August 4, 2023 Show with Jason Wallace on “The Failure of Eastern Orthodoxy”

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.

The Program Opens and Introduces the Guest on Eastern Orthodoxy

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.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own 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 Friday on this fourth day of August, 2023.

I am thrilled to have back on the program an old friend whose ministry has blessed me enormously. Speaking of Jason Wallace, an accomplished documentarian, debate coordinator and host, and pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church, which is a congregation in the Orthodox Presbyterian denomination in Magna, Utah.

And today, we are going to be addressing his latest documentary, which is an extremely valuable documentary, not that all of his documentaries are not valuable, but this one especially, because there is so, there is such little known in any reasonable level of depth about the religion of Eastern Orthodoxy outside of Eastern Orthodoxy.

There are very few Protestants, very few Protestant apologists that have really grasped a thoroughly deep understanding of this mysterious religion. And I would hazard to guess that the majority of adherents and members of the Eastern Orthodox Church are in that same position.

And I'm not referring to their priesthood necessarily or their professors and apologists, although I'm sure that there are many of them in that category as well, just as there are evangelical so-called apologists who are ignorant about a great deal of things.

But this is a very mysterious religion and very rarely discussed in Protestant and evangelical and reform circles. And so I'm urging all of you to watch the failure of Eastern Orthodoxy. We're going to be telling you how you can do that momentarily.

And in fact, I would urge everybody who's listening right now to either text or email or give a phone call to family, friends, and loved ones who are either Eastern Orthodox right now, who are dabbling with the possibility of converting to Eastern Orthodoxy, or perhaps they have their own apologetics ministry and have long been frustrated in their or by their dialogue with Eastern Orthodox people because they've had inadequate answers to questions and accusations to them and so on.

So please tell them to listen because this is sure to be an eye-opening and edifying and educational experience. Jason Walsh, it is so wonderful to have you back on Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

Chris, it's a pleasure always to be on your show.

And as always, for the sake of our listeners who have not heard you on this program or have not seen any of your debates that you've conducted with James White of Alpha Omega Ministries or your interviews with him on The Dividing Line, tell our listeners about Christ Presbyterian Church of Magna, Utah.

Thank you. We're a congregation of the Orthodox Presbyterian denomination. Started here from scratch 25 years ago and really quickly got introduced to James White. He was coming up doing evangelism twice a year at General Conference, the LDS General Conference that they have every year, the Mormons.

And so we helped out with some of that and partially because of what you had done with James in terms of the great debates and things like this, we thought we could do the same thing out here. And so we started lining up debates with him and particularly Mormons, but also Roman Catholics.

And we lined him up with, years ago, a pastor in the Metropolitan Community Church to debate homosexual marriage and did a lot of debates for several years. The Mormons basically put out the word, no more debates.

Daniel Peterson down at BYU, from what I understand, put out that word. And so we couldn't get the level of people that we used to have. Plus, street preachers came with the Olympics and started making it much harder for James to actually have a conversation with people.

They were using megaphones and just screaming at people, insults, and they weren't preaching. They were mocking, they were accusing like 14-year-old girls of being lesbians and things like this. It just turned into a circus down there.

Sounds like Westboro Baptist Church.

They actually showed up as well.

That's right, I remember James saying that. He had a brief confrontation with the former pastor of that church who is now deceased.

Yeah, it was here in Salt Lake. They're primitive Baptists, so they're 1689. And so James goes up and introduces himself. And I think he asked him something about, what do you make of Paul saying that we're supposed to speak the truth in love?

Oh, what was his name? Fred Phelps shoves his finger in his chest and says, you hate God and I hate you.

That's right. By the way, primitive Baptists protest his claimed affiliation with them. And one thing that I know for certain that would reveal that his claimed affiliation with the primitive Baptists is fraudulent is that the primitive Baptists, by and large, not all of them, they're not cookie cutter churches, but many of them, if not most of them, the serious error in theology that they have is that their understanding of the gates of heaven are far broader than you and I would hold to because they believe that a truly elect person may not ever come to faith in Christ on this earth and will still be in heaven because they so far remove the proclamation of the gospel from election.

And they will claim that if somebody is a devout Roman Catholic or Muslim or something else, that the reason why they have a love for God, even though it's not the correct God, is because God first loved them.

Really strange logic. But the Westboro Baptist Church that claims to be primitive Baptists, they have a very, very, very, very, very tiny width of the gates of heaven that basically only includes them.

Yeah, and the universalist primitive Baptists are actually a minority as well, at least in our neck of the woods, but both sides of my family historically were primitive Baptists.

Yes, I remember you telling me that.

But anyway, we got involved with James doing debates. We've done hundreds of book tables, free evangelistic materials. The debates, when James couldn't do them anymore, I'm not a debater, but I figured out neither were the Mormons.

And so I started doing some of the debates. I debated some local pastors on homosexuality, including the pastor of First Baptist of Salt Lake. He's American Baptist and very, very liberal. He says that homosexuality is a gift from God that should be celebrated.

And so I debated him at the University of Utah on that. The debates basically led to the opportunity to do a television program for seven and a half years. It was actually a Pentecostal TV station, but they let me on.

And so we did that. We did live call-in, we did interviews. When they sold the station and it changed formats, I realized the power of video. And I like not being in front of the camera. So I like being able to gather my thoughts and crystallize them.

And there's some wonderful books out there that hardly anyone reads. There's a lot of popular short videos and sermons and teaching materials. There's not a lot that tries to fill the gap in between. And so seven years ago, we started making evangelistic videos and we made first ones dealing with Mormonism.

That sort of naturally led to Roman Catholicism, to atheism. We've done things on Islam. So the Adventist and a number of other topics. But now we turn to Eastern Orthodoxy.

And by the way, I wanna make sure our listeners have your website for Christ Presbyterian Church of Magna, Utah. It is gospelutah .org, gospelutah .org. Well, what was the first compelling factor that rose up in your mind that made you draw the conclusion, I have got to do a documentary on Eastern Orthodoxy.

And how much of Eastern Orthodoxy were you familiar with before you actually set out to create the documentary?

Well, a number of things basically came together. Mormons love to appeal to Eastern Orthodoxy because the doctrine of theosis, which we deal with in the video, they claim is the same as their doctrine that you can become a God.

And that's not what Eastern Orthodox are teaching, but some of them actually do almost begin to sound that way. Some of the more radical ones. But it's not a legitimate claim. Athanasius clearly didn't support what the Mormons try to claim he supported.

And we actually deal with that. But essentially, part of what drew me out here was I had been a nominal Christian to the age of 23, and God shook me from that by driving me to the Word and showing me that simply being religious wasn't being a Christian.

Knowing that there's a God, you know, the demons believe in tremble. I had a young lady trying to recruit me into a cult called The Way International, and she embarrassed me with my ignorance of scripture.

I could fake my way through a Sunday school class easily enough, but when I actually went and started studying the Bible for the first time in my life, I got confronted by a God I didn't know. And I saw that with Mormonism.

And through Mormonism, watching a number of people, Dave Barshowitz and others, convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, I realized, you know, this is just another form of religion to hide from God. That's what Mormonism is.

That's what Roman Catholicism is. And there are people who are very sincere. I was sincere when I was a nominal Christian, but there's a difference between being sincere about some basic facts and knowing God.

And, you know, Mormonism, it teaches people to be outwardly moral. It presents a good front, but it's a different God and a different gospel. And the deeper you go, the worse it gets. The only thing that separates me from Heavenly Father and Mormonism is time and exaltation.

In Eastern Orthodoxy, I had a peripheral knowledge, but I kept being confronted with it. I saw more and more people going that direction. It was actually coming across a guy named Josiah Trenum, who's featured in the video, that really set me off, because here's a guy that was a licentiate in Presbyterian Church of America.

And he was ordained, or he graduated, he was never ordained, but he graduated from Westminster Seminary in Escondido, California, in 1992. And the next year, he became an Eastern Orthodox priest. And he's out there lying the same way the Mormons lie, lying about the Protestant Reformation, lying about the Bible, creating caricatures and deceiving people.

And it's like, you know, I am motivated by love for Christ and for his people, but I've also got a Scottish streak that I just, when I hear people lying, I get fired up. And that's kind of what set me off.

Why Jason Wallace Made a Documentary on Eastern Orthodoxy

Now, I wanna assure our Eastern Orthodox listeners that this is not an exercise in hatred. This is not an exercise in religious bigotry. As you should know, and probably understand in regard to a defense of your own belief system, that to expose and reveal serious errors in the theology of others, when done so with humility and integrity and honesty, where nastiness and hatred is not your motivation, that there could be few other ways to demonstrate love for people.

Because if you believe in eternity, and if you believe in a place called hell, if you really love someone, you don't want them to go there. You don't want them to continue to hold to something that is damning.

And if you're an Eastern Orthodox person, especially one who is on the historic, right-leaning end of things, you know that you have a very exclusivistic understanding of Christianity, and that those outside of your religion are not truly Christians.

I know that there is a broad spectrum of Eastern Orthodox adherents, some are even leftists who endorse homosexuality, which was actually a shocking revelation to me when I watched the video that we're talking about.

But please do not take what we are doing and saying as anything to do with hatred. In fact, some of the comments that have already come out in social media, an Eastern Orthodox individual by the name of John says, the nerve of a Protestant heretic who adheres to the heresy of sola scriptura, claiming that the Orthodox are a failure, the arrogance of a heretic.

Now, that is reminiscent of Archie Bunker's comment that the Irish, now they're bigots. He is really revealing that he is guilty of the very thing he's trying to claim about us. And a woman named Lisa, who is a moderator for the Protestant Orthodox and Catholic Discourse page on Facebook says, you have no points of discourse in this post and it is inflammatory to the Orthodox in this group.

Also to others of us who do not believe that orthodoxy is a failure, I am turning off comments. Now, she obviously didn't realize that this was an advertisement for a radio program where it is open for live dialogue with our listeners because we invite our listeners to send in questions.

And I would actually hope that more than anybody, Eastern Orthodox people are the ones that send in questions. Perhaps they vehemently disagree with anything that my guest might be saying. I invite you to join the conversation.

But let's start with a summary of how Eastern Orthodoxy is different from Roman Catholicism. And then we will move on to how Eastern Orthodoxy departs from biblical Christianity.

Well, Chris, one of the notable differences is that since Vatican II, it's been a lot harder to pin down Roman Catholics in terms of what they believe, and especially with Pope Francis. You and I both know that Trent anathematized what we believe.

Right, and that is, Trent is where the dogma is, no matter what Pope Francis says that is not pronounced ex cathedra, or ex cathedra as some pronounce it. And even the modern Catholic catechism, there are things in there that are not Catholic dogma.

So when we really have to delve to the depths of what the Roman Catholic Church truly stands for, in spite of what even their modern apostate pope says, we really have to look at what the official teachings are, don't we?

Definitely, and the first debate we actually did with James White years ago, we had him debate a local conservative Baptist pastor who had gone Roman Catholic. And the guy came in talking about how he prayed to St. Martin Luther, and he was just, you know, sort of all rainbows and sunshine.

By the end of the debate, he's quoting Trent and calling us all heretics. But you have to peel a little bit of the veneer to get that. You don't have to peel the veneer of Eastern Orthodoxy. The first Sunday of Lent, the great Sunday of Lent, is when they chant the, and we have it in the video, they chant the anathemas against anyone who refuses to venerate an icon.

Yes, I saw that in your video.

And so, you know, I've been dealing with Mormons for years, and we live in a culture where it's, the knee-jerk response for a lot of people is to play the victim. And what I try to tell them is, your church, in terms of the Mormons, the Mormons, their standard works, which include the Bible, but this statement from the Pearl of Great Price carries just as much weight as the Gospels in their view.

And in that Pearl of Great Price, it's Joseph Smith is supposedly told by God that he's to join none of the existing churches because all their professors are corrupt, all their creeds are an abomination.

And I said, you know, can we simply be honest and admit that we are all making truth claims? You say that my statement of faith is an abomination in the sight of God. Can I respond to that without you saying that I'm being unfair?

Eastern Orthodoxy is doing the same thing. They're anathematizing us. But when we respond, we're being mean and hateful and nasty and all this other stuff. Now, in terms of differences between them and Rome, I think one of the crucial differences is East doesn't have a pope.

In fact, there were a number of Eastern Orthodox people who came out to hear James White preach the night before he was debating the papacy. And I can't remember right now if he was debating Robert St. Genes or Mitch Pacwa right now, I can't remember.

But anyway, he was doing one of my great debates on the papacy, and Eastern Orthodox people showed up the night before the debate at a church where James was preaching, and they showed up at the debate as well.

So it was interesting.

Yeah, well, Rome is able to distance itself from many of its historic claims, like the donation of Constantine and things like this, because their central focus is they have a pope. One of the debates we did years ago, Robert St. Genes, he said, yes, there have been 42 times popes were wrong, because other popes told us they were wrong.

And in the questioning, he was asked, how are we supposed to know a pope's wrong? And it's only if another pope tells you. But their focus of infallibility is on the pope. And when they contradict, they say, well, he wasn't really speaking ex cathedra, he wasn't really, you know, he didn't say the right words, he wasn't standing on one foot waving his hand in the air, he wasn't doing the things that we think make it official declaration.

Eastern Orthodoxy claims to have an infallible church. And so in one sense, it makes a harder target, but it also means they end up defending a whole lot of things that simply can't hold up the scrutiny.

Eastern Orthodoxy, Rome, and the Claim of an Infallible Church

In fact, we're gonna pick up right where you left off there. Don't forget where you left off. We have to go to our first commercial break. If anybody has a question on Eastern Orthodoxy for Pastor Jason Wallace, please submit it to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. We'll be right back. Please do not go away.

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That's royaldiadem .com. We're now back with our guest today, Pastor Jason Wallace of Christ Presbyterian Church of Magna, Utah. We are discussing his latest documentary, an invaluable documentary that everyone needs to view and keep the link handy to use when having conversations with loved ones who are either in Eastern Orthodox or are considering entering into it or even to further assist and further equip Christians who want to better communicate with their Eastern Orthodox loved ones on that religion.

It is such a mysterious religion where very few Protestants could honestly claim to be an expert on it. So please, in fact, as I said before, contact your Eastern Orthodox friends and have them listen to this broadcast.

If you have questions of your own, send them to ChrisArnson at gmail .com. ChrisArnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. Before the break, you were talking about one of the significant differences that Eastern Orthodoxy has with Rome is that they do not believe in an infallible papacy.

They do have a patriarch, but they believe it is the church that is infallible, not a pope. And can I ask you, how do they answer, having stated that reality that they claim to have an infallible church, how do they answer to the truth that they are not a monolithic religion?

They, as your documentary reveals, have a wide spectrum of religious views and theology and ideology and worldviews present within their priesthood. And I wasn't even aware until I watched your video that even on the left wing, they have advocates of homosexuality in the priesthood.

So how do they make the claim that the church is infallible, knowing of that wide spectrum of views within their own religion?

Well, basically, since they have a common liturgy, that's supposed to mean they have the same church. So long as you don't reject the Trinity and so long as you don't refuse to venerate icons, you can make Eastern Orthodoxy pretty much what you want.

There are bishops who will embrace homosexuality. There are bishops who will say that they are the lone bastion against sexual immorality. You've got all these different things going on out there. There are lots of divisions.

How do they respond? Generally, by ignoring you and just attack. What I've seen over and over is it seems that they think the best defense is a strong offense. And so they come back and they say, well, there's 40 ,000 Protestant denominations.

And we deal with that in the video. No, there are not 40 ,000 Protestant denominations. The number they're citing is from the Center for Global Christianity or Conwell Seminary. They count 40, they're up to about 45 ,000 denominations worldwide.

But they count each country in which a denomination functions. 580 of those are Orthodox denominations. Because you've got, obviously, the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia, but you also have a Russian Orthodox, you have division within the Russian Orthodox Church here in America.

You have Greek Orthodox here in America. You have Serbian Orthodox. You have all these, you have divisions within Ukraine between the Ukrainian church that's loyal to the patriarch of Moscow and those that are trying to break off and declare themselves all the selfless.

But most, they are so ingrained that their church is united. And there's one church, and you're all divided. No, over 500 of those 40-something thousand are Orthodox. 370 of them are Roman Catholic because they count Latin mass, Maronite, and all the other different rites within Roman Catholicism once for every country in which they exist.

They count Mormons. They count anything that claims to be Christian. And Eastern Orthodox tend to lump all of us together. Either we're all a bunch of Protestant heretics or we're a bunch of papist Roman Protestant heretics.

Supposedly, the great era was with Rome, and we're just the heirs of that, and we all splinter and splinter and splinter.

By the way, when I interviewed former Eastern Orthodox priest Joshua Shuping, and by the way, I wanna urge everybody listening after this live show is over to listen to that archived recording that occurred on May 12th, 2023.

If you just type in the ironsharpensironradio .com search engine, Shuping, S-C-H-O-O-P as in Peter, I-N-G, that interview will come up on Joshua's book Disillusioned, Why I Left the Eastern Orthodox Priesthood and Church.

That was our discussion. He was talking about, in part, during our two-hour interview, the militancy of the exclusivity of Eastern Orthodoxy. And they do not accept Protestant baptism. And the only thing that he was uncertain about because of current dialogues between the East and Rome, he wasn't certain whether or not they have finally opened up an acceptance of Roman Catholic baptism.

But when you talk about the left wing of Eastern Orthodoxy, those that are embracing homosexuals as legitimate Christians, I'm talking about active, unrepentant homosexuals, would they be ecumenists? Would they open the door to Protestants as their brethren?

Or is it just that they're opening the door to anybody who claims to be Eastern Orthodox, no matter how depraved and perverse they may be?

I'm not that well-versed in terms of some of the finer points. And so my initial feeling has been, so long as you're within their church, they'll cut you an awful lot of slack. If you're outside their church, no, it's not the same.

I hear a lot of discussion about how there's supposed to be dialogue taking place between Rome and the East, and that they may actually come up with the same date for Easter and may do some other things together.

I find that hard to believe. I don't know what's gonna happen. You've got Bartholomew, who is the ecumenical patriarch from Constantinople, where there are very few Orthodox that live there anymore. I think there's 4 ,000 Orthodox surrounded by millions and millions of Muslims.

But he's, because that's the old seat of government, that's, he's sort of the first among equals, in theory. Well, he's denouncing the patriarch of Moscow, who is the actual head of over half of Eastern Orthodoxy, as promoting pseudo-religion and theologically justifying criminal behavior.

You've got Russians who are accused, I had people in the comments to the video telling me that it was completely inappropriate to have Patriarch Kirill in it, because everyone knows he's a political hack.

And then I had people telling me that everything Patriarch Kirill said was right, and that Patriarch Bartholomew is the CIA client. And, you know, there's all these divisions. But when you get them talking about us, they stand together against the historic Protestant understanding of the scriptures, and the early church understanding.

How is a Patriarch different from a Pope?

There are several of them. You have the ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople. You have Patriarchs in Antioch and Alexandria and Jerusalem and Moscow. The importance of these have evolved over time. Obviously, in Moscow, the Russians weren't converted until what, 989 or something like that.

It was the late, it was the 980s, I believe. I forget when Vladimir converted. But, you know, you listen to traditional Russians, they'll say, you know, there have been three Romes, two have fallen, one remains, and there will never be a fourth.

Rome, Constantinople, and now Moscow. Moscow's the real Rome of Russian Orthodoxy.

The Infallibility Claim and the Many Divisions Within Eastern Orthodoxy

Now, I understand that Eastern Orthodox, the Eastern Orthodox, disagree in part with both Rome and the Reformation in regard to the nature of man. They're not full-blown Pelagianists, from what I understand.

But is it, unless I misunderstood, is it that our inherited sin of Adam only will certainly lead us to physical death, and not that it has an imprint of sin upon our souls, as both the Church of Rome and Protestants teach?

We both believe in original sin, and Protestants who are Reformed make that issue even more clear by saying that before our regeneration, we're totally depraved. But where are the Orthodox on that?

Pretty much wherever they wanna be. You've got, I mean, you've got guys like John Romanides, who was very, very vocal in his attacks on Augustine. Augustine is despised by many Eastern Orthodox. Others will, others recognize his writings were committed by two ecumenical councils, and so they're not as vicious against him.

But they don't tend to think about theology in the same way that the West does, for a number of reasons. And so, yeah, they are more Pelagian. In the West, Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism were the most announced heresies in Church history.

Even by Rome.

Even by Rome. And of course, Rome ends up becoming Semi-Pelagian.

Right, and in some circumstances, even though not on paper, full-blown Pelagian.

Truly, but in the East, partially because, I'm guessing at this part, I think partially because of the history, especially with invasions from the Muslims, because of just, the structure is not as centralized in all the various things.

I mean, it is centralized on a national level. It's not centralized with a Pope. But even the Patriarch of Alexandria still holds the title Pope, by the way.

Mike, can you repeat what you just said?

The Patriarch of Alexandria has historically been known as Pope.

Really?

Yeah, I mean, it was a more generic term.

Oh, you mean like Papa, you know, like?

Yeah, right. But at any rate, the, so the Coptic guys will, you know, they love to say, you know, Pope. But they're not in communion with the Chalcedonian churches. But at any rate, I think a number of things have happened in the East that have kept them from having to deal with the sinfulness of man in the same way.

Part of it is that things that are sorta kinda believed in the West, by Rome, become the heart of their faith. Things like Thakwa, things like Barlam and Josaphat, which we deal with all three of them in the video.

Rome has removed all three of them from their list of official saints, but they are, they have been hymned. They've been included in the Eastern Orthodox hymns, which gives them the same authority, the same validity as what's in the ecumenical creeds.

They claim their church is infallible. If they adopt hymns, it's true. Well, Thakwa, Thakwa is not Orthodox, and Saints Barlam and Josaphat are a reworking of the legend of Buddha. And even Rome admits that now.

You know, it's a medieval legend that's been Christianized. Wow.

Now, when it comes to the, I'm sorry.