The title of this episode is Coping.It’s time once again to lay down our focus on the Western Church to see what’s happening in the East.With the arrival of Modernity, the Church in Europe and the New World was faced with the challenge of coping in what we’ll call the post-Constantine era. The social environment was no longer favorable toward Christianity. The institutional Church could no longer count on the political support it enjoyed since the 4th C. The 18th C saw Western Christianity faced with the challenge of secular states that may not be outright hostile but tended to ignore it.In the East, Christianity faced far more than benign neglect for a long time. When Constantinople fell in 1453 to the Turks, The Faith came under a repressive regime that alternately neglected and persecuted it.While during the Middle Ages in Europe, Popes were often more powerful than Kings, the Byzantine Emperor ruled the Church. Greek patriarchs were functionaries under his lead. If they failed to comply with his dictates, they were deposed and replaced by those who would. When the Emperor decided reuniting with Rome was required to save the empire, the reunion was accomplished against the counsel of Church leaders. Then, just a  year later, Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. Many Eastern Christians regarded this calamity as a blessing. They viewed it as liberation from a tyrannical emperor who’d forced them into a union with a heretical church in Rome.The new Ottoman regime initially granted the Church limited freedom. Since the patriarch fled to Rome, the conqueror of Constantinople, Mohammed II, allowed the bishops to elect a new patriarch.  He was given both civil and ecclesiastical authority over Christians in the East. In the capital, half the churches were converted to mosques. The other half were allowed to continue worship without much change.In 1516, the Ottomans conquered the ancient seat of Middle Eastern Christianity in Syria and Palestine. The church there was put under the oversight of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Then, when Egypt fell a year later, the Patriarch of Alexandria was given authority over all Christians in Egypt. Under the Ottomans, Eastern Church Patriarchs had vast power over Christians in their realm, but they only served at the Sultan’s pleasure and were often deposed for resisting his policies.In 1629, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucaris, wrote what was considered by many, a Protestant treatise titled Confession of Faith. He was then deposed and executed. Fifty years later, a synod condemned him as a “Calvinist heretic.” But by the 18th C, the Reformation wasn’t a concern of the Eastern Church. What was, was the arrival of Western philosophy and science. In the 19th C, when Greece gained independence from Turkey, the debate became political. Greek nationalism advocated Western methods of academics and scholarship. The Greeks also demanded that the Greek Church ought to be independent of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Conservatives wanted to subsume scholarship under tradition and retain allegiance to Constantinople.During the 19th and early 20th Cs, the Ottoman Empire broke up, allowing national Orthodox churches to form in Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania. The tension between nationalist and conservative Orthodoxy dominated the scene. In the period between the two world wars, the Patriarch of Constantinople acknowledged the autonomy of Orthodox churches in the Balkans, Estonia, Latvia, and Czechoslovakia.Early in the 20th C, the ancient patriarchates of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch were ruled by Arabs. But the newly formed states existed under the shadow of Western powers. This was a time when out of a desire to identify with larger groups who could back them up politically and militarily, a large number of Middle Eastern Christians became either Catholic or Protestant. But an emergent Arab nationalism reacted against Western influence. The