Audio only:
Today, Joe examines the claim that the Catholic Church has changed positions to fit with the times, while Eastern Orthodoxy has remained the same since Christ founded the Church.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to respond to a specific criticism. I’ve heard from some orthodox against Catholicism that Catholicism is guilty of changing and developing unlike unchanging orthodoxy. And the argument goes, the Catholic church is out here changing the mass and changing her moral teachings to look more like current times unlike orthodoxy, which builds itself as staying constant and true throughout the ages.
CLIP:
Something wonderful about orthodoxy that I think sometimes we don’t think about it because we are so used to it and that is the unchanging nature of our church. Our divine liturgy is pretty much the same as it’s been for 2000 years. The liturgy that we are celebrating today is based on the liturgy of St. James of Jerusalem, which is the second century liturgy, and it was written accounts of it. The moral teachings of the church are the same.
Joe:
Now, I love the beautiful traditions in Eastern Orthodoxy and in Eastern Catholicism, and there absolutely is a rich theological and liturgical patrimony that we would be incomplete without. But imagining that orthodoxy is simply unchanging oversimplifies history in some important ways. In fact, Catholicism has held the line of little O orthodoxy while Eastern Orthodoxy seems to have compromised with the world in some important ways. Now, speaking of compromise, I plan to never compromise this show by accepting ads, and I’m able to do that because of your generous support over@shamelessjoe.com. So instead of me doing an ad read for some other guy, I just rattle the cup every Tuesday and so many of you are responding with wonderful generosity. I try to repay that generosity with cool perks like ad free episodes that drop a day early livestream q and as show notes, and I’ve got some other perks that are in the works as well.
But just know this, your support truly makes a huge difference to the channel, so thank you to everybody who gives all of you sharing your hard earned cash and your spare change. Speaking of change, when people talk about unchanging orthodoxy, I think it’s worth asking first, what is it you mean hasn’t changed? Because sometimes people mean liturgically, and that is partially true. The core structure of the Eucharistic sacrifice, which is offered by priests in both Catholicism and in Orthodoxy goes back 2000 years. We find that basic structure described for instance by St. Justin Martyr in his first apology in the mid one hundreds, but that doesn’t mean that every prayer in the liturgy is that old. On the contrary, whether we’re talking about the mass in the West or the divine liturgy in the East, there’ve been a lot of liturgical changes throughout the past to millennia as proto Presbyter Thomas Hoko points out in a book featured on the Orthodox Church in America’s own website, the present form of both the liturgy of St.
John Chris system and liturgy of St. Basil the great, these go back to the Middle Ages sometime after the ninth century, not to the time of Christ, and anybody familiar with the history of the various forms of the Eastern liturgy will know that some of the liturgical changes in the last 2000 years have been controversial. For instance, the Russian Orthodox Church had a series of controversial modernizing liturgical reforms in the 17th century going so far as to anesthetize the old believers who wouldn’t go along with them. Now, to be clear, calyx and Orthodox share a beautiful and ancient liturgical heritage. I’m not claiming otherwise, but claiming that your particular way of celebrating the liturgy is the one that goes back 2000 years is overs simplistic and it’s just not true. It’s not historically credible in both cases, east and West, the Eucharistic liturgy blends both newer and older prayers as we offer the body and blood of Christ to the Father. Okay, what about the idea that Orthodox is unchanging theologically? Some Orthodox will accuse Catholics of caving to modernity on, for instance, issues of sexual morality, and in fairness to those critics, there absolutely are Catholics who want to see Christchurch change its teachings. But let’s consider two of the biggest threats that Christianity has faced on sexual morality. The first involves Jesus’s radical teaching on divorce and remarriage as the Orthodox priest. Father Josiah Trium so beautifully puts it, Jesus’s teaching on this score is just radically countercultural.
CLIP:
When Jesus taught his disciples what true marriage was, they were completely scandalized. As a matter of fact, the apostles, these aren’t just the normal people, these are his closest disciples. When they listened to Jesus’ teaching about the permanence of marriage, about the fact that fidelity was non-negotiable, that there was no such thing as divorce, they were so scandalized that they said to him, Lord, if marriage is like this, it’s better not to get married. Jesus lifted up Christian marriage and explained that it is inviable that divorce and remarriage is adultery.
Joe:
I genuinely could not have said it better myself. I did try on a few shameless popery episodes that I’m going to link to in the description, but the reality is this, there are a handful of times where Jesus presents a teaching that is just so radical, so countercultural that even people in the gospel itself point this out. Jesus’s eucharistic teaching is a good example of this. His own disciples respond by saying, this is a hard saying who can listen to it? So we know that whatever it is Jesus is saying about the Eucharist in John six, it’s got to be shocking. It’s got to be hard to believe that’s a big red flag. If for instance, you think the Eucharist is just a symbol, Jesus using a symbol isn’t particularly shocking or hard to believe. Well, similarly here, whatever it is that Jesus is teaching about divorce and remarriage is so shocking that the apostles literally respond by saying, if such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.
CLIP:
When they heard this, they said it’s better not to get married. And he didn’t say, Hey, you’re misunderstanding me, guys. No, he said, let him who can accept the teaching accept it.
Joe:
So what was it that made Jesus’s teaching on marriage so radical? Well, in his day, there were two schools of Jewish thought on divorce. One school said that you could divorce and remarry for any reason. The other said you could divorce and remarry, but only in a serious case like adultery. But Jesus rejects both schools of thought. He teaches instead that the only reason the mosaic law had ever permitted divorce was due to the hardness of the people’s heart, and that from the beginning it was not. So that is sin in marriage. The two become one flesh. What God has joined together, let not man put asunder, and Jesus gives his own teaching in no uncertain terms. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. Now, in the version of Jesus’s words that appear in Matthew’s gospel, you’re going to also find language including a clause except for pornea. Now, pornea is a Greek word for sexual deviancy and for fornication, and this has led many people to claim that Jesus made
CLIP:
A
Joe:
Very tiny exception, but I’d argue that this exception isn’t really an exception at all. The word porneia is not the Greek word for adultery. When Jesus says, people who divorce and remarry commit adultery, he uses that term laia. But when he talks about the so-called exception, he uses a different word. So whatever that word means, he’s clearly distinguishing it from wia, from adultery. So what is pornea? Well, it’s a term for fornication, as I said, but it’s also the word that the Jews used for gentile marriages that they regarded as invalid, and so that harmonizes perfectly with Jesus’s teaching in the gospel of Mark. If God has joined you and your spouse together, you’re not to get divorced and remarried for any reason, but if you’re in a sham marriage, one not recognized by God, then that teaching obviously doesn’t apply to you. So Jesus’s teaching seems to me is clear.
It is admittedly tough. Well, how does the Eastern Orthodox Church handle this? As the Orthodox church in America explains? The Eastern Orthodox Church does permit divorced individuals to marry a second and even a third time. Now, they stress that this is penitential, but it sounds a lot like they’re creating a new exception for divorce and remarriage due to the hardness of our hearts, the very thing Jesus is cracking down on and the Orthodox teaching isn’t rooted in scripture, but rather they appeal to the tome of union, a local council in Constantino in nine 20. It’s a complicated case involving a widowed Roman emperor who had three dead wives and then wanted to get married to his mistress, and the local church there responded by permitting second and third marriages in various contexts and forbidding fourth marriages. Now, Orthodox spirituality often lays out a high moral bar and then permits spiritual fathers and the bishop to exercise a principle called okia in which they can dispense in specific cases.
And that’s not itself a bad principle. You call people to a rigorous rule of fasting and then you make exceptions, for example, for the elderly in the infirm. We Catholics actually do something similar because we’re mindful of the fact as the last line of the code of Canon law says that the salvation of souls is the supreme law, but here’s the rub. While that works for mere church law, you cannot dispense from the law of God like that. You don’t have the authority to. You can’t just create an exception clause to God’s law like the Pharisees did when they created an exception for corban. In fact, there’s a danger with starting with an unrealistically high moral principle as well as the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe warm. The danger is that principles that are mistakenly high and strict are a trap. They may easily lead in the end directly or indirectly to the justification of monstrous things.
A lot of ideas that sound really good on paper as ideals don’t work in practice and in fact lead to worse results. If you act as if all private property is theft, you’re not in a good place to distinguish between just and unjust economic practices. If you preach strict pacifism, you’re not in a good place to distinguish a just war from an unjust war or just conduct from unjust conduct in a war, and you risk turning Christianity from a severe impractical religion into a beautifully ideal but impracticable one, and that is exactly what seems to have happened with the Orthodox teaching on marriage. They didn’t start out by lowering the bar of Jesus’s teaching. They actually started out by raising it.
CLIP:
Orthodoxy is strictly adherent to marital monogamy. The marriage of one husband with one wife is considered to be an icon of the union of Christ with the church, and I want to emphasize that orthodoxy resists deviations from this norm, even for widows who lose spouses to sudden death.
Joe:
Now, widows remaining celibate after the death of their spouses is a beautiful ideal. St. Paul speaks of widows who even made a pledge not to remarry what would later be called the order of widows, but he’s clear this is voluntary celibacy for the kingdom. Paul is explicit that like the unmarried widows are otherwise free to remarry. But if you treat widows remarrying as a kind of adultery, then it looks like Paul is now saying adultery is sometimes okay, and that quickly opens the door to allowing actual adultery pretty quickly. You’ve got this idea that the church can excommunicate you and then give you a sacramental remarriage even while your real spouse is still alive.
CLIP:
Orthodoxy does permit second and even third marriages at the discretion of the bishop with the understanding that remarriage is a deviation from this norm and necessitates repentance on the part of those entering into it. Historically speaking, a person who wanted to remarry was excommunicated for seven years according to Byzantine canon law before the bishop would consider a sacramental remarriage.
Joe:
But if a divorce and remarriage is adultery, as Jesus says, there can be no such thing as a sacramental adultery any more than you could have sacramental same-sex marriage or sacramental fornication or fill in the blank. Until recently, that moral laxity extended only to the laity. Priests were actually expected to just be the husband of one wife, but orthodoxy is beginning to crack here as well. 2025 saw the first C noal benediction of remarriage from a divorce clergyman. Okay, and what about contraception? Historically, all Christians stood united against the evil of contraception within marriage, recognizing that it changes the nature of the life-giving union of husband and wife in a radical and destructive way as late as 1920, even the Anglicans were denouncing the evils of contraception, although they would go on to reverse that position pretty markedly in 1930. But the Orthodox Church has also broken with tradition on this matter.
In 2020, the Greek Orthodox Church announced that the Orthodox Church has no dogmatic objection to the use of safe and non abortifacient contraceptives within the context of married life. In the stand of the Orthodox church on controversial issues, father Stanley Haras acknowledges this as a new view that is not in continuity with earlier Orthodox teaching, but more shockingly, in that same 2020 document, the Greek Orthodox Church announced that it has no objection even to married couples using in vitro fertilization, so long as the resulting embryos are not destroyed. The Russian Orthodox Church followed suit in 2021, releasing a draft document saying that it’s now okay with the possibility of IVF for spouses of childbearing age. Now look, once again, Eastern Orthodoxy has done a wonderful job of holding fast to much of Christian tradition, both liturgical and moral, and we have a beautiful and tremendous shared patrimony. But it’s just not accurate to say that Orthodox Christianity has always held the line, always remained unchanging on some of the most important moral issues of the day. Orthodoxy is the one that is caved and now takes positions that cannot be harmonized either with traditions or the clear and challenging words of Jesus Christ. But the Orthodox aren’t alone on this. They’re not the only ones who try to read into our Lord’s words wiggle room that simply doesn’t belong there.
CLIP:
I believe that the Bible provides four grounds for divorce with the assumption that the person would get remarried. The first is adultery. Jesus says that if a spouse commits adultery, then the other spouse has the option to divorce and remarry. However, we must always remember that reconciliation is always preferred if the offending spouse is truly repentant.
Joe:
Again, Jesus doesn’t say we should prefer reconciliation over divorce and remarriage as if it’s a case of plan a verse plan B. No, he says divorce and remarriage is adultery, and he doesn’t just prefer marriage to adultery, he commands it. So if you’re struggling with that challenging commandment, I would encourage you to check out this video in which I go into greater depths about what Jesus means and why and how we can live that out. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.