I am an Orthodox Fundamentalist

[bogoliubtsy]

Is your jurisdiction in communion with any others?

[OrthodoxyOrDeath]

Yes we are in communion with many others, but most of all Christ.

We are in communion with the Holy Fathers and the Orthodox Church of all centuries past. We argee with their teachings, faith, and practice just as they. We are in communion with an army of His angels who will soon be here with trumpets blowing and great "rush" like a waterfall.

Sounds ridiculous I know.

[bogoliubtsy]

Yes we are in communion with many others, but most of all Christ.

We are in communion with the Holy Fathers and the Orthodox Church of all centuries past. We argee with their teachings, faith, and practice just as they. We are in communion with an army of His angels who will soon be here with trumpets blowing and great "rush" like a waterfall.

Sounds ridiculous I know.

Umm...yeah, kind of. As far as other human beings who you consider to have membership in the Church Militant....anyone?

[OrthodoxyOrDeath]

When people ask: “Who are you in communion with?”, it reveals a certain and honest glimpse into a type mentality as to how they view the Church.

Usually this kind of a question means they understand the catholicity of the Church as a legal system of cohesion, as an interdependence regulated by some code of mutual acceptance. S"C"OBA is a good example. For them the Church is an organization with laws and regulations like the organizations of nations. Bishops, like politicians, are distinguished by ranks of perceived authority: patriarchs, archbishops, metropolitans, bishops. For them, they are not all equal and free bishops, and one diocese is not something complete, but a piece of a larger whole: the autocephalous church or the patriarchate, communion with which validates ones Orthodoxy.

Such a concept of the Church leads directly to the Papacy. The catholicity of the Church has nothing to do with these systems.

The catholic Church which we confess in the Creed is not called catholic because it includes all the Christians of the earth, but because within her one can find all the grace of God. The meaning of catholicity has nothing to do with a "universal" organization the way the Papists and those who are influenced by that mentality understand it.

Just as humanity can become an abstract idea, the same thing is happening to the Church - when we see her as an abstract, universal idea. In order to understand humanity well, it is enough to know only one man, since the nature of that man is common to all men of the world.

Similarly, to understand what the catholic Church of Christ is, it suffices to know well only one local church. And as with men, it is not submission to a hierarchy which unites them, but their common nature, so the local churches are not united by organizational structures, but by their common nature.

A local Orthodox church regardless of her size or the number of the faithful is by herself alone, independently of all the others, catholic. And this is so because she lacks nothing of the grace and gift of God. All the local churches of the whole world together do not contain anything more in divine grace than that small church with few members.

She has her priests and high priest; she has all the Holy Mysteries; the Body and Blood of Christ. Any worthy soul can taste of the Holy Spirit’s presence. She has all the grace and truth. What is she lacking therefore in order to be Orthodox?

St. Paul, wrote to “the Church of God which is at Corinth…” Yes, it really was the Church of God, even if it was at Corinth, at one concrete place and time.

This is the catholic Church, something concrete in space and time. This concrete entity can occur anywhere without any knowledge of the other, without ceasing to remain essentially the same and certainly complete.

Her relations with the other local churches are not relations of legal and jurisdictional interdependence, but relations of love and grace. One local church is united with all the other local Orthodox churches of the world by the bond of identity and the Body and Blood of Christ. Just as one is the Church of God, the other is the Church of God also, as well as all the others. They are not divided by boundaries of nations nor the political goals of the countries in which they live.

The Latin system, and even the new-calendarist one, is the greatest distortion of Church unity. It has made that bond of love and freedom, a bond of constraint, and not just contstraint, but also tyranny. It is unbelief in the power of God and confidence in the power of humans.

So, who are we in communion with? Well, tell me who is Orthodox in their faith and has preserved Holy Tradition unadulterated and I will be happy to hear it – that is who we are in communion with.