Hello Tomster,
I really had no intention of going into this here, but I must address what I believe are incorrect assumptions on your part, for the sake of those individuals reading here.
… the Eastern Orthodox have preserved the apostolic succession and the essentials of Christian doctrine and worship. Orthodox bishops are true Christian bishops; Orthodox priests are true priests; the Orthodox Divine Liturgy (the Mass) is a true sacrifice; and the sacraments of the Oriental Churches are true sacraments.
This is only a matter of opinion on the part of your church, but of course we are flattered.
Respectfully, I should point out that any decision your church makes on the validity of Holy Orthodoxy one way or another is meaningless to the Orthodox themselves.
There is no reason to bring up the Protestants at all. They are the children of your church tradition, and everything they are is the fruit of your church. You may compare them to your church but not to ours.
What you might want to take a good look at is the fact that today we find an Orthodox world which consists of a number of equal, independent, and autonomous churches united only by a certain spiritual fellowship, the common Byzantine liturgy, and adherence to the doctrinal statements of the first seven ecumenical councils. No one church speaks for Orthodoxy and no one theologian speaks for any particular Orthodox church.
This is an unfair comparison.
Can you say any one RC theologion speaks for the Catholic church? Avery Dulles? Edward Schillebeeckx? Hans Urs Von Balthasar? Hans Kung?
For Holy Orthodoxy the traditional theology is set, everyone knows or has access to it and the resources are very abundant. You could study it for a lifetime and not exhaust your resources. This is one important reason why Holy Orthodoxy has been so consistant in it’s beliefs and teachings all of these centuries, we have not resorted to any artificial institutional means to maintain our orthodoxy, simply Tradition and the Holy Spirit. We have been so successful at this, without a Pope, that even your own church praises us.
There is a natural reluctance to explore new theological frontiers, which are typically so attractive to heretics. Our only development is in the form of paring back, reining in on what others try to push as True. Our theology is apophatic and by it’s very nature much more conservative.
Tertullian, the notable early Latin Father, had
this to say in his “Catholic phase” in about the year 200AD (just 165 years after Christ and two hundred years before Augustine). I find it a very Orthodox attitude:
" This rule (as it will be proved) was taught by Christ, and raises amongst ourselves no other questions than those which heresies introduce, and which make men heretics."
Now Tertulian expressed his Rule of Faith spontaneously in five different various writings but they are all essentially the same as the one he gives with this statement:
*Now, with regard to this rule of faith—that we may from this point acknowledge what it is which we defend—it is, you must know, that which prescribes the belief that there is **one only God, and that He is none other than the Creator of the world, who produced all things out of nothing through His own Word, first of all sent forth; that this Word is called His Son, and, under the name of God, was seen “in diverse manners” by the patriarchs, heard at all times in the prophets, at last brought down by the Spirit and Power of the Father into the Virgin Mary, was made flesh in her womb, and, being born of her, went forth as Jesus Christ; thenceforth He preached the new law and the new promise of the kingdom of heaven, worked miracles; having been crucified, He rose again the third day; (then) having ascended into the heavens, He sat at the right hand of the Father; sent instead of Himself the Power of the Holy Spirit to lead such as believe; will come with glory to take the saints to the enjoyment of everlasting life and of the heavenly promises, and to condemn the wicked to everlasting fire, after the resurrection of both these classes shall have happened, together with the restoration of their flesh. *
Again, as its doctrinal standard the Orthodox churches recognize as binding any dogma defined by the first seven ecumenical councils.
There have been seven and no more, just seven.
The last of these councils, the 2nd Council of Nicea, was held in 787 A.D. and an appeal to an ecumenical council today is theoretical for the Easterners since they agree that no such council could be called without including the Western Church.
This is an erroneous assumption, I suggest you speak for your own church, let Holy Orthodoxy speak for itself.
Orthodox theological statements lack the precision of Catholicism and since the Orthodox are over twelve centuries behind the times doctrinally they have not officially adopted the dogmas defined by Rome since the schism.
You make the error that your more “developed” theology is somehow more precise, when in fact this is precisely how the western tradition spawned Protestantism.
{countinued in post #16 below}
