The Bruce Collins Show – 09/04/13 (Collins Brothers)
The Bruce Collins Show – 09/04/13 – Guests: Paul and Phillip Collins
This is Part Two of an interview regarding the Collins brothers’ forthcoming work, tentatively titled Invoking the Beyond. Please refer to last week’s program for Part One.
I do respect the amount of work the Collins brothers put into their newest book, but to say that “orthodoxy” is a biblical faith is absurd. The bible speaks of churches being an assembly of believers under a pastor who teaches the whole council of God. Its as if these guys buy into the glitz and glamour of golden statues and exquisite paintings of “saints”. Its this man made debacle that we are to ” get out of her my people”.
What gets me is they speak continuously about the occult tradition of the deification of man, but gloss over the exact teaching that the orthodox church embraces, and even the catholic church acknowledges.
If either of the Collins brothers are reading this please explain how you reconcile your faith in orthodoxy given the above facts. Man will never be gods. Little gods or however the orthodox church tries to explain it away, its not biblical.
Orthodoxy does not embrace the occult soteriological doctrine of apotheosis. Anyone who has done serious study of Orthodoxy would know this. Orthodoxy embraces the soteriological doctrine of theosis, which, incidentally, is presented in 2 Peter 1:4. To understand theosis, one can turn to the words of St. Athanasius of Alexandria. Enunciating the ultimate purpose of the incarnation, this fourth century bishop declared: “The Son of God became man, that we might become god.” St. Athanasius’ second invocation of the term “god” is made with a lowercase “g” to reinforce the ontological distinction between God and man. In theosis, humanity experiences union with God, thereby becoming as holy as his Creator. Yet, this union is one without fusion. Human essence does not commingle with divine essence. Man remains fundamentally human. Never once does he become God or some other separate deity. Instead, humans become, in the words of II Peter 1:4, “partakers of the divine nature.” Expanding on the meaning of this verse, St. Athanasius describes theosis as “becoming by grace what God is by nature.” This is deification by energies, the Grace of God Himself.
Conversely, the deification promised by Satan is deification by essence. It is union with fusion. It is the commingling of human essence with divine essence (or, in the case of some autotheistic systems, human essence is actually conflated with divine essence from the outset). In short, it is not theosis, but apotheosis. This autotheism was ideologized by theoreticians like Diderot, Comte, Feuerbach, Hegel, Marx, Bakunin, Proudhon, Nietzsche, Hitler, and Alinsky. It is nowhere to be found in Orthodox theology. Again, anyone who has done a serious study in Orthodoxy theology would know this. Clearly, you haven’t.
Now, I will refrain from broaching the topic further with you for two reasons:
1. Your assertion that we “buy into the glitz and glamour of golden statues and exquisite paintings of ‘saints’ was asinine. It’s also hysterical that you characterize Orthodoxy as a “man-made debacle” while simultaneously embracing the man-made Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.
2. Terry is partial to a more secular orientation. So, he probably would not appreciate his website being used as a forum for theological debates.
A word of advice… Study before you express misgivings with somebody’s views. And, when you do express those misgivings, try not to be a jerk about it.