| Photo: http://basilica.ro/ The Orthodox world is buzzing with the recent news repor t on the ordination of deaconesses in the Patriarchate of Alexandria. To the best of our knowledge, the ordination occurred after the Divine Liturgy in the nave of the temple, and appears to resemble the rite used to ordain subdeacons. This rite includes the presentation of the orarion, handlaying, a prayer, and the washing of the bishop’s hands. The reports do not offer details on the prayer said by the Patriarch. It seems that the Patriarch did not use the Byzantine Rite for the ordination of a deaconess, which takes place at the end of the anaphora (before the deacon intones the litany before the Lord’s Prayer, “Having remembered all the saints”), in the altar, and includes the deaconesses receiving Communion with the other clergy in the altar, according to order. While Patriarch Theodoros II appeared to use the rite for the ordination of subdeacons, the Patriarchate of Alexandria is referring to these newly-ordained women as deaconesses, and has appointed them to perform crucial sacramental and catechetical ministries as part of the Patriarchate’s missionary work. The ordination of these five deaconesses in Alexandria marks a turning point in the discussion about the order of deaconess within the Orthodox Church. To date, the restoration of the female diaconate has been limited to discussion, deliberation, and study – not to mention heated debate. With this ordination, we now have a historical episode of ordination and appointment to ministry, a pattern for what the female diaconate could become. Will the Alexandrian ordination become the new rite for the order of deaconess, or will the Church dust off the Byzantine rite of the ordination of a deaconess? What other ministries might the deaconesses execute? We do not know the answers to these questions. We do know that the debate on the female diaconate is going to intensify. As part of an ongoing research project, I’ve been asking Orthodox lay women and men for their opinions about the restoration of the order of deaconess. The responses seem to fit the positions presented by ideologues in the debate. Some people argue that restoring the order of deaconess is a legitimate application of ressourcement , of drawing upon our liturgical and ecclesiological history to appoint ministers who contribute to the building up of the body of Christ through particular gifts. Others depict the attempt to restore the deaconess as a trojan horse strategy to inject secular egalitarian values into the Church’s political theology. Others are unsure: one lay woman remarked that Orthodoxy “has the Panagia, and the Greek Orthodox Church has the Philoptochos Society – women essentially run the Church – why do we need a female diaconate?” |
| Michael Prokurat, Alexander Golitzin, Michael D. Peterson Скачать epub pdf AUTHORITY AUTHORITY. The question of authority, and with it “infallibility,” in the Orthodox Church is primarily dependent on the Holy Spirit (q.v.) or pneumatology, and not upon human agency. Thus, the way the question is handled in the East is different from its treatment in the West. When the Holy Spirit is recognized as the ultimate source of authority, claims to inerrant authority for the hierarchy (e.g., “papal infallibility”) or for Scripture (e.g., sola Scriptura) can be relegated to high-level political posturing; for the claims are actually for a particular hierarch’s interpretation of the matter, and not all hierarchs’ (universal) understanding, and a particular group’s interpretation of Scripture (q.v.), and not how Scripture has been understood by the Church throughout the ages. The Orthodox generally consider the question as posed in the West in the last half millennium, with due respect to Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians, to be a wrong question predicated on unfortunate political developments, both before and after the Reformation. Having said this, it should be pointed out that in the East the same questions of ecclesiastical and civil authority have been as acutely felt as in the West, but with differing appeals: I. The appeal to the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) as paradigmatic for church decision-making procedure is frequently made by those emphasizing the importance of the hierarchy in the process of defining the faith: “The apostles and the elders met together to consider this matter” (v. 6). This citation has as its strength the witness of Scripture and the successful resolution of a difficult problem in the nascent Gentile mission, seemingly a perfect example. On closer examination, the example is problematical. Did the hierarchy really make the decision? First, Peter makes a speech and in it takes responsibility for the Gentile mission; but then James, the brother of the Lord, speaks and states, “I have reached a decision. . . .” Next, we find that “the apostles and the elders with the consent of the whole church decided . . .” (v.22); and again, when we read Paul’s account of what is ostensibly the same Council ( Gal 2:1–10 ), he states that he is the leader of the Gentile mission and the meeting in Jerusalem added nothing to his message or method. Finally, the Council was not really about orthodoxy at all, but about orthopraxy: The decision did not involve theology (q.v.) or the content of the faith, but only whether circumcision and certain types of abstinence would be practiced. Excepting these controversial items, the Orthodox have preserved the formula, “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28), in concluding their conciliar deliberations. |
| Introduction 1. Personhood and Being I. From Mask to Person: The Birth of an Ontology of Personhood II. From Biological to Ecclesial Existence: The Ecclesiological Significance of the Person 2. Truth and Communion I. Introduction: The Problem of Truth in the Patristic Era II. Truth, Being and History: The Greek Patristic Synthesis 1. The “Logos” Approach 2. The Eucharistic approach 3. The Trinitarian Approach 4. The “Apophatic” Approach 5. The Christological Approach 6. The Approach through the “Eikon” III. Truth and Salvation: The Existential Implications of Truth as Communion 1. Truth and Fallen Existence: the Rupture between Being and Communion 2. Truth and the Person 3. Truth and the Savior IV. Truth and the Church: Ecclesiological Consequences of the Greek Patristic Synthesis 1. The Body of Christ formed in the Spirit 2. The Eucharist as the Locus of Truth 3. Christ, the Spirit and the Church I. Introduction II. The Problem of the Synthesis between Christology and Pneumatology III. Implications of the Synthesis for Ecclesiology IV. Conclusions 4. Eucharist and Catholicity I. The “One” and the “Many” in the Eucharistic Consciousness of the Early Church II. The Composition and Structure of the Eucharistic Community as Reflections of Catholicity III. The Eucharistic Community and the “Catholic Church in the World” IV. Some General Conclusions 5. Apostolic Continuity and Succession I. The Two Approaches, “Historical” and “Eschatological,” to Apostolic Continuity II. Towards a Synthesis of the “Historical” and the “Eschatological” Approach III. Concrete Consequences for the Life of Church IV. Conclusions for the Ecumenical Debate 6. Ministry and Communion I. The Theological Perspective II. The Relational Character of the Ministry III. The “Sacramental” Character of the Ministry IV. Ministry and Unity V. The “Validity” of the Ministry 7. The Local Church In a Perspective of Communion I. The Historical and Ecclesiological Background II. Questions Concerning the Theology of the Local Church Today 1. Ecclesiality and Locality 2. Locality and Universality 3. The Local Church in a Context of Division List of Sources |
| The Assembly of Bishops specifically demands the inviolability of the religious rights and freedoms of the Serbian people and of other peoples in Kosovo and Metohija. We, the bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the ancient and glorious Patriarchate of Pech, gathered by the grace of the Holy Spirit, for the regular convocation of the Holy Assembly of Bishops in the historic See of Serbian archbishops and patriarchs, the Monastery of the Patriarchate of Pech, and in the republic capital Belgrade. During this preparatory year for the Commemoration of the 800 th Anniversary of Autocephaly of our Church of Saint Sava (1219-2019), concerned with the survival and wellbeing of the Serbian people and their holy sites in Kosovo and Metohija, headed by His Holiness the Serbian Patriarch, direct this message to all faithful sons and daughters of our holy Church, as well as local and international media. The question of Kosovo and Metohija represents a Serbian church, national and state question of the first order. Our Church, the spiritual mother of our people, as a whole, and of Serbia, the country in which the largest number of Serbian people reside, to which the territory of Kosovo and Metohija belongs, bears the greatest burden of responsibility for the preservation of that historic province within the borders of Serbia and for the future of the Serbian people in it. Kosovo and Metohija, with its one thousand and five hundred Serbian Orthodox monasteries, churches, foundations and monuments of Serbian culture, represents the inalienable central part of Serbia. This is convincingly witnessed by the traditional spiritual conscienceness of our Church, in which the Kosovo Testament signifies the expression of the central message of the New Testament. Concretely, experienced in the historical experience of the Serbian people, as well as the conscienceness of the Serbian people with regard to their indentity, spiritual and ethical values and historical path. Kosovo and Metohija, from our standpoint, is neither a question of national ideology or mythology nor, even less, of mere terminology, but represents the very core of our being and existence as a church and people, without which we will be lost in the overall process of globalization and secularization. The prosperity of Serbia cannot be built on the disintegration of that which represents the cornerstone of its identity, history and statehood. |
| John Anthony McGuckin Holy Trinity ARISTOTLE PAPANIKOLAOU The Trinity is what Christians eventually came to refer to as the New Testament witnesses to a faith in Jesus as the Son of God, who as a result of his unique relation to the Father, reveals the Father and offers the eschatological gift of salvation by the power of the Holy Spirit. The New Testament itself does not give any definitive or creed-like statements about God as Trinity. What the earliest followers and interpreters of Jesus do is to continue to speak about Jesus and interpret his life, sayings, and deeds, together with the salvation he offers, in terms of Jesus’ relationship to the Father and the Spirit. Although there existed a variety of interpretations of Jesus in the earliest formulations of Christianity, two positions became predominant. The first consists of understanding Jesus as a divine mediator, but not generally seen as divine in the same degree as God the Father (often known as Pre-Nicene subordinationism); the second affirms Jesus as of equal divinity with the Father. It is important for the understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity to notice that these two positions share many common assumptions: (1) that Jesus is the Messiah and, as such, the one who fulfills the promise of salvation; (2) that this salvation consists in the bringing of creation into some form of renewed contact with the divine; and (3) as mediamediator of this contact between divinity and creation, Jesus is revealed as the divine Son of God. The core of the debates of the identity of Christ in the 2nd and 3rd centuries gravitated around the question of the degree and nature of divinity ascribed to Jesus by the church. These two parallel trajectories would ultimately culminate – and critically so – in the famous controversies of the 4th century between St. Athanasius of Alexandria and the Nicene theologians, and the so-called “Arians.” Athanasius would stand in continuity with Sts. Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyon in emphasizing salvation as humanity’s freedom from death and corruption, and that this freedom requires a conceptualizing of the God-world relation in terms of a communion between the created and the uncreated. The unequivocal declaration of the co-equal divinity of the Son with the Father occurs first in Athanasius, who argues that there is no freedom from death and corruption, and hence no eternal life, without a communion of the created with the full divinity as revealed in the person and work of Christ. |
| The interpretation of Scripture is not available to just “any fool.” It has been hidden, purposively by God. And it is hidden in a figure. The trouble with reading Scripture is that almost everybody thinks they can do it. This idea is rooted in the assumptions of Protestant thought: only if the meaning of Scripture is fairly obvious and more or less objective can it serve as a source of unmediated authority for the believer. If any particular skill or mastery is required, then the skillful masters will be the mediators of meaning for all the rest. The concept of any intervening authority is anathema to the Protestant project. It is equally unsuitable to the assumptions of the modern world. For the modern world, born in the Protestant milieu, is inherently democratic . The individual, unaided, unbridled, and unsubmitted, is the ultimate authority. These assumptions are greatly removed from the thoughts of the fathers of the Church. No matter how “literal” a father’s treatment of Scripture might be, he never assumed the meaning of Scripture to be obvious and universally accessible. The clear consensus of the fathers is found in the words of the Ethiopian Eunuch: “How can I [understand the Scripture] unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8:31). Andrew Louth, writing in his book, Discerning the Mystery , says: If we look back to the Fathers, and the tradition, for inspiration as to the nature of theology, there is one thing we meet which must be paused over and discussed in some detail: and that is their use of allegory in interpreting the Scriptures. We can see already that for them it was not a superfluous, stylistic habit, something we can fairly easily lop off from the trunk of Patristic theology. Rather it is bound up with their whole understanding of tradition as the tacit dimension of the Christian life: allegory is a way of entering the ‘margin of silence’ that surrounds the articulate message of the Scriptures, it is a way of glimpsing the living depths of tradition from the perspective of the letter of the Scriptures. Of course the question of allegory in the Fathers is complex (and often rendered unduly complicated by our own embarrassment about allegory): but whatever language the Fathers use to describe their exegetical practice (and there is no great consistency here), they all interpret Scripture in a way we would call allegorical, and allegoria is the usual word the Latin Fathers use from the fourth century onwards to characterize the deeper meaning they are seeking in the Scriptures. |
| 7. The Local Church In a Perspective of Communion I. The Historical and Ecclesiological Background The basic ecclesiological principle applying to the notion of the local Church in the Orthodox tradition is that of the identification of the Church with the eucharistic community. Orthodox ecclesiology is based on the idea that wherever there is the eucharist there is the Church in its fulness as the Body of Christ. The concept of the local Church derives basically from the fact that the eucharist is celebrated at a given place and comprises by virtue of its catholicity all the members of the Church dwelling in that place. The local Church, therefore, derives its meaning from a combination of two basic ecclesiological principles: (a) The catholic nature of the eucharist. This means that each eucharistic assembly should include all the members of the Church of a particular place, with no distinction whatsoever with regard to ages, professions, sexes, races, languages, etc. (b) The geographical nature of the eucharist, which means that the eucharistic assembly – and through it the Church – is always a community of some place (e.g. the Church of Thessalonika, of Corinth, etc. in the Pauline letters). 552 The combination of the above two ecclesiological principles results in the canonical provision that there should be only one eucharistic assembly in each place. But the geographical principle gives rise inevitably to the question of what we mean by a “place”: how are we to define the limits of a particular place which should be the basis of only one eucharistic assembly and thus of one Church? This question receives particular significance when the complexities of the early historical developments are taken into account. Since the Orthodox tradition was formed, both ecclesiologically and canonically, on the basis of these early historical developments, we must examine them briefly. Already in New Testament times there seems to be a tendency to identify κκλησα or even the κκλησα το Θεο with the assembly of the Christians of a particular city. |
| Thomas E. FitzGerald 9. AN ERA OF TRANSITIONS The year 1970 marked the beginning of two major controversies that profoundly affected the development of the Orthodox Church in the United States and marked a transition to a new stage of growth. The Russian Orthodox Metropolia was granted autocephalous status by the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1970. This meant that the Metropolia, from then on, known as the Orthodox Church in America, had been given recognition to be a fully independent, self-governing local church. This dramatic decision, however, was not recognized by all. During the same period, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese became embroiled in discussions over greater use of vernacular languages in worship. While both issues created much discord lasting well over a decade, they were expressions of deeper concerns over the permanent witness and mission of Orthodox Christianity in the United States. THE AUTOCEPHALY QUESTION The position and status of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia were dramatically altered by the political and ecclesiastical developments in the Soviet Union, especially after the death of Patriarch Tikhon in 1925. The October revolution of 1917 not only affected the relationship between church and state in the Soviet Union but also dealt a profound blow to the Russian Orthodox communities in the United States and Western Europe. The loss of financial support, combined with crisis in leadership and schisms, shook the Russian Orthodox Church in America throughout the 1920s. Under the leadership of Metropolitan Platon (Rozdestvensky), the Metropolia in 1924 declared itself to be «temporally autonomous» from its mother church, the Patriarchate of Moscow. This action was taken chiefly because many in America felt that communication with the official church in the Soviet Union was unreliable. Moreover, by 1933, the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia were refusing to give any pledge of loyalty to the government in the Soviet Union. 272 When attempts to reconcile the Metropolia to its mother church failed, the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Moscow, led by the acting locum tenens of the Patriarchate, Metropolitan Sergius, declared on January 5, 1935, that the Metropolia was schismatic. Despite this bold action, the majority of the clergy and laity of the Metropolia " s approximately 250 parishes remained faithful to the leadership of Metropolitan Platon. 273 |
| A Call for Liturgical Renewal The Liturgical Effectiveness of Pews Liturgical Life Last Updated: Feb 8th, 2011 - 05:50:02 A Call for Liturgical Renewal The Liturgical Effectiveness of Pews Mar 26, 2009, 10:00 Discuss this article Printer friendly page Source: The Internet Edition of St. Luke " s Mission Periodical Implied in the Orthodox liturgical tradition, and axiomatic as well in the modern Liturgical Movement, is the basic principle that what we do and what we say in corporate worship directly influences our beliefs, our attitudes and our daily behavior. That influence is indeed one of liturgical worship " s intended effects. Liturgy teaches. Liturgy is designed to affect life. Bad liturgy therefore has bad effects. Heretical worship sows the seeds of error. Boring services of worship bore. But the Divine Liturgy served in the beauty of holiness manifests the light of truth and inspires holy living. Few Orthodox believers in North America today would deny the validity of the above fundamental principle, especially when it comes to using, the language of the people in our services of worship. For how can the Word take full effect, if that sacred Word is spoken exclusively in a foreign tongue? We are quite conscious as well that the quality of the preaching, the excellence of the teaching, the beauty of the iconography, the loveliness of the singing, and everything else that contributes to the liturgical celebration, also directly influence the thinking and the living of those who participate in that Liturgy. But have we thought about the direct effects of having pews (or rows of chairs) installed in our churches for use during the Divine Liturgy and the other rites of the Church? Are pews, which we borrowed not so very long ago from the Protestants and the Roman Catholics (who borrowed them from the Protestants) a liturgical accretion without consequences? Or, do pews (and pew-like rows of chairs) make a significant difference in the life of the Church? Or is the idea they do make a difference perhaps only the bothersome complaint of reactionaries who want to obstruct the progress of Orthodoxy in the name of a false traditionalism? Asking ourselves these questions, we came up with the following painful observations. They lead us to the inescapable conclusion that pews and rows of chairs make a significant difference, a big difference, in our Orthodox Christian lives. That has absolutely nothing to do with jurisdictional differences or with shades of opinion in the Church, or with labels like " traditionalist " and " modernist. " It has everything to do with the Orthodox understanding of the Body of Christ, and the nature of liturgical worship. |
| Скачать epub pdf The City of God (Book VIII) Augustine comes now to the third kind of theology, that is, the natural, and takes up the question, whether the worship of the gods of the natural theology is of any avail towards securing blessedness in the life to come. This question he prefers to discuss with the Platonists, because the Platonic system is facile princeps among philosophies, and makes the nearest approximation to Christian truth. In pursuing this argument, he first refutes Apuleius, and all who maintain that the demons should be worshipped as messengers and mediators between gods and men; demonstrating that by no possibility can men be reconciled to good gods by demons, who are the slaves of vice, and who delight in and patronize what good and wise men abhor and condemn– the blasphemous fictions of poets, theatrical exhibitions, and magical arts. Chapter 1.– That the Question of Natural Theology is to Be Discussed with Those Philosophers Who Sought a More Excellent Wisdom. We shall require to apply our mind with far greater intensity to the present question than was requisite in the solution and unfolding of the questions handled in the preceding books; for it is not with ordinary men, but with philosophers that we must confer concerning the theology which they call natural. For it is not like the fabulous, that is, the theatrical; nor the civil, that is, the urban theology: the one of which displays the crimes of the gods, while the other manifests their criminal desires, which demonstrate them to be rather malign demons than gods. It is, we say, with philosophers we have to confer with respect to this theology, – men whose very name, if rendered into Latin, signifies those who profess the love of wisdom. Now, if wisdom is God, who made all things, as is attested by the divine authority and truth, Wisdom 7:24–27 then the philosopher is a lover of God. But since the thing itself, which is called by this name, exists not in all who glory in the name – for it does not follow, of course, that all who are called philosophers are lovers of true wisdom – we must needs select from the number of those with whose opinions we have been able to acquaint ourselves by reading, some with whom we may not unworthily engage in the treatment of this question. |
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