If you've five hours this weekend (especially if you are Coptic Orthodox) I highly recommend listening to the following talk:
Orthodox Interchurch Dialogue (Critical Look at Challenges)
Alternatively you can download these talks in mp3 format from:
Dr. Schneider is Professor of Church History, Trinity College, Toronto, ON, and St. Vladimir Seminary, NY. Also, he is Emeritus President of the Canadian Council of Churches. His background is scientific and his beginnings were Jewish. He is participating in SMOF Annual Conference for the first time, but he has participated in many of the previous Canadian SMOF Conferences.
In his first lecture, Interchurch Dialogues, Progress in Unity, and Fields of Cooperation until Church Unity can be achieved, Dr. Schneider emphasized that the model presented in the book of Acts (Acts 4:32-35) regarding the Church is its oneness and its unity (Jn. 17:11). But, as we know, there were always differences and divisions in views, authorities, and even in Dogma. Being Orthodox (right) we tended to condemn the others as heterodox (wrong). But issues are now more complex than this simple view, as we live in a reactive and evolving multicultural world. Our present civilization is collective, and neither law nor philosophy justifies condemning others as being wrong.
Therefore, participation in ecumenical efforts becomes essential. To deal with this dilemma, Prof. Schneider presented the model adopted by the Canadian Council of Churches, which was constructive despite the differences. This model is based on 1Corinthian12 regarding the different gifts and the unity of the body. It requires unanimous agreement, which in turn requires seeking the truth through dialogue. Fruitful dialogue requires mature good teaching together with wisdom. Old arrogance should be replaced with listening to the others in Christian humility and patience. That is the only way for us to become true witnesses, remembering that witness means martyrdom also.
In his second lecture6, Practicing Religion in a Civil-Rights Democratic Society, Prof. Schneider said that the events of the early Christian history, primarily the blood shed in martyrdom, followed by the Roman acceptance of Christianity, have promoted our feeling of the firmness of truth in our faith. On the other hand, they also promoted self-confidence. And as all churches, when embraced by their States, change from dependence on faith and preaching to dependence on state legislation and enforcement. Historically, this led further to religious wars.
In this respect, the North American experiment of separation between Church and State, becomes a unique experience in history, and it has important repercussions on Orthodoxy ecumenically and locally. It demands intellectual openness and a return to the apologetic approach of the early Christianity, renouncing the attitude of self-righteousness or correctness, just because we are Orthodox. So, Can we adapt to Civil-rights and remain faithful to the Truth? In democracy, the week groups (e.g. minorities and the poor) suffer, and they become the field of our Christian calling, even our treasure, and even our Christ Himself (Mt.25: 34-36). Are Orthodox people the good example here? Can we learn from other churches?
On the last day of the Conference, Prof. Schneider delivered his third lecture, "Orthodox Values and Scientific Understanding of Man and World". He started by pointing that there is no war between Science and Religion. But in the recent era, Science and Religion became two different languages, in need for dialogue. This effort is required from both scientists and theologians. Regarding religion, the old spiritual vocabulary cannot cope adequately with the insights of modern science, and our religious values must be renewed on account of this. Both fields need to teach each other. The Orthodox, with their holistic understanding and Patristic vision of the world as God's creation, should be leaders in this dialogue. Instead, we are ways behind every other church in this area. Very few Orthodox have spoken about bioethics, conservation the environment ... etc. Our habitual use of monastic vocabulary, concepts, and hagiography may have limited our vision and understanding of the world, which is God's own creation and His image (Col. 1:15-17). Sanctity and mystery should be found in most simple, ordinary, everyday realities, not only in spectacular "violations of scientific laws" (i.e. miracles). The greatest mystery is love.
The lecture was followed by discussion of Dr. Schneider's three lectures with their content of essential and serious issues.
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Unedited Transcript
(Please note this transcript may contain transcription errors)
Prof. Schneider: I’ll start with where I am now and how I got there. I’m in the Orthodox Church in America. A professor emeritus of church history from York University which means I taught church history in a secular university. A very interesting situation but I am now the director of a brand new program in Orthodox and East Christian studies in the University of Toronto, Toronto School of Theology.
This is quite a fascinating thing because it’s the first time … Toronto School of Theology is a consortium, so all the theological colleges joined together to make one faculty. They’ve got catholic colleges, Presbyterian Colleges, United Church College, Anglican College, right? I mean, you never heard of orthodoxy. It’s very interesting that now they’ve been able to add orthodoxy to the mix but there is no [inaudible 00:01:18] college, we can’t afford it. We are operating, being hosted by the Anglican College. We’ll talk about that tomorrow. It’s very interesting.
This is the first time there has been college level, grown up education for adults in Orthodoxy in Toronto. It covers everything, we have … In one class I had students who were Greek, Russians, OCA, an Armenian, Coptic; I’ve had three Copts, one of whom was Doctor Edward, I had one Ethiopian, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and a Baptist who wants to know about the east.
It’s a very, very interesting situation of unity. This is teaching now religion within a religious faculty, but it’s an ecumenical religious faculty. Church history in a secular faculty and then Orthodoxy in an ecumenical faculty, I’m also visiting professor of Iconology at St. Vladmir Seminary.
I also have to teach Orthodoxy in an Orthodox setting. That’s very interesting too because it actually turns out to be extremely rare, believe it or not, to teach Iconography and Iconology in Orthodox seminaries. It’s something that I don’t understand at all but it really is very rare. It’s very eye opening for the young men in training there.
Besides these, from 2003 until 2006, I was president of the Keating Council of Churches. I was the first orthodox person ever to be president of the Keating Council of Churches in its 60 year history. It’s something I’ll talk about in the talks. One of the things this led to, because we’ve done a revolution in Ecumenism in Church Unity in Canada, which I’ll be talking about tomorrow; this model that’s taken over by the World Council of Churches in 2003. I was lucky to be part of that and I’ll tell you something about that tomorrow.
Besides that I’m on the Metropolitan Council of my church in the diocese, the Committee of the Diocesan Council and it’s a lot of work.
Question: Where did you complete your schooling?
Prof. Schneider: Where did I complete my schooling? That requires going into my past biography a little bit. My degrees are from Dartmouth, Princeton, and Columbia. I did theological education in Toronto School of Theology and then some more at St. Vladmir’s.
My education was basically as a historian with a strong interest in religion, as you’ll hear in the talk. I don’t think religion can be a separate subject, I don’t think it could be detached from life because otherwise what’s it about. Religion as an education of ourselves, to be able to live where God has planted us, I think, for example, it’s been very generally … York is a very secular university in Canada and its origins actually had a lot of Jewish [inaudible 00:05:20], that was very generous and they let me teach a two year course in church history. Not in the religion department, in the history department. They think religion is a vital part of historical understanding of what it means to be human, but then that was able to service the religious studies program too. That was my basic education.
I am not a cradle Orthodox. I was an Orthodox Jew until I was 26. I am a lot older than 26 now. We’ve been through a lot of life, my wife is a 15 year cancer survivor. We are both educators. We have seven children. You are going to hear of stories of a couple of them as examples. They are all over the world. One is a doctor in East Vancouver; she walks the streets of East Vancouver giving medical care.
One is directing an NGO in Bali which is trying to help native people do sustainable agriculture using their indigenous farming methods.
One is also in Bali. Created the first media studio ever in Bali and is training the Balinese on how to run their own media studio.
Question: In Indonesia?
Prof. Schneider: In Indonesia. One is a radar engineer; climbs mountains. One is a master chef in Toronto, just graduated. He is now line chef in a restaurant in Toronto.
The next one is an orthodox monk and you’ll be hearing something of his story tomorrow, no Monday, you’ll hear something of his story. The youngest is a primate anthropologist, she lives in the jungles with gorillas. I just got back from doing the Lumen Orientale conferences, the dialogue conferences between eastern Catholics and Orthodox in Istanbul and Washington, San Diego. The chairman there said, “You see, it just runs in the family. Even the daughter like the father is engaged in the study of primates.”
Thank you. It’s actually very flattering to be asked to be here. I think it’s extremely important that I was asked, not that I was asked, but that in a gathering that is dedicated to the unity of churches, you’d think to include somebody from the visiting tradition and somebody who is so thoroughly North American.
There is certainly no need for an apology for the audiences. I mean, Christ himself taught us that. “Wherever there were two or three gathered in my name that’s where I am.”
Question: I accept that but I think we should build our [inaudible 00:09:05] in order to give them a good chance to come. We had to discuss this in our fellowship, but I think a speaker like you deserves more than that.
Prof. Schneider: Perhaps, if you tell everybody the parable of the wedding feast. It’s very nice because all the ladies here are dressed very elegantly even if the men are in shorts so people do have on their wedding garment. Just one small correction, I’m the past president of the Trinity Council of Churches. No, I’m bringing this up only because it bears a point of the first talk.
Question: Yes, [inaudible 00:10:08] were you the ex-president?
Prof. Schneider: That’s right. The significant fact is that the Community Council of Churches is 60 years old, it’s older than the World Council of Churches. I’m the first Orthodox ever to be elected president. The other interesting thing, I’m saying all this please don’t misunderstand, not to boast but rather to make a point.
I was elected president after I had served for 15 years on the council representing the Orthodox Church in America. I’m going to talk about those 15 years because during those 15 years we made a revolutionary change in ecumenism, one that’s become a role model to the whole world. I was privileged to be part of working out that change for the whole 15 years.
I think it’s because of that that I was elected president and I think it’s very significant that I was nominated not just by Orthodox churches but also by the Presbyterians, the Lutherans and the Baptists. They all wanted me for president. I think that’s very interesting. We’ll talk about that in a minute.
Question: Just as a quick comment, I think that the Catholics were not members in any Council of Churches but they called like a [inaudible 00:11:43], so it’s only the Orthodox Church that accepted to become partner with the other churches.
Prof. Schneider: Not true and I will correct that. Again, it’s what we did in Canada that changed everything.
Question: Good to know.
Prof. Schneider: I will explain that, it’s an important point. Now, Professor or Doctor Melci and Father Gragas had an easy time with it. Why did they have an easy time with it? Because they talked in generalizations. There were extremely important generalizations, they talked in terms of the ideals, the goals, things, the fundamentals, things we must accomplish and we must accomplish [inaudible 00:12:47].
Doctor Melci was wonderful in reminding us that love has to be the primary thing and without it nothing is going to be accomplished. It’s something we have to remember all of the time. It’s rather interesting, I have quotations here from Father Hapco whom everybody knows and from Elizabeth Percy Gell, a very famous European theologian, died this year at the age of 90. Both of them say exactly the same thing that you have to make love the primary condition and the thing you never forget or all the other goals can’t be accomplished.
Nonetheless, what they left for me was all the practicalities. That’s where it starts to get hard. Would I come here and talk about the practicalities on my own? Probably, partly because it’s been my responsibility to wrestle with them for the last 15 years so I’ve been down there in the trenches. Mostly, it’s because of Doctor Edward, he said he wanted me to talk about these three topics.
If you look at the three topics, the first one is about relations between churches. I’m going to start right where Father Gragas left off, relations between Orthodox churches. Then move on to relations between Christian churches.
The second topic is about relationship of being Christian to the world we live in. We are going to talk about relating to the world we live in, that’s a world full of people. It’s a complex modern world. In that same talk, I’m going to speak in particular about relating to the world of North America. That’s going to connect the two talks very closely.
Tomorrow morning we are going to talk about the means of dealing with the problems of the world. In particular, the focus will be on the issues of science and religion and their impact for ethics and for coping with the problems of the world.
Underlying all three of these things, how do churches relate to each other? How do churches operate within society in general? What use are they, what are churches doing for society, with society? What are they offering to society?
Finally the issue of how best to cope with trouble, with difficulty, with the problems of the world. Is it the scientific way, is it the religious way? What would heal the world? All of these have underlying them. These very basic things that we heard about yesterday.
I would add one thing. It’s something that got a little danced around yesterday, that’s the issue of truth. The question of truth because religious knowledge is a claim to know the true God and what the true God wants for humanity. If you notice, I’m still talking in generalizations. See how easy it is? I could go on like this for hours and hours and hours. I could talk in generalizations.
If we are going to talk about what God wants from humanity, we are specifically talking about what does God want from us, as people. What are we to do? That is, by the way, the title of a very famous communist treatise [inaudible 00:17:32] What are we to do? He stole the title from a very famous anarchist from the 19th century.
Christians aren’t communists. They can’t be. Christians aren’t because communism is atheistic; they think it’s a science. Christians aren’t anarchists either. Especially not Orthodox Christians, we think God made an orderly world. That’s one of the fundamentals of the Orthodox vision of life. That God made an orderly world.
If I were Father Gragas I would throw a bunch of Greek words at you at this point. I would talk about toxis. No matter how chaotic the world might look it really is orderly. If you did look up some of the bible quotations I gave you yesterday, you’ll know that in Ephesians we are told that everything is made according to the plan of God. Everything that is happening is according to the plan of God.
Now, why then should we bother to talk about what is to be done? Here’s where the issue of practicalities comes in. The practicalities aren’t there because of the human limitation. That’s a common mistake, a very common mistake the Orthodox make it a lot. We say, God set up a perfect world, God showed us the ideal, we know these ideals, why aren’t we living according to these ideals? Why aren’t we showing the kind of love that was spoken of yesterday? It’s because we are limited. It’s our own fault and these are our limitations.
To a certain extent that is true. The world is the way it is because there is sin, that’s our limitation. Sin comes from a lot of psychological conditions - Individuality, selfishness, arrogance, pride. There are also limitations because this is the world the Lord has made, as the psalmist says. This is the world that the Lord has made. The world and all that’s within it, that’s the 24th psalm.
We’ve all studied history in school. We all know that people had a hand in making this world, this world that God has made which means that somehow we are engaged in this process of God making the world. Now, that happens to be very good Orthodox doctrine. Since this good Orthodox doctrine has to have a Greek word. The Greek word is synergy.
What is synergy? Synergy means that humans are given the gift of existence by God, that existence is to be God. So, if God creates the world with his knowledge and his energy, so too do we. If you wouldn’t misunderstand it, I call synergy, cooperative. Creation means human cooperation with God.
Now we come to the deep point. Here is the sticking point that lies behind all three of these lectures, these talks. If we are going to cooperate with God with all our knowledge and the grace that God has put into our hearts, all our experience, it means it’s an ongoing process. The limitation partly comes from the fact that it’s not over yet. We know what we know.
One of the consequences of sin, this is not personal sin, this is a built-in sin of Orthodox history, is that we certainly don’t know as much as we should know, we don’t know enough. As Orthodox, we are really, really badly educated even in the most elementary things, and that’s why we prolong the life history of stupidity and why things are not moving faster.
Both speakers yesterday spoke about this. Father Gragas said, he got his dates a little confused but Father Gragas said “Okay, there’s been basic agreement between being the so-called oriental Orthodox churches and [inaudible 00:23:08] churches and the byzantine churches, it means that’s true. The day on the signed document is 1992. Yet we haven’t restored one church out of these. We heard this also from Doctor Melci, the same thing, he attributed a little more to political reasons.
Those kinds of things do get in the way. I’m going to add that it’s lack of education that partly gets in the way but it’s partly because to make the next step and the next step and the next step is a decision. Decisions have to be made on the grounds of, as much as we are capable of knowing, we have to expect that there will be other decisions to make in the future. The idea of one church that is the church of God, is what’s called eschatology.
When God says the church should be one, should be a unity, and once again, I’m giving you quotations, they are very famous, I’m giving you a number of quotations. The most famous, of course, is the one from John chapter 17, where it’s at the last supper and says, decide to hear me says, Jesus speaking to God says “I have loved them so that they may be one as you and I are one,” ultimate unity. That’s eschatology. That’s what the church is and therefore it’s where the church should be going.
It’s a historical process that results from our work and our decisions. Let’s just consider for a minute. Think about this society. Why does this society exists, do its work? Because some people made some decisions. I’m going to point out a little later that almost all the injured Orthodox works for Orthodox unity has been organized and pushed in the first place by lay people. Isn’t that interesting? Why is that so? Because lay people have a sense of the hurt, a sense of the stupidity.
The trouble is that to do it concretely, practically by decisions in this world, you need to have a very precise sense, an educated sense. It can’t be done by only falling back on the generalizations. That’s why I suggested Father Gragas had an easy time. He chose to fall back on the generalizations and get back on the airplane and go home. I’m not being sarcastic. He opened a discussion and that’s what he should have done. Now he’s left it to us to face square on the practical problems and talk about what should be done about them.
Partly for that reason, I want to keep my part of the lecturing fairly short and run these three hours more like an American classroom, where we are talking together and trying to discuss the problem. What I’ll do is open up and lay out the problems for you. Give some good examples and then we’ll have the kind of discussion that we need to have.
Even at the level that Father Gragas was talking about. Orthodox education is really not up to the job. Laymen have started these movements for unity because they feel the hurt. How many of you could really explain the problem of the two natures and one nature? I have had very nice conversations with a number of you. Questions have been … Since during the days we’ve been here, questions have been put to me. I can tell you that I heard three questions, in all innocence, were totally heretical. I’m not talking about little stuff, I’m talking about great big heresies of the fourth century.
Question: It’s [inaudible 00:28:43].
Prof. Schneider: No, I mean it’s not even that issue. These were other issues in which the doctrines … These are not issues where the doctrines in the oriental church and the doctrines in the byzantine church differ. These are heresies older than that in which all Orthodox churches share the same doctrine.
The reason was not that the persons who put the questions were heretics, certainly not. The reasons were that they had not been given a fundamental education in Orthodoxy. I think it’s absolutely spectacular that this group is a lay group. I think it’s somewhat worrisome, it’s not your fault, I assume you don’t keep the clergy out. You don’t stop them at the door if they have a collar and a cross on you and you say “Out.”
I think there’s some problems with the clergy out here, although I have to admit, and I’ll say this even coming from St. Vladmir seminary of all places, that even the clergy are fairly badly educated these days. At Saint Marks there was a very, very big meeting a number of years ago, at Saint Mark’s Church in Toronto, some important visiting bishops from Egypt. One of them gave a talk in English afterwards and he gave a presentation of the solution. How the question of the one nature, the two natures has now been resolved.
As I listen to this presentation, I thought, “Right”, the way he’s putting this, what we’ve done is say that we’ve resolved the major problem of the 5th century in a way that’s going to lead us straight to the problems of the 6th century, which is, in fact exactly what happened in history and exactly what happened history.
The Byzantines kept looking for solutions to reunite the two churches and in the process invented a ten times worse heresy than the one that caused the problem in the first place. We won’t go into details, if you want to ask me about it afterwards, I’ll explain it. I said, as I listened to this lecture, I said “He’s going to go there exactly, that’s where it’s going to end up.”
Okay, so we need some education. That’s one of the difficulties that stand in our way. Now comes the practical, that’s a practical problem. People have busy lives. Where do they get their education? Where do they learn these fundamentals of Christian understanding? One point is to catch them while they’re young. The Copts, I must say do a wonderful job of this. Better, I think than any other Christian Church or Orthodox Christian Church I know.
None of us do this as well as The Protestants do, none of us. But among the Orthodox, Copts do it best by a long chalk. Nevertheless, I’ve had Coptic students in my programs in the University and they say the same thing that Western Christian students say, I always ask my students, “Why are you taking my courses?” Especially in the secular university, where I teach church history, I say, “What are you doing at this course?” No requirement here.
They all say the same thing, they say, “The Church educated me as a child and has talked to me like a child ever since.” I want to know, how do adults do this thing? That’s what they all say. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Presbyterians or Catholics or Anglicans or Greeks or Goths. They all say it.
When we get this education, what do we come to realize? We come to realize that to be Orthodox is not, in the first instance, to be a Copt who does things the Coptic way, also the Coptic doctrines, wears the Coptic vestments, celebrates the Coptic liturgy or an Armenian or a Russian or a Greek. You can’t believe the wars that happened in the seminary over whether to wear Greek vestments or Russian vestments and cassocks, which aren’t even vestments. Greek style cassock or Russian style cassock and the metropolitan actually lays down rules about these kinds of things; none of that to the first place.
The gospels are quite clear. To be a Christian is to acknowledge that God is in Christ. It’s something we both acknowledge, that God is in Christ, to acknowledge that the discovery of Christ and the centrality of Christ in our lives is life, is what keeps us alive and now comes the third thing. That the purpose of grace, remember we spoke about synergy. We all know we’re saved by grace, everybody in this room knows that. Does anybody ever ask why we’re saved by grace?
Question: [inaudible 00:35:33]
Prof. Schneider: That’s a Protestant answer. The Catholic answer is because God loves us so much. The Orthodox answer takes synergy into account. It is so we will announce to the world that Christ saves us. For us to recognize that Christ saves us becomes a commission in the Acts of the Apostles. When the apostles start, they’ve received the Holy Spirit, this is chapter two, they received the Holy Spirit. They start speaking about the resurrection. Everybody is astonished and the thing they say about it is, “To this resurrection, we are all witnesses.” they say. Here we really do have to go to the Greek, because the Greek word that they’re using for witness is martyrs, we are all martyrs.
What it means that we testify to the truth. We testify to the truth, and the truth is the resurrection and that Christ saves us. What that means is that Orthodox Christianity is an evangelical religion. To be evangelical doesn’t mean to be like this crazy people you see on television, and they are crazy. To be evangelical means to announce the gospel. Evangelion is just another Greek word for that, Gospel’s a German word actually. Evangelion is the word that’s used in the scriptures. We supposed to announce it. That’s our purpose in life.
What activity in the Church is true and valuable is that which furthers the job of being evangelical. In the second talk, we’re going to talk about how that relates to culture. What it means to be Orthodox in North America. Father Hopko, in a passage I’ll quote a little later, emphasizes this very strongly that we have to be prepared to be martyrs, nowadays it means be defend of the death, that which is true and vital and necessary in our faith. Yet only do that if we’re prepared to take risks, to let go of that which isn’t true and vital and necessary.
We have to put that in the second place, not the first place. We have to identify our Orthodoxy with Christ, to be Orthodox is to put on Christ. We say it that Baptism is many as, from Romans chapter eight, “As many as there are baptized into Christ, have put on Christ.” We’ll repeat that. Everybody repeats that on Holy Saturday and we sing it through gospel.
That’s what it means to be Orthodox. Put on Christ. Christ Jesus says, “Unless you take up your cross and follow me, you can’t be my faithful, you can’t have a place with me.” Part of that cross has to do with dealing with others.
Now, in the course of these three talks, we’re going to encounter a whole bunch of others. In the first talk it’s other Christians. Maybe, even before we get to other Christians, we should step back for a minute and talk about other Orthodox. How is that we’re supposed to announce the gospel as the Orthodox understand it to other Christians. We can’t even agree among ourselves.
The first practical problem is Orthodox disunity. One other thing Jesus tells us is that it’s not just the words that we preach, it’s what we do that, in fact, is the announcing of the gospel. Remember he says “Many come in my name but not all of them are the Christ.” He also says, “Many will call after me, but only few are chosen, only few are living alike.”
It’s by our example that the effectiveness of our announcing the gospel is made true. You might ask what kind of example do the Orthodox show the world? Why should anybody take it seriously? Father Hopko points out the Orthodoxies are kind of laughing stock in the world. It’s a little bit bitter, I don’t think he’s right.
Certainly, he says it in the context in which he’s fighting the forces of modern permissive liberalism, which of course doesn’t like the fact that the Orthodox stand on the other side of certain values. There certainly is a certain truth in it. In the ecumenical world that Father Hopko was used to, he said that before the Canadian example, he was used to a kind of bitterness in which the Protestant world said, “We’re getting on with the job of Church unity.” Then the stubborn Orthodox are slow in their … Like a dragging break or a dragging anchor, they’re slowing us down. The Orthodox are the problem, said a lot of the world. What did that make the Orthodox say? “I don’t know, the modern world is the problem.”
All this modernism, all this liberalism, all this permissiveness, all this willingness to give up fundamental things is the problem. Included in those fundamental things, by the way, by the Orthodox in the World Council of Churches is the fact that there are women priests in the Anglican Church.
It was over that issue that three churches walked out of the WCC in 1998. You may talk about prolonging stupidities. In a world that is going to hell, in a world that is sick, I hope you notice, the last word is my notes is therapy, I brought that of course especially for that. It’s Father Tom’s word. Why in the world should that be a fundamental issue of division? Especially when, if you understand Orthodox teaching, you know that it is not a dogma, it’s what’s called, in the kind of fancy techno speak that professors love, theologoumena, it’s an opinion.
It wasn’t always the Orthodox practice, women were ordained in the early church. It’s been a kind of core Orthodox opinion for a long time. There are a lot of very important Orthodox theologians nowadays who don’t agree with it, including Elizabeth Percy Gell, of course she’s a woman, but also including metropolitan Anthony Blum, who also died this year. Very important theologian.
Question: [inaudible 00:44:32] these three churches that walked out, people from the congregation [inaudible 00:44:39] left with all the priests and with the congregation and many of them are now in Orthodox field.
Prof. Schneider: These problems are not unique to Orthodoxies, certainly. In every Christian church, there are the people who want to absolutely cling to the ways we do things as the life and death issues. It’s in every church.
Question: Conservatives.
Prof. Schneider: Conservatives, right. In the second talk, I’ll tell you about my experience of addressing the Anglicans, on the question of same sex marriage, for example. They’re totally split about it. It’s in every church. Father Hopko’s fundamental Evangelical Orthodox point is true for every Christian. Anything that is not in the first place, seeing the vision of Christ, hearing Christ as the word, because Christ is the word of God and what I’m adding in these talks, in a good synergistic cooperative way, understanding what that word says, “We are to do.” Notice I said understanding, requires use of our faculties, requires being who we are, whom God made us to be.
Anything that isn’t that is an obstacle, a red herring; it’s getting in the way. This is why the Canadian solution to talk among churches has been so fascinating. Now, ecumenism is the command of God. How can I say that when so many Orthodox hear the word ecumenism and instantly throw up and scream and yell and say, “What do are we doing there? How dare you talk to people who don’t hold the truth?” Notice, by the way, that’s based on presumption. We are right, they are wrong. That’s the presumption.
How can I say ecumenism is a command of God? It is because of the very texts of unity that we just spoke of. If that kind of unity of love is the eschatological goal, then we have no choice but to speak. While we should be speaking to the whole world certainly, missions are long and rather glorious history in Orthodoxy until fairly recently, until the Russian Czars took over, we by and large, no, it’s not true. Byzantine emperors were pretty bad too. By and large, we didn’t missionize with canons and the sword. By and large with missionize with respect.
But talking to fellow Christians isn’t mission. At the Orthodox protest and protest rather bitterly about fellow Christians who do come and missionize Christians, I imagine you have them in Egypt as well. Certainly, they’re all over Europe, Evangelical Christians who are trying to make conversions to a kind of simplistic version of Christianity. No, talking to fellow Christians is because they are doing something truthful and important, they are acknowledging Christ. They’re saying, “Christ is our savior. Christ is the way. We want to love Christ. We want to act like Christians in the world. We want to be the people in the world that Christ called us to be.”
Yet they do it differently from us. They hold different views, they have different opinions on this and that, even very different statements about the meaning of Christ. It is our evangelical duty to speak up, to say to Christians, “Yes, you care about Christ, you need to understand what the Orthodox know about loving Christ and putting on Christ and being Christ.” That’s something we say and we shock everybody else. We say, “We are God. We are Christ.”
Now in the old ecumenical activity, that became nearly impossible. The ecumenical activity that produced the World Council of Churches, back in the 1940’s had a long pre-history in which by the way the Orthodox took part, I won’t take the time, time doesn’t let me read this, rather wonderful document from 1920. It’s an [inaudible 00:50:51] from the ecumenical patriarch and he’s calling for what the kind of thing that eventually became the World Council of Churches, and explaining why in love we have to be there.
Theologically, most Orthodox thinkers would go along with this kind of thinking. By in large the Orthodox who try to make a huge case for the idea of ecumenism as a heresy aren’t thinking at all, they are ranting. They’re really a very tiny group, very tiny group. The Churches that left the WCC in 1998 didn’t do so because they didn’t like ecumenism, to a certain extent they were succumbing to pressure back home. They had internal politics to deal with. What they didn’t like was the way the World Council of Churches was doing ecumenism. That was why they left. So it’s our duty to do it, the question then becomes, how to do it?
Question: You need to [inaudible 00:52:07]
Prof. Schneider: Exactly. The World Council of Churches was created in a search for unity, the Commission on Faith and Order; notice the names, it’s the Commission on Faith and Order. This is the theological commission, the great theologians who do the thinking work for the WCC. In the 1940’s that commission had one of the greatest names in Christian’s thought in the world, including both Oriental and Byzantine Orthodox theologians. George Florovsky was one of the great founders of that. Aram the first was one of the great founders of that, for example.
But they made a terrible mistake. They said, and it was kind of typical of thinking right after World War II, they said, “Okay, our goal, our eschatological goal is church unity. How do you get there?” You study what a church is. You study what the church is. They made the nature of the church, their primary topic. It’s interesting, it was game over from the start really.
First of all, almost all of them were clergy, very highly famous responsible clergy. They couldn’t really daringly step out of line, they all would’ve gotten clobbered by their home churches. Tradition made them cling to all these things that were so essential, it is so-called in their various churches.
There were, of course, matters of doctrine that separated them too, and they all knew it, they were wise and learned men. It was the wrong topic. It’s no worthy, that immediately in 1950 they issued a document called “The Toronto Statement” and “The Toronto Statement” looks exactly like what we accomplished in Canada. It says, “There’s no such thing as a super church. The World Council of Churches is an assembly of churches. In no sense will one church ever impose doctrine and so on another church” Those kinds of statements.
In practice, it never worked out because their way of operating was majority hope. Of course, the WCC was overwhelmingly protestant and it was understanding of this that made the Catholics refuse to join. So they never joined the WCC. The whole project kind of didn’t go anywhere and in 1954 there was a major change of direction at the world assembly in [inaudible 00:55:43], Illinois.
At that assembly, they said we’re not getting anywhere in theological side. Let’s be patient with the theological side and in the meanwhile, to get something done, let’s put our emphasis on the peace and justice side, that’s the other big commission, peace and justice. Suddenly they started rushing into peace and justice issues. Well, you see what would inevitably happen. With the overwhelming majority of Protestants, Western liberal ideas would become peace and justice ideas without an examination of their theological foundation.
A question like women’s ordination becomes a question of women’s rights. I’ll talk about rights in the second lecture. Rather than an issue of a ecclesiology and theology, which needs to be debated on a theological basis, it all went nowhere and as these liberal causes multiplied and multiplied, things got more and more and more uncomfortable for the Orthodox.
Climaxing in 1998 with two churches actually walking out, the Georgian and the Bulgarian and two other churches on the brink, especially and the important one was the Russian, on the brink of walking out. I’ll talk about what the World Council did in a second, but first I have to go back 15 years before 1998 to the Community Council of Churches which made the realization that what was in the Toronto Statement expressed a notion of churches as an assembly that really could be given living form and show how churches, that are all witnessing to Christ can relate.
We call it forum. The basic principles of it are, to keep it simple. Every church is at the table as a church. That part rules out the notion of democratic voting altogether. There are no big churches, no little churches. Every church is a voice. Every church speaks and is trying its best with the best knowledge that it has, what I’d like to comment we made at the beginning, which is why things move; speaking with the best knowledge that it has to speak the voice of Christ, the evangelical voice that the world needs to hear.
Therefore what we have at the table is dialogue. No matter what the issue is, churches bring up various issues, the world presents us with certain issues, like war and so on. There are things that happen in the world, biotechnology, peace and justice, anti-Semitic things happened in Canada, America went to war in Iraq, I’ll be talking about some biotechnology things later, same sex marriage came on the table, all kinds of issues.
Then some very deep theological issues too because of biotechnology our theological commission, notice the difference, we call it faith and witness, not faith and order. Faith and witness, that’s kind of true to our notion of each church being a witness has put out a wonderful booklet on human anthropology in an age of biotechnology. What the Christian view of being human is in nature of biotechnology, we are now following it with a companion volume on suffering and hope. What it means to be in a world where suffering happens and what the Christian hope has to say to such a world.
That kind of work goes on too but it's all done by consensus. We simply work and work and work and work until we reach consensus, and then we know the mind of the member churches. Never vote. The only thing we vote on is money issues and we have to do that by law.
Question: Consensus means unanimous?
Prof. Schneider: Unanimous. That's very ...
Question: That's difficult.
Prof. Schneider: Very difficult.
Question: What are some of your [inaudible 1:00:58]
Prof. Schneider: We never vote.
Question: [Inaudible 1:01:09]
Prof. Schneider: That's right. All yes's, no no's. Exactly. What makes it so difficult? Why is that so difficult? Because, I go back to what we were saying, it requires exactly the kind of humility that Father Hopko was speaking about. It requires not just coming and saying, "We were right, you are wrong" it requires listening. Now that's listening is “Oh God” too, you know. If we couldn't listen, we couldn't be Christians. Why? Because Jesus is the word and Jesus comes to us through the word. What do we know about Jesus? Let me speak as a historian for just one second.
Father Gragas brought up the issue about historical criticism and how historical scholars and critical scholars are turning everything into historical myths and so on and so on and so on. I'm sorry but what it shows us is that Father Gragas simply does not understand history and historical methodology. The past is past.
We know of Jesus because of two things. One is that He works in our lives and we recognize that, and our ability to recognize that He's working in our lives is because He comes to us as the word. The church has given us Jesus in the word, and said, "What's working in your lives is what's in this book." You see? So, listening therefore becomes terribly important, and listening to other people becomes terribly important.
Even in the Old Testament. Elijah is trying to hear God, and God only comes when He is able to hear the still small voice. In the New Testament what makes Jesus unique is that He can hear authentic repentance. The woman taken on adultery, the woman who washes His feet; He hears what these people are saying. The woman who washes His feet doesn't even use words. She just washes His feet and He hears it.
You have to be prepared to hear the voice of the other. Unless we are going to be the kind of Orthodox, in my second bulletin you say, "Because we are Orthodox we got it right, you got it wrong." Then we have to hear our fellow Christians at the table when they say, "We know Christ and we love Christ."
We hear what they have to say, but then we have the right, because it's a forum to expect them to hear us. You see what this does? It totally reverses. For the orthodox it is terribly important, because it totally reverses our role in ecumenism. In a democratic ecumenism, where we are going to be the minority, we have to be the ones to say no. That's our rule. Our rule is to say, "Ah, can't say that." In formal ecumenism, our rule suddenly is to be teachers, evangelical, outreach people. That is to say, "This is what we think ought to be said." By golly, the world listens.
I could tell you story after story after story after story. One of the great moments was the members of the United Church at first said this forum thing is never going to work. It took us ten years to hammer it out, I was there, I was part of the work for the whole ten years. Right from the start of defining what it was and how it worked to identifying the procedures, to writing the new constitution and bylaws that entrenchment to teaching people how to make it work, and so on and so on.
The United Church people said, "This is never going to work. Never" Well, I can tell you I have the United Church people who were there coming to me saying now, things like “Teach me how to pray with icons because I've understood what you've said about the church being the incarnation of Christ. Now, I came understand what you mean when you say, that's in the icons. So teach me how it works."
Finally, a year later the same guy came back and said, "It's really weird, but I pray better with my icons." This is a United Church member, as liberal Protestant as you can get.
I could tell you story after story after story, but to go back to Dr. Lavit's question, I think the best example of the fact that this works is that once we had made it official, that this was the way we were working, the Roman Catholics joined the Canadian Council of Churches. At the time we were the only Ecumenical board they belonged to officially, but even more fascinating, at the very same moment, we had two churches join. One was the Roman Catholics and the other was the reformed churches.
They are in the dialogue and then you start to discover fascinating things like how close the reformed churches and the Orthodox are and so on. So the dialogue produces results. But what it means is that we have to totally abandon triumphalism. We have to totally abandon the notion that we are right and you are wrong, and we have to replace it with what was the characteristic of Christians’ speech for the first three centuries. It's called apologetic and apologetic runs right through St. Paul, right through the first three centuries. What does it mean?
Now remember the history. In the first three centuries Christianity was illegal. It had no official status. It was the era of martyrdoms. Christians were being martyred left and right, tough times. Nevertheless, Christians spoke up boldly. Christianity is being martyred again in the 21st century. It's being martyred by culture, by liberal culture, by western culture, particularly, which is becoming global culture, by post-modern culture.
The first three centuries was the era of martyrdoms and Christians spoke up boldly, but they spoke, they had to speak in an apologetic way. They couldn't come out and say, "We're right and you are wrong" They had to say, "This is our faith and it's right for this and this and this and this reasons and experiences and your faith is weakened in the face of that for this and this and this and this reason." That's apologetic speech. It's been absent from the church for centuries.
Now it has come back in the work of great theologians in the 21st century because they know that the way that says, "We are right and you are wrong," is a total failure. They know that these pronouncements one gets from the Russian Orthodox Church abroad and from [inaudible 1:09:49] and so on. They are silly. They look silly, they are no argument. They do know that the word of Christ is true and that we ... Now what is the synergy? What is our responsibility? To find the truthful way to pronounce it that will speak to the others. The virtue of our Canadian ecumenism is that we've created a mechanism so that others will actually be listening.
To make a long story short, when everything fell apart in 1998 the World Council of Churches, in a panic, set up what was called The Special Commission. The Special Commission was half Orthodox, half Protestant. Delegation to try to find a completely new way to operate for the World Council of Churches. They met for three years. During the second of those years they said, "Let's consider consensus models." At that point they invited ... They knew about Canada because somebody had heard me speak, so they invited the Canadian Council of Churches to speak and effectively they invited me. I was not yet President but I was ... I had been, I was the only one still there that had been with the process from the beginning.
I went; everybody said that consensus couldn't possibly work, it's too difficult. I said "It does work. I can prove to you that it works. It works even when we disagree.” When we disagree the statement is that there is no consensus and now we come back to what was said yesterday, by Dr. Melci. So the discussion continues.
In a forum model and a consensus model the discussion continues in love not in antagonism. The most interesting example perhaps was same-sex marriage. I'm going to come to that in the second talk. That was obviously the one where there was the hugest amount of outright disagreement, black and white, Jews. I will tell you when I tell you the story, the relationship among the churches has always been clear, respectful, searching. Even when there are notions of the truth they are like black and white.
On a lot of things we agree. The World Council of Churches ... When I went away from this meeting it was in Damascus and it was also interesting how important this was for the Oriental Orthodox. They were all there, all, every church represented strongly. The Orthodox, of course, loved this. They said, "Right. This really gives ..." They understood what I meant when I said, "This really gives us an Orthodox voice at the Christian table.” A voice that commands respect that needs to be heard as opposed to the voice of the old fuddy duddies who won't let anything move.
Suddenly all of the riches and the treasure and the wonderful stuff we have to say become part of the dialogue. The Protestants all said, "This will never work." Two years later, when the report of the special commission came out they recommended the Canadian model and I thought, "Gee that's nice. They actually listened, but it will never go any further." Six months later the executive committee said, "We agree. We are accepting this and we are going to operate by consensus from the next year until the General Assembly." They tried it and it worked. Last year the General Assembly adopted it.
So it is a model of how churches can work together.
Question: The Catholic joined the Canadian consultation, are they now considered members of the World Council of Churches?
Prof. Schneider: No, why?
Question: They adopted the same model.
Prof. Schneider: Because they are waiting. We’ve got a long track with it, we have had 15 years of proving that it works. They are just getting started and the World Council of Churches is maybe a slightly different organism from the Canadian … in that we are well within conventional boundaries, whereas WCC has many, many small groups, so they are waiting.
Dialogue produces results. To give you two examples, I spoke to a 15, 20 year dialogue that produced the 1992 agreement at Chambesy between the Oriental Churches and the Byzantine Churches with regard to the question of the nature of Christ. It is an important document. How many of you have read it? How many people in your congregation have ever heard of it? How many understand how important it is? That's why it's going nowhere. I think Dr. Melci was a little bit cynical yesterday, in saying, "Well, it's the clergy that are opposing this, they’re the obstruction. They don't want to give up their power."
Well, I happen to know both Patriarch Ignatiuses of Antioch and there are very good friends and both very smart, wise people. They are handling things slowly because they don’t want to scandalize the faithful and they know this thing has to be worked out. The real obstruction is lack of knowledge.
Question: If people also exposing the people and the congregation about the importance of these things …
Prof. Schneider: Now, here's what I said we were going to talk about the difficult stuff tonight, want to hear my answer?
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: You are. The church is conciliar. Look who's in this room? This is a gathering of the brightest and the best. Look at the level of education in this room. Why aren't you all church educators?
Question: As much as we do …
Prof. Schneider: Why are youth groups all talking about sex and not talking about this?
Question: The clergy who is in charge of who the educators are.
Question: No, but also the people demand. People are interested in meeting and hearing about what they should do, if we [inaudible 1:17:22], but do you think we think they’re part from observation and why we need [inaudible 1:17:26] in your home, in your home, you don’t listen to what the children, what you teach the children and you do the best for the interest of the children.
So you can say that the public wants that. If you don't do this in your home, don't do it in the church.
Prof. Schneider: This is a perfect example of what Father Hopko is talking about when he says that, “The notion that we live in a hierocratic, higher hierarchical church is something that we inherited historically. We inherited it from, basically 300 years of Orthodox sleep between the 15th century and the 20th century in the rediscovery of the Fathers who rediscovered the essential nature of the church is conciliar.
So you have a voice. You have to have a voice, it is the nature of the church. I gave you a passage from Acts four "All were of one mind," all work by consensus, right? It included everybody. If you leave it to the level of blame, you say, "The clergy are in charge, there's not a thing we can do about it" you have a bit [inaudible 1:18:48]. You have abandoned your evangelical calling which is to be like Christ and announce the word.
Here is where what Dr. Melci said that's important, you can do a confrontation or you can go to the clergy and say, "Okay, we are tired of this tyranny and we have created this wonderful lay society and we are going to run the world now." How far do you think you are going to get?
Question: [inaudible 1:19:16] You are not Christian.
Prof. Schneider: It's not really the gospel if it doesn't speak in love. Now Dr. Melci got on the plane and went back to Cairo and we are stuck with the practical problem. How do you say ... How do you get something accomplished? I say these things in love.
Question: It's hard for me to [inaudible 1:19:47] Sunday school curriculum that is used by many of the churches here in North America which was actually established by the Southern US Dioceses deals with the discussion of the nature of Christ. Actually, in two separate lessons during the year of the curriculum for grades 9-12, which is great. For us, as servants or teachers in the Sunday school it actually was very educational for us, as well. These short manuscripts, so to speak, that are written-up for the teachers to present to the youth are very well done. It covered the discussion, I think in some depth.
I just wanted to bring that up because I do know how many people here actually realize that. That's great that the Coptic Church at least is making an effort in teaching the youth about some important issues and certainly the issue of the nature of Christ is very important.
Question: It’s very [inaudible 1:21:20]
Question: I can actually give you the [inaudible 01:21:03] website it’s [inaudible 1:21:29]
Question: [inaudible 01:21:22]
Prof. Schneider: How many grownups get exposed to this?
Question: Just the [inaudible 1:21:42] actually [inaudible 01:21:43] It would be great, at least when it comes to be [inaudible 01:21:52] conventional Orthodox in logical shapes that [inaudible 01:21:58]
Prof. Schneider: To move it up a notch like Emeril, if the material does not exist why not take a look at and see if it could be used, this marvelous new French Orthodox Catechism that is totally grounded in Christology instead of ecclesiology investments and church history and authority and jurisdiction and everything else.
The first volume is completely Christological, it's called The Living God. If 1992 was right and we've really recognized the truth in each other, one would like to think that this Catechism which is quite recent should look like something. The Catholic Church would say, "Yeah, right, useful stuff." If it doesn't, somebody has not been dialoguing, you understand? and 1992 was just an empty piece of paper. How would you know this thing exists anyway?
A topic that I haven't taken up yet that I will in the next talk is about insularity. Okay, this organization had the graciousness to invite a non-Coptic to speak to you and I happen to know about this thing, and I told you something came out of the dialogue. If you would have all Coptic speakers, would anybody have known this book exists? It’s a wonderful book, it's available in English at St. Vladmir seminary. That’s what dialogue does. In fact, it's my last statement for this first talk.
Okay, the lessons learned in the Canadian Catholic Churches have to do with ecumenical relationships between the usual politically correct things to say to sister churches. The old evil thing to say would be competing churches. What's the hard-nose truth? Dialoguing churches, because the dialogue is between people who don't hold the same view. That's where we are really at this point.
Can we take this lesson back? We started off by saying, "We'll never get anywhere really unless we show a good example. Can we take this lesson back inside our own houses and find in it some kind of model of how we're going to move along this thing that has seemed to have stayed stalled since 1992; which is what this organization and this meeting is trying to do.
I can tell you that the year that we adopted forum as our official policy, consensus forum the official policy, which was the year the Catholics and the reformed churches joined. What the orthodox churches, who sit on the Canadian Council decided in a caucus among themselves, and by the way there are three Byzantine and three Oriental, decided among themselves is that we would never again speak as six individual churches. It would be one orthodox voice. Amazing, huh? The Copts are one of the three. The OCA the Ukrainians, the Greeks, Copts, Armenians, Ethiopians. Isn't that amazing? It's just amazing. That was the good news. Now comes the bad news, and that will open us up for the next one.
We tend to turn inward. Our concerns are largely for the welfare of our own church. When I first started going to the Community Council of Churches, back in the early days of this thing, one of the great voices and certainly was a mentor for me for sure, was Father Antonious Guirguis from St. Mark's in Toronto, wonderful person, fabulous.
For the last ten years, I've hardly seen Father Guirguis. He used to be right in the thick of it all. So where has he been? Well, the Copts are creating ... In Toronto they bought two square blocks, just north of Toronto. Do you have any idea what that means? This is Toronto we are talking about. It’s kind of next after New York City, in terms of ... They are going to create an entire Coptic village. I've seen the plans. It really is a village. I'm astonished they haven't planned to build a ten foot wall around it. Father [inaudible 1:27:33] and Father Guirguis is the Project Manager and that's where his attention has gone.
Question: [inaudible 1:27:41]
Prof. Schneider: In a later talk, I will say something about the one person who shows up for the Copts, that's when we are talking about civil society. I have to tell you some of the things he says, I’m not going to name his name.
The tragic thing, the tragic thing ... Really, I mean that's bad and it shows what happens when one starts to look inward instead of looking outward. I'm setting up the next talk. The really tragic thing is that I have also ... I still represent the OCA on the Faith and Witness which has been doing of this fabulous theological work. In 15 years, although the Coptic Church is entitled to three seats on the Commission like every church is. Every church is entitled to three seats at the Commission. There has never been a Copt to attend the meetings. The meetings are totally opened to observers. There has never been a Copt at the meeting.
Question: You have names but they don't attend or there are no names assigned?
Prof. Schneider: No. They have never assigned anyone. Every three years there is a new appointment cycle, from the secular [inaudible 1:29:03]. Every year the appeal goes out to appoint somebody. It's not even … We have to approve. It's the people you think are your good theologians that would share in this dialogue, never been an appointment.
Question: [Inaudible 1:29:19]
Prof. Schneider: Observers would be like you. They wouldn't be appointees, that's right. Appointees should be people who have the theological training to cope with the situation like that.
Question: Is it the hope that [inaudible 1:29:35].
Prof. Schneider: No, no, no, no. The church in Canada.
Question: So it's the priests in Canada that is responsible for this?
Prof. Schneider: Yes.
Question: Actually [inaudible 1:29:48] that the guy died, they’re thinking of sending … This was three, four years ago.
Prof. Schneider: Okay. Let’s stretch our legs.
Question: One more question?
Prof. Schneider: This must be a lot of fun, I’m feeling much better.
Question: Good. What’s the name of the book again that you sais was French …
Prof. Schneider: The French Catechism. It’s … In English it’s called The Living God, two volumes.
Question: The author?
Prof. Schneider: It doesn’t have an author’s name or a title page.
Question: All right.
Prof. Schneider: It’s published by St. Vladimir’s Parish.
Question: They’re both [inaudible 01:30:33] The Living God.
Prof. Schneider: The Living God.
Question: You have it [inaudible01:30:36]
Prof. Schneider: I feel much better.
Question: Huh?
Prof. Schneider: I feel much better.
Question: Already?
Prof. Schneider: Yeah.
Question: Before I get the [inaudible 01:30:47]
Question: [Inaudible 01:30:47]
Prof. Schneider: Surrender? He said that if you’re going to be like Christ you have to be ready to die. You might end … Everything that you know, might have to die. Every Coptic nuance, every symbol, every procession, every vestment, everything you know, it might be necessary to [inaudible 01:31:21].
Question: Isn’t that just the [inaudible 01:31:24] martyr?
Prof. Schneider: Yes. That’s the meaning of being a martyr, exactly. Originally, but never forget the original meaning that is the experience, the 2nd and 3rd centuries caused the narrowing of the word. To me, only the people who actually physically died for the name of Christ, but what Saint Peter says it impacts too. It means the word actually comes from law court. It actually means I will not hurt you myself, but I gave madras testimony, it’s the same as sworn testimony in a court. It got to be the absolutely truth, nothing but the truth. That’s what it originally means.
So it’s a very strong way to put it. What came out of our discussion is, from this kind of talking and Madam Levid was so perceptive and so quick that she realized that it applies to everything, not just church relations but it applies to family relations and everything else. The three great virtues are listening; if you listen and you could only do that if you have a certain degree of humility. What is proper humility because what’s the humility of a witness who knows the truth? The humility of the witness is to say “How do I know this is the truth?” rather than to say “Because I know that is the truth.”
With that virtue of humility, then works together, that synergy, the virtue of faith. If you have a solid foundation of knowledge and experience in your church then Christ will open you up to the answer to that question, but the question has to be authentic. It has to be really authentic.
If you think of The Parable of The Good Samaritan, anybody who’s going to understand The Parable of The Good Samaritan has to be willing to give up all sorts of Jewish values because the person who is Christ in that story isn’t a Jew, he’s a Samaritan which means he was a heretic and an outcast for the Jews, a heretic and an outcast with all kinds of false doctrines. It’s very interesting.
One of the good things that can come out of it, this was the result actually of some work I did for the Anglicans, actually on the very thorny subject of same sex marriage was that, I told you yesterday in the Toronto School of Theology which is this consortium and which all the churches are dialoguing together, it’s really neat because catholic students enrolled in the Catholic College and Presbyterian students enrolled in the Presbyterian College, but the course counter comes from all the colleges together and students had been taking any college and so they get this open-minded education.
They never had Orthodox saying now there is four adults, that’s the only such program for adults in greater travel area, a full program at Orthodox studies. Because the Orthodox don’t have a college, it was the Anglicans who said this must be, we have to have this and so they’re sponsoring it fully, it’s housed within an Anglican College so.
Question: [Inaudible 01:35:34]
Prof. Schneider: No. It’s Trinity College.
Question: Trinity.
Prof. Schneider: At the University of Toronto. I brought along description of program, it would only be of approximate interest if you don’t live within the GTA, between Hamilton and Kingston but if you do and you’re interested in knowing about this, please feel free to take one. I think there’s probably enough for almost for everybody.
Question: There’s no correspondence courses?
Prof. Schneider: No correspondence courses. You have to sit in a classroom one night a week.
Question: One to [inaudible 01:36:11]
Prof. Schneider: Especially if you do live in a GTA call lists to people’s attention.
Question: [Inaudible 01:36:19]
Prof. Schneider: I said before that it is always been the lady that had been in the forefront of this kind of thing. I have to admit, I have put notices of this kind of thing, bulletins and posters in someone in … Virtually, everyone who’s at church in Toronto. All the Clergy have, to my face, promised that they would really promote this. When students actually comment, because they heard about it from somebody else that not from clergy.
Question: [Inaudible 01:36:51]
Prof. Schneider: They all say this was new to us. So please let people know about this, okay?
Question: [Inaudible 01:37:00]
Prof. Schneider: All right. Now, we started very late tonight and because we have a whole lot of time tomorrow morning, I think what we should agree among ourselves, I’m looking for consensus, that’s how we do it. When I was the chairman, the hardest job of being president was claiming consensus, getting people to talk to what happened. Split up the time and so let’s quit by the clock tonight rather than … Right? Let’s say we’ll go to the 10:00 and then stop because we have tons of time tomorrow morning to finish, how’s that?
Question: But then many people I think may not be able to attend the morning. I don’t know.
Prof. Schneider: That’s why I’m looking for consensus.
Question: Some people who want [inaudible 01:37:48] early and then … So I think … What [inaudible 01:37:51] making the consensus? Is it that between for you and …
Prof. Schneider: Me? Let’s put this way, my first year of teaching at Columbia University, I was in my last class and I knew I was leaving and I didn’t notice the clock and I stopped talking at 2:00 in the morning and not a single student left. So I can do it, but …
Question: Okay. What’s your preference?
Prof. Schneider: I’m looking …
Question: [Inaudible 01:38:15] for everyone.
Prof. Schneider: We are looking for consensus.
Question: Skip today and continue tomorrow or 10:30 with confirmation …
Question: 10:30?
Question: For those who are leaving tomorrow.
Question: [Inaudible 01:38:26]
Question: What we did tomorrow?
Question: [Inaudible 01:38:31]
Question: 10:30. It’s about [inaudible 01:38:34]
Question: 10:30 tonight or 10:00. [Inaudible 01:38:39] 10:30 or less?
Question: 10:30 is perfectly fine.
Question: Well, he was able to …
Question: Okay. 10:00. Okay.
Question: [Inaudible 01:38:44] instead of [inaudible 01:38:55] because it’s one to go.
Question: Okay. [inaudible 01:38:59] it’s up either 2:00.
Prof. Schneider: Yes. Well, I have …
Question: The only thing we can use is the …
Prof. Schneider: I do have to be a little but careful because I really did spend the entire day sick and um …
Question: We don’t know what will happen tomorrow for people so I have to [inaudible 01:39:15]
Prof. Schneider: If I take care of myself, I’ll be alright the way I feel now.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: I’ll make the bridge from what we just said in the first talk to the new talk by reading a passage from Fr. Hopko. ‘For this miracle to happen, the Orthodox churches in all parts of the world are global village, have to die to their present Byzantine Ottoman and imperial orations structures and human institutional forms and live its Christ, one Holy Church.
In this death, they will not remain alone but will bear much fruit in a manner proper to God. The greatest obstacles in the evangelical and philanthropic, remember philanthropy means love of mankind. Philanthropic mission of our eastern Orthodox churches and surely for our “Orthodox Ecclesiastical Jurisdictions”, that’s in quotes, in America, is our unwillingness to deny ourselves and die to ourselves, humanly speaking, so that others may live through our loving self-sacrifices for their sake. This is why our churches jurisdiction, dioceses and parishes remain alone. Bears so little fruit and are filled with so much turmoil and trouble.
Self-interested Christian Churches concerned about the preservation of their institutional and cultural forms and expressions cannot be authentically evangelical and philanthropic. Additionally, members of such churches often declare that they need …They need not worry because they have Christ promised, see? We are right, you are wrong. They have Christ promise that the church, meaning their particular parish or dioceses or patriarchy in its presence historical form, know this. All those things that is supposed to be so absolute just have a present historical form which is a consequence of 2000 years of historical effort and circumstances and changing context and so on.’
The important things is not the historical form, it’s the eschatological form, as we were discussing. Our job, our task is to make the present form look as much as possible like the eschatological form.
They’re sure that they have Christ promised that their church will survive, so they called the Lord’s words about the gates of hell being unable to prevail against it and thus they cease to be real Christians. How strong is that? Thus they cease to be real Christians and their churches cease to be the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ.
Question: [Inaudible 01:42:48]
Prof. Schneider: Yeah.
Question: [Inaudible 01:42:57]
Prof. Schneider: Now, having laid down these principles in the first talk, the rest of the time together is going to be about a various practical applications, but these practical applications moved beyond the sphere of just relations among the churches. They move out to the sphere of speaking the Gospel to the whole world. What does it mean to be a Christian in the world?
In this present talk, we’re going to speak about the social and political will. Tomorrow’s talk, we’ll speak about the world of knowledge, in particular, scientific knowledge and how one find solutions. Where do solutions lie?
Now, Father Hopko talked about our present historical form, it’s almost tempting to say what the Orthodoxy is cursed by its history, but that would be the fly in the face of the planet. God! Our history is our history, it’s whatever it is, right? Our church has taken on various historical forms. The curse is not only in the history, the curse is that we won’t let go of it, that we will not acknowledge it. We lived in a different time and different circumstances.
The first social context of Orthodoxy was bloody martyr, the period of bloody martyrdom. This has its advantages although it really did already lay the foundation for this, ‘us versus them’. It’s ‘us versus them’ kind of mentality because the world was murdering it. The world is prosecuting. It didn’t allow any room for what you heard yesterday, that wonderful phrase of Guirguis, the ‘I vow’ relationship.
Now, when Guirguis says ‘I vow’, he’s talking about our relationship with God, but it’s also our relationship with the world of others, the world of everyone. Obviously, it’s tough to think that way, when the world is searching their basement to find you and haul you off to throw you and all your alliance.
In my office, I have great, big sign for students. It’s a baseball score board except what it says on, it is ‘Lions 66, Christians 0’, just pure fun. The real difficulty was called by the Byzantine era, followed by the Ottoman era with the same thing, a 180 degrees reverse. The trouble with the Byzantine era is that the church, we came established and to keep matter short, I’m just going to say these things and if you want a question about details later, I’ll be glad to elaborate on them; An established church that is a situation where one church is identified by the state as the approved church, established and sanctioned by law, which means that membership and it is effectively obligatory and non-membership in that church is to be outside the norm of society, the norm of the law.
Now, where that church becomes privileged and all other churches become … all other such associations become disadvantaged, that’s an established church. The Byzantine church was an established church. I personally regard this catastrophic for a church, absolutely catastrophic. It’s a style of churchmanship that a lot of Orthodox say they wanted to go back to.
When the government of Canada was contemplating the idea of same sex marriage being legal, the Orthodox Bishops of Canada put together a petition into the government, and the petition was hopeless. Basically told the government, the only way a government was allowed to act is that the government had the institute of Christian values and they cited a whole bunch of laws. They we’re made back in the days when homosexuality was regarded as a crime and it cited them all as presidents. Notice how this puts the other, the homosexual, totally outside the norm defined by law. It’s no wonder those laws where are abandoned 15 years ago. So they should be. As for a while, would never go for prison nowadays.
In tomorrow’s talk, we’ll return to this subject of homosexuality as scientific problem, we’ll talk about it. Today it’s … Right now it’s a social legal problem in today, in this present talk.
Question: Are was going to talk about it as Christian problem or Christian [inaudible 01:48:38]
Prof. Schneider: Sure, right.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: But because it’s a scientific … Exactly, because it is a scientific problem, it is a Christian issue. The issue is the subject of the talk, I mean we’re not going to settle a problem of homosexuality tomorrow, that’s to be [inaudible 01:49:02], but we won’t. The problem is, what are Christians supposed to do with what scientists think and what are the ethical implications of it.
Question: Yeah, but we are not assuming that what the scientist said is what the science say because some scientists do not agree with what [inaudible 01:49:27] besides sex. So, we have to allow the consensus here.
Prof. Schneider: Right.
Question: Because I am the one who is supposed to be from the science group. I don’t agree with what it is said from those scientist until the ‘70s. It wasn’t the science said.
Prof. Schneider: Correct.
Question: Until now.
Prof. Schneider: Let’s us save that for tomorrow.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: Let’s save that …
Question: Because some people will start to become afraid of some of the statement.
Prof. Schneider: Well, you can all read it tonight, that’s on the 2nd page.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: You can do it for bed time reading. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, okay? I hope you read the first bullet in this talk, rather carefully. The difficulty with established churches is threefold.
Number 1, religion is an outcome of state tyranny. You agree within an established church, you agree with the church or you were a criminal, or at the very least you are seriously disadvantaged. In 17th century England, you were criminalized. In 18th and 19th century England you were disadvantaged. People who were not Anglicans could not vote, could not sit in parliament, could not attend universally, for example. The establisher was, of course, paid for by public taxes including the taxes of the people who were not Anglicans.
In Canada, right now, we’re having a massive debate about this, in that, because of historical circumstances in Canada, the Catholic churches are allowed to collect taxes, now it’s done in an extremely fair way, people declare which tax will they prefer to be on. This was done in order to make peace between the Quebec French and the Anglican English, way back in the 19th century, was the solution. It’s relatively fair. Nobody in the 19th century expected Canada to be a totally multicultural society which it is today, most multicultural society in the world in Toronto.
So now, there’s a very big debate, what’s the fair way to deal with this? Fun … Nothing but the public schools and have no religious schools funded or allow every school to get a share of the public tax money in whether, Christian School, Muslim School, Jewish School and so on. I can assure that number one on the agenda of metropolitan [inaudible 01:52:30] of the Greek Orthodox churches that they want Orthodox schools too. Anything [inaudible 01:5237] should be the basis of what Orthodox school operation. We should all want schools and build ten foot high walls around them and the public should pay for it. Here in Eden is one problem.
Second, it means there’s no longer any necessity for apologetic. There’s no reason to, if you’re in the established church, you have no reason to explain yourself.
Third, perhaps the worst problem of all, this is the unseen problem, is that it makes religion and church truth the consequence of public policy, political policy. This is inevitable consequence of an established church.
Theoretically, that’s not supposed to be so. The Emperor Justinian when he codified the Roman law for the last time, announced the principle called Symphonia and this supposed to be, it’s in all the books as the big Orthodox political principle. Symphonia, just you can tell by the name, means the absolute cooperation of church and state. It’s why it’s a double-headed … One of the reasons why it’s a double-headed eagle, and you’ll notice, by the way, that the ecumenical patriarch has adopted as his symbol. It’s right there on the [inaudible 01:54:06], the double-headed eagle, cooperation of church and state.
Question: The two heads are state and the …
Prof. Schneider: Church.
Question: The church.
Prof. Schneider: Because Christian truth is Christian truth, they’re both supposed to think alike; but notice there’s no dialogue here. In fact, states operate by the politics of the world, there are subject to circumstances. What’s good for the state is what is Orthodox truth. We’ve spoken several times by the … Guirgius spoke about the 150 years it took for the split between the Oriental and Byzantine churches over the nature of Christ to become definitive.
Well, during that 150 years, the emperors desperately tried to find a compromise solution that will work for both sides and the reason was state policy. He did not want to lose the allegiance of what was his bread basket, his commercial center and his military frontier, which was all in the Levant, Egypt and the Levant.
I said that the worst heresy of all was produced in the 6th century not on the 5th, it’s the one about Christ having only one will. That was one of those imperial compromises some theological genius of an emperor thought that up and said, “Everybody must accept this” this is the solution. Nobody accepted it. The wisdom of the fathers and the orient do much better. One of the consequences, by the way, is that it made it very, very easy for Islam to conquer Levant to make a kind of caricature. Basically, the attitude was “Please come in and save us from these dire thoughts.
It didn’t go in Byzantine circles either, no matter how hard the emperor tried including tearing out the tongue of Maximus the confessor, speaking of state tyranny. The same emperor, just any who spoke about Symphonia, didn’t have to worry about the ecumenical patriarch because that guy was just the toady of Justinian. But other patriarchs opposed Justinian and what Justinian did was kidnapped them and imprisoned them and forced them to sign various documents that he approved of. State tyranny ends up like that.
So, the Byzantine solution, which you will notice was instantly copied institutionally by the churches. We all say we’re traditionally a high hierarchical church, that’s nonsense. We became a high hierarchical church from the 4th century, in imitation of the Romans State. Before that, the model was a family; you can see it in first Timothy, easy to see.
The model was a family, the bishop was the wise leader and the liturgical presider, we see that from liturgical documents from the 3rd, 2nd or 3rd century, and the church policy was conciliar.
Orthodox has always kind of preserved a modicum of that conciliarity because we have a lot late theologians. So, at least we listen to the educated laity. The west even abandoned that. But in terms of the running of the church, as far as to my knowledge, the only authentically conciliar church in the world, if it is in fact authentic, is the Orthodox Church in America. Certainly, I put ten good years of my life and I’ve aged considerably trying to keep it that way, working in a Metropolitan Council over against a senate of bishops who raised in the Russian model and think that a church is run by bishops and that’s the way it is and that’s the end of the story. So, the hierarchical model and the established …
Question: Can we say that the church is based on the bishops but run by them and the others?
Prof. Schneider: It’s based only by the churches.
Question: There’s no church without the bishop?
Prof. Schneider: There are a lot of churches without bishops, the Baptist.
Question: No, no, no, we’re talking about the orthodox here.
Prof. Schneider: Orthodoxy, all of the orthodox churches derived from the Byzantine model.
Question: Right.
Prof. Schneider: The church is not based on bishops, it is based on Christ. The church is the body of Christ. Now, go back to the scriptures and look at the descriptions of the body of Christ, 1st Corinthians 12 was the most clearest … Is the most clear example.
Question: Right.
Prof. Schneider: Then many of the heads of …
Question: Right but where is the priesthood?
Prof. Schneider: In the New Testament? There’s only one priest and who is that?
Question: Christ.
Prof. Schneider: Christ.
Question: The priests are the servant of the one priest.
Prof. Schneider: Right. Most of the orthodox way, to think about it, because we are such an iconic graphic people is to think typologically. The priests are the representatives of Christ, the image of Christ.
If you look at what priests says in the liturgy of John [inaudible 02:00:07], before he does the [inaudible 02:00:11] on the consecration, he says “If I were doing this, I couldn’t it”. It is not I who do it, but you who do it through my hands, Synergy.
Question: But without the priest …
Prof. Schneider: If you listen to what’s said before confession, and it’s some forms of confession, priest says, “It is it not I who forgive, you are not speaking to me, you are speaking to Christ, it is not I who forgive you, it is Christ who forgives you” and so on.
Question: By me as [inaudible 02:00:40] can’t please the priest who is doing it. It has to be him or …
Prof. Schneider: Right.
Question: Who won’t throw his hand, Jesus do it.
Prof. Schneider: That’s right. I won’t go into why because I have to explain the heresy of [inaudible 02:00:56] which is one of the heresies that came out in a question that asked of me. Now, I was asked, “Should I receive the sacrament from evil priest?”
Question: I can’t.
Prof. Schneider: The answer is why not?
Question: It doesn’t mean he’s stayed with the vision. I mean …
Prof. Schneider: Right.
Question: I mean that the construction of any local church …
Prof. Schneider: Yes.
Question: That needs a Priest or Bishop in order to …
Prof. Schneider: Yes. It‘s really because … It’s really… No. It’s because of the liturgy that we are in a Episcopal church, because of the liturgy.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: The liturgy, it derives from the bishop. It derives from the [inaudible 02:01:39], it derives from chrisom, it derives from a bunch of things that we need bishops for.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: The Bishop was the original liturgical provider. If you take it back to when that got established, the bishop was in fact the local priest. Bishops were bishops of a city.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: It was local [inaudible 02:01:57]. You take that back to 1st Timothy.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: The Bishops is just the local … The most respected local leader. Bishops do not run the church, the church is conciliar, the church is based on the unity of the whole body. There’s no question about this. The church is …
Question: [Inaudible 02:02:19] right now, maybe it’s the lack of [inaudible 02:02:22].
Prof. Schneider: It could be.
Question: To [inaudible 02:02:23]
Prof. Schneider: No, I actually don’t think so. I think it’s the result of Byzantine habitude, Father Hopko addresses it a lot in here, even in the passage you’ve just read. We have to be prepared to give up our Byzantine rational assumptions. It’s a long standing habit, bishops are, by and large, pretty infected with. My job is to be smart and keep you from being harmed by your own ignorance.
Question: Yes. I believe.
Prof. Schneider: So what I say goes, which means the bishops are adopting the same kind of tyranny that the state has. By the way, under the circumstances, it’s okay for very brave bishop to stand up for the truth when the state was wrong. When they did, the result was usually a return to the original modern model. So it took a really, really, brave Bishop.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: Well, there’s lots and lots and lots of examples. There’s Ambrose in the 4th century, there is [inaudible 02:03:40] in the 8th century, there’s Nicholas I in the 9th Century who finally told one emperor, he just to could not get married four times. There was one famous example under Ivan the terrible and he might have killed them.
There are examples but, by and large, the people who stood up, had been willing to stand up against the state has not been people in high authority in the church because in an established church, their jobs depend on the state. Remember that the emperor … Bishops are supposed to be elected. They’re supposed to be locally elected. Well, throughout the Byzantine period, the emperor appointed the ecumenical patriots, simply appointed them. Got the right man for the job, so to speak, meaning his kind of guy.
Historically, if you get established churches in a world of multiple churches, like the one we were speaking up in the first talk, you get wars of religion. That’s been true for a long, long time, not just the medieval phenomenon, the [inaudible 02:05:08] church was eliminated by warfare, just simply wiped out by the Roman Army that’s back in the 4th century.
Once Protestantism … Well, it has [inaudible 02:05:22] rebellion in the 15th century, the conquest of Constantinople in 1204. Notice, these are wars of religion between fellow Christians. I’m not just … I’m not even speaking of the crusades of Muslims against Christians, and you notice, by the way, how quickly the notion of getting your religion established by war can be turned from fighting the Muslims to fighting Christians who don’t agree with you, as in the sack of Constantinople in 1204, that’s was happened.
It was supposed to be war against the Muslims, but any point affect the split between the Western church and the Orthodox Churches was always part of the policy of the crusade, right from the get go, it just bubbled to the surface in 1204.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, we have major, major wars of religion between Anglicans and low church Protestants, between Catholics and Protestants of Germany. Well, that was then, those were the bad old days. Yes? Well, everybody in this room followed the news in Bosnia and what was that? Unless you say, “Well yeah, but that was against Muslims?” Muslims ha, phooey! Especially those Muslims because they renegade Christians on the 13th Century. What about the war in Croatia?
Question: [Inaudible 02:07:04]
Prof. Schneider: Which was simply a revenge war for the persecution of the Orthodox during the 2nd World War by the Croatian Catholics. Where’s your religion? Bad stuff.
Question: It is political cooperative to …
Prof. Schneider: That is re-dialogue. That’s a complex question, Madam Lavit pointed out. I warned you at the beginning that those guys yesterday had it easy, we were dealing with the complicated … We’re dealing with the complicated, really greedy, on the grounds problems, detail by detail. The more you try to do that, the more complicated it gets. That’s not me. I said I warned you at the beginning, Madam Lavit reinforced it during the break. That’s a very good example of one of the complications but it does illustrate my point. I said, when you get in an established church, you can’t separate religion from state policy. Whereas religion is the truth of Christ and everything about the truth of Christ is primary and everything else is secondary and potentially you can give it up.
This is what makes the North American situation so very, very unusual. Historically speaking, it shouldn’t be called the North American experiment it should be called the United States experiment. It’s spreading, it’s spreading to the world and recently it’s become Canadian. The reason we can’t call it originally Canadian is because Canada did institute this protection of the Roman Catholic Schools, Roman Catholic in the British North America which created Canada in 1867.
Already before that, the Anglicans in Canada wanted to have an established church the way they had it in England. That was in the 1830’s when England still had all this disability rules for non-Anglicans. Non-Anglican Christians could not go to University, could not be in parliament, could not vote and etcetera, etcetera.
Question: [Inaudible 02:09:40] by the church?
Prof. Schneider: No. The rather powerful bishop of Toronto wanted to have such an established church in Canada and partly because the Anglicans were not in the majority, the other Protestants were, it didn’t work, ended up with public schools instead. So, in the sense, Canada is in there from the beginning too. But in United States, the amazing thing is the Bill of Rights and especially the first amendment of the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights establishes a situation in which on the one hand, no church will ever be established but on the other hand, all churches are free to practice religion. It’s not just the ‘no establish church’ that matters, it’s the ‘no disabilities’. This is an amazing experiment! An amazing experiment. The people were freely horrified by it. It’s very hard to make it work because people’s religious prejudices run very deep. America still made it very, very hard, for example, for the Catholics; and also, by the way, for the Orthodox in Alaska.
You may not know that Orthodoxy is the primarily religion of Alaska and still to this day. When America purchased Alaska in the 1860’s, the vast majority of the indigenous population was Orthodox. The first thing that happened was basically a whole bunch of Presbyterians coming in and setting up the State Schools and seriously disenabling Orthodoxy which they regarded as, of course, this is 19th century version of the word religion as superstition and [inaudible 02:11:54] and blah, blah, blah.
There are letters to President Mckinley, they’re probably fairly rhetorical but they say that, “Why do you allow these Protestants to come in and shoot us for practicing our religion?” I hope it’s rhetorical. On the other hand, remember that these people are Indians and Americans, and that period which “Shoot anybody who is Indian.” Doesn’t matter what religion they are.
In real life, in sociology, these things are hard but at least in law, the American experiment set the churches free. Now, why do I say this is terribly important for the churches in America? In my view, it is because, therefore the church’s only claim to authority, to authenticity, is on the basis of their ability to speak the truth which means it’s an absolute return to apologetic.
The beauty of democracy is that it makes the churches free to speak the truth. We can speak up. We couldn’t do that in the Ottoman Empire. No church in the Ottoman Empire was allowed to speak outside of its own walls. The Ottomans were terribly liberal, I mean really liberal. You just had to be willing to keep it to yourself and not go out and missionize.
Now, of course, Islam was an established religion in the Ottoman Empire and telling the Christians that they couldn’t missionize is to tell them they can’t even be Christians. The very first thing we said to tonight was that “To be evangelical, to outreach, to missionize is the essence of Christianity.” It is to announce the word, announce the Gospel. So the Christians had to hang in there. It was a martyrdom period, still kind of is.
In America, no church is subject to that. Every church can speak, which sets up a situation you will notice, very like the one we talked about in the first talk. It means that what the churches have to do to have any kind of claim, is to be what churches really are. Missionaries, people who reach out, people who speak the truth, people who seek to offer the beauty of Christ to a sick world that’s greatly in need.
Now, I will come to a difficult point in a minute, but right away, first point I want to turn to is that to do that means that you have to think that your home is where your feet are. This responsibility of missionizing and so on is not a responsibility that comes to the churches, belongs to the bishop and is handled by some office of the secretariat, and only by specialized, trained people either, right? No. It is the nature of every Christian, the good Samaritan was a missionary. Remember he was not even a Jew, he’s a missionary for what God really is.
Therefore, the Christian’s home is eschatological; the Christian’s home is in Christ. That means that his home in this historic moment in which he lives, is wherever he happens to be. Philip stumbles across a eunuch in the middle of Nubian Desert and converts it. In fact the story ends with a miracle, there is water in the Nubian Desert. You understand? The person he is speaking to isn’t a Palestinian Jew like Philip either, he is Ethiopian, right?
Question: The Nubian is a [inaudible 02:17:16], you mean the [inaudible 02:17:17]?
Prof. Schneider: Well, it’s way down south in the desert.
Question: It’s a [inaudible 02:17:22]
Prof. Schneider: He’s way down south. Home is where your feet are. Now, where is home for the people in this room?
Question: [Inaudible 02:18:45]
Prof. Schneider: Pardon?
Question: Everywhere.
Prof. Schneider: Everywhere, but in your historic moment, where are your feet planted? Aha! I was waiting for that answer. I will tell you two words that are the curse of Orthodoxy. One is: Mother country
Question: [Inaudible 02:18:09]
Prof. Schneider: As opposed to homeland, your homeland is America. Mother country is a curse, and worst is the diaspora. There is no such thing as the Orthodox diaspora, but it is the most commonly used word in Orthodox style. Why is that so? Here, I would need another whole hour to discourse on the history of Orthodoxy in America.
Father Thomas was speaking about jurisdictions here. You noticed how upset he got when he was speaking of jurisdictions, it’s because the existence of multiple jurisdictions in one place is a heresy. At the very least, it’s a complete violation of canon law and this is not just one bishop’s canon law, this is canon laws of the Councils of Nicaea.
Question: Meaning, too many bishops presiding the same place?
Prof. Schneider: Having jurisdiction in the same place. There are six bishops at Chicago, six Orthodox bishops of Chicago. There are four in Toronto.
Question: Different nationalities?
Prof. Schneider: No, different ethnic jurisdictions.
Question: National, I mean, [02:19:49]
Prof. Schneider: Yes.
Question: This is again a Nicaean Law?
Prof. Schneider: Absolutely against the canons of the Council of Nicaea, one bishop in one city. That’s because the church is unified, right?
Question: These had the same priest like Bulgarian, Russian and Ethiopian. They all have the same priest but [inaudible 02:20:14].
Prof. Schneider: I made a very quick count. In Toronto, if I count in all the non-canonicals like the old calendar Greeks and the self-proclaimed [inaudible 02:20:26], I’ll include them as well, and I include all the Orientals and all the Byzantines; there are 31 Orthodox jurisdictions in one city. This is partly why this concept of diaspora homeland is so important and it’s a question of where our loyalties go.
I spoke about … For me the sadness, I mean he is doing a great piece of work, but nonetheless the sadness of seeing other Father Ramonius having to devote all his energy to a project whose purpose is to create a ghetto for the Copts. Now some of it’s valuable, I think old people like to live within their language, if you are going to extended and care for residents, I am rather in favor with being ethnic. It’s comfort for the old people.
For the young, this is kind of catastrophic. For what the Coptic Church could offer to Toronto society, which is a very sick society, it’s a catastrophe. Nobody is learning how to talk to where you are.
Question: Is it a [inaudible 02:21:51] for the [inaudible 02:21:52] for being separated from the society to get in peace? [Inaudible 02:21:57]
Prof. Schneider: Again, I think we ended the discussion. You should think about this overnight and we should discuss this. It’s an important issue there’s all kinds of reasons for it - security, safety, fear of the others. We know our own; some of it is false spirituality of the kind, Father Tom speaks about, that God really intended our church. We are alright, the others can deviate if they like.
It’s the power of culture. It makes a total mockery of what the Canadians say they are so good at, which is multi-culturalism. Well, the culturalism is not the same thing as this block is cut is Egyptian and this block is Italian and this block is Ethiopian, that’s not multi-culturalism, that’s ghettos.
In North America, it’s even tougher because North American Society, sociologically or anthropologically resist the idea of multi-culturalism, has a melting pot [inaudible 02:23:11] us instead and very successful people like you, generally are quite good. Therefore, I double think so that you could work all week as Americans, do your job as well, contribute to society, pocket your paycheck and you expect the church to defend diaspora homeland.
I would not be so rude, I guess, as to hold up the Copts as my example here, but I will certainly tell you what my experiences with the Armenians. You should look at the Armenian Website. All the energy is going into creating loyalty and commitment to our Armenia. All of it! And especially for the young. It’s about language, and so and so on. It’s about culture, it’s about making sure you go to camp and yet a [inaudible 02:24:16] not in [inaudible 02:24:18].
Question: [Inaudible 02:24:21]
Prof. Schneider: It is also nationalism because the Byzantine models are so alive, yes, in Orthodoxy. So, there is a lot of association with the search for a nation-state so that we can reestablish them Symphonia. By the way, this has been condemned as a heresy in Orthodoxy, it’s called Philatism. It’s a notion that you belong to our church, if you are a member of our ethnos, our ethnicity.
Question: [Inaudible 02:25:02-09]
Prof. Schneider: Oh yes. Oh, absolutely!
Question: I know that, I mean, when you verify saying this but when you look on, the website that I mentioned earlier, it’s not in the United States but it has to be found to bound our spiritual value and resources. One of the resources that, it is very valuable and it’s sort of the questions and answers section to that website; what I find very unfortunate is that one of the questions on that website is in regards to the Coptic Language within the liturgical service and within the hymns of the church. The way … The question basically says “What is the importance or should we retain the Coptic Language in the liturgical life of the church as well as within the hymnology, etcetra? The answer is very, very strong, stating that, undoubtedly yes, we should maintain the Coptic Language that our ancestors, and this is the famous quote, unfortunately, it has been potentiated within the church over and over again.
That our ancestors had their tongues cutout because they spoke Coptic and how can we be the generation to dispose of this language or minimize the language, may be not dispose of it, but minimize this language. It is not up to us, actually, it is up to us to carry the torch, so to speak, of this language and to carry it to generations to come.
I find that answer very unfortunate and I find it again, furthering this philosophy that we are to, not only carry the torch of our faith and our dogma and our tradition, but we are to carry the torch of our culture. So we have this rich tradition, dogma and faith, and we wrap it, we coat it in culture, we coat it in language and you can only partake of the richness if you can first find your way through the culture and find your way through the language. How are we going to be evangelical if we are going to go out to the world and say, “First, understand the Egyptian culture, first understand or at least, be okay with speaking or understanding Coptic, then you can be part of our church.” Our church being our faith, our dogma and our tradition.
I just … I, as one who was born in and raised here, within North America, I find that unacceptable, I mean we cannot continue in that vein.
Prof. Schneider: Let’s look at, a 180 degrees around. Suddenly, things go in the right order. What is needful? What is vitally necessary is that which speaks of Christ; that which makes it possible to come into an eschatological fullness of understanding of Christ and to announce that to the world.
Then comes the next question: What is needful include what Coptic history and tradition has contributed to the Christian dialogue? In a better way, the answer is unmistakably “Yes!”
Therefore, for those who have the capacity, the time, the ability, is it a good thing to learn the Coptic fathers, the Coptic language, the Coptic liturgy and so on? Sure it is! Should every student in Toronto School of Theology know Coptic? It would be nice. Is it going to happen? No!
Therefore, we need some people who do that because that’s a valuable nuance in the dialogue. Just as we need some people who do our minion and we need some people who can do Cyriac and we need some people who can do Greek and we need some people who understand Father Florousky, and they are all in the dialogue. That’s what we mean when we say Orthodoxy is a religion of tradition. What we do not mean is that cultural traditions are, as you said, that cultural traditions are intrinsically in their essence, holy. Only Christ is intrinsically … God in Christ is intrinsically in essence, holy.
If that is true, then people and the world are intrinsically in an essence, holy because they are the image of Christ. Beyond that, all is synergy, all is trying to get at to some, get in tuned in harmony with the [inaudible 02:31:10]. Does getting into harmony with the [inaudible 02:31:14] mean getting into harmony with the state? No, but the Byzantine solution says, yes.
Now the Byzantine Empire of course, disappeared. So we don’t have an Orthodox state anymore, nowhere in the world to protect this. I can assure that the present [inaudible 02:31:37] of Armenia wants one. Whereas the new government of Armenia’s a bunch of 40 something, who got their degrees in Colombia, Harvard and Princeton and they want a modern democratic republic. I assure you, I know this from his mouth, that what the Catholicos wants is to return to medieval state in which the Catholicos also happen to be the king of Armenia.
But to the best of my knowledge, there is no such state left in the world, not in Bulgaria, not in Russia, nowhere. Therefore, what is left to be that kind of establishment authorities that says you must be Orthodox because you got to obey the law that says you must be Orthodox, so then it’s a hierarchy? That’s where it comes from.
There are, of course, other factors. Their income depends on it and so on and so on. So Father Hopko is absolutely right. We’ve got to get people to say “I am a witness for Christ. It is Christ who saves me, I belong to the church because the church is the body of Christ and my belonging to the church means as 1st Corinthians 12 says, “Bring my gifts to that church for the use of the [inaudible 02:33:07]; the building up of a church.”
The next question is to what extent does that … Is that, further maximize derived from the traditional ways my church does things? You have to think about all that stuff.
Question: There’s one important thing here, I think the bishops or the people in that positions think of that because of the history, when the church is leaving the positions of authority, there is risk of somebody else gets those positions and dictate things on the church. So, in their mentality, they are trying to protect the church by usurping those positions.
Prof. Schneider: Right, which is why I am arguing for a conciliar model.
Question: So, how to reassure them by Christian way?
Prof. Schneider: Okay, well, the clock says you have to think about that over night.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: Now we are half way through this topic. So far it’s stayed within church and state, but now what do you do when the state … We’ve said that the greatest freedom a church can have and the greatest challenge a church can have, the real challenge, the most realistic challenge, is to be free within a state that says there will be no established religion, which means a democratic society. Winston Churchill, along with the American model which is rapidly becoming a global model, even in the world of Islam; what we haven’t dealt with so is that you still need law and order. A democracy has to somehow be good for everyone who is governed by that democratic government.
So there is a serious dialogue and sometimes it’s a confrontation between church and the democratic state. That’s the last bullet in the first page. So what we have yet to talk tomorrow is the last bullet in the first page and it’s a biggie. That will lead to the conclusion on the second page and then we will take up, decide our last topic. That will be for tomorrow.
Question: Thank you very much.
Question: No, in Egypt. Were you insinuating about the Sikh and about the second article in their constitution, Islam is the official religion. The Egyptian liberals say “When we make a certain religion official and the first religion, so actually we are dealing with a religious state.” I think states which have one religion; Armenia is one nationality, the Armenian Nationality and one religion which is Christianity. I think when they are all different religions in the country and well, all the people have the equal rights.
In this case, I don’t think that the church will combine itself with the state but when …
Prof. Schneider: There are two things. First of all, it’s not true in Armenia anymore. There are Catholics and now, as everywhere, the Evangelical Protestants are missionizing and the Catholicos really wants this democratic republic to pass laws; A: Establishing Armenian Orthodox church and B: Keeping the Evangelicals out.
Question: When you say that they are keeping the religion, you mean Orthodox, the only Orthodox. They are rejecting Catholics and others or making them second-class citizens or …
Prof. Schneider: Well, basically, he wants to forbid public missionizing. Missionizing of Christians by Christians is I think, not of Christ. It is a real difficult, a real problem of arrogance. If you start asking a democratic republic to pass such a law, you got an absolute conflict in your politic and you are back to the medieval established church and all the problems that brings with it.
Question: Yeah, I saw that when we say one religion, I mean that they are all Christians. That’s why they want state to be purely Christian and purely Armenian.
Prof. Schneider: Yes. Part of it, the rhetorical view, is that Orthodox are not Christians, that they have gotten all confused. That’s part of the Evangelical message.
Question: I have spoken with one of my friends this afternoon, he said, “I think the end result that we are going to abolish or may disturb Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant or Evangelican; so, are we going to go back to relate the church to the city?” Say, when Paul sent his apostles to Corinth or to Ephesus or the Colossian or ... Is it what we expect in the future, if we are going to restore this division of, and despises of Orthodox and Catholics?
Prof. Schneider: Well, who knows! But you have to take historical context into account. Church has always existed in history. In those days, the organizations of society were essentially these urban agglomerations. The Roman Empire was a bunch of cities with a whole lot of farms in between, but it was really a bunch of cities. What we are rapidly moving into is something that has been called the global village. So you have got to take modern civilization into account - the airplanes, the travel and the internet, etcetera, etcetera. Are we going to go back to something urban like that or are we going to go into something global? Who knows?
Question: We want to define a certain church. For example, the church of Egypt? What are you going to say if we had all churches in Egypt, say the Catholic and also [inaudible 2:40:40] and others, we say 'We are all Christians and I accept you and you accept me. Your baptism is accepted to me. I can't find any difference between you and me.’ Do we say the church of Egypt including all these ... We have to find ...
Prof. Schneider: See, I think that’s a little like Father Gragas’ simplification yesterday was we have to patiently to work our way through all these issues. There are issues of truth, of doctrine. They'll have to be worked through.
Question: So it’s a [inaudible 02:41:28] for decades, I think.
Prof. Schneider: For decades and decades and patience is one of the virtues. It is the third grade virtues, patience.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: After listening in humility ...
Question: At least we are dealing with one another and we are talking to one another. This is good. I knew that ... I think the …
Prof. Schneider: The ecumenical 20th century is historically astonishing, compared to the 19th centuries before it.
Question: The Vatican is dealing with Evangelicans, I think, and talking with them. This is a big change.
Prof. Schneider: The Orthodox are in bilateral dialogues with something like 11 different churches. We are in bilateral dialogues with the Catholics, with the Lutherans, with the Congregationalists, with the reform churches, the Anglicans. This is a lot of bilateral dialogue going on.
Question: This deal [inaudible 2:42:30] with the difficult aspects, difficult [inaudible 2:42:35] in the story because I think in the Palestinian [inaudible 2:42:40], for example, now there is 50 years of war and negotiations, and all that; what we read in the newspapers these days that 'Please go directly into the difficult issues that is the state and the capitalizing on that. I think, instead of just extending the talks and differences on how to ... They should have this [inaudible 02:43:13] of ... Do you actually accept one church, the Christian church in the whole world? There should be the good intention for that otherwise they are sitting together, they are eating on the tables and discussing things. They go back and will meet next year and so on. Like the scientific conventions that we attend every year and we have the next convention to be held in this city at this date and that continues forever.
Prof. Schneider: Right. Thank you very much, anyhow. That last is an obligation for us because it's scripture is given to us in the Gospel. We have to no choice but to think about unity.
Question: Yes, but there should be the good intention and there should be the power of forgiveness and not sticking to our positions as bishops and popes.
Prof. Schneider: You will find all of that in those messages.
Question: Thank you very much, thank you very much.
Prof. Schneider: [Inaudible 2:44:24] you were quite wonderful about that.
Yesterday, we ended with a point, the point we were talking about at the end was that, in fact, our feet are planted in America, our churches are planted in America. If you get rid of the idea of diaspora, you suddenly realize, the reason in God's plan that these churches are in America, is to be a mission to America. That is that the orthodox churches have something to say, go back to that idea of Evangelism that American society desperately needs to hear.
Now we go back to something I said in the first lecture of ours, being an authentic voice. To be an authentic voice you have to listen as well as speak. It is the people who only speak who get into that mentality of 'I am right and you are wrong.’ It is the people who listen, who get into dialogue. Dialogue is saying “Hi, I understand what you have to say, but have you thought about this?". That's the new apologetic. It isn't 'You're wrong and I am right' it’s 'I can move your thought along a little bit.'
From this point of view, another very interesting thing happens. We talked yesterday about the diversity. All these Orthodox churches, 32 canonical Orthodox churches in North America. And then there’s all the splitter groups and crazies. But 32, canonical groups, yet why? The whole talk about unity has been from the ecclesiological point of view. One church, one hierarchy, one authority, one structure, one set of laws and one set of jurisdictions and so on. Of course, that is going to go nowhere. Nobody is going to give up a position of authority, but that isn't in fact the issue. In fact, the issue is culture.
About 15 years ago, the World Council of Churches did a global project, very important project. It was called Gospel and Culture. It was a tremendous wake up call, to make people realize that while there is the eschatological, the simple truth of the gospel, ‘Christ has died, Christ has risen,’ the Easter your affirmation. There is also, we spoke about synergy, the understanding of that Gospel. What does that mean for our lives and that understanding is always in culture.
I can tell you an amusing story. The representative for the World Council of Churches who started the project and was in charge of it, he was a Tamil Indian, from Tamil Nadu, way down in the south of India. Somebody who was totally Black and being raised an Anglican under the British Raj. He said as a boy he sang in the choir and at eight years, he suddenly realized, there he was in Tamil Nadu, December 25th, the temperature outside is a 110 degrees. He is wearing Elizabethan choir robes and Elizabethan starch rough and he is singing in his boyish soprano, “See amid the winter snow, tadadada,” he realized he didn't have a clue what he was talking about. This is, of course, a British hymn, which comes from a culture of northern climates. The chances are pretty good that, except maybe in the Galilee, Jesus never saw snow either. That is when he realized that there has to be this relationship of the simple gospel to culture.
If we think about North American society in the terms that we were talking about yesterday, one its essential features is multi-culturalism. I don't have time to go through the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America, but it is really quite fascinating. It started as a mission. In its beginnings, it begins in 1794, do you realize that? In Alaska, more than 200 years ago.
In its beginnings, it was a very typical orthodox outreach mission. The same as the one in Japan and in Siberia to the Bulgars and so on, to the Ethiopians back in the 4th century, it was a mission to the natives to the indigents; because it was like that and done with respect for their culture and their language, it was hugely successful, still the majority of religion in Alaska. What happened around, at the end of the 19th century, was this tremendous wave of immigration from Orthodox countries to North America from all orthodox countries. From the Baltic and the Slavic lands, you got mostly factory workers. They wanted religion. They were lonely, they were lost, they were illiterate, they wanted religion that looked like what they were familiar with. If you look in the cities, the immigrants are Greeks and Arabs, mostly Lebanese, but all kinds who get involved in commerce and so on, they too wanted religion that looked like their society.
At that point the American Church thought of ways to accommodate them. They invented something never seen before in Orthodoxy, never ever. That's ethnic bishops. Ever since the beginning, bishops have always been territorial bishops, and the bishops of a certain distinct defined region. What Arch-Bishop [inaudible 2:51:45] invented was the idea of, "No, let's have bishops and we'll put them in the major cities, of course, because they have to have a cathedral, but their responsibility will be for the, that ethnos.
The first bishop ever consecrated in North America was an Arab. There was no Antiochian church yet, it was only the one church still. He came from Antioch, he was sent by a Patriarch of Antioch, transferred to serve this American Church, which meant that the Patriarch of Antioch was allowing him to go under the Patriarch of Russia. It wasn't patriarch, it was metropolitan at that point. His name was Rafael [inaudible 2:52:37]. He's now been canonized by the Orthodox Church in America, a great man.
This was the vision at that point. What happened to that vision? It was two things, one is the great metropolitan [inaudible 2:52:54] was called back to Russia, so the Great senate of 1917 and was elected patriarch and then immediately was put under house arrest and died under house arrest 20 years later.
Question: He’s canonized the …
Prof. Schneider: Oh yes, absolutely and deserves it too. So that was one catastrophe. The much bigger catastrophe was what we talked about yesterday, ethnicity, the diaspora mentality. Suddenly of the Greeks are saying “We want a Greek Church” they were the first. Right after them the Arabs said, "We want an Antiochian Church." They both got what they wanted, and I'm feeding Dr. Edward worst instincts here but in both cases, if you examine the history, they got it because the patriarchs were pursuing their own political ambitions, especially in the Greek case.
Then the floodgates opened. Suddenly we had Serbian ex-archaic, suddenly we had Bulgarian ex-archaic, suddenly we had a Romanian ex-archaic, boom, boom, boom! You see? These really were ex-archaic that is the Head of Church wasn't in North America. The Head of Church was ...
Question: Homeland.
Prof. Schneider: You notice how you even use the word, it was motherland. Immediately this diaspora mentality develops. The diaspora mentality develops and along with it all of those things we talked about yesterday - the loyalties to the homeland, the focus on the homeland, the ghettoizing, the total lack of relationship to the fact that the seeds were planted in North America.
I have to say, this was especially strange in the case of the Greeks and the Arabs because the Slavic workers, only the men came. They were sending money back home, and they didn't think they were going to stay, they ended up staying, of course. I'll tell you an interesting thing that happened to them, socially. In the case of Greeks and Arabs, the whole family came. They knew where they were going. They knew why they were going, they were going to make money. The mentality stayed in the homeland and the church encouraged that.
Question: [Inaudible 2:55:34]
Prof. Schneider: Right, well from ... Again from ... We have to go back to the beginning of what we said, at the very beginning. From a gospel point of view, this is no longer the Church of Christ. It is the Church of the Egyptians, it is the Church of the Greeks, and it is the Church of the … That's what it is. Whereas there is only one Orthodox Church and that is the Church of Christ. The job of the Church of Christ is to evangelize. We said this right at the beginning. You will evangelize the people that you find. Phillip found the Eunuch.
Go back and look at ... Read Acts 2 carefully. It's a very significant story. It's an allegory. It's the day of Pentecost. When the Apostles get the Holy Spirit, the one detail that is given is that they speak all the languages of the world and everybody is astonished, and everybody is hearing his language and everybody is astonished at that. The issue is not language, the issue is geography. It is the idea that the gospel is for everywhere.
The job of an Apostle, a witness, is to announce the gospel, both in words and in lifestyle where one is. If one is totally shut off, if one's eyes are only focused on Egypt or Serbia or wherever, how is your neighbor going to see your Christian lifestyle? What's your neighbor going to see? What your neighbor’s going to see is the ghetto.
What is your neighbor going to hear of the word of God? He's going to hear gospedi familie from Italy. Hear kyrie eleison. Your neighbor who comes from Portugal or Brooklyn says “What?” You follow? You see what I mean? Your neighbor has social concerns of all kinds, the Orthodox there. The other churches are there, but the Orthodox is there.
That was our closing point yesterday, that there's a real neglect of the fact that we're in America and it's neglect not just of our civil duties, it’s a neglect of our gospel responsibilities. To be loyal to culture, our culture; to feel our culture, to want to maintain and sustain our culture, these are noble things. They are important.
My argument right now is that, in fact, to do good to North American society, we need to do that because North American society is multi-cultural; but the goal of being Egyptian, Greek, Russian, whatever, is not to create a ghetto but to show the whole of North America society what value there is, that the Greek, the Egyptian, the Russian form of orthodoxy had brought, you see?
Again, do we model that? To do that in the first instance, I’m back in the first talk again; in the first instance to model that we have to give that to each other. We have to give that to each other. There is a very strange phrase that has developed in the 20th century. It's a phrase which should have no meaning at all, inter-Orthodox. Why is that a strange phrase? Because there is only one Orthodox. Only one Orthodox, only one Orthodox Church? But if you take gospel and culture into account, then it's a meaningful phrase.
There's many ... it's like Baskin & Robbins, there are many, many flavors of what is all ice cream and each one is delicious, you see how it works? So one has to ... The metaphor is starting to break down here, but one, so to speak, has to be able to taste them all to know how delicious they all are but you only buy one cone, that's yours. At least there has been the sharing of the richness of each. That’s the model we ought to be presenting.
Instead, what we get is fellatism, ethnic hostility, nationalism. Go to Greek churches, you know what you see there, right up there in the altar? The Greek national flag, right?
In 1994, there was a historic meeting. It was an organization called SCOBA. This is a Standing Committee of Orthodox Bishops of America. It doesn't include any Orientals, by the way.
Question: Why not?
Prof. Schneider: Probably because despite 1992, we haven't admitted to each other it is legitimate, at least there is this committee. In 1994, at a historic meeting at Ligonier, they finally agreed that it was ridiculous to try to multiply the services and functions so they would have ... So all the Orthodox, one secretariat, one educational committee and program, and so on and so on, cooperate. Everybody rejoiced until one month later the ecumenical patriarch said, "No, we can't do this." No one understands why, it was probably Dr. Edward’s reasons.
Since then, it has gotten worse. It is interesting that things are improving down at the grass roots level. Twenty years ago, if an OCA priest went to a Greek Church and tried to go into the altar and help serve, he'd be thrown out. Nowadays that won't happen. There's a sense of openness of hospitality among the Orthodox which is a sign of improvement, I think. In the outreach to North America, I'm not so sure what's happening.
The Ethiopians in Toronto have just collected $3.5 million, and believe me, Ethiopians do not get top level jobs. These are nickel-and-dime contributions, and just like that, they collected $3.5 million. What for? They wanted to build a church that looked like it was in Ethiopia.
It's still that sense of cultural identity, not cultural riches that keeps people ... Keeps a barrier between Orthodox people and North American society, which needs to hear our voice, and now I'm going to turn to that. Here, there's a problem.
Yesterday I emphasized very strongly the value of American freedom, this historical breakthrough that was created by American democracy that put the churches back into a position of creative development and that's a great thing. With it comes a cost, comes a problem. If you are not going to have an ... Every society needs values, every society needs law and order, for example. It needs a set of values. It needs an ethos, something that is dedicated to. The American ethos is in the Declaration of Independence. It's about "All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator", notice, this is vaguely religious, it was written by bunch of deists. “Endowed by their Creator with certain rights and so on and so on, all men are equal.”
The Constitution, and it's a pretty good Constitution, is designed to make that work as a form of government and law. But you notice that it's very 18th century in that it's grounded in rights. It's grounded in rights and we are all very conscious of rights. Believe me; if people start having disabilities for Egyptian immigrants, all of you are going to be on the picket line claiming your rights. We have two beautiful women here today. I can guarantee you they are acutely conscious of the issue of women’s rights and thinking deeply about it. Whether your wife tells you this or not, I can guarantee you this is so, isn't it so? Yes.
So we all know about rights. Dr. Edwards is a psychiatrist, he knows about rights. He has to face this issue all the time because a patient has a right not to take his medicines for schizophrenic. Does Dr. Edward have the right to lock somebody up? We have physicians here. Right to life? Right to die? These are rights issues, rights of all kinds, and they are important. In democracy, people are supposed to influence their government too, and rights come in all of the time.
Well, I'll tell you a very interesting story. Because of the equality of all of the churches and the Canadian Council of Churches, one of the many ways we show that is, is that we don't have one vague common ecumenical worship service. We worship in the traditions of the member churches. So, of course, we never do Eucharist, we couldn’t do that. We do evening prayers and things like that, and we pass that around, so that every church gets its turn, and the church gets to learn about each other that way. We do the same with Bible study, passes around I turn.
At one meeting, one day we were dealing with native Indians and their problems. I'll ask you a nasty question, by the way, don't try to answer it. Just put it in ... Tuck it into your head. How many times have you ever, since you've been in an orthodox church, heard the discussion of the problems of the North American Indians?
Question: Never.
Prof. Schneider: Never. We were having a ... This is one of the virtues of joining an ecumenical body. You are made to encounter things that you ignored, that you’ve neglected. So we had a big discussion. The Indians say "We want …” Were there, they gave presentations. They said, "We want our rights. Please help us out. Join us." The next day was Orthodox Bible Study and I was leading it. What we pointed out was that rights are not a bible concept, there's no such thing as rights in the Bible.
From a Christian point of view, we have no rights, we have gifts. All gifts are from God and we are supposed to act in a Godly way; but to act in a Godly way, it’s my last bullet actually, to act in a Godly way is to protect the weak. To see to it that nobody is left out. That's how it works in Christianity. It's not a question of rights. Rights are an absolutely rational 18th century idea. In government and law what rights produces is lawsuits, and there's no way rights is an equal, it's called an equity issue in law; there's no way that one person can gain a right without taking away some right from another person.
What democracy is supposed to do is create a balance of rights. A very good idea. Excellent, right? Winston Churchill once said, "Democracy is the worst form of government that was ever invented except for all of the others.
Question: But back to this, you just said the state and the religions, now why we have to discuss the Indian rights in the church? This is not the Bible, it’s exactly ...
Prof. Schneider: Okay, let’s turn to our … My very last bullet, let’s turn to my very last bullet, right away then.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: It’s right there.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: I am going to read it, in fact. ‘In particular, the weak have a hard time in democracy; but the weak are our Christian calling, they are in our care. Arch, they are our treasure, they are our Christ; we all know the story of St. Lawrence, right? Roman Emperor said “Bring me the treasures of the church” Lauren said “Of course” What does he bring? He goes and gets all the beggars from Rome, brings them, “Here’s the treasure of the church.”
What’s he basing that on? Matthew 25. We all know Matthew 25.
Question: That was [inaudible 03:11:06]
Prof. Schneider: Let me, and that was me. Now, if that’s our Christian calling, then the weak are our concern. It’s very important for the Orthodox to get involved this because we are the only major church in North America that has a good track record. Every other church in North America has oppressed the Indians, seriously oppressed them, taken away their culture, rip their families to pieces, stolen their livelihood, their land, everything. It’s been total tyranny, state tyranny; and worse tyranny in the name of Christ. You are pagans, we have to make you like us, your culture has no value. Only the Orthodox missionized with respect for Indian culture.
Question: In Alaska.
Prof. Schneider: In Alaska. Therefore, we have a duty to get involved in this issue, because we have a message, we have an example. We have to offer that to the dialogue.
Question: Yeah, but here we are back from the backdoor to politics. Like, the Egyptians Copt, the church people will scant and the church people not the clergy, but the people, lay people, start their political movements from within the church.
This is … My personal view is no, we have to split separate between the church and politics. I as a person have life in the church, and life in the community. As a Coptic I can stand as a citizen in Egypt and ask for my rights but not emanating from my affiliation with the church, but my affiliation with the society.
So, we here in Canada, for instance, we can talk about the rights of the Indians or the rights of any problem from the point of view that I am a citizen of Canada, not a member of the church.
Prof. Schneider: Now my answer to that would be that you can’t make that separation. Justinian did understand … If gospel is always in culture; politics is part of culture, so the issue is how to do a Christian politics. Justinians understood Symphonia, what he misunderstood was the nature of the state and government; because the government was imperial, politics was going to be top-down on what the state says.
Democracy … Politics is supposed to be what we say. You can’t stay out of this debate, so what you are going to bring to it. Now you said, “Okay I can, as a Canadian, I can talk about the rights of Indians and I can keep myself separate as an Orthodox”. You can’t, because politics is valued, you can’t have a values-free politics. The question is going to be, what values?
Question: The prime minister of Canada when he talks, does he talk as a member of whatever church he goes or as a Canadian?
Prof. Schneider: He talks in terms of values and I will tell you this is a fact. When the gulf … When George W. Bush’s Iraq war started, we had a lot of peace discussions in the Community Council of Churches, we had a wonderful day of discussion in which the conclusion was there is no such thing as a just war; this included the military chaplains who agreed with this. So when George W. Bush’s war started all the churches were willing to agree, signed on by the heads of churches that Canada should not join this war.
Question: Why the church has a say in that?
Prof. Schneider: Because the church … Because one of the things, that is the message of Jesus, is peace. Jesus promises “My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you”. Therefore we, dealing on the ground, have to make decisions, we said yesterday, further this message of Jesus.
Question: But now you are a politician not a religious man.
Prof. Schneider: Oh no, it’s not an either or.
Question: No. Now you make everyone in a democratic country talking … The Muslims would talk about applying their Sierra Law, I apply this, the state has to be separate from the church and everyone talks whatever value, whatever resources he has to make and shape his idea but he does not have to say Jesus said that or Mohammed or Buddha or whoever.
Prof. Schneider: Nor did I say that either.
Question: So why we have to those churches talk about politics?
Prof. Schneider: Because there is … Okay, go back two steps. The truth of Christianity is truth for everybody. Jesus came into the world to save everybody, that’s also one of my bullets. Therefore if the truth is the truth, we have to work to interject that truth into the value system of democracy. Democracy, remember, works like that; it’s our voice.
Now, you are absolutely right. We have separation of churches and state, it’s one of the essences of our freedom. There is no way a democratic government should adopt Sierra Law or Canon Law either. No way, but the basic values that are Jesus are values … They are for the salvation of whole world and it’s our duty to announce these to inter-put these into the political dialogue in a way, but in a way that can be heard.
Remember yesterday ‘I’m right you are wrong’ so we stand up and say “You can’t go to war because Jesus say you can’t go to war” they’d be laughing at your face, understand? If you stand up and talk about the universal value of peace and justice and so on, people will listen. It was, again, the consensus of all the churches that made this heard. It went in a letter to the Prime Minister, it was John Curtin at that point; John Curtin himself, acknowledged that that letter was one of the reasons why Canada did not join the war.
Question: Did they convene and wrote a letter and send it to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia?
Prof. Schneider: I’m not sure what happened.
Question: If they want to get into politics they should be all over the world and they will lose their job as a leader of a church. This is too much for the church. This is my personal view and why they are doing this when America is defending itself by the politician point of view? I’m not saying he is right or wrong but I’m saying I didn’t hear them sending up and doing the world church or WWCO, World Council of Churches doing the announcement of September 11 or Taliban doing this or whoever doing that so they are not fair.
We will get this dilemma because they are jumping into an area that it is not yours. If they want to shift the world, they should shift the world by shifting the cultures, the society, the mentality so the leaders of the world lead the world in a Christian way.
Not coming from the top and tell the leaders what to do; but change the … They preach Christianity so that whatever the society could use of a leader, of a great man or whatever, of a soldier would be a Christian in what he or she is doing?
Prof. Schneider: Yes, no question about that. In this particular instance about going to war you have to talk to the leaders.
Question: Abu, please correct me if I’m wrong; Christians are part of the world and in democracy, as we understand, it has to stem from the public, the public opinion has aroused. We don’t normally hear it, everyone has to say this vote, what she wants what she thinks that is right. So, if the churches agreed … If they had to express the freedom and say “We all agree that this thing is wrong” but we are not enforcing it.
Prof. Schneider: The only justification for a Christian voice and what is a political debate is, if the church leaders got up and said “Vote for the Liberal Party” that would certainly be wrong.
The only reason there is a Christian voice in a political debate is because the political debate must be grounded and valid. There’s a wonderful essay in here, notice it’s called ‘Discerning the Science of the Times’ and that’s what our responsibility is in synergy. That God gives it to us, to our free will to discern the science of the times.
The essay’s called Christian and Orthodoxy in Peace. It reminds us that our values, our liturgy, our prayers completely filled with peace. Jesus says “My peace I give you” those are his first words after the resurrection; “In peace, let us pray to the Lord” we say.
So there is, in fact, a Christian value here and together with a whole bunch of other values, respect for life and so on and so on. This is what we’re given voice in this letter. Christian truth is not done by plebiscite, Dr. Edward, by the way.
Question: By what?
Prof. Schneider: By plebiscite.
Question: What’s that?
Prof. Schneider: Christian truth is not democratic, Christian truth is truth. You can’t vote out what is it … You can’t vote out what is the truth.
Question: This is why you are not supposed to get into politics, because it is by voting. If you want to, I am not disagreeing with the Christian values, I am disagreeing with the means of presenting. You don’t present Christian values by getting, interfering in politics but by changing the makeup of human being by being Christians and when they become citizen and become influential members, they become Christian, this is how to change the world.
Prof. Schneider: If you read the letter, you’ll see that is exactly what it does.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: The letter is, in effect, a civil sermon. It’s on the website, you could see it on the website if you …
Question: I hope that they send letters to themselves to be civil between each other.
Question: Not known that the [inaudible 03:23:57]
Question: Okay, I’ll make you what?
[Inaudible 03:23:58 – 03:24:12]
Prof. Schneider: In short, the freedom that democracy gives allows Christianity to be a meaningful voice in a dialogue, a meaningful Christian voice in the dialogue but it means we have an obligation to pay attention to these dialogues from the beginning.
The ecumenical movement realized that it had to have two arms, or to use John Paul II’s phrase, two lungs. One was the theological arm, Faith and Order; the other was called Peace and Justice.
These are things that Christians are supposed to bring. Now, justice means we care for everybody in the Christian sense. Justice is right-spaced in the civil democracy sense and so there’s going to be a lot of head-butting here. Same sex marriage is a perfect example.
Question: You are just stating your opinion or just politics?
Prof. Schneider: Not just politics, rights.
Question: When we come to this talk …
[Inaudible 03:25:24 – 03:25:32]
Prof. Schneider: A very good example of the boundary that has to exist between rights culture and religious values is the same sex marriage question. The Community Council of Churches had to face this because we knew the government was dealing with the issue. This was on the agenda, on the quarter paper
Question: The government needs input from the public.
Prof. Schneider: The government needs input from the public. We knew also perfectly well that there was not going to be consensus. For the first five years of forum, we only dealt with matters on which we thought we could get good consensus. We chose relations with the state and bio-technology as our two chief agendas. You’ll hear about the bio-technology in a minute.
For five years it was astonishing. The first thing … It was just when we decided on the forum consensus approach and everybody said “You will never accomplish anything ever again, you’ll just talk and talk and talk.” The first thing that happened is that very day we were able to get a complete consensus about euthanasia, complete. It’s amazing.
That was why, part of my success in talking to the World Council of Churches of Special Commission, I could say, we had five years of being able to find all kind of consensus; but on same sex marriage we knew there was not going to be consensus. There were churches that said same sex marriage … The gospel has to be interpreted in such a way so that this is an impossibility, this simply against the image of God. There were other churches that said the image of God is total love for all humanities. We have to embrace all people, we can’t shut people out of our churches, the more liberal churches.
It’s a very hard debate and a very serious debate. Very interesting experience of what tells … Remember we talk about the three big virtues? Listening, Humility and Patience. Those are the three big virtues - Listening, Humility and Patience. The fourth virtue, of course, is being absolutely firm in your truth.
So here we have a situation where we got competing notions of the truth with very firm sides. Are we going to be able to show, in really black and white, are we going to be able to show listening, humility and patience? Well, so first thing we did was stage a debate, a panel. The panel had a Reformed Church, Orthodox was me and United Church, representative speaking.
Each one defended the position, good apologetic. The Reformed Church person, I knew of course would speak from the Bible being a Reformed Church person. He did brilliant, brilliant scripture presentation that churches could not tolerate same sex marriage.
Since I knew he was going to do that, I spoke from an iconographic position, marriage is the image of Christ, so it has to be about union and various other things, I won’t go into the argument.
United church person, as we knew, presented from the point of view of human, love, respect for humanity, respect for persons, freedom and Christ and so on; the kind of things liberal say.
Everyone listened. All three papers where exceedingly wise, well-grounded, learned. People listened intensely and it was an amazing moment. So, of course, obviously no conclusion and spontaneously at the end of the meeting all three of us got up and hugged each other.
Question: Even [inaudible 03:30:11].
Prof. Schneider: Yeah, that is how it should be. So of course there is no consensus; So of course there is no Canadian Counsel of Churches position on same sex marriage. Individual churches had their positions. I had to write a letter about this. My letter is on the internet, if you want to read it. It is one of the hardest things I ever had to write. What I wrote was about listening.
At first, I wrote and explained why there is no Community Council of Churches position. Some churches defend this for very good and grounded gospel reasons and other churches defend that for very good and grounded gospel reasons, and what these means is that we clearly don’t understand what the totality of the gospel says. Not yet. But each church believes that it has found the essence of the gospel.
Therefore, if the debate would continue, the churches would have to carry-on being Christ in the world as they know best and what was incumbent on us was still to operate with love and respect for each other, that’s what the letter says. These letters had tremendous impact, it’s on the Community Council of churches website.
Under those circumstances, here is where you do have to draw the line between Civil Rights culture and Christian culture. The church has to be true to Christian culture. Civil rights culture has to be absolutely true to the values of Civil Rights, which is equal rights for everybody.
Under those circumstances, the reason to state ought to authorize. The reason the state ought to authorize same sex unions, I prefer to call them unions not marriages because of my Christian point of view; the reason of the state ought to authorize same sex unions is because unless it does that, committed, dedicated partners who are living as couples for a lifetime lose all their rights when one partner dies. They can’t get insurance, they can’t get social insurance, they can’t get survivor benefits, they can’t share the property and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on. These are civil rights disabilities.
Question: Excuse me, the signs of the same picture, that’s what they lose, but sex is losing also because they can’t adopt boys and girl, they throw them up in this, what we think they [inaudible 03:32:57]
Prof. Schneider: That is right, there are loads and loads and loads of issues here, loads of issue. This is a long story and it is by no means over. The important things for the churches is that freedom of religion allows the churches to say ‘no’.
Question: But the churches cannot say ‘no’ to this issue.
Prof. Schneider: Oh yes they can, absolutely.
Question: Because they get [inaudible 03:33:25].
Prof. Schneider: Oh no, we do say ‘no’.
Question: The individual churches [inaudible 03:33:30] counsel is.
Prof. Schneider: Individual churches say ‘no’. Nobody can have a same sex marriage in an Orthodox church, in a Catholic church, a Baptist church; because they say, well about half of them … so we have the right to say ‘no’. Well it’ll become state tyranny, is if the states says “Because of Civil Rights, the churches have to perform these marriages”.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: At which point … The trouble is that we don’t have 100% separation of church and state. Clergymen are all agents of the state. They’re legal aide, they are like justices of the peace. They can sign marriage licenses, marriage contracts. So maybe that the churches will simply have to totally get out of the business of performing legal marriages which is the way it works in France and many other countries in Europe.
The state makes the legal marriage and then if people want to have a church marriage, they are free to do so.
Question: How it look like in Canada?
Prof. Schneider: In Canada?
Question: Yeah.
Prof. Schneider: If you are married in church and a licensed clergyman signs the wedding license such you’re legal marriage, that’s what will get registered in the registrar’s office.
Question: Whoever is married according to the church got illegal marriage and whoever the church does not accept?
Prof. Schneider: Gets married at City Hall.
Question: Yeah. So, why the churches should give up its legal marriage rights?
Prof. Schneider: Because of these conflictive values. Somebody is going to try a supreme court case one day, for sure. That says because it’s a civil right, churches have to do it because they are agents of the state.
Question: Of course the church objects that in the beginning but they [inaudible 03:35:28].
Prof. Schneider: So it goes back to the point which I began these, churches should never be agents of the state, never.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: You’re right, Dr. Edward, churches are not places to do politics. Churches shouldn’t be agents of the state, they should be agents of the gospel, agents of truth, but truth is part of what civil society needs.
Question: [Inaudible 03:35:58] servants of what they’re ordered, they are ordered by the state. To do this marriage they have to … They do the marriages that happen in the church. The marriages that happen outside the church they has nothing to do with it. So why someone who is married against the church system wants to get the legality of the marriage in the church? This is not a civil rights that you come and eat in my house against my will.
Prof. Schneider: Yeah, correct.
Question: So, it is civil rights.
Prof. Schneider: Correct but as we said, rights culture is non-scripture culture. I can virtually guarantee you that within your lifetime somebody is going start a civil rights case of this kind.
Question: But they will not win.
Prof. Schneider: At the moment, they won’t win. People certainly, there have been signs of this. People have tried to introduce legislations and parliaments and make these happen. There is one case, out of the western Canada, where some people have taken a clergyman, accused him of a hate crime for preaching a gospel sermon against same sex marriage. So there are straws in the wind.
Let me give you another example. This is a tough example, I told you we were going to get tough.
Here is another example. We are speaking with the Christian voice has an effect on public notions of rights, justice and policy; very good case. About eight years ago, some scientist at Harvard developed what was called the Oncomouse.
Question: Oncomouse.
Question: Cancer mouse?
Prof. Schneider: Yeah, cancer mouse. It is a mouse which was genetically programmed to catch cancer very quickly. Harvard and the scientist wanted a patent on this mouse because they developed it. Of course, they got their patent instantly in the United States, United States being totally capitalist country, they got it in Japan then they came to Canada. They try to get a case.
Now as you’ll hear in a second, we have in the Community Council of Churches, what’s called the biotechnology reference group. This is a committee made up of half-theologians, half-scientist which was supposed to be our think tank, like the other two commissions, like the theological commission and the peace commission. This is our think tank that will have wisdom on biotechnology, Christian wisdom, but also know something about biotechnology.
We decided that we could intervene, that we have something to say here. Because our brief was so good, we were allowed intervener status with the Supreme Court. This case made all the way to the Supreme Court and it was our intervention that was decisive. What did we say? It was a values-based statement which said, “You cannot patent life” and that was the argument the court agreed with.
Now, that is not a scientific value, that’s a theological value.
Question: [Inaudible 03:39:42]
Question: [Inaudible 03:39:43] no one can use this mouse unless [inaudible 03:39:51]
Prof. Schneider: Any effect, the mouse has become a commodity that Harvard owns. What we said you cannot commodify life, you simply can’t. Canada is now the only country in the world with a Harvard Oncomouses, not patented. This is a case of using democracy and civil rights and so on, with the Christian voice. Of course, this is not the Christian voice in the eschatological sense of announcing Christ. We didn’t get up and say “Christ forbids this, so you got to listen” that would be the ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’.
What we said was we know that if Christ is God, and of course we know that Christ is God, then the image of God in every person means there are certain basic values that all share and that everyone should be able to recognize if they’re given voice, and we gave it voice.
Question: Would you apply this to sins or only to creatures?
Prof. Schneider: Well, it has to go case by case, obviously. That’s why we have biotechnology reference group. You see?
Question: [Inaudible 03:41:15] mouse is a living organization, it’s like human? It’s an experiment [inaudible 03:41:20]
Prof. Schneider: Right. Would you come and talk to the biotechnology reference group? We’re talking about this right now.
Question: I guess that’s what it is.
Question: I just want to know.
Prof. Schneider: Right, when … We’re talking about these kinds of things right now.
Question: The result of this Supreme Court decision. Now in the university in Canada here, can create the same mouse and can use it. No one will pay me a royalty, that’s the only difference.
Prof. Schneider: Well now we’re coming to the third talk which is about …
Question: [Inaudible 03:41:51 to 03:51:55] in this group?
Prof. Schneider: Janet Summerville, you mean?
Question: [Inaudible 03:41:58 to 03:42:03]
Prof. Schneider: Oh yes, we talk to her all the time. She’s not on the reference group, she’s not a sitting member but she is talked to all the time. Yes?
Question: Actually, it’s important. The [inaudible 03:42:15] from the contact proposition even in Canada so [inaudible 03:42:20 to 03:42:23]
Prof. Schneider: Okay, so now we come to the third topic. The conclusion of that was that, despite what my friend Dr. Edward said, there’s no such thing as separating church from politics because there is no such thing as separating church from culture. The question is simply what kind of voice must the church have in everything that is cultural, in society in general. The answer to that is always the gospel voice, always the gospel voice.
The third point was, under those circumstances, the church is in fact much better off in a civil rights democracy despite all of the difficulties of the clash in values between the rights culture and the gospel culture; because the church is free to speak the gospel.
Where in a theocracy, which is imperial and tyrannical, you’re going to have topped on ruling and the power of the state and say policy is going to run church policy and church government unless the church is prepared to be monitored from time to time.
Finally, how can we tell whether or not the church is selling out to politics? When it forgets Matthew 25. As long as the church is always speaking for Matthew 25 in its social concerns, its peace and justice concerns, it’s doing alright. That means, last conclusion, we have to be prepared to apply Christian values to everyone including the others.
How many of you have ever joined a protest against virtual profiling and discrimination against Muslims?
Question: Against Muslims? Not ever.
Prof. Schneider: I told you this is the hard step, right?
Question: But is there an …?
Prof. Schneider: Oh terrible! Dr. Edward, don’t be naïve.
Question: [Inaudible 03:44:58 to 03:45:00] protesting there, trying to change the constitution [inaudible 03:45:03] and particularly keep Sierra as a part of their marriage, legal [inaudible 03:45:08]
Prof. Schneider: You weren’t there yesterday but that’s my argument. It’s exactly civil democracy that makes that impossible. That’s why it’s glorious to live in civil democracy. It’s protecting us, it’s our freedom. But I can tell you, one of the things I have to do as president of the council, I was called in by the government, by the Department of Justice because of the anti-terrorism laws, the security laws has just run out and that was the debate; Should we extend this or not? They summoned one commission that was made up of what they call “Faith and Culture Groups” it’s very interesting.
There were 25 different Muslim groups there, two Jewish groups, one Christian group in the Council of Churches, that was it? The Muslims group mostly told horrible stories about discrimination and profiling, and they’re all true, by the way. Will you try to go back across the Canadian border and experienced it coming here too.
The Jewish groups all said “More security, more security, do more of this” I got up and said, “The essence of Canada has been the defense of humanity, peace-keeping and so on; this is the soul of the nation. What is the profit, a man or a nation, if it gains the whole world and loses its soul” Afterwards everybody said “That was amazing, who said that?” You see? Do you understand?
Question: Doctor Schneider, If there is a high risk group in medicine, we focus on this high risk group to help controlling a problem. If the statistics shows that a certain color people, a certain race people, a certain religion people have more risk of something disease, crime, whatever; we have to enhance or increase the focus on those people.
So if someone if Saudi Arabia now or Egypt or England has higher rate, by statistics, of being … Carrying TB or carrying terrorist plans or carrying whatever; me as an authority have to increase my surveillance, my caution and whatever. This is not discrimination, this is a scientific method of doing our job.
If the slum areas have more rate of disease, we focus our health education in those, not that we discriminate against the wealthy areas by not giving them health education because they know about education and we … Other side of the coin applies too.
Prof. Schneider: Now we are getting into the science and religion debate. Of course, you’re absolutely right, we have to do these things. It is because there is a high risk group, the high risk group is called the radical Islam. Politically, it’s a form of world anarchy that is not a unique to Islam, it’s existing forever, you’ll find it all the time. At the moment, there is an outbreak of it so we have to increase care and surveillance.
The values is … That’s the science issue. The values issue is still the Christian issue. It’s still nothing to do with … We do this with respect to people. Do we do this in a way that maximizes people’s awareness that we love them? or do we do it in a way that says, “We are right and you were wrong, we got it straight you were the criminals?” Now, we don’t, of course, know which ones of you are the criminals, obviously, statistically speaking one person in this room is a terrorist. Okay, so which one of you is it? You see? Now, that’s the point. So therefore, there is what we might call the police approach and there is what we might call the Christian approach which is listening, respect, patience; all the while that we are being as wise as serpents. You understand? It doesn’t change the fact that every person is the image of Christ and the only way to follow Matthew 25 is to see the image of Christ in everyone.
When I teach iconology at the seminary, I teach my students the climax of the courses to say you understood this course. If you looked at the icon of the [inaudible 03:50:59], the icon of Christ and you see your own face, you’ve understood Christianity. If you look at the icon of the [inaudible 03:51:09] and you see Dr. Edwards face, your neighbor’s faces, you see? Do you understand?
Question: Yeah
Prof. Schneider: That’s got to be true of the other.
Question: Whatever you do with the others, you have done with me.
Prof. Schneider: Right.
Question: What you do to yourself.
Prof. Schneider: Exactly. The first Orthodox parish, I think, I’ve ever encountered is in downtown Toronto, is the mission of Saint John the compassionate. Little Orthodox parish Carpatho-Russian, Saint John the compassionate.
Question: He is a Saint in the Russian church?
Prof. Schneider: John the compassionate? In the Greek Church, he was an 8th century bishop. It was when Islam has first coming in and times were very, very tough talk in Egypt and didn’t work; so what he did was simply open his doors, took everybody in, gave away everything he has, fed everybody, reduce himself to poverty. It was active wasn’t monastic, it was active poverty, that’s why he is Saint John the compassionate.
Question: He was a priest or a layman?
Prof. Schneider: A bishop, he was Patriarch of Alexandria.
Question: At exactly?
Prof. Schneider: Yeah.
Question: [Inaudible 03:52:31]
Prof. Schneider: Yeah. [inaudible 03:52:34], of course.
Question: No, what?
Prof. Schneider: [inaudible 03:52:36] of course.
Question: Baptized in the Calzedonia.
Prof. Schneider: Calzedonia. This mission is deliberately created basically in Toronto Skid Row. It’s a soup kitchen so most of the building is a place to feed people. They also have a small inner city business, they have a bakery where people are given job, learn how to be bakers. They sell bread to churches all over the place and they’ve got an Orthodox parish there, and people have come.
You find the street people who have been feed, they come into the parish. Some of them are catechumens now.
Question: [Inaudible 03:53:33]
Prof. Schneider: Right. They come to eat but they stay to hear the word. It’s all done with absolute humility, patience, love; and everybody who is in this parish sees Christ in the people they are serving.
Friend of mine in the parish just spent years raising the money to create a country retreat where the street people could go in the summer, to take a little retreat, a little rest, be out in the woods. There’s absolute patience. As soon as you pay off the mortgage the house … Lightning struck the house, it burned down; he had to raise the money to build a new house.
This is the work and that’s all because they can see Christ in those people. You have to be able to do that and you have to take it to the absolute extreme. What is Jesus’ fourth word from the cross? He is on the cross, people put him there, what’s his fourth word?
Question: Forgive them.
Prof. Schneider: Forgive them. You’re out in a world where people don’t know, so it is your job to teach them. Now, you were talking about the Egyptian professors. You don’t teach anybody anything if you say “I’m right and you’re wrong” You just create hostility. You don’t create love and social meeting, and multi-culturalism. I think, every single person who looks Arab - you are probably a criminal and I’m not.
Question: What’s true in the post in the news just yesterday or a day before yesterday on CNN, homeless person saves the life of a woman in a burning car. When you read it, there were three homeless women and they saw this car in an accident and it burned and they found the lady driving there. They went and they drew her, it doesn’t drove and they didn’t know who is she. She was one of the crew that we were working in this siesta or place for baby. They knew her face that she was the one serving there but they went there just to see the human life within.
This changes our mentality about thinking “These homeless people are useless.” They are still living, they still have the image of Christ and the same thing about Muslims or …
Question: I’m not saying that we call the homeless people are useless but I am saying that homeless people had higher risk of whatever, so I have to focus my attention to this.
If I am a government, I will pay attention to people coming from certain areas because there is higher risk of whatever. So, I feel good when the people of the border, when they find me Egyptian, pay more caution because this is good.
Question: There are two sides.
Question: But they have to do this with respect, that’s all.
Question: Okay, the reason that I’m [inaudible 03:57:17] it is unfair, because there are some Muslim fanatics that I … Coming from the …
Prof. Schneider: The airport, yes. We have to pay that price. When the price we have to pay becomes racism, then Christians have to speak up; even when it is not directed against them. That’s the line of distinction; we have to have this voice.
Question: I have to feel what the others feel.
Prof. Schneider: You have to feel what the others feel.
Question: I didn’t say no, they are different and we are different, and that people what they think.
Prof. Schneider: That’s exactly this first virtue of listening. So let’s move into science and religion and we can do it exactly starting from what Dr. Edward’s says because he was right to use statistics in all those statistical arguments.
Statistics is the logic of science and so it should be because science is about universal laws, laws of nature that always apply. Statistics is not the language of religion. The language of religion is about persons because each person is the image of Christ. There is the difference.
Questions: Statistics cannot be applied through individuals.
Prof. Schneider: Now, theologically there should not be a distinction between science and religion. I’m jumping down to the most important bullet here that what both of them acknowledge, but both of them are trying to understand his existence - Why are we here? Why is the world here? Those are the fundamental questions of religion and of science.
The fathers solve this in an absolutely synergistic way. Why? Because they were grounded in the idea that God created the world. If you look at the theology of St. Basil; St Basil a very learned man, a tremendous amount of his theology comes out of what was then current biology, geology and geography. Tremendous amount of how the world works. Theologians have always talked about these as a model of society.
Now, this sense, in the patristic revival, this sense has never been lost. Ignatius Antioch IV, he’s the Malachi patriarch, gave wonderful sermons. Nobody knows about these, they disappeared into obscurity. They were published in Sorer, a set of wonderful sermons reviving this idea about creation and the environment that we all have to be environmentalist because we’re stewards of God’s creation. In fact, the environment is us. It’s not us and the environment; we are part of the environment. Any biologist can tell you that, any ecologist. My daughter can tell you that, from sitting in the jungle, day after day after day with her gorillas.
Question: [Inaudible 04:00:47]
Prof. Schneider: Pardon? Sorry?
Question: [Inaudible 04:00:49]
Prof. Schneider: There isn’t any separation between us and the world of science studies. What has become the separation is the mode of speaking. The history of thought stands about the 16th – 17th century, that the world is, it’s partly connected with universities and departments, that the world has developed specialized methodologies. That’s why universities have departments and why departments have exams for their doctoral students so that they learn this techno speak. Scientist learn scientific techno speak and theologians learn theological techno speak. We have another kind of techno speak, the one we use in church. Remember, it’s not just the simple gospel; it’s the understanding of the gospel.
The reason for techno speak is that it creates your way of understanding. It’s because of this that the two fields have drifted apart. They aren’t both starting with the premise that God created the world. By the way, religion and science are grounded with the notion of universal laws, isn’t that interesting? But the universal laws of science are supposed to be value-free. That’s one of the rules of the game in science. The universal laws are value-free; whereas one of the rules of the game in religion is that the universal laws are values. They are and they are themselves, values.
So the two sides have a very hard time talking to each other. You noticed, this is not about stupid arguments like the evolution or creationalism and stuff like that. Those are stupid arguments; they don’t have any meaning at all. We don’t have time to go into that, I can explain it later if you want.
These are all about much most fundamental arguments about whether existence involves value or not. If there’s going to be a new dialogue between religion and science, it’s going to be an attempt for both sides to come to an understanding.
On the one hand, religion has to understand that science has made this contribution of saying, “There are irrevocable laws and you have to take them into account.” They are the way the world works. Religion has to take that into account.
Science has to take into account the notion that there’s no such thing as value-free laws. Every scientific law is more than a mathematical analysis. It’s a value judgment about force, about structure, about neuro-pathways and about all kinds of things, it’s a valued judgment.
The consequence of this dialogue is that both will realize that there’s a necessity for change, that both have to realize that there’s a necessity for change. Now, the difficulty comes when you get down to particular cases. That’s because both are changing. Science changes very fast; religion changes rather slowly. Science changes very fast.
We have an immunologist here. A hundred years ago, infections were caused by bad air. Science changes very fast. We have a psychiatrist here who’s made it very clear that he thinks that personality and attitude are socially determined. This was absolutely the wisdom in the 1970’s and 80’s. Schizophrenia was a social disease in the 1970’s.
My wife is a Dean of Curriculum. She spends most of her time now going to conferences of neurophysiologists, brain physiologists because there’s a tremendous field opening up which has to do with learning and the function of the brain, tremendous field. It’s astonishing how much is built in to the structure and functioning and working of the brain.
For awhile, the pendulum swung over to its all totally hard-wired and laws of nature, and now, suddenly, they discovered the fluid brain. They discovered that people can shift things around in their brain from one place to another place. They can overcome brain damage and stuff like that. It’s constantly developing and it means that the dialogue has to go back and forth.
In the meanwhile, what has religion done? It has gotten itself stuck in a spiritual language which takes no account of what science knows. No account, whatsoever. I have to say, the Orthodox are perhaps the worst of all Christians in this regard.
Question: Some of them.
Prof. Schneider: Yes. We’re not only stuck in a spiritual language, we’re stuck in a particular peculiarly monastic language in which spirit is not connected to body. Flesh is one thing and spirit is another. Everything that has to do with personality is wrapped up in vices and virtues in which the attitude toward the world of nature is, in Greek it’s called Apathea, we’re supposed to be indifferent to it.
My son is undergoing a discipline like this. It’s very interesting that when he was in his noviceship, his Abuna, his Abba took him to Egypt to live for six months. He lived in Mar Saba. He really learned this discipline.
Question: Where is Mar Saba?
Prof. Schneider: It’s in the Sibaya.
Question: Southern part of Egypt? Upper Egypt?
Prof. Schneider: Upper Egypt.
Question: Mar Saba?
Prof. Schneider: It’s a monastery, not Mar Saba, that’s in Jerusalem. Watinatrum, he lived in Watinatrum.
Question: Where he lived there?
Question: What monastery?
Prof. Schneider: There are several. They went to several of the monasteries.
Question: [Inaudible 04:08:10]
Prof. Schneider: Yes.
Question: What he learn there?
Prof. Schneider: He was in his noviceship as a novice monk.
Question: A novice. [Inaudible 04:08:22]
Prof. Schneider: Now, our habit of speaking this way is going to have to change or we will never get any further with this dialogue with science. No way would we be able to teach science anything to help it get further. Think of this Alkama situation, in terms of thinking about it does as coming to an understanding of the created world and of life. Science is about existence, of what it means to be. That has to include the vision of the eschatological end, the value of what science does.
The difficulty with a value-free science that deals in absolute laws is that it’s completely absent of any eschatology. If the law is universal, the law is always true. It never changes. That means that it’s very hard in science to know what things mean. It’s easy to know how they work; it’s not easy to know what they mean.
Question: It’s not the road. Science is not the road to know what it means. This is for [Inaudible 04:09:59]
Prof. Schneider: Right. Now, therefore …
Question: What did he say?
Question: Science is about what it works …
Prof. Schneider: The scientists are not in the business of talking about meaning, actually. Maybe, they should be and maybe, science should look a little different, but at the moment, they’re not. Therefore, since we have these various specializations now on departments and so on’ philosophers, you say, theologians. It has the totality of knowledge about existence, it can’t be left just to the scientist and it can’t be left just to the theologians, it has to be a dialogue. Once again, we come back to this model of dialogue.
As I told you, for example, on the Canadian Council of Churches, we have created the biotechnology reference group. Half-scientist, half theologians, both committed to the idea of determining meaning, values, and so on.
To do this, it means that scientists have to learn something about theology and philosophy and it means that theologians, instead of only learning the language of these century monks, have to learn something about science. Once again, it’s a consequence of education.
It’s probably wise of you, theologians, especially the Orthodox, really bad at this, really behind, write about bioethics and know what they are talking about. One of the best in Orthodox world is Father John Breck. He has written several books on bioethics and he has taken years to really learn his biology. One of the best in Canada, outstanding; he wrote his doctoral dissertation on [inaudible 04:12:13] is a pediatrician.
Question: What’s his name?
Prof. Schneider: Father [inaudible 04:12:18]
Prof. Schneider: He was in Montreal; he’s a bright gentleman from Montreal left. He was from Montreal. He created the first [inaudible 04:12:13] for children, created hospices for the dying children and did a lot of investigation in an end-of-life issues as a physician. Now, he’s an orthodox priest.
While there have to be these specializations, these specializations have to know enough about each other to talk in the middle. When you do this, you come out with certain types of wisdom. Let me give you some examples of wisdom. The Ankamall is an example of such wisdom, but I promised you that we talk about the tough stuff.
What are homosexuals? As Doctor Edward emphasized yesterday, there’s a scientific debate about homosexuality at the moment, about the causes of homosexual orientation personality. There’s the nature-nurture debate. There’s genetic information in it that nobody knows. The jury is out. We don’t know. What then should churches do with homosexuals?
On the one hand, we have our ethics, our social values. So we have to say, we can’t tolerate homosexual behavior. If you really believe that to be homosexual is your absolute nature and this is the way God made you, the Orthodox Church is not for you. There are churches there for you, not the orthodox.
On the other hand, if a person says, “I am committed to the Orthodox way and I am a homosexual, does the church say, “You’re not welcome here?” Absolutely not, says, “You’re a person.”
It’s the same issue as the homeless person, the same issues as the racial issue, the convert, and all kinds of things. Now in behavior, as we said yesterday, “Churches like to get arise themselves.” They liked to keep oddities out and only have the familiar inside. It’s their security blanket, but that’s an infant security blanket. Father Hopko writes about that a lot in the book I showed you yesterday.
We have to treat persons as persons. We distinguish between persons and behavior. We’re not abandoning church values but we are remembering the most fundamental of Christian values which is to seek Christ in everyone.
Question: Right, but in life, we have to have acceptance. There are people who do not have the capacity to practice sex and we teach them that they have to accept what they are like. With the story of Zoe, there is a supernatural; there is God-absolute decision. Why when it comes to homosexuality, we have to have a solution for it that they have to practice what they have been brought up in. It is exactly like someone who is a heterosexual who can’t afford marriage and wants to be a Christian and he wants to live according to the Bible. So he does not allow himself to practice sex although he is heterosexual because he cannot afford sex in the legal, spiritual, religious, Christian and for men.
Why when it comes to homosexuality, we make it something that the churches divide on it, although they don’t divide on the issue of a heterosexual who cannot marry. Did we have any church that say, “A person who cannot afford marriage has to use the escort service?” No. Why when it comes to something like homosexuality, we start to make this big issue about.
Prof. Schneider: Alright, you’re confusing two different things.
Question: Please help.
Prof. Schneider: The division between the churches is not about premarital sex. I don’t know of a church that approves of premarital sex of any kind. The issue in the churches is about whether or not homosexuals can contract the marriage the same way heterosexuals can. That’s the dividing issue.
Question: I didn’t say, “Except that.” They don’t divide on that, why do they divide on that? They don’t divide on premarital sex. Although, if any church has a member who cannot marry, they don’t tell him, “Please go practice sex outside marriage,” right? So why a person who has homosexuality, tendency is, they say, “Oh, you have the right to practice sex because this is the image of God and so you are allowed to marry a man.”
Prof. Schneider: Again, you are confusing two different things. One, it’s all about order working within the structures, control. The idea is that marriage is marriage. Some churches say, “Marriage is a gift of God to every person,” and some churches say, “Marriage is only a gift of God only to heterosexual persons.” No church says, “Sex, out of control for any person, is the Godly way.” Jesus says, “Go and do not sin anymore.”
Question: I don’t find any sympathy in the Bible towards homosexuality, whether in Sodom or whether Saint Paul himself. He denied this. How come the Bible through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit say that homosexuality is something which is not accepted by God and He punish those who went into this line of life.
In the New Testament, the same thing; Saint Paul in the Romans, he said that this is very bad and this is some examples of how human beings can deviate so much from the will of God.
I think when things are so clear in the Bible, how come we come to discuss it, and to find ways and to attach this to human rights and [inaudible 04:19:57] of God and we have to accept them at all? I have to help them also or they themselves don’t feel that this is bad or this is against the Bible?
Prof. Schneider: We are not, in fact, debating that. That is the Orthodox view of homosexual behavior, and we simply don't recognize it. So there's no place in the Orthodox Church for homosexual behavior, it's as simple as that. There are other churches that say, "The moral rules and the regulations and so on of the bible, are only 1st century, and we have to look at the big picture and we have to say 'love for all people’ is the essential commandment, and so we have to change with the times.'" Those are the liberal churches. They aren't the Orthodox churches and that's not for a debate. The issue I brought up here is that we ... Without a clear-cut scientific love of homosexual persons, the only thing we can do is accept them as persons. To say yes, certainly they are persons. We don't really know, scientists haven't told us yet, why they are homosexuals and scientists may never tell us that. We then agree with the liberals, love is the mandate and we have to love them as persons. That's all we are saying here.
The reason that it's such a hot issue is twofold. One is that it's a current social issue, a hot social issue and we have to pay attention to it. We can't stick our heads in the sand.
Number two, we have to atone for our sins and our sin has been to not love these, for centuries it has been to not love these people.
Question: I disagree though. We never ever say in the church not to love anybody. We as Christians love our enemies. So whether we accept this as a way of life, of our life or not, but we love everybody.
So I disagree with the word love. I am talking about allowing, accepting this to be part of our life practice is to have sex between man and man; but I love my enemy, the homosexuals, the heterosexuals and this is not the question.
Prof. Schneider: It isn't. Maybe it isn't nowadays and maybe it isn't in your circles; but historically speaking, and also as you really get down and talk to people, you will find prejudices is much the same as the race prejudices and other prejudices against poor people and other such prejudices.
Question: We're talking about the principles, not what happened in history.
Question: I may accept him but I don't accept his attitude. As it happens was somebody who has been in prison for ten years for killing. Yes, I have to deal with him as a human being, but I can't say, "Yes he did this big crime and this is bad." So we have to discriminate between his attitude and he himself as a human being. Yes, I can’t otherwise to accept him.
Question: The Bible is clear about it.
Prof. Schneider: Nobody is saying ... In fact, the whole point is for people to be honest and open and frank and admit who they are. The question is do they want to live the Orthodox way or do they not? If they wish to join the Orthodox Church it is a distinction that we have to make. What we’re talking about here is language and attitudes and learning.
In this regard, for example, the Orthodox could learn a tremendous amount from the Quakers or The Salvation Army who have been the best at dealing with former prisoners, for example; the example you brought up. Perhaps it's not the most fortunate example, maybe if I go on to bioethics instead, issues like the end of life, whether you terminate or not, euthanasia, abortion, and those kinds of issues. Everybody would have seen much more clearly the need for this dialogue between values and science, and it's a complicated dialogue in which each side has to learn from the other.
We also didn't bring up information technology and how it muddies the waters of discussion of religion and science.
Question: Can I briefly comment on the scientific explanation of theory of, about homosexuality because you mentioned this that scientists didn't say ... Or didn't give out the final report. That's true, but our present understanding of homosexuality, like other diseases in the human being, diabetes and other things, these are multi-factorial. The genes that affect them are not just one gene, there are many genes that can affect the inclination to something. Inclination may be very strong in some person and maybe less in another person. So that's the present understanding; but we don't think that everyone is compelled by his genetic makeup to be this way he can resist it still.
Prof. Schneider: That's the religious value contribution to the debate between science and religion. Now the pure science understanding but the pure scientific view, the value-free methodology says there are these implacable laws of nature and therefore nothing can be changed. If we have such and such a genetic makeup, that's the way it's going to be and there's nothing we can do about it.
Question: But the genetic ... it's not compelling.
Prof. Schneider: Of course not.
Question: It's just an inclination that you can resist if you want.
Prof. Schneider: That is right.
Question: Psychological and social.
Prof. Schneider: You are now speaking from the religious point of view.
Question: No, from the biological point of view, you can resist it if you want to. You are not compelled. It may be infamous by religion, but I mean ... Until now scientists couldn't find anything that compels that person to be either homosexual or other diseases, except in the very well-known hereditary genes that are controlled by one gene or two or three genes only. These, sometimes, are compelling.
Prof. Schneider: Right, but in fact what you are talking about is free will which is a theological topic. What's happened is that scientists are learning values. They just aren't admitting that they learned this from the theological language.
Question: Because it's exactly the same doctrine ...
Prof. Schneider: It's the same when the theologians, instead of ... Ignore the science, and instead of taking account of it, starts talking about the warfare [inaudible 4:27:42] and use that monastic vocabulary, the warfare of the flesh, the warfare with the world, the separation of flesh and spirit and all that kind of stuff.
There's a book ... The last bullet here is about therapy and that's really the outcome of this dialogue. The outcome of this dialogue is that it is ... If we are going to be loving, if, as it says here, "The greatest mystery is love" then the outcome, in that case the applied outcome of the dialogue between science and religion should be therapy; but it's got to be a therapy that is adequately scientific and adequately theological.
The example of what I am talking about, there's a book by our [inaudible 4:28:28] Vlachos called The Orthodox Psychotherapy, which over and over and over and over again, the Orthodox holds up as, "See all of this psychotherapy stuff is all bunk," You look at it and it could have been written by 5th century monk. It's all about diseases of the soul.
I took a course from Father Hopko, Tom Hopko; it was so powerful I took it twice, called Vices and Virtues. What he did was to put the 12-steps program on one hand and monastic literature on the other hand and show ... Analyze the relationship.
The outcome of this was that if you do it this way you end up with a dialogue. So if you want to be therapeutic you don't just give the person the monastic literature and say, "Repent." You send them also the 12-steps. It's hard to describe this, it was exceedingly powerful because it was taking account of both sides to create a therapy that took advantage of the best that science had created as well as the best spiritual that pastoral care he created. Now that we’re in a more biochemical age, it’s gotten even more complicated. There’s even more for therapist, for therapy to learn about the brain, about neurology, about all those kinds of things. Schizophrenia is a great example of course.
At the moment, the pendulum is swinging toward a biomechanical model of mental conditions. In the ‘70’s, the pendulum was all the way at the other side. What we need is some kind of dialogue here.
I’ll end by reading you an example but I’ll be right back. You can start talking.
[Inaudible 04:30:46 – 04:30:58]
Question: Yes, everybody can be a sinner. If sin is your faith, there is no way to say that you can change or you repent because, “What can I do.” God, in this case, should be so cool and so unjust if He is condemning and judging me, although I can do otherwise. Actually, yes, everybody can be a sinner, but you have no idea to have the power to be towards the will of God. This is noted in the Bible. Homosexuality is an expression of this sinful aspect in their lives. If they want to be pure and Christian, they can do it, if they want. But actually, they accept what they are …
Question: They want justice.
Question: Yes, like a shoplifter or any person who has something which is complaining; He didn’t condemn this. If you do anything bad, if you are unable to leave your friends or your community and the others; if you confess about that to God or to any person that this is a bad thing which I fear; I am unable to leave other person except myself. These gifts when you accept that, when you, I mean, condemn that, you are on the way to a change your life. That’s when you say, “I am good this way, I have the right to do as I want to do.” In this case, you are actually destroying yourself.
Prof. Schneider: I am with two examples. The one example is to illustrate my point of a therapy. This son who is the monk, he ought to be dead.
Question: You’re talking about?
Prof. Schneider: My son.
Question: Your son.
Prof. Schneider: He ought to be dead. When he was one year old, he was put to an irreversible coma by cerebral meningitis. This was in France, to all intent and purposes, he was dead. The doctor was prepared.
Question: At which age?
Prof. Schneider: One.
Question: One year old.
Prof. Schneider: Now, without any hesitation, without any doubt, he was saved miraculously. He was saved, first of all, by the sacrament, by unction. In the middle of the sacrament, he went from coma to full consciousness. He was saved by prayer, by community service, by care, by the intervention of St. Herman of Alaska; by a whole lot of things. It’s a long and complicated story. It is also absolutely unmistakable when he was saved by the wisdom of the doctor, who was an atheist.
The meningitis was of a sort that it was incurable at the time and she had to use all kinds of her scientific knowledge; she had to use experimental drugs that were only known in Chicago, in a laboratory in Chicago. So she had to have this scientific knowledge. There were all kinds of interventions. Nevertheless, it’s a miracle. He’s supposed to be totally brain damage. The scientific measurement, the EEG said he was supposed to be totally brain damaged. At the end of the process, the MRI said there was nothing wrong with his brain. It was a first MRI, one of the first MRI’s in France.
Now, If we fall back on the old language, this starts to look like monastic ideography, life of the saint. If we fall back in the old theological language, we say, “It’s a supernatural, not a natural theory.”
The point I’m trying to make here is that there’s no possible way, no possible way to draw the line to what cause what. If both religion and science explain existence by looking for causes, which is what they do they both do. In religion the cause of everything is God. In science, the cause of everything is whatever the laws nature say, is the cause.
If one is searching for causes to explain this, there’s no possible way to draw the line. If one is trying to analyze out the threads, how much was sacramental power? How much was the worthy power of the experimental drug? How much was the care of the community? You can’t filter it out. It’s all this … The story is one single piece. You understand?
The clue to the old story is love. I came in one night, they allowed my wife to live in the hospital with this boy because we were in France and he was new to France. It was first time that the hospital had broken its policy and allowed the parents to stay, because we told them that the boy only spoke Russian. By the way, when he came out of the coma, his first language was French, which he only heard in the hospital in a coma.
Question: That worked in the human brain and that’s the evidence of [Inaudible 04:37:03]
Prof. Schneider: Yes, and can you separate out that - What is supernatural and what is the brain function? Neurophysiology?
Question: No way.
Prof. Schneider: I came one night and found this strange woman sitting in the room with my wife, they were holding each other and crying. It turned out to be the doctor. What she used to do was be Madam Doctor all day long, using her best scientific knowledge and then she just came and visited my wife at night. That’s love.
When she saw the boy walked for the first time, that’s when she told us that she was an atheist. She said in French, it’s very good in French, she said “This is the true resurrection.”
There was another patient of the same doctor, another kid. The kid was born hydrocephalic. He never learned to talk. At this time, he was about twelve years old, he was dying, he was dying of leukemia. It was the end of the road. There was no cure. The hardship on his parent’s family, they lived fifty kilometers away, it was terrible. They have six other children.
I watched this boy’s behavior, everyday he’d walk down the hallway and he’d leave one of his toys outside the isolation room. I thought, “What is going on here? What is this?” In the meanwhile, I am asking, “God, why is Kristoff,” his name in Greek means the one who carries Christ, “Why is Kristoff dying and why is my son living? What does this mean? How is this the great plan of God?”
What I realized is that Kristoff had reached the total fullness of his capacity to love. He had learned as much as he could learn about love. So the arc of his life is complete. Therefore, it was alright. Obviously, it meant, my son still needs something to learn, something ahead. That’s why God is planning to live his coming back to life.
The point of the story is that, there is no way to separate these things out. Saint Basil was right, the wisdom of God is a whole. We’re all in the dialogue together, that has been the point of all three of these lectures. We’ll get somewhere if we realize that we’re all in the dialogue together.
My last example is to read you a bible passage, to send you away with. This is from the Gospel of Matthew. When Jesus comes to the lake, the disciples are in the boat. Jesus is walking to them on the water. He says to them, “Come!” So Peter got out of the boat, walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and beginning to sink. He cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “Oh, man of little faith. Why did you doubt?” The question I want to lead you with is what does it mean to get out of the boat?
Question: Walk with faith.
Prof. Schneider: In the light of this discussion, what does it mean for us all to get out of the boat?
Question: Out of the boat … [Inaudible 04:41:08]
Prof. Schneider: Exactly, what is the boat? Is the boat a Coptic Church? Is the boat the way you see it? Is the boat scientific truth?
Question: [Inaudible 04:41:19] Feeling safe in this confined environment, we have nothing to do with the [inaudible 04:41:27]
Prof. Schneider: Right, the boat has ten foot walls around.
Question: Outside the boat …
Prof. Schneider: To get out of the boat, you have to be willing to climb over ten-foot high walls.
Question: To the dangers and to the troubles of the society. Those who can’t swim, they go out of the boat.
Prof. Schneider: Oh, no!
Question: Even if you can swim, I wouldn’t leave the boat ...
Prof. Schneider: No, no. If you depend on your swimming, that’s science.
Question: What I mean is that those who are qualified to deal with what is outside are those who should go out with the Lord. Those who are unable to do that, they should stay as they are.
Prof. Schneider: You have no qualifications at this point. Christ is talking to a simple fisherman. He says, “Walk on the water, like me; be me.”
Question: It is the trust of Jesus that makes you leave the boat, faith. The challenge is to stick to the boat or to have Jesus as your goal is to depend on the boat or the God of the sea, or who has control over the sea and the boat.
Prof. Schneider: That’s right, but two things … One is that, that’s a nice generalization. The point of these free talks is I said that it has to apply in particular cases. That’s the difficulty.
The second thing to remember is that individualism is not an Orthodox value. We are all persons but we are a community. We are one church. We’ve several people, Doctor Melci and others, brought up the First Corinthians’ 12 passages. We all have gifts. The body needs all the gifts together or it can’t function. Paul says, the part nobody ever reads, “Can the arm work without the leg?” Nobody ever reads that part.
Question: Peter asked with the Lord, “Shall I come?” So He had told him, “Come.” He also [Inaudible 04:43:55] on all parties to ask him was that He is [inaudible 04:44:00] and says, “Come.”
Prof. Schneider: That’s correct. That’s the synergy.
Question: I discussed with Professor Schneider that we will have a year-round kind of project in Toronto City about topics to avail from his spirit and mind. We’ll put it in CD’s and send it to you. I think he will not say, “No.”
Prof. Schneider: It doesn’t have to stop at Toronto.
Question: Thank you Doctor Schneider, Professor.
+ + + +
Unedited Transcript
(Please note this transcript may contain transcription errors)
Prof. Schneider: I’ll start with where I am now and how I got there. I’m in the Orthodox Church in America. A professor emeritus of church history from York University which means I taught church history in a secular university. A very interesting situation but I am now the director of a brand new program in Orthodox and East Christian studies in the University of Toronto, Toronto School of Theology.
This is quite a fascinating thing because it’s the first time … Toronto School of Theology is a consortium, so all the theological colleges joined together to make one faculty. They’ve got catholic colleges, Presbyterian Colleges, United Church College, Anglican College, right? I mean, you never heard of orthodoxy. It’s very interesting that now they’ve been able to add orthodoxy to the mix but there is no [inaudible 00:01:18] college, we can’t afford it. We are operating, being hosted by the Anglican College. We’ll talk about that tomorrow. It’s very interesting.
This is the first time there has been college level, grown up education for adults in Orthodoxy in Toronto. It covers everything, we have … In one class I had students who were Greek, Russians, OCA, an Armenian, Coptic; I’ve had three Copts, one of whom was Doctor Edward, I had one Ethiopian, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and a Baptist who wants to know about the east.
It’s a very, very interesting situation of unity. This is teaching now religion within a religious faculty, but it’s an ecumenical religious faculty. Church history in a secular faculty and then Orthodoxy in an ecumenical faculty, I’m also visiting professor of Iconology at St. Vladmir Seminary.
I also have to teach Orthodoxy in an Orthodox setting. That’s very interesting too because it actually turns out to be extremely rare, believe it or not, to teach Iconography and Iconology in Orthodox seminaries. It’s something that I don’t understand at all but it really is very rare. It’s very eye opening for the young men in training there.
Besides these, from 2003 until 2006, I was president of the Keating Council of Churches. I was the first orthodox person ever to be president of the Keating Council of Churches in its 60 year history. It’s something I’ll talk about in the talks. One of the things this led to, because we’ve done a revolution in Ecumenism in Church Unity in Canada, which I’ll be talking about tomorrow; this model that’s taken over by the World Council of Churches in 2003. I was lucky to be part of that and I’ll tell you something about that tomorrow.
Besides that I’m on the Metropolitan Council of my church in the diocese, the Committee of the Diocesan Council and it’s a lot of work.
Question: Where did you complete your schooling?
Prof. Schneider: Where did I complete my schooling? That requires going into my past biography a little bit. My degrees are from Dartmouth, Princeton, and Columbia. I did theological education in Toronto School of Theology and then some more at St. Vladmir’s.
My education was basically as a historian with a strong interest in religion, as you’ll hear in the talk. I don’t think religion can be a separate subject, I don’t think it could be detached from life because otherwise what’s it about. Religion as an education of ourselves, to be able to live where God has planted us, I think, for example, it’s been very generally … York is a very secular university in Canada and its origins actually had a lot of Jewish [inaudible 00:05:20], that was very generous and they let me teach a two year course in church history. Not in the religion department, in the history department. They think religion is a vital part of historical understanding of what it means to be human, but then that was able to service the religious studies program too. That was my basic education.
I am not a cradle Orthodox. I was an Orthodox Jew until I was 26. I am a lot older than 26 now. We’ve been through a lot of life, my wife is a 15 year cancer survivor. We are both educators. We have seven children. You are going to hear of stories of a couple of them as examples. They are all over the world. One is a doctor in East Vancouver; she walks the streets of East Vancouver giving medical care.
One is directing an NGO in Bali which is trying to help native people do sustainable agriculture using their indigenous farming methods.
One is also in Bali. Created the first media studio ever in Bali and is training the Balinese on how to run their own media studio.
Question: In Indonesia?
Prof. Schneider: In Indonesia. One is a radar engineer; climbs mountains. One is a master chef in Toronto, just graduated. He is now line chef in a restaurant in Toronto.
The next one is an orthodox monk and you’ll be hearing something of his story tomorrow, no Monday, you’ll hear something of his story. The youngest is a primate anthropologist, she lives in the jungles with gorillas. I just got back from doing the Lumen Orientale conferences, the dialogue conferences between eastern Catholics and Orthodox in Istanbul and Washington, San Diego. The chairman there said, “You see, it just runs in the family. Even the daughter like the father is engaged in the study of primates.”
Thank you. It’s actually very flattering to be asked to be here. I think it’s extremely important that I was asked, not that I was asked, but that in a gathering that is dedicated to the unity of churches, you’d think to include somebody from the visiting tradition and somebody who is so thoroughly North American.
There is certainly no need for an apology for the audiences. I mean, Christ himself taught us that. “Wherever there were two or three gathered in my name that’s where I am.”
Question: I accept that but I think we should build our [inaudible 00:09:05] in order to give them a good chance to come. We had to discuss this in our fellowship, but I think a speaker like you deserves more than that.
Prof. Schneider: Perhaps, if you tell everybody the parable of the wedding feast. It’s very nice because all the ladies here are dressed very elegantly even if the men are in shorts so people do have on their wedding garment. Just one small correction, I’m the past president of the Trinity Council of Churches. No, I’m bringing this up only because it bears a point of the first talk.
Question: Yes, [inaudible 00:10:08] were you the ex-president?
Prof. Schneider: That’s right. The significant fact is that the Community Council of Churches is 60 years old, it’s older than the World Council of Churches. I’m the first Orthodox ever to be elected president. The other interesting thing, I’m saying all this please don’t misunderstand, not to boast but rather to make a point.
I was elected president after I had served for 15 years on the council representing the Orthodox Church in America. I’m going to talk about those 15 years because during those 15 years we made a revolutionary change in ecumenism, one that’s become a role model to the whole world. I was privileged to be part of working out that change for the whole 15 years.
I think it’s because of that that I was elected president and I think it’s very significant that I was nominated not just by Orthodox churches but also by the Presbyterians, the Lutherans and the Baptists. They all wanted me for president. I think that’s very interesting. We’ll talk about that in a minute.
Question: Just as a quick comment, I think that the Catholics were not members in any Council of Churches but they called like a [inaudible 00:11:43], so it’s only the Orthodox Church that accepted to become partner with the other churches.
Prof. Schneider: Not true and I will correct that. Again, it’s what we did in Canada that changed everything.
Question: Good to know.
Prof. Schneider: I will explain that, it’s an important point. Now, Professor or Doctor Melci and Father Gragas had an easy time with it. Why did they have an easy time with it? Because they talked in generalizations. There were extremely important generalizations, they talked in terms of the ideals, the goals, things, the fundamentals, things we must accomplish and we must accomplish [inaudible 00:12:47].
Doctor Melci was wonderful in reminding us that love has to be the primary thing and without it nothing is going to be accomplished. It’s something we have to remember all of the time. It’s rather interesting, I have quotations here from Father Hapco whom everybody knows and from Elizabeth Percy Gell, a very famous European theologian, died this year at the age of 90. Both of them say exactly the same thing that you have to make love the primary condition and the thing you never forget or all the other goals can’t be accomplished.
Nonetheless, what they left for me was all the practicalities. That’s where it starts to get hard. Would I come here and talk about the practicalities on my own? Probably, partly because it’s been my responsibility to wrestle with them for the last 15 years so I’ve been down there in the trenches. Mostly, it’s because of Doctor Edward, he said he wanted me to talk about these three topics.
If you look at the three topics, the first one is about relations between churches. I’m going to start right where Father Gragas left off, relations between Orthodox churches. Then move on to relations between Christian churches.
The second topic is about relationship of being Christian to the world we live in. We are going to talk about relating to the world we live in, that’s a world full of people. It’s a complex modern world. In that same talk, I’m going to speak in particular about relating to the world of North America. That’s going to connect the two talks very closely.
Tomorrow morning we are going to talk about the means of dealing with the problems of the world. In particular, the focus will be on the issues of science and religion and their impact for ethics and for coping with the problems of the world.
Underlying all three of these things, how do churches relate to each other? How do churches operate within society in general? What use are they, what are churches doing for society, with society? What are they offering to society?
Finally the issue of how best to cope with trouble, with difficulty, with the problems of the world. Is it the scientific way, is it the religious way? What would heal the world? All of these have underlying them. These very basic things that we heard about yesterday.
I would add one thing. It’s something that got a little danced around yesterday, that’s the issue of truth. The question of truth because religious knowledge is a claim to know the true God and what the true God wants for humanity. If you notice, I’m still talking in generalizations. See how easy it is? I could go on like this for hours and hours and hours. I could talk in generalizations.
If we are going to talk about what God wants from humanity, we are specifically talking about what does God want from us, as people. What are we to do? That is, by the way, the title of a very famous communist treatise [inaudible 00:17:32] What are we to do? He stole the title from a very famous anarchist from the 19th century.
Christians aren’t communists. They can’t be. Christians aren’t because communism is atheistic; they think it’s a science. Christians aren’t anarchists either. Especially not Orthodox Christians, we think God made an orderly world. That’s one of the fundamentals of the Orthodox vision of life. That God made an orderly world.
If I were Father Gragas I would throw a bunch of Greek words at you at this point. I would talk about toxis. No matter how chaotic the world might look it really is orderly. If you did look up some of the bible quotations I gave you yesterday, you’ll know that in Ephesians we are told that everything is made according to the plan of God. Everything that is happening is according to the plan of God.
Now, why then should we bother to talk about what is to be done? Here’s where the issue of practicalities comes in. The practicalities aren’t there because of the human limitation. That’s a common mistake, a very common mistake the Orthodox make it a lot. We say, God set up a perfect world, God showed us the ideal, we know these ideals, why aren’t we living according to these ideals? Why aren’t we showing the kind of love that was spoken of yesterday? It’s because we are limited. It’s our own fault and these are our limitations.
To a certain extent that is true. The world is the way it is because there is sin, that’s our limitation. Sin comes from a lot of psychological conditions - Individuality, selfishness, arrogance, pride. There are also limitations because this is the world the Lord has made, as the psalmist says. This is the world that the Lord has made. The world and all that’s within it, that’s the 24th psalm.
We’ve all studied history in school. We all know that people had a hand in making this world, this world that God has made which means that somehow we are engaged in this process of God making the world. Now, that happens to be very good Orthodox doctrine. Since this good Orthodox doctrine has to have a Greek word. The Greek word is synergy.
What is synergy? Synergy means that humans are given the gift of existence by God, that existence is to be God. So, if God creates the world with his knowledge and his energy, so too do we. If you wouldn’t misunderstand it, I call synergy, cooperative. Creation means human cooperation with God.
Now we come to the deep point. Here is the sticking point that lies behind all three of these lectures, these talks. If we are going to cooperate with God with all our knowledge and the grace that God has put into our hearts, all our experience, it means it’s an ongoing process. The limitation partly comes from the fact that it’s not over yet. We know what we know.
One of the consequences of sin, this is not personal sin, this is a built-in sin of Orthodox history, is that we certainly don’t know as much as we should know, we don’t know enough. As Orthodox, we are really, really badly educated even in the most elementary things, and that’s why we prolong the life history of stupidity and why things are not moving faster.
Both speakers yesterday spoke about this. Father Gragas said, he got his dates a little confused but Father Gragas said “Okay, there’s been basic agreement between being the so-called oriental Orthodox churches and [inaudible 00:23:08] churches and the byzantine churches, it means that’s true. The day on the signed document is 1992. Yet we haven’t restored one church out of these. We heard this also from Doctor Melci, the same thing, he attributed a little more to political reasons.
Those kinds of things do get in the way. I’m going to add that it’s lack of education that partly gets in the way but it’s partly because to make the next step and the next step and the next step is a decision. Decisions have to be made on the grounds of, as much as we are capable of knowing, we have to expect that there will be other decisions to make in the future. The idea of one church that is the church of God, is what’s called eschatology.
When God says the church should be one, should be a unity, and once again, I’m giving you quotations, they are very famous, I’m giving you a number of quotations. The most famous, of course, is the one from John chapter 17, where it’s at the last supper and says, decide to hear me says, Jesus speaking to God says “I have loved them so that they may be one as you and I are one,” ultimate unity. That’s eschatology. That’s what the church is and therefore it’s where the church should be going.
It’s a historical process that results from our work and our decisions. Let’s just consider for a minute. Think about this society. Why does this society exists, do its work? Because some people made some decisions. I’m going to point out a little later that almost all the injured Orthodox works for Orthodox unity has been organized and pushed in the first place by lay people. Isn’t that interesting? Why is that so? Because lay people have a sense of the hurt, a sense of the stupidity.
The trouble is that to do it concretely, practically by decisions in this world, you need to have a very precise sense, an educated sense. It can’t be done by only falling back on the generalizations. That’s why I suggested Father Gragas had an easy time. He chose to fall back on the generalizations and get back on the airplane and go home. I’m not being sarcastic. He opened a discussion and that’s what he should have done. Now he’s left it to us to face square on the practical problems and talk about what should be done about them.
Partly for that reason, I want to keep my part of the lecturing fairly short and run these three hours more like an American classroom, where we are talking together and trying to discuss the problem. What I’ll do is open up and lay out the problems for you. Give some good examples and then we’ll have the kind of discussion that we need to have.
Even at the level that Father Gragas was talking about. Orthodox education is really not up to the job. Laymen have started these movements for unity because they feel the hurt. How many of you could really explain the problem of the two natures and one nature? I have had very nice conversations with a number of you. Questions have been … Since during the days we’ve been here, questions have been put to me. I can tell you that I heard three questions, in all innocence, were totally heretical. I’m not talking about little stuff, I’m talking about great big heresies of the fourth century.
Question: It’s [inaudible 00:28:43].
Prof. Schneider: No, I mean it’s not even that issue. These were other issues in which the doctrines … These are not issues where the doctrines in the oriental church and the doctrines in the byzantine church differ. These are heresies older than that in which all Orthodox churches share the same doctrine.
The reason was not that the persons who put the questions were heretics, certainly not. The reasons were that they had not been given a fundamental education in Orthodoxy. I think it’s absolutely spectacular that this group is a lay group. I think it’s somewhat worrisome, it’s not your fault, I assume you don’t keep the clergy out. You don’t stop them at the door if they have a collar and a cross on you and you say “Out.”
I think there’s some problems with the clergy out here, although I have to admit, and I’ll say this even coming from St. Vladmir seminary of all places, that even the clergy are fairly badly educated these days. At Saint Marks there was a very, very big meeting a number of years ago, at Saint Mark’s Church in Toronto, some important visiting bishops from Egypt. One of them gave a talk in English afterwards and he gave a presentation of the solution. How the question of the one nature, the two natures has now been resolved.
As I listen to this presentation, I thought, “Right”, the way he’s putting this, what we’ve done is say that we’ve resolved the major problem of the 5th century in a way that’s going to lead us straight to the problems of the 6th century, which is, in fact exactly what happened in history and exactly what happened history.
The Byzantines kept looking for solutions to reunite the two churches and in the process invented a ten times worse heresy than the one that caused the problem in the first place. We won’t go into details, if you want to ask me about it afterwards, I’ll explain it. I said, as I listened to this lecture, I said “He’s going to go there exactly, that’s where it’s going to end up.”
Okay, so we need some education. That’s one of the difficulties that stand in our way. Now comes the practical, that’s a practical problem. People have busy lives. Where do they get their education? Where do they learn these fundamentals of Christian understanding? One point is to catch them while they’re young. The Copts, I must say do a wonderful job of this. Better, I think than any other Christian Church or Orthodox Christian Church I know.
None of us do this as well as The Protestants do, none of us. But among the Orthodox, Copts do it best by a long chalk. Nevertheless, I’ve had Coptic students in my programs in the University and they say the same thing that Western Christian students say, I always ask my students, “Why are you taking my courses?” Especially in the secular university, where I teach church history, I say, “What are you doing at this course?” No requirement here.
They all say the same thing, they say, “The Church educated me as a child and has talked to me like a child ever since.” I want to know, how do adults do this thing? That’s what they all say. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Presbyterians or Catholics or Anglicans or Greeks or Goths. They all say it.
When we get this education, what do we come to realize? We come to realize that to be Orthodox is not, in the first instance, to be a Copt who does things the Coptic way, also the Coptic doctrines, wears the Coptic vestments, celebrates the Coptic liturgy or an Armenian or a Russian or a Greek. You can’t believe the wars that happened in the seminary over whether to wear Greek vestments or Russian vestments and cassocks, which aren’t even vestments. Greek style cassock or Russian style cassock and the metropolitan actually lays down rules about these kinds of things; none of that to the first place.
The gospels are quite clear. To be a Christian is to acknowledge that God is in Christ. It’s something we both acknowledge, that God is in Christ, to acknowledge that the discovery of Christ and the centrality of Christ in our lives is life, is what keeps us alive and now comes the third thing. That the purpose of grace, remember we spoke about synergy. We all know we’re saved by grace, everybody in this room knows that. Does anybody ever ask why we’re saved by grace?
Question: [inaudible 00:35:33]
Prof. Schneider: That’s a Protestant answer. The Catholic answer is because God loves us so much. The Orthodox answer takes synergy into account. It is so we will announce to the world that Christ saves us. For us to recognize that Christ saves us becomes a commission in the Acts of the Apostles. When the apostles start, they’ve received the Holy Spirit, this is chapter two, they received the Holy Spirit. They start speaking about the resurrection. Everybody is astonished and the thing they say about it is, “To this resurrection, we are all witnesses.” they say. Here we really do have to go to the Greek, because the Greek word that they’re using for witness is martyrs, we are all martyrs.
What it means that we testify to the truth. We testify to the truth, and the truth is the resurrection and that Christ saves us. What that means is that Orthodox Christianity is an evangelical religion. To be evangelical doesn’t mean to be like this crazy people you see on television, and they are crazy. To be evangelical means to announce the gospel. Evangelion is just another Greek word for that, Gospel’s a German word actually. Evangelion is the word that’s used in the scriptures. We supposed to announce it. That’s our purpose in life.
What activity in the Church is true and valuable is that which furthers the job of being evangelical. In the second talk, we’re going to talk about how that relates to culture. What it means to be Orthodox in North America. Father Hopko, in a passage I’ll quote a little later, emphasizes this very strongly that we have to be prepared to be martyrs, nowadays it means be defend of the death, that which is true and vital and necessary in our faith. Yet only do that if we’re prepared to take risks, to let go of that which isn’t true and vital and necessary.
We have to put that in the second place, not the first place. We have to identify our Orthodoxy with Christ, to be Orthodox is to put on Christ. We say it that Baptism is many as, from Romans chapter eight, “As many as there are baptized into Christ, have put on Christ.” We’ll repeat that. Everybody repeats that on Holy Saturday and we sing it through gospel.
That’s what it means to be Orthodox. Put on Christ. Christ Jesus says, “Unless you take up your cross and follow me, you can’t be my faithful, you can’t have a place with me.” Part of that cross has to do with dealing with others.
Now, in the course of these three talks, we’re going to encounter a whole bunch of others. In the first talk it’s other Christians. Maybe, even before we get to other Christians, we should step back for a minute and talk about other Orthodox. How is that we’re supposed to announce the gospel as the Orthodox understand it to other Christians. We can’t even agree among ourselves.
The first practical problem is Orthodox disunity. One other thing Jesus tells us is that it’s not just the words that we preach, it’s what we do that, in fact, is the announcing of the gospel. Remember he says “Many come in my name but not all of them are the Christ.” He also says, “Many will call after me, but only few are chosen, only few are living alike.”
It’s by our example that the effectiveness of our announcing the gospel is made true. You might ask what kind of example do the Orthodox show the world? Why should anybody take it seriously? Father Hopko points out the Orthodoxies are kind of laughing stock in the world. It’s a little bit bitter, I don’t think he’s right.
Certainly, he says it in the context in which he’s fighting the forces of modern permissive liberalism, which of course doesn’t like the fact that the Orthodox stand on the other side of certain values. There certainly is a certain truth in it. In the ecumenical world that Father Hopko was used to, he said that before the Canadian example, he was used to a kind of bitterness in which the Protestant world said, “We’re getting on with the job of Church unity.” Then the stubborn Orthodox are slow in their … Like a dragging break or a dragging anchor, they’re slowing us down. The Orthodox are the problem, said a lot of the world. What did that make the Orthodox say? “I don’t know, the modern world is the problem.”
All this modernism, all this liberalism, all this permissiveness, all this willingness to give up fundamental things is the problem. Included in those fundamental things, by the way, by the Orthodox in the World Council of Churches is the fact that there are women priests in the Anglican Church.
It was over that issue that three churches walked out of the WCC in 1998. You may talk about prolonging stupidities. In a world that is going to hell, in a world that is sick, I hope you notice, the last word is my notes is therapy, I brought that of course especially for that. It’s Father Tom’s word. Why in the world should that be a fundamental issue of division? Especially when, if you understand Orthodox teaching, you know that it is not a dogma, it’s what’s called, in the kind of fancy techno speak that professors love, theologoumena, it’s an opinion.
It wasn’t always the Orthodox practice, women were ordained in the early church. It’s been a kind of core Orthodox opinion for a long time. There are a lot of very important Orthodox theologians nowadays who don’t agree with it, including Elizabeth Percy Gell, of course she’s a woman, but also including metropolitan Anthony Blum, who also died this year. Very important theologian.
Question: [inaudible 00:44:32] these three churches that walked out, people from the congregation [inaudible 00:44:39] left with all the priests and with the congregation and many of them are now in Orthodox field.
Prof. Schneider: These problems are not unique to Orthodoxies, certainly. In every Christian church, there are the people who want to absolutely cling to the ways we do things as the life and death issues. It’s in every church.
Question: Conservatives.
Prof. Schneider: Conservatives, right. In the second talk, I’ll tell you about my experience of addressing the Anglicans, on the question of same sex marriage, for example. They’re totally split about it. It’s in every church. Father Hopko’s fundamental Evangelical Orthodox point is true for every Christian. Anything that is not in the first place, seeing the vision of Christ, hearing Christ as the word, because Christ is the word of God and what I’m adding in these talks, in a good synergistic cooperative way, understanding what that word says, “We are to do.” Notice I said understanding, requires use of our faculties, requires being who we are, whom God made us to be.
Anything that isn’t that is an obstacle, a red herring; it’s getting in the way. This is why the Canadian solution to talk among churches has been so fascinating. Now, ecumenism is the command of God. How can I say that when so many Orthodox hear the word ecumenism and instantly throw up and scream and yell and say, “What do are we doing there? How dare you talk to people who don’t hold the truth?” Notice, by the way, that’s based on presumption. We are right, they are wrong. That’s the presumption.
How can I say ecumenism is a command of God? It is because of the very texts of unity that we just spoke of. If that kind of unity of love is the eschatological goal, then we have no choice but to speak. While we should be speaking to the whole world certainly, missions are long and rather glorious history in Orthodoxy until fairly recently, until the Russian Czars took over, we by and large, no, it’s not true. Byzantine emperors were pretty bad too. By and large, we didn’t missionize with canons and the sword. By and large with missionize with respect.
But talking to fellow Christians isn’t mission. At the Orthodox protest and protest rather bitterly about fellow Christians who do come and missionize Christians, I imagine you have them in Egypt as well. Certainly, they’re all over Europe, Evangelical Christians who are trying to make conversions to a kind of simplistic version of Christianity. No, talking to fellow Christians is because they are doing something truthful and important, they are acknowledging Christ. They’re saying, “Christ is our savior. Christ is the way. We want to love Christ. We want to act like Christians in the world. We want to be the people in the world that Christ called us to be.”
Yet they do it differently from us. They hold different views, they have different opinions on this and that, even very different statements about the meaning of Christ. It is our evangelical duty to speak up, to say to Christians, “Yes, you care about Christ, you need to understand what the Orthodox know about loving Christ and putting on Christ and being Christ.” That’s something we say and we shock everybody else. We say, “We are God. We are Christ.”
Now in the old ecumenical activity, that became nearly impossible. The ecumenical activity that produced the World Council of Churches, back in the 1940’s had a long pre-history in which by the way the Orthodox took part, I won’t take the time, time doesn’t let me read this, rather wonderful document from 1920. It’s an [inaudible 00:50:51] from the ecumenical patriarch and he’s calling for what the kind of thing that eventually became the World Council of Churches, and explaining why in love we have to be there.
Theologically, most Orthodox thinkers would go along with this kind of thinking. By in large the Orthodox who try to make a huge case for the idea of ecumenism as a heresy aren’t thinking at all, they are ranting. They’re really a very tiny group, very tiny group. The Churches that left the WCC in 1998 didn’t do so because they didn’t like ecumenism, to a certain extent they were succumbing to pressure back home. They had internal politics to deal with. What they didn’t like was the way the World Council of Churches was doing ecumenism. That was why they left. So it’s our duty to do it, the question then becomes, how to do it?
Question: You need to [inaudible 00:52:07]
Prof. Schneider: Exactly. The World Council of Churches was created in a search for unity, the Commission on Faith and Order; notice the names, it’s the Commission on Faith and Order. This is the theological commission, the great theologians who do the thinking work for the WCC. In the 1940’s that commission had one of the greatest names in Christian’s thought in the world, including both Oriental and Byzantine Orthodox theologians. George Florovsky was one of the great founders of that. Aram the first was one of the great founders of that, for example.
But they made a terrible mistake. They said, and it was kind of typical of thinking right after World War II, they said, “Okay, our goal, our eschatological goal is church unity. How do you get there?” You study what a church is. You study what the church is. They made the nature of the church, their primary topic. It’s interesting, it was game over from the start really.
First of all, almost all of them were clergy, very highly famous responsible clergy. They couldn’t really daringly step out of line, they all would’ve gotten clobbered by their home churches. Tradition made them cling to all these things that were so essential, it is so-called in their various churches.
There were, of course, matters of doctrine that separated them too, and they all knew it, they were wise and learned men. It was the wrong topic. It’s no worthy, that immediately in 1950 they issued a document called “The Toronto Statement” and “The Toronto Statement” looks exactly like what we accomplished in Canada. It says, “There’s no such thing as a super church. The World Council of Churches is an assembly of churches. In no sense will one church ever impose doctrine and so on another church” Those kinds of statements.
In practice, it never worked out because their way of operating was majority hope. Of course, the WCC was overwhelmingly protestant and it was understanding of this that made the Catholics refuse to join. So they never joined the WCC. The whole project kind of didn’t go anywhere and in 1954 there was a major change of direction at the world assembly in [inaudible 00:55:43], Illinois.
At that assembly, they said we’re not getting anywhere in theological side. Let’s be patient with the theological side and in the meanwhile, to get something done, let’s put our emphasis on the peace and justice side, that’s the other big commission, peace and justice. Suddenly they started rushing into peace and justice issues. Well, you see what would inevitably happen. With the overwhelming majority of Protestants, Western liberal ideas would become peace and justice ideas without an examination of their theological foundation.
A question like women’s ordination becomes a question of women’s rights. I’ll talk about rights in the second lecture. Rather than an issue of a ecclesiology and theology, which needs to be debated on a theological basis, it all went nowhere and as these liberal causes multiplied and multiplied, things got more and more and more uncomfortable for the Orthodox.
Climaxing in 1998 with two churches actually walking out, the Georgian and the Bulgarian and two other churches on the brink, especially and the important one was the Russian, on the brink of walking out. I’ll talk about what the World Council did in a second, but first I have to go back 15 years before 1998 to the Community Council of Churches which made the realization that what was in the Toronto Statement expressed a notion of churches as an assembly that really could be given living form and show how churches, that are all witnessing to Christ can relate.
We call it forum. The basic principles of it are, to keep it simple. Every church is at the table as a church. That part rules out the notion of democratic voting altogether. There are no big churches, no little churches. Every church is a voice. Every church speaks and is trying its best with the best knowledge that it has, what I’d like to comment we made at the beginning, which is why things move; speaking with the best knowledge that it has to speak the voice of Christ, the evangelical voice that the world needs to hear.
Therefore what we have at the table is dialogue. No matter what the issue is, churches bring up various issues, the world presents us with certain issues, like war and so on. There are things that happen in the world, biotechnology, peace and justice, anti-Semitic things happened in Canada, America went to war in Iraq, I’ll be talking about some biotechnology things later, same sex marriage came on the table, all kinds of issues.
Then some very deep theological issues too because of biotechnology our theological commission, notice the difference, we call it faith and witness, not faith and order. Faith and witness, that’s kind of true to our notion of each church being a witness has put out a wonderful booklet on human anthropology in an age of biotechnology. What the Christian view of being human is in nature of biotechnology, we are now following it with a companion volume on suffering and hope. What it means to be in a world where suffering happens and what the Christian hope has to say to such a world.
That kind of work goes on too but it's all done by consensus. We simply work and work and work and work until we reach consensus, and then we know the mind of the member churches. Never vote. The only thing we vote on is money issues and we have to do that by law.
Question: Consensus means unanimous?
Prof. Schneider: Unanimous. That's very ...
Question: That's difficult.
Prof. Schneider: Very difficult.
Question: What are some of your [inaudible 1:00:58]
Prof. Schneider: We never vote.
Question: [Inaudible 1:01:09]
Prof. Schneider: That's right. All yes's, no no's. Exactly. What makes it so difficult? Why is that so difficult? Because, I go back to what we were saying, it requires exactly the kind of humility that Father Hopko was speaking about. It requires not just coming and saying, "We were right, you are wrong" it requires listening. Now that's listening is “Oh God” too, you know. If we couldn't listen, we couldn't be Christians. Why? Because Jesus is the word and Jesus comes to us through the word. What do we know about Jesus? Let me speak as a historian for just one second.
Father Gragas brought up the issue about historical criticism and how historical scholars and critical scholars are turning everything into historical myths and so on and so on and so on. I'm sorry but what it shows us is that Father Gragas simply does not understand history and historical methodology. The past is past.
We know of Jesus because of two things. One is that He works in our lives and we recognize that, and our ability to recognize that He's working in our lives is because He comes to us as the word. The church has given us Jesus in the word, and said, "What's working in your lives is what's in this book." You see? So, listening therefore becomes terribly important, and listening to other people becomes terribly important.
Even in the Old Testament. Elijah is trying to hear God, and God only comes when He is able to hear the still small voice. In the New Testament what makes Jesus unique is that He can hear authentic repentance. The woman taken on adultery, the woman who washes His feet; He hears what these people are saying. The woman who washes His feet doesn't even use words. She just washes His feet and He hears it.
You have to be prepared to hear the voice of the other. Unless we are going to be the kind of Orthodox, in my second bulletin you say, "Because we are Orthodox we got it right, you got it wrong." Then we have to hear our fellow Christians at the table when they say, "We know Christ and we love Christ."
We hear what they have to say, but then we have the right, because it's a forum to expect them to hear us. You see what this does? It totally reverses. For the orthodox it is terribly important, because it totally reverses our role in ecumenism. In a democratic ecumenism, where we are going to be the minority, we have to be the ones to say no. That's our rule. Our rule is to say, "Ah, can't say that." In formal ecumenism, our rule suddenly is to be teachers, evangelical, outreach people. That is to say, "This is what we think ought to be said." By golly, the world listens.
I could tell you story after story after story after story. One of the great moments was the members of the United Church at first said this forum thing is never going to work. It took us ten years to hammer it out, I was there, I was part of the work for the whole ten years. Right from the start of defining what it was and how it worked to identifying the procedures, to writing the new constitution and bylaws that entrenchment to teaching people how to make it work, and so on and so on.
The United Church people said, "This is never going to work. Never" Well, I can tell you I have the United Church people who were there coming to me saying now, things like “Teach me how to pray with icons because I've understood what you've said about the church being the incarnation of Christ. Now, I came understand what you mean when you say, that's in the icons. So teach me how it works."
Finally, a year later the same guy came back and said, "It's really weird, but I pray better with my icons." This is a United Church member, as liberal Protestant as you can get.
I could tell you story after story after story, but to go back to Dr. Lavit's question, I think the best example of the fact that this works is that once we had made it official, that this was the way we were working, the Roman Catholics joined the Canadian Council of Churches. At the time we were the only Ecumenical board they belonged to officially, but even more fascinating, at the very same moment, we had two churches join. One was the Roman Catholics and the other was the reformed churches.
They are in the dialogue and then you start to discover fascinating things like how close the reformed churches and the Orthodox are and so on. So the dialogue produces results. But what it means is that we have to totally abandon triumphalism. We have to totally abandon the notion that we are right and you are wrong, and we have to replace it with what was the characteristic of Christians’ speech for the first three centuries. It's called apologetic and apologetic runs right through St. Paul, right through the first three centuries. What does it mean?
Now remember the history. In the first three centuries Christianity was illegal. It had no official status. It was the era of martyrdoms. Christians were being martyred left and right, tough times. Nevertheless, Christians spoke up boldly. Christianity is being martyred again in the 21st century. It's being martyred by culture, by liberal culture, by western culture, particularly, which is becoming global culture, by post-modern culture.
The first three centuries was the era of martyrdoms and Christians spoke up boldly, but they spoke, they had to speak in an apologetic way. They couldn't come out and say, "We're right and you are wrong" They had to say, "This is our faith and it's right for this and this and this and this reasons and experiences and your faith is weakened in the face of that for this and this and this and this reason." That's apologetic speech. It's been absent from the church for centuries.
Now it has come back in the work of great theologians in the 21st century because they know that the way that says, "We are right and you are wrong," is a total failure. They know that these pronouncements one gets from the Russian Orthodox Church abroad and from [inaudible 1:09:49] and so on. They are silly. They look silly, they are no argument. They do know that the word of Christ is true and that we ... Now what is the synergy? What is our responsibility? To find the truthful way to pronounce it that will speak to the others. The virtue of our Canadian ecumenism is that we've created a mechanism so that others will actually be listening.
To make a long story short, when everything fell apart in 1998 the World Council of Churches, in a panic, set up what was called The Special Commission. The Special Commission was half Orthodox, half Protestant. Delegation to try to find a completely new way to operate for the World Council of Churches. They met for three years. During the second of those years they said, "Let's consider consensus models." At that point they invited ... They knew about Canada because somebody had heard me speak, so they invited the Canadian Council of Churches to speak and effectively they invited me. I was not yet President but I was ... I had been, I was the only one still there that had been with the process from the beginning.
I went; everybody said that consensus couldn't possibly work, it's too difficult. I said "It does work. I can prove to you that it works. It works even when we disagree.” When we disagree the statement is that there is no consensus and now we come back to what was said yesterday, by Dr. Melci. So the discussion continues.
In a forum model and a consensus model the discussion continues in love not in antagonism. The most interesting example perhaps was same-sex marriage. I'm going to come to that in the second talk. That was obviously the one where there was the hugest amount of outright disagreement, black and white, Jews. I will tell you when I tell you the story, the relationship among the churches has always been clear, respectful, searching. Even when there are notions of the truth they are like black and white.
On a lot of things we agree. The World Council of Churches ... When I went away from this meeting it was in Damascus and it was also interesting how important this was for the Oriental Orthodox. They were all there, all, every church represented strongly. The Orthodox, of course, loved this. They said, "Right. This really gives ..." They understood what I meant when I said, "This really gives us an Orthodox voice at the Christian table.” A voice that commands respect that needs to be heard as opposed to the voice of the old fuddy duddies who won't let anything move.
Suddenly all of the riches and the treasure and the wonderful stuff we have to say become part of the dialogue. The Protestants all said, "This will never work." Two years later, when the report of the special commission came out they recommended the Canadian model and I thought, "Gee that's nice. They actually listened, but it will never go any further." Six months later the executive committee said, "We agree. We are accepting this and we are going to operate by consensus from the next year until the General Assembly." They tried it and it worked. Last year the General Assembly adopted it.
So it is a model of how churches can work together.
Question: The Catholic joined the Canadian consultation, are they now considered members of the World Council of Churches?
Prof. Schneider: No, why?
Question: They adopted the same model.
Prof. Schneider: Because they are waiting. We’ve got a long track with it, we have had 15 years of proving that it works. They are just getting started and the World Council of Churches is maybe a slightly different organism from the Canadian … in that we are well within conventional boundaries, whereas WCC has many, many small groups, so they are waiting.
Dialogue produces results. To give you two examples, I spoke to a 15, 20 year dialogue that produced the 1992 agreement at Chambesy between the Oriental Churches and the Byzantine Churches with regard to the question of the nature of Christ. It is an important document. How many of you have read it? How many people in your congregation have ever heard of it? How many understand how important it is? That's why it's going nowhere. I think Dr. Melci was a little bit cynical yesterday, in saying, "Well, it's the clergy that are opposing this, they’re the obstruction. They don't want to give up their power."
Well, I happen to know both Patriarch Ignatiuses of Antioch and there are very good friends and both very smart, wise people. They are handling things slowly because they don’t want to scandalize the faithful and they know this thing has to be worked out. The real obstruction is lack of knowledge.
Question: If people also exposing the people and the congregation about the importance of these things …
Prof. Schneider: Now, here's what I said we were going to talk about the difficult stuff tonight, want to hear my answer?
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: You are. The church is conciliar. Look who's in this room? This is a gathering of the brightest and the best. Look at the level of education in this room. Why aren't you all church educators?
Question: As much as we do …
Prof. Schneider: Why are youth groups all talking about sex and not talking about this?
Question: The clergy who is in charge of who the educators are.
Question: No, but also the people demand. People are interested in meeting and hearing about what they should do, if we [inaudible 1:17:22], but do you think we think they’re part from observation and why we need [inaudible 1:17:26] in your home, in your home, you don’t listen to what the children, what you teach the children and you do the best for the interest of the children.
So you can say that the public wants that. If you don't do this in your home, don't do it in the church.
Prof. Schneider: This is a perfect example of what Father Hopko is talking about when he says that, “The notion that we live in a hierocratic, higher hierarchical church is something that we inherited historically. We inherited it from, basically 300 years of Orthodox sleep between the 15th century and the 20th century in the rediscovery of the Fathers who rediscovered the essential nature of the church is conciliar.
So you have a voice. You have to have a voice, it is the nature of the church. I gave you a passage from Acts four "All were of one mind," all work by consensus, right? It included everybody. If you leave it to the level of blame, you say, "The clergy are in charge, there's not a thing we can do about it" you have a bit [inaudible 1:18:48]. You have abandoned your evangelical calling which is to be like Christ and announce the word.
Here is where what Dr. Melci said that's important, you can do a confrontation or you can go to the clergy and say, "Okay, we are tired of this tyranny and we have created this wonderful lay society and we are going to run the world now." How far do you think you are going to get?
Question: [inaudible 1:19:16] You are not Christian.
Prof. Schneider: It's not really the gospel if it doesn't speak in love. Now Dr. Melci got on the plane and went back to Cairo and we are stuck with the practical problem. How do you say ... How do you get something accomplished? I say these things in love.
Question: It's hard for me to [inaudible 1:19:47] Sunday school curriculum that is used by many of the churches here in North America which was actually established by the Southern US Dioceses deals with the discussion of the nature of Christ. Actually, in two separate lessons during the year of the curriculum for grades 9-12, which is great. For us, as servants or teachers in the Sunday school it actually was very educational for us, as well. These short manuscripts, so to speak, that are written-up for the teachers to present to the youth are very well done. It covered the discussion, I think in some depth.
I just wanted to bring that up because I do know how many people here actually realize that. That's great that the Coptic Church at least is making an effort in teaching the youth about some important issues and certainly the issue of the nature of Christ is very important.
Question: It’s very [inaudible 1:21:20]
Question: I can actually give you the [inaudible 01:21:03] website it’s [inaudible 1:21:29]
Question: [inaudible 01:21:22]
Prof. Schneider: How many grownups get exposed to this?
Question: Just the [inaudible 1:21:42] actually [inaudible 01:21:43] It would be great, at least when it comes to be [inaudible 01:21:52] conventional Orthodox in logical shapes that [inaudible 01:21:58]
Prof. Schneider: To move it up a notch like Emeril, if the material does not exist why not take a look at and see if it could be used, this marvelous new French Orthodox Catechism that is totally grounded in Christology instead of ecclesiology investments and church history and authority and jurisdiction and everything else.
The first volume is completely Christological, it's called The Living God. If 1992 was right and we've really recognized the truth in each other, one would like to think that this Catechism which is quite recent should look like something. The Catholic Church would say, "Yeah, right, useful stuff." If it doesn't, somebody has not been dialoguing, you understand? and 1992 was just an empty piece of paper. How would you know this thing exists anyway?
A topic that I haven't taken up yet that I will in the next talk is about insularity. Okay, this organization had the graciousness to invite a non-Coptic to speak to you and I happen to know about this thing, and I told you something came out of the dialogue. If you would have all Coptic speakers, would anybody have known this book exists? It’s a wonderful book, it's available in English at St. Vladmir seminary. That’s what dialogue does. In fact, it's my last statement for this first talk.
Okay, the lessons learned in the Canadian Catholic Churches have to do with ecumenical relationships between the usual politically correct things to say to sister churches. The old evil thing to say would be competing churches. What's the hard-nose truth? Dialoguing churches, because the dialogue is between people who don't hold the same view. That's where we are really at this point.
Can we take this lesson back? We started off by saying, "We'll never get anywhere really unless we show a good example. Can we take this lesson back inside our own houses and find in it some kind of model of how we're going to move along this thing that has seemed to have stayed stalled since 1992; which is what this organization and this meeting is trying to do.
I can tell you that the year that we adopted forum as our official policy, consensus forum the official policy, which was the year the Catholics and the reformed churches joined. What the orthodox churches, who sit on the Canadian Council decided in a caucus among themselves, and by the way there are three Byzantine and three Oriental, decided among themselves is that we would never again speak as six individual churches. It would be one orthodox voice. Amazing, huh? The Copts are one of the three. The OCA the Ukrainians, the Greeks, Copts, Armenians, Ethiopians. Isn't that amazing? It's just amazing. That was the good news. Now comes the bad news, and that will open us up for the next one.
We tend to turn inward. Our concerns are largely for the welfare of our own church. When I first started going to the Community Council of Churches, back in the early days of this thing, one of the great voices and certainly was a mentor for me for sure, was Father Antonious Guirguis from St. Mark's in Toronto, wonderful person, fabulous.
For the last ten years, I've hardly seen Father Guirguis. He used to be right in the thick of it all. So where has he been? Well, the Copts are creating ... In Toronto they bought two square blocks, just north of Toronto. Do you have any idea what that means? This is Toronto we are talking about. It’s kind of next after New York City, in terms of ... They are going to create an entire Coptic village. I've seen the plans. It really is a village. I'm astonished they haven't planned to build a ten foot wall around it. Father [inaudible 1:27:33] and Father Guirguis is the Project Manager and that's where his attention has gone.
Question: [inaudible 1:27:41]
Prof. Schneider: In a later talk, I will say something about the one person who shows up for the Copts, that's when we are talking about civil society. I have to tell you some of the things he says, I’m not going to name his name.
The tragic thing, the tragic thing ... Really, I mean that's bad and it shows what happens when one starts to look inward instead of looking outward. I'm setting up the next talk. The really tragic thing is that I have also ... I still represent the OCA on the Faith and Witness which has been doing of this fabulous theological work. In 15 years, although the Coptic Church is entitled to three seats on the Commission like every church is. Every church is entitled to three seats at the Commission. There has never been a Copt to attend the meetings. The meetings are totally opened to observers. There has never been a Copt at the meeting.
Question: You have names but they don't attend or there are no names assigned?
Prof. Schneider: No. They have never assigned anyone. Every three years there is a new appointment cycle, from the secular [inaudible 1:29:03]. Every year the appeal goes out to appoint somebody. It's not even … We have to approve. It's the people you think are your good theologians that would share in this dialogue, never been an appointment.
Question: [Inaudible 1:29:19]
Prof. Schneider: Observers would be like you. They wouldn't be appointees, that's right. Appointees should be people who have the theological training to cope with the situation like that.
Question: Is it the hope that [inaudible 1:29:35].
Prof. Schneider: No, no, no, no. The church in Canada.
Question: So it's the priests in Canada that is responsible for this?
Prof. Schneider: Yes.
Question: Actually [inaudible 1:29:48] that the guy died, they’re thinking of sending … This was three, four years ago.
Prof. Schneider: Okay. Let’s stretch our legs.
Question: One more question?
Prof. Schneider: This must be a lot of fun, I’m feeling much better.
Question: Good. What’s the name of the book again that you sais was French …
Prof. Schneider: The French Catechism. It’s … In English it’s called The Living God, two volumes.
Question: The author?
Prof. Schneider: It doesn’t have an author’s name or a title page.
Question: All right.
Prof. Schneider: It’s published by St. Vladimir’s Parish.
Question: They’re both [inaudible 01:30:33] The Living God.
Prof. Schneider: The Living God.
Question: You have it [inaudible01:30:36]
Prof. Schneider: I feel much better.
Question: Huh?
Prof. Schneider: I feel much better.
Question: Already?
Prof. Schneider: Yeah.
Question: Before I get the [inaudible 01:30:47]
Question: [Inaudible 01:30:47]
Prof. Schneider: Surrender? He said that if you’re going to be like Christ you have to be ready to die. You might end … Everything that you know, might have to die. Every Coptic nuance, every symbol, every procession, every vestment, everything you know, it might be necessary to [inaudible 01:31:21].
Question: Isn’t that just the [inaudible 01:31:24] martyr?
Prof. Schneider: Yes. That’s the meaning of being a martyr, exactly. Originally, but never forget the original meaning that is the experience, the 2nd and 3rd centuries caused the narrowing of the word. To me, only the people who actually physically died for the name of Christ, but what Saint Peter says it impacts too. It means the word actually comes from law court. It actually means I will not hurt you myself, but I gave madras testimony, it’s the same as sworn testimony in a court. It got to be the absolutely truth, nothing but the truth. That’s what it originally means.
So it’s a very strong way to put it. What came out of our discussion is, from this kind of talking and Madam Levid was so perceptive and so quick that she realized that it applies to everything, not just church relations but it applies to family relations and everything else. The three great virtues are listening; if you listen and you could only do that if you have a certain degree of humility. What is proper humility because what’s the humility of a witness who knows the truth? The humility of the witness is to say “How do I know this is the truth?” rather than to say “Because I know that is the truth.”
With that virtue of humility, then works together, that synergy, the virtue of faith. If you have a solid foundation of knowledge and experience in your church then Christ will open you up to the answer to that question, but the question has to be authentic. It has to be really authentic.
If you think of The Parable of The Good Samaritan, anybody who’s going to understand The Parable of The Good Samaritan has to be willing to give up all sorts of Jewish values because the person who is Christ in that story isn’t a Jew, he’s a Samaritan which means he was a heretic and an outcast for the Jews, a heretic and an outcast with all kinds of false doctrines. It’s very interesting.
One of the good things that can come out of it, this was the result actually of some work I did for the Anglicans, actually on the very thorny subject of same sex marriage was that, I told you yesterday in the Toronto School of Theology which is this consortium and which all the churches are dialoguing together, it’s really neat because catholic students enrolled in the Catholic College and Presbyterian students enrolled in the Presbyterian College, but the course counter comes from all the colleges together and students had been taking any college and so they get this open-minded education.
They never had Orthodox saying now there is four adults, that’s the only such program for adults in greater travel area, a full program at Orthodox studies. Because the Orthodox don’t have a college, it was the Anglicans who said this must be, we have to have this and so they’re sponsoring it fully, it’s housed within an Anglican College so.
Question: [Inaudible 01:35:34]
Prof. Schneider: No. It’s Trinity College.
Question: Trinity.
Prof. Schneider: At the University of Toronto. I brought along description of program, it would only be of approximate interest if you don’t live within the GTA, between Hamilton and Kingston but if you do and you’re interested in knowing about this, please feel free to take one. I think there’s probably enough for almost for everybody.
Question: There’s no correspondence courses?
Prof. Schneider: No correspondence courses. You have to sit in a classroom one night a week.
Question: One to [inaudible 01:36:11]
Prof. Schneider: Especially if you do live in a GTA call lists to people’s attention.
Question: [Inaudible 01:36:19]
Prof. Schneider: I said before that it is always been the lady that had been in the forefront of this kind of thing. I have to admit, I have put notices of this kind of thing, bulletins and posters in someone in … Virtually, everyone who’s at church in Toronto. All the Clergy have, to my face, promised that they would really promote this. When students actually comment, because they heard about it from somebody else that not from clergy.
Question: [Inaudible 01:36:51]
Prof. Schneider: They all say this was new to us. So please let people know about this, okay?
Question: [Inaudible 01:37:00]
Prof. Schneider: All right. Now, we started very late tonight and because we have a whole lot of time tomorrow morning, I think what we should agree among ourselves, I’m looking for consensus, that’s how we do it. When I was the chairman, the hardest job of being president was claiming consensus, getting people to talk to what happened. Split up the time and so let’s quit by the clock tonight rather than … Right? Let’s say we’ll go to the 10:00 and then stop because we have tons of time tomorrow morning to finish, how’s that?
Question: But then many people I think may not be able to attend the morning. I don’t know.
Prof. Schneider: That’s why I’m looking for consensus.
Question: Some people who want [inaudible 01:37:48] early and then … So I think … What [inaudible 01:37:51] making the consensus? Is it that between for you and …
Prof. Schneider: Me? Let’s put this way, my first year of teaching at Columbia University, I was in my last class and I knew I was leaving and I didn’t notice the clock and I stopped talking at 2:00 in the morning and not a single student left. So I can do it, but …
Question: Okay. What’s your preference?
Prof. Schneider: I’m looking …
Question: [Inaudible 01:38:15] for everyone.
Prof. Schneider: We are looking for consensus.
Question: Skip today and continue tomorrow or 10:30 with confirmation …
Question: 10:30?
Question: For those who are leaving tomorrow.
Question: [Inaudible 01:38:26]
Question: What we did tomorrow?
Question: [Inaudible 01:38:31]
Question: 10:30. It’s about [inaudible 01:38:34]
Question: 10:30 tonight or 10:00. [Inaudible 01:38:39] 10:30 or less?
Question: 10:30 is perfectly fine.
Question: Well, he was able to …
Question: Okay. 10:00. Okay.
Question: [Inaudible 01:38:44] instead of [inaudible 01:38:55] because it’s one to go.
Question: Okay. [inaudible 01:38:59] it’s up either 2:00.
Prof. Schneider: Yes. Well, I have …
Question: The only thing we can use is the …
Prof. Schneider: I do have to be a little but careful because I really did spend the entire day sick and um …
Question: We don’t know what will happen tomorrow for people so I have to [inaudible 01:39:15]
Prof. Schneider: If I take care of myself, I’ll be alright the way I feel now.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: I’ll make the bridge from what we just said in the first talk to the new talk by reading a passage from Fr. Hopko. ‘For this miracle to happen, the Orthodox churches in all parts of the world are global village, have to die to their present Byzantine Ottoman and imperial orations structures and human institutional forms and live its Christ, one Holy Church.
In this death, they will not remain alone but will bear much fruit in a manner proper to God. The greatest obstacles in the evangelical and philanthropic, remember philanthropy means love of mankind. Philanthropic mission of our eastern Orthodox churches and surely for our “Orthodox Ecclesiastical Jurisdictions”, that’s in quotes, in America, is our unwillingness to deny ourselves and die to ourselves, humanly speaking, so that others may live through our loving self-sacrifices for their sake. This is why our churches jurisdiction, dioceses and parishes remain alone. Bears so little fruit and are filled with so much turmoil and trouble.
Self-interested Christian Churches concerned about the preservation of their institutional and cultural forms and expressions cannot be authentically evangelical and philanthropic. Additionally, members of such churches often declare that they need …They need not worry because they have Christ promised, see? We are right, you are wrong. They have Christ promise that the church, meaning their particular parish or dioceses or patriarchy in its presence historical form, know this. All those things that is supposed to be so absolute just have a present historical form which is a consequence of 2000 years of historical effort and circumstances and changing context and so on.’
The important things is not the historical form, it’s the eschatological form, as we were discussing. Our job, our task is to make the present form look as much as possible like the eschatological form.
They’re sure that they have Christ promised that their church will survive, so they called the Lord’s words about the gates of hell being unable to prevail against it and thus they cease to be real Christians. How strong is that? Thus they cease to be real Christians and their churches cease to be the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ.
Question: [Inaudible 01:42:48]
Prof. Schneider: Yeah.
Question: [Inaudible 01:42:57]
Prof. Schneider: Now, having laid down these principles in the first talk, the rest of the time together is going to be about a various practical applications, but these practical applications moved beyond the sphere of just relations among the churches. They move out to the sphere of speaking the Gospel to the whole world. What does it mean to be a Christian in the world?
In this present talk, we’re going to speak about the social and political will. Tomorrow’s talk, we’ll speak about the world of knowledge, in particular, scientific knowledge and how one find solutions. Where do solutions lie?
Now, Father Hopko talked about our present historical form, it’s almost tempting to say what the Orthodoxy is cursed by its history, but that would be the fly in the face of the planet. God! Our history is our history, it’s whatever it is, right? Our church has taken on various historical forms. The curse is not only in the history, the curse is that we won’t let go of it, that we will not acknowledge it. We lived in a different time and different circumstances.
The first social context of Orthodoxy was bloody martyr, the period of bloody martyrdom. This has its advantages although it really did already lay the foundation for this, ‘us versus them’. It’s ‘us versus them’ kind of mentality because the world was murdering it. The world is prosecuting. It didn’t allow any room for what you heard yesterday, that wonderful phrase of Guirguis, the ‘I vow’ relationship.
Now, when Guirguis says ‘I vow’, he’s talking about our relationship with God, but it’s also our relationship with the world of others, the world of everyone. Obviously, it’s tough to think that way, when the world is searching their basement to find you and haul you off to throw you and all your alliance.
In my office, I have great, big sign for students. It’s a baseball score board except what it says on, it is ‘Lions 66, Christians 0’, just pure fun. The real difficulty was called by the Byzantine era, followed by the Ottoman era with the same thing, a 180 degrees reverse. The trouble with the Byzantine era is that the church, we came established and to keep matter short, I’m just going to say these things and if you want a question about details later, I’ll be glad to elaborate on them; An established church that is a situation where one church is identified by the state as the approved church, established and sanctioned by law, which means that membership and it is effectively obligatory and non-membership in that church is to be outside the norm of society, the norm of the law.
Now, where that church becomes privileged and all other churches become … all other such associations become disadvantaged, that’s an established church. The Byzantine church was an established church. I personally regard this catastrophic for a church, absolutely catastrophic. It’s a style of churchmanship that a lot of Orthodox say they wanted to go back to.
When the government of Canada was contemplating the idea of same sex marriage being legal, the Orthodox Bishops of Canada put together a petition into the government, and the petition was hopeless. Basically told the government, the only way a government was allowed to act is that the government had the institute of Christian values and they cited a whole bunch of laws. They we’re made back in the days when homosexuality was regarded as a crime and it cited them all as presidents. Notice how this puts the other, the homosexual, totally outside the norm defined by law. It’s no wonder those laws where are abandoned 15 years ago. So they should be. As for a while, would never go for prison nowadays.
In tomorrow’s talk, we’ll return to this subject of homosexuality as scientific problem, we’ll talk about it. Today it’s … Right now it’s a social legal problem in today, in this present talk.
Question: Are was going to talk about it as Christian problem or Christian [inaudible 01:48:38]
Prof. Schneider: Sure, right.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: But because it’s a scientific … Exactly, because it is a scientific problem, it is a Christian issue. The issue is the subject of the talk, I mean we’re not going to settle a problem of homosexuality tomorrow, that’s to be [inaudible 01:49:02], but we won’t. The problem is, what are Christians supposed to do with what scientists think and what are the ethical implications of it.
Question: Yeah, but we are not assuming that what the scientist said is what the science say because some scientists do not agree with what [inaudible 01:49:27] besides sex. So, we have to allow the consensus here.
Prof. Schneider: Right.
Question: Because I am the one who is supposed to be from the science group. I don’t agree with what it is said from those scientist until the ‘70s. It wasn’t the science said.
Prof. Schneider: Correct.
Question: Until now.
Prof. Schneider: Let’s us save that for tomorrow.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: Let’s save that …
Question: Because some people will start to become afraid of some of the statement.
Prof. Schneider: Well, you can all read it tonight, that’s on the 2nd page.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: You can do it for bed time reading. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, okay? I hope you read the first bullet in this talk, rather carefully. The difficulty with established churches is threefold.
Number 1, religion is an outcome of state tyranny. You agree within an established church, you agree with the church or you were a criminal, or at the very least you are seriously disadvantaged. In 17th century England, you were criminalized. In 18th and 19th century England you were disadvantaged. People who were not Anglicans could not vote, could not sit in parliament, could not attend universally, for example. The establisher was, of course, paid for by public taxes including the taxes of the people who were not Anglicans.
In Canada, right now, we’re having a massive debate about this, in that, because of historical circumstances in Canada, the Catholic churches are allowed to collect taxes, now it’s done in an extremely fair way, people declare which tax will they prefer to be on. This was done in order to make peace between the Quebec French and the Anglican English, way back in the 19th century, was the solution. It’s relatively fair. Nobody in the 19th century expected Canada to be a totally multicultural society which it is today, most multicultural society in the world in Toronto.
So now, there’s a very big debate, what’s the fair way to deal with this? Fun … Nothing but the public schools and have no religious schools funded or allow every school to get a share of the public tax money in whether, Christian School, Muslim School, Jewish School and so on. I can assure that number one on the agenda of metropolitan [inaudible 01:52:30] of the Greek Orthodox churches that they want Orthodox schools too. Anything [inaudible 01:5237] should be the basis of what Orthodox school operation. We should all want schools and build ten foot high walls around them and the public should pay for it. Here in Eden is one problem.
Second, it means there’s no longer any necessity for apologetic. There’s no reason to, if you’re in the established church, you have no reason to explain yourself.
Third, perhaps the worst problem of all, this is the unseen problem, is that it makes religion and church truth the consequence of public policy, political policy. This is inevitable consequence of an established church.
Theoretically, that’s not supposed to be so. The Emperor Justinian when he codified the Roman law for the last time, announced the principle called Symphonia and this supposed to be, it’s in all the books as the big Orthodox political principle. Symphonia, just you can tell by the name, means the absolute cooperation of church and state. It’s why it’s a double-headed … One of the reasons why it’s a double-headed eagle, and you’ll notice, by the way, that the ecumenical patriarch has adopted as his symbol. It’s right there on the [inaudible 01:54:06], the double-headed eagle, cooperation of church and state.
Question: The two heads are state and the …
Prof. Schneider: Church.
Question: The church.
Prof. Schneider: Because Christian truth is Christian truth, they’re both supposed to think alike; but notice there’s no dialogue here. In fact, states operate by the politics of the world, there are subject to circumstances. What’s good for the state is what is Orthodox truth. We’ve spoken several times by the … Guirgius spoke about the 150 years it took for the split between the Oriental and Byzantine churches over the nature of Christ to become definitive.
Well, during that 150 years, the emperors desperately tried to find a compromise solution that will work for both sides and the reason was state policy. He did not want to lose the allegiance of what was his bread basket, his commercial center and his military frontier, which was all in the Levant, Egypt and the Levant.
I said that the worst heresy of all was produced in the 6th century not on the 5th, it’s the one about Christ having only one will. That was one of those imperial compromises some theological genius of an emperor thought that up and said, “Everybody must accept this” this is the solution. Nobody accepted it. The wisdom of the fathers and the orient do much better. One of the consequences, by the way, is that it made it very, very easy for Islam to conquer Levant to make a kind of caricature. Basically, the attitude was “Please come in and save us from these dire thoughts.
It didn’t go in Byzantine circles either, no matter how hard the emperor tried including tearing out the tongue of Maximus the confessor, speaking of state tyranny. The same emperor, just any who spoke about Symphonia, didn’t have to worry about the ecumenical patriarch because that guy was just the toady of Justinian. But other patriarchs opposed Justinian and what Justinian did was kidnapped them and imprisoned them and forced them to sign various documents that he approved of. State tyranny ends up like that.
So, the Byzantine solution, which you will notice was instantly copied institutionally by the churches. We all say we’re traditionally a high hierarchical church, that’s nonsense. We became a high hierarchical church from the 4th century, in imitation of the Romans State. Before that, the model was a family; you can see it in first Timothy, easy to see.
The model was a family, the bishop was the wise leader and the liturgical presider, we see that from liturgical documents from the 3rd, 2nd or 3rd century, and the church policy was conciliar.
Orthodox has always kind of preserved a modicum of that conciliarity because we have a lot late theologians. So, at least we listen to the educated laity. The west even abandoned that. But in terms of the running of the church, as far as to my knowledge, the only authentically conciliar church in the world, if it is in fact authentic, is the Orthodox Church in America. Certainly, I put ten good years of my life and I’ve aged considerably trying to keep it that way, working in a Metropolitan Council over against a senate of bishops who raised in the Russian model and think that a church is run by bishops and that’s the way it is and that’s the end of the story. So, the hierarchical model and the established …
Question: Can we say that the church is based on the bishops but run by them and the others?
Prof. Schneider: It’s based only by the churches.
Question: There’s no church without the bishop?
Prof. Schneider: There are a lot of churches without bishops, the Baptist.
Question: No, no, no, we’re talking about the orthodox here.
Prof. Schneider: Orthodoxy, all of the orthodox churches derived from the Byzantine model.
Question: Right.
Prof. Schneider: The church is not based on bishops, it is based on Christ. The church is the body of Christ. Now, go back to the scriptures and look at the descriptions of the body of Christ, 1st Corinthians 12 was the most clearest … Is the most clear example.
Question: Right.
Prof. Schneider: Then many of the heads of …
Question: Right but where is the priesthood?
Prof. Schneider: In the New Testament? There’s only one priest and who is that?
Question: Christ.
Prof. Schneider: Christ.
Question: The priests are the servant of the one priest.
Prof. Schneider: Right. Most of the orthodox way, to think about it, because we are such an iconic graphic people is to think typologically. The priests are the representatives of Christ, the image of Christ.
If you look at what priests says in the liturgy of John [inaudible 02:00:07], before he does the [inaudible 02:00:11] on the consecration, he says “If I were doing this, I couldn’t it”. It is not I who do it, but you who do it through my hands, Synergy.
Question: But without the priest …
Prof. Schneider: If you listen to what’s said before confession, and it’s some forms of confession, priest says, “It is it not I who forgive, you are not speaking to me, you are speaking to Christ, it is not I who forgive you, it is Christ who forgives you” and so on.
Question: By me as [inaudible 02:00:40] can’t please the priest who is doing it. It has to be him or …
Prof. Schneider: Right.
Question: Who won’t throw his hand, Jesus do it.
Prof. Schneider: That’s right. I won’t go into why because I have to explain the heresy of [inaudible 02:00:56] which is one of the heresies that came out in a question that asked of me. Now, I was asked, “Should I receive the sacrament from evil priest?”
Question: I can’t.
Prof. Schneider: The answer is why not?
Question: It doesn’t mean he’s stayed with the vision. I mean …
Prof. Schneider: Right.
Question: I mean that the construction of any local church …
Prof. Schneider: Yes.
Question: That needs a Priest or Bishop in order to …
Prof. Schneider: Yes. It‘s really because … It’s really… No. It’s because of the liturgy that we are in a Episcopal church, because of the liturgy.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: The liturgy, it derives from the bishop. It derives from the [inaudible 02:01:39], it derives from chrisom, it derives from a bunch of things that we need bishops for.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: The Bishop was the original liturgical provider. If you take it back to when that got established, the bishop was in fact the local priest. Bishops were bishops of a city.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: It was local [inaudible 02:01:57]. You take that back to 1st Timothy.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: The Bishops is just the local … The most respected local leader. Bishops do not run the church, the church is conciliar, the church is based on the unity of the whole body. There’s no question about this. The church is …
Question: [Inaudible 02:02:19] right now, maybe it’s the lack of [inaudible 02:02:22].
Prof. Schneider: It could be.
Question: To [inaudible 02:02:23]
Prof. Schneider: No, I actually don’t think so. I think it’s the result of Byzantine habitude, Father Hopko addresses it a lot in here, even in the passage you’ve just read. We have to be prepared to give up our Byzantine rational assumptions. It’s a long standing habit, bishops are, by and large, pretty infected with. My job is to be smart and keep you from being harmed by your own ignorance.
Question: Yes. I believe.
Prof. Schneider: So what I say goes, which means the bishops are adopting the same kind of tyranny that the state has. By the way, under the circumstances, it’s okay for very brave bishop to stand up for the truth when the state was wrong. When they did, the result was usually a return to the original modern model. So it took a really, really, brave Bishop.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: Well, there’s lots and lots and lots of examples. There’s Ambrose in the 4th century, there is [inaudible 02:03:40] in the 8th century, there’s Nicholas I in the 9th Century who finally told one emperor, he just to could not get married four times. There was one famous example under Ivan the terrible and he might have killed them.
There are examples but, by and large, the people who stood up, had been willing to stand up against the state has not been people in high authority in the church because in an established church, their jobs depend on the state. Remember that the emperor … Bishops are supposed to be elected. They’re supposed to be locally elected. Well, throughout the Byzantine period, the emperor appointed the ecumenical patriots, simply appointed them. Got the right man for the job, so to speak, meaning his kind of guy.
Historically, if you get established churches in a world of multiple churches, like the one we were speaking up in the first talk, you get wars of religion. That’s been true for a long, long time, not just the medieval phenomenon, the [inaudible 02:05:08] church was eliminated by warfare, just simply wiped out by the Roman Army that’s back in the 4th century.
Once Protestantism … Well, it has [inaudible 02:05:22] rebellion in the 15th century, the conquest of Constantinople in 1204. Notice, these are wars of religion between fellow Christians. I’m not just … I’m not even speaking of the crusades of Muslims against Christians, and you notice, by the way, how quickly the notion of getting your religion established by war can be turned from fighting the Muslims to fighting Christians who don’t agree with you, as in the sack of Constantinople in 1204, that’s was happened.
It was supposed to be war against the Muslims, but any point affect the split between the Western church and the Orthodox Churches was always part of the policy of the crusade, right from the get go, it just bubbled to the surface in 1204.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, we have major, major wars of religion between Anglicans and low church Protestants, between Catholics and Protestants of Germany. Well, that was then, those were the bad old days. Yes? Well, everybody in this room followed the news in Bosnia and what was that? Unless you say, “Well yeah, but that was against Muslims?” Muslims ha, phooey! Especially those Muslims because they renegade Christians on the 13th Century. What about the war in Croatia?
Question: [Inaudible 02:07:04]
Prof. Schneider: Which was simply a revenge war for the persecution of the Orthodox during the 2nd World War by the Croatian Catholics. Where’s your religion? Bad stuff.
Question: It is political cooperative to …
Prof. Schneider: That is re-dialogue. That’s a complex question, Madam Lavit pointed out. I warned you at the beginning that those guys yesterday had it easy, we were dealing with the complicated … We’re dealing with the complicated, really greedy, on the grounds problems, detail by detail. The more you try to do that, the more complicated it gets. That’s not me. I said I warned you at the beginning, Madam Lavit reinforced it during the break. That’s a very good example of one of the complications but it does illustrate my point. I said, when you get in an established church, you can’t separate religion from state policy. Whereas religion is the truth of Christ and everything about the truth of Christ is primary and everything else is secondary and potentially you can give it up.
This is what makes the North American situation so very, very unusual. Historically speaking, it shouldn’t be called the North American experiment it should be called the United States experiment. It’s spreading, it’s spreading to the world and recently it’s become Canadian. The reason we can’t call it originally Canadian is because Canada did institute this protection of the Roman Catholic Schools, Roman Catholic in the British North America which created Canada in 1867.
Already before that, the Anglicans in Canada wanted to have an established church the way they had it in England. That was in the 1830’s when England still had all this disability rules for non-Anglicans. Non-Anglican Christians could not go to University, could not be in parliament, could not vote and etcetera, etcetera.
Question: [Inaudible 02:09:40] by the church?
Prof. Schneider: No. The rather powerful bishop of Toronto wanted to have such an established church in Canada and partly because the Anglicans were not in the majority, the other Protestants were, it didn’t work, ended up with public schools instead. So, in the sense, Canada is in there from the beginning too. But in United States, the amazing thing is the Bill of Rights and especially the first amendment of the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights establishes a situation in which on the one hand, no church will ever be established but on the other hand, all churches are free to practice religion. It’s not just the ‘no establish church’ that matters, it’s the ‘no disabilities’. This is an amazing experiment! An amazing experiment. The people were freely horrified by it. It’s very hard to make it work because people’s religious prejudices run very deep. America still made it very, very hard, for example, for the Catholics; and also, by the way, for the Orthodox in Alaska.
You may not know that Orthodoxy is the primarily religion of Alaska and still to this day. When America purchased Alaska in the 1860’s, the vast majority of the indigenous population was Orthodox. The first thing that happened was basically a whole bunch of Presbyterians coming in and setting up the State Schools and seriously disenabling Orthodoxy which they regarded as, of course, this is 19th century version of the word religion as superstition and [inaudible 02:11:54] and blah, blah, blah.
There are letters to President Mckinley, they’re probably fairly rhetorical but they say that, “Why do you allow these Protestants to come in and shoot us for practicing our religion?” I hope it’s rhetorical. On the other hand, remember that these people are Indians and Americans, and that period which “Shoot anybody who is Indian.” Doesn’t matter what religion they are.
In real life, in sociology, these things are hard but at least in law, the American experiment set the churches free. Now, why do I say this is terribly important for the churches in America? In my view, it is because, therefore the church’s only claim to authority, to authenticity, is on the basis of their ability to speak the truth which means it’s an absolute return to apologetic.
The beauty of democracy is that it makes the churches free to speak the truth. We can speak up. We couldn’t do that in the Ottoman Empire. No church in the Ottoman Empire was allowed to speak outside of its own walls. The Ottomans were terribly liberal, I mean really liberal. You just had to be willing to keep it to yourself and not go out and missionize.
Now, of course, Islam was an established religion in the Ottoman Empire and telling the Christians that they couldn’t missionize is to tell them they can’t even be Christians. The very first thing we said to tonight was that “To be evangelical, to outreach, to missionize is the essence of Christianity.” It is to announce the word, announce the Gospel. So the Christians had to hang in there. It was a martyrdom period, still kind of is.
In America, no church is subject to that. Every church can speak, which sets up a situation you will notice, very like the one we talked about in the first talk. It means that what the churches have to do to have any kind of claim, is to be what churches really are. Missionaries, people who reach out, people who speak the truth, people who seek to offer the beauty of Christ to a sick world that’s greatly in need.
Now, I will come to a difficult point in a minute, but right away, first point I want to turn to is that to do that means that you have to think that your home is where your feet are. This responsibility of missionizing and so on is not a responsibility that comes to the churches, belongs to the bishop and is handled by some office of the secretariat, and only by specialized, trained people either, right? No. It is the nature of every Christian, the good Samaritan was a missionary. Remember he was not even a Jew, he’s a missionary for what God really is.
Therefore, the Christian’s home is eschatological; the Christian’s home is in Christ. That means that his home in this historic moment in which he lives, is wherever he happens to be. Philip stumbles across a eunuch in the middle of Nubian Desert and converts it. In fact the story ends with a miracle, there is water in the Nubian Desert. You understand? The person he is speaking to isn’t a Palestinian Jew like Philip either, he is Ethiopian, right?
Question: The Nubian is a [inaudible 02:17:16], you mean the [inaudible 02:17:17]?
Prof. Schneider: Well, it’s way down south in the desert.
Question: It’s a [inaudible 02:17:22]
Prof. Schneider: He’s way down south. Home is where your feet are. Now, where is home for the people in this room?
Question: [Inaudible 02:18:45]
Prof. Schneider: Pardon?
Question: Everywhere.
Prof. Schneider: Everywhere, but in your historic moment, where are your feet planted? Aha! I was waiting for that answer. I will tell you two words that are the curse of Orthodoxy. One is: Mother country
Question: [Inaudible 02:18:09]
Prof. Schneider: As opposed to homeland, your homeland is America. Mother country is a curse, and worst is the diaspora. There is no such thing as the Orthodox diaspora, but it is the most commonly used word in Orthodox style. Why is that so? Here, I would need another whole hour to discourse on the history of Orthodoxy in America.
Father Thomas was speaking about jurisdictions here. You noticed how upset he got when he was speaking of jurisdictions, it’s because the existence of multiple jurisdictions in one place is a heresy. At the very least, it’s a complete violation of canon law and this is not just one bishop’s canon law, this is canon laws of the Councils of Nicaea.
Question: Meaning, too many bishops presiding the same place?
Prof. Schneider: Having jurisdiction in the same place. There are six bishops at Chicago, six Orthodox bishops of Chicago. There are four in Toronto.
Question: Different nationalities?
Prof. Schneider: No, different ethnic jurisdictions.
Question: National, I mean, [02:19:49]
Prof. Schneider: Yes.
Question: This is again a Nicaean Law?
Prof. Schneider: Absolutely against the canons of the Council of Nicaea, one bishop in one city. That’s because the church is unified, right?
Question: These had the same priest like Bulgarian, Russian and Ethiopian. They all have the same priest but [inaudible 02:20:14].
Prof. Schneider: I made a very quick count. In Toronto, if I count in all the non-canonicals like the old calendar Greeks and the self-proclaimed [inaudible 02:20:26], I’ll include them as well, and I include all the Orientals and all the Byzantines; there are 31 Orthodox jurisdictions in one city. This is partly why this concept of diaspora homeland is so important and it’s a question of where our loyalties go.
I spoke about … For me the sadness, I mean he is doing a great piece of work, but nonetheless the sadness of seeing other Father Ramonius having to devote all his energy to a project whose purpose is to create a ghetto for the Copts. Now some of it’s valuable, I think old people like to live within their language, if you are going to extended and care for residents, I am rather in favor with being ethnic. It’s comfort for the old people.
For the young, this is kind of catastrophic. For what the Coptic Church could offer to Toronto society, which is a very sick society, it’s a catastrophe. Nobody is learning how to talk to where you are.
Question: Is it a [inaudible 02:21:51] for the [inaudible 02:21:52] for being separated from the society to get in peace? [Inaudible 02:21:57]
Prof. Schneider: Again, I think we ended the discussion. You should think about this overnight and we should discuss this. It’s an important issue there’s all kinds of reasons for it - security, safety, fear of the others. We know our own; some of it is false spirituality of the kind, Father Tom speaks about, that God really intended our church. We are alright, the others can deviate if they like.
It’s the power of culture. It makes a total mockery of what the Canadians say they are so good at, which is multi-culturalism. Well, the culturalism is not the same thing as this block is cut is Egyptian and this block is Italian and this block is Ethiopian, that’s not multi-culturalism, that’s ghettos.
In North America, it’s even tougher because North American Society, sociologically or anthropologically resist the idea of multi-culturalism, has a melting pot [inaudible 02:23:11] us instead and very successful people like you, generally are quite good. Therefore, I double think so that you could work all week as Americans, do your job as well, contribute to society, pocket your paycheck and you expect the church to defend diaspora homeland.
I would not be so rude, I guess, as to hold up the Copts as my example here, but I will certainly tell you what my experiences with the Armenians. You should look at the Armenian Website. All the energy is going into creating loyalty and commitment to our Armenia. All of it! And especially for the young. It’s about language, and so and so on. It’s about culture, it’s about making sure you go to camp and yet a [inaudible 02:24:16] not in [inaudible 02:24:18].
Question: [Inaudible 02:24:21]
Prof. Schneider: It is also nationalism because the Byzantine models are so alive, yes, in Orthodoxy. So, there is a lot of association with the search for a nation-state so that we can reestablish them Symphonia. By the way, this has been condemned as a heresy in Orthodoxy, it’s called Philatism. It’s a notion that you belong to our church, if you are a member of our ethnos, our ethnicity.
Question: [Inaudible 02:25:02-09]
Prof. Schneider: Oh yes. Oh, absolutely!
Question: I know that, I mean, when you verify saying this but when you look on, the website that I mentioned earlier, it’s not in the United States but it has to be found to bound our spiritual value and resources. One of the resources that, it is very valuable and it’s sort of the questions and answers section to that website; what I find very unfortunate is that one of the questions on that website is in regards to the Coptic Language within the liturgical service and within the hymns of the church. The way … The question basically says “What is the importance or should we retain the Coptic Language in the liturgical life of the church as well as within the hymnology, etcetra? The answer is very, very strong, stating that, undoubtedly yes, we should maintain the Coptic Language that our ancestors, and this is the famous quote, unfortunately, it has been potentiated within the church over and over again.
That our ancestors had their tongues cutout because they spoke Coptic and how can we be the generation to dispose of this language or minimize the language, may be not dispose of it, but minimize this language. It is not up to us, actually, it is up to us to carry the torch, so to speak, of this language and to carry it to generations to come.
I find that answer very unfortunate and I find it again, furthering this philosophy that we are to, not only carry the torch of our faith and our dogma and our tradition, but we are to carry the torch of our culture. So we have this rich tradition, dogma and faith, and we wrap it, we coat it in culture, we coat it in language and you can only partake of the richness if you can first find your way through the culture and find your way through the language. How are we going to be evangelical if we are going to go out to the world and say, “First, understand the Egyptian culture, first understand or at least, be okay with speaking or understanding Coptic, then you can be part of our church.” Our church being our faith, our dogma and our tradition.
I just … I, as one who was born in and raised here, within North America, I find that unacceptable, I mean we cannot continue in that vein.
Prof. Schneider: Let’s look at, a 180 degrees around. Suddenly, things go in the right order. What is needful? What is vitally necessary is that which speaks of Christ; that which makes it possible to come into an eschatological fullness of understanding of Christ and to announce that to the world.
Then comes the next question: What is needful include what Coptic history and tradition has contributed to the Christian dialogue? In a better way, the answer is unmistakably “Yes!”
Therefore, for those who have the capacity, the time, the ability, is it a good thing to learn the Coptic fathers, the Coptic language, the Coptic liturgy and so on? Sure it is! Should every student in Toronto School of Theology know Coptic? It would be nice. Is it going to happen? No!
Therefore, we need some people who do that because that’s a valuable nuance in the dialogue. Just as we need some people who do our minion and we need some people who can do Cyriac and we need some people who can do Greek and we need some people who understand Father Florousky, and they are all in the dialogue. That’s what we mean when we say Orthodoxy is a religion of tradition. What we do not mean is that cultural traditions are, as you said, that cultural traditions are intrinsically in their essence, holy. Only Christ is intrinsically … God in Christ is intrinsically in essence, holy.
If that is true, then people and the world are intrinsically in an essence, holy because they are the image of Christ. Beyond that, all is synergy, all is trying to get at to some, get in tuned in harmony with the [inaudible 02:31:10]. Does getting into harmony with the [inaudible 02:31:14] mean getting into harmony with the state? No, but the Byzantine solution says, yes.
Now the Byzantine Empire of course, disappeared. So we don’t have an Orthodox state anymore, nowhere in the world to protect this. I can assure that the present [inaudible 02:31:37] of Armenia wants one. Whereas the new government of Armenia’s a bunch of 40 something, who got their degrees in Colombia, Harvard and Princeton and they want a modern democratic republic. I assure you, I know this from his mouth, that what the Catholicos wants is to return to medieval state in which the Catholicos also happen to be the king of Armenia.
But to the best of my knowledge, there is no such state left in the world, not in Bulgaria, not in Russia, nowhere. Therefore, what is left to be that kind of establishment authorities that says you must be Orthodox because you got to obey the law that says you must be Orthodox, so then it’s a hierarchy? That’s where it comes from.
There are, of course, other factors. Their income depends on it and so on and so on. So Father Hopko is absolutely right. We’ve got to get people to say “I am a witness for Christ. It is Christ who saves me, I belong to the church because the church is the body of Christ and my belonging to the church means as 1st Corinthians 12 says, “Bring my gifts to that church for the use of the [inaudible 02:33:07]; the building up of a church.”
The next question is to what extent does that … Is that, further maximize derived from the traditional ways my church does things? You have to think about all that stuff.
Question: There’s one important thing here, I think the bishops or the people in that positions think of that because of the history, when the church is leaving the positions of authority, there is risk of somebody else gets those positions and dictate things on the church. So, in their mentality, they are trying to protect the church by usurping those positions.
Prof. Schneider: Right, which is why I am arguing for a conciliar model.
Question: So, how to reassure them by Christian way?
Prof. Schneider: Okay, well, the clock says you have to think about that over night.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: Now we are half way through this topic. So far it’s stayed within church and state, but now what do you do when the state … We’ve said that the greatest freedom a church can have and the greatest challenge a church can have, the real challenge, the most realistic challenge, is to be free within a state that says there will be no established religion, which means a democratic society. Winston Churchill, along with the American model which is rapidly becoming a global model, even in the world of Islam; what we haven’t dealt with so is that you still need law and order. A democracy has to somehow be good for everyone who is governed by that democratic government.
So there is a serious dialogue and sometimes it’s a confrontation between church and the democratic state. That’s the last bullet in the first page. So what we have yet to talk tomorrow is the last bullet in the first page and it’s a biggie. That will lead to the conclusion on the second page and then we will take up, decide our last topic. That will be for tomorrow.
Question: Thank you very much.
Question: No, in Egypt. Were you insinuating about the Sikh and about the second article in their constitution, Islam is the official religion. The Egyptian liberals say “When we make a certain religion official and the first religion, so actually we are dealing with a religious state.” I think states which have one religion; Armenia is one nationality, the Armenian Nationality and one religion which is Christianity. I think when they are all different religions in the country and well, all the people have the equal rights.
In this case, I don’t think that the church will combine itself with the state but when …
Prof. Schneider: There are two things. First of all, it’s not true in Armenia anymore. There are Catholics and now, as everywhere, the Evangelical Protestants are missionizing and the Catholicos really wants this democratic republic to pass laws; A: Establishing Armenian Orthodox church and B: Keeping the Evangelicals out.
Question: When you say that they are keeping the religion, you mean Orthodox, the only Orthodox. They are rejecting Catholics and others or making them second-class citizens or …
Prof. Schneider: Well, basically, he wants to forbid public missionizing. Missionizing of Christians by Christians is I think, not of Christ. It is a real difficult, a real problem of arrogance. If you start asking a democratic republic to pass such a law, you got an absolute conflict in your politic and you are back to the medieval established church and all the problems that brings with it.
Question: Yeah, I saw that when we say one religion, I mean that they are all Christians. That’s why they want state to be purely Christian and purely Armenian.
Prof. Schneider: Yes. Part of it, the rhetorical view, is that Orthodox are not Christians, that they have gotten all confused. That’s part of the Evangelical message.
Question: I have spoken with one of my friends this afternoon, he said, “I think the end result that we are going to abolish or may disturb Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant or Evangelican; so, are we going to go back to relate the church to the city?” Say, when Paul sent his apostles to Corinth or to Ephesus or the Colossian or ... Is it what we expect in the future, if we are going to restore this division of, and despises of Orthodox and Catholics?
Prof. Schneider: Well, who knows! But you have to take historical context into account. Church has always existed in history. In those days, the organizations of society were essentially these urban agglomerations. The Roman Empire was a bunch of cities with a whole lot of farms in between, but it was really a bunch of cities. What we are rapidly moving into is something that has been called the global village. So you have got to take modern civilization into account - the airplanes, the travel and the internet, etcetera, etcetera. Are we going to go back to something urban like that or are we going to go into something global? Who knows?
Question: We want to define a certain church. For example, the church of Egypt? What are you going to say if we had all churches in Egypt, say the Catholic and also [inaudible 2:40:40] and others, we say 'We are all Christians and I accept you and you accept me. Your baptism is accepted to me. I can't find any difference between you and me.’ Do we say the church of Egypt including all these ... We have to find ...
Prof. Schneider: See, I think that’s a little like Father Gragas’ simplification yesterday was we have to patiently to work our way through all these issues. There are issues of truth, of doctrine. They'll have to be worked through.
Question: So it’s a [inaudible 02:41:28] for decades, I think.
Prof. Schneider: For decades and decades and patience is one of the virtues. It is the third grade virtues, patience.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: After listening in humility ...
Question: At least we are dealing with one another and we are talking to one another. This is good. I knew that ... I think the …
Prof. Schneider: The ecumenical 20th century is historically astonishing, compared to the 19th centuries before it.
Question: The Vatican is dealing with Evangelicans, I think, and talking with them. This is a big change.
Prof. Schneider: The Orthodox are in bilateral dialogues with something like 11 different churches. We are in bilateral dialogues with the Catholics, with the Lutherans, with the Congregationalists, with the reform churches, the Anglicans. This is a lot of bilateral dialogue going on.
Question: This deal [inaudible 2:42:30] with the difficult aspects, difficult [inaudible 2:42:35] in the story because I think in the Palestinian [inaudible 2:42:40], for example, now there is 50 years of war and negotiations, and all that; what we read in the newspapers these days that 'Please go directly into the difficult issues that is the state and the capitalizing on that. I think, instead of just extending the talks and differences on how to ... They should have this [inaudible 02:43:13] of ... Do you actually accept one church, the Christian church in the whole world? There should be the good intention for that otherwise they are sitting together, they are eating on the tables and discussing things. They go back and will meet next year and so on. Like the scientific conventions that we attend every year and we have the next convention to be held in this city at this date and that continues forever.
Prof. Schneider: Right. Thank you very much, anyhow. That last is an obligation for us because it's scripture is given to us in the Gospel. We have to no choice but to think about unity.
Question: Yes, but there should be the good intention and there should be the power of forgiveness and not sticking to our positions as bishops and popes.
Prof. Schneider: You will find all of that in those messages.
Question: Thank you very much, thank you very much.
Prof. Schneider: [Inaudible 2:44:24] you were quite wonderful about that.
Yesterday, we ended with a point, the point we were talking about at the end was that, in fact, our feet are planted in America, our churches are planted in America. If you get rid of the idea of diaspora, you suddenly realize, the reason in God's plan that these churches are in America, is to be a mission to America. That is that the orthodox churches have something to say, go back to that idea of Evangelism that American society desperately needs to hear.
Now we go back to something I said in the first lecture of ours, being an authentic voice. To be an authentic voice you have to listen as well as speak. It is the people who only speak who get into that mentality of 'I am right and you are wrong.’ It is the people who listen, who get into dialogue. Dialogue is saying “Hi, I understand what you have to say, but have you thought about this?". That's the new apologetic. It isn't 'You're wrong and I am right' it’s 'I can move your thought along a little bit.'
From this point of view, another very interesting thing happens. We talked yesterday about the diversity. All these Orthodox churches, 32 canonical Orthodox churches in North America. And then there’s all the splitter groups and crazies. But 32, canonical groups, yet why? The whole talk about unity has been from the ecclesiological point of view. One church, one hierarchy, one authority, one structure, one set of laws and one set of jurisdictions and so on. Of course, that is going to go nowhere. Nobody is going to give up a position of authority, but that isn't in fact the issue. In fact, the issue is culture.
About 15 years ago, the World Council of Churches did a global project, very important project. It was called Gospel and Culture. It was a tremendous wake up call, to make people realize that while there is the eschatological, the simple truth of the gospel, ‘Christ has died, Christ has risen,’ the Easter your affirmation. There is also, we spoke about synergy, the understanding of that Gospel. What does that mean for our lives and that understanding is always in culture.
I can tell you an amusing story. The representative for the World Council of Churches who started the project and was in charge of it, he was a Tamil Indian, from Tamil Nadu, way down in the south of India. Somebody who was totally Black and being raised an Anglican under the British Raj. He said as a boy he sang in the choir and at eight years, he suddenly realized, there he was in Tamil Nadu, December 25th, the temperature outside is a 110 degrees. He is wearing Elizabethan choir robes and Elizabethan starch rough and he is singing in his boyish soprano, “See amid the winter snow, tadadada,” he realized he didn't have a clue what he was talking about. This is, of course, a British hymn, which comes from a culture of northern climates. The chances are pretty good that, except maybe in the Galilee, Jesus never saw snow either. That is when he realized that there has to be this relationship of the simple gospel to culture.
If we think about North American society in the terms that we were talking about yesterday, one its essential features is multi-culturalism. I don't have time to go through the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America, but it is really quite fascinating. It started as a mission. In its beginnings, it begins in 1794, do you realize that? In Alaska, more than 200 years ago.
In its beginnings, it was a very typical orthodox outreach mission. The same as the one in Japan and in Siberia to the Bulgars and so on, to the Ethiopians back in the 4th century, it was a mission to the natives to the indigents; because it was like that and done with respect for their culture and their language, it was hugely successful, still the majority of religion in Alaska. What happened around, at the end of the 19th century, was this tremendous wave of immigration from Orthodox countries to North America from all orthodox countries. From the Baltic and the Slavic lands, you got mostly factory workers. They wanted religion. They were lonely, they were lost, they were illiterate, they wanted religion that looked like what they were familiar with. If you look in the cities, the immigrants are Greeks and Arabs, mostly Lebanese, but all kinds who get involved in commerce and so on, they too wanted religion that looked like their society.
At that point the American Church thought of ways to accommodate them. They invented something never seen before in Orthodoxy, never ever. That's ethnic bishops. Ever since the beginning, bishops have always been territorial bishops, and the bishops of a certain distinct defined region. What Arch-Bishop [inaudible 2:51:45] invented was the idea of, "No, let's have bishops and we'll put them in the major cities, of course, because they have to have a cathedral, but their responsibility will be for the, that ethnos.
The first bishop ever consecrated in North America was an Arab. There was no Antiochian church yet, it was only the one church still. He came from Antioch, he was sent by a Patriarch of Antioch, transferred to serve this American Church, which meant that the Patriarch of Antioch was allowing him to go under the Patriarch of Russia. It wasn't patriarch, it was metropolitan at that point. His name was Rafael [inaudible 2:52:37]. He's now been canonized by the Orthodox Church in America, a great man.
This was the vision at that point. What happened to that vision? It was two things, one is the great metropolitan [inaudible 2:52:54] was called back to Russia, so the Great senate of 1917 and was elected patriarch and then immediately was put under house arrest and died under house arrest 20 years later.
Question: He’s canonized the …
Prof. Schneider: Oh yes, absolutely and deserves it too. So that was one catastrophe. The much bigger catastrophe was what we talked about yesterday, ethnicity, the diaspora mentality. Suddenly of the Greeks are saying “We want a Greek Church” they were the first. Right after them the Arabs said, "We want an Antiochian Church." They both got what they wanted, and I'm feeding Dr. Edward worst instincts here but in both cases, if you examine the history, they got it because the patriarchs were pursuing their own political ambitions, especially in the Greek case.
Then the floodgates opened. Suddenly we had Serbian ex-archaic, suddenly we had Bulgarian ex-archaic, suddenly we had a Romanian ex-archaic, boom, boom, boom! You see? These really were ex-archaic that is the Head of Church wasn't in North America. The Head of Church was ...
Question: Homeland.
Prof. Schneider: You notice how you even use the word, it was motherland. Immediately this diaspora mentality develops. The diaspora mentality develops and along with it all of those things we talked about yesterday - the loyalties to the homeland, the focus on the homeland, the ghettoizing, the total lack of relationship to the fact that the seeds were planted in North America.
I have to say, this was especially strange in the case of the Greeks and the Arabs because the Slavic workers, only the men came. They were sending money back home, and they didn't think they were going to stay, they ended up staying, of course. I'll tell you an interesting thing that happened to them, socially. In the case of Greeks and Arabs, the whole family came. They knew where they were going. They knew why they were going, they were going to make money. The mentality stayed in the homeland and the church encouraged that.
Question: [Inaudible 2:55:34]
Prof. Schneider: Right, well from ... Again from ... We have to go back to the beginning of what we said, at the very beginning. From a gospel point of view, this is no longer the Church of Christ. It is the Church of the Egyptians, it is the Church of the Greeks, and it is the Church of the … That's what it is. Whereas there is only one Orthodox Church and that is the Church of Christ. The job of the Church of Christ is to evangelize. We said this right at the beginning. You will evangelize the people that you find. Phillip found the Eunuch.
Go back and look at ... Read Acts 2 carefully. It's a very significant story. It's an allegory. It's the day of Pentecost. When the Apostles get the Holy Spirit, the one detail that is given is that they speak all the languages of the world and everybody is astonished, and everybody is hearing his language and everybody is astonished at that. The issue is not language, the issue is geography. It is the idea that the gospel is for everywhere.
The job of an Apostle, a witness, is to announce the gospel, both in words and in lifestyle where one is. If one is totally shut off, if one's eyes are only focused on Egypt or Serbia or wherever, how is your neighbor going to see your Christian lifestyle? What's your neighbor going to see? What your neighbor’s going to see is the ghetto.
What is your neighbor going to hear of the word of God? He's going to hear gospedi familie from Italy. Hear kyrie eleison. Your neighbor who comes from Portugal or Brooklyn says “What?” You follow? You see what I mean? Your neighbor has social concerns of all kinds, the Orthodox there. The other churches are there, but the Orthodox is there.
That was our closing point yesterday, that there's a real neglect of the fact that we're in America and it's neglect not just of our civil duties, it’s a neglect of our gospel responsibilities. To be loyal to culture, our culture; to feel our culture, to want to maintain and sustain our culture, these are noble things. They are important.
My argument right now is that, in fact, to do good to North American society, we need to do that because North American society is multi-cultural; but the goal of being Egyptian, Greek, Russian, whatever, is not to create a ghetto but to show the whole of North America society what value there is, that the Greek, the Egyptian, the Russian form of orthodoxy had brought, you see?
Again, do we model that? To do that in the first instance, I’m back in the first talk again; in the first instance to model that we have to give that to each other. We have to give that to each other. There is a very strange phrase that has developed in the 20th century. It's a phrase which should have no meaning at all, inter-Orthodox. Why is that a strange phrase? Because there is only one Orthodox. Only one Orthodox, only one Orthodox Church? But if you take gospel and culture into account, then it's a meaningful phrase.
There's many ... it's like Baskin & Robbins, there are many, many flavors of what is all ice cream and each one is delicious, you see how it works? So one has to ... The metaphor is starting to break down here, but one, so to speak, has to be able to taste them all to know how delicious they all are but you only buy one cone, that's yours. At least there has been the sharing of the richness of each. That’s the model we ought to be presenting.
Instead, what we get is fellatism, ethnic hostility, nationalism. Go to Greek churches, you know what you see there, right up there in the altar? The Greek national flag, right?
In 1994, there was a historic meeting. It was an organization called SCOBA. This is a Standing Committee of Orthodox Bishops of America. It doesn't include any Orientals, by the way.
Question: Why not?
Prof. Schneider: Probably because despite 1992, we haven't admitted to each other it is legitimate, at least there is this committee. In 1994, at a historic meeting at Ligonier, they finally agreed that it was ridiculous to try to multiply the services and functions so they would have ... So all the Orthodox, one secretariat, one educational committee and program, and so on and so on, cooperate. Everybody rejoiced until one month later the ecumenical patriarch said, "No, we can't do this." No one understands why, it was probably Dr. Edward’s reasons.
Since then, it has gotten worse. It is interesting that things are improving down at the grass roots level. Twenty years ago, if an OCA priest went to a Greek Church and tried to go into the altar and help serve, he'd be thrown out. Nowadays that won't happen. There's a sense of openness of hospitality among the Orthodox which is a sign of improvement, I think. In the outreach to North America, I'm not so sure what's happening.
The Ethiopians in Toronto have just collected $3.5 million, and believe me, Ethiopians do not get top level jobs. These are nickel-and-dime contributions, and just like that, they collected $3.5 million. What for? They wanted to build a church that looked like it was in Ethiopia.
It's still that sense of cultural identity, not cultural riches that keeps people ... Keeps a barrier between Orthodox people and North American society, which needs to hear our voice, and now I'm going to turn to that. Here, there's a problem.
Yesterday I emphasized very strongly the value of American freedom, this historical breakthrough that was created by American democracy that put the churches back into a position of creative development and that's a great thing. With it comes a cost, comes a problem. If you are not going to have an ... Every society needs values, every society needs law and order, for example. It needs a set of values. It needs an ethos, something that is dedicated to. The American ethos is in the Declaration of Independence. It's about "All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator", notice, this is vaguely religious, it was written by bunch of deists. “Endowed by their Creator with certain rights and so on and so on, all men are equal.”
The Constitution, and it's a pretty good Constitution, is designed to make that work as a form of government and law. But you notice that it's very 18th century in that it's grounded in rights. It's grounded in rights and we are all very conscious of rights. Believe me; if people start having disabilities for Egyptian immigrants, all of you are going to be on the picket line claiming your rights. We have two beautiful women here today. I can guarantee you they are acutely conscious of the issue of women’s rights and thinking deeply about it. Whether your wife tells you this or not, I can guarantee you this is so, isn't it so? Yes.
So we all know about rights. Dr. Edwards is a psychiatrist, he knows about rights. He has to face this issue all the time because a patient has a right not to take his medicines for schizophrenic. Does Dr. Edward have the right to lock somebody up? We have physicians here. Right to life? Right to die? These are rights issues, rights of all kinds, and they are important. In democracy, people are supposed to influence their government too, and rights come in all of the time.
Well, I'll tell you a very interesting story. Because of the equality of all of the churches and the Canadian Council of Churches, one of the many ways we show that is, is that we don't have one vague common ecumenical worship service. We worship in the traditions of the member churches. So, of course, we never do Eucharist, we couldn’t do that. We do evening prayers and things like that, and we pass that around, so that every church gets its turn, and the church gets to learn about each other that way. We do the same with Bible study, passes around I turn.
At one meeting, one day we were dealing with native Indians and their problems. I'll ask you a nasty question, by the way, don't try to answer it. Just put it in ... Tuck it into your head. How many times have you ever, since you've been in an orthodox church, heard the discussion of the problems of the North American Indians?
Question: Never.
Prof. Schneider: Never. We were having a ... This is one of the virtues of joining an ecumenical body. You are made to encounter things that you ignored, that you’ve neglected. So we had a big discussion. The Indians say "We want …” Were there, they gave presentations. They said, "We want our rights. Please help us out. Join us." The next day was Orthodox Bible Study and I was leading it. What we pointed out was that rights are not a bible concept, there's no such thing as rights in the Bible.
From a Christian point of view, we have no rights, we have gifts. All gifts are from God and we are supposed to act in a Godly way; but to act in a Godly way, it’s my last bullet actually, to act in a Godly way is to protect the weak. To see to it that nobody is left out. That's how it works in Christianity. It's not a question of rights. Rights are an absolutely rational 18th century idea. In government and law what rights produces is lawsuits, and there's no way rights is an equal, it's called an equity issue in law; there's no way that one person can gain a right without taking away some right from another person.
What democracy is supposed to do is create a balance of rights. A very good idea. Excellent, right? Winston Churchill once said, "Democracy is the worst form of government that was ever invented except for all of the others.
Question: But back to this, you just said the state and the religions, now why we have to discuss the Indian rights in the church? This is not the Bible, it’s exactly ...
Prof. Schneider: Okay, let’s turn to our … My very last bullet, let’s turn to my very last bullet, right away then.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: It’s right there.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: I am going to read it, in fact. ‘In particular, the weak have a hard time in democracy; but the weak are our Christian calling, they are in our care. Arch, they are our treasure, they are our Christ; we all know the story of St. Lawrence, right? Roman Emperor said “Bring me the treasures of the church” Lauren said “Of course” What does he bring? He goes and gets all the beggars from Rome, brings them, “Here’s the treasure of the church.”
What’s he basing that on? Matthew 25. We all know Matthew 25.
Question: That was [inaudible 03:11:06]
Prof. Schneider: Let me, and that was me. Now, if that’s our Christian calling, then the weak are our concern. It’s very important for the Orthodox to get involved this because we are the only major church in North America that has a good track record. Every other church in North America has oppressed the Indians, seriously oppressed them, taken away their culture, rip their families to pieces, stolen their livelihood, their land, everything. It’s been total tyranny, state tyranny; and worse tyranny in the name of Christ. You are pagans, we have to make you like us, your culture has no value. Only the Orthodox missionized with respect for Indian culture.
Question: In Alaska.
Prof. Schneider: In Alaska. Therefore, we have a duty to get involved in this issue, because we have a message, we have an example. We have to offer that to the dialogue.
Question: Yeah, but here we are back from the backdoor to politics. Like, the Egyptians Copt, the church people will scant and the church people not the clergy, but the people, lay people, start their political movements from within the church.
This is … My personal view is no, we have to split separate between the church and politics. I as a person have life in the church, and life in the community. As a Coptic I can stand as a citizen in Egypt and ask for my rights but not emanating from my affiliation with the church, but my affiliation with the society.
So, we here in Canada, for instance, we can talk about the rights of the Indians or the rights of any problem from the point of view that I am a citizen of Canada, not a member of the church.
Prof. Schneider: Now my answer to that would be that you can’t make that separation. Justinian did understand … If gospel is always in culture; politics is part of culture, so the issue is how to do a Christian politics. Justinians understood Symphonia, what he misunderstood was the nature of the state and government; because the government was imperial, politics was going to be top-down on what the state says.
Democracy … Politics is supposed to be what we say. You can’t stay out of this debate, so what you are going to bring to it. Now you said, “Okay I can, as a Canadian, I can talk about the rights of Indians and I can keep myself separate as an Orthodox”. You can’t, because politics is valued, you can’t have a values-free politics. The question is going to be, what values?
Question: The prime minister of Canada when he talks, does he talk as a member of whatever church he goes or as a Canadian?
Prof. Schneider: He talks in terms of values and I will tell you this is a fact. When the gulf … When George W. Bush’s Iraq war started, we had a lot of peace discussions in the Community Council of Churches, we had a wonderful day of discussion in which the conclusion was there is no such thing as a just war; this included the military chaplains who agreed with this. So when George W. Bush’s war started all the churches were willing to agree, signed on by the heads of churches that Canada should not join this war.
Question: Why the church has a say in that?
Prof. Schneider: Because the church … Because one of the things, that is the message of Jesus, is peace. Jesus promises “My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you”. Therefore we, dealing on the ground, have to make decisions, we said yesterday, further this message of Jesus.
Question: But now you are a politician not a religious man.
Prof. Schneider: Oh no, it’s not an either or.
Question: No. Now you make everyone in a democratic country talking … The Muslims would talk about applying their Sierra Law, I apply this, the state has to be separate from the church and everyone talks whatever value, whatever resources he has to make and shape his idea but he does not have to say Jesus said that or Mohammed or Buddha or whoever.
Prof. Schneider: Nor did I say that either.
Question: So why we have to those churches talk about politics?
Prof. Schneider: Because there is … Okay, go back two steps. The truth of Christianity is truth for everybody. Jesus came into the world to save everybody, that’s also one of my bullets. Therefore if the truth is the truth, we have to work to interject that truth into the value system of democracy. Democracy, remember, works like that; it’s our voice.
Now, you are absolutely right. We have separation of churches and state, it’s one of the essences of our freedom. There is no way a democratic government should adopt Sierra Law or Canon Law either. No way, but the basic values that are Jesus are values … They are for the salvation of whole world and it’s our duty to announce these to inter-put these into the political dialogue in a way, but in a way that can be heard.
Remember yesterday ‘I’m right you are wrong’ so we stand up and say “You can’t go to war because Jesus say you can’t go to war” they’d be laughing at your face, understand? If you stand up and talk about the universal value of peace and justice and so on, people will listen. It was, again, the consensus of all the churches that made this heard. It went in a letter to the Prime Minister, it was John Curtin at that point; John Curtin himself, acknowledged that that letter was one of the reasons why Canada did not join the war.
Question: Did they convene and wrote a letter and send it to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia?
Prof. Schneider: I’m not sure what happened.
Question: If they want to get into politics they should be all over the world and they will lose their job as a leader of a church. This is too much for the church. This is my personal view and why they are doing this when America is defending itself by the politician point of view? I’m not saying he is right or wrong but I’m saying I didn’t hear them sending up and doing the world church or WWCO, World Council of Churches doing the announcement of September 11 or Taliban doing this or whoever doing that so they are not fair.
We will get this dilemma because they are jumping into an area that it is not yours. If they want to shift the world, they should shift the world by shifting the cultures, the society, the mentality so the leaders of the world lead the world in a Christian way.
Not coming from the top and tell the leaders what to do; but change the … They preach Christianity so that whatever the society could use of a leader, of a great man or whatever, of a soldier would be a Christian in what he or she is doing?
Prof. Schneider: Yes, no question about that. In this particular instance about going to war you have to talk to the leaders.
Question: Abu, please correct me if I’m wrong; Christians are part of the world and in democracy, as we understand, it has to stem from the public, the public opinion has aroused. We don’t normally hear it, everyone has to say this vote, what she wants what she thinks that is right. So, if the churches agreed … If they had to express the freedom and say “We all agree that this thing is wrong” but we are not enforcing it.
Prof. Schneider: The only justification for a Christian voice and what is a political debate is, if the church leaders got up and said “Vote for the Liberal Party” that would certainly be wrong.
The only reason there is a Christian voice in a political debate is because the political debate must be grounded and valid. There’s a wonderful essay in here, notice it’s called ‘Discerning the Science of the Times’ and that’s what our responsibility is in synergy. That God gives it to us, to our free will to discern the science of the times.
The essay’s called Christian and Orthodoxy in Peace. It reminds us that our values, our liturgy, our prayers completely filled with peace. Jesus says “My peace I give you” those are his first words after the resurrection; “In peace, let us pray to the Lord” we say.
So there is, in fact, a Christian value here and together with a whole bunch of other values, respect for life and so on and so on. This is what we’re given voice in this letter. Christian truth is not done by plebiscite, Dr. Edward, by the way.
Question: By what?
Prof. Schneider: By plebiscite.
Question: What’s that?
Prof. Schneider: Christian truth is not democratic, Christian truth is truth. You can’t vote out what is it … You can’t vote out what is the truth.
Question: This is why you are not supposed to get into politics, because it is by voting. If you want to, I am not disagreeing with the Christian values, I am disagreeing with the means of presenting. You don’t present Christian values by getting, interfering in politics but by changing the makeup of human being by being Christians and when they become citizen and become influential members, they become Christian, this is how to change the world.
Prof. Schneider: If you read the letter, you’ll see that is exactly what it does.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: The letter is, in effect, a civil sermon. It’s on the website, you could see it on the website if you …
Question: I hope that they send letters to themselves to be civil between each other.
Question: Not known that the [inaudible 03:23:57]
Question: Okay, I’ll make you what?
[Inaudible 03:23:58 – 03:24:12]
Prof. Schneider: In short, the freedom that democracy gives allows Christianity to be a meaningful voice in a dialogue, a meaningful Christian voice in the dialogue but it means we have an obligation to pay attention to these dialogues from the beginning.
The ecumenical movement realized that it had to have two arms, or to use John Paul II’s phrase, two lungs. One was the theological arm, Faith and Order; the other was called Peace and Justice.
These are things that Christians are supposed to bring. Now, justice means we care for everybody in the Christian sense. Justice is right-spaced in the civil democracy sense and so there’s going to be a lot of head-butting here. Same sex marriage is a perfect example.
Question: You are just stating your opinion or just politics?
Prof. Schneider: Not just politics, rights.
Question: When we come to this talk …
[Inaudible 03:25:24 – 03:25:32]
Prof. Schneider: A very good example of the boundary that has to exist between rights culture and religious values is the same sex marriage question. The Community Council of Churches had to face this because we knew the government was dealing with the issue. This was on the agenda, on the quarter paper
Question: The government needs input from the public.
Prof. Schneider: The government needs input from the public. We knew also perfectly well that there was not going to be consensus. For the first five years of forum, we only dealt with matters on which we thought we could get good consensus. We chose relations with the state and bio-technology as our two chief agendas. You’ll hear about the bio-technology in a minute.
For five years it was astonishing. The first thing … It was just when we decided on the forum consensus approach and everybody said “You will never accomplish anything ever again, you’ll just talk and talk and talk.” The first thing that happened is that very day we were able to get a complete consensus about euthanasia, complete. It’s amazing.
That was why, part of my success in talking to the World Council of Churches of Special Commission, I could say, we had five years of being able to find all kind of consensus; but on same sex marriage we knew there was not going to be consensus. There were churches that said same sex marriage … The gospel has to be interpreted in such a way so that this is an impossibility, this simply against the image of God. There were other churches that said the image of God is total love for all humanities. We have to embrace all people, we can’t shut people out of our churches, the more liberal churches.
It’s a very hard debate and a very serious debate. Very interesting experience of what tells … Remember we talk about the three big virtues? Listening, Humility and Patience. Those are the three big virtues - Listening, Humility and Patience. The fourth virtue, of course, is being absolutely firm in your truth.
So here we have a situation where we got competing notions of the truth with very firm sides. Are we going to be able to show, in really black and white, are we going to be able to show listening, humility and patience? Well, so first thing we did was stage a debate, a panel. The panel had a Reformed Church, Orthodox was me and United Church, representative speaking.
Each one defended the position, good apologetic. The Reformed Church person, I knew of course would speak from the Bible being a Reformed Church person. He did brilliant, brilliant scripture presentation that churches could not tolerate same sex marriage.
Since I knew he was going to do that, I spoke from an iconographic position, marriage is the image of Christ, so it has to be about union and various other things, I won’t go into the argument.
United church person, as we knew, presented from the point of view of human, love, respect for humanity, respect for persons, freedom and Christ and so on; the kind of things liberal say.
Everyone listened. All three papers where exceedingly wise, well-grounded, learned. People listened intensely and it was an amazing moment. So, of course, obviously no conclusion and spontaneously at the end of the meeting all three of us got up and hugged each other.
Question: Even [inaudible 03:30:11].
Prof. Schneider: Yeah, that is how it should be. So of course there is no consensus; So of course there is no Canadian Counsel of Churches position on same sex marriage. Individual churches had their positions. I had to write a letter about this. My letter is on the internet, if you want to read it. It is one of the hardest things I ever had to write. What I wrote was about listening.
At first, I wrote and explained why there is no Community Council of Churches position. Some churches defend this for very good and grounded gospel reasons and other churches defend that for very good and grounded gospel reasons, and what these means is that we clearly don’t understand what the totality of the gospel says. Not yet. But each church believes that it has found the essence of the gospel.
Therefore, if the debate would continue, the churches would have to carry-on being Christ in the world as they know best and what was incumbent on us was still to operate with love and respect for each other, that’s what the letter says. These letters had tremendous impact, it’s on the Community Council of churches website.
Under those circumstances, here is where you do have to draw the line between Civil Rights culture and Christian culture. The church has to be true to Christian culture. Civil rights culture has to be absolutely true to the values of Civil Rights, which is equal rights for everybody.
Under those circumstances, the reason to state ought to authorize. The reason the state ought to authorize same sex unions, I prefer to call them unions not marriages because of my Christian point of view; the reason of the state ought to authorize same sex unions is because unless it does that, committed, dedicated partners who are living as couples for a lifetime lose all their rights when one partner dies. They can’t get insurance, they can’t get social insurance, they can’t get survivor benefits, they can’t share the property and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on. These are civil rights disabilities.
Question: Excuse me, the signs of the same picture, that’s what they lose, but sex is losing also because they can’t adopt boys and girl, they throw them up in this, what we think they [inaudible 03:32:57]
Prof. Schneider: That is right, there are loads and loads and loads of issues here, loads of issue. This is a long story and it is by no means over. The important things for the churches is that freedom of religion allows the churches to say ‘no’.
Question: But the churches cannot say ‘no’ to this issue.
Prof. Schneider: Oh yes they can, absolutely.
Question: Because they get [inaudible 03:33:25].
Prof. Schneider: Oh no, we do say ‘no’.
Question: The individual churches [inaudible 03:33:30] counsel is.
Prof. Schneider: Individual churches say ‘no’. Nobody can have a same sex marriage in an Orthodox church, in a Catholic church, a Baptist church; because they say, well about half of them … so we have the right to say ‘no’. Well it’ll become state tyranny, is if the states says “Because of Civil Rights, the churches have to perform these marriages”.
Question: Yes.
Prof. Schneider: At which point … The trouble is that we don’t have 100% separation of church and state. Clergymen are all agents of the state. They’re legal aide, they are like justices of the peace. They can sign marriage licenses, marriage contracts. So maybe that the churches will simply have to totally get out of the business of performing legal marriages which is the way it works in France and many other countries in Europe.
The state makes the legal marriage and then if people want to have a church marriage, they are free to do so.
Question: How it look like in Canada?
Prof. Schneider: In Canada?
Question: Yeah.
Prof. Schneider: If you are married in church and a licensed clergyman signs the wedding license such you’re legal marriage, that’s what will get registered in the registrar’s office.
Question: Whoever is married according to the church got illegal marriage and whoever the church does not accept?
Prof. Schneider: Gets married at City Hall.
Question: Yeah. So, why the churches should give up its legal marriage rights?
Prof. Schneider: Because of these conflictive values. Somebody is going to try a supreme court case one day, for sure. That says because it’s a civil right, churches have to do it because they are agents of the state.
Question: Of course the church objects that in the beginning but they [inaudible 03:35:28].
Prof. Schneider: So it goes back to the point which I began these, churches should never be agents of the state, never.
Question: Okay.
Prof. Schneider: You’re right, Dr. Edward, churches are not places to do politics. Churches shouldn’t be agents of the state, they should be agents of the gospel, agents of truth, but truth is part of what civil society needs.
Question: [Inaudible 03:35:58] servants of what they’re ordered, they are ordered by the state. To do this marriage they have to … They do the marriages that happen in the church. The marriages that happen outside the church they has nothing to do with it. So why someone who is married against the church system wants to get the legality of the marriage in the church? This is not a civil rights that you come and eat in my house against my will.
Prof. Schneider: Yeah, correct.
Question: So, it is civil rights.
Prof. Schneider: Correct but as we said, rights culture is non-scripture culture. I can virtually guarantee you that within your lifetime somebody is going start a civil rights case of this kind.
Question: But they will not win.
Prof. Schneider: At the moment, they won’t win. People certainly, there have been signs of this. People have tried to introduce legislations and parliaments and make these happen. There is one case, out of the western Canada, where some people have taken a clergyman, accused him of a hate crime for preaching a gospel sermon against same sex marriage. So there are straws in the wind.
Let me give you another example. This is a tough example, I told you we were going to get tough.
Here is another example. We are speaking with the Christian voice has an effect on public notions of rights, justice and policy; very good case. About eight years ago, some scientist at Harvard developed what was called the Oncomouse.
Question: Oncomouse.
Question: Cancer mouse?
Prof. Schneider: Yeah, cancer mouse. It is a mouse which was genetically programmed to catch cancer very quickly. Harvard and the scientist wanted a patent on this mouse because they developed it. Of course, they got their patent instantly in the United States, United States being totally capitalist country, they got it in Japan then they came to Canada. They try to get a case.
Now as you’ll hear in a second, we have in the Community Council of Churches, what’s called the biotechnology reference group. This is a committee made up of half-theologians, half-scientist which was supposed to be our think tank, like the other two commissions, like the theological commission and the peace commission. This is our think tank that will have wisdom on biotechnology, Christian wisdom, but also know something about biotechnology.
We decided that we could intervene, that we have something to say here. Because our brief was so good, we were allowed intervener status with the Supreme Court. This case made all the way to the Supreme Court and it was our intervention that was decisive. What did we say? It was a values-based statement which said, “You cannot patent life” and that was the argument the court agreed with.
Now, that is not a scientific value, that’s a theological value.
Question: [Inaudible 03:39:42]
Question: [Inaudible 03:39:43] no one can use this mouse unless [inaudible 03:39:51]
Prof. Schneider: Any effect, the mouse has become a commodity that Harvard owns. What we said you cannot commodify life, you simply can’t. Canada is now the only country in the world with a Harvard Oncomouses, not patented. This is a case of using democracy and civil rights and so on, with the Christian voice. Of course, this is not the Christian voice in the eschatological sense of announcing Christ. We didn’t get up and say “Christ forbids this, so you got to listen” that would be the ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’.
What we said was we know that if Christ is God, and of course we know that Christ is God, then the image of God in every person means there are certain basic values that all share and that everyone should be able to recognize if they’re given voice, and we gave it voice.
Question: Would you apply this to sins or only to creatures?
Prof. Schneider: Well, it has to go case by case, obviously. That’s why we have biotechnology reference group. You see?
Question: [Inaudible 03:41:15] mouse is a living organization, it’s like human? It’s an experiment [inaudible 03:41:20]
Prof. Schneider: Right. Would you come and talk to the biotechnology reference group? We’re talking about this right now.
Question: I guess that’s what it is.
Question: I just want to know.
Prof. Schneider: Right, when … We’re talking about these kinds of things right now.
Question: The result of this Supreme Court decision. Now in the university in Canada here, can create the same mouse and can use it. No one will pay me a royalty, that’s the only difference.
Prof. Schneider: Well now we’re coming to the third talk which is about …
Question: [Inaudible 03:41:51 to 03:51:55] in this group?
Prof. Schneider: Janet Summerville, you mean?
Question: [Inaudible 03:41:58 to 03:42:03]
Prof. Schneider: Oh yes, we talk to her all the time. She’s not on the reference group, she’s not a sitting member but she is talked to all the time. Yes?
Question: Actually, it’s important. The [inaudible 03:42:15] from the contact proposition even in Canada so [inaudible 03:42:20 to 03:42:23]
Prof. Schneider: Okay, so now we come to the third topic. The conclusion of that was that, despite what my friend Dr. Edward said, there’s no such thing as separating church from politics because there is no such thing as separating church from culture. The question is simply what kind of voice must the church have in everything that is cultural, in society in general. The answer to that is always the gospel voice, always the gospel voice.
The third point was, under those circumstances, the church is in fact much better off in a civil rights democracy despite all of the difficulties of the clash in values between the rights culture and the gospel culture; because the church is free to speak the gospel.
Where in a theocracy, which is imperial and tyrannical, you’re going to have topped on ruling and the power of the state and say policy is going to run church policy and church government unless the church is prepared to be monitored from time to time.
Finally, how can we tell whether or not the church is selling out to politics? When it forgets Matthew 25. As long as the church is always speaking for Matthew 25 in its social concerns, its peace and justice concerns, it’s doing alright. That means, last conclusion, we have to be prepared to apply Christian values to everyone including the others.
How many of you have ever joined a protest against virtual profiling and discrimination against Muslims?
Question: Against Muslims? Not ever.
Prof. Schneider: I told you this is the hard step, right?
Question: But is there an …?
Prof. Schneider: Oh terrible! Dr. Edward, don’t be naïve.
Question: [Inaudible 03:44:58 to 03:45:00] protesting there, trying to change the constitution [inaudible 03:45:03] and particularly keep Sierra as a part of their marriage, legal [inaudible 03:45:08]
Prof. Schneider: You weren’t there yesterday but that’s my argument. It’s exactly civil democracy that makes that impossible. That’s why it’s glorious to live in civil democracy. It’s protecting us, it’s our freedom. But I can tell you, one of the things I have to do as president of the council, I was called in by the government, by the Department of Justice because of the anti-terrorism laws, the security laws has just run out and that was the debate; Should we extend this or not? They summoned one commission that was made up of what they call “Faith and Culture Groups” it’s very interesting.
There were 25 different Muslim groups there, two Jewish groups, one Christian group in the Council of Churches, that was it? The Muslims group mostly told horrible stories about discrimination and profiling, and they’re all true, by the way. Will you try to go back across the Canadian border and experienced it coming here too.
The Jewish groups all said “More security, more security, do more of this” I got up and said, “The essence of Canada has been the defense of humanity, peace-keeping and so on; this is the soul of the nation. What is the profit, a man or a nation, if it gains the whole world and loses its soul” Afterwards everybody said “That was amazing, who said that?” You see? Do you understand?
Question: Doctor Schneider, If there is a high risk group in medicine, we focus on this high risk group to help controlling a problem. If the statistics shows that a certain color people, a certain race people, a certain religion people have more risk of something disease, crime, whatever; we have to enhance or increase the focus on those people.
So if someone if Saudi Arabia now or Egypt or England has higher rate, by statistics, of being … Carrying TB or carrying terrorist plans or carrying whatever; me as an authority have to increase my surveillance, my caution and whatever. This is not discrimination, this is a scientific method of doing our job.
If the slum areas have more rate of disease, we focus our health education in those, not that we discriminate against the wealthy areas by not giving them health education because they know about education and we … Other side of the coin applies too.
Prof. Schneider: Now we are getting into the science and religion debate. Of course, you’re absolutely right, we have to do these things. It is because there is a high risk group, the high risk group is called the radical Islam. Politically, it’s a form of world anarchy that is not a unique to Islam, it’s existing forever, you’ll find it all the time. At the moment, there is an outbreak of it so we have to increase care and surveillance.
The values is … That’s the science issue. The values issue is still the Christian issue. It’s still nothing to do with … We do this with respect to people. Do we do this in a way that maximizes people’s awareness that we love them? or do we do it in a way that says, “We are right and you were wrong, we got it straight you were the criminals?” Now, we don’t, of course, know which ones of you are the criminals, obviously, statistically speaking one person in this room is a terrorist. Okay, so which one of you is it? You see? Now, that’s the point. So therefore, there is what we might call the police approach and there is what we might call the Christian approach which is listening, respect, patience; all the while that we are being as wise as serpents. You understand? It doesn’t change the fact that every person is the image of Christ and the only way to follow Matthew 25 is to see the image of Christ in everyone.
When I teach iconology at the seminary, I teach my students the climax of the courses to say you understood this course. If you looked at the icon of the [inaudible 03:50:59], the icon of Christ and you see your own face, you’ve understood Christianity. If you look at the icon of the [inaudible 03:51:09] and you see Dr. Edwards face, your neighbor’s faces, you see? Do you understand?
Question: Yeah
Prof. Schneider: That’s got to be true of the other.
Question: Whatever you do with the others, you have done with me.
Prof. Schneider: Right.
Question: What you do to yourself.
Prof. Schneider: Exactly. The first Orthodox parish, I think, I’ve ever encountered is in downtown Toronto, is the mission of Saint John the compassionate. Little Orthodox parish Carpatho-Russian, Saint John the compassionate.
Question: He is a Saint in the Russian church?
Prof. Schneider: John the compassionate? In the Greek Church, he was an 8th century bishop. It was when Islam has first coming in and times were very, very tough talk in Egypt and didn’t work; so what he did was simply open his doors, took everybody in, gave away everything he has, fed everybody, reduce himself to poverty. It was active wasn’t monastic, it was active poverty, that’s why he is Saint John the compassionate.
Question: He was a priest or a layman?
Prof. Schneider: A bishop, he was Patriarch of Alexandria.
Question: At exactly?
Prof. Schneider: Yeah.
Question: [Inaudible 03:52:31]
Prof. Schneider: Yeah. [inaudible 03:52:34], of course.
Question: No, what?
Prof. Schneider: [inaudible 03:52:36] of course.
Question: Baptized in the Calzedonia.
Prof. Schneider: Calzedonia. This mission is deliberately created basically in Toronto Skid Row. It’s a soup kitchen so most of the building is a place to feed people. They also have a small inner city business, they have a bakery where people are given job, learn how to be bakers. They sell bread to churches all over the place and they’ve got an Orthodox parish there, and people have come.
You find the street people who have been feed, they come into the parish. Some of them are catechumens now.
Question: [Inaudible 03:53:33]
Prof. Schneider: Right. They come to eat but they stay to hear the word. It’s all done with absolute humility, patience, love; and everybody who is in this parish sees Christ in the people they are serving.
Friend of mine in the parish just spent years raising the money to create a country retreat where the street people could go in the summer, to take a little retreat, a little rest, be out in the woods. There’s absolute patience. As soon as you pay off the mortgage the house … Lightning struck the house, it burned down; he had to raise the money to build a new house.
This is the work and that’s all because they can see Christ in those people. You have to be able to do that and you have to take it to the absolute extreme. What is Jesus’ fourth word from the cross? He is on the cross, people put him there, what’s his fourth word?
Question: Forgive them.
Prof. Schneider: Forgive them. You’re out in a world where people don’t know, so it is your job to teach them. Now, you were talking about the Egyptian professors. You don’t teach anybody anything if you say “I’m right and you’re wrong” You just create hostility. You don’t create love and social meeting, and multi-culturalism. I think, every single person who looks Arab - you are probably a criminal and I’m not.
Question: What’s true in the post in the news just yesterday or a day before yesterday on CNN, homeless person saves the life of a woman in a burning car. When you read it, there were three homeless women and they saw this car in an accident and it burned and they found the lady driving there. They went and they drew her, it doesn’t drove and they didn’t know who is she. She was one of the crew that we were working in this siesta or place for baby. They knew her face that she was the one serving there but they went there just to see the human life within.
This changes our mentality about thinking “These homeless people are useless.” They are still living, they still have the image of Christ and the same thing about Muslims or …
Question: I’m not saying that we call the homeless people are useless but I am saying that homeless people had higher risk of whatever, so I have to focus my attention to this.
If I am a government, I will pay attention to people coming from certain areas because there is higher risk of whatever. So, I feel good when the people of the border, when they find me Egyptian, pay more caution because this is good.
Question: There are two sides.
Question: But they have to do this with respect, that’s all.
Question: Okay, the reason that I’m [inaudible 03:57:17] it is unfair, because there are some Muslim fanatics that I … Coming from the …
Prof. Schneider: The airport, yes. We have to pay that price. When the price we have to pay becomes racism, then Christians have to speak up; even when it is not directed against them. That’s the line of distinction; we have to have this voice.
Question: I have to feel what the others feel.
Prof. Schneider: You have to feel what the others feel.
Question: I didn’t say no, they are different and we are different, and that people what they think.
Prof. Schneider: That’s exactly this first virtue of listening. So let’s move into science and religion and we can do it exactly starting from what Dr. Edward’s says because he was right to use statistics in all those statistical arguments.
Statistics is the logic of science and so it should be because science is about universal laws, laws of nature that always apply. Statistics is not the language of religion. The language of religion is about persons because each person is the image of Christ. There is the difference.
Questions: Statistics cannot be applied through individuals.
Prof. Schneider: Now, theologically there should not be a distinction between science and religion. I’m jumping down to the most important bullet here that what both of them acknowledge, but both of them are trying to understand his existence - Why are we here? Why is the world here? Those are the fundamental questions of religion and of science.
The fathers solve this in an absolutely synergistic way. Why? Because they were grounded in the idea that God created the world. If you look at the theology of St. Basil; St Basil a very learned man, a tremendous amount of his theology comes out of what was then current biology, geology and geography. Tremendous amount of how the world works. Theologians have always talked about these as a model of society.
Now, this sense, in the patristic revival, this sense has never been lost. Ignatius Antioch IV, he’s the Malachi patriarch, gave wonderful sermons. Nobody knows about these, they disappeared into obscurity. They were published in Sorer, a set of wonderful sermons reviving this idea about creation and the environment that we all have to be environmentalist because we’re stewards of God’s creation. In fact, the environment is us. It’s not us and the environment; we are part of the environment. Any biologist can tell you that, any ecologist. My daughter can tell you that, from sitting in the jungle, day after day after day with her gorillas.
Question: [Inaudible 04:00:47]
Prof. Schneider: Pardon? Sorry?
Question: [Inaudible 04:00:49]
Prof. Schneider: There isn’t any separation between us and the world of science studies. What has become the separation is the mode of speaking. The history of thought stands about the 16th – 17th century, that the world is, it’s partly connected with universities and departments, that the world has developed specialized methodologies. That’s why universities have departments and why departments have exams for their doctoral students so that they learn this techno speak. Scientist learn scientific techno speak and theologians learn theological techno speak. We have another kind of techno speak, the one we use in church. Remember, it’s not just the simple gospel; it’s the understanding of the gospel.
The reason for techno speak is that it creates your way of understanding. It’s because of this that the two fields have drifted apart. They aren’t both starting with the premise that God created the world. By the way, religion and science are grounded with the notion of universal laws, isn’t that interesting? But the universal laws of science are supposed to be value-free. That’s one of the rules of the game in science. The universal laws are value-free; whereas one of the rules of the game in religion is that the universal laws are values. They are and they are themselves, values.
So the two sides have a very hard time talking to each other. You noticed, this is not about stupid arguments like the evolution or creationalism and stuff like that. Those are stupid arguments; they don’t have any meaning at all. We don’t have time to go into that, I can explain it later if you want.
These are all about much most fundamental arguments about whether existence involves value or not. If there’s going to be a new dialogue between religion and science, it’s going to be an attempt for both sides to come to an understanding.
On the one hand, religion has to understand that science has made this contribution of saying, “There are irrevocable laws and you have to take them into account.” They are the way the world works. Religion has to take that into account.
Science has to take into account the notion that there’s no such thing as value-free laws. Every scientific law is more than a mathematical analysis. It’s a value judgment about force, about structure, about neuro-pathways and about all kinds of things, it’s a valued judgment.
The consequence of this dialogue is that both will realize that there’s a necessity for change, that both have to realize that there’s a necessity for change. Now, the difficulty comes when you get down to particular cases. That’s because both are changing. Science changes very fast; religion changes rather slowly. Science changes very fast.
We have an immunologist here. A hundred years ago, infections were caused by bad air. Science changes very fast. We have a psychiatrist here who’s made it very clear that he thinks that personality and attitude are socially determined. This was absolutely the wisdom in the 1970’s and 80’s. Schizophrenia was a social disease in the 1970’s.
My wife is a Dean of Curriculum. She spends most of her time now going to conferences of neurophysiologists, brain physiologists because there’s a tremendous field opening up which has to do with learning and the function of the brain, tremendous field. It’s astonishing how much is built in to the structure and functioning and working of the brain.
For awhile, the pendulum swung over to its all totally hard-wired and laws of nature, and now, suddenly, they discovered the fluid brain. They discovered that people can shift things around in their brain from one place to another place. They can overcome brain damage and stuff like that. It’s constantly developing and it means that the dialogue has to go back and forth.
In the meanwhile, what has religion done? It has gotten itself stuck in a spiritual language which takes no account of what science knows. No account, whatsoever. I have to say, the Orthodox are perhaps the worst of all Christians in this regard.
Question: Some of them.
Prof. Schneider: Yes. We’re not only stuck in a spiritual language, we’re stuck in a particular peculiarly monastic language in which spirit is not connected to body. Flesh is one thing and spirit is another. Everything that has to do with personality is wrapped up in vices and virtues in which the attitude toward the world of nature is, in Greek it’s called Apathea, we’re supposed to be indifferent to it.
My son is undergoing a discipline like this. It’s very interesting that when he was in his noviceship, his Abuna, his Abba took him to Egypt to live for six months. He lived in Mar Saba. He really learned this discipline.
Question: Where is Mar Saba?
Prof. Schneider: It’s in the Sibaya.
Question: Southern part of Egypt? Upper Egypt?
Prof. Schneider: Upper Egypt.
Question: Mar Saba?
Prof. Schneider: It’s a monastery, not Mar Saba, that’s in Jerusalem. Watinatrum, he lived in Watinatrum.
Question: Where he lived there?
Question: What monastery?
Prof. Schneider: There are several. They went to several of the monasteries.
Question: [Inaudible 04:08:10]
Prof. Schneider: Yes.
Question: What he learn there?
Prof. Schneider: He was in his noviceship as a novice monk.
Question: A novice. [Inaudible 04:08:22]
Prof. Schneider: Now, our habit of speaking this way is going to have to change or we will never get any further with this dialogue with science. No way would we be able to teach science anything to help it get further. Think of this Alkama situation, in terms of thinking about it does as coming to an understanding of the created world and of life. Science is about existence, of what it means to be. That has to include the vision of the eschatological end, the value of what science does.
The difficulty with a value-free science that deals in absolute laws is that it’s completely absent of any eschatology. If the law is universal, the law is always true. It never changes. That means that it’s very hard in science to know what things mean. It’s easy to know how they work; it’s not easy to know what they mean.
Question: It’s not the road. Science is not the road to know what it means. This is for [Inaudible 04:09:59]
Prof. Schneider: Right. Now, therefore …
Question: What did he say?
Question: Science is about what it works …
Prof. Schneider: The scientists are not in the business of talking about meaning, actually. Maybe, they should be and maybe, science should look a little different, but at the moment, they’re not. Therefore, since we have these various specializations now on departments and so on’ philosophers, you say, theologians. It has the totality of knowledge about existence, it can’t be left just to the scientist and it can’t be left just to the theologians, it has to be a dialogue. Once again, we come back to this model of dialogue.
As I told you, for example, on the Canadian Council of Churches, we have created the biotechnology reference group. Half-scientist, half theologians, both committed to the idea of determining meaning, values, and so on.
To do this, it means that scientists have to learn something about theology and philosophy and it means that theologians, instead of only learning the language of these century monks, have to learn something about science. Once again, it’s a consequence of education.
It’s probably wise of you, theologians, especially the Orthodox, really bad at this, really behind, write about bioethics and know what they are talking about. One of the best in Orthodox world is Father John Breck. He has written several books on bioethics and he has taken years to really learn his biology. One of the best in Canada, outstanding; he wrote his doctoral dissertation on [inaudible 04:12:13] is a pediatrician.
Question: What’s his name?
Prof. Schneider: Father [inaudible 04:12:18]
Prof. Schneider: He was in Montreal; he’s a bright gentleman from Montreal left. He was from Montreal. He created the first [inaudible 04:12:13] for children, created hospices for the dying children and did a lot of investigation in an end-of-life issues as a physician. Now, he’s an orthodox priest.
While there have to be these specializations, these specializations have to know enough about each other to talk in the middle. When you do this, you come out with certain types of wisdom. Let me give you some examples of wisdom. The Ankamall is an example of such wisdom, but I promised you that we talk about the tough stuff.
What are homosexuals? As Doctor Edward emphasized yesterday, there’s a scientific debate about homosexuality at the moment, about the causes of homosexual orientation personality. There’s the nature-nurture debate. There’s genetic information in it that nobody knows. The jury is out. We don’t know. What then should churches do with homosexuals?
On the one hand, we have our ethics, our social values. So we have to say, we can’t tolerate homosexual behavior. If you really believe that to be homosexual is your absolute nature and this is the way God made you, the Orthodox Church is not for you. There are churches there for you, not the orthodox.
On the other hand, if a person says, “I am committed to the Orthodox way and I am a homosexual, does the church say, “You’re not welcome here?” Absolutely not, says, “You’re a person.”
It’s the same issue as the homeless person, the same issues as the racial issue, the convert, and all kinds of things. Now in behavior, as we said yesterday, “Churches like to get arise themselves.” They liked to keep oddities out and only have the familiar inside. It’s their security blanket, but that’s an infant security blanket. Father Hopko writes about that a lot in the book I showed you yesterday.
We have to treat persons as persons. We distinguish between persons and behavior. We’re not abandoning church values but we are remembering the most fundamental of Christian values which is to seek Christ in everyone.
Question: Right, but in life, we have to have acceptance. There are people who do not have the capacity to practice sex and we teach them that they have to accept what they are like. With the story of Zoe, there is a supernatural; there is God-absolute decision. Why when it comes to homosexuality, we have to have a solution for it that they have to practice what they have been brought up in. It is exactly like someone who is a heterosexual who can’t afford marriage and wants to be a Christian and he wants to live according to the Bible. So he does not allow himself to practice sex although he is heterosexual because he cannot afford sex in the legal, spiritual, religious, Christian and for men.
Why when it comes to homosexuality, we make it something that the churches divide on it, although they don’t divide on the issue of a heterosexual who cannot marry. Did we have any church that say, “A person who cannot afford marriage has to use the escort service?” No. Why when it comes to something like homosexuality, we start to make this big issue about.
Prof. Schneider: Alright, you’re confusing two different things.
Question: Please help.
Prof. Schneider: The division between the churches is not about premarital sex. I don’t know of a church that approves of premarital sex of any kind. The issue in the churches is about whether or not homosexuals can contract the marriage the same way heterosexuals can. That’s the dividing issue.
Question: I didn’t say, “Except that.” They don’t divide on that, why do they divide on that? They don’t divide on premarital sex. Although, if any church has a member who cannot marry, they don’t tell him, “Please go practice sex outside marriage,” right? So why a person who has homosexuality, tendency is, they say, “Oh, you have the right to practice sex because this is the image of God and so you are allowed to marry a man.”
Prof. Schneider: Again, you are confusing two different things. One, it’s all about order working within the structures, control. The idea is that marriage is marriage. Some churches say, “Marriage is a gift of God to every person,” and some churches say, “Marriage is only a gift of God only to heterosexual persons.” No church says, “Sex, out of control for any person, is the Godly way.” Jesus says, “Go and do not sin anymore.”
Question: I don’t find any sympathy in the Bible towards homosexuality, whether in Sodom or whether Saint Paul himself. He denied this. How come the Bible through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit say that homosexuality is something which is not accepted by God and He punish those who went into this line of life.
In the New Testament, the same thing; Saint Paul in the Romans, he said that this is very bad and this is some examples of how human beings can deviate so much from the will of God.
I think when things are so clear in the Bible, how come we come to discuss it, and to find ways and to attach this to human rights and [inaudible 04:19:57] of God and we have to accept them at all? I have to help them also or they themselves don’t feel that this is bad or this is against the Bible?
Prof. Schneider: We are not, in fact, debating that. That is the Orthodox view of homosexual behavior, and we simply don't recognize it. So there's no place in the Orthodox Church for homosexual behavior, it's as simple as that. There are other churches that say, "The moral rules and the regulations and so on of the bible, are only 1st century, and we have to look at the big picture and we have to say 'love for all people’ is the essential commandment, and so we have to change with the times.'" Those are the liberal churches. They aren't the Orthodox churches and that's not for a debate. The issue I brought up here is that we ... Without a clear-cut scientific love of homosexual persons, the only thing we can do is accept them as persons. To say yes, certainly they are persons. We don't really know, scientists haven't told us yet, why they are homosexuals and scientists may never tell us that. We then agree with the liberals, love is the mandate and we have to love them as persons. That's all we are saying here.
The reason that it's such a hot issue is twofold. One is that it's a current social issue, a hot social issue and we have to pay attention to it. We can't stick our heads in the sand.
Number two, we have to atone for our sins and our sin has been to not love these, for centuries it has been to not love these people.
Question: I disagree though. We never ever say in the church not to love anybody. We as Christians love our enemies. So whether we accept this as a way of life, of our life or not, but we love everybody.
So I disagree with the word love. I am talking about allowing, accepting this to be part of our life practice is to have sex between man and man; but I love my enemy, the homosexuals, the heterosexuals and this is not the question.
Prof. Schneider: It isn't. Maybe it isn't nowadays and maybe it isn't in your circles; but historically speaking, and also as you really get down and talk to people, you will find prejudices is much the same as the race prejudices and other prejudices against poor people and other such prejudices.
Question: We're talking about the principles, not what happened in history.
Question: I may accept him but I don't accept his attitude. As it happens was somebody who has been in prison for ten years for killing. Yes, I have to deal with him as a human being, but I can't say, "Yes he did this big crime and this is bad." So we have to discriminate between his attitude and he himself as a human being. Yes, I can’t otherwise to accept him.
Question: The Bible is clear about it.
Prof. Schneider: Nobody is saying ... In fact, the whole point is for people to be honest and open and frank and admit who they are. The question is do they want to live the Orthodox way or do they not? If they wish to join the Orthodox Church it is a distinction that we have to make. What we’re talking about here is language and attitudes and learning.
In this regard, for example, the Orthodox could learn a tremendous amount from the Quakers or The Salvation Army who have been the best at dealing with former prisoners, for example; the example you brought up. Perhaps it's not the most fortunate example, maybe if I go on to bioethics instead, issues like the end of life, whether you terminate or not, euthanasia, abortion, and those kinds of issues. Everybody would have seen much more clearly the need for this dialogue between values and science, and it's a complicated dialogue in which each side has to learn from the other.
We also didn't bring up information technology and how it muddies the waters of discussion of religion and science.
Question: Can I briefly comment on the scientific explanation of theory of, about homosexuality because you mentioned this that scientists didn't say ... Or didn't give out the final report. That's true, but our present understanding of homosexuality, like other diseases in the human being, diabetes and other things, these are multi-factorial. The genes that affect them are not just one gene, there are many genes that can affect the inclination to something. Inclination may be very strong in some person and maybe less in another person. So that's the present understanding; but we don't think that everyone is compelled by his genetic makeup to be this way he can resist it still.
Prof. Schneider: That's the religious value contribution to the debate between science and religion. Now the pure science understanding but the pure scientific view, the value-free methodology says there are these implacable laws of nature and therefore nothing can be changed. If we have such and such a genetic makeup, that's the way it's going to be and there's nothing we can do about it.
Question: But the genetic ... it's not compelling.
Prof. Schneider: Of course not.
Question: It's just an inclination that you can resist if you want.
Prof. Schneider: That is right.
Question: Psychological and social.
Prof. Schneider: You are now speaking from the religious point of view.
Question: No, from the biological point of view, you can resist it if you want to. You are not compelled. It may be infamous by religion, but I mean ... Until now scientists couldn't find anything that compels that person to be either homosexual or other diseases, except in the very well-known hereditary genes that are controlled by one gene or two or three genes only. These, sometimes, are compelling.
Prof. Schneider: Right, but in fact what you are talking about is free will which is a theological topic. What's happened is that scientists are learning values. They just aren't admitting that they learned this from the theological language.
Question: Because it's exactly the same doctrine ...
Prof. Schneider: It's the same when the theologians, instead of ... Ignore the science, and instead of taking account of it, starts talking about the warfare [inaudible 4:27:42] and use that monastic vocabulary, the warfare of the flesh, the warfare with the world, the separation of flesh and spirit and all that kind of stuff.
There's a book ... The last bullet here is about therapy and that's really the outcome of this dialogue. The outcome of this dialogue is that it is ... If we are going to be loving, if, as it says here, "The greatest mystery is love" then the outcome, in that case the applied outcome of the dialogue between science and religion should be therapy; but it's got to be a therapy that is adequately scientific and adequately theological.
The example of what I am talking about, there's a book by our [inaudible 4:28:28] Vlachos called The Orthodox Psychotherapy, which over and over and over and over again, the Orthodox holds up as, "See all of this psychotherapy stuff is all bunk," You look at it and it could have been written by 5th century monk. It's all about diseases of the soul.
I took a course from Father Hopko, Tom Hopko; it was so powerful I took it twice, called Vices and Virtues. What he did was to put the 12-steps program on one hand and monastic literature on the other hand and show ... Analyze the relationship.
The outcome of this was that if you do it this way you end up with a dialogue. So if you want to be therapeutic you don't just give the person the monastic literature and say, "Repent." You send them also the 12-steps. It's hard to describe this, it was exceedingly powerful because it was taking account of both sides to create a therapy that took advantage of the best that science had created as well as the best spiritual that pastoral care he created. Now that we’re in a more biochemical age, it’s gotten even more complicated. There’s even more for therapist, for therapy to learn about the brain, about neurology, about all those kinds of things. Schizophrenia is a great example of course.
At the moment, the pendulum is swinging toward a biomechanical model of mental conditions. In the ‘70’s, the pendulum was all the way at the other side. What we need is some kind of dialogue here.
I’ll end by reading you an example but I’ll be right back. You can start talking.
[Inaudible 04:30:46 – 04:30:58]
Question: Yes, everybody can be a sinner. If sin is your faith, there is no way to say that you can change or you repent because, “What can I do.” God, in this case, should be so cool and so unjust if He is condemning and judging me, although I can do otherwise. Actually, yes, everybody can be a sinner, but you have no idea to have the power to be towards the will of God. This is noted in the Bible. Homosexuality is an expression of this sinful aspect in their lives. If they want to be pure and Christian, they can do it, if they want. But actually, they accept what they are …
Question: They want justice.
Question: Yes, like a shoplifter or any person who has something which is complaining; He didn’t condemn this. If you do anything bad, if you are unable to leave your friends or your community and the others; if you confess about that to God or to any person that this is a bad thing which I fear; I am unable to leave other person except myself. These gifts when you accept that, when you, I mean, condemn that, you are on the way to a change your life. That’s when you say, “I am good this way, I have the right to do as I want to do.” In this case, you are actually destroying yourself.
Prof. Schneider: I am with two examples. The one example is to illustrate my point of a therapy. This son who is the monk, he ought to be dead.
Question: You’re talking about?
Prof. Schneider: My son.
Question: Your son.
Prof. Schneider: He ought to be dead. When he was one year old, he was put to an irreversible coma by cerebral meningitis. This was in France, to all intent and purposes, he was dead. The doctor was prepared.
Question: At which age?
Prof. Schneider: One.
Question: One year old.
Prof. Schneider: Now, without any hesitation, without any doubt, he was saved miraculously. He was saved, first of all, by the sacrament, by unction. In the middle of the sacrament, he went from coma to full consciousness. He was saved by prayer, by community service, by care, by the intervention of St. Herman of Alaska; by a whole lot of things. It’s a long and complicated story. It is also absolutely unmistakable when he was saved by the wisdom of the doctor, who was an atheist.
The meningitis was of a sort that it was incurable at the time and she had to use all kinds of her scientific knowledge; she had to use experimental drugs that were only known in Chicago, in a laboratory in Chicago. So she had to have this scientific knowledge. There were all kinds of interventions. Nevertheless, it’s a miracle. He’s supposed to be totally brain damage. The scientific measurement, the EEG said he was supposed to be totally brain damaged. At the end of the process, the MRI said there was nothing wrong with his brain. It was a first MRI, one of the first MRI’s in France.
Now, If we fall back on the old language, this starts to look like monastic ideography, life of the saint. If we fall back in the old theological language, we say, “It’s a supernatural, not a natural theory.”
The point I’m trying to make here is that there’s no possible way, no possible way to draw the line to what cause what. If both religion and science explain existence by looking for causes, which is what they do they both do. In religion the cause of everything is God. In science, the cause of everything is whatever the laws nature say, is the cause.
If one is searching for causes to explain this, there’s no possible way to draw the line. If one is trying to analyze out the threads, how much was sacramental power? How much was the worthy power of the experimental drug? How much was the care of the community? You can’t filter it out. It’s all this … The story is one single piece. You understand?
The clue to the old story is love. I came in one night, they allowed my wife to live in the hospital with this boy because we were in France and he was new to France. It was first time that the hospital had broken its policy and allowed the parents to stay, because we told them that the boy only spoke Russian. By the way, when he came out of the coma, his first language was French, which he only heard in the hospital in a coma.
Question: That worked in the human brain and that’s the evidence of [Inaudible 04:37:03]
Prof. Schneider: Yes, and can you separate out that - What is supernatural and what is the brain function? Neurophysiology?
Question: No way.
Prof. Schneider: I came one night and found this strange woman sitting in the room with my wife, they were holding each other and crying. It turned out to be the doctor. What she used to do was be Madam Doctor all day long, using her best scientific knowledge and then she just came and visited my wife at night. That’s love.
When she saw the boy walked for the first time, that’s when she told us that she was an atheist. She said in French, it’s very good in French, she said “This is the true resurrection.”
There was another patient of the same doctor, another kid. The kid was born hydrocephalic. He never learned to talk. At this time, he was about twelve years old, he was dying, he was dying of leukemia. It was the end of the road. There was no cure. The hardship on his parent’s family, they lived fifty kilometers away, it was terrible. They have six other children.
I watched this boy’s behavior, everyday he’d walk down the hallway and he’d leave one of his toys outside the isolation room. I thought, “What is going on here? What is this?” In the meanwhile, I am asking, “God, why is Kristoff,” his name in Greek means the one who carries Christ, “Why is Kristoff dying and why is my son living? What does this mean? How is this the great plan of God?”
What I realized is that Kristoff had reached the total fullness of his capacity to love. He had learned as much as he could learn about love. So the arc of his life is complete. Therefore, it was alright. Obviously, it meant, my son still needs something to learn, something ahead. That’s why God is planning to live his coming back to life.
The point of the story is that, there is no way to separate these things out. Saint Basil was right, the wisdom of God is a whole. We’re all in the dialogue together, that has been the point of all three of these lectures. We’ll get somewhere if we realize that we’re all in the dialogue together.
My last example is to read you a bible passage, to send you away with. This is from the Gospel of Matthew. When Jesus comes to the lake, the disciples are in the boat. Jesus is walking to them on the water. He says to them, “Come!” So Peter got out of the boat, walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and beginning to sink. He cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “Oh, man of little faith. Why did you doubt?” The question I want to lead you with is what does it mean to get out of the boat?
Question: Walk with faith.
Prof. Schneider: In the light of this discussion, what does it mean for us all to get out of the boat?
Question: Out of the boat … [Inaudible 04:41:08]
Prof. Schneider: Exactly, what is the boat? Is the boat a Coptic Church? Is the boat the way you see it? Is the boat scientific truth?
Question: [Inaudible 04:41:19] Feeling safe in this confined environment, we have nothing to do with the [inaudible 04:41:27]
Prof. Schneider: Right, the boat has ten foot walls around.
Question: Outside the boat …
Prof. Schneider: To get out of the boat, you have to be willing to climb over ten-foot high walls.
Question: To the dangers and to the troubles of the society. Those who can’t swim, they go out of the boat.
Prof. Schneider: Oh, no!
Question: Even if you can swim, I wouldn’t leave the boat ...
Prof. Schneider: No, no. If you depend on your swimming, that’s science.
Question: What I mean is that those who are qualified to deal with what is outside are those who should go out with the Lord. Those who are unable to do that, they should stay as they are.
Prof. Schneider: You have no qualifications at this point. Christ is talking to a simple fisherman. He says, “Walk on the water, like me; be me.”
Question: It is the trust of Jesus that makes you leave the boat, faith. The challenge is to stick to the boat or to have Jesus as your goal is to depend on the boat or the God of the sea, or who has control over the sea and the boat.
Prof. Schneider: That’s right, but two things … One is that, that’s a nice generalization. The point of these free talks is I said that it has to apply in particular cases. That’s the difficulty.
The second thing to remember is that individualism is not an Orthodox value. We are all persons but we are a community. We are one church. We’ve several people, Doctor Melci and others, brought up the First Corinthians’ 12 passages. We all have gifts. The body needs all the gifts together or it can’t function. Paul says, the part nobody ever reads, “Can the arm work without the leg?” Nobody ever reads that part.
Question: Peter asked with the Lord, “Shall I come?” So He had told him, “Come.” He also [Inaudible 04:43:55] on all parties to ask him was that He is [inaudible 04:44:00] and says, “Come.”
Prof. Schneider: That’s correct. That’s the synergy.
Question: I discussed with Professor Schneider that we will have a year-round kind of project in Toronto City about topics to avail from his spirit and mind. We’ll put it in CD’s and send it to you. I think he will not say, “No.”
Prof. Schneider: It doesn’t have to stop at Toronto.
Question: Thank you Doctor Schneider, Professor.
