This will be
the only post on this blog, and it's for the sole
purpose of sharing my testimony of how I converted
from Evangelical Protestantism to the Eastern
Orthodox Church. After the text of the testimony,
there are two appendices: the first is a breakdown
of the earliest bishops in the Christian Church and
their beliefs, and the second is a brief defense
addressing from Scripture certain issues
Evangelicals have with Orthodoxy. Enjoy.
”If
any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.
The old things have passed away; behold, all
things have become new.” II Cor.
5:17
BEGINNINGS
When I talk
with people “who knew me when”—during my
first twenty years of life as an Evangelical
Protestant—I usually am met with a variety
of reactions when I tell them that, in the middle of
my time at one of the nation’s foremost charismatic
universities, I decided to convert to the Eastern
Orthodox Church. Some are offended, as though I were
rejecting everything I’d been taught to believe as a
good Protestant; others react with genuine, open
curiosity, since the Orthodox Church is still
relatively unknown to many Americans; still others
react with dismay, convinced that I’ve traded in
biblical, relationship-based Christianity for the
rules and regulations of the Pharisees, the exotic
“smells and bells” of Orthodoxy’s “foreignness,” and
the off-base traditions of men that only serve to
take a soul away from a true, unadulterated
relationship with Jesus Christ. It is my hope that
this essay will help to shed light on the issues
that were central to my conversion, as well as
provide insight both to those who are thinking about
converting to Orthodoxy and to those who have a
loved one on the way into (or already in) the
Orthodox Church and are concerned for their
spiritual well-being. The Orthodox Church has been,
for me, the ultimate revelation of what it means to
be “in Christ”; my upbringing in Evangelical
Protestantism has not only helped me appreciate this
now, but was very much preparing me for this all
along
.
My childhood was one of sharp
contrasts between my mother’s and father’s
homes—they divorced when I was an infant—for while
my mother (with whom I spent most of my time growing
up) was devoutly religious and marked the week with
several outings to Church, my weekends spent with my
father were quite devoid of any religious
observance. This is not to say that my mother was a
saint and my father a horrible person; I thank God
for both of the loving, morally sound parents He
gave me, and I feel the debt of gratitude that any
child raised by good parents (even separately) feels
upon reaching adulthood. Since, however, my
religious environment was shaped almost completely
by my mother’s influence, we’ll begin there.
My mother became a
Christian around the time I was born, and was
extremely devout and passionate about knowing God
through reading the Scriptures. From the time I
could understand what was going on, my mother and I
read a chapter out of the Bible each night, almost
without fail. My mother made it clear to me that
this Bible was “God’s book,” and that in it He told
us the story of His Son, Jesus, and how we could be
forgiven of all our sins. It’s perhaps not
surprising that a small child would believe all this
unquestioningly. What was surprising was how
naturally I took to Scripture memorization and
things having to do with Church, worship, etc. From
the most impressionable years onward, I was given
the steady example of a person who knew that, if God
had really come down to Earth to live with us, then
it was the greatest thing that had ever happened in
history, and everything else should be seen in the
light of this magnificent event, of this glorious
Person. I thank God for my mother’s influence, for
the love of Scripture He instilled in me through
her, and the desire to proclaim truth that she
always lived out in front of me.
We attended a Bible
Church, as Mom assumed that a denomination who named
themselves after the Word of God itself would be
unashamed to preach directly from it. Sadly, though,
when I was in third grade, Tulsa Bible Church
underwent a “split”—I don’t remember what over—but I
knew that many people were leaving, and that my
mother had decided that we should, too. This was
seen as an unfortunate event, but the reactions of
the congregation were ones of recognition: These
things just happen, unfortunately. We spent a
few months looking around until we happened upon a
Baptist Church and were pleased with how Scripture
was taught, explained, defended and cherished. I
stayed there for six years, during which time I
attended a Christian summer camp where I heard that
Christ had gone to the Cross for my sins. It
was there that I had my first personal encounter
with Jesus Christ. In high school I moved to another
Baptist Church that had a more active youth
ministry, since I was, by this time, what we called
a “sold out and radical” Christian: the kind of
Christian who believed wholeheartedly in the gospel,
who desired to live according to the teachings of
Christ and the rest of the Bible, and who was ready
to share his faith with anyone who would listen. The
experience of sharing my faith boldly both with
people in this country as well as with those in
other countries who had never heard of Jesus Christ,
while perhaps something that needed to be tempered
with wisdom and tact at the time, is something I
will never forget and for which I will always be
grateful, for it forced me to know why I believed
what I believed, and showed me that my faith, if
true, was something of which I should never be
ashamed to defend or proclaim.
Nevertheless, some issues came
to the forefront of my mind during these zealous
high school years. As a Baptist, I
had been
taught that Scripture alone must be our guide in
telling us what we believed. This was usually
contrasted with the Roman Catholic Church, whose
unbiblical teachings (so I was told) were simply
man-made traditions used to tear people away from
the gospel message. And what was that gospel
message? Simply this: God created Man, who then
sinned by disobeying God, thus separating himself
from God. Man now owed a debt of sin to God, but
since God was eternal, no human payment would be
sufficient. Yet God loved us so much that He sent
His Son Jesus to die for us, so that our debt of sin
would be paid by Christ’s blood, and simply by
placing our trust in Christ’s work on the Cross we
would be restored to a perfect, immediate, and
unbreakable union with God. Any of these other
“traditions” of the Catholics—prayers to Mary and
the Saints, Purgatory, the Pope, confession to a
priest, infant baptism, the rosary, statues,
communion really being the Body and Blood of
Christ, ritualistic worship, works being necessary
for salvation—that were not explicitly found in the
Bible were seen as “traditions of men” that were
tacked on later, when the Church slid into error.
This, I was told, happened when the Catholic Church
was made the religion of the Roman Empire and the
leftover pagan influences crept in, thus corrupting
the Church. By God’s providence, however, the
Protestant Reformation occurred, and the gospel of
grace was “re-discovered” when people let the
Scriptures—and only the Scriptures—be their guide.
Our calling, as I heard it Sunday after Sunday, was
“to get back to the New Testament Church” in all its
purity, unified by the simple, biblical gospel
message. It was with this mindset that I went to
Latin America during the first three summers of high
school with Teen Mania Ministries;
so many people in predominantly Roman Catholic Latin
America were misguided (although, I was convinced,
well-meaning) individuals that simply had no idea
what a true, living relationship with Christ was
about. It was our job to go and give them what the
Bible clearly taught.
Yet, this very
idea—“what the Bible clearly taught”—proved to be a
difficult issue once I went on these trips. In my
Baptist churches, the issue was fairly easy—Man
chose at one point in time to place his trust in
Christ, and was at that moment eternally saved.
Baptism then followed, but was only done out of
obedience to Christ’s command. Water baptism played
no actual role in our salvation; it was merely a
sign of what had already happened in our hearts
through faith. Once Christ saved a man, it was
impossible for said man to truly fall away. No deed
of man was seen to be more powerful than the grace
of God, and no God of love would ever leave us
wondering if we were truly saved. This idea of “Once
Saved, Always Saved,” seemed to me to be a
self-evident teaching of Scripture. Yet others in my
missions group seemed to question this. They
believed—and defended from Scripture—that if man
could choose to accept Christ, he could choose to
reject Him later. And one other fellow
missionary—a Calvinist, the first one I ever
met—believed something yet different: that man did
not, in fact, choose to follow Christ in the
first place, as that would be seen as man saving
himself and having something to boast about. He,
too, defended this from Scripture! This was very
strange to me, and there were many long
discussions—never arguments, thankfully—late into
the night about these and other issues (such as
speaking in tongues, the end times and the
“rapture,” worship style, etc.) but in the end our
leaders told us that these teachings were all
“non-essentials” to our salvation, and that we could
safely believe in either position and still work
together as brothers and sisters in Christ. This
satisfied me at the time, but I still remember the
lingering thought that I came back from my trips
with: Is there any way to know what the Bible
really says about any of this?
Added to this diversity of opinion was the even
greater diversity seen in my high school’s
pan-denominational Bible Study, where everyone from
Catholics to Baptists to Presbyterians to Methodists
to Charismatics, as well as many others, came
together to discuss the faith. The meetings
themselves were orderly enough, with a leadership
delivering sermons and a brief time of worship
choruses. But the conversations I got involved with
outside the meetings got me wondering about even
more issues:
-
Baptism—whether it “saved” you or was just a
symbol;
-
whether
or not infants should be baptized;
-
communion—whether it was just a symbol or
something more significant;
-
faith
and works—whether St. Paul and St. James were
opposed to each other, or talking about
different things, or talking about the same
thing from different angles, as well as what
qualified as “faith” and what qualified as
“works”;
-
church
government—whether it was congregational or
episcopal or presbyterian or something else
entirely...
All of these
issues seemed to have support in the Scriptures, but
no one could prove conclusively that this is what
the “original Church” believed, as we all seemed to
be coming from the same source: the New Testament.
My assurance that these were all “non-essentials”
was still there, but it was wavering. Several
questions loomed large in my mind by the end of my
senior year: How could I say that ALL of this was
truly “non-essential”? How much do we have to assign
to the realm of “non-essentials” in order to be
unified? If we have no way of knowing how we “enter
in” to Christ—baptism? communion? faith alone? once
saved always saved, or not?—or what role the Church
is supposed to play in our walk with Christ, do we
really know how to live in the life Christ gave us?
By the end of high school, however, I had come to a
tacit acceptance of the idea that, truly, no one
group could be expected to “have it all right,” and
therefore no one denomination could be, by itself,
the only Church of Christ. In spite of our
differences in doctrine and practice, I reasoned,
all denominations who confessed Christ as Lord,
believed in Him as God, and placed their trust in
His death, burial and resurrection somehow comprised
“the Church,” with each different denomination
bringing something unique to the table, each playing
a different role in the Body of Christ. I therefore
felt free to embrace certain aspects of the
“charismatic movement,” a movement within
Protestantism characterized by loud, passionate
praise and worship services and an expectation of
the Holy Spirit’s powerful movement on a regular
basis. Because I now stood somewhere in the middle
of “Baptist” and “Pentecostal”—I jokingly called
myself a “Bapticostal”—I felt no qualms but rather a
calling to go to Oral Roberts University, one of the
most prominent charismatic universities in the
world. It was here that my questions about coming to
a consensus about the Bible and the traditions of
the Catholic Church would finally find their
answers, but not at all in the way I expected.
WINDS OF CHANGE,
BREAD OF HEAVEN
Oral Roberts University, as I’ve said, is one of the most
well-known—and, in charismatic circles,
well-respected—institutions in charismatic
Christianity. Their school of education was quite
rigorous (I studied to be and later became a
teacher), and I’m very satisfied with the
preparation I received academically. Furthermore,
ORU was where I met some of the nicest, warmest,
most sincere, well-meaning followers of Christ I've
ever met--one of whom was the beautiful woman who
was to become my wife and fellow Orthodox Christian!
Unfortunately, in spite of all the good things that
can and should be said about Oral Roberts U, the
particular religious worldview that permeated most
aspects of the university was inescapable, and I
quickly began to shed the “-costal” part of “Bapticostal.”
By the end of my first semester, I was willing just
to be a good Baptist and involve myself as much as I
could in my home church (at that time I was involved
in the Spanish-speaking congregation as a hymn
leader and Sunday School director).
Without going into too many particulars or naming
names, suffice it to say that, at ORU, there were
constant repetitions of three ideas:
-
God
wanted to “prosper” believers financially and
materially
-
Believers could take physical healing as
something they were entitled to by virtue of
their being Christians
-
The Holy
Spirit was meant to be manifested in a
believer’s life by means of “speaking in
tongues” and could even be seen in strange cries
and moans, falling on the ground and laughing,
shaking, etc.
These ideas,
which I had heard mentioned in charismatic church
services, were expressed much more often and with
much more insistence at ORU. This bizarre spiritual
environment helped me (and many others, who left
their charismatic upbringings in droves and went to
everything from Orthodoxy to agnosticism) see the
logical conclusion of emphasizing such “signs and
wonders of the Holy Spirit” in churches instead of
the virtues of humility, patience, service and love
(which, by the way, my Baptist church taught very
well).
It was at this Baptist Church—Parkview Baptist
Church in Tulsa, OK—where I believe I had the
encounter with Christ that opened the next door of
my conversion to Holy Orthodoxy. Following the end
of my first semester at ORU, I was seated in the
darkened sanctuary of the Anglo congregation for a
Christmas Eve communion service. Now, the Southern
Baptist Church firmly believes that communion, or
the Lord’s Supper, is an observance that our Lord
initiated and commanded us to have: “Do this in
remembrance of Me,” He said. Yet Southern Baptists
also firmly believe that the bread and the wine are
only bread and wine when we eat them as an assembly.
It is merely a symbol of Christ’s Body and
Blood, they insist; no “special presence of the Holy
Spirit” accompanies it, as Methodists and other more
“sacramental” Protestants believe, and it
certainly did not become the actual Body
and Blood of Christ the way the Roman Catholics
believe—even though our Lord said (and we repeated!)
“This [bread] is My Body; this [wine] is My Blood.”
Regardless, there I sat, with quarter-inch-squared
piece of bread in one hand and small, plastic cup of
grape juice in the other, and for some reason, I
looked at those two elements and a thought paralyzed
me: This is my entry into the very Kingdom of
Heaven. This is the passage into salvation, the
actual, physical flesh of my Lord, the spilled, red
blood of my Lord. I swallowed the bread and wine
with more reverence than I ever had before, and
began to sob silently there in my seat. I had
touched something that had taken me to a different
place, and it had happened through the bread and
wine. My fellow Baptists would say later that I had
merely done what our Lord had asked—namely, I had
just remembered Him—and He had blessed me for my
obedience with the warmth of His presence. Yet, I
longed for that closeness again; I was convinced
that something happened through the bread and
wine, that God had used those physical elements to
change me. I took to having my own, private
communion services in my dorm room—with Welch’s
grape juice and pita bread—by reading Christ’s words
of institution over my “elements.” The Baptists only
held communion once a quarter, but I needed to taste
the Body and Blood of my Lord more often than that
now, and I was determined to do so. I also was now
intrigued by the existence of confessions that, I
knew, partook of communion every Sunday—the DOC,
the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, and, yes, even the
Roman Catholics, among others—and though I wasn’t
quite ready to break ties with my Baptist
congregation, I was fascinated that so many
Christian confessions saw the same need as I did to
approach the Table as often as possible.
Imagine my
delight, then, when, after a mandatory chapel
service at ORU (we met twice a week for a praise and
worship session and a sermon from a faculty member
or guest speaker), I heard the words, “Noon
Communion will be held in the small chapel alongside
our main chapel.” I had never had any reason to pay
attention to this little advertisement before, but I
was listening with new, hungry ears now. I went, and
participated in a very nice, although truncated,
communion service from the Anglican tradition. It
was led by faculty, and sometimes a charismatic
Roman Catholic professor would deliver a homily. I
sat there and soaked up this, my first exposure to
liturgy. I absolutely loved the reverence
with which the elements were handled, the shared
solemnity of the small, intimate group who gathered
every Wednesday and Friday (this became a regular
practice for me, as well) and, most of all, the
words uttered by those administering the wafers and
cups of wine—“The Body of Christ...the Blood of
Christ...”—all of this served to feed my hunger for
the contact with the Lord through His Meal that I
had been experiencing. The quietness and somberness
of the liturgy, though I “knew” it to be something
imposed by the Roman Catholic Church later on down
the line in Christian history, was much more a
fitting tribute to the holiness of God than the
“entitlement attitude” and “rock concert choruses”
with shallow, often self-serving lyrics that I heard
in the main chapel services each week or the bare,
stark minimalism of a quarterly Baptist memorial
meal. There’s no way, I thought one day after
comparing Noon Communion to these two traditions,
that what goes on in either one of those places can
be the “New Testament Church” I hear about at
Parkview Baptist. It was then that I realized
something significant: I, as an Evangelical
Protestant, had no idea what the original believers
actually looked like in worship, how the Church
originally operated, what the Church’s role was, or
what the role of the Eucharist was in the
Church. All my questions from my dialogues in
high school came back, and I knew I needed to do
some research to see what the Church of the New
Testament looked like from other documents of that
era.
Such
information comes, at times, from places and in ways
which one least expects. Being a college student in
a dorm room with a high-speed Internet connection
can be a dangerous thing! For me, it was the true
start of my way out of Protestantism and into the
Church of the first centuries. In particular, it was
a website put out by a Roman Catholic gentleman that
got me thinking.
He had taken certain tract booklets put out by a Mr.
Jack T. Chick, a notoriously anti-Catholic
fundamentalist Protestant, and dissected them page
by page using Scripture and—to my surprise—the
writings of the Christian bishops of the first,
second, and third centuries—the era when the Church
was still under Roman persecutions. His treatment of
the “Chick Tract” entitled, Are Roman Catholics
Christian? truly was thought-provoking. Many
institutions claimed by the Catholics as original
Christian teaching and decried by Evangelicals as
man-made, anti-biblical traditions seemed to be
supported, according to this gentlemen, by Christian
leaders who either were themselves trained by the
writers of the New Testament, or from those leaders
the Apostles trained—we’re talking one or two
generations away from the Apostles. This was a
serious issue to me, for, if they all said the same
thing so early on, it would be hard to refute the
idea that their ideas truly were from the Apostles
themselves! Most disturbing (and yet, in a way,
comforting, even at that time) were the quotations
about the Eucharist (the word used for communion,
meaning thanksgiving) from St. Ignatius of Antioch
(AD 90-120) and St. Justin Martyr (AD 120-150),
among others, who seemed to state (according to this
website) that the Eucharist was the true Body
and the true Blood of Christ—the doctrine
known as the Real Presence of Christ in the
Eucharist. To say it was not truly such, they
said, meant to deny that Christ had come in the
flesh, as some heretical groups were doing at the
time. They believed that Christ had come in the
flesh to live among men, and now gave us his
true Flesh and Blood to eat and drink in the
Eucharist; those who denied the transformation of
the bread and wine did so because they did not
believe there was any Flesh or Blood to begin with
in the life of Christ. To these early Christian
Fathers, the Eucharist was of primary importance in
the life of a Christian, for it was in reality—and
not just in symbol, as I had been taught—an
encounter with Christ Himself. The creator of the
website pointed to a verse in 1 Corinthians that,
when I looked at it on the screen, I thought,
that can’t actually be in the Bible, can it?!
It was 1 Corinthians 10:16, and it read as follows:
“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the
communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we
break, is it not the communion of the body of
Christ?” Now this, admittedly, is not exactly the
same as saying, “The bread really does become
the Body, and the wine really does become the
Blood,” but the word “communion”—êïéíùíéá or
koinonia in the Greek—means “a participation
in, a fellowship with, a union with.” Here was
Scripture, telling me that the bread was the means
of union with the Body, and the wine with the Blood.
While I wasn’t about to convert to Catholicism then
and there, my world was forever changed. I knew I
had to investigate this issue further.
Further
issues followed, however, through the website, such
as the claim that “the Catholic Church, guided by
the Holy Spirit, gave us the Bible in it's current
form.”
According to the website’s claims, one of
Protestantism’s faults lay in the way in which it
tried to find truth: through an individual’s reading
of Scripture alone, or the idea called sola
scriptura (“Scripture alone,” in latin). The
fact that sola scriptura was ineffective
could be seen, said the website, through the many
different doctrinal positions that contradicted each
other in all the denominations that claimed to be
guided by the Holy Spirit in their reading of
Scripture. The remedy, said this gentleman along
with other Catholic apologetics (both online and on
campus), was to hear the uninterrupted, ancient
tradition of the Catholic Church—which, far from
being inventions that showed up centuries later,
reached all the way back to the spiritual children
and grandchildren of the Apostles who were cited in
his arguments—and allow that tradition to guide us
in our understanding of Scripture. For one man can
say, “Scripture says ‘X,’” and another, “Scripture
says ‘Y,’” which is oftentimes the direct opposite,
and both are left with merely their own takes on the
issue (or, usually, their own respective
traditions’ interpretations of Scripture, as no
one interprets Scripture apart from a traditional
method), throwing proof text verses back and forth
at each other and going nowhere. Rather, the
Christian should realize that the New Testament as
we know it did not exist as one, whole volume until
well into the fourth century; until that time, there
was no one, authoritative list of books one could
point to as “the Bible.” Each group had its own
original letters sent to them by an Apostle (or
copies thereof forwarded to other churches, if
possible), and the rest was transmitted orally to
the churches.
This
concept—that the Apostles trained their converts in
person, orally, and thoroughly—seemed obvious to me,
yet I had never thought about the ramifications of
in-depth discipleship apart from the only materials
I had at my disposal: the writings of the Apostles
and the New Testament gospels. It did, however, shed
new light on yet another Scripture that, though I’m
sure I’d read it before, was most definitely not one
an Evangelical is known to underline: 2
Thessalonians 2:15. This verse is a command by Paul
for believers to “stand fast and hold the traditions
which you were taught, whether by word
or our epistle” (emph. mine). In other words,
there were things that were taught to the churches
by the Apostles that were never written down in
the Bible, and this very fact is attested to
in the Bible itself! This came as a total shock
to me, for, as an Evangelical Protestant, I most
certainly believed that the Bible contained
everything that we needed to run the Church, to find
salvation, and to live the Christian life. Yet I
couldn’t deny these claims I was hearing from devout
Roman Catholics I corresponded with via email and
spoke with on campus, as I myself had seen the
confusion and disunity within the Protestant world
among those who claimed to use Scripture alone as
their guide.
With these
two gauntlets thrown down at my feet—that the first
Christians to hear and proclaim the Gospel believed
in a sacramental view of the Eucharist and that they
did so authoritatively without a concrete Bible in
hand—flew in the face of my Evangelical preconceived
ideas that the New Testament documents “founded” the
Church, “clearly taught” symbolic views of
communion, and were absolutely (and solely)
necessary for knowing how to live the Christian
life. However, not one to be content with merely
taking “some guy’s website’s” word for it, I decided
to devote my spare time to the reading of the
“source documents”—those documents written by the
men themselves—of the trainees of the Apostles, as
well as those of the trainees’ trainees, and so on,
through the years wherein the Church suffered
persecution for and was under the constant threat of
martyrdom for her beliefs. If I was to ascertain the
truth as to what Christians believed and were
willing to die for in those early years, I thought,
I’d have a much better grasp of the issues these
websites and colleagues were making claims about.
Over the next nine months or so, I did just that,
and more, even to the detriment of my English Ed and
Spanish studies (and sleep!) for a while. I became
known as “That guy who’s always reading those Greek
guys I can’t pronounce” around campus, but I didn’t
care. I was determined to see if the claims the
Catholics were making were true, or even partially
true, concerning the beliefs of Christianity as
received by the original hearers. As it turns out, I
didn’t have far to go before I would leave
Evangelicalism as a whole for good.
I found the
first group of documents I’d need, conveniently, in
one little volume. The title of this quick, easy
read is usually just The Apostolic Fathers
and is available through many bookstores (or online
here). The
book gets its name—“Apostolic”—because the men who
wrote the epistles that comprise the book were men
who were trained personally by one (or more) of the
original apostles. Here I read to my heart’s content
the beliefs of the immediately post-apostolic Church
in their own words and, while certain things like
free will vs. predestination were settled according
to “my liking”—the Church declared with one voice
that it was very much up to man to respond to the
calling and grace of God—I have to say, what I read
concerning other issues troubled me quite a bit.
There were several things that any good Baptist
would take issue with within these men’s writings:
-
Baptism
was seen as the moment when a believer is fully
and truly born again
-
Infants
were admitted to baptism
-
Worship
was seen as liturgical and directly connected to
Jewish ritual worship; spontaneous worship was
nowhere to be seen
-
Obedience to one’s bishop and/or priest was seen
as a direct measure of whether one was an
obedient Christian
-
Salvation was seen as something that was a
process and which the believer could, after
having started it, forfeit through later
unbelief
-
Fasting
was outlined specifically before the end of the
first century, and the way it was to be done was
expected churchwide, not individually
-
The
departed saints, as well as the angels, were
seen as and sought as intercessors in prayer for
those still in the flesh
-
The
Church was seen as a single, visible body of
believers that was guided by the Holy Spirit and
protected from error; one of its chief
characteristics was that its bishops (and, by
extension, priests) could trace their ordination
through the laying on of hands back to one of
the apostles themselves
-
Salvation was never discussed in terms of Christ
paying a debt to God the Father, but rather in
terms of His defeating death by His Incarnation,
transfiguration, death, and resurrection
-
The
Eucharist was, time and again, referred to as
the true Body and Blood of Jesus Christ
Himself
My journey
into the first century and a half of Christianity
had left me, then, not with comforting answers of
Evangelicalism’s fidelity to the New Testament
Church, but with many more issues to confront. The
second century, with the insistence of Irenaeus and
others on an intermediate state of the dead between
the end of this life and the final Judgement, along
with affirmation of the beliefs of the Fathers of
the first century, offered little promise to
aligning itself with my current beliefs. Either the
Church had slipped dangerously “off the
rails” immediately after the death of the
last apostle, or my reading of Scripture—and that of
Evangelicals everywhere—was dangerously
off-base! Still, like any good Evangelical, my first
retort to all this was…
BUT…THAT’S NOT IN
THE BIBLE!
I quickly
realized, however, that what I was really saying
was, “That’s not the
way I read the Bible.” I had
already established to my own satisfaction that
prefacing my beliefs with the phrase, “The Bible
says,” while being a recognition of Scripture’s
trustworthiness, was rather futile, as I could “make
the Bible say” whatever I wanted it to say 2,000
years later, depending on my denomination’s
tradition. This was when what should have been
obvious all along really hit home: All
denominations, even if they say they’re just reading
Scripture, are filtering it through a tradition of
some sort. Many Protestants will admit this
readily, merely saying that their particular
tradition is the most faithful to the authors’
original intent. However, how will one prove this?
By appealing to the Scripture? Other groups claiming
as much do the same. The issue then becomes this:
who do we choose to tell us how to read Scripture?
If, therefore, we go to the ones who first
received the Scriptures (and had the added bonus
of being trained by the very authors of the New
Testament), we perhaps will receive some insight
into those issues that divide us and resolve the
difficulty. Indeed, on many issues that divide
Protestants today, the early Church was united.
Giving those bishops a voice in telling us how to
interpret Scripture seemed only fair, since they
were infinitely closer in time, language and culture
to the actual writers of the documents.
Now, this is
not to say that I just gave up reading Scripture and
blindly “took these ancient guys’ words for it.”
After reading the Apostolic Fathers, I went back and
re-read the Scriptures I had always used to combat
Roman Catholics (and others) concerning these
issues, as well as ones that the Fathers themselves
had made reference to. Almost without exception, the
verses the Apostolic Fathers referenced were ones I
had either “skipped over” unconsciously or had never
been instructed on in detail by Protestant pastors
or teachers. The joke among us
former-Protestants-turned-Orthodox is that Orthodoxy
is biblical; it’s just found in
everything we didn’t underline in our Bibles as
Protestants! I slowly began to see that the very
doctrines I had fought so hard against as being
“inventions of men” had, in reality, their roots in
Scripture itself, and were elaborated on in the
beginning by those who sat at the feet of the
writers of Scripture themselves.
All of these issues, however, began to pale in the
face of one new question that, though both my
newfound reading of Scripture and the insight from
the Fathers, threatened to trump all other issues I
might have...
The Church,
St. Paul says, is the “pillar and ground of the
truth,” and the “household of God.” Christ said that
the Holy Spirit would “guide [the Church] into all
truth” and that “the gates of hell will not prevail”
against Her. He also gave the apostles—the leaders
of the Church—the power to forgive or retain the
sins of other men: “If you forgive the sins of men,
they are forgiven...whatsoever you bind on earth
shall be bound in heaven.” There was an authority
given to this Church that was founded on the
apostles by Christ and that was directly related to
heavenly grace being given to men. It was this
Church, this community of faith, that wrote the
Scriptures of the New Testament and eventually
compiled them under this same claim of Holy Spirit
inspiration. I began to realize that the reason I
could trust the Holy Bible was because it had been
compiled by a specific group, a certain assembly of
clergy and laity that had as their promise from
Christ Himself that they would be led into all truth
and kept from error. If I trusted this Church to
hear clearly enough from God to compile the
Scriptures correctly, then I needed, at the very
least, to give them a serious benefit of a doubt
concerning the interpretation of said Scriptures.
This was not, obviously, the first issue I
investigated upon looking into the Fathers, but it
was, quite possibly, the most significant question
to face. The Church was seen, not as an “invisible”
entity whose members were only known to God and who
were all members of different and separate
denominations who differed between themselves on
major matters of doctrine. Rather, the Church was
one, visible group of people one could definitively
point out and who were unified in all matters of
doctrine and practice, who took the Apostle Paul at
his word when he proclaimed that there was “one
Lord, one Faith, one baptism,” not several faiths or
several dramatic variations on one faith who could
be “separate but still one.” What this meant for me
was that I couldn’t just be content to be a part of
a denomination (or several ones at once) that held
to doctrines that not only contradicted each other
but (more importantly) the beliefs of the initial
and singular Christian Church and say that I was
still, somehow, in that Church that Christ founded.
If these were the beliefs of the one, authoritative,
original Church, I needed to find out if this Church
was still around. To summarize about a nine-month
period of time in a half of a paragraph, I looked in
the Episcopalian Church (as well as a couple of
“offshoot,” non-mainstream Episcopal denominations),
but many issues such as homosexuality and female
clergy led me to search in Roman Catholicism for a
time. I loved the (high) mass, as it was an extended
version of the reverence I had seen in the ORU Noon
Communion services. I had some issues, however, with
the idea that one bishop—the Pope of Rome—held the
authority of supreme bishop over all other bishops,
as well as with the idea that Christians whose sins
were forgiven in confession still had to go to
Purgatory because they didn’t have enough “merit” to
satisfy the justice of God the Father and enter
heaven yet.
It was there, however, where I first heard about
Orthodoxy. I knew almost nothing about the Orthodox
Church at the time, but I looked a local parish up
on the Internet and, on the Feast of the Entrance of
the Theotokos in the Temple
of 1999 (Fall of my sophomore year), I attended my
first Orthodox service in Tulsa, OK at a
mostly-Lebanese parish.
I
absolutely couldn’t stand it.
The worship
was so foreign and repetitive, the chant so Middle
Eastern, the saints so unknown—in spite of the fact
that there were certain resemblances to
Hebrew worship, I was wanting to go back to the
familiar, more western services I found so
beautiful. Nevertheless, I stayed and told the
parish priest afterwards about some of the things
I’d been wrestling with. To my surprise, he was
quite knowledgeable about the very documents I had
been reading. After a few more visits to the parish
and a few more talks with the priest (as well as a
lot of prayer), I began to get a feeling that, in
this Church of supposedly “strange” worship and
“foreign” practice there just might be all the
things I had read about in the Apostolic Fathers and
beyond. By the end of that school year, it was clear
to me: here is a Church where the doctrines and
spiritual disciplines of true prayer and fasting of
the early Church are all accepted and practiced, a
Church which could trace its origins directly back
to the apostles themselves, and who saw themselves
as the “one, holy catholic and apostolic Church”
that they confessed in their creed every Sunday, a
Church who worshipped the King of Glory as a great
God who is greatly to be praised, in a manner worthy
of all of His might and holiness--the one Church
which was founded by Christ. After approximately
another year and a half of further questions, more
regular attendance (I had to eventually give up my
post at my Baptist Church, obviously), and much more
prayer and fasting according to the ancient and
glorious rule of these Middle Eastern Christians, I
was received into the Holy Orthodox Church by
chrismation
on Orthodox Holy Saturday,
2001. I was blessed, then, to have my first taste of
the true Body and Blood of my Lord on Pascha (or
Easter) night. It has been a long journey, but I
feel as if I have truly arrived at the “ground zero”
of Christianity, to the simple faith of our
Incarnate Lord and His twelve Apostles. My discovery
has led to the most intimate of ways of being “in
Christ” that I’ve ever known: baptized into His very
death and brought out of the water as from a womb
(or tomb) into His life, anointed with oil and given
His Holy Spirit, nourished in body and spirit by
feeding on and merging with His very Body and
Blood, and taught by the direct spiritual
descendants of the New Testament writers—all this,
in order to acquire the Holy Spirit and to be
changed into Christ’s image and likeness--a
life-long process called theosis.
It’s my hope that Evangelicals everywhere
will discover how the “New Testament Church” truly
was and come home to the mother of all Churches:
holy Orthodoxy.
She’s waiting, and so is her Lord.
=====================================
APPENDIX A:
THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS ON SEVERAL ORTHODOX DOCTRINES
-
The Didache: Meaning “the teaching of the
Twelve,” it was written during the heart of the
New Testament era. Clear instructions for
baptism were given, and it was to be done by
triple immersion, not single as had been done to
me. Fasting rules were also given, which was
something I had not had exposure to as a
church-wide expectation but only as an
individual prompting. Most interesting were the
instructions for the Eucharist; the service had
prayers prescribed for it, and the service was
seen as a sacrifice akin to the Old Testament
tabernacle service, with the bread being the
“Lamb,” that was slain—again another reference
paralleling Christ to the bread—and the means by
which we were all united to each other.
-
I and II Clement: Here things got a bit
hairier. One of the first bishops of Rome—not
the first, but still trained by an apostle— made
clear distinctions between clergy and laity in
terms of spiritual authority—submission to the
bishop in all things being one of the points
alluded to—and an interesting phrase: “Preserve
your baptismal garment” until the last day. Not
only did Clement seem to attach some
significance to baptism that Baptists,
themselves named after the institution,
did not, he also seemed to say that one needed
to work to preserve one’s salvation
instead of believing in “once saved, always
saved.”
-
Ignatius of Antioch and The Martyrdom of
Ignatius: If I had been concerned
about issues of the authority of (and our
submission to) a bishop or priest posed by
Clement, I was about to get those concerns
pushed to new levels with Ignatius. Placed in
Antioch by either Peter or Paul (probably both
had something to do with it), he was ordained a
bishop in the heart of the New Testament era by
two very reliable sources. Yet here he was,
saying things like, “Where the bishop is, there
is the catholic Church” and “It is clear,
therefore, that we should look upon the bishop
even as we would upon the Lord Himself.” Most
interestingly, though, was the realization that
I could not refute the Roman Catholics’ claims
of Ignatius’ support for the Real Presence in
the Eucharist; the quotes they took from him
were most definitely in context. Ignatius was a
bishop at the beginning of the second century
(right after the apostle John died in exile on
Patmos) and he was martyred during the first
half of that century. After his martyrdom, the
faithful who were under his care were praying
together, no doubt to console themselves, when
Ignatius himself appeared in their midst, and he
appeared to be dripping with sweat, as if he had
undergone a great trial (which, obviously, he
had just done). More than that, he was praying
for them. This idea—that departed Christians
could pray for us—was one of the main objections
we Evangelicals had against Rome, yet here it
was, in the first/second century AD, attested to
by a beloved presbyter of the Church. So now,
not only did I have a sacramentally-minded
Father on my hands, but one who, in unison with
his Christian brother in Rome, insisted on
submission to a hierarchical system of “bishops,
priests and deacons” and who revealed to his
flock--after his own departing from this life,
no less!--that the Christians in the next life
pray for those in this one. More questions
loomed...
-
Polycarp of Smyrna: Polycarp of Smyrna
was also a bishop in the late first and early
second century, the direct appointee of John the
Apostle. He, too, was martyred by being burned
at the stake, and when asked to renounce Christ,
said that he had been a Christian for all his 86
years--not just after he had grown to the age
where he could decide for himself to become a
Christian--and since Christ had never denied
him, he would not deny Him. Along with being an
amazing story of committment of Christ even to
the point of death, this also attested to the
practice of infant baptism within the infant
Church.
-
Justin Martyr: Justin was a learned Greek
philosopher who converted to Christianity and
wrote several defenses of the faith in response
to pagan misunderstandings. Within his writings
we once again find an insistence—spelled out
correctly in the quotes by the Roman
Catholics—that the Church insisted on the change
of the bread and the wine into the true
Body and Blood of our Lord, “who was crucified
for us.” More than that, however, Justin
elaborated on the set prayers found in the
Didache. He had a set order of worship that
mirrored first the Jewish synagogue service with
the reading of the Old Testament, plus whichever
New Testament epistles a congregation happened
to have (if they had any at all), then the
Jewish Temple sacrifice (which was no longer
done by that time, as the Temple had been
destroyed) through the offering of the sacrifice
of the Eucharist, with the consecration of the
elements of bread and wine being prayed over by
the “president” of the congregation and
afterwards being consumed as the Body and Blood
of Christ, and no longer as mere bread and wine.
I was to read later a third-century bishop,
Hippolytus, repeat this same exact order of
service, only to follow it with the claim that
“all Christians, in all places, worship in this
manner.”
-
The Shepherd of Hermas: This was an
epistle written in the first, perhaps early
second century. Notable here is the continued
emphasis of salvation at the moment of baptism,
and the intercession for the living by heavenly
beings (in this case, an angel).
-
The Fragments of Papias: “Fragments”
because much of the original manuscripts have
been lost. Nevertheless, he sat at the feet of
one “who sat at the feet of John, who sat at the
feet of Christ” and not only records sayings of
the Lord that were not recorded in the gospel,
but holds the oral passing down of information
to be more reliable than “even the written
word.”
=====================================
APPENDIX B:
SCRIPTURAL DISCUSSION OF CATHOLIC DOCTRINES: PRO
AND CONTRA
Since
attempting to state both sides of the debates on
each of these points would be, not only
time-consuming, but also unfair to Protestants (as
would an attempt by Protestants to depict Orthodox
belief), I’ll just state some common objections many
Evangelicals have to the teachings of the Orthodox
Church (and which I have heard myself) on the basis
of their reading of Scripture and how, from
Scripture alone, the Orthodox Church can answer them
(though is not limited to doing so).
-
The Orthodox
Church believes that you are saved through works
like baptism and frequent communion, as well as
church attendance and confession to a priest,
whereas the Bible says that we are saved by
grace through faith alone. It is true
that, in Ephesians 2:8-10, St. Paul says we’re
saved by grace through faith, and not by works.
Yet he was speaking to Jews about the works of
the Old Testament, apart from Christ.
The phrase “the works of the law” is key to
understanding this, as in Romans 9:32 and
Galatians 2:16; 3:2, 5 and 10. St. Paul never
said that nothing that was an effort of any kind
on the part of man would be required for
salvation, only that such works would only have
meaning if they were accompanied by faith in
Christ. This was his point, not a “just believe
in your heart and you’re saved” sort of
salvation.
-
When the Lord
said, “This is My body,” He was speaking
symbolically, like when He said, “I am the
Door.” Well, apart from the fact that He
really is the door to eternal life,
spiritually (not just symbolically—the
difference is important!) speaking, you’re right
about the door comment: He’s not a six-foot
plank with a knob. He did, however, say that
“unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man you
have no life in you” in John 6. The phrase “eat
the flesh,” if taken metaphorically, means
“revile and put down.” Surely Christ was not
saying that unless we insult Him we have no life
in us! Rather, His use of language was so
readily understood as literal by the hearers
that it was too much for many of them, and the
Bible says they “walked with Him no more.” The
next time eating the Body and Blood of Christ is
mentioned is at the Last Supper, when all Christ
says is “this is my Body.” Surely, even if one
is unwilling to admit even the possibility
of Christ’s speaking literally here, we can see
that this is where He puts the passage in
John 6 to work and that, if we do not partake of
communion (at the very least), we have no life
in us—this is another example of something we
do—yet do in faith—in cooperation
with God and for our own salvation.
Nevertheless, to further the point of Christ’s
presence in the Eucharist, in 1 Corinthians
10:16-7, St. Paul describes the bread as being
the “communion of the Body of Christ” and the
wine as the “communion of the Blood of Christ”—a
word meaning “participation in and with”—and
says that men have grown sick and died from
partaking unworthily of it—something like that
doesn’t happen if it’s just a symbol.
-
The Orthodox
submit to bishops and priests as teaching
authorities, whereas Christ said to go by the
Scripture. Actually, Christ, a teacher of
Israel Himself, corrected the Pharisees on their
doctrine, but told those under the spiritual
authority of the Pharisees that, “whatever they
[the Pharisees] tell you to observe, that
observe and do,” because “[t]he scribes and the
Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat.” So submission to
authority is expected from Christ, as well as
from the Apostles (Hebrews 13:7, 17). The catch,
however, is that, even though the faithful need
to obey those in authority over them, they must
not “do not do according to [the leaders own]
works” if those leaders “say, and do not do”
what they themselves teach. The question now is
this: which authoritative body should we as
Christians trust to teach us about the
Scriptures and the Christian life? A body that
follows what was believed even in the very
beginning of Christendom? Or one that follows
ideas only a few centuries old?
-
The Orthodox
Church believes in “baptismal regeneration,” or
the idea that a man is saved by being baptized,
but the Scripture says we’re saved by grace
through faith, not baptism. St.
Peter says that there is a type of water “which
now saves us,” and that water is baptism (1 Pet.
3:21). Like he says in the last part of the
verse, though, the Orthodox Church recognizes
that there’s nothing magical about just getting
wet, but rather obeying Christ in faith in
this manner that prompts the new birth of a
man. As St. Paul says, “as many of us as were
baptized into Christ Jesus” have both “put on
Christ” Himself (Galatians 3:27) and “were
baptized into His death” (Romans 6:3). In the
Bible, then, this is all connected to responding
in faith, yes, but it is accomplished when we do
so in a specific way: by being baptized.
To say that baptism plays no role in our
salvation, we believe, goes against Holy
Scripture.
-
The Bible says
that the death of Christ on the Cross was a
payment to satisfy the justice of a Holy God,
Whom our sins had offended. The Orthodox Church
ignores the Cross’ purpose and serves instead to
emphasize only the resurrection and other parts
of Christ’s life. The Orthodox most
certainly do not ignore the Cross. Our
differences lie, rather, in what we believe
was done on the Cross. Christ said He came
“to give His life a ransom for many” (Matt.
20:28; Mk. 10:45), but it does not say that this
ransom was paid to God the Father—how could we
ever make our Creator our Captor from whom we’d
need to be delivered?—rather, the ransom was
“paid” to hell and death (Heb. 2:15). Yet we
don’t see this as Christ “giving in” to death or
being under the power of death (even though He
did make Himself subject to death before the
Father exalted Him (Phil. 2:8)). Rather, when
Christ “paid the ransom,” he led death captive
(Ps. 68:18; cf. Eph. 4:8) and indeed is now in
the process of destroying death as “the last
enemy” (1 Cor 15:26). He takes on our corrupt
human flesh, and redeems it with His divine
nature, since He is God, and thus reconciles all
things, including human nature, to himself (Col.
1:20). We then unite to His flesh through
baptism, then commune with His flesh and blood
through the Eucharist (thus partaking of His
divine nature as St. Peter wrote in 2 Pet. 1:4),
and are ultimately saved at the end of time—soul
and body—from death’s finality, not from
the offended vengeance of the Father.
-
The Orthodox
Church baptizes infants, a practice which is
found nowhere in Scripture. Rather, the
Scripture shows adults making the decision for
themselves to be baptized and exercising their
own faith in the process. While it is
true that there are many instances of adults
making the decision to be baptized in the
Scriptures, this is to be expected, as
Christianity was a brand-new religion at the
time, and most of the converts would be adults.
But we do not limit baptism to adults, and
neither do the Scriptures, we believe. Peter
says in Acts 2 that the baptism for the
remission of sins is for “you and your children”
(vv. 38:39)—and the Greek word used is not for
youths who can choose, but for small children
still under the care of their parents. Again,
salvation is included for all within a household
in Acts 16:31, and this would presumably include
small children. For a clear injunction to see
baptism as appropriate for children, however,
see St. Paul’s comments in Col. 2:11-12. Baptism
in this passage is seen as the new circumcision
for Christians; if God had no qualms about
circumcising a boy at eight days of age to bring
him into the people of Israel, it stands to
reason that, since baptism is the fulfillment of
circumcision, He would accept the bringing of an
infant to the baptismal font to become a part of
His Church.
-
Orthodox
Christians ask departed Christians to pray for
them, but the Bible says that it is appointed
for men to die once, then after that, the
Judgement occurs. The Bible also says that there
is one mediator between God and man, and that is
Jesus. Why do you then set up other mediators to
pray to Jesus for you? Actually, the
verse in Hebrews that you quote, along with the
one after it (9:27-28) say this: “And as it is
appointed for men to die once, but after this
the judgment, so Christ was offered once to bear
the sins of many. To those who eagerly wait for
Him He will appear a second time, apart from
sin, for salvation.” There is no mention of what
happens between death and the Judgement, and
from the wording of the verse, it could
be construed that the dead are “eagerly waiting”
for the Second Coming of the Lord, even as we
are. Recall that Jesus said that the departed
are not really dead, but alive, as God is
not the God of the dead, but of the living, and
all live in Him (Matt. 22:32; Mk. 12:27; Luke
20:38). Revelation 5:1-14 and 8:3-4 show what
goes on in heaven before that Judgement: the
elders and angels carry the incense—which is the
prayers of the saints on earth—before the Throne
of God. Clearly they are playing a part in our
prayers’ reaching God. As for the “one mediator”
passage, we do not see any difference between
asking a departed saint to pray for us and
asking a Christian here on earth to pray for us,
since neither person is separated from Christ's
Body--the Church--and both are therefore still
alive in Him. We wouldn’t call the Christian we
ask to pray for us a “mediator” in place of
Christ; why should we do so with a departed
Christian who has lived faithfully for Him in
this life and now stands before Him directly?
-
The Orthodox
Church has highly ritualistic liturgy as its
method of worship, a pattern which is found
nowhere in Scripture and which keeps the
individual from expressing himself or herself to
God through its dead, stifled forms.
Worship in the Orthodox Church is meant to
pattern itself after the worship of heaven, as
seen in Isaiah 6 and Revelation, wherein the
same thing is sung again and again because the
worshippers can never do the holiness of God
justice. The Jewish tabernacle was also
patterned—and very specifically so in the Old
Testament—after this heavenly worship, and it is
this pattern that is continued on in the
Orthodox Church. Liturgical worship is not only
biblically based, but revealed as the worship
before the very Throne of God! This doesn’t have
to stifle us, as it’s been said that liturgy is
not dead or alive, but rather either true or
false. It’s people who are either dead or
alive. What needs to happen is for Christians
who truly long for God to pray true prayer, and
this happens in vibrant Orthodox churches
through the liturgical life of 2,000 years. At
the start of those 2,000 years, in Acts 2:42, we
read that, as good Israelites, the first
Christians devoted themselves to fellowship, the
breaking of bread (which we see as communion)
and “the prayers,” as it reads in Greek (but is
translated as just “prayer” in many English
Bibles). This acknowledgement of “the
prayers” shows that, from the beginning,
Christian worship came from set prayers.
-
II Tim. 3:16-17
says that the Bible is all that is needed for a
Christian to be “complete, thoroughly equipped
for every good work.” The Orthodox Church,
however, teaches that a Christian needs the
tradition of the Church to interpret Scripture,
thus making Tradition equal to Scripture, which
Christ condemns in Matt. 15. This verse
doesn’t specifically say that Scripture is
all we
need; it’s simply all that’s mentioned
in that
particular verse. To say that nothing
else is needed is too much. To use a parallel
example, in Ephesians 4:13-15 we read that God
gave us teachers, apostles, and all kinds of
ministers so that we all can “come to the unity
of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of
God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the
stature of the fullness of Christ...[and] grow
up in all things into Him who is the
head—Christ.” Nowhere in all of that call to
perfection is Scripture mentioned as a part of
that process, but we would not therefore exclude
Scripture from that process because of this one
passage. Rather, we understand that, just as St.
Paul said in 2 Thessalonians 2:15, the apostles
taught some things through their writings, but
there were many things (such as teachings on how
to worship, for example) that were taught orally
and never written down in canonical Scripture
that are key to understanding things that
were written down. Christ’s rejection of
certain anti-biblical traditions, by the
way, was not a condemnation of all things
not found in Scripture, but rather only of
things that go against the Scriptures.
While Christ condemned the Corban rule as going
against the Fifth Commandment (Mk. 7:11), He
supported the tradition of “Moses’ seat,”
mentioned by Christ in Matt. 23:2, which is not
found anywhere in the Old Testament but rather
in extra-biblical Jewish tradition.
-
The Orthodox
kiss icons of Christ, Mary and the saints. These
are graven images, and the Orthodox therefore
practice idolatry, which is condemned by the
Second Commandment. If one reads just a
bit further in Scripture after the Ten
Commandments are given, we find God Himself
giving instructions for images of angels to be
woven into the cloths of the Tabernacle, and for
two large statues of angels to be made and
placed on either side of the Ark of the
Covenant. Obviously, the commandment does not
prohibit all images, only those of the
invisible true God or those of a false God. Yet
God is no longer invisible and unable to be
depicted as He was in the Old Testament.
Colossians 1:15 says that Christ “is the image
of the invisible God”; if God prohibited
depictions of Himself in the Old Testament
because He had not yet made Himself visible,
then now, since He has made Himself visible in
Christ, an image of Him is not only therefore
honorable, but necessary to proclaim that God
truly has come in the flesh. Regarding honoring
and kissing icons: the instructions for the Old
Testament Temple also include instructions for
honoring the Ark with incense, which is akin to
our censing and kissing His image and those of
His holy ones, who are themselves "arks" that
contain His Holy Spirit.
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The Bible in
John 10:28 says that Christ’s sheep are His, and
that no man shall take them out of His hand. It
also says in Romans 8:31 that those whom He
justified, He will also glorify. This shows that
salvation can never be lost, while the Orthodox
Church teaches that man can lose his salvation.
While it could be stated that Protestants as a
whole are not in agreement about this teaching
of the Bible, suffice it to say that, if it were
the understanding that a believer, once secured
in the salvation of Christ, could never and
would never fall away, the numerous warnings by
the apostles of the possibility of falling away
or believing in vain, and the understanding that
our enduring to the end was an “if” that we had
to ensure the completion of (1 Cor 10:12; Rom.
8:17; Col. 1:23; 1 Thess. 3:5; 1 Tim. 2:11-12; 2
Pet. 2:20-22), would be out of place, at best.
Rather, we are “God’s co-laborers” in all
things; He initiates, guides, and completes our
salvation, but He will not force us at any
moment to continue with Him. Rather, we must
cooperate with Him at all times. If we cease to
do this along the way, God will not force
salvation upon us, as we clearly no longer want
it.
NOTES
It should be
stated at the outset that this essay is not meant to
be a justification of every single doctrine of the
Orthodox Church, nor is it meant to reflect every
struggle or issue I encountered on my way to the
Church. Rather, it will merely summarize the main
problems I found within Protestantism, and the main
points that convinced me of the Orthodox Church’s
faithfulness to original Christianity.
_______________________________
About the Author:
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Name:
David B
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Location:
New York, United States
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General
info: I'm a husband, a daddy, a former
high school Spanish teacher, and a reader/seminarian
in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Here you can
read the thoughts of someone who's trying to
cooperate with God to live life both as
Eucharist--that is, as one thankfully being
transfigured by and for God--and as Icon--that
is, as an ever-clearing window that bears
witness to God's union with man. Thanks for
stoppin' by.
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