From the world of Protestantism...

Touma · Apr 7, 2012

"For these and other reasons, it seems best to me to omit from the Apostles Creed the clause, “he descended into hell..."

So, let's change 2000 years of tradition for the interpretations of modern men who are following a movement that is only 500ish years old.

Did Jesus Spend Saturday inÂ[bless and do not curse]Hell? - Desiring God

Seriously? This is one of the reasons I cannot be a Protestant any longer, and a major reason that the Orthodox church is so appealing. I need something grounded in truth and authenticity, not in the whimsical musings of power hungry theocrats that live thousands of years after Christ and the Fathers.

Just thought I'd share this with you all. Blessings :wave:

Ann_of_Love · Apr 7, 2012

I read some of it this morning, and then scrolled down for the pretty pictures of people at worship. I really don't consider the creeds to be up for debate. That they are is something I just roll my eyes at and move on.

Touma · Apr 7, 2012

Touma said:
"For these and other reasons, it seems best to me to omit from the Apostles Creed the clause, he descended into hell..."

So, let's change 2000 years of tradition for the interpretations of modern men who are following a movement that is only 500ish years old.

Did Jesus Spend Saturday inÂ[bless and do not curse]Hell? - Desiring God

Seriously? This is one of the reasons I cannot be a Protestant any longer, and a major reason that the Orthodox church is so appealing. I need something grounded in truth and authenticity, not in the whimsical musings of power hungry theocrats that live thousands of years after Christ and the Fathers.

Just thought I'd share this with you all. Blessings

I am not sure why it did the bless and do not curse thing on my link?

Adam Warlock · Apr 7, 2012

John Piper...sigh

KyrieEleison87 · Apr 7, 2012

Touma said:
"For these and other reasons, it seems best to me to omit from the Apostles Creed the clause, he descended into hell..."

So, let's change 2000 years of tradition for the interpretations of modern men who are following a movement that is only 500ish years old.

Seriously? This is one of the reasons I cannot be a Protestant any longer, and a major reason that the Orthodox church is so appealing. I need something grounded in truth and authenticity, not in the whimsical musings of power hungry theocrats that live thousands of years after Christ and the Fathers.

Just thought I'd share this with you all. Blessings

As someone who is himself in the process of conversion away from Protestantism, I completely sympathize with your sentiments. When taken to it's logical conclusion, there really is little if anything in the Protestant worldview holding individuals back from revising whatever part of Church Tradition they want. It's a cherry-picking, every-man-for-himself fiasco. I wonder how my conservative Protestant friends who love John Piper will react to this...

Best wishes on your journey into Orthodoxy!

(and pray for me, too, while you're at it, won't you?)

InnerPhyre · Apr 7, 2012

"I don't understand this concept based on my gross misunderstanding of scripture. Therefore let us change ancient traditions."

Also, to quote this fellow "With regard to 1 Peter 3:19, I take these words to mean that Christ, through the voice of Noah, went and preached to that generation, whose spirits are now “in prison,” that is, in hell. In other words, Peter does not say that Christ preached to them while they were in prison. He says he preached to them once, during the days of Noah, and now they are in prison."

The emboldened phrase is exactly what is wrong with Protestantism. Basically, scripture is totally authoritative on its own, but it means whatever you take it to mean. We won't accept the historical interpretation of scripture that has held up for 2000 years because I am God and it doesn't make sense to me.

ArmyMatt · Apr 7, 2012

I guess when Christ said that the sign He would show them was the sign of Jonah, that is something that can be fudged or ignored as well.

oy

MKJ · Apr 7, 2012

So what is the principle common to or at the root of all Protestantism that you feel leads to what Piper has done here?

There are nut-bar people all over the place. I wouldn't, as a sort of Protestant (I would not use the term about myself but there is some historical reason to say it isn't inappropriate), own John Piper any more than you Orthodox would, nor would Martin Luther or many others. Just as a nutty Orthodox person who takes some idea in a weird direction and sets up some Fake-Orthodox group probably doesn't reflect on you, I don't think that people like this reflect on me.

gurneyhalleck1 · Apr 7, 2012

Now if it had been Rowdy Roddy Piper, we wouldn't have sighed!

Adam Warlock said:
John Piper...sigh

KyrieEleison87 · Apr 7, 2012

MKJ said:
So what is the principle common to or at the root of all Protestantism that you feel leads to what Piper has done here?

There are nut-bar people all over the place. I wouldn't, as a sort of Protestant (I would not use the term about myself but there is some historical reason to say it isn't inappropriate), own John Piper any more than you Orthodox would, nor would Martin Luther or many others. Just as a nutty Orthodox person who takes some idea in a weird direction and sets up some Fake-Orthodox group probably doesn't reflect on you, I don't think that people like this reflect on me.

The idea is that essentially there is no authority within Protestantism that regulates the interpretation of Scripture. The individual's right to read and interpret Scripture for himself (as "guided by the Holy Spirit," as they all would claim while teaching mutually exclusive doctrines) is held as paramount.
So, John Piper is remaining perfectly within the parameters of how Protestants arrive at theological truth by making the claims that he's making here. You might disagree with his novel interpretation, sure, but so what? What Protestant authority would be able to resolve your dispute? The short answer is, there isn't one.

InnerPhyre · Apr 7, 2012

MKJ said:
So what is the principle common to or at the root of all Protestantism that you feel leads to what Piper has done here?

There are nut-bar people all over the place. I wouldn't, as a sort of Protestant (I would not use the term about myself but there is some historical reason to say it isn't inappropriate), own John Piper any more than you Orthodox would, nor would Martin Luther or many others. Just as a nutty Orthodox person who takes some idea in a weird direction and sets up some Fake-Orthodox group probably doesn't reflect on you, I don't think that people like this reflect on me.

The idea that the individual's understanding of scripture is authoritative for that individual.

MKJ · Apr 7, 2012

KyrieEleison87 said:
The idea is that essentially there is no authority within Protestantism that regulates the interpretation of Scripture. The individual's right to read and interpret Scripture for himself (as "guided by the Holy Spirit," as they all would claim while teaching mutually exclusive doctrines) is held as paramount.
So, John Piper is remaining perfectly within the parameters of how Protestants arrive at theological truth by making the claims that he's making here. You might disagree with his novel interpretation, sure, but so what? What Protestant authority would be able to resolve your dispute? The short answer is, there isn't one.

This idea is not ubiquitous in Protestantism. To say that there is no authority in Protestantism is misleading, at best. It is untrue in many cases. And you can't treat Protestantism as a whole - it is not as if all Protestants are really part of one group - to demand they ought to be is a bit like insisting that the EO and OO have the same beliefs because they are both "orthodox" somehow. Even historically there were several "Protestant Reformations" that had different sources and ideas.

InnerPhyre said:
The idea that the individual's understanding of scripture is authoritative for that individual.

As far as this goes, very few Protestant groups would agree with that, and the ones that would belong to a very specific sub-set.

hedrick · Apr 7, 2012

KyrieEleison87 said:
The idea is that essentially there is no authority within Protestantism that regulates the interpretation of Scripture. The individual's right to read and interpret Scripture for himself (as "guided by the Holy Spirit," as they all would claim while teaching mutually exclusive doctrines) is held as paramount.
So, John Piper is remaining perfectly within the parameters of how Protestants arrive at theological truth by making the claims that he's making here. You might disagree with his novel interpretation, sure, but so what? What Protestant authority would be able to resolve your dispute? The short answer is, there isn't one.

Of course most Protestants are part of a specific theological tradition. We typically operate within those traditions informally. There is no Pope to make final decisions, but consensus usually exists on important issues. The descriptions I've seen of Orthodoxy often say something similar.

Traditions are more formalized for the two confessional traditions, Reformed and Lutheran. Consensus for them is documented in confessions.

Piper is Reformed. The Reformed comments I've found typically start by observing that this is a fairly late addition to the Apostles Creed, and that there is minimal Biblical evidence. They typically accept it, but often as a way of saying that Jesus died. Calvin sees it as pointing to Christ's spiritual torment. While I tend to think of Piper as pushing the boundaries in some ways, I think what he says here is an acceptable Reformed position, though not the typical one.

I should note that often traditions (and I'm not just limiting myself to theology, but to all areas of life) differ not just in answers but in what they consider important. In some ways the questions you ask are just as important as the answers you find, because they dictate the terms in which potential answers are couched. Protestants often do not see unity as essential in areas where Orthodox would. I think this is an area where most of us would see several reasonable answers. I'm part of a "mainline" church. We tend to find commonality in a general approach, and not in many of the traditional doctrines. However Piper is part of a conservative tradition, and the conservative Protestant traditions are closer to Orthodoxy in the importance placed on doctrine.

beardedone · Apr 7, 2012

To the OP--I know your pain. One of the reasons I started looking at Orthodoxy was because I was done being my own authority. I wanted something grounded in more than my own thoughts because I know that I don't know everything.

To those defending Protestantism--not all of Protestantism is bad. Nor is everything that Protestantism is based on bad. There were very valid reasons for the reformation. However, given the culture that bred the reformation and the philosophy that appropriated Christianity, there is an underlying individualism that is hard to ignore. While there are creedal/tradition segments of Protestantism, there is still a mindset that I am my own final authority on all things 'Christian.' There are individuals who are lifted up as mini-Popes within Protestantism; such as Calvin, Luther, Wesley, Piper, Driscoll, etc. who have their own followers. But if a follower decides that he/she no longer thinks that this mini-Pope is proclaiming truth as they see it, they leave and start following another mini-Pope. The final authority still rests on the follower.

But what I see and have found in Orthodoxy is something much different. There are things within Orthodoxy that I do not agree with, but I am putting myself under the authority of the Church--not an individual within the Church. I am learning to humble my own thoughts to that which has been deemed consensus for the last 2,000 years or so.

Make sense?

KyrieEleison87 · Apr 7, 2012

MKJ said:
This idea is not ubiquitous in Protestantism. To say that there is no authority in Protestantism is misleading, at best. It is untrue in many cases.

Protestants acknowledge different levels of ecclesial authority, yes. But ultimately, in every form of Protestantism, at the end of the day no ecclesial authority is absolutely binding and authoritative. This is why denomination after denomination after denomination has been founded since the Reformation. Individual men and women read the Bible and thought they knew better than their churches/denominations, and so they went and started their own.

And you can't treat Protestantism as a whole - it is not as if all Protestants are really part of one group

While there are nuances from group to group, Sola Scriptura is a pretty all-encompassing doctrine that Protestants share. It is the root of the problem we're addressing.

- to demand they ought to be is a bit like insisting that the EO and OO have the same beliefs because they are both "orthodox" somehow. Even historically there were several "Protestant Reformations" that had different sources and ideas.

While it is true that the Reformation occurred somewhat independently in different parts of Europe, what unites the English, Swiss, and German Reformation(s) is still the over-arching principle of Sola Scriptura. The only truly and completely binding and authoritative thing in the Christian life are the words of Scripture, and everything else is secondary...which means that one simply needs to INTERPRET the words of Scripture differently than one's church or denomination and one is fully within his or her rights in the Protestant framework to eschew that secondary authority and, if necessary, go out and found the church that will be the "true" reformation/restoration of the full truth, "straight from the Bible alone."

KyrieEleison87 · Apr 7, 2012

hedrick said:
Of course most Protestants are part of a specific theological tradition. We typically operate within those traditions informally. There is no Pope to make final decisions, but consensus usually exists on important issues. The descriptions I've seen of Orthodoxy often say something similar.

While the Orthodox do not recognize the infallibility of the Pope, binding and dogmatic authority does exist within the Church, outside of Scripture Alone. The Orthodox are not Protestants.

Traditions are more formalized for the two confessional traditions, Reformed and Lutheran. Consensus for them is documented in confessions.

Yes, I recognize that. And the more traditional Protestants are going to adhere more closely to those confessions, but at the end of the day the question is, why? If I'm Reformed or a Lutheran, and I've read and studied the Bible, and my studies (all being "guided by the Holy Spirit," of course) have led me to different conclusions than those expressed in the confessions of my denomination, why should I adhere to those confessions? There's no guarantee in Protestantism that those confessions are without error.

Piper is Reformed. The Reformed comments I've found typically start by observing that this is a fairly late addition to the Apostles Creed, and that there is minimal Biblical evidence. They typically accept it, but often as a way of saying that Jesus died. Calvin sees it as pointing to Christ's spiritual torment. While I tend to think of Piper as pushing the boundaries in some ways, I think what he says here is an acceptable Reformed position, though not the typical one.

And this precisely confirms what I've said. Piper is adopting an "acceptable" position within Protestantism in denying part of the Apostles' Creed. At the end of the day, in Protestantism, there IS no truly binding and authoritative creed.

I should note that often traditions (and I'm not just limiting myself to theology, but to all areas of life) differ not just in answers but in what they consider important. In some ways the questions you ask are just as important as the answers you find, because they dictate the terms in which potential answers are couched. Protestants often do not see unity as essential in areas where Orthodox would. I think this is an area where most of us would see several reasonable answers.

Clearly the early Church disagreed with you; they're the ones who put the clause in there and declared that the ENTIRE Creed was binding on the faithful, not just the parts we like or we personally think are "clear enough" in Scripture.

GratiaCorpusChristi · Apr 8, 2012

KyrieEleison87 said:
The idea is that essentially there is no authority within Protestantism that regulates the interpretation of Scripture. The individual's right to read and interpret Scripture for himself (as "guided by the Holy Spirit," as they all would claim while teaching mutually exclusive doctrines) is held as paramount.
So, John Piper is remaining perfectly within the parameters of how Protestants arrive at theological truth by making the claims that he's making here. You might disagree with his novel interpretation, sure, but so what? What Protestant authority would be able to resolve your dispute? The short answer is, there isn't one.

This isn't exactly true. Martin Luther believed that the Bible should be translated into the vernacular and read by the laity (something that was discouraged, though not forbidden, by the Western Catholic Church in the late middle ages; his program was thus to bring the place of Scripture in the community of the faithful into accord with the historic place it continued to have in the East), and he believed that trained scholars should comment on the Scriptures with full understanding and knowledge of the history of the early church and the positions of the fathers, but it would be left for later generations to take the further step to say that the laity, untrained, should be able to discern systematic theology from the Scriptures on their own. For Lutherans, that idea strikes us as being just as silly as I'm sure it strikes faithful Orthodox.

Moreover, Lutherans and other early Protestant groups formulated confessions of faith on the basis of years and years of study of both Scripture and church history. The Lutheran Confessions, in particular, were put into their final form under the direction of Martin Chemnitz, who was a patristics scholar and began a longstanding project among Lutherans to show that we, and not the Roman Catholic Church, are the true inheritors in the west of the heritage of the united church of the first millennium. I'll be the first to admit that this self-conception has been somewhat lost through the Protestantization of Lutheranism, and also that it's not entirely fair to the Catholics, but the Book of Concord, to which Lutherans are bound and which includes the Apostolic, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds as well as various confessional documents of the sixteenth century, seeks to be a genuine compendium of both Scriptural doctrine and patristic exposition.

I don't say all this to start a debate on your forum. I say this because I want Orthodox believers to know that there are "Protestant" believers that are very sympathetic to the classic understanding of the relationship between the visible traditions of the church as regulated by the councils, exposited by the fathers, and expressed in the liturgy and the continuing project of canonical biblical exegesis.

Faithful Skeptic · Apr 8, 2012

GratiaCorpusChristi said:
This isn't exactly true. Martin Luther believed that the Bible should be translated into the vernacular and read by the laity (something that was discouraged, though not forbidden, by the Western Catholic Church in the late middle ages; his program was thus to bring the place of Scripture in the community of the faithful into accord with the historic place it continued to have in the East), and he believed that trained scholars should comment on the Scriptures with full understanding and knowledge of the history of the early church and the positions of the fathers, but it would be left for later generations to take the further step to say that the laity, untrained, should be able to discern systematic theology from the Scriptures on their own. For Lutherans, that idea strikes us as being just as silly as I'm sure it strikes faithful Orthodox.

Moreover, Lutherans and other early Protestant groups formulated confessions of faith on the basis of years and years of study of both Scripture and church history. The Lutheran Confessions, in particular, were put into their final form under the direction of Martin Chemnitz, who was a patristics scholar and began a longstanding project among Lutherans to show that we, and not the Roman Catholic Church, are the true inheritors in the west of the heritage of the united church of the first millennium. I'll be the first to admit that this self-conception has been somewhat lost through the Protestantization of Lutheranism, and also that it's not entirely fair to the Catholics, but the Book of Concord, to which Lutherans are bound and which includes the Apostolic, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds as well as various confessional documents of the sixteenth century, seeks to be a genuine compendium of both Scriptural doctrine and patristic exposition.

I don't say all this to start a debate on your forum. I say this because I want Orthodox believers to know that there are "Protestant" believers that are very sympathetic to the classic understanding of the relationship between the visible traditions of the church as regulated by the councils, exposited by the fathers, and expressed in the liturgy and the continuing project of canonical biblical exegesis.

Not to sound overly critical here, but that's just one step removed from the larger problem at hand today. Is it far less problematic? Certainly, but it is still a symptom of the same initial problem. Those initial patristic scholars studied the fathers and early Church within their own contemporary context (which was rather anti-Catholic), not in a context external to them, and that's why they disagreed with the Church in the East. The idea that one can study these things in a contemporary context is the fundamental problem at hand. That the Church in the East has an unbroken context since they were originally written seems significant enough (to me, at least, but I guess you could say that I'm biased) to merit significant consideration. Those patristic scholars cannot claim to have an unbroken context. They thought that the Catholic context that they inherited was itself broken, which is why they broke away, but instead of trying to find an unbroken context, they simply created a new one based on what they thought it meant to them. How can you then deny that same ability to any later patristic scholar who claims that the Lutheran scholars got the interpretation wrong? Again, the degrees of the problem can vary greatly amongst denominations, but the root is still the same.

JTornado1 · Apr 8, 2012

I wouldn't worry about John Piper. The creeds of the church were around long before he came along and will be around long after he is gone. :amen:

CaliforniaJosiah · Apr 8, 2012

Touma said:
"For these and other reasons, it seems best to me to omit from the Apostles Creed the clause, he descended into hell..."

Seriously? This is one of the reasons I cannot be a Protestant any longer

Just thought I'd share this with you all. Blessings

This is not an action of "the world of Protestantism."

It's at most the action of ONE Protestant individual. It is unrelated to "the world of Protestantism."

.

From the world of Protestantism...

Well-Known Member

Regular Member

Well-Known Member

Well-Known Member

Orthodox Catechumen

Well-Known Member

Regular Member

Contributor

Reader

Orthodox Catechumen

Well-Known Member

Contributor

Senior Veteran

Newbie

Orthodox Catechumen

Orthodox Catechumen

GratiaCorpusChristi

Guest

Newbie

Newbie

Well-Known Member

Similar threads