That is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Fr. Eusebius has the blessing of his bishop for his ministry and I don't see him advocating what is going on in the Coptic Church as you describe.
No, I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Fr. Eusebius' teaching never gained much traction in the Orthodox Church. It was marginalized and withered, and no bishop ever endorsed it. In fact, as Fr. David Moser, who knew Fr. Eusebius has reported:
I don't know what Fr E teaches today - he has changed his position somewhat and eliminated some of the more extreme pentecostal views due to threats from the heirarchy that if he did not "change his ways" he would be defrocked and thrown out of the Greek Church.
The Charismatic Movement originated outside of the Church and the spirit that motivates it is not the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it has no place in Orthodoxy.
Fr. Eusebius would disagree. He viewed the Charismatic Movement which swept over the Roman Catholic and Mainline Protestant churches in the 1960-1970s as the authentic work of the Holy Spirit and prayed for it to sweep over the Orthodox Church. This is wrong. His evaluation of the Charismatic Movement was as follows:
"The tree is known by its fruits... Do these fruits demonstrate the presence of the devil or of the sanctifying Spirit of Christ? No Orthodox in his right mind who has seen the fruits of the Spirit with his own eyes can give a mistaken answer to this question" (Logos, Jan., 1972, p.13).
A poster on another Orthodox forum said this about Fr. Eusebius' teaching:
I was at one time on Fr Eusebius Stephanou's mailing list, and received several newsletters from him, so I am aware of what he teaches. And the problem is not the presence of spiritual gifts, or that the higher gifts should be exercised only by monastics. The problem is that Fr Eusebius uses a Pentecostal, rather than an Orthodox pneumatology to interpret spiritual gifts. Many non-Pentecostal bodies that experienced the charismatic renewal of the 1960s-1980s tended to do this, and it often clashed with the pneumatology of their own groups, so it did not just affect Orthodox.
I have read quite a few of these newsletters myself, and I agree.
The Charismatic Movement is not the work of the Holy Spirit and it has no place in Orthodoxy.
More from the same poster which demonstrates why Fr. Eusebius' teaching is dangerous:
The point I was making was that in his writings Fathe Eusebius Stephanou bases much of what he says on Pentecostal pneumatology, not Orthodox pneumatology. Many of the non-Pentecostal denominations that were affected by the charismatic movement of the 1970s and 1980s did something similar -- Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Roman Catholics -- they interpreted what was happening in terms of Pentecostal pneumatology, rather than, Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran or Roman Catholic pneumatology.
There may have been some excuse for Western bodies to do such a thing, but there was far less excuse for an Orthodox priest like Fr Eusebius to do so.
Western theology, since the introduction of the filioque, has tended to play down or neglect the role of the Holy Spirit. They retained some teaching about the Holy Spirit, but it was unrelated to their practice. They could read about things in the scriptures that were not part of their experience of the church.
Then at the end of the 19th century the Pentecostal movement sprang up. People spoke in strange tongues, people were healed after prayer, people prophesied. These things caught on and became fashionable. They had no clairvoyant spiritual elders to determine what was of God and what was not. They had several different (and clashing) strands of 19th century Protestant theology to help them interpret what was happening -- including Dispensationalism, which said that such things could not happen because they were only intended by God for the period when the canon of scripture was incomplete. so Pentecostal pneumatology was a raction against a distortion which was therefore iself distorted. Many of the Pentecostals adopted dispensationalist eschatology, though, which came to be known as premillennial and pretribulational. Orthodoxy recognises no such scheme, which it regards as chiliasm, which Orthodoxy rejects.
Pentecostal pneumatology varies, because there are thousands of different Pentecostal denominations, but most of them teach that there is an experience of "baptism in the Holy Spirit" which they see as separate from what they describe as "water baptism", and that the initial evidence for the "baptism in the Holy Spirit" is "speaking in tongues" -- in other words, if you don't speak in tongues, you haven't been "baptized in the Holy Spirit" and you are therefore a second-class Christian, and lack what they call "the full gospel" or "the four-square gospel".
In Fr Eusebius Stephanou's writings it is clear that he has bought into this pneumatology, and he teaches it in such a way that implies that Orthodox pneumatology is somehow deficient without it. So the Orthodox Church as a whole does not accept the teaching of Fr Eusebius Stephanou and does not regard it as Orthodox.
Unlike Western, and especially Protestant bodies, manifestations of the Holy Spirit (such as those mentioned in I Cor 4-11), and spiritual gifts (such as those mentioned in Ephesians 4:12-16) have never disappeared from the Orthodox Church. So the Orthodox Church has never had the urge to develop a theology to account for their absence (like Dispensationalism) or to account for their sudden reappearance (like the Pentecostal modifications of dispensationalism).
In the Orthodox Church the "higher gifts" are not "possible only to monastics" as the person I was replying to (Jan Sunkvist) suggests. But those who manifest such gifts tend to enter monasteries, often on the advice of their spiritual fathers, perhaps precisely because they (or their spiritual fathers) are aware of the danger of prelest, and that monasteries are the best places to test such gifts to see whether they are of God or not. And thousands of people came to see clairvoyant spiritual elders like St Seraphim of Sarov, because they had the "higher gifts" that St Paul refers to as "the word of wisdom", "the word of knowledge" and "prophecy" in I Co 12:8-10. It is not impossible for these gifts to appear outside monasteries, but it is much easier for them and for those who manifest them (or think they do) to go off the rails. That is why there are so many different Pentecostal sects, because for some, especially in the charismatic renewal movement, the highest spiritual gift is novelty. So you get self-proclaimed "apostles" and "prophets" saying that "God is doing a new thing" and of course he is doing it through them. And that is how most of todays Neopentecostal sects started.
Some Pentecostals and charismatics have been concerned about this indiscipline, and have tried to restore some discipline. So the "Fort Lauderdale Five" (you can Google for them) came up with notions of "shepherding" and "covering". They lacked apostolic succession so they had to had to come up with something that filled the gap, so they started a succession that started with themselves, self-proclaimed apostles who offered "covering" to others. If one of them asks me what "covering" I have, I say I am covered by the omphorion of my bishop, whose "covering" goes back to the real apostles who gathered on the day of Pentecost to receive the Holy Spirit in AD 33. But, having lost the real thing, they felt impelled to concoct a man-made substitute, which itself went off the rails.
So these are some of the ways in which I think Fr Eusebius Stephanou has gone wrong, and his teaching is not accepted by most Orthodox Christians, or any Orthodox bishop that I know of.
http://www.monachos.net/conversation/topic/6435-orthodoxy-and-pentecostalcharismatic-teaching/I have to say, I truly glorify God that there has never been an Orthodox equivalent of Charismatic Catholicism. The demonic cancer of the Charismatic Movement can't survive in the true Body of Christ.
