Did This Orthodox Church Father Actually Affirm Sola Scriptura...?

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Redeem Zoomer put together a brilliant video on how to pick what is the correct church in light of all the ecclesial anxiety, people coming into Christianity, being confused on what church they should be going to. He put together a brilliant video highlighting John Croissm. This is significant because the liturgy of John chrostm the liturgy is the order of service if you will with an Eastern Orthodox church and many Byzantine right Catholic churches.

[00:00:28]Catholic churches that used to be Eastern Orthodox churches but then they became one with Rome if you will. And this is the guy that they use his liturgy today, right? Uh going all the way back. Redeem Zoomer uses this guy's quotes directly from one of his teachings on how to find the one true church. Okay, this is brilliant on his part to redeem Zoomer >> there. We have something to be grateful for today. But yeah, St. John, he was writing after the council of Nika, but still in the 4th century where there was a lot of division with different forms of Christianity. So he has some wisdom on this issue. What do you do if there are many forms of Christianity that all claim to be the true form of Christianity and you have no idea which one to join? What do you do? He has some good advice for that. We're going to get into that. But first only.

[00:01:10]>> And by the way, at the beginning of this video, Redeem Zoomer argues that there was more division within the church in this era than there is today because of all the heresies that are floating around >> little controversies as well. He has lots of great commentaries on loved preaching from the Bible. Golden mouth because he was one of the right into it.

[00:01:27]So once again, St. John, one of the most important early church fathers. He's called the golden mouth because he was one of the greatest expository preachers of the early church. He loved >> expository just means you're preaching through the Bible verse by verse.

[00:01:37]>> Loved preaching from the Bible. He was helpful in many theological controversies as well. He has lots of great commentaries on the New Testament that I've used many times and he has this advice. This is from his 33rd homaly, his 33rd sermon on the book of acts. So he's preaching and a lot of people uh struggle with this issue that he addresses. So he talks about a scenario that is very common today. He says there comes a heathen. A heathen is like somebody who's not any form of Christianity at all. There comes a heathen who says I want to become Christian but I know not whom to join.

[00:02:03]There's much fighting and faction among you. Sound familiar? Looks like John Pros was on Twitter. Much confusion.

[00:02:08]Which doctrine am I to truth? How shall we answer him? Each of you says, he asserts. I speak the truth.

[00:02:12]>> So yeah, this was written about 1700 years ago, but it is very very relevant today. If you read the church fathers, you'll find that they weren't writing purely about ancient issues like, oh, what do you do if somebody wants to trade your daughter for your goats? What do you do? Now, a lot of the issues they were talking about are the same issues we deal with today. We like to think we're so different than people back then. Now, obviously, back then they didn't have iPhones. They didn't have Skippy toilet or tung, but the general idea that the book of Ecclesiastes gives us, there's nothing new under the sun.

[00:02:36]That's kind of true. I I think the only difference today now is that because of the iPhone, because technology, we're so interconnected. But to Redeem Zoomer's points, they were having many of the issues back then.

[00:02:45]>> The problem people the existential problems people struggled with back then like you know, love, war, disease, all that. Those are the same existential problems we deal with today. And one of those problems is there is religious anxiety. People had ecclesial anxiety back then. Um there are back then there were many different factions that all claimed to be the true church and nobody knew who to believe. There's of course the trinitarian faction which won out in the end. And so retroactively we understand them as the true church. But back then people didn't know that because there were also the Aryans.

[00:03:11]There were also Donatists. There were several other groups. There were still some gnostic groups. They all claimed to be the true form of Christianity. They all claimed the others were not true forms of Christianity. That was very stressful for people had this general understanding that Jesus is God. They or Jesus is the Lord because obviously the Aryans did not believe Jesus God. They this general understanding they want to be Christian. They want to follow the Christian faith. They want to follow Jesus. But they did not know who to follow. They did not know who accurately represents the Lord Jesus Christ because they all claimed to. Now uh you can look at their arguments but they all have pretty decent arguments. So this guy is saying each of you claims to be right.

[00:03:40]Who should I believe? What do we do about this? Now John Christom gives us some advice but he says if we told you to be persuaded by arguments you might well be perplexed. Now this I think is very key here. This is very important.

[00:03:51]There are lots of debates between different denominations today. There's six-hour debates between Catholics and Orthodox online on like the Philoquay who's right about that. I know there's like a lot of young dudes who will spend hours and hours watching live stream debates on the Philly way so they don't accidentally pick the wrong church and go to hell. Uh lots of debates about the papacy, lots of debates about icons, relics, all these debates. And I'm not saying they're not important, but there is a problem with relying too much on these debates.

[00:04:13]>> Yeah. I think the deeper issue with debate bro culture is if someone can argue you into the kingdom of heaven or into being a Christian or into the one true church, someone else can argue you out of it. And I think the the slight of hand that often happens is that these are debates based on a logical absolutely certain conclusion of what is the truth here. The way 2 plus 2 equals 4. That is not how many of these debates are. There's a lot of quote mining that happens. A lot of folks that argue for the sake of arguing. There's a lot of folks that are invested in their position and they're going to do whatever they can to reverse engineer their conclusion instead of taking an honest look from the primary sources and trying to have a discussion from first principles >> to find the one true journal. I'm not saying you shouldn't listen to these debates. Not saying they're not helpful, but if you rely too much on them, you'll just drive yourself insane.

[00:05:05]>> I I would say listening to too many of these debates would definitely drive you yourself insane. And if you consider that the average American spends 7 hours a day passively consuming media between uh doom scrolling on Tik Tok, Instagram, Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, podcast, not working, not educating themselves, just passively consuming stuff, listening to stuff. I would argue listening to a lot of this stuff at an integral point in your life where you should be building something. You should be developing useful skills. You should be learning how to provide for your future family someday. I would say some of these things are probably not helpful towards your own development depending on the season of life that you're in and how much you're consuming. Six hours six-hour debates, holy moly, when are you getting time to do anything else? It just it become it can become so hyperfocused and hyper obsessed with something instead of living out the things that God has called us to live out as children of God. Because no matter how much you study this, no matter how much you dig through the history, dig through the ecumenical councils and the church fathers and all these debates and all these excommunications, no matter how much you study that, there's always going to be somebody who studied more than you, who is smarter than you, who came to a different conclusion and joined a different church.

[00:06:15]>> Again, that would require epistemic humility, though.

[00:06:18]>> And epis epistemology is just the idea of like how do you know anything, right?

[00:06:22]to to have a degree of epistemic humility is going to come down to a lot of this being based on personal experience and based on what makes the most sense and sometimes even what makes the most amount of sense for you in the season of life that you're in. I think there are certain people that may need to go to a specific type of church for a season and there's other people that may need to go to a home church for a season and there's other people that may need to go to a church where they can just be called to be the person that they're called to be with very simple practical teachings. I that that's personally my preference, but I don't ever shame anybody for saying, "Hey, I you know, I think I need to go to something else. I think I need to go to something more lurggical, yada yada yada." I think that God can use different uh streams of the church in different ways.

[00:07:00]>> I think it'd be very convenient for all of us if everyone who was above a certain IQ level who studied uh these texts, everyone who had all the information, all the smarts, all the brain cells all joined the same church.

[00:07:09]But that's not the case, right?

[00:07:10]>> Uh lots of people with very high IQ levels who studied way more than me or you or anyone here, they have come to different conclusions. So that's why debates can only get us so far because every side I mean there's some sides that don't have good arguments. I've never heard a good prosperity gospel argument. They just pray on people who are not very educated. Like there's some groups that just don't have any good arguments whatsoever. Never really heard any good like new apostolic reformation arguments. I've never heard many Jehovah's Witness arguments. But you know between the main >> Chris folks don't really debate to be fair to them. But uh yes I've never heard of any of those either.

[00:07:39]>> Christian traditions, Lutheran, Reformed, even Baptist sometimes Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Rant Orthodox, they all have decent arguments. They all have decent debaters. And I find increasingly people with ecclesial anxiety put their faith in these debate champions. Like sometimes when I make a video arguing for my denomination, everyone comments, I can't wait for my favorite YouTuber to debunk this. Okay, so you're relying on men to do your thinking for you.

[00:07:57]>> Yeah. Again, a lot because the the frameworks from there is that everything has been settled and we figured out the dogmas of the faith and you just need to shut up and submit and do what we say and believe what we believe.

[00:08:08]>> You can't think about this yourself. You can't think this through yourself, >> right? And >> no, I mean again as we saw Father Harris say earlier, you have to crucify your intellect. There's a degree which you have to crucify your intellect with these we're the one true church models.

[00:08:21]Hey, real quick. Not sure if you know this, but this show is now available on the Spotify podcast app or wherever you consume your podcast at. It's a long form where we take all the clips from the day and we put it together in a long podcast. So be sure to go to Spotify podcast or wherever you consume your podcast and give me a follow over there.

[00:08:41]>> John Krastom answers that. He says, >> "But if we bid you believe the scriptures, and these are simple and true, the decision is easy for you. If anyone agree with the scriptures, he is the Christian. If any fight against them, he's far from this rule."

[00:08:52]>> Isn't it interesting? He says, "But if we bid, you believe the scriptures and these are simple and true." Sounds like the opposite of much of what we're hearing from people that say, "Oh, you don't even know how to rightfully interpret the scriptures. How do you know what your interpretation is correct? Yet the guy who is one of their most popular fathers that they use his liturgy till today says that the simple the scriptures is simple and true and the decision is easy for you. If you agree with the scriptures, he is the Christian. If any fight against him, he is far from this rule. Yesesh.

[00:09:26]>> At first, this can sound very unsatisfying to us, very unhelpful of course because Johnum just said arguments aren't going to work. So why is he telling us to believe the scriptures? because all these groups claim to believe the scriptures. All different groups of Christianity except, you know, theologically liberal ones will claim to believe the scriptures.

[00:09:39]So, how does that make the problem any easier? How does it solve the problem at all? Uh, but what we're missing here that John knows about, but I think everyone in the modern debate space forgets this is that the scriptures are not like these church history debates.

[00:09:50]The scriptures actually have a promise from God that he is going to speak through them when they are read in faith. The scripture says the word of God is a double-edged sword. It always convicts. It never returns void. It judges all the hearts of men. judges all our hearts and thoughts and feelings.

[00:10:05]The scripture has an inherent power to it that church history just does not.

[00:10:09]The scripture has the power that God has promised to speak through it. I think we would all agree that God has not made any covenant promises to speak through filioquay debates. God has promised to speak through his word. The word of God fundamentally is Jesus Christ. But the scriptur is the unique and authoritative witness to Christ. So the scripture is what we should use to judge which church is the true church. John Krostum is not saying the church is not important. John Kos believe the church is extremely important. I believe that too. But you can't use the church to judge which church is the true church. Obviously that's common sense because um then that you just have circular logic. You cannot use the church to judge which church is the church. Use the scriptures because all the churches claim to agree with the scriptures. But who actually follows the scriptures? You need to actually use the scriptures to discern that. This is something I think is very concerning in the modern debate space.

[00:10:53]>> So again now let's go back to the scriptures we were looking at. We were looking at this Ephesians passage. It's Ephesians chapter 1 verse 4. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight in love. He predestined us for adoption of sunship through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will to the praise of his glorious grace which he has freely given us in the one he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood. Okay. I mean that sounds like there's a substitute that happens there, right? That that in him we have redemption through his blood. So again, like I I think sometimes I hear these conversations and I go, "Man, do people really have such a low view of scripture that they don't think that the average person can read this and understand that there's some sort of substitute that happens." Right? Now, that that doesn't mean that I endorse all forms of PSA. Uh but I do think that Jesus died for our sins and in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. He made us he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he promised in Christ. So the mystery of his will is promised in Christ to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth. In him we were also chosen having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will.

[00:12:14]in order that we who were the first to put our hope in Christ might be the praise of his glory. And you also were included when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation.

[00:12:25]When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal. So when you heard the gospel of truth, when you believed, that is when you were marked. Not when you had to jump through a bunch of other hoops and spend three years going through a catechum program. No, no, no.

[00:12:38]When you heard the gospel of truth and you believed, it says you were sealed with the Holy Spirit, which is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance. Okay, that's a deposit that was made. Us hearing, believing, that is a deposit that was made until redemption of those who are God's possession to the praise of his glory. And again, if we go here and we look at the cross reference, we jump into the original Greek, we see this is a first installment. And the second time this is used is when Paul's also writing 2 Corinthians, right? It says, 'Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us and put his spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. There's a future guaranteeing of what is to come based on his current actions here. So, I love the way this is broken down. By the way, I'm reading this in the Logos Bible software. If you don't have Logos Bible Software, they're giving them all you guys a free 60-day trial. You should absolutely get it. And I love Redeem Zoom. for breaking this down because I think so much of this is way simpler than we like to make it out to be. What did the scriptures say and what church teaches the scriptures?

[00:13:42]Okay. And I did a whole video with David Wood going over the teaching of the scriptures in terms of the main and the plain things, the essential things and things that we could disagree on as Christians. Uh this is connected to a very ancient rule of faith that uh Redeem Zoomer and I have been talking about and then connected to Nian Council and also uh CS Lewis's Mere Christianity. So if you guys want to check that out, we'll have that here.

[00:14:07]You should really watch that video and I'll see you on the next one. All right.

[00:14:10]Peace.