Another Question for Orthodox Members

[manualman]

Disclosure: I’m not EO, so my observations are based on EO reactions and opinions I’ve encountered myself. Use grains of salt accordingly.

Protestantism is really only 500 years old. Barely a teenage ideology in the EO scheme of looking at the world. Being so young, there is no direct guidance on the issue from the Early Fathers, who are considered the next most authoritative sources next to Scripture itself. There’s a mixed bag in the EO world as to whether the Catholic church is still a genuine church as EO understand the term. I think you’ll find a pretty broad consensus among EO similar to that of catholics that protestant groups, even high liturgy ones don’t have validly ordained priests and don’t actually have the privilege of receiving the Eucharist (whether said protestants BELIEVE they are or not).

EO generally consider Catholicism to be a distortion of the faith and, from that, consider Protestantism to be a further distortion resulting from the unmooring of Scripture from Tradition (admittedly I use the catholic terms, not sure if EO use different labels here. They often do). I think you’d find little support for the protestant idea that the protestant reformers actually moved the faith back towards a purer understanding of the gospels. They may agree with protestants about denigrating the papacy, but I suspect you’ll find little other common ground that isn’t ALSO common ground with catholics.

 

[QNDNNDQDCE]

They also would deny the mysticism that is found in the orthodox church in favour of a more Augustinian approach to Chrisitanity.

This is a strange statement given that Augustine was a monastic. I have noticed anything more “mystical” in the writings of the Greek fathers than Augustine.

 

[dzheremi]

Earliest church model; who has it?

Just as Mommaduckofmany’s post clarifies that the British Isles were evangelized well before any major schism, so it is not correct to say that they were evangelized by “Catholic” and not “Orthodox”, I would say something of similar of ecclesiology: It didn’t “belong” to anybody. It was simply the way that the early, undivided church functioned.

When I look at the Orthodox church, that is where some of the confusion for me comes in. Let’s take the New World. Would not the earliest church model dictate that missionaries with the gospel come over, preach, those that believe form their own congregation, leaders are then taught and put in place from that local area. Is that not the claim of the Orthodox church? So, why is there a “Greek Orthodox Church” in say, Boulder, Colorado. Why is it not “The Church at Boulder” with Boulder natives in the church and leading it?

It is, but there is more to this question than you realize. In addition to the already posted answer that many were refugees rather than missionaries, there is also the fact that for a specific rite or usage to develop naturally in a new society can take a long time, particularly in the modern world where there are so many different options and influences out there. In the old days, when there were only Orthodox Catholics and various heretics (at least so far as Christianity was concerned), some traditions grew to be predominant in a given area (e.g., Coptic and Coptic-influenced churches from Egypt and Libya to the Sudanese kingdoms and Axum), but even in the cases of those traditions, they are themselves developments. We know that St. Mark originally brought Christianity to the Greek-speaking city of Alexandria, and therefore the liturgy of the Church of Alexandria was originally in Greek. The earliest surviving bilingual Greek/Coptic Bible fragments date to about the middle of the second century, or just under 100 years after the martyrdom of St. Mark in Egypt, in 68 AD. So this is a sign how fast the faith spread in the country, but it may have been a while yet before the liturgy came to be prayed entirely in Coptic. There is no way to know this for sure because the earliest manuscript evidence for any of the three liturgies commonly used by the Coptic Orthodox Church dates from roughly the 3rd-4th century, so we can extrapolate based on that the faith must’ve grown quite a bit in the two centuries after St. Mark’s death, to the point where it was probably completely nativized by the 4th century (around the time of St. Anthony the Great, whose biographer St. Athanasius tells us did not know Greek).

Consider that we have in the above timeline the best case scenario that has ever actually existed in the history of Christianity (the bilingual Greek-Coptic bible fragments are the earliest evidence of a translated Biblical text in the world), and still it took perhaps about 100 years for people to begin nativizing the faith and liturgy, and that process continued on for maybe another 300 years or so after that. (And then there was the whole issue of Arabic after the invasion of the Arab Muslims; it wasn’t until the 11th century that HH Pope Gabriel ordered that the readings in the liturgy be done in Arabic in addition to Coptic). Contrast this with the Bolivia example, where the Church is about 10 years old. In that 10 years it has grown from one person (the one Egyptian who stayed behind after the few families in the country had left) to over 400 people (none of whom are Egyptians) in the capital city alone, with many more in the countryside. I have spoken with priests and missionaries who have served the Church in Bolivia and they say it is really booming, and the Bolivians really have taken ownership of it and nativized it, and it is very well received into the fabric of Bolivian life. The liturgies are in Spanish, as well as the catechumens and deacons’ classes, etc. It is Bolivian in every way except its priesthood and bishop, and this is again because it is very, very new.

The answer really is that things take time, and it is better that people adapt to Orthodoxy within some kind of known framework, and then have native priests emerge as the population naturally changes (more converts + more nth generation people). There are non-Egyptian priests in the Coptic Orthodox Church in America (though I don’t think we have any convert bishops yet), and as the demographics change, things will only become in the diaspora more and more like they’ve always been in the church at home (where Romans, Persians, Ethiopians, Syriacs, and many others were counted among the monastics of the Egyptian desert, for example). Some churches are better poised for this than others (e.g., the Greeks have been in America for a lot longer than the Ethiopians), but it’s coming to all of them eventually. 've seen recently some videos of mixed English-Amharic-Ge’ez liturgies held by the Ethiopian church in Canada; pretty cool! Friends of mine in Los Angeles tell me that the EOTC they go to already does portions of the liturgy in English, though I haven’t seen it yet.]

Here’s a story you might like about the recent conversion of a German Protestant scholar to the Syriac Orthodox Church: theorthodoxchurch.info/blog/news/2012/10/protestant-new-testament-scholar-converts-into-the-syriac-orthodox-church/

Trust me: It absolutely does not matter where you come from when you come to Orthodoxy. What matters is that/if you’re here now, and (most importantly) where you’ll be in the hereafter.

 

[Peter_J]

British Isles were christianized pre-Schism…so it’s not “they were Catholic, not Orthodox”…they were one church. The Early British Church resembled more Orthodox, imo, than Catholic (the Church in the West grew and changed over time) and we share some saints (my patroness is St. Brigid of Kildare, one child has St. Aidan of Lindsfarne, and another has St. Margaret of Scotland, who was born pre-Schism and died post-Schism…one of my godmothers is chrismated for St. John of Columba).

I imagine we could have a protracted argument over different views of the CoE’s history. But the thing is, I believe that proselytizing them is wrong, regardless of which historical view you take. So the question should be: Does the Orthodox Church (or the Catholic Church) proselytize Anglicans? In both cases, I believe the answer is No (for the most obviously), hence there’s really no problem.

 

[aidanbradypop]

I imagine we could have a protracted argument over different views of the CoE’s history. But the thing is, I believe that proselytizing them is wrong, regardless of which historical view you take. So the question should be: Does the Orthodox Church (or the Catholic Church) proselytize Anglicans? In both cases, I believe the answer is No (for the most obviously), hence there’s really no problem.

Well stated. I hear from Catholics on here all the time about converting from RCC to the Episcopal Church. I always caution to the individual about converting due to social issues.

For an Episcopalian, trying to convert a Roman Catholic is like trying to convert your sister to your family.

 

[Peter_J]

I always caution to the individual about converting due to social issues.

I can’t exactly say I would do likewise – I’d be afraid that the nuance would be lost, and it would sound like I was discouraging conversion to Catholicism, period.

 

[dzheremi]

I imagine we could have a protracted argument over different views of the CoE’s history. But the thing is, I believe that proselytizing them is , regardless of which historical view you take. So the question should be: Does the Orthodox Church (or the Catholic Church) proselytize Anglicans? In both cases, I believe the answer is No (for the most obviously), hence there’s really no problem.

This post strikes me as more than a little odd. Certainly, Peter, as a Catholic you would know that the Anglicans and the CoE as an established church is but a tiny blip on the overall timeline of Christianity in the British Isles.

 

[MommaduckofMany]

I imagine we could have a protracted argument over different views of the CoE’s history. But the thing is, I believe that proselytizing them is wrong, regardless of which historical view you take. So the question should be: Does the Orthodox Church (or the Catholic Church) proselytize Anglicans? In both cases, I believe the answer is No (for the most obviously), hence there’s really no problem.

Nowhere in my post was I talking about or referring to proselytizing any Anglican. Where does this play into the conversation?

 

[MommaduckofMany]

This post strikes me as more than a little odd. Certainly, Peter, as a Catholic you would know that the Anglicans and the CoE as an established church is but a tiny blip on the overall timeline of Christianity in the British Isles.

Thank you. And it definitely was nowhere in the vicinity of the era that was being discussed.

 

[IgnatianPhilo]

This is a strange statement given that Augustine was a monastic. I have noticed anything more “mystical” in the writings of the Greek fathers than Augustine.

By Augustinian, I suppose a more systematic approach to faith in which things are more likely to be defined. For the Orthodox there isn’t this sort of approach to theology like we find in Augustine and his successors, be it Aquinas or many of the other great logicians and theologians in the Latin tradition. In the Orthodox church I would dare venture to say that most of the things held in common by the people are not neccessarily defined, for instance salvation, what is salvation, what is the relationship between works and faith, this sort of debate it seems (if I am wrong someone correct) is something Orthodoxy has relatively speaking only just got in on.

I hope I have been concise enough.

 

[Peter_J]

Nowhere in my post was I talking about or referring to proselytizing any Anglican. Where does this play into the conversation?

Therein lies my point – if nobody’s claiming that the Orthodox proselytize Anglicans, then debating whether Anglicans used to be Catholic (as distinct from Orthodox) seems academic.

That’s my two cents.

 

[MommaduckofMany]

Therein lies my point – if nobody’s claiming that the Orthodox proselytize Anglicans, then debating whether Anglicans used to be Catholic (as distinct from Orthodox) seems academic.

That’s my two cents.

You are making absolutely no sense. My comments were Pre-Schism.

 

[josie_L]

By Augustinian, I suppose a more systematic approach to faith in which things are more likely to be defined. For the Orthodox there isn’t this sort of approach to theology like we find in Augustine and his successors, be it Aquinas or many of the other great logicians and theologians in the Latin tradition. In the Orthodox church I would dare venture to say that most of the things held in common by the people are not neccessarily defined, for instance salvation, what is salvation, what is the relationship between works and faith, this sort of debate it seems (if I am wrong someone correct) is something Orthodoxy has relatively speaking only just got in on.

I think when one talks about the Orthodox Church, one needs to make a distinction between the pre-schism Church and the Orthodox Church of today, i.e., the pre-schism Church, more specifically the East, was very much involved in a “systematic approach to faith in which things were more likely to be defined.” Recollect that the East was riddled with heresies because there were so many attempts at defining the mysteries as such of our faith, i.e., it is as much a Byzantine legacy as it is a Latin one.

p.s. In fact, the Byzantines compiled an encyclopedia with more than 30 000 entries in Greek in the 10th century, that’s a pretty systematic approach, if you ask me!

 

[QNDNNDQDCE]

By Augustinian, I suppose a more systematic approach to faith in which things are more likely to be defined. For the Orthodox there isn’t this sort of approach to theology like we find in Augustine and his successors, be it Aquinas or many of the other great logicians and theologians in the Latin tradition. In the Orthodox church I would dare venture to say that most of the things held in common by the people are not neccessarily defined, for instance salvation, what is salvation, what is the relationship between works and faith, this sort of debate it seems (if I am wrong someone correct) is something Orthodoxy has relatively speaking only just got in on.

I hope I have been concise enough.

I better understand what you were trying to say, but I’m not sure that it’s accurate. First, there’s a difference between a systematic approach to faith and defining things. It is a mistake to believe that the Eastern Fathers never said anything definite about matters of faith. If you mean by “definition” that they did not insist on one rigid formula to the exclusion of all others, this is not Augustine’s style either, nor is it absent in Orthodoxy. For example, look at many modern Orthodox who insist rigidly on their particular Byzantine definitions, such as the Palamatic essence-energy distinction, and deny aspects of Latin theology that have always been taught in the West, even from the first centuries. It is a mistake also to believe that there was no systematic approach to faith in the East. I would submit St. John Damascene as the most famous example. Augustine never wrote any systematic theology like Damascene did. If you have not read very much Augustine, I would encourage you to do so. Then, for fun, try reading something by Thomas Aquinas and see if their styles are anything alike.

 

[GaryTaylor]

“there’s a difference between a systematic approach to faith and defining things.” To me this is just the language of many in the early church. All your seeing is the early teaching of the East through Greek philosophy which became taught in Alexandria and Antioch, this rigorous method of logic is seen in a lesser more fluid style with Augustine, then more systematic with Aquinas, and even more so with Duns Scotus in his works, its displayed in Plato and Aristotle, which is recommended reading to understand this. Plato’s Republic for example.