Redeemed Zoomer Vs Jay Dyer

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah [Music] [Music] [Music] what up what we're going to go over the differences between Calvinism and Orthodoxy so we have redeem Zoomer and Jay dyer for those who don't know redeem Zoomer one of the fast growing channels on YouTube some of his videos gotten over millions of views lots of my audience love his videos because it's you know Zoomer content straight to the point um like me he's kind of RIS secular but he became a calvinist and we're GNA kind of get into that and then of course we have j d one of the most popular Orthodox apologists he's a philosopher comedian singer geopolitics he he he does he does it all but uh Jay's his like signature issue is reform theology he went to bonson Seminary so I thought connecting redeem Zimmer and Jay Dyer would be very good um so I think it's going to be a great stream thanks for both for joining us but just for those who don't know regim Zoomer can you explain you know from secularism what led you specifically to Calvinism in the Presbyterian Church um USA yeah well thank you Kyle for uh having me on again it's going to be great uh thanks for this opportunity so yes as Kyle already said I was raised in a very secular part of the country where it was basically ridiculous to take religion seriously in my generation Generation Z all of that changed when I went to the Midwest I was going to like a a music summer camp but it was also a Christian themed camp and it was partly sponsored by the Presbyterian church because it was run by an oberin Professor who was a devout Presbyterian and he basically shaped the camp according to his vision of what the the kingdom of God should look like and I saw the beauty of the kingdom of God there I saw the goodness truth and beut beauty of Christianity there and that completely changed my perspective I learned that the stereotypes I had heard about Christians all my life were completely wrong it wasn't true that Christians were all a bunch of dumb anti-intellectual Hillbillies like I was raised to believe in my Public School um so once I saw that I became Christian I didn't immediately abandon leftism but I gradually saw that leftism and Christianity were incompatible but because I was still living in my very atheist Community for the rest of you know my high school career I was my faith was assaulted on all sides and I didn't really know how to defend it and I had a crisis of Faith about a year after becoming a Christian um and I kept scourging the internet for like resources to help me with my faith and at that time I didn't really know what to where to go for resources so I went to some not very good places I went to like Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro for defenses of the existence of God I facts and logic so you went you went for facts and logic you went facts and logic yeah yeah friendship here um it's like they're Jewish they believe in God it's the same right um so what they ended up saying was very different than Christianity but I didn't really realize that at the time because you know I had recently become Christian I didn't know much um and they talked a lot about Free Will so I was getting my sort of resources from them but then I then I tried to think okay what is my church actually teach because I'm I've been going to this Presbyterian church but I haven't really been reading the Bible much or studying theology much so that year I was getting confirmed in my church and I thought okay maybe I'll actually find out what my church teaches and uh I was assigned this really smart Mentor this Mentor who's like a Colombia Professor but who's also an elder in the church and I learned that Presbyterians teach something called Calvinism and I was like okay that sounds interesting I wonder what that is so I look up Calvinism I'm like are you serious we don't have free will um so when I heard about that I was horrified by that I was horrified by the idea that we don't have free will especially because these you know Jewish influencers Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro had ingrained inside me that Free Will was such an important Concept in religion so I really didn't like Calvinism and I was going to I was going to go up to my mentor I was scheduled to meet my mentor I was gonna go up to him and say look I I can't accept this Calvinism stuff so I thought I would just read my Bible in preparation for when I was going to meet him so I I flipped randomly to a page I had never really read the Bible before the page I randomly flipped to was Romans 9 and I did not like Calvinism I was not reading it with a bias I mean I was reading with an anti- calvinist bias then I was like uh oh this really does look like what the Calvinists are saying where it says you know um God is faithful to those who he's goingon to be faithful he judges those who he's going to judge um we have no right to say it's unfair the the pot has no right to say to the Potter why did you make me like this God made some people as vessels of Mercy some people as vessels of Wrath prepared for Destruction that sounded horrifying to me um but I had to admit yeah it seems to what the Bible is saying so I shared these concerns with my mentor I was like does Calvinism mean that we are robots does this go against Free Will and he explained that it did not but I I didn't understand that at the time it's it still sounded really bad to me but then I kept investigating you know the resources of the Presbyterian church and I realized that Calvinism and presbyterianism um had so many ways to defend the faith that I didn't know existed way better than like these Jewish people I was trying to go to earlier um but the difference is they backed up everything with scripture with the Bible these Jewish influencers I was listening to they were just arguing based on you know the best philosophy they could think of um but for the Presbyterians everything was based on scripture and everyone everything was very well thought out I discovered Tim Keller who's one of who was sadly he died last year he was one of the greatest apologists of our time so I'm sure both of you guys can can agree that presbyterianism is better than Judaism so yeah so that's sort of how I came to the Presbyterian church and that's just where I've been ever since when I was when I was figuring out what Calvinism was I did briefly consider Orthodoxy among a few other things but I found that you know the more I studied the Bible the more I found that the Presbyterian Church has the best resources to explain what the Bible actually says um so yeah that's how I became Christian and how I became calvinist all that awesome thanks for sharing so Jay you kind of had the opposite experience where you were Baptist and you became reformed kind of reading the Bible and getting into the church fathers and actually going to bonson Seminary getting into Orthodox presbyterianism so and now if you want to explain your experience of like kind of reading out of Calvinism eventually to Catholicism and then to Orthodoxy as you go deeper and deeper yeah I was uh first got into the reading the Bible when I was 18 or 19 and um my exposure to Christianity at that point was just being raised Baptist but I never really took it seriously and then I um went to some Evangelical Bible studies that I was invited to and uh eventually like you said kind of got interested in uh more historical Christianity so I started reading actually not the church fathers but I went to Lutheran Calvin actually I started with a lot of the Baptist Calvinists first so I got really into Spurgeon um and then I read a lot of the the Puritans at that time I got into John Owen and um all those kind of guys and then that kind of led me to start questioning um my Baptist assumptions about Believers baptism and the issues of dispensational theology because I was raised in kind of an just an Evangelical dispens dispensational attitude um we didn't go deep into eschatology but I never really questioned it so I started wondering about you know covenant theology and then I got deep into that so I started reading John Murray and Charles hod and Herman witus um and burkhoff and all the reformed systematic Theologian people and that eventually led me to questioning um Baptist theology as a whole because I was starting to see a lot more continuity between the Old and New Testament than I previously been aware of and even when I was a Baptist Reformed Baptist in my mindset I was really into apologetics so I was really deep into bonson transcendental argumentation um I read basically everything I could get my hands on from bonson and vanel um and at that time I was like well I want to go to Bible college but I don't know if I want to go to anything Baptist anymore I ended up getting asked to leave my Baptist Bible College because I was attending a PCA church so they were they were mad that I was going to a church that believed in infant baptism um so I I ended up leaving Baptist Bible College and I was like well I don't want to go to secular University um so I'll just try to see if I can get into um bonson Seminary which at that time is kind of a adjunct to what they called the Southern California Center for Christian Studies which was a lot of PCA and OPC people at that time like Ken Gentry was involved in that um bonson and some other people and I got really into Reconstructionist theology so I was reading a lot of Rush Dy a lot of Gary north um a lot of um James Jordan and all those guys and then I started thinking well when I was at bondon Seminary I had a class with I think a guy who's still a or foreign Presbyterian Elder U Chris dille he taught a church history class and we had a stack of about 10 patristic and medieval text that we had to read and so I I dove I dove into it I was really into it I bought the Philip sha a Church Father set at that time and I realized I was going to have to really read the church fathers and see what they taught because I was kind of like you like you said like working working my way back historically through um the progression of the church I mean I was very obviously interested in biblical theology as well it's not like I only made this decision or whatever based on um could you bring me a water as well I didn't make the decision just based on um history right for me it wasn't like just some kind of history question it was a combination of all these things like biblical theology Church fathers church history um all of that together as well as studying philosophy so studying philosophy as well at the same time in h secular University I decided not to do Boston Seminary because right around the time after a year of bonson I decided that I was starting to question protestantism and reform theology as a whole so I took I read all the city of God and I read all of um um like the works of I don't know if I read all them I read a lot of St cyprian at the time and I read a lot of St Jerome and I knew that as a reformed you know we had a lot of Reliance on uh older ideas like Augustine right Augustin sort of the Proto calvinist of the um you know the patristic era so I I thought why don't I read this guy himself and see what he taught and of course he doesn't teach anything close to reform theology so I was kind of put in in an existential crisis so I after I read all the city of God I listed a bunch of questions and took it to all my professors and um I found all their questions to be really or their answers to be inadequate so then I started um ending um Catholic rcia classes not because I was ready to convert but just because I was ready I wanted to see what the Roman Catholic view was on all of these different contentious issues and I knew the Reformation critiques of those things because I've been reading reformed theology for many years but I didn't know like well what's their answer right so I started realizing a lot of the things that I thought were the case I didn't really have a good picture of and I didn't really uh give the benefit of the doubt or steal Ste man the other position so I thought why don't I try at least to understand their arguments from their side because a lot of what I assumed Augustine taught wasn't the case right I assumed that he was kind of this protoc calvinist and then I finally know actually believes in episcopacy he believes in abolic succession he believes in the real presence um he believes in all these things that I thought were very you know he believes in the necessity of good works as a manifestation of uh the the the whether you have the gift of perseverance or not I know the Calvinists believe in that but I'm saying that his conception of faith and works is not solid it's not the it's not the reform view um and then I read a book by um aliser McGrath at around that time that came out where he was arguing and pointing out that nobody taught Luther's doctrine of solid prior to Luther right so if that's the case then you I started realizing the Lynch pin of what would be the church right so you know Luther thinks that the solos and these different Lynch pins are kind of what the church hinges on if those started falling then then protestantism wouldn't be a viable option anymore but I decided that really the issue wasn't even going to be those things it was going to be something more fundamental um which was the formation of the biblical Cannon so I basically just started reading tons of Evangelical Works um on the formation of the Canon and in across the span of all the works that I read whether it was evangelicals like FF Bruce or Baptists like Lee McDonald or even Anglican or other Traditions talking about the how the Canon came to be I realized I didn't know much about this and I just had all these assumptions but when you get into actual history of the formation of it um it's very obvious that the church as an existing visible historical body played an an Inseparable role in the preservation the transmission and the decision about what would be canonical um and so I eventually I just found answers from people like you know when RC Sproul would say stuff like it's a fallible collection of infallible books I think that ends up being self-refuting it leads to The Logical conclusion that the academic realm um could then determine through study and research and overturned everything that the church had believed prior to that and that's exactly what happened after Luther you get in the um German Hier critical tradition coming out of Luther the the ability to deconstruct the whole text because now it's no longer in the ecclesiastical sphere to make these decisions that are normative about normative Authority here now it's passed over into the academic realm so all of those questions were really um bugging me for many many years and then in 20023 I came into the Roman Catholic church but you have to remember at that time that was like prior to the Omni presence of the internet so there weren't a whole lot of resources there wasn't a whole lot of stuff in 2003 that you could go to for a lot of this you had to just get that actual books and do the reading um you know there weren't really podcasts yet there there was new advent existed but that was about it when it when it came to like finding you know resources resources that you if you didn't have the church fathers set right you have to go to new advent um and there were some Catholic websites and at that time again the only debate that existed online was reformed and Protestant debates with Roman Catholics that was it like if you go into chat rooms or whatever you would see people you know like spam spamming an AOL chat back and forth between Roman cathol and it would be like quote Minds like the Protestants would be putting the Protestants would be spamming like Romans 3 and Romans 9 and the Catholics would be spamming like quotes from St Jerome and and you know trying to refute argue that protestantism was was a historical anyway so for me it was just going to be pretty much a consistent um approach of like studying the text going back into the text so I was Roman Catholic for about maybe I always say eight I don't remember exactly how many years but it was basically eight or nine years basically a decade um anyway so then as the internet got more and more popular people were exposed to a lot more ideas like Orthodoxy started getting more and more popular online even in 2007 or8 when I first encountered Orthodox stuff um there was only like two or three kind of popular blogs um there wasn't a whole lot of resources and material and you know apologetics so that was the first time I really encountered Orthodoxy I didn't have it near me so I didn't really take it very seriously but within the Roman Catholic world if you're in that world for you know a span of time for almost a decade you're going to be presented with a lot of the um the contradictions and difficulties and one thing I've noticed with with younger guys like you guys is that what the internet's done is is allowed a lot of these debates that in like the the early 2000s or mid 2000s it took a lot longer to work through the internet has been basically sped all that up so you can you can work through these issues a lot quicker because there's so much there's so many more resources so much more information available than there was in 2003 4 5 6 that what took me like you know three four five years to work through uh I think online you know intelligent young people can work through them a lot faster right like redeem Zoomer you were talking about kind of working through issues of like well I don't really buy this leftist stuff you know maybe Ben Shapiro has a good argument and then you kind of you know you were able to quickly move through that to where you are now and I think it's just it's a lot different um people have to understand that like you know it's kind of like people will look back and they'll be like why didn't you understand how come you didn't see Orthodoxy was true in 2005 and it's like I had one book on Orthodoxy in 2005 from Timothy wear um and I didn't even know if there was an Orthodox Church anywhere near me in Tennessee so it's like how was I supposed to know that you know this thing that I was only recently exposed to was the case it takes a lot took a lot of time is what I'm trying to say to work through issues back then so um long story short yeah so I work through a lot of the contradictions in the Roman Catholic World by kind of going through the bell curve or what a lot of people do where you go from Trad cat and for me it was a really easy transition from Calvinism to tomis um in fact Arvin Voss wrote a book about this at the time that was really popular in the mid 2000s about similarities between Calvin's predestinarian theology and Thomas aquinas' views so I got really into aism throughout my 20s and the 2000s um but then I started noticing that a lot of the kind of idealized picture that I had a lot of a lot of these systematic theologies there's there's problems like serious problems and I couldn't keep ignoring them or try to cope and make them fit together and work so not just problems in Tom ISM but problems in um Western doctrines of divine Simplicity um problems in terms of what Vatican 2 teaches is and everything post Vatican 2 vers is what Vatican one taught and what the the pratic 2 teaching was of the popes um I had to Grapple with that for many years and so finally I just kind of started attending an Orthodox Church to check it out when I found one in Nashville that was 2007 um but I wasn't ready to become Orthodox I still had all these kind of Latin and Tom mistic presuppositions in my head and it takes a long time to kind of work through a lot of that stuff to work it out so um I had a phase where I just kind of didn't go to church for a few years um I got burned out on all the theology um and then about 2014 I started warming back up to Orthodox ideas I wasn't like an atheist or anything I just kind of had a like I'm going to take a break from church period um and uh I I never adopted atheism or even agnosticism I was just kind of like in a pause period um so I started going to um Orthodox church again about 2015 and then finally made the decision around 2017 to become a catak humanin I'd already been through the whole kakum it in 2007 though um but I ended up not converting at that time because it wasn't just the theological reasons I was about to be engaged to somebody we were going to be married in the church at that time and we ended up not getting not getting married so I didn't want to go to church where my ex was so so basically yeah um anyway so that's that's the long story of it I didn't mean to ramble that long but that's when I ended up being or Orthodox in about 2017 officially but I've been reading Orthodox stuff since 2007 or 8 thank yeah thank you that was really helpful kind of T touching on a lot of issues now deem zomer did you have any questions about any of the specific issues he was talking about like he said kind of the formation of the canon was a kind of a big thing for him like was there anything you wanted to ask him about those uh sure well generally I want to say that um I think a lot of the reason why people just leave protestantism these days is right now protestantism is a mess protestantism is in crisis because as i' many times of an Ile Protestants have been alienated from their own traditional institutions like all the historic Protestant churches and seminaries mostly have been hijacked by liberals and there have been times when the Catholic church was hijacked there have been times when the Orthodox Church was hijacked right now it's the Protestant churches that are hijacked that's why we're seeing like waves and waves of Protestants convert to Catholicism but back in like the 1600s when the Protestants institutions were strong in the Catholic Church was hijacked by like corruption that's when waves and waves of Catholics were were becoming Protestant and that's why I say that a lot of Calvinism out there and I'm sure you've seen this with like Spurgeon and those reformed Baptists a lot of Calvinism on the internet has nothing to do with traditional Reformation theology at all and um I know that since you've been to Seminary you would probably know this but there's a lot of mischaracterizations of Calvinism such as that Calvinists don't believe in the real presence or that Calvinists don't think the early church had the authority to determine the cannon or whatever because that's that's not true at all calvinist do believe in the real presence um Calvinists do believe in the necessity of Good Works maybe not in the exact same sense as the Orthodox do um but we're not antinomians and Calvinists do generally have a high view of of the church a very high view of the church we're the ones that are always saying it's like you know Christianity is is a collective reality it's not an individualist reality it's not just me my Bible and my own personal interpretation so I think even in a lot of these Presbyterian seminaries today the ones that have been disconnected from the main line there's a lot of Baptist assumptions that get sort of read into reform theology into presbyterianism and it gives people sort of not the best idea of what reform theology actually is yeah I mean to be fair I understand that and I wasn't trying to give the impression that um Calvinism is equated to baptist theology I mean I I went through the same dilemma when I was you know like 22 so I'm not trying to be a douchebag I'm just saying that I'm really I'm aware that it's not the Baptist low view of the sacraments but also Calvin's spiritual presence is not the real presence in the sense of the way that the Orthodox or the Roman Catholic Church believes in a transformation of the elements through the invocation of the Holy Spirit via the presbyterate right so it's not it's not the real presence in the same sense so it's kind of this spir like it's a spiritual sense but it's not a transformation that occurs and between the Orthodox church and the Roman Catholics you know we pretty much agree that there is a transformation that occurs in the theology that is of what happens at the Eucharist and also when it comes to the the formation of the Canon um I would disagree there just in the in the fact that while it some calvinist or reformed theologians might confess that there is this quote authority of the church to decide a Canon first point is that the calvinist Canon unless you're an Anglican is not the Orthodox or the Roman Catholic can and two um typically you know when you when you look at reformed theologians they tend to agree with what somebody like RC Sproul says which is that it's a fallible collection of infallible books so the question there is normative Authority does the historic church have authority to bind anybody to any decision about the cannon of scripture or is it rather that the church might have the ability to have historical attest St ation to two things or something like that but it doesn't have any way to bind your conscience to a decision I mean in other words if you looked at something like the Council of NAA many Calvinists would affirm most Calvinists would affirm the Theology of NAA but it doesn't have the ability to bind your conscience in terms of at least classical Reformation theology it always teaches that you have the liberty of conscience the liberty of you you have free will when it comes to the decisions of Theology and thus for example Westminster Confession says that no Creed or council could bind you necessarily in terms of your conscience right so it might be true in terms of agreeing with the theology but there's no binding or what we call normative Authority now I would just say this simply something that is inconsistent in the classical Reformation tradition right so it is a question that stumps a lot of Protestants and makes them give up and go Catholic it's like who had the authority to make the cannon we have you know the Bible doesn't have a table of contents contents the answer is it was the Holy Spirit that gave us the Bible that we have today and we believe it's the Holy Spirit working through the means of the church we believe providentially that God arranged the church to be the means that produced the cannon I mean who else would produce the cannon just because the church produced the cannon and just because it was God's infallible Authority working through the church to produce the can Canon that doesn't mean The Descendants the organizational descendants of that church today have some sort of infallible Authority an example but wait a minute hold on just one second because you you said it was God's infallible Authority working through the church to decide the Canon yes because Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would would guide the church okay but but there are but there that is not a a classical Reformation teaching so you would be departing from is that the church itself is not infallible but God can use is infallible Authority working through the church that's the classical Reformation teaching so at one point in church history in what fourth fifth 6th Century there was an infallible decision that the church made no it's not like that well you just said it was through the church though it was the church itself wasn't infallible Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would guide the church in truth because of that we can shr but it's a historic decision post-apostolic that made this decision yeah it was like for example Jesus the Bible that Jesus used used um he also the Old Testament doesn't have a table of contents either he was relying on the traditions of you know the leaders of the Temple of the Sadducees did that make the Sadducees infallible for Jesus no not at all he said they were like Brut of vipers and stuff so God no he was using the Pharisees tradition not the Sadducees the Sadducees rejected the prophets okay so well whoever it was that assembled the Canon these Jewish leaders Jesus didn't give them any infallible Authority whereas like a lot of Protestants today lot of proests today will they'll think okay the the church had no Authority the Bible just dropped out of the sky in the King James version I'm sure you know that's not the classic Reformation right but you actually said that post-apostolic there was an INF infallible decision made about the Canon and you said that the church didn't possess it but they made that decision but it was God working through them so you don't see the contradiction there well I don't think it was a single infallible decision that determined the Canon I think so hold on so which Canon do you accept like where what Canon Well for now it's like how do you know that the books we have our trustworthy let's say like the General New Testament Canon all Christians can agree on that um the fact that there's different Old Testament cannons you know the Orthodox hold on there's not just one New Testament Canon though as far as like Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox have the same new test Canon well but I mean there were many different cannons in the first six centuries is what I'm saying and so just because Orthodox and Protestants and Catholics agree on what later became the New Testament list that doesn't mean that it's therefore true because there's some majority agreement I that's just resting on the assumption that we should take the majority opinion why should we do that I mean the majority opinion in the 4th century was that aryanism was true we wouldn't assume that arianism is true just because it's the majority right well yeah the majority like I said the church has always been hijacked at various points in times but the truth went out in the end so hold on well why wasn't it hijacked when it made this decision about the Canon well because the holy spirit is going to guide the church so in the end the truth went out right but aren't you relying on the text of John 14:15 156 to know that the holy spirit will guide the church well we know we know the holy spirit's going to guide the church we can trust Jesus told us that but wait where did he tell us that he told us that in in the scriptures right but but but this is a question about which are the scriptures so that's prior to what you're arguing well that you have that problem no matter what church you're a part of like the problem not if I believe in historical normative Authority which you're saying in one case is allowed when the church made the decision for the Canon but also the church doesn't possess that power so you're saying the church is really what has the authority and the Bible only has author an extension of the church you just admitted that the church has that Authority when you admitted that they made a decision within history post-apostolic that was an infallible decision of a Canon but then you're saying that they don't actually possess that power though well like I said I don't I didn't say that there was one Council or one meeting that decided the Canon it's an organic development of the Canon oh wait so but it's an organic development then it requires a historical body of people post apost olic to make the decision right yeah is an organic development through the church Community not through some sort of authoritative one Council through the church Community is an organic development so what were some of those important councils do you think I mean do you think that like what do you think some of those were the councils were all very important but like which ones for the Canon it's like RC Sproul said it's like I'm not sure exactly what RC spr meant when he said it's like an infallible collection of infallible documents well he's being consistent with the Reformation teaching that nobody after the apostles possessed any ability to infallibly bind anybody to a decision yeah so the apostles they were the ones that had the infallible Authority correct but you already admitted the apostles didn't give you a cannon they they wrote they wrote things down they didn't you already said they didn't list the books they didn't list the books but we still we can rely on tradition to know which books are Apostolic which on but whose tradition What whose tradition all the all the traditions of the the Church of the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church agree on which of the New Testament but they don't they don't agree Jerome's Cannon is not the same thing as athanasius's Canon not the same thing as John damascus's Cannon so you're saying all the Traditions agree and I can I mean there's different codices codex alexandrus codex vaticanus the pita they all have different canons for both Old and New Testament well I didn't say every individual in the church agrees but these aren't just individuals these are canonical Traditions I didn't say that well like I said there have been like the church is fallible the church is fallible there but you admitted a minute ago that in the decision for the Canon they possessed infallibility you said it was an infallible decision that God did through the church but the church doesn't possess infallibility that's just another way to say I said I didn't say I didn't say it was a single decision I said it was an organic development Guided by the Holy Spirit that's what so that's even worse for your situation because now it's multiple decisions throughout centuries that's an infallible decision well like I said it's not an infallible decision on the part of the people like I said it's so how so wait so God does this and abstracted from the actual people making the decision and passing you you just said it's a tradition so is tradition abstracted from the people in the community no it's it's a providential development like you know for just saying it's providential doesn't yeah but that's still people within history making the decision just saying it's providential and God does it is not answering the question of does it how through who I said it's it's through the church God does it through the church you don't see the contradiction here because I don't think I don't think there is a I don't think there's a contradiction between saying God works through the church the holy spirit because you immediately five minutes ago you you said that it possess an infallible power to do this the holy spirit is infallible God works through the church how do you know that how do you know that though from John 16 14516 right yes we so you're a it's called circular argument right the Fai of the entire Christian Community in a sense we do how do you know that that but how do you know John's supposed to be in there the tradition itself is not infallible we rely we it is it is possible to rely on so hold on so the so the so the Bible relies on the the what goes into the books relies on a thing that is itself fallible this tradition that you're talking about so the infallible thing relies on a fallible thing okay here's an analogy your your priest is fallible correct yes you can still trust your priest to deliver the faith to you correct yeah but this is not this is two different questions normative Authority versus existential Authority okay your your reasoning is fallible correct but God still brought you to the church through your reasoning in some sense correct yeah but that's a category mistake so you're confusing two categories you're confusing the existential with the normative so my point is that God can use fallible means to deliver infallible Authority the church is fallible how do you know that the that how do you know number one there's multiple cannons there's a development as you admitted over multiple centuries how do you know that the fourth fifth sixth Century decision which by the way is not the Protestant Canon it includes the dudo Canon when trolo and the seventh Council affirmed the Orthodox Cannon how do you know that that's the wrong Cannon because you don't have that Cannon you have a different Cannon are you talking about like the differences between the Protestant and Orthodox canons today MH yeah so the the problem of different cannons is not solved just because you're Orthodox because the Orthodox and the Catholics and the Ethiopians have different cans from each other so how do you know the Catholics aren't right well I have an argument because I believe in the normative authority of the church and if you don't believe in the normative authority of the church it's not a it's a problem for you not for me I believe the church has the authority chur in a sense what church which church the the church Community there are schisms when people can't agree on certain things but I would say so who was the church in the fourth Century I would say that the the church which includes the Protestant church today has the authority to make make their best decision on the Canon and maybe it won't be maybe it won't be an infallible Authority it's like they can't all be right so wait a minute so hold on now you're saying that the Protestants today can participate in deciding the Canon but you've already admitted that it was a decision based in the past now are we if we're talking about like the New Testament Canon or the Old Testament Canon either one the New Testament Canon that delivers the teachings of the Apostles and all the churches agree on that today the Old Testament but that's a fallacy why because all of today why because all today's groups agree on something does that make it true for the fourth fifth sixth sth Century so let's assume that maybe let's suppose that the Gnostic Gospels are actually the true Canon and then all the things we have now are are retical well that means that God has not been guiding his his church and by faith we know that that's wrong that's gnosticism that's um yeah but but but you and I both believe that God uses the holy spirit to guide the church in history so how do we delineate between you and I which is the right Canon when we both believe in the holy spirit's guidance there has to be a normative historical attestation which decides this question and for me the decision is made because the apostolic succession of the fourth fifth sixth 7th Century Church fathers who have normative Authority that's different from Individual existential questions of of you how do you know it as an individual normative Authority means that there's a body of people who has the ability to interpret and bind people to that decision and your Reformation theology denies anyone after the apostles the ability to bind anybody to that decision so you're basically just in the same boat that you were in when you were in the liberal position and you're grappling with the Jewish arguments you're saying well is there free will I don't know well it's not any different now because you don't have a way to know with historical attestation which is the correct Canon you're just assuming that the Protestant Canon is what the apostles taught and I'm calling that into a question and so if I call into a question that that's what the Protestant that the Protestant Doctrine is what the apostles taught then I need for you to tell me in what way you can know what the right list of the books is without just deing to John 14:1 1516 which is assuming that John is part of the list of books so how do you know if you think that the infallible Authority rests in a body of people how do you know it's your body of people not the Catholic body of people because my my position is consistent and it has a historical witness versus what Roman Catholics claim and by the way that doesn't that doesn't disprove my position because there's disagreements within history there's always been disagreements as we already admitted right so the disagreements though mean that some group group will leave uh the one true true church so Paul says there's one Lord One Faith one baptism there's one body there's not a thousand different bodies there's not an invisible Body of Christ Christ's body was visible so both the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches both claim we are the one true church with the the it doesn't matter that's a fallacy Apostles they both claim that do you understand that's a fallacy it doesn't matter how many people claim something because that has nothing to do with whether it's true or false that'd be like say that'd be like but a lot of Catholics and Orthodox have been debating who's the one from church for a thousand years and fundamentally you used your reason to determine who is correct in that debate that doesn't mean that reasoning is the final Authority so that's another category or using something doesn't mean that it's the final court of appeal so using it's not the final Authority but you used your fallible reason to determine which is correct understand but you're not understanding what a category error is so this is a difference between existential questions and normative Authority so you keep going back to the question of how how does the individual know at an existential level what's true or what's false in these in these cases we all agree that at the last court of appeal the final analysis it's the Holy Spirit that's guiding the individual everybody Roman Catholic Orthodox and Protestants all believe that at the end of the day it's ultimately the Holy Spirit that's giving that certitude and that Assurance but how do we know that in history there whether there's any decision that's binding on anybody that's what we call normative Authority that's a different question than the question of the individual certitude two different questions they relate to one another but they're different questions and so for example think about the Constitution right the Constitution is a document it's a piece of paper and is our system in America set up where everybody just goes and reads it and then tries to figure out who has the right interpret ation no there's a body of people the Supreme Court that has normative authority to interpret the document and give legislative rulings so the difference between us is that I'm saying that because Jesus promised to the people that he blew the Holy Spirit on that they would have the holy spirit to guide them and lead them into truth that means that in each of these successive Generations after Christ and after the apostles they would possess that same power and authority you're saying that they possess that same power and authority for just the decision of the Canon over many centuries and in no other way and in nothing else I didn't say that they possess that Authority in many ways they wrote the Creed the N Creed it is the you don't believe that the Ning Creed is is binding the nying Creed is not binding by its own authority it is binding because it contains what the Bible says yeah but that's just begging the question because the question is not existential certitude you believe that it's a correct interpretation of scripture but no you just admitted that it's not morally binding on people as it as an authoritative document because it's not the Bible Well the what the Protestant reformers say what the what our confessions say is buy its own authority these councils they don't have the authority they don't have authority but then the same

Confessions will go on to say, "What you must believe to be saved is the contents of the creeds." Yeah, but that's not resolving the question that I'm saying about normative authority. So, in the Reformation tradition, we do have normative authority.

No, you don't. We don't believe it's infallible authority, but what makes the authority of it's irrelevant authority? Because no, no, it's you don't. It's not a question of infallibility. It's a question of whether people can be bound in conscience to a doctrine. So, even if you believe that it's fallible, you don't believe that any creed or council can bind your conscience, right?

Let's think about excommunication. So, in the Orthodox Church, if you read, you know, in the councils, when somebody teaches against the teaching of NAA or or 4567 Council, they are excommunicated and banned from the churches. The Reformed Church doesn't have the ability to do that. They might excommunicate a person here or there, but you can just go and start your own church down the road and still be just as much a Protestant as anyone else because there's no normative authority.

Well, Protestants, I don't see what the real difference is. You could leave the Orthodox Church and start your your own new church. Um, because it's a totally different conception of ecclesiology. Because you already admitted that the Protestants together participate in this decision because there's not one church. So, you might leave the Orthodox Church, but you're not the Orthodox Church anymore. In the Protestant church, you can be excommunicated from the Protestant church, and you're still just as much legitimately the Protestant church as anybody else down the road, the strip mall, or whoever else.

Well, that's because Protestant is a category, it's not a denomination. It's like if you're excommunicated from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, you can't start a new Orthodox Presbyterian Church because you have a false right. So, because the ecclesiology is wrong, there's no way to delineate within history what is the true church. So, Protestants, we do have the we do have normative authority. We do excommunicate people who don't agree with doctrines that are binding. We do have doctrines that are binding. Um, generally speaking, the Protestant doctrines are a lot less, are a lot more inclusive than the Orthodox ones. Generally, it's basically you just have to affirm the the creeds to be saved. I know there's some Protestants who will say you have to affirm sola scriptura, most Protestants don't believe you have to affirm sola scriptura to be saved, but we do have normative authority. It's not just like we can have people believe whatever they want as long as they see they're following.

Yeah, but you already said that. No, but you already said that when you said that the decision of the canon was infallible in the beginning of this discussion, you then retracted that by saying that, "But the church doesn't possess infallibility." That's a contradiction.

I never said the decision of the canon was infallible. You said God used the church, the Holy Spirit made this decision within history. Do you? So, the Holy Spirit did this without the people making the decision? Is that what you're saying?

The Holy Spirit guided the natural process of the formation of the canon. And at what point was it a a binding decision? There's no. That's like the fallacy of the beard. The beard fallacy. It's not a fallacy when it's your argument. You argue that this was a process, and at what point was the process complete? Is it still ongoing? Can we still decide? We don't know the canon. Still the the beard fallacy is is what you're saying, like just because, just because you can't know when something becomes something that means so you don't know the canon. We, we don't have infallible certainty about the canon.

Okay, was when was the infallible historical decision? Well, like I said, there was not an infallible historical decision. It was a fallible, natural process guided by an infallible God.

Okay, so it's still ongoing? It's not done? We don't know the canon yet? Well, to this day, there's still work being done in like translating. So, exactly. So, in Protestantism, there's not normative authority. Nobody can bind anybody to this decision. There's not a, you don't have a canon. This is why Luther doubted the canon and after him, the Protestant tradition in Germany destroyed the canon with higher criticism. You understand? You're in the same position.

So, the, uh, I, I don't, of course, there is the higher criticism thing. That has nothing to do with, with Luther or anything. Luther, of course, it does. What do you mean? That's it's a historical fact that many scholars today in the tra, in the, in, in many traditions will date the beginning of higher criticism to Luther. What do you mean it has no, has no basis in history? So, you disagree with today's consensus amongst most scholars in evangelicalism that that the destruction of the Bible begins with the questioning of? I mean, you know, Luther doubted a lot of the text, right?

Yeah, but again, our Protestants are not bound by Luther. You're not bound by anybody, are you? We're bound by our confessions, which are produced by. You're not bound by your. No, you're not. You're not bound by confessions. Yeah, yeah, we are. We, no, you're not. Your confessions say that no post-apostolic creed, council, or confession can bind your conscience.

Well, it depends on what you mean by bind. It's like, what do your confessions? The Bible is, but it's still authoritative. It's like a pastor. A pastor is not infallible, a pastor is still an authority. You have to submit to. Again, you're confusing existential certitude with normative authority. Because I can just go down the street to the next strip mall. If I don't like my pastor there, if he excommunicates me, I can start my own Protestant church, can't I? If I get excommunicated from the Orthodox Church, I can go to the Catholic Church. What's the difference?

You're not understanding. That's two different. That's two different categories. Because I'm talking about a single body within history that has authority to bind people. When the Council of Nicaea meets, do you think that they saw themselves as having the authority to bind people to the Nicene Creed and to excommunicate people like Arius?

The Council of Nicaea was convened for the specific decision of the church needs to all gather to agree on what the faith is. Did you not hear my question? I don't, I don't know exactly what the Council of Nicaea. Wait a minute. So, how then, how do you know about the historical formation of the canon if you don't know what Nicaea taught?

I know Nicaea taught. You asked what the mindset of the people was. I don't know exactly what the mindset. Well, I mean, Athanasius says that the Holy Spirit guided. And did they excommunicate Arius? They did. Okay, so they thought they had the ability and authority to do that, right? In an ecumenical synod?

Just like Protestants do. Yes. Protestants do not do that. Where, where was the last Protestant synod that excommunicated anybody like Arius? We've, we haven't. Does exist to have an ecumenical council to spell out? You don't have any. You don't have all you have Presbyterians. I will give you credit. You do have synods. You have local synods, which is Presbyterian church government. But actually, the decision of those people at Nicaea, you understand, they were bishops, right? Have you read Nicaea? Yes. I know that Nicaea had bishops. Okay. Have you read the canons? Yes. I know the canons have a very bishop-oriented structure, episcopal, right?

Well, you know, you can find the episcopacy prior to Nicaea, right? Have you read those Church Fathers? Yes. I know that there's like bishop lists very early on, but the, the scholarship is still debated. It's like the best scholarship, best neutral scholarship says that in some regions, there was episcopacy, in some regions, there was Presbyterian government. Eventually, the episcopacy won out. Oh, like scholars like who? I, I can't. Specific. Right. So, have you read, uh, Irenaeus? I know that that's what Arius said, that there was, there was the bishop lists, but then you also have St. Jerome who said that elder used to be identical with bishop until basically the first among equals, like the highest elder ended up getting more and more authority until he became a bishop.

Well, where does he say that? Uh, I mean, the episcopacy, the structure in the New Testament, the episcopacy is mirrored on the Old Testament, right? So, bishop, presbyter, deacon, that mirrors high priest, priest, Levite. So, I'm not sure where you're getting that. I mean, uh, Jerome wrote about, you know, relics. He wrote about, he wrote to Pope Damasus, right? So, it's like, I, I'm not an Episcopalian.

But how would you respond to Protestants who are Episcopalians who do have that structure and who do have councils that excommunicate people? Protestants do not typically have councils that excommunicate people. I mean, tell me of the, when was the last time Protestants did this? I mean, maybe there's some synod somewhere that did this, but I'm not aware of it.

Well, we haven't needed to have an an. Wait a minute. What? So, are there heretics? There are heretics, and heretics do get excommunicated from Protestant churches. But what I'm saying is that in the Orthodox conception, you're either in or you're out, right? And that's the attitude of the church in the councils. When Nicaea meets, they excommunicate Arius. Arius can go start his own group, but he's no longer part of the body of people that met at Nicaea. When Constantinople I happens, you get the same attitude of excommunicating the Macedonians and the Apollinarians. When Ephesus meets, you get the rejection of Nestorius. Yeah. Historians. And then the Monophysites and all that.

Um, yeah, and by the way, do you understand that you're, that Calvinism actually holds a bunch of those same positions that are condemned in the first seven councils, like monothelitism, monergism, and Nestorianism?

Since when are Calvinists monotheletes? Where, where are you getting that from? The debate about monothelitism turns into a debate about monergism. So, monergism is what the result of the monothelite debate is. How do Calvinists agree with that? Because you believe in monergism in conversion.

Monergism is not the same as monotheletism. Yes, it is. It's the end result of that. The debate that Maximus has with Purus is identical to the debates that the Protestants have about about conversion. How so? How is monergism? Because the divine energy has to overcome the human energy. That's the debate that Maximus has with Purus. And so the Calvinist position to monergism in anthropology is already condemned at the Sixth Council when it rejects Purus's anthropology. So, that's, you're saying that the logical conclusion of monergism is Calvin? That's just because the Sixth Council also affirms the divine energy distinction in human anthropology, which means that man has free will. So, is there like some reformed confession that says, "No, the fifth and sixth councils were wrong. We actually believe in monergism and monothelitism"? Where does it say that?

It doesn't. That's not even required. I don't have to have that. If you guys affirm monergism and conversion, because the same argument is refuted at the Sixth Council, so I don't need you to say I have affirmed monergism in Christology and I reject the Sixth Council. If you have the equivalent belief, it doesn't really matter. So, I still, this is the first time I've ever heard of this. I've always rejected monergism, monothelitism, while holding to a Calvinist view of conversion. I've never seen any.

Okay, but that's monergism. That's an anthropological view. That's monergism. Don't you believe that the divine grace has to overcome the human will? Providentially, God changes the the human heart? No, it's not just providentially, it's also the Holy Spirit overcoming the human will. That's the classical Reformation teaching.

Does the Holy Spirit not have the power to do that? Uh, it's not a question of power. It's a question of whether there's synergy and whether man always retains his natural faculties in his in his human nature. So, for your position, basically, man loses his natural faculties. And you have a, you have it, not just a Christological, but anthropological heresy. So, you're saying that man, mankind needs to have free will in matters of salvation all the time, or it's monergism?

Correct. So, if that's true, then post, uh, resurrection, how do we know we're not just going to, how do we know humanity is not just going to fall again if there's going to be free will post-resurrection? Oh, you mean the eschaton? Yeah, yeah. Because this is the problem that's with all Augustinian systems, which is called dialectical willing. So, in the Augustinian position, you're forced to either a choice between good or evil as the determiner of what free will is. And in the Orthodox view, we explicitly reject that free will is a choice between multiple goods, not a choice between good and evil. So, there's multiple, there's multiple goods to will in the eschaton.

If free will is not a choice between good and evil, then why do we, why do people need a free will decision in this life to choose between having faith and not having faith? Well, it's a question of, uh, how humans are made such that free will in the patristic definition, pretty consistently, is the ability to choose different outcomes or different options. So, for example, Adam and Eve had free will when there was no evil to choose. And so that necessitates that in the eschaton, there will always be free will, even when evil doesn't exist. And so the, the argument then is that there's no beatific vision, for example, because the beatific vision just means there's one thing to will, the divine essence. But if there's multiple goods, multiple things to will, that's how you preserve free will without a dialectical definition.

But if you go back to libido dominandi and what Augustine talks about in, uh, uh, City of God, he defines free will as the choice between good and evil, and whether the will is directed towards God at all times, or whether it's directed towards creatures. And because for him, sinning is always in some way willing towards creatures, he could never admit the possibility of willing multiple goods. There's a really good book on this called Free Choice in St. Maximus that goes through this whole critique of the Augustinian, um, collapse of willing. And this is because Augustine collapses person into nature, uh, in the triad, just as well as in anthropology. And so this is what happens in Calvinism. When in Calvinism, you get the collapsing of, uh, uh, a person into nature in humans, which means, this is why all humans are damned in Adam. In the Calvinist view, so humans are damned in Adam because Adam is seen as an archetype, as a, as a figure containing all of the archetypes of the humans that would come to be, right? So, he's the archetype of man, and so when he sinned, he basically brought damnation upon all of his descendants. But this is actually a collapsing of person into nature heresy, which is based on the collapsing of person into nature in the triad, which basically Calvinists all, default, they default to adopting the Augustinian collapsing of a person into nature in the Trinity as well, due to divine.

How does Augustine collapse person into nature in the Trinity? He explicitly argues that person is nature in On the Trinity. I've not heard of that. I'm not sure if Calvinists would agree with him on that, which I'm not sure of. So, what do you mean by collapsing person into nature? Does that mean Augustine did not believe it was one nature and three persons? No, it means that he was inconsistent because he was trying to use a lot of Neoplatonic ideas to figure out how to philosophically argue for, uh, divine simplicity and the unity of God, the being of God, and then later on to try to figure out how there's distinctions in that in that primal, uh, unity. So, he came up with things like relations of opposition, he came up with things like speculating about the human psychological analogy to mind and will and spirit and breath, all of which are not accurate in terms of the ontological Trinity. So, that's why the first, the second ecumenical council, it didn't accept the Augustinian doctrine of the Trinity. The second ecumenical council accepts almost wholesale the Cappadocian doctrine of the Trinity. So, by the way, if you want to be Orthodox in terms of Trinitarian theology, you got to accept Constantinople I. You can't accept the Calvinist Augustinian model of the Trinity.

So, you'll agree that the Calvinist model of the Trinity is consistent with Augustine? Uh, yeah, on most points, including the, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you're, you're in the camp that agrees that Augustine taught some sort of Filioque? Of course. I mean, he's explicit in On the Trinity, many passages. In fact, Lyons and Florence both quote that section in On the Trinity when they're arguing for what the Filioque is. So, the double eternal hypostatic procession quote in Lyons and Florence is from On the Trinity of Augustine? Yes.

So, um, I know that we definitely need to talk about the Filioque, because that's like the, the biggest here. Well, hold on, before we go to that, though, before we go to Filioque, well, I'll let you make your your point. There's one point I want to ask you about too. Go ahead. I was going to go back to the monergism. I'm still not understanding. So, can you briefly define monergism and then define, then explain how Calvinism is that what?

So, monergism in Christology is the idea that in Christ, the human will had to be overcome or supplanted, and so the divine will and energy functions to do that. So, while somebody might be a Monophysite, they might think, "Okay, I can admit maybe there's there's a duality in Christ, maybe it's even some kind of duality of human and divine, but his will and his operation are somehow a blended thing because, or or the divine takes over the human will." And the idea was that the human will was so fallen and so damaged that in Christ, if he assumes our nature, and if he's going to assume the nature that he, he wants to heal, he's going to have to overcome the natural antipathy that the human willing has against the divine will. So, Maximus and Purus have this long debate in Maximus's book, Disputation with Purus, where they start arguing about the text in the garden, where Jesus is saying, "Let this cup pass from me." And Purus says that that's proof that Christ, that the divine will in Christ supplants and takes over the human will, because the human will doesn't want to die, and so it's naturally in antipathy. There's a natural antithesis between the human will and the divine will. And Maximus goes to great lengths to point out that in human nature, even after the fall, there's there's not a natural antipathy, because everything that God creates is good. So, there's no such thing as evil nature. That would be Manichean. That would be a Gnostic kind of heresy to say that nature takes on the potentiality of the power of being evil. There's no such thing as an evil nature, because that would be to make God a creator of evil, and God says that he's not a creator of what he creates. So, man, even though man's fallen, in Maximus's argumentation, in that text, it's the same natural will, pre and post-fall. And so the fallen will is not in itself evil, but it does have the desire to flee from pain. It does have proclivity to sin, but it's still not in itself inherently sinful. And he argues that for Christ to assume the nature that's consubstantial with us, the nature that we possess, then must also be identical to the nature that Christ assumed. So, we have in our in our natures, uh, uh, body, mind, soul, will, that's the nature, that's the natural faculties. And then the person is the being, the individual, or the subject of the agent that has that nature. So, Christ assumed universal human nature. That means he assumed, consubstantially, everybody's nature. And that's why everybody's resurrected. In Calvinism, by the way, there's not an explanation as to why all men are resurrected because Calvinists do not believe that Christ assumed universal human nature. Calvinists believe that he died basically only for the elect. And so, while there might be common grace that extends to the non-elect, Christ is not assuming universal human nature, and therefore he does not raise all human beings.

So, then the question becomes, that's, that's not entirely true. The question then becomes for the Calvinist or for the Augustinian, then why does God raise all human beings? And their answer is, he just wills to. But the question, but the question is, but if resurrection is only on the basis of union with Christ, resurrected human nature, and if reprobates are not united to Christ, then why is their nature resurrected? So, Calvinism does not necessarily teach that Christ did not assume universal human nature. There's many Calvinists who have taught that. And Carl Bart really taught that. I'm not saying Carl Bart is like an authority for Calvinists. He's not at all. But Carl Bart was drawing on a lot of other elements of the Calvinist.

But Carl Bart's a universalist. I don't know why you'd want to cite a a modernist universalist. He's not a universalist. I don't even know what he is. But the point is, he's more of like, he more than actually being a theologian, for anything, he basically brings to mind a lot of recovered reformed doctrines that have been forgotten. Like his doctrine that election is fundamentally in Christ. It's really Christ that's the, like that exists in Calvin, that exists in Knox, that exists in the Westminster Confession. But that was, wait, wait, it's what Christ? That's the, what do you mean? Election is not some abstract decision of the Father. Election is in Christ. And of course, you would agree with that because that's just in Ephesians. Um, but a lot of Calvinists had forgotten about that and were talking about election like it was just some abstract decision the Father made separate from.

Okay, well, but Bart does teach universalism. And this is a big contention between him and Van Til. They had an argument over this. And so, I mean, maybe there's a later Bart retraction or something like that. I don't know. I'm not a, I mean, it's pretty explicitly said. I do, I am not a universalist. I do not teach universalism. Um, I'm not, I'm not using as an authority.

Okay, well, so, so even if he's not, uh, if Christ resurrects all human beings and they're united to him on the basis of universal human nature, then you're going to have to have the nature-person distinction to explain why the wicked are in, are in Hades or in hell in the eschaton and not and not in theosis or in grace. Because this, this is the Orthodox argument at this point, is precisely that the distinction between the mode of willing according to individual hypostasis is precisely what decides your experience of the eschaton. So, that requires you having free will to have that argument. That's Maximus's argument against universalism is that because you have to recapitulate the virtues via your own mode of willing. So, Christ doesn't assume everybody's hypostasis, he assumes everybody's, uh, nature. We agree with that? Yes.

No, you don't. That's not, that is not a Calvinist teaching. Not at all. Because you don't teach that. You don't, because that requires free will. That requires synergy. So, what you're doing is you're saying that Calvinists don't teach X because X is inconsistent with Y. No, I'm saying that I mean, there, that is not a classical Reformation teaching. Maybe some Calvinist somewhere teaches that, but that's not the classical Reformation teaching. Usually, what happens is there's some sort of, Calvinists will like new wants a certain doctrine, and then everyone's be like, "Oh, they denied it." For example, like the eternal generation of the Son. Calvinists have a different nuance of what that means than like a traditional Roman Catholic or Lutheran position. But then that leads a lot of Catholics and Lutherans to say, "Calvinists are denying this doctrine." For example, it's also true, Calvinism, Calvinism does teach that Jesus died for all people in some sense. But because of we have this limited atonement thing, some people think.

No, that's different. Okay, but this is different from what Maximus's argument is about the distinction between nature and person in, in individual human beings and how that determines your experience of the eschaton. So, Maximus is not saying that your, uh, place in the eschaton is determined on the basis of unconditional election. Maximus is saying that what you're experiencing, because we're all going to the same eschaton, because Christ assumed everybody's nature, what determines your experience of the eschaton will be the mode of willing that you did, that you engaged in in this life, whether to recapitulate the virtues or to choose evil and vice. And that is not the Calvinistic doctrine, which is basically, it argues that your determination in the eschaton is, number one, based on God's decision in the divine decree, and number two, it's based on the fact that you didn't have, uh, saving solid faith in Christ. Right? That's not the Orthodox, Maximus doctrine at all.

Sure, but how does that mean that Calvinists don't distinguish between person and nature? Because the argument that everybody is in Adam as in an archetype is based on the removal of the distinction between nature and person in humans. It's an Augustinian argument that collapses nature and person in anthropology. So, all of us are consubstantial with Adam. We're not the same person as Adam, though, right?

But I'm not guilty of Adam's actions. So, you've collapsed nature into person to do to make that move. Okay. I, I can see what you're saying. So, you're saying that if we have a nature-person distinction, the fact that Adam personally sinned shouldn't corrupt the entire human nature for the entire. No, it means that I'm not liable for his, I'm not guilty for his actions. The, the corruption can be passed on, not the guilt. I think what some Protestants have said about this is that it's not just nature that's inherited from Adam, that it's also like personhood. Like, in some sense, all of us did personally sin in. Right? That's what I'm saying is a collapsing of nature and the person, which you just admitted right there. Correct. That's the Calvinist view, and I'm saying that's what we reject. That is based on on collapsing person in the nature in anthropology.

Well, just because you're saying that there's some personal union of all people with Adam, that does not necessarily mean you're completely collapsing nature into person. It's not black and white. I'm not, again, it is though. Because for me to, uh, be represented by Adam does not mean that I'm personally in Adam before I exist. This is why scripture says in Ezekiel that I'm not guilty for the sins of my fathers. The corruption and the, the effects of the sin can pass on. Just like, for example, you know, if a mom, uh, does crack and she has a crack baby, the baby is not guilty for the mom's sin of crack. Because sin, in James, is a specific action of the will. James says that desire or passion or concupiscence, when it is, uh, conceived, it gives birth to sin. So, the desires themselves are not the sin. By the way, Calvinism classically and Lutheranism has has classically said that the desires themselves are actually sin as well. And they say that because if sin is defined as a specific act of the will against the divine law or against, you know, the moral law, then infants aren't guilty because they're not rationally making the decision to sin. So, Calvinists and Lutherans, at least classically, agreed that concupiscence is sin. They specifically. Huh? Yeah, we definitely. That. Okay, well, then that's making my point right there. So, now sin is a state of being. It's not actually an act of the will.

In some sense, you could say that. Yeah. I, I wouldn't necessarily dispute that. Okay, so if sin is a state of being, then now you're admitting that God creates. Because being refers to existence, now you're admitting that God creates sin. No, God creates un. God creates the, the natures. God creates stuff. And sin is not.

So, how is the, but so if, so it can't be both. It's got to be either one. So, if it's a state of being, then how do you avoid Manichaeism? Evil is not a state of being.

So, hold on. So, now you're equivocating. Because we're talking about guilt, whether infants are guilty for concupiscence or for having, uh, sinful, you know, passions or whatever. You said it's a state of being. Are they guilty for that state of being? Well, yes, because we believe in original sin. Well, we believe in original, uh, sin, but not original guilt. So, that's the, that's the point I'm making here, is that I'm not guilty for somebody else's actions. And that's why scripture says in Ezekiel that the son shall not be held liable for the sins of the father. So, I mean, do you think Romans 5 is contradicting Ezekiel? How, how are both of those passages reconciled?

My position reconciles the two because what's passed on is the consequences of the sin, not the guilt of the sin. And so that's why it becomes a debate about the, the passions and concupiscence, whether those themselves are sin. And so you're admitting the reformed position, the classical Reformation position, that yes, infants are guilty because they possess sinful passions or desires. But the point is that that makes sin now a state of being and not a specific action of the will, because infants are not using their will to, uh, rationally make the choice against God's commandments.

Well, there's a difference between sin and sin, as I'm sure you know. So, children, that's, hold on. That's your position. But that's, we would say that there's no such thing as sin as a state of being, because that's Manichaean. Evil is not a state of being. If there's no such thing as, um, inherited sin, if like you're, yeah, right, right, not inherited guilt. Yeah, that's what you believe. So, if that's the case, then could a baby theoretically be born and not sin at all? Sure, because sin is a specific act of the will. And if that's why Isaiah, could a baby be born, could someone be born and grow up and just never sin?

Well, now you said grow up. Isaiah talks about before the child comes to the age to know to choose the good versus the evil. So, there is a point in each child's life where they get to the age where they do know the difference between good and evil. And that might be, that might differ from child to child in terms of, you know, their level of maturation and how fast they mature. But they're not guilty of of any actions until they. Guilt is is hypostatic, is what I'm trying to say. Personal guilt is not a feature of nature. And Calvinism is predicated on guilt in nature.

Sure. Let's, so, if, if that's the case, so every, um, when the child grows up and when they do know the difference between good and evil, they still have a free will choice whether to choose good or evil, right? Right, right. So, could someone grow up and be faced with choices between good and evil and choose the good every time? No, because of our fallen state and because of the presence of concupiscence, or the passions, uh, we are, we tend to choose sinful actions. You tend to choose sinful actions.

But is it possible, like, let's say, a child grows up, the first time they have a choice between good and evil, could they make a good choice? The first time? Yes. Second time? Yes. Third time? Yes. So, if you say at a certain number of times they can no longer make the right choice, then that means they don't have a free will decision. No, it's a fa, it's a, it's a, it's a false, uh, expectation for me to be able to tell you at what point a person's going to sin. I mean, Paul actually argues this way in Romans, where he talks about before he, before he knew about sin, he had no sin. And then when he learned about sin, he then had and took on the desire to want to sin because of the fallen state. So, that, you basically, you're arguing as if there's not a fallen state. I'm saying there is a fallen state. But because I can't tell you at what point a person will choose sin, doesn't mean that they can never or will never choose sin. It's, it's a non sequitur. Because again, we're in the fallen state. It's just simply preserving the fact that sin is, as James says, not concupiscence. Do you understand in the text that James says he doesn't equate desire with sin? He says sin is when you consent to the desire against God's will, not the desire itself.

We have a free will choice whether or not to consent to the desire every time, right? Yeah. If that's the case, it's possible for someone to never. No, it's not. So, it's again, two, it's two different types. A mathematical contradiction right there. No, it's not. It's two different types of. So, mathematical contradictions aren't going to apply to the metaphysical domain. This is like, that's why I said you could look at Leibniz for different types of necessity. There's not just one type of necessity, right? And this is the, the typical sort of Calvinist dialectical thinking. You can have necess ex hypothesi, which is what's, what it's an example that he gives of this type of a thing, where just because something, uh, will happen, it doesn't necessitate that you know at what point it's going to happen, right? And it, and that type of necessity doesn't remove the fact that you're making that choice or that decision, right?

So, it's kind of like, let's bring it back to the question of Christ, right? Like, in Christ, because for the Orthodox, the paradigm is always Christ, right? If Christ has the same desires that we have, except for sin, do you admit that he did have desires? Right? Like he desired water, food, you know, he, these kinds of things, right? He said, he said, "I thirst." Yes. Yeah. To his divinity? Wait, what now? According to his humanity, had desires. Yeah, right. So, if desires themselves are sin, though, or a state of sin, as is the case with the Reformation argument about infants, then when Jesus was desiring when he was a child, wasn't he sinning in those actions?

Well, was he desiring sinful things? Well, it doesn't matter because you've already admitted that as per James 1, in the Reformation tradition, the doctrine is that sin is the desire because that's what makes infants guilty because we're the sons of Adam, you see. So, how do we, in other words, the question is, how do we have original guilt for infants? The response to the Reformation tradition is that infants have sinful passions and sinful desires, and so the desires themselves are now sin, you see. And I'm saying if Jesus is consubstantial with us, right, because he took on our nature to heal it, to save it, then Jesus has the same desires in your view, correct or not? Or do you have to make a distinction between the passions or the desires and the act of sin?

That's how our view gets out of the dilemma. And I'm go ahead. Concupiscence is a corruption of natural human desires and it makes. But you're now you're shying away from saying it's a sin because you know that that's the argument the reformers used to say that infants are guilty. I'm not. I've said many times, desire to sin is sin. No, no, no. Desires, passions. And infants, are they sin or or do they produce guilt? It's what the desire is. Desiring food is not sin. Desiring to steal is sin. Do infants desire to sin? In. Well, the reason that infants are guilty is not necessarily because of what they desire. It's because of inherited guilt, which believe. Well, that's not true. Because the question is amongst the reformers, is concupiscence sin? And they say yes. Desire to sin is sin. No, concupiscence is desire. Passions. Desire is plural, right? So, it can be desires for all kinds of things. So, you're saying the reformers taught that being hungry is a sin? They taught that the desire. They don't make the distinction, is my point. If concupiscence or the passions are sin and make you liable to guilt, then if Christ possesses the exact same status as other infants by virtue of homoousios, then how is Christ not a sinner? How is he not liable to what you're calling, he has the same state of being as the other infants?

Well, so Jesus himself said that, you know, wanting to, if you desire to like hurt your brother or kill your brother, that's still sin, just as if you actually. We're talking about infants. So, on the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, if you look at a woman lustfully, even if you don't actually. Think infants. Okay, infants. Do you think infants lust after women? They don't do that particular thing. No. So, we're talking about infants. We're not talking about adults that consent to sin with their with their. This is just, this is just defending the point that desire to sin is sin. It's desire in infants. Not. No, in the reformers, infants are liable because they have the desires that Adam passed on to his descendants. Concupiscence, the passions are also sin. You already admitted that's a Reformation teaching. It's a Reformation teaching that desire to sin is sin. It's not that desire in general is sin. No, it's their argument is that concupiscence, what is concupiscence in your view? Concupiscence is desire to sin. And infants possess concupiscence, and that's why they're guilty.

I didn't say that the fact that infants possess concupiscence or the reformers teach that why they're guilty. They're guilty because they inherited Adam's sin. What does it mean to inherit Adam's sin if not to inherit the concupiscence which makes them guilty? That's the, that Calvin makes this argument in the Institutes when he rejects the Roman Catholic distinction between original sin and original guilt. Yes, and I'm sure you've seen me rejecting the distinction between original sin and original guilt many times here. That's just making my point. Yeah. So, original sin, all in Adam, all sinned. So, that means even before the baby, even if a baby doesn't desire any sin, even if the baby does, even when it's like a single-celled embryo in the womb, that cell is not desiring anything, but it's still guilty of sin. How is it guilty of sin if sin is not a state of being? It's guilty of Adam's sin because in this was everything I argued 20 minutes ago, that you collapse person into nature. So, now I'm guilty for other people's actions because my nature is condemned. Correct. You're guilty for other people's actions. Adam's other people's actions. It's not like Adam is some guy who is like, all of us are united to Adam. All of us may, in some sense, did make the decision to sin in Adam. Again, so now guilt and sinning is not personal, it's natural. It's a state of nature, right?

Well, there's, you could go into the question of like, are do people have a personal union with with Adam, or is it just a union of nature? That there. Well, you just argued that it was natural. So, right. I mean, for me to be guilty of a sin, it's my nature that is condemned. And that collapses person into nature. So, so you're saying that are, are you saying that because like Augustine, the reformers collapsed person into nature, that's why, um, that's why they, so you're saying that the reformers believe all of us are personally united to Adam because they collapsed person and nature? Yes. And that's when Augustine does the exegesis in Romans 5, which he mistranslates. What it actually says in the Greek, it does not say "all sinned in Adam." It says "all are in Adam." And that's what led to the effects of Adam's sin. And you can read Mindorf has a really good exegesis of that, and he rebuts the Augustinian mistranslation because Augustine was looking at the Latin. The Paul's letter is written in to the Greeks, or it's written to the Romans in Greek. So, my Endorf, if you look up his exegesis of Romans 5, he points out how this led to this misunderstanding in the West. And that's where Augustine brings in the, uh, Neoplatonic archetypal imagery to.

Say that everybody is in Adam as an an archetype. He uses this argumentation in *City of God*.

And then that's what leads to the state of nature being itself a condemned and damnable state. And that's what we're saying is that you this is confusing sin as a state of being with sin as an action. Sin and guilt are not states of being. Evil is not a state of being. Sin is specifically an action of the will, and that's it. That's what James defines it as. And so you can never be guilty for something that you didn't do. And so all of Calvinism is actually predicated on one of these big mistakes here.

But I'd like to move on, if we can, to Christology. Because, um, based on what you're saying, I think Augustine was right. I think that all of us did personally sin in Adam, and single-cell embryos are guilty of sin. That's what I think. That's what Calvinism teaches. I think, you know, that's what Calvinism teaches, right? Right. And so again, that's making my point. The point that I've been making. So that that was what I was trying to make the point. Thank you for, I guess, I guess to summarize my points, like, I'll agree with a lot of your premises. I just don't necessarily agree that the logical conclusion of that is the heresies that you attach. That that's all I was saying.

But the her, the monoenergis is the teaching in the classical Reformation tradition that the Divine will has to overcome the human will because there's a natural antipathy of the human will to the Divine will. So Catholics hold, I mean, I would say Calvinists hold the councils infallible. You wouldn't believe Catholics hold the councils as infallible. They also follow on this issue. We believe that. So if there's some, like, how do Catholics affirm both if they're contradictory? Because the Augustinian position is a dialectical mode of willing where, uh, in Augustine's view, that's why I mentioned *libido domi* earlier, because that's the Augustinian position. The will is either directed towards God in all of its thoughts and actions, or it's directed towards creatures. So Augustine thought that if it's ever directed towards creatures, that in some way involves some degree of venial sin, at least if not mortal sin. This is why Augustine says that even in married life, he doesn't understand how married sex isn't still in some way sinful. He admits that it's a sacrament of the church, but he says, I can't understand how it's not sinful because if I'm enraptured with my wife, I'm willing towards creatures, and so therefore I'm still in some way involved in some degree of sin. So this is a dialectical mode of willing. You're either willing towards God or towards creatures, and creatures in some way involve sin.

The reformers don't, the reformers don't go with, they don't go with a lot of this, um, nuances that Augustine has because Augustine believes in operative grace and cooperative grace. He thinks that in conversion, there's this operative grace that basically effectually moves the will, and then after that, you have cooperative grace. But he teaches baptismal regeneration. So he's not, I just don't think he's consistent with these different positions that he's trying to work through.

The Eastern Church, the Orthodox Church, never accepted this idea that man's will is so fallen and so so damaged that he has to have grace replacing his human will and energy. And this becomes a discussion at the Sixth Council when they're debating Christology because you understand that in our view, in Orthodox theology, Christology and the anthropology that's formulated in terms of Christology is a one-to-one parallel with anthropology in humans in catology. So the theological positions that we have in Christology are going to determine our catology. In reformed theology, it's backwards. You start with theology, and then down the road, you do Christology or you do your Trinitarian theology. For us, everything begins with the person of the Father in the *monarchia* of the Father. That's why we don't have things like *filioque*.

But I'd like to ask a question about about Christology because the other big problem that I see with reformed theology, and maybe you don't teach this, I don't know, but the classical Reformation teaching, whether it's Calvin, Luther, Charles Hodge, John Murray, J.I. Packer, R.C. Sproul, they all teach that Christ on the cross was damned. And that that damnation that he underwent in the hours of his crucifixion and death, that that's the equivalent of the experience of hell and damnation in terms of what the human race was due. And so the penal substitution argument in them is that the penalty that was due to us, Christ paid. And then Christ's payment then is the thing that's put into our bank account, you know, to give us the perfect righteousness of Christ. Do you agree with that idea that that, uh, that Jesus was damned on the cross?

So this is, are you just talking about double imputation? That our sins were imputed to him, and he suffered all the penalty for our sins? Well, not everybody who believes in, uh, double imputation necessarily believes that Christ was damned on the cross. There are some modern reformed theologians and Protestants who reject that idea. But the classical reformers teach it. So I'm just curious what your take is on that. I haven't really thought through that. Remember, I am just a Minecraft YouTuber. I've never gone to seminary or anything like that. So I'll have to look more into that. I don't, I don't know. It's like, I have heard the pastors, the reform pastors, I've heard they've spoken about Jesus suffering God's condemnation on the cross. I'm not sure if what they mean by that is Jesus was damned on the cross, or if they mean that he just suffered the penalty for our sins, took the weight of our sins on his shoulders, which all Christians universally would.

Well, if that's the, I mean, even if you took that route, like, what is the penalty for our sins in your view? The wages of sin is death. We deserve damnation for our sins. Yeah. So if it's a double imputation, I mean, did, was he damned? Well, I, I guess. Well, generally when Calvin interprets, he descended into hell from the Apostles' Creed as the damnation Christ received on the on the cross. You could say so. I would say I'm not gonna like die on this hill, but I'll say, sure, let's go with that. And I'll, I'll, I'll be open to hearing your criticisms of that view.

Right. Well, you know, all Orthodox Trinitarian theology from, you know, councils, you know, three, four, five, six, agree that, you know, Christ is a Divine person. He's the second person of the Godhead, assuming human nature. And so if he's the second person of the Godhead, it's absolutely impossible that the Trinity could be split by one person damning another person, or that the, you know, this. Think of all the things that this would result in, right? To be damned is to be excluded from the presence of God, to have the act of wrath of God against you, and so forth. In the Calvinist view, that would mean then that as a Divine hypostasis, now the Trinity is split because Christ is no longer the second person. He doesn't share the same will as the Father and the Spirit. Now he, the Spirit and the Father have their will against him. And now also the doctrine of *perichoresis*, so the Divine indwelling, would no longer be the case. So now the Father and the Spirit no longer indwell the Son because he's damned. So all the things that would result from this idea are so insane to me that this alone, I think, is one of the strongest arguments against all the Reformation tradition because it results in being anti-Trinitarian or Arian.

The other option is that you could say, well, I'll just say that there's a human subject that is the receiver of the damnation, Jesus of Nazareth, this sort of historical person that's damned in our place. It's a human being being damned in our place. And that then preserves the, you know, I'm not falling to the anti-Trinitarian dilemma. Uh, but the problem with this is that that's an historian. So now you've adopted a human subject that is the receiver of this damnation. And also, by the way, God doesn't need anything from us. So how does the damning of a of a human being or a human person pay off an infinite debt, especially if God doesn't need creatures? Right? So these, um, these reformed theologians you've heard that say Jesus was damned on the cross, what position would they take? Would they argue that there was a rupture in the Trinity, or would they, what would they say?

No, I think they just simply didn't see this. I think that maybe more recent, uh, Protestant scholars and people have seen this and then they want to move away from that. But this really begins to undo the whole, whole of imputation theology because imputation theology is built on that equivalence, right? So you're saying that it doesn't cause Trinitarian problems for God the Son to suffer on the cross, but it does cause Trinitarian problems for there to be some sort of damnation of God the Son on the cross, right? And it, and it shows that the, the punishment or the penalty, which the Orthodox Church has said for the, I mean, the first seven centuries of the church were summarized in John of Damascus's *On the Orthodox Faith*. He talks about, we already knew, the church already universally understood what the Descent into Hades was. Nobody in the early church believed that it was Christ being damned. It was Christ literally descending into Hades. And that's why Peter says that he preached to the spirits in prison. So Peter teaches the Descent into Hades. The church always taught the Descent into Hades. And that's why it's not a damnation. It's Christ going and preaching the gospel to the spirits in Hades. This is called the Harrowing of Hades in Orthodox theology. It's basically a doctrine that's completely lost in the West, whether it's the reformed tradition or even the Roman Catholic tradition, which still confesses it but has basically no significance in its theology. For us, it's central to redemption that Christ descended into Hades and preached the gospel to the dead.

Point being then that the, uh, the solution then for the Orthodox is that Christ is a Divine person. He's the second person of the Godhead. All of his incarnate actions are the actions of the second person of the Godhead. So there's never a human subject in Christ. That's Nestorianism. And so what happened at the cross, as John of Damascus says in book three, is that this, the human soul is severed from the human body. Death. So the Divine person of the Logos experiences the severance of the human soul from the human body. That's death. And that's it. That's. And then he descends as the Divine person to that soul, to Hades, to preach the gospel to the dead. Totally different than the Reformation, uh, idea of this transactional event.

Yeah, so the transaction, like, you agree that it's not, it doesn't cause Trinitarian problems for God the Son to suffer. It just can't be like the condemnation of of God the Father, right? Well, it can't be him being condemned by any member of the Trinity. So it just simply depends on what we mean by condemnation and punishment, right? I mean, when John of Damascus explains the passages, for example, of him becoming a curse, he says that's by appropriation. In other words, it's as if he were one cursed. But Christ could not be cursed because his holy body never suffered decay or corruption. So he wasn't actually cursed. He wasn't actually damned. He willingly underwent death. And that's why it's the later councils specified that you have to say that he willingly underwent death, not that it was taken of him of necessity. He willed it because he's, he's God. He's the second person of the Godhead. We would definitely agree that this is not cosmic child abuse, like in some Baptist systematic theologies. We agree that Jesus willingly went to the cross. And all that. That's 100%. I guess what some Calvinists might say in defense, again, I have not, this is the first time I've, I've heard specifically that they teach Jesus was damned on the cross. I guess what they would say is he suffered the penalty equivalent to damnation without actually being condemned by the Father or the Holy Spirit.

Well, even if, even if you say it's an equivalence, it's still, right? I mean, they will execute the passages that, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" as if the Father has forsaken the Son. Well, that's just quoting a Psalm. That's not necessary. I said they execute the passage to mean that he is in some sense rejected by the Father. Well, it's sort of like, like you said with John of Damascus, like, in some sense, it's as if he were rejected without him actually being rejected. The Bible uses language for things about God that we know, right? Actually, the way it happens, just like it says God regretted making humanity, okay? But, and I grant you that, as if Jesus was, uh, forsaken by the Father, even if there wasn't actually some sort.

Okay, well, then it's not an equivalence, right? So then if that's the case, there is only one will in the Trinity, right? If that's the case, then it's, it's not the equivalence of the imputation. Then that would undo the imputation view. So Jesus can suffer for the sins of his people without actually being condemned by the Father, because he suffered the thing as a result of being condemned. The whole model is different because Christ isn't doing this to placate the Father's wrath. Christ, as the second person of the Godhead, is assuming human nature to heal it and to deify it. So it's not that one person in the Trinity is paying off another person of the Trinity, because that's also anti-Trinitarian, right? So the traditional Reformation doctrine isn't just erroneous when it comes to the damnation of the person or the hypostasis. It's also anti-Trinitarian because the payment between the Father and the Son subordinates the Holy Spirit. You can't have an action in the Trinity that excludes one of the persons. I know Protestant systematic theology fully agrees with that. There is the doctrine of inseparable, inseparable operations, which is explicitly taught in like the Lutheran reformed.

Okay, so if there's a payment being made to God the Father, then where is the Holy Spirit in this transaction? That the Son is paying the Father the infinite debt. So where are you getting the specific idea that the Son paid the? Again, where in the confessions? Because you'll find some reformers like speculating on things, just the way you'll find church fathers speculating on things. Is there a place in the confessions where it says the Son paid the Father and the Holy Spirit was not doing anything? My tradition was the Westminster Confession. I don't know if the Westminster Confession explicitly argues that the Son was damned. I haven't read that. Like, a lot of times you'll, you can find examples of people in the Protestant tradition saying certain things, you'll be like, oh, this is what Prot. Okay, but.

Well, hold on. This is, this is not just, this is like the classical reformers. They explain the passages this way. So, and by the way, I mean, it's fine. Okay, so even if it's not in the, you know, Westminster Confession, I mean, the Westminster Confession is not binding. So I mean, I could, if I'm a Protestant, I could just simply say the Westminster Confession is wrong. Yeah, I guess. But saying like, I'm not sure exactly where you're where you're getting this.

Well, I do, do you want to, do you want to floor a *Gellium* of quotes? I mean, I have a, my friend, my, when I was Roman Catholic many years ago, uh, we wrote a, a pass. He took all these quotes from me. But if you want the, I can give you the list of all the statements about, uh, Jesus being damned in classical Reformation teaching. I believe you that there's a lot of people who say that. The confessions say, like, this is what we're, we're certain about. It's sort of like the refined version of the doctrine because you'll have people explaining things, you have people writing things right and left, but that doesn't mean that becomes actual dogma. It becomes dogma. But hold on.

Well, wait a minute. But how, I don't, how do you actually have dogma anyway? I mean, dogma that's gonna take us back to the whole, like, earlier debate. It's gonna be another three hours. So I would just, I would just recommend, you know, there's a really good book on this by John McGuckin. I don't affirm everything that John McGuckin teaches, but if you get book *St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy*, I think that's one of the strongest, uh, refutations of, uh, Calvinistic theology in terms of Christology. And I think if, if Christology fails, you know, then basically the rest of it fails.

So of course, um, now, you, you said, uh, offhand earlier that, um, reformed theology starts with soteriology and then goes to Christology. So this is something I have encountered a lot with a lot of, um, Calvinists, mainly Reformed Baptists, by the way. And there's another example of Reformed Baptist theology affecting even mainstream reformed theology. For a lot of them, they say, fundamentally, you need to be exactly right about, you need to be exactly right about how salvation works. You need to be exactly right about TULIP and the five *solas* and all that stuff. But if you're a historian heretic, the way John MacArthur is, I'm sure we can agree John MacArthur is a historian, right? I don't keep up with John MacArthur, but I have absolutely no surprise if he is. I think most, I think most, I think most, I think most, most Calvinists are historians. So I don't have any problem with that. I mean, well, we, we condemn what he said as historianism. He said it's heretical to call the blood of Jesus Christ the blood of God, and he also said Mary did not give birth to God. That's historianism, right? Those are historian statements. But I think that you can find historianism in many, like Herman Ridderbos. You can find historianism in a lot of reform theologians. I'll admit that, even like Charles Hodge and R.C. Sproul can be a little, little story in here and there, maybe not full-blown. But because they would affirm Chalcedon, but it's, it's, it's not ideal.

But can I, can I make, can I make one point here? Is that there's a lot of problems in some reform circles of putting soteriology before, you know, Christology. But I've spent basically my entire, um, presence as a Calvinist YouTuber basically trying to argue against that, trying to say that, you know, salvation is not the most important doctrine. I've tried to say that the five points of Calvinism are really tertiary, maybe maybe tertiary doctrines. I've tried to say Christology is central. So I agree 100%. Trinitarian theology, Christology, that's what's absolutely essential. And soteriology is secondary. We can age on that, right? Right. And Trinitarian theology then will mean that you're accepting Constantinople I in 381, that is the Orthodox view of the Cappadocians, which is premised on the *monarchia* of the Father, no *filioque*.

Okay, so you said, you said you have a problem with Calvinist Christology. So what specifically, what's specifically wrong with Calvinist Christology? There are Calvinist Trinitarian theology things that are, uh, distinct from both Catholicism and Orthodoxy. There's the *auto theos*, which I believe in. But, okay, so that's what about Christology distinct about Calvinist Christology that you think is heretical?

Well, I mean, that's, that's heretical right there. I mean, the Nicene Creed, the original Nicene Creed explicitly affirms that the Father is identified as being *autotheos* of himself. So to give to the Son *auto theos* is to confuse the persons of their hypostatic properties and to create a dyad just as much as the *filioque* does.

Thank you. So, um, I'll get to that in a second because that is actually something I've spent a lot of time thinking about, um, unlike the whole Jesus being damned on the cross. I've never heard of that. But what about the, like, the two natures, or the general Christology? It's like Calvinists subscribe to Chalcedonian Christology.

This was a huge misunderstanding. This is a huge misunderstanding that I had even as a Roman Catholic. That the end of the discussion is not Chalcedon. The fifth and sixth councils are just as important to Christological disputes because after Chalcedon, there was a remaining question left, which the Monophysites continued to explicate, which is what does it mean to be in a hypostatic union? And the fifth, the fifth Council met to reaffirm what they call the Neo-Chalcedonian view. The Neo-Chalcedonian view excludes the Antiochene view or any kind of *tertium quid* type of view because of the tendencies of those views towards both Monophysitism or towards, uh, a kind of Nestorianism. So you have to affirm that the second person of the Godhead assumed impersonal human nature, and then by virtue of that assumption, he deifies it. So if you don't believe in the deification of the human nature, which I, I mean, maybe there's Calvinists who believe this, I've never heard of Calvinists believing in deification.

The other problem that I would say with this is that in, in Calvinism, the grace that you're getting is still a created grace because you don't have the essence-energy distinction. And the only way to have uncreated grace, which is the only way to have the gospel, is to have the essence-energy distinction. So, Calvinists do affirm the fifth and sixth councils. We reject, uh, Monism. I know you thought we don't believe in, I'm not trying to be mean. I'm not trying to be mean. Hold on. So I'm not trying to be mean to you. I know that you give verbal credence to it, but you don't understand it. And I'm not trying to be a douchebag or mean, but I'm saying that Calvinists do not actually, because the fifth Council teaches the deification and the sixth Council, the deification of the human nature that he assumed. And that means that believe in there is a, a Calvinist teaching on *theosis*. We don't call it that. We call it union with Christ because we do have a stronger Creator distinction than Orthodoxy. But that, that does exist. Michael Horton, for example, has done a great job recovering it. Michael Horton does argue for an essence-energy distinction in his *Systematic Theology*. It's not the same as the Orthodox version. We still believe in Divine Simplicity. Um, but there is a sense in which Calvinists do believe that. We reject, we reject Monothelitism as heresy. I'm sure you've heard of Wayne Grudem, right? Yeah, yeah. I was, I was reading Wayne Grudem when I was 19. That's the Monothelite heresy. We reject that.

Wait, hold on. What? Say that again. Um, you know about like some, you know, Reformed Baptists are subordinationist. They believe that the Son eternally is subordinate to the Father. Well, that's the Cappadocian view. Things can be, things can be subordinate in different ways. Yeah, actually, now that you mention it, yes, Eastern Orthodoxy does subordinationism in many ways. But subordinationism on the grounds, I'm sure you would reject this type of subordinationism, though, because they say that the Son's will, the Son's will is eternally subordinate to the Father's will. There's no such thing as a Son's will. That's a heresy. Exactly. Exactly. What these people, like even Doug Wilson, Wayne Grudem, they think will comes with person and not with nature. That's correct, right? That's a, that's a, that's the heresy. We believe that. We believe that Jesus has two wills because will comes with nature and not with.

Okay, but that's not all there is to this discussion. And the fact that Michael Horton talks about that, he wants an essence-energy distinction, he's just taking that from Orthodox theology. Well, no, he does not just invent it out of thin air. He quotes the Reformed Scholastics on it. The Reformed Scholastics do not. How do they teach that you are participating in uncreated grace? So they don't use the same language as Orthodoxy, but there is union with. Union with Christ is sort of like the Calvinist version of *theosis*. It's not exactly the same, but it has a lot of the same ideas, just sort of nuanced and corrected by having a greater Creator-creature distinction. Again, like, if the, the essence-energy distinction, by the way, is argued from Paul. Right? Paul uses this distinction quite often in his epistles where he talks about the divine power or *dynamis* at work in him in Philippians, for example. In First Corinthians, when he talks about the gifts of the Spirit, he says that they are the inner *energeia*, the operations of the Holy Spirit that are the gifts that we partake of and we participate in.

So I'm curious though, because like in John 17, you know, Jesus says that he came to give the the disciples a participation in the glory that he had with the Father before the foundation of the world. And that glory, by the way, can't be the Divine essence because we all agree that the Divine essence is non-participable. You can't participate in the Divine essence. So in your view, like, what is it in John 17 that we, what is that glory that we're participating in?

We are, you, through our union with Christ. It's without Christ, without the hypostatic union. Now, this is not necessarily reformed. This is more, uh, neo-Orthodox on my part. Ordinarily, it's impossible for the human and divine to be reconciled. It's impossible for the finite and the infinite to be reconciled. But through, why? Because of the Creator-creature distinction. Because.

Hold on. So right there, that just is the essence of Calvinism right there. Is dialectics of opposition? You have the not capable of the infinite. Yeah, exactly. But that's that's heretical. The Incarnation is necessary. No, it's not, because God created the world and there's no opposition between God and world. He pronounced it good. You said that the, it's impossible without the Incarnation for the infinite and the finite to be reconciled. There's no, uh, tension or need for it to be reconciled because God created it. Why does it need to be reconciled?

So I just want to disclaim here. I am sort of going astray from what might be classical reformed theology. I'm not saying I'm contradicting any of the confessions or anything, but this is more of a neo-Orthodox take. So I'm not speaking on behalf of all Calvinists right now. I don't even know what neo. What do you mean, Bart? What's neo-Orthodox? Bart is a figure associated with neo-Orthodoxy, but neo-Orthodoxy is just sort of like modern, modern but non. It's, it's like the anti-liberal. Why wouldn't you want to go to the Cappadocians and the people that defined the doctrine of the Trinity? Why would you want to go to Bart and all these these characters? I just don't understand the motivation.

Want Bart to define the doctrine of the Trinity? No, I'm saying why wouldn't you get your Trinitarian doctrine from the Cappadocians? We get our Trinitarian doctrine in many ways, we inherit it from the church fathers, maybe more so Augustine than some of those Cappadocians. But so, so you don't believe in Cappadocians then? So you pick and choose which guy you want to follow because Constantinople I didn't accept the Augustinian view of the Trinity. So anyway, what I was saying is that the, the, you agree that the fundamental idea of Calvinism is the *extra Calvinisticum*? Is what? The *extra Calvinisticum*? Do you know what that is? No. The *extra Calvinisticum* is the Calvinist doctrine that the finite is not capable of the infinite. And that's what makes us different from Lutherans. That's why Luther. What does that mean? Not, I don't even know what that means. Not capable. What does that mean? That means the finite. Well, what it meant in its original context is that the human nature cannot take on divine attributes. It, the human nature cannot take on divine attributes. And that was originally in a debate between Luther and Calvin on the.

Really? Luther and Zwingli? But Zwingli was not. I'm aware that this is how Luther argues. This is how Luther argues for this is how Luther argues for his Calvinism on the Lord's Supper. Yeah, I know. This is how Luther argues for his real presence is that the, the body of Christ takes on things like omnipresence. Yeah, the body. He thinks that Christ's human nature can take on omnipresence. Calvinism rejects that. Calvinism does not believe the human nature of Christ can be omnipresent. We still believe by the operations of the Holy Spirit, we can receive the true human and divine natures of Christ in the Lord's Supper. Um, but we just don't believe the human nature itself can be omnipresent.

But the, what the accusation the Lutherans made against the Calvinists for saying that was, you're denying the Incarnation if you're saying the finite is not capable of the infinite. And the Calvinists responded by saying, no, actually we're saying that the, um, incarnate, the reason the Incarnation is necessary is because the finite is not capable of the infinite. Because there's this gap between the finite and the infinite that can only be bridged by the Incarnation. Yeah, I don't have a problem. I mean, that's kind of similar to Maximus's argumentation that the Logos performs the function of making the infinite, uh, accessible to the finite. You know, he argues. Fully agree with that, right? But I mean, this doesn't, none of this equates though with the idea that the reformed tradition has a doctrine of participation in uncreated energies. Because for example, if you look at the way that the, you know, Fourth Ecumenical Council, or even Athanasius, like, so if you read Florovsky's essay on creation, in Athanasius, he'll point out that the Creator-creature distinction is necessitated by also the essence-energy distinction. So you have to distinguish between the action of the Father generating the Son and the action of God creating the world. So there's different types of acts in God or that God does. So that requires the essence-energy distinction. I know that you're saying that maybe, you know, you are okay with some of these elements, but the essence-energy distinction is not a theoretical thing that just sort of like exists on its own. If you look at the debate between Barlaam and St. Gregory Palamas, the essence-energy distinction ultimately becomes a question of participation and what we're participating in. So I appreciate, and I was also a Calvinist, very interested in the union with Christ. I'm aware that that's in reformed theology. It's in, you know, Westminster Confession, all that. But it's not actually addressing the specific question of what is it or in what way we're united. Because if you don't have the uncreated energies, then you don't really have salvation because we can't meld with the person of the Holy Spirit. So what exactly is the grace that we're partaking of in the reformed tradition? Classically, you have Christ meriting a created state, right? So when he fulfills the divine law, the covenant works, he's merited this created status that's then imputed to our bank accounts. But that's not what Jesus is saying in John 17 about participating in uncreated glory. So if we agree that we don't participate in the, uh, essence of God, and we agree that the uncreated glory is then therefore an energy that's distinct from the essence of God, then you can't have the model that you said earlier that you affirm the classical Western doctrine of divine simplicity and the *filioque* and *autotheos*. I mean, *autotheos* is a, in Calvin, would be a result of this absolute divine simplicity doctrine. And so if your model of the Trinity isn't beginning with the person of the Father and the *monarchia* of the Father, which then requires the type of subordination that I talked about, not subordination in essence, but subordination between divine hypostases.

Jesus says that he always does what the Father wants. He always does the Father's will. That doesn't mean he has a separate will. It means that there's an ordering in the Triad that begins with the person of the Father. Right? When God said, "I am, I am He," right? That's a reference to the person of Yahweh, the Father. And so Jesus is identified, but he's identified as the second person who's derivative of the Father. So the original Nicene Creed says that the Father is the source, cause, and origin of the existence of the Son, who is begotten of Him. And so the Son eternally is derivative of the Father. He is notated by the common essence. He is, excuse me, he is not generated by the common essence because he would then generate himself or the Spirit would generate him. So he has to be specific to the Father as a, as a specific relation to the Father in terms of deriving his essence and his existence and his hypostasis from the Father. And so if you don't believe that, then you're actually rejecting Nicene theology and the and Constantinople I. So because, and that's that's odd because earlier on we agreed in the chat that you said you agreed with Nicene theology, that it was correct. But Nicene theology does not teach that the Son is *autotheos*. In fact, it rejects that.

So Calvin's teaching on *autotheos*. Not, not all reformers, not all reform people agree with this. I, I do, though. So you can, uh, you can put me in the same. So you don't agree with, so, so you rejected the actual Nicene and Constantinopolitan definition of the Trinity? So what Calvin taught is when you're, no, you have, you've rejected it. Well, what, when you're talking about the Son in in isolation, the Son is God in and of himself. The Son is not a derivative, like God by derivation. When you're talking about. So you don't, there's no such thing as the in himself. There's, I mean, how, what do you mean? The Son in himself exists from the Father. And do you understand that this is in the original Nicene Creed? That Athanasius's theology, which accepted there, actually discusses the very question that you're talking about. Yeah, the Son, when you're talking about the Son in relation to the Father, the Son is indeed of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is of the Father and the Son. But the Son doesn't exist of himself. He, he derives his hypostasis and his existence from the Father's nature. That's the original Nicene teaching. So I'm just want you to be, I want you to say that you reject the Nicene and Constantinopolitan teaching.

So you're talking about the Nicene Creed or some other, like, canons of Nicaea? The Nicene theology about *genos* and *a-genos* from Athanasius that's accepted at the original Nicene Creed is that there's an eternal generation and that you mark off the persons by hypostatic properties. The Father is identified as *autotheos* or of himself. So the Son cannot be identified as *autotheos*. He would be having the Father's hypostatic marker.

So is self-existence one of the Divine attributes? Is a *causa* one of the Divine attributes? No. So you're saying a *causa* is not a Divine attribute. This is the logical problem of the Trinity. We've already done multiple, uh, streams on this. So it's, you have to distinguish nature and person. And so you can't collapse properties that are specific to hypostasis into properties that are common to the persons. So a *causa* is a hypostatic property. Do you understand that the Cappadocians, Basil, all of those fathers that are that their theology is accepted ecumenically at Constantinople I, they explicitly teach hypostatic properties is how you pick out the persons. And the Father's hypostatic property is to be cause and to be of himself, to be *a-causa*. So the Son cannot receive the Father's hypostatic property because anything you say or predicate of two persons must also be predicated of the third. There's no, there's no properties that two persons share that three don't have.

What about the fact that the Son and the Spirit are both of the Father? In your, that's not a hypostatic property. That's a negative relation. So the, you should read the Cappadocians. That's my, my, yeah, as you can see, as you can probably tell, I have not read the Cappadocian fathers. Um, I've read Augustine. Not the Cappadocian fathers. I did the same thing. And again, I want to stress, Augustine's Trinitarian theology is not accepted ecumenically. It's the Cappadocian doctrine of *monarchia*, which is consistent with Athanasius's doctrine of the Son being eternally begotten.

So Calvinism and Calvin himself does teach that the, you distinguish the three persons of the Trinity by their personal properties, but they're only distinguished in relation to one another. Yeah, that's, that's an error. You think it's an error to say only distinguished in relation to one another? Right, because that's not hypostatic properties. If they have more distinctions than in relation to one another, they have different essences, then you have three gods. No, no, they don't. So again, hypostatic properties is not the same thing as relations. There are relations, but relations are predicated on hypostatic properties. That's why you have to read Athanasius and the Cappadocians themselves because you're going to realize that. And I just did the live streams with Dr. Bo Branson. His dissertation is on Nicaea and the Cappadocians on the *monarchia* of the Father. This is, this is, this is the Trinitarian theology of the church, okay? And it's not the Augustinian view. So again, I just want to point out that you departed from what the first and second councils actually teach. I'm not trying to be mean to you. I'm just saying that this is not the Augustinian view.

Relations are, uh, predicates. They're not subjects. Persons are subjects. So this is why, for example, Aquinas says *persona est relatio*. Persons are relations. That's not what distinguishes the persons. Persons are subjects and they have hypostatic properties that make them or mark them out as that. And so if we wanted to use negative, uh, scriptural ascriptions as *idioma*, this doesn't work because there's infinite negative descriptors. You could say the Father is not China, the Father is not Florida, the Father is not. So all those negative descriptors don't actually function as *idioma* or markers. So what does function as markers in Augustine's theology? He struggles with this because he's trying to do a bunch of different models. He's got egalitarian Trinitarian theology. He's got Neoplatonic, Plotinian philosophy. When he quotes the *Enneads* to try to prove the *filioque*, he's got a bunch of different things going on. But he does have some elements of the hypostatic properties because he thinks the Father, for example, is the principal cause, but he's he's introduced a secondary cause by making the Son also a co-cause with the Father of the Holy Spirit. So the point there is, I'm just trying to say that Cappadocian theology is very explicit about this point. And if you read Gregory of Nyssa, if you read Basil's *Against Eunomius*, if you read Gregory of Nazianzus's *Orations*, I've read all the theological orations. They make this point over and over and over that there are specific hypostatic identifiers or *idioma*. The Father is cause of himself, unbegotten, *a-causa*. These are all stating basically the same idea about what picks out or identifies the hypostasis of the Father. And it's to be sole cause, over and over and over. The Cappadocians say sole cause, sole cause, sole cause. That means that any of those descriptors that we used cannot be transferred over to the hypostasis of the Son.

So, *a-causa*, if you don't have *filioque*, what are, what's the? I'm sure there is one. What is the distinction in personal properties between the Son and the Spirit? Basil says that what that distinction is, we don't know. That there is the distinction. We do know. So that, that is a big problem because *filioque* makes a lot more sense because then you do have a very clear distinction between the Son and the Spirit.

No, it's not. It's the, again, relation is not person. You understand that? A person is a subject. And to talk about a relation, there are relations, right? So Gregory of Nyssa talks a lot about relations, and the Father and the Son do relate to one another. And it is, it is proper to speak of distinguishing them via relations. But the distinction by relation is already resting on a more fundamental assumption of persons as agents. Okay? And so what are the properties that mark out the different persons? So the thing that marks out the person of the Father is that he eternally begets the Son. And that is a relation, but it's presupposing the subjects, right? So the Son is a distinct subject who relates to the Father. That's true. But he's distinguished by being begotten. And he's also distinguished by all the *oikonomia* and the roles that he takes on. So it's not true that if I don't have *filioque*, I don't have a way to distinguish between Father and Son.

The distinction is Son and Spirit. If you don't have *filioque*, you can't really distinguish Son and Spirit. I'm sorry, I meant Son and Spirit. Okay, you're good. Right. So the, what, again, the starting point of what distinguishes them is what's called hypostatic properties. Okay? That's that's Cappadocian. That's Athanasian. That's what's in the Second Ecumenical Council. And the Father's hypostasis is to be cause, is to be of himself. The Son's hypostasis is to be generated, to be Son of the Father. Those are all correct. But the relation is still not identical to the subject. Think about me and my father. Right? I'm I'm the son of my father, right? That's a relation that I share to him. Is the relation identical to the hypostasis or the person? Jay? Uh, no, right? Because I'm a distinct, individuated subject or person. So there is a distinct individuation refers back to their common origin of being from the Father. And so the fact that we don't know the nature of, uh, expiration versus generation does not mean there's not a distinction. It just simply means the nature of the distinction, we don't know that there is a distinction. We do know because that's what's revealed. And that's why the, the, the thing that distinguishes is Father, Father as sole cause, is precisely what makes this distinction. And in fact, to have *filioque* is again, like *autotheos*, to give to the Son the hypostatic marker of the Father. And by the way, you don't avoid any of the problems because in this action, you subordinate the Holy Spirit. Because if the Father and the Son possess a power that the Holy Spirit lacks, then how is the Holy Spirit not ontologically subordinated?

But you think it's okay to subordinate the Son? He's not ontologically subordinated. So the, in a way, then you can say the Father, you're keeping confusing hypostatic properties with common powers or energies. That's the confusion here. Hypostatic property of being cause or being *a-causa* marks out the Father. The hypostatic property of being the Son marks out the Son because he's generated from the Father, right? Those are hypostatic properties. You can't have things that two persons in the Triad share that one of them lacks because that would be common powers, energies, or attributes. And so if being cause is what is a marker of divine power, then the Father and the Son now have a power that the Spirit lacks, and he's ontologically subordinated. That's not the same thing as.

I see the, I see the problem. Why can't you say like, as the *filioque* people would, the Father causes and does not, it is not caused. The Son, it both causes and is caused. And the Spirit is caused but does not cause. That is a very simple way to distinguish all three persons of the Trinity with hypostatic properties.

Because it still is, uh, subordinating the Spirit. Because you still have two persons that have a power that the third lacks. So that's called ontological subordination. So.

Okay, so then you're not a Trinitarian. Then you're a Macedonian. You're not a Trinitarian. So I mean, you understand that the Macedonians were condemned in the Second Ecumenical Council for that very position. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so you're basically saying, you can have like, if you have negative attributes shared by two persons, that's fine. But if you have positive attributes shared by two persons.

Negative negative attributes aren't *idioma*. They don't really work to do that because, because again, do you understand relations are not subjects? You could have infinite relations, right? And some relations are more relevant than other relations, right? Like I relate to my father by being his son via generation, and that's a more, uh, that's a better *idioma* than saying that, uh, I'm not China, I'm not Brazil, I'm not a candy bar. Right? Like we can list infinite, uh, negative categories or or relations that don't really do anything for us. So, and this comes up actually in *On the Trinity*. Augustine says one way that we might distinguish the persons is by saying that, well, the Father is not the Son or the Spirit. Son is not the Father or the Spirit, right? But the problem is that this is an a negative marker that all three share, and it doesn't actually do much work to actually identify which one is what that subject is. Just like saying that Jay's not China, Jay's not Brazil, Jay's not candy.

Bar none, none of that is actually telling you the specific hypostatic idiom, mat, or marker of who Jay is, you see? Yeah. I, I, I see what you're saying. Um, I noticed that Kyle hasn't said anything since the last decent right. Yeah, I've just been listening. This has been really interesting going through all these issues. I wanted, I wanted to mention when I made my second, why I'm not Orthodox video, I mentioned that the Western, the philio makes it more sense because it makes the Trinity more like a triangle, and then you just roast me for that thing. It's like, Trinity, a triangle? It's like 2,000 years of theology out the window. Now, yeah, whatever.

I think you guys have done a really good job of explaining that there really are differences between Reformed and Orthodox theology. And this kind of the question that I have is, RedeemZoomer, you kind of have the view that we're part of the same church, like even Baptists, Catholics, Orthodox, we're all part of this bigger church. But Jay and I, we believe that the Orthodox Church, you know, it is, it is the ark of salvation, and that's why we want to convert everyone to Orthodox. Yea. And, you know, you've said that, you know, the Orthodox Church, it's, it's spiritual nourishment, as Jay has described. Like, we had our theology is very in-depth, and we have the right theology. So what exactly is like the Orthodox Church missing? Because we have explained that, um, you know, the errors in these, in these other views. So, and also, it seems contradictory because we know the Holy Spirit guides the church, but it's not leading it in different directions. So there has to be like, back to that, that visible body, that, uh, norm of authority. So, um, yeah, like what, like why not be Orthodox? And then, Jay, if you want to talk about humanism and how that's problematic in ecclesiology. Well, I'm going to have to go pretty soon, but after this question, um, maybe we could try to wrap it up. And I'm not trying to be rude or whatever, but I'll probably have, I have to go after this question. But go ahead. Yeah.

So briefly, um, what, what is the Orthodox Church lacking? It's like, yeah, it has spiritual nourishment. It is the true church. It's not, it's not exclusively the true church. The Orthodox Church, it is the true church. If it has rootedness in church history, that's because it does. That's, that's not a, it's not a charade or anything. I would say the Catholic Church is also the true church, and the Protestant churches are also the true church. Um, so I'm not saying their true churches. There's one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and it's not united by a human organization. It's united in Christ. We're all united in Christ. The Bible says no one can confess Jesus is Lord sincerely except by the power of the Holy Spirit. And Lord in this case means God. So that means you can't be a Mormon where you say Jesus is like, um, a God, but by God, you mean something completely a thousand miles off the planet to what, you know, Christians mean by by God. But we are united by our faith in Christ. The Bible says if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord, you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. And remember in Mark 9, there were people who are not with the disciples, not part of the disciples' organization, casting out demons in Jesus' name. The disciples ask Jesus, tell them to stop. And Jesus says, no, don't hinder them. Uh, forever, who, anyone who is not against us is for us. So the New Testament clearly says that our faith in Christ is what unites us as the church. We're not united organizationally. I think providentially, God did arrange it so that the church was united originally organizationally so they could work out what the true faith is and what it's not. Doesn't mean the early church as an institution itself was infallible. Like I said, but we're, I don't want to go back into the whole debate that we said. I would be very interested to hear Jay Dyer's problems with Eism. First of all, I'll say, like, what is the Orthodox Church lacking? Well, like I said, we have some, even though we see it as the true church, we have some serious problems with its theology. We think its theology of sin is one of the biggest things. We don't think that's biblical. Uh, we believe the philio way is biblical. So that's kind of why it's like, yes, it can be a, it can have great spiritual nourishment. That doesn't mean it's correct about everything. I mean, if it is the one true church, church, then yeah, we have to accept whatever it says. We don't, we don't start with that assumption. So we see these theological errors, and that's why we're not telling everyone to become one to us. I would add, uh, by the way, I did look up, uh, thank you to Gib. I forgot about the Westminster Larger Catechism. Uh, it does state in question 48, 49, 50, that, uh, Christ was in some way damned to the Father. It says specifically that he did experience the full weight of God's wrath on the cross. So, yeah, I knew that. I didn't know, I wasn't sure if that equated to being damned. Well, but didn't you already admit that Christ, the wrath that we deserve is damnation? So does he give, does he give, does he give Jesus like 50% wrath or like 30% wrath? Or the wrath we deserve is damnation, but that doesn't necessarily mean suffering the penalty of damnation is the same as actually being condemned by the Father. It's like, let's say you, um, you go to jail because of a crime that you committed. That's not the same. That doesn't mean that going to jail is the same as actually being accused of the crime. Well, what is the wrath? What, what is the wrath there? So the wrath is simply the punishment of damnation. That doesn't necessarily mean in order for Jesus to experience the wrath of God, he necessarily has to actively be condemned by the person of the Father. Anyway, um, okay, again, I've got it on screen there, and people can look and see what the Westminster Confession is. So my, my comment on the statement about the church is that, you know, historianism doesn't just come in a, in a Christological form. It also comes in an ecclesiological form. And the idea that all the multitudes of sects that exist, uh, out there, that on the basis of a lowest common denominator, uh, citation of the fact that nobody can say Jesus is Lord. Um, I mean, Mormons actually confess Jesus is Lord. So to say that Jesus is Lord, uh, somehow excludes Mormons as a common identifier of Christianity also doesn't work. There's a lot of different churches, and they don't actually believe he's Lord because Lord in the New Testament means God. They don't believe he's God. Yeah, they do. They believe that he, they believe in three Gods. They're tri-theists. So I'm just making, if I said that, like, Jesus is a tomato, and I, the word I use for tomato is God, that doesn't mean I actually think Jesus is God. So what they are, tri-theists, is completely different. No, it's not any Abrahamic religion. Okay, but they're tri-theists, and so they do believe that Jesus is God. And so that's why you're going to have to go into the actual, uh, Trinitarian theology of the church that's historical. There is no other Trinitarian theology. We don't need, uh, today's Michael Hortons and whoever working to try to make something that was already laid down and solidified make it work with Protestantism because, and I'm not trying to be rude here, but just simply saying that all of the discussion, I think, throughout the sort of trying to find Protestant theologians that have some elements of Orthodoxy, it's fine to do that in dialogue, but when it comes to the actual, uh, practice and life of the church, it doesn't actually work to have a church based around lowest common denominator ideas of confessing just that Jesus is Lord because that, you didn't have to, you yourself there just had to qualify, well, when Mormons say it, they mean this, this, this, this, this, this. Exactly. And that's precisely why we already have these qualifiers in the ecumenical councils, particularly first and second, which already cut out philio and cut out the denial of, uh, the Father as theos alone. So I'm just trying to say that if we're going to be faithful to, uh, you know, these councils and whatever, then we're going to be faithful to the church that produced those councils. And the church that produced those councils is identical to the theology of the Orthodox Church today. We don't differ in any significant way. When I read not just the dogma, but the canons of those councils, when I read the canons of Nicaea, it talks about the Eucharist, it talks about, uh, fumigation for the dead, it talks about bishops, it talks about the virgins, it talks about monastics. All these kinds of things are mentioned in the first, second, third ecumenical councils. Um, and so, you know, that's, uh, Apostolic succession is the thing that is one of the key indicators of a true and a false church. Protestants, uh, uh, wholesale do not possess Apostolic succession. And so I'm not saying that Roman Catholics are therefore the church because they have that. I'm just saying it's one of the necessary criteria. Protestants don't even have that necessary criteria. So to have that, Jesus says, for example, he who hears you hears me. And so he breathes on them, and when they go out, if you read the Pauline Epistles, Paul to Timothy, he says, I laid hands on you, Timothy. You don't lay hands on anybody, uh, too quickly in Ephesus. Make sure that you find good people who you can lay hands on them. He says the Holy Spirit is imparted in the laying on of hands. That's also something unique to, uh, uh, the Orthodox Church, or even specifically Apostolic succession, I should say, because Protestants, they believe in the laying on of hands of elders. They do not believe that there's a specific succession that's passed on. This is really just a biblical idea because the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament is passed on through Moses laying on his hands upon Joshua and others. There's a lineage of the successors of the ironic priesthood. That's a succession that is melded in the New Testament into the successors of the apostles who have the blessing, who have the, uh, the true priestly priesthood. So there's these things are continued in the New Testament. They're not just made up wholesale. And even in what, uh, our friend RedeemZoomer said there about the church initially being constituted as a body to decide these things, he talked as if it almost kind of failed, like soon after that it fell off into all of these accretions and false doctrines or whatever that no longer allow it to function that way. But Paul says, there is one Lord, one faith, one body, one baptism. And ecclesiological historianism is then to divorce the notion of the body from the physical, historical, physical body, the physical body of the people at Ephesus, the people at Corinth, the people who succeeded those churches. By the way, there are still churches, there is still a church in Ephesus that extends back to what Paul is telling Timothy to do in Ephesus, to lay hands on, to create successors. Those churches still exist to this day. And so any church that lacks that succession and that transmission is not even a church. Typically, in the church fathers, they're called parro churches. So we would agree that, um, we can have dialogue and discussion about areas that we agree and disagree. But I think that the normative authority of the church in history, the idea of them putting together and deciding the canon, which is the Orthodox Bible, which includes the Deuterocanonical books. It's not the Protestant canon that Martin Luther decided that he would choose Jerome, the Catholic one. Well, but we don't have a doctrine of, uh, the notion of canonicity as, and infallibility as the sort of like, the only authority, right? So in other words, if you believe in tradition, you might have a, a looser notion of what constitutes canon to allow for extra-canonical things in different traditions to be there or to not be there. So, for example, if the Roman Catholic canon lacks one or two of the deuterocanonical texts, that's not really a problem for a church that, that accepts extra-canonical tradition because that's how the, but, but the, but the, but the Protestant church, but your, but, but your doctrine is authority, then it almost doesn't matter. You don't even need a Bible. No, that's not true at all. It's just simply to say that the church is not governed by the written text alone. It's governed by multiple different authorities. There's a living authority of the episcopacy. There are written texts. There's the teachings of the councils. All of these things go together holistically. It's not an either/or. So, um, I'm not, anyway, we can continue this discussion. We have another discussion down the road if we want. But, um, yeah, I would just say that I think that ultimately Calvinism is a kind of historian ecclesiology whereby it leads logically to in a kind of a humanism where all the churches, and by the way, I know you would say that well, you have to confess the deity of Christ. Oh, so wait a minute. If I confess the deity of Christ, I can be part of your, uh, ecumenical project of who constitutes, but I don't have to believe in the deity of the Holy Spirit. So when we say Jesus is Lord, we're saying Jesus is is God. And that means basically you need to believe in the one true God, who is the one true God. It's not just God in some abstract sense. It's the Christian God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So, well, but now you're talking on additional criteria. So it's not actually just believing in Jesus as Lord, right? It's all these other things. And Paul talks about all kinds of things constituting heresies and schisms. And that's why the church in Corinth, for example, has the ability and authority to excommunicate and throw people out. And I don't think that you find, uh, modern-day Protestant churches continuing to have that authority and that ability. And so, on the whole, there is no Protestant church with normative authority. And I think that's the point I was trying to make. Yeah, that was what we talked about in the beginning. I said that there are examples of Protestant churches, you know, doing church discipline and kicking people out for. Yeah, but that doesn't equate to normative authority, which I was talking about in terms of binding people's consciences. There's no Protestant church. Do you believe that there's a Protestant church that has elders or living authorities that can bind people's consciences to a decision? So it's not an infallible authority, like I said, but it is. That's not what I asked. Do is there any notion of binding people's consciences to an to a decision? It's ministerial authority, not magisterial authority. Can they bind people's consciences to a decision? Depends on what you mean by that. Well, I mean, the Reformation confessions say that you can't bind people's consciences to decisions like that. I would say generally no. But they can still kick people out. It's like, um, if someone, okay, so, so I don't have to listen to it. So you can, so if I'm in a Calvinist church and they excommunicate, say, somebody who follows Doug Wilson, I don't have to listen to it because it doesn't bind me. Right? I, I guess not. Okay. Exactly. So not there's not normative authority. That's my point. Well, also, if you were excommunicated, according to you, RedeemZoomer, you would still be part of the church because you think if you leave a like a Reformed Church and you join an Anglican Church, you're still part of the church. So just, um, it's a little, it's confusing ecclesiology. Yeah. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one body. And that's the attitude of the church fathers at the ecumenical councils. They have the authority to say the Arians, the Macedonians, these people over here, they aren't the church. They do not possess. It's not just Apostolic succession, but they also don't possess the doctrines that are true. They don't possess the sacraments and the presence of the of Christ in the sacraments. And they don't possess the same, uh, faith as us. Yeah. Well, I would agree. You said it's like ecclesiastical historianism. We do see a distinction between the visible and the invisible church. The invisible church is anyone who believes in Christ. And sometimes it's the pro, the reason the problem with the invisible church is that it's invisible. You can't exactly know whether someone is a genuine believer. You can only see what they, the fruit they produced, like James says that. So if someone is either living in unrepentant sin or confesses, uh, heretical doctrine, you do expel them from the assembly of believers. Again, but the decision isn't binding. I don't have to listen to that. And so it really doesn't mean anything that one Protestant group expels somebody who can just create their own group the next day. So there's not normative authority because the Protestant doctrine itself says in its classical Reformation traditions that there is the freedom of conscience, that you can't bind people to, uh, interpretations of scripture. But you need to be able to bind people to interpretations of scripture to excommunicate them. And this is precisely the point is that there is one church in history. There's not a thousand different churches in history. And so the invisible church doctrine divides the presence of Christ from his actual visible historical body and his presence amongst the thousand different sects. So I can agree that there's grace in different groups, but there's not the grace of the one true church in a thousand different groups. And that's why there's one Lord, one faith, one body. And that's the attitude of everybody at these ecumenical councils. You understand that they're not arguing what you argue. They don't argue that we are one church with all of the different schisms and all the different groups out there if you just confess Jesus is Lord. Because then you said it's not just that, it also has to be the Trinity. Okay, but wait a minute. All of the Unomas said he believed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but he was an anti-Trinitarian. Right? So every group, that's why it has to get explicit. And there has to be, you can't just say that everybody that's a Protestant and a Catholic and Orthodox person is part of a general visible church because there has to be normative authority, otherwise it's just chaos. And I'm not trying to be rude to you, but that's that's my argument. It's legitimate criticism. Protestantism today is indeed chaos. I, I will, I will admit that, uh, Protestantism in its ideal form, like you say, you say that these classical reformers, they said you, they didn't have authority to bind people's consciences, but they still were excommunicating people. It's like Surus, for example, added. You just admitted that as a Protestant, I don't have to, I don't have to follow that. I admitted what you just admitted that as a Protestant, you don't have to follow that. But it's like they don't have the, they can't bind people's consciences because they don't have infallible authority. They were still excommunicating people. Those same reformers you're talking about, the people of the classical Reformation, they did tons of excommunications. There were a lot of Anabaptist heretics, and these heretics were worse than like modern Baptists. They were, they were Trinity deniers. Cadus is the biggest example. But you're, but your, your attitude, Trinity denier. So I mean, yeah, the Orthodox are very picky about distinction between like this sort of essence and this sort of like, no, it's the first two ecumenical councils, which you rejected. But I don't. No Calvinist, no respectable Calvinist would reject the Nicene Creed. You just, we already established earlier that when you said that you believe in theos, that's a rejection of the first and second ecumenical councils. Is it a rejection of the Nicene Creed? Yes. No, it's not. Yes, it is. Because Calvin still affirms the Nicene Creed. Yeah, it's, you're playing word games. I'm not saying you're mean, but or being bad, but I'm saying that you're playing word games by saying I accept the Creed as it is, but I interpret it my own way. Just like when the Constantinopolitan Creed says, I believe in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, every Calvinist reinterprets that to allow for Calvinism to be in there somehow. No, no. One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church meant in the mind of those people that wrote the Creed, Apostolic succession and a single visible institution, which you reject. And also, they taught the monarchia of the Father, hypostatic properties, the Father is the sole cause, and they do not teach that the Son is theos. That's specifically rejected in Athanasius's argumentation at the original Nicene Creed. So you do not believe that the first and second ecumenical as they as the theology is presented, you could take the phrases of the Creed itself and reinterpret them to mean Calvinism and althos, but that's dishonest with the theologians who produced that council. And that's what every Calvinist does is reinterpret the church fathers to make it Calvinistic. And I'm saying that that's a, that's a bogus move. So the way a Creed or a confession works is different people who often have different ideas. It's that's been the case in many different instances of church history, whether the, you specifically are rejecting the doctrine of the subordination of the Son deriving his existence from the Father. So every, every Creed that's ever written is a bunch of people with differing positions coming together to produce something that they can. No, it's to produce a definitive decision. It's not to produce a document that everybody can interpret their own way. Was not to make a document everyone can interpret their own way. You cannot interpret the Nicene Creed to say Jesus is not. You cannot interpret the original Nicene Creed to say that the Son is theos. You, you can't. That's dishonest. You cannot. You just admitted that you weren't familiar with the Cappadocians. So how are you going to know that the second ecumenical council's Creed, which builds on the original Nicene Creed, how are you going to know that they teach and allow for theos if you haven't read them? So you're saying that there is, that every single person who was involved in the creation of the Nicene Creed, they all rejected theos? The council accepts Cappadocian theology specifically, which is building on Athanasian theology. Nicaea explicitly says you have to believe it the way that Athanasius taught it. Cappadocian, the council one. There's a decree sent out by Theodosius saying, you better agree with Gregory of Nyssa as representative of the Cappadocian theology because that's what the second ecumenical council teaches and means. So yes, they specifically are saying you have to understand it in the Cappadocian sense. Okay, I see what you're saying. And what do you think the binding and loosing powers in the Bible are like? What authority do the apostles have that like lives on? Like what does it mean to bind? Hey, by the way, if this, if this, my phone dies, it's because the battery. It's not, I'm not like leaving and rage quit or something like that. So it's just my battery is about to die on on my phone. Okay. Yeah.

So what Protestants would all agree on is that the authority the apostles had is not necessarily the same exact authority as the authority of the church generally. The more Apostolic, tra, Apostolic succession traditions would say the power of the apostles lives on in the structures of the church today in bishops and stuff. And more Protestants, like Reformed Protestants, would say the authority of the apostles lives on in the Holy scriptures. I think we would agree that binding and loosing, that the powers that the apostles had, for the most part, are passed on to the successors. And so you do see in the early church, uh, eventually the confession of sins in an oracular sense. I think maybe in the first few centuries, there might have been more of a general confession. But we do see in the New Testament people coming to John the Baptist to confess their sins to him. Why can't, you know, your average, um, modern Orthodox bishop, like, faith heal people and raise people from the dead like the apostles were doing? Why don't I? Wasn't. Hold on. I wasn't finished with what I was going to say. So what I was going to say is that not every single action that the apostles did, we don't believe that's passed on to every bishop. So the, for example, the apostles had the ability to orally and in a written way, um, teach the and reveal the word of God, right? So they were, they were kind of like the same office of a prophet in the Old Testament. That what they taught or what they wrote is essentially divine revelation. And so Paul, for example, uh, equates his oral teaching at Ephesus, because he taught in Ephesus three for three years, and if you read the book of Acts, and then when he writes to Timothy, he says, all the things that you heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, pass on that whole deposit, right? Which is, is the deposit of faith, oral and written, ala 2 Thessalonians. So in our view, the, uh, deposit of the faith is sealed and complete when the apostles are gone. There's no new revelations, there's no new public divine revelation or something like that. And not every characteristic of the apostolic era, uh, is passed on to every single successor of the apostles. So I don't, I don't believe that we need, for example, in every situation, the miraculous use of tongues. God could have be wanted to, you know, grant the miraculous experience of tongues at some place in church history, but it's not, uh, as needed as it was in Acts 2 to demonstrate the power and authority of the apostles as the successors. So one of the reasons that, right, that Pentecost happens is as a demonstration of the fulfillment of the Feast of Pentecost and of the fulfillment of the prophecy of Joel, right? So Jews are supposed to recognize that when the miracle Pentecost happens and everybody speaking miraculously in these tongues, and everybody hearing the same language, that's a manifestation, the fulfillment of specific divine prophecies and redemptive history. So it's not something that has to characterize every age of the church. So I'm just basically agreeing. I think we would agree that we're both cessationists in the sense that when the apostles were gone, there's no new public divine revelations. We agree with that. It's just simply that we don't think that scripture alone has the ability to preach the word of God. There's also oral tradition that's passed on. All right. Anything else you want to say, Kyle? Anything else you want us to cover? Uh, yeah, the last thing was, do you think the lack of belief in like the binding and loosing has caused like endless schism in the Protestant world? Because everyone's kind of their own authority. And so I think if you're looking at the Protestant Reformation, you can kind of see the trajectory back in like the 1500s. If you're not really bound by anything, that's why we end up seeing just this explosion of different, um, denominations, and it continues to this day. Um, so do you think that that doctrine of not having that view of the church can contribute to all this confusion and just radically different theologies throughout, uh, Protestantism? Sure. Yeah. Um, so a lot of misconceptions that Catholics and Orthodox have about Protestant splits is that they call those splits schisms because Protestantism does not have this one true church model or Apostolic succession. A split of Protestant denominations are not nearly as much of a big deal, and they will still affirm each other as part of the one true church. So it's not exactly that much of a, a schism. For example, that's why we can take communion at each other's churches. I know there's some very, very conservative Lutheran sects that will only let you take communion if you're one of them. But just because we, there's organizational separations, it does not mean that there is schism. Like there's really a handful of different Protestant traditions. It's not like there's 40,000 denominations there. It's like that number comes from the fact that every single independent non-denominational church is considered its own denomination. I'd say in many ways Protestants are more united than the Orthodox have been, given that the Orthodox often split down ethnic lines. Like a lot of Orthodox churches in America, it's like they do the opposite of evangelism. If you try to go there and you're not part of their ethnicity, they're like, yeah, we don't want you here. Um, well, I mean, that's, if you looked at the history of Protestantism in America, hasn't exactly like been the most inclusive. And like, I don't think that's a good example to say that that is unique to Orthodoxy. Like there's so many people, I've experienced both. It's like, that's not a unique thing to Orthodoxy because every church is made up of people. And, um, yeah, I, I think that's a very superficial thing to say that, oh, it's just ethnic. Like if someone, a Russian person, maybe going to a very American, like evangelical church, is going to feel like an outsider. So yeah, yeah. I mean, the Orthodox Church specifically rejects ethnophilism as a theology. And this would be to replace the nation-state or the ethnos with the universality of the church. So while it is true that some ethnic parishes might be somewhat insular, um, I think the experience of most of people in the Orthodox world is that when you visit a lot of different American Orthodox churches, you find a tremendous amount of diverse people in different groups. My church has black people, it has, uh, Russian people, it has Hispanic people, and a lot of people, uh, uh, you know, have experienced that in a lot of different groups, so in a lot of different Orthodox circles. So, you know, the history of the Protestant church is that it immediately was sort of subservient to the German princes, for example. When Luther did his Reformation, there was an immediate sort of stepping in of the German princes who actually saw a lot of use in the Lutheran movement as a bulwark against the papacy and the sort of geopolitical pretensions of the Pope at that time in Europe. So there was an immediate sort of Caesaropapism that occurred in the Protestant churches. I will give Calvinists credit for, uh, at least they wanted in the time of the Westminster Confession to eradicate what they called Erastianism, which is the idea that the king or whoever has a, a control of the church or can say what's going on in the church. And they often critique the Anglicans precisely for being Erastian. And we would, we would agree as Orthodox that Erastianism is is incorrect. And in fact, if you look at a lot of the, the promotions of heresies, a lot of times were were emperors. There was a lot of heterodox emperors that were trying to change the church to teach Arianism. There were emperors that were trying to get the church to become iconoclastic, and the church actually survived those and rejected the, uh, the imperial, you know, attempts to change the doctrine. So I would say that, you know, in reality, every church is susceptible to the temptation of ethnophilism or something like that. But I don't think that you could deduce from that that the Orthodox Church is more divided and more split than the Protestant church because the, I, I, I that came off. I wasn't trying to say the Orthodox Church is more divided. And it is superficial. I know it doesn't really represent Orthodoxy. I'm just saying that it's the fact that there are these different Protestant denominations does not mean that there are schisms in the sense that schism means like for Orthodox, schism means you're excommunicating each other. For Protestants, most of the time when there's a denomination split or a new denomination forms, it's usually more of a reorganization than a schism. It's usually not a schism at all. Well, actually, for us, schism doesn't even necessarily imply an immediate excommunication. I mean, there might be a schism, uh, that's, it's schism is a severance in brotherly love, right? So you might have the same theology, and, uh, but the group says, we don't want to be in communion with, with, with you. So for us, schism is actually necessarily tied to communion. And communion is defined in terms of canon, canon law, canonicity, and who's, who's in communion canonically. So the canonical structure of the Orthodox Church is another indicator too, by the way, that we are the successor to the Church of the first thousand years. Every one of the ecumenical councils produces canons, which are basically church law. Church law has continued to govern the Orthodox Church ecclesial, ecclesiastically. And if you look at the history of the Protestant Church, there isn't church law. There aren't canons. They don't operate that way. Um, and so I would just say that this is another indicator that we're the same church of the first seven, eight councils. All right. Yeah, I see what you're saying. I guess for Protestants, because it's tied to communion, we Protestants, we have open communion, except for Lutherans. We have open communion. I can go to any Presbyterian church, even if it's not my denomination. I've taken communion at, uh, PCA churches, OPC churches. I can take communion at any Presbyterian church. Um, I could take communion at any Anglican or Episcopalian church. I can take communion at any Baptist church. So we're different organizations, but we, we are still, we still recognize each other as the one true church, theoretically. We would let an Orthodox person take communion at our church. I know there's some very, very conservative Lutheran sects that will only let you take communion if you're one of them. But just because we, there's organizational separations, it does not mean that there is schism. Like there's really a handful of different Protestant traditions. It's not like there's 40,000 denominations there. It's like that number comes from the fact that every single independent non-denominational church is considered its own denomination. I'd say in many ways Protestants are more united than the Orthodox have been, given that the Orthodox often split down ethnic lines. Like a lot of Orthodox churches in America, it's like they do the opposite of evangelism. If you try to go there and you're not part of their ethnicity, they're like, yeah, we don't want you here. Um, well, I mean, that's, if you looked at the history of Protestantism in America, hasn't exactly like been the most inclusive. And like, I don't think that's a good example to say that that is unique to Orthodoxy. Like there's so many people, I've experienced both. It's like, that's not a unique thing to Orthodoxy because every church is made up of people. And, um, yeah, I, I think that's a very superficial thing to say that, oh, it's just ethnic. Like if someone, a Russian person, maybe going to a very American, like evangelical church, is going to feel like an outsider. So yeah, yeah. I mean, the Orthodox Church specifically rejects ethnophilism as a theology. And this would be to replace the nation-state or the ethnos with the universality of the church. So while it is true that some ethnic parishes might be somewhat insular, um, I think the experience of most of people in the Orthodox world is that when you visit a lot of different American Orthodox churches, you find a tremendous amount of diverse people in different groups. My church has black people, it has, uh, Russian people, it has Hispanic people, and a lot of people, uh, uh, you know, have experienced that in a lot of different groups, so in a lot of different Orthodox circles. So, you know, the history of the Protestant church is that it immediately was sort of subservient to the German princes, for example. When Luther did his Reformation, there was an immediate sort of stepping in of the German princes who actually saw a lot of use in the Lutheran movement as a bulwark against the papacy and the sort of geopolitical pretensions of the Pope at that time in Europe. So there was an immediate sort of Caesaropapism that occurred in the Protestant churches. I will give Calvinists credit for, uh, at least they wanted in the time of the Westminster Confession to eradicate what they called Erastianism, which is the idea that the king or whoever has a, a control of the church or can say what's going on in the church. And they often critique the Anglicans precisely for being Erastian. And we would, we would agree as Orthodox that Erastianism is is incorrect. And in fact, if you look at a lot of the, the promotions of heresies, a lot of times were were emperors. There was a lot of heterodox emperors that were trying to change the church to teach Arianism. There were emperors that were trying to get the church to become iconoclastic, and the church actually survived those and rejected the, uh, the imperial, you know, attempts to change the doctrine. So I would say that, you know, in reality, every church is susceptible to the temptation of ethnophilism or something like that. But I don't think that you could deduce from that that the Orthodox Church is more divided and more split than the Protestant church because the, I, I, I that came off. I wasn't trying to say the Orthodox Church is more divided. And it is superficial. I know it doesn't really represent Orthodoxy. I'm just saying that it's the fact that there are these different Protestant denominations does not mean that there are schisms in the sense that schism means like for Orthodox, schism means you're excommunicating each other. For Protestants, most of the time when there's a denomination split or a new denomination forms, it's usually more of a reorganization than a schism. It's usually not a schism at all. Well, actually, for us, schism doesn't even necessarily imply an immediate excommunication. I mean, there might be a schism, uh, that's, it's schism is a severance in brotherly love, right? So you might have the same theology, and, uh, but the group says, we don't want to be in communion with, with, with you. So for us, schism is actually necessarily tied to communion. And communion is defined in terms of canon, canon law, canonicity, and who's, who's in communion canonically. So the canonical structure of the Orthodox Church is another indicator too, by the way, that we are the successor to the Church of the first thousand years. Every one of the ecumenical councils produces canons, which are basically church law. Church law has continued to govern the Orthodox Church ecclesial, ecclesiastically. And if you look at the history of the Protestant Church, there isn't church law. There aren't canons. They don't operate that way. Um, and so I would just say that this is another indicator that we're the same church of the first seven, eight councils. All right. Yeah, I see what you're saying. I guess for Protestants, because it's tied to communion, we Protestants, we have open communion, except for Lutherans. We have open communion. I can go to any Presbyterian church, even if it's not my denomination. I've taken communion at, uh, PCA churches, OPC churches. I can take communion at any Presbyterian church. Um, I could take communion at any Anglican or Episcopalian church. I can take communion at any Baptist church. So we're different organizations, but we, we are still, we still recognize each other as the one true church, theoretically. We would let an Orthodox person take communion at our church. I just, your church wouldn't let you do that, obviously. But, but you're welcome to take communion if your church changes its mind, which it won't. Well, I mean, we believe in the real presence in the sense of, uh, it really is body, blood, soul, and uncreated energy, uh, of Christ. And so, you know, that's an Anglo-Catholic church would probably definitely let you take communion there. But we also have canonical limitations on who we commune. We don't want to, we don't want to commune with people that have heterodox theology because it's a. I know, I know. I'm saying your church wouldn't allow you to commune with us, but we would allow, we would allow you if you wanted. Well, but that doesn't mean that does itself doesn't prove or disprove anything. It just means that you have a different policy. So it doesn't mean that you're, yeah, it means that all I'm saying is that Protestants, the fact that there's a lot of Protestant denominations does not mean Protestants have like endless schism because we are still in communion with each other. Well, but that communion is not a communion other. Like, so, so I can have completely different theology about, you know, I mean, a Baptist thinks that it's just a sign and a symbol, and I can find high church Anglicans and Lutherans that think that it really is the body of Christ in some way. So just because there's, because we're not Donatists, we believe it's God working through the sacraments. So I believe Baptists really receive the body and blood of Christ, even if they think they're just receiving like. Okay, so I don't even have to believe in the real presence and I still receive it. If you're receiving communion, okay. I'm sorry, I'm not trying. I just think that makes no sense. I'm not trying to be rude. I just, I don't see how that makes any sense. Wait, so, so you think, let's say, like an Orthodox person is personally unconvinced of the real presence, does that make the real presence void in that case? Yeah, it becomes a curse. Paul says that you eat unworthily, even unto death. What about, so that's, I'm, assuming for you, that's different than someone who just doesn't understand it? What if someone's mistaken? What if someone mistakenly thinks it's a symbol? Because I've heard of a lot of individuals, Catholic and Orthodox people, thinking their church teaches it's just a symbol. What about those people? Yeah, I think that heresy for us, as goes along with the rest of our moral theology that we were talking about earlier, is a specific sin of will and obstinacy in action. So in other words, it's not just being wrong. Heresy requires that you, uh, willfully and in an obstinate way, uh, defy what is the case. So in the case of, again, we believe in sola gratia, so we believe that God's grace basically overrides our unbelief. And so that applies to the sacrament. So that means when a Baptist takes communion, the Baptist is still receiving the body and blood of Christ, even if they don't believe that's what's happening. Okay, but you can't have the body and blood of Christ without the minister there to confect the Eucharist. So we have a completely different view. I mean, I mean, can I have graham crackers and, uh, and grape juice, and does it become the body and blood of Christ if I really believe that and I want it to be? Well, the, uh, what Martin Luther saw as the really what makes the Eucharist is like the words of institution. And yes, it doesn't need to be bread and wine. The words of institution, this is my body given for you. The words of institution. Laid out in. What, what does it matter what kind of bread? Or can I, can I use any? Can I use cookies? So I mean, so if I use cookies in my basement, if I could use gluten-free bread, could you use rye? No, let's say it's, I want to use cookies and, uh, and grape juice. And because you said that it has, did you say it had to be wine? Baptists don't use wine, they use, they use, they use Ocean Spray. So you think Jesus is there in the Ocean Spray with the Baptists, even though they don't believe it? Well, then like I said, I don't believe Jesus is present in, with, and under the elements. I believe it's a spiritual reception. Well, that's not the traditional view of the church fathers. So again, let's just point out that it is a departure from the first thousand years' view because they believe. I believe in. You're sure? Yes, sure. Whatever. And it's like, I respect. Yeah, yeah, sure, whatever. Okay. You said, yeah, sure, whatever. At the end of the day, I don't really, it, the church fathers, like I said, they're not binding on me. Oh, but you did appeal to them for the canon. I, like I said, we're going to go cessationist. Right? So again, if I have the Ocean Spray and I have the cookies and I'm in my basement and I say the words of institution, is it the Lord's Supper? No, because that's not the, the true church is where the word of God is rightly preached and the sacraments are right. What if I'm, uh, preaching from the Protestant, uh, KJV down there in my basement? For a true church, it needs to be like an assembly. Says who? Like, so now you're just hacking on all these things. Okay, so what if I get, you know, what if I wheel people out of the mental institute down to my basement? I, I gotta say, I don't know. In that case, it really does not seem like it would be a true church, right? Just because I can't tell exactly in what case this is a true church, in what case it's not. It's like the, well, we, the invisible church. What, we, the invisible church? Yeah, but like I said, it's invisible, so that means I can't know if it's a part of it or not, right? So it's like, yeah, theoretically, so it's the one true mental institute asylum church with Ocean Spray and cookies. Well, if you're talking about like this place is a church, then you're talking about the visible church, you're not talking about the invisible church. All you, you tell me whether that's a church and whether it's the Lord's Supper or not. That's what I'm asking you. I'd say, I'd say probably not. I would say, okay, but now you're adding all the criteria to now it gets more complicated and it gets more qualified. So what was originally sort of a general idea of open communion and that now it's getting really specific and qualified, and you're tacking on a bunch of other things. So it's not actually as generic as it appealed to be, appeared to be. Well, it's, it's the same way we say that fundamentally, you need to believe Jesus is Lord, believe that you'll be saved. But then there's a lot of logical extensions of that. So we believe the word needs to be rightly preached and the sacraments need to be rightly administered. There's a lot of logical extensions that. Okay, well, what's rightly ministered? I mean, again, why is my basement mental institute patient church not the true church? I wasn't rage quitting. My my phone just died. So you can see that it just died out. So I told I said it was going to die. Um, anyway, that was a fun conversation. I hopefully he's not mad or doesn't think I was being mean or whatever. But, uh, you know, it's Calvinism. It's Calvinists are in, you know, hip to heated discussions. And I noticed he's had a lot of debates on his channel, so I don't think he would be too offended at that. It, it's like, you know, when it's me, it's like, no matter what I do, people are like, oh, we got him. He's being mean again. Um, anyway, I, I enjoy that conversation with RedeemZoomer. I think he seems like a cool guy. So I don't have any qualms or any personal complaints. Uh, we're going to Super Chats now because my battery died. Vulture $5. Jay, I enjoy your lecture, specifically the geopolitical stuff. What was the process of making money off of your work? Have you ever done merch? So, you know, I have a subscription service where people subscribe to get my full talks and lectures. So that's, you know, we have Rockfin. We sell books. Um, I don't really have merch. We've talked about maybe getting t-shirts or something. I don't know. I just haven't got around to it. Seems like a lot of hassle. I've checked into it a couple times. It just seems like a lot of hassle for not a lot of turnover. So I'm not sure if I want to, you know, continue to try to sell mugs and t-shirts. But I don't know, maybe one day. Uh, how long did it take for me to make what I do into a business? Um, I, I blogged for about 10 years, and then I started doing this full-time about 2015. Sven $3. Jay, the Orthodox seem to have a right view of the canon, but how could Jesus hold Pharisees accountable for scripture without the Old Testament having an infallible list? So again, the argument is not whether you can, uh, know true from false without a public canon, uh, or a church to make that decision. But let's ferret out a few points here. First of all, the, there was an existing visible living authority in the Old Testament. It wasn't every Jew interpreting the scrolls as he saw fit. There were rabbinical courts that were set up. And as Jesus says in Matthew 23, the scribes and the Pharisees sit in the seat of Moses. Also, there were living, infallible authorities in the Old Testament in the sense that when any prophet was preaching or teaching, they had the authority of God. So if you lived, if you were blessed enough to live in the time of Isaiah, then you could have, uh, talked to Isaiah. Isaiah would have been a great source for what's true and false theology and what's the right exposition of the Torah. So there is a canonical, you could say, structure within Judaism at that time. And that rabbinical court structure is actually what the church adopted when in Acts 15, you see the, the apostles gathering together to do a council. In Acts 15, they're not creating out of nowhere this idea. They're actually modeling it on the way Israel already operated. So, uh, the, the point is that it's a, it's two different questions between the individual's knowledge and certitude of what's true and false versus the public historic attestation to what the true and the right canon of scripture is. So it's two different questions. So yes, for example, let's, I mean, the same thing applies in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th centuries when there's not yet a full canon. So in other words, the Old Testament person and the people, let's say in, you know, 2nd, 3rd, 4th century Roman Empire, they're basically in the same situation because there's not a, a closed official quote canon. And yet, how are people in the 3rd, 4th, 5th century knowing what the church is, where is the Orthodox true church? If you went to one Apostolic See or another Apostolic See, you might find conflicting lists of books. So it's never a question of the books themselves are the final arbiter. It's a question of who has the correct doctrine. And that's why Aronas.

In book two of Against Heresies, he utilizes the argumentation of apostolic succession as one of the indicators. Right, he talks about the tradition that this is a. Book three and he uses Rome as the example. And so when this question arose, for example, how are we going to know what the true church is, this is not organized by books, it's kind of organized by, here we go, book two, this is book three, chapter two. And you see that Irenaeus argues that this is 180, by the way, he's the bishop of Lyon. The heretics follow neither scripture nor tradition. And so he cites a bunch of Gnostics and he talks about how they don't follow the succession of the Apostles in the various sees.

In book three, let's go to the next section. The heretics don't follow tradition and they also don't follow the succession of the bishops. So you'll notice that apostolic succession, according to Irenaeus, was common in 180 AD. And this is one of the indicators by which you would know a true and a false church. Right, so the very things that he was listing are the very that that he disagrees with are the very things used in the second century to indicate the true and the false church. So, in other words, it's not ultimately going to be decided between, uh, a definitive decision on the canon. Because even though we have a definitive decision on the canon, many people don't re, don't accept the Orthodox Church's decision on the canon. So they don't accept Trullo, they don't accept the ecumenical council. And it's true that you could come to know true and false. But my point is different. My point is that there's nothing that stops me as a Protestant from creating my own canon because it's a four collection of infallible books. So that's a question of normativity. It's distinct from the question of epistemic certitude. The two relate to one another. But if we all agree at the end of the day, between Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic, that the Holy Spirit is the ultimate enlightener and decider, just appealing to the Holy Spirit isn't really going to solve any of the historical disputes and questions because everybody believes that they're guided by the Holy Spirit. So we've got to have another way to adjudicate between which group in history has the correct body and tradition and transmission. And that cannot be resolved without going and looking at what these different church fathers and councils taught. And they don't teach Calvinism or Protestantism in any stretch of the imagination.

Spin $3. Hey, man, Jay, I'm looking at Orthodoxy and it seems if you have the correct canon. Oh, he just sent the same question twice. Real cter Brown $5.50. Thank you so much, Kristen $10. This is another excellent debate. Yeah, well, I think we're just intending to have a conversation and it kind of ended up being more debate. But, you know, sometimes that's how that's how it goes. Kind of a lot of parallels to the debate that we had with or the discussion we had with Dale. Dale ended up getting really mad. So, but that's relevant for this discussion. If you guys never saw it, by the way, here is the link to Jesus being damned in the reformed tradition. So I'll put the link right there. That that is the traditional Reformation teaching that Jesus was damned. And you can qualify it however you want. Still seems to be a problem to me. I do recommend if you haven't seen it, going and watching the discussion with Dale because Dr. Bo Branson brought a lot of really important insights because he's done a lot of scholarly research into this topic and this domain. Let's see. And so if you want more of this type of a discussion that we just had, this debate right here with Dale P. And a lot of Dr. Branson's insights on the Old Testament and how it was structured in the Old Testament will apply to your questions there. Sven, I got to have some water. My throat's getting dry. A lot of talking. Bumble Bee $10. Thank you for doing the debates with Protestants. It's extremely helpful. It was instrumental in my decision to leave Protestantism and become Orthodox. Thank you, Bumble Bee. Glad to hear that. Rod him $3. And says nothing. Remember, guys, look, it's that time of the year when you need to get based and Chad pilled. And how do you get based and Chad pilled? Well, you go over to chalk.com and use the promo code J50 to get 50% off all those excellent products over at chalk.com. You've got the Tongkat Ali, the Tongkat 100 right there. Use the promo code J50 to get 50% off. You can buy them individually, but I also recommend this male vitality stack. You're going to enjoy that. And you're not going to be paying that amount. You're going to be paying 50% off using the promo code J50. So get a hold of that Tongkat Ali, the daily, and the Ashwagandha right there by going to chalk.com. CHQ.com. It's in the show description. I will also be putting this in the chat for you guys. People are like, hey, do you even work out, bro? Yes, in fact, we've been going consistently to the gym. And it's been pretty wild. I mean, we've been upping how often about the past month or so, right? We've been pretty consistent in our workouts. And I'm really enjoying it. And it's good to be because where I used to live, there wasn't anything near me. But now we have a gym. So that makes it a lot easier obviously for really putting the chalk stuff to the test. And so this new product is just out. This is the pre-workout that they got. That's it. It's not out yet, but it's coming in November. So it's going to ship soon. I'm looking forward to getting it as a pre-workout. It's the chalk Chad mode. People were like, is this real? Is this like a meme? Well, it's utilizing the Chad meme. You see the Chad bro there. And yes, it's real. It's a real pre-workout. So you guys can test it out with me. We're going to check it out when it arrives very soon. So utilize the the me the Chad mode meme power right there into your pre-workout. Let's see. We got another Super Chat. Bantos $5. I'm thinking of starting a political party. It will be called the Retake Constantinople Party. I think you're joking, right? Yeah, I don't hold out much hope for like mainline politics. You know, and in our view, we don't try to capture the political sphere first. We, you know, focus on the paradigm first. And then eventually that will lead to the par the political sphere changing down the road. You notice like the, you know, the in the Roman Empire, it took three centuries before it was converted and then it became, you know, so we're not primarily focused on trying to retake Byzantium or whatever. I mean, Bartholomew is not going to be your friend. So Bartholomew is not going to have any interest in helping the Canadian Retake Constantinople Party. But thank you for that Super Chat. And, you know, if people want to work in the domain of politics, that's that's your calling. That's, you know, hey, go for it, man. I support you guys that want to focus on that. If that's what you want to do. I think there's certain dangers to that. So I would just be leery of kind of making politics into an idol if that's your approach. But we do need people in all spheres, you know, applying these principles. Let's see. Who else? What else? I want to remind you guys too to head on over to our show sponsor also, which is Grand Theft World. Amazing weekly 7-hour podcast that dives super deep into geopolitics. Grand Theft World right over here at Rockin. Actually, that's me. You can also subscribe to me on Rockin. But our buddy Richard Grove, whom we have the courses with, he's over here on Rockin. Right there, you can subscribe to Richard right there. I'm in a streaming mode. I might do another stream today. I don't know. I'm kind of in just in this mode. I mean, I'm hyped up. I've been drinking tons of coffee. My phone died. I would have kept doing that conversation, but my phone died. I got to go do something here in a little bit, but we might do another stream later. I don't know what to see what I feel like. So I'm going to have to head out here in a second to do something. But maybe I'll come back later and do another type of stream. I don't know what we'll do. But heading over to Rockin, excuse me, yeah, to Rockin and subscribe to Richard right there. Grand Theft World again, our sister podcast that goes deep into geopolitics. They get really. Richard and I are planning a new podcast. We're going to probably do pretty soon, going deep into history with Buras. So that'll be coming up maybe in the near future. Also, you can get the courses that we do, me and Richard, in the show description. You'll see the link there for the Autonomy Marketplace where you can purchase my philosophy course, which is 12 courses on the history of Western philosophy right there. You'll see that right there. Kyle and Rim Zoomer, you're saying where are they? They're linked in the title. So guys, come on, go to the title of the show. They're tagged in the freaking title. You can follow them over there on their channels. Bantos, oh, we already did that one. Beep. Yeah, maybe I'll do a funny, goofy stream. I don't know. We'll have to see what the mood is. Y'all want, y'all want to do a clown around stream tonight with cryptids and witches and all that nonsense that we have a lot of fun riffing on. I'm not really yet. I'm not really up yet to do the movie stream. Those are fun to riff on the movies, but a lot of people tune out for whatever reason. So I don't know. We're still going to do the movie stream in the near future. Maybe tomorrow night, we'll see. Cyber Tracker, which I thought would be fun. Dawn the Dragon Wilson, that looks like a lot of fun. I love riffing on the movies, right? Because it's, you know, Mystery Science Theater, Rifftracks type stuff. But it seems like people really enjoy riffing on the TikTok cringe a lot more. So we'll be doing both. We'll do both for sure. Anyway, thank you to Kyle and thank you to Redeem Zoomer. I hope everybody had a good discussion. We'll come back later on and see if we could do another stream tonight. Everybody have a good night.