TPW 78 Eastern Orthodoxy Fr. Thomas Hopko Am I Saved

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Welcome to the Protestant Witness, this is Pastor Patrick Hines here at Bridwell Heights Presbyterian Church in beautiful, lovely, and yet very rainy and cloudy
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Kingsport, Tennessee. And I'm going to repost a podcast, actually it was a video
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I did a long time ago, in response to Father Thomas Hopko. I posted a couple things on the
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Protestant Witness responding to him, a convert, a very zealous convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, had sent me his stuff,
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Father Hopko's stuff, on the cross, and it was pretty bad, and I responded to that over two programs.
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This one was a response to a video called, Am I Saved?, and the title immediately caught my attention, and I thought,
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I bet you this would be interesting, because it's interviewing this guy, Thomas Hopko, and he was put out there to me as an efficient spokesperson for the cause.
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But I kind of introduced all that here in the old video that I'm making the audio available here on the
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Protestant Witness, because this is a really teachable moment, and it really, I think that not just Eastern Orthodoxy, but also the new perspectives on Paul, and a lot of other false strands of pseudo -Christianity that are out there that don't have any place in them for Christ suffering divine justice and punishment at the cross, need to be answered.
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And we, and Christians especially, need to be equipped to recognize this is the heart and soul of the Christian faith. This is the heart and soul of absolutely everything that we believe.
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So I hope that you'll find this to be useful and edifying, and thanks for listening. Well, I'm going to review a two -part, what looks like a television program of some kind called
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Orthodoxy Today. I've noticed in my dialogues with some
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Eastern Orthodox individuals, some of them are very nice, some of them are not, about these issues, is that Eastern Orthodoxy is evidently pretty hard to represent accurately.
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And I've noticed that no matter what I say, it's a misrepresentation. Apparently only they can say it.
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Now, I have been told that the guy being interviewed on here, Father Thomas Hopko, is kind of a liberal, but he was a priest.
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Listen to this introduction on this TV program. Just listen to the way he's described. I'm not sure that the priest that told me that he's kind of liberal,
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I don't know if the host of the TV show here would agree with that, but anyway, here it is. Listen to the intro to this guy.
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I'm Quaylin Nassar. You know, most of us want to be sure that we're being saved, even though we're not quite clear what that means.
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Well, this program might... I thought that introduction was really interesting. All of us want to be sure that we're being saved, even though we're not quite sure what that means.
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Okay, renowned Orthodox theologian, Father Thomas Hopko. Okay, renowned Orthodox theologian.
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So I would think this guy, you know, is able to speak efficiently for Eastern Orthodoxy, so I guess we'll see.
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He's the dean emeritus of Crestwood, New York's St. Vladimir Seminary.
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Okay, so he teaches at an Orthodox seminary, St. Vladimir Seminary. Well, he did. I know he died a couple years ago, but...
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So he's a speaker. He's a published author from this perspective, so I think that he, again, should be someone that we could look to to speak efficiently for this cause.
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He's going to talk about salvation with John Righetti. Father Tom, welcome back.
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Thank you. Oh, it's a pleasure to have you here. Well, today, the million dollar question. Huh? Salvation.
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Salvation. How many of us in our lifetimes have been asked, have you been saved? Are you being saved?
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So let's talk about salvation. When we talk about being saved, from an Orthodox perspective, what does that mean?
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Well, I think that it means that we realize, and I think most people, if they're alive and awake, realize that we don't know really what things are about, that we are confused, and that there's a conflict of understanding of things, and then we have also the feeling that, you know, what we want to do, we can't do.
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What we don't want to do, we do, as the Apostle Paul said somewhere. That's Romans 7.
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It's interesting. He was the guy that was referred to me by a convert as the end -all be -all.
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He did a series of messages on the cross, and I reviewed those. They're just the one message.
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It was 56 minutes long, and I did a couple of programs on that sermon and reviewed it, and it was really bad, and it was a frontal attack on almost everything taught in Scripture about the nature of the cross, of Christ, and what it accomplishes.
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But here, I can hear the same kind of emphasis already. We're kind of confused, and we don't understand what everything's about.
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So, salvation to this particular individual, Thomas Hopko, Father Hopko, seems to be more saved from ignorance, saved from confusion, and things like that, because he doesn't believe in salvation from the wrath or anger of God or against sin or anything like that.
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So, right out of the gate, you hear the same old stuff that we've heard.
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I mean, really, this is, as I said in the other programs I did, reviewing this guy, that what he represents theologically is really quite old.
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We heard all this from liberals really throughout the centuries. He reminds me a lot of neo -Orthodox and liberal theologians that we read when
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I was in seminary. So, again, this is a guy who's a seminary professor, a published author, a sought -after speaker, and a renowned theologian of Eastern Orthodoxy.
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And, of course, the whole issue of injustice. You have the issue of meanness and cruelty.
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Injustice, meanness, cruelty. We're talking about what does the
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Bible mean when the Philippian jailer asks the question, what must I do to be saved?
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Paul and Silas didn't go on a discourse about the meanness of people or the ignorance of man or social injustice or anything like that.
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And yet this is where he was asked a basic question about being saved, and this is where he's going.
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People's to each other. You have sickness. You have disease. You have death, the ultimate enemy.
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So I think that salvation mainly means, I mean, if you try to put it as quickly as you can.
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Listen carefully. In a sense, being delivered from or liberated from or victorious over all the things that any normal human being would consider negative.
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So victory, this was a major theme in this particular guy's understanding of the cross.
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The cross of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, I remember him saying over and over again, he just has to suffer in order to do
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God's victory. That's the way he just kept saying it. You have to suffer and then rise again to do the victory of God.
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And you just wonder, the only reason that the Christus Victor model, which is a biblical concept, 1
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Corinthians 15 speaks about the victory of Christ. The only reason it is a victorious act is because it does propitiate the wrath of God against sin.
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He does bring a perfect righteousness, which is imputed to his people.
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He brings perfect forgiveness of sins to his people. That's what makes it victorious. And yet he's saying that salvation ultimately is victory over everything negative.
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Ignorance, darkness, injustice, wickedness, evil, suffering, sin, disease, and ultimately death and irrational powers of all sorts.
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And that would be the from. And then for would be for wholeness, integrity, life, peace, joy.
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And we would even say in the Orthodox tradition, all the qualities of God. Notice what's missing. What's missing is human sinfulness against the holy
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God. That's what saved. When the Bible speaks of being saved, Romans 5, 9.
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How much more than having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.
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The ultimate thing that people need to be saved from. Yes, all of the effects of sin. Yes, we need to be saved from those.
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But we need to be saved from the wrath of God. That's primarily what's going on at the cross.
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And that has cosmic implications. Romans 8, 21 and following speaks of the creation itself is going to be delivered from all the influence of the curse.
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All the influence of sin and everything else. But sin is the main issue. And God is angry at sin.
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This guy does not like that idea. And so he steers clear of it. That's one of the reasons I wanted to review these programs.
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If you can have someone who is this allergic to the basics of the biblical gospel, be a priest in good standing, a sought -after speaker, a published author and a seminary professor, that says a lot about this particular religious group.
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That even one of the kind of proofs of God is that we're so dissatisfied inside ourselves. I mean, everyone from St.
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Augustine to the Rolling Stones said, can't get no satisfaction. That's actually a really good point.
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He's right about that. When can we finally be at peace? And then, of course, the ultimate reality is knowledge of truth and victory over death.
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And by the way, in Hebrew language, the word for salvation is synonymous with the word for victory.
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They're not two different words. He really, really, really likes the Christus Victor model.
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And it doesn't make any sense in his system because the reason that the death of Christ is a victory is precisely because he has paid in full the debt that his people owed to God's justice for their sins.
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That's what makes it a victory. That's what makes the resurrection a victory, is that it has removed the enmity between man and God due to our sin and the punishment thereof.
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But he doesn't like the idea of punishment. He doesn't like the idea of there being any kind of legal justice that God is pouring out on Christ, even though that's explicitly what
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Isaiah 53. The Lord, it pleased Yahweh to crush him.
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The chastisement for our peace was on him. By his stripes we are healed. The Lord has laid on him the iniquities of us all.
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This guy doesn't like that idea. And so he's going to find a way to explain Christianity without it.
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It actually reminds me a little bit of M .T. Wright. He's similar to that. Even the term Yeshua, which is the name
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Jesus that the angel gave to Joseph, it can mean savior, but it can also mean victor.
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Yeah. Yet when the angel Gabriel spoke to Joseph in his dream, in Matthew 1, verse 21, he said,
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And you shall call his name Jesus, Iesus. That's the Greek form of Yeshua, meaning Yahweh is salvation.
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And he tells him why his name is going to be called Yeshua or Jesus. And it is because he will save his people from their sins.
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Not he will save his people from ignorance and from injustice and from all of the negativity of life.
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It's from their sin. This guy doesn't like that idea. And so he just really just kind of ignores it.
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Even when in the sermon he did, when he does take up the key passages, he just kind of glibly dismisses them and then goes back to all this victory stuff.
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The victory, but the victory over what? Well, ignorance, sin, wickedness.
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At least sin is thrown in there. I guess there's no way around it. But the main thing we need victory over is ignorance and that kind of stuff.
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Death itself. So I think and then how that would happen, of course, we would claim that we can't save ourselves.
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You know, no matter how much we would try, whatever, what we would do, however enlightened or kind we might be, we all realize that we're never perfect.
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And then we all realize that we have to face the injustices of life and that, in fact, we're all not.
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So I think that would be. So salvation is that point, if you will, that takes us from those senior things in life all the way to death and brings us to wholeness, to light.
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In essence, I guess what I'm hearing you say is the presence of God. Yeah, exactly. Another way of just saying, you know, are you saved or being saved?
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Are you really living according to God? Are you living? That's not what what Scripture is talking about.
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Are you saved? It is has a specific biblical concept. God is holy.
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God is righteous and just. Man is a sinner. Man is under the wrath of God. Just last night was reading with my children,
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Ephesians chapter two. We were by nature children of wrath. Just as the others under the wrath and anger of God for our sins.
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And he this guy just he just completely misses it. I mean, listen to what he just said again. Listen, are you really living according to God?
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Sirs, what must I do to live according to God? That's what he meant by saved.
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No, clearly he was being convicted of his sin and he wanted to know how can I be saved from the just punishment that is going to fall upon me for my sin?
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When we talk about being saved, am I saved from what? Saved primarily, biblically, from the justice of God.
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That's what hell is. That's what Jesus endured on the cross was the justice of God against the sins of his people.
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That's why his name was Jesus. He will save his people from their sins. He is primarily a savior from sin.
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Everything else that we're delivered from is a corollary to that central truth. But that's the main thing people need to understand.
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When we ask, am I saved? We're not asking, am I living according to God?
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Now, those who are saved will live according to God. But that's sanctification. That's another category of biblical redemption.
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Are you living according to truth, to wisdom, to reality? In biblical language, are you not a fool?
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You know, are you wise? That's not what saved means.
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It just isn't. Can you see things clearly? Do you know how to relate properly and have virtue?
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I mean, what most cultures would call virtue. You know, being a wise, true, kind, peaceful, joyful person.
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And here, of course, we Christians would claim the only person on the planet who ever did that was
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Jesus. That's why he's our savior. Whom we call savior. Who is our savior. And he is the only one who had absolute, unbroken communion with God.
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So he's our savior. Or as he said, you could say he's our victor.
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But he's our savior because he's the only one that's ever done it. But what does he mean by that, though? He's not really fleshing this out.
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Let's see if he does. I mean, at all times. And therefore was able to destroy death, to conquer death.
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So Jesus Christ, therefore, as savior. I mean, what does that really mean for us? Good question.
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Is there salvation outside of Jesus? Well, sure. We would definitely say that. We would say.
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Well, you have to say that. That's what Peter said in Acts 4 .12. Christ saves us. However, we would say immediately two things.
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The church fathers would say immediately two things. One thing would be, as far as God Almighty is concerned, for us this would even be a gospel.
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The good news would be, as far as God Almighty is concerned, everyone and everything is saved.
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See, he brought this out in the other sermon, too. Everything's saved. Everybody's saved.
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So it made me wonder, is this guy a universalist? Does he believe that everybody's going to heaven because everybody is saved?
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I don't get it. If there's anything clear in the New Testament, not everybody is saved.
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There are people who are going to die in their sins under the wrath of God. Think about John 3 .36.
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The Scripture says, There it is again.
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So why is he missing this point? He doesn't like it. He does not like it. And so he's going to find a way around it.
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Everyone and everything is saved, he said. That is just bizarre.
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Whether you like it or not, everyone and everything, everyone, every human being, repentant or unrepentant, is saved.
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If that's true, why does Paul say, for example, in 1 Corinthians 9, he says here, towards the end,
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Well, if they're already saved, if everybody is saved, from God's perspective, everyone is saved, why do you need to win people?
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And so on and so forth. No, people need to be saved. It's not that they're all saved, whether they like it or not, from God's perspective.
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Everyone. Because when Christ dies on the cross, he literally loves
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God perfectly with all his mind, soul, heart, and strength, and keeps all the commandments, and is a totally righteous man.
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That's true. But he is also fully divine, embracing all of our, you know, St. Paul said he became cursed, he became sin, he became dead.
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He became cursed in behalf of his people. Yeah, substitutionary atonement.
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What is the curse? That is the punishment of God. The curse of the law is the punishment, the judicial, legal, penal punishment of God against our law -breaking.
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If you break the law of God, you incur its curse. That's why Galatians 3 .13,
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Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse, hupere heimon, in behalf of us.
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When Christ, well, just quote one of our saints, Gregory the Theologian, he said, one drop of his blood recreates the whole creation and empties the graves and renews the whole creation.
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Yeah, everything is now beginning again. So we would say as far as God is concerned. However, we have to accept that.
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We have to believe that. We have to want that. And here you could say if a person desires it, wants it, hungers and thirsts for it, in the end they will have it by sheer grace.
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So if you want it and desire it, you'll have it by sheer grace. That's not what the
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Bible means by grace. Grace necessitates unconditional election. That's why, for example, in Ephesians chapter 1, listen, just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to himself according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace.
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The choosing of individuals by name individually from before the foundation of the world, and that is not everybody in the human race.
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That is to the praise of the glory of his grace. To say that we are saved by sheer grace necessitates that we were chosen before the foundation of the world in Christ.
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And he does not choose everybody in Christ. He does not choose everyone. He chooses those whom he freely loves.
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And nobody deserves to be chosen. No one is chosen because they're better than anyone else. Grace necessitates unconditional election.
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Realize that they have it only because of Christ. At the same time, a person in this world may never have heard the gospel or heard it in a terribly perverted form,
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I tend to say sometimes like on TV, and would want no part of it. But they might be closer to the real
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God. And in the end, only God knows. But we would say everyone is saved. Did you hear that?
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So he sounds a lot like Karl Rahner, the Roman Catholic theologian. Sounds like a universalist.
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Sounds a lot like many of the Arminians and the open theists. What about those who have never heard?
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Well, as long as you're sincere and you've drawn closer to the one true
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God through the light of nature and everything else, just total denials of biblical truth, total denials of a passage they've already alluded to.
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There is no salvation in anyone but Jesus Christ. Well, you can have salvation in Christ without really knowing about Christ.
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That is not a biblical category. You have to hear the gospel. You have to hear about Jesus in order to believe in him.
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But this whole obsession with free will and works and everything else, that necessitates, well, maybe people who have never heard, they can make a generic faith move toward God and be saved based upon whatever knowledge that they did have revealed in the stars and creation.
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Again, totally unbiblical. That is not a biblical teaching. Men universally suppress the truth in unrighteousness,
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Romans 118 and following. All men know God, but they suppress the truth about him.
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And unless they are acted upon by God's almighty, invincible, irresistible grace, they will never turn towards God, ever.
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Hell, hell, if there's hell, it would be simply the... Oh, I remember this part. If there's hell, listen.
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Hell, if there's hell, it would be simply the... If, if there is hell.
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See, this, I really wonder if this guy even believes in such a thing.
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I don't get the impression that he believes in hell. And it makes sense that he wouldn't. Because he doesn't believe that God has a judicially applied punishment that he lays upon Christ at all.
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In the sermon I was given, this sincere young guy sends me this sermon.
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Pastor, please listen to this sermon. I think this will really help you understand. And I listened to it three times. And I just, it was one of the most horrifically unbiblical treatments of the cross
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I have ever heard in my life. It reminded me of Harry Emerson Fosdick and J. Gresham Machen fighting about this back in the 1920s.
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It was a horrendously unbiblical idea. And I emailed back and said, does this guy, does he believe in eternal punishment?
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I don't get the impression that he does. Listen to this. He says, hell, if there is a hell. Listen to it again. Only God knows.
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But we would say everyone is safe, but hell, hell, if there is hell, it would be simply...
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If there is hell. Was that a slip of tongue or is he showing his cards a little there? The conscious rejection of the life and the truth and the beauty and the glory of God.
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Well, to use Jesus' own words, they prefer darkness to light. They don't love love.
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That's John 3, 19 and 20. Very true. The only reason people reject the true gospel is because they love sin.
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The reason that mankind suppresses the truth and unrighteousness is because they love unrighteousness. No one can serve two masters.
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You can't love sin and Christ at the same time. Love truth. They prefer to be sick.
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In fact, in the language of the old covenant, Moses' law, it would be to choose death.
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God said through Moses, I give to the people a blessing and a curse, life and death.
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Choose life. Choose life. You have to choose life. You have to want life. But our claim would be anyone who wants it, they'll have it on the last day.
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Anyone. So whether you've ever heard the gospel or not, that's cool. So we don't have to do evangelism and missions.
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Everybody can make a generic faith move toward whatever, and they'll be okay on the last day or whatever.
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This is not biblical. Man needs to hear the gospel. Jesus, when he was speaking to Paul on the road to Damascus, when
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Paul explains this to King Agrippa, Jesus said, I am sending you to turn them from darkness to light.
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You can't turn from darkness to light without hearing the gospel. This is like standard
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Arminian, semi -Pelagian, and open theistic. This sounds very liberal.
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It does sound liberal. Father, I'm sure you have had plenty of people in your life, I certainly have had in mine, people who come from particular traditions where they believe that the concept of being saved is a particular moment, a particular episode in their particular life, and they have said to me, and I'm sure said to you, when were you saved?
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How do you answer that question? Well, if somebody asked me when were you saved, I would say when Jesus gave up his spirit on the cross and died.
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Yeah, that's quite true, but I don't mean it the same way he does. You're saved at the moment of your conversion.
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Just like Paul says in Ephesians 2, before he was made alive in Christ, he was a child of wrath.
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He was by nature a child of wrath, just as the others, it says in Ephesians 2, verse 3.
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But God, verse 4, who is rich in mercy because of his great love of which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses and sins, made us alive together with Christ.
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By grace you have been saved. Have been saved. Yes, it is a point action in the past, because in that context, it's synonymous with justification, with the judicial declarative act of God that we are justified forensically, legally, judicially, by faith in Jesus Christ.
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That's the moment of my salvation. But I do think that there is a certain truth in that approach, namely that faith has to become alive.
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It has to be accepted. It has to be kind of self -conscious. Yeah, it's hard to believe in someone that you've never heard of.
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In fact, Paul says that very thing. How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?
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How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they believe without a preacher?
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Romans 10, 14. So you do need to hear the gospel in order to be saved.
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You can't just generically respond to the light of nature. The light of nature is not sufficient to give us a saving knowledge of God.
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But I think we would say, Orthodox would say, that happens over and again many times.
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No. See, and this is the common error. The Roman Catholics make the same argument that we've been saved, we're being saved, and we will be saved.
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The fact of the matter is our ultimate salvation or justification is an eschatological reality, yes.
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However, at the moment we believe, that eschatological last -day verdict is brought backwards in time and applied to us in the way that the
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New Testament teaches us that it is. That at one point we are by nature children of wrath.
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When we are converted, when we are born again, and our faith is in Jesus Christ, at that exact moment we are justified once and for all before God legally, judicially.
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Fall away from it and fall back to darkness and come back. It's a whole drama, and I think that that's very important.
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That you can't say, at this moment I was saved and I know... And another thing, John, I think one of the most terrible things, in my opinion, is when people start saying, well, what do you need to do to be saved?
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Do I have to go to church? Do I have to accept Jesus? Do I have to do good works? Well, my professor of theology used to say, he was a
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Russian, he would say, my dears, this is an abomination, this approach to salvation.
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He said a person can't just say, what's the minimum I need to do to get to go to heaven when I die?
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Yeah, that's very true, and you hear that kind of thing, so I know what he's talking about, pastorally speaking.
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If a person has no desire to follow Christ, no desire for holiness, the fact is they are not a
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Christian, period. That doesn't mean we're saved by doing those things, but a true
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Christian is going to become a member of a church, is going to have a hunger and thirst for righteousness, is going to desire to follow
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Christ and so forth and so on. That would be horrible. It would be like saying, how much time should
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I give my wife? Right, that's very true. It's just a sick approach. It's a sick approach.
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It is. And if salvation really is about living and knowing the truth and rejoicing in God, and knowing wisdom and rejoicing in the flowers and so on, that's a process.
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It's going on all the time. No, it's not. We have been saved by grace.
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You have been saved through faith. It is a one -time action. Now, yes, you could say that the term, biblically speaking, does encompass more than that.
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Excuse me, but when we speak of salvation from the wrath of God, that is a one -time you have been saved by faith in Jesus Christ.
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All the time. And here, of course, we would say, not quoting a church father, but Yogi Berra, it ain't over until it's over.
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And so we have to persevere to the end. And even Jesus said, the one who perseveres to the end will be saved.
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Right, very true. And that is a descriptive statement. He who endures to the end shall be saved.
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That does not mean, and this is such a common error, once again, that does not mean that by enduring to the end you are saved on that basis.
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Merely, it is a descriptive term. Those who endure to the end, those whose faith stays in Jesus Christ to the end, shall be saved.
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Those who fall away from their profession were never saved to begin with. 1 John 2, 19 teaches that very clearly.
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And, again, this is another passage I would love to hear these people deal with. They went out from us, but they were not of us.
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For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out that they might be made manifest that none of them were of us.
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Those who fall away from their profession have not done so because Jesus failed to save them, but because their faith was something they drummed up in themselves and was not a divine gift, as it is to the elect when they are affectionately called.
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But it's to the end. So when someone says to you, I've been saved by the blood of Jesus Christ, what's your response to that?
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I say, yes, you have, and you better be living by it every day, and you better not betray it, and you better not presume it.
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Isn't that amazing? This is another thing that this guy brings out a lot, and I've seen this from other
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Eastern Orthodox individuals that I've dialogued with. Well, yeah, that's true, but you better not presume on it. Eric Castleman said the same thing.
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We believe Jesus died for our sins, and we're saved by the blood of Christ, but you always have to listen out for these buts.
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But we don't presume on it. It's just incredible to me what these people call presuming.
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Christians have looked at from the beginning as believing the promises of God. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our
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Lord Jesus Christ. Romans 5 .1. Romans 8 .1. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.
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I don't say, now, you can believe that, but you don't want to presume on it. You better be living by it.
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No. You believe the promise of God. You believe the promises of his word that salvation is your possession.
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You have eternal life and shall not come into condemnation. Who will bring a charge against God's elect?
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It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? We don't presume on it. It's not presumption to believe the promises of God.
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If you are, of course. See, and the thing is, in Roman Catholic theology, there's a whole category of sin that they call presumption.
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The sin of presumption is what? Believing that you are, in fact, a Christian. I mean, is this really the life that we've been called to by Jesus Christ?
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A life of nail -biting and uncertainty? I don't know. I better be keeping up with everything and better not do this and better not do that.
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That is not the way that living the Christian life is at all. It is a life of growing in assurance that what
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God's word promises us is most definitely, absolutely, infallibly true and certain.
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And it's not presumption. It is faith. It is believing the promises of the word of God.
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According to the Scripture, it will be proved by your works. And it's incredibly interesting.
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That's true. Very interesting. According to Scripture, we will answer on the last day for our works.
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Yeah, and this is another very common error that is made by these folks and by the
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Roman Catholics and by many other groups. The judgment of our works has nothing to do with the acceptance of our persons as righteous in the sight of God.
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Our works are judged, yes, for reward on the last day. Yes, indeed. But that has nothing to do with providing a foundation for our justification.
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The righteousness by which we are justified is imputed to us. Romans 4 .6, just as David speaks of the blessedness of the man, to whom
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God imputes righteousness apart from works.
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Are we judged by our works on the last day? Yes. Is that our justification? No, because the righteous works that are ours by faith in Christ, that is the basis of our acceptance with God, the acceptance of our persons.
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Our works are judged, yes, but that has nothing to do with the acceptance or rejection of our person.
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Listen to the word of God here. Listen. Romans 4 .5, but to him who does not work, but believes on him who justifies the ungodly.
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Yeah, he justifies the ungodly who are inherently ungodly. His faith is accounted for righteousness.
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That's the term logizimai, imputed for righteousness. Just as David also describes the blessedness of the man to whom
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God imputes righteousness apart from works. God imputes righteousness apart from works.
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Thomas Hopko doesn't believe that. In the Eastern Orthodox people that I've talked to, I've asked many of them to explain that.
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What does hathaios logizitai to kaiasune kolros ergon mean? God imputes righteousness apart from works.
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Not with the infusion of his grace and his help and the Holy Spirit working in us.
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It's apart from works. Apart from works. Kolros ergon. Righteousness is imputed apart from works.
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And then he quotes from Psalm 32. Blessed are those whose lawless deeds have been forgiven, whose sins have been covered.
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Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.
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Why would God not impute sin to me? Because my sins were imputed to Christ. So listen to all this stuff about the judgment of our works as if that's what justification is about.
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It's not. He is conflating two completely different things. And this is a massive error in his understanding.
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For what we have done, even the book of Revelation, it says what's written in the book of life is what you have done.
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That's correct. Not what you say or what you claim. That's true. What motivates you to do that. Exactly. What your intent is.
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Absolutely. Yeah, and if what motivates you is the salvation of my own skin instead of gratitude, which is what biblical grace does produce in us, it's gratitude.
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If gratitude is not the motivating force behind your good works, then they're not good works at all.
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Important because there are some folks who might say on the opposite extreme would say, well, it doesn't matter if you believe anything.
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As long as you give food to the hungry. He almost said that earlier.
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Whether they know it or not, they're saved. As long as they make a generic faith move towards whatever, they'll be all right.
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Closer than they can work for. Well, that would not be a Christian view because you can do all those things out of arrogance and pride and judgment and boastfulness.
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And you can also do it thinking that, well, I'm judged for my works and I've got to do enough good works to get a good judgment and get to heaven, which seems to be what he's saying.
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No, I help the poor, not like you. And then you can do it out of vanity. You can do it to be praised.
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You can do it trying to save yourself, which sounds like what he's saying. You can do it for, I don't know, sick reasons.
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So certainly Jesus would say on the judgment day, the judgment will be, I was hungry, you gave me food,
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I was thirsty. But those have to be acts of love. That's why the Apostle Paul says, you can give your body to be burned and be lost because it's not done out of real love for God.
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That's because love always is a fruit of the Spirit. And the
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Spirit of God takes up residence in the heart of every person who is justified by faith alone.
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And the Spirit will bear that fruit of love. Yes, indeed. The neighbor for some other perverse.
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So we Orthodox would do this. We would say, yes, we are saved.
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But we never presume it. See, it is not presumption to believe the promises of God.
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I think that is what he's describing here. We have been saved, but we don't presume it.
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Meaning, in other words, we don't believe it. Why does he not believe it? Because he thinks that the judgment of works at the end is going to be the thing that gets you into heaven.
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And he's wrong about that completely. We pray for it every day, and then we try to live by it.
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This is not good news. This is not good news. We believe it. We don't presume on it. We pray for it every day, and we try to live it out.
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And what he just said, hey, there's a judgment of works at the end. That's going to determine whether or not you get to heaven.
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And if you haven't done your works out of purity and love and good motives and instead have been arrogant and prideful, and I would argue trying to do it to save your own skin, you're lost.
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Of course, again, does this guy even believe in hell? I honestly can't tell. And say every day,
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Lord, have mercy for my failures to keep the commandments of God. And Jesus said, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments.
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But that bespeaks to me then that a part of salvation for we as Orthodox Christians is a recognition of humility as well.
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Well, sure, humility. So a part of salvation, is he saying we're saved by being humble?
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God help us if that's true. Everything is the most divine. But also, you know, we had a conversation here once about the
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Bible as part of our conversations here. And here I think would be like a really important, a good example would be reading the whole
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Bible, reading the whole sentences. Because many folks will say, well, wait a minute, it's written in the
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Scripture, we are saved by faith through grace, not by words.
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No, no. We are saved by grace through faith, not faith through grace.
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That was just a mix -up on this word. Lest any man should boast. That's right.
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Not by works, lest any man should boast. That's Ephesians 2, verse 9, verses 8 and 9. Great. Stay with that concept.
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We're going to come back and talk more about that. We've got lots more to talk about with Father Tom Hopko. But first, more ideas about salvation.
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Okay. So here, that's the end of part. Well, let's get right back to it here. Let's go to part two.
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Let me see if I can. I learned that when we said certain prayers. Hello. Okay. Salvation.
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Father, we just heard Father Fred Fowle's testimony about his conversion to orthodoxy. That trek, that trip that people make in coming to the faith, does that have something to do with salvation?
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Does it have anything to do with perhaps the hungering for it? Well, I think certainly the hungering for it is basic and essential.
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But I do think that the whole issue of salvation and how it works and how it's explained and how it's supposed to work and doesn't seem to work in practice, it's a big problem for Christians today.
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You know, it's probably how salvation works is one of the most debated issues among Christians.
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I mean, from those who say. And yet, it's one of the clearest and most easy to understand things in the Bible, too, which is more of a testimony to human sinfulness and rebellion and human traditions than it is to the clarity of scripture.
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You must choose Jesus as your savior. So it is almost totally your own choice all the way over to those.
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That's what he sounded like he was saying earlier. I do nothing about it. God is sovereign. He can choose me or damn me and do whatever he wants in some kind of radical predestined.
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Very, very common misunderstanding and caricaturization of what, in fact,
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I just read to you. We are predestined. The God is sovereign. He can choose or damn me as he pleases.
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Is that really the way that the Bible speaks of it? No. He can choose me or damn me and do whatever he wants in some kind of radical predestinationistic way.
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But that's what the Bible does say. He predestined. What does predestined mean?
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What does predestined mean? To determine the destiny beforehand. That's what the word means.
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See, in this case, we, I believe it. Christians believe it. And he does not.
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He just doesn't. again, these are, that's the biblical teaching. But he just, he doesn't believe it.
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And then I think another thing that bothers a lot of people is the sense that to get saved means you got to pay off the punishment for your sin.
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Here we go. Now we're going to get his, his diatribe against the substitutionary, penal substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ.
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He hates that idea with a purple passion. He hates it. Listen, you can't do it.
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So Jesus is punished in your place. Well, I think that just turns people off. So what?
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If it turns people off? No, you know, let's, let's be honest here. Father Hopko, that turns you off.
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But for those of us who are under the conviction of the Holy Spirit of God and can see clearly the depth of our own sin and the utter futility of trying to live it out well enough to get to heaven.
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We look to the substitutionary atoning work of Jesus Christ. Christ is the propitiation for my sins.
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He took the wrath of God against my sins away at the cross and gives me his righteousness.
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That is the heart and soul of the Christian gospel. Christ died for our sins.
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My God, God sounds like the ultimate child abuser. You got to beat up people in order to allow them to go to heaven.
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So I think salvation, he just, this guy hates Christianity. He hates the gospel. He sounds like an ultimate child abuser.
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It's not child abuse because Jesus is taking real justice, real punishment against the sins of his people that he loves and is giving his life for.
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He loves the sheep and lays his life down for the sheep to redeem them from the curse of the law of their disobedience.
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Yes, it is punishment. And yes, God is angry at sin. Read the book of Isaiah. Read the first 39 chapters of Isaiah.
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Listen to this passage here. Listen to Isaiah chapter 13.
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Isaiah 13. Well, for the day of the Lord is near.
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It will come as destruction from the almighty. Therefore, all hands will fall limp. Every man's heart will melt.
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They will be terrified. Pains and anguish will take hold of them. They will ride like a woman in labor.
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They will look at one another in astonishment. Their faces aflame. The anger of the
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Lord is something that burns hot against the wicked every day. Is God angry at sin? Yes, he most certainly is.
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Father Hopko. This is one of these tough issues that people struggle with.
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No, there's no reason to struggle with what is plainly asserted in scripture. I do honestly know at my age that a lot of folks do enter into orthodoxy because they find its formulation and expression most satisfying, both to their brain, to their mind, as well as to their actual spiritual experience.
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So what is that? In other words, not because they find it in conformity with the word of God with the
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Holy Scripture, but it makes the most sense with their own brain. Yeah, their own fallen, fallible, and error ridden brain.
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Doc's interpretation, if you will, about salvation. What is it that these people find? I think that they realize that they come to see that salvation is life itself.
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It's truth itself. It's communion with God. It results in communion with God.
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It results in a changed life, but that's not what it is. This guy is treating the effects of salvation as if they are salvation itself.
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Just like N .T. Wright does. He treats the effects of justification as if they are justification.
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It's the fulfillment of human life being made in the image and likeness of God. And then they come to see that that is what is given to us from Jesus.
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And very particularly in his crucifixion. Jesus doesn't save us by being beaten up and killed, punished for us.
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Yes, he does. It's just amazing to me to listen to this guy's hatred of the gospel, of the biblical gospel.
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I mean, Isaiah 53, 5, but he was wounded for our transgressions.
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He was beaten up for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities.
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He got beat up at the cross by an angry father that abused him. That's not what it is. It's an act of love.
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Him taking the punishment for our sins away so that it doesn't fall on us. That's the whole point.
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He is saving us from the wrath of God by being cursed in our behalf, by being wounded in our behalf, bruised on our behalf, chastised on our behalf, oppressed and afflicted in our behalf.
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That's because he, in his humanity, is really fulfilling everything that it means to be human.
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And if God exists and God really is his father and no human can save himself. So God so loves the world that he sends his son as our savior, that those who believe in him will not perish, but have everlasting life.
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See, the thing is this guy's conception of Christianity does not need the cross.
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The cross just must be such a, an enigma to this man. It just doesn't make any sense.
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Can't Jesus be an example and save us from ignorance and do God's victory over darkness without the cross.
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There's no punishment that needs to be poured out upon him. There's no wrath or anything like that. He doesn't need to get beat up to save us in order to let people into heaven.
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Then why the cross at all? That's why the sermon this guy did on this for 56 minutes or however long it was, was just a giant lesson in misdirection and obfuscation.
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Just amazing. But when he comes, what does he do? Well, he shows perfect love. He shows perfect truth.
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He shows perfect forgiveness. In other words, he's an example. This is Pelagianism. What is Jesus? Primarily?
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He's a good example where Adam was a bad example. Instead of the federal head of the elect, he dies for them, saves them from their sins, redeems them, and then calls them to himself in time, giving us a mercy to everyone.
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In other words, he lives a truly divine life and that's what saves us. And that's what we see.
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And that's so weird. He just lives this life. The cross doesn't make, the cross doesn't enter in here.
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It doesn't make any sense to it. Plug in through faith and grace in him, within the community of faith and church and the sacraments and so on.
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Right. He just, Jesus has this pool of divine grace. It's channeled to you through these rituals and sacraments.
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And that's sort of the end of it. Where does the cross figure in here, sir? Where does
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Jesus going to the cross figure into this? It doesn't. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't fit with his scheme.
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And that's because his scheme is unbiblical. That's what ultimately happens.
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Now people could say, why did he have to die on the cross for that? Well, if he's the perfect human being and the final prophet, he's got to reveal who
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God really is as love. And he's got to show. How does him going to the cross reveal who
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God really is as love? The only reason you can say that the cross is a loving act is because it's taking the punishment away.
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If there's no punishment, it's an arbitrary and cruel act that makes no sense at all.
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So what love is, what truth is, and he does that by total surrender to God unconditionally, even unto death in total identification with crazy, mixed up, stupid, unjust dead people.
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And so he, he, he, he, as God and man is a, he being God. Do you hear him struggling?
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I mean, he hates the idea that God is angry at sin and that God has to punish it in order for people to be saved.
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So he's trying his best to dance a jig around that and trying to explain what cannot be explained without the idea of God's holiness and justice and wrath being poured out on Christ as a substitute for his people.
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You can't understand Christianity or the new Testament, the entire sacrificial system, all the prophecies about Jesus, the priesthood of Christ.
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None of it makes any sense without these concepts that he rejects. And so he is stuttering and stammering and fumbling all over himself to try to make sense out of this.
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And he can't do it. Comes and becomes man and does what we need to do.
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Then his, his, his death on the cross is also the reconciliation because when he dies on the cross, he fulfills all righteousness.
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He does justice. He fulfills all the commandments of the words of the law. And therefore, how, how, if it's not taking the curse of that law, that the people who are going to go to heaven have broken, how does it do that?
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It doesn't make any sense. If there is no God who is holy and must punish sin, according to it's just desserts, according to his own holy nature is righteous.
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The cross doesn't make any sense. Listen, he is, he cannot die.
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He is saved because he has, he does God's will. And he offers himself as the perfect offering, but you can't be the perfect, perfect offering to God at this fall in the world without suffering and dying and identify offering for what?
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Offering for what? He's just gotta die. He's just gotta die.
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Be obedient unto death. But for what? The only reason it does show us God's love is because, well,
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I'll just keep saying this. With the enemy that you forgive and love, no matter what.
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And then of course, ultimately, so ultimately Jesus is death on the cross is just an example. It's him showing a good example, proper example of how to live, how to forgive your enemies and things like that.
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He's the victor by destroying death and you cannot die. Yes, but it destroys death because it takes the punishment of sin away.
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What is the wages of sin? Death. So how is the, the cross death, burial and resurrection of Christ a victory because sin, it's punishment has been taken away by it.
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You cannot destroy death except by dying. You've got to transform death. You can't take the wages of sin away, which is death without dying and rising again.
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That's right. And that, and I'm sure, you know,
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John, that our main hymn in the orthodox church, practically orthodox people know nothing else, or people know nothing else about orthodoxy.
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They know our Paschal celebration of Easter and our little song. Very short.
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Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs, bestowing life.
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So it's by dying. When life dies, it's death that dies.
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You see? And, and so Jesus has the final prophet. The final great high priest, the final king and Victor.
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He has to die, but it doesn't make any sense. He says that constantly.
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He has to die, but he doesn't tell you why. Well, he has to die to do the victory of God.
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How does it do a victory? Unless it takes away the sins of his people. It doesn't make any sense.
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That death is a saving death, but just bear in mind, this is a published author, scholar, sought after speaker and seminary professor.
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And what claims to be the only true church on earth. And we are hearing complete obfuscation, misdirection and confusion regarding the central motif of the
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Bible, namely the death of Jesus on the cross and what it means to be saved from God's wrath by it.
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Nothing to do with our being punished or God reveling in the blood of Jesus or anything like that.
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It's terrible. Terrible, terrible. He is as liberal as they come.
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He is the reincarnation of Harry Emerson Fosdick and the liberals. Same exact identical stuff.
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Death is in essence conquering death, turning it into life. It is taking the negative and turning it into the positive.
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And then life gets us that. Yeah, because we need to be saved from negativity. That's what the
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Philippian jailer was asking. What must I do to be saved from all the negativity of the world? Take, for example, a little example.
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If the room is dark, you turn the light on. All the darkness goes away. So if perfect light is there, there's no darkness.
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Well, it would be if there's injustice and evil doing and perfect goodness and righteousness comes.
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The evil is destroyed. Right. If if if if life comes into death, it's death that dies.
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So I think that's that's our understanding of how Jesus saves us. You know, and he is the only
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Savior and we believe, which is, but it doesn't make any just always bear in mind. He's saying this.
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That sounds kind of biblical, but he does not believe that God has wrath or punishment against sin.
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Even though the Bible says in Romans 6, 23, the wages of sin is death.
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The wages of what sin. Why did Jesus have to die? Because God told Adam in the day you eat of this fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
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And the day you eat of it, you will surely die. So what did Jesus have to do to redeem us from death? He had to die in our place.
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What is that? That is the punishment for sin.
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Jesus takes the punishment for sin away at the cross. Without him, we wouldn't be saved.
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And so we do believe if anyone anywhere is saved in the sense that they get to live forever in communion with God, it's only because of Christ.
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But they could be saved without even knowing about Jesus. They don't even know who he is. See, and this is again, this is the universalistic tendency.
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It's not Christian. It's not biblical. And it has to be despised and rejected as false.
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Pressing question. We've got about a minute to go. And that's therefore within the context of orthodoxy. Are only
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Orthodox saved? Yes and no. Yes and no.
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Only Orthodox are saved, so to speak. Only Christians are only, because it's only the person who ultimately hungers for what is true, good, right and beautiful.
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See, but he thinks people can hunger for what is true, good, right and beautiful without being one of God's elect and without even hearing the name of Jesus.
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And suffers for it in any way they know how. We believe. So we were saved if we suffer for what is true, good, right and beautiful with that.
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That's how we're saved. They will be saved by the blood of Jesus. There's no other way they can be saved, because all that righteousness would be lost if Jesus did not save it perfectly.
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See, this is just not a biblical way of thinking. You have to know the truth, and the truth will set you free,
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Jesus said. You can't just, well, you might know something, but it's not really the truth.
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You have to know the truth. So in that sense, yes, however, it's very important to know a person can be nominally in Orthodox, go to church every
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Sunday, but not be interested in God or their neighbor, and just going there to play a role or whatever.
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And now the last judgment, there's going to be many surprises. So the real question is, who is the real disciple of Christ?
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And it's not the one who says it or claims it. It's the one who does it. But they do need to say it, and they do need to confess him as Lord.
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That's certainly something everyone who is a Christian does. Loves it and lives according to it as well as they can, and admits when they don't, and then trusts on the mercy of God.
01:00:00
And anyone anywhere who does that, we believe, will live forever with God. Anyone anywhere. So you can, what's being sort of subtly suggested there, is that you can be that way.
01:00:12
see, what does this devolve to? You see, once you've abandoned soul scriptura, once you've abandoned the Bible, the way this guy has, what are you left with?
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Ethics. If you're a nice atheist, if you're a nice Hindu, a nice Buddhist, a nice Muslim, who tries to be kind to people and lives it out, don't presume on it, and just lives it out, you're going to be good.
01:00:33
You're good to go. This is not a Christian or biblical way of thinking, folks. So everyone really has a shot at salvation.
01:00:41
Absolutely. Did you hear that? Everyone has a shot at salvation. Even those who have lived and died in total ignorance.
01:00:49
Of the gospel. That's very sad. I mean, Romans 10 just completely contradicts that.
01:00:55
How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? That's a rhetorical question. Meaning they can't believe on him of whom they have not heard.
01:01:02
And as we said earlier, Christ's death on the cross has saved everyone. It's only a question of having received it.
01:01:09
But a person can only receive it according to the conditions of their life. If they haven't heard it.
01:01:16
But here, another point we should always remember, that there is the inner dwelling, the law written on the heart, that is also fulfilled in Christ.
01:01:24
So St. Anthony the Great said, unless and until a person follows the indwelling law, the truth of God written in their heart.
01:01:32
See, but that's exactly what we can't follow. That law that's written on our hearts in Romans 1 and 2 does not save us, and it can't save us.
01:01:41
We don't obey it. That's the problem. We suppress the truth in unrighteousness, and everyone has sinned and falls short of the glory of God, and therefore needs to be justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
01:01:57
So here again, we're just getting the standard Romans 2, the law is on the heart, you respond to the revelation that you do have.
01:02:04
If you respond to it sufficiently enough with enough sincerity, you can go to heaven. It devolves into ethics. All forms of Pelagian and semi -Pelagian theology, they all devolve into this.
01:02:14
It just becomes ethics. What is Christianity? It's ethics. Nothing else. Their heart. They will never come to understand it in scriptures, and they will never see it fulfilled perfectly in Jesus.
01:02:23
But when they follow it, sooner or later they will, and for some, we Orthodox believe, it may be only at the second coming of Christ, where people will recognize, he's the one
01:02:33
I've always longed for, where some folks who would claim... So, sincerely longing.
01:02:40
All men have this capacity. That is Pelagianism. All men can do this.
01:02:46
They might not even realize who it was they were longing for until the last day when they're going to be saved, even though they never heard of Jesus.
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Amazing. So completely unbiblical, this is. To be his. We'll realize they were never his, and they don't even want him now.
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Father, what you give us is always enlightening. Thank you again so much for being with us. You're welcome. It's been a great deal of enjoyment for me sharing.
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Enlightening is not how I would describe what we just heard. That was Christianity without the cross,
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Christianity without the Bible, without divine revelation, without the necessity of being born again, without the necessity of divine grace.
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Well, I hope you heard another aspect of salvation that will guide you and keep you free from thoughts.
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Okay, so that's the end of that. Oh, goodness. Sola Scriptura, folks.
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That's the question of every generation of Christians, Sola Scriptura. Will we listen to what the
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Word of God says and believe it, or will we go off to human traditions and speculations and everything else?
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This is Pastor Patrick Hines of Brittle Heights Presbyterian Church, located at 108 Brittle Heights Road in Kingsport, Tennessee, and you've been listening to the
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Protestant Witness Podcast. Please feel free to join us for worship any Sunday morning at 11 a .m. sharp, where we open the
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Word of God together, sing His praises, and rejoice in the gospel of our risen Lord. You can find us on the web at www .brittleheightspca
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.org. And may the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.