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Talk:Birth Control and Contraception

983 bytes added, 14:21, June 23, 2018
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Which raises a question as to the overall point you are trying to make -- do you believe that all contraception is prohibited, or simply artificial methods? --[[User:Fr Lev|Fr Lev]] ([[User talk:Fr Lev|talk]]) 14:04, June 23, 2018 (UTC)
 
There is more to be said about Clement of Alexandria, but I don't believe that Eastern Orthodoxy considers him a saint, and he is not reckoned as a particularly influential figure. St Photos the Great deemed numerous ideas of his to be heretical. Again, not a figure on which to put a great deal of weight in seeking to determine patristic teaching. St John Chrysostom seems a better bet for a figure to consider, and he didn't think child-bearing was essential to marriage. But more to the point is how the Orthodox Church has received and understood the testimony of Fathers. I would say that the Church has not understood the odd reference to be a condemnation of family planning per se, as the particular comments tend to be about avoiding the consequence of sexual immorality or the issue of abortifacient methods. Apart from those sorts of issues, the silence of the Church on this is deafening. --[[User:Fr Lev|Fr Lev]] ([[User talk:Fr Lev|talk]]) 14:21, June 23, 2018 (UTC)
== The 1937 Decision by the Church of Greece ==
The one local Church to condemn birth control that I know of was the Church of Greece in 1937. There is a story to that. In his book, ''Orthodoxy and the West'', [[Christos Yannaras]] attributes the decision to the influence of Seraphim Papakostas (1972-1954), writing that Papakostas's books are characterized by "legalistic moralism, spiritual self-interest centered on the individual, and a reliance on a guilt-ransom-justification scheme of salvation.... he wrote like a Protestant pietist. In his book ''The Question of Conception'', Papakostas faithfully follows Anglican and Roman Catholic opinions about contraception, presented as a quintessentially Orthodox view" [229-230). In footnote no. 386, he adds: "The misleading nature of Papakostas's book has been demonstrated by Stavropolous (1977). Papakostas's insidious influence even extended to the official publications of the hierarchy. A Church of Greece encyclical of October 1937 borrowed Papkostas's heterodox theses verbatim." The reference is to Alexandros Stavropolous, ''To provlima tis teknogonias kai i enkyklios tis Ekklisias tis Ellados'' [The Problem of Contraception and the Encyclical of the Church of Greece], Athens, 1977.
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