Transcription
Hello friends. Today we're exploring why the claims of Orthodox Christianity are so difficult. But first, I want to give a shout out to our friends over at Barbell Apparel. Lightweight joggers. Awesome. Super comfortable.
So, here's the thing. When I was growing up, my dad was a Protestant minister and I grew up around Protestantism my whole life. I drifted obviously away from it when I was 14 and then came back really when I was 17 and 18 and really made a conscious choice when I was 18 to turn my life over to Christ and to turn my life around particularly obviously my behavior and to enter into that path of repentance.
Fast forward six years, I was 24ish. I was in college, took a class on Eastern Orthodoxy and church history and began to study church history. And this process was, I could say, kind of deeply unsettling for me because even though I had been in university for 3 years, even though I felt like I had such a good grasp on Christianity, I I realized right off the bat that what I believed in was not really in line with what the early church taught. And it actually didn't align itself very accurately with church history.
For instance, one of the five core tenants of the reformation is this idea of solely scriptorra, the authority of the scripture. Well, I take a history class and I'm learning about it and it's taught from a Protestant professor and he says, "Look, you know, the the Bible, the New Testament was not codified really for 300 years." And not only that, but people were illiterate. It was very expensive to make uh duplicates of the writings of the apostles and sending them around the world was difficult as well. And so most people couldn't read the Bible. They didn't have all of the books of the New Testament. And whatever they had was basically read in church and it was read by those who were literate. And other than that, people weren't at home studying their Bibles. And I realized in that moment like there's no way solely scriptor is true because it's not like the church didn't have the Bible for 50 years or a hundred years. We're talking hundreds of years that people were not studying reading their Bibles at home. That didn't even exist.
And so one of those first claims that I encountered of orthodoxy was listen the Bible is not the authority. The Bible is an authority, but it's not the ultimate authority because every time you read the Bible, it requires interpretation. And so then we have to know what the interpretation is and who's providing the interpretation. And how do we know that we have the correct interpretation? And my life as a Protestant over those six years, I had changed my theological views over time, all the while still reading the same Bible. came to realize like I thought other Protestants were wrong in their interpretations of the Bible as well. But there was no commonality in our theology. And so this claim from orthodoxy was listen the authority is not the Bible. The authority is the church which interprets the holy scripture under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That is what creates sound and correct doctrine. That's a big claim because when you've lived for so long with just me and my Bible and now all of a sudden it's like not me and my Bible, it's me and the church, it is actually changing the whole compass of who the authority is. In the past, I would have said it was the Bible. But the reality was it wasn't the Bible. It was my interpretation of the Bible. So in actuality, I was the authority because I was the one interpreting it.
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And so these claims were very difficult because now I'm not the center. Now I'm not the referential point. And then we move on to things like icons where historically speaking the church always venerated icons. That icons were a part of the Christian faith. that they were a natural expression of what we believe and that they were part of Christian worship from the very beginning. And here I was, I had no icons. I didn't even know what to think about icons. In fact, the first liturgy I went to, I saw a young child kissing icons. And I remember thinking, for this child, it's totally normal and natural, but I can't imagine myself doing it because it's so different. And I don't want to say it was weird, but it was so different for me. That was a very difficult claim that the church was making, the Orthodox church was making, was that venerations are a healthy and natural and normal and essential part of our Christian faith.
Then I begin to learn more about the theology of the Orthodox Church. And the Orthodox Church says, "Listen, we don't really care what your interpretation is. There's one theology. The church has one theology. And for you to become orthodox, you have to follow that one theology. You can't have your hodgepodge amalgamation of theology that you think is true." And what was so interesting for me was in the university that I went to, even the professors in the religious department who are all Protestants, even they couldn't agree on a commonality of theology. Like they held different views regarding different topics that were related to the Christian faith.
Then I began to see that Protestantism makes this claim that we all believe in the essentials. But then the the question becomes like well what are the essentials of the Christian faith because that's not laid out by St. Paul. He never says these are the essentials that you have to believe. And then I started to understand historically things like baptism the view of the church on baptism. And there's no consistent view of baptism within Protestantism. Some baptize the babies, some don't. Some wait for a certain age. Some do triple immersion, some do single immersion in Jesus's name. They don't even view baptism as being for the remission of sins, even though that's what Jesus Christ teaches in the Gospels. And it's what's affirmed in the Nian Creed.
And so I started to have like this really strong kind of titanic shift in my thinking which was orthodoxy is this authority that it is claiming is from Christ through the apostles and is easily followed and documented in church history and the church councils. And here I am off in kind of outer space doing my own thing, but I'm kind of doing my own thing with everybody around me who's also doing their own thing. And I've become conditioned to think that this is normal. But goodness, how hard is it to make the shift to actually come under the authority of the church? How hard is it to give up being kind of a little pope in my own world with my own interpretations and my own view of Christianity? And I realized if I'm going to become Orthodox, it's not like I have to change a little bit. I have to change a lot. And not only that, the Orthodox Church is not saying that there's any way for me to be Orthodox while still holding my own views, my own particular thoughts or feelings or whatever about a whole variety of theological topics and life in the church. Like the Orthodox church is not changing for me even if I want it to change. And that's why those claims were so hard. Those claims were so hard because there was no kind of individuality. There was no nuance and there was no way for me to kind of exist by myself.
In fact, even when I encountered the idea of confession in the Orthodox church, I was used to being Protestant. Like maybe you told somebody whatever if you had a struggle with X, Y, or Z or maybe you talked about something, whatever. But you didn't never you never had to go systematically to somebody and lay out all of your sins. And so even that idea of uncovering who I was or uncovering my whole life, but then I started to shift and I started to realize like everything within the church was a safeguard against the individuality that I was holding on to. The confession of sins was for my soul. It wasn't so the priest knew what I was doing and God already knew what I was doing. It was so that I could unbburden my soul and receive forgiveness, which is the forgiveness that Christ gives to the apostles when he tells them, "I have given you power on earth to bind and loose sins. Whatever sins you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Whatever sins you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven."
And so those things that I was experiencing experientially within my own soul that were still holding on to me, I realized confession is to get rid of that. My own theological interpretation of whatever which changed over time is unreliable and unpredictable. I actually need someone to tell me what to believe. And I need to understand that when I believe what the church is teaching me, this is the same teaching for 2,000 years. So what are the odds that the church fathers were teaching exactly what the apostles handed on to them? Well, obviously very high, right? What were the odds that somebody 1500 years later, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Zwingley, the Anabaptists, as they were rebelling against the Roman Catholic Church, came up with this pseudo theology that wasn't even the same as the church fathers. Well, it became apparent like it was pretty high that they just kind of created their own theological system. And that theological system was a response to Catholicism, but it was not the early Christian theology regarding Christ.
And so when we encounter the Orthodox Church, we're encountering something that is its own authority. We're encountering something that is making absolute claims, right? Like as a Protestant, you say, "I am a Christian and this is the path of salvation." And then all of a sudden, Orthodoxy says, "I'm sorry, brother, but the path is much narrower and the teachings and the life of faith are much more specific and the sacraments have real power." And you kind of go from this broad highway to this narrow path. And you have to ask yourself, well, if I give up all of what I have, am I going to find something better or more deeper here? because I felt at the time like my relationship with Christ was very stagnant and I could see in orthodoxy the lives and the writings of the saints and the intimacy that they had with Christ was so profound that I knew there was something that was drawing me into orthodoxy. But if I was really really honest, it was a lot of my pride and my ego that I was struggling with. It was a lot of my own way of doing things that I found so hard to give up. And so that was the hardest thing to overcome about orthodoxy. It wasn't what orthodoxy was claiming. It was the fact that I wanted to kind of run my own show and do things the way that I wanted to do it. And in orthodoxy, I was going to have to allow Christ to play a greater role in my life. And I was going to have to submit some of my own personal authority to the apostolic lineage and the faith that was handed down by the apostles. God bless.