This is lecture 23, the Church of the Seven Councils Eastern Orthodoxy, for the first thousand years of Christianity, just about what we've studied so far, when I have referred to the Eastern Church, which I have from time to time, I really have met the Eastern part of the One Catholic Church, because there really is not a separate Eastern Church until the year 1054, and we're going to study the events that led up to the separation of Eastern Orthodoxy from the Roman Catholic Church and some of the repercussions of that separation in this lecture today. In the second thousand years of Christianity, we're coming near the clothes of that second thousand years now, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church have been separate churches. The prayer that I would like to use to begin this lecture is taken from the Orthodox liturgy, and it is a rather famous prayer to Orthodox people, and it's a very wonderful prayer that we can pray as well. So as we begin to think about the history of Orthodoxy, let's pray in the traditional words of the Orthodox liturgy, the prayer that is in the syllabus, I'll pray, and you follow these words, please. Set our hearts on fire with love to thee, O Christ our God, that in its flame we may love thee with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our soul, and with all our strength, and our neighbors as ourselves. So that keeping thy command, let's we may glorify the giver of all good gifts. Amen. Certainly as we think of the pulling apart of the two parts of the Christian church there is much cultural influence at work there. The Western Church became increasingly Latin speaking. The Eastern Church remained Greek speaking, and so even in the use of two different languages there were certain differences that came to bear upon the history of the two parts of the church. In fact someone said that the Eastern Church and the Latin Church could not understand each other because they could not understand each other. They spoke two different languages and it was always difficult to know exactly what the other side was talking about. The Eastern Church has always taken great pride in the fact that it is the Church of the Seven Councils, and we need to stress that the Western Church also believed and held to the teachings of the Seven Ecumenical Councils as they are called. And those councils are very important in the history of the church. We've studied some of those in some detail already, but let's review the Seven Councils for a moment as we think about Eastern Orthodoxy as the Church of the Seven Councils. The first council was Nicaea, 325. The second was Constantinople, 381. And there's a line there in the syllabus, if you could put one word in that blank to summarize those first two church councils, what word would that be? Nicaea, Constantinople, both dealt with the doctrine of the Trinity. So write Trinity in that space. And then the next four councils, Ephesus, Calcedon, Constantinople II, and Constantinople III, all dealt with the doctrine of Christ, so write Christ in that space. And the seventh Ecumenical Council is Nicaea II, which met in the year 787, and it dealt with a controversy about the icons, so you can write icons in that space under Nicaea II. So if you learn those seven councils and divide them into those three categories, add a few dates, you know a lot about church history. And those councils are important for both Eastern and Western church history, so they are significant for us. All of those councils met in the east, you can see from the names Constantinople, Nicaea, Calcedon, Ephesus. Those are Eastern cities in modern day Turkey. And the Eastern church sees these councils as particularly the possession and treasure of the Eastern church. I suppose the Eastern Orthodox Church grudgingly shares those with the west, but the east views itself as the church of the seven councils. And the Eastern church has been very concerned not to change anything that the church fathers wrote in the documents of those seven ecumenical councils. John of Damascus, the greatest of the Eastern Orthodox theologians, I'll talk about him in a few minutes, wrote this, we do not change the everlasting boundaries which our fathers have set, but we keep the traditions just as we receive them. You get one thing in mind about Eastern Orthodoxy, it's this, it doesn't change, it stays the same. Eastern Orthodox theology doesn't change, at least that's what the Eastern Orthodox Church claims. And probably has been able to verify that claim more than the Western Catholic Church in making something of the same claim. So let's think of Eastern theology for a few minutes. Most of our classes up to this point have focused more on the west so we have become more familiar with Western names like Augustin and Ambrose and into the Middle Ages, people like Boethius and Isadora of Seville and so on. But we need to take a look at some of the important names in the east, the east in the west of course shared the early church fathers up until about the time of Augustin. You would see both churches claiming the same tradition, but Augustin is a transition because Augustin belongs to the west and the Eastern church doesn't really like Augustin. He's the beginning of the problem, they think. But before Augustin there is a shared tradition, but increasingly the west developed its own theological history and tradition with Ambrose and Jerome and pre-immunately Augustin and Gregory the Great and so on, down to Thomas Aquinas and into the Reformation. The east had its own particular favorites, people that the west honored as well, people like Athanasius and the Great Capodotians and John Chrysostom. These were Eastern Theologians and if you read much of the history or theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church you'll find Athanasius quoted over and over again in the Great Capodotians. And John Chrysostom quoted, like people in the west quoted Augustin, people in the east quote those Theologians. There are some others too that we should know. John Clemacas lived in the sixth and seventh centuries. He was an avid of a monastery in Sinai. He wrote a book called Ladder of Divine Ascent. It was one of the most widely read manuals of monastic and mystical spirituality during this time. Actually he sets the book up as thirty steps up a ladder representing the thirty years of the life of Christ. And there is prayer and meditation and various things to do and to think and to pray as the soul slowly and with difficulty ascends the ladder. The ladder will become a very strong image not only in the Eastern Church but in Western mysticism as well as we'll see later. It was also Maximus the Confessor who lived mainly in the seventh century, considered by many to be the real father of Eastern Orthodoxy. He was an opponent of monofelatism. I haven't really talked about monofelatism but it's an offshoot of monophysitism. And you can look that up in Gonzales to get more information about it. So this man Maximus held to Calcedonian Orthodoxy against any kind of merging of the two natures, a very aesthetical lifestyle as most of the Eastern Orthodox theologians exercised and very liturgical in his writings. As you read the Eastern theologians, liturgy tends to merge with theology more than it does in the West. The West we think of theology as one thing and liturgy as something else. And the East is very hard to separate those two. Theology and worship. Blend and merge. It's a principle that's not a bad principle. Maybe a very good one. And the Eastern mind tends to think that the West is too concerned to separate worship from theology and then to become rational in its understanding of theology. And the East really rejects that sort of rationality as it sees it developing particularly in the scholastic medieval theology of the Western Catholic Church. Perhaps the most important of all the Eastern theologians is John of Damascus. You should remember this man he was from a distinguished family actually by the time John comes along he lives in Syria that part of the Eastern Church is now under the control of the Muslims. So John grew up in a Christian family, distinguished Christian family but in a Muslim control country. He served in the government of that country but remarkably he was bold enough to write a strong treatise against Islam which he called the Ishmaelite Heresy and did not lose his life because of it. This man John of Damascus retired from public office and entered the great monastery of Marsava and there he began to write on theology. His most important book is the Orthodox faith. Someone is called it Orthodoxy's first most important and by some accounts only systematic theology. So you need to have John of Damascus in your mind in the Eastern Church as a kind of parallel perhaps to Thomas Aquinas who will come to soon as the great theologian of the medieval Western Church. John of Damascus also wrote hymns the day of resurrection and come ye faithful to of his hymns or in the Trinity hymnal. Well let's think now about the theology of these Eastern theologians. What did they really teach? Many areas of course the East shared with the West but there were certain distinctive infacies in Eastern Orthodox thinking and those are still there very much in present day. And I've summarized those under four points in the syllabus. In the West we get an emphasis by this time on sin, on grace, on justification, salvation, the sacraments. But if you make a list of infacies in the East, it will sound something like this. Opal phaticism, tradition, feosis and icons and just making those two lists shows that theology is moving in different directions at least assuming different infacies. And to the Western mind that Eastern list sounds rather strange as though the Eastern Church has really lost the main direction of theological understanding. But let's look at it in more detail when trying to understand at least where the Eastern Orthodox Church is coming from and its theological infacies. Opal phaticism is simply a way of talking about negative theology such as Dionysius the pseudo area of a guy created an emphasis on the mystery of God. It's the shadow, the darkness rather than the light. There is light but there's darkness to there is revelation that there's mystery to. And the Eastern Church emphasizes, celebrates, loves, adores the mystery. You know, the Western Church we're always trying to solve the problems, understand things. The Eastern Church really doesn't try to understand much, it just adores and worships rather than trying to explain the page and the syllabus on an exercise and wonder. I will give you some illustrations of what I mean by that. Second emphasis in the Eastern Church is on tradition. And these are relative infacies because the Western Church preserves the mystery to some extent. But the Eastern Church revels in it. Both the Eastern Church and the Western Church have a role for tradition. In fact, the Western Church has so much emphasis on tradition that the Reformers felt they had gone too far and Luther and Calvin and the others reject some at least of the Roman Catholic tradition and its emphasis on tradition along with Scripture. But in the Eastern Church there's never been a check on this high estimate and value placed on tradition because in the Eastern Church tradition is really the witness of the Spirit. It doesn't really mean that the Spirit is not speaking now as the Spirit spoke in the Word and actually spoke in the acumenical creeds and speaks now in tradition in the living voice of the Church and the community of the faithful, the Spirit still speaks. At each true council, the miracle of Pentecost is renewed and the Holy Spirit descends and truth is revealed. I was watching a film on Eastern Orthodoxy the other day in the experiencing Church history elective class and an Eastern Orthodox theologian said just about those words. Despite the confusion in these councils despite the people who were there, many of whom were not worthy people, nonetheless the miracle of Pentecost takes place and the Holy Spirit comes and speaks and the words of the council become the words of the Spirit. Well, with a view like this, the acumenical councils rise almost to the level of Scripture. In fact, in some expressions of Eastern Orthodox thought they're the same as Scripture. That's why you don't tamper with the confessions. That would be the same as changing the Scripture. And the Eastern Orthodox mind doesn't think that God promised to speak only in the Scripture, so there's no possibility of Scripture alone, its Scripture plus the continuing revelation of God through the Church. Notice not through the Pope because there's no Pope in the Eastern Church, it's through the community, the whole Church. It grows into the truth and God speaks continually through the Church. A third emphasis in Eastern Orthodoxy is theosis. This is a Greek word that means deification, the deification of humanity. This is the word that really sums up salvation. In the West we talk about sin and justification as a way of understanding salvation. In the East the emphasis is on theosis or deification. We are changed so that we become like God or the Eastern theologians will say it even more strongly than that. As Athanasius put it, God became man, that man might become God. That's theosis or deification. That strikes the Western mind as a problematic way to understand theology and to understand the transforming effect of grace. The Eastern mind sees that as the real purpose of Christ coming into the world to so transform us that we become like Him. In some ways we can see that if we're talking about union with Christ or becoming more and more like Christ or becoming more and more like God. But in the Eastern expression of theoses it is stated so strongly that Christ became man that we might become God, that most Western thinkers pull back from that because it sounds like a kind of heresy of some sort. I expect closer examination of the Eastern idea of theoses will reveal that the Eastern theology doesn't for the most part go over the line but it uses language that can be suggested of something that Western Christians would want to avoid. The people that in the West that pick up the same idea are the mystics and in the West they were constantly being accused of pantheism because to the Western mind this kind of language and this kind of expression goes too far because it tends to blur the distinction between God and His creation. And then finally the fourth great point in Eastern theology is the icons, the use of the icons, the image of Christ and also of the saints. When a Protestant goes into an Eastern Orthodox church you're struck first of all by the icons and they're all over the place. The central icon is usually an icon and that just means an image or a painting of Christ and this is one that it's not actually a painting but it's copied from a mosaic on the ceiling of a church in Italy which was not a Roman church but an Eastern church. The Southern part of Italy tended for some time to be more Eastern than Western but this is a common depiction of Christ it's called the Pento Crater that means the Almighty. The Western church was more likely to picture Christ as suffering on the cross so the crucifix becomes very important in Western piety but the Eastern church depicts Christ as the king. This is not the suffering Christ this is the Almighty Christ. Well icons were very important in the Eastern church and the use of icons was going to cause a controversy in the Eastern church. About a century of controversy as to whether this was appropriate or not it's called the iconoclastic controversy. The iconoclast were people who wanted to destroy the images and the church struggle for a long time over that and we're going to come to the iconoclastic controversy but let me first talk about a conflict. Between the East and the West the primacy conflict the iconoclastic controversy took place in the East but the primacy conflict was between the two parts of the undivided church. Some of the ecumenical councils particularly Constantinople and Calcidon had not only dealt with issues of Trinity and Christology but also some other points as well and one was the relative significance of the two major churches or cities now, Rome and Constantinople. And these ecumenical councils acknowledge Constantinople as quote the new Rome with equal privileges and equal rank in ecclesiastical matters with Rome. So the church councils the unchangeable church councils had said that Rome has great authority but so does Constantinople. The problem is that the Roman popes never really quite accepted those statements because the Roman popes viewed that Rome had the ascendancy that Rome was the number one place and the number one church and that Constantinople could be number two but it couldn't be the same as Rome. So you can see how there's going to be great deal of stress and strain between the two parts of the church as a result of that. The orthodox church was willing to acknowledge the primacy of Peter as it was called. Peter was the leader of the apostolic band and the first bishop and pope in Rome in a personal sense they could acknowledge his primacy as a kind of first among equals a place of honor. But they could not acknowledge the primacy of Peter and so of Rome in the sense of power or authority that is in an institutional sense. In other words they could say yes you're first in the kind of honorary sense but you're not first in any kind of real sense. The Roman Catholic church became increasingly monarchial through the Middle Ages that is authority was vested in the pope. So that's not going to go unchallenged as we'll see later there is a conciliar movement in the west that tries to undo that and make the western church a more like the eastern church became but that was going to fail. So the western church became more monarchial authority vested in the pope. It's not really finalized until Vatican I in the 19th century but all that's underway much earlier. The eastern church became conciliar that means it's a church of councils not of authority vested in one church leader. The patriarch of Constantinople has an honorary position among the patriarchs of the various eastern churches but those churches are independent or autosophiluses the word they have their own hand. So you have the church of Russia, the church of Ukraine, the various churches in Europe, the Greek Orthodox church and so on each one with its own head and no one liked the pope in the eastern church even today. So the primacy controversy was the problem. Another problem was the Filioque controversy and this becomes a major issue with debates and books and all kinds of arguments and all kinds of language on this one word. And it takes someone far smarter than I am to figure out what it was all about. But let me give you the best I can do with the Filioque controversy. The word Filioque, that's one Latin word but it means and the sun, Filioque and the sun as so in. You see the Nicene Creed had said this, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the father but eventually the western church added Filioque to its Latin version of the Nicene Creed, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the father and the sun. That's called a double procession. From about the time of Augustine on, the western church used the Creed that way. Officially this word was added to the Creed by Pope Benedict the 8th and the year 1014 but long before 1014 and Benedict the 8th, the Filioque was part of the western Nicene Creed. Well the east objected to this, you can understand readily on one ground why the east objected to this because you don't add anything to the Creed. Just like you don't add anything to the Bible and the eastern church was greatly offended because the Creed is authoritative and it is fixed and it is not right or in the eastern mind even possible to change. The west viewed the Creed as a human document, not a divine document, a providentially arranged document. God was in all of this the west thought in producing these creeds but they're not infallible and it is not impossible to change them to state truth more fully as truth is revealed. So on one ground the east objected simply because the west changed the Creed but there was also a doctrinal issue involved and I think you can diagram the different approach to the Trinity this way. Here's the doctrine of the Trinity. The eastern approach to the Trinity the father begets the son and the father breeze the spirit. The father is the one source of divinity the one principle of the Godhead within the Trinity. So there has to be a particular emphasis on the role of the father which safeguards the unity of the Trinity the favorite text in the east on this point is John 1526 when the counselor comes whom I will send to you from the father Holy Spirit comes from the father. The east does add through the son because the son sends him but from the father not from the son and the emphasis is on the unity the role of the father as the source of divinity or the principle of the Godhead. The west after a gustan looked at the doctrine of the Trinity in a different way can be diagram this way. The father who begets the son and the father and the son are the two who breathe the spirit. You can see that this particular emphasis safeguards the quality of the father and the son and the text that was often used in the west Jesus breathed on the disciples and said receive the Holy Spirit. So he seems there to be the source of the spirit in John 2022. Well great deal of debate has gone back and forth on that issue and I'm sure it's an important issue but it has been the key theological issue that separated the eastern church from the western church although not the only issue as we have seen. You can read Eurus Love Pelicans comment in the melody of theology if there is a special circle in the inferno described by Dante reserved for historians of theology. The principal homework assigned to that subdivision of hell for at least the first several eons of eternity may well be the thorough study of all the treatises in Latin, Greek, church, lavonic and the various modern languages devoted to the east. Churches devoted to the inquiry does the Holy Spirit proceed from the father only as eastern chrysidum contains or from both the father and the son as the Latin church teaches. By the way, Pelican probably the greatest historian of doctrine in modern church was a Lutheran until very recently when he converted to eastern orthodoxy. So it's interesting to read this quotation from him from a book written in his Lutheran Protestant phase but now he is in the orthodox church. Well, let's come back to that icon of classic controversy. It was a hundred years struggle in the east. It did have repercussions in the west. I say east only they are in the syllabus. But Charlemagne in the west the Holy Roman Emperor carried on a tirade against the icons mainly in an attack on the eastern church because Charlemagne had designs on increasing his power toward the east and the eastern church was something of an obstacle to that. And eventually in the 16th century there would be another emphasis on this issue in the Protestant Reformation when Luther particularly Calvin and then later the Puritans would object to the use of images or pictures in worship Luther not so much but Calvin and the others. But in the east there was a violent reaction against the veneration of icons icons had been used for some time and suddenly there seems to have been a kind of reaction against all of that. In fact, icons had been used throughout the eastern church. Their use was prevalent in worship and very extreme in many ways such as adding flex of the icon paint, the gold paint from the icons. There were some flex of that where sometimes added to the Eucharistic wine as though that would increase the efficacy of the Eucharist because of the little bits of gold paint that were added to the wine. But all of a sudden there is a reaction. Why? Why did the eastern church? Some people in the east say this is not right. The different explanations have been given to this. One is that the emperors in the east, the emperor of Constantinople, now the successor to the emperor of Rome, felt that too much power resided in the monasteries. The monasteries were the places where the icons were drawn up, painted, venerated, promoted. So to put down the power of the monasteries which threatened the emperor himself in the east there were a number of emperors who tore down the icons. These icons often created riots in the churches because the monks and the people would sometimes defend the icons and be killed in the process. A second reason which may also influence this reaction against the icons was that by this time we were in the Muslim period, the Muslims are there in control of much of the area of the eastern Mediterranean where the eastern Orthodox churches are. And the Muslims you know are very committed against any kind of indigent worship. So as a protection against Muslim criticism that the eastern believers were idolaters there could have been a reaction against the use of the icons. And then thirdly it could well be that some people just said this is wrong, theologically wrong and should not be done. So we have a long period of dispute finally settled by the second council of Nicaea, the last of the seven ecumenical councils in the year 787 in which the icons were defended by this council. That's in the eastern Orthodox tradition that is a great moment still called the feast of Orthodoxy and once a year the eastern Orthodox churches will celebrate the second council of Nicaea when the icons were defended and supported. The argument went something like this the icons are of equal benefit with the written word you have revelation from the written word and revelation through the pictures or the icons and they are mutually revelatory. The gospel by word and the gospel by color really to look at icons you need to see them in color because the color is the impressive thing gold bright colors in the icons. So it's a way of getting truth to look at the picture and have that picture reveal something to you about the gospel. Another stress at the second council of Nicaea was this if the incarnation is genuine if Christ is really man then he can be depicted as any other man could be depicted. So it became a defense of the humanity the real humanity of Christ and those that attack the icons were accused of not believing that he was really human a kind of dosedicism was coming through there. And then thirdly the council at Nicaea said that the use of icons promotes sanctification so way people can grow in their love for Christ and for the church. Not only did the second council of Nicaea defend the icons but so did John of Damascus in many of his writings and I have quoted from him in the syllabus the actual practice people using the icons sometimes kissing the icons how was that to be understood. Well the eastern church the council John of Damascus and the eastern church made a distinction between absolute worship which is to be given to God alone and relative worship or veneration or respect can be given to any number of things like the Bible. The eastern church you often have people as well kissing the Bible as a mark of respect to the Bible itself to marry to the saints and of course to Christ to a western Christian seeing all of that it looks like idolatry to us looks like image worshipping but it doesn't look like that at all to the eastern. The eastern Christian at least not to the eastern theologian what the eastern Christian really is thinking I don't know but the eastern theologian tries to make quite a distinction between the veneration of the icon and worship of Christ as one of the capitals said the honor given to the image passes over to the prototype and then it becomes worship. You honor the image you don't worship the image even a different word is used there both in Greek and Latin for what's going on there but then somehow that act is transformed into worship not of the image but the worship of Christ. The outward form of veneration can look the same as absolute worship but the inward intention is very different it looks like worship but it's not it's veneration. Well my question I suppose is is that true in actual practice what does the eastern Orthodox Christian really do when that person kisses the icon or even the Bible does that person make that rather find theological distinction in his or her own mind. Well the attempt to establish a autistic authority for icons has I think not really succeeded certainly you can't establish biblical authority for icons and you don't really find many texts quoted here on the eastern side of this debate. But even the church fathers don't in the first 300 years lend much credence to this practice there's not a single unambiguous text that mandated icon veneration in the first three centuries of Christian literature. An almost unbroken succession of early writers equated the use of external images with paganism but in the light of lack of evidence scripturally and in the early protistics the eastern church moved in the council of Nicaea to an acceptance of the icons as a proper way of worshiping. And it closed by a word about the permanent and I put a quote a question mark there because who knows what will happen in the future but up till now. There has been a division from 1054 war until now between the eastern and the western church there was a temporary division in the night century called the photian sism but the mutual unathomers of 1054 mark the official break between the church the pope excommunicated the patriarch and eastern. Christians and the patriarch replied in kind and excommunicated the pope and the western Christians and pronounced anathomers upon them so the anathomers were there condemning the other side actually those anathomers were revoked by both churches in 1965. So it took a long time for the anathomers to be removed and the sism still exist. I suppose the final blow was the attack on Constantinople in 1200 and 4 by Catholic crusaders rather than going on to the holy land to fight the Muslims the Catholics from the west settled down and fought the eastern Christians in Constantinople. And stole a good many of the eastern Orthodox treasures and moved them to places like Venice. Well that did not help the relationship between two parts of the church and there is still that division today. The grass withers flower fades but the word of our God shall stand forever.