I think the challenge for the Orthodox is to respond to this teaching effectively by challenging the basis of Rapturist ideology, sola scriptura and sola fide: scripture alone and faith alone. Going after the “proof text” themselves has not been successful because misguided individuals will fall back to the use of decontextualized quotes from the Bible as evidence and justification for this error. The opportunity presented is to evangelize those who have been mislead into believing that the Bible alone is the sufcient source of Christian belief and that Faith alone is sufficient for salvation.

While Biblical sources are an important source of Christian belief, Christian Faith comes from the Church, apostolic sources which have maintained Orthodox teaching since the Apostolic preaching of the Gospel. The Gospel is the preaching of Christ Himself, of which the New Testament is a textual record of the earliest period of the Evangelization. The Gospel is more than the printed text, and Faith is more than belief in the words of the printed text of scripture.

The Gospel is the preaching of the Church and the teaching of the Birth, Crucifixion, Burial and Resurrection of Christ: that the Logos of God became Incarnate and born the of the Theotokos, that He was Crucified, buried and Resurrected, that He ascended and will return.  The Gospel is the preaching of the overcoming of Death by the Crucified Lord and that humanity has been delivered from this eventuality. This is the Gospel preached by St. Paul:

“the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures ³ regarding his Son, who as to his earthly lifewas a descendant of David, ⁴ and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power  by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.”

The Gospel is the power of Christ over Death through the Resurrection and that through this overcoming we too overcome Death. The scriptures are a testimony, a Testament of this Gospel, which is the preaching of the Resurrection of Christ. Thus the Gospel is the living teaching of the Orthodox Church, the Church which is teaching and has taught the Resurrection of Christ for 2 millenia.

This is the meaning of 1 Thessalonians Chapter 4: that those who sleep in Christ, that is to say those who have have died, are not dead as those who are pagans, but sleep in Christ and will be raised at the Last Day along with those who are living at that time.

A good treatment of the sola scriptura fallacy can be heard at this podcast on Ancient Faith Radio.

Thus, Roman Traditionalism is scarcely more “traditional” than the Lutheran and Calvinist reforms and is a response and a reaction to the Reformation, it is a newer Church rather than the remnant of the original Apostolic foundation of Peter.

Similarly, there was a reform which preceded the thesis-antithesis of the Reformation/Counter-Reformation, that being the Gregorian reform and this is where the rupture with the Apostolic tradition and the larger Catholic Church begins for the west Romans in 1052 with Pope Gregory VII.

The Tridentine reform is demonstratedly a departure from, rather than, a continuation of the Catholicism which preceded it. Similarly Vatican II represents a shift from the tradition of Omnia, Ubique et Semper of the Vincentian Canon: a reform of the Tridentine reform which is a reform of the Gregorian reform: a soup of the soup of the soup of the duck, a simulation of a simulacrum of a similitude. It is a continuing revolution from the deposition of Holy Tradition with an eye to accommodating the world and its fashions.

Thus the problems current in the Roman Catholic Church are systemic and will not of themselves be corrected by hierarchical formalism, the legalism that has come to characterize the Roman Church. These maladies in the Roman Catholic Church can only be fixed by retracing its steps to its origins in Orthodoxy and reassuming a proper relationship with the Church that it divorced itself from when it excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1054 during Divine Liturgy at the Hagia Sophia. This act effectively severed Rome from the True Vine and the subsequent withering is the product, a barren fig tree encumbering the soil.

In short, I am doing my part, by recognizing that for all the good in the Roman Catholic Church, the ills that befall it and which surround it have arisen by the result of the presumption of Papal supremacy and the misguided understanding of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, both of which being more than mere formalities are in fact heresies, the first being an heresy regarding the ecclesial body of Christ its nature and composition, the second being an heresy with regard to the distinct person of the Holy Siprit and the relationships between the persons of the Godhead Holy Trinity.

While I cannot change the world around me I can choose to believe and worship rightly, with and within Orthodoxy.