The Dogmatic Position of the Mother of God.

The dogma of the incarnation of the divine Logos is closely linked with the dogma of the Virgin Mary as “Mother of God” and “God-bearer.” Again, the cult of the Mother of God did not develop out of theory; rather, the doctrine itself reflects only the extraordinary importance that veneration of the Mother of God early acquired in the liturgy, in the devotions of the Christian communities, and in the personal worship of Orthodox believers.

This birth of the cult of the Virgin Mary as “Godbearer” — theotуkos — is one of the most amazing processes in the history of the primitive Church. The New Testament would seem to offer little stimulus for such a development. Mary appears in all four Gospels as playing only the most subsidiary of roles. It is disclosed that Jesus encountered considerable opposition from his family when he began to preach the kingdom of God. According to the. Gospel of Mark, his family were so little convinced of his mission that they thought him insane (Mark 3:21). Mary does appear twice, without mention of her name, as the mother of Jesus.

The concept of Jesus Christ as the Son of God was early paralleled by a tendency in Christian communities to accord the Mother of God's Son a special position within the Church. There are hesitant intimations of this in the New Testament. Only Matthew and Luke mention the virgin birth. Nevertheless, the idea of the virgin birth entered into the creeds of all Christendom and became one of the strongest motifs in the liturgy and worship of the early Church.

Veneration of the Mother of God took a tremendous leap from the moment Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Empire and the pagan masses began pouring into the Church.

In Egypt the veneration of Mary began very early. Origen, the Alexandrian Father of the Church, employed the term theotуkos — God-bearer-in the third century. The Council of Ephesus gave its sanction to this title. The second Council of Constantinople added the epithet “everlasting Virgin.” The prayers and hymns of the Orthodox Church invoke the name of the Mother of God as often as the names of Christ and the Holy Trinity. A good example of such homage is found in the Eucharistic liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, at the conclusion of the great intercessory prayer: “Truly worthy is it to praise Thee, Godbearer, eternally blessed and perfectly irreproachable Mother of our God, who art more worthy of honor than the cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the seraphim, who, intact, hast borne the Divine Logos — Thee, the true Mother of God, we praise.”

Among the innumerable hymns in honor of the Mother of God in which her cosmic aspect is also touched upon, we shall quote only the hymn of the shepherds from the morning service of Akathistos Saturday:

Joy to Thee, Warrant of them who crave rest. Joy to Thee, Prelude of the wonder of Christ.

R udolf Sohm, the well-known historian of Church law, came forth with the highly controversial thesis that the elaboration of canon law was the downfall of the early Church. The primitive Christian community had lived in a fellowship of love that sprang from experiencing the direct presence of the Holy Spirit, he said. With the development of canon law, the free, spontaneous operation of the Holy Spirit in the Church was repressed, and the inspired leadership was replaced by an elected, office-holding bureaucracy.

Seductive though it is, this idea of Sohm's cannot be sustained. The primitive Church was also ruled by law, for even the earliest communities wished to be guided by the apostles' instructions. The pastoral epistles of Paul virtually established the constitution of the Church. Moreover, the authority of the Holy Spirit transformed the inspired commands of the prophets within the Church into statutes of permanent validity. Spirit and law were not opposites; spiritual holiness created Sacred Law; the authority of the one upheld the authority of the other.

Simple logic also casts some discredit on this theory. We cannot imagine a church operating effectively by inner light alone. A historical community like the Christian Church, charged with the duty of making converts on a massive scale, could scarcely have functioned without a fixed legal organization.

T he problem of heresy was a further reason for the Church to set up fixed standards. Gnosticism and the religions of late antiquity had a powerful influence upon Christian theology and resulted in a great variety of interpretations of the Christian gospel. These pagan ideas were all the more insidious because their proponents likewise claimed divine inspiration or adduced revelations of the resurrected Christ. The Church set up three bulwarks against the flood of “pneumatic” prophetic and visionary notions, and against the tide of pagan syncretism. These three bulwarks were the canon of the New Testament, the Creed, and the apostolic succession of bishops. All three rested upon a common foundation: the idea of “apostolicity.”

The official New Testament as we know it today was not so much a collection of existing writings, as a selection from them. The first few centuries of the Christian era were astonishingly productive of sacred writings: gospels, apocalypses and other prophetic works, and epistles. Gnosticism and pagan-Christian syncretism were responsible for much of this literary output. Out of the wealth of available material the Church eliminated everything that did not fully accord with the apostolic tradition. The “apostolicity” of these writings was the criterion of selection.

The Orthodox Church has kept this fact in mind. It has never forgotten that the Church created the New Testament books. This is one of the essential differences between the Orthodox Church and the Reformed churches, for the latter regard Scripture as the ultimate criterion and authority for the Church and ecclesiastical dogma. The Orthodox Church knows that the Christian Church is older than the New Testament, that it existed for many decades without the New Testament scriptures. Its tradition is older than Scripture, in fact is the source of Scripture itself. Hence the importance of the apostolic tradition to the Eastern Church. Holy Scripture is regarded as only a special form of the apostolic tradition, namely, that form which has been fixed in writing.

A second, highly condensed summary of the beliefs of the Church, at first oral and later written, likewise arose out of the apostolic tradition. This was the apostolic Creed. It, too, was constructed to fend off Gnostic and syncretistic interpretations of the Christian truths. The most important root of the Creed was the liturgy, especially the baptismal liturgy. From the epistles of Paul and the pastoral letters we can see that even in the oldest communities the Christian evangel had coalesced into specific didactic formulas, used especially in conjunction with the Eucharist, but also included in the sacrament of baptism. The briefest of these didactic formulas was the profession of faith made at baptism; its wording was at first kept secret and imparted to the candidate only at the baptism itself.

In the early days of the Eastern Church there were a large number of these creeds, embodying the needs of each of the Christian communities. The decree of the Council of Nicaea in 325 for the first time set up a uniform creed. In 381, at the end of half a century of disputes over the interpretation of this Nicene Creed, it was accepted by the Synod of Constantinople with only the most minor changes. To this day the Creed is recited at every Eucharistic service, in the baptismal liturgy, and at many other services and consecrations.

Система охраняемых территорий в США Изучение особо охраняемых природных территорий(ООПТ) США представляет особый интерес по многим причинам...

Живите по правилу: МАЛО ЛИ ЧТО НА СВЕТЕ СУЩЕСТВУЕТ? Я неслучайно подчеркиваю, что место в голове ограничено, а информации вокруг много, и что ваше право...

Что делать, если нет взаимности? А теперь спустимся с небес на землю. Приземлились? Продолжаем разговор...

Что делает отдел по эксплуатации и сопровождению ИС? Отвечает за сохранность данных (расписания копирования, копирование и пр.)...

Не нашли то, что искали? Воспользуйтесь поиском гугл на сайте: