“All Protestants Go to Hell”: Eastern Orthodoxy’s Official Rejection of the Gospel at the Synod of Jerusalem
“In 1672, the East held a Synod to respond to the Protestant Reformation… At Jerusalem, the East condemned the core tenets of the Reformation, canonized a false gospel, and declared that salvation was impossible outside the Orthodox church.” - Christ Over All
The argument that "the church is infallible" is one of my biggest reasons to reject Orthodoxy and Catholicism. When we Protestants screw something up--and God knows we do often--our children are not bound to hold to that error. We can go back to Scripture and say "oh, boy, I'd like to go back in time to make that decision correctly...."
When Catholic Popes and Orthodox Patriarchs screw things up, there are a fair amount of cases where all Catholics/Orthodox are bound by the Magisterium/Tradition--even when that tradition clearly counteracts Scripture. I would argue that when a religious group has two sources of authority, the lesser authority always gets treated as the greater. That's the case for Catholic Magisterium vs. Scripture, Orthodox Tradition vs. Scripture, and for that matter Jewish Talmud/Oral Torah vs. Tanach/Scripture.
That lesser authority becoming the greater becomes especially laughable when we're looking at Patriarch Kyrill working for the KGB and enthusiastically endorsing Putin's genocidal wars (Ukraine, Syria, Georgia, Chechnya).
Side note; the article is also a good primer on Orthodox theology. Thank you.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
On the whole, I wish Baptists and other evangelical Protestants valued historical theology more. But RC and EO et al clearly have an “accumulation of error” problem. When you root authority in the church rather than the apostles and their teaching (i.e., the NT), that’s going to happen. It stands to reason that the church, being human, is going to make mistakes along the way and over time, if you don’t have any kind of reset mechanism, those are going to build up. Eventually believers are going to take a reset into their own hands. So we had the Reformation.
But on the opposite end of the ‘accumulation without housecleaning’ you have the ‘every man did that which was right in his own eyes’ problem. So the evangelical end of the spectrum is like a free for all, and often doctrinal innovation is prized for its own sake—not because it’s tested and found faithful.
Evangelical Protestant theology doesn’t have the doctrinal greasy buildup problem of RC and EO, at least not in the same form or to the same degree. But it seems to solve the problem by using plastic and paper plates most of the time. So everything seems disposable.
So we have opposite flavors of unapostolic and unbiblical that seem abundant.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Discussion