Is Eastern Orthodoxy Orthodox?

All right. Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I just want to start off with a brief apology.

If you guys have noticed, I've been missing in action for the past three and a half weeks.

I came down with the virus, okay, and I felt its full wrath, its full force, and it wasn't fun.

I felt the wide range of symptoms. The only thing that I did not experience, which

I was very grateful for, was the loss of taste. So while I was writhing in pain and agony,

I was still able to enjoy food and things like that, but it was pretty bad.

It was only by the grace of God and some ibuprofen that I was able to survive the ordeal.

My wife was so helpful and she was there for me every step of the way. This is really my first day back at work.

I was able to go back to work. I'm a teacher and so I was there for the first day of work, the first day when

I met with my students to say, hello, let's go over the syllabus, and then I haven't seen my students for two weeks since then.

So this is my first day back and my first evening back doing

Revealed Apologetics. So I just want to thank everybody, Facebook friends and things like that, who have been keeping me in their prayers.

My family in prayers as well. My family had the virus as well and they were able to recover.

I'm very grateful for everyone who's kept us in our prayers or kept us in your prayers.

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Last time I looked, I think we're at 3 ,230 something subscribers. I appreciate every single one of you, whether you agree with my position, the content that I put out.

I do appreciate your support in whatever form that it comes.

So with that said, I'd like to say I'm glad to be back. If I seem a little slow in my speech,

I'm still kind of recovering. So I feel good. I'm ready for this discussion, but I do feel a little fatigued.

And so, you know, Dr. Tony Costa is going to, he's going to do what he does and jump into some of these issues and hopefully it will be of great benefit to those who are listening.

All right. Well, I entitled this episode, Is Eastern Orthodoxy Orthodox?

And I thought that was a fun way of titling this discussion that we're going to have, this interview.

And it's no secret, those who have listened to Revealed Apologetics, that I am not

Eastern Orthodox. I'm actually a Reformed Christian of the Baptist flavor.

If I can put my theology in the context of ice cream flavors, right? I'm a

Baptist, a Reformed Baptist in the flavor of my theology. And when we speak of orthodoxy, we speak of, you know, when you take a look, for example, of the, the etymology of the word orthodoxy, it has this idea of being of the right opinion.

And of course this is related to our belief systems, you know, orthodox theology, what is the correct doctrine as it pertains to the essentials of the

Christian faith? And those who study theology understand why orthodoxy, not

Eastern orthodoxy, but the concept of believing orthodox theology is so important as it flows into orthopraxy, right?

Right practice and right living. The way we live our lives is reflective as Christians is reflective of having a proper theology.

And so having correct doctrine is important and not perfect doctrine.

I don't claim to have perfect doctrine, but having right doctrine in as much as the scripture reveals truth about these important distinctions that we're going to be talking about,

I think it's very important to have a proper understanding of the gospel, having a proper understanding of the work of Christ.

And to that, as you, as we reflect upon Eastern orthodoxy, we can tip our hat off to many within church history that has contributed to a clarification of certain doctrines that we all share in common.

But of course there are some dividing lines that I'm very excited to be speaking with Dr.

Acosta about. There are these very important dividing lines that I think need to be drawn as we want to, we want to conform our beliefs to that of the teachings of the scripture.

Now, every Eastern orthodox gentleman that I have had discussions with, there's always this idea of, well, you know, all of your theological disputes between you and the

Roman Catholics and things like that, we were so detached from all these things and we've maintained kind of a faithfulness to apostolic teaching.

And of course they go through their various doctrines that they believe go back to the teaching of the apostles and of course

Jesus Christ himself. Well, well real quick before I invite Dr. Acosta on, suppose, suppose they were,

Eastern Orthodox Church was involved in the Reformation. The issue would have most likely been the same issue.

If you look in terms of the context of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism and the, the causes of the

Reformation where you, where we make a distinction between the material cause and the formal cause and this issue of justification by faith alone and, and what was lurking under that dispute was the idea of sola scriptura.

When you understand what Eastern Orthodoxy teaches and believes, it's ecclesiology, and you compare it to Roman Catholicism, there's differences, but there's important similarities that I think still is relevant to the

Protestant and Eastern Orthodox differences. And I think that's an important issue to keep in mind that our responses from an apologetic context is going to be very similar when we're dealing with the

Eastern Orthodox person, as well as when we're, when we're discussing things with a

Roman Catholic individual. So I want you to keep that in mind. They're not exactly the same, but there are some similarities that I think are very important and very apologetic, apologetically relevant.

All right. So before we get into all those details, just a real quick announcement in terms of two guests that I'll be having in the near future.

I have just been informed that Dr. Michael Heizer is undergoing some health issues. And so I'm not sure if that will affect him coming onto the show.

I'm going to be reaching out to Dr. Heizer to see how he's doing and hopefully he's doing well.

And I'll see where he's at in terms of whether he's able to do the interview on our schedule date.

And I also am going to be having Dr. Matthew Barrett to come on and discuss issues of sola scriptura.

And I want to be on this kind of reform theology, Reformation principles sort of thing, because I think it is very apologetically relevant.

And so hopefully you guys will appreciate those sorts of discussions. And to tip a hat to our presuppositional brothers and sisters out there, all of these are related to presuppositional apologetics.

Okay. The assumption of sola scriptura and the ultimate authority of scripture are very important. So hopefully you guys can draw those connections and see the importance of this sort of theology and how it relates to apologetic methodology.

Now, real quick, I want to show you guys this book I just got. Greg Bonson, and maybe some people who grew up in the nineties will get this reference.

Greg Bonson is the Tupac Shakur of apologetics. Okay. If you know anything about Tupac Shakur, he was a hip hop rapper of the nineties, which

I'm not endorsing his music. It's definitely not the sort of music that you want to listen to and have wonderful, beautiful thoughts.

But when Tupac Shakur died, there were actually multiple albums that were released after his death.

And so I remember even in middle school, I was like, how's he coming out with albums? He just passed away. You know, Greg Bonson apparently is coming out with a bunch of books and he passed away in 1995.

So I'm just joking around, but American Vision has just put out this book,

The Impossibility of the Contrary. Without God, you can't prove anything. And it's based on a series of lectures in which

Dr. Bonson defends a presuppositional approach and goes into great detail concerning the transcendental argument for God's existence.

Very, very useful resource for those who want to get into presuppositional apologetics.

And of course, this is one book out of a series of three. There was one that came out before this one called

Against All Opposition, Defending the Christian Worldview. And there is another one in the series. I think it's kind of a red cover.

If you look on American Vision website called Pushing the Antithesis, of which I have the old school, the old school version here, which is upside down.

There we go. Okay. Which I highly recommend if you guys really want to get your, sink your teeth into some good presuppositional apologetics.

All right. Well, I have some people in the comments now. I'm ordering it right now. Yes, please order it right now.

It's totally worth it. I've read all three of them. Well, actually I haven't read the newest one, but they're based off lectures that I probably listened to a thousand times.

So highly recommend that. Also, I want to highly recommend Dr. Tony Costa's YouTube channel.

If, and I always joke around in saying this, but I'm partially not joking. The fact that many have not subscribed to Revealed Apologetics and Dr.

Costa's channel, it demonstrates the truth of total depravity. So definitely get yourself over to Dr.

Tony Costa's YouTube channel. He has some great discussions and teachings, and he also teaches online classes as well.

You definitely want to check that out. He is a great resource and an excellent teacher. Definitely very down to earth and can bring a lot of these technical ideas down to the average person, which

I think is very, very important. All right. Well, I'm going to now get all that stuff out of the way, and I'm going to welcome

Dr. Tony Costa on the screen with me. How's it going, brother? Hey, Eli. I'm doing well, and I'm glad to hear that you're feeling better.

Yes. I don't know if you want me to put my hand on the screen, and you could join with faith, and I could pray healing into your body.

We're not going to do any of that. If you call the number on the bottom of the screen, we will send you this water from the

Jordan River. That's right. That's right. Look at that. See, now that is not orthodoxy right there.

No, it's not. No, neither in the Orthodox church or in the Reformed churches. Yeah, that's right.

Well, what have you been up to? I mean, you are a machine, man. You're on my show now, but you literally just hopped off someone else's show.

Yeah, I was with Brother Jordan Ravines, I believe it's pronounced, in the

Philippines. So I was just in the Philippines there, and we were talking about theological approach to apologetics, and that kind of dovetailed with some of the things you were just saying,

Eli, about presuppositional apologetics. So I had an opportunity to talk about the difference between presuppositional apologetics and evidentialist apologetics, classical apologetics.

We also touched a little bit on Molinism. So that was a great, great show, but yeah.

Good, excellent, excellent. Yeah, he's a good brother. I think I've been on his show a while back to talk about it. He's very interested in Reformed theology and presuppositionalism and things like that.

Yeah, indeed. Cool, cool. Very good. Well, let's jump right into things. Let's go over the simple question, right, and then we'll dive into the details.

So is Eastern Orthodoxy orthodox? Why don't you unpack that for us and perhaps share in ways in which it is orthodox and in ways in which, hey, there's some warning flags that we need to be careful about.

Yeah, we need to define our terms, obviously, otherwise we're going to be equivocating, and therefore we need to understand, well, what does the word orthodox mean?

And I think you've already defined that as the right teaching, true teaching, and so forth, and its corollary, of course, is orthopraxy.

And when we talk about orthodoxy and Christianity, we're talking about basically the fundamental doctrines that define

Christianity, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, salvation by grace alone in the

Reformed tradition, of course, and the bodily resurrection, the virgin birth of Christ, and the coming of Christ to judge at the end times the new heaven, the new earth.

All of these things are considered those creedal -like confessions that have been encapsulated in the

Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Nicene Constantinople Creed of 381, and so forth.

That's what we mean by orthodox. Now, when we talk about the orthodox church, we're now talking about a church, let's call it for lack of a better word, a church denomination, a series of churches that are known as Byzantine.

And orthodox simply means that this church believes that it is the heir of the apostles, and that it believes that it has maintained the true doctrine of the church through the infallible seven ecumenical councils.

Now, the Roman Catholic Church would also say they're orthodox, even though they use the term Catholic, but they would also say they're orthodox.

The orthodox would also say they're Catholic, because they believe the word Catholic means universal, global. But then

Protestants can also use the word Catholic because they believe the church is global, it is universal. So we need to define our terms very carefully so that we don't end up, again, equivocating.

So when we mean orthodoxy as Reformed Christians or Protestant Christians, we're talking about true doctrine and true teaching and sound doctrine.

Now, there is some flexibility. Is it not the case that within orthodoxy, there is some flexibility in terms of what we would call orthodox

Christianity? For example, you and I are Reformed Baptists, but we are not of the position that unless you're a

Reformed Baptist, you're not a Christian, right? Why don't you talk about the flexibility within the concept of orthodoxy?

Yeah, I mean, the flexibility here says that we believe that salvation is the work of God, and that we believe that anyone who has a vital living relationship with Christ and knows

Christ as Lord and Savior in a transformative manner, we believe they're Christians.

And so we're willing to say, yeah, there are believers in the Wesleyan tradition, there's believers in the

Arminian camps. Can there be believers in the Roman Catholic Church? Well, yes, but the

Reformers were all converted while they were still in the Roman Catholic Church. Luther was in there, Calvin was in there, but in due time, they left because they just felt the tension between what they saw in Scripture and what they saw in those traditions.

And there are examples of people, even in the Orthodox Church, who come to a saving faith in Christ. Some of my students at the

Toronto Baptist Seminary are former members of the Orthodox Church who are now Reformed Baptists.

And then we have, of course, Cyril Lucaris, who can forget the 17th century patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucaris, who went to Poland to educate the

Orthodox Church there against Roman Catholic proselytization that was taking place.

And he came across these Protestants who were of the Calvinist persuasion, and Cyril Lucaris wrote a confession that sounds exactly like Calvin's Institutes of the

Christian Religion. Yeah, that's right. And he was a brilliant Orthodox theologian, but if you read his confession, it's basically the

Institutes of the Christian Religion. He was eventually killed by Muslim Turks and his body thrown into the

Bosphorus. But the point here is that here's a person like Cyril Lucaris, a patriarch, no less, of Constantinople, and he came to the conviction of God's electing grace.

He came to the conviction of predestination and so forth, the doctrines of grace. And so no particular church has a monopoly on those whom

God will save. The Holy Spirit, the wind blows as it wills. You don't know when it comes, know where it goes. And so we're not saying unless you're part of these four walls of this

Reformed church or the Presbyterian church, you're not a Christian. So we do believe in Augustine's, there is the mystical church and there's also the local church.

So we know that in the mystical church, God knows all his elect, the Lord knows those who are his. But in the local churches, it's made up of, let's face it, it's made up of genuine believers.

And there's also goats in there, there's wheat and tares. So you would equate local church with the language of the visible church and the mystical church with the language of the invisible church.

Correct. That's correct. That's correct. Okay. So why don't we actually kind of draw some comparisons here?

If someone were to ask you, Dr. Costa, what is the difference between Protestant Christianity and...

You know what? Let's compare Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy and then we'll throw

Protestantism there into the mix and draw some important distinctions. If someone were to ask you, Dr.

Costa, what is the difference between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy? How would you draw out those differences?

The differences ultimately have to do with church authority. So up until 1054, which was the

Great Schism, the break between the East and the West, up until that time, there was an understanding of each other.

There was this, okay, you're over there in Rome and you're over there in Constantinople. And there was this understanding that we could still get along.

We don't like this papal supremacy thing and we certainly don't like the filioque that you inserted and the sun into the

Nicene Creed. How dare you do that without the formation of a council? But in 1054, the break came.

And the break came because the Pope in the West, in Rome, the

Pope sent a papal bull basically excommunicating the

Eastern church. And because they wouldn't submit to the supremacy of the Western church, the papacy.

So basically the major difference is authority. Rome is based on a

Pope who is one figure, the successor of Peter over the magisterium, which are the bishops are the successors of the apostles.

The Pope is the successor of Peter and they oversee the church. The Orthodox church, of course, rejects the papacy.

The Orthodox church is very close to the Protestant churches in that it has affirmed from the beginning a collegiality of bishops, that bishops are autocephalous or they're autonomous to their own local churches.

And while they do have patriarchs, the patriarchs are not papal in authority. The patriarchs are bishops at the very top, but they regard other bishops in a college, if you will, a college of bishops.

And so the saying amongst them is that the Bishop of Rome is first among equals.

He is primus inter pares in Latin. He is the first among equals because of the prestige that Rome had.

He's not first among equals because he's better or higher, has more authority, but because of the honor that was given to Rome as the place of Paul and Peter's martyrdom.

And Constantinople in 324, Constantine declared Constantinople to be the second city in honor after Rome.

It was the new Rome. That's what Constantine created, the new Rome. So it's authority structures are very different.

The liturgy is different. So for example, the West moved towards Latin in the year 200

AD. They used to use Greek in the Senate, but then they abandoned that and started using

Latin. The East continued using Greek in the liturgy. So now you've got Latin and Greek, and you've got literally they're talking past each other in many cases, which led to a lot of misunderstandings.

The other problem, of course, is that the Eastern Church, their view of salvation was one of theosis, the idea that Athanasius said,

God became man, that man may become God. And so the Eastern Church believes that the ultimate aim of humans is to be divinized, not to become

God in essence, but to become absorbed into the triune life of God. In the

Western tradition, which saw the atonement in more judicial forensic terms, in the

West, everything was about the atonement meant that God was judicially removing the penalty of the law, which is death.

And so the focus on the West was on Christ's atonement as a sacrifice.

In the East, it was Christus Victor. Christ's death and resurrection was Christ's triumph over the infernal powers.

And you see that in the beautiful icon of the resurrection, where Christ is breaking through the bars of Hades with Adam in one hand and Eve on the other, and he's taking out the

Old Testament saints. So there is a difference in the view of the councils.

The seven ecumenical councils are - Can I interrupt you? And I do apologize. I know you're on a roll. There's just so much there, but I think what people might find interesting is this idea of theosis.

And you said that man becoming like God, and how that's not the belief within Eastern orthodoxy that man becomes divine, but it's very much rooted in what the orthodox distinguish between the essence and energies of God.

So that the essence of God is the unknowable element of his being, whereas his energies are kind of like, correct me if I'm wrong, they compare it to kind of rays from the sun, right?

In which God communicates to his people, and it's within those energies that theosis finds its culmination, that believers participate in the energies.

Right, right. So think of it as the ontological trinity and the economical trinity. The ontological trinity is about the essence.

And so in Eastern orthodoxy, the essence of God is unknowable. And this is why many of the

Eastern fathers used what's called, in Latin we call it the via negativa, the negative way.

Apophatic theology is talking about God in what he is not. So God is immortal, he's not mortal.

God is invincible, he's not invincible. God is immaterial, he's not material. It's defining God by using negative terminology, what he is not.

So the essence of God, according to Basil and others, especially Gregory Palamas, who is the big proponent of this idea of the energies of God, is the view that the essence of God is unknowable.

It's beyond, it's transcendent. And that God can only be known through his energies. And like you said, it's like the rays that proceed from the sun.

So the way the orthodox would describe that is that the energies of God is the way the economical trinity works.

How God reveals himself through Christ and then the Holy Spirit coming on the church. And it's through the work of the

Holy Spirit that human beings, through the mysteries, the sacraments they call them, mysteries, are brought into union with God.

So the incarnation is the pivotal point in orthodoxy. It's not the necessarily. It's the incarnation.

Because the incarnation is God taken on human form. One person with two natures, divine and human.

And so what they see in the incarnation is Christ is recapitulating creation back to himself.

And in that work, he is raising humanity from its state of disease and sin, raising them up so that they can be taken in, partakers of the divine nature, according to 2

Peter 1 .4, and thereby they are absorbed into the life of God. Now to Protestants, that sounds a little odd.

But if you think of it among the lines of glorification, what we mean by glorification, where we are finally perfected and so forth, we become like him, we see him as he is, partakers, not overtakers, but partakers, then glorification is what the

East would refer to as theosis. And Protestants who are listening to the concept of theosis might be tempted to think of it in terms of something akin to Mormonism.

It's not the same thing. Can you say that quote again by St. Athanasius?

Athanasius said God became man so that man may become God. But we can't just leave it at that.

We need to let Athanasius define what he means by that. He makes it clear it certainly does not mean that the creature becomes creator.

The creature doesn't become God. But the creature, just as when

God became man, he didn't cease to be God. So when man becomes divinized, he doesn't cease to be human.

He doesn't lose one form and then become another. And so in the view of the Eastern fathers, like Gregory of Nyssa and Basil and Athanasius, the view was that in theosis, what the

West would call the beatific vision, in theosis you become basically glorified.

You become absorbed into the life of the triune God and you are perfected in that state.

Now, again, being Protestant Christians or Western in our orientation, would we agree with that in a sense but utilize different language?

So we would agree with theosis but use the language of the West to describe the process of justification, sanctification, and glorification.

Correct. So when we think of glorification, what does the Bible say? Well, we are heirs of God. We are joint heirs with Christ.

And so obviously there is a sharing that goes on there. It doesn't mean God transmits his essence to us because the only ones who share the essence of God is the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But there is something that he shares. Christ will share his glory with us.

Well, what does that glory look like? Well, that glory means to be united to him. If we are united to him in the likeness of his death,

Paul says, we shall be united to him in the likeness of his resurrection. And that involves becoming immortal in the resurrection, immortal bodies, glorified bodies, incorruptible bodies, spiritual bodies.

So what the West means by glorification, the final state, is what the

East means by theosis. It's just that, again, when we are using Latin and we are using Greek, you know the old saying, something is lost in translation sometimes.

And so they are basically talking about the same thing but they are using different language.

So we are not used to hearing this language. So the Mormon belief is that there is a finite

God and then a man becomes God and then he populates this new world and then he sends his son and then you become a

God yourself. That's not what Eastern Orthodoxy teaches. Even though some Mormon apologists have tried to justify their view through theosis.

Sure, sure. So you would say that theosis is Orthodox but it is often misunderstood because of the language that's used to describe it?

Correct. Okay, very good. And I think that's a beautiful concept when we talk about, say, for example, partaking in the nature of God, whether we are talking about it in categories of theosis theology or participating in the nature of God in terms of glorification.

I want folks to understand that at this moment you need to step back from the intellectual discussion and stand in awe and worship of the idea that the triune

God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was an eternal relationship before time began and a relationship that is the most intimate relationship one can possibly think of.

And God invites us into that Trinitarian relationship that has been going on from all eternity.

This is why I think theology, and I know Dr. Costa, you would agree, theology should produce worship once we understand the implications of these profound truths.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for clarifying. Let me add something, though, if you don't mind. From 2

Peter 1 and 4 there, it's important to also realize that in 1 -4 there, and here

I'm looking at the Greek text here of 2

Peter, he points out here that this sharing that we're going to have, he uses the

Greek word theos, and that's important because the word theos there is the word that we get divinity from, divinity, divine.

And we need to be very careful here because it's not the typical word used of God's deity. The word deity, the word theotes in Colossians 2 -9, it only appears there, it's a hypoxil gammona, you know what that is, hypoxil gammona, it appears only once.

And the word theotes, Colossians 2 -9, is translated deity, in him dwells the fullness of deity or the godhead bodily.

And in Romans 1 -20, Paul says that we could see God's divine attributes.

He uses the word, uses a different word, theotes, it's a different word. And so one has to do with essence, theotes, deity is essence.

The other word, and Peter uses that word here, theos, in the feminine form, it means divine.

And so the word divine carries the notion of likeness, divine as in being like God, not the same as God.

It doesn't mean having the essence of God. And so when God made man in Genesis 1 -26, orthodox theologians also focus on this, it says, let us make man in our image after our likeness.

And so they look at that word likeness, and they see that as the template, if you will, the archetype of this thing called theosis.

Very fascinating. Now, okay, so when we asked the question, if we can kind of rewind, we asked the question, what is the difference between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy?

It really boils down to the issue of the nature of their authority. So would you say that both

EO, which a lot of people use for short, and Roman Catholicism, they have similar authorities with some important caveats.

So for example, we would say that the authority within Eastern Orthodoxy is scripture and tradition, and authority in Roman Catholicism is scripture and tradition with the specific caveats that differentiate them, papal authority in the magisterium and things like that.

Would I be correct there in summarizing? We need to be careful that in Orthodoxy, tradition is a single stream.

So to them, if you say, is it scripture or tradition? They'll say it's both.

It comes from one stream. And so to the Orthodox, God makes his grace, his energies known through scripture, tradition.

Those are one stream. And icons and so forth are ways they believe God communicates his energies to his people and so forth.

Whereas in the Roman Catholic Church, you do have this, if you will, think of a three -legged stool.

You got scripture, you got tradition, and you got the magisterium. And so they would look at scripture and tradition as these, let's say, distinctive planks, but they're harmonious.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, it's all one line. It's all one straight line. Sure. Okay. That's important to keep in mind.

Thank you so much. And there's some nuances. I know a lot of people caricature

Eastern Orthodoxy as kind of a popeless Catholicism, but there is some important nuances there that I think differentiate them, that I think is important to keep in mind, especially when we made reference to Mormonism and how theosis is not like what

Mormonism teaches. If we can just step aside for two seconds and acknowledge the important apologetic importance of properly understanding and representing a person's view.

You're not going to get very far in a discussion with the Eastern Orthodox gentleman or young lady or whoever you're speaking with, if you're equating the

EO doctrine of theosis with this idea that is expressed in Mormonism.

So we want to make sure we properly represent the side that we're engaging. All right. Thank you so much for that.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So now let's throw in Protestantism. Okay. So what is the difference between Protestantism and, well,

I guess we'll pick since Eastern Orthodoxy is our focus here, people should already know the main difference, but it's going to be very similar to what you said with some caveats.

What is the difference, the key difference between Protestant Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy? Yeah, I would say that once again, it all comes back to authority.

In the historic Protestant tradition, it is sola scriptura.

It is the supremacy of scripture over all things. It's the final court, the Supreme Court. And it's not that Protestantism eschews tradition.

It doesn't. In fact, all the reformers appreciated tradition. And in fact,

Calvin spoke highly of the fathers like Chrysostom and others and Augustine and so forth.

And so in the Protestant tradition, we have scripture is the final arbiter, the final court of appeal in all things.

And that scriptures judge the church. In the Orthodox tradition, there is no distinction between scripture and tradition.

They're all one. They're one stream. And so in the Orthodox church, if you were to say to them, is it proper to venerate icons?

And they will say, well, of course it is. Why? Well, because the second council of Nicaea proclaimed it in 787

AD. And then if you say, well, what about the Bible? Well, you've got to read John of Damascus and understand what he means by when the incarnation meant that Christ has divinized matter.

And so that means that if we make icons, which are made of matter, the icons have been divinized because in the incarnation,

God became man. And even in his baptism, he blessed the material world, he blessed the waters and so forth.

So there's a very mystical view of this idea of the world's divinization in Christ. So are you saying that the icons that Eastern Orthodox use are exemplifications of incarnation, which was that important?

Ah, okay. That actually. Because the whole idea of the icons is that since matter has been blessed by the incarnation of God taken on flesh, then matter, since he saw fit to take upon himself a material body, the reasoning of John Damascus, for example, is that matter has been sanctified and therefore matter can be used as a way of showing

God's grace and depicted in the icons of Christ and the

Theotokos, which is the title for Mary, the mother of God, and also the saints and so forth. Hmm.

All right. Very interesting. So, okay. So we have, uh, the, the main difference really, which, uh, again, this is why

I said at the beginning, the central issue, uh, between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism and Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy is really going to be this issue of authority.

I mean, everything hinges upon the nature of our authority and dictates, uh, what we're going to believe based upon, uh, that authority.

So let's dive into, uh, let's, let's cast, um, Roman Catholicism aside as, as it's not the central focus of this discussion and really, um, pit, if we will, the authority, the asserted authority of Protestantism and the asserted authority of Eastern Orthodoxy.

At what point, Dr. Costa does Eastern Orthodoxy start becoming unorthodox, um, in terms of scripture and how the

Protestant would defend the genuine authority of Protestant authority, right?

As opposed to, because it's, these are authority claims. I mean, some people who might be listening, um, who know certain

Eastern Orthodox, um, folks think along very presuppositional lines. And so they know they're very familiar with this idea of ultimate authorities and how everything's viewed through the lens of worldview, things like this.

But now you have Protestant asserted authority versus Eastern Orthodoxy asserted authority.

And then now we have this very interesting thing, and perhaps you could address this. How might we deal with Eastern Orthodoxy through the context of a presuppositional apologetic approach?

Right, right. Yeah, it is presuppositional on both sides because they both affirm a sola, like we hear, you know, my

Orthodox and Roman Catholic friends say, well, you know, you guys believe in sola this and sola that. And I said, sola what?

Uh, and, and, uh, I love theology humor. That was very well remembered. Absolutely.

And, and so I, I say to them, I said, look, you know, I believe in sola scriptura, but, but you also believe in the sola.

I go, what are you talking about? You believe in sola ecclesia. At the end of the day, what defines

Orthodoxy is the church. The church defines the church. In other words, there is a circularity to this argument that why do we know the

Bible is true? Because the church defined it. Uh, what books, the canon, the books of the canon, who decided them?

The church. Um, and where's the, where is the, the, the remedy for salvation?

Where can we find salvation in the church? You know, in the West, they would say extra, extra ecclesiam nallus salus, outside of the church, there is no salvation.

Well, the Orthodox church would hold to that view as well. Okay. Now, now when we look at the Protestant view, they wouldn't hold to, uh, see when you say, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but when you say they hold to a sola ecclesia, that's not what they affirm.

No, they wouldn't say that's what we hold. You're saying that one could make an argument that that is the logical conclusion of their authority structure.

That's correct. Okay. So, so in, in, in, in the Orthodox position, it will be where the church of the, of the apostles, where the, the, the ancient church.

And even that, even that type of argumentation is suspect. And the reason why I say that is there is a fallacy.

There's a, there, there is a fallacy, uh, an argument from age, which basically says, well, because something is very old, it must be true.

Well, on that basis, we would argue Gnosticism is true because the Gnostic, the Gnostics were around very early.

In fact, there were prognostics in the first century, in the late first century from the first letters of John, first letter, second letter, uh, the

Colossians, you can do that. Yeah. Or the Judaizers. All right. We could say, well, no, those guys, those guys go back to the first century, you know, and because they're so old, they must be true.

It doesn't necessarily follow that because something is old or ancient, it must therefore be true.

That's the first problem. Uh, the other problem is the moment you say, well, we know where the church of the apostles, because, uh, we can trace our line, our bishops back to the apostles.

Well, I don't know if you know this, uh, uh, Eli, but the whole argument for the bishopric, the whole idea of the bishops and the apostolic succession was started because the

Gnostics claimed that their bishops were descended from the apostles. Well, this got

Irenaeus and then Ignatius and then Irenaeus to start arguing for, no, our bishops can be connected to the apostles as well.

And so there was this rivalry going on between the Gnostics and then of course, the, the church. Now here's where we've got to be really careful because when we start hearing people say, well, we know that the apostles appointed these bishops in the

Eastern church. Take for example, uh, Irenaeus around AD 150, he tells us, this is the first time the word apostolic tradition appears in the fathers.

He tells us that he received this information from the apostles that Jesus Christ was 50 years old when he died, that Jesus lived to 50.

And he tells us so that, because the Greeks believe that, that when you're 50, you've pretty much lived your full life.

The recapitulation theory. Correct. Theological underpinning as to why he believed that as well.

So instead of reading what was in scripture, Irenaeus used this philosophy to define what was in scripture. And, but he said he got this from the apostles.

Now I don't know any Orthodox theologian, Roman Catholic theologian, Protestant theologian today that believes

Jesus was 50 years old when he died. They all put him in his 33, 30 to 33 range, not in the fifties.

But if we're to trust Irenaeus after all, he is a bishop and he's a father. He claims he got it from the apostles.

Well, if he did, why is it that no one holds to that today? Well, they don't hold to it because it's not tenable. The Bible doesn't say that.

Now let's go to the Protestant, the Protestant worldview is ad fontes, back to the fountains, back to the sources.

And what are the sources? The sources are the scriptures. And so what you and I want to do Eli, is we want to say, let's get back to the source.

What did the source look like? What did the church that originally received the scriptures, what did they look like?

So when we read the New Testament, what do we read about the churches? They gathered, they kept the apostles teaching, they prayed, they broke bread, they had the

Lord's supper together. Anything in there about incense in the worship service?

No. Anything in there about priestly vestments? No. Anything in there about venerating dead saints?

No. There's none of that. And so the Protestant idea is we want to go back to the fountain, to the source.

We're not really interested in what someone thinks in the second century, that's important, but it's not, it is not scripture.

It is not part of the Theanustos, the God -breathed scriptures. If I can give a quick pushback then. So when you say, for example, as I was just speaking about this with my students, we were talking about the

Protestant Reformation and I was discussing with my students the difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism being rooted in their different authority structures.

So you have scripture and tradition and the magisterium, the Pope, and then you have sola scriptura, which is the foundation of Protestant theology.

When you say to a Roman Catholic, because when you ask, for example, what's the difference in Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, a lot of people who kind of dip their finger in theology and kind of know a little bit, they will dance upon surface differences.

Well, you Catholics, you're the guys who pray to the saints or you're the guys who pray to Mary.

And while that's a true difference, it really gets down to the authority. So when the

Protestant says to the Catholic, hey, Mr. Catholic, praying to the saints is unbiblical.

Well, I mean, the Catholic is going to be like, so? That's only a problem if we assume the truth of your principle of sola scriptura.

So what you just said, when you said that the reformers are looking at the scriptures and they're saying, hey, what's going on here?

We want to go add fontus back to the fountain. What's to keep the

Eastern Orthodox individual to say, well, wait a minute. You think that's a problem that some of these things aren't found in scripture, but that's only a problem if you presuppose a principle that I, as an

Eastern Orthodox believer, reject, namely sola scriptura. How would you interact with that? What I would do is

I would interact with them by focusing on, for example, the language that is used in scripture.

For example, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, rather, 3 .16. So all scripture is theanostos.

Theanostos means, and it's traditionally translated inspired, but its literal meaning is

God breathed or God breathed out. The only literature that we have that is called theanostos is the scriptures.

The fathers of the church clearly distinguish their writings from the scriptures. They clearly point out, even

Athanasius said that in these scriptures, in these alone, that sounds like sola scriptura, in these alone are the fountains of salvation.

And if you look at Basil, Basil the Great, he makes similar comments about the scriptures being the ultimate authority.

And so when I talked to my Orthodox friends, I asked them, I said, are the fathers infallible?

They said, they're infallible. I said, where do the fathers claim that their writings are theanostos, that they're

God breathed? And Paul says, because these scriptures are God breathed, he says they can do what?

Well, they're useful to teach, to correct, to rebuke so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

That certainly sounds like scripture is sufficient for the cause of building up and teaching and correcting.

And so what I do is I simply challenge my Orthodox friends that Jesus have a high view of scripture, very high view of scripture, no doubt about it.

He wasn't very keen on traditions that contradicted scripture. He had no problem with traditions that did not.

I mean, there were certain Jewish traditions Jesus kept that were not biblically mandated, but what he railed against was those man -made traditions that conflicted with holy scripture.

And that is where as Protestants, we would have to draw the line and say, this whole idea of praying to the saints or praying to Mary and so forth lacks biblical support.

There's nothing in scripture to even insinuate that that is proper.

But what they will say is the church owns the scriptures and the church interprets the scriptures and therefore tradition and scripture are a harmonious piece.

They're not contradictory. That's where we need to challenge that thinking and show that, wait a minute, there is some conflict here.

Okay. Well, I want to touch on that in just a bit, but you made mention a while back there about the argument from age.

So like if something is old, then it's most likely, hey, this is the view. Now I know

Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox folks who argue along those lines, but I mean, I have to tip my hat off to the intellectual tradition of the

Eastern Orthodox Church. There are brilliant minds of the Eastern Church and surely those who are in our modern context where Eastern Orthodox are aware that that is not the end -all be -all way to argue for the truth of Eastern Orthodoxy.

Some of the best defenders of Eastern Orthodoxy are not simply arguing that because we're the oldest church, therefore that demonstrates the truth.

What sort of pieces of actual evidence and argumentation do Eastern Orthodox scholars point to to actually demonstrate the claims of their authority?

Well, one of them is age. One of the whole point why Francis Schaeffer's son,

Frankie Schaeffer, joined the Orthodox Church, and now he's an atheist apparently, but one of the reasons why he joined it was because he says that it is the oldest church, that it is the most antiquated church.

And you do hear a lot of Orthodox folks use that argument. And they'll say that Protestants are just a by -product of the

Roman Catholic Church. They broke off from the Roman Catholic Church and so forth. These Johnny Come Latelys.

But we're the church of the councils and so forth. And that is not at all to, of course, denigrate any of these great minds of the

Eastern Church. I mean, Athanasius was the great defender of Orthodoxy when the whole world was going

Aryan. He took a stand and he was exiled several times and so forth. And of course, the writings of John Chrysostom and Basil and his great, the

Cappadocian fathers defending the deity of the Holy Spirit against the Macedonians.

So I'm trying not to make a blanket statement here, but this is one argument we usually do here, especially in apologetic dialogue between Orthodox and Protestant, as if Protestants really have nothing to bring to the table because you guys weren't around until 1 ,500 years after us.

And so we need to, in many respects, we need to take what is valuable and learn from that tradition.

I mean, all of those councils, all of them took place in the East. All of them. Nicaea, Ephesus, Constantinople, Chalcedon, all of these took place in the

East. And these were great defenders of the faith. Now, were they perfect? Well, no.

There's a debate about whether Cyril of Alexandria, rather he misunderstood

Nestorius. Then Nestorius ended up being exiled as a heretic. And Nestorius basically says, what they're saying

I said, I didn't say. There's a lot of academic debate now on whether Nestorius was actually a heretic or not.

And then you take someone like Athanasius. I mean, Athanasius rejected the Apocrypha in his listing of the canon of the

Bible in his 39th Easter Festival letter. He mentions the Old Testament books, and he makes reference to some of these

Apocrypha books, but he doesn't classify them as Scripture. But today, the Orthodox Church not only accepts the

Apocrypha, but they accept extra books that are part of the Pseudepigrapha, like 3rd

Maccabees and 4th Maccabees. So I think we need to let the church fathers be the church fathers. And we got to stop putting them into a

Protestant mold, or we make them Presbyterians or Reformed Baptists, or the Roman Catholics make them

Roman Catholic, and the Orthodox make them Orthodox. And so I would say that we need to let the fathers be the fathers, accept them for who they are, warts and all.

The Protestant view is they were faithful men that God raised up, but they were crooked sticks like we're crooked sticks.

And so we can glean from them much wisdom and appreciate that God used them at critical points in the church's history.

Amen. I agree with that. I'm just going to have a quick shout out to Dr. Bob, this $5 super chat. Thank you so much,

Dr. Bob. I appreciate it. He says, enjoying Dr. Acosta's take, he should do a formal debate with Josiah Trenum on Apostolic Succession and the alleged defined character of the

Episcopate. Yeah, there are so many different topics to debate. I don't know if Matt Slick of CARM is a mutual friend.

He's often known for saying there's so much heresy, so little time. Matt's a great guy and we've dialogued on the phone and we've done some work together in ministry.

So yeah, he's a great brother. Very good. Yes, he's quick and slick.

He is, by the way. I've had some really fun conversations. And right when I try to corner him on some disagreement we have, he's slick.

We can't fight with that, you know, that little voice that Matt has. That's right.

No, no, definitely not. When I have him on my show, I have to put the blank screen on. At least it's not the

Tucker Carlson look, you know, that no one was speaking. That's right.

That's right. All right. So let's bring this in the context of, let's throw the

Protestant gloves into the ring for a moment. But before I do that, I want to encourage folks, if you have any questions about Eastern Orthodoxy, Sola Scriptura, any of the

Reformation principles that may or may not be directly related to this discussion, leave your questions in the comments and just preface your question with questions so I could differentiate them from the normal comments and discussions that are going on in the comments.

So Dr. Costa will be more than happy to take some of those questions at the tail end of our discussion. Just to give you a heads up,

Dr. Costa, folks are really enjoying this discussion and comments. They said, hey, this is great information.

Thank you so much. So just throwing that out there. If you have a question, feel free to leave it in the comments, we'll get to them.

All right. Now, you know, we can see the Eastern Orthodox and the

Roman Catholics kind of duking it out, you know, who's got the oldest tradition, who's got the true, you know, connection to the apostles and things like that.

And us poor Protestants, you know, when we try to throw our gloves into the ring, you know, the Catholic and the

Eastern Orthodox folks, they just look at us and be like, wait a minute, you're, like you said, you're Johnny Come Lately, right?

You're just stepchildren. Yeah, you're like the redheaded stepchild. Why are you even here in this discussion?

And it will often be claimed that nobody believed in Sola Scriptura before the

Reformation. Nobody believed in justification by faith alone. Nobody believed what us

Protestants are spouting. You guys are a branching off of the true church and you've gone the way of the multiplicity of denominations.

You have nothing useful to bring to the discussion. How would you, Dr. Costa, interject in the ongoing discussion and disagreements between the

Eastern Orthodox folks and the Roman Catholics? How would you say, wait a minute, hold up, you know, when you guys say you're the oldest, that begs the question, because if justification by faith alone and Sola Scriptura are biblical, then we beat you on those.

So, how do you engage in that? Well, I teach a course at Toronto Baptist Seminary on biblical reliability.

And what we do is we look at some of the early fathers and we show how

Clement of Rome and we show how many of the post -apostolic fathers, the anti -Nicene fathers actually did speak about, they didn't use words like Sola Scriptura, but they speak of Scripture as not only inerrant, but absolutely authoritative.

So, for example, you take Augustine, someone like Augustine, and Augustine says that if you find a presumed error in the

Scripture, it's not the Scripture that's inerrant. It could be a scribal variant or it could be our understanding is fallible, but he never attributes error to the

Scripture. That's very interesting. And so there are a number of quotes from the fathers going before Nicaea and after Nicaea that affirm

Scriptural authority above the church. That is, we appeal to the Scriptures as our ultimate authority.

In terms of justification by faith, the thing about the Eastern Orthodox Church is there is a rich tradition embedded in the fathers of the

Eastern Church that speak about justification by faith without works, where they affirm that we are saved by God's grace and that at the end we cannot appeal to our works as the means of our salvation.

So obviously I can't do this in the time we have now, but I do have a PowerPoint with a lot of these citations from the fathers on the authority of Scripture.

There's a great book by Nathan Busenitz called Before Luther. And in that book, what

Dr. Busenitz does is he traces from the apostolic fathers up until the

Reformation, a consistency of arguments from the fathers on things like grace alone,

Scripture alone, faith alone, Christ alone, and so forth. Now, of course, you're not going to find that language in there, but there's a lot in theology.

We use a lot of terms for things that we don't find in Scripture. Trinity is not in Scripture. Millennium is not in Scripture.

Monotheism. Yeah, monotheism is not in Scripture, exactly. And so when we use words, theological words, we're not assuming or presuming that these words are in the language of the fathers.

But again, we need to also understand that not only did the fathers talk about these things, but let's face it, the fathers made some pretty big mistakes.

I think of Clement of Rome and he talks about the phoenix as a real bird. And he talks about how every 500 years, it goes back to its breeding place and then it dies in a flaming fire.

Wait, the phoenix isn't a real bird? Yeah. I'm just kidding. Yeah, Clement, he used that as an example of the resurrection.

And he said that he believed that the phoenix was a real bird. And again, we know that that was just an

Indian myth, that the phoenix is not. But again, you got to understand, you're talking about late first century, early second century.

A lot of this is you're hearing this, you've heard it from someone else, you're just assuming things. So at the end of the day, the only thing that we can rest our hope in that is infallible and inerrant, at least in the

Protestant view, are the Holy Scriptures. And if you glean, I mean, to read the fathers of the church,

I've got Robertson's collection here, and it's 38 volumes.

That's a lot of literature. But when you go through the literature, you do find the father speaking about certain things, certain views of doctrine that accord with what the reformers would later call sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, and so on.

And that the end of all things is the glory of God, soli deo gloria. Right. And that's a good argument. It's not a knockdown refutation of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, but it goes a long way of showing that what the

Protestant is saying is not coming out ex nihilo in the 16th century. Correct. Right.

I mean, the whole thing with Luther was that Augustine was teaching this.

Now, the Orthodox, to the Orthodox, Augustine's in the doghouse. They're not big fans of Augustine.

They don't wear the t -shirt, Augustine is my homeboy. No, no, no, no. He's not my homeboy. He's in the doghouse.

And him and his retractions and everything. So they don't like him. In fact, they think he's responsible for a lot of the so -called corruptions of Western theology, like original sin.

And he questions the whole procession of the spirit from the father alone and the filioque and all that.

But again, at the end of the day, while we appreciate the fathers as Protestants, we need to begin with a presupposition that if God is real and God exists, then that would mean that any word or expression by which

God would reveal himself would necessarily have to be infallible. It would necessarily have to be inerrant because it proceeds from him.

And the only thing I know that is declared to be God breathed, which

Jesus himself and the apostles pointed to as both says the Lord, this is what the

Lord says, is scripture. Not the writings of Shammai or Halal, not the teachings of the elders, but what

God spoke. Now I hear this argument, and again, I'm not sure if it's used by more of the scholarly type, but in the popular level, when a

Protestant is having an interaction with an Eastern Orthodox gentleman or whoever, they'll say, hey, well, the scripture says, and the

Eastern Orthodox person will say, well, wait a minute, we gave you the scriptures. And usually a Protestant is, and this is something, and perhaps you could agree with this, a lot of Protestant believers are, and myself included to my own shame, we're very ignorant of various important aspects of church history.

I mean, my knowledge of church history goes back from today, all the way back to the

Reformation. And once I go beyond the Reformation a little back, I start getting a little fuzzy on, wait a minute, what did this person teach?

And who is this person? So I would imagine, and I do apologetics, I would imagine the average Christian who doesn't.

How would the Protestant respond to the Eastern Orthodox fellow who says, we gave you the scriptures, and they start quoting the councils and this person, and how would you encourage someone to interact with that claim?

Well, it is true that most Protestants think church history started in 1517. And that, of course, is false.

And the way they speak of these Reformers, you would think you're reading a book, a comic book of superheroes.

And they were not. They were broken men. When Luther started in 1517 with the 95

Theses, Luther was not thinking, it was the farthest thing from Luther's mind that he was going to start a new church, and that he was going to break with Rome.

He believed the Roman Catholic Church was the church of Jesus Christ, even when he pounded that hammer away.

He didn't become a Protestant there and then. But when the Orthodox Church make this claim, and the

Roman Catholic Church make the same claim, my question to them is always this. How would a

Jew living in the third century BC, how would a Jew living in the third century BC know that Isaiah was canonical?

Well, there is no church at that time, obviously. There's nothing in the

Old Testament to suggest that there was a rabbinate, a rabbinical court that determined what was

Scripture. There was no Council of Jamnia in the third century BC. Well, how did the

Jews know that Isaiah and Hosea were canonical? Well, if you read the

New Testament, Jesus understood the tripartite division of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, the

Torah, the Law, the Nevi 'im, the Prophets, and the Ketuvim, the Writings, which he called the

Psalms, the greater part of the Writings. By his time, we know the Hebrew Bible is arranged the way it is today.

And so how would a Jew know that Hosea was canonical in the third century BC? There was no church to tell him that, to guide him, and to show him that.

The people of God received these Scriptures as God's Word. They were confirmatory to their lives.

Roger Beckwith, in his great book, The Canon of the Old Testament and the New Testament Church, does an excellent job of showing how these texts were received as God's Word, not by any council or synagogue, and they were laid up in the temple in the time of Jesus.

So what I would say is this, where's your evidence that—I mean, if the

Orthodox Church gave us the Bible, and the Roman Catholic Church is saying the same thing, you've kind of got a problem, because your

Old Testament canons don't agree. So for example, in the Roman Catholic Church canon, Old Testament, you've got seven extra books.

And in the Orthodox Church canon, you've got the Prayer of Manasseh. You have the 151st

Psalm, so we missed one. So they got the 151st Psalm, and then they've got, of course, 3rd

Maccabees and 4th of Maccabees, all of which are rejected by the Roman Church. So they can't even agree on that.

Now remember, the Orthodox Church is willing to say that the Roman Church is also an ancient church by the

Bishop of Rome. But again, if you guys were like this, at least before 1054, until that final rupture took place,

I mean, why don't your canons agree? Why is there disagreement among the—not the

New Testament, but the Old Testament canon? So it's easy to affirm and state that, to say, yeah, the church gave you the

Bible. You need to show that, prove it. I mean, the Council of Carthage in North Africa accepted 1

Esdras into the Old Testament, but the Council of Trent rejected it. So again, the

Council of Carthage was a local church council. It wasn't ecumenical. But still, you will notice what

Luther said in his famous defense before the Diet of Worms, right? What did he say? He said that my confidence is in the

Word of God, which cannot lie. Popes and councils have been known to contradict each other and have done so.

My conscience is bound to the Word of God, and I will not recant. Unless I'm shown by Scripture or by reason,

I will not recant. So I think the statement—I think they make the assertion,

Eli, they make the assertion, but it's one thing to assert something. It's another thing to prove it.

And so most of the time when I hear them, they're simply saying, oh, the church said it was

Scripture. When? When did it say it was Scripture? The Council of Trent, I could see that, but the

Council of Trent is not considered an ecumenical council by the Orthodox Church because they weren't there.

It was particularly a Roman Catholic council of bishops. So it's basically an assertion,

I believe, without any water. All right. Well, this is definitely good information.

That's a good question to ask with respect to the Old Testament. That's very helpful. Now, when we get back to the title of this episode, is

Eastern Orthodoxy orthodox? And we say in some sense, yes. Okay.

And we would applaud not just the fact that there's a lot that we agree.

We can also applaud the brilliance with which many Eastern Orthodox thinkers have expressed those truths in profound ways, those points of agreement.

But when we get to those disagreements, when we say Eastern Orthodoxy is not orthodox, what are the key central unorthodox elements of the

Eastern Orthodox Church and why are they issues that need to be dealt with apologetically by the

Protestant? Yeah, I think the issue of justification by faith is a big one.

Not that some of them haven't talked about it. They have, but it was never a central issue because justification has forensic ramifications.

And the idea is that the West was more of a judicial... Protestantism as well, right?

We use that language. Which is Western, right? I mean, the East never had a reformation. They didn't even have an enlightenment period, so they never had to deal with these things.

But in the Eastern Church, it's not so much justification, but that is a very important issue because the

Pauline letters, you cannot go through Romans or Galatians without being confronted with the issue of justification.

And also the question of imputation, which is rejected by the Orthodox Church. They don't believe in original sin.

They don't believe that Adam's nature passes on to his progeny, that we are condemned in Adam, that in Adam all die.

The Orthodox Church would say, no, it's not imputation of Adam's depravity.

It's imitation. We're imitating Adam. We're diseased. We're not totally depraved.

So that's very important because the whole idea of imputation means that God has declared all those in Adam to be guilty, but in Christ, he has declared us to be not guilty.

He's justified us by faith. So Orthodoxy has not really done a lot of work in this area.

And this is crucial because when you look at their view of the atonement, it's not so much the atonement to them, the death and resurrection of Christ is the idea that in the incarnation,

God tricked Satan with a bait, and the bait was Christ's humanity. And Satan believed that by destroying the humanity of Christ, he would have frustrated

God's plan. But he didn't know about the resurrection. The resurrection was the surprise, the element of surprise.

And therefore, and it was in many ways, but we agree with that. The West agrees with Christus Victor.

We do believe that Jesus was victorious. It is finished. That's a cry of triumph. But we also believe in penal substitution, that Christ suffered the wrath of God on our behalf.

That view is rejected by the Orthodox Church in general. And so that's a major issue.

The whole idea of praying to the saints for Mary. The interesting thing here is they would say, we don't worship them, we venerate them, which

I think is really a semantic game. The Bible doesn't use those semantic differentiations.

When we say things like to venerate Mary is proskynesis, or it's hyperdulia.

That's not Latria. Latria is adoration of God. But in the New Testament, Old Testament, these words are used interchangeably about the worship of God.

And the arbitrary way that Nicaea 2 separates these words, if you read the document of Nicaea 2, they don't back up those words with any scripture.

It's just an arbitrary statement of we don't worship, we venerate them. Well, here's the point. Think of it this way.

When Paul talks about in 1 Thessalonians 4, he talks about the resurrection of the dead. He tells the

Thessalonians not to be worried about those who've gone before them, who've died in Christ. Now think about this.

In Paul's letters, he always asks for prayers. He talks about, let intercessions be made, let prayers be made.

Wouldn't you think, at least Eli, that in 1 Thessalonians 4, where Paul talks about the departed in Christ, at that point, he could have said, let us call on our brothers who've departed from this world, let us call on them to intercede for us.

He never mentions that. He doesn't mention it in 1 Corinthians 15. He doesn't mention it in 1

Thessalonians 4. And yet that would have been the most opportune moment for Paul to mention the intercessory prayer of the dead saints.

So that's a major problem. Why do we need to ask the saints intercession when we have a great high priest, whoever liveth to make intercession for the saints, and who is the mediator?

Now we're not saying, and I'm sure Eli, you agree with me, we're not saying you can't ask a brother or sister. You just said about your

COVID experience, we ask our brothers and sisters to intercede, to pray for you. That's fine.

But there are no cases in the New Testament, or the Old Testament for that matter, where deceased saints are called upon to make intercession for the living.

And so when we go to Scripture, we don't see that anywhere in Scripture.

And isn't it very odd that all of a sudden, in the following centuries, this idea pops up, and then there's purgatory.

Now the Orthodox Church doesn't believe in purgatory, but the Western Church, the Roman Catholic Church does.

But it's all based on this idea that they can hear you. So Peter can hear you,

Mary can hear your prayers, which would almost imply that they have this omnipresence attribute where they can be anywhere to hear these prayers.

So this is why this stuff, it doesn't jive with Scripture.

And that is why I think Protestants have historically rejected it. Okay, that's very helpful.

Now my last question for you before we get into some of these questions, and they're not too many questions, but there are a lot of people listening in.

It might be because a lot of people don't know enough about Eastern Orthodoxy. But if the folks do have questions, please send them in.

I'm going to ask the last question here. So suppose someone's listening to this discussion, and they're saying, you know,

I have some Eastern Orthodox friends, or I have a Protestant friend who is kind of flirting with the idea of converting to Eastern Orthodoxy.

What resources would you suggest someone read, study, so that they can get a firm grasp on this position and be in a better position to kind of share the gospel, the biblical gospel with those folks?

Yeah, I think one of the, and I think I saw this on your Facebook too, Eli, but Through Western Eyes by Robert Latham is a great book, and I think you have it there in your library somewhere.

Through Western Eyes, that's it. That's a great book. It's written from a

Reformed perspective, and Dr. Latham is a fair scholar. I've read that book, actually, and his treatment of Orthodoxy, and I've studied

Orthodoxy at university under an Orthodox, well, a new

Uniate, which is actually an Orthodox priest that acknowledges the Bishop of Rome as the leader.

So they're seen as schismatics by the Orthodox. They're called

Uniate. They've united with Rome. Anyway, but the Orthodox liturgy is the same. So anyway,

I studied with him, and I can say that Latham is very fair in his treatment.

There's another book, and I don't have it here. It's downstairs, but there's another book called Four Perspectives on the

Orthodox Church. It's one of the counterpoints, Zondervan. Yeah, the Zondervan series, and I think

Michael Horton represents the Reformed side, and he does a very good, adequate job in responding and engaging with his

Orthodox interlocutors. So the Four Views on Orthodoxy, Robert Latham's through Western eyes, has very good material there.

I think the website, monergism .com, also has a very good section on Orthodoxy as well.

If you want an Orthodox source, the Orthodox Church by Timothy Ware is still considered, even though it was written in the 60s, it's still considered a straightforward book, a very good book on the subject.

So what I would say is get educated, look at the arguments, and at the end of the day, what

I always challenge my friends is to think this. Is Christ enough? Is Christ sufficient?

And that's not to do a disservice to the church, but at the end of the day, is Christ enough to redeem you?

Do you need to kiss icons, venerate icons, baptize people three times in the name of each person of the

Trinity, and so forth? At the end of the day, is Christ enough? And I always point to the thief on the cross in Luke 23, where this man had nothing to show for, he was guilty of sin, he rightfully deserved his punishment, but on his deathbed, if you will, of the cross, he looks to Christ, admits he's a sinner, knows that he's worthy of death, looks to Christ and tells him to remember him, and Christ promises them paradise the very same day, without any works, no baptism, no sacraments, no mysteries, but faith in Christ alone is what saved them.

And I think at the end of the day is the only reliable thing we have is the Word of God. The Scriptures are

God's eternal Word, the Word of the Lord endures forever, the grass withers, the flower fades, the

Word of God endures forever, and if they do not speak according to this law, Isaiah 20 says, it's because there's no light in them.

Our standard must be the Word of God. The fathers of the church were great men of God, thank

God for them, but they contradicted each other. They also made a lot of mistakes. So the only source that we have that is said to come from the mouth of God, proceeds from the mouth of God, are the

Holy Scriptures, and it's on that we need to take our stand. Yeah, and I'm so glad that it comes back to that firm foundation of God's Word.

When I read the Bible, as you would know, that the theology of Scripture can be very complex and there are some interesting connections between this doctrine and that doctrine, but you really get down to the foundation that there is a profound simplicity to the gospel message that when

I look at religions like the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox perspective, there is this, how can

I say this, all of the extra dross that is added on to the gospel, I think, makes that simple message we find in Scripture obscured.

Yes, I like the way you put that, Eli, because the idea here is the idea of the dross, or think of it as a snowball.

You keep rolling it, and it gets bigger and bigger, and then you make Frosty the snowman, right? So the idea is we want to remove all of that dross, all of that incrustation, and we want to get back to the core.

We want to get back to the source. That's what the Reformers meant by ad fontes, going back to the source.

So we got to get rid of all that, you know, incrustation, right? You want to get to that diamond.

You got to remove all that hard coal around it to get to that precious diamond. So what we want is the precious

Word of God. And the other thing we need to point out is this. In the Orthodox Church, everything primarily is visual.

You walk into an unorthodox church, and you are immediately stunned by the icons, not just the iconostasis at the front of the church that separates the people from the clergy, which, again, there's nothing in the

New Testament that calls for this. We're one in Christ, and if you look at the liturgy, even the structure of the church building, it's all based on the

Old Testament tabernacle, the temple, the dividing, you know, the holy place, the holy of holies from the holy place.

I don't think Paul, Peter, John, James spoke at all about this as being part of the church. This developed over centuries.

So what I'm saying is this. In the Orthodox Church, everything is primarily visual. So you walk in, you look up, you've got these domes, you've got

Christos Pantocrator, Christ the Almighty, and then you see the front, you've got the

Theotokos, the Madonna and Child, you've got Christ holding the Book of Life, and then you've got the angel

Gabriel, the angel. Everything is visual. Same with the Roman Church. Everything is visual.

It's all directed to the altar at the front. Now you go into some Protestant churches, and they look pretty bland, they're pretty boring, right?

And what is this? Depending on a genuine Protestant church. Some of them are like auditoriums, you know.

Even Episcopalian churches, you know, they're very ornate, you know, Church of England. But here's the difference.

The focal point of God's saving message is not the visual, it's the audible. And so in Romans 10, 17, what did

Paul say? Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ, or the Word of God.

So God has determined that the means by which He will save people is by the boring preaching of the

Word. That's right. The old geezer at the top there who's giving you the Gospel, that is the foolishness of God that is greater than the foolishness of the world.

That is the power of God described in the world's foolishness. So when you think about it, the means by which the

Gospel is spread, and by which God saves His people, is that His sheep will hear

His voice, and they will come to Him. It's not the visual. It's not the aesthetics, which really, when you think about it, the

Orthodox Church is very aesthetic. The priestly vestments, you know, the bishops' crown and miter, and the icons painted on the walls, and so forth.

The Gospel is preached by the hearing. It's audible.

And so the focus is on Scripture, not on the raising of the

Eucharist in the Roman Catholic Church, or the bells and the smokes, you know, the smokes and the bells and all that.

So let's keep it simple. Let's not multiply, you know, let's not do the

Occam's Razor. Let's slice off all that dross, Eli. Let's get back to the basics, and let's realize that it is the preaching of the

Gospel that is power to those who are being saved. It is foolishness to those who are being lost, who are perishing.

And that, once again, the means by which faith comes is not by the visual. It's by the hearing, the hearing of God's Word.

Not the hearing of the elders or the church fathers, but the hearing of God's Word. Amen. Thank you for that.

And just a quick encouragement. It can be very difficult dealing with Eastern Orthodox folks, and in defense of Eastern Orthodox folks, it can be difficult talking to Protestants.

I mean, we believe that we have a true position, and I do want to encourage people always, I know it's kind of a cliche at this point, because those who do apologetics have heard 1

Peter 3, verse 15, a million times, but always remember that we are to interact with Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, atheists,

Mormons, Jehovah's Witness, with gentleness and respect, but with a firm conviction, standing on the truth of God's Word, which is our authority.

So thank you so much. Eli, if I can just put a plug for my new book. Absolutely. It's kind of related to our topic, but my new book just came out a couple of days ago.

It's called Early Christian Creeds and Hymns, What the Earliest Christians Believed in Word and Song, an Exegetical Theological Study.

This book, and in my book, I address the issue of the creeds as well. I go through the

Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed. I go back to some of the Fathers as well. Can we sneak a peek of the table of contents real quick?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The table of contents. Sometimes that's the main thing that will make someone purchase a book is to, oh, wait a minute, there's a chapter.

It continues on the other side, but this is some of the things that are covered there. Let's see.

There we go. So let me just take that back a bit. So what are creeds?

I divide it into creeds and hymns. What are creeds? The Old Testament is the forerunner of Christian creeds, creeds in the

New Testament, and then I deal with a number of creeds in the New Testament. Jesus is

Lord, Jesus is Christ, the Christian Shema in 1 Corinthians, sorry, the Earliest Christian Creed in 1

Corinthians 15, and then I deal with some of the hymns. A lot of Christians don't know this, but there are hymns embedded in the

New Testament text. There are creeds embedded in there, and notice we didn't have to wait.

One of the points I make in my book, Elias, we didn't have to wait till Nicaea to give us creeds.

We didn't have to wait till the Apostles' Creed. The New Testament already contains creeds. The Old Testament, you know, the

Shema, hero Israel, the Lord of God, the Lord is one. The Bible contains creeds. They're already there, and the councils of the church simply, let's say, took them and magnified them.

They elaborated, they expanded them, but the idea of Christ being one with the Father, homoousios, as Nicaea says.

By the way, homoousios is nowhere found in the Bible. It's not even found in the Greek New Testament, but it's implied in Hebrews 1 .3

that he is of the exact imprint, the exact imprint of the nature of God, of the Father. And so I deal with that creed in that book.

What I'll do, Eli, I'll send you the link to the publisher. It's on sale right now. They can get it on Amazon as well.

ISAAC ZABLOCKI Is it available on Kindle as well? Some people are... PASTOR MIKE Not yet. It just, it was just released.

So I'm assuming it will be put on Kindle, but I'll send you the link to the publisher.

And so the endorsements are, you know, we've got Robert Plummer from Southern Baptist.

He endorsed it. Lydia McGrew, as you probably know, who wrote the book On the Eye of the Beholder.

Dr. Pierre Constant from Toronto Baptist Seminary.

And James White wrote the foreword to this book. PASTOR MIKE So yeah, so this book will help you, take you back to the source and show you how the creeds are already formulated in the early

Christian church. And they believe exactly what we believe today about the Lord Jesus. ISAAC ZABLOCKI So what was the title of that book?

PASTOR MIKE Early Christian Creeds and Hymns. ISAAC ZABLOCKI Awesome. PASTOR MIKE Early Christian Creeds and Hymns. ISAAC ZABLOCKI Yeah. PASTOR MIKE At any moment in the future, if you write a book and you want to do a plug or do a show to talk about just the book, you let me know.

I'm more than happy to promote your stuff. PASTOR MIKE Yeah, I'm writing another book, which is more dealing with the current affairs of our world.

It's entitled No King But Christ, the Collapse of World Views, the

Collapse of World Views in Light of the Christian World Views, something along those lines. But I always know when it's ready.

ISAAC ZABLOCKI Yeah, absolutely. And we can get together. Maybe we'll just talk about the book. I think that's, well, I want more of your stuff out there.

You're super helpful and down to earth and fun to listen to. There's a gentleman here, Aurelio says,

Dr. Tony Costa is quickly becoming one of my favorite theologians. PASTOR MIKE Right, thank you. ISAAC ZABLOCKI And I agree.

You are definitely up there and an excellent communicator. So let's take a few minutes and take some questions.

I've got to go through some of the comments here, but there are some questions. If I do skip a question,

I do apologize. I'm not trying to avoid you. Some people think

I'm doing that when I miss their question here. Let's see here. There's actually some funny comments.

I won't read them, though, but let's see here. Just give me a moment.

I got to kind of scroll through. OK, there.

OK, so here's a question from Ax2 Pentecostal.

Question, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics like to use 2 Thessalonians 2 .15 to try and disprove sola scriptura.

How would you respond to their claim when they use that particular text? PASTOR MIKE Yeah, those are the favorite go -to texts that they go to to show that tradition was part of the church's early authority.

Well, if you allow the scripture to speak for itself, what Paul is saying is the word tradition there is the word that we get.

It's a technical word that means the passing on of oral information. So instead of writing it down, you pass it down orally.

Well, Paul says, don't forget the traditions that we deliver to you. But then he says, whether in oral or written form.

Well, obviously, what Paul had delivered to them was the gospel. And the gospel was communicated first, obviously, orally.

You preach the gospel. Paul planted a church in Thessalonica. And then when he left, he wrote to them.

He says, remember what I said to you while I was still with you. And remember what I delivered to you.

That's what the word tradition there means, something that's been delivered. What I delivered to you, either in word or in writing.

And notice it's in the past tense. Notice Paul doesn't say this is an ongoing tradition that will remain in the church.

He doesn't call this a perpetual line that will continue throughout church history. He uses the past tense.

It's something that he had already given to them. And so what had he given to them? And what did he preach? Well, we know what

Paul preached. He said, I care to know nothing among you, but Christ and Him crucified. So we know whatever tradition

Paul's talking about is the gospel and the gospel message. So to say that this is talking about the

Marian dogmas, or it's talking about veneration, you know, kissing icons inside the church, that is serious exegesis.

You're reading into the scripture what is clearly not there. So knowing what we know about the

Pauline letters, whatever he delivered to them in word, he confirmed in his writings. And what we know from his writings, it was the gospel that he gave them.

Amen. Thank you for that. Austin Giles asks, at least, I guess he's identifying himself as an

Orthodox Christian, maybe. Orthodox Christian, I do have a good question. However, we'll be the judge of whether that's a good question or not.

Yeah, solitony, solitony. That's right. I do have a good question. However, Jesus constantly relied on scripture, but this would have been the

Septuagint. At what point did the New Testament become scripture? Right.

Well, let me just say something about the Septuagint. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the

Old Testament. And that is the Old Testament version that the Orthodox Church uses today.

The Old Testament version that we use today with the Roman Catholic Church came from the

Masoretic text, which is the Hebrew text. The Hebrew text we have today, which looks like this.

That's the Masoretic text. Okay. So Jerome felt that if anyone knew the

Old Testament, it had to be the Jews, because Romans 3, 4 says, to the Jews, God gave his oracles. If the

Jews don't know what the scriptures are, nobody knows. I'll tell you right now, if they didn't know, nobody knows, because it was to them that God gave his oracles, his word.

They were the ones whom God gave the covenants, the prophets, the revelations, and the Messiah came from them. So just because Jesus used the

Septuagint, the Septuagint was regarded by the Jews just as authoritative as the

Hebrew Bible. Because remember, the people of God were always translating. They didn't have a problem. They weren't

Masoretic text only. They weren't MTO, Masoretic text only, folks, like the KGB only, you know.

If it was good for the Apostle Paul, the King James is good for me. That's not what they were like. They believed that there was the

Hebrew text. They believed in the Greek Septuagint. And then later you had the Targums, the Aramaic commentaries on the

Bible. So this is really—I don't know what the argument is being made here.

We would agree with you that he did quote from the Septuagint. There are some quotations from the

Masoretic text. For example, Matthew wrote the gospel to the Jews. In Matthew's gospel, some of his quotations are from the

Masoretic text. And Paul in the pastoral letters also makes some quotations from the

Masoretic text. Now the question is, when did the New Testament become Scripture? We do know that in the

New Testament itself, there is self -attestation that some of the New Testament was already being accepted.

So for example, 2 Peter 3, 16, 17, Peter talks about the letters of Paul.

He says some things are hard to understand in Paul. So if you don't understand Paul, don't feel too bad.

Peter had problems with him too. Peter goes on to say that the unstable, the false teachers distort

Paul's letters as they do the other Scriptures. Peter is placing Paul's letters in the category of Scripture.

And then in 1 Timothy 5, 18, Paul quotes from the Scripture and he quotes the first from Deuteronomy 25, verse 4 about not muzzling the ox,

I believe it is, something along those lines. And the second one is, the laborer is worthy of his hire.

I wonder where that comes from. That's a quote from Luke 10, verse 7, right out of the gospel of Luke. Well, that's not surprising because Luke was

Paul's missionary partner. Of course, he would know about Luke's gospel. Luke was his buddy, his missionary buddy.

So at least we know some of the gospel, the Eucharistic sayings of Jesus. Paul says, what

I received, I pass to you. And the night he was betrayed, he took bread. And Paul's rendition of the

Lord's Supper matches the one in Luke. Again, surprise, surprise. So the

New Testament canon, by the end of the first century, 22 of the

New Testament books were there. They're already accepted. There were five outstanding books. There was questions about Hebrews, James, Revelation, 2

John, actually also 3 John, and also 2 Peter. And so there was some debate over that, and rightfully so.

They wanted to know, did this come from the apostles? Is this consistent? Hebrews was accepted by the

Eastern Church eventually. Then the West accepted it. Revelation was a little suspicious.

You know, that apocryphal language. You know, I mean, thank God. We wouldn't have a Left Behind series if we didn't have the book.

And so eventually these books were accepted. Now, a lot of people say Athanasius is the guy who pinpointed the completion of the canon in 397.

That's not true. If you go to the third century, the early, mid 200s, origin in his commentary on Joshua already produced for us the canon of the

New Testament as we have it today. This was over 100 years before Athanasius. And guess what,

Eli? Origin didn't include the apocrypha. Origin didn't believe the apocrypha.

So if you notice, anybody who knew anything about the Hebrew Masoretic text and studied

Hebrew, they were the ones who fought against the inclusion of the apocrypha. Origin, Jerome, Melito of Sardis.

It's not surprising. These guys says it doesn't belong in scripture. You know why? Because they read the

Hebrew Bible, they learned the Hebrew Bible, and they knew the Hebrews didn't have it. So yeah, so the

New Testament, 22 of its books was already in by the end of the first century, and the other five were eventually brought in in the second century.

All right. Excellent. Excellent information there. Dylan says in a passing comment, but perhaps you could address this.

He says, I'd find it incredible to argue that the early church was some form of proto -Protestant. That's just poor history.

How would you respond to something like that? Yeah, well, I mean, again, I mean, it'd be the same thing as saying that it would be incredible to argue that the early church was proto -Orthodox or proto -Roman

Catholic. We need to look at the New Testament documents for themselves as neutral as we can.

Does the New Testament document say anything about venerating icons or pictures of Mary or the saint?

Nothing. Does it say anything about priestly vestments? Nothing. Does it say anything about in the church, we have to have the separation of the clergy from the laity?

Nothing. In fact, Hebrew says that was all done away with in Christ. There is no more.

The Holy of Holies is the very presence of God in heaven. So, I mean,

I respect this gentleman's statement here, but the only way we're going to know what is proto, proto means first, if we really want to know what the first Christians believed, we're stuck with the

New Testament. And so when I look at the New Testament in Acts 2 .42, I see that they were committed to the apostles' teaching.

Where do I find the apostles' teaching? In their letters in the New Testament. Uh, they broke bread.

So they had the Lord's table, supper. Yeah. They also prayed and they had fellowship. That sounds a lot like what

Protestants do. And then when you think about the fact that, um, that the apostles' teaching,

I mean, the apostolic succession. I mean, I believe in apostolic succession, but what I mean by apostolic succession is that the apostolic succession is right here.

Here's the apostolic succession right here, right here. It's not, you know, it's not

Theodosius the first and the fourth and the fifth and you know, Sophronius, this guy.

And no, it's not Pope Pius XII or, or Pope Frankie in Rome. The apostolic succession is right here.

I have the words of Peter. I have the words of Paul. I have the words of John. I have the words of James. These are their inspired words, not what somebody said.

Oh, my, my bishop goes back to St. Andrew or St. Philip. So really, uh, why go to this idea of apostolic succession chains that incidentally are made by the church of England, by the

Anglicans and the Mormon church also claims to have apostolic succession. When we have the words of the apostles here in Holy Writ, right?

I'd rather go with their words than the words of those who claim that they're descended from them. Oh, me too. Good point there.

Uh, as a question by Sean, uh, he says, uh, how would the reformed respond to the objection about the perspicuity or the, the clarity of scripture?

Um, if I gave a Bible to someone who never heard of Christianity, how would he figure out what is needed? Yeah, I think that that could be answered in the fact that we've had people like that for, for salvation.

There was a not for salvation. Okay. For salvation. Okay. Um, I think John Wycliffe is an example of that.

I think that people who picked up the Bible for the first time, there is no way you can walk away from it without knowing at least three things.

I mean, I know it's going to sound like a child's nursery rhyme, but Jesus loves me. This I know because the

Bible tells me so. And when people like Wycliffe and, and others picked up the Bible for the first time, what they took away from it was

Jesus Christ died for my sins. He rose again from the dead for my salvation. And it's true that the gospel message is so simple that a child can understand it.

It's true. Unless you become like one of these, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Now, perspicuity of scripture doesn't mean that therefore, you know, everything in scripture.

Of course not. There are some, there are some obscure passages like first Peter 3, 18.

What did Jesus do after he died? Did he go to a spirit prison of some sort? Or what exactly is he getting at?

But what we do know is the simplicity of the gospel, John 20, 31. These things have been written that you might believe that Jesus is the

Christ, the son of God. And that by believing, you may have life in his name. That's the gospel message. And that is simple to understand for salvation.

And so God doesn't save us through mysteries, through coded books.

Like, you know, Dresden wrote that the Bible, there's a coded message in here. You can only understand it if you buy.

You know, Hitler's mentioned in Isaiah. No, the Bible is not a crypto magical book that we need to decipher like a

Rubik's cube. The Bible is clear in its main message. And that is, we need a savior. And that savior died for us.

And he rose again from the dead. And Jesus is enough. Jesus is enough. Awesome.

Dr. Bob says, what is the significance of the fall in the East versus the West? The EO conception of ancestral sin denies original guilt.

How does this play into Romans 5? Yeah, the fall in the Eastern church is not really considered this big cataclysmic event that it is in the

West. And so in the East, the idea there is that Adam sinned.

Yes, he did something awful against God. But it wasn't a sin that would plunge his progeny into alienation from God.

In other words, they don't believe in original sin, right? That's one of the reasons, by the way, Eli, they don't accept the

Immaculate Conception of Mary, because the Holy Immaculate Conception of Mary means she was freed from the stain of original sin.

Well, they don't believe in that. So they don't believe in the Immaculate Conception because it necessitates original sin. And therefore, in the

East, the fall is not this horrible thing. I mean, it was bad. Don't get me wrong.

But it's not this cataclysmic thing that the Western church made it out to be. And the problem with Romans 5 is

I really have not found a good commentary or a good treatment by any of the

Eastern theologians on Romans 5. And that's where you got to read Michael Horton in his book,

Four Views of the Orthodox Church, where he challenges his Orthodox interlocutor why they don't face the ramifications of Romans 5.

Romans 5, you got two federal heads. You got Adam, you've got Christ. And in Adam, you die.

In Christ, you're made alive. Sin came into the world through the disobedience of one man and through the obedience of the second man, eternal life and righteousness.

So there's two federal heads there, both representing their people. And if you're in this federal head, you're going to die.

And if you're in this federal head, you're going to live. So you need to be in Adam number two. Adam number one, not good.

Adam number two, you'll be saved, right? I sound a little bit like Shilin there. But the point here is

Orthodoxy has not really dealt with the ramifications of Romans 5. They just don't.

There's not a lot written about Romans 5, Galatians 2. Okay. We have just a few more questions.

I mean, maybe two of them. Someone has a question that's unrelated, but might be interesting to you. I know this is unrelated, but can a reformed theologian like Dr.

Acosta ever review the show The Chosen? They seem to be capitulating to Rome and its theology.

I'm not sure if you've seen that show. I've seen a couple of them. It's worse than this.

It's worse than that. They've actually capitulated to Mormonism. I've done a video. If you go to my channel,

I did a video where I review the director said that he has

Mormons on set, and he's also getting input from the Mormons.

And so the issue here is he actually said that he doesn't see much of a difference between the

Jesus of Mormonism and the Jesus of the Bible, which I almost fell off my chair when I heard that.

And so what I did was I reviewed a video that he had with, I forgot her name now. She's a Christian sister who was interviewing him, and she was very concerned about these statements that he was making to the effect that Mormons are pretty much

Christians, that there's really nothing horrendous about their Christology.

So I'm not surprised if they're capitulating to Rome. They're even capitulating to Mormonism. So if you got

Mormons on site and giving you some advice on the director, giving advice of the director, that's not good.

All right. Thank you for that. Someone makes a comment here that might be relevant to something you said. Someone says, I don't think the

East is unified on original sin. So I guess the popular notion is that Eastern Orthodox folks reject original sin.

I suppose the assumption here is, well, they're not unified on that. Can you speak to that? Yeah, well, officially, officially, they reject original sin.

They don't acknowledge it. The Uniate, however, that is the Orthodox churches in the 17th century that join fellowship with Rome, they came under Rome's leadership.

So they acknowledge the Bishop of Rome as their leader. They have accepted original sin. And that's simply because they've accepted the

Bishop of Rome. But as far as I know, the Orthodox Church in general, and I think

I would throw the, we didn't get a chance to talk about the Oriental Orthodox churches like the Copts and the

Syrians and the Armenians. Not the Armenians. Not the Armenians. The Armenians, which are a people group, the

Armenians, the Syrians, even in India too, and the Copts in Egypt, the

Byzantine church rejected them as heretics because they refused to acknowledge the

Council of Chalcedon and they were accused of being monophysites, only believing Jesus had one nature.

So that's, I guess, a discussion for another day. But they rejected as well. So the concept of the original sin is not there.

They blame Augustine for this. They say Augustine is the guy who brought in this whole original sin business.

But Augustine was simply reading Romans 5. Okay. Very good. This is the last question,

Dr. Costa, you're doing excellent. This discussion is chock -load filled with information that is useful for folks.

So if you are coming in late and just catching the tail end of this discussion, I know we've been going an hour and 44 minutes, but I highly recommend you go back and listen.

Dr. Tony Costa has given us a lot of information to mull over and to use in our individual context.

So here's the final question I'm taking here. And someone is asking, why do you reject the essence energy distinction?

Well, to me, I don't have a problem if we understand the idea of the ontological

Trinity, the very essence and nature of God, and the economical Trinity being the way

God acts out in his redemptive purposes towards his people. So if we understand essence and energy in that context,

I wouldn't have a problem with it. It's just that a lot of folks, I mean,

Gregory Apollinus was one of the spearheads of this idea. And of course, he was part of the mystical school or the mystical movement, if you will, within the

Orthodox Church. I don't have a problem with it as long as we understand what do they mean by the energies?

What do they mean by the essence? One critique of the Orthodox Church is that God's essence becomes so transcendent that it almost becomes unknowable.

And so there's a bit of Neoplatonic thinking there, like Plotinus. If you read Plotinus, Plotinus says the one is unknowable, the one is indescribable, and so forth.

But I think Deuteronomy 29, 29 gives us a very good balance here, right? When it says, the secret things belong to the

Lord our God, the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever. And so there are secret things, right?

I don't know if you ever saw that movie, I think it was late 90s, Eli, or I don't know, maybe you're just a kid, but maybe that was the late 90s or early 2000s.

I was in high school. Okay, okay. I'm only 39, man, I'm not that old.

Okay, I'm just feeling my age. But you remember that movie, Hidden Dragons? And was it Hidden Dragons?

Oh yeah, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Yeah, yeah. And you ever notice in that movie, you never saw the dragons and the tigers because they were hidden and crouching.

That's why you never saw them. But in this theology, the idea is that, you know, look,

God's secrets are hidden from us. So his decrees, God's decrees are hidden. There are things we don't know and we will never know, but the things that are revealed belong to us.

So the only thing we can know of God is what God has revealed. If God did not reveal himself, which is an act of grace, amazing grace, if God did not see fit to reveal himself, we would know absolutely nothing and we would have no transcendental argument if God did not speak his word into us or speak it to us.

And so, as I pointed out, I mean, the whole concept of the transcendental argument, the presuppositionalism is the basis of truth and so forth.

Well, truth rests in God, but that truth is communicated by word, right?

One of the persons of the Trinity is called the Word, the one who reveals and explains God to us and so forth.

So if energies and essence and energies are used in that context, then

I wouldn't have a problem with it. It's just that we want to know what our neighbor is saying on the other side.

We want to make sure we're at the same table, we're understanding the same words. And that's why

I appreciate the fact, Eli, you first brought up the idea that we need to know what we mean by our terminology.

Terminology is, a doctor that doesn't know the difference between appendicitis and tonsillitis, you're in big trouble.

If you go in with an appendicitis and he takes your tonsils out, you're in trouble. So words have meaning and they are vitally important.

Okay. And if it's okay, Dr. Costa, I would like to fit in this one question, since the primary focus of my show is presuppositional apologetics, and this is very much related to that sort of line of reasoning.

So, and this will be the last one. So if anyone shows, you know, puts a question and I'm not going to take another one after this,

I do apologize. You know, Dr. Costa has been on marathon. This is his second show.

How long did the previous one go? Did it go long? I think it was just under an hour. Okay. See, I'm the one who steals.

Look at that. We're in the Eastern time zone. So I'm helping you accrue good work so that you go to heaven.

That's right. I'm getting good merits. So that's just the thesaurus meritorium. So you're dispensing grace.

That's right. That's right. Wow. That went heretical real quick. All right. So here's the question. So given that interpretation is theory laden, this implies that your interpretation of scripture relies on an interpretive tradition.

Does this not undermine the perspicuity, the clarity of scripture?

That is a very good question. It deals with presuppositions and paradigms and things like that. Well, I think that every theory is interpretation laden.

I mean, every theory. And I don't think theology is an exception, but I think we need to,

I mean, the word interpret comes from the word that means to read out, right? The word hermeneutics is the science of interpretation.

So what I would say is, yes, of course, it's theory laden.

Absolutely. No doubt about it. But what I think we need to do is we need to show whether our interpretation meets the facts.

Does it back up? Is it backed up by the grammar of a given text that we're using? Does it line up with the thought of the author?

Does it line up with, is it consistent with the text from which it comes from?

I mean, anyone, you know, people always say, well, that's your interpretation. But everything is interpreted.

I mean, even John 1, 18, it says that no one has seen God at any time.

There's that hidden God thing again, the deus absconditus, but the only begotten

God, God, the only one, the monogamous deus, who is in the bosom of the Father, it says he has interpreted him.

He has exegeted him, literally exegeted him. And so the idea here is that how did

Jesus interpret the Father? Well, he interpreted him by word, right? By action, by doing the works of the

Father, by speaking the words of the Father, speaking those words in a context. Jesus didn't just go around, you know, speaking gibberish.

He spoke words in context. And so what I would say is that everything is interpreted and everything is, yes, we all have biases.

I've met people who say, well, you know, you're biased. And I say, well, so are you? And he says, no,

I'm not. Well, the person who says he doesn't have a bias, that's his bias. So at the end of the day, I think what we need to do is we need to look at our theories and see whether or not our interpretations are being faithful to the text.

Sure. And that's the only way we're going to be able to figure that out is deal with what we have and does the evidence support the theory that I'm holding?

Is it presuppositional? Is this the idea that God exists? Well, Genesis 1 .1, if there was ever a presuppositional statement,

Genesis 1 .1, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. That's how it starts. You start with God and everything else flows down from him.

Sure, sure. And so, yeah. I think, Dr. Costa, it is a bad argument against the perspicuity of Scripture that people have interpretation.

So that the existence of multiple interpretation does not entail that, therefore, the correct interpretation is impossible to get at, right?

That's correct. That's right. There is an elementary presupposition that we make, namely, that language is sufficient for communicating truth.

And if the Bible is communicated to us via language, then it's sufficient.

We can use tools of interpretation, right? Even though we're using frameworks and paradigms, we can use language and get at the meaning using hermeneutical principles and things like that.

That is a presupposition that if rejected, you fall into a reductio ad absurdum.

So if someone says, well, you know, words have to be interpreted, and so we really can't know what words mean. Okay, well, you just use words to convey that.

So the presupposition there is that words have meaning. And if words have meaning, then we can know what they mean.

Sorry. So yeah, yeah. And the very important words have meaning is a presupposition.

That's right. That's right. It's like the person who says there's no such thing as truth. Is that true?

That's right. Is that statement true that you just made? So it's like the person sitting on a branch and sawing off the branch while they're saying,

I'm not sitting on a branch. Appealing to church authority, infallible authority does not help you either.

That's right. The authoritative interpretation of the church requires language to convey.

And how do you interpret that language? Yeah. Either the scripture is self -attesting or the interpretation of the church is self -attesting.

Right. Right. So that's an important thing to keep in mind. And you end up going in circles. That's what happens.

You end up with a circle argument. And whose circle saves rationality? This is where you get into the whole transcendental element.

Is it the circle that relies on the authority of God's word and God's word alone? Or is it the circle that relies on a tradition that is required for interpreting scripture?

And you have this vicious circularity that makes that kind of circle fallacious.

Yeah. Just look at if you have a gerbil or a hamster, just watch him on his wheel. That's what it looks like. You just keep running and getting nowhere.

That's right. That's right. Well, Dr. Costa, thank you so much. This has been, I've learned a lot just listening to you.

And I'm sure folks gotten a lot of comments here that I have not read. Folks have been speaking very positively about this discussion.

They're learning a lot. So thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, please go over to Tony Costa's YouTube channel and follow his content.

He does interviews as well and teachings. It's definitely, if you've enjoyed what he's shared here, you definitely will enjoy his content and check out his book that's available on Amazon, right?

Yep. Amazon. Well, thank you so much, guys. I'm glad to be back and I'm feeling better.

Our next episode, we'll be doing a part two with the debate between Pastor Sean Cole and Layton Flowers.

So we're going to try to continue that. I have to put a new date on that so that we can continue.

But I also will be doing an episode with just myself walking through Greg Bonson's work.

There's a nice outline that summarizes the presuppositional methodology. And I'm going to walk through that and kind of unpack some things for folks who are interested in the apologetic methodology stuff.

Well, thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Dr. Tony Costa. Until next time, take care. God bless. Bye -bye.