Let's agree to disagree on THIS, please.
That is what I sought to agree to disagree on, and that is acceptable.
Although I do feel obliged to make a post correcting certain inaccurate statements about the agreement itself which I believe resulted from a misreading of it on your part. However, I believe that clarifying certain details about the ecumenical agreement can be done without debating the issue of what kind of relationship the Syriac Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox are in; my goal rather is simply to clarify what the agreement says without saying how it should be interpreted.
However, you raised another issue which I cannot possibly agree to disagree with you on, as it is much more important than the rest:
EO doesn't seek to convert any other confession.
I don’t think you understand. Under no circumstances does the current ecumenical agreement allow a Syriac Orthodox Christian to join the Antiochian Orthodox Churcj, or vice versa. It is not allowed under the 1991 agreement. Instead, Syriac Orthodox and Antiochian Orthodox are allowed to worship and receive the sacraments in each other’s churches as much as they need.
Furthermore, it is not true that the Eastern Orthodox do not seek to convert any other confession. Indeed, we venerate as Equal to the Apostles a number of people, specifically because they converted entire nations to Christ, St. Gregory the Illuminator of the Armenians, St. Nino the Evangelist of Georgia, and St. Vladimir the Great, the Evangelist of the Kievan Rus people, a Slavic tribe that partially intermarried with Swedish Vikings (who also provided the Varangian Guards, who protected the Emperor at the Bucoleon Palace in Constantinople* and while travelling) and who were also the literal ancestors of the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarussians, and the Rusyn peoples such as the Carpatho-Rusyns and Lemkos, and also the spiritual ancestors of the Native Alaskans, Chinese, Japanese and other ethnicities converted to Orthodox Christianity in the second millenium. And likewise we also praise the Holy Apostles for the nations they converted: St. Paul, who evangelized the gentiles of the Western Empire, and St. Peter, the first Patriarch of Antioch, who supervised St. Paul and converted Jews in the same areas, before reaching Rome and setting up the Church there with St. Paul, before the two were executed by the mad emperor Nero. And St. Peter’s protege, St. Mark the Evangelist, owner of the house with the Cenacle, was sent to Alexandria to establish the Church in Egypt, which he did, before himself being martyred. Then we have Andrew the First Called, who evangelized Byzantion and various populations along the shore of the Black Sea, generally having travelled Northwest from Antioch, who was crucified on an X shaped cross, for the same reason St. Peter insisted on being crucified inverted, because they did not feel worthy to be crucified in the same position as our Lord (whereas St. Paul, as a Roman citizen, was beheaded; the reason why the basillica built on the site of his martyrdom is called St. Paul outside the Walls is if I recall related both to the location of the Circus Maximus, and the fact that weapons were not allowed through the inner walls surrounding the center of Rome, the
Pomerium, which in Roman Paganism was regarded as a sacred domain in which weapons were not allowed unless wielded by Praetorian Guards; this was terribly inconvenient and thus the Roman Senate had a second Curia built outside the Pomerium in addition to their Curia on the Capitoline Hill). And we have St. Bartholomew who was skinned while preaching to the Armenians, and St. Thomas the Apostle, who travelled East from Antioch with his disciples Saints Addai and Mari, converting Jews and Gentiles on the trade route to India, and thus establishing churches in Edessa, Nineveh, Seleucia-Cstesiphon and Kerala, home to the Kochin Jews who settled there to engage in commerce shortly after Alexander the Great opened up trade routes to the Malabar Coast. And it was in Kerala where an enraged Maharajah gave St. Thomas the Apostle a crown of martyrdom by throwing a javelin at him. And likewise, the other Holy Apostles also converted many other Pagans and Jews to Christ, and all were martyred except for St. John the Beloved Disciple and Theologian.
And in the fourth century, St. Athanasius the Great, rather than ignoring the rival confession of Arianism, worked under his mentor, Pope Alexander of Alexandria, to eradicate it; as protodeacon to St. Alexander, he defended the anathema against Arius at the Council of Nicaea, and procured an anathema against Arianism as a whole, and was instrumental in the formulation of the first edition of the Nicene Creed. Later, after the sinister Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia through politics persuaded the ageing and ailing St. Constantine, who we venerate for legalizing Christianity and causing the conversion of many Romans to Christianity, to have St. Athanasius exiled on a false accusation of murder, to Nicaea, on the opposite end of the Emperor, a perilous journey that St. Athanasius later survived only through the grace of God, and from which he returned when evidence surfaced that exonerated him, but then unfortunately after St. Constantine reposed in the Lord, his son, Constantius, was converted to Arianism by Eusebius, and promptly exiled St. Athanasius again, and in the 340s-350s AD, St. Athanasius fought “contra mundum”, against the world, to re-establish Christianity and eradicate Arianism, during a period of time when, through Imperial support, Arianism had the upper hand, but through divine assistance and his own endurance, St. Athanasius made progress, aided by allies such as St. Ephrem the Syrian, the “Harp of the Spirit”, who composed hymns and metrical homilies to promote Christianity (for Arianism, going back to Arius, had made a major effort to propagate songs promoting its central anti-Christian premise that Jesus Christ was a created being, of a different essence than the Father, the Son of God, but not the co-eternal and co-equal person of the Holy Trinity who put on our humanity in order to restore and glorify it through His incarnation.
Pope St. Athanasius returned to Alexandria, and the Arian bishop was deposed, during the reign of Emperor Julian “the Apostate”, who was a neo-Platonist (his nickname amuses me, because considering his immediate predecessors were militant Arians who persecuted Christians, rather than Nicene Orthodox Christians, converting from Arianism to neo-Platonism doesn’t seem like much of an act of apostasy). And we venerate St. Athanasius as the Pillar of Orthodoxy for his defense of the Christian faith against this heresy. Likewise, we venerate St. Ephrem the Syrian, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and many others, for helping in the struggle, with the three Cappodacians also tackling the dreadful heresy of Pneumatomacchianism, which denied the personhood of God the Holy Spirit, regarding the Lord and Giver of Life as an impersonal force rather than as the third person of the Trinity, coequal and coeternal with the Father, from whom He proceeds, and the Son, who he conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Who sent Him on Pentecost Sunday to descend upon the Twelve Apostles in the Cenacle at the Third Hour, the same time most regular Christian church services begin, aside from Vespers and feasts such as Pascha which are celebrated at midnight, and also liturgies in some monasteries, to act as our Comforter and Paraclete.
And in modern times, we continue to venerate those who convert people to Holy Orthodoxy, even from other Nicene Christian churches that we have good ecumenical relations with. For example, we venerate St. Alexis Toth for bringing to the Orthodox Church the Ruthenian Greek Catholics who had arrived in North America, only to be informed by the Latin Rite bishops that their married priests would have to divorce their wives, which would have caused horrible hardship for many pious Christian families, and these converts, primarily Carpatho-Rusyns, Lemkos, Byelorussians and Western Ukrainians, made a major contribution to the Eastern Orthodox church in North America, and form a substantial portion of the membership of the OCA, ROCOR, the Patriarchal Parishes, the UOCNA, and even the Antiochian Orthodox churches, and also comprise the entirety of the American Carpatho Rusyn Orthodox Diocese (aside from the bishop, who is Greek, oddly enough, considering the UOCNA, which was also established by Patriarch of Constantinople) and indeed, they are so numerous in parts of Pennsylvania that the city of Wilkes-Barre and surrounding townships are now known as “Fourth Rome.”
Indeed, the instruction to convert people from other confessions to Orthodoxy is in the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19. And a major reason for engaging in ecumenical reconciliation is to facilitate such conversions; the Roman Catholics using a similiar approach, by sending missionaries to work with disenfranchised leaders of minorities within the ethnic groups of different Orthodox churches, managed to set up an Eastern Catholic church that corresponds with every single autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as several of the more important autonomous churches.
However, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal, while stating that proselytism and spreading Orthodox are legitimate activities, did say that he regarded negative proselytism as extremely unorthodox. Examples of negative proselytism include the Jack Chick tracts attacking Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and other types of aggressive polemics, intended to make people doubt the faith in which they were raised, and the Orthodox Church has instead focused on showing people the Truth, and indeed in several cases, for example, the Western Rite Orthodox communities, has done so in a manner that accommodates the existing liturgical traditions of the people.
So I must say I disagree with you on your claim that Orthodoxy does not seek to convert members of other confessions much more than I disagree with you on the somewhat obscure and technical issue, specific to Middle Eastern Christianity, of the exact nature of the relationship between the Antiochian Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox.
*The Bucoleon was located on part of the grounds occupied by the much more extravagant Topkapi Palace built by the decadent hypocritical Ottoman Sultans to house themselves, their wives and concubines, as well as to serve as a prison for their brothers, since under Turkocratia, rather than the King writing about loving one’s brother, and how it was good for the brethren to dwell together in brotherly love, the brothers of the Sultan were threats to the Sultan’s power, who had to be imprisoned in the Emperor’s own palace, so that his Janissary guards, comprised of the firstborn sons of Christians, could kill them immediately if the emperor or his mother, the Valide Sultan, decided that one of them posed a risk to the rule of her preferred son.
