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Where we stand I am often asked on discussion boards on other sites to outline the similarities and differences between Orthodox Christianity and other Christian traditions. This prompted me recently to put all this together into a reasonably comprehensive article which would be permanently archived and updated on this site. In an age in which people like to think everything is the same really and the differences are just a matter of style, we need to look afresh with honest minds at both what unites us and what still hinders unity in the wider Christian world. Orthodoxy is often left out of these comparative studies. Many in the west think that Christian divergence / convergence is just a Catholic / Protestant thing. I hope that this article may effectively refute this notion and offer a refreshingly different perspective. I have retained the original text and structure of my on-line version as I think that it has a clarity which helps in the treatment of this rather difficult subject. THE TRUE CHURCH? Christian Orthodoxy is not well understood in the Christian world. Since we are attempting here some assessment of the Christian Church / churches, you may find this quick guide and comparison of Orthodoxy with other Christian traditions useful. The text includes at the end those distinctive elements which substantiate Orthodoxy's claim to apostolicity. ORTHODOXY COMPARED ... SIMILARITIES - CATHOLICISM (this is not to deny that SOME of these similarities are shared by SOME Protestants) We are both liturgical churches, that is to say that our teaching is conveyed by both rite and ritual. We are both sacramental churches in the sense that spiritual realities are conveyed by material forms and means. We both centre our Christian lives on the Eucharist as a communal celebration of and encounter with our saving God. The Eucharist is for both of us an encounter with the Risen Christ. He has many modes of His Presence but we, in the Eucharist, celebrate His coming to us in the Holy Mysteries, (our word for Sacrament). We are both credal churches in the sense that the ongoing life of the Holy Spirit in the Church is definitive against heresy, (remembering that creeds define against error rather than teach comprehensively the truth). We both affirm the role of Tradition in unfolding the meaning and consistency of Scripture as the foundation of the Church's life. We both assert the need for continuity in ministry not only as to form but also as to content in the historic yet evolved threefold service of the episcopacy, presbyterate and diaconia. We both uphold the reality of the Church as the Body of Christ, the sure means of access to salvation without denying the possibility of salvation by other less certain means. We both celebrate the saints as living icons of God's redemptive power. We both rejoice in Mary as the Mother of God, recognising that the refusal to ascribe this title to her reflects a continuing Nestorian Christology amongst some Christians. We both assert that redemption is a renewal of creation and not simply or only a matter of human regeneration. We both assert that salvation having been secured by God in Christ is in its application in human life a process and not merely a forensically applied past event. Salvation requires a growth in holiness to make it complete. We both assert that the gospel has profound social and political implications but only by preserving the Church's distinction from worldliness and carnal power so she can be a prophetic voice in the world. We both affirm the role of monasticism in maintaining that distinction and witness. SIMILARITIES - PROTESTANTISM (this is not to deny that SOME of these similarities are shared by SOME Catholics) We both assert that the only Head of the Church is our Lord and God and Saviour, Jesus Christ and that the Holy Spirit alone is the Church's Guide, Inspiration and Strengthener. We both celebrate the unfettered and universal priesthood of all believers, believing that each man and woman has a ministry to fulfil by virtue of his or her baptism. We both believe that the believer can know God personally and in the most intimate manner, and in this knowing, the believer becomes mystically joined to and transformed by the Holy Trinity. We both believe that Scripture is the authoritative foundation of the Church's life and not to be separated from Tradition which is the ongoing reflective mind of the Church in the Holy Spirit as the Word of God is broken and shared afresh in each generation. We both believe that defending and living the Faith is the province of the whole People of God and not merely the clergy. It is the whole People of God also who are ultimately responsible for the legitimacy of any ministry or teaching which is exercised in its midst. DIFFERENCES - CATHOLICISM (MANY of which are shared by Protestants, SOME of which also apply to Protestants) We neither accept the universal jurisdiction claimed by the Pope over the whole of Christendom since the Hildebrandine period of the papacy, nor the claim to infallibility defined by Vatican 1, however qualified. We reject the "filioque" addition to the Nicene Creed not just because of its unilateral imposition by the Latin Church but also because it effectively subordinates the position of the Holy Spirit in the Church. Also, by creating a dyarchy of origin, (however qualified), for the Holy Spirit (proceeding from the Father and Son) under the false premise that the Son is thereby distanced from Arianism, the Trinity itself is radically unbalanced and the Holy Spirit reduced to an incomprehensible, impersonal afterthought. We accept much of St. Augustine's teaching but reject his contribution to the filioque development in which he embraced the psychological analogy of the Trinity and the associated understanding of the Holy Spirit as the "bond of love" between the Father and the Son. We reject the dogma of the Immaculate Conception as based on a faulty understanding of original sin largely perpetuated by St. Augustine who regarded the primal rebellion against God as a "sexually transmitted disease." Although we believe in the assumption of Our Lady to heaven at her Dormition, nonetheless this is not to be overdefined as public dogma as it has never been part of the public preaching of the Church but rather an essential part of the Church's inner life which we have no business defining as if it were a saving truth in the public domain. (We do not rank truths according to their alleged importance; we distinguish them according to their appropriateness). We do not think it necessary to define "everything under the sun" in order to make the Church's teaching either more rational, systematic or clear cut. We accept that there are truths firmly to be believed but embedded in the mystery of God. The most appropriate language for such truths is poetry and hymnody, not the legalistic and defective analytical language of the scholastic theologian or canon lawyer. We reject the notion that the end of saved humanity consists only in the Beatific Vision or mere reconciliation. The end of humanity is the resurrection life of Christ where we shall be transformed by the divine energies of the Trinity from one degree of glory to the next. In this we shall be divinised, made whole and perfect as an iron glows red in the fire. We thereby reject, (after Anselm who defined the idea), that redemption consists ONLY or PRIMARILY in the satisfaction of Christ's substitutionary sacrifice. The resurrection is as much part of the salvation process as the Cross. The full and rich biblical salvation metaphors need all to be included, not just the ones that emerged from feudal medieval Europe, (if these at all)! DIFFERENCES - PROTESTANTISM (MANY of which are shared by Catholics, SOME of which also apply to Catholics) Notwithstanding our acceptance of the primary and definitive authoritative role of Scripture in the Church we do not believe that the Bible alone, decontextualised as it were from the life of the Church in her Tradition, Liturgy, Ministry, Art and Sanctity, can possibly ever function on its own as the yardstick of belief, worship and life. We base this belief on the understanding that the Bible was written by the Holy Spirit in the hearts of men and women who were members of the Church in both the Old and New Testaments. We observe that where "Sola Scriptura" prevails, there are over 20,000 denominations each more or less claiming to have the correct "angle" on the Word of God. The impossibility of this approach combined with the marginalisation of the Roman magisterium, (including amongst many Catholics), has indirectly hastened the secularising, agnostic and rationalist trends in the west since the Enlightenment. This has now reached rock bottom in post-modernism whereby no meaning exists in life apart from that which the individual may ascribe to it. In this, Protestantism has unwittingly hastened secularisation and unbelief. Once the Church is divorced from the Bible, BOTH suffer. We also reject the over-spiritualising tendency of Protestantism which divorces the spiritual and material realms. This legacy has rendered the Protestant tradition opaque to the physical aspects of creation and sometimes even antagonistic to sacramentalism and a creation based spirituality. It has also stripped the physical dimension from such hitherto shared beliefs as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of the Body. We also do not accept the latent or actual individualism inherent in the Protestant approach to God which tends to marginalise or reject the role of the community in the Church. We regard this as a rather strange development within the Reformed Churches considering the manifestly body-corporate nature of salvation in both Old and New Testaments. Orthodoxy also rejects the narrowing of salvation to satisfaction which has been a common legacy from Catholicism, (ante) and the corresponding existential removal of the resurrection from day to Christian life and liturgical celebration. Notably, the feast of Pascha (Easter) has a greater prominence in the Orthodox Church than that of the other non-Orthodox churches where the sentimentality of an emasculated Christmas seems to have taken over. DISTINCTIVENESS OF ORTHODOXY Orthodoxy's ecclesiastical polity is based on the Council and conciliarity. This is how the mind of the Church emerges as the Holy Spirit speaks to the assembled faithful. The period of the Ecumenical Councils and the Undivided Church has a great prominence in the Orthodox Church. We have a synthetic and maximalist approach to Church life, (as opposed to analytical and minimalist). We place worship at the centre of the Church's life for it is here that we are transformed progressively into what we already are by baptism ... the body of Christ. We see worship (on the human side) as an ascent to God. We see worship (on the divine side) as a descent to Creation / humanity. Our worship is "a capella" and standing (no pews ... usually!) because it affirms the dignity and beauty of the unaccompanied human voice and the importance of movement / bodily posture in worship. We venerate icons and saints (living icons) because beholding and encountering the glory of God we are transformed ourselves by that glory as we repent. We are confident, (without being triumphalist or proselytising), that God has not left Himself without a witness and that this witness is in the Orthodox Church. This confidence is based on the empirical evidence of the claim of the Orthodox Church to be the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church" of the creeds .... the Church of the Old Testament, New Testament and the Pentecostal period, (ie. to the present day). The validation of this claim can only be undertaken by both close study and experience of the Orthodox Church herself and certainly not merely this weak, incomplete and imperfect offering. Lord have mercy! Fr. Gregory |
