By popular demand, and at the insistence of Matthew Baker, it is time for more from the wonderful Fr Thomas Hopko. What goes for the Orthodox goes for the rest of us. I have taken some liberties with Fr Hopko’s paragraphs.
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If you are in Eucharistic communion, you are one church. That’s what makes the Church one. It’s the unity in the body broken,
the blood shed of Jesus before the face of God. That’s where the Church is actualized on earth in the celebration of the mysteries: baptism, chrism, Eucharist. That’s what makes us one. That is where the unity of our doctrine is shown, our unity of worship, our unity of morals, our ethics, the unity of spiritual life.
We claim to belong to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church of Christ, the church that teaches the gospel truly, fully, that prays properly, that acts and teaches the right way to behave according to Christ, according to God Almighty, according to the Holy Scriptures, the canons, the saints, the fathers, etc.
So what is really required… all above everything, is a real desire for unity…to want to be one, to suffer over the division, to weep over it, to carry it around like a sword in your soul that we who claim Christ and praise God in Christ (especially in this world which is getting less and less Christian as the clock ticks) are divided…
Father Thomas Hopko What would the Orthodox have to do to have unity?
