Orthodox Perspective on Protestants

[Scott]

Some people have talked about Orthodoxy recently. This article might be of interest, The Orthodox Mind. Anyway, it is an Orthodox appeal to fellow Orthodox to become less protestant. Gives some insight into their thinking.

 

[biblelighthouse]

This quote from the article is rather interesting:

People often wonder why it is that the Russian Missionaries in Alaska were able to evangelize the Indians there very quickly and convert entire tribes, and yet here in Protestant America, converts have only in the last few decades become numerous, and even still they mostly all come only after a good and long fight.

The reason is very simple. When the Aleuts heard the Orthodox Gospel from the Russian missionaries, they did not wrongly think that they already knew what these missionaries were talking about, and so they got it right the first time, and so never had to contend with heterodox misinterpretations of the Faith. Protestants, on the other hand, have in a sense been inoculated against the truth by having first been injected with a dead form of the Christian Faith. They thus have an immunity which is only over come with difficulty. A Protestant is almost never going to be able to accept Orthodoxy immediately upon his first exposure to it -- only after a long and painful period of dealing with the issues that separate them from Orthodoxy can they usually come to terms with it.

 

[JohnV]

Another quote ( this ought to stir up a hornets' nest ):

For example, every Western Christmas, you can hear Protestants loudly bemoaning the fact that Christ has been taken out of Christmas and replaced with Santa Claus -- but where did that come from? It was the English Puritans who opposed the idea of a religious calendar, and who opposed Christmas and all other holidays as "pagan" and so sought to replace those holidays with secular observances. It was these Puritans who invented Father Frost, and replaced the idea of going to Church on Christmas to celebrate Christ's birth with the family fun, games, gifts, and food observance that characterizes the common Protestant observance of Christmas. So in their quest to get rid of the "pagan" Christian calendar of feasts, it was in fact the Protestants who developed the truly pagan secular calendar that our culture has come to know and love.

Man, has he got this all mixed up. I wonder if he knows what a Puritan is. In this passage he has Protestant and Puritan being the same thing. Lutherans, though, were the first Protestants; Puritans came quite a while afterward. Both were initially derogatory terms to describe departures from the status quo, and both refer to those who stood against prelacy, but they are not the same thing.

So here you have someone who doesn't understand what Protestantism is telling people what Protestantism is. This passage simply demonstrates that.

 

[Puritan Sailor]

The author could certainly persuade the uninformed! But his Nazarene background explains his ignorance of a full-orbed Reformed theology and worldview, which answer all his criticisms. But he has many gross generalizations which he never defends, like lumping conservative and liberal scholars together as "rationalists" or "modernists" or even "empiricists." Clearly he's never studied Calvin or true Protestant theology. I agree with his criticisms for the most part of contemporary protestantism, especially the whole consumer fads which infect the Church. But he has several errors which he needs to take account of. First, Descarte was a Catholic not a Protestant (at least, that's what I recall). Second, Protestants don't believe the Scriptures are the "only authority" but rather the final authority. Protestant don't reject tradition or councils. They only reject them when they conflict with Scripture.

But the Church better get it's act together, or arguments like this will cause many to go astray. Rome is using the same tactics with much success. The Protestant churches in compromising to be relevant, have made themselves irrelevant. We must return to the Word and abandon the ways of the world.

 

[Scott]

Yeah, there is allot of nonsense in there and I think Patrick is right that the Nazarene background explains some things. I picked out the exact quote John did as a historical problem. I also homed in on the exact quote Joseph did (the injection of a dead faith)!

 

[Puritan Sailor]

I think it also explains some of his ignorance of the "Fathers." They were not so monolothic in their doctrine and practice as the EO or Papists wish to think.