Eastern Orthodoxy Issue 54 | 1997 Purchase this issue

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The Orthodox Church is not a single church but rather a family of 13 "autocephalous," or self-governing, churches. They are united in their understanding of the sacraments, doctrine, liturgy, and church government, but each administers its own affairs.

The head of each autocephalous church is called a "patriarch" or "metropolitan." The patriarch of Constantinople (that is, Istanbul, Turkey) is considered the "ecumenical," or universal, patriarch. He enjoys special honor but no power to interfere with the 12 other Orthodox communions.

Many Westerners have been confused about Orthodoxy's distinct identity. In the American armed services, military identification tags of enlisted Orthodox believers once bore the inscription "Protestant."

On the other hand, some western theologians have dismissed Orthodoxy outright. Nineteenth-century church historian Adolf von Harnack wrote, "The Orthodox Church is in her entire structure alien to the gospel and represents a perversion of the Christian religion, its reduction to the level of pagan antiquity."

The Orthodox Church claims to be the one, true church of Christ. Orthodox thinkers debate the spiritual status of Roman Catholics and Protestants, and a few still consider them heretics.

The doctrine of justification by faith is virtually absent from the history and theology of Orthodoxy. Rather, Orthodoxy emphasizes theosis (literally, "divinization"), the gradual process by which Christians become more and more like Christ.

The Orthodox have experienced more brutal and lasting persecution than any other Christian body. Under Soviet atheism, for example, communists closed 98 percent of the Orthodox churches in Russia, as well as 1,000 monasteries and 60 seminaries. Between 1917 and the outbreak ...