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PRESENTING HOLY ORTHODOXY

I. HOW CHRISTIANITY DEVELOPED

A. WHY JESUS WAS BORN WHERE AND WHEN HE WAS BORN 

     The divine Majesty planned for the CREATOR-LOGOS, GOD the Son, Savior of humanity, Teacher of the nations, to be born in a region (near the Hellenistic city of Tiberias in Galilee) where the Greek language and the form of Hellenic thinking crossed the content of Hebrew religion.   Why there and then and not elsewhere and earlier or later.  It so happens that the place and time of Jesus' human maturing made it possible to synthesize the Greek-language Apostolic paradigm, using as its "matter" the Hebrew respect for the rôle of matter and time (rejecting Hellenistic-Gnostic view of matter and time, which they regarded as cyclic and ever-repeating, as evil or at best irrelevant to religion) with the "form" of Hellenistic energy ontology (rejecting Semitic juridicalism).  If matter and time are bemeaned, the Incarnation, Mysteries (sacraments), and bodily resurrection of worshipers can hardly have any positive value or importance.  

     An Orthodox Christian can be thankful that God knew what He was doing when the Creator, YHWH, became human two milleniums ago.    

B. HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY FROM THE LATTER CENTURIES OF THE FIRST MILLENNIUM   
     Latin theology was founded by three jurists or law-students--Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine--from ex-Punic North Africa and with strong input from St. Ambrose, who had been a Milanese judge when Milan was a Western capital of the Byzantine Empire.  Augustine was the most recent and most influential of the four.  He died when the Vandals were at the gates of his city, initiating the Dark Ages in that region..  Augustine's work became increasingly formative for theology during the Middle Ages.  But, as will be seen, an event was to take place than ended the Dark Ages and was to exert far more formative influences on Western Christian theology (and its differentiation from Orthodoxy) than even Augustine's teachings.  
     After SS. Kyrill and Methodios translated the Scriptures and Liturgy into Slavonic, the Viking, Waldemar, accepted Orthodox Christianity for Kievan Rus (later Russia, though Kiev is in present-day Ukraïne) and became St. Vladimir.   When Prince Vladimir sent envoys to the "religions of the book," they reported back negatively on Islam, Judaism, and Papalism, but declared that in the Great Temple of Christ the holy Wisdom of God in Constantinople, they didn't know whether they were in heaven or on earth; this convinced the prince to adopt Orthodoxy.  Russian monks were eventually to missionize twelve time zones of northern Asia and Europe--including Alaska in the at the end of the eighteenth century.  
     At the end of the first millennium the scholar Gerbert (i.e. Herbert--later Pope Sylvester II) came on the scene; he may have visited Cordova and he was exposed to Greek ideas by his patroness, the Empress Theophano--a Byzantine princess who had married the German Emperor Otto III and encouraged the Greek-speakers of southern Italy (Magna Græcia) to study in Rome.  (The real Greek influence on the West was to come, not so much as the result of the Crusader's conquering and obscenely ravaging the holy places of Constantinople in 1204-1261,  but later, in the Renaissance, after the city's fall to the Turks in 1453, an event that caused Byzantine scholars flee to the West (via Mistrãs and Crete, a Venetian dependency).  Greek had been taught at Florence a little earlier, presumably by Hellenophones from southern Italy.)  From the last quarter of the fourth century on, Germanic and Hun barbarians overran Europe.  Civilization was destroyed, Rome, Milan, Ravenna, and Trier becoming villages.  Later the Vikings established a trading empire from western Canada to Russia.  They ravaged the West but became Orthodox in the East (the Viking Waldemar, a kinsman of St. Olaf, became St. Vladimir) and in time constituted (when they were called Varangians) the palace guard of the Byzantine Emperor.  Augustine, the real founder of Western theology, died at the Vandals reached the gates of his city in 430.  Like his immediate predecessors--the other North Africans and  Tertullian and Cyprian as well as St. Ambrose the Milanese Judge--Augustine and these founders of Western theology were all jurists or had been law students or orators.
      During the last two and a half centuries of the first millennium, there arose in Córdova a great Arabic-Islamic culture based on late eighth-century translations of pagan Greek scholarship made at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.  Cordova became as large as Constantinople and Baghdad with modern amenities and 700 mosques.  Its decline in the third quarter of the twelfth century--not long before the rise of the Moghul Khanate and Jenghiz Khan's conquering of most of Asia up to the Danube in the decade ending in 1224--made possible by the Moguls' invention of the stirrup, which allowed bowmen to shoot their arrows from horseback.  (Jenghiz made his capital at Karakorum. The glorious civilization of the Khans in China--when Cambuluc [modern Beijing], the new Khan capital had become three times as large as Constantinople, Córdova, or Baghdad had been--is described by Marco Polo in his famous travelogue including his visit to Kublai Khan's court in 1275.  One of the glorious remains of the Khanate is the Taj Mahal, built by the Mughals in India.)   
     As the second millennium got going, three Lombards (a German tribe) went even further than Augustine (who died in 430 when the Vandals were at the gates of his city) in establishing a juridical format for Christian thinking.  Anselm invented the satisfaction view of Christ's Death (which was held to "satisfy" divine justice, on the view that God would not forgive until satisfaction had been made--a wholly un-Orthodox outlook); Gratian the jurist created such a juridical atmosphere that nearly all popes from 1100 to 1300 are reported to have been lawyers), and Peter Lombardus systematized doctrine in a manner that prevailed throughout the Middle Ages; his volume were the basis for theological lectures in the West from then on.  An explosion of intellectual activity followed the sensational arrival of Latin translations of the Arabic translations of Greek learning.  The translations were made by Arabs (John the Saracen [John Sarrozin] who [mis]translated "On Orthodox Belief" by St. John of Damaskos) at two places in Sicily and at Toledo by Scots and Herman the German.  Till then only translations of a few works by St. Maximos the confessor and St. Dionysios the Areopagite by the Irish monk John Scotus Eriugena and Latin translations of some of Aristotle's writings made by Voëthios's  had made Greek learning available to Western scholars.  The West was luckier than the Arabs, for Christian fundamentalists never fully take over Western culture the way Islamic fundamentalist took over Arabic culture, which has been in decline ever since it apogee at the end of the third decade of the 1100's.
     Two enduring schools of philosophy were established in the West:  
--Thirteenth-century Thomism, which became the official Latin philosophy and theology, kept ontology and the primacy of the intellect over will and even had an idea of energy (under the misleading Latin terms actus and operatio).  Unfortunately, the Thomists did not keep actus/operatio distinct from essence, something that nullifying its value for understanding God and théosis--worshipers' Divinization through unity with the divine Energies, not of course with the imparticipable divine Essence--which Thomas's Deification had to regard as to be "intentional"--conceptual, virtual.  Thomas, like the Scotist-Nominalists, was a Norman (another name for the Vikings). 
--Scotism and Ockham's Nominalism or via moderna, a British-originated philosophy that exalted will over mind and had little use for traditional ontology, seeing reality to lie in singulars--single things.  Individualism was of course promoted by Nominalism, which was Luther's framework (he called himself a modernus).  If the via moderna provided the form of Luther's Reformation, his other modernism, the Gnostic inclined devotio moderna, provided the matter.  Like the via moderna, the devotio moderna promoted individualism, if not so much of the emphasis on words that has always characterized Protestantism.  Luther decanonized or deuterocanonized the Greek parts of the Old Testament along with half a dozen books of the New Testament, which he placed at the end of his German translation of the Latin New Testament.  As already observed, Calvinists (cf. Turretin, Berkhof, etc.) view sacraments as virtual sermons and unity with God as covenantal--i.e. virtual.  The traditional view of the Trinity has declined in Protestantism over the centuries.  What has grown stronger has been the individualism so power that it disregards 2 Pet. 1:20 and Col. 2:22 (against self-invented worship) and, even among those claiming to believe the Bible literally, rejects the literal sense of John 6:53-54.  The claim to be able infallibly to recognize that the Bible is infallible is as unsubstantiated as is the literal understanding of its contents by those making that claim.
       With the subjugation of the Balkans by the Turks, a Balkan Dark Age began.  Greek scholarship fell into total decline, though Georgians and others continue studies at Mt. Athos, the center of Orthodox spirituality (St. Aikaterina's monastery on Mt. Sinai, as well as some pre-Communist famous monasteries in Russia centers of pious study.  Moscow carried the torch after the fall of Constantinople (Vyzantion), but in the last four centuries of the second millennium Orthodoxy became seriously infected with Western heresies as the result of Greek and other Orthodox scholars' studying in the West.  This has now been reversed through the efforts of Russians and others in Paris and most notably through the great (Florida-born; he was a high school football-player) Greek theologian--Fr. John Romanides, whose book (hardly 190 pp. in translation), The ancestral sin, covers most of theology and represents a near-complete turn-around and restoration of the Greek-language framework of the Apostolic writers and the Fathers and Mothers of the Church.
      Three enduring paradigms developed, the last being the Reformation paradigm in the early Renaissance.  The form and matter of the Orthodox and Reformation paradigms have been described.  The new Latin paradigm of Aquinas had a juridical form like its Reformation successor.  But it retained ontology and the Theotokos and, unlike Reformation thinking, kept reason (with the idea that truth has got to conform to what is) superior to will.

(SEE ALSO HERE, HERE, HERE, &  HERE.)

II. ORTHODOX BELIEFS AND PIETY

A. SUMMARY OF BELIEFS AND PRACTICES

     Orthodox beliefs are based on the consensus of the Father's interpretation of the Greek Bible (the oldest copies of the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament made in 250 BC, are a millennium older that the official Hebrew text; the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in the late twentieth century uphold the Greek text in most places where it disagrees with the official Hebrew text; the Septuagint is canonical for the Orthodox, who canonized the New Testament and Standard of Belief in the later fourth century.    While the core idea of one God and three persons is not contradictory--God is not three and one in the same respect--it presented sufficient problems to require centuries of the best thinking and piety to work out--an idea that is anathema to the static (non-energetic)  viewpoint of many Westerners.   But the tradition goes back well before the earliest Gospel; the latest New Testament books may have been penned as late as the last quarter of the first century.  Western Biblical critics have not been able to make the paradigm-shift into the Greek-language energy paradigm of the Apostles and consequently has misunderstood and misanalysed the New Testament.  An early Saint was Longinus, the Roman centurion (commemorated on Oct. 16); he said, "Surely, this was God's Son" (Mat. 27:54), at Jesus's Death on the Cross--which he supervised.   (The oral tradition carefully preserved a number of details of his life after his subsequent confession of faith, including his subsequent martyrdom and miracles wrought in connection with his severed head; he may be identifiable with one of the other centurions mentioned in the Gospels--but not Cornelius in Acts 10.)   Our earliest knowledge of the Church comes from the Letter of St. Paul's companion at Philippi (who thought of bishops, priests, and deacons as paralleling the Hebrew high priests, priest, and levites) and the letters of the martyred St. Ignatios (the Apostle John's disciple and a successor to St. Peter as bishop of Antioch), as well as the early apologetes.  Bishops head a diocese; archbishops supervise a larger area.  The chief metropolitan archbishop of a country is its primate; a few primates are patriarchs.
     One cannot understand the Orthodox worldview without understanding energy, whose purest form is light.  Before energy, water, or anything was created, the Spirit hovered above the waves of uncreated Energy according to Gen. 1:2.  If that is how the cosmos began, and if the seven days of creation are interpreted the way they were by  St. Vasil the Great and St. Gregory of Nyssa--i.e. as time periods of unknown duration, there is little inherent conflict with science--especially if one also recalls that ADAM in Hebrew refers to humanity--human nature.  The time following Christ's Resurrection (which the Orthodox call Pascha)  is called the Eighth Day of Creation, the first week of which (during which the Orthodox neither fast nor kneel or prostrate themselves; they simply touch the knuckles of the right hand to the floor) is called the Week of Creation or Week of Renewal--or Radiant Week.  There is no kneeling from Pascha till Pentecost (Trinity Lordsday).   There is no fasting during the week following Pascha or during the week following Pentecost Lordsday.
     After the founding of Constantinople in 330, Christianity became a tolerated Faith; paganism was not officially attacked till the time of the Emperor Justinian (who died in 565).  But Justinian was a contemporary of Muhammad, and Islam was soon to overwhelm the patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, but not until 1453 was the great city of Constantinople, already weakened by the Crusaders' rapine and the corruption of its rulers,  overwhelmed by the Muslim Turks.  
     Of the Nine Synods acknowledged by the Orthodox to have been "Ecumenical," the earliest ones dealt with the doctrines of Christ and the Trinity--one God of three co-essential and co-equal Hypostáseis or Persons, of Whom the Father is the Source of all Being and the LOGOS Son is YHWH, Who created "all that has been made" (the opening verses of the Gospel of St. John the Theologian), Who appeared to Moses on Mt. Sinai (cf. Exod. 3:14 with Jesus's words in John 8:58), Who is the Ancient of Days, who appeared to Old Testament worthies as the "Angel of the Lord." Creator of the cosmos--as well as the Incarnation.  The early Synods anathematized  the Gnostics, who rejected the material creation as inherently evil, who also had been anathematized from the earliest days because of their rejection of Mysteries (Sacraments), icons, relics, and so on, as well as tradition's rôle of sifting out from many errors the truth that would endure for millenniums to come.  But the earlier Ecumenical Synods  (all held in the ancient Greek language) dealt mainly with the Trinity and Incarnation, anathematizing the Nestorians who had a false view of Jesus's divine Nature and the Monophysites, who had too weak a view of His human nature.  They also canonized the New Testament.    

 The last three Ecumenical Synods respectively upheld the veneration of icons, condemned the interpolation into the Creed of the Filioque (Latin for "and from the Son"--a teaching about the procession of the Holy Spirit based on Augustine's De Trinitate and  promoted by the German emperors of the Western Dark Ages).    Aside from its originally purpose of thwarting Visigothic Arianism and promoting Charlemagne's political reasons, such Western Christians as still retain the synodical view of the Trinity defend the Filioque on the basis of two untenable Augustinian premises:  (i) In opposition to John 15:26, the teaching of the analogy of being requires what happens in "the economy of creation" (as the Orthodox would express it) must reflect divine reality ("theology" in its narrower Orthodox sense):  The Spirit's ékpempsis (or His sending by Christ on His earthly mission) has got to  parallel His ekpórefsis (His Procession from Christ as well as the Father.  
     As already intimated, the ultimate authority in Orthodoxy is the Greek Bible as interpreted in the patristic consensus, not least as laid out in the nine Ecumenical Synods and the Creed they formulated.  Since most Christian thinking after the Turks overran the Balkans was done in the West, that's where most of the Western  heresies subsequently to the Filioque emerged.  Despite famous canonists like Valsamon, the East remained free of the juridical conceptuology of the formative Western theologians.  Of the earliest, only Tertullian knew Greek; he eventually became a schismatic.  In Eastern thinking, the Patristic age did not culminate with St. John of Damaskos, who was Grand Vizier to the great Muslim Caliph there till he was falsely denounced and mutilated, or even with St. Gregory Palamãs, one of three Saints called "the Theologian" and (with St. Photios the Great, and St. Mark Evyénios of Ephesos) one of the three "Defenders of Orthodoxy."    
    If the Father is the sole Source of all being, there is appropriated to the Son (the Reason and Wisdom of God) the creation of the cosmos (see the opening verses of the Gospel of John as well as Col. 1:16-27 and Heb. 1:2), although the Biblical account indicates that the Father and the Spirit were also present at creation.  unembodied spirits such as the Angels, Cheruvim and Seraphim--were first created; but some Angels, including satan, fell and became demons.  The first humans were created (Gen. l:26) according to the Icon (Image) of God and according to the Assimilation to God ('omoíosis, often mistranslated as "Likeness"--which would be non-energetic 'omoíoma).  Traditional Orthodoxy does not believe that Adam was created immortal by nature.  The Icon (Image) of God according to which human nature was made consisted of capacities to participate in the Energies of divine reason (lógos) and freechoice (proaíresis, aftexousía).  These capacities are faculties were energized by the uncreated Energies of the Assimilation to God, according to which Adam (humanity) had likewise been created.  This is the beginning of Divinization (théosis, the partaking of the uncreated Energies of the divine Nature in 2 Pet. 1:4 and John 10:34 [quoting Ps. 81:6 = Protestant Ps. 82:6]; this is not apothéosis or Deification, which is a partaking of the divine Essence).  Eve and Adam were not yet divinized before Eve and he sinned. 

     The loss of the Grace Assimilation to God ('omoíosis Theõ) resulting from the first humans' sinning meant that the capacities of reason and freedom to please God were no longer energizable.  There an ontological Fall--the separation of humanity and indeed the cosmos from the Energies of uncreated Grace.  God allowed satan to enslave humanity in this alienation from Grace and to impose decay and death on human beings.  This sin-prone condition of separation from the Energizing of Grace is called 'amartía in Greek; in its singular form, it is not "a sin" ('amártema).
     Salvation ontologically reverses this situation.  Salvation has two parts--what Christ did for us, and what His worshipers do to respond to that.  The Incarnation united human nature with divine Nature, and the Resurrection unites individual worshipers as new creations who are members of Christ's Risen Body, partaking of the Energies of His Life.  But this could not happen till Jesus died and rose to life again.   If the Cross is ubiquitous in Orthodoxy ( three-dimensional or graven images are not allowed), adorns temples and homes,  is venerated, and if worshipers frequently cross themselves, it does not unite our nature to God the way the Incarnation did, nor does it make Christ's worshipers new creations and members of His risen Body the way His Resurrection does. It was necessary for Christ to rise again and defeat satan and overcome the separation of creation from God's Grace.  While dead, Christ ravaged satan's kingdom of Hades and liberated the Old Testament Saints.  (He bestowed the first resurrection--that of the soul--on them; Christ's worshipers received the first resurrection  when they are born again in Baptism and partake of Christ's Body and Blood at Holy Communion--which even baptized infants receive.  Baptism is often called Illumination, and one speaks of the newly illuminated."  The Crucifixion expiated the obstacles of sin from Christ's worshipers in order that they might be able to become one with Him in His risen body.  Rom. 4:25 says that Christ "was handed over because of our sins and was raised for the sake of our being made righteous."  Christ's Self-Offering was the first perfect Worship--which is the returning of a part of creation to God in acknowledgement of God's ownership of and dominion over the entire cosmos.  It had the additional benefit of making perfect Worship possible ever after in Christ's offering in His members Himself at every divine Liturgy.  Christ's Resurrection destroyed satan's power to sustain the decay and death of humans in any ultimate way and made it possible for the Holy Spirit to incorporate His new-born worshipers into His risen Body through sharing in the Grace or Energies of His risen Life.
     Worshipers are sustained in this condition (or returned to it when the last part of Baptism, Chrismation, is served to lapsed Orthodox at their return to Orthodoxy) by the Mysteries, who number has never been stipulated by the Orthodox Church.  Mysteries include prayerful confession and absolution, marriage and burial, ordination and tonsure (of bishops [who have got to be monks]), of priests and deacons (both of which orders may get married before, but not after, ordination].  They include icons, relics (cf. Acts 19:12), various blessings--holy oil and holy water, including the Great Blessing of Waters on Theophany--tonsures (including the tonsure received at Baptism), making the sign of the Cross, and many other things.  Note that formal validity (right performance of a Mystery by a person in the physical Apostolic succession) is a potential that can be authenticated (made real, genuine, functional) only, so far as assurances and guarantees are concerned, in the Orthodox Church.  A valid Mystery (one served correctly by someone in physical succession with the Apostles is not necessarily an authentic Mystery; it is only a potential Mystery unless or until it has been energized in the Orthodox Church.  One Mystery of great importance in Orthodox think is that of the Transfiguration on Mt. T(h)avor, when certain disciples were miraculous enabled to see Christ's uncreated Light--a manifestation of His uncreated Energy.
     As worshipers synergize (co-operate) with the Holy Spirit's energizing good works in them (Philp. 2:13)--works that are soterial because they are God's as well as the worshipers--more Grace is given to the Grace already energized in them (John 1:16).  Unlike those who teach that all acts are predestinated and therefore equal, the Orthodox recognize the heroes of the Faith as Saints.  Aside from the all-holy Theotókos, The holy Apostles and Evangelists (authors of Gospels), as well as St. Mary Magdalene Equal-to-the-Apostles and the other six  myrrh-bearing women who went to Jesus's tomb to embalm him, who--with Joseph of Arimathea and Nikodemos--are commemorated on the third Lordsday following Pascha.  St. John the Forerunner and Baptist is very eminent among the Saints.  The icons of the Saints surround the worshipers in a temple to remind the worshipers of reposed Saints at the earthly divine Liturgy (see below for the Communion of Saints).   The Orthodox venerate crosses, icons, relics of Saints, and holy places because of the holiness the Church finds in them:   Sanctity is not restricted to non-material reality, as in Reformation theology.  Saints often have epithets like "great martyr, wonder-worker, equal-to-the-Apostles."  Holy persons and holy things are sometimes perceived as being surrounded by a halo of the created Light represented the normally invisible Light of the divine Energy.  This glow has been seen on many Saints; e.g. St. Seraphim of Sarov.  Christians are sometimes permitted miraculous to see what is ordinarily invisible; the prototype of the vision of uncreated Light was the Transfiguration of Christ on Mt. T(h)avor.  An example of non-Christians' seeing the created light of halos occurred with the appearance of Light on the temples of Kiyev when the communists slaughtered a huge crowd of clergy and monastics; the communists themselves reported seeing the halos! 
     When worshipers die, they are said to go to the true Glory, joining the Saints.  We pray for the departed; certain days, including some Sabbaths (Saturdays) during the Great Fast are appointed for commemorating those reposed in Christ.  We pray to the Saints for their prayers and help--above all, to the all-holy and all-pure Theotókos.  At the end of time the second resurrection--of the Body, will take place.  What happens to pious otherdox people and those anathematized by the Church (who may secretly repent before dying) or even those who seem to be pious but may not be, is not known for certain.  The Orthodox believe that only pious Orthodox have the guarantees of Salvation.  Seeing the Vision of uncreated Light (the purest form of Energy) and being bathed by it, those who are saved will be divinized by those uncreated Energies.
     The Theotókos or Mother of God (see Luke 1:43) was, like all infants,  born without sin or guilt, but was given a special Grace to live a sinless life as Christ's Virgin Mother.  Since her rôle in the Orthodox ontological view of Salvation was essential, she is highly revered with hyperduly, a degree of veneration greater than that accorded to other Saints.   She is invoked as Queen of Heaven.  In a non-ontological, juridical view of Salvation--with Western teachings of satisfaction, atonement, ransoming, legal adoption, virtual re-birth, and virtual unity with God's Essence--the Theotokos is, like Christ's Incarnation and Resurrection, merely incidental to Christ's "penal" and "substitutionary" Crucifixion.  Since the Orthodox do not view death as a divinely imposed punishment for sin, they have no reason to reject the idea of the Theotokos's dying, as related in early Christian documents.  (The Latin dogma leaves open the possibility of her not dying--as well as the possibility of her dying.)   Traditionalists agree that she was bodily carried off to Heaven by Angels. The Dormition (Falling Asleep) of the all-pure Panayía ("all-holy"), as she is informally and affectionately called, is celebrated on Aug. 15--following a fortnight of strict fasting.   It is an integral part of Orthodox belief that the Theotókos was carried off to heaven by Angels three days after dying, as related in very old documents.  

B.  ORTHODOX WORSHIP AND OTHER PIETY 

      If Christ's Self-Offering on the Cross expiated sin and enabled Him to die and rise again, there was a third thing accomplished:  Though Jesus's Immolation (the killing of what is offered as an expiatory, but not of an non-expiatory, sacrifice) cannot be repeated, as the Epistle to the Hebrews emphasizes four times, Christ can, in the members of His risen Body, offer Himself--His Body and Blood--as perfect Worship daily on the Church's Altars.  The Offering, which is the essence of every sacrifice (many sacrificial offerings in Leviticus involve no mactation or immolation of what is to be offered), can be re-offered perpetually as the center of Orthodox worship.  The Orthodox refrain from speculating how the change (metavolé) of bread and wine into Christ's Body and Blood takes place.  In their reluctance to probe infinite Mysteries with fine human minds, they had no doctrine comparable to Western impanation, consubstantiation, and substantiation, though they admit that the bread and wine remain. 

For Luther, the true evening sacrifice of a believer is rather the slaughter of reason (occisio rationis), as Luther said in his famous tract, Prelude on the Babylonian captivity of the Church, where also his will-first juridicalism, his Gnostic leanings, and his individualism come together in his assertion that he could have the "mass" [i.e. Communion] "whenever I might "will" (voluero) it so.

In accordance with St. Paul's admonition, women wear a head-covering when praying and, above all, when receiving the Holy Communion--Christ's Body dipped in His Blood and proffered on a spoon.  Approaching the holy Mysteries, one crosses one's right arm (the canons say "arm") over one's left arm on one's breast.
     Orthodox Worship properly served in an Orthodox temple with adequate singers  is extraordinarily beautiful and moving.  It is hard for Westerners to understand the Lamb on the Altar in the Apocalypse of St. John the Theologian--the last book of the New Testament--given that Westerners are unaware that the Greek Church has always called the consecrated Loaf of the Eucharist the "Lamb."  (One speaks more generally of "the holy Gifts.")   Heavenly Worship portrayed in the Apocalypse reflects what the writer knew on earth:   Christ on His throne in the apse with the Presbyters on either side; the Lamb on the Altar; Angels acting as acolytes with censers; prostrations; and so on. 
     For what it is worth, the Orthodox do not understand the Evangelical preference for praying around sacred flagpoles (like the Canaanites' sacred asherim,  phallic poles, a practice condemned in the Old Testament).
     The traditional prayers are said or sung facing the East (from where Christ will return), standing with eyes open and facing a blessed icon.  Even when offering thanks for a meal the Orthodox stand and face East.  The Orthodox cross themselves whenever the Trinity is mentioned and at other moments:  With the thumb and first two fingers together, first on the forehead, then on the middle of the lower abdomen where a belt buckle would be, next on the right [!] breast, and finally on the left breast.  Public—and most private—prayers are communally established over the years (in what Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead”) and are hence free of private, heterodox sentiments or expressions that could detract from praying—say, because of a clergyman’s deficient verbal skills . . . or even a too fertile imagination.   

     An "ideal" Orthodox temple is built in the shape of a cross with a dome or round tower letting light come through  its windows.    Often Christ the Pandokrâtor ("Almighty") is portrayed seated on His throne in the main dome.  The "top" of the cross faces East and is closed off with an iconostasion. The icons positioned on the iconostasion are traditional.   Immediately to the left of the curtained main doors in the middle of the iconostasion (those on either side are for the deacon and hypodeacon and acolytes) are icons of Christ; immediately to the left are those of the Theotókos with the infant Christ.  Above the center ("royal") doors. the first Mystical Supper is painted. St. John the Baptist or the Saint a parish is named for have traditional places, and Angels are painted on the side doors.  The corners of the arches supporting the main dome have the four Evangelists.  Organs are virtually unknown; if there are windows in the wall (which are decorated with icons), they do not traditionally have stained-glass panes.
     Worship is what people give to God, not what people get out of a service.   Comforting, teaching, and exhorting the faithful are not primary objectives of Orthodox services.  Human-addressed activities include a human-addressing pulpit or lectern activity, prayers for one’s own needs, or a non-latreutic Mystery (sacrament).   If there is a sermon at some service, it teaches doctrine and piety; it is normally based on the Gospel or Epistle of the day.  All services--the monastic hours--the Akathist, the Paraklesis, Mol(i)ében, and Slavas or Trisagions--including ones offered for those reposed in Christ--take their life and validity from their center--the Eucharistic Sacrifice.  Worship of the divine Being beyond being is no cotidian thing--with laughter, clapping, Gospel rock music, or the like  The awe evoked by the all-holy Trinity--so infinite and august as to resist speculations by finite minds--reduces worshipers to an almost thunderstruck silence.  (Indeed quietude characterizes monastic hesychasm.)  The Orthodox are reluctant to speculate on Mysteries in general but most of all those having to do with the divine Being beyond being.  Understanding these--other what revelations tells us God or the Eucharistic Gifts are not or cannot be--is beyond finite minds.  
     There is no strict division between the piety of non-monastic Orthodox and monastics, though it is normal for monastics to practice a degree of asceticism unknown to the generality of lay-people.  Lay and monastic vocations are not radically distinguished, though each person is understood to have different talents (1 Cor. 12, especially verses 3-8, and 1 Cor. 15:4-31) to exercise for spreading the Gospel and pleasing God in other ways.  All are to be "ever ready for a rational defence [apoloyía] to everyone asking you for the reason [loqgos] of the hope in you”  (1 Peter 3:15).  Monastics have a special pursuit or struggle (Slavic pódvig "feat".).  Very typical of Orthodox piety is the Jesus prayer, which monastics say "unceasingly" and lay people say when the can (using a prayer rope, if they wish):  “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” 
     The Orthodox call bishops hierarchs.  (Unlike prelates in the West, hierarchs do not include protoprevyters and protodeacons).  A hierarch supervising a region consisting of more than one diocese is an archbishop or metropolitan; the chief hierarch of a country is a primate unless it is a country with its own patriarch.  Deacons and priests (who may not marry after ordination, as already said) constitute the main clergy.  Below them are the lesser orders of hypodeacons and lectors (reader, cantors).  The unmarried equivalent of a protopresvyter is an archimandrite.  The head of a monastery is an 'egoúmenos or (female) 'egouméne, often called abbot and abbess.  An archimandrite may be the 'egoúmenos of a monastery.  Female monasteries are occasionally called convents, but some Orthodox object to the term.
     The Sermon on the Mount (especially as related in Mat.  6-7) offers Jesus's guide for Christian behavior.  The Beatitudes that the sermon begins with are sung in the typics following the opening litany of the divine Liturgy (contrast the similar place of the Decalogue in Calvinist worship and in the traditional Anglican Book of Common Prayer.  It is, incidentally, significant that the earliest sophisticated volumes on Anglican theology were titled The laws of ecclesiastical polity.)  

As for the motivating goal of happiness and beatitude (Greek evdaimonía) in Western scholastic philosophy and theology, that is not found in Orthodoxy, according to Fr. John Romanídes.
    Because of human weakness, all who have reached the age of reason and have wills that are sound enough for them to make rational choices have sinned and come short of God's Glory (Rom. 3:23),, every Orthodox Christian needs to go to go to confession after sinning before receiving the holy Mysteries of Christ's Body and Blood; this is a canonical rule for the Paschal Communion at the end of the long forty-day Great Fast and  Holy Week.
         The Church is a hospital for sinners.  It medicaments include the Mysteries, not least confession and absolution and fasting--strict fasting (which is fasting from everything, such as occurs on Great Friday) on Wednesdays and Fridays.  (Fast are mitigated when an important Saint's day co-occurs as well as during Renewal Week, the week  following Pascha, and the first ten days following Christ's Birthday).  There are four major fasting seasons--besides the Great Fast, whose first week is strictest,  there are the fast (of variable length, depending of the date of Pentecost) preceding the Festival of the Apostles Peter and Paul, the fortnight preceding the Dormition, and forty days preceding Christ's Birthday--of which the last few days are stricter.  The Great Fast begins seven weeks before Pascha and ends forty days later. After a slight "break" for Lazaros Sabbath and the Lordsday of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem (Palm Lordsday), there ensue that the solemnities of Great Week, which ends with the Festival of Festivals and Lordsday of Lordsdays--glorious Pascha--after which the Orthodox do not kneel until Pentecost--also called Trinity Lordsday.
     Spiritual advisors--laypeople as often as ordained clergy.  Full-time spiritual advisors are called "elders" or "eldresses."  A spiritual advisor is supposed to guide sinners on the three-phase path of purification (kátharsis), illumination (photismós), and glorification (théosis).     Famous spiritual advisors have included  Symeon Stylites, who lived for decades atop a pillar and died in 459, and other ascetics like St. Efrem and St. Isaac of Syria, St. John of the Ladder, St. Theodore of the Studion monastery in Constantinople, especially St. Simeon the "latter-day" Theologian (who lived the turn of the second millennium, and more recently St. Seraphim of Sarov.   Many have been miraculous able to glimpse the Vision of uncreated Light in a momentary and temporary théosis.   
     Monasticism was, much more than in the West, the formative influence on Orthodox thinking, Worship, and other piety.  It  is based on Mat. 19:5, 29.  Monasticism is mainly responsible for the Orthodox phrónema or "mindset," which is often characterized as "ascetic and mystical"; the last term is an misleading, since the correct word is "mysteric" (or "mysterial" in the usage of some), which refers to the incarnational or sacramental marriage of spiritual things with material and bodily reality that so pervades the Orthodox ethos.   The most corporeal acts like prostration or signing the holy Cross bespeak the marriage of spirit and materiotemporality.  Extremes are represented by those who worship matter and the Gnostics who reject the legitimate rôle of material objects and time (tradition) in religion.  St. John of  Damaskos said that he didn't  worship matter, that he did worship the One Who became matter and through matter saved him. The most everyday things like bread, wine, water, and oil are imbued with spiritual meaning.   Many Orthodox manage to be "mystical" without purging themselves of reason the way Luther recommended.  

     Mt. Athos in Greece, the Holy Mountain, is a nation of monks on a peninsula east of Thessaloníke that became the center of Orthodox life and thought in the eleventh century.   The greatest promoters of Mt. Athos in its early days were the Georgians.  The Archbishop of Thessalonike who is so important for Orthodox theology, St. Gregory Palamãs (for more on whom, see elsewhere on this page), had been an Athonite monk.  No small number of Hagiorites (Athonites) and elders living in Russian or Romanian monasteries have made rich contributions to Orthodoxy, notably  monks of the Holy Mountain and a famous monasteries like those of Valaam and Optina in Russia.  In passing, it is worth noting that the sharp division between contemplatives and active monastics found in the West is not found in the East.   
     Orthodoxy honors many glorious heroes whose destiny has been to defend the Faith against those who would tear it down; one thinks especially of St. Athanasios the Great, the "three hierarchs"--St. John Chrysóstom of the Golden Mouth, St. Vasil the Great, and St. Gregory (of Nazianzós) the Theologian--and the three "Pillars of Orthodoxy"--SS. Photios the Great, Mark Evyenikos of Ephesos, and Gregory Palamãs.  Much earlier than St. Gregory Palamãs, St. John of Damaskos (who lived from the middle of the seventh century, to the middle of the eighth)  is very important.  Some Saints are commemorated every day, the last Western Saint being St. Olaf.  Orthodox Saints range from St. Moses the Black to St. Mary Magdalene and St. Mary of Egypt (see above)  The Orthodox differ over which calendar to use, except that Great Pascha and the calendar events that depend on it are all observed according to the Old (Julian) Calendar" in most places.  A given holy day (festival or fast)  falls on the same date in both calendars, but an Old Calendar date occurs thirteen days later than the same date in the new (secular, Gregorian) calendar.  Which Saint co-occurs with, say, a day of the Great Fast will depend on which calendar is used.  The rank of the commemoration will determine whether it begins at Vespers (one says:  "has a vigil") on the preceding evening (ending any fasting peculiar to that day) and to what degree the fasting is mitigated. 
       More Orthodox Christians suffered martyrdom in the twentieth century under the Turks before the first World War and during Communist rule after that war than the sum of Christian martyrs of all persuasions in the entire past history of Christianity.  In Russia alone, 600 bishops, 40,000 priests, and 120,000 monks and nuns were murdered in the Communist period; altogether, sixty million Orthodox died in the Soviet Union, and only 200 clergy remained in Russia at the end of that gruesome time.  Among the witnesses for Christ in the twentieth century, St. John of Kronstadt is one of the most beloved, but there are dozens of others, including St. Arseny and St. Alexander Men (a convert from Judaism).  The Church has been purified as by fire.  

The Orthodox normally pray standing, facing an icon on an eastern wall or in an eastern corner, as mentioned earlier.  We pray with eyes open gazing on the icon or the words and icon in a prayer book.  It is proper for women to wear a scarf or other headdress in the temple.  (See 1 Corinthians 11:13.)  Without exception unless they are lying on a sick-bed, women are to wear a head covering when receiving the holy Gifts.  The Orthodox approach the holy Mysteries with the right arm (the canons say “hand’) crossed over the left on one’s breast.  (Visitors need to be apprised that at times when one is sitting, if chairs are provided, one is not to cross one’s legs, since some Orthodox take offence at this.)  The Orthodox prostrate themselves (cf. 1 Corinthians 14:25) at certain moments in the services, though not on Lordsdays or during the fifty-day Pentecost season. 

     The result of history is that when East and West use like words, they are not saying the same things.  This is because the words are premised on conflicting axioms in Eastern and Western paradigms or thought worlds.  Unless the delegates to interfaith meetings can make temporary paradigm-shifts, such talks are inevitably doomed to futile cross-talk.  The West is locked in its cognitive box.  And the Orthodox have not often proved themselves apt in presenting their views in English.  The early theologians who came to Britain and North America were not native-speakers of English.  They established for time to come Western usages attempting to translate Orthodox ideas.  The basic energy ontology of the Greek Bible got transmogrified through the use of Western terminology in the English-speaking world, given how Western Christians confined  in their cognitive boxes to their Mediæval thought worlds.  They read Greek, but what comes forth are word for LOGOS, likeness for assimilation (they rightly take likeness to be a synonym of image), and new creature for new creating; as for the energy terminology pervading St. Paul's writings and the Father's writings as well as modern current Orthodox theology (read Fr.John Romanídes's The ancestral sin ['amártema, not amartía] as translated by George Gabriel [Zephyr Publishing, 2002]) . . . all of that goes for nought in the static Western paradigms.
     At the time of this writing, His all-holiness the Patriarch of Constantinople (appointed by the Muslim government from three candidates chosen out of the two-to-three thousand Turks of Greek ancestry--who are of course mostly women, children, and married men ineligible to become a bishop)  is  blocking the jurisdictional unity of most of the six million Orthodox in North America.  This unity was agreed on by the hierarchs of most of the major jurisdictions in 1994.   A synod presided over by the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1870 declared phyletism, dividing jurisdictions along ethnic lines, to be heretical.  Orthodox Constantinople was notoriously multi-ethnic.  The current uncanonical situation (the canons forbid more than one bishop in any region) is a sad consequence of the planting of Orthodoxy in North American in the glorious mission of the Russians to the native Americans of Alaska (before the US bought Alaska from Russia).  For Orthodoxy in the Americas began with two martyrs; one was St. Peter the Aleut, a native American, and the other was St. Yuvenaly, a Russian monk. 
     If a native-speaker of English like Fr. Romanides began to reverse the trend of incommu- nicability between West and East in the latter half of the twentieth century, things are obviously less rosy on the jurisdictional side.   The present disarray gives the Orthodox far less influence on the national culture than is exerted by the six million Jews or even the six million Muslims--whose terminology the media get right in a way almost unknown with regard to Orthodox names for feasts, beliefs, etc.  Orthodox searching for unity should begin with Orthodoxy unity, not with Latins or Protestants.  It will of course native-born hierarchs more eager to live humbly and promote the faith than to live in palaces and pray at political inaugurations.  And of course dishonest assertions that claim that love can make falsehood true and the dishonest strategy of pretending that similar words mean the same things in East and West need to be banished.  Certainly, no interfaith talks that do not give the Orthodox paradigm its rightful place should be contemplated, for that would be a betrayal of the Faith. 
     Despite all obstacles, the Holy Spirit doubled Orthodoxy's growth in the Americas at the end of the second millennium.  Holy Orthodoxy's guidance of the Church (John 16:13) continued long before Protestantism and the infallible Papacy were invented and has continued ever since--down to the present.  This belief and worship and other piety  have proved to be just what many have been looking for at a time when the Mediæval ideas of Western theology and practice have begun to unravel.

Theophilaion (Mt Athos) 2002

D. CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

     The paradigms for conceptualizing the Gospel that developed in the West are radically different from those of Greek-speaking Christianity, Western paradigms differ radically from the authentic forms of current Orthodoxy.  The account given in the foregoing makes this amply clear.  A paradigm consists of a fairly small set of axioms or premises and assumptions and of axiom, premises, assumptions, presuppositions, and definitions that in themselves are not falsifiable.  (They are often confused with falsifiable assertion by naïve writers.)  One can find reasons for embracing or rejecting them, but not to prove them false.  They determine what is meant by  the "technical" terms used in discourses concerning the subject they apply to.  For Orthodoxy, Being is primary.  The Incarnation of God sanctified and ratified the value of created materiality and time; the Resurrection of the Body--Christ's Body--brought that ratification to its fulfillment.  While keeping the juridical "form" in front, the latter-day paradigms of the West respectively focus more on intellect (Thomism) or will (the Reformation outlook; it has been seen that occisio rationis "the slaughter of reason" was Luther's idea of a Christian's evening sacrifice).  Who knows whether what the paradigm of the apparently limitless self-invented forms of Protestantism are?  We in televised megachurch services a preacher (avowedly Christian) who hypnotizes an entire audience, making them fall back into their pews; one who preaches about worry more than about Christ's Resurrection; and one who gives a hard knock on a person's  forehead to cure that person's ills?   One such commandeer of a megachurch even preaches--or at least preached--from a boxing ring, providing added rope-skipping and push-ups for the edification of his audience.  One preacher offered a whole basket of private interpretations in the course of her sermon on 2 Pet. 1:20.  Leaving aside matters of truth, to question any of this for whatever reason is not to deny these preachers' sincerity.  The salient question is:  What has it got to do with what could have gone on in Near Eastern circles two milleniums ago?  
     The Reformation paradigm is actually the mirror image of the two-millennium-old Orthodox paradigm.

     Orthodoxy has been spared (to see  why it has been spared from day one, read John 16:13) from the emphasis on "the word" that has re-oriented what had been the Worship of God at the Altar to a humanward pulpit--to instruction and exhortation of believers and others and prayers for their needs.  It has been spared those Biblical critics who set out from an axiomatic paradigm so at odds with the energy ontology and culture of the Greek-language Apostles, and who, without any evident dishonesty on their part, ravaged holy Scripture.)  Worship, Grace, and Salvation for this or that group are not the uncreated Energy of the New Testament writers and the Orthodox Fathers and Mothers.   Every important term has a conflicting sense among the three historical paradigms of Christianity--the original Greek-language thought world, the Papal  paradigm invented a dozen centuries after the Resurrection, and the Reformation Protestant paradigm invented at the onset of the Renaissance.   
     Since Orthodoxy has preserved the outlook of the Greek-speaking Apostles and Christians of the early centuries, it offers a more obvious basis for Christian unity than does any Western paradigm invented over a dozen centuries after the Resurrection--more than any thinkable amalgam of contradictory paradigms--say by the method of "Your side can choose this; we'll be the ones to choose that item."  The Orthodox cannot reject pr modify the Faith of the Standard of Belief and the nine Ecumenical Synod or the consensus of the holy Tradition of the Fathers' and Mothers' interpretation of Scripture.   Quoting a Father or the Bible raises the problem that what a passage means.  Translations of the Fathers and commentaries on them by Western scholars makes it clear that their paradigms extract senses very different from what a Greek-, Arabic, Russian, or Serbian-speaking write could have meant.   If by no means everything an Orthodox Father or Mother wrote has been adopted by the Church as part of the consensus of the holy Tradition--which has been sorting out the correct interpretation of each mooted point of belief from the multiplicity of mostly false interpretations of the Bible--at least the consensus is what John 16:13 refers to.  This promise covered the time before the Filioque and a millennium before Papal infallibility and the time before Luther and Calvin.  Some forms of Protestantism does not go far back beyond the beginnings of the twentieth century.  

 APPENDIX I:  RESOLVING OTHERWISE 
INSOLUBLE PROBLEMS WITH ENERGY
[See also R75.html]

     If the West continues to fail to differentiate essence and energy, it will never have a satisfactory way of understanding certain would-be problems:

     1. How to reconcile the immutability, unknowability, and imparticipability of the Creator's Essence with His participa­tion in the finite, changing world is a question of how God can be at once wholly transcendent, yet immanent in His creation.  (Note that if the changeless God can become part of the mutable world, that is deism; but if, on the other hand, humans can partake of His changeless Essence, that is pantheism.  If God's Energy of willing belongs to His changeless Essence, how can predestination be logically avoided.  St. Vasil the Great, in his Letter 234 to Amphilochios, wrote, "We say that we know our God from the Energies, but we do not undertake to approach the Essence Itself."  In his Refutation of the impious Evnomios, he said, "Is it not ridiculous to say that . . . all of the Energies are always simply the Essence?"  (Yet Thomas Aquinas made existence, knowing, and willing part of God's Essence and taught that the faithful could partake of the divine Essence, though only by "intentionally" and uniting one's ideas with the divine ideas--prototypes that the Scholastics alleged to be in God.)  Which realms is finite reason is competent in?  It is not competent to probe the inner architecture of Mysteries beyond what revelation allows us to infer; and it is also con­cerned with how revelation can really occur in a meaningful way when God’s Essence is unknowable.  How the divine rôle in the material Mysteries (Sacraments) and in the holy Tradition is possible without giving up divine transcendence is a question that can be adequately re­solved only if the divine Energies emanating from the transcendent Essence uphold and energize created being in on-going time—including of course the vessels of Grace divinely or­dained.  It is clear that the resolution of this set of paradoxes lies in distinguishing from the unknowable and imparticipable uncreated Essence the operation of uncreated Energies in the created cosmos.  (Note that Aquinas’s actus purus Deity was as close as his third-hand Aristo­telianism could get to uncreated Energy; but since he is speaking of the Essence, the expression is at all events based on a category confusion of energies with essences.  The Mysteries cannot rightly be analysed by finite reason the way we see attempted in the Filioque, transubstantiation, the afterlife [purga­tory], etc.) 

     2. How the all-holy Spirit can be energetically “sent” by the Son, Jesus Christ, in time on the earth while eternally proceeding from the Father alone, clear in John 15:26, becomes unclear (I) when it is strait-jacketed in the false Augustinian and Scholastic analogia entis that forces uncreated Essence beyond essence—the procession of the Paraclete in the Essence of all-holy Trinity—into an untenable paral­lelism with energetic activity; or (ii) when it is subjected to the Augustinian idea that relations are “substantial,” being causally related to as well as defining the beings that they relate—a theory that inverts and subverts the logic that beings have a prior and greater ontological status than the real (but not “substantial”) relations subsisting among such beings.  These two Western errors are utterly unacceptable to the Orthodox.

     3. How it is feasible to think of Grace as something divine and uncreated, some­thing that is necessary to Salvation (without reducing it to a mere form of the cre­ated soul or to a virtual reality willed by the divine volition, as in Western frameworks, is something that can be resolved by under­stand­ing Grace to be (uncreated) Energy.  If what is conveyed in mysteric (sacramental) vehicles is Grace, how is that compatible with Grace conceptualized as a created and inoperative (i.e. non-energetic) habit or form or quality of the soul (as maintained by the Latins) or as divine goodwill (as with Protestants)?  If unity with Christ is not even ontological—as with Aquinas (for whom it occurs through an intellectual vision and is non quantum ad modem essendi)—and if partaking of the divine Being is a partaking of the imparticipable divine Essence (rather than with the uncreated Energies), the divergence from Orthodoxy is complete.  In the Reformation view of Grace as divine benignity, sacraments become superfluous or even magical.   If Grace is not an energy, Mysteries have got nothing to do with energization.  In a framework lacking the concept of energy, there is no satisfactory answer to the questions, “What do material Myste­ries channel or convey?” and “What are they vessels or vehicles of?”

     4. How one can say that something vital got lost at the Fall without also maintain­ing that human nature did not lose faculties (reason and freewill) that distinguish it from the beasts is a matter that can be coped with only by assuming that what got lost at the fall was not the essence and potential of humanity made according to the Icon (Image of God), but the superimposed Energies of the Grace of Assimilation to God ('omoíosis Theo)—which, when present, energize the potentials (dynámeis) of the Icon (reason and freewill) to serve God worthily.  Various Fathers from St. Eire­naios on accepted that humanity has been created in both the Icon and Assimilation to (or Cognation with) God (Gen. 1:25).  Without being energized to serve the divine Majesty by the Grace that assimilates believers to God, the dýnamis of our finite human essence—the faculties of reason and freewill that belong to the Icon of God—remain unrealized and unable to please God.  On the other hand, energization by uncreated Grace would not be possible if there were no potential to be energized:  Both are necessary. 

     5. How guilt or merit can be morally transferred from one individual to another is a question that hardly receives a satisfactory resolution unless the two individuals are one—something that requires their ontologically sharing the same life (energy).  Despite the Nominalist tenet of the Reformers, justum quia jussum “right because commanded” (or “might makes right”), a bad command cannot make what is wrong right--nor can love make an untruth true.  Neither do newborns physically inherit the guilt of our first ancestors—certainly not “by natural generation” (cf. the Latins’ view of an inherited reatus penalize “a state of being accused for a punishable offence”), as if a moral trait could be physically transmitted, and certainly not by divine imputation, which would make God the cause of evil.  To suppose that a moral trait can be physically inherited is a category confusion.   The notion that God is full of wrath toward us for sins He Himself imputes to us lands theology in never-never-land.  The other side of the coin is that no one’s merits can be transferred to another unless the two become energet­ically one, one sharing the other’s Life and Energies.  A loss can be inherited in a way sin and guilt cannot be.  Newborns can inherit bad genes or the effects of the sins (e.g. AIDS contracted, say, through sinning) of a parent—but not a parent’s or other ancestor’s guilt deserving and warranting punishment.

     6. The statement in Rom. 4:25 that Christ “was handed over  because of our sins and rose for the sake of our becoming righteous” can be understood as the Crucifixion’s being the first instance of perfect Worship and removing obstacles to Salvation (by expiating humans’ sins) and the Resurrection’s energizing or actualizing that potential in overcoming the separation of God and humanity—which is what Salvation is. The only acceptable way of transferring merits is for two beings to become ontolog­ically one, as the sacred tradition teaches.  How the partaking of the di­vine nature (théosis “Divinization”) can occur if the divine Essence is imparticipable and is distinguished from a pagan partaking of the divine Essence (apothéosis  “Deification”) is resolved by referring the partaking to the divine Energies, being bathed in the uncreated Light (the purest form of energy).  The omoíosis Theo is natural since it complements nature and is not alien or opposed to nature; but it, unlike the Icon of God, is obviously not part of human essence.  For unlike the Icon, it can be lost without our becoming animals.  It is the path to Divinization..  Becoming a member of Christ and sharing His uncreated Life through the Mysteries of Baptism and Chrismation and the partak­ing of His Body and Blood is the way the tradition offers for a believing and penitent individ­ual to become an onto­logical participant in what Christ has done for the benefit of Christians. 

     7. Avoiding a conflict between Grace and works is possible only if Christ and one of His members do the same works—He being the Energizer, while the member willingly allows oneself to be divinely energized by Grace (Christ’s Life) so as to exert one’s own human energy to do what is pleasing to God.  There is no conflict if “it is God energizing in [His members] both to will and to energize for the sake of His being pleased” (Philp. 2:13).  Works synergized by God with His faithful members win favor with Him because they are primarily His works, energized by Him (in a way that other works, however good, are not) and so receive Grace for Grace (John 1:16).  In this sense, such works promote the on-going Salvation of Christ’s members.  Grace remains indispensable and by one's embracing or rejecting the help of divine Energy one will be judged (Mat. 16:27, 1 Pet. 1:17, Apoc. 2:23, 20:13) on the last day.  With this outlook, one does not have to disparage (as “filthy rags”) the good that non-Christians do—even though any good that one does cannot suffice for Salvation apart from its being energized by the Holy Spirit. 

     8.  How one understands Immolation and Anaphora (also called Oblation or Offering— the essence of sacrifice) can be achieved by noting that the Anaphora, an offering up to the Creator of a piece of creation in acknowledgement of His ownership of and sovereignty over all that exists energizes what is offered.  In the case of expiatory sacrifices, what is offered is an immolated (or mactated) victim.  The victim is energized as a sacrifice in offering it up to the Creator for whatever purpose it is intended.  While Christ's Immolation cannot be repeated--it was once for all according to the Epistle to the Hebrews--He can repeatedly offer Himself up in His members at the divine Liturgy.

     9. How we distinguish the validity of a purely physical or formal continuity reaching back in an unbroken line to the Apostles themselves from the authenticity of the same is possible only if we understand that mysteric (sacramental) validity is a potential, a dýnamis, which may or may not get energized to become real and authentic.  For the Orthodox, the energization is possible only within the Orthodox fold (where authenticity is tied in with the constantly trivialized concept of canonicity).   If there is no ontological Energy or Life impart in a repentant believer’s eating the consecrated Gifts of the Holy Communion, eating bread and drinking wine amount to no more than merely obeying an “ordinance”—done because commanded—hardly a possible interpretation in the Greek-language culture of the Apostles.  (Even fasting is no more than a diet if not energized by prayer.)  

    10. Dogma and the doctrines that give it meaning and life are related as dýnamis is related to energy.  Note that the dýnamis is as necessary as energy.