Protestant Ecclesiology on Orthodox Perspective,  in Priest Professor Doctor Isidor Todoran’s Writings Cover Image

Eclesiologia protestantă din perspectivă ortodoxă în scrierile Pr. Prof. Dr. Isidor Todoran
Protestant Ecclesiology on Orthodox Perspective, in Priest Professor Doctor Isidor Todoran’s Writings

Author(s): Dacian But-Căpuşan
Subject(s): Christian Theology and Religion
Published by: Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai

Summary/Abstract: Protestant Ecclesiology on Orthodox View in Priest Professor Doctor Isidor Todoran’s Writings. Priest Professor Isidor Todoran, doctor of Theology and Philosophy granted an exquisite attention in his works to the problems of ecclesiology and the protestant position regarding these problems. In some studies he critically analyses the position of Dialectical or Crisis Theology’s protagonists Karl Barth and Emil Brunner and also the position of other contemporary theologians. In Protestantism, the notion of Church was somehow emptied of its specific content, remaning almost only a name given to the christians’ community, not beeing considered anymore an infallible authority for keeping, transmitting and interpreting the Revelation and an organ of salvation. The reformers’ opposition to the Roman-catholic ecclesiology led to a kind of ecclesiological nominalism. Although they reject sacramental hierarchy, which would interpos between faithfull and Christ, the protestants can not dispense with church servants, resorting to the separation between sacerdotium and ministerium. Apostolical succesion of a capital importance for Church’s life, must be understood as doctrinar succesion, the identity of always of Church with Apostles’ teaching regarding the spiritual succesion of those who have the capacity and the right to ordain. The protestant extremist thesis of Church’s invisibility, Pr. Todoran says, is teoretically affirmed, but it can not be sustain practically, becouse it would have led to the disolvation of protestant communities themselves, thus even the reformers establish certain signs and though them the real Church can be recognised. The Church is a community and an institution, too. Its institutional fundament is Christ.

  • Issue Year: XLVIII/2003
  • Issue No: 1-2
  • Page Range: 189-198
  • Page Count: 10
  • Language: Romanian