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Patristic Ant ☦️ 🐜
@patristicant
Ex-Pentecostal preacher, now Orthodox ☦️ Yale MAR in Bible | Patristics & Orthodox apologetics | Sr. Web Developer
Houston, TX
Joined June 2023
102 Following
44 Followers
322 Posts
Hot take: sola scriptura isn’t taught in Scripture.
St Paul: “hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2 Thess 2:15).
And it is the Church that Scripture calls “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15). ☦️
@CSLewisDaily Because Pope Gregory I's Homily 33 (AD 591) merged her with the sinful woman of Luke 7. The East never did. Orthodox call her Equal to the Apostles: she first announced the Resurrection, "that she had seen the Lord" (John 20:18). Rome dropped the merger in 1969. ☦️
@Truth_matters20 "Only the Bible" is itself an opinion; no verse teaches it. St Epiphanius of Salamis (c. AD 375): "tradition must be used too, for not everything is available from the sacred scripture" (Panarion 61.6.5). A 4th-century saint, not Bible-only. ☦️
@JamesDueck As a former Pentecostal preacher, I agree. Christ built accountability in: "tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man" (Matthew 18:17). Not "tell it to your Bible." That Church still meets in council: Orthodoxy. ☦️
@Truth_matters20 Baptism isn't our work to boast in. Paul calls it God's: "Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God" (Colossians 2:12). Peter: "be baptized every one of you... for the remission of sins" (Acts 2:38). ☦️
@Catholic_bro True, but the Church that recognized it had no universal bishop. Pope St Gregory the Great: "whosoever calls himself, or desires to be called, Universal Priest, is in his elation the precursor of Antichrist" (Epistles, Book 7, Letter 33). No pope over all. ☦️
@5Solas2 Peter answers it: Paul's letters have "things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest... unto their own destruction" (2 Peter 3:16). So believing it was never enough. The question is who interprets it, and Scripture points to the Church. ☦️
@5Solas2 Then post Paul too: "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12), and John's vision of the Last Judgment: "the dead were judged... according to their works" (Revelation 20:12). A faith with nothing to judge isn't the faith the Judge describes. ☦️
@JoelOsteen Christ never sold the faith as a battle with spoils in this life: "we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22); "all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution" (2 Timothy 3:12). The Cross is the path, not a detour. ☦️
20 years of apologetics and David Wood, who argues against "adding" to the "essentials" of the Gospel, can't give you a list so you can tell when someone is trying to add to it. Absurd.
@caitak88 Glory to God for that night! Fourteen voices singing "O Gladsome Light" where there used to be two is His work. (Just a layman here, no Batyushka!) May your little community in the mountains keep growing. ☦️
From the Philokalia:
“God is the beginning, middle and end of everything good.”
St Mark the Ascetic, On the Spiritual Law 2 (Philokalia, vol. 1; 5th c.). Translated from the Greek.
Not my effort, not my gifts. Everything good starts and ends in Him. ☦️
@AsherJacob23060 @brokenbose @DustinAshWrites Then Scripture is "wrong" too: "be baptized, and wash away thy sins" (Acts 22:16), "the washing of water by the word" (Ephesians 5:26), "born of water and of the Spirit" (John 3:5). St Justin Martyr only repeated the apostles. ☦️
@ManassehRJones Both are true. He found us first (Romans 10:20), and He still says "Ask... seek... knock" (Matthew 7:7). St Seraphim of Sarov meant guarding and growing in the grace already given: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, the Mysteries. Grace leads; we respond. ☦️
@LJersey77 @slapyomomma9912 @joshwhitlatch Agreed on two of three: Orthodoxy rejects papal infallibility and purgatory too. Paul's guard against the wolves was the elders he had just charged (Acts 20:28) and the traditions (2 Thess 2:15). And the saints' prayers rise before the throne (Revelation 5:8). ☦️
@Burgess7281975 Same chapter, next lines: "the rest of the apostles were also the same as was Peter, endowed with a like partnership both of honour and power" (St Cyprian of Carthage, Unity 4, c. 251). And in 256 he told 87 bishops none of them is "a bishop of bishops." ☦️
Former Protestants who became Orthodox (or are on the way):
What was the first thing that made you think, “Wait, maybe the early Church wasn’t what I was told”?
For me it was the desert fathers. Your turn. ☦️
“For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God.”
St Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies IV.20.7 (c. 180). Translated from the Latin.
The second half is the point: we come alive by beholding God.
Icon photo: Ted/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0
Fasting isn’t just a diet.
“Let not the mouth only fast, but also the eye, and the ear, and the feet, and the hands, and all the members of our bodies.”
St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues 3 (387). Translated from the Greek. ☦️
3/ The Orthodox Church doesn’t sell blessings. Her treasure is Christ Himself, given in the Holy Mysteries. If “sow a seed” preaching burned you, come and see. ☦️
The prosperity gospel says faith is a seed that grows into wealth. Christ said: “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God… But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation” (Luke 6:20, 24). 🧵
2/ God the Word became man and “hath not where to lay his head” (Matt 8:20). A gospel that promises the servant more comfort than his Master is not the Gospel.
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