BTW despite my vehement disagreements and occasional frustration I gotta give it up to Godfather for patiently and civilly engaging without tire, I don't have a chance talk to knowledgeable Protestants in depth in my day to day life so it's been quite interesting and led me to grow in patience and spend more time studying the Epistles I wasn't so familiar with.
It's easier to keep your cool if you don't actually care about Truth. St Nicolas probably would have given him a backhand by now. Hermetic Seal nailed it earlier in the thread.
When you say stuff like this it's obvious to anybody who's spent even a short time in the Orthodox world that your knowledge of Orthodoxy is shallow and seemingly based on second-hand sources (eg., some Protestant apologist in a YouTube video trying to respond to Orthodoxy) and not spending any real effort to understand what Orthodox believe, just enough to try to cram a caricature of it into box of Calvinist argumentation.
Of course you're under no intrinsic obligation to study Orthodoxy in depth, and one from the Western world can't be faulted for misunderstanding Orthodoxy, as it has an outlook that is very different from that of the individualistic western mind and isn't something that will immediately be picked up, especially not just from reading about it. But if you're going to opine on what you think we believe, as you've done on a regular basis for the last several years, constantly making these kinds of erroneous statements makes you come across as a bad-faith actor with an axe to grind.
He'll reference church fathers when it
suits him, and disregard others
like St Ignatius, even though he was a disciple of St John the Theologion. He doesn't actually care about what they say unless he can shoehorn it into a defence of his beliefs. He's like King Zedekiah, who ignored Jeremiah's advice even though he knew everything he had prophesied had come to pass. The truth is there for anyone to see, and it's their choice whether to ignore it or not.
You are free to think of me however you want. I view these kinds of discussions as both a way to learn, and as a sparring match, or like playing chess. I would not make it out to be anything bigger than it is. I am not under the expectation that I will convince you, so I do not experience anger or disappointment when you remain unconvinced.
You don't play chess, or spar to come to the truth, it's an ideological battle taking one side of the fence, which is entirely missing the purpose of the scriptures, but in the same vein, it's behaving in a similar manner as the Jews have. The Jews being around longer as a group just have more cohesiveness using the laws of Moses and their tradition of abrogating those laws through the Talmud their idol, whereas Protestants have very little unity and cohesiveness, and can just put themselves as the center (just as the Jews have), and have words on a page as in idol. Because whether Protestants like it or not, words on a page do not interpret themselves. Just as the Filioque Clause isn't immediately obvious in it's meaning, it requires elaboration, yet the lack of awareness is clear as no cognitive dissonance is triggered.
Although one good thing he's done is given an excellent illustration of why St. Paul says what he does in Titus 3:9-11. By discussing with him, all you're going to do is make a obstinate heretic more clever in his argumentation.
Generally, the denying of the Filioque is tied up with a Monarchian view of the Trinity, where only the Father is the true God and both the Son and the Spirit are communicated their Divine Nature from the Father alone. Thus, the Father remains the only uncaused cause.
If the Spirit is caused from the Father through the Son (as in the Filioque), then the claim is that this makes Him "subordinate to both the Father and Son." But if causation necessitates subordination, then both the Son and the Spirit are subordinates in the Monarchian Trinity.
If any of this sounds strange to you, it's because the Bible doesn't talk about any of this. It relies on extra-Biblical philosophical categories, of which both the Greeks and the Latins were importing their own.
And what you call a "Monarchian view" has nothing to do with Orthodoxy. Anyone persistently and obstinately promoting such a view would be tossed out and deemed a heretic as many have been in the past. Even Roman Catholics would disagree with that view of the Trinity. Stop talking carelessly about things that you're either talking about in bad faith, or that you don't understand.
Does this sound to you like Christ endorsing tradition over the revealed word of God? I have no doubt the Orthodox have some argument on how their own traditions don't fall under this category. But that strikes me as a rather tortured rationalization to contradict what seems a VERY clear teaching from Christ Himself.
As you referenced Mark 7:1-14 If Christ came to abolish all traditions, why do you think he obeyed the customs, like paying the temple tax? Or telling others to observe what they say, but not what they do? Certainly the Pharisees were only rebuked because while they observed the forms of outward cleanness, and it is indeed important to be clean while coming to share communal food, but to be truly in communion with others, it is more important to be inwardly clean, than outwardly clean so you can actually share a meal together while loving one another.
