Hank Hanegraaff’s Attack on Sola Scriptura Refuted, Part 2

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Tuesday, I think.

So far, anyways. Could become Wednesday halfway through. I saw more people saying get rid of this stupid daylight savings time thing this time than I have in the past, including politicians.

So maybe, who knows, maybe sanity will... no, it won't. We're currently buying up all the toilet paper in the land.

So no, no, that's... we're doomed. Anyway, on the last program, lots of things we could be doing today.

It seems that there is a tremendous need for remedial 101 instruction on what presuppositional apologetics is about and why it's important.

And I'm not talking about the new Christian intellectuals. The single most arrogant title that anyone's ever come up with for themselves.

Especially at something like 30 years of age or something like that. But there's there's just there's this tremendous amount of straw man burning going on in that particular field right now.

And so definitely the next time around we'll need to remind folks of the fact that presuppositional apologetics is a fundamentally theological form of apologetics.

It's not a... it addresses many philosophical issues, but it does not take its life and origin from philosophy.

And that's one of the main reasons it is detested by so many who feel that...

well, because of their theology they have problems there. But we'll get to that, not today, but later in the week.

It's gonna have to either be tomorrow or Friday. Thursday for me is going to become absolutely positively insane.

So I'm gonna be in the East Valley pretty much all day on Thursday. So tomorrow or Friday, whichever one works for you, we can we can make that make that work.

But on the last program, we began responding to a video that appeared, and I expected another video to appear for some reason, but it hasn't yet.

Since it was talking about the Eucharist, things like that, I do want to respond to that when it comes out.

I didn't check today, so it may have come out today. But responding to a segment of Hank Hanegraaff unplugged.

I'm not sure what that is. I don't know if there still is a Bible Answer Man broadcast. I don't know.

Things have changed greatly over the years, and certainly the reach and outreach of CRI is a tiny fraction of what it once was.

Obviously one of the greatest reasons for that, 2017, when

Hank Hanegraaff swam the Bosporus and entered into Eastern Orthodoxy.

So we began looking at a edition of this particular program.

We started with where you have to start. You have to start with the subject of authority and foundation. And even though Eastern Orthodoxy, as a religious system, as it exists in its, shall we say, in its native environment, is fundamentally averse to dogmatic definition.

And if you speak with Eastern Orthodox in Eastern Orthodox countries, in Russia, Ukraine, especially, you will discover that Orthodoxy seeks to express itself through, were you just coughing in there?

Allergies. Well, it's nice knowing y 'all.

Oh, he's, well, both. Yeah, you're allergic to the

Coogees. You figure they're all gone, and then this rainstorm comes through and cools things down, and out they pop again.

It's just like weeds in a yard. I was just, I thought

I'd get there before you, that's all. Anyway, I just haven't done the vacuum bag thing to suck them, get them all squished down and get them stored away for the the heat that is undoubtedly right around the corner.

So, yeah, anyway. But as I was attempting to say,

Eastern Orthodoxy expresses itself through the prayers and the liturgy. And part of that is just because the worldview out of which it came, and part of that,

I think, has continued to be an emphasis upon that, to try to differentiate it from Roman Catholicism as they seek to, you know, obviously they make the argument that Rome split away from them.

They're the ancient Church. And since Roman Catholicism is extremely focused upon Western thinking and a legal forensic concept that allows them to write books of dogma and doctrine, well, did.

We're still speaking, you know, we're still living in a rather new time period in the pontificate of Francis, where everything is now up for grabs.

But I think there's that's where some of this emphasis comes from within Eastern Orthodoxy is is a self differentiation from Roman Catholicism.

Anyway, the subject of this particular discussion is absolutely foundational.

But when someone like Jay Dyer or Hank Hanegraaff seek to attack

Sola Scriptura, they're doing so in a Western context. And so part of what is definitional, in fact,

I would say part of what is definitional of the best expressions of Eastern Orthodoxy, sort of gets lost.

By necessity, because there has to be this, you know, you're engaging in dialogue and debate with Westerners.

And so you have to, let me put it this way,

Eastern Orthodoxy is never more like Roman Catholicism than when it attempts to engage in apologetics within a

Western context. And I think we see that in this conversation that is that is going on here.

And so with that in mind, we were looking at the subject of Sola Scriptura, and we were looking at the issues that it raises.

And already we have looked at texts that we've looked at within the past few months.

Somebody on Twitter just today was asking me, well, you know, are you gonna continue your response to Jay Dyer?

We've been doing that a little bit at a time. Basically, it's been breaking down to particular texts that he has attempted to say, well, this means the early church believed this, the early church believed that.

And so we're gonna continue doing that. But it has just broken down into little segments that we've been providing responses to.

So that's what's happened here as we've been listening to Hank and his guest, and so we will continue with that.

I just want to bring one thing up over here before I do that so that I can be looking at that at the same time.

I think we're ready to go. I backed it up a few seconds from where we were, just so you're—and we're just not picking up at the exact same second that we let go last time.

So let's let's go back to listening. Now all of a sudden you have people that come to the same biblical text and they say, you know what?

That biblical text does not mean that this is truly the body and blood of Jesus Christ, but rather it's a memorial, it's a remembrance.

Okay, and so we had stopped right there, and why? Because we pointed out that that's the biblical language.

The biblical language is memorial remembrance. That's the Greek—since Hank's really into Greek today— you know,

I'm almost remembering something where now

I don't think it would have happened in the first program, because in the first program is where— first program when I was on the Bible Answer Man was when we did

King James Only controversy and set all the records as far as melting the phone lines, because there was a lot of people who really had a lot of questions about that.

But I have the strong recollection of some point earlier on where something was said about try to avoid using

Greek, try to avoid using the biblical languages, and so it's somewhat ironic that there would be this big, huge emphasis now upon these things.

But the reality is the biblical term is do this as an anamnesis, a remembrance of me.

And so it just struck me as very strange and odd that this would be the argumentation that Hank would make at this point, because that's the first and foremost plainly biblical teaching.

So you have all these different interpretations, and because of the interpretations that are different, you have all kinds of permeations within Christianity.

Now, I've often said God has his people everywhere, but the problem is the Christian faith keeps fissuring, keeps fragmenting, and a lot of what's behind that is private interpretations, the sola scriptura, where everybody becomes their own

Pope. Yeah, where everyone becomes their own Pope. That undoubtedly was an assertion that I rebutted in his presence on the program, and at that time he agreed he doesn't any longer.

And obviously sola scriptura does not mean everybody becomes their own Pope. That would not explain, for example, divisions amongst

Eastern Orthodox who don't have a Pope, according to their own confession. But the reality is that the abuse of an completely perfect and sufficient source is not an argument against the sufficiency of that source.

And the whole sola scriptura blueprint for anarchy thing is false on its face, and this has been pointed out before,

I'll point out again. Maybe Hank's friends can point it out to him, though I've not found him to be one listening really well to what is said once he makes up his mind he's going to do something.

If you take all of the religious organizations, movements, denominations that profess to hold the sola scriptura, they know what it is, they define it, and they seek to live in light of it.

It's part of their confessions, it is something that they try to hold, the members of their denomination, their ministers, to sola scriptura.

Now, there are not that many organizations that fit into that particular rubric.

And you might go, really? Aren't all Protestant denominations? No. No. You can't tell me that Bethel Church believes in sola scriptura.

The charismatic movement as a whole with exceptions, and only very knowledgeable exceptions who recognize what the issue really is and seek to do something about it.

But the vast majority of people watching the Trinity Broadcasting Network and listening to people on a regular basis saying, the

Lord says this and the Lord says that, do not believe in sola scriptura. They have either a very squishy understanding of what the canon itself is, or they have a concept of continuing revelation or whatever else it might be.

But the idea that the scriptures are the sole infallible rule of faith for the

Church, because they are theanustos, because they are God -breathed, that's not where they are.

That's not a part of it. So, when you see differences and divisions between word -faith advocates and followers of word -faith teachers, that's not because of sola scriptura.

And never does the belief that scriptures are the sole infallible rule of faith make everybody a pope.

That's the standard Roman Catholic argument that Hank has borrowed, and it's a completely fraudulent argument, because that does not give me infallible certitude as far as interpretation is concerned.

I do not get to ignore the Church. I do not get to ignore history. I do not. I have to practice all those things that Hank has made up acronyms about for decades.

I have to practice all those things, and I have to recognize that I stand upon the shoulders of giants.

I do listen to what preceding generations have said, but I recognize the fundamental authority difference that exists between them and the scriptures.

And so, it doesn't make me a pope. Everybody who thinks they are a pope, you know, them and their

Bible, sola scriptura, out under the tree. We've spoken against this for a long, long time, but, and this is something that Hank did know, should know, certainly had access to all sorts of resources that would have explained these things to him.

So, it's disturbing and sad to see someone utilizing this kind of argumentation when it's just invalid argumentation.

It would not survive any meaningful cross -examination. That's for certain. So, this, so, look at the, look at the organizations that seek to practice sola scriptura, and the theology that they arrive at.

How different is it between the various groups that truly believe in sola scriptura? As far as I know, they're all

Trinitarian. They all believe in justification by faith.

They all believe in the resurrection of Christ. They believe in the coming of Christ. They believe in the inspiration of scripture.

They believe there is a church. They have tremendous consistency in what they believe.

Now, let's look at all the groups that say the Bible is a revelation from God, but do not practice sola scriptura.

What do they believe? Well, that's a big group. It's not just Rome.

It's not just Eastern Orthodoxy. You've got the Mormons. You've got the Jehovah's Witnesses.

You've got all sorts of people who say they believe the Bible's Word of God, but it's not enough in and of itself, and when you look at what they all believe, they can't even agree on who

God is. So, the Roman Catholic goes, well, that's not fair because we're the one true church.

You can't compare us. The Eastern Orthodox says the same thing. But if you're going to make, whether you accept or reject sola scriptura as the dividing line, well, they're all on that side of the line.

And where is the vast majority of confusion? The vast majority of confusion is found when you bring tradition, when you bring external sources of authority in.

Look what's happening among Southern Baptists today. Where's so much of this division coming from?

It's not so much coming from meaningful exegesis of the text of Scripture.

It's coming from bringing the mindset of the world in, whether it be your old -fashioned traditions or in the current situation, critical theory and intersectionality and getting woke and all the rest of this kind of stuff, and that's causing division.

But it's a rejection of sola scriptura, not an embracing of sola scriptura, that is causing this fracturing that Hank was referring to in his discussion here with a fellow by the name of Nathan Jacobs.

I had not heard of Nathan Jacobs before, but he's about to continue on with the conversation here.

Yeah, so I think— Any problem with what I just said? Not at all, actually. I'm very sympathetic to the argument that just from, you know, common sense, if you were to say, well, who's in a better position to tell us what, you know, this text means?

Somebody who's native to the culture, native to the language. Okay, this harkens back, if you weren't listening last time, to an argument that had just been made by Hank that you need to look at the people who spoke

Greek in the early Church as your ultimate authority because they were the closest, and I argued against that.

That the large majority— Good grief. I can't think of anybody who doesn't—

Milito Sardis, at least he was in that area and he— excuse me—he did inquire of people in Palestine.

But the vast majority of the writers in the first three centuries that we possess today— again,

I can't think of an exception— are not writing from the culture that produced the

New Testament. They may be Greek, but good grief. Again, Church history.

How about world history? Why were they speaking Greek? Was there a unified culture?

No, there was not a unified culture. There was an enforced unanimity or enforced utilization, thanks to someone by the name of Alexander the

Great, the king of Macedonia, son of Philip, who, in a very short life, expanded his kingdom massively, primarily to the east, and then the huge expansion of Greek language, which became the lingua franca, was then utilized by the

Romans, who arose shortly thereafter, as far as a world power is concerned, and consolidated what he had accomplished.

But their language never displaced. In fact, they were more influenced by Greek thought than the other way around.

And so their language never really displaced Greek until the second, third century in the

West within Christianity. Then Latin takes over at that point as the language of the

Church in the West. But the point is, that means people from so many—I mean, all the

Gnostics were speaking Greek. That doesn't mean they're even in the same worldview as the writers of Scripture.

So to look at someone like Tertullian or Irenaeus or Justin Martyr and think that their interpretation should be given some kind of extra credit—

Origen, Clement of Alexandria, you look at their writings and then you ask a simple question from a biblical perspective.

Did they understand? Did they really have a solid grasp on what was going on in two -thirds of the

Bible called the Tanakh? And the answer is no, not really. Not really.

Each one to a different extent, obviously. But they're not coming from that culture.

They are not Jews. And after AD 70, there's only certain places you can go where you can inquire of those who are

Jews. And some of those being Babylon, some of those are in Bethlehem and places like that.

And some early writers did seek their information, but still they weren't coming from that perspective.

So this just doesn't work. It's just historically unfounded.

Is only a couple of generations removed from the text or one generation or maybe knew the author, right?

There's certainly a case from just common sense to say the Church Fathers are probably more reliable interpreters than us, right?

Again, and I pointed this out before, this sounds logical, but it's not.

Many of these individuals, someone like Justin Martyr, did not even have a completed canon. Can you imagine what your systematic theology would look like if you didn't have

Hebrews as a vitally, I mean, that's been one of the biggest problems, in my opinion, for the

Church up to the point of the Reformation, was a massive diminishment of a recognition of the centrality of Hebrews.

And the importance of Hebrews. Hebrews is the longest sustained argument about the intention of the

Father, Son, and Spirit in the atonement in all the New Testament. What if you didn't have that?

And many of these early writers didn't have it. So is that not going to impact how you interpret

Romans chapter 8? Yeah, of course it will. Of course it will.

So I just think this is just naivete at best. And so, on the one hand,

I'm sympathetic to that. But of course, obviously, you have the problem of the exercise of interpretation creates this diversity of interpretations, right?

That fracturing and figuring that starts to happen. One of the things that I think is interesting is...

Can I just mention that that is not an inevitable result? That's what people assume.

That the more interpretation you get, the more fracturing that you get. That's a function, I think... In fact,

I'm really surprised that the Orthodox are arguing this way. I think this is where the

Western way of thinking has influenced. Because the Orthodox would say we have the same traditions we've had since the 8th century, 9th century.

And we can keep going over it over and over and it does not require fracturing at all. Why does the

Bible require fracturing, but your traditions don't? See, that's...

That's something a Westerner would say. That's something a Westerner would go. Well, yeah, I mean the more people interpret, the wider the perspectives are going to get.

But the reality is that I think most of that comes from the Western mindset and the

Western way we do scholarship. The only way you're going to get published is if you come up with something new. You're not going to get published if you say, you know what, on this subject, we've had it right all along.

That's not going to get you anywhere. And so it's the very way that we do scholarship, borrowing it from the world, that ends up producing much of this type of fracturing.

It's not something about scripture itself and it's not the necessity of truth. One of the greatest, encouraging things to me is when

I will read Athanasius. We just had, my fellow pastor

Jeff just had another grandchild. He's getting very early start on these things. And the middle name is

Athanasius. And my first comment was, poor kid's going to be spelling that the rest of his life.

But when we read Athanasius, who's very popular amongst the

Orthodox, and when you read his arguments against the Arians, he's arguing the same text that we argue today in the same way that we argue today.

So it doesn't require that there be a fracturing. The truth hasn't changed.

Can we get a deeper appreciation of it? For example, when we look at the

Granville Sharp Constructions in 2 Peter 1 .1, in Titus 2 .13,

can we more strongly substantiate the arguments that someone like Athanasius might have made in light of the study of the language?

See, we have access to significantly more This is gonna sound strange.

Because they obviously would have had much more Greek literature available to them at that time in a library.

How many libraries were there? Now there certainly was a big one in Alexandria. But for the vast majority of people, library was not something you could ever access.

And so, though there would have been more extant manuscripts, books, in their day, we have things like Thesaurus Lingua Graeca, where we can look for a word or a construction in the

Greek language or the Latin version thereof. And we can we've now catalogued things, and they couldn't catalog things back then.

So we can compare things they could never ever compare. In fact, you could not make the comparisons that we can make today until 15 -20 years ago.

When I was doing my PhD on the Trinity, one of the things that we got, man, we could barely afford it back then, we couldn't afford it all, but we got it anyways, was the

TLG CD -ROM. Now they don't have that anymore, now you have to do it online, but anyway, and that allows you to do these incredible searches that no one could do before.

It was not physically possible to be able to see the structures in the language that we're able to see today.

So this modernistic, hey, you know, everybody back then, you know, as far as church history is concerned, there's two extremes.

You've got the modernist who says, hey, it's only stuff today that matters, and so we can ignore those people back then.

And then you've got the people back then saying, well, those people are the only ones that mattered, because they were so close to the original. And if you think it through, there are advantages and disadvantages in both, and there has to be a balance.

There has to be a balance. You mentioned mystery, right, and the etymology of the word mystery is a fascinating one in terms of how it originates and how it makes its way into Eastern Christianity.

Moustakos, right, the word moustakos, from which we get mystery, its root, right, its underlying root was mouin, which was a

Greek verb that meant to shut. And that referred specifically to the initiation into mystery cults, where you would shut your eyes and shut your mouth in order to be received into the mystery cult.

And so Plato starts to use the word moustakos to refer to those, that knowledge that is had only by the initiated, that secret knowledge that's only had by the initiated.

Of course, that's not really the meaning in the New Testament, but the point is the mystery cult's Gnosticism, gnosis, knowledge, the idea that these things are hidden and therefore can only be obtained through the process of the cult itself.

Mystery in the New Testament is that which was unknown in the past, but now has been a part of the relation to Jesus Christ. And so, at least that's how

Paul uses it in the key texts. Well, when this term gets picked up by Clement of Alexandria and the

Eastern Christians, it begins to be used for that knowledge of God that is had only via Christ, meaning those who have been initiated into the faith, who have been received into the church, who have embraced the faith, those are the ones who have been initiated into a certain knowledge of God that comes only via Christ.

Now, of course, what I would point out is what we would want to do, is we would want to look at the term wistidion, and we would want to define it biblically, and then it's perfectly valid to go, um,

Clement of Alexandria does this. Now, Clement of Alexandria is a broken read.

Origin. He even said origin is not a church father. Well, of course, he was a church father. But he was wildly unorthodox, and Clement of Alexandria is only slightly more orthodox than origin was.

And so, you would want to define these terms biblically first, and then ask the question, did these fathers have an accurate understanding, or, and this is a big issue, how many of them were deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, and allowed that to become a lens through which they then started seeing things in the text of the

New Testament or the text of the Old Testament. That would be how we would do it.

Also important is that for Clement, that's specifically referred to, Moustakos specifically referred to the opening of the biblical text, the opening of the

Old Testament in particular, to see the things that are there, right, to see that, for example, the

Ark is a type of baptism, right, and see that's why there's three stories to the boat, you know, and things like that.

Because Clement's point is that on the one hand, the Old Testament is filled with all these odd stories, right, odd characters.

Now remember, Clement leads us to origin, who leads us to the allegorical interpretation of the

Old Testament, which leads to literally a more than a millennium of a fundamental degradation of the authority of the

Old Testament text. Because, partly because of the division that took place between the synagogue and the church, part of which was necessary, part of which was not, because of an ignoring of Paul's warning in Romans 9 through 11, especially in 11, you had this, this, there was a recognition, even in the medieval period, of the content of the

Tanakh. But that was seen for a long time, up until the

Reformation. The Reformation really helped to undo this, but it was seen as having that knowledge is something anybody could have.

This kind of thing, this kind of spiritual insight, which has no connection to the text, became the methodology.

So you had to have this spiritually enlightened understanding text, so you could see things that have nothing to do with what the original authors would have intended, the original audience would have understood, and do not have prophetic fulfillment in the

New Testament scriptures. And there's, that's where the issue is, is we're not talking about passages about the

Messiah. We're not talking about Isaiah 9. We're not talking about things like that. We're talking about looking at things where God worked with his people in having the tabernacle, or in these types of things, and where you all of a sudden start claiming to have this spiritual kind of knowledge, and then you attach to that the idea that if you only have the knowledge that any old

Joe on the street could have of what was going on in the Old Testament, well, that's, anybody can have that.

But you need to have the secret knowledge. You need to have this special sacred knowledge, which you only get in certain ways, you see.

That led to the Old Testament becoming a closed book for the vast majority of people up until the

Reformation. There were some exceptions during the medieval period, but they weren't popular exceptions in the sense of having major impact upon a large number of people.

Murderers, you know, adulteries, and murders, and talking snakes, and all sorts of weird stuff.

And what does it all mean? And his point is, only in the revelation of Christ and the knowing

God through Christ do you begin to see those things flower and open, so that you see what they are really all about.

And that's how Clement used the word moustakos. And then origin of Alexandria, not a church father, but an early

Christian writer who was very influential. I still don't get, how can you say he's not a church father?

I suppose what he's saying is we recognize that he was unorthodox on numerous things, because he was.

And in fact, the interesting thing is, we do not yet know how unorthodox he was.

Because last I heard, I suppose something major could have changed. But the last

I heard, all of his materials hasn't even been translated yet. And hence, a lot of his stuff is still locked away in original languages that only a few people have ever seen.

Because he, I mean, he produced, it's like 6 ,000 volumes. It's like, there was a, he had scribes just followed him around and just wrote down everything he said.

Man, no thank you. I mean, that was, that was weird.

Brilliant, but not grounded. Yeah, exactly. Brilliant, but not grounded.

Origin begins to use that and expand on that. Specifically, he uses the, his spiritual interpretation of the transfiguration is that the transfiguration, at the transfiguration, obviously, you know the story that, you know, we have some of the apostles there, and then

Christ is transfigured. He glows with divine glory. His garments shine whiter than anyone can bleach them.

And he converses with Moses and Elijah, who both show up.

And origin suggests that Moses and Elijah represent the books of the prophets and of the law, which have no light in themselves, but only become illuminated when bathed in the light and glory of Christ.

And the Christ's white garments that glow represent the four gospels that are illuminated only in light of Christ, and that the apostles who are there are the illuminated interpreters.

Yeah, because they're cloaked in a cloud of uncreated energy as well.

That's right. Now, did you catch that? They're cloaked in a cloud of uncreated energy.

Whenever an Orthodox person uses the term energy, tune in! Energia! I mentioned this last time when

I was in, I got to bop around Kiev with my dear friend

Nick a couple years ago, and we went to a museum of World War II and all the stuff that Ukraine has been through between the

Soviets and everything else. It was fascinating, and it even had a section on the current war that was going on and continues to go on, which the world has pretty much ignored.

That's a whole nother issue. Anyway, as we were leaving, we walked by a very large

Orthodox church that had just begun a service. And so we walked in, and right up front was a gift shop where you could buy icons.

And then inside, the choir had just begun to sing. Now, look,

I have friends who still have a lot of fundamentalists in them that freak out about this, but there are few things musically more beautiful in the world than chant.

I mean, I posted on Facebook recently, somebody had posted this, and I listened to it.

They went into the Hagia Sophia, the huge, the massive, incredible Byzantine church in Constantinople, modern -day

Istanbul. As you know, in the middle of the 15th century, the Turks finally breached the walls, primarily thanks to the

Crusades and things like that. They finally breached the walls. They had stood against, they had kept the

Turks out of Europe all that time. And finally, they take Constantinople as a bloodbath, and they turn this massive church, which at one point was one of the largest structures in the world, into a mosque.

But it's a Christian church. And what they did is they went in there.

Did you see this? Did you listen to it? Oh, man, you've got to. A few years ago, they got permission to go in there when nobody was in there, because you can't have anybody in there to do this.

When nobody's in there, and they set up equipment all around the room, and then all they do is they just, what was it?

It wasn't clap. What was it? There was some sound they would make. And then they recorded what that sounded like at various places in the room.

And they created an audio filter that you can then apply so you could hear what a choir would have sounded like in that building back in the day.

And so they'll play a chant, and then they'll apply the filter. And it's just like, oh, wow.

So the music, I mean, it was beautiful.

Nick and I walked in, and there is beautiful, beautiful music coming out of there.

But I'm looking around, and you can have beautiful, beautiful music.

But from a Christian perspective, the world can produce beautiful, beautiful music. What makes it beautiful is its truth content.

Yes, God made us to appreciate the beauty of that sound, just as we appreciate the beauty of the sunset.

And an Orthodox service lasts forever, and you are assaulted from every direction.

They have incense going, and the sound, and the building, and it's meant to fill all the senses.

But from the Christian understanding of the creation of man, what would make any of that important is not the response of the creature, but the conforming of the creature to the image of the

Creator through the communication of divine truth. And what happens, and what has happened in the vast majority of Eastern Orthodoxy is a replacement of that truth with traditions, a denial of certain vitally important elements of divine truth, especially in regards to anthropology and soteriology, and foreign concepts.

And some of those foreign concepts, the primary one is this concept of Energia, of energies.

There are places of energies, and you have to go to these places. I would argue in the

New Testament, the places of Energia is wherever the Holy Spirit of God is, and the Holy Spirit of God dwells within his people.

And so, when you have a small band of believers in prayer in the back room of a storefront in Poughkeepsie, that's where real

Energia is going to be found, when they're on their knees seeking to be obedient to Christ in all things, applying the gospel, living the gospel.

But the tradition has developed, there's these places of Energia, and it can take on, quite simply, a rather blatant character of paganism.

With all the beautiful music, all the structure and the architecture, once you take out

Christian truth, then you've got people simply coming to a place, hoping to get certain energy for healing and for success in business, and it becomes very token and very materialistic, even though it's talking about uncreated energy.

Because what animates is Christian truth, and that's why solo scriptura is so important, because once you deny that, the church is the bride of Christ, and the church hears the voice of Christ in his word.

Once the church says, we are the infallible interpreter of this, and once the church says, we are the one that determines what this is, the church enters into a monologue with herself, a mere echo.

You no longer hear what is outside of you and can bring correction. There can be no reformation anymore, and that's a tragedy, especially when that tragedy takes place in the midst of such beauty.

And so, one of the reasons, again, that, and here

I am talking about it, again, that I have attempted to try to avoid getting dragged into this whole area, is because trying to communicate with Western evangelicals and going, no, wait guys, hold on, the smells and the bells aren't the issue.

The bells are beautiful, the smells are fine, the chants are beautiful, they're incredible, and very frequently, extremely orthodox,

Trinitarian. I mean, some of these chants have deeper Trinitarian theology than almost anything in an evangelical hymnal, except for the

Christmas hymns. But that's normally the third stanza. We skip that all the time anyways. But it's frustrating to have to acknowledge this, but it's true, and that's what people focus upon.

They just focus upon the external stuff and just don't even begin to get to the point where you're thinking about, okay,

Eastern people think this way, and so, okay, am I even really asking a question here?

Is the answer I'm getting back even meant to answer the question I'm asking? I mean, it's just that much of a challenge.

Like I said, these are westernized guys, and that's why they end up sounding so much more like just a standard

Roman Catholic, once they try to start answering questions that most Eastern Orthodox folks, in their experience, where they're not running into Western people.

And of course, the internet's changing a lot of this, so that's another thing to keep in mind. But they end up having to adopt categories that are challenging in the expression of orthodox belief.

Again, why are we doing this? Well, we're doing this because it's important. Anyway, so there you go. And so one of the things that's important to understand here is that with Origen and others, what they're pointing out is that there were any number of people who say encountered

Christ, but didn't see his glory, right? And they didn't really see him, right? And on the one hand, they saw him, right?

They saw his person, right? But they didn't really see him. They didn't really see who he was. And in many ways, we do the same thing with the biblical text.

Many of us read it, and it's never open to us, and it's never illuminated with the light of Christ.

And this is one of the reasons why revelation and the treatment of revelation within the early

Christian church was not about just syntactical accuracy. It wasn't just an exercise in comparing manuscripts and engaging in lexical studies and so on.

It had to— catch that. It's not just an exercise in lexical studies and stuff like that.

There is a less than subtle degradation of the centrality and importance of exegesis.

Now, my personal experience doesn't mean anything except for me, but I know that many people would agree with me that the deepest, most amazing experiences of worship that I can think of are almost always connected with in -depth study of the

Word of God and a communication of those truths to others. When I can see, when

I can communicate something to people that I can see, not only are they going to take that out of the room, but it's going to make them better servants of Christ, that's just fantastic.

That's the height of worship, because you're being changed by divine truth.

But there's a degradation, I think, amongst Orthodox and Roman Catholics, because—and you can understand where part of it comes from—if they live in Western culture, they know that most evangelicals have a very low ecclesiology, a very low appreciation of the worship of the

Church. And so, from their perspective, hey, we've got something you don't have. And in fact, that's what's attracting people to Orthodoxy right now.

Smells and Bells has always done that, but it's not the Smells and the Bells. It is a view of the

Church that, unfortunately, is rare today. Having a high ecclesiology, viewing, you know, if you've been called as an elder in the

Church, that's the highest calling a person could have. Truly understanding the building of the body of Christ—certainly something

I've come to appreciate traveling globally—is that, you know,

I've told the story before, but it is in an interesting context. I have, on that same trip

I was just referring to, but even before then, when I had the opportunity of going to Kiev, I haven't been able to get over there for a while.

Hey guys, remember me? But in the worship services, just last year when

I was in Samara, Russia, um, they did live stream the worship services.

It was like three o 'clock in the morning here or something. I forget when it was. But it was very, very early. They did live stream it.

And I remember one of the things I thought of when I was in that worship service, um, even though I just wrecked my knee.

I had slipped on ice. It was, had been 27 degrees below zero the day before, and I almost went downstairs.

But unfortunately, I stopped myself and in the process strained my knee. So I was having trouble walking. Um, but I remember one of the things

I was thinking as I listened to this fairly large congregation of Russian Christians singing.

It was not Orthodox Church, obviously. It was a Baptist Church. It was, uh, you know, in the

MacArthur realm of evangelicalism there. Uh, generally, um, as I was listening to these

Russian voices, and I had had this happen when I was in chapel, uh, at the school there, I just couldn't help thinking about what my mom would think.

Uh, she passed away 10 years ago. Um, but I remember the first time when

I heard them singing, all I could think about was that's the sound from my youth of the enemy.

When you, I mean, because from our age, you, we still did, we still had drills where we dove under our desks in case of nuclear attack, cold war, man.

And when you would see movies or you would, you know, you'd hear those Slavic Russian voices, you know, martial music type thing, you know?

And so I remember that the very first time over there in Kiev when we sang, and it's, it's just like, wow, because they're singing the same songs.

I don't understand a word of it. Um, but they're singing the same hymns and I know they're singing the same hymns.

And here's the body that we've been aiming nuclear missiles at most of my life.

And so when you travel like that, you realize how the body is so much bigger.

And that's why so much of this social justice stuff and everything else just makes me ill because it's so yankified.

It's so American. It's so, it's so much the American experience rather than recognizing the experience is completely different.

Just a few borders down, if you even have borders anymore. Um, but it's so Americanized that it's just like, well, uh, it's just so shallow when it doesn't recognize just how great the body of Christ is.

So anyway, um, yeah, sorry. We, we, we only have three minutes and 35 seconds.

We've got, we've got to get through all of it. With really and truly understanding those texts in the light of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, which is ultimately a communion with God, and it's ultimately an ontological reality.

It is not an academic exercise first and foremost. Okay. No one would say it's an academic exercise first and foremost, but there is a, there is a bias here.

Um, because I would argue that, especially when it comes to, um, well, the misuse of the texts we've already seen, the arguments they make in regards to justification.

Um, I think they fear going in depth. Funny thing is they fear going in depth into the language they themselves claim for themselves.

Um, and so in my experience, in the times

I have engaged with Eastern Orthodox, very often what has happened is there has been a default back to tradition and a rejection of the supremacy of the exegetical analysis of the text itself.

That is key to understanding how the church fathers always approached the biblical text is that it needs to be open to us by our communion with Christ, which ultimately happens inside the church.

Give me the cliff notes as we close this segment, uh, on Sola Scriptura. Oh, that's a good question.

The cliff notes version. All right. So I would say the clip cliff notes version is the quick takeaway. The quick takeaway is that the biblical text is indeed the revelation of God.

Uh, but that revelation is a deposit inside the church and that what we know of God comes by that communion with God internal to that church.

And that is the context in which we come to fully understand what is there and not just what is there in the biblical text, but what is there in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, which is ultimately worked out in our church.

Now, it almost sounds in a sense there as if there is something greater than what is in scripture.

And I think that is really where orthodoxy is at is that while you acknowledge the authority of scripture and do not expand the canon in an artificial fashion, that outside of the traditions that have been established in the liturgies and prayers of the church, that if all you have is the

Bible, you don't have enough. And obviously we believe that,

I think the New Testament teaches, that the church is central to God's purposes, that the church is the body of Christ.

Um, there is a very true sense to the Cyprianic formulation, uh, extra

Ecclesiam Nullus Solus, there is no salvation outside the church. Because if you define the church as the body of Christ, as the body of the redeemed, well then that's almost a tautology.

It's like, duh, all you're saying is that Christ is the only way of salvation. But obviously, once you begin to exalt the,

I'm not going to say epistemological status or epistemological authority of the church, but when you begin to exalt the offices of the church and the officers of the church, and the traditions of the church, then you get this idea of the creation of an organization, um, that now transcends its earthly expression in the local bodies, which then gives you the basis of establishing all these offices and, and, and, and things that the apostles never established, and that were not a part of the early church, uh, and not certainly a part of scriptures and then developed early on the church, but they, they are developments after the apostolic age.

And once you get to that point, it seems inevitable that the church will end up exalting itself to where it enters into that echo chamber, the end of that monologue with itself.

Um, and unfortunately that's what's happened, um, with the vast majority of Eastern Orthodoxy, certainly with Roman Catholicism as well.

Um, and I think that's what we're hearing here. Meaning with him, life lived together within, within, within the church.

In the next video, I want to talk about the Eucharist. Um, I became

Orthodox, quite frankly, because I believe in the real presence of Christ in the

Eucharist. I believe that when I'm partaking of the Eucharist, something is taking place that I'm being infused with not biological energy, or at least not exclusively biological energy, but zoetic energy.

Okay, this is why I was watching for it, and I, we will address it when it comes out.

Um, zoetic energy, life energy. Again, Energia, this is, this is, this is part and parcel of, uh, now will you find

Roman Catholic, uh, spiritual writers likewise referring? Yeah, you'll find

Protestant spiritual writers referring to spiritual energies and things like that, but it's become, it's, it's become a non -dogmatic dogma, which if that troubles you, you'll always be troubled by how

Eastern Orthodoxy thinks. But, uh, it's become a, a central defining aspect of Orthodox practice and piety to seek that, that Energia.

And so what you have here is not the technical

Roman Catholic perspective on the Eucharistic sacrifice, transubstantiation, uh, things like this, but you end up with a sacramental location of Energia.

So by participation in worship at that place, and at that time, you have access to Energia that you would not have access to any place else.

And as a result, you do have in Orthodox theology, a fundamental diminishment of what

I think is a plain biblical emphasis in regards to sin and substitution, wrath, and associated subjects, because man doesn't like that part.

And if you're looking for Energia, that's distracting, that's distracting.

Um, and it is consistent, cross -generational emphasis upon ex -Jesus that constantly brings the

Church back to that firm foundation. But once you deny sola scriptura, you don't have that, that kind of position.

But talk about that. Uh, there's real grace that's being imparted, and that grace is transformational.

We'll talk about that. Okay, so transformational grace. So this is where this language and Rome intersect, um, that is being imparted or infused.

Um, and so they're, you know, this is why Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism have all these, you know, get -togethers, ecumenical stuff, and things like that, because they use a lot of the same language, try to bend things together so that they're saying similar things, very different than it was back in the 15th century.

Council of, uh, well, anyway, um, Florence, uh, interesting stuff that went on there. But today they're, they're, you know, trying to make these connections in this infusion of sacramental grace.

That's the more Roman Catholic way of talking about it. Uh, we would say that when one is obedient to Jesus Christ by the power of the

Holy Spirit, that we are conformed closer to the image of Christ, that it's a matter of sanctification, holiness, obedience, presence of the

Spirit, and that that does not require a place of Energia. Um, now, before you, uh, march off to your local

Eastern Orthodox Church, keep in mind there are, there isn't nearly enough discussion amongst our own branches in regards to the supper, the importance of the supper.

It's, it is a given from their perspective that if you go to a church that only has

Lord's Supper once a quarter, that you don't think it's very important. And how do you respond to that?

I mean, I don't, I don't want to make everybody uncomfortable, but I'm going to anyways.

Um, one of the reasons that these groups have been not totally unfazed by our efforts to evangelize, but primarily unfazed by our efforts to evangelize, is because when we do not dive deep and think biblically and historically, and in a systematic fashion about our own faith, they're not interested in hearing what we have to say, because they can just stand outside and go,

Christ established this? Christ establishes his supper and says, do this in remembrance of me.

It's, it's, he does it on the night that he is betrayed. It is established in all the early churches in the

New Testament. Paul has to write to correct abuses to the Corinthians, but you know that every other church

Paul established was doing this. And yet you all have reduced it to a few minutes, once a quarter?

How does that work? Um, and, and they've got a point.

Most of us are abysmal in our understanding of our doctrine of the

Lord's Supper. In fact, if you look at the statements of faith of the large majority of evangelical churches, we believe in baptism in the

Lord's Supper. Well, what is any of that? Well, we're not going to say. And so, you know, uh, we, we, we aren't armed in the, in that area.

I get it. And when someone realizes, let's say you've, you've been in a, uh, uh, conservative evangelical church, uh, your entire life, maybe even serving in it.

And then something happens. You've been betrayed. It happens. Something happens that it's, it's, you, you did the best you could to serve

Christ, but everything goes topsy turvy and you get blamed for stuff and you get betrayed, you get hurt, you lose friendships.

And all of a sudden, the stuff that you've been putting over here and you've, you sort of recognize that, you know, we don't, we don't spend much time talking about the church as the church.

I, uh, there's, there's very little discussion of, you know, the eldership and the fact it's supposed to be a plurality of elders and, and what the body of Christ means.

And man, when it comes to the, to the ordinances, um, you know, we, we sort of know why we don't baptize babies or something, or maybe you're in a

Presbyterian church. And well, we've, at least we've got Reformed Theology and we've got, uh, uh, some type of viewpoint on that.

Um, going back to Calvin or something. And, but still, you know, when it, when it comes to the supper and stuff like that, you know, it's just something that we do.

We don't really think much about it. And man, it's, it's talking about, you know, Christ being with us and we're doing this as a remembrance of him.

And there's some, you know, we're proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes. And in most places it more looks like we're sitting like bumps on a log, um, not proclaiming the

Lord's death. And once something bad has happened, that opens the crack, that opens the door.

And maybe there's something else out there. And that's, that's very often exactly how you end up with people someplace you never expected them to be, because of the fact that there are certain areas that we just don't think through.

And, um, we're almost, almost done. Almost done. In the next edition of Hank Unplugged with my good friend,

Nathan Jacobs, uh, that we're doing a series on stumbling blocks, perhaps even as we talk about the

Eucharist, I want to talk in, in tandem in the next video about smells and bells.

Um, you know, we say that in sort of a humorous or semi humorous way, but what was interesting to me is when

I became Orthodox, uh, there were some evangelicals who followed me into the church to kind of see what

I was up to. And then they wrote about, uh, me and my family and the church, uh, or my family and I in the church.

And they were, were, were making the point that, my goodness, this church smells like weed.

This church smells like, uh, people are high on marijuana. And then there's all these sounds that, well, what in the world is going on?

They had no frame of reference for it. And, uh. Let's just be perfectly honest.

Um, we, we know who that was. Um, and you can look it up yourself. I mean, it didn't take you very long to find that stuff,

Rich. Um, but, um, I, I have not been tracking any of the responses that Hank has received since 2017.

It's just, I only have so much time. I'm, uh, next week, a week from Thursday, I'm flying up to Moscow.

I've got the stuff with, with Doug on pedo -baptism, pedo -communion, textual issue. Gotta remember to pack the 1550

Stephanos down there. Um, I don't want to disappoint, uh, in showing up with that. That's the only reason they want me up there is

I'm bringing my 1550 Stephanos. Um, and then 10 days after that, up to Salt Lake City, we've got, you know, dialogues and debates and general conference and I've got a thing at BYU.

And so I've got, I've got enough to keep me busy for a long, long time.

Um, so I don't track this stuff, but I have a feeling that, um, of anyone who has responded from a negative perspective and saying, this is, this is a fundamental denial of what you have professed up until this point.

Um, I think we've probably been, we've been about as fair as you can possibly be in seeking to accurately represent, uh,

Eastern Orthodoxy, um, and to not just view it as a cult of popeless

Catholics. Um, and so it would seem to me that Hank has primarily played the victim card in regards to people who don't have any background to understand what

Eastern Orthodoxy is saying in the first place. I mean, I was just talking about going into an

Orthodox church in Kiev, Ukraine, and the beauty of the music, and it didn't smell like weed, it smelled like incense.

Um, but I was focused upon the theology of the

Energia and making application to biblical parameters. So why not respond to the better, the better objections?

Um, I know you're talking about, that that's not, that's not going to be your, your top end response to Eastern Orthodoxy, uh, by any, by any stretch of the imagination.

I think these two things are tied together. The Eucharist people don't have a frame of reference for, and what's going on when you enter an

Orthodox church and all your senses are engaged. Let's talk about that in, uh, in the next, in the series.

And obviously it will be our intention to, uh, to look at that because,

I mean, aside from the, um, smells and bells, external stuff, role of tradition in developing these things over time, the question of apostolic authority for how you do your worship issues along those lines.

Um, most importantly, you have the impact of the whole concept of the

Eucharist, salvificly. So it's impact upon soteriology.

And because of what I feel is one of the most fundamental errors of Orthodoxy in regards to anthropology and the impact of sin.

That's why you, you have much more of a focus in historic

Orthodox thinking on the incarnation than you do upon the crucifixion.

The crucif-, they're, they're, neither one's denied, obviously, but, but you, from our perspective, it would seem like an imbalanced move away from, from their perspective, they look at Rome primarily.

And then they, they just look at us as Roman Catholics without a Pope and a few other things.

Um, but they see the imbalance going the other direction. Um, they, they have such a strong emphasis upon, upon theosis and connect that with incarnation.

And the cross then becomes the necessary end result of the incarnation.

Whereas in the West, the emphasis is upon the cross, to the point where the incarnation is, um, barely,

I mean, outside of Christmas. And even then, that's not where the emphasis, unfortunately, normally is.

Um, so again, different perspectives. And what's the only, where, where's the only, what's the only mechanism we could possibly have to deal with any of this?

We've got to go to scripture. Gotta go to scripture. So I will keep an eye open as I can, as I just mentioned, my schedule is going to be extremely busy, um, starting, you know, well into April, uh, and then only a few weeks before more business after that.

But I'll keep an eye open for that particular episode because I think it'd be important to analyze it and hopefully it would be, um, useful to everybody in the audience as well.

So yes, sir. Uh, tomorrow? Yeah, that works for me.

Um, because like I said, Thursday is going to be incredibly busy for me. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, it's going to be raining. It's supposed to be raining. Not in here? Oh, okay. Well, I really hadn't been overly concerned about in here.

Uh, but, but you're right. Thank you for that observation, um, Captain Obvious. Uh, anyways.

All right. Uh, but, um, so next time, I'm not sure exactly because like I said, that might come out.

Uh, then I have to weigh stuff that's going on and the presuppositional stuff and a few other things in the, in the pile of things as someone has, has identified it.

So we'll, we'll see what we're doing on the next program. But anyways, thanks for watching. I hope it was useful to you. We'll see you next time.