Why on earth would you think you had gotten my "panties in a bunch" ? Your response was a cause of mirth, not anger, thats why it began LOL and ended with my smiley face. I do not attach the smiley to angry or irritated posts.
Most importantly, I don't wear panties. Except when I'm expecting you over for a romantic evening of dinner and sexual intercourse.
With his sexy panties in a bunch,
Nate
What is orthodox Christianity?
by Justin 16 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Nate Merit
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Nate Merit
Yes Evan. The Great Schism of 1054.
Nate -
Nate Merit
Hello Narkissos
I wanted my reply to be as simple and to the point as possible, and simply off the top of my head.
If you look at the responses, you will see that my post caught its readers like deer in a headlight. They are unaccustomed to thinking in any ways other than the odd old ruts they've always thought in.
Your online friend,
Nate -
TopHat
Nate, I think you are wrong about the Apostles:
Most scholars argue that 1 Cor 15: 3-7 in the context of Acts 1:25-26 indicates that being a witness to the resurrected lord was a (if not THE) key criteria for being called an Apostle. If this is true, there may have been as many as 500 Apostles. The texts is as follows:
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; that he appeared to Kephas, then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. After that he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one born abnormally, he appeared to me. For I am the least of the apostles -
Nate Merit
How very fundamentalist of you, Tophet, to ignore anything that challenges your well-worn fundy-ruts in favor of side issues. Yes, yes. There were thousands upon thousands of apostles Tophet, all of them with magic brooms and Carte Blanche.
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Justin
Nate . . . Hey, man! Don't highjack any more of my threads! My question, "What is orthodox Christianity" was a rhetorical one to encourage people to read the Archbishop's lecture. By now, no doubt, many have. It was a way for people to be exposed to orthodoxy apart from the fundy issue, apart from the old JW vs. Christendom polarity. (And yes, Narkissos, the lecture has its own context, but it is not the context we have been conditioned to.) But you, Nate, have managed to drag the old fundy issues into this thread anyway. I wanted folks to see a sample of what orthodox Christianity is - not how it got that way. Once the Bible was canonized, it became part of the orthodox churchman's repetoire. The Bible is now included in the orthodox tradition.
The primary example of orthodoxy as the tradition inherited from the first thousand years of Christianity would be the Eastern Orthodox Church if it had not long ago abandoned the dedactic element of Christianity. Most of the forum participants are not going to go to an Orthodox church and start crossing themselves and kissing icons - being incorporated into the practice of the tradition - and therefore it was necessary to point to a Western example of orthodoxy (small "o"). And yes, their interest would lie in an intellectual presentation of the tradition rather than its practice, because that is how they have been conditioned as ex-JWs. The Eastern Orthodox Church, as such, seems to have forgotten that people have no interest in being initiated into the mysteries if they have not first heard the gospel.
So whoever has read the lecture has fulfilled the purpose of this thread, and that could have been done with no posts at all. But as it is, we had to listen to your diatribe, and any answers given to you were a response to your concerns.
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SonoftheTrinity
Not to be nit-picky but 'orthodox' was spelled with a small o, rather than a big O.
orthodox Christianity, when spelled with a small o, refers to Christianity that corresponds generally to the Athanasian creed. There is little o orthodoxy, and then there are two Big O Orthodoxies. Oriental Orthodoxy and Eastern Orthodoxy....Oriental and Eastern mean the same thing right? Well, so do the the Miaphysite and Diaphysite Formulas of The Person of Christ, for the most part. The first major split in Christianity was long before the filioque clause that divided the Eastern Orthodox from the Roman Catholic. The first church to describe itself as Orthodox as opposed to Catholic was the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, which excommunicated Roman Catholics after the Council of Chalcedon. While there were secular pressures as well, such as Roman closures of the Egyptian public schools, the Greek language that described the two natures of Christ came across to the Egyptians as describing Christ as having a split personality, one human, the other divine. Since Arius taught that Christ was subordinate rather than co-equal right there in Egypt, causing a great deal of controversy, the Egyptian church could not affirm the Calcedonian doctrine concerning Christ. Thus the Oriental Orthodox, (Egypt, and Armenia, and thus East Africa and Asia) were the first to reject Catholicism and excommunicate the Pope of Rome (We have our own Coptic Pope). The Coptic Egyptians suffered centuries of discrimination later on at the hands of the Muslims, clinging to the doctrine of the Trinity and a divine Christ to this day. I am Oriental Orthodox, or as the Ethiopians say, Tewahedo.