D
DL82
Guest
It seems that the Eastern Churches are much less prone to mincing their words when it comes to talking of other churches and other faiths. You guys call a spade a spade. While we in the West have been tying ourselves in knots since Vatican II about what to call our ‘separated bretheren’, the East has a simple answer: ‘heretics’.
What do people think of the pros and cons of this?
It seems to me that some Eastern Christians look to the Church Fathers out of context on this one. For the early fathers, contending with Marcionites, Arians, Gnostics, Manichees, etc. the word ‘heretic’ denoted someone who preached a radically different Christ from the Christian Christ. For them, the only answer was to have no dealings with heretics until they converted. I’m not sure that’s true of today’s Protestants, who share the basic doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, and just lack something of the fullness of faith. Even less so can that be true of the differences in understanding between Catholic and Orthodox, which are miniscule by comparison to these earlier heresies.
A friend recently lent me an old (1940’s) Catholic devotional book, which talked about praying for ‘schismatics, heretics, jews, pagans and atheists’. The idea that anyone in the Church would talk that way today is just totally outside my experience. Is there some reason that the East’s relationship to language is different?
Maybe I’ve misunderstood here, I’m not trying to be rude to anybody, so please don’t take offence at anything I’ve said.
What do people think of the pros and cons of this?
It seems to me that some Eastern Christians look to the Church Fathers out of context on this one. For the early fathers, contending with Marcionites, Arians, Gnostics, Manichees, etc. the word ‘heretic’ denoted someone who preached a radically different Christ from the Christian Christ. For them, the only answer was to have no dealings with heretics until they converted. I’m not sure that’s true of today’s Protestants, who share the basic doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, and just lack something of the fullness of faith. Even less so can that be true of the differences in understanding between Catholic and Orthodox, which are miniscule by comparison to these earlier heresies.
A friend recently lent me an old (1940’s) Catholic devotional book, which talked about praying for ‘schismatics, heretics, jews, pagans and atheists’. The idea that anyone in the Church would talk that way today is just totally outside my experience. Is there some reason that the East’s relationship to language is different?
Maybe I’ve misunderstood here, I’m not trying to be rude to anybody, so please don’t take offence at anything I’ve said.
