The Church’s Moral Witness to the World
Not Social Reformers but Preachers of the Word
Like ecclesiology, social ethics seeks to articulate the social dimension of the Christian vocation. But while ecclesiology is concerned primarily with the nature and internal life of the Church, social ethics is concerned with articulating the Church’s understanding and response to the world outside her walls.
The Basis of the Social Concept (Basis) in the Introduction put it this way: Orthodox social ethics are the Church’s “teaching on church-state relations and a number of problems socially significant today.” But what does this mean? To answer this, let’s look at one of the distinctive characteristics of our social ethics.
The Father’s Moral Witness & Ours
Both Moscow’s Basis and Constantinople’s For the Life of the World (FLOW) integrate insights from Scripture and the Church fathers. Our reliance on the fathers is one of the defining characteristics of Orthodox social teaching. But we need to be careful here. We cannot simply assume that our social world is the same as that of the fathers. For better and worse, our time is different from the era of late antiquity in which the fathers wrote.
For example, today, when we see men and women living in poverty, unhoused, or suffering from any number of physical or emotional illnesses our response is to act—or at least want to act. Whether personally or through the agency of some institution (church, government, etc.) when see human suffering we feel need to comfort those who are so afflicted but fix the problem.
And so, quite laudably, we provide medical care or psychological counseling. We offer housing vouchers, create a job training program, establish a food bank, or provide monetary assistance to help people “get back on their feet.” Today our goal is not simply to mitigate the burden of poverty but to lift the poor into the middle class. To make “them,” if you will, like “us.”
For the fathers, however, there was no notion of making the poor wealthy. As a practical matter this wasn’t possible. Living as they did in an era of widespread deprivation, the resources simply didn’t exist for them to do so. The best that could be done for the poor was to ease—but not erase—the burden of their poverty. But this is not the only difference between the fathers era and our own.
Preachers Not Social Reformers
St. Gregory of Nyssa says that “the poor are our gateway to the Kingdom.” He goes on to say that they
...are the ones who store away the good things that we look upon. They are the gatekeepers of the Kingdom. They open the gates before the merciful and shut them in the face of the cruel ones who do not do good. They are the strongest accusers and the best defenders. They do not accuse and defend with words, but the Lord sees what is done to them. Every action cries out in a loud voice before God, the searcher of hearts.
The point here is this. As least as we understand the term today, the Church fathers were not social reformers.
While they preached against the injustices of their day, they also accepted the existence of the Roman Empire. As a practical matter, this meant that they simply accepted their society as the context in which the Church found herself. Working within their society, the fathers encouraged the believers to do what good they could do.
Take, as another example, slavery.
Again, for the fathers, slavery—like poverty—is the result of human sinfulness. St. Basil the Great says that “no one is a slave by nature.” Rather, men or women “are brought under the yoke of slavery either because they are captured in battle or else they sell themselves into slavery owing to poverty.”1 But while he lays out guidelines for how master and slave are to behave, he never “opposed slavery.”2
St. Gregory of Nyssa is even more explicit in his condemnation of slavery but, like St. Basil and (as we’ll see) St. Gregory Nazianzus, what he condemns is not the institution of slavery as such but the pride of the slave owner in usurping the place of God:
So, when someone turns the property of God into his own property and arrogates dominion to his own kind, so as to think himself the owner of men and women, what is he doing but overstepping his own nature through pride, regarding himself as something different from his subordinates? “I got me slaves and slave-girls.” What do you mean? You condemn man to slavery, when his nature is free and he possesses free will, and you legislate in competition with God, overturning his law for the human species. The one made on the specific terms that he should be the owner of the earth, and appointed to government of the Creator -- him you bring under the yoke of slavery, as though defying and fighting against the divine decree.3
Though the saint opposes “the concept of mastery due to its proud nature” and “is against the notion that human beings are fungible” his concern is not with overturning the institution of slavery. Instead, he “use[s] the metaphor of slavery (i.e. that God is the slaveholder and human beings are slaves).”4
Finally, the “last of the Cappadocian fathers, Gregory of Nazianzus,... is also very aware of the problems of owning and managing slaves” but (once again) his concern is the spiritual harm done to the owner”:
To be a master over slaves is a fatal net! Harsh masters always become hateful, but slaves will trample a pious master without shame, the bad slaves cannot be made mild, the good ones cannot be made docile. They breathe sharp bile against both types of master beyond all reasoning.5
It should be noted, if only in passing, that the saint like St. Basil owned slaves and that both fathers accepted slavery “as an inevitable part of human social existence.”6
Building on the Fathers’ Witness
To contemporary Christians the response to slavery—and Christians owning slaves—is scandalous! But for the fathers of the Church, the concern (once again) is not social reform but repentance. And while they see slavery as evil, they accept it as a reality in a fallen world.
As we read in FLOW (§65),
...the early Church did not pretend it had the power to end bonded servitude in its society, or even succeed in imagining such a possibility, the Christian community at its best did attempt to create a community and even polity of its own in which the difference of masters and slaves was annulled by the equality of all Christians as fellow heirs of the Kingdom, and therefore as kin one to another.
But, as the document goes on to say "Christian society did not over the centuries adhere faithfully to this rule, or properly recognize and accept the dissolution of the institution of slavery that it logically implied.” Instead, “Christian culture came to accept an evil it should have eschewed from the first.” It is only since the Enlightenment in the 18th century, that it “has it become fully possible for the Christian world to repent without any duplicity for its failure in this regard to live perfectly in accord with the liberating Gospel of Christ, who came to set the captives free and to pay the price of their emancipation.”
Learning from the Fathers’ Witness
Two things, I think, are important here.
First, while we respect the fathers, their social ethics were developed in a time of almost universal poverty and rigid social hierarchy. Their moral teaching therefore is not always immediately applicable to our situation in the West. The Church now must minister in a pastoral context of widespread (if not universal), abundance and (especially in the American context) “rugged individualism.”
Second, while specific moral teachings may not be applicable, I think their underlying approach to social problems is. Following the fathers, we should minimize harm while at the same time seeking to foster the good.
The world we inhabit is a fallen order, broken and darkened, enslaved to death and sin, tormented by violence and injustice. Such is not the condition God wishes for his creation; it is the consequence of an ancient estrangement of our world from its maker. As such, it is a reality that can in no way dictate or determine the limits of our moral responsibilities to our fellow creatures. We are called to serve a Kingdom not of this world (John 18:36), in service to a peace that this world cannot give (John 14:27). We are called, therefore, not to accommodate ourselves to the practical exigencies of the world as we find it, but instead ever and again to strive against evil, however invincible it may at times appear, and to work for the love and justice that God requires of his creatures, however impractical that may at times prove (§4).
Yes, as we have seen with slavery, we need to be on guard so that we do not fall into a life of moral laxity and even become agents of moral evil. But as we see in the lives of the saints, these are harms we can not only guard against but avoid.
Theosis & Our Ascetical & Liturgical Social Witness
Holding fast to the fathers’ practice of economia in the pastoral life presupposes that we also adhere to the Church’s ascetical tradition.
As the requirements of Christian love are unremitting, those who are joined to Christ may on many occasions be called to pursue God’s goodness even to the point of self-sacrifice, after the model of their Lord. The work of transfiguring the cosmos is also a struggle against everything distorted and malignant, both in ourselves and in the damaged structure and fabric of a suffering creation; and this means that, inevitably, this work must be an ascetical labor (FLOW, §5).
Rooted in the sacraments and human freedom, we must each of us practice “ascetic self-denial in service of God’s love, and for the work of transfiguring creation” (§15).
None of this frees us from the obligation to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to serve our neighbor and care for the creation. We are not pietists who deny that we are co-workers with Christ. Rather, our social ethics, our practice of economia, our commitment to asceticism and the sacramental life of the Church are part of a larger whole. We must always bear in mind that
On the path to communion with God, it is humanity’s vocation not merely to accept—but rather to bless, elevate, and transfigure—this world, so that its intrinsic goodness may be revealed even amidst its fallenness. This is the special purpose of human life, the high priestly calling of creatures endowed with rational freedom and conscience. We know, of course, that this work of transfiguration will never be complete in this life, and can reach its fulfillment only in the Kingdom of God; still, however, our works of love bear fruit in this life, and they are required of all who would enter the life of the age to come (Matthew 25:31–46). The Church knows that such efforts are never in vain, moreover, because the Holy Spirit is also at work in all the labors of the faithful, bringing all things to their fruition in due season (Romans 8:28).
Simply remaining silent on pressing contemporary moral problems is unacceptable. But when I speak, I need to remain focused on the goal that Christ has set for me as a Christian and a priest: the transfiguration, the deification, of creation.
Bibliography
De Wet, and Chris L. “The Cappadocian Fathers on Slave Management.” Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 39, no. 1 (May 1, 2013). https://scielo.org.za/pdf/she/v39n1/17.pdf.
“The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church.” Https://Incommunion.org/Tag/The-Basis-of-The-Social-Concept-of-The-Russian-Orthodox-Church/. Russian Orthodox Church, 2000.
www.goarch.org. “Social Ethos Document - Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America,” 2020. https://www.goarch.org/social-ethos.