A Respectful Response to Hank Hanegraaff with Dr. Tony Costa

All right, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today we have a very, very important topic to cover. If you guys were able to watch the previous episode just two days ago, I had Hank Hanegraaff on from the Christian Research Institute.

He is the current president of CRI and he is considered the Bible Answer Man, and of course he shook the evangelical world and the Christian world in general, I suppose, with his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy.

And so through various events, I was able to get connected with him. I interviewed Dr. Walter Martins, the founder of CRI, his daughter, Cindy Martin, and she was kind enough to connect me with Hank Hanegraaff.

And so one thing led to another and we were able to have Hank Hanegraaff on to discuss Eastern Orthodoxy, a topic that many are not very familiar with, myself included. I am a seminarian. I do apologetics, as you guys know, but Eastern Orthodoxy is a topic that I haven't really delved into as much as maybe I should.

So I thought that it would be a great idea after having Hank on explaining his view that I would have Dr. Tony Costa back on. He is a scholar, he's Reformed, Protestant through and through. And so I want to be able to help folks get some apologetic application from the discussion that I've had with Hank and getting the perspective of someone who really knows his stuff.

And so I'm looking forward to having a very in-depth discussion and analysis of my discussion with Hank with Dr. Tony Costa. So we're going to be playing the interview I had with Hank and we'll be stopping and pausing and commenting at various places.

So let me just briefly, real quick, introduce Dr. Tony Costa once again. If you don't know who he is, we did have him on a couple of episodes before. We had him on to defend the Five Solas of the Reformation.

And this is such an important topic. And of course, I'll kind of ask my first question to Tony before we get started, why this is such an important question, and then we'll just dive right in. So Dr. Tony Costa has earned his BA and his MA in the study of religion, biblical studies and philosophy from the University of Toronto.

Tony received his PhD in the area of theology and New Testament studies from Radboud, I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that, University in the Netherlands. He's a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Evangelical Theological Society and the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

His area of expertise is biblical and systematic theology, the cults as well. And he also specializes in the area of the New Age movement, comparative world religions with a specialization more specifically in Islam.

Tony is also an ordained minister of the gospel. As a Christian apologist, Dr. Costa gives reasons for the valid belief in Christianity and also advocates the unique claims of Jesus Christ. He also lectures and debates at various universities and colleges on the existence of God, as well as the credibility of the Christian faith.

Tony is a professor of apologetics with the Toronto Baptist Seminary, and he also teaches as an instructor with the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto in the area of New Testament studies.

He serves as an adjunct professor with Heritage College and Seminary in Cambridge, Ontario and Providence Theological Seminary in Franklin, Tennessee. And he's lectured and ministered throughout Canada, the United States and overseas.

He's the author of Worship and the Risen Jesus and the Pauline Letters and the forthcoming book Earliest Christian Creeds and Hymns, What the Earliest Christians Believed in Word and Song with H &E Publishing.

He's also a contributor of scholarly essays in Christian origins and Greco-Roman culture and Christian origins and Hellenistic Judaism and various journals. Tony is happily married to a wonderful wife, Vita, has three children and a grandson and resides in Toronto, Canada.

All right, well, all of that out of the way, he is a very seasoned scholar and quite a gentleman, and I am very excited to have him on. So let me bring Dr. Tony Costa on the screen with me right now. Hello, brother.

How's it going? I'm doing well, Eli. How are you doing tonight? I'm doing very well, and I'm super excited that you've been able to join me again and looking forward to talking about this topic.

Yes, I'd rather be doing this and watching the presidential debates right now. So yes.

Well, while I was at work, I'm a teacher, so I teach middle school and high school, the Bible class there at a Christian private school, and I have to switch between buildings. And as I was switching between buildings, I received a text message from a friend saying that they were looking forward to this discussion more than the presidential debates.

I guess we're trumping Trump on this one. That's right.

Well, we'll see. I think they have a very large viewership. Yes. Before we start playing the discussion I had with Hank Hanegraaff, why don't you give us kind of a brief introduction as to why these issues of the Reformation, because this is going to be very important to this discussion.

I'm not just talking about Eastern Orthodoxy, but we're also coming at it from a uniquely Protestant perspective. Why are these topics so important for people?

They're important because they deal with the gospel. At the heart of all this is the gospel. Remember what Luther said, that it is the doctrine of justification by faith alone that is the hinge upon which the door moves.

In other words, the church stands or falls on this question, how is a sinner made right with a holy God? And so the Apostle Paul made it clear in Galatians 1 -6 -9 that the dividing line is the gospel.

He was not arguing with the Judaizers over the deity of Christ because they agreed with him on that. He didn't argue with them on the sufficiency of Scripture because they agreed with him on that. But the one thing where they were in disagreement was the nature of the gospel.

And Paul says that if you bring a gospel other than the gospel that was preached by the apostles and commissioned by the Lord Jesus Christ, then such a preacher or an angel, if it were to appear and deliver that gospel, would be anathema.

And that word is a really strong word. It's one of the strongest words in the Greek New Testament. It literally means to be under the divine curse of God. And so what is at stake here, Eli, is the gospel.

We're not debating the Trinity. We're not debating the creeds. We agree with the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith. But where the rubber hits the road is on the question of how is a man or a woman made right with God in God's presence?

Mm.

Yeah. So these are very central issues. And again, it is correct to understand that the conflict during the Reformation was between Rome, right, and the Reformers. And so Eastern Orthodox folks tend to distance themselves because historically they were distant from that discussion.

But that doesn't alleviate whether that discussion struck at the heart of the gospel. Just because you are directly related doesn't mean that it's not an important question. And so I think that's still connected.

Now, I have a first question for you before we kind of start the video here. At the beginning of my discussion with Hank, I expressed thanks to him because he was quite generous. He's a very busy guy.

And so I was very happy to have him on. But he actually was okay with me just coming out at the beginning, just sharing my own perspective. And I wanted to hear maybe your thoughts on my opening comments with regards to Rome, Roman Catholicism, having a false gospel.

And respectfully towards Hank, I expressed that Eastern Orthodoxy in its rejection of sola fide, justification by faith alone, that it has a false gospel. And so I appreciated that he was able to allow me to say that without kind of being scared off of the interview or whatever.

But would you agree with my comments there? Or was I off? Do you think this is a central gospel issue? Absolutely.

Again, the gospel is the dividing line. And I think that what you did there, I think, was right. It was commendable. You told him where you stood. You set down your boundaries so that he knew where you were coming from.

Of course, you and I share the conviction that the Church of Rome and the Orthodox Church, and of course, we're going to include the Oriental churches, the Coptic Church and the Syriac and Ethiopian. That didn't get covered yesterday or when you spoke to Hank.

We can talk a little bit about that. But the issue here is that we consider these churches to be apostate churches with some truth in it, whereas those who take the view like Dr. Walter Martin did, that the Orthodox Church is a true church with some false doctrine, or the Roman Catholic Church is a true church with some significant error.

And if you remember, Hank told you that he believes that it has significant error. I think the issue here, once again, is the gospel. How are we made right with God? Again, the Apostle Paul made that the issue, the burning issue in Galatians was, he uses the phrase, the truth of the gospel, twice in that letter.

And in that letter, he writes it with his own hands. If you remember at the end, he says, look with what large letters I write this, write my name. In other words, Paul took it upon himself. He must have been really peeved at what was going on in Galatia, that he wrote the letter himself and wrote it in his own handwriting.

So that was a very disconcerting situation there, and it involved the gospel of grace. All right.

Well, thank you for that. Well, let's jump right in. Just a quick reminder for folks, if you have any questions on this topic, we will leave some time towards the end to take some questions. Of course, if you send in a super chat, it's greatly appreciated.

Your question will be asked first. And hopefully we'll give it a sufficient time for the questions at the end. I was speaking with Dr. Costa before we got started, and he was like, oh, I watched the discussion.

I got over four pages of notes. So it's a good thing that he not, he didn't just listen to it, but he really listened to it intently and came ready to respond. And so we may hopefully, I'm not sure how much we'll get covered here, but we may have to break this up into a two part series.

But I'm sure folks who are taking the time to listen to this, they won't mind that at all. So just a reminder, if you have questions, you can shoot them down. So I'm going to start the discussion. I don't have fancy technology, so I picked a spot where I'm going to start.

And then at any moment, Dr. Costa, you can tell me to stop and we can talk a little bit about the comments that are made. Okay. All right. Let me do this here. Thank the Lord for technology, right? Let's see here.

All right. All right. Folks can see that. And that's a, that's a flattering, flattering pose there. There we go. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to start right now. Let's, let's start this. All right. Well, well, let's jump right in.

What I appreciated about the fact that you agreed to come on was that through our contact, I believe it was Steven. That's where I stand. I think there are some dividing lines. All that to say, I appreciate that.

What is Eastern Orthodoxy?

Well, you know, the first thing I would say, Eli, is that if you look at church history, and a lot of people do not have any kind of working knowledge of church history. There was a time when the church was young.

So there was a time when you had a tradition being passed along from our Lord to the apostles, the apostolic fathers, to the great early church apologists, to the pre, the post-Nicene fathers, and then to every Eucharistic assembly throughout the land.

And this was the one church. And that existed for the first thousand years of church history. So up until 1054, the great schism, as it's called, there was only one church. The great schism divided the East and the West.

And then 500 years later, there was a second great schism. And that schism was between Rome and the Reformers, or the Reformers and Rome. I can stop it there, brother.

Okay. Yeah, let me just say that there are some presuppositions that I think Hank is holding to here. And let me first start off and say that I do appreciate Hank. I thank him for his honesty. I also want to add as well that I found many of his works very helpful.

I still find his work, Christianity in Crisis, to be one of the best works on an expose on the Word of Faith movement. And so that book was very helpful. I just want to state very clearly that I think he's done good work, although I was clearly taken aback when he joined Orthodoxy.

But let me just say a couple of things. There's a number of presuppositions that he makes there, and that is this idea of this tradition, this body of tradition that is being passed on from the Lord to the apostles, to the church fathers.

So there's a presupposition that he's making that there's this separate stream. There's the scriptures that are written, and then there's this unwritten tradition that has been passed on orally from Christ to the apostles, and then to the early church fathers.

Now, there's a problem with that, because he's assuming a lot here. The church fathers clearly distinguished what they said and wrote from what Scripture says. The fathers of the church recognized that they were fallible, and they recognized, as 2 Timothy 3 .16 points out, that all Scripture is theanos nos, that all Scripture is God breathed.

In fact, it's the only literature that is called God breathed. It's the scriptures. And Augustine affirmed that. Athanasius affirmed that. Many of the Eastern fathers, like Basil the Great, affirmed that, that the scriptures are inerrant and they're authoritative, and they should be the judge on what we say, and so forth.

The other thing he also is assuming is this idea of there's this one church. And he's assuming that that one church is the Orthodox church, and that it remained static until there was the great schism in 1054, where in the Orthodox interpretation of things, the West basically broke off from the East.

But the Roman church will say that they rebelled against the authority of the Bishop of Rome, and they broke off. But what he's not saying is that there wasn't just the Orthodox church. There were the Oriental Orthodox churches, like the Coptic church in Egypt, the Copts.

There's the Syriac church in Antioch. There is the Ethiopian Orthodox church. And these churches are very different than the Orthodox church. That is the Byzantine Orthodox church, the Greek Orthodox, the Russian, the Ukrainian.

And what is very interesting about these other churches is that they actually broke after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD over the question of the two natures in Christ, the hypostatic union. And so the Copts and the Syriac and the Ethiopian church, the Armenian Orthodox church, these churches hold to a view that rejects Chalcedon and holds to a view called meaphysitism, which has this idea that Christ has this one nature.

The two natures basically become this unique one nature. And so the church, the Byzantine church and Roman Catholicism and Protestantism rejected that idea. And they still reject this idea. So my whole point is this.

He's assuming way too much here. There are clearly different bodies or denominations, we can call it, that opposed the Greek Orthodox church and the Greek liturgy and so forth. And so there was no just one church until 1054.

And then there was this big split. There were other churches that rejected the authority of Constantinople. And so I think he assumes way too much in that statement.

So he's presenting kind of a very surface level picture of just this, you know, this unargued unanimity that was broken, you know, only later on.

Correct. And so take, for example, Nestorianism. Nestorius broke with the church in the early 5th century, and he was exiled. And now you've got Nestorian churches as well. Some of them went as far away as into India and into Iran.

And then, of course, you've got the whole question of the—I know Hank brought this up—the Filioque controversy. The Filioque controversy was the idea that in the Nicene Creed, it says the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, but then the Western church added, and the Son, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

And so the Byzantian church rejected that and actually called it heretical because the idea is that the creeds cannot be changed. As Hank rightly pointed out, they oppose innovations or any changes. But already in the 6th century, there's tension going on between the Western church and the Eastern church.

So again, I think that Hank is painting this idea of this unanimity, as you pointed out, that simply does not bear true to the facts. Anyone who reads Philip Schaaf, the history of the church, or La Tourette, or any church historian will recognize that he really has painted a very broad picture here.

Now, is it the case, though, that there were people very early on in the church that held to the kind of tradition and its specific status as being equal to Scripture? Did people hold to that during that very early period?

Or do you think that it was—.

Well, there was an idea of—the first person to mention apostolic tradition is Aaronettes, bishop of Lyon in 150 AD. Around 150 AD, he talks about this apostolic tradition, but he does that in his work, I think, Heretics, Heresies.

And in there, he's addressing the Gnostics. And what the Gnostics were doing is they were creating these lists of these leaders or bishops that could be traced back to the apostles. And so because of that, this is where the mono-apescapacy, the idea of the one bishop over the city, this arises around the middle of the 2nd century as a reaction to the Gnostic claims that their bishops could be traced back to the apostles.

And so what Aaronettes does is he first introduces this concept of apostolic tradition. But in that apostolic tradition, he says that we get this from the apostles, that Jesus was 50 years old when he died.

I don't know any scholar—Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant—who holds that Jesus was 50 when he died. I don't think even Hank holds that view. But Aaronettes is saying this in the middle of the 2nd century, and he's doing this to attack the Gnostics.

So already in the middle of the 2nd century, you've got this church father who, again, was very Orthodox in his approach. But unfortunately, he made this outlandish claim that the apostles taught that Jesus was 50 years old.

And this is the first time he mentions apostolic tradition.

And wasn't that based off a particular theological perspective, something to the effect of a recapitulation theory? Yes.

Yes, it was. It was. The idea was that Jesus lived every part of every epoch of the full life. And so 50 was considered that full life that you could achieve. So it was based on this presupposition of this recapitulation, that Jesus Christ was recapitulating not just life, but he was recapitulating time within himself.

But did they hold to this idea that tradition was on the same level with the Scriptures? I don't see that at all. In fact, they clearly distinguish the Scriptures from what they're saying. Now, we need to be careful because we have nothing against tradition.

You and I understand that every church denomination has its traditions. The issue is when those traditions violate Scripture. So in Mark 7, when the Pharisaic traditions violated God's Word, Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites because through their man-made traditions, they were making the commandments of God null and void.

So Jesus clearly opposes tradition that violates Scripture. But in terms of tradition that doesn't violate Scripture, there is no issue there. Even Jesus respected traditions that would not violate Scripture.

We have many examples of that.

Sure. And I think that's very important because it's often in popular conversation, you have presented this false dichotomy. It's Scripture or tradition. You Protestants throw out the other, and that's not the case.

I think that's important to point out. All right, well, let's continue on. And once again, you just let me know when something popped out, or if something pops out to me, I'll stop it.

That took place in the church. But prior to those schisms, the church was young. The church held to the dogmas of the seven ecumenical councils. And that's why oftentimes I say Eastern Orthodoxy is the church of the seven ecumenical councils.

Okay, we can stop there.

Okay. Yeah, he mentioned when the church was young. And he does use the analogy of, you know, that friend of his in India and that river, how he could see the bottom. And he talks about how you want to get to the part where you could see through the water and you could see the bottom of the river.

And he wants to go to when the church is young. But what I was surprised to find is that we know what the church looked like when it was young, and we know where to find the church when it is young. And it's not in the seven ecumenical councils.

It's in the New Testament. And so when we go back to the first century, which is where the church was young, not in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth century. But if we go back to the first century and we go into the New Testament church, what we find is the affirmation of scriptural authority.

We find the position of elders and deacons in the church. We don't find these Marian dogmas taught by Paul or John or James or Peter. I mean, imagine in your mind that when Paul was writing to these churches or when he was establishing churches where he preached, that Paul was walking around in priestly vestments with a turban on his head and there were icons inside these buildings.

That's not what we're talking about. And so if you really want to see what the church was like when she was young, you got the Book of Acts. The Book of Acts shows us what the church looked like when she was young.

And we know what the church looked like. It was an evangelistic movement. It had Jesus Christ as the head of the church, the foundation of the church. And it had the faith once for all delivered to the saints in their possession and so forth.

And when he talks about how the Protestant Reformation kind of muddied the waters. Well, I think the waters were already getting muddied in the second century with the Gnostics and with other heretics.

And so the idea here is once again that he's making this presupposition that the Orthodox church is the church when it was young. Well, that's a bandwagon argument because the Roman Catholic Church says the same thing about itself.

No, no, no. That was us. The Roman Catholic Church was still young in those days.

And the Ethiopian church. The Protestants are like, why don't we just go back to like the earliest documents that we have?

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so when you look at the New Testament and you look at the New Testament documents and you compare them to Orthodox theology today, or you look at the Orthodox liturgy, or you look at their veneration of icons or prayers and invocations to Mary, those things are absolutely absent in the New Testament.

And this whole issue of justification is just swept over. They just go from this idea of creation all the way to theosis, and he talked about how the West was more based on this judicial aspect of God's law.

Well, God's law is judicial by definition, and if you look at the Old Testament and you read Romans 3 and 4 and 5 and 6, there is no way you can get around the fact that Paul uses forensic terminology like justification.

That's a forensic term in the Greek New Testament. So if I want to see what the church is like, then what did the reformers say? The reformers didn't say, let's get back to Augustine. Let's get back to Justin Martyr.

Let's get, they said, ad fontes, back to the scriptures, back to the fountains. In other words, the Reformation was saying, let's go back to these sources from whence we came and let us look at how the church was established and how the church was organized.

And it sure doesn't look like what we see in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Church. Right. And I think that's an important thing.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I have nothing against kind of the, some of the complexity that worship and liturgy has taken shape just in general. I don't see anything wrong with that just in principle, but there's just a simplicity to the New Testament that a lot of these later traditions kind of just add all this unnecessary intricacies that you go back to scripture and it's like, where is all of this?

And why is it almost completely absent? Now you think that there might be allusions to some of these very important things that the church seems to say is as tradition, but not in scripture. So I think that's very, very important.

It's not so much an argument from silence, but the silence is deafening with regards. Very much so.

And that's why they appeal to tradition. They know they need tradition because they know they're not going to get it in the scripture, and so they have to supplement it with tradition. But in order to do that, they need to claim that tradition is equal to scripture.

So there's an implicit denial of sola scriptura. Right, right. Let's continue on.

Thank you for those thoughts. Subtract anything from it. And I think what's also very important to recognize about Eastern Orthodoxy is it's not innovative. It's seeking to perpetuate the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

So again, it's not seeking to be innovative, but perpetuate the faith. And I think this is a very important point because there was a time in which the stream was unpolluted. A friend of mine oftentimes tells the story about when he was a boy in India, he used to climb the bamboo tree and jump into the clear water of a river, being able to see the bottom of that river.

He says he now goes back to that same place, and he can't see the bottom of the river because it's polluted. But if you take a canoe or a kayak and you go to the headwaters or the origin of that river, the waters are still unpolluted.

And that's... I'm going to stop right there. Yeah, I wanted to ask a question. I want to ask a question. When he says the waters were unpolluted, there's a time where the waters were unpolluted. I'm just thinking, weren't the waters polluted from the very beginning?

And so you needed a standard to differentiate the pollution and the purity, right? I mean, that's kind of...

Right, right. Yeah, but when the waters were unpolluted, we could honestly say this was when the Lord ministered in the world and establishing his church and so forth. And then, of course, you get the Judaizers coming in, and then the Gnostics are coming in and so forth.

But what about 1 Corinthians 1, where the apostle Paul is dealing with these schisms in the church, and he's got people saying, I follow Apollo, I follow Paul, I follow Peter, and then there's these super Christians, we follow Christ.

And Paul says, look, is Christ divided? Would Peter die for you? Were you baptized in my name? And so forth. In other words, already from the get-go, you've got these schismatic people in the church in Corinth, and then they're drunk at the Lord's Supper, they come to the Lord's Supper, and they're over-drinking and so forth.

You've already got a church in trouble, and that's because the church is made up of broken people. But again, the presumption that Hank is making is that the water was clear when you had this Orthodox church in place.

And then what muddled it was the Roman Catholic Church, and then the Protestant Reformation. By that time, you couldn't even see clearly through the water. And so there's clearly an anti-Protestant bias here.

The undercurrent, no pun intended, there's an undercurrent of anti-Protestantism here. But if you really want to get back to when the source was clear, that's the New Testament.

All right, thank you. In my estimation, it's a good depiction of what Eastern Orthodoxy is. I mean, from the time of the Reformation, there has been tremendous pollution of the Christian stream.

Okay, we can stop there. Yeah, well, see, I love Hank, and we should continue to pray for him and pray for Sal as well. But this sounds more like the Orthodox Answer Man, not the Bible Answer Man. And I think Dr. Martin may have been quite shocked to find someone in the Orthodox tradition leading his ministry, even though he thought they were a true church with some error in it.

But then again, if you notice, with the Reformation, this is the time when it really got muddled. But yet the model of the Reformation was post-Tenebrous looks. After darkness, light. Not darkness, not pollution, but light.

And so the fact that people could read the Word of God in their own language and that there was revival and Reformation that not only affected Germany, but think of what happened in Switzerland and then in England with John Knox and then later with William Tyndale.

And then, of course, the Puritans coming to America. All of that is a fruit of the Reformation, which has built the West. Really, when you think about it, the West was built on this idea of Reformation and freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and so forth.

So, yeah.

All right, good point there. What happened with respect to Zwingli and Luther? Luther believed in the real presence of Christ. Zwingli believed that Luther's belief in the real presence of Christ constituted bread worship.

So what happened? They had a debate, a very famed debate. And Zwingli asked Luther how Christ could be really present in the Eucharist, in the Thanksgiving meal. He said, how is that possible? And Luther's response was telling, he said, if you can tell me how Christ can be one person with two natures, I'll tell you how Christ can really be present in the Eucharist.

In other words, Luther was saying what the Eastern Orthodox Church has always said, this is a mystery. To use a Latin phrase, it's the mysterium tremendum et fescanans. It's the mystery that causes—. We can pause there.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay. Wow. So again, there's a lot of presupposition going on here. The whole debate was Zwingli and Luther in Marburg, the whole issue that they agreed on all these points on the Reformation. But where they differed was, of course, on the Lord's Supper.

And what Hank is assuming here is that this has always been the view of the church, that the church has always held to this idea of the real presence in the Eucharist, the transubstantiation idea in the Roman Catholic Church.

Here's the problem. The idea of real presence and the idea of the Eucharist are not the same thing, at least in the early periods of the church. They were not seen as the same thing. It later developed into—they merged the two concepts together, right?

And so in the West, you ended up with transubstantiation, which was thanks to, well, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 defined transubstantiation, and then Thomas Aquinas worked it up with Aristotelian categories.

And so Aquinas, who was an Aristotelian theologian as well, scholar, philosopher, he used the whole concept of form and substance and substance and matter and accidents, and through Aristotelian logic, he tried to explain transubstantiation.

So he depends on Greek philosophy to explain this novel idea called transubstantiation. But if you read Augustine, read Augustine's commentary on John, on John 6, where Jesus speaks about himself as the bread of life, etc., he clearly shows us that Jesus is not talking about literal flesh and blood that we're eating.

He clearly says that this is spiritual food. We are eating spiritual food, and that's Christ himself. He offers himself, and he uses the analogy of bread and of blood and flesh and so forth. But clearly, he says it's a spiritual presence that he's talking about.

And so this merger that we're talking about is something that took centuries to develop. And so Zwingli understood this. Zwingli was not some airhead type of reformer. He did his history. He studied history.

Luther, on the other hand, Luther was one of those—I usually use the phrase that Luther had these Roman Klingons, like he had difficulty having this—he still held these Roman ideas like the mass, infant baptism.

Of course, all the magisterial reformers were paedo-baptists. But the point here is that it's not as cut—you know, it's not this clean cut that Hank makes it out to be. Calvin would disagree with Zwingli as well.

And Calvin would say, no, it's a spiritual presence. Whereas Zwingli would say, no, the supper is completely memorial. And Luther held to the view that, well, some—it's come to be known as consubstantiation.

And so, yeah.

But I think it's also important, too, if we are to follow Luther, who held to sola scriptura. Right. Right? Calvin, who held to sola scriptura, and Zwingli, who held to sola scriptura, regardless of their disagreement, to follow the reformed principle would require us to say, well, let's check it with scripture.

So it's irrelevant as to whether—you know, what did Luther believe? What did Calvin believe? You know, some people often bring up, well, you guys, you know, trust Luther. He argued that the book of James didn't belong in the—it's like, well, who cares?

We tested against scripture, you see? So I think there's often appeals to these things, and they don't—people don't remember—they forget, rather, that it's the principle of scripture. We test even them against the word of God.

Correct. Thank God we're not—I mean, even Luther, at the end of his life, went completely anti-Semitic in his diatribe against the Jews. And, of course, you know, Calvin was not responsible. People accuse him of—he's responsible for the burning of Michael Servetus.

Actually, he wasn't. He actually had no say in the matter, other than pleading Servetus to recant. He didn't want to see him burned to death and so forth. But once again, these were not infallible men.

Did God use these crooked sticks to make straight lines? Yeah, he did. And out of Luther and Calvin and Knox and even Wycliffe and Hus and Tyndale, God has reformed his church. He's brought light out of darkness and so forth.

So I think, once again, I think in the words of Shakespeare that Hank protested too much. All right, very good. It's a good transition.

Let's continue. ...yet attracts us. So the church did not innovate early on, but from the time of Zwingli on, there was all kinds of innovations. The stream kept getting more and more polluted. So I like to think of Eastern Orthodoxy as when the church was young.