What is Eastern Orthodoxy?

Question 09042.

Eastern Orthodoxy is the Christian tradition most Western believers know least about, and that ignorance runs both ways. Ask an average British evangelical what Eastern Orthodoxy teaches and you will usually get something about icons and beards. Ask an Orthodox believer what Baptists believe and you may get something equally thin. Since a growing number of restless young evangelicals in Britain and America are now converting to Orthodoxy, the question has stopped being an academic one.

I want to describe this tradition fairly before I say where I part company with it. Nobody is helped by a caricature, and there is a great deal in Orthodox Christianity that a Protestant can admire without hesitation. But there are also differences that touch the gospel itself, and I am not going to smooth those over to sound generous.

Where Eastern Orthodoxy Came From

The Christian world of the first millennium had five great centres: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Language, politics and geography slowly pulled the Latin West and the Greek East apart. By the ninth century the two halves of Christendom were arguing over the filioque clause, whether the Nicene Creed should say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or from the Father alone. Behind that argument sat a much larger one about whether the bishop of Rome held authority over the other patriarchs.

The breach came in 1054, when legates of the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated one another. That date is neat but a little misleading; the separation had been developing for centuries and was not felt as final by ordinary believers for a long while afterwards. The sack of Constantinople by Western crusaders in 1204 did far more lasting damage to relations than the events of 1054 ever did.

Eastern Orthodoxy today is a family of self-governing national churches, Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Antiochian and others, in communion with one another and recognising the patriarch of Constantinople as first among equals rather than as a supreme head. That is a structure worth noticing. Whatever else divides us, the Orthodox have never accepted a single universal bishop with jurisdiction over the whole church.

How Eastern Orthodoxy Understands Authority

This is the heart of the matter, and everything else follows from it. Eastern Orthodoxy locates authority in Holy Tradition, understood as the living life of the Spirit in the church across the centuries. Scripture sits inside that Tradition rather than above it. So do the seven Ecumenical Councils, the writings of the Church Fathers, the liturgy, the canons and the icons.

An Orthodox theologian will tell you, quite reasonably, that the church produced the canon of Scripture and that no one reads the Bible without a tradition of interpretation. The point has some force. I do not read my Bible in a vacuum either, and pretending otherwise would be self-deception.

But there is a difference between acknowledging that we all stand in a tradition and making that tradition a second source of revelation which cannot be corrected by Scripture. That is where I cannot follow Eastern Orthodoxy. If Scripture is God-breathed and Tradition is not, then Scripture must be able to sit in judgement on Tradition rather than beside it. Jesus Himself set the written Word against the received tradition of the elders when the two collided (Mark 7:8-13), and He did not treat that as an impious thing to do.

Icons, Beauty and Worship

Walk into an Orthodox church and you are met with images. The iconostasis screens the sanctuary, saints look out from every wall, and worshippers venerate the icons with a kiss and a bow. The seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 defended this practice and distinguished veneration, which may be offered to icons and saints, from worship, which belongs to God alone.

I take the distinction seriously as a statement of intent. I do not think most Orthodox believers imagine that the wood and paint are divine. The argument runs that since God took a real human body in the incarnation, matter can now carry holiness, and to refuse images is to flinch from the incarnation itself.

My difficulty is not with beauty. It is with the second commandment, and with what happens in ordinary practice rather than in careful theology. Israel was told not to make a carved image and bow down to it, and the golden calf incident is instructive precisely because Aaron intended it as a festival to the Lord (Exodus 32:5). The intention was orthodox. The practice was idolatry. Distinctions that hold in a council document have a way of dissolving at the level of the village church, and I do not think that observation is unkind.

Salvation, Theosis and the Nature of the Problem

Eastern Orthodoxy centres its soteriology on theosis, deification, the believer’s growing participation in the divine nature. The favourite text is 2 Peter 1:4, that we may become partakers of the divine nature. Salvation is framed less as a courtroom verdict and more as a healing, a restoration of the image of God in a person who has been made sick by sin and death.

There is genuine biblical material here that Western Christianity has sometimes underplayed. Sin really is a corruption as well as a crime. Salvation really does include transformation and not only pardon. When Paul says we are being changed from one degree of glory to another (2 Corinthians 3:18), he is describing something Eastern Orthodoxy has kept in view while parts of the West have let it fade.

What concerns me is what gets displaced. The New Testament’s language of justification, of a righteousness from God received through faith and reckoned to the believer, is not a Latin overlay on the text. It is Romans and Galatians. If salvation becomes a lifelong process of participation with no decisive verdict already pronounced, assurance becomes very difficult to hold. And in practice, Orthodox pastoral care rarely encourages a believer to say that he knows he has passed from death to life, though 1 John was written so that we might know exactly that.

Sacraments, Baptism and the Church

Eastern Orthodoxy has seven mysteries, or sacraments, understood as genuine channels of grace. Infants are baptised, chrismated and given communion at the same service, so an Orthodox baby receives the Lord’s Supper from the beginning of life. Baptism is regenerative in Orthodox teaching; it is the moment of new birth rather than a picture of it.

I hold, with the New Testament, that baptizo follows faith and confesses it. Every baptism in Acts is the baptism of somebody who has believed. That is not a small disagreement about timing; it changes what a church is. A congregation of the baptised who cannot yet believe is a different body from a congregation of believers who have been baptised. You can read my fuller reasoning on infant baptism and on baptismal regeneration.

Eastern Orthodoxy also holds a real presence in the Eucharist, though it declines to explain the mechanism as precisely as Rome does with transubstantiation. The Orthodox are content to call it a mystery. I find that reticence more attractive than the Latin scholastic account, but the practical result is similar: the elements are adored, and the memorial character that Paul emphasises in 1 Corinthians 11 recedes.

Where I Genuinely Admire It

Let me put my cards down. Eastern Orthodoxy has held the deity of Jesus, the Trinity and the bodily resurrection with unwavering firmness for two thousand years, through Islamic conquest, Ottoman rule and Soviet persecution that produced more martyrs than most of us can imagine. That is not nothing.

It has resisted the theological liberalism that hollowed out so many Western denominations in the twentieth century. It takes worship seriously as an act rather than as a warm-up for the sermon. It has kept a sense of reverence and transcendence that much modern evangelical worship has cheerfully thrown away, and I understand exactly why a young believer raised on fog machines finds the liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom a relief.

It has also kept fasting, repentance and the discipline of the Christian life as normal expectations rather than optional extras for the keen. I would rather learn from that than sneer at it.

Where the Difference Is Serious

The differences that trouble me most are not the beards and the incense. They are these. Scripture is not the final authority, which means there is no fixed standard by which the tradition itself can be corrected. Salvation is not received as a settled gift through faith alone, which removes the ground of assurance. Prayer is offered to Mary and the saints, which the New Testament nowhere teaches and which sits uneasily with the one mediator of 1 Timothy 2:5.

And the church itself is identified with a visible institution, so that being outside Eastern Orthodoxy raises questions about being outside salvation. Orthodox writers are usually careful here, saying that they know where the Spirit is but not where He is not, which is a more gracious formula than Rome has often managed. Even so, the identification is there.

These are not secondary matters where believers may cheerfully differ, as with baptismal mode or church government. They touch how a person is put right with God. I can love an Orthodox believer, learn from him and pray with him. I cannot pretend that we are saying the same thing about the gospel.

Talking With Orthodox Friends

If you have Orthodox neighbours or family, start where the New Testament starts. Do not open with icons. Open with Jesus, with the cross, with what He accomplished and how it becomes yours. Ask what they would say if they died tonight and God asked why He should receive them.

Read the Bible together rather than arguing about who owns it. The NET Bible notes on Romans 4 are useful on the language of reckoning and crediting. And do not assume that a person raised in Orthodoxy has never heard the gospel; some have, and some have not, exactly as with people raised in Baptist chapels.

Above all, be honest about what we hold in common. The creeds are not a Protestant invention we tolerate. They are our confession too, and starting there is not a concession. It is the truth.

Prayer to the Saints and the Place of Mary

Eastern Orthodoxy asks the saints in glory to pray for the believer, and it gives Mary a place of particular honour as Theotokos, the God-bearer. That title was fixed at Ephesus in 431 and it is a statement about Jesus rather than about her, defending the truth that the one born of Mary was God. I accept the title in that sense without hesitation, and Protestants who flinch at it have usually not understood what it was defending.

What I cannot follow is the practice built on top of it. Orthodox services address Mary directly, ask her intercession and describe her in terms that go well beyond anything in the New Testament. The defence offered is that asking a saint to pray is no different from asking a living believer to pray for you, which sounds reasonable until you notice what it assumes: that the departed can hear many people at once, in many languages, which is an attribute Scripture reserves to God.

There is also the plain silence of the text. Not one prayer in the New Testament is addressed to anyone but God. Paul asks living churches to pray for him constantly and never once asks the departed. When a practice this central to Eastern Orthodoxy has no example anywhere in the apostolic writings, the burden of proof does not sit with those who decline it.

Why Western Evangelicals Are Converting

The traffic from evangelicalism into Eastern Orthodoxy is small in absolute numbers and worth understanding, because the reasons people give are remarkably consistent. They speak of exhaustion with novelty, of churches that reinvent themselves every few years, of worship that feels manufactured, and of a nagging sense that their tradition began somewhere around 1950 and has no memory beyond it.

They speak of authority too. A believer who has watched three evangelical churches split over interpretation may find the promise of a settled, ancient, unified reading of Scripture enormously attractive. And they speak of seriousness: fasting that costs something, confession that is actual rather than notional, worship that assumes God is present rather than hoping to generate the feeling of it.

I take all of that as a rebuke rather than as an argument. Every one of those complaints describes a failure of Western evangelical practice rather than a defect in evangelical doctrine. Reverence, historical rootedness and spiritual discipline belong to us as much as to anyone, and if believers have to leave in order to find them, we have not been giving them what our own confession requires. Eastern Orthodoxy is not the answer to that failure, but it is a fair diagnosis of it.

Testing the Claim of Unbroken Continuity

The claim that carries most weight in conversation is continuity. Eastern Orthodoxy presents itself as the church of the apostles, unchanged, while Protestantism is a sixteenth-century innovation. Set beside a Baptist chapel built in 1878, the claim has obvious force.

It deserves examination rather than deflection. The Orthodox churches have genuinely preserved a great deal, and their liturgy contains material of real antiquity. But continuity is not the same as identity. The iconostasis, the developed veneration of icons, the settled seven mysteries and the elaborate liturgical calendar all have histories, and those histories are traceable. A second-century believer set down in a modern Orthodox cathedral would find as much unfamiliar as he would in a Baptist chapel, though he would find different things unfamiliar.

This is why the question of authority comes first and everything else follows. If Scripture is the standard, then the age of a practice tells you nothing about its rightness, and the church of every century stands under the same judgement. Eastern Orthodoxy locates the standard inside the tradition, which makes the continuity argument decisive. I locate it in the God-breathed text, which makes the argument interesting but not final.

So, now what?

If you are an evangelical feeling the pull of Eastern Orthodoxy, I understand the appeal, and I would ask you to be honest about what is drawing you. If it is reverence, depth, historical rootedness and a sense that worship should cost something, those are good instincts and your own tradition has resources for them that you may never have been shown. Go and find them.

But if you are being told that Scripture cannot be trusted without an infallible interpreter, and that the verdict of justification cannot be known in this life, then weigh that carefully against Romans and Galatians before you move. What you gain in beauty you may lose in assurance, and assurance is not a Western luxury. It is what the apostle John wrote his letter to give you.

I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.

1 John 5:13 (ESV)

For Further Study

For the historical background, Jaroslav Pelikan’s volume on the Spirit of Eastern Christendom remains the standard survey, and Timothy Ware’s The Orthodox Church is the accessible insider account most converts read. On the evangelical side, Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology handles the authority question with fairness, and Robert Letham’s Through Western Eyes offers a careful Protestant engagement. For the doctrine of justification that stands at the centre of the disagreement, Lewis Sperry Chafer and Charles Ryrie both set out the classical evangelical case with clarity, and Ryrie’s Basic Theology is the easiest entry point for a lay reader.