Speaker 1: It's j Dire Jason j D.
Speaker 2: Jay Diers Days Analysis, Jade Ires Days Nells.
Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to Jay's Analysis. Today. We're gonna be
talking about Protestantism and Evangelicalism and how they are refuted.
And we're gonna do it in eighties Chad shirt an
eighties boomer hat. This hat is way too big for
my head. It looks really ridiculous, but I couldn't find
my good hat. I don't feel like combing my hair,
So we're gonna be I've got my dry erase pad.
Now this is pig Martin Luther two demonstrate dry race bad.
How that's gonna work? So I'll be sketching notes for
you boys and girls. You can take your notes here.
The nerds are pleased. And we got one hundred and third.
Last time I did a weekend stream, I got like
three hundred people right away. So where is everybody partying tonight?
What is tonight? Is this party night? Is this fish fry?
Is this the feast of Saint Booz tonight? Anyway? So
maybe with the aid of dry erase board, we can
help you kids get along in the world. Maybe if
you're good, I'll draw you a bronie all right now,
will be taking questions. Of course, We've already got a
couple of super chats. Appreciate that go. We're going to
talk about I'm gonna I want to try to go
pretty hardcore. I want to go in depth because I've
had so many questions about doing, you know, reputation of
Protestantism over the last few years. So we've covered a
lot of ground with Catholicism. We've done a lot of
theological issues related to Rome, but we haven't really done
a whole lot of protest and apologics. And we're going
to do some of that tonight, so hopefully we can
hit all the majors. I've got with me my seven
Ecumenical Council's book from the Chaft set, so we'll be
diving into some of that, looking at the councils. And yes,
we will be doing the papacy very soon. In fact,
there was going to be a debate and surprise, surprise,
he wasn't ready to do it, which is what we
always find. And yes, we will essentially probably work through
the famous of ab gatea the papacy. This is one
of the classic critiques of the Roman Papacy by a
convert from Rome to Orthodoxy, So some of the other
books that would be relevant in this for newcomers, I
always recommend The Experience of God to Everybody by Father
Stunny Lloyd. This is a classic of Orthodoxy, so that's
a good one to get in terms of what we
conceive of as a holistic view of salvation, theosis or
identification in Christ by Paniotis Nellis, so that's another good
one you can get trying to get the light right,
so it doesn't there you go, there's a There are
sermons by Saint Gregory Palamas on Mary why She's stay
at Tokos, and of course the writings of Saint Cyril
against this Storius on the Unity of Christ, and John
mcguckin's book Saint Cyril of Alexander and the Christological controversy
will will play a central role in the theology that
we're gonna be talking about tonight, because most Protestantism, whether
it knows it or not, falls into Nestorianism. So we'll
get into all that later on. But uh, for other options,
people going what they think is other routes, I recommend
the set of a conciesst Delusion by John Pontrello, good book.
He was influenced by my work. I can't get the
light right set of a conscious delusion, so that we
don't go down that road, that mistake. Let's see what
else have we got here. Michael Welton's book is pretty standard.
Two Paths Roman Orthodoxy Michael Welton, Two Paths, that's a
good book, one of the Catholic stuff, because I'm sure
we're gonna have a wide audience here different theological views.
And then, of course it's always important to understand the
cosmic scope of Orthodoxy as opposed to the limiting scope
of all Western theology, whether Roman, Catholic or Evangelical. And
to begin to understand the cosmic scope of Eastern theology,
you need to understand Saint Maximus and to understand that
Christ is by his incarnation united to all human beings,
universal human nature. That's why all men are resurrected. That
is the universal teaching of all the Orthodox fathers. After Augustine,
the scope of salvation begins to be limited, particularly in
terms of the elect or the predestined, and Rome certainly
goes down that route. So then you have the loss
of the cosmic scope of the redemption. However, Roman's eight
Paul very clearly says that the scope of redemption is cosmic.
And then of course you can read Lars Thurnberg's summarize
work there Man in Cosmos on Saint Maximus as well.
And then for worship, of course, Orthodox worship, it's a
big deal for many of the Protestancy evangelicals. Orthodox worship
is based on the continuity of worship in the Temple
and the Synagogue. So I would recommend Orthodox Worship a
live in Continuity with the Synagogue Temple in the Early
Church by Williams and Anstall. And for maybe something a
little more on the scholarly side of things, if you're
interested in just the historic the Orthodox Liturgy by Hugh
Weybrew the development of Divine Liturgy in the Byzantine era.
So those are some introductory books that are worth checking
out if you are because everybody always asks for books.
I have already linked below the recommended reading section. And
tonight we're gonna be talking about not just the Bible,
not just theology. We're also be talking about a lot
of history. Now I have old essays that everybody could
read and Jason. Also, I worked all day to day
basically fixing old articles. So I fixed another thirty or so,
so you can go and find all those in the archives.
But I have old articles that deal with the canon
of Scripture, the septuagent, the use of the Deutero canon
by the early Church, the Catechism. Get ready, what are
you talking about? Catechism? Get ready? Yes, microcosmo media, right, yes, exactly.
So basically in the archives you can find all the
kind of stuff that I'll be talking about in written form.
So and no, I'm not referring to them, You'll just
have to dig them up. We're all going to be
just going from memory here. So I've put enough time
into this. I can do all this off the cuff
over the years. So now I would not do a
drinking game based on the names I use. All right,
So where to start with Protestants. Well, it doesn't really
matter whether we start historically or whether we start biblically.
Both are going to be problematic. So I think if we,
let's see, I want to be able to pull up
the Church fathers to have the quotes ready for you
when we refer to that. Let's see here, So similar
to the critique that we had with with Rome. We're
going to see that there's a different anthropology, there's a
different theology, a different eschatology, a different ecclesiology, a different
sacramentology across the board for pretty much all forms of Protestantism.
And you're going to notice as well that the absolute
divine simplicity doctrine of Rome will really condition absolute divines,
will condition the theology and Protestantism as well. The difference
is that it will condition the theology in a different
direction than it conditioned the Roman theology. Roman theology, of course,
was a lot more make sure my volumes levels are
right here. Roman theology was a lot more philosophical than
the truck of Protestantism. Of course, Protestanism, seeking to out
of the humanist tradition of the Late Renaissance, returned to
the original sources, the idea of being able to just
go back to the Bible, just go back to supposedly
the original sources, the original texts, right, the Greek, the Hebrew,
and then we could we could purge the Church of
all of its accretions, all of its man made traditions,
all of its bogus ideas and doctrines that had that
had crept in over the centuries. Now, as Orthodox, we
do not believe either the Roman Catholic doctrine or the
Protestant doctrine, so we will agree that there are problems
on both sides. And one thing I'm going to recommend
to you that shows this the same point about basically
falling on two sides of the same coin, is the
book by doctor phil Schard Church gives Them a Papacy. Now,
the best part of this book, which you can still
get online Amazon, I think has it pretty cheap, is
the chapter about I think it's the last chapter about
the Trinity affecting Rome and how the papal doctrines are
connected to the philioque right, because again, absolute divine simplicity
conditions the entire Roman scheme. And the reason I recommend
that on the Protestant stream that we're talking about is
because it's going to be the same issue in Protestantism,
except on the other side of the dialectic. So whereas
in Rome the papacy begins to be viewed as necessary
because of error on the Holy Spirit and then thus
basically not understanding the power of the Holy Spirit to
guide the Church within history Pentecost right because of an
error quite literally on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit,
you're going to have a displacement of the doctrine of
how man understands and perceives doctrine in history. So what
happens is that Rome sets up this external juridical means
by which we supposedly know doctrine and theology, and the
papacy is supposedly the solution to this. We get the
idea of the great imperial God, Emperor of the Pope,
who makes the final decisions, supposedly, and that's the only
way to know what's true or false. Now, if you
know anything about basic epistemology, you know that this just
moves the problem back of stuff, doesn't it. There's no
insurance policy that you know that you're interpreting the papacy correctly.
In the twentieth century, papacy bears that out perfectly, because
nobody is sure what to do with Vatican two, and
there's a million different interpretations of Ettikan two. So so
much for the easy, simple jurisdictional perfection interpretation of the papacy,
and wider Catholks believe that because they believe in classical foundationalism.
This is a view of epistemology that is connected to
classical apologetics and approaches to anthropology and epistemology, and it's
connected ultimately as well to tonism. And we're going to
see that. Of course, in the Protestant tradition, the early Protestants,
they continue all this, right, they continue classical foundationalism, they
continue the classical apologetics. They have the same epistemology. Basically,
there's a good book on this about similarities between Calvin
and Aquinas, because it's something it's called Calvin and Aquinas.
I read that many many years ago, back when I
was a Calvinist. And the point being is that the
anthropology that you get in Protestantism is not really any
different than the anthropology that you get in Rome, except
that they see the fall is basically different and having
different effects. So you get a little bit more fleshed
out anthropology and scholastic speculations. I cannot get this right
without light shine off of it. All. Right, here we go.
I have to hold it like this down here, right,
So we're going to see that Orthodoxy has a different
view here on all these and also has a different
view of anthropology that is neither Roman nor Protestant. So
a couple more terms we want to keep in mind here.
We don't believe in classical foundationalism because that's essentially an
empirical view that would arise after Aquinas in terms of
how man knows God and does theology. Hence we get
natural theology. Hence we get the idea of we can
look at the natural world and we can reason back
to a generic first cause a right, the generic creator.
In Roman theology, we're gonna call this an analogia us
right now, there's a corollary in Protestantism called analogia fe day. Okay,
So these are two more terms we want to be
familiar with because they have a lot of impact on
the history of Western theology. And what again, I want
to show you consistently. And the reason I'm bringing up
both Rome and Protestants here is because it falls on
two sides of a coin. So the analogy of being,
this is the tonistic idea again that created order. You
can reason back through cosmological succession to a first cause. Right,
this is the whole aerosol first cause stuff. And since
all things possess all things possessed being, there must have
been a first being, and it's a supreme being, some
kind of generic supreme being. This is all the garbage
traditional classical apologetics of aquinas in the Western tradition, which
led directly to atheism, because those arguments are bad arguments. Now,
in contrast to this, the Protestants came up with a
different idea of how man knows and approaches God, because
they have a different anthropology, and they have a different
conception of the fall, they have a different conception of salvation,
different conception of what grace is and how man is saved,
and so likewise, knowing God required for them a different approach,
which they called the analogia fide or the analogy of faith. So,
because man has fallen, he can't really reason from the
natural order properly back to some first cause or some
creator cause. Instead, he needs revelation precisely because of what
we might call the noetic effects of sin, this is
the mental right effects of sin upon humankind, and because
they're so severe in the Protestant tradition, when we speak
of Luther or Calvin or the Calvinist tradition or the
Puritan tradition. We have to understand where this theology leads us, right,
and we're going to see that this doesn't work. So
what happens in the Protestant view. We're going to speak
classically here of the Reformed tradition, the Presbyterian tradition, the
Calvinist tradition, and also by extension, we could apply it
to the Lutheran tradition as well. The noadic effects of sin,
this is the mental effects of sin, and they are
such that human beings cannot properly interpret the natural world
without revealed information about the natural, namely scripture. So this
leads to solo scriptura. The effects, the extreme effects of
sin after the fall, have so damaged human nature, catch
that human nature, that human nature itself is almost sinful.
Now you get different approaches to this. Now, Luther writes
a book called Bondage of the Will, where essentially he
affirms this. He affirms the Manichean doctrine that human nature
is inherently sinful. He says, man is an ass that's
either written by God or the devil. So he explicitly
denies the power the energy of a natural human will
in mankind. Likewise, Calvinism, although it affirms the goodness of
the human will, in most cases, the human will has
no ability whatsoever to move towards God. It is dead
in sin. Man has no natural ability at all. It's
been destroyed as a result of the fall, and hence
their doctrine of total depravity. Now, total depravity doesn't just
affect the movement of man's will and conversion, it also
affects how he interprets scripture. This leads to the doctrine
of the fallibility of man in interpreting scripture. And what happens,
of course, is that this is one of the chief
reasons that they reject the infallibility of the papacy, because
of the noeedic effects of sin. There's no such thing
as an infallible interpreter. But now both of these problems
run into Both of these positions run into a little
bit of a problem when we consider the fact that
the noeedic effects of sin also seem to affect the
believer in interpreting the scripture too, don't they Well, yes
they do. If the effects of sin are such that,
as the Westminster Confession of the Calvinists say, even after conversion,
sin is still affecting you throughout your life daily, right
the way that even if you try to interpret the scriptures,
you're still dealing with the noetic effects of sin, even
if you've been regenerated now. But the problem is that
you don't ever then get to any potential certitude or
what we might call infallible certitude. Doesn't matter what you
put in whatever interchangeable terms you want, The noedic effects
of sin already conditioned the impossibility of certitude when it
comes to understanding scriptures or relationship with God, because ultimately
you don't even know if the psychological subjective belief that
you have that your quote saved or the one of
the elect is not a delusion. And many of the
Puritans suffered with this psychological delusion. And what do the
Protestants say, Well, they just had to fall back on Well,
the spirit will assure you if you're elect. Okay, but
how do I know, Well, if you bear the fruits,
if you bear the works worthy of repentance. Well, but
how do I know I'm not bearing dead works that
I think are true works? Right? You see, So there's
this never ending sort of introspective pietistic lose yourself in gobbledegook.
When this is all because of the errors of Protestantism
based around faulty human anthropology. They have the wrong anthropology
and they have the wrong anthropology because they departed from
what the Church had already established in terms of the
medical councils. In terms of Christology. You cannot have proper
Biblical orthodox anthropology without the right Christology, because that's how
we are. That's how the Church has fleshed out what
proper anthropology is through the centuries of the council's debating
and settling christological disputes. And because and the reason for
that is because the christological disputes solidify the Biblical revealed
tradition about what it is to be human and what
the fall is and what Christ did in the incarnation.
That's why we're going to see, for example, that the
Council of Ephesus, we'll talk about the deifying flesh of
the Eucharist. Christ deified his flesh and the incarnation, and
then by extension in the Lord Supper, the Eucharist, we
participate in that deified humanity. Now that's not at all
believed by any Protestant sect out there, and I don't
care about Anglicans and all their speculation. That doesn't matter
because it's all the same nonsense. It's all the same gobbledygoog.
But we want to start there because we already see
from the outset that the systems of whatever form of
Protestantism right, or whatever form of Catholicism it's contrasted to,
they really exist. Prot exists as a kind of negation
of Rome. It doesn't exist as a historical phenomenon that
has a lineage that it can trace back, because as
soon as we start going into the ecumenical councils, all
those ecumenical councils refute every aspect of protestantsm across the board.
They believe in tradition, they believe in the real presence
of the Eucharists. They believe in icons, they believe in
relics of the Saints. They believe in confession to a priest.
They believe in the visible body of the Church. They
believe in they believe in a historical succession of the Church.
They believe in oral tradition, they believe in the episcopate, uh,
they believe in basically any anything but Protestantism. There's there's
nothing about the first millennium of the Church that is
Protestant except for the heresies. And this is what's amazing
and why everybody, for the most part who really delves
into church history in the first thousand years of the
Church Fathers will usually convert either to Roman orthodoxy is
because they realize that, uh, they didn't teach Protestanism, and
in fact, the same heresies that the early Church Fathers
battled pop up in Protestantism. For example, example, Jerome wrote
against heretics who devaught, denied the relics, right, who denied
the goodness of the sacramental aspects of creative, creative creation
and the created order. Right. Jerome has multiple treatises against this.
Jerome has treatises defending the perpetual virginity of Mary. All right,
So if you're new to the Church Fathers and you
start reading that, you're like, WHOA, You know, I wasn't
really expecting this. I myself was Calvinist, and Calvinists all
hold Augustine in high regard because they thought he taught
the doctrines of grace. Right, Apparently that's all that matters
is as long as you get this doctrine, this generic
idea of the doctrine of grace correctly, that's true salvation
is actually having a proper understanding. So it's like a
rational mental state that is true faith, which is defined
as a proper understanding of salvation by faith alone, through grace,
by faith through grace, etcetera. Exactly what that means, well,
that requires a whole bunch of scholastic litigation and reading
giant Puritan tones to try to figure this out. And
then hopefully you're not deceiving yourself by thinking that you're
one of the elect when you're not. So again, it's
not hard to figure out when you do begin to
delve into the Church Fathers that although these so called
Protestant Reformers wanted to maintain Orthodoxy so called, they end
up messing up on the doctrines of christology and human
nature and they don't even know it. And that's because
Protestantism essentially arose out of an attempt to go back
to Augustine. And it's that simple. But that only works
if Augustine was fundamentally correct on most of his points,
and he wasn't right. That's why orthodoxy is universal. Orthodoxy
believes in the common ideas of the Church fathers. We
don't exalt one guy. We don't exalt the Bishop of Rome,
we don't exalt Augustine, we don't exalt one guy over
there acquit us to be our so called pre eminent theologians.
That's not universal, that is local, that is that is
not that is fundamentally contradictory to what we would say
about the Catholicity of the Church, which is ironic because
both Protestantism and Romanism to try to somehow claim Catholicity anyway.
So we start with the notion of how do we
know what's true? And we mentioned solo scriptura. Well, it's
not very difficult to break apart the idea of solo scriptura,
even from scripture itself. Scripture itself does not tell us
which texts were supposed to be in the canon. And
anybody who's read anything about the history of canonicity or
the compiling of the text into what would become the
Bible knows that this was done over many centuries in
the early Church. Now we don't have, for example, a
statement that the Gospel of Matthew was written by Matthew.
The apostle there's no biblical statement to prove that. It's
a aspect of tradition that went into the decision of
the Church fathers to include Matthew's Gospel in the can Now,
that wasn't the only reason that Matthew was included in
the canon. It was included because it was handed down
in certain bishoprics and known to be authentic. So there's
a liturgical aspect of canonicity which no Protestant knows or understands,
which is that if they were going to have these
synods and councils to determine which text would make it
into the canon, it would require more than just some
guy reading it and saying, I feel like this was
written by the apostles and it aligns with the Restroscripture
because I read the other parts of scripture. That's presupposing
what the scripture is, and that's what's in question, right.
So there's multiple synods that are happening throughout the first
several centuries of the Church. We don't have to just
point out Roman Catholics always say the Bible was the
decision was made by the fourth and fifth centuries by
the Roman Church. No it wasn't. It was longer than that,
and there was not even a definite canon by the
fourth and fifth centuries in the entire imperi. So it's many, many,
many centuries debating when the normative canon would be settled.
And even still when you factor in the idea of
tradition oral tradition, there's still minor variances. Even amongst Apostolic
churches to this day, there are still divergences. You know,
the Slavonic canon is a little bit different than other canons,
and that's because we don't have the sole scripture review.
That's not a problem in our church and our tradition,
but it is a problem in Protestantism. So the more
uneducated versions of Protestantism, in response to these kinds of issues,
they'll fall back on stuff like King James only, which
you know, is really really absurd, but it doesn't even
really deserve to be to be dealt with. But sticking
to the main point, one of the things that would
go into, for example, the decision of canonicity would be
whether it had Apostolic pedigree, whether whether the church fathers
felt like it could be attached to one of the
apostles like Matthew, whether it had been read in the electionaries.
This is something Protestants don't anything about. But from the
early stays of the church, because the church comes out
of temple slash synagogue worship, they had what were called
electionaries and electionaries or old collections of texts to be
read in the church services, essentially a liturgical type document,
and a lot of those electionaries had ancient readings in them. Okay,
So it's not just a question of let's go back
to the ancient church and see who had the most
copies of Matthew's Gospel. Right. There wasn't just written copies
of Matthew's Gospel. It was also in the electionaries. It
was also in the liturgy, the daily readings. It was
also in church fathers. Church fathers would copy, you know,
proof texts in their writings. Okay. So all of this
goes into the decisions of canonicity over many centuries. And
I will give you for example, there's a Protestant scholar
named Lee MacDonald who is a Baptist who wrote a
book about the formation of the Canon. And at the
back of Lee McDonald's Baptist book on the Formation of
the Canon, he is a Baptist liberal I should admit.
And I'm not signing him because I think he is
a reliable person. I'm signing it because here is a Protestant.
Let me let's see here, let me pull it up
for you. Yeah, who charts all this out for you?
And he's like, well, you know what, I guess if
this is true, then we've got to be liberal, right,
So in other words, he in order to maintain the
Baptist nonsense, where else could you go but be liberal
since this is true? Right, because there's no solo scriptura
for centuries right now, we haven't answered this. Not just
be liberal. It's the orthodox tradition, right. Tradition is a
big part of how this canon is brought to be,
how it comes to be over many centuries, and you
can't divorce it from the oral tradition, the liturgy and
the decision of the church in terms of the bishops.
Wasn't a decision that the Bishop of Rome said if
this was all, if the early Church fathers had the
Vatican One view of papal infallibility, all anyone needed to
do was just ask Peter's magical Church of Rome, which
one is the true canon, and they would know. But
guess what they didn't know. Did you know Athanasius had
to go to Rome and argue with them about the
inclusion of the Book of Revelation. Yep. And Lee McDonald's
book in amazingly in the back includes all of the
differing canons of the church fathers. Right. So Origin had
a list, Athanasius has a list. Other church fathers have
a list. Right, So you can't just treat the church
fathers like solar scripturia, which is what Protestants do. They'll
try to like mine the church fathers as if the
writings of the church fathers in just another version of
solar scripturial, like a very Talmudic type thing. No, because
they didn't have the same canon. So there's absolutely no
way for the Protestants to get out of this or
to figure this out. And I spent a long time
as a Protestant on this very question. I've read probably
fifteen books on this question from Protestant scholars and academics.
Another one I can recommend that will illustrate all of
this is the famous evangelical scholar F. F. Bruce's book
The Canon of Scripture. Now. Elf FF Bruce is a
scholar who is a conservative evangelical. So we had Lee
McDonald with his sort of liberal leanings because he couldn't
figure out how to make sense of this. And here
is a conservative evangelical and guess what his book makes
all the same points I'm making to you. These are
Protestant evangelicals who are realizing, Oh, the retard Baptist answer
as to how we got the Bible is retarded. It's
not true. So what do they do, Well, they just
presuppose that the spirit guided the church. Oh no, wait
a minute. Now, if the spirit can guide the church
in the decision of the canon, maybe the spirit can
guide the church in other decisions. Has it ever occurred
to you as a Protestant that maybe that's the case. Well,
it is, okay, So there's no there's absolutely no solution
to this as a product. And in fact, when we
read Second Thessalonians two what is it thirteen fifteen? Yeah, fifteen. Therefore, brethren,
stand fast and the traditions that I delivered to you,
whether oral or written. So Paul and Second thessaloni Is
two fifteen commands the church to continue to keep the
orld traditions because there was no Bible at this point.
Do you understand that there was not a Bible. They
were using the most of the time, the Septuagint, the
Old Testament Greek. Most of the quotations of the New
Testament from the Old Testament are from the Septusient, not all,
but most, and there are many dudo canonical citations. By
the way, the New Testament references the Deuial Kennon. Did
you know that Protestants, Yes, it does in many places,
and so do all the Church Fathers. Now, I remember
when I really dove into the Church Fathers back when
I was about twenty three twenty four, and I started
noticing all this this. It really shook me because you know,
I had spent many many years in and apologetics as
a Protestant, you know, really trying to hammer down this stuff,
and realizing that if we base our belief system as
a Protestant on the Bible, it also requires that there
be some kind of guidance or certitude about knowing that
we have the right canon, because guess what, not everybody has.
Everybody has the same canon of scripture, do they. The
Protestant canon is different from the Catholic The Protestant canon
is different from the Orthodox canon. So if the Bible
alone is true, then it requires that we be certain
about which Bible, don't we right? So how do we
know that we have the right Bible? Well, we assume
that the Holy Spirit properly guided the Church to collect
these documents together. But guess what. This decision, as everybody knows,
was made hundreds of centuries after the time of the Apostles. Now,
if you read my essay The Biblical Nature of Sacred
Tradition and jas Analysis, you will see where I go
into extensive detail about numerous examples of tradition, not just
in the New Testament or in Paul's you know, admonitions
or whatever. For example, if we think about the fact
that from Genesis to the time of Moses, nothing that
we know of was written down. It was an oral
tradition that was handed on from the patriarchs through the
Family of God. Essentially at that time that was in
covenant with God. The other nations, pagan nations, as far
as we know, did not have the revelation of the
covenant of God except for maybe a couple examples of
Melchizedic or job. So from the time of you know, Adam,
eve Seth Noah down through the patriarchs Joseph, Abraham. We
don't know that any of that was necessarily written because
the Torah is from the time of Moses, which is
a significant number of millennia right after Adam. So for
all of these centuries God can preserve the revelation. Orally,
that means we know that there's nothing that's inherently flawed
or there's nothing outside of the power of God keeping
him from preserving oral tradition. God can do anything he wants.
You know, what does the Angel say, is there anything
impossible for God? No, of course not. So there's nothing
inherently wrong about oral revelation being preserved from Adam to
Moses and Joshua. So when we serve at the Old Testament,
we realized that all the patriarchs operated through this kind
of infallible oral tradition, that they maintained a right. So that,
by the way, shows that they weren't purely infallible, totally
depraved human beings because they were able to preserve this
revelation they were certain about it. Now we also when
we read about for example, Abraham building an altar, we
know that he wasn't given a written textbook to instruct
him how to do this. But he had at least
some sense of direct revelation with God or something of
that nature, or he knew in terms of the oral
tradition that had been passed on him how to do this.
So even ceremonial aspects of the way Abraham acted or
keeping of the Sabbath, for example, even that preceded the
written text of the Mosaic Law. So when we keep
that in mind, then we can move into like the
historical period, for example, and we see second second Chronicles
twenty nine or Hezekyah talks about stationing the leevites in
the house of the Lord with symbols, string instrument, harps,
according to the commandment of David, Goad, the Goad, the
king seer, and Nathan the prophet. For thus was the
commandment of the Lord by his prophets. The leevites stood
with the instruments of David, and the priests with the trumpets.
We do not have a written record of what David
commanded concerning these things. Furthermore, it is also clear that
King David flourished some two hundred fifty years before the
time of King has Akiah, so it might be argued
that this was David's opinion concerning worship, but we know
that God doesn't typically tolerate human opinions in worship. So
this is the irony of kind of the regulative principle
of many Protestants is that the way that has Akaia
knew this was because of the world tradition. So again
I'm not saying that that means we just make up stuff.
It's rather that there was a body of doctrines handed
down even at this time, which was being passed on.
And yes, it does get corrupted. Jeremiah talks about the
corruption of human opinions being added on, and it's the
same thing that Jesus rebukes in his day about the
scribes and the Pharisees. But the fact that there were
corruptions does not mean that there wasn't still a solid,
true revelation from God. The mere fact that we have
the Old Testament in our scriptures shows that. So the
point here is that for the Protestants, for the Evangelicals
who aren't aware of this, we start to realize that
out the Old Testament, there's many examples of traditions that
are cited in what Protestants believe is the word of
God that are not part of the canon. We read
in numbers twenty one, there's a citation of the books
of the Wars of the Lord. We read in Joshua ten,
the Book of the Just, we read in Second Kings
about the Book of the Just, we read about, the
Book of Nathan the Prophet, we read about Let's see,
there's a whole bunch of these, the books of Ohias
the seal Anite, the Book of Ido the Seer, They're
all quoted throughout the Old Testament. And nobody knows what
these books are. They're lost to history, but they were
not viewed and at that time as lost to history, right,
they were cited. So those books had true tradition that,
in God's providence, did not make it into the canon.
But the point is that there was oral tradition, were
extra canonical traditions that were true. And this is the
same attitude of the Church today. So this is why,
for example, in John twenty it says Jesus did many things,
and he did countless signs in the presence of his disciples,
which are not written in this book John's Gospel, but
the ones that I have written for you are written
that you might believe that Jesus is the son of God.
And he says later in John twenty one, if there
are many other things that if Jesus did, if they
were already written down, I would suppose that the world
itself could not contain the books that could be written.
So the point being is that you'll see examples of this.
For example, Paul in Acts will quote Jesus in a
sex in a text that we don't have any reference
to Jesus saying it is more blessed to give than
to receive, but Paul quotes our Lord as saying this.
Now we'll see other examples like, for exa, a protest
will cite Acts twenty twenty seven about the full Council
of God, which they assume means only written texts. But
it doesn't because when Paul preached, for example, an Acts,
we read about the story where he preached all night long,
and you know, somebody fell asleep and fell out of
the window and broke their neck basically, and Paul healed them.
That entire sermon is the Council of God. We don't
have that sermon, but he preached an entire sermon. You see.
So the Apostolic preaching was authoritative and it was inspired.
It wasn't just the written text of Paul. It was
anything Paul taught, because Paul had the Holy Spirit. Now
this is I'm making these points because these are points
that Protestants don't usually think about. That's why we read,
for example, for this reason, without ceasing, Paul says, because
when you receive the Word of God, you heard it
from us, and you welcomed it not as the word
of man, but as it is the word of truth,
which effectively works in you who believe. That's first Essaloni's
two thirteen. So paul oral preaching, he calls the word
of God. You see, because Protestants have all these dumb
things where they try to say, oh, it's only the
written thing Paul was only reciting. Was he just reciting
the Bible? Of course not. No, he was preaching orally
for hours from the Old Testament, right and whatever gospel
he might have had. And here specifically and for Assonians
two thirteen, he identifies his oral teaching with the Word
of God. So, in other words, the oral teaching of
the apostles was also infallible. And this is why he
commands the Thessalonians to continue the oral traditions. He says
this also to Timothy. He says to Timothy, hold fast
to the pattern of sound words which you heard from
me oral that the good thing which was committed to
you will be kept by the Holy Spirit dwells in us.
So Paul believes that the passing on and he ordained
Timothy right by laying his hands on him Apostolic succession.
And then he tells Timothy, lay hands on men after you,
but not hastily. Apostolic succession. And he says that the
Holy Spirit will keep that inheritance, that will keep that tradition.
That's Apostolic succession. Second Timothy one thirteen. He also says
to Timothy and Second Timothy two, you, therefore, my son,
be strong in the grace of Christ. And the things
that you have heard from me, these commit to faithful
men who will teach others. Did you hear that the
things you heard, the oral teaching that I gave you,
commit that to other men, and then they'll pass it down.
That's apostoltics succession. And that's the oral tradition being passed down.
That's what all the church fathers teach. They do not
teach sola scriptureup and even if they did, which they don't,
but even if they did, you don't have the right canon.
No Protestant believes in the Deutero canon. They all follow
Luther and Calvin and rejecting it. So, by the way,
you wonder why there's higher criticism in Protestant churches across
the whole world, Well, maybe because your founders saw fit
to toss out books they didn't like.
Speaker 3: Me.
Speaker 1: It's not too far to go from that to denying
the rest of the canon. Therefore, brethren, hold faster the
traditions that you were taught by me, whether oral or
by my epistle seking this on. He's two fifteen. Now.
The command then is for both to be passed on,
and both are the word of God. Peter also says this.
He says, you have been born again, not a corruptible seed,
but through the word of God, a person which lives
and abides in you forever. And he says the word
of God is that which was preached to you. And again,
that wasn't just reciting Bible texts, right, because they weren't
sol scriptura. They didn't have a canon. Yet this is
how stupid it is for Protestants to use all these
texts as if it presupposed soul scriptura. There wasn't a
canon yet when they were writing this. John hadn't even
written The Apocalypse. So Peter understands that the oral preaching
he did was infallible and it was aspired revelation from
God just as much as the written texts were. So
you'll get Protestant. Even James White will admit this, and
some of the debates that he does. But this is
when you count. When you factor in the fact that
other texts of the Bible had not been written yet,
then the whole Council of God doesn't make any sense
on their Protestant argument, How could it be the whole
Council of God that Paul is instructing them to follow,
namely solo scriptura, when the whole Council of God had
not been revealed yet it's retarded. We read in Colossians four,
salute the brethren who are at Laodicea Nymphis and the
church that is in his house. And when the epistle
shall have been read with you read the Epistle to
the Laodoceans We don't have Paul's Epistle to the Laodioceans. Okay,
so even aspects of what Paul taught or wrote have
been lost to history in God's providence, Now is that
part of the whole council of the Word of God.
Protestant now say why he got lost? It doesn't matter.
But again, the point is that there was no canon.
They didn't have a canon. Right. You can't read into
the mind of the first century Church five hundred years,
six hundred and seve hundred years before canon came about
and assume that they're teaching sol scriptura. They're not. Jesus
doesn't teach script Jesus refers in many cases to oral tradition,
and in many cases in the New Testament, the deteral
Canon is cited. Now, these basic facts completely destroy the
Protestant position of sola scriptura, like there's no refuge for
any of it, because the entire thing is erected on
stupid assumptions, namely the assumption that anytime I read something
in the New Testament is talking about sola scriptura, which
is the sixty six books of the Protestant Canon that
I presuppose. I mean, that's so stupid now we have,
let's say, one example from the Early Church, which is
the Council of Gangra. And I believe the council it's
a local syna, but it just it gives you an
example of the Early Church in the three hundreds. And
I believe the Council of Gangra is reaffirmed at later
ecumenical synods if I'm going for memory. But this is
a local synod of many bishops of the Early Church,
and again about three twenty five. And it goes on
to talk about the necessity of keeping the oral traditions,
of keeping all of what was handed down, and it
talks about discipline in the church and the tradition of
discipline in the Church. It was already, by the way
the Apostolic Canons. If you read the Church Fathers, or
if you have the Church Fathers say, you'll see that
the volume on the Apostolic Canons, this is the normative
approach of the Early Church to doctrinal questions that came up.
By the way, it excludes effeminate dresses, for men don't
dress eminently, but it says, make sure in all things
that what we've been delivered in the Holy Scriptures and
in the APIs traditions are observed in the churches. Now
you can go with the stupid you know, seven day
av in this type nonsense of saying, oh, well that's
three hundred. That's around when Constantine he messed the church up.
That's when it got messed up. I s when the
system of Antichrist entered the church. Well, Jesus says, the
gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church. And
there were no Baptists in the third third century, There
were no Baptists in the fourth century, there were no
Baptists in the fifth century. There were no Baptists in
the sixth century, except for heretics who had very similar
views to the Baptists, right, the Rebaptizers as they originally
called the Anabaptists. Right. So the early Church in countless examples,
and again you can read my essay just for a
few examples will affirm the necessity of keeping the Apostolic traditions. Now,
if we look at for example, Nicea, which as an
important canon excuse me, counsel, when it came to determining
the canon, it would it would be important. We do
not find anything resembling Protestantism in the many Canons of Nicea.
We find Constantine making Nicia civil law. According to page
eight of the chef set, we find baptismal regeneration taught.
In Canon two, we're told that there's no immediate episcopacy
allowed for converts. Episcopacy that's bishoprics. Now, every Baptist, by
the way, it will affirm that they believe in the Niceno,
constant and Apolitan creed because it teaches the deity of Christ.
But now wait a minute, all these people who they
believe teach the deed of Christ, they teach all this
Catholic stuff that I'm talking about, and Athletic can be Orthodox, right,
we are Orthodox Catholics. Canon three talks about clerical celibacy,
that there was a widely established practice of clerical celibacy.
It also wasn't enforced by the way Roman Catholics. Canon
five talks about lynt and it talks about the Eucharist
as an offering. Canon six talks about the major Metropolitans
and the raising and lowering of certain jurisdictions, and how
it is a custom for the Bishop of Rome to
have the first among equals status. So, by the way,
every Orthodox person, for a thousand years knew what Canon
six of Nicia says and has nothing to do with
papal supremacy. What does it say is the reason for
Rome being mentioned a custom, a tradition. It doesn't say
anything about magical petrine supremacy. It says that Rome because
it's doubly apostolic. If you look at every Orthodox icon
of Rome, it's the Church of Rome, it's Peter and Paul,
and they're both equal holding of the church. That's why
Santa Renas calls it doubly apostolic. And he says it's
to be followed because they teach rightly. He doesn't say
it's magically delicious. He doesn't say that has a magical
terrorism of Matthew sixteen. No, it's called in Canon six
of Nicea a tradition. It's a tradition to have the
honor given to the Roman bishop and then after him. Likewise,
it says, did you know likewise, so listen to this.
The Bishop of Rome is to have jurisdiction like Alexandria,
and likewise Antioch and the other provinces retain their traditional privileges.
It's customary they have limited jurisdictions. The jurisdiction of Rome
is likewise a limited jurisdiction of Antioch and the others.
And everybody who's honest with Nicia knows that they didn't
think Rome was what Vatican one says. Do you think
that at Vatican one, the exact same mindset of what's
going on at Nicia was that it translates. Of course
it doesn't. Do you think that, Nicea they thought that
the Bishop of Rome could depose anyone in the world.
Of course not. That's because he's a Roman patriarch. And
the Canon seven makes this clear. When Canon seven and
Icia says that it is a custom about the Bishop
of Jerusalem, these are customs. Canon eight is about the
ordination of novations being valid. In other words, all of
this is a million miles away from anything Protestant or Baptist.
Canon eleven is about the sacrifice of the Eucharist. Canon
twelve says that you can be in the military. There's
nothing Unchristian about being in the military, which disproves pacifists.
By the way. Canon thirteen is about ancient canon laws
that retain to the reception of the Eucharist from the
bishop at death. You know, any Baptists to do that.
I don't never heard of that. Let's see Canon eighteen
is about the offering of the body and blood of
Christ on the altar. Wow. Anyway, there's more canons, but
you get the point here. The point is that every
Baptist on the one hand, or Protestant or whoever, doesn't
have to be out to somebody's using them as an example.
They will refer to Nicea as something that is the
you know, the great pinnacle of church fathers, defending the
deity of Christ against arias right. And every Baptist believes
that Jesus is divine. Well, they're supposed to, and they
tend to believe in the creed of Nicea and Constantinople One,
hence the Niceno Constantinopolitan creed. But in fact, when we
read what the mindset of all of these Orthodox Catholics was,
they would not hesitate to call these people lunatics, idolators,
and pagans, which the early Reformers did. So there's nothing
at all about this council and these canons that is
all favorable to anything Protestant whatsoever. Now, in response to this,
most of the time the protests say, yes, we know
that We don't care about your man made councils. Dude.
Now wait a minute, you don't care about man made councils.
But how the canon of Scripture come to be? Where
did it come from? It came from these councils, and
not just one of them, many centuries. Well, I'm going
to trust that God led these men to put the
can Wait wait a minute, you believe they're all idolators
and and and phonies. They're apostates, they're the Church of
Anti crash. But they put the Bible together. This is
other utterly retarded. This is nonsense. Now I want to
look here briefly at a couple more points on the
canon here. Uh, and I have reputation of the prostant
Canona Scripture, which is a very scholarly work that I
did about twelve years ago, ten years ago somewhere in there. Uh,
and we look through you know, if if let's tell
what I did in this this uh. This article was
a Protestant, famous Protestant Ian Paisley who says that the
Jews did not accept the dudoconical books. Let's go with
his first argument, they were not part of the oracles
committed unto them Romans three to two. Therefore they are
not written in Hebrew. This is false. Paisley makes no
distinction between Jews of the Diaspora and Palestinian Jews. Palsinian
Jews eventually rejected the Septuagent, which is the Greek version
of the Old Testament composed in the second third century
b c. At Alexandria. It is well known that the
Septuagent was the Bible of the Diaspora Jews of and
the Bible of all the early Church, the Old Testament Bible. Furthermore,
it's also a fact that the Septuagent contained the Dudoconical books. So,
for example, if you look at Oxford Church historian Paul
Johnson in his book History of Christianity quote, there was
already in the first century a huge Jewish diaspora in
the Mediterranean, and they utilized the Greek adaptation of the
Old Testament, the Septugent, which was composed in Alexandria and
used amongst the diaspora. Lee McDonald that are referenced earlier
says in the formation of the Christian Biblical canon, it
is most likely that these dud Chonical books were considered
by the Jewish community holy or sacred well before the
time of Christ, and they were thus inherited from Judaism.
There is evidence that at least some of the non
canonical books of Protestantism had their origin in the land
of Israel, and were translated and transported there from Israel
to Alexandria. Probably whether the Jews lived in significant numbers
where they lived in Roman Empire. The grandson of Ben Syak,
that is, the writer of the book Ecclesiasticus, lets us
know that he was translating for Jews in Alexandria. The
New Testament also has countless allusions to the judo canonical books.
Did you hear that the New Testament has countless Of
course it does. Anybody who reads about it knows that
the oldest collections of the Old Testament scriptures by the
early Church contain the Duchonic literature. Of course it does.
Fassett's Bible Dictionary the Protestant Text. Protestant Dictionary says apocrypha
the writings in the Septuagent first and second Ezra Tobad,
Judith Esther Wisdom, Ecclesiaskus, Barrack, Song of the Children, Susannah Bell,
and the Dragon. The Protestant in Nelson's Christian Dictionary says
the Septuagiant incorporates all of the Dudo chronical books, with
the exception of Second Esdras, and they are not differentiated
from any of the other Old Testament books in the
Septuagent I mentioned F. F. Bruce earlier in his book
Kenneth Scripture, he writes, whatever wording of Stephen's defense in
Acts seven may owe to the narrator, the cons consistency
with which the biblical quotations are read from Stephen in
Act seven are from the septuagent. As soon as the
Gospel was carried into the Greek speaking world, the Septuagint
came into its own as the sacred text to which
the preachers would appeal. It was used in the Greek
speaking synagogues throughout the Roman Empire. Protestant patristics scholar J. N. D. Kelly,
Anglican writes in his famous Early Christian Doctor's Book, it
should be of the Old Testament, thus admitted authoritative in
the Church, a different canon from the masoretic Palestinian Jewish canon.
Of course, it did, and the Protestants all follow the
Palestinian Jewish canon. It was always included with varying degrees
in the so called apocrypha or the dudocononical books. This
is the reason for this is that the Old Testament
which passed into the hands of the Early Church was
not the masoretic Hebrew text, but the Greek text known
as the Subtuagin. There you go. F. F. Bruce writes,
Yeshua bin Syra was in Egypt in one thirty two BC,
and he translated his book The Wisdom of Ecclesiasticus or Syric,
from Hebrew into Greek. Lee MacDonald again writes that the
dudochroonical books were transported from Israel into from Hebrew and
into Greek at Alexandria, on and on and on and
on and on. Charles Pfiffer's book in the Dead Sea
Scrolls on pages sixteen seventeen says all the same stuff. Now,
Ian Paisley, who I've chosen as just one Goufus evangelical
example of why he thinks he has the right Protestant canon.
His next argument was, the New Testament never quotes the
Deutero canon, and the Early Church never used it. This
is utterly retarded in idiotic. Ecclesiasticus is cited in John
Second John ten Ecclesiasticus eleven thirty one. Ecclesiasticus eleven eighteen
through twenty is cited as in Jesus's Parable of the
Wealthy Farmer Luke twelve nineteen. Jesus' statements about the I
making the whole body dark in Matthew six twenty two
are a reference to ecclesiastic As fourteen eight through eleven.
This is my article I wrote ten years ago. Wisdom
twelve and thirteen are exact parallels to Roma's one Do
you hear me? Wisdom twelve and thirteen exact parallels to
Roma's one. Wisdom two contains a lengthy prophecy of Christ. Wisdom, too,
is a lengthy prophecy of Christ, and the Church fathers
all used it of Christ. Wh I think the Jews
rejected the Judo canon because the Church fathers were using
it and the apostles were using it to prove Jesus.
In the Old Testament, Hebrews eleven five eleven thirty five
refers to women and children who refused to be delivered
from death and accepted martyrdom to achieve a better resurrection.
This is second Maccabe's Seven Dummies. Now there's a whole
bunch of more examples, but that should suffice. Let's see
from Protestant Jan D. Kelly again, it should be observed
that the Old Testament, thus admitted as authoritative in the Church,
was bulkier and more comprehensive than the Hebrew Canon. It
was the Septuition. And let's see Nelson's Christian Dictionary once again. Protestant.
The early Church fathers Clement of Rome, Clement of Alexandria,
Origin consistently cite the dudoconical books. Christians made extensive use
of them for apologetic purposes because of the text referred here.
They utilize them for the incarnation the logos the Son
of God. However, the Reformation leaders were instrumental in completely
rejecting the duo deudro canon and thus refuse to ascribe
to them the status of Word of God. Now, anyone
who spent any time in the post Apostolic Fathers, whether
it's Clement Ignacious Origin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian,
they know you will know that they frequently cite the
decononical books. So it is athenacious. And these are all
the church fathers who determined the canon. Right, So if
some Guphas says, well who cares what the church father said, Well,
these are the people who determine the canon Guphus. That's
why final Paisley argument. Ian Paisley says, the Synod of Laodicea,
the local synod which many Roman Catholics will refer to,
and the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon do not accept the
dudo canon. Once again, Ian Paisley is completely idiotic and
knows nothing about what he's speaking. Laodicea was a regional synod,
and it was actually a series of synods over many years.
And again, the canons, as we saw from Lee McDonald's
if you read his appendix in his book, there's a
whole list of all the different canon. There's canon, there's
all kinds of different canons. There's not one canon. So
there are some people who doubted the Book of Revelation.
There are people who doubted the Gospel of John. Many
thought the Gospel of John was gnostic, not universally, but
some thought this is dubious. Now we all know today
that This is ridiculous. The Gospel John is not gnostic.
But there were some areas of the church in the
early Church period where people doubted it. People doubted the
Book of Revelation. They thought it was too crazy, too wild. Again,
Athanasius had to convince Rome to include Revelation. So it
really doesn't matter that Ian Paisley finds a list of
a canon in Laodicea where they're not mentioning the Duro canon. Secondly,
the fact that it's not mentioned in the normal list
doesn't mean that they didn't cite from it. That's why
it's called the Duduro canon, right. It doesn't even in
our churches. It's not accorded the same status as the
rest of the text, but it is part of the Bible.
By the way, you have to read first and second
Maccabees to properly understand preterism. If you don't read Versts
Second Macabees, you can't understand the Book of Daniel and
Ezra Ezra also Verst and second Asdris. That helps vindicate
the timeline of what Daniel talks about in his prophecies.
So it's only shooting yourself in the foot and doing
damage to your own religion when you toss these books out,
because those books actually help vindicate preterism and the destruction
of the temple in seventy eight. And by the way,
if you read the Orthodox Study Bible, you get all that.
All of that is in the study notes under the
deduoconomical books. If you read through the entire Orthodox Study Bible,
you will get all this. You will understand why it
is the Deudero Canon is there. It's there for historical
testimony to the theological points and timeline of things like Daniel,
the prophecies of Daniel. Now this is look at let's
look at how stupid this is. Leo, the Great Pope,
Saint Leo at Chalcedon frequently cites the dudoconical books as scripture.
And this is one of the key arguments that Ian
Paisley thinks proves the Dudero Canon isn't scripture. By the way,
why is he citing Catholic Orthodox Catholic synods to prove
his point that itself disproves him because he doesn't accept
their authority. Another point, too, is that the Senator of
Leo Deicia is one of these many synods that does
not accept the Book of Revelation at scripture. Oops, So
that doesn't work, does it? No, Because we don't go
by what one local synod you know, in the year
three point forty one decided about the scripture in the Canon,
and nor does Ian Paisley and his goofy examples here.
And when we think about the Council of Chalcedon, why
would we cite Chalcedon. Calcedon speaks of the Bishop of
Rome as the first patriarchate along with Alexandria. It speaks
of apostolic succession, It speaks of the canons and councils
that teach apostolic succession. It speaks of hierarchy, it speaks
of monasticism, tradition, et cetera, et cetera. There's nothing Protestant
about that. How are you going to use that in
your dumb arguments? So thus, and much more could be
said on this, but the point is that it's easy
to operate on assumptions and think that you're right and
think that you know what you're talking about about the
church fathers or the history or how this happened. But
that's very different from when you actually go and you
read the Church fathers. When you spend thirteen years reading them,
then you start to realize that not only were they
not Protestant, teach anything anything Protestant, anything approaching close to Protestantism.
And if we just let's if we consider this historically.
I'll show you this very boring book by Alistair McGrath,
which I did read a long time ago, back when
I was still Protestant. I think it was right around
the time I was leaving Protestantism. This came out somewhere
in there. But this very boring book is funny because
here you have a Protestant basically doing historical theology, Alster
McGrath's Eustacia Day, and it's about how nobody taught justification
by faith alone. Oops, no orthodox father, no Western Church father,
no far Church writer, no liturgy, nobody. Now, goofy evangelicals say,
so what the church? The church went into a blackout?
Excuse me? I thought, the gates of Hell can't Preveilicans
the church. Uh. And by the way, so where was
this doctrine? Who who was there that taught this? Well
some of them will say, well, they were there, We
just we don't have any evidence of the true Baptist
believers of you know, first Baptist Church of Laodicea and
two hundred a d. But they were there. There, there
was a Blood River Baptist Church in Rome, and they
were hidden, and they were in the catacombs. It was
a secret church because they were being persecuted. Now, wait
a minute, No, in the first three hundred years of
the church, all the people who were the Orthodox Church
fathers were being persecuted. The Baptist gufuss were not being persecuted,
namely because they didn't hardly exist if you want to
link them to heretical group. So the point is is
that this has been well documented amongst the Orthodox Church
fathers and amongst Protestant scholars and academics of the history
of the Church and history of theology, that the early
Church doctrines are not the Protestant doctrines. So we know
that they didn't have solo scriptura. We know they didn't
have solo fide, which are the hallmarks of the prostant Reformation. Also,
by the way, I want to there's a series that
I would recommend if you want to go down the
route of getting deeper into this. I have I think
I've read almost all of Pelican's books pelican Yuros of Pelicon,
but his the best history of theology is probably you know,
if you don't want to immediately dive into all the
writings of the Church Fathers, which I would actually recommend
that above, most people just start reading secondhand scholars. Why
aren't you reading the actual Church fathers? You know, same
idea of the Bible. You read the actual Bible and
the Church Fathers for yourself. That's not Protestant. It's not
any more Protestant than when Roman Catholics go read the
posts for themselves. Is that Protestant? So Pelicon series is
a classic. I read this ten years ago, the Formation
of the Catholic Tradition volume one, and then you can't
see volume two on here. But then it goes up
to medieval and then Reformation and then modern is Jesus book. Sorry,
he has a book on the Canon two that's not bad.
Shows that, you know, the Protestant conception of how the
Canon came about is nonsense. But Pelicana eventually ended up Orthodox. Actually,
if I recall, he was a Lutheran who converted to Orthodoxy.
So that is a good series if you want a
scholarly approach to the history of theology. Right, So there's
different kinds of theology. Right. There's patristics, which is the
writings of the church fathers themselves, or the lives of
the Church fathers or will it really lives of the
Church fathers would be hagiography, lives of the saints. There's
also church history, which is not necessarily the history of theology.
But you know the Ecumenical Councils book that I have
here with me. This would be like you know, canonics
or that would be like studying church history basically, and
obviously there's some overlap. But then there's also the history
historical theology, and that would be what Pelican's series is
historical theology. So if you want a theological overview of
the history of the Church, then I would read his
five volume series. Now, the point here was to show
essentially that just in the in the terms of the
Solas in Sola Scripture, was to show that the Bible
doesn't operate in a vacuum. It does it doesn't come
to you outside of a historical context and outside of
the liturgy. The Bible is actually a liturgical document, and
it was meant to be read. This is why all
of the church fathers, or excuse me, that's why the
apostles talk about the Word of God, which you heard
from us, right, So it's it's a it's an oral proclamation.
Certainly the texts are written, and certainly they should be
read and must be read, but they cannot be divorced
from the church. This is why Paul says to Timothy,
the Church is the pillar and ground of truth. He
does not say the Bible is the pillar and ground
of truth. He says the institutional historical church. And this
is why when we begin to move into reading the
church fathers, when we read Ignatius, when we read Aaronaeus,
when we read Clement, when we read Ambrose, when we
read Augusta, and when we read Jerome, we find that
they don't teach anything approaching Protestantism, none of them at all.
They all teach Apostolic succession, They all teach Abstock tradition,
they all cite the Dudo Canon. They all believe in
synodal church government and ecumenical councils. Eventually, on and on
and on the point being the fathers of our church, right,
they do not teach Protestantism. They don't teach any aspect
the Protestantism. Now, one thing they do teach is that
you can, in the context of the Church read the Bible.
And there were periods in the post Tridentine era of
Roman Catholicism where Rome did try to forbid people reading
the Bible, mainly because they wanted to be fair to Rome.
They were trying to protect protect against faulty Protestant translations,
which there were actually many Protestant translations of the Bible
after the first Bible translated into English. By the way,
it was a Catholic Bible, but the Tyndale Bible and
other others were fairly notorious for not being very good. Yes,
Calvin does the Judoo canon I've read, I've read the
entire Calvin's Institutes fifty fifteen, fifty nine whatever. The later
one is, the two volume one, but Calvin does not
rank them as canonical. All right, now we're going to
move on to the point here was that what this
is how we have to approach the questions of how
the Bible came to be before we can try to
just assume and claim that we have the right Bible.
Because if the Protestants don't have the right canon, then
sol scripture doesn't work, and they don't and if, for example, Wisdom.
I remember having a Protestant friend I used to argue
with old Time and you finally got furious because, well,
you believe that if something is prophetic and preaches Christ,
then it's inspired, right And he said yeah. And I said, well,
do you think Wisdom predicts Christ in the text that
I mentioned earlier? He said, yeah, it does seem like
that's predicting Christ. And everybody admits that was written before
the birth of Christ. I was like, well, how come
that's not in your canon? He said, well, the providence
of God determined that it would not be in the canon.
I said, well, who were the instruments of the providence
of God? Well it was the historic Church. But that
doesn't mean that they're right about everything. Oh okay, so
I will follow the Church in the selection of the
book that I think is inspired on everything else. However, though,
I'm going to go to the book that they gave
me to determine that I don't think that they are
the church. It really makes no sense at all. But
if this guy were to admit that I was right.
Guess what. He couldn't be getting his Protestant pastor paycheck anymore,
could he. No, he would be kicked out of his
made up Protestant sect, which was quite literally a denomination
invented within the last ten years. So Luthor didn't convert
to Orthodoxy because he wasn't Orthodox. He was a man
of Quean and he did not believe in the Orthodox
inception of salvation. That's one Luther didn't become Orthodox, all right.
So before we move on to the next section, here
we mentioned a couple solas here, let's talk about let's
do some of these super chazz while they're here. Anthony
Cavalho ten dollars? Are you too white to grab early shekels?
Or do you have enough in you to go for
the gold? Ha ha haha, Thank you, Anthony, appreciate that.
Benjamin and Green on Angry Gnostic five New Zealand dollars,
Process House Sola, Scripture Calxi of Magisterium. What is the
bonding authority in Orthodoxy? Well, this is why Orthodoxy doesn't
attempt to create a single external juridical authority, because that
doesn't work as a In other words, our worldview is
based on transcendent truths, right, And when you talk to
a Protestant or when you talk to Roman Catholic, they're both,
as we said earlier, trying to essentially erect some kind
of public juridical thing that everybody could point to to say,
there it is. That's the final deciding factor there. And
we know because it's public and everybody can see it.
But as we said, all that does is move the
problem back a step. Right, And having spent ten years
in Rome, I know how it works. I can attest
to that fact because as soon as you start trying
to figure out who's interpreting the popes or the councils
correctly in Rome, there's a million different debates and nobody
can know, nobody can decide for sure. And it doesn't
matter how many times the pope reaffirms something or restates something.
You have to still assume that you are properly reading
the pope. You see. So this is a problem of
circularity that the Roman Catholic epistemology thought it could solve
by just adhering to classical foundationalism, right. And this is
the older medieval entomistic way of viewing human anthropology in
human nature. It's called classical foundationalism. That's why I mentioned
it a minute ago. I'm getting a echo here. Let
me fix that. So I mean, let's draw some come
on now, okay, so we have I'm drum a little
pope figure. So here's our here's our little pope figure
here with his xis. Okay, all right, make sure my
he's getting some feedback there. Had to fix that. So
here's our little pope figure. And here's a little We're
gonna put a little lowly normy Roman Catholic guy here. Now,
Pope figure just decides one day that it is time
for an infallible declaration. Now he doesn't just simply cite
in the document that it is infallible, which would make
it pretty easy for everybody wouldn't know. What he does
is he says that with full apostolic authority, uh, from
the chair right here, he's gonna be proclaiming it in
his proclamation bubble, I decree blah blah blah blah blah
blahlah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And then later
he issues an encyclical that helps interpret this. And then
later there's I don't know another, the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith issues a proclamation that helps interpret this,
and then later there's another I don't know, papal whatever,
it doesn't matter. Just come up with all the different
layers and levels PC papal claim clarification, papal claim clarification.
Now let's say this is how because also works. I'm
not I'm not joking, right, this is really how it works. Okay, Now,
what is what is necessary for something to be ex
cathedral from the chair? Well, it's for the whole universal Church.
It's proclaim a full Apostolic authority right from the chair
and supposedly or I'll put an inverted cross on him here,
since they they love those inverted crosses in Rome just
because of Peter. Ye're right. Now, here's mister lowly little
Catholic guy here, And I'm not joking. This is how
comical it is in the world of Rome. About Now,
how are you going to understand this miasma, which, by
the way, cannot actually be understood without being situated within
the last two thousand years of supposed Roman dogma? Right,
this is on the Catholic view, right, So you need
a little bit of context of the last two thousand years,
don't you to understand from the Apostolic seat chair Proclamation xxxx,
which is also clarified in encyclical BCD, which is also
clarified by the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith with
Ratzinger as its head supposedly years ago. With all so
then the papal clarification that comes later down the road,
and here's a you lowly little Roman guy, and you
think we just need the pope to solve these questions
of theology. It solves it, does it? Really? But see
what we've already done is we've introduced the mysterious chair
of authority that isn't always made clear when and yes,
Roman Catholics will debate ad nauseum which statements are ex
cathedral and which ones aren't, which shows us that this
whole nonsense doesn't really do anything like it's supposed to.
It doesn't solve the problems it's supposed to. If we're
all sitting around for decades debating which ones are the
ex cathedral pronouncements, that's because it just moves the problem
back a step? Can you not see that? So here's
lowly Roman Catholic, Now what does he do. He says,
all right, I'm gonna interpret this, so in his mind,
he's got to be sure that the interpretation of all
this layers of gobbledinggook is proper, properly entering into his
mind and interpreted correctly. Now, guess what every Roman Catholic
will tell you to do in this process. Oh, you
can't just do this. This is kind of this is
kind of Protestant, bro, it's kind of Protestant going directly
to these papal proclamations. Assuming that you can figure this out,
Oh you also need to Before you can do that,
you need to go talk to your local priest, because
your priest is there, Father so and so, Father Brute,
father breath, father Bruce is there to help you. No, no, no,
you need to go first to Father Bruce, who will
then interpret this for you to help you. That's not
really works, right, But now wait a minute. Father Bruce
is less than Orthodox, right, He's less in the romancallic sense.
He's less than orthodox. We've all been complaining about Father
Bruce for so long for having X Y Z heresy. Right,
So how do we know that Father Bruce is going
to help us with us? Well, he's probably not. So
now we're gonna have to ex out Father Bruce because
we've decided he's not Orthodox. We're gonna have to go
over here to Bishop Williamson in the SSPX, who's over
here with his rival group. Maybe Bishop Williamson can help
us out because he's faithful to tradition and he's not
afraid to talk about conspiracy subjects. So now we're going
to ex out Father Bruth and we're going to go
over here to Bishop Williamson. And Bishop Williamson is going
to help us interpret this, and he tells us don't
worry about any of this because this is not faithful
to tradition. Now wait a minute. You see what we've
done here is just a vicious, nonsense gobbledegook circle of
trying to figure out the very thing that this was
supposed to solve for us. But it doesn't, does it.
And Vatican two makes that abundantly clear that you are
in no better spot than the person that you make
fun of as Orthodox. Yeah, you don't have a pope,
you don't have a way to determine what the infallible
dog is. Have you actually been in Rome for any
number of years neither do you. So that's how Rome
Catholicism really works, and that's why Orthodoxy says it's a scam.
It's a big heresy, and it doesn't solve for you
the problems that it pretends to solve, and it doesn't
grant the unity that it pretends to grant. I can
go to a Novus Orto chapel that is in full
communion with Rome, that has never been excommunicated or rebuked,
that will teach me freemasonry is good, that will teach
against Roman Catholic classic doctrines. They'll have a liturgy that's
worse than an Anglican liturgy. They'll have Zen meditation services,
and that's perfectly okay. And then I can go across
the street to a Fraternal Society of Saint Peter Church,
which is supposed to be the same faith, also in
communion with Rome, that has a completely different liturgy in Ethos,
to Zen Buddhist Novasorto Church. And then I can go
down the road to the set of a contiest chapel
that says that the other two are complete lunatic heretics. Now,
who's right out of all these? And guess what you
can't just say the pope. The pope decides. Now, does
that mean that we're in Protestant land. No, because when
you read the church in its first thousand years, when
they had all the same problems that we have today,
what do they do do? They just say, hey, Bishop
of Rome, what do we do? And then the Bishop
of Rome just basically said do this, do that, do that,
do that, that that, and then everybody was happy. No,
they called councils. Did the Bishop of Rome convoke the
Ecumenical council? No, he did not. The emperor is called
the ecumenical councils. The emperors called every one of the
argumenical councils, not the Bishop of Rome. Now, anyway, we're
not here to talk Rome here today, but we're trying
to illustrate a point here about the problem of both
Protestant and Roman Catholic anthropology and epistemology. Now, what's the answer, Well,
specifically on knowing God in Orthodox theology, the key here
is that we don't set up dialectics. Okay, so how
is it is a Christian going to know God or
no truth? Well, first of all, that can't be divorced
from the action of the Holy Spirit, right, So in
that regard, a Protestant would say something like the Holy
Spirit has to enlighten a person to know God, and
we would agree. So in that regard we sound like
we wel might agree with a Protestant, but we're not Protestants.
Why well, because we know that in the history of
the Church there are synods and councils that have been
set up by God to ferret out truth from falsehood,
to excommunicate people, and so forth. So there we start
to sound like we're Catholics, right, but we're not. We're
not either one because we believe the historical formation of
the Church was always sinodal and that Christ set it
up that way. And the reason that we don't need
the super bishop is because Christ directly is the super
bishop of his church. He doesn't need a vicar on
earth with a giant palace and a bunch of castrated
boys singing gay songs to him, which is quite literally
what the Renaissance popes did, especially when there are three
of them, two antipopes and one supposedly valid pope, living
in giant French palaces castrating boys to sing pretty songs
to them. No who in the right mind could think
that that is the legiti, I'm a succession of the Apostles.
That is preposterous. It's it's what the f dude, And
yes they did that. So, by the way, the abuse
probably wasn't just in this twentieth cent the twentieth century,
was it? If they were castrating little boys to sing
pretty pretty little girl songs to them, something tells me
those Medici, you know, Borgia characters were pretty degenerate. I
don't know how Christ in their minds could have anything
to do with that nonsense. But if you're a Roman Catholic, oh,
I was way. It was so way it was, and
that's you know, the pope is the The pope is
the the bridge between heaven and Earth. And as Unum
Sanctum calls him like, it's almost like he's like another
He's like a bridge between the Trinity and man. It's
the pope utterly blasphemous stuff. So this is why we
what you have to see is that the doctrine of
the papacy evolves, and even the Roman Catholics admit it evolved.
This is why Cardinal Newman had to write a whole
treatise defending the evolution of doctrine to explain how the
early Church didn't believe in the Vatican One definitions of
the papacy. Well, because doctrine evolved to that, that's preposterous,
doesn't evolve, and only Orthodoxy strives to adhere to the
ecumenical formation of the Church. Now you say, but there
haven't been ecumenical councils for Orthodoxy. Correct, There doesn't have
to be. There's no promise of Christ that there will
be an ecumenical council every century. There were no ecumenical
councils for the first three hundred years of the church,
and Orthodoxy does hold to binding doctrinal councils after the
Eighth Council, and yes, there are eight ecumenical councils if
you're Orthodox. Ecumenical only pertained to the Empire, and once
the Empire was gone, there weren't ecumenical councils. There were
still binding councils, and every Orthodox person still has to
follow binding medieval councils. Now you say, how do you
know which ones are true? Well, that's why there's no
simple answer to anybody's position about how you know what's
true and what's false. First of all, the Church we
know from Christ's words will always be guided into the truth,
and we won't be let into error when it comes
to major doctrinal issues. Right. That relies on understanding the scriptures.
My understanding the scriptures relies on the testimony the Church.
Me understanding the testimony to the Church, and the scriptures relies
on my having the spirit hopefully right. And so, in
other words, there is no classical foundationalists public juridical thing
that you can set up that is the public proof
of truth, because truth can't be had by mere empiricism.
It's not a merely empirical thing. It also requires the spirit,
and the spirit's only had in the Church. So, in
other words, there's not an easy answer to that question.
And it's also not answerable on the phony answers of
Protestantism and Romanism. Now Protonism and Romanism, if you remember
earlier we talked about them having Here's how we're going
to answer the question for you. By the way, the
answer is direct knowledge of God. That's how. Now you said, now,
wait a minute, if you believe that you can know
God directly, now you're starting to sound like a Protestant. Again,
what do we always talk about avoiding in Orthodoxy dialectics? Right,
So this is key to understand here, and this is
what all the Protestants and Roman Catholics don't understand, is
that you don't need any dialectics. You want to throw
them all out because you don't want to set the
one against the many. This is what Protestants do. Roman
Catholics do it by setting the pope over the church.
They don't have a harmony of equality in the church.
They don't have every bishop having essentially the same power
and function of the rest of the apostles. No, they
think that Peter is somehow some galactic emperor. Did Peter
act like a galactic emperor in the New Testament? Did
he have a giant palace in France with castrated boys
under him and zillions of dollars? No? No, that's not
how the church operated. The church is not to be
set against scripture. Scripture is not to be set against
the church. That would be a dialectic. The individual believer
is not set against the rest of the church. The
rest of the church is not swallowing up the believer. So,
in other words, the direct knowledge of God that we
read about in so many Orthodox fathers. The direct experience
of God via the noos and knowing God is not
set against church or tradition or community, the community of
the church, and it's not set against the scriptures. It's
not a dialectical either war. It all works in harmony.
The direct knowledge of you that you have of God
comes through your direct knowledge of God, or it comes
through the scriptures. Right. We experience these things in all
of these ways. So in this this is why many
people speak of Orthodoxy as experiential as existential. That's not
to equate it with the lunacy of modern existentialist philosophy,
but rather to say that there really is no external proof,
just in the same way as in apologetics. We can't
set up some external earthworm proof that's going to convince
all the unbelievers of creation, because it's a system wide thing, right,
and it's all it all kind of coheres together, So
you can't like take one thing out of it and
set it up over here and say, look at I'll
just prove to you the Bible. And if I can
just prove to you the Bible, then you're gonna then
you're gonna believe the Bible can't be divorced from the Church. Right.
The Bible can't be divorced from tradition, the Bible can't
be divorced from liturgy. None of these things can be
divorced or taken out of the context of the rest
of them. And you can't divorce the church from the
historical experience of the Church. You see, So there's no mental,
calvinistic spiritual church. That's not the historic church. Okay, there's
no invisible mystical spiritual church that's not the actual visible
church of history. All of God's covenants and history were
visible bodies of people. There's no invisible church. There's only
one church. That's why Jesus says there's one shepherd and
one flock. Anyway, so I went way off on that question,
but hopefully that answers your question there. The answer is
that Protestants don't know the faith from sola scriptura or
analogia fide any better than Catholics and their magisterium. Those
both of those just moved the problem back of stuff, because,
as we saw in the Protestant tradition, the noetic effects
of sin have so damaged you that you really can't
interpret scripture at all properly because you never escape the
noetic effects of sin. In classical Protestantism, you are always
under the noetic effects of sin, and they are always
it's always skewing your interpretition. So you can never have
infallible certitude about any of the doctrines. So, how, by
the way, does any Protestant argue for the transcendental argument?
How does he argue that God's existence is certain when
he also confesses the noetic effects of sin? Exactly? Yeah,
so much for certitude and consistency there. Now, what is
missing in all of these views, Well, both Roman Catholicism
and Protestantism long ago dumped the doctrine of the news.
Only orthodoxeology holds to the essence energy distinction, and only
orthodoxology holds to proper Christology, And only orthodoxeology holds to
the news. The doctrine of the news is the faculty
that man has for knowing God directly. It is the
eye of the soul, It is the eye of the heart.
Right the church, fathers and elders and many spiritual writers
will speak of it in different ways, but they're essentially
speaking of the same thing. And the news is not
the same thing as intellect. It's not the same thing
as ratiocination. Merely rationalizing things are merely having a psyche,
the soul and the heart functioning in unison with repentance
and turning to God is what cleanses the news to
see the world correctly. So man cannot properly interpret his
world without repentance. Now, this is why you might say, well,
annoying it, you sound like a Protestant. No, no, we're not
Protestants because we do not believe in total depravity. We
do not believe in any of the Protestant doctrines, and
so we do believe that grace raises man's nature. Oh no,
wait of it. Now you sound like a Roman Catholic.
Now we don't. We're not Roman Catholics because we don't
believe in natural theology. Right, if you read Father's stun
Eloys book, you will see the first chapter rebukes natural
theology and critiques Tomism. So we are neither Protestant nor Catholic.
We have a different view on all of these things,
and they have different views on all these things. Now,
the News, as we said, requires a ceasis ascetic practice
to control the passion, so that the passions don't cloud
or nows the fall clouded the news, and the news
is not what Plato talked about. That's something different. We
just simply believe that when Paul says, and this is
what Saint Gregory Palamos when he quotes Paul, that man's
faculties are body, soul, and spirit. That's noos. Man's spirit
is his noos. Not exactly the same thing as the
Holy Spirit. Obviously, because we participate in the energy of
the Holy Spirit, we are not merged with the person
of the Holy Spirit. That would be heretical. So what
I'm getting at is that we don't believe in analogia
fe day, and we don't believe in analogia, neither the
Protestant nor the Catholic view of knowing God and knowing
the world and knowing the scriptures. We believe in the
power of the news. And you will find at Orthodox
Info good site. There are multiple essays there on the news.
Let's see if this is the one I'm looking for here. Yeah, well,
there's one at Ortho Christian by Father Whitford that's pretty good.
But this is this is important because this is a
different anthropology, you see, and it is nowhere in Rome
and is nowhere in Protestanism. So again I'm stressing the
fact that we have unique different approaches to anthropology, which
condition why we believe what we do about man and
man understanding the world and understanding God. So the point
is that it's neither Protestant nor Catholic, and we don't
believe in analogia entus or analogia fide. Both positions are
problematic and essentially corruptions. And the reason that the West
went with that was because of Augustine. Augustine has essentially
a dual view of man body and soul, or soul
essentially becomes equated with intellect. To my knowledge, he does
not at all teach news that man has a news,
and that's because he was very influenced by this sort
of dualistic anthropology of Platanism, the body and soul, right,
the soul is always fighting against the body, this kind
of a thing. So anyway, so that's why we don't
We can't believe in either. So it wouldn't make sense
to talk about solo scriptura because number one, God is
not equated with the text Jesus says you follow the
scriptures because you think that in them you have salvation.
What it is then that testify of me? Right? The
scriptures are a letter, They're a text, They're not a person.
They testify to the relationship that you should have with
the divine person. That does not mean that they have
errors to go against the modernists here. All right, let's
move on to the next question here, Damon Paffen Wrath,
my grandfather isn't a weird Armstrong at church? He argues
for worship on Saturday. Yeah, I'm familiar with the garner
Ted Armstrong cult Worldwide Church of God. They believe they're
one of the preachers of British Israelite theory. This is
all just really goofy stuff, and anybody who has any
knowledge of church history would avoid that nonsense. And in fact,
I think very recently though they were converted. I think
James White supposedly converted or helped convert the Armstrong Church
to his version of the Trinity, which is funny, it's
not worthodox at all, but it's ironic that I think
James White claims or he claimed that many years ago,
ten years ago, so, that he converted the Armstrong Ends
to because they used to be anti Trinitarian or something
to that effect. But the reason that we do worship
on Sunday is because when Jesus resurrected is called the
Lord's Day, and it's called the first day of the week.
And in the Book of Acts, the church gathers together
to break bread, which we believe is the Eucharist. It's
not just eating cracker snacks. It's not just eating crackers
and drinking Welch's grape juice like Baptists think. It's actually
the Eucharist. So that's why we meet on Sunday, and
it shows the supersession of the Mosaic administration. By the way,
the Orthodox Church, though, does still reverence the Seventh Day Sabbath.
We do still in the liturgy. There is still reverence
and honor on every Saturday, because there's a liturgy every Saturday.
Best way, there is still reverence paid to the Sabbath.
So we technically speaking, we actually don't completely reject the Sabbath.
So anyway, but as for the Armstrong Church, I mean,
I'm sure you could find plenty of instances of online
stuff refuting the rest of their gifty nonsense. I mean,
it's just a cult started by some businessman. Any church
started by some businessman, come on, that's come on, there's
no businessman church. That's the true church. I'm gonna start
my Shawnees Church. I'm gonna start up Shawnee's big boy Church.
I'm gonna start up. Actually, all all the Protestants they
look like businessmen. So I guess technically every Protestant church
is businessman church, isn't it? And they act they act
like businesses. Right, it is like a business So I
should I'm wrong there. Actually most churches are businessman churches exactly.
What's that one goofball? Businessman church isn't funny? How that?
Like the Protestant churches evolved from Luther and Calvin. And
let's look at what do we get in the Protestant world. Now, yeah,
you get like female trans bishop, you know what I mean?
So I guess I should say the megachurch. Megachurch pastors
are like businessman pastor. Come to business church.
Speaker 3: We will teach you the techniques of time saving and
learn learn time share, learn how to sell your time
share at business church.
Speaker 1: Anyway, cracking up over here at business church. But that's
what Protestants is just business church, businessman church and Garner
Ted Armstrong that was like, he's just like some business
dude starting a racket. Dude. Thank you Anthony Cavolo for
ten bucks. Eric, what does the Orthodox take on near
death experiences? Uh? Well, Father Rose has a book on it.
I'm not saying that endorse every story and Father serafrom
roses Soul after Death book, but that is the first
one that comes to mind. There's some kind of weird
stories in there which nobody has to believe every story
in a book like that. But Eric, I would say,
read The Soul after Death by Father Rose Hans Lah
five dollars seriously. Looking at Orthodoxy, do they consider mary sinless? Well,
there's some debate actually in the history of Orthodoxy about
this question, and there's not really a simple answer to it,
because we don't view sin in the same way that
Roman Catholic or Protests do. By the way, so for example,
in Protestant tradition, humanity after the Fall basically takes on
a sin nature, which ninety five percent of Protestantism actually
confuses into like Manicheanism, where they think that human nature
itself has somehow become inherently evil. That is Manicheanism. There's
nothing that God creates that actually possesses evil. So evil
isn't part of human nature or inherent to human nature.
Evil is, as the Church fathers say, only the move
of the will away from the good. That's it. So
we do inherit something. We do pass on something which
is in the Orthodox tradition called ancestral sin from Adam.
But it's not a thing that immediately puts us under
the hell fire status that most of the Church believes.
And this is why the Eastern Fathers consistently don't teach this.
Now that's a little abtuse, but if you read the
Orthdox Study Bible page on ancestral sin, it's a very
good explanation of that. So I would recommend that in
the Orthodox Study Bible. But there's different debates, and there
were debates in late Middle Ages between the East and
the West over Mary and Mary status. And so sometimes
if you had fathers that were more influenced by Western theology,
and if they use the term original sin in a
more Augustinian sense, it just depends on what you mean
by these terms. Right, It's not like the terms are
inherently bad, but for example, we do believe that Semipalagianism
is wrong. It's actually condemned the councils of the Orange.
The sinods of Orange are reaffirmed in the Ecumenical councils.
So so no, we don't believe that in the sense
that Mary somehow had to be immaculately conceived for Jesus
to be who Jesus is. But there have been certain
Orthodox theologians who have believed that God preserved Eve from
the taint of ancestral or original sin. And it's a
very difficult debate at times. But if we think about
the fact that there is a seminal transmission an aspect
to original sin, that is there hence the virgin births right,
and we when we understand that Jesus this is a
very difficult doctrine that actually I was corrected on a
couple of years ago because I was mistaken on this.
But Jesus did not take on fallen human nature. And
that's not because of a sin nature, but it's because,
as Saint John Damascus and other Church Fathers teach, he
actually assumed the humanity of Adams as it was in Eden.
So Jesus's humanity is not fallen. And that's why Saint
Maximus teaches that Jesus did not possess a nomic will,
that is, he did not possess a discursive will of Oh,
I don't know what I should do today. Maybe I
should do this, maybe I should do that. And you
can read Saint Maximus on why Jesus did not have
a nomic will, and that's because he wasn't fallen. Now
he did, however, will undergo death. But that's not because
he was a son of Adam in the sense of
this a corruptible nature. He was not corruptible. His flesh
was incorruptible. So what I will say on the Mother
of God is to read Saint Gregory Palamas's Little book,
Married the Mother of God. So that's the answer to
that for you. But we don't have this is not
the space to really go into the into depth on
the difference between ancestral sin and original sin. So what
she sinless, Well, she could be preserved from sin by
God's grace because of it being like Eden, right, and
there's nothing preventing grace from doing that. And that would
not mean that she wasn't saved. It would mean that
she was saved. She wouldn't just saved from following, she
was saved throughout her whole life. And again this has
been debated. Just read read Saint Gregory on it. Please
post YouTube videos on your website and make NB three
I do for everything, so thank you, Nigel, Nigel. But
every YouTube video goes on the website, would you talk
about Guruism and Orthodoxy and how to avoid it for example,
Romanidies Disciples Bulgakov Disciples. Yeah, I mean there's you know,
this is no there's no easy answer to anything like this,
because any group that you're in, there's going to be
Guruism and there's going to be weird, weird ideas, so
there's going to be you know, I mean I have
friends that like Bulgakov. I think that Lawsky is correct
that Bulgakov is just basically bringing German idealism into Orthodoxy
and we don't need that. We don't need German idealism.
And he's also an ecumenist and was rebuked for being
a humanist. I'm not going to go into the old
calendar stuff that's used to divide people. That doesn't mean
that they don't have a point about ecumenism. They do
but the old calendars are all divided amongst themselves. Anyway,
So Romanites read my giant essay about Romanites and they
are cultic. One of my good friends, we're not really
friends anymore because he is a cultic Romanites follower. And
there's plenty of stuff in Romanites that's just ridiculous. Anyway,
I don't know what to say. I mean, you know,
the way to avoid it is to the more conscious
you can be of the totality of the of the
Church's tradition east and west, right. I mean, one of
the things that really brought me out of the cult
of roman Now, I was never in the Cult of Romanites,
but was reading the Church Fathers and the fact that
the Church Fathers talking about the logoy being archetypes and patterns,
and that there is an analogia in Romanites, says there's not.
So do I go with the common mind of countless
Church Fathers or the weird ideas of Romanites himself. But
so many people don't read the Church Fathers. They just
read one guy, just read Romanites. Here's my guy, right,
I'll just follow him for the next ten years. So
the best way to do that is to not get
stuck reading one guy, Timothy Rainfield five dollars, what is
your refutation of soul scripture and solo feede. Well, we
cover that in the first hour. So the refutation is that,
first of all, sol scriptura is not biblical. You cannot
find a list of the books of the Bible, and
the Bible and the history of the formation of the Canon,
even from all the Protestant scholars liberal to conservative, confirms
the fact that the Church created the Canon, it put
it together. And if you want to believe in sol scripture,
it logically follows that the decision of the books that
went into the Canon are also infallible. That leads to
the infallibility of the Church. So lafide, Well, this is
a little bit of a more involved question which will
probably be in the talk for subscribers. So we're already
going on two hours here and this is also going
to be a half and half, so subscribers to Jay's
analysis will get the full talk on this. So I'll
answer sola fide in depth probably by tomorrow in the
subscribers talk, but we went into a little bit of
it earlier, but I'll go into more detail with how
all of the covenants in scripture always have covenant requirements.
And when Abraham, for example, was required in the Covenant
to follow God and to be moral, you can't. We
don't set that over against the fact that he was
saved by grace. Okay. So in other words, grace and
works are not antithetical when you understand that grace can
move or impel or not impel. That's not the word
grace can can bring about good works? How's that? And
this is actually actually Augustine has insights on this when
he's writing against the Donatis and against the Palladians. He
does have insights on this, which is fine because actually,
as we said, the Synative Orange, which is ratified by
later ecumenical councils Orange one and Orange two, condemned semi Pelagianism.
So Orthodoxy has to also condemn semi Plagianism. Anyway, I
will go into that as I said, solofide as not
being sensical in the Reformation sense, the prison sense when
we get to the second hour. Another point too about
solo fide is that it rests on Asaurianism, and the
way it rests on Assorianism is that you have this
penal de claration in Protestant and Calvinist theology, where this
is the classic reformers, they all teach this. Now modern
some of the modern Protestants and Calvinists and so forth
might shy away from this because it's obviously retarded and blasphemous,
but the older ones do and they teach the luther
even teaches us calvin that the Father damned the son
as the payment right, so we owe God an infinite
payment of hell, and so God damned the son to
pay for the debt or whatever. That either requires that
Jesus be a human person who got damned, which is
an Astorianism, or the Father damned the son, which splits
the trinity. So that is the chief most blasphemous, wicked
doctrine of all Calvinism and Protestantism is the splitting of
the trinity in the idea, the stupid idea of the
Father damning the son. And that is absolutely historic Protestant theology.
It's a historic Lutheran and Calvinist theology. It's the it's
taught by Charles Hodge, just taught by the Puritans. Yeah,
the Father didn't damn the son. It's completely stupid and
the only way you could come to that conclusion is
if you have a historian Jesus, a Jesus who could
be damned while the son of God remains in the Godhead.
That's an Astorianism. To a Jesus who's the son of
God and then a human Jesus who's damned. That's I mean,
come on, Anybody who knows what Nestorianism is and knows
that it's condemned and why it's condemned is because it
leads back to Arianism, knows that this is retarded. And
yet how many of the classical reformers teach this stupid doctrine.
Let's see Troy Sampson two dollars, Thank you, Troy Sampson again,
ten dollars. What's the difference between Oriental and East Orthodoxy. Well,
Oriental Orthodoxy be two different branches. You could be the
Nestorian Syrian Church which still maintains a Nestorianism which I
just talked about in Syria, which they do still exist.
Or it could be the Orthodox so called who are
Monophysite or Monothelite right, Coptic Church of Egypt or Egyptian
Tawahido Church right or excuse me not Egyptian. The I
just went blank. Who's the Tewahido? You know what I'm
talking about? Anyway, they are not with us because they
essentially followed Ay. There were two ways to read the
Council of Chalcidon. One way was the Kirillian way and
the other way was in a Nestorian way. So what
happened was the tragedy was that after the Council of Calcidon,
in the West, by the way, still kind of did this.
They will the West will erroneously at times view the
incarnation as an addition formula. So they'll view it like
like who is who is Jesus after the incarnation? And
this is why this is the problem's too. This is
why there were later councils is because there's two different
ways to read the tone of Pope Leo at the council.
So there's this is the wrong way to do it,
which many, many, many Western and Protestants read it this way,
and this is Jesus is basically an addition formula, and
they'll read it like this. They'll read it like Pope
Leo's ton teaches that Jesus is a human nature plus
his divine nature and this equals divine person Jesus. Now,
everybody who's Orthodox and who is familiar with Nestorianism knows
that that is wrong. That is the wrong way to
read pop Leo's tone. But many of the Monophysites did
read it this way and they were correct. They're not correct,
but I'm saying they were correct when they said, if
that's what Leo means, this is wrong because this is
not right. Jesus is not the product of some addition
formula to give us a divine person Jesus. Right, that's
not right because it's not a divine nature that smushes
with a human nature. Or the divine nature did not
become incarnate, did it. No, it did not. It's a
divine person from all eternity who assumes an impersonal human nature. Right.
So this is the correct formula. This is the correct
way to read it. Jesus is a divine person from
all eternity, right, second person of the Godhead, and he
assumed an impersonal human nature. So this is why Saint
Cyril was correct against Nestorias to say that the sole
subject of all the actions of Christ. There's only one
subject present for every action of Christ. Whether it's being crucified,
whether it's walking on water, whether it's the breaking of
the bread the loaves. The only person, the only person
present is the divine person. That's why we're not in historians, right.
So this is Saint Cyril's basic model here. So now
one could read then the tone of Pope Leo at
Councildon in either the Karellian way or in the addition
formula way, which is dumb and Nestorian. So that's why
there's later councils which came along to say, no, it's
not we're not talking about an addition formula where a
divine nature plus a human nature equals the Jesus, the
divine Jesus. That's not that's not that's not right. So
that's why they got mad. They said, that's what that
council means. We don't want any of that. That's an historian.
Leo is basically reaffirming Astorianism. So then we get the
monofusus that Jesus essentially is one incarnate nature of this
of there's one incarnate nature of the logos. And the
preason for that is also because unfortunately Cyril did use
that phrase, but he used that phrase when he was
trying to stress what he talked about as in hypostatized.
This is an important term in Eastern theology, okay, And
what he means is that it's the same point he
was making when he talked about Jesus as the sole
subject of all of the actions of Christ being a
divine person. There is no human person in Jesus at all.
There's a fully human nature, but no human person, And
we do that to guard the salvation as a whole.
Everything hinges on this. Why, because the only person present
for all of those actions is a divine person who's
in hypostatized in a human nature. So, in other words,
when Cyril says there's one incarnate nature, he's talking about
the fact that when Jesus is walking around doing what
he's doing, there's only one Jesus there. And any of
the actions of God, the energies of God, whatever, they're
all personal, they're all in hypostatized. In other words, there's
no abstract divine nature. There's no abstracted Jesus. The only
Jesus is the one who came in the mode of
human nature. The sole subject of all the actions of
Christ is one divine person, the eternal logos. And this
is why we're not a Nestorian. This is why Jesus
is not a human person. This is why he's an
eternal person. He's the logos, he's divine. This is why
there's no hippie Jesus, there's no buddy Jesus, because he
is the pantocrater, the eternal Lord. Now he's fully human.
He cries, he hungers, he experiences and has and possesses
full humanity as a human soul. He has a human will,
he has a human body, flesh right. But his humanity
is human. I mean, excuse me. It's not fallen, it's incorruptible.
It's essentially the new atom. So when we understand that,
then we understand that any other scheme even and this
is really bad. In the Protestants, they don't even know
that they're a Nestorian because they don't know this whole debate.
They don't realize that in order for their their redemption
theory to be true, penal redemption theory, the penal atonement
view of Protestantism, they need to have the father essentially
condemn the son right. So if the father damns the
son in the in the Crucifixion. How is this possible, Well,
he either has to be a human person who gets
damn and then we're back to the Nestorianism, or it's
the father splitting the son and damning him and that
the Trinity gets severed, which is completely retarded. So penal
substitutionary atonement theory in the reformed classical Lutheran sense is
utterly blasphemous and not true. So that's the That is
the easiest way, by the way, through refute Protestantism. But
most Protestants don't even they're not even they're not anywhere
near this. They have no idea when you start talking
about in hypostatized and they don't know what you're talking about.
And this is in the theology of Saint Cyril, is
called hindosis henotic theology. So I'm going to tell you
the book for this, all right, So this is important
for understanding Saint Cyril hinnosis henotic theology. And the best
book for this is this book. Well, actually there's two,
but John mcguckin's book is really good because, Yeah, when
I became orthodox, I kind of struggle with this issue,
or when I was first reading orthodox I should say, well,
what about the Oriental ord. Maybe they're right. If you
read mcguccan's book, Saint Cyril of Alexander and the Christological Controversy,
it will settle this issue. There's also right here the
Unity of Christ by Saint Cyril, and anybody who reads
these will completely leave Protestanism. That alone is enough to
annihilate all forms of Calvinism and Protestanism when you understand
their penal substitution moment nonsense, because it's not trinitarian. You
have to be anti trinitarian to be consistent with their
penal substitution view of what happens to the Father and
the Son and the crucifixion. It's just it's completely retarded. Also,
you want to read Saint Maximus, his small work, his
Dispute with Paris, because the Monophysite problem becomes the Monothelite problem.
There's one will and energy in Christ. Right, well, maybe
there's not one nature, but there's one will and energy
in Christ the disputations with Puris. So what those two
works will show you is the how it's based on dialectics.
The Monothelites, like the Monophysites, had a dialectical theology, where
they felt like human nature was essentially in natural tension
with God and God's grace. And by the way, guess what,
that's what Calvinists teach, right, So the Monothelites also taught
that there was one energy in Christ, one energy in
one will. Well, one energy in Christ means that in
the incarnation, the divine energy, the divine nature, the divine power,
overcomes and in a way supplants the human and that
means that in salvation. Right, you can see how this
leads to Calvinism, the divine energy, divine work supplants and
basically replaces the human will and energy. Why because humans
are so fallen that their natural state is always in
perpetual tension with God. Total de pravity. Well no, the
as Saint Maximus says, grace is completely natural to man.
There's nothing more natural to man than grace. And that's
because we don't believe in total pravity anyway, Thank you,
Ron Park. Also, if Free Choice in Maximus Confessor is
still available, it also highlights these but it has been
It looks like there's a paperback for fifty bucks. Okay, yeah,
so this was out of print forever and ever and ever.
But it also now that's not it. It also makes
the same points yeah by doctor Farrell back when he
was Orthodox, free choice and maximous confessor also makes all
these same points. So there is that and that that
solves the issues with Oriental Orthodoxy and uh, Coptic stuff.
By the way, Coptics are so goofous. Uh if you
read Pope this is how dumb Coptic stuff is. Pope Shanalda,
who is the I think I mentioned this on one
of the other streams. Oh crap, I think I said,
hold on, it's gonna take me a second to find it.
He doesn't believe in deification. He thinks that he thinks
dedification is a pagan So let's see. I think this
is it. It sounds like a Baptist wrote this, like
this is the degree of theology that you get in
the I mean, these Coptic churches are. It's kind of sad. Actually,
I shouldn't be, because they have cut themselves off for
all these centuries and they basically just became a kind
of a state church. I'm not saying that the church
and state shouldn't have a relationship. I'm just saying, when
you consider. All right, let me dig it up because
this is important to see. All right, where did I
say that to you? I'll see he's got an essay
about against deification. Could you imagine this an Orthodox so
called writer against deification? Oh? Here it is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Uh, I guess I'll put the link here.
Speaker 1: This is how silly. Yeah, I'll put it in the
in the description here. All right. He thinks deification literally
is pagan like. It's almost like you're supposed to be
the successor. You think you're the successor of Saint Athanasius,
and you have a treatise that sounds like it was
written by a landmark Baptist against deification. I mean it's
like what so yeah, I mean there's little to nothing
in these Coptic groups. And by the way, Ancient Faith
and all those clowns, they act like Coptics are all Orthodox. No,
I'm sorry, but somebody who argues against dedification is not Orthodox,
so thought audit. I don't know what that is. I'm
guessing it's a kind of a funny thing against thoughts.
Karl Marx there, thank you, child of Grace five dollars.
What happened to the Jerusalem Church? Do you mean the
Patriarchate of Jerusalem or do you mean the church in
Acts fifteen? So sorry, I'm not sure what Jerusalem Church
you mean. Joline Kay, ten dollars. Thank you, Matthew Kitchen.
Have a blessed liturgy tomorrow. Everyone. Thank you, Matthew. You two.
David Daily own ten dollars. Any thoughts on Eastern Right Catholics,
in particular the Melchite Catholic Church, Greek Caeloic Church that
hold the first seven councils, Well, okay, well that doesn't
make any sense because you can't be a Roman Catholic
and only hold to seven councils as orthodoxy. This is
why the stupidity of Eastern Rite Catholicism, because the Tridentine
doctrines are binding on the entire church. You can't be
a Melchite or Eastern Right Catholic and reject purgatory. You
can't reject, you know, the definitions of Trent. They're binding
on the entire church. That's the point of the papacy.
So it's a position that is completely double minded and
makes no sense. Two dollars Doorman three to sixty Galactic
Emperor sound something from DBZ, Yeah, it does. I guess,
so five dollars. Greetings from the Schofield Belt, that is
the Bible belt. But the Schofield Bible Belt. I guess
that's a good one, white top high speed drifter two dollars.
Is Orthodox Faith tied to ethnicity? No, it's not, because
the church is Catholic but is also ethnic. If you
read the Canons of Chalcedon, you'll see its exact same way.
They all meet together, and there are ethnic bishops talking
about their respective ethnicities and metropolitans and groups and areas.
But that does not mean that we identify the church
with ethnicity, even though ethnicity is an important component of
the church, just like gender. Gender is an important component
in the church. It can't be wiped away or thrown away.
But we also wouldn't identify the Church with gender. But
the reason that the Orthodox faith has historically been tied
to ethnicity is because the kings of various countries converted.
If natural theology is bunk, how did an aristotol or
reason to the uncaused cause? Well, the question here is
what is the deity that he calls the uncaused caused?
Did you have you looked at the fact that Aristotle
caused the uncaused cause multiple gods in certain sections of
his writings, and in other sections he calls it one God.
So Aristotle's uncaused cause is thought thinking itself. God is
not thought thinking itself. God is not the monad of Plato.
God is not any of the stupid demonic doctrines of
the Greek philosophers period. He's not any of them. So
those arguments don't work, and they're not any good. Now
is it true to say there's a first cause? Correct?
There is, because I can, as an Orthodox person interpret
that according to revelation, according to tradition, to scripture, as
God is the first cause. Right, But who is that God? Well,
if you're Orthodox, he has a believe it's the Trinity.
None of these other groups believe it is. So I
do not have common cause with a Muslim and a
Jehovah's witness and a whatever other goofy sect in proving God,
because we don't believe in the same God. So you
can't have an apologetic argument on the side of a
Jehovah's witness and a Muslim and an Orthodox person altogether
arguing against an atheist, because it doesn't work because the
arguments that you're trying to prove, you're trying to convert
the atheists too, are not to generic theism, but to
the theism of revelation. The god of Exodus three fourteen,
who says I am that I am, is not the
uncaused cause of Aristotle. So there you go. And if
you read Saint Maximus, and if you read Father stan
Eloy's book, you'll see why natural theology is not true.
And natural theology leads to the atheism of Rome. That's
why Rome is a perennial Vatican to ecumenicist organization because
it's based on natural theology, which is which is faulty.
So how did Aristotle reason to the uncaused cause? Well,
because not everything the unbeliever says is false, right, Paul
says in Romans one, everybody knows that there's a god.
But hey, by the way, you may show here's the
easiest way to show you natural theology is bunk. Hey,
I believe in natural theology. There's one divine cause and
he's Satan. Yeah. See, Can I join with a Satanist
who believes that there's one cause for the universe? Of
course not. So that's retarded, and any smart atheist will
completely dissect natural theology and reasoning back to an uncaused
cause to show how stupid it is, and they should.
They should one more quick question. All wait, let's see
slav k thank you for good stuff. Why are accumenists
against proselytizing and less than enthusiastic about mission work because
they're not Orthodox? Because you can't accept We should say
too that there are different senses to ecumenism. So originally
ecumenism meant ecumenical councils, right, the word ecumenism comes from
acumenical councils. The acumenical councils were all called to reconcile
the church right in terms of debates and disputes. Now,
the ecumenists believe that the church is not one though,
so they essentially err on the doctor of the Church,
and they don't believe that there's historically one Orthodox church.
That's why it doesn't work with Orthodoxy or any group
that claims to be the true church. Now, original ecumenism,
what they even call the Acumenism of return, is what
the modern ecumenists have rejected. So there have been periods
when Orthodox theologians went into ecumenism many decades ago, with
the intent of the Ecumenism of Return, which was to
convert people. And that's not wrong. That's what it's for.
When I go on shows with atheists or with Roman
Catholics and I engage in or an evangelical in a
position of agreement and then we talk about other issues.
I'm interested in the ecumenism of return. That's why I
do apologetics. The ecumenists do not do apologetics because they
don't believe in the ecumenism of return, and in fact
it's a stumbling block. So the churches, like middle of
the road type groups that will, on the one hand,
will do apologetics and try to convert Protestants and people
like that and atheists. Right, they're correct in that regard,
but they also want to placate the ecumenists and not
convert people. Now, many of the handbook of that, for example,
the Greek Orthodox Archidiocese of America, it's handbooks says do
not convert people. That is not true. You cannot tell
people not to convert people. That is apostasy. So they're wrong.
So the ecumenism of I'm okay, You're okay is different
from the ecumenism of return, that is, convert become you must.
So that's why they don't do mission work, is because
they don't believe the gospel. Jesus says, go out and
convert the nations, and they are essentially apostate. So it
depends on which acumenism you mean. If you mean the
ones that are against proselytizing, they're wrong, and the fact
that they don't proselytize, and the entire church, entire history
of the church is proselytizing. Church fathers debating with heretics
to convert them proves them wrong their phonies. One more
quick question is the shroud of turn legit. I don't don't.
I don't follow that. I've never found that. Plus it's
not so what if it was, like, what does that prove?
I mean that kind of I'm not saying there aren't miracles,
but you know, what does Jesus say. Jesus says, a
wicked generation first after miracles, and no miracle will be
given to it of getting feedback again here, So I
don't pay attention to the shroud of Turin or any
of that because it's not gonna. I mean, if you
if you already believe and have faith, then you're going
to interpret it as something vindicating Christianity. I don't know.
I don't know. I'm not I'm not into the shroud
of turn stuff. So could it be legit? I guess
it could be, but I mean I don't. It's like
with the people who argue to me, it just it
just gives too much credence to bad argumentation because it's
not a good apologetic argument because you're never going to
get people to do DNA analysis on some blanket in
a church in fr Answer or wherever it is. I mean,
how is that gonna get That's not going to convince
anybody anyway. But does that mean that I think it's
not legit. I don't have any opinion on it. I've
never really paid attention to it. Benjamincollins One pound advice
on avoiding false information? False? What kind of false information?
I mean, there's not really an easy answer to a
really broad question. So it depends. I guess it depends
on if you mean false theological information. You know, there's
just not an easy example except to you know, trust
God and seek the truth, and you know, Jesus says
my sheep will hear my voice, and I know them,
they know me, and they will be let into truth.
So God is good and he's not going to lead
you astray if you seek him out with all your heart.
So when it comes to ferreting out trimp false information,
I mean God gave us logic and reason for a reason,
and you know, knowing basic logic, knowing basic facts about
how to reason and argue, that's one of the things
that we promote here. That's a big way to not
be duped and to be able to sift through true
and false information. Right, So logic is not antithetical to God.
It's not an enemy of God. It's not That's is
all modern pietistic nonsense that scientism promotes and that purveyors
of Protestantism promote, or Pietism. They say that the faith
is not logical, it's incoherent. Just take a leap again,
How contrary is that to what we read in Saint
John Damascus when he writes very lengthy philosophical and apologetic treatises.
That's the tradition that we follow here. We're not interested
in Pietism. So I would say just try to ground
yourself in the church. Fathers. Try to ground yourself in scripture,
read your Orthodox, study Bible every day, try to pray
every day, go to the liturgy, and you will know.
You will know when people are telling you false information.
But now if you're talking about analyzing geopolitics or the
news media, that's a little more you know, that takes
a little more practice. You know, I've been doing that
for a long time, so I can pretty well spot,
you know, fake news, fake information, false reports, because I've
studied psyops and I know how a lot of that
stuff works. So it comes a little easier to me
just because I'm I have a pretty good trained eye
at spotting nonsense in the news or or propaganda. How
to spot propaganda and spotting phonies in terms of you know,
different organizations like you know, why won't you go on
this or that show? Well, maybe I can spot phonies.
That's why I'm not saying that everybody has told no
to the phony. I'm just saying that I have a
pretty good track record of people that I'm not associated
with being phonies, so I make the decision who I
want to associate with. So I would say you gotta
do the same thing. Can just use basic common sense
most of the time. It'll be fine again. God gave
us common sense for reason. It's not antithetical to theology.
Randy Churchill fifty dollars, Thank you. Randy. Did the term
federal referring to Adam's headship as a term come to
existence after Calvin? Is there a historical understanding of federal
headship or is it just a way to refer to
the juridical understanding of protest servation. That's a good question.
I mean, I don't think the term federal itself would
be necessarily excluded from patristic discourse. I mean, you know,
the way athanacious and on the incarnation, the way he
speaks of the role of Adam and the fall in
Christ is there's nothing wrong with legal language. I mean,
paul Us this legal legal language. It's just that we
can't understand