www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Reconciling theologies

The Catholic Church has never been a "single" Church either. This post schism idea that the entirety of the Church revolves around Rome and every bishop is only a true bishop by his communion with the pope, every church is only a true church by its being submissive to Rome has never been the belief or practice of the undivided church of the first millennium. It is illogical and history easily disproves it. The Church started in Jerusalem, not Rome. St Peter established the Church in Antioch and Alexandria long before he went to Rome to be martyred. Rome operated with appellate authority as a court of last appeals. We don't see this singular Roman supremacist kind of language anywhere in the first millennium in any kind of exclusive sense (the quote mines people appeal to don't mean anything since the Orthodox can do the same with flowery language quotes promoting Constantinople, Antioch and other Patriarchates). Rome and the Orthodox need to sit down together and get back to being the undivided church of the first millennium again. The last three popes, if I'm not mistaken, have publicly said that the Orthodox do not need to accept anything post schism in order to reestablish communion. If that is true then we Byzantine Catholics are not bound to accept it either. Especially when it contradicts with our own faith and patrimony as we received it from the Fathers. I am being accused of speaking polemically but I do not believe this is polemical. This is just how it was in the first millennium and most of the second.

Exactly to the contrary, there is one and only one Catholic Church because there is only one Christ. As St. Ignatius of Antioch ( † ~AD 100 ; Epistle to the Smyrnaeans,§8) teaches:

ὥσπερ ὅπου ἄν ᾖ Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, ἐκεῖ ἡ καθολικὴ ἐκκλησία.

For where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.

If that is true then Catholicism went apostate in 1054 when it caused the great schism and separated from the Orthodox

What do you mean and understand as "apostate"? A standard definition is someone who abandons the faith. So in this post on the Byzantine Forum are you stating that the entire Catholic Church in communion with Rome is presently apostate? Who, what other church or churches, shares your understanding that "Catholicism went apostate in 1054"?

EasternChristian19 does not understand the definitions of terms he uses to make apologetics. "Schism" and "apostasy" are quite different things, and not to grasp this fact betrays a severe lack of comprehension.

To be fair though, he may have gotten his definitions from the Orthodox, who when asked "what is schism?" or "what is apostasy," responded with the usual unhelpful chorus of "ask your priest" or "we don't define everything."

Lack of clarity is not a bug, but a feature of O[o]rthodoxy.

To use the analogy of the Sun that is often used: the sun is God's essence, the light from the sun is God's energy, the warmth in the object which is warmed by the Light is created Grace.

Easy, intuitive, and you can go about your day without having to worry too much.

Christ is in our midst!!

Colin Singleton,

Welcome to the forum. We hope your time with us is spiritually enriching.

Bob
Moderator

Christ is in our midst!!

May I ask why is it necessary to "reconcile theologies"? It seems to me that we human beings are trying to understand a Mystery which is and a Person Who is beyond our understanding. If either the Mystery or the Person were able to be completely understood or explained by us mere humans, then the Person would not be the God we worship and Who has revealed to us as much as we can understand. Remember He had to enter His own creation in the Person of His Ony Begotten Son to reveal all this. And the Son sent the Holy Spirit to continue to lead us to the fullest understanding we could make of the Mystery Christ revealed. Our fullest understanding will continue to be made to us, as St. Gregory of Nyssa, as we advance "from glory to glory" in the Kingdom: the title of his book on our continual absorption of God's revelaiton of Himself to us.

Theologies are contingent, precisely because they are elucidated by human beings, and they don't touch on the Deposit of Faith. Before responding to your question, it seems important that we recognise that all theologies exist within philosophical scaffolding that defines terms, categorises concepts, and constructs arguments.

One example would be the theological tradition of Thomism, which expresses itself within the Aristotelian philosophical package. This can pose very serious problems for some of its conclusions, even those in the Summa Theologica. For example, when St. Thomas speaks of Angels' bodies as being made of "Condensed Air", during a section devoted to explaining how Angels are physically defined on those rare occasions that they might appear to us and interact with the environment, we would rightly recognise such a statement to have little to no value in our contemporary understanding of Physics. Our world is not scientifically defined by the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, even if this model continues to have poetic value. So if, like St. Thomas, we are really trying to understand how the Angel became present in natural terms, we'll need to move beyond his Aristotelian framework.

It is important to stress that this doesn't discredit Thomism at all, but it does require us to continually develop the theological tradition, since our knowledge of the natural world has deepened over the centuries. So, if we were to attempt a re-reading of St. Thomas' argument regarding Angels, we might explore questions of whether the Angels in question appear only to the mind of those observing them, or whether they are physically rendered present in the space where they are seen. What is their relationship with the world? We might also ask how their bodies are defined, within our present understanding of matter, energy and information. Looking at all of that, we might even start understanding how our own beings may be "disembodied" after death, i.e. they may not be fully disembodied at all, but only exist in a form of corporality that is less substantive.

My point is simply that, no theology will ever be able to express truth in a manner that is without contingency. Theology is a discipline, it is an Art, and it requires careful attention. It's not something, tempted as we may be, that we can jump into without the requisite training.

If we are looking for anything approximating an absolute, all we have is Dogma, articulating the Revelation that does express an irruption of the Divine into our human finitude. However, even here, we have challenges associated with language. Our human means of communication are limited, and often reductive, unable to express Revealed truth in a satisfying way. The Logos is the only guarantor of the power of language, and the Holy Spirit helps us to find mutual understanding across conflicting languages, which touches on your initial question.

I do think that conflicting theologies might be reconcilable, but careful work needs to be done to unpack their contents, and to judge their meaning within a contemporary epistemological method. Only then can we compare them properly. We must always be wary of asserting Dogmatic precepts (even if they might indeed be infallible) because the language needs to be articulated properly. This is precisely why many hierarchs and theologians, from both the Assyrian Church of the East and the Roman Catholic Church, now agree that their initial schism was perhaps not so radical as had been thought. In fact, they have highlighted that language (and the theological conclusions drawn from its use) was at the root of the problem. It is certainly of note that this schism, which may have just been about misunderstanding, is the first among the Apostolic Churches, and there were Saints on both sides.

Byzantine Catholics do not believe in created grace. I mean perhaps individual byzantine catholics do but it is definitely outside our theological patrimony.

As Catholics then -- at the least -- it is not outside our patrimony.