17/08/2026
Very wise words from Most Rev. Maxim Vasiljević
Bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Western America
A quiet misunderstanding often shadows the Orthodox Church: that faith is safest when questions are silenced, that truth flourishes best when inquiry is restrained. Yet this fear is foreign to the Church’s deeper memory. Orthodoxy was never born from stillness, but from *movement, from encounter, struggle, listening, and courageous speech.* Where the Church is alive, questions do not threaten her but awaken her. For this reason, free inquiry is not an imported luxury, nor a modern concession to restless minds. It belongs to the Church’s very way of being. From the beginning, the Church has lived by discernment rather than decree. It preferred conciliar listening rather than unilateral command. Dogma itself, so often invoked as a boundary against inquiry, emerged through inquiry that was patient, communal, and often spirited. Truth was not imposed from above but confessed together… and sung in the Church.
The problem arises when Orthodoxy is treated as an ideology instead of a church. Ideologies fear questions because they must protect a system. The Church, however, is not a system but a living body that listens to its members, feeling pain and responding to the critical existential issues of human life. When questions are silenced too quickly, it often protects fragile authority more than faith. Real dialogue is an act of liberation. It requires the courage to step beyond our own circles and embrace those with different traditions. By being honest about our historical mistakes and open to the “agony of the other,” we stop treating God as a concept and start seeing faith as a living, existential reality.
Sadly, the twenty-first century does not lack examples of ideological mechanisms being deployed in the Church, whereby—sometimes in the name of ecclesial authority or even of synodal responsibility—a kind of campaign is waged against those who think differently, not for the sake of clarification, but for discreditation. Such practices look new but are old in spirit, and the Church’s own history offers a sobering corrective to them.
The task of the theologian has never been to seize upon an awkward expression or an incomplete formulation as a pretext for condemnation. Rather, it is to offer a corrective gesture that does not exaggerate disagreement, but patiently seeks a clearer, fuller, and more faithful articulation of the truth. This was precisely the path followed by Saint Maximus the Confessor in his engagement with certain problematic positions found in Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Dionysius the Areopagite. He did not erase them from the Church’s memory, nor did he reduce their legacy to their ambiguities. Instead, he read them with generosity, discernment, and fidelity, allowing the Church’s living faith to refine what was unclear without resorting to exclusion or denunciation.
Responsible free inquiry in the Church does not mean relativism, nor does it dissolve the boundaries of faith. It means something far more demanding: to stay faithful without becoming intellectually lazy, to remain obedient without giving in to fear, and to stay rooted while still daring to grow. Inquiry becomes irresponsible only when it forgets communion, i.e., when it speaks without listening, criticizes without love, or isolates itself from the worshipping life of the Church. But it is equally irresponsible to forbid inquiry entirely.
The Orthodox tradition knows how to distinguish dogma from theology without ever separating them, between the faith once confessed and the many ways that faith must be articulated anew. Dogma protects the mystery of Christ; theology explores it. To confuse the two is to burden dogma with questions it was never meant to answer, and to starve theology of the freedom it requires to serve the Church. When every question is treated as a threat to faith, faith itself becomes brittle.
Throughout the Church’s modern history, some of the most faithful voices have been those who insisted on asking uncomfortable questions, not from rebellion, but from love. They refused to accept that fidelity required silence, or that obedience demanded intellectual submission. They trusted that truth, when spoken in the Church, does not divide but ultimately gathers. Their confidence was not in novelty, but in the Holy Spirit, who leads the Church into all truth not by freezing the Church, but by guiding her.
This is why suppressing inquiry harms not only theologians or clergy, but the whole ecclesial body. When questions about pastoral practice, social realities, or historical precedent are forbidden even to be examined, the Church risks speaking a language no one can hear. Silence may preserve appearances, but it cannot sustain life. A Church that cannot listen will eventually find it difficult to proclaim.
Free inquiry is especially necessary where the Church encounters the suffering and complexity of the modern world. Questions about authority, power, the role of women, violence, justice, and human dignity do not arise from academic curiosity alone. They arise from lived parish experience—from people seeking to remain faithful while facing realities their ancestors could not have imagined in the same way. To dismiss these questions as dangerous is to abandon those who ask them.
Yet inquiry in the Church is never solitary. It is not the freedom of the isolated thinker, but the freedom of the person-in-communion. The goal isn’t to score points or dismantle the Church. It’s to understand her better and help her speak truthfully in her own voice. This kind of freedom requires humility, patience, and a willingness to be corrected. But it also requires courage from those entrusted with authority: the courage to allow conversation, to endure disagreement, and to trust the Spirit at work in the whole body.
The task before us today is not to choose between Orthodoxy and free inquiry, but to reunite what was never meant to be separated. A Church that listens is a Church that lives. A faith that can be questioned is a faith that can be confessed. And a tradition that dares to think is a tradition that trusts the Spirit who makes all things new—without ever ceasing to be ancient.
