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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hermetic Seal" data-source="post: 1358591" data-attributes="member: 10915">[USER=6516]@infowarrior1[/USER]: I checked out some of the articles on the site you linked and I didn’t find them persuasive.Most egregiously, Orthodox don’t deny the atonement at all; rather, they reject a specific formulation of it, the Penal Substitution Theory, in favor of something similar to the Christus Victor theory of atonement. I was already a skeptic of Penal Substitution for years before now, so this wasn’t much of a change for me. Of course, Penal Substitution isn’t the universal interpretation amongst Protestants anyway, and many hold to Christus Victor or other models. None of the patristic quotes offered suggest Penal Substitution.<a href="http://orthochristian.com/105429.html">Here’s a good article that goes into the Orthodox view of the Atonement.</a>In regards to Sola Scriptura: this guy’s definition of “Sola Ecclesia” doesn’t even seem like an accurate representation of how the Orthodox Church sees itself. Using his own method of terminology, “Prima Ecclesia” would be a more accurate way to describe the Orthodox conception of the Church: in which the Church holds the Bible in a position of esteem and honor, but guides how it’s interpreted. (Actual Orthodox folks on this forum, feel free to correct me if I’m stating this wrong.) Using things like the bodily assumption of Mary as some sort of argument for Sola Scriptura is just silly because Mary was still alive when the scriptures were written! Of course there’s not anything about that in, say, Paul’s epistles.In regards to celibacy of bishops, some research reveals that this ecclesiastical change was instituted in order to prevent nepotism, where one family could control a bishop’s seat for generations; an issue not even remotely in view in Paul’s time, but a clear issue in a mature church that was no longer being persecuted. Requiring celibacy from bishops helped prevent the emergence of a sort of family empire of church properties passing from a bishop father to son. <a href="https://www.stmaryorthodoxchurch.org/orthodoxy/articles/married_bishops">More on this subject here.</a>I know there will be differing opinions on this, but I don’t see evolving organizational demands as “changing the Word of God” at all, particularly when you consider that the purpose of Paul’s epistles is often troubleshooting issues brought up by the Galatians, and we don’t have the original letters *to* Paul. The New Testament epistles are not intended to be full expressions of everything Christians ought to believe and don’t contain detailed instructions for important topics like how worship ought to proceed, how we should pray, and so on, all of which would have been taught by the Apostles (and, as the Orthodox claim, are maintained by their church.) The Epistles are valuable and God-inspired, of course, but not comprehensive. I would be concerned if some moral teaching were changed, and an Ecumenical Council had declared the morality of homosexuality or something like that, but there’s nothing of the sort.Moving on...This is an illuminating quote because *the Jews could bring this exact same charge against Christians!* The actions and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament appear to be “God contradicting himself,” like Jesus’ actions upon, and teaching about, the Sabbath. Changes to ecclesiastical codes are a far less egregious case than what appeared to the Pharisees as *an alteration of the Ten Commandments.*This is simply begging the question and relies on the assumption that the interpretation of Scripture is a free-for-all and not entrusted to the Church; an idea that not really anybody believed before the 16th century. I fully acknowledge the authority of God’s word; but now I recognize that an endless stream of problems have resulted from turning interpretation into a personal affair. On top of that, I’m not convinced that the typical areas of objection (Mary, saints, etc.) are contradicted by scripture at all. There are some verses that are used as positive evidences for such practices, but I won’t even go that far; I’d just say, the Bible on its own is silent or ambiguous about them.This guy spends a lot of time on writers like Frederica Mathewes-Green and Matthew Gallatin, but these are lay people and popularizers. Not to say they don’t represent Orthodoxy, but they don’t carry anywhere near the rigor of somebody like <a href="https://saintjonah.org/responses-to-protestant-apologists-on-sola-scriptura/">Father John Whiteford, who has written extensively on Sola Scriptura and issues involved.</a>.Again, as I wrote in my original post, a huge problem I have with Sola Scriptura is that it didn’t exist before the Reformers created it. It’s not found in the Bible. It’s an interpretative presupposition and this guy’s response is laughable: the word “Trinity” doesn’t appear in Scripture, but was articulated by the Ecumenical Councils and early church writers and also has scriptural evidence. Sola Scriptura is not found in the Bible, wasn’t believed by anybody before the 16th century, and none of this guy’s numerous citations support his argument that only scripture is the ultimate authority: only that scripture can be used to instruct and correct wrong teaching, both of which any Orthodox Christian would also affirm. The “scripture” of 2 Timothy 3.16-17 is the Old Testament, and following “Sola Scriptura” would lead to the absurd conclusion of rejecting Gospel and Christian faith which hadn’t even been written down yet at that time! His attempt completely fails to argue that “…the only infallible teaching authority given in scripture is scripture itself,” which is not evidenced in the passages cited. Again: the content of what we now consider the New Testament would not have met this guy’s own criteria in the first century.This writer doesn’t really deal with the challenges to Sola Scriptura: he tries to hand-wave the endless division and creation of denominations by politics or other non-religious factors, but in this quote:He proves the point. The United Methodists will tell you that they’re following Scripture and give you a list of references affirming their decision to ordain gay clergy or whatever.In the vast majority of these cases it comes down to a difference of interpretation, and even amongst conservative Evangelicals and their range of interpretation, the differences are so striking that you can reasonably ask if they even worship the same God. Is the God of double-predestination the same God of the Arminian, or the open theist? Is the Penal Substitution God who punishes one person of the Trinity to sate the wrath of another person of the Trinity the same as a God who offers His Son not as a sacrifice to himself, but to break the power of Satan?These are vital questions, to name just a few, all of which can be backed up by copious references to scripture. The fact that serious, committed, God-loving Christians can come to such dramatically different conclusions about core Christian beliefs on the basis of scripture alone ought to cause extreme doubt about the wisdom of building one’s faith on the edifice of Sola Scriptura’s presuppositions, especially since these kinds of divisions were not present in the first-millennium Church.Trying to turn this around to use against Orthodoxy, as he does in his tepid "BUT WHICH APOSTOLIC CHURCH?" quip in regards to 1 Timothy 3.15 is just silly, and a weak argument when you can count Orthodoxy’s significant schismatic movements (I’ll avoid including the Catholic Church here, Catholic Bros) on one hand:- The Oriental Orthodox churches who rejected the Chalcedonian definition of Christ’s nature,- The Assyrian Church of the East,- Russian Old Believers,- True Orthodoxy,- and Old Calendarists.The issues separating these communions are all of far less consequence (Semantics! Calendars! Hand gestures! [I know this is simplifying things somewhat, but you get the idea]) than amongst Protestantism, and they don't, as far as I can tell, come from differences in scriptural interpretation (perhaps excluding the Oriental Orthodox schism.) This whataboutism is a rather egregious example of this critic ignoring the Protestantism-shaped log in his own eye, where the divisions in Protestantism outnumber Orthodoxy by magnitudes, and Protestant divisions have their very root in scriptural interpretation.Finally, this critic is frequently lazy; a good example is his “Objection #6”, in which he mentions “…Thomas Aquinas correcting the views of men like John Chrysostom” as if an Orthodox cares about how a post-Schism Roman Catholic theologian evaluates a 4th century patristic writer. Orthodox already affirm the patristic consensus of the Church Fathers and their shared ideas, rather than over-emphasizing someone like Augustine who held views on things like Original Sin that weren’t in accord with the other patristic writers. The appeal to patristic authority is based on the notion that those closer to the source are in a better position to evaluate and interpret scripture properly than lawyers living in 16th century Europe. This doesn’t mean the Reformers never have a good insight or interpretation; but it does mean we should skeptically examine their presuppositions and new ideas not found in earlier Christian writers.Again, if you're an Evangelical who holds to Sola Scriptura I don't think you're going to hell or anything like that, and don't even remotely view you as "the enemy." I'm just sharing observations from my journey, hoping that somebody finds it helpful.</blockquote>

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