Orthodoxy - Catholic or Protestant?


© Steve Hayes

One of the questions asked in one of the discussions was whether Orthodox Christianity is Roman Catholic or Protestant, and I thought I would try to answer that question in this article.

The short answer is that Orthodoxy is neither, and Orthodox Christians tend to regard Roman Catholics and Protestants as two sides of one Western coin. Many of the "either/or" debates between different groups of Western Christians make little sense to Orthodox Christians, and Orthodox Christians might take the line of "both/and", or see some of the debates as meaningless, because the questions they are about don't arise in Orthodoxy.

But it is a little bit more complicated than that.

Many Western Christians who know a little of church history are aware that there was a split in the 11th century, and that it was over something called the "filioque", and that Orthodox Christians reject the authority of the Pope of Rome.

This is true as far as it goes, but it is very simplified.

The "filioque" was an addition to the Creed, to the effect that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father "and the Son" (Filioque is Latin for "and the Son). It was apparently first added in Spain, then spread to the empire of Charlemagne, in what is now France and Germany.

It was only adopted in Rome in the 10th century, but three legates from the Roman pope who were visiting Constantinople in 1054, and were ignorant of this history, were shocked to find that it was not included in the Creed in Constantinople, and accused the church there of removing it! They demanded that it be "restored", but the Patriarch of Constantinople saw no need to "restore" something that had not been there in the first place. The papal legates then "excommunicated" the Patriarch, who in turn excommunicated them. But by the time they got back to Italy, the pope who had sent them had died.

The breach that thus began has never been healed, despite several attempts, but rather it has deepened and widened over the years. The effect was to limit communication and theological discourse between East and West, and in the next couple of centuries Western theology underwent rapid development, which increased the theological distance.

One of the most significant developments in the West, which hardly affected the East at all, was the publication of Anselm's Cur Deus homo? in 1086. This profoundly changed the Western theology of the atonement. For hundreds of years afterwards Western theology, Protestant as well as Catholic, traced its soteriology (the understanding of salvation and how we are saved) back to Anselm. Because of the split between East and West, Anselm's theology had little or no influence in the East.

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Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: View all related messages

4.   Apr 26, 2001 8:52 AM
I appreciate you sending me the link to your article. I have placed your link in my article on Protestant Denominations and Differences in America at http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/3830/53494

...


-- posted by Minnie


3.   Apr 11, 2001 7:48 PM
In response to message posted by JimForest:

Thanks for posting your observations, Jim. I agree with most of the points you ...


-- posted by methodius


2.   Apr 11, 2001 3:56 AM
Your short piece "Orthodoxy - Catholic or Protestant?" is brief but informative. Thanks for sending me its web address,

Bishop Kallistos makes the same point about Catholics and Protestants being t ...


-- posted by JimForest


1.   Apr 6, 2001 10:53 PM
Thank you, Steve, for sending me the URL of this article. In my article, "What is your Religion?" I discuss my checkered background with many different ...

-- posted by biogardener





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