Sermon: The Old Testament God of Mercy and the New Testament God of Wrath

Sobering!

Martin Luther would be proud of this sermon on the bondage of the will!

Alice, you respond to this only by saying that Martin Luther would be proud of this.  Is that praise or blame coming from you?  Can you tease out from this what you agree with and what, as an Orthodox Christian you have to disagree with? 

I know that is asking you to do a lot of theological fisking of the sermon, not a short and easy task, so I will understand if you decline.  But I think I have good reasons for asking.  One is that as a Catholic who hears Matt’s sermons just about every week, I have to make this kind of distinction for myself all the time; accepting the admonitions and calls to a holy life, learning from much of the teaching, and yet trying to keep centered in a Catholic understanding of the faith.  Sometimes I don’t have any difficulty making these distinctions.  But there are some issues on which I find myself puzzled.  Another reason I ask is that there is someone who comes to Matt’s church whose wife has just become Orthodox (in a rather uber Orthodox type of church).  This man comes from one of the older charismatic Protestant traditions and he and his wife both practiced that faith until she went to church with her Orthodox neighbors. He is not antagonistic about it; it has just put him in a position of thinking for the first time about a whole spectrum of questions in Christianity.  He has been coming to Matt’s adult ed class where we just did a run through of Christian history and are now lingering in Reformation issues.  Of course the class tends to deal primarily with the spectrum of views in Western Christianity.  But I know, in a vague sort of way that Orthodoxy doesn’t go at these questions in the same way.  Orthodoxy never was confronted with a Luther asking Luther’s questions. 
(I know some Orthodox would like to present that as the result of some virtue of Orthodoxy rather than as an accident of history..or sheer good luck, but leaving that aside if you can..)  So anyway,  both for myself, and with this man’s concerns in mind, sometimes I want to bring an Orthodox point of view into the discussion.  On some issues I can say that both Catholicism and Orthodoxy would say X, but on others I think they may represent two separate points of view other than the Reformation one.  (which may not actually be one either, of course.) 

So, with that background, would you care to comment further? 

Susan Peterson

PS:  I wish the whole sermon were available as a text as well as as a podcast.  Not all of us know how to access podcasts or have whatever kind of thing you have to have to carry around with you to listen to it on. (that is how ignorant i am about this.)

Susan,
I can’t say much beyond recognizing the Reformed emphasis of this excerpt. I too wish the entire text were available. I’m certain that I would have gained from hearing Fr. Matt’s sermon.

In Orthodoxy the proper theological emphasis is always on the need for repentance and the recognition of prevenient grace, however there is a different understanding of the role of human volition because the Eastern Church doesn’t understand the Fall in Augustinian terms. While Orthodoxy regards St. Augustine as an important Church Father (he was remembered just yesterday!), it is more concerned with what he has to say about divine illumination. The very fact that humans can be divinely illuminated suggests that there is a synergistic aspect to our sanctification and none is able to say at what exact point in time or in what metaphysical sense this begins. The Western Church tends to overlook St. Augustine’s teaching on divine illumination and is largely unaware of other early Fathers’ views of “theosis.”

Here is a very readable explanation of the different emphasis: http://www.uky.edu/~dbradsh/papers/Christianity East & West.doc

Ananias and Sapphira, YIKES!