We can't hope to be like Christ substantively, who was NEVER IN NEED OF REDEMPTION, but we can hope to be like Peter who is made perfect in Christ, and inasmuch as we realize that hope, we become the Church.
That is true, but it does not change the reality of the office Christ established for Peter, as affirmed and taught by Tradition Christ even gave him keys!
I’m really ready to move on from all of this. The Orthodox have never agreed with the kind of Papal Supremacy that developed in the Post-Schism West. That there exist Bishops with Apostolic Succession in the East who disagreed with the late-medieval Papal claims is evidence enough that its an innovation, as far as I’m concerned. Unlike Western pontiffs and their subject-scholars, I believe these Bishops were in a better position to rightly divide the Word of Truth, and the Holy Tradition they received, in matters pertaining to their own Church function.
The Latin claim depends on proving that these Eastern Bishops were decided schismatics, foisting schism upon their flock, by refusing to recognize the West’s bloated claims of political and spiritual supremacy. On the contrary, I see no reason to believe they had ever commemorated the Bishop of Rome in their Liturgy, simply because Rome never had anything to do with their founding. But the Latins attempted to enforce innovation of these Bishops, by sending delegations to compel them to change the Tradition they’ve inherited from their Holy Fathers, or suffer excommunication from the “Universal Pope”.
This actually happened in Church history. This is a thing the Orthodox have actually had to deal with. This isn’t some words on a page or a screen. This is a hostile foreign power attempting, first by force, and then by subterfuge and subversion, the religious observances of otherwise pious Christian Communities, which had never inherited these claims or observances as part of their Deposit of Faith.
And the reason they never inherited these innovations, is because they were never part of the Deposit in the first place.
My Bishop doesn’t go to your Bishop’s house, and suddenly start demanding that he accept his rites and observances. But that’s what the Roman’s have been doing, with their weird and foreign Papal Supremacy. And it really only became a problem like this post-schism.
I’m willing to move past this, because Orthodoxy has proven perfectly capable of resisting this innovation, for the most part, and it isn’t any sort of threat anymore. The Papacy has done more damage to its own credibility, by dint of its historical behavior, than any of us could ever do.
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