Ancestral/Original Sin

A florilegium collected by Eric Lozano and originally published here. Used with permission.

“For what is sin? Could a child who has only just been born commit a sin? And yet he has sin for which it is commanded to offer a sacrifice. For this reason the Church received from the Apostles the tradition to administer baptism to the children also. For the men to whom the secrets of divine mysteries had been entrusted knew that in everyone there were genuine sinful defilements, which had to be washed away with water and the Spirit.”

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Inherited Guilt in Ss. Augustine and Cyril

© Alexis Torrance and Dylan Pahman, ed., Treasures Old and New: Themes in Orthodox Theology in Memory of Fr. Matthew Baker (Jordanville: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, forthcoming).

Introduction: “Why can it be so hard to see the face of Christ in [historical] scholarship? Perhaps we forget how that face was beaten, spat upon, and crowned with thorns for our salvation and fail to recognize it before our eyes. Or perhaps, more likely, the problem is that the image in us and the scholarship we produce is obscured by the overgrowth of our sin and corruption. As the chanters pray in the person of Adam during memorials for the dead, ‘I am an image of Your ineffable glory, though I bear the scars of my transgressions.’ Whether studies of texts new or old, the contributions to this volume sift through the dragnet of history and human thought, endeavoring to sort the good from the bad. This even applies, as is the custom of the Fr. Georges Florovsky Orthodox Christian Theological Society, to the works of Florovsky himself. And so it does, far too soon, to the works of Fr. Matthew Baker.” Continue reading “Inherited Guilt in Ss. Augustine and Cyril”

Theological Aesthetics East and West: The Reception of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II)

By Sarah H. Begley (ThM Thesis)

“A world in need of redemption is a world in which vision of God is not an optional extra. . . Art, faith, theology and doing good can provide paths to such glimpses of the transcendent.”
– G. Thiessan, Theological Aesthetics Continue reading “Theological Aesthetics East and West: The Reception of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II)”

The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus: Taken From Paraliturdical Devotions of the Western Church and Their Role in Orthodoxy 1992

The devotion to the Sacred Heart also is rooted in intuitions of the early Church and even in the Old Testament. Fundamentally, it is a recollection of the sacrificial love of Christ as witnessed in His Incarnation, passion, and death. It includes also, the fullness of Divine love for mankind which is evidenced throughout the history of our race and is fulfilled in Christ’s act for the salvation of man.

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A Condensed History of the Orthodox Western Rite

Any history of the Western Rite movement of the Orthodox Church should properly begin with Saints Cyril and Methodius, who operated during the ninth century in Moravia and Dalmatia. With the blessing of Pope Adrian II, later confirmed by Pope John VIII, these saintly brothers offered the Roman Mass in the vernacular to the people they were evangelizing. When offering the Roman Liturgy, they employed what is sometimes called “The Liturgy of St Gregory,” whose liturgical forms were set by the 6th century and codified by Pope St Gregory the Great (known as Dialogus). Continue reading “A Condensed History of the Orthodox Western Rite”

A Reasonable Philosophy for the Western Rite

“Congregations and parishes, or larger administrative units, may be received…and be permitted to retain and use all such Western liturgical rites, devotional practices and customs that are not contrary to the Orthodox faith and are logically derived from a Western usage antedating the Papal schism of the eleventh century.” This is from the 1958 Western Rite edict of Metropolitan Antony of the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America. Continue reading “A Reasonable Philosophy for the Western Rite”

Bishop Basil Comments on the Western Rite

My observations begin with my own experience with Western Rite. Some of you who have known me since I’ve been consecrated have heard this confession before. Before I was thoroughly exposed to the Western Rite by attending services, I was very leery. I knew that philosophically and historically it was legitimate. But I couldn’t believe that it could be authentic. And that was because I hadn’t experienced it. So the confession is that you have a convert here.

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Orthodox and Catholics in the Seventeenth Century: Schism or Intercommunion?

EVENT OR PROCESS?

For use on the first Sunday in Lent, the service books of the Greek Orthodox Church include a special office known as ‘The Synodikon of Orthodoxy’, which contains no less than sixty anathemas against different heresies and heresiarchs.1 Yet in this comprehensive denunciation there is one unexpected omission: no reference is made to the errors of the Latins, no allusion to the Filioque or the papal claims, even though more than a third of the anathemas date from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, a time when doctrinal disagreements between East and West had emerged clearly into the open.

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