I appreciate the kind spirit of your question. I found Rollins’ answer to the question to be so fuzzy, I honestly had a difficult time understanding exactly *what* he was saying. “Exploring life through the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Huh?

Scripture speaks with clarity and potency about what being a Christian is. Therefore, I am troubled when someone such as Mr. Rollins has an opportunity to speak with clarity and potency and instead gives me “soggy bread.”

Hope that helps. thanks.

The lack of clarity in this interview is my fault. What I am really wanting to do is to re-affirm the usefulness of the word by showing that it can be (re)interpreted outside a strictly epistemological frame. Etymologically speaking the word is generally associated closely with creeds etc., however I am interested in the undecidability at work in the word between doxa as belief and doxa as praise.

By saying that I think there is a more ancient tradition which affirms orthodoxy as ‘right praise’ (a definition which, of course makes room for epistemology without giving it the best seat) I am referring to the idea that this resonates with what Jesus was up to.

I am adopting a similar strategy to the one I used regarding the word ‘heresy’. While understanding that the word generally refers to something bad I would argue that there is a positive revolutionary potential housed within it that I am keen to explore.

By returning to the revolutionary event hinted at in the word ‘orthodoxy’ I am rejecting the orthodoxy/orthodpraxis distinction. For I would argue that both are already at work within the word orthodoxy itself.

How do we know what life is without a correct definition which leads to doctrinal belief?

How do we know what love is without a correct definition which leads to a doctrinal belief?

Can one be sincere in their worship of God and yet be wrong?

The idea that one can be a Christian and yet not adopt a Christian worldview is somewhat of a weird thing to say.

I absolutely believe that mere affirmation of creeds is not enough, one’s life must be transformed by truth (sanctified) if one truly is a believer in Christ.

But to somehow disconnect living the truth from believing the truth and say this is what Christ (or any prophet or apostle) taught is absurd. Correct belief and correct worship are interconnected and inseperable.

Well, on orthodoxy being right praise. Ortho-doxy is not built upon orthos + doxa/praise but more on orthos + dokeo/doxa/opinion, and the latter is about right thinking. The two work hand in hand, in fact, and bad thinking will not lead to right praise.

And, lexicographically and historically speaking, is it really accurate to say doxa means praise rather than belief, or even praise more than belief? It has been a few years since my year of NT Greek, but my foggy memory and a quick internet search suggest otherwise.

I’m a philosophy student now, and we talk about funny things like ‘reliable doxastic practices’, which has to do with being careful about how your beliefs are formed. Here doxastic simply means ‘pertaining to belief or things like beliefs’.

Philosophers, at least those of us who don’t have a belly full of the Continental Cool-Aid, get worried when people accuse things of being ‘Enlightenment-influenced’.

And regardless of how Jesus used the word ‘truth’, the question of the truth of statements like ”God is reconciling the world to himself in Jesus” remains meaningful and important. Jesus used ‘truth’ to refer to the real, to himself as the reality to which the types and shadows in the OT theocracy pointed. Fine. That is a great way to use the word! You can use it that way too, if you like! But there is something else for which the word ‘truth’ is used. And this thing, whatever it is exactly, can’t be dumped just because Jesus wasn’t referring to it when he used the word ‘truth’ in those passages. Jesus was simply talking about something different.

Early Church history shows that a lot of the activity in the Church was focused on correct belief vs. heresy. The early councils and much of the Patristic writings were focused on dealing with the various “wrong beliefs” and correcting them.

Peter’s view of orthodoxy does not have historical merit.