"What was there from the very beginning? Did the Apostles have "faith" in the exact details as expressed by the ecumenical councils? That would be pressing pretty hard, wouldn't it?"
No, it would hardly be pressing it hard at all. I don't think that any Orthodox Christian would have any doubt that were the Apostles to have been faced with Nestorianism, Arianism, or Monophysitism, that they would have rejected them, and in response articulated essentially what the Ecumenical Councils did in their response.
"Did they have an implicit and intuitive faith but not as detailed as expressed in the creeds? That would seem more likely, would'nt it?"
Yes, that is exactly what I believe I stated when I disagreed with the idea that "a belief articulated with precision for the first time is a belief that has only newly sprung into being."
"If you want to press that the Apostles had the exact same knowledge as expressed by the creeds then Kosta's pushing the envelope that the OT patriarchs and prophets possessed a different faith is logically consistent with that prior proposition."
Kosta will have to explain and defend what he means with regard to the OT patriarchs and prophets. My understanding of the Church's teaching in that regard is of a piece with what I said about the Apostles. In the case of the Patriarchs and Prophets, the teaching of the Church seems clear that while they probably held such beliefs only "implicitly and intuitively" to use your terminology, they would indeed have recognized Christ as the Messiah and acknowledged him as God.
This is really not just a theoretical proposition, either. St. John the Baptist was the last of the OT prophets, and he recognized Christ. The Apostle Nathaniel "a true Israelite, in whom there is no guile" recognized Christ. On Mount Tabor, Moses and Elijah appeared with Christ, and spoke to him concerning his coming passion. They clearly recognized Christ as being God, and in their persons, all of the law and prophets were encapsulated.
And within Orthodox theology, they specifically did have the chance to encounter Christ in Hades and recognize him as God -- and they did. It is inconsistent with Orthodox teaching in general about the afterlife to believe that the Prophets and Patriarchs would have responded to Christ differently in Hades than they would have had they encountered him on earth while they were alive. There are few OT references to the Messiah as God, but they are there, and I believe that they reflect an "implicit and intuitive" understanding of devout Hebrews prior to the time of Christ.
I believe that it was St. Augustine who said something to the effect that the New Testament is within the Old Testament concealed -- and that the Old Testament is in the New Testament revealed.
"I really don't see the need to compress all knowledge into one historical situatedness. It seemed implicit in your posts that you seem to believe that the knowledge of the OT patriarchs and prophets was not an exhaustive knowledge of the exact persons and events to come but enough of a implicit faith and so then the question becomes why then would knowledge end?"
I'm not sure what your question means, or what exactly you are asking. Perhaps at root is the question of what constitutes knowledge. In one sense, there is no-one with a greater knowledge of Christ than those of the Apostolic era -- they walked and talked with God in the flesh, and they were there for the great outpourings of the Holy Spirit. Their knowledge of Christ can hardly be exceeded -- certainly at the heart of our reverence for the Theotokos was that she, bearing God in her womb, knew God more intimately than anyone else before or since possibly could. They set a standard for knowing Christ, and it is for that reason that New Testament Scripture is restricted to writings of Apostolic origin.
Articulation of theological formulations is not the same thing as knowledge. One can mouth precise statements of dogmatic truth and not know God at all. No-one is claiming that the Apostles were going around in the 1st century preaching the specific terminology of Ephesus or Chalcedon or the Cappadocian Fathers. We are saying, though, that the body of faith was intact from the beginning because the knowledge of Christ was intact from the beginning.
"Again, your terminology tries to force faith and knowledge as exactly the same thing. The Reformation faith is "exactly" like the Apostles faith in the substitutionary atonement of Christ. However, our "formulations" are more precise because knowledge is not static. To deny the Church grows in understanding is to deny the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit to "blow where he may". Faith seeking understanding. Nothing wrong with that, is there?"
No, I'm afraid that it was you who were forcing faith and knowledge into being the same thing, when you asked Kosta the rhetorical question about whether the Apostles held the faith of the Ecumenical Councils. Your own implied answer was that they did not. The only possible explanation for such an answer would be that since the Ecumenical Councils used specific doctrinal definitions, terminology, and formulations for the first time, that the Apostles couldn't possibly have held the same beliefs as the Orthodox Church of, say, the 4th or the 8th century.
My point was that if you are going to consider patristic teachings to be innovations on the basis that they are supposedly not Scriptural because they make use of certain philosophical terms that are not used in the Bible in exactly the same way, or not at all -- then one must certainly apply that same standard to the Reformers, who were pretty obvious creatures of their own time and philosophical milieu...
If you are going to accept the teachings of the Reformers in spite of the fact that their specific formulations are found neither in the Scriptures nor in the writings of the early Church -- then there is no rational reason to reject the writings of the Fathers whose faith stands directly in the line of our Orthodox tradition.
What the Orthodox Church essentially teaches is that the Apostles passed on their faith, their body of knowledge, their understanding, and their praxis to their followers, and they passed it on to subsequent generations without interruption. In response to heresies and challenges and through the working of the Holy Spirit, all of this became more precisely developed -- without changing. The combination of that preservation of the deposit of the faith and the action of the Holy Spirit yields the very "precise" (to use your term) beliefs and practices of the Orthodox Church today.
What Protestantism teaches is that the Apostles failed utterly in passing on the deposit of faith, since their bones were hardly cold in the grave before the faith began to be lost and perverted. According to this view, St. Augustine had some bits of understanding in spite of being part of a very lost Church but was a lonely island. Only in the 16th century did someone finally start to get it all right and put it all together correctly by reading properly for the first time the Greek texts of Scripture that had been passed down in the Orthodox Church...
The question that must be asked is which form of "growing with understanding" is a more likely path for the faith of the Apostles to take?
Agrarian says that there are many OT references to Messiah as God. In most cases, when God is referred to as the "Savior" it relates to His brining Israel out of Egypt or physically saving Jewish people and cities from wrath. As a Redeemer, He is referred to in terms of having mercy on fickle Israel, but nothing even close to what Christ preached in the Gospels.
If there is a seamless connection between the two Testaments, showing one and the same faith, I leave it up to experts to demonstrate, which I have yet to see. We speak of Catholics having a different faith than the Orthodox, yet I would say our the Orthodox have more in common even with Calvinism than the New Testament has with the Old Testament.
Again, I hear over and over that the Judaism at the time when Christ walked on earth was "different" from the rabbinical post-Jamnia Judaism, yet I see no proof or specifics to defend such an assertion.
What we are asserting is that only those who followed Christ were real Jews, as we, followers of Christ, are "real" Israel. We also assert that all the Patriarchs believed exactly what we believe, yet their only problem with Israel was that the Jews kept reverting to worshiping idols.
If they had the same faith, why were the Patriarch and Prophets in Hell when Christ descended there? They were righteous, yet they were condemned!
Needless to say, there is an extraordinary amount of "stretching" that is required to make the two Testaments become "seamless."