Why One Convert Left Eastern Orthodoxy

For those following the Hank Hanegraaff situation with Eastern Orthodoxy, here’s a first-hand account of a Reformed believer who migrated to Eastern Orthodoxy, before coming back to a more Reformed Anglican posture (he is now a Deacon in one of the more conservative branches of Anglicanism):

http://www.oldjamestownchurch.com/blog/2012/6/8/for-evangelicals-and-others-considering-eastern-orthodoxy.html

It’s an account of why he left. Couple of highlights that I had pulled out of this in an earlier blog post:

“Everything outside Holy Scripture, not being of faith, is sin.”

Embryo Parson put up a recent blog post that I’ve wanted to share:

The English Reformation and the Early Church Fathers:

“We and our people - thanks be to God - follow no novel and strange religions, but that very religion which is ordained by Christ, sanctioned by the primitive and Catholic Church and approved by the consentient mind and voice of the most early Fathers.” (Queen Elizabeth I)

I. Justification

Clement of Rome (30-100): “All these (saints of old), therefore, were highly honoured, and made great, not for their own sake, or for their own works, or for the righteousness which they wrought, but through the operation of His will. And we, too, being called by His will in Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding, or godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which, from the beginning, Almighty God has justified all men; to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.”

Source: Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians, 32.4. (Discussion of works follows.)

Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus (c. 130): “He gave His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy One for transgressors, the blameless One for the wicked, the righteous One for the unrighteous, the incorruptible One for the corruptible, the immortal One for them that are mortal. For what other thing was capable of covering our sins than His righteousness? By what other one was it possible that we, the wicked and ungodly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God? O sweet exchange! O unsearchable operation! O benefits surpassing all expectation! That the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors!”

Source: The Epistle to Diognetus, 9.2-5. (Quote occurs in discussion about the atonement, God’s objective act of “taking on the burden of our iniquities.”)

Justin Martyr (100-165) speaks of “those who repented, and who no longer were purified by the blood of goats and of sheep, or by the ashes of an heifer, or by the offerings of fine flour, but by faith through the blood of Christ, and through His death.”

Source: Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 13.

St. Irenaeus: “Human beings can be saved from the ancient serpent in no other way than by believing in him who, when he was raised up from the earth on the tree of martyrdom in the likeness of sinful flesh, drew all things to himself and gave life to the dead.”

Source: (Against the Heresies, IV, 2, 7)

Origen (185-254): “For God is just, and therefore he could not justify the unjust. Therefore he required the intervention of a propitiator, so that by having faith in Him those who could not be justified by their own works might be justified.”

Source: Origen, Commentary on Romans, 2.112.

Origen: “A man is justified by faith. The works of the law can make no contribution to this. Where there is no faith which might justify the believer, even if there are works of the law these are not based on the foundation of faith. Even if they are good in themselves they cannot justify the one who does them, because faith is lacking, and faith is the mark of those who are justified by God.”

Source: Origen, Commentary on Romans, 2.136.

Hilary of Poitiers (300-368): “Wages cannot be considered as a gift, because they are due to work, but God has given free grace to all men by the justification of faith.”

Source: Hilary, Commentary on Matthew (on Matt. 20:7)

Hilary of Poitiers: “It disturbed the scribes that sin was forgiven by a man (for they considered that Jesus Christ was only a man) and that sin was forgiven by Him whereas the Law was not able to absolve it, since faith alone justifies.”

Source: Hilary, Commentary on Matthew (on Matt. 9:3)

Didymus the Blind (c. 313-398) “A person is saved by grace, not by works but by faith. There should be no doubt but that faith saves and then lives by doing its own works, so that the works which are added to salvation by faith are not those of the law but a different kind of thing altogether.”[31]

Source: Didymus the Blind. Commentary on James, 2:26b.

Basil of Caesarea (329-379): “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord, that Christ has been made by God for us righteousness, wisdom, justification, redemption. This is perfect and pure boasting in God, when one is not proud on account of his own righteousness but knows that he is indeed unworthy of the true righteousness and is justified solely by faith in Christ.”

Source: Basil, Homily on Humility, 20.3.

It goes on like this for another six or eight feet down the page. It’s a great source of early church citations on the topic of “justification by faith”.

One more:

“What is the mark of a faithful soul? To be in these dispositions of full acceptance on the authority of the words of Scripture, not venturing to reject anything nor making additions. For, if ‘all that is not of faith is sin’ as the Apostle says, and ‘faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God,’ everything outside Holy Scripture, not being of faith, is sin.”

- St. Basil the Great (The Morals)

Islam throughout the world

We need to deal with the world as it is, not as we imagine it to be.

[Aside from the fact that they are Roman Catholic, this is one of my biggest qualms with the Called to Communion gang. They do not present Roman Catholicism as it is; rather, they present a Roman Catholicism that is merely imagined.]

As Christians, in possession of God’s revealed Word, we have a greater access to “the world as it is” than anyone else we know. It is a big and daunting world; but our hope and expectation is that the Lord and Creator of the world is far more involved with things than we can ever imagine.

With that said, we still need to deal with the world, in all of its manifold parts, and Islam is one of those parts.

I’ll be honest. There are only so many hours in a day. In addition to what I do here, I have a full-time job, and a very active family (which is becoming much more engaged in our church than we ever have been, for which I am very thankful). And we do have to prioritize.

So I don’t really focus on Islam all that much. I’m just a beginner when it comes to Islam. Rather, I choose to focus on Roman Catholicism, because I know a lot about it. My own personal struggles with it have led me to read deeply, and I can write about it in a way that I think will be of benefit to a lot of people. On the other hand, men like James White, Ken from Beggars All, and my fellow Triablogger Rhology, for example, have taken a profound interest in dialog with Islam. I do think these individuals are doing us a tremendous service.

The Wall Street Journal this morning features an article on the phenomenon of “moderate Islam”:

Moderate Islamic Preachers Gain Followers in Indonesia

The map nearby shows the extent of Islam in the world (the eastern hemisphere, at least).

As conservative Christians, and especially as conservative Presbyterians and Baptists, we are not great in numbers, and I think it behooves us to look for allies in the world where we can find them. I’ve written about my friendships with conservative Anglicans, for example. And conservative Lutherans are also natural allies in the cause of the Gospel.

While I don’t think that the phenomenon of “moderate Islam” is anything near to being a “natural ally” for Christianity, in the global scheme of things, I believe they may be a group that we can trust rather than not trust to have an understanding of Islam as it is, rather than as they imagine it to be.

“Family Feud”; or, “Our American Christian Heritage”

Steven Wedgeworth has posted a brilliant review of John Frame’s The Escondido Theology: A Reformed Response to Two Kingdom Theology.

It’s brilliant not merely because he addresses (in an irenic way) the substance of all the contentions that are made in that book, not least of which is Two Kingdoms theology. He discusses the issue of who is the proper bearer of “the Reformed tradition”. He brings a sharp focus to bear upon “Christless Christianity” (and it’s “Gospel-Driven” counterpart, the “Lost Soul of Protestantism, and more). He discusses Protestant Scholasticism and Richard Muller (the real heroes of this story); and lots, lots more. (The whole thing is more than 7500 words, but still, I highly recommend giving it a look).

But beyond the issues, he talks about something that’s a lot deeper:

Michael Horton, who ends up bearing the brunt of the critique, described the book as “a new low in intra-Reformed polemics.”

To be the nastiest and most unfair polemicist in the Reformed community would be quite the accomplishment. Prof. Frame would have to outpace several of the Escondido men themselves, along with any number of Clarkians and theonomists – and that would only take into account the American cranksters! As biting and even sometimes inflammatory as some of Prof. Frame’s writing may be, this book does not take the prize for nastiness. And it is certainly a long way off from the battles of those golden years of Reformed confession-writing. We should never forget that the debates carried out by our Reformed ancestors, even the men now idolized by the Reformed gatekeepers, at times involved literal hatchet jobs.

Wedgeworth is spot-on when he says “We should never forget that the debates carried out by our Reformed ancestors, even the men now idolized by the Reformed gatekeepers, at times involved literal hatchet jobs”.

I’ve been hanging out at D.G. Hart’s blog recently because of his fun interactions with Bryan Cross. I came to Reformed theology largely through Hart’s books about Machen, whom I came to regard as the heir of Calvin through “Old Princeton” (though I tend to tune out Hart’s disagreements with Turretinfan over 2K views). While I agree with Steve Hays that “natural law” fails to address some very difficult moral issues, I don’t think anyone is going to hell over the Westminster “Two Kingdoms” theology, either.

I’ve known Scott Clark for about as long as there has been an Internet through which we could email. I’ve met Michael Horton. I write for a blog where Steve Hays, who calls himself a Biblicist, has been strongly influenced by the writings of John Frame (and presumably his “Something Close to Biblicism), which I like a lot, and with which I fundamentally agree. Clark writes scathingly about Frame. Clark is not well-regarded by Hays, but I’ve learned more about historical theology from Scott Clark than anyone else, I think.

Cyril of Alexandria was apparently a pretty good theologian. But he was just simply a thug as well. He can be a lesson for folks today.

Yes, I cringe when I watch Joel Osteen. But I found the graphic nearby on the front page of his website. I can honestly say, I know someone who has turned to Christ because of Joel Osteen. And while Osteen’s particular messaging is, I think, not helpful in ways that have been amply described, what would happen if he were to do a sermon series on, for example, “the history of the Reformation”? His audience is probably bigger than several whole Reformed denominations.

American Christianity certainly has its problems. But Christianity has always had problems. And despite the problems in American Christianity, it is our Christianity now.

I’m no fan of things like “bishops”, but I’m a very big fan of an old fart who goes by the handle “Embryo Parson”. There was a time when I despised him, but our more recent friendship shows us how (“in the Lord”) such transformations are possible. And I do think he has a very healthy attitude toward American Christianity.

Wedgeworth does not simply point out the problems. He points to a solution:

Instead, we do need a Reformed ressourcement. It needs to move forward by building upon the tradition. It should be a Reformed irenicism that is really Reformed, having clearly-stated and definitively Reformational principles. It should be an irenic catholicity that achieves peace through courageous and rational dialogue and debate, charitable but assertive. And it must always be truth-telling, with regards to itself and its opponents. Prof. Frame possesses the latter qualities of peace and honest integrity. The Escondido men aspire towards the former qualities of consistency with the great Reformed tradition, ….

Closing:

We think we have begun to point to a way beyond the dead ends and impasses of ultra-confessionalism on the one hand, and a Neo-Calvinism so “neo” it is no longer really Calvinist on the other. And we are finding that many young pastors and churchmen, seeing the problems of the two opposing camps which have so far dominated the American Reformed world, are quite ready to step out onto that road.

Traditional Anglicanism on Predestination and Election

http://www.oldjamestownchurch.com/blog/2012/9/2/fr-roger-salter-on-article-xvii.html

XVII. Of Predestination and Election.

Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour. Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God, be called according to God's purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they through Grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God's mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity.

As the godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal Salvation to be enjoyed through Christ as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God: So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God's Predestination, is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation.

Furthermore, we must receive God's promises in such wise, as they be generally set forth to us in Holy Scripture: and, in our doings, that Will of God is to be followed, which we have expressly declared unto us in the Word of God.

And here begins the commentary on it:

PREDESTINATION AND PROMISE: ARTICLE XVII

By Roger Salter
Special to Virtueonline
www.virtueonline.org
Sept. 1, 2012

Anglicanism's commitment to the doctrine of predestination is not merely something to be noted, acknowledged, and calmly filed away. Anglicans are often apologetic for their own personal convictions and tend to keep them private. Electing love is a truth to be rejoiced in, reinforced in our generation, and proclaimed for the comfort and reassurance of God's people, especially in times of testing, which we may be confronting sooner than we expect. Calvin's emphasis was due not only to his loyal exposition of Holy Scripture and his fidelity to the long standing Augustinian tradition. It was a pastoral response to the appeal of cart loads of saints being transported to prison and possible martyrdom.

Persecuted believers needed to know, in the face of death, that they were in the secure grip of their Saviour's love. Calvin knew the Biblical answer to their intense fear for themselves and their loved ones. Electing love is the recurrent theme through Scripture that persuades the Christian of the eternal, irreversible fondness of the Mediator for the folk he came to represent and rescue. Electing love, God's prior choice of his people, is the entrancing message of the Word of God. It is a rapturous, romantic refrain sung by prophets and apostles throughout the eras of divine revelation and it is a tune that bids all believers to sing with exuberant wonder and gratitude at the absolutely unmotivated mercy of God....

Thomas Bradwardine and the Gospel of Grace

This is from my old friend the Embryo Parson. (Seems like calling an old guy an "embryo" anything is a misnomer, but I think it's just a perspective on eternity).

Thomas Bradwardine, born c. 1290, was the briefly the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1349 before the plague took his life. He is known as one of the English Church's greatest philosophical clergymen. An Augustinian, he defended predestinarianism against the "New Pelagianism" that was becoming widespread in the church of that day (one of the contributing factors to the Protestant Reformation two centuries later)....

Moreover, as the Roman Catholic scholar (and Augustinian) George Tavard documented in his book Justification: An Ecumenical Study, this medieval incarnation of Augustinian theology would later give rise -- quite naturally -- to the doctrine of justification by faith alone, principally in the work of the Augustinian monk Martin Luther but eventually in the Church of England as well. Thus Bradwardine was an immediate predecessor to the English Reformation, though that Reformation came about mainly through continental influences.

Though Alister McGrath compellingly argues in his magisteral work Iustitia Dei that Luther's doctrine was a "theological novum", one may argue that it was always implicit in Augustine, the greatest doctor of the Church, as evidenced by these quotes ...

Read more ... "The Augustinian and Solafidian Legacy in the English Catholic Church: Thomas Bradwardine"

For anyone considering Eastern Orthodoxy

Here is a first person account by someone who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and who remained one for 13 uncomfortable years. He finally left Eastern Orthodoxy in favor of a conservative [“Continuing”] Anglicanism. He cautions people considering Eastern Orthodoxy to consider other alternatives (what follows is completely his own testimony): 

A sizable number of Evangelicals … have opted to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy rather than to Roman Catholicism or Traditional Anglicanism.  One can read the convert literature of (the increasingly unhinged) Frank Schaeffer and the ex-Campus Crusade folks (Peter Gillquist, et al.) for the standard panegyric about how these Evangelicals ”came home” to “the ancient Christian church”.  Your blogger The Embryo Parson was one of them.  I spent approximately 13 years in the Orthodox Church, and I can assure you that Schaeffer and Gillquist were smitten with romantic notions about the Orthodox Church church that bear little relation to reality.  I could go into great detail about why I left, but I will confine myself here to four principal reasons. 

1.  Creeping liberalism.  Here is an account from a Lutheran blog that refers to an article written by Orthodox academic and priest Gregory Jensen, who frankly admits the problem … the Orthodox Church is slowly but surely beginning to look like its increasingly “Episcopalianized” sister, the Roman Catholic Church.  Both, to one degree or another, are aping the liberal Protestant “mainline.”  Though officially “orthodox” in their respective theologies, there is much turmoil beneath the surface that is associated with the activity of liberals, and the Evangelical convert can’t miss it.  I certainly didn’t.

2.  Virulent anti-Western mentality.  The Orthodox are openly hostile to just about everything Western.  Any Evangelical who hopes to retain something of the Western theological framework in which he learned about his faith will be quickly disappointed in that hope if he enters the Orthodox Church.  David B. Hart, an Orthodox theologian and brother of our own Anglican Catholic priest Fr. Robert Hart, says this about it:

The most damaging consequence . . .  of Orthodoxy’s twentieth-century pilgrimage ad fontes—and this is no small irony, given the ecumenical possibilities that opened up all along the way—has been an increase in the intensity of Eastern theology’s anti-Western polemic. Or, rather, an increase in the confidence with which such polemic is uttered. Nor is this only a problem for ecumenism: the anti-Western passion (or, frankly, paranoia) of Lossky and his followers has on occasion led to rather severe distortions of Eastern theology. More to the point here, though, it has made intelligent interpretations of Western Christian theology (which are so very necessary) apparently almost impossible for Orthodox thinkers. Neo-patristic Orthodox scholarship has usually gone hand in hand with some of the most excruciatingly inaccurate treatments of Western theologians that one could imagine—which, quite apart form the harm they do to the collective acuity of Orthodox Christians, can become a source of considerable embarrassment when they fall into the hands of Western scholars who actually know something of the figures that Orthodox scholars choose to caluminiate. When one repairs to modern Orthodox texts, one is almost certain to encounter some wild mischaracterization of one or another Western author; and four figures enjoy a special eminence in Orthodox polemics: Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and John of the Cross.

3.  Essentially Eastern European.  The Orthodox Churches tend to be Eastern European or Middle Eastern cultural outposts.  While they welcome converts from Western countries, the latter never really quite fit in.  One person commenting over at the Stumble Inn writes:

Eastern Orthodoxy is a gigantic Eastern culture club. They have a saying for a sort of mania new converts (of the generic Anglo/Celtic/German-American variety) get - Convertitis. Basically it’s marked by a) aggressive appropriation of your parish’s ethnic culture, b) rabid defense of your theology. The second one is just the excitement of finding something you believe to be true - it’s an altruistic sort of joy with unintended negative consequences that go away over time.

The first one is a survival/assimilation technique that is pretty much necessary when one finds himself surrounded by Russians, or Greeks, or Arabs... Bulgarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Serbians, Georgians, Albanians and 20 different varieties of each. There’s nothing else. If you walk into an Orthodox church as an old stock American, you simply don’t belong there. You’re out of your league. You have to make yourself belong - and it’s difficult.

If not impossible.

4.  Compromised soteriology.  While we should certainly be grateful to the Greek Church Fathers for the triadology and christology that became the basis of the Creed, they were not so orthodox when it came to an issue that would come to bear upon the question of soteriology, or salvation:

Part of the fascination of the patristic era to the scholar lies in the efforts of its theologians to express an essentially Hebraic gospel in a Hellenistic milieu: the delights of patristic scholarship must not, however, be permitted to divert our attention from the suspicion voiced by the Liberal school in the last century - that Christ’s teaching was seriously compromised by the Hellenism of its earlier adherents. The history of the development of the Christian doctrine of justification lends support to such a suspicion. In particular, it can be shown that two major distortions were introduced into the corpus of traditional belief within the eastern church at a very early stage, and were subsequently transferred to the emerging western theological tradition. These are:

a. The introduction of the non-biblical, secular Stoic concept of autoexousia or liberum arbitrium in the articulation of the human response to the divine initiative in justification.

b. The implicit equation of tsedaqa, dikaiosune and iustitia, linked with the particular association of the Latin meritum noted earlier (p.15), inevitably suggested a correlation between human moral effort and justification within the western church. The subsequent development of the western theological tradition, particularly since the time of Augustine, has shown a reaction against both these earlier distortions, and may be regarded as an attempt to recover a more biblically orientated approach to the question of justification. . . .

The emerging patristic understanding of such matters as predestination, grace and free will is somewhat confused, and would remain so until controversy forced full discussion of the issue upon the church. Indeed, by the end of the fourth century, the Greek fathers had formulated a teaching on human free will based upon philosophical rather than biblical foundations. Standing in the great Platonic tradition, heavily influenced by Philo, and reacting against the fatalisms of their day, they taught that man was utterly free in his choice of good or evil. . . . (Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, Vol. I, pp.18-19)

This sub-biblical notion of free will would later inform the heresies of Pelagianism and Semipelagianism, and would also result in a soteriology in the East that would put a greater stress on theosis - sanctification - than on the atonement.  Accordingly, Orthodox theology is deficient in its understanding of just how the atonement relates to sanctification.  One need only listen to the narrative of this video to see an example of the man-centered nature of theosis.  Note the repeated use of “I”, “me” and “my”.  I call this the “Little-Christian-Who-Could” model.   There is nothing in this video about what God did to effect man’s salvation, aside from a brief and vague reference to the destruction of sin and death at the beginning of the narrative. 

Because the Orthodox reject the Augustinian view of original sin, and by implication the Pauline teaching on the inability of man to save himself, and because the Orthodox still labor under pagan notions about “free will”, their soteriology suffers.  Frs. Hart and Wells discuss this deficiency at the [Anglican] Continuum, here and here.

The Old Jamestown Church and “Continuing” Anglicans

Some folks are attracted to a “liturgical” style of worship, and for those who are, I’d recommend a look at “Continuing” Anglicans. These are mostly traditional folks, and some of them even adhere to a more Calvinist type of theology.

“The Old Jamestown Church” blog is by an old friend who has been around the block a few times. He remains anonymous (I think) here, so I’ll respect his privacy. But I wanted to give him a link and an opportunity to tell you what he’s all about:

The Old Jamestown Church is to be a blog about the hows, whos, whys, whats, whens and wheres of Traditional or "Continuing" Anglicanism. Much of what you will read here will be devoted to an "apology" of sorts, explaining to you why, if you are a conservative Christian in this day of ecclesial chaos, theological pluralism and liturgical insanity, you should seriously consider joining a Traditional Anglican Church. The blog is written by an "embryo parson" (see the movie Cold Comfort Farm) in theAnglican Catholic Church, which is to say someone who is possibly headed for at least the diaconate and maybe the priesthood. Your blogger is theologically educated, long in the tooth, has been through several schools of hard knocks, but is arguably none the wiser. That said, he does manage to hammer out a cogent argument every now and again, and hopes to posit a few of such here.