Metropolitan Jonah Suddenly Resigns His Office: Why?

I have followed with great interest and Christian hope the work of Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America. His passionate stance for the rights of our first neighbors in the womb and efforts to promote alliances between faithful Christians – Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant – have set him apart. His compelling personal faith journey from an Anglican background into the Orthodox Church, by way of the fathers of the Church, is personally inspiring. I am a revert to the Catholic Church and walked a similar road through the apostolic Fathers home to Rome many years ago.

Last month the Primate gave an address to the leaders of the Anglican Church in North America, who gathered in Ridgecrest, North Carolina. He showed his prophetic insights into the common struggle which faithful Christians must engage. Here are a few excerpts:

"There is another element in this which is of immediate importance, and directly follows on the above. As was written about by Robert Terwilliger, a great Anglican divine of the 20th century, there is a coming realignment within Christianity, one which we can already see the strains of. Whenever schisms happen within the Church, they are generally because certain individuals lead a group out of the Church, being disobedient to the Faith and Doctrine, and refusing to submit to the authority of the hierarchy, which is trying to discipline them and call them to repentance."

"What is happening now is somewhat different: a split between those who hold to traditional, biblical faith as interpreted by the Fathers of the Church and the ecumenical councils; and those who espouse a secularized belief, subject to the rationalizations of the scholars according to contemporary philosophy, who dismiss the Fathers and the Councils as no longer relevant, who dismiss the moral teachings of the Scriptures and Fathers as culturally relative. This could be called, by one side, a break between traditional Christianity and post-modern worldly philosophy. Or it might be labeled as the freeing of people from fundamentalist oppression to the light of their own reason."

Continue reading at catholic.org

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Sometimes it is the commission of a sin that causes one to step down. But sometimes it is because one gets saved! In any event we ought to let the man have some privacy, yes?
great_grandma

The more things change the more they stay the same. It's the argument Eve accepted in Eden: You will be like a god, judging for yourself what is good and what is evil.
aceituna

The question is what are the protesters protesting against? Who is their authority? If their authority is God and his word then they are turning the correct direction. If it is tradition it depends upon whether the tradition is in line with God's word or not. If it is license to do as you please, God's word is not valid, it is contrary and not to be joined. If it is the first listed, fulfilling God's Word, a question that could arise is are they sticking with the word, or are the going beyond and making demands that God is saying something that is not there. If so,their protest again is not valid. Every protest needs to be evaluated in the light of God's Word before one supports it. Pray that the Holy Spirit grants the gift of discernment so one can truly support something that is God pleasing.
bighoss

The "Metropolitan" of the Orthodox Church waxes eloquent about holding with "traditional, biblical faith as interpreted by the Fathers of the Church" versus holding with the ecumenical councils. But Biblically-based faith has no place for appointing a single person to a hierarchical position over a church within an entire continent, irrespective of what any "Fathers of the Church might have devised. That kind of sacerdotalism has no place in Holy Scripture and is an invention of carnal men. It has resulted in, among other heresies, the Papacy, which is even worse in that it places a prelate over all that corrupt church's adherents worldwide. The "Metropolitan" has a very big beam in his own eye.