A Protestant Learns About Orthodoxy From an Orthodox Priest

father paul troubenbach what is orthodoxy okay well that's that's let me give it to you one sentence um all right all right uh we believe that the orthodox church is the church founded on the day of pentecost when the holy spirit descended we trace our roots all the way back there and this means roots in three ways it means roots of administration which is is what's typically you know called apostolic succession it means roots of belief that what the apostles taught and believed we believe and teach today and roots of worship which doesn't just mean what we do in this building it means how we live the christian life and that how the christian life was lived in the first century of the church is how it's lived today it doesn't mean that there can't be growth over time it doesn't mean that you can't explain things more over time or that things can't get more ornate over time but the essence of the worship and beliefs is is the same as was taught by the apostles and the fathers following them so to what degree does ethnicity fit in with orthodox i feel like i whenever i hear about an orthodox church it's greek it's russian where does that come into play yeah so obviously my last name is truman bach i started off in the greek archdiocese and so and i'm married to a romanian so i'm i was father paul truman trumabach with a good german name married to a romanian in the greek archdiocese so you don't need to be greek to be part of the greek orthodox church you don't need to be middle eastern to be in the in the antioquine orthodox church it just so happens that these the churches that were brought by people from their homelands um in our particular parish we do the lord's prayer i think in eight or nine different languages because we have that many ethnicities in here most people though are you know american english speaking and uh so unfortunately with many parishes ethnicity became so much part of their parish that this is where culture was preserved and language was preserved but i think a lot of churches have figured out over time you know it's not really a good recipe for growth and eventually you need to make sure you worship in the language of the people so we do our worship in english again except for the lord's prayer we do it in i think nine different languages but you don't need to be of a particular ethnicity to be a member of any of these orthodox churches does that have to do historically with the reality that the west is a little more insulated i mean the east kind of served us the buffer between islam and europe for all of those centuries and as a result there's a lot more political pressure military pressure on the east and i mean the ottoman occupation lasted in some places in the late 19th century whereas in the west i mean i don't want to say it was the easiest thing ever but maybe the west had it a little bit easier and so it doesn't break up quite as much into those ethnic identifiers as in the east where those little pockets of holding out that remnant is is part of the story is that a fair character yeah this is this is a really good question because this is a a place where misconceptions come in and sometimes people look at these these different jurisdictions or dioceses as we would call them and they think okay well you're placing the ethnicity over over the faith and that's not true at all in fact that's been condemned as a heresy in the church you know we never place the ethnicity over the faith that again you may see expressions of that in individual parishes but if they're doing that this is this is not correct this is not the true gospel um really the reason that you have a serbian orthodox church in a romanian orthodox church in a georgian orthodox church the country not the state and you have all these different things is is for practical reasons you want to make sure that the hierarchy of the church knows the culture and speaks the language of the people and so the the boundaries often match the same boundaries you'll see for the countries but that's not because this is somehow a separate expression of orthodoxy or that we want to be separate from one another so as an example again we all believe the same faith and we worship in the same way there may be slight differences here and there however when we're good friends with the serbian priest here in town with some of the greek priests you know with the russian priests and so sometimes we can celebrate together there are services where we do them all together and all the people will gather at one church and we'll do it all together and that's that's a very normal thing for us to do so linguistically true or false the western catholic church is to latin as the orthodox church is to greek yeah that's that's a difficult one only because uh there was a tradition with roman catholicism for a while that there were sacred languages and you don't worship anything but those things and then of course that opened up and now you know most catholic masses done in america are done in english um we would say this i would say that greek is probably the very best vehicle for the theology of the church i think it was providential that hellenism spread before christ was born and before christianity spread however do we believe that that's a sacred language and you can't worship in the language of the people no you worship in the language of the people as much as possible and uh and we wouldn't separate one from the other we have no problem not only uh translating the hymns and the liturgy and the different services but all the writings of the fathers and everything there's there's no sense that somehow um greek is is a sacred language that must be kept it's it's again it's more about the the minds and the hearts of the people if i am hanging out at a church that says greek orthodox and then i come and hang out with you at a church that says antioch yin i always want to say antioquine but antiochian would be the the correct moniker here am i getting the same religion or are these two different expressions are you guys at odds over some things yeah you're getting again the the same the same basically the same worship practices there may be different emphases you know that that may happen especially with the russians the russians are much more regimented everyone knows exactly where to stand when and and how to move and everything and sometimes we're a little bit looser than that you know but it's the same faith it's the same worship now are different jurisdictions at odds with one another that can certainly happen that can certainly happen over over many things you get uh just as as i mean you read the book of acts nothing was smooth from the beginning and so this has happened in 2000 years of the orthodox church's history you get political issues you also get um again a different emphasis on on what's really important in the faith um in our our particular parish we we really emphasize what has always been emphasized and that's the aesthetic life of the church we we really push fasting we push um frequent confession we push prayers you know set in the home together as a family and individually and we make sure that the ascetic life is is really being lived we make sure that people don't approach communion unless they're properly prepared which means that they have sought and forgiveness and and uh if if they've had any any conflict with somebody that they've they've committed themselves to the fast of the church in most weeks it's wednesday and friday fasting sometimes like in the nativity period before nativity we're fasting for 40 days from from meat and dairy we make sure that they're doing their prayers and they've confessed and you get other churches that other parishes and other jurisdictions where that's not as emphasized so when you are talking about disagreement between one cluster of orthodoxy and another cluster we're not disagreeing about like the essence of the sun we're disagreeing about where do you stand and what color is the napkin that you hold in front like stuff like that how do you properly live the faith and uh it's not even really disagreements about worship it's just this is this is our style this is how we do it so emphasis so not everyone is as into the ascetic monasticism outside the walls maybe even slightly rejectionist at times approach others might do a more one and a half feet in the world kind of approach right okay all right and i think you see those distinctions within catholicism within oh absolutely reformed protestantism center as well okay absolutely what is the very brief version of here is what we believe that you would articulate to a complete outsider to christianity yeah yeah there i don't know if there is a a brief pitch for that it's only 2 000 yeah yeah we would say that that the the nicene cosmopolitan creed uh enshrines the basic beliefs of the orthodox church but the problem you run into that is the same with that is the same problem you run into when looking at the scriptures we can say that we believe in the same 27 books of the new testament but when it comes to reading and interpreting and what those words mean that's that's where we run into a lot of disagreements and a lot of confusion and so the orthodox church um it insists that our understanding needs to be the understanding of the creed as it was written at the time and that that understanding expresses the same faith that the apostles had and taught from pentecost on do you embrace any of the other creeds or is it that nicene is the creed where some other groups will look at two other creeds and they'll say we are creedal in this larger city right right and there are there are other creeds that i think we would we would definitely say we agree with however the nicene cosmopolitan one is the only one that is is recited in within the liturgy what's the primary thrust of nicene theology nicene meaning this is named after the town of nicaea correct modern-day turkey this is where in the early fourth century we had this big get-together of right formerly persecuted bishops and leaders and they were there to work out a problem that had to do with the nature of jesus right right yep arius comes in arius is a is a priest who begins preaching that there was a time when the son of god was not he believed that christ was a was a creature a divine creature to be sure but still still a creature of some sort and the the fathers of the church got together in 325 in nicaea and essentially said this does not express the worship that we have been living and so they began the the writing of the nicene creed that creed then that was the first holy ecumenical synod or ecumenical council at the second council that theology was continued to include more about the holy spirit and so the the nicene creed expresses a belief in a trinitarian god father son and holy spirit it expresses that the son of god is is of one essence which was one of the big sticking points of one essence with father one essence i seem to remember there being some greek term for this thing that's debated lucia lucia this is this is the big question uh saint nicholas of fame was was at that council and if you want to find out when your kids go to santa claus and and uh before crisps you want to find out if this is the right santa claus you ask him homo uscios or homo eusios and if he doesn't know what you're talking about this is not the real it's not yeah that's the key you're not getting your presence just forget it he would know homo of the same substance so that guy that's in the back there that's venerated as people walk into church it's over a syllable that's the real saint nicholas and that's that's the one who believe it or not actually actually punched arius over this i heard a rumor about that yeah arius just wouldn't repent and he thought maybe if i show him how serious this is is that a point of eastern pride or is that a point of okay maybe i mean maybe we don't need to punch people over it you know it's interesting because at the time he was imprisoned for it bishops weren't supposed to strike anybody he was about i mean it seems like a good rule but then many of the other bishops had had dreams in which christ and the theotokos appeared and said saint nicholas didn't do this over anger or or over some sort of sin he did this out of zealous love for the faith and he he realized aries could not be corrected in any other way so he this was the last resort so release him this is a holy bishop okay so i still have questions about the elevator pitch and the core of nicene creedalism but i gotta ask is that precedent setting does that mean that violence is allowed if somebody's wrong enough about theology you know just that theology this this is it's one of those things it's one of the reasons i have the issue with with the question what would jesus do that the realm of possibilities there is is pretty big including making a court of whip you know or a whip of uh hordes and whipping people out of the church including summoning matter from non-matter and i try not to do that too often so no no the that's not precedence i mean it's what it is is hopefully we're humble enough to recognize that saint nicholas was a very very holy man who had you know god's ways are not our ways and he he when saint paul talks about obtaining the mind of christ saint nicholas had had gone through many years of of prayer and ascetic struggle and he knew the mind of christ we we need to be humble enough to recognize we need to be very cautious with that type of stuff and so no don't go around doing that obviously though i mean violence and the church we got a track record if we do this as one big giant family yeah you have protestants in the new world a bit of a track record there you have catholics in the age of exploration and in the age of the dominance of the papacy quite the track record that got that got pretty ugly it as i go through it in my head it seems like orthodoxy was more like the anabaptist kind of on the receiving end of things has that affected the orthodox view of violence in the name of the church yeah i i i'd start by saying i don't think that we've ever had a systematic theology regarding this like you see with roman catholics and the idea of of you know justified war theory and things like that um however you're right i mean you can certainly find your share of of dark history in the orthodox church and the reason for that is we were talking during the church tour about the church triumphant church militants but we also talk about the church as a hospital for the sickness of sin and what do you expect to find in a hospital sick people and so sometimes people abuse that position for the most part though especially in the second millennium especially then orthodoxy has known a lot of suffering and a lot of persecution and we saw it with the ottoman empire and the turks and then as soon as that started to get kind of sorted out then we had the the horrors of communism and hundreds of thousands of dead and uh and many martyrs from that and so orthodoxy is is uh first and foremost i would say it's the suffering faith it uh especially again in the past thousand years it's been pretty constant suffering but that suffering that suffering isn't uh isn't without uh isn't without meaning in a sense if i'm a catholic i just i just have to ask for grace look we kind of ended up in the driver's seat of the state we wielded the sword of the state now from my perspective that's not the best idea other people disagree with me okay cool we can have a conversation about that but the reality is if you end up wielding the sword of the state as the church you're gonna have to develop an ethic of violence and force because you're the one who gets to do it on behalf of society it's going to get weird sure so if i'm hearing you right if we divide the history of orthodoxy in half at the great schism 10 54 is that right then for a thousand years you guys really haven't had to wrestle with that question because you've been in the driver's seat of the state wielding the sword you've been on the receiving end it makes the emphasis on the faith not so much what do we do with power but how do we respond to suffering is that a fair distinction yeah i think it is now some people would object to that and say yeah but what about that first thousand years when you have what's now known as the byzantine empire and the emperor actually plays a role in the liturgy and and you know it goes into the altar and all this different stuff there's there's a big misunderstanding though because even then even then the emperor was seen as serving christ and as soon as he stopped serving christ as soon as he fell into heresy the church stepped in he didn't have authority to do whatever he wanted in the church and he didn't have authority to act however he wanted and so you have you have famous cases where emperors and empresses are very very much slammed slammed by the bishops of the church and sometimes great saints and some great saints really suffered over that but one that crosses the line between east and west becomes the mind would be theodosius being vigorously corrected by ambrose for the incident in the earth yes thessalonica huge one and he humbled himself in that you know it turned out to be a good thing in that case um uh st john chrysostom is also a very famous one where when he starts mocking uh somebody for making a statue of herself in the middle of the of the the city and saying this is vanity she got pretty upset with him eventually he was exiled over it now that has a long history to it and it's an interesting story but it's probably too long for us to talk about right now look it up it's pretty incredible but either way yeah these these lines sometimes became blurred but in the end in the end the this this when the state was considered considered orthodox when it was considered christian it's always a relationship of service first and foremost so it's a really really important fact going into a completely different topic we would say that this is really where rome began to fall away is that the bishop of rome taking the first spot among all the other patriarchates being first among equal we were fine with that but then when rome began wielding power over the other patriarchs when he began not not serving but but but holding up an authority that we would look at as as prideful that's when the split began early on did the east find credible the roman claim that peter received the keys to the kingdom where he dies is where those get handed off that there's some kind of inheritance that works there yeah and so the the objection isn't then to the roman well the western catholic doctrine of apostolic succession through peter per the words of jesus the objection is to how that got wielded yeah that's i'd say actually there's a little bit of both sides of this um i'll start just just to make sure it's clear i've been to two catholic universities there are catholic writers that i read um i i really love to read even some of the some of the more modern uh pope's writings i have very close catholic friends and i really respect their faith um in many respects having said that um i think there's there's been not only a thousand years of unity but a thousand years of separation that's been really significant and obviously this issue of the place of the pope of rome has been a rather large one so this this idea of associating peter specifically with rome is one that that developed over a long period of time and we're talking to the you know the three the 400s the 500s and it takes a long time to develop now it's important we believe that your church have apostolic origins we want to be able to trace our church back to the time of the apostles we think that's an important line and we think that line should be unbroken but when rome began taking peter who we believe was we call him the prince of the apostles we we we believe that he he was he was uh in a sense a leader of the apostles but he was first among equals and we see we see in peter not this this uh idea of directing the other apostles on how to act and what to do and everything but rather as being the first spokesman and the really the first servant of the other apostles which is why this is saints peter and paul we love saint peter and his idea of service so when rome began making these claims that this is this is the seed of peter which which really our argument would be no every every bishop is a successor of in a sense every apostle we wouldn't just constrain peter just to roam i think that's a mistake but when when rome began making more of those claims there was kind of a sense in which all right let's play ball and just just keep things okay because this really hasn't created any issues yet and we'll just kind of go along with it but once that became again this this issue of not only am i one among all the other patriarchates not only not only i'm no longer first among equals i'm actually first over all of you and and this came to a head when when the pope of rome decided to add a word to the to the creed the creed that we were talking about was was written by hundreds of fathers of the church in two holy and economical synonyms and this was a collective mind of the church you know if saint paul had the mind of christ how much more so does the entire church have the mind of christ when when the pope of rome inserted the word filioque which changed the trinitarian theology to say that the holy spirit proceeds not just from the father but from the father and the son the first thought was we don't really like this theology but the second one which was just as important was where do you get where did you get this authority to do this we've always done things together we've done things in what's called a conciliatory manner and we see this in the book of acts and that was the first getting off point historically was and that was the first real assertion yeah it had been happening for a few hundred years by that point you know really in the 700s is where it really started ramping up but again there was this kind of okay let's just keep peace keep peace and then in 1054 that's that's when uh continuous said red flag when the whole church gets together and the mind of the chur of christ is expressed through the church in the creed you can't just come along and change it you're not above the economical synonyms and that's when the pope said no no i'm not i'm not just i'm not just bishop over rome i'm actually bishop over all of you as well well the church had never functioned that way before it had never run that way before and so constantinople said if you believe this you're changing the way we've always done things you've changed the way the apostles did it in the book of acts with the council in jerusalem and so you have changed the faith in doing so you've set yourself outside of the faith you've excommunicated yourself and rome said well if you don't go along with this i'm going to excommunicate you and that's when that split happened well then you have the other patriarchates alexandria antioch and jerusalem and they looked at this and said clearly constant noble's right here clearly they're right and they stuck together some people call that you know the creation of the orthodox church we would say no this was actually the creation of roman catholicism and the creation of the orthodox church was acts and the orthodox church was just continuing on as it always had and so in this the question in my mind is always who changed who changed and and it's very clear rome added the word to the creed and changed the way that it began to function with the entire church and now and ever since in rome you don't have the idea of patriarchates are you still excommunicated by rome or has that been worked out yeah so the the theology or the modern understanding gets a little muddy it depends on who you ask um there there was a a was called a lifting of the anathemas uh between constant noble and rome but the problem is is that constant opal doesn't take as first among equals it doesn't take the place of roman being it can't speak for the entire church and so from the earthworks perspective no those those are still in place and and we are absolutely still separated from one another um okay there is a push for unity but there's a lot of debate about how that unity ought to be pushed and how we ought to try to achieve it i think the language under vatican ii toward me a protestant is separated brethren i think some other catholics would point to trent as being authoritative there and obviously everything's still real hot at the council of trent the 1550s with you know luther and now all of the reformation starting in 1517 and i think the language there is anathema so i guess in that respect we're uh we're floating at the same boat but right did you guys excommunicate them back did you send them a note too yes it was a mutual excommunication okay who shot first tan or greedo oh boy this is going back to the specifics of the history that i haven't looked at in about 10 years um i remember that the papal legates went into the divine liturgy i believe in agia sophia and basically put the papal bull down right on the altar and i don't remember if constantinople then responded or if they had already agreed that rome had excommunicated herself i really don't remember exactly what the order was but it was it was basically at the same time is the point of tension then largely ecclesial how the structure of the church works and where authority comes from because when i hang out with my catholic friends i mean they would take exception to this they'd be you know oh sure they still feel things about that split they still they feel things about anybody who they view as splitting off from the one true holy apostolic church i mean i just respectfully see that and feel very differently about it but theologically is as we've been hanging out and i've been picking your brain both here on camera and just shooting the breeze because we hang out and i like you it doesn't sound that not catholic i mean for that matter it doesn't sound that not missouri synod lutheran i see a lot of overlap in anglican soteriology i mean theology of salvation missouri synod lutheran orthodox catholic there's a there's a lot more overlap there than you get going down the street to the evangelical mega church with the bedazzled jeans and everything and so what would be the points of not ecclesial but theological difference that you might really point to yeah uh there's really quite a few actually and this is this is one of the things that you're right when you first look at it from the outside it does look like there's there's a lot of agreement as you get deeper into it you realize no there are actually a lot of points of contention and the places where we seem to agree we may use the same words but we mean very different things by them and so when we get to the kind of the list that people typically ask for we can talk about people's supremacy the idea that the pope is is the bishop over the entire church we disagree with that and people uh people infallibility we would disagree with that uh they have a theology of purgatory that we don't have they believe in the filioque this trinitarian theology that we disagree with um and then you can get into other issues you can get into the issues uh for instance of um um unmarried clergy we have married clergy although theirs isn't even completely universal that gets no you know muddy waters um there's some allowance for eastern catholicism correct correct and that's surely born out of the traditions that were strong in the east yep prior to ten people and there's there's a lot of bitterness over that over what we would call the eastern catholics uh um uh with how they were created might you know my wife in romania she her her father has told me the history of kind of how some of them were almost forcefully converted so there's still bitterness there um what about icons is that something that you can see eye to eye on or is that different yeah i think theologically we would say we we see eye to eye but again this goes to one of those areas where there's a deeper understanding that's really changed over time in in the west and so their religious art has moved from the theological iconography that you see all around us here and that orthodoxy has preserved and they've gone towards a more uh realistic um kind of renaissance or enlightenment type of view with with statues and and the the the um the deeper meaning behind it isn't always necessarily there but if they've got a painting of saint dominic st dominic isn't in the room it's a painting whereas that's not a painting that's an icon that i'm looking at right there of the great martyr irene like she's she's in the room out of time we wouldn't say this we would say there's an illustration of priest used once i like this a lot where he said he would go he'd go out to the outside of his house and he'd stick his cheek up against the glass and the kids from the inside would go and they'd kiss the kiss his cheek and he'd ask them who did you kiss and they'd say you papa and you'd say but what did your lips touch they'd say glass and he'd say this is the way icons work and this is kind of how we view them we're venerating you know wood and paint but that veneration is passed on to the figure and there's there's a real presence of the figure there that's i've never heard it put that way that's succinct first let's not say i pick up an icon of saint paul and say this is saint paul of course not of course not this is not saint paul but but but this icon somehow is this connecting point between us icons are interesting because they weighed into this the questions of the temporal obviously our experience right now is very linear the western rationalistic protestant mind functions in that very linear way the systematizing of western theology works in this way but the but the greek mind born out of the respectful disagreements and and banter between teacher and student plato and aristotle just seems to have a little different set of questions a little different set of categories but about the relationship between the physical and the abstract and time and what time would do outside of the physical i think that's just a little hard for us to compute right with where we're coming from right west yeah and this this goes back to what we were saying during the tour that the human and finite language just will never be able to truly express the divine and the infinite and this is why most of the fathers of the church didn't do what we would call speculative theology there might be a little here and there but for the most part they responded to heresy and so a heresy would pop up and they'd say all right what we've always done and what we know to be true here now we have to put into words but know that those words are imperfect i mean even with the nicene creed they had to redefine words in ways that they were never defined before because they had no words to properly express what they were trying to say the language would just never really suffice that's why orthodoxy really emphasizes there's this difference between what's called apathetic theology and cataphatic cataphatic to say what god is and apathetic to say what god is not the orthodox church although we use both the emphasis is on apathetic we say mostly what god is not we god is infinite he's not finite he's invisible he's incomprehensible he can't be comprehended why because as soon as you say what god is you have to realize you're using that word with a human concept that won't match the reality of it so saint gregory nancy says he says we need to be careful we shouldn't even call god just because when we say just god's idea of justice and the way he lives it is so beyond any human understanding that our word it it essentially um soils what we're actually trying to say about god and so we have to be supremely careful with our language that's interesting now of course you can't go too far with that because you have to say something but that's why in the scriptures we use a lot of human imagery for god that doesn't necessarily match the reality it matches the human experience of what's happening you know just for instance god who is the same yesterday today and always does he get angry it seems like is he always angry seems like it from exactly is he always angry the fathers used this beautiful image i love this where they say the human heart can be like two substances it can be like clay or like wax put the both of those items out into the midday sun the clay is going to harden but the very same sun beating on the wax is going to soften it and so the clay is going to say boy this is a really oppressive sun and the sun must be angry at me whereas the wax is going to say no this is this is love this is pure love and this is this is kind of how we perceive god this is kind of what's happening with this is uh is we're cautious with our language because our experience really may rely very much on us and what we really want is that word experience we want the experience of god first and foremost and if we have to put into words we will all the way back to that place where we left a pin on the nicene creed and the elevator pitch the elevator pitch to outsiders would be we profess nice in christianity you had a lengthier adjective for the nicene conscious politician because it was completely at the second ecumenical council in constantinople sure okay key components would be god exists eternally in all directions in three persons and the son is eternally coexistent not created correct would you say that is the centerpiece is really nailing the who is jesus that's like the calling card of orthodox theology absolutely yes yeah you in that that's why that's why the creed begins it begins with the father then the son why because you can't go further if you don't have at least that understanding would anybody through history who could rightly say the creed be inside the boundaries of christianity or would a protestant like me that i think i can rightly say the creed i agree with what you say is bible like yep that's that's the new testament or am i saying it in error and therefore with no threat of offending me and therefore i would be outside the boundaries of christianity you guessed it we're gonna do the thing again where i pause a long video and divide it into two parts but i break it right at the moment where i ask the person from another faith tradition that's different from my own whether or not i'm a christian in their eyes and we'll get father paul's answer to that next time around i love this guy i am so impressed with his ability to put a ball in play and bounce it back and forth without getting hackles up he's smart he's gracious he really knows his stuff and i'm gleaning a ton from this i hope you're having fun with it as well the very next video will be the second half of this conversation i know that sometimes it frustrates you that i do this but thank you for your grace and your patience with me because it takes a long time to edit these videos it takes a lot of time and money to go and make these kind of videos and so i want to do a shout out and a thank you to a whole bunch of people who literally are the reason that i can afford to go and do things like this these are the patrons of this channel they're the people who have been supporting this for a long time because they want to see more internet like this happen on the internet and so by name alex dustin van austin aston i hope i'm saying that right buddy gabriel kevin carr stanford brown kelly farrar jonathan paz seth tucker jake steins micah owens tom wilson frank phillips ben latour andrew baldwin christopher eric anders karen m mcrae and mary c thank you you are just a few of the people and some of the most prominent people who have invested in what this thing is about and make it go if you'd like to support the program you can do so for like a buck an episode if you want to it's a really cool platform that enables us to invest in the kind of internet that we want to see in even very small increments so that platform is called patreon.com if you go to patreon.com tmbh you'll figure out how it all works really quickly and again huge thanks to everybody who supports the program to everybody who supported the program for a while and needed to move on to something else thank you to all of you and thank you to those of you who don't want to support things on the internet or who don't want to support this particular thing on the internet i'm still super glad we get to hang out either way it's cool i'm matt this is the 10 minute bible hour let's do this again soon

Channel: Matt Whitman

Views: 361,048

Keywords: Bible, Theology, Study, Matt Whitman, TMBH, No Dumb Questions, Matthew, Jesus

Id: PE9TDX_dqOo

Length: 35min 18sec (2118 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CranesVIII]

I’ve watched a few of these videos lately and Fr. Paul did a great job IMO.

[u/grayutopia]

I’m a Protestant and his videos are what caused me to follow this subreddit. I knew almost nothing about the Orthodox Church before and have found it interesting. I really enjoy church history and Orthodoxy seems to have preserved it

[u/[deleted]]

Hasn't he done Orthodoxy a few times?

[u/FaradaySaint]

There’s two more of these. In the second one, he mentions that he was bombarded by some violent comments, which he recognizes are a small minority of Orthodox Christians. Is that something you guys deal with a lot online?

I’m a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) and we have a similar issue. There is a very militant group on Twitter called DezNat that is unyielding and often aggressive, but that doesn’t reflect the attitudes of the majority of our Church.

[u/Tigerlily2306]

Is this working now? It went private while I was watching earlier.

[u/[deleted]]

Haha Matt from the 10 minute Bible Hour. Watched most of his vids