How Orthodoxy Saved Me From Myself - A Conversation w/Frederica Mathewes-Green

Hank Unplugged: Essential Christian Conversations

The Christian Research Institute

Education, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.9 • 809 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2017

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

Hank Hanegraaff, host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and president of the Christian Research Institute, makes his debut into podcasting with the first episode of Hank Unplugged by inviting his close friend and best-selling author Frederica Mathewes-Green onto the podcast to discuss Hank's transition into Eastern Orthodoxy, being diagnosed with cancer, and the way that those two situations have impacted one another. Topics discussed include the difference Orthodoxy has made for Hank after being diagnosed with cancer and reordering his life around the divine (11:00); the history of the church, schisms, and the high priestly prayer that we all must be as one (14:00); community memory as a source of Church authority and the perpetuation of Holy tradition in addition to “being biblical” (22:30); the “spiritual gymnasium” found in the Orthodox Church (37:30); the tension Hank feels between wanting the Lord to heal him and wanting the Lord to prune him for His glory as a witness (40:30); the idea of intercession of the community of the saints through prayer and the idea that there are no dead Christians (46:30); and how Hank has staked his whole career and ministry on his belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist (52:30).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, this is a foray into podcasting.
0:28.9	And I have to tell you that for many years, I knew what broadcasting was.
0:35.2	Broadcasting, the Bible Answer Van, broadcast. But I had to have my son David
0:41.9	explained to me what a podcast is. And the way he explained podcasting to me was to let me
0:51.0	listen to podcasts.
1:04.1	And podcasts are very, very interesting because, in a sense, what you are, I'm talking about you listening to me right now, is a fly on the wall.
1:14.2	I don't mean to demean you in any way, but you're listening, as it were, to a conversation that I'm having with some of my closest friends,
1:18.5	some of the people I most admire in the Christian world.
1:20.9	We're going to go deep.
1:28.0	We're going to range broadly in terms of what we discuss.
1:37.7	This is going to be a way of perhaps not so much didactic teaching, although there will be teaching, but this is going to be more of dialogue.
1:42.5	So if you can picture me, sitting back, kicking my feet back, taking my shoes
1:49.3	off, I'm talking to a great friend of mine. Her name is Frederica Matthews Green.
1:58.3	I got to know her as a result of her work. She wrote a book, Welcome to the Orthodox
2:06.4	Church, an introduction to Eastern Christianity. And actually, this was a really interesting book to me
2:14.2	on a lot of different levels. But Frederica has this gift of taking the complex,
2:20.7	make it simple and transferable. So I want to tell a little story, and then I'll get in to my
2:27.1	little discussion here with Frederica. But what's interesting about Frederica is a number of years ago, it's almost three years ago,
2:38.0	I had started going to an Orthodox church, I told my family that I was exploring, keep going to church,
2:44.2	I'm exploring, and I started going to an Orthodox church, and about the fourth week, my family
2:50.3	couldn't handle it anymore.
2:52.7	They wanted to find out what I was doing, why I was doing it.
	...

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