Truth Unites - Former Priest Critiques Orthodox Theology (with Joshua Schooping)

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

Rev. Joshua Schooping shares his top three theological concerns with Eastern Orthodox Theology, as outlined in his recent book—and why he is now Protestant.    My first video with Josh on his departure from Orthodoxy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUXQiF1MWnQ  Josh's book: https://www.amazon.com/Disillusioned-Eastern-Orthodox-Priesthood-Church/dp/B0B92VGQ23 Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Hey everyone. Welcome or welcome back to Truth Unites. Truth Unites is a place for theology and apologetics done in an ironic way. And this is my second interview with Josh Schupping, who is the pastor of Alliance Church in Russellville, Arkansas, and the author of this book that we're going to talk about today, called Disillusioned Why I Left the Eastern Orthodox Priesthood and Church. So the last interview that we did talked a little bit more about your story. and there's a link to that one in the video description. And this one will talk a little bit more about your theology and the theological concerns you have that you work through in this book. So I'm really excited to get into this. Thanks for doing this, Josh.

How are you doing today? Thank God. I'm alive. I'm well. God is good. Awesome. Let me ask you first. I mean, we had just mentioned this a moment ago

that in response to our first video, there is a lot of negativity that was directed. toward you and toward your wife. Not everyone responded badly, but there were a lot of people who responded with anger, with rage, with kind of over-the-top criticism. And I remember watching one interaction on social media where someone was giving an anathema to you for your decision to leave the Orthodox Church, and I thought it was very honorable.

You responded by blessing the person who did that. But how have you endured that kind of negativity? without becoming embittered in the process? It's been a wonderful journey, to be honest. God's grace has been just coming along and holding me and my family and keeping us protected, I think. A lot of it didn't come as a surprise, and so that allowed me to kind of steal myself in some ways

and protect myself emotionally, not to be guarded, but to just trust that, you know, people are going to be hurt. People are going to express their hurt. I know I did disappoint a lot of people. And I think some people may have even said those things that were very mean. Out of love, you know, in first feeling hurt or betrayed. And some, you know, just being sectarian and petty as well. I don't want to paint in two broad of brush strokes.

But I know that I did disappoint some people. And so, you know, I tried to feel, you know, where they were coming from and not just interpret it as being them being harsh or dumb or, you know, simple-minded or something like that. But maybe they felt genuine pain at it, especially if there are people that I had known. If there were people that I didn't know, I just, you know, just said, okay, well, they don't know me. So it's like, you know, what am I going to do about people that don't know me? People like, oh, he left in order to become a millionaire, you know, or become to sell things or something like that. And it's like, oh, no, nobody's getting rich here. Some of those comments are funny.

You just have to laugh at them. And you mentioned earlier before we started, just the wisdom of kind of blocking out a lot that's on the Internet from all sides. Because all church traditions can have nastiness and unpleasant dynamics online, especially. So one thing I want to say is as we start off. here we're going to be getting into some criticisms theological criticisms of various Eastern Orthodox beliefs and practices and the intention behind it is not primarily just to attack or especially at a personal level or to kind of vent or something like that but it comes more from a sincere concern for the

truth and the desire for a pure gospel so that's kind of where we're coming from here so I'll just say that at the beginning but you've got three sections in the book, you deal with ecclesiology, doctrine of the church, iconology, doctrine of icons, and Maryology, doctrine of Mary. So would those be like the biggest three areas of concern for you with Orthodox theology? Yes, and particularly because I believe they're wedded to actual formal canonical positions within the church. It takes it out of the realm, in my opinion, of just about what is contemporary or what might be a trend or something that is just kind of overtaking, you know, the populace within orthodoxy. So I found that those three particular issues, because of where they're located on the map of the larger Orthodox Christian theological framework,

I think they're particularly fatal to their overall position. Give us just basically a rundown of the concern about an exclusivistic, ecclesiology. What does that mean exactly and what is the concern there? Yeah, my view of this exclusivistic ecclesiology that they have is, it's just quite simply that they'll formally claim that no one is a Christian other than them. According to their own canons, they'll say that no one is even a Christian, much less in a church. So to even approach them as an evangelical, as a Lutheran, as a Presbyterian, as a Baptist, or even technically as a Catholic, they're not really Christian. They don't have the Spirit of Christ. They're outside of the ark. They're in the floodwaters,

you know, of sin, and so they're unsaved. And so to me, that is almost the definition of a sect, is to say that we alone have the truth and that no one else really even has a meaningful, realistic hope for salvation. And so that's kind of how I understand their their notion of exclusivism. Yeah. Now when we talk about this and when this has come up, some in response, including some orthodox commenters, have expressed great surprise or disagreement saying, oh, not at all. But to my awareness, and this is what I want you to speak to in terms of the history, the backlog on this issue, to my awareness, there really isn't much deviation from this. older, more exclusivistic view that outside of the church there is no salvation, the boundaries of the church are determined institutionally.

So if you are not Eastern Orthodox, you are damned, that there really is no divergence upon that until starting a little bit in the 19th century, and then a little more in the 20th century. Is that your perception of the historical backgrounds to this? Yeah, I guess if I were to try to paint a fuller picture of what I see as having happened, It would be that sometime after Constantine and the conversion of the empire itself, where we start getting into Theodosius, end of the fourth century, as we're moving along the trajectory to Justinian, we see an identification of church and state to the point where to be a citizen is to be a Christian. To be a Christian is to be a citizen. And so it amplified the, or it intensified the rigidity of the boundaries of what it means to be a Christian at all. And it gets connected with this sort of secular arm of the empire. And so once you have this, you are all of a sudden intensifying again the risk of what it means to not be in the church. Because now you're going against the emperor himself if you're disagreeing on this or that issue.

So icons, for example, were an incredibly political, you know, politicized issue. So you have one emperor being against icons and then the next emperor being four icons. And so if you're going to be on one side or the other, now all of a sudden you're part of some rebel element. You're some anti-political element. You're no longer with the empire itself. And so you're starting to undermine the very fabric of even the society to have a difference of opinion. And so they start making these incredibly restrictive sorts of claims that unless you bow down and kiss the icon with affection, you are now outside of the church itself. You are condemned by God.

We're going to use the keys. We are the church. We have the keys. We're locking you out. The condemnation is upon you. Gehena is your destiny if you don't do this. And so that's kind of where I see some of the historical, I mean in broad brushstrokes where I see some of the historical. leading up to that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I've heard people say, oh, well, the anathema didn't

necessarily mean damnation, but we'll come back to icons more later. But if you read through it, and I see it too, the bishops there write a letter to the empress right afterwards and say, hey, just so you know, here's what we mean by anathema. Damnation, separation from God. And as I said, I don't see any exceptions to that in the east or in the West in the medieval era for centuries and centuries until you start to get up to much. more recent times in church history, which is just interesting. Yeah. And this sort of attempt at getting out from underneath, like, for example, the Synod of 1672 in Jerusalem, where it makes some of these claims that if you're not under an Eastern Orthodox bishop, then you're not even a Christian.

It's really kind of a double-edged sword, in my opinion, because either it's true or it's not. And if this patriarch in Jerusalem at the time was saying falsehood, why has no one condemned it? How is he able to make this claim? And now people can just, you know, well, we'll play the Protestant here for our own sake and, you know, get outside of whatever we don't like that the church may, you know, may have said in its past. So it's like they'll try to have their cake and eat it too. So it's like, well, you know, we'll call that a Latin captivity, which I believe is. a phrase from Callistos Ware, who I know has just recently departed, hopefully to be with the Lord. And so it's very regrettable that in the 20th century, you have this kind of rationalizing and intellectualizing and relativizing of what you just pointed out very well.

It's like you don't find any deviation until maybe the late 1800s, but certainly coming into the 1900s. And I think some of it may even come from coming into the West, coming into America, trying to kind of blend in with Western culture a little bit. You have George Floreski. He's entering into teach at Princeton. He's actually teaching at Princeton right after the Westminster professors had left to go form Westminster Seminary. So you have a lot of the conservative theologians who had just left Princeton, and then Florovsky coming in, and he's starting to come.

of rub elbows with some of these more liberal professors. And so it's like I have a, I don't know, I can just see sort of, see sort of an academic camaraderie happening among these various theologians and you start to soften. I don't want to come into your seminary and say, you're not even a Christian and expect to be able to teach. Yeah. Yeah, and one thing, I hope it's okay, and every now and again, I might just make a comment of my own and then see just what you,

if you want to interact with it a little bit. But one thing, I want to clarify, in my own thinking about this, because I've articulated this argument from Matthew 7, that the good fruit reveals a good tree, and therefore we should not restrict the church to one institution because we see good fruit in multiple institutions. And I think one of the things I've seen so much in response that has surprised me that I thought it might be helpful just to throw this out there in this conversation, because I think a lot of viewers have this concern. they think, oh, so are you against exclusivism of any kind? Are you advocating for universalism? What about Mormons? What about Buddhists? You know, does spiritual fruit mean some generic, positive, religious experience?

And I, you know, my response to that is, no, we're not against, I'm not advocating for universalism. We're just against an exclusivism that is inconsistent with the New Testament, an institutional exclusivism. because spiritual fruit is that's a term that Jesus means something very specific by he Jesus was not a religious pluralist he Jesus didn't mean you know just spiritual fruit reveals a good tree so any kind of positive religious experience means you're part of the church so that's one thing I just wanted to clarify uh in terms of my arguments and I'll probably do another video on that some some point I have one more question about this but I'll give it your chance to comment on that if you want to it all first yeah well I think that you're right to talk about fruit because the scripture asks us to judge the tree by its fruit. So I think the objection sounds a little bit weak to me if they're going to say, oh, well, if you're going to use a scriptural standard, that that's now obligating you to affirm that if a Buddhist is very peaceful, that that means that he is saved, you know, because it's like you're actually just obeying what scripture says to use that as a fruit. But part of the fruit is also the proper confession of Christ.

And so a person can't confess Christ. I mean, the preaching of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. And so the ability to believe and trust oneself to Christ is a supernatural operation of the gospel, the gospel being the power of God unto salvation. And so we're not saved by fruit, but we're asked to utilize fruit as a means of, verifying whether this confession in Christ is consistent, you know, is authentic. You know, so I think that it's perfectly fair to be able to say, well, one of these fruits is the proper confession of Christ.

Yes. That well said. And, you know, with the test of 1 Corinthians 12, 3, that no one can say Jesus is Lord except speaking by the Holy Spirit. There we've also to have a doctrinal test that a Buddhist or a Mormon wouldn't pass. they wouldn't say Jesus is Lord in the sense that Paul understands that. So I think to me, just obeying these scriptures, as you put it, is what we're required to do. But let me ask you a question about the anxiety that these exclusivistic claims put people in

because I want to read a great quote from your book on page 30. And again, encourage people to pick the book up by the link in the description. You talk about how these exclusivistic claims are represented by multiple churches. So, for example, the same claim that the Eastern Orthodox make is made by Roman Catholics and Oriental Orthodox in broad form. We're the one true church. And you say, this sends credulous inquirers and would be defenders of the faith on a man-centered hunt to find out which one true church is really the one true church, according, of course, to the investigators, gasp, private judgment. Now it requires a PhD in church history and theology, together with mastery of multiple languages, not to mention access to all the relevant resources to find out whether one is even in the church and therefore saved.

And you quote Romans 10 and say, no. You know you're saved if you have Christ. And I just thought that was helpful because so often we're Protestants are criticized for overrelying upon private judgment. But one of the things you're pointing out here is it's unavoidable to use our judgment. to make a decision of which church we will be in. And it really does put people in anxiety to try to figure out, you know, and I know so many people like this, they're thinking, they're worried about getting damned by making the wrong ecclesial decision.

Do you see people feeling that anxiety at all? Yes. I've had many long conversations with people who really did struggle and suffer with that very anxiety. And, I mean, some of them write more. multiple hundreds of pages, you know, of books on trying to figure this out. And they're combing through church history or they're looking almost to the point where they're looking at newspaper headlines. I mean, maybe the patriarch of Constantinople is, it's a false church because of who he is or maybe now because of the war in Ukraine. Maybe the Russian patriarch

is maybe that's the wrong church. And like people get these. sorts of really intense ideas. I was speaking with someone very recently, and they were walking me through, you know, the history of like late 19th, early 20th century Russian Orthodox politics in relation to the churches. You know, after the Bolshevik revolution, which bishop was a real bishop, which bishop was a false bishop, which bishop is a KJB, KJV, I was thinking, KGB agent, you know, and there's, and there's, all of these sorts of things. So it's like, well, these churches are a part of the World Council of Church, like the Antiochian Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church, and they're a part of this World Council of Churches, and how do we understand that? And there's these true Orthodox

churches or these old calendarist sorts of churches, and these are the real ones, and they have the right history. And it's like there's this underlying, I mean, frankly, I can't help but wonder if they understand the gospel itself, if they think that this late 19th, early 20th, mid-20th century history all the way up to today, it's really up to you to find this out at the cost of your, at the risk of your salvation. And it's like, how can I all of a sudden have to become a contemporary, you know, a historian of contemporary politics in order to discover this? I mean, where's the gospel at this point?

Where's the New Testament? Where's Romans? Where's Ephesians? Where's where is all of this? How do I connect that? Like what a tenuous web? And you have similar anxieties with like the SSPX, you know, the Saint Pius, the 10th society of, you know, that a lot of traditionalist Roman Catholics will go in there. And it sort of creates this sort of, I ultimately think an alternative object of faith, you know, that's not just Christ and the gospel.

How would you pastor someone with the gospel who's watching this video and is experiencing that anxiety? Because I know one of our motives, our shared motives and talking about these things is to help pastor people, help encourage people who are, they are a sheep of Christ and they're drowning in anxiety about these questions. What would you say to them? That's a really tough question because of the diversity of problems that people present, you know, that they're at what they're wrestling with. but often I'll look at the doctrine of the church. I'll take them perhaps to the Nicene Creed or to the Apostles' Creed, and we'll see that the doctrine of the church is an item of faith. It's not an item of calculation and mathematics.

And being an item of faith, it's something that we ultimately trust Christ for. It's not something that we figure out through kind of an ecclesial, logical rationalism. And so I think that that's kind of where I'll typically lead someone. And it's so it's something we we trust is there. That's that's really good. The last comment or question about this issue of ecclesiology I wanted to ask is what would you say is the strength of Protestantism in contrast to these more institutionally restrictive visions of the church? because I think you're arguing that Protestantism offers us a pathway. Ultimately, if you understand unity, the nature of unity a bit more broadly, the nature of Catholicity, a bit more broadly,

the Protestantism actually offers us a pathway toward greater Catholicity. Yeah, and I think it's kind of a counterintuitive claim if someone has absorbed the kind of Catholic or Orthodox kind of ecclesiological assumption. that diversity of administration or diversity of institution just automatically means schism and sectarianism. Because sectarianism, in my understanding, is to say, we have the church and you don't. But confessional Protestantism doesn't have that claim. The Lutheran Book of Concord, the Westminster standards, they don't make these sorts of claims. the three standards of unity or the, you know, like Dort and the Belgian Confession and Heidelberg Catechism, the three forms of unity. That's what they're called.

They don't make this kind of claim. So when we look at the magisterial, the confessional documents or the 39 articles or the London Baptist Confession of 1689, none of them make this sort of reductionistic claim about the nature of the church. So for them, administrative diversity is just a sign of the inevitability of human nature, of time, place, culture, language. And I think to expect that Jesus's admonition for us to have oneness of mind and oneness of spirit has to be expressed in bureaucratic lockstep, I think is just an absurd assumption that comes from the Byzantification of the church. after Constantine and Theodosius especially. Yes, that's really helpful. Let's talk about icons a little bit. This is another major area in the book that you address.

Just give us a brief introduction to the nature of your concern in relation to this issue. Yeah, well, one of the concerns, one of the primary concerns I have is kind of a popular claim as well from the Orthodox Church, where they say we're unchanged, we've never changed. It's the Church of the Fathers. Everything's been maintained the same. And it's a really rude awakening for people when this sort of pietistic kind of nonsense really gets absorbed. It can be very, very painful. I remember in seminary, like, I felt sick to my stomach when I'm in a liturgical theology class, and they're going through the history, and it's like, this has changed, this has changed, this has change, this is change, this is change, this is change, this is change, this has changed. And I'm like, wow, people say, oh, well, if you got into a time machine

and you were worshipping with Justin Martyr, and then you got into a time machine and went and worship with Cyril of Alexandria, and you got into a time machine and worship with John of Damascus, and that it would always be the same. This is the sort of popular image. People call me a fool for having believed what, you know, local priests had told me about these sorts of romantic legends of orthodoxy. But, you know, kind of bracketing that aside, like in just sort of of taking it very seriously where they say, because they really do on some level say it's never changed. And when it comes to icons, they say, well, we've always venerated icons. It's just how we've always been. But when you go back and you look at the first several centuries of the church,

it was a trope for them, just a constant repeated thing. Like every apologist had a chapter or some sort of section that dealt with, we don't do images. We, like, or, Or these images are foolish. Representative images, the whole notion of the transfer from, you know, what is seen to what, you know, to the prototype, from the type to the prototype or whatever. They knew that argument and rejected it. And so then they say, oh, well, you know, that's an argument from silence to say that they weren't venerating images at that time. It's not an argument from silence. It's a fortiori.

It's by force of argument. They're not going to sit there and have a unanimous. miswitness against the veneration of images and fail to mention for several centuries that they weren't themselves doing it the true way. You know, it's starting to say, well, you have the false God, so here's the true God. You know, this is the normal way of things. You have the false, here's the true. If they're going to say you have the false veneration of images, they're going to say we have the true. But since it's this universal condemnation of it and ridiculing of the veneration of images. It's an a fortiori argument. It's not an argument from silence. And so you have this

clear witness in the first centuries of the church all the way up through at least Gregory of Nazianzus and Basel. And then it's not until about a century prior to John of Damascus, where the very arguments that Christians were arguing against are now being picked up by people like John of Damascus and others. And now they're starting to say, oh, no, we've always done it. Well, here's a little known, secret perhaps, but known to many people in orthodoxy when you're in the local parishes, is if a local church has been doing something for 40 years, that's holy tradition now. Now imagine a church has been doing something for a hundred years. They're going to go back.

Well, my spiritual father and his spiritual father, they were all venerating icons. Well, yeah, from your vantage, it was. But from the actual advantage of real historical scholarship, no, it wasn't. And even they'll say, oh, well, we can find these old architectural. you know, these pieces of architecture where they had images painted on the walls and stuff. But that proves nothing about their usage. And also in some of these, the evidence that we have of architectural art, you know, on the walls or whatever, in some of these cases, it wasn't even in the quote-unquote worship space.

And so they'll use this sort of like this very flimsy evidence to try to bring the whole, camel, try to get like the camel's nose under the tent here and bring the whole camel of what ends up being in Nicia 2 is not only did we used to do it because they claim that and of course in their their notion of authority, the councils itself are equal to scripture and they're as equally infallible. So they say that this is an unchanged practice in these councils, which historically it's completely unverifiable and all of the evidence is against them. So not only would that be false, but they say it's so clear to them that if you don't do it, you're rejecting Christ. Rejecting the incarnation, rejecting the significance of it. And it's like, you know, it's like if, for example, if the Bible said that there were 150 boards in Noah's Ark, and if you say, well, maybe there was 151 or there was 149, no, it has to be, you can't be rounding it. And if you think that it was 149 boards in Noah's Ark, then you don't believe the Bible. And if you don't believe the Bible, you don't believe it's God's Word.

And if you don't believe it's God's Word, then you don't believe in God. So you're an atheist. If you believe there's 151 boards instead of 150 boards in Noah's Ark. And it becomes a sort of absurd maximalism, in my opinion, that the Orthodox Church has perpetrated on the people. by saying if you don't worship or venerate an icon and they literally define it, you have to have affection for it. And if you don't have affection for kissing these pieces of wood with paint on them, then you are hellbound. You're already condemned. We've put in the key.

We've turned it. We've locked it. Mark it down. Unless you repent and join the Orthodox Church and kiss these icons, you're going to hell. The wrath of God is on you. So yeah, that's kind of where I stand on that. Yeah. At the beginning of your comments there, you mentioned that feeling of a sick stomach and the pain.

When people come to understand the historical record is messy and complicated and there has been change. And I just wanted to follow up on that myself because one of the pieces of counsel I've gotten used to giving people who are wrestling with these questions is to really slow down and take your time. Now, obviously, people can slow down too much and take 40 years. or something like that. But usually I think people tend to go too quickly because this is one of those points where I want someone, I have compassion on people, I want people to see these complexities before they make a big change. And so they don't regret it down the road.

And I think if people would look at this issue, I think they will be overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed. I've been studying it recently by the strength of the biblical and historical argument against the veneration of images. And I would just in agreement with your argument. comments. I would encourage people not to dismiss them or think you're overstating it. The damnation and the clarity of that damnation at Nicaea 2 is very clear. You know, if you say that it's idolatry, you're damned to hell. You're anathematized. That's another. I mean, there's so many things you can

get damned for there. And then they flesh out. This is what anathema means. It's separation from God. It's in hell. It's the same as the heretics of old. I mean, you know, they flesh it out as clear as can be. And yet, if people will look into the historical record on this issue, I believe it is decisive in and of itself enough to convince, I would go so far as to say this issue alone is a powerful reason to be a Protestant Christian because Protestants are not yoked to Nicaea too in the way that both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians are. So let me read a paragraph and then I'll let you respond to this quote. I haven't shared this with you in advance, so I'm sort of putting you on the spot here. But this is from Richard Price's translation and introduction to the acts of Nicaea 2. That's an standing piece of scholarship. He cannot be accused of a Protestant bias.

But here's his summary of this scholarly history. He says, the iconoclast claim, so the iconic class are those who want to do away with images, that reverence toward images did not go back to the golden age of the fathers, still less to the apostles, would be judged by impartial historians today to be simply correct. The iconophile view of the history of Christian thought and devotion was virtually a denial of history. He goes on from many pages just talking about how the bishops at Nicaea too are just forging documents.

Some of their biblical interpretation is very extreme. They're relying on a misquotation from Basel. The case is very weak that the apostles actually taught venerating images and the historical evidence for that I think is pretty overwhelming. That's my take on it. What would you like to comment on about that? Yeah, and I think it is a fairly decisive issue. The problem I see is getting people to take it seriously.

They don't understand that they're blood earnest about these cannons when they make them. And people will say, oh, well, it was contextualized. this has to do, you know, I mean, you have to understand how it was back then. And it's like, the statements still stand and say what they say and mean what they say. So they either mean it or they don't. And the other escape hatch that people have is this, I would distinguish between free iconodulia and forced iconodulia. Usually when you go into an Orthodox church and the priest talks to you, oh, hey, I'm curious, I'm inquiring. I'd like to know more about it.

And then the local priest who probably hasn't studied, and I see it too carefully. And has probably heard, oh, the iconoclasts were very mean and very cruel people. And they did awful things, which is probably true. And then they'll frame it as we get to. It's a free veneration. We're free to do it. But that's not what the actual counsel says. It's forced.

It's actually a forcing of the affections. And so the fact to me that so deeply betrays the spirit of the gospel that it's just shocking. It's just shocking to me. And you find people going into even someone like John of Damascus. And one of the reasons why I didn't include a chapter on John of Damascus in there is because he's not actually part of the council, even though he's one of the framers of the Orthodox position on it. because, and it's to answer one of the questions from earlier, why I chose iconology and specifically focused on Niccia II is because the second you start talking about John of Damascus, someone will say, oh, well, we don't really take what any particular father says fully.

You know, that's just his opinion. And so then they'll kind of like play that back and forth off of each other. So they'll believe John of Damascus and everything he says about iconology. But then when you press it, they'll say, oh, well, we don't want to put. too much weight on John of Damascus because ultimately he's just a single father. So they get to have John of Damascus and reject John of Damascus if they so choose whenever it is advantageous for them. So I really tried to stick with these canonical issues to really kind of show that it's critical. It's not just what one father says. It's actually embedded into their whole system.

But John of Damascus ultimately makes, in my opinion, kind of a non sequitur. It really doesn't follow that because Jesus Christ was incarnated, that now all of a sudden I can venerate the image of him. And then even all of these references back to imagery or types in the Old Testament, like looking at the at the bronze serpent, for example, they bowed to the bronze serpent, right? And or they looked to the bronze serpent or venerated the staff or something like that. And it's like where they find something that's a type of Christ, sure, it's a type of Christ, but it's not a type of iconography. Right, exactly.

If the brass is a type of Christ, it doesn't thereby become also a type of brassware iconography. And so I find that a lot of the bait and switch and the non sequitur type of stuff to kind of get around the fact that it's really a corruption of the gospel, where the spirit is, there is freedom. And Jesus Christ didn't die on Calvary to force us to bow down to images of him. Yeah. Well, and also with that, I mean, the fact is that the biblical testimony on the poem this, I mean, it's like it's literally one of the Ten Commandments that says, don't bow down to images. Now, to me, I'm thinking, if the incarnation changed this commandment, I think it's kind of reasonable that that would be mentioned.

Like that would come up in the new town. By the way, second commandment no longer applicable. Or if there's a distinction between veneration and worship in this systematic way, in the context of regular religious practice in the context of a local church, you know, then it seems kind of reasonable to think that this distinction would be laid out in scripture. You know, you just, it's kind of like a metaphor would be like if, in certain cultures, if you kiss someone as a way of form of greeting, but a wife says to her husband, don't kiss other women. I don't want you to kiss other women. And then the husband comes back and

later says, well, that was just a kiss of affection, not a kiss of romance. That's inauthentic because his wife never gave him permission for any kind of kissing. The distinction came later as a way to justify the practice. And that would be a concern I would have with this distinction between veneration and worship. I just don't see that distinction anywhere in the Holy Scripture itself. I would also say that that's another sort of bait and switch where it's like that really is an irrelevant distinction in and of itself when the very, and John of Damascus never deals with this in his treatises against icons, is that the reason scripture gives isn't only what Moses says when he says. says, for you didn't see a form on that day. We had seen forms on other days when Jacob

wrestled the angel or Abraham had lunch with the angels, with the three guests. But scripture gives other reasons for not venerating or worshiping or bowing down to images is because they're literally not alive. But those who bow down to them become like unto them. And they become lifeless like them. And so John of Damascus never deals with those arguments. He just never talks about it. But that's one of the principal scriptural reasons for not venerating them. Think about the notion of the union that we have with Christ, that it's by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, in our heart, God gives us the Holy Spirit, by which we cry out Abba Father. Now, when I start projecting onto this painted image about an absent

a distant God, a God up there, rather than God, the kingdom of heaven being within, I start to externalize my whole relationship with God, rather than actually depending on the indwelling Holy Spirit given to me in the Word, which comes to me through a living voice into my ear and into my heart. And so it starts to undermine, in my opinion, the very relationship, the ordering of the relationship we have with God by getting us to rely on that which is outward. visually rather than an outward word coming in. Yeah. Last question on icons. Then we'll move on to Mariology. When I read the early, the anti-Nicene period, the first 300 or so years of church history,

so before Council of Nicaea 325, I am struck that it seems to be, number one, virtually unanimous, roughly, against the veneration of images, in some cases, against any usage of images, and also that it seemed to be a hallmarked, feature of what makes Christian worship different from pagan worship. And I'm thinking people like origin or Justin Martyr people like this. Do you see the practice of veneration of images as a sort of infiltration of a broader human temptation into the church? Is that how you would interpret how what's going on? Is it starting to come in in that post-constantinian era?

Yeah, I think it was a flood of understanding. converted people, so to speak, entering into the church. Because now it's socially advantageous to be in the church, you know, during the Constantine and the immediately following era, after Theodosius, by the time you get up into Justinian, you know, it's like you just have to be a Christian in order to really be a legal citizen, so to speak. And so I don't think they were able to tame the cult of idolatry that just exists in the pagan world. And so they tried to Christianize it. They tried to baptize it. They tried to find some way to mitigate those forces and powers. And I think that's also where, you know, not to anticipate too much, but where the Mariology came from as well. It's just goddess

worship. And they're just, they couldn't really control it. So they tried to use, they tried a false hermeneutic and inappropriate use of typology in order to kind of find a way to baptize this stuff. And so once you have all of these people in these churches who really have no respect for God's word, now all of a sudden it's, you know, we have images of the saints. We pray to them for this. We pray to them for that. And just kind of like this mushrooming of, you know, unchristian practices.

Well, that's a good segue to get into Mary. And I suspect that many viewers will be more familiar with Roman Catholic views and attitudes toward the Virgin Mary than Eastern Orthodox. So could you orient us to this? What's the basic role of Mary within Orthodoxy? Well, I, the basic role of Mary within Orthodoxy is really rooted in the hymns that are written about her that are sung. within the church. So these are like canonical hymns. These aren't like, what is this church father's quote about her or what is that church father's, you know, quote about her? This is what the church formally confesses through song in the various feasts to marry. You have 12 basic feasts of the year,

more or less, and then you have half of them are to marry, half of them are to Jesus. Her birth is the first feast of the year, and her death, her dormition, her falling asleep is the last. So she kind of frames the entire church year, like her coming into the world and her departing from the world. So she's a very central figure. If someone examines the hymns in the Orthodox Church, whether that's the acathist hymn, or whether those are hymns like to, you know, for her entry into the temple, they ascribe to her super historical or super historical role that essentially you cannot approach Jesus unless she blesses you to do it. You know, they took how Jesus couldn't come into the world unless he came

through Mary, so we can't get to Jesus unless we go to Mary. They do like kind of a mirroring kind of image there. That started probably after the fourth, fifth, sixth century, you start to see Mary being treated as something more than a part of the historical salvation, the Historia Saludist. I get the Latin mixed up there. You have like the Ordo Saludus, but then you have the Historia Saludist, you might recall how to pronounce that better than I. But, you know, we have an Irenaeus. We have him talking about Mary as a historical phenomenon, a historical personage, but then by the time you get up to where these hymns are coming from in the 7th, 8th, 9th century, now she is the propitiation for the whole world. She's the one who we have to go to in order to get to Jesus.

Yes. And why don't I read one or two examples from your book of this is from a collection of ninth century prayers that you've drawn attention to. And I want to read these and then ask you to comment on these in terms of are these representative or are they exceptional or something like this? And I'll set it up like this. One of the arguments you hear to defend Mariology among Catholic or Orthodox Christians is this, it's a, it's a, it's, It's a both-hand. It's not Mary displacing Jesus. Mary just leads us more into the heart of Jesus. It's like the sun and the moon. Jesus is the sun. He's reflecting off Mary the moon, this way of thinking, this both-hand way of thinking. And as one who wants to treat Mary with honor and respect as a great woman of God, that's not where this is coming from. We don't hate Mary, as sometimes we're accused. It's not that at all. And we want to honor what God did through Mary in the incarnation, I have to say that I'm convinced in my conscience that these prayers and the general role of Mary in these traditions doesn't really fly by the whole both-and way of thinking, because particular soterological roles are given to Mary that belong exclusively to Christ.

And in Western prayers that you'll find, you'll find basically the prayer is Mary propitiate Jesus, propitiate your son. And so we're saying, wait a second. not a both-end. That's Mary playing the role toward Jesus that the gospel teaches us Jesus played toward the Father and has already been done at Calvary. So here's an example from page 76 of your book. One of the prayers says, I do not dare to draw near with boldness to your son, but instead I pray to you that I may obtain salvation through your intercessions to him. Do not allow the dark power to seize me and cast me into the depths of Hades,

grant that the just judge should look upon me favorably. Deliver me from the eternal fire, for you are the only helper of mankind. Another one from page 77, through your pure and acceptable supplications, persuade the righteous judge to have compassion upon me, for you are his mother. Open up for me the compassionate heart of your merciful son

and beseech him to overlook my transgressions. Well, that sure sounds like it's saying Mary has to propitiate Jesus. And that, to me, is a concern that would touch upon the very heart of the gospel message. So what would you like to say about that? Yeah. And I mean, those prayers, some might say, oh, well, those aren't everyday prayers that everybody would always pray, perhaps, even though it comes from an Orthodox prayer book. but it actually is completely consistent with the Akathist hymn, which is one of the core, central, even daily devotionals that many people have. So I think the both and is really just a rhetorical ploy because that's just not really, it's not real.

It's just not real. I don't know how to say a both and. I've never really quite been able to figure out or wrap my head around how we, can distort the message of the gospel that Jesus Christ is the propitiation for our sin. And now Jesus Christ gets absorbed into his divinity. He's no longer constantly interceding on behalf of the saints. And so now Mary becomes the intercessor. It's like a both end of what? Which Jesus are we talking about? It's not the Jesus of the gospel. It's both and it's Mary and another Christ. Yeah. And I mean, would you say here's the thing. It's,

Like, at one point in your book, you had this statement about how the East needed a reformation. The Eastern Christianer needed some kind of spark of renewal. But the challenge is, it seems as though the theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church, to speak specifically of that church, is such that it, it sort of makes a reformation impossible to some extent. And so far as this whole appeal is of changelessness. And Nicaea, too, is irreformable. It's not going away. Correct. Yeah.

They've dug themselves in through this excessive belief about the nature of the church. It's kind of rooted in their exclusivism, their sectarianism, that if they admit that they made a mistake at Nicae 2 and said, we need to back off a little bit from the extremity of this claim, then now they admit that it was an error and that those church fathers didn't have the authority that they irrigated for themselves. So at this point they would be cutting off their nose to spite their face and they can't have their both and here. It can't be the friendly alternative mystical, alternative to new ageism and legalistic forensic Christianity or something like mechanistic Western Christianity or something like that. It is what it is. It's an extreme claim. It's very harsh and they have no problem with it. until they become, you know, Westerners trying to find a way to kind of square the circle or whatever

with whatever cognitive dissonance brought them into the church or keeps them there. Trying to get them to take it seriously is almost impossible, I think, it would, because it's such a complete picture. It's so culturally attractive. It seems to offer something unchanging in the midst of America or of a Western. civilization that seems to be falling apart all around us. And so a lot of people are holding on to orthodoxy as kind of like a life raft. Yeah.

Earlier you mentioned the differences between Ironaeus's Mariology and later mariological developments where people will try to defend the later developments by saying, oh, look, Irenaeus said this. But then if you look at the both, you're saying, these are pretty different. similarly with Cyprian you have a section in the book where you're talking about you know people will defend the exclusivist ecclesiology by looking back at Cyprian and his exclusivist ecclesiology and you point out there's some differences here Cyprian's kind of in a different context some of the people he's thinking of as outside the church are a little different than what we're dealing with say in like the 11th century or the 16th century and these kinds of schisms that are happening later so would you like to say say anything about this of the differences in context from Cyprian's day to later developments? Yeah, Cyprian, of course, was before Constantine. He was before the secularization of the church. You had a much, this was the church that was being persecuted all of the time. And so he's talking about

unity in that sort of context where people are able to spiritually unify, unite around the basics. of the faith that were not, this was before Nicaea, this was before many things had been clarified and defined. And so the person that he was condemning was someone who was saying, you can't return back to the church, you can't repent. And so the person who was separating and creating a schism here was someone who was being a rigorous and not allowing those who had lapsed during the persecutions. to return back to the church.

And so he was creating a de facto pure church that Cyprian was against. And so here we have the Orthodox almost kind of playing this other role of where now they're excessively creating a rigid notion of the church where they're multiplying canons, multiplying their councils to the point where now you have seven ecumenical councils. I don't know how many hundreds of canons that are involved in this. And so that in order to be a church unity, you have to be able to actually, at least hypothetically or virtually affirm, every single one of those, as if none of them had ever erred. But Cyprian did not have anything like Constantine in his mind,

didn't have anything like a Christian Roman empire in his mind. He didn't have anything like even the debates between the Oriental Orthodox and the Byzantine emperor, Calcedon in 451 or in Ephesus 2 in 349. He didn't say that church unity had to be at such a fine degree of attunement that you couldn't, that you had to accept Calcedon in 451 as opposed to the 349 Ephesus. I'm not trying to side with one or the other, but to say that Cyprian had in his mind or in his intention such a maximal level for the to be able to be kind of like a a baseline for what unity could even be to me is is absurd it's kind of like a a canonical rigorism that i don't think cyprian could have even imagined at the time well let me just ask one more question josh this was one of the portions of the book that i thought was really that you had an appendix that was engaging the work of josea trenum and one of the points you made for people who want to follow this in the book is it's from page 122

You made a really good point that I appreciated it because I see this happening so much, where there's an apples to oranges comparison. So street-level Protestant practice will be compared to official Orthodox theology, or it could be Catholic theology or something like this. So, you know, as opposed to official theology to official theology or street-level practice to street-level practice. So it's like this statement from this church father or this canonical decree or something, something compared to what I saw over there at that Protestant parish or whatever. And it's a very

unfair, obviously, way of freighting the, and kind of framing the differences. So I thought you had a really, just a good response to that. Do you want to elaborate on that at all? I think this was in connection to the doctrine of salvation. Yeah. You know, it can get really salacious, really fast if a person was going to compare, you know, apples to oranges or oranges to apples because I think there's rotten fruit in all churches, you know, there's always wheat among the tears, or tears among the wheat. And so, you know, it ends up becoming a kind of blind spot if we're just kind of taking our own personal experience. You know, I grew up in this evangelical church. I grew up in this Methodist church or Presbyterian Church or Baptist Church. And they taught it

this way, and I just assume it because all of a sudden I get familiarized to a certain kind of pattern of language. And so once that pattern of language is established, it's hard for me to kind of second guess and kind of reinvigorate an assessment of it and get deep down into the theology of it by looking at going from the apple to the orange, so to speak, from my personal experience to the actual theological doctrine that would be presented in, you know, informal documents like the Westminster Confession or something like that. And then now let me look at Thomas Watson and his exposition of it, or Thomas Boston, or let me look at someone like a Michael Horton or a Robert

Lethem, and let me go through their systematic theology and see how they're reasoning this out so I can get the fullness of the doctrine because no local presentation of the gospel can actually account for like the fullness of the total tradition. tradition, any particular tradition. So it's like as good of a preacher as you might be or as I might be or as someone else might be, you know, we're not going to be able to give to our local congregation the full spectrum that would be present in an entire systematic theology that might run four or five, six volumes. You know, that's, that's a, that would be a lot to cover. But when people get dissatisfied at the local level, what do they do? They go, well, I'm going to, I'm going to start reading and they find Athanasius. They find Gregory of Nazianz. They find. They find Gregory of Nazianzes. They find all of these people, then they're going to go to Dimitrustano loya. They're going to look at his dogmatic theology, or they're going to look at Michael Pamazansky. They're going to look, and they're going to find this kind of like idealized picture. And then they create this idealized picture. They get very excited. They come from a bad church. Everybody knows that there's tears

among the wheat. So they go into this local Orthodox parish with kid gloves. And they say, oh, well, of course, nobody's perfect. But they have this idealized image. that allows them to kind of work through all of those problems that every single parish has and kind of excuse them. But then they use the bad experiences that they had in their previous evangelical or Protestant parish and say, see, that's just evidence that it's all wrong. But that same process can work in both directions, where someone can grow up in an Orthodox parish. They never heard the gospel in their life. They never, you know, this, this, this.

There's bad actions here, bad actors there. and then they get this idealized version of Protestantism, and then they don't critique their own tradition in an authentic way. And so either way, you create this kind of impressionism. I have this impression here, and then I get the ideal image there, or going doing the same thing from one church to the other. And so I think actually taking the time to read through, you know, one of my favorites is Herman Bovink.

I think his four-volume dogmatics are great. I also like Francis Piper. He's a Lutheran dogmatian. And when you go through and you read through, like just the intelligence that they have, the broadness that they have. So if we're talking about satirology from that particular section, like to say that Protestantism has a reductionistic satirology that doesn't involve things like union with Christ. Well, that's absurd. It's one of the basic ideas that you find in all centuries of Protestant thought in their systematic theologies is the doctrine of union with Christ. Christ and how everything flows from union. And that it's not just being saved from sin or saved

from an angry God. It involves justification. It involves sanctification. It involves glorification. It involves being liberated from sin, death, the devil, the flesh, the world, all of these things in a full, robust soureology. And so all of those are present within the evangelical and Protestant tradition. And it avoids all of the canonical errors that are in the Orthodox Church, because the Orthodox Church, unfortunately, can't ever fix itself if it ever missteps or mistakes. And so in order to become Orthodox, even if you were going to try to balance their two systematic theologies, let's take Demetri Stanolye, on one hand, and Herman Bobink or Francis Piper on the other, and even if you like what Demetri Stannoloia says, you still can't escape the canonical question

of iconology, forced Iconodulia, this sort of corruption of the gods. by treating Mary as a second sort of transcendental savior that only can approach Jesus through her, or the idea of the exclusivity of the church. And so those three particular problems, in my opinion, ultimately even make it difficult to just simply take what Demetri Stanolya says in his systematic theology or his dogmatic theology said or a Michael Pomazansky versus what you would find in a Herman Bovink, because in, you know, in the Dutch Reformed or in just the reformed traditions in general, you have confessions. And in those confessions, you have a clear statement of what their ecclesiology is.

But you don't have a clear ecclesiology unless you start ransacking Niccia II and all of the various canons and the council of 1672. There's no clear statement of ecclesiology in the Orthodox Church until you find these very uncomfortable things that modern-day Orthodox people want to shy away from unless you find some of the more bold tradition. amongst them. You know, they'll say, yeah, no one else is a Christian and you're only saved if you're in the Orthodox Church. Of course, these churches are typically a part of the World Council of Churches as well. So you'll find the true Orthodox and the Greek, the old calendarists, they'll say, oh, no, even these traditionalist Roe-Corps guys are part of the World Council of Churches, so they're not even truly Orthodox either. So, you know, this sort of chaos that happens over there.

But in the mess that you have in the Protestant world, because they're not exclusivistic, we can appreciate our differences with a spirit of collegiality, I think. that allows us to affirm, yes, I can, this is an important enough issue that it becomes like a, we couldn't share the same church body necessarily, but that doesn't mean I think you're outside of the church itself as the mystical body of Christ. But, you know, we have to, we baptize infants and, and you baptize people upon profession of faith. And we just can't really work out the pastoral kind of issues that might become complicated through that. So you guys can work that out. It's a serious scriptural affirmation. We work it out this way. It's a serious scriptural affirmation. But at the same time, we recognize that there is a basic brotherhood, even though at the administrative level we diversify. That's a really good answer and a good one to finish with. And I think this interview will be really helpful for people who are working through these questions. Josh, I admire you and your courage and your convictions. And it's evident to me as we talk. And I know this is both of our heart as we. We want to honor the truth.

We want to strive for a pure gospel because it's worth doing so. We're trying to do that in a way where that is the goal. We're not just trying to attack or we're trying to avoid any sense of vitriol or anger. But we have to talk about these things, and we can't shy away from the truth because the fact is these things matter immensely. And a lot of people, you know, I think a lot of Protestants are just too, a bit naive, too, maybe. just not coming into these conversations and I think just hearing from you on these topics would just be really helpful for people. So I'm very grateful. Where can people find a copy of your book if they look for it?

Oh, it's on Amazon. That's where it is. Yeah. Just type my name and the title and it ought to be there. Great. So Joshua Schuping disillusioned why I left the Eastern Orthodox priesthood and church. people can find it on Amazon. Thank you, everybody, for watching.

May the Lord bless you and keep you.