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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hermetic Seal" data-source="post: 1569129" data-attributes="member: 10915">You can make an argument from Scripture but it means nothing if you can't prove that this is how Christians have always understood it. No matter how much rhetoric you use to insulate the Calvinistic doctrine of determinism, it is nowhere to be found in the first-millennium Church, not even in St. Augustine (whom Fr. Seraphim Rose carefully explains in his excellent "The Place Of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church" never taught the Calvinistic doctrine and whose teachings were largely misunderstood, misinterpreted, or misused by Reformers a millennium later, who were incredibly distant from St. Augustine's particular circumstances and heretical opponents in response to whom he wrote many of his "controversial" works.)The problem with this response is the same problem with Nestorious complaining at the Third Ecumenical Council: the advocates of Calvinism assert their doctrine but deny the logical implications of where it leads, such as God being the author of sin. The problem is that these implications are pretty obvious when you've examined the Calvinistic tradition, and it takes a great deal of effort to obscure them. They are far more easily resolved by taking the same stance of first-millennium Christians and the Church Fathers: that God knows the future, being outside time, and predestines those who choose to follow him; and maybe more importantly and largely lost on modern westerners, "predestination" in St. Paul's epistles is collective predestination of groups of people, not specific individuals, and rhetorically used by Paul in response to Judaizing heretics, to explain that saving the Gentiles was not God's "Plan B" but his intention all along. With these understandings in mind, the anachronistic, modern western European idea of determinism melts away.Find me the Church Father who interprets this to mean that the Church is anybody who professes a vague allegiance to Jesus and has his own opinions about how to interpret everything rather than a concrete, sacramental institution. I doubt you will, though, because this interpretation is a novelty.What you call "God and the Bible" really means "the Reformed interpretation and paradigm surrounding God and the Bible." It isn't the "traditions of man" in the Orthodox Church versus "God and the Bible", it's "the Apostolic tradition transmitted by Christ to His Apostles and the entire Church" versus "the 16th century tradition of Calvin, Luther, etc." The necessity of knowing how the Church has always interpreted Scripture is crucial for passages like Matthew 19.12:Reading this passage in isolation you could easily misinterpret it as an endorsement of castrating yourself for the Kingdom of God, rather than voluntary celibacy and Monasticism. To say nothing of other hyperbolic statements by Jesus (Cutting off the hand or eye causing you to sin.)How long have you been on this forum? You should know better than this; or you haven't bothered to really try to understand what Orthodox actually believe. Christ earned salvation when He overthrew death and sin at his crucifixion and resurrection. We are incapable of accomplishing this. However, we must cooperate with God to accept the work he has accomplished before us, just as Christ submitted his human will to the divine will, and this is always how Christians understood salvation before the Reformation. Sometimes you'll hear Roosh or Orthodox people say they're "saving myself", "working on my salvation" or something similar that sets off your Sola Fide alarms but this is really just semantic shorthand for "working on submitting myself to God's will by fighting against my passions, abstaining from sin, doing good works, etc."Calvinism is a tradition of men, an interpretative school of thought that emerged fifteen-plus centuries after Christ. The great irony of protestants throwing around this accusation is that they are, by any objective measure, far more guilty of it than anybody in the Orthodox Church. And this interpretation of "call no man father" is a silly, boomer-tier argument that reflects <a href="http://www.tektonics.org/gk/hyperbole.php" target="_blank">typically poor understanding of hyperbole in the Ancient Near East</a> that is contradicted by the entirety of the Church's interpretative history and by St. Paul.That's because their hermeneutic and ecclesiological foundations make it impossible to determine the correct interpretation and ultimately leads to relativism.This article is none of those things, it's just a book review. Roosh has done this exact same format for numerous other books.</blockquote>

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