Say that word 5 times. Schism, schism, schism, schism, schism. It’s a fun one. I like it. And I’m talking about it, specifically the schism of the Eastern church and the Western church. Joys!?
Matthew 18:15-20; Romans 13:8-14; Psalm 119:33-40; Ezekiel 33:7-11
In the book of Acts, the center of Christianity was Jerusalem. The apostles were mostly there; when there was conflict the resolution went through James the Just in Jerusalem. After AD 70, when Jerusalem was sacked by the Romans, the church in Rome, being the capital of the Empire, naturally grew in importance, along with Antioch in Turkey and Alexandria in Egypt. This continued for around 200 years, which Rome administering the church’s affairs, and Alexandria and Antioch being the centers of theological thinking.
Now, in and around 293 AD, a Roman Emperor name Diocletian, who happened to actively persecute Christians, sought to fix some of the increasingly unstable Empire’s issues by splitting it into two halves, the East and the West. After Diocletian’s death, and Constantine’s rise to power, rule of each half became centered in Rome in the West and the newly renamed and rebuilt Constantinople. Seeking for Constantinople to be a Christian city away from the hedonism and heathenry (isn’t that a fun word?) of Rome, Constantine moved his capital from Rome to there.
At a council of the churches in 381, church government was given to four provinces: Rome first, then Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch, with Jerusalem being given an honorary place. This spawned a conflict between the bishops of Rome and Constantinople, as while Rome held higher authority in religious matters, Constantinople held higher authority in secular matters.
When Rome fell, and with it the Western Empire, the Eastern emperor and the bishop of Constantinople together tried innumerable times to reassert their control over Rome and the rest of the former Western Empire. Essentially, the Pope in Rome thought that he was the last word in Christianity, and the Patriarch of Constantinople thought the same. Understandably this led to some problems.
Over the course of 600 or so years, this tension continually grew, spurred on by things such as jurisdictional disagreements, the role of the church in secular rule, liturgical practices (disagreements over worship style are apparently nothing new), clerical celibacy, and, most significantly, the Western church’s insertion of the phrase “and the son” into the Nicene Creed.
Finally, in 1054, after a power play by both the Pope and the Patriarch, they each excommunicated the other, and the gulf between East and West grew until the Fourth Crusade, when in 1204 some overzealous Crusaders from the West sacked Constantinople and looted it. There were a few attempts at reconciliation, but neither side would compromise, and thus nothing has really been solved to this day, in part because neither side will admit they were wrong.
Curiously, this is in direct contrast with Jesus’ own teachings on how to deal with conflict between Christians. In our gospel lessons Jesus teaches, in short: first confront each other in private to resolve the issue; if that doesn’t work bring in two or three others; if that doesn’t work, bring in the whole community; if it still doesn’t work, remove him from the fellowship. Note that the primary goal is to mend the relationship — breaking the relationship entirely is a last resort.
How would things be different in the church if the Pope and Patriarch followed those instructions and sought to mend their relationship instead of stubbornly exerting their own authority? The Eastern and Western churches to this day don’t get along well at all — even less than Catholics and Protestants do. Even Protestants look at the Eastern Orthodox a little weird, whereas we should all be working together as Christ’s body. There’s a break in relationship there that hasn’t been healed in nearly 1000 years.
In fact, this same kind of situation is mentioned in Ezekiel 33. “When I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked man, you will surely die,’ and you do not speak out to dissuade him from his ways, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable for his blood. But if you do warn the wicked man to turn from his ways and he does not do so, he will die for his sin, but you will have saved yourself.” The leaders of the Eastern and Western churches spent a good deal of time telling each other how wicked they were, but never sought to bring them back to following God.
In the same way, Christian today are quite good at telling others how wicked they are, without ever really doing anything about it. How many times do you hear people with Christian backgrounds railing against people for their wickedness, and only explaining as far as “O wicked man, you will surely die” without ever giving them a reason to turn from their wickedness? Or, more accurately, Christians tend to focus so much on sin that it becomes the main theme of Christianity, instead of God’s love for us and the eternal life it brings.
I don’t mean to lessen the seriousness of sin, because it is very true if we don’t turn to God our sin will have a very real consequence, but, as God says in Ezekiel, “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.”
In a way, at the core of these issues, both today and with the Eastern and Western church, is a lack of love. Remember that it is all about restoration of relationship, with removal from relationship a last resort. This is how God interacts with us after all; He continues to love us and seek to restore our relationships to Him even when we choose to break away from Him. Because that is how God loves us, it is our response to that to love others in the same way. “Love does no harm to its neighbor,” Paul writes.
Of course, the how of this is much less clear. It’s not easy for us to act out of love. It’s easier to stand and say, “O wicked man, you will surely die,” than it is to confront someone in love seeking to restore them into a relationship with God, but that is exactly what Jesus was, and in turn we are, called to do. When Jesus interacted with people who are in sin, he didn’t tell them to clean up their life and then follow him, or to stop what they were doing and then he’d heal them; he healed and forgave them and only then did he suggest the stop sinning, and he always loved them and brought them into relationship with him.