WWUTT 410 Q&A Eastern Orthodox Vander Laan Youth Groups?

Is there a catechism for the teachings of the Eastern Orthodox Church? Who is

Ray Vanderlaan and are his videos acceptable? And is it okay for your church to have a youth group?

The answer to these questions and more when we Understand the Text. Many of the

Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we Understand the Text is an online ministry committed to teaching sound doctrine and exposing the faulty.

Visit our website at www .utt .com. Now here's our host, Pastor Gabe Hughes.

Thank you, Becky. And greetings all. It is Friday when we respond to questions from the listeners, and the best way to get a question to us is by email, whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

I'm behind on responding to emails this week because I was sick for a couple of days, so I apologize if you hadn't heard from me yet.

I think one of the emails that I'm responding to today, I haven't replied to by email, so you're getting my response today.

And because I was sick this week, I had to sleep on the couch a couple of nights ago. Becky didn't kick me out of bed or anything.

It's because I was coughing real bad, and I didn't want to wake up Becky or the baby, and so I voluntarily slept on the couch.

I also had to make a few edits in one of the podcast episodes because I had to stop and cough, and Becky said she noticed some edits in there.

I don't know. Maybe if you noticed some glitchiness in one of the episodes, it could have been because my editing was real bad that particular night.

Anyway, I'm on the upswing now. I'm still coughing a little bit, so I might even have to stop and start the recording here, but thank you for your prayers and continued support, listening to me even when

I sound all congested and gross. All right, let's get to the emails, and the first one has to do with the video that was just published yesterday on the

Eastern Orthodox Church. I'm going to play that video first, and then we'll get to the question. In 1054, there was a split between the

Latin -speaking Church of the West and the Greek -speaking churches of the East. This split became known as the

Great Schism, in which the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other.

To this day, the division remains between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Like Roman Catholicism, the

Eastern Orthodox claims to be the true church, tracing its origin through an unbroken line of apostolic succession.

They believe Jesus is the Son of God, that God is triune, and the Bible is his word. However, they're still a

Roman Catholic knockoff. The Orthodox Church denies justification by grace through faith alone, even though the

Bible says there's no other way a person can be saved. Instead, the Orthodox Church says Christians receive salvation through a process of faith works and partaking in the sacraments.

Like the Roman Catholics, the Orthodox Church believes the sacraments literally become the actual flesh and blood of Christ, a false doctrine known as transubstantiation.

Though the Orthodox Church teaches the Bible is the authoritative word of God, they believe the church is equal in authority, and no one should interpret the

Bible apart from church tradition. The Orthodox Church prays for the dead, and says it's possible for salvation to occur after death.

But the Bible says it is appointed for a man once to die, and after that comes judgment. We have this life only, to turn from sin and follow

Christ. It's possible for a person to attend an Orthodox Church, hear about Jesus, and become a Christian.

But if they're growing in the knowledge of God and His word, they should not remain under the false teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church when we understand the text.

So following that video, and just yesterday, I got this email from Pavle, and I apologize if I'm butchering your name.

But he says, hello, thank you for being diligent to make very good videos that exalt God and His word all the time.

I appreciate that, sir. I wanted to make a quick comment, suggestion regarding your most recent video.

I am Serbian, so all of my family is of the heretical Eastern Orthodox kind. Open a

Bible? Never. In fact, I remember when I was 20 years old and I returned to Serbia for the first time in 11 years.

I grew up in the U .S., I went to a church there, and the priest questioned why I carried my

Bible. Anyway, when you made the video on the Catholic Church, you included sources that say what the official teachings are of the

Catholic Church, and you compared them with the Bible. In this video, you said what the

Orthodox Church believes, but you provided no official stance from the church that says this.

Is there any such documentation? I'd be interested in being familiar with it and using it to compare with the

Bible when I tell my fellow Serbians to leave that faith. Thanks, Pavle. Well, in response to your question,

Pavle, no. There is no official documentation from the Eastern Orthodox Church.

In fact, and though there are websites that you can go to, there is

GoArch .org, there's the OCA .org, which is the Orthodox Church in America.

These websites will tell you what the Eastern Orthodox Church teaches, but they're not official.

They don't give you official documentation because such official documentation doesn't exist.

This is from the GoArch .org website under a page that is titled,

The Fundamental Teachings of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and this is the section that is headlined,

Authority with Freedom in Church Administration. Here is what they say. The revealed truths of the

Church on faith and morals have not been formulated as a whole. The whole body of revealed truths is to be found in the

Scriptures and in tradition, which have been interpreted and used as such by teachers and thinkers of the

Orthodox Church. Only the truths of the Church, which have been disputed by misinterpretations, are formulated by an ecumenical synod, the authoritative body of the

Orthodox Church in such matters. In this Church, there is no authorized listing of all the truths on faith and morals in a formulated system, nor an official catechism which encompasses all the truths.

The Church leaves teachers and thinkers of theology free to constantly study and present the existing truths of the revealed

Word to cope with human needs and circumstances. Orthodox theologians are free to further study various subjects in greater depths, achieving a greater perspective from which to interpret the truths of the

Church for the steadfastness of the faithful. These findings of the theologians are not new truths, but the same truths interpreted with greater simplicity and clarity.

The gradual unfolding of a revealed truth is the result of devoted research and profound clarity in faith and practice, which should not be isolated from the entire body of revealed truths.

The freedom of inquiry in the Orthodox Church characterizes its nature of authority with freedom.

It also provides a sacred opportunity to the fathers and theologians to further explore these revealed truths.

So that's pretty ambiguous. There is not a catechism of Eastern Orthodoxy, nor is there a particular council that specifies what all these beliefs are that the

Eastern Orthodox Church teaches. So I've got my book on the catechism of the Catholic Church.

I can see it from where I'm sitting. Of course, I can see it from where I'm sitting. It's a big book. It's the edition that was edited by Pope John Paul II, and I've got it marked up.

There's bookmarks in it and highlights and all this other kind of stuff, because when people ask me what the

Roman Catholic Church believes, I can go right to it and point to here's their teaching on this, and here's what the

Bible says. And that's the way that I approach that what video on Roman Catholicism. But I can't approach the video on Eastern Orthodoxy the same way.

The Roman Catholic Church also has the Council of Trent, which was their response to the

Protestant Reformation. In that council, they affirmed many of the heresies that they were accused of teaching.

Of course, they don't call them heresies. They say that's the true teaching. But the Eastern Orthodox tradition did not assemble such a council.

Now, I did find a series of audio recordings on basic teachings of the

Eastern Orthodox faith, and it's pretty lengthy. It's like 10 hours long.

I haven't had the chance to sit down and go through them yet. But one of these days, I'll probably invest one of these

Friday episodes into understanding the Orthodox Church and go through that audio and kind of play some clips and say,

OK, here's what they say they believe, and here's what the Bible says. And Pavle, that might be a good resource for you.

So I'll try to keep your email saved and be able to respond to you again in the future when

I get that done. I think it's important to know what it is that the Orthodox Church teaches because it's the second largest church on the planet.

Now, it's not very influential in the United States, however. Of all of the adherents to Eastern Orthodoxy on the globe, less than 1 % of them are in the

United States of America. So Roman Catholicism is quite a bit more influential in North America than Eastern Orthodoxy.

But nonetheless, with that kind of widespread appeal and influence,

I think it's important that we know the false teachings of the Eastern Orthodox Church so that we can show people who are caught in that faith that what they are believing is a lie and be able to share with them the true words of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Thank you again for your question, Pavle. This next one is from Justin in Chicago. And he says, hello.

First, I want to take a minute to thank you for all that you're doing for the kingdom. Your videos are excellent.

I had a question on one of them, however. In the video that I linked to below about David and Goliath, you mentioned

Ray Vanderlaan, and it seems you mentioned him in a negative light. I've watched many of his videos and enjoyed them, but now

I'm concerned that I may be missing something. I don't want to be led astray or be naive to incorrect teaching, so I'm looking for help and clarification.

Yeah, the video that Justin is referring to is the very first what video I ever did.

It's a four and a half minute video on David and Goliath, and because it's that long, I'm not going to play the whole thing. But here's a clip that features the voice of Ray Vanderlaan.

The book of 1 Samuel chapter 17 captures one of the most well -known stories, not only in the Bible, but in all of human history, the story of David and Goliath.

From the time we're old enough to hold a crayon in Sunday school, we're coloring pictures of David and Goliath. We have a giant shown against a little boy, and already we're learning something out of context.

David wasn't a little boy, despite what VeggieTales or this guy might tell you. So David is herding sheep.

You might even say he could have been 8, 10, 12 years old. Now, Vanderlaan, his name is never mentioned in the video, but that's who that is.

And he did a series of videos starting back in the 90s called That the World May Know. It was produced by Focus on the

Family. I think he did these videos for well over a decade. I've got them all on DVD, and I love his stuff.

I think it's great. He'll go to archaeological dig sites with a group of people touring the

Holy Land, and he'll sit there at a tell, and he will say, OK, if you look over here, you see this.

And during Bible times, this is what that would have represented. And over here, you see the construction of this, and he'll point to it in a passage of scripture.

And I love that stuff. I think it's fantastic. However, Vanderlaan can still be rather eisegetical.

In other words, he imposes his view on the text related to the story of David and Goliath.

He says the faith lesson here is that is that we need to be responsible with what

God gives us to be good at. Just as David was good at slinging stones at targets, so he was faithful with that gift and slayed a giant.

That is that is not what the story of David and Goliath is about. And so whenever I'll watch these with my kids,

I think it's great for them to get the history lessons and stuff like that. But I will tell them when we get done watching an episode now,

Vanderlaan said that the story is about this, but that's not what the story is about. The story is actually about this.

And I mean, sometimes, despite what Vanderlaan knows about Bible history, sometimes he just is rather ignorant of the context.

And that comment right there is a good example of that, where he said that David was 8, 10 or 12 years old.

If you would go to First Samuel chapters 16 and 17 and and read it in context, you would see there's no way you can come away from that story and believe that David was a little boy.

The narrative specifically says that he was a man of war and a man of valor.

So at the youngest, he would have been 16 or 17 years old. This was not a little boy, the way that we often think of David as being or the pictures that we color in Sunday school class.

So for all the knowledge that Vanderlaan has and shares in these videos, it's rather ignorant of him to even suggest that David could have been eight years old.

So it's stuff like that. And because Vanderlaan makes the common mistake with the

David and Goliath story, the common mistakes that you often hear, that's why I used his audio clips in that video.

But he's not a heretic, at least from the stuff that I've heard of Vanderlaan's.

I think it's pretty solid historical teaching. He just gets rather eisegetical with his stuff, and sometimes it gets rather man centered.

So when I'm watching them with my kids, I just have to make sure that they understand the

Christ aspect of the story, even if Vanderlaan won't give it. But sometimes he's dead on.

Sometimes he's terrific with his stuff. So anyway, thank you for asking for that clarification, Justin.

This next question or this last one here, this comes from Matt in Illinois. He says, Hello, Pastor Gabe.

I thank you so much for your faithfulness to truth. You and your ministry are a blessing. My question is in regard to youth ministry.

Since something like this isn't found in scripture, what should a healthy youth group look like?

My concern is that it is doing more harm than good. Why do we feel like teenagers have to be constantly entertained and can't take a couple hours a week and dive into scripture without silly games and goofy illustrations?

Any thoughts would be wonderful. I feel like a curmudgeon and I'm only 31, but there you have it. Well, thank you for your question,

Matt. A book that I would recommend while I'm thinking about it. I'm going to go ahead and mention this. It's the book

Judge Not by Todd Freel. He addresses some of this very thing in that book. Some of you may have watched videos on YouTube from Votie Bauckham and Paul Washer talking about how youth group needs to be abolished.

But I want to clarify that when Bauckham talks about these kinds of things, he's he's become rather known for talking about the abolishment of youth group.

When he discusses this, he's not saying that that there should never be any kind of Bible study in a church that is geared toward teenagers and that sort of thing shouldn't exist.

What Bauckham is mostly speaking up against is having a youth subculture, which is different than saying that any kind of Bible study for teenagers should be completely abolished.

So here is Votie Bauckham talking about the dangers of a youth subculture in a church.

I've done a lot of youth events over the year, some significant youth events over the years, and was really known in that circle, in those circles rather, as one of the go -to guys for events that related specifically to young people.

And although it's never been the majority of my schedule, there had always been 10 or 15 percent of my itinerant schedule that incorporated these significant youth events.

So I've been there, and most of the things that I was doing were things that involved the most significant, the largest, the most well -respected youth ministries in local churches and also parachurch youth ministries in the country.

Being at these events was like casting pearls before swine. These events looked the same. They sound the same.

These youth pastors were just sort of reincarnations of the same guy. The events themselves were sort of reincarnations of one another, always trying to outdo one another, and it was wholly ineffective.

The fruit that was born in these ministries and through these events was negligible.

In fact, success in these youth ministries was always determined the same way. The successful person coming through the youth ministry usually went on to become a youth minister.

The people who were most committed to the youth ministry were the ones who became workers in their college ministry or workers in their youth ministry or youth pastors themselves.

There was no sense of a broader, bigger picture of preparing young people for full -orbed adult

Christian life and experience. That's why youth ministry is not the term anymore. Now it's student ministry.

That's the term nowadays. The terminology has changed, sort of like global warming changed into climate change.

So now what's happened was youth or teenagers were growing up beyond their high school years and falling out of church because they were never part of the church as a whole.

They were always part of a subculture within the church. So what do we need to do? Well, since we've created a philosophy of ministry, since we've created an ecclesiology that looks completely different than the church as a whole, what we have to do in order to retain these people longer is to incorporate them into a college ministry and a singles ministry.

So now the youth pastor is no longer the youth pastor. He's the student minister because the ministry now incorporates people all the way from their early teen years through their mid -20s and sometimes even beyond.

So again, the fruit of this is just a self -perpetuation of this cottage industry of subculture ministry.

Now I will tell you that I cannot sit here and say that you should abolish your youth group because we have a youth program at our church, but it's

Bible study. It's not what you think of a youth subculture being, as Vodie Bauckham was describing there.

It's the same kind of Bible study that I would do with adults, but it's on Wednesday night when we've got our

Awana program, we've got Trek for middle school students, and then we do Journey with the high school students, but we don't follow the

Journey book. We do when it comes to the memorization scripture plans, but as far as our

Bible study time together, it's open Bible, sitting around a table together, reading scriptures in context, applying it to their particular situations, the things that they go through in their lives.

And half my students are homeschooled, the other half are public schooled. So I'm able to say, for those of you who are homeschooled, you may not deal with it this way.

For those of you who are public schooled, this is how you will encounter these kinds of situations. So we can apply it specifically to the kinds of things that they will face on a regular basis.

And that's the way that we do youth group. We do actual Bible study.

It's expositional. It's taking them through the scriptures. It's using scripture to interpret scripture.

And that's the way that we conduct our youth group. When I was in high school, the youth group that I attended, it was still rather topical, but it was open

Bible. We would have our Bibles open in our laps and whoever was giving the lesson that particular week would show us what the scriptures have to say about that.

And I'm still friends with my youth pastor to this day. The guy that I had, who was my youth pastor back in high school,

Leo Reimer. I still regularly talk to him. Well, regularly, every once in a while, but he will call me up and say, hey, why don't you come back and share with the youth group?

And sometimes I go back to the town where I graduated high school from, and they're still doing youth group the same way

I stand in front and I'll say, okay, today we're looking at this chapter in Colossians and they'll open their

Bibles up. They've got Bibles open in their laps. They're marking in their Bibles as I'm talking. It's great.

The way that youth group has done there. And I think if you're going to have a youth group in your church, that's the way that you should do it.

It's not a subculture separate from the rest of the way that church is done. It's also not something where the church has been handed the responsibility of teaching teenagers.

That's still the parent's job. So as long as the church has an understanding that the parent should be the primary spiritual caregiver to their students, then the fact that you have a

Bible study in your church, that's geared toward teenagers. That's great. And I know that what videos are popular among youth groups because we get emails about it from teenagers and youth pastors who will say,

Hey, we play your what videos in our youth group. And I think it's great that teenagers are learning how to understand the scriptures and, and seeing

Christ through something that was said to them in, in a what video youth pastors, I would just tell you, make

Christ big point to the scriptures, be expositional, call out sin, tell your students to turn from sin and follow

Jesus Christ. The way that you win a teenager to Christ is not by playing a game where you're licking peanut butter out of somebody's armpit.

It's by the same way that you would lead anyone to Christ, the gospel of Jesus Christ, Romans 10 17, faith comes by hearing and hearing through the word of Christ.

Thank you so much for listening today. If you would like to send me an email, the address is when we understand the text at gmail .com.

God bless. I'll be back on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday with our study in first John and Thursday, we'll continue our study in first Kings.

This is when we understand the text with pastor Gabe Hughes. There are lots of great Bible teaching programs on the web, and we thank you for selecting ours, but this is no replacement for regular fellowship with a church family.

Find a good gospel teaching Christ -centered church to worship with this weekend and join us again Monday for more