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All pope means is “papa”. So “papa”-pope became an official title (I would assume) after it was first a term of endearment.
. In a sense they do. Each is different, but let’s look at how the Patriarch of Constantinople is elected, which is by a synod of all Turkish born Metropolitans. Antioch is just by all Metropolitans, and Alexandria does include folks who are not bishops into their electoral synod. When comparing, there isn’t much difference.
On this we will have to disagree. To understand Transubstantiation, which like the term Trinity is just an identifier for the Dogma, you don’t need Aristotelian categories. Council of Trent simply defines the it:
But since Christ our Redeemer declared that to be truly His own body which He offered under the form of bread,[20] it has, therefore, always been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy council now declares it anew, that by the consecration of the bread and wine a change is brought about of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood.[21] This change the holy Catholic Church properly and appropriately calls transubstantiation.
In other words unlike the Lutherans, we simply teach, that at Consecration the bread and wine becomes substantially the Body and Blood of Christ; but we continual to see, feel and taste just bread and wine. Which in my many discussions on this topic with Orthodox Christians this is what they believe as well. For whatever reason they just don’t like us coming up with the term of transubstantiation, for whatever reason.
Actual Orthodox theologians, like Fr. Alexander Schmemann, would not agree that it was a mere triviality. Fr. Alexander Schmemann's Eucharistic theology was somewhere between the Lutherans and Reformed Anglicans, seeing mystical significance in ordinary bread and wine becoming the sacramental body and blood of Christ. Not by abolishing their realities, but by divinizing them, uniting them sacramentally to the body and blood of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. In that sense, the Eucharist becomes a sign of the New Creation.
I would argue that Fr. Schmemann's theology is closer to how Augustine actually understood the sacrament, than Trent. Augustine doesn't speak of the sacramental signs as illusions or accidents.
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