POWER AND AUTHORITY in EASTERN CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE Papers of the Sophia Institute Academic Conference New York, December 2010 Edited by Fevronia K. Soumakis 1 IC XC NI KA Editorial Board: J.A. McGuckin F.K.Soumakis Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Power and Authority in Eastern Christian Experience Edited by Fevronia K. Soumakis 1. Orthodox Christian Church. Power and Authority. Copyright © 2011 by Theotokos Press - The Sophia Institute, 3041 Broadway, New York 10027 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any process or technique without the prior permission of the Sophia Institute. The views expressed in this volume of Studies in Orthodox Theology are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those held by the Editorial Board or Officers of the Sophia Institute or its Academic or Ecclesial sponsors. Printed in Canada ISBN: 978-0-9831054-2-8 (paperback) Cover Design by Eileen McGuckin Cover Art: Icon of Divine Sophia by Eileen McGuckin. www.sgtt.org. 2 3 POWER AND AUTHORITY in EASTERN CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE Papers of the Sophia Institute Academic Conference New York, December 2010 Edited by Fevronia K. Soumakis Theotokos Press. New York. The Sophia Institute, 3041 Broadway, New York, NY 10027 New York, 2011 4 5 Contents President’s Preface 10-11 Editor’s Preface 12-15 PART I: POWER AND AUTHORITY IN ANCIENT TEXTS AND TRADITION Authority, Obedience, and the Holiness of God: The New Testament Sense of the Kingdom 18-33 John A. McGuckin Literacy, Orality, and the Brokerage of Power and Authority in Late Antique Egyptian Christianity 34-60 Stamenka Antonova ‘I Must Decrease’: Spiritual Direction and Power in the Orthodox Tradition 61-69 Alexis Torrance “The Limits Now Fixed”: Appealing to Authority in the Trullan Canons 70-82 Seraphim Danckaert The Relationship between Bishops, Synods, and the Metropolitan-Bishop in the Orthodox Canonical Tradition Alexander Rentel 83-90 The Theology of St. Cyprian of Carthage: The Unity of the Church and the Role of the Bishop 91-102 Theodor Damian An Exploration of Hierarchy as Fractal in the Theology of Dionysios the Areopagite 103-118 Georgia Williams 6 PART II: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE Gregory the Great and a Post-Imperial Discourse George Demacopoulos 120-137 Holy Disobedience: Resistance to Secular and Ecclesiastical Authority in Orthodox Christian History 138-162 A. Edward Siecienski Church-State Right-Ordering: St. Columba’s Early Medieval Example in the Insular Isles 163-170 Kim McCann The New Emperors? Post-Soviet Presidents and Church-State Relations in Ukraine and Russia 171-192 Nikolas Gvosdev PART III: THE INTERACTION BETWEEN CHURCH, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE Phoebe as an Example of Female Authority Exercised in the Early Church 194-208 V.K. McCarty Symphonia in the Secular or How to Be Orthodox When You Lose Your Empire 209-218 David James Dunn Training the “Community Servant”: The Greek Orthodox Church in America and the Teachers College of St. Basil’s Academy, 1959-1973 219-232 Fevronia K. Soumakis Authority in the Church: Confronting Contemporary Challenges Frank Dobbs 233-240 The Synod Guiding the Church: A Patristic and Theoethical Perspective 241-247 Eftychios Phil Eftychiadis 7 PART IV: BOOK REVIEWS 248-261 Trakatellis, D., Authority and Passion: Christological Aspects of the Gospel According to Mark By William Gall Hieromonk Silouan, Wisdom Songs: A Book of Wisdom Chapters in Five Centuries By Paul F. Knitter Chryssavgis, J., In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers By Vicki Petrakis Cleenwerck, L., His Broken Body: Understanding and Healing the Schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches By Sergey Trostyanskiy Palmer, M., Philosophy of Religion: Classic and Contemporary Readings. By Sergey Trostyanskiy Fanous, D., Taught by God: Making Sense of the Difficult Sayings of Jesus By Sergey Trostyanskiy Kärkkäinen, V., Holy Spirit and Salvation: The Sources of Christian Theology By Sergey Trostyanskiy Biographical Notes on Contributors 262-265 8 9 President’s Preface John A. McGuckin It is a pleasure to be able to offer the third volume of Sophia - Studies in Orthodox Theology, this time on the theme of how Power and Authority play themselves out as organizing forces across Church History. The scholars in this present study show how both things are integral aspects of the Church; charisms of the Lord himself passed on to his resurrectional community. Orthodox ecclesiology in both theory and practice has traditionally laid great stress on the virtues of obedience and conformity to authoritative charism that flow, as corollaries, from the exercise of these valid charisms of the Lord’s continuing dominion, or basileia, over his Church which is his Mystical body. In many instances, however, that great Mystery of the faith has been over-narrowly channeled, in late-modern Orthodox writing, to being a commentary on how a section of the Church (especially its clerical leadership) exercises the Lord’s exousia. But an overly clerical understanding of Christian authority distorts the picture considerably. We also know from even a cursory glance at the history of the Church, that one of the concomitant problems associated with the exercise of valid authority, is the imposition of authority inappropriately, and we may say, invalidly. Christ’s own exercise of exousia was accompanied by his “extreme humility”; and often Christians have exercised sway over others, without regard for this balancing and liberative aspect of authority as service for the community. This has happened times innumerable, despite the Lord’s own explicit warning that it must never become institutionalized as part and parcel of Christian culture (Mk. 10. 42-45). The use of power on the wider horizon has also impacted the Church from without: from pagan Emperors persecuting the faithful in ancient times, to modern autocrats suffocating Orthodox experience in more recent history. Both power and authority, therefore, are so potent, and so multi-faceted as ideas that it is important to examine them carefully from the perspectives of an Orthodox consciousness. Today we live in a world where traditional authorities are often disregarded. Those claiming to speak authoritatively to the wider culture now have the difficult charge of being seen to be worthy of being heard, not merely having the right to be listened to (and 10 obeyed) by virtue of the office they hold. All of these things make the theme of our third annual Sophia conference a suitable and important notion for contemporary Orthodox scholars to review and gloss. This book, ably edited by Fevronia Soumakis, performs that task impressively. John A. McGuckin. President of the Sophia Institute. New York. December 2011. 11 Editor’s Preface Fevronia K. Soumakis The essays in this volume were delivered at the Third Annual Conference of the Sophia Institute in December 2010 at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The theme of that conference, “Power and Authority in Eastern Christian Experience,” brought forth a diverse group of scholars who contributed their perspectives on the ways the Eastern Orthodox Church, in its broadest sense, has negotiated the notions of power, authority, (dis)obedience, and resistance over time and space. These insightful essays promise to draw the Orthodox world into a dynamic and productive discourse. This volume then can be seen as evidence of the conference’s scholarly merits and of the creative energy exerted by Orthodox thinkers in generating the momentum to educate, debate, and further an understanding of our faith on important issues. Some of the authors hold positions in academia, while others are graduate students or independent scholars. All are exceptionally qualified to contribute their intellectual understanding of the Eastern Orthodox experience. The essays are grouped together under three broadly conceived themes. The first group deals in whole or in part with power and authority in ancient texts and tradition. In his essay, John A. McGuckin, president of the Sophia Institute, offers a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the New Testament sense of the Kingdom. He elaborates upon the covenant relationship of divine Exousía as authority as it is intricately connected to the nature of the Kingdom or Basileia tou Theou. Drawing upon the works of Plato, Socrates, and Jacques Derrida in her analysis of the development of emerging literary genres in late antiquity, Stamenka Antonova demonstrates the ways in which the ‘sub-culture’ of the Egyptian-Christian desert movement negotiated religious power and authority. Alexis Torrance addresses issues of power and authority by providing scriptural examples of how the Eastern Christian tradition has promoted and protected the concept of spiritual direction from spiritual abuse of power throughout its history. In his essay, he analyzes the spiritual director’s practice of “self-abasement, humility, and love” as the foundation for safeguarding spiritual direction. The next three essays in this group offer a critical assessment of ethics and canon law. Seraphim Danckaert examines the canons promulgated at the Council in Trullo to 12 illustrate the growth of Christian theologians’ dependence on patristic texts and Scripture as a source of authority. Like Danckaert, Alexander Rentel grounds his research in the corpus canonum as an authoritative source to examine the question of primacy in the Church. Rentel discusses the nature of the relationship between bishops, synods, and their metropolitans and how that relationship is defined within the intertextual “dialogue” that exists in canon law as well as with direct engagement within the life of the Church. In a similar fashion, Theodor Damian examines the life of St. Cyprian of Carthage and his treatise, De unitate ecclesiae, which grounds its authority in foundational biblical texts. In his essay, he expounds on Cyprian’s approach to the problem of the unity of the Church and how it is intricately related to the role and position of the bishop within a historical context.