Modern Ecumenism

By Bishop Artemije (Radosavljević) of Raska and Prizren

1. The very name "World Council of Churches" contains the entire heresy of this pseudoecclesial organization.
The church is One and Catholic, and in it is all Truth, all Grace, and all that that the Lord brought with Him to the earth and gave to the people, and left among them for their salvation. The Church is One and Catholic because it gathers all who desire salvation into one, into wholeness, which is the Body of the God-Man Christ. Hence the very idea of a "council" or "union" of churches is unthinkable, inadmissible and unacceptable to the consciousness and conscience of the Orthodox person.

2. The World Council of Churches was born out of a modern heresy—the pan-heresy that is called ecumenism. Today the phenomenon of Ecumenism is not anything new and unknown. Quite a bit has been written and said about it for decades, and it can be rightly said that it is a very complex phenomenon. Ecumenism is above all an ecclesiological heresy because it strikes at the very root of Orthodox faith—at the holy Church, attempting to transform it into an "ecumenical organization" stripped of all the theanthropic characteristics of the Body of Christ, thus preparing the path for the Antichrist himself.

The foundations of ecumenism were laid as early as the end of the 19th century, in 1897, at the conference of 194 Anglican bishops in Lambeth, England. The basic principles of the future ecumenical union of Christian "churches" were formulated at this gathering. The Lambeth conference defined a dogmatic minimum, stemming from the idea that unity should be sought in the lowest common denominator of theological teachings. This lowest common denominator should be sought in the Holy Scripture (but outside the context of the Holy Tradition), in the Symbol of Faith of Nicea and Constantinople, and in just two holy mysteries: Baptism and the Eucharist.

In addition, there was an emphasis on the so-called "Principle of Tolerance" toward the teaching of other "churches" in preparation for the introduction of a "compromise of love." The third invention of the Lambeth Conference was the famous "branch theory," stemming from the assertion that the Church of Christ is supposedly a tree of many branches, all of whose branches are mutually equal and which represent the manifestation of the one Church only in their collective unity.

Once sown, the evil seed spread quickly. By the beginning of the 20th century, in 1919, the Protestant "churches" organized a World Mission Conference in Edinburgh where it was decided to organize a worldwide Christian movement to address issues of faith and church organization. Simultaneously active was the Life and Work movement, whose task was to realize the unity of Christians through their cooperation on issues of practical life. Out of these two exclusively Protestant movements and with their unification in 1948 at the first General Assembly in Amsterdam, the World Council of Churches based in Geneva was created. Sadly, also present at this assembly, unfortunately, were some of the Orthodox Churches, including the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Church of Cyprus, the Church of Greece and the Russian Metropolia in America (today the Orthodox Church in America).

(Translated by Snezana Ivanisevic De Berthet. Excerpt from http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/artemije_thess.aspx)