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In this episode Trent reveals the most annoying argument Eastern Orthodox apologists make.
Having Trouble Accepting a Church Teaching?
Transcription:
Trent:
Even though Eastern Orthodox Christians only make up 1% of the American and 4% of the global population, I’ve been seeing more posts from them saying Christians should leave their churches and come home to orthodoxy. And some of the reasons these apologists give undermine their own orthodox commitments. So in today’s episode, we’ll look at those reasons and I’ll share my thoughts on engaging in Orthodox polemics and help me do that. I’ve asked Eastern Orthodox priest, father Loren clean work, author of He’s Broken Body Understanding and Healing the Schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches to review today’s script. Alright, the worst arguments Eastern Orthodox apologists make against Catholicism are the ones that would also apply to their own church. And to be clear, what I’m talking about seems to be unique to Eastern Orthodox who spend a lot of time arguing on the internet.
Like many terminally online people, the internet can deaden your ability to think critically. It lulls you into a complacency where you post whatever feels good or based and you don’t stop to think of what you’re posting makes sense. For example, one common post by Eastern Orthodox critics of Catholicism goes like this, the Pope did something the poster doesn’t like or thinks his cringe like blessing of lock of ice at an event about climate change. Therefore, Catholic should become Eastern Orthodox, but cringe isn’t a synonym for heresy and the patriarchs of the Eastern Orthodox Church also do things the poster probably doesn’t like, such as supporting efforts to combat climate change. Plus what’s wrong with the Pope blessing ice given that Catholics and Orthodox bless themselves with holy water all the time. If there are Orthodox priests who bless ballistic missiles, then the Pope can bless frozen water or Orthodox apologists will say, if the Pope makes a doctrinal error, then all of Catholicism is false. And so all of orthodoxy must be true. I saw a lot of posts like this when Pope Leo reaffirmed the Catholic church’s opposition to the death penalty. But Eastern Orthodox patriarchs and even groups like the Orthodox Church in America have opposed the death penalty as well. Here’s a priest on the popular YouTube channel, roots of Orthodoxy.
CLIP:
We don’t believe in abortion. We don’t believe in euthanasia. The death penalty subverts God’s will for a person’s life. Even if the government kills a person in response to a crime, it doesn’t give the person their entire life to repent.
Trent:
Eastern Orthodox apologists say in response that the Pope doing something cringe-worthy or being an error is fatal to Catholicism because of the Pope’s claim to be infallible. The Pope can’t make mistakes they say, however, according to them, the patriarchs and even National Orthodox councils can make mistakes, and so those mistakes can be ignored as they don’t falsify orthodoxy. But Catholicism teaches that the Pope only acts with the charism of infallibility on very rare occasions. Most of the time when he teaches, he teaches authoritatively but not infallibly. So if the Pope were to air when teaching, it wouldn’t falsify Catholicism. So even if the Pope we’re wrong on say the death penalty, he would just be making the same error as the leaders of Eastern Orthodox churches. But I don’t think this bothers many online Eastern Orthodox apologists because the patriarchs and National Orthodox Church councils really serve more as ceremonial figureheads so they can use what looks like a Protestant method of individual doctrinal formation neatly wrapped in the aesthetic of ancient communal tradition to see what I mean consider the issue of whether Catholics and Muslims worship the same God.
I’ve already done a whole episode on that subject where I say I don’t like that specific language, but I affirm Muslims like anyone can know, God exists from reason and direct acts of worship to God. In that episode I addressed Jay Dyer’s arguments that Muslims cannot be said to worship God because they reject God being a trinity. But how does Jay know that he’s correct on this point? Given as I showed to my reply to him that the Greek and Russian patriarchs say Muslims worship God and even saints revered among the Orthodox also say this about monotheistic non-Christians. Watch Jay’s reply to me and notice how he finds assurance that his personal opinion on this doctrinal question is correct,
CLIP:
Even if it were correct, and even if Gregor Niso spoke out of hand, it wouldn’t matter because we aren’t as orthodox bound by every statement that a church father says. We are not bound by the varying cannons that many church fathers propose. We recognize that no bishop is infallible. Every bishop can become a heretic. Every bishop can say things wrong. John says in the book of John, you have an anointing and you know all things. So I don’t need a magisterium to know truth and falsehood because every person who has been mated in the Orthodox church has a direct connection to God.
Trent:
How is that any different than Protestants saying they have the Holy Spirit guiding their personal interpretation of scripture and church history? Now, Orthodox apologists might say they aren’t relying on their personal interpretation because they have an infallible tradition or sacred tradition to guide them. But how do they know the specific contents of that infallible tradition be Orthodox because Catholicism contradicts what I think is true is a bad argument because by their own standards, Eastern Orthodoxy itself may contradict what they think is true or orthodoxy may leave a theological question open and not condemn the Catholic position on the matter. And there are many other cases where I advise Gungho online Eastern Orthodox apologist to stop and reflect for a minute before you try to dunk on Catholicism. For example, Jay Dyer reposted Taylor Marshall lamenting the decline in mass attendance and Dyer said, pap is dying, orthodoxy is exploding.
But the same Pew study Marshall cited that says only 29% of Catholics attend mass weekly says only 23% of Orthodox attend divine liturgy weekly. What about a large number of cafeteria Catholics who disagree with major church teachings? Well, you can find similar rejection of church teaching on issues like abortion and homosexuality in large groups and even majorities of laypeople in predominantly orthodox countries. But what about scandalous liberal Catholic priests? Well, you can find liberal orthodox priests and bishops who create scandal around things like so-called same-sex marriage after some Orthodox priests said that laypeople should not view Jay Dyer’s content. Dyer lashed out at them for not addressing the rampant liberal problems with an orthodoxy. He posted a meme saying that they should focus instead on real problems in the Orthodox world related to abortion, homosexuality and deaconess, one of which was ordained in Zimbabwe under the Alexandrian patriarchy.
Dyer also wants to debate Catholics on Vatican geopolitics as if the Vatican’s political involvement disproves Catholicism. But Eastern Orthodoxy has a long history of secular rulers like the Byzantine Emperor being deeply entrenched in church leadership. Even today, the Russian Orthodox Church is accused of being a propaganda arm for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. However, none of that disproves Eastern Orthodoxy, so similar accusations don’t disprove Catholicism. And if Jay says Catholicism has an infallible charism, so it’s different than orthodoxy, I would respond by pointing out again that the church’s divine guidance does not guarantee every Prudential decision church leaders make will be good or even that all their teachings will be correct. A Catholic teaching that has not been infallibly defined could be an error. If these kinds of teachings did not exist, then it would not make sense to have infallible definitions of doctrine because by this standard all doctrines would be infallible. But they are not all infallible because the Catholic code of Canon law says no doctrine is understood as defined infallibly unless this is manifestly evident. That’s why I said Jay’s complaint about the second Vatican Council saying Muslims worship God does not disprove Catholicism as a whole because even if that teaching were false, it’s not an infallible definition or a dogma that cannot possibly be false. And in some cases, Jay complains about statements from the Vatican that aren’t even church teachings at all.
CLIP:
The actual Vatican source that loft dog mc loft dog pulled up, which refutes what Trent says, the Holy Spirit that guides the church is at work in the religions. The universal presence of the spirit cannot be compared to the presence in the church, although one cannot exclude the salvific value of the false religions. This is the 1997 Vatican document clarifying what you see in Vatican two. So notice they don’t explain things the pop apologists because they have some idea that this is absurd and obviously a contradiction. They don’t explain things the way their Vatican does.
Trent:
The Catholic church often permits theological opinions without officially teaching them. For example, the church permits competing Dominican and Jesuit explanations of predestination without saying one of them just is what the church teaches on predestination. Likewise, the International Theological Commission, which is the document Jay is citing, does not publish official church teaching. Instead, it publishes permitted opinions that have gained a consensus among members of the magisterium. And the document Jay cites is not an error on the point Jay raises because it says salvation quote is not produced independently of Christ in his church. It also does not outright say other religions have Salvi value. It discusses the question of whether we can say non-Christian religions that predispose people to truth have Salvi value. This is why the document talks about the possibility of the existence of salvific elements and says whether the religions as such can have salvific value is a point that remains open.
So that document doesn’t say what Jay claims it says, and it isn’t even an official teaching of the church in that respect. It would be like many documents proposed by Orthodox theologians that Jay or other online apologists might disagree with, but don’t disprove orthodoxy. Now, Jay is correct that Catholics must submit even to the non infallible teachings of the church, including the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. But since those teachings are not infallible, that means in rare cases that Catholic could privately not publicly, but privately fail to accept these teachings if they have a proportionate serious reason for doing so and such, an act would not constitute the grave sin of heresy or the rejection of dogma. And for more on what to do if you think a non infallible teaching is an error, see my colleague Jimmy Akins article on what to do if you’re having trouble accepting a church teaching that’s linked below and all this is just the tip of the iceberg.
If you’d like to see even more examples of poor arguments from popular Orthodox online personalities, check out my colleague Joe Hess Meyer’s response to Father Moses McPherson, which included things like Father Moses saying that sex abuse cases show the gates of hell prevailed against the Catholic Church even though the Orthodox, like most major religious bodies and secular bodies also have abuse scandals. Finally, you may have noticed my channel rarely discusses Eastern orthodoxy, and there’s a reason for that. There are already numerous Catholics who engage Orthodox related content, so I’d rather devote my finite time and energy towards other topics and groups that get less attention. My deepest desire is to reach the greatest number of people who are the furthest away from Jesus Christ. That’s why the first books I ever wrote were on atheism, the furthest away doctrinally from Christ and on abortion because Graves sin makes one the furthest away from Christ from a perspective of salvation.
I want to help as many people as possible come to know the person of Christ, and there are around 2 billion people over world who don’t believe in any religion in the United States. While millennials have become less non-religious, gen Z has sharply increased with nearly half of that generation saying they aren’t religious at all. And globally there’s another 4 billion people who believe in God but not in Christ. So if I were going to spend more time doing research and creating content on other belief systems, it would be the most common ones that deny Christ like Islam or Hinduism. Even in the US, with a generous assumption, there are 1.5 million Eastern Orthodox, there are still twice as many Hindus, three times as many Muslims and four times as many Mormons. So that’s why I would spend more time addressing these non-Christian groups when it comes to those who do know Jesus.
I’m going to focus my limited resources towards sharing the Catholic faith with those who do not have valid sacraments like the Eucharist, because I believe Jesus when he said, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life within you. That’s why I just released a new book called Salvation is from the Catholic Church, and when it comes to Catholics leaving the church, the majority of them, 24% become non-religious, 14% become Protestant and less than 1% become Eastern Orthodox. It might seem like more do this online, but social media algorithms easily distort our perception of reality. I’m also not interested in polemics meant to convert Eastern Orthodox because I’m more interested in promoting ways for Eastern and western apostolic Christians to be in full communion with one another. Pope Leo recently said this on a visit to Turkey.
CLIP:
We must also take inspiration from the experience of the early church in order to restore full communion, a communion which does not imply absorption or domination, but rather an exchange of the gifts received by our churches from the Holy Spirit for the glory of God the Father, and the edification of the body of Christ.
Trent:
I’m genuinely excited at that prospect, which would allow Orthodox churches to function according to their same liturgy while finding a way to restore communion with the Pope. Obviously, this won’t be easy as there are serious theological issues to resolve first, but we should focus on those issues and not issues that apply to both Catholics and Orthodox churches equally and are not essential and just meant for getting clicks and outrage. In the meantime, I’ll be focusing on reaching the most people who are the furthest away from Christ, and I hope online Catholics and Orthodox who spend most of their time debating each other will take a break from that and seek after the other lost sheep, especially the Unbaptized who don’t even know the Good Shepherd. And I appreciate when Dyer and other Eastern Orthodox apologists do this and hope other Christian apologists will engage in similar outreach to those who are furthest from Christ. With that said, I’d like to thank once again follow Lauren Clean work for reviewing this script, and I also recommend his book iParts, which I consider to be the best defense of Mary’s perpetual virginity. Now, if you’d like to support our channel, please support us@trenthornpodcast.com and sign up today for our April 11th conference in dallas@conferenceoftrent.com. Thank you all for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.