While investigating the possibility of converting to a big "C" Church, I must consider to which I would convert. I find beauty and wisdom in both the "East" and "West", both Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
The difficulty for me is with what criteria would I make this decision? Doesn't it require me to revert back to my Protestant mindset, determining for myself which Church best interprets the passages concerning the papacy, or which interprets the Church Fathers in the way I most see fit?
Or do I revert to that other Protestant fallacy of following my feelings, just going with my gut about which one I feel better about?
Feel free to chime in here, readers! If you are RC or Orthodox, why did you choose to go that way? I've asked this question before, and the answer I almost always receive (from RC) is the papacy - but why? Why do you believe the RC got the papacy right while the Orthodox are mistaken?
I really would love to hear answers on this one, so please comment!
♥ee
11 comments:
Elizabeth,
Both Catholicism and Orthodoxy have strong claims. It is not bad--quite the opposite--to study and pray and use your intellect and heart to decide, trusting God will lead you. What if you make the "wrong" decision? Well, God will still be with you, helping you, loving you. And Catholics and Orthodox both have valid sacraments, even if they view each other as in schism.
Catholicism is strong on the unity of the bishop of Rome, who even the Orthodox see as having primacy (though they think he overstepped his bounds, etc.). Catholicism is also strong on the subject of ecumenical councils. The Orthodox admit they do not know what the criteria are for a council to be ecumenical, nor do they claim to have convened one since the schism.
Orthodox are strong on maintaining reverent liturgy, preserving sacred Tradition, and keeping the Faith mysterious (in a good way), rather than making it so rational/intellectual.
Ultimately I hope for reunion. That is what we need, and it would do away with your decision. But for now you must decide one or the other (though you could also choose an Oriental Orthodox Church or an Eastern Rite Catholic one).
God bless!
This is Erin (iwantnothingless) from tumblr. :)
I'll tell you a little bit about my experience, and maybe it will be helpful. I must disclaim that I was 16 when I began thinking through these things, and 18 when I was baptized Orthodox, so take that for what you will. I began investigating Orthodoxy because my best friend was Orthodox, and I was becoming disillusioned and confused in evangelicalism. Primarily, it didn't make sense to me that there could be multiple divergent, yet true, interpretations of Scripture, and there had to be something more to spiritual practice than talking to Jesus and reading your Bible.
As for the issue of Roman Catholic claims of papal primacy, I mostly dismissed them out of hand for lack of logic. In the Scriptures and in the early writings of the Church, the practice was (clearly, to my eyes) conciliarity among presbyters and bishops, and the authoritative claims of the Bishop of Rome did not mesh with that, and the passage in Scriptures of Christ's words to Peter - 'on this rock' etc - were still reasonably interpreted within an Orthodox framework.
The true turning point for me was St. Athanasius writing On The Incarnation. A small work, it sets up the Orthodox thinking on man, sin, God, and salvation. The resurrection is everything, and we participate in it through Christ's incarnation. It established Christianity as a faith of hope and joy, participation, attainable holiness, and deep love and kenotic sacrifice. This book gave me a fairly holistic and deep concept of what it means to be a Christian.
To be honest, I didn't give much but an afterthought to Roman Catholicism, but I saw in my experience of the Orthodox church what St. Athanasius was speaking about, and that basically sealed the deal for me.
That was maybe more than you asked for. But this journey with God is about our whole person. Don't dismiss the intellect, don't dismiss the emotions, or rather the heart. If you are seeking truth, you will find it.
I would respond to Erin's post by recommending a book by Adrian Fortescue that explores the testimony of the early Christians (up to the council of Chalcedon) to papal primacy: "The Early Papacy to the Synod of Chalcedon."
There is a large amount of testimony from Fathers East and West to the bishop of Rome's primacy, including from the greatest saints in the Orthodox world.
Not trying to strike a combative note, but do want to point out that the question of the nature of papal primacy--which the Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical meetings have been focusing on--is not an open-and-shut case either way.
This is the dilemma -- how do you submit to authority when submitting to authority requires an act of will rather than being the default? I have a friend who has completely thrown in the towel on the ecclesiological question because, he believes, the whole cultural context that made it work doesn't exist in the States. Even Lewis' insistence that "the hall is a place to wait in... not a place to live in" he has concluded is unworkable in a secular, pluralistic society, because it still assumes that there's a culturally default option (Church of England, in Lewis' case).
Obviously, I disagree, and I think there is a way to resolve it, but I'm not going to tell you how I did it. The trouble with asking questions like this is that they tend to give rise to partisan, "rah rah for our side" answers, and I don't want to add to that. Instead, here are the things I think you have to think about one way or the other:
1) What does "catholic" mean?
2) What does "tradition" mean?
3) What is authority (as opposed to the secular historical word "power")? Who had it, and why? (No matter where you come down, the "why" is very important.)
4) What historical circumstances led to a divergence in these understandings?
5) Who went where, and why, after that divergence?
The picture that emerges from those questions is, I think, reasonably complex, but that's as it should be. There's still an answer to be found there.
I would caution you, one way or the other, to not make any move without believing fully that you making that choice because you believe it is the truth. As certain recent events have demonstrated, there's no more militant "anti-" than an "ex-".
Thank you all for your comments! You've given me a lot to think about, and actually for the most part discerned what I was asking even though I'm a remarkably unclear writer :) . I know, more or less, the general arguments in place for each, so it's not that I need more arguments or proofs or something like that.
But I think, Richard, that you hit the nail on the head with your comment, and I will definitely be crawling through answering those questions.
Thank you for reminding me, Devin, that my relationship with God isn't dependent on my "rightness" -- and thank God for that! Somehow, in all this, I keep slipping into that mistake of wanting to know truth so that I can be right instead of searching for truth because God is truth.
Erin, I just downloaded that book! I am very muchly looking forward to giving it a reading, although my list of reading is very long right now. I initially dismissed RC too, because it was just too much for me initially. I was more open to Orthodoxy at that point because I'd kind of always been jealous of Catholics for their Saints, but wasn't ready to accept the Pope or the totality of their doctrines of Mary.
Now, however, I find that I could accept those doctrines, if I was convinced that the RC was the true Church. But it's hard to be convinced of that truth when I hear the same thing from Orthodoxy.
The fact is, it is not an open and shut case at all! I wish I was more patient, that I could just pray and be at peace that the decision will come, but how difficult waiting is!
I remember the moment I realized I would have to be either Catholic or Orthodox. I honestly didn't do a whole lot of research to make my decision between the two. I saw some convincing quotes from ECF's that attested to the papacy very early. It also seems to me that if I were leaving Protestantism because it is unable to provide a path back toward unity, much less to even provide the semblance of unity, then why would I go with Orthodoxy, which has much of the same problem. To be fair, the Orthodox faith is much more unified than the Protestant world and there are differences among Catholics. However, I just don't see, without the papacy and Catholic magisterium, how we can make principled distinctions. "This is orthodox doctrine; that is not." Sez who? Who in Orthodoxy can claim to be the final arbiter? And without a final arbiter, how can we maintain unity? I didn't see the sense in a church that doesn't even claim to have that.
Sarah
Elizabeth,
I would also second Richard's suggestions, which I would phrase as: "Start with the Church Christ founded in the 1st century and trace it forward, noting the schisms from the Church and why they were schisms."
This is important since, for example, the Coptic Orthodox split in the 400s and claimed to be "the" Church while the rest of the Church went into schism. Some people decide they were right while everyone else (the other Patriarchs, bishops, etc.) were wrong. How would we know? What was the principle of unity in the early Church? Etc.
God bless! I'm planning to do a blog post in a week or so on the attractive things about Eastern Orthodoxy.
Devin, thanks for the encouragement! My reading list seems to be growing by the mile daily! :) I look forward to your post!
I will put in my two cents. I have absolutely no intellectual weight like Devin does. I think for more practical reasons The Catholic Church is the true Church. The city on the hill. Almost no matter where you are, you can find a Catholic Church that's not too far away. Even several. With the EO churches it's not that easy to find one nearby. I don't even know where one is in my city. To me that's a sort of testimony to the universality of the Catholic Church. She's visible no matter where you are. Not hidden. The EO churches seem to be more hidden and fewer and farther between. There's also Eastern Catholic churches that are very similar to the EO Churches with the only exception that they are in communion with the Bishop of Rome.
With either one you'll get the sacraments and that's the real important thing. God will meet us wherever we sincerely seek Him.
As an Eastern Catholic, I've had to grapple with the pull towards both Rome and Orthodoxy a lot. Ultimately my decision to remain Catholic rests on two factors.
And both of these factors amount to Truth, truth concerning two different but related things. We don't pick and choose a Church to belong to. We submit to Christ. We do His will. If we are still Protestant (as I was, about ten or eleven years ago), we do have to do some critical reasoning about Scripture and the Church Fathers in order to figure out what the true role of the Papacy is, what the one true Church is if there is one,which church is actually faithful to the deposit of Christian teaching. And then having found the Church, we submit to her as the one speaking with the authority of Christ ("He who hears you hears Me, and he who hears Me hears the one who sent me").
The first question I have to ask myself concerning Catholicism versus Orthodoxy is, are the Orthodox speaking the truth when they dismiss the Catholic Church as being heretical and apostate? Can I or must I break communion with the world's largest body of Christian believers, over a billion people, including my own family (who are now Roman Catholics), and also the Pope, the successor of Peter? I am not convinced that there is anything in Roman Catholicism which is heretical. Perhaps a few things especially since 1969 which are a bit distasteful aesthetically according to my personality, and a few questionable technical expressions among individual theologians, but they are not heretics. And I have read the Greek Fathers with their quite ultramontane-sounding regarding for the Successor of Peter and those in communion with him. St. Maximos the Confessor especially was enlightening in this regard; while there are far too many things the Greek Fathers said about Rome to repeat here, one citation from the post-1054 St. Symeon of Thessaloniki will suffice:
"Let [the Latins] only show that the pope perseveres in the faith of Peter, and we acknowledge in him all the privileges of Peter, and we recognize him as the leader, as the head and supreme pontiff… [W]e will proclaim him truly apostolic and we will consider him the first of the pontiffs and we will obey him not only as Peter, but as if he were the Savior himself." (PG 155:120-121)
I see in him the faith of Peter, so I obey him as first of the pontiffs.
Everything between Orthodoxy and Catholicism really does come down to Peter and the papacy. The universal role of the Papacy was going to be the second issue I was going to mention. Christ declared him the "rock" upon which He was going to build His Church; well then, I will not build some other church on some other rock! My dearest hope and prayer is that the Orthodox will return to communion with Rome and stop reviling her for trumped-up charges of heresy (many Orthodox have an incredibly poor understanding of Catholic doctrine, and seem unwilling to listen whent I explain it to them). But I will not wait for them before being in communion with her myself.
As far as the two traditions go (Roman and Byzantine), from the Catholic perspective it really doesn't matter. They are both true, and both contain the fullness of the Faith. I am engaged to a beautiful Roman Catholic, and our family will in some way combine both traditions. Although she is practicing as a Byzantine, she has decided to remain officially and canonically a Roman Catholic so that our children can legimitately claim both traditions as their inheritance, although they will be baptized in the Byzantine rite. The Church breathes with both lungs.
God bless!
Seraphim, thank you so much for your comment! I am sorry it sat unpublished while I was on blogging-hiatus.
I wish there was a Byzantine Church nearby, as I am always hearing about the beauty of it. I am beginning to see more and more clearly every day the necessity of the papacy.
Thank you for sharing your story with me! Your children are very lucky to have such a beautiful inheritance.
Post a Comment