November 21, 2023 with Jason Wallace on “Cyril Lucaris: Calvinist Patriarch Orthodox Saint”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Questions. And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon, Cumberland.

County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 21st day of November 2023, and it is my honor and privilege and delight to have back on the program a returning guest, an old friend of mine, Pastor Jason Wallace of Christ Presbyterian Church of Magna, Utah, which is a congregation in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church denomination, and Pastor Jason is also a Christian documentarian.

We're going to be speaking about his latest documentary, Cyril Lucaris, Calvinist Patriarch Orthodox Saint, which obviously sounds like an oxymoron, but we'll find out why that is not the case. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron.

Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Jason Wallace. Chris, always a privilege to be with you.

And first of all, tell our listeners about Christ Presbyterian Church of.

Magna, Utah. Well, basically we're in Salt Lake City. We started from scratch 25 years ago, and the Lord has blessed. It's a difficult place here. Obviously Mormonism is the number one religion, atheism is right behind it, and we're quickly turning into the Bay Area as far as, you know, so many people turning atheist and we've just got voted one of the gayest cities in America.

Wow. Many people are leaving Mormonism and embracing secularism. The City Council of Salt Lake City, they were very proud to announce last January, or January of last year, that for the first time in their history, the majority of their council people are LGBT.

We're on the west side of Salt Lake. The Lord's blessed. We have a congregation here. We have a sister congregation in Clearfield, which is just north of us, about 40 miles, and then we have a mission work 250 miles.

South in Cedar City. Well, we could only hope and pray that this deformation of Mormonism, where it is becoming more and more left-wing and more and more of a departure from their roots, not that their roots are biblical, they are just as lost.

The right-wing historically accurate Mormons are just as lost as leftists are, but we would hope and pray that this change that is occurring would open the eyes of many a Mormon and cause them to realize that their religion is false, that they may come to a true understanding of the scriptures, a true understanding of who Jesus Christ truly is and who the Triune Godhead truly is, and also what the gospel truly is, the one true gospel of Jesus Christ.

And how can our listeners who are either living in or near Magna, Utah or traveling through, perhaps on vacation, how can they find out more about Christ Presbyterian.

Church? Well, our website is GospelUtah .org and that's the easy way. We have the YouTube channel Ancient Paths TV, that's Ancient Paths P-A-T-H-S TV, all one word, and our phone number is 801 -755 -3013.

Okay, we'll be repeating that.

Information, God willing, towards the end of the program. And as I opened up the show today, you are a documentarian, have created a number of wonderful, fascinating, informative documentaries, and the latest is really a sequel to your last documentary.

The latest is, as I mentioned, Cyril Lucaris, Calvinist Patriarch, Orthodox Saint, and this would be a sequel to the most recent documentary before this, The Failure of Eastern Orthodoxy. Why don't you start off, perhaps, by giving a very brief summary of The Failure of Eastern Orthodoxy, and then we'll use that as a platform to plunge into this latest documentary on a fascinating historic figure, Cyril Lucaris.

Well, in dealing.

With Mormonism for years, Eastern Orthodoxy has sort of popped up here and there, and a number of people who have left Mormonism have gravitated towards Eastern Orthodoxy. We've seen some Protestants go that direction as well, and so I began looking into it and realized it was making many of the same arguments against the Protestants as the Mormons make, and so essentially made the video, you know, they love to rant that, you know, that Protestantism is supposedly a 16th century heresy.

That's not the case. The Protestants, especially Calvin and the Reform side, saw themselves as holding on to tradition and holding all tradition up to the light of God's Word. Calvin's Institute, many people don't realize, roughly 850 times he quotes the church fathers against what Rome said was the historic tradition of the church.

No, Protestantism is the historic faith of the church. The early church wasn't without error. You can find errors that later were expanded and expounded by Rome and the East. There were Gnostics who had images that Irenaeus mentions, but the united testimony of the church was against icons.

The Council of Elvira took place two decades before Nicaea while the church was still being persecuted. I believe about the year 305 it said that we're not to have images in the church, and perpetual virginity of Mary is not the historic faith of the church.

There were people who were teaching it, but we go through the sources and we show it's Gnostic, it's not Orthodox, and there were people who were opposing it. Tertullian rejected the perpetual virginity of Mary about the year 205.

They like to say that things like the propitiatory substitutionary atonement is an invention of the Reformers. No, it's taught in the Epistle to Diognetus about the year 140. We go through and we show, you know, yes, that the church fathers spoke of tradition, but they tried to use the same categories that Rome uses today as scripture versus tradition.

No, the central part of what had been handed down, the tradition, was scripture, and it was the infallible part that was to be the test for everything else. Protestant Reformers valued tradition. They weren't digging the Christian faith out of a hillside like a Joseph Smith.

They valued what the generations who had gone before them had to say, but they didn't see it as infallible, and so basically went through their claims and showed that things like, you know, how Mary, first the claims for her perpetual virginity, become, you know, more and more and more exalted to the point where she becomes the patron saint of the Byzantine Empire, and her icon leads her battles into army, or leads her armies into battle, rather.

This isn't the Mary we see in scripture, and this whole idea that you have to go through Mary to get to Jesus, that's not scriptural. Yes, you can find people in the early church who recognize that without Mary we wouldn't have Christ.

You know, she played an integral role, but what you see is an evolving tradition, like with the Pharisees, and we documented all of that in the first video. The second video expands on what we touched on.

There was a 17th century patriarch of Constantinople named Cyril Lucaris. The Greeks would call him Coryllus Lucaris, and I'm sure my pronunciation stinks, but even when I think I'm repeating the same sounds, they just don't come out the same, but Cyril Lucaris was patriarch in the 1620s and 30s in Constantinople, and he became a Protestant and tried to reform the church.

This is not widely known. Lots of people are vaguely aware of it, but the East has said for a very long time that he was no Calvinist at all. This was all a Calvinist conspiracy, and so technology has made access to the the archives in Rome and France and Austria a whole lot more readily available, and so what we did with the video was essentially looked at the evidence, and what it shows is that, you know, here's this Council of Jerusalem in 1672 saying that the Eastern Church never considered him to be as our enemies of Ur, as the quote, but they say that he was Orthodox and considered Calvin a heretic.

Well, what do they base that on? They base it on oral tradition, like they base so many of their other claims, and what we show is that we have documentation. We have a copy of the confession that he wrote in 1529 where he states his belief in Protestant terms that the Scriptures have a greater authority than the church and that were justified by faith alone.

Things like this rejection of the veneration of images. We have a copy of this statement of faith that the East says he was not the author of. We have a signed copy with his attestation and his signature, and his signature matches.

And he was.

Alive when this this confession of his was spreading and being printed and so.

On. Yes, there were several other versions that had made their way to Constantinople when it was first made in 1529, and it was printed in Geneva, and they say, well, you know, this, you know, he would have done it locally.

Well, no, the Jesuits had his printing press destroyed by the Turks, and he had his New Testament printed in Geneva as well. It was clearly from him, but not only do we have these other versions, but there's a Greek version that was put out in 1533, five years before his death, and it circulated all through Constantinople.

And essentially the Eastern Orthodox say, well, he never denied his authorship in writing, but we have oral testimony that he denied it.

Multiple times with an oath. You mean they admit that he never denied the.

Authorship in writing? Right. They say, you know, we don't know why he didn't do it in writing, but he clearly did. He denied it numerous times, and they say that they never considered him a Calvinist.

Well, what we do in the video is we show them that, yes, he did write it. We have signed copies. We have numerous letters written over the course of years admitting authorship of it, and they say, well, if he did it, he was telling the Protestants one thing, and he was telling the Orthodox another.

No, we have the Orthodox clearly recognizing him as the author of the Confession, denouncing him as a Calvinist, and plotting his death with Rome. They were returning to Rome to get financial help.

To bribe the Turks to ultimately kill him. Now, tell us about how he became aware of Calvin's teaching, because I understand he initially rejected the teaching of Calvin and the Reformers, but obviously our Sovereign Lord began enlightening his mind and opening his eyes to the truth in what Calvin was teaching.

Tell us how this came about, and also, if you could, tell us the primary things that Lucaris came to embrace that are in contradiction to Eastern Orthodox.

Teaching. Okay, well, as far as his exposure, he had exposure fairly early to a number of different sources. There was, there's some histories out there that claimed that he actually studied in Geneva and Wittenberg and things like this.

That doesn't appear to actually be historically correct, but he was probably exposed to some Protestant ideas when he was studying at Venice as a young man. Venice was seen as somewhat rebellious for the area against Rome, and so they had Protestants that were there.

There was printing of Protestant materials. Eventually, it was all crushed, but he probably had some exposure there. We have a letter that he wrote, I want to say, I think about 1613 or 1618, to a Dutchman where he, who ended up on the Armenian side of that controversy at a later date, but Oten Bogart was the guy's name, his last name, and it's fairly clear that he really didn't like what he was hearing out of Protestants, but there was another man, Cornelius Haga, who apparently gave him Reformed books, and as he started reading them, what seems to have happened is he realized that much of what he had been taught was established, unquestioned tradition, really wasn't.

He saw the Reformers appealing not just to the scriptures, but also to the early church. The early church wasn't infallible, but it was faithful, and everything that they found, everything that he thought was a novelty, found people advocating it, you know, like Athanasius and Jerome rejecting the Apocrypha as scripture.

He found that these weren't new ideas, and so he ends up breaking on all the major issues, the authority of scripture. He joins with the Calvinist in terms of predestination, that it's not based on any works of ours, it's all of grace.

Justification is by a faith alone. It's not a faith that is alone, but rather, he didn't develop the works as the fruit of the Spirit so much as he did, but he was clear that they would accompany true faith, and rejected the veneration of icons.

So he ends up saying that he dies an Orthodox Catholic, and then he goes on to say what he means by that is that he is holding to the historic biblical faith as spelled out in the Belgic Confession, which is a Reformed confession of faith, his own confession, the other evangelical confessions.

He says he rejects the heresies of Rome and the superstitions of the Greeks, and he's standing on Christ alone. It wasn't an overnight kind of thing. I think sometimes, because there was confusion on some of the history, there were people who thought that he had studied at these Protestant places before, and then the Orthodox were able to come along and say, well, you say he was Protestant and clearly we have this contradicting.

Well, it was basically a straw man. People were overstating the case, but very, very clearly, he was a Protestant who was working to reform the church. He had the Greek New Testament translated into more modern Greek because Koine Greek by the 17th century was very, very hard to understand for a lot of Greeks, and so he had a more modern translation made.

After parts of the Orthodox Church conspired with the Catholics and accused him to the Turks and he was executed, his successor burned all the copies he could find, and he called the later Council of Jerusalem, asked the question, or they answered the question that Lucaris had asked in his confession, should the scriptures be read by all Christians in the common language, the vulgar tongue as it's often rendered?

His answer was yes, and the answer of.

The Council of Jerusalem was no. Now, in Rome, the language had to be Latin. What was the language.

According to the Council of Jerusalem? You had the original Koine Greek and you weren't supposed to change it. So that's where they differed from Rome as far as... Well, and part of it, I think, what you see in terms of the rationale is basically the same as Trent's, which is that it's not just, you know, it wasn't that the language was so much an issue as if you make it readily available, people are going to read it for themselves and they're not going to listen to.

The church, and the church knows best. So the things that were primary that transformed Lucaris's understanding that he previously held are that the scriptures alone are the final and inerrant authority over the church, that salvation was by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and that the veneration of icons was to be forbidden, that was idolatry, although from what I understand, Lucaris permitted the use of icons, just forbidden the veneration of them.

Have.

I got this right? Yeah, Lucaris, you have to understand, by this point, Eastern Orthodoxy is drenched in images. In the first video, we showed that that's not the historic faith, that you really don't see this coming about until late 4th century, and really even much later, and you had what called itself the Seventh Ecumenical Council rejecting images entirely.

That's followed by the Second Council of Nicaea, which says that it's the actual Seventh Ecumenical Council, and they say if you refuse to venerate icons, then you're anathematized, and we show in the latest video what that actually means.

It means that you will never be forgiven in this life or the next, and you will suffer eternally in hell. They're calling down God's curse on us. The new video on Lucaris, we actually open up with a clip from a Romanian church where the priest is saying to Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Henry VIII, the ungodly king, and all branches of Protestantism, anathema, and everybody joins in, anathema, anathema, anathema.

Yeah, that was quite a chilling scene to watch that and hear that. I love the philosophy of making movies that Cecil B. DeMille had. He said, you start with an earthquake, and you build to a climax. So yeah, right out of the gate, that's, you know, we open with the anathemas.

You get Eastern Orthodoxy that is marketed the way Mormonism is marketed. You have your truth. We have our truth. You bring all your truth, and let's all just get together. They're not warm and fuzzy.

You know, I mean, Mormonism is falling apart. Mormonism can't figure out whether it wants to marry homosexuals or not, it seems. That might be a bit of an overstatement, but honestly, there's parts of it that seem to be lining up to do that, and the leadership's not really taking a strong stand against it.

Eastern Orthodoxy is actually doing the same thing. The head of the Greek church recently did a baptism for two homosexual men of their child, but anyway, the... I was going somewhere with this, and I'm...

Why don't you collect your thoughts, and we will go to our first commercial break. Okay. Thank you. If anybody would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name, at least, city and state, and country of residence. If you are asking a personal and private question, for instance, if you are in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and you're starting to doubt whether you are in a true church, or if you are contemplating converting to Eastern Orthodoxy, and you just don't want to make your identity public at this point, we would understand those as valid reasons to remain anonymous, and I'm sure there's many others, but please, if you're just asking a general question about the Bible, about the history of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the teachings of Eastern Orthodoxy, and specifically about Cyril Lucaris, please give us your first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

We'll be right back with Jason Malos. Don't go away.

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So please go to royaldiadem .com soon and mention Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We are now back with today's guest, Pastor Jason Wallace, who is a Christian documentarian and also pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah, an Orthodox Presbyterian Church congregation, and we are discussing his latest documentary, which is Cyril Lucaris, Calvinist Patriarch, Orthodox Saint.

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And before we went to the break, Pastor Wallace, you were trying to formulate your thoughts there, so I'm hoping that you have done that. It's getting harder every year, it seems. Oh, believe me, I know myself too.

Basically, a lot of people get sucked into Eastern Orthodoxy because it's presented in a very warm, fuzzy way. And, you know, it's like, you know, we have all these wonderful things without all the without all the strife and division.

And, you know, we have all these things that appeal to your senses. And the reality is they, like Mormonism used to be, and still is to a great extent, Mormonism denounces all other churches as wrong.

They claim that God said that all their professors were corrupt, all their creeds were an abomination in his sight. They claim they are the one true church. Well, Eastern Orthodoxy does the same thing.

And they anathematize the Protestant faith very specifically. And it's not hidden away in a footnote somewhere. It's in their statements of faith. They're supposed to read anathemas every once every year on Orthodoxy Sunday against those who will not.

It's not just a matter of allowing that you must venerate the icon or you.

Are under the curse of God. Wow. They're even more militant about anathematizing every other professing Christian. They're more militant about it than Rome is, aren't they? It seems that Rome, even the most conservative apologists of Rome, with some exception, the most conservative apologists of Rome seem embarrassed by the anathemas pronounced at Trent and don't really want to bring it up.

It's usually Protestants when they're involved in debate when these things come up because Rome has even tried to redefine what that even means. It does not mean that you are cursed to hell, according to them.

It means that you just can't be a Roman Catholic in good standing. It doesn't mean you can't go to heaven. It doesn't mean you're not a true Christian, etc., etc. It just means you're a separated brother and on and on.

But it seems that the Eastern Orthodox are even more militant. And even if I'm not mistaken, no matter what kind of baptism you have received, even if it's in the name of the Trinity, you cannot become a member of the Eastern Orthodox religion unless you are rebaptized by them.

Is that not the case?

It varies. There's a lot of dissension within Eastern Orthodoxy over this. There are some that are more liberal that will accept it. There are others that say that unless it's done by them, it's not valid.

Rome will try to downplay the anathema typically of Trent and things like this. And then they'll say, well, like you said, it means we're separated. You're not part of the true church. Well, that's not what the East, that's really not what Rome meant either.

But the East has been very specific. One of the prayers in regard to the confession of Cyril Lucaris was against the Protestants in general. And the council said, and let them be subject to an eternal anathema, an excommunicated by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the only God, one in nature, both in the present life and in that which is to come, and cursed, and unforgiven, and unabsolved after death, and partakers of eternal punishment.

So they draw.

Lines. Yeah, they were making it clear that the anathema meant eternal punishment.

Yes, they're calling on God to curse us now and forever and ever and ever. And so, what's funny is like the Mormons, you start trying to answer these things and they play the victim. Why are you attacking us?

And it's like, you just anathematized me. You've anathematized the Protestant faith. Can we actually deal with the arguments for and against now? And either they play the victim or they sneer at you. It's like, you wouldn't even have a Bible if it wasn't for the church.

The church has authority over the Bible. That's not what you read in Paul's epistles. The apostles defined the church, not the church is defining the apostles teaching. If you refuse to listen to the apostles, you weren't a church.

You could claim to be, but it didn't make it true. So, go ahead. I was just going to go to a listener question,.

If you are finished your thought there. Are you ready? Okay. We have Drake in Flanders, Long Island, New York. Drake asks, what exactly does it mean that Cyril Lucaris was an ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople?

And my other question is, did he have any personal contact with John Calvin since there were a number of decades where their lives overlapped, or any other of the reformed reformers in that day? Okay.

They actually did not overlap.

Calvin died in 1564, and Lucaris, I remember here. Yeah. Lucaris died in 1638. I knew the death date. I was trying to remember his birth date.

1572. So, he died decades after Calvin was... I'm sorry. He was born almost a decade...

After Calvin died. Right. So, there was no overlap there. Clearly, there was overlap between people who had been taught by Calvin, or known Calvin, and him. So, they never met. And then, what was the other part of the question?

What exactly does it mean that he was an ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople?

Okay. One of the things you have to understand is that when the church became legal, there had already been a tendency towards centralization that you see manifested in various ways while the church is being persecuted.

It's somewhat, I think, a natural phenomenon that you may have a number of different elders in a church, but it's typical that there's going to be somewhat of a first among equals. There's a distinction, even in Scripture, between a teaching elder and a ruling elder.

But you have elders and deacons, and there's a tendency for the larger churches to have a larger voice. And so, you end up with the rise of a sort of a bishop within the local churches distinguished from the elders.

You see them synonymous in places like Acts 20, and elsewhere in Scripture, and in the earliest church. But you see sort of a bishop of bishops in the local church, and then you see a rise of preeminence among the bishops of larger towns.

Well, what happens is, ultimately, you get mirroring the structure of the state, to some extent, where you have these capital cities of a region where the bishop there sort of oversees that region in terms of the churches, and you end up with this higher bishop.

Well, that gravitates into Alexandria, Rome, Antioch, Jerusalem, Ephesus, being central bishops, having a stronger voice. Well, when Constantine's converted, one of the things he does is he moves the capital to Constantinople.

Byzantium becomes Constantinople. And it's the seat of government. And so, one of the discussions in the early church is, what standing are we going to give to the bishop of Constantinople? Ultimately, he becomes one of the five patriarchs that are recognized within the church.

But on what basis? It doesn't really have a clear apostolic history. Well, they invent one where Andrew becomes the founder there, and he becomes the seat of St. Andrew. And Constantinople becomes one of the five major churches.

You've got four patriarchs in the East. You have one patriarch in the Latin-speaking West. When the Roman Empire finally collapses in the West in 476, the Eastern church keeps going. You don't really have a collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire until the 16th century when the Ottomans capture Constantinople.

They developed this deference to Rome to some extent. But with the loss of the Western part of the empire, they regained it. They lost it again, regained it, lost it again. And then, eventually, there's just a larger break for a whole host of reasons, both the Germanic invasions and things like this.

But there'd always been division between the Latin-speaking West and the Greek-speaking East. But Rome becomes more and more bold, and it's claiming to be the bishop of bishops. Gregory had said anyone who claimed to be the universal bishop was the Antichrist.

But by 1054, you end up with the Pope excommunicating the patriarch of Constantinople. In the East, Constantinople, being the seat of government, being the cultural and political commercial center of the empire, they literally called it the new Rome.

One of the expressions you'll hear from Russian Orthodox is, and I'm butchering the paraphrase of this, but basically, there have been three Romes, two have fallen, and the third never will, or there will never be a fourth.

And what they claim is Moscow is the new Rome. And to a large extent, you need to recognize the majority of Eastern Orthodox are Russians and Ukrainians. I mean, there are other Orthodox churches out there, but the majority are under the patriarch of Moscow, which has been autocephalous since, I want to say, 1453, roughly.

But Constantinople, though, even with Russia declaring its independence, Constantinople still holds the title of ecumenical patriarch. He's essentially the Pope of the East, first among equals, so to speak.

The irony, of course, is that with what happened with World War I and the genocide of the Armenians, whereas Greeks at the beginning of the 20th century, I think, made up 20 of Turkey. The patriarch of Constantinople today only represents about 3 ,000 people in Turkey, but it's still given ceremonial jurisdiction over all the East.

But in the 16th century, the defeat of the Byzantine Empire was a much fresher thing, and so there were a whole lot more Greeks at the time in that area. And so, he's the head of the church in the East, to a great extent.