What's so Bad about Eastern Orthodoxy?

27:47 Graham Gunden the Western church was complaining against the Eastern church because the Eastern church was not accepting Western baptisms because they merely sprinkled

Fr. John Meyendorff (conciliarist) The documents of 1054 run the opposite way and say nothing about sprinkling. Cerularius's own letter to Peter of Antioch complains that the Latins baptize by a single immersion while adding salt to the mouth; Western baptism in 1054 was by immersion, not aspersion. And it was Humbert's bull, not a Greek complaint, that accused the Greeks of rebaptizing Latins, "as the Arians rebaptize those baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity, and especially Latins." Meyendorff calls the whole eleventh-century schism "almost exclusively a dispute about ritual practices," of which this was one, but the practice at issue was one immersion against the Apostolic Canon's three, not sprinkling.

Humbert, Bull of Excommunication (16 July 1054); Michael Cerularius, First Letter to Peter of Antioch (1054); Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p. 95

22:07 Graham Gunden they believe in a too infallible source theory of authority load-bearing

Fr. Georges Florovsky (synthesist) This states the position exactly backward: Orthodoxy does not hold Scripture and Tradition as two parallel infallible sources standing beside each other. Ware states it plainly, that "in reality there is only one source, since Scripture exists within Tradition," and to treat them as two distinct sources is "to impoverish the idea of both alike." Florovsky's case in Bible, Church, Tradition is that Scripture is the verbal icon of Christ read inside the one Tradition that produced the canon, not a rival authority checked against an outside body of teaching.

Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, "Holy Tradition: the Source of the Orthodox Faith"; Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition

30:31 Graham Gunden proskuneo is is worshiped for the divine and latrea is veneration load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) This has the two terms exactly reversed. Nicaea II's own horos reserves latreia, "that true worship of faith," for the divine nature alone, and calls what is given to icons only "salutation and honorable reverence" (timetikē proskynēsis), a relative honor that passes to the prototype and stops there. Proskynesis is the broad word for bowing or reverence, given in Scripture even to kings and elders; latreia is the narrow word the Church reserves for God, and it is never offered to an image.

Horos of the Second Council of Nicaea (787); John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, Treatise 1.8

31:17 Graham Gunden it's not simply images of the divine that they give Latreia to, but it's also images of the saints and angels and and other things as well load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) Nicaea II's definition anathematizes exactly this move: it names latreia as belonging to the divine nature alone and gives icons of Christ, the saints, and angels alike only the relative honor of veneration, never latreia. If some devotee's private piety in fact collapses that distinction, that is a failure to keep what the council defined, not what the Church's own theology teaches; the same charge of confusing relative honor with worship was leveled by the iconoclasts and was answered by Damascene on these very terms.

Horos of the Second Council of Nicaea (787); John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, Treatise 1

51:46 what they really are doing is they are bowing down to they are worshiping the thing and thinking that they're worshiping God through the thing, which is just textbook definition of what idolatry is load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) The distinction the host himself names, latreia against proskynesis, is not a modern gloss papering over idolatry; it is the actual ground of the horos of Nicaea II, which rules that "the honor paid to the image passes to its prototype," quoting Basil, and that whoever venerates the image venerates the person represented, while latreia, worship proper, belongs to God alone. Idolatry as the commandments and the Fathers use the word is the mistaking of a creature for God, offering it latreia; venerating a portrait of a person one believes is really in heaven, with honor referred beyond the wood to the person, is a different act than sacrificing to Baal, and Nicaea II's own text is written precisely to draw that line, not to blur it.

Second Council of Nicaea (787), Horos, citing Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45

1:11:44 the savior in Eastern Orthodoxy is a half savior. He doesn't get you from beginning to end. He doesn't save you, he makes salvation possible load-bearing

St. John Chrysostom (preacher) Synergy as Orthodoxy actually states it is not Christ doing half and the believer doing the other half like two men carrying a table; it is grace enabling and sustaining the whole of a real human response, the way a father's hand around a child's hand still moves the pen while the child truly writes. Dositheus's decree 3 says grace itself "co-operates with us, and enables us, and makes us to persevere," language that puts the initiative and the sustaining power on the divine side throughout, not merely at the start. Whether that account of grace and freedom is finally correct is a fair question to press, but "half savior" describes neither what the confession says nor what Palamas or the Liturgy teach about Christ as the one "who is offered and distributed."

Confession of Dositheus, Decree 3; the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the anaphora

29:50 Jacob Trotter you'll have a fourth century father saying, where there are images, there is no religion load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) This is drawn from fragments attributed to Epiphanius of Salamis against images, cited by the iconoclasts at Hieria in 754. The Fathers of Nicaea II examined these fragments in session and rejected them as spurious in Epiphanius's name, precisely because the Church does not treat every private opinion of a single Father as settling a question the whole Church has not received. Even granting the one authentic incident behind the dossier, a curtain Epiphanius tore down on his own initiative in a church not his own, one bishop's personal act is not "almost universally" the patristic mind, and Nicaea II said so on the record.

Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), session examining the Epiphanian testimonia; John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, Treatise 1

9:04 Jacob Trotter as Carl Truman says, the drama is not always in the doctrine... so there's as much political as theological differences

St. Photius the Great (answerer) There is real politics in the filioque's history, but Photius's own case against it, in 866 and again in the Mystagogy, is squarely theological: adding "and the Son" to the procession compromises the Father's sole causal monarchy within the Trinity, making two principles of the Spirit's origin rather than one. Meyendorff's account calls this "the first open Greek refutation," directed at a theological alteration of a conciliar creed, not merely at Frankish politics or Bulgarian rivalry, even though those were also in play. Reducing the dispute to jurisdictional drama leaves out the substantive Trinitarian argument the Byzantines actually made and that the Orthodox still make.

Photius, Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p. 92

32:09 Jacob Trotter In the early church, there's some artwork never used in worship, almost universally forbidden load-bearing

St. Basil the Great (tradition) The claim that images were "almost universally forbidden" and never used devotionally sits poorly beside the physical record the councils themselves appealed to: catacomb art of the Good Shepherd and orants from the second and third centuries, and the third-century house-church baptistery at Dura-Europos, painted with biblical scenes for the instruction of catechumens before baptism, well before Nicaea I. Basil's principle that the Church keeps some things "in a mystery" by unwritten tradition, received in silence rather than legislated in writing, is exactly what Damascene invokes for the antiquity of icon veneration: absence of a written New Testament command is not evidence the practice did not exist, any more than it counts against the sign of the cross or facing east to pray, which Basil lists on the same principle.

Basil, On the Holy Spirit, ch. 27; John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, Treatise 1

49:02 you'll have a fourth century father saying, where there are images, there is no religion. It's just a mimicry of religion load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) That line is Lactantius, Divine Institutes, writing before Nicaea I as a Latin apologist against pagan idols of gods who were never men, in a world where no developed Christian iconography of the incarnate Christ yet existed to be in view. It answers a question - may you make a cult image of a god who was never seen - that Damascene's actual argument does not ask: "I do not worship matter, but the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake... and worked out my salvation through matter." His case is Christological, that to refuse any image of Christ because he cannot be depicted is to deny that the Word truly took visible flesh; citing a pre-Nicene anti-pagan line against that argument does not meet it.

Lactantius, Divine Institutes; John of Damascus, First Apology Against Those Who Decry Holy Images, §16

1:06:43 very explicitly in decree 13 of this seventeenth century eastern confession called the Confession of Doscythias very explicitly says it's faith and works, and we can we are contributory to our salvation load-bearing

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (guide) Dositheus's own text, cited two decrees away in the same document, says works are "contributory to salvation" only because they are "wrought by supernatural grace," and that the believer "is not able of himself to do any work worthy of a Christian life" but must "be guided and prevented by grace" even to will the cooperation, which is prevenient, not Pelagian, grace. Quoting decree 13 alone and calling the result works added to grace like Kool-Aid added to hemlock leaves out decree 14's own qualification in the same breath. It is also worth naming what this council actually is: a regional synod of Jerusalem in 1672, received by some Orthodox and criticized by others, including Lossky's own objection to its language of merit, not an ecumenical definition binding the whole Church the way Nicaea or Chalcedon does.

Confession of Dositheus, Decrees 3 and 14, trans. J. N. W. B. Robertson, The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem (1899)

14:14 Jacob Trotter You have something like the oriental church separating further east, and then a couple other smaller churches kind of declaring their autonomy from the Western Church. And so the Eastern Orthodox Church as we think of it was really in a line of groups doing that historically. load-bearing

Fr. John Meyendorff (conciliarist) This flattens two very different events into one pattern. The Oriental Orthodox did not "declare autonomy from the Western Church"; they separated from Constantinople and the imperial Chalcedonian consensus in 451 over a genuine Christological dispute about the wording of one hypostasis in two natures, a rupture East of the Mediterranean that had nothing to do with Rome. Later grants of autocephaly, by contrast, are not schisms at all but a canonical reordering within the same communion, recognized or contested according to the diptychs. Treating Chalcedon's rupture and later autocephaly as instances of the same "declaring autonomy" erases the doctrinal stakes of the first and the communion that still holds in the second.

Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, chapter on Chalcedon and the fifth/sixth-century Christological schisms

23:34 Graham Gunden they would have you believe it's monolithic... that they're doing today exactly what happened after the apostle John died... you have something like the oriental church separating further east... a couple other smaller churches kind of declaring their autonomy

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (guide) Orthodoxy's own account of itself is not a claim of static, unchanging uniformity but of Tradition as "inwardly changeless and constantly taking new forms," a living continuity of faith rather than a museum piece, so pointing to development or to internal difference is not by itself a hit against what Orthodoxy claims. The Oriental Orthodox departure after Chalcedon in 451 is also mischaracterized as one more group "declaring autonomy" like a jurisdictional split; it was a dispute over Chalcedon's Christological formula, over one nature or two, not an assertion of self-governance, and Orthodoxy's diptychs and communion structure are a different question from that Christological breach entirely.

Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, ch. 10; The Orthodox Way, ch. 1

37:31 Jacob Trotter they believe in a too infallible source theory of authority... they believe that their particular selective tradition is as authoritative as scripture load-bearing

St. Basil the Great (tradition) Basil, whom Orthodoxy actually appeals to on unwritten tradition, does not describe two parallel infallible sources; he says the kerygmata kept in the Church come partly from written teaching and partly from what was handed down in secret, "and both have the same strength in matters of piety," precisely because both carry the one apostolic faith rather than being two competing repositories of it. Florovsky's reading of that chapter is explicit that Basil is "very far" from a double-authority scheme: his examples are all liturgical explications of what Scripture already teaches, not additions standing beside it. Orthodoxy's own formula is Scripture within Tradition, not Scripture and Tradition as two sources weighed against each other.

Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27 (66); Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition, pp. 86-89

0:14 Graham Gunden real absence of any, like, theology of God. Like, it's there, but it's not something that people talk about a lot. People don't talk about God a lot. load-bearing

St. Gregory the Theologian (theologian) Gregory the Theologian earned his title precisely because Orthodoxy talks about God with exacting care: his Five Theological Orations spend hours parsing what may and may not be said of the Father, Son, and Spirit against the Eunomians, and Palamas's Triads and the Tomos of 1351 exist for no other reason than to say correctly what union with God is and is not. What is true, and worth granting, is Schmemann's point that this theology is prayed as much as argued, which can look like silence to someone expecting seminar-style propositions, but it is not the absence of a theology of God, only theology carried in a different key.

Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Orations 27-31; Gregory Palamas, Triads and the Tomos of 1351; Schmemann, For the Life of the World

16:44 Jacob Trotter these doctrines are developed later and then they're reading it backwards into these early fathers. Like Gregory Palamas with the energies essence distinction, that's the thirteenth and fourteenth century that that really gets hammered out... it's the myth of doctrine load-bearing

Fr. Georges Florovsky (synthesist) Palamas did not present the essence-energies distinction as his own invention; he presented it, and was received by the councils of 1341 and 1351, as simply following the Cappadocians, whose language of ousia and energeia in Basil's Against Eunomius and Gregory of Nyssa's Against Eunomius he quotes at length. Florovsky's own study of exactly this controversy takes its title from the standard patristic self-description, "Following the Holy Fathers," the very phrase Chalcedon and Nicaea II use to introduce their own definitions, and argues that Palamas's synthesis is a legitimate unfolding of a distinction already operative in the fourth century rather than a reading-back. Whether that unfolding is itself doctrinally correct is a further question the tradition answers at 1351, but the charge that it is bare anachronism, with nothing in the earlier fathers to unfold, is not one Orthodoxy's own historians grant.

Georges Florovsky, "St Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers," in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, ch. 7, opening section "Following the Fathers"

20:45 Jacob Trotter that really starts to undermine something like divine simplicity, I believe... he was accused of diatheism... you've made two gods somehow by having these essence and energies load-bearing

Vladimir Lossky (mystic) The charge is old, not new: Lossky himself records that Barlaam and Akindynos accused Palamas of exactly this, ditheism and a derogation of divine simplicity, and the tradition answered it at the councils rather than ignoring it. The answer is that the distinction is not a division of God into parts or a second deity but the difference between the unknowable essence and God's own uncreated activity, which Meyendorff describes as itself "tri-hypostatic," the shared life of the one Trinity communicated to creatures, not a fourth something alongside Father, Son and Spirit. Simplicity is preserved because the energies are not composed with the essence as one thing added to another; they are God really giving himself, which is a different question from whether God is composite.

Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, ch. 4; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, pp. 186, 188

26:28 Jacob Trotter Like the Roman Catholic church, they believe in seven sacraments.

Fr. Georges Florovsky (synthesist) Fixing the number at exactly seven is late and, as Florovsky's critique of the "pseudomorphosis" of post-Byzantine Orthodox theology argues, owes something to the same Latin scholastic categories then current when confessions like Dositheus's were drafted under Western pressure; earlier Fathers do not count the mysteries. But it does not follow that the mysteries themselves are borrowed from Rome or absent before Nicaea: baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist are attested as the Church's mysteries from Ignatius and Justin Martyr onward, centuries before either East or West settled on a number. The number is a late convergence; the reality it counts is not.

Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, on the pseudomorphosis of post-Byzantine confessions; Confession of Dositheus, Decree 15

27:18 Tom Ascol this is an interesting historical point you can press Eastern Orthodoxers on... where are those seven sacraments pre Nicaea? So if Nicaea's in 03/25, are there any writings in the early church that would lead you to this idea of seven sacraments?

St. Basil the Great (tradition) The technical enumeration "seven," fixed under later, partly scholastic influence, is not itself pre-Nicene, and that much can be granted freely. But the realities so numbered are not late inventions: Basil, writing in the fourth century to defend unwritten tradition, lists as apostolic and already ancient the sign of the cross at the catechumen's admission, the epiclesis in the eucharistic rite, and the blessing of oil and water, and Theodore the Studite could ask rhetorically "whence arose the tradition of becoming Christians?" of six mysteries he takes as apostolically ordained. Pressing the number "seven" as anachronistic is fair; treating that as proof the underlying practices are absent from the early Church is not the same argument.

Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27 (66); Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p. 56, quoting Theodore the Studite

33:53 Jacob Trotter the Eastern Orthodox system of salvation is works based load-bearing

St. Gregory Palamas (energies) Orthodoxy does not teach that the will earns grace by unaided effort; synergy is Palamas's own subject, and his consistent teaching is that the human will's free assent is itself enabled by the grace it assents to, not a contribution alongside grace that could stand without it. Dositheus's Decree 13 does say faith and works together, but its own wording is "faith which works through love," aimed at a bare intellectual assent that produces nothing, not at replacing grace with merit; the "seesaw" image assumes the very forensic, either-or frame that Orthodox synergy denies is the only way grace and freedom can relate.

Gregory Palamas, Triads; Confession of Dositheus, Decree 13

36:13 Tom Ascol the prayer for the dead. I mean, they would do that. They'll try to get them through these things all the way to God... we say that's wasted breath because they're in Christ or they're not in Christ. And that is a final determination load-bearing

St. John Chrysostom (preacher) Chrysostom preached that offering for the departed at the altar is not wasted breath: "It is not in vain that oblations are made for the dead, that supplications are offered... these things are done in remembrance of them," and he urges the living to "help them and commemorate them" rather than mourn as those without hope. This is not a claim that prayer arbitrarily reverses a settled destiny, but that the whole Church, living and departed, remains one body in Christ interceding for its members, which the Divine Liturgy that bears Chrysostom's name still enacts at every commemoration of the departed.

John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, Homily 41; the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, diptychs for the departed

23:52 Jacob Trotter they do believe in apostolic succession, but not only through Peter. Right. So they've got a broader view of apostolic succession from any of the apostles.

St. Photius the Great (answerer) This is reported correctly and is exactly the point Photius pressed against Rome: every apostolic see, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Ephesus, Rome itself, carries the same apostolic dignity, so that no single chair can claim a monarchical primacy of jurisdiction over the rest of the apostolic churches. The Church is one communion of self-governing churches ranked in honor by the diptychs, not a pyramid resting on one successor of one apostle.

Photius, Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarchs; the Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit

34:32 Jacob Trotter I believe all Eastern Orthodoxers will say there's a forty day journey of the soul after death... you go through what they call toll houses where you'll be approached by demons and if they find enough sin in you or on you or in your soul, they can drag you down to hell. Even after death, you're still in that works based system. load-bearing

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (guide) This is not what "all Eastern Orthodoxers" hold; it is a disputed theologoumenon, not the dogma of any ecumenical council. Jean-Claude Larchet states plainly that the toll-house teaching "has been the object on the Church's part of no dogmatic definition" and "should not be taken literally," and the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Abroad, defending the tradition's antiquity in 1980, still conceded that "no one can dogmatically establish the existence of the toll-houses precisely in accordance with the form described" in the vision literature. Orthodox theologians disagree with each other here, which is the honest answer, not a uniform demonological works-test binding on every believer.

Jean-Claude Larchet, Life After Death According to the Orthodox Tradition, pp. 116-17; Synod of Bishops of ROCOR, minutes of 19 Nov/2 Dec 1980

57:39 I believe all Eastern Orthodoxers will say there's a forty day journey of the soul after death... a large contingent of them say that even in that journey you go through what they call toll houses

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (guide) The toll-houses are not settled, universal Orthodox teaching but, in the words of Jean-Claude Larchet's study of the question, a theologoumenon, "the object on the Church's part of no dogmatic definition," which should not be taken literally in its materiality even by those who accept it. Orthodox writers have argued the point against each other in living memory, some defending the imagery as ancient, others rejecting it as owing more to apocryphal and folk sources than to the Fathers; no council has bound the whole Church to it either way. Reporting it as what "all Eastern Orthodoxers will say" overstates a live internal dispute as a fixed dogma.

Jean-Claude Larchet, Life After Death According to the Orthodox Tradition (2012), pp. 116-117