Preface

A review owes its readers two things: a fair account of what a book says, and an honest judgment of whether it is true. Rock and Sand, by Archpriest Josiah Trenham, deserves both. It is the work of a learned man,¹ it is clearly written, and it asks questions that matter a great deal. Where does final authority lie? What is the Church? How is a sinner saved? What is baptism, and who should receive it? A book that asks such questions should not be waved aside. It should be answered.

The answers given here come from a Baptist, and it is better to say so at the start. No one writes from nowhere. Trenham writes as an Orthodox priest and does not pretend otherwise. This review is written from the other side of the table and does not pretend otherwise either. But a man may hold his own position firmly and still describe his neighbor’s position fairly. That is the aim of these pages. Where Trenham is right, the review says so. Where he is wrong, it tries to show why, using evidence the reader can check.

This review is a defense, not an attack. Its subject is the book’s arguments, not the author’s character. Nor does it pretend that the differences are small, for they are not. It holds that the official Orthodox teaching on how a sinner is made right with God departs from the gospel of the New Testament, and Section 5 gives the reasons. A disagreement about the gospel cannot be settled by politeness. It can, however, be carried on with courtesy. The apostle Peter told Christians to give a defense of their hope “with humility and fear” (1 Pet. 3:15), and that is the rule these pages have tried to keep.

The Standard

Every contest needs a referee, and much depends on who it is. Trenham’s referee is Holy Tradition as the Orthodox Church receives it. The referee of this review is Scripture: the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, read in their plain sense. Section 1 explains why the choice of referee matters so much, and why Scripture is the one referee both sides already accept.

The people of Berea set the pattern long ago. When the apostle Paul preached to them, they “examined the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were true” (Acts 17:11).² If an apostle could be checked in that way, so can a priest, and so can a reviewer.

A Note on the Bible Used in This Review

Out of courtesy to the author, and to readers who are drawn to the Orthodox Church, I have quoted Scripture from the translation that Rock and Sand itself uses: The Eastern / Greek Orthodox Bible.³ There is a second reason. An argument is strongest when it is made with the other side’s own tools. No reader should be able to set this review aside on the ground that it depends on a different Bible. The New Testament of the Orthodox Church contains the same twenty-seven books as the New Testament read in Baptist churches, and every argument in these pages can be made from it.

The Orthodox Old Testament is translated from the Greek Septuagint, and some of its chapters are numbered differently from those in most English Bibles. Where this review refers to such a passage, the footnote gives both numbers. The Orthodox Old Testament also contains several books that Baptists do not accept as Scripture. This review does not quote them.

A Note on Terms and Sources

Trenham often appeals to “the Holy Fathers,” the Christian teachers of the early centuries. This review calls them “early Christian writers,” except when describing Trenham’s own view.⁴ Their writings are valuable evidence of what Christians believed and practiced in the early centuries. They are cited here as witnesses, never as authorities equal to Scripture, and the review does not claim that they always agreed with one another or with Baptists.

Appendix A is a documented list of factual errors, faulty reasoning, and loaded language in Rock and Sand, arranged by chapter. The footnotes refer to it by chapter, category, and item number, for example, “Appendix A, Ch. 4, Misuse of Scripture 1.” Page numbers refer to the third edition of Rock and Sand (2018).