Eastern Orthodox Christianity arose out of the Great Schism of 1054. Its roots in mystical thinking, imagistic worship, and the Church Fathers continue to shape the Eastern Orthodox Christians that exist today. As we shall see, their organization of community and beliefs regarding sin and salvation differ from those of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches.
The Eastern Orthodox Church comprises of regional groups such as the Russian or Bulgarian Orthodox Churches and the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. Contrary to the Roman Catholic Church, which centralizes its leadership on a single person—the Pope, and his group of cardinals—the Orthodox Church decentralizes its community. It organizes around these regional or local groups instead of deriving from a singular head. Likewise, Protestants, who attribute priority to the individual believer and consist of fragmented denominations, differ from the Orthodox. The former organize under a principle opposite of the Catholic Church, pitting the Eastern Orthodox somewhere in between, as its organization centers neither on a singular authority nor on every individual.
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"Eastern Orthodox Christianity".
The beliefs of sin and salvation differ for the Orthodox from other churches by way of emphasis rather than essence. For example, the Orthodox view sin primarily as a distortion of the human’s imaging of God. As bearers of God’s likeness, humans originally lived in communion with God and displayed his image to the rest of creation. With sin, however, humans broke communion with God and thus defame his image. Protestants and Catholics also hold to this perspective regarding sin, but they emphasize a different aspect. They claim that humans broke God’s law and thus fail to fulfill his commands since the first sin of Adam and Eve. While they believe that humans do bear God’s image and live in severed communion with God, the primary problem of sin is legal.
This distinction carries into salvation. For the Orthodox, salvation consists in restoring the divine image in man through reunion with God. Humans aim for that original communion, which theologians term deification. Protestants and Catholics on the other hand view salvation as legal, where the guilt imposed by breaking God’s law is cleared and the original wrong is now righted. This entails a restoration of communion and image, but emphasizes salvation’s legal aspect.
The differences between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Protestant or Roman Catholic forms appear in their organization and beliefs. While they all differ in organization, from singularly-centralized to individualistic to regional communities, the Eastern Church lands in the middle of the bunch. In terms of beliefs, sin and salvation do not constitute an essential difference between Orthodox Christianity and the doctrine of others. Rather, the differences in belief reveal a difference in emphasis, as each group includes the elements of the other with their own foci.
- “Eastern Orthodox.” ReligionFacts: Just the facts on religion. Web. 26 March 2014. http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/denominations/orthodoxy.htm
