(John Carpenter) Most serious American Christians are accustomed to engaging groups like the Mormons, with their sexually immoral con-man who wrote bad fiction full of provable absurdities, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, repackaging ancient Arianism, or even Roman Catholicism, which claims to be the Church the Lord Jesus established while encouraging prayer to the dead and bowing before statues that Scripture forbids and the early church opposed. But Eastern Orthodoxy catches them by surprise. Its weapons are unfamiliar, its jargon sounds ancient, and its strategy is sneaky. As a result, many sincere believers are caught flat-footed. Our blindside to the Eastern Orthodox ruse is made worse by polemically adverse evangelicals who want us to believe that the wolves stalking our sheep mean well.
I have heard too many accounts of Bible-believing Christians drawn into Eastern Orthodoxy by the promise of “the early church.” The most obvious stumbling block for such converts is the icon. At first, icons appear to be a straightforward violation of the Second Commandment. Sometimes, like here, first impressions are right. But Eastern Orthodox apologists deploy a carefully rehearsed maneuver: they redefine “icon” in a way they do not themselves believe, to make icon-veneration appear biblically harmless. If you are being persuaded by these arguments, you are being worked.
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