Fr. Thomas Soroka: Welcome to Ancient Faith Today. This is Fr. Tom Soroka, and I’m so glad you’re with us this evening. We’ll be taking your calls in a bit, at 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. Trudi will be answering your calls tonight, so please make sure to turn the show volume off before you come on air. To participate online, we encourage you to go either to the AFR Facebook page, at facebook.com/ancientfaithradio and place a question there for the thread for tonight’s show where it is now being live simulcast; or you can also go to facebook.com/ancientfaithtoday and place your question there in the thread for tonight’s show. You can also send us an email at aft@ancientfaith.com, and you can also submit questions in the stories at Instagram. So let’s get started.

Tonight we are continuing our occasional episodes called the “Answering Objections” series. These episodes are specifically designed to address particular works online by non-Orthodox apologists that are directed toward the Orthodox Church. They are in no way meant to be a comprehensive look at the doctrines of the various heterodox denominations, but rather to answer, with love and with truth, specific objections raised about Orthodoxy by the non-Orthodox presenters.

In this episode, we’ll turn our attention toward Lutheranism. While the various Lutheran bodies in the United States have seen a recent steep decline, their worldwide presence is significant, numbering almost 80 million adherents. Lutheran bodies in the United States vary greatly in the way they present and interpret Lutheran doctrines, but there is no denying that classical Lutheranism is at the very heart of the Protestant Reformation away from the Roman Catholic Church, led by Martin Luther.

So tonight we’ll be answering the ideas presented in a video entitled “Five Reasons Why I’m Not Eastern Orthodox,” presented by a Lutheran pastor. Again, this is not meant in any way to be an attack on the presenter, but rather for us to present well-reasoned answered to the ideas in specific presentations.

So, with that, I would like to welcome to our program two excellent guests tonight who will answer those objections: Fr. Gregory Hogg from Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Fr. Gregory is an affiliate professor of philosophy at Grand Valley State University. He was a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor and professor for 22 years before coming to the Orthodox faith. And we also have with us Fr. Basil Biberdorf, a mission priest of the Orthodox Church in America. He’s leading the St. Nektarios Mission in Waxahachie, Texas. Fr. Basil was also a former member and seminarian of the Luther Church (Missouri Synod). So, with that, Fr. Gregory and Fr. Basil, welcome to Ancient Faith Today!

Fr. Gregory Hogg: Thank you.

Fr. Basil Biberdorf: Thank you.

Fr. Tom: Good. Great to have you. So what I would like to do, if we could go first with Fr. Gregory. We do want to get to the questions, and we have questions that are piling up online. We already had several that have been submitted, but we do want to get to the questions or the points submitted in the video.

Fr. Gregory, if I could ask you, could you give us a brief presentation about your journey to the Orthodox faith? Of course, you were a professor and a pastor for many years. Why did you come to the Orthodox faith?

Fr. Gregory: Alasdair MacIntyre has a book called Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in which he discusses competing traditions, and he says somewhere near the end: When someone is in a tradition and encounters obstacles that they can’t answer, and then discovers a different tradition where either those things are answered easily or they don’t even arise as questions, it creates a crisis. In the margin of that book, I have written, “This is the story of my life.” [Laughter] So there were certain issues arising in the Missouri Synod where I was back in the day, and they didn’t seem to be solvable, and I spent about 22 years trying to be as faithful a Lutheran as I could, and it was just not a sustainable situation, I thought.

Fr. Tom: And I assume we’re going to get into some of those issues. Was the issue, or were the issues, excuse me, doctrinal for you, or was it more about morals and social practices, or a little bit of both?

Fr. Gregory: I was looking for the Church. For me, the issues were ecclesiastical. In other words, there are people who come to Orthodoxy because of the doctrine, from Lutheranism, but my experience is there are always the debating points to be made, but there’s no debating what happened to the Church that Christ started. As one of my parishioners used to say, “If you’re Martin Luther looking forward, you see 33,000 different options; if you’re Martin Luther looking backwards, you see two.” It makes it pretty simple.

Fr. Tom: Wow. Very interesting. Fr. Basil, tell us about your journey to the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Basil: Well, mine started a bit earlier I guess than Fr. Gregory’s did. For me, I was already a seminarian and was getting a lot of good exposure to patristic thought and a deeper understanding of the scriptural language. My issues, similar to what Fr. Gregory said, were not initially dogmatic or theological reasons so much as the Lutheran insistence, in particular, on sola scriptura, and for me the basic question then becomes: If we know that the holy Scriptures did not fall out of the sky—they’re not our version of a Quran or something—if we know that, and we can actually go to Walmart and purchase a reasonably accurate translation of the Scriptures without a bunch of spurious books in it, if we can trust the people who gave us that, then why can’t we trust them in other things? So that just sort of spun wider and wider and wider until I was ultimately reading things like St. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, where he specifically condemns those who reject the unwritten tradition simply by pointing out that everything they’re already doing—I mean, huge chunks of what they are doing is from the unwritten tradition.

Fr. Tom: Right, right, exactly. And I think that’s a difficult… It’s the perspective with which people come to the faith that I find is most difficult to have inquirers understand, because if they look at the Church as simply a body of doctrines, then it becomes this constant exercise of answering questions instead of the Church into which you enter and experience. And of course doctrines are important questions, and the Scriptures. But I find this, until people understand that they’re actually entering the Church and not simply an organization that has certain beliefs, that the journey becomes very difficult.

Fr. Gregory: Bingo.

Fr. Tom: Okay. So let’s go ahead and look at the five reasons that the presenter—whom I have tremendous respect for… And we’re not going to mention him by name; this is not about him; this is not about his personality or anything like that. It’s just about the ideas, because it’s an influential video; it’s been viewed tens of thousands of times, and we wanted to be able to give that an answer.

So the first reason that the presenter gives in this Lutheran video is about the apophatic way of doing theology, and that’s what he says that he has an objection to the Orthodox approach of theology. Now, as I mentioned in our show notes to you and so forth, I think that maybe he overstates the idea of… We’re not exclusively apophatic—but, Fr. Gregory, I’m going to start with you. Tell our listeners, please, just what apophatic theology is or what that means. And how would you answer him regarding the idea of Orthodoxy and apophatic theology?

Fr. Gregory: Okay, so there’s two ways to do theology. Apophatic, literally speaking away from, and then cataphatic, literally speaking according to. Apophatic is what we might call negative, the way, via negativa, to use the Latin expression; and then cataphatic is affirming things. So, for example, I say: God is just. When I say God is just, I’m making an affirmation about God: that would be cataphatic. But the apophatic thing has to be added in, by saying when I say God is just, I don’t mean God is just the way people are just. We need to do that in order to preserve the Creator-creation distinction.

The other aspect, the other reason for apophatic theology, is because the holy Fathers teach we can never know God in his essence. The Scripture says, “He who dwells in light unapproachable”—not just unapproached, but unapproachable. Therefore, when we speak affirmatively, we speak about what we might call the energies of God. But for example John of Damascus will say, “If you say God exists, then nothing else exists. If you say that other things exist, that God doesn’t exist,” not that he has no existence at all, but that his existence… the Fathers sometimes call him super-essential, to show that we’ve got to be careful in our language about God.

Fr. Tom: Right, right. Fr. Basil, how would you approach this question about apophatic theology and the objection toward it? Which, again, I want to put out there my own two cents and say it’s a rather curious thing to object to, but how would you answer this as it’s presented?

Fr. Basil: Well, coming from a Lutheran angle, and I believe the person that you’re talking about a little bit has… in listening to it, I identified the same tendency, and that is there is a persistent desire among Lutherans to be able to systematically talk about God, to talk about things of the faith, even at the finest detail, down to the finest level. And they truly end up putting themselves in knots because, to use an example, we talk about the holy Mysteries. For us, we say the prayer; we believe that they’re truly the body and blood of Christ and so forth, and yet our term for them is Mysteries.

Whereas the Lutherans have repeatedly caught themselves up in little debates, I mean, significant ones. I mean, they were almost ready to unite with the Zwinglians, the Reformed, except they disagreed on this one point. And in the case of the Lutherans, they end up with all of these kinds of things about, well, no, it’s not like eating a slab of meat. And I’m not exaggerating! These are the kinds of things that they end up doing, and it’s because, in my opinion, they continually want to… They never want to back off. They never want to back off and leave some things in the knowledge of God, that we do not know. That at best we get some limited comprehension of it.

Fr. Tom: Right. I’m reminded of the prayers that we say during the anaphora of St. John Chrysostom. “You are incomprehensible, immutable…” These terms show that somehow human language is… We can say what we can say, because the Lord has given us that revelation, but there are things that we can’t say, because the language will always fall short. How do you express a being that is beyond being? I just found the objection to be very odd, if you’re going to pick the top five, why that would be one of them. But I love that you both pointed out this idea of wanting to know, wanting to explain things in great detail.

1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. And we’d love to have anyone call in if you have a particular question for Fr. Gregory or Fr. Basil. We do have some questions that came in. So before we go to the next point, gentlemen, I would like to maybe just toss a couple of these questions to you. The first one is from a reader—a listener, excuse me—on Instagram. And it says: Why are there only two sacraments in Lutheranism, and why do they reject the five others? Why are there only two sacraments in Lutheranism? Why do they reject the five others? Fr. Gregory, you want to give that one a go?

Fr. Gregory: So Lutherans don’t have as precise a definition of sacraments as, say, Reformed do. We often say that there are two sacraments in Lutheranism, but some Lutherans would recognize, for example, ordination sacramentally and perhaps also confession. So I wouldn’t say that Lutherans… This is a matter of definition of terms, I think, more than it is a matter of substance. They will reject, for example, unction because that was not dominically instituted; it wasn’t instituted by the Lord is their claim. Likewise they would reject chrismation as a sacrament. But Lutherans’ understanding of sacraments is not quite as crystallized as the question might imply.

Fr. Tom: I see. Okay. Very good. Now, there is another question that came in. Fr. Basil, I don’t know if you want to try to take this one in. And it says: Should we blame Luther for not advocating for Orthodoxy in his feud with Rome? So I guess this speaks to the lack of redirecting his energies to “the East” and just being concerned with Roman issues. Can you speak to that a little bit, Fr. Basil?

Fr. Basil: Well, I think that that one is a hugely complicated question simply because of what was going on historically at the time. Luther’s own crisis of faith occurred, his tower experience that led him to become a monk and so forth. That I don’t think all of this can be laid at Luther’s feet, and this is an issue that I’ve raised in other discussions, because I think it requires a great deal of nuance, as you’re suggesting, in order to really address Luther here.

For example, if it is the desire of some to criticize Luther, for example, for his 95 Theses and so forth in there, okay, so you wish to criticize that. Does that mean that you support indulgences, that that’s a valid theological category? So I would say that in many ways Luther was a product of his own education, his own Augustinian order, and the Augustinian theology that was very informative in shaping him, the philosophical background that he had.

And then, on top of all of that, what was going on in the East at the time, the logical connection would be, of course, would be to talk to the Greeks, but Constantinople fell in 1452, fully half a century before Luther, and so the Greek Church in many ways had its own problems and were limited and constrained in numerous ways. They were not… They could not interact fully freely and in all the kind of ways that, by comparison, the Westerners could at the time. So I think that that really complicates that scenario a great deal.

Fr. Gregory: Yeah, Luther himself has had some positive things to say about Orthodoxy. He noted that the Greeks were fully Christian. So, well, there you have it.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, isn’t there sort of a curious… I never knew if it was spurious or genuine. There’s some kind of meme going around that says that Luther said that, among all the Christians, the Greeks have it right, or something like that. Do either of you know if that is true or not, that he actually wrote this or said this? Have you ever seen that meme?

Fr. Gregory: I’ve seen the meme. I don’t remember the exact quote, but I can say that I can’t recall a single negative thing he says about the Orthodox Church, ever.

Fr. Basil: Ever. I’m of the same opinion. And to add, just briefly to that, to add to that, from Luther’s perspective, he knew for a fact that some of the things going on among the Orthodox were different than what the Roman Church, that he was busy taking on, he knew that they had some practices and dogmas that differed.

Fr. Tom: I guess the distance, the travel, the lack of communication would have made that extremely difficult. Of course, we know about the later correspondence between Constantinople and what university is it?

Fr. Gregory: The Tübingen theologians.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, the Tübingen scholars, which eventually sort of fizzled out. Gentlemen, we have a caller on the line, and I believe it is Patrick. Is that right, Matushka Trudi? Hi, Patrick. Welcome to Ancient Faith Today. You’re on the line with Fr. Basil and Fr. Gregory.

Patrick: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. I’m actually a former Lutheran who converted to Orthodoxy. But something I wanted to ask, just looking back at my days as a Lutheran, something I never understood, to kind of piggy-back off of the last question regarding the Lutheran view of the sacraments, is that I think Luther said in the Babylonian captivity of the Church that he didn’t regard—I think he calls it extreme unction—to be a sacrament because it doesn’t fit the definition of… that we kind of see in the Lutheran confessions with the word and the physical element, or the external sign and the promise. But what’s odd is that… And I know that Lutherans regard it as Antilegomena, but in the epistle of St. James, I think we do kind of see the external sign of oil and then the promise, the remission of sins.

But what was…? How do Lutherans usually explain this even with kind of that definition of the sacrament that they use being in St. James’ epistle regarding holy unction?

Fr. Tom: Fr. Gregory, you want to start? What’s the definition, the Lutheran definition, of a sacrament? And why do they exclude unction?

Fr. Gregory: Well, I would just go back to what I said earlier about unction, and that is because it was not dominically instituted, their claim is. It occurs in the epistle of James. Both baptism and Eucharist are instituted by Christ. So that would be a reason they would not recognize that as a sacrament.

Patrick: Thank you.

Fr. Gregory: But it has an outward element and it has the promise, but it doesn’t have the dominical institution.

Patrick: Mmm. I see. Okay.

Fr. Basil: Well, I would add to what Fr. Gregory said, that Luther was very much shaped by the Augustinian formulation as well, that it is the combination of the word with the physical element. It is the Word and the Spirit of God coming upon that that makes it a sacrament. So in baptism you have water and the Word of God, and in the Eucharist you’ve got of course bread and wine and similar, but in his case he didn’t think that that was really the case with the others. And of course he didn’t have a very high view of St. James’ epistle anyway, so there’s that, too.

Fr. Tom: [Laughter] I was going to ask that. Is that an official sort of Lutheran doctrine, though? I mean, what do they do with that statement of Martin Luther that James, what, is an epistle of straw or something like that?

Fr. Gregory: They receive James. They study James. I have one of my former seminary professors, one of the most beloved professors I’ve ever had, actually wrote his commentary on James, the apostle of faith, specifically to in many ways kind of push back on Luther. So I think there is always the need to separate Luther from Lutheranism, but I do think that, especially at the time that the Reformation was going on, Luther’s opinion held quite a bit of weight.

Fr. Tom: Interesting. Patrick, any other questions or comments?

Patrick: No, that covers it. Thank you all very much.

Fr. Tom: Great. Thank you for calling. Appreciate it. 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346.

We also have a question that came in—there were several questions that came in on a recorded line—we call it Speakpipe. We want to remind all of our listeners that if you are a little bit shy about calling in, but you want to get your question on air, you can also go to ancientfaith.com/live, click on any of the shows there that you want to record a question for, and then you’ll be able to send that directly to the show. Matushka Trudi, I’m going to ask you to play the question from Jake who is a former Lutheran, and he has a question regarding infant communion and veneration of icons. Let’s listen to that now.

Jake: Hi, Fr. Tom. This is Jake listening in northern Colorado. I’m a former Lutheran who is now Orthodox, and I’m so glad you’re doing tonight’s program on answering objections to Orthodoxy. I would love it if it would be possible for the guests to maybe address two questions, two common objections that I hear from Lutherans. The first one is when a Lutheran sees the veneration of icons, or Orthodox asking the saints to pray for us. This raises a lot of red flags for them. Would the guests be able to maybe unpack some of the scriptural background and theological background to help any Lutherans who are listening understand better the Orthodox understanding and approach to this question?

And then also, infant communion is something that often is very attractive to a Lutheran who’s looking at Orthodoxy, but at the same time there’s some cognitive dissonance, and they’ll look at things like 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul says to examine yourself, and they see that Orthodoxy stresses that too for adults, but at the same time Orthodoxy will commune infants who, from the Lutheran point of view, cannot examine themselves. So if the guests could maybe explain how Orthodox understand 1 Corinthians 11 and why it’s still permissible to commune infants in light of that. I think that would help to answer a very common objection that I hear from many Lutherans. Thank you.

Fr. Tom: All right, thank you, Jake. Fathers, I’m going to ask you to pass right now on the veneration of icons, because that’s in our list and we’re going to get to that after the break. But can you speak to, right now, the idea of infant communion? And again, forgive me because I’m ignorant regarding this: is infant communion and communion to children a practice in the various Lutheran churches?

Fr. Basil: Well—this is Fr. Basil, and I would say that traditionally, let’s say up to 20-30 years ago, I would say the broad trend was typically that most Lutheran kids went through confirmation somewhere in the middle school years, so grades five through grades eight, somewhere in there, and then they typically participate in communion for the first time following their confirmation, which itself is kind of an interesting thing, that they would have what they would rate as a non-sacrament, confirmation, to be established as a prerequisite for participating in the Eucharist. The more recent trend has to push that younger, probably in toward elementary school, and there has been a movement in some Lutherans to move back to infant communion, but that has been pretty much nixed every time that it’s really gotten any kind of traction.

The basic response that I have to it—and this should appeal to the Lutherans—and that is Augustine himself defended communion of infants. He makes the point that, yes, they’re infants, but they’re Christ’s members. They’re infants; they receive the sacraments. They’re infants; they share in this table in order to have life in themselves. And that’s from Homily 174. So that’s a very big kind of thing.

Now, to that I would add that the general Lutheran objection to communing infants is based on the fact that they cannot make a confession; they cannot examine themselves and confess anything about what it is they’re partaking of, that there is no rational process there. To which the only response—well, one of the only response I have had is that by that standard, a huge number of our older members, those suffering dementia, strokes, other sorts of brain damage, and so forth, should be denied as well; those with congenital defects such as Down Syndrome, I mean, all of them should be cut off—and that, compared to Christ saying, “Suffer not the little children to come unto me…” Yeah, I simply reject that notion. This was actually a big deal for my family, because I had a newborn when a lot of this was really coming to a head for me.

Fr. Tom: Fr. Gregory, thoughts about infant communion and Lutheranism?

Fr. Gregory: When Lutheran pastors call me and say they’re thinking about infant communion, I always thought, “How much longer until you become Orthodox, then?” [Laughter] Because this is an issue that just seems to be… This is one of those issues that pushes people much further towards Orthodoxy, especially when it’s resisted by Lutherans, which is inconsistent, I would argue, with their view of the sacraments as means of grace.

Fr. Basil: Absolutely.

Fr. Gregory: Where they make self-examination almost a thing you have to do in order to receive the Eucharist. And, as I like to point out, in 1 Corinthians 11, about the self-examination, there were certain grown-ups misbehaving in the liturgical assembly. Why are we blaming the kids for what the grown-ups are doing? Not every time you have a commandment is it meant to be understood universally. So when he said, “Let a man examine himself and so eat,” he’s talking to grown-ups, and even Luther himself said that explicitly, that he’s not talking about children there.

But when my kids were little, I used to say to them, “Never cross the street without Mom and Dad.” Now if they called me on the phone to say, “Is it okay to cross the street?” I’d be like: “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you understand how language works?” [Laughter]

Fr. Basil: And one more thing there, simply because I’ve heard this accusation from a number of Lutherans, that they do talk about our mechanism for communing infants. For those listeners who don’t know, we use a liturgical spoon for giving the body and blood. And I’ve actually heard this likened to force-feeding, which has always struck me as among the most absurd accusations. If you’re feeding your child cereal for the first time, are you force-feeding it? Yes, it’s a new experience for the children, and I’ve baptized two infants in the last eight days, so I’m thrilled to get to commune them, but it’s an amazing thing.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, but I would say any parent that loves their child is going to feed their kid breakfast. I mean, unless you consider feeding your child three times a day force-feeding them, I don’t know why we would consider the Eucharist anything else.

All right. Thank you very much for those answers. 1-855-AF-RADIO. We are talking about Lutheranism. We’re answering the objections by Lutheran apologists. We’re speaking with Fr. Gregory Hogg and Fr. Basil Biberdorf. We’re going to take a quick break; come right back and listen to more!

Fr. Tom: Welcome back. We’re speaking with Fr. Gregory Hogg and Fr. Basil Biberdorf about answering objections by Lutherans. Fathers, let’s get to the second point in the presentation. Thank you for—we took a little side journey there; we answered some other questions. The second point in the presentation by this Lutheran scholar is his objection to what he calls “neo-Platonic theosis,” and essentially that his claim is St. Gregory Palamas took “theosis” in a direction that was not intended by St. Ignatius and St. Athanasius who of course were much earlier in their explanation of theosis. So he sees theosis as a redemptive historical economic action instead of what he claims is a neo-Platonic sense of St. Gregory Palamas.

Now I want our listeners to… Some people might be thinking, “Whoa, that’s way too much!” But just hang on. This is very, very important that we understand this. Fathers, who would like to take that question first?

Fr. Gregory: I’m sorry, I got cut off for just a minute.

Fr. Tom: Oh, I’m sorry. Fr. Gregory, are you there now?

Fr. Gregory: I am now, yes.

Fr. Tom: Okay, so we’re talking about the second point in the video, and that is the idea of his objection to “neo-Platonic theosis,” the idea that St. Gregory Palamas’s understanding of theosis goes far beyond what Ss. Ignatius and Athanasius intended. How would you respond to that?

Fr. Gregory: I don’t think he would have read St. Gregory Palamas. [Laughter] I mean, I was just reading The Triads, or The 150 Chapters the other day, and he develops all of this out of completely biblical and patristic texts and not at all neo-Platonic philosophy. But I might add that in terms of the relationship of neo-Platonism to the Church—there are probably scholars that are way better at this than [I am], like David Bradshaw in Kentucky, but neo-Platonism, which would have just been Platonism back in the day, dealt with issues like the problem of evil, for example, and also the Platonic or neo-Platonic authors were also strongly against the Gnostics. So it’s not uncommon for Christians to make use of what they used to call the “Egyptian spoils” principle for developing Christian ideas.

The other thing to note is that Orthodoxy alone, I think, explicitly rejects Platonism in the Synodikon, which is confessed once a year. So, I mean, it’s kind of laughable that they would have that idea. Just because Plato says something doesn’t make it wrong either, by the way.

Fr. Tom: Okay. Fr. Basil, anything to add there?

Fr. Basil: I don’t have a ton to add to that except, of course, to remind everyone that Augustine himself was strongly in the line of neo-Platonic thinkers, at least usually regarded that way, and was, again, a huge influence on Luther as a man and upon the Lutheran simples, the confessions.

Fr. Tom: Interesting. Okay, very good. Let’s move on to the next question. I want to remind our callers—our listeners, if you’d like to call in, please call 1-855-AF-RADIO, or you can drop your question into one of the threads for tonight’s show.

So the third objection that he gives—and this one, of course, may be the foundation of all Protestant preaching and thought—and that is what he says is Orthodoxy’s lack of the idea of justification as a forensic concept, which he reads in St. Paul. In other words, Orthodoxy ignores the idea of justification or being made righteous simply as a mechanism of a legal understanding in St. Paul. Fr. Basil, let’s start with you and then let’s go to Fr. Gregory on this particular question.

Fr. Basil: Well, I think that… The doctrine of justification has always been one of those challenges for me, and of course the notion of forensic justification is the idea that man is either declared righteous or… or not. And it is in salvation in this legal sense of being declared righteous. And typically Lutherans make a distinction between justification, which is the declaration of righteousness, and sanctification, which is actually the growing in virtue and spiritual life and so forth in accordance with that. So they usually separate those things, and I think that separation ultimately ends up being, well, first and foremost, extremely artificial, simply because Christ himself doesn’t talk that way. The woman taken in adultery is the classic one, where she’s forgiven but then: “Go and sin no more.” And this goes on in a lot of different places. The presupposition in the Christian life is that, yes, our sins are forgiven by the grace of God, but that does not preclude that there is anything we do. There is a human component to that.

So in many ways this forensic justification becomes also an attack on Orthodox synergism, which is I think an issue. Well… I need to get my next thought together.

Fr. Tom: Are Lutherans monergists?

Fr. Gregory: Yes, absolutely.

Fr. Tom: They are? Okay.

Fr. Basil: So, Fr. Gregory, why don’t you take it for a moment? because I had another thought or two, but it just evaporated.

Fr. Tom: Okay, Fr. Gregory, pick that up, please.

Fr. Gregory: Okay, so I knew we were going to talk about this, so I went back to one of the books I read before I became Orthodox, because I was looking for counter-evidence as much as possible, and this is a quote from a book by Alister McGrath who wrote The History of the Doctrine of Justification. I think it’s probably the most authoritative study, and McGrath says the following:

While the importance of soteriological considerations, both in the development of early Christian doctrine, and as a normative principle during the course of that development, is generally conceded, it is equally evident that the early Christian writers did not choose to express their soteriological convictions in terms of the concept of justification.

And again:

Justification was simply not a theological issue in the pre-Augustinian tradition.

So he acknowledges that soteriology was crucial to them; he also acknowledges that they did not express it in terms of justification. So the argument would be: if justification is the article on which the Church stands or falls, and there were 300 years for sure in which it was simply not addressed, those two things don’t seem to go together very well.

Fr. Tom: Interesting. I did want to ask, however, in terms of the forensic understanding of justification—and again, I’m speaking from a position of a great lack of knowledge; I’m asking you a question. Is it true that Luther’s model, in a lay sense, is the idea of snow-covered dung, that this is that sort of forensic justification? In other words, you, as being entirely depraved, are covered in Christ’s righteousness, and that is the snow, on you, and you are the dung: is that kind of how he sees justification, being made righteous?

Fr. Gregory: Well, I’ve heard that saying from him; I’m not sure it’s the operative one. The idea of forensic justification, I think, comes from a deeper underlying problem, and that is the West doesn’t make a distinction between God’s essence and God’s energies, and when you don’t make that distinction, you have to say either that you’re justified by the communication of created grace, which would be the Roman position, or you’re justified by the imputation of uncreated grace, which would be the Lutheran position. And it would be… Because in the West the attributes are identical with the essence, and they don’t make the distinction that we do, this is the problem.

Fr. Tom: Thank you for that clarification.

Fr. Gregory: In other words, my argument would be that the Western Reformation came about because of the issue of created versus uncreated grace, which the East dealt with in the conflict between Gregory Palamas and Barlaam.

Fr. Tom: Yes, very good. 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. If you have a question about Lutheranism or about our understanding, our teaching, as opposed to Lutheranism, please feel free to call.

So you both brought up Augustine, and that actually is the fourth objection that is raised in this particular presentation by this Lutheran apologist. He says that in Orthodoxy there is a lack of Augustinianism and Augustinian anthropology. In other words, he gives the idea that Augustine was correct on the idea of the Trinity, which I assume means the double-procession of the Holy Spirit, and that he was right, correct, in his teaching about original sin. So he’s basically saying that Orthodoxy has ignored? I assume, the idea of the Augustinian teaching on these things. And I know this is a very, very hot topic online. This is brought up all the time.

So who would like to go first on the idea of Augustinianism and the Augustinian teaching on God and on anthropology? … Fr. Basil, you want to go first?

Fr. Basil: Oh, I was about to say: Teacher, you’re going to have to call on somebody! [Laughter]

Fr. Gregory: We were both waiting kind of nervously.

Fr. Tom: When it’s silent, I’m going to choose.

Fr. Basil: Understood. Yes, the… I struggle with this elevation of Augustine above all of the theologians in the West, and in the East he is venerated as a saint, albeit with the title of the Blessed Augustine. I know that Fr. Gregory feels the same way. I’m not interested in “West is bad; East is good” kinds of argument. However, I do think Augustinianism in general suffers from a tendency to want to reduce every theological issue to a matter of a simple proposition. So a classic example of this, because we are often accused of being Pelagian by Lutherans—and I’ll come back to that in a moment—but Augustine, in writing against Pelagius, who argues that man could completely save himself through his own free will, choosing good and rejecting the bad and all of that; so Augustine rejected all of that. And in his arguments, he ends up making it completely the work of God; this is completely the grace of God, and so it ends up being a very polarizing kind of thing.

If you say that man has much to do with his own salvation, even in a limited sense: “Oh, you’re semi-Pelagian.” And this is what gets lobbed our way, even though I think you have a false dichotomy that Augustine introduced, because the real defect in Pelagian thinking was that man’s will was effectively unimpeded by the fall, so that man freely chooses… He would as easily choose the good as choose the bad, but we know scripturally that is not true. I mean, St. Paul repeats that over and over, that our free will is darkened. But Augustine leads us to this either-or situation that gets adopted, and then we get kind of hammered by saying, well, that’s a false dichotomy.

Fr. Gregory: May I point out that Augustine wasn’t an Augustinian? [Laughter] I mean, so Augustine at the end of his life writes this work called Retractions, and one of the delightful things about Augustine is his humility.

Fr. Tom: Oh, wow.

Fr. Gregory: Well, I’m not saying he retracted everything he said. But, I mean, he has this delightful humility whereby he keeps saying, “If I’m saying something wrong, please correct me,” and so forth. And I always like to say to my Western brethren: I take seriously what Augustine said. He recognizes he might be making mistakes. Similarly, when we talk about St. Thomas Aquinas, he has a vision at the end of his life where he says, “I looked at everything I wrote, and I see it as straw.” And I say: Why can’t you believe your own guys’ last words?

So, yeah, the East also tends to be more conciliar than the West. The West has a pattern of wanting to have one guy be the guy, whether that’s Augustine or Luther or the papacy, whereas in the East we have what my one seminary student referred to as the “Cappuccino Brothers.” The Cappadocian Fathers: he called them the Cappuccino Brothers. [Laughter] So there’s a kind of conciliarity in the East. I’ll just say it that way. And I think that’s a useful thing.

Fr. Basil: Well, it even balances even the Eastern Fathers, because some of the Eastern Fathers in their Trinitarian theology, some of them emphasize the Persons more than the Unity, and vice-versa, and yet they’re always correcting each other, effectively.

Fr. Tom: Yeah, I think sometimes the objection that’s lobbed our way is that we entirely ignore the Western Fathers, preferring the East, the Eastern Fathers. And I’m not really sure that that’s true other than to say when the Western Fathers give an Orthodox understanding, we’re all on board. Okay, please go ahead, because we’re going to go to the last question. Fr. Gregory?

Fr. Gregory: No, I was just agreeing with you. So I’ve had some back-and-forth with some of my former colleagues who complain that Orthodox don’t develop their doctrine in very much detail and Lutherans are continually disputing and developing the positions in ever-finer detail. I said to them that’s kind of like saying that your Volvo is better than my Honda because it’s in the shop more.

Fr. Tom: [Laughter] I’m stealing that one; I love it. All right. Here is the last point in the presentation, and it goes back to the question I think that Jake had talked about regarding the veneration of icons, but the presenter’s objection is simply the role of iconography in the Orthodox Church, where he says he’s not opposed to icons—and he even has a few icons there, a few icons in the video—but that in Orthodoxy there was a development of the centrality or the necessity of iconography, and he objects to that. He says they’re fine if you want to have a few around, but they should not be central or necessary in any way. So we’re going to go to each of you, one at a time, and then we’re going to wrap it up. Fr. Gregory, let’s go to you first, and then we’ll talk to Fr. Basil about his thoughts about iconography and Lutheran objections to it.

Fr. Gregory: Okay, two points. First, the West has always had a slightly different understanding of iconography than the East did, and that was kind of fostered by a mistranslation of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, where the Council said we don’t worship icons, but we venerate them, and the translator got it backwards and said we worship them.

Fr. Tom: Yikes.

Fr. Gregory: And then that made the Frankish theologians go ballistic until they realized there was a mistranslation.

But the other thing I would add is the importance of icons is… All the seven Ecumenical Councils are Christological in nature, and so with an icon we have an excellent opportunity to develop a distinction between person and nature. We reverence the icons because of who they are, not because of what they are. So it’s just another excellent opportunity to talk about persons and natures and how they interact with each other and how they relate to each other. So icons are an excellent teaching tool, among other things. Obviously, they’re objects of devotion as well.

Fr. Tom: Excellent. All right. Thank you for that. Fr. Basil? Thoughts about this idea of iconography shouldn’t be so central in the Christian faith.

Fr. Basil: Well, I think that if you look at what the confessors in their confessions, what the Lutherans were saying in their documents, that they were not changing anything in the faith, and so this was something that Fr. Gregory and I have discussed earlier. There is simply this agreement: East and West, we both had religious images. Now, there are differences in terms of whether they are flat and statuary and all that, and that’s not even my interest, but it’s kind of an interesting thing, then, that Luther—and Luther himself came out of hiding, at risk of his own life, in order to shut down Zwinglians’ attempt to strip icons out of churches.

So I think that a specifically Lutheran objection to icons is kind of a questionable one, and I think that in many ways they are more valuable today, more necessary today than ever, simply because of all of the strange ideas people have about what kind of person Christ is and what happens to people after death. And the icons actually depict a lot of these things for us, that this is not a Star Wars moment, where people just evaporate and then they’re just glowing images or something; that we can actually talk about that Christ is really and truly flesh and blood. And so there is that.

I think it is curious in the extreme that there are two things that are going on. My own alma mater in Lutheran terms, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, has a gorgeous campus designed by the Finnish architect, Eero Saarinen, but the chapel, in retrospect, strikes me as an iconoclastic dream. It’s a giant A-frame structure that goes up probably 70 feet, and it’s just bare inside, except for a cross behind the altar. It’s really quite a thing in retrospect that it is so utterly devoid of religious imagery. But then, by the same token—and my wife actually observed this just a couple of weeks ago—that why is it that so many of the Lutheran articles and postings and other sorts of things that I still come into contact with, because I have a lot of Lutheran friends—I deeply respect them—but I find it curious in the extreme that I’d say 80-90% of the artwork, the images that they’re putting with their articles and posting these days are actually icons.

Fr. Gregory: Iconography, specifically in the Byzantine style.

Fr. Tom: Fascinating, yeah.

Fr. Basil: They’re not using Western art. They’re not even using the famous Reformation artists. They’re using icons.

Fr. Tom: Interesting. Very interesting, and it always seems like around Christmas, all Protestants become iconodules because they post all kinds of icons and they have statues in their homes of the Nativity creche and so forth. I always find that a little curious.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for a wonderful discussion. It was very, very inspiring and very knowledgeable. And I want to commend you both for the gentle way in which we answered and you answered these questions. I know that you speak with me; we speak with one voice in saying that this program is not meant to be polemical in any way; it’s not meant to be anything but an answer of love to the Lutherans that we know want to love God fully and want to know him fully. So, Fr. Gregory, Fr. Basil, thank you very much. Christ is risen! So wonderful to have you this evening. I hope you’ll come back soon.

Fr. Gregory: Truly he is risen!

Fr. Basil: Indeed he is risen. Thank you.

Fr. Tom: Thank you both. Thank you. Again, I want to thank—before I share a few final thoughts—I want to thank Fr. Gregory Hogg and Fr. Basil Biberdorf for joining us tonight. Thank you also to Trudi for engineering the program; for those that called in, for those that sent questions—it was really terrific—for those that are listening in, and for those who will listen to the podcast later on.

So we talked a little bit just at the beginning of the program—and I apologize because I sort of had a little brain freeze there—there was this correspondence between the Tübingen scholars in Germany and the Church of Constantinople through Patriarch Jeremiah II. And the first thing that happened there was they sent the Augsburg Confession to the synod, and they had them review it, and you can go online, and you can read all of the documentation and the answers. It’s really very, very fascinating. And so to close tonight I would like to read to you—and I’m reading this out of great sincerity and love for our Lutheran brothers and sisters who I know love God very much. And Patriarch Jeremiah II says to them:

O most wise German men and beloved children of our humble self, since as sensible men you wish with your whole heart to enter our most holy Church, we as affectionate fathers willingly accept your love and friendliness, if you will follow the apostolic and synodal decrees in harmony with us and will submit to them. For then you will indeed be in communion with us, and having openly submitted to our holy, catholic Church of Christ, you will be praised by all prudent men. In this way, the two churches will become one by the grace of God. We shall live together hereafter, and we will exist together in a God-pleasing way until we attain the heavenly kingdom. May all of us attain it in Christ Jesus, to whom belongs all glory unto the ages of ages. Amen.

And that’s our show for tonight. Remember, like us on Facebook at facebook.com/ancientfaithtoday. Share out our program after that’s posted. Give us your feedback and contact us with any ideas or topics or people that you might want to hear about. Join us next Tuesday evening for another edition of Ancient Faith Today. Good night, everybody!