Eastern schismatics believe in consecration by the Epiklesis and reject the Filioque.
We come to a great question which one would like to clear up at once. What is the attitude of these smaller sects as to the Church of Christ? We believe that this is necessarily one visibly united body, everywhere holding the same faith, in communion with itself always and everywhere. So do the Orthodox, as I have shown.[1] We say it is our Church, they say it is theirs. But what about the smaller Eastern sects? Are they logical, claiming each to be the whole true Church, in the teeth of the absurdity of such a claim; or do they admit separated sects, teaching different faiths, as making up one Church together? Has, in fact, the Branch theory adherents in the Highlands of Kurdistan, the Egyptian desert and the wilds of Abyssinia? I am not sure; it is a difficult point; but I believe it has. In the first place, these rude folk have probably not thought much about the question at all; they have too little theology of any kind to have evolved a clear theory about the unity of the Church. It may no doubt be said safely that their sects have no dogmatic position as to this question, except that, of course, in any case they themselves are all right. Whoever else may be, they are members of the true and Apostolic Church. Otherwise, it is a matter about which each member will form his own opinion, and form it differently. I know one case of an Armenian bishop who has a theory of juxtaposition of all bishops with equal rights, co-ordination not subordination, which comes to very much the same thing as the famous Branch theory.[2] But the others? If one were to ask a Nestorian, Coptic, Jacobite bishop, what would he say? One can only conjecture. The Monophysite would say that the Council of Chalcedon taught heresy, that all who accept its dogma are heretics. Could he admit that heretics are part of the true
- ↑ Orth. Eastern Church, pp. 365–372.
- ↑ See Lord Malachy Ormanian (ex-Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople): L'Église Arménienne (Paris, 1910), p. 86. He admits "every Church which acknowledges the dogmas of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Redemption" as part of the universal Church. This would include every kind of Protestant sect—Quakers, Christian Scientists and Mormons. He comes up against the fundamental difficulty of all branch theories, that no one can tell you which the branches are.
