My church defined your church's bible

Let's get real here. How could Paul himself had known? Not even Paul
knew what the canon was, nor did he even know that there would be
established a canon prior to Jesus' returning. He didn't even know
what else he himself would yet write before he was martyred, let alone
what everybody else would write. All Paul knew was that he had visited
Thessalonica, and he had emparted to them the Traditions, some in
written and some in oral form, and he wanted them to hold to both. We
don't even know what Paul emarted to them in written form! Obviously,
it wasn't the letter which he was half way through writing as this
thought occured to him. It wouldn't have been the entirety of the New
Testament, and may not have even been any of the New Testament. He may
have put in written form a list: "baptise infants, give them
communion, venerate the holy icons" for all you know. All we know is
that he gave them what they needed, and he wanted them to stick with
it.

What you're doing basically is making an assumption about what God
ought to have done as far as writing everything in scripture, and used
that as the ultimate foundation of your faith. Such assumptions are
not consistent with sola scriptura are they?

Maybe you are not familiar with the nuanced JW arguments, like I think
John 10:34, and others?

And you assume that Hebrews and 2 Peter and James and Jude and
Revelation and Mark and Luke are apostolic, even though all those
books were either not written by an apostle, or it has been disputed
in church history that they were written by an apostle. Can you prove
it? No you can't, you take it on faith. Can you give a reason for your
faith? About all you could say is that the church of God agreed upon
these things after the 4th century, which is the exact same thing we
say about Tradition.

Well you say everything is merely a sign, and has no reality to it. So
why do it? Why get the priest to annoint with oil when you are sick?
It is a waste of time right? Why did they get hankerchiefs that had
touched Paul and it healed them? It was a waste of time right? You say
it is just our traditions, but most of our traditions are not purely
oral, they have a scriptural component too. Scriptures that baptists
and protestants conveniently ignore.

Wow. I wouldn't have said that the Church fathers in unison all
interpreted scripture according to Greek philosophy. But let's say for
a second it is true. If the culture at that time was so steeped in
Greek philosophy that that it was basically a given that this is the
framework in which it was interpreted, then all I can say is,
interpret scripture according to the cultural framework under which it
was written! That's got to be a heck of a lot more valid that using a
21st century American cultural context. Prove to me that the only
known cultural context of the 1st century for interpreting scripture
also happens to be the wrong context.

And neither will heaven look exactly like an Orthodox service, but it
is a symbol and shadow of it, just like Revelation.

If grain is a figure of the bread, what is incense a figure of??

I'm not quite sure of the point. The whole of the church calendar
revolves around passover, I'm not sure what you mean that Passover was
"replaced". And Sunday is not the Sabbath, even though there are
similarities in how it is treated.

I could probably argue that the whole attitude to the law is a
Tradition too. Paul says "We uphold the Law", which the 7th day
Adventists have taken very literally. There's another issue on which
again a schism continually lies in wait.

If they didn't, what was a Christian to do in the first few hundred
years while they waited for the canon to be finalized? The church
ought to have broken apart in an explosion the size of a thousand
reformations, since they not only had exegesis to argue about, they
also had the canon to argue about.

But they didn't blow apart, they emerged from the darkness of
persecution, more or less one. Even more impressively, they stayed
one.

CONTINUED.....

 

.....CONTINUED

To paraphrase you, being in black and white doesn't prove it is
true. What would you rather - one eywitness account in writing, or 100
eyewitness accounts orally?

Yeah, except that you and me agree that the organization of the
Orthodox church _was_ founded by men God raised up. The ultimate
result of denying the Church's ability to preserve oral tradition is
Islam, which also denies the church's ability to preserve written
tradition.

Well... if you're going to doubt the church, that's the end-game.

Sure you can say that. Once you doubt that God would preserve his
church, all manner of speculation is now open. You've got to seriously
consider the possibility that Joseph Smith was needed to restore the
church because the bible can't be fully trusted, or that Muhammad was
right that the church had corrupted everything, or that we need a
Watch-Tower society to restore the true church on earth.

After all, the apostles did form a visible church, so why not look to
find a prophet restoring the visible church?

Acceptance of other protestant groups is somewhat of a new
thing. Historically there was very limited acceptance. One can see why
acceptance is on the increase - nobody can say with any authority that
their group is right about anything whatsoever, so logically it's not
possible to reject any group any more.

Of course it depends what you mean by "accept" each other. My priest,
before he became Orthodox, spent many years working with Orthodoxy as
a protestant in Russia. It wasn't like Orthodoxy didn't want him
around, but that doesn't mean Orthodoxy would compromise its claims.

So now you seem to be claiming that the church went off the rails
within 30 years!!?! Even your 100 year references were pretty amazing,
but now you're saying we can't trust anything because of the dark 30
years?

It's a pretty amazing claim don't you think? God spends thousands of
years working up to this moment when he'll send his Son to die for the
sins of the world, and will start his Church, and then the Church
blows it all straight to hell, because it can't follow Paul's commands
to keep the oral traditions, and it doesn't yet have any scriptures to
follow. And when it does get scriptures, the universal Greek
interpretive framework just happens to be the wrong one to get at the
truth.

Boy, things are tough!

The "people" as you call it, is the church. There was no concept yet
fabricated in the minds of theological naval gazers called an
"invisible church". The scriptures weren't kept by the pagans, they
were kept by the church.

Tell me this: who are Paul's epistles addressed to? Does he just send
them out into the ether, or does he address them to the Church?

There may well have been some refinement of terminology, but I'm not
sure you could say there was actual change in the meaning of offices.

Because it's not enough to preserve the traditions, you have to HOLD
to the traditions.

CONTINUED.....

 

.....CONTINUED

I'm not surprised your church doesn't "deal in that argumentation",
because the whole idea that the truth exists and can be identified and
held to, is an idea that has burnt out in protestantism with the
explosion in denominations. In real life, outside the chat rooms of
the internet, you would rarely find an Anglican or a baptist
discussing the pros and cons of infant baptism, or monarchial
episcopate, or whatever. It's all "you're ok, I'm ok" type thinking.

Well, so why are you still baptists? Why don't you all just merge into
one jelly-like church that holds to no more than me and Jesus under a tree?

Because now what divides protestantism is personal preference
about worship services, and who has the best church facilities.

And you complain because all the Orthodox worship exactly the same
way!! But difference in worship is now the primary division in the
churches. There is no unity for no better reason than everybody wants
things their own way, and are continually hunting looking for a new
model church that has more and better features than last year's model,
or a more charismatic preacher than their current church. Part of
Orthodox worship is to de-emphasize the personality of the priest so
that this whole cult of personality does not arise.

Funnily enough, it doesn't seem to happen in Orthodoxy. It's an axiom
of Orthodoxy, that you don't change things. Because the West has papal
infallibility, every liberal with a new fangled idea at least holds
onto the hope that one day a pope will get in power who will give
credence to their idea. Every protestant with their own view hopes
they can find or form a church which preaches their
theology. Orthodoxy almost lacks mechanism for changing the Holy
Traditions, thus it is not even on the agenda. Obviously, you can't
force people to have an Orthodox mindset. You can't force people to
want to hold to the traditions as Paul admonished.

Would you baptize a baby if asked to, because - hey, these little details don't matter, as long as you believe in Jesus?

Even if he could be contacted, which seems highly doubtful for an
itinerant preacher without a mobile phone, it doesn't mean that every
fresh Christian in Thessalonica was supposed to be writing him letters
to double check that the traditions were being passed on accurately.

But we want to be tested by the criteria of holding to the teachings
of the church of the early centuries. JWs, baptists, Church of Christ
don't even claim that. I would advise you in all sincerity, that if
the fathers of the early church teach the infallibility of the pope,
that you ought to become Roman Catholic. It's not "We are the true
church, because we said so". It is "We believe the true church has
always existed. Go forth and discover where it is".

Your position is "The true church invisibly and universally morphed
into a consistent, yet wrong church, during a dark 30 years".

Secret tradition?? I think you've used that term a couple of times
now. Nobody is claiming that the Traditions are secret.

Define a state institution.

Really? So you reckon if I formed a church based purely on the old testament, I would come up with the exact same doctrines as Paul taught in the New Testament? That's an amazing claim.

Paul told the Bereans that Christ had risen, as foretold in the
scriptures. Unlike the other cities who told Paul to get out because
he was a mad man, the Bereans checked that it was the case that the OT
foretold these things about the Messiah. That doesn't mean that the
entirety of Paul's doctrine is found in the OT, which it clearly
isn't.

A monarchial episcopate means one bishop, multiple priests, multiple
deacons. That is EXACTLY what Ignatius refers to. But there's no pope
in here by the wildest stretch of the imagination.

In this religious context? Protestants would like to think so
anyway.

Take a look at Justin Martyr's description of the liturgy compared to
a Syrian liturgy 200 years later:
http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/everyman_history/Chapt14.htm

Not sure what you mean by "mandatory" worship. However it was that
they worshipped in the NT church, it wasn't as if you could hop over
to the church next door if you didn't like it.

Orthodox don't say that other groups are unsaved, and they recognize
anybody's baptism as long as it is in the name of the trinity.

 

I don't know what you mean by intentionally two separate bodies. I mean, even the written tradition may not have been verbal. He may have drawn a diagram showing the procedure for blessing the Eucharist, or he may have drawn them a cross to explain the type of stauros that Christ was crucified on, for all I know. There's another tradition that JWs now dispute. The written traditions Paul speaks of need not be scripture, and the reason they may not be scripture, is because they could be non verbal.

In fact, almost all the traditions are not so much lacking from scripture as they are the traditional interpretation of how to apply scripture. Scripture says to give communion, but it doesn't say what age you may receive it. It's not that communion isn't scriptural, it's that the details of how to apply it come from Tradition.

You keep referring to tradition as "all this other stuff", but it isn't really that at all. The fact is, scripture doesn't say what age people may partake. Some try to draw inferences, but that's all they are - inferences and guesses.

Sure, but if you can muster enough faith to decide they got the canon right, it ought certainly be within your grasp to have faith that the church got the traditions right. Doubt is certainly always an option - ask Thomas.

Yes sure, some do. I doubt they would have much of a theological backdrop for having a consistent understanding about it though. And there's another data point ripe for schism. Are we up to 128 churches now?

Well, you claim they are symbols, but there's your extra-scriptural assumptions at work again.

1 Cor 11:28 But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not judge the body rightly. For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep."

Look at that! People are getting sick and even dying because they take the Eucharist in an unworthy manner. Does that sound like a mere symbol to you?? It sure doesn't to me. This is serious stuff. There are real spiritual forces at work here.

Tell me, when was the last time your pastor said to be careful at communion because there was a risk of death?? My guess is: never.

Oh ok, a full 30-50 years after they were written. Yow.

If your hindsight and archeology is so darned good, then you ought to be able to demonstrate clearly when Orthodoxy changed its doctrines.

Myself, I think if you claim to understand ancient Greek better than the ancient Greeks, that's a rather puffed up attitude.

I don't know, I think it depends which orthodox church you are in because some have reformed the calendar.

I don't have the answer to every "why", all I can tell you is that we hold to the traditions. In this case - again, there is evidence that the tradition originates with the apostles because we see them meeting on Sunday, unlike the traditional Jewish practice of Saturday. Of course, for the sola scriptura adherent, this again is open for debate. Is that 256 churches now?

CONTINUED.......

 

.........CONTINUED

Even generations and generations later there was the option to compare notes with the other churches. So if ever a church had doubts about say infant communion, all they had to do was to consult the other churches. If everybody was doing it, then the doubts would be ended.

How you think all the churches were simultaneously led astray, I still don't understand and wish you would explain. Have you EVER even heard of ONE baptist church changing its mind and starting baptizing babies? I've never heard of such thing. Yet you say that thousands of the churches of God all changed their mind and emerged in the 2nd century with the same wrong doctrine.

Built a worldly organization around it? Which part of the church is supposedly the worldly bit that the apsotles didn't found?

What corruptions and persecutions from the Orthodox church are we talking about?

I understand the protestant reaction against the papacy whose claims to power knew no bounds, but we are talking about Orthodoxy now. I'm not saying the Orthodox church has been perfect, but is there really such a problem that you can say bluntly "it didn't work"?

How are you going to put the differences aside? Let's say you tear down your signposts so you can't tell what church is methodist and baptist. So now your unsuspecting new Christian goes to the methodist evening service, who tells them to get their baby baptized, then when she turns up at the baptist morning service the next day, she is going to expect the pastor to baptize her baby. Then the pentacostals will tell her to be annointed with oil because she is sick, and she'll be confused when the baptists won't do it. So she'll be running between churches trying to get the best deal from each one.

Does God preserve scripture? Does it happen "automatically", or do you actually have to go do some work to make it happen?

Firstly, yes that is your tradition, but I didn't ask if you'd be happy about it, I'd ask if you'd do it in your proposed new jelly-fish protestant church, that pretends there are no divisions.

Secondly, you say that people "trust their baptism" and become "culturally Christian". But that's not what the church teaches, neither yours nor mine. A baptist can get baptized and "trust their baptism" if they choose to. Doesn't mean the baptist church teaches you to do that. Neither does the Orthodox church teach that either.

Well, you've got to make a decision either way. Scripture doesn't say at what age to offer communion. It doesn't say what kind of age range and understanding warrants baptism. So you can either make it up out of your own head and speculations, or you can follow the early church on the basis that hey, maybe, just maybe they could, like, keep a tradition for a hundred years. Baptists don't seem to have fallen off the wagon in 500 years and started baptizing babies, don't ya think maybe, just maybe the church the apostles founded could keep it for a hundred years?

CONTINUED...........

 

...........CONTINUED

I don't know about "deliberately" kept from the writings. Was it deliberately kept from the writings that persons of around the age of 15, give or take a few years who are capable of counting the cost and repenting in an adult fashion are eligable for baptism?

Or is it more likely that the apostles simply mentioned baptism in an ad-hoc fashion, and just assumed the church knew the rest? It's certainly easier to imagine them omitting the mention of ages if there were no age restrictions, than if there were restrictions. As soon as there is ANY restriction, the question is going to come up straight away - how old?

The bible says that the Church is the pillar and foundation of the truth. It doesn't say it should aim to be the pillar, or that he hopes it may be a pillar. He says it IS the pillar.

Well, when everybody in the govt is Orthodox, I don't know what you can do about it. Do you suggest you ought to be athiest to get into government?

Read the NT sometime. It is a completely separate body of teachings than that which is found in the OT. These things in the NT, these traditions that Paul passed onto the churches long before he wrote his first epistle, how were the Bereans supposed to check them?

Absolutely it doesn't say whether it goes up as far as region or whole church. But it does go at least as high as city, right? That is still a monarchial episcopate. Rome and Orthodoxy agree on monarchial episcopate. We don't agree on papacy. Ignatius doesn't mention papacy. In some Orthodox churches, like I think the Jerusalem Orthodox church, the highest authority in the church is the bishop of Jerusalem. In other Orthodox churches, there are archbishops. Orthodoxy can cope with both.

Do you agree that Ignatius and Orthodoxy are consistent?

But Orthodoxy isn't one organization! Orthodoxy is more than a dozen organizations. One Orthodox organization does not interfere in the goings on of another Orthodox organization. New, completely independant Orthodox organizations can be formed at any time. At least in theory, if your baptist church was willing to become Orthodox, we could pass onto you the traditions and it could be self-governing as a completely separate organization. That's not going to happen in practice for a tiny baptist church, because there's probably already an Orthodox bishop in your city, and the aim is to get to the biblical model of one bishop, one city. But still, the point is, that the main thing stopping your church being part of the Church, is not that your organization is separate, it is that your doctrines are not Orthodox. Just like the main thing stopping you from having fellowship with the Mormon church is not that it is a separate organization, it is because it does not share your beliefs.

Specific teachings? Where in the NT does it say that doctrine doesn't matter? Do your concordance search on doctrine and see if it says it is important.

It's not about the organization! Make your church Orthodox in doctrine, and I'm sure the Orthodox church will let you into its fold. It's happened before.

The apostles founded AN institution of the church, or rather a number of institutions. Yes certainly it is possible for people to go out from the original institution and found new institutions. But unless they hold to the Traditions of the 1st institution from whence they came, then they are not the Church any longer. If they do hold to the Traditions, then the new institution is the Church. If they don't, they are just a group of people following their own winds of doctrine. That doesn't mean they can't be saved. The bible says there is salvation in the Church, what there is outside the Church we cannot say.

 

Your complaint is that there is no evidence that the written and oral are different bodies of teaching. My point is, even the written teaching was probably beyond scripture, or at least beyond the scripture that Paul knew anything about when writing to Thessalonica. Whatever Paul passed to Thessalonica, written and oral, that he later wrote to them and told them to hold to, it wasn't the NT scriptures, because they didn't exist yet.

These issues are interesting because protestant land can't agree on them.

The purpose is, because they are not merely a symbol but also empart a spiritual blessing. When the hankerchief was taken from Paul to heal the sick, would it have not been of any benefit if it was a child who didn't understand? Of course it would have still benefited.

"Truely" understand??? Do you "truely" understand God? The trinity? The whole council of God and the Christian religion? Of course you don't, you do your best according to your own age, mental abilities and so forth.

Here is the problem, and it's hard to explain this in a few emails to a western scholastic mindset, when the bible was written in an Eastern relational mindset. It was not the Jewish way and mindset to accept children into the faith only upon reaching a sufficient age.

That certainly is common sense in a western scholastic mindset and interpretive framework. Funny thing is, in 1500 years nobody seems to have pointed out this "common sense" idea of yours.

Ah huh. More extra-scriptural conditions.

Don't you think in all the NT period whilst the apostles were writing, if infant baptism wasn't normative, it would have come up that somebody wanted to get their youngish child baptized and a dispute arises about how deeply they had to understand? It would be astonishing if this had not arisen and caused Paul to say something.

So you agree I could use this verse? So will you now advocate at least baptising smaller children?

But baptism doesn't save. One is baptised for the remission of sins as the bible says, but one is able to then go and reject God and go to hell. What baptism does is empart a spiritual blessing that assists the sincere Christian in their walk, but it would be wrong to say bluntly "baptism saves". There's no point making a characture of what we teach and then tearing it down.

I havn't heard that one before.

That's an ungrammatical interpretation, both in Greek and English. In Greek, "God" is in the genitive case, because it is the church "OF" God. "Living" is also in the genitive case, as grammar dictates in Greek, because it describes God, and since God is in the genitive case here, so is "living". If "pillar and ground of the truth" was also describing God, it would also be in the genitive case. But it isn't, it's in the nominative case like "Church" is, because it is a clarification of the subject of the sentence.

You won't find any English translation either, whose translation or punctuation would give you any cause for interpreting it that way.

In my view, this is a great illustration of what happens when a church is off on its own apart from the universal church, making up its own doctrine. Self-styled bible interpreters decide that they know better than everyone else, and come up with brand new interpretations. And the typical Christian is in no position to test their claims.

If there is danger in playing around with them, then they are no longer a mere symbol by definition! Nobody ever got hurt playing around with a "mere" symbol. You are admitting that there is a spiritual reality that goes beyond the mere physical symbol. Having admitted that, why do you find the spiritual realities that Orthodoxy teaches so offensive or unlikely?

Yes, people went into error. And Paul's solution to that concern was to admonish people to keep holding to the traditions.

Since you seem to advocate the jellyfish church, where it doesn't matter what set of propositions you accept, why not accept the traditional interpretations? The Traditions can at least lead to unity (which you seem to admit is good), as 2000 years of evidence can testify to. But abandoning the Traditions has clearly failed on that score.

In the protestant world, no matter which interpretations are correct, you would pretty much have to say that the vast majority of protestants have got it wrong about a lot of things. I mean, I'll bet if you listed down your personal beliefs, and then listed the denominations that agree with your and their numbers, I'll bet you find that there is a vanishingly small number who are right according to you.

But since you seem fairly relaxed about the protestant ethos leading everybody into error, why not go with the Traditional interpretations, at at least have have unity?

It's fairly puffed up to imagine that the church was reading the scriptures for 1500 years, and could never discover the truth, but that some people came along 1500 years later, with a completely different mindset and interpretive framework, and they finally discovered the hidden truth. Having supposedly discovered this hidden truth, the church that was there 1500 years still can't see it.

How do you explain this?

Well from our point of view, unless they were a blatant error, even the errors reflect Orthodox Christian doctrine, because all the well-intentioned yet misguided scribes who accidently or intentionally changed the text, were still Orthodox.

Someone who is heterodox can come along and argue that 1Jn 5:7 and 1Ti 3:16 are not original, and thus argue that the church has changed doctrine. For you, you've got to first prove what the text is, before you can argue what the text means. And you can't prove with certainty what the text is. From our point of view, the church knows what the truth is, and what the text means, and any future academic discoveries about what the text is, is not going to make the faith into an every changing jelly, at the beck and call of academics.

The point is, that when Paul met the Bereans, the NT wasn't written. So when Paul passed on his new covenant teachings, which are not in the OT, the Bereans had nothing written to check him against.

 

..... CONTINUED

Who said anything about "only" on a city and higher level?

The point is, Ignatius teaches that in 100AD, there was one bishop with multiple elders subordinated under him. Does your church follow the 1st century model, yes or no?

The "institution" doesn't have to go back to the apostles, because as we discussed, Orthodoxy is multiple institutions, not all of which go back to the apostles. For example, the Russian Orthodox church was founded in the year 988.

But the point is the Orthodox institutionS can trace back the passing on of the traditions back to the original church. It's not about the leaders, or at any rate not just about the leaders, it is about the church passing on the traditions, both the leaders and the laity. And it is not about the instutions, because the traditions could be passed onto any institution who is willing to receive and follow them.

So the authority is not with just the leaders, the institution or the traditions. It is with the church, the pillar and foundation of the truth, which has passed down the traditions to the present time.

Well it's not just about communion and incense, it is about the entirety of the Christian faith. The protestant abandonment of tradition and promotion of "me and my bible under a tree" has ultimately spawned Mormonism, Jehovah's Wittnesses, Oneness Pentacostals, Unitarian Universalists, and rejection of almost every Christian doctrine that exists.

Even these things are not agreed upon. The Salvation Army denomination does not take baptism or communion. Since they are merely symbols, they feel free to dispense with them.

You say the other stuff doesn't matter, but then, the NT is not a one paragraph book, it's a bit bigger than that. You say that we're wrong that symbols are only symbols and have no spiritual reality. But what if you're wrong? What about the hankerchief that healed the people? What about the annointing with oil when you are sick? What about the apostles laying on of hands to receive the Holy Spirit? You say we don't need these things, but what if you're wrong? A lot of protestantism has abandoned these things, and the Salvation Army has taken protestantism and taken it the last logical step. But what if you're wrong? Were the apostles wasting their time with all this mucking around? They ought to have just said "Don't worry about it, it's just you and Jesus under a tree. Amen".

 

I'm not contradicting the text. Obviously the Bereans could search the OT to see if it prophesised the overall message that Christ died to atone for sins etc, which was what Paul preached to them in the streets.

But once the Bereans joined the church that Paul started - if they chose to, then they would have been to exposed to a ton of teaching that were nowhere written down in the OT. Like baptism, communion, not having to keep the Law anymore, and so on and on with all the uniquely NT teachings.

There's no logical way you can point to the Bereans as any evidence of sola scriptura, because if the Bereans became Christians, they would have to immediately go beyond scripture with new covenant teachings. So how noble really were the Bereans, given that they weren't the sola scriptura adherants that you had hoped?

Because we KNOW that Paul was preaching... say baptism, and we KNOW that the NT wasn't written yet and we KNOW that baptism is not in the OT. Thus for the Bereans to become Christians they had to go beyond the scriptures.

If it referred to what they were reading there and then, why on earth tell them to hold to the oral, which according to you is plagued with the issues of reliability? And if all he said in the oral, was what was written in the rather short letter of the Thessalonians, why didn't he write it all down before he left, and save the reliability problems, not to mention arguments 2000 years later?

Nobody said they aren't symbols! Yes they are symbols that impart spiritual realities. You could be half way to becoming Orthodox.

Here you go assuming, without any scriptural foundation, that a new-born baby is "unworthy". We believe that a new-born baby, being without sin, is worthy. And therefore, understanding is not a pre-requisite to receiving the benefit. You see, we are consistent in these matters.

We believe that a baby has a good conscience.

Well it saves in the sense that it is for the remission of sins, and we need remission of sins for salvation. But it doesn't save in the sense that this is the end of the story, that we just need the water and we are saved.

Here you go again with the extra-scriptural concepts that you need to support your traditions. And you complain about us!

Where in scripture does it even hint at any concept of an "age of accountability"?

Because, as I said, baptism emparts a spiritual blessing that will assist the child in their coming life and walk with God. Remember the hankerchief? Remember the oil?

Ahh, the opposition of your baptist brethren. I guess we are up to 512 churches now.

The only way you can argue that is if they were baptising the very youngest possible child that expressed some kind of faith as a reason why it never became a controversy about how much faith and understanding was necessary.

And if that's the case, ALL protestants are wrong (well except you , since there are no denominations to my knowledge that won't baptise babies but will baptise very young children.

Ahh, the amazing differences that arise because of what we read into the silences, both in scripture and the rest of history. If all the church practices infant baptism, I assume that consistency is most likely because they were all taught the same by the apostles. You on the other hand assume it was because they all fell off the rails.

Not normative but nominative. In Greek, the subject and object of the sentence aren't implied by word order but specified by the letters trailing the word. So nominative means the subject of the sentence. And in Greek there is no word for "OF", but rather a different set of trailing letters implies the "OF", and those words are then called genitive. In this verse God and living are both genitive because they are both linked together and tied to the church by a concept like "OF". Thus we get "Church of the living God".

Your understanding? Is this your way of saying that you are importing your theology into the text?

Anyway, the text isn't about who is the source of the truth, it is about who is the custodian of the truth.

I've never heard EOC argue that it means "source". It means, as you say, pillar and support. The church is the one who supports the truth. The church is the one who upholds the truth. We support it, we uphold it. If you want to know the truth, wouldn't you go to whoever is upholding it?

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