Category: Inter-Orthodox

The Myth of Unity

Nine years ago, at a conference at St. Vladimir's Seminary, I presented a paper called, "The Myth of Unity and the Origins of Jurisdictional Pluralism in American Orthodoxy." My thesis, basically, was that, contrary to the prevailing narrative at the time, Orthodoxy in America was not administratively united prior to...

Fr Matthew Baker: Florovsky Visits America

Last night, March 1, 2015, the brilliant Orthodox scholar (and priest, husband, and father of six), Fr Matthew Baker, died in a car accident. In remembrance of him, we are republishing a really outstanding article that he wrote for this site in 2012. You can read more about Fr Matthew in this post by his friend, Fr Andrew Damick. If...

Who was St. Raphael under — Antioch or Russia?

Who was St. Raphael under? It depends partly on whom you ask, and it also depends on when you ask. In 1895, when Archimandrite Raphael Hawaweeny came to America to oversee the Syro-Arabs, he was most definitely under the Russian Church. In fact, at the time, he was on the...

Early stages of the Bulgarian schism from Constantinople

We just finished running a series of six articles on the 1872 Council of Constantinople, published contemporaneously in the Methodist Quarterly Review. The following article is from about a decade earlier, and describes the early stages of the Bulgarian split from the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This piece is from an...

The “Bulgarian Question” and the 1872 Council of Constantinople, Part 6

This is the final Methodist Quarterly Review article dealing with the aftermath of the 1872 Council of Constantinople. From the Methodist Quarterly Review, April 1874.   The Bulgarian Church question has, on the whole, attracted less attention during the year 1873 than in the previous years. The Bulgarians, undoubtedly, have...

The “Bulgarian Question” and the 1872 Council of Constantinople, Part 2

Yesterday, I ran the first of six articles on the so-called "Bulgarian Question," a controversy that rocked the Orthodox world in the early 1870s and ultimately led to the 1872 Council of Constantinople, which condemned the heresy of "phyletism." Search the Internet -- both Google and the various subscriber-only databases...

The “Bulgarian Question” and the 1872 Council of Constantinople, Part 1

Recently, I had occasion to research the 1872 Council of Constantinople, which somewhat famously condemned "ethno-phyletism." The issue arose because, as I understand it, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church -- which was under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate -- declared itself autocephalous. Anyway, before I began this research, I could...