First of all one needs to understand that natural religion has it orgin in natural theology that starts man with out any revelation from God in the Scripture.
Natural Theology stats with autonomous man and lead to rationalism, existentialism, mysticism, fideism, naturalism. The problem with comparative religious studies is that people are using the same words but with different meanings. So there have been different systems of naturalism theology:
1. East – Plato > mysticism > Eastern Orthodoxy
2. West – Aristotle > Rationalism or Empiricism > Roman Catholicism
3. Islam – Paganism > Emotionalism
This is why Biblical Christianity condemns Natural Theology (Psalm 147:1-20). The gospel is at stake in critiquing Eastern Orthodoxy.
Eastern Orthodoxy churches were the first seeker churches because they looked to the pagan community to dictate ways of worship that would attract them. This lead the church to assign humanistic philosophic meanings to Biblical words. The culture swallowed up the church when the church tried to relate to the culture by over contextualization. An example of this is the venerating icons. Orthodoxy was also the first emergent Church in that they started to prefer humanistic philosophers over Scripture writers. They became so relativistic that true truth became unknowable. They looked to pagan philosophy to dictate what should be preached. This led Orthodoxy away from propositional revelation in Scripture to natural theology where man is the origin of all truth, meaning, justice, morals, and beauty.
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