Eastern Orthodox v. Protestantism

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arapahoepark

Puritan Board Professor
Looking around on EO beliefs in this forum and like at Monergism.com, I can't help but wonder why they didn't go the way the west did. Also was it Augustine that was the driving force behind doctrines like original sin and a legal and forensic view of salvation, or did other earlier fathers have such views?

Why do Orthodox have such different interpretations of scripture, like the galatians 3:13, regarding overcoming death (which is no doubt part of it, but not necessarily all of it) and salvation? Or does it just revolve around their 49 volumes of eastern church fathers' fanciful interpretations?

Hope you can help answer some of these.
 
The EO church has historically been more mystical than the western church. It was the Eastern Desert Fathers who drive a lot of EO theology. Probably the main reason the Eastern Church did not go the way the West did was because of the Western Church's association with the "Holy Roman Empire". This association caused the West to take on many of its tradition, while the Eastern Church derived its tradition from the monastics and mystics.
Also was it Augustine that was the driving force behind doctrines like Original Sin and a legal and forensic view of salvation, or did earlier church fathers have such views?
Paul?? In all seriousness, Augustine was the main proponant of a Systematic Theologial approach to Orignal Sin.
 
Part of it has to do with linguistic differences and the differences between the Greek and Latin minds. Consider Latin: it was the language of law, of business, and of politics (even as late as Justinian in the East). As a result, authors who wrote in Latin in the early centuries tended to see things in legal and forensic terms. They tended to be more systematic. Greek, on the other hand, was the language of philosophy, art, and poetry of the day. Thus the Greek fathers tended to be indebted to Greek neo-Platonic philosophy and its categories, which were highly mystical. They tended to see sanctification, for example, in metaphysical terms, not mere legal or moral ones.
 
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