Okay, we're continuing to talk about Eastern Orthodoxy. Last week we talked about, we had a couple of examples of controversies that the Eastern Orthodox Church experienced. Talked about the Christological controversies over Nestorianism and Monophysitism. And I wanna start today by talking about another controversy in the Eastern Orthodox Church, but one that didn't have anything to do with, one that didn't have anything to do with the, well, not directly with the person of Christ, but it's still a really important issue, a really important matter in the, Eastern Church and it helps a lot to understand kind of what the Eastern Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church is all about today. And that's the issue, that's the issue of iconoclasm. The iconoclast means a, an iconoclast is a breaker of icons, is what the word literally means. And it was the, and it was the controversy over the use of icons. Icons are, any kind of flat art, like a painting or a wood cutting or a mosaic or something of that nature. And the issue was the use of such icons in worship. The use of icons, the use of pictures and things like that was, there was, you know, it kind of went back and forth to a certain degree. In both the Eastern and the Western Church, there was probably some use of icons and pictures very early in the church, but it didn't really get to be a big deal until after the Christianization of the Roman Empire. And then the use of pictures and statues and things like that became more prominent, although there was always resistance to it from some circles. There were always those that thought that the second commandment forbade such pictures and images, as the reformed churches generally do today. And you remember we talked about Charlemagne, for example. Charlemagne, the Frankish emperor, towards the end of the eighth century. He forbade the use of all pictures and images in church in the Frankish Empire and commissioned a book written, a scholarly book written to study the issue and to reject these, to attack the use of pictures and images in worship at all. using arguments that were very familiar to the sorts of arguments the reformers would later use. That was in the Western Church. But the Western Church, while they did use statues and pictures and so forth, their use was not nearly as prominent or nearly as important. as it was in the Eastern church. Now the Eastern church, we say icons because they do believe that what the second commandment forbids is any three-dimensional art, statues specifically, because it specifically says, Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images. And so they say, well, that applies to, now we would say that's a pretty kind of legalistic and narrow reading of the commandment. It's clear that visual representations more broadly used in worship is what that's really talking about. But, they said the use of flat images, pictures and mosaics and sort of things like that was allowed. And actually they came to say over time that not only was it allowed, but it was necessary, that it was really necessary for true biblical worship. But there was a big controversy over that during the reign of Emperor Leo III, and this was in the eighth century. And Leo III was totally opposed to their use. We don't know exactly why, what all of his reasons were. Part of it was certainly that, see, he was from, he was not Greek, but he was Syrian. And Syria at the time was contending with the Muslims. And one of the main criticisms of Islam against Christianity at that time, and even today, is that Christians are idol worshippers. Because most Christians are, or an awful lot of Christians are. You know, that they used all these, they'd bow down to these statues and paintings and pictures and so forth. So it was one of the great Muslim criticisms against it, And Jews always criticize the Christians for the same reasons. Christians are idol worshipers because they bow down to statues and pictures. So Leo III may have been motivated by that criticism of the Muslims to want to take that objection away from them. It also very much took on a regional flavor because it was kind of the the further Eastern Syrian Palestinian Christians versus the Greek Christians was very much the way this controversy ended up kind of shaping out. It also had very important political dimensions because the emperor and the army and the political apparatus tended to be against the use of the icons, whereas the priests and the monasteries especially were very much in favor of the use of the icons. you It was a major controversy. It went back and forth for a century with icons. The iconoclast means an idol smasher. And they actually did destroy a lot of, Leo III and others after him actually did destroy a lot of religious artwork for that very reason. But ultimately it prevailed. Ultimately, the use of icons was defended and established in the Eastern Church and became very, very important. I don't know if any of you have ever seen an Eastern Orthodox worship service or an Eastern Orthodox church. But the way they're laid out is very theological. They're shaped like a cross, first of all. And you have the narthex kind of at the bottom of the cross, which is where people come in as kind of the entryway. Then you have the nave, which is the main centerpiece, which is kind of like the sanctuary here, which is where all the people sit. It has transverses, cross pieces that kind of come off like this, wings. And they'll have usually like altars for candles, or they'll have choirs or things that will be in the side. And then up at the front, There is the front area of the church, and there is a big screen of pictures, of icons. And there'll be icons of various saints, and Mary, and Jesus, all across the front. And it's behind that screen, where what they call the sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, which is where the Lord's Supper is prepared and the Eucharist is prepared and blessed by the priest. And their view is that the icons are a window into heaven. The icons are a means by which one can look and see the glorified saint. You have to look with faith. But with faith you look at these icons The icons are an actual means of grace in their understanding. They are a means by which you look and see the grace of God mediated through these saints. And kind of their biblical basis for it... is the Mount of Transfiguration, actually. When Jesus saw God, or Jesus was lifted up into the glory of God, and he shone with the glory of God, and he came down, then those disciples that were there, They would have received some of that grace in return. They would have been blessed by the sight of that grace. It would have worked grace in them. And then other people who saw those disciples with faith could likewise receive that grace. It transmitted. And that if you painted pictures, and you painted them in the right way, and you painted them according to the certain theological principles, then that grace would even, those pictures of saints would then communicate that grace to worshipers. So that by looking at a picture of a saint, you will actually, by that process, you will actually see the glory of God by faith. You have to be ordained in the Eastern Orthodox Church to paint an icon. You can't just be a good artist. You can't just anybody to paint or make an icon out of mosaics or woodcuts or whatever. You have to be actually ordained as a priest. And not just any priest, but a particular office. The office of icon painter is an ordained office in the Eastern Orthodox Church. And they believe, they have come to believe over, through this controversy and through this time, that you cannot worship. Not only are they allowed, but they are necessary. That the icons are necessary for true Christian worship to happen. The use of images and pictures in the Western Church was never so well developed, was never as sophisticated or as full-orbed a theology as it became in the East. To understand the Eastern Church, you really have to understand the way that the the icons function. The year and the day when the council met and the use of icons in the Eastern Church was established is still, it's a celebrated feast day in the Eastern Church today. And they call it the victory of orthodoxy or something like that, something related to that. That's how important the use of these icons is in the Eastern Orthodox Church. At that time, yes, and probably true today. I don't think that the, I think that this theology of icon use is, this is, here we're talking about the Eastern Orthodox Church. We talked last time about those breakaway groups, the Assyrian Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, and then the Old Oriental Church, which was in Alexandria and South, what we today call the Coptic Church. I don't believe the icon theology functions in quite the same way in those churches, because they broke off the Eastern Orthodox Church before this, before this would have happened. So they still use icons. I know that, I know the Assyrian Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox Church do use icons, but I don't know that they regard them in quite the same way as the Byzantine Church does, the Eastern Orthodox Church. you know, I can bring this icon, or St. Paul blessed this icon, and I'll bring it to the hospital. I was wondering, do they believe that it has a healing power, do you think? An awful lot of individual Catholics certainly do. My house back in Lyman has a statue of St. Anthony buried in the yard somewhere, because that was supposed to make it more likely that your house would sell for a good price. Okay, now that's just superstition. Whether that is any kind of official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, I don't know. I couldn't answer that. The use of images, of religious images is certainly a part of, And they also, and that is a creedal thing. They have in the Western Church, and it was the same distinction they made in the Eastern Church. In the Western Church, they made the distinction between veneration and worship. See, they said you could venerate a saint, and you could venerate the image of the saint. but you couldn't worship the saint. Now, what is the difference? The reformers always said veneration was just a lesser version of the same thing, that you could venerate, which means really like respect, you'd respect it a lot. And so when you're bowing or to the statue of Mary or whatever. Oh yeah, they'll pray to them, absolutely. Well, that was always our argument. Their argument would be something like this. Tony, if I said to you, hey, you know what, I've got a job interview later this week, would you pray for me? Would that be okay? Well, so if I can ask you to pray for me, why can't I ask Mary to pray for me? So when I pray to Mary and I say, Mary, please help me with this. It's really just a different version of the same thing as when I say to one of you, hey, pray for me in this situation that's coming up. Now, the counter-argument to that, first of all, is that Catholics do a whole lot more than just ask Mary to pray for them. They pray to Mary, and they ask Mary to help me. They don't ask Mary to ask God to help me, they ask Mary to help me, or St. Anthony, or St. Peter, or whoever. The other problem is, is that nowhere in the scriptures do we have any indication that a dead person can hear our prayers. A dead person can hear me talk to them. And in fact, we have quite a bit of prohibitions of talking to the dead or trying to, it's necromancy. Divinations and so forth that are kind of appealing to the dead, any kind, it's all forbidden in the scriptures. And further, like I said, if I said to you, you're my friend, you're my brother in the church, and so I say to you, pray for me in this situation that's coming up, that would be one thing. If I then went on to publicize to all the Christians that I know, you need to have Tony in particular pray for you because Tony in particular has special prayers that are more effective than other people's prayers. Now we're starting to approach the sort of thing the Catholics do with the saints in actual practice. I would be surprised if Roman Catholic theologians or any kind of official council ever said that a statue of itself held some kind of almost magical power. They might. I would be a little surprised. They tend to be a little more sophisticated than that. But it's certainly the practice of lots and lots of individual Catholics. you know, but they're just like in every church. There are lots of things that people in the church do or believe that are not necessarily the official doctrine of the church. You know what I mean? Um, but they certainly, uh, if nothing else, I think that, you know, they do, uh, you know, I know the council of Trent said that it was right and proper for, um, processions of the images of the saints, to have processions of those images, to carry them around in procession in the town square on feast days and so forth, and for people to venerate them, to pray to them, to bow to them, and so forth. So if nothing else, official Catholic theology certainly leads to, I think, the way an awful lot of Roman Catholics, what they actually do. I don't know enough about that to be sure what they say as far as, you know, the actual gracious power of the... Now certainly the Eastern Orthodox and the way they view icons and so forth I think would have to lead to that idea, you know, have to lead to the idea that they are somehow of themselves virtuous and meritorious and power giving because they view them as, I mean, they're painted by special people. That was never the case in the West where you, I mean, you know, Michelangelo could make a, you didn't have to be ordained to do that in the West, but in the East you did. And that's one of the reasons why if you see Eastern Orthodox artwork today, looks, the religious artwork, looks the same as Eastern Orthodox religious artwork did 1500 years ago. It still has a sort of medieval kind of flat strange, almost otherworldly feel to it. Whereas in the West, because it was important, but it wasn't as important, art developed a lot more in the West. Art, you know, you had advances in how to make good art. Yeah? Are icons only in the churches, or do individual people have icons in their houses and stuff? I think they can, I think a real, a true, real icon can only be in an actual church. Well, Catholics do, Catholics do, definitely. I'm not sure about Eastern Orthodox. Well, these friends of ours, I thought I remembered on Facebook, they're, they've become, they joined. They joined Eastern Orthodoxy. I must be wrong about that. It must be able to be in other places as well. I'm not sure about that. Yeah, Roman Catholics, I've known lots of them that had, yeah, like you said, the little shrines and will have candles and looks like a Hindu thing going on in there, yeah. Yeah. All right. as like special, magical, like Paul, like the spirit of Paul is resting on that object, and then like when Jesus killed the woman. There was a view that the physical objects, oh, fine. That's a kind of mysticism, I would say. It's a mysticism. I can't remember a particular term I'm not recalling. Yeah, it's mysticism. Right after that, there was this boy in the community and his family that went to the church and that boy came back and remembered what disease he had. It wasn't too long after this saint had died, well, then the whole church decided they were going to take all these rosaries and everything that this saint had blessed and bring them over and put them around the boy in the hospital. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, again, they do, they do in practice, whether, to what degree official Catholic doctrine supports that, that's what I'm not sure about. I don't, I wouldn't be surprised, too surprised if they did, but I just wanna be cautious because I don't know for sure, that's all. Yeah, certainly a lot of rank and file Catholics and priests and so forth certainly behave as if they do. And I think their theology, if nothing else, leads to that. Yeah, Titus? How far do they go to this one? How far do they believe? How far do they believe that? Like, do they believe, like, clothes that, like, say, Paul wore or are sacred? Oh, yeah, yeah. See, they have, yeah, in the West, I'm getting a little off track here, but that's okay. In the West, the use of relics is a big deal. And relics will be, relics will be, was that what you were trying to remember about? Yeah, yeah, relics in the West are, and again, they were originally just, kind of keepsakes, memorials. If somebody got burned to death for being a Christian in Rome, and they would collect their ashes, or a piece of a bone, or some of their clothes, or something like that, to remember. And so that future generations would remember the martyrs, because being a martyr, that was huge, of course. I don't even understand why. And they would keep these in places in the churches, and they would have collections of relics. And then they would, you know, with kids growing up in the church, they'd come, and they'd show them, and they'd teach them, and say, here, this is the bone of Saint Pachomius, or whoever, you know, to tell them the stories, and to remind them of the things that happened. So it very much started out with very good intentions. But yeah, over time, then all these little pieces of bone, and cloth, and so forth, became, they became holy things. They became holy things that by the time of the Reformation, again, the reformers certainly accused them of acting as if these things had some sort of magic power. And that's certainly how they, again, that they, A Roman Catholic church, as I understand it even today, has to have a relic in it to be considered a true church. You can't have a church without a relic of some saint in it. Because the presence of the relic kind of sanctifies it, makes it holy so that it can be a church. Martin Luther was famous for, in one of his tracts against the church, to have said, something like St. Peter, you know, all the relics that are out there of St. Peter, he was, you know, 15 feet tall and had four legs and two heads and, you know, because there are so many bones of St. Peter all over the place that he, so it got ridiculous and it's still like that. But that was, so that was the relics, the relics, you know, any kind of, I think I told you last time about the holy spear that pierced Christ's side that they supposedly found when they were on crusade, and it allowed them to have the victory over the Muslims at the first, with the battle of, I think that was in Antioch. So yeah, they go pretty far with it. Would they dig up the dirt, like say Jesus walked on it and put it in the bucket? I don't know, I don't know if they would. I know they, I know there are, you know, I don't know. I don't know about that. They go pretty far, though. The example of my mom, you've probably heard of her. She was, where was she? She was over in Europe, and they, in a tourist group, and they took her to a Catholic or, you know, something there, and she was healed. But anyway, it was some Catholic shrine or something that they took him to. And that's, you know, I'm reluctant to call people liars, but at the same time, every religion has their stories. You know, the Muslims and the Hindus and the Mormons and everybody has their stories, you know? So we have to, we can't be guided by stories. We have to, yeah, you know, we have to. Right. Oh yeah. Holy places. And yeah. And they go on pilgrimage and pray at the tomb of, Yeah, pray at the tomb of this or that person and get healed. Yeah. Yeah, and that's true in both branches of the church, very much so. So the spread of the church, the Eastern church, territorial gains that it made, if you've got your map there that I gave you last time, You see there the area of Asia Minor there, that's Asia Minor and Syria there were always the oldest. That's where the first areas where Christianity was strong. And the Eastern Orthodox Church was especially centered there in Asia Minor. Especially after the Muslims came, and the Muslims took Egypt and Palestine and Syria mostly, and they kind of stopped there at Asia Minor for quite a while, although they kind of slowly pushed in. You see the Balkans there. The Balkans are that area that's now the Czech Republic and Hungary and Romania and Bulgaria and so forth. The Eastern Church successfully evangelized the Balkan Peninsula by the 9th century. By the end of the 9th century, they had evangelized that area. And that was really a re-evangelization because that area had been Christian because it had been under the old Roman Empire. But when the old Roman Empire started to collapse, Barbarians pushed into that area, and they pushed Christianity out. And that was the Maigars, and the Huns, and the Avars, and the Slavs. That's where the Hungary and Slav, we call the Slavic peoples, the Yugoslavia, the name comes from that. They were barbarian tribes that pushed into that area and pushed Christianity out when the Roman Empire was at its weak point. So in part, the Eastern Empire reconquered some of that area, but also missionaries went into the area and converted and re-evangelized it over time. The Balkans, that area was never very firmly under the control of the Eastern Orthodox Church, though. There was always kind of an independent spirit there. There was an empire there for a while called the Bulgarian Empire that was a rival to the Eastern Orthodox Church. And the Bulgarian Empire was very good at playing the East and West. off against each other for political advantage. So they'd tell the Eastern Orthodox Church they'd accept their missionaries and get, you know, they'd come and plant churches and convert people. But then they would pledge loyalty to the Pope for a while. And it was just to kind of play them off against each other and to maintain political balance. And there were a lot of heresies, a lot of really strange doctrines that were taught, the heretical views that were very prominent in that area. So it was always kind of loosely connected. The biggest territorial gain that the Eastern Orthodox Church ever made, though, and probably the reason why the Eastern Orthodox Church continues to exist today, is because of the conversion of Russia. That was a very, very big deal, when Russia became Christian. In those days, the forerunner of Russia was a federation, a confederation of tribes known as Kievan Rus. Rus was the name of the tribal confederation, and it was centered on the city of Kiev. And Kiev is now in the Ukraine. And so it was known as Kievan Rus. And in about, let's see, it was in, I believe it was in the 10th century. How do you put the date there? 9th or 10th century. One of the original leaders of, once they got pretty big and pretty powerful, the Prince Vladimir of Kiev, decided that Kievan Rus needed a new religion. That paganism was old and outdated and unsophisticated, and he wanted to follow one of the newer, higher religions. And so he sent delegates out and advisors to decide which religion to follow. And they were going to choose between Islam, Judaism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Western Christianity. Islam was rejected because they forbade alcohol, and that was never going to fly in Russia. They rejected Judaism because Judaism was clearly a weak religion because their God had allowed them to lose their, had permitted them to lose their land. Western Christianity was rejected because it was boring. And Eastern Christianity was finally adopted because the representatives of Prince Vladimir went to Constantinople and sat in on a worship service and said they didn't know whether they were in heaven or on earth. It was so beautiful and so glorious and the beautiful art and music and everything just convinced them. And the wealth of Constantinople That is the story, that that has convinced them to adopt Eastern Orthodoxy, so they did. The other story, and there's some debate about which one's the right one, the other one is simply that there was a rebellion in Constantinople, in the Eastern Empire, that was really causing the the emperor a lot of trouble, and he made a deal with the Russians. He made a deal with them. He said, if you convert to Christianity and help me with this rebellion, then the emperor would give his daughter to Prince Vladimir to marry, and they would be allies. And that's why they converted to Christianity. It was just because of the political arrangement. We're not totally sure which is the truth, but we know that in the time of Prince Vladimir, Russia converted to Christianity. And again, it was like in a lot of places where you have this kind of top-down imposition of Christianity. Obviously, that doesn't mean that all of the people, or even very many of the people, instantly became true believers. But it did mean that you built churches, and in came the missionaries and priests, and they started teaching people. And over time, some of them certainly came to a true faith. What really changed things, their Christianity was very lightly held. They were really a pagan people, even though they were nominally Christian, the people still engaged in a lot of paganism in the old ways. What really changed things there was the Mongol invasions in the 13th and 14th century. That was very, very hard on Russia. Of all the European countries, Russia took the brunt of that. The Mongols drove Russia mostly out of their old country. They destroyed Kiev and Rus'. And they captured that whole area around Kiev and all of that and drove the Russians north. When we think of the Russians being kind of centered around Moscow and St. Petersburg and so forth now, that was later. Earlier, they were south. And that's a big part of what's going on in the Ukraine right now is because Kiev and Ukraine used to be the heartland of the Russian people. And they were driven out of there by the Mongols. But they've always felt like that was really theirs, and they should have the right to come back, which, I mean, that was a long time ago, but that's still kind of the way they felt. But during the Mongol times, and the people, they went north, they really hungered down, they suffered tremendously under the Mongol invasions, and that really actually deepened their Christianity a great deal. They really clung to their Christianity as a matter of national identity and who they were, how they were different, how they were not gonna follow the Mongols. They were not gonna be subject to them. And they really became a great deal more Christian through that whole period. So that they became really passionate about it. When you come to the Russia of the, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th century, by that period, they are a very strongly Christian nation, and the paganism is really mostly gone, except for the kind of obscure forests and so forth, where things always happen. Did somebody have a question? No? Thought I saw a hand up. After the fall of Constantinople, which we'll talk about in a moment, the Russian Orthodox Church really saw themselves as the standard bearers for Christendom at that point. And that's why the Russian leader started calling himself the Tsar. The term Tsar, C-Z-A-R or T-S-A-R, the Russianization of the word Caesar. So after the Eastern Empire fell, their view was that the Eastern Roman Empire just transferred to Moscow and Moscow became the Caesar and the Russian Orthodox Church became the Orthodox Church, became kind of the standard bearer, the leader. And for a long time, for several hundred years, the Russian Orthodox Church was the strongest, most vital, largest, body within Eastern Orthodoxy. They became kind of the defenders of the faith in a lot of ways. And today it'll help you understand an awful lot about the relationship that even modern Russia has with places like Hungary and Bulgaria and Serbia and so forth, which were always Orthodox. And so Russia always felt a kind of a loyalty to them, like they needed to protect them and help them, and even later on when they got overran by the Muslims. And it also helps a lot to understand Russia's relationship with Islam and the way they view the Muslims, the way they view Turkey, the hostility that exists there was because the Mongols converted to Islam and the Muslims in Russia have been at war, you know, and for a long time it was very much that the Muslims were victimizing and enslaving and raiding a much weaker Russia. until Russia finally got strong enough that they could defend themselves against them. And that explains a lot of things going on in the news today that you can only really understand. You can only really understand a guy like Vladimir Putin in the light of all of Russia's history. And you understand why when Vladimir Putin starts to make noises about they're doing things like banning homosexuality and so forth like that in Russia. And some Christians are thinking that, oh, that means Putin must be some sort of Christian or something. It's part of the old pattern of the Russian strongmen using the church to advance and support their power. He sees himself really as the new czar, as kind of reinvigorating and he has a very close relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church and he promotes it. And it's like the old days. And that really changed when Gregory the, not Gregory, Ivan the Great, And then Ivan the Terrible. made the Russian Empire strong and started fighting back against the Muslims and started expanding and defeating the caliphates that had taken up so much of, first the Golden Horde and then the other caliphates that had taken root in various territories around Russia. Ivan the Terrible, by the way, does not mean the same thing as it means in our language. We think of Ivan the Terrible as Ivan the Awful or Ivan the Bad. Terrible there is the old use of the word terrible, which means, terrifying, formidable, dangerous. It's a compliment to him in Russia. It's like Ivan the really great, Ivan the awesome. And that's how they view him. He's a national hero. And he really was a great man in a lot of ways. He was an unstable and violent man. And that was part of where he got his reputation of being formidable and dangerous. He beat his own son-in-law to death with a cane, which his son-in-law was beating his wife, was abusing his wife, Ivan's daughter, and so he probably had it coming. But that was the kind of guy he was. He was unstable, unpredictable. He was very pious, though, a very passionate Christian. But you kind of never knew what he was going to do. But he really solidified the Russian empire and defeated a lot of the, he kind of ended Muslim. So then all those countries like Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and Chechnya and so forth that are Muslim countries but are with under the rule of earlier Soviet, like Peter the Great and then even in the Soviet Union, That's why that happened. That's why those Muslims are under Russian rule now, was because they had attacked and invaded Russia so long that when Russia finally got strong enough and counterattacked and defeated them, they ruled over them, was just for that very reason, was because of that relationship. The East-West schism, how did that happen? Well, it lie all the way back in the Roman Empire itself. And remember, we talked back in the Roman Empire about the division that existed between East and West and the empires. And so then these churches, when they arose, the Roman Church and the Byzantine Church, they were natural rivals. The Roman Pontiff, the Roman Pope claimed to be supreme over all the churches, the successor of Peter, as we've talked about before. The Patriarch claimed equality with the Pope of Rome. He never claimed to be superior over the Pope of Rome. He claimed to be equal. He said that Rome was first in dignity and respect because Rome was the oldest church, but that in terms of authority, Constantinople was equal and shouldn't be under the thumb of the Roman church. And I think there were doctrinal issues, but I think it always came down to that. I think it always ultimately came down to power about who was gonna be in control. They competed over different territories. We talked earlier about the Balkans. There was a hot conflict between East and West over who would dominate the Balkans. When Justinian the emperor invaded the South of Italy and conquered the Southern part of Italy from the barbarians, from the barbarian tribes that were there. He then tried to impose the Eastern Church onto the Italian peninsula, never succeeded. The Italian bishops resisted him and wouldn't, they maintained their loyalty to the Pope. But technically, they were always in fellowship with one another until 1054. 1054 was when the schism really finally became complete. In 1054, Pope Leo IX decided he was gonna flex his muscles, and he sent his delegates to Constantinople. They demanded that Patriarch Michael Serularius recognized the primacy of Pope Leo IX, partly, in large part, based on the donation of Constantine, which we discussed earlier was a forgery. It wasn't even true. It was a made-up document. It was a forgery. So the patriarch, Michael Seriolaurus, rejected the claims of Pope Leo IX, and so Pope Leo excommunicated him. It's interesting to us, it sounds like that's a huge deal, obviously the Pope excommunicating the Patriarch of Constantinople, but the interesting thing was it really wasn't a very big deal at the time. Nobody really thought it was a very big deal, because those things had happened before. Those things happened before and they would just kind of blow over. The successors would reverse it and nobody would, it wouldn't stick. They, you know, it was just, and the Popes weren't as powerful and people just, ah, they're just throwing their weight around and it's no big deal. But this time it did stick and it applied to all the successors of the Patriarch and the Patriarch excommunicated Pope Leo IX and all of his successors. And so it was at that point that the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church officially became separated and no longer recognized each other as true churches, as valid churches, and it went on from there. So the Pope's, or the Roman Catholic Church's argument with Eastern Orthodoxy then has never been about doctrine. It's always been about power. It's always been that they refuse to recognize the authority of the Pope of Rome is what it's about to them. To the Eastern Orthodox, The Roman Catholics are heretics. They don't accept because they rejected the creeds, the councils. Because you remember the council of Chalcedon in 451 declared that the two seas were equal in primacy. And the Roman Catholic Church never accepted that. So to the Eastern Orthodox, they said, see, you've rejected the councils, part of the great ecumenical councils, therefore you cannot claim to be part of the Orthodox faith. So it's interesting, I think from our perspective, to think of the Roman Catholics as being innovators, freewheeling, individualists. That would be a strange way for us to think about the Roman Catholic Church, but it's exactly the way the Eastern Orthodox Church think of them, as they view the Pope as the first Protestant. because they rejected the true authority of the church. They rejected the councils. That's the way they viewed them, was that the Protestant Reformation was just one more in a long history of innovation and heresy and apostasy by the Western church. That's the way the Eastern Orthodox view them. A couple of issues that continue to stand between them. We mentioned primacy. There was also the filioque clause. This is a huge deal to the two churches. And it has to do with the phrase in the Nicene Creed that says that the, I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life who proceeds from the Father and the Son. And the Son, that phrase there is filioque in Latin. And the original creed that was adopted by the council just said he proceeded from the father. And at a certain point, in order to combat certain heresies, first they started saying, proceeded from the Father and the Son. The Western Church did. It was never decided by a council, they just started saying that. And then it was ratified later on by a council. Given what we know about the Eastern Orthodox Church's attitude towards the councils, you could see why that would be so offensive to the Eastern Orthodox. That was a horrible thing to do, to just add something to a creed without any official church decision, just on their own. But that's what they did. And then there was a huge amount of theological literature that went back and forth, a huge argument that went back and forth about that phrase, the filioque clause. Somebody, one of the, Eastern Orthodox theologians at one point said something like purgatory was to be required to read all of the treatises that were ever written in the history of the church on the matter of the filioque. This is just a huge amount of literature talking about all the theology of why it matters. Did this Holy Spirit proceed from the Father or did he proceed from the Father and the Son together? A great deal of theological literature has been written on that very question. I think to most Western Christians it was surprising that it would be such a big deal, but it was. But again, I think there was all the theological stuff that was written about it, but again, I think the real issue was your view of the councils, and your view of church authority, and how that functioned, and how could, you know, did a church have a right to simply insert something into the creed without the whole church agreeing? Couldn't they do it on their own? Clerical marriage was another dividing point between them. Priests have always been permitted to marry in the East. You couldn't be married and become a bishop. A man could only be a bishop because you remember in those old days usually the wives would usually die fairly youngish. They would usually die in childbirth at some point. Usually what you do is you get married and then your wife would have babies until one of them would kill her and that was just kind of normally how it went. And so a man who was still married couldn't be a bishop. It was kind of his way of saying he's too young, he's too involved in the affairs of the world. Only once his wife died and he couldn't remarry. It was seen as unacceptable, unspiritual to marry a second time. A first marriage was okay, but not a second one. Because there was always that attitude, going back to the early Roman church, because of coming out of that environment of such immorality and such wickedness, where being married at all was sort of seen as not very spiritual. A really spiritual man is gonna be a monk, he's gonna withdraw from the world, he's not gonna be involved in those things. It would take the Protestant Reformation before marriage was seen in a different light. And so in the Eastern church, a priest was permitted to marry, but not a second time. In the West, there was always a push for clerical celibacy, that the priests would not marry at all, although it wasn't until the 11th century and Innocent III until it became official practice. And then finally, the other difference, as we said before, was the term we use is caesaral papism. And what that refers to is the idea that the church is under the Caesar. The church is subject to the Caesar. In the East, and it's true in the Russian Orthodox Church as well, that the church was always subject to the state. The church was always under the power of the state. The state governed the church and used the church for its own purposes. And as a result, the church was always passive. It was, it was, it tended to be less, less activist, less involved in earthly affairs, more mystical and contemplative. The Eastern Church, yes. The Western Church was, and a rise of the Pope in a lot of ways, because the Roman Empire fell in the West, and there was no empire to be subject to, the Church in the West got out from under the thumb of the emperor, and as a result was much more, doctrinally, they developed doctrine, they got more sophisticated, they were much more involved in political and cultural affairs, they were activists, they sought for reform of society a lot more in the West than they ever did in the East. And that was true under the czars and under the Russian Orthodox Church was very passive. The Russian Orthodox Church typically did not advocate for societal change. They would help people and comfort people and prepare people for the afterlife and so forth. But they would very rarely would Eastern Orthodox Churches ever challenge the empire, challenge the czar, challenge the king. to change his ways. That just didn't happen very often in the East, where it happened all the time in the West, as we talked about before. Okay, last little bit here. In the 10th and 11th century, the Byzantine Empire experienced a resurgence in the Renaissance. They had some very good leadership during that time, and the Muslims were pretty passive, and they regained a lot of their lost territory. In the late 11th century, though, they began to face new setbacks and enemies. After the official split between East and West, one of the things that happened was the Pope encouraged the Normans, who lived in what's Normandy, the Vikings who had settled in France, encouraged the Normans to invade Sicily and Southern Italy. That was ruled by the Eastern Orthodox. And so the Normans invaded the Eastern Orthodox territory and took that away from the Eastern Orthodox, from the Eastern Empire. And that had long been a Byzantine territory. The worst problem came from the Seljuk Turks, though, a new Muslim dynasty that arose in the early 11th century. They pushed across Asia Minor. This was a similar story we've seen lots of times, that the Muslims grew and then they became kind of passive and civilized and decadent under the Abbasid dynasty, what they call the Golden Age of all the science and development and so forth happened then. And then they got invaded by a band of horse riding nomads, the Turks, the Seljuks, And they converted to Islam. But then they were a fresh new tribe of very, very belligerent, fierce warriors. And they began pushing back into Byzantium. And they fell on hard times. They had bad leadership through this period. You remember we talked about the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204. Well, it's important to know that 20 years before that, a Byzantine emperor had instigated a massacre of Western Christians in Constantinople, just 25 years before. So that doesn't justify what the Crusaders did, but it certainly puts it in some context. that this emperor, a terrible leader, who wanted to blame the Latin Christians for his problem and also seize all their wealth, encouraged a riot against them that led to their massacre. And 20 years later, then the Crusaders came and returned the favor and sacked Constantinople. Constantinople never really recovered from that sack. They declined more and more until 1389, was the Battle of Kosovo. Kosovo was over in, remember there was all the business with Serbia and Yugoslavia and the big war that happened there. Part of that happened in Kosovo that's in the Balkans. After the Battle of Kosovo, the Eastern Empire lost all of the Balkans. They were all under the control of the Muslims. That was in 1389. And at that point, Constantinople was effectively besieged. They were surrounded on all sides by the Muslims. Nonetheless, they managed to hold on about another 50 years or so, until 1453, by which time Constantinople was just a tiny shadow of its former self. Sultan Mehmed, besieged it with 80,000 men against perhaps 9,000 defenders. And despite their weakness, the walls of Constantinople had always defended them, just the great, big, old, very well-built walls of the old empire. But Sultan Mehmed had bombards. It was one of the first uses of cannon in a, in a European battle and eventually breached the walls and sacked the city. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, died in hand-to-hand combat on the walls. He was reported to have said his last words was that he has failed the empire, he has failed the church, he's failed Christ, and therefore he threw away his royal regalia and jumped into the battle and was never seen again. And that was the end of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453. And that was the end of the Roman Empire itself. That was the actual end of it after 2000 years. And the great church Hagia Sophia, the Church of Saint Sophia was made into a mosque, which it remains to this day. Any questions about Eastern Orthodox? Yes. Yeah, the Eastern Orthodox Church had already fallen on fairly hard times before that even happened. I don't think it was a big part of the reason why that happened. The Orthodox, because it was passive. It didn't confront the corruption of the government and participated in a lot of ways. And it was very, very wealthy. And so the Russian Orthodox Church was a major target of communist propaganda, a lot like the French Revolution. Look at these rich, abusive, horrible clerics that are living high on the hog while all the peasants are starving. And you're paying taxes to them. And so the Russians, the communists never stamped out the Russian Orthodox Church, but they suppressed it a great deal. And it was very weak and very passive throughout that time. And those that did speak up, and there were heroes. There were certainly Russian Orthodox priests and people who tried to stand up and tried to speak out against the communists and usually got killed for their trouble. So there were a lot of Russian Orthodox priests that went to the gulags along with you know, all other kinds of people that died. And so they were greatly weakened by that. It was in 1970 that the Russian Orthodox Church declared the American Church, because a lot of Russians had fled to America and continued the Russian Orthodox Church there, and they declared the American Orthodox Church to be autosyphalous, which remember it means they have their own head, they're self-governing. That's really how they survived in a lot of ways was from the Russian expatriates that had fled to other places and kept them alive. As I understand the Russian Orthodox Church is back on the move now. But again, a lot of it is because they've got the support of the government. The government is, Putin is making it very difficult for other Christian groups to operate, especially newer ones, that you have to have a license, you have to be kind of officially recognized by the Russian government in order to do mission work in Russia right now. So he's really kind of sheltering and protecting and promoting the Russian Orthodox Church in a lot of ways. Yeah, Titus? Oh, their system of prisons and work camps, and it's where they sent political dissidents, people who disagreed with the government, they'd send them to the gulag, and they'd usually die there. Like in Siberia, places like that, yeah. So on the Filioque clause, was it the Eastern Church that added the Anglican praise? It sounds a little bit unfair. Oh, I went through that kind of fast, yeah. It was the Western Church that added the Filioque. And the Eastern Church always protested it. And there is theological significance to it. How you see the Trinity, how you see the work of the Spirit, how you see the work of the Church, there's implications for all of those things. But it seems clear, and I think the Western Church had the right to the argument because You know, one time we read that the father will send the spirit to the church. You know, I will ask my father and he will send the comforter, Jesus says. But Jesus also says, I will send the comforter to you. So those two statements. The Eastern Church always said that's only speaking of his role as the Messiah who sends the Spirit to his people. It cannot be read as a description of the actual nature of the Trinity, that the third person proceeds from the first and the second person. But it gets very, very abstract and difficult to follow. You know that joke, did I tell you this last time? The joke or the saying about contemplating your navel Did I mention this? That was an actual thing in the Eastern Church. There was a very mystical sect within the Eastern Church that the monastic life, they would contemplate, what was seen as your spiritual center was your belly button, and they would contemplate their belly button. And so that sort of became a, it was a small, it was a minority, but it became a good fodder for jokes for lots of years. But it was always kind of a way of seeing the difference. The Eastern church was always more passive, more mystical, more introspective, and so forth, than the Western church was. Titus? Didn't they lock themselves up in their cells and just contemplate the name of it? Yeah, well, and you know, they did that in the West, too, but it was more so in the East, yeah. The monks would spend their whole life in a little cell, a little box, and think deep spiritual thoughts. And usually go crazy. Anything else? Now you know a little bit about the Eastern world. No, it was a Western church, because that came under, originally under Charlemagne, was the one who spread Christianity into Germany. No, Eastern Orthodoxy's never been, I imagine there are a few now, but that's always been a Western church. Poland was kind of the dividing. That was where the East and West kind of clashed, was in Poland mostly, in Northern Europe. In the whole part of the West? Did Poland go to the west, or did they come along the east? Or it's dependent? It varied, because sometimes, see, sometimes Russia had the upper hand in Poland, and sometimes Germany did, and so it would just, it would vary. I don't know the history of Poland super well, but I know it went back and forth under different, under whichever particular emperor, empire had the upper hand at the time. My grandmother asked, were in Poland, they were Catholic, Yeah, I think Catholicism is probably the dominance, but I think it, like I said, I think it varies at different times. All right, well, let's close in prayer. Gracious Heavenly Father, thank you for your blessings. Thank you for the work you've done in preserving and advancing your church throughout the centuries, Lord. And I pray, Lord, that we would learn from that history, that we would learn what to do, what not to do, to do your work and to advance your kingdom in whatever sphere you put any of us, Lord. I pray all these things in Jesus' name, amen.