Nick Fuentes says don't read your bible, just listen to "clergy"
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You telling me I'm wrong is your subjective opinion. Truth doesn't care about subjective opinions. The Orthodox Church holds the objective standard for what the true faith is - not single individuals in or outside of it. The Church has a living body that is visible and mystical just like you have a living body - both physical and spiritual. It has a head just like you have a head. The difference is that the head of your body is your human mind, and the head of the Church is Christ. This is why Protestants worship the self, their own head and not Christ. Because you can't be in one with the head if you're not part of the body. You have to submit to the Church thus letting Christ be your head (through the bishops and priests who were given their office by Him - apostolic succession).
Here's the correct (only) path to knowing God:
This mirrors God's plan for our salvation: God the Father sent Christ who then sent the Spirit.
Go to an EO Church (if you're in the US, I'd suggest ROCOR) and talk to a priest about becoming a catechumen. If the priest is well-disposed you may ask him questions that you're struggling with. Beside that read the early Church fathers and look up Orthodox channels on youtube like Orthodox Ethos, Jay Dyer, Patristic Nectar, Orthodox Wisdom, Father Spyridon.
Both are correct and are not contradictory if understood in context. There are no other churches because the Church is only one. What the metropolitan says has to do with normative and extra normative ways to be united to the Church. There's no salvation outside the Church but God can work out ways that are not understood by us and are not revealed to us. The normative is baptism and chrismation. The extra normative is God uniting people to the Church outside the rituals and proper worship, because He knows their heart - this of course is the exception to the rule and in no way suggests that people outside of the Church should hope to be saved by exception. We have a duty to seek God and enter the Church through the front door. The exception is for people who have a good reason in God's eyes why they didn't do that.
The best example of such extra normative union to the Church is the righteous thief on the cross. This is central to the Orthodox tradition, hence the Orthodox cross having the tipped line on the bottom, signifying the thieves crucified along with Jesus and their respective judgement. As Orthodox we follow what God has commanded through His Church but we can never know God's ways and we can't set boundaries to them.
So God can unite people to the Church extranormatively outside the rituals and Orthodox worship and we can't bound his ways. Thanks. Then you do feel qualified to explicate that answer, and we'd be better off just not arguing about the size of the exception.
But you don't feel qualified to answer about conscience from your own being born or catechized into Orthodoxy, you refer me to the bishop. Got it.
("Christ sent the Spirit"? Sounds like filioque to me! What is this change?)
But there it sounds like you know for certain that all Protestants are disconnected from extranormative unity. That sounds like arguing over the size of the exception, that's all.
When I investigated the question of conscience I concluded that two professing Christ who agree they disagree on an essential (i.e. where at least one is not in communion with the other) do not get to judge each other. The division is from the Lord, to show which of you are approved. If they agree it shows they're both approved, if either goes bad it shows he is disapproved, if either dies in the separated state approval will be shown by the later direction of the movement living (ultimately reuniting) or dying. I see nothing that commends one side over the other: not succession, not titles, not size, not depth, not tradition, not hierarchy, not even appeal to logic as humans experience it. Only the Logos can show it and he waits patiently to do so, often by other means than human formality.
Now that tested conclusion pits me against churches that say we have not only unique distinctives but also an automatic superiority (the thing Rome got in trouble for in fact). "We are #1 in humility." Each distinctive has its own commendation, like a name only the bearer understands, and so if anything has a "superiority" they all do in their own ways. The argument "who is greatest" is ultimately answered by God showing all his children are greatest in their own different way as he ordained, as we humbly realize the imago Dei in everyone.
That may be enough to roll with. Since you exposit Kallistos, I can limit the issue to whether you seem to weaken that exposition separately. Someday I will interview both Orthodox and Catholic to see if their claims have some compatibility with each other, because for every appeal you make a Catholic has made the same appeal. Protestants typically reject "sheep-stealing" and so I generally stick with where my family grew up because I have vital connection. If someone says I must lose something I have in Christ to join their church, that's suspicious, and my perception of what is loss must be tested as well as their own perception of gain.
Exactly. If you want to learn about Orthodoxy you have to go to the physical Church and talk to the clergy. I can only reiterate the teachings of the Church and my opinions as an Orthodox layman. There's a hierarchy within the Church. You probably won't be talking to a bishop but to a priest who was ordained by the bishop. The bishops are those who have apostolic succession and lead the Church.
No. This is the Orthodox teaching of the Church Fathers. The filioque claims double hypostatic procession of the Spirit and it has to do with the origin of the Spirit. The Spirit spirates from the Father, not the Son. The Son sending the Spirit is the Spirit originating from Him.
I knew you would go there and that's why I emphasized extranormative union applies to exceptions where there's good reason for the person not to be received in the Church through normative means. This is not the case with Protestants today, who have access to the Church but choose not to come to it out of their own volition and because they persist in their heterodox teachings.
Leading sheep back to the Church is sheep saving actually. In th end you have to choose between the world and Christ. If the Truth leads you away from your community and family, so be it.
I was making light, but I agree in essence: I've said all along that calling it something like "origination and sending without procession or spiration" is just argument over the same thing with different definitions applying.
Yes, and that reason is judged two ways, either by God (where we can't argue the size of the exception) or by human reason (where we'd be at risk of wanting to second-guess his good reasons).
The latter of the ways of judgment.
All I have to do is invert. Our Church and Tradition judges that we have apostolic succession through Luther and that the Eastern Church are the heterodox by not agreeing with Luther when they had and have access (he tried!); and Eastern claims to the contrary have already been proven wrong by our tradition, even if it sounds silly and illogical to them and we don't explain it very well, because our tradition is The True Church. You see how it doesn't work in the reverse direction, and why I don't think it works in your direction either?
Which is why I say feel free to keep the theology of "exceptions for good reason" and be prepared to be called on any variances from that theology.
We need a new name, Orthodox Protestant Catholics (paragraph 6 here). Then we can drop the "Protestant" part when Rome apologizes and we'd be back to exactly the primitive name, Orthodox Catholics.
I just explained how that's not the case - is you being born of your father the same as your brother sending you to do some work? Maybe consider that theological disputes that led to the splitting of the Church are not over semantics?
You can't because you don't have a Church and tradition, that's the point. You have denominations which agree on some things and disagree on other things. We've been over this. Luther's theology has nothing to do with what the Early Church teaches so pretending he was on the same footing as the Orthodox Church is just stupid. There were no "Luthers" in the first millennium. There was a universal apostolic and synodal Church. Actually there were guys like Luther but all of them were excomunicated like Nestorius, Valentian, Origen and Tertullian.
I don't keep anything. It's not up to me to pick and choose what the faith is. I am convinced EO is the true Church and I follow it a 100%.