Ok, I will go ahead and attempt a more serious response to this.
I appreciate the effort but your post shows many misunderstandings of what I’m saying and what the Catholic Church teaches about the church fathers and development of doctrine. It is becoming more apparent as time passes by that almost every major hangup you have with the CC is based on some strawman.
I imagine most Orthodox have no issue with Catholics participating in Adoration outside the Liturgy or worshipping the Sacred Heart since these are later Roman Catholic devotions, and Catholics are obviously free to do as they wish.
I wish this were the case but from past experience and this is confirmed by other Catholics who also interact with many EO across many platforms, this simply does not reflect reality even on this board. EO are hostile to even Eucharistic adoration and it’s very much not uncommon. The basic argument being that the Eucharist is meant for liturgy and not for anything else, like worship in Eucharistic adoration.
Having said that, we as Orthodox also adore Christ in the Eucharist during the Liturgy and worship the whole Christ. The issue is with your claim that without incorporating these later Catholic devotions, our Eucharistic theology has somehow become defective.
This is not my claim. My issue is that EO are hostile to these practices done by Latins when they shouldn’t be. That’s what makes their theology defective. The objection is the issue not the lack of incorporation.
When have I ever asked the EO to adopt these practices? Please quote me as justification for your claim about me.
I have never.
Tell me, was the theology of the Church of Rome in the first millennium "defective and infantile"? Because that is the implication.
This is all based on your above strawman understanding of my position
And herein lies the problem with the Catholic concept of "development", which believes that the early Church and the Fathers held a "primitive" theology (which the scholastics later improved upon), and that each succeeding age of the Church and each living magisterium
improves and develops a superior theology and understanding of the Faith than that which came before.
Whether you want to admit this or not, the way the church in general understood the Holy Trinity, Hypostatic Union and it’s follow on implications on the Wills of Christ for example was significantly superior to the prior ages before those controversies.
It is absolutely ridiculous to consider as a possibility that the pre-Nicene church had a general understanding of the Trinity as did the post-Nicene and post-Constantinopolitan church after the Arian controversy. In fact this point is proven by the simple truth of how the ante-Nicene church authorities such as Origen were seen as orthodox in their theology of the 3 persons mostly, but later in the post-Nicene period their teachings even on the Trinity (outside of other controversial points) were seen with great suspicion and even heresy.
It’s the reason why Theodore of Mopsuestia and his works were left untouched by the Council of Ephesus and why Ibas’ letter was deemed okay by the council of Chalcedon but both later condemned by the church at the 5th council. it’s also why some of Origens teachings were also condemned at the 5th council yet had been left untouched and taught openly for centuries prior to the 5th council.
In the spirit of brutal honesty, there is no way that the early church before the councils understood any of the dogmas we now consider standard orthodoxy in the same way and depth as we do now. If this were not true, there would have never been an Arian, Monophysite, Nestorian nor Monothelite controversy as the church and everyone in it would have known that such teachings were false because everyone would have already been Trinitarian, Dyophysite and Dyothelite. Yet the opposite proved to be true; as these errors did not just the rise but even became a popular opinion amongst most of the churchmen in their day. No matter how much we are devout in our Christian Faith, it is simply ahistorical to believe that doctrine didn’t develop in a way that the church in subsequent centuries, based on the foundations of prior centuries, acquired a depth in understanding that those preceding centuries did not have.
The Church has always contained the fullness of truth even from her first moment. Yet, this was akin to the early church having a seed (the fullness of Faith in its most basic form) that contained all that would become a tree ( the later dogmas declared by the church). As time passes by it actually develops and grows into a tree. What was once implicit and implied became explicit and known. Where once in prior ages the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit were vaguely understood, allowing for all kinds of errors to flourish in this ambiguity and uncertainty without much objection, these same dogmas in later ages became solidified and precisely understood to the point where no room for error exitsted or if error did creep up it would be easily identified and rejected.
The tragedy being that this whole erroneous concept of development is the very root of the spread of modernism and the crisis within Catholicism.
Modernism has nothing to with development but has everything with rejection of prior teaching. It’s why modernists pretend that everything prior to the modern age is irrelevant and sometimes unbinding despite conciliar and papal definitions pinned with anathemas. Nevermind that every church has been infected with modernism to varying degrees and in different forms. As St Pius X said, modernism is the synthesis of all heresies.
The Orthodox Church believes that the Faith was understood the most clearly by the Apostles, who received it directly from Christ Himself and by direct revelation and illumination of the Holy Spirit. After them the holy Fathers received their Apostolic teaching and fleshed out the dogmas of the Faith through the Councils
That is literally doctrinal development but with a mystical and poetic spin put on it so as to hide what it really is.
t what has been handed down and understood "at all times, everywhere, and by all." (St. Vincent).
St Vincent more truly is understood in that saying by the analogy of the seed and the tree. The simple fact is the church as whole did not
explicitly believe in dyothelitism until after the 6th council and anybody who thinks otherwise is honestly stuck in a romanticized version of church history that doesn’t bare out to the facts available to us. This romanticism does more harm for the Christian witness than good. The only way Church has always believed the same faith is implicit belief that by confessing Jesus Christ as the Son of God, to the best and limits of your understanding, you believe implicitly all the logical implications that follow from that confession.
Post-Schism Catholicism takes pains to constantly update and add to what has been revealed, as if it is in need of improvement. Before you know it you have a Popes who believe they are living oracles of the Faith, able to singularly declare dogmas about their own office, or radically alter the liturgy at will, etc.
This is simply a strawman not worth a reply
