Orthodoxy Doesn't Solve the Problem of Hell
In which for once I actually defend Calvinism
This weekend Protestant apologist Gavin Ortlund and popular symbol salesman and Orthodox Christian Jonathan Pageau sat down to have a conversation about their disagreement over salvation in the historic Orthodox church. At the outset, having written a piece commenting on Jonathan’s original response in which I bemoaned his comments on Gavin’s character, vague responses and apparent refusal to engage, I should say this is a good thing that such a conversation happened, and positive engagement in which people talk without “debating” and just post the video without the need to say anyone “destroyed” anyone is to be celebrated. That said, much of the conservation is, to say the least, mildly frustrating.
Suffice to say, it is also pretty clear Gavin’s points about the inconsistencies within a certain type of modern Orthodoxy are not well refuted by Jonathan’s attempts to reinterpret statements in Orthodox history, an interpretation that one might politely say contains quite a bit of cognitive dissonance on his part, which probably says less about Orthodoxy itself as much as Jonathan’s choice of argument. There seems fairly obviously to be a notion of God and salvation that Pageau personally (and I think perfectly admirably) believes, something he draws from certain early church Fathers and from things found in modern Orthodoxy and indeed from an aspect of its enduring traditions, but because this notion doesn’t track with explicit claims within Orthodox history, and since he declines to simply state those things not to be binding, he is kind of forced into pretending what what they really meant wasn’t really what they said but what he wanted them to mean, resulting in some clumsy arguments.
Jonathan of course wishes to express a more nuanced view of the Orthodox notion of salvation against what he would see as Protestant misrepresentations, which is fair enough, and he rejects those who have told Gavin those outside of the Orthodox church are damned, but equivocates, as his his wont. This is not helped when early on Gavin asks if someone like C.S Lewis, a Protestant Christian, is saved, to which Jonathan says that he cannot say he is damned, because that would be to sit in the place of God, buut: “since C.S. Lewis is not in the one true church I can’t see that he participated in the fullness that is revealed to us…he was in a difficult situation because he didn’t have this fullness that Christ gave us.” He also says that we can hope God to be merciful and so on, but we can only “hope and pray” that God be merciful to him because he was in a “difficult situation.”
Again, much of this is being mediated about Orthodoxy through Pageau, and so part of the issue is a particular way in which Pageau chooses to engage rather than an exposure of the problems themselves. This is particularly the case when it comes to a discussion Gavin and Jonathan have on the Synod of Jerusalem, which Jonathan introduces by reading a passage from a blog Gavin wrote twenty years ago about Luther glorying in God’s justice in sending people to hell in an attempt to paint Protestantism as inherently bad, then reading a passage from the Synod that says God wishes all people to be saved, thus opposing the two, before claiming that this is really what the Synod is rejecting, and says he found a God who wants all to be saved when he “fled” the baptist church and entered Orthodoxy. It’s a rhetorical approach that I would imagine appeals when preaching to the choir, but it lands neither historically nor in its representation of Protestantism.
