15 June 2023
As some random nobody writing about this stuff, I can offer one advantage: I'm just fine with you deciding to choose the Catholic, Orthodox, any other church, or none at all. All I'm doing here is outlining my own take on things, and it might help you make up your own mind. Building your faith and sense of conviction is my mission.
One of the biggest hurdles in trying to understand Church History in general, and the Great Schism in particular, is that the differences are deep and not easily explained. In order to really understand either Latin or Greek orthodoxy, you have to be a part of one or the other. Both tend to take themselves and their positions too seriously, and bristle at characterizations from the other side or from the outside. I note in passing that the Orthodox writers in particular tend to be excessively wordy. It's hard to get a concise and objective explanation; too few people who know about either church can offer an explanation that outsiders can easily grasp.
Here's the problem: Neither Catholic nor Orthodox trust the Holy Spirit to convict you that they are on the right track. Worse, they assume you cannot get to God without coming through them. You have to come to them first before God does anything with you. This brings us back to a fundamental flaw in Church History itself as an academic discipline: The people involved are obsessed with the human outcomes. Both sides of the Latin-Orthodox conflict have a political interest in what any seeker chooses. They cannot imagine that God would lead anyone outside of their politicized religious control.
They are the "true church" and nobody else can possibly be hearing from Jesus.
The fatal flaw of the generation of Christian scholars who followed John was the growing insistence that the gospel message be taken seriously on a human level. The loss of biblical mysticism meant they brought into their religion a very human concern for the mechanism of their witness. This was the birth of Decision Theology, where everyone conveniently forgets how the New Testament keeps talking about God calling only a certain limited number of people to salvation. The later generations believed the gospel must be put within reach of every human mind, and the notion that redemption was fundamentally a miracle was one of the first casualties left lying on the field of battle. The task of evangelism was to herd people into the church.
This is a fundamental shift away from Jesus and His parables, which specifically aimed to filter out those who were focused on a human solution to their problems. There was among the Early Church Fathers an insistence on demystifying things that are supposed to be a mystery. I don't recall reading how the Early Church Fathers stated this directly, but I do recall seeing it manifested in how they proposed Christians should act.
Further, there was a growing emphasis on being taken seriously by those outside the churches. It was not solely an accommodation of the worldly system, but was partly in trying to get their church system recognized as a valid option by the world. It seems that they were taking the common persecution personally.
This is what you really need to understand in order to make sense of the early debates and accusations of heresy. They were determined to have a unified front, not of the mystical kind, but of a kind very easy for the world to understand. As they strove harder and harder to define the gospel message in Greek language, they fell prey to the intellectual assumptions behind that language. The ambition for semantic precision is frankly contrary to what Jesus taught. More than once He picked on that specific thing. And here we see the second generation of church scholarship wrapped up in it.
The bulk of early church controversies can be summed up as semantic battles over questions no one should have been asking in the first place. It was less about faith and more of a cerebral exercise. The creativity in varying efforts to nail something down verbally got on the nerves of those who felt it was their job to keep the churches on the same sheet of music. When some brilliant mind demanded a little more intellectual specificity on some statement of faith, it caused other brilliant minds to react with their own preferred answer.
It seems none of them understood they were delving into things for which human minds are incompetent. And yet, they insisted on having a human answer, instead of keeping things within the realm of parables. Ultimate truth cannot be put into words, least of all the Greek language, which is alien to the mystical approach of the Bible. The rise of the use of Latin in some areas didn't solve this problem; Latin has its own hostility to Hebrew mysticism.
At any rate, feel free to look up early church controversies. They are numerous and some are very complicated. If you ask me, Infogalactic may offer better scholarship than Wikipedia, but both do a fair job of outlining the questions themselves. More to the point, Wikipedia is simply bigger and covers more bits and pieces. However, both are biased in their own ways, so be skeptical of any online source, including me.
If you search for "early church heresies" you'll get this from Wikipedia and this from Infogalactic.
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