These are transcripts from a spoken lecture. The audio is attached to this lesson. If there is any confusion from reading the transcript, please refer to the audio for clarification!
We’re jumping into our first session on this series, which is about the Gospel according to the Eastern Church Fathers. I mentioned previously that the term “the gospel” is used frequently by Christians. But what is meant by that term, what the gospel is thought to be, varies depending on whether you’re a Protestant or a Catholic or Orthodox. And so in order to understand the Eastern Church Fathers, where I’d really like to begin is understanding the Gospel according to these Fathers.
The way I want to approach this is less by starting with the fathers themselves and what they have to say, and instead focusing on a biblical doctrine. My own spiritual journey led me to Orthodoxy, and the journey of studying religion and philosophy and eventually led to my discovery of the Eastern Church Fathers. There’s a doctrine in the scriptures, in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, in Jewish tradition, outside of the scriptures of resurrection, namely, the doctrine of resurrection to judgment. And when I studied that doctrine, prior to ever encountering the Eastern Church Fathers, it was actually that doctrine and the anomalies about it, the strange threads that emerged in looking at it, which first awakened me to something that’s happening in the scriptures in this doctrine, something that at the time of studying it, I saw as nothing more than just contradictions in the Bible, in Jewish tradition, until the church fathers gave me tools to resolve those contradictions.
