Church Fathers
This Doctor of the Church wrote On the Incarnation and is sometimes called the "Father of Orthodoxy."
Who is St. Athanasius of Alexandria?
Orthodox theology teaches that icons are not worshipped but are given the same honor and respect shown to the Gospel book, the Cross, and holy persons.
What is veneration (proskynesis)?
Orthodox theology uses this Greek term, meaning "right glory" or "right worship," to describe both correct doctrine and correct liturgical praise, insisting the two cannot be separated.
What is Orthodoxy (Orthodoxia)?
This Greek word, often translated "mindset" or "way of thinking," describes the distinctly Orthodox framework for reading Scripture, doing theology, and living the Christian life; as opposed to approaching faith through Western rationalist or legal categories.
What is phronema?
Orthodox Christians receive this Mystery first at baptism, when the priest anoints the newly illumined with holy chrism conferring the gift of the Holy Spirit and completing their initiation into the Body of Christ.
What is Chrismation?
This Cappadocian Father gave us the most developed theological articulation of the Holy Spirit's full divinity, arguing He must be worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son.
Who is St. Basil the Great?
The Seventh Ecumenical Council, held in this city in 787 AD, definitively restored the veneration of icons and ended the iconoclast controversy.
What is Nicaea?
The Nicene Creed's phrase homoousion to Patri, "of one essence with the Father," was the central affirmation that defeated this heresy at the First Ecumenical Council?
What is Arianism?
Orthodox theology tends to describe humanity's condition before Christ primarily in terms of mortality and corruption rather than this Western legal concept that dominates Latin theology and most Protestant thought.
What is original sin?
In the Orthodox understanding, the Holy Eucharist is not a symbol or a memorial only. The bread and wine truly become this.
What is the Body and Blood of Christ?
At the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea, this bishop-saint became famous not only for defending the faith but for striking the heretic Arius across the face.
Who is St. Nicholas of Myra?
This feast, celebrated on the First Sunday of Great Lent, commemorates the final restoration of icons in 843 AD and is known by this triumphant title.
What is the Triumph of Orthodoxy?
Orthodox theology insists on a real distinction between God's unknowable divine essence and His communicable divine energies, a distinction most fully articulated by this 14th-century hesychast theologian.
Who is St. Gregory Palamas?
Western atonement theology, particularly following Anselm of Canterbury, frames salvation primarily as satisfaction of divine justice. Orthodox theology frames it primarily in terms of this, the defeat of death and the restoration of human nature in the image and likeness of God.
What is theosis?
Orthodox sacramental theology teaches that the transformation of the eucharistic gifts occurs through this, the prayer invoking the Holy Spirit upon the gifts, rather than through the words of institution alone as in Western theology.
What is the Epiclesis?
This Syrian monk, who lived atop a pillar for nearly 37 years, became one of the most visited figures in the ancient world and a model of extreme ascetic witness.
Who is St. Simeon the Stylite?
This 5th-century desert saint, whose life was recorded by St. Sophronius of Jerusalem, abandoned a life of radical sexual excess to become one of the most severe ascetics in Christian history; her story is a thunderclap rebuke to our age's embrace of appetite as identity.
Who is St. Mary of Egypt?
The Orthodox doctrine of theosis holds that human beings are called to participate in the divine nature. This phrase from St. Athanasius succinctly captures that vision.
What is "God became man so that man might become god"?
This mode of theological knowing, central to the Orthodox tradition, holds that God ultimately exceeds every human concept and category and that silence, negation, and contemplative prayer bring one closer to divine truth than any positive doctrinal formula. What is apophatic theology (negative theology / the via negativa)?
What is apophatic theology?
In Orthodox theology, Baptism is not merely a symbolic rite of membership but an ontological event. The newly baptized is described in this way: as a dying and rising with Christ, a putting on of Christ, and of entering into the very life of the Holy Trinity.
What is new birth?
This 4th-century theologian, though never a bishop, wrote the Philokalia with St. Basil, helped define the distinction between ousia and hypostasis, and is called "the Theologian" along with only two others in Orthodox tradition.
Who is St. Gregory of Nazianzus?
This theological principle, articulated by St. John of Damascus, grounds the entire defense of icons: because the eternal Son took on human flesh, the invisible God became depictable. To refuse icons is implicitly to deny this event.
What is the Incarnation?
This term, used by the Cappadocian Fathers to resolve the Trinitarian controversies, describes the manner of the divine persons' mutual coinherence, each fully in and through the others, without mixture or confusion.
What is perichoresis?
The Western church's use of the Filioque, "and from the Son," as an addition to the Creed is objectionable to Orthodoxy not only on theological grounds, but because of this ecclesiological principle it violates: that no local church may alter a creed promulgated by an Ecumenical Council without universal consensus.
What is conciliarity (sobornost)?
Orthodox theology holds that Baptism, Chrismation, Ordination, Marriage, even Repentance, find their completion, their telos, in this.
What is the Eucharist?