Various media reports and editorials have described the controversies before, during, and after the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, recently held during Pentecost on the island of Crete. Some have concluded that the Council’s difficulties were the result of geopolitics, and can therefore be explained away as little more than an ecclesial version of the larger political and cultural…
And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. —John 12:32 Ascension Day is possibly the most forgotten of the great feasts of the Lord. Why? In part because, unlike all the other feasts of the same rank, it can never fall on a Saturday or Sunday. Forty days after Pascha is always a Thursday,…
Today I ran across this fascinating piece over at First Things by Richard J. Mouw: “Mormons Approaching Orthodoxy” (“Orthodoxy” here is what we might call “small-O orthodoxy”). In this, Mouw, the former president of Fuller Theological Seminary, makes observations about his relationship with Mormons that resulted from his participation in years of Evangelical-Mormon dialogue, which he uses to interpret statements made by…
I recently came across Paul Ladouceur’s translation of an article by Vladimir Lossky on “The Doctrine of Grace in the Orthodox Church,” published in the St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2014). The whole article contains matters of interest to readers here, but I’d just like to highlight its inclusion of a rare statement by Lossky on his understanding of ecumenical…
Editorial introduction: Here is a follow-up response from Dr. Nicholas Marinides commenting on the reply he received from Coptic author Mina Soliman on his piece from earlier this week, “Chalcedonian Orthodoxy and Non-Chalcedonian Heterodoxy.” For the full context, you’ll want to take a look at the previous posts: Read Dr. Marinides’s initial post. Read Mina Solimon’s response. Thanks Mina, for taking the…
We’ve received a note regarding a more thorough response from a Coptic writer, Mina Soliman, regarding Nicholas Marinides’s recent post, “Chalcedonian Orthodoxy and Non-Chalcedonian Heterodoxy.” Mina is a lector (reader) of the Coptic Orthodox Archdiocese of North America. Here are some excerpts from his piece: You begin with the ecclesiological issues. One is left in a quandary over two traditions, split for…
The following two excerpts are from the revised text of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Finding the Way to Christ in a Complicated Religious Landscape, which is due for publication by Ancient Faith Publishing in December 2016 (see the full Table of Contents here). The chapter on Pentecostalism from which these sections are drawn is completely new for this edition. The “Parham” mentioned in…
The title of this essay may startle many who assume that union of the Orthodox with the Non-Chalcedonians (the historic Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, West Syrian (Syriac/Jacobite), Armenian, and Indian (Malankara) churches) is imminent. Such an assumption is due to ignorance among many Anglophone Orthodox of the criticism to which eminent Orthodox theologians in other countries have subjected the dialogue between the Orthodox…
I’m getting pretty close to done with my edits for the revised, expanded version of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, which is now available to order. The final word count will be about 125,000 136,000 words, which makes it about 75% 90% larger than the first edition (which was about 72,000 words). Now that I’m almost done we’re in the editorial stage, I can…
Over at his First Things blog, ironically (or fittingly?) adorned with an icon of the baptism of Christ from the Arian baptistry of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, Peter Leithart has a novel idea about the problem of the wills of Christ: It is sometimes argued that the Christological formula of essence and person determines the way to understand person and essence in Trinitarian…