Truth Unites - Does Eastern Orthodoxy Have the "Fullness of the Faith?"

Episode Date: February 10, 2024

In this video I respond to Jonathan Pageau's claims that Eastern Orthodoxy has the fullness of the faith. I show that this is not the historic Orthodox view, nor the historic Roman Catholic view, and then suggest reasons why the Protestant approach to discerning the one true church is superior. See the original video here: https://youtu.be/vzapf-qtF9A?si=Rg8-p_Vfx1Gb3Hoq Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

We often hear this appeal about the fullness of the faith, sometimes from Eastern Orthodox Christians, sometimes from Roman Catholic Christians, sometimes from others. It's like, you know, we're not denying that God is at work out there, but we possess the fullness of the faith. And this can sound very appealing and inviting and so forth. Ruslan has a great channel, you've probably heard of him, and he had Jonathan Peugeot on recently and another guest, and Jonathan Peugeot expressed this sentiment in their interview. Why should I be an Orthodox Christian? Oh my goodness. Oh, my gosh. gosh, I love that question. Just cut to the chase.

I'm not that kind of a guy, but... I know. I know. This is, like, the worst thing. You can't answer that question. This is not for him. No, so I would say, like, I would, can all I can tell you is the way that I came to discover in orthodoxy the fullness of the faith. Maybe that's the best way to understand it.

And like, even now, today, I don't, I don't think that people that aren't orthodox aren't Christian or that they're all going to hell or all that kind of stuff. We're still in. I'm still in. I think that, I think that, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, see it as a hierarchy, like a kind of hierarchy of participation, like I see most things. It's a gradient. So, okay.

So Orthodox are at the peak of the hierarchy. Then you got Protestants, Catholics? Who's that? Well, just tell me I'm almost. This is a bad game. This is a bad game. And that's not an easy question to answer. He does a good job going on from there trying to rank some of the different traditions.

Jonathan seems like a nice guy, and I appreciate the more ecumenical posture of his answer to that. But what I want to argue in this video is that. that's not the historic Eastern Orthodox view. I'm not really just responding to Jonathan, though, because that's a common way of thinking today. Let's give a label to it. So let's call this a hierarchical way of construing the one true church claim. You heard that word hierarchy come up in Jonathan's answer. It's this idea that there's the one true church, but then there's kind of a spectrum or a gradation going out from it. Some other traditions are closer. Others are further away.

and sometimes you'll hear this sentiment that, you know, we know where the church is, but we don't know where it isn't. The boundaries are a little more porous. It's a little more mystical. And this is just to show that I'm not just trying to single out him. I watched this video and I thought, oh, you know, I got to talk about this. But that's a very common view, Timothy Ware, who has a very erudite book about orthodoxy. I'll put up his statement. He is a similar position there. He's a little bit more moderated or inclusive in his construal of this. So the basic idea here is, you know, you've got these major Christian traditions outside of Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, the Assyrian Church of the East. They all claim to be the one true church. So they're all seeing themselves as to the exclusion of the others, the original church that Christ founded. But then there are variations in how that's construed. You know, where, where, what does that mean for these other traditions in terms of their sacraments, in terms of salvation? And there's lots of, lots of differences there. But, So this particular construal, let's call it a hierarchical construal.

So this is the idea that, well, the one true church, you know, Eastern Orthodoxy is the one true church. It has the fullness of the faith. But then there's kind of a gradation stemming outwards, and you heard very clearly from Jonathan. There's definitely Christians and salvation outside. While I appreciate that sentiment, what I want to argue and document in this video is that that's not the historic Eastern Orthodox view. that's actually, though people don't like hearing this, a more Protestant way of thinking. The more historic way of thinking is what I'll call the Noah's Ark view. This is a different way of construing the one true church claim and its implications.

So we got the hierarchical view, and then we got Noah's Ark view. This is definitely, the Noah's Ark model is more black and white. It doesn't have these porous boundaries. Basically, the consequence of this view is if you're not Eastern Orthodox, you're damned. the presumption is you've got to become Eastern Orthodox to get saved. Or if this view was articulated in a different tradition, you could substitute a different tradition for it rather than Eastern Orthodox. So the idea is basically that, you know, there's no spectrum or gradation going outward

here. It's like, you know, the metaphor is Noah's Ark. And this is all throughout the tradition for this doctrine of no salvation outside the church. And basically, you know, you could say whether you're five yards outside the Ark of Noah, or five miles, either way, you're in the water. And so you're not going to be saved because you're not on the ark. Being on the ark is the only possible way. And basically, what I want to argue is that historically it was more of the Noah's Ark view. A fullness of the church, a hierarchical view,

all of that is modern innovation. And to the extent that modern Eastern Orthodox Christians accept that, they should scale back their claim of being the unchanging church, because that's a change. So let me document that and give an overview. And I'll just clarify here that I'm going to focus on the 9th to the 19th centuries. So basically from a little before the time of the great schism between the East and the West and then looking at how they each viewed each other. The Church Fathers is more complicated. I have a different video on that. There's definitely more variation then. So you have people early on like Justin Martyr who talk about how there's ways that pagans who lived justly could be members of the body of Christ. So Socrates, who uses his reason as a member of the body of Christ and so forth. And so people, you know, you might argue that you could apply that to even to pagans who live after the coming of Christ, after the incarnation, and there's debate about that. I'm also uncertain about some of the passages in Augustine that I've kind of gone back and

forth on of like, is he allowing that maybe the Donatus could get saved? And I'm not always, to be honest, totally sure how to take some of his passages. And there's lots more we could comb through, you know, how do we understand Cyprian's doctrine of no salvation outside the church? church in the third century, where you have one million total Christians, you're a persecuted minority. He's applying that to heretical groups like the Gnostics and the Marcionites. And then so then, but then that doctrine, no salvation outside the church, develops and grows.

And then you've got the union of church and empire in the fourth century, and this starts to become more absolutely and more restrictively. And then you could try to trace out. And I guess I could just say leave room for further review of kind of these earlier times. I don't have enough knowledge. I've looked into a little bit like in the fifth century, the Christological schisms. You know, the Chalcedonians and the non-Chalcedonians are both anathematizing each other. It's clear they're not, they don't like each other, but I don't know enough about the history

to know if there were any exceptions or not. I haven't studied that as much. Let me focus here on this millennium, from the 9th to the 19th century. So basically, leading up to the times where the tensions between East and West are strong enough that people might wonder, are those Westerners over there who affirm the filiocque saved? I've combed through this as much as I can before I debate I had with an Eastern Orthodox priest, because this doctrine is actually one of my top concerns about Eastern Orthodoxy. For all that I admire about this tradition, this is one of my major concerns, the exclusivism.

And basically, I have to be honest with you and say, I've not been able to find any, not a single one, affirmations that non-Orthodox Christians like Roman Catholics or Protestants can be saved during this span of time. And I've asked people over and over, and what people relentlessly do is just tell me that that's not the Orthodox view, but don't give historical documentation for that. I've not found any counter-examples where any kind of major Eastern Orthodox theologian or counsel or really anything within orthodoxy is saying, oh, well, you know, it's possible that a Roman Catholic could be saved or a Protestant could be saved and that kind of thing. So let me just document this. The basic theological framework here seems to be that perceived Western innovations like the filiochre are heresy. The filiocque is the idea that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and this is maintained in the West,

and this was seen in the East among Eastern Orthodox Christians as heresy. So heresy places you outside. of the canonical boundaries of the Orthodox Church. To be outside of the church is to be cut off from the grace of the Holy Spirit given in the sacraments, and therefore it is to be cut off from salvation. And this is a particular way of understanding the unity of the church. The recurrent metaphor is the Ark of Noah.

If you're not on the Ark, you're in the water. If you're not in the church, you're like explicitly, knowingly Eastern Orthodox. Because that's another way we'll talk about later. People try to qualify things in ways that are not historically authentic. So just to be clear, the claim on the table, what I'm arguing is that consistently, from the 9th to the 19th century, Eastern Orthodox Christians taught that if you affirm the filiocque,

you are damned to hell. That's the view, okay? And let me document that. I'll start with this passage from the 18th century Orthodox monk and theologian, Paezius Velvchowski. Velik Chofsky. I always, people dispute the pronunciation of both his first and last name, but it's Velichkovsky.

I can never say that right. And I usually hear Paezias. But anyway, he's, but I've heard different too. But anyway, he's responding to a priest who, and he's basically warning him about the filiocque, and he sets the stakes pretty high. He says that the filiocque is the first and most important of all the heresies. And basically he says that they're rejecting the filiocchio. is the unanimous position of the church, so if you affirm it, you have no hope of salvation.

Quote, all the holy ecumenical teachers who have interpreted the scripture as if with one mouth say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, and nowhere have they written that he proceeds from the Son also. Thus, if Uniates think exactly like the Romans in such a serious heresy, what hope do they have for salvation, unless they openly renounce this spirit-fighting heresy and become united again with the Holy Orthodox Eastern Church? Now, Uniott, Christians or Uniatt churches are Eastern churches that maybe historically were Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox, but they're in full communion with the Church of Rome, and even while they retain their own liturgy. And so Velocovsky is basically making it clear that if you're

among those churches, you know, you're without salvation. That's the entailment of his words. What hope do they have for salvation unless they openly renounce? Then he puts it even more clear. depart and flee from the Unia as speedily as possible, lest death overtake you in it, and you be numbered among the heretics and not among the Christians. So you can see the stakes he's setting here in his warning. He's saying, turn, depart, run from the filiocque way, lest you die. What hope would you have a salvation unless you openly renounce that? Okay.

Now, someone can say, Felichofsky is just one theologian, but what I'm arguing is that that perspective is just what I'm arguing is that. I see, basically, I think I'd have to say unanimously. In the pre-19th century Orthodox thought, really the 19th century two, I just remember that there's disputed maybe one or two possible exceptions there, but very rare, even in the 19th. It's really not until the 20th where you see a sizable alternative. So in the 17th century, for example, you have this crisis where basically you have a patriarch of Constantinople who's sounding a little bit too Protestant, even too Calvinist in some of his views. The 1672 Synod of Jerusalem meets, produces the confession of Dysithius, who's the patriarch of

Jerusalem. This is an official, approved, formally approved statement of Eastern Orthodox belief. It categorizes repeatedly Protestants as wicked heretics, and in the context of opposing this Protestant idea that the office of priest and bishop are the same, it says the dignity of the bishop is so necessary in the church that without him, neither church nor Christian could either be or be be spoken of, he is, we affirm as necessary to the church as breath is to man or the sun to the world. Then note the consequence that is drawn from this. When these forsake the church, they are forsaken by the Holy Spirit, and there remains in them neither understanding nor light, but only darkness and blindness. So this is not a matter of the fullness of the faith. This is a Noah's arc view.

You know, if you're not in the church, if you're not connected to the bishop, which is a distinct office from priest, then you are in darkness and blind, the Holy Spirit has forsaken you, and so forth. Toward the end of the 19th century, the patriarchal encyclical of 1895 is responding to Leo the 13th's invitation to unity with Rome, and it maintains the same position. Roman Catholicism is heretical, and in doing so, it's self-consciously operating in a tradition of thought, and then it draws the same implications with respect to salvation. Quote, but as has been said before, the Western Church, from the 10th century downwards, has privily brought into herself, through the papacy, various and strange and heretical doctrines

and innovations, and so she has been torn away and removed far from the true and orthodox Church of Christ. How necessary, then, it is for you to come back and return to the ancient and unadulterated the doctrines of the church in order to attain the salvation in Christ after which you press. So that's very interesting. Those final words are making it clear. You know, these other people are seeking salvation. But in order to get it, it is necessary for them to come back into the ancient and unadulterated church.

You have to leave off the filiocque. Same way of thinking. This is a Noah's Ark construal of the one true church claim. You're either on or you're on the ark or you're in the waters. earlier in the 19th century, you have the 1848 encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, a letter issued by the four Eastern patriarchs in response to Popeius the 9th's epistle to the Easterners earlier that year. And this maintains this basic identification.

The filiocque is damnable heresy. It's up there with Arianism and the papacy. And it repeatedly refers to the Roman Catholic Church as apostate and heretical. Here's just a one flavor, though it goes on a great length. Quote, the one holy Catholic and apostolic church following in the steps of the Holy Fathers, both Eastern and Western, proclaimed of old to our progenitors, and again teaches today, synodically, that the said novel doctrine of the Holy Ghost proceeding from the Father and the Son is essentially heresy, and its maintainers, whoever they be, are heretics, according to the

sentence of Pope St. Damascis, and that the congregations of such are also heretical, and that all spiritual communion and worship of the Orthodox sons of the Catholic Church with such is unlawful. Now, bear in mind, the capital C Catholic there, that's referring to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Historically, the Eastern Orthodox Church has also referred to itself as the Catholic Church. Now, this is the general way of thinking I just find everywhere. I see it in Mark of Ephesus. I see it in the Sigillian of 1583, though that has a disputed textual history, so I won't draw on that.

I see it in the longer catechism of St. Philaret, a significant 19th century metropolitan of Moscow. He uses the same Noah's Ark imagery and says to have part in Christ's salvation, we must necessarily be members of his body that is of the Catholic Church. Now, so what people do with these passages, because I'm used to this by now, is they'll say, they'll try to interpret these in a modern framework where you can like be a member of the church. There's one visible church, but you can be a member of it invisibly. But that's not what they meant. So people will come along and say, oh, well, yeah, you can be a member of Christ's body, but just implicitly or unknowingly or invisibly or so forth.

But if you've been paying attention to these quotes, you see, that's not the idea. The whole appeal is no run from the filiocque. How can you be saved unless you openly renounce the filiocque and so forth? So this idea of, you know, these modern ways of trying to kind of finagle this teaching to make it more workable, this is an innovation. And if people would like to say to me, no, Gavin, you're wrong. Basically, yeah, there's one true church and you need to be in the one true church to be saved, but you can be in it in some implicit or invisible way.

Give me historical documentation for that, because I don't see that. I think it's basically unanimous for a millennium to the other direction. And I also think it's the same in the other direction, by the way. Just real brief in the other direction, the Roman Catholics were looking across to the east and saying the same thing. Those people outside of the communion with the bishop of Rome, they're off the Ark of Noah. they're drowning in the floodwaters of sin, and they have to come into communion with the one true church in order to be saved. There's only a few Jesuit theologians in the early modern era that seemed to have articulated a different view that was very controversial

and kind of squashed. So although the modern Roman Catholic view is certainly much more inclusive, like after Vatican II and certainly even before Vatican II, the historic view, I've documented in other videos, so I won't really document it here. I've talked about the Unum Sonctum, which basically says, you know, you have to submit to the Pope to be saved. I've talked about the cantate domino from the Council of Florence in the 15th century, which has, again, a very strong and explicit affirmation of a similar idea. I'll just respond to one of the counter arguments I saw recently just today. When I was already planning on making this video, Dave Armstrong put out a video on and tagged me, or not a video, an article. He writes a lot of these articles against me,

and he tagged me on Facebook. So given the topic, I gave it a quick read. He's basically arguing that since valid baptism occurs outside of the Roman Catholic Church, I'm not trying to simplify it too much. This is what I detected to be the main argument. Since you have valid baptisms, and baptism confers salvation, salvation must occur outside of the Roman Catholic Church. And I'll put up this passage. You can see what he's arguing from that. And then he's concluding that my argument's been utterly defeated and so forth. So, but if you just read how the cantate domino continues, it's. addresses the status of those who have a valid sacrament outside of the one true church.

It says the unity of the ecclesiastical body is of such importance that only for those who abide in it do the church's sacraments contribute to salvation. So the fact that a baptism could be valid for someone entering Rome doesn't mean it was salvific for someone remaining out. That seems explicitly opposed here. I mean, the language is very clear, only for those who abide. in the body of Christ, do the Church's sacraments contribute to salvation? If baptism is this sort of automatic, mystical conveyance into the body of Christ, this warning makes no sense. There would be no possibility to get baptized to have a valid baptism, but not be in the body of Christ. So the statement would be meaningless if baptism automatically conferred salvation. That's not what it's saying. And again,

people just read the modern ideas back into these historical sources. I'm very much consistent with the scholarship on this, even Roman Catholic scholars pretty much acknowledge you have to have explicit Christian faith. There's no implicit submitting to the Pope. You know, that's another, one of the qualifications people will introduce. People say, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, you have to submit to the pope and you have to be a member of the church, but that can happen implicitly. But that is not the medieval view. That's a modern innovation. It has no, if an interpretation is being put forward of these magisterial documents, and it has zero historical precedent for 600 years, then why should we take it seriously? I don't think there would be one single medieval pope who would have recognized

that. Like you can be sort of unknowingly in the church or implicitly in the church or something like that. They didn't have a conception for that anymore than they thought you could be unknowingly on the Ark of Noah. And again, I'm consistent with the Catholic scholarship on this point to the extent that I've engaged it. Here's Francis Sullivan, a Catholic scholar, the teaching of St. Thomas, and of the whole medieval tradition required explicit Christian faith for the salvation of everyone in the Christian era. After the suppression of the Jesuit order, hardly any Catholic Deologians dared to question the traditional teaching on this point. It's only then in the modern era that that changes. This also raises a practical concern about the value of an allegedly

infallible magisterium. We're told we need this to interpret the deposit of faith. But if everyone can misinterpret the Magisterium itself for 600 years, then the practical utility of it seems to be greatly reduced. How do we know that 600 years from now it won't be overturned again? And we'll just say, well, everybody got it wrong. You see, nobody thought like that in the medieval era. Nobody had these modern ways of getting around this. And I actually think, and here's where I want to talk about why Protestantism, and to finish off, I think is a better option on this point of no salvation outside the church, because we affirm that doctrine. But here's where we differ. And First, let me just say a point of appreciation for Jonathan in his own position on the filialoquy.

That's not what the creed was talking about at the outset. At least not thought what the Orthodox understood the creed to be talking about, then it became very difficult for them to finally, you know, go along with that proposition. But you'll find the idea that in terms of creation that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the sun, you find that in Eastern fathers as well. I think Jonathan's position there is much more. I wish the historic views were as fair-minded as Jonathan. I think he's absolutely right that the filiocque issue is not as kind of slam dunk on either side,

as though the whole, like Paezias Volocci was saying, as though the whole church spoke with one voice one way or the other. But ultimately, I feel this is a good reason to be a Protestant Christian. Protestants are often, people often misunderstand my appeal, so let me clarify this. I'm not advocating for universalism. I've had people say, well, you guys anathematize people too. You guys think people are damned as well. Yeah, totally.

We're not saying it's universalism or there's no boundaries. The point of distinction between Protestantism and the other major Christian traditions is institutional exclusivism. Okay. So basically, we have boundaries, but we do not restrict the one true church to one institution. Stated differently, we affirm that the one true church coheres within multiple institutions. And I've documented, and we do that with historical consistency, because I know lots of contemporary Christians and traditions agree with me. But I'm saying that's a departure, that's an innovation. We do that with historical consistency. In my five-minute case for Protestantism video, I documented this. Luther and Calvin

thought there's true churches all over the place outside of Protestantism. They even criticized the Catholics for damning the Orthodox. And they said, no, they're, you know, how can you do that? When the Lutherans in the 1570s wrote to Jeremiah the second ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, they addressed him as a Christian. And they made a Christian. And they made a Christian. appeal as a fellow as fellow Christians. Historically, Protestants have recognized the true church is not restricted to one institution. So this is the point of distinction that it's an institutional exclusivism that we are concerned about in these other traditions. And basically, we would say the Protestant position represents an alternative approach to discerning the one true church.

There is only one church, but she coeres within multiple institutions. Sadly, the one true church is institutionally fragmented today. And basically what we say, it's not that we deny that the church is visible. That's another common misunderstanding. We, drawing from St. Augustine and John Wycliffe, have historically affirmed that there is an invisible aspect to the church as well as a visible aspect to the church. So we make that distinction. But in making such a distinction, we're not denying one versus the other.

We're not saying it's this rather than this. We're distinguishing between the two. Yet people act as though we're denying the visible church. But that distinction is extremely modest and reasonable. Basically, all we're saying is you can count how many baptized Christians are, in principle. That's the visible church, but only God knows who's truly united to Christ. That's the invisible church. So Judas Iskariot was a member of the visible church, but not a member of the invisible church. You don't even have to use the adjectives visible and invisible.

You can use different adjectives, but that's not. that's basic point. I think that's completely undeniable. So that's, so, so in other words, what distinguishes a Protestant view of discerning the one true church is not that we deny the visible church. It's this, we deny the, the church is restricted to one institutional hierarchy. To conclude, the reason this is so important is that it does affect people's assurance of salvation. As you know, the point of my YouTube channel and the point of my life is to help people find assurance, the happy enchantment of knowing that God is your father and your sins are forgiven and your name is written in heaven and you don't have it. You're not 99% sure that you're

saved. The Holy Spirit has a ministry of testimony to your heart. You're 100% sure that you're saved. And I think the topic of this video, look, I respect the Eastern Orthodox tradition and learn from great Eastern Orthodox theologians. It's a significant tradition. But their claim of exclusivity is very concerning to me. And from a practical and pastoral standpoint, the reason it's concerning is because it puts ecclesial anxiety upon people. And frankly, a lot of the other, the Roman Catholic tradition does this same thing. They put a storm cloud over people's heads. And frankly, I think sometimes they intimidate people into conversion because people are afraid they're going to get damned. I see it. I see that playing out. And it burdens me from a

pastoral angle. So let me just pastor people at the end of this video. You can trust the words of Christ Himself. Jesus himself said, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. When you come to Judgment Day, you can stake your everlasting salvation or damnation on the words of Christ. You can say, Jesus, I'm trusting that you won't damn me because you're not a liar. And on Judgment Day, you can even repeat these words back to Christ and say, look, I repented of my sins, I surrendered my life to you, I took up my cross and I followed you on the basis of your promise. Now I'm appealing to you. Be true to your promise to me. and he will. And you shall be saved. He is not a liar. His promise, you don't have to worry,

well, if I pick the wrong institution, am I out? No, that is not the way salvation happens. It's, it's, that's an important thing to think through. But your salvation is secure on the basis of the promise of Jesus Christ. If you have ongoing doubts about that, I have a video on salvation outside the church that might be helpful for you. Hope that blesses you. All right, thanks for watching everybody. My background should change soon. Hopefully my studio will be built soon. I'm dressed nicely because I went to a father-daughter dance tonight. And then I'm filming up here and my kids are sleeping right beneath me, so I got to get out of here. We don't see this background too much more. If you would like to support Truth Unites, I'm trying to raise support over the course of 2024. I need to raise more support

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