As for your compliments, I am flattered that you call me a theologian.
I have long dedicated my life to the study and apologetics (defense) of my religion. Though I technically got Saved at six (like many kids where I grew up), I Rededicated and accepted Christ by my own accord at fifteen, after a long struggle with doubt and my own secular knowledge. I ultimately made full peace between science and religion, and I consistently fight the notion that a man of God cannot also be a man of science. Science, to me, is what the Bible meant by "all Creation 'proving' God's existence".
A mixture of Pascal's Wager and the observation of the perfect precision of the universe, of evolution, and of the buildup of life on the earth to sustain man's dominance is, to me, evidence that stands behind the Bible as irrefutable proof that God is real and that He truly created the heavens and the earth.
In my interpretation, the start of Genesis to the Fall of Man is figurative poetry to be taken loosely. I never dispute that God made everything, but I hold to the theory that the Hebrew "yom" (translates to "day" in the modern Bible) referred to "epoch" because ancient Jewish culture (Moses, who lived in the Bronze Age, wrote the first five OT books) observed no day, only day and night cycles.
However, I hold most events in the Bible outside of the six days of Creation to either be literal fact or a parable. That is a matter of faith: by faith I see Adam and Eve and the Garden as a literal event, by faith I believe Balaam's donkey spoke, and by faith I believe in Christ's virgin Birth, Death, and His Resurrection for our sins./spoiler]
That's how I came to be so knowing of my own faith and that is what I can advise storytellers on when they RP Christianity.
Of course, my Protestant background means I can only explain Christianity by the lens of Sola Scriptura (literally "Only Scripture", which states that only the Bible has authority in the Church and all canon law is preferential opinions alone), Chalcedon, and the Enlightenment's Reformation.
In RL, Orthodox and Protestant Christians share almost all theological agreements except the structure of the Church and Apolistic Succession.
Itʻs why Orthodoxy and Protestantism in RL were chummy and supportive of their mutual opposition to the Catholic Church, which they both saw as decadent, heretical, and even idolatrous because of its treatment of the Virgin Mary and intercession of saints.
Nobody I know who has an Orthodox friend has ever seen them pray to any being or thing except God through Jesus, and in no circumstance has my research uncovered any support from
the mainstream Orthodox Church (except some parts of Russian Orthodoxy until the end of the Tsars) for prayer or Catholic-style pseudo-worship of saints and Mary.
When you depict characters praying to Markos or to Markos' icons, you are actually depicting a heresy in RL Orthodoxy! The same goes on declaring Markos to be equal to the Disciples and Apostles, the latter who Jesus declared would sit on thrones beside Him. That would be a grave heresy in both RL Orthodoxy and Protestantism.
However, you are right to state that they considered icons to be holy in the Dark Ages. To some extent, they still do, and a few of the oldest icons believed to be crafted by nature (supposedly at God's direction) and discovered or given to man. There's a name for these supernatural icons, but I can't remember it.
Perhaps one of the first icons of Markos could be alleged by the Angeloi to be crafted by divine ordinance? Those icons were so special that even all but the most extreme Iconoclasts spared them!
A mixture of Pascal's Wager and the observation of the perfect precision of the universe, of evolution, and of the buildup of life on the earth to sustain man's dominance is, to me, evidence that stands behind the Bible as irrefutable proof that God is real and that He truly created the heavens and the earth.
In my interpretation, the start of Genesis to the Fall of Man is figurative poetry to be taken loosely. I never dispute that God made everything, but I hold to the theory that the Hebrew "yom" (translates to "day" in the modern Bible) referred to "epoch" because ancient Jewish culture (Moses, who lived in the Bronze Age, wrote the first five OT books) observed no day, only day and night cycles.
However, I hold most events in the Bible outside of the six days of Creation to either be literal fact or a parable. That is a matter of faith: by faith I see Adam and Eve and the Garden as a literal event, by faith I believe Balaam's donkey spoke, and by faith I believe in Christ's virgin Birth, Death, and His Resurrection for our sins./spoiler]
That's how I came to be so knowing of my own faith and that is what I can advise storytellers on when they RP Christianity.
Of course, my Protestant background means I can only explain Christianity by the lens of Sola Scriptura (literally "Only Scripture", which states that only the Bible has authority in the Church and all canon law is preferential opinions alone), Chalcedon, and the Enlightenment's Reformation.
In RL, Orthodox and Protestant Christians share almost all theological agreements except the structure of the Church and Apolistic Succession.
Itʻs why Orthodoxy and Protestantism in RL were chummy and supportive of their mutual opposition to the Catholic Church, which they both saw as decadent, heretical, and even idolatrous because of its treatment of the Virgin Mary and intercession of saints.
Nobody I know who has an Orthodox friend has ever seen them pray to any being or thing except God through Jesus, and in no circumstance has my research uncovered any support from
the mainstream Orthodox Church (except some parts of Russian Orthodoxy until the end of the Tsars) for prayer or Catholic-style pseudo-worship of saints and Mary.
When you depict characters praying to Markos or to Markos' icons, you are actually depicting a heresy in RL Orthodoxy! The same goes on declaring Markos to be equal to the Disciples and Apostles, the latter who Jesus declared would sit on thrones beside Him. That would be a grave heresy in both RL Orthodoxy and Protestantism.
However, you are right to state that they considered icons to be holy in the Dark Ages. To some extent, they still do, and a few of the oldest icons believed to be crafted by nature (supposedly at God's direction) and discovered or given to man. There's a name for these supernatural icons, but I can't remember it.
Perhaps one of the first icons of Markos could be alleged by the Angeloi to be crafted by divine ordinance? Those icons were so special that even all but the most extreme Iconoclasts spared them!
