Orthodox Reflections

By Nicholas – member of the Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America

Quite by accident, I found myself on a YouTube Channel where the host was blasting the Netflix show Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. His two hour rant was dedicated to exploring the many departures of the show from original Tolkien canon lore. Intrigued, I looked further and discovered multiple channels run by other members of what is sometimes referred to as the “Fandom Menace.” These are content creators who see their major role as opposing the Woke mutilation of source material currently afflicting franchises such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel MCU, Disney, Lord of the Rings, and more. They are very serious about their work to preserve the authentic lore of related stories set in fictional universes. Yes, the irony writes itself. Some of them have amassed huge followings.

The characters in these stories don’t exist. The places in the stories don’t exist. The science and technology in the stories don’t exist. Everyone knows this is all make believe. Yet, according to a growing body of content creators and their fans, it is vitally important for new stories set in these fictional universes to remain consistent with previous source material. This large, diverse group is completely decentralized. There are no meetings, dues, or secret organizations pulling the strings behind the scenes. Yet, their power across a wide spectrum of platforms has caused multi-billion dollar media companies to sit up and take notice.

Plunging down this rabbit hole, the first thing that came to my mind was, “Wow, people really are naturally orthodox about their myths.” Few people like it when their beloved stories change. Even if the myths are of recent vintage, once people have formed a connection to stories, to the characters in the stories, and to the internal logic of the stories – resistance to change is inevitable.

Regardless of who wins this face off, the billionaire corporations or the Fandom Menace, many years from now future historians will be able to research and write about the conflict. Direct evidence will be provided by blog posts, podcasts, livestreams, scripted videos, articles, books, movie reviews, and press releases. Indirect evidence will come from the financial results of the production companies (serious losses appearing year after year). The conflict may be over fiction, but its impact on the real world is very real in monetary terms.

To summarize: Nobody likes it when their cherished myths are altered. Many people are hardwired to resist such things.  Conflicts of this scale invariably leave historical records.

Which brings us to the early Church, and how the standard modern Evangelical historical narrative completely rejects human nature as illustrated by the Fandom Menace. As presented to me, since childhood, Evangelicals say that the early Church (pre-Constantine) was Evangelical. The teaching of the Apostles was Evangelical. There was no hierarchy overseeing things after the death of the last surviving Apostle. The New Testament writings were interpreted by early Christians according to an Evangelical framework. That meant the Eucharist was purely symbolic, and worship services revolved around a sermon as Evangelical worship does today.

For now, let’s just focus on the Eucharist. Below is the Apostle Paul from his 1st Letter to Corinthians (Chapter 11) on the Eucharist:

23 For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread:

24 And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.

25 After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, this cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.

26 For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.

27 Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.

28 But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.

29 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.

30 For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.

31 For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.

32 But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world.

33 Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another.

34 And if any man hunger, let him eat at home; that ye come not together unto condemnation. And the rest will I set in order when I come.

According to modern Evangelicals, early Christians being taught by the Apostles understood the Eucharist to be purely symbolic and even optional. Which is how, according to modern Evangelicals, early Christians would have understood the above text from the Apostle Paul, even though a literal reading of it gives a very different impression. Modern Evangelicals also contend that, even though the first Christians were converts from Judaism in which worship (Temple and Synagogue) was liturgical, the Early Church was non-liturgical.

By the time you reach the 4th Century, however, the institution claiming to be the Christian Church clearly had hierarchy, defined dogma, a monopoly on Biblical interpretation, and a liturgical service centered around the Eucharist as the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Somewhere in time between the 1st Century and the 4th, the entire Evangelical understanding of Apostolic teaching (especially as recorded in the New Testament) was completely lost and replaced by what modern Evangelicals call “pagan influences.”

There is a major problem, however, with this Evangelical narrative of history. It requires you to believe that 1st to 4th Century Christians, many of whom willingly offered themselves up as Martyrs rather than renounce Christ, would silently allow the entire Christian Faith to be transformed into almost the exact opposite of what the Apostles had taught. If you think people get upset over a Narnia remake with a woman cast as Aslan, try completely changing the Christian Faith and see what kind of reaction that provokes. In past centuries, Christians have actually rioted over Theological controversies.

Early Christians, many of whom were willingly fed to lions rather than offer so much as a pinch of incense to the Roman Emperor, were perfectly fine watching the Christian Faith succumb to worldly corruption. 

There should have been a 1st to 4th Century equivalent of the Fandom Menace for the Evangelical narrative to be true. Pastors, evangelists, common people – all of them should have been speaking out about the transformation of the Evangelical Church into what we now recognize as the Orthodox Catholic Church. There should have been polemics from both sides, congregations refusing to go along with the changes, splits within congregations, possibly even physical violence. When the Romans established the Church of the Bishops as the state religion, you would have seen Evangelical congregations refusing to bend the knee. As Arians and Nestorians did later, some dissident Evangelicals would have escaped beyond the borders of the empire to preserve the true Evangelical Christian Faith.

Only, we don’t have a shred of evidence of any of that happening. If the true Evangelical Church of the 1st Century really did transform into the hierarchical Church of the 4th, then it did so without so much as a whimper of protest. Not that we can find anyway. Which creates a problem for Evangelical apologists, but one which they are willing to try to overcome. Here is one such effort by a poster on X:

By the end of the first century, Christianity had already spread across multiple continents—Judea, Samaria, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Rome, Egypt, North Africa, even as far as Arabia and India. Thousands of churches existed across a vast range of cultures and languages. And yet, the surviving writings from the so-called “early church” come from just a small handful of men—most of whom lived in or around the Roman Empire’s western regions.

 

The truth is, the writings we have from the first and second centuries represent only a tiny, regional sliver of what Christians across the world believed and practiced. There was no central institutional authority collecting, preserving, or verifying what all churches taught. Most churches relied on oral teaching or the Scriptures, and many were isolated, persecuted, or lost to history. The church fathers we hear quoted today—Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr—represent only a minority snapshot, not a global consensus. Even church historians like Eusebius admit that many Christian writings and voices were lost, and the church fathers themselves (like Irenaeus and Tertullian) often acknowledged the widespread presence of false teachers in their own time. So the idea that their writings reflect a unified, majority opinion is simply false.

Let’s summarize this: The early Church must have been Evangelical, but we can’t find any actual evidence of that. The Christian writings we do have from the 1st to 4th Centuries are contrary to the assertion of Evangelicalism being the mainstream of the Church, so we will simply ignore those authors as outliers. For some reason, the Evangelicals of this period apparently tolerated the gradual “Catholicization” of their Church without any protests we can find. But we know that there must have been opposition, because who would sit back passively and allow their entire religion to be flipped on its head?

Authentic Evangelical Christian worship of the 1st Century – no Eucharist in sight!

Talk about faith in things not seen. Modern Evangelicals can’t locate the 1st Century variety, except by interpreting New Testament verses according to their modern framework. However, modern Evangelicals have perfect faith that Early Church Evangelicals must have been there. Perhaps there really was an Evangelical Eucharistic Fandom Menace, and their existence was suppressed by the winning Orthodox Catholic side? Highly unlikely, as the Orthodox side would have treated the 1st Century Evangelicals as a heresy. The Church has preserved the history of multiple heresies from the pre-4th Century time period:

• Arianism: This heresy, championed by Arius, a clergyman of Alexandria, asserted that Jesus was not co-eternal with God the Father and was therefore a created being, not divine. The Nicene Creed, adopted at the Council of Nicaea, directly addressed Arianism by affirming the divinity of Christ.
• Gnosticism: This diverse group of beliefs emphasized secret knowledge or gnosis as the path to salvation, often viewing the material world as evil and created by a lesser deity.
• Marcionism: Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament was a different, lesser God than the God of Jesus, rejecting the Old Testament and its God as a being of wrath and violence.
• Montanism: This movement, originating in the 2nd century, emphasized ecstatic experiences and prophetic revelations from the Holy Spirit, often leading to a focus on spiritual discipline and asceticism.
• Docetism: This heresy, prevalent in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, held that Jesus only appeared to have a physical body, but was actually a pure spirit, and his suffering and death were illusory.
• Adoptionism: This belief suggested that Jesus was not the Son of God from eternity, but was adopted as such at some point in his life, perhaps at his baptism, resurrection, or ascension.
• Sabellianism: This heresy, also known as Modalism, argued that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were not three distinct persons, but rather different modes or aspects of the one God.

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Which of the above heresies looks like modern Evangelicalism? None of them match up, though there are many elements of these heresies in various flavors of modern Evangelicalism. For example, some Evangelicals do teach modalism as did the Sabellians. Other Evangelicals have reinvented Arianism, though usually by accident. Of all the heresies, however, the closest to modern Evangelicalism would have to be Gnosticism. Gnostics emphasized salvation through acquiring knowledge, rather than participating in the life of the Church. Evangelicals similarly treat salvation as understanding and accepting a set of beliefs about Christ. Further, like Gnostics, modern Evangelicals insist on a radical separation between the physical and the spiritual. Material bad or irrelevant, spiritual good.

So there were false teachers in the early Church who promulgated false doctrines. These were identified, and denounced, by writers such as Irenaeus who wrote in the 2nd Century. In his book, Against Heresies, Irenaeus attacked sects that deviated from Orthodoxy, mainly the Gnostics and Marcionites. Writing as a bishop, he especially sought to disprove the incorrect interpretations of scripture on the part of Gnostics such as Valentinus. As his treatise bears out, Irenaeus clearly understood Gnostic doctrines, and refuted them on the basis of what he presented as a century old authentic Christian tradition. One of the teachings that Irenaeus defends in his treatise is the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist:

When, therefore, the mingled cup and the manufactured bread receives the Word of God, and the Eucharist of the blood and the body of Christ is made,(14) from which things the substance of our flesh is increased and supported, how can they affirm that the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God, which is life eternal, which [flesh] is nourished from the body and blood of the Lord, and is a member of Him?-even as the blessed Paul declares in his Epistle to the Ephesians, that “we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones.”

Evangelicals, in the main, do not claim Gnostics as their spiritual forebears. However, similar to the Gnostics, they too deny that the Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood of Christ. Modern Evangelicals further deny that the Eucharist has any salvific benefit. If the Church of the 2nd Century were mostly Evangelical, then Irenaeus’ book would have been a complete misrepresentation of Christianity. It would have been seen, quite rightly, as an attempt to change the understanding of the New Testament writings. Further, as Irenaeus claimed to be a bishop, his work would also have been seen as imposing a ruling hierarchy on an Evangelical Church that previously had none.

Irenaeus’ writing should have provoked a reaction from the Evangelical Church. But, historically speaking, we can’t find 2nd Century Evangelicals defending their belief in the merely symbolic nature of the Eucharist. Nor does Irenaeus write in opposition to any group that would be readily identifiable as Evangelical. Though, as noted previously, modern Evangelical movements do have teachings which were part of these ancient heresies.

Justin Martyr also wrote in the 2nd Century. Here is how he described Christian worship as he knew it at that time:

And this food is called among us Εὐχαριστία [the Eucharist]… For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. For the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that Jesus took bread, and when He had given thanks, said, “This do in remembrance of Me, this is My body;” and that, after the same manner, having taken the cup and given thanks, He said, “This is My blood;” and gave it to them alone.

First Apology, Chapter 66

As with Irenaeus, if Justin Martyr was an “edge case” outside the Evangelical mainstream of the Early Church, then one would have expected a furious reaction to his writing. He alleges that not only is the Eucharist the true Body and Blood of Christ, but even worse, he specifically claims that this teaching is in accordance with the Gospels. This was the mid-2nd Century, long before the establishment of the Church of the Bishops in the 4th Century as the official religion of Rome. Evangelicals getting wind of Justin’s writings should have been apoplectic, just as modern Evangelicals are when they read him. However, we can find no evidence of any opposition, to either Justin Martyr or Irenaeus, that one could classify as coming from the Evangelical “mainstream” of the Early Christian Church. Yet, modern Evangelicals assure us that such opposition must have existed.

Christians of the first, second, and third centuries were in the habit of writing apologetics, pleading with the Roman Empire to not persecute them. A feature of these apologetics was affirming that Christians consumed the Flesh and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist. This teaching was often misrepresented by pagans to accuse the Christians of being cannibals. (Not unlike similar claims made by modern Evangelicals.) Any Christians in this time period, who did not believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, would have leapt at the chance to denounce this teaching in order to avoid persecution by the pagans. Yet, we can find no evidence that any one did so. Rather, the writers we have all took great pains to both affirm the Real Presence, and to explain why this belief is not cannibalism or anything else nefarious.

So we are left with two broad possibilities.

Option A – The Apostles and the Early Church were Evangelical. This Evangelical Church started to run into opposition from an “Orthodox Catholic” faction early in the 2nd Century, which eventually took over. The true Evangelical meaning of the scriptures was lost in the process. This Evangelical Church must have mounted some kind of resistance, but we can’t find any evidence of it. It simply disappeared from history, without a trace. Which is not at all typical, as many heresies were able to sustain themselves for hundreds of years.

Option B – The early Church was actually Orthodox Catholic the whole time. The bishops, the successors to the Apostles, continued to teach the true Catholic Faith and to rightly interpret the New Testament. There is no recorded Evangelical opposition to the development of Orthodox Catholic doctrines for two reasons. There was no Evangelical Church, and there was no development of doctrine. The early Church had preserved, in its fullness, the teaching of the Apostles. These teachings are not only found in the authentic interpretation of the scriptures, but also in the writings of Christian apologists from the first few centuries A.D.

Which do you find most likely to be true?

I was Evangelical for the first 30 years of my life. Even when I was attending weekly services, periodic revivals, and Bible study on Wednesdays, I still had nagging doubts as to the authenticity of what I was doing. It all seemed so modern, so simply made up. Just like the tale of there having been a silent majority of Evangelical Christians in the 1st Century. That is just a modern lie Evangelicals need to believe to prevent themselves, and others, from converting to the Orthodox Catholic faith. Self-delusion is a really hard thing to overcome.