Beliefs Of Orthodox Church Full Members Of#

With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. History: The Orthodox hurch states, Sometimes the Orthodox Church is also called the Eastern Orthodox Church, or the Oriental Church, or the Christian Church of the East, or the Orthodox Catholic Church, or the Graeco-Russian Church.The famous English philosopher and critic of religion, Bertrand Russell, gave a talk in London in 1927 entitled, 'Why I Am Not a Christian.' Following Russell's lead, I want here to outline why I have chosen to sever my ties with the Orthodox Church, after many years of participation in the church and reflection on its history and teachings.Orthodox Church: About Origin/History Main Beliefs Symbols Organisational Structure - GOD THE FATHER is the fountain of the Holy Trinity / J ESUS CHRIST is the Second Person of the Trinity, eternally born of the Father. The Eastern Orthodox Church Collected and Edited by Scott Shifferd Jr.

Against OrthodoxyRaised in a Greek migrant family in Melbourne, I had a fairly conventional Orthodox upbringing, including the mandatory infant baptism, observance of the major feasts and customs of the Christian calendar, such as the forty day fast leading up to Easter, the occasional communion and confession, and so on.Most members of the Greek community in Australia would be content to leave matters there, regarding the Orthodox Church primarily as a custodian of ethnicity, tradition and morality. My main target, rather, is only religious traditions and communities with highly developed systems of belief and power, exemplified best (but not solely) in the 'big five' religions of the world (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism) - these, I contend, threaten to undermine the philosophical life. But unlike these secular thinkers, I am not advocating the wholesale rejection of religion. Again, many others - from Russell to the New Atheists - have said likewise. Although my position here is not particularly innovative, I do hope to briefly raise some crucial philosophical questions that are often neglected in historical scholarship on the central texts and claims of Christianity.I will then turn in the final part of this article to the even more radical view at which I have arrived recently, where commitment to any institutionalised form of religion, Christian or otherwise, is regarded as incompatible with the pursuit of truth and wisdom.

But my attention was initially caught by the fiery and much maligned leader of the Greek Orthodox Church in Australia, Archbishop Stylianos (Harkianakis), with whom I shared a love of poetry and of our fellow Cretan, Nikos Kazantzakis. There I was introduced to some wonderful scholars, including the eloquent, softly-spoken and Oxford-trained John Chryssavgis (who connects spirituality with ecology, and currently serves as advisor to the Ecumenical Patriarch on environmental issues) and the comparatively tempestuous American-educated Themistocles Adamopoulo (a specialist on the apostle Paul, now in Pauline fashion undertaking missionary work in Sierra Leone). Andrew's Greek Orthodox Theological College in Sydney.

Beliefs Of Orthodox Church Full Members Of

Representatives from the Ecumenical Patriarchate have attended meetings of the World Council of Churches since its establishment in 1948, and at present almost all Orthodox Churches are full members of the World Council of Churches. ExclusivismTo begin with, there are challenges arising from the prevalence of exclusivism among Orthodox leaders, where this involves an attitude of triumphalism and a sense of superiority towards other religious faiths, and even other Christians.The Orthodox Church, to be sure, has been a significant member of the Ecumenical Movement. In what follows, I will outline some of these challenges faced by the Orthodox Church in the modern era (I am very much indebted to Vrasidas Karalis's withering critique of contemporary Greek Orthodoxy in The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity ). There was, for example, little freedom to genuinely question or to express doubts, at least without being deemed a 'heretic.'By the time I completed my theological studies I could no longer fail to acknowledge the serious problems crippling the Orthodox faith in the modern world, though I often wavered as to whether and how these problems could be resolved. He was not entirely mistaken.Strangely, however, the archbishop's words proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it was the very attitudes and teachings imbibed by us that led me and some of my fellow students (and even teachers) to suspect that something was deeply amiss in Orthodoxy.

This is a very selective form of listening: the others enable us to better see how we are right, rather than being humbly open to correction by others.Compare this to the words of the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh: 'We have to appreciate that truth can be received from outside of - not only within - our own group. Is genuine dialogue possible if I (as one partner in the dialogue) am already convinced that I possess the fullness of truth, and so the other does not have something to tell me which I could not in principle discover from my own tradition? Wouldn't dialogue, in such circumstances, be nothing more than a thinly disguised apologetics?Timothy Ware, a prominent Orthodox convert, has stated: 'We Orthodox are , not simply to bear witness to what we ourselves believe, but also to listen to what others have to say.' But isn't this disingenuous? If the Orthodox already possess the truth, then in what sense could they (genuinely) listen and learn from others? Ware's response is that, by listening to (non-Orthodox) others, the Orthodox stand to better understand the truth they have been entrusted with. And then a conflict between dogmatism and dialogue ensues.

HierarchicalismThere are also significant challenges relating to the ways in which the church is structured. What has unfortunately emerged here and in many other segments of the Orthodox Church is a psychopathology of defensiveness and victimization (related, no doubt, to the church's struggle for survival under oppressive Ottoman and communist regimes), allied with a propensity towards traditionalism, where this often takes the form of a naive romanticism about the Byzantine past. Christos Yannaras, one of Greece's leading Orthodox theologians and public intellectuals, has put forward a 'contamination model,' according to which nearly everything that has come from the West (beginning with the translation into Greek of Thomas Aquinas's Latin writings in the fourteenth century) has contaminated the purity and authenticity of Orthodox tradition.

This, together with the traditional Orthodox emphasis on episcopal collegiality rather than monarchy, has allowed for a measure of diversity and distinctiveness across the Orthodox community, and made possible a decentralised and flexible administrative model that spreads authority out to the regional, national and local levels - by means of, for example, autocephalous and autonomous churches which have a certain degree of independence from their respective historic Patriarchates, or 'mother churches. Admittedly, there are many Orthodox leaders who champion freedom, justice, equality and pluralism in principle, but in practice they often remain wary of the open competitiveness and embrace of difference that democracy promotes - consider the reluctance of the hierarchs and clergy of Greece in supporting church-state separation.Just as importantly, the Orthodox Church refuses to democratise itself by, for example, allowing the whole church to elect its bishops, and adopting a more inclusive approach towards the laity, especially women, who continue to be barred from ordination and even, in most cases, from the sanctuary.(This is not to overlook the fact that the Orthodox Church lacks the powerful centralised authority structure found in, for example, the Roman Catholic Church. (Interestingly, media attention has focused on the perceived prejudice against Islam in this statement, while neglecting the connection Huntington was making between Islam and Orthodoxy.) Like much of modern-day Islam, the Orthodox Church has yet to completely shake off its autocratic medieval inheritance and to promote democratic principles, both within the church and outside it.It was no accident that oppressive forms of communism took hold in Eastern European countries with Orthodox backgrounds.