That the book West of Jesus
(published 2006) is an exercise in combative polemics may be seen
clearly in its subtitle: The Bible's Answer to the Protestant
Departure from Orthodox Belief. In this it is typical of many of
the volumes published by Regina Orthodox Press and associated with
the combative figure of Frank Schaeffer (who pens an endorsement for
the book's back cover). The author names himself simply as
"Anthony", though a blurb on the same back cover reveals
that he was a former Episcopalian and Evangelical convert to
Orthodoxy who was rebaptized in an Athonite monastery in Arizona. It
is a slim volume of 118 pages--one which offers a very small
battlefield on which to fight such a large battle.
It attempts, for example, to deal with
Church History in chapter one in a mere nine pages, and includes
subsequent chapters dealing with "Holy Tradition", "Sola
Scriptura", "The Holy Sacraments" (he enumerates
seven), "Eternal Security", "Other Divergences"
(which include the proper Old Testament canon, the preference for the
Masoretic text, Evangelical eschatology, the Holy Virgin Mary, and
Prayer with Saints, all within 23 pages), "Disregard of
Liturgy", and "Obedience to Holy Tradition". Given
that each of these topics really require a separate book to even
begin to do justice to the complexities of the matter at hand (to say
nothing of the complexities of four hundred years of Protestant
variation), one sees that the author has set himself a formidable
task.
He does not begin well. On page 5 he
cites a number of Christological heresies, such as those of
Nestorius, Eutyches, and Arius and includes among them "Origen's
contentions that God had human physical features". Origen,
unfortunately for our author, was one of the first to take pains to
show that God in fact did not have human physical features,
and in the contentions later swirling around this controversy Origen
remained famous for his assertion that God was incorporeal.
Such a basic blunder does not speak well for the author's credibility
or his credentials.
Howlers like these aside, the book's
basic flaw is that the author tries to beat the Protestants at their
own game by multiplying Biblical proof-texts, when Orthodoxy's main
quarrel with Evangelical Protestantism is that this theological
method is too poor to do justice to the Biblical material and is
itself invalid. In his haste to smite Protestant departures the
author oversimplifies both the Protestant theology he attacks as well
as an authentic Orthodox response.
Take for example his attack on
"Eternal Security" (known in the Reformed tradition also as
"the perseverance of the saints"). He writes, "Say I
accepted Christ Jesus my Saviour on January 1, 2006 at 2.47 PM. The
concept of eternal security contends that this would have triggered
permanent, instant, almost magical 'salvation.' When following this
premise to its conclusion one must allow for scenarios such as a
subsequent renunciation of Jesus Christ say a year later going on to
commit multiple sins (e.g. robbery, murder, rape) until and then
dying and going to heaven". It is unlikely that any Evangelical
or Reformed theologian would recognize this doctrine as his own
doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. He would be more likely
to contend that if a person so spectacularly renounced Christ so as
to commit robbery, murder, and rape that the person was never saved
to begin with. Creating such a parody of Evangelical teaching is
unlikely to convince many Evangelicals that the author has any
understanding of their theology in the first place. Straw men may be
fun to knock down, but the exercise makes for poor apologetics.
Or take the example of the author's
handling of the Old Testament canon. Oversimplifications follow one
after another. The author writes, "the Scripture used by our
Savior and His followers was the Septuagint Old Testament".
While the apostles used the Septuagint when branching out into the
diaspora (though even here not rigorously), our Savior did not
use the Septuagint. As a Palestinian Jew He would have used the
Hebrew text available in the synagogue, "targumed" or
paraphrased afterward into His native Aramaic. The author also seems
to conflate the Church's use of the Septuagint with its acceptance of
the longer canon of the Old Testament, and he talks about "the
long canon of Scripture...that Jesus used". In fact it is
highly doubtful that the Old Testament canon was completely closed in
the first century, and so any talk about "the canon which Jesus
used" is anachronistic. (See L.M. McDonald's The Biblical
Canon for details.)
The author is to be congratulated for
wanting to deal with Protestant objections to Orthodox teaching. But
patience is required for such work, and the first order of business
is not refutation, but understanding. There is little evidence that
the author, for all his good intentions, understands the many
variations of Protestant thought. An informed and scholarly
Protestant would have little to fear from this Orthodox broadside. I
can only hope that this one does not fall into his Protestant hands.
The case for Orthodoxy is actually much stronger than Anthony's book
would suggest.
