Yes I know how you are using it, and it is fallacious for you or for HAH Bartholomew to use it as such. What he is claiming is that the difference between Catholics and Orthodox is similar to the difference between cats and dogs, instead of it being differences between two brothers from the same Father and mother, which is what we truly are.
I thoroughly disagree that this is an accurate summation of the use of 'ontology' in this context. You keep coming up with analogies that attempt to make its usage akin to talking about different species and so on (cats and dogs), but the reason why I highlighted the portion from HAH's speech that I did is that he explains it in very simple terms: our modes of living have become ontologically different.
So it's not about the people engaged in those modes at all -- they're still people and share that in common in any case; it's about the modes themselves. And truly it would be foolish to pretend that there is no such difference between being a Roman Catholic Christian and being an Orthodox Christian. That's why they are different things. That's why you, the Roman Catholic, cannot simply show up to an Orthodox liturgy and take communion, and vice-versa. We do not recognize that we share the same mode of being, because we don't. HAH is correct.
Here is the difference. I believe that the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of Faith. I believe that Orthodoxy is close to having the fullness, but have lost some things along the way. The differences though are not ontological, but accidental.
No, I'm sorry. This is too much. Your church did not "accidentally" assert prerogatives over others' that all others reject that it ever had. Your church did not "accidentally" insert the filioque into the creed (it was placed there rather deliberately after several centuries of
Roman resistance to it). Your church did not "accidentally" come up with the idea that its patriarch is infallible in certain circumstances. None of the things that separate the Roman Catholic Church from others, that it asserts as matters of divinely revealed doctrine and fidelity to the apostolic Christian faith, can be described as such. I know this because I know that the Roman Catholic Church does not describe them as such.
Nobody woke up one day and said "Oops! Would you look at that -- we've suddenly all become Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox/Oriental Orthodox/etc." These are very definite places to be, and while
individual people may stay or leave according to whatever is keeping them in or drawing them to a particular communion, that doesn't make
the communions themselves all part of the same Church (cf. my point above and in other posts regarding what you don't seem to understand about the idea of ontology in this context). The "branch theory" of Christianity does not come from Orthodoxy, or (as far as I can remember) from Catholicism.
Now I will grant that the differences between us all have been exacerbated in some cases and lessened in others, but the basic differences that make being Roman Catholic different from being Orthodox and vice-versa remain.
Both groups are fully Christian
I don't believe I've ever even slightly hinted otherwise. As my own priest was fond of reminding us at St. Bishoy, the line separating an Orthodox Christian and a non-Orthodox Christian is different than the line separating a Christian from a follower of some other religion entirely. So, yes, of course Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Church of the East, Anglican, and so on are all Christians.
both groups teach all that is required for salvation
I disagree, if only because I know that some of the things that your church in particular has taught are absolutely not what is necessary for salvation (i.e., ecclesiastical/temporal and spiritual submission to the Roman Pope; see here the Papal bull
Unam Sanctam, 1302), and reveal a difference in the way that your tradition views and teaches concerning salvation and the way that others do.
both groups have the same destiny
This is for God to know, not for us to know. (1 Corinthians 5:12)
but both groups deviate in our practices and in some beliefs, which are accidental to being Christian. Thus our differences are not substantial (i.e. ontological), but only accidental.
See, I just can't agree with this. I think that when you're Orthodox you (come to) understand that we don't do "accidental" things. Absolutely everything we do and everything we affirm with our mouths reflects our theology in deep and substantial ways. Like it's not an accident that we don't have the filioque in the Creed, but you do.
An ontological difference would be what is between Catholics/Orthodox and lets say Hinduism or Buddhism
No, again, this is highly inappropriate and wrong. It is not like that. HAH Bartholomew does not say that Roman Catholicism isn't a form of Christianity, and neither do I, and neither has anyone in this thread. Please stop forcing the words of others into your own paradigm in order to lessen or explain away the differences that really do exist between RC, EO, OO, Anglican, etc.
and maybe some of these fringe Christian groups who no longer believe in baptism or the creed or other substantial teachings on salvation and how one is saved.
Has anyone in this thread claimed that the Roman Catholic Church can be placed among these groups? I haven't, and I haven't seen anyone else do so. I think this is irrelevant.
Even before then we had a common baptism. When you are baptized as a Coptic and I baptized as a Catholic, whether or not you like the idea, we were both brought into the Body of Christ. Not just into our Patriarchate, but into the Body of Christ. That is why it is a common baptism.
No, no it isn't. If anything, the very fact that we've spent the last 200 years or so rebaptizing Catholics, as shameful as it is (because it was not in line with our own fathers and tradition, not because we don't believe we are different), shows that this is not what we believe. Even returning back to the historically-attested way, whereby all Chalcedonians are received into our Church in the same way (see here the decrees of HH Pope St. Timothy II, the direct successor to HH St.Dioscorus), does not say "we are part of the same body". That's clearly false. That is not our ecclesiology, and moreover I know that it is not yours, either. When I was received into Orthodoxy, none of my Roman Catholic friends were rejoicing that I had been received into the Body of Christ, and I didn't think it odd that this was the case. And I still don't.
Two or more siblings are not the same thing, but they are all human beings sharing in their humanity. The CC, EO, and OO are pretty much the same.
What? Get outta town. No. That's not true at all.
The OO are their own tradition(s), and the EO theirs, and the RCC theirs. I really can't stomach this conflating of everything to absolutely no good end, because at the end of the day, we are not actually in communion with one another, and haven't been for 1600 to 1000 years.
We are not the same things, and I don't claim as such
What? You literally just wrote that we are all basically the same.
but we are all Christian, and we all share in a common Baptism, and we all share in the same salvation and destiny.
Again, the truth of these statements is variable, to put it politely.
I thought that was obvious from the other points made.
No, it's not obvious at all. You have not explained how it is that we share all this stuff despite the reality of it not being manifest in the actual world in which we live as it is within our respective communions.
I disagree. The point being made, is what is and is not ontologically different. Buddhism and Catholicism/Orthodoxy are ontologically different religions. Catholicsm and Orthodoxy are not
For at least the third time, this is not an apt comparison.
I disagree, I think it is you who do not understand the magnitude of the word being used.
I think I understand it in the sense that it is being used in the source that I am pointing you to. That you disagree with how that source is using it is obvious enough, but you have not shown how it is appropriate to bring up different religions, different species, etc. when HAH does not do so. It seems that you think the argument being made is different than what it actually is. Suffice it to say that if anyone
were saying that the relationship of Catholicism to Orthodoxy is akin to that of any kind of Christianity to Buddhism, then I would reject that out of hand. But nobody has said that. So you are arguing against a straw man here.
So we are back to the idea that there is more than one Body of Christ, more than one foundation, more than one household of the children of God.
No, we aren't. As uncomfortable and scandalous as it may seem to the RC way of looking at things, we are back to the strong and historically-grounded Orthodox ecclesiology that says that the Orthodox Church is the body of Christ, and hence anything else that is not within it is not a part of His body. This is not a judgment of individuals, but of entire ecclesiastical bodies and the claims that they make, just as you yourself have pronounced judgments upon Orthodoxy (albeit more positive ones, from your view where we are all "basically the same"), so it is not saying anything about your status as a Christian, but rather about the RCC claim to be the Church, which is unanimously rejected.
And this is not a later, sectarian interpretation of how ecclesiology works, either. It is found not only in fathers specific to my own Church (see below for one such example), but also in the text of our anaphoras, as in the litanies of the Liturgy of St. Basil:
Priest:
Make us all worthy, O our Master, to partake of Your Holies, unto the purification of our souls, our bodies, and our spirits,
that we may become one body and one spirit, and may have a share and an inheritance with all the saints who have pleased You since the beginning.
Remember, O Lord, the peace of Your one, only, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church—
Deacon:
Pray for the peace of the one holy catholic and apostolic orthodox Church of God.
People:
Lord have mercy.
Priest:
this, which You have acquired to Yourself with the precious Blood of Your Christ,
keep her in peace, with all the orthodox bishops who are in her.
Foremost remember, O Lord, our blessed and honored father, the archbishop, our patriarch, Abba (Tawadros the Second),
and his spiritual brothers, the Patriarch of Antioch Mar Ignatius (Afrem the Second), and the Patriarch of Eritrea Abouna (Antonios).
In the presence of a bishop:
and his partner in the liturgy, our father the bishop (metropolitan), Abba (...).
Deacon:
Pray for our high priest, Pope Abba (Tawadros the Second), pope and patriarch and archbishop of the great city of Alexandria,
and his spiritual brothers, the Patriarch of Antioch Mar Ignatius (Afrem the Second), and the Patriarch of Eritrea Abouna (Antonios).
In the presence of a bishop:
and his partner in the liturgy, our father the bishop (metropolitan), Abba (...).
And concludes with:
and for our orthodox bishops.
People:
Lord have mercy.
Priest:
And those who rightly divide the word of truth with him,
grant them unto Your holy Church to shepherd Your flock in peace.
Remember, O Lord, the orthodox hegumens, priests, and deacons.
Deacon:
Pray for the hegumens, priests, deacons, subdeacons, and the seven orders of the Church of God.
People:
Lord have mercy.
Priest:
And all the servants, and all who are in virginity, and the purity of all Your faithful people.
(Remember, O Lord, to have mercy upon us all.)
People:
Have mercy upon us, O God, the Father, the Pantocrator.
Priest:
Remember, O Lord, the salvation of this, Your holy place, and every place, and every monastery of our orthodox fathers.
Deacon:
Pray for the salvation of the world and of this city of ours and of all cities, districts, islands, and monasteries.
People:
Lord have mercy.
Priest:
And those who dwell therein in God’s faith.
+++
Note that these are Oriental Orthodox leaders mentioned by name in the above litanies. We do not include the Syriac or Etirean Catholic patriarchs in their place or in addition to them.
And it is not wrong to say that this is a very definite stance vis-a-vis those of other confessions, and has been so for a very long time:
"...that you must not recognize any distinction between those who are banished from the East, and made illustrious by the combat of confessorship, and the saintly bishops in Egypt, and that you must reckon that to be one church which is compacted together in the orthodox faith, and is most pure and serene through the non-association with the heretics..."
-- HH St. Severus of Antioch, in a letter written between 525 and 531 to his fellow Syrians (from Lucas Van Rompay "Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (512-538), in the Greek, Syriac, and Coptic Traditions", in the
Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies, ed. Amir Harrak, vol. 8, 2008, 3-22)
Look you are looking at what is on the outside, what is material
Excuse me, but I'll thank you not to call me a materialist for following my own faith, and not yours. Such presuppositions regarding what others do and why are unwelcome and unhelpful.
but that isn't the way it should be seen.
Oh, really? So now you're going to tell me how it should have been?
And you don't see any problem with this? It doesn't strike you as paternalistic and insulting in this context in which
you asked about differences?
We should be looking beyond our physical senses and using our spiritual ones.
What? No, no...I don't go in for this cosmic, dematerialized ecclesiology. That's a non-starter. That's not what being in communion is about. You too have standards. Don't even bother going down this road, please. I'm not interested in it in the slightest.
There is one God, one Faith, one Hope and one Baptism
Amen.
and these are what makes us one people, of one household, with one Father.
No. You're not Orthodox. We do not share one faith. You are Roman Catholic, I am Oriental Orthodox, other people are other things. These are not all the same.
All of these makes us ontologically the same, even when in our human weakness, we prefer not to be.
Unacceptable. This is just another iteration of the RC canard that the Orthodox would prefer disunity to unity, which was not supported last time, and can't be supported now.
If it were about preferences, then to be exceedingly frank about it, I would
prefer it if Chalcedon and all subsequent councils were relegated to the status of local councils akin to those councils which were binding upon the Latins or the Greeks respectively from before your schism from one another (say, Elvira for the Latins and Trullo for the Greeks). And the Roman Pope, of course, would go back to being "Patriarch of the West" (a title used until quite recently), and give up any claim to jurisdiction over other territories or churches, either through proxies or personally, and the non-Western Catholic churches would be welcomed back into the fold of their Orthodox mother churches, Greek with Greek and Oriental with Oriental, with those who truly have no counterpart such as the Chaldeans and the Syro-Malabar either being brought into conformity with Orthodoxy doctrinally with their liturgies following as a consequence and remaining their own thing (as the Persian church was its own thing before Nestorius was ever alive, as any COE person would be happy to tell you), or being welcomed into whichever Church they are closest to in a cultural and geographic sense (e.g., I would imagine it would be easier for a Syro-Malankaran Catholic to become Malankara Syriac Orthodox than, say...Romanian Orthodox or something).
And if some of you wanted to take up the Agpeya and the five yearly fasts, that'd be welcome too, though not as strictly necessary as getting more basic matters of ecclesiology dealt with. (I suppose more so for the Latins than the Greeks, as the Greeks have not eviscerated their own pre-schism practices in this area as the Latins have. But in either case, we generally do not have a problem with different traditions having different practices, so long as everyone is fasting and praying. I used to attend the hours as a Roman Catholic, and I don't see anything wrong with that just because it's not in the form of the Agpeya. This is why I can very easily and naturally reject your claim that such 'outward' things are being focused on and used as a pretext for maintaining division. That's simply not the case.)
But it is most emphatically not a matter of preferences. I mean, I would
really prefer it if none of this had happened in the first place and hence this conversation wouldn't have ever happened, but that's even more out of the question than everything else I just typed.
We at this time are at the point that we are brothers who dislike each other, and would prefer not to be part of the same family.
Again, no. Stop claiming this. It's ridiculous on its face. I would certainly prefer that people leave the heresies of non-Orthodox churches and come to Orthodoxy, but that is miles away from saying that we dislike each other and hence prefer to not be part of the same family. Rather, we quite simply
are not part of the same family because we do not hold to the same standard of what it takes to be considered as within the Church. It's not hatred. It's having some standards, which again, you also have (or at least your Church have). Do not wonder why no one here, either EO or OO, has asked you why you "dislike" Orthodox people? Because that's an insulting and ridiculous thing to say.
So please stop this. Orthodox ecclesiology is not a matter of personal animus.
Sadly this is the case, because we only see the differences
In a thread about differences (which you started), yes.
Why do you ask questions that you don't want answers to?
We need to see that the same Blood is flowing through our veins, and when we see that the fallacy of us being ontologically different, will start to fall away.
Ughhh...for the millionth time, that's not what ontology means. It's about mode of being (the
way that something is), not ousia.
In my opinion the differences don't have to be reconcilable.
Huh? You meant irreconcilable, no?
There are different levels of communion.
Ehhhh...it is better to say that there are some mutual agreements forged between individual Patriarchates (e.g., the Antiochian Orthodox and the Syriac Orthodox) for their own reasons in recognition of their unique circumstances that do not rise to the level of sustaining communion across entire communions. And that's fine, so long as both sides agree to them willingly and do not try to make them into more than they are.
Before we were enough in number to get our own priest, the Coptic Orthodox people in New Mexico used to receive in the local Greek Orthodox church, with the full knowledge and approval of the nearest Greek and Coptic Orthodox bishops. When the Copts in Albuquerque got their own priest, that arrangement ceased, because there was no longer a need for it. Is this a "different level" of communion? I guess it depends on who you ask. In the view of my own Church, which is the only view I care to follow, it appears that pastoral care does not intercommunion make, as our priests have said in no uncertain circumstances that they will not commune Chalcedonians for any reason under any circumstances, and that's in keeping with the guidance of our bishop, which is following the guidance of the synod.
Of course your mileage may vary, but this is how things are for us, and they too have their own reasons for being. Would I like it better to be in communion with the Chalcedonians? Yes, sure, but openly and with no preconditions, in mutual recognition of our shared faith. We do not yet have that mutual recognition, though great strides have been made informally since the 1960s (and formally beginning a little later).
If the ancient Patriarchates ever find any level of reunion
I should point out here that the formalization of the Pentarchy significantly post-dates the Chalcedonian schism, being first expressed in laws of Justinian (527-565), and given ecclesiastical sanction in the Quinisext Council of 692.
I only bring this up because as both of these are significantly after Chalcedon (and even more or less after the lines had been solidified concerning Chalcedon with regard to the Alexandrian and Antiochian patriarchates), there's nothing in them that makes this an inherently more desirable arrangement than any other, so far as the OO communion is concerned.
So, go figure...another difference between your Church and its way of being and mine. Even what you're trying to get back to is different.
IMO it will not be based upon common knowledge, but rather based upon our common Flesh and Blood.
And yet what does Christ our God say is life eternal? In John 17:3 that they may know Thee, the one true God, and Jesus Christ, Whom Thou hast sent.
That they may
know Thee.
Even brothers with opposing opinions on matters can share the same table, if they only listen to their Father and mother, and not their own idiocy.
Idiocy, huh? Idiocy like the Tome of Leo and Chalcedon; or idiocy like the filioque; or idiocy like the medieval Roman Popes and the modern Roman ecclesiology that springs from their wrong and baseless assertions
contra errores Graecorum; or idiocy like the fiction of Papal infallibility; or idiocy like the post-schism developments in Mariolatry and related things; or...?
I want to know what 'idiocy' in particular I shouldn't be listening to.
I guess I look at this on a spiritual level and not a material one. Again whether you like it our not, we are brothers from the same Father and mother. We were reborn the same way, we have the very same Blood flowing through our veins, and because of this it is impossible for you and I to be ontologically different.
I find what you have written to be frankly pretty despicable, and very far from showing any kind of spiritual insight or illumination. To baselessly insult and paternalistically drag others' traditions through the mud out of fidelity to your own preconceived answers to questions that you yourself have asked strikes me as a pretty low form of communication.
But what do I know? All that the Lord wills to happen will happen according to His power and His time, so it is better to pray as we do at the conclusion of the liturgy.
Save us and have mercy upon us. Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord bless Amen. Bless me, bless me, behold the repentance, forgive me, say the blessing.
May God forgive me for anything I have written in error, ignorance, or zeal without compassion.