The Whole Teaching in Plain Words

Some readers will walk the long road of this book chapter by chapter, weighing every canon and every Father. Others need the whole teaching in a handful of plain words before the road begins, or a place to return to when the argument grows heavy. This page is for them. Everything said here briefly is said again in the book at length, with its proofs; and nothing is said here that the book does not prove.

WHAT IS THE CHURCH?

The Church is not a building, an organization, or a club of the like minded. She is the Body of Christ, joined to Him as a body to its head, so truly that the Lord could say to a man persecuting Christians, why persecutest thou Me. There is one Church, as there is one Christ. To belong to her is to hold her faith, to receive her Mysteries, and to live her life; and to be cut off from her is to be cut off from life itself. That is why every question in this book matters so much.

WHAT IS THE ONE ALTAR?

Saint Paul teaches that the cup of blessing is the communion of the blood of Christ, and the broken bread the communion of His body: for we being many are one bread, and one body; for we are all partakers of that one bread. The Church, then, is not a club that also has sacraments; she is the one Body which the one Eucharist creates. And because the whole Christ, not a portion of Him, lies on every true holy table, the thousands of Orthodox altars across the earth are in reality one altar, joined visibly to one another through the bishops who are named at each and through the one faith they all confess, and joined to the altar of heaven itself. To commune at an altar is to be made one body with all that it confesses. That is why commemoration matters so much, why the cup can never be allowed to seal a false confession, and why this book is called Heavenly Communion.

WHAT IS HERESY?

Heresy is a false teaching about the faith itself: about God, about Christ, about the Church, about salvation. It is not bad behaviour but a poisoned confession. The Church forgives every sin that is repented, no matter how dark; she cannot make room within herself for a false confession, because the true confession is the one treasure she was created to guard. Sin is a wound in a member; heresy is poison in the blood. The Church endures the first with patience, and cannot endure the second at all.

WHAT IS SCHISM?

Schism is dividing the Church over something that is not the faith: a quarrel, a rite, a personal accusation, a custom, an ambition, a nation. The Fathers call it a grave sin even when the separators believe all the right things, because it tears the one Body of Christ over what was never worth a tear. And Saint Basil warned that a schism persisted in hardens, with time, into something like a heresy.

WHAT IS WALLING OFF?

Walling off, in Greek, apoteichisis, is this: when a bishop begins to preach, openly and publicly, a heresy that the Church has already condemned, the faithful stop commemorating his name in the services and stop being in communion with him, before any council has judged him. The fifteenth canon of the First and Second Council of Constantinople, held in the year 861, says that those who do this are not schismatics and deserve the honour due to the Orthodox; for they have not torn the Church, they have laboured to rescue her from the tearing.

WHY IS COMMEMORATION SO SERIOUS?

Because naming a bishop in the Divine Liturgy is a public declaration before God: I believe what this man believes; I stand where he stands. When he holds the true faith, that declaration is a joy. When he openly preaches condemned heresy, the declaration becomes a lie told at the altar; and Saint Theodore the Studite taught that it stains even the Orthodox man who makes it. The wall exists so that the faithful do not have to tell that lie.

WHAT IS WALLING OFF NOT?

It is not leaving the Church; it is refusing to leave her when a false shepherd walks out of the faith. It is not the founding of a new church: the walled off may not consecrate bishops of their own, set up a rival hierarchy, declare other people's Mysteries empty, or pass sentence on anyone's soul, for all judgment of persons belongs to God and to the Church in council. And it is never for personal grievances, moral scandals, calendars, rites, nationalities, or suspicions. It is for one cause only: open, already condemned heresy.

WHEN IS SEPARATION WRONG?

Whenever the cause is anything less than that. History is full of the wrong kind, and this book tells its story honestly. The Novatians separated over strictness toward repentant sinners; the Donatists over a personal accusation that proved false; the Old Believers over the correction of rites; and in our own age the Old Calendarist synods of Greece, the self named Genuine Orthodox, over the reckoning of the feasts. Each of them raised a rival altar, and each was condemned, even though each believed itself the faithful remnant. In every crisis both kinds of separation appear side by side, the lawful and the unlawful, and they can look alike at first. The difference is the cause, the manner, and the spirit; and the book teaches the reader to test all three.

MUST EVERYONE WALL OFF AT ONCE?

The refusal to make open, condemned heresy one's own confession binds every Orthodox conscience, for the defence of the faith is not optional. But the moment and the manner of each soul's step call for guidance, sobriety, and love, not haste. The timid and the confused are to be strengthened, not cursed. Those who in good conscience still stand within, grieving and protesting, are not thereby heretics. And the man who runs ahead of the canon, separating over suspicions and raising altars, falls off the other side of the same narrow road.

WHAT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE WHOLE MATTER?

Love. The wall is raised weeping, or it should not be raised at all. Hate the heresy and love the man caught in it. Refuse the false communion and pray for those you must stand apart from. Keep the heart humble, for a correct confession in a proud heart saves no one. And wait, in patience, for the Church to gather in council and set all things right, as she has done after every storm in her history.

WHERE DOES IT ALL END?

At the marriage supper of the Lamb. The wall is not the goal; the goal is the unbroken communion of the soul with Christ, kept safe through the storm until the truth is vindicated, as it always has been, and the faithful come home to the banquet that has no end. Everything in this book exists for that, and for nothing else.