I wonder what Martin Luther would have to say about the mega modern churches of today?
Protestantism: Critique and Debate Thread
- Thread starter GodfatherPartTwo
- Start date
I imagine he would have despised them at least as much as he hated the Anabaptists.
We find passages in the scriptures that hint of Christians falling away, for example, Hebrews 6 and this chapter refers to mature Christians and it even says it will be impossible to renew them to repentance again. There are warnings in Pauls letters like when he talks about excommunications and turning people over to satan, there are the warnings in the book of revelations too, Romans 11 also warns the gentiles that we can also be cut off from the vine just as the jews were cut off, so even if we just go by the scriptures we can see that in the scriptures, how those people lose their salvation is another topic altogether, in the scriptures we also find the need for Christians to do confession
When I grew up protestant as a kid our protestant church was not like protestants today, I went to a Portuguese protestant church, a 2000 seater and it was very traditional in its own way, the dress code was very formal, ladies wore dresses the pastor didnt really allow pants on woman, there was no drums and electric guitars mostly organs, pianos, violins, acoustic guitars, singing hyms, wooden pews, the community was also very close and all knew each other, but today that same church has fallen away I dont think the building is even in use anymore and the people are scattered around, many still go to church somewhere else but all more modern churches and others have lost their faith, it was a sad thing to witness, there were many factors that led to this and also the strong influence of the world, that kind of protestant church no longer exists in my countey anymore, when I started attending an Orthodox church I found that the church is still the same as in the old days, the church endured and it didnt bend to the world so I found that interesting and I noticed this difference
I've been visiting an Antiochian Orthodox Church that does the Western Rite Liturgy for several months. One of the parishioners grew up Anglican or Episcopalian, an older man, and I'm told that experiencing the Liturgy brought him to tears, because it was so similar to the traditional Episcopalian Mass that he grew up with but is no longer practiced. It's sad what happened to mainline Protestant churches.
Unfortunately the protestant churches (the institution, the collective) they bend to the culture of the world very easily, Im talking about the majority Im sure there are some who hold out more than others, they also evolve a lot, at a very high pace, what I noticed in the protestant world is that you would find individuals who would do rather well but as a whole not so good and then when that great individual dies then the church they belonged to suffers.
Happy Lord's Day to you.
The warning passages are fair and should not be neglected. But they should not be applied in a way that would contradict other passages of Scripture, such as Jesus promising to not lose anyone whom the Father gives Him in John 6, or Paul saying that those whom God predestined are also justified and glorified in Romans 8, or that those for whom the offering is made are perfected forever in Hebrews 10. Are passages like these simply meaningless?
1 John gives us the harmony: "They went out from us because they were not truly of us, for if they were truly of us then they would have remained with us, but they went out so that it would be demonstrated that they were not truly of us."
Whenever I read some of these quotes, I often wonder if the person even stopped to think about what he was saying or writing. What should Christians believe instead? That we are "fallibly" saved or that we are not saved at all?
To the one who works, knowing you are saved is presumptuous and arrogant. To the one who does not work but believes upon Him who justifies the ungodly, not knowing you are saved is a lack of faith in God's grace.
We are saved (justified), we are being saved (sanctified), we will be saved (glorified).
They go well together I accept them both.
Before taking holy communion there are some prayers we as Orthodox can read before partaking in our prayer book and there is a part in the prayers were we pray and say that we know we are undeserving and unworthy to partake and we ask God for His mercy and the attitude of the prayer is to partake of the Eucharist like the thief on the cross "remember me when you enter your kingdom Lord, like the unclean woman with the issue of blood who touched Jesus, I thought that was quite beautiful.
The way I think about if personally is that the grace and mercy of God are gifts to me that I dont deserve and even after I have partaken of them I still try remind myself and keep in mind that Im still unworthy of it, I try not to get too prideful about it as it can be dangerous.
Do you believe like the calvinists do about predestination and that we dont have a free will?
Amen!
Yes, I am a Calvinist. I do believe in predestination, not because John Calvin believed in it, but because it is a Biblical doctrine. I do believe we have a will, I do not believe it is free from sin because we are fallen. I believe that the Son of God sets us free from our bondage to sin so that we are free to believe and follow Him.
Do the Calvinists believe in evangelizing?
When you say predestination what does that mean to you?
Some of the biggest evangelists of all time have been Calvinists. God has decreed the ends (those who will believe) as well as the means (the proclamation of the Gospel). There are some extremists who do not evangelize but they are so miniscule that they are inconsequential. We believe that we can have confidence in our evangelism because "as many as are appointed to eternal life" will believe, as in Acts 13. This is why Calvinists remain very conservative in their evangelizing, we do not believe we need to modify the Gospel in order to attract more followers. We believe that God always "reserves a remnant for Himself."
That's hard to give a short answer to. God has decreed the ends (the salvation of the Church) as well as the means (the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ). This creation was created with a purpose, a telos, and God has been working to bring this creation to it's intended purpose. His omniscience cannot be falsified, He knows everything that will happen because He is the one who is holding this creation together. With God, there is no rogue molecule and no contingency, "He works all things according to the counsel of His will."
Without predestination, the creation would be in a state of flux. There is no longer purpose that holds the creation together but everything in it becomes meaningless and random, it is the cosmos of the materialist and the athiest. I cannot grant this because "all things were created by Him and for Him and through Him. He is before all things and in Him all things consist (they hold together)."
The sacraments are the normative means of receiving grace, but not the rigidly legalistic category you constantly present them as. For example, the thief on the cross would have been baptized if he had heard the preaching of the Apostles and had the same repentance and faith, but the whole being-nailed-to-a-cross-in-the-process-of-dying thing precluded that.
There are countless examples in the lives of the saints of a Christian being tortured, onlookers observing this and declaring that they too are Christians, and being immediately martyred with no opportunity for baptism. These are commemorated as saints in the services of the Church so it's hard to get much more official than that. If these people weren't killed, they would have been baptized and entered the Church in the normative way. If they had professed faith but rejected baptism when it was possible, then they would not have been Christians. It's as simple as that. For 99.9% of us, who are not facing immediate martyrdom in professing faith in Christ, baptism is the normative manner of entering the Church. Exceptions don't disprove the rule.
This is not hard to understand. And it's not a problem for Orthodoxy, it's only a problem for a logic-obsessive bean-counting mentality that can't conceive of perceiving any of this outside of its myopic arbitrary parameters.
No. There are progressive individuals, some of whom make disproportionate noise on the Internet, but they don't speak for the Church no matter how they try to spin it. There is no equivalent to what just happened to the United Methodist denomination, for instance.
So in other words, if you had the misfortune of living before the printing press made owning your own copy of the Bible viable, and/or the misfortune of being an illiterate person who couldn't sit down and read the Bible and decide for yourself what it means, then you're shit outta luck. This cornerstone of Protestant epistemology could only spring from the minds of scholastic western European nerds with a crippling lack of perspective beyond the ivory towers. That's exactly why there's nothing like it before widespread and affordable printing emerged, resulting in people quickly taking universal access to the printed word as a given.
This document is probably a forgery, found under remarkably dubious circumstances, but even if we grant that it's completely authentic and this Patriarch subscribed to Calvinist notions, so what? He's not the Infallible Supreme Pontiff of Orthodoxy. He can simply be wrong, and that has no effect on the Church.
In other words a Calvinist can never actually know he's saved and can merely be a deluded reprobate. This places him in a far worse position than the Orthodox. For instance, upon committing an act of fornication, the Calvinist might start to ask am-I-really-elect-or-reprobate, and conclude upon constantly falling into sin that they aren't really saved and give up, that God obviously hasn't given him grace. The switch, so to speak, is either flipped to On or Off, and if empirical experience suggests it's in the Off position, then you're screwed.
Meanwhile, an Orthodox in the same position knows that he hasn't been fated one way or the other. The issue is not whether God has fated him to salvation or damnation, but his own problem, that he rejected the grace and help God offers in favor of following his own will, and can always get up and try again, and struggle to repent as long as he still has breath.
I don't know about anybody else, but I find the latter notion a lot less bleak, and a lot more hopeful. If you scratch beneath the surface, you find that in Protestantism, especially Calvinism, you can't know that you're actually saved. You can be fervently faithful today and totally Believe In Jesus, but if in the future you fall away, your present seeming faith is total delusion.
Accounting for this is baked into Orthodoxy, where you can't pat yourself on the back for being faithful today because you could fall tomorrow, but rather have to keep on pushing, keep on struggling until the end. This is all quite different from the Pharisaical mindset St. Paul confronts.
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.
Forget deep dives into dense theological texts, merely using an Orthodox prayer book and going to services and paying a slight amount of attention would immediate disabuse one of these misunderstandings, if not outright misrepresentations, of what Orthodox actually believe. So all these accusations of Works Salvation and Boasting and yadda yadda ring hollow for anybody with actual experience.
Martin Luther, John Wesley, and others who created new Christian Protestant sects were great Christian men. I wonder if they would have any second thoughts about splitting the church. This decision of course was not taken lightly, but when you look at the dozens of Christ-lite churches that teach prosperity gospel or monthly sermons on "forgiveness" not to mention all the "nondenominational" churches which sprang from this split, I wonder if it has created more harm than good in the long run.
One of the biggest problems is many of these churches lead men who are trying to lead a Christian life, down a path of evil.
The legalistic nature of Orthodox sacramentology reveals itself in their understanding of what makes a sacrament "valid." For the Orthodox, only their sacraments are valid, meaning only their sacraments confer saving grace. Because the Orthodox already deny justification by faith alone, the sacraments become necessary to receive saving grace. I agree that they will, inconsistently, affirm that many are saved without the sacraments and by faith alone but this only goes to show the deficiency in their sacramentology.
Before the printing press, only the rich and the local churches had copies of the Bible. The laity would receive the Scriptures as told through the preacher. This former lack of availability in the Scriptures doubtless led to many of the superstitions surrounding the Scriptures. When the average person got a hold of the Scriptures and could not find the doctrines that his bishops had taught him, he quickly abandoned those doctrines.
Have you watched the video? There is more to Cyril Lucaris than just the one document. He makes for an interesting case-study because he shows that Eastern Orthodoxy, as it is now expressed, not necessarily in his day, is a post-hoc reaction against the Protestant Reformation. So when you say he was wrong, who are you to say he was wrong? You are only part of the laity and he was the first among the bishops.
There is nothing in Calvinism that makes giving up necessary. We know we are weak, but God is the one who is causing us to persevere to the end. I think everyone who has sincerely struggled with their sin has asked the question "does God really love me?" He does, and because He does, He will not forsake us.
The same book that says "you may know that in the Son of God you have eternal life" also says "they [apostates] went out from us so that it would be demonstrated that they were not truly of us." This is how to Biblically account for this seeming paradox.
You accuse me of not understanding what you believe, but then you go on to affirm everything that I say you believe, which is where these discussions come from. Then after doing so, you suggest I am bad faith actor. I don't get it.
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.
Last edited:
It's tricky, if we think we are earning our way, we've missed the point, but likewise, if we think we can just intellectually assent to a set of beliefs (even if they are true) we've also missed the point. The point is our relationship with Christ and that is always going to be a struggle this side of the eschaton.
Whether or not sacraments/rituals are legalism is in the perspective one takes.
For example, is it legalism if I legitimately want to do those rituals (or even naturally do them) rather than do the modern rituals like go to the movies, watch sports, shop, play video games, scan the news/social media? Some rituals aren't even bad and we just naturally do them - like a handshake. Is it legalism if we just naturally want to worship in a pattern that is oriented towards communion with Christ?
This reminds me of a quote from an Orthodox Saint I recently saw. I suppose it's more of a critique towards Roman Catholicism but I think it speaks towards this shift in perspective:
"Fear of torment is the way of a slave,
desire of a reward in the heavenly kingdom is the way of a hireling,
but God's way is that of a son,
through Love."
-St. Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain
We have a completely different understanding of faith. Faith is not simply "consent." Faith is true belief, one that transforms the soul and converts a human into an totally new person. Hence, "faith without works is dead." Faith is experienced; someone must choose to believe, there is no predestination that humans can be aware of (only God knows). Hence free will is paramount.
Thus the sacraments are not sufficient for grace, but they are necessary insomuch as one is capable of receiving them. This may sound like a contradiction to the reductionist worldview of Prots, but Prots forget that all things are possible with God. Contradictions do not exist for God like they do for humans.
Sacraments alone cannot confer grace, but if someone is actively avoiding them it means they lack faith and will not have grace.
Our attitude is that you get to partake of the sacraments because you have been redeemed, not that you need to do the sacraments in order to be redeemed. Do you see the contrast between Grace and Law? And so the sacraments are a means of grace. We should partake of the sacraments if we have been redeemed. They are signs and seals of our regeneration in Christ.
I don't believe faith is simply consent at all. It is a fruit of the regenerative work of God, it is a gift.
Romans 8 and 9 make us aware of predestination. To you, it looks like you are making a choice. To God, you are doing what He has already foreordained. Free will assumes a moral neutrality and innate ability that the Bible says man does not possess. Man chooses evil every time. It is only by God that man ever chooses good.
Not you, I, or anyone else has the slightest clue as to what God is seeing. To claim otherwise is Prelest (a dangerous delusion). God is so far outside of our understanding that is impossible to describe how far beyond us He is.
That's why predestination is completely worthless on a day to day, basic decision making level. Tells us nothing of how to be saved, or who is being saved.
Calvinism is such a dark and bleak view of God's creation. It essentially boils humanity down to sockpuppets or automatons that God is toying with. What a thing to believe. Never mind the fact the pretty much the entirety of the Gospel is instructions on how to exercise our will toward God. Crazy how Christ spent so much time preaching and teaching something that is apparently impossible!