Former Priest Critiques Orthodox Theology (with Joshua Schooping)

5:00 Joshua Schooping they'll formally claim that no one is a Christian other than them according to their own canons... that's kind of how I understand their notion of exclusivism... it's really regrettable that in the twentieth century you have this kind of rationalizing and intellectualizing... coming into the West, coming into America, trying to kind of blend in with Western culture... You have George Florovsky... starting to kind of rub elbows with some of these more liberal professors load-bearing

Fr. Georges Florovsky (synthesist) Orthodoxy holds that "extra Ecclesiam nulla salus" is true, but Florovsky himself says its whole force "lies precisely in its tautology": the Church simply is the place where salvation is wrought, which settles nothing about the state of any particular soul outside her visible bounds. He wrote this as a constructive Orthodox essay decades into his career, not as a concession wrung out of him by liberal Princeton colleagues, and it stands in a line that includes Augustine's own distinction, pressed against the Donatists, between the visible and the effective bounds of grace. The move Schooping calls twentieth-century capitulation is Orthodoxy's own older logic — that dogma binds absolutely only where Scripture and the seven councils speak, while everything else, including a patriarch's rigorist gloss, binds only so far as the whole Church receives it — being applied, not invented, in a new century.

Georges Florovsky, "Sobornost: The Catholicity of the Church," in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, p. 37 ("Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus... All the categorical strength and point of this aphorism lies in its tautology"); Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, ch. "Holy Tradition," §2, "The doctrinal definitions of an Ecumenical Council are infallible... along with the Bible, an abiding and irrevocable authority" — implying lesser Orthodox statements are not.

59:57 Joshua Schooping There's no clear statement of ecclesiology in the Orthodox Church until you find these very uncomfortable things that modern day Orthodox people wanna shy away from. load-bearing

St. Ignatius of Antioch (bishop) The classical statement of Orthodox ecclesiology is neither uncomfortable nor late; it is Ignatius, writing to Smyrna around the year 107, two centuries before Constantine had any part in it: "wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church." The Church is constituted around the bishop gathering the local community at one altar for the one Eucharist — this is the doctrine, stated positively, long before Nicaea II or 1672 existed to be embarrassed about. That later ages weaponized the doctrine in harsher, more political ways is a fair historical complaint against particular applications; it is not evidence that the doctrine itself has no clear original statement.

Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, ch. 8

19:16 Joshua Schooping the synod of sixteen seventy two in Jerusalem where it makes some of these claims that if you're not under an Eastern Orthodox bishop, then you're not even a Christian... why has no one condemned it? How is he able to make this claim? load-bearing

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (guide) Someone has condemned it, or at least fenced it: Ware himself, writing inside Orthodoxy, states that "while the doctrinal decisions of General Councils are infallible, those of a Local Council or an individual bishop are always liable to error," and that the seventeenth-century councils' statements of faith "have in part been received by the whole Orthodox Church, but in part set aside or corrected." Dositheus's synod was convened chiefly to condemn Cyril Lucaris's Calvinist confession, and its own text concedes it does not speak with the voice of the whole Church the way an ecumenical council's dogma does. So the charge that Orthodoxy has "no clear statement of ecclesiology" apart from 1672 gets the authority structure backwards: 1672 is exactly the document Ware names as the standing example of what does not bind everyone, not the ground of the exclusivist claim.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, ch. 10 ("The Church's Teaching Authority")

24:05 Joshua Schooping when you go back and you look at the first several centuries of the church, it was a trope... every apologist had a chapter... they knew that argument and rejected it... it's an a fortiori argument... they'll use this sort of, like, this very flimsy evidence... it wasn't even in the, quote unquote, worship space load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) John of Damascus's actual case is not "we've always done exactly this" but that the pagan polemic Schooping cites targeted the worship of false gods represented as animals or idols with no prototype behind them, which is a different target from the question the Church only had to settle once iconoclasm forced it: whether the true God who took a real body could be depicted at all. And the "flimsy" architectural evidence is not so easily set aside — the mid-third-century Christian house-church at Dura-Europos has a painting of Christ as the Good Shepherd over its baptismal font, which is to say inside the one room in the building whose entire purpose was worship and sacrament, roughly five centuries before Nicaea II and well within the period Schooping calls unanimous. That does not prove Damascene's further theological argument, but it does mean the silence of the apologists is not the clean, unbroken wall Schooping needs it to be.

Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p. 46 (Damascene's distinction between the idol and the icon, and Old Testament temple images as prefigurations Christians may read typologically); Yale University Art Gallery, "Christian Building," Dura-Europos: Excavating Antiquity (baptistery painting of Christ as the Good Shepherd, house-church converted c. 240 AD).

33:40 Joshua Schooping then they'll frame it as we get to. It's it's a free veneration. We we're free to do it. But that's not what the actual council says. It's forced. It's actually a forcing of the affections. load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) The council's own text, which I have read, grounds the practice in a distinction the speaker elsewhere denies it draws: "true worship of faith [latreia], which pertains alone to the divine nature" is reserved to God; icons receive only "salutation and honourable reverence." What is enforced by canon is public communicant standing in the visible Church, exactly as every other disciplinary canon enforces standing over disputed practice — it is not a claim to compel the inward state of a man's affections, which no canon can reach and Orthodox penitential theology has never pretended to reach. The severity of the sanction is a fair target; calling it a claim to coerce interior feeling is not what the horos itself says.

Second Council of Nicaea (787), the Decree (horos), on latreia and proskynesis

43:29 Joshua Schooping we have an Irenaeus. We have him talking about Mary as a historical phenomenon, a historical personage. But then by the time you get up to where these hymns are coming from in the seventh, eighth, ninth century, now she is the propitiation for the whole world. load-bearing

St. Irenaeus of Lyons (rule) Irenaeus is not merely historical narration about Mary; he already states the very typology the later hymns expand. Writing against Valentinus, I have read him say: "what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith," so that Mary, "by yielding obedience, became the cause of salvation, both to herself and the whole human race." That is a soteriological role assigned to Mary's free consent, in the second century, in the plainest terms — the later hymnography intensifies the language, but it is drawing out a typology Irenaeus himself planted, not manufacturing an unrelated Mary out of nothing. The real question is whether the later intensification stays within that typology or outruns it into rival-mediator territory, which is a fair question — but "historical personage" versus "propitiation" understates how far Irenaeus already went.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book III, ch. 22, §4

44:40 Gavin Ortlund they claim that in their notion of authority, the councils itself are equal to scripture, and they're as equally infallible... they dug themselves in... if they admit that they made a mistake at Nicaea two... those church fathers didn't have the authority that they arrogated for themselves load-bearing

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (guide) Orthodoxy does hold the doctrinal horos of an ecumenical council to be as irrevocable as Scripture, and it will not walk back Nicaea II's confession that denying the icon denies the reality of the Incarnation — that much Schooping reads correctly. But he collapses that single dogmatic point into everything the council and its later reception produced: the disciplinary canons, which "apply dogma" but "lack its unalterable force" and of which a great many, including much of Trullo's moral legislation on which Nicaea II draws, have simply fallen into disuse; and the harshest rhetoric of the acts and of local zealots enforcing "forced" veneration, which is not the conciliar definition itself. A tradition can retire a disused canon or correct a rigorist local practice without touching the horos at all, which is exactly the room Nicene ecumenicity itself was worked out in retrospect rather than fixed by any external mark — so "we made a mistake" about a canon's application is not "Nicaea II erred."

Ware, The Orthodox Church, ch. 10 (canons apply dogma but lack dogma's unalterable force; many have fallen into disuse; Nikodemos's Pedalion is commentary, not itself a conciliar act); Meyendorff, "What is an Ecumenical Council?" SVTQ 17:4 (1973), on the retrospective, non-external criterion of ecumenicity.

8:53 Gavin Ortlund the bishops there write a letter to the empress right afterwards and say, hey. Just so you know, here's what we mean by anathema. Damnation, separation from God... if you say that it's idolatry, you're damned to hell. You're anathematized. load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) I could not verify the specific letter to the empress cited here, and so I answer only what stands in the council's own horos, which I have read: its sanction is ecclesiastical, not a claim of certain knowledge of a soul's fate — bishops who reject the teaching are "deposed," laity and monastics are "cut off from communion." That is the ordinary form of every disciplinary canon in the Church's life, applied here with unusual severity to a dispute that was, as it happens, entangled with imperial politics on both sides of it. Anathema in Orthodox usage names exclusion from the Eucharistic communion of the Church pending repentance, not a pronouncement that God has already sealed a particular man's damnation; the Church has never claimed the authority to read hearts, only the authority to say who may and may not commune at her altar.

Second Council of Nicaea (787), the Decree (horos), sanction clause, NPNF 2nd ser. vol. 14 (Percival)

21:30 Joshua Schooping administrative diversity is just a sign of the inevitability of human nature... to expect that Jesus' admonition for us to have oneness of mind and oneness of spirit has to be expressed in lockstep bureaucratic... I think is just an absurd assumption load-bearing

St. Ignatius of Antioch (bishop) On the oldest Christian definition of schism this is not merely an assumption of Byzantine bureaucracy but the thing itself: Ignatius makes unity turn not on shared sentiment but on one bishop, one altar, one Eucharist in each place, and warns the Smyrnaeans that whatever is done "apart from the bishop" is not a valid Eucharist at all, precisely because separate altars mean a broken, not merely a diversified, body. By that criterion, confessional Protestant bodies that do not commune at each other's tables — a Baptist congregation and a Presbyterian one recognizing each other as Christian brothers while declining to share the one cup — are, on Ignatius's own terms, in exactly the state of division he calls schism, whatever charitable language is used about each other's salvation; the absence of anathemas does not by itself supply the eucharistic unity he requires.

Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 8 ("Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop, or by one whom he has appointed... it is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast"); To the Ephesians 5, on the one altar.

26:53 Joshua Schooping they claim that in in, of course, in their their notion of authority, the the councils itself are equal to scripture, and they're as equally infallible. load-bearing

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (guide) This is not the Orthodox position as Orthodoxy states it of itself: infallibility rests, in Ware's own summary, in Scripture and "the doctrinal decisions of the Ecumenical Councils" specifically, not in "the councils" as a blanket category covering every canon of every synod. Canons apply dogma but do not share its unalterable force, and many canons — the speaker is right that there are hundreds — have simply fallen into disuse without anyone thereby denying the faith. Collapsing dogmatic definition and disciplinary canon into one undifferentiated mass of "the councils" is precisely the move Ware's graded account of authority exists to block, and it is what lets the argument later claim Orthodoxy can never admit any council erred about anything.

Ware, The Orthodox Church, ch. 10, on the standing of General Councils versus Local Councils and canons

40:22 Joshua Schooping where the the mariology came from as well. It's just goddess worship. load-bearing

St. Cyril of Alexandria (christology) This names a real ancient temptation and then reads it back into Orthodoxy's own dogma, which was built precisely to forbid it. Cyril fought Nestorius to secure the title Theotokos not to raise Mary to divinity but to protect Christ's: if she did not bear God, then God the Word was not truly united to the flesh he assumed, and the whole economy of salvation collapses. Nicaea II's own horos, which I have read, reserves latreia — true worship — to the divine nature alone, explicitly including in this restriction the images of Christ, "our spotless Lady," and the saints alike; there is no conciliar or patristic category in which Mary receives what a goddess receives. That the term functions in practice as "worship" in some pious excess is a fair pastoral complaint; that it is what the dogma teaches or intends is not.

Cyril of Alexandria, Third Letter to Nestorius, the Twelve Anathemas, esp. anathema 1; Second Council of Nicaea, horos, on latreia

52:35 Joshua Schooping now you have second seven ecumenical councils... in order to be a church unity, you have to be able to actually, at least hypothetically or virtually affirm every single one of those as if none of them had ever aired. load-bearing

Fr. John Meyendorff (conciliarist) This misstates how the Church actually recognizes a council as ecumenical. Meyendorff's own account is that ecumenicity has no external mark and is established retrospectively by the reception of the whole episcopate, not by a requirement to affirm every disciplinary canon of every council as if error were structurally impossible; he notes explicitly that Byzantium "never thought that such councils were the only source of the Church's magisterium." Many canons from these very councils have fallen into disuse and are not treated as binding today, which is only intelligible if canonical acts and dogmatic definitions carry different weight — exactly the distinction the speaker's "hypothetically or virtually affirm every single one" collapses.

John Meyendorff, "What is an Ecumenical Council?", St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 17:4 (1973)

10:43 Joshua Schooping He's actually teaching at Princeton right after the Westminster professors had left... he's starting to kind of rub elbows with some of these more liberal professors... I can just see sort of an academic camaraderie happening... and you start to soften. load-bearing

Fr. Georges Florovsky (synthesist) The chronology runs the wrong way for this story. Florovsky argued that sacramental grace can exist beyond the Church's canonical limits — the position doing the "softening" work here — in "The Limits of the Church," published in 1933; he did not arrive at Princeton until 1962, nearly thirty years later, and by his own telling the essay grew out of engagement with Augustine and Cyprian, not with mid-century American liberal Protestant colleagues. And the phrase attributed a few minutes earlier in this conversation to "who I know has just recently departed" is Florovsky's own "pseudomorphosis, or Western captivity of Orthodox theology," coined in a 1936 Athens paper and developed in his 1937 Ways of Russian Theology — he died in 1979, which was not recent by any interview given decades later. If a different, more recently departed figure is meant, the phrase should be credited to him and not left resting on Florovsky's name and a Princeton chronology that does not fit.

Georges Florovsky, "The Limits of the Church," Church Quarterly Review, October 1933; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology (Paris, 1937), on pseudomorphosis / Western captivity

31:13 Gavin Ortlund the bishops there [at Nicaea II]... are relying on a misquotation from Basil... the case is very weak that the apostles actually taught venerating images load-bearing

St. Basil the Great (tradition) The line Nicaea II leans on is real Basil, not invented: "the honour given the image passes to the prototype," from On the Holy Spirit 18.45, where he is arguing that the Son as natural image of the Father receives worship that passes wholly to the Father, using the analogy of honoring the emperor's portrait. Damascene and the council do extend that argument from its original Trinitarian use to religious veneration of painted icons, which is a real interpretive leap the sources should own rather than disguise as unbroken apostolic practice — so far the objection lands. But an extension of a genuine text by analogy is a different fault from forging or inventing words Basil never wrote, and it is the kind of patristic argument that stands or falls on its own logic, to be judged as reasoning about the Incarnation, not smuggled in as testimony that the apostles already did this.

Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45, NPNF2-08, tr. Schaff; the analogy of the emperor's image and the Son as natural image of the Father.

42:35 Joshua Schooping essentially, you cannot approach Jesus unless she blesses you to do it... they took how Jesus couldn't come into the world unless he came through Mary, so we can't get to Jesus unless we go to Mary. load-bearing

St. Cyril of Alexandria (christology) Orthodoxy denies this as a statement of its dogma, whatever devotional excess it grants exists at the level of piety. Christ's own words that no one comes to the Father but by him, and Paul's "one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus," are read at every Divine Liturgy without qualification or footnote; nothing in the seven ecumenical councils makes access to Christ conditional on Mary's blessing. What the tradition does affirm, following Cyril's insistence that she is properly called Theotokos, is that her intercession is asked the way any departed saint's is asked — as one who prays with the Church, not as a gate the Church must pass through to reach her Son. The mirroring argument from the Incarnation to intercession is a rhetorical figure in the hymns, not a conciliar premise, and Orthodoxy's own dogmaticians distinguish sharply between the two.

Cyril of Alexandria, Third Letter to Nestorius, on Christ as the one Word incarnate through whom access to the Father is given; cf. 1 Timothy 2:5

45:34 Gavin Ortlund I do not dare to draw near with boldness to your son, but instead I pray to you that I may obtain salvation through your intercessions to him... persuade the righteous judge to have compassion upon me... it's not the Jesus of the gospel. It's both end. It's it's Mary and another Christ load-bearing

St. John Chrysostom (preacher) These prayers ask Mary to persuade and beseech her Son on the petitioner's behalf, which by their own verbs is intercession, the same category Chrysostom uses of the departed Paul when he asks his hearers to make themselves "worthy of such intercession" so that Paul may go on interceding for them — a pattern of asking a member of the Body still alive in Christ to pray, never itself named propitiation, which in the same Liturgy these hymns belong to is reserved to Christ alone as the one who, in the anaphora, "offers and is offered." Schooping is right that some of this hymnody, read as flat dogmatic prose rather than the exalted rhetoric of the Akathist genre, edges toward crediting Mary with turning aside the Judge's wrath in a way that threatens to eclipse the single, sufficient reserve the Liturgy itself makes for Christ's own blood — that tension is real, and where hymnography is preached or taught as though it settled soteriology rather than sang around it, the fault stands.

Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, Homily 32, on Rom. 16 ("Who is there then to pray over us, since Paul hath departed?... imitators of Paul... that it may not be that we hear Paul's voice here only... but that hereafter... we may be counted worthy to see him"), NPNF1-11.

1:00:24 Joshua Schooping these traditionalist ROCOR guys are part of the world council of churches, so so they're not even truly Orthodox either. So, you know, this sort of chaos that happens over there.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (guide) These disputes are real, and Orthodoxy does not have a tidy answer to every jurisdictional quarrel of the last century — that much should be granted plainly. But a dispute over which self-governing church recognizes which other, tracked in the diptychs and complicated by real cases like the Orthodox Church in America, autocephaly for which Moscow granted and Constantinople still withholds, is a dispute about communion between churches, not evidence of an absent doctrine of the Church. Every tradition that has more than one jurisdiction has this kind of boundary dispute, including the speaker's own Protestant world of competing confessional bodies; naming it "chaos" describes a real mess of church politics without showing that Orthodoxy's ecclesiology itself is unclear or incoherent.

Ware, The Orthodox Church, ch. on the modern Orthodox communion and the diptychs

37:00 Joshua Schooping scripture gives other reasons for not venerating or worshiping or bowing down to images is because they're literally not alive... And so John of Damascus never deals with those arguments. He just just never talks about it. load-bearing

St. John of Damascus (expositor) On the narrow point, this stands: in the treatises I read, Damascene does not take up the psalmist's specific topos that idols are lifeless and their worshippers become like them, verse by verse, the way the pre-Nicene apologists he is answering did. What he argues instead is that the objection proves too little, because his icon is not offered as alive or as a god in the wood; the honor "is referred to the original," and the deeper ground is that God himself took flesh in dead matter and thereby sanctified matter as a vehicle of His presence, which is a different question than the one the psalm is asking. So the specific engagement is genuinely missing; the case for icons Damascene actually mounts stands or falls elsewhere, on the Incarnation argument, not on having answered that psalm.

John of Damascus, On the Divine Images (trans. Mary H. Allies), Treatise I

47:17 Joshua Schooping Jesus Christ gets absorbed into his divinity. He's no longer constantly interceding on behalf of the saints, and so now Mary becomes the intercessor... it actually is completely consistent with the Akathist hymn... Propitiation of all the world. load-bearing

Fr. Alexander Schmemann (liturgist) The wording is real and I will not soften it: the Akathist does hail Mary as "propitiation of all the world," and a reader who takes that as systematic soteriology has real grounds for alarm. What has to be granted and what does not are different things here: granted, that Byzantine hymnography reaches for superlatives about Mary that, read as dogmatic prose, would rival Christ's own unique office; denied, that the Church ever taught Christ had ceased his heavenly intercession — the same Liturgy that sings that hymn also confesses him "who sitteth at the right hand of the Father" and chants "having in remembrance... all that was done for us: the cross, the grave," precisely as the abiding, unrepeated ground of salvation. The Liturgy is where Orthodoxy's theology actually lives, and it holds both texts without resolving them into a formal doctrine that Mary now performs Christ's own priestly office — which is why this remains devotional excess to correct, not a dogma to defend.

The Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos, Oikos 12; the Anaphora of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom

50:41 Joshua Schooping Cyprian, of course, was before Constantine... this was before Nicaea, this was before many things had been clarified and defined... to say that Cyprian had in his mind such a maximal level for what unity could even be, to me, is absurd

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (guide) This is fair, and Orthodoxy's own principle admits it without embarrassment: a Father is read with discernment, and Cyprian's own specific application of his ecclesiology — that heretical baptism outside the visible Church is simply void and must be redone — was in fact contested in his own lifetime by Rome under Pope Stephen and was not the position that prevailed everywhere in the ancient Church, let alone one that carries conciliar, infallible weight. Cyprian gives the Church On the Unity of the Church, a real and lasting text on schism and the bishop, not a canonical rule fixing exactly which later boundary disputes count as church-dividing; reading his rigorism about the lapsi back onto ninth-century canonical maximalism is exactly the kind of anachronism the tradition's own rule against treating any single Father as an infallible norm is meant to catch.

Ware, The Orthodox Church — the Fathers read with discernment, no one Father's private application binding the whole Church; the historical record of the third-century rebaptism controversy between Cyprian and Pope Stephen of Rome.