"And, I suspect you'd acknowledge that the Roman lens and the Orthy lens are not necessarily more pure and holy than the Protesty lens. If you wouldn't acknowledge that, then the bias disease is well entrenched in your lens as well."
I can't speak to the Roman lens, except to say that at least for a good long while it was pretty generally the same lens that the East was looking through. protestantism was a reaction to Roman practices and what it saw as the theological underpinnings of the practices they found lacking or destructive. There was also a pretty healthy dose of politics involved. In the East, at least among the Fathers and the council fathers, you don't see that in the same way. Certainly there was and is a lens, but it is a lens which recognized the culture and language within which the NT was written, something which simply wasn't true with the 16th century reformers. For that matter, it wasn't true with +Augustine, whose own No. African/Latin background was very different from that of the Eastern Fathers and that shows in what he wrote. I'm not ready to say that the lens of the Eastern Fathers was "pure" or "holy" or even clear. They saw, "as through a glass darkly" but likely, because they were where they were and spoke the language they spoke and very regularly fought with the Emperor, and each other, that glass might well have been less dark than in the West and their scriptural interpretations less subject to "spin" than further West and later on.
They saw, "as through a glass darkly" but likely, because they were where they were and spoke the language they spoke and very regularly fought with the Emperor, and each other, that glass might well have been less dark than in the West and their scriptural interpretations less subject to "spin" than further West and later on.
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I could believe SOME MEASURE of that. But I'm fairly sure the implications and size of said measure would be different in my view.