What Do Orthodox Christians Believe? (And Why I Care)

hey everybody i'm matt this is the 10 minute bible hour and this is the last part of my last video on orthodoxy i've been doing a series i think this is my fifth video on the topic it's been a blast i've learned a ton of stuff but i cut us off on the first half of this video on this gigantic cliffhanger where i went and asked my orthodox buddy father paul trubenbach whether or not in the orthodox tradition i a protestant would be considered a christian am i going to heaven and he was gracious enough to play along and answer that question that of course put him in an incredibly difficult spot here's what he had to say in the rest of the interview as well sure sure i i think we have to make a distinction between being inside the balance of christianity and being inside the bounds of the church and of course we can't really separate christianity from the church but the word we typically use are heterodox which means people who believe in christ but are of different beliefs they have different beliefs about about god about man about the relation about salvation you know whatever it may be and so i one of the images there's no perfect image for this i don't really know how to how to describe it well but i think one of the images that uh i heard somebody give recently that i liked for the most part was if you imagine an electrical cord laying on the ground this is this is all people we're all we're all created by god we're all kind of laying there on the ground some are more frayed some are less afraid you know the cords are in different shape but we're there then you plug that chord in that's christianity you're a christian you profess christ you believe that christ is fully godfully human you believe in the trinity you're christian but this is what this is one of those those outlets where you have to flip a switch and you flip a switch well now now now the full energy is going through and and now you're you're in the church and the reason for that is again that's not that's not the reason that image is not perfect is because that's not i don't want somebody to say oh so you're saying that if i'm not orthodox there's no there's no energy there's no life to make christianity no i'm not saying that at all it's it's an image it's imperfect but but there is a difference and uh we see that in at the end of uh the first chapter of ephesians when when saint paul calls the church the fullness of him who fills all in all so that's why i say when we when we recite the creed when we read the scriptures there there needs to be some sort of common understanding and and that's that's unfortunately the tragedy of christianity days we read the same things we profess the same things but are we professing the exact same faith there's a lot of really significant and essential disagreements there so would i look at you and say well you're not in the orthodox church and therefore you're not a christian no i wouldn't say that at all i would say this is somebody who i believe is seeking christ with the best understanding that he has from the depths of his heart and god can do with that what he wants it's not my place to judge where you are in your relationship with christ if i were to do that i'd be worse off for it that's not my place my place is to seek god in the best way i know how and i believe that he has revealed the orthodox church to be the church that he he granted on pentecost the holy spirit founded that the apostles began and so that's the path that i have to follow in light of that the the western view and and i would argue and this is a place where i i suspect we might see it slightly differently i would argue the biblical view of salvation is that clearly christ did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many that's what happened on the cross there is an atonement there is a there is a resolution to corruption and sin there is an initiation of a kingdom that happens now and also in its complete realization later not a problem for a god operating beyond the boundaries of time seems linear to us within it and so there is this resolution to sin and death that is defeated in the cross by the here's the word where i think we might disagree substitutionary atonement of christ right and my understanding is that the orthodox don't see that in the text quite the same way right right yeah there's there's there's a a very different view on this but i'd start by saying this i think we made a mistake in history when christians came along and said i want to be able to take the mystery of salvation and fit it into one paradigm i think we run into a huge problem there because the mystery of salvation is so vast so grand it is so mysterious can it really fit into one simple story you may get different aspects of it but this is not something you really see the fathers of the church doing a whole lot of there were a couple theories early on but but um the idea that that uh um christ's death was a payment to the devil saint gregory nancy and says again came on and said i don't know if could we could get a lot of transactions yeah i didn't get a lot of attraction and then and some came along with with his theory with each of these these theories i would say we have some issues and the the big problem i think there's a couple that we have with substitutionary atonement um the first is that with many not all but with many people who believe it death is a punishment created by god um we would have a significant issue with that that would not be yeah and i i was gonna say necessarily the the whole of protestantism either right i think i think that the take you would get there would be death is an inevitability of imperfection and deviation from the perfection of god and his standards means that just the result of that imperfection is entropy the second law of thermodynamics working which is much closer yeah to kind of what we would say the the bigger problem though is that um there's a sense in which what what needed to be rectified what was the problem that needed to be rectified and that's that's where a lot of the answers we find um insufficient and and problematic um one of the one of the ideas that goes around is that somehow god's sense of justice was injured but we would say well wait a minute sin sin doesn't affect god it affects us and so even without those details because again there's there's this gets more complex than people realize i've seen a lot of cases where people said this is substitutionary atonement and i went oh actually i know a lot of products that would disagree with that you know the details there aren't so aren't so close so there are a lot of little nuances in there our main issue is that it often is viewed in a very legalistic way it's viewed as as in terms of crime and punishment and the orthodox would emphasize more the medicinal aspect of it the therapeutic uh with the idea of sin being an illness and so i mean the story of salvation for us and again one paradigm won't do it one period so this don't take this as the orthodox position this is just one way to describe it that i think is a little bit closer to the way we approach this when when adam and eve sinned to sin means to i mean literally to miss the mark as the greek word and so if my focus is on christ to sin means i've taken my focus off of christ so when adam and eve sinned they took their focus off of god well god is your source of life so what happens when you remove yourself from your source of life death naturally enters in it's a natural result it's like if you take a flower which you know the two main things it needs are water and light you stick that into a closet and don't water it the one the water didn't kill it the sunlight didn't kill it it's just going to naturally die and so when adam and eve turned away from god death naturally became a part of their being and with death came corruption the reign of the devil sin disease everything so at that point there's this division almost between god and man the divine and the human that's biblical now the way i like to think of it again because images are never perfect in this but if there's a wall of separation the prophets manage to claim that wall and look over it and you know face shining and everything but okay eventually they get pulled right back down that's pretty greek of you right there that's a cave illustration somebody who almost made it out of the cave to see what was going on you come back it's not to say that god had no relation with man at that point of course he had a relation with man but death would ultimately death was part of man's nature and so even in the incarnation we see healing beginning because in the incarnation we have in one person the divine the human brought together in one person so christ begins healing right at that point then with his death well he who is life had death try to cover him and so when death tries to cover life it realizes it can't contain him and death shatters death just breaks apart and life shines forth and christ rises from the tomb this is this is all part of salvation and so again for us it's more that sin is an illness on man's soul and christ comes to heal that no again is that is that one paradigm going to cover everything he does no because we haven't even talked about his defeat of the devil you know we haven't there's a lot of things we haven't discussed and if you if you go through the new testament and look at all the names of christ and think about what those mean what are the implications for salvation you can spend your entire life trying to find one paradigm that covers all of those things i don't think you can do it i don't think you can do it so that's that's where i would start and again there's a lot of nuance there and there's a lot of there's a lot of things we could kind of play with but for us the main thing is sin affects us and god out of his love for mankind wants to heal that and be our healer and so we want the physician the healer to dwell inside of us but there is a maybe an intentional resistance to the systematizing impulse we see in the west yes on the question of soteria the theology of salvation that in the east it i don't sense that it's you're trying to be difficult to pin down it's that you're saying this is a multi-faceted thing that isn't as simple as a legal exchange whereas i would look at the text and say i mean paul paul explains the thing in a way that to me seems like well pretty clearly there was a brokenness to humanity and a resolution that could only be found in christ what's interesting is how much that seems to funnel western thought toward the imagery that is not introduced from the outside in its biblical limitary that that i'm leaning on here sure but there's maybe this is a place where that solar scriptura impulse says yeah i'll go with the image that's in the text whereas the also scripture is very important position of the orthodox church which yes scripture is it happened in the context of the saints and the fathers and it continues to happen in that context and here's a whole bunch more thought from very early on that maybe offers other illustrations and imagery for this thing the result if somebody catches me in the elevator and they're like what is the protestant position on how people are saved well it's this this this and here are bible verses and here's ephesians two eight and nine and maybe i could walk you through romans 3 23 6 23 let's go to chapter 10. like it's just i mean we just got a thing that we do and it's i think it's biblical and i think it works right i'm sensing you would need a much longer elevator ride yeah well yeah i mean we asked that question you know what do we need to be to do to be saved i mean st peter answers that he gives a long homily and people say well then what shall we what shall we do what then we're gonna do and repent and be baptized okay but what do we mean by repent and what does baptism entail or or saint paul we're saved by grace through faith well that seems pretty straightforward until you ask what do you mean by grace what do you mean by faith what do you mean it is true and with each of these things if it was just that simple where we could box it up into one formula how come saint paul doesn't use that formula in every single epistle he writes and just just repeat it over and over and over again sometimes we're looking at things that from just different angles he's talking to different groups that we're culturally excited you look at a map now it looks like everybody's from the same place they should all think the same thing but it was a very diverse eastern mediterranean world that absolutely he was writing to absolutely i think i'm spot on yeah so so none of that scriptural language we would never disagree with it that's i i want people to make sure they don't misunderstand me and think that we're saying no no we found a better way to say that no it's not that it's just that with every word of the scriptures we read you to read the scriptures objectively is not possible for mankind you always are going to bring some sort of life experience some sort of memory some understanding of some word i think you're right you're going to bring that in no matter what and so we think that the best way to do that is if the church is the pillar and ground of truth you know fine to find the church that the apostles established and has a 2000 year history and if you find that one then you can be sure that that's the the right place to that's the right perspective from which to look at the scriptures so when we're talking about the distinction on this topic then of just what is the bible where does it come from how authoritative is it it's not that there would be a disagreement about what is the text inspired by the holy spirit second timothy 3 16 youthful for all of these different things i mean that the authors of scripture are carried along by the spirit i mean none of this would be foreign to you not at all how many mistakes like just theological or historical errors do you see in the new testament no none so we would see that the same way this is what god meant to say yeah it's sufficient because i was it was an obnoxious obnoxious rhetorical device on my part i apologize no i get it but i think i think the language that you would see in a and an otherwise completely orthodox statement theologically on the bible but from a protestant perspective was that would be that we would include the word sufficient we agreed that the the early church the apostles the authority of christ what is bible and what is not bible is really clear really early understandably there's some debate about inter-testamental stuff that you don't see quite the same way as the catholics but you see it closer than protestants and you see it setting aside the old testament and the inter-testamental debate there's no disagreement between the east and west in terms of the new testament pseudepigrapha the new testament apocrypha you guys aren't tracking down the gospel of mary magdalene that we have half a sentence of right we're in lockstep there yes so so the issue would just be the order we put them together in where does church tradition come in for the protestant well it's not co-equal at number one also i think a lot of people outside of protestantism look again at kind of maybe the more bedazzled genes make a church version of it and they're like well it doesn't factor at all you've never even heard of the saints and that's true for a segment of protestantism it isn't true my tradition at all we're we're knee-deep in this maybe a different list of saints that we know the stories of maybe a little more western but you know yeah we view these people as rock stars too theology around it might be a little bit different we read this we see protestantism in this i know that's just i mean i'm sorry they're in here with us i don't want to commit sacrilege in your church but but it seems like to me and please correct me if i'm wrong that the difference isn't we like the bible a lot and you guys aren't really into it that much or we think it's true and you guys are like that's only mostly true right the difference is how much does church tradition and the words and writings of the church fathers how much does that speak into scripture and how exactly would we arrange that on the board i sense that you hold these more in equal esteem than a western protestant would is that a fair statement yeah yeah and we'd have to understand what holy tradition is i think there's a there's a mistaken notion that holy tradition is just a cosmic game of telephone you know you used to play that game of telephone when you're a kid sure someone whispers into one ear and they go okay i'm gonna whisper it next and by the time the message is at the end it's completely different the show started and i think that would be that would be a legitimate um complaint if that's all holy tradition was but we call it holy tradition because we believe that the the church is not just an organization it's an organism okay and the lifeblood is the holy spirit the holy spirit is sent to lead the church into according to john all truth and so there was a 20th century theologian named vladimirlovsky and he defined holy tradition as the life of the holy spirit in the church wow which is a beautiful explanation of it and that helps us understand the place of scripture because the new testament becomes an expression of holy tradition of the life of the holy spirit in the church and the compilation of the books becomes an expression of holy creation in the church but also the interpretation i think i'm close to understanding something i haven't understood before so the scriptures can't be wrong about theology right can tradition no no no holy tradition no not not when it is uh not when it is um not like the word codified but when it is when there is a clear official statement of the church as a whole and sometimes that takes hundreds of years for that to happen so i've got a pretty clear picture of how the bible happened i really like the manuscript lower criticism text work i find that really interesting there's just so much yes but then we look at the church fathers and i mean there are some of these guys from the second century where the only way we know what they thought is because eusebius quotes them a whole bunch right 150 years later as an outsider i'm taking what you see via quotes this or that person is saying and i'm really interested and i'm really excited about that but just in terms of data support it doesn't do the job for me critically as much as the mass of data support behind the new testament how do you guys reconcile that difference in manuscript support between the two yeah if the holy spirit truly does guard and guide the church then whatever the church finally says is is we believe god had a hand in that okay and so yeah some of these fathers are are less quoted and some are more quoted okay and we believe that was a guided process and so so as much as we you know historical critical approaches to these things aren't wrong they're not wrong in themselves however the life of the holy spirit in the church will be expressed in the worship it'll be expressed to the hypnology it'll be expressed in the ecumenical councils we're going to find that in in places where we can say definitively okay yes even if i can't figure out why this is what it says and so so i can trust in this i can trust that god continues to work in his church yeah that's that's really helpful that's really clarifying i think i mean they're gonna be a lot of people from [Music] you know again from from the west and it's just it's history it's geography all of that adds up to i'm gonna go homestead in a place where bears are trying to eat me all the time whereas we can't remember that in europe it's just it's too far lost and it's it's water downstream well it's a very recent recollection for the protestant interaction with the frontier and the west and surely these two things shape the way we encounter the text shape the way we think about the individuals you know my level of optimism about the individual's ability through the illumination of the holy spirit to understand scripture is going to be higher as somebody whose tradition is born out of the part of the western civilization that is about the optimism the individual's ability to conquer nature handle their business whereas in the east you're talking about at this point thousands upon thousands of years of no we are settled we are civilized there is a more of a notion of collectivism i mean we invented cities if you're from the east you can claim things like that and so so it's just interesting to me to see how how the two expressions really kind of just make sense based on when they happened i'm not trying to to you know do an equivalency here no no no it's the same yeah but i i wonder if there's something to that well and it's also going back to one of the things i i don't really love using the word authority because i think that became such a it became such a touchstone of of the the difficulties and differences in the west whereas in in orthodoxy the issue of authority was was never really pushed as highly it was never really so contentious with the issue of authority because again if if it's the life of the holy spirit in the church you know what do we look for we look to blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see god we look to those who have have gone through the process and have purified themselves to the point that they look and act and speak like the apostles it's one of the things i tell my congregation all the time we should never ask if the apostles were alive today what would they say to us because the same spirit who inspired them inspired the modern saints of the church and we have saints who died in the 1990s and the 2000s and and so you can get a bunch of bishops together who claim that they they're in ecumenical council but the church can come later and say no you weren't that was false you know and so so just as with theology and just as with salvation there's no systematic way that we can go about it we could do that also with yes there's structure and there's order in the church but how god works through that that can change throughout history and he can do it in whatever way suits the time think of the saint maximus the confessor see maximus the confessor came along and said jesus christ had a fully human and a fully divine will he had two wills and they're completely united with one another but everyone disagreed with him all the bishops saw the priests everyone told him he was wrong it was only after he died after his tongue was cut out and his right hand cut off and he was in exile disappointing that they had an ecumenical sin on this said oh actually he was right he was right so how could he know did they give him back the hand and then yeah yeah sorry we kept these just in case it turned out you were right so but the question becomes how can he be so sure there's only two answers there's only two answers either a he was a super arrogant guy who just refused to listen to anybody else or b he had had the experience of faith he had had he had such a pure heart that god had revealed himself to him and he was not expressing what he thought he was expressing what god had revealed to him and when we look at the church as a whole we go okay one person can have that experience and still express it wrongly that's why we look to the collective voice so there's a mechanism for what happens if the collective voice seems to be getting it wrong for a time can the church be wrong well if the church is divine and human the human side can can certainly be wrong and the divine will come and correct it and so when you say can the church be wrong it would depend can the church as a whole be wrong no because the church is christ and christ is the jew christ literally self-identifies with the church it's interesting when saul is on the road to damascus and christ appears to him he says he doesn't say saul saul why are you persecuting my church he says why are you persecuting me so christ self-identifies with the church this is and and when christ said you know very last verse of matthew lo i'm with you always even to the end of the age how is he with us we believe it's through the church so can the church be wrong no but can members within it be wrong absolutely and can large groups of members be wrong yes okay follow a bible question but obviously also the language of the bride of christ is used throughout the new testament we don't see jesus ever saying i am the bride he's always the bridegroom right so there's there's also language that indicates that they're they're not the same thing right and we see we see the bride getting it wrong like when peter misbehaves socially in terms of how he treats different groups within the church i mean we know they can air me understand the difference between the two yeah genuine question i really want to understand yeah yeah you're right that we get a lot of these image this imagery sometimes uh the church is called the body of christ but sometimes it's the bride of christ and so there are always those those two aspects of it there's the divine aspect and the human aspect the human aspect is ill it's it's sick with sin it's it's it's really sick with with egoism and so it seeks to be purified by the divine aspect and just as in any hospital you have members who are more sick and some members who are less sick and we look to the ones who have gone through this process of healing so much so that again when we look at them we go wow he looks he acts or she speaks writes breathes like i see the apostles doing and like two thousand years of of saints have done and those are the voices where we go okay i really i can really trust this and again do i trust that voice individually over and above all else no it has to con it has to agree with the holy tradition that has always been there and that's why we look to the collective voice it's an interesting thing that's been happening lately is there have been a lot of modern elders of the church holy figures who have not officially been glorified as a saint as a saint yet and there have been a lot of prophecies prophecies about viruses going around prophecies about earthquakes prophecies about hunger about third world war there's a there's a bishop in in greece who talks a lot about these prophecies but he says i'm only going to share these with you if i can find two or three elders who have said the same thing because we're cautious about that we know that one person can make a mistake it's not as if you lose your complete sense of self and you're subsumed to the divine and you're just gone no you're still there you're still there and so we look to their collective voice and again sometimes that comes out really clearly directly powerfully in a way that you almost can't deny i mean the first ecumenical sin on saint nicholas was there saint spirit on a lot of people don't know about him but you know read his life and i mean this is a great wonder worker so many of these incredible saints were there at other times it's less clear and so we tend to do things a little slowly so we take we take our time we go i'm not really sure what to think about this but in time we'll be able to figure this out so somebody shows up they watch a video like this like that church is beautiful and they're right this is beautiful they say i am fascinated by the fact that every single one of these icons represents this elaborate lifelong story of faith and i want an elaborate lifelong story of faith that's a part of this same grander story of this king whose icon adorns the ceiling here and they don't know the first thing they're not greek they're not from antioch they don't know that's first place that people were called christians they've never read the bible but they think there might be something to the god thing is this a church that they could come to to start or should they go somewhere else to start oh by by all means yeah this is this is we we get i'd say at least once a week at least once a week i get an email or a phone call or a text message or even just a person who shows up and says i want to know more about this um and so typically what we have them do is i tell them i usually meet with them i usually the first question i ask is how the heck did you end up here because there's always some story you know you don't you don't end up at an orthodox church especially you know like this without some sort of story behind it i get a little bit of their history and then i tell them why don't you come just just come come and see for about a month come to you know you can write down whatever questions we can continue meeting if you want but come and see for about a month get used to it because it's jarring at first admittedly i i i was 10 years old when i first stepped in orthodox church i i told my parents you guys are nuts we're not doing this i changed my mind well you were coming from missouri synod lutheran which is pretty catholic looking i mean it's pretty high church so yeah and it was still staggering oh it was still pretty darn different yeah well okay so let's say somebody does that and they take you up on it and they show up and they kind of learn where to stand a little bit and maybe four weeks in they're like okay i'm getting it i'm hearing what we're singing i'm hearing what we're repeating i'm seeing the rhythm here i've read a little bit about this all right i'm in father paul how do i become a christian what's the answer so we we start them off by making them catechumens one who's officially being instructed in the faith and this is this is an interesting period we we we have this last six months to a year typically that's the typical in the early church three years you know so when people hear a year they go ah it's not three years relax um but the the the reason this is so interesting is although they are not full members of the church at that point because they've committed themselves we kind of look at look at it as as like an engagement is to a marriage no okay i mean engagement in hundreds of years ago style today engagements are broken off left and right no big deal early church if you're engaged to be married and you break it off you have to get an official divorce so this is this is a commitment so becoming a catechumen says i'm committed to orthodoxy and we take it so seriously that if someone were to die god forbid but if they were to die before they were baptized we would still give them a full orthodox funeral as if they were north korea because they committed themselves what would happen to their soul god willing if they lived out their repentance they're you know they're in paradise they're in heaven so is there a singular moment of like i wasn't a christian before then i said i want to be and then a thing happens and then now they are yeah or is it this is one of those areas where i think we have to be cautious of the language because it depends on the context in which we're saying it but if somebody's is first of all if somebody believes in christ and is seeking him i would consider that you know a christian um if if they become a catty human i would you know they can begin wearing a cross if they weren't already that's no problem they're a christian but are they a full member of the church that happens at baptism this is this is the the formal entrance of the church and so again that'll take place six months to a year afterwards okay but the reason i'm i'm cautious about that language i know there's people are going to watch this and go boy he wavers a lot like well no the reason i don't want to make a definitive statement on on that and and be too overly sure of it because a lot of this has to do with the person's heart and their sincerity and again that's up to god but would i call them a christian as a category absolutely absolutely i've taken up a ton of your time this is i asked for half an hour i think i just took an hour plus so i thought this was the introduction thank you for processing all of this out i know you've done a great job of being patient because you're talking with a man of the west who's showing up i mean we both have beards but our beards mean very different things you know a little better you're just thicker than mine oh yeah you're so generous no it's a and so i know that you're having to run a translator in your head for just how i'm wired to think about all of these things i think a lot of people sitting on the conversation will really benefit from your nuance and artfulness in in thinking outside these walls and imagining what it would be like for an outsider to encounter it's been really helpful for me so thank you a ton thank you would you be up for doing this again absolutely just pick a topic and we just go down one rabbit hole as far as we can maybe some barbecue or something absolutely i like the way you think appreciate it father paul thank you was that fun because i thought that was a lot of fun five videos on orthodoxy and i know some of you are like how come my thing only got the one video or only got the two videos the answer is i don't know i just really don't know there's no secret message in there like i'm gonna punish these people your tradition is dumb you only get two it's just really how long it takes to work through the ideas and the truth of the matter is i spent more time with father paul troubenbach and saints peter and paul orthodox church in salt lake that i have with anybody else that i've done one of these videos with and that was a function in part of logistics some technical details scheduling stuff but also the ideas are slow they take a minute to work through and to articulate whereas ideas at maybe a protestant church that is a bit more action oriented we try to do this with these people it's just going to be a little bit quicker to get to the heart of the matter and get a sense of it for you and so when i got all my material together and i sat down over there to edit my heart out it took a long time to get that tour video done like it was a month of staring at my computer moving things around trying to figure out how to best present that and the technical side of that was really hard too so it took a long time of thinking about this but in the end i was like i just want to share almost all of it it's all relevant and if people are watching videos like this i think they're game like y'all are here because you want to think it through too i also know that some of you come at this from a perspective similar to my own or another group that maybe disagrees with orthodoxy historically and you're like why are you not arguing with him listen to the thing that he said there's a bible verse say the bible verse that obviously counters the thing he just said and see what he does with that and to some extent i'm willing to throw those things out to just hit the ball back and forth but i'm not doing it as a debate because i told him that it wasn't a debate i told him i want to come and i want to learn about orthodoxy because i'd like to learn more about orthodoxy and he was like cool come and do that and so i don't know he's smart we debate stuff in other contexts from time to time when we talk but here the exercise really was very simply i'm not trying to win an argument i'm not trying to prove that my expression of christianity is the once and for all final expression that was right and everyone else is wrong i just would really like to get you better i would like to be fair to your ideas i want to do the thing that i don't remember who said it now but somebody smart was like hey if you want to know if you're being fair to other people's ideas you want to know that you really understand their idea you should be able to articulate it pretty much as well as they can well i am nowhere near that because father paul is exceptional but i'm much closer to being in a place where i could repeat the basic tenets of orthodoxy in a way that is close and is of goodwill and demonstrates a fair understanding of what's going on there instead of a caricature of what's going on there that's a lot of what i'm using these videos to do for me and i hope they're useful for you i want to get beyond the caricature understanding of other people's beliefs stuff that i hear from somebody who maybe agrees with me and they're like ah these people are crazy and they think this and this and this and this i would rather just listen and if i come across things that i just don't think square with church history or reason or the bible or theology i'd like to not embrace those things on their own merits and to do so with a primary source instead of a secondary source as being how i learned about that so it's not a debate because it's not a debate it's an opportunity to learn and if some of the questions come off as like oh this is an opportunity for debate i mean maybe i don't know i'm trying to be relaxed and just bounce questions back and forth but father paul was excellent knows his stuff inside and out he's patient i could see him calculate through all the potential pitfalls that he has to deal with if he answers it the wrong way and he navigated it i thought absolutely beautifully so this is a great experience for me i continue to be deeply convicted that all of these creedal expressions of christianity that is the versions of christianity that profoundly agree on the creeds we agree on exactly which god we're talking about the creedal language on the nature of god the nature of christ is so specific from the classical world that there can be no ambiguity as to like well which god does an evangelical free church guy mean though no the language is so precise an evangelical free church guy a baptist an orthodox a catholic they are inarguably talking about exactly the same god because of the shocking degree of specificity that was used in that early church language that even though we might disagree about some other stuff from the early church we all definitely agree on that language and what god it is that we're talking about when we do theology when we interpret the bible and so again within a set of three four five key assumptions these groups all are more or less internally cohesive as i look in from the outside orthodoxy makes sense if you answer those handful of questions a certain way catholicism makes sense if you answer those handful of questions a certain way there's still room for disagreement within those camps but like i get it yeah i can't just write that off as crazy i get how you could think that but also i think protestantism makes a ton of sense within a key set of assumptions as well and we get so feisty with each other and i get it we all want to be right and who wants to believe in something that's wrong and your souls are at stake and i get it that's why i do this stuff because i do think it really really really hyper matters not just as an academic exercise but as a thing for the state of my soul i care about these ideas i care about the implications but it has really helped me to to see this pattern that each of these different church leaders have shown me that yeah well within your assumptions i i get why you come at it the way you do i get why you do that i get why you would never do that i get why you wear this outfit i get why you do communion the way you do communion okay roger that and that's been very helpful for me we're getting out of like the super intimate heart level stuff here i'm just gonna stick with it it's been very helpful for me because my time doing this youtube channel has corresponded very closely to one of the weirdest most abrasive hostile socially tense times ever i mean certainly in the history of my life this is the worst it's ever been i it's like we don't even see the humanity in each other anymore we just burn each other down at the flip of a switch the drop of a hat and i don't i don't like it i don't like the way it feels i don't like it when i've participated in it to my unending shame and i'm trying to figure out a way out and in a way these videos and the series you just watched are part of my constructive proposal for a way out if i can really understand other people and if i can at least see how they would think it and if i can earn enough respect and give enough respect that they can maybe see why i would think something else and we can learn how to incorporate the other person's dance steps conversationally then maybe we could talk again instead of just camping up tribing up and lobbing bombs at other tribes or other camps especially among tribes that again name the exact same god with the exact same specific language we should be able to do pretty well with each other in light of the fact that we so specifically agree on who this god is even if we disagree on some of the finer points of exactly how everything plays out and so this is a constructive proposal for me i don't want to sit around my butt and be sad that the world's divided and then my heart hurts and then gets suckered into it from time to time that makes it sound like it's everybody else's fault and then willfully go into it myself from time to time and help add to the mess instead of making it better i don't want to be the guy who just sits around and learns how to turn a phrase about how much it's awful right now and then does nothing and makes a living and carves out a little social space because i'm the one who can really see and really articulate how bad and divided it is i don't want to be that guy i want to be like the people i admire from history the people i admire right now who see stuff that's dumb and they try to figure out a way to change themselves and to keep their hearts soft and to come up with a way forward to make the conversation happen to make grace and peace and redemption and restoration and forgiveness and tolerance and patience with each other happen while also not sacrificing deep hard earned conviction that i know you have about stuff and that if you're still here i know you respect that i have about stuff so for me this has a whole lot to do with a whole lot of things in terms of my own process of faith but it also has a whole lot to do with me working through a better ethic of how i navigate the way the world is right now in a way that is redemptive and it's not polished it's not done but i'm working on it and father paul and the antioquia orthodox church just helped me in that regard it was a favor it was a kindness that they showed me it was a grace that they showed me it made my soul better it made my heart softer it made my head more fully aware of what a whole bunch of my brothers and sisters think about things and why and i'm better for the time and i hope you are as well so thanks for doing this thanks also i'm just going to say it again quickly to the people who make it so that i can do videos like this the people who want this kind of internet to happen and are working on the same constructive proposal the same redemptive project that i'm working on you support the program at patreon.comtnbh and that's why this happens please please please never feel pressured to do that there's just there isn't any it is totally cool one way or the other for a few of you it makes sense to jump on and support the program and it it helps it makes a big difference so either way thank you thank you for caring about this stuff thank you for hearing me out as we got into some of the deep water here in ways that i didn't sit down and plan to do i appreciate you processing it with me i'm matt this is the 10 minute bible hour i really like you let's do this again soon

Channel: The Ten Minute Bible Hour

Views: 114,733

Rating: 4.9598098 out of 5

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

Id: aRMsLntuVcQ

Length: 42min 6sec (2526 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021