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

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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 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 Reformed 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 by their dialogue with Eastern Orthodox people because they have 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. We 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?

And, oh, what was his name, Fred Phelps, shoves his finger in his chest and says, you hate

God and I hate you. 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.

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. 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. There are 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, Southeast Adventist, and a number of other topics, but now we turn to Eastern Orthodoxy.

And by the way, I want to 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 tried 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.

I mean, 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 in 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 when I hear people lie, I get fired up. And that's kind of what set me off.

Now, I want to 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, 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 that 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, 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, 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 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. In that Pearl of Great Price, 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 the

East doesn't have a pope. Right. 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.

So, 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, you know, 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.

In fact, we're going to 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.

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 world views 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.

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

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 the

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 at Conroy Seminary. They count 40 ,000, 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 the

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 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 all of us together.

Either we're all a bunch of Protestant heretics or we're a bunch of papist Protestant heretics.

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

By the way, when I interviewed former Eastern Orthodox priest

Joshua Schuping and by the way, I want to 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 Schuping, 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 off a 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 going to 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 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 plant and 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 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 it was the 980s

I believe I forget when Vladimir converted but you know you listen to traditional

Russians they'll say there have been three Romes two have fallen, one remains and there will never be a fourth you know

Rome, Constantinople and now Moscow. Moscow is the real Rome of Russian 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 want to be

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 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 denounced heresies in Church history even by Rome and of course

Rome ends up becoming Semi -Pelagian 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 Wait, 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?

Yeah, right. But at any rate the so the

Coptic guys will they love to say 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 sort of kind of believed in the

West by Rome become the heart of their faith things like Barlaam and Joseph 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,

Thecla Thecla is not Orthodox and Saints Barlaam and Joseph are a reworking of the legend of Buddha and even

Rome admits that now it's a medieval legend that's been

Christianized wow now when it comes to I'm sorry

I should say medieval Christianization of an older legend when it comes to the veneration of icons that is one of the other differences between the

East and Rome is that the East forbids the veneration of three dimensional images as far as I know in other words if you enter into an

Eastern Orthodox church, and I understand that they don't call themselves that but for sake of making our discussion easier

I know that they usually will go by the ethnic origin of whatever they are Russian, Greek Coptic and so on when you enter into one of their houses of worship as I have done when my relative of mine years ago married a

Greek Orthodox woman and one of the things that you will note is that although there are icons, flat images everywhere even usually more abundant than I've ever seen in a

Roman Catholic church as far as images they are not three dimensional and am

I right on that that they would absolutely forbid like a statue a three dimensional statue being venerated?

From what I can tell it depends on who you ask. I've heard people say exactly what you said is the standard and yet I've also seen photos of three dimensional images in Orthodox churches and some people say no it's not as clear cut as some make it out to be.

Yeah well I've seen the icons very often the image is raised from the surface enough where it might be technically considered three dimensional

I don't know how they think they are escaping that but is there any difference between the manner with which these things are venerated which reformed

Christians and most biblically minded Christians period would say no matter what the

Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic person claims is indeed worship because of the very definition of worship is fulfilled in everything that they do with these images but is there any difference in that area not the image itself but the way that they are venerating these things from Rome I'm speaking of.

Yeah I'm not an expert on Rome or the East I mean I've tried to do a reasonable amount of research on both but I don't see a big difference they pray to the they pray to the image they kiss the image they burn incense to the image they light candles in front of the image it's a similar veneration they try to draw the line between worship and veneration they try to create just one big gray area that you know if you show any respect to a person that's all that they're really doing they're not offering the worship to God alone well the second commandment is explicit you don't make these images you don't and it forbids both in the

Greek Septuagint it forbids proskynesis we're going to pick up right where you left off when we come back from our midway break please be patient with us folks because the midway break is always a bit longer than the other breaks in the show because Grace Life Radio 90 .1

FM in Lake City Florida who airs this program is required by the FCC to localize this program geographically to Lake City Florida and they do so with their own public service announcements and other local things that they air during our midway break while they do that we simultaneously air our globally heard commercials please use this time wisely respond to our advertisers as often as you can and to further ensure that you'll successfully do that write down the contact information please for as many of our advertisers as you can and either buy their products use their services or visit their churches but when you can't do any of that please at least thank our advertisers for sponsoring this show we need our advertisers to exist folks the amount of donations that come in don't nearly come close to the amount of funding we need to remain on the air so please thank our advertisers and also send in your questions to Jason Mollis to chrisarnson at gmail .com

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The Mid -Atlantic Reformation Society presents The Future of Christendom 2023

The Gospel at War September 15th to the 16th in Lancaster County Pennsylvania featuring

Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries We are excited to be including a formal debate in this year's conference

Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries will be debating Dr. Gregory Coles author of Single Gay Christian A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity The debate topic

Is gay Christian a biblically acceptable identity for a member of Christ's Church? So come join us for the 6th

Future of Christendom conference The event will take place at Spooky Nook Sports in Mannheim Pennsylvania and will run from Friday evening through all day

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Gospel at War in many areas of our culture including government schools, the Supreme Court, missions, feminism and even the church pulpits head to futureofchristendom .org

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Bible, and love God should watch and listen to. We are now back with Jason Wallace, our guest, to discuss this documentary,

The Failure of Eastern Orthodoxy. If you have a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

And before I go to any listener questions, we were right in the middle of comparing

Eastern Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism. And I don't know if you've completed what you were saying the last time, but a couple of the other things that I'd like to address before we move on to a comparison of Eastern Orthodoxy to Biblical Christianity, which we would call the

Protestant Reformation and its legacy. The issue of celibacy in the priesthood,

I know that there is a nuanced difference in Eastern Orthodoxy, and also the area that is really a contrast between both

Rome and the Reformation, about what exactly happened on the cross. If you could either finish what you were saying before or pick up on the area of celibacy in the priesthood.

Unlike Rome, Eastern Orthodox priests can be married. That was actually the case in the

West up until I believe the 11th century. And when they tried to enforce it, you actually had riots in Milan because it was a tradition in Milan that the bishop had to be married.

But even back in the 4th century, you had Ambrose and others who were pushing for at least bishops to be celibate.

And so in the East, you still have prohibitions on bishops being married.

But priests can be married. Even if a priest is unmarried when he enters into the priesthood, he can marry later?

I believe so. I'm not clear on the nuances, and from what I gather, it varies among the various groups.

To some degree. And there are some less serious differences.

I know that Eastern Orthodoxy practices exclusive a cappella worship.

I actually love a cappella, but it depends on what you're actually saying and who you're worshipping.

A cappella is my favorite form of singing and worship, but I understand they have an exclusive insistence upon a cappella.

And going back to a much more crucial difference that the

East has with both Rome and the Reformation is what exactly happened on Calvary, if you could go into that distinction, which is probably the most significant point of all of this discussion.

Well, they downplayed Calvary to a great extent. The great emphasis in the

East is on the Incarnation. You'll see this in the video. There's the idea that by Christ becoming a man, that this changed all of creation.

All of matter has been transformed. And so it's not a cross -centered religion.

It's not that they deny it, but they do downplay it in comparison to what you see in the

Scriptures. The Incarnation is vital to the Gospel. We have to be clear about who

Jesus is, but the Incarnation is not the great emphasis of the

New Testament that they try to make it out to be. By stressing the

Incarnation, they see a way of people growing and maturing and becoming more and more divine.

Theosis is something that you'll see in the video can become, and we have a

Protestant former Baptist, I think he's former Baptist, former Episcopalian, former

Anglican, now Eastern Orthodox. And he's led a bunch of people up in Appalachia into the

Orthodox Church. He says that to see

God face -to -face is to see Him as an equal. I remember that from your video.

That was the most shocking thing in the video. Well, they don't have clear lines of theology like in the

West. And in the West, for all the exalted claims of the ascetics and everything else, you don't get that in the

West. Even in Rome, you have the crucifixion as the central event.

You have Paul saying, I endeavor to know nothing among you but Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

Rome has twisted that from what the Bible and the early

Church taught. But Eastern Orthodoxy has downplayed that in favor of this exalted incarnational theology.

And that is the reason that you mentioned earlier why Mormons will claim the writings and perhaps twist them of Eastern Orthodox fathers because they believe that they, if they are faithful Mormons, will become gods of their own planets.

So they take the Eastern Orthodox understanding of theosis as their ammunition to make them more palatable to the

Christian mind. When the average Protestant hears

Athanasius being quoted as saying that Jesus became man, that man might become God, they don't know what to make of that.

And he did say that. We've got the quote and the citation in the video.

But the East tells us that's theosis and it's the historic faith of the Church. Well, Athanasius never used that term.

He used a different term, theopoiesis, not theosis. What you see is theosis is only first used by Gregory Nazianzus at the very end of the 4th century.

And we have a quote from him. Instead of the crucifixion being a substitutionary atonement and there being regeneration, where we're given a new heart, a new record.

Christ bears our sins to the cross. And we point out that great exchange you find in the 2nd century in the epistle to Diognetus.

Protestantism isn't new. It's the historic faith of the Church. There's other things in the early

Church as well. But it's not Eastern Orthodoxy and it's not

Roman Catholicism. We're not looking for perfection back then. But with Gregory Nazianzus, what you have is after Constantine and the

Church is at peace and then the

Church is declared the only legal religion in the Roman Empire. What you end up having is a melding more and more of Platonic philosophy with Christianity.

And you listen to the quote that we get from Gregory Nazianzus. It sounds more like Platonism than it does

Biblical Christianity. It's through contemplation. And they play on some of the legends that they believe are historic.

Like Mary was miraculously born to a barren mother at six months old.

She sets her down. She takes seven steps. She snatches her up. She's too holy to touch the ground again.

Until she's three years old and she's dedicated in the temple. And she supposedly runs up the steps and she's taken by the high priest into the

Holy of Holies. And she lives there by herself in the Holy of Holies fed by an angel.

And some Catholics will believe this. A lot of Catholics believe that it's a nice story.

Eastern Orthodoxy build their whole theology on it. Right, I remember seeing that as well in the documentary where a priest was explaining it with visual images.

Yeah, and it's that and the writings of Pseudo -Dionysius which are fake writings from the 6th century that are attributed to the 1st century convert of Paul.

And this is all in the video. They're the basis of the Hesychastic theology of St.

Gregory Palamas. And it's they basically turn the gospel into platonic philosophy where instead of guilty creatures needing to be reconciled to their creator they emphasize the image of God, which is true.

But they emphasize it in exclusion to everything else. And it becomes a way of self -exaltation.

Yes, they would say that God is involved. God is gracious and no one is other. But it is

God. It ends up sounding like Mormonism. Not because Mormonism is biblical by any stretch.

It's because this is the natural tendency of sinful man. It goes back to the

Garden. Ye shall be as gods. That's the lie of Satan. We have some listener questions.

We have let's see Robert in West Rochester County, New York who says, unless I missed it before,

I think one of the important differences that Eastern Orthodoxy has with the Church of Rome is that the

Eastern Orthodox reject the teaching of purgatory. Is that true? Yes and no.

Technically, yes. They actually did accept it in theory at the

Council of Farrar, Florence in the 15th century. They were trying to get military aid from the

West. But it was rejected. It was approved by the

Council and they're thrilled that Mark of Ephesus stood against it.

He was the only Eastern Bishop who did. But they say he defines

Orthodoxy not the Council. And they come up with all these things about how a Council is actually ecumenical or not.

Which they create after the fact and say, this has always been the standard.

But you don't have purgatory in the formal sense that you have it in the

West. But you do have there being ways of getting closer to God after death.

And yes, they pray for the dead. There actually were patriarchal indulgences, just like you had indulgences from the

Pope that they would sell. They would sell them in the East as well. They didn't call it purgatory, but it was the same basic thing.

And when you look at the tollhouses and what the church can supposedly do after you're dead to help you get to a better place.

To me, it's a distinction without a strong difference.

Okay, we have Ronald in eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, who says, forgive me if you've already addressed this, but from what

I understand, another difference that the Eastern Orthodox religion has with the Roman Catholic religion is that the

Eastern Orthodox reject the immaculate conception of Mary, that Mary was conceived sinless in the womb of her mother, although she somehow was sinless later.

Is that true? Once again, it's a distinction without a strong difference.

Since they reject original sin, most will admit they believe

Mary was born sinless. Oh, you know, see, that's something that is, maybe

I misspoke earlier. I thought that they did believe in some kind of inherited effects of Adam's sin, but it only led to physical death, not to hell, necessarily.

Isn't there something? Right. They would say that Mary was born mortal, but they would not admit that she was a sinner.

But they don't call that original sin as far as...

And so, Mary... One of the big things for them is that they think that the immaculate conception, which was first adopted, what, 1850...

I'm getting old. In the 1850s,

I believe, was the immaculate conception. It became official dogma in the

West. They think that that undermines her triumph over sin, that she is the model for ascetics.

She's the model for all of us. And if you see, she ends up becoming... Essentially, no one is saved apart from Mary in Eastern Orthodoxy, like in Rome.

And she becomes the gateway to God. In the

East, she became the patron saint of the Empire. So...

Okay. Well, thank you for the excellent question. We have an anonymous listener.

And the anonymous listener says, I'm remaining anonymous because I am having very serious and animated disagreements with a

Coptic Christian, otherwise known as Oriental Orthodox. This Coptic Christian is insisting his priest informed him that I am misrepresenting their religion by saying they believe in meritorious works and deeds performed by humans in order to gain entrance into heaven.

He told me that his priest said that they also believe in justification by faith alone, through grace alone, and Christ alone.

Is my friend misunderstanding his priest? Could his priest actually believe in the gospel?

Or what am I missing here? I don't know the individuals involved.

I can only guess. Having dealt with Mormons for 35 years, been pastor here for 25 in Utah, I've met a whole bunch of Mormons that will tell me, oh, we believe that.

We believe that you're saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone. And then you ask them, you try to flesh that out a little bit, and you find out they don't really know what they're saying.

They believe that you can become a god and that you have to go through the temple, you have to receive the ordinances, you have to receive the

Aaronic and Melchizedekian priesthood, you have to learn the handshakes, you have to do this and that and the other. And you have to...

It's a workspace religion, and yet they can call black white and white black and think they're being straightforward.

So whether there's purposeful deception, whether there's confusion, I don't know, but no. Coptic Christianity does have its differences, but it's fundamentally the same.

Most, or at least a lot of Coptic priests in America actually end up going to places like St.

Vladimir's or maybe St. Deacon's or some of the others. I know at least a number of them are

St. Vladimir's grads, which is a Russian Orthodox school. We had somebody complain that we had a

Coptic priest talking about Helvidius, it was the best video out there, giving the

Eastern perspective. And they're like, if you knew anything about Eastern Orthodox, you wouldn't have a Coptic priest. And it's like, he's a

St. Vlad's grad and he's telling exactly the same thing that all the others learned at seminary. What did he say you disagree with?

And of course they don't have an answer. So there is a rivalry then between those in the more traditional

Eastern Orthodox group with the Coptic or Oriental Orthodox.

Correct. Yeah, the Oriental Orthodox are Monophysites.

And so there's a schism that goes back to Chalcedon. Now, not to belabor that, can you be succinct in summarizing what would be the difference there and what the term you used even means?

The question is at the Council of Chalcedon is the nature of the relationship of Christ, humanity, and divinity.

The Monophysites basically and they would probably not use this term, I'm trying to make it simple, but basically the divine nature overwhelms the human nature.

Chalcedon says no, there are two distinct natures that they one person, two natures forever.

And the Monophysites, for a number of different reasons, they would not submit to that.

And so they are non -Chalcedonian. They believe that Christ has one essential nature, divine.

By the way, you mentioned St. Vladimir's Seminary earlier, which is a

Russian Orthodox seminary in New York State. I want to let our listeners know that I have interviewed a

Presbyterian who got a doctorate from St. Vladimir's not because he was an ecumenist with the

East, but because he wanted to learn as much about that religion as he possibly could and wanted to learn those things firsthand.

And his name is Dr. Jack B. Kinnear, a retired faculty member from Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh.

And I interviewed him on Eastern Orthodoxy, what separates it from Rome and the Reformation.

And you can hear that on IronTrump and ZionRadio .com as well. If you type in the name K -I -N -N -E -E -R that will be the only interview that comes up.

I only interviewed Dr. Kinnear once on April 13th in 2018.

So, I think that you may benefit from that interview as well.

We're going to our final break right now. If you do have a question for Pastor Jason Wallace, I would strongly urge you to send it in quickly because we're rapidly running out of time.

ChrisArnson at gmail .com, ChrisArnson at gmail .com Don't go away, we're going to be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

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Please visit us at truthloveparent .com. Welcome back. I have one more listener question for you, then we'll move on to Protestant claims.

And the anonymous listener says, I am having disputes with Reformed and Protestant friends of mine who are making the claim that Eastern Orthodoxy has a pristine understanding and teaching of the

Trinity that is actually, in some instances, superior to that which is revealed in Protestantism.

Is this just a ridiculous rumor? How do you respond to such things?

Well, I think that a whole lot of theology is ignored in some of the more popular churches out there.

But, no, anything that you can find in Eastern Orthodoxy, you can find better in Reformed churches generally.

Yes, they do stress the incarnation, but it's basically something that they hype to distract you from the substitutionary atonement and everything else.

And they wrap it up in all kinds of mystery that the early church didn't. Well, it was specifically the

Trinity, not necessarily the incarnation. I understand that the second person of the Godhead was incarnate.

Yeah, I mean, the Trinity is not dealt with in some churches.

You mean evangelical churches? Some evangelical churches, yes. I mean, evangelicalism runs its own gamut, and so there are some churches out there that don't really teach much on the

Trinity. My old pastor, as a teenager, I asked him about the Trinity. He said, the

Trinity is a mystery. Does Eastern Orthodoxy do better than that? Yes. Yeah, I think the listener may have been speaking about the giants of Protestant and Reformed theology, not necessarily your average uneducated pastor.

And believe me, folks, I'm not saying that most pastors are uneducated. I'm talking about the kind in the popular version of modern evangelicalism where there is little depth.

I think he was speaking about—and I could be wrong—from academia of Reformed theology, that Eastern Orthodoxy exceeds our giants on even an issue as important as the

Trinity. I would say not at all. I think that there are some

Reformed guys who have definitely been leaning towards mysticism.

Some of them end up going Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. They will dress this up in terms of some of the supposed scholarship and insights.

Eastern Orthodoxy is fundamentally flawed, and whatever they have that's good in terms of Trinitarian theology, yes, there are some good things there, and yes, sometimes we're appealing to the same sources, but we aren't appealing to them as part of an infallible church, and we're testing everything by God's word, and we're putting them in a proper understanding of history.

They're viewing them as the unfolding of the infallible churches building on that.

Well, if you could address Protestant claims, please. Well, the thing

I hear from so many of the Eastern Orthodox is, you know, your church didn't even exist before Martin Luther, 15th, 17th, 16th century, heretics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

There are a lot of Protestants who aren't really understanding of what the

Protestant claims are. In our culture, Protestant simply means you're not Catholic, and you're not

Orthodox, and you're not a Mormon. True Protestantism is not a restorationist religion.

We don't think that the gospel got dug out of a hillside in 1830. We don't think that there was some new outpouring of the spirit where it was restored after some great apostasy.

You read John Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, he quotes the church fathers over 800 times to demonstrate that they were reading the scriptures the same way the

Protestant reformers were. Were the church fathers perfect? No. Were the Protestant reformers perfect?

No. We're not looking for an infallible church. We're looking for a faithful church that will hold to the infallible word of God.

That is what is theonoustos. That is what God breathed. This idea that they're the early church and we're the historic novelty.

No. What the video seeks to show is they're the historic novelty. We stand with Tertullian on a bunch of things.

Tertullian also had goofy things to say. They pick and choose what they like out of the church.

So do we. They do it on the basis of claiming an infallible church.

We pick and choose based on the inerrant word of God. By the way,

I want to really endorse a book by a dear friend,

William Webster, The Church of Rome at the Bar of History. This would even be helpful to Eastern Orthodox because it is primarily dealing with the patristic evidence that Rome has not faithfully maintained the legacy of the church fathers as they claim and that many times, possibly most of the time, the church fathers were actually more in agreement with what would later be the

Protestant Reformation. And so since there's overlap on some of that in regard to the patristics with Eastern Orthodoxy, it may be helpful.

And you could go to christiantruth .com, christiantruth .com, which is the website of William Webster.

I want you to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today about Eastern Orthodoxy.

No one has anything to fear from the truth but liars. The early church was not perfect, but it wasn't

Roman. It wasn't fully Protestant. It wasn't fully Catholic. It wasn't fully Eastern Orthodox. You had faithful people, you had confused faithful people, you had unfaithful people, you had outright heretics.

How do you sort through them? God has spoken. The Bereans were called more noble than those of Thessalonica in that they searched the scriptures to know what is true.

That's the God -breathed word. Go and search the scriptures and read history for what it really says rather than forcing a narrative upon it.

Amen. And how can our listeners watch this video other than just typing in the failure of Eastern Orthodoxy in the

YouTube search engine? Is there anywhere else they can find it? If they contact me through gospelutah .org,

there's a contact page. I'm happy to help them with that or any other information that they need.

That's gospelutah .org. I want to thank you so much, Pastor Wallace, for being such an extraordinary guest as you always are.

I look forward to your frequent future visits, and I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who took the time to write.

I hope you have a blessed, safe, joyful, and Christ -honoring weekend and Lord's Day, and I want you all to remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater