Orthodox Christian Meditations

Source: marcheladimitrova.wordpress.com

This last Sunday, I began the homily with a personal anecdote from my past. And that was about one of my first "encounters" with the depths of Orthodox theology through the book Christ in Eastern Christian Thought by Fr. John Meyendorff. This was in the early 70s. I do not intend to repeat here what I said on Sunday, but I did leave out an important element of the reminiscence by failing to say that when I arrived at St. Vladimir's Seminary in 1978, Fr. John was teaching there, and thus was my professor for my three-year stay at the seminary. He taught both Patristics (the study of the Church Fathers) and Church History. Needless to say, that was a great learning experience, as Fr. John was an internationally renowned theologian and scholar. One of my first papers in my Patristics course was an analysis of St. Gregory of Nyssa's The Life of Moses. And I recall a paper in my Church History course about the Old-Believer Schism which racked the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th c. 

The concept of Holy Tradition is essential to the Orthodox Church. We are not simply a "traditional" Church, but Holy Tradition signifies the very life of Christ in the Church as a gift of the grace of the Holy Spirit. Fr. John Meyendorff often wrote about Tradition and how this Tradition was expressed in Orthodox theology often within the context of the Ecumenical Councils. Leaving it at that, I wanted to share the two texts below from Fr. John in which he brilliantly "liberates" genuine Holy Tradition from passing forms that will only distort it. So, please read these two statements carefully and "think on them" as to how they profoundly express the true meaning of Tradition, and then challenge us to grasp the concept as well as possible so as not to distort it.

Holy Tradition and traditions

“The one Holy Tradition, which constitutes the self-identity of the Church through the ages and is the organic and visible expression of the life of the Spirit in the Church, is not to be confused with the inevitable, often creative and positive, sometimes sinful, and always relative accumulation of human traditions in the historical Church.”

“To disengage Holy Tradition from the human traditions which tend to monopolize it is in fact a necessary condition of its preservation, for once it becomes petrified into the forms of a particular culture, it not only excluded the others and betrays the catholicity of the Church, but it also identifies itself with a passing and relative reality and is in danger of disappearing with it.”

Fr. John Meyendorff