Orthodoxy '

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Orthodoxy .
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Orthodoxy

• Key Ideas
• Trinitarian Theology
• Deification
• Mystical Union with God
• Historic Faith

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Orthodoxy

• A Brief History
• Nicea (Constantinople)
• Chalcedon
• Drifting Apart from the West
• The Filioque
• The Great Schism

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Eastern Orthodoxy vs. Western Christianity

• West
• Legal
• Pragmatic
• Celibate Clergy
• No Beards
• Different Holy Days
• Individualistic
• Next World Orientation

• East
• Philosophical
• Mystical
• Married Priests
• Beards
• Different Holy Days
• Community Oriented
• Deification

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Eastern Orthodoxy vs. Western Christianity

• West
• Traditional
• Culturally heterogeneous

• East
• Traditional
• Culturally, relatively homogenous

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Orthodox Theology

• Apophatic
• Trinitarian
• Opposition to the Filioque
• Procession of the Spirit
• Deification
• Unity of the Church
• philokalia

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Deification

• Christ became man that we should become god
  (i.e. participants in the divine nature). This
  personalist and mystical element stands in stark
  contrast to the legal categories of salvation
  which developed in the West.

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Deification

• All that God is, except for an identity in
  nature, one becomes when one is deified by
  grace.
• Maximus the Confessor

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IconsOpened books to remind us of God

• Every facet of the icon holds a symbolic meaning.
  
• By teaching the meaning of the symbols the
  Orthodox claim to teach the whole body of
  Christian truth in pictorial and symbolic form.

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Icons

• Of old God the incorporeal . . .was not depicted
  at all. But now that God has appeared in the
  flesh . . . , I make an image of the God who can
  be seen. I do not worship matter, I worship the
  Creator of matter, who for my sake became
  material . . ., who through matter effected my
  salvation. I will not cease from worshipping the
  matter through which my salvation has been
  effected. John of Damascus

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Authority

• Dynamic
• Internal
• Pneumatic
• The Witness of the Spirit

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Tradition

• Scripture
• First Seven Councils
• Consensus of the Fathers
• The Anathema of Novelty
• Devising new formulas or making up new terms
  according to our own ideas is presumptuous
  deranged and heretical.

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Critique

• Sacradotalism
• Exclusivism
• Frozen in Time