Once again Mr. Jim Jatras, who I’ve recommended in the past, has written a very perceptive article which deals with the “Western Campaign against Orthodoxy.”
I highly recommend taking the time to read it.
The “enlightened” Western Powers will not tolerate anything that does not bow before their totalitarian doctrines. One is not free to reject “freedom and democracy.” Either accept “progress” or suffer the consequences. You will be “liberated” whether you want it or not.
There can be no competing “truth claims.” “There is no truth” can be the only dogmatic profession, therefore Orthodoxy must be attacked. It maintains faith in ultimate Truth which even the relativism of Protestantism does not dare to claim (this is why Protestantism is supported to a degree by the Western Powers, at least in “non-western” cultures because Protestantism prepares the ground for modern secularism.)
Read Mr. Jatras article.
Archim. – St. Sophrony (Sakharov): Unity of the Church, an Image of the Holy Trinity- published in 1950 rejects EP’s papal claims 70 years ago! https://orthodoxsynaxis.org/2019/04/20/archim-sophrony-sakharov-unity-of-the-church-an-image-of-the-holy-trinity/
In this essay first published in Russian and French in 1950, the Elder Sophrony (Sakharov), then a relatively young hieromonk, argues forcefully that Orthodox ecclesiology must conform to Orthodox trinitarian theology. In striking contrast with ideas later put forward by Metropolitan John (Zizioulas), Sophrony understands the Orthodox dogma of the Trinity to reject any form of subordinationism whatsoever, as subordinationism corresponds to papism. In Orthodoxy, the Father begets the Son, but the Son is no less equal to the Father for this. Therefore, there can be no primacy that places a certain bishop or church over the other churches. Likewise, the institution of autocephaly is fundamental to Orthodox ecclesiology as it expresses the consubstantiality and equality of all the local Churches and teaches us that no place and no race enjoys a greater fullness of divine grace than any other. For Sophrony, the best canonical expression of Orthodox ecclesiology is Apostolic Canon 34.
Papist tendencies in general are only natural to our sinful world. They manifest themselves in the East as in the West, in Byzantium as in Rome. But until now God has protected the Eastern Church and these tendencies died out without disturbing the profound peace of the Church. We do not want to pause here over the the reasons that have caused a new growth in these tendencies, limiting ourselves to examine only the dogmatic basis of this question in order to show that papism, whether of First, Second or Third Rome or of any important or unimportant city is foreign to the very nature of Christ’s Church.
The dogma about the Church is tightly bound to that of the Trinity and the Incarnation. That is to say, to Triadology and Christology. The articles of the Rev Fr Kovalevsky, of Mr Lossky and also of Hieromonk Silvanus, which appeared in Issue I of our Messenger deal with the Christological aspect of the dogma about the Church. This is why here we shall only touch upon the tradological aspect of this teaching.
This dogma teaches us that the perfect Unity of the Divine Love of the Three Persons excludes any domination by One of Them. Each time that Christian thought slid towards rationalism, it became unable to contemplate this aspect of the divine nature. Rationalism, which always tends toward logical monism, cannot avoid imagining either a hierarchical structure within the Holy Trinity by affirming the superiority of the First Person as an ontological principle or the confusion of the Three Persons, thining of them as “modes” of manifestation of the One Essence of the Godhead. Theology calls the first deformation “subordinationism” and the second “modalism”. The principle of the papacy introduces subordinationism into the inside of the Church. As only this principle interests us here, we will set aside modalism and limit our analysis to the first triadological deformation.
….The Church categorically rejects every form of subordinationism. She professes her faith in the Holy Trinity in these terms: “None is greater, none is less great (in the Trinity), but rather the Three Hypostases are whole, coeternal with Each Other and equal.”
Triadological subordinationism, transposed onto the structure of the Church, takes the form of papism, which reflects one or another form of this false doctrine. Thus in ecclesiology Roman Papism corresponds to the ontological aspect of Arius’ subordinationism, since it give the Bishop of Rome a place that separates him from the rest of the body of the Church, raising him to a height that makes him not simply great but of another nature (τὸ ἑτερούσιον). We must make clear that we are not applying this parallel to the origin of Roman Papism, but to its current form established by the Vatican Council in 1870. Its origin is nothing but a survival from the pagan Roman Empire. Its dogmatic conception was later influenced by the theology of the “filioque”, which leads to a specific form of christocentrism. There then appeared a rupture between God and the world: Christ became transcendent to the world and the Bishop of Rome took His place in the earthly Church; the Holy Spirit, in practice, lost His absolute hypostatic equality to the Father and the Son, becoming nothing but a power of Christ, entrusted to the authority and judgment of the Bishop of Rome.
All these historical processes are of an extreme complexity. They are the result of the reciprocal action of countless influences, conditions and wills. In speaking here schematically about Roman papism, we limit ourselves to only a dogmatic summary.
The modern papacy of Constantinople is only in its embryonic phase. For the last 20 or 30 years, it has appeared to seek ground. Its current development is very rapid, in contrast to the slow development over centuries of Roman papism, which only attained its final phase in 1870. In fact, the ideology of Constantinople’s papism has varied several times in only a little time and it is still difficult to define.
The Russian adepts of this papism are almost all found in France. Until 1948, we had not seen among them any canonically or theologically-founded idea. As they themselves admitted, they “were looking” above all “for a canonical basis” so as not to be outside the Body of the Universal Orthodox Church after their separation from the Mother-Church of Russia. With this goal, they began by recognizing a privilege of jurisdictional right of the Patriarch of Constantinople inasmuch as he is “Ecumenical”. Later, they attributed to the See of Constantinople primacy and the right of Supreme Appeal in the Universal Church, forgetting the struggle that the latter had waged for centuries against Rome’s pretentions to this right; forgetting that these pretentions were precisely the cause of the definitive Great Schism in the Church in 1054 and that at the Council of Florence Rome sought above all from the East recognition of this supreme arbitration in the Universal Church. They also forgot the multiple Canons of the Ecumenical and Local Councils which refused to attribute these rights to any given local Church, canons that even the Church of Constantinople understood very well when she was firmly insisting on the Orthodox position in order to combat Rome’s pretentions.
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