John S. Romanides

Orthodox Church

An Excerpt from:

ORTHODOX-HETERODOX DIALOGUES and THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES

THE THEOLOGIAN IN THE SERVICE OF THE CHURCH IN ECUMENICAL DIALOGUE

© John S. Romanides

At Amsterdam in 1948 the Protestant founders of the WCC began their theological cooperation with their three Orthodox co-founders. They were Archbishop Germanus of Great Britain and Father Georges Florovsky, professor at St. Sergius School of Theology in Paris, both representing the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople New Rome. The third Orthodox co-founder was Professor Hamilcar Alivizatos of the University of Athens who represented the Church of Greece.

The Protestants within Faith and Order had already begun their theological dialogue with Father Florovsky and continued doing so when Faith and Order became part of the WCC in 1948. All this time Father Florovsky had been one of the chief spoksmen of Orthodox theology.

But by the time of the Genral Assembly of the WCC in New Delhi 1961 Father Florovsky and other Orthodox present sensed that their Patristic theology was about to be replaced by Nikos Nissiotis' ideas about theology. That Nickos Nissiotis had beome the "chosen one" of Visser 't Hooft, the first General Secretary of the WCC, became clear when he made his debut as a main speaker at the General Assembly at New Delhi in 1961. This was 'the omen' that dialogue between the Orthodox and the Protestants within the WCC would end up a disappointing and expensive failure.

Some Orthodox professors present at Delhi had initially had voted to reject Nissiotis' doctoral thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Athens and were a bit surprised at seeing him being promoted as a distinguished Orthodox theologian. The basic reason why both they and Father Florovsky were quite bewildered was simply because he was not a specialist in the theology of the Orthodox Fathers of the Church. He was an outstanding specialist in such theologians as Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Existentialism and related topics.

At the very same time that Nissiotis' doctoral thesis on existentialism was being processed for approval, my thesis on "Ancestral (Original) Sin" was also being approved by the very same faculty. My thesis had proven that Augustine's analogia entis and analogia fidei and his teachings about original sin as inherited guilt and predestination of some inspite of this guilt which supposedly makes them worthy of eternal damnation but with some saved anyway because God so choosed, were completely foreign to both the Bible and the Orthodox Fathers of the Church.