by Haruo » Mon Aug 10, 2015 6:30 pm
I was thinking something along the same lines, Kai, but decided to wait to see your response to Dave and Ed's suggestions. I was thinking maybe this was more like "full communion" vs. "partial communion" vs. "being out of communion", a distinction (or range of gradations) which is also found in many other Christian denominations. I am thinking of the degrees of communion between, say, the Roman Catholic Church; the non-Roman (e.g. Byzantine, Maronite etc.) Catholic churches that are in full communion with Rome and acknowledge the Roman understanding of the Petrine Primacy; the Eastern Orthodox Churches that do not acknowledge the Pope's primacy and who maintain their own apostolic succession of patriarchs; groups like the Anglican Communion, the Old Catholics, etc., or Orthodox churches that are a bit beyond the normal degree of foreignness (e.g. some of the Copts, and the Ethiopians); Moravians and Lutherans; then passing into some degree of heterodoxy with the Calvinists, the Anabaptists, the Moravians, the Waldensians... the Baptists, the Quakers, the Christian Unitarians, the Swedenborgians, the Christian Scientists, the Mormons, the (New) English Shakers, the (Indian) Shakers, and on and on, getting less "inner" and more "outer" as they go. Baptists would arrange the map differently, with their own local congregation in loco papae perhaps, and with the Catholics on the fringes of orthodoxy... I'm kidding, to a degree, but sometimes it feels like I'm serious...
Haruo = Leland Bryant Ross
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