Nick Fuentes says don't read your bible, just listen to "clergy"
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So is the OrthodoxWiki conception of the Invisible Church in heaven. I merely point out that some of the church is invisible on earth due to its incomplete acceptance of the hierarchical churches. This seems to accord with agnosticism about where the Spirit is not.
If Orthodoxy declines to pick something someone else got, they just say it's not in the tradition. Maybe Orthodoxy claims to be the only that preserves all traditions that once reached a standard of universal acceptance. But then so does Rome claim by its standard, particularly claiming the filioque should be regarded as having reached that standard.
What's binary is knowing Jesus by regeneration or not, which is switching faith from off to on. The content of one's faith is always growing with knowledge. Now if you want to say catechized members have mastered a traditional deposit and yours is the only whole deposit, you're still saying filioque is not of that deposit and thus the question is debatable again.
Not really, Orthodoxy has had mistakes and internal arguments without losing its promise the Church (in it) won't be poisoned. Rev. 2-3 says every church has infiltrators but the righteous will prevail in the Church.
So do Protestants, to the degree it's possible to put down individual judgments entirely and represent others entirely. But if everyone does that there's nobody left to represent. So actions must always have an element of individuality, even if it's the individuality of the ones represented; agency doesn't go back infinitely.
I don't know what your point was in saying we get to look at them and feel good about them then. If there is no individual judgment, there's no reason for the hierarchy to be transparent at all because dogmatic obedience is forced (I'm thinking of recent Rome). Either they publish them because it's good for us to practice approval and to air out disapproval in case it results in further understanding; or there's nothing for us to approve and no reason for leaders not to be absolute despots in the name of Tradition that is inscrutable to us. So I don't believe Orthodoxy actually operates that way, I believe, as you tipped your hand, that they actually do accept a bit of individual judgment right, especially in that one unavoidable case of the person using his judgment to submit his judgment to the Church in the first place.
When my judgment "prefers" my reading over my authority's, I humbly present it to my authority and seek resolution. I learned about 7th-day Sabbath 25 years ago and sought an authority with whom I could reconcile all that time, and God only made it happen last year such that I can totally affirm the Lord's Day and relegate my Sabbath observations to qualifiers, footnotes, and context instead of sect. I believe it's God's grace that he gave me the patience as I realize that's atypical. The issue isn't disagreement, all church councils and canons arose from disagreement. It's the church finding answers through judgment of individuals that respected and spoke from tradition. The councils set new traditions, but the Orthodox act like the age of novelty ended with the councils, which is not an epochal crisis that I recognize.
Then it didn't exist until the first creed. But OT saints were unanimous on the Shema, and on God's existence before that, but God unfolded more of himself, more matters of faith, over a calculated temporal agenda. He kept unfolding through the councils. When a new creed or canon is delivered, its dissenters are disciplined and it takes time to propagate through the laity. So unanimity is alive, not static. Resolution of contradictions can take millennia!
That suggests that it'd be easier to point out that everything was "made up" freshly at some point, that's why Paul is treated as such a hostile innovator when he wasn't. I appreciate your reference to Palamas, but I think that route (though I suggested it) would then lead to circular defense, because the latest is always said to have come from before. But the earliest teaching of any proposition is "new" in its time. And that's how the Scriptural canon works: books kept getting added to the Word that had already been approved and each book took its centuries to have unanimous approval, Revelation being the fastest approved perhaps. Well, each book is "change" and "novelty", but over time it becomes Tradition. But maybe Orthodoxy has closed its canon of Tradition like we agree the canon of Scripture is closed. I don't recognize that epoch, I see reasons why Tradition must remain open. I appeal to Stephen's reference to "living oracles" being understood in Messianism as oral tradition remaining flexible, not static.
Thanks for admitting. Protestantism by its name means not that Rome is false (that was an extreme) but that Rome erred in handling Luther. That's nominal united agreement even when Protestants forget their name. Since Rome takes about 911 years to apologize (1054-1965), we're still waiting. Protestants believe the Church continues otherwise but that radical times called for flexibility about physically demonstrated succession (just as they do for flexibility about water baptism and even Eucharist). The conservatives recognize Rome (and Luther tried to partner with Constantinople but the work was physically undoable at that distance).
So again the similarity is that we have sufficient assurance our church is right enough, we constantly test our assurance, and we decline to judge other professing churches except in extreme cases. And that seems compatible with the Orthodox view. For an Orthodox to say that Orthodoxy has perfect assurance of continuing in its own name, no need to keep tested daily, or perfect ability to judge outside its jurisdiction, seems incompatible with it.
Jesus spoke to individuals individually. Communal thought was much more necessary for social survival until recently, yes, but nobody has ever been a total chameleon free of individuality, that would be Buddhist. Chameleons blend in, if they totally disappeared in every way they wouldn't exist. And Paul was a great individualist while demanding that everything he wrote built on tradition. Here, Col. 1:26: "Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints". How could God manifest was was formerly mysterious without there being novelty through an individual revealer for the sake of community appropriation?
Again you are commended for your dogged maintenance of this discussion and it's helpful to me; perhaps your sharing your ideas of how Orthodoxy will someday under Messiah heal the breach and welcome Protestants back en masse under some agreements and negotiations (while definitively ruling out the heretics among us) will be a useful tack to take.
Come on, you're being bad faith again. Did you miss the part where the Orthodox also believe in the visible historic Church here on Earth? Don't cherry pick but look at the whole picture.
Exactly, all you have is negative theology. The Orthodox have both the negative and the positive claim as to where the Spirit is and isn't. Protestants don't have an objective standard for that - it's whatever individuals claim to have the Spirit and profess a generic faith in Christ and even that standard is subjective to each person (because each person reading the Bible is the ultimate authority).
It's not circular - it's regressive and ultimately goes back to the beginning of the apostolic Church. What the Early Church taught is the standard against which later teachings are verified. This is why appealing to the Scripture doesn't work, because it was compiled by the Church at a later stage and wasn't there initially. This is the defeater argument against Sola Scriptura.
The tradition is not closed because it's living. There are contemporary Saints of the Church. What you propose is evolution of doctrine which is a RC idea. But the dogmas and doctrines of the early Church reflect truth and changing truth leads to falsehood. What would necessitate such a change today?
You're playing word games. It doesn't matter how the name of the movement came to be, but what the movement was and it was a radical theological movement in opposition to the Western Church and not just a reaction to a political incident. Of course the Reformers believed Rome was false and denied the authority of the Pope and the See's indefectibility. Again, they may recognize certain aspects of the tradition but to determine that they'd need to have a standard which is other than tradition itself. Hence, they had to claim Sola Scriptura as their standard to judge tradition, but I've already explained why that doesn't work (because tradition is prior to and more fundamental than Scripture; it produced Scripture and encompasses it).
No you don't and you don't have a standard to judge that. What does "right enough" entail? You're appealing to sufficiency which also requires a standard. Where is the cutoff point where one's not "right enough" anymore?
The true Church has assurance given by Christ. If I can demonstrate the Orthodox Church is the true Church (and going back to Church history proves that) then whatever it judges, it is right because it has the guidence of the Spirit.
Our eschatology differs. You mean after Christ second advent? Everyone who renounces their false beliefs and wishes to come to the true Church is welcomed at any time of course. No negotiations or compromises with the faith are possible, even if it means that only one Orthodox person is left in the world. Anything else would amount to surrendering the true faith and abandoning the Church. If any Orthodox Church does that then it's no longer the Church (here's looking at you, Bartholomew seeking to unite with Rome). Those outside the Church are like the prodigal son or the lost sheep but in the end we're told there will be few people, even among the nominally Orthodox, who would have kept the faith and the commandments as Christ has ordered. So I don't think we'll be seeing more people coming to their senses and coming to the Church but the opposite. Jesus prophesized that false teachings and deceptions will multiply in the end times.
Not bad faith at all, it's my understanding of the quote, which is Metropolitan Kallistos (1934-2022), "We know where the Church is but we cannot be sure where it is not", The Orthodox Church. Now I see cited against him Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894), "Christ is here, in our Orthodox Church, and He is not in any other church", Thoughts for Each Day. (I wonder how an individual would judge between two apparently contrary implications from within didactic Orthodoxy.) I learned the first quote as if it were normative from the Orthodox u/CuomoisaMassMurderer. Perhaps you think Kallistos was not a valid teacher, but if so you would just make my point about individual judgment even stronger; if his view isn't what you regard as Orthodoxy, it's strange then that it should be taken as Orthodoxy (unless individual judgment exists).
Can you show this before the Great Schism?
But the early church didn't teach that their own teachings were verified by earlier church teachings alone, but by (originally Hebrew) Scripture and tradition. My understanding is that later teachings also taught that they would be verified by both Scripture and tradition. Your phrasing puts a difference between verifying early and verifying late.
That's my point! What is static isn't alive.
Life isn't to change truth but to refine it by bringing out more of it that harmonizes with what came before, such as adapting it to the tech age. Jesus refined the OT tradition and interpretation.
It's not a word game but original (though somewhat forgotten today). We were first called Evangelical, 1517 (that's the real unity and we share it with others), then we agreed to be named after the Protestation of Speyer, 1529. If we and Rome worked out the Luther issue we protested, we should reunify, which would also mean working out the evangel. It was because of treatment of Luther that the Protestants declared Rome to have fallen, which is just like the Orthodox's view of treatment of Michael; but we mostly admitted we coulda been wrong. Rome did a counter-reformation, and we cleaned up our rhetoric, and those initial extremes are now past and the movement is now about what is the evangel and how long will the protest last.
Which they determined they did, your position notwithstanding. They held that personal interpretation of Scripture and Tradition is all that we have because we imperfect ones can never comprehend or accommodate God's perfect standard. There is no external stack of books called Scripture and Tradition to which I can point everyone to externally, there is only every man's conception of Scripture and Tradition, which often largely overlap. (There's never even been a collection of perfect autographs of the whole Scripture in one place, God deliberately kept the several inspired manuscripts away from each other so we'd recognize via copying that we are imperfect carriers.) So "Tradition" is not a standard because it doesn't externally exist to our experience, unless we count it as a concept in God's ineffable mind, something that we each collectively and substantially approximate.
There are two standards: the temporal standard is what any man or organization judges on earth for themselves, which is their judgment and which stands for their domain; and the eternal standard is what God judges and eventually reveals by "positioning candlesticks". The temporal standard can fail and need correcting; we keep testing and trust another that we're getting it right instead of ourselves. We submit to the wisdom of the eternal standard even if we're wrong on any point and it takes awhile to find out.
Orthodoxy is preserved from major error while it stands, but it seems to admit error. (Because I want to learn,) I find that Archbishop Stylianos pretty well recently introduced Orthodoxy to the ideal of conciliar infallibility. (Before that, OrthodoxWiki notes Catholic Gallican Assembly 1682 and Utrecht II Council 1763 placed infallibility generically in the church to prevent it from being papal, though that didn't last in Rome.) So I'm not confident that Orthodoxy teaches that it never errs; the AI is giving me that it may have changed its position on contraception since 1937, which isn't a great example, but if it never taught infallibility until others made it a hot button then it wasn't denying risk of error even at the conciliar level.
What of my claim that it proves other churches are true also? Whenever you cite something and I say I see the same elsewhere, we're not making progress. Maybe we could both agree on where to find the deposit of tradition, or maybe not because it's living and we must point to people, but we don't agree on the epistemology or the nature of the deposit. How can I go against my conscience first and only then see that my conscience was wrong? I change my ways because my conscience is awakened, I don't change my conscience to fit some way I could be walking. You've used your conscience to surrender your conscience, fine; but my conscience isn't permitting me to surrender it, even as I believe that it does surrender to a coherent system that addresses its concerns. So how could we arrive at unity of conscience unless we either agree on the standard we individually use or one of us capitulates conscience?
Without an agreed standard, we don't have proof Orthodoxy is the (only) true Church from history. If the Spirit told me (by intuition or by thought) that a church was a True (eternal) Church, I'd know it would always be right, just like we decide collectively which glorified saints are definitely the True Eternal Church. I don't get that certainty in earth establishments. I can hope, but eschatologically I can't speak of knowledge that a current org will continue forever or that it will die out.
And I don't argue about eschatology, which you point out is part of the debate. If we "only" know a heretic after he dies, or a heretic movement after it dies, then all going concerns are unknown. John hints that we might intuit special knowledge of eternal damnation, and I think we might intuit special knowledge of eternal salvation too. I might get a revelation that the Orthodox is in fact eternal, but I wouldn't logically argue that from your sources but only from the revelation. I can certainly argue logically that there's an invisible church on earth and it is in fact eternal (in the new heaven-earth), but I don't get to assign that to individuals or orgs with certainty apart from revelation.
But I guessed right, your conclusion offers hope. We are (all) just to renounce false beliefs when they arise and make no negotiation or compromise contrary to (a) the written traditions or (b) the living decisions of our appointed leaders. Did I summarize you accurately on that?
Because let's say you invite me to get catechized by your bishop. I don't usually have a problem submitting to books I am offered, if I'm permitted to ask informational questions if I perceive paradox or contradiction. I would presume that the bishop would seek to answer questions and not argue that I must believe a paradox against my conscience; and that comes to the living decisions. If I seek catechesis sincerely and admit at the start I'm a hard case, and it should come to the point where the bishop and I disagree over how to basically break new ground in resolving the meaning of tradition, then we have logical options. Either we agree to disagree and I leave (making him no longer my responsible leader); or one of us conscientiously suspends judgment (including by dropping the subject) and decides to abide with the other knowing the risk that unresolved suspension may grow into problems later; or we press on working with each other until a "new" harmony bridge is built (founded on the old territory). In none of those does it appear that the bishop has some right to wield tradition over the head of my conscience and overwhelm and quench it. (I could naturally submit my conscience from the start and agree to be totally bound by the conscience of others even unto my destruction, and then I'd be judged only for that submission and not for the judgments made by others, but that way's been tried and is pretty sterile, and tempts people to break the bond.) So I conclude the use of Scripture and tradition is always to bolster the use of conscience and not to usurp it. Do you see an issue with that approach to catechesis?
Dude I can't deal with your filibustering and walls of texts. We're going in circles but the circles only get bigger because you can't write to the point. I'm addressing this and tapping out.
You don't see the problem with this? What does "largely overlap" entail? An appeal to majority's interpretation? For the last time: You don't have a standard against which to judge what the correct interpretation of both scripture and tradition is. If one protestant believes in baptism and the other doesn't when both appeal to their interpretation of Scripture, how do you arbiter this?
Wrong. Tradition exists externally in the Church which keeps it. It doesn't exist externally in your system where very denomination or Bible reader makes up their own tradition by deconstructing and reforming what came before. Sure, some are more conservative with the process but that's arbitrary - both radicals and conservatives are equally Protestant (same goes for "protestantism" in the political realm - the left/right republicans where both sides are equally revolutionary and opposed to true conservatism which is monarchy and Church). Just like everything else in this system, it's entirely subjective and built around the individual and their immediate relationship with God. It is self-worship guised as Christianity. Protestantism is at its core satanic because it appeals to man and not God (the Church being His Body and His Spirit) as the authority. I can be a protestant and deny all previous traditions while interpreting Scripture in the most schizo way possible and you still wouldn't be able to tell me that I'm wrong and I'm not the Church. As long as I appeal to Scripture we're at an equal footing epistemologically.
how do you explain https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FG6jRyaIbwAUXbH3.jpg https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FG6jRyaIbwAIPjwe.jpg https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FG6jRyaKbwAMOMHq.jpg
?
Clearly the nazis weren't True Christians.
What you said, Scripture is part of Tradition.
Exactly, only God does.
Any number of ways. (1) It doesn't need to be arbitrated anytime soon, they continue in separate polities. (2) They negotiate an agreement together or with a mediator. (3) One unilaterally yields either by submission or by enfolding. Same as in your church if two people of equal standing disagree BTW.
You imply that separation is a problem because of an assumption something like there's only one Church organization on earth. Not proven.
Then it's writing to be interpreted, or lives that are dynamic and capable of adjustment. Neither of those are absolute like God is.
What I said.
You'd be surprised what reliance on tradition becomes (as you understand it, or as any mere human understands it)! Worshipping only God means leaning on him to teach not assuming we have the whole teaching accessible by human methods.
Well, you're free to keep me excommunicated, I did offer to seek catechesis, I'll just have to ask the next Orthodox. I'm not kidding either. Soon as we get over this hump of understanding authority, the rest is a downhill 3-year period. But I learned from Luther it is never safe or right to go against conscience. If I leave my conscience outside the door, that's the only place I can go back and get it if I ever need it!
I told you I appeal to God. Of course I appeal to the Body of Christ within that; I appeal to the Spirit who reveals; I appeal to the Word of God; I appeal to any special appearance the Father yields. (I don't have the Church being his Spirit, Orthodoxy teaches it's the dwelling of his Spirit.) When you tell me I'm satanic because I don't appeal to the Orthodox Church the Spirit of God, that's pressing it pretty far, your bishop might say.
Of course I can tell you you're wrong, but I can't force you to see it any more than I'm telling you I think you're wrong now and you don't see it. If the Orthodox Church told you you were wrong and you disagreed, you'd be out of there. (Or else perhaps you swore to always agree with whatever the bishop tells you even if he abuses his power because he's the bishop.) Orthodoxy doesn't solve the problem of people being wrong either. People who think they're the Church either work it out with others who think they're the Church (proving they are) or they don't forever (proving they're not). Simple.
TLDR: You're free to proceed any way you like. If you think I might be worth a little more of your evanglistic effort, we might try again with how catechesis works. How do I submit to the bishop or catechist, what's being asked of me, what do I do with my conscience? We might also work on those two positions I identified. Is Metropolitan Kallistos right to say "We know where the Church is but we cannot be sure where it is not"? Is Theophan the Recluse right to say "Christ is here, in our Orthodox Church, and He is not in any other church"? Orthodox disagree interpreting those two! If you don't want to answer my questions, it's been enlightening, but brothers seeking truth together ought to be able to get past a little hiccup like my talkativity.