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Comments
Really, “Church of Rome” probably isn’t the best of terms since, strictly speaking, it refers to the diocese of Rome rather than to the conglomerate of local Churches that are in dogmatic union with the Church of Rome. I was trying to be unambiguous; “Catholic Church” is problematic, too, though, for other reasons.
I’ve no doubt that, historically, many views of the Chacedonian schism have been in play—that goes for a wide array of theological concepts, of course.
I don’t think the West uses the imagery of the husband as “priest”. We don’t have crownings or such. (I think the pre-V2 wedding rite had more such “pomp” than our modern rite—alas—does.)
Do you think your (and others’) arguments against the “Roman model” of understanding Petrine primacy are unanswered? What would a “devil’s advocate” response to your assertion be? I don’t have a background in Patristics and can’t comment intelligently on what St. Ignatius of Antioch said (other than that I recall his saying that the bishop was necessary) or what his contemporaries or short-term successors may have added. Were I to take a stab, though, I would wonder if this may be an instance of “ongoing revelation”, a theology that, like Aquinas’s models for understanding the Eucharist, simply took definitive form later, even as it is (arguably) recognizable in a different form in the early Church. There certainly is not unanimity in all modern Catholic teachings among all of the saints whom we venerate; as I recall, Aquinas himself denied the Immaculate Conception.
I wonder, actually, if this all may indeed be “different strokes for different folks”. Protestantism and secularism seem to affect Western Christianity much more than they do the Orthodox. If the West did not have a centralized “tie-breaker” in the Bishop of Rome, perhaps we would have splintered in many more ways than we did from Luther & Co. I mean, goodness, I know “Catholics”—and many of them!—who believe the Church should recognize same-sex unions and female clergy, allow abortions, and grant marital nullity decrees basically willy-nilly … to say nothing of the perennial hot-button topic of contraception. Our recent Synod on the Family revealed an awful lot of divergence even among our episcopate on pretty fundamental ideas of family and marriage. Perhaps, ok, that is God’s punishment for our heterodoxy, or maybe it’s a vestige of our centuries of being essentially intertwined with secular government—or, maybe that’s exactly why we in the West do need the Pope as leader.
I’ll grab the Cleenewerk. Looks interesting. I’m a bit suspicious of Cdl. Kasper, but hey.
@RomanNomad,
I appreciate your willingness to discuss this subject. I hope my comments do not raise another red flag. The truth is we all want perfect union. But I wish to reply to some of comments.
First, I like to reiterate Minasoliman's comments that the Roman Catholic Church's dogmatizing of every issue under the sun opens them to heresy and unnecessary claims and positions. I will add that the net result usually ends with some form of back paddling. Take for example your reference of
Catechism in #838:
“The Church knows that she is joined in many ways to the baptized who
are honored by the name of Christian, but do not profess the Catholic
faith in its entirety or have not preserved unity or communion under the
successor of Peter.” Those “who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in a certain, although imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church.” With the Orthodox Churches, this communion is so profound “that it lacks little to attain the fullness that would permit a common celebration of the Lord’s Eucharist.”
How can a church say one who doesn't profess our faith in entirety or has not preserved unity under the successor of Peter has a communion nonetheless and that communion ”is so profound that it lacks little to attain the fullness"? One can't say we know other churches have communion with Christ and but they have an imperfect communion, unless one defines perfect communion as communion under the Roman Catholic Church. If the latter is the case, then there was no need to say other churches who have not preserved unity under the successor of Peter have a communion.
In addition, from this whole thread, you seem to show that all the criteria Roman Catecesis allows for the other churches to profess the fullness of faith (such as faith in the Trinity, baptism, priesthood, interfaith marriages) are more easily found in the Protestant churches than the Coptic Church. (Anglican, Lutheran, Episcopal. Even though Protestant sacraments are ceremonial in nature, they still have Eucharist and baptism, etc). If such is the case, then Catechesis 838 is misleading at best.
Maybe the Catholic catechesis addressed these ambiguous definitions of communion, fullness of faith and profoundness elsewhere.
Second, you wrote "For us, at least, a sacrament is a sacrament per its form merely. For example, I can baptize anyone, such as in a state of emergency, even regardless of whether they desire it or not. That’s definitely not normal for us , but it’s consistent with the idea that the sacrament is efficacious independent of the individual’s action/thought or lack thereof: it’s God who works rather than we."
Not even Christ baptized anyone by force regardless of whether they desired it or not. It seems the fact that Roman Catholic Church (and most EO churches) allow this loophole, shows a lack of sacrament form. There can't be a sacrament if the sacrament’s form is "anything under the sun" without specific requirements to that form. Some Protestant Churches have the same loophole (layperson baptizing in the Trinitarian formula in emergency). By your definition, their Protestant sacrament is a sacrament per its form merely.
Third. You wrote, "Of what salvific significance is it if I believe that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and from the Son versus from the Father alone, or that the Bishop of Rome is, by virtue of his office, Christ’s very Vicar on earth, as opposed to an honorary “first among equals”? Personally, I can’t see it as a “sine qua non” to be united on these matters, which seem, to laypeople, much more of theological than of practical, day-to-day import."
The problem here is that you are building a false dichotomy between theologians and laypeople. All laypeople must be theologians (that is think and live the faith intellectually) and all theologians must be simply laypeople (that is live the faith piously). No one can live piously without making an intellectual and theological decision to pursue Christ. The two cannot be separated. Papal infallibility and the Assumption of Mary are ex cathedra declarations of the Catholic Church. The fifth condition of ex cathedra declarations is that "must be held by the whole Church". Therefore, the layperson cannot be united to the Roman Catholic Church if he does not hold it as "sine qua non". In fact, in 1950, with Munificentissimus Deus, Pope Pius XII's infallible definition regarding the Assumption of Mary, there are attached these words:
“Hence if anyone, which God forbid, should dare willfully to deny or to call into doubt that which we have defined, let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith.” (emphasis added).
One could argue that a Catholic who marries a non-Catholic does not necessarily deny or doubt the doctrines of papal infallibility and the Assumption of Mary. He simply chooses to submerges them into a subset of non-essential matters. However, even if one allows the possibility of such submergence, when you marry the two become one. Your other half will not believe in essential Roman Catholic faith. Since the two are one, you have not only submerged essential Catholic theological doctrine, but you have essential fallen away from the Catholic faith by marrying a non-Catholic. Therefore it is of the same salvific significance to believe in essential Roman Catholic theological doctrine, as it is to have any marriage sacrament. The only thing one can do to reconcile is back paddle again to either state that ex cathedra declarations are not really essential or to say marriage to a non-Catholic makes one fall away from the Catholic faith.
Again, I am not saying this to insult the Catholic faith. I truly think union is possible and essential. Minatasgeel has answered the original question. There cannot be true Orthodox marriage if one expects to ignore essential theology. This is the position of the Orthodox Church. Minasoliman convincingly attempted to show why one particular Catholic doctrine is incompatible with Orthodoxy. My sense from your comments and from others is that some were trying to argue theology is meaningless at the grassroots daily living of Catholics and non-Catholics. This is view point is extremely dangerous and outright illogical.
http://tasbeha.org/community/index.php?p=/discussion/5689/theosis/p1
http://tasbeha.org/community/discussion/15450/the-deification-of-man-hh-pope-shenouda-iii/p1
Have any of the Bishops actually come out publicly and stated corrections or clarifications concerning Theosis and HH's book? I would imagine that unless the Synod or a few of our Bishops begin using the term and teaching about it, there will be continual misunderstanding about what Theosis is.
I am a bit late to this thread, having just found this site, so I realize this may go unread. At any rate, congratulations on your planned marriage.
I was a sincere, serious-minded, practicing Roman Catholic for nearly a quarter of a century, until I discovered the authenticity and Grace of Orthodoxy a few years ago. I wish to share a thought: if your wife were to adopt the same stance towards other 'men' as your church does towards other 'religions', how long do you think your marriage would last? to believe in everything, is to believe in nothing. I hope this is not the case with you. I am familiar with the turf from which you display your church's gushing 'openness'. I have lived on both sides of the fence that Vatican II erected... modernist and traditionalist. I would most strongly encourage you to remember God's Providence as you think about the love you bear towards this Coptic woman, and her entry into your life. Your relationship with God has to do with an eternal context... your marriage, if I understand correctly, occurs in a temporal context. Demonstrate your love for her by respecting and learning about her ancient and Orthodox Faith... one which sees her brothers and sisters in the Mideast being murdered/martyred regularly. If we fail in humility, you or I, we will find all doors closed but the exits. Please accept this advice as sincerely given...from a husband of 35 years and a father of 5 children; and 8 grandchildren.
Forgive.
Theofan
Mina’s last response touches on the idea that even we on this thread might simply have such a different set of “tools” for communicating on these topics that it is hard to discern similarities apart from divergences.
On “we need to keep things simple” … I personally think that God gives us rational minds for the precise purpose of “reaching out” to Him who is infinite wisdom, infinite logic, perfect reason. In the same way in which a procreating couple “reaches out” to God by imitating his creative work in effecting a new human being, the rational mind, in analyzing parts of the faith, can be similarly “reaching out”. Are such distinctions as consubstantiation vs. transubstantiation fundamental for salvation? I certainly hope not since I imagine most believers don’t grasp the full theological significance of these concepts—including myself! But, I think there *are* some whose purpose *is* to do that kind of thinking.
The Church in the West hasn’t been under widespread, systematic persecution or subjugation to another faith since antiquity. That’s a very different set of circumstances than under which the Orthodox Churches have operated since the rise of Islam: the Orthodox Churches had to worry about basic survival in a way that the West did not, which left Western theologians free to ponder things that, in a context of merely attempting to survive amidst Muslim aggression, would indeed appear trite, piddly, and/or immaterial. This, to my mind, can at least partly explain the divergence of spiritual mindset between the Orthodox and the West.
Much of the commentary here, to my reading, strikes me as quasi-fundamentalist … the quotation from Pius XII, for example, begs the question of context and, yes, interpretation: the language of documents such as that is couched in a tradition of meaning that, as with Scripture, isn’t immediately apparent. Then you add in the matter of translation, and there’s yet another layer of complexity.
As another example, liturgy-minded Romans have written ad nauseam in the past several decades about the meaning of the phrase “full, conscious, and active participation” from Vatican II’s liturgy constitution, but many participants in that discussion haven’t stopped to consider the difference between the Latin word “actuosa” and the English word “active” (or the Latin “activa”), and the same folks usually also haven’t bothered with reading and understanding documents from before V2 that use the same phrase.
This is, of course, not to imply that we consider Church documents to be of equal footing with Scripture! But, as with Scripture, context and language matters can suggest a more nuanced, “shades-of-gray” understanding of things that, at face value, can seem quite “straightforward”.
Note, too, that the decentralized ecclesiology has indeed allowed what Romans can see as moral error to creep into Churches like the Coptic Church: specifically, the Coptic Church’s acceptance of contraception. Bl. Paul VI’s predictions in “Humanae vitae” of the consequences of contraception have come to pass in much of the world: more marital infidelity, lowering of moral standards, exploitation of women.
(I believe I posted above that, in my own relationship, we’ve had the contraception discussion multiple times and have reached agreement on how we would live our marriage.)
The “arbiter among Patriarchs” is essentially the role that the Pope plays. The Pope does not function like, say, the Mormon president, who literally can (and has!) get up one day and announce that God has done a 180-degree reversal of teaching. The two cases where we’ve had “ex cathedra” pronouncements were both matters on which there had long been discussion, and (so my theologian mother tells me) there was seen a pastoral need for “arbitration” (Mina’s term), which took form in the “ex cathedra” pronouncements. The Pope is NOT a “sole” source of infallible dogma—though it may seem that way at first glance because this is the most “direct” source of such that the RCC identifies.
Are there other examples of "moral errors" besides non-abortive contraception that you feel Orthodox churches have fell into due to "decentralized" ecclesiology? Because you've repeated this example before, and I find it a very weak example, imo.