This week on the Word of the Lord endures forever, we move further along in the Salter with

Psalms 58 through 60, break their teeth. Deliver me, O God, a refuge in the day of my distress.

Give salvation by your right hand, and with God we shall do valiantly. Join me, Pastor Will Whedon, for the Word of the Lord

indoors forever, your daily 15-minute verse-by-verse Bible study on demand. Listen at

thewordendors.org or your favorite podcast provider. Are there similarities between the East and the West?

And I'm talking here about the church.

There's the Eastern Church, usually referred to under the blanket

term Eastern Orthodoxy, and there's a Western Church, which includes, of course, Roman Catholicism

and all of Protestantism, and depending on how you draw that line, even Lutheranism. Are there

similarities? What are the big differences? Welcome back to Issues Cedar. I'm Todd Wilkin.

It's time for part two of our series on Eastern Orthodoxy. Pastor Joshua Schuping joins us. He spent five years as an Eastern Orthodox priest. He's pastor of St. John's Lutheran Church in Russellville, Arkansas. Joshua, welcome back. Thank you so much for having me back.

How would you summarize areas of agreement between Lutherans and the

Orthodox? Yeah, that's a really, really tough one, to be honest. I rack my brain when I get that

question because there are very few things that we would say we agree 100%.

So we might agree up to, I don't know, what percentage, 70% on this, 80% on that, 90% on that, 30%.

And so when we say, what do we agree with if it's only 30%, what does it mean to affirm that we agree if it's only 30%?

Or if it's up to 70% what does it mean to say that we agree? So we could say that we agree

to be creedal. We affirm the necessity of having creeds, but they condemn our creed as heretical.

So we have this agreement, this overlap where we say we should be creedal, but they condemn our creed

and say we're heretics and blasphemers of God for holding to this creed, because our creed affirms the filiocque.

And we affirm, of course, the Athenation creed, which affirms the filiochae. And we affirm, of course, the Athanasian creed, which

affirms the filiocque. And we don't affirm all of their creeds or their canonical decisions.

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