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It’s A New Era - What Can Protestants Offer? || SLP659 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it's Bryce Crawford with Trent Horn or Gavin Ortland with Jonathan Peugeot or Andrew Wilson with David Woods, denominational differences are back.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the age of mere Christianity is over.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Mere Christianity was the book that C.S.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis wrote in 1952.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was taken from his radio broadcasts during the war, and that defined the next 80 years of what evangelism looked like.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was about eliminating all denominational differences and stripping things right back.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Billy Graham would preach a simple gospel and church differences and sometimes even church was minimized.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: But now denominations are back.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Let's pray we have the maturity to navigate the differences.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying you can't criticize someone or that if you do criticize someone, you're responsible for people for how people use that.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna ask the time of mere Christianity is over.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Denominations are back, and that can be a good thing.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: My name's Glenn Scrivener from Speak Life.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, mere Christianity was the title of C.S.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's book in 1952.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's the collection from his radio broadcasts during the war, and Mere Christianity is his attempt to get back to creedal basics.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Let's not talk about Eastern Orthodox or Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox or Roman Catholic.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Let's not talk about the many Protestant denominations.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just get back to the creeds and we'll emphasize what every single Christian can affirm at the base of all things.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Mere Christianity has been the assumption, really, since the war.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: For the last 80 years, we've attempted to speak of Christianity in some quite denominationless terms, which often means it's a very boiled-down, assumed Protestantism light.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that kind of Protestantism light has been the default for the last 80 years.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: Think of the great Billy Graham Crusades.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: He will rent out Yankee Stadium, go and preach to tens of thousands of people, and they called it mass interdenominational evangelism.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: The time of denominations was over.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: The time of the simple gospel was upon us.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: And notice that this evangelism is not happening in the four walls of any church, be they Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Evangelism was happening on the airwaves, on the radio, increasingly on TV, and in these mass crusades where churches and church distinctives are very much minimized, and what is brought to the fore is a very simple gospel.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: The last 80 years have been the age of mere Christianity, and that age is over.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: What we're seeing now is that denominations are back and they are back with a vengeance.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: That is striking a lot of Christians nowadays as a very alarming kind of development, and certainly Protestant Christians who have assumed a very vanilla, lowest common denominator, Protestantism light.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: We Protestants are feeling a little bit at sea at the moment because we had assumed that mere Christianity would last forever.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: We assumed that mere Christianity was the norm and that denomination somehow was the blip.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's the other way around, obviously.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Historically, in the mission of the church down through the ages, denominations have been a major, major factor to consider, and mere Christianity is the post-war blip.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's a post-war blip that has had a secular and a spiritual dimension to it.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: In the secular sphere, the post-war settlement was very much a Catholic kind of a movement in the sense of being a universalizing kind of a movement.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: What do we need after the horrors of World War II and after the horrors of that very sectarian Nazi threat?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Hitler wanted to divide the world into races, and the Russians wanted to divide the world into classes, and what we really needed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a new understanding of our commonalities.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: The post-war settlement was very much a universalizing settlement where we minimize what might be distinctive about us all, and we all gather together in the United Nations.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: You might know that the word Catholic means universal, and in that sense, uh world affairs since the war have really tried to lean into a kind of a Catholicity, a kind of a universality to minimize distinctives and to focus on what we can unite around.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: In spiritual terms, isn't it interesting that Vatican II, that was meeting in the 1960s, made moves that lent away slightly from the Roman side of Roman Catholicism and lent into the universalizing aspect of Roman Catholicism.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And they even started to countenance Protestants as separated brethren, and they started to countenance ways of being saved outside the church somehow.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that the universal church isn't identical with the Roman Catholic Church, but that the universal church subsists in the Roman Catholic Church, which opens up the space for being able to say that others are Christian outside of Rome.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Roman Catholicism remained and remains very particular, orbiting around the Pope, but there were some universalizing kind of moves made in Vatican II, and I think that was a sign of the times.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what was good about that mere Christianity phase?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: What was good is obviously in evangelism, it's nice to be able to set aside every denominational issue and simply focus on the offer of Christ to the sinner.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: The last 80 years has been the age of the sinner's prayer and the bridge diagram and four spiritual laws, and the very simple and simplifying question: if God was to ask you why he should let you into his heaven, what would you reply?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the reply is nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's a simple and simplifying gospel that is stripped of almost everything else and is stripped of the church.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: But that is now over.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think in the secular sphere, as well as in the mission of the church, an assumed universality can no longer be taken for granted.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: The post-war anti-Hitler story that had bound us together is falling apart.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: And in the mission of the church, distinctives and denominational distinctives are coming back.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: In my face-to-face evangelism, I'm coming across person after person who has all sorts of questions about Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, and is this a true church?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: And what do I make about this article in the Creed?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: And all these sorts of questions that I had assumed were questions that Christians ask as a kind of an inside baseball, geeking out kind of a question.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: For the first 15 years of my life as an evangelist, I was never asked a question about the Nicene Creed and about that phrase, is the Spirit uh proceeding from the Father and the Son or just from the Father?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: I was never asked a question about that, except by very geeky Christians.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now I am commonly asked that question, and I assume that this is a geeky Christian in front of me.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: It turns out they're not a Christian at all.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: They've never been to church, they've just encountered a lot of different online content, and they're asking questions that get to the heart of some very involved theology.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm tempted to think, oh, that's a bad thing.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think it could be a bad thing, but I think we can embrace what's good about this moment, and actually we can identify what had been bad about the mere Christianity phase.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, what's bad about the mere Christianity phase is that we forgot about church altogether.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the gospel that we offered to people had no link at all, really, to the body of Christ.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: And the call was to Christ alone, and then trying to get such a person to church and then to commit to church and to walk together with brothers and sisters in the church, that was radically undermined by a gospel that says the only thing that's important is me and Jesus.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Mere Christianity made possible churchless Christianity.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And in the last 25 years, there have been maybe 50 million Americans who've walked away from church.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: Largely it's been quiet quitting.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: They haven't slammed the back door of church because they don't like the doctrine.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: They signed up to that quite stripped back doctrine, and they probably still believe that quite stripped back doctrine, but they don't see any place for the people of God in their faith.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: We gave them a churchless Christianity, and a churchless Christianity is what they have run with.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: There were negatives to the mere Christianity phase, and there are positives when denominations are back.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: These are positives if we can appreciate the differences of other traditions.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: Two people who recently have been trying to appreciate the differences and finding the difficulty in that are Jonathan Peugeot and Gavin Ortland.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Both of these two men have been on this channel in the past.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Jonathan Peugeot is uh Eastern Orthodox, Gavin Ortland is a fellow Protestant.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: But his YouTube channel, I think, is testimony to everything that we're talking about here.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: He wanted to get into mere apologetics, defending a kind of mere Christianity, and he's found that it's impossible to talk about the faith nowadays without talking about denominations and therefore talking about denominational differences.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: So Gavin and Jonathan Peugeot have been having these conversations because, well, Gavin has said, the classic Eastern Orthodox teaching is that there is no salvation outside the Ark, and the Ark is sacramentally and institutionally defined within Eastern Orthodoxy.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's also institutionally defined within Roman Catholicism.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Within Protestantism, the ark of salvation is Christ Himself, and therefore a Protestant is much more able to identify a Christian in an Orthodox or in a Roman Catholic denomination, because we're very clear that our union with Christ is a spiritual union that is not based on the institutional church, even though church itself is very important.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Gavin noticed that Jonathan, when asked how he relates to those in Protestant denominations, for instance, Jonathan had given answers that were not really in keeping with the teaching of Orthodoxy traditionally.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that people who that aren't Orthodox aren't Christian or that they're all going to hell or all that for.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: I'm still in.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: I'm still in.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think that I think I see it as a hierarchy, like a kind of hierarchy of participation, like I see most things.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's a great game.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_03: So Orthodox are at the high at the peak of the hierarchy.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: Someone's gonna be on topic.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_03: Then you got Protestants, Catholics?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_03: Who's up?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_03: Well, just tell me I'm a bad game.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: This is horrible.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is a bad game.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Jonathan spoke in terms of the fullness of the faith being found in Orthodoxy, but in others being able to access that in a lesser way.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Gavin Ortland says, no, the traditional Eastern Orthodox teaching is that those who are outside the Ark of Salvation, they could be five meters outside the Ark of Salvation, they could be five miles outside the Ark of Salvation.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Either way, you're off the Ark and you're under condemnation.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so Jonathan and Gavin have a conversation, and well done for them having a conversation with one another rather than simply at one another.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that conversation was painful for them both, but I I hope that pain was worth it.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: You can you can hear the pain here when Gavin asks Jonathan, do you consider me to be a brother?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_04: Do you currently relate to me as a Christian brother?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: I How can I say this?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: I would say that colloquially, yes, but that my prayer for you would be that you that you come to participate in the fullness of the life in Christ.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that the Protestants have damaged that fullness, you know.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: So colloquially, you're a brother, uh says Jonathan to Gavin.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um but in reality, um that question is sort of left hanging, and and and you can feel pain there, okay?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Gavin will want to call Jonathan a brother.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Jonathan will be much more reticent to call Gavin a brother because of their beliefs about church.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: But then you can hear Jonathan's pain when he talks about how Protestant missionaries can assume that no Orthodox person could be saved, or else that seems to be their motivation for coming and planting churches in places where there are Orthodox churches, but the Baptist missionary doesn't think that any of these people are saved, and that's why the Baptist missionary comes in and does whatever the Baptist missionary does.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you can understand the pain that Jonathan is discussing here.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have examples of Orthodox people trying to convert Protestants maybe until the last 20 years, but you have many, many examples of Protestants going into Orthodox lands and trying to pull them out of the Orthodox Church and trying to convince them that they're not Christians.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: I grew up a Baptist, and so I'm used to that.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: I I grew up in churches that were desperately trying to convert Catholics because they believed the Catholics were not Christians, that were desperately trying to convert Orthodox because they said that Orthodox were not Christians.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so the me, like that's why I find all of this so weirdly reversed is that the the Protestants acted very intently to the in the notion that the people they were evangelizing were not Christians and that they had to be saved and they had to be brought into the truth of Christ.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why you have people going to Ukraine, to Russia, to Serbia, starting Baptist churches or Methodist churches or whatever types of churches, because the type of accusation that you ye that you have against the Orthodox is one that has been extremely rampant in in the Protestant the Protestant church.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: It is painful to have these conversations, and yet I think it is so important to have these conversations, um, because you know I'm I'm on Team Protestant here, and I'm just going to finish with that distinctive that that is a Protestant distinctive.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: It it is not something shared by the Roman Catholics, and it is not something shared by the Orthodox.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: The the gospel of salvation by faith alone is a beautiful thing, even if Jonathan Peugeot calls it a heresy here.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was obviously justification by faith alone is a heresy, Catherine.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: You know that.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, we're gonna get pulled off.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna get pulled off.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: I shouldn't have said that.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: I apologize.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: But here's why that doctrine is good news, and it's even good news for Jonathan Peugeot, who feels like it's a heresy right now.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's good news because it it enables us to be more Catholic, it enables us to be more universal and to be able to identify the work of the Spirit of Christ wherever he may be found, because we define our union with Christ not institutionally and not simply sacramentally, we understand our faith union with Christ to be a spiritual union which is truly available to all.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why Gavin is able to say, wherever the works of the Spirit of Christ are manifest, we can see Christ at work.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_04: Here's what he says Look, I grew up in the West.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, all my Christian experience is in churches that are evangelical Protestant, and then I visited, of course, other churches as well, but in terms of being a member, that is everything that I have known of Christ and his gospel has come in those contexts.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_04: So when you ask why wouldn't I want to be Eastern Orthodox, there are a couple of reasons, but one of them is what that would entail for my vision of where is the church, where is the Eucharist, and where is generally speaking Christianity.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_04: Um I would have to s I I would feel as though I was spitting in the face of Christ Himself to say, Oh, actually, that wonderful church there that shared the gospel with me, first Pres Augusta, where I became a Christian, Cross Life, Libertyville, you actually, guys, you don't have a valid Eucharist and you actually aren't true churches in the full sense of the term.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_04: And maybe actually the way you're going to get to heaven and be saved is a sort of exceptional, extra normative case, and that'll kind of depend on which person you're talking to and so forth.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_04: To say that is so problematic, both in terms of how compelling it is, but also in terms of the concern of honestly blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_04: The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit concern comes up in not recognizing an exorcism as a valid exorcism and attributing it, and Jesus does bring the tree and fruit metaphor there.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_04: The good tree produces good fruit.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_04: I see good fruit in Protestantism.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's therefore a good tree.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_04: And so I'm um I'm answering you from a very honest place.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_04: I'm I thank you for letting me say that.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I want to you can push back as much as you want, but that's honestly it.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it feels like a blasphemy against the spirit to say that these works are readily happening, but that can't be from Jesus.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Jesus himself says you can discern the works of the spirit, and you can discern whether Jesus is from heaven or hell based on the works of his spirit in exorcisms and other fruits of the life of the kingdom.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: To define the Christian by their faith union with Jesus enables you to actually identify the Spirit of God at work in the world.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And surely the Spirit of God is at work in Orthodox Christians, and surely the Spirit of God is at work in Roman Catholics.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Which is not to say that we share the same gospel message as the official teaching of Rome or the official teaching of Eastern Orthodoxy.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: We don't.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Jonathan Peugeot has just called the gospel of faith alone a heresy.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that is a very serious difference between what we're saying and what they're saying.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that difference really, really matters.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: But because Protestants are able to identify faith alone as the heart of our union with Christ, we are therefore able to be more Catholic, small C Catholic, universal Catholic.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: One of the great reasons why I am Protestant is that it helps me to be more Catholic.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: And just as I finish, the second thing that this gospel of salvation by faith alone in Jesus enables is that I can now enjoy what the Orthodox say that salvation is.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: Here's Gavin kind of steel manning Jonathan Peugeot's view on what salvation is.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: And Jonathan is able to say, yeah, this is basically what the Orthodox think salvation is.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have a sense of what would what we mean when we talk about salvation in the Orthodox Church?
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_04: I I think the biggest well, one of the points of contrast, so even in as a foil to what was just said, there getting to heaven when we die, there's more of an emphasis upon a process, more of an emphasis upon the organic nature of it, and then in particular union with God, theosis.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_04: This is the climactic uh ultimate expression of it.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell And what Jonathan will add to that is the sense of healing, that salvation is a kind of a healing.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what he says.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: We understand salvation as a healing and as a process of the transformation of the person into the, you know, we could say into the image of God, into the fullness of Christ, and then obviously that becomes an image of theosis.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so we don't separate the aspects of salvation the way that Western thinkers do, and obviously the way Protestants end up doing, which is the idea of justification as a moment, and then you know, sanctification as this other process, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: We kind of see it as this entire process going together, right?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: That that God is transforming us into his image and and making us uh bringing us into his life.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and that it that in fact is uh indefinite process, right?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: That it's from glory to glory, you know.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Gavin as a Protestant is able to say, yeah, there's all sorts of process in salvation from one point of view.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Protestants have always believed in salvation as past, present, and future.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell, I do think there's caricatures of Protestant views of salvation, because I I think what I'm trying to say is, and we can talk get into this, is I think Protestants uniformly in every Protestant tradition think of salvation as past, present, future.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_04: We have been saved, we are being saved, we will be saved.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: By the Spirit, I have been saved.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: Ongoingly, in the renewing of my mind, I am being saved.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: And at the resurrection, when I participate not only in Christ's spirit, but also in his flesh as well, and I have a resurrection body just like Christ.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, on that day I will be saved.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: I was saved, I am being saved, I will be saved.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: This is classic Protestant doctrine, this is classic biblical doctrine, the idea of salvation being ongoing, and the idea of being brought into the life of God, what an Eastern Orthodox theologian might call theosis, participating in the divine nature.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's in the Bible.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Second Peter chapter 1, we participate.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: In the divine nature.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: By adoption, I am filled by the Spirit of Jesus, united to God the Son, and I call on his Father as my Abba Father.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm participating in the divine nature of Father, Son, and Spirit.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: Salvation involves that kind of theosis, and salvation involves an ongoing healing and formation into the image of Christ.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: Protestants can say all of this, but that salvation is not simply the finish line, it's the foundation.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: And here is the gospel that is such good news.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it's good news for Jonathan Peugeot, it's good news for Roman Catholics, it's good news for the world.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's also good news that Protestants forget all the time.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's that the gift of Christ is not the carrot held out to me at the end of the process.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: The gift of Christ is my union with Jesus that is offered to me for free in the gospel right now.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: I have enjoyed two decades of marriage to the same woman, but I'm no more married today than I was uh 20 years ago.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: Our marriage is better and stronger and richer and deeper.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: But our union was begun on the 24th of May 2003.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that union was offered at the outset, and that is the foundation for everything else that follows.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't earn the union.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Union will not be offered to me on our 40th anniversary if we are sufficiently united.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Union was at the outset, and union is the context in which we work out our relationship together.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: And with Christ, it's the same.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm united to Jesus.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: And as I am baptized into Christ, I'm clothed with Christ, and I'm in Christ from the outset.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's not after 40 years of faithful service to Jesus from the outset.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: I am united to Jesus and I work that out.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: And Jonathan Peugeot has a different way of putting it.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: In a previous video that he released a couple of weeks ago, he speaks about the way in which Protestants and the Orthodox talk about the gospel and talk about faith and works.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's very interesting.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Check it out.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and it's the same with the problem of works.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: No matter how many times the Orthodox will explain to someone, you'll always hear Protestants say, Well, it sounds like you believe in works-based salvation.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: And we don't believe in works-based salvation because we don't believe that there is like that we're trying to either do a bunch of things to attain a certain kind of to make God happy so that so that this moral standard is kind of uh attained.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and if we and either believe that or believe that we can't do that, so we just have to kind of rely on God's grace.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like we don't, we don't, we just don't believe that.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: We also don't believe that that the you do works, like this weird idea that you do works out of gratitude for being saved.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what is this?
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what is this?
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: The works are your salvation, right?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: They are your salvation in the sense that they are the fullness that you're participating in.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, you know, it's like if I said, it's like if you're learning, you're learning a skill.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: You're learning to be a carpenter, and then I tell you, you know, and then you you you're doing carpentry, and I say, well, you know, these are the works that you're doing in gratitude of having learned to be a carpenter.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: What the hell are you talking about?
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like to be a carpenter is to make things with carpentry, to be a human is to manifest Christ in the world, right?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: To be in a relationship with God is to manifest Christ in the world.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: And of course that will be good works.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: It will be good works, not in not in some arbitrary kind of way of doing the things that God asked me to do.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: It will be the natural manifestation, it will be the fruits of the seed, right?
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: It will be the natural reality that comes out.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so your works are your salvation, right?
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: Not that you have to do works to get to salvation in the same way that it's like this weird idea that you you're learning to be a carpenter, but you have to, you have to do carpentry.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness, can you believe it?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: You have to do carpentry if you're learning to be a carpenter.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's like if you're learning to be a carpenter, you will do carpentry out of the love of carpentry.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: It'll just happen because that's what you're learning to be.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're learning to be in the image of Christ, then you will manifest him in the world.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's just a whole other way of thinking.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: I get the carpentry analogy.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's very good.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and if ever Protestants are foolish enough to say um you you you shouldn't talk about striving or efforts after salvation, and that's just a works-based thing and that's Pelagian or whatever, um, that would be that would be foolish for the Protestant to say.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but how do you become a carpenter?
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And if the answer is how you become a carpenter is you just get good at carpentry, um, how do you go from not being a carpenter to being a carpenter?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: And like what how good do you have to be at being a carpenter before you are declared to be a carpenter?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because the gospel that that ought to be able to be affirmed by all branches of the church that is there in the Bible is that we are born in Adam and we must be born again in Christ.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not to simply teach Adam to be a better Christ.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: That would be the heresy of Pelagianism.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and and that's just no gospel at all.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: That you simply teach the children of a uh the children of Adam to become more Jesus-like.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's not the gospel.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you must be transferred from Adam to Christ.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: And how does that happen?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, well, Jonathan and the Orthodox know that salvation is a healing.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: He's he's he's made a good point about that.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: The hospital is a church is a hospital for sick sinners, right?
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: And we are we are sick.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't become better by willing myself to act healthy.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Just act, act more healthy.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like I get the carpentry analogy, but the carpentry analogy is very limited, and there's lots of disanalogy in terms of what it is to be a Christian.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: If I am sick and I need healing, then I don't just need to act more healthy.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: I need to be healed, right?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: I need the medicine.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm perfectly happy with fine, go go to the hospital of church and and receive the medicine of immortality, which is which is what you know ancient Christians would would call this and what uh many Eastern Orthodox call the sacraments nowadays.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, take the medicine of immortality, but but that is because you are sick and you need a salvation from beyond yourself to come to you.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not about you acting healthier in order to get healed.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the Protestant gospel enables you to enjoy the gospel of healing and to enjoy the gospel of formation, to enjoy the gospel of theosis, of participating in the divine nature, but it does so by offering you Christ at the outset.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: And you receive him as a sheer gift and you grow up into the salvation that he offers you.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: C.S.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis, who is often a part of these conversations and was a big part of the conversation between Gavin and Jonathan, he was quoting George MacDonald when he said, Because we are the children of God, we must become the children of God.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: But it's that way around, right?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: Since we are the children of God, we must become the children of God.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you cannot earn your way into a family.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: You just don't.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: There are only two ways into a family.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: You're either adopted into a family or you're born into a family.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: In both cases, it's not about you trying harder to act like a member of the family.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's gotta be salvation.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's gotta be actually this there's gotta be actual salvation.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to actually be taken from one realm into the other, delivered from Egypt and brought into the promised land, taken from Adam and put into Christ by the power of the Spirit, and it's not your doing.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: It is the gift of God.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: That is a gospel which Protestants foreground.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: But because we foreground it, I hope it can be a gift to every Christian in every church.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: A gift that once you embrace, you get these two wonderful gifts.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: You can suddenly be you can be Catholic enough to actually identify the work of the Spirit in Christians who might ignore everything the Pope is telling them about their salvation and actually simply trust in Jesus.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: And and Roman Catholics, of course, can be saved, and Eastern Orthodox, of course, can be saved because of the Protestant gospel, which I think is the biblical gospel.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: You can identify Christ wherever you find him, and you can enjoy the salvation that Jonathan Peugeot beautifully articulates when he talks about it as healing and when he talks about it as walking out your identity in Christ and participating in the divine nature, all that stuff is wonderful, but it is based on this past tense salvation that is guaranteed because I'm offered Christ for free.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I am a Protestant.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: I am I am a Protestant in order to be more Catholic and in order to uh enjoy the gospel that is laid out in the scriptures and that offers me Christ for free.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's a beautiful gospel.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: That gospel is also held out in 321.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's a course that rejoices in truths that Orthodox and Catholic ought to be able to uh rejoice in as well.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: The threeness of God, the two-ness of the world, Adam and Jesus, the oneness of you, union with Christ.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: But when you really grasp it, you recognize that that union is yours from the beginning.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you check out 321course.com and let me know how you get on with it in the comments.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you've got this far in the video, surely it deserves a share around the place and a like.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: And please do subscribe to us so we can catch you on the next video.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: God bless.