Ialmisry,
The Ethiopian Church is autocephalous, I am not sure that any major ecclesiastical changes were allowed under the Ottomans.
The situation of keeping Ethiopia in subjugation rather than developing into an independent Church predates the Ottomans by a thousand years. The influence of Ethiopia in the cause of the Church was demonstrated in the reign of the Emperor Caleb (500-534) demonstrated that, and it remained a focus for the non-Chalcedonians as Constantinople remained for the Chalcedonians, see for instance the origins of Pseudo-Methodius and the Legend of the Last Emperor in e.g. The Byzantine apocalyptic tradition By Paul Julius Alexander, Dorothy deF. Abrahamse,
http://books.google.com/books?id=nw-rR_Skb-cC&pg=PA30&dq=Pseudo-Methodius+last+emperor+monophysite+Ethiopia&hl=en&ei=9ORSTNu4IMH9nAf69bG9Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=falseIt should have been allowed to develop into a patriarchy. Instead, the office of Abuna was instituted to prevent that.
When the Greek Church of Alexandria was going to unite with the Coptic Orthodox Church the Patriarch was poisoned.
Which Pope was poisoned?
The Indian situation is not a happy one, but the Indian Church has faced many different situations over the last hundreds of years. It is not at all the same as the Ethiopian/Coptic relationship for instance. And the autocephalous Indian Orthodox Church is recognised by all the Orthodox except of course for the Syrian Orthodox.
In other words, but all but her Mother Church. I'm claim they are still in communion, and we had a similar situation with Poland. There are differences between Antioch-India, and Alexandria-Ethiopia, but I wonder which ones you are thinking of.
In what sense did a Greek peasant in 1800 feel part of the same Church as a Siberian peasant? I can't imagine they would have given each other a thought.
LOL. First to stand up for the peasants: in the "Information Age" in which we leave, most Americans on the street haven't the slightest idea that Great Britain and the US are NATO allies.
Since peasants, of course, don't write down their thoughts, we are dependent on what their betters notice of their opinions. Taking your scenario in reverse to start, the Siberian peasant was very aware of being in the same Church as the Greek peasant: a lot of Greek history and cult (for instance, local shrines) became transplanted in Russia from Greece, along with a lot of Greeks (there was a constant flow away from the Ottomans to Russia all during the Sultan's rule). When serfdom ended, and the peasants were free to travel, many ran off to piligrimage to the sites they had heard in Church for centuries. As for the Greek peasant, since their prelates were constantly going to Russia for alms, and the Russians were constantly contributing to the welfare of the Sultan's EO subjects, I'm sure he was pretty aware of the Russians as well. The Arab peasant, much to the increasing chagrin of the Greek Ottoman establishment, was well aware.
Above the level of peasant, craftmen to traders through hiearchs, this awareness of one communion is well documented. I just came across that Shelikov, the Russian responsible for founding the Orthodox mission to America in 1794 put a Greek captain in charge of Kodiak, the first home of the first Orthodox see in the New World, while he went back to St. Petersburg to drum up support and recruit priests.
It is the modern immigrant situation which is especially forcing Christians to recognise each other in different cultural guises. Here in the UK the sense of being one Church is growing stronger and stronger each year as we do more and more together.
I would agree such developments are a good thing. They are not, however, a new thing, a least not for the EO.
The Russian Church, it seems to me, was for a long period simply a department of state and the episcopal authority was entirely subservient to the governmental authority.
Not exactly the same set up as you have in England. The Holy Synod never was answerable to the Senate, for instance, so things like Parliament voting on women bishops didn't happen. The Czar as supreme judge of the Holy Governing Synod wasn't always a bad thing: when it voted to close the see of Kodiak, Czar Nicholas I refused and told them to get another bishop. When it claimed it didn't have a bishop for St. Innocent, then Father John of Sitka, Czar Alexander I told them to ordain St. Innocent [of Alaska, Apostle to America) and install him in his city as his see. And even Peter the so-called Great had to get approval for the new set up from the other Orhtodox Churches.
Although each Russian bishop had to acknowledge and swear to the Czar as Supreme Judge of the Holy Governing Synod, it wasn't much different from what OO (or EO) bishops had to do to get their berat, irade and wilayah from the caliphs and sultans. Except I don't think the Russians had to pay a fee.
This was how it often was in the Byzantine empire as well.
If that were true, we would be a-Chalcedonian Monothelite Iconoclasts in submission to the Vatican.
Byzantine Caesaropapism is an invention of the West, projected on the reality of the Orthodox Church to which such Orientalism bears no resemblance.
It has not been like that for most OO communities since the 6th/7th centuries.
The primates of most OO communities acted as the arm of the Muslim state to collect taxes and enforce dhimmi order. Not that a lot of pastoring didn't get done, as it did during the Synodal period, but to say that a seperation of Church and state prevailed isn't to see things are they were. It is, after all, why the Coptic patriarchate was translated to Cairo.
HIM Haile Selassie was a respected figure but he was not the emperor of a civil community which encompassed all of the OO.
No EO emperor's rule encompassed all the EO. Ever.
He was a respected monarch of an Orthodox nation, as to a lesser extent HM the Queen is respected as a Christian monarch. This is not at all the same as the position of the Byzantine Emperor who could and regularly did depose whoever he wanted, make ecclesiatical law when he wanted, and even write the scripts of his own councils when he wanted.
You mean, like the Ecumenical Councils?
The experience of the Russian Empire surely does colour the experience of a large proportion of local EO churches since they were all part of the Russian Empire.
?
Only Russia, (briefly, and for no longer than Armenia, for instance) Georgia, Romania, Poland, Czech Lands and Slovakia and the OCA were even in part part of the Russian empire. That is 6 out of 15. If you eliminate those under the Russian Emperor under a century, you strike half off the list (CZS was only occupied during WWI, and Romania was only under the 20 years of the Protectorate, and even if you count Bessarabia as part of Romania-and I do-it is still under a century). Increase that by only a quarter century, and everyone except Russia is off the list. Since now even the OCA has spent more outside the empire than in (68 years versus 143), let alone Georgia (which existed as a Christian nation nearly a millenium and a half before annexation to the Russian Empire), the source of Russian influence is other than direct rule.
The situation of the Church of Finland is also interesting since it receives state support and in return keeps Pascha on the same day as the Lutherans, and as far as I understand, uses a lectionary produced by the state department of religious affairs.
Produced or printed? As far as I know, Finland's lectionary doesn't differ from any other non-Greek one (they revised it IIRC when they revised the Typica). And fair's fair: the Lutheran church was official in Finland under the Czar as well, something that led to the interesting status, by treaty, of the Lutheran church of Sitka under US law.
I am not sure I am making some majorly significant point. I guess I am not sure what you are not sure about.
I am not sure how the British and French (OO) Orthodox Churches taking Alexandria as the Mother Church demonstrates "attitude of jurisdictional organisation for the sake of others and not for the sake of the power of the Mother Church."
