There's been a bit of a frenzy lately in the religious press about a meeting that took place on September 18 between Pope Benedict XVI and Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev. The archbishop is a very high official in the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Church and the Vatican have had a chilly relationship for a number of years now, which is why any sort of meeting between the two is a newsworthy event. But what makes this story particularly interesting is that some people see what's happening here as more than just a calming of tensions. Some are speculating that what we're seeing is in fact the end of the Great Schism.

Most American Christians have no idea about the Great Schism. They might have some notion of the Reformation of the 1500s, but they don't realize that the largest and most damaging split in the history of the Christian Church came five hundred years earlier, when the east and the west broke away from each other, forming what we know today as the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The issues that drove this schism range from the important to the mundane, including matters of secular power as much as theology. Both churches today claim to be the One Church that Jesus established. As one might imagine, when such claims to uniqueness are in the mix, there's a great deal of tension that develops. The millenium long split between the east and the west has been bitter, and Christians on both sides of the divide have been impoverished by the lack of communion with one another.

Personally, I don't think that this meeting is a sign of the Great Schism's immanent end, though it may contribute to it somewhere a long way down the road. The issues of a millenium worth of schism are far and deep and cannot be overcome in one single meeting between two men. I doubt very much that Archbishop Hilarion will be asking the Patriarch of Russia to submit to the pope's claim to universal jurisdiction, nor do I see it likely that the pope will consider dropping the filioque or either of the two later Marian dogmas. Still, just the possibility that we could be witnessing the beginning of a reunion of these two great and noble Christian traditions is enough to inspire awe.

I find this particularly interesting as an Anglican, since I hear much more about churches breaking apart from one another these days than I do about them coming together to fulfill Our Lord's desire "that they all may be one" (John 17:20-21). As a catholic Christian, I share much in common with my friends in the Orthodox Church and in the Roman Church. I wonder a bit whether the Anglican Church would exist today as a seperated church were it not for the Great Schism's destabilizing effect on the whole of Christendom. If the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics were to work out their differences and come together as one united Church, it would be quite difficult for Anglicans to justify being seperated from such a body.

On the other hand, from a traditional Anglican perspective there is nothing currently barring us from entering into communion with either one of these churches, at least from our end. Certainly, the ordination of women and other modern changes in the Anglican Church pose a problem for any sort of meaningful dialogue with either Rome or the East. Nevertheless, the impediments that we would see as Anglicans are quite few, particularly with the Orthodox. We all believe in the essential need for Holy Scripture, the apostolic succession of bishops and the classical three-fold order of ordained ministry, the centrality of the Holy Eucharist and Holy Baptism in our common life, and the Nicene and Apostle's Creeds as being the standard of faith. The Orthodox might say we've added to that, and while Rome says we've taken away things like the office of Peter. But what should that matter to us if we don't see these things as communion blocking issues?

A parishioner said to me recently, "I see myself in communion with the Orthodox. Maybe they don't see it the same way, but that won't change how I see it." He has a point. After all, Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians are welcome to receive Holy Communion in our churches. We consider those who've been confirmed by their bishops to be truly confirmed. When a priest from either of those churches is received into the Episcopal Church, we recognize his orders; we don't re-ordain him. So why even cede the ground by suggesting that we aren't already in communion, at least where it counts, at the level of the sacramental? How would ecumenical conversations change if we approached them from that angle?

And how might that also change our ongoing splintering and schisming within Anglicanism? What if, instead of lawsuits and Internet warfare and acrimony, we all just simply decided that we're going to maintain sacramental and true communion with one another, regardless of ecclesiastical politics?

What would happen if there was a schism and nobody showed up?