This page is for anyone outside the Orthodox Church who has run into her claims and wants to understand them, or is troubled by them. When the Orthodox Church says she is the Church Christ founded, it can sound arrogant or exclusive. I want to explain what she means, and why I believe it.
A little about me: I grew up Protestant, spent over a decade as a convinced atheist, and was recently received into the Orthodox Church. I’ve only been studying this for about six years, and plenty of people reading this have studied it far longer than I have. I’ll probably state the obvious, but writing it out helps me think. So take this as a friend being honest, not as me being arrogant.
The real disagreement isn’t over any one doctrine. Orthodox and other Christians differ on some things and share a lot, and many Protestants have taken a great deal from the Fathers. We all believe Christ gave the faith whole. Where we differ is how we receive it, and those two ways are incompatible. That’s why comparing where we overlap misses the point. Everything else flows from this one difference.
Here’s how I understand the Protestant way, and tell me if I’ve got it wrong. As Protestants, we’d read Scripture with the Fathers and the creeds, claim them as our heritage, and trust the Spirit to guide us and our churches into the truth. Nobody’s making it up alone. But when the Fathers, the creeds, or two readings of Scripture pull different ways, the final word on which is right still rests with each believer. Nobody can bind him to another theology, and he can’t bind anyone else. If someone in a church like that disagrees on a fundamental, he can go start his own.
One word we’ll need to be careful with is “Church,” because we don’t all mean the same thing by it. The Orthodox mean something visible, with edges: the bishops in communion with each other, and everyone joined to them by baptism and chrismation. That’s the Orthodox Church. I think most Protestants mean all true believers wherever they are, with local churches as visible gatherings of them. But if that’s the difference, it’s the same fork again. On that definition, you have to know which beliefs are right before you can tell who’s in the Church. On the Orthodox one, you find the Church and receive the beliefs from her. So from here on, when I say “the Church,” I mean the first.
The Orthodox Church teaches that she is the Church Christ founded, and my stance follows from that: the Orthodox Church, as a package deal with all that entails, is the revealed and only means by which we come to fully participate in the life of Christ. I don’t get the final word. I receive the faith where God has given it, and let that judge my judgment. That’s what I mean by normative authority: not someone with an opinion about the faith, but a body that has the authority from God to bind us to it. Dcn. Ananias Sorem calls the two ways autonomous and theonomous: reason that stands on its own, or reason that stands under God’s revelation. There’s no neutral ground between them for us to both start from.
Only the second gives me knowledge of what God has revealed, instead of my best guesses. I’ve listened to hundreds of people use the first method, and they disagree on things they all consider fundamental. Appealing to the Spirit doesn’t settle it either. Everyone appeals to His guidance, and we still disagree. A method anyone can use to reach the opposite conclusion leaves each of us with a best guess and no way to tell whose is right. It’s the same bind I was in for over a decade as an atheist: my own reason couldn’t vouch for itself, and neither can any worldview built on each person’s own judgment. So it really is either/or. Either God revealed Himself in a way that binds us, or every Christian decides for himself, and that kind of Christianity can’t account for itself at all. I don’t believe Christ left us like that. If you see a way out of that I’m missing, I’d honestly like to hear it.
You might say I used my own judgment to get here too. I did. But a patient’s judgment gets him to the hospital; it doesn’t write his prescriptions. My judgment brought me to the Church. It doesn’t sit over her. That’s the one decision I’ve made: to stop piecing the faith together and receive it where God gave it.
And I’m not here because Orthodoxy is the best-organized Christianity or the one I find most convincing. I’m here because it’s what Christ and the apostles actually set up. Christ didn’t write a book. He founded a Church, gave it the Spirit and sent the apostles. They didn’t leave a book and tell everyone to rebuild the Church from it. They appointed bishops and handed on a faith and a way of worship, and when a real question came up, the apostles and elders settled it together, for the churches: “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us.”
The canon is the clearest example, because on the New Testament, Orthodox and Protestants hold the same list. The difference is why it binds us. The New Testament came out of the Church the apostles founded: written within churches that already had bishops and already worshipped together, and read aloud in that worship. No council vote or reader’s criteria chose the canon. The canon is the books the churches received from the apostles and read in worship; the lists came later and described what was already being read. The one who chose them was the Holy Spirit, in the life of the Church.
For me, that’s what makes the list binding. The Church that read these books is Christ’s body, where the Spirit lives, “the pillar and ground of the truth.” Her receiving them was the Spirit choosing them, the same way the apostles could write “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us.” So I don’t check her work; I receive it.
A Protestant would say the Spirit chose them too, and I agree. But he can’t say it the same way, because he doesn’t grant the Church that authority. So the list binds him only as far as he’s convinced the early churches got it right, which is his judgment about her judgment. Either her reading was Spirit-led enough to bind him, and then it binds him on more than the books, or the list is a well-informed best guess that could be wrong. R.C. Sproul, to his credit, says it plainly: the Protestant canon is “a fallible collection of infallible books.”
The Fathers lived this way. They didn’t piece the faith together from their own reading; they received it. Irenaeus said there’s no need to look for the truth anywhere else, because the apostles deposited all of it in the Church, like a rich man putting his money in a bank. The Fathers submitted to their bishops, to the communion of bishops and to the councils. So allegiance to the Church isn’t separate from allegiance to Christ. It’s the same allegiance: submitting to a real bishop, receiving the councils, reading Scripture as the Church reads it, praying to the Theotokos and the saints, venerating icons and kissing relics, confessing to a priest, receiving His actual body and blood, and receiving the mysteries only where He has placed them. I don’t get to sort these into essentials and extras and rebuild them somewhere else. That’s the package I mean. These aren’t extras around the faith; they’re how we take part in His life.
Baptism shows the same thing. Many Protestants are close to the Fathers on what baptism is. The difference is where the Fathers received it: within the visible Church, Christ’s body, divine and human. After my baptism I believed exactly what I believed before. What changed is that I’m now in Christ’s body. My beliefs drove me to the font; they didn’t join me to Him. Israel worked the same way. A boy was circumcised on the eighth day, long before he could believe anything, and a Gentile who wanted to eat the Passover had to be circumcised first, however sincerely he already believed. What joined either one to God’s people was the rite God gave, not a list of beliefs. If I changed my mind and was baptized into another church with all the same theology, I still wouldn’t be in His body. I’d actually be worse off, because I’d have known what Christ asks and turned it down for a reconstruction.
I grew up in a church that taught that being saved required saying the sinner’s prayer, and it taught double predestination. That gave me years of anxiety, and I wouldn’t have it today, because the Church teaches that salvation is healing, and she’s the hospital where it’s found in its fullness. But I didn’t just find a teaching I like better, even though I do. If that were all, I’d be trading one opinion for another, and the new one could be just as wrong as the old. What changed is that I stopped piecing it together and came under the Church, Christ’s actual body, which has the authority to say what’s true.
So this isn’t arrogance, team sports, or my beliefs against yours. It isn’t up to me, or any of us, to decide what Christianity is. None of this is a claim about anyone’s salvation; the Church says where the Church is, not who is saved, and I don’t know how God will judge anyone. God can heal people outside the hospital, and I believe He does. But the Church is the hospital He built, and the mysteries are the medicine He prescribed, where He gives Himself in His fullness. Healing outside it is His mercy, not the way He asked us to come to Him. I believe the Spirit is at work in many people outside her, and I affirm every way He’s leading them toward the Church: visible, with bishops and boundaries, guided by the Holy Spirit, the body of Christ.
Everyone is responsible for someone: a parent for their children, a child for their parents, a friend for a friend, a pastor for his people, and each of us for ourselves. If the Church’s claim is true, that responsibility includes looking into it honestly and bringing the people we love to receive the faith in its fullness. People have come in that way: whole families together, and even whole congregations with their pastors.
Here’s my question for anyone outside the Church: when two Christians both pray, and the Spirit seems to lead them in incompatible directions, what settles which of them He actually led, in a way that doesn’t come back to one of them deciding?
No rush on any of it. My only ask is that you try to see it from the inside before you decide, because I don’t see a way around it. Paul-bot below can take the first round of questions, and the best next step is to visit an Orthodox parish and stand through a Divine Liturgy. — Paul
