Theodore Bosen: Understanding the Orthodox Christian Church

Recently, I was asked by a local pastor to explain where the Orthodox Christian Church came from. Surprised by the question coming from a man of the cloth, I thought it was time for a brief public session on the history of the Christian Church. As I explained to him, the Orthodox Church is the original Christian Church of the New Testament, founded by Christ. This is simply a historical fact. When Christ sent his Apostles out to spread the Gospel, His Church began. All the ensuing practices, rituals, worship, and doctrine developed during the first millennium of Christian history when the Church was undivided is preserved in the Orthodox Church and remains in authentic active practice today only there. By the principle of Apostolic Succession, every Orthodox bishop and priest traces his ordination back, in reverse succession, to the “laying on of hands” by one of the original 12 Apostles, and thus, to Christ, himself. The Scriptures constituting the New Testament were, themselves, selected for canonization by the Church through its ecumenical councils from the many books circulating in early centuries, as best defining the faith and the oral history already in practice.

In the original Christian Church, once it was legalized by Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine, Christians, finally free from persecution, emerged from the catacombs. They established five Holy Sees, or jurisdictions, each governed by a Pope or Patriarch. They were Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. The Pope of Rome was regarded as having a seat of honor as bishop of the capital city, but had no more authority than any of the others. All doctrine was established by consensus, as derived from the convening of ecumenical councils to which all jurisdictions sent delegates from every corner of the Christian world, the first of which was convened by Constantine, himself, in the city of Nicea in 325 AD, exactly 1700 years ago last month. There, the Nicene Creed, defining the nature and character of the Holy Trinity, was penned, and became the initial universal statement of Christian theology, particularly with regard to the Church’s shared vision of the nature of Christ. There were a total of six subsequent ecumenical councils through all of which the undivided Church spoke collectively.