Very Eastern, Less Orthodox
Stone Choir
Stone Choir
4.8 • 585 Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 2023
⏱️ 160 minutes
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Summary
Hosts
We are told to ‘test the spirits’, and this is a blanket admonition. You should test the things we say on this podcast against the Word of God; you should test the things your pastor says against the Word of God; you should test the things you believe against the Word of God. Yes, there are things that belong to natural revelation — to wisdom that can be gained from exploration of God’s Creation —, but, where Scripture speaks, Scripture is binding and final.
In today’s episode, we will subject Eastern ‘Orthodoxy’ both to Scripture and to natural revelation, which is to say human wisdom derived from God’s good creation. At the end of this episode, we fully believe that you will be left with a simple and unavoidable conclusion: Whatever the EO may have been historically, they are no longer Christian today.
The practice they call ‘hesychastic prayer’ is not prayer, but it is a very real spiritual practice — the problem is that those spirits with which it seeks (and even obtains) communion are not of God, but of an entirely different master. And God has spoken on the matter:
»“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.«
— Matthew 6:7–8 (ESV)
These are not idle or unimportant matters. To believe the things taught by the EO is to endanger one’s soul. If you or anyone entrusted to your care has ever expressed or pursued any interest in the EO, then we strongly encourage you to listen carefully to this episode — perhaps more than once. We also encourage you to ask question, if you have them — we will try to respond promptly.
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Show Notes
See Also
Further Reading
- “Distinction” (Philosophy) [Wikipedia]
- See also Duns Scotus [Wikipedia]
- “Eastern ‘Orthodoxy’”
Parental Warnings
We discuss the demonic in this episode (and also, briefly as an example, sex), so you may wish to screen it before listening to it with your children.
Nota
When speaking of “distinctions”, I deliberately did not mention the difference between “logical“ and “formal” or “conceptual“ distinctions, because that difference was not relevant or helpful for the episode. If you are interested in the philosophy of this, please start with the links under the “Further Reading“ section.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The |
| 0:07.0 | The Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still, whoa. On today's Stone Choir, we are going to be discussing the subject of Eastern Orthodoxy. This is a subject we've had requested many, many times, pretty much since we began doing |
| 0:55.0 | Stone Quire, and we've avoided it nearly as long because, frankly, it's unpleasant to delve |
| 1:00.2 | into, and it's one that's going to get people riled up in ways that are not at all productive. |
| 1:06.0 | But the reason that we're going to discuss it today is that there are a lot of you who are asking |
| 1:10.6 | for the sake of friends who are in the same position as all of us. |
| 1:15.3 | You're in a world that is on fire. |
| 1:17.7 | You see churches that are becoming more faithless by the day. |
| 1:21.3 | And you have friends who are looking around at that and thinking, I need to go find |
| 1:27.4 | real Christianity somewhere |
| 1:28.7 | because I think real Christianity has to be the solution to what I'm seeing in the world. |
| 1:34.7 | And that's absolutely true. |
| 1:35.8 | Like that is a godly impulse of the problem. |
| 1:40.2 | And as we've said in the past, the reason I in particular, and the quarry also spent several years reaching out to men on the right and this political sphere to discuss religion, is that most people, especially if you're kind of starting from a dead stop or you've been away from church for a long time and you probably never paid much attention to begin with. When you look at the state of the various churches, you're probably not equipped |
| 2:07.4 | to judge their theology. And that's not anything to be ashamed of. It's not insulting. You're starting |
| 2:13.3 | from zero. Whatever you know today about whatever church you're going to become interested in, |
| 2:18.5 | you know the least amount today that you will ever know about it for the rest of your life |
| 2:22.7 | because you're going to spend more time learning about it and maybe you like it, maybe you |
| 2:26.2 | don't. If you become more invested, you're going to know a lot more a year from now than you |
| 2:31.3 | do today. The problem is that when someone is starting from zero, |
| 2:35.9 | you don't know how to weigh the various claims, you don't how to weigh the various doctrines. |
| 2:42.0 | And one thing that I noticed years ago on the right was the guys in that situation |
... |
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