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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
I think it is perfectly reasonable to study the ancient world, including the life and ministry of Jesus, from a naturalistic perspective.
A You Tuber has created a video attempting to explain how Christianity got started without Jesus actually rising from the dead. It’s not high scholarship. It’s a short video. But the point of his video is that there are naturalistic explanations for the emergence of Christianity.
Whether they are more or less persuasive than supernatural explanations for the emergence of Christianity depends on one’s opinion.
But I would not write someone off just because they say at the outset, “I don’t believe that miracles happen.” I agree with that statement.
Why not?
Isn’t a talking donkey a weird scenario? Isn’t someone turning water into wine a weird scenario? Is someone talking to Satan a weird scenario?
Why accept one weird scenario while rejecting another weird scenario?
Say I chose B, what would be my motivation for worrying what Jesus said about salvation? Why would I care if everyone could go to heaven by helping the needy, obeying the Will of God, or believing in Jesus or by some combinations of those concepts? Why would it even matter to me?
I think if you are trying to disprove the divinity of Jesus you can try to high light what you believe to be contradictions in the text to say the religion is incoherent and the faith in the text and the God the text describes is in vain. That would be useful I suppose.
If you talk about how someone get to heaven though, and act as if that destination matters, then I think you can’t just say the texts are completely unreliable so I think I will privilege this one text in isolation and not discuss it in context of all the other teachings considered by some to be of similar value.
Brian Wolf, Saint Augustine = patience of Job
Right. Let’s say I think that Jesus actually said the words attributed to him in Matthew 25:31-46 and let’s also say that I interpret those words as an indication that Jesus believed that one gets into the kingdom of God by feeding the hungry and so on.
I could also believe that Jesus’s view on this issue, how to enter the kingdom of God, is either correct or incorrect.
As for why one text should be privileged over another text, that’s a very complicated issue where New Testament scholars disagree. Bart Ehrman thinks that Matthew 25:31-46 does trace back to Jesus because he does not think that some later Christian, living years after Jesus died, would want to invent these verses.
Similarly, E. P. Sanders thinks that in Mark 10:17-18 [“Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”], these verses were probably not invented by the early Christian church. It’s likely, in E. P. Sanders’ view, that Jesus actually said this or something like it.
Notice how Matthew modifies this to “What good thing must I do?” instead of Mark “Good teacher, what must I do. . . . . ?” Maybe Matthew didn’t like the way Jesus seemed to be denying his own goodness and/or divinity?
Yeah, tell that to my wife.
I feel like I have the patience of Job. Saint Augustine asks me question after question after question. I try hard to answer the questions as best I can. Saint Augustine responds by accusing me of dodging questions.
You’re missing the point. Don’t speculate about conceivable weird scenarios. Reason about the facts.
Those particular weird scenarios are facts. Reason about them.
If you doubt that they are facts, then reason about the facts on the basis of which I and many others conclude that they are facts.
But it doesn’t do any good, when people are reasoning about facts, to meander into speculations about fanciful putative weird scenarios.
For the same reason we should not reject a historical Socrates: Those criteria for good historical evidence.
You are still avoiding the question. I wouldn’t write that person off either. I think his view is a fine conclusion, if there should be good premises for it.
The problem, which we have both acknowledged, is that his view is a lousy premise to use to argue against historical evidence.
Do you reject the arguments of scholars when they rely on this premise?
I’m not sure what to say about this. You tend not to answer the questions asked.
But thanks for trying!
Yeah, maybe I wasn’t being fair here. Sorry, bro. Hang on.
There may be a few reasons. Pascal and William James, for example, might point towards a good reason to believe. Or Kant.
But the main reason is very simple: The reason is the evidence.
When the alleged scenario is a historical event and the evidence for it is historical evidence, then you have to look at the criteria for reliable history.
No. Because as I live my life, I live it based on the assumption that there are no miracles. I don’t jump off of a 10 story building thinking that angels will catch me as I fall.
It’s a good idea to start from the premise that miracles don’t happen. If I am watching a magician saw a woman in half, my attitude is, “How did this magician make it appear that he sawed a woman in half?” I don’t take the attitude of, “Wow! He sawed that woman in half and put her back together at the end. Amazing.”
I start from the premise that miracles don’t happen.
The key words you used were “historical Socrates,” not “divine Socrates.”
With respect to Socrates, people tend to make rather mundane claims. It’s possible that the story that he died drinking hemlock was an invention of someone. So, I can go either way. I can believe that Socrates died drinking hemlock or I can believe Socrates died of old age and then after Socrates died, some of his admirers embellished his biography. Maybe someday I will devote myself to studying the source material and write a book on the subject.
With Jesus, people are making one very large claim after another. Let’s review the claims that have heard.
[A] They aren’t only claiming that Jesus rose from the dead.
[B] They are saying that Jesus is God.
[C] They are saying that belief in Jesus’s death and resurrection and his divinity provides one salvation, that Jesus’s death and resurrecting provides atonement for one’s sins.
So, even if I accepted A, this would not necessarily mean that I accepted [B] or [C].
In my opinion, the appropriate way of dealing with the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is to look at the source material and then come up with a variety of explanations such as:
[A] Jesus really did rise from the dead, but was not God.
[B] Jesus really did rise from the dead and he was God.
[C] Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, but some people in the 1st century came to believe that he had and also either believed that Jesus was divine while he was alive or came to believe that Jesus was divine after they came to believe in his resurrection.
It’s sort of like if there is a crime scene and the detective gathers evidence and then they consider various suspects and possibilities. Maybe the victim’s death was a suicide or maybe the murderer tried to make the death appear like a suicide. Who would have access to the victim’s apartment? Did the victim has enemies, someone who would want him dead? And so on.
So, we don’t have to look at “Jesus rose from the dead” as the only possible explanation for “the evidence.” Maybe there is a naturalistic reason for people believing that Jesus rose from the dead in the same way that there is a naturalistic reason for people believing that Mohammed heard the word of God in a cave in the 7th century.
There are lots of claims of divinity, miracle, the supernatural, the paranormal and so on. And there are naturalistic explanations for these claims.
OK, this is what I was wondering at – the assumption that miracles do not occur. I figured this might be your position. However, you make the same categorical error that so many others do* in defining what miracles are, just in order to claim they do not happen – ultimately this is a sort of straw-manning as you are taking examples of things people do not typically claim to experience when they testify to miracles, then saying that such things are impossible. I’m not aware of any biblical examples, for instance, of anyone being sawed in half and put back together. And the whole bit about jumping off a building, well Jesus Himself refused to do as much when tempted.
In other words, you’ve picked things Christians don’t claim to believe, and said you don’t believe in them either.
Let’s narrow the field then to two specific categories:
Do you rule these out? If you were to encounter or experience something like either of these, how might you react (obviously you cannot know for certain how you would react unless / until it happens)?
(*As an aside, I’m always surprised when I meet people who claim to be Christians who also start from that premise – that there can be nothing miraculous – and it makes me wonder “well, why do you claim to be a Christian at all then?” They tend to define miracles the same way you have, then claim that they’re impossible.)
Part of the message of Exodus is that seeing miracles is not enough. It is very true. I remember seeing a Jordan Peterson lecture where he said so someone about that “No you wouldn’t” when they said they would believe only if they saw a miracle.
When Peter confesses who Jesus is, Jesus does not respond “That is because of the bread thing”, no he says that God has reveled that truth to Peter.
I find the impact of Christianity to be a rational argument that something is very odd going on.
Now, people can talk about facts in the past, but what I have above all happened. There is something very, very odd about Christianity. It changed the world and made the West possible. Without it, we would not be Free Men. It is hard for me to rationally discount all of that. Based on what I know about human beings, Christianity seems more unlikely to arise than any other faith in the world.
I was trying hard to not just say, “I don’t believe in the miracles Christians believe in.” Instead, I was trying to take a more abstract position on miracles.
Initially, I mentioned that I could view how I met my wife as a miracle.
@saintaugustine took exception to my classifying an improbably event as a miracle, arguing that my meeting my wife did not violate any laws of physics.
I also mentioned a previous comment that if I said I ran a marathon (26.2 miles) in 30 minutes, people wouldn’t believe me because the world record is somewhere around 2 hours and 2 minutes.
Maybe this marathon claim doesn’t violate the laws of physics, but it does contradict our knowledge of human capabilities regarding running long distances at a fast pace.
I’ll tackle the rest of your comment after I run an errand. Stay tuned . . . . . .
I have always kind of wondered about this too. Bart Ehrman and others basically make claims that the people that wrote the New Testament Gospels were not trying to write down the true story or nature of Jesus but instead were trying to make sense of some events or series of events that implied to them that Jesus may have been more than a man. As Bart Ehrman once explained it might just be the fact that the disciples saw someone that looked like Jesus from a distance two or three times and those spooky events inspired them to create a religion with billions of followers. Ok, for the sake of argument I will go with that for now.
What I don’t get is why did they make the Gospels so contradictory. According to @heavywater the Gospel of Matthew alone has several contradictory methods of salvation in that one book. Why would they do that? Could they not read what they wrote? A possible explanation is that memory constrained them to put some real things that Jesus said, almost everything real about Jesus contradicted what they really wanted, but they had to leave it in because people remembered that it happened. Which is kind of weird. Did it go something like this….
Gospel writer 1: This material is gold it makes it look like Jesus knew he was going to die even though we all knew he was stunned when he was arrested. People will eat this up! What is next?
Gospel writer 2: I think we should put in the part where Jesus says we don’t need to know him or God to be saved. Instead we just need to be kind to those in need.
Gospel writer 1: What? We have been saying throughout our story that Jesus is essential to salvation that is why he is important! We even put all that stuff in about his death to show that it really means something. If we leave in his message to just be nice to the poor then why did he die?
Gospel writer 2: I think it is important because he said it so even though it contradicts us I think we should leave it to have a little truth season our lies.
Gospel writer 1: Well if you think it best I guess we can leave it in there….
Why is this considered plausible? Would not someone making up false teachings want to internally consistent?
I have not encountered, in a personal way, “unusual and quite rapid healings from terminal diseases.”
Let’s take pancreatic cancer as an example because unlike other cancers, pancreatic cancer usually means the patient will die within a year or two. Let’s say I knew someone who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and the doctor says, “You probably have six months to live.” Let’s say this person lives three years and then goes to the doctor and the doctors says that the cancer is gone.
Would I then say that this is a miracle? Perhaps I would use the word “miracle.” Or, alternatively, I could say that this person was among the highly fortunate 10 percent of people with pancreatic cancer who live longer than a few years.
Then the question is how did this person obtain this excellent result? If the person didn’t receive any treatment because the disease was considered incurable, then effective medicine is ruled out.
Maybe the person went to see a spiritual healer in India? If so, what is this spiritual healer’s success rate? Can we fly this spiritual healer from India to the United States and have this person treat all of the children who have cancer in our children’s hospitals? Does this spiritual healer get better results than a placebo?
In other words, can we make testable predictions based on the information we have? That’s how I would approach the issue?
I think Bart Ehrmans’ view, which is pretty mainstream among New Testament scholars, is that the Gospel writers received much of their information from oral tradition and/or prior written work (in the case of Matthew and Luke, they seem to have had read the Gospel of Mark).
I don’t think this is Bart Ehrman’s view. I think he once mentioned it as something that was proposed by someone in the past. There’s this idea that Jesus had an identical twin brother and when his disciples saw the twin, they thought Jesus had risen. I don’t really buy it myself.
Sometimes Matthew did modify what he read in the Gospel of Mark. Same for Luke.
They did not necessarily write their entire gospel from scratch. They inherited some stories, modified some of them and didn’t “scrub” the whole thing to make it follow some carefully constructed theology.
Although, it does seem to some scholars that, for example, the author of Luke downplayed the “atonement effect” of Jesus’s death and resurrection. John was the only one who included quotations of Jesus saying, “I and the father are one” and “If you have seen me you have seen the father” and “Before Abraham was I am.”
Matthew and Luke are the only gospels with accounts of Jesus being born in Bethlehem.
Luke says Joseph and a pregnant Mary traveled to Bethlehem from Nazareth due to a world wide census; Matthew does not mention this. Matthew mentions Joseph, Mary and Jesus fleeing to Egypt from Bethlehem after Jesus is born; Luke does not mention this but instead says that Joseph, Mary and Jesus went back to Nazareth.
Would you, could you if you saw such?
Would you, could you? Do we ask so much?
Sorry–just playing around with Dr. Seussiness.
In some senses. If it’s not as old as Genesis 3:15 and Genesis 12 and so on–if it doesn’t start with the Torah–it’s all rubbish.
Again. Most scholars don’t think the gospel writers were starting from a blank slate and starting from scratch.
The gospel of John appears to have had several different editors/authors. Even the Gospel of Mark, likely the 1st gospel written, seems, in the eyes of many scholars, to be a conglomeration of different oral sources plus the writer’s editorial/literary additions.
Why is that?
I’ve never made that assumption, or expected angels to protect me from gravity.
All the practical benefits you’re pointing to may be gained merely by assuming that there are laws of physics. There’s no need to also assume that no G-d exists who may overrule them if he wants to.
So you reject a premise, but do not reject arguments which rely on it? That is an enormous mistake.
Maybe you didn’t notice: We’ve been talking about arguments that rely on that premise–not arguments that just happen to involve it in some way or other.
If an argument relies on a premise, it stands or falls with its premise.
Ockham’s Razor is just one great reason to begin with that as a working theory.
It is an entirely different matter to use it as a premise in an argument against the evidence for a putative miracle.
And this would be an error–by your own standards. We established in # 114 and # 127 that we should consider miracles to be at least a theoretical possibility; we should not rule them out prior to examining the empirical evidence.
To use their non-existence as a premise in an argument against some evidence for a miracle is ruling them out prior to examining the empirical evidence.