Help the Jewish guy understand - what is an "Orthodox Church?"

Factual Questions
21

I came into this thread to mention them, and also the Orthodox Christian Reformed Churches in North America. Both are very conservative Calvinist denominations who found the mainstream versions of their faith (Presbyterianism, Dutch Reformed, Christian Reformed) too liberal.

The Orthodox Presbyterians are quite popular in my area. There are 3 OP churches within 10 miles. Fewer of the Reformed Churches in my area carry the Orthodox label in their name, but embrace what they call the “orthodox” teachings of Calvinism.

22

Honestly, I think that is splitting hairs if you could even say that was correct at all. Arianism was splinter faction within Christianity, it was explicitly Unitarian and perhaps most importantly was condemned as a heresy ;).

23

??? Meanwhile, a splinter of the Constantinople Empire set it’s self up in Rome.

AIR, The “Roman” empire had been based in Constantinople for some time.

24

Almost everyone believes that it was a question of translation and personalities, not of theology. The Greeks thought that the Italians thought that the Greek word meant something else in Greek than what the Italians thought it meant…

The churches now remain separated for historic and whatever reasons. The catholics and the orthodox agree on the meaning of the creed, although they didn’t realize that at the time.

25

Not to confuse the issue, I know an adherent to the Greek Catholic church. Basically they recognize the Pope and the Pope recognizes them as Catholic, but their priests can marry and I assume there are many other differences. But they are not Greek Orthodox. And she is actually Lebanese, but definitely not Maronite.

26

That’s the Catholic view. The Orthodox view is that they are the original church and it’s the Catholic Church that split off when it wrongly insisted that the Bishop of Rome had authority over the other major church leaders.

27

Yeah, within the Catholic Church, there are the Roman Catholic sect, and various other sects including the Eastern Catholics (and the Coptics and others). And within the Roman Catholic sect, there’s the Latin Rite and assorted other rites. And among all of them, it’s only the Latin Rite of the Roman Sect of the Catholic Church where priests aren’t allowed to marry. Except that that one rite of that one sect is 90-something percent of all Catholics, so it’s still almost always true that “Catholic priests can’t marry”.

Most of the differences between the various Catholic rites and sects are in things like which prayers are said at which points in the Mass, and in things like what style of artwork is used inside the chapels, and other such details which everyone involved agrees are mostly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, which is why they consider themselves united.

28

Augustines are still heavily iconoclastic, as in “you can tell a Catholic church is probably in Augustine hands because it’s got less images than a horse barn”; not a good combination with Hispanic Mariology. Us Hispanics love our medals and have been known to get to blows over “my image of Our Lady of Hope is more miraculous than your image of Our Lady of Hope”.

Someone who’s a peer to somebody else is, by definition, not superior to everybody else.

29

Not that I understand all of this, or even most of it, but thanks to all who answered.

30

Maybe I can try and simplify. You’re Jewish, so you are broadly divided into Conservative, Orthodox and Reform Judaism. Your Orthodox Judaism is nothing like Orthodox Christianity, so get that out of your mind now. Orthodox Judaism probably has more in common with maybe Fundamentalist Christianity where everyone else is screwed up and they’ve got it going on rather than Orthodox Christianity which mostly doesn’t concern itself with what other groups are doing.

Orthodox Christianity… (actually, I’m going to digress a bit. Orthodox Christianity itself has two broad divisions - Oriental Orthodox (mostly practiced in the Middle East) and Eastern Orthodox(mostly practiced in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus). We’ll concern ourselves mostly with the latter.)…anyway Orthodox Christianity is in many ways like Judaism as a whole. It tends to be very culturally based. If you’re Russian, you go to the Russian Orthodox Church and your 'leader 'is the Patriarch of Moscow (who sorta kinda answers to the Patriarch of Constantinople as all Eastern Orthodox churches do, but it really functions more like a council of bishops who get together and figure things out). If you’re Greek, you go to the Greek Orthodox Church and your leader is the Patriarch of Constantinople so the churches are very much ethnically based (This is not a requirement though, anyone is welcome to go to a Russian Orthodox Church, but it’s rare for non-Russians to be there.) They are in full communion with the Catholic Church. What that basically means is that both groups recognize the other as full and complete expressions of Christianity. It doesn’t mean they are the same though. An analogy might sorta be the way Conservative Jews feel about Orthodox Jews. “They’re different, but they’re still following a valid form of Judaism.” In a similar way, Catholics feel that Protestants have made serious breaks with Christianity, perhaps analogous to how Conservative Jews feel about Reformed Jews.

In liturgy (the way in which they hold their services) Orthodox Churches are ‘High Churches’ This refers to a very formal liturgy (sometimes called ‘smells and bells’ by the more jovial among us - as an aside, you can tell I’m Methodist which comes from the Anglican tradition, since I just noticed I tend to use their terminology) What it really means is that their services tend to be sort of ‘set in stone’ and involve a great deal of traditional religious practice and imagery. It’s kind of hard to analogize with Jewish services, but think of Evangelical Protestants kind of having services like Reformed Jews while Catholics and Orthodox are closer to Conservative Jews. To get into all of the exact differences in liturgy would require a book and not a board post, but suffice it to say that even though Catholics and Orthodox Churches are ‘high churches’, this doesn’t mean that their services look alike. They don’t. Pre-“Vatican II” (a conference that the Catholics held in the early 1960s that significantly changed Catholic liturgy) Catholics might have a bit more in common with Orthodox liturgy, but post-Vatican II things have changed quite a bit.

As a Western Christian, I would say that mostly Orthodox Christianity isn’t thought of at all. It’s a small religion in the West, so we don’t think about it much at all except to broadly think “It’s nice that they are Christians too.” When we do think about Orthodox Christianity, we almost immediately think of two things. How their priests look and iconography. Their priests dress all in black with tall hats (a lot of the time anyway) and they look like dwarves (being facetious, but they are known for having very long beards. They actually look pretty cool.) That’s different than most forms of Western Christianity, so it stands out. We also think of their icons which to us are very pretty pictures of saints and angels and the like. In the Eastern Orthodox Churches though they are stand-ins for Christ or the saints themselves and the paintings have very specific attributes that are required to represent the person they are representing. This is weird to Western Christians (to Catholics a bit less so than to Protestants, but even Catholics probably think that Orthodox take it too far.) and quite a few Protestants would almost certainly say idolatrous, but like I said, we don’t tend to think of the Orthodox churches much at all and those types of Protestants are too busy screaming about crucifixes to bother delving into Eastern Orthodox beliefs. The only other thing that MIGHT cross our minds is their fasting tradition which is shall we say ‘intense.’ Orthodox Christians that completely follow their fasting schedule end up fasting over half of the year. Now, it should be said that not a whole lot of them actually do, but they’re supposed to if they are completely following recommendations of the faith.

I don’t know if I made it easier for you to understand or harder, Christian divisions usually come down to fundamental differences in how we think about God and our relationship to him, and Orthodoxy is no different in that regard than any of the other 30 thousand denominations floating about. Getting into real theological differences though could be very difficult for a non-Christian to understand without a great deal of reading, so I tried to stay more on the visible side of things.

31

Sorry, I noticed your original question is do the Orthodox Churches behave similarly and the answer is ‘yes.’ They aren’t identical though, but if you were to walk into a Greek Orthodox or a Russian Orthodox service, you would feel that you are in the same ‘type’ of service. There might be places where one group kneels and the other stands or they use a slightly different wording or Bible passage, or extend a passage here or there, but you would likely recognize that they are broadly similar. This differs from Catholics in that you would largely see say a Russian Orthodox and Catholic service as fundamentally different from a Catholic service in order and really in tone. Protestants even more so since their services are all over the board and 1/3 the time look like you’re at a Bruce Springsteen concert with a hipster giving the message while sitting on a stool with 15 TVs zooming in on his face a 1/3 of the time like you’re at a back woods family reunion where you expect someone to pull out a fiddle and go to town and the last third like you’re in a church that sorta wants to be Catholic, but kinda sorta doesn’t. If I were to walk into a Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox service without knowing which it was, I could probably guess within 30 seconds where I was (Unless it was high church Episcopalian, they are so Catholic that it might take me a bit to figure it out.)

32

[QUOTE=senoy;21233549Their priests dress all in black with tall hats (a lot of the time anyway) and they look like dwarves (being facetious, but they are known for having very long beards. They actually look pretty cool.) [/QUOTE]

I’ve seen this, mostly in and around the Old City in Jerusalem.

Thanks for your explanation.

33

These guys: Melkite Greek Catholic Church - Wikipedia
They’re the second largest Catholics in Lebanon after Maronites. Both are Catholic (capital and lowercase C), just not Latin rite.

34

One other noticeable difference between the Orthodox and other Christians is that they use a different calendar (at least for religious purposes; in day-to-day life they use the same as everyone else). They never switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which means that their holidays are 12 days later than the corresponding Western ones (except for Easter, which is complicated, but still on average about 12 days later).

When my mom was a little girl, the family who lived up the hill from them were Orthodox. She tells how, every year, her family picked out a Christmas tree… and then, right after their Christmas, they gave it to their neighbors to be their Christmas tree.

35

LittleNemo is right to remark:

But SanVito’s post promotes an inaccurate view:

This inaccurate view stems in the Western habit of regarding the fall of the Western Roman Empire as the fall of the entire Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire that continued its existence was not a splinter, but a large territory with dense population: see map here. When the Great Schism occurred, the Eastern Roman Empire had lost territories, indeed, but Orthodoxy had increased its influence by including Romanian and Russian (Ukrainian) populations in the North: see map here.

Unlike the Westerners, the nations in the former Eastern Roman Empire have been Christian without any interruption ever since this religion entered and became dominant in the empire. In the East, the Catholic Church is regarded as (at least slightly) deviant or nurturing a propensity for deviation, a view confirmed by the subsequent splits within the Catholic Church itself, whereas the Orthodox Church boasts its unwavering dogma, a proud feeling reflected by the etymology of the term ‘orthodox’: right view.

36

A story with biblical flavor, I should say.

37

Or January 19 in the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the latest date.

38

Putting aside issues of dogma, there were historical factors at work as well. Most of the major Christian leaders were based in areas where the Eastern Roman Empire still held political control; Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople itself. As a result, these religious leaders had to accommodate a reasonably strong secular power which interfered with church affairs. In Rome, imperial authority had mostly faded away so the religious leaders ended up holding as much secular power as any rival government. So the Bishop of Rome could make a plausible argument that he was better suited to address religious issues because he didn’t have to answer to any outside authority.

Language was another issue; the Roman church used Latin while the other churches all used Greek. This meant that there was much closer communication between local church leaders serving under the various eastern churches than any of them had with the Roman church. The Roman church was seen as being isolated from a lot of church politics.

A result of this was that on a number of occasions when there was a dispute between two of the eastern Patriarchs that couldn’t be resolved, the suggestion would be made to refer the matter to the Bishop of Rome. He was seen as an equal who wasn’t involved in the dispute and could act as a neutral arbitrator.

But the Bishop of Rome came to see his role differently. He began to feel that he wasn’t being asked by his peers to give an opinion on a dispute between them. He began to see his role as being the boss who was settling a dispute between his subordinates and telling them what the policy should be.