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Well, because you asked...

Posted by Tovah on October 6, 2003, at 21:59:11

In reply to Re: Faith made me sick, and then it made me well » Tovah, posted by Dena on October 6, 2003, at 21:29:01

The following is 1) my opinion and 2) based on actual church history, so please read with discernment. The theology below is representative of my particular religion and I am sharing it becasue I was asked to. Thanks. :)

For more than a decade I searched for "the right church," the one that belonging to would remove doubts (or at least that I would feel safe in). I had long regarded Christianity to be a sort of "Password" game...I figured there had to be interpretations, ways of worship and understandings that had been there all along, and so I was uncomfortable with post-Reformation theology, before I even knew there was such a thing as Orthodoxy. When I met my husband and discovered Orthodoxy, I realized I had discovered the first people in the line of "Password."

Here are some of the theological reasons I chose this faith:

- We worship exactly as the earliest Christians worshipped, liturgically (our liturgy that we follow every Sunday dates back to the 200s AD and our specific church can be traced to 52 AD!)

- There have been very few theological changes in our church since the first few centuries. Priests are married (as they were in the Catholic church until the 1000s AD). We perceive mankind to be "fallen," but do not hold to inherited original sin or the total depravity of man, theologies which did not develop until later (under Augustine).

- We read scripture as historical as well as symbolic and allegorical. We hold to original interpretations as set forth by the Early Chruch. Therefore we don't follow newer interpretations of scrupture such as the Rapture (which surfaced in the 1800s), etc. When we understand something we have some 2000 years of interpretation behind our understanding.

- Orthodoxy is very holistic, seeking to keep togehter the spirit and the material world, rather than being Gnostic by trying to make the material world into something evil.

- Although there is a range of opinion within Orthodoxy on this, it is accepted within the faith to undertand Christ's saving grace as inclusivistic (for all of mankind) vs. exclusivistic. In other words, we all go into the same state of being when we die. For those who lived a life of love and caring, they will find being with God to be blissful. For those who lived a life of hatred, they will find being with God to be hellish. However we will all be with God, and we are not "saved" or "damned" according to what theology we chose in life.

Hope this answers your questions as to why I chose Orthodoxy. I realise some people on the forum will not agree with what my church teaches - that's fine, but I hope that it is OK that I shared it.


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poster:Tovah thread:266053
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/faith/20030908/msgs/266140.html