Jay Dyer is the king of the online orthobros, a deserved title from his reign as the most prolific Eastern Orthodox apologist on the internet. He in also a right wing influencer outside of religious debate. As such, his appearance on Tucker Carlson is arguably overdue by the time it would air on July 13.
The beginning of the interview would feature Dyer’s bizarre hot take that the Byzantine Empire was the greatest empire of all time. This is a convenient take for an orthobro, but the Byzantine Empire was the declining Eastern Roman Empire. With enemies on all sides, it persisted several hundred years after the fall of Rome, but all of its periods of restoration, most notably the Justinian Restoration, were short-lived, and most generations suffered either massive military defeat or civil war. It was an Empire of managed decline and remarkable endurance. But this is hardly the GOAT empire. And its glory days are prior to the schism between Rome and Constantinople.
From there, Dyer argues that Evangelicalism, because of its novelty, is highly susceptible to succumbing to being a mere NGO. Although there are some clear examples of this, it is the older denominations in the United States that exemplify this the most. Catholic Charities is perhaps the largest NGO in the United States, if its various “franchises” were combined under one group. Catholic Charities is one of the biggest open-borders profiteering organizations in the United States, and they even allow Jews to be corporate officers. So Dyer’s claim is fundamentally backwards as mission drift has often turned a once great institution into a whitewashed tomb more than it has a start-up church plant into more than a minute player in the grand scheme of nonprofits.
The biggest headshaker would come from a discussion on nominalism, a metaphysical position that atomizes reality and denies shared essences. Although Protestants correctly recognize salvation as an individual transformation in man, they do not deny shared universals or shared essences. Rather, Protestants rightly reject the excess absurdities of applying them. And medieval thought has found useful concepts such as Ockham’s Razor and eventually the scientific method (empiricism).
Nominalism believes that universals are not real extra-mental things; they are merely names (nomina in Latin) or mental concepts we create to group similar individuals. Dyer uses this explanation to argue that Protestantism rejects shared essences and believes that salvation and righteousness are names given rather than transformational essences.
This falls apart for a number of reasons as a grotesque straw man. Dyer, claiming to have been a Calvinist, should know that Calvinism teaches that human nature, a shared universal, is totally depraved. This alone would restore Protestantism to a moderate realism position, much like Thomas Aquinas.
Nevertheless, Dyer uses this straw man to attack Penal Substitutionary Atonement and justification as doctrines of nominalism that reduce salvation to mere legal statuses. Dyer goes so far as to argue that Evangelicalism does not believe that salvation confers a change of essence. This is his most wrong take on Protestantism yet, as Evangelicalism’s use of “born again” and its understanding of the Holy Spirit denote a clear understanding that the Christian life entails a change in essence for the believer. Even secular surveys recognize “Born Again Christian” as a filter for public polling, a stratum that generally narrows down Evangelicals.
If anything, it would be Eastern mysticism that has a more destructive impact on a larger scale. Dyer argues that Evangelicalism separates the Bible from liturgy, deriding the Protestant view as a devotional. But the liturgical view of Scripture is why Catholics and Eastern Orthodox notoriously do not read their Bibles. I will take the fruit of the group that reads the Scriptures and prays more over the fruit of the group that uses mysticism and divine energy seeking as workarounds.
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3 Responses
As tradition is accumulated BS, what alternative do the Eastern Orthodox have except to slander those who try to correct received theology by studying the apostolic writings?
Perhaps a more interesting question is, why is Eastern Orthodoxy now represented by a pseudo-intellectual such as Dyer? Why is kook stuff becoming so popular among younger people? (E.g. Joel Webbon and his promotion of the Heiser mythology?) What is the direction being taken by Christianity if the characteristic of our time is anything goes, so long as it sounds intriguing?
The issue is not so much what Jay Dyer says as the fact that Tucker Carlson is leading a sustained attack on Protestant Christianity. Dispensationalism was just the start but now he is going after Protestantism itself. Why? It is simple. Carlson is a pro-Putin guy (remember his claim that Moscow was better than any American city) and those guys claim that the Russian Orthodox Church is the only legitimate form of Christianity in areas that Russia claims as its own. Of course, this allows Putin to co-opt right wing Orthodox believers worldwide. It is similar to how the Soviet Union co-opted all communist, socialist and Marxist movements. Putin was a KGB guy during the Soviet Union era so he is just adapting his tactics to the modern era. And no, Putin is not advocating actual conservatism. Instead, internally Putin’s regime praises its diversity and embraces Islam (which is 20% of the Russian population as compared to less than 2% of the American population) and would gladly add Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia etc. for even more if given the opportunity. Muslims have far more rights in Putin’s Russia than Protestants do, including top jobs in the government and military. Putin just poses as a paleoconservative fighting to defend western civilization to dupe very ill-informed western conservatives, including not a few guys who have emigrated to Russia and joined their military.
@rano
I am not persuaded that there is that much method to Carlson’s madness. He grew up among the Washington elite, got a big media job somehow, and became convinced that he was special and that his opinions needed to be heard. But I think he fundamentally cannot separate the fake from the real. For example, any foreign threat looks to him like something invented by the neocons. He accepts Moscow elites as representative Russians. He interviews religious kooks of various sorts as those with deep insight into Christianity. I think he just can’t tell the difference.