What is Orthodoxy: One and Apostolic

They say the devil’s in the details, and I would have to agree. But not only would I agree; I would add that the devil is in the details especially when it comes to words. As Fr. Alexander Schmemann puts it in his book The Eucharist, “The devil did not create new, ‘evil’ words, just as he did not and could not create another world, just as he did not and could not create anything. The whole falsehood [i.e. the deception in the Garden] and the whole power of this falsehood lie in the fact that he made the same words into words about something else…” (Fr. Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist). In the Church, when it comes to words, particularly the words the Church herself uses, meaning has always been a significant detail. So, in beginning to answer the question What is Orthodoxy? I thought we could focus on an couple of words whose meaning are essential to Christian faith but also differ vastly between Protestants and Orthodox. The words come directly from the Nicene Creed: I believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

For those who know the Nicene Creed these words will be familiar. For those who do not know the Nicene Creed (read here) or are not very familiar with it, the phrase may be somewhat new. But regardless, the phrase is vital to the question of Christian identity and thus Orthodox identity. This significance comes from the fact that as a part of the Nicene Creed, it is an essential part of Christian belief.

But, remember: details, details, details. One could give a number of meanings to those words from the Creed, but what do they actually mean? Or more to the point of this post, what is the meaning of these words for the Orthodox Church? In lieu of this post’s purpose I’ve chosen not to deal with each aspect of the phrase at length (even though I’d love to), but I do want to zoom in on just the two words from that creedal phrase: One and Apostolic.

Apostolic. That the Church is Apostolic means that she is the Church of the Apostles. In saying so, the Orthodox Church asserts more than that we merely believe in the same Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as did the Apostles. Being Apostolic in this sense means far more than just agreeing with the Apostles in the basic tenants of belief. It means the the Church is connected to the Apostles in a creedal way AND an embodied way. Connected in a creedal way by means of the whole (not just the most basic) content of apostolic belief as understood according to the seven Ecumenical Councils, the Creeds (Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed), Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. AND connected in an embodied way by a historical, ecclesial continuation of the Ancient Church’s life manifested in the office of bishop and expressed in the whole of the Church’s life, not just in her belief. That includes the Sacraments (seven of them total), all the services and rites in their liturgical and iconographic (icons) entirety, the feasts and fasts of the Church, and more.

One. The Church is One because there is “There is one body and one Spirit…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” as St. Paul the Apostle says, and thus, we are not of Paul, Apollos, Peter, etc. but we are all in Christ. Another word to describe this onenesss could be unity. However, there is another dimension to the meaning of the Church’s oneness (also rooted in Christ), and that is oneness as singularity. This means that just as one could say that Jesus is Lord and Caesar was not Lord because there’s only one, singular Lord, we can (and must) also say that such-and-such is the Church while another such-and-such is not the Church because there is only one, singular Church. And this is a massively important point to be made because when Orthodox confess that the Church is one, they’re confessing that the Orthodox Church is that one, singular Church, and no one else is.

The Orthodox Church’s belief that she alone is the One and Apostolic Church is essential to her identity, and it is the root of all that she does. Thus, when asking What is Orthodoxy, this bold self-identification is primary and essential to the answer. Orthodoxy is NOT just one of many ways to express the Christian faith. It is not another denomination like Lutheranism or Presbyterianism. And it is definitely not a movement like the Great Awakenings of early America or the Jesus Movement of the mid-1900’s. Orthodoxy is the one, singular, apostolic faith that has belonged to the one, singular, apostolic Church since the Apostolic Age. And regardless of whether or not you agree with it or believe such an assertion, it is necessary to recognize it in order to make sense of any other part of the Orthodox faith.