The True Light
by Fr Michael Harper
We have seen the true Light, we have received the heavenly Spirit, we have found the true faith, worshipping the undivided Trinity, who has saved us.
The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom
Holy is the true Light and passing wonderful, lending radiance to them that endured in the heat of the conflict; from Christ they inherit a home of unfading splendour wherein they rejoice with gladness evermore.
The Salisbury Antiphoner
It is an awesome moment. The people of God have received the Holy Gifts of the Body and Blood of Christ. The Liturgy is nearly over. Suddenly the choir bursts out with the words, "We have seen the true light." This ringing chant takes us to the heart of Orthodoxy. The chant goes on, "We have received the heavenly Spirit; we have found the true faith, worshipping the undivided Trinity, who has saved us." Here, joined together in this chant, are five key words which unlock the door of our understanding of Orthodoxy light, Spirit, faith, Trinity, and salvation.
At this joyful moment we are at the centre of Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Church worships and lives in the light and presence of the Trinity. It worships "the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world" (John 1:9). This is the light that has come into the world, even Jesus Christ. The Orthodox Church worships and receives the heavenly Spirit; Orthodox believers have "found the true faith" and, at great cost in human life, have borne witness to it.
We live in fearful days. Most churches are in serious decline in the Western world. Pascal once wrote, "Men despise religion; they hate it, and fear it is true." He is right, but the other side of the coin is that some fear it is not true. It is this fear which lies at least partially behind the tensions which have torn churches apart through the centuries. There has always been a longing for certainty clear and affirming dogmas to drive away the fear that our faith is unfounded after all. This is the doubt which haunts us. Here, I believe, the Orthodox Church can provide an answer.
How can we be sure about the truth? Is there an outward authority which can provide us with the certainty we deeply desire? The Roman Catholic answer is, "Trust the Church." The evangelical answer is, "Trust the Bible." The Orthodox answer is both of these but adds, "Trust the Holy Spirit."
In 1848 the four Eastern Patriarchs wrote to the Pope to explain how the Orthodox Church understood authority. They declared that the source of authority is not to be found in a single person or hierarch, or even in all the clergy. It is in the entire body of the faithful. Nicholas Zernov adds, "The Orthodox Christians believe that the Holy Spirit guides and protects the Church from all error."1 It needs to be added that authority is not a matter only for those alive today. The teaching of the saints and Fathers of the Church who have died is part of it. This is what G. K. Chesterton once called "the democracy of the dead."
There is no question that "authority" has been, and still is, the main and ultimate issue which has separated the churches through the centuries East from West, Protestant from Protestant, Pentecostal from Pentecostal. In the Protestant world the Scriptures, from the Reformation onwards, have been the sure test of doctrinal truth and the provider of certainty and assurance of faith. If the Bible says it, it is certainly true. In the Roman Catholic world the papacy, and ultimately the Pope himself, are seen as the final authority and the source of certainty the rock upon which all truth is established. If the Pope says it, you can depend upon it; it is true.
But neither of these sources of authority has delivered the goods. Protestantism has spawned thousands of churches and little "popes," each with their own beliefs and interpretations of biblical truth. Roman Catholicism has its problems with its strict dogmas and authority, especially the dogma of papal infallibility. Is there a way of avoiding the two extremes of papal and biblical infallibility?
The Model of the Jerusalem Council
We need to look at one of the most important stories in the New Testament the so called Council of Jerusalem (see Acts 15:1-29). The Church was in danger of being torn apart by a controversy of paramount importance. The decision was bound to affect the whole future of the Church. The issue was whether non Jews needed to become Jews (the men through circumcision) before they could be baptized as Christians. Saint Paul was adamant; although Jewish himself, he campaigned for the freedom of non Jewish men and women to become Christian without having to be Jewish first. There were many others who took the opposite position, and Saint Peter wavered between the two, coming down first on one side and then on the other.
So they met in Jerusalem to seek agreement. Although the first Ecumenical Council was not to meet for nearly three hundred years, two main principles were followed at the meeting in Jerusalem. The first was faith in the Holy Spirit as the divine guide to truth, and the second was the consensus of the Church. This was summarized by the definitive words, "For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us . . ." (Acts 15:28).
At the Council there was full discussion, and both sides freely put their cases. The Holy Spirit guided them, and the whole leadership of the Church spoke with authority based on confidence in God the Holy Spirit. At this gathering in Jerusalem we find some interesting pointers to what I have just been describing. Let us ask the question, "Why didn't the Apostles settle the matter with a quotation from the lips of Christ?" Would not a "scripture" have been sufficient? One can hardly imagine greater demand for a decisive word from Christ when the whole future mission of the Church was at stake. After all, they knew a great deal more about what Christ said than we have recorded in the Gospels. John Meyendorff has written about this, "Neither side made use of Jesus' sayings on the matter precisely because there were none, and nobody proceeded to invent any.” 2
Jesus Christ did not lay down definitive statutes or dogmas to cover every situation, even something as important as this. He did not define the Trinity, describe in detail His two natures, or give His mother the title Theotokos. He left the Church to do that. But there is one thing of immense importance that He did do. He promised the Church the Holy Spirit. He said to the Apostles, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth.... All things that the Father has are Mine. Therefore I said that He [the Holy Spirit] will take of Mine and declare it to you" (John 16:12-15).
But the Church needs to be protected from individual judgment, which has proved one of the most potent causes of division in the Protestant world through the centuries. It is no good someone saying, "The Holy Spirit has revealed this to me." It must also be tested by the Church and compared with the teaching of the Church down the centuries. And the bigger the issue, the wider should be the representation of the Church. In Jerusalem the truth was arrived at through the Holy Spirit and the Church. At the Jerusalem Council the Holy Spirit "made it known" to the Church through their representatives, the Apostles and elders. The Holy Spirit did it again at Nicaea in 325 and at the next six Ecumenical Councils. He has continued to do it to this day.
The slogan sola scriptura is not enough on its own. The Church always needs the Holy Spirit to guide it in major issues, like defining the Trinity and understanding the Person of Christ, His Incarnation, and the relationship between His humanity and His deity. When the Council ended its sessions the Apostles and elders gave glory to the Holy Spirit, but also affirmed the Church's part in all this. "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us," they said. The "us" was the whole Church speaking through its representatives. That is made clear when "the apostles and elders, with the whole church" (Acts 15:22) chose the emissaries to take the message to the rest of the Church. One cannot see here the authority of one person, a pope or a bishop, however godly or dedicated, for such a vital and universal decision, which affected the whole Church. A Russian lay theologian of the last century called A.S. Khomiakov (1804-60) put it boldly when he wrote, "The Church is not an authority . . . but the Truth." His critique of the whole of Western Christianity was sound. According to him, in the West "authority became external power" that of the pope or that of the Bible.3
The Right Way
The Orthodox Church has helped us to see things that were hidden from us. It has been like strong floodlights turned on, illuminating things we knew before but which we had never seen properly. Two of these are the Feast of the Transfiguration and the Feast of Feasts, Easter which the Orthodox call Pascha.
Dazzling Light
The Kontakion for the Pre feast of the Transfiguration wonderfully describes this event: "Today the whole of mortal nature glitters in the divine Transfiguration, in a divine manner, shouting with joy: Christ is transfigured, the Savior of all." Here is a feast which sparkles with the radiance of the glory of God.
As we examine the account of the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor, as recorded in the Gospels, we discover that most of the major features of Orthodoxy are woven into it. So it is no surprise that the Feast of the Transfiguration has such an important place in Orthodox worship. Its rank is equal to that of Christmas, Theophany (called Epiphany in the West), the Ascension, and Pentecost, yielding in importance only to Easter.
The Orthodox see this event in the life of Christ as a Trinitarian experience, similar to the baptism of Christ, which is remembered on January 6 each year at the Feast of the Theophany. As at Jesus' baptism, there is the voice of the Father, "This is My beloved Son. Hear Him!" (Mark 9:7). This time there is no dove; instead there is the cloud which appears and envelopes them, and in both the Old and New Testaments this often symbolizes the Holy Spirit.
Again when we focus on Christ Himself we see in this incident His two natures, the divine and the human, united and not confused. We see the manhood of Christ, which does not diminish the Godhead. Nothing is taken from His humanity; neither is anything added. In the words of Saint Paul, "in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily" (Colossians 2:9). All this was hidden behind the veil of flesh, but for a moment was seen by the three disciples and by Moses and Elijah.
We are in the heartland of Orthodoxy here. For instance, the importance of the communion of saints is underlined by the appearance of Moses and Elijah, talking to Christ. Unlike the Western Church, the Orthodox Church honours Old Testament personalities with the title "saint." And that is not all. Here we also see the Orthodox understanding of "deification," and we observe in Christ's experience the potentiality for our own glorification in Him through the work of the Holy Spirit. Many Orthodox saints have shone physically with the light of God's glory, so that their fellows have had to avert their eyes. Indeed, in traditional Orthodox teaching the Transfiguration has cosmic significance. The light of Christ shines not only from His body; but His clothes and the rocks around are also transfigured. In Mark we are told, "His clothes became shining, exceedingly white, like snow" (Mark 9:3; the Greek is literally "brighter than the sun"). The light of the sun is created light, but Jesus shines with uncreated light. As the kontakion states it, "The whole of mortal nature glitters." The Incarnation is something that not only affects our humanity; potentially it transforms the whole of creation.
There is obviously an important link between this event and the coming events in Jerusalem, Christ's Crucifixion and His Resurrection. According to Saint Luke, this was the subject of the conversation between Jesus and Moses and Elijah (Luke 9:30-32). Thus the Orthodox Church has the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross just forty days after the celebration of the Transfiguration.
An Explosion of Joy
New converts to Orthodoxy will always remember their first Easter or Pascha. Father Dumitru Staniloae writes of Easter as the "centre of Orthodox worship." He goes on, "It is an explosion of joy . . . it is the explosion of cosmic joy at the triumph of life." That perfectly describes our experience of our first Pascha Service in 1995 at the Greek Orthodox church in Bath. It was an "explosion of joy," a "triumph of light.”
We have found in the Orthodox Church a sense of "perpetual resurrection" which needs no "bureaucratic protection," as John Betjeman once put it in a poem he wrote after visiting an Orthodox church in Greece. The sense of timelessness in Orthodoxy is part of this living resurrection. How time oriented we Westerners have become! I found a marvelous antidote to this when I became an Orthodox priest: when we serve the Divine Liturgy we wear our wrists cuffs which hide our watches.
An unknown Soviet prisoner in a Siberian labour camp, imprisoned for his Orthodox faith, once wrote a letter describing Easter. On Easter Day in this gulag there were no services, no bells, no candles, and no special Easter dishes. In fact, there was deliberately more work and more interference than usual. There was more spying and there were more threats from the secret police. "Yet Easter was there," he wrote, "great, holy, spiritual, unforgettable. It was blessed by the presence of our risen God among us blessed by the silent Siberian stars and by our sorrows… Death is conquered, fear no more, an eternal Easter is given to us!"4 It is that "eternal Easter, experienced by a Russian imprisoned in Siberia for his faith, that has been our great gain. It is what the true light of the Orthodox Church has given us. As Orthodox we live from one Easter to the next.
"Christ is Risen!"
"He is risen indeed!"
- The Concise Encyclopedia of Living Faiths, Hutchinson, p. 100.
- John Meyendorff, Living Tradition, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1978, p. 34.
- The paper from which this quote comes was published in French in 1872 (Lausanne and Vevey) pp. 3-7. It is quoted in Meyendorff, Living Tradition, p. 27f.
- Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, p. 117.
An extract (chapter 16) from the book "A Faith Fulfilled: Why are Christians Across Great Britain Embracing Orthodoxy? " by Fr Michael Harper.
Harper, M. (1999) A Faith Fulfilled: Why are Christians Across Great Britain Embracing Orthodoxy?. Conciliar Press, Ben Lomond, California, USA
This book can be purchased from the Saints Michael and Gabriel Orthodox church bookstore.
The full book can also be purchased online from crossroadbooks.