Chapter XIX
Watch and Listen
A video series, a music playlist, and a glossary of the terms
Playlist · Apple Music
Orthodoxy
Chant and hymnody to put on while you read — the
same texts the chapters above walk through, sung.
The study that goes with it: Finding the Church That Jesus BuiltBible study · Four parts · Church, canon, and apostolic tradition
A Short Glossary
Words that turn up throughout, defined once. Every one of them appears somewhere above.
- Anamnesis
- Greek for remembrance — but not merely recalling something past. In the Liturgy it means making a saving act of God present again. It is the word behind Christ’s “do this in remembrance of me.”
- Ancestral sin
- The Orthodox understanding of what Adam passed on: death, corruption and a wounded nature, inherited by everyone — but not Adam’s personal guilt. Distinguished from the Western doctrine of original sin as inherited guilt.
- Catechumen
- Someone formally enrolled in the Church as a learner, being instructed toward baptism. An ancient status, not a modern class. Catechumens are prayed for by name in the services.
- Chrismation
- Anointing with holy oil immediately after baptism, for the gift of the Holy Spirit. What the West separated out as confirmation, Orthodoxy keeps joined to baptism — including for infants.
- Deuterocanonical
- “Second canon.” The Old Testament books received by Orthodoxy but placed in a separate Apocrypha section, or omitted, in most Protestant Bibles — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees among others.
- Divine Liturgy
- The Eucharistic service — the central act of Orthodox worship. Not a term for any church service, but for this one.
- Economia
- Pastoral discretion. The Church’s authority to apply a rule flexibly to a particular person’s situation without abolishing the rule. Its opposite is akriveia, strictness.
- Ecumenical Council
- A gathering of bishops from across the whole Church to settle a question of the faith. Orthodoxy recognises seven, held between 325 and 787.
- Filioque
- Latin for “and the Son.” The clause the Western Church added to the Nicene Creed, so that the Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son.” One of the two great causes of the East–West schism.
- Latreia / proskynesis
- Two Greek words the Seventh Ecumenical Council distinguished. Latreia is worship, and belongs to God alone. Proskynesis is the honour shown to holy things and persons — a bow, a kiss — and is not worship.
- Phyletism
- Organising the Church along ethnic or national lines. Condemned as an error by a council at Constantinople in 1872 — which is the formal answer to anyone who thinks Orthodoxy belongs to one people.
- Prelest
- Spiritual delusion. The state of mistaking one’s own imagination, or something worse, for the voice of God. The ascetic writers warn about it constantly, especially in people seeking dramatic experiences.
- Septuagint
- The Greek translation of the Old Testament, begun in the third century before Christ. The Bible of the Greek-speaking world into which Christianity was born, and the version the New Testament writers usually quote.
- Sola Scriptura
- “Scripture alone.” The Protestant principle that Scripture is the only infallible authority, by which all councils and traditions must be judged. Orthodoxy affirms Scripture’s authority but denies that it was ever meant to function apart from the Church that recognised it.
- Synergy
- Working together. The Orthodox term for how grace and human freedom relate — God’s grace does everything, and the person genuinely responds. Paul’s “labourers together with God.”
- Theosis
- Deification. Becoming a partaker of the divine nature by grace, as Peter puts it — sharing God’s life without ever becoming God in essence. Orthodoxy’s word for what salvation is finally for.
- Theotokos
- “God-bearer,” the title of Mary defined at the Council of Ephesus in 431. It is a statement about Christ before it is a statement about her: the one she carried was truly God.