1937 Miraculous Cross wrote:
Then which post-Nicene "fathers" are "true" Orthodox Fathers who maintained a pre-Nicene council calendar?
Likewise, in an earlier post you stated that the Celtic church still exists today. to my knowledge there are no Celtic bishops today who have maintained Apostolic Tradition, nor any bishops elsewhere who maintain a pre-nicene calendar. so, if we assume the Church is comprised of an Orthodox bishop and true believing clergy and laity, I know of no church or jurisdiction that is now Orthodox by the definitions you have been suggesting.
Dear Nectarios, my point is really that the whole concept of "the Fathers" is not Orthodox, not least because we still remember the Mothers of the Church...
There well may be many who were true to Christ's teaching, but as we've seen even Chrysostom failed on two counts to preserve true Apostolic tradition; in his diatribes against the Jews and keeping their traditions thus separating this from Christianity and in his exhortations to use violence against those who don't agree with his idea of God. These are not insignificant changes.
To include all of Chrysostom without orthodox, right thinking, examination of him in context of the history of the Church and of this mythical idea of the Church's authority as "the Mind of the Fathers equals the Mind of the Church equals the Mind of Christ", is simply perverse.
In his defence, he may well have been doing his best to lead his flock, but that is the best we can say of him here or any of the fathers of the early Church who spent their time imposing rules and regulations on their flocks contrary to Christ's Canon re authority and who thought so much of their own thinking that they failed to see any contradiction between their own teaching and that of Christ.
"An Orthodox must not simply know and quote the Fathers, he must enter into the spirit of the Fathers and acquire a ‘Patristic mind.’ He must treat the Fathers not merely as relics from the past, but as living witnesses and contemporaries."
Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, London, 1992, p.212.
It is one thing to treat them as living witnesses and contemporaries and another entirely to treat them as if their every pronouncement is Orthodox, if by Orthodox we mean the continuation of Christ's teaching and ecclesiology, because they show themselves to be failures as much as any of us can be. The Orthodox Mind recognises this.
The 1917/18 Sobor in Russia included in its brief a purging of Latin accretions, brought into the Church in the previous centuries especially under the Tsars from Peter the Great who took control of it. (They were also going to look at the re-introduction of women deacons.) I'd like to see such a council among the Orthodox, and would include the insidious teaching of Augustine as one of the accretions that needs to be got rid of, but I think this idea of "the patristic mind" needs to be examined before all else.
I think this idea suffers from the main problem of ecumenism in that by incorporating heresies indiscriminantly it's built itself up into a particular heretical view. Claiming that "Orthodox tradition as the mind of the Fathers" is the benchmark against which to judge ecumenism is false Orthodoxy as it is itself a chimera created over centuries of incorporating un-Christian ideas, is itself a heretical view when compared with Christ's teaching.
So, "if we assume the Church is comprised of an Orthodox bishop and true believing clergy and laity, I know of no church or jurisdiction that is now Orthodox by the definitions you have been suggesting."
Quite so.
If we make the mistake of thinking that these accretions/changes define the Church.
Everyone is on a "non-Orthodox" calender, either the New Calendar or the Old Calendar. so, are you claiming the "true' Orthodox may just be those few laymen who happen to follow a pre-nicene calendar?
in Christ,
nectarios
By process of elimination that would probably leave none! What I'm trying to say is that we're all in the same boat here, OC and NC. Neither calendar actually conforms to the "Nicean" calculation so all arguments from both sides are so much hot wind blowing the boat around in no paricular direction, and adding to that the boat is on sea of its own creation in a wider ocean which still contains the traditions of St John which the Nicean calendar didn't incorporate. As a calendar it has a lot going for it, but it's not a 'perfect' Church calendar because it excluded remembering the 14th Nissan, on which day Christ first gave us the Eucharist to remember Him. This, I think, should be the focus of calendar discussions.
Because, in the Orthodox Church, the fathers and mothers and saints and sinners we are are not confined to some black hole of forgetfulness, St John is still a living witness and contempory in our liturgy and we are ignoring him.
Myrrh