PIRAEUS 2012
OPENING ADDRESS
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE
CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
by
His Eminence Serafeim, Metropolitan of Piraeus
Your Grace, Bishop Meliton
of Marathon, representative of His Beatitude Ieronymos II, Archbishop of Athens
and All Greece,
Your Eminence Damianos,
Archbishop of Sinai, Faran and Raïtho,
Your Eminence Pavlos,
Metropolitan of Glyfada,
Your Eminence Serafeim, Metropolitan of Kythira,
Archimandrite Damianos, Exarch of the Holy Sepulchre in
Greece and representative of His Beatitude Theofilos, Patriarch of Jerusalem,
Honourable Minister, representative of the Prime Minister
and the Government,
Very Reverend and Reverend Gentlemen,
Monastic Brothers and Sisters,
Honourable members of the Body of Christ,
Blessed Nikodimos, the
Athonite, that fragrant blossom of the grace of God and of the tradition of the
Kollyvades, wrote the astonishing work “Invisible Warfare” in which he
repeatedly refers to the debilitating labours of the vengeful and murderous
devil, of whom Saint Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, so eloquently spoke:
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against
spiritual wickedness in the heavenly realms…” (Eph. 6, 12). The attack and battle against the truth is being
intensified in our own apocalyptic days, when darkness has appeared as light
and light as darkness. It is being promoted within the walls of the Church,
with the cultivation and projection of ideas supposedly of theological
perspicacity and the contextual “updating” of the truth, the aim of which is
revision, negative transformation, banishment of true theological dialogue,
reinforcement of error and the conversion of the Church’s work of salvation
into a secular system of social principles which will embrace all the
tendentious contradictions of the
postlapsarian reality: a new and extremely dangerous process of structuring a
supposedly new theological discourse.
Those aspiring “reformers” of the Patristic theology of
the two-thousand-year old, undivided Orthodox Catholic Church of Christ claim
that the main problem of the world is not that of rejecting deification
(glorification) and sanctification but a supposedly urgent demand for a new
incarnation of the word and a contextual reading of the Fathers, as well as the
existence of a post-Patristic Orthodox theology, the product of an intellectual
approach.
The subjects they raise, however, such as: the notion and
content of authenticity and agreement among the Fathers and of the recourse to
the invocation of their authority; the
exclusivity of the relationship between Patristic theology and the Greek
categories of thought, between the Fathers and Hellenicity; the enduring nature
and prescriptive nature of the use of the ontology and Greek philosophical
categories in theology; the authoritarian Patriarchal pre-modern model and its
relationship with Patristic theology; the tolerance and persecution of heretics
in the Patristic texts and in today’s cultural pact; the interweaving of the
Church and theology with imperial ideology; the anthropological heights of the
theology of the Fathers and the supposedly imperfect anthropology of the
Fathers; the new challenges to humanity of bioethics and biotechnology. All
these supposedly make for an imperative demand for a contemporary “Orthodox
Post-Patristic theology”, a reinterpretation of our fidelity to the Patristic
tradition and fur us to it transcend it “when and where necessary”.
They also propose the outrageous position concerning a
“new Orthodox theology of religions”, with even hierarchs in high positions in
the Church claiming that the saving grace of God is not restricted to the
canonical bounds of the Orthodox Catholic Church but extends, to a different
degree and model, to other Christian “Churches”, i.e. communities, to
communities of “other living believers” such as the anti-Trinitarian Islam of
the pseudo-prophet Mohammed, or the anti-Trinitarian Judaism of the Luciferian
rabbis of the Kabala and the Talmud, to agnostics and even to atheists. They
propose the really tragic position- and attempt to graft it onto people’s
consciousness- that “the possibility of salvation that exists for those who are
outside the Church must bring Christians to the unshakeable hope that God, in
His boundless love and mercy, communicates His saving grace through other
unknown and hidden paths to those who have natural knowledge of God and faith,
as well as a moral conscience, which is characterized by a life of love, though
lived beyond the clear bounds of the Church”. But this is to traduce the Gospel
entirely and to make a mockery of the incarnate dispensation of the Word of God
and, in particular, His Crucifixion and Resurrection.
They refer to non-existent concepts, such as “neo-Patristic
synthesis or post-Patristic theology”; to supposed “Patristic fundamentalism”;
to supposed “Church triumphalism” which they analyze as a position of spiritual
superiority against the “Alter” of the West and which they present as a
spiritual isolation and Hellenicity which approaches idolatry.
Of course, no-one ought to be surprised by this new
attack against our spotless faith, since those responsible for the above
shamelessly write articles in favour of the tragic retreat from human ontology,
which breeds the ontological and ecclesiastical abomination of homosexuality,
or the more secular expression of homo-eroticism. Everywhere present is the
well-known Fordham University of the Jesuits of America, which openly
“expresses” its intention to “modernize”
and “correct” the theological positions of the Fathers of the Church. It has
already organized two conferences on the themes of “Orthodox Readings of
Augustine” (2007) and “Orthodox Structures of the West” (2010). The effort
behind all of the above is to reintroduce into theological thought the
institutional alienation which springs from Augustine’s transformation of
theology and the Church into legalism and the reversal of the terms of
ecclesiastical ontology by Thomas Aquinas. They also aim at consolidating the
view that the negative approach by the Fathers of the Church to Western
theology was unfair and misconceived; they accuse them of anti-Westernism and
an inability to understand the issues.
Finally, these particular circles who preach the transcendence
of Patristic theology or the re-formulation of it for the sake of some supposed
harmonization with the modern world, oppose participation in the enduring unity
of ecclesiastical experience, and do so in an exceptionally skillful manner
which is entirely devoid of content. Patristic teaching and the Orthodox study,
and application in practice, of the experience of the holy Fathers have been
declared under persecution because a “post-Patristic heresy” is being hatched
which insults the Holy Spirit Who glorified the Fathers, as if He were not aware of the
future and
especially the fact that the eternal Word would be found wanting in
terms of contextual updating by people who are besmirched by worldly
passions. This is a crime which is already being carried out by the false
beliefs and heresies of so-called “baptismal theology”, the theory of the
“unseen Church”, the theory of “branches or climbing vines” and the theory of
“perverted eucharistic ecclesiology” which form the basis for the total and very
real impairment of the word of the Gospel and for the success of the
misconceived union of the Church with the heretical para-synagogues of the
Roman Catholics, the Monophysites and the Protestant communities of every ilk
of the self-styled World Council of “Churches”, and not of the union in the
Holy Spirit, concerning which the Church continually prays on the basis of the
dogmas of its Synodal constitution and the Canon Law of the first millennium.
They impiously, insolently and shamelessly mangle the Lord’s
words of the Hieratic prayer in the 17th chapter of the Gospel
according to Saint John (21-25) “that they all may be one”, passing over,
deceitfully and impiously, the whole sentence of the Lord as well the following
passages with the same content, where the Saviour addresses His Father of
Lights saying: “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those
who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one,
Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that
the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory
that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in
me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent
me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I want those you
have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have
given me because you loved me before the creation of the world”. They sweep away and hide these words of the Lord,
isolating from them a few words to support their
wrong-headed ideas, and in this way undermine the true faith, because the Lord
of the Church is praying for the unity of His children, but with the Triune
mode of existence of the eternal God as His model, that is in truth,
interpenetration and faithfulness- and certainly not in heresy,
misrepresentation of the divine revelation in deceit and impairment of the
dogmas formulated by the Holy Spirit through the 9 Ecumenical Synods.
And with these
humble words, I declare the opening of this conference and ask of you to pray
to the Lord of the Church to bless it.
I pray that
the years of all of you may be blessed, peaceful and joyful.
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