BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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- Free will has nothing to do with the Anunciation. You're confusing concepts, as usual.

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The only confusion, or actually refusal is by you.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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- Did Paul have free will when he was made blind? Does God need anyone's persmission to make them lame, blind, pregnant, or even dead?

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You are "blinded" (pardon the pun) by your pride.

Mary's fiat was God seeking human cooperation for a redemptive act requiring free consent had free will to accept God's plan.

Paul's blindness was God performing a physical sign (punishment) to arrest a soul in error not a moral act requiring consent

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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- Maybe you haven't heard, but Satan isn't one of God's angels anymore. In the garden of Eden, he was already in a fallen state. He was in the realm of demons. Do you usually call demons "angels"?

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A fallen angel is still an angel. They still possess the intellect, will, power, and existence.

They no longer have supernatural grace, beatitude, or are rightly ordered to God.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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- Yes, some early church fathers like Irenaeus linked Mary with Eve. Irenaeus also said Jesus was near 50 years old when he was crucified. Do you believe THAT?

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Just because someone is off on their timing estimation doesn't' mean that that are wrong on other aspects of the faith.

I will add a quote from Justin Martyr, AD 155 -
"He became man by the Virgin, in order that the disobedience caused by the serpent might receive its destruction in the same manner in which it derived its origin. For Eve, who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived the word of the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death. But the Virgin Mary received faith and joy when the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings."

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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Stop trusting in the word of fallible men, and start trusting in the infallible word of God.

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I do trust the word of God -

Luke 1:38 -

hen Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

Oldbear83 said:

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" Would you agree that this early Church Father draws a link between Mary and Eve?"

I will go with Scripture, which never mentioned Mary that way.

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Pride is a difficult thing to overcome.

canoso said:

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The issue is whether the Holy Spirit (the only Vicar of Christ) does that. I'm waiting for that. When it appears somewhere in the canon of Scripture, I'll believe it.

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Where does the canon of Scripture tell you that Mark and Hebrews are in the canon?
Where does the canon of scripture tell you that Public Revelation is closed?
Where does the canon of scripture tell you that there will be no new apostles?

When it appears in somewhere in the canon of Scripture, I'll believe it.

Coke Bear said:

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Oldbear83 said:

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" Would you agree that this early Church Father draws a link between Mary and Eve?"

I will go with Scripture, which never mentioned Mary that way.

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Pride is a difficult thing to overcome.

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As you so often demonstrate, brother.

Coke Bear said:

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BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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- Free will has nothing to do with the Anunciation. You're confusing concepts, as usual.

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The only confusion, or actually refusal is by you.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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- Did Paul have free will when he was made blind? Does God need anyone's persmission to make them lame, blind, pregnant, or even dead?

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You are "blinded" (pardon the pun) by your pride.

Mary's fiat was God seeking human cooperation for a redemptive act requiring free consent had free will to accept God's plan.

Paul's blindness was God performing a physical sign (punishment) to arrest a soul in error not a moral act requiring consent

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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- Maybe you haven't heard, but Satan isn't one of God's angels anymore. In the garden of Eden, he was already in a fallen state. He was in the realm of demons. Do you usually call demons "angels"?

---

A fallen angel is still an angel. They still possess the intellect, will, power, and existence.

They no longer have supernatural grace, beatitude, or are rightly ordered to God.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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- Yes, some early church fathers like Irenaeus linked Mary with Eve. Irenaeus also said Jesus was near 50 years old when he was crucified. Do you believe THAT?

---

Just because someone is off on their timing estimation doesn't' mean that that are wrong on other aspects of the faith.

I will add a quote from Justin Martyr, AD 155 -
"He became man by the Virgin, in order that the disobedience caused by the serpent might receive its destruction in the same manner in which it derived its origin. For Eve, who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived the word of the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death. But the Virgin Mary received faith and joy when the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings."

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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Stop trusting in the word of fallible men, and start trusting in the infallible word of God.

---

I do trust the word of God -

Luke 1:38 -

hen Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

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You're just repeating already defeated arguments.

Any rational, intelligent person can read the Anunciation (not Proposition) story and see that there was NOTHING for Mary to decide, permit, or obey. It was decided for her. "You WILL...", not "Will you?".

And if you're drawing a similarity between being visited by God's beloved angel and being approached by the PRINCE OF ALL EVIL, then you are just too far gone to be talking sense to. You are absolutely determined to worship Mary, and by golly, you'll find a way, even if it means twisting and dishonestly interpreting Scripture.

If a church father is SO WRONG, not just "off on their timing" as Irenaeus was, clearly he isn't reliable, and thus it would be completely FOOLISH to base one's theology off of him.

In Luke 1:28, the word that the angel uses is kecharitomene. So it's not literally "full of grace," but its root word is the Greek verb "to give grace" (charitoo). The word is the past perfect tense, meaning that the action of giving grace has already occurred. It was not something that was about to happen to her but something that has already been accomplished. The word was also used as a title. The angel did not say, "Hail Mary, you are kecharitomene" but rather, "Hail kecharitomene." Therefore the word is not simply an action but an identity.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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You're just repeating already defeated arguments.

Any rational, intelligent person can read the Anunciation (not Proposition) story and see that there was NOTHING for Mary to decide, permit, or obey. It was decided for her. "You WILL...", not "Will you?".

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The verb is future indicative. The key is Mary's response in verse 34 which is the pivot of the entire passage

"How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?"

The future tense of the angel's declaration expresses God's foreknowledge and eternal will
But it does not override or bypass Mary's freedom
God's omniscience already knew her "yes" but that does not make her "yes" any less free or necessary

Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (III, Q. 30, Art. 1) addresses this directly.
Thirdly, that she might offer to God the free gift of her obedience: which she proved herself right ready to do, saying: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord."

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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And if you're drawing a similarity between being visited by God's beloved angel and being approached by the PRINCE OF ALL EVIL, then you are just too far gone to be talking sense to. You are absolutely determined to worship Mary, and by golly, you'll find a way, even if it means twisting and dishonestly interpreting Scripture.

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Hey, another Strawman fallacy for you today!!! You know that Catholics don't worship Mary, but you continue to state that. It's difficult to have a conversation with you when you keep making false accusations about people's beliefs.

Secondarily, most rational people can see the parallels between Mary and Eve. Both were virgins. Both were approached by angels (one evil and one good). Both said, "yes", one to evil and one to good.

God reversed what man had done.

Jeremiah 5:21 - "Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not..."

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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If a church father is SO WRONG, not just "off on their timing" as Irenaeus was, clearly he isn't reliable, and thus it would be completely FOOLISH to base one's theology off of him.

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This is just a silly argument. Just because a person then know the age of someone doesn't mean that they aren't creditable when it comes to other theological aspects. Catholics don't base their theology on just one human person. Another strawman fallacy, you're two for two in the same post!

Thomas Aquinas, one of the most brilliant minds to walk the earth, misunderstood when people received their rational soul. He thought that the soul was infused at 40 days for males at 40 days and 80 days for female. This doesn't mean that he isn't credible with other matters, it means he was dealing with bad science of the day. The same can be said for Irenaeus.

Doc Holliday said:

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Mothra said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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Mothra said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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EO has an entire psychospiritual taxonomy for how sin takes root and how you fight it. We see sin as a disease, not a legal debt.

How do you guys handle your habitual sin, your passions, your pride, your ego etc.?

From my experience, if you're not fasting in some manner, not praying daily, not reading scripture, not confessing, not talking about your sin with others…you're gonna get cooked. It's not enough to just remember the gospel, believe harder or join an accountability group: that's not going to cut it.

If you're not fighting sin or you think the Holy Spirit is going to just automatically change you without any synergy or effort on your behalf…you WILL have dead faith. You will either be delusional about your salvation or you'll completely reject Christ. The person who stops fighting eventually stops praying. The person who stops praying eventually stops meaning it. The person who stops meaning it eventually stops altogether, and usually tells themselves a story about intellectual reasons why.
The warfare isn't separate from the faith.

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I am sure you will be mortified, but I agree with you on this subject a lot more than you might expect - especially that sin is not just a legal category, that it embeds itself in habits and desires, and that passivity is spiritually deadly. The way the EO treats sin is not unique to EO. My own reformed congregation views sin similarly and treats it similarly.

Where we disagree is not whether Christians must fight sin, but what grounds that fight. Protestants do not believe the Holy Spirit "automatically" sanctifies people without effort. That's yet another one of your mistaken assumptions (as an aside, is your knowledge of Protestantism limited to watching Robert Tilton?). Protestant theology has always taught active, serious, disciplined resistance to sin: daily prayer, Scripture, confession of sin to God and to trusted believers, and deliberate cultivations of godly habits. The difference is we see that as the fruit of grace already given.

When you say "it's not enough to remember the gospel or believe harder," I would respond: remembering the gospel is not intellectual recall, but instead a daily reorientation of the self. The gospel doesn't merely forgive guilt; it redefines identity. The Protestant answer to pride, ego, and habitual sin is relentless exposure of the self to grace that undercuts any sort of self justification.

You're absolutely right that the person who stops fighting eventually stops praying. My Reformed congregation would wholeheartedly agree. Where we push back is on the idea that liturgical frameworks are somehow only capable of sustaining the fight. I know enough Orthodox Christians to also know those who go through the motions of fasting, confession, and prayer while remaining deeply unchanged, just as there are Protestants who drift into presumption. No tradition has a monopoly on vigilance.

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I was protestant before Eastern Orthodox and have been to multiple churches: non denominational, Baptist, and evangelical. I've been in a handful of megachurches, small churches and in between. I've been told I can't lose my salvation. I've been told that I'm totally depraved and that I can't even cooperate with God if I wanted to, that I should be thankful that I'm one of the elect by God's choice, not mine. I've been told the same things yall are telling me too. The more different types of churches you go to…the more you realize nobody is really on the same page. There's no dogma and that was the problem for me.

The ascetic infrastructure of fasting, regular confession, liturgical rhythm, and embodied practice exists precisely because the Church learned over centuries that serious intention without structured means produces inconsistent results. The system exists because human beings are embodied, habituated creatures who need more than correct doctrine to actually change.

Going through the motions of confession and fasting while remaining fundamentally unchanged is a genuine failure mode. No tradition has a monopoly on vigilance, you're right.
But here's where I think the deeper disagreement lives. You said sanctification is the fruit of grace already given. If the fight is downstream of something already secured, what exactly is at stake when someone stops fighting? I'm not asking rhetorically.

The Orthodox answer is that unresisted passion disorders the nous and progressively destroys the capacity for communion with God. The stakes are real and present, not just inconsistency with your positional status.

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Thanks. This helps me better understand your position. With respect to Protestantism, I would submit that you are committing what I would call a category error. Your argument assumes, implicitly, that Protestantism should function like Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism - as a single, unified ecclesial body with a common authority structure, defined dogma, and an internally consistent set of beliefs. This is where I believe you err.

As you should know, Protestantism is not one church or sect but a broad historical family of traditions that arose from the Reformation and developed along distinct theological, ecclesial, and devotional lines. Undoubtedly, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, nondenominational, etc. differ substantially from one another, often selfconsciously so, and they do not pretend otherwise. Given this fact, pointing to doctrinal disagreement across various Protestant churches does not demonstrate a failure of Protestantism, in general. It might expose a failure of a particular denomination (indeed, I think there are many). But the idea that Protestantism is somehow doctrinally wrong because of fracture does not a strong argument make because it is based on a category error.

As I've said in other posts, my beliefs are likely much closer to Orthodoxy than the current Methodist church, and I flatly reject many of its current positions as completely heretical. Does that mean Protestantism has failed? Of course not, because Protestantism is not a single ecclesial body, and never has been. The various Protestant churches you attended were never attempting to speak with one voice, nor do they claim to represent the same theological tradition. Expecting uniformity across them imposes an Orthodox or Catholic standard of ecclesial identity onto a movement that explicitly operates under different assumptions. You may judge that model inadequate, but you should at least try to first describe it accurately.

But perhaps we can discuss something we agree on - the need for vigilance in battling sin. While I am generally familiar with Orthodox belief, I truly am curious what it is about the ascetic infrastructure of Orthodoxy that you believe makes it more vigilant in the war against the flesh. I've said on these boards before I have been a part of what I would call a recovery group for years that assists men battling sex and porn addictions, and I have taken some pretty extreme actions in my battle against that. At this point in my life, it is more an accountability group than anything, and an opportunity to encourage younger men in their struggle against sin.

What is it about Orthodoxy that you believe better equips men for such battles against the flesh? Is there something about the ritual that you believe helps you, personally, in whatever issue you are dealing with?

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That's a fair viewpoint of Protestantism and yes I do think that model is inadequate. I don't know that its even accurate to call non denominational, reformed or other churches outside of the mainlines as genuinely protestant. Its something else entirely. I see the fracturing and lack of dogma as the logical conclusion of removing the "pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15). Without a fixed dogmatic boundary, I think language itself loses its ability to bind a community together because the same words (like "grace," "justification," or "marriage") begin to mean radically different things depending on who is speaking. I noticed this a lot.

Think about this: Before Adam sinned, did he need salvation?

If we define salvation strictly as "forgiveness for a crime" or "rescue from hell," then the answer would be no, Adam was innocent. But if we define salvation as Theosis, the movement from a "natural" state to a "divine" state...then Yes Adam did need salvation before he sinned. Even before the Fall, Adam "needed" salvation because he needed to be lifted out of his created, finite nature and brought into the uncreated, eternal life of God: union with God, so he refused to fall. This movement, from being a biological creature to a "god by grace", is the very definition of the salvation the Church offers us now.

If Adam needed "salvation" (as Union) before he even sinned, it proves that the Christian life isn't just about "getting back to zero" or returning to a state of innocence. It's about moving toward a state that even Adam in Paradise had not yet achieved. The "infrastructure" of the Church: the sacraments and the ascetic life, isn't just a repair kit for a broken world, it's the ladder that was always intended to take humanity into the Divine.

Its anchored in the words of Christ in John 10:34, where He quotes Psalm 82:6: "I said, 'You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.'". Also 2 Peter 1:4, which says we are called to be "partakers of the divine nature."

A Protestant often thinks of salvation like Adoption. A judge signs a paper, and now you are legally part of the family. Orthodoxy says: Yes, it is adoption, but it's an adoption that rewrites your DNA. You aren't just "called" a son of God: you actually start to take on the "features" of the Father. You aren't just "forgiven" for being a sinner: you are being cured of the "sickness" of death and sin. Its a much deeper view of salvation and it faces a completely different problem.

Christ's Resurrection was not just a spirit returning to a body; it was the total "deification" of human matter. Because His human nature was perfectly united to His Divine nature, death could not hold Him. The reason many Orthodox saints do not decompose (or do so very slowly, often emitting a sweet fragrance known as the "odor of sanctity"). We see in the Bible that even the hem of Christ's garment or St. Paul's handkerchiefs could heal people. This is why we take physical things serious: the Eucharist, relics, icons etc.

If your body is just a "container" for your soul, then sin is just a bad thought. But if your body is a Temple, then sin is desecration. We aren't just being pardoned for a crime; we are being invited to live the same life that God lives. Imagine how that will dramatically change your behavior and how you comport with reality.

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Sorry for the slow response. Work and family obligations.

I would submit that within the Reformed tradition I belong to, there is indeed a fixed dogmatic boundary - every bit as much as the one that exists in the Orthodox Church (though in many ways quite different, of course). I think your idea that such dogma does not exist stems from your category error. If you viewed each denomination as its own ecclesial body (which, it is) instead of a number of splinters of Protestantism, that might change your mindset a bit.

I would also submit that your position stretches the meaning of the word salvation beyond how Scripture uses it. If salvation is defined as "maximal union with God" or the completion of humanity's ultimate destiny, then yes, Adam had not yet reached that end before the Fall. But that does not mean Adam needed salvation in the ordinary biblical sense of rescue, healing, or deliverance. It simply means Adam was created good but unfinished, oriented toward growth and communion with God. Scripture consistently frames salvation as God's response to sin, death, and exile, not merely to finiteness.

Similarly, the claim that removing a single visible "pillar and ground of the truth" inevitably leads to linguistic collapse and fragmentation overstates the case. Human communities regularly preserve shared meanings and practices without a single infallible interpretive. We saw this throughout the early church in Acts. Even Orthodox theologians disagree among themselves on many issues while remaining Orthodox, which suggests that some degree of interpretive diversity is compatible with unity. The issue, then, is not whether disagreement exists, but how much diversity a community can tolerate before it loses its identity.

As for Adam, if he truly needed salvation in the same sense we do, then it becomes difficult to explain why Scripture consistently contrasts Adam and Christ in terms of fall and redemption. I would submit a more balanced view is that Adam was created for deification but did not yet require healing.

Protestant theology has never taught that salvation is merely a legal fiction in which God signs paperwork and nothing changes. It teaches union with Christ, regeneration, sanctification, transformation of desires, obedience, and bodily resurrection. Where Protestants differ is not over whether transformation is real, but whether transformation is the basis of acceptance before God or the fruit of it. Framing Protestantism as minimalism misrepresents what many Protestants actually believe and practice.

Likewise, participation in the divine life and the seriousness of the body are not uniquely Orthodox insights. Many Protestants, including the Reformed tradition in particular, affirm participation in Christ, the indwelling Spirit, real moral and bodily transformation, and the final resurrection of the body, while being cautious (and sometimes skeptical) about Orthodoxy's metaphysical language like "god by grace" or about treating sacramental systems as necessary rather than means God freely uses. Disagreements over icons or relics do not entail a denial of the body's holiness, just a different idea about how those things function theologically.

Your argument seems to imply that only Orthodoxy can take Scripture, transformation, incarnation, and deification seriously, but there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Christianity can affirm that salvation is more than acquittal, without concluding that Adam was "unsaved" before the Fall or that Protestant accounts of salvation are inherently thin or inadequate.

Doc Holliday said:

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Mothra said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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Realitybites said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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The Orthodox answer is that unresisted passion disorders the nous and progressively destroys the capacity for communion with God. The stakes are real and present, not just inconsistency with your positional status.

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The concept of the Nous doesn't even exist in western Christianity. That was something new for me to get my head around when I became Orthodox.I doubt that most who haven't gone to seminary - and probably quite a few who have - have never heard of it.

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Yeah western Christianity is built upon either Roman Catholicism or Medieval Latin assumptions.

This is a good/simple explanation:

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Still not sure I understand the "Nous" or how it differs from what my Reformed church teaches. Any more detailed explanations?

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Reformed theology inherited a broadly Augustinian framework. Sanctification for you guys is largely a matter of the will being realigned through the Spirit working through Word and correct belief.

Nous means mind. When we have the mind of Christ, that means nous. It'a not position against knowledge, rationality, reasoning, education etc., it's more the concept that you can't come to know God through just the operation of the human mind. You can learn about God and the scriptures…but still be very far from God.

It's not the intellect. It's not reason. It's the eye of the soul or the organ of direct perception of God. It's the faculty by which the human person participates in divine life, not by inference or proposition but by immediate spiritual perception. If you have children, I'm certain you love them, but you don't love them because of logic or studying them: I know deep down you know what that spiritual perception is.

A big reason why it's hard for western Christians to understand is because you guys subscribe to total depravity. If total depravity means what Reformed theology says it means, the nous isn't just darkened, it's dead. Not wounded, not clouded, not in need of rehabilitation. Dead. The natural man has no functional receptivity to God whatsoever apart from irresistible grace acting unilaterally on him.

Reformed: sin misdirects the will and darkens rational apprehension of truth. Fix: correct doctrine applied by the Spirit realigns the will. Knowledge precedes practice.

Orthodox: sin progressively blinds the very faculty by which God is perceived and known. Fix: ascetic purification of the nous through nepsis, fasting, prayer, and the sacramental life restores the organ so it can see again.

You will know it by practicing it. You don't understand prayer by studying prayer, you understand it by praying. You don't understand fasting by reading about fasting, you understand it by fasting. If you don't have a category for the nous, you will consistently misidentify the problem as intellectual or volitional when it's actually perceptive. You'll keep feeding correct propositions to a faculty that can't receive them properly because the receiving organ is damaged.

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Thanks for the video. While I am still not quite sure I understand this concept, it sounds to me like what she is referencing is the heart, the regenerated mind, or the conscience as illumined by the Holy Spirit, if we want to use Western or Protestant terminology.

I do have to say that all of the paintings in the background of saints and church fathers is really weird to me. I still don't get the Orthodox veneration of icons such as these.

Coke Bear said:

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BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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You're just repeating already defeated arguments.

Any rational, intelligent person can read the Anunciation (not Proposition) story and see that there was NOTHING for Mary to decide, permit, or obey. It was decided for her. "You WILL...", not "Will you?".

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The verb is future indicative. The key is Mary's response in verse 34 which is the pivot of the entire passage

"How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?"

The future tense of the angel's declaration expresses God's foreknowledge and eternal will
But it does not override or bypass Mary's freedom
God's omniscience already knew her "yes" but that does not make her "yes" any less free or necessary

Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (III, Q. 30, Art. 1) addresses this directly.
Thirdly, that she might offer to God the free gift of her obedience: which she proved herself right ready to do, saying: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord."

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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And if you're drawing a similarity between being visited by God's beloved angel and being approached by the PRINCE OF ALL EVIL, then you are just too far gone to be talking sense to. You are absolutely determined to worship Mary, and by golly, you'll find a way, even if it means twisting and dishonestly interpreting Scripture.

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Hey, another Strawman fallacy for you today!!! You know that Catholics don't worship Mary, but you continue to state that. It's difficult to have a conversation with you when you keep making false accusations about people's beliefs.

Secondarily, most rational people can see the parallels between Mary and Eve. Both were virgins. Both were approached by angels (one evil and one good). Both said, "yes", one to evil and one to good.

God reversed what man had done.

Jeremiah 5:21 - "Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not..."

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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If a church father is SO WRONG, not just "off on their timing" as Irenaeus was, clearly he isn't reliable, and thus it would be completely FOOLISH to base one's theology off of him.

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This is just a silly argument. Just because a person then know the age of someone doesn't mean that they aren't creditable when it comes to other theological aspects. Catholics don't base their theology on just one human person. Another strawman fallacy, you're two for two in the same post!

Thomas Aquinas, one of the most brilliant minds to walk the earth, misunderstood when people received their rational soul. He thought that the soul was infused at 40 days for males at 40 days and 80 days for female. This doesn't mean that he isn't credible with other matters, it means he was dealing with bad science of the day. The same can be said for Irenaeus.

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There is nothing in Scripture about the Anunciation that indicates that God had to know her "permission" rather than her "submission" beforehand in choosing Mary. Again, ratonal and intelligent people read that story, and they don't come away from it thinking that there was something for Mary to obey or give permission for. It's something you Roman Catholics have been taught to believe and so you read that in, through confirmation bias. You can only cite fallible men like Thomas Aquinas for your theology. NOWHERE in Scripture does it ever say that Mary "obeyed".

The parallels between Mary and Eve were drawn up by fallible men, not Scripture. Rational people do NOT see this parallel naturally. In fact, rational people see it as counter to reason: Eve did not give birth to Adam. She came from Adam, not the other way around. Eve was Adam's wife, not mother. Eve was tempted by the Devil who who was not from heaven, but who lived as a creature in the same Garden as Eve did; she was not visited by a beloved angel of God who came from heaven, like Mary. Eve was confronted with a choice, and chose to disobey God. Mary was not given any choice or command to obey, she simply submitted to what was chosen for her.

The Eve-Mary parallel is simply a man-made concoction. It's the result of starting with the conclusion, and then finding the "facts" to support it later. Roman Catholicism grasped onto this idea in order to elevate Mary's importance and role in God's plan of salvation so as to justify their worship of her. And make no mistake - you Roman Catholics are worshiping Mary. You can deny it all you want, it only makes you look like a brainwashed cult. When you:

• make statues and images of her, and bow down to them, IN CHURCH
• pray to her in church
• sing hymns for her
• build churches in her honor
• hold hundreds of festivals a year in honor of her
• say prayers where you call her name ten times as much as you say God's name
• call her "Advocate", "Co-Mediator", "The ALL HOLY ONE";
• say that salvation comes through her, and only through her.
• have Psalms written about her, where you take the Psalms from the OT and remove God's name and replace it with her name
• call her the "peacemaker between sinners and God", "ruler of my house", "God of this world", "ruler of my house", "the salvation of my soul"
• say that we can come to her and entrust her with ALL our petitions and cares
• say that "in her hands I place my salvation"
• etc, etc, etc, etc

.... then to any rational person, this is worship in every sense. In fact, it makes you look completely insane to the rational world when you deny it.

Irenaeus is NOT the only fallible church father you base your beliefs on. Virtually your entire theology surrounding Mary is completely built from the beliefs of error-prone men, like Irenaeus, rather than from God-breathed, infallible Scripture. And you do this to your undoing. Wake up and open your eyes, and open your brain. Stop blindly swallowing what your Church feeds you. None of us know when our time will come and it can come suddenly like it did for our friend LimitedIQ, after which point it is too late to get things right.

And please, please, PLEASE - learn what logical concepts like "strawman" and "ad hominem" means before you try to use them in arguments. You are using those words as if you just learned what they mean, and it makes your arguments seem so silly and unintelligent.

Mothra said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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Mothra said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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Mothra said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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EO has an entire psychospiritual taxonomy for how sin takes root and how you fight it. We see sin as a disease, not a legal debt.

How do you guys handle your habitual sin, your passions, your pride, your ego etc.?

From my experience, if you're not fasting in some manner, not praying daily, not reading scripture, not confessing, not talking about your sin with others…you're gonna get cooked. It's not enough to just remember the gospel, believe harder or join an accountability group: that's not going to cut it.

If you're not fighting sin or you think the Holy Spirit is going to just automatically change you without any synergy or effort on your behalf…you WILL have dead faith. You will either be delusional about your salvation or you'll completely reject Christ. The person who stops fighting eventually stops praying. The person who stops praying eventually stops meaning it. The person who stops meaning it eventually stops altogether, and usually tells themselves a story about intellectual reasons why.
The warfare isn't separate from the faith.

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I am sure you will be mortified, but I agree with you on this subject a lot more than you might expect - especially that sin is not just a legal category, that it embeds itself in habits and desires, and that passivity is spiritually deadly. The way the EO treats sin is not unique to EO. My own reformed congregation views sin similarly and treats it similarly.

Where we disagree is not whether Christians must fight sin, but what grounds that fight. Protestants do not believe the Holy Spirit "automatically" sanctifies people without effort. That's yet another one of your mistaken assumptions (as an aside, is your knowledge of Protestantism limited to watching Robert Tilton?). Protestant theology has always taught active, serious, disciplined resistance to sin: daily prayer, Scripture, confession of sin to God and to trusted believers, and deliberate cultivations of godly habits. The difference is we see that as the fruit of grace already given.

When you say "it's not enough to remember the gospel or believe harder," I would respond: remembering the gospel is not intellectual recall, but instead a daily reorientation of the self. The gospel doesn't merely forgive guilt; it redefines identity. The Protestant answer to pride, ego, and habitual sin is relentless exposure of the self to grace that undercuts any sort of self justification.

You're absolutely right that the person who stops fighting eventually stops praying. My Reformed congregation would wholeheartedly agree. Where we push back is on the idea that liturgical frameworks are somehow only capable of sustaining the fight. I know enough Orthodox Christians to also know those who go through the motions of fasting, confession, and prayer while remaining deeply unchanged, just as there are Protestants who drift into presumption. No tradition has a monopoly on vigilance.

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I was protestant before Eastern Orthodox and have been to multiple churches: non denominational, Baptist, and evangelical. I've been in a handful of megachurches, small churches and in between. I've been told I can't lose my salvation. I've been told that I'm totally depraved and that I can't even cooperate with God if I wanted to, that I should be thankful that I'm one of the elect by God's choice, not mine. I've been told the same things yall are telling me too. The more different types of churches you go to…the more you realize nobody is really on the same page. There's no dogma and that was the problem for me.

The ascetic infrastructure of fasting, regular confession, liturgical rhythm, and embodied practice exists precisely because the Church learned over centuries that serious intention without structured means produces inconsistent results. The system exists because human beings are embodied, habituated creatures who need more than correct doctrine to actually change.

Going through the motions of confession and fasting while remaining fundamentally unchanged is a genuine failure mode. No tradition has a monopoly on vigilance, you're right.
But here's where I think the deeper disagreement lives. You said sanctification is the fruit of grace already given. If the fight is downstream of something already secured, what exactly is at stake when someone stops fighting? I'm not asking rhetorically.

The Orthodox answer is that unresisted passion disorders the nous and progressively destroys the capacity for communion with God. The stakes are real and present, not just inconsistency with your positional status.

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Thanks. This helps me better understand your position. With respect to Protestantism, I would submit that you are committing what I would call a category error. Your argument assumes, implicitly, that Protestantism should function like Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism - as a single, unified ecclesial body with a common authority structure, defined dogma, and an internally consistent set of beliefs. This is where I believe you err.

As you should know, Protestantism is not one church or sect but a broad historical family of traditions that arose from the Reformation and developed along distinct theological, ecclesial, and devotional lines. Undoubtedly, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, nondenominational, etc. differ substantially from one another, often selfconsciously so, and they do not pretend otherwise. Given this fact, pointing to doctrinal disagreement across various Protestant churches does not demonstrate a failure of Protestantism, in general. It might expose a failure of a particular denomination (indeed, I think there are many). But the idea that Protestantism is somehow doctrinally wrong because of fracture does not a strong argument make because it is based on a category error.

As I've said in other posts, my beliefs are likely much closer to Orthodoxy than the current Methodist church, and I flatly reject many of its current positions as completely heretical. Does that mean Protestantism has failed? Of course not, because Protestantism is not a single ecclesial body, and never has been. The various Protestant churches you attended were never attempting to speak with one voice, nor do they claim to represent the same theological tradition. Expecting uniformity across them imposes an Orthodox or Catholic standard of ecclesial identity onto a movement that explicitly operates under different assumptions. You may judge that model inadequate, but you should at least try to first describe it accurately.

But perhaps we can discuss something we agree on - the need for vigilance in battling sin. While I am generally familiar with Orthodox belief, I truly am curious what it is about the ascetic infrastructure of Orthodoxy that you believe makes it more vigilant in the war against the flesh. I've said on these boards before I have been a part of what I would call a recovery group for years that assists men battling sex and porn addictions, and I have taken some pretty extreme actions in my battle against that. At this point in my life, it is more an accountability group than anything, and an opportunity to encourage younger men in their struggle against sin.

What is it about Orthodoxy that you believe better equips men for such battles against the flesh? Is there something about the ritual that you believe helps you, personally, in whatever issue you are dealing with?

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That's a fair viewpoint of Protestantism and yes I do think that model is inadequate. I don't know that its even accurate to call non denominational, reformed or other churches outside of the mainlines as genuinely protestant. Its something else entirely. I see the fracturing and lack of dogma as the logical conclusion of removing the "pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15). Without a fixed dogmatic boundary, I think language itself loses its ability to bind a community together because the same words (like "grace," "justification," or "marriage") begin to mean radically different things depending on who is speaking. I noticed this a lot.

Think about this: Before Adam sinned, did he need salvation?

If we define salvation strictly as "forgiveness for a crime" or "rescue from hell," then the answer would be no, Adam was innocent. But if we define salvation as Theosis, the movement from a "natural" state to a "divine" state...then Yes Adam did need salvation before he sinned. Even before the Fall, Adam "needed" salvation because he needed to be lifted out of his created, finite nature and brought into the uncreated, eternal life of God: union with God, so he refused to fall. This movement, from being a biological creature to a "god by grace", is the very definition of the salvation the Church offers us now.

If Adam needed "salvation" (as Union) before he even sinned, it proves that the Christian life isn't just about "getting back to zero" or returning to a state of innocence. It's about moving toward a state that even Adam in Paradise had not yet achieved. The "infrastructure" of the Church: the sacraments and the ascetic life, isn't just a repair kit for a broken world, it's the ladder that was always intended to take humanity into the Divine.

Its anchored in the words of Christ in John 10:34, where He quotes Psalm 82:6: "I said, 'You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.'". Also 2 Peter 1:4, which says we are called to be "partakers of the divine nature."

A Protestant often thinks of salvation like Adoption. A judge signs a paper, and now you are legally part of the family. Orthodoxy says: Yes, it is adoption, but it's an adoption that rewrites your DNA. You aren't just "called" a son of God: you actually start to take on the "features" of the Father. You aren't just "forgiven" for being a sinner: you are being cured of the "sickness" of death and sin. Its a much deeper view of salvation and it faces a completely different problem.

Christ's Resurrection was not just a spirit returning to a body; it was the total "deification" of human matter. Because His human nature was perfectly united to His Divine nature, death could not hold Him. The reason many Orthodox saints do not decompose (or do so very slowly, often emitting a sweet fragrance known as the "odor of sanctity"). We see in the Bible that even the hem of Christ's garment or St. Paul's handkerchiefs could heal people. This is why we take physical things serious: the Eucharist, relics, icons etc.

If your body is just a "container" for your soul, then sin is just a bad thought. But if your body is a Temple, then sin is desecration. We aren't just being pardoned for a crime; we are being invited to live the same life that God lives. Imagine how that will dramatically change your behavior and how you comport with reality.

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Sorry for the slow response. Work and family obligations.

I would submit that within the Reformed tradition I belong to, there is indeed a fixed dogmatic boundary - every bit as much as the one that exists in the Orthodox Church (though in many ways quite different, of course). I think your idea that such dogma does not exist stems from your category error. If you viewed each denomination as its own ecclesial body (which, it is) instead of a number of splinters of Protestantism, that might change your mindset a bit.

I would also submit that your position stretches the meaning of the word salvation beyond how Scripture uses it. If salvation is defined as "maximal union with God" or the completion of humanity's ultimate destiny, then yes, Adam had not yet reached that end before the Fall. But that does not mean Adam needed salvation in the ordinary biblical sense of rescue, healing, or deliverance. It simply means Adam was created good but unfinished, oriented toward growth and communion with God. Scripture consistently frames salvation as God's response to sin, death, and exile, not merely to finiteness.

Similarly, the claim that removing a single visible "pillar and ground of the truth" inevitably leads to linguistic collapse and fragmentation overstates the case. Human communities regularly preserve shared meanings and practices without a single infallible interpretive. We saw this throughout the early church in Acts. Even Orthodox theologians disagree among themselves on many issues while remaining Orthodox, which suggests that some degree of interpretive diversity is compatible with unity. The issue, then, is not whether disagreement exists, but how much diversity a community can tolerate before it loses its identity.

As for Adam, if he truly needed salvation in the same sense we do, then it becomes difficult to explain why Scripture consistently contrasts Adam and Christ in terms of fall and redemption. I would submit a more balanced view is that Adam was created for deification but did not yet require healing.

Protestant theology has never taught that salvation is merely a legal fiction in which God signs paperwork and nothing changes. It teaches union with Christ, regeneration, sanctification, transformation of desires, obedience, and bodily resurrection. Where Protestants differ is not over whether transformation is real, but whether transformation is the basis of acceptance before God or the fruit of it. Framing Protestantism as minimalism misrepresents what many Protestants actually believe and practice.

Likewise, participation in the divine life and the seriousness of the body are not uniquely Orthodox insights. Many Protestants, including the Reformed tradition in particular, affirm participation in Christ, the indwelling Spirit, real moral and bodily transformation, and the final resurrection of the body, while being cautious (and sometimes skeptical) about Orthodoxy's metaphysical language like "god by grace" or about treating sacramental systems as necessary rather than means God freely uses. Disagreements over icons or relics do not entail a denial of the body's holiness, just a different idea about how those things function theologically.

Your argument seems to imply that only Orthodoxy can take Scripture, transformation, incarnation, and deification seriously, but there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Christianity can affirm that salvation is more than acquittal, without concluding that Adam was "unsaved" before the Fall or that Protestant accounts of salvation are inherently thin or inadequate.

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Yes, each Reformed denomination has internal dogmatic boundaries, but this only pushes the problem back a level. The question was never whether your particular branch has fixed doctrine. The question is: what makes your branch's fixed doctrine authoritative? On sola scriptura, the answer can't be "the church" without circularity, and can't be "Scripture alone" without explaining why your interpretation is binding on anyone outside your ecclesial body.
Calling each fragment "its own ecclesial body" doesn't resolve the epistemological problem, it basically just distributes it.

On Adam: the distinction you're drawing between deification-as-destiny and salvation-as-rescue is precisely what's at issue.
If salvation is only rescue from sin, then Christ's work is primarily remedial, and humanity's original telos was abandoned rather than restored and exceeded. The Orthodox framing isn't stretching salvation beyond Scripture. It's restoring it to its full biblical and patristic scope. Your framing is the narrower one, shaped by a fall-and-redemption binary that dominates post-Augustinian Western theology, not the earlier tradition.

The early church in Acts resolved doctrinal disputes by appealing to apostolic authority centered in Jerusalem, not by each community authenticating its own reading. Acts 15 is an argument for conciliar authority. And yes, Orthodox theologians disagree on secondary matters, but that diversity operates within bounds set by the received dogmatic tradition, not by individual or denominational self-interpretation. The issue isn't whether some diversity is tolerable. The issue is whether your system produces any reliable mechanism for resolving disputes on matters touching salvation that binds anyone beyond your own self-defined community. It doesn't.

No Orthodox theologian I'm aware of claims Protestants deny transformation. If justification is forensic and logically prior to union with God, then theosis can't be the frame of salvation, only an appendage to it. When justification is the load bearing concept and union is downstream of it, you get a different anthropology, a different ecclesiology, and a different sacramentology vs. when theosis is the organizing center from the beginning. You're defending the sincerity of Protestant piety, which I'm not questioning.

you're defending the piety of Reformed Christians, and I'm genuinely not disputing that. My critique was never that Protestants are bad Christians or that transformation doesn't happen in Reformed communities. The critique is that sola scriptura can't ground the doctrinal authority it claims, that the forensic frame distorts the soteriological whole, and that fragmentation is a structural feature of the system.

Mothra said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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Mothra said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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Realitybites said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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The Orthodox answer is that unresisted passion disorders the nous and progressively destroys the capacity for communion with God. The stakes are real and present, not just inconsistency with your positional status.

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The concept of the Nous doesn't even exist in western Christianity. That was something new for me to get my head around when I became Orthodox.I doubt that most who haven't gone to seminary - and probably quite a few who have - have never heard of it.

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Yeah western Christianity is built upon either Roman Catholicism or Medieval Latin assumptions.

This is a good/simple explanation:

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Still not sure I understand the "Nous" or how it differs from what my Reformed church teaches. Any more detailed explanations?

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Reformed theology inherited a broadly Augustinian framework. Sanctification for you guys is largely a matter of the will being realigned through the Spirit working through Word and correct belief.

Nous means mind. When we have the mind of Christ, that means nous. It'a not position against knowledge, rationality, reasoning, education etc., it's more the concept that you can't come to know God through just the operation of the human mind. You can learn about God and the scriptures…but still be very far from God.

It's not the intellect. It's not reason. It's the eye of the soul or the organ of direct perception of God. It's the faculty by which the human person participates in divine life, not by inference or proposition but by immediate spiritual perception. If you have children, I'm certain you love them, but you don't love them because of logic or studying them: I know deep down you know what that spiritual perception is.

A big reason why it's hard for western Christians to understand is because you guys subscribe to total depravity. If total depravity means what Reformed theology says it means, the nous isn't just darkened, it's dead. Not wounded, not clouded, not in need of rehabilitation. Dead. The natural man has no functional receptivity to God whatsoever apart from irresistible grace acting unilaterally on him.

Reformed: sin misdirects the will and darkens rational apprehension of truth. Fix: correct doctrine applied by the Spirit realigns the will. Knowledge precedes practice.

Orthodox: sin progressively blinds the very faculty by which God is perceived and known. Fix: ascetic purification of the nous through nepsis, fasting, prayer, and the sacramental life restores the organ so it can see again.

You will know it by practicing it. You don't understand prayer by studying prayer, you understand it by praying. You don't understand fasting by reading about fasting, you understand it by fasting. If you don't have a category for the nous, you will consistently misidentify the problem as intellectual or volitional when it's actually perceptive. You'll keep feeding correct propositions to a faculty that can't receive them properly because the receiving organ is damaged.

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Thanks for the video. While I am still not quite sure I understand this concept, it sounds to me like what she is referencing is the heart, the regenerated mind, or the conscience as illumined by the Holy Spirit, if we want to use Western or Protestant terminology.

I do have to say that all of the paintings in the background of saints and church fathers is really weird to me. I still don't get the Orthodox veneration of icons such as these.

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Amulets come in strange disguises. All amulets invariably come to control those who make them. Such happens in every life context.

What are yall's thoughts on repentance?

For a lot of people its just feeling shame and crying out for forgiveness.

Its more than that...its also putting in the work to get out of your own way so that God's will and your will become one, and in that union, you are transfigured. If you really are ashamed and truly seek forgiveness, then you will naturally try to change.

If I fall I see myself sometimes praying to hate my sin more. I never did this as a protestant. I used to feel like I had arrived, but now I refuse to stop praying and struggling: the closer you get to the light, the more you see what is still dark in yourself. I see the whole spiritual life as the will being gradually conformed to the divine will, which is the very movement of deification. Repentance is ongoing and active, not an episode or passive.

Doc Holliday said:

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What are yall's thoughts on repentance?

For a lot of people its just feeling shame and crying out for forgiveness.

Its more than that...its also putting in the work to get out of your own way so that God's will and your will become one, and in that union, you are transfigured. If you really are ashamed and truly seek forgiveness, then you will naturally try to change.

If I fall I see myself sometimes praying to hate my sin more. I never did this as a protestant. I used to feel like I had arrived, but now I refuse to stop praying and struggling: the closer you get to the light, the more you see what is still dark in yourself. I see the whole spiritual life as the will being gradually conformed to the divine will, which is the very movement of deification. Repentance is ongoing and active, not an episode or passive.

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Well, to start I do not see repentance as a Protestant or Roman Catholic or Orthodox thing. Pretending one of the groups has been better at this than the others is arrogant and wrong.

But to the question, I see repentance exercised in several ways. There is the common guilt of getting caught, in which case repentance means the person wishes they did not have to face the consequences of their wrong. There is also the human conceit of imagining this sin is somehow not so bad, not like that sin the really bad people commit. That's very dangerous, because over time some come to believe that some of their sins are not even really sins.

Genuine contrition is present in real repentance, sorrow for what was done to the victim(s), even if the only one offended was God (strange how so many never think of grief caused to the Holy Spirit by our sins). Repentance means being sorry not only for doing what you knew to be wrong, but also for the harm caused, and also for soiling the person you could and should have been.

I believe Jesus doesn't just want us clean and renewed, but to become the person we were always meant to become. Repentance is the start of redirection to that purpose.

Doc Holliday said:

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What are yall's thoughts on repentance?

For a lot of people its just feeling shame and crying out for forgiveness.

Its more than that...its also putting in the work to get out of your own way so that God's will and your will become one, and in that union, you are transfigured. If you really are ashamed and truly seek forgiveness, then you will naturally try to change.

If I fall I see myself sometimes praying to hate my sin more. I never did this as a protestant. I used to feel like I had arrived, but now I refuse to stop praying and struggling: the closer you get to the light, the more you see what is still dark in yourself. I see the whole spiritual life as the will being gradually conformed to the divine will, which is the very movement of deification. Repentance is ongoing and active, not an episode or passive.

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I have to be honest - it sounds like whatever Protestant church you were attending was some sort of seeker church that really didn't take much of anything seriously. Your experience is nowhere close to my own.

My non-denominational bible church back in Dallas was quite serious about the struggle against sin. Started a program called Regeneration, which spread across the country. It helped free me from a porn addition, and transformed my life. It encouraged radical steps to fight the sin, and radical accountability.

Again, I am just not sure what you are describing is at all unique to Orthodoxy.

Mothra said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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What are yall's thoughts on repentance?

For a lot of people its just feeling shame and crying out for forgiveness.

Its more than that...its also putting in the work to get out of your own way so that God's will and your will become one, and in that union, you are transfigured. If you really are ashamed and truly seek forgiveness, then you will naturally try to change.

If I fall I see myself sometimes praying to hate my sin more. I never did this as a protestant. I used to feel like I had arrived, but now I refuse to stop praying and struggling: the closer you get to the light, the more you see what is still dark in yourself. I see the whole spiritual life as the will being gradually conformed to the divine will, which is the very movement of deification. Repentance is ongoing and active, not an episode or passive.

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I have to be honest - it sounds like whatever Protestant church you were attending was some sort of seeker church that really didn't take much of anything seriously. Your experience is nowhere close to my own.

My non-denominational bible church back in Dallas was quite serious about the struggle against sin. Started a program called Regeneration, which spread across the country. It helped free me from a porn addition, and transformed my life. It encouraged radical steps to fight the sin, and radical accountability.

Again, I am just not sure what you are describing is at all unique to Orthodoxy.

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from what I have seen: good bible teaching churches teach to actively fight sin, confess and ask for forgiveness of any new sin and repent(change our mind back to righteousness) when we stumble. Continual asking for forgiveness of previous sin is unbelief in Gods word. Praying for the same thing over and over is unbelief in Gods word. Thanksgiving for the promises kept is the follow up to every prayer request.

Shame is a feeling that opens doors to the evil one. Conviction can be confused with shame but it is God requesting correction. Shame usually accompanies the belief of God won't love me because I did this. Conviction comes with the belief of God does this because he loves me.

Repentance is an ongoing need as long as sin is an ongoing action. True repentance eliminates the sin, but sins are many and the great deceiver will point you towards new sin if the old sin has no draw for you.

Mothra said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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What are yall's thoughts on repentance?

For a lot of people its just feeling shame and crying out for forgiveness.

Its more than that...its also putting in the work to get out of your own way so that God's will and your will become one, and in that union, you are transfigured. If you really are ashamed and truly seek forgiveness, then you will naturally try to change.

If I fall I see myself sometimes praying to hate my sin more. I never did this as a protestant. I used to feel like I had arrived, but now I refuse to stop praying and struggling: the closer you get to the light, the more you see what is still dark in yourself. I see the whole spiritual life as the will being gradually conformed to the divine will, which is the very movement of deification. Repentance is ongoing and active, not an episode or passive.

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I have to be honest - it sounds like whatever Protestant church you were attending was some sort of seeker church that really didn't take much of anything seriously. Your experience is nowhere close to my own.

My non-denominational bible church back in Dallas was quite serious about the struggle against sin. Started a program called Regeneration, which spread across the country. It helped free me from a porn addition, and transformed my life. It encouraged radical steps to fight the sin, and radical accountability.

Again, I am just not sure what you are describing is at all unique to Orthodoxy.

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I think what's unique to Orthodoxy is that you can't half ass it because there's formalized, institutional gatekeeping. Its not like Catholicism either. Orthodoxy essentially tries to turn that "intensive program" you mentioned, into a permanent, lifelong lifestyle for every member, regardless of their specific struggles.

In many Protestant churches, even very serious ones, the "examination of the soul" is primarily a private matter between the individual and God. You are encouraged to be worthy, but the decision to walk down the aisle is ultimately yours. That can't really take place within Orthodoxy.

If you want the Eucharist, you can't have it unless you've talked to the Priest. You literally cannot take the Eucharist unless you have been to the Mystery of Holy Confession. The Priest acts as a spiritual physician who must "bless" your participation.

About half the days of the year are fast days. This isn't just "giving something up" for Lent; it's a rigorous, communal schedule where you abstain from meat, dairy, oil, and wine for weeks at a time.

We also have prayer rules. If you only pray when you feel like it, you are essentially beholden to or even worshipping your own moods. A formal rule: praying specific psalms and prayers at specific times, forces you to show up even when you're spiritually dry. It's a disciplined submission to a tradition rather than a reliance on personal inspiration.

There's days where I will wake up and do 20 or so prostrations. Like I'm out of breath and deeply in the presence of God. If I do that, its so much harder for me to fall or give into temptation. When you use your whole being and body to worship, it changes you.

In a Bible church, accountability often happens among peers (which is excellent for breaking addictions). In Orthodoxy, you have a Spiritual Father. This is a vertical relationship. You don't just "vent" to him, you submit your life to his guidance. If he tells you that you aren't ready for Communion or that you need to increase your fasting to combat a specific passion, you follow that direction. It removes the "self-law" (autonomy) that often lets us off the hook when we're struggling.

I'm not trying to downplay your experience or anything. Just giving you some info on my experience and others. Most people that come to Orthodoxy find it extremely difficult. It asks a lot from you and you really have to commit to Christ in ways that really cost you in significant ways.

Decent article on the subject:

https://www.walkinganancientpath.com/2021/09/29/2708/

Doc Holliday said:

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Mothra said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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What are yall's thoughts on repentance?

For a lot of people its just feeling shame and crying out for forgiveness.

Its more than that...its also putting in the work to get out of your own way so that God's will and your will become one, and in that union, you are transfigured. If you really are ashamed and truly seek forgiveness, then you will naturally try to change.

If I fall I see myself sometimes praying to hate my sin more. I never did this as a protestant. I used to feel like I had arrived, but now I refuse to stop praying and struggling: the closer you get to the light, the more you see what is still dark in yourself. I see the whole spiritual life as the will being gradually conformed to the divine will, which is the very movement of deification. Repentance is ongoing and active, not an episode or passive.

---

I have to be honest - it sounds like whatever Protestant church you were attending was some sort of seeker church that really didn't take much of anything seriously. Your experience is nowhere close to my own.

My non-denominational bible church back in Dallas was quite serious about the struggle against sin. Started a program called Regeneration, which spread across the country. It helped free me from a porn addition, and transformed my life. It encouraged radical steps to fight the sin, and radical accountability.

Again, I am just not sure what you are describing is at all unique to Orthodoxy.

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I think what's unique to Orthodoxy is that you can't half ass it because there's formalized, institutional gatekeeping. Its not like Catholicism either. Orthodoxy essentially tries to turn that "intensive program" you mentioned, into a permanent, lifelong lifestyle for every member, regardless of their specific struggles.

In many Protestant churches, even very serious ones, the "examination of the soul" is primarily a private matter between the individual and God. You are encouraged to be worthy, but the decision to walk down the aisle is ultimately yours. That can't really take place within Orthodoxy.

If you want the Eucharist, you can't have it unless you've talked to the Priest. You literally cannot take the Eucharist unless you have been to the Mystery of Holy Confession. The Priest acts as a spiritual physician who must "bless" your participation.

About half the days of the year are fast days. This isn't just "giving something up" for Lent; it's a rigorous, communal schedule where you abstain from meat, dairy, oil, and wine for weeks at a time.

We also have prayer rules. If you only pray when you feel like it, you are essentially beholden to or even worshipping your own moods. A formal rule: praying specific psalms and prayers at specific times, forces you to show up even when you're spiritually dry. It's a disciplined submission to a tradition rather than a reliance on personal inspiration.

There's days where I will wake up and do 20 or so prostrations. Like I'm out of breath and deeply in the presence of God. If I do that, its so much harder for me to fall or give into temptation. When you use your whole being and body to worship, it changes you.

In a Bible church, accountability often happens among peers (which is excellent for breaking addictions). In Orthodoxy, you have a Spiritual Father. This is a vertical relationship. You don't just "vent" to him, you submit your life to his guidance. If he tells you that you aren't ready for Communion or that you need to increase your fasting to combat a specific passion, you follow that direction. It removes the "self-law" (autonomy) that often lets us off the hook when we're struggling.

I'm not trying to downplay your experience or anything. Just giving you some info on my experience and others. Most people that come to Orthodoxy find it extremely difficult. It asks a lot from you and you really have to commit to Christ in ways that really cost you in significant ways.

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Thanks. I am pretty familiar with some of the more onerous rules, as I have several close friends who are Orthodox. I do appreciate the seriousness with which some of you take your faith. The problem, as I tell them, is much of what I see is a set of rules that aren't biblical.

For example, while communion is treated with seriousness in the New Testament, the responsibility given is for self-examination before God, not for receiving approval from a priest beforehand. Similarly, confession is certainly biblical, but Scripture teaches both confessing sins to one another and going directly to God for forgiveness; it never explicitly requires confession to a priest as a condition for receiving grace or participating in communion.

The idea of a "spiritual father" providing guidance can reflect biblical mentorship, but the level of authority you describe (where someone essentially submits their personal decisions and readiness for spiritual life to a single individua) goes further than what the New Testament outlines. Church leaders are told to shepherd and care for believers, but not to exercise controlling authority over them, and each person is ultimately accountable to God.

Likewise, while fasting and disciplined prayer are clearly encouraged in Scripture, the Bible does not mandate fixed, universal schedules or detailed systems for all believers. In fact, it warns against turning external rules about food or practices into binding spiritual requirements, noting that such regulations can appear wise but don't necessarily produce true spiritual transformation. See Colossians 2:20-23.

My concern is that these practices can become treated as necessary structures through which grace is mediated or dispensed. The New Testament consistently emphasizes that believers have direct access to God through Christ, who is the one mediator. So while discipline, repentance, and intentional spiritual effort are biblical, no question, presenting a system where participation in core aspects of Christian life depends on some sort of human mediation or approval goes beyond what Scripture clearly teaches.

The heart of the issue is not whether these practices can be beneficial, but whether they should be considered binding or essential in the way described. Some of this seems to substitute a set of rules for a personal relationship with Christ.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

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There is nothing in Scripture about the Anunciation that indicates that God had to know her "permission" rather than her "submission" beforehand in choosing Mary. Again, ratonal and intelligent people read that story, and they don't come away from it thinking that there was something for Mary to obey or give permission for. It's something you Roman Catholics have been taught to believe and so you read that in, through confirmation bias. You can only cite fallible men like Thomas Aquinas for your theology. NOWHERE in Scripture does it ever say that Mary "obeyed".

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Once again, you have defaulted to your false belief of sola scriptura. Just because something isn't expressly stated in the scriptures doesn't mean that it isn't true or we shouldn't believe in it. The bible NEVER makes this claim. This has been demonstrated to you MANY times; however, it seems to be your last-ditch effort to rest your case. It's not the trump card that you believe it to be. It's the play of those that fail to support their argument.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

The parallels between Mary and Eve were drawn up by fallible men, not Scripture. Rational people do NOT see this parallel naturally. In fact, rational people see it as counter to reason: Eve did not give birth to Adam. She came from Adam, not the other way around. Eve was Adam's wife, not mother. Eve was tempted by the Devil who who was not from heaven, but who lived as a creature in the same Garden as Eve did; she was not visited by a beloved angel of God who came from heaven, like Mary. Eve was confronted with a choice, and chose to disobey God. Mary was not given any choice or command to obey, she simply submitted to what was chosen for her.

---

I'd suggest you check your bible again. First, Satan is an angel. He's a fallen angel. BTW, an angel is not a "who" as much is they are a "what". Angel means "messenger."
Second, Satan did original come from heaven.

• Isaiah 14:1215 - "How you have fallen from the heavens, O Morning Star, son of the dawn!"
• Luke 10:18 "I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky."
• Revelation 12:79 gives the most dramatic account a war in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting the dragon, and the dragon being cast down to earth.

So, I guess that you are stating that Eve had free will, but Mary didn't? God doesn't work like that. I've demonstrated how the nature of Mary's question showed that she had free will to obey. God foreknew her obedience.

Finally, it's truly sad that you refuse what's so easy to see.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

The Eve-Mary parallel is simply a man-made concoction. It's the result of starting with the conclusion, and then finding the "facts" to support it later. Roman Catholicism grasped onto this idea in order to elevate Mary's importance and role in God's plan of salvation so as to justify their worship of her. And make no mistake - you Roman Catholics are worshiping Mary. You can deny it all you want, it only makes you look like a brainwashed cult. When you:


make statues and images of her, and bow down to them, IN CHURCH
pray to her in church
sing hymns for her
build churches in her honor
hold hundreds of festivals a year in honor of her
say prayers where you call her name ten times as much as you say God's name
call her "Advocate", "Co-Mediator", "The ALL HOLY ONE";
say that salvation comes through her, and only through her.
have Psalms written about her, where you take the Psalms from the OT and remove God's name and replace it with her name
call her the "peacemaker between sinners and God", "ruler of my house", "God of this world", "ruler of my house", "the salvation of my soul"
say that we can come to her and entrust her with ALL our petitions and cares
say that "in her hands I place my salvation"
etc, etc, etc, etc
.... then to any rational person, this is worship in every sense. In fact, it makes you look completely insane to the rational world when you deny it.

---

lol!!! You keep posting these same sad objections. I'll bet you $20 that you have them saved on a Word doc (or Google doc) so that you can copy and paste them like it's your signature death blow. All of these "objections" have been explained by me and many others ad nauseum. You refuse to accept the rational and logical explanations. It's either pride or ignorance. Take your pick: a deadly sin or shear stupidity.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Irenaeus is NOT the only fallible church father you base your beliefs on. Virtually your entire theology surrounding Mary is completely built from the beliefs of error-prone men, like Irenaeus, rather than from God-breathed, infallible Scripture. And you do this to your undoing. Wake up and open your eyes, and open your brain. Stop blindly swallowing what your Church feeds you. None of us know when our time will come and it can come suddenly like it did for our friend LimitedIQ, after which point it is too late to get things right.

---

The Church bases their beliefs these men that interpreted the infallible Scriptures. Men like St. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Epiphanius, St. Jerome (the guy that translated the bible), St. Augustine (your "protestant" hero), and many others linked Mary to eve. They used the scriptures to do so. BTW, your buddy, Martin Luther, did too:
In his last sermon at Wittenberg in January 1546, Luther declared: "Is Christ only to be adored? Or is the holy Mother of God rather not to be honoured? This is the woman who crushed the Serpent's head." ,

PS: Bonus he also called Mary, the Mother of God. But don't worry, Calvin, Zwingli, and Cranmer accepted Mary's status as the Theotokos, Mother of God.

Coke Bear said:

---

Thomas Aquinas, one of the most brilliant minds to walk the earth, misunderstood when people received their rational soul. He thought that the soul was infused at 40 days for males at 40 days and 80 days for female.

---

Looking around at society today in 2026...are you absolutely sure he was wrong about that?

Mothra said:

---

For example, while communion is treated with seriousness in the New Testament, the responsibility given is for self-examination before God, not for receiving approval from a priest beforehand. Similarly, confession is certainly biblical, but Scripture teaches both confessing sins to one another and going directly to God for forgiveness; it never explicitly requires confession to a priest as a condition for receiving grace or participating in communion.

---

Orthodox confession is not a process in which you confess your sins to a priest who then personally grants you absolution from a treasury of merit the church possesses in exchange for your performance of certain works. It is a process in which the priest serves as an accountability partner as you confess your sins to God. During it, you and the priest stand before the altar together as you make your confession. God grants the absolution. The priest's role is as guide to the penitent in executing Jesus' commandment "Go and sin no more." Of course, Orthodox Christians are also encouraged to confess their sins directly to God in the absence of a priest or church if one is not available.

It is the difference between a gatekeeper and a patient going to his doctor, telling him symptoms and being told the diagnosis and treatment.

Given what 1st Corinthians says about communion and how it can cause sickness and death in those who receive it unworthily, treating it as a prescription medication is a good thing. In fact the church has always done this - the early church dismissed the unbaptized from the service before communion and before the 20th century most churches that taught some form of the real presence had closed communions for this reason.

Quote:

---

Likewise, while fasting and disciplined prayer are clearly encouraged in Scripture, the Bible does not mandate fixed, universal schedules or detailed systems for all believers. In fact, it warns against turning external rules about food or practices into binding spiritual requirements, noting that such regulations can appear wise but don't necessarily produce true spiritual transformation. See Colossians 2:20-23...My concern is that these practices can become treated as necessary structures through which grace is mediated or dispensed.

---

Let's go back to the very original fast commanded by God.

"And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." (Genesis 2:16)

The proximate cause of the fall of man was our refusal to fast: "So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was [a]pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate." (Genesis 3:6)

That was a binding regulation was it not? As a self-professed Calvinist, I presume that you adhere to covenant theology and not dispensationalism (if I'm wrong about that, I'd really recommend reading this book by Dr. John Gerstner, forwarded by R.C. Sproul.). So you can't simply dismiss this as irrelevant to our time.

Fasting is still relevant to us today. In fact, it is part of all pagan religions - Rabbinic Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, etc. Sort of an ancestral memory of that original trauma passed down over time as the original monotheism devolved, I think.

It is something all Christians are called to engage in (Matthew 9:15). While it is not a practice that can justify us in the eyes of God, it is a practice through which God's grace is mediated and dispensed. Jesus did not need to be baptized, and yet he was. Jesus did not need to fast, and yet he did (40 days, the length of our Lenten fast today). Jesus carried His cross, we are to carry ours.

Which then brings up the question of how one should fast. Should I make this up as I go along? Should I fast from the same things on a set schedule? What should I fast from? Should I pick that myself? Can I substitute abstinance from other things (for example, watching football or time on Sicem365.com) for food? No. Our Creator knew of The Brain Gut Connection. After all, He made it. Fasting from food is fundamental to "go and sin no more."

The answer of the Orthodox church is from the Didache, an early Christian writing that was the Bible's contemporary and gave many instructions on living out the Christian faith: "Don't let your fasting coincide with those of the hypocrites.They fast on the 2nd [Monday] and 5th [Thursday] days of the week. So, you should fast on the 4th day [Wednesday] and the preparation [Friday] day of the week." That is the pattern of fasting we Orthodox still follow today, 1800 years later.

"Thus says the LORD: "Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls." (Jeremiah 6:16).

Quote:

---

The heart of the issue is not whether these practices can be beneficial, but whether they should be considered binding or essential in the way described. Some of this seems to substitute a set of rules for a personal relationship with Christ.

---

The problem with "the personal relationship with Christ" is that this phrase itself is unbiblical. I understand where it came from - to illustrate that every individual must come to faith individually instead being free riders on organizational, cultural, or familial coat tails. But what it has become strikes at the very heart of how the Christian faith is lived out: communally in the church. "The norm of the Christian faith is not isolated believers, little islands of spirituality, but a continent of Christians banded together by the Spirit. We are baptized into one body, the body of Jesus. Our so-called personal relationship with Jesus is indeed with his person - his body of which all other believers are a part. Fingers don't have a relationship with Jesus apart from the hand, the hand from the arm, the arm from the shoulder, and so on." The phrase itself has become destructive to the church at large.

Coke Bear said:

---

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

There is nothing in Scripture about the Anunciation that indicates that God had to know her "permission" rather than her "submission" beforehand in choosing Mary. Again, ratonal and intelligent people read that story, and they don't come away from it thinking that there was something for Mary to obey or give permission for. It's something you Roman Catholics have been taught to believe and so you read that in, through confirmation bias. You can only cite fallible men like Thomas Aquinas for your theology. NOWHERE in Scripture does it ever say that Mary "obeyed".

---

Once again, you have defaulted to your false belief of sola scriptura. Just because something isn't expressly stated in the scriptures doesn't mean that it isn't true or we shouldn't believe in it. The bible NEVER makes this claim. This has been demonstrated to you MANY times; however, it seems to be your last-ditch effort to rest your case. It's not the trump card that you believe it to be. It's the play of those that fail to support their argument.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

The parallels between Mary and Eve were drawn up by fallible men, not Scripture. Rational people do NOT see this parallel naturally. In fact, rational people see it as counter to reason: Eve did not give birth to Adam. She came from Adam, not the other way around. Eve was Adam's wife, not mother. Eve was tempted by the Devil who who was not from heaven, but who lived as a creature in the same Garden as Eve did; she was not visited by a beloved angel of God who came from heaven, like Mary. Eve was confronted with a choice, and chose to disobey God. Mary was not given any choice or command to obey, she simply submitted to what was chosen for her.

---

I'd suggest you check your bible again. First, Satan is an angel. He's a fallen angel. BTW, an angel is not a "who" as much is they are a "what". Angel means "messenger."
Second, Satan did original come from heaven.

• Isaiah 14:1215 - "How you have fallen from the heavens, O Morning Star, son of the dawn!"
• Luke 10:18 "I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky."
• Revelation 12:79 gives the most dramatic account a war in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting the dragon, and the dragon being cast down to earth.

So, I guess that you are stating that Eve had free will, but Mary didn't? God doesn't work like that. I've demonstrated how the nature of Mary's question showed that she had free will to obey. God foreknew her obedience.

Finally, it's truly sad that you refuse what's so easy to see.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

The Eve-Mary parallel is simply a man-made concoction. It's the result of starting with the conclusion, and then finding the "facts" to support it later. Roman Catholicism grasped onto this idea in order to elevate Mary's importance and role in God's plan of salvation so as to justify their worship of her. And make no mistake - you Roman Catholics are worshiping Mary. You can deny it all you want, it only makes you look like a brainwashed cult. When you:


make statues and images of her, and bow down to them, IN CHURCH
pray to her in church
sing hymns for her
build churches in her honor
hold hundreds of festivals a year in honor of her
say prayers where you call her name ten times as much as you say God's name
call her "Advocate", "Co-Mediator", "The ALL HOLY ONE";
say that salvation comes through her, and only through her.
have Psalms written about her, where you take the Psalms from the OT and remove God's name and replace it with her name
call her the "peacemaker between sinners and God", "ruler of my house", "God of this world", "ruler of my house", "the salvation of my soul"
say that we can come to her and entrust her with ALL our petitions and cares
say that "in her hands I place my salvation"
etc, etc, etc, etc
.... then to any rational person, this is worship in every sense. In fact, it makes you look completely insane to the rational world when you deny it.

---

lol!!! You keep posting these same sad objections. I'll bet you $20 that you have them saved on a Word doc (or Google doc) so that you can copy and paste them like it's your signature death blow. All of these "objections" have been explained by me and many others ad nauseum. You refuse to accept the rational and logical explanations. It's either pride or ignorance. Take your pick: a deadly sin or shear stupidity.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Irenaeus is NOT the only fallible church father you base your beliefs on. Virtually your entire theology surrounding Mary is completely built from the beliefs of error-prone men, like Irenaeus, rather than from God-breathed, infallible Scripture. And you do this to your undoing. Wake up and open your eyes, and open your brain. Stop blindly swallowing what your Church feeds you. None of us know when our time will come and it can come suddenly like it did for our friend LimitedIQ, after which point it is too late to get things right.

---

The Church bases their beliefs these men that interpreted the infallible Scriptures. Men like St. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Epiphanius, St. Jerome (the guy that translated the bible), St. Augustine (your "protestant" hero), and many others linked Mary to eve. They used the scriptures to do so. BTW, your buddy, Martin Luther, did too:
In his last sermon at Wittenberg in January 1546, Luther declared: "Is Christ only to be adored? Or is the holy Mother of God rather not to be honoured? This is the woman who crushed the Serpent's head." ,

PS: Bonus he also called Mary, the Mother of God. But don't worry, Calvin, Zwingli, and Cranmer accepted Mary's status as the Theotokos, Mother of God.

---

- if sola scriptura is false, why does your own Doctor of the Church John Henry Newman say that it's what the ancient church believed and practiced?

- You: "Just because something isn't expressly stated in the scriptures doesn't mean that it isn't true or we shouldn't believe in it." - the huge problem lies in the fact that your beliefs contradict Scripture. There is no "obedience" or permission needed on the part of Mary in the story of the Anunciation.

- Eve did not have original sin until she disobeyed a direct command by God. Mary's situation was nowhere near the same. Mary, being a descendent of Adam and Eve, inheritied sin. Eve, unlike Mary, was given a choice to obey God or not. God did not tell Eve "You WILL eat that fruit".

- No one is denying that Satan is a fallen angel. But that expressly means he's no longer one of God's angels. A visitation from one of God's beloved angels and a visitation from the Prince of Darkness, God's principal enemy, isn't a parallel of similarity. It's actually making a comparison of opposites.

- your "explanations" of that list "ad nauseum" only made rational people nauseous. Simply stated, if you truly can't see that those things constitute worship, you are a complete and utter fool. WAKE UP from your own lies.

- "The Church bases their beliefs on these FALLIBLE men that interpreted the infallible Scriptures." - Corrected for accuracy.

- Protestants don't follow Martin Luther. They follow the principle that he and other Reformers correctly perceived, that they are fallible, while scripture is not. Martin Luther is not immune from his own principle.

Sam Lowry said:

---

Quote:

---

There is nothing in Scripture about the Anunciation that indicates that God had to know her "permission" rather than her "submission" beforehand in choosing Mary. Again, ratonal and intelligent people read that story, and they don't come away from it thinking that there was something for Mary to obey or give permission for. It's something you Roman Catholics have been taught to believe and so you read that in, through confirmation bias. You can only cite fallible men like Thomas Aquinas for your theology. NOWHERE in Scripture does it ever say that Mary "obeyed".

---

"Fiat."

---

Roman Catholics giving a special name to Mary's response so they can support Roman Catholic beliefs. Hardly meaningful as an argument.

"You WILL", not "Will you?"
Submission, not permission.

Realitybites said:

---

Mothra said:

---

For example, while communion is treated with seriousness in the New Testament, the responsibility given is for self-examination before God, not for receiving approval from a priest beforehand. Similarly, confession is certainly biblical, but Scripture teaches both confessing sins to one another and going directly to God for forgiveness; it never explicitly requires confession to a priest as a condition for receiving grace or participating in communion.

---

Orthodox confession is not a process in which you confess your sins to a priest who then personally grants you absolution from a treasury of merit the church possesses in exchange for your performance of certain works. It is a process in which the priest serves as an accountability partner as you confess your sins to God. During it, you and the priest stand before the altar together as you make your confession. God grants the absolution. The priest's role is as guide to the penitent in executing Jesus' commandment "Go and sin no more." Of course, Orthodox Christians are also encouraged to confess their sins directly to God in the absence of a priest or church if one is not available.

It is the difference between a gatekeeper and a patient going to his doctor, telling him symptoms and being told the diagnosis and treatment.

Given what 1st Corinthians says about communion and how it can cause sickness and death in those who receive it unworthily, treating it as a prescription medication is a good thing. In fact the church has always done this - the early church dismissed the unbaptized from the service before communion and before the 20th century most churches that taught some form of the real presence had closed communions for this reason.

Quote:

---

Likewise, while fasting and disciplined prayer are clearly encouraged in Scripture, the Bible does not mandate fixed, universal schedules or detailed systems for all believers. In fact, it warns against turning external rules about food or practices into binding spiritual requirements, noting that such regulations can appear wise but don't necessarily produce true spiritual transformation. See Colossians 2:20-23...My concern is that these practices can become treated as necessary structures through which grace is mediated or dispensed.

---

Let's go back to the very original fast commanded by God.

"And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." (Genesis 2:16)

The proximate cause of the fall of man was our refusal to fast: "So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was [a]pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate." (Genesis 3:6)

That was a binding regulation was it not? As a self-professed Calvinist, I presume that you adhere to covenant theology and not dispensationalism (if I'm wrong about that, I'd really recommend reading this book by Dr. John Gerstner, forwarded by R.C. Sproul.). So you can't simply dismiss this as irrelevant to our time.

Fasting is still relevant to us today. In fact, it is part of all pagan religions - Rabbinic Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, etc. Sort of an ancestral memory of that original trauma passed down over time as the original monotheism devolved, I think.

It is something all Christians are called to engage in (Matthew 9:15). While it is not a practice that can justify us in the eyes of God, it is a practice through which God's grace is mediated and dispensed. Jesus did not need to be baptized, and yet he was. Jesus did not need to fast, and yet he did (40 days, the length of our Lenten fast today). Jesus carried His cross, we are to carry ours.

Which then brings up the question of how one should fast. Should I make this up as I go along? Should I fast from the same things on a set schedule? What should I fast from? Should I pick that myself? Can I substitute abstinance from other things (for example, watching football or time on Sicem365.com) for food? No. Our Creator knew of The Brain Gut Connection. After all, He made it. Fasting from food is fundamental to "go and sin no more."

The answer of the Orthodox church is from the Didache, an early Christian writing that was the Bible's contemporary and gave many instructions on living out the Christian faith: "Don't let your fasting coincide with those of the hypocrites.They fast on the 2nd [Monday] and 5th [Thursday] days of the week. So, you should fast on the 4th day [Wednesday] and the preparation [Friday] day of the week." That is the pattern of fasting we Orthodox still follow today, 1800 years later.

"Thus says the LORD: "Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls." (Jeremiah 6:16).

Quote:

---

The heart of the issue is not whether these practices can be beneficial, but whether they should be considered binding or essential in the way described. Some of this seems to substitute a set of rules for a personal relationship with Christ.

---

The problem with "the personal relationship with Christ" is that this phrase itself is unbiblical. I understand where it came from - to illustrate that every individual must come to faith individually instead being free riders on organizational, cultural, or familial coat tails. But what it has become strikes at the very heart of how the Christian faith is lived out: communally in the church. "The norm of the Christian faith is not isolated believers, little islands of spirituality, but a continent of Christians banded together by the Spirit. We are baptized into one body, the body of Jesus. Our so-called personal relationship with Jesus is indeed with his person - his body of which all other believers are a part. Fingers don't have a relationship with Jesus apart from the hand, the hand from the arm, the arm from the shoulder, and so on." The phrase itself has become destructive to the church at large.

---

What's "destructive to the church at large" is having non-believers considered as part of the "church", who don't have a "personal relationship with Jesus", but instead believe that as long as they have membership in and engage in the activities of an institution, they are part of Jesus' body. This is what "institutionalization" of Jesus' church does, and it is the real destroyer of churches. It's what happened when the state of Rome entered Christianity and adopted pagan beliefs and practices into the "institution". The result is what we're seeing today, how churches don't even know what the true gospel is and are even flatly denying it, and are practicing egregious, rank idolatry and heresy and can't even recognize it. The result is that there are unregenerate people being part of the man-made "institution", and moving Christianity in a direction away from the true church and saving gospel of Jesus.

It's not a special name for her answer. It is her answer. Not "it shall be," but "let it be."

Sam Lowry said:

---

It's not a special name for her answer. It is her answer. Not "it shall be," but "let it be."

---

It is her answer as Roman Catholics call it. No surprise they want to frame it as an obedience.

"Let it be" as an answer to "Will you?" is a personal choice.
"Let it be" as an answer to "You WILL" is submission to God's choice.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

It's not a special name for her answer. It is her answer. Not "it shall be," but "let it be."

---

It is her answer as Roman Catholics call it. No surprise they want to frame it as an obedience.

"Let it be" as an answer to "Will you?" is a personal choice.
"Let it be" as an answer to "You WILL" is submission to God's choice.

---

In other words, obedience.

Sam Lowry said:

---

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

It's not a special name for her answer. It is her answer. Not "it shall be," but "let it be."

---

It is her answer as Roman Catholics call it. No surprise they want to frame it as an obedience.

"Let it be" as an answer to "Will you?" is a personal choice.
"Let it be" as an answer to "You WILL" is submission to God's choice.

---

In other words, obedience.

---

No, in other words, agreement with.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

It's not a special name for her answer. It is her answer. Not "it shall be," but "let it be."

---

It is her answer as Roman Catholics call it. No surprise they want to frame it as an obedience.

"Let it be" as an answer to "Will you?" is a personal choice.
"Let it be" as an answer to "You WILL" is submission to God's choice.

---

In other words, obedience.

---

No, in other words, agreement with.

---

Even better. Call it what you want, there's no evidence of anything but consent on Mary's part.

Sam Lowry said:

---

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

It's not a special name for her answer. It is her answer. Not "it shall be," but "let it be."

---

It is her answer as Roman Catholics call it. No surprise they want to frame it as an obedience.

"Let it be" as an answer to "Will you?" is a personal choice.
"Let it be" as an answer to "You WILL" is submission to God's choice.

---

In other words, obedience.

---

No, in other words, agreement with.

---

Even better. Call it what you want, there's no evidence of anything but consent on Mary's part.

---

Simply asserting it doesn't make it any more true that it already wasn't.

There was no more consent involved in the "you will" to Mary as there was in the "you will be mute" to Zechariah when the same angel announced to him the birth of John the Baptist.

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

It's not a special name for her answer. It is her answer. Not "it shall be," but "let it be."

---

It is her answer as Roman Catholics call it. No surprise they want to frame it as an obedience.

"Let it be" as an answer to "Will you?" is a personal choice.
"Let it be" as an answer to "You WILL" is submission to God's choice.

---

In other words, obedience.

---

No, in other words, agreement with.

---

Even better. Call it what you want, there's no evidence of anything but consent on Mary's part.

---

Simply asserting it doesn't make it any more true that it already wasn't.

There was no more consent involved in the "you will" to Mary as there was in the "you will be mute" to Zechariah when the same angel announced to him the birth of John the Baptist.

---

I suspect Zechariah would disagree with you.

Sam Lowry said:

---

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

BusyTarpDuster2017 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

It's not a special name for her answer. It is her answer. Not "it shall be," but "let it be."

---

It is her answer as Roman Catholics call it. No surprise they want to frame it as an obedience.

"Let it be" as an answer to "Will you?" is a personal choice.
"Let it be" as an answer to "You WILL" is submission to God's choice.

---

In other words, obedience.

---

No, in other words, agreement with.

---

Even better. Call it what you want, there's no evidence of anything but consent on Mary's part.

---

Simply asserting it doesn't make it any more true that it already wasn't.

There was no more consent involved in the "you will" to Mary as there was in the "you will be mute" to Zechariah when the same angel announced to him the birth of John the Baptist.

---

I suspect Zechariah would disagree with you.

---

This is complete nonsense. It puts your whole view about the Anunciation in perspective.