"Apologies for butting in univited (or is it 'unpingend?')."
Yeah, like that would stop you! :)
"Kolo, Protestant revolt was directed, initially, at corrupt practices of a powerful Church in the West, and not at its theology. The aim was to reform the practices and not the Church."
That was my point. I apparently was inartful in the way I presented it.
"When the East was the seat of Imperial power, during the last five centuries of the 1st millennium, corruption and — indeed the worst heresies — came out of it."
And they were crushed.
"It was +John Chrysostom who, as the Bishop of Imperial Constantinople, initiated first reforms with regard to the arrogance, lack of modesty and privileges practiced by the clergy and the laity. He made enemies with the highest echelons of the Imperial Court when he corrected the Empress for her bejeweled appearances in the church."
Not simply of the clergy and laity, but of the hierarchy also. "The floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops". But none of this lead to anything like the Protestant Reformation or its aftermath. I propose that it didn't because of the ecclesiology of The Church in the East.
"When the Lutheran divines approached Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremiah II, hoping to find allies in the Eastern Church, he rebuked them — three times — not over their revolt against corrupt practices of the clergy, but over their corrupt theology."
I agree wholeheartedly. But this theology came about, I think it can be argued, as a justification ex post facto of the revolt itself and the reaction of the Latin Church to that revolt.
Thanks to whom? To Rome. Once the Church split along the east-west fault line, there was no balance. The Latin Church became the hyper-Church and the Greek Church became a pauper and a virtual prisoner of the Ottoman Empire.
The checks and balances were gone, no one to oppose, no one to account to. Five centuries later, it reached the critical mass and exploded.
I'm about a third way through - covering the six elements of development - Orthodox Spirituality by a monk of the Eastern Church. It's more modern, 1945, than I expected. So it's more encompassing.
It is quite a remarkable framework for pulling things together - the smatterings of this and that that I've been reading. It also makes me feel quite ignorant.
I was happy to see that my observations thus far agreed with: "There is no chasm between Eastern and Western Christianity. The fundamental principles of Christian spirituality are the same in the East and in the West; the methods very often alike; the differences do not bear on the chief points. On the whole, there is one Christian spirituality with, here and there, some variations of stress and emphasis."
Happy to see this partly because it means that while I am a rank amateur, I don't start from scratch in learning from the East.
This short tome and the link from Kosta to The Mystery of Faith are extremely valuable in combining clarity and breadth. Thanks to you both.
I'm also reading and recommending "The Art of Prayer - an Orthodox Anthology" compiled by Igumen Chariton of Valamo; and, for pure fun, a book of Tolstoy's tales.
One day soon, maybe I'll wake up and understand Greek. Thus far all I've managed is Texan with a Slavic accent.
The core Protestant theological error: Sola Fide and Sola Scriptura -- are a direct response to the rhetorical need to eliminate the Church from Christian practice. At every corner, the Reformers looked at what priests are doing, and invented a theology to bypass the priest.