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I am reworking my book on the Covenant of God and hope to republish it in the near future. Here is the forward to it:
FORWARD
In the pages which follow, I offer to Orthodox Christians material which I hope will be helpful in your evangelization effort if you should find yourself someday in conversation with person who holds deeply to Calvinism and Covenant Theology. Most likely, this will be a member of a conservative Presbyterian organization such as the PCA or OPC.
There are many as different methods of evangelization as there are people. What might well be used of the Holy Spirit to bring the Gospel home to the heart of one individual might well turn another one off. Indeed, conversion stories I have read are filled with different experiences of how people came to Christ in different manners, through different approaches, and using different means. I hope this book will provide for my Orthodox brothers and sisters another tool in their efforts to evangelize and share the fullness of the Christian faith, which is the Orthodox faith, the faith of the Early Church.
I have found that for most Christians, bringing the Covenant of God into a theological conversation results in raised eyebrows and a look of confusion. Only in the Presbyterian Church in America did I encounter people such as Scott Hahn, for whom the covenant and its principles eventually led to his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. A few years later, my study of these principles, explained in Ray Sutton’s book, THAT YOU MAY PROSPER - Dominion by Covenant, led me to enter the Byzantine Catholic Church in April of 2001.
Unfortunately, at that time I misapplied one of the five working principles of a covenant relationship, one which Scott Hahn also missed. I think this came from my familiarity with the Western churches of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism and the manner in which they approach Christianity. Over the last several decades, a growing number of Evangelicals and Protestants have discovered the beauty and fullness of the ancient Orthodox faith.
In the Orthodox faith, a theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian. Theology is not approached in the same manner as it is in the West, as an exercise of mental acuity, clever dissertations on God, and intellectual exercises done in regard to Bible passages, often clouded by the prejudice and judgment of the one reading the text. It is instead, coming to know Christ/God through prayer, ascetic exercise, and the silence of the heart before God, or heyschasm. It is to experience God, not just to talk about the ideas your own mind or your own understanding of the Bible have formulated about Him.
I am newly chrismated into the Orthodox faith, and while Eastern Catholicism tries to be Orthodox, it is not at all the same. In entering the Orthodox Church, I made up my mind to sit down, shut up, listen, and learn. As such, I shouldn’t even be writing this book, but there is a problem I need to address. After my conversion from Protestantism, I wrote and published the initial draft of this book, with the goal of sharing with friends and others the covenant principles which had led me to enter into communion with the Roman Catholic Church through Eastern Catholicism. This book is available on the open market; therefore, it needs to be revised and republished in order correct the error I made in the discussing Sutton’s second principle of covenant – hierarchy.
Hierarchy is the principle of covenant headship. As you will see discussed later on, Christ is the New Adam, who is the human covenant head over the Church – not the Patriarch of Rome.
FORWARD
In the pages which follow, I offer to Orthodox Christians material which I hope will be helpful in your evangelization effort if you should find yourself someday in conversation with person who holds deeply to Calvinism and Covenant Theology. Most likely, this will be a member of a conservative Presbyterian organization such as the PCA or OPC.
There are many as different methods of evangelization as there are people. What might well be used of the Holy Spirit to bring the Gospel home to the heart of one individual might well turn another one off. Indeed, conversion stories I have read are filled with different experiences of how people came to Christ in different manners, through different approaches, and using different means. I hope this book will provide for my Orthodox brothers and sisters another tool in their efforts to evangelize and share the fullness of the Christian faith, which is the Orthodox faith, the faith of the Early Church.
I have found that for most Christians, bringing the Covenant of God into a theological conversation results in raised eyebrows and a look of confusion. Only in the Presbyterian Church in America did I encounter people such as Scott Hahn, for whom the covenant and its principles eventually led to his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. A few years later, my study of these principles, explained in Ray Sutton’s book, THAT YOU MAY PROSPER - Dominion by Covenant, led me to enter the Byzantine Catholic Church in April of 2001.
Unfortunately, at that time I misapplied one of the five working principles of a covenant relationship, one which Scott Hahn also missed. I think this came from my familiarity with the Western churches of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism and the manner in which they approach Christianity. Over the last several decades, a growing number of Evangelicals and Protestants have discovered the beauty and fullness of the ancient Orthodox faith.
In the Orthodox faith, a theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian. Theology is not approached in the same manner as it is in the West, as an exercise of mental acuity, clever dissertations on God, and intellectual exercises done in regard to Bible passages, often clouded by the prejudice and judgment of the one reading the text. It is instead, coming to know Christ/God through prayer, ascetic exercise, and the silence of the heart before God, or heyschasm. It is to experience God, not just to talk about the ideas your own mind or your own understanding of the Bible have formulated about Him.
I am newly chrismated into the Orthodox faith, and while Eastern Catholicism tries to be Orthodox, it is not at all the same. In entering the Orthodox Church, I made up my mind to sit down, shut up, listen, and learn. As such, I shouldn’t even be writing this book, but there is a problem I need to address. After my conversion from Protestantism, I wrote and published the initial draft of this book, with the goal of sharing with friends and others the covenant principles which had led me to enter into communion with the Roman Catholic Church through Eastern Catholicism. This book is available on the open market; therefore, it needs to be revised and republished in order correct the error I made in the discussing Sutton’s second principle of covenant – hierarchy.
Hierarchy is the principle of covenant headship. As you will see discussed later on, Christ is the New Adam, who is the human covenant head over the Church – not the Patriarch of Rome.
