A Short History, Pentecost to America

What you'll notice

You'll hear history before you read any. The Creed the congregation sings every Sunday was finished at a council in 381. The title the deacon gives Mary, the Theotokos (the one who gave birth to God), was defended at another council in 431. The icons all around you were fought over for more than a century and restored in 843, and the first Sunday of Lent still keeps the anniversary as the Sunday of Orthodoxy.¹ In the Great Litany the deacon prays "for our Holy Synod (or Patriarch); for our Bishop," and names him,² which is how a parish in Ohio tells you every week which ancient church it belongs to.

The sign out front is history too. Greek, Antiochian, Russian, Serbian, Romanian: each word is a chapter, and the parish is where the chapters end up sharing a parking lot.

What it's called

The great gatherings of bishops that defined the faith are the Ecumenical Councils. Ecumenical comes from the Greek for "the inhabited world," which in later use meant the Roman world;³ a council was ecumenical because the whole Church received it, not because everybody on earth was in the room. The Orthodox count seven, and each is named for its city: two at Nicaea, three at Constantinople, one at Ephesus, one at Chalcedon. Numbering is the other habit. "The Fourth Council" is Chalcedon, "the Seventh" is Nicaea II, and people say "the Fathers of the Sixth" without blinking.

The break with Rome is the Great Schism. The name suggests a single rip on a single day. It wasn't, as you'll see.

What's actually happening

The Orthodox tell their history as one continuous story: the same Church, gathered at Pentecost, still gathering. The bishops are successors of the apostles, the Creed is the councils' Creed, and the Liturgy grew from the one those councils' bishops served. Most of the rest is a matter of where the Church lived and who ruled the country around it: Roman emperors, then Arab caliphs, Ottoman sultans, Russian tsars, Soviet commissars, and finally American zoning boards.

Three habits make the story easier to follow. Dates of definition are not dates of origin: a council usually defended something the Church already believed and wrote it down because someone had denied it. Splits happen slowly: the Church's divisions grew over generations, and the famous dates mark moments in a long process. And the Church remembers in its services: many of the people and councils below have a feast day, so you'll meet them again in the calendar.

Why it matters

The Orthodox claim is a historical claim. When an Orthodox Christian says this is the Church the apostles founded, he isn't describing a feeling; he's pointing to bishops who can name their predecessors, a Creed with a date on it, and canons you can look up. That kind of claim can be checked, so this guide tries to check it, and to say "nobody knows" where nobody does.

It matters for a plainer reason too. Almost everything that puzzles a visitor, from the patriarch's name in the prayers to the dozen jurisdictions in one American city, is a scar or a souvenir of something that happened. Know the story and the room starts to make sense.

Where it came from

Pentecost and the first centuries

"When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place" (Acts 2:1). Pentecost (the fiftieth day after Pascha) is the Church's birthday. The Spirit came, the apostles preached in the languages of everyone listening, and "that day about three thousand souls were added to them" (Acts 2:41). Within a generation there were churches across the eastern Mediterranean, and at Antioch "the disciples were first called Christians" (Acts 11:26).

The first three centuries were a time of bishops, martyrs, and households. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, writing on his way to execution in the early second century, told the Smyrnaeans: "Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be."⁴ Saint Justin Martyr, around 150, described a Sunday assembly that read the apostles and the prophets, heard a sermon, prayed, and shared the bread and cup.⁵ Persecution came and went. In 313 the emperors Constantine and Licinius granted that "the Christians and all others should have liberty to follow that mode of religion which to each of them appeared best,"⁶ and the Church came out into the open.

The seven councils

With freedom came arguments in public. The Orthodox receive seven councils as ecumenical, and each answered a question about who Christ is.

The texts are in the public-domain Seven Ecumenical Councils.⁷ A few details are worth knowing. Nicaea's twenty canons covered church order as well as doctrine, including the rule that Christians pray standing on Sundays; its letter to the Egyptian church announced that the East would now keep Easter "at the same time with the Romans."⁸ Constantinople I gave the bishop of Constantinople "the prerogative of honour after the Bishop of Rome; because Constantinople is New Rome."⁹ Chalcedon's definition cost the Church dearly: the Copts, Armenians, Syrians, and Ethiopians did not accept it, and the two families have been apart ever since, though they now call each other's faith the same faith in different words (Who Are the Orthodox? has the 1990 agreement). When the Sixth Council named the teachers of a single will in Christ whom it condemned, it added, "and with them Honorius, who was the ruler (proedron) of Rome."¹⁰ Nobody was exempt.

The councils sit on top of one another like floors of a house. Nicaea said the Son is God. Ephesus said the Son really became the child in Mary's arms. Chalcedon said he stayed fully God and became fully man. The Sixth said that a full man has a human will, so Christ has two wills, divine and human. The Seventh said that a God who took a face can be painted. The Creed in Plain Words walks through what the first two councils wrote, and Icons tells the Seventh's story.

East and West drift apart

People like to pin the split with Rome on a single year, usually 1054, and the year gets blamed for a divorce it didn't finalize. That summer papal legates laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia, and Patriarch Michael Cerularius answered in kind. But the excommunications named individual clerics, not whole churches, and the pope who'd sent the legates had already died, so their authority was doubtful at best. Bishop Kallistos Ware makes the point that the schism can't be given an exact date.¹¹

It helps to separate a practical schism, bishops no longer recognizing each other and Christians no longer sharing the cup, from a formal one, an official declaration that the churches are severed. By that measure the unraveling was slow. Language drifted apart, Latin in the West and Greek in the East, until neither side could easily read the other's theology. Questions about Rome's authority and the filioque (the Western addition "and the Son" to the Creed) sharpened. Even after 1054, plenty of churchmen on both sides treated each other as brothers. Then in 1204 the Fourth Crusade, which had set out for Jerusalem, sacked Constantinople instead: Christian armies looting a Christian city. That wound did more than any bull, and many historians date the practical schism from it.

Attempted reunions followed, at Lyon in 1274 and at Florence in 1438–39, both pressed by emperors desperate for Western help. Both were rejected by the Orthodox clergy and people at home. At Florence, Saint Mark of Ephesus alone refused to sign, saying there could be no compromise in matters of the Orthodox faith, and went home to urge his people to reject the union.¹² Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, and later Orthodox councils formally repudiated the union. It took centuries to build that wall, and nobody laid all the bricks at once.

The repair has been slow too. On December 7, 1965, Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras declared that they "regret and remove both from memory and from the midst of the Church the sentences of excommunication" of 1054.¹³ It didn't end the schism. It ended the habit of treating each other as excommunicated, which mattered. Orthodox and Catholic covers what still divides the two.

The faith goes north

While East and West were drifting, the Church was growing. In 863 two brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius, devised a Slavonic alphabet and translated the Gospel, the Epistles, the Psalter, and the services into Slavonic for the Slavs of Moravia. German bishops who served in Latin objected that services belonged in one of three languages; Pope Adrian, to his credit, gave permission for the Slavonic.¹⁴ In 988, by the usual reckoning, Prince Vladimir of Kiev was baptized, and his people after him in the Dnieper; his envoys had reported that in the great church of Constantinople they didn't know whether they were on earth or in heaven.¹⁵ In 1219 Saint Sava was consecrated the first archbishop of the Serbs.¹⁶ Georgia honors Saint Nino, a woman, as the one who brought it the faith.¹⁷

Under the crescent

Christians in the old heartlands lived under Muslim rule long before Constantinople fell. Jerusalem fell to the Arab armies while Saint Sophronius was its patriarch (634–644); after a long siege he opened the gates of the starving city on condition that the holy places be spared.¹⁸ The Orthodox, Judaism, and Islam tells that side of the story.

When Constantinople fell in 1453, the sultan made the patriarch the civil head of all the Christians in his empire. George Scholarios was installed as patriarch on January 6, 1454, and the patriarch became the ethnarch of the "Roman people," the Rum millet, with courts over marriage, divorce, guardianship, and wills among his people and responsibility for their taxes.¹⁹ The arrangement kept the Church alive and cost it dearly. New churches needed a permission that was usually refused; bells, processions, and preaching to Muslims were forbidden; Christian boys were taken for the Janissary corps and raised as Muslims.²⁰ The system also tied church membership to ethnic origin, and Greek control of the hierarchy was increasingly resented by the Balkan Slavs and the Romanians.²¹ In 1872 a council in Constantinople condemned the idea that the Church belongs to one nation (the ethnic-church myth has more).

The Russian centuries

As Constantinople weakened, Moscow rose. In 1448 the Russian bishops elected their own metropolitan, and the Russian Church became autocephalous (self-governing). In 1589 the Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremias II, visiting Russia, raised Metropolitan Job to be patriarch of Moscow, and the other patriarchs confirmed the new see.²² A monk named Philotheus told the grand prince that two Romes had fallen, Moscow was the third, and there wouldn't be a fourth.²³ The Church had a protector, and protectors have opinions. In the 1660s Patriarch Nikon's reforms, bringing Russian books into line with the Greek ones, split off the Old Believers; in 1721 Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate and ran the Church through a Holy Synod under a government official.²⁴

The patriarchate came back in 1917. A council in Moscow restored it and elected Saint Tikhon, who had been the Orthodox bishop in America from 1898 to 1907.²⁵ The new Soviet state turned on the Church. In 1922, in a campaign to seize church valuables, Tikhon was imprisoned, and the OCA's life of him counts nearly two thousand trials and more than ten thousand believers shot.²⁶ In 2000 the Russian Church glorified the New Martyrs (the saints martyred under the Soviets) and Confessors of Russia, more than a thousand of them by name, and remembers them on the Sunday nearest January 25.²⁷

To America

The first Orthodox mission to the New World came from Russia, by way of Alaska. In 1794 eight monks from the Valaam monastery landed at Kodiak.²⁸ Saint Herman of Alaska belonged to that mission. Saint Innocent, who came in the 1820s, translated Scripture and the services into native languages and devised an alphabet for them, and later became Metropolitan of Moscow.²⁹ The diocese's headquarters moved south to San Francisco and then to New York.

Then the ships came. Greeks, Arabs, Serbs, Russians, Carpatho-Rusyns, Romanians, Ukrainians, Albanians, and Bulgarians arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and built churches where they landed. There's an old saying: wherever there's a seaport, there you'll find Greeks. The usual pattern was a society named for the old country, then a rented hall, then a letter home asking for a priest who spoke the language. A San Francisco parish was founded in the 1860s by Serbs, Russians, and Greeks together.³⁰ In 1891 Saint Alexis Toth brought his Minneapolis parish of Eastern Catholics into the Orthodox Church, and whole parishes in the coal country of Pennsylvania are Orthodox today because tens of thousands followed him.³¹ In 1904 Saint Tikhon, bishop here from 1898 to 1907, consecrated the Arab priest Raphael Hawaweeny as bishop of Brooklyn, the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in North America.³² The Greek Archdiocese was incorporated in 1921.³³

Then 1917 cut the American diocese off from Moscow. Communication with Russia was "greatly hindered," and the American Church decided it could no longer keep strict administrative ties.³⁴ Each immigrant community looked to its own mother church, and the result was what the OCA's own history calls "multiple, overlapping jurisdictions based on ethnic background" (How the Church Is Organized sorts them out). Russian Orthodoxy itself divided, between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia; the two signed an Act of Canonical Communion in Moscow on May 17, 2007, "ending the 80-year division."³⁵ In 1970 Moscow granted autocephaly to its old American mission, which took the name the Orthodox Church in America; not every church recognizes the grant.³⁶ In 2010 the canonical Orthodox bishops of the region met in New York as one assembly for the first time, under rules set by a pan-Orthodox conference at Chambésy the year before.³⁷

Converts kept coming, a few at a time and then in groups. In 1987 about two thousand former evangelicals were received into the Antiochian Archdiocese, the visible start of something now ordinary: converts from every background and none, in every jurisdiction, often as the majority of a parish.³⁸ That's the story so far. It's still being written in your parish hall.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: learn the saints of your own mother church and at least one of somebody else's. Keep the Sunday of Orthodoxy, when the whole Church remembers that it argued its way to the faith you confess. When someone at work says the Church was invented in 325 or split in 1054, you now have dates.

If you're visiting: listen for the history in the service: the Creed, the Theotokos, the names in the litany. Read Acts 1–2 before your next visit. If you're Catholic or Protestant, the first thousand years are your history too, and you're welcome to them.

Go deeper

• Acts 1–15, the Church's first chapter.
• The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed. Henry Percival (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 14), the creeds, definitions, and canons in a public-domain translation.
• Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church.
• The Liturgy on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the first Sunday of Lent.

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