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Practical Differences Between the Orthodox and Evangelicals
First Orthodox Cathedral built in Georgia in 1,000 years.
I am a Baptist and a missionary that was on the field for 14 years and I worked primarily in Georgia but other Orthodox countries as well. My experience with culturally Orthodox and faithful Orthodox believers are from these countries in descending order of interaction, Georgia, Russia, Romania, Ukraine, and America. I was inspired by this post from @heavywater on the conversion of the Bible Answers man to Orthodoxy. What I wanted to do here is to lay out the practical differences I found between not just the teaching of Orthodoxy and Evangelicals generally but how the teaching is put to work in the real world. I am a Baptist and I would be a Reformed Baptist, on the question of salvation, to lay down a theological marker.
I am not trying to win or even make an argument here, I am not interested in this post who better reflects the teaching in the Bible or the wishes of Christ, instead I want to lay out how the differences in the teachings of the two churches play out in the lives of people practicing the two faiths. I want to illuminate what motivates the conversions that move people from Orthodoxy to Evangelicalism and what often motivates the reverse. I intend to take a more bottom-up look at what happens here so instead of starting with theology and then working down to the people I am going to start with the people and work my way up to some insights on the theology.
Let’s get started with part of a testimony of a girl that went from Orthodoxy to Evangelicalism.
“My first doubt about my faith is when we went to sacrifice a chicken to the Lord at the local Orthodox church. We had sinned and the Priest said we needed to sacrifice a chicken to Lord to atone for it. So my parents brought the chicken and while we prayed the Priest slaughtered the chicken and threw half in a basket before the altar and then took the other half for himself. Before I could control myself, I said aloud, “That is for God, why are you taking it?” My parents were mortified but the Priest just smiled at me and said, “Christ also takes care of his Priests.”
Now any, even nominally educated, Orthodox believer will quickly tell you the above story is a mess. Orthodox theology does not need chickens, no one atones for sin with the blood of animals. Some even question whether the above incident could have even happened. No one in Georgia would bat an eye at it however, they all know it happens. I am here to tell you though that Orthodox theology does not allow the Priest to act the way he did and it is true even if the people believed the chicken was sacrificed for their sins it was only because they were taught incorrect Orthodox theology.
Even Priests in Georgia, educated ones used to foreigners, will tell you what we see here is simple folk practice. Country priests have to find various ways to supplement their income to survive and people build up stories about once simple rituals to give them greater importance and so we get bad theology. But they are also quick to assure you that it is alright and the people’s faith in the Church is justified and their salvation is secure. Why is that? Well, one more story.
My sister in law, Nino, is out on a camping trip with her girlfriend and some male cousins and friends. They are feasting on fish the boys have caught in the stream and the next day they are going to a church up in the hill country called Tetri Giorgi (White/Silver George) the church is ancient and very holy. It is said the earth all around the church is black from the tens of thousands of cattle sacrificed there over the centuries. One of the boys noticed a gold chain around her neck and said, “You better hide that or even bury it out here.” Shocked Nino responded, “No, way. Why would I do such a thing?”
The boys explained that Saint George and other Saints located at the church are very hungry for sacrifice and if they “see” the gold they will demand it from her and if she does not give it they may even curse her causing her death. Nino, then explained that the church they are going to is simply a piece of cultural heritage to her and there are no saints who do anything like they say, and that her faith is in Jesus Christ regardless and Jesus doesn’t really need nor wants her necklace.
The boys then launched into long stories about how magical the church was, how the Saints can mess with the Earth’s magnetic field and essentially tell horrifying ghosts stories with gruesome ends for those that tried to defy the Saints of the church of Tetri Giorgi. When Nino and her friend still weren’t moved and tried to explain that even according to normal Orthodox teaching what they were saying about the church was wrong. The boys were so angry the girls were frightened and asked to go home and one the cousins drove them away from the camping trip.
What to make of these two stories, stories used often when explaining to others why the people that experienced them became Baptist instead of Orthodox? Well, normally the conversation derails on high theological grounds and defenses based on the fact that the bad actors in this story were not acting as true Orthodox and who seem ignorant of basic Orthodox teaching.
I think this misses the point. The Orthodox are basically unchallenged in Georgia. They have government backing and have been free of Communist oppression for more than a generation. If the Orthodox Church in Georgia wanted to stop these practices, they certainly could. A priest or monk coming out of the church of the Tetri Giorgi and telling everyone with a cow in tow that there was no reason to kill the cow and that it would bring them no advantage would swiftly put an end to the practice. They chose not to end it. Why?
Church Authority in Salvation
The reason these practices horrify Baptists and usually get rueful shrugs from Orthodox Priests is their different views of the role of the Church in salvation. For the Orthodox, the membership in the right church brings a person to salvation. The hard work of the priest and the church hierarchy is to bring their flock into salvation the flock does not have to do much more than belong and stay members in good standing with the church to make it into heaven.
Imagine for a moment that you are a priest and strongly believe that people need salvation and that salvation is on offer in the Orthodox Church. You head out to a village or small town and start caring for the flock. As you teach standard Orthodox theology you find that many people are surprised by what you are teaching and they start questioning many of their folk’s beliefs. As you try and reassure them that their folk beliefs are wrong they begin to worry about their dead grandparents and other relatives and get upset. The flock is troubled and there is dissension in the flock with many accusing you the Priest of teaching bad or “new doctrine”. You have a big mess on your hands, you are barely paid anything, you depend on donations from the flock who are upset and angry, other Priests around rebuke you for rocking the boat, and in general your life becomes very unpleasant. What would you do?
Well, I think we can forgive a Priest for asking, “Do the people really need to know any of these things?” They are in the right church, it is your job to secure their salvation by blessing a few folk practices you make a lot of people happy and you will give them correct sacraments and really isn’t that the most important thing?
People yearn for the supernatural and the unexplained, they desire meaning in their lives and folk practices, superstitions, legends, and Saints give them something to get them through hard days and for the Priests there really is no harm done since the people are in the right church. They obey their “Fathers” and they get the correct and very powerful sacraments and that is simply enough for salvation. I should say here too that the Priests I knew of or knew personally did not, for the most part, hide their deeper theological truths from their people but they took a very God-focused approach to sharing theology. If God moved someone to really ask questions and wanted to read books the Priest would help them do those things and teach them, because they figured they really wanted to know. They were always careful to leave some wiggle room for the customs and practices of the local people however, no matter how weird. As long as the practice did not detract from the authority of the Priest or the church he served.
There is a movie that gets at this as well. It is called Leviathan. A 2014 film from Russia. In the movie a man is losing his lands to a corrupt official but the innocent man knows a lawyer so he fights back to keep his land. This land stealing has been normal for a while in the region and the corrupt official Vadim is giving some of the land to the Church and using some of his wealth to build up the church in the area. There is Bishop in the movie and he is pretty good. I could not find the scene I wanted on YouTube but when Vadim thinks he is about to be undone by his victim’s lawyer he goes to the Bishop for advice. The scene starts at the 1:11-minute mark in the movie and Vadim confesses he is feeling uneasy about his criminal behavior, he is not sure if he will succeed. The Bishop carefully keeps himself from hearing any details of crimes and instead checks in on the man’s faith. He asks if he is going to the mass and talking with his confessor and then spiritualizes the conflict for him. The Bishop says that the realms of the two men are different, Vadim is in the secular realm and must use his strength to solve his conflicts. Vadim is doing God’s work, yes? Then act like a man and don’t let the Enemy win over him. The Bishop rebukes him for being a child and having doubts and then blesses him and sends Vadim off. Sure enough, the lecture works and Vadim solves all his problems with some carefully applied violence and fear and soon all his enemies have fled, committed suicide or are in jail.
Again this is not what the great moral theology of the Orthodox theology would teach. What is shows how easy the Orthodox fall into the trap separating what happens inside and outside the church. In the Secular world, you do what you must to accomplish your goals and the “greater good” when you are in the world of the church you obey the church authority and trust in them for your salvation.
Again the point here is to not show how the Orthodox Church “really” works I am discussing flaws in the system thate convince people to leave the Church for another denomination or faith.
A Nominal Orthodox confesses her faith in Christ.
So what about the Baptists?
While I have been discussing cracks in the Orthodox practice, it has to be said that the system overall is quite popular. Things like this don’t last if they are not popular and do not appeal to a side of our human nature. Since this post is about conversion, I thought I would line up how Baptist practice, and Protestant more generally, match up against these fault lines.
The first is the practice that matters here is the emphasis on Bible reading. It is often alleged that the Orthodox don’t read the Bible because they are not allowed too. That was not what I experienced working and living with Orthodox for 14 years. There is rarely, if ever, any command not to read the Bible by any Orthodox authority. Instead nearly all Orthodox believe, especially those in Orthodox countries where I have direct experience, the Bible is challenging and confusing. Reading the Bible directly is a holy exercise that requires regular access to a Priest and a lot of time. It is troublesome to read the Bible so it is better to read the readily available and curated books that Priest have put together where you read Bible verses and/or chapters with explanation in one book. Passages that are too troublesome are just left out.
This usually meant that the normal Orthodox member you ran into wasn’t just ignorant of the Bible, most people everywhere are Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox or other notwithstanding, they were shocked to learn what was in the Bible. In other words, Orthodox were often truly ignorant of the Bible but confident they were not. Reading the Bible, especially passages they didn’t know existed, would shock many Orthodox and undermine their trust in the church. I would say that of all the Georgians and others who sat down and read the Bible with me over the course time 80% of them became Baptist. Now, getting them to read the Bible with you for a period of time was very difficult but if they did they were very likely to convert.
This was not because the Bible “disproves” Orthodoxy; it was because they had been told for their whole lives that the Bible was confusing and that the Church would take care of the salvation. Reading the Bible, they did not find it very confusing and the Bible was pretty clear about having faith, yourself, in Christ to be saved. The church hierarchy didn’t seem to factor into this according to the Bible.
The second aspect of the Baptist practice that attracted people away from the Orthodox Church was fusing their normal secular lives with their faith. As a missionary, the hardest lift for me in teaching and preaching was not convincing people that Jesus loved them and they needed a personal faith Christ but that faith in Christ meant their “public” life was to match up with the “church” life. When people realized that Christ could affect their whole life, through a relationship with Him, the rituals of the Orthodox Church would feel empty or even pointless. Doing rituals to get rid of sin as you went pales in comparison to Jesus Christ who forgives all sin, once and for all so that we can love Him and love others more freely. This strikes many Orthodox as a life of greater integrity and fulfillment than one of ritual obedience to the Church. Once you believe that you are in a relationship with Christ and his Holy Spirit dwells within you the idea that Saints of any kind or Holy Water, Blessed Crosses, Holy Candles or any other aid or intercessor is necessary loses their appeal. Instead, converts felt these things distracted from Christ instead of drawing Christ closer to them. If Christ loved them instead of being angry with them, why do you need someone that Christ “really” loved, like a Saint, intercede for you?
This post is more than long enough. I will write a part II that will be up early next week where I will write an “Ode to Orthodoxy” about how the practical aspects of Baptist practice will lead people to the beauty and ancient wonder and wisdom of the Orthodox Church.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Okay, then let’s see your criteria. So far I’ve figured out
What am I missing?
I suggest you read some books on the Historical Jesus written by various New Testament scholars.
There are various criteria used by New Testament scholars to determine whether an event is likely historical or likely not historical. But there is disagreement among these scholars.
There is no clear consensus.
At some point we do indeed have to figure out whether a text is correct or not, which involves questions of authorship and so on. But at this particular juncture the only point under consideration is what the text means. These questions of authorship and so on are (almost) entirely beside the point.
Then why did you mention your unspecified premises in unspecified scholarship in # 70?
Plainly, based on what you say here, those scholars are irrelevant.
And why do you ignore my concerns in #s 73-74, drawn as they are directly from the words of Matthew?
Why?
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but there’s a standard assumption in every attempt to divine the ‘historical’ truth behind any Bible story. They assume miracles can’t exist and therefore any story that includes them is ahistorical somehow. Even if they were to describe the existence of a practical man’s Jesus who doesn’t heal the lame or rise from the dead then they’re left with something that’s completely unworthy of worship. It’s Dr. Wernstrom’s triumphant cackle: “If my calculations are correct we’ll all die horribly! Hah! Hah ha;. hah.”
I’d get better use out of my time diving back into Warhammer 40k novelizations.
A church many of friends go to spent two and half years studying the issue of whether the Bible supports Evangelism or not. They decided that in the end it did support evangelism. I can’t even begin to comprehend how they dragged that out of two and half years! It boggles my mind.
I have always thought that preaching should match the theme and intentions of the Bible text being preached on. The author’s intent and purpose should always stay in the for front of our minds. That is what studying the Bible is and I think that is how the Bible is most correctly handled. Preaching 45 minutes on three words is teaching theology, which is valuable! But it is not preaching the Bible on its own terms. I think people should be up front about what they are doing. I always cringe and feel very uncomfortable if a preacher starts using a text to make some different or larger point then the author intended. Even if what they are saying is right. If you going to preach the Bible, preach it as it is for what it actually says. If you want to teach theology, Great!, I love theology but be up front about what you are doing.
You are not the first and I am sure not the last person I will hear mention this or read this from someone. Many people find a richness in the liturgical cycle that I don’t see and do not appreciate. It seems forced and constricting to me, personally. Others find it very moving. I am glad that you do. Anything that makes the Word come to life for you is a good think in my book.
Actually Orthodox building practices and layouts in a Cathedral are like commentaries on the Old Testament in architecture. They take a lot of inspiration form the Old Testament that way.
Yes. Why not talk about the criteria and make sure we’re applying them logically–instead of ending a conversation by citing scholars?
Some things are matters of authority, but sometimes it’s our job to do the logic ourselves. In this case, the scholarly authorities themselves are supposed to be reasoning based on evidence.
Why don’t we do that?
E.g., we could start by listing some of those criteria. I’ve set up a short list of some of them at # 159 of “Knowledge and Faith Can Be the Same Thing.”
Were they ents? Was it an Ent-moot?
As one local cathedral warden likes to describe it, the building itself should convey Christ in as many means possible. In that cathedral, every little bit of glass or tile has a definite purpose, and it all ties to scripture.
Further, the layout of Orthodox churches is a direct descendant of synagogue architecture of Christ’s time, which itself was always meant to echo The Temple. The lineage is pretty clear, and the claim to lineage has been backed up by recent archaeological findings – I forget the one at the moment, but a synagogue from about AD60 was excavated about a decade ago, and its layout is exactly what one would expect. This makes sense as the early Christians were Jews, and they did go to the synagogues to worship and to teach until they were finally booted out.
My favorite part in these quotes is the concession that there “could be some Jesus-Paul overlap”. Thanks for that possibility!
First a quick point, that I can develop more fully if you wish later, is that there is no reason to believe that Matthew 25:31-46 conflict with any other teaching the Scriptures have on salvation and the need for faith. Because knowledge of Jesus does not save. Satan has unique and intimate knowledge of Jesus and is not saved. Knowledge of Jesus has never been enough nor is it ever claimed to be enough to save anyone. Beliefs lead directly to actions. If someone says, “Hey, stop! Don’t drink any of that red fluid in those bottles it is deadly poison!” Then he precedes to pop one of those bottles open and drink happily from the bottle one could infer that he was lying about his belief in the poisonous nature of the red liquid.
Belief in Jesus as your Lord and Savior then precedes to you acting on those beliefs. If you don’t act appropriate to having faith in Jesus as you savior we could infer that your statements about belief in Jesus are false. In other words Jesus is saying nothing more than your actions prove that your statement of faith was false. We have several examples in Scripture of people proclaiming, falsely, their faith in Jesus only to be shown to not have that faith.
Jesus is under no obligation to carefully develop this point at every juncture because he knows that we are not supposed to make bold across the board claims on a narrow selection of his teachings or the small selection of the teachings from his disciples.
Which brings us to the core issue at hand the Resurrection of Jesus…to be continued.
Alternately that it’s Mountain Dew: Code Red.
Have you ever gone through an Orthodox Lenten cycle? I would recommend you do, if the opportunity presents itself – you might see what I mean. I did a series of posts on the Sundays of Lent this year, if time and energy had permitted I would have carried the sequence all the way through Pentecost (maybe next year?). All of Lent is a build-up to Holy Week itself, and the Holy Week services (if the church can offer them all – many can’t) take you almost hour by hour through Jesus’s final week before the Crucifixion – and these are not seen as past events, but events that we are also somehow participating in. It’s anything but constricting – it’s living. The hymnody is rich and, if you listen and read carefully, chock-full of deep theology along the way, including deep references to OT events and prophecies as foreshadowing Christ’s ministry and passion.
It’s still a deadly poison.
A point James made extraordinarily well too.
Continuing from 100. If Jesus was raised from the dead that gives us a strong reason to believe that the Bible was written as intended and we can trust the Scriptures to speak to us about the true desires of God and the true teachings of Jesus and that we can trust that his Disciples to have understood him. Since Jesus came to Paul specifically later than the other Disciples we can trust that Jesus knew what he was doing and Paul conducted himself and wrote the things he did in a way to please Jesus.
If you do not accept that Jesus was raised from the dead then we have a couple of options.
First none of this matters and discussing it at all is a waste of time.
Second the only value these discussions have is the real world impact these beliefs have on the world around because these beliefs do impact the actions of billions of people and anything that does that deserves to be discussed!
In that case what matters is the whole book of Scripture that people falsely believe to be divine revelation because that is what they are using to make their decisions. That is what is affecting the real world. So lets take your privileging Matthew as possibly being the real words of Jesus and so Paul’s take on everything is of lesser value.
Why are we going to give Jesus that privilege? If he is was just a guy that said some things that other people wrote down then he is no more important Paul. There would be no reason in fact not to privilege Paul over Jesus since Paul was a more systemic thinker. And if Jesus was not raised from the dead he deserves no special treatment. It is better to look at what is the most influential teaching at the Bible at any one time in history and deal with that teaching alone.
On the other hand if Jesus should be privileged why is he privileged? If it was because he was raised from the dead then why can’t I trust his endorsement of Paul and out put of Paul’s ministry as a guide to what Jesus wants? If he was just a guy that was eaten by dogs what impact does or should his words have for me?
And it’s not like Paul thinks we can be saved through intellectual assent without following Christ.
It’s also in Hebrews 11:1. We need to check the Greek. It looks to me like we mistranslate it regularly.
Faith is the elegchos of unseen pragmaton / the reproof of unseen deeds / the life-change required by the deeds of Christ described a chapter or two earlier.
To continue from 105:
Which leaves two options either we talk about concept of salvation in the context of the what Christian find authoritative or we don’t but I have no reason to give the special status that you do to Matthew or if I accept your premise any words of Jesus.
If Jesus is special and we need to pay close attention to him then I think we also need to pay attention to the fact that he specifically called Paul, personally, to care out his mission and write what he did of the New Testament.
I mean the whole New Testament could have been just a conspiracy by the Jews after the Third Revolt to throw the Romans off the scent of Jewish world domination and cause social upheaval among the Gentiles that just got out of hand. We can know from taking the right numerlogical approach to the Book of Jude where if you decode things correctly the Pharisees admit to the whole scam! It is sad that we will never really know, without a time machine, but we can hope to one day figure it out.
True and important.
The sheep and the goat passage doesn’t affect anything respecting people who follow Jesus and never act like it, or people who follow Jesus and do act like it.
But HW is onto something. A first-glace reading of the passage does suggest a terms-of-salvation account that makes a difference for people who do not consciously follow Jesus but do love their neighbors–that they are saved.
One of my concerns is (in # 73) that this passage, in context, might just not be about terms of salvation at all. (I lean towards terms of salvation being one aspect of the passage, however!)
Another (in # 74) is that Jesus’ phrasing “the least of these brothers of me” may suggest that the passage is not talking about human beings in general, but about followers of Jesus. So these sheep are not people who never reverenced Jesus, but people who do believe that Jesus is at least some of the things he says he is–and who act like they believe it by helping his followers.
Hello @geezerbob. Why is it stumbling block? If it has no practical insight to how some people experienced Orthodoxy why did you write this:
GeezerBob (View Comment):
FYI, I was raised Presbyterian but when I decided to marry, I found I was not baptised. The Presbyterian minister who had been a friend of the family as long as I could remember would not baptise me. I am still not sure why.
By your standard are not these sentence of no value to understanding you and meaningless when we think about your experience with Presbyterians?
Then the story should not have surprised you nor been a stumbling block to you. Not everyone experiences the Orthodox church at its best as I am sure you will allow you did not experience the best the Presbyterians offer. Yet these mistakes lead people to change churches and the way their practice their faith. Sometimes I find it edifying why people do so.
I had similar thoughts!
That is exactly what I had in mind…..this is a little freaky…
This is essentially my take on the passage. There is a lot here and many illuminating Scriptures on the subject but if we can’t agree to discuss the whole counsel of Scripture and we are to even privilege speak words of Jesus over other words of Jesus then we can’t get anywhere.
About that. Say it is about terms of salvation. It is almost a certainty that there is another aspect of the passage we miss–whatever it would mean to the Jewish community grounded in the land and thinking about the Mosaic covenant after just hearing Yeshua predict the catastrophe of AD 70.
I don’t think the sheep and the goats can be limited to these people because of the word ethnos, “nation,” appearing here in the plural–which I believe is also a standard Septuagint term for the Gentiles.
But what does the passage mean to those Jews?
Maybe something like this: If you join with your leaders in persecuting my followers, you will be held guilty under the terms of G-d’s covenant with his people. If you instead help them you will be ok; you’re still in the old covenant, regardless of the coming judgment.
We can assume miracles can exist. But we still would not know when they happened and when they are simply inventions of people.
If I tell you that I once ran a marathon (26.2 miles) in 30 minutes and you heard that the world record is somewhere around 2 hours and 2 minutes, you might ask me for the online race results web page so that you could verify that I am not lying to you.
But I could do what a dentist in Michigan once did: Create a fake race results web page with a fake race director (who had the same name as the coach of the University of Michigan’s college football team). This dentist didn’t go so far as to make himself the fastest marathon runner who ever lived. But he did have himself winning the race.
I will make a 2 part comment.
Part 1
The judge of the entire human race is a figure Jesus calls the “Son of man.” The debates over Jesus’ use of this phrase among scholars are long, hard, and complicated. This use of “Son of man” is almost certainly an allusion to a familiar passage of Scripture, Daniel 7:13-14, in which the prophet sees that at the end of human history a figure will come from heaven to destroy the evil kingdoms that currently rule the earth. He will then himself become the ruler of all.
This idea of a cosmic judge who destroys the forces of evil and establishes his kingdom is a prominent theme in the apocalyptic teachings of Jesus, and coincides well with the apocalyptic views of other Jewish teachers in Jesus’ day.
In Mark 8:38 the Son of man comes accompanied by other divine beings, “all the angels.”
When Jesus refers to the “Son of man” he does not always indicate that he is talking about himself. Though sometimes he does seem to hint that he is talking about himself. My view is that Jesus did not understand himself to be the cosmic judge of the earth, but the Gospel writers precisely did understand him that way – which is why they identify him as the Son of man even though he never did so.
Before him gather “all the nations.” The term that is used there for “nations” is the greek term ETHNĒ, which is often used to refer to “peoples other than the Jews” but can simply also mean something like “all the peoples on earth.” It is not clear from what is said here whether this is to be imagined only as the people who happen to be alive at the time, but since there is also nothing that clearly indicates otherwise, that should probably be the assumption. This is the judgment of the living, not the dead.
So you reject all those scholars’ arguments insofar as they depend on the assumption that miracles simply cannot happen?
Part 2 of my 2 part comment.
The Son of man issues his judgment first to the sheep, calling them “blessed of my Father”; they are brought into the Kingdom of God that has been part of God’s plan since the creation. The reason they are given their reward is that they took care of the Son of man when he was in need: hungry, thirsty, unclothed, a stranger, sick, and imprisoned.
The “sheep” don’t understand: they’ve never even seen the Son of man before. How did they take care of him? He tells them that when they did such things for “the least of these, my brothers and sisters” then did it for him. In other words, by tending to those who were in need, showing compassion on them and providing them with what they lacked, they did what God wanted them to do and cared for those God cares about.
We can consider whether “the least of these” could be a reference to the disciples of Jesus – that they were the ones cared for by these peoples of earth. My view is that it would be hard to imagine that “all the nations” (in other words, everyone alive) had an opportunity to meet a disciple of Jesus. But everyone does meet, all the time, people in need. From that I would conclude that this is not a reference simply to taking care of Jesus’ closest followers but taking care of anyone who is needy.
The “goats” receive the opposite fate. They are sent off to “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” The reason? They did not take care of others who were in desperate need.
At the end, Jesus makes a clear differentiation: some people will go to “eternal punishment” and others to “eternal life.” Both punishment and reward are said to be eternal.
One of the keys to this passage is that it does not indicate that a person is saved or damned based on their belief in Jesus, their acceptance of the Christian message, their adoption of any particular Christian doctrines, or, technically speaking, their relationship to anything Christian at all. These people have never even heard of Jesus. What matters is not their Christian faith but their righteous life: they have taken care of those in need. All who do so will be rewarded; those who refuse to do so will be punished.
I don’t accept or reject a scholars’ argument based on how they deal with miracles, though I personally am very skeptical about miracle claims.
But when Paul says in Galatians 1:11-12
This is a key point. Paul is making a claim that he received his ideas about salvation straight from Jesus.
But what if Paul didn’t actually receive the word from Jesus/God? A few option here are that [a] Paul lied or that [b] Paul thought he received word from Jesus but didn’t actually receive word from Jesus.
If either [a] or [b], then we might want to just read Matthew 25:31-46 and take it for what it is, rather than view it in the context of other scripture (such as Romans 10:9 or John 3 and others).
This isn’t to say that reading Matthew 25:31-46 in the context of other scripture is a bad idea. However, we might also want to view it on it’s own, to make sure we aren’t distorting its meaning based on preconceived ideas about Jesus’s views on salvation.
Excellent. A counterobjection to my # 74 objection.
Your objection appears to assume that “all the nations” must apply to each human being. Why can’t it be a generalization of some sort? It’s not like the passage reads like it’s supposed to have a rigid system for referring to groups of people. Biblical literature rarely if ever does, and, after all, this passage refers to people as sheep or goats.
And is there any evidence that Jesus says all people in need are his brothers? Or is this just a theory that explains the passage nicely?