Purgatory And Prayers For The Dead.

[sandman]

Sounds like you got yuour church history from Chick tracts.

Even those would be better than making up stories about a place that is totally contrary to God's word .... in so many different areas.

 

[RileyG]

Even those would be better than making up stories about a place that is totally contrary to God's word .... in so many different areas.

1 Corinthians 3:15

 

[sandman]

Not at all. Only the saved of Christ go to purgatory.

No place in the Bible does that line up with the truth of God's word

 

[RileyG]

No place in the Bible does that line up with the truth of God's word

The ECF all accepted an intermediate state after death that wasn't heaven or hell and it's certainly biblical. Even Jesus would have prayed for the dead given he was a practicing Jew. St. Paul prays for the dead in one of his epistles.

 

[RileyG]

It is my understanding the Orthodox reject Purgatory because they don't see it as a fire and all will experience a foretaste of heaven and hell after death. Prayers for the dead are helpful, they just don't define HOW they help. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[d taylor]

None of that explained in Scripture, though, is it?

Is the Outer Darkness Protestant Purgatory? – Grace Evangelical Society

 

[sandman]

1 Corinthians 3:15

Sorry Riley ...that scripture is a broken cistern to what is being presented on purgatory.

 

[RileyG]

Sorry Riley ...that scripture is a broken cistern to what is being presented on purgatory.

The ECF accepted is an intermediate state after death. See St. Augustine.

I do not accept Sola Scriptura.

 

[dzheremi]

Just out of curiosity, are you among the High Church / Anglo Catholics who believe in it?

Either way, whether one accepts purgatory or another soteriology, prayers for the dead are very important, and I love the Western All Souls Day and the Eastern Orthodox “Soul Saturdays.”

@dzheremi , aside from the “general funeral” held on the afternoon of Palm Sunday for anyone who reposes in Holy Week, does Coptic Orthodoxy have any equivalent to these solemnities? Also, is there an All Saints Day in the Coptic Rite like in the Byzantine and Western rites?

Not that I'm aware of, but I don't know what "Soul Saturdays" are, so I can't be sure. The only thing that comes up for جميع القديسين (this is what "All Saints Day" is called in Arabic in the countries that celebrate it) when I search for it on Coptic websites is the standard commemorations of the saints from the liturgy, like this one from the Liturgy of St. Basil. I mean, I guess those are 'general' in the sense that they include a bunch of saints rather than focusing on one or one group, but I don't think that's the same as the Western or Byzantine holy days.

 

[RileyG]

Not that I'm aware of, but I don't know what "Soul Saturdays" are, so I can't be sure. The only thing that comes up for جميع القديسين (this is what "All Saints Day" is called in Arabic in the countries that celebrate it) when I search for it on Coptic websites is the standard commemorations of the saints from the liturgy, like this one from the Liturgy of St. Basil. I mean, I guess those are 'general' in the sense that they include a bunch of saints rather than focusing on one or one group, but I don't think that's the same as the Western or Byzantine holy days.

I'm not Orthodox, but according to Wikipedia, some Eastern Christians pray for the dead on Saturday because Christ laid dead in the tomb on Saturday. I do not know if Oriental Orthodox or Copts etc do this practice.

Saturday of Souls - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(I know Wikipedia isn't always reliable).

 

[ozso]

Well all this goes to show that I really made a fool of myself when I called you “anti-Orthodox”, so again, my apologies for that. Anyone who appreciates Fr. Josiah Trenham and dislikes the penal substitutionary atonement/satisfaction model of soteriology, that was derived from Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, is moving towards having an Orthodox phronema.

There's probably more I agree with than disagree with. I do express anti-Orthodox polemics regarding the smaller amount that I disagree with. So you were right in that sense and I took it the wrong way.

 

[ozso]

The ECF accepted is an intermediate state after death. See St. Augustine.

Is someone who was born over 300 years after the establishment of the church really an early church father?

 

[RileyG]

Is someone who was born over 300 years after the establishment of the church really an early church father?

I would say, yes.

 

[ozso]

I would say, yes.

300+ years after the fact seems like a long time considering the US is 247 years old. It's hard to think of people born after 2076 as being early fathers of the United States.

 

[Xeno.of.athens]

300+ years after the fact seems like a long time considering the US is 247 years old. It's hard to think of people born after 2076 as being early fathers of the United States.

The Church is ancient, the USA is not.

 

[The Liturgist]

Not that I'm aware of, but I don't know what "Soul Saturdays" are, so I can't be sure. The only thing that comes up for جميع القديسين (this is what "All Saints Day" is called in Arabic in the countries that celebrate it) when I search for it on Coptic websites is the standard commemorations of the saints from the liturgy, like this one from the Liturgy of St. Basil. I mean, I guess those are 'general' in the sense that they include a bunch of saints rather than focusing on one or one group, but I don't think that's the same as the Western or Byzantine holy days.

In the Byzantine Rite liturgy, as @prodromos @HTacianas @Lukaris @PsaltiChrysostom and our other Eastern Orthodox friends can attest, the Saturdays of the pre-Lent and Lenten period have a particular emphasis on praying for the souls of the reposed loved ones of the congregation and those more generally who are at rest. So it’s sort of like All Souls Day, but over multiple weekends, and without the use of a Catafalque. The Assyrians do this on the last Friday before Lent, as well as other churches using the West Syriac Rite. In Syriac Orthodoxy I am not aware of a specific day set aside for this purpose, but memorial services are routinely held, and during them there is a stand on which a portrait of the deceased is flanked by a pair of candles. These services add about fifteen minutes to the length of the liturgy, but are quite beautiful, and the family of the departed will customarily buy lunch for the congregation (given the large size of the congregation at St. Ephrem’s Cathedral in Burbank, this has to be expensive, particularly given the delicious nature of the food, much of which is sourced from the few Syriac Orthodox-owned bakeries and caterers in Southern California). I have assumed the Coptic Rite has something similiar, since the Alexandrian Rite has, in addition to its own unique properties, such as the three-fold aspect of the Divine Office (the Agpeya, the Morning and Evening Raising of Incense, which clearly are descended from something akin to the Byzantine “Cathedral Typikon”* and the Evening, Midnight and Morning Psalmody, which can be thought of as Vespers, Vigils and Matins, or alternately as comparable to the three-watch Nocturnes, but which corresponds to Matins in the Byzantine Rite as being the primary source of doctrinal information pertaining to the specific liturgical day or the liturgical season, for example, the Khiak Psalmody about to be used during the 6 weeks of the Nativity Fast (known to Western Christians as Advent).**

* The Cathedral Typikon was a version of the Eastern Orthodox Divine Office, or Liturgy of the Hours as Catholics like to call it, (daily prayer, such as Morning Prayer, or Matins, Evening Prayer, or Vespers, Nighttime Prayer, or Compline, and so on) used at the Hagia Sophia, and major Eastern Orthodox cathedrals in Thessaloniki, Athens and a few other places, until the 13th century, when it was interrupted at the Hagia Sophia by the Venetian invasion, and was never restored, and soon fell out of use in Thessaloniki and elsewhere. However, the content of it has been by and large preserved, and indeed it has been reconstructed with its glorious Byzantine Chant by Dr. Alexander Lingas, and performed in beautiful recordings by the choir Capella Romana which he directs, as part of a series of recordings he did of obscure and interesting parts of the Byzantine liturgical world, for example, the liturgies on the island of Cyprus which have an interesting blend of Roman and Byzantine influence , so that the chants of the Roman Catholic churches on the island historically sounded a bit like Byzantine Chant and those of the Orthodox Churches sound a bit like Gregorian or Ambrosian Chant. At any rate, the Cathedral Typikon was particularly majestic, with a vast choir suited towards the grandeur of the Hagia Sophia, although the actual offices were simpler than the fairly ornate offices of the surviving monastic offices, which are a synthesis of the office as celebrated by two ancient Orthodox monasteries, one in the Holy Land and one in Constantinople, both of which were unfortunately wiped out by the Muslims.

Speaking of churches wiped out by the Muslims, the Assyrian Church of the East (and its Roman Catholic counterparts, the Chaldean Catholics in Iraq and the Syro-Malabar Catholics in India, and also the Ancient Church of the East which is in a schism with it, which is in the process of being healed) has only a Cathedral Office, since all of its monasteries collapsed in the aftermath of the genocide initiated by Tamerlane in the 12th century, which killed of all Christians of the Church of the East in Tibet, China, Mongolia, Central Asia and Yemen, with only those on the Malabar Coast of India and the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East surviving.

Additionally, the Anglican Divine Office as contained in the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer is in many respects similar to the Cathedral Offices of antiquity, in that it consists of between three and five or six services at most (not counting Ante-Communion, which one could count, but counting the Litany), basically, Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer and the Litany, and occasionally, some newer editions of the Book of Common Prayer have Compline (night prayer), and the 1928 English BCP added Prime (the First Hour, an ancient part of the Divine Office in Europe and the Eastern church, and also an office which was used by literate people in the High Middle Ages and Renaissance to learn Latin, using books, which for members of the nobility were often lavishly illuminated manuscripts, called Primers, a word we still use today for introductory text books), and some have Midday Prayer, such as the 1962 Canadian BCP, and the 1979 American BCP, and there are monastic derivatives which feature all of the offices one would expect (in the Western Rite these are Vespers, Compline, Nocturnes (or Vigils), Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext and Noone, the latter meaning the 1st, 3rd, 6th and 9th hour, with the 3rd hour commemorating the betrayal of our Lord and also the descent of the Holy Spirit, the 6th hour His crucifixion, and the 9th hour His death on the cross, with the Resurrection commemorated at Lauds and in the Mass). Fr. Robert Taft, SJ, wrote a very good book on the history of the Divine Office across different churches, called The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, which is very good, although it contains a few very minor inaccuracies, which are so minor I believe I’m the only one who has noticed and commented on them (specifically, they relate to some obscure details of the Coptic Rite used by the persecuted Oriental Orthodox Christians of Egypt and members of their church such as our friend @dzheremi).

** The only liturgical rites I am aware of that have an Advent season lasting four seasons rather thansix, are the Roman Rite and its variants such as the ancient Sarum Use, the Dominican Rite, the Carmelite Rite, the Carthusian Rite, the Norbertine Rite, the Use of Lyons, the Use of Cologne, the Use of Braga, and its Protestant derivatives such as the majority of Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran and Moravian liturgies, all of these Roman-based liturgies being unique in this respect.

In every other liturgical rite, it is six Sundays in length, even in the other two surviving Western Rites that have been continuously celebrated (the Ambrosian Rite used by almost all Roman Catholics in Milan and its surrounding environs, and the Mozarabic Rite which used to be used in several parishes in Toledo, Spain, but is now only celebrated in a dedicated chapel in the cathedral of that city and also in a nearby monastery), and in the ancient Gallican Rite as revived by Western Rite Orthodox groups, Advent is invariably six Sundays in length. This is not to suggest the Roman Rite or Protestant Rites are defective in this respect, rather, it is a unique attribute that should be preserved, although I do find it interesting that in their attempts to get away from certain aspects of Roman Catholic liturgics, the liturgical Protestants for the most part did not adopt the more common practice of a longer Advent, the exceptions being, to my knowledge, the Mar Thoma Syrian Church in India, which is part of the Anglican Communion but uses a stripped-down version of the Divine Liturgy of St. James in its West Syriac variant, known to liturgy scholars as SyrJAS, the Ukrainian Lutherans and certain other Protestant churches in predominantly Eastern Orthodox countries that use the Byzantine Rite with modifications (I believe the Georgian Evangelical Baptist Church falls into this category), and also the Anglican Church in Mexico, which uses or at least used for a time a bilingual English and Spanish reconstruction of the Mozarabic Liturgy, which I have heard is also used by the Anglicans in Spain).

 

[RileyG]

The Church is ancient, the USA is not.

Amen.

 

[The Liturgist]

300+ years after the fact seems like a long time considering the US is 247 years old. It's hard to think of people born after 2076 as being early fathers of the United States.

Some people impose an artificial distinction between “Ante-Nicene Fathers” and “Post-Nicene Fathers”, but to me this is problematic, because you have important Patristic figures such as St. Alexander of Alexandria, who was Pope of the Church of Alexandria during the council, who had deposed Arius, the event which triggered the council, and his protodeacon St. Athanasius, who would succeed him when he reposed as Pope of Alexandria, who basically prosecuted Arius at the council on St. Alexander’s behalf, and Arius himself, as well as various other bishops such as St. Nicholas of Myra, who was tortured during the Diocletian Persecution, and Eusebius of Caesarea, who equivocated and was at a minimum sympathetic to the Arian position, and was possibly an Arian, certainly, the only advocate of Arianism who attended the entire council (most pro-Arians like Eusebius of Nicomedia avoided the council and kept their cards close to their chest, as it were).

Rather I think the only meaningful distinctions can be made on the basis of permanent schisms which still unfortunately endure into the present, starting with the Nestorian Schism, which alienated the Assyrians from the rest of the church for a time, and resulted in the Church of the East being briefly under Nestorian control, until its Christology was revised by Mar Babai the Great in the Sixth Century along Chalcedonian lines, but which continues to be the only church to venerate Nestorius, most everyone else considering him to be rather gross), the Chalcedonian Schism between the Oriental Orthodox and what would become the Roman Catholics and Protestants, since the Tome of Leo, the Bishop of Rome, who opposed the council being held, but since it was held, became the only Roman pontiff to intervene in a major way in an ecumenical council, submitting a document on Christology that, while more or less equivalent to that of St. Cyril the Great, differed from it in key terminology, which made those churches, particularly those which consisted largely of non-native speakers of Greek, namely the Copts (and Ethiopians), Armenians and Syrians, great consternation, and leading to a schism which fortunately is now being reconciled, and then the Great Schism in 1054 when the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople for refusing to concede certain doctrinal points, which were divergent from Patristic theology, being driven by the new Scholastic Theology as it is known in Roman Catholic circles, which emerged in Benedictine Monasteries such as the Cluniac Monasteries, and was associated with the likes of Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas. Indeed Roman Catholics view the 8th century Syro-Byzantine theologian Saint John of Damascus as being the last Patristic figure.

The Eastern Orthodox disagree; there was never an equivalent in either Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox theology to Chalcedon. So with regards to both churches, aside from the minor doctrinal disagreement at Chalcedon, one could read the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by St. John of Damascus (also known as St. John Damascene, primarily in older Roman Catholic publications), and everything in it would still be applicable at present. Indeed given the existence of that work, I myself have questioned the need for subsequent and voluminous works of systematic theology, such as the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, or Calvin’s Institutes, or the particularly massive Church Dogmatics of Karl Barth. What is more, the ancient writings, such as those of St. Athanasius (On the Incarnation, the Life of Anthony, and his various letters and other works), the Cappadocians (principally St. Basil the Great, his brother St. Gregory of Nyssa, and his best friend St. Gregory the Theogian, also known as St. Gregory Nazianzus), St. John Chrysostom, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Ephraim the Syrian, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. John Cassian, St. Vincent of Lerins, St. Cyprian of Carthage, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Clement, St. Polycarp of Smyrna, St. Justin Martyr, St. DIonysius the Aeropagite, among others, with all of those who I have just enumerated predating the Chalcedonian Schism. And there are some important saints from after that schism we also read, on the Oriental Orthodox side, St. Severus of Antioch, who had a huge influence on Eastern Orthodox theology and Western theology as well, which can be felt as far away as Lutheranism and Anglicanism, although few people are aware of it, St. Philoxenus of Mabbug, St. Jacob of Sarugh, and on the Assyrian side, St. Isaac the Syrian, and on the Chalcedonian side, St. Maximos the Confessor, St. Photius, St. Gregory the Great, the most beloved Pope of Rome among the Eastern Orthodox (not counting Bishops of Rome before the mid sixth century, who did not style themselves as Papem, or Pope; between the third and sixth century, only the Bishops of Alexandria officially adopted the title of Papem, or Pope, which they retain to this day, although the Alexandrian Popes have never claimed Supremacy or Infallibility, but rather function like the Roman Popes did in the centuries before the Great Schism of the Eleventh Century, as Primus Inter Pares, the first among equals within their own ecclesiastically sovereign church (ecclesiastical sovereignity is called Autocephaly among the Orthodox, meaning “self-headed”, and it is guaranteed to the churches of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, as well as Rome, by Canons 6 and 7 of the Council of Nicaea, which have the effect of making it uncanonical for the Roman Church to demand submission to it from the Eastern churches, which is what actually happened in the eleventh century, and when this submission was refused, the Eastern Orthodox churches were excommunicated. The principle in question however had been established previously; when St. Victor (the Bishop of Rome responsible for ordering the translation of the the Greek New Testament, the Septuagint, and the liturgy Into Latin so that the majority of Romans could understand it, which is ironic, given that later on, for many centuries, the Roman Church insisted on using Latin even after it was no longer well-known or understood) attempted to issue a command to an Eastern church, if I recall, the Church of Corinth, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who was a senior bishop in the Roman patriarchate, wrote him a letter in which he explained that St. Victor did not actually have the power to do that.

At any rate, since the Orthodox and also the Assyrians and other Eastern Christians immerse themselves so heavily in the writings of all the early church fathers, and not just St. Augustine, who is the only Patristic figure most Western Christians have read, if they have read any at all, or the Reformers, and also, since the liturgy of the Eastern churches is attested to in the Second Century Strasbourg Papyrus, in a form that closely resembles the present form, in the case of the Alexandrian liturgy, known as the DIvine Liturgy of St. Mark to the Eastern Orthodox and as the Divine Liturgy of St. Cyril to the Copts and Syriac Orthodox (since St. Cyril of Alexandria had it translated into Coptic; the Bible had already been translated, but St. Cyril desired Copts to be able to understand the entire liturgy; this was in addition to his struggle against Nestorius and his opposition to Pelagianism and problems he experienced, such as a false accusation that he murdered the Pagan priestess Hypatia, and civil unrest among the Jews in Alexandria). This divine liturgy is very similar to the others in terms of the language it uses, the only unique aspect of it involving the fact that it has two Epicleses, which are part of the Eucharistic Prayer or Anaphora, specifically the prayers asking the Holy Spirit to make the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of our Lord, rather than the usual single prayer one finds in liturgies originating in Antioch. Indeed, the changes that occurred over time to the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox liturgies are very well understood, as the liturgy is surprisingly well documented, and unlike in the case of certain apocryphal scriptural texts where we have lost them, such as most of the Gospel according to Peter, where only the Passion and Resurrection account survives, but it would be really interesting to have the entire thing, for what we know about it, it sounds much closer than the other “Gospels” such as those of Gnostic origin like the “Gospel of Truth” and so on, to the four canonical Gospels, and is a regular narrative, and not a sayings document, like the Gospel According to Thomas (which I believe is a Gnostic corruption of an authentic document, which is why most of the sayings correspond to the Synoptic Gospels, but there are a few sayings, and also the introduction or preface, which are obviously Gnostic).

But whereas I simply cannot access the latter and have no hope of doing so unless an archaeologist makes a breakthrough and finds it, or a forgotten copy of it turns up in a monastery on Mount Athos, or Tur Abdin, or in Egypt, or Syria, or Iraq, I am out of luck, in the case of the liturgies of the Eastern churches, we know how they were celebrated in the fourth century, we have liturgical texts from the second and third century which are consistent with it, and we know all of the changes made since then, and everything is documented to a great level of detail. What is more, of the major liturgies, in all of the traditional churches, not just the Orthodox, but also the Anglican and Catholic churches, most of the liturgy consists of Scriptural texts; in the case of the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which is a recension of the older Liturgy of the Twelve Apostles historically used in Antioch, and still used by the Syriac Orthodox on occasion, 93% of it is of Scirptural provenance.

Furthermore, there have been no substantial changes in how the liturgy is actually celebrated since the thirteenth century, only relatively minor changes, such as the popularization of tonal four part harmony in the Slavonic churches. And the substantial change in the thirteenth century was the loss of the Cathedral Office at Hagia Sophia as a result of the Venetian conquest of the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade, which Venice organized ostensibly to try and overthrow the Muslims who had recaptured Jerusalem under Saladin, but after the fleet got underway, it diverted to Constantinople. This Crusade is also known as the False Crusade. At any rate, following this crusade, due to poverty, impending invasion by the Turks and other factors, those cathedrals that celebrated the Cathedral Office ceased doing so, but we still have that office; we know what it consisted of, and it could, and probably should, be restored, especially on that glorious day when we retake Constantinople, ideally by converting the Turks to Christianity (which I think is actually viable, considering the extent to which Erdogan was nearly overthrown a few years ago due to his Islamic fundamentalism and the relaxed nature of the Turkish people, many of whom subscribe to Sufi sects which are in some cases crypto-Gnostic, and also related to the broader family of Persian and Kurdish religions, which have Christian influences).

Owing to the principle of lex orandi, lex credendi, since the Orthodox and Assyrian liturgies have changed much less than the Western liturgies*

*These changed dramatically even in the late first millenium, when Charlemagne decided it would be a good thing to suppress the Gallican Rite and make the Roman Rite the standard liturgy throughout his Empire (I would argue that liturgical affairs were none of his business, but hey, he was the Emperor, and Frankocratia was a force to be reckoned with), and subsequent changes such as the introduction of the filioque, the use of unleavened bread, the requirement of clergy to be clean-shaven (historically, clergy were bearded, like the Orthodox), and the move towards Chrismation only occurring to the youths, and eventually, by the end of the first millenium, the laity being denied the Chalice and receiving the Eucharist only in one kind. The Protestants then changed the liturgy again, as did the Roman church itself, by discouraging the various regional uses of the Roman Rite and promoting the standard Tridentine liturgy and its predecessors such as the Dominican liturgy, which were developed for the same purpose of standardization, but in the case of the Dominicans, Carmelites, Norbertines and other friars, they had a need for it, since they might be reassigned to a church anywhere in the Roman Catholic world, and it was something of a bother learning the local liturgical customs; language differences limit the extent to which this is practical in Orthodoxy, even though there is no canonical reason why a Belarussian priest could not concelebrate with an Antiochian priest in Mexico City, for example.

Since we know to such a great extent the early liturgy and the current liturgy, and since the prayers are unchanged, we can assert the faith is unchanged, and from that, we can assert that the Eastern churches, including to a large extent even the Eastern Catholic churches, where in many cases there have been no changes made to the liturgy, or those that were, were largely rescinded after Vatican II (the exception being the Maronite liturgy, which was damaged even more severely than the Roman Rite in the wake of Vatican II). In general, the liturgies of the Byzantine Rite “Greek Catholic” churches are the least changed, being in most cases identical to the Eastern Orthodox liturgies except for the addition of some Roman Catholic saints on the liturgical calendar, some of whom are specifically Greek Catholic, for example, St. Josaphat of Ukraine, and perhaps the omission of one or two recent Eastern Orthdox saints, but surprisingly, St. Mark of Ephesus and St. Gregory Palamas are widely venerated, so the only real difference is that the Pope of Rome is prayed for in the litanies and commemorated in the DIptychs, which is actually proper, since these churches are under his jurisdiction, in the same way that, for example, the American Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox Diocese, which is what we call an “autonomous church” (which really means semi-autonomous; a fully autonomous church is called autocephalous) under the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople pray for the Ecumenical Patriarch in their litanies and commemorate him in the Diptychs. Indeed, the Greek Catholics do not even include the filioque in their prayers.

So, if the law of prayer is the law of belief, lex orandi, lex credendi, and I believe it is, we can assert that the Eastern churches have changed the least. That said, it is also possible to identify churches which have moved closer to us, for example, High Church Anglicanism, and Lutheranism of the Evangelical Catholic variety. And early liturgical Methodism under John and Charles Wesley, and those liturgical methodist churches in the US, such as Epworth Chapel on the Green in Boise, Idaho.

 

[The Liturgist]

300+ years after the fact seems like a long time considering the US is 247 years old. It's hard to think of people born after 2076 as being early fathers of the United States.

This effect is further intensified by the fact that the historic liturgical churches of both the East and the West used the liturgy as the place to retain doctrinal information. Indeed, Anglicanism is remarkably like Orthodoxy in that it does not have an equivalent of the Lutheran Formula of Concord, or the various Calvinist confessions, such as the Belgic Confession or the Westminster Confession of Faith. Rather, the Book of Common Prayer is the confession of faith for the Anglicans, and in the same way, the liturgical texts of the Eastern churches are their confession of faith. The most reliable way of finding out what any of the Eastern churches believes about a given subject is to look through their liturgical calendar to find out when, for example, scriptural verses pertaining to that subject are read, or the subject matter is the focus of the liturgy (for example, the theology of the Trinity and of the Holy Spirit are heavily discussed on Pentecost, and are also discussed, together with the theology of Baptism, on the Feast of Theophany, or the Baptism of our Lord), and then read the liturgical texts for that occasion, particularly the Divine Office (so in Eastern Orthodoxy, you would read Vespers, Matins and the Royal Hours, and also the scripture lessons and certain proper hymns used in the Divine Liturgy). In the Coptic Rite you would look at the text for the liturgy, particularly the Synaxarion and the other scripture lessons, and also any specially appointed Fraction prayers (prayers said while the consecrated bread is broken before distribution to the faithful), and also the text for Holy Psalmody, which is the variable part of their Divine Office.

In the Anglican Rite, you simply look up the Collect and Scripture Lessons, both for the Holy Communion service and Morning and Evening Prayer, and also, in newer editions of the BCP, there will be proper liturgies for major liturgies such as Easter.

Of course, the most important theological details of the Anglican church and the Eastern churches on which the Anglican liturgy is closely modelled are contained in the invariant part of the liturgy; this is also true for the Roman Catholic liturgy and the more traditional forms of the Lutheran liturgy.

There is one difference however between the Eastern liturgies (and the traditional Catholic liturgies) and the Protestant liturgies (and the Novus Ordo Missae, the post-1969 Roman Catholic liturgy) which makes the Eastern and traditional Catholic liturgies more authoritative as sources of doctrine, and that is that the hymns proper to each liturgy are not discretionary, but rather are specified, just like scripture lessons in the lectionary. Indeed all of the details of each service, including the hymns ,what part of the service may be abbreviated, whether light or dark vestments are to be used, et cetera, are typically contained in a book that in Eastern Orthodoxy is called the Typikon (meaning “Order” or “Rule”; the Armenian version is referred to using a word which is best translated as “Directory,” whereas the Syriac Orthodox version is the “Hudra” or “Cycle”, since it contains the instructions for the scripture and hymns to be used for the annual cycle of liturgies). which basically consists of instructions on what material to take from the other liturgical books, which are predominantly hymnals (there is a hymnal for Lent and Holy Week, called the Triodion, a hymnal for Pascha (Easter) through the first two Sundays after Pentecost called the Pentecostarion, a hymnal for the tone of the week, of which there are eight, which are numbered and cycled through weekly, called the Octoechos, meaning eight tones, and a hymnal called the Menaion which contains the hymns for feasts like Christmas which occur on specific dates, and then the invariant parts of the liturgy are in user-friendly books such as the Horologion for the Divine Office, and the Liturgikon or Sluzhebenik as it is known in Slavonic for the Eucharistic liturgy, and the Trebnik or Euchologion for other Sacraments such as weddings, baptisms and so on, as well as related services of a Sacramental or Beatific nature such as funerals and memorial services, the consecration of churches, the blessing of homes, the Great Blessing of Waters on Theophany, and so on. The typikon, which can vary between Orthodox churches and can be modified to meet the specific needs of individual parishes, cathedrals and monasteries, contains the instructions on what to take from which books (by the way, the most important of the variable portions of the liturgy were consolidated in a book from the 1940s, Orthodox Prayers and Services by Fr. Seraphim Nasser, and other related books called “Anthologions.”* The “Nasser Five-Pounder” as it is affectionately known contains enough to run a typical Orthodox parish, and is very good. In the traditional Eastern liturgies and the pre-1969 versions of the Roman Rite, Ambrosian Rite and other Roman Catholic liturgies, most or all the hymns and other aspects of the liturgy are fixed, with minor variations allowed for the specific needs of a diocese or monastery, but nothing dramatic, the liturgy becomes an authoritative and extremely detailed source of doctrinal information, as well as the liturgical books themselves.

In contrast, in the post-1969 Roman Rite and in Protestant churches, discretion over the selection of hymns makes the liturgy either less authoritative, or in the case of Anglicanism, it remains the most authoritative source of doctrinal information, but since important details are left to the discretion of clergy and church musicians, this results in the unique Anglican phenomena known as “Churchmanship”, wherein you have low church parishes with simpler worship, high church parishes with more elaborate worship, evangelical parishes which might have contemporary praise and worship music, or which might have traditional music but follow evangelical doctrine, Anglo-Catholic parishes which are either heavily influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox, or both (usually both influences can be seen, since many Anglo Catholics desire Anglicanism to be the “Western Orthodox Church” and there is a long history of positive contact between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy, whereas those Anglicans most attracted to Roman Catholic theology, known as Anglo-Papalists, were finally accomodated in the Roman church during the Papacy of Benedict XVI, who created the Anglican Ordinariates; in addition, there are broad church parishes that seek to attract as many people as possible, and Liberal Catholic parishes which seek to combine the liturgy of Catholicism with the liberal theology which has taken over many Anglican churches except for the Global South, GAFCON and the Continuing Anglicans, in recent years. In Confessional Lutheran and Calvinist churches, the lack of standardization of the liturgy is less important because they have extra-liturgical confessions of faith.

Now in the case of Orthodoxy, and also the Assyrian Church of the East, we essentially have both, in that there is a corpus of Patristic works that are regarded as extremely important sources of doctrinal information concerning specific teaching, which I mentioned at the beginning of this post, and these works are consistent with the liturgy. And in the case where a prominent work is correct on most things but might be in error on some things, for example, the excellent writings of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, which would be perfect except for his subscription to Chiliasm, which was later rejected by the church (and the revised Nicene Creed adopted at Constantinople, the one everyone uses, actually contains a confession which is intended to prevent Chiliasm, the statement about Jesus Christ, that “His Kingdom shall have no end,” however, some premillenial dispensationalists confess the Nicene Creed without it occurring to them that that one line refutes it; likewise they might enjoy the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah, without realizing the phrase “And He shall reign forever and ever” contradicts their eschatology. At any rate, the combination of this vast material of Patristic writings, and the liturgy, where the two exist in harmony with each other, and with scripture (and indeed, you can tell what the Scripture used on a given occasion is interpreted as meaning based on the hymns from Matins, and Matins in turn contains a condensed version of the Patristic commentaries on that scripture, but if you read St. John Chrysostom, for instance, his homilies on the meaning of various parts of scripture are generally regarded as authoritative, and likewise in the Church of the East, the homilies written by his friend Theodore of Mopsuestia, who they venerate, but who was anathematized in Eastern Orthodoxy because his work was later used, or I would argue, abused, by Nestorius, in order to sustain his heresy), there should be no tension between what they have to say about a given part of scripture, and what the appointed hymns and other parts of the liturgy have to say. In this manner the Eastern churches have also managed to avoid the problems of Churchmanship.

*There is also a very useful book which contains all of the proper scripture lessons compiled in English by the exiled Albanian Orthodox Archbishop Fan Noli, who I hope will be glorified as a saint given how he worked to preserve Albanian Orthodoxy in exile after it was banned in Albania by the evil atheist Communist dictator Enver Hoxha, who went further than any other Communist dictator to try to enforce atheism, by having his secret police round up and execute or imprison any Christian and Muslim clergy they could find, whether Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Sunni, Bektasi Sufi, or Shia, or any other religions, with only a hundred of the country’s priests somehow staying under the radar and continuing to operate the most underground of the Catacomb Churches of Eastern Europe, the most secret since the Roman Empire, until the recent pandemic, when some brave souls operated secret churches out of their houses in the face of a hypocritical regime which, for example, allowed liquor stores to operate in Nevada while prohibiting the operation of churches and synagogues, since getting drunk is so much more important than religion. But I digress. What Archbishop Fan Noli did was to ensure that when the reign of Enver Hoxha toppled, which it did, in spectacular fashion, the Albanian Orthodox Church could swiftly resume normal operations, and the church is now functioning once more, as an autocephalous church, alongside the other persecuted religions of Albania, including the Roman Catholics, who gave us Mother Theresa, and the Sunni and Bektasi Muslims (the Bektasis are actually an example of crypto-Christian Sufis of Persian and Kurdish influence; see Ishikism, they are also the only Sufi Muslims I am aware of who practice monasticism, and the Sunnis of Turkey persecute them viciously, along with the related Alevis, who are also crpyto-Christian, celebrating a Eucharist and worshipping a Trinity which ostensibly consists of Allah, Muhammed and Ali, but there are alternate interpretations, and the hymnody of these Sufi groups seems intentionally symbolic and open to interpretation. I am not saying these are normative Christians, but rather, they are members of sects which were influenced by Christianity, very strongly, and which retain aspects of Christian faith which are entirely absent in mainstream Islam.

 

[ozso]

The Church is ancient, the USA is not.

The USA isn't still a developing country though.