Listen to this post on audio!

These days, what passes for religious discussion online is a cage match with a comment section. Somebody gets “destroyed.” Somebody gets “owned.” Nobody gets converted, and nobody gets any closer to Christ.

So when a friend of mine sat down with a Protestant for a long talk about the deepest disagreements between us, and both men walked away grateful, I wanted you to see it.

The video is “Orthodox vs Protestant: Who Follows the Early Church?” on Lucas Curcio’s channel, Method Ministries. Lucas is a Protestant. My friend Jeff Moss is formerly a Protestant minister, who is now Orthodox.

Don’t let the “vs” fool you. What follows is a model of how Christians who disagree ought to talk.

How to Disagree Like a Christian: two seats at a shared table beneath a cross

My Friend Jeff

I go back a long way with the Moss family. Over twenty years ago, before I was Orthodox, Jeff’s brother designed a really cool “mere Christianity” theology-for-everyday-Joe’s type website for me. It was called Wittenberg Hall, and had several subbrands—Enjoying Beer (pints!), Holy Trinity Classical (education site), JameyB (personal blog), and Postmillennialism.com (an alternative approach to eschatology). We modeled it, on purpose, on the then-iteration of Doug Wilson’s Blog & Mablog: similar structure and formatting, but could house multiple brands under one banner. And Doug Wilson linked a couple of those brands back then, so I guess the effort worked. Doug turns up in both our stories—Jeff spent years in Wilson’s church in Moscow, Idaho, and trained in its ministerial school.

Later, while Jeff was exploring Orthodoxy, he and I grabbed beers together in that part of the country. Over the years we’ve had many good conversations, comparing notes and talking through his honest struggles. I’ve pushed back on him more than once. He has always stayed gracious and respectful. More than that, he has convinced me that some of his concerns, specifically about Doug Wilson’s theology, were legitimate—in places where I first worried he was coming across too harshly.

That’s rare. Most of us can be gracious or honest, and Jeff manages both.

His road is a long one: a Catholic mother, a father raised in a secular Jewish home, an evangelical upbringing, two years as a missionary in Russia with Operation Mobilization.

He saw the Orthodox Church there and loved it, at a distance:

I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was absolutely gorgeous... This is a beautiful form of Christianity. This is wonderful for the Russian people because it’s their church... I’m an American. This isn’t for me.

A lot of us have said some version of that. God has a sense of humor about it.

The Question Under the Question

Jeff became a Reformed pastor. What moved him wasn’t a book or a debate. It was pastoral work. He sat across from a man who had walked out on his wife and called him to repentance, and then he had to face his own theology:

If God ordained his sin, if that was part of God’s eternal plan, if it was God’s intention, then what am I doing?... I couldn’t make that add up as a pastor.

Notice what he didn’t do. He didn’t throw out the faith. In his words, “I knew Jesus. I believed in him.” He asked a better question: what is the faithful path?

He found his answer in an eighth-century monk. St. John of Damascus draws the line Jeff needed:

We ought to understand that while God knows all things beforehand, yet He does not predetermine all things. For He knows beforehand those things that are in our power, but He does not predetermine them. For it is not His will that there should be wickedness nor does He choose to compel virtue. (Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith II.30)

God sees your sin coming, but He doesn’t write it. That’s why a pastor’s call to repentance means something. Jeff read the same Holy Father on providence and on icons and came to the end of the line:

I’m just convinced in my soul that everything that he says is true. And so what does that make me?

Orthodox, as it turns out.

The Portrait Under the Mud

Lucas holds to total depravity, and he explains it carefully: fallen people can still do civil good, but they can’t turn to God apart from His grace. Jeff answers with an old picture of the image of God (Genesis 1:27):

It’s been obscured. It’s been smeared... But if the mud could only be cleaned off, you would see that the image of the king has always been there. It’s just been hidden. And that’s our condition as fallen human beings.

That image goes back at least to St. Athanasius, using a metaphor of a painting on a wooden panel:

For as, when the likeness painted on a panel has been effaced by stains from without, he whose likeness it is must needs come once more to enable the portrait to be renewed on the same wood... in the same way also the most holy Son of the Father, being the Image of the Father, came to our region to renew man once made in His likeness. (On the Incarnation 14)

The painter doesn’t throw out the wood. He comes back to it. That’s the Incarnation, and it’s why Jeff puts it at the center of the gospel. Christ died and rose to break death. David saw it coming: “Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption” (Psalm 16:10).

Lucas pushed hard on the atonement, with Isaiah 53 and 2 Corinthians 5:21. Jeff didn’t dodge. They didn’t settle it. They didn’t need to.

Thanks for reading Simply Orthodox! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Neither “You’re Going to Hell” Nor “You’re Good”

The sharpest question Lucas asked was personal: If the Church is the Body of Christ, and you weren’t in it, were you a Christian back then? Jeff said yes, he was. He also said he wasn’t yet a member of the Church. Lucas found that hard to square, and said so.

Jeff’s answer comes from Acts 19. Paul arrives in Ephesus and finds disciples of St. John the Baptist:

He doesn’t say to them, “You’re not believers in Jesus. You’re going to hell.” That’s not his response to them. But he also doesn’t say to them, “Okay, you’re followers of John the Baptist, you’re good.”

He asks, “Into what then were you baptized?” They answer, “Into John’s baptism.” Paul preaches Christ, and “when they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 19:3, 5).

That’s the Orthodox posture. We don’t sort souls. We know where the Church is. We don’t know the limits of God’s mercy. Paul told the Athenians, “the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23). His message everywhere was the same: “repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21). As Jeff puts it, “that’s the core, that’s the heart of it all.”

Real truth outside the Church is a signpost, not a destination. The Church is the home it points to.

Iron on Iron

Here’s what I want you to notice most: the tone. Lucas opens by saying that “even though we disagree, I respect and appreciate that Jeff can do so in a mature manner.” He stops himself more than once to make sure he isn’t straw-manning Jeff. He brings Scripture, not slogans.

Jeff listens, answers the question actually asked, and corrects Lucas gently when it seems he’s been misheard. At the end he’s “delighted with your questions.” So am I.

That’s not a sign of weakness. Rather, it’s a sign of mature obedience:

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear. (1 Peter 3:15)

Another translation renders it “gentleness and respect.” Swift to hear, slow to speak (James 1:19). “As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend” (Proverbs 27:17). Even the Lord says to His people, “Come now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18).

So go have the conversation. With the Baptist at work, with your Reformed cousin, with the friend who thinks icons are idols. Ask real questions. Answer the one they asked. Assume they love Jesus until they tell you otherwise. And when you hit the end of what you know, say so, and bring them to your parish if they will come.

Jeff says it himself at the end of the video: he’s “not a teacher of the faith,” but he teaches catechism at his parish. That’s exactly where this kind of conversation should lead.

Watch the whole thing. It’s worth your hour. And if you know Jeff, thank him for me.

Leave a comment

How to Disagree Like a Christian