ansesreral sin and grace.

[Toolbelt]

Hello! I'm looking for some online resources that can explain how the OO view ansesreral sin. My understanding is that the OO didn't venture into theological debate over this topic. Surely though there must be certain consequences for the fall. I'm trying to understand.
Also looking into the concept of grace and is grace something attainable in this life. Similar to theosis or is it a reward into the future? Thanks

 

[Not me]

Hello! I'm looking for some online resources that can explain how the OO view ansesreral sin. My understanding is that the OO didn't venture into theological debate over this topic. Surely though there must be certain consequences for the fall. I'm trying to understand.
Also looking into the concept of grace and is grace something attainable in this life. Similar to theosis or is it a reward into the future? Thanks

What is your definition of grace?

Much love in Christ, Not me

 

[HTacianas]

Hello! I'm looking for some online resources that can explain how the OO view ansesreral sin. My understanding is that the OO didn't venture into theological debate over this topic. Surely though there must be certain consequences for the fall. I'm trying to understand.
Also looking into the concept of grace and is grace something attainable in this life. Similar to theosis or is it a reward into the future? Thanks

Generally, the Orthodox view on ancestral sin differs from the Western view of original sin. In the Western view, the guilt of Adam's first sin is inherited by all mankind, but the Eastern view has it that it is not the guilt that is inherited, but the propensity to sin. Guilt is not imputed until sin is complete.

This article will help:

Saint George Greek Orthodox Cathedral

 

[~Anastasia~]

As far as I know, OO would agree with EO regarding the fall and ancestral sin.

Grace may be another matter. I think we probably agree on theosis and holiness in life, but maybe not on the actual understanding of grace itself.

Hopefully @dzheremi will be along to clarify.

 

[dzheremi]

I'm not sure what precisely is being asked here, but I think I've written enough on our view of ancestral sin in the thread on that topic that was recently posted in the St. Justin's subforum of TAW, so I can't think of much else to say. I don't recall anything written there by any of the EO that struck me as incorrect, though there is probably stuff I didn't/don't properly understand due to my own lack of knowledge concerning post-Chalcedon developments in the way that EO talk about these topics.

Same too about grace: I can't really think of any separate teachings we have about grace as a thing or whatever, so I'm not sure what you're looking for. Sorry.

 

[~Anastasia~]

I'm not sure what precisely is being asked here, but I think I've written enough on our view of ancestral sin in the thread on that topic that was recently posted in the St. Justin's subforum of TAW, so I can't think of much else to say. I don't recall anything written there by any of the EO that struck me as incorrect, though there is probably stuff I didn't/don't properly understand due to my own lack of knowledge concerning post-Chalcedon developments in the way that EO talk about these topics.

Same too about grace: I can't really think of any separate teachings we have about grace as a thing or whatever, so I'm not sure what you're looking for. Sorry.

I've never heard anything that would make me think you could have anything different to say about original sin or the fall or salvation.

Does the OO agree that grace is the uncreated energies of God? I wasn't sure about that? But if grace is not a created thing or a measured commodity, it seems we agree to some extent?

 

[dzheremi]

I don't know that we have any specific teaching on grace as a thing in itself. That's what I was meaning to get at. I'm sure you could find some Coptic, Syriac, etc. writers of ancient or modern times whose writings could be adapted to fit either view, but that would be by whoever is doing the adaptation, and hence shouldn't be read back into the work itself (at least not without looking at its wider context to make sure that you are not presuming to know what is intended). If I recall correctly, the essence/energies distinction that underlies your question was only 'codified', as such (though I'm sure taught much earlier), by the Eastern Orthodox as a result of the struggle between Gregory Palamas and Barlaam of Calabria in the 14th century, which as you might guess is far too late for us to have known or cared all that much about it at that time. This is why this question doesn't really make a lot of sense to me, even though I have heard multiple Coptic bishops and priests (including my own) invoke the distinction in speaking on Theosis and our belief in it.

Case in point, I have personally heard my own former bishop HG Bishop Youssef of the Southern United States speak on Theosis and how we are united with God not in His essence but by His energies, and yet when I checked just now, I could not even find a specific category on "Grace" in the Q&A section of the diocese's website. So this is probably not a question that Coptic people are thinking to ask about, which leads me to think that we probably never developed a distinctive teaching on the matter, most likely because the particular motivation to do so was not there for us as it was for you (i.e., we didn't have a Barlaam of Calabria to deal with). So I'm not sure how I can answer your question when I don't know where to find said answers. Clearly HG knows about it, or at least a basic outline of the particular terminology that is involved (which he used correctly, as far as I can tell), but that's probably a result of pretty recent interaction with EO, and/or the renewal of Patristics among the Copts in the modern age via organizations and websites like Orthokairos (which appears to be offline now, but was previously a very good web resource). Last night I checked the earliest Coptic catechism I could find in English (the 1892 catechism of one Fr. Filotheos, which was translated by the Anglicans in Egypt and I suspect bears the hallmark of some of their theology in its particulars, though I've never seen the Arabic original), and could find plenty of mentions of grace, but again no discussion of grace as a thing. 1892 is but a blink of an eye in Church history terms, but is perhaps quite old relative to the modern OO-EO rapprochement which began only in the 1960s.

 

[~Anastasia~]

Thank you. I wasn't looking for ways to separate us, btw. Not that you seemed to think that, but just for the sake of any readers.

And I knew our codification came far later than the schism between EO and OO, which is why I wasn't sure what your communion might say.

It seems to me that your answer is what I would expect from an EO mindset if the situation were reversed. No need to create controversies and explain what isn't questioned. Surely God Himself is quite the Mystery, so without having to deal with a controversy, no need to try to define Him.

And I expect (maybe I'm just being optimistic - but I don't think so?) that our understanding of theosis would be essentially the same, and can agree with your statement on it of course.

I don't occupy myself anymore seeking differences between us (I did when I was at the stage of trying to discern if I should be EO) ... but it's always been extremely difficult for me to identify differences anyway. I still am encouraged by what I perceive as our very great similarity. And I still see that similarity paired with this being the first real schism in the Church as being evidence that both your communion and mine have maintained the faith once for all delivered to the Saints. Maybe I'm being too simplistic. But I've become grateful for that assurance.

God be with you. And thank you for the reply.

 

[Toolbelt]

I'm not sure what precisely is being asked here, but I think I've written enough on our view of ancestral sin in the thread on that topic that was recently posted in the St. Justin's subforum of TAW, so I can't think of much else to say. I don't recall anything written there by any of the EO that struck me as incorrect, though there is probably stuff I didn't/don't properly understand due to my own lack of knowledge concerning post-Chalcedon developments in the way that EO talk about these topics.

Same too about grace: I can't really think of any separate teachings we have about grace as a thing or whatever, so I'm not sure what you're looking for. Sorry.

Thank you. I will look into your comments in that subforum.
Do OO view grace as theosis. In that it happens during our life. Or is it a reward on judgement day?

 

[dzheremi]

Thank you. I wasn't looking for ways to separate us, btw. Not that you seemed to think that, but just for the sake of any readers.

Of course.

And I knew our codification came far later than the schism between EO and OO, which is why I wasn't sure what your communion might say.

It seems to me that your answer is what I would expect from an EO mindset if the situation were reversed. No need to create controversies and explain what isn't questioned. Surely God Himself is quite the Mystery, so without having to deal with a controversy, no need to try to define Him.

This is exactly it. You'd have to imagine how it would be if your Church had never been involved in any of these controversies, and then think of how you might answer the question. You might look at what others have said and take your pick of what you like out of what they say, or you might not answer it at all, or you might do some other thing neither of us can even imagine. But if you lack the sort of background that you would need to even approach the question, then there's no real reason to expect any one answer over any other or none at all. Without the necessary 'category' already carved out in your tradition, it's hard to really even know what to make of the question. I can see why it makes perfect sense from the EO perspective to ask this, but I'm not sure how I should (or if I should) attempt to answer it.

And I expect (maybe I'm just being optimistic - but I don't think so?) that our understanding of theosis would be essentially the same, and can agree with your statement on it of course.

Yes. I think if it were not for the well-publicized statements of HH Pope Shenouda III on this matter, which have largely been stripped of their context by our detractors or those skeptical of the orthodoxy of our communion (as I believe I have tried to point out in the past on the EO board, the entire subject came up for HH in the context of answering a specific question regarding 'consuming' the divinity, which is an idea that neither of our churches would find even the least bit acceptable), this would not be in question whatsoever. And I have transcribed recently the interview with Fr. Matta el Miskeen from Coptologia journal (on the EO board) in the early 1980s, which gave the kind of answer on Theosis that you could have expected to have gotten before too many Copts began to take everything that came from the mouth or pen of HH as de facto infallible, a position which is thoroughly against Coptic and wider Orthodox traditions, and has been repudiated explicitly by his successor, the current Pope Tawadros II, who famously stated in one of his first statements after being elevated to the Papacy "We are a conciliar Church, not a Papal Church".

I don't occupy myself anymore seeking differences between us (I did when I was at the stage of trying to discern if I should be EO) ... but it's always been extremely difficult for me to identify differences anyway. I still am encouraged by what I perceive as our very great similarity. And I still see that similarity paired with this being the first real schism in the Church as being evidence that both your communion and mine have maintained the faith once for all delivered to the Saints. Maybe I'm being too simplistic. But I've become grateful for that assurance.

HH St. Pope Timothy II, the direct successor of HH St. Pope Dioscorus, once wrote that should a simple person come to us (from among the believers in the Tome), desiring to have communion with us once again, then we are not to burden them with specific word choices that they may not understand, but instead ensure that they confess our Lord's fleshly consubstantiality with us. (Keep in mind that in the immediate aftermath of Chalcedon both the Nestorians and the groups that would become the EO and the RC thought that the Tome affirmed their theology, and in HH St. Pope Timothy II's time you guys had not had the subsequent council which ferreted out the crypto-Nestorians among you, so asking about our Lord's fleshly consubstantiality with us would've been a way to ensure that the perspective communicant is not in fact a Nestorian or crypto-Nestorian.) Some people might also think that this is being too simplistic (after all, there are other Christological heresies besides Nestorianism and Monophysitism), yet this is how we have always operated: if they (whoever they are) are willing to confess the Orthodox faith as defined by our fathers and the three councils, then the exact wording is something left to the incoming party's tradition, and the receiving party's accommodation, if it can indeed be accommodated (obviously we don't accept just anything, or else we'd not form a communion in the first place). This is how our common father St. Cyril came to accept the dyophysitism of John of Antioch before the Chalcedonian council (he neither adopted it himself, nor merely permitted it as a kindness or out of pity or something, but found it to be Orthodox all the while not compromising his own formula), and how we have accepted the Armenians since ancient times despite the fact that they use an intermediate Jerusalemite Creed of the 360s (most likely attributable to St. Epiphanius of Salamis and a group of bishops gathered in that city at that time) rather than the "finalized" version of 381 that both EO and Copts use, and so on.

A great deal can be accomplished -- and not just for short term or short-sighted reasons or effects (God forbid!) -- by being simplistic. Do you confess the three Holy Ecumenical Councils? Yes? Okay then. We can definitely work with that as a common base. Let's continue to discuss things and see what else we may have in common, and where we differ and why, and if those differences are reconcilable.

God be with you. And thank you for the reply.

God be with you as well. Thank you for visiting this sadly disused portion of the website and sharing your thoughts and questions. You and they are always welcome, even if I don't always know how to address what you guys write.

 

[dzheremi]

Thank you. I will look into your comments in that subforum.
Do OO view grace as theosis. In that it happens during our life. Or is it a reward on judgement day?

Theosis is the union of man with God through the grace of our Lord, God, and Savior, Jesus Christ, Who by His life, death, and glorious resurrection has established for us the only true way to salvation. It happens in our lives when we approach the holy mysteries in liturgy with all humility in prostration before them and take within us His holy and precious body and blood, which are given for the salvation of all who believe in Him and confess His death, resurrection, and second coming together with us, but also when we pray at the seven appointed times throughout the day in the Agpeya or extemporaneously at any time, and when we fast the holy eight fasts of the Coptic year and celebrate the feasts together with the Church, or do any other thing as appointed and encouraged by the Church and her holy fathers beginning from our masters the apostles and disciples and down to this very day. As God is eternal, and God-willing we will live with Him eternally in heaven, this process has no end, and there is no true separation between death and life such that it can be a "reward" on judgment day, because He will be the same on that day and after it, and He has promised His faithful that as He lives they too shall live.

Please focus here on the comments of HG Bishop Moussa (the man giving the talk after the prayers), from the funeral of the martyrs of the New Years' Day bombing of the Church of the Saints in 2011. They say it much better than I could, even as HG does not use the specific word "Theosis" (in Arabic, ta'alah, which apparently has a lot of theological baggage attached to it, as explained by a native Arabic-speaking Coptic person on OC.net here; the whole thread is worth a read, really, if you want to get into the technical side of all of this; as a person who only learned the basics of the language as a fourth language, with only working knowledge of "Church Arabic" from the liturgy, I cannot evaluate this on the level that they do in that thread):

I should note here for the sake of balance that some modern Coptic writers and priests (prominent among them is Fr. Athanasius Iskander, who is not a lightweight in Coptic circles, as far as I understand) have advocated that other terms would be better suited to express the Coptic Orthodox position vis-a-vis Theosis. Fr. Athanasius argues in one of his writings for the term theopoiesis, but as the particular writing I have in mind is extremely polemical in ways that I cannot myself stand behind (not because I assume Fr. Athanasius is wrong, but because I don't know about a lot of the things he brings up, and besides I am obliged to follow my bishop's teaching, which is obviously in favor of the term theosis), I will not present it here. I only mention it so that any reader can know that such points of view are out there, though I couldn't tell you how popular they are. I have no interest in arguing against EO just for the sake of it if I can't even understand why I should be doing that, so please don't take this mention as any kind of personal endorsement of the view that theosis is incorrect. I think Fr. Athanasius' extreme boldness in this matter has to do with the way that some of the statements of St. Gregory Nazianzen (who is a saint in our Church and wider communion) have been taken by later EO theologians and writers, but again, I don't know anything about that. And also, with respect due to the good father, it seems that Fr. Athanasius might be misreading some of the Cappadocian fathers, as when he claims that they have said that virtues such a virginity can in themselves deify man; I don't recall ever reading that in either St. Gregory Nazianzen or St. Gregory of Nyssa, who Fr. Athanasius claims this about...perhaps I missed it, or perhaps I am not understanding the basis for his claim.

If I may venture to do a bit of personal wondering on this last point (Lord have mercy), I think one area that might be worth exploring is what I have sensed to be a bit of a distinction in how OO (or at least Copts; I don't intend to speak for all of the OO, as I don't know everyone else's prayers) and EO talk about Christ's incarnation with regard to His taking on the flesh. This is maybe not so directly related to your question, OP, but is certainly in that same area, so hopefully this diversion will not be a waste of everyone's time (again, Lord have mercy).

I have posted before in a thread in which you participated on what I considered to be a very interesting and confusing change in wording in an episode of the popular Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy podcast on AFR, hosted by Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick (I don't know if EO are like us and refer to their priests by their first name, or if he would be called Fr. Damick), who is of the Antiochian EO Church. As you can read at the link, the change was such that any talk of Christ's human nature being subject to the fall has been excised (I still have the original on my ipod, though, so that's how I know it has changed), and it seems the consensus among the EO -- at least in that thread -- is that the humanity that was assumed by Christ was in its 'pre-lapsarian' state, i.e., before the fall of Adam and Eve.

I am not 100% sure (in fact, I'm zero percent sure, because this is another thing where I cannot find writings from OO on this particular bit of theological philosophy, or whatever you'd call it; there seem to be a lot of subjects where we just don't have readily accessible writings to look at, because we seemingly didn't develop this question or an answer to it in the first place, as you guys did; in a way it kind of stinks, but I guess it's also a testimony to how we really have kept to only the first three councils, in terms of what we have defined and what we have not), but I think we would say instead that it was in the assuming of the flesh, i.e., at/with/through the incarnation itself that the flesh was redeemed/made holy/elevated or however you'd like to put it (in other words, it was not 'pre-lapsarian', as He took flesh from the Virgin Theotokos St. Mary, and her flesh was not 'pre-lapsarian', i.e., she was subject to the fall, while He was not because He redeemed the flesh by assuming it, and hence went through a voluntary death for us sinners).

Coptic Orthodox Christology is heavily 'incarnational', and it is basically impossible to understand without understanding this as the basis of it. On the other hand, when/if it does 'click' with you, it opens up an entire world of theology that really puts you back in the days of our fathers...yes, I am plugging my own communion here, as is perfectly right to do, but without denigrating what others may believe I am also trying to show a bit of what being OO looks like "from the inside", where instead of having these questions on grace and the exact nature of Christ's flesh or whatever, we have what we proclaim in our liturgies and prayers and vigils, and what has established Christian monasticism which is doubtlessly the greatest gift of the Church in Egypt to the world, and so on. It is 'simpler', perhaps, but just as still waters run deep, within that simplicity and I guess ignorance of what others are doing or have done there is the unshakable belief that Christ came in the form of a servant, and blessed our nature in Himself, and by truly uniting His divinity and His humanity and making it one, He has prepared for us the way to salvation and theosis that is accomplished eternally through His defeat of death upon the holy wood of the life-giving cross. I'm not going to say you can't get there with this 'pre-lapsarian' belief or with Chalcedonianism more generally, because that's not my call to make and I don't intend to make this thread about Chacledon -- by God, I am sick of even typing or thinking that name -- but I will say that this is what I understand to be the basis of our Orthodox faith, and this is how we believe it and always have and always will. And as our good friend and sister in Christ Anastasia has put it, I am grateful for that assurance.

 

[dzheremi]

Actual prayers from our Nativity liturgies (a most appropriate place to look for our theology on the Incarnation), to back up my blather concerning Christ's humanity and what we will say about the incarnation:

Christ blesses/transforms/redeems the human nature by His glorious and mysterious incarnation:

"...and blessed my nature in Yourself..." (wow, I hadn't realized at the time that I was basically quoting this in my previous post; I love it! Our prayers are stuck in my head and my way of 'extemporaneous' explanation of things! Gee...I wonder if now I'll get better at Arabic or Coptic, or start liking strange Egyptian desserts more or something...hahaha )

The manifestation of Christ is the destruction of death itself (here is a link to the translated text of the prayer, since some of it is in Arabic in this video):

Please note that I do not for even a fraction of a second think that any EO or Chalcedonians more broadly would dare to reject either of these points, seeing as they are the entire foundation of the Christian religion no matter what particular communion you belong to, but it seems to me that at the level of talking about Christ's humanity and the incarnation, we do have slightly different ways of talking about these things, and naturally I prefer the OO way, though I am open to accepting the EO so long as they can also accept what we confess (i.e., don't demand only one specific understanding if the others are actually reconcilable in some way). I don't imagine you will find any problem with the text at the above link, though I don't know.

The effect of this difference in understanding or emphasis or whatever on the discussion of grace and theosis is hard to quantify for me, since I'm just a simple layman who lives by lex orandi, lex credendi, but I could see it having a big effect for those who are 'higher up' in the discussion between our respective communions, since of course it does matter what we say about Christ and why. As a mere baby (I was only received into the Coptic Orthodox Church in 2012 after all, and do not mean to present myself as any kind of authority; I just happen to be here, and would take correction from any OO who knows more than I do, which is basically everyone), I am comforted by the fact that in this area of discussion -- just like any discussion we could have but probably will not be having on grace as a thing -- I believe the result is the same, and hence at that level 'we believe the same thing' (in scare quotes only because that particular combination of words has come to make me shudder after too many fruitless encounters with my former co-religionists in the RCC who claimed that about RC and OO when it was not true, but I can't think of a better way to put it right now), because Christ's humanity being 'pre-lapsarian' or not does not change what He actually did, only how we conceive of how exactly it was that He came to do it.

And to be honest, this is one of those (many) things I'm glad we did not define! I feel like I can learn a lot from you EO in these circumstances and just sort of tuck it away in a generalized knowledge part of my brain. Like "Oh, that's interesting. I wonder what we would say about that? Wait...have we already said something about that? I don't know. Time to go searching!" It ultimately does not matter to me at all that you guys have a different way of talking about something we never explicitly pry into in the first place, because we don't have to. So if I can learn something from what you guys say, and yet I don't have to add anything to my own faith, then great. That's positive for everyone, because you guys get to explain what it is that you're talking about to a numbskull like me who had no way of even thinking about these things (because, again, we apparently did not develop that way), and I learn something new and a bit about how you look at things. I think that is most important in our coming together to talk: Don't just look at the other person as some kind of weird Chalcedonian automaton, as though they come out of a factory with a pre-set range of opinions and experiences, but really try to get in there...look at them as worshipers of God who prostrate before Him just as you do, and treat them accordingly while trying to really get at what it means to be EO (or RC, or God forbid Nestorian, etc.), even if ultimately you can never know it as they do. The Bible says come let us reason together, but it also says to treat the guest in your country (VITD being OO e-country) fairly. "For you were foreigners in the land of Egypt"...boy can I really relate to that!

(Hooray for internet! Hahaha. I don't know. There was great love "in the trenches" with the Greeks where I previously lived in Albuquerque, but I have not even seen an EO or OO church in my current city; I know they're out there somewhere, but I can't drive, so until such time as I can get to one, I have this place. Please pray for me that in my weakness some congregation somewhere nearby will have mercy on me and accept me in my broken state. Lord have mercy.)

 

[Toolbelt]

There is a lot to consume here. Thanks
One more question. On what criteria are the saints chosen?

 

[dzheremi]

We do not have rigid criteria like the Roman Catholics (X number of miracles or whatever). I have been told that it is traditional to wait some decades until the person has been reposed for a while, but that doesn't seem like a hard and fast rule, as the new martyrs of Libya were obviously added long before even half a decade had passed since their martyrdom. Some people have claimed that this is a special case, but I'm not so sure, given how frequently the Coptic people have faced martyrdom in recent decades and centuries.

It is mostly by popular acclaim, I guess you could say, in that the veneration of a person may begin on a local level and spread from there, and if there is enough reason to officially add them (after a thorough look at their lives and teachings, of course), then it will happen. Those who grace our synaxarium, for whom public veneration is thereby afforded on the calendar (though we have way more saints that are not in the synaxarium, for various reasons) and hymns may be written about will be added by the Holy Synod. There is a sense that the potential pitfalls of this method can be (1) a sort of "blanket sainthood", as has been argued to be happening with Popes of recent centuries (e.g., there is already a church dedicated in the name of HH Pope Shenouda III in California! ), and (2) that many who are thought of far and wide as being probable saints or are basically seen to already be so nonetheless are not yet officially recognized, for some reason (e.g., Fr. Matta El Miskeen, Tamav Irini the Abbess of Abu Seifein convent, Fr. Bishoy Kamel, etc). I'm afraid I don't know enough about whatever other churches might be doing to be able to say what we could or should change, other than the obvious problems in basically declaring every Pope to be a saint (what about Pope Yusab II, who was deposed? Somehow he never comes up...). That's got to stop, and it seems like HH Pope Tawadros II would be a good man to stop it, with his determination to refocus our Church according to the historical conciliar model that the long papacy of HH Pope Shenouda III did a pretty big number on, honestly (not on purpose or anything, just as a consequence of its length and the unprecedented worldwide growth of the Coptic Orthodox Church during this time; I think I remember reading that at the start of HH's reign in 1971 there were maybe half a dozen churches outside of the traditional North African territories of the Coptic Orthodox Church; today there are over 200 in the USA alone, and many more in Canada, sub-Saharan Africa, Australasia, etc).

I imagine the EO are similar in this sense of starting with local veneration and then things progressing from there. Is that so?

 

[~Anastasia~]

Wow I did not know you didn't have a Church. Lord have mercy! Prayers for you!

And did not realize you were so recently received. Before I became EO but not too much before (I know I still feel like a beginner - and rightly so IMO).

I would like to observe the conversation among those who might know more from both our Churches. Yes, I've heard that Christ's nature was pre-lapsarian. But I'm not sure if that's simply a description or some comment about where He received it. Because as you said, He received His flesh from the Theotokos, and we don't believe in the IC. But, of course we regard her as purified before bearing Christ, else she could not have borne Him.

At the same time, I've also heard that Christ sanctified mankind in general by the Incarnation - by passing through a man's life. And that He sanctified waters by being baptized. And so on. So - I'm not sure what theologians would actually say in this case? I'd be interested.

As far as our canonizing Saints, it does most often start on a local level of people who knew a person to have lived an especially holy life, asking prayers from them and so on.

 

[Toolbelt]

Thank you. Dzheremi. It seems that the OO have embraced a lot of EO theology unofficially. As there is no dogma on most of these topics.

 

[~Anastasia~]

Thank you. Dzheremi. It seems that the OO have embraced a lot of EO theology unofficially. As there is no dogma on most of these topics.

This may be me being a bit picky, but I doubt it's accurate to say that the OO embraces EO theology. Rather I think it's that we have a shared history prior to Chalcedon and have both been faithful to our roots.



And - y'know - the Holy Spirit. Glory to God!

 

[dzheremi]

Yeah, all the stuff that was defined by you guys after Chalcedon mostly hasn't been embraced, or at least not in the same way, hence my not really being able to directly address certain questions, because it's not my place to go farther than we have except perhaps to speculate what an answer could be based on what we do say. Did we "adopt" Theosis from the EO, or is it found in our common fathers like St. Basil? Certainly the EO have a particular understanding of it that causes some among us to question if this is the best way to express our own view (hence things like the writings of Fr. Athanasius, alluded to above), but that's the entire point, from where I'm sitting: because we didn't develop as you guys did, we didn't codify as much stuff, etc. (however you want to say it), there's no real reason to call this specifically "EO" theology rather than just...I don't know...theology. The fact that you recognize it as distinctively EO is good in the sense that it means that you recognize something of your own faith in ours despite our long period of continuing estrangement from one another, but I'm with Anastasia on this one: given the reality of how it is that we have preserved these things to whatever extent we have (you guys by having 4 or according to some EO sources even 5 or 6 additional councils, and us by...not...doing that ; you guys by laying down the law following various outbreaks of distinctly Greco-Roman iconoclasm, and us again not doing that; you guys...you get my point: you guys X, us not-X), I would be much more willing and comfortable saying that it is by the Holy Spirit and not by any line of direct influence (maybe indirect? I'm sure it varies depending on where or when you're looking at), as we did not really adopt exactly what you have, did we? The Greek hymns that we do have that are of relatively recent vintage (c. 1850s and onwards) are the only things that we can say with confidence were directly adopted from you, and are recognized to be so by those who have studied our liturgies and the historical accounts of those times, while everything else is very, very old. Like pre-Chalcedon old (cf. the 13 or so canons shared with the Greeks in Egypt vs. the larger set of 100+ that are unique to the Copts; obviously the larger set is newer -- it's not even completely available in Coptic, only in Arabic -- but that doesn't mean we took the 13 that match from you; we share them with you, and you with us). We were, after all, for quite a few centuries one and the same Church, and unlike the Eastern Chalcedonians eventually did, we did not go through a distinct period of liturgical/ritual Byzantinzation, though this is not the same as saying that there is no Byzantine influence in any of our churches or liturgies (clearly there is; probably most clearly among the Armenians, as unlike the Egyptians, they did not have as much pre-Christian Greco-Roman contact, and had mostly shared their religious beliefs and practices with the neighboring Persians, so the layers of their history are a bit more clear cut, even if the distinct period of Byzantine Armenia was itself very short, lasting just under a century and a half; nevertheless they have distinct periods of Syriac, Byzantine, and lastly Latin influence, all of which come through in their worship in different ways).