Heaven or Earth

Words to Know

Orthodox — from the Greek orthos, right, and doxa, which can mean both belief and glory. So the word means right belief, and also right worship.

Holy Tradition — the whole inheritance your church says it has received from the apostles and kept faithfully: the scriptures, the creed, the councils, the writings of the early teachers, the liturgy and the icons.

The seven councils — the gatherings of bishops from 325 to 787 that your church accepts as speaking for the whole church. Their decisions are the backbone of its teaching.

Symphonia — harmony. The ideal, set out by the emperor Justinian in 535, that the church and the empire are two gifts from God that should work together as one.¹

Start with what the envoys saw.

There is a story your church tells about how the Russian lands became Orthodox. Around the year 987, Prince Vladimir of Kiev sent men to look at the religions of his neighbors. They were not impressed by the others. Then they went to Constantinople and were led into a church for the liturgy, which your church remembers as Hagia Sophia. They came home and reported: We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.²

I understand why. Your worship is the most beautiful thing many people will ever see. The gold, the candles, the incense, the chanting that never stops, the icons looking back at you from every wall. It is built to make you feel that heaven has come down into the room.

But I want to hold that story next to something I said, because your church prays it at nearly every service. I taught you to pray: Let your Kingdom come. Let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10). I did not ask for heaven to come into a building. I asked for God’s will to be done on earth: in the fields, in the markets, in the courts, in the way the poor are treated.

The rest of the envoys’ story matters too. The chronicle says that Vladimir came home, had the idols of Kiev thrown down, and ordered the people to the river to be baptized, warning that anyone who stayed away, rich or poor, would answer to him.³ The beauty came first. The order came right after it.

I am not going to tell you that the people in your church are bad people, or that your worship is false. Many of the holiest people who ever lived stood in those churches. Your church kept some things that many other churches lost, and I will come back to them. The question is whether the four things it built on, the liturgy, the icons, the councils and the symphony with rulers, are the ones I set down. Let me take them one at a time.

The First Pillar: The Liturgy

You were taught that the liturgy is heaven on earth. I told you what to do before you came to the altar.

My own disciples were the first envoys to be dazzled by a holy building. As I was leaving the Temple, one of them said: Teacher, see what kind of stones and what kind of buildings! I answered: Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone on another, which will not be thrown down (Mark 13:1–2).

I was not against worship. I went up to the Temple for the feasts. But I told you what comes first: If therefore you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift (Matthew 5:23–24). The brother first. Then the altar.

I learned that from the prophets. Amos spoke for God to people who had beautiful worship and cheated the poor on Monday: I hate, I despise your feasts, and I can’t stand your solemn assemblies … Take away from me the noise of your songs! … But let justice roll on like rivers, and righteousness like a mighty stream (Amos 5:21–24).

And I warned about the men who make worship a stage: Beware of the scribes, who like to walk in long robes, and to get greetings in the marketplaces, and the best seats in the synagogues … those who devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers (Mark 12:38–40). The very next thing Mark tells is a poor widow putting her last two coins into the Temple treasury (Mark 12:41–44).

A woman once asked me which mountain was the right place to worship, hers or Jerusalem. I told her: the hour comes, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, will you worship the Father … the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth (John 4:21, 23). Not in the right building. In spirit and truth.

The liturgy your church calls by the name of John Chrysostom took its present shape over the centuries after him.⁴ It is beautiful. But the earliest gatherings of my followers were meals in ordinary houses, and the test of them was whether the poor went home fed.

The Second Pillar: The Icons

You were taught to kiss my image. I told you where my image walks.

Your church fought hard for its icons. In two waves, from about 730 to 787 and from 815 to 843, emperors tore them down, and monks, bishops and empresses put them back. In 787 the last of the seven councils ruled that icons should be honored, and in 843 an empress restored them for good. Your church still celebrates that day, on the first Sunday of Lent, as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.⁵ The defenders of the icons had a strong argument: since God became visible in me, God can be painted.

But I already told you where to find a picture of God. On the first page of your Bible: God created man in his own image (Genesis 1:27). Every person who walks into your church is an icon. So is every person outside it.

And I told you where I would be. In my scene of the last judgment, the king says: I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat … I was a stranger, and you took me in (Matthew 25:35). And then: because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me (Matthew 25:40). That is my face. Hungry. Foreign. In prison.

A letter handed down under the name of my beloved disciple put it bluntly: If a man says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who doesn’t love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? (1 John 4:20). The brother you can see comes first.

Your own greatest preacher said it best. John Chrysostom, the bishop whose name is on your liturgy, told his congregation in Antioch: Do you wish to honor the body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. He asked them what good it did to load my table with gold cups while I was outside, starving.⁶ Your church gave him a gold icon. It did not always do what he said.

The Third Pillar: The Councils

You were taught that the councils defined the true faith. They defined my nature, and left out my teaching.

The first of the seven councils was called by an emperor. In 325 Constantine summoned the bishops to Nicaea, paid for their travel and sat in on the meeting, and the bishops who would not sign were sent into exile.⁷ The councils that followed were also called by emperors, and their decisions were enforced by imperial law.

The creed that came out of the first two councils is the one you sing at every liturgy. Read it slowly and notice what is missing. It says that I was made flesh of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man. Then the very next words are that I was crucified under Pontius Pilate.⁸

Between my birth and my death, there is nothing. Not a word about the poor, or enemies, or forgiving debts, or the Samaritan, or the Sermon on the Mount. The creed that became the test of the true faith skips everything I said.

The councils argued for centuries about my nature: how God and man were joined in me, whether I had one will or two. I never asked anyone to settle that. I asked a lawyer what the law said, and when he answered with love of God and love of neighbor, I told him, Do this, and you will live (Luke 10:28).

And councils can be wrong. Your church knows it. In 449 a council met at Ephesus, with the emperor’s backing, and forced its decision through with soldiers and violence. Two years later another council overturned it, and history remembers the first one as the Robber Council.⁹ If a council can be a robber, then a council is not the test. The test is what I said it was: By their fruits you will know them (Matthew 7:16).

The Fourth Pillar: The Symphony

You were taught that church and state belong together, like two voices in harmony. I refused the throne.

The emperor Justinian put it in law in 535: the priesthood and the empire are the two greatest gifts of God, and when both are in order there will be a good harmony between them.¹ For a thousand years in Constantinople, and then in Moscow, your church lived inside that harmony. The emperor or the tsar protected the church. The church blessed the emperor or the tsar.

Watch where it went. In 1721 Peter the Great abolished the office of patriarch in Russia and put the church under a council called the Holy Synod, overseen by a government official. It stayed that way until 1917.¹⁰ The harmony had become a department of state.

I was offered that kind of harmony, and I turned it down. When the crowd wanted to make me king, I went up the mountain alone (John 6:15). When Pilate asked if I was a king, I told him: My Kingdom is not of this world. If my Kingdom were of this world, then my servants would fight (John 18:36). When Peter drew a sword to defend me, I said: Put your sword back into its place, for all those who take the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52).

Your own church once saw where the symphony leads. In 1872 a council of Orthodox bishops in Constantinople condemned the idea of a church organized by nation and race as against the gospel and the holy canons. It is often called the heresy of phyletism.¹¹ It has never stopped being a temptation. On the 6th of March, 2022, the patriarch of Moscow preached a sermon that gave a spiritual defense to the war his government had just launched against Ukraine, a country where most people are Orthodox too. He did not name the invasion. He spoke of a struggle with “metaphysical” meaning, and of a gay pride parade as the test of loyalty. He preached it on Forgiveness Sunday.¹² A week later, Orthodox theologians around the world published a declaration rejecting the teaching behind that war as a heresy. Within weeks, more than a thousand had signed it.¹³

Blessed are the peacemakers, I said, for they shall be called children of God (Matthew 5:9). I did not say blessed are the empires.

What Your Church Kept

Now, in fairness, look at what your church kept.

You kept married priests. Your parish priest may well have a wife and children, as Peter did (Mark 1:30).¹⁴

You kept the prayer of the tax collector. The Jesus Prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, is built from the prayers of the tax collector who stood far off (Luke 18:13) and the blind beggar by the road (Luke 18:38).¹⁵ Of all the prayers a church could repeat a thousand times a day, you chose the one that puts you with the outcasts.

You kept forgiveness at the door of Lent. On the evening of Forgiveness Sunday, in many of your churches, every person bows to every other person and asks to be forgiven. That is Matthew 5:23–24 acted out. It is one of the closest things to my teaching that any church does with its whole body.

You kept the poor in your oldest preaching. Basil of Caesarea built a whole complex for the poor and the sick outside his city, which a friend called a new city.¹⁶ Chrysostom preached about money and the poor again and again, and bluntly. And in the last century, an Orthodox nun in Paris, Maria Skobtsova, turned her house into a shelter, hid Jews from the Nazis, and died at Ravensbrück in 1945. The Patriarchate of Constantinople has named her a saint.¹⁷

And you never built some of the machinery that grew up in the West. You never claimed that one bishop could not be wrong. You did not escape every abuse, though. Under Ottoman rule, certificates of absolution were issued in the patriarchs’ names, often for a fee.¹⁸

So the question is not whether I am in your church. I am in the bow on Forgiveness Sunday, and in the prayer of the tax collector, and in Maria’s shelter. The question is which part stands on top. And on top, in the dome, is the throne.

What You’ll Hear Back

If you show this to someone you love, they will have answers ready. Here are the six you will hear most, and what is underneath each one.

“We have changed nothing since the apostles.”

It is a beautiful claim. Your best teachers do not say that nothing has changed. They say the faith has been kept while its forms grew. But look at how much grew. The creed you sing was finished in 381. The icons were settled in 787 and 843. The liturgy grew for centuries. In 1923 a meeting in Constantinople, with only some of the churches present, backed a revised calendar. When Greece, Romania and other churches took it up, groups inside them broke away over it, and Russia, Serbia and Jerusalem kept the old one.¹⁹ Your church has changed. Every living thing does.

And unchanged was never my test. A seed changes into a tree. I asked whether the tree bears fruit.

“The councils were guided by the Holy Spirit.”

I told you what the Spirit would do: the Holy Spirit … will teach you all things, and will remind you of all that I said to you (John 14:26). The Spirit reminds you of what I said. A creed that leaps from my birth to my death has not been reminded of very much.

And the Spirit has fruit you can check: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22–23). The Robber Council was a council too.

“The honor given to the icon passes to the one it shows.”

That is a line from Basil, and the council of 787 used it.²⁰ I agree with it. So follow it all the way. If the honor you give a painting passes to me, then the contempt you show a living person, who is God’s image in flesh, passes to me as well. You did it to me (Matthew 25:40).

“God became man so that man might become god.”

Athanasius wrote it, and your church has built its whole hope on it: that you can share in God’s own life.²¹ I will not argue with that hope. I will only tell you what God looks like, so you will know what you are becoming: he is kind toward the unthankful and evil. Therefore be merciful, even as your Father is also merciful (Luke 6:35–36). To become like God is to become merciful. There is no other way up.

“Our church is the soul of our nation.”

In 1872 your own bishops condemned tying the church to one nation or race. And I sent my friends out to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19), and I called the Temple a house of prayer for all the nations (Mark 11:17). No nation owns me. When my friends wanted to call fire down on a village that would not receive us, a village of another people, I turned and rebuked them (Luke 9:54–55).

“Come and see. You cannot understand Orthodoxy from outside.”

Come and see is a good invitation. It was mine first (John 1:39). But when John the Baptizer sent his followers to ask whether I was the one, I did not invite them to a service. I told them what to look at: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them (Luke 7:22).

That is what there is to come and see. Look for it in your church, and where you find it, I am there.

If You Were Raised in It

You may remember standing for hours as a child, the smell of the incense in your clothes, the long fasts from meat and milk, and the midnight at Pascha when the candles were lit one from another and everyone shouted Christ is risen! and the answer came back, Truly he is risen! Some of you came to it as adults, looking for something older and deeper than what you had been given. Some of you found it.

Nothing here asks you to give up the beauty, or to think less of the people who taught you to love it.

It only asks you to do what I asked of the lawyer: How do you read it? (Luke 10:26). Read my own words, the ones the creed leaves out, the way you would read an icon: slowly, and letting them look back at you. Then, when the liturgy ends, go your way (Matthew 5:24). The brother you must reconcile with is outside. So is the hungry man Chrysostom told you about. Heaven came down into the room for an hour. I asked for it on earth.

Check It Yourself

Read Mark 13:1–2 and Mark 12:38–44. Write down what the disciples admired, and what I pointed to instead.

Read Matthew 5:23–24. Then read Amos 5:21–24.

Say the Creed slowly, and write down everything it says I did between my birth and my death.

Read Matthew 25:31–46 and 1 John 4:20. Write down where those passages say God’s image is found.

Read John 6:15, John 18:36 and Matthew 26:52. Write down what I did when I was offered power, and when a sword was drawn for me.

Read Luke 6:27–36. Write down what it says God is like.

Look up the Russian Primary Chronicle’s account of Vladimir’s envoys and the baptism of Kiev (it is free online). Read what happened at the river.

The Short Version

• Orthodox means right belief and right worship. Your worship was built to make the envoys say they knew not whether they were in heaven or on earth.
• I prayed for God’s will to be done on earth, and I told you to leave your gift at the altar and reconcile first.
• I warned about long robes and long prayers that devour widows’ houses, and I said the Temple’s great stones would fall.
• You were taught to kiss my icon. I said my image is in every person, and that what you do to the least, you do to me.
• The creed goes straight from my birth to my death. Nothing I taught is in it.
• Emperors called the councils, and one of them, in 449, is remembered as the Robber Council.
• Symphonia made the church a partner of the throne, and under Peter the Great a department of state. Your own bishops condemned phyletism in 1872.
• In 2022 the patriarch of Moscow gave a spiritual defense to a war in a sermon on Forgiveness Sunday, and over a thousand Orthodox theologians signed a declaration calling the teaching behind it a heresy.
• You kept married priests, the Jesus Prayer, Forgiveness Sunday, Basil’s new city, Chrysostom’s sermons and Maria Skobtsova.
• Come and see is my invitation too. What I told people to come and see was the poor hearing good news.