Who are the Orthodox?

I explore the origin and history of the Eastern Orthodox before delving into their beliefs on divorce and remarriage.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Divorce Your Remarriage podcast. We're going to be talking next about the Eastern Orthodox. What do they believe about divorce and remarriage? And I think those answers are going to surprise you quite a bit. But before we can actually dive into what they believe about it, we have to answer an ancient question.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Who are these people?

unknown 0:20

Who are these people?

SPEAKER_00 0:23

I love that clip. Yeah, we got to find out who are these people, the Eastern Orthodox. So let me say who they are not, first of all. So there's a group out there, it's kind of a fad right now. Who knows how long it'll last? But they call them the Ortho Bros. These are guys who are kind of aggressive online. They self-identify as Eastern Orthodox, and they don't really give an accurate representation of Eastern Orthodox. Like if you talk to an Eastern Orthodox priest and then you listen to an Orthobro online, it's just not the same thing. If the Eastern Orthodox was a sport, let's say it was like wrestling, the uh ortho bros are like WWE. It's pyrotechnics and ridiculousness, but it's not really, you know, Eastern Orthodox, the traditional religion that goes back 2,000 years. So it's just kind of a sensationalized version of Eastern Orthodox. It's not really what they believe. So who are the actual Eastern Orthodox? Um, well, if we start with the New Testament, um, you know, and then we go from a thousand years after that, the church was actually pretty unified for a long time. I mean, just think about that. An organization unified for a thousand years over a large territory, that's pretty good. There's not a lot of organizations you can say that are like that. But there was a schism then eventually called the Great Schism in 1054, where the Roman Catholic, well, what became known now as the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox, they are no longer in communion. They split apart. It's called the Great Schism of 1054. But if you start, if you go back to the beginning in the New Testament, what do you have? You have Jesus and you have the disciples, and then you have the crowds, right? And uh then Jesus, you know, ascends into heaven, and then you have Pentecost, and now we're spreading the gospel out. And then there is this need, you know, you have, you know, say Paul goes somewhere and spreads the gospel there, and he's gonna go somewhere else. Well, you're gonna have to leave somebody in charge. And so there's this need to kind of create some organizational structure that wasn't really um necessary during the life and ministry of Jesus, but now is necessary now that the church is going out further. So there's like, okay, we're gonna have some leaders at these individual churches and things. And then eventually, well, if they have a dispute, who do they go to? Where they they talk to the apostles, they write them a letter, you know, and they ask, hey, what about this question? What about that question? We had an argument about this, what do we do about these different questions? And then they'll write back and they'll say, Well, here's what you need to do. And then the apostles pass away, and then they go, Well, who we're gonna ask now? I know what we'll do. We'll ask those people who are really close to the apostles, like their disciples of the apostles, because they'll they'll have the answer, right? So eventually what we get to is we have what are like uh uh seats of like authority in the church uh centered in cities. So Rome was one, Constantinople, Alexandria in Egypt, uh, Antioch, and Jerusalem. So there's five, right? And each of these had authority uh uh over a particular area, but basically the Rome was in the West and the other four were in the east. Okay. Now, how does this work when there's a dispute amongst themselves? So this is a way of governing an institution, the church, that we're not really accustomed to. So we need to pause on this and give it a second to reflect on it. So I'm gonna think, I'm gonna use an analogy for Chick-fil-A, right? So let's say you've got Chick-fil-A in the United States, and let's say they've got five offices. Let's say we got New York and Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and of course, Atlanta, where Chick-fil-A, I believe, is from. Anyway, and they carve up the country into five different parts, right? Yeah, and so each of them have a regional manager. Well, the way we think of corporate structures, those five regional managers would like report up to somebody else, and then eventually, you know, you get the CEO, and then eventually they report to the board of directors. But that is not what's going on in this early church. In the early church, instead you got the five cities, and they're those regional managers kind of are the board of directors, like they're the patriarchs of those different uh areas there. So it's a different kind of organizational structure than we think of. And then what would happen is every now and again there would be a problem, uh, uh there'd be a heretic, a heresy that would get around and it would start getting some influence. And this was a problem, and they would have a council, they would, they would call it. They have a meeting, get together, and it would be the patriarchs would get together, right? Or or they would delegate, they would send somebody on their behalf. And then they would also have like a lot of their really smart theologians and church leaders would come and be this huge meeting. Anyway, they have the huge meeting and they would figure out what the problem, the nature of the problem was, and they would get into like very detailed, specific distinctions being made by theologians. Anyway, and then they would come up with canons, which are very like specific statements of truth. And then they and then the idea is they would sign off on these canons, all the different patriarchs would, and then they would say, okay, well, this is now binding on the church. And they had these are called ecumenical councils, and they had seven of these ecumenical councils. We'll talk more about that in a minute. And this is a great way for them to stay unified because when there's a big issue, they would have this meeting come together and it would it would clarify what is the teaching, right? And then we can all make sure we're teaching the same thing. So if we go back to the Chick-fil-A analogy, that way, if you're uh a customer of Chick-fil-A and you're going to a Chick-fil-a in New York, and you're you get your chicken sandwich and you get your pepperjack cheese, whatever you do, right? And then if you have a business trip and you go down to Dallas, you're not, if you go to Chick-fil-A, you're not getting like brisket, right? Because that's like not Chick-fil-A. That would be Chick-fil-A heresy. You can't be putting brisket on your chicken sandwich. It's not in the name. It's called Chick-fil-A for a reason. So here's my point they would have these councils and the canons, and they would keep everything kind of nice and uniform so you can keep this thing kind of going. Now, not everything that came up for dispute are they going to have a meeting about, but if it was a big deal. Oftentimes they couldn't get these meetings, they didn't get these meetings together just because they chose to. I think many of the meetings, maybe all of them, were because political leaders require them to get together because the political leaders want to have a unified kind of culture. But in 1054, they had the great schism. Um, and that's where the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox were no longer in communion with each other. So, what caused the schism? They were doing great, thousand years. We're holding everything together. What happened? We were doing, we were doing okay. Well, there's a number of different causes that people point to. There's a question of authority. So who gets the final say, right? I treated the five regional managers here as like a uh like a board of directors, and it's kind of like majority vote, is the implication there. But uh, is it really consensus of the patriarchs? So they all have to agree. Is it the Bishop of Rome who who has like the real final say? Can he just like line item veto things? Say, well, I don't agree with this one, so we're not going to do it. So they had an authority uh dispute there. Then they had the council of Trulot, which we're gonna talk a lot about, the Quintisext Council of 692. Now, the Great Schism happened in 1054, and this council happened in 692. That's a long, that's a 350-year difference. So it might seem like one does has no cause on the other, but I would say the Council of Trudeau, the Orthodox side, the East side, adopted a ton of novel views that the West never adopted. And I think that over time just kind of exacerbated the tension between the two sides. Then there was this question about the filioque. It's a beautiful sounding word, it's a complex question, doctrinal question uh about the Trinity and it's over the head of most people. And anyway, it it came to head over the course of hundreds of years. It's kind of a sticking point. Um, and but anyway, the East and the West didn't agree on the on the filioque. And but it was pro that was probably arguably really a proxy question for the authority question. Like, can Rome just kind of impose their view on the East when the East never agreed to this filioque thing? Okay, then we have cultural differences, right? So in the West, Rome, in the West, we've got Latin language, but in the East we've got Greek language. In the West, we've got legal thinking. In the West, we have allegorical, mystical thinking. And then there's politics. So there's different uh governments over the two during different periods of time. Uh, and so those governments may have had different interests, they kind of increased uh the division between the two halves. Why don't they just get back together? It was a long time ago. We're we're more modern now. We why don't we just get back together today? Well, the problem is they have different doctrine. 1054 was a long time ago. They've kind of drifted further apart. So to reunify one or both of them is gonna have to give. And of course, nobody wants to have to give. Then you're gonna have to tell your own people, I guess we were wrong. People are gonna have to, who are in the church, are gonna have to forsake some of their kind of sincerely held beliefs. They don't want to do that. So, anyway, there's not a lot of reunifying going on. They have meetings and they get together and they try to talk about how they want to be unified. But the fact is, there's gonna have to be some hard decisions made. And so far, people are not making those hard decisions between uh Rome and the Eastern Orthodox. The Eastern Orthodox, I think, are like the third largest religious group. You have Catholics are first, and Sunni Muslims, I believe, are second, and then Eastern Orthodox are the third largest group. And today they're they're a communion of churches. So they were still going, they're still going by this whole idea of like we have individual cities, and in those individual cities, we've got these leaders, these patriarchs, and those patriarchs are are like the church, right? So that's they're still kind of going by that. And they've got, you know, Constantinople and Alexandria and Antioch and Jerusalem. They've also got Georgia, and they've got Cyprus and Bulgaria and Serbia and Russia and Greece and Poland and Romania and Albania and the Czech Republic and Slovakia. And, you know, there's some there's some other ones that are like disputed or whatever. It gets complicated. Here's another issue we have today that makes Eastern Orthodox even more hard to understand is that the original idea was you had uh patriarchs that had jurisdiction over their region, right? And so if you started a church or, you know, the Eastern Orthodox had a church in that region, that church would have to report up to through many layers of hierarchy, up to the patriarch. Right. But then what happens when you have a bunch of churches in America? Right. So what happened was you had people come over to America, immigrate here to America, and then they're from different, you know, you got Polish and Czech and all these different people, and they want a little taste of home, right? They're a little homesick, they want a little taste of home. Part of that's their faith. So they want, you know, I want the Czech church, I want the Russia church, I want the Greek church, I want, they want their own kind of thing. Well, that doesn't really make any sense because uh America's not like under multiple jurisdictions at once. That's not the idea. The idea was you have one jurisdiction for each like geographic area. So, but here in America, we've got like all these different Eastern Orthodox churches. So that's one of the confusions we have in America, like what is going on with the Eastern Orthodox because you see all these different like churches and everything. So what happened was what started off as a regional thing got kind of mixed up with ethnicity or nationality or whatever you want to call it. And so then you have like kind of a mix here in America. And that's really not how this is supposed to work. And they know they have Eastern Orthodox, they know they've got a problem. And the thing is they get they get a lot of their donations from America, and it goes then to the other churches. So none of them want to give up their American churches. This is like the cash cow for the Eastern Orthodox, like they want to give it up, but it's really kind of wrong the way they have it set up here in America and just kind of happened over time, and now they don't really know how quite how to fix it, and so they just kind of leave it alone. Uh, but it's really not how their system is supposed to work. There's another angle if you want to just like do the hierarchy. So generally it goes like priest, bishop, metropolitan, patriarch, yes, metropolitan. That's that's what it's called, and then patriarch. Okay. And so my understanding, I believe there's like currently there's nine patriarchs uh in the Eastern Orthodox, and they also have like 11 churches or whatever that don't have a patriarch, so they go up to like an archbishop or a metropolitan. So in total, there's like 20, but nine have patriarchs. I think that's roughly the right, the right number here. Now, now they're in now, all the Eastern Orthodox churches, uh, they're all in communion with each other because they say that they agree with the doctrine. Okay. And then what they do though is they apply that doctrine to the churches in their under their kind of jurisdiction. So their application of the doctrine can change. And again, the doctrine that they have, not everything is defined in like in like the seven ecumenical councils, for example. They're not, it's not everything is defined in there. So they can have some variation from you know Greek to Cyprus or whatever. And they don't have a pope per se. What they have is a guy who is, they call him first among equals, which is kind of an interesting phrase, first among equals, and that's the patriarch of Constantinople. And so if they ever have like an event, if there's ever an event where they have to have like one guy go to represent all the Eastern Orthodox things, he's the guy, the Constantinople guy, he's the one going to represent all the all the things. Or if they have to have a one guy in a meeting, it's going to be the patriarch of Constantinople. And they're also really into their garb, by the way. So uh if you see them together, oftentimes my recollection is the patriarch of Constantinople, like his garb is like nicer than the other garb that the other people are wearing. Anyway, okay, so they hold to the seven ecumenical councils. All right, so the first one is Nicaea. That's the one that's like the most popularly one known. That was in 325 AD. That one had like 20 canons. And then you go Constantinople 1, and then you have uh Ephesus and Chalcedon, Constantinople II, Constantinople III, and then Nicaea II. That was that one was in 787 A.D. Now, in total, the number of canons from those seven ecumenical councils is about 90 canons, 90 canons from seven ecumenical councils from 325 to 787. So what is that? 450 years, 90 canons, just to give you an idea there. Now the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox will both say we hold to the seven ecumenical uh councils. They'll both say that, okay, with a straight face, 100%, they'll both say it. And and that makes it sound like they both agree with each other because they have the same councils and the same canons. But let me tell you, that is a total misrepresentation. That is not what's going on here. Um, the Eastern Orthodox hold that there is another council. I referred to it earlier, the council of Trulot. It's also called the Quintisext Council. Um, and they will say it's part of Constantinople III. The Roman Catholics they reject the Council of Trulot. The Council of Trulot is called the Quinsext Council. Quinisext. Quinisext means fifth, sixth. And this reminds me of something.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

My sister Judy got me the tickets because she loves me and she knows how much Barbara means to me. No, I'm a little the climb. Talk amongst yourself. I'll give you a topic. The Italian neorealist movement in film was neither Italian nor neo, nor particularly real. Discuss.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Right. If you don't know, that was uh Mike Myers. Uh, he's doing coffee talk with Linda Richmond. It was a hilarious segment that they had way back in the day. Linda Richmond there loved to talk about Barbara Streisand and says she's like butter. The line there that Mike Myers would use often is getting ver I'm getting verklumped. I'll give you a topic to discuss, and then would say something ridiculous like this one or another one was um the partridge family. There were neither partridges nor family discussed. But the Quintisex Council reminds me of that. The Quintisex Council was neither the fifth nor the sixth council. It doesn't make any sense. And and and that's just the beginning of the confusion that was the Quintisex Council. The whole thing is confusion. And so it's an appropriate name because it tells you you are now entering into a confusing council. It had 102 canons, and then it had a bunch of other canons that were like lesser canons. So it's like hundreds of canons that come out of this. Now, I already mentioned to you over the course of 450 years, over seven councils, the Catholics and the Orthodox, at the time it was just one church, but the Catholics in the Orthodox, East and West, they agreed to 90 canons. Then you get to the Quintus Sixth Council, and you have hundreds of canons. They passed all of these canons. This is under just Emperor Justinian, and he wanted a lot to reform a lot of things. And so he kind of brought all these Eastern Orthodox people together to pass these canons. Anyway, so they do the canons and they send them over to the Pope. The Pope is uh the patriarch, uh Bishop of Rome, Sergius I, I believe it was his name. And he looks at this and he goes, I don't think so. I don't think so. And he he says it's full of novel errors. And I have to tell you, I'm not Catholic, but I think he was correct on this one. I think he was correct. It is full of novel errors. There were a couple of other councils later that some people call ecumenical councils, other people call them pan-Orthodox, but they're not really relevant for our discussion. But I just wanted to mention that there are a couple of other councils people talk about. Okay, so back to the seven ecumenical councils. So when the Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox agree, they go, Oh, yes, we both believe in these seven ecumenical councils. Okay, well, yeah, the Eastern Orthodox are smuggling in the Council of Trulot, and they're saying, well, it's part of Constantinople. It's part of one of the Constantinople. Okay, but it's it's not, it's not. The Constantinople one ended in what year was that? 681. The Council of Trulot was in 693. It's 12 years later. 12 years later. Constantinople III is over. It's over. Anyway, and they send them over to Sergius, and Sergius goes, I don't think so. So it's not an ecumenical council, but they smuggle it in. I think it's a problem. Okay, so now what happens is the word game gets a little more confusing. The Eastern Orthodox will say, well, you know, later popes said the ones that were not wrong that they accepted those, those canons, that the canons from the Council of Trudeau, that the canons that were not wrong, that they accept those. Yeah, okay, that's not, I mean, yeah, uh, I listen to somebody who I disagree with, they say 30 things I disagree with, they say three things I agree with, and I go, well, the things I agree with, I'm okay with those. That doesn't mean I agree with the whole thing. It means I majority disagree, but I'm trying to be nice. That's all that means. I'm trying to be nice. It doesn't mean I agree with your whole speech, or in this case, the council of true love. Sergius rejected like the whole thing. And what the Eastern Orthodox will say, well, that doesn't make it not ecumenical, because they'll say uh there were other times when there was a canon here or a canon there that the Bishop of Rome would not agree with, and he would just say, Well, I don't agree with this one or whatever. So they'll say, well, him disagreeing doesn't make it not ecumenical. But here's the problem the things that the Pope would disagree with before were just minor, uh, were relatively minor. There's process questions, authority questions. It wasn't like huge doctrinal questions that were being dealt with there in the Council of True Law. I should say they're disciplinary questions that have doctrinal implications to be technical about it. But they weren't like these huge things. They were more like questions of authority. Different, but the differences in the Quintus Sex Council, these are these have huge doctrinal implications. At first, you know, first the just the number of canons, we're talking about 102 canons and then a hundreds more that are kind of like lower canons. That's not the same as like one or two. The quintess councils are often framed as, well, these are just disciplinary count canons. This is just like when somebody does this thing, here's, you know, you have to make them do penance or whatever, and here's the kind of penance you're gonna do. And so we're just, you know, it's just administrative, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They try to characterize it as just something like that. But here's here's the issue. When someone is to be excommunicated or whatever, uh, or when someone is allowed a second marriage, that that's got major doctrinal implications smuggled into a disciplinary canon. So now I will say this. There's some good news here. Um, that since they're disciplinary canons and not doctrinal statements, they're subject to change. So the Eastern Orthodox Church, I believe, I believe they could update their canons and they could like get rid of the Council of Trudeau if they ever wanted to, without tripping over their doctrinal views on tradition. And I hope they do because the council of Trudeau has got a lot of problems, frankly. You want to know that uh the hierarchy of canons. So the ecumenical council canons have the highest authority, and then the local councils, they'll have like regional councils. These are like, I don't know, a few towns get together or whatever, and or a region gets together, and then they'll have like their own council and they'll have canons, right? So those there's some of those canons uh that exist from different regions, and those are less than the ecumenical. So if there's a if there's a disagreement between a regional and an ecumenical, the ecumenical one wins. The ecumenical one is the the higher one. It's like federal law and state law, I guess. Anyway, it's the higher one wins. Okay. Or I guess state law and municipal law. Maybe that's a better analogy. Anyway, the point is the higher one wins. Um, and then after that, you get church father statements. So there's like some revered statements by church fathers. Those are important, but a regional council trumps a church father, and then an ecumenical council trumps the uh regional council. And then after ecumenical and then local, and then church father comes the customs of the local church. That's like the lowest level there. So the council of Trulo had, like I said, 102 canons. Uh, and and they they not only endorsed kind of the six ecumenical councils that had already happened, but it also you know endorsed the 85 apostolic canons, the synod of uh Neo-Caesarea, of Antioch, of of uh Laodicea, anyway, a bunch of different synods and a bunch of different councils that had happened in different places, and then also the 92 canons of Basil of Caesarea, you know, 18 canons of Timothy I of Alexandria, just a ton of other canons that it brought into uh the Council of Trudeau. I needed to distinguish the Eastern Orthodox from other traditions in the East. So there's the Church of the East, not Eastern Orthodox. There's Oriental Orthodox, not Eastern Orthodox. The Coptics, for example, are not Eastern Orthodox. And the final thing I'm going to mention here is when it comes to marriage, the Eastern Orthodox contain a mix of mystical and legal ideas. Now, everybody has a mix of mystical and legal ideas, but the Eastern Orthodox have more mysticism than. than the other. Sorry, so in our next episode, we're going to go through what does the Eastern Orthodox say about divorce and remarriage. I think it's going to surprise you.