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Foundations: Understanding the Orthodox Church STRATFOR analyst Lauren Goodrich explains the tenets that define the Eastern Christian Orthodox Church – a faith system deeply embedded in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Note: The following document is a transcript of a recorded interview. It has been formatted with subheads for the benefit of readers, but the content is a faithful reproduction of the speaker’s diction and grammar. The Orthodox Church is the second-largest Christian communion in the world. There are many different versions of Orthodoxy within Christianity. The largest is the Eastern Christian Orthodox Church. There’s many similarities, especially doctrinally, between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church, but how each of them acts vis-a-vis the state and the population is incredibly different. As a faith system, you really have to trace it back just to the basic doctrines of Orthodoxy, which came around the fourth century -- meaning the very start of the Roman Catholic Church. These doctrines began a series of debates over how homogenous should the Catholic Church be. Overall, the church attempted to be both Orthodox and hold to Catholic principles -- meaning the papal primacy. But over time, the west factions of the Church began to deviate from the ones in the east, with the Eastern churches leaning more toward Orthodoxy and the Western more toward Catholicism. Naturally there are gray areas, but the true identity started to really form around the fourth century. This is when there was a series of council meetings in Constantinople over orthodox tradition. The pope was invited, and he rejected the councils outright. This is when the splits started to form even further. Distinguishing the Orthodox and Catholic Faiths There are multiple dividing issues. But two is the papal primacy and the cultural linguistic diversification within the church and state relationship. (A RESTATE (for grammar and emphasis) WOULD BE HELPFUL HERE)meaning you want me to come in and redo it? Can do. As far as papal primacy, Orthodox consider Jesus Christ to be the head of the Church, so there’s no patriarch like the pope. Orthodox also reject the infallibility of the pope. Of course, Orthodox respect, honor and venerate the pope – and he’s actually a part of the Orthodox system -- but he ‘s not solely in charge. The second difference is between the relationship of state and faith. In Orthodoxy—did you mean to say Catholicism here?nope, it’s one and the same. The Catholic Church unites many nations under one head, whereas orthodoxy does not, in theory, unite nations or create a broad, culturally diverse empire. The Orthodox Church is divided into many self-governing bodies -- each nationally and geographically distinct, but united under one theology, which is very different from Catholicism. This is why there are various Orthodox churches with national titles – the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Russian Orthodox Church, Romanian Orthodox Church. This second difference has allowed each Orthodox church to have a distinctive language, bishop, cultural elements -- each to fit their own population. So in theory, where Catholicism were more uniform, to unite or control all of Europe, Orthodoxy is more exclusive and broken. Language and Doctrine Before Orthodoxy split off from the Catholic Church, there was a series of missionaries, that followed the Orthodox creeds and theology and doctrines, that ended up proselytizing across Eastern Europe. This is why Orthodoxy is so prevalent in Eastern Europe. The reason why it became so successful was that these theologians came up with a hybrid language, called Old Church Slavonic – which was Slavic-based, so they could go across each Slavic region and translate the Bible and implement the Bible, but underneath an Orthodox doctrine. This was very unlike the Catholic tradition, which they would proselytize via Greek or Latin, which doesn’t take in the Slavic world. So you started to have a unity within the Orthodox communities, from Belarus to Russians to Ukrainians to Bulgarians and Serbs -- all because of this hybrid language that was created. The Catholic Church hated this, because it doctrinally does not fall underneath Catholicism to have the Bible translated outside of the Greek or Latin versions. This became one of the major components of the schisms that of course eventually led into the larger problems between the Orthodox and the Catholics and papal primacy and the diversification within church and state. – word choice – just verify that’s what you meant to state here (not sure if you meant separation instead) heh, I don’t know what I meant either… I can re-state for “and the relationship between church and state” A Divided Geography With the schism that happened around the 11th century, the East-West split really happened between Rome and Constantinople, with Constantinople taking control of the Orthodox populations in the Balkans, central Europe, eastern Europe. This has today become the countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, etc.