In the last issue of the article I shared that the first characteristic of the Eastern Church is that it is communal. Another characteristic of the Eastern Church is that it is intuitive. Although the Eastern Church is firmly supported by true scholarship, it does not really trust in scholarship as such as faith. It firmly believes that the Christian Faith stands upon both an experiential and objectifiable knowledge of God; neither of which can be separated from the other. Thus, the thinking of Eastern Christians is that it is impossible to encapsulate the Christian faith into intellectual propositions. Doctrines have value in that they can protect the mystery of Christ and redemption from heretical twistings. They can never, however, communicate the faith so well that one could experience God by studying them alone. God will always transcend every one of man’s finite, doctrinal statements and formulations. For this reason, Eastern Christianity shies away from making exhaustive doctrinal confessions and would never put forward any creed or confession as the definition of Christianity.

Although the Eastern Church was greatly instrumental in formulating the Creed that we use every time that we celebrate the Divine Liturgy, this Creed was formulated only to stamp out what was seen as heresy. Eastern Christians would never say that the Creed is the complete substance of what we believe.

The inability to capture the Faith in words is underscored by the fact that, although reason should be used in our attempts to perceive truth, our physical senses will always be unable to fully comprehend the things of the Spirit. The character Job, who is found in the Old Testament, recognized one of his sins as being too quick to declare what he did not understand. The Eastern minded Christian would not want to repeat his error by making any real   dogmatic statements about those things which have not been clearly and unambiguously revealed by the Spirit.

The Eastern Church subscribes to what is known as apophatic theology, that is a theology that attempts to describe God by negation, to speak of God only in absolutely certain terms and to avoid what may not be said. Eastern theology is based on the assumption that God’s essence is unknowable or ineffable and on the recognition of the inadequacy of human language to describe God. It is balanced with cataphatic theology or positive theology and a belief in the incarnation through which God has revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. To know God one must know Jesus.