THE LITURGICAL THEOLOGY OF FR. A. SCHMEMANN By PROTOPRESBYTER MICHAEL POMAZANSKY

In past centuries the greatest peril to the Church of Christ came from false teachers who were singled out and condemned because of their dogmatic errors. Thus the early Fathers and Councils condemned Nestorianism, Arianism, Monophysitism, Iconoclasm, etc. But the enemy of man's salvation does not sleep, and in our day, when there is no basic new heresy – unless it be that conglomeration of all heresies, ecumenism – he has inspired various currents of "renovationism" within the Church which have attacked chiefly the life and practice of traditional Orthodoxy, beginning with the outright Protestantism of the "Renovated" or "Living Church" in Russia in the 1920s, through the reforming uniatizers of the Church of Constantinople (Patriarchs Meletios Metaxakis and Athenagoras, Archbishop Iakovos) to the numerous would-be reformers who may be found in almost every Local Orthodox Church today.

In this article the work on liturgical theology of one well known and widely respected contemporary Russian theologian is carefully criticized and its "reformist" tendency pointed out. In all fairness it should be noted that Fr. Schmemann probably does not see himself as a "reformer," and it will doubtless be left to other less sensitive souls, another generation removed from the life of genuine Orthodoxy, to draw the inevitable iconoclastic conclusions from Fr. Schmemann's already Protestant views.

The author of this article, Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, one of the last living theologians to have graduated from the theological academies of pre-Revolutionary Russia, has taught theology to generations of Orthodox priests, and now teaches and resides at Holy Trinity Monastery at Jordanville, New York. (Text from ORTHODOX WAY, Jordanville, 1962. All page numbers in the text below are from the English edition of Fr. Schmemann's book.)