the holy new martyrs of eastern russia - Coptic Orthodox teaching

67
“How would you interpret, from the civil and ecclesiastical points of view,
the appearance of the new church tendency – the platform of the Declaration
of July 29, 1927?”
From the ecclesiastical point of view: as an incorrect teaching on the Church and
on the matter of our salvation in Jesus Christ – an error of principle by Metropolitan
Sergius…
“How do you look at the ‘Declaration’? etc.”
From the Church point of view it is an incorrect teaching on the Church and on
the matter of our salvation in Jesus Christ (Metropolitan Sergius’ error in principle),
while from the civil point of view it is the desire to be freed from this oppressive and
disturbing situation in which the hierarchs of the Orthodox Church find themselves.
The ‘Declaration’ is a separation from the truth of salvation. It looks on salvation
as on a natural moral perfection of man (a pagan philosophical doctrine of salvation),
or otherwise as the foundation of the Kingdom of God on earth, and for its
realization an external organization is absolutely essential. In my opinion, this is the
same error of which, as early as 1912, I accused Metropolitan Sergius, warning that
THROUGH THIS ERROR THEY WOULD SHAKE the Orthodox Church. I said
this in the article, ‘The New Theologians’, published in the Old Ritualist journal “The
Church” N 16 for 1912, signing it with the pseudonym ‘Wanderer’. They knew who
printed this, and for a long time I experienced their ill disposition towards me. By dint
of this error of theirs, they cannot even THINK of the Church without an external
organization, and since the authority of the USSR as a civil political organization is
unacceptable for them in this respect (since it has suppressed various of their external
activities and diminished their external position), it is entirely possible that they will
oppose this authority. Then they repented of this and recognized their mistake, or
rather, the uselessness of OPPOSITION.
The personal composition of the Synod has no great significance as regards its
acceptability. It is the very platform [of this Synod] that is unacceptable, for it sees in
the Church an external political organization which is united with the civil
organization of the authorities of the USSR, and in accordance with this aims for a
corresponding external political activity for the Orthodox Church, and thereby pushes
the Church onto the path of new upheavals and surprises, at the same time distorting
THE VERY ESSENCE OF THE CHURCH.
Also, in reply to a question on the aims of his speech, he replied:
Only the salvation of my own soul, since I believe that they (the synodals) are
destroying Orthodoxy, making it worldly and earthly, and completely distorting the
essence of the Orthodox Church… I will never refuse to carry out any tasks given by
the government that do not bind my conscience, if only in order to show that they are
not thinking up any evil against it. A purely political civil organization of believers is
possible only as a subsidiary weapon of the civil authorities, as it was before the
67