miaphisite theology

Kind of Bad Joke from Anglicans first to destroy and expropriate the Sanctuary and then building another one and inviting non catholic Eastern Orthodox to fit in.

Anglicanism is obstinate in replacing Catholicism and in claiming to be the Catholic Church of England.......
...... Please.

Alonso_Castillo said:

Kind of Bad Joke from Anglicans first to destroy and expropriate the Sanctuary and then building another one and inviting non catholic Eastern Orthodox to fit in.

Anglicanism is obstinate in replacing Catholicism and in claiming to be the Catholic Church of England.......
...... Please.

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Thank you for sharing your opinion of the Holy Tradition that has carried to me the Faith of Christ, Incarnate, Crucified and Risen. I honour your tradition as well

FireDragon76 said:

I found this article talking about problems in western theology and the Roman Catholic encounter with miaphysite theology in the Oriental Orthodox, as well as Pope Benedict's critique of the Nestorian tendency in western Christianity:

http://www.academia.edu/12828239/Af..._Dialogue_with_the_Oriental_Orthodox_Churches

There's some excellent points. I was unaware that the later Ecumenical Councils were not fully received.

It does seem many non-Lutheran Protestant churches have a Nestorian tendency, particularly in the early Eucharistic theology.

The then Cardinal Ratzinger makes a good case by pointing out there is a moralistic tendency in western Christendom because of the lack of full reception of later ecumenical councils. There's a tendency to focus on humanity apart from the divinity of Christ , to psychologize Christ. He connects this with a tendency to view worship as entertainment or the celebration of being human, and I think that analysis is correct. This is why there are "worship wars" in western churches, but there is no confusion over worship in eastern churches to this degree. The concept of worship has been weakened or lost and been replaced with moralism as a dominant ethos.

I have been studying history moreso in the past weeks and it's clear to me that in terms of religion and culture, the separation from the east happened much earlier than I previously imagined, esp. due to the rise of Frankish culture in the late ancient period. A culture that was less interested in philosophy or mysticism and more interested in practical matters of creating a civilization with clear rule of law, and I believe this tendency is what defines western Christianity to this day.

I don't think these issues are particularly relevant to our day because our civilization has reached a limit on what law can do to bring social harmony. If anything, what is happening is that politics is becoming a way for various groups to express resentment and individual identity rather than develop practical solutions. We do not have the tools to create social harmony due to the decline of Christian symbolism, because the symbols themselves have been degraded through centuries of rationalism.

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This is a very interesting post. However, as a member of a Miaphysite church, I will say that the adherence to ancient forms of liturgy is present in our Miaphysite Oriental Orthodox churches, in the Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox churches, and in the explicitly Nestorian Assyrian Church of the East.

Although I will say the Church of the East is less Nestorian in my opinion than many Calvinists or many poorly catechized Protestants. However, I do believe Luther's accusation of Nestorianism to John Calvin was unwarranted, although I very much dislike John Calvin; traditional Calvinism I think is slightly Nestorian simply to the extent that, perhaps @hedrick might correct me if I am wrong, Calvinists reject the identification of St. Mary as the Theotokos, the Mother or Birth giver to God, and this combined with the Calvinist idea of our Lord being apiritually but not corporeally present in the Eucharist has the effect of rendering Calvinism Nestorian.

Actually, on that basis, I think the Assyrian church and the major Calvinist denominations ought to pursue ecumenical dialogue. The main difference between them is the Assyrians follow an ancient liturgy which does not really follow the regulative principle of worship as interpreted by Calvinists (no ancient liturgy does, really), and the Assyrians believe in transubstantiation.

But in summary, the "worship wars" of the West have not happened in the East.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church however, there have been two dramatic worship wars; firstly, iconoclasm, secondly, the schism in Russia when Patriarch Nikon reformed the liturgy to make it more akin to Greek praxis, and thirdly, and most recently, the huge controversy of the Revised Julian Calendar, which was not accepted by the majority of Eastern Orthodox Christians (it was accepted by a majority of the autocephalous Patriarchates, but, the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox combined with the Churches of Serbia, Georgia, Jerusalem, ROCOR and Sinai, and Mount Athos, are collectively larger than all of the other Eastern Orthodox Churches combined.

However, to the average Western Christian, I think the worship wars in Eastern Orthodox would be incomprehensible, because with the exception of the Iconoclast controversy, every subsequent major dispute about the liturgy has involved questions of very subtle points.

There have also been worship wars in the OO churches; I should note an actual major worship war is shaping up in the Coptic church because several Coptic churches in extra-diocesan areas, which operate with only minimal episcopal oversight, have replaced the traditional chants sung during Communion after Psalm 150 with antiphons is completed, with Western praise and worship songs, and this has infuriated a number of traditional Copts. The problem does not exost however within any of the actual dioceses, but due to a quirk in how the Coptic church is geographically configured, most of the Diaspora is an extra diocesan area under the control of the Coptic Pope, who does not really have time to monitor or serve those churches in any way, with episcopal functions like ordination being performed by "General Bishops" who have no diocese and cannot depose the clergy of the churches in the extra diocesan areas; they exist as far as I can tell largely just to provide for the extra diocesan parishes those rites which only a bishop can perform. I would be interested to hear the comments of @dzheremi on this issue.

Philip_B said:

http://www.anglicancommunion.org/relationships/ecumenical-dialogues/oriental-orthodox.aspx

The Anglican Communion has been in discussions with the OO and this page on the communion website contains access to the material. I believe both sides of the discussion have much to learn by listening to one another.

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That said, tragically, full communion seems completely unlikely to occur due to the Anglican communion having churches that ordain women and perform homosexual blessings or marriages, as a simple matter of fact. The Oriental churches are extremely traditional in this regard.

I wish we were having ecumenical talks with aome of the Continuing Anglican churches and the traditionalist Old Catholics of the Union of Scranton (primarily the Polish National Catholic Church), as they seem to share with us several important ideas about the faith.

Paul Yohannan said:

Although I will say the Church of the East is less Nestorian in my opinion than many Calvinists or many poorly catechized Protestants. However, I do believe Luther's accusation of Nestorianism to John Calvin was unwarranted, although I very much dislike John Calvin; traditional Calvinism I think is slightly Nestorian simply to the extent that, perhaps @hedrick might correct me if I am wrong, Calvinists reject the identification of St. Mary as the Theotokos, the Mother or Birth giver to God, and this combined with the Calvinist idea of our Lord being apiritually but not corporeally present in the Eucharist has the effect of rendering Calvinism Nestorian.

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Yes, it appears that Calvin didn’t accept theotokos: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davear...vins-objection-to-the-term-mother-of-god.html.

However his objection seems to be that it gives the wrong impression. I would argue that the implications of the term in the 16th Cent may have been different than in Nestorius’ time. I’ve seen the latter defended as pointing to the reality of the Incarnation. I’m skeptical myself, but certainly Nestorius’ failure to use it was attacked on Christological grounds. By the 16th Cent, I think calling Mary the “Mother of God” had at least as many Mariological implications as Christological. Certainly the term is paradoxical. If you picked a random person off the street, who didn’t understand the Christological issue, I think they would understand the term as implying something that pretty much everyone would agree is wrong.

So I understand Calvin as not objecting to the Christology but to other implications of the term. Also, note that the form in which he normally encountered it was "mother of God." While the technical meaning may be the same, I think the implications of that are different than "theotokos," which states more precisely the theological meaning.

As you may know, many modern assessments suggest that the situation with Nestorius may well have been similar. One thing that worries me about the ancient discussions of the Trinity and Incarnation is the extent to which politics and interpersonal rivalry were mixed into theological considerations.

You’re also right that Lutherans often accused Calvinists of being Nestorian. I think the accusation based on differences in the Real Presence are bogus. But it also seems that Calvinists have tended to emphasize the reality of Christ’s human life more than many other theological traditions. There was a discussion a couple of years ago about R C Sproul that made a pretty good case for Nestorianism in at least one of his views. But certainly most traditional Reformed writers, including Calvin, intended to avoid Nestorianism.

Modern Reformed writers are a different issue entirely. Recall that N T Wright, who is one of the most conservative, thinks that Chalcedon is inadequate. I think the current tendency is to treat Jesus as an actual human being who is at the same time God’s personal presence in human life. I think any treatment that makes Jesus an actual human being can reasonably be accused of Nestorianism. (Please note that I'm choosing my words carefully. Traditional theology certainly makes Christ human, just not a human being. I think modern theology generally rejects anhypostasia.)

Paul Yohannan said:

I should note an actual major worship war is shaping up in the Coptic church because several Coptic churches in extra-diocesan areas, which operate with only minimal episcopal oversight, have replaced the traditional chants sung during Communion after Psalm 150 with antiphons is completed, with Western praise and worship songs, and this has infuriated a number of traditional Copts. The problem does not exost however within any of the actual dioceses, but due to a quirk in how the Coptic church is geographically configured, most of the Diaspora is an extra diocesan area under the control of the Coptic Pope, who does not really have time to monitor or serve those churches in any way, with episcopal functions like ordination being performed by "General Bishops" who have no diocese and cannot depose the clergy of the churches in the extra diocesan areas; they exist as far as I can tell largely just to provide for the extra diocesan parishes those rites which only a bishop can perform. I would be interested to hear the comments of @dzheremi on this issue.

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Oh absolutely, Paul, I think you will find many people in the Coptic Orthodox Church who decry the spread of General Bishops as contrary to tradition and problematic for the very reasons you cite (so not only from a canonical perspective, but also because they don't even have the powers that regular bishops have to deal with problems in the communities they serve), and the current structural issues as being at fault for the problem areas in the Coptic Orthodox Church in the diaspora, at least as far as the infamously problematic areas of Canada and the USA are concerned (DC is the big one everyone is always talking about, and where HH sent a committee recently to investigate claims of heterodoxy; I'm not in Canada, so I know less about their situation).

If my memory serves me, general bishops were not a thing before HH Pope St. Cyril VI (some articles I read in the dust up over canon 15 of Nicaea and the election of HH Pope Shenouda III's replacement suggest that they came into being in the COC in particular only in 1962, although there are certain antecedents to this concept in churches outside of the OO communion, like the Russian Orthodox Church). So I find it difficult to argue that this is not an innovation, although what exactly should be done about it now that such a thing has been established is certainly above my meager level of knowledge to speculate on. I trust that the arguments that are heard now will continue on until something is done about this situation. Same too concerning the massive territories that exist essentially with no effective oversight, being in essence the responsibility of the Pope even though there's no way that this can do anything but beget problems.

As far as the effects of these things in terms of practice, that's more clear to me, and I would hope to everybody with their heads on straight. No 'praise and worship'/western praise music should be incorporated or tolerated at any point in the Coptic Orthodox liturgy, by anyone of any level or rank. Period. This has been the consistent message of every deacon, priest, bishop, monk, etc. who I've ever talked to, and the vast majority of individual laypeople as well (granted, I have been stuck in the rather isolated SW corner of the Southern Diocese for most of my life in the COC, so that's not many people overall). Obviously this stuff is coming from somewhere (I've heard reports from EO acquaintances of college age that it's common among young Copts involved in college ministry; Lord have mercy), but I suspect that it is still largely isolated to particular geographic trouble spots. I know, for instance, that in Egypt itself the Church of St. Simon the Tanner at Mt. Moqattam has been a huge problem, such that HG Bishop Abanoub finally stepped in and told all assembled there that he would not allow any singing of praise and worship music in the church, no matter who wants it for whatever reason. I don't know why that announcement wasn't made long ago, but it is clear that something similar needs to be made known to all churches in the USA and Canada, and enforced by appropriate penalties when broken.


Whether or not such a thing will happen is probably mostly dependent on how widespread the problem actually is, hence the sending of the committee to DC is seen as an important first step in dealing with this mess. But so long as it is seen as the fault/problem of a few charismatic preachers and the churches connected to them, I'm not sure much will or can be done, particularly as the structural issue will take so much more time and effort to deal with than the forcible laicization of individual priests would (not that anyone is eager to do that, either). So things are likely to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before they get better. Lord have mercy.

FireDragon76 said:

GratiaCorpusChristi already covered what's lacking in Wright's Christology. It's not so much wrong, it's inadequate: Is N T Wright's concept of the Incarnation consistent with Chalcedon?

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The Protestant tradition that captures what you're looking for best is probably the Lutheran. I find their Christology very attractive. I just don't think it's true. As far as I can tell, all of the strands of the NT see Jesus as a human person. It's a hard judgement, because of course the question hadn't arisen in the 1st Cent. So nowhere will you see a statement sufficiently explicit to rule out anhypotasia. But it seems an unlikely reading of what the NT writers say, and seems more likely a result of popular piety. This does not reject the Trinity. All major versions of liberal theology are Trinitarian. Unfortunately for our future as a nation, there are lots of things that are attractive that aren't true.

For a second I thought GratiaCorpusChristi was back. I miss his posts.

~Anastasia~ said:

For a second I thought GratiaCorpusChristi was back. I miss his posts.

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Me too.

dzheremi said:

Oh absolutely, Paul, I think you will find many people in the Coptic Orthodox Church who decry the spread of General Bishops as contrary to tradition and problematic for the very reasons you cite (so not only from a canonical perspective, but also because they don't even have the powers that regular bishops have to deal with problems in the communities they serve), and the current structural issues as being at fault for the problem areas in the Coptic Orthodox Church in the diaspora, at least as far as the infamously problematic areas of Canada and the USA are concerned (DC is the big one everyone is always talking about, and where HH sent a committee recently to investigate claims of heterodoxy; I'm not in Canada, so I know less about their situation).

If my memory serves me, general bishops were not a thing before HH Pope St. Cyril VI (some articles I read in the dust up over canon 15 of Nicaea and the election of HH Pope Shenouda III's replacement suggest that they came into being in the COC in particular only in 1962, although there are certain antecedents to this concept in churches outside of the OO communion, like the Russian Orthodox Church). So I find it difficult to argue that this is not an innovation, although what exactly should be done about it now that such a thing has been established is certainly above my meager level of knowledge to speculate on. I trust that the arguments that are heard now will continue on until something is done about this situation. Same too concerning the massive territories that exist essentially with no effective oversight, being in essence the responsibility of the Pope even though there's no way that this can do anything but beget problems.

As far as the effects of these things in terms of practice, that's more clear to me, and I would hope to everybody with their heads on straight. No 'praise and worship'/western praise music should be incorporated or tolerated at any point in the Coptic Orthodox liturgy, by anyone of any level or rank. Period. This has been the consistent message of every deacon, priest, bishop, monk, etc. who I've ever talked to, and the vast majority of individual laypeople as well (granted, I have been stuck in the rather isolated SW corner of the Southern Diocese for most of my life in the COC, so that's not many people overall). Obviously this stuff is coming from somewhere (I've heard reports from EO acquaintances of college age that it's common among young Copts involved in college ministry; Lord have mercy), but I suspect that it is still largely isolated to particular geographic trouble spots. I know, for instance, that in Egypt itself the Church of St. Simon the Tanner at Mt. Moqattam has been a huge problem, such that HG Bishop Abanoub finally stepped in and told all assembled there that he would not allow any singing of praise and worship music in the church, no matter who wants it for whatever reason. I don't know why that announcement wasn't made long ago, but it is clear that something similar needs to be made known to all churches in the USA and Canada, and enforced by appropriate penalties when broken.

Whether or not such a thing will happen is probably mostly dependent on how widespread the problem actually is, hence the sending of the committee to DC is seen as an important first step in dealing with this mess. But so long as it is seen as the fault/problem of a few charismatic preachers and the churches connected to them, I'm not sure much will or can be done, particularly as the structural issue will take so much more time and effort to deal with than the forcible laicization of individual priests would (not that anyone is eager to do that, either). So things are likely to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before they get better. Lord have mercy.

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HG Abanoub did successfully reform the liturgy in Muqattam, but he had to reform virtually everything else as well, as misguided evangelical "missionaries" had, supposing the Orthodox faith to be superstition, infilitrated that church, which due to the poverty and population density of the pig farming community of Muqattam, is effectively equivalent in size to a megachurch, and were running it on strictly evangelical principals without regards to the foundational strictures of Oriental Orthodoxy, for example, auricular confession and absolution. His Grace, whose patron saint is one of my favourites, had to restore all of Coptic Orthodoxy, not just the music.

Further to that point, take a look at the setting from which he delivered that homily. Notice anything missing?

His Grace Abanoub is worthy of the indefatigability of his namesake the 12 hear old martyr-confessor for his zeal in restoring traditional Christianity where it had been effectively, and dare I say, audaciously, demolished.

I agree completely, Paul. I just limited myself to the hymns since that's the example you had given of one area where heterodox practice is pushing the Copts into potentially warring factions. But yes, HG Bishop Abanoub has been a steadfast champion of Orthodoxy in a place where it was desperately lacking. May there be hundreds more in his line, ready and willing to do the same hard work in the trouble spots in the USA, Canada, Malaysia, and to remain on guard against heretical influences of every kind in every place.

hedrick said:

The Protestant tradition that captures what you're looking for best is probably the Lutheran. I find their Christology very attractive. I just don't think it's true. As far as I can tell, all of the strands of the NT see Jesus as a human person. It's a hard judgement, because of course the question hadn't arisen in the 1st Cent. So nowhere will you see a statement sufficiently explicit to rule out anhypotasia. But it seems an unlikely reading of what the NT writers say, and seems more likely a result of popular piety. This does not reject the Trinity. All major versions of liberal theology are Trinitarian. Unfortunately for our future as a nation, there are lots of things that are attractive that aren't true.

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I believe you are following somewhat of a non sequitur. Your argument seems to be "all of the NT aees Jesus as a human person." Setting aside the fact that that is strictly speaking untrue, for example, John 1 describes him emphatically as a divine person, and Matthew 28:19 enumerates him as one of the three prosopa of the Trinity, you seem to be under the misapprehension that accepting the completeness and perfection of our Lord's humanity requires some form of concession to Nestorian thought, when it, from a Patristic soteriological perspective, does not.

I would argue the hypostatic or, as we would say in Oriental Orthodoxy, the natural theandric union, are attested to by verses such as "He who has seen the father has seen me" and "I and the Father are one." Every member of the Nicene Church and its offshoots, including Oriental Orthodoxy, accepts the full humanity of our Lord as well as His complete eternal deity.

Indeed, the paramount importance of the completeness of our Lord in both His humanity and divinity is found throught the writings of the entire apostolic church, as essential to our salvation. Consider this: practically all of the soteriology of the early Church, including the Nestorians, the Chalcedonians, and the Miaphysites, rested upon the idea of God glorifying our human nature through a participation into it. The Nestorians merely wished to preserve to the fullest extent possible the ideas of divine immitability and impassability, which are scriptural, but their zeal suggests also a whiff of Platonic philosophy.

Their perspective became a minority perspective I would argue based on the immediate logic of communicatio idiomatum, as best expressed in the hymn Ho Monoges, composed by St. Severus from the words of Sts. Cyril and Athanasius, and sung at the beginning of every Syriac Orthodox divine liturgy, and later introduced into the Eastern Orthodox divine liturgy by St. Justinian (where it is presently sung at the end of the Second Antiphon), in expressing how our Lord glorified our fallen human nature by condescending to assume it, restoring it to not only accurately bear his image but to the point of facilitating our own deification (see St. Athanasius).

The blood-atonement/penal sunstitutionary idea of soteriology really began with Anselm of Canterbury based on a knowledge of St. Augustine not tempered by a knowledge of the Greek fathers, and I would argue that Calvinism represents the apex of this soteriological error, to the extent of embracing a semi-Arian position and rejecting the coequality of the divine logos with Federal Vision theology (which I would assume that the PCUSA, to its great credit, has always completely rejected). It seems to me that one potential positive aspect of liberal theological thought in the PCUSA is a potential openness to other soteriological models, particularly the ancient one as expressed by St. Athanasius, the Cappadocians, St. Cyril, St. Severus, St. Maximus the Confessor, et al.

By the way, this marks the second occasion of my having met a Calvinist who wanted to believe in a different doctrine but regretted being unable to based on their own theological analysis. In her case, she seemed resigned to accept the idea of predestination, unconditional election, and conversely, unconditional damnation, based on what she had been taught within Calvinism, but she had no knowledge at all of Patristics.

In your case on the other hand, I strongly suspect you have great erudition in this regard, to which end I would dncourage you to study the writings of Mar Babai the Great, Catholicos Timothy, or St. Isaac the Syrian, all prominent members of the Nestorian church whose theology nonetheless seems to negate and undermine your objection to communicatio idiomatum.

Lastly I would note communicatio idiomatum could take us i to the realm of Eutychianism if we were to delete the important implicit qualification "in the flesh," which is explicit in the hymn Ho Monoges. In other words, the eternal and uncreated God was born, in His assumed humanity, but He was not born in His divinity, but rather begotten of the father before all ages. Likewise God walked upon the earth, and God was buried in a tomb, but again, only in respect of His humanity, because according to His divinity, the God we pray to is "everywhere present, and fillest all things," and completely unbounded and uncircumscribed (the great error of the Samaritans being to assume a specific localized presence of God upon Mount Gerizim).

Increasingly I am inclined to regard Ho Monoges together with the Nicene Creed as the ideal test of Christological Orthodoxy; if someone will recite the former, they reject the errors of the Fourth Century, and if they will sing the latter, they reject the errors of the Fifth, Sixth and Sixteenth centuries (and if then upon confessing the Creed and singing Ho Monoges, they embrace iconoclasm, they contradict themselves fairly dramatically).

dzheremi said:

I agree completely, Paul. I just limited myself to the hymns since that's the example you had given of one area where heterodox practice is pushing the Copts into potentially warring factions. But yes, HG Bishop Abanoub has been a steadfast champion of Orthodoxy in a place where it was desperately lacking. May there be hundreds more in his line, ready and willing to do the same hard work in the trouble spots in the USA, Canada, Malaysia, and to remain on guard against heretical influences of every kind in every place.

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Indeed, we just need to pray that HH Tawadros II would proceed to create more dioceses and consecrate the current plethora of general bishops each to a specific diocese.

By the way, the early church did have chorepiscopi, choir bishops, who were limited in their episcopal mandate; they could only ordain to the minor orders; indeed, the three Syriac Orthodox communions in India and the Assyrian Church of the East retain Chorepiscopi to this day, who typically preside over major churches or over the regular worship in cathedrals; they tend to be married and not monastic and are used where the Syriac Orthodox in the Levant, the Suroye, would have instead promoted a presbyter to the rank of archpriest, or where the Russian Orthodox might have a mitred archpriest. The difference being an archpriest cannot ordain readers, psaltis or altar servers, whereas a chorepiscopus can.

Also, I believe there is fairly early historical attestation to coadjutator, suffragan or auxillary bishops, but these bishops were always attached to a particular diocese or archdiocese, and were consecrated specifically to assist the principal bishop in the performance of his episcopal duties. Their importance becomes obvious when one considers the problems of pastoral care posed by a large but sparsely populated diocese. So I see no reason to object to the existence of coadjutators or suffragans; they are full bishops who enable large dioceses to function properly by ensuring that all the parishes in the diocese have ready access to a bishop in order to ordain clergy, celebrate the hierarchical divine liturgy, and ensure the supervision of clergy, the consecration of churches and certain other functions canonically reserved for the episcopate (for example, in one Eastern Orthodox jurisdiction, I have heard that arson, along with two other sins, which I cannot recall, can only be confessed to, and absolved by, a bishop).

The problem in the Coptic Orthodox church is specifically that the Patriarchal Archdiocese of Alexandria has swollen to include Cairo and indeed most of the surface of the planet Earth; everywhere there are Copts present but not a specific local diocese. This neccessitates a veritable army of auxillary bishops, and the problem is chiefly that these general bishops, lacking clearly defined canonical territories and a clearly defined prerogative to depose unfit clergy and enforce ecclesiastical order (since strictly speaking, this job falls on tne Patriarch), cannot effectively preserve the integrity of the Orthodox faith on their own, without the added dignitas, gravitas and imperium conveyed by being charfed with the pastoral care of a clearly defined diocese.

This situation becomes particularly lamentable when you conaider that HG Abanoub's Diocese essentially consists of one massive cathedral church surrounded by a massive land fill, where the desperately poor laity of Muqattam eke out a meagre existance by herding swine which feed off of the accumulated rubbish (and indeed nearly perished of starvation during the Swine Flu scare around 2011 when President Mubarak ordered all of their pigs to be shot), whereas most of the diaspora including the Northern United States and Great Britain is extra-diocesan, or rather, let us be frank, simply a neglected remote outpost of the Diocese of Alexandria. However, owing to the ascesis imposed on them by their horrible poverty, I would propose that perhaps the beleaguered laity of Muqattam are more deserving of a diocesan bishop than the comparatively wealthy and less devout Copts of the diaspora.

I also feel very strongly by the way that since Alexandria retains a Coptic and a Greek Orthodoc population, the Pope ought to reside and serve there, and that an Archbishop of Cairo should serve as his second in command (this also might help to facilitate ecumenical reunion, with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria; Byzantine and Coptic Rite bishops would alternately hold the Patroarchate and the Archbishophric of Cairo; I would also very much like to see our Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate moved to Cairo, an Archbishop of Damascus appointed, and a similiar arrangement instituted, so as to ease what I pray will be our inevitable and impending reunion with the Antiochians).

hedrick said:

Yes, it appears that Calvin didn’t accept theotokos: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davear...vins-objection-to-the-term-mother-of-god.html.

However his objection seems to be that it gives the wrong impression. I would argue that the implications of the term in the 16th Cent may have been different than in Nestorius’ time. I’ve seen the latter defended as pointing to the reality of the Incarnation. I’m skeptical myself, but certainly Nestorius’ failure to use it was attacked on Christological grounds. By the 16th Cent, I think calling Mary the “Mother of God” had at least as many Mariological implications as Christological. Certainly the term is paradoxical. If you picked a random person off the street, who didn’t understand the Christological issue, I think they would understand the term as implying something that pretty much everyone would agree is wrong.

So I understand Calvin as not objecting to the Christology but to other implications of the term. Also, note that the form in which he normally encountered it was "mother of God." While the technical meaning may be the same, I think the implications of that are different than "theotokos," which states more precisely the theological meaning.

As you may know, many modern assessments suggest that the situation with Nestorius may well have been similar. One thing that worries me about the ancient discussions of the Trinity and Incarnation is the extent to which politics and interpersonal rivalry were mixed into theological considerations.

You’re also right that Lutherans often accused Calvinists of being Nestorian. I think the accusation based on differences in the Real Presence are bogus. But it also seems that Calvinists have tended to emphasize the reality of Christ’s human life more than many other theological traditions. There was a discussion a couple of years ago about R C Sproul that made a pretty good case for Nestorianism in at least one of his views. But certainly most traditional Reformed writers, including Calvin, intended to avoid Nestorianism.

Modern Reformed writers are a different issue entirely. Recall that N T Wright, who is one of the most conservative, thinks that Chalcedon is inadequate. I think the current tendency is to treat Jesus as an actual human being who is at the same time God’s personal presence in human life. I think any treatment that makes Jesus an actual human being can reasonably be accused of Nestorianism. (Please note that I'm choosing my words carefully. Traditional theology certainly makes Christ human, just not a human being. I think modern theology generally rejects anhypostasia.)

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The problem with this statement is simply that Sts. Severus, Dioscorus, Jacob of Sarugh, and other Oriental Orthodx, along with Chalcedonian saints like St. Justinian, who greatly improved upon Chalcedon with his Three Chapters, which helped to crush the crypto-Nestorian party unwittingly enabled by Chalcedon, and Sts. Maximus the Confessor and Theodore the Studite, who defended the doctrine of the incarnation in the Chalcedonian church against the neo-Apollinarianism of monothelitism, and against Iconoclasm, all regarded Jesus Christ as an actual human being.

Indeed, it was this recognition that was essential to the doctrine of the Seventh Ecumenical Council regarding icons. Because our Lord put on our fallen human nature and restored and glorified it, it became possible to depict God in the flesh in sacred icons, whereas previously, it had not been, as God had been until the Incarnation, a spirit (setting aside a few possible Christophanies in the Old Testament; these Christophanies, if that is what they were, must be viewed as in a certain sense coming after the Incarnation, in that they are most clearly of the risen and resurrected Lord, but that is another question entirely).

It is easy to see however how an Anglican theologian like N.T. Wright might become inexorably confused on this issue, given that his own communion has only within the past 200 years come to firmly reject iconoclasm, and Anglicanism as a whole still lacks an institutionalized practice of iconodulia; there are now Byzantine icons in the altar of Westminster Abbey, but you never see anyone kissing them.

In order to properly understand the doctrine of the Incarnation, the churches of a Calvinist or semi-Calvinist heritage like the Anglicans or indeed even the Methodists, must first go beyond the mere recovery of sacred images in the form of stained glass windows depicting our Lord, and must progress to the veneration of these, and of relics, and move to discourage the desecration millions of Temples of the Holy Spirit that occurs whenever someone is cremated, rather than actively promoting it by installing columbaria in their churches, because only then, in venerating the sacred images and the relics of the saints, and in discerning the vital diatinction between such veneration and the worship that is alone owed to God Almighty: Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that the laity of these denominations as a whole will understand the theology of the image, the meaning of the incarnation, and the idea of the Resurrection.

Also, this would very much help to dispell the erroneous idea that when one dies, one immediately ascends merely as a soul to Heaven or Hell and there remains for all eternity, without any bodily resurrection and without having to face Christ Pantocrator on the dreadful Day of Judgment.

Until iconodulism is systematically understood and practiced together with the proper veneration of relics and the proper respect for the deceased, I believe Anglicanism and other Calvin-influenced denominations, and even to a certain extent Lutheranism, will continue to remain in a state of confusion on this issue, resulting in aberrations like St. Gregory of Nyassa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.

As it stands there are very few Anglican theologians who have any deep knowledge of the theology of the image; Dr. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, being one of the most prominent. In his case however his knowledge of this issue stems from his substantial knowledge regarding the Eastern Orthodox communion and its beliefs, to which he nearly converted (time will tell whether he has accomplished more good as an Anglican bishop than he would have had he joined the Orthodox church, however, despite his clear understanding of the theology of the image and of the incarnation, I was very disappointed by his work on Arius, which seemed to border on wishing to rehabilitate Arius, an act which would be tantamount to a complete rejection of the idea of the Incarnation and of the ancient Nicene understanding of Soteriology, which has become obscured in the West, particularly in those churches which were directly or indirectly subject to heavy Calvinist influence).

Paul Yohannan said:

Indeed, we just need to pray that HH Tawadros II would proceed to create more dioceses and consecrate the current plethora of general bishops each to a specific diocese.

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Amen.

Also, I believe there is fairly early historical attestation to coadjutator, suffragan or auxillary bishops, but these bishops were always attached to a particular diocese or archdiocese, and were consecrated specifically to assist the principal bishop in the performance of his episcopal duties. Their importance becomes obvious when one considers the problems of pastoral care posed by a large but sparsely populated diocese. So I see no reason to object to the existence of coadjutators or suffragans;

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I don't imagine any of the Coptic people I know would have any problem with them either, were that what we have. Rather our situation is much fuzzier than that, as you seem to already know.

they are full bishops who enable large dioceses to function properly by ensuring that all the parishes in the diocese have ready access to a bishop in order to ordain clergy, celebrate the hierarchical divine liturgy, and ensure the supervision of clergy, the consecration of churches and certain other functions canonically reserved for the episcopate (for example, in one Eastern Orthodox jurisdiction, I have heard that arson, along with two other sins, which I cannot recall, can only be confessed to, and absolved by, a bishop).

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I've never heard that bit about arson. Curious. What's the reasoning behind it?

The problem in the Coptic Orthodox church is specifically that the Patriarchal Archdiocese of Alexandria has swollen to include Cairo and indeed most of the surface of the planet Earth; everywhere there are Copts present but not a specific local diocese.

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Distressing, but true.

This neccessitates a veritable army of auxillary bishops, and the problem is chiefly that these general bishops, lacking clearly defined canonical territories and a clearly defined prerogative to depose unfit clergy and enforce ecclesiastical order (since strictly speaking, this job falls on tne Patriarch), cannot effectively preserve the integrity of the Orthodox faith on their own, without the added dignitas, gravitas and imperium conveyed by being charfed with the pastoral care of a clearly defined diocese.

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Yes, that about sums it up.

This situation becomes particularly lamentable when you conaider that HG Abanoub's Diocese essentially consists of one massive cathedral church surrounded by a massive land fill, where the desperately poor laity of Muqattam eke out a meagre existance by herding swine which feed off of the accumulated rubbish (and indeed nearly perished of starvation during the Swine Flu scare around 2011 when President Mubarak ordered all of their pigs to be shot), whereas most of the diaspora including the Northern United States and Great Britain is extra-diocesan, or rather, let us be frank, simply a neglected remote outpost of the Diocese of Alexandria. However, owing to the ascesis imposed on them by their horrible poverty, I would propose that perhaps the beleaguered laity of Muqattam are more deserving of a diocesan bishop than the comparatively wealthy and less devout Copts of the diaspora.

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I wouldn't pit the two populations against each other in any way. Rather I am very pleased that the zabbaleen now have the bishop that they very clearly needed to address their own ills, and wish that the same would happen in other parts of the world to address the problems of other peoples.

I also feel very strongly by the way that since Alexandria retains a Coptic and a Greek Orthodoc population, the Pope ought to reside and serve there, and that an Archbishop of Cairo should serve as his second in command (this also might help to facilitate ecumenical reunion, with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria; Byzantine and Coptic Rite bishops would alternately hold the Patroarchate and the Archbishophric of Cairo; I would also very much like to see our Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate moved to Cairo, an Archbishop of Damascus appointed, and a similiar arrangement instituted, so as to ease what I pray will be our inevitable and impending reunion with the Antiochians).

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I don't have such strong feelings about this sort of thing, I guess. Perhaps if I had an idea that reunion was impending I would feel differently (and I could see why you might feel that way; from what I understand, Syriac Orthodox are much closer to their EO Antiochian counterparts than are the Copts to the Greeks in Egypt, though of course that relationship has improved in some very visible ways recently, e.g., the agreement concerning mixed marriages between the two in the territory of Alexandria proper). As it is, we still have the Cathedral of St. Mark in Alexandria. It's not like it ever went away just because the seat was transferred to Cairo in 1047. Outside of what help it might be in considering a reunited OO-EO church, I can't imagine there's much of an impetus to move it back. Or if there is, I haven't heard about it, and imagine it might be fairly low in the order of priorities of the Church in Egypt.

Philip_B said:

Am I the only one who finds the image of the Soldiers Marching the Crucifix moderately disturbing?

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Would you rather they be marching in full battle gear with guns, ammunition, grenades, and so on?

Alonso_Castillo said:

And I know that there among Protestants there is Desperation for the Gay marriages, abortion and divorse aproved by the Protestant churches... ¿What are you left to believe in if you swallowed the full tale that Catholicism was the harlot of Babylon?.... Eastern Orthodoxy.

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I for one have never thought that the Roman Catholic Church was the harlot of Babylon.

Nor are divorce, gay marriage, or abortion approved by most of the Protestant churches in the USA. I grew up Roman Catholic, spent some time in the Assemblies of God, and finally found out about Eastern Catholicism, which is now home to me. I know full well what most mainline Protestants believe, and none of them believe in killing babies.