How the World Is Marking the 500th Birthday of Protestantism

[Elok]

I'm not familiar with the bit you're citing; is it from Hebrews?  At any rate, the NT itself makes clear that the early church was authoritative; the very first church council is recorded in Acts 15, with a binding conclusion ("it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us") about which parts of the Law are necessary for converts.  Likewise the various epistles make it clear that certain beliefs and practices are unambiguously wrong, on the Apostles' authority (though of course not without reference to the OT).  Things hadn't crystallized by that point, obviously, but given that the scriptures were written by men, and compiled by the consensus of men, it seems strange to draw a line between "scripture" and "traditions of men."  There wasn't any scripture for decades after Pentecost, and what scripture there was took the form of directives from living authority figures.  When things did settle down, they were into a fairly familiar pattern of hierarchical clergy.

From an Orthodox POV, Sola Scriptura is something of a shell game; the interpretation of the Bible which grew organically from centuries of worship and practice is wrong, while the one developed in an alien cultural context more than a thousand years later is right, because the latter interpretation is not an interpretation at all, but "what the Bible teaches."  So, for example, when Jesus says things like "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you have no life in you," obviously Jesus is being metaphorical, while a verse which could be taken to express Protestant sympathies is true in the most literal and straightforward way.  But there are a lot of "clear Biblical teachings" that weren't clear and Biblical to an awful lot of people who spent an awful lot of time reading the Bible, for centuries.  It rather staggers the mind that the Bible was saying this stuff for so long and we all missed it for a millennium and a half.

An Orthodox difference: most or all of the Western churches, AFAIK, have a concept variously known as the Satisfaction theory, or the Penal Substitution, which holds that Jesus died to save us from the righteous wrath of God the Father.  We had sinned so much that we were condemned to die, and God could not or would not save us without somebody else paying the fee.  Now, there are verses in the Bible that could be read that way, yes, and I think some parts of Augustine hint in this direction, but it's absent from the patristic tradition otherwise until around the turn of the millennium, when it was elaborated by a guy named Anselm of Canterbury.  It's a reading of the Bible that makes great sense if you grew up in a feudal honor culture, like Anselm; we find it unfathomable and offensive for a number of reasons.  We understand sin as a disease, not a crime.

Okay, I'm going to try and write my book now.  Thanks for talking.

[Unorthodox]

So, for example, when Jesus says things like "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you have no life in you," obviously Jesus is being metaphorical

SURE.  Metaphorical. 

[Elok]

Okay, I haven't had time to go through all of Hebrews, but a cursory skim hasn't shown anything that says priesthood is obsolete as such; it says Christ is our new High Priest, a newer and better sacrifice, but nothing about "you shouldn't have ordained priests anymore."  If there is, I couldn't find it.  Where is it?

[Buster's Uncle]

Forgive me for being lazy, but:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_priesthood  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priesthood_of_Melchizedek

[Elok]

We understand Hebrews to mean that the New Covenant is superior to, and supersedes, the Old, same as Protestants.  Christ's priesthood does not obviate the need for actual priests.  It's not clear to me how the Protestant concept of ministers or preachers differs significantly from actual priests, beyond clothes and nomenclature.  There's less majesty in the authority, and the contrarian and dissident tendencies built into the ideology do encourage schism, but it's still an authority.  We Orthodox are somewhat more democratic than the RCC--every national church is almost purely independent, and nobody has the kind of dictatorial authority the Pope does--but this follows ancient and canonical practice.  To be fair, the RCC's more autocratic structure evolved in parallel with ours.  Both, however, were rooted in the very oldest practices.  There were priests and bishops long before there was a New Testament canon.  Those books were selected by the collective judgment of thousands of clergymen.  Paul tells Timothy about the desired qualifications for bishops and deacons.

[Buster's Uncle]

Well yeah; that last has caused some trouble, too.

[Buster's Uncle]

Let me say this, too, that we talk past one another's blind spots less - I don't claim to have made the case that a priesthood isn't needed; but you've gone on from the base assumption that one is without even trying to prove that case.

Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus (Live on Letterman)

Protestants talk about a "personal Jesus" because well, the Church is for spreading the Word - and mutual support of the faithful and instruction of the young and all that.  Like any group of more than --- one person --- there's a need for organization and leadership, of course, but I've read the Bible cover to cover, and I still don't see a need for "priesthood".  I'm profoundly given to understand that my relationship with Jesus is between me and him; no need for any intersession/mediation on the part of the living or dead.

[Elok]

But a "personal Jesus" diminishes the church to the point of irrelevance, and the Christian life is a communal life, always has been.  You can't have a really functional and healthy community without shared principles.  If everybody has the inalienable right to decide what the Bible says, with no authority or arbiter, there's nothing to prevent the Church from splintering--which it did almost immediately after 1517.  It splintered again, and again, and again, to the point where there are now something like 3000 Christian denominations, which adds up to something like five or six schisms a year on average.  The priesthood of all believers has led to a whole lot of bad blood, and not much else that I can see.

There never was a "personal Jesus."  In Jesus's own lifetime there were disciples with delegated power, and afterwards the NT describes a rapidly expanding hierarchy, with the diaconate being created even before the conversion of Paul to assist with charitable endeavors.  Some local churches even became outright communist--I believe the community at Jerusalem was the one where they shared everything.  Try and tell them that it's about your personal relationship or whatever.  Odds are it would have struck them, as it strikes us, as (there's no daintier way to put it) offensively proprietary and self-centered.  You don't own your Messiah.

Have you ever read Laura Bohannon's Shakespeare in the Bush?  She went to live with a tribe called the Tiv in Africa for a while, and tried to tell them the story of Hamlet while she was there.  They were interested in the story, but they were so far removed from even modern Europe, let alone Elizabethan England, that they couldn't help understanding the story in a radically different way than it was intended.  Hamlet's killing of Polonius, for example, is not mad but perfectly sensible, because if you're living in the African bush any unexpected noise in the background is assumed to be danger and speared.  Serves Polonius right for stupidly sneaking up like that.  As for the madness itself, so far as the Tiv know madness can only be caused by forest spirits or witchcraft by male relatives in your father's line, so plainly Claudius is to blame for it, and the moral of the story is "don't practice witchcraft, it'll bite you right in the ass."  And so on.  She doesn't even try to explain purgatory and all that.  Basically, this is how Protestantism (and to a much lesser extent Catholicism) looks to us.  The New Testament was written in Greek, for an audience composed largely of Greeks and Hellenized Jews.  We are the descendants, culturally if not always in blood, of those same people.  You, and your predecessors, came to a set of intuitive but incorrect conclusions about the Bible because you lacked the cultural background to understand it.  Sorry if that sounds condescending, but that's how we see it.  Of course, the Jews say similar things about us, but I'm inclined to wonder just how much of modern Judaism was formed in reaction to Christianity.

As for intercession--don't Protestants ask people to pray for them?  It's not like we believe the priest is some kind of superhuman being.  It's been understood since the time of Constantine (Donatist controversy) that Grace comes from God, regardless of the priest's own merits.

[Buster's Uncle]

Besides the stage in my mood cycle, a major thing that's holding me back in holding up my end of this conversation is feeling like it would be rude to go into what-all I think is rank blasphemy according to an amalgamation of protestant theology and my private opinion if only I still believed.  I once flatly conceded a forum argument taking pro on the thesis that Constantine the Great was Satan's victory when I realized that defending my position was going to require bad-mouthing the Catholic and Orthodox Churches in public --- and that not everyone enjoys rough-and-ready arguments about religion like I do, nor does just everyone have as thick a skin...  I didn't want to win that bad, to get into dicey stuff like that in public when it was all just for fun.  -That was before I came to see the truth of the meme about arguing on the nets being like competing in the Special Olympics.

So there.  I've lost a religious argument to Nikolai.  -Good kid, but doesn't know what a whoopin' he was spared.

....

On a far more congenial anecdotal note that I imagine you'll enjoy, a few years ago, I played host to guest from a European country that exists because it chose Catholicism -he's an atheist, actually, but had been an altar boy growing up- and while I drove him around the area to see the sights for several days, we ended up talking religion a good deal.  See, fish don't know the water is wet, and he noticed something I wouldn't have as long as I lived on my own; that we couldn't go for five minutes anywhere in the unzoned countryside without passing a church.

This here's protestant country, almost exclusively.  Blew a fellow from a Catholic nation's mind, that there wasn't one huge church to a town...  Worse than that, over a third were all Southern Baptist, and still separate churches sometimes not a mile apart.  My best guess for some of them was simple split congregations, which is gonna happen sometimes in a democracy without police/military powers.  -And speaking as a pale native of the southeast, and make of it what you will, I say thank God for that last lack.

The guilty part is welcome to chip in on this of course, of course.  Every few minutes, mid-sentence, one of us would call out CHURCH. 

[Elok]

Eh.  Constantine was a thing that happened.  I think it's rather silly that we made a saint out of him, treating sainthood like a British knighthood for services rendered, but eh.  It's silly that we canonized (most of) the Romanovs too--only GD Elizabeth deserved it, the rest were just our way of flipping off the Communists.  Anyway, there were good and bad consequences there, but church doctrine and structure were largely formed by the time he came along.  Most of the controversies after were disguised political fights, and we paid the price for them (Islam).

Which doesn't mean I reject their conclusions; good things can come from ugly places.  One of our priests recently succeeded in getting an alt-rightist excommunicated; his justification was a council ruling against "phyletism" in the 1800s, called by the Greeks to hammer some uppity Bulgarians.  The council itself was nakedly political, and petty to boot.  But it's our best hammer against infiltration by the jingo nuts.

[Buster's Uncle]

Man, I don't think even Paul knew Jesus from a hole in the ground, so yeah; not a fan of Constantine or the Council of Nicaea or any or them jokers.  -But that's just me, and mostly not Protestant stuff.  In fact, I think something on the order of the upper 90s percentile of all "Christians" have it fundamentally wrong, according to their own holy text -and that's coming from the base assumption for the sake of argument that the Bible is true- so you might imagine that I might fail to see the harm in schism, what with almost all of them being wrong in subtly different ways, but mostly alike in the fundamentally wrong-headed polytheistic doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

[Elok]

Whereas you, from a distance of two thousand years and rather more miles, are seeing something they did not?

[Buster's Uncle]

[shrugs] I've actually read the Bible, which very much puts me in the minority of Christians, ever.  I cannot account for the error of ancients who could not separate sundry pagan ways and traditions from what Jesus taught, just as I can find absolutely no consistency between his teachings and any Christian participating in military service and still thinking they're adequate Christians.

Yo, yer appeal to authority don't work on me; your authorities aren't Jesus, and that's kinda the point of the thread.

[Elok]

But you only know Jesus via those same authorities, and you're editing out the sources you know Jesus from based on inherited biases.  Which is to say, you're hacking at the base of the same pillar you're standing on.  If I said to you that I understood the teachings of Confucius better than the Chinese, or those of Muhammad better than the Muslims, because I'd read their respective works in translation and come to conclusions which did not fit with what people from their culture concluded, you'd laugh at me.  It's immensely improbable that your superior understanding comes from actual insights rather than ignorance.

[Elok]

Just an example: the Trinity is pretty well attested in the NT.  Terms like "consubstantial" don't appear, but it's clear that, in addition to God as originally understood, Jesus is either God or something so close as to make little difference (Arianism), and there's something called the Holy Spirit that does a lot of God's work.  They're three separate things or people or what-have-you.  And concurrent traditions come to the simplest conclusion of this conundrum.  Aside from the Pauline formula "the Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all," there's a lot of contemporary evidence for trinitarian thought.  Phos Hilarion, a hymn from perhaps a few decades after the best scholarly estimate of the composition of the Gospels, contains the words "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God."  We don't see a gradual decline into polytheism, but something integral to Christianity from quite early.  Above all, Jesus gives an extended monologue on the HS in John.  In order to say the Trinity is a corruption, you have to argue that a lot of the Gospels are interpolated, while still claiming the other parts represent a discernible earlier tradition.  But since your only possible grounds for authority on Jesus in any sense lies in those same scriptures you're undermining ... do you see the contradiction?

Unless, of course, you want to appeal to the various Gnostic "gospels."  But it doesn't sound like it.