In most ways, I much prefer the EOC "take" on things..... and I find a VERY different attitude, a lot of humility in the East, a lot of egoism/power-grabbing in the West.
The treasury of Orthodoxy is obedience to Christ...
The treasury of the Latin Church is the authority of the Chair of Peter...
The treasury of the Reformation is the authority of the Bible...
So that the argument between the Latin Church and the Reformation is bitter and vitriolic...
It is an argument between two authoritarians...
The EOC does indeed claim the Truth, and is authoritative...
But we do not presume to impose Truth on the unwilling...
On the other hand, I have a big embrace of original sin and what Protestants call "total depravity" and these are quite different in the East; here I'm closer to Catholicism.
Indeed you do and are... You see the Fall of Adam as total, a tumbling into the pit of absolute death, unto utter and total inertitude... With no good in Adam's spawn whatsoever at all... Dead as a door nail... Not merely sinful, but dead... You see mankind as a victim of Adam's transgression, and the only way out is by God giving you life in the midst of the death in which we all lie supine and inert...
Some of that Theosis talk of the East spooks me a bit.... I think I'm far more Western there....
Theosis IS Salvation in the OT - Moses being the most Glorified...
And it is the Crown of Salvation in the New Testament...
It comes AFTER Justification by God...
I'm almost convinced about Communion for babies....
The East makes a valid point here....
Yes, why deprive our children of the Food of the Kingdom of Heaven into which they are baptized 40 days after being born? And more than this, children are full participants in all the Services - The Church is their Home, a place of safety and holiness and joy, with the result that when later, as young adults, IF they should go prodigal, they will find the husks being fed to the hogs instead of themselves, and will remember in their starvation the provision of the Father they have forsaken... And they will have a basis for their return, as did the Prodigal...
The memories of the earliest years are a big deal... Keeping Services for adults and sending kids to Sunday School loses those kids when they go wandering off into the carnal and secular world...
The East has a lot of Marian devotion without all the Marian DOGMA - I'm not far from them on that.
Well, She IS the Mother of our Lord, with Whom we are His brethren, which all by itself makes of Her OUR Mother too... But as Christ noted, John the Baptist IS Elijah, IF you can receive it... So likewise the Mother of our Lord...
No Purgatory... no Indulgences.... no Papal Infallibility.... no Transubstantiation.... no obsession over POWER and Lordship ... many reasons to look to the East rather than to Rome....
MY frustration with Eastern Orthodoxy is the "marriage" of faith with culture..... one must at least pretend to be Greek to be GREEK Orthodox, for example.
The West is in transition from imported to local Orthodoxy, and the imports, fleeing persecutions, tend to enclave themselves, the Greeks perhaps less so than other ethnicities... I was sniffing around the Bookstore of a Russian Church in San Francisco, and a woman came up to me and asked me a question in Russian... I looked at her and smiled, and said "Forgive me, I only understand English..." And she took a step back, raised her head and looked at me, and said: "Oh - I thought you were one of US..." and pivoted away... And I replied in a fairly loud voice: "I AM one of US!!"
I thought it was a very funny encounter - Others there not so much... Russians can be almost morose sometimes... But I will have none of THAT!
It's none my business, but I think these EOC denominations could learn a lot from Protestants on this.... in the USA, maybe those 30 MILLION plus former Catholics would go Orthodox (where most of their reasons for leaving don't exist) if they didn't have to learn to speak Greek or Russian and pretend to be a foreign culture. The GOOD aspect of "catholic" (universal) is almost entirely missing in Orthodoxy and IMO it is needlessly holding this great church back. The EOC should be far larger then the RCC - in most ways, it deserves to be. My Greek friend (and yes, she is very GREEK in all ways) insists that when I left the RCC, IF I had gone East, I would be a priest today. Well.... I just didn't want to convert to Hellenistic culture in order to be Orthodox. I'm an American.... I speak English.... I ate good American food like tacos and pizza. And I could not grow a beard if my life depended on it.
I serve in a convert Arabic Church - We only have one "cradle-O" there who has Arabic genetics, and she is half-Russian, but gives the Lord's Prayer in Arabic on Sundays... Converts to Orthodoxy from the Evangellicals is a long and slow and complicated process of unlearning and relearning what being a Christian actually is... It is almost like AA - "Hi, My name is Bob, and I am a recovering Evangellical Protestant..." That process takes years and years and years... A recovering atheist has better prospects... Or at least more rapid...
But there is Grace and there is Grace, and the Grace of Evangellization is different from the Grace of fleeing persecutions... And the Evangellization of the Americas into the Orthodox Faith came through Russia across Siberia and into Alaska, and that Grace is the main channel and conduit... Yet everywhere Orthodoxy grows, it is in the process of producing Saints - It can almost be said that the Job of the Church is to produce Relics... If any one person finds Peace, a thousand around him will be Saved... And the Church is becoming American through all these scatterings of the faithful, and home-grown Orthodoxy is sprouting forth, and you will be seeing the fruit of this Vine soon enough... But in a certain Ekklesiastical way, the Americas are under the Homophoron of the Church in Russia...
Revelation records the future history of the Faith as the Serpent chasing the Woman from place to place, from Jerusalem to Rome to Constantinople to Moscow through Alaska into the New World... So it is coming to America, where it will be persecuted again, and is enjoying a resurgence in Russia... And it is pretty much kept underfoot in Moslem countries...
So if you are right, that should still prove no obstacle if the Truth is there... And the Truth IS There... But it is not a Faith in which each person expresses Faith preferences, picking and choosing eklectically which elements to embrace and which not... It is the whole enchilada, beans, meat, and salsa... We are ekklesiological maximalists, not theological minimalists... We look for what is good in any praxis that may seem odd... We do not - although God know we can and do otherwise - sniff around looking for things to criticize others for...
I mean, Greeks have a LOT of VERY questionable practices...
And so do the Russians...
And the Serbs...
And the Antiochians...
And the Romanians...
ALL of these, as you know, have been heavily persecuted...
Arsenios
