Difference Between Eastern Churches on Papal Authority and Anglican Churches

[Nine_Two]

Besides, if you reject augustinian original sin theology the Immaculate Conception doesn’t make much sense either. So if you want the latter you need to accept the former as well.

Apparently you read what I had on my screen before I decided to truncate my post before hiting “submit reply”.

 

[Pfaffenhoffen]

Interesting. Many Catholics say that it is understandable to not be Catholic if one is Orthodox instead, but it’s not understandable to be anything else.

P.S. As far as talking about devotion to the Mother of God, many Anglicans and Lutherans (and note that the latter are nearly always included in the term “Protestant”) have devotions to her as well.

I do not care what others feel. They may be Muslim and suicide bombers.
I love your icons. Theotokos is in my computer and at bedside.
I have not never felt anything similar to Anglicans or others. Remember there were anglicans and there are anglicans. These ordain women and accept gay marriage. No way.

 

[Peter_J]

I love your icons.

Thanks, I just put it up a couple days ago. (It’s Jericho, in case anyone can’t tell.)

 

[Peter_J]

Remember there were anglicans and there are anglicans. These ordain women and accept gay marriage.

Yes, I’m familiar with the differences. In fact, I’ve read a fair amount of explanations from Continuing Anglicans of why they are not in the Anglican Communion since it started ordaining women.

 

[Pfaffenhoffen]

Thanks, I just put it up a couple days ago. (It’s Jericho, in case anyone can’t tell.)

Sorry, I missed the point.
I was referring to the Orthodox Icons, I did not know how it went there…
I thought you were Orthodox…How did I do such mistake ?

 

[wushuangpu]

Thanks all answer

 

[Peter_J]

No, I’m Catholic. But I suppose the mistake is understandable: my profile says Traditionalist, which the majority of Catholics definitely aren’t.

 

[dgj23112]

It’s complicated.

I can’t answer your questions in full but I can make a few comments. I will try to give the skinny on this without getting too detailed, so naturally the story is simplified and that means anyone who wants to blow a hole in this explanation will have a nice opportunity to do so.

-1- The Anglican church was once under the authority of the Pope. They reject it now (perhaps for good reasons, perhaps not) but they owe much to that earlier relationship. In a sense it is a renegade province of the Roman Catholic church (sort of like Taiwan in relation to China and Ulster in relation to Eire).

While on the other hand the Pope never controlled the eastern churches, and therefore they have never ‘disobeyed’ the Pope nor had a reason to, since he was not their boss in the first place. Thus for Orthodox the position is that the Pope has no right of jurisdiction because it can be shown he never had any in the past, this is an entirely different argument.

Another way of putting it is that the Anglicans might say the Pope should not have had that kind of power over Catholic churches because it is an abuse of the Petrine office which they reject. For Orthodox the argument might be that the power and the abuse never existed for them in the past and they don’t want to start any of that now at this late date.

-2- Based on Roman Catholic theory of Apostolic succession, a church can have true bishops even if they are not in communion with Rome and even if they believe and teach heresy. (This is how the phenomena of vagante bishops has been propagated.) However Anglican orders (and therefore the confected Eucharist) are not considered valid because for a long time (after the reign of Elizabeth I) the men who were appointed Anglican bishops did not believe they were passing on a sacramental order, thus their ordinations were not sacramental since they did not intend to impart a sacrament and had no faith in it. Some later Anglican priests (and bishops) did want to believe in the sacramental nature of the Eucharist and their ordinations but they couldn’t get it from someone who hasn’t got it to give. Sort of like trying to get milk from a bull.

However the Orthodox do believe in the sacramental nature of Holy Orders and the Eucharist, and always intended to pass this along, so according to Roman Catholic theory they have never had a break in this practice and their bishops and priests and sacraments are continually valid.

-3- Orthodox do not have such a theory as the Roman Catholic church on Apostolic succession, in the strictest sense a bishop now outside of the church is deposed and not a bishop even if he thinks he is or would like to claim he is. That means that technically the Orthodox view Roman Catholic and Anglican orders in a similar (though not exactly the same) way.

After reading this, I remembered having heard a podcast (and having read the transcript, from which I will quote) by an Orthodox author, and professor of philosophy, one Dr. Clark Carlton, on his podcast “Faith and Philosophy” on Ancient Faith Radio. I’ll quote him here:

“This brings me to the second misunderstanding (here, Dr. Carlton refers to statements by Pope Benedict), which is the idea that bishops have apostolic succession. This is completely wrong. Churches have apostolic succession, not bishops. In the early church, the office of apostle was unique and non-transferrable. The apostles were not bishops and the earliest lists of bishops confirmed this. Linus was the first Bishop of Rome, not Peter. This means then, that bishops are not the successors of individual apostles.
To say that a church has apostolic succession is to say that it shares the same life and theology as the apostolic church in Jerusalem. This succession is traced through the office of bishop because the bishop is the sacramental head of the church, but this does not imply any sort of personal apostolic power on the part of the bishop. Otherwise, bishops would be able to appoint and consecrate their own successors, which they cannot do.
The idea that the office of bishop is tied to Peter, in particular, comes from St. Cyprian of Carthage in the third century. He is the first to speak of the chair of Peter, and yet, for Cyprian, each bishop in each local church has an undivided share in the chair of Peter. In other words, all bishops sit on the chair of Peter, not just the Pope in Rome.
In fact, Cyprian had a rather famous falling out with Pope Stephen. He certainly did not believe that the Bishop of Rome was either infallible, or the head of a universal church. So we see that in the early church, both East and West, the term Catholic Church referred to the local church in each place, headed by her bishop, and no one claimed that individual bishops were the successors of individual apostles, with the exception, perhaps, of Cyprian, who asserted that all local bishops were the successors to Peter.”

At the very least, quite interesting fodder for thought, no??

 

[GKC]

Yes, I’m familiar with the differences. In fact, I’ve read a fair amount of explanations from Continuing Anglicans of why they are not in the Anglican Communion since it started ordaining women.

Sometimes I feel like I’m getting my message across.

GKC

posterus traditus Anglicanus, Anglicanus-Catholicus

 

[Hesychios]

After reading this, I remembered having heard a podcast (and having read the transcript, from which I will quote) by an Orthodox author, and professor of philosophy, one Dr. Clark Carlton, on his podcast “Faith and Philosophy” on Ancient Faith Radio. I’ll quote him here:

"This brings me to the second misunderstanding (here, Dr. Carlton refers to statements by Pope Benedict), which is the idea that bishops have apostolic succession. This is completely wrong. Churches have apostolic succession, not bishops. …

He is correct on this score.

The role of Metropolitan, or Patriarch or Pope is an office of the church. It passes from the individual back to the local church, and from the local church to another individual. Very often the bishop has never met the man who will succeed him in that office. The succession of worthy men we call a ‘lineage’ of an Apostolic church is actually a succession of choices the local church has made, a collection of people the local church has installed in it’s office.

There is the other ‘type’ of Apostolic succession (sacramental) which is not an office but an order that passes from bishop to bishop by the laying on of hands, but this does not pass from a bishop to his own successor in office, bishops do not name their successors, it always passes to someone else’s successor!

 

[Exsilivm]

That is the theory, although I have met some Eastern Catholics who have serious doubts. These remain in communion with Rome because they either believe it is right to do so anyway or they are being loyal to the church and community their parents raised them in. It may seem contradictory, but some people don’t put Rome first, but it is part of a package deal.

I had one priest actually tell me person to person that he believed the Holy Spirit was moving the church to a better understanding (or something like that). He certainly had a lot of examples to illustrate the point. He seemed to be saying that the church would eventually develop this doctrine away from the Ultramontanist interpretation which seems to be canon up to this point.

Either one believes in original sin, or one does not, for example. It can be persuasively argued that the Greek (or Eastern) teaching on baptism is complementary to the Augustinian articulation of original sin, or that they both source to and explain an earlier apostolic understanding, but they are clearly not “the same.” Hence, the Eastern understanding of the sinlessness of the Blessed Virgin is not “the same” as the Latin understanding as expressed in the Immaculate Conception doctrine; it is harder to square the latter with the preceding understanding because it was expressly rejected by theologians, including St. Thomas Aquinas. The point is, that Eastern Catholics, to the extent that they are “Eastern” have a different understanding of the nature of the Theotokos than Latins do.

 

[Vico]

Either one believes in original sin, or one does not, for example. It can be persuasively argued that the Greek (or Eastern) teaching on baptism is complementary to the Augustinian articulation of original sin, or that they both source to and explain an earlier apostolic understanding, but they are clearly not “the same.” Hence, the Eastern understanding of the sinlessness of the Blessed Virgin is not “the same” as the Latin understanding as expressed in the Immaculate Conception doctrine; it is harder to square the latter with the preceding understanding because it was expressly rejected by theologians, including St. Thomas Aquinas. The point is, that Eastern Catholics, to the extent that they are “Eastern” have a different understanding of the nature of the Theotokos than Latins do.

One can believe in ancestral sin, and also original sin, without conflict. The original sin is the same as the ancestral sin. The effects of original sin and the effects of ancestral sin are the same also. What the stain of original sin means is where the misunderstanding occurs.

 

[Exsilivm]

One can believe in ancestral sin, and also original sin, without conflict. The original sin is the same as the ancestral sin. The effects of original sin and the effects of ancestral sin are the same also. What the stain of original sin means is where the misunderstanding occurs.

How baptism operates is also different.

 

[Vico]

How baptism operates is also different.

It is certainly presented differently, as can be seen here from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

1250 Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called.50 The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism. The Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer Baptism shortly after birth.51

1265 Baptism not only purifies from all sins, but also makes the neophyte “a new creature,” an adopted son of God, who has become a "partaker of the divine nature,"69 member of Christ and co-heir with him,70 and a temple of the Holy Spirit.71

1266 The Most Holy Trinity gives the baptized sanctifying grace, the grace of justification:

• enabling them to believe in God, to hope in him, and to love him through the theological virtues;
• giving them the power to live and act under the prompting of the Holy Spirit through the gifts of the Holy Spirit;
• allowing them to grow in goodness through the moral virtues.
  Thus the whole organism of the Christian’s supernatural life has its roots in Baptism.

And St. John Chrysostom:

St. John Chrysostom, Baptismal Instruction

3:6
“You have seen how numerous are the gifts of baptism. Although many men think that the only gift it confers is the remission of sins, we have counted its honors to the number of ten. It is on this account that we baptize even infants, although they are sinless, that they may be given the further gifts of sanctification, justice, filial adoption, and inheritance, that they may be brothers and members of Christ, and become dwelling places of the Spirit.”

12:6
“You are called faithful both because you believe in God and have as a trust from him justification, sanctity, purity of soul, filial adoption, and the kingdom of heaven.”

Ancient Christian Writers, p. 57 …