Hey everybody this is Steve and I’m an Orthodox Christian.
As an Orthodox Christian, I’ve had this one weird experience many times in my life.
Whether I’m at school or at work or just hanging out with friends, I’m very often
the only Orthodox Christian in the room. Have you ever had an experience like that?
More people know about the Church today than in years past, thanks to
ministries like Ancient Faith Radio and the work we do here at Y2AM.
But there are still a lot of people who don’t know much (if anything) about the Orthodox Church.
We still make up less than 1% of the population here in the United States. So
it’s no surprise that I’m often the only Orthodox Christian in the room.
Sometimes I’m even the first Orthodox Christian that someone has met.
Have you ever had an experience like that? When I meet new people and they first learn
that I’m Orthodox, they usually ask, “Wait, you’re Jewish?”
And then when I explain that I’m an Orthodox Christian,
they tend to respond with similar questions: What is the Orthodox Church, and why are you
an Orthodox Christian rather than a kind of Christian I’ve actually heard of before?
A few years ago, we made a video titled “3 Reasons I’m an Orthodox Christian.”
It was our attempt to offer a simple and straightforward answer to these questions.
Lots and lots of people have watched the video. And, thank God, they’ve loved it!
We’ve even heard from people who first discovered the Church by watching that
video. And then they watched other videos on our channel. And are now Orthodox Christians.
Others have watched the video and responded with even more questions.
Why am I an Orthodox Christian in particular? Rather than a
Catholic or Protestant or something? Have you ever gotten a question like that?
So, following up on our last episode about what Christian unity really is,
Father Andrew and I want to share 4 reasons why we’re Orthodox Christians.
Father Andrew wrote a great blog post titled “12 Reasons Why I Became and/or
Remain an Orthodox Christian.” It’s a great read and the link[1],
as always, is down in the doobley doo. And of course, his excellent book
“Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy” gets into specific differences between
the Orthodox Church and other religious traditions.
But we wanted to distill things a bit more than his book or his blog.
So we’re coming together again to share 4 reasons why we’re Orthodox Christians.
4 basic reasons why the fullness of the Church and the truth of the Gospel can be found
here specifically, rather than some other Christian tradition.
Father Andrew, take it away! [TITLE] The first reason I’m an
Orthodox Christian is that the Orthodox Church really is One Church.
In the last episode, Steve and I explored what unity among Christians really looks like.
And we narrowed it down to two basic things: unity of faith; and unity of worship.
Before I entered the Orthodox Church in my early twenties, I was a Protestant.
Which is how most American Christians identify.
And even though most Protestants will talk about how all Christians are part of one
“invisible church,” that’s not what we actually see in practice.
A Presbyterian and a Pentecostal may each recognize each other as Christian,
but they have almost no stake in each other’s internal church life.
The same holds true of someone belonging to the Presbyterian Church in America
(the PCA) and someone belonging to the Presbyterian Church (USA) (the PCUSA).
Which are both Presbyterian denominations. And yet even they have
big doctrinal disagreements with each other. While there are certainly disagreements and even
conflicts within the Orthodox Church (which Steve and I were honest about in the last episode),
we fight from within rather than without. The fact that we have such bickering and fighting
with each other means that we recognize in each other that we are one Church.
That we have a problem and that we need to fix it. Together.
Splitting off and starting your own denomination just isn’t an
option if the Church is really One. So one reason I’m an Orthodox Christian is
that the Orthodox Church really is One Church. [TITLE] Another reason I’m an Orthodox Christian
is that the Church is not derived from a book; it’s a historically continuous
lived experience. Being comfortable with
denominations that don’t really have anything to do with each other makes sense if you see
Christianity as centering on a book. One of the core principles at the heart of
Protestant (and post-Protestant) Christianity is that idea that the Scripture by itself is enough,
at least as a starting point. But, as we covered back in episode 128,
the problem with this idea is that that’s not what the Scripture actually says.
The first Christians were all Jewish. They had Scripture;
the books we today call “The Old Testament.” But just because they had those books,
and knew they were important, didn’t mean they knew how to properly interpret them.
In chapter 24 of the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus encounters some of His disciples on the
road to Emmaus. And those disciples are pretty heartbroken because their teacher is dead.
Jesus was just crucified. So His disciples are devastated.
And when the Lord meets them on the road, risen from the dead, He scolds them a little bit.
[TITLE] “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!
Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?” (Luke 24:25-26)
And then Luke tells us that Jesus opened the Scripture to His disciples.
Beginning with Moses and the prophets Jesus taught them to interpret the Scripture: specifically,
how to find Him in the Scripture. So there’s a right way to interpret the Scripture:
a way given by the Lord Himself and which is preserved
by the living community of the Church. And we see this way at work as we answer the
big questions of who Jesus is and other deep questions of theology,
but also as we approach smaller questions. For example, the second Sunday after Pascha
is dedicated to the Myrrh-Bearing Women who went to the Lord’s tomb
to anoint Him after the Crucifixion. We celebrate eight such Myrrh-Bearing women;
but you won’t find a complete list of their names in the Scripture.
[TITLE] Luke, for examples, writes about “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and
the other women with them.” (Luke 24:10)[2] If all we had to go on was the Scripture,
we wouldn’t know who these other women are. But Luke wrote his Gospel account
for a Christian audience. He wrote his Gospel account
for people who were already Christians, who already knew who Jesus is, and who already knew
who visited Jesus at His tomb. Luke could refer to the “other
women” in his writings because his audience knew who those other women were.
And that audience is the very same Church that Father Andrew and I are a part of today.
Because the Oneness of the Church doesn’t simply extend across the world today. It also extends
back in time to the very first Christians. And maintaining this connection across both time
and space is part of what keeps us grounded in the Gospel as Jesus Christ delivered it to us, rather
than in a Gospel of our own invention. When we reject the community of the Church and
establish our own splinter communities, things get messy in a hurry.
For example, a survey of American Christians discovered that 57%
agree with the statement “Jesus is the first and greatest being
created by God.” Which is Arianism,
a heresy refuted by the Church during the First Ecumenical Council in AD 325.
And 59% believe that the Holy Spirit is a force rather than a personal, divine being.[3]
Which is a heresy refuted by the Church during the Second Ecumenical Council in AD 381.
When we cut ourselves off from the Oneness of the Church, it’s really easy to forget
things that the Church already knows. It’s really easy to fall into mistakes
that the Church dealt with centuries ago. So the second reason I’m an Orthodox Christian
is that the Church is not derived from a book but is rather a historically continuous
lived experience. [TITLE] The third reason
I’m an Orthodox Christian is that Jesus Christ is the source of our unity.
So, on the one hand, as Orthodox Christians we disagree with the idea of “Church” that
you find amongst Protestants. Yet we also disagree with the idea of
“Church” that you find amongst Catholics. Catholics see their unity as being centered on
the Pope, who is dogmatically taught to be supreme over all Christians.
For Catholics, in order to be fully Christian in the traditional sense,
you have to be obedient to the Pope. In that model, the obedience that we owe to Christ
flows through the Pope to the rest of the bishops and then to each Christian from there.
One of the titles Catholics use for the Pope to express this authority is
“Vicar of Christ,” which means he exercises Christ’s authority in His place.
As Orthodox Christians, we don’t believe that any person can have all that authority
absolutized in one office, even if he is a bishop or archbishop or patriarch.
While Christ’s authority is expressed through His bishops in various ways,
the Lord Himself is the center of unity, exercised actively through His Holy Spirit.
Jesus works through bishops, but He did not delegate Church unity
to any one of them in an absolute way. Jesus isn’t gone so He doesn’t need to delegate
all of His authority to any particular person who rules in His place.
We sometimes talk about the Second Coming of Jesus as if He were gone
from us and will one day be back. But that seems to be a translation
issue because both the Scripture and the Church Fathers talk about Christ’s second appearing or
manifestation; not His second coming. It’s not that Jesus is gone (and needs a
vicar to rule in His place); it’s that He’s not manifest in the same way as
He was during His earthly ministry. Which should make sense. Even when Jesus
appeared to His disciples after His Resurrection, the disciples didn’t always see Him at first.
That’s because we see the Lord not just with our physical eyes,
but with the eyes of our hearts: as Jesus Himself predicted before the Crucifixion.
[TITLE] “A little while longer and the world will see Me no more,
but you will see Me...And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and
manifest Myself to him.” (John 14: 19, 21) So no, Jesus isn’t gone. He’s still with us.
And what’s more, even from the earliest times, the Church has seen our unity not in any particular
bishop but in the Lord Himself. We come together in unity of faith
so we can assemble in unity of worship. And there, in our common worship as a Church,
our unity is both assured and manifest. St Ignatius, an important 1st century bishop
who was a disciple of St John the Evangelist, described the unity of the Church as centered
on this unified worship. In his letter to the Magnesians, Ignatius writes
“your bishop presides in the place of God.” It’s not that the bishop is a vicar of God,
who is absent. But rather that our worship is an image or icon of God’s Kingdom.
And the bishop is joined to God as he presides at worship.
Back in episode 119, Steve talked about sacraments: which are experiences
where our life meets the life of God. And it’s in the midst of our sacramental
life that the Church is fully present. Not in union with any one bishop for everyone
but with *our* bishop: surrounded by his presbyters and deacons and laity;
a beautiful icon of the Kingdom of God. [TITLE] Because, as St Ignatius also wrote:
“Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the people also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is,
there is the fullness of the Church.” (St Ignatius, Letter to Smyrnaeans)