Does (Chalcedonian) Orthodoxy suffer from imperial consciousness?

[archer75]

I thought we were talking about "religious conservative/liberal".

See, we should toss these terms even for this thread!

 

[Not David]

See, we should toss these terms even for this thread!

Well, Orthodoxy should be traditional yet there are members who might have a more Mainline Protestant (or modernist) mindset so like I said, it is difficult for that to be avoided.

 

[dzheremi]

Unless EO baptisms are different than OO baptisms (which I don't think they are in this respect), baptism should include an explicit renunciation of any previously held heresies and false beliefs. Of course, acquiring the mind of the Church is not a one-time event, but the point is that there should be guards against Protestant ideas: the bishops, priests, all the saints past and present, GOD...

 

[archer75]

Unless EO baptisms are different than OO baptisms (which I don't think they are in this respect), baptism should include an explicit renunciation of any previously held heresies and false beliefs. Of course, acquiring the mind of the Church is not a one-time event, but the point is that there should be guards against Protestant ideas: the bishops, priests, all the saints past and present, GOD...

In our service book, the list of heterodox ideas explicitly renounced is pretty limited. We don't have any of the following, for example:

• The only morality is sexual morality, and you just need to make sure no one finds out
• Hypocrisy is a-ok
• When you're received into a new church, you become too cool for school
• Bickering over Scripture is a great idea
• Murder is OK if it helps you and the victims seem kind of abstract

So some people, me included, are received without having to think about this stuff too much.

 

[dzheremi]

In our service book, the list of heterodox ideas explicitly renounced is pretty limited. We don't have any of the following, for example:

• The only morality is sexual morality, and you just need to make sure no one finds out
• Hypocrisy is a-ok
• When you're received into a new church, you become too cool for school
• Bickering over Scripture is a great idea
• Murder is OK if it helps you and the victims seem kind of abstract

So some people, me included, are received without having to think about this stuff too much.

Yeah, that was kind of my point. (Sorry if that wasn't clear. Reading it over, I can see how my use of the word "any" is confusing.) At baptism you renounce the specific ideas that would be involved in actually being a member of another church (e.g., ecclesiological and Christological heresies, I'd imagine), along probably with making some affirmative statements that are sort of 'catch alls' (e.g., renouncing Satan and all of his works; that could cover a lot of ground), but doing this doesn't magically make you acquire the mindset of an Orthodox Christian. For that usually much longer process, a person must look to others outside of themselves and their own proclivities and ideas that they may still be carrying with them, since renouncing the various Papal heresies isn't going to do much about thinking that joining a new church makes you too cool for school.

I guess in an ideal world a person wouldn't be baptized until they'd already gotten rid of erroneous ideas such as the above, but as you note some are received without having to think about this stuff.