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To: sionnsar
We Anglicans are now witnessing first-hand the disintegration of a world-wide communion partially because of the absence of a divinely instituted organ of central authority. In the first millenium the Church employed the Ecumenical Council to serve as this final authority; but for the past thirteen centuries Orthodoxy has been unable to convene such a council. Is it a matter of logistics, or is the matter perhaps more serious, a question of constitutional impotence?

And yet even without one conviened the Orthodox Church has survived 4 times as long since the last Ecomunical Council then the Anglicans as a whole. Conservatism vs the spirit of the day has prevailed and will continue to do just that until the Second Coming.

78 posted on 06/13/2005 9:34:20 AM PDT by jb6 ( Free Haggai Sophia! Crusade!)
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To: jb6; sionnsar

jb6 picked up on something that I chose not to address with my initial post. It is not really true that the Orthodox Church hasn't convened ecumenical councils -- they just haven't called them that, presumably out of the same motivation that the Orthodox Church has never made a bishop of Rome and called him the Patriarch of Rome.

Fr. John Romanides makes a strong case for other councils that meet criteria for being Ecumenical in the Orthodox Church. Whatever one calls them, they are quite reliable expressions of the mind of the Church.

The Anglican author in question seems to be quite influenced by Vatican II. It is rarely talked about that Vatican II was an unusual council in that it really had no pressing dogmatic issues, but seems to have purely pastoral in nature.

From an Orthodox perspective, my question to those who would criticize the Orthodox for not convening ecumenical councils -- what heresy or heresies should these councils have been called to address? Calling an ecumenical council just to prove that one can do it is a bit like having a Pope make an infallible declaration ex cathedra on something that all Catholics believe anyway -- just to demonstrate that he can do it...


83 posted on 06/13/2005 11:36:44 AM PDT by Agrarian
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