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Category: Theosis (Page 2 of 2)

Why I’m Becoming Orthodox (3 of 3)

 

Part 3    Why I Became Orthodox – I Always Was

by Matt Ferdelman

Matt Ferdelman

Matt Ferdelman and son

 

Today’s posting is by Matt Ferdelman.  Welcome Matt! 

Matt Ferdelman is a catechumen at St. Paul the Apostle Orthodox Church in Dayton, Ohio.

Matt was born into the Pentecostal church where he attended for the first 17 years of his life. In 2008 he began the process of becoming a five-point Calvinist at Apex Community Church in Kettering, OH, where he remained until his conversion to Orthodoxy in November 2014.

After marrying his wife Erin in 2011, he finished his Bachelor’s and Master’s of Science in Accountancy at Wright State University in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Matt now works as a CPA in a small accounting firm downtown, and spends his free time entering deeper into Orthodox theology and life, and playing with his two young boys, ages 2 and 3 months.

This is the third installment of a multi-part series. Part 1Scripture and TraditionPart 2 “Why I Deny Penal Substitutionary Atonement”

 

images-45The further I dive into Orthodox life, doxology, and theology, the more strongly I get the impression I have always done and believed these things and worshipped in this way. Or, at least, I have always attempted to worship in this way. Orthodoxy for me was like a light switch going on, illuminating parts of my faith which had been dark since the beginning. A candle had been lit and burned, but it not yet become a lamp. With a great many topics of Orthodox theology, as I began to study I realized Orthodoxy said what I had been trying to articulate for years. I see in my past clear signs of God’s work to prepare me for the Orthodox faith, in prayers he placed in my heart and desires that developed within me.

Let me walk you through some of these developments.

 

Icon - Holy Transfiguration

Icon – Holy Transfiguration

A. Theosis

I remember from my early teen years thinking often on the doctrine of Sanctification. In Sanctification we become more and more like God, forsaking sin and attaining to his level of righteousness. Really, this idea is quite incredible. As time goes on, we start to look more and more like the risen Son. We forsake idols and seek him and, like Moses, our faces begin to shine from the close encounters we have with God. The more sanctified we become, the closer we get to God.

At some point I began to consider the implications and limits of Sanctification. All the teachers I listened to seemed to have this idea that Sanctification ends when you die. After death, we are made perfect and there is no need for us to become more like God. Once the death of our physical body occurs, we are free from sin, which is perfection. I fully believed we would be without sin once we died, but I wasn’t so sure that we would stop becoming like God. I mean, God is infinitely perfect, right? That means he’s not just free from sin. Being free from sin would just be tabula rasa – it would make you a blank slate. But being free from sin is not the same thing as having righteousness. In life we are not called to just stop sinning; we are called from that to the act of love for God and man. If we are to seek to be like God in this life, why not in the next also? I reasoned that God would want us to become more and more like him after we are with him too. Because God is infinite there would never be an end to us becoming like him. There would always be some level of perfection above and beyond the level we had already achieved. One can understand this partially by comparison to technology. Personal computers currently are very powerful machines. They crunch numbers for us, help us communicate with each other, and serve as centers for entertainment. But every month better and technology is developed. Better processors are built. Clearer screens are made. Lighter laptops are tested in the field. There is no foreseeable end to the improvements we could make through technology. Becoming like God is similar in this way.

170px-Ipod_5th_Generation_white

I thought like this and rigorously checked my logic through most of my teenage years. In my junior year of high school I solidified my claim to this doctrine. At that time I bought my first ipod. When you order from the Apple store, you have the option to inscribe something on the back of your ipod. After much deliberation, I chose these words:

I have been humbled by

The Art of Becoming God

At first, the words felt like blasphemy, but I couldn’t escape the thought that we were meant to become like God, and that we were meant to do so for eternity. Becoming like God forever logically seemed to follow from the doctrine of Sanctification. But I also knew I couldn’t say that we actually became God. That would obviously be heresy. Still, I chose these words to express the mystery to which I joined myself, hoping that its meaning would one day become clear to me … And so it has.

What I did not realize at the time was that I had inadvertently expressed the Orthodox doctrine of Theosis. Theosis for the Orthodox is the very purpose of salvation. Jesus came to earth to take away our sins, free us from death, and build a bridge that we could take to be unified with God. Theosis is that process by which we are unified to God. It is the everlasting deification of man into the likeness of God. The part about this that simply confounds me is that I had never heard the doctrine of Theosis before I had its meaning engraved on my ipod. The only exposure I had to Orthodoxy prior to that was a minimal coverage in history class. At the time I was not drawn to Orthodoxy at all, and only had a vague impression that it was a form of Christianity that had been overly-influenced by Buddhism and had lost the faith. I think I might I have gotten this idea from my history class, but I am not entirely certain. In any case, I had not studied anything about Orthodoxy, and yet their doctrine was engraved upon my life.

The reason I thought my extrapolation on Sanctification might be heresy is because at that time I was not aware of the Essence vs. Energy distinction. God in his Essence is unknowable. But God’s Energies are knowable and we can relate to them. Theosis is the process of unifying ourselves to the Energies of God. To help explain this, think of your relationship with your spouse or a really good friend. You do not know their heart. No one knows a man’s heart except the spirit within that man. But we do know what that person is like based on how they act, what they do, and what they say. We experience their emotions because they express them. The essence of a human is their heart, to which no other human can be united. But their actions are knowable and other humans can relate using actions. In the same way, we can understand God by his actions, his Energies, and seek to become like him in every way possible. We become gods by grace, but not by nature.

If you want to read more on this, check out these two interesting Wikipedia articles: Theosis (Eastern Orthodox theology)  and Essence–Energies distinction.

 

B. Hell

I find it most interesting that the teachers I was drawn to most in the Protestant church were those that expounded one or more Orthodox-leaning views. At times I was enthralled by teachers that taught doctrines opposed to those of the Orthodox Church but, as time went on, I steadily stopped listening to these preachers, finding the goal of their teaching to be unedifying. The teachers to whom I was most drawn and still am were C.S. Lewis, Timothy Keller, and N.T. Wright. All these teachers have expressed views of either the atonement or hell which are similar in some regards to Orthodoxy theology.

C.S. Lewis and Timothy Keller espouse views of hell that are quite different from those most often taught in the Protestant church. Both Lewis and Keller have explained that hell is a place locked from the inside. Hell is, in their view, not a prison system to which God sends those whom he dislikes to be tortured for eternity, but a state of mind in which a human chooses some good thing above God. That good thing ultimately cannot satisfy, and yet the human that clings to it keeps looking to that good thing to fulfill his deepest desires. In our own lives we see this in things like the worship of spouses and drugs. When we look to our spouses for our sense of meaning, as a sort of god, we grow impatient when they fail our expectations. We continually desire they replace God in our lives, and we are continually disappointed, since they cannot. Every time they fail some standard we have set, we make another loop in the cycle of expectation and disappointment. This cycle, if left unchecked, can go on for eternity and lead to insanity. Likewise with drug addictions, the addict seeks more and more pleasure from increasingly high doses of substances. Every time a high is reached, chemical changes in the brain make a larger dosage in the future necessary to achieve the same level of euphoria. Eventually, there won’t be enough of that substance on the planet to satiate one’s desire. A infinite cycle has been started. And the only end it to which it leads is dissatisfaction and turmoil.

Ungoliant Attacking the Tree of Life

Ungoliant Attacking the Tree of Life

I am reminded also of the character Ungoliant in J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. For those who have read or watched tales of Middle Earth, Shelob and the spiders of Mirkwood are descendents of Ungoliant. Tolkein, a personal friend of Lewis, describes Ungoliant as a giant venomous spider that teamed up with Melchor, a Satanic archetype, to destroy the tree of life at the center of the city of the Valor. Ungoliant pounced upon the tree and sucked its dry, gorging herself upon its life, but receiving no life thereby. She became so large, in fact, that she frightened the powerful Melchor, who in his might had known little fear prior to that day. Later in the story, Melchor steals three of the most precious gems on earth out of jealousy for their glory. Ungoliant demands he give the diamonds to her that she might consume them. Unwillingly, he delivers two of them into her maw. But even after swallowing such beauty, she is unsatisfied. In the end, Ungoliant prowls the earth, seeking whom she may devour. But her hunger becomes so great that no food or glory or weight on earth can fill her. So, at the last, she consumes herself.

This is the view of hell espoused by Lewis and Keller, and one to which I was drawn as soon as I heard it. It made a lot more sense than the view of hell as a place where God is actively involved in torturing unrepentant sinners. Because, though I tried very hard over many years, and with a sincere heart, I simply couldn’t bring myself to love a god that would do that. Whenever I dwelt on a punitive idea of hell, I could no longer approach God by faith within my heart. I was separated.

What I did not realize at that time was that the view of hell to which I had ascribed through Keller was inconsistent with my belief in Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA). See, if God doesn’t torture anyone for eternity in hell against their will, then he didn’t need to stop himself from doing so by placing all that misery on Jesus at the cross. Jesus’ work saves us from hell. In PSA, Jesus went through hell so we wouldn’t have to. But if hell is not punitive, neither was the cross. Because Orthodoxy denies PSA, it likewise denies a penal view of hell. My beliefs from long ago were inconsistent with PSA, though at the time I did not take my belief about hell and apply it logically to my beliefs concerning the atonement. But God in his mercy helped me in his good timing.

I likewise have been drawn toward the teachings of N.T. Wright for many years. Both he and Keller explain Jesus’ salvific work in a more holistic manner than do the teachings of most others I knew at the time. They both explain salvation as a cosmic restoration of creation – all of it – and a reunification of the created order to God. (Just listen to how many times either of them uses the word “cosmic” in a sermon. It’s quite amusing actually.) Because of this, I was most intrigued to learn N.T. Wright denies Penal Substitutionary Atonement. I was not aware of this until I started studying PSA just a few months ago. But given Wright’s studies on the history of the Church and his cosmic view of salvation, his denial of PSA shouldn’t be surprising.

Now, I know there is some confusion as to what precisely Wright believes. While I have not read extensively on Wright’s musings on the atonement, I did see one video where he explained his view that I believe makes his doctrine clear. In that video the interviewer asked point blank “Do you deny Penal Substitutionary Atonement?” Wright responded by saying “Yes, I believe in Penal Substitutionary Atonement, but I deny the Anselmian view of Penal Substitutionary Atonement.” He then went on to explain that the Jews of Jesus’ time were under punishment from God in the form of Roman rule. Jesus was killed by the Romans using crucifixion, thus bearing the wrath of God toward the Jews and, by extension, everyone who would believe in Jesus. But this view is entirely different from the view of PSA currently held. The Anselmian view explains that Jesus suffered an infinite punishment from the Father at the cross. But Wright’s explanation says Jesus suffered a finite amount of punishment. Really, the idea Wright is expressing is entirely different from what Anselm and Calvin taught and what most Protestants have believed for centuries. Though I do not know his heart, I would guess Wright believes PSA is false, but realizes that if he just comes out and says that point blank, he will lose a great part of his audience, and have less opportunity to help people understand why he denies it. So, for the time being, he has masked part of his belief for the benefit of others.

Interestingly, Wright and Keller appear to hold the opposite sides of the same coin. Wright denies PSA. Keller denies the hell that results from PSA. Yet I have never heard Wright say that he denies a punitive view of hell. Nor have I heard Keller says he denies PSA. To be logically consistent, though, these men must hold to the other’s belief. I look forward to seeing how their theology develops and/or is revealed in the future.

 

God as Mystery

God as Mystery

C. Mystery

I have always been fascinated by mystery. Whenever I have run across a theological concept that baffles me, I study and study it and soak in its ideas and implications. I can’t get enough of it.  The Trinity, the Hypostatic Union, the Virgin Birth, the Eternity of God, the Omnipresence of God – I ate up these doctrines. After watching the Fellowship of the Ring in my teenage years I started reading Tolkein and Lewis extensively. I have loved all of Tolkein’s works, especially the Silmarillion, and greatly enjoyed Lewis’ Space Trilogy. These books and my love for the unknowable developed in me an appreciation of Mystery. I tried to understand the greatest concepts and ideas I could find. But when I did so I did not begin to think I was something special or that I had attained some level of knowledge beyond my fellow man. Actually, the opposite happened. I realized rather quickly in dwelling on these things in my teenage years that I simply couldn’t get it. My logic could only take me so far. There was an end to reason, and I had reached it. I took the road as far it went. I found myself consistently saying “I don’t know.”

Scripture and other forms of revelation only show us part of the picture of creation and of God’s nature. But even if God had written down for us every scientific detail and description of who he is and what he’s been doing for eternity, we still could not understand. As Jesus said to his disciples “I have many things to tell you, but you are not yet ready for them.” So too no human can ascend to God by his own will and understanding. God doesn’t leave us in the dark on purpose, but is patient, waiting until we are ready to receive more of who he is.

From these musings I realized I couldn’t expect to figure out how God did everything. I could at least understand part of how it worked. But for now I only see through a glass darkly. I do not yet know fully as I have been fully known.

When I began to study Orthodox theology, I soon came across their apophatic approach to explaining who God is. In this method, they say what God is not, as opposed to what He is. So while it is true to say God is love, the Orthodox will often respond by saying it is more accurate to say God is not evil. Speaking of God in positive terms is called cataphatic theology. Speaking of God in negative terms (saying what God is not) is called apophatic theology. This apophatic approach comes from the realization that there is much that has not been revealed to us and that there is much we simply cannot understand. Apophatic theology is a humble acquiescence to the mystery of God’s existence and ways, a form of divine worship in which we bow to the unknowable essence of the I Am.

This mystery is extended by the Orthodox to their understanding of the sacraments. They believe, contrary to Protestant belief, that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Jesus. How does this happen? They don’t have an answer. They recognize that Christ told us Communion was his body and blood, but they don’t know exactly how God accomplishes this. Unlike the Roman Catholic church, they do not hold strictly to the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Likewise, they recognize Baptism is not just a token of one’s faith in Jesus, but a participation in the death and resurrection of our Lord, a Pascha of the future and the past brought into the present.

In all of these things, the Orthodox recognize that we cannot approach God by rationalistic logic. Logic and reason only take us so far. The reduction of the Sacraments by the reformers to mere tokens or symbols was based in part on the Scholastic reasoning that had developed through the Medieval period. Today that rationalism is seen in naturalistic science which seeks to explain the entire created order through observation and reason. Science has provided us with many wonderful things. But naturalistic science assumes the natural, observable world is all that exists. It assumes only the material exists. It cannot, by its own definition, observe or experiment upon other dimensions or modes of being. It is limited. Much of the reductionism applied to the sacraments and the mysteries of God, however, is due to this rationalistic approach.

The Orthodox Church recognizes the mystery of God’s ways and worship him for it. They teach the Theosis of man into the image of God. They proclaim the doctrines to which I have held, though I did so then in an incomplete manner.

In my studies on Orthodoxy I keep finding myself saying “But this is what I always believed.” Orthodoxy is the full revelation of the partial faith I had in some areas and is the explanation to the questions with which I struggled with in others. In fact, the more I think about it the more I begin to see my journey parallel that of Israel. Under Moses, God gave his chosen nation a partial revelation of his will and character. He gave Moses the law to keep the people until the time of full revelation should come and to train them to recognize the Messiah when he appeared. In many ways, this describes my life in the Protestant church. I will be forever grateful to my shepherds there, but from it I did not receive a full revelation of God. There I was first taught how to begin to know God. I began to see his works in all of creation. I learned in part how to worship. I learned in part how to believe and trust him.

But when the fullness of time came God gave to me the fullness of his revelation. When once I understood in part, God in Christ demonstrated to me the entirety of whom he was and the intentions behind his actions. While I used to approach God with uncertainty, now I approach with full confidence in the knowledge of the Son. While I understood God wanted to save humanity, now I see he wishes to restore all things. While I used to offer the sacrifice of guilt, I now offer my very self. While I used to worship in part, now I worship in spirit and in truth. What I knew was like a tutor preparing me for the coming of the Messiah. But when the new comes, the old passes away.

Really, the Orthodox Church is God’s answer to every prayer I have ever prayed – my desire to be like God, my desire to seek him, my desire to know his love, my desire to understand his intentions, my desire to be united with him. In his mercy and perfect timing, he has delivered to me true faith and understanding and enlightenment in the knowledge of his Son, who is blessed forever. Amen.

Now I say with peace that I am not a stranger to God. I know him because he has shown himself to me. He is merciful to those that seek him. I am no longer a sojourner. I am home.

 

Ligonier Ministries on Eastern Orthodoxy

J. Ligon Duncan III, John MacArthur, Sinclair Ferguson, R.C. Sproul, and Richard Phillips   Source

After years of obscurity on the American religious landscape, Eastern Orthodoxy is beginning to catch the attention to Evangelical leaders.  In 2004, Ligonier Ministries sponsored a national conference “A Portrait of God” which featured: J. Ligon Duncan III, R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur.  At one of the Q&A sessions, the moderator noted that he had received several questions about Eastern Orthodoxy.

It is unfortunate that these well known Reformed theologians made erroneous statements about Eastern Orthodoxy.  Some have derided their answers as “laughable” and as “maligning” Eastern Orthodoxy.  I feel that the more charitable response is not to use emotional words impugning the motives of these Reformed theologians, but rather to correct their erroneous statements with facts and reason.  As a former Calvinist who converted to Orthodoxy I feel it is incumbent to correct these erroneous remarks made by these well intentioned Christian leaders and to provide a well reasoned apologia in defense of Eastern Orthodoxy.  My hope is that Calvinists will become open minded about and interested in Eastern Orthodoxy.

Error #1 — Evangelical Salvation vs. Sacerdotal Salvation (Ligon Duncan)

There are two systems of salvation: the sacerdotal system and the evangelical system.

Sacerdotal doctrine of salvation is based upon the dispensation of sacraments by the church.

Evangelical system of salvation acknowledges the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the sinner, drawing the sinner to Christ, uniting him to Christ by faith.

Its system of salvation similar to Roman Catholicism in terms of the function of the sacraments.  Eastern Orthodoxy clearly fits into the category of sacerdotalism.

My Response:

The key error here is the separation of the two key dimensions of our salvation in Christ: the sacraments and the inner response of faith.  The Orthodox Church believe that both are needed for our salvation in Christ.  The Orthodox Church teaches that the sacraments are efficacious because of the Holy Spirit’s presence and because the Holy Spirit is at work in our hearts bringing forth a faith response.  God initiates and we respond to God’s mercy by faith.  We also believe that God works invisibly in our hearts as well as outwardly through material elements like bread, wine, water.

There was no such dichotomization of salvation in the early Church.  This dichotomization was the result of the controversy between Roman Catholic and the Protestant Reformers in the 1500s.  It has led Pastor Duncan into the trap of thinking either you are Roman Catholic or you must be Protestant Evangelical.  Orthodoxy is neither.  There is a strong emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit in the Orthodox Liturgy: (1) the priest prays for the Holy Spirit to come down upon the bread and the wine, and (2) the faithful before going up to receive Holy Communion prays: “I believe, O Lord, and I confess that you are truly the Christ, the Son of God, who came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the greatest.”

Error #2 — Theosis as a “Bizarre” and “Warped” teaching on the Bible (Ligon Duncan)

Some branches of Orthodoxy still stress the doctrine of theosis or deification.

In the fourteenth century some Orthodox theologians misread some fifth to eighth century Eastern Orthodox theologians on sanctification or glorification.

Response: Theosis has been one doctrine that usually gets the attention of Reformed Christians.  This Eastern Orthodox teaching is so radically at odds with the Reformed theological paradigm.  Where Calvinism assumes a transcendent deity who saves us by means of a legal transaction carried out by Christ’s death on the cross, the emphasis in Orthodox theology has been the Son of God taking on human nature and by his life, death, and resurrection he redeems and restores our fallen humanity.

The first point that needs to be made is that theosis is integral to the teachings of the Orthodox Church.  It is a mistake to say that it is held by some Orthodox, implying that it is not held by other branches of Orthodoxy.  All Orthodox Christians hold to the doctrine of theosis, but the core of the Orthodox teaching on salvation is Jesus Christ the Incarnate Son of God.

The second point is that the Orthodox teaching on theosis is biblical.  It is taught in II Peter 1:4:

Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires (NIV, emphasis added).

While II Peter may be the most widely used proof text to support the doctrine of theosis, it can also be found in other parts of the New Testament.  A similar line of thought can be found in I John 3:3:

But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall be see him as he is (NIV, emphasis added).

Paul likewise teach about our ultimate transformation into the likeness of Christ in Romans 8:29:

For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers (NIV, emphasis added).

The fact that the apostles Peter, John, and Paul all taught theosis shows that this Orthodox teaching has a solid biblical basis.

Pastor Duncan is mistaken when he claims that theosis was the result of fourteenth century theologians misreading fifth to eighth century Church Fathers.  Athanasius the Great, respected by Evangelicals for his defense of the deity of Christ, taught the doctrine of theosis.  He was born in the third century and lived of his life in the fourth century, much earlier than Duncan implied.  In his theological classic On the Incarnation (§ 54), Athanasius wrote: He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God.  Basil the Great described the human person as a creature who has received the order to “become a god.”  These teachings are based upon Genesis 1:26 which teaches that humanity was created in the image of God.  We do not become God by nature, rather we become like God by grace; we share in the life, love, and glory that the Son has with the Father (John 17).

R.C. Sproul adds:

Eastern Orthodoxy never had a Council of Trent.  It has been Olympian and aloof from the Protestant Reformation.

Eastern Orthodoxy did not anathematize justification by faith alone.

I’ve never seen a statement by an Eastern Orthodox person denying justification by faith alone.

Response: Actually, the above statements are wrong.  In the early 1600s, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucaris, was deposed for his Calvinist beliefs and a council was convened in Jerusalem which drafted a creed — the Confessions of Dositheus — which rejected the teachings of Calvinism.  See John Leith’s (ed.) Creeds of the Churches (pp. 485-517).  Decree XIII articulates the Orthodox Church’s position on the Protestant doctrine of sola fide:

We believe a man to be not simply justified through faith alone, but through faith which worketh through love, that is to say, through faith and works (emphasis added).

Thus, Orthodox Christians believe in justification through faith in Christ.  But it does not accept the idea of “faith alone.”  Faith in Christ is not abstract nor is it disembodied, but rather faith is expressed through our confession of faith in Christ and our participation in the sacraments established by Christ.  That Eastern Orthodoxy is evangelical in belief can be seen in Decree VIII of the Confessions of Dositheus:

We believe our Lord Jesus Christ to be the only mediator, and that in giving Himself a ransom for all He hath through His own Blood made a reconciliation between God and man, and that Himself having a care for His own is advocate and propitiation for our sins.

Error #3 — Eastern Orthodoxy is not all that focused on, interested in doctrine.  The focus is more on the liturgy.  (R.C. Sproul)

There has been such a stripping of the aesthetic element from worship in Evangelicalism.  Beauty has been vanquished from our worship. That is why so many Evangelicals find Orthodoxy attractive.  So many people hunger and thirst for an aesthetic approach to the majesty of God which they find in Eastern Orthodox Churches.

John MacArthur adds:

I just happened to attend an Orthodox service in Moscow.  There was no sermon, no book table, no tracts table.  Nobody preached; there was chanting, and more chanting, and more chanting.  And walking in circles through doors behind back screens and going through and coming through.

No one said anything, no teaching, no preaching; which supports the idea that there’s essentially no theology.  This is sacerdotalism plus nothing!

Response: Oftentimes when we visit other cultures, we misunderstand them because we expect them to be like us.  Instead, we need to first seek to understand their practices on their own grounds and then compare it against ours before we can evaluate their beliefs and practices.

Let me say up front, that the complaint that there was no sermon is probably and sadly accurate.  All too often many Orthodox priests today will proceed directly to the second half of the Liturgy right after the reading of the Gospel.  The tradition of the Orthodox Church has been for the priest to preach right after the reading of the Gospel before moving on to prepare for Holy Communion.  However even if there is no sermon, every Liturgy has the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel.

The complaint that there was no book table or tracts table is ridiculous.  These are very recent and American Evangelical inventions.  It is not appropriate to expect to find these inventions in a church far removed from the USA.  Many Orthodox churches in the US do have a book table or tracts table.  The Orthodox church I attend has a tract rack by the entrance and a bookstore.

Pastor MacArthur’s complaint that there was only “chanting, and more chanting” and therefore no theology in the Orthodox Liturgy shows his ethnocentric imposing Protestant assumptions on Orthodox worship.  It assumes that doctrine is only found in the sermon and that singing is mostly emotional expression.  One of the tragic consequences of the Protestant Reformation has been splitting off of doctrine from worship.  Protestantism does theology in prose, not in song.  Orthodoxy like the early Church has kept together doctrine and worship.

Orthodox Liturgy is full of theology.  Every litany concludes with a prayer to the Trinity.  At every Sunday Liturgy is sung the ancient hymn, Only Begotten (Monogenes) which teaches Christ’s incarnation and his crucifixion for our salvation, and his being one of the Holy Trinity.  At every Liturgy the Nicene Creed is recited.  If that is not doctrinal, I don’t know what is!  And just before the priest recites Christ’s words of institution over the bread and the wine, the Orthodox priest recites a paraphrase of John 3:16: “You so loved Your world as to give Your only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”  Therefore, to say that there is no doctrine in the Orthodox Liturgy is just wrong.  As a first time visitor John MacArthur didn’t know what to look for in Orthodox worship.  Orthodox worship is so radically different from Evangelical worship because Evangelicalism has moved so far away from the historic Christian worship.

Summary

What happened at the 2004 Ligonier conference is significant.  Reformed Christians are becoming aware of and asking questions about Eastern Orthodoxy.  Reformed theologians are being forced to grapple with Orthodoxy.  It is unfortunate that the responses given here show that the leading Reformed theologians are at present ill equipped to answer questions about Orthodoxy.  Their answers reveal their ignorance or fundamental misunderstanding of Orthodoxy.  It is hoped that the answers given here will show the following:

One, the Orthodox understanding of salvation is far removed from the sacerdotalism of Roman Catholicism and has an evangelical emphasis on God’s grace and mercy in Jesus Christ.  Salvation in the early Church was both sacramental and evangelical; faith in Christ was necessary in order for God’s grace to be received through the sacraments.  Where the Orthodox Church has retained this unity, Protestant churches have split them apart.  The Orthodox approach to salvation is based upon Christ’s Incarnation; Reformed theology has resulted in a disembodied gospel message that calls for a pure faith shorn of an external response.

Two, every Orthodox Liturgy is filled with references to fundamental doctrines: creation, the fall, our need for salvation, the Incarnation, Christ’s death on the cross for our salvation, his resurrection, justification, sanctification, the second coming, the final judgment, Trinity.  Where Calvinism does theology in prose, Orthodoxy does theology in prose and song.  Orthodox worship is holistic; we worship God with mind, heart, and body.

Three, the stripping of beauty from Reformed worship, the neglect of liturgy and the sacraments, and the reduction of faith into philosophical systems all reflect the price Calvinists have paid in their reaction to medieval Roman Catholicism.  Reformed Christians need not be afraid of Eastern Orthodoxy because it has retained the rich heritage of the early Church.  Once they clear away the misunderstandings and false assumptions Calvinists will discover that Eastern Orthodoxy is genuinely evangelical in its beliefs and worship.

Robert Arakaki

Source: Message 10, Questions and Answers #2; A Portrait of God: 2004 National Conference. http://www.ligonier.org/learn/conferences/orlando_2004_national_conference/questions-and-answers-2-3919/

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