You make some good points. A couple corrections in case you want to know (though I know that as a doubter, you may not care).

The EO do believe in grace, and the nature of their doctrine doesn’t even allow for a God that looks upon his creation judicially.

Actually they do allow that. Like so many things though, they temper judiciality with other attributes like forgiveness, long-suffering, etc.

Within EO, wrath is considered a metaphor for obtaining a distorted perception of God

Partially. They still do recognize that God has wrath. After all they do have the OT still. Kinda hard to dance around wrath there.

The window for the Church to simply have dropped so many doctrines that the Protestant Evangelicals think they dropped early on, is so small that it is unfeasible that such doctrines held importance in the early Church

Which doctrines, apart from Sola Scriptura, are you meaning here?

There was no centralizing authority at the time either

Oh yes there was so far as we can tell. Not totally centralized of course (a la a papacy) but hierarchical, with bishops and patriarchs.

On a side note, the comparing of Protestant and Orthodox Christianity is much like comparing apples to oranges. They are drastically different. Whoever made the Sola-Gratia comment was clearly speaking in ignorance. The EO do believe in grace, and the nature of their doctrine doesn’t even allow for a God that looks upon his creation judicially. Within EO, wrath is considered a metaphor for obtaining a distorted perception of God that causes one to hate all things good and essentially wallow in self destructive thought and practice for eternity. Much like gollum in LOTR…

In regard to Sola Scriptura, the notion is retarded. Sola scriptura doesn’t have any good reasons to justify the formation of canon, and what should be called scripture in the first place.

It then turns to weak arguments that make presuppositions about God, how although he allows all sorts of other confusing things in the world, such as allowing his Church to fall into error, would have not allowed the sacred scriptures of the church that allegedly fell into error have been accidently canonized books that weren’t scripture.

The window for the Church to simply have dropped so many doctrines that the Protestant Evangelicals think they dropped early on, is so small that it is unfeasible that such doctrines held importance in the early Church.

There would have been a large historical controversy had something like that taken place, and there just wasn’t. There was no centralizing authority at the time either, and no means of mass communication or consolidating of power, so such a change would have been slow coming in that era. There would be evidence of resistance. There is simply nothing.

There is enough early Christian written material left behind to know this. Scholars know what the doctrines of early Christianity were, and Sola-Scriptura wasn’t an essential for the early Church.

The even worse thing about someone like John Piper is that his teachings often contradict one another.

Joshua, I agree, and that is pretty much what I’ve done.

At the same time, I can appreciate studying religion and can find something interesting and beautiful (in some ways) by seeing it as a form of midrash. Something more literary than historic or scientific. And that helps me to better appreciate the relationships I have with Christians, to the extent that we can discuss the religion in a non-dogmatic way.

It seems to me is that religion is nothing more than reinventing a perfect human-like character as the source of everything in the universe as we discover more about the universe. Each piece of new data either fits the character (god) we have already invented and is accepted as “evidence” or it does not fit the character we have invented and is thrown out as bad data (like creationism) or we simply reinvent the character to fit the new data.

Why not just remove the character?

I have read about Christianity using midrash, reinterpreting older texts and traditions, to recast the stories as the “new testament.” And that they were following in a rich tradition of doing this, as the “old testament” authors had the prophets doing with earlier revelations. Revelations built on revelations. This can in a sense be a beautiful thing in a literary tradition of people writing about God. And it can allow a religion to “reinvent” itself to fit the data as times change. I believe that is a fine way to practice religion and to seek God. Or maybe you could say, there is a way “making shit up” can have some sort of redeeming value at some level.

The problem is when that becomes rigid, dogmatic, inflexible. The texts written by 150 AD (or whatever date you choose) and the canon fixed by 400 AD (or whatever date you choose) become authoritative and fixed in time. And then fundamentalism tries to enforce those beliefs on others, and insists it is NOT an invention, it is how God fixed things a certain way at a certain time, and they never change. And everyone must believe them. Or else! For me, that is where religion loses its beauty and becomes coercive and intellectually vacant dreck.

Think about it Rover. If Christians around the globe all claim to know the same God, but disagree on fundamental aspects of his character and how he interacts with the world, then this is good evidence that there is not enough interaction by god with the world to be conclusive about his character.

So, people just start making shit up about him. And as soon as you are making shit up… you might as well all have different gods.

Heck, this is exactly what all the biblical authors were doing: reinventing god to fit the data. God is a 3500+ year invention that keeps being tweaked by each individual sect to fit how they view the world. So each sect ends up with their own “brand” of god with unique characteristics and presents their god as the only one. Of course, they use a lot of the same parts of the invention that work really well (like the resurrection, atonement, etc.) because those pieces of the invention have been proven to be effective in some way.

But its still all invention.