Orthodox Reflections

By Nicholas – member of the Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America

The last remaining child at home, after two years of virtual high school, wanted to go back to attending a physical campus. Given that the local public high school is over crowded, dangerous, and academically deficient, private school was the only real option. Fortunately, a quaint little private Christian K-12 (Protestant, of course) is close to the house and affordable. At orientation, the history teacher remarked that he liked to start his classes with scripture readings, and that students could either bring their own Bibles or borrow one. As soon as we got in the car, I asked my wife to order our son his own copy of the Orthodox Study Bible. We had copies at home already, but he needed one to take to school everyday.

The OSB arrived a few days before school started. My son is cradle Orthodox, and has had very little exposure to Protestantism. I usually do the scripture readings at home, so some orientation was in order. I opened the Bible, and pointed out the footnotes at the bottom of the pages which explained verses the OSB committee had felt needed clarification.

“Here is how this is going to work in class,” I explained, “The teacher is going to pick a Bible verse and read it. After he does, he will say some variation of the following words, ‘this is what this Bible verse means to me….’ He will then proceed to give you his interpretation of this scripture. It may be something he came up with on his own under the supposed guidance of the Holy Spirit. It may be something he saw on YouTube or social media. Maybe he read it in a book, or his own Bible has footnotes. Whatever. The point is for any verse, check for a footnote. If there is one, read the footnote. If the teacher’s personal interpretation is different, ignore him and go with the teaching of the Orthodox Church. Don’t be disruptive about it, but remember that you are not there to learn Theology from these people. They aren’t bad people, just lost, and we don’t need you following them in their blindness. If he asks you for your opinion on a verse, and you are not sure what to say, read the footnote out loud if there is one. Sometimes there will be footnotes about the whole chapter or series of verses that can help, even if one specific verse is not footnoted. So be sure to look around in the text. When in doubt, decline to offer an opinion. Also, see all these articles in this table of contents? They explain key teachings of the Orthodox Church on all kinds of topics such as salvation, marriage, the nature of the church, etc. If you get into a discussion on a topic that you need more information about, always check for a specific article. Never try to represent the teaching of the Orthodox Church unless you are sure about what you are saying. Never accept any teaching unless you are sure it is congruent with Orthodoxy. Never mistake your personal opinions for the teachings of the Orthodox Church.”

After that bracing lecture, I handed him the Bible. When I picked him up after the first day of school, we talked about his day and about whether or not the history teacher had read a Bible verse to the class. The conversation went like his:

Me: “Did the history teacher read a Bible verse?”

Son: “Yeah, he did.”

Me: “Did he do the thing we talked about?”

Son: “Yep. He even used the exact same words you said he would.”

Me: “Was there a footnote on the verse?”

Son: “Yes, I read it.”

Me: “Was the teacher’s personal interpretation of the verse close to the footnote?”

Son, busting out laughing: “Uh, no. Not even related.”

Being cradle Orthodox has so many advantages. My cradle children never had to unlearn decades of Protestant indoctrination. They instinctively gravitate to the Church as their home. Things I had to consciously learn, they grasp intuitively from a lifetime of prayer, fasting, altar service, Divine Liturgy, weekly homilies, Bible readings at home, studying Church history, Orthodox summer camp, confession, and reading the lives of saints.

On the other hand, however, we live in a society that is thoroughly saturated by Protestantism. Having a Protestant background allowed me to anticipate what my son was going to experience in a Christian school, and prepare him for it. This prevented him from experiencing the kind of shock that one cradle Orthodox described in a July 2022 article on Orthodox Reflections entitled Understanding and Defending the Orthodox Faith:

The fact that my fellow students were using the Bible to denigrate the Church was shocking to me. What was even more shocking was my realization that I didn’t know how to respond. Up to that point, no one had equipped me to successfully explain and defend the Orthodox Faith. It shook me up so badly, that I wondered if the kids who seemed to know so much more about the Bible than me might be right. Maybe the Orthodox Church was wrong after all.

Back when Gen X were children, there was no Orthodox Study Bible, so the author of the above referenced article (the son of Russian immigrant parents) had to learn how to cope with Protestant attacks on Church teaching largely on his own. Thanks be to God, we have way more resources available to us today to help our children. Our job as Orthodox parents is to make sure we get them into the hands of our children, and no resource is more valuable than an Orthodox Study Bible.

As part of preparing our children to live in this society, they need to understand, to at least a basic level, how Protestants think and how they view us. Protestants in America tend to believe a lot of myths about the Orthodox Church. Really, the myths aren’t even about Orthodoxy, of which most are ignorant, but are based on myths taught to them about the Roman Catholic Church. Because Orthodoxy looks superficially similar to Roman Catholicism, Protestants (mostly meaning Evangelicals here, as this applies less to Lutherans and Anglicans) assume we are the same. Therefore, they assume their Biblical “proof texts” (scriptural passages supposedly disproving Church practices and/or teaching) work as equally well against us as they “work” against the so-called “Papists.”

So let’s look at a few of these myths versus the actual truth of Orthodoxy, which our Orthodox children should understand to be ready for the world they live in.

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1. Orthodox Christians Don’t Read and Understand the Bible

The biggest myth, probably foundational to every other one, is that Orthodox Christians do not read and study the Bible. According to Protestants, the Orthodox Church relies on “traditions of men,” which supposedly evolved in the first few centuries of the Church, and which are mostly contradicted by the scriptures. If we Orthodox only read the Bible for ourselves, then we would see that clearly, so their thinking goes. Which is why religious discussions with Protestants usually devolve into “proof texting” – quoting Bible verses back and forth to prove points. Protestants assume that merely exposing Orthodox Christians to the scriptures is sufficient to convince them that their own Church is in error.

This assumption is wrong, obviously. At each Divine Liturgy, Orthodox Christians read a minimum of one passage from an Epistle and one from a Gospel. These two passages are in addition to the text of the Divine Liturgy, much of which is drawn word-for-word from the scriptures. The priest’s homily is typically focused on explaining and analyzing either the Gospel, the Epistle, or both. The two daily readings are often supplemented with additional scripture readings, depending on the Feast Day, season, etc. It is, in fact, quite common for Orthodox services to feature multiple readings from both the Old and New Testaments. It is impossible for an Orthodox Christian to go to Church and avoid the Bible. Scripture readings are at the heart of everything we do.

Further, all the major events of the New Testament, and many in the Old, are depicted all over our churches in our iconography. The icons are both our history, and our Theology, presented in a way even young children can understand. It is one thing to occasionally read the Gospel accounts of the Incarnation, and quite another to come face to face with the reality of the Incarnation every single time you enter your Church. Icons make the Bible stories come to life. They put us in the stories, transforming our perception, while deepening our understanding of God’s plan of salvation for the human race, and through us all of creation.

Which hits harder – reading about the Transfiguration, hearing about the Transfiguration, or actually seeing it? Fortunately, the Orthodox Church recommends all of the above. 

Sunday school, with some form of Bible study, is a thing in many parishes. So are mid-week Bible study classes for adults and teens. Those are just the in-person options. Online, you can find priests and Orthodox Theologians leading more Bible studies than anyone could consume in a lifetime. These Bible studies often focus on explaining the daily scripture readings, which the Orthodox Church publishes and encourages all Orthodox Christians to read. Instead of discouraging Orthodox Christians from “reading the Bible for themselves,” the Church literally does the exact opposite.

Because of the many ways in which scripture comes into our lives as Orthodox Christians, even believers who practically never read on their own still have a high knowledge of the contents of the Bible. A much higher level of knowledge, in my experience, than the majority of the “scripture alone” Protestants. If an Orthodox Christian faithfully follows the discipline of reading the recommended daily scriptures, he will have more Biblical literacy than most Protestant Bible College graduates.

2. Scripture Interprets Itself

Orthodox Christians do not lean to their own personal understanding of the scriptures. In fact, we are warned explicitly against doing so by the Apostle Peter in his 2nd Epistle, “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.” (2 Peter 1:20) The Church, being the ground and pillar of truth, has been led by the Holy Spirit to preserve the true Apostolic Christian Faith. Part of the teaching of the Apostles was explicitly recorded in the New Testament. But not all of it. Orthodox Christians freely state that our understanding of the scriptures is formed by the fullness of Orthodox Tradition, preserved via hymns, writings and homilies of Patristic Fathers (particularly those close to the Apostolic Era), liturgical texts, Church practices, iconography, the works of Church Councils, and more. It is on the basis of all these pillars of the faith that the Orthodox Church can definitively agree on the proper interpretation of scriptures.

Protestants often make the case that scripture does not need to be interpreted. Rather, so they say, the meaning of all verses should be clear to the average reader through the leading of the Holy Spirit. If scripture really needed no interpretation, then everyone would simply read a verse and sit down. Yet, no one just reads a Bible verse out loud to a group. A high school teacher feels the need to read a verse of scripture, and immediately follow that up with what that verse means to him. Protestant pastors preach lengthy sermons interpreting Biblical passages for their congregations. Protestants have frequent Bible studies to help their church members understand scripture. Protestant pastors and Theologians produce hefty books, blogs, and podcasts to further assist in building Biblical literacy.

The conflict between Orthodoxy and Protestantism is not that we ignore the Bible, while the Protestants follow it. The conflict is that the Orthodox Church interprets the Bible according to 2,000 years of unbroken Orthodox Tradition, while Protestants erroneously claim to “just follow the Bible”. What most of them fail to understand is that most Protestants interpret the Bible based on some kind of tradition, be they Baptists, Pentecostals, Calvinists, or something else. A Biblical text never “stands alone.” You will always interpret any Biblical text based on your mental paradigm, whether you consciously realize that or not. Many of the traditional Protestant Biblical interpretations date back only to the 16th Century “reformers” (not the Early Church), who were driven more by anti-Roman Catholic bias than sound, historical scholarship. Their errors become modern Protestants’ errors through following the traditions they founded. Further, more than a few Protestants cling to Biblical interpretations derived from personal “revelations” (usually visions or dreams), or from the personal “revelations” of preachers they follow, that have absolutely no historical or scholarly basis at all.

It was not just anti-Catholic bias that fueled the rise of interpretative errors that have wound up being foundational to Protestant traditions. Faulty Biblical interpretation also arose due to problems stemming from translating the Bible into modern languages. English translations, for example, can be misleading when compared to the true meaning of verses originally written in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew. This is simply the nature of translations. Unfortunately, Protestant preachers / Theologians, over the past 500 years, have crafted entire traditional Protestant belief systems on the basis of misunderstood Bible verses. The “I can interpret scripture all by myself” crowd are busy creating new errors as we speak

Further, English has been a very dynamic language over the past few hundred years. English words have changed meanings, and some have dropped out of use altogether. Older translations, often favored by “traditional” Protestants, can be hard for them to read and understand. Why Protestants who struggle with Shakespeare think they can infallibly understand the King James Version is a mystery.

In addition, misunderstanding the cultural context in which the scriptures arose has caused no end of problems. How much do most modern Americans really understand about the 1st Century Near East? Then again, how much did the Protestant preachers a century or two ago (whose belief systems many modern Protestants follow) understand? Further, how much do Protestants really know about the cultural and Theological struggles between early Christian Hebrew and Gentile believers? Struggles that prompted many of the Pauline Biblical passages concerning the “law” and “works of the law”? Not much about any of that is the honest response. Such ignorance leads to all kinds of embarrassing misreading of the Bible.

Fortunately for us, the Orthodox Church has maintained a continuous contact with the original scriptural languages, and with the Near Eastern cultural context in which the scriptures were written.

Unfortunately, most Protestants can’t see the simple fact that scripture not only does not interpret itself, but that their interpretations of key scriptural passages are always based on some kind of tradition (when not wholly based on personal revelations). This blindness causes Protestants to accuse Orthodox Christians, when their interpretations of scriptural passages vary from ours, of “not reading the Bible,” or “not following the Bible”, etc. To them, their interpretations are just the plain, literal reading of the Bible that everyone should agree on. That Orthodox Christians know the Bible, understand the Bible, and yet have completely different interpretations of key Biblical passages are facts that simply do not compute for them.

Which, frankly, is surprising for any Orthodox Christian who ever had the privilege of watching, for example, a Pentecostal try to argue via “proof texting” with a Calvinist. Same Bible. Same verses. Wildly different interpretations. These intra-Protestant arguments can go on for centuries. Such conflicts illustrate why “just reading the Bible” has produced tens of thousands of Protestant denominations in the U.S. alone. No one within Protestantism has any authority to actually settle any of the disputes between all these mutually antagonistic, squabbling groups. Had the Early Church been this chaotic, then Christianity would have long ago collapsed and we’d all be worshipping Allah or Krishna or maybe the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster.

For Protestants, the True Faith of Christ disappeared from the Earth for some 1,400 years. However, they are positive that after that massive gap in time, they can still totally trust the books the “apostate” Church preserved and canonized for them. They also have a perfect understanding of those books. There is no way, in their opinion, that their image of God could be utterly distorted through their own misreading of the Bible. 

Quoting Bible verses to Orthodox Christians won’t work to convert them, but Protestants don’t realize that. Conversely, quoting scriptures to Protestants also won’t work, as they have traditional anti-Orthodox / anti-Roman Catholic interpretations for all the verses which explicitly affirm Orthodoxy. They cling to those interpretations as tightly as Orthodox cling to the doctrine of the Trinity. Rather than “proof texting”, a better approach might be to point out that Orthodox Christians engage intimately with the scriptures, but that our traditional interpretations are often different than the various Protestant traditional interpretations.

3. The Orthodox Church Has Added to the Christian Faith

Practically all Evangelical Protestant denominations, so-called “non-denominational” groups of churches, and Judaizing cults (Seventh Day Adventists) teach that the Early Christian Church of the Book of Acts:

• Interpreted the Old Testament and New Testament the same as these groups do today
• Worshipped the way these groups do today (minus modern accoutrements such as electric guitars, jumbotrons, and elaborate stage lighting)
• The Early Church had no ruling hierarchy, the same as these groups have none today

These groups are aware that the Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church, and the Oriental Orthodox Church are ancient. They are also aware that all three of those Churches are very similar to each other, while having almost nothing in common with them. How can that possibly be? For Protestants, who want to remain Protestant, the only answer is that the Early Church was corrupted at some point. One key element of that corruption was losing the ability to properly interpret the scriptures. Another was the incorporation of so-called pagan influences such as liturgical worship, hierarchy, veneration of saints, infant baptism, etc. When this collapse of the Church into apostasy is thought to have occurred varies among the plethora of competing Protestant traditions. Practically all of them, however, believe it was a process that was complete by the 4th Century.

Many Protestants are convinced the Early Church was Protestant, and that it somehow persisted somewhere, in some form, throughout 1,400 years of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Catholic “domination”. They can’t find any trace of it historically, but they have absolute faith that it was there.

Most Protestants absolutely ignore the ante-Nicene Patristic writers who bore witness to an Early Church that looks remarkably like the Orthodox Church of today. According to most Protestants, the Church Fathers, writing as early as the late 1st Century, were already espousing so-called “traditions of men” such as liturgical worship, the centrality of the bishops in Church life, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the need to cooperate synergistically with God in our salvation. If the Church Fathers, some of whom were taught directly by the Apostles, disagree with modern Protestant practices and Biblical interpretations – then the problem must be the Church Fathers. The problem simply cannot be that traditional Protestant practices and beliefs are based on interpretations of the New Testament that are fundamentally wrong. Many Protestants truly believe that they understand the New Testament better than, for example, Clement the bishop of Rome (a contemporary of the Apostles Peter and Paul) who wrote about Apostolic succession (often criticized as a “tradition of men” by those who believe it is permissible for them to start their own churches) at the end of the 1st Century:

The only known genuine extant writing of Clement is his letter to the church at Corinth (1 Clement) in response to a dispute in which certain presbyters of the Corinthian church had been deposed. He asserted the authority of the presbyters as rulers of the church because they had been appointed by the Apostles. His letter, which is one of the oldest extant Christian documents outside the New Testament, was read in the church at Corinth, along with other epistles, some of which later became part of the Christian canon. This letter is considered to be the earliest affirmation of the principle of apostolic succession.

For Orthodox Christians, this is absolutely bonkers. The Protestants don’t just “believe in Jesus.” They don’t just “believe in the Bible.” They believe in their traditional interpretations of the Bible, which causes them to reject authentic Christian faith and practice, in favor of traditions made up post-16th Century. The way in which Protestants conduct worship services, baptisms (including at what age), ordinations, prayers for the sick, weddings, conversions, and so much more are not actually in the Bible at all. For example, there is no explicit set of instructions in the New Testament as to how to conduct a Sunday morning worship service. Yet, despite that fact, all Protestants manage to have one. These same Protestants will then criticize the Orthodox Divine Liturgy as being “unbiblical”, a “tradition of men”, and even “Pagan”. The Pagan accusation is particularly interesting, given that God Himself established liturgical worship in the Mosaic Tabernacle and the Jerusalem Temple. The Early Christians, all being Hebrews, were formed by Temple worship and the liturgical practices in the Synagogue. The Orthodox Divine Liturgy combines Hebrew liturgical practices with the Eucharist instituted by Christ Himself. It is worship as taught by the Apostles to the first Christian Churches, and preserved by the Orthodox Church until today.

Many Protestant denominations have worship that regularly involves altar calls. A time during the service when people come forward to ask forgiveness for their sins, frequently by repeating a “Sinner’s Prayer.” Ironically, these Protestants often insist they follow only what is in the Bible. There are no altar calls recorded in the New Testament. The various Sinner’s Prayers traditionally used are also not recorded in the New Testament. These churches are also non-sacramental, so the so-called “altar calls” take place at the foot of a stage. Not at an actual altar, as there isn’t one anywhere in the building.

Protestants believe they alone possess the authentic Gospel and authentic Christian practice, despite being broken into tens of thousands of different, often mutually hostile, sects arguing over practically everything. All this division and acrimony stem from misunderstanding the Bible, and the role the Bible actually plays in the life of the Church. The Orthodox Church predates the New Testament. The NT arose within a functioning Church, which has continued in an unbroken historical succession till today – still teaching and practicing the Apostolic Faith in accordance with a proper understanding of the scriptures.

Conclusion

To properly prepare our young people for the world around them, I suggest we need to focus on three things. The first is authentically living our own Orthodox Faith. Our children care far less about what we say, than they care about what we actually do. Do they see us striving to carry our cross, to die daily to sin, to pray unceasingly, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to forgive our enemies, to study the authentic teachings of our Faith? If not, we have to work on ourselves. The historical witness of the saints has taught us that practicing the Orthodox Faith at home is essential to the proper formation of children.

Second, our children must grow to understand the teachings of our Church (using all the tools at our disposal) well enough to articulate them when they are challenged. This is essential for our children to not be deceived. Their defense of the true faith also plants seeds. My conversion, from Pentecostalism to Orthodoxy, began with encountering faithful Roman Catholics. Their erudite explanations of their doctrines germinated in my soul for over a decade, before flowering into a desire to seek the True Gospel in the True Church.

Third, we need to  safeguard our children from the influences of the Protestant / post-Christian society around us. A fish has no idea that it is wet. Our children swim in a Protestant ocean, and it is quite easy for them to swallow bad teaching and practices without realizing it. We have to give our children the spiritual guidance, and spiritual tools, to grow them in the Faith so as to reject errors and not drown in them. Which is why my son carries an Orthodox Study Bible to a Protestant private school everyday, goes to Divine Liturgy every Sunday, prays with the entire family morning and evening, and reads Orthodox material daily.