Word: synodical
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...taste of forbidden fruit tainted man forever with original sin? Did Jonah spend three days in the belly of a "great fish"? Did the Red Sea actually part for Moses and the Hebrews fleeing from Egypt? Last week in New Orleans, the 3,000,000-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod said yes to all those questions. By their votes, the delegates at the biennial L.C.M.S. convention made a crunching and almost unprecedented shift to the right, a shift that promises a major purge at the largest Lutheran seminary in the world...
...harsh tactics caught up with Ieronymos last November, when the full Greek church hierarchy met for the first time since 1969. At issue was the selection of a new ten-member Synod to run the church. Among the obscure complexities of the Greek Orthodox Church is the fact that just over half of it owes obedience solely to the Church of Greece. The rest, some 33 dioceses in the "new lands" of northern Greece, which the Greeks won from the Turks more than a half-century ago, still owes a residual loyalty to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Demetrios...
Canon Law. Ieronymos' effort to pack the Synod provoked a counterattack. Bishop Ambrosios, Metropolitan of Eleutheroupolis, called Ieronymos a despot; the Primate thereupon suspended Ambrosios for three days. "You are violating canon law, Your Beatitude!" cried Ambrosios. "You are afraid of the light, Your Beatitude...
...Beatitude retired to his native island of Tinos for rest and contemplation after the protracted arguments. Upon returning, he announced to the Synod that, "after much thought and prayer," he was resigning. The Synod rejected his resignation, just as Ieronymos had apparently expected. What he did not expect was that dissident bishops would go to court and, on a technicality, get. the whole Synod declared illegal. The bishops thereupon elected a new Synod in May. It went back to the old geographical arrangements and reduced Ieronymos' supporters to a minority of three...
...settle the matter, putting an end to Ieronymos' autocratic rule and restoring the antique system of checks and balances that has kept power in the Greek Church divided among an episcopal oligarchy. Though a few of Ieronymos' supporters have asked a Greek court to declare the second Synod illegal, they stand little chance of success. Moderates now hope that the Church of Greece can get back to constructive work, which progresses slowly enough in the best of times and has been all but paralyzed since last year by the internecine warfare...