Over on the Book of Face, I noted this story with a prayer that Jesus’ prayer for the unity of the Church would be answered:
Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I said at a gathering in Budapest that he prays for the day when Orthodox and Catholic Christians will share full communion again. He pointed to the 2024 restoration of the papal title “Patriarch of the West” as a significant step toward that unity, and based on the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, he called for unity rooted in the shared faith of the Church’s first thousand years. The Ecumenical Patriarch was speaking at the 27th International Congress of the Society for the Law of the Eastern Churches in Budapest. He also highlighted the need to deepen theological dialogue between East and West, which is essential to arrive at a deeper communion.
I got three responses from readers I thought were interesting. The first is pretty normative for most westerners:
It is a pi*#*ng contest between old men.
This is, I think, hardly fair, particularly given that the two old men under discussion are Pope Leo and Patriarch Bartholomew and both of them want healing and reconciliation and unity, not a pissing match. But it is a common enough knee-jerk assumption for many people anyway.
Not unrelatedly, a second reader asked:
What is the theological dispute? And why did it show up after 1000 years?
My short answer was this:
It’s primarily a social/cultural/political/economic split. The theological stuff is, I think, largely ex post facto excuses to justify that. Sort of the way divorced couples come up with “the way she squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle instead of at the end/the way he leaves the toilet seat up” once the divorce is finalized on completely different grounds. The reason I think that is simple: The western Church adopted the word “and the Son” into the Creed in the early 800s. The schism was over two centuries later. The notion that this change sparked the Schism is like saying Trump renamed Lake Ontario and declared a trade war with Canada because he was shocked–shocked I say!–to learn that French Canadians sided against Americans in the French and Indian War.
And that, in turn, brings me to the third remark of interest to me: the reader who wrote of the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Churches:
I’ve never understood what difference it would make to us, as human beings with boots on the ground, working out our salvation in awe and trembling, praying for the return of Christ and for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in our hearts…what difference it makes whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son together. Certainly not enough to split Christendom.
It doesn’t seem to me (and I have no formal theological training, so feel free to correct me) that the nature of the Holy Spirit or our response to His grace in any way changes in either interpretation.
My response:
You’re not alone. It matters, however, to many in the eastern Churches and respect for them requires that we take it seriously. Just as a Christian should not say, “Jews and their hangups about pork! Who cares!” (Answer: Jews care.) So we have to take seriously the difficulties our eastern brothers and sisters have when it comes to our divisions.
All of which prompts me to say that, this being my blog and all, I thought that rather than just sticking with that short answer, this would be a great time to give you guys a look at the development if the Church’s understand of the Holy Spirit (including a bit on the the history of the theological quarrel over the Filioque) since it is, in fact, interesting, as well as useful to anybody trying to navigate the conversation between Eastern and Western Christianity. There are no white hats and black hats in this story and everybody has plenty of sin to go around. But it’s also an interesting window into the way in which varying Christian traditions intertwine, bounce off each other, conflict, and evolve along side each other since, at the end of the day, they have far more in common than they have differences.
So tomorrow, we will start looking at the Church’s theology of the Spirit (which will touch on the Filioque argument in due course), as it is discussed in my someday-to-be-published book on the Creed!
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