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→January 1, 2010 changes
So what do you label the Church prior to the Great Schism -- the Roman Catholic Church? If so, that would be no less "anachronistic and dishonest" than you claim the original article here is. But truth be told, both the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Church claim that they are (respectively) the Church founded by Jesus Christ. And it is historically false to claim, not to say anachronistic and dishonest, to suggest that the Orthodox Church did not develop its identity until after the Schism! OrthodoxWiki is an Orthodox encyclopedia and it represents a mainstream Orthodox view by design. This includes the fundamental assumption that today's Orthodox Church is the Church of the Fathers, the Church of the Ecumenical Councils, the Church founded by Jesus Christ. Rome says the same of itself, and I could not fault a Roman encyclopedia for saying as much. To claim that the Orthodox saying as much is "bearing false witness" is an attempt to introduce a polemical spirit where none was intended. --[[User:Fr Lev|Fr Lev]] 03:45, January 2, 2010 (UTC)
1. I didn't say that the pre-Schism Church is necessarily Catholic.
2. You introduced the polemical spirit when you said, "These seem to be the edits of someone promoting a Roman Catholic perspective."
3. The Orthodox identity can only be said to exist after the Great Schism since before that time none within the Church thought of themselves as somehow different from Christian believers in the West. The fact that an Orthodox identity developed after the Schism is evident in the slow realization of the division.
4. You will also do well to read Latin documents, which clearly say "Christ's Church ''subsistit in'' the Catholic Church"--that is their position in their own words.
5. If you are going to sit here and claim that the Christians faithful to Christ's Church before the Schism in any way thought of themselves in the same way that modern Orthodox Christians do, you are bearing false witness and flat out lying. Consider the argument so often given that people in the eastern Mediterranean, although Greek-speaking, thought of themselves as Romans and did not cease to think of those in the West as also Roman. The situation of the pre-Schism Church was just like that. You '''might''' be able to say that the Church was "Orthodox" in belief, but you '''cannot''' say it was "Orthodox" in identity because such an identity did not exist.