Bible Answer Man Converts to Eastern Orthodox!

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Evangelical

Protestants look to early church fathers too. The Reformers Luther and Calvin looked to and were influenced by the writings of the church fathers. Protestant theologians today also look to the early church fathers.

It's more or less a myth that Catholics look to the early church fathers and Luther and Calvin only relied upon the "bible alone".

Such I expect from Evangelical. I knew you would say that.

[Evangelical]

Originally Posted by Kevin

Such I expect from Evangelical. I knew you would say that.

Protestants are no better than Catholics in regards to standing on the shoulders of the early church fathers.

What is the difference really between Calvin drawing from Augustine for their doctrine of salvation and Lee drawing from Athanasius for the doctrine of becoming God?

[Evangelical]

John Piper's book - The Legacy of Sovereign Joy: God’s Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin shows the link between Augustine, Luther and Calvin.

https://www.desiringgod.org/books/th...-sovereign-joy

Piper is a 5 point Calvinist. He did not obtain his doctrine by reading the bible on his own. No, he's got his nose in the ancient books too, reading the early church fathers.

John Piper, (he loves Athanasius as I've shown before, even praises him), loves Augustine as well. He's second to the apostles themselves, somewhere between Paul and Luther, even calls him SAINT Athanasius (like a Catholic would?):.

The influence of Augustine in the Western World is simply staggering. Adolf Harnack said that he was the greatest man the church has possessed between Paul the Apostle and Luther the Reformer.

The publishers of Christian History magazine simply say, "After Jesus and Paul, Augustine of Hippo is the most influential figure in the history of Christianity."

https://www.desiringgod.org/messages...-is-not-silent
Calvinists are following the teaching of the early church father Augustine. CH Spurgeon and others wrote as much - the link between Calvin and Augustine is undeniable. Yet Saint Augustine was no Calvinist, he was the ultimate Roman Catholic, a much revered Saint in the Roman Catholic church to this day. It seems that whatever Awareness wrote about Anthanasius living 350 years after Christ, should apply to Augustine as well, who lived in A.D. 354-430.

I guess the real problem with Calvinists holding onto Augustine and rejecting deification is that Augustine most likely believed in deification as well.

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Evangelical

John Piper's book - The Legacy of Sovereign Joy: God’s Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin shows the link between Augustine, Luther and Calvin.

Guess who my profile picture is. So, Mr. Evangelical this is supposed to be a forum on the LC, not my fellow Calvinists. If you wish to discuss with this and not divert to the reformed faith in order to defend theosis, go to reformed forums. I know your statics here as well as the DCP apologists. You're quite clever. And there's no theosis in Reformed orthodoxy. It's more of an Eastern Orthodox Church doctrine.

[Drake]

Originally Posted by Kevin

Guess who my profile picture is. So, Mr. Evangelical this is supposed to be a forum on the LC, not my fellow Calvinists. If you wish to discuss with this and not divert to the reformed faith in order to defend theosis, go to reformed forums. I know your statics here as well as the DCP apologists. You're quite clever. And there's no theosis in Reformed orthodoxy. It's more of an Eastern Orthodox Church doctrine.

Kevin,

I don’t know who your profile picture is of.... but whoever it is has a body way too small to carry that super-sized cranial mass!

The local church has a context and it has peers. One cannot talk intelligently about this or any subject for that matter without understanding those aspects. Since church history, church fathers, and church groups are shared then of course they are fair discourse to prove a point. In this case, the divinization of the believer, is the debate so what they thought about that is relevant.

Drake

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by Drake

Kevin, I don’t know who your profile picture is of.... but whoever it is has a body way too small to carry that super-sized cranial mass!

Well then that's my boi John Piper.

[Evangelical]

Originally Posted by Kevin

Guess who my profile picture is. So, Mr. Evangelical this is supposed to be a forum on the LC, not my fellow Calvinists. If you wish to discuss with this and not divert to the reformed faith in order to defend theosis, go to reformed forums. I know your statics here as well as the DCP apologists. You're quite clever. And there's no theosis in Reformed orthodoxy. It's more of an Eastern Orthodox Church doctrine.

Need I remind you that you first diverted to Roman Catholicism to insinuate against the LC, but also that we have been considering Piper's views on this thread as well.

Even though Piper quotes them and values certain early church fathers, Piper makes his views clear in an article called "Don’t Equate Historically Early with Theologically Accurate".

It says:

Neither the experiences nor the teachers of the first 300 years of the church are as reliable as the finished New Testament.

The New Testament rescued the early church from instability and error.

We are in a better position today to know Jesus Christ than anyone who lived from AD 100 to 300. They had only parts of the New Testament rather than the collected whole.

Many of these statements go against commonsense, not to mention the second law of thermodynamics. It was the early church who gave us the New Testament. We don't need the whole completed NT to know Jesus, and the stories about Jesus themselves, the very content of the NT, were records of experiences and teaching. And how come later Catholicism and its degradation was not prevented by the existence of the completed New Testament?

So Piper must think he is more orthodox than anyone living in the first 300 years of Christianity, yet I think if we ignore what they have to say, then we are in more danger. Theosis is not a view held by one or two of the early church fathers (and some of them had really crazy ideas), but by a whole lot of significant people involved in defense of orthodoxy. If it was so heretical they would not have touched it.