My Journey to Orthodoxy. Follow Me.

The resurrection of Adam and Eve. By lifting The original Man
 from the grave, Christ redeems all of Adam's posterity.

I’ve recently been attending a catechism preparatory to entering life in the Eastern Orthodox Christian church. I’m a cradle Catholic and have practiced (often poorly) Roman Catholicism all my life. My mother was an Irish Catholic from the old sod, so I was brought up in a rigidly Catholic fashion that was doing its best to reconcile itself to the innovations of Vatican II. My father was an atheist, or more properly an anti-theist. He wasn’t supposed to interfere in my faith upbringing according to the nuptial agreement, but as a teen, on late nights after Mom went to bed, he would start probing, and I found myself defending my faith at a relatively early age. I would usually lose these philosophical debates, which did nothing but make me study so I could come back better prepared the next time. It also made me think a lot about my faith and why I believed the way I did.

Why am I a Christian? 

History records a man we refer to as Jesus of Nazareth. Like many holy men of history, he has a certain mythology about him, that we could attribute to legend and myth. He taught a unique philosophy, challenged the status quo, performed miracles. Nothing really to differentiate him from numerous other holy men on whom religions have been founded. The unique thing about Jesus, though, was the behavior of his followers. They weren’t the typical people from the fringe of society who gravitate towards the guru du jour. These were fishermen, tax collectors, tent makers, one may have been a minor politician. They were practical men in respected professions.

Had Jesus died on the cross and been put to rest and the Twelve had scattered and made their way to Galilee without being further arrested or harassed, they would have returned to their profession and the memory of the failed teacher they had followed would fade. They would have bounced their grandchildren on their knee and tried to impart some of the Wisdom of Jesus to them, but it would have just been a man they had once known. A man with great ideas, but mortal and flawed like anyone else, and his religion would have died with them or at most their second or third generation.

But something happened, something so profound that it changed these men, opened their eyes, and made them believe. They believed that Jesus was the Son of God and was in fact God incarnate. They believed this so vehemently that they would no sooner deny their knowledge than they would say that the sky wasn’t blue. They didn’t believe it, they knew it, and they went cheerfully to their deaths – all martyred but John – proclaiming this truth with joy with their dying breaths. The Gospels tell us why. After dying a public and humiliating death, Jesus rose from the dead, conquered death so that his followers would know that life is everlasting. And there’s no doubt that Jesus was dead. The Roman executioners were experts at their job. The mode of death in crucifixion is suffocation, as the diaphragm is paralyzed unless the victim can hoist himself upward for a breath. It was clear that Jesus had died because he was no longer breathing.

The behavior of the Apostles after the recorded account of the resurrection is the evidence for me to accept that the accounts of the Gospels are largely accurate. That Christianity has fundamentally changed the world and every culture it’s contacted is historical fact. The historical evidence is compelling, and the narrative is more consistent than one would expect from a work of fiction. The Shroud of Turin is, for me, a compelling relic. I’ve studied it extensively. I understand how the STURP investigation was adulterated to give the result the director was seeking. There’s no explanation for the shroud. I believe that it is in fact the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth. There are too many details that would have been unknown to a forger, too many details that precisely match and even explain some of the Gospel accounts of the passion.

Why was I a Catholic?

Growing up Catholic, I wasn’t subjected to many of the myths about the Catholic church that are promoted by Protestants. If everything Protestants said about the Catholic faith were true, there would be no Catholics. Unfortunately for the Protestants, their understanding of the Roman Catholic faith is based on straw man arguments and propaganda promoted by Calvin and Knox to justify their many heresies. I’ve been a faithful Catholic because of what the church is, not what the protestants say it is, which has little to do with what Catholics actually believe.

If I am to be a Christian, then I naturally want to practice the faith that most closely represents what the first Christians believed. All Protestant sects – every single one – derive their faith and traditions from the Roman Catholic church, either directly or indirectly. They’re either breakaway sects who broke faith directly from Rome, like the Anglican or the Lutheran, or they’re offshoots of those who did. Some are homegrown versions of Christianity who picked up a Bible and tried to reproduce what’s there, but that Bible came to them through the Roman Catholic church. Almost all western Bible translations are derived from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate – the authoritative Latin translation from the fifth century. Why would I be a Protestant – be a branch on the tree – when I could be a Catholic, the trunk from which all branches derive?

As a Catholic, I celebrate an unbroken line of apostolic succession from the twelve Apostles, particularly the Apostle Peter, to present day. I practice a faith that was practiced for decades before the first gospels were written, and for centuries before the canon was finalized. The Bible is based on the Catholic faith, not the other way around. The term Catholic means “universal” and was first applied to Christianity by Ignatius of Antioch in his letter to the Smyrnaeans in the year 107. 

Growing up, the idea of the infallibility of the Pope didn’t sit well with me, but when I joined the military, I began to understand and reconcile myself to it. The idea is that the Pope is infallible by virtue of his authority. It doesn’t mean he’s necessarily right, it just means that if he says something is so, his decision is infallible, because the responsibility falls on him, not on those he’s charged with leading. There are other beliefs that I wasn’t quite so fond of defending. I understood the theology well enough to argue it but doing so felt uncomfortable. It seemed to me that sometimes the church developed its theology by running an idea beyond where it should have ended, like the concept of the Immaculate Conception. The doctrine goes that Christ couldn’t have been born of a woman tainted with original sin, so for Mary’s womb to be sacred enough to bear Christ, she must have been born free of original sin. This brought up a whole slough of uncomfortable questions to me, though. Did Mary have free will, or was she predestined to be the mother of Christ? If she was born immaculately, how could she have been born so if her mother was tainted with original sin? When you run into a question where the answers do nothing but create more questions and paradoxes, something in your understanding has gone wrong.

When I was a teen, the church we attended had a folk choir, with guitars. They were very good, and the music was wonderful, but I realized something was wrong at the end of one Sunday mass when they gave a rousing recessional song, and at the end everyone applauded. That didn’t sit well with me. We were supposed to be there to give glory to God and worship Him, not attend a music festival. As an altar boy I had a behind the scenes view of the liturgy and appreciated the solemnity of the sanctification of the gifts and the sacrifice of the eucharistic liturgy.

Why am I an Orthodox Christian?

The break for me came when Pope Francis was seated in Rome. Francis is a small man, not up to the standard of the Papacy. I was dismayed with his political calls to embrace socialism, for the USA to go against its best interests and throw open its borders to foreign invaders. I began to refer to him as the commie pope. The commie pope enacted policies of appeasement towards the arch-enemy of the church, Islam. The commie pope embraced the deviant and anti-family agenda of the alphabet soup crowd, instead of calling them out to repent and return to Christ. The commie pope embraced the manmade climate change narrative and scolded Catholics for generating too much CO2.

Apologists have argued that none of these have been enacted with the Pope’s dogma of infallibility, which is only when the Pope is speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals. Until that happens, it’s just one man’s opinions. Yeah, but. . . . The Pope is the leader of the Roman Catholic faith, and faithful Roman Catholics are obliged to embrace his teachings even when he’s not speaking ex cathedra. I cannot in good conscience do so. I know as clearly and profoundly as the apostles knew that Christ had risen from the dead that Islam is the arch-enemy of Christianity worldwide. I absolutely know that socialism and communism is an evil, bankrupt economic model that’s been directly responsible for the deaths of millions of people and the suffering of countless more in the last century. I know as a scientist who has investigated the claims from the perspective of my particular specialty field that the claims of the manmade global warming apologists are flat out wrong, and that the physics of CO2 spectral absorption are such that adding more CO2 cannot possibly result in increased global temperatures.

How can I follow a man who’s profoundly and fundamentally wrong on three critical issues like this? And what does that mean for me as a Catholic? Christ prophesied that his church would withstand the Gates of Hell, but I’m watching it melt into an incoherent mess riddled with political corruption and sexual deviancy right before my eyes.

It's okay, I assured myself. The church isn’t the Pope or the Bishops. The church is and always has been the rank-and-file congregation. All I have to do is ignore the many Obama and Biden bumper stickers on the cars in the parking lot as I make my way into mass.

My first exposure to Eastern Orthodoxy was when a colleague invited me to the Pascha service. Note to my Orthodox friends: if you want to invite someone to experience Orthodoxy, the Pascha service is probably not the place to start. It was confusing and disorganized to the point of seeming randomness, with a lot of motion and bustle that I really didn’t understand.

When I married my wife, who’s Eastern Orthodox, we did so on the understanding that our faiths were very similar and that we would respect each other’s faith and beliefs. We attended mass at the local Catholic church, and then also at a slightly more distant Antiochian Orthodox church.

Attending the Orthodox divine liturgy made a big impression on me. It was strange at first, because while all the elements of the Catholic mass are there, they’re rearranged, and out of order. The common prayers, like the Nicene creed are the same (almost), but the translation is slightly varied. The meaning is the same, but in English there’s always at least three ways of saying something, and it’s clear the Orthodox and Catholics didn’t share the same English translators. Then the Orthodox has some parts of the liturgy that are missing in the Catholic ordinary mass, like a beautiful prayer before communion.

Shortly after having attended the Orthodox liturgy, I happened to attend mass at the proto-Cathedral of St. James in downtown Vancouver. The priest there was a traditional curmudgeon who used the building’s status as an historical landmark to remove the free-standing altar and restore the sanctuary to what it had been before Vatican II. It was the first time I’d experienced the mass said ad orientum (toward God) instead of vox populi (toward the congregation). The Orthodox always celebrate the liturgy ad orientum and go one step further by placing the priest behind a screen, with only a door through which to view him. If he’s on the other side of the screen, he’s praying to God. To address the congregation, even to give a peace blessing, he comes through the door to our side of the screen. It was the mass at St. James that made me realize what an insidious heresy it was to say the mass vox populi. By orienting the priest towards the congregation, he quits being the leader of the congregation leading the prayer directed at God, but becomes the focus of attention, removing our attention from God. When the priest says mass ad orientum, we’re naturally inclined to direct our attention at that which the priest is attending, and the focus is on God. Using vox populi, the priest’s attention is either on us or behind us, and our attention is on him, interrupting our attention which should be towards God.

This then manifests itself in all sorts of undesired behaviors. The priest naturally falls into the role that his position casts him in, and he quits being the liturgical celebrant, but the master of ceremonies, with a retinue of supporting cast, in the form of altar servers, liturgical ministers, and even a live band to provide an appropriate soundtrack to set the mood. Since I was young, I’ve seen innovations of allowing lay persons to distribute the consecrated Eucharist, bringing girls and women onto the altar as servers and ministers. I’ve seen priests invite non-ordained lay people to the pulpit to give a homily. And at the end of mass, I’ve even seen the priests invite the crowd to “give it up” and applaud the altar boys, the band (I refuse to dignify it by calling it a choir), and all those who help produce the show.

Honestly, after attending the Orthodox divine liturgy with my wife, it was embarrassing to go to the Catholic mass. I can only remember once or twice that I attended a High Mass outside of the Easter Vigil, and I don’t even think most parish priests know how to celebrate it.

So I started investigating the differences. The most glaring difference is the Orthodox have no Pope in the way that Roman Catholics understand the Pope. This goes back to the Great Schism of 1054, when the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic church mutually excommunicated one another. The proximal cause of the schism was that the Roman Bishop had made some changes that hadn’t been approved by an ecumenical council. When the question arose if the Bishop of Rome had the authority to do that, four out of five of the Christian patriarchs at the time said he did not.

The Bishop of Rome has always held a special place in Christianity. He was considered the first among equals by the other bishops. This was on account of his physical proximity to the Roman seat of government, and his subsequent ability to influence legislation and imperial decrees. This never gave him any authority over the other bishops. Catholic apologists will direct you to many historical instances to demonstrate that the Roman Bishop did, in fact, exercise such authority over the rest of Christendom since the earliest days of Christianity, but they wonderfully ignore the many historical times when the rest of Christendom told the Roman Bishop to go screw and he had no recourse but to do anything but mutter about it. Indeed, the Book of the Acts of the Apostles tells us about times when St. Paul called out Peter on something he felt was wrong, and argued him back to parade rest, thus destroying the myth that the throne of Peter is infallible. The doctrine of infallibility is a relatively recent innovation in the Roman Catholic church and would have been quite a foreign concept to the earliest Christian churches. When the Great Schism happened, the Pope claimed ecumenical authority over all of Christendom. Sad for him, four out of five patriarchs disagreed.

The Roman Pope had the secular power to anoint kings, and this made who sat on the bishop’s seat a huge political issue. Consequently, many Popes were pretty rotten people, and corrupt through and through. One Pope turned the Vatican into his personal brothel, and from his position of power pretty much sexually assaulted anyone he encountered, be they male or female. Another bankrupted the Vatican treasury to outfit his personal villa, and resort to the heretical practice of selling indulgences to prop up his flagging finances. Other Popes murdered their way into power, executed rivals, had children by mistresses, pretty much proved the adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and put to lie the doctrine of papal infallibility. These abuses disenchanted many Catholics, to the point that Martin Luthor nailed his thesis to the door of the church (Luthor approached the eastern Orthodox to avoid the abuse of the Roman Pontiff, but was given the cold shoulder, because an Orthodox infringement into Roman Catholic Germany would have started a war).

By their fruits you shall know them.

Differences

Ask any Orthodox and the first difference they’re likely to cite is the filioque. The filioque was the point of contention that led to the great schism of 1054. The Nicene creed, amended by the first Council of Constantinople stated, “[we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified.” 500 years later the Western church under Rome begin to insert a single word, filioque, which means “and the Son”. Catholics today are used to the creed saying, “[we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified.” Part of the reason for this was to address the ongoing Arian heresy in the west, which the Eastern Orthodox church didn’t have to deal with. The question of whether this is correct or appropriate is relatively insignificant, although most Orthodox will disagree. It’s a question that should be addressed in an ecumenical Council. I could make a case from Scripture for either position. The real issue was whether the Roman Pope had the authority to make such a change to the creed without an ecumenical Council. It was the last of a long list of doctrinal issues that the Roman Bishop had unilaterally resolved outside of an ecumenical Council, to the dismay of the other bishops Christendom. It’s not really a doctrinal hill that I’m interested in dying on.

More significant, to my mind, is the understanding of original sin. The Roman Catholic understanding is that we are all born tainted by original sin, and that this sin is washed away with baptism. The Eastern Orthodox understanding, which is apparently more in line with what the earliest Christians believed, is that we all suffer the consequences of Adam’s original sin, but we are only guilty of the sins that we commit. I’ve never been a fan of the theology of the children bearing the guilt of their parents, which seems unfair and arbitrary. This also results the paradoxes created by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Without the guilt of original sin there’s no need to postulate that Mary (Or, as the Orthodox refer to her, the Theotokos or Christ-bearer) was immaculately conceived, and therefore no question whether her fate was predestined. Indeed, it glorifies the Theotokos, in that she was without sin through her life of her own agency. This makes much more sense to me.

Of course, the Orthodox have no Pope in the way that the Roman Catholic church understands it. The Orthodox resolve doctrinal issues through councils the way it’s been done since the earliest days of Christianity. They don’t have to apologize for the infallibility of their church leaders when they do fail.

Culturally, the Roman Catholic church is very legalistic, with a list of rules and prescriptions for punishment if the rules are broken. To the lay person and many clergy these are rigid and inviolable. Do this, or do that, you go to Hell. They say the Jews invented guilt and the Catholics perfected it. The Orthodox church, on the other hand, seems to take the rules and glance at them, then throw them over their shoulder and get to work on saving your soul and keeping it saved. Indeed, it seems the Orthodox priests take their charge as shepherds very seriously, and if you’re seen to be straying, they’re not shy about snapping you back in line. 

If you go to a divine liturgy, everything seems out of place at first. It takes two or three times, but you begin to recognize that all the essential elements of the Latin Mass are there, and then some. The normal first reading from the Old Testament seems to be missing, until you realize that the Sunday Divine Liturgy actually starts on Saturday Evening with Vespers, and the old testament reading is there.

If Divine Liturgy is scheduled for 10:00am, as most are, you’ll walk in and think you’re late, because the service already seems to be in progress. That’s because Orthros starts about an hour beforehand and segues right into the Divine liturgy. After you’ve been a few times, you realize that the Divine Liturgy actually starts with the small entrance (A holdover from days when the Orthros was often said in a smaller chapel from the main sanctuary). The Creed, the Our Father, and the eucharistic prayers are all nearly identical to the Roman Catholic rite, with a few translation differences that have no impact on the meaning. There’s a beautiful prayer before communion that the Roman Catholic church lacks. Many Orthodox churches in America service an immigrant congregation, so the Divine Liturgies are often bilingual.

Most Orthodox churches have no pews. You stand through the whole ceremony, in a kind of Brownian motion around the sanctuary. Wear comfortable shoes. More western congregations have pews.

The decoration will seem strange. The religious artwork is mostly icons. The Eastern Churches never participated in the medieval art renaissance, so traditionally their artwork isn’t as photorealistic as it is in the Western churches, and it certainly eschews the modern look you see in many Protestant and some unfortunate recent Roman Catholic churches. If you know to look, you’ll see that in the icon art, the saints and holy subjects of the art aren’t illuminated, but the illumination seems to come from them. There’s no proscription against statuary or more realistic artwork that you see in Roman Catholic and more traditional Protestant churches (which, after all, derive their sensibilities from their Roman Catholic roots), but it’s just not a tradition that caught on in Orthodoxy.

The communion uses leavened bread which is mixed with the wine and served to the communicant on a spoon. Very different. No lay people are involved in communion, the Orthodox take the Eucharist very seriously, as the Roman Catholics have forgotten how to do.

At the end of the liturgy, there’s no recession, and you don’t just get up and leave. The congregation is called forward as in communion to venerate the cross, at which time they’re dismissed individually. Frequently antidoron is distributed either with communion or during the dismissal. This is the bread that was blessed but not consecrated, and all congregants can partake, unlike communion, which is only for the Orthodox who have prepared themselves through confession and fasting.

If you’re a Protestant, you’ll find the Divine Liturgy strange. The degree of strangeness will depend on how traditional your Protestant background was. Lutherans and Anglicans probably wouldn’t feel too out of place. Baptists and Pentecostals will find it unrecognizable. The Orthodox church isn’t a place you go to get saved, or have your faith jumpstarted by a motivational speaker, or sing and dance and show how happy you are to believe in Jesus. The Orthodox Divine Liturgy is where you go to worship God, admit to yourself that you are a sinner unworthy of His love or Forgiveness, yet by His divine grace you’ve been forgiven and loved. It’s a hospital for the soul, whether you need to heal the hurts of the day or deeper wounds that haunt your sleep at night and make your soul ache. You won’t leave the Liturgy feeling good about yourself and ready to excitedly go out in the world and make it better for Jesus, but you’ll leave with a sense of calm and relief that there’s hope for you but knowing that you face a struggle to stay true to His word and example in the coming week. It’s not unusual to cry at some point during the Liturgy if you’re really paying attention to what’s happening.

If you’re a Catholic who’s sick of what’s happening in the Church and feel powerless to do something about it, a Protestant who’s realizing that the Sunday services are still leaving your spirit hungry, or a lonely soul looking for a meaning, come to Divine Liturgy a few times. Give it a chance for the strangeness to fade, and you’ll realize you’ve come home.

The Plan for the Soviet Socialist States of America

You’re being manipulated. In a time where ideology appears to trump facts in the public discourse, the power lies in the hands of the most outrageously plausible liar. This puts Conservatives at a disadvantage, because among their many values, Conservatives believe that adhering to the truth gives the least number of problems in the long run.

The truth is that the United Sates is and has been for nearly a century the most prosperous, resource rich country in the world. So why are we experiencing skyrocketing food prices? Why are the shelves of many stores suddenly bare?

The “pandemic” of 2020 gave the government the perfect excuse to implement a number of measures. The reason for these measures will become clear. Stay with me while I lay the foundation.

Whether you believe the COVID-19 virus was engineered in a bioweapons lab in Wuhan, China using American funding and technology transfers or that it escaped from a reservoir in the local bat population, the initial reports were alarming. People dying in droves, extreme transmissibility, hospitals overloaded. Maybe these reports were real. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that they were.

Highly lethal, highly contagious pathogens burn out pretty quickly. The faster they kill their host, the faster they reduce the pool of available victims to jump to. Corona viruses are unstable and mutate quickly. A less lethal form of a virus has a reproductive advantage over the more lethal strain and will typically outpace the more lethal strain in the long run. The result will be a lower death rate per infection as time goes on. The less lethal strains will confer immunity to the more lethal strains. The pandemic becomes endemic, as the victim population settles down to learn to live with the less lethal strains of the virus. This progression has been seen time and again with SARS, H1N1, Swine Flu and is exactly what we see today with COVID-19. While initial containment measures were prudent at the beginning of the outbreak in light of how lethal it was at the time, today they are either worthless or counterproductive.

The lockdowns and travel restrictions from COVID-19 caused major disruptions to multiple supply chains. In a fit of Soviet-style central planning, many state governments chose what activities were essential and what weren’t. The choices were often whimsical at best. In a complex economy, even essential activities often rely on supply chains that one wouldn’t consider essential at first glance. The amazing thing is that the economy didn’t come off the rails altogether with the idiotic meddling the government did.

The lockdowns hit our food supply hard. Unable to get their goods to market, farmers dumped their produce and it rotted. Livestock was slaughtered because feed was scarce, and again, getting the meat to market was difficult and expensive. This rippled through the economy and continues to be felt. Food prices are skyrocketing, and certain items remain scarce. Meat, especially, has become very dear.

Need I point out that this suits the Earth-first, incoherent vegan PETA green advocates who seem to form a major coalition among the current liberal ruling party? Nah. Coincidence.

Stores, merchants, and food service providers are having problems serving their clientele because they can’t find workers. Under the guise of “COVID Relief,” the government is paying people more to not work than they can make at minimum or near-minimum wage. I saw this this summer touring the Western US, where restaurants were closed or operating for reduced hours because they couldn’t adequately staff their kitchens. Ask the store managers why their shelves are empty at Wal-Mart, and they’ll tell you they can’t find enough people to stock them, and the trucks are unable to keep up deliveries because of manpower shortages.

Now the Federal government and certain governors (I’m looking at YOU, Jay Inslee, you ambulance-chasing charlatan) are trying to enact vaccination mandates, trying to restrict people’s ability to conduct business or be employed unless they agree to accept the experimental injections for which the long-term effects are unknown and which killed all the animals in the preliminary trials. After the last four years of the media continuously lying to the point where Social Media companies have appointed their private “Ministries of Truth” to ensure that only state-approved propaganda can be conveyed on their platforms, it’s little wonder that a majority of Americans are saying, “Thank you, no.” to getting the experimental jab. This will serve to prolong the manpower shortage.

The baffling thing to me up to now has been, “Why?”

Why would the government deliberately kill the source of American prosperity? Why would the government cause food and labor shortages in this land of immense bounty? Who does this serve?

I’m sure you’ve heard the question asked whether we should take the vaccine that’s advocated by a group of people who are on record saying that the world should be depopulated to about 500 million people. You make up your own mind. One has to wonder if people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos understand that their immense wealth is the result of a large population buying their goods and services. You think they would, but I make it a habit to never underestimate the power of human stupidity, even from successful people.

I’m torn between two principles. The first is that it’s a mistake to ascribe to evil intent what can easily be explained by incompetence. The second is that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. The level of governmental incompetence has been too directed, too focused. I honestly believe that many players in this farce are incompetent and have no idea what they’re doing and why. But I also believe that there are a few powerful people directing action, either directly or through proxies they control to achieve a desired outcome.

Like I say, the outcome they seem to be driving for makes no sense at all. Until yesterday, it hit me, and it all fell into place.

 Today, thanks to university indoctrination and a willful tendency to either ignore or rewrite history, we actually have a generation of young people who actually think that socialism and its ruder alter-ego, communism, is a good idea. Completely oblivious of the history of the 20^th century and the incomprehensible misery and death that these ideologies caused, young people today think that Capitalism is evil, and socialism is the cure. These useful idiots (If you don’t recognize that term, young person, go read up on the writings of Lenin) will form the core of the 21^st century Bolsheviks.

The key to understanding is the food shortages. Supply has been disrupted at the source. Transportation is breaking down, and retailers are finding it difficult to operate. This is designed to get worse. In the guise of “aid” the government will institute measures to supposedly alleviate the crisis which will do nothing but make it worse. This is by design.

But why?

Look at history for the answer. The hard leftist socialists in this country who hate Capitalism know that they can never enact their policies and agenda against the American public as long as the people maintain control of the government. So, the first step is to cause a civil breakdown where the people themselves abolish the government. Remember, the Russian Revolution was started because of – you got it – food riots. Stop the food to the cities and use your antifa fringe as the core to foment a popular uprising among the hungry people. Run this in cities nationwide and wait until civil order and the government collapses. Exacerbate this by defunding law enforcement, removing the civil authority’s prime weapon in suppressing disorder.

Once the government has been rendered ineffective, follow the Russian Revolution model. Move into the power vacuum with your Bolsheviks and “solve” the problem. Replace civil authority with people’s courts and a centrally managed economy. Eliminate or imprison those who refuse to play along. It wasn’t pretty in Russia and sparked a brutal five-year civil war. That’s okay, they’re ready for that, and they’re not bothered by the bodies they’ll have to stack to enact their agenda.

Far-fetched? Go into the coffee shops of Portland and see if the idea doesn’t get a warm reception. Listen to idiots like Kshama Sawant or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Instead of being the laughingstocks that they are, they’re repeatedly voted back into office. Believe it or not, there are actually people who don’t think this is a really bad idea.

To look at this realistically, we have to admit that things aren’t quite what the Left thinks.

First, the Russian Revolution was a popular uprising that had nothing to do with socialism. The Bolsheviks just took advantage of the serendipity to seize power. By contrast the current events seem to be engineered.

 Second, the bulk of the Russian population were barely literate peasants with little love for life under the Tsar. In 21^st century America, the population is very literate, and a huge number of them are combat veterans who learned guerrilla warfare from the best in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans love the US constitution and the life they had under it until the idiots began subverting it.

Third, Americans aren’t going to go quietly into the night. It takes a lot to piss off an American, but when you put his back against the wall and give him nothing left to live for, he turns into a vicious, sneaky, implacable foe.

What does this mean for us today? Recognizing the intent of the enemy prepares you to counter it. Look for the following: 

• Increasing food and retail shortages.
• Increasing national debt, which devalues our money and exacerbates inflation.
• Increasing unemployment.
• Increasing government corruption – be especially wary of anything that even smells like election fraud. Election fraud is like cockroaches. If you see one, you can be sure there’s thousands you don’t see. None of this can be done if we throw out the perpetrators and take away their power.
• Increasing government interference and restrictions on business and personal activities.

All of this is designed to destabilize the country. If and when the wheels come off and the people take to the streets with pitchforks, be prepared by doing the following:

• Have emergency food, water and ammunition sufficient to last at least a month, more like a year if possible.
• Establish contact with like-minded constitutional Americans. Form militias. Develop plans of action for moving into the power vacuum before the Bolsheviks do when the government collapses.
• Read Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for tips on establishing and maintaining a resistance. 
• Develop alternate forms of communication. Expect to be de-platformed from most social media. Count on your standard communications not being secure. 
• When disorder strikes, seize control of governmental functions and restore order locally as soon as feasible . Don’t wait for the government to do it, they’re not coming, and when they do, you may not like the form they take. Concentrate on security, water, electricity, and food in that order. 
• You’ll know when the crisis is over when the promoters of the collapse face justice for their crimes.

 I honestly hope I’m wrong, for all our sakes.

Holy Week - Tradition and History.

Christians throughout the world are familiar with Holy Week, beginning on Palm Sunday, commemorating the Triumphant entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem.  The celebration begins in earnest with Holy Thursday, which commemorates the Last Supper and the washing of the disciples feet.  A vigil is held until Good Friday, commemorating the crucifixion, and concludes on Easter day, the most important feast in the Christian calendar.

And this timeline is all wrong, because of a misunderstanding on the part of gentile Christians regarding the Gospels.

What do we know?  In Matthew chapter 12, Jesus prophesied his time in the tomb: "But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign shall be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish three days and three nights, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."  (Matt 12:39-40)

But if Christ was crucified on Friday, he would have spent but two nights and only one full day in the earth.  There's been a lot of twisting and spinning done on the part of Christian apologists to reconcile this, and none of it has been necessary.

Nowhere in the Gospels was it said that Jesus was Crucified on a Friday.  What is conclusive is that the resurrection took place on a Sunday, the first day of the week (John 20:1).  The only other bit of evidence about the day of the crucifixion is that the high priests wanted the bodies off the cross before the beginning of the Sabbath (John 19:31, Luke 23:54, Mark 15:42 ).

To the early Gentiles who had converted to Christianity, the Sabbath meant one thing: Saturday, the Jewish day of rest.  Therefore, if the High Priests were worried about the beginning of the Sabbath, then Christ must have been crucified on a Friday, and the entire Holy Week schedule was based on this when the liturgical calendar was established.

The thing to remember, though, is that this was the Passover, a Great Sabbath; much different than the weekly Sabbath, and wasn't tied to a specific day of the week.  The Jewish Calendar was a Lunar Calendar.  A Jewish month begins at the new moon, and lasts 28 days.  Occasionally, they would throw an extra month into the year, just to keep the months more or less in synch with the seasons.  They also observed the equinoxes and solstices, which remained constant throughout the year.  The first month of the Jewish Calendar is Nisan, and it begins at the new moon closest to the spring equinox.  The Jewish day begins at sunset, i.e., Saturday begins at sundown Friday.

The Jewish Passover feast begins on the 14th day of Nisan, or the first full moon after the equinox (Exodus 12:2-6, Lev 23:5, Numbers 9:1-3). Of course, this can happen on any day of the week, and sundown on that day begins the Great Sabbath of Passover.  We are told many times in the Gospels that Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.  There is great significance to this, as the day of preparation is the day the Passover lamb is slaughtered, as Jesus was to be killed to atone for the sins of many.

Tradition holds that Jesus was around 33 years old when He was crucified.  It's generally understood that Jesus was born in 4 BC.  The following shows the days of the week that Passover fell on for the years that Jesus may have been crucified, along with the Julian Day.

26 AD Wednesday, March 20

27 AD Monday, April 7

28 AD Saturday, March 27

29 AD Thursday, April 14

30 AD Monday, April 3,

31 AD Saturday, March 24

32 AD Saturday, April 12

33 AD Wednesday, April 1

34 AD Saturday, March 20

As we can see, the Great Sabbath of the Passover coincides with the weekly Sabbath on four of these years.  But does that square with the prediction of Matt 12:39-40?  If Jesus dies on a Friday, that leaves just one full day and two nights in the tomb.  But if Jesus was crucified in AD 29, he would have been 33 years old, according to tradition, he would have been Crucified on a Wednesday, the day of preparation, and would have spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday in the tomb, to be raised sometime after sundown Saturday.  Three full days and nights, as he foretold.  The dates and tradition align perfectly.  The mistake was when non-Jewish Early Christians interpreted the reference to the Sabbath to be the weekly Sabbath, not the Great Sabbath of Passover.

It's proper and right that we commemorate the Last Supper and Good Friday.  Just keep in mind that the last supper actually happened on Tuesday, and the Crucifixion on a Wednesday.  The church isn't going to change its liturgical calendar, but that's of little consequence.

The Christian celebration of Pascha, the resurrection (It's only called Easter in German and English), properly occurs on the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.  The Eastern Orthodox religion still calculates the religious holidays off the Julian Calendar, which has slowly been going out of synchronization with the Gregorian calendar in use by the rest of the world.  This is why the Eastern Orthodox frequently celebrate Pascha on a different date than Western Christian traditions.  Unfortunately, the Orthodox feel that the appropriate change can only come through an ecumenical council, and the Orthodox believe that no ecumenical council can be valid without the Roman diocese being represented.  Since Rome and the Orthodox church are in schism, the Orthodox cannot hold what they believe is a valid ecumenical council.

COVID, Vaccines and Hydroxychloroquine

So I recently got into a discussion about vaccines, the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine when treating COVID19.  I was informed I was a conspiracy theorist who got my information from Facebook. It's kind of sad, really, because the person who said this knows me well enough to know better.

Natural hydroxychloroquine is quinine, first isolated in 1820 from the bark of a cinchona tree, which is native to Peru.  It was identified in 1820 as a preventative for malaria, and they figured out how to synthesize it in the lab in the 1940's, because so many of our soldiers in the Pacific theater were catching malaria.  Today it's an over the counter medication in much of the tropical world, referred to as the Sunday pill, because people take it on Sunday as a prophylactic against malaria. Its side effects are well known in that part of the world.  In the US it's  a prescription drug because we don't have a big malaria problem here and there can be interactions with other drugs, or side effects if taken indiscriminately in large doses, like some idiot gulping an aquarium additive.

HCQ is also used as an anti-inflammatory to treat the inflammation related to autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. This suggests a possible mechanism for preventing  severe COVID19 symptoms by keeping the airway inflammation under control.

COVID19 is a particularly nasty member of the corona virus family, but corona viruses are common and generally have mild symptoms. See https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/general-information.html.  Chances are you've already had a corona virus that you experienced as a common cold.  Like the common cold, there is no vaccine.  Corona viruses mutate very quickly, so even if a vaccine is developed for one strain, it's efficacy over time is highly questionable - one reason why the COVID19 vaccine is dubious. One of the problems that's been encountered is that corona viruses are quite common, and the antigen test to check for COVID19 doesn't discriminate.  It just says you had a corona virus recently, and it can't tell if it was COVID19 or just your run-of-the-mill coronavirus.

For what it's worth, I've been lied to by the media since 1972 at least.  I have no reason to trust anything on the news without corroboration.  I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I don't think 9/11 was an inside job, I don't believe in chem trails and yes, we did go to the moon. But I've seen a president railroaded out of office on innuendo and lies supported by a continuous false narrative promoted by the press, I've seen America go to war for no good reason, I've seen three years of a false narrative about Russian collusion, I've seen a media tell us that an election was honest when anyone with two working brain cells could see it was rigged, and I've seen much ado made about things that I've been personally involved in that was nothing like it was reported.

If you look at studies for hydroxychloroquine they're all over the map. The WHO has come out and decried HCQ, and my guess this was done to prevent a run on the existing supplies of HCQ, which is the specific reason India gave for making it a schedule H-1 prescription drug last year. Remember, in most countries, this is an over the counter medication. We saw what happened with toilet paper here, right?

My look at HCQ studies seems to fall into two categories: Studies where HCQ was used as a preventive, or administered when the first diagnosis was made or the symptoms were first noticed; and studies where HCQ was used to treat patients with full-blown, debilitating COVID19 as a last resort.  The reports of efficacy seem to break right along these categories, with the treatment of full-blown critical care COVID showing no efficacy (duh). I'm not the only one to notice this.

A team at Henry Ford Health System in Southeast Michigan said Thursday its study of 2,541 hospitalized patients found that those given hydroxychloroquine were much less likely to die.

A Yale epidemiologist said hydroxychloroquine could save up to 100K lives if used for coronavirus.

The reports of success varied internationally, as well.  37 percent of doctors internationally said that HCQ was the most effective treatment.

I was involved with the medical industry for 10 years with a prominent medical device manufacturer.  I know what it takes to take a treatment from concept to FDA approval.  There is no way in hell they did the necessary trials to declare this vaccine safe.  Read the disclaimer before you get it, and see if they don't have some legalese in there that absolves them of all responsibility if you get sick and die from the vaccine. I guarantee it's there, because they didn't do the necessary trials and they know it.

When studies of the effectiveness of a treatment contradict the experience in the field, I start looking for process errors in the controlled trials.  Having been involved with similar studies in a different field of science I know how initial assumptions and test protocol designs can give less than objective results - often the very results you're looking for.  I don't trust controlled trials as the final arbiter for that very reason.  They're not objective. Color me a skeptic, but I've seen it too many times. I can point you at a couple of books that show how studies have been engineered to give a predetermined result, especially if someone in control of that study has a vested interest in the result.

My question: why the campaign against HCQ?  Yes, if a bunch of idiots act like children and overdose on it, you're going to have complications and death.  You can say the same thing about aspirin, ibuprofen, Tylenol, Nyquil, or any other drug.  Those warning labels are there for a reason. But the reaction to HCQ has been over the top, with the media basically saying, "Don't take it at any cost!"  That doesn't pass the sniff test with me.  They're not saying it because of possible health complications.  If that were the case, they would say, "Don't take more than the manufacturer's recommended dosage, and see your doctor if you are on other medication."  But they're trying to make you think that HCQ is bad and WILL harm you if you take it, which isn't true at all.  Sorry, when a talking head starts lying like that, I start asking what their motivation is.  Are they trying to prevent a run on HCQ stockpiles?  Maybe. 

Or maybe they want you scared so you'll get the vaccine?  After all, they can't make money if the vaccine isn't in demand.  And yes, oh yes, they'll make money.  CNN business reports a possible $32 billion for Pfizer alone.  The BBC breaks down the players in the field.  Even though you're not paying for it, governments are buying it for as much as $40 a dose.  There's a LOT of money out there to be made, and if you don't think some of that isn't getting kicked back to the politicians and media who create the market for this, you're pretty naïve.

So, to sum up, COVID19 is a corona virus, and as such mutates as fast or faster than the common flu virus, so any vaccine is of limited effectiveness.  Since, according to Johns-Hopkins, you have a 98.2% of surviving COVID 19 if you catch it, and since, according to the CDC, only 6% of the COVID deaths have not involved a comorbidity, a healthy young American has a 99.892% chance of survival if they catch it. In a staggering case of medical negligence, numbers on deaths from side effects of the vaccine aren't being tracked, but if you sift the news they're not zero. Aix-Marseille University Faculty Member Dr. Herve Seligmann and Engineer Haim Yativ have done some research (PDF) with frightening results. The chance of a bad reaction to the Vaccine may be HIGHER than the natural COVID, assuming the vaccine can even defend against the COVID strain that you might catch.  The risk vs. reward calculus doesn't make sense.

CDC Admits: More Dead from COVID-19 Vaccine Than ALL Vaccines From Last 20 Years Combined

Sola Scriptura

One of the common things I hear from American Protestants is that they are “Sola Scriptura.” If it’s not in the Bible, it’s not part of their Christian belief, and should be shunned. According to this school of thought, the Bible is the foundation of all Christian belief and practice.

In this article, I’m going to explore the roots of scripture, the roots of the Christian faith, the origin of the sola scriptura belief and why it’s in error. If your belief system makes you uncomfortable with dealing with actual history and facts and reconciling them to what and how you believe, then you should stop reading right here.

What is the Christian church, and what is its origin? Scripture is very clear; Christ established his church specifically in Matthew 16:18. In the book of Acts and the various letters we see many accounts and references to how the church was structured, with episcopoi (Bishops) being responsible for multiple congregations, presbuteroi or presbyters (translated as elders in many English texts, and the root word for today's "priest" in English) being responsible for a given congregation, and diakonoi or Deacons being responsible for assisting Bishops and presbyters. This was the church that Christ established, and which was promoted by his apostles. Christ didn’t establish multiple churches, and we're admonished from thinking divisively like that in 1 Corinthians 1:10-15. We're taught by Paul that the Church is literally the body of Christ, and that we are all members of one body. 

So the question every Christian must ask is, “Am I a member of the Church that Christ established, and in communion with that earliest of churches?” Another way of looking at this is to examine your line of apostolic succession. Christ taught his Disciples, who accepted his teaching and passed it on to their students as Christianity spread. As generations passed, each generation had its Bishops who had learned their faith from the generation before, and who agreed with it. Yes, there were heresies, and some taught a faith that was not what they had been taught. The church had a mechanism for such problems in the ecumenical councils of Bishops, where questions regarding the faith were discussed and resolved by the body of Bishops. In this way the church stayed true to its roots for more than a thousand years, until the Great Schism of 1054 – which was more about politics and egos than it was about dire matters of faith.

If your faith is based on scripture alone, then how can you be in communion with the Early Church, which couldn’t have been based on scripture, as the church was thriving and growing for decades before the first Gospel was written and for centuries before the canon was finalized? The church that Christ established is not, cannot be based on scripture. Rather, scripture is based on the Church that Christ established. If you see the Bible as the blueprint for your church, I’m afraid you have it quite backwards.

The early church didn’t operate in a vacuum. It maintained a rich heritage of scholarly works by its elders. The Bishops of the Early Church loved to write to one another and to the faith communities of their sees. To understand the Early Church, one cannot rely solely on scripture, because scripture is a particular type of record established for a particular purpose and was written within the framework and the frame of reference of the already established church.

What is Scripture?

What is scripture and why did the books that we have in the New Testament get into the bible and other contemporary writings get left out?

Before we discuss this, we need to acknowledge that the New Testament was predominantly written in Greek. From the time of Alexander the Great, Greek was the most common and widely used language in the world. Yes, the Romans governed that part of the world speaking Latin; the local common language was Aramaic; and the language of the Old Testament and the Jewish faith was Hebrew. But if you wanted to write something scholarly and get the widest distribution to the greatest numbers of people, you wrote in Greek. Greek was to the world of Christ what English is to the world today.

In the earliest days of Christianity, the faith was spread through word of mouth. People would gather to hear what someone had seen or heard. The eyewitnesses to the works of Jesus were rock stars and drew crowds wherever they went. But words are ephemeral, and subject to misinterpretation as they pass a series of Chinese whispers. As the Apostles established churches, they would move on after a time, and those churches would have to learn to operate independently. Of course, there were questions, which were posed back to the Apostles/Bishops in letters. Unfortunately, posterity didn’t preserve those queries, but only their responses, which we have recorded in the various letters and epistles found today in the New Testament. We’re quite confident that there were many more like these, but these were retained by their congregations as having particular significance.

The first Gospel texts date back to about AD 70. This isn’t a great deal of time between Christ and the appearance of the first gospels. Christ was crucified in approximately AD 32, only 38 years earlier. How many people alive today recall vividly the Reagan administration or the eruption of Mt. St. Helens? It’s not that far a stretch in living memory.

Peter was one of the more prolific evangelizers. Wherever he went, he preached about what he'd seen and heard. Unlike today, where we have TV and books, he repeated his stories over and over, always to new audiences. As anyone who’s told a story many times knows, you develop a pattern with practice. You learn how to best organize your account, convey your experience, and the difference between each telling of the story becomes less and less, until it’s almost like you’re reciting it by rote. This happened to Peter, to our advantage.

Peter had an acolyte, Mark, who was his scribe. Mark himself was an eyewitness to Christ, even though he was a teenager at the time. The evidence that Mark himself was a witness and a follower of Christ in person is in a clue in Mark 14:51-52, a reference that appears nowhere else in scripture. It’s widely believed that Mark was referring to himself in this passage.

Note for anyone reading the New Testament, in some cases the scripture refers to the author themselves. It was considered gauche to refer to oneself in the first person in a narrative, so we see patterns like in Mark, where he refers to himself as “a certain young man,” and many times in the Gospel of John, where he refers to himself in a pattern such as “the disciple whom He (Christ) loved.” Another literary mechanism that should be noted is Luke’s addressing “Theophilus” in the opening of Acts. Luke isn't addressing a person in this greeting, he’s addressing you and me. Theophilus means a lover of God, and this is Luke’s address specifically to you as the reader.

Anyway, Mark was at Peter’s side when he preached about what he had seen and heard and about Christ’s life, and he may have heard the story a thousand times. I can almost imagine Mark in the shadows as Peter addressed a new group of catechumens, mouthing the words to himself as Peter spoke them. Mark, as his scribe, had the idea that the message had become rote, and could be spread to more people through writing it down than one man could possibly address in a lifetime. So Mark wrote Peter’s account down. In many ways the Gospel of Mark is in effect the gospel of Peter.

Matthew preached primarily in Judea before taking his mission East or South. His biggest challenge in Judea was the faithful Jews, who were informed by scripture as to the nature of the Messiah. Jesus didn’t fit their preconceived notions. Mark’s Gospel was a godsend to Matthew, who took it and expanded on it, but did so in a way to tie the life of Christ to the many prophesies that referred to him in the Old Testament. Matthew’s Gospel was an argument to the Jews to demonstrate that Christ fulfilled the prophesies of the Old Testament. 

Luke may have been a gentile, or a Jew of Greek origin. What we know is that he was a physician and a companion or acolyte to Paul. As a scholar, he felt that the Early Church owed it to posterity to record the life of Christ and the history of the Early Church. Using Mark’s Gospel as the foundation, he conducted interviews, including with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and did a thorough scholarly investigation of this man whom he had never met. It was through his scholarship that many details of the early life of Jesus are preserved in his Gospel. His Gospel was the first of a planned trilogy that would teach future generations about Christ and the foundations of the Christian church. Unfortunately, his third book was lost or never completed, and all we are left with is his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which end before the executions of Peter and Paul.

John’s Gospel was written after the other three, and with no real connection to them. John is the only one of the twelve to die a natural death. His gospel is unique in that it traces a journey of discovery for the reader, to walk the path of discovery that John did. In this Gospel, the reader learns about Jesus the preacher, the rabbi (teacher), the Messiah, the Son of God and finally God incarnate. John’s gospel was written to lay to rest with finality the question of the identity of Jesus, and states unequivocally, proven through John’s journey of discovery, that Jesus was God, walking among us. Without this gospel of John, Christianity would be a much different faith than it is today.

Are these the only works written about Jesus by his followers? Of course not. Preserved for us today are copies of the Protoevangelium of James, the Gospel of Thomas, a Passion narrative that is said to pre-date Mark, a Signs Gospel that may have influenced John’s writing, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Apocalypse of Adam, and many others. Because these are not canonical, they often weren’t preserved as rigorously as the canonical texts, which had been duplicated in thousands of lectionaries, and thus allowed a historical cross-check.

What did it Mean to Be Canon?

The Bible we have today, on which the Sola Scriptura folks base their faith, is canon. What does that mean? To some people, it means that these books are true and accepted, and all others – the apocrypha – are not. This is incorrect. What these texts have in common is that they were – and still are – used in the conduct of the Eucharistic liturgy.

The Christian mass as conducted by the earliest Christians has a number of elements to it. If you want to experience the mass as the Early Church did, please attend an Eastern Orthodox Mass. The normal mass of the Eastern Orthodox is the Mass of St. John Chrysostom, the archbishop of Constantinople in the 5^th century. His mass is adapted from, with very few changes, the mass of St. James the Greater, the Archbishop of Jerusalem and Apostle of Christ. How much closer to the source of Christianity do you want to get?

As the letters from the Bishops and the Gospels became available, the churches would set aside a time in the mass to read from these works. This was done to reinforce the catechizing of the faithful, and to keep alive the history and record of belief. Each community had their own library of sacred writings that they would use during the mass, and they weren’t all the same.

In AD 325, Christianity had become acceptable in the Roman Empire, and the emperor Constantine was a friend of Christians, although not a baptized Christian himself until he was on his deathbed. The Christian community was facing a schism which threatened the peace between Christian communities throughout the empire as the Arians taught a doctrine concerning the nature of Christ that was considered heresy among the other churches. 

Up to this point, there had been ecumenical councils among the bishops, but they were all local affairs. Since the hierarchy of the church was egalitarian, no bishop considered himself to have the authority to call an ecumenical council of all of Christendom. Interestingly, it took the pagan emperor Constantine to exert his authority and call such a council, which convened in Nicaea in modern Turkey to resolve the question of the Arian heresy. As long as the bishops had all gathered together anyway, they took this opportunity to standardize a number of other things, including the creed of the church, which is still used in many traditional congregations today, even though it speaks of a universality that most of these churches eschew. They also set about to standardize the materials to be read during the mass throughout Christendom. This caused a great deal of consternation, because each congregation had their own peculiar books that they were fond of and took poorly to having outsiders tell them what they should and should not be reading during mass. After much argument and negotiation, a basic list of works to be read during the mass was established. This became the canonical list. It wasn’t set in stone just then and in fact didn’t actually become final until nearly a thousand years later.

The story that they stacked all the books on an altar and left it overnight, and those that were still on the altar the next morning were canon is just a myth.

This doesn’t mean that the rest of the rich library of Christian writings and history were to be consigned to the ash heap. They still formed the frame of reference for the church. The veneration of Mary the Mother of God in the Roman Catholic world, known as the veneration of the Theotokos (Christ-bearer) in the Eastern Churches, is practiced throughout every church in the world that can trace a legitimate unbroken line of apostolic succession to the twelve Apostles, from the Roman Catholic church, the Orthodox, Copt, Chaldean and even the Thomas Churches of India. It’s like the entire Eastern Church doesn’t even exist for the sola scriptura people. I’m sure the Orthodox Patriarchs in their sundry sees will be grateful to know that they only believe all that rubbish about Mary because the Pope of Rome commands them to do so. Likewise, the acceptance of the Eucharist as the literal body and blood of Christ is practiced in every church that can trace its origins back to the Twelve, yet it’s not explicitly taught anywhere in the Bible.

The point is that the Bible records the roots of Christianity but can only be properly interpreted within the frame of reference in which it was written – by Early Christians, who believed and practiced and taught the same doctrines that are practiced and taught by the root churches today, such as the Eastern Orthodox church.

Sola Scriptura

So where did this idea originate that everything you needed to know about Christianity is in the Bible? For this we need to look at the history of the Roman Catholic papacy, the advent of the printing press and the earliest days of Protestantism.

The idea of an infallible Pope being the head of all Christendom would have been a strange one to early Christians. The various Bishops were the heads of their particular patriarchies, but none claimed authority over another. The Bishop of Rome was considered to be first among equals, not by any hierarchy, but simply because he was proximate to the secular seat of power and therefore in a position to influence the secular government more than his brothers in more far-flung cities. Over the years this de-facto advantage of the Roman Bishop affected the relationship between Rome and the rest of Christendom. Rome regularly tried to assert ecclesiastical authority over the other patriarchies, who regularly told him where to stick it. Tensions grew high and in 1054, the Roman Bishop subtly changed the wording of the Apostle’s Creed without permission by an ecumenical council. The actual change was of little consequence in and of itself and would have made an interesting footnote in Christian history if it had actually been debated in council. But the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs and the Roman Bishop let it develop into a battle of ego and wills over whether the Roman Bishop had the authority to overrule an ecumenical council. Things spiraled out of control, and they ended up mutually excommunicating each other.

Western Europe was a feudal society and the kings ruled by divine right. Land was not privately owned, it all belonged to the crown, and the farmers and workers of the land were simply tenants who paid rent to the royalty who claimed ownership of the land. The linchpin to this absurd fiction was the kings ruled with the acceptance of the Church. There was some mutual backscratching which enriched the coffers of the Vatican, and for that the Church ignored the affairs of kings for the most part. Nevertheless, the Pope was the de facto ruler of Europe, with the nominal power to say who could and couldn’t sit on a throne.

This secular power was a commodity which was bought and sold by Italian nobility, and the office of Pope many times ceased to be a religious seat in all but name. There were some horrid popes, who looted the Vatican treasury for their own enrichment, who were morally depraved and who defiled the office with sexual scandals, prostitution, and murder. The Roman Catholic church became a caricature of religiosity and indulged in money-making schemes that preyed upon the faithful for the enrichment of those at the top of the church.

Bibles weren’t commonly available, as the only way of reproducing a Bible was by painstaking manual transcription. A single Bible was the product of years of work, and so only the wealthiest had personal access to one. Most Bibles were the property of the Church. The cycle of reading in the Roman Catholic church ensured that if you attended mass daily, over the course of three years you would have heard the entire New Testament read to you. Unfortunately, the practice of attending daily mass began to fall out of favor, so the exposure of the lay person to the scripture became somewhat problematic. This is the origin of the myth that the Catholic church sought to keep Bibles out of the hands of the lay people, promoted by John Calvin for his own propaganda purposes. 

When Martin Luther protested the abusive practices of the Vatican, such as selling indulgences, he disobeyed his vow of obedience to the church. He renounced the Papacy, and set about to establish his own church, faithful to the precepts of original Christianity, but without the authority that Rome and the Vatican had usurped. Had Martin Luthor been properly educated in church history, he would have found his home and what he was after in the Eastern Orthodox church, but as a product of his day and place, he knew nothing of eastern Orthodoxy except what the propagandists told him.

Martin Luthor’s movement was noticed by many other European congregations who disagreed with the excesses of the Vatican. One of the most influential was John Calvin. Armed with a personal copy of the Bible and a complete disregard for history and theology, Calvin declared anything not directly supported by the Bible to be anathema. In his righteous crusade to distance himself from the papacy, he threw out the entire church, keeping only the books that had been inspired by, written by, and interpreted by the church as his guide. In doing so, he divorced himself from the body of Christ, the Church. One can legitimately question whether the Roman Catholic church is the rightful heir of the claim to be the body of Christ. That claim may very well legitimately belong to the Eastern Orthodox church. But there is no logic on Earth than can be tortuous enough to make the case that a sola scriptura belief promoted by John Calvin that repudiated all of Christian teachings, tradition and doctrine for the previous 1500 years is an any way rightful heir to the claim of being the Church that was established by Christ, evangelized by the Twelve Apostles and other disciples of Jesus, and which wrote the very texts on which Calvin claimed to base his church.