Orthodox Views on the Nature of Christ

The Liturgist · Saturday at 11:48 PM

Today we are celebrating on the Julian calendar the feast of the 1st through 6th ecumenical councils, and the feast of St. Gabriel the Archangel.

Since the Orthodox liturgy is the definitive source of doctrine, I shall quote from the Vespers liturgy of the Seventh Sunday after Pascha, the Feast of the Council of Nicaea, from the Eastern Orthodox hymnal known as the Pentecostarion:

Verse: From the morning watch until night, from the morning watch *
let Israel hope in the Lord.
Before the morning star * from the womb Thou wast begotten from the Father * motherless before the ages, * though Arius held Thou wast created and thus not God, * boldly and mindlessly identifying thee, the Creator, * with things created, * thus storing up fuel for the eternal fire. * But the Council gathered in Nicaea proclaimed that Thou, O Lord, ** art truly the Son of God, * one in rank with the Father and the Spirit.

Verse: For with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is plenteous redemption; * and He shall redeem Israel out of all his iniquities.
O My Savior, Who hath rent Thy raiment? * Thou didst say: It was Arius who hath cut asunder the Trinity’s headship, * which is one in rank and honour, * disputing that Thou art One of the Most Holy Trinity; * thereby teaching Nestorius the godless one * to not say Theotokos. * But the Council gathered in Nicaea proclaimed that Thou, O Lord, * art truly the Son of God, ** one in rank with the Father and the Spirit.

Verse: O praise the Lord, all ye nations; * praise Him, all ye peoples.
Keeping his eyes shut, that he might not see light, * Arius fell headlong into the deep pit of sin. * His bowels were rent asunder by a divine hook, *(1) such that he violently gave up all his substance and his soul * and in this manner became another Judas, * through his most evil purpose and disposition. * But the Council gathered in Nicaea proclaimed that Thou, O Lord, * art truly the Son of God, ** one in rank with the Father and the Spirit.
Verse: For He hath made His mercy to prevail over us, * and the truth of the Lord abideth forever.

Mindless, foolish Arius * once divided the all-holy Trinity’s sole dominion * thus making three essences, * dissimilar and foreign. * Hence, the God- bearing Fathers fervently gathered together, * burning with zeal like Elias the Tishbite, * cutting down with the sharp sword of the Holy Spirit * the vile blasphemer, who taught blasphemous doctrines, ** as thus the Spirit revealed unto them.

in Tone VI
Let us acclaim today * those mystical trumpets of the Spirit, * the God- bearing Fathers, who, in the midst of the Church, * sang a harmonious song of theology, * teaching that the Trinity is one, unchanging in essence and Godhead; * they are the refuters of Arius, * and the foremost warriors of the Orthodox. ** And they ever intercede with the Lord that our souls find mercy.

in Tone VI:
Who doth not call thee blessed, O most holy Virgin? * Who will not hymn thy most pure birthgiving? * For the only-begotten Son Who hath shone forth timelessly from the Father, * came forth, ineffably incarnate, from thee, O pure one; * By nature He is God, by nature for our sakes, He hath become a man * not divided into two Hypostases, * but known in two natures(2) without commingling. * Him do thou beseech, O pure and all-blessed one, ** that our souls find mercy!”

Notes:

(1) This refers to an incident where Arius came to a grotesque demise shortly before his scheduled reception of communion in the Hagia Sophia at the order of Emperor Constantine, over the objections of the Christian bishops. Some have, without evidence, accused the Christians of poisoning him, but given the lack of evidence and the fact that Arius was by the 330s quite elderly by the standards of the fourth century, not to be taken seriously.

(2) The Oriental Orthodox use the expression “from two natures” but this has not precluded their ecumenical reconciliation, for example, between the Antiochian Orthodox (Eastern Orthodox) and the Syriac Orthodox (Oriental Orthodox).

tall73 · Sunday at 4:35 PM

The Liturgist said:
Today we are celebrating on the Julian calendar the feast of the 1st through 6th ecumenical councils, and the feast of St. Gabriel the Archangel.

Since the Orthodox liturgy is the definitive source of doctrine, I shall quote from the Vespers liturgy of the Seventh Sunday after Pascha, the Feast of the Council of Nicaea, from the Eastern Orthodox hymnal known as the Pentecostarion:

So how does one know from which volumes to derive the liturgy?

The Liturgist · Monday at 7:30 PM

tall73 said:
So how does one know from which volumes to derive the liturgy?

Ah, that question is very near to my heart. The easy answer is that for each of the Orthodox jurisdictions there is a Department of Liturgics where people, usually a mix of clergy and laity (cantors, including women, who have not been ordained, often know the variable parts of the services better than anyone, from memory,* provide instructions for how to celebrate each service in accordance with the specific usage of that jurisdiction (which could be an individual diocese - not all Orthodox churches celebrate the services the same way, just as different Eastern Orthodox churches have different styles of music, such as the Byzantine Chant used by the Greeks, the Syro-Byzantine chant used by the Antiochians, the Protopinije used by the Ruthenians, and the various systems of mostly four part harmony mixed with some plainsong (called znamenny chant) used by the Russians, there are also differences in how the services are celebrated and also differences in the calendar since each church tends to celebrate its local martyrs and so on, which is good and proper.

But I would assume you want the more complex answer, since as I’ve established the Byzantine Rite is just slightly too complex to be entrusted to memory, and that is, how those liturgists know how to structure the services? Since of course every year the calendar is different - we have multiple liturgical calendars that operate concurrently, like intricate clockwork:

- The daily cycle of prayers (which are liturgical, sometimes called the Divine Office and in the West called the “Liturgy of the Hours” but in the East the word Liturgy implies the Holy Communion service, the Divine Liturgy, which is integrated into the daily cycle of prayers, so that if for any reason you can’t celebrate the Liturgy there is an alternate prayer service without communion called the Typika.
- The weekly cycle of hymns which change on each day of the week, and which use a set of hymns which operate on an eight-tone cycle, with one tone being used each week, starting with tone 1 for the first Sunday after Easter (Low Sunday, St. Thomas Sunday or Antipascha as we call it).
- The annual cycle of fixed feast days like Christmas, the Annunciation, the Transfiguration.
- The annual cycle of variable feast days centered around the date of Pascha, which begin with the start of Lent and end a few Sundays after Pentecost
- the Lectionary, which includes multiple moving segments, for example, 11 Gospel pericopes describing the Resurrection are read sequentially every Sunday in a cycle which lasts every 11 weeks.

Thus, what happens when the Annunciation happens in Holy Week, which happened this year? What happens when Christmas happens on a Sunday? What happens when it doesn’t?

There is one book called the Typikon which basically contains detailed instructions on what hymns and prayers and scripture lessons are to be used, and there have been multiple editions and regional variations of the Typikon which have changed over time, and different churches and even different monasteries have had their own, and the Typikon has existed so long that a father in the first millenium was compelled to say that one should not criticize the typikon at a monastery one is visiting. This is an extension of the policy of toleration for liturgical diversity that was taught by St. Ambrose, when he famously advised St. Augustine, “When in Rome, do as the Romans” - he was not speaking of secular customs or practices but of Christian liturgical worship, and at the time worship in the church of Rome was very different from how it is today - Gregorian chant wouldn’t even exist for another two centuries, and St. Ambrose was just beginning to introduce antiphonal hymnody to the West, so at the time, most Roman services lacked hymns and consisted of the chanting of the Psalms and Scripture in monotone (like the Jews, early Christians sung or chanted virtually everything; indeed monotone continued to be used for Low Mass in the Roman church until the Ninth century, when they adopted the present custom of saying it in a low, nearly inaudible voice.

Modern services in a spoken voice in the English language at least were developed in the Church of England during the Reformation, and actually became quite refined, so that I myself have frequently enjoyed the very solemn traditional form of Anglican worship known as the Said Service. Byzantine Rite Orthodoxy sings almost everything, or everything in the case of the Russians and Slavs, including the Scripture lessons (indeed different melodies are used to sing the Gospel vs. the Epistle, and in English the effect of this in terms of making present the voice of Christ our God is striking, since - you may find this odd having not experienced it - when the readings are sung, you no recognize the voice of the person reading them.

This custom is not limited to the Eastern Orthodox but existed in all ancient churches, and also remains the custom in Judaism and even among the Samaritans (the Jews call the system of melodies they use to sing the weekly Torah portion and other Scriptures cantillation, and cantillation marks and vowell points are used in the versions of the Torah used to learn how to read the Torah in a synagogue, and are also documented in the Masoretic text, for like ancient Greek or the Estrangela script of Syriac Aramaic used by Christians, the Hebrew alphabet (actually a 22 letter subset of the Imperial Aramaic “square letter” alphabet which replaced the older Paleo-Hebrew alphabet which looks kind of like Phoenician or Samaritan - indeed its likely the Samaritan alphabet was based on it) in its original form lacked vowels.

*which is also how in most of the Oriental Orthoodox churches other the Armenian Apostolic Church things are conducted - indeed only the Ethiopians historically had musical notation, so the hymns of the Syriac and the Coptic Orthodox Church were memorized, which is also why the genocide against them and against the Assyrian Church of the East is so tragic - because priceless unwritten cultural heritage is being endangered, particularly of the Eastern Syriac Orthodox school of music from TIkrit in Iraq, from which most Syriac Orthodox had to flee since that was also Saddam’s hometown) = at any rate, the Byzantine Rite historically had musical notation and the Slavic churches except when doing Byzantine chant will use Western notation, since they’ve been using four part harmony and tonality since the 19th century.

**I would note that these regional variations in the services are typically less dramatic than the difference one might experience between two Baptist churches, one dedicated to traditional hymns or the a capella square note singing historically used in the Southern Baptist Church verses those which have gone over to contemporary “praise and worship bands” but the principle is the same (with limits - some Orthodox churches have an organ but none have a drumkit or an electric guitar and for that I am grateful, although I would note these limits are not formal, whereas in theory, well, Pope Pius X issued an order prohibiting unauthorized musical instruments in Catholic churches called Tra le Solecitudini, which I agree with entirely with regards to traditional Roman Rite Catholic music and more generally I agree with the idea that advised it and would favor using it as a model for a similar canon for use in other liturgical rites like ours).

The Liturgist · Monday at 7:39 PM

tall73 said:
So how does one know from which volumes to derive the liturgy?

By the way, I do realize that I could have simply answered your question with an “its complicated” and I do hope that you feel in reading my post at least a glimmer of the beauty and fascination I felt when I first read an article about how Orthodox services are ordered, which perhaps I should link you to, a satisfaction like opening up a great old hymnal, and not like the unpleasant or alienating experience of opening a can of worms. Because while Eastern Orthodox liturgies are very different from Western worship (for which reason we have Western Rite Orthodoxy which worships in a manner very similar to that of high church Anglicans or confessional Lutherans like our friends @Jipsah and @MarkRohfrietsch - well, except for ROCOR, which has pursued the interesting path of trying to reconstruct what worship was like before the Great Schism and also aggressive Byzantinization, but their services remain very beautiful, kind of in between the East and the West, not unlike the historic worship in Toledo, Spain using the Mozarabic Rite or the Ambrosian Rite of Milan which survives to this day, or on the island of Cyprus where the hymnody of the Greek and Latin communities influenced each other resulting in some elegant cross-polination carefully documented in some exquisite recordings by the noted Byzantine choir Capella Romana.

Capella Romana also has a recording of the Byzantine Rite in English (mostly, I think it has a small amount of Arabic in the beginning) by the Greek composer Michaelides, which is exceptionally clear and which I found very helpful as a beginner, and another exceptionally clear recording of the Divine Liturgy in Byzantine chant in English recorded in the UK, both of which are very good for first time listeners.

For my part, since I’ve memorized so much of the service books I now mostly listen to services in Church Slavonic because I like the way it sounds (it, Syriac, Armenian and Coptic are my favorite languages to listen to)

tall73 · Monday at 7:41 PM

The Liturgist said:
Ah, that question is very near to my heart. The easy answer is that for each of the Orthodox jurisdictions there is a Department of Liturgics where people, usually a mix of clergy and laity (cantors, including women, who have not been ordained, often know the variable parts of the services better than anyone, from memory,* provide instructions for how to celebrate each service in accordance with the specific usage of that jurisdiction (which could be an individual diocese - not all Orthodox churches celebrate the services the same way, just as different Eastern Orthodox churches have different styles of music, such as the Byzantine Chant used by the Greeks, the Syro-Byzantine chant used by the Antiochians, the Protopinije used by the Ruthenians, and the various systems of mostly four part harmony mixed with some plainsong (called znamenny chant) used by the Russians, there are also differences in how the services are celebrated and also differences in the calendar since each church tends to celebrate its local martyrs and so on, which is good and proper.

But I would assume you want the more complex answer, since as I’ve established the Byzantine Rite is just slightly too complex to be entrusted to memory, and that is, how those liturgists know how to structure the services? Since of course every year the calendar is different - we have multiple liturgical calendars that operate concurrently, like intricate clockwork:

- The daily cycle of prayers (which are liturgical, sometimes called the Divine Office and in the West called the “Liturgy of the Hours” but in the East the word Liturgy implies the Holy Communion service, the Divine Liturgy, which is integrated into the daily cycle of prayers, so that if for any reason you can’t celebrate the Liturgy there is an alternate prayer service without communion called the Typika.
- The weekly cycle of hymns which change on each day of the week, and which use a set of hymns which operate on an eight-tone cycle, with one tone being used each week, starting with tone 1 for the first Sunday after Easter (Low Sunday, St. Thomas Sunday or Antipascha as we call it).
- The annual cycle of fixed feast days like Christmas, the Annunciation, the Transfiguration.
- The annual cycle of variable feast days centered around the date of Pascha, which begin with the start of Lent and end a few Sundays after Pentecost
- the Lectionary, which includes multiple moving segments, for example, 11 Gospel pericopes describing the Resurrection are read sequentially every Sunday in a cycle which lasts every 11 weeks.

Thus, what happens when the Annunciation happens in Holy Week, which happened this year? What happens when Christmas happens on a Sunday? What happens when it doesn’t?

There is one book called the Typikon which basically contains detailed instructions on what hymns and prayers and scripture lessons are to be used, and there have been multiple editions and regional variations of the Typikon which have changed over time, and different churches and even different monasteries have had their own, and the Typikon has existed so long that a father in the first millenium was compelled to say that one should not criticize the typikon at a monastery one is visiting. This is an extension of the policy of toleration for liturgical diversity that was taught by St. Ambrose, when he famously advised St. Augustine, “When in Rome, do as the Romans” - he was not speaking of secular customs or practices but of Christian liturgical worship, and at the time worship in the church of Rome was very different from how it is today - Gregorian chant wouldn’t even exist for another two centuries, and St. Ambrose was just beginning to introduce antiphonal hymnody to the West, so at the time, most Roman services lacked hymns and consisted of the chanting of the Psalms and Scripture in monotone (like the Jews, early Christians sung or chanted virtually everything; indeed monotone continued to be used for Low Mass in the Roman church until the Ninth century, when they adopted the present custom of saying it in a low, nearly inaudible voice.

Modern services in a spoken voice in the English language at least were developed in the Church of England during the Reformation, and actually became quite refined, so that I myself have frequently enjoyed the very solemn traditional form of Anglican worship known as the Said Service. Byzantine Rite Orthodoxy sings almost everything, or everything in the case of the Russians and Slavs, including the Scripture lessons (indeed different melodies are used to sing the Gospel vs. the Epistle, and in English the effect of this in terms of making present the voice of Christ our God is striking, since - you may find this odd having not experienced it - when the readings are sung, you no recognize the voice of the person reading them.

This custom is not limited to the Eastern Orthodox but existed in all ancient churches, and also remains the custom in Judaism and even among the Samaritans (the Jews call the system of melodies they use to sing the weekly Torah portion and other Scriptures cantillation, and cantillation marks and vowell points are used in the versions of the Torah used to learn how to read the Torah in a synagogue, and are also documented in the Masoretic text, for like ancient Greek or the Estrangela script of Syriac Aramaic used by Christians, the Hebrew alphabet (actually a 22 letter subset of the Imperial Aramaic “square letter” alphabet which replaced the older Paleo-Hebrew alphabet which looks kind of like Phoenician or Samaritan - indeed its likely the Samaritan alphabet was based on it) in its original form lacked vowels.

*which is also how in most of the Oriental Orthoodox churches other the Armenian Apostolic Church things are conducted - indeed only the Ethiopians historically had musical notation, so the hymns of the Syriac and the Coptic Orthodox Church were memorized, which is also why the genocide against them and against the Assyrian Church of the East is so tragic - because priceless unwritten cultural heritage is being endangered, particularly of the Eastern Syriac Orthodox school of music from TIkrit in Iraq, from which most Syriac Orthodox had to flee since that was also Saddam’s hometown) = at any rate, the Byzantine Rite historically had musical notation and the Slavic churches except when doing Byzantine chant will use Western notation, since they’ve been using four part harmony and tonality since the 19th century.

**I would note that these regional variations in the services are typically less dramatic than the difference one might experience between two Baptist churches, one dedicated to traditional hymns or the a capella square note singing historically used in the Southern Baptist Church verses those which have gone over to contemporary “praise and worship bands” but the principle is the same (with limits - some Orthodox churches have an organ but none have a drumkit or an electric guitar and for that I am grateful, although I would note these limits are not formal, whereas in theory, well, Pope Pius X issued an order prohibiting unauthorized musical instruments in Catholic churches called Tra le Solecitudini, which I agree with entirely with regards to traditional Roman Rite Catholic music and more generally I agree with the idea that advised it and would favor using it as a model for a similar canon for use in other liturgical rites like ours).

There being that much variation, that must make it difficult if the doctrine is preserved mostly in the liturgy.

The Liturgist · Monday at 9:16 PM

tall73 said:
There being that much variation, that must make it difficult if the doctrine is preserved mostly in the liturgy.

Indeed, it would be, but for this reason, with every Eastern church, the essential doctrine is in the invariant portions of the liturgy, in particular the Divine Liturgy, which is structured so that in every service, regarding the liturgical occasion, one will hear the entire history of salvation and the premise of the Gospel in the form of the invariant hymns (there are variant hymns in the Divine Liturgy, but most of the variant hymns, and nearly all of the complexity involving the supplemental hymnals, pertains to the Divine Office, mostly to Matins (Morning Prayer, also called Orthros in Greek) and to a lesser extent Vespers (Evening Prayer; in the Slavic tradition this is usually combined with Vespers and sometimes Compline for a Vigils service on Saturday evening, which has proven a good idea as these services are well attended and in many Greek and Antiochian churches Vespers aren’t even celebrated). The variation involves musical styles, such as Byzantine chant or the Western four-part harmony used in Russian and Ukrainian and most English language liturgy, sometimes alternate versions of certain prayers or hymns, and also, a geographical preference in terms of commemorations (doctrine is conveyed through among other things the commemoration of important hierarchs and saints who died or suffered to preserve that doctrine, such as St. Maximus the Confessor, whose tongue was cut out by the Byzantine Emperor for speaking against the doctrine of Monothelitism, which was yet another variation on the theme of our Lord not being fully human and divine but a mixture of the two (in this case, a human and divine nature but with a divine will only rather than a human will and a divine will, which would obliterate the humanity of our Lord and contradict his prayer in the Garden of Gesthemane et cetera), causing him to die six days later - thus St. Maximus is commemorated everywhere. However there are so many martyrs and confessors that most churches emphasize regional ones, thus in the North America we see a veneration of St. Peter the Aleut, St. Tikhon of Moscow, St. Rafael of Brooklyn and St. John Maximovitch and St. Olga are very heavily venerated along with other saints such as St. Alexis Toth and various pre-schism Western saints (St. Patrick being especially popular). This is right and proper, but the other saints are still acknowledged, and one will find them venerated more intently in parishes consisting of the diaspora from those lands. Additionally the Orthodox feast of All Saints is the First Sunday after Pentecost (thus completely disconnecting it from any of the controversy that has been inculcated around Halloween, since obviously no one is going to be carving pumpkins at the start of June - well actually I suppose in Australia that might be an option, assuming they have pumpkins or gords which could be so carved).

MarkRohfrietsch · Monday at 9:24 PM

tall73 said:
There being that much variation, that must make it difficult if the doctrine is preserved mostly in the liturgy.

For us Lutherans, Doctrine is preserved in Scripture, it is taught and expressed in the Liturgy.

tall73 · Monday at 9:38 PM

MarkRohfrietsch said:
For us Lutherans, Doctrine is preserved in Scripture, it is taught and expressed in the Liturgy.

That raises an interesting point of comparison.

For Lutherans Scripture is by virtue of being God breathed a means of reforming and testing the church, if I understand correctly. Hence it being the means employed by Luther at the time to bring reform to a corrupt church. Please fact check me if I am incorrect.

But I am not sure the EO holds to that view. @The Liturgist can clarify.

MarkRohfrietsch · 2026-07-28T08:03:04-0500

tall73 said:
That raises an interesting point of comparison.

For Lutherans Scripture is by virtue of being God breathed a means of reforming and testing the church, if I understand correctly. Hence it being the means employed by Luther at the time to bring reform to a corrupt church. Please fact check me if I am incorrect.

But I am not sure the EO holds to that view. @The Liturgist can clarify.

You are correct, but, we do not shun tradition, the Ecumenical Councils, or the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. To maintain continuity and good order, traditions and practices that neither conflict with scripture, nor are forbidden be scripture are acceptable. (As far as the confessional Lutherans go, pretty much anything goes in the more liberal synods).

The Bible is not absent in either Orthodox or Catholic doctrine, however sometimes traditions and philosophies have resulted in some things over-stepping the bounds of Scripture (from our point of view).

Some examples would be things like Luther's statement that he would rather drink Christ's blood with the pope than wine with the enthusiasts (reformed). Likewise, we are free to hold to to the perpetual virginity of Mary, we may also hold the Assumption of Mary; our calendars still mark that festival on August 15, now officially called the feast of "St. Mary, Mother of our Lord. Even calling Mary "Queen of Heaven", while not common, is acceptable in that Christ is the King of Heaven, she is the Queen Mother. Other things like candles, vestments, incense, candles, bells, statues and icons are not forbidden.

Another cool example is this comparison between the traditional Latin Mass and the Lutheran Mass. (Not all Lutherans are this "High Church", but many are, myself and my Pastor included, and we are free to be so.

Enjoy:

tall73 · 2026-07-28T08:27:38-0500

MarkRohfrietsch said:
You are correct, but, we do not shun tradition, the Ecumenical Councils, or the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. To maintain continuity and good order, traditions and practices that neither conflict with scripture, nor are forbidden be scripture are acceptable. (As far as the confessional Lutherans go, pretty much anything goes in the more liberal synods).

Yes, that was my understanding. Thank you for clarifying.

MarkRohfrietsch · 2026-07-28T21:23:07-0500

MarkRohfrietsch said:
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