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Jan 6, 1997 · Converts from Protestantism claim that Orthodoxy is strongest where evangelicals tend to be weak-its robust liturgical celebration of the majesty and mystery of God, its unyielding insistence on...
Nov 9, 2006 · John admits he cannot conceive of Orthodoxy as a minority; neither can he come up with a reason why one would leave a “life-giving relationship with God for a ‘dead’ church.” “But can there be true believers who decide to remain within the Orthodox church?”
- Trevin Wax
My major reasons are: Their rejection of the true place of the Pope, which is that of supremacy, in the role of the Church. They have abandoned in recent decades the Apostolic teaching regarding non-abortive contraception.
Aversion of heresy: the establishment of orthodoxy Already in apostolic times, distortions of belief threatened the Christian community from within. The Apostle Paul needed to correct those who misunderstood the preaching of Christ’s Resurrection and the general resurrection to come (1 Corinthians 15).
- I Believe The Orthodox Church Really Is The One, True Church of Christ.
- Orthodoxy Gives Me Something to do.
- Orthodoxy Gives Me A Way to See and Touch God physically.
- Change Is Really Hard.
- Orthodoxy Really Is One Church.
- Orthodoxy Is A Faith For The Whole Life.
- Orthodoxy Is A Faith For The Whole World.
- Orthodoxy Is A Faith For The Whole person.
- Orthodoxy Is Both Mystical and Rational.
- Orthodoxy Is ascetical.
There’s a lot that could be said here, but the reason why I believe this is that I examined both the Scriptures and the early history of Christianity, and I became convinced that the only church that matches them both is Orthodoxy. Particularly formative for me were the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of the Apostle John. The church...
I don’t mean that I was bored and needed something to entertain me. I mean that the Christian life as I had been taught it prior to becoming Orthodox was essentially non-critical. I had been “saved,” and there was really nothing criticalto do after that. I should try to be moral, of course, and get other people to get saved, too, but those things w...
The Son of God became the Son of Mary, and that means that He became visible and touchable in a truly material way. In Orthodoxy, the implications of the doctrine of the Incarnation are that the divine presence — holiness — actually becomes present in and alters the material world. Now, one can argue that that presence is uniquely present only in o...
People sometimes joke that Orthodoxy is not really an “organized religion,” with emphasis on “organized.” There is no pope handing down uniform instructions to the whole Church; our chiefest prelates often can’t seem to get along; and it seems like we’re never going to get around to holding that Great and Holy Council we’ve been talking about for n...
Unlike the denominationalism of the Protestant world, the various churches of Orthodoxy really do have to talk to each other and work things out. A Presbyterian and a Lutheran may each recognize each other as Christian, but they have almost no stake in each other’s internal church life. The same even holds true of someone belonging to the PCA and s...
Because Orthodoxy comes with a vast set of expressions of its tradition, you can never exhaust it all. There is always something new not just to learn but to become. While we don’t really “arrive” until the next life (and I’d argue even that is not an arrival; that is, it’s not the end of the road of salvation), there are many way-stations in this ...
There are no “target demographics” for Orthodoxy. We don’t do market research to figure out how to attract young people, old people, urban people, suburban people, or whatever particular demographic we might desire for our parish. A parish can often have a certain degree of commonality among members, but that isn’t by inherent design. There was no ...
Mankind is not just emotionally moved by beauty, but he aches to be near it, to create it as much as that is possible. More than any other iteration of Christian faith, the Orthodox Church knows how to envelop the worshiper with beauty in all five (or more!) senses, both otherworldly beauty that transports the worshiper and otherworldly beauty that...
Some Orthodox will oppose the mystical to the rational, but that’s a mistake, I believe. For all the apophatic theology (theology which emphasizes our inability to know God with our minds), there is also a lot of cataphatic theology (theology that makes clear, positive truth claims) in the tradition of the Church. We don’t have to choose one or the...
No Christian body takes asceticism as seriously as Orthodoxy does. Roman Catholicism has it in its tradition, but it is mostly ignored. Yet Orthodoxy expects all Christians to fast, to stand vigil, to be as non-possessive as possible, etc., and it provides a programme for how to do that. You don’t have to make it up for yourself, because the tradit...
Apr 1, 2005 · Orthodox do not recognize the pope as having the kind of teaching and governing authority that the Catholic Church claims. When I was an Evangelical considering Catholicism—and previously, even when I was quite anti-Catholic—I recognized that there is a certain logic to the office of the papacy.
May 20, 2023 · These new scholarly modes of inquiry recognize that Orthodoxy in the United States is not set apart from American religious history, nor is it unmoored from the global flows of Christianity both in the historical and contemporary context.
