https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=D0dTba845ls
Talking about the structure of the church, isn’t there a risk that it could become bureaucratic at some point, or that there’s a lack of bond, of this bond that you’ve talked about and more of a corporation style administration? Yes, of course. Of course there’s that problem, there’s that difficulty. In theory, there are two, let’s say one of the reasons why there are like the two traditions, let’s say the two authorities in the church, has been a desire to prevent the fossilization, let’s say. You can imagine that the church, just like in the Old Testament, has two lines. It has a priestly line and a prophetic line, and the priestly line is there to be more of a top-down, let’s say, enforcing power. The prophetic line is there to be more of a wilder, but also a more direct version of the pattern. That’s the same thing that happens in the Catholic Church, for example. You have the authority of the church, but then you also have the saints. The saints have more power than the authority. You see it in the history of the Catholic Church, for example, where when there were three popes in Avignon, they asked Catherine of Siena, who was this woman who lived in a room her whole life and never came out and was completely isolated, asked her to decide who the pope was going to be. Because she was a holy woman, she ended up having more direct authority than the more formal structure of the church. But you need both. You can’t just have one side. If you just have one side, either the church crystallizes and it solidifies and becomes, like you said, just a cold, empty bureaucracy, or it starts to split and starts to break apart. Before you know it, you have 10 million denominations that all think their others are heretics. You need to have those two sides, or else the prophetic side, without the order side, is like someone drinking too much wine. It doesn’t work. It just falls apart. And do you have an example of a contemporary church that has these two forces keeping it together? I mean, I think, as you know, probably I converted to Orthodoxy. I think the Orthodox Church has that. It’s painful. None of it’s fun. It’s like human beings are not great. It still is painful because you see the conflicts and you see the—it kind of looks horrible. You see the politics. You see the monastics who are fighting with the church hierarchy. The church hierarchy will want to sometimes compromise politically because it’s to their advantage, and then the monastics will be radical and say, like, you know, you can’t do that, whatever. So you’ll see this tension between the monastic community and the church hierarchy. I think in the end, if you back off and you kind of pull away and you look at how it’s going in general, it ends up kind of balancing itself out. So not that the Orthodox Church isn’t in danger right now because everything’s in danger. We’re in such strange, confused times that it’s difficult to avoid it, but I think of all the churches, it’s the one that has avoided the most.