The NXR Podcast - American Glory - Why I’m Not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox

00:00:00.000 Today on American Glory, I'm going to be sharing why I'm not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.

00:00:05.380 In my weekly audit, I'll be sharing an extremely fair and helpful video resource

00:00:09.780 from a former Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian.

00:00:13.080 All that and more coming up right now.

00:00:14.520 welcome to american glory this is season two on american christianity i'm your host dale

00:00:33.060 partridge this is episode number seven of season two and it's titled why i'm not roman catholic

00:00:39.340 or Eastern Orthodox. Now, this episode will serve as part one. Next week, I'll explain why I'm what

00:00:46.040 I would call a Reformed Catholic, what that means, and why I believe you should be too.

00:00:51.900 Now, why am I talking about this? Because this season, I'm going to be talking about eight

00:00:57.740 different episodes facing American Christianity. In my last episode, if you got a chance to listen

00:01:02.700 or watch it, I was discussing the coming religious conflicts in America and why Christians must begin

00:01:08.440 building Christian towns. And I laid out the basic ingredients required to establish those

00:01:15.180 communities and the four institutions necessary to sustain them. Now, if you didn't know,

00:01:20.380 American Glory is both a podcast and a video show. And if you want to listen to it, you can

00:01:25.320 listen to it on the NXR podcast feed. You could also listen to it if you just search American

00:01:29.000 Glory. You'll find that wherever podcasts can be listened to, whether it's Spotify, Apple,

00:01:33.620 or anywhere you do listen to podcasts. Now, if you want to watch the video, which I recommend

00:01:39.480 that you do because I put so much effort into all these slides to kind of make it like a

00:01:43.640 documentary style function, you can do so by going to my YouTube channel, which is at Dale Partridge

00:01:49.180 TV. Now, I do want to preface this episode with one very important point. I believe that we are

00:01:56.760 living in a time that calls for creedal Christianity more than confessional

00:02:02.220 Christianity. And by that, I mean that any fellow Christian or any tradition that sincerely

00:02:09.140 confesses the historic ecumenical creeds, which is the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed,

00:02:14.260 the Athanasian Creed, should be regarded as an ally in our present moment, okay? The West is

00:02:21.580 being overtaken by Islam and Hinduism and Jewish supremacy and secular ideologies and moral chaos.

00:02:28.040 Infighting between our groups is a luxury of a victorious Christian society, and we do not have

00:02:36.200 that luxury right now. So yes, our confessions and traditions, they still divide us on several

00:02:43.820 important matters, and Christians should worship according to conscience and conviction. But this

00:02:50.520 is not the time to be spending all of our energy anathematizing one another and constantly

00:02:56.280 shouting heretic or fighting over every secondary disagreement while far greater threats are

00:03:03.040 preparing to consume our families, our churches, and our communities. So yes, these theological

00:03:10.500 questions that we're going to be talking about today, they do matter. But right now we're facing

00:03:15.360 against so many things, right? Mass abortion, mass atheism, mass pornography, feminism, paganism,

00:03:22.460 sexual disorder, immodesty, demonic confusion, evil religious systems that are pressing hard

00:03:28.520 against the Christians here in the West. Now, so to obsess over the intergroup disputes

00:03:35.540 while the wolves are devouring the sheep and our fellow countrymen, I think is a serious

00:03:43.420 misordering of priorities. So this episode, I'm going to try to represent those traditions fairly.

00:03:50.320 I'm going to try to avoid strawmanning any of their positions and make the comparison

00:03:55.900 with as much charity and clarity as possible. So I do believe that those people, I will say this,

00:04:04.560 I believe that there are Christians in the Roman Catholic Church. I believe there are

00:04:08.860 Christians in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and I believe there are Christians in the Protestant

00:04:11.600 church. And so I'm going to be talking about the differences between us theologically,

00:04:17.600 but I'm going to try to do so with charity. So on that note, let's begin.

00:04:25.320 Now, it's difficult to have this discussion with such a broad audience, okay? Because people are

00:04:30.120 coming from very different backgrounds. And so I think it's important to first lay out the

00:04:34.780 historical landscape of the church and then tell you my own story. And then after that,

00:04:39.740 address the particular doctrines that have kept me from Rome and the East. So let me begin just

00:04:46.880 with some church history. So Christianity begins, as we know, in Jerusalem. Christ is crucified and

00:04:53.160 raised there. The Spirit is poured out there on Pentecost. From Jerusalem, the gospel moves outward

00:04:59.840 first through Judea and Samaria, and then into the Western Gentile world. In the book of Acts,

00:05:06.580 you can actually watch the center of missionary activity shift steadily westward through Asia

00:05:13.520 Minor, Greece, and finally toward Rome. Now, Israel stood at the crossroads. Now, in the ancient world,

00:05:22.020 west came to mean anything that was west of Israel, which was the Greco-Roman world and later

00:05:28.620 the Latin world. Now, while the east included anything that was east of Israel, it also included

00:05:35.480 Israel, and everything east like the Persian, Byzantine, later Islamic empires that were to

00:05:43.960 the east. So Israel sat somewhat between the west and the east as both kind of this physical and

00:05:50.320 spiritual meeting point of those two worlds. Now, by the third and fourth centuries, the gospel had

00:05:58.700 taken deep root in the east. We know that the apostle Thomas brought the gospel to Parthia,

00:06:05.320 Persia, Edessa, eventually India, while other apostles and missionaries carried the faith into

00:06:12.000 Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and several of the surrounding areas there. Now, while Rome in the

00:06:20.440 West had become a major Christian center, strengthened especially by the ministry of

00:06:26.460 Peter and Paul, and of course also their martyrdom there, Christianity was simultaneously at the

00:06:34.040 same time, developing these powerful centers throughout the East. And so this geographic

00:06:38.480 spread of the faith soon collided with shifting political realities of the Roman world. The

00:06:46.260 Emperor Diocletian in 286 recognized that essentially the massive empire had to become,

00:06:53.040 it was becoming too large for a single ruler. So Diocletian formally divided its administration

00:06:59.080 into the Eastern and Western halves. And this division inadvertently reinforced the distinct

00:07:07.560 cultural linguistic spheres of the church. And so you had the Latin West that was dominant and

00:07:17.320 surrounded around Rome. And then you had the Greek dominant East around Byzantium. And so

00:07:24.300 something politically significant happened after this. Constantine, who had his own rise to imperial

00:07:33.440 power that actually began in the Western Empire, eventually became the ruler of the entire Roman

00:07:38.480 world. And in 330 AD, he moved the imperial center from the west to the east. And essentially what

00:07:48.980 was remaining as Byzantium, and he turned it into Constantinople. And Constantinople grew not only

00:07:55.820 as like an imperial capital, but also as one of the most important ecclesiastical centers of

00:08:01.020 Christianity. So it eventually started rivaling Rome in its influence. Now, because political

00:08:07.800 and ecclesiastical importance were closely connected in the ancient world, Constantinople

00:08:14.080 quickly rose in prominence. However, Rome still remained the preeminent in the ecclesiastical

00:08:21.660 sphere. Now, at the Council of Constantinople in 381, the Bishop of the East was given a place of

00:08:28.540 high honor, but only after the Bishop of Rome. Then at Chalcedon in 451, Constantinople's position

00:08:36.600 was strengthened even further, but the Bishop of Rome still remained preeminent. The two wings

00:08:43.380 of the church remained in communion for centuries. Yet they spoke different languages,

00:08:49.440 developed different theological emphasis, lived under different political conditions,

00:08:53.900 and gradually formed very different understandings of authority. So Rome increasingly emphasized the

00:09:01.420 universal jurisdiction of its bishop, and the East maintained a more conciliar, which is just a word

00:09:07.980 for council, church council, so more of a group model, organized around the great patriarchal

00:09:15.700 seas. Now, these differences didn't appear overnight, but over the centuries, they became

00:09:21.560 harder and harder to reconcile. And then in 1054, the division was formalized in what we now know

00:09:28.880 as the Great Schism. Now, the break grew out of just these centuries of tension over papal authority,

00:09:35.760 differences in religious culture, disputes over the filioque in the Nicene Creed,

00:09:41.980 questions around sacramentology, questions around claims of jurisdiction between Rome

00:09:49.140 and Constantinople. And so from that point, these two great ancient claimants to Catholic

00:09:56.460 Christianity, and when I say Catholic, I just mean little c, universal Christianity,

00:10:00.560 they stood divided. And this wasn't a small disagreement. Both sides issued excommunications

00:10:08.360 toward each other, essentially anathematizing and condemning one another to hell. And so

00:10:13.720 these excommunications remained in place all the way until 1965. But even to this day,

00:10:21.400 neither side is presuming the salvation of the other. Though there is, I think, more charity

00:10:28.480 now than there has been in a long time. Now, between 1054 and 1517, the Western church

00:10:38.380 continued to develop and more precisely define a number of their doctrines and practices that

00:10:44.460 would later become major points of controversy, not just with the East, but also within the West

00:10:50.500 that worked toward the next schism of the Reformation. So transubstantiation was formally

00:10:58.120 defined at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1214, while medieval theology also started to develop

00:11:05.440 these kind of elaborate systems surrounding penance and purgatory and indulgences and the

00:11:12.100 treasury of merit and papal authority. Now, these developments increasingly troubled theologians,

00:11:18.580 not just within the West, but also in the East, but these reformed-minded clergy within the West

00:11:26.160 who believe certain doctrines and practices lacked sufficient warrant in scripture.

00:11:32.420 And they believe that Rome in the West was departing from the teachings of the early church.

00:11:39.740 And when I say early church, it's around the first 500 years of the church. So

00:11:44.440 So long before Martin Luther or figures like, you know, that were John Calvin and these

00:11:52.100 Reformation figures, long before them, figures like John Wycliffe in England or John Huss

00:12:00.120 in Bohemia, they're already calling for Western reform.

00:12:04.060 They're criticizing ecclesiastical abuses, and they're appealing to a more direct understanding

00:12:10.780 of Scripture.

00:12:11.580 So Luther appears on the scene in 1517, and he's not like suddenly inventing the idea of reforming

00:12:20.700 the Roman Catholic Church. No, he entered into an already existing stream of reformers calling

00:12:25.960 the church back to scripture and to what they believed was the, again, old Catholic faith.

00:12:32.800 Now, in 1453, you have the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, and that further altered the

00:12:41.440 balance. Okay. The Eastern Christian world was placed under Islamic rule while the Roman papacy

00:12:49.980 in the West continued to consolidate its claims and grow Christendom. And this created greater

00:12:56.100 animosity that was happening between the East and the West because the West did not send support or

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00:14:35.880 And so to say that in the 16th century, in the 1500s, that the reformers essentially divided

00:14:44.160 the church, it's too simplistic to say that. So the church was already divided long before

00:14:49.160 Luther. East and West had been separated for nearly 500 years at this point. And within the

00:14:55.000 Western church, there were already serious disputes over doctrine, authority, and of course,

00:15:00.420 reform. Now, Catholics often say that Luther divided the Catholic church. But here's my

00:15:08.520 argument. Institutional unity is easy when ignorance is high. And when you have limited

00:15:16.620 access to scripture and little freedom to question ecclesiastical authority, and you have high

00:15:23.680 illiteracy rates, it's hard to call that unity because it's really cloaked in ignorance.

00:15:32.940 Before the Reformation, the mass in Western Europe was ordinarily conducted in Latin

00:15:39.200 rather than the common language of the people. Latin is an ecclesiastical language. Now,

00:15:44.720 even in the East, they didn't do this. They would actually perform their services in the

00:15:51.160 language of the people. We also know in the West that translating scripture into the native language

00:15:56.880 was highly restricted in various places and circumstances. An open questioning of ecclesiastical

00:16:03.680 authority could result in excommunication. It could also, if the religious and civil authorities

00:16:10.000 overlapped in that particular instance, it could even end in capital punishment. Now, you can't

00:16:16.680 talk about the Reformation without talking about the printing press. So in the early 1500s,

00:16:23.960 scripture, theology, and controversy could suddenly circulate on a scale that had never

00:16:31.020 been possible before that. And that is why I don't think that the Reformation can simply be reduced

00:16:38.420 to men like Luther or Calvin or Cranmer. If those men had never been born, the combination of the

00:16:45.560 printing press, the increase in written debate, printed debate, the renewed study of the biblical

00:16:52.200 languages through the scholastical movement, the increasing public literacy, and the growing

00:16:58.920 concerns with the integrity of Rome's doctrine would almost certainly have produced some sort

00:17:04.100 of cataclysmic reform anyway. So in other words, the reformers, they didn't manufacture the

00:17:13.260 Reformation. The printing press and the mass access to Scripture was really undergirded this

00:17:21.580 Reformation. The unity prior to access to the Scripture was built heavily, again, on ignorance.

00:17:27.220 But once people could read the Scriptures and see that some of the practices within

00:17:32.560 the Roman Catholic Church had no biblical warrant, and in some cases even went against Scripture,

00:17:39.640 the institutional distrust began to rise. So I don't view the Reformation primarily as the

00:17:48.640 beginning of division, but as the beginning of a new period of doctrinal clarity. Now,

00:17:56.680 if we want to understand the Reformation properly, we need to begin with the magisterial reformers.

00:18:03.220 And so we're looking at Luther in Germany, Cranmer in England, Calvin in Geneva, Knox in Scotland.

00:18:09.880 These men, first, they did not initially set out to inaugurate new Christian traditions.

00:18:17.640 Their stated aim was to reform the existing Roman Catholic Church according to scripture

00:18:22.680 and the teaching of the ancient church, the church fathers, which in my view would have

00:18:29.480 given them a remarkable balance of Eastern Catholicity, Western inheritance, and Reformational

00:18:36.620 clarity. A balance that I believe is probably best preserved in the Anglican tradition,

00:18:44.360 at least according to its formularies, its formal doctrines. But we'll talk more about that

00:18:49.640 in the next episode. So the Reformation and the Reformers, they understood themselves

00:18:57.080 not as abandoning Catholic Christianity, but as recovering it. So in that sense,

00:19:04.780 they can properly be described as Reformed Catholics. So Christians seeking continuity

00:19:12.640 with the ancient Catholic Church, little c, Catholic Church, while rejecting what they

00:19:18.440 believed were later Roman corruptions. And this essentially is important because the Reformers

00:19:26.320 sometimes stood closer to the East than people realized, particularly in rejecting the universal

00:19:34.880 papal jurisdiction. Along with the East, they rejected purgatory or the treasury of merit

00:19:41.580 or the codification of transubstantiation. And they also, you know, the East, along with the

00:19:50.120 reformers repeatedly appealed to the church fathers and the early ecumenical church.

00:19:56.180 And they did this while still disagreeing with Eastern Orthodoxy. And this is very important.

00:20:02.120 So you have these reformers who had lots of agreement on many other issues with the East,

00:20:07.960 yet they still disagreed with Eastern Orthodoxy on some other very important doctrines.

00:20:14.420 And this is an important point because here in the West, for Western Christians who are attracted

00:20:19.660 to Eastern Orthodoxy. The Reformers recognized that agreement on those several questions if they

00:20:26.860 did not become Orthodox. They believed that their calling was to reform the Western church from

00:20:33.960 within its own inheritance, not to abandon the civilization or the culture or the ecclesiastical

00:20:40.900 tradition of their forefathers in order to just join the East. In other words, they did not allow

00:20:48.620 the weaknesses of their own tradition to become the attraction of another. And that is a serious

00:20:56.600 consideration, okay? Because Christianity does not call us to become rootless, right? Heritage

00:21:03.100 and language and liturgy and memory and the faith of our forefathers, they all matter, okay?

00:21:10.980 Your Western tradition should not be abandoned simply because another appears stronger or maybe

00:21:18.440 more beautiful in a season of weakness or decline. Now, I understand that many people go, oh, I'm

00:21:24.020 going to the East specifically because I find that they have the most truth. And that's the

00:21:29.060 perspective that you might be going for. But I think that a lot of people disregard the understanding

00:21:34.520 of your own heritage and holding onto that. So sometimes faithfulness means recovering and

00:21:42.560 rebuilding what has been handed down to you rather than leaving it behind. Now, had Rome

00:21:49.700 not hardened many of its disputed positions at the Council of Trent, this is really the Roman

00:21:58.120 Catholics' response to the reformers' positions, perhaps there would have remained more room for

00:22:03.520 reconciliation within the Western Church. But Trent's anathemas toward reform doctrine

00:22:09.600 followed centuries later by dogmatic claims in Vatican I and made the division far more

00:22:17.980 difficult to overcome. Now, before I tell you my own story, I need to just make one distinction

00:22:25.080 because the word Protestant has become far too broad, okay? Baptists and Methodists and

00:22:32.040 Pentecostals and modern non-denominational evangelicals are often lumped together

00:22:37.280 with the churches of the Magisterial Reformation. They're called Protestants, but historically

00:22:42.760 and doctrinally, they are not the same thing, and I believe it's an unfair association, okay? So

00:22:50.060 Lutheran, Anglican, and Presbyterian churches retained the ecumenical creeds, confessions,

00:22:58.940 sacramental theology, the historic liturgy. I'm talking the liturgies that you would see back

00:23:03.500 in the first few hundred years of the church. The old hymns, the Gregorian chants in some places,

00:23:10.540 a strong claim to the continuity with the ancient Catholic church. The magisterial reformers would

00:23:17.000 have radically disagreed with many later developments in these restorationist movements

00:23:24.780 like the Baptists, the Pentecostals, et cetera, et cetera. And they certainly did not envision

00:23:30.340 their traditions in the Reformation leading to an endless collection of independent churches

00:23:37.280 and denominations. So when I use the word Protestant, I am principally talking about

00:23:45.140 what I would call classical confessional Protestantism, the Reformation churches

00:23:51.840 that believe they were reforming the historic Catholic church, not starting new Christian

00:23:57.940 traditions. And that distinction matters because the Protestant chaos that I came from was mostly

00:24:05.340 the later evangelical restorationist world. I began, like many people in the Southwest,

00:24:12.280 at Calvary Chapel, and then the broader megachurch Christianity. And from there, I moved into

00:24:16.580 John MacArthur-style Calvinism, and then briefly into Reformed Baptist while I was studying the

00:24:24.480 Presbyterianism and Anglicanism. And I always loved the Puritans. Even the Catholics loved

00:24:32.420 the Puritans. I have a story that Thomas Watson was one of the great former Anglicans and then

00:24:38.780 later Puritan preachers. And he's such an eloquent preacher that the Catholic priests

00:24:46.180 would come and listen to his sermons because they were so excellent. But at the same time,

00:24:53.920 I was deeply drawn to men like J.C. Ryle, John Stott, J.I. Packer, C.S. Lewis, who were all

00:25:02.600 Anglicans. And so for several years, I remained under the Westminster standards, which is the

00:25:09.520 Presbyterian Confession. Though I took a number of exceptions always to the Westminster. And in

00:25:16.920 practice, our church was always in a more historic and liturgical space, right? We used

00:25:23.220 pretty high liturgy. We're kneeling, we're singing canticles, recitations, etc. I wore,

00:25:29.520 I still wear a clerical collar when I'm preaching. I appreciated Christian art. I didn't have this

00:25:35.020 strict second commandment violation on images. We believed in the mystical bodily presence in

00:25:42.640 the Lord's Supper. And we even included the 39 articles, which is the Anglican Confession and

00:25:47.760 the Book of Common Prayer in our church's constitution. So we were already kind of

00:25:51.960 associated in that kind of Presbyterian Anglican world. Now, over time, our elders and members,

00:25:59.060 along with, you know, kind of a growing appreciation for my English heritage,

00:26:03.000 partridge, right, we more embraced the Anglican tradition while still valuing, you know, the

00:26:11.120 Presbyterian documents. Like, we still keep the Westminster Shorter Catechism as one of the

00:26:15.520 approved documents at our church. Now, what finally convinced me to kind of pick a side with

00:26:21.140 this reformed Anglicanism, it allowed me to not have to choose between Catholicity and the

00:26:30.360 Reformation, deep liturgy and scripture, or the ancient church and Protestant clarity. I could

00:26:36.740 hold those things together in one tradition. And so we made the Anglican formularies really our

00:26:45.540 core foundation, though in practice, you know, the change was not that dramatic because for a long

00:26:51.820 time we've already been functionally there. Now, you guys might have, I might have even said it on

00:26:58.680 an episode before, we've often called ourselves Anglitarians. And if you know our world, the

00:27:05.380 Reformed world, you know that there's really not a big difference between, say, like J.C. Ryle

00:27:11.080 Anglicanism and R.C. Sproul, Presbyterianism. And so we kind of sat in that space for some time.

00:27:18.720 Now, but the term I actually prefer is Reformed Catholic. I like that term, and it captures what

00:27:25.800 I believe I had been moving toward for years, not away from the Reformation, but back through it

00:27:32.660 toward the historic Catholic faith of the West, where you have this Reformed church according to

00:27:40.320 scripture according to early church history. So yeah, I'm still a Calvinist. I'm still

00:27:45.660 post-millennial. I'm still covenantal. I have patriarchal positions. In many ways, I feel like

00:27:53.720 I just kind of spent many years slowly working backward out of the modern evangelical fragmentation

00:28:00.620 until I arrived at the place where the debates are actually worth having, okay? The serious

00:28:07.440 conversation, in my view, is not between Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy and megachurch

00:28:15.040 evangelicalism. Now, that conversation is not a serious conversation. It is between

00:28:20.480 the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformed Catholic Church. That's where those conversations

00:28:27.040 are really meaningful. They can be respectful. There's great conversations to be had.

00:28:32.440 There is deeper doctrine. There's a lot closer liturgical practices there. And so the real

00:28:41.240 question for this episode is this. If I want, or if I wanted historic or sacramental,

00:28:50.520 creedal, Catholic Christianity, why am I not a Roman Catholic? And why am I not

00:28:57.760 Eastern Orthodox. And this is where I want to go next, okay? So I want to move from kind of

00:29:04.440 some more abstract arguments to some very direct theological reasons. So first, I'm patriarchal,

00:29:14.720 okay? I am a Christian nationalist, and I believe there is something deeply Christian

00:29:20.760 about honoring our fathers and receiving our inheritance with gratitude, okay? Scripture

00:29:26.560 repeatedly commands us to remember those who came before us. You can see this in Deuteronomy 32.7.

00:29:34.420 And also the fifth commandment, right, tells us to honor our father and mother. Now, America

00:29:38.700 was historically formed within the Protestant tradition. And I believe our national and

00:29:45.100 ecclesiastical inheritance is not something to just get rid of, but to reform, to strengthen,

00:29:52.180 to hand down. In fact, George Washington, our national patriarch here in America, was Anglican.

00:30:00.140 And there's something good about that. Second, America, like Europe, belongs historically to

00:30:06.920 Western civilization. And that also matters to me. And as I said earlier, I believe our

00:30:12.380 responsibility is ordinarily to recover and reform our own inheritance rather than to abandon it

00:30:19.980 for another civilization's ecclesiastical tradition. I think when people hate their

00:30:27.360 own tradition so much, there's so much chaos or fragmentation, it's easy to adopt something

00:30:33.460 foreign in hopes that it will be better. It's kind of a grass is greener paradox.

00:30:39.960 So Eastern Orthodoxy is ancient and Christian, but it developed primarily within the Greek,

00:30:48.240 Slavic, Byzantine, and Eastern cultures. Its iconographic spirituality, the Byzantine liturgy,

00:30:56.840 the ecclesiastical customs, the devotional practices, and the cultural instincts,

00:31:02.000 they do feel genuinely foreign to the historic religious life of the West. I once had a friend

00:31:09.800 who converted to orthodoxy, and even he joked that within kind of his Western framework,

00:31:16.740 He said, at first, it felt like Buddhism with Jesus. And I think there's some truth to that

00:31:22.980 impression from a Western perspective. The spirituality, the aesthetics, the developmental,

00:31:30.600 or the habits, the devotions, the theological instincts can feel profoundly foreign.

00:31:38.400 Orthodoxy remains a very small minority in the United States. I think it's less than 1%.

00:31:44.600 1%. And if we are going to think patriarchally rather than individualistically, conversion is

00:31:54.780 never merely like an isolated decision. So in choosing Eastern Orthodoxy, while remaining

00:32:00.740 culturally and geographically in the West, you are essentially placing your children and

00:32:07.420 descendants within Eastern ecclesiastical traditions formed in a very different

00:32:13.960 civilizational setting, which again, I think can create long-term tensions between faith,

00:32:19.880 heritage, culture, and even nationalism. And so if you were in the East, it would be a different

00:32:26.240 discussion to have. But in the West, having Americans convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, I do

00:32:31.820 think those elements are something to consider at the very least. Now, third, I have serious

00:32:39.600 reservations about Rome's tendency toward globalism. Okay, Roman Catholic teaching

00:32:47.060 certainly recognizes the legitimate authority of sovereign nations, including their right to

00:32:53.220 regulate their own borders. But Rome is simultaneously possessing kind of a profound

00:32:58.880 globalist ecclesiology, kind of a one worldwide church under one universal pontiff, coupled with

00:33:07.040 kind of a strong modern emphasis on migration and international solidarity, multiculturalism,

00:33:13.980 and kind of this reception and integration of migrants. And it's why you see so many Catholic

00:33:20.280 NGOs and charities behind the mass immigration problem in the West. And this isn't just

00:33:27.820 theoretical, right? So Pope Leo was repeatedly emphasizing this idea, the welcoming and

00:33:34.800 integrating of migrants to the West. In fact, on 4th of July of 2026, just this year, he traveled

00:33:42.140 to what is called the gate of Europe. And he said, quote, welcome, protect, promote, and integrate,

00:33:49.720 end quote. And he said this referring to migrants and refugees. So earlier this summer, during his

00:33:56.240 visit to Spain, he called for legal pathways and protections and reception and integration of

00:34:00.880 migrants, describing migrants and migration as a possible source of mutual enrichment between

00:34:07.120 peoples. And he did this all while migrants are literally raping and destroying Europeans.

00:34:13.480 And so as a nationalist, that just creates a real problem for me. So again, these aren't my

00:34:20.340 strongest objections to Rome or the East, but they explain something about the ground on which I stand

00:34:26.880 as some general principles. I'm Western, a Protestant in the classical sense, attached to

00:34:32.980 the inheritance of my American and English forefathers, and convinced that our present

00:34:39.760 task is not to flee that inheritance because it has decayed and has corruption, but to reform it,

00:34:48.620 to recover it, and to build it again. Now, theologically, I have six major issues,

00:34:57.760 and I'm going to try to touch on them briefly today. But if you want to go deeper, I wrote a

00:35:03.480 book called Reformed vs. Rome, which focuses more on Rome than orthodoxy, but it explores each of

00:35:12.580 these issues and more in greater detail. And it's available in audio if you want to listen to the

00:35:17.900 audiobook and the ReLearn app. And it's also in print at Amazon. You can pick up a copy there.

00:35:24.860 And it has already, from what I've heard, it's already helped many people just make distinctions

00:35:30.540 and discernment on which positions they may want to take. So number one on my theological

00:35:37.200 disagreements is how we view scripture. Ultimately, we're talking about authority.

00:35:42.440 Jesus constantly says, it is written. He says it 17 times in the Gospels. We know that there's

00:35:52.360 other words. He'd say, did you not read or have you not heard? Another five to 10 times.

00:35:59.020 When Satan tempts him, he doesn't appeal to an unwritten tradition, some sort of infallible

00:36:06.200 bishop or an ecclesiastical consensus. He says it is written. And in addition to that, you know,

00:36:13.820 again, he's constantly asking questions. Have you not read? Have you not understood the story of

00:36:19.800 Adam and Eve? Have you not read the Psalms? Have you not read Genesis? He's implying these things

00:36:24.000 constantly. The New Testament uses that formula again and again. We actually have the apostles

00:36:32.240 saying it is written 70 times. And it creates, again, this further authority of the written

00:36:40.300 word. And so the New Testament scripture possesses this unique authority. And when tradition

00:36:49.040 contradicts revelation, Jesus does not harmonize the two together. In fact, he actually condemns

00:36:56.100 tradition in one spot, at least in Mark 7, 13. He says, you nullify the word of God

00:37:00.280 by your tradition. And scripture itself testifies to the supremacy of scripture, right? The Bible

00:37:06.580 is woven together by thousands of internal cross-references. Prophets interpreting the law,

00:37:12.680 Christ interpreting the prophets, apostles interpreting both, later revelation clarifying

00:37:16.940 earlier revelation. In fact, there are over 300 direct quotations of the Old Testament in the New

00:37:25.500 Testament. There's over a thousand allusions and echoes of the Old Testament in the New Testament.

00:37:30.760 So the biblical writers, what they're doing is they're appealing again and again and again

00:37:34.100 to what God had already written, not to an unwritten or written body of tradition as a

00:37:39.500 parallel, infallible, or equal authority. Okay, so to read scripture and come away with tradition

00:37:48.800 or history having equal authority is really to ignore the implicit pattern that we see in

00:37:56.340 Scripture. Now, again, I'm not against church. I think that church history and tradition is an

00:38:03.340 authority. I think it's a lesser authority. I think reason, human reason, is also an authority,

00:38:10.720 but it's a lesser authority. And so here's why I find the argument against Sola Scriptura or

00:38:20.340 Prima Scriptura. People say this all the time, but all the Protestants interpret the Bible

00:38:25.260 differently. Now, sure, but all the Catholics and Orthodox interpret history differently.

00:38:31.720 And history is far messier than scripture, right? History comes to us through incomplete records,

00:38:39.040 competing historians, destroyed manuscripts, political interests, disputed councils,

00:38:46.740 and really, often cases, contradictory witnesses. So God promises in His Word to preserve His Word

00:38:54.280 and to preserve His church. And He never promises to preserve a perfect transcript of church history.

00:39:02.400 So tradition does matter. Again, I read the fathers, I honor the councils, we confess the

00:39:07.260 creeds, but something that has to sit at the highest chair. Now, for me, that chair belongs

00:39:12.520 to the word of God. Now, yes, I reject private, self-authorizing interpretation of scripture.

00:39:20.100 I'm not part of the me, my Bible, and I camp. I align more with the East in that we ought to have

00:39:26.920 a conciliar and creedal source of an interpretation. And that is precisely why I believe

00:39:33.780 the confessionalism of classical Protestantism is so important. Okay, the church should publicly

00:39:41.340 state how it understands the core doctrines of Scripture. It needs to be scrutinized and defended,

00:39:49.460 and when hundreds of years pass and those confessions are still standing, that's assuring,

00:39:55.360 right? We should also hold our ministers accountable to those confessions. For us,

00:40:01.700 that means the ecumenical creeds, the 39 Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer,

00:40:08.980 together with the Ordinal and the Homilies. Those are the standards that give Anglicanism

00:40:15.400 its shape. Now, unfortunately, many churches have gone either beyond those formularies or below

00:40:23.240 while still keeping the Anglican name or the Reformed name. And I've been frustrated with

00:40:31.000 that, and I've actually kind of thought of it like calling yourself an American or calling,

00:40:37.860 let's just use this as an example. Like when people go to America and they call it a democracy,

00:40:43.360 when according to our documents, like more precisely, we're not a democracy. We are a

00:40:48.320 constitutional republic. Or, you know, people that call themselves constitutional conservatives

00:40:54.100 while ignoring the Constitution. If you call yourself a Lutheran or an Anglican or a Presbyterian,

00:41:02.260 that name should actually bind you to the confessional standards of that tradition.

00:41:07.860 Otherwise, the label begins to lose its meaning. And I think that's some of the problem

00:41:13.420 in the Protestant traditions, but I don't think it's as much of a problem

00:41:18.400 as we see in these classical Protestant Reformed Catholic traditions.

00:41:23.860 Now, because of the age we live in, I think all Protestant confessions need stronger guardrails.

00:41:30.020 When many of these documents were written, their authors could hardly imagine

00:41:34.100 women's ordination or like the normalization of homosexuality under the banner of Christianity

00:41:40.340 or Protestants adopting practices like praying to saints. They just couldn't imagine the need

00:41:47.020 to clarify on these things even more. And my hope is over time that Protestants not only recover the

00:41:57.600 historic formularies themselves, but also have the courage to enforce them. The men at our church

00:42:04.380 have even discussed forming something like a Reformed Catholic confession that, you know,

00:42:11.420 adds these necessary guardrails to our already existing confession. And I think that's something

00:42:20.480 that we might do. And so, again, I'm not saying that tradition or reason or church authority

00:42:29.680 have no authority. I believe they have great authority. But I believe that when those

00:42:37.740 authorities contradict scripture, scripture must remain above. And that's more of the position I

00:42:44.840 would hold is called prima scriptura rather than sola scriptura. And I can explain more of that in

00:42:50.700 my next episode. Number two of the reasons why I'm not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox is

00:42:57.900 Mariology. Now, Mariology is probably one of the reasons that's keeping many people from those two

00:43:04.180 traditions. Now, I honor Mary. She is the Theotokos, the blessed mother of our Lord,

00:43:10.720 and one of the great women of redemptive history. But I cannot find the later Marian dogmas in

00:43:19.380 Scripture. The Immaculate Conception, bodily assumption, her role as heavenly intercessor

00:43:26.320 or some sort of co-mediatrix, these require theological constructions that the Scriptures

00:43:32.440 simply never give us. And Mary herself calls God her savior, and scripture nowhere explicitly

00:43:40.300 exempts her from the universal problem of sin. I know the systematic arguments for that. I have

00:43:47.820 written extensively in my book trying to explain why I don't buy those systematic arguments.

00:43:55.020 Now, Romans, the book of Romans, is devastating on this question to the Roman Catholics. So Paul

00:44:06.320 gives us the most extensive explanation of the gospel in the Bible. It is the magnum opus of the

00:44:15.160 gospel in the New Testament. It talks about sin, justification, Abraham, Adam, election,

00:44:22.620 sanctification, Israel, the church. I mean, it touches on everything. And Mary is not mentioned

00:44:29.700 once. In fact, after Acts chapter one, she essentially disappears from the apostolic

00:44:36.960 writings. Paul refers only to Christ being born of a woman. So if Marian devotion were so essential

00:44:45.900 to Christian devotion as it later became, how could Paul or any of the apostles never tell us

00:44:53.500 about it? And as I say in my book, you can't read Romans and arrive at the doctrines of Roman

00:45:01.500 Catholicism. But again, this isn't just a problem of Rome. It's also a problem in the East.

00:45:09.380 Number three of the reasons why I am not a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox is the papacy. Now,

00:45:17.920 obviously, this is going to be focusing on Rome because the East also rejects the papacy.

00:45:24.180 I simply cannot find the papacy, the doctrine of the papacy in the New Testament. I know the

00:45:30.680 arguments. I could find Peter. I can even grant that Peter has some sort of special prominence

00:45:35.240 among the apostles, what I cannot find is Peter functioning as a universal monarch over the

00:45:41.340 church, much less a command that that unique authority that he had was transferred perpetually

00:45:48.780 to the Bishop of Rome by the laying of hands over and over again. And so if you look at the New

00:45:58.340 Testament, at Jerusalem, the apostle James is the one that actually gives the decisive judgment.

00:46:05.240 not Peter. In Galatians, we hear Paul rebukes Peter to his face. Peter never announces a

00:46:14.160 successor to his supposed universal office, even though other apostles were still alive when he

00:46:20.560 died. Matthew 16 itself was interpreted in multiple ways. That's the passage about on this

00:46:30.060 confession of Peter on this rock. It's that text. But it's interpreted multiple ways,

00:46:36.800 even by the fathers. The rock sometimes is Peter. Sometimes it's Peter's confession.

00:46:41.660 Sometimes it's Christ. Sometimes it's the apostolic faith. Sometimes it's both or all of them.

00:46:47.700 And so even Eastern Orthodox Christians agree with Protestants that Rome's later claim to

00:46:53.700 universal papal jurisdiction is an innovation and not backed by scripture. And so if the

00:46:59.720 papacy were essential to the constitution of Christ's church, I expect that the New Testament

00:47:07.840 to be overwhelmingly clear about it, if it's essential, okay? Instead, I find in the scriptures

00:47:15.020 a plurality of elders, councils, bishops, and Christ as the only unquestioned head of the church.

00:47:24.700 Uh, number four is prayer to saints and icons. So this is going to be touching on both Rome and

00:47:33.600 Orthodoxy. I cannot get around the silence of scripture concerning prayer to or through, uh,

00:47:42.260 departed saints. Uh, the Bible contains roughly 1 million words. Um, it contains prayers everywhere.

00:47:49.380 Okay, Paul repeatedly asks living Christians to pray for him. Yet not once does Paul or any

00:47:57.580 apostle say, David, pray for us, or Moses, intercede for us, or Stephen, intercede for us.

00:48:05.980 Peter never invokes Abraham. John never asks Isaiah for help. Acts gives us an extraordinary

00:48:14.680 detail and a picture of the apostolic worship in life. And the prayers are always directed to God

00:48:23.800 through Christ by the Holy Spirit. So there is not one instance anywhere in the entire Bible,

00:48:32.120 even if you include the Apocrypha, of affirming praying to saints. Okay? And so scripture tells us

00:48:40.480 that there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. And that is not just in

00:48:47.600 salvation. That's also in prayer. And that is why the kind of, it's just like asking your friend to

00:48:54.660 pray for you argument. It just doesn't persuade me. My friend is standing next to me and scripture

00:49:01.760 explicitly commands Christians on earth to pray for one another. He divides also kind of reality

00:49:07.580 versus glory in two different spheres that don't intersect the way that we want them to intersect.

00:49:15.140 Scripture never tells me that departed saints hear me or hear millions of petitions from around the

00:49:21.440 world. If you're going to argue the elders in Revelation that are handing the prayers to God,

00:49:29.280 I don't think that solves the problem either. Whatever their identity may be, the text never

00:49:34.800 shows Christians on earth praying to them. It shows heavenly beings presenting the prayers

00:49:41.080 of the saints to God. And the key is this, the prayers terminate to God. The prayers terminate

00:49:49.080 at the throne of God, not at the elders, right? So you're not, they don't have some sort of

00:49:54.560 mediating, hearing reality in that sense. And so the same concern extends to icons.

00:50:04.320 When they move from Christian art, which I believe is helpful, and I appreciate that they

00:50:13.960 can be instructive, when they move into devotional meditation, kissing and bowing before them,

00:50:21.280 or incensing or venerating or addressing an image as a part of worship. That becomes a problem.

00:50:28.140 The issue is not whether Christians can make beautiful art. The issue is whether God authorized

00:50:35.060 images to function as instruments of devotional communion. Again, we never see this in Scripture,

00:50:42.820 not in the life of the Old Testament patriarchs, not in the life of the prophets of the kings,

00:50:47.620 not in the life of the apostles. In fact, we even see scripture that seems to forbid such practices.

00:50:55.420 And so the reformers' answer on this was no. Worship is centered upon Christ, given to us

00:51:03.640 in word and sacrament, not mediated through anything else, including statues, wood, plaster,

00:51:12.460 paint, gold, etc. Okay, the fifth one, fifth reason, is sacramentology. And erotically,

00:51:20.820 this is actually an area where I am much closer probably to the East because of their ambiguity.

00:51:28.620 And the Lutherans and the historic Anglicans, I think, hold this position as well. Then I'm much

00:51:35.000 closer to them than I am to modern evangelicalism. And I believe in what is called a real presence,

00:51:43.740 not just a real spiritual presence, but a real presence. So communion is not grape juice and

00:51:49.720 crackers helping us think about Jesus. It's not merely a memorial. It is a memorial, but it's a

00:51:57.160 memorial plus something else. And I believe Christ really gives himself to his people

00:52:04.480 sacramentally. The bread remains bread and the wine remains wine, yet through the Holy Spirit,

00:52:12.400 believers truly and mysteriously participate in the body and blood of Christ. Where I part ways

00:52:20.860 with Rome is the demand that we define the mystery through transubstantiation. Now, why?

00:52:31.440 Jesus said, this is my body, and I believe him, and I simply do not think Scripture requires me

00:52:36.900 to explain that statement. It is a mystery. It is a miracle. I don't need to bring clarity

00:52:42.540 to a miracle. And so this is one of the places that I think Eastern restraint is appreciated.

00:52:51.560 We don't need to bring clarity to a mystery. The Lutherans, Anglicans, and the Reformed all

00:52:57.340 have historically maintained forms of a real presence while refusing Rome's kind of philosophical

00:53:05.380 definition or the change of the substance while maintaining the visual appearance of bread and

00:53:11.200 wine. So I don't believe that we can say that God is going to lie to our senses. And I actually did

00:53:18.360 a very significant piece on that in my book, talking essentially about the apostles saying,

00:53:27.480 touch, feel, see. I touched Jesus. I felt him. This was the validation that his senses, you could

00:53:32.900 trust his senses. And in transubstantiation, we essentially have a moment where we can't trust

00:53:39.440 our senses because we have the change of the substance into the body and the blood of Jesus.

00:53:45.540 And under Roman Catholic doctrine, they've actually changed, truly changed into Jesus Christ

00:53:52.560 while remaining visually under the appearance of bread and wine. And so we essentially can't trust

00:53:59.600 our senses, which goes against the senses argument that the apostles use in the scriptures. So there's

00:54:06.140 more to be discussed there. The next thing that I am struggling with, with Roman Catholicism and

00:54:13.380 Eastern Orthodoxy, is justification, which is imputed righteousness versus infused righteousness

00:54:21.400 versus theosis. And this might be, outside of Scripture, probably the most important

00:54:28.780 doctrinal issue for me. Rome teaches that God gives us grace, and as we cooperate with that

00:54:35.980 grace through faith, the sacraments and obedience we actually become. It infuses righteousness

00:54:43.860 into us. And they call that, again, the doctrine of infused righteousness. So justification is

00:54:50.700 not God declaring us righteous once for all. It's a state of grace that can be received,

00:54:59.400 strengthened, and lost through serious sin and then also restored. And so in Roman Catholic

00:55:11.860 teaching, there's a distinction between what they call venial and mortal sin. So mortal sin

00:55:16.840 involves a grave matter committed with full knowledge, a deliberate consent that destroys

00:55:24.180 the state of sanctifying grace, and it eliminates your justification, while venial sins

00:55:33.440 wounds the soul without severing that grace. So restoration from mortal sin comes through

00:55:41.560 the sacrament of confession and absolution. For me, coming from the doctrine of the perseverance

00:55:49.480 of the saints, that creates a very different understanding of the Christian life and of the

00:55:54.540 gospel for me. So my confidence is not that sin does not matter, but that those truly united to

00:56:02.580 Christ are kept by God. As Paul says, nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God

00:56:09.660 in Christ Jesus, our Lord. First Peter 1, 3 through 5 says, blessed be the God and father of our Lord

00:56:17.220 Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope

00:56:22.720 through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable,

00:56:28.940 undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith

00:56:38.240 for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. So the reform view is that my standing

00:56:48.080 before God rests on Christ's righteousness and preserving grace, not on my own righteousness

00:56:55.200 or not on me not committing particular sins or me remaining continually within a sacramental

00:57:04.240 state of grace. Again, I'm not saying that you don't need the sacraments. I'm not saying that

00:57:08.800 you don't need the word preached. I'm not saying that you don't need to obey and you need to have

00:57:12.040 personal holiness, right? I'm not saying any of that. My critique of Rome is that the Christian

00:57:17.300 life can become kind of sacramental rollercoaster, right? So you're baptized into grace, nourished

00:57:24.520 through the Eucharist, maintaining that state through obedience, losing it through mortal sin,

00:57:29.700 then being restored through confession and absolution. Now, Rome would insist that all of

00:57:36.620 this itself is grace and not a crude works righteousness system, and I want to represent

00:57:43.300 that fairly. But I still believe it places the believers standing before God too closely on

00:57:50.520 a works-based condition of his ongoing sacramental and moral performance. Now, Eastern Orthodoxy

00:57:59.060 speaks less in Rome's forensic categories and Protestants' forensic categories,

00:58:06.220 and more in terms of what they call theosis, which is basically the participation in the

00:58:12.260 divine life. It's becoming, by grace, what God intends for humanity to be. So Eastern Orthodoxy

00:58:20.680 tends to frame the issue a bit differently. They see sin more as like a spiritual sickness

00:58:25.780 and rather than say like Rome's or the Protestant's view of like a legal debt.

00:58:32.500 And salvation has like a healing and participation in the life of God

00:58:37.780 more than like a courtroom declaration. My problem with this is that scripture is

00:58:46.720 filled with courtroom language. And so we have law and guilt and transgression and accusation

00:58:54.760 and charge and witness and judgment and condemnation and justification and vindication

00:59:01.560 and advocacy and debt and reckoning and sentence and all these. There's actually like a whole bunch

00:59:06.840 more court-like words, forensic words. And so God is repeatedly presented as a judge and sinners

00:59:14.560 are guilty and Satan is an accuser, right? Christ is our advocate and justification as God's

00:59:21.260 declaration is what he does for sinners. And so in both systems, I believe the distinction between

00:59:30.120 our acceptance before God and our progressive transformation and holiness lacks the clarity

00:59:36.480 that we find in the Reformed faith. And in the Reformed world, we have what is called the

00:59:43.300 doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ. So I actually affirm what theosis is trying to

00:59:51.060 protect, okay? Christians really are united to Christ. We're transformed and sanctified

00:59:58.760 and ultimately glorified. My concern is that Eastern Orthodoxy can make the question of how

01:00:05.680 a sinner is declared righteous before God unnecessarily ambiguous by folding justification

01:00:13.000 into this larger, vague process of healing and participation in the divine life. In fact,

01:00:19.880 if you ask an Eastern Orthodox if they can have the assurance of salvation, they will tell you

01:00:25.500 no. They don't have that assurance of salvation in the same way that a Protestant does. And so

01:00:32.420 Scripture speaks with clarity. Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.

01:00:43.440 Romans, that's Romans 4.3. Romans 4.5 says,

01:00:46.580 And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is

01:00:54.220 counted as righteousness. Philippians 3.9 says, Paul's talking, not having a righteousness of my

01:01:02.620 own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from

01:01:09.760 God that depends on faith. Then we have 2 Corinthians 5.21, which gives us this clear

01:01:16.300 exchange saying, for our sake, he made him, being Christ, to be sin who knew no sin so that in him,

01:01:26.640 in Christ, we might become the righteousness of God, end quote. So yes, salvation transforms us,

01:01:36.060 but our process of transformation is not the basis of our righteousness. The basis of our

01:01:43.140 righteousness is that Christ was born without sin. He kept the perfect moral law. He lived a perfect

01:01:51.380 life. And by faith, Christ imputes or gives his righteousness to us by faith. So by faith, we are

01:02:01.580 made righteous. So justification by faith alone, that's the doctrine of the Reformed faith. And so

01:02:07.100 as Paul said, we don't have a righteousness of our own. We don't earn anything. We have an alien

01:02:14.660 righteousness that comes to us by faith through the merit of Jesus Christ. And so this allows us

01:02:21.800 to realize that our obedience and process of sanctification is one that pleases God. So our

01:02:28.700 are going to church and taking the sacraments and obeying and following the moral law.

01:02:36.000 These things are things that please God, but it also allows us to rest in the finished work of

01:02:44.000 Christ, knowing that our salvation is not dependent upon our works, but upon the finished

01:02:51.020 work of Jesus Christ. And that is why this matters so much to me. Reformed doctrine teaches that

01:02:57.780 We do not work for righteousness. We work from righteousness. And so our obedience is necessary.

01:03:07.660 It's a necessary fruit and evidence that we are genuinely saved. Our sanctification is real and

01:03:14.220 it's vital, but it's the fruit of our redemption, not the root of our redemption. So God does not

01:03:21.600 look at my gradually improving spiritual condition and declare me potentially righteous

01:03:28.660 because I have finally become righteous enough through either a sacramental system or a degree

01:03:35.540 of healing. He looks at me as an adopted child united to his perfectly righteous son and declares

01:03:45.120 me righteous because I am in Christ who is perfectly righteous. And this allows Christians

01:03:52.920 to have what I call the assurance of salvation or eternal security, where you work and obey

01:04:00.020 to please God, not to sustain or maintain your salvation. Now, this idea of the once saved,

01:04:08.460 always saved, people will argue, well, then it puts you in a position where people get nominal

01:04:13.720 in their Christianity, and they don't obey. They don't work. They don't follow Christ.

01:04:20.660 They don't have any sort of fear. Well, again, my thought would be is if you are not walking

01:04:27.060 in obedience, someone should rebuke you, correct you, exhort you. If you continue to not walk in

01:04:34.840 obedience, it is becoming more evident that maybe you are not saved and you should not have assurance

01:04:40.920 of salvation. And so I think that these things still work out in the Protestant framework.

01:04:46.040 So I would say classical Protestants have much in common with both Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy.

01:04:54.560 But at the core, our differences begin with the question of authority. And once you change

01:05:01.420 your doctrine on authority, it inevitably affects your doctrine of the gospel. And eventually it

01:05:08.380 affects your entire spiritual life, how that really is played out. Now, again, I don't just

01:05:14.660 want to tell you what I'm against. I also want to explain why I'm a Reformed Catholic, what that

01:05:20.880 means, and how I think it fits best in the Anglican tradition. Now, because this episode,

01:05:30.360 it's pretty long. It's a pretty long episode. I'm just going to skip the weekly audit this week,

01:05:35.460 But I do want to recommend two videos from an Anglican priest, Andrew Hara. He did two

01:05:45.500 YouTube videos that I thought were very helpful in my research when I was writing.

01:05:51.940 One is titled, Why I Left Eastern Orthodoxy. And he spent many years there in Eastern Orthodoxy.

01:05:59.420 And then he did another video called Why I Left Roman Catholicism, and he spent many years there

01:06:07.080 as well. And I found both to be very fair and thoughtful testimonies from someone who spent

01:06:13.900 many years in both of those traditions and is now an Anglican priest here actually in Arizona.

01:06:20.120 Now, he's slightly doctrinally more into the Anglo-Catholic than I am. I'm more into what

01:06:31.800 they would call Reformed Anglicanism. But those videos, again, are still very helpful,

01:06:39.000 and they offered a lot of wisdom on some of these questions and discussions. And so,

01:06:45.280 if you are Eastern Orthodox or you are Roman Catholic and you're watching this,

01:06:51.620 my hope is that you can at least understand the positions that Protestants hold. If you're

01:06:58.580 a Protestant and you're considering a shift to any other tradition, hopefully these are helpful

01:07:05.400 perspectives. Again, I want to reinforce that right now, man, I have friends in the Eastern

01:07:12.640 Orthodox Church. I have friends in the Roman Catholic Church. And we are banding together

01:07:17.780 on an ecumenical creedal level to fight for true Christian nationhood across the West.

01:07:27.260 And so we need to maintain that spirit in this generation. So that's a wrap for this episode

01:07:32.880 of American Glory. I hope it was helpful. If you don't already, you can follow me on X. You can

01:07:38.620 follow me on Instagram and YouTube. I'm posting new content all the time. My featured book,

01:07:43.800 of course, for this episode is my book, Reformed vs. Rome, which is, again, it's available at

01:07:49.340 relearn.org. You can do the audio in the ReLearn app. You can pick it up on Amazon. It goes much

01:07:55.200 deeper. Again, I try to be very fair even in that book as well, but it might be a good resource for

01:08:01.200 those of you that are entertaining these discussions. So on that note, my name is Dale

01:08:05.920 Partridge. Thank you for watching or listening to American Glory. I'll see you next week.

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The NXR Podcast - August 18, 2026

American Glory - Why I’m Not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox

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