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Sunday, December 25, 2011

Pieper on the Greek Church (Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox)

In the 1927 issue of Lehre und Wehre (vol. 73, pg 281-283), Pieper wrote of events involving the Greek Catholic (and Greek Orthodox) church under the title "The Representatives of the Greek-Catholic Church as Disturbers of the Peace at the World Conference of Lausanne." After reporting of certain events, he had this comment on the Greek Church:
...The Greek Church however has a teaching concept that is sorely in need of correction from the Scriptures. It does much the same as in the teaching of the Roman Church – minus the papacy. To take the place of the papacy in the Greek Church are council decisions and the bishops. Christ is the invisible head of the Church. However the bishops are its visible representatives who alone can make ministers to be effective administrators of their office.  The Greek Church has also the transformation doctrine in the Lord's Supper, the Mass as unbloody offering for the absent and the deceased. It also has the veneration of saints and their relics and images. The justification of man is done by faith and works. Man's will to spiritual good is weakened by the Fall, but not quite dead. Man helps to his conversion by the right use of the free will still remaining in him to the good. Without this assumption, conversion would be constrained. Predestination to salvation happens in view of the right use of human free will. These are the main tenets of the Greek "Orthodox" Church.
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Professor Pieper was the best judge of all the "religions" of the world, whether they called themselves Christian or not.  Why?  Because he stuck to the Scriptures.  No one did so more than Pieper in the 20th Century.  If you want to know what is going on in the world now, read Pieper's comments made many decades ago because they are still fresh.

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