MORE ON WHAT EASTERN 
ORTHODOXY IS 
with an Appendix on
HOW TO TREAT STRANGERS 
IN YOUR TEMPLE

© 2000. 2001 by Orchid Land Publications  

[updated 1-9-01]

Correspondent:  What do you perceive God to be in the Eastern Orthodox view as to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit?  This may not be stated as you would but I hope the idea is somewhat clear; do you view the sum of what Jesus was while on earth to be the sum of what is constituted by Jehovah or YHWH?  

Reply:  It cannot be done briefly.  If you want brevity, you'd best skip the following.  If you look at any icon of the Savior, you will see inscribed above it "o ON" from Exod. 3:14 (LXX).   We believe that all three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are co-essential and co-equal Participants in the divine Essence--which is unknowable and imparticipable.  What finite reason can know of infinite Mystery is limited to negations we infer from revelation--what God would not be--contradictions.  But the Being-beyond-being (hyperousía) includes the uncreated Energies that radiate from the Essence.  (As you know,  Greek and the Greek New Testament are full of the dynamis ("potential of an essence") vs. energeia ("actualization, energization, realization of the potential in question") correlation. These Energies lie behind revelation, halos (created light), miracles, etc.  They are part of the Vision of God and Theosis. The Person of God the Son, YHWH, assumed human nature in the womb of the all-holy Theotokos (the essential "portal" of God's entering human nature); this resulted in a theandric Person (the LOGOS "Reason" [St. John the Evangelist] and SOPHIA "Wisdom" of God [St. Paul; wisdom is practical reason]:  Jesus.   The Mystery of his being both completely God and completely human is unfathomable.  
      Jesus came into human nature not just incidentally in order to be able to preach to humans and die as a human, but for an ontological reason--to undo the separation from God and His uncreated Energies caused by the Fall.   Hamartía is a sin-conducive condition brought on by death and the separation from the uncreated Energies.  (It is neither hamártesis "sinning" nor hamártema "a sin"--the result of the energy of sinning.  These two things entail guilt, whereas the condition of hamartía in itself does not.)  The Assmilation to God spoken of in Gen. 1:26 energized the potentials of the lógos "reason" and aftexousía (free choice) of the eikón of God to serve and please God.  (The East sees the Fall as a loss of a certain essential ability or freedom; the West sees Adam's sin to consist of trying to gain freedom from slavery to God.)   (Homoíosis is often mistranslated as though it were homoíoma--the result of a failure to distinguish the two kinds of nouns derived from -iz- causative verbs in Greek--viz. feminines in -sis (-tis after -s-, as in pístis) representing energizing acts and paired neuters in -ma denoting the results of the energization.  But Bible translators don't understand the dýnamis : enérgeia relation in Greek.  Eastern Christians do not believe in inherited guilt--if we did, we do not see how a moral trait could be physically transmitted (by natural generation, as the Latins say).  The Fall resulted in something ontological--separation from God--loss of the Homoíosis Theõ[i].  The resulting condition is ontological separation, not inherited guilt with its corollary of "punishment."  
     The East does not view the work of Christ through the juridical- punishment filter or lens of the West.  Punishment is not part of the reason for Christ's En-flesh-ment.  Newborns are not sinful or guilty of anything.  Grace is ontological--the uncreated Energies of God--His Life, His uncreated Light; Grace is neither a created and inoperative quality of the soul as the Latins teach (for Sanctifying Grace) nor just virtual acts of benignity by the divine will that paper over reality, the teaching of the Reformers.  Neither late-invented idea could have been understood by a Greek-language Christian in the first millennium and a half.  The Orthodox have none of those juridical things--satisfaction, atonement, justification, redemption, legal adoption, etc., etc.--just an ontological new ktísis (usually statically mistranslated in the West as though ktísma)--being born again in the Baptismal pool.  (We baptize with trine immersion.)   
     The book Hebrews is latreutic; it is not about a punitive Crucifixion.  Through Baptism and the other Mysteries received with true faith and repentance, we become new creations, ontological (not intentional, covenantal, or virtual) members of Christ.  The end result of assimilation to God  is permanent théosis (Divinization--often mistranslated as Deification--the Latin apothéosis or partaking of the divine Essence, though that Essence is imparticipable and hence non quantum ad modum essendi--as Aquinas hedges it:  It doesn't go so far as the mode of being).   Some OT prophets and some Christian Saints experience a temporary théosis, as when Moses' countenance was so bright that he had to veil himself--the created manifestation of uncreated Light.  Théosis in the Vision of uncreated Light energizes us to become wholly partakers of the uncreated Energies.   
     The Incarnation sanctified created matter and time (after all, the LOGOS created the spiritual and physical cosmos and made it log-ikós--coherent and investigable by reason--not lexikós "wordy") to be vehicles of Worship and Salvation.  Matter includes Mysteries (Baptism, etc., icons, relics, incense--whatever enhances our awe before the inenarrable divine Energies); time includes the collective tradition which according to John 16:13 is inspired to sort truths out of the abounding errors, truth able to endure for millenniums.  Time is also opposed to an instantaneous creation--St. Vasil said that the LOGOS began with lower forms of reality and proceeded across the eons to create higher and higher forms--and to an instantaneous Salvation (conversion can be sudden, but not, except exceptionally, Salvation).  The new creation is ontological, not just covenantal or virtual, as in Luther's simul justus et peccator; this idea that a saved Christian is virtual righteous (through divinely imputed righteousness) but really an unchanged sinner is an idea that would have been unintelligible to a Greek-language early Christian.  Calvin even accepted that the body is the soul's prison and that the Lord's supper is a virtual partaking of Christ--all of which  is foreign to the Orthodox, who believe John 6:53-54 quite literally. 
     Worship  is ontological like Salvation except that it is God-addressed, whereas Salvation and prayer for human needs have humans as their objects.  This explains why our services are not designed to comfort, exhort, or even to teach except through the readings and anthems that Orthodox Christians hear over and over and absorb if their hearts are right.  Sermons and prayers for our own needs may or may not accompany a service, but they are not "Worship," because they are human-directed.  Worship is doxological entirely; at its heart, Worship is offering a part of creation to God as an acknowledgement of His ownership and sovereignty over all.  The only perfect Offering (Anaphora, Oblation) is the perfect God-human--Jesus.  Propitiatory sacrifices have a prior mactation or immolation; this cannot be repeated the way the Offering can.  Christ's Immolation was [ep]hapax ["(once-)for-all] according to the Epistle to the Hebrews.  But we believe that Christ in His members is both Offerer and Offered (to quote a prayer in the liturgy); if His Immolation cannot be repeated, the Offering of what the West calls the "Victim" can be repeated over and over.  To make this doable, the bread and wine get ontologically changed into the real Christ.  
     That's Orthodox Worship; other services, the monastic hours, the paráklesis, trisagions, moliebens, etc. derive their authenticity from their relation to the central act of Worship every day or at least every Lordsday (Resurrectionday in Slavic)--viz. the divine Liturgy.  The word for "Worship" in Hebrew and Greek means "prostration"--and that's the posture of important acts of Worship, though it is abrogated on Lordsdays or during the Pentecost season in order to honor the Resurrection--the center of Orthodox belief and piety.  The greatest holy day is Great Pascha, the Lordsday of Lordsdays, and Festival of festivals.  It and its reflection in each Lordsday (when our prayers refer to Christ as "the One Who rose from the dead") recall the the victorious act that saves us, His rising to liberate humanity from Satan and the dominion of sin.  It anticipates and makes possible the resurrection of believers' bodies. 
     You see that, though we are said to be "mystical," matter and time, even postures, are vehicles and carriers of spiritual reality--Grace--the uncreated Energies of God.  We of course make use of icons in Worship; the walls of a temple are covered with them, reminding us of the Saints present, as we believe Heaven comes to earth at the awesome Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of the Creator human nature.  The wording of the anthems (troparions) and the music are unlike anything in the West; when properly sung (most of the service is sung by the Deacon with the people as he stands outside of the iconostasion, with its images of Christ on the right and its images of Christ with the Theotokos on the left), while the priest does his part behind the screen.  The priest comes out and sings to the people at the "entries" and various other times during the service.  When we go up to receive the holy Mysteries, we give the priest or deacon our Christian (baptismal name; and that of any  godchildren that we have brought with us to receive Communion); and then he says, "Name, the servant of God, receives, etc."  We receive the holy Mysteries standing.  Note that it is by partaking of a sacrifice that one becomes an offerer of it..
     Works:  As Philp. 2:13 and other passages say in the Greek New Testament, our good works are really Christ's energizing us--with our synergistic consent--to do good.  There is no conflict between God and human in this synergy;  God is the energizing Agent; humans give the assent of their will to co-operate in this unequal joint-working.  We honor Christ's work of Great Holy Week by fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays from anything connected with living animals that have blood (we allow crustaceans and theoretically eels, turtles, froglegs).  The fasts are mitigated when festivals of certain typeS coïncide.  
     Since the Fall yielded ontological separation from God and death (not guilt and punishment), there is no need for an Immaculate Conception:  We believe that all are born sinless, but the unimaginable function of giving birth to the Creator of the cosmos and eternal God meant endowing the Theotokos with special Graces--for which we "offer" her hyperduly.  Other Saints received duly (veneration).  God alone receives latry--Worship in its core sense.  And since the Theotokos remained a Virgin without sin, as we believe--and since death is not a "punishment" for Adam's sin, just an ontological result of it--there is no need, we think, to have a deathless Theotokos, as the Latins teach.  We believe that the all-pure Theotokos died like any other human but was carried off to Heaven three days after her death, in accord with the narrations of early non-canonical Gospels.             

     There are 182 or so  pages on the Orthodox part of this website.  The internal search engine at the bottom of the pages will, if you enter "paradigm," bring you to pages that tell HOW the paradigms of East and West--ontological/energetic for Orthodoxy, intellectual (and juridical) for the Latin Scholastics, and will-based and juridical for the Reformers--came to be different.  The Latins got cut off from Eastern learning during 750 years of illiterate and barbaric Dark Ages (think of the time from 1250 till 2000!); this ended when the Muslim Aristotle came to the Teutonic/Latin West from Islamic Cordova through Latin translations of juridicalized Arabic translations of the pagan Greek philosopher.  The two new paradigms invented almost a dozen centuries after the Resurrection took as basic the opposed sides of more holistic Cordovan teaching--intellect first among the Latins, will first among the Nominalists--including Luther--a school that boasted that will isuperior to reason.  (Orthodoxy put energetic being first.)  Unity with Christ take place  through an intellectual vision for Thomas Aquinas, though he hedges in saying its not ontological; unity with God is covenantal and virtual--will-based--among the Reformers.  

Correspondent: Is this Unitarian, somewhat? . . .  

Reply:  I see nothing Unitarian about it--if you mean the sense that refers to the Unitarians as a religious group; but we firmly believe in One God--one divine Essence.  Yet, we start from the Three Persons (probably because Orthodoxy grew up on Islamic territory), whereas the Latins start from the One Essence (probably because of the surrounding polytheism of the Germanic tribes).  We don't believe in the Filioque in the Creed for reasons given on a page devoted to that topic on this website.  Anyhow, we feel that finite reason is incompetent to analyse infinite Mysteries and, as said above, that apophatic knowledge is the best we can attain to; we are satisfied with not amplifying John 15:26, where the mission (sending) of the Paraclete by Jesus is distinguished from the Paraclete's proceeding from the Father alone.  The West insists that the mission and procession be parallel; that is apriori not on given the difference between what is uncreated and what is created.   
    We base everything on the Scriptures as interpreted by the Greek-speaking Fathers--not least the Fathers speaking in the Creed--a brief statement of some essentials of the Faith.  Not every essential is there, let alone the whole Faith; e.g. the holy Eucharist is not mentioned in the Creed.  The first-century letter of Clement (Paul in Philippians mentions Clement as one of his companions at Philippi) and several turn-of-the-century letters by Ignatios (who was a pupil of St. John as well as a successor to St. Peter in the bishopric of Antioch, where Christians were first known as such) give us Orthodox a fair picture of an early "diocese."  
      What I have written above is not just a list of beliefs but represents a lame attempt to convey the atmosphere or phronema of Orthodoxy--so different from Western versions of Christianity.  If I have succeeded to a certain degree, it should be obvious that Eastern Christianity is a different thought world and a different piety from the paradigms invented in the Middle Ages.  I haven't mentioned monastics, but they are vital to Orthodoxy.  If there is much else that has been left out, the foregoing description is different from the pedestrian articles about Orthodox piety, ethnic groupings, and other doings that you will find in the encyclopedias.  CLICK HERE FOR AN ENCYCLOPEDIA ARTICLE.   
     An Orthodox New Testament in two volumes will appear next month; it is the second edition of an earlier experimental first edition being produced by the sisters of Holy Apostles Convent in Buena Vista, CO.  It will be the first correct translation into English of all such examples as  I have looked at.  I predict that Christ won't be a "Word," and that the energy terms and other terms will be satisfactorily rendered. 

CLICK HERE ON TRANSLATING 
ORTHODOX TERMINOLOGY 

APPENDIX ON HOW TO TREAT STRANGERS 
IN YOUR TEMPLE

-----------------------------------------------------------
The following excerpts come from  
The Orthodox Church in America Resource Handbook 
Parish Development  I-87-1
"Entertaining Angels Unawares," by Katrina E. Davis

     During the service itself a friendly smile, a nod of greeting, and the
offering of a Liturgy book open to the proper place sets the tone and makes
the newcomer more at ease. Because many people do not like having attention
drawn to themselves, this should be done quietly.  If the service is a
special one or unusual in any way, a quiet word of explanation may be in order.
     After the welcome and invitation to attend the coffee hour has been given
by the priest at the end of the Liturgy, the church member designated to
greet newcomers (if there is one) should introduce himself or herself to
the visitors and conduct them to the refreshment table, making sure that
they are served before they are surrounded by "well-wishers." If the
greeter can make introductions, it will keep mumbled names from being
misunderstood.
     A few general questions such as: "Are you new in the area? Do you live in
the neighborhood?", will usually elicit enough information for the greeter
to work with, yet keep the visitors from being put through the
"third-degree" by everyone who comes up to talk to them.  If they are
searching for a church, or come from one of the local churches, members
should not make comparisons.  Much more appropriate is something on the
order of, "We hope you enjoyed our service and will come again." "Do not
neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained
Angels unawares" (Heb 13:2).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some Guidelines

DO NOT

* question visitors on doctrine or other practices of their present church
* allow any one member to monopolize and isolate them
* assume that because they came once they will want to become involved in
   all phases of church life: choir, Sunday School, baking, tithing envelopes, etc
* give a "crash course" in Orthodoxy
* tell them about financial problems, personality conflicts, gripes against
   the priest or parish gossip -- they may be trying to escape these things at
   their present church
* load them down with books, crosses, icons, and the like or make them feel
   obligated to browse or buy if the church has a bookstore
* emphasize ethnicity or use a foreign language in conversation -- this
   often gives the impression that the newcomer is an outsider or is being
   talked about
* refer to them as "our visitors" -- this creates the impression that they
   are not encouraged to return

DO

* welcome them to our services, and ask if they have any questions
* try to introduce them to as many members as possible, particularly those
   of similar background and age and make sure they are introduced to the    
   priest
* assure them that all areas of church life are open to them should they
   wish to participate
* answer specific questions simply and briefly
* tell them good things that are going on: upcoming events, special
   projects, etc -- show them that the church is busy and involved in the
   community
* let them know if the church has a library or bookstore, but only as one
   item of interest
* give them a tour of the church if they seem interested
* assure them of their continued welcome and invite them to return
* give them a schedule of services, making sure times are clear and correct.
* ask them to sign a guest book so follow-up can take place
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A 12 minute videotape, "Evangelization: As Close as the Parish Coffee
Hour," can be had from Dormition Orthodox Church 
Box 14073, Norfolk, VA 23518

This article is part of the series: Resource Handbook for Lay Ministries:
Parish Development.  The Resource Handbook is available at 
www.oca.org/Resource-Handbook
Copyright © Orthodox Church in America, 1982-2000. All Rights Reserved.
Permission is granted to reproduce for personal, local parish, and local
discussion use only.

http://www.oca.org/Resource-Handbook/Parish-Development/
Entertaining-Angels-Unawares.html