Thursday, January 13, 2005

Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism

For my paper on the iconoclasm, I had to do a little research on Eastern Orthodoxy.
A short essay (excerpt) follows, for your enjoyable boredom:

Eastern Orthodox Christianity centers around the icon. This is a manifestation of the heavenly ideal: Christ and the saints united with a worshipping congregation. Man, being created in God’s image, carries the “icon of God” within himself.
Catholicism formed a doctrine of justification, with priests, purgatory, and indulgences. They set up a legal system involving the pope as “supreme judicator” of the physical church (and in the Middle Ages, the whole world). But in Eastern Orthodoxy there was no such thing. Instead, the emphasis was placed on the incarnation of God and the re-creation of man. Man’s sin blotted out or diminished the divine likeness and inflicted injury upon the original God-image. Christ came to earth to restore this image (or icon) of God in man. Salvation, then, was this restoration of the God-image.

While the West began to equate salvation with justification, the East saw salvation as sanctification: rebirth or re-creation, transfiguration.
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I found myself agreeing with Eastern Orthodoxy over Catholicism. Funny, the way bias works.

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Here's a Byzantine church--the San Vitale, in Ravenna: It's a beautiful old Byzantine church, built around 538 AD.

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