More on Hank Hanegraaff from Dr. White - excellent analysis

"Can a Consistent Eastern Orthodox Believer be "the Bible Answer Man" ?

More like the "Bible in the light of sacred oral tradition in the liturgy of EO history-Answer Man"

https://apologeticsandagape.wordpress.com/2017/04/14/can-a-consistent-eastern-orthodox-believer-be-the-bible-answer-man/

On Hank Hanegraaff and his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy

I link to lots of sources on the issue of Hank Hanegraaff's recent conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, Dr. White's analysis, other resources on Eastern Orthodoxy in general.

https://apologeticsandagape.wordpress.com/2017/04/11/on-hank-hanegraaff-and-his-conversion-to-eastern-orthodoxy/

Humorous illustration of Rome's real tactic to achieve unity

From Lutheran Satire

Catholic Answers, Let Me Introduce You to: Orthodox Answers

I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that there is a website named, Orthodox Answers.

What is Orthodox Answers

We are a partnership of Orthodox Christians working together to provide sound answers to any questions you may have about the Orthodox Faith. We contribute our time and effort to try and make sure that there are good resources available to those who have questions about Orthodoxy. We hope you can sense the love of God in our work of apologetics.

This website includes answers for (in this order):

Roman Catholics
Evangelicals
Calvinists
Atheists

On the Roman Catholic page appears the following:

We recommend that you take some time to read the stories of people who have converted from Roman Catholicism to Orthodoxy.  Hearing from those who have been down this same path, working through the same questions and challenges as you, is a powerful witness to the truth of Orthodoxy.  You are definitely not alone in your journey. 

And well, just like Catholic Answers, Orthodox Answers wants to make sure to provide answers to none other than.... James White.  And of course:

We recommend that you take some time to read the stories of people who have converted from Calvinist Protestantism to Orthodoxy.  Hearing from those who have been down this same path, working through the same questions and challenges as you, is a powerful witness to the truth of Orthodoxy.  You are definitely not alone in your journey.

Addendum
Here's an interesting quote from an advocate of Eastern Orthodoxy on the CARM boards:

Many Orthodox love to believe that the RCC is a few cups of coffee away from complete doctrinal unity, but as an ex-RCCer, I know better. The sheer volume of things the RCC would need to repent of at the church level, not to mention the individual level of all her clergy, is staggering. So many truths have been lost, the RCC would have to collectively spend years unlearning what it has invented, and then more years catching up to the Holy Spirit revealed truth. The entire Western concept of salvation would have to be almost completely dismantled. The Catholic Catechism would have to go, along with the Magisterium, the college of cardinals, the jesuits, most of the ministries, and then all of the various errors that have crept in to each of the liberal Catholic churches that have sprouted up across the globe over the past few centuries would have to be dealt with as well. Even the Eastern Catholics would have to unlearn and relearn quite a bit. All of this would have to be entered into prayerfully, fearfully, and reverently. The reintroduction of icons in the West would certainly be a big step and would help immensely with the reeducation part.

Christopher and the Church "Fathers"

Christopher Lake said:
I meant (that was) my last comment at Triablogue, nor merely my last comment under that thread.

And we can all see what good fruit that bore.


Scripture itself does not say that all we need to believe and do, as Christians, is explicitly stated in Scripture.

How can he then also affirm the words of Psalm 119?

In 2 Timothy 3:15-17, we see the richness of what the Scriptures are, and what they do:
-sacred
-can give one wisdom…
-…so as to be saved (through faith)
-breathed out by God (cf: Matthew 22:31)
-profitable for teaching and correction
-can train one in righteousness
-to render the man of God adequate for every good work.


Jesus thought enough of it to say "The words I have spoken are spirit and are life" (John 6:63).

John 20:30Therefore many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; 31but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.
Two things about this passage:
1) John's Gospel alone apparently was, to his mind, sufficient to have life in Jesus' name. What else do I need, again?
2) The "other signs Jesus also performed", which by his own admission receive no mention, are unnecessary to have life in Jesus' name.

I've done a whole debate on this.
So has TurretinFan. Oh, wait, he's done more than that.
James White might have done a few as well.


It does not even say that everything which is "essential" is *clear* in Scripture. 

"All things are clear and open that are in the divine Scriptures; the necessary things are all plain." (John Chrysostom, Homilies on Second Thessalonians, 3, v. 5)
More on why Christopher won't accept this teaching from Chrysostom in a moment.


As a Calvinist Protestant, I had to, and did, assert that my own "private judgement" on the meaning of Scripture was better than that of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Augustine, Athanasius, and the other early Church Fathers

And you continue in that to this very day.
Here's the proof - they've said things that are contrary to the modern dogma of Rome, and you don't believe those things.
Now, you or some other Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox might remind us that a given Church Father taught elsewhere something that does in fact agree with the modern RCC/EOC.  So now we have two different teachings from the CF on a given topic. What do we do?

Let's just say for the sake of argument that you're right - the CF taught in more than one other place the opposite doctrine to what the Sola Scripturist already quoted.  

For example, that Athanasius taught Sola Scriptura.  Or that John Chrysostom, Basil of Caesarea, Jerome, Ambrosiaster, Hilary of Poitiers, and (Pope) Clement of Rome taught Sola Fide. Then an RC or EO friend counter-cites one or all of these men with clearly non-Sola-Scriptura/Fide verbiage.

That leaves us with CFs who have contradicted themselves. 

Now, to fulfill what Christopher wants us to do, namely to be consistent with these CFs (and remember, my claim is that modern RCC/EOC is inconsistent w/ them), we would either have to:

A: Teach just as inconsistently as these two guys do, sometimes saying one thing, sometimes the other, or

B: Call these teachings not actually part of Divine/Apostolic Tradition.

The problem with resolution A is that the cognitive dissonance would be pretty much unbearable. The upshot is that I don't know if I'd expect a lot of people to turn away from RCC/EOC in real life.

The thing about resolution B is that they have indeed already done just that. Somehow these godly, forcible, powerful writers, from whom RCC/EOC (and thus, by profession, Christopher) ostensibly derives much of their tradition and doctrine, also produced impious, ungodly, and flat wrong teachings.

Now, how would Christopher know judgment about wrong teachings? Apparently from judging these non-"Apostolic Traditions" by... yup, you guessed it! What The Church® Says.

In the end, it's a vicious circle of question-begging. I claim the modern RCC/EOC is not totally faithful with CFs and then cite them when challenged. Then they say, "Hey, those aren't part of ApostolicTradition!" I say, "Thanks for proving my point."

I also pause to note how pernicious this is. The Lord Jesus set an authoritative example for how one is to judge tradition - by Scripture. The RC/EO refuses to do that and instead appeals to his own doctrinal construct which is already in place to then look back on tradition and Scripture and pick and choose what he will and won't believe. Thus the RC/EO holds to the Scriptural teaching of the Deity of Christ and rejects the Scriptural teaching of salvation by grace alone thru faith alone. He accepts the Trinity and rejects Sola Scriptura. He accepts the fact that we should pray to God as commanded in the Scripture and rejects the fact that prayer to dead people and angels is strictly prohibited in the Scripture.

It becomes easy to see how this not only dishonors God in ideal (that is, that we should not judge men's teachings by God's) but also later in practice (bowing down to images, praying to dead people, trying to work one's way to salvation).

A few more points on this:

As Steve already reminded you, but you either didn't read, were too disingenuous to care, or didn't understand how this wrecks your point, you had to engage in private interpretation to choose Rome over other "infallible interpreters", other rival magisteria, such as the WatchTower, the LDS, the Eastern Orthodox, the Copts.
It's either sheer obstinacy or rank ignorance that brings Roman Catholics back to this ridiculous "argument" time and again. It's as predictable as a priestly sex scandal.

Christopher Lake said further:
anytime that I dipped into the above Church Fathers and found anything faintly "Catholic," I asserted that my understanding of Scripture was simply better than theirs. 

As mentioned above, however, you do that, and I commend you for it. The Apostle Paul's command to "test everything, hold fast to that which is good" is meant for everyone and anyone.  We test the 1st generation of the church just like we test this current generation.
Your problem is that you do the same thing but reproach us for preferring what the Scripture teaches versus the limited selection of "Church Father" teachings that Rome enjoins upon us. This brings up another fundamental incoherency of the "Church Father" argument.

• You don't know that what these guys said is what the church of their time believed. 
• You don't know how what they wrote was received by other churches. Any mere claims to "we believe thus" are not necessarily true. Not without proof, and  more proof than their say-so.
• You don't know whether they were held in the highest respect by their contemporaries.  Maybe you're reading the Charles Stanley of their time - not really all that bad, but quite shallow compared to others, most of the time.
• You don't know whether you have all their writings, or even what % their today-extant writings form of the total things they wrote over their lifetime. Thus you don't know if they ever took it all, or part of it, back.
• You don't know whether what they said in public or in private teachings actually comports with the extant writings you have.
• You don't take everything that is extant from a given "Church Father" and believe it. You believe only the parts that the modern Roman Catholic (though this applies to Eastern Orthodoxy too) Church has dogmatised and accepted for modern times. Why call them "Church Fathers" at all? Seems to me a traditional nomenclature that fails to take the above into consideration, fails to think through the divide between what any of them believed and what modern Rome believes, and has served as a useful tool for you, so you decided to keep it. And it is useful - citing "Fathers" sounds so imperial, so high-fallootin', so mysteriously powerful, that often it causes a brain block within the mind of the Sola Scripturist.  I myself have experienced this many times. 

Is this overzealous, unreasonably radical skepticism? Depends on whom you're asking, I suppose.
What this illustrates for certain is that our certain guide, our certain lamp for our feet, is the Scripture. The Scripture is simply not subject to these kinds of questions (at least not within the RC/EO/Sola Scripturist circle of debate), for we all accept its authority and sourcing - it is the very Word of God.
Such is demonstrably not the case for "Church Fathers", however. We read them like we read DA Carson today - to understand who they are, what they taught, and their theological contexts. They are not authorities. They (and I, or my pastor, or Billy Graham, or John MacArthur) have power only insofar as they repeat the Word of God. Where they do so, let us praise God for the insight they have shared. Where they have not, let us learn not to repeat their mistakes.

The only sense in which they are "fathers" is that they are older and came before us. They made many mistakes, however, and we do not necessarily know even the majority of what any one of them believed and/or taught.

Nobody invests them with great authority - not Sola Scripturists, not RCC, and not EOC.
Sola Scripturists - obviously.
RCC and EOC, for reasons mentioned above - if these men really were their authorities, they would teach like them: inconsistently. And they certainly wouldn't anathematise Sola Fide, for example.
No, for the RC and EO, the modern church is the only authority in practice. "By their fruits you shall know them."

But for us who love and follow Jesus and believe His words in Mark 7:1-13 wherein He told us to test traditions by Scripture, our Church Fathers are named: Jesus, Mark, Luke, Paul, Peter and John and the rest of the 11, James, Jude, and the guy who wrote Hebrews. Do you want to know what the earliest church believed? Read the New Testament.

Look, the "unity" argument just doesn't work

Let me try to give a fuller explanation of the point of my last post with respect to what David B has said starting here.

First and foremost, nothing in this post is intended to put forward a Sola Scripturist position.  The point is to rebut a very common Sola Ecclesia-ist argument, and nothing more.  SEists like to rip Sola Scr b/c it produces all these denominations.  I'm just showing another way (to say nothing of what's already been said that this is a terribly stupid argument to use.

David B says that the GOC have excommunicated themselves.
This is not excommunication, at least not biblically.  Biblical excommunication/church discipline is an action taken by the church.  Of course there's room biblically for them to go "out from us" (1 John 2), but that's not the same thing.  So when I said "So excommunicate them" and David B said "Already done", this is not precise.  It would have been far more precise and informative, apparently, to say "We can't; they already left", although apparently some of these GOC-ers, the priest in question included, see themselves as "resisting from within".  Within what, if not EOC?
Along those lines, I'd asked for an "authoritative church statement", and didn't get one.  I'd still like to know whether that exists, or whether this is David B's private, fallible interpretation of history.  (Not that this is a big deal to me, but I say that to mock still others who use the "private fallible interpretation" argument, which is, if possible, even stupider.) (I do not recall David B ever using said argument, fortunately.)

Now, we turn to this comment:
the main reason I see the calendar as NOT part of tradition and NOT reason for schism is that it was simply the civil (and pagan!) calendar of Julian's day...

That sounds an awful lot like "the main reason I see the question of Presbyterian infant baptism as NOT part of the essentials and NOT reason for schism is that it is simply the outworking of Presby covenant theology and has nothing to do with the question of the Gospel", doesn't it?  Yet do we Sola Scripturists ever get a pass from our Sola Ecclesia friends when we say that?  Nope.
So when we see "The Orthodox Church is internally divided over the issue of the Church calendar. A minority of Orthodox churches worldwide, beginning in 1923, decided to follow the so-called 'New' (Gregorian) Calendar." (Source), I don't see a good reason not to doubt this kind of "we have unity, and you don't, so haha" argument.  David B's church is in the minority.

He or other EOx might respond:
But we are in communion with most of the Old Calendarists who aren't schismatics!

I'm a Reformed Baptist, and I'm in communion with all sortsa people - Presbyterians, not-Reformed Baptists, Assemblies of God, charismatics, Pentecostals...


But y'all don't go to the same church!

Neither do y'all.
And you don't earn any points for fudging on the definition of "denomination" either.  Your not-denomination denominations, in which you disagree with each other about certain things, are the same situation as the one in which I find myself today among Sola Scripturists.


But we have the same name!

No, you don't.  ROCOR, Russian Orthodox, OCA, GOA...


Those are just ethnic divisions for convenience' sake!

1) Then why do some of you differ on, for example, the calendar?
2) So it's better that y'all hold to the same doctrine and just squabble amongst yourselves like you do on the basis of racial dislikes?  Nice.


But you're not in communion at all with other Protestants!

You mean so-called Protestants?  Those with whom I'm not in communion have excommunicated themselves by denying the Gospel or another essential of the faith.
And you're not in communion with other Orthodox.


You mean so-called Orthodox?

Yep, that's precisely what I mean.  Why do you get to play the "they've schismed" game while I don't?  Where's your consistency?
It would appear that this is a case of "they're in communion with us unless they're not".  I shouldn't have to remind anyone that this is a tautology, and yet that is what's behind any appeal to this "unity" argument.


But we have a way to tell which tradition is right!

So do we - the Scripture.  Which doesn't keep writing itself with every new church pronouncement, BTW.  And which is far less question-begging.

Having said all that, one has to ask how David B knows that OCA is part of The True Orthodox Church, whereas those who've kept to the ostensibly older tradition of the Old Calendar aren't the ones holding firm in the face of innovation, a new calendar, ecumenism, getting all liberal-soft on baby murder, but by God making sure that everyone knows that the EOC is really serious about being green.  Nnnoooo, none of that is suspicious!
You know, for a while it sure seemed like the Arians were going to win the struggle in the 4th century, and anathemas had been flung about.  If David B had been alive that day, how would he know that the party of Athanasius was correct?  Appeal to "the Fathers"?  Each side had their own "Fathers".  Besides, a mere individual man like David doesn't get to define who is a Father and who isn't.  And since the typical Sola Ecclesia interp of Matthew 16:18 tells us that the church will never go largely down into heresy, the only way to be sure would be to wait and see who'd win the struggle.
How is that helpful for the believer at the time whose very soul is at stake?
How is that a good guide for the believer who wants to further the cause of good and of God?  How can he know where to direct his efforts?
Easy - he can't know, b/c individual interpretation of the Scripture is not available to him, and Apostolic Tradition hasn't been defined yet, and can't be by any one man.

The rich, rich irony

Following in the spirit of this older post pointing out the gross and obvious chasm between how Eastern Orthodox talk up their church's unity and the actual exercise of that "unity", I pause to note the just-published article "Why the True Orthodox are Truly Orthodox" from The Holy Metropolis of the COC of America.  As the first link should make clear, it's not as if this is a recent development, hot off the presses, and I just couldn't wait to crow about how the Eastern Orthodox Church's long-invulnerable armor of unity has just now been cracked.  I'm writing about it because it activated my brain.  Yes, it hurt.

Anyway, let's consider this irony.

Eastern Orthodox (like their partners on the other side of the Sola Ecclesia coin, Romanists) love to rip "Protestants" for their disunity, for fragmenting into 59 gazillion (and growing) denominations.  The answers we've given to that are manifold (and not well dealt with by EOx and RCs) but what do we see here if not a break within the Eastern Orthodox Church itself?
It's pretty funny how it's gone down, too.  Often I have to explain to our EO and RC friends that we are biblically commanded to break fellowship with those who have fallen into heresy.  They want to count towards the 59 gazillion, say, Oneness Pentecostals among the ranks of "Protestants", or liberal types who deny virtually everything supernatural in the Bible but still go to a "Presbyterian" or "Lutheran" or "Methodist" church.  When we respond, "Um, no, those guys are called 'heretics' and are not Christian in any meaningful sense", they often choose to ignore the obvious and settle for the pejorative quip that, see? we even call each other non-Christians and heretics!
And that's for major differences in doctrine - the Trinity, the Resurrection of Christ, the virgin birth, etc.
Now, they'll say, you also break fellowship with others over minor matters, such as the music you use during worship, women pastors, who gets to head the Agape Meal Planning Committee, etc.  That can be true, and sometimes it's sad and a bad thing, sometimes not so sad or bad.
But lookie here - I don't guess the Eastern Orthodox have room to talk noise about that.  These guys are throwing the Heretic Card for people who hold to a different calendar.  In terms of pettiness, that's sandwiched riiiigggghhhhttt between the music-during-worship schism and the Meal-Planning-Committee schism.


But Rhology!  The Calendar is a big deal!
||Nodding skeptically||  Um, OK, if you say so.  Then so's the Meal Planning Committee, yo. 


To wit, from the article:  

In our day a new heresy has appeared which seeks to bring all these together and for this reason is aptly referred to as a "pan-heresy." This is Ecumenism, which we may briefly define as the belief that sects which the Church had previously considered heretical and cut off from her are in fact in some way still part of her. The threat Ecumenism poses to the Church is perhaps greater than that of any heresy of the past, for two reasons. First, by far the larger part of the Church has succumbed to its temptation.

Get that?  Most of the EOC has engaged in heresy.  Is that "the gates of Hades" overcoming the church (Matt 16:18)?  So, since this is the church that believes the true meaning of the Bible, I presume they'll be excommunicating over half their members pretty soon?  No?  Hmmm.  But, wouldn't just keeping those people around in the churches imply that they prefer more butts in pews feet on the floor (they don't sit at most Divine Liturgies) and more rubles in the offering plate than to be consistent and cease fellowship with heretics?  Wouldn't that put them in the same position as the Sola Scripturist, who appeals to the remnant paradigm from the Old Testament people of God to rebut the challenge that believers in the slightly-later-than-early church were not Sola Scripturists or Sola Fide-ists (which we don't necessarily grant, but just for the sake of argument)?
Or could it be that Matt 16:18 doesn't say what our EO and RC friends like to say it says?

One thing I've learned over the years is that RCs and EOx like to make attractive and impressive claims about how their church is this and that, and how bad my church is, and it can be tempting.  But just take a hard look at the alternative they're offering you, and it becomes clear it's really poison and fake.

Here's the punchline - I don't see a good reason to think that a lack of unity within a certain faith group has a whole lot to do with the truth value of the system the group is proposing.  In this way I am unlike our EO and RC friends, but unfortunately since neither EOC nor RCC can live up to the standard that they brag they fulfill, this makes me more intellectually honest than they.  Further, since each bills itself as "The Church Christ Founded®", thus entailing some great unbroken unity, which turns out to be a product of wishful imagination, this becomes an argument against the truth of EOC and RCC because of the claims each makes.  Sola Scripturist churches do not make that kind of claim; why would we think that disunity in our ranks is evidence of our beliefs' untruth?  So, at best, this internal squabbling and tossing around of "Heretic"s shows that EOC and RCC are false churches.  At minimum, it destroys a very common argument that EOx and RCs use against Sola Scripturists.

A compendium of resources on Eastern Orthodoxy, so far

James was contacted by an acquaintance inquiring about Eastern Orthodoxy, because he was alarmed at the rate of conversion to EOC among seminarians with whom he is familiar.  James (perhaps unwisely) forwarded him on to me, and I gave it my best shot.  I'd like to reproduce a distillation of our brief correspondence here, for future reference.  May the Lord use this information for His glory.

----

Hello!
I'm a coblogger/underling on James' blog, and in my blogging career, I've written on EOC and interacted a significant amount with EOdox.  That is mostly b/c a close friend of mine with whom I grew up in the faith, after some 6 years as a Bapticostal and a student at ORU in Tulsa, converted to EOC.  I was alarmed, of course, and tried to stop him, and our discussions actually for a time had me on the ropes.  I was unprepared for the things he'd already thought through a few steps ahead, and so for a time I felt my own foundations shaking.  Then, however, I was able to get on top of things with the help mainly of James White lectures and debates on Romanism (which is in many ways, especially in terms of authority and religious epistemology, very similar to EOC) and on Sola Scriptura, a couple of books by Eric Svendsen, and the 3-volume set "Holy Scripture: The Ground and Pillar of Our Faith" by Webster and King.

That started me down the road of being able to deconstruct the arguments that EOx put forward, and with all that behind me now, I can say with confidence (Lord willing) that EOC is totally off the table as a live option for piety toward God.  My further interactions with knowledgeable EOx, both in person and in the blogosphere, both have convinced me further of the folly of EOxy and have helped me develop even more powerful arguments against it.

I'd encourage you to learn a little about EOC.  A good place to start is Timothy Ware's "The Orthodox Church", but unfortunately it's a pretty sanitised version of EO theology.  All the really heretical and "red flag!  Danger, Will Robinson!" stuff is removed out of its presentation of EO theology, but not a bad place to start.  If nothing else, someone will ask you if you've read anything, and you can tell them that.  It might help satisfy them that you're not just shooting in the dark.
I've read a fair amount of "dialogue" and "conversion" stories, but most of them weren't any good, weren't helpful.  Two I think would be helpful would be:
--Conversion-themed stuff written by Peter Gillquist
--My friend's conversion story
Also, I'd recommend this short e-book/long pamphlet from a Romanian who is quite familiar with EOC theology and especially the more unsavory elements and sayings from their "church fathers".  I just finished reading it and recommend it because of its lengthy quotations and evaluations of what you might call "EOC's source documents" - the church writers who have gone before.  Point these pagan and Platonic ideas out to those who are wavering, and if they respond with "but that's not what the Church itself believes!", ask them on what basis these same early church writers are cited sometimes to back up EOC's authority and are sometimes cast aside as "speaking only as a private theologian".  It's a fatal epistemological flaw in EOC, and one that is, if nothing else, sort of fun to exploit, to watch the dancing and writhing commence.

Now, as for refuting EO assertions, I'd recommend, just like with a Romanist or a Mormon, majoring on the majors, and that would be the question of authority. I think you'll have a fairly difficult time if  you try to go at it from any other position than Sola Scriptura.  That is to say, the 3/4-legged stool I've heard expressed in certain Protestant contexts will not serve you well in this arena, but perhaps that's not where you're coming from.
Anyway, you can start with my recent debate on Sola Scriptura with a knowledgeable EO blogger.  It's maybe not the best ever done, but I think it was quite good, it raised a lot of good issues, and it was accessible, not super super long.

In other blogging arenas, a great deal of superior material has been delivered on the Triablogue.
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/search/label/Eastern%20Orthodoxy
I am in awe of these men's abilities and output.  I would encourage you not to unwisely confuse earnestness and gladness to know and be able to communicate the truth with nastiness.
My blog also has a lot of material on EOxy, so here you go:
http://rhoblogy.blogspot.com/search/label/Eastern%20Orthodoxy

My most fundamental recommendation would be, as I said, on the topic of authority.
Here are some posts I'd encourage you to focus on:
http://rhoblogy.blogspot.com/2010/02/reflection-on-sola-scriptura-debate-1.html
http://rhoblogy.blogspot.com/2010/03/irony-in-patristics.html

You'll probably also find that EOx will challenge you with "But there are so many denominations in Protestantism!"  Don't let them get away with it!
http://rhoblogy.blogspot.com/2009/12/special-pleading-of-sola-ecclesia-ists.html
http://rhoblogy.blogspot.com/2009/12/jesus-prayer-for-unity-in-john-17.html
http://rhoblogy.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-special-pleading.html

---/---

The correspondent replied:  I have been shocked and saddened by the number of seminarians turning Orthodox.  It seems to be the cool, sentimental thing to do.

I responded:  Yes, it is the cool sentimental thing to do.  It's embracing "ancient" faith, "the church of the church fathers", "the early church", with liturgy and all that stuff.  It looks mystically attractive.  It's much more sensibly rich than a Protestant service.  I can relate to the attraction.  But the false Gospel, you know...sorta spoils it for me.
And that is, of course, the bottom line - does this church preach the Gospel?  Does it teach that the filthy, spiritually dead, enemy of God, God-hating sinner can be reconciled to God and have peace with God by God's grace alone by repentance and faith alone in Christ alone as mediator for the forgiveness of sins?  Ask any Eastern Orthodox, and make the question specific enough so as to eliminate wiggle room, and you'll find that the answer is a very clear no.  Which makes the answer to the question, "Should I join this church?" pretty clear as well.

DavidW on Gnosticism and Calvinism

I've been interacting some on DavidW's blogpost about his comparisons of Gnostic predestination and Calvinistic predestination.  He swears up and down that Calvinism is dressed-up Gnosticism, and I already corrected him on his point, told him:

My response is basically that you're committing a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Alot of EOC doctrines resemble Mormonism; that doesn't mean they're related. Looking at it the other way, all the ancient heretics held to doctrines that EOC would accept as well - that's what makes heretics so dangerous. They creep in, sound the same in almost everything, but secretly introduce destructive heresies, subtly, drawing away disciples after them. So this point of yours in principle proves too much. Otherwise stated, it proves nothing. 

 DavidW today laid out 5 questions on this topic he'd like me to address.  Let's see how well he did.

David,
1) No, it's not a tu quoque. I don't grant that Calvinistic predest is of Gnostic derivation, remember? Rather, I derive Calv predest from Scr, which preceded Gnosticism. So, that's wrong.

2a) "early church writer" means "someone in the early church who wrote". Nothing more or less.
The entire reason I use that term is to point out your question-begging distinction between "Church Fathers" and "heretics". You test everythg by the church; well, what if those whom you now identify as heretics had won the struggle? Then the men you now identify as CFs would be heretics, to you.
This is the problem with the Sola Ecclesia position; the only way you can judge the heretics of old to have been wrong is b/c the modern church is the group that won out, that won the power struggle. Not so for me - I can and must judge anyone and everyone and their teaching by the Word of God, which does not change.

2b) at least one early Church Father who believed in predestination

I've given you three many times - Jesus, Peter, Paul.
This business about early church writers and the dissent that existed between them is an internal critique of the EO position. It doesn't have any bearing on Sola Scriptura.

3) I've identified your arguments as committing the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (and am still waiting for a rebuttal). I can demonstrate that my doctrines are drawn from Scriptural exegesis. The ball's in your court.
You said:
If the Gnostic doctrine is not the same as the Calvinist doctrine, surely you should be able to explain how they are different.

Gosh, let's see. Oh, I know - one's Trinitarian and Christian, the other isn't. One's drawn from Scriptural exegesis, the other isn't.
From your own post:
their own selves (who are saved by nature)

Nope, saved by the grace of God. Fail #1.


Faith, then, is no longer the direct result of free choice, if it is a natural advantage.

Define "direct", "result", "free", and "choice".
Besides, Calvinism teaches that the regenerate man DOES freely choose - he chooses God b/c his nature has been changed and he's been given a new heart. Before that, he always freely chooses death and sin, b/c his nature is dead in sin and he hates God, his Enemy.
Fail #2.


Ye are originally immortal

Yet Calvinism teaches we are born dead in sin, and w/o God's intervention we will go to Hell forever.
Fail #3.


he also, similarly with Basilides, supposes a class saved by nature

It's so funny how you want to equate the Trinitarian God of the Bible with the Gnostic "nature". Why would you do that?
Fail #4.


In this way also they make a twofold distinction among souls, as to their property of good and evil

And yet the Bible teaches, and Calvinism of course affirms, that "there is no one good, no, not one." Fail #5.
(BTW, why are you citing the heretic Tertullian?)


For this reason it is that they neither regard works as necessary for themselves, nor do they observe any of the calls of duty, eluding even the necessity of martyrdom on any pretence which may suit their pleasure.

1) Calvinism teaches that God works thru means. Fail #6.
2) Calvinism teaches that man is responsible and called to "be holy as your Father in Heaven is holy". I am obligated to follow the entire law of God. Fail #7.


a rigidly deterministic scheme

Perhaps you're confusing Calvinism with HyperCalvinism? I'm pretty sure you've been corrected on that before, but you seem not to be a big fan of taking correction. Fail #8.
Now that, friends, is a lot of fail.


4) Irenaeus says They have also other modes of honouring these images... Seems like he's not a big fan of ANY honoring of images. I can certainly see where he's coming from - why not honor Christ? If you say "we already do", are you denying you could do so more? Or have you honored Him enough already? Let someone else get their snout in the trough, as it were.

Irony in Patristics

I haven't read a ton of patristic writing, I freely admit.  About 200+ pages starting from page 1 of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, and taking notes the whole way, so far.
But I can apply logical argumentation to common Eastern Orthodox argumentation in regard to the way they view patristic support for their position, and thus perform an internal critique of Eastern Orthodoxy.  Now, given that the Scriptures are the way they indeed are, it makes very little difference to me whether the entirety of those who identify themselves as "The Church®" over the course of history stand in opposition to what the Scripture teaches - "Let God be true and every man a liar." 

But of course, anyone who's familiar with patristic writings to a more than surface-level extent will know that the early church situation is not nearly that simple.  The questions of who was in schism from whom, who agreed with whom, who contradicted whom, who contradicted himself, who properly represented the actual position of most of the people in the church at his time, etc, are fundamental questions, and far too often our EO and RC friends simply assume that they are unimportant, assume that their church is The One True Church® and thus the default position, and any dissenter from such necessarily has all the burden of proof to defend his dissent. 
Let's take a look, for a case study, at DavidW's blog in which he likens Calvinism to Gnosticism.  I dropped by and dropped an Irenaeus quote from Jason Engwer:

"They style themselves Gnostics. They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles." (Against Heresies, 1:25:6) It seems likely that Irenaeus was part of the ante-Nicene consensus against the veneration of images. (source)

DavidW has responded, I replied, and DavidW once more.  I encourage you to read what he said, and here I relate my own rebuttal.

approach Orthodoxy on its own terms, free of such confutation.

Do you venerate images?  Bow down to them? 
What substantial differences can you name between EO practice and RC practice, besides that they use statues and you don't?

the book explores the supposedly iconoclastic references that Protestants cherry-pick from the Church Fathers

The existence of which is evidence in support of my position.  I don't think the early church writers had a consistent consensual position, remember?  I judge ALL THINGS by Scripture.

it's a case of looking at the Fathers on their own terms and in their fulness, as you are unwilling to do.

Hahaha, that makes me laugh, that you who ignore early church writers who dissent want to "look at the Fathers on their own terms".  Whatever, man.

3. How do they know Epiphanius' letter is a forgery?
Answers.

The very existence of ppl who'd like to forge such a letter shows that there did exist such an iconoclastic strain of tradition.  Which, again, is my position.

The iconoclasts of the 8th century picked up their iconoclasm from the Muslims.

Even Muslims get stuff right, you know.  I sorta picked mine up from the OT Jews.

You ASSERT that Tertullian doesn't represent early opinion. Prove it.
Professor Jeffrey Macdonald, a professor of early Christian history

OK, I listened to it, thank you. 
Macdonald:  "He's not technically a Church Father" - begging the very question at hand.  Who decided that?  Why isn't whoever decided that himself in schism, himself unreliable with respect to what is authoritative and normative in church history?
"He wrote a lot" - yup.  And yet you judge him wrong on many counts.  How is that any diff than what I do with what you claim about CFs that you DO agree with?  Why do you get to disagree with an early church writer and I don't?
"He did not remain in the Orthodox Church" - so he schismed?  So he was Protestant before there were Protestants? 
"Gnostics wanted Christians to live under extra rules" - that's very interesting. You mean like necessitating works like baptism on top of faith for salvation from sin?
"most of the CFs tried to work thru Greek philosophy, that meant to Tatian's crew that they were apostatising" - doesn't sound like there's a ton of unity and agreement in the early church, now was there?  There sure seems to be a big diff in the way you EOx talk to Protestants and the way you talk to each other.  Kinda like how Yasser Arafat would say "Peace, peace" in English to the Western goober politicians, then go say "War, war" in Arabic to his own ppl (though obviously less violently).
"Tertullian is not reflecting the reality of early Christianity, he's reflecting a particular position" - What a dumb thing to say!  Of COURSE he was reflecting a particular position.  EVERY writer "reflects a particular position".  Sheesh.

Now, around minute 48-49, Macdonald has a very interesting extended quotation:

"The church has a tradition that the married women did this, and the girls, I guess, they didn't wear veils.  So he makes the statement:  'Whatever favors the opposition to truth is heresy, even if it's ancient custom'.  And he says that in a number of places where he's contrasting the tradition of the church, he rejects the tradition of the church, in favor of the prophecies of the women.  And it stuck in my mind b/c Cyprian, who comes after him in Carthage, makes almost the same statements; for Cyprian, to him he's not a Montanist, but he always refers, Tertullian for him is the only church father b/c he wrote in Latin, and he refers to Tertullian as 'a master', but he makes that statement in regard to the rebaptism, b/c the church was not rebaptising people from heretical groups but was receiving them by chrismation and Cyprian says 'well, ancient custom is just ancient error', you know, so it's this ultimately, the church disagreed with Cyprian on that and have the canons and everything, but this attitude of rejection of the church tradition.  And we will say that OK, not everything that every early Christian ever did is necessarily Gospel, but the consensus of the church and the tradition of the church's practice is part of what Irenaeus is referring to, when he says 'What's to separate us from the Gnostics, who make up their errors?  Each Gnostic is just making stuff up.  That our teachings go back and are continuous back to Christ' and that's what distinguishes the church from a heretical group.  For Tertullian and later Cyprian, they both say 'no, that the church's practice is no indication of what is true,' particularly Tertullian.  And of course, he's coming at it from the idea that these Montanist teachers were in fact revelations of the Holy Spirit."

There is a lot to catch there, but notice how Macdonald says Saint Cyprian treated Tertullian, a guy who was headed to heresy according to the EOC.
Notice how Macdonald even characterises Cyprian's view that Tertullian was the only church father.
Notice how these two early witnesses seem to be treating "church tradition" just like I do - easily prone to error, and in the case of the doctrine under dispute, just a mistaken tradition that got accepted by enough people, handed down enough, and eventually crystallised into unshakable "Sacred Tradition".  And yet these two men disparage it as merely "ancient error".  So what is the EO antidote to this problem?  More appeals to more so-called Sacred Tradition?  As if that's not the very problem at hand?  Why not appeal to what God has said?  Oh no, they've got more important things!  Like preserving their Sola Ecclesia presuppositions, their pet authority. 

Questioner - "It's not like he did a flipflop." 

"That's not surprising.  Alot of his writings, when he's writing against the church he's also contradicting his own early writings, when he was in the church...Tertullian sort of took exception with the decision of the Roman church and ultimately decided, even in his pre-Montanist writings, you start seeing, not the earliest ones, but the period about 204 on, he starts adopting Montanist ideas and then 207 he leaves..."

So...Tertullian takes exception to what a bishop (the one in Rome) defined.  And yet 1800 years later, the Reformed are roundly criticised for following his example.  (Macdonald clarifies that this dissent by Tertullian took place in 197, BTW.)
And I have said in the past that a strong case can be made that church fathers contradict themselves in their own writings over the course of time.  Of course, I catch flak for that kind of statement from RCs and EOdox, but I bet Macdonald won't catch any.  Oh no, b/c he's one of the boys. 

DavidW continues:

Historians don't have polling data; we work with what we have

And then you assume that's what the early church believed.  So you DON'T have any polling data, yet you take ~50 writers who wrote variegated things on a wide variety of topics with some disagreement between them and frequent disagreement between writings from any one of them over the course of his life, and from THAT you decide what the early church believed?  No, you decide after the fact. That's always been my point.  You, the modern EOC, decide which views out of the sparse info that you have from the past you're going to follow.  Sola Ecclesia.
Pardon me, but I don't want to follow such circular self-referential reasoning, such begging of the very question at hand.  I follow what God has most surely said - the Scripture. 

Okay: I say that aliens came to earth, enslaved all people, and set up a kingdom that was only finally overthrown in the 6th century by St. Justinian the Emperor. It's okay, though, lack of documentary evidence doesn't mean it's not true

You're exactly right - that doesn't mean it's not true.  ANYthing could conceivably be true; that's the problem of induction at work (since you mentioned logic).  You have faith on the modern EOC's interp of archaeology and historical data, despite when we show you that your view of history is flawed. You are a humanist at the core.  I have faith in God's Holy Word. 

Right -- he was a heretic. He did become a Montanist, you know?

Yes, I know that, and you're begging the question to claim that joining a Montanist sect means that he was necessarily wrong or out of step with the church.  Prove that most ppl weren't in fact part of the Montanists.  Polling data. 

Irenaeus is not talking about my position because my position is the same as Irenaeus' and I sincerely doubt that Irenaeus is calling his own position Gnostic.

Wow.  That was a naked assertion of epic proportion.  How about you actually deal with what he said?

More discussion of the title of "heretic" for early writers

My opponent in my recently-concluded debate on Sola Scriptura, DavidW, has had some interesting things to say afterwards, and it has provoked some (what I hope are) helpful thoughts, which I'd like to share here.

I thought I'd sort of broken his spirit and will to debate any more, but it doesn't appear that is completely true, so oh well.
(That's mostly a joke, about me breaking his spirit, just FYI.)

OK, so DavidW likes to assert that I hold to some kind of great apostasy in the early church not long after the apostles died, and that I think the early church 'fathers' were heretics. I wrote this post to correct him, and then Viisaus made some very good comments in the combox and PilgrimsArbour a good one as well.
DavidW lastly left a thought-provoking comment, trying to bring the discussion to a concrete level and then accusing me of "distorting and ignoring the evidence and the historical facts".
So, here is my answer.

But were they points of controversy with respect to what the biblical position actually is? Was the biblical position represented? That's the big question.
As we've discussed numerous times before, I don't grant that "Augustinianism" didn't exist before Augustine. Paul, Peter, and Jesus all taught what I teach today with respect to soteriology, predestination, hamartiology, etc. But at least some of it was forgotten by at least some people in the early church. Since this is a difficult thing for you to remember, apparently, please note that "some" does not mean "all". Got that?

Now, as for your three:
1) A. So they were proto-monophysites, is what you're saying. That's a problem. (For you.)
B. I don't know why you think that I think that a sacramental understanding of the Eucharist is heresy. Do you think I consider Presbyterians or Lutherans heretical?
C. You know, there's plenty of reason not to grant that point to you at all. But even if I did grant it, I'd have to ask whether the writers whose writings are still extant ever wrestled with the issue as it is defined biblically. Did he have an opportunity to be corrected by someone correctly interpreting the Scripture? Remember how I made resistance to correction a big deal in the post?
D. To say nothing of the question-begging nature of such appeals to "the early church" on your part, as if you knew anything about said early church masses beyond what a handful of people said that they themselves believed and, less commonly, said what others of their time believed. If you want to substantiate your claims that "the early church" believed what you believe, show me the polling data.

2) James White has admitted that all of the Fathers held to Baptismal Regeneration

I'd like to see that quote, actually.
And obviously Clement of Rome didn't, as he held to sola fide. Further, there's reason to think that Mathetes, Polycarp, and Tertullian didn't hold to such.
It occurs to me that quoting these early writers against your assertion that they "all... held to Baptismal Regen" actually weakens my point in the post, though it's worth it as it is just one more example of how wrecked and untenable your "early church consensus" position is.

3) Not holding to Calvinistic predestination is not heresy.

OK, moving on:

and you still claim that Calvinism isn't Gnosticism?

Yes, I still claim that it is not, unless you're willing to claim that EOdoxy is Muslim, since both hold to monotheism, prophets and supernatural revelation, angels, etc. Just waiting for some non-fallacious inferences from you. Apparently I'll be waiting a while.


which would be that you are condemning yourself, your Scriptures, and the Apostles in the process?

The idea that you or I could "condemn" the Scripture or Apostles is laughable.
This further begs the question at hand, both that the early extant church writings do in fact represent unbroken and uncorrupted DOCTRINAL transmission from the apostles, and that the Scripture does a worse job than those other writings of teaching us apostolic doctrine.


The Fathers of the early Church largely sorted the Apostolic from the apocryphal in their collation of the New Testament by deciding based on whether or not it agreed with their Faith.

1) Taken in isolation, that's certainly quite commendable. Reminds me of some town in Acts 17 that begins with "Bere" and ends in "a".
2) This raises an interesting point.
Let's say I grant that the extant early church writings express more or less EO doctrine.
Given other facts, such as that the Scripture is God-inspired and sufficiently clear to communicate what it intends to communicate, and that the Scr does not teach more or less EO doctrine on these points of contention between us, I don't see why I wouldn't be fully justified in positing with certainty either that either the entire church of the time was in serious, serious error or that these men didn't properly represent the beliefs of the church at large. In the absence of any data to the contrary (such as polling data from the laity and other church leaders from the time periods in question which I've repeatedly requested and you've repeatedly been unable to provide), my position has logical consistency in affirming the latter.
Yes, I know you'd dispute the statements about the Scripture, but as we've seen over and over again, your position just can't get there, sorry. And I think you know that, which is why you slip in these little jabs at Scr's reliability, whether in affirming its errancy when you want to, or in moving away from it towards early church writers, or in doubting its clarity and ability to communicate sufficiently. Or I could be wrong; as we saw in our debate, your exegesis of most every Scr text you tried to deal with was horrific, so I guess that could be it too.


They did not have access to the same historical and archaeological methods as we do, and so this was the rule of which they made use.

1) And so much the worse for them. I thought you'd want to make arguments that help your position...
2) Though my own arguments for the Canon to which I subscribe are primarily theological.


If the Faith of the early Church was as deeply flawed as you allege that it is, your New Testament is also apparently deeply flawed.

Back to the old myth that I hold to some universal apostasy after the 1st century.


Error does not produce truth.

This is equivocation between the TEACHING and the TEACHER. We need to be more careful than that.

The special pleading of Sola Ecclesia-ists' claims to unity

A favored argument against Sola Scriptura frequently used by our friends in the Roman Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church is "Just look at Protestantism! It's a mess, of 22,000 25,000 30,000 33,000 58 gazillion denominations!"
What are they saying? Mostly that Sola Scriptura as a rule of faith is insufficient to bring about institutional, organisational unity to the church of Jesus Christ. And of course, Christ would obviously want His church to have institutional, organisational unity! Evidently, setting the Scripture alone up as the sole infallible final rule of faith for the church doesn't accomplish what it's supposed to. Ergo, Sola Scriptura is false.

I've created this crude and very maladroit drawing to illustrate.


Let's analyse, then, the alternatives of Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Now, we of course like to accuse them of Sola Ecclesia; that is, we contend that their sole infallible final rule of faith is Whatever The Church® Says. But they don't like it when we say that, so let's be conciliatory and lay the contention aside. Their "real" rule of faith is Apostolic Tradition, which includes written and unwritten tradition from the apostles, both in Scripture and in other places such as the lived-out faith of the church, the liturgies, the writings of church fathers down through the years, etc.
Notice that, like the Scripture, this too forms a corpus with limits. The Da Vinci Code is not part of Apostolic Tradition. Neither is the Qur'an, nor is The Audacity of Hope (though, depending on which Roman or EO priest you ask, that last one might be close). We and others have contended many times, rightly, that the limits to the Roman and EO Canons of Scripture are not only poorly defined but actually non-existent. It is also indisputable that one's presupposition of an infallible interpreter (whether she be Rome or EOC) will govern which little-t traditions are actually accepted, promoted if you will, to Big-T Sacred Apostolic Tradition, thus forming the basis for Roman or Orthodox dogma, leaving the little-t traditions to rot by the wayside, relegated to "Well, he was just speaking as a private theologian" or "That was just his opinion" status.
But let's leave all of that aside and grant that there is one big and awe-inspiring God-given Verbum Dei corpus of Scripture and Tradition that is the proper rule of faith for the church of Jesus Christ.

The problem is obvious - Rome, sedevacantists, traditionalist Catholics, Pope Michael-ists, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, and various other churches with incompatible teachings all appeal to this set and limited corpus of Scripture and Tradition. It would appear that the criticism against Sola Scriptura of multiple denominations applies to the Roman and EO rule of faith as well.

The Romanist or Orthodox might object: "But we're not in communion with those schismatics/heterodox/heretics!" Now, what if I were to reply, as a member of a Southern Baptist church, that, have no fear my non-Sola Scripturist friends, my church holds that everyone who's not a member of a Southern Baptist church is a schismatic/heterodox/heretic too? Would that make our Romanist or Orthodox friends feel better?
Or would that make them criticise us even more strongly: "See? You Sola Scripturists can't even hold communion with each other!"? Yep, my money's on that one, too. We're darned if we do and darned if we don't, but somehow if the Romanists or Orthodox don't hold communion with these other churches, that's just fine. Such special pleading is just...special.

So let me break this down as clearly as I can. "The Protestant Church" does not exist. Self-named "Protestant churches" vary so widely in doctrine and authority as to make points of comparison impossible to ascertain. If you want to compare unity and disunity, compare the adherences to the competing rules of faith. Or compare churches, like the Roman Church to the Southern Baptist Convention or the Pope Michael Catholic Church to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. What do we find, if we do this? How different from each other are the churches that hold to Scripture alone as rule of faith, and how different from each other are the churches that hold to "Sacred Apostolic Tradition" as rule of faith? Answer that and you'll know one reason why we consider all this talk about how Tradition and Magisterium make for superior church unity to be just that - talk.

Eastern Orthodoxy's gospel

Let's recap a brief conversation with DavidW, unofficial representative of Eastern Orthodox and official biblical errantist.

Me: 2) DavidW, if we don't hold to the same Gospel, how is it that you've said that I'm not headed for Hell (if my current trajectory holds)? Did you change your mind on that, or is your Gospel not all that central to how one escapes damnation?

DavidW: I trust in the loving mercy of our good God and Father.

Me: God's loving mercy unto relief from damnation (ie, salvation) is granted outside of the Gospel?

DavidW: "With God all things are possible." - Matthew 19:26.

Me: You don't think quoting Matt 19:26 in reply to that question is just a tad out of context?

DavidW: I trust in the loving mercy of our God and Father, with whom all things are possible -- and I leave it at that.


Maybe it would be helpful if we could define "Gospel". I assume you'd agree that from its Greek root, it means "good news".

What is the good news offered? Isn't it that Jesus Christ has come to take away sin, forgive sin, and give eternal life? What could be better news than that? "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his soul?"

Why is that good news? Because we're sinners! What's the problem with that? Why does it matter that we're sinners? B/c God is angry with sin AND sinners, no?


Lk 3:7 So he began saying to the crowds who were going out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

John 3:36 “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”

Rom 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness

Rom 2:5 But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, 6 who WILL RENDER TO EACH PERSON ACCORDING TO HIS DEEDS: 7 to those who by perseverance in doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life; 8 but to those who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, wrath and indignation. 9 There will be tribulation and distress for every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek,

Rom 4:14 For if those who are of the Law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise is nullified; 15 for the Law brings about wrath, but where there is no law, there also is no violation.

Rom 9:22 What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?

Col 2: 13 When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, 14 having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

Col 3:5 Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. 6 For it is because of these things that the wrath of God will come upon the sons of disobedience, 7 and in them you also once walked, when you were living in them.

1 John 5:11 And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. 12 He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life.

Rev 6:16they said to the mountains and to the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; 17 for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”

Rev 14:10 he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. 11 “And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; they have no rest day and night, those who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.”


What is the remedy for this? Jesus Christ!
What does Jn 3:36 mean?
--If one believes in Christ --> eternal life.
--If one does not believe in Christ --> not eternal life. Wrath.

And you want to tell me that Matthew 19:26's "all things are possible with God" means "self-contradiction is possible with God"?
I guess since you're an errantist, you're free to do whatever you want in this case. Do you really think that Jesus forgot His discussion with Nicodemus when He said Matthew 19:26, or vice versa? Or maybe your grand inclusivity is wrongheaded and exhibits postmodern politically correct inclusivism? I expect that from someone like Billy Graham, not from a representative of "the ancient Church".
When I was considering conversion to EOC, this is one of the things that bothered me greatly - your theology doesn't make a very big deal out of sin. It's only gotten worse and more obvious in the years since I stopped considering it.

Context doesn't matter when you own the book

My Eastern Orthodox debate partner David made an astonishing statement the other day that I would like to share.

The original post was on a different topic, but that's OK. I don't ordinarily mind derailing a comment box, but this one got pretty far afield, and I liked the post and its feeble responses from a couple of atheists, so I'll be diverting the EO-related discussion to this and another future post.

Anyway, what led up to the statement was that David had claimed that EOdoxy offers a better answer to the materialist atheist than my presuppositional approach and argumentum ad absurdum offered in the post. (He still hasn't let me know exactly what that answer is.) I challenged that, naturally, especially given the fact that he is a biblical errantist and accepts the theory of evolution as usually stated by the modern neo-Darwinists (or so he has implied). He pointed in due course to a webpage detailing some experiences EO martyrs have suffered at the hands of Soviet communists. I read some of them, including this one:

The overthrow of the Tsar, "he who restraineth" (2Thes.2:7) opened the way for the servants of Antichrist to exterminate the spiritual powers of Russia, and first of all -- the clergy.

David defended this:

Do you disagree that the Czar restrained the Atheist Communists? Or that Atheist Communists are the servants of the AntiChrist? 1&2 John are very clear about who the AntiChrist is... And Atheist Communists fit the bill.

My reply set up my favorite statement from him so far:

Nice leap there. Context much?
2 Thess 2:1 Now we request you, brethren, with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, 2 that you not be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. 3 Let no one in any way deceive you, for it will not come unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, 4 who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, displaying himself as being God. 5 Do you not remember that while I was still with you, I was telling you these things? 6 And you know what restrains him now, so that in his time he will be revealed. 7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way. 8 Then that lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord will slay with the breath of His mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of His coming; 9 that is, the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders, 10 and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. 11 For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false, 12 in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness.

It's pretty reckless Left-Behind-type eisegesis to apply those contemporary events to 2 Thess 2's prediction. I didn't think Tim LaHaye had a lot of pull in the EO community.

Then the kicker from David:

Their use of this particular phrase from Scripture is not somehow "official Orthodox doctrine." The Scripture is a living document and the possession of the Church; they chose to use a phrase from our Book.

Now, I presume that the Bible is a "living document" to David b/c, as all organisms have evolved from a common ancestor, the Bible itself is evolving as well, hopefully in the direction of perfection (depending on the mutations it suffers and the natural pressures it experiences that will govern whether it survives or not), but it's not there yet.

No response to the obviously bad exegesis performed by the author of the blurb who was no doubt expressing EO popular piety unto one of her martyrs. All this preceding talk about the unity of the Church, but when an EOdox expresses a view that David apparently doesn't feel like defending, and all of a sudden, the site is a private individual expressing a private opinion, not Orthodox doctrine. Whom am I to believe is a more reliable purveyor of Orthodox doctrine - David the layman 20-something-year-old errantist or the website of the ROCOR parish All Saints of North America?

Even more pointedly, David is evidently vicariously sidestepping an EOdox's responsibility to properly interpret Scripture. Why? Because it's "our Book" - we'll thank you not to lecture us on how badly we used it, since it belongs to US, not you! If we want to take 2 Thessalonians ludicrously out of context and ape Hal Lindsey, we're gonna do it and we don't need no guff from youse guys.
Given this mentality, is it really any surprise that it's nearly impossible to find any actual biblical support for most EO distinctive dogmas?

Eastern errancy

I'd like to respond to this comment on my blog about the inerrancy of the Scripture and harmonisation from my Eastern Orthodox friend David Bryan, and as always, to ask him please to correct any misconceptions I've incorporated about EOC. I understand whenever you have to cut this off; moving cross-country is no easy task. But I think the problem for your position is deeper than you realise, I really do.

Men wrote the thing, yes, but "men carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:21). Don't you believe that your church is guided by the Holy Spirit? Why can't someone turn the same objection back on your church? I mean, it's made up of MEN.
What's really funny to me is that it's your church that believes in theosis, faithful believers' partaking in the divine nature. These 4 Evangelists were, I'm sure you'd agree, much, much farther along in their being conformed to the image of Christ than you or I will ever be (until we die). Thus they would have been much closer to God, better, deeper partakers of the divine nature than you or I. And yet, here you are
1) correcting them according to your far-removed, 21st-century perspective.
-The irony here is that EO-dox are usually the ones criticising Reformed believers for looking at early writers and the Scr from a far-removed, future perspective.
2) making a powerful distinction between man and God.
-The irony here is that EO-dox are usually the ones who, from a Reformed perspective, shrinks and blurs the distinction between man and God.

All that to say, in this line of reasoning, you are acting like a liberal Protestant. That's not a good thing, but unfortunately it's not the only area in which EO-dox do so.

Maybe it's not as apparent to you for another reason. I've asked both you and Anastasios about the role that evangelism and apologetics play in the life of the semi-serious and serious EO layman, and you've told me that the former is inadequate and the latter is barely existent. Anastasios in particular let me know that he'd never heard of an EO apologist engaging, say, an atheist in public debate. I could be wrong, but I'm not at all sure you have encountered many atheists or skeptics and really talked turkey with them about stuff like this. So let me come at it from another angle.

You're talking to Joe American Skeptic. You tell him you believe that Jesus Christ instituted a church while He was walking the Earth, and entrusted it to His disciples, and His disciples spread the good news of Jesus all around the world and appointed other people to take their places when they died in the churches and to celebrate the sacraments of Christ, like baptism and the Eucharist. So, this church has come down to us through the years with successions of bishops, which is kind of like what you'd call "pastors".

You tell him you believe the Bible, that you believe what the Bible says and also what the church has always believed down through the centuries. You know, b/c the guys who were handed down the tradition of the church from the apostles and then on down through their successors, they all taught the same things.

So he wonders if it is true? For example, what would you say the sign above Christ on the Cross actually said, in its entirety? Each gospel account stated something explicitly regarding what the sign said, when in reality only one of the four was actually right, at best, and the other three (or all four) were (in some cases drastically) in error as to what the sign actually said after all, right? (He hadn't read Seth's comment, which clears up the misunderstanding.)

You'd say you're fine with one gospel saying one inscription and another saying sthg else, because men wrote the thing. Inspiration doesn't necessarily produce airtight, factual data synchronization. There's still far and away enough agreement as to the major events (Nativity, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost) that Scripture very strongly stands as a faithful witness to the Advent of Christ and the reality of His Church.

He wonders if inspiration doesn't necessarily produce factual data, how do you know that the Resurrection, for example, actually, factually happened?
You'd answer that you have the faithful witness of the church down thru the centuries. It's a lot of people.

Here's where it gets sticky. He thought that "a lot of people" is what caused the problem in the first place - multiple ppl write these varied accts of what was written above the Cross. But suddenly more people is a good thing?

So, what will you say? That you have a succession of people who heard from the teachings of the apostles themselves, no?

But hadn't the Gospel writers also heard from them? Weren't at least a couple of them eyewitnesses? Why do you rely on early church writers when the earliest ones are untrustworthy?
Or do you trust them for SPIRITUAL truth but not other kinds of truth? How do you make the distinction when the truth in question is not only spiritual in nature, such as
1) the Crucifixion
2) the Resurrection
3) the promised Parousia
4) the new Heaven and the new Earth
5) the theosis of the faithful
etc.

On what basis do you assert that those are indeed faithfully transmitted, while other things, such as the Cross inscription, were not? Is it just b/c you don't understand how the Cross inscription accts could fit together (even though Seth explained how)? Why is it better to ascribe error to a production of the Holy Spirit rather than to admit that you don't understand how it could all work together, but God knows and, while often He does make that knowledge and understanding available to humans, sometimes He just doesn't. You talk about mystery an awful lot in EOC; why do you abandon it in this arena? Where does the Bible itself distinguish between "OK, here's some spiritual truth, so this is really the real truth, for real," and "Here's some other stuff about, you know, the physical surroundings, the historical narrative. This isn't really a big deal. In fact, you could probably skip over it, b/c 21st-century archæologists will be able to totally reconstruct the whole thing WAY better than I'll be able to tell it here. So yeah, just fuggedaboudit (2 Maccabees 15:38-39)"?

The same questions go for early church authors. Only, there were alot more of them! You think the 4 accts are irreconcilable, but 40 different early church authors all saying different things is a better situation? Will you retreat to "oh, well, ____ was just speaking as an individual, private theologian, and the church's reaction to it over time bore out that he was mistaken"? But when all the church fathers hold the Scr in highest regard and ascribe no error to it thru hundreds and hundreds of years and thousands of pages, somehow *you* know better, with your 21st-century wisdom and insight?

Is this where following EO tradition leads someone? Is it really that far out of the vein of EOC tradition to hold to the inerrancy of the Bible?
And of course, we must ask, if it is, how would anyone know for sure? After all, if God-breathed Scripture is errant, what hope have non-theopneustos writings from men who were *not* "carried along by the Holy Spirit"?






(cross-posted at my blog)