Church and Ecumenical Responses

Almost immediately on the launch of the invasion, the WCC Acting General Secretary Professor Dr Ioan Sauca issued a statement:

The statement goes on to call for an immediate end to the armed hostilities, with protection for all affected by the violence, and all churches and people of goodwill around the world to pray for peace.

At its meeting in Brussels on 23 May 2022 the Governing Board of the Conference of European Churches (CEC) issued a statement condemning the Russian aggression and calling for peace and a strong alliance of Christian solidarity. It affirmed ‘the need for an immediate ceasefire, a diplomatic solution through international law, respect of borders, self-determination of people, respect for truth and the primacy of dialogue over violence’. The president of the CEC, Pastor Christian Krieger (who is also president of the Protestant Federation of France) had written to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church His Holiness Patriarch Kirill, appealing for a clear word against the Russian aggression: ‘I am disheartened by your daunting silence on the unprovoked war your country declared against another country, which is home to millions of Christians, including Orthodox Christians that belong to your flock.’Footnote ⁴

The statement of the WCC Central Committee meeting in Geneva, 15–18 June 2022, repeats earlier condemnations of the war, drawing attention to the WCC 2011 document Ecumenical Call for Just Peace and, warning against any misuse of religious language to justify or support armed aggression, states that ‘A fresh and critical analysis of the Christian faith in its relation to politics, the nation and nationalism is urgently called for.’ It further states:

At the WCC 11th Assembly in Karlsruhe, Germany, in September 2022 there was an intensive plenary debate on the war in Ukraine. The resolution that was adopted included the following statements:

On 17 May 2023, a WCC leadership team, including newly appointed General Secretary Dr Jerry Pillay, following consultation with both the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, visited Moscow to discuss engagement with the ROC in dialogue processes convened by the WCC on consolidation and unity in Ukrainian society, and ‘to discuss engagement also by the Russian Orthodox Church in dialogue on the war and its consequences, including with regard to the deep divisions in the Orthodox family in this context’. The press report states that in his meeting with Patriarch Kirill, Dr Pillay identified four important reasons for the visit: the need to bring an end to the current war; to work for the unity of the Orthodox family; to discuss the role of the churches in peacebuilding, and ‘to propose an initial roundtable dialogue meeting to address these issues, with the participation of all parties concerned’.

Ecumenical bodies such as the WCC and CEC are thus clearly mindful of the immensity of the task of peacebuilding and the complexity of the situation

Dialogue Unconditional?

It is notable, however, that in these statements the promotion of ‘dialogue’ is repeatedly seen as both the method and goal of the ecumenical task, to the point of its being viewed as the very essence of ecumenism, division and exclusion being the antithesis of its purpose. Notwithstanding the high importance of dialogue in the ecumenical calling, however, it has to be asked whether dialogue is feasible in all circumstances, and moreover whether it truly is to be regarded as the very heart, the esse, of ecumenism. This question raises concerns not only about the war in Ukraine but about what kind of organizations, in their nature and purpose, are the WCC and other ecumenical bodies based on like principles. The actual basis of the WCC should be noted:

The Conference of European Churches has the same stated basis, ‘a fellowship of churches which confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the scriptures … ‘. The WCC constitution continues:

The WCC basis thus lists ‘theological dialogue’ in ‘mutual accountability’ as one of the means by which the primary purpose of the Council is fulfilled, along with activities promoting common witness, diakonia, the integrity of creation, and life in unity, mission and service. Doubtless it assumes that theological dialogue takes various forms and is embodied in specific programmes. Dialogue, unqualified, however, is not stated to be the essential or core purpose of the WCC’s existence, which is to seek unity in the confession of Jesus Christ as God and Saviour, and it is within that confessing act that mutual accountability is set. It is accountability in confessing that is crucial.

Confessing Christ

If ecumenical organizations are fellowships of churches which confess Jesus Christ as God and Saviour, then they are themselves confessing fellowships, and the confession of Christ supplies the basis and criterion for the validity and aims of all their enterprises. Every activity, including dialogue, must be assessed according to whether it serves and reflects the stated basis and core of the ecumenical enterprise, namely, to confess Jesus Christ as God and Saviour. Dialogue may indeed serve that purpose. Equally, it may serve as a means for evading or obscuring that purpose, most especially when regarded as a good end in itself.

The term ‘confess’ has its roots in the Greek New Testament verb homologein, which means ‘confess’ in the sense of ‘agreeing to’ or ‘promise to’ or ‘intentionally or avowedly’ adhere to a declaration; or, in the form exomologein – to ‘confess in full’ or even ‘praise’, ‘celebrate’:

In both texts, it could even be argued that the actual order of words in the original Greek of ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ suggests a certain emphasis: ‘The one who is to be regarded as Lord is Jesus [Christ].’ The confession of Jesus Christ is thus not just a formal assent to a doctrine, but an intentional, avowed commitment to his claims of lordship over oneself and all things. It is the baptismal vow of immersion into and identification with Christ, for life and for death. And because it is a full acknowledgment of Christ as Lord the confession is inherently polemical: he, and no other, is to be regarded as Lord: not Caesar, not the empire or any of its appointed sub-authorities, nor any of the powers – whether angelic, human or superhuman – to whom incense is offered to placate their anger or from whom guarantees of human well-being are sought. Confession requires a continual discernment of where the loyalty of the believing Christian and the Christian community lies, and where false demands for loyalty are being temptingly offered.

The calling to confess Christ has in fact for many years been stated to be central to the ecumenical movement. It came to full verbal expression at the 5th Assembly of the WCC in Nairobi in 1975 with the report of the Faith and Order study ‘Confessing Christ Today’ and the recommendations by the Assembly for its follow-up. The report affirms confession as an act of conversion, which leads us into discipleship in all its risk and cost, and into the search for authentic faith, albeit with diverse cultural expressions. Significantly, it warns against structures in church and society, which militate against the full confession of Christ. It affirms that confession is both intensely personal and essentially communal. Four paragraphs in particular may be read as still pertinent nearly fifty years later, and especially in the currently difficult ecumenical and world context:

The Confessing Church

The earliest versions of the basis of the WCC, inaugurated in 1948, spoke of a fellowship of churches which ‘accept’ Jesus Christ as God and Saviour. Along with other changes of wording the replacement of ‘accept’ by the much stronger ‘confess’ was adopted at the 3rd WCC Assembly in New Delhi in 1961 (at which, incidentally, the Russian Orthodox Church was accepted into membership). Among the influences behind this change was undoubtedly the story of the German churches under Nazism and the formation of the Confessing Church in 1934, in opposition to the attempt by the pro-Nazi ‘German Christian’ movement to impose upon the Evangelical (Protestant) Church an order and set of beliefs reflecting the Nazi racial ideology and form of leadership. Those opposed to these measures believed that the demands of the German Christians had brought about a crisis, which in historic Reformation terms amounted to a status confessionis, a situation in which the Gospel of Christ itself, no less, was at stake and was being threatened by heresy, and had to be confessed in resistance. This resulted in the formation of the Confessing Church in May 1934, with the promulgation of the Barmen Theological Declaration, largely the work of Karl Barth, with its famous first thesis:

The Barmen Declaration and the stance of the Confessing Church (notwithstanding its place amid the complexities and ambiguities of the German scene at the time) was a major stimulus for the growing ecumenical movement of the 1930s and the formation of the WCC, and it has continued to resonate with churches witnessing in contexts of injustice and conflict, notably in South Africa where the issue of apartheid oppressively dividing both church and society as a status confessionis was highlighted from the 1960s onwards. This indeed resulted in a severance of relations between some major white-led churches and the WCC and some world confessional fellowships, until the fall of apartheid in the 1990s. In Latin America, North America, Asia as well as Europe the echoes of the German Struggle have continued to be heard.

The most stalwart and celebrated advocate of the Confessing Church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, viewed the Barmen Declaration as the unequivocal challenge for the church in Germany to decide whether it was truly the church of Jesus Christ or, by allowing unchristian – indeed pagan – criteria for membership and practices, was the church of Anti-Christ: replacing the lordship of Christ with subservience to the forces of nationalism, racism and militarism. Equally he saw it as no less a challenge to the ecumenical movement: which church in Germany would it welcome to the international ecumenical table?Footnote ¹⁰ It is not surprising that parallels can be drawn between the German church scene under Hitler and the situation of the Russian Church under the autocratic nationalist regime of President Putin. Confessing Church leaders and theologians like Bonhoeffer argued that by its effective denial of the lordship of Christ the official ‘Reich Church’ had no place in ecumenical fellowship, and that only the Confessing Church could be accepted as the true representative of Protestantism in Germany. So too, it is being argued today, it is the case with the Russian Orthodox Church under the leadership of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill, which by its stance on the war in Ukraine has made it hard to see the lordship of Christ and has thereby dismembered itself from ecumenical community. It is a very grave, but unavoidable, question. The case against Patriarch Kirill’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that in setting aside any considerations other than that of national self-interest as determined by President Putin, allowing the launch of a devastating war to go unchallenged and then unequivocally praised, the ROC leadership did not confess Christ as God and Saviour before the world, thereby sundering the fellowship of the WCC and other ecumenical bodies as a community of churches which are united in their confession of Jesus Christ. In April 2002 the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams stated:

Unworthy Servants, Faithful Confessing

Immediately, however, objections are raised that such a response is overly judgmental: the ecumenical fellowship is not a court of judgment and blame; if there is a danger of Russian heresy, there is equally a danger of ecumenical hypocrisy; the primacy of dialogue must be maintained. For, which church can claim that it is without sin in its witness to Christ? Which church is not to some extent shamed by its compromises, evasions and failures especially when it comes to matters of justice, peace and war? To this it may be said that of course no church is innocent or angelically praiseworthy here. This can be conceded unreservedly, if painfully. But it is one thing when a church is stumbling fitfully in response to the call of its Lord. It is quite another when it appears to be rejecting or disregarding that call as such. While many churches and disciples will readily admit that ‘we are unworthy servants’ (Lk. 17.10) it is of quite another order in effect to say ‘we have no ruler but Caesar’ (Jn 19.15). That is the allegation against the ROC leadership in regard to the invasion of Ukraine, and it cannot be sidestepped simply by calling for ‘dialogue’ as if this was an unconditional good. If there is to be dialogue, it must be focused on what it means to confess Christ concretely in that situation. Otherwise, what is the point of dialogue? What will it be about? It cannot be allowed to evaporate into an endless exchange of theological principles and generalities about the wider context, about the iniquities of war and the need for peace in the world today, about church-state relations and deep-rooted sources of conflict, about nationalism, with endless ruminations about the proper role of the churches in relation to the state, and so on. There has been repeated discussion and writing on these matters for decades, more than enough already. Such endless dialogue is an evasion of the confession. Any meaningful exchange has to be about this war (or ‘special military operation’) and its consequences of devastation, suffering and death unleashed upon Ukraine and Russia, and about what peacebuilding and reconciliation entail in this case. It has to examine the ROC’s perceived acquiescence on and after 24 February 2022, and Patriarch Kirill’s latest pronouncements. Is this to relapse into self-righteous condemnation? Not if we recall St Paul’s injunction: ‘If anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. Take care that you yourselves are not tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way, you will fulfil the law of Christ’ (Gal. 6.1-2). But first the fact of it being a burden needs to be acknowledged by the person or community bearing it. Until a response comes we must, if not actually breaking off relations, continue either in a waiting silence in hope of an eventual prophetic stance from the ROC. Or else enter into an intense and critical discussion with the ROC of the kind indicated above. Should not the ecumenical community be prepared to put itself in place of the ROC and say what it believes the ROC should be saying to Russia and the world? Or is this to risk sundering the ecumenical fellowship? But that fellowship is already at great risk thanks to the apparent refusal by one member to confess the lordship of Christ in its critical situation. Instead of talking only about the risk to the ecumenical fellowship, we should be talking about the opportunity presented by the crisis for the fellowship to find what it really stands for, beyond its own harmony and self-preservation, namely the truth in light of Christ.

The ecumenical movement has a significant record in daring to take this kind of risk. At crucial points it has survived and advanced precisely because churches and Christians either resisted dictatorship and nationalist, racist and militarist pressures, or acknowledged and repented of their mistakes in giving way to them. In 1919, the World Alliance for International Friendship Through the Churches, one of the organizations that engendered the WCC, held its first post-war meeting at Oud Wassenaar in the Netherlands. Suspicion, bitterness and recrimination were still rife, especially between the French and the Germans. The meeting would have collapsed completely had not the Germans present issued a statement that they believed the invasion of Belgium in 1914 to have been morally wrong. Even more striking was the declaration by the German Protestant leaders at their meeting with representatives of the infant WCC at Stuttgart in October 1945, so soon after the defeat of Nazi Germany:

The ‘us’ and ‘ourselves’ included even Confessing Church leaders, like Martin Niemöller who had been imprisoned by Hitler for seven years in a concentration camp. The Stuttgart Declaration was controversial both at the time (many Germans in the misery of defeat and chaos saw no particular guilt to be acknowledged) and afterwards (critics have pointed out how little it actually said about Nazi crimes especially against the Jews). But it signalled a readiness to confess the past and an openness for a new beginning, without which post-war reconciliation would not have advanced in the way it did. Added to this must be the examples of courageous prophets who publicly protested against the policies of their own governments. An outstanding example was the Anglican Bishop George Bell, who in 1944 caused great public controversy by speaking out against the British and American obliteration bombing of German cities. Bell, a leading ecumenist and a founding figure of the WCC, warned that although he was a bishop of the established church he did not wish to be regarded as simply a mouthpiece for the British government. Then there is the catalogue of churches repenting of their sinful complicity in racial oppression in apartheid South Africa or in social and economic oppression in Latin America. The churches of the ecumenical movement have a notable tradition of declaring against state injustice, from which encouragement can be drawn for this present challenge.

Prophetic Witness under Autocracy?

Is it, however, legitimate for the wider Christian fellowship to ask for a prophetic witness against the injustices committed by an autocratic regime when the likely cost of that witness will not fall directly on members of the outside community but on the ROC itself, or on prophetic figures within it?Footnote ¹³ It may be argued that the Orthodox tradition of the ‘symphony’ between church and state allows no room for prophetic questioning or criticism of the state’s actions by the Church. There is indeed a strong affirmation of patriotism and loyalty to the state in Orthodox teaching. But the careful wording in the Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, should be noted:

In the German case, ecumenical concern from outside could at least identify a community that had voluntarily taken the initiative to resist, namely, the Confessing Church, whereas in Russia currently there apparently is no such community. That should not in itself inhibit the ecumenical question, which can look with hopeful anticipation as it prays ‘Come, Holy Spirit’. Moreover, there are already individuals of varying religious affiliation or none who are taking immense personal risks in declining to support the war, or actually to speak against it. These are the martyrs for truth and righteousness of whom Jesus says, ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for truth and righteousness’ sake …’ (Mt. 5.10) and for whom the solidarity of the churches is surely called, in advance of any appeal by the church itself.

Dialogue at All Cost? The Primacy of Confession

It has not always been easy for the ecumenical movement to combine the role of peacemaker with that of prophetic voice for the truth. There is an instinctive, understandable desire not to ‘take sides’ in the interests of mediation,Footnote ¹⁵ which can too readily become a search for a ‘mutual understanding’ that sacrifices the search for truth to neutrality and mutual affability, independent of the confession of Christ. As early as 1932, the young Bonhoeffer gave a warning to an ecumenical peace conference:

Eight years later, as Europe entered into war again, the newly appointed first General Secretary of the WCC in formation, the Dutchman W.A. Visser’t Hooft, found himself disturbed by the attitudes of Christians to the war in its early stages, despite the full publicity given to the evil nature of the Nazi regime. There was, he wrote, ‘such a fear of national self-righteousness and such a sense of the failure of all nations that very many refused to make up their minds about the basic issues of this war’, and quoted the American Reinhold Niebuhr on the paradox that the revulsion against the moral simplifications of 1914–18 was now tempting people ‘to abstain from moral discriminations which are justified and essential in the present situation’. Ecumenical leaders like himself, he felt, were partly responsible for this situation, for:

What matters above all is that the ecumenical community maintains its loyalty to the confession of Christ as its identity, all other considerations including ‘dialogue’ being ancillary and dependent on that. The only meaningful dialogue is that which takes place under the proclamation and confession of Christ, which is not negotiable. It is vain to seek a way round in the hope of avoiding the painful struggle and risk of division. If the Russian Orthodox Church comes to believe that the ecumenical community as represented by the WCC is no longer a body with which it can identify, or if the ecumenical community, however painfully, adjudges the ROC to be a church that does not share in the unity of the confession, that indeed is cause for pain and sorrow.Footnote ¹⁸ But at some point, if not (in Rowan Williams’ words) a reading of the riot act, at least a knot has to be tied, a stand taken for the sake of truthfulness. That point has surely now been reached. For the confessing community, faithfulness to the confession has the primacy.

But what will happen if such a major player on the ecumenical scene as the ROC should sever its connexion, or have that connexion suspended? The simple answer is that we do not know, but that is no reason for not making a clear decision. At the very least, what will result will be an unambiguous positioning of the ecumenical community on where its stands, its clarity made absolute by the risk it has taken. At a critical moment in 1934 for the ecumenical movement, facing the question of where it stood in relation to the German Church conflict, and when siren voices calling for neutrality were so strong for fear that the question of truth was too dangerous and divisive for a movement working for ‘unity’, Bonhoeffer spoke with an unmistakable resonance for today and our current crisis: