Is Christ Present in the Eucharist? -Francis Chan, Hank Hanegraaff & KP Yohannan (Hank Unplugged)

lately i've received a lot of criticism and it's it's primarily your faults okay it's over this issue of the eucharist the lord's supper communion you know i had a conversation with you where you were explaining to me you know and hank i mean to me you were the guy i grew up listening to on the radio uh the bible answer man if we have a question about any call any issue we go to you and uh and so when we had we've had discussions over the years and uh uh but then lately we had discussions about communion and you made the comment that for 1500 years no one saw the the communion table as just a piece of bread and a cup that was just a symbol um that everyone saw a real presence of cr and i thought that was a very strong statement and coming from the bible answer man you know i i kind of repeated that uh without quoting you i wish i had quoted you and said this came from hank because then everyone would just say oh stupid gullible francis just believing whatever he hears but i did some research myself and i'm going gosh i think he's right but even a lot of that came out of ukp and and seeing some changes in your life over the years and even you asking me to endorse a book and i'm reading about some of these sacraments and i'm going i don't know if i believe that and so kindly said i i need to research and think this through now as i've been researching i'm a little bit confused the one thing that one way in which i've changed and i know this is i used to look at anyone who saw the bread in the cup as more than the bread and cup i would just label them as catholic and i don't know if it's superstitious but it's almost like silly to me if i'm being honest like uh heretical and now that i'm really looking into it first i'm embarrassed that i haven't really studied what the early church fathers believed about this but the more i study the more i'm confused and going gosh it does seem like there was a prevalent view for many years and so if i'm going to stand opposite to that i better be sure um and you've always challenged me and i i never really took you up on the challenge you always said francis study the first 300 years of church history everything you know is from the last 500 years just what did the early believers do those first few hundred years and i'm like oh that's good that's good but then i never really did it until recently and so it's it's fresh to me and i i just i'd love for you to try to explain that statement unpack it a little bit more for me um and and for you to chime in in your because your love is for church history and it's only recently that i've developed this desire to understand church history more but your words to me were it was the eucharist that caused you to really uh pursue the eastern orthodox um first of all let me say this that i'm here because i hold these two men you francis and you metropolitan johannan i hold both of you in in the highest regard in respect the reason i do is because both of you have demonstrated through the course of your life that you're willing to follow truth wherever it leads and i think that's where we humbly must start in any discussion we must say we're willing to follow truth wherever it leads why because jesus christ is not only the way to the father he is the truth and the light he's truth he's life and therefore we need to be willing to follow our lord jesus christ and then take what arrow whatever arrows come along the way that's just part of the christian life in this world you have trouble take heart i've overcome the world with respect to church history i think that we have to first of all look at the centrality of the church in church history the church was the epicenter of everything it was the epicenter of the universe and why is that it is because paul in his didactic epistle 1st timothy chapter 3 says that the church is the ground and the pillar of truth it is the church if you look at early church history that gave us the bible without the church we would not have the bible people think that the bible fell out of the sky you know many people think that the king james version 1611 is an autograph it fell out of the skies saint paul used yeah exactly but the truth of the matter is there was no bible in the early church in fact the bible was not codified as the 27 books of the new testament canon that we enjoy today until 367 it was it was codified formally by athanasius many letters circulating throughout the churches but formally codified by athanasius and by the way athanasius was the one who fought the aryan heresy he was the one who said athanasius against the world he was willing to stand against the world for the deity of our lord and savior jesus christ so the bible then is codified and it takes centuries quite frankly before those codified books become prevalent in the eucharistic assemblies uh throughout the then known world so you look at many many centuries of church history in which there is no no bible well god has not ceased working he's worked through the church the holy spirit working through the church is continuing to communicate truth the truth not only of scripture but a proper understanding of that scripture and you can kind of get this just by common sense you think for example if i'm a latin living in rome speaking a different language from secular koine greek the the street language of the day it's going to be harder for me to understand what the apostles had in mind than if you are geographically close speaking the same language well you think about the early church you had jesus christ he took 12 men that they should be with him and he communicated truth to them and then they interned to other people you had the apostolic fathers you had the holy fathers and then you had the churches that disseminated throughout the world well the apostolic fathers were not removed from the apostles they were contemporaries of the apostles you think of polycarp you know polycarp famously said 80 in six years i have served him will i now deny the lord who saved me and he went down in flames he was martyred ignatius of antioch they were contemporaries of peter and john now you look at their dissemination of the truths of the church to a next generation the holy fathers and on it goes and the church continues to communicate truth until we have a testament that we can read not only a testament but two testaments the old covenant and the new covenant which aren't qualitatively different because the only reason that the new covenant is better than the old covenant is because the new covenant is the blood of jesus christ which fulfills all the types and shadows that came before and therefore it's better than the blood of bulls and gouts so i i'm laying the groundwork here uh metropolitan johannan and and francis i'm laying the groundwork because it is the church that is the ground and pillar of truth and so we have to look at what did the church do well the early church made not a pulpit but they made the altar the center of worshiping god the early church uniformly believed that when you partook of the eucharist you were partaking of the real presence of christ jesus said this is my body this is my blood uh he wasn't he wasn't speaking metaphorically he said this is my blood this is my body and the disciples took him at his word um if jesus says i am the door we believe that jesus is saying he's the entrance to the kingdom when he said this is my body this is my but this was a hard saying and many left because of it and the contextualization for what jesus is saying about the eucharist you can find throughout the synoptic gospels and the gospel of john so for example you see john speaking of the eucharist in john chapter 6. a lot of people say well john chapter 6 couldn't be talking about the eucharist because it's early on in the gospel but john obviously was going to explain it that way yeah i'd hear you on the radio explaining well so i've made mistakes are you trying to make that point yeah absolutely that's but you know if you really look at the the gospel of john you realize that john wrote thematically he didn't write chronology uh chronologically uh but but this is communicated in john chapter six it's communicated in luke chapter 22. i was just referencing those words of the lord from luke chapter 22 mark chapter 14 matthew chapter 26 verses 26-28 this is a very very important aspect of what christ is communicating is just before it goes into the garden of gethsemane it's just uh uh during that period that judas is going to betray him and so jesus is communicating something of transcendent importance and later on when you have the didactic epistles where the epistles are explaining many things that are going on in the gospels you have paul saying in first corinthians chapter six if you partake of this in an unworthy manner many of you will get sick and many of you will die well a mere remembrance doesn't create that so let me not get too deep into the weeds let me give you just a little bit of a sense of how this developed in the context of church history in the context of church history you have for the first thousand years and i'm going to give this in just rough figures rather than giving dates and and details but roughly speaking for the first thousand years the church was undivided at the table so the statement uh statement that we could demonstrate with fact the statement is that for the first thousand years of church history all christians believed that when they partook of the body of christ they were partaking not of biological energy but zoetic energy you know the word zoe spiritual energy so christ was literally being distributed through their limbs and they were receiving a power that was not merely a power that is human but a power that is divine something transformational was happening within them so that they could go out and transform the world this was the belief of the early church period then you had a great schism that took place between the eastern church and the western church so after a thousand years the church became divided at the table the western church was being influenced by scholasticism by by rationalities by which they wanted to explain everything you had the age of rationalism in which we now have to explain how is it possible that this is truly the body and blood of jesus christ doesn't make any sense so the church is now forced in the epicenter of rationalism to give an explanation for that so what happens you have the church starting to explain it the church trying to do the impossible to take a mystery and put it into words to say what transcep transubstantiation well there's uh you see the accidents but this is really the body and blood of christ all that are left are the accidents the appearance the eastern church never held that position the eastern church always said this is a mystery in fact to use a latin phrase it was called the mysterium tremendous ephiskenons meaning the mystery that causes us to tremble and yet it attracts us so it was considered a mystery in the eastern church it was being explained now after the great schism in terms of rational philosophical terms and the christian faith is not irrational but it transcends all philosophical speculation anyway to get back to now you have an eastern church and a western church divided at the table 500 years later you have another great schism this great schism separates the protestants from rome the reformers from rome this happens in uh the 16th century in 1517 uh with the 95 theses of martin luther he was protesting something and it was the pillaging of the poor by the pope that was the main catalyst for the reformation he was using people like johann tinsel who was selling indulgences as soon as the coin in the coffer rings the soul from purgatory springs he was using that as the basis by which he could raise money for building the basilica at st peters well luther was violently opposed to that and opposed to practices that had encroached upon the medieval catholic church and so there was a great split between the two now let me make one tangential point here but it's an important point probably for further discussion later on and that is many people think that roman catholic roman catholicism and orthodoxy are more closely linked than roman catholicism and protestantism that is not true we often would say that the the roman catholics and and uh the the protestants are like quarreling brothers or sisters a quarreling family because one came out of the other this is the western part of the church well what happened with the reformation again related to the eucharist well luther believed what the eastern church believed with respect to the eucharist and the white reason i can say that is 12 years after the reformation in 1529 there was a a colloquy a debate if you will or discussion between luther and zwingli who was another leader of the reformation uldrick swingley and in that discussion we'll call it the eucharist came up and zwingli asked luther how can you believe that christ is really present in the eucharist that doesn't make any sense luther's response and this is codifying something that could be extrapolated in longer discussion but simply for purposes of communication luther's response was if you can explain to me how christ is one person with two natures i will explain to you how christ can really be present in the eucharist this is a mystery it's an antinomy the antinomy comes all over the place in scripture we believe that god is one in three one god eternally manifested in three persons or three subjects eternally distinct so we believe in one what three who's right that's an intimate it's something that we hold intention it's not a contradiction if we said there's one what and three what's that would be a contradiction there's not a contradiction but it is an antinomy it's something that we hold intention because we cannot as finite human beings comprehend or even apprehend to some degree the ineffable god who is beyond our knowing he is beyond our knowing on the one hand and he's knowable he is ineffable and he came in incarnation so there is another intimate anyway luther held this intention uh he held this as a great mystery well zwingli's response was you know what you believe is bread worship and now you start having the fissuring that takes place in the protestant reformation a break between zwingli and luther and zwingli his followers and the fissuring that took place in the early reformation took the reformation to places that luther could never have envisioned but the biggest thing that happened is zwingli was dwarfed at marburg in terms of the discussion he lost the debate so to speak but he won the war because wingley's view of the eucharist eucharist simply meaning thanksgiving meal the lord taking the cup and giving thanks zwingli's view became the the predominant view of protestantism and still is to this very day in fact malenkthon the disciple of luther philip lengthon who believed in the real presence of christ changed his view to the zwinglian view at first he believed that anyone who did not believe in the real presence of christ ought to be ought to be martyred quite frankly later on he adopted the same view in fact the same words as zwingli did if you believe in the real presence of christ then you have committed uh the sin of of of worshiping bread as a as opposed to worshiping jesus christ so you have this long swath of history first thousand years everyone believed in the real presence of christ we were undivided at the table next 500 years there was some rationalism in explaining what's going on in the west but they still believed in the real presence of christ as as roman catholics do today the protestant reformation began with luther and a belief in the real presence of christ and later on uh devolved in the fissuring that took place within uh within the present reformation so that's kind of a template of what's going on in terms of a historical perspective that's great i mean i'd love for you brother kp to share just your understanding of it because i you know when you challenged me to think about the first 300 years of church history i never really thought about it till later uh until recently where i thought i have this one picture of my walk with the lord means i get alone with the bible have my time with god incredible time with him and most recently just more with my church body and the elders and praying and worshiping and that's all i know i gather on sundays i listen to a sermon i sing these songs but i never really thought if i lived in the first 300 years i would be doing hardly any of that because first i wouldn't have this uh you know this didn't come for centuries later where people would have access to have this time with the lord you know what would worship have looked like for me and the more i study that and the more i think about it it feels like wow what i'm doing now in the year 2020 a lot of it would look so foreign to those early believers but maybe maybe we first start with my understanding of the eucharist for my whole life it has been merely a symbol and to me everything else is heresy and now i'm starting to question that view don't know where i land yet um but i i would just love to hear from you uh you know maybe your understanding of what worship would have looked like back then and how worship looks like for you today what the eucharist would have looked like back then and how the partaking of it looks for you today well i i would begin by saying i'm hang honograph and i we're talking about you yesterday and and yeah i've known you for so long time one of the most amazing things about franciscan which you know it or not i did not know very many people in my entire life that is so desperately and dangerously sincere you are no agenda you know just you're like a little kid you know that just follows the parents and um and you usually do not know the risk you're taking also that is very childlike and i i think hank hanograph i have known him forever like listen to radio first time to meet him yesterday like i couldn't believe i'm you know meeting him in person um i would i would look at this whole thing from a little different angle that is um you know in the gospels we have thousands of people pressing against jesus and a lot of them were sick people but there was one lady who couldn't even be in public because she was an outcast and she came crawling thinking to herself if only i can touch the hem of his garment i'd be healed and she touched the clothes the robe jesus was wearing and also jesus says who touched me and here's a man jesus speaking not god because if if he embrace the powers of being almighty god that he was he didn't need to ask the question he was operating completely under the direction of the father and the disciple said that's a real bummer what's wrong with you everybody's you know pressing you he said no someone touched me and he didn't explain the same thing with the bible you read one bible where there's a thousand pages more than what it says and so the conversation should have been very very long i think in the disciples are confused what on earth is talking about so the lady then comes and says i'm the one. so here is a mystery that is i used to be and i'm still in some ways extremely radical on discipleship movement and what that is taking literally the commands of christ and evangelism and this and that all these things and doing it with my power which paul talks about in philippians 3 i don't want my own righteousness he was a perfect christian by any standard before he embraced christ's lordship but he realized all that is done and nothing if the energy was not the living god behind it so here is my dilemma i surrendered my life to christ when i was eight years old and when i was 16 and half 17 and so hearing george world speak about missions i turned my life over to the lord for the rest of it and i during my college years later i learned you know speed reading which um i don't talk much about it but i used to read five books a week and my head was so full of knowledge like the best lawyer you can find for god but years would go by i find like romans 7 says the the struggle of the dichotomy the separation of my head knowledge and my heart and i began to say god became flesh and he is here and i say he's in me but i i can't see him i can touch him i don't know i my heart longed for understanding and experiences god and um this is when i realized that the when i read through the bible just to find out how god became real for people in the old testament nutrition all that and i realized god both the old testament and new testament or first testament second testament took the senses of human beings of sight hearing and taste and all these and revealed himself god said let my people go from egypt so that they may worship me in the wilderness i mean what is in the wilderness nothing but worship me and then you see the incredible detail explanations or the physical arrangement the length the width the color the way the priest should wear his clothes and and you know aaron's uh sons i mean they were elite they knew god and um you know they were told well you know do you know start the fire for the sensing and in koroke language these boys um errands and so well there's a bummer go all the way to get that fire from the altar no we just strike a match and the fire is fire you know it doesn't matter but god strike them dead you see this very god is the very god we worship today he is so meticulous about the physical reality that represent him and so you know i mean multiplied millions of people listened to me on the radio for now 40 years uh now it's 100 languages and more and i don't have gift of healing never i claimed it and but i used to read bible verses and say this jesus is real he's right there with you you can see him and you talk to him and tell him to heal you and as one lady that we verified she had a uterus taken out in the extreme north in the remote you know tribal community that didn't have anything illiteracy that's all there is and she heard this on the radio and said jesus this man talk about you being the real god would he please do this for me and year later she had a child and when i came to know about i said somebody is trying to trick me and make a joke out of me but then we verified this whole thing and found out that it was true so he sent his word and healed them the scripture says and when you look at the serpent and you believe you shall be healed how do you explain that so the symbol becomes reality when we believe so what is faith faith is not reading bible verses and says okay this is all true faith is engaging our whole emotion mind and being you agree with what god meant you see for example if you now go to my village and say well we want to write a book on kp's life um and where you say oh that's a big trouble 20 hours of flight no i'll just write it and i can research it on a google and all those things and you write the book and somebody read it my contemporary or who knew me and say friends he's crazy that is not true of the what it's all about why because when i grew up in my village until 16 years of my life there there was no roads no electricity and none of those things that you have today and the people who can tell you how i was as a boy growing up in my village you talked to people older than me or my age or who knew me and there was no there's no written explanation about anything but oral communication so when hank hannah craft talked about the lord's supper the holy communion i mean they were nearly 100 extreme cults in the first century against the church what sustained the church it was not the new testament they called it it was the teachings of the apostles that were handed down so i'm i'm 15 years old i come home to dad by the way we both are the same age yeah and and you're a little older and two months and say i come across a dad i got a problem he said son now what's your problem that i was in school and my friends says this whole thing is a hoax you are you're part of witchcraft and this is an illusion and all these son what are you talking about but that this eucharist thing you you're saying this is the real presence of christ and real thing but i i can't figure this out and he says son listen to me when jesus took that bread and said this is my body after giving thanks which we we call it in our faith consecrated and took the cup and those who are with them explain that to the people that were not in the room and there was one the first leader of the church in jerusalem called saint james or bishop james wrote down the best he knew how exactly what happened during the time when jesus did the first holy communion and which is now known as saint james liturgy and then he explains son the problem is people are saying so many things about it because they were not aware about exactly what jesus said and what happened so what is the bible what is the truth it is what is handed down from the apostles on down from generation to generation meanwhile the cults were developing saying jesus is not god he's an illusion and he was a man this and that but what kept them from falling apart the true church it was not the new testament that we have it now but the same things that orally communicated they believed okay my dad said it i know it is true and so i go to my friends in school and say i don't understand what you're saying but i can tell you what my dad told me is not an illusion it's a real thing that handed down the same thing with my childhood somebody can tell you well when he was growing up he had no shoes and he wore this wrap around clothes and he he jumped from coconut tree into the river and he took a bath and there was no fork and knife he always ate with hands and and um they tell you a thousand things about my upbringing which is not in any book but it was handed down and you get from the contemporaries or people older than me so when it comes to eucharist then and now the most important factor is how does our heart faith respond to this somebody can be in orthodox church or catholic church and partake of the consecrate elements and don't have any impact unless they also realize it but another thing discipleship and spirituality is not i found out that i can become spiritual by doing anything or believing anything but he transforms me from within and the power of the eucharist or the and the holy communion is that it's not just jesus said me because the bible says it all of a sudden i this is amazing about me francis i should have now a million enemies that i should be praying god kill them all i've been hurt and wounded so bad but honestly i can say there's not even a tiny bit of anger or bitterness unforgiveness in my heart toward anyone and the reason is honestly i can't tell you how it happened i changed from within and now my only thinking is this guy is my enemy or he did so much bad to me and talked about me and wrote about me but tomorrow he could be ashamed like saint paul and so i'm i should not look at it from just physical point of view but from god's perspective and so when i look at the eucharist then all the sudden i say lord i don't understand this is beyond my head and my knowledge but it's you i don't understand it and there are so many things in my life journey since i began to understand this that it's been one of the most incredible transformation that my life began to change without me doing anything about it and this this this is um you know humble it says humble yourself in the sight of god i used to be known as gandhi man in my early days in india because by nature i'm i i basically very withdrawn person and people thought i was terribly humble and very very down to earth and this and that but in my heart i was quite proud and the more i realized the living christ and partaking of his life change my inside that i i pray thousand times a day like to the jesus prayer lord jesus son of god have mercy on me as sinner and francis what happened all these years i would say 10 12 15 years now every day i be i realize i'm a worse sinner and god is so great and so holy i only have his mercy nothing else and that that changed me about being humble on the inside i didn't have to pretend or i cannot take a cup of coffee and bring it to you and say oh wow he's a great leader now he's so humble no it it he changed me and he's changing me and then i would say this as a stop here the greatest of all doctrine in the bible in 2008 church history and old testament that doctrine is one word love yes and in christian religion the more we seems to know the bible the more we fight and divide and hurt one another why i say this a greatest doctrine because bible says god is love not that he's loving he's loving but he is love the true manifestation of somebody really knowing this living god is that we become no more arrogant and critical toward anyone and um i was on television now that a week ago on you know public television in india and this guy asked i mean you wrote so many books and this and that why are you not fighting more for this god and being more strong and i said well jesus was angry one time but 99 times he was embracing the prostitutes and the broken and the hurting and the sinners and i haven't begun my journey in loving people and someday maybe when i'm 100 500 years old i will have a chance to get angry with someone but all this all this transformation i'm saying has a lot to do with understanding of christ now in me with me before me and inside me and this is this has been a beautiful journey yeah and and over the years you've had a tremendous impact in my life i'm sorry i didn't start with that you know both of you men have but but okay so i'm hearing what you're saying about the eucharist and the last time we met you were explaining to me the experience you get of this grace that's imparted to you and this new life that you're experiencing and and now hearing what you're saying of how you you feel like it's the eucharist that's giving you this life and this uh somehow through that something internal has been happening to you um but i hear that and i go i've not had the same view of the eucharist as you men have and yet i believe those things have been happening to me like when you talk about like this absence of anger and like this this love where i'm going god where does this come from i mean there are things that are said toward me attached toward me and it's crazy but i i fast and pray in love for these people i'm like god this is insane like thank you thank you for your grace because this isn't me and and then i find this life when i'm praying with the body of christ and when i'm alone with him i mean again like i've shared with you like a year ago my 25 year anniversary my wife's asking do you know of anyone happier than us that just is more blessed than us on the whole earth because she goes i can't think of anyone and i and i feel that same way so i'm feeling this life i'm experiencing like this supernatural like character change in me and yet i'm not all along i've not held this view of the eucharist and so that's what it you know i i think when you explain like your journey of just questioning like am i even saved uh you know after you know experiencing life from those believers in china i don't have quite that same i've had the same feeling sitting inside a normal church service going ah there's got to be more than this um but i haven't had that same experience of looking at these other believers and going gosh they have so much life and i am not experiencing that internally well i can i can absolutely um say that the sanctification that has taken place in your life over the years is manifest in the way that you treat others in the way that you have given yourself selflessly for the gospel so i i bear witness to the truth of what you are saying in my particular case i mean if you look at what i did for the better part of my years in ministry 30 to 40 years i became as brother johannan was saying i became a very good lawyer for christ i debated truth i defined truth i defended truth i gave answers to biblical questions so i had a head full of knowledge but i wasn't experiencing the life that jesus talks about in john 10 10 where he said i've come that they may have life and have it more abundantly when i was in china as you alluded to i saw christians who didn't have a head full of knowledge but they personified christ in a way that was not visible through their words but was visible in their countenance and so i was flying back from china on one of my trips and i was staring off into the clouds and i was wondering am i even a christian head full of knowledge but was i experiencing the reality of jesus christ and the answer to that question was no i was not i was experiencing the map but i wasn't experiencing the territory you know maps are important if you have the wrong map to get to the wrong territory maps are very very important truth is important truth matters particularly posterior culture but i wasn't experiencing the territory to use another metaphor that may resonate with people listening into our discussion the menu is not the meal yesterday i went out with your wonderful son what what a credit your family is to you and the same with you francis and and i can say the same with my family uh but i went out to eat with your wonderful son and he took me to a nice restaurant and i was handed a menu and before i ordered the food my mouth was already watering but it wasn't until i ate the food that i had the experience with food and so i'm not denying that sanctification takes place in the life of people in all spheres uh in fact another discussion we can have either now or another time is i believe god has his people all over the place you know so i i uh i'm not against tribes i'm against tribalism uh but another discussion what we're saying about the eucharist is not that you can't be sanctified uh because you don't believe in the real presence of christ or you haven't come to that place you're on a journey what i'm saying is that the church has always provided chief instruments for deification deification is foreign to modern ears but it was rife right through the 16th century i mean it was luther who said word became flesh so that flesh might become word athanasius the great who said god became man so that man might become god this was talked about as the great exchange his kenosis meaning his emptying philippians 2 becomes our filling his kenosis becomes our theosis it becomes our filling it becomes our transformation from one glory to another now where does it take place well historically the church has always said the church is the epicenter of the universe with respect to transformation so nothing happens outside of the church even evangelism has to happen from the church out to the world back into the church why because in the church god provides the means of grace that transform us we often times in in western christianity and certainly in protestantism think of salvation as punctilior the idea of a point in time the church has always thought of salvation as a process being transformed from one glory to another glory to another glory well there are means of grace that are are provided for within the church and the the chief of those means of grace is the partaking of the eucharist that is the center that ought to be central it was central to the early church and ought to be central now now why am i saying this ought to be central um without elaborating too far on this let me say that uh a father andrew luth who i have read copiously he gives an illustration of two arches and i think this is instructive that people can just get this into their head the ancient church so let's not talk about orthodoxy or protestantism or catholicism let's talk about the ancient church the ancient church held to a large arch that arch extended from creation the creation of adam and eve all the way to deification becoming gods by grace not becoming what god is in his essence that's impossible there are not four or five or five million in the trinity we become gods by grace god's by being partakers of the divine nature so this arch stretches from the creation of adam and eve all the way to deification and by the way that's a process that never ends because deification is becoming more and more godlike a process that never ends because god never ends he's ineffable there's no coming to an end of god so even in eternity we will learn and grow and develop alveola without error so that's the big arch now most of western theology has focused on a smaller arch that arch is from fall to redemption so nothing wrong with that and certainly that is central to the christian faith but if that's where your focus is then the port of salvation becomes the end it becomes the goal of your salvation well god has not just saved us from sin he has saved us for sonship to be divinely adopted sons and daughters of the king you talk about your family we're adopted into the family of god that is what we want to progress beyond we want to progress beyond being saved from sin to being saved to sonship to be genuine sons and daughters and that love is progressive just as the love for your family is progressive so you know one of the orthodox theologians says that after uh the fall of adam and eve the history of the human race is a history of shipwreck awaiting rescue but the port of salvation is not the goal the goal is for the rescue to continue on a journey whose sole goal is union with god and that's really what we're talking about when we're talking about deification so i mean if you if you think about the metaphor for a moment it makes sense i mean if you're on the titanic and you get rescued you're gonna be very grateful for that rescue i mean you're gonna be so grateful for those who rescued you and gave you another chance at life life that is really life to the full but you don't want to just stay in the port of salvation you want to continue on if the rescued are only in the rescue station then their rescue is short-served you have to continue on a journey whose sole goal is union with god and that's the emphasis of the ancient church and that happens within the context of the church you know cyprian of carthage said you cannot have god as your father without having the church as your mother why do you say that well because it's in the church that you receive the graces that transform you from one glory to another and the way paul puts it is with unveiled face a reference to moses who had to have his face veiled but we go from one glory to another in the new covenant with unveiled faces [Music] you

Channel: Bible Answer Man

Views: 97,650

Keywords: Apologetics, Bible Answer Man, Bible, Christian Research Institute, CRI, Hank Hanegraaff, Christ, Christian, Christianity, God, Gospel, Jesus, Scripture, Truth, Francis Chan, Metropolitan Yohan, History Mystery & the Eucharist, Eastern Orthodoxy, Eucharist, Communion, Real Presence, KP Yohannan

Id: OSyTJaTufcw

Length: 53min 17sec (3197 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020