It is common for Orthodox Christians and Catholic Christians to pray together and worship our God together.
Curiously, the filioque clause, the Pope’s role in the administrative structure of the Church, and the other disagreements and divisions existing between Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholic Christians do not seem to prevent this oneness/unity.
Perhaps these and other examples are all reality because God is creating us to be the One Visible Church?
Imagine having access to a medicinal treatment known to heal what is broken into a united wholeness but before administering it insisting that everyone, patients included, agree about which doctor is supremely in charge of the medical field and how each doctor and medical group rank and order among each other.
It seems to me this is a similar approach to the full communion conversation between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity. People are expected to be healthy and whole somehow on their own before being allowed to receive medication together that is known to makes us healthy and whole.
While we can celebrate our agreements along with how fraternal friendships among East and West clergy of the highest ranks are the best in years, hinging full communion based on human will seems too fragile a foundation than what God has already done:
“…that they may be one as We are.” (John 17.11)
“…that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us…” (John. 17.21, 22)
“…that they may be made perfect in one…” (John 17.23)
How much faster would full communion be realized if we shifted emphasis to our full communion with God?
God Himself changes hearts and minds as people spend time with Him and grow in loving relationship with Him when they commune with Him. If this happens on an individual basis and within a local community why not apply this to Orthodox and Catholic unity?
If East and West clergy and laity began receiving the medicine of immortality-the Eucharist- with the Christians with which we want to be in full communion, could God Himself change us and inspire us so we could more quickly resolve our complex, complicated organizational and theological differences?
It is my hope that Orthodox and Catholic Christians will soon be instructed by our Hierarchs to receive the Eucharist together trusting that our True Cornerstone God makes us perfect in one, in full communion, while we work through our differences.
Disciple John is concerned because there was someone doing the works of Jesus Christ who was not exactly following them. John forbid him because, to use modern Christian terminology, he was not recognized by the disciples as in communion with them.
Jesus replies, “Do not forbid him, for no one who works a miracle in my name can soon afterward speak evil of me. For he who is not against us is on our side.”[1]
Eastern and Western Christians work miracles in Jesus’ name, do not speak evil of Him, and are not against Jesus and the disciples. According to Jesus’ definition, we Christians are already on His side altogether.
Our present unity is proven even more when certain Christians in both East and West are discovered many years after their physical death intact, that is, the body is not decomposing; they are incorrupt!
How can Christians living in division experience these same miracles if we disagree on so much?
Perhaps because we are communing from one Divine source whose very Being unites us!
Our reality is as if God is saying, ‘Look, I’m blessing you the same as each other while you continue to fight over who is more right.”
Both Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis have said that Christian Division is a scandal.
“It was precisely that Gospel truth that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the inspiration for the mobilization of our churches, who,confronted with the scandal of division, (emphasis mine) gave their attention to the pressing question of Christian unity, by establishing bonds of fellowship between divided churches and by building bridges to overcome their divisions.”[1]
“But we should recognize with sincerity and pain that our communities continue to live in division that is scandalous. Division among us Christians is a scandal. “(Emphasis mine)[2]
Obviously scandal is not virtue, it is sin. Thus, of all the reasons to proclaim oneness and unity in Christ immediately and then continue working through the issues that divide us, the scandal of schism requiring Christians to sin seems to be the most urgent.
Sin misses the mark. The mark is God Who is Trinity in Unity; Diversity in Unity; Three Persons in the Oneness of God.
In contrast, Christians are a trinity (Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant) divided; diversity in division; three in division.
Jesus prayed, “…that they may be one as We are.” Later Jesus prays that all who believe in Him may be one as the Trinity in Unity is One. (John 17.11; 20-23). Believe in Jesus and be one. Belief in Jesus Christ is all that He requires for oneness.
By 55 A.D. the Corinthian Christian community was divided and in factions. St. Paul wrote to them and we clearly see in 1 Cor. 1.10, 17-34 that he pleaded with them to work through their issues as one and commune together. What was St. Paul thinking? How could he counsel divided Christians to commune together? It is possible that he believed communing with the One, True God would heal their divisions and factions because God is divine medicine and perfect Oneness.
Even with God’s example and Paul’s guidance, over the centuries Church leaders and some Christians still choose the scandal of division for the collective church experience.
Therefore let us discover how this scandal of Christian division affects the individual Christian.
The definition of ancestral sin according to Orthodox Christianity, as I understand it, offers insights. Ancestral sin is theoretically defined like an inherited disease with ‘moderate to severe’ tendencies to sin personally but without being responsible for anyone else’s sins.
Practically, Christian schism requires the individual Christian to be responsible for the sins of those Church leaders who created and continue Christian division in the following ways. First, the individual Christian is responsible for the sin of a divided Christianity created by others just by being a member of a church. This inherited scandal is felt more acutely when the individual Christian disagrees and determines ours is a false division but has no authority to change the reality. (The phrase ‘false division’ refers to how churches have not followed Jesus’ own requirements for oneness nor St. Paul’s guidance to the Corinthians, as noted above.)
Second, the individual Christian must personally sin by maintaining and creating new Christian divisions in their own life. Take the example of upholding the created custom where baptized Christians are prevented from receiving God until that person first agrees with the community/denomination in which they are worshiping God. Once they join that church community by believing its theology and teachings then God is accessible to them.
The Gospels show a different process for receiving God.
Everyone who approaches Jesus Christ with faith that He is the Messiah and that He can help and heal them receive Him, often immediately, and without needing to agree with any community or even be baptized first. The focus is only on the person receiving God for their own salvation; the community that is God!
These few examples show how the scandal of Christian division requires Christians to sin both as a collective community and also as individuals. How might this acknowledged scandal finally propel us to proclaim our oneness and unity in the year 2024-2025?
After so many centuries officially divided, I imagine how it may feel irresponsible to pronounce our oneness and unity due to our outstanding differences.
Because this blog is a place to creatively imagine oneness and unity differently between East and West Christianity, the conclusion of the article is a possible pastoral message for how our spiritual shepherds could attend to the reality that Christian division requires Christians to sin.
Most honorable brother hierarchs and beloved children in the Lord,
Reminded of God’s vision for us that He makes us one as He is one, we the Fathers and Hierarchs of Christianity East and West acknowledge to you, our beloved spiritual children, that in our faithful work to dialogue and seriously study what divides us Christians we unintentionally lost sight of the impact schism has on you, the individual Christian. We now realize that our careful and slow approach to unity with each other actually makes you, our dear spiritual children sin by inheriting and maintaining this schism in your own lives and families. You personally bear the burdens of Christian schism; scandal that it is. We are deeply grieved and we humbly ask your forgiveness for this significant oversight.
So that you our cherished faithful Christian flock may be released from these sinful schism burdens we officially proclaim Christian oneness today because ultimately God has already done this for us through His Son’s ministry as the Chief Cornerstone.
You may be assured we will continue our dialogues and serious studies of the issues where we disagree in hopes of deeper understandings. Because we will all understand ourselves as one in Christ and will be communing together as St. Paul guides divided Christians to do (1 Cor. 1.10, 17-34) we expect to generate more quickly joint statements for our outstanding issues like for example, the role of the Pope of Rome/Patriarch of the West in the Christian experience.
We understand not everyone will agree with our newly realized oneness and unity however we ask for your patience and trust in God that He is inspiring and guiding us in this Way.
Please accept this starter plan for how we will live out our oneness in parish life.
Each Christian will be able to exercise their own free will and choose for themselves how to proceed. We expect every Christian community to continue practicing their beloved prayer and worship traditions. These will not be lost since we are not suggesting consolidating traditions into one. In this way we will imitate the Divine Diversity in Unity.
Then, for those Christians who agree with us, you will be responsible for finding the priest and community who also agree with our oneness/unity in God. That the Priest will be leading his community in our newly proclaimed oneness implies their Bishop agrees with us and is guiding their clergy in this way too. This will keep good order, as St. Paul says. (1 Corinthians 14.40)
In Church communities as described in the paragraph above, all baptized Christians may receive Christ sacramentally, practice their faith and then over time grow into communion and agreement with that church’s teachings, if they choose. Jesus Christ Himself taught us that the only requirement to be one is believing He is the Messiah; it is to our Lord’s requirement that we are returning.
Those Christians who are not ready to accept this oneness that God gifts us with will no longer be living in the sin of Christian schism because the Church will officially not be practicing it.
We know that this change may result in concerns from some that what we are describing is a ‘false unity’. We understand how you might be feeling as many of us have felt this way in our lifetime too.
What we are saying is that instead of making the focus of oneness about us-limited human beings that we are- we are saying now that we are one in the True God because He made us and makes us one. Again, we commit to you that we will continue working through our disagreements as we shared with you earlier in our caring counsel.
Because this approaches oneness and unity from a different direction, for those who are not ready to accept Christian oneness, you may continue with a Bishop, Priest and Community of your choosing and in the tradition of members’ only sacramental participation until such time as you personally and/or the community are ready to embrace East and West Christian oneness in Christ in the model introduced above.
It would even be expected that anxious attempts to divide from we who write these words and also from the communities who start to practice Christian oneness are contemplated and even begin to happen. While we will grieve such decisions please know those will be personal choices that will not affect the oneness God gifts to us as Christians of East and West. Our pastoral guidance to you will be the same as the Apostle Paul’s to his flock in Corinth. (1 Cor. 1.10, 17-34 ) Again, a path forward for you is described above. We do implore you to consider how we collectively missed throughout history how our division decisions actually goes against our Lord’s ministry for us. As spiritual shepherds we must lead our spiritual children to follow our Lord’s teachings and examples.
For now, we close believing we are continuing to be empowered by the Holy Spirit Who is guiding us to adjust our traditions for our uniquely modern era of the rejuvenated Body of Christ as expressed in Eastern and Western Christianity. We are confident we are following our ancient church’s creativity and innovations in tradition making with these words and actions.
Please continue to pray for us as we pray for you so that we may faithfully become more closely resembling our True God Who is One; a Diversity in Unity.
Paternally yours.
Creatively writing the proposed message in italics above is also a prayer that gives me brighter hope that our Christian oneness is truly right around the corner…stone.
As always, what is impossible with us, is possible with God…when we allow Him and follow Him!
In the book “The Language of God”, scientist and author Francis S. Collins, one of the leading scientists of the Human Genome Project studying DNA, presents evidence for the compatibility of faith and science.
“How marvelous and intricate life turns out to be! How deeply satisfying is the digital elegance of DNA! How aesthetically appealing and artistically sublime are the components of living things, from the ribosome that translates RNA into protein, to the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly, to the fabulous plumage of the peacock attracting his mate! Evolution, as a mechanism, can be and must be true. But that says nothing about the nature of its author. For those who believe in God, there are reasons now to be more in awe, not less.”[1]
In a similar way this essay will attempt to define death as I understand its description from the Holy Bible and explanations from other Christian writers.
The problem I am studying is that Christians proclaim that Jesus Christ destroyed death by His death but death continues to exist. Therefore, what sort of death did Jesus destroy?
It is helpful to begin by reminding ourselves how God creates human beings.
“Then God said, let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.”[2] Then God “breathed in his face the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”[3]
These verses reveal that every human being is imprinted with the divine, eternal image into or onto our soul. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos explains that the soul is created immortal while the body is created mortal.[4] This explanation sets us up to understand better why Christians explain that death affects our entire being. For example, St. Ambrose of Milan describes three types of death as: spiritual (through sin), mystical (through identification with Christ), and physical (through the separation of body and soul).[5] Metropolitan Vlachos says that there is a distinction between bodily death and spiritual death.[6]
Applying the above clarifications to Genesis 2.17 where death is first discussed in the Holy Bible, it seems that both spiritual and biological death are introduced but not specified as such. In v.17 we overhear a dialogue between God and the first humans where God warns them that if they disobey His guidance “they will die by death.” Later, these first humans were tempted to believe that they would not die by death and they therefore could disobey God’s guidance if they desired.
Their disobedience results in a list of consequences two of which were that they were cast out of the garden where they lived with God and also that they would experience bodily death. Because they did not die bodily in that moment after being expelled it makes me wonder if this first consequence is a description of spiritual death because spiritual death is separation from close relationship with God Who is divine life. It also seems the expulsion is describing spiritual death because Adam and Eve would go on to live for many years until their biological death. That event would be marked with returning the body “to the ground from which you were taken[7]”. Since there are two forms of death described in the very beginning it makes sense to me to look for these two forms in the rest of the Holy Bible.
Thus when we read that God did not even create death[8] it would seem appropriate to wonder what kind of death did God not create: spiritual, biological, or maybe both?
Learning that God generates creation we can faithfully apply learnings from today’s sciences to understand in greater details creation’s cycle of birth, lifespan and biological death. Even Christians of their own generation used the sciences of their day to help explain creation.
St. Basil spoke in extensive detail about the germination and procreation process in his Hexamearon sermons. St. Gregory of Nyssa described how human’s biology from birth to death [is] in like manner to animals.[9]
These famous Christians prove biological death is clearly part of the creation God develops. Following their example, could we imply that Solomon is saying that God did not create spiritual death because God’s purpose is to enjoy close relationship with His creation, especially human beings? When humans imitate the Adam and Eve incident they make choices that result in falling away from relationship with God which again is specifically spiritual death.
Thinking further then could we agree with Solomon and say that God indeed does not specifically create biological death but that He creates a biological process that results in biological death?
These last few paragraphs could explain scientifically and faithfully why spiritual and biological death still exist even after Jesus is known to destroy death but there seems to be an explanation for our problem that is even more complete.
The Scriptures reveal that Jesus’ ministry and way of life shows human beings how to live, live through death, and live after death. The incarnation event is therefore much more than a rescue mission from sin.
St. Maximos explains that it was always part of God the Father’s plan for His Son to become human:
“He who brought all visible and invisible creation into being solely through the momentum of His will, had in His good counsel determined – before all the ages and even before the very genesis of created beings – an ineffably good plan for His creations. And this plan was for [Jesus] to be mingled, without change, with human nature through a true union according to hypostasis, uniting human nature, without alteration, to Himself, so that He would become man – in a manner known to Him – and at the same time make man God through union with Himself, and this He wisely divided the ages, determining that some would be for the activity of His becoming man, and others for the activity of making man God.”[10]
The Son of God, the Messiah of the world becoming fully human while remaining fully God provides human beings with the perfect example of how to navigate spiritual and biological death. Jesus the Christ shows us how to choose relationship with God, how to change our ways so we desire to do so and reminds us to understand death as sleep which naturally directs us to the reality of life after it.
Resurrection from spiritual death happens when one reconciles their relationship with God through the forgiveness of sin(s). The Old Testament and the New Testament have specific ways to do this. There is so much more that could be said here but I would rather focus on how the word and concept of sleep is used in both testaments about biological death:
“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Behold you will sleep with your fathers…”[11]
“And it shall come about, when your days are fulfilled and your rest with your fathers…”[12] Here ‘rest’ and ‘sleep’ are interchangeable as we see in the next verse.
“Then Solomon rested with his fathers and was buried in the City of David his father.”[13]
The concept of ‘sleep’ arouses the act of waking which vivifies resurrection!
In conclusion, Jesus definitely destroys the biological death He experienced by changing it into a Passover into eternal life. Spiritual and biological death do still exist for human beings possibly for the reasons this essay ponders. Most inspiring to me is knowing that God can and does raise us back to life, if we want, from every instance of spiritual death that we voluntarily or involuntarily cause with Him. Then we look to Jesus’ example of sleeping in death after being crucified and rising to life before ascending into the heavens. His example is inspiring and provides clarity for what happens during and after a human beings biological death.
There is much to be said about the quality of our life after death and how we can actually affect that quality but this topic is outside the scope of this present study though it seems worth mentioning.
It seems to me that science and faith are compatible in helping define death as presented in the scriptures as well as helping clarify potential solutions to the problem that plagued me.
“Thus I will end [this essay] here. If I have written well and made my point in the narrative, this is what I myself desired. But if it was done poorly and is just average, this is the best I could do. This then shall be the end.[15]”
[10] St. Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Response to Thalassios. Trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2018), 150.
Three sisters grew apart over the years. Practical and serious matters contributed. First, the sisters all moved away from each other to different countries and even different continents taking on the languages and cultures of their new homes making it difficult to converse and find commonalities. While establishing their families they could not connect frequently because they lived in a time before cell phones and social media existed.
One of the major divisive issues happened during their adulthood years when the oldest decided she would be in charge of the other two regarding family matters. The other two wanted all three of them to continue discussing issues together as equals. As that tension simmered, each sister started to believe that the rest of the family should believe exactly as they were about life and even about their religious beliefs without room for a person’s growing into certain beliefs. Disagreements on these decisions resulted in their relationship growing even more distant. One day, the sisters mutually severed ties with each other because they could not agree on everything. Later, the youngest sister tried to reunite the sisterly bond they shared when they were younger and so she protested persistently but the older sisters would not budge, inviting her instead to take a side.
As the years went on, extended family members who were pained by their family division tried to help unify the family. Not every family member was on board because complete agreement on what divided them would not be accepted by everyone.
Those who wanted reunion worked carefully and slowly because so much hurt had happened over the years. Prayerfully, many meetings varied in degrees of agreements and disagreements.
One day, a young family member had the thought that their family is already and has been one even with all the disagreements. Realizing how naïve their idea might sound to everyone after so many years of division, for encouragement they turned to St. Paul’s ministry to the Corinthian Christian community in that first letter found in the New Testament. There Paul considered the Corinthians to be one community even though among them were factions, divisions and dissensions. The Corinthians believed different things at different times about life and faith matters and the apostle Paul still invited them to continue receiving the Eucharist together.
The young person invited their family to consider the similarity of the situations. Instead of trying to agree themselves into oneness they could acknowledge that Jesus Christ already joined into one new creation the children of Israel with everyone else centuries ago- which meant their family was already one even though they disagreed on important issues.
The patriarchs and matriarchs of the family carefully considered and quickly chose St. Paul’s approach to help heal their family divisions so that in their own lifetime reunion would be realized. They knew not everyone would agree with the sudden change and began working creatively to communicate the news. They also encouraged each family to continue their own beloved cultures, customs, beliefs and traditions that had developed over the years.
The main change would be that they now understood themselves as one because of Jesus Christ’s ministry. They were even more hopeful that everyone would grow closer together during their discussions finally feeling faithfully firmer on the rock foundation.
This is a parable about the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christian families and is my prayer for a way for us to know ourselves as one.
Cornerstone Unites 