What is the Orthodox Church?

Answer 1

An Orthodox Church is a Church that is not under the authority of the Pope, but, still has Apostolic Succession. Like the Catholic Church, they trace their origins to the very beginnings of Christianity.

Answer 2

Orthodox can have two meanings. One being to do with Doctrinal Correctness, and the other referring to A group of quasi-National churches divided on the basis of nations, states and rites all loosely affiliated under various patriarchs.

Orthodox in the doctrinal sense simply means that a church teaches correct doctrine, in this case, for example, if you are a member of the Southern Baptist convention or something along those lines, and you were going to go to another southern baptist church which taught the same things as yours did, you would be able to say that that church is an "orthodox" church as opposed to the mennonite church down the road which might teach docrtines which are incompatible with yours and thus be "Heterodox."

The Orthodox church as an organisation however is classified as a liturgical church with ordained ministers, and accepting 7 sacraments. thse are divided into various national groups such as the Greek orthodox church, the Coptic Orthodox church, etc. All of them having the 7 sacraments and holy orders in common, as well as the rejection of the pope as the head of the church. They also share a common doctrine on the holy trinity, namley the rejection of the 'filioque' clause of the constantinopolitan-nicean creed. This being the statement in the creed that the holy spirit proceeds from the Father 'And the Son'. So instead of the trinity appearing as an equilateral triangle with each proceeding fromt he other, both the son and the spirit proceed form the Father.

Answer

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orthodox church

Orthodox church the eastern orthodox church dating from earliest Christian times has its centre at Constantinople (Istanbul), the residence of the ecumenical patriarch, who has primacy of honour over much of the 'intricate tapestry' of the Christian East, including the Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars, Georgians, and Russians. In 1995 there were c.190 million adherents world-wide. British contacts with orthodoxy began with 16th-cent. merchants and Peter the Great's visit to England (1698). Since the 1950s orthodoxy has flourished in England with c.287, 000 members (1995).

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Orthodox Churches are among the oldest Christian groups in existence. Originating in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, they have held tenaciously to the classical theological definitions of the first seven ecumenical councils, held between A.D. 325 and 787. The major work of these councils consisted of defining the doctrines of the Trinity and the two natures in Christ, and in determining the possibility of representing Christ in an image or icon. Eastern Orthodox churches see their bishops as symbols of the unity of the church but do not recognize any single bishop as having authority over all the churches.

The eastern branch of Christianity began to separate from the western branch shortly after the fall of Rome in the fifth century. While early Western theology developed along eschatological (doctrines dealing with death, resurrection, and judgment) and moral lines, reflecting the influence of aristotleand Augustine, the theology of the East moved in a mystical direction. The schism came during a ninth-century dispute between Pope Nicholas I and photius, archbishop of Constantinople. Nicholas refused to recognize the election of Photius and excommunicated him (A.D. 863). After further disagreements over the interpretation of the nicene-creed, in 1054 mutual anathemas (condemnation, excommunication) were pronounced, further deepening-meteorologythe split. These anathemas were rescinded (abolished) in 1965 by Pope Paul IV and Patriarch Athenagoras.

The tenth century was the great age of the expansion of Orthodoxy into Eastern Europe-for which saints saint-cyrilprepared the way by translating both the Orthodox scriptures and liturgical books into the Slavic language in the previous century. In 988, the spread of Orthodoxy was completed when the Russians entered the Byzantine ecclesiastical fold. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, Moscow became the chief protector of the Orthodox faith. As the nations of Eastern Europe became independent in the nineteenth century, their churches also became independent national churches with full rights of self-government.

Although the first American Orthodox churches were the nineteenth-century Russian missions in Alaska, Orthodoxy in the United States grew most rapidly during the heavy Immigration from Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The American history of these churches has been a story of division and controversy, as Old World issues have been perpetuated. Since the mid-twentieth century, there have been signs that this period of controversy is drawing to a close. The patriarch of Moscow healed some of the schisms among the American Russian Orthodox church in 1970 and declared the American church to be autocephalous(self-governing); since then, the various Greek churches, now organized as the Orthodox Church in America, have moved toward a greater degree of unity and centralization. Many of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the United States have been active in the ecumenical movement and have joined both the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. During the early 1980s and 1990s, the American church refocused its efforts on coping with the growth of its membership and, by the year 2000, numbered more than one million. Meanwhile, as church leaders in Constantinople, Moscow, and Serbia established new ties with the Orthodox Church in America, the concept of a global mission emerged as a central unifying theme. In the late 1990s, the church organized a number of humanitarian efforts in the war-ravaged former Yugoslavia and the Caucasus region of Russia.

- UPDATE -

The Orthodox Church is the church that was founded by Jesus Christ himself in 33AD and remains unchanged over 2,000 years later. All other Christian churches have come out of the Orthodox Church starting with the Oriental Orthodox Church in 451 and the Roman Catholic Church in 1054AD.

Answer 3

• Orthodox is one of the denominations of Christianity.
• it means conforming to the Christian faith as represented in the creeds of the early church.
• Specifically, certain denominations call themselves Orthodox, such as the Greek Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox.
• Orthodox also refers, in Judaism, to those who practice Judaism in full.

Answer 4

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