Truth Unites - An Orthodox Priest Becomes an Evangelical Pastor

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Rev. Joshua Schooping shares his journey from being an Orthodox Priest to becoming an evangelical Protestant pastor. Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus, hosted by Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) author and Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites | One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truth... FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesP... Website: https://gavinortlund.com/ Episode analytics

Welcome back to my channel and welcome for the first time. Truth Unites is a place for theology and apologetics. And I always say doing that in an ironic way. And everyone always asks, what does ironic mean? And ironic means aiming for peace. And so I've been involved in some ecumenical dialogue and been very enriched and by that and very grateful for that. Today I get to talk with my friend Josh Schuping. So excited for this and he's going to share a little bit of his story of coming back to evangelicalism. So this is going to be a great conversation. So Josh, thank you. And maybe you can just start off by introducing yourself a little bit. Anything you'd like to share?

Hi, yes. My name is Joshua Schuping. I'm a pastor with the Christian and missionary alliance. I serve in a church in Russellville, Arkansas. I'm married. I have three children. And originally from Florida, served for a time there. also served for a time in northeastern Pennsylvania.

And also we just moved to Arkansas, so we're still surrounded by boxes. But it's been great, and it's been nice to get started in the ministry here and to be with really Christ honoring and God-loving people. That's awesome. Well, tell us a little bit. You served as an Orthodox priest for many years. tell us a little bit about how you became Orthodox. Yeah, okay.

Well, in my late 20s, I have to say, I was unconverted. I was syncretist, you know, and that kind of like American kind of grab bag, cross-fit spirituality kind of thing. But God was working on me for a long time. I grew up. I was blessed. Most of my best friends were all Christian growing up. And so they really shared the heart of Christ with me and gave me a real strong love for him.

And so God just kept moving in my life to the point where by the time I get into my late 20s, my wife and I, our son, Isaiah, was on the way. And, you know, definitely leading out a lot of those middle steps there. but as things worked up, God just sort of lovingly confronted me and just asked me, do you want to give your son your best guess, or do you want to give him me? And, you know, God speaks in a very rich way. So it just hit all of the notes in my soul and in my heart. And I just knew instantly that I just wanted to give my life to him to serve him. And yet with all my baggage coming up, having studied, you know, far.

Eastern philosophy and theology and, you know, and everywhere in between. It was, I was kind of a bit of a project. I was at a used Christian bookstore, great little used bookstore in Fern Park, Castleberry, Florida, at least it is there now. And tons of used Christian books. And I had a stack of books in my hand, and a guy on the other end of the aisle had a stack of books in his hand. And it was like, what do you got? What do you got? And this young man was really placed. there by the Lord, I have to say. And we just started talking. And I asked him, so if you were going to share your faith with somebody, what would you say? What would you do? And he evangelized me, to be perfectly honest. He shared the good news with me, even though I had grown up going

to churches, going to youth group, going to young life, went to Windy Gap. You know, he, or in God prepared my heart to hear him in a way that kind of spoke to me for the first time to really show me my need, you know, in a very objective sort of way. And he was just so winsome. He was so knowledgeable. He knew his Bible so well. He was so humble, so well-spoken. I just thought to myself, I want to go where he's going.

I just want to at least visit and give it a try. Lo and behold, it was a Reformed Baptist Church. And, you know, this is in, you know, Central Florida area. and it was, they had a tremendous discipleship program, very good preacher, verse by verse. Sometimes, you know, one verse would take one week and then the other half of a verse, you know, like, A, you know, that part of the verse, and then part of that verse B, like would be the next week. And he would sometimes even preach upwards of an hour and a half. And there would even be like, you know, like kids who are 12 years old, like writing notes like the whole time. And he was able to just keep people's attention.

He was really blessed in that way. But it was very strident in a lot of ways, very strong on the doctrine of separation, you know, what is a false religion and what is Christianity. And coming out of my kind of eclectic, you know, background, that was just really shocking and really jarring to me and to my wife. and so I was I think I was a little bit more of a project than you know maybe they maybe I was prepared to work through with them and so I kept reading I kept reading I kept learning and I had stumbled across documents like the philocalia authors like Theo from the recluse and you know popular works also in the Eastern Orthodox tradition like the way of a pilgrim and And those things kind of started to speak to my more experiential spiritual side. And they were able to kind of provide some theological answers related to the incarnation and

to the Trinity that really kind of opened doors for me because growing up, you know, I mentioned that my friends had shared with me the heart of Jesus. But for whatever reason, I was never able to really kind of understand doctrine. Christ was kind of presented to me. It was almost, and so it's not their fault, but my ears just heard it like the father is like Zeus and Jesus is kind of like a demi-God. You know, he's like God and man, kind of like how Zeus would mate with a woman and all that kind of what we understand is anthropomorphism, which is, you know, like a very basic kind of misunderstanding that people can have. even found John Cassian writing about it in the 4th century. People were misunderstanding even all the way back then.

But that was kind of what was given to me. So when I was reading authors like Loski in the mystical theology of the Eastern Church or Athanasius on the incarnation and just kind of understanding like what it really means to say that Christ is fully God and fully man and to understand the Trinity and not kind of a gross analogy like, oh, water can be in three parts. You know, you have solid, liquid, and gas, and that's like the Trinity. And those things, like, just, like, didn't resonate with me at all. And I had no idea why. But then when I read the, like, really profound presentations of Trinitarian theology and incarnational theology, I was kind of wowed. And so the unchanging

sort of rhetoric, the rhetoric of the unchanging church in the, the, the rhetoric of the unchanging church in the East, you know, kind of worked on me a little bit. So their embrace of Hezekiah, stillness, theosis, you know, kind of like that applied spiritual life of sanctification, just really was attractive to me. And I enjoyed the liturgy. I appreciated St. John of Christostom's liturgy. I thought it was very beautiful. I appreciated their sanctification of time, their feasts. So, you know, between the Philocalia, which is a collection of texts on prayer, a multi-volume collection of texts on prayer spanning from about the fourth or fifth century to about the 15th century, just collected works on the interior life in Christ. So with those, the liturgy, the, you know, the more or less unchanging nature of a lot of that, the stability of it, all of that kind of attracted me to orthodoxy. Fascinating. Okay. And so then talk us through the timeline a little bit of how long did you serve as a priest?

Will give us a little more of the narrative there? Yeah. So I felt called to ministry actually fairly early on in my conversion. What was given to me in the gospel just seemed like the most amazing thing to give to anyone else. And I just wanted to be able to give that. And I've kind of like a, I like to teach. So that kind of was a part of it. And so as we got into the Orthodox Church and went through our catechism, how old am I? I am 42. I think we were 29.

I was 29 when I entered, you know, into the catechuminate. And so once the catechuminate was finished and our daughter, our first daughter, Emma, she was born. We had two kids now, my wife and I. and just seemed like, hey, let's go to seminary. It just kind of seemed like a good thing to do. And so we went fairly early on to St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers, New York, and trying to think spent about four years there. I think we graduated 2015, maybe. We did a four-year thing.

The three-year for the M-Div, and we stayed an extra year for a T.HM a master's in theology. and then moved back down to Florida, worked as a chaplain for about a year, and then towards the end of that year of chaplaincy, I was ordained actually with Rokor, the Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia, even though I started my time in the OCA. Okay, fascinating, okay. And one of the things we've talked about is that... Five years. Forgive me. So I served as a priest for about five years in the Orthodox Church.

Got it. Okay, great. One of the things we mentioned earlier is the intent of you sharing your... story is in no way to just attack or bash another Christian tradition. So maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the things you especially appreciated from the Orthodox Church or learned during your time there. Yeah. Well, you know, I would echo again that I really appreciated the liturgy. I'm not ceremonial by nature. I'm from Florida, you know, putting on shoes is, you know, a burden, want to wear my flip-flops, where I'm going to go. And so, and growing up in and around evangelical churches, you know, the idea of something that's highly structured liturgically

didn't really make a whole lot of sense to me. I mean, of course, you have high church Anglicans who are, you know, also have, you know, fairly, you know, more complex liturgies. But yeah, so that was kind of a learning curve for me. But I learned to really appreciate appreciate it. And I thought that the structure added a lot of space for reflection and formation and meditation is very biblical, you know, like so much of the liturgy is either a quotation from scripture, you know, verses from the Psalms or what have you. And a lot of the hymns are very theologically oriented. So I enjoyed that. I also appreciated the historicity of it, the fact that St. John Chrysostom's name is on it. St. Basil, the great, his name is on one of the

liturgies that's, you know, celebrated regularly. And so I really loved that it was unchanging in a midst of a changing culture. I feel and felt like America was becoming and is becoming more and more unmoored, untethered from tradition, from, you know, what was considered normal, you know, even 30 years ago is now considered, you know, backwards thinking, you know. So orthodoxy kind of provided a place where you could find an unchanging kind of environment. I appreciated the spirituality in a lot of ways, especially the teaching about like the inner life, you know, being able to get quiet before God, to concentrate the mind on God. The Philocalia has a lot of, you know, that collection of texts on prayer.

You know, they have a lot of insight into, you might call it like a biblical psychology where they just really kind of go through. I don't want to say it's systematic, but like a really full treatment about, you know, how the inner life of a person works. And that was a level of insight that I hadn't come across yet in the evangelical churches or churches in the West, really. I mean, the Catholics have some things approaching it, and so I wouldn't want to, you know, say that they don't have a biblical mystical psychology or something, but I found it very

approachable in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Something about it just made sense to me as I read it. So that was another thing that I appreciated. I also appreciated some of the heroic kind of efforts at prayer. You know, like they would sometimes pray for hours at a time. you know, like the Jesus prayer or something like that. And I just really loved that. It seemed like a powerful and profound thing.

And it is. Those are some of the things at least that come to my mind, you know, off the top of my head. Yeah, that's great. So tell us a little bit about the reasons why ultimately you came back to evangelicalism. Yeah. Okay. Good question. So when I, I mean, there's definitely multiple pieces of,

of that. And I think there's like two broad categories. There's like kind of like an experiential side that kind of led to it. There's also kind of like a doctrinal side that kind of led to it. And sometimes those kind of like overlap a little bit and speak to each other and inform each other. But when I entered into the Orthodox Church, and again, I don't want to bash anybody. So some of the things I say might be negative. but not with the intent of like airing dirty laundry or trying to make anyone look bad or anything like that. I wasn't really challenged in terms of doctrine, I'll say. There was, you know, authors like David Bentley Hart is a very popular author read amongst many Orthodox Christians. And he teaches universalism that all will ultimately be saved.

And, you know, so that was the kind of doctrine that resonated with me as I was coming out of my American, I call it American CrossFit religion, you know, just syncretism. I take a little bit of that. I take a little bit of this. I could probably even fairly call it New Age, even though I wouldn't have liked the term at the time. Because I can get a little bit more woo-woo. I was a little bit more of the intellectually type. Perennialism is another word that is often thrown around. Frith Jafs-Shu-on is a popular author among those perennialists.

But Philip Sherard is also known to be, was at least known to have had a perennialist phase of his career. And he was one of the translators of the Philocalia into English along with Callistos Ware. And so this perennialism was another element of orthodoxy that I kind of resonated with at the time. It kind of was like an easy step like, oh, Callistos Ware and Philip Chirar and the fellow Kalia. And, you know, that's kind of like a no-brainer if I'm going to be, you know, coming from Frith Jafshuan and Perennialism in that. Most or many of the Western writers of perennialism will typically go to Islam. And that wasn't really an option for me. I wasn't interested in that.

I loved Christ. And so moving into Orthodoxy, that kind of universalism and perennial. nationalism seemed like a very comfortable fit for me. And in the Reform Baptist Church, you know, it's, I, you know, they're talking about penal substitutionary atonement and, you know, hellfire and brimstone and people are going to, you know, be damned and the necessity of salvation in Christ alone, you know, those things were very boldly proclaimed from the pulpit. And I was like, oh, man, that's that Christian legalism. And, you know, they're just, you know, they're just. just, you know, God being wrathful. I don't relate to a wrathful God, you know, and I didn't understand about the doctrine of impassibility, you know, or or God's immutability. And so those doctrines, like, struck my ears as like, oh, God's stomping around in heaven, just looking for people, he's going to smite, you know. And so entering into the Orthodox, the mystical Orthodox East, you know, it was like, oh, well, we don't believe that God has any wrath. There's no penal substitutionary atonement.

And, you know, so that's what kind of led me into the Orthodox Church that ended up becoming kind of a setup for me to leave. Because when I got to seminary, again, no one really disabused me of that, you know, idea. And, you know, people would say, oh, we know where the church is, but we don't know where the church isn't. You know, we don't say that people outside of the Orthodox Church are necessarily outside of salvation. You know, well, you know, we have the fullness of the church. You know, you might find some authors saying, you know, and so the idea was that, well, these other churches don't have the fullness, therefore they have like a less full version. I was later disabused of that.

Much later, that's more recent. But at seminary, I'm reading Church Fathers like, you know, St. Simeon, the New Theologian, St. Cyril of Alexandria. I'm finding, I'm reading in the hymn book, you know, the Festal Menean or the, you know, the Lenton Triote, and I'm reading in these books. And I'm finding the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement in there. And I hated the idea. I hated that doctrine. I thought it was just completely misrepresented God. That's not any kind of God.

I would serve or love and, you know, and so I'm reading it. And the first one that I remember encountering was in St. Simeon the New Theologian, some homilies that were actually translated by Father Sarah from Rose, some homilies that had been collected prior to Sarah from Rose's translation, they were collected by Atheophe and the recluse, and translated into Russian by him from the Greek, Simeon, the New Theologian writing in Greek. And the first homily in there and the first created man was like, what am I reading? This sounds like penal substitutionary atonement to me.

I mean, I ran from the Reform Baptist Church and the evangelical church or the Western churches because of this. And then I'm like finding out people saying, oh, Anselm, you know, he made all this up, you know, when people would often confuse Anselm's satisfaction theory of the atonement with penal substitutionary atonement. And so like one of the first things that I do when I'm reading in Simeon the New Theologian on his view of the atonement, well, what are his dates? Maybe he was corrupted by the West. Maybe he was corrupted by Anselm. And his dates proceeded.

He came before Anselm. And I'm like, so wait a second. This is like before Anselm, before. It's like there's no capitulation to scholasticism here. This is just a mystical theologian in the Orthodox Church that's teaching this. And I'm telling a priest about it at seminary and he's saying, oh, you need to go and find, you know, you can't just go by what one father says. You have to find it to go to our hymn book and the Menean to see if it's in there.

And he's assuring me that it's not. So I just go to double check and I find out, well, wait a second. and one of the feasts of the cross, there's a clear pointing towards penal substitutionary atonement. Of course, there's varieties of that doctrine. Not all penal substitutionary atonement theories or presentations are the same, and there's subtle differences between them and nuances that we don't have to go into. But by and large, the idea that Christ was our substitute is there, and that he suffered a penalty is there.

And so I find it there. And the priest who told me that, you know, he doesn't like that I found that. And then I keep researching and I find it in St. Cyril of Alexandria. I even find him discussing the idea of God's wrath. He gives the definition of God's wrath. I'll paraphrase. It's basically God's justice when it's applied destructively. Not that God is filled with a passion of anger, but biblically speaking, when God's, you know, justice is applied destructively against someone that's described as God's wrath.

It's like, okay, so we can talk about God as being wrathful. So that's starting to kind of blow my mind and shift my paradigm because no one's talking about it. And everywhere I go, I find people saying, well, that's the one thing orthodoxy doesn't teach. We're the alternative to those penal substitutionary atonement guys. And so I kind of like, well, I'm finding it. And in fact, I found that the very image of Christ being the substitute for the criminal comes to, from John Chrysostom in his commentaries on 2 Corinthians 5 and in Galatians, I think it's three.

And the very image that Christ is a substitute who takes not only the punishment of the criminal, but the guilt of the criminal as well, taking both aspects. And so I know I'm a little bit long-winded here, so forgive me, but those things are starting to wake me up to problems, you know, within 20th and. 21st century presentations of orthodoxy. And so, yeah, I guess I'll pause there and, you know, see if you want to redirect or anything. No, that's helpful. That's helpful. So, because I think a lot of times people hear stories of people leaving evangelicalism,

and sometimes they don't hear as many stories of people coming into evangelicalism. And so that's why it's, I think it's fascinating for me, and I know it'll be helpful for people to just hear your thought process and your story. And I know there's so much to it that we can't cover every. everything here. But one of the issues I know you've thought a lot about as well would be the doctrine of the church. And this is an area where a lot of times an evangelical perspective can be perceived to be very weak. And, you know, so maybe just a few thoughts I'll throw out and just let you interact with these and reflect upon these. One of the concerns is that

evangelicalism has fragmented the church into, you know, the number seems to keep increasing. 50 billion denominations, or not quite that high, but there's a sense of fragmentation and disunity and evangelicalism, whereas these other traditions have this strong claim of unity. And sometimes that feels leveraged in a way that's a little bit unfair and overstated. But how would you interact with a concern like that? Yeah. Well, I guess I'll tie it back a little bit into my story about how I left, because during COVID, the churches sadly closed down.

I had to shut down for a little while. And so I wanted to use that time as productively as possible because I knew my people needed to learn things. They needed, you know, there's often a very low threshold of knowledge in a lot of Orthodox churches, especially where they're predominantly cradle. And sometimes if they're third or fourth generation, Orthodox, a lot of that time spent through the generations was spent for trying to preserve cultural traditions, you know, Russianness or something. And so one of the things that I really

wanted to do is use that time to teach people. And I didn't want to give them my own best guess. I wanted to give them something Orthodox. And I didn't want to give them something that a 20th or 21st century priest or bishop had written either. I wanted to give them something that that was conciliar, something that was long held in tradition, or something that had been long accepted or used for at least some period of time in the church prior to our immediately modern era. And so I found translated St. Philaret of Moscow's longer and shorter catechism that had been published in like the late 1800s.

Similarly, with De Scythius' confessions, his decrees, I guess you could call him a confession. Yeah, I guess the confession of De Scythias, which was from a local synod in Jerusalem. De Scythias was a patriarch in 1672 called the local council. And so that was something that I had found translated in the late 1800s that had been published in over 100 years. And similarly, I found St. Peter Mogila's Confession of Faith, which you could call a catechism. It has a question-on-answer format that hadn't been published in over 100 years. So I used my two or three months in quarantine, you know, when everything is closed down, trying to re-type-set those. I would, you know, laid them out again.

I would, if I had access to the Greek or Latin, I would try to make sure I would connect like key words that make sure that we'd or they were translated, et cetera, et cetera. And so as I was going through those documents and publishing them, trying to make them available, one of the things I would come across, like in De Scythius's decree about, like, the visibility of the church, saying such statements as we can't even call someone a Christian if they're not inside the canonical Orthodox Church.

And it just like really struck me because from seminary days it was like, oh, well, we know that there are Christians in other places. You know, we're the Orthodox Church. We have the fullness of the church. Many, many, many priests would affirm that, you know, like, oh, yes, there are other Christians. But then I'm finding like this like really strong discrepancy about, you know, here. And Dysithius is saying, like, no, they're not even a Christian if they're not Orthodox under a bishop. in the Orthodox Church. And I'm like, that's really frustrating.

I just want to kind of find out some more because I know what popular modern Orthodox scholars would say. But then refreshingly, you'll find, I think you spoke with Hiramunk Patrick Ramsey's Father Patrick. He was very open and honest. No, we just call other people Christians by convention. Like they're not really Christian. Father Josiah Trenum similarly states the kind of exclusivity that is the authentic Orthodox position.

And not authentic to what people in congregations may think, but to what the actual canonical formal position of the church is. People usually try to escape the formal position of the Orthodox Church in order to just say, well, my priest says this or my bishop says that. And that's very unfortunate because it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance between what the actual canyston. canonical tradition of orthodoxy is. And so I'm trying and what other people may want to say or like it to be. And another document that came to my attention as I'm trying to republish some of these conciliar types of documents is the sonneton of orthodoxy. It's read in the church formally pronounced from the en vone, pronounced from essentially what would be the equivalent of a pulpit every year, once a year on the Sunday of orthodoxy. It's basically the Sunday of Orthodox apologetics, you might call it.

And from it, it says, following the Council of, I think, of 1553, where they rejected union with the Catholics, that anyone who affirms the filiocque, which is the part of the creed in the West that says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. So it says anyone who affirms that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son is anathema, which is to be cursed. Now people think, oh yeah, you know, people have to say stuff, but the Orthodox doctrine of the church is that they have the keys, right? So what they lock, what is locked, what they unlock is unlocked. So when they say formally from the Anguon as a part of the church service, It's the most sacrosanct thing to do anything within formally within the liturgy is they're closing and they're saying anyone who affirms this filialue, this doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from the father and the son is a curse.

They're shutting out of the church. The church is the ark of salvation. Everyone outside of the Orthodox Church is outside of salvation. They're outside of the ark. just like everyone drowning in the flood in Noah's time, anyone who's not in the Orthodox Church, they're drowning in the flood of sin. So they excommunicate and say they're outside of salvation,

anyone who affirms the filiocque. Now that's you, that's me, that's the entire Catholic church, all of the Protestant churches. And so, you know, you have these ecumenical dialogues or whatever, but you can't get around the fact that they're excluded. And so that became a real big problem.

It even got to the point where I was reading in the synodicon that anyone who uses unleavened bread for the communion service is doubly accursed. Because they're like those Armenian Orthodox Church, even names the Armenian Orthodox Church as like a criteria for what is accursed andathematized. And I'm like, I just don't believe this. I don't believe this. And then I read the same sort of thing in Pomazansky who wrote the kind of normative, orthodox, dogmatic theology text, textbook in the English language at least. And so this idea of extreme exclusivity is something I could not affirm. And so I left. And that speaks to why I left.

you ask the question about like unity, but I would distinguish because in the Orthodox churches, there's an incredible amount of disunity. I would call it a paper unity in many ways, whether you have this mutual excommunication between the Greek, the patriarch in Constantinople and the patriarch in Moscow, or whether you have the old calendarist groups, or whether you talk about at the local level of disunity where you have many times you'll have a congregation that's filled with cradle orthodox who are very prejudiced against cradle or I mean converts to orthodoxy and so you find disunity at all levels so they have a strong rhetoric of unity but in reality unity is either unity or an ain't either have unity or you don't having the same worship service

Having the same program is not unity. Rejecting penal substitutionary atonement as Theophan the recluse or John Chrysostom or Patriarch Jeremiah II in his conversation with the Lutherans as they affirm penal substitutionary tommen. They're disunified from them today. So what does unity really mean? Does unity mean brotherly love? I mean, I've been in parishes where there were people who had come in from out of that. community, they had been in that parish for over 10 years and they never felt welcomed, never once, from those who were cradle and local. So that sense, in that sense, I don't think Orthodoxy

can truly claim unity. They can make a theological, mathematical, ideological, ideological claim for unity. But when it comes to, hey, you're my brother in Christ and I'll, I love you and we're going to work together and we're going to be a family outside of our natural family, you know, in addition to our natural family, because we're one, that's actually hard to find. You actually find a lot of, often a lot of bickering, you know, and disunity. But then in terms of the criteria for unity, I think, is another really big issue. the Orthodox Church has created a maximalist view of unity. In other words, like if you take, for example, St. Cyprian of Carthage from the 3rd century,

when he writes on the unity of the church, you'll find some Orthodox priests saying, oh, well, we've strayed from, you know, the Protestants have all strayed from, you know, St. Cyprian. Well, in St. Cyprian's day, you didn't have a thousand canons. you didn't have seven ecumenical councils. You didn't have a full cycle of Marian feasts. You hadn't gone through an iconoclast controversy. And so in Orthodoxy you have, I don't know if it's a thousand canons, maybe it's 500 canons, or maybe it's 1,500 canons.

I just use that word as symbolically here. So you have 1,000 canons, you have seven ecumenical councils. You have however many additional local councils. and all of them have become the criteria for unity. So now that to even have a different calendar is to not be in unity with the Orthodox Church, to not affirm the Menean, to not affirm the filiocque is to not. So now that criteria of unity to me is unbiblical and unreal, you know, because they could never be unified, say, with the Oriental Orthodox Church,

because the Oriental Orthodox Church doesn't accept Calcedon, much less the Council of Calcedon 451, much less the later councils that came, like the Iconiclass Council and all that. So when we talk about church unity, I'm thinking more in terms of a Cyprionic sense, which was a persecuted era. He was condemning and divided,

he was accusing Novation of schism because Novation was denying the gospel. He wasn't novacious wasn't, or novation wasn't receiving people who wanted to repent. That's not what the Orthodox, that's not the criteria of unity that the Orthodox Church necessarily has. So the criteria for unity in Cyprian's time was probably, probably looked much more like the Apostles Creed, you know, or maybe we could say the Nicene Constantinapolitan Creed. But once you get past the second ecumenical council, that's when you have churches like the Assyrian Church of the East dividing. After the third council, you have the Oriental Orthodox churches being divided. Finally in 1054, you have the Western churches being divided from what was left of the Roman Empire in the East.

And so there's this constant increase of canonical flow that now is their criteria for unity. But if you and I had just heard of Jesus and we walked in to, you know, four local churches on a street corner, you know, one's Eastern Orthodox, one's Oriental Orthodox, one's Roman Catholic, and I don't know, maybe one's Anglican, right? We're going to say, well, why should we believe you, right? Well, you and I, we first go into Eastern Orthodox Church, and they're going to say, oh, well, the priest is going to say, because we're the unchanged church. We have the church fathers and we have all the councils. Okay, great. We wrote those notes, those down as our notes. Eastern Orthodox Church. Church councils, church fathers, unchanged. We go into the Oriental Orthodox Church and say, well, why should we go to your church?

Well, we're unchanged. We have all the councils, you know, and we have all the fathers. Okay. The same three items that we just had in the Eastern Orthodox Church. This is a little suspicious. Then we go over to the Catholic Church and we say, why should we go to your church? We have all the councils, we have all of the fathers, and we're unchanged, right? But even though they have their doctrine of development, right? But in its

essence, it's unchanged. They still make the same kind of argument that it's unchanged. And it's like, we come out and we have those notes. All the same. We go into the Anglican church that may say the exact same thing. And so this idea of church unity being so maximalist, you know, with every canon, basically you have to sign on the dotted line. To me, it's unreal. And so the Reformation actually lowered the threshold from the maximalist, not to a minimalist, but there does need to be a baseline. And that's what I think scripture alone, we're saying by Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone, for God's glory alone.

I think that serves as a fundamental kind of baseline. And all churches, at least most evangelical churches I know, certainly the confessional ones, they can all affirm the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed. And so we find that we have this kind of baseline. And so we don't make, you know, you as an evangelical pastor in a denomination or me as an evangelical pastor in a denomination. we don't say, like I don't say the church is with me and me only and my group. You know, I can affirm that church is with you as well because you affirm the same Christ as I do. And so Christ becomes the source of our unity,

not our denominational distinctives. So people make the claim there's 50 billion different Protestant churches and they say that that's evidence of division. No, it's evidence of distinction, right? If you assume an Orthodox or a Catholic ecclesiology, you say that that's evidence of division, because that's how they conceive of ecclesiology as absolutely maximalist. But if you conceive of ecclesiology as centered in Christ, and that various times and cultures and locales will create different organizations around Christ

that are going to inevitably be distinctive from another denomination, they don't see that as at the point of a gun. They don't say that if you're a Lutheran, you're going to hell. We don't say that all non-evangelicals are going to hell. We affirm that there are Christians among the Orthodox, Christians among the Catholics. Christians, if you're a Calvinist, they'll even usually affirm that there's Christians among the Armenians

and vice versa. And so Orthodox have made the criteria of salvation to be all non-Orthodox are outside of the Ark of Salvation, which is the Orthodox Church, therefore they're outside of salvation and they're outside of Christ. Because you can't have Christ and not be saved. So if they've said that you're not saved, that means you don't have Christ. But we don't say that as evangelicals. Lutherans don't say all non-Lutherans are going to hell. Presbyterians don't say all non-presbyterians are going to hell. Baptists don't usually say all non-Baptists are going to hell.

But formally in the canonical position, not what the local priest says or the local bishop says, formally in the Orthodox Church, all non-Orthodox are going to hell, unless God does some special action of grace. But according to all normal knowledge, the affirmation is that all non-Orthodox are going to hell. So anyone who wants to convert to orthodoxy, in my opinion,

they should, the priest should ask them, are you willing to admit that your grandma, who's a Baptist, who prayed for you during that rough time in your life before you came to Christ, she's going to hell. She's probably already in hell because she didn't come to orthodoxy. And she's already passed. So I think unless a person is willing to affirm that, they don't understand Orthodox ecclesiology. And so 50 billion evangelical denominations make another 50 billion because Christ isn't. divided when we distinguish. Even in the Orthodox liturgy, when they hold it when they break the

the host, so to speak, we say that Christ is broken but not divided. We can have all sorts of denominations. That doesn't divide Christ. I don't think Christ is divided to acknowledge that Christ is in you. You know, I don't think Christ is divided to acknowledge that he is in a Lutheran. I don't think Christ is divided to acknowledge that he's in an Orthodox. But somehow in an Orthodox ecclesiological thought to affirm that Christ is truly in and among Baptists, for them is to divide Christ. So they have a small Christ in my opinion. They've lowered Christ.

And so they have a high-sounding rhetoric, which is very persuasive to people, but I think it's unbiblical and unreal. Yeah. I think it's helpful for people to here. It's helpful for me to hear your perspective on that because I wonder if many evangelicals, because they don't have as much familiarity with Eastern Orthodoxy, compared to, say, Roman Catholicism, where there's more shared history, there's perhaps naivety or looking through rose-colored glasses, and there are these powerful appeals to tradition and to historicity and so forth. But as I'm

listening to you share, it feels to me as though you're shining some realism and kind of helping us think that through and understand more accurately what the Orthodox Church teaches. So thank you for that. And maybe just another category here I could throw out and see if you want to reflect upon is the appeal to history. And you've gotten into this a little bit, but very frequently this is leveraged against the evangelical as though there's this massive castle that is the Orthodox Church. And then there's this puny little village that the evangelical is no historical basis. But maybe to speak positively of evangelicals, if we could. Do you think it's possible for evangelicals to be rooted in the historic church? Yeah, I absolutely do. I think all Christian history is evangelical

history. To me, it's sort of undeniable. This gets a little bit more maybe in like the Western historical trajectory of Christendom. But, you know, in the thought that usually comes to my mind is, let's imagine that we're in a German village in the early 1500s, right? And we're all Catholic. You know, our priest is Catholic. We maybe have a couple priests. They're Catholic. And then we hear about somewhere else in Germany that there's this wild man named Martin Luther.

And he's just starting, you know, a huge controversy and everything is ablaze, you know, in the church. And our two priests. priests, they go off to Wittenberg and they meet with Martin Luther and some of the other theologians that are together with him. And our priests went there as Catholic priests. Right? And then they get persuaded about the gospel by Martin Luther. And then they come back and they say, you know what? Martin Luther, we should all hear out what he's saying.

and we decided to become Lutheran, and they persuade us and the whole congregation, and the whole village becomes Lutheran. Now, prior to that, they had been Catholics for generations. We'll just say it this way. They'd been Christians for generations. Hundreds of years, centuries. It's the same people. It's the same two priests.

It's the same you and me, and it's the same congregation that one day, were a part of a historic church, and the next day they're part of, is it really not a historic church? It's the same church. The question is, is who moved? Who gets to win the argument that it's an innovation? That's a fundamental question. Was Martin Luther's an innovation, or did it look like, was it made to look like an innovation because of the unbelievable amount of incrustation that had happened in the Catholic Church at that time?

So when you put, you know, and you have the church standing there with its coat on, and then you put another coat on top of it, and then another coat on top of it, another century, and another coat on top of it. And this would be an analogy for the Catholic Church or the church going through the Middle Ages, and then another coat on top of that, and then a hat on top of the hat, and then Martin Luther comes along, and then he takes all of the extra hats off that everyone had gotten used to looking at for the last several hundred years. And then he takes all the extra coats off that everyone had been getting used to looking at for the last few hundred years.

And they're going to say, wow, this is an innovation. This is a totally new thing. It's like, no, it's not. It's the gospel. We didn't move. The Catholic Church moved. I think that's the meaning, the providential import when he says, here I stand, you know, and I can do no other. And so I think in that sense, the evangelical church is the continuity of the ancient church.

but without all of the accretions. Now, that doesn't answer all difficulties. It doesn't make it not messy. But there's always been messiness in the church. I mean, if we just read Corinthians, we find that it's messy. If we read the New Testament, we find that it's messy. And so sometimes I think the rhetoric of some of these, you know, Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church,

they make it sound somehow like they've answered the problem of all messiness in a conversation. with an evangelical. And it's like, well, I don't really think that's true. And so, you know, yeah, I'll pause there. And maybe if you want to redirect or, yeah. Yeah, maybe I can throw two other categories here where I could anticipate someone watching and saying, well, number one, but what about bishops?

So let's talk about bishops. Do we need to have bishops because there's an appeal that can be made that these go back to the second century? This wasn't a coat put on in the 1,200 or the 13th. this goes back away. So don't we need bishops and we've got these statements about the necessity bishops? And then maybe we can touch on the Eucharist if you want to talk about that as well, because this is another area that's often leveraged against Protestants where the claim is, you know, everybody saw it one way. And now you guys went off and moved, moved things.

So do you want to interact with either of those issues as well? Yeah. Well, the bishops won. I mean, you could just you know, cheat, I suppose, and just like point at the Anglicans, right? And the Episcopalians, right? They have bishops. So that's, you know, probably the least satisfying answer. Many Lutherans have bishops as well. But I think, you know, you've argued before, and I think it's the historically most sustainable position, is that the Presbyterian and the Episcopacy, you know, biblically is one office.

you know, the elder and the bishop is one office. And so the continuity of leadership in the church is that, still that singular office, to create a third office and then call that the bishop to divide the elder from the bishop. That's the innovation. And so you can find going all the way back to people like Jerome, you know, that affirmations of this. And he's fairly late. you know, in terms of church history, you know, fourth century, fifth century, I'm not sure exactly when.

But I think it was fifth. But anyway, so the, if we want to talk about apostolic succession of leadership in the church, that passes through the laying on of hands of elders into the Protestant church. Martin Luther was an elder. He was a presbyter. They called it a priest at the time. He was a priest. other people like Peter Martyr Vermigli, he was a priest. We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of priests during the Reformation becoming

reformed, you know, in the broader sense of Protestant. And so to say that just because they didn't bring in the innovated third-tier bishop, I don't think that that's a loss of any charism of apostolic succession. But I think apostolic succession has to be understood a little bit more organically as well in the sense that a flesh and blood Christian transmitted Christianity to another flesh and blood Christian and that's just remained in constancy

since the beginning even in our imaginary German town that we were both from a few minutes ago they had been Christian there for how long so to say that there's some wildly new alien innovation that's happening nope we've had leaders those leaders were hands were laid on those leaders, our priests came back, they're still leaders. And whatever the

historic reality of the ordination of leadership, it just continues. And I don't think that it's beyond God's ability to raise up pastors where there aren't any. And I don't think they're illegitimate just because they don't have an identifiable genealogy. I don't think genealogy is the end-all-be-all. But among Baptists, you had many people who were priests, you know, who became a part of the Baptist movement, whether, you know, I mean, that can be contested. What area of Baptist history is modern-day Baptist history, continuity of? But Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, Episcopalians, all of them have maintained a continuity of leadership from the transition out of the Middle Ages into the Reformation era. The problem is, is that we as evangelicals don't typically look to history to become scholars of history. That's part of the genius and beauty of Sola Scriptura, but that's its sort of inevitable kind of handicap,

is that it allows us to connect immediately with the gospel today without getting caught into the web of so-and-so-and-so-and-so all the way back. Now, it's true that in most Orthodox parishes, your, you know, your creedal Orthodox aren't going to know the difference between Gregory Palamas and, you know, Gregory of Nissen, Gregory of Nazianzus. They're not going to be able to tell you the significant difference between those three, even though if we've studied or read those authors, we'll find enormous differences between them. So to say then also, to kind of turn it around to say that Orthodox or the Catholics, you know, are more historical in terms of individual. Christians? Well, I don't know if that's so true if your average everyday run-of-the-mill cradle Orthodox person is knowledgeable about all of the church fathers. So do they know much more than your average evangelical? I mean, maybe a little bit because they hear the names, but in terms of substance, no. They don't. They couldn't tell you, well, how is Justin Martyr's

Christology probably corrected by the time we get to Nicaa, you know, or that sort of thing. Nobody can really, few people can do this. So to say because an evangelical can't do that, that they're somehow less, you know, they have less of a claim to the historical trajectory of Christianity is, I just don't think that that's a realistic criticism. I think an evangelical Christian can go back and, you know, if you're a Presbyterian or or Dutch Reformed, you can go back and look at Herman Bavink and Charles Bridges or, you know, whoever, just keep going back to Peter Martyr-Rimigley or Thomas Boston, and then you can go back

to John Calvin and Martin Luther and then the scholastics and then, but in a lot of ways, and this was well pointed out by a Luther, and he said that in some ways the Protestant tradition created patristics as an independent field of study in terms of historical theology. I mean, it was in order to bypass the scholastic manuals of the medieval era that the earliest Lutherans, for example, like Martin Keminitz or Johann Gerhard, were going back to the church fathers in order to show that what they were teaching was not really an innovation. So it's been a constant evangelical instinct to go back to church fathers, not to reject them, but to actually, I mean, even like you have them behind you over, behind your left shoulder there, the Nicene father set,

that was edited and translated by a German reformed guy and an Anglican guy. So a lot of people say, well, I read my way into orthodoxy because I read the Nicene post-nicine or Antinicine father's set because evangelicals are totally not interested in. But it's like they're the ones who produced that scholarship that we're all benefiting from today. So to say that evangelicals are by and large not interested in church history or feel a sense of connection with it, it's just unsustainable. Maybe at the local parish level, you don't see like church history groups springing up all the time. That's because Christ is our life. Augustine isn't my life. Aquinas isn't my life. Christ is my life.

You know, Gregory Abnazianzis isn't my life. Christ is my life. And that's usually where the evangelical heart maintains a good center around. I'll invite you if you want to say anything about the sacraments and especially the Eucharist. And I forgot to say this earlier. So in case I forget later, for people watching this, if you'd like this video, we'd really appreciate that. That will help YouTube get it out there more. And I'm also going to put links to some of Josh's books in the video description. And so you can get to know him a little bit better and see some of his work.

But do you want to say this is another one of those areas that sometimes, I have this feeling of unfairness and how it's leveraged against the evangelicals in terms of our usage of the sacraments and her view, especially of the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper. Do you want to touch on that at all? Yeah. Well, in my study of Protestant history, the doctrine of real presence in the Eucharist is the normal doctrine. You know, it's almost always denied that it's a mere sign or a mere symbol or an empty sign or an empty symbol. whether that's taught, promoted, or widely known is irrelevant. Just like someone shouldn't judge an Orthodox, the Orthodox Church, based on a local Orthodox parish or local Orthodox parishioners.

I don't think we should judge evangelical churches based on what a local parishioner or church member knows or doesn't know or thinks or doesn't think. We should go into founding documents and founding members. or key figures within a denomination who have done more systematic work and made these informed arguments and positions and study those. So it's like if you read Herman Bavink and you know, you know, who's Dutch reformed, you're going to find real presence being very firmly taught so that when you receive the Eucharist by faith, you actually receive Christ's body. nothing happens to the bread.

Transubstantiation, the doctrine of transubstantiation made such a huge wrinkle that oftentimes these theologians are just trying to say that nothing is happening to the bread. The substance of the bread doesn't go away. And so in doing that, in trying to not teach transubstantiation or in rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation, people get the false impression that the reform position or the Protestant position is to deny real presence. The Lutheran position is real presence. The, you know, the Calvinist or the traditional reformed position, which you'll find in Heinrich Bollinger as well, or Peter Martyrmer fromigli or Baza, like theodore Baza, these people, real presence, real presence, Thomas, even

Puritans like Thomas Boston, real presence. When you receive the bread, together with the bread, you receive together with the bread eaten physically, the soul feeds on Christ really, truly, presently. It's not a local corporeal presence, but it is a real presence. And so in that way, they embrace the mystery and try to explain it as far as they go. I try to push up to the furthest edge that they can try to explain, but at the same time, they embrace the mystery that I don't know fully how he's present, but he promises to really commune with me here. So he's really communing. A common image that's given, I think Henry Bollinger, Henry Bollinger gives this image. And I think it might be in the second Helvetic confession,

which I recommend to read, is that Christ, like the sun, can be present in heaven, but his rays can be present here. So the sun is really present here. The sun really shines here. When it shines through the window, it's really the sun that's shining through. The sun is present through its rays. And so that in some way, Christ is locally in heaven, but that his real presence is made present shining in and through the bread. And so nothing happens to the bread. There's no magical change. There's no mystical change in the bread. The substance of the bread remains the substance of the bread, just as the substance, Christ's humanity remain substantially humanity. And so, yeah, I guess that's usually what comes to my mind when I think of people,

criticizing Protestants about the doctrine of the Eucharist. They don't know that the majority position is to affirm real presence. Yeah, that's really helpful. Okay, I've just got two more questions. One is for someone who, let's suppose an evangelical is considering converting to a non-evangelical tradition, what would be the steps that you would encourage them to think through whatever they ultimately decide, that should be a part of the process, that would be wisdom, that would be godliness for how to go about making a decision like that. Yeah, that's a good question. It's a hard question because people are so different.

You know, a lot of times when people get, have a sense of dissatisfaction with church life, they'll often externalize it and project that onto the problem with the church rather than seeing that as God's invitation to dig deeper, where they are. And so they'll misread that sense of dissatisfaction. And then often, and not only instead of being more church there, like manifesting the Spirit of Christ there to help be the church, not only not doing that, but also not say, well, where does my church come from? You know, like if you're Baptist, well, let me read about not just where my local church comes from, but where did my pastor went to a seminary, probably? Well, where did a seminary come from? Who are those theologians? Were there any other Baptist seminaries around? Who were those theologians? Let me go back

and look up John Gill. Let me look up some of these other earlier. Let me look up Charles Spurgeon. Let me find out their history. Well, who was Charles Spurgeon reading? He was reading other Puritans. Let me find out and like fill, back fill that picture of where you come from. You know, because a lot of times they'll try to jump all the way back to the first and second and third centuries. And they'll say, well, what I see here, is not like what I experience in my local church, and then they'll get confused by Orthodox or Catholic or Oriental rhetoric that says, well, see, that's proof. Instead of following the arguments from the first century all the way through Martin Luther, you know, Martin Kemniz, Johann, Gerhard, John Calvin, Theodore Bays, instead of following their arguments all the way through, they'll usually just kind of stop and say, okay, well, I'm just going to stick with John Chrysostom. and Gregor Nazianzus and Athanasius, and I'm just going to assume that everything else

the Orthodox is claiming about itself is true. And so I think kind of backfilling history from today back, and then going back to the first century and reading post-aphistolic fathers, Antinic fathers, and actually meeting in the middle and joining a fuller picture of 2,000 years of church history,

just have to do the work. Just do the work. People like John Calvin, Martin Luther, some of these other guys I've mentioned, they knew their church history. They knew their church fathers. You can't read Martin Keminitz, for example, or John Gill without coming across quotation after quotation or reference after reference to a church father. They knew them. They were patristic scholars. So we can't just say, well, because my local pastor doesn't know about church history,

and my church was built 25 years ago by some local missionaries or, you know, some church planters, that that's actually the full story of the Church of the West. I think that would maybe be my advice. Yeah, that's really good advice. Okay, the last question is about, I think, as evangelicals, one of the things I often try to acknowledge is, well, we've got a lot of work to do as evangelicals, and one of those areas would be in getting more historical.

rooted because that is, as you say, kind of the historic evangelical attitude, but sadly, a lot of times we don't have a lot of knowledge of church history. So just a practical question is for evangelicals who realize I need to do better at that, how would you advise them to become more rooted in history? What are starting spots for people to look into? How would you encourage them to go about that? Yeah. Well, you know, assuming that this is a person who's still fairly, you know, confident in their evangelical faith. I would say find some good evangelical scholars. I think Gerald Bray wrote a book on historical theology. So starting to get familiar with the historical trajectory. Just pick up someone like him. I think it's, forget the title of that book,

something about God speaking. Godfrey from Ligoneer Ministries has done a nice, I think there's like a six volume or like there's like six cases in like a church history uh DVD set where he teaches it's like 20 minutes long each lecture and there's a bunch of and there's I don't know maybe 20 or so of them and he goes through all of church history you know it's not in the deepest possible way but like start getting familiar with the shape just get familiar with the shape of of church history by finding some of these godly scholars who have done good good work like that. At the church level, something like Godfrey's DVD set and lectures, it comes with like little booklets that you can kind of answer, you know, study guides,

and, you know, local churches can do that and they can go through it. And if there's some area of church history that interests you, or some theologian that interests you, just dig in a little bit deeper, but, you know, and then start to kind of like flesh out more and more. I'd say to me that would be the, maybe the first couple steps to kind of take, you know, is get like a nice good overview that's like a little bit meatier than, okay, there was the book of Acts, and then there was Augustine, and then there was Aquinas, and then Martin Luther. You know, like that's some people's sort of, you know, understanding of church history, but start to kind of like, even the Reformation Heritage study Bible put out by Joel Beakey has like,

like, an one-page article for each century, you know, it's more or less good information. So starting to just kind of fill that out. Treat church history, you know, as God's providential guidance of you reading that book right now that you're reading, or you're reading, listening to that DVD that you're reading. It's all a part of God's providential guidance of you to be church now. That's great. Josh, thank you so much for being willing to share your story. I think it takes a lot of courage.

I know that it will be helpful for people to hear you. I just love, listen, I learned so much just throwing. This is easy. I just get to throw the questions out. This is easier than my normal videos. So thank you. And are there any places people can go to learn more about you, social media, your Amazon page, anything like that you want to mention?

I do have a few books that I wrote while I was an Orthodox priest, which I still affirm, as far as I know, everything written in them, because I don't make any arguments regarding ecclesiology. You know, the spirituality that I have has been maintained from there to hear. So, you know, if anyone wanted to look at those, I try not to have a very big Facebook presence. It distracts from my prayer life and my ministry. I struggle with the balance of that.

I can get sucked in and like it's like keeping boundaries is very hard for me. But, you know, people can reach out or message me, you know, on Facebook. I'm there. You know, my sermons have been getting uploaded to the church where I'm serving at in Russellville, Arkansas. It's the Alliance Church. I'm a part of the Christian and missionary alliance. And so you can find some of my sermons there. I do have some of my sermons from preaching prior to coming to the evangelical church from when I was still in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Some of my sermons are uploaded there if anyone wants to listen. So, yeah, that's maybe people connect with me. Perfect. I'll put a link in the video description for anyone who wants to check out some of Josh's work. And for everybody watching, thank you for watching. Again, if you'd hit a like button on this video, we'd really appreciate it. And may the Lord bless you.