The Collaborative International Dictionary
Eastern Church \Eastern Church\ That portion of the Christian church which prevails in the countries once comprised in the Eastern Roman Empire and the countries converted to Christianity by missionaries from them. Its full official title is The Orthodox Catholic Apostolic Eastern Church. It became estranged from the Western, or Roman, Church over the question of papal supremacy and the doctrine of the filioque, and a separation, begun in the latter part of the 9th century, became final in 1054. The Eastern Church consists of twelve (thirteen if the Bulgarian Church be included) mutually independent churches (including among these the Hellenic Church, or Church of Greece, and the Russian Church), using the vernacular (or some ancient form of it) in divine service and varying in many points of detail, but standing in full communion with each other and united as equals in a great federation. The highest five authorities are the patriarch of Constantinople, or ecumenical patriarch (whose position is not one of supremacy, but of precedence), the patriarch of Alexandria, the patriarch of Jerusalem, the patriarch of Antioch, and the Holy Synod of Russia. The Eastern Church accepts the first seven ecumenical councils (and is hence styled only schismatic, not heretical, by the Roman Catholic Church), has as its creed the Niceno-Constantinopolitan (without the later addition of the filioque, which, with the doctrine it represents, the church decisively rejects), baptizes infants with trine immersion, makes confirmation follow immediately upon baptism, administers the Communion in both kinds (using leavened bread) and to infants as well as adults, permits its secular clergy to marry before ordination and to keep their wives afterward, but not to marry a second time, selects its bishops from the monastic clergy only, recognizes the offices of bishop, priest, and deacon as the three necessary degrees of orders, venerates relics and icons, and has an elaborate ritual. See also Greek Church, under Greek.
Usage examples of "eastern church".
The Eastern church service is almost a physical re-creation of heaven on earth.
The peace of the Eastern church was invaded by a swarm of fanatics, incapable of fear, or reason, or humanity.
It is somewhat remarkable, that the prelate of the first eastern church, however anxious for the conversion of his friend, thought proper to decline this fair and reasonable challenge.
You demonstrate a very special grasp of early Byzantium, and of the eastern church.
By his command the metropolis of the Eastern church was transformed into a mosque: the rich and portable instruments of superstition had been removed.
In time, however, the Christians of Egypt came to regard the sixth of January as the date of the Nativity, and the custom of {190} commemorating the birth of the Saviour on that day gradually spread until by the fourth century the Western Church, which had never recognized the sixth of January as the day of the Nativity, adopted the twenty-fifth of December as the true date, and in time its decision was accepted also by the Eastern Church.
At this time it was instituted that, after the manner of the Eastern Church, hymns and psalms should be sung, lest the people should pine away in the tediousness of sorrow.
These questions were: first the relation of the Orthodox Eastern Church to other Churches—.
The Byzantine Empress Zoe, whose career would have made Theodora blush, is a saint in the Eastern church though naturally not among the Romans: likewise Alexander Nevsky, because he stopped a bunch of Catholic invaders.