On Holy Tradition, Development in the Church, and the Call to Transformation: A Response to Fr. Jillions’ Response

I begin by thanking Fr. John Jillions for responding (https://publicorthodoxy.org/2025/08/22/response-to-edith-humphrey/) to my paper, (https://edithmhumphrey.com/2025/07/14/experience-prophetic-faithfulness-and-orthodoxy/), even if he has mistaken or missed some of my major points.  I am sorry that he found my tone “strident,” but am glad that he has taken it as an example of “vigorous debate” by someone of conviction.  I apologize in advance for the length of my response to his response, but want to be understood more fully.

To begin, Fr. Jillions says that the “the main point of [my] critique” is  “that the Church has nothing to learn from the experience of LGBTQ+ people.”  This is simply not the case.  My main point is that experience is not in itself an authority for making decisions, either dogmatic or ethical, in the church. Experience, along with reason, are tools by which we receive, understand, and pass on what is given to us by Scripture, in consonance with Holy Tradition in its many expressions. (And indeed, Scripture is part of that Holy Tradition, its parts and whole given to us by those who spoke by the Holy Spirit, not individually, but in harmony, cf. 2 Peter 1:18-20).  Both personal and corporate experience play an important role in our life together, as I make clear at the end of my first response to him, where I urge us to “befriend those in the rainbow community,” and take seriously their intimate insights that loneliness rather than erotic desire is their deepest need. So, no, I do not say that taking new experience into account is a “Protestant hermeneutic,” but that making such an experience an authority, so that it acts as a trump card, is directly out of Albert Outler’s “quadrilateral” playbook.  Nor do I deny that divine revelation has typically included moments of personal revelation, but I note that the personal elements are not private or limited, because they are accompanied by other signs of God’s communication to the Church as a whole (see again 2 Peter 1:20-21).

There seems also to be a Roman Catholic variation of this hermeneutic.  Here it is maintained that a collective contemporary experience can become strong enough to introduce an utter novelty or perhaps even reverse a longstanding belief or tradition in the Church.  Examples of this might perhaps be seen in certain arguments for the adoption of the filioque, in the dogmatization of the Assumption that leaves a space for those who do not believe that the Theotokos died, in the ongoing clamor that the Theotokos be titled “Redemptrix” (still resisted by the Magisterium), or in the suggestions of priests like Fr. James J. Martin regarding a necessary change in the Church’s understanding of sexuality.

Some Catholic scholars such as de Chardin and Karl Rahner have in fact articulated a view of “evolving tradition” that proves friendly to the adoption of novelty, whereas others such as Newman and Ratzinger have distinguished sharply between authentic development and evolution.  As Orthodox who have received the deposit of faith, and who worship the Holy Spirit who is everywhere present, we should eschew “progressivism” that mirrors either Albert Outler’s “Wesleyan” or the evolutionary Catholic hermeneutic.  In a day enamored by progress and novelty, it is wise to maintain the importance of what we have been given, rather than to suggest that an issue that was clearly settled in the Scriptures, in Holy Tradition, and in the canons, can now be questioned because it has been articulated with “premature clarity.”

We are told by Fr. Jillions that Orthodox tradition has “evolved.”  There seem to be two problems of definition here. First, should we not distinguish between Holy Tradition, that is, the deposit of faith, and tradition that is mutable—whether, wrong-headed, merely human, or good for a certain time?  Next, is “evolution” a helpful way to think about the living expression of Holy Tradition, or would not “development” be a better way to envision this?   Fr. Jillions says that I “mask the truth of how radically the early Church went in a new direction.”  To that, I would say that he seems to have a picture in his mind of a consistent stream that maintained the natural trajectory of Judaism up to our day, whereas Christianity introduced a huge transformation that “made their Jewish tradition unrecognizable for Jewish Christians and Jews of first century.”  This is far too simplistic.  As the Jewish scholar Alan Segal (whom I had the great pleasure of knowing before his untimely death) points out in his book Rebecca’s Children, both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity were successful developments steming from an early conglomerate of different ways of keeping the Hebrew tradition: that is, these two had staying power beyond the first century.  They are related as siblings, though, not as mother-daughter.  Born in the first century A. D., they both developed from, but took a different trajectory out of second Temple Judaism. 

The Christian claim is, of course, that Christianity developed, but that rabbinic Judaism, taking its genius from Pharisaism, evolved, or devolved—leaving behind the quintessential Hebrew Temple and its sacrifices for a rabbinic way of parsing the OT.  In rabbinic Judaism, the center of the faith became Torah and its exposition, whereas in Christianity, the center is Jesus, whom we believe is the God-Man.  When Christians recognized, for example, the purity laws as temporary things fulfilled in Christ, they did not move away from the YHWH (LORD)-centered faith, but embraced it and understood it more fully.  Jesus radicalized  the Torah when He said things like “in the beginning it was not so;” he did not simply sweep Torah aside.

I understand that Fr. John Meyendorff was concerned that Orthodox discipline might devolve into a Roman Catholic hermeneutic of obligation by looking woodenly to “an external criterion” of truth: so he stressed the essential role of the Holy Spirit, as Fr. Jillions reminds us. But, of course, we can just as easily be swayed by looking to another fully external criterion— that of contemporary secular experience, sadly internalized by some sons and daughters of the Church. The Bible, the Fathers, the Councils, and the bishops all belong to the Church, and are within it: they are not external  or arbitrary authorities.   And so we continue to pray that bishops today rightly divide the Word of truth, knowing that it is the Holy Spirit who is in Himself within us and among us, and that from Him springs the living Tradition which we must maintain in our day, with its challenges. We laity, too, have a role in this.

Orthodoxy does not just have, as Fr. Jillions says, a “tolerance” for mystery,  but we revel in it and celebrate many mysterious things—the nature of the Trinity, the sacramental nature of the cosmos, the mystery of humanity.  To lump mystery together with uncertainty, however, seems to miss the mark.  There are ineffable things that we cannot now declare or precisely know: but this is quite different from remaining undecided during a present-day controversy when the Church has spoken unequivocally about that matter for twenty centuries, and indeed further back into the congregation of the Old Testament.

Fr. Jillions tries to give examples of radical (and good) change, over against the conservative desire to preserve the tradition.  He speaks of the fathers’ unfolding teaching of the Father and the Son as homoousios (“of the same essence”) as though that is an indication of open-ended revelation, rejected by the traditionalists of their day.  But this is surely an over-statement.  First, the combatants weren’t simply rejecting a non-biblical term, since the they themselves used the equally novel homoiousios, “of like essence.” Secondly, the term homoousios might have been new, but the concept is embedded in the Gospels and Epistles in nucē, and sometimes in astonishing clarity.  For example, in Phil 2:5-11, St. Paul uses Isaiah’s language for the One YHWH (Isaiah 45) and applies it to Jesus! (And he may even be quoting an earlier Christian hymn).

Then there is the use made of Jesus’ statement on the night before His death. When Jesus said “when the Spirit of truth has come, He will guide you into all truth,” this did not mean that utter novelties would be discovered through the centuries, like the possible blessing of what was once renounced as porneia (sexual immorality).  Rather, on that last night, Jesus was referring specifically to the wonder of Pentecost, which opened the door for ongoing illumination by the Spirit as He has interpreted spiritual things to the whole Church when the need arises, or when there is conflict. Sometimes scholars have wrongly attributed to St. Gregory of Nazianzen, too, a doctrine of progressive revelation, when he appealed to Jesus’ same words at a time when the personhood and deity of the Holy Spirit were being guarded.  He reasoned this way:

Our Savior had some things that, he said, could not be borne at that time by his disciples. . . and therefore they were hidden. And again he said that all things should be taught by the Spirit when he would come to dwell among us.Of these things, one, I take it, was the deity of the Spirit himself, made clear later on when such knowledge should be seasonable and capable of being received after our Savior’s restoration, when they no longer disbelieved for wonder. . . . For what greater thing than this did either he promise, or the Spirit teach?    Theological Oration  5 (31).27 NPNF 2.7.326

Clearly,  St. Gregory has in mind the revealing of the Spirit at Pentecost, rather than the formulation of a new teaching about the Holy Spirit centuries later when the creed was being hammered out.  After all, Nazianzen’s close friend St. Gregory of Nyssa declared of the eternal Spirit “This [is] the view held by all who accept in its simplicity the undiluted gospel” (Against Eunomius I.33), and Nyssa’s brother St. Basil insisted that the deity of the Spirit had been celebrated for centuries in the “O Joyous Light”— “we worship God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”  Moreover, when Nazianzen speaks of a “seasonable” time when believers would be “capable of receiving,” and “no longer disbelieve for wonder” (Luke 24:41), we are led directly to Jesus’ words in Luke’s second volume (Acts 1:6): “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.”

Jesus, and Fr. Gregory, too,  spoke of the faculty of understanding that came at Pentecost, not an evolving doctrine or ethic through the ages. Again, we do not want to deny that the Spirit illumines necessary truths for our time—but these are developments of the deposit given to the Apostles, not brand new things.

Towards the end of my response to Fr. Jillions, I asked a tangential question concerning the freedom of scholars (“What, then, of academic freedom?”).  In interpreting this, Fr. Jillions avers that I “strangely assert… that [Fr Jillions’] comments stem from a misguided attempt to defend academic freedom.”  No, I don’t, nor did I suggest that his main concern in the paper was to defend academic freedom.  It is clear that he was, in this essay, talking about the internal process of how progress might be made in the Church.  For my part, I mentioned academic freedom as an extra point because the OCA bishops have been criticized for stifling that freedom by admonishing Orthodox scholars to pass on the Church’s teaching on sexuality, and many of us are yearning for more statements of clarity like theirs of July 2022.  Several Orthodox scholars have written on this topic, including Fr. Jillions himself in The Wheel 21/22.  My brief comment, then, was intended to troubleshoot questions about this issue, and I never took it as the basis for Fr. Jillions’ paper in Public Orthodoxy. There is, perhaps, a connection, though, since some have suggested that academics, over against bishops and clergy, might have the freedom to pursue so-called progressive attitudes in matters such as sexuality or abortion, without fearing discipline, and that this is of benefit to a Church that “needs to change.” I beg to differ: the professor’s role is to profess, not to effect radical change, and for an Orthodox professor, this means to remain in the heart of the Church. Any corrective work we will remain within that context if we are faithful.

Let’s finish with a few brief words regarding pastoral implications.  It is clear that these must spring from a genuine love and close connection to those who struggle with mistaken erotic desires.  An example from St. Paisios is given by Fr Jillions concerning someone who was tempted by same-sex desire.  When Fr. Jillions reports the elder’s advice, however, the life-context of the man is not given.  Was St. Paisios suggesting that the man was not able to abstain from erotic practices, and that he should therefore not fuss about this, but do whatever else he was able to do?  Would St. Paisios concede that there are human beings who simply can’t be continent? (How patronizing!) Or, more likely, was he talking about the man’s inner desires and feelings, and telling him not to obsess about these, but to remain chaste as well as he could?

I find it odd that Fr. Jillions changed his description of a putative trajectory in the Church from his first essay in Public Orthodoxy, when he responded to me.  In the first go-round, he says “it remains to be seen whether the Church will move from awareness, to tolerance, to acceptance, to blessing.”  But in his response to me the first term has been altered: “from revulsion to tolerance to acceptance to blessing.”  This striking alteration of awareness to revulsion perhaps is his way of charting what he thinks to be the conservative reaction to same-sex practice and practitioners (“revulsion”).  I want to assure him that those of us who stand against this trajectory do not do so out of revulsion for our hurting brothers and sisters, but out of deep concern (a true awareness) of the dangers of porneia, and its distorting consequences.  

We want to ask, when he says, “Everyone is welcome,” In what sense?  Welcome to live and think in whatever way we like and still call ourselves Orthodox?  We want to ask of his maxim, “Everyone is expected to be pursue an ascetic life,” Does ascetism involve eschewing porneia, including same-sex, bi-sexual, or transgendered eroticism? We want to ask, In what sense is “everyone on their own timeline,” and How does that square with the urgent call to repentance and transformation?  And we want to ask regarding the statement “Everyone must focus on what they can do, not on what they can’t,” Does God call someone to chastity if he or she is unable, or is there always hidden strength available for what is difficult? Transformation may take a lifetime, but surely that is the goal.

Yes, “No one who comes to me will be cast out” (John 6:37). I agree entirely with Fr. Jillions about the depth of divine love, and desire this for everyone that I know, too.  That means, as I have been taught, and as I have experienced, coming to Him daily in repentance, with the hope of restoration and change.  Our gospel is indeed inclusive, calling everyone to ongoing repentance and transformation, whatever that one’s failings and need for healing.