Why Jay Dyer Became Orthodox

[00:00:01]and then of course we have Jay Dyer one of the most popular Orthodox apologists he's a philosopher comedian singer geopolitics he does he does it all but uh Jay's his like signature issue is reformed theology he went to bonson Seminary Jay you kind of had the opposite experience where you were Baptist then you became reform kind of reading the Bible and getting into the church fathers and actually going to bonson Seminary getting to into Orthodox presbyterianism so now if you want to explain your experience of like kind of reading out of Calvinism eventually to Catholicism and then to Orthodoxy as you go deeper and deeper yeah I was uh first got into the reading the Bible when I was 18 or 19 and um my exposure at that point was just being raised baptized but I never really took it seriously and then I um went to some Evangelical Bible studies that I was invited to and uh eventually like you said kind of got interested in uh more historical Christianity so I started reading actually not the church fathers but I went to Luther and Calvin actually I started with a lot of the Baptist Calvinists first so I got really into Spurgeon uh and then I read a lot of the the Puritans at that time I got into John Owen and uh all those kind of guys and then that kind of led me to start questioning uh my Baptist assumptions about Believers baptism and the issues of dispens ens ational theology because I raised in kind of an Evangelical dispens dispensational attitude um we didn't go deep into esy but I never really questioned it so uh I started wondering about you know covenant theology and then I got deep into that so I started reading John Murray and Charles Hodge and Herman witus um and burkhoff and all the reform systematic Theologian people and that eventually led me to questioning um Baptist theology as a whole because I was starting to see a lot more continuity between the Old and New Testament than I previously been aware of and even when I was a Baptist Reformed Baptist in my mindset I was really into apologetic so I was really deep into bonson uh transcendental argumentation uh I read basically everything I could get my hands on from bonson and vanti uh and at that time I was like well I want to go to Bible college but know if I want to go to anything Baptist anymore I ended up getting asked to leave my Baptist Bible College because I was attending a PCA church so they were they were mad that I was going to a church that believed in infant baptism um so I I ended up leaving uh Baptist Bible College and I was like well I don't want to go to secular University um so I'll just try to see if I can get into uh bonson Seminary which at that time is kind of a adjunct to what they called the Southern California Center for Christian Studies which was a lot of PCA and OPC people at that time like uh Ken Gentry was involved in that um bonson and some other people and I got really into Reconstructionist theology so I was reading a lot of Rush Dooney a lot of Gary north um a lot of um James Jordan and all those guys and uh then I started thinking well when I was at bonon Seminary I had a class with I think a guy who's still a reform Presbyterian Elder Chris dille he a church history class and we had a stack of about 10 patristic and medieval texts that we had to read and so I I dove I dove into it I was really into it I bought the Philip shaft a Church Father set at that time and I realized I was gonna have to really read the church fathers and see what they taught because I was kind of like you like you said like working my way back historically through um the progression of the church I mean I was very obviously interested in biblical theology as well it's not like I only made this decision or whatever based on the decision just based on um history right for me it wasn't like just some kind of history question it was a combination of all these things like biblical theology Church fathers church history uh all of that together as well as studying philosophy so studying philosophy as well at the same time in secular University I decided not to do Monon Seminary because uh right around the time after a year of bonson I decided that I was starting to question protestantism and reform theology as a whole so I took I read all the city of God and I read all of um um like the works of uh I don't know if I read all of them I read a lot of St cyprian at the time and I read a lot of St Jerome and I knew that as reform you know we had a lot of Reliance on older ideas like Augustine and Augustine's sort of the Proto calvinist of the uh you know the patristic era so I I thought why don't I read this guy himself and see what he taught and of course he doesn't teach anything close to reform theology so I was kind of put in in an existential crisis so I after I read all the city of God I listed a bunch of questions and took it to all my professors and um I found all their questions to be really or their answers to be inadequate so then I started um attending Catholic rcia classes not because I was ready to convert but just because I was ready I wanted to see what the Roman Catholic view was on all of these different contentious issues and I knew the Reformation um critiques of those things because I've been reading reformed theology for many years but I didn't know like well what's their answer right so I started realizing a lot of the things that I thought were the case I didn't really have a good picture of and I didn't really uh give the benefit of the doubt or steal man the other position so I thought why don't I try at least to understand their arguments from their side because a lot of what I assumed uh Augustine taught wasn't the case right I assumed that he was kind of this protoc calvinist and then I finally no actually believes in uh episcopacy he believes in absolute succession he believes in the real presence he believes in all these things that I thought were very you know he believes in the necessity of good works as a manifestation of uh you know the the whether you have the gift of perseverance or not I know the Calvinists believe in that but I'm saying that uh his conception of faith and works is not solid it's not the it's not the reformed view um and then I read a book by Alistair McGrath at the on that time that came out where he was arguing and pointing out that nobody taught Luther's doctrine of solid prior to Luther right so if that's the case then you I started realizing the Lynch pin of what would be the church right so you know Luther thinks that the Solas and these different Lynch pens are kind of what the church hinges on if those started falling then then protestantism wouldn't be a viable option anymore so I but I decided that really the issue wasn't even going to be those things it was going to be something more fundamental uh which was the formation of the biblical Cannon so I basically just started reading tons of Evangelical Works uh on the formation of the Canon and in across the span of all the works that I read uh whether it was evangelicals like FF Bruce or Baptists like Lee McDonald or even Anglican or uh other Traditions talking about the how the Canon came to be I realized I didn't know much about this and I just had all these assumptions but when you get into actual history of the formation of it um it's very obvious that the church as an existing visible historical body played uh an an Inseparable role in the preservation the transmission and the decision about what would be and So eventually I just found answers from people like you know when RC Sproul would say stuff like it's a fallible collection of infallible books I think that ends up being self-refuting it leads to The Logical conclusion that the academic realm uh could then determine through study and research and overturn everything that the church had believed prior to that and that's exactly what happened after Luther you get in the uh German hoc critical tradition coming out of Luther the the ability to deconstruct the whole text because now it's no longer in the ecclesiastical sphere to make these decisions that are normative about normative Authority here now it's passed over into the academic realm so all of those questions were really um bugging me for many many years and then in 20023 I came into the Roman Catholic church but you have to remember time that was like prior to the Omni presence of the internet so there weren't a whole lot of resources there wasn't a whole lot of stuff in 2003 that you could go to for a lot of this you had to just get the actual books and do the reading um you know there weren't really podcast yet there there was new advent existed but that was about it when it when it came to like finding you know resources resources that you if you didn't have the Church Father set right you have to go to new advent um and there were some Catholic websites and at that time again the only debate that existed online was reformed uh and Protestant debates with Roman Catholics that was it like if you go into chat rooms or whatever you would see people you know like spam spamming an AOL chat back and forth between Roman cathol like quote Minds like the pro the pro would be spamming like Romans 3 and Romans N9 and the Catholics would be spamming like quotes from St jome and and you know trying to refute argue that protestantism was was ahistorical anyway so for me it was just going to be pretty much a consistent um approach of like studying the text going back into the text so I was Roman Catholic for about maybe I always say eight I don't remember exactly how many years it was basically eight or nine years basically a decade um anyway so then as the internet got more and more popular people were exposed to a lot more ideas like Orthodoxy started getting more and more popular online even in 2007 or8 when I first encountered orthod stuff um there was only like two or three kind of popular blogs um there wasn't a whole lot of resources and material and you know apologetics so uh that was the first time I really encountered Orthodoxy I didn't have it near me so I didn't really take it very seriously but within the Roman Catholic world if you're in that world for you know a span of time for almost a decade you're going to be presented with a lot of the um the contradictions and difficulties and one thing I've noticed with with younger guys like you guys is that what the internet's done is it is allowed a lot of these debates that in like the the early 2000s or mid-2000s it took a lot longer to work through the internet has basically sped up so you can you can work through these issues a lot quicker because there's so much there's so many more resources so much more information available than there was in 2003 four five six that what took me like you know three four five years to work through uh I think online you know intelligence young people can work through them a lot faster right like redeem Zoomer you were talking about kind of working through issues of like well I don't really buy this leftist stuff you know maybe Ben Shapiro has a good argument and then you kind of you know you were able to quickly move through that uh to where you are now and I think it's just it's a lot different uh people have to understand that like you know it's kind of like people will look back and they'll be like why didn't you understand how come you didn't see Orthodoxy was true in 2005 and it's like I had one book on Orthodoxy in 2005 from Tim where uh and I didn't even know if there was an Orthodox Church anywhere near me in Tennessee so it's like how was I supposed to know that you know this thing that I was only recently exposed to was the case it takes a lot it took a lot of time as what I'm trying to say to work through issues back then so long story short yeah I saw work through a lot of the contradictions in the Roman Catholic World by kind of going through the bell curve or what a lot of people do where you go from Trad cat and for me it was a really easy transition from uh Calvinism to tomis um in fact uh Arvin boss wrote a book about this at the time that was really popular in the mid 2000s about similarities between uh Calvin's predestinarian Theology and Thomas aquinas's view so I got really en atomism throughout my 20s and the 2000s uh but then I started noticing that a lot of the kind of idealized picture that I had a lot of a lot of these systematic theologies there's there's problems like serious problems and I couldn't keep ignoring them or try to cope and make fit together and work so not just problems in Tom ISM but problems in um Western doctrines of divine Simplicity uh problems in terms of what Vatican 2 teaches and everything post Vatican 2 versus what Vatican one taught and what the the preva 2 teaching was of the popes um I had just grapple with that for many years and so finally I just kind of started attending an Orthodox Church to check it out when I found one in Nashville that was 2007 um but I wasn't ready to become Orthodox I still had all these kind of Latin and tomisic presuppositions in my head and it takes a long time to kind of work through a lot of this stuff to work it out so um I had a phase where I just kind of didn't go to church for a few years uh I got burned out on all the theology uh and then about 2014 I started warming back up to Orthodox ideas I wasn't like an atheist or anything I just kind of had a like I'm going to take a break from church period um and uh I I never adopted atheism or even agnosticism I was just kind of like pause period uh so I started going to uh Orthodox church again about 2015 and then finally made the decision around 2017 to become a catak human I'd already been through the whole catak human in 2007 though um but I ended up not converting at that time because it wasn't just the theological reasons I was uh about to be engaged to somebody we were going to be married in the church at that time and we ended up not getting not getting married so I didn't want to go to church where my ex was so so basically yeah um anyway so that's that's the long story of it I didn't mean to ramble that long but that's when I ended up being Orthodox in about 2017 officially but I've been reading Orthodox stuff since 2007 [Music] or Divinity raises the humanity in Christ through theosis and that's exactly what we experienced