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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’ll just add some of other thoughts.
When I attended a Baptist church in 1990 (I attended for about 8 months or so), I attended several mid-week bible studies. We spend some time on the sermon on the mount.
I was puzzled by some of Mathew 5.
I was skeptical when I started attending church. But I did want to be part of a community. I had graduated from college a few years earlier and I didn’t have the network of friends that I had in college. So, joining a church seemed like a good idea. (In 1989, I gave the Methodist church a shot. But I left.)
But this part of Matthew (and other parts of it) seemed hard to accept. It’s not enough just to no murder another. One must not get angry with another.
Matthew 6:19-21
I was puzzled by this too. I was trying to save money for my retirement and also to buy a house so I could move out of my father’s house.
Don’t store up treasures here on earth? Some others in the bible study said that this does not mean one can’t save money, only that one must “question one’s lifestyle.”
Huh? It seemed that we were coming up with creative interpretations of what Jesus supposedly said. Creative so that we could pretend to follow his words. I felt like we were being fake. But I didn’t say too much at the time.
That’s the problem with miracles – you can certainly test the results, but you cannot test the inputs, otherwise they wouldn’t be miracles. Which in your comment makes for a roundabout way of you saying that you do not believe that miracles are at all possible, but must always have a mechanistic explanation. So even if confronted with one, you likely still would not believe you had seen one.
I will try to remove any ambiguity here.
Obviously, only a crazy person would believe that he could expect another random person to save him from death or rescue him from peril. There is no expectation without a context, such as a promise to help or a testimony from someone who has been helped. An intelligent agent like a person is not forced to perform a certain way.
So that is why we have a legal system, and why people do not walk around expecting miracles. You cannot rely on people like you can physical laws.
However, people clearly change their circumstances and take actions all the time. It would be just as crazy to believe people do not take actions and make choices.
If I tell you that someone rescued me from certain death, that’s not denying that I normally would have died! That’s the point of the statement. Would you say that I am lying for stating that someone saved me?
Similarly, the point of a miracle is that it is not mandatory. You need a religious context, and it should be improbable. It is often entirely unexpected. God is not a vending machine. The lack of constant miracles is a poor reason for rejecting God.
“Constant Miracles” is an oxymoron anyway, as would be “predictable miracles”.
Okay. Let’s go back and do this thought experiment again.
There’s a guy I know who has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His doctor gives him 6 months to live. He ends up living 3 years, gets checked out again and his doctor says that his pancreatic cancer is gone.
Let’s say that I say, “It’s a miracle.”
Someone else could say, “It’s a mystery,” meaning we don’t know how or why the cancer went away.
This is why I think asking questions like “Do you believe in miracles?” and “Do you believe in the supernatural?” can cause a lot of confusion.
What we are really talking about is
[A] The known
and
[B] The unknown.
In some cases, it’s like in this thought experiment. Someone recovers from a horrible illness. We don’t know exactly why or how. We just know an event happened.
In the case where someone tells me that they spoke to her brother yesterday, even though her brother died 20 years ago, I am not convinced that this “miracle” actually happened.
In the case where a Muslim tells me that Mohammed heard God’s word in a cave in the 7th century, I am not convinced that this event actually happened.
In the case where Paul writes in Galatians that he received his Gospel directly from Jesus, not from any human source, I am not convinced that this event happened.
So, there we have the [A] known versus [B] unknown issue coming up not in terms of how or why some event happened, but if some event actually happened.
Also, someone might make a non-miracle claim and instead make a very mundane claim and I still might not believe the person.
For example, someone could tell me, “I received my PhD in physics at Cal Tech.” If I don’t think this person is very good at math or science, I would tend to doubt this person’s claim. However, if I thought this person was very strong in math and science, I would find this claim more believable.
So, background information is important for me in determining whether a claim that someone makes is believable, even if it really isn’t a claim like someone turning water into wine or a talking donkey or someone rising from the dead and ascending into heaven.
This is why I don’t think that it is a bad idea to take an extremely skeptical view towards things like someone walking on water or parting the sea.
The background information we have about the world indicates to me that when two explanations for some data are available, it’s better to go with the explanation that doesn’t require devils, angels, unicorns, space aliens, Godzilla and so on.
Once we travel down the road of “a ghost stole my car keys,” we might just give up looking for our car keys. If we give up looking for our car keys, we will never find them.
I remember hearing one story that does a good job explaining why skepticism about God’s existence is well founded.
A friend of mine says to me, “I have a dragon in my garage.”
I say, “Really? I will come right over and look at it.”
I come over and my friend and I go into his garage. But the garage is empty.
“Where’s the dragon?” I ask my friend.
My friend says, “It’s an invisible dragon.”
I say, “Okay. Let’s put some paint on your garage floor so we can see his footsteps.”
My friend says, “My dragon floats above the ground.”
I say, “Okay. I have a heat sensor. I will use it to detect the dragon.”
My friends says, “My dragon is a cold dragon and doesn’t emit heat.”
At this point I say to my friend, “What is the difference between your dragon and no dragon at all?”
My friend might be tempted to say, “I you believe in my dragon, you will go to heaven. If you disbelieve in my dragon, you will go to hell.”
To which I might respond, “But we don’t know that heaven or hell actually exist. Those places could just be the invention of religious people. Certain religious people might have become attracted to the idea of heaven and hell as a means of providing inducements for people to convert to their religion and the threat of punishment for not converting to their religion.”
Ok great maybe we are getting somewhere! Wooohooo! Alright let me take a stroll through the argument here and see what we can find…this will take a few comments to get through I apologize for that. I will number each one like this 1/… until I finish. So you can be sure to follow my whole argument made over several comments.
This is how we started with Matthew 25
HeavyWater (View Comment):
Jesus is saying that one’s knowledge of Jesus is irrelevant and what is relevant is how one treats “the least of these.” This seems to open up salvation to people who lived good lives even if they didn’t accept Jesus as lord and savior. I realize that there are other verses in the New Testament that say otherwise.
This is the question that I started this current lengthy discussion. I read it as you asking if your interpretation of Jesus in Matthew 1: made sense and if it did make sense would that not mean that people could be saved by their good works instead of their faith in Jesus
Next:
You reassured Saint Augustine that:
HeavyWater (View Comment):
Just to clarify, I read it carefully, not hastily.
I took this to mean that you trying to actual read the text for what it said
You moved on to this post:
HeavyWater (View Comment):
I think there is a lack of willingness to consider the interpretation I described above not so much because it’s an incorrect interpretation, but because it’s just not one that many church leaders want to accept.
Which question the motives of Evangelicals. As if only bad motives would keep people from understanding the truth of your interpretations of Matthew 25. You also linked an audio file to a lecture by Dr. Allison who counsels not to eliminate all of Scripture just because some of the texts are in doubt and that you can’t really extract the historical Jesus from the Scriptures that describe him.
Post: 1/…
To Continue. Post 2/…
So after posting a lecture by Dr. Allison who both says that Paul meeting Jesus was a fiction and that to ignore what Paul wrote about Jesus would be a terrible mistaken you claim that Paul does not help us understand Matthew 25 better because….
HeavyWater (View Comment):
You quoted Romans, one of Paul’s letters. Matthew is supposedly quoting Jesus.
As I see it, we have to make some guesses about a few things.
[1] Did Jesus actually say the words attributed to him in Matthew 25:31-46. We can’t be certain, but it seems likely that these words were probably words spoken by Jesus.
[2] When analyzing Paul’s words, not just in Romans but in all 7 of the undisputed Pauline epistles (not including those epistles which were likely forgeries [2nd Thessalonians, 1st Timothy, 2nd Timothy, Titus, Ephesians, Colossians], we have to wonder whether Paul’s words are simply Paul’s words or Jesus’s words.
We have to consider the very real possibility that Paul’s words are in conflict with some of Jesus’s words, even though there could be some Jesus-Paul overlap.
We should doubt Paul and can’t assume that Jesus and Paul are not in conflict with each other.
Which leads us to this claim:
HeavyWater (View Comment):
What I am doing is simply explaining how I understand Matthew 25:31-46. The evidence is the actual words of Matthew 25:31-46.
There is no other evidence that we can appeal to other than the words of Matthew 25:31-46.
Which is to claim that Matthew 25:31-46 w as meant to be read in isolation by either the author of Matthew or by Jesus himself and that you should remove those verses from their context because they do not belong in their context but are meant to stand on their own independently. You can’t just make this claim and then leave there you have to present some kind of evidence for that claim. Do we agree to that or do you think than anyone’s words can be taken from their context and judged completely in isolation from the words they were purposely surrounded by? Do think that form of exegesis could lead to misunderstand and misinterpretation, if you remove words without reason from their broader context?
Which then leads you to this:
HeavyWater (View Comment):
Regarding the Gospel of John, the main issue is how much of the Gospel of John is historical versus theological, whether the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John actually trace back to something Jesus said.
John is considered the last of the Gospels to have been written.
So here the words of Jesus aren’t meant to interact with the other words of Jesus because we should doubt quotes from Jesus in John because it the last Gospel and he might not even be quoting Jesus
2/…
Post 3/…
At this stage the argument is we should interpret Matthew 25 alone and in isolation from the rest of Matthew and further we cannot trust the writing of Paul nor the Gospel of John as they are likely untrustworthy. The reasons given are that Church leaders have selfish motives not to interpret Matthew 25 correctly and you site a lecture by Dr. Allison that disagrees with your main points, namely that you can exclude Paul and the Gospel of John from the discussion. Nothing else is on offer yet. Only that you think Matthew 25 should stand alone in contradiction of the rest of the New Testament.
Which leads us to this:
HeavyWater (View Comment):
Not really.
But let me admit at the outset that I don’t really know which words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were actually spoken by Jesus. Nor do I know which events depicted in the Bible actually happened.
Which you said in response to Hand Rhody. Which just throws more highly skeptical dust up in the air. Again I find this strange because the video that you shared of the Lecture at Duke would reject your skeptical claims here and would say that we can glean value from the entire New Testament including stories that he finds to be fictional like the dialogue between Jesus and Satan which he thinks captures truths of about Jesus and his character even though he does not believe that even ever took place.
Which led us here, in a discussion I remind you that is about Matthew 25:
HeavyWater (View Comment):
You forgot to mention the Koran, the book of Mormon and a host of other books people have written.
Clearly, not everything written in a book is historically accurate. Yet it’s often very difficult to know what actually happened versus what was non-historical.
We can only do our best given the source material we have. Until we obtain access to a time machine, we will just have to make do.
This is a theme that you often return to in what follows that unlike things, are in fact exactly a like with similar evidence, when they are radically different. The case for or against the Koran and the Book of Mormon is radically different than a case for or against the Bible the books are radically different with radically different purposes and radically different histories. It would like making a successful case that water polo is boring to watch and then saying, “I have proven that all sports are boring to watch!” Water polo is a sport, it boring to watch, therefore all sport is boring to watch. No.
Post 3/…
Post 4/…
Which brings us too….
HeavyWater (View Comment):
Sure, I have talked to Mormons who really seem to believe what they have been told about their Mormon beliefs. But that doesn’t mean that they are correct.
Similarly with those very hard core Catholics who say that you can not obtain salvation outside of the Catholic church and that all churches other than the Catholic church are false churches.
People say all kinds of things.
People write all kinds of things.
It doesn’t mean they are true.
Well you are not wrong. But just throwing skeptical dust up in the air doesn’t really help us, saying everything may be true or it may all be false doesn’t cut it. You have to explore the evidence for your position. Whatever the merits of the Catholic dogma or Mormon beliefs you need to show why the best interpretation of Matthew 25 requires us to read it in isolation, alone and base salvation on that interpretation alone. Why do we need to place more weight on Matthew 25 then anything written by Paul or put in the other Gospel or even the other writings of Matthew in the same book that Matthew 25 exists in.
So after bringing up miracles you offer a two part comment that explains, quite well, your view of Matthew 25. You sum it up this way…
HeavyWater (View Comment):
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.
The unanswered question here is why would Jesus be giving practically only teaching on salvation here? Why would Jesus’ expectation be that you are only hearing or reading this one passage instead of all the things he said about salvation. If the only claim is that Jesus and the people that wrote about him contradicted themselves then it is very unconvincing. Again the reason has to be one that would justify removing Matthew 25 from its context. Removing texts from their context often allows from a wide variety of meanings to be given to them.
Post 4/…
Doubtful. It says (interlinear Greek here) that you are liable (this word) for judgment if you orgizo against your brother, i.e. if you have orgeh, steadfast opposition to your brother. The “brother” in this Jewish context would surely refer to one’s fellow-member of the religious community.
Jesus is apparently describing communally destructive hatred and disdain, which any number of Jews have thought is ok as long as you don’t murder. Jesus is not saying you can never be angry.
Note that this is not a “creative interpretation.” It’s exegesis based on the original language and the original context.
In turn, I say: Huh?
Do you really think this passage is about saving money at the bank?
Of course this passage is about nothing of the sort. It’s about not loving money more than G-d and neighbor. It’s about not staking your happiness on it, not mistaking money for the purpose of life.
Between your interpretation and “Huh?” I will go with “Huh?”
I didn’t find this explanation credible in 1990 at the Baptist church and I find it even less credible today.
It doesn’t surprise me that Christians think that the Bible is free of falsehood while believing that the Koran and the Book of Mormon are full of falsehood.
Similarly, it doesn’t surprise me that Muslims think that the Koran is free of falsehood while other books contain serious error.
Orthodox Jews don’t accept the New Testament as a reliable source of truth.
My view is that all of these groups of people have a point.
I am not convinced that the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) is entirely accurate, nor do I believe the New Testament is entirely accurate. Similarly with the Koran and the Book of Mormon.
Maybe one of them is water polo and the others are cricket. (Hey, some people think water polo is exciting, I suppose.)
Back in 1989 I was asked if I wanted to join the Methodist Church I had been attending for a few months. I agreed. During a church service I was asked, as part of my membership approval, if I believed the word of God was contained in the Old and New Testaments. ‘
I said I did.
But I had not read very much of the Bible at that point. Yet, I had made friends at the church, I did find the message of forgiveness and compassion and a heavenly afterlife appealing. So, I accepted the inerrancy of scripture and joined the church.
But if we take a step back from the peer pressure and the sales pitch for Christianity and read Dr. Bart Ehrman’s books, the case for the inerrancy of the Bible looks pretty weak, in my opinion.
I realize that you don’t agree.
Post 5/…
You then try to answer my question about removing by throwing up more skeptical smoke like here…
HeavyWater (View Comment):
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.
The argument seems to be Paul maybe be deluded or an out right liar, therefore we need to Matthew 25 in isolation. But even if Paul is a deluded AND a liar, if that is the case, than it does not justify reading Matthew 25 in isolation from the rest of Matthew. Maybe the author of Matthew knew nothing about Paul and so cared nothing for him but why would the author of Matthew or Jesus himself desire us to see Matthew 25 in isolation? What historical, critical, theological or even just logical reason would we have to for thinking any passage in Matthew is best read in isolation of the other passages of Matthew?
What impact does Paul’s honesty or lucidity have to do with the way we read Matthew?
Post 5/…
Post 6/…
Now we get to this…
This idea then lead to this…
Say I take option B. I would need to be believe that the Gospel of Matthew was put together by a group of authors that were arguing with each other? Every scholar I have read believer and unbeliever a like have thought that Matthew had a plan, wrote an internally consistent book that successfully made Matthew’s points, whoever “Matthew” might be. To make your case for Matthew 25 you would need to point out why it seems authentically Jesus and was not written by “Matthew” and why it would have been added later or kept in the book during later edits for these other hidden “authors” when the meaning of Matthew 25 is so clearly in conflict with other reaching in Matthew. The fact that you get a unique reading of Matthew 25 when you read it in isolation proves nothing because your interpretation fails in the context of the book. There has to be a reason for taking this chapter out of context beyond the reasons of :
It makes things easier for my argument
The whole of the Bible is untrustworthy
Jesus is not God
the Koran and the Book Mormon also make many claims that we can’t trust.
None of your arguments addresses why we NEED to remove Matthew 25 from the Gospel where it resides to understand it.
Post 6/….
Astonishing.
Do you really think this passage is about saving money at the bank?
How do you know which ones are worth reading?
How do you know which ones to agree with most of the time? Why, e.g., do you agree so much with Ehrman rather than, say, Doug Kennard or N. T. Wright?
Do you have enough time to study the primary sources? They are more important.
Do you have enough time to go beyond the observation that different ones conclude such-and-such and study their reasoning?
You’re not doing much to sell Ehrman.
I believe this is the second time you’ve attributed to him the surprising biblical ignorance of thinking Jesus only claims divinity in John’s Gospel.
You also make him sound like a guy who never paid any attention to biblical epistemology and abandoned his faith because he only knew a straw-man version of it that avoided the whole topic of epistemology. And like a guy who falls for a shoddy version of a problem-of-evil argument.
You make him sound much less of a NT scholar than N. T. Wright, John Piper, that neat Orthodox blogger @Skipsul likes, or Kennard, just to name a few.
It was a case of someone pointing to a logical fallacy in some NT scholarship. He says it is “a standard assumption in every attempt to divine the ‘historical’ truth behind any Bible story.”
I haven’t read enough of the secondary sources myself to make that call, but I’ve noticed that it is a standard move to point out that such scholarship exists.
And it does exist. Even without keeping the secondary sources in my head, my friend Bob‘s analysis of them is quite sufficient to show that they exist.
Anyway, one of the more important points is: If you became aware that a NT scholar uses such an argument, would you reject that argument?
You seem to assume that these early believers do not have local assemblies, mutual contact among the assemblies, lettered members of the assemblies, and a deep love of books. That is a deeply incorrect misunderstanding of Second-Temple Judaism, the Messianic communities growing out of them, and the ancient western world in general. Since you’re so fond of scholars, allow me to refer you to a real expert on canonicity. You need Michael Kruger’s book The Question of Canon. That should help. I can probably cite a few primary sources on these matters myself.
Post 7/…
Where we come to this:
HeavyWater (View Comment):
And we don’t have to actually believe that Jesus ever received a trial by the Romans either. We could view all four accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion as being invented by the Gospel authors. Even if we think that Jesus was crucified, we might not think that the Romans, as ruthless rulers as they were, would even bother with a trial of Jesus. We might not even think that Jesus received a burial. We might think that Jesus was thrown into a mass grave and eaten by predators over a period of weeks.
There’s lots of speculation done among scholars who do not necessarily believe that the Bible contains “the truth, and nothing but the truth,” but instead includes lots of myth as well. The challenge for those scholars is to justify believing that some things in the Gospels are historical while others are not.
Right! Exactly the point of contention on Matthew 25! This is what I am asking you to do, your interpretation does not stand if you read the passage in the context the author intended for you to read it in. So what is the justification for removing it?
You venture an answer here…
Again it is skeptical smoke screen. You assume that your reading of Matthew is correct but the vast majority of people do not. Simple interpretations of the text as written are available that find no break between what Jesus was teaching in Matthew 25 and what Jesus is reported to have taught else where. Bart Ehrman believes a lot of things, like Peter spoke and understood no Greek, without evidence. Bart Ehrman’s guess the internal motivations of 1st century Christians that had a hand in writing Matthew is very speculative at the danger of gross understatement. The fact that there was a lot of “inventing” going on is highly speculative. There has to be reasons, good reasons offered with some kind of evidence that Jesus was teaching in Matthew 25 a road to salvation at odds with his other teachings and at odds with the writer(s) we know as Matthew.
Storing treasures on earth can be interpreted as accumulating wealth.
It seems that Jesus is telling people to focus on the kingdom of God, not the accumulation of wealth.
Dr. Ehrman is correct.
You are incorrect.
Post 8/…
Which you try to get to here:
HeavyWater (View Comment):
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.
Right fine that is not an explanation of why they would leave a teaching of Jesus in that did not fit with the rest of what Jesus is saying. My argument was never they had to scrub the whole thing it was why leave in something clearly at odds with what they were trying to do in the rest of the book. If they did not feel the real teachings of Jesus were that important why keep contradictions?
Which led you to this
HeavyWater (View Comment):
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.
Which in what way shows that we should read the Gospel in atomized pieces for better understanding or how does it address your claimed contradiction in Matthew?
Then arrived here
How does that stack up with the historical record? We know, even Bart Ehrman knows(!), that the early church put enormous effort in copying the early works of Paul and the Gospels. The amount of scarps we find of very early Gospels are staggering compared with other manuscripts. One gets the impression that some guys just casually threw some stories together, maybe read it over a couple of times, while a bit tipsy and the mostly poor believers then spent enormous effort and money to preserve and copy these scrolls and then put them in codex without realizing the sloppy and lazy work put into collecting them? You find this plausible?
Post 8/…
First off, how did you determine that the vast majority of people disagree with my interpretation (and Dr. Bart Ehrman’s interpretation) of Matthew 25:31-46?
Did you take a Gallup poll on this last night? My guess is that most people have not read Matthew 25:31-46 and, thus, do not have an opinion on it at all.
Or did you mean to say, “The vast majority of evangelical Christians who have taken the time to read Matthew 25:31-46?”
In that case, you would likely be correct.
Second, let’s say you are correct.
So, evangelical Christians do not interpret Matthew 25:31-46 to mean that salvation is based on works (feeding the hungry, etc.) instead of faith in Jesus.
But to be an evangelical Christian is to believe that salvation is based on faith in Jesus. So, how does this make the case for salvation based on faith stronger?
It seems like you are starting from the presupposition that the New Testament is either 100 percent accurate or nearly so.
From that perspective, I can see why my arguments (and Dr. Ehrman’s) are not persuasive.
I think you can go either way. You can read Matthew 25:31-46 in isolation, uninfluenced by the rest of the NT (including the rest of Matthew) or you can read Matthew 25:31-46 in the context of Matthew only or you can read Matthew 25:31-46 in the context of the entire NT and the OT.
It’s up to you (and me and Bart and NT Wright and Frank Turek).
If the dragon lit your cigarette for you, I bet you would assume that there was trickery.
You disbelieve in God, faulting the lack of evidence. Then you claim miracles are impossible and no evidence for God, as God does not exist.
I will offer you a small bit of evidence – one bacterium from your colon would do. There is no random or deterministic process that explains how a prebiotic soup became a self-replicating organism. The only way out is multiverse theory, which just as unobservable as your dragon. Before you try evolutionary theory, keep in mind I am a biochemist with a master’s degree who studies the origin of life as a hobby. I have studied the matter in detail.
Just that none of the ones he offers is more likely but there is probably a more likely one out there somewhere. It is very hard to get a religion off the ground from nothing and have it last and not just last but spread. Especially, peacefully against opposition. Seeing a guy from a distance that looks a bit like Jesus seems incredibly poor motivation and especially poor motivation for Saul who as in good with the Jews and sitting pretty in his position until his sudden and surprising conversation, that brought him no known material benefit.
9/…
HeavyWater (View Comment):
I think the best way to explain the development of the New Testament is that is was developed incrementally.
Whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark probably didn’t think, “My gospel will become part of the New Testament.”
A reasonable guess as to what motivated whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark is that he wanted to read a story about Jesus to his social circle, his “church.” He probably didn’t think, “Well, I am going to have to work really hard on making this written work consistent because I don’t want anyone to find any contradictions in it.”
Again how does that fit with the historical record? We know Mark was copied and distributed over the near east in a very short amount of time. Did it go something like?
Listeners: Man that was amazing we want to spend enormous sums of money and a ton of effort to copy that scroll and share it with everyone.
Mark(s): Whoa, slow down there I just slapped this thing together to read to you in the heat of the day. I never even thought it through completely if it makes sense.
Listeners: Never, mind we need to share it with everyone right now!
Not very plausible.
but
Even though they know that Mark has spread far and wide and they know they have things not in Mark and there are people that remember specific things that Jesus said that they needed to include. But they did care enough to look it over? They didn’t feel a reason to be consistent, they wanted people to think there multiple, contradictory paths to salvation? Despite that lazy sloppy work people still wanted to spend enormous sums of time and money to copy these works and spread them around the Roman Empire?
This you find plausible?
9/…