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Christianity

• The Eastern Orthodox Church likes to think of itself as the original church with the Roman Catholic having split off from it. The Roman Catholic Church likes to think it is the original church with the Orthodox splitting away from RC.

• In actuality, neither the Orthodox nor the Roman Catholic churches existed until 1054 CE when the bishops of Rome and Constantinople excommunicated each other. OR, we might consider that both of them existed from at least the 5th century on. Both churches share equally in the first 1000 year history of the Christian church.

• When Constantine became Emperor in the 4th century he shifted the political center of power from Rome to Constantinople, in the Eastern part of the Empire. The church’s center of power tended to follow the center of political power and Constantinople became a second seat of ecclesiastical power.

• The break between East and West was not sudden. The issues involved were numerous and built up over a period of many centuries.

• The cause was primarily due to the geographic distance and cultural differences between the western and eastern seats of the Roman Empire. These differences contributed to doctrinal and ritual differences:

• Eastern bishops resisted claims to primacy of the bishop in Rome.

• Eastern culture was different; tending toward a more contemplative, mystical, and passive approach to religious practice than the active, pragmatic, and legal approaches of the west.

• In the 7th and 8th centuries the east had to deal with encounters with the new and spreading Islamic faith which was not an issue for the west.

• The east felt that statues and realistic pictures of religious figures in use in the west was idolatry and thus banned such representations. They were iconoclasts (against such icons). Ironically, in the end, the East became associated with icons but only as stylized two dimensional images.

• The filioque statement added to the Nicene creed was a major theological issue between east and west. The Eastern bishops held that God the Father is sole creator and origin of everything, including both the Son and the Holy Spirit. They felt that the Holy Spirit proceeds only through the Father, not, as the West held, through both the Father and the Son.

• Differences of opinion regarding ritual practice included the use of leavened (east) or unleavened (west) bread in the Eucharist and baptism by immersion (east) or sprinkling (west)

• All these issues served to create harsh feelings and strained relations between the eastern and western seats of the Church. The final break came in 1054.

• From 1054 onward, the two churches continued to develop in different directions, independent of each other

• Organizational Structure:

• Eastern churches continued to remain autocephalous: self-ruling. The various national churches operate independently of each other, each under its own Bishop, but they are in mutual communication and cooperation with each other through periodic councils. They are a co-operative of independent church bodies.

• The Western church is united under (ruled over by) one head: the Pope (the Bishop of Rome) with other Bishops serving under the Pope in a hierarchical relationship from Cardinals and Bishops down to local Priests, Deacons and, finally, The People

• Corporate Nature of the Eastern Church:

• In the Eastern Church the clergy is seen as more equal to the laity than in the West. Eastern priests marry and have families.

• The Eastern Church holds that the church, as a body, is infallible but rejects the notion of the infallibility of a single representative of the church, i.e., the Pope, as held by the Western church

• Relationship to the larger society:

• The Eastern churches maintain a separate but close and mutually dependent relationship with the secular government of their respective nations

• The Western Church is often at odds with the secular society and has, at times, been both religious and secular head of society.

• Theological differences:

• The Eastern church focuses on the incarnation, the West focuses on the atonement through Jesus’ death and resurrection

• The Eastern Church sees the ultimate spiritual goal to be the eventual divinization of humanity and actively encourages the mystical life in all its members while the Western church tolerates but does not provide for such experience as a primary goal.

• Both Eastern and Western churches hold to the same basic sacraments but with a somewhat different interpretation reflecting the East’s focus on the divinization of all humanity vs. the West’s focus on the atoning nature of Christ.

• Eastern liturgy vs. Western Theology:

• Most significantly, the Eastern Church lacks the kind of theological development seen in the Western Church. Theologically, the East maintains the basic theology found from the earliest centuries of the Church without the later accretions added by the West.

• Rather, the East has developed the liturgy to an art form - a feast for the senses - with images (icons), smells (incense), and sound (the liturgy is chanted almost continually). All this is intended to foster a deep spiritual elevation in the worshiper.