Three Big Questions for Protestants

Having family that is still Protestant, I sometimes find myself at their church for various reasons. Never at services, but the church is a convenient place to rent for family events. Last time I was there for an anniversary party, I picked up the weekly bulletin and was reading it when the pastor came over to chat. I showed him the schedule for the previous Sunday and asked him, “Where did you learn how to conduct a worship service?”

He laughed and said, “Seminary.”

I then asked him, “Where did the people who taught you how to conduct a worship service learn how to conduct a worship service?”

He started to look uncomfortable. “From the Bible, I guess,” he finally answered.

“This order of worship,” I pointed at the bulletin, “Is in the Bible?”

“Well,” he answered, “It’s based on the Bible.”

“How?” I asked.

At that point, he made an excuse to go see some other guests. I hope I gave him something to think about, without ruining his event for him. It can be tough to be a Protestant pastor since you often really are making it all up as you go along.

As Orthodox Christians we have all the answers. Not us personally. We’re all miserable sinners. But the Church has all the answers. After 2,000 years of guidance by the Holy Spirit, the Church has seen, heard, and responded to everything. There is so much knowledge within the Church that it can be attractive to dump as much of it as possible on our Protestant neighbors.

Which can work, of course, if someone is genuinely seeking to learn about the Orthodox Faith. However, many aren’t. Rather, we often find ourselves up against Protestants who are convinced Orthodoxy is wrong. Rebuffing their assertions sets up arguments, and may not be the best way to go in every case. Which is why asking questions can be an effective way to engage others. Instead of defending Orthodoxy, sometimes asking Protestants to explain aspects of their faith can be very enlightening for them.

Protestantism is ahistorical and self-contradictory. If you can lead people to see that for themselves, the path to Orthodoxy can become clear. For cradle Orthodox, the questions below may seem strange, especially if you are not familiar with common Protestant doctrines. All the more reason to keep reading.

1) Where was your “church” in the early Christian centuries?

Most Protestantism is founded on the same assumption – at some point the historic, visible Christian Church fell away from the True Christian Faith found in the New Testament. This Apostate Church persecuted True Christians, and was only finally overcome via the Protestant Reformation at which point the True Church reappeared. (The Reformation actually didn’t happen in the Orthodox lands, but let’s not quibble over that.)

Answers to when this Great Apostasy occurred vary among low-church Protestants. Some will tell you the 4th Century and blame it all on Constantine. Some will tell you as far back as the close of the Book of Acts. Others pick different dates in between. Few low-church Protestants are willing to claim even the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, though I have met brave Baptists who tried to sell a gathering of Orthodox Bishops as a Baptist convention.

So, if the early Church of the Book of Acts was Baptist or some other flavor of Evangelical, where did it go? Who were its leaders? Who are the writers that testified to its existence? It had to go somewhere, because the visible Church became apostate. So where was the True Church?

This question is a rhetorical trap for low-church Protestants. It really doesn’t matter which timeframe they pick for the slide into apostasy, the problems with their answers are the same. No matter the era, any Protestant researching Church history will quickly discover that the Church was not Baptist or Pentecostal or anything else of the kind. In both the New Testament and the writings of the ante-Nicene fathers, you find a Church that is hierarchical, liturgical, and centered around the Eucharist. The best thing for his soul, that a low-church Protestant can do, is go in search of the historic Christian Church to prove it was Baptist.

The New Testament presents less of a problem for Protestants than ante-Nicene Patristic writings. Protestants have traditional scriptural misinterpretations that have convinced them the Apostles really were Protestants of some flavor or another. They will confidently butcher the interpretation of even the clearest New Testament passage to deny the truth of Orthodoxy. Ante-Nicene Patristic writings, however, are tricky for them. Christian writings from the 1st and 2nd Centuries testify to an Orthodox Faith in full bloom with hierarchy, liturgy, and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Their witness has nothing in common with modern low-church Protestantism, and there is no way to pretend it does.

So where in the historical record is the “True Church” of sing-alongs, grape juice, and praise bands?

Nowhere. 

Many Protestants will simply shut down at this point, as they have no answer for who their spiritual forbears among the early Christians could have been. In fact, many of them have never even thought about that question. Some of them have answers worked out that avoid the True Church being missing for 1,500 or so years. The True Church, according to them, went underground and persisted as a holy “remnant”. There were True Christians “everywhere” or “somewhere” or “hidden in plain sight”. There’s no actual evidence of that, so they can’t tell you who any of the holy “remnant” were, but they are completely convinced they must have existed.

Sometimes Protestants do have a theory about who the “remnant” were. This usually involves claiming multiple heretical groups as having been the “True Church” which was bloodily suppressed by the evil Catholic Church. This belief is most often found among Baptists. Groups frequently included in the “Baptist succession line” (“Trail of Blood”) are the Montanists, Novationists, Donatists, Paulicians, Cathars, Waldenses, Petrobrusians, Arnoldists, Henricians, Hussites (partly), Lollards, and Anabaptists. They got the Anabaptist part right, at least, but they didn’t show up until the 17th Century. As any historically-minded person is aware, the listed groups did not even agree with each other on doctrine, much less with modern Evangelicals such as Baptists. The succession line also often puts the existence of these groups wildly out of chronological order.  Curiously, most of those groups were Gnostics. Which makes any affinity modern Evangelicals feel for their teachings…. interesting. The standard timelines also portray many Orthodox practices and beliefs as later innovations. Reading the ante-Nicene Church Fathers quickly blows that up, firmly establishing that “Catholic” innovations were right there in the 1st and 2nd Centuries.

Once a Protestant starts to ask, “Where was my church in history?”, a crisis of Faith can ensue because the standard Protestant answers to that question are less-than-convincing.

2) If the Bible was meant to stand alone, why is it so incomplete, and where did it come from anyway?

“All we need is the Bible. It is the all-sufficient guide to Christian Faith,” so say many modern Protestants. But at the very beginning of this article, I noted something important.

The Bible does not provide directions on how to run a worship service. Nowhere in the NT does any writer tell you how to do that, yet the Evangelicals have an order of worship. Where did they get it from, if they just believe and practice what is in the Bible?

Here are some other things the NT provides no guidance on:

  • How does one conduct a baptismal service and at what age?
  • How does one conduct an ordination?
  • How does one convert to Christianity? Are there steps? Requirements? What constitutes membership in the Church?
  • How does one prepare for and conduct a wedding?
  • Since Matthew, Mark, and Luke are not signed, how do you know they wrote those Gospels?
  • Which books actually belong in the New Testament? The New Testament doesn’t contain a list. The books in the NT were canonized by the Orthodox Church.
  • The Gospels and the Apostle Paul mentioned other teachings and traditions, what are those since they are not in the NT?

Those are just a few examples. For a set of books that was intended to be “all sufficient”, the New Testament certainly leaves out a lot of important details on how to run a church. Which, frankly, is not surprising. The New Testament arose within functioning Churches. The Churches had been established by the Apostles and their disciples. The local clergy and the people had been taught how to be Christians in-person. Not through a book. There was no need, and really no way, to write down everything that the Apostles spent years teaching people orally and by example. The New Testament books, after they were written and began circulating, were selected for authenticity based on their conforming to what the Church was already doing and teaching. That is why a book such as the “Gospel of Thomas” was rejected, despite being the purported work of an Apostle. Reading “Thomas” in light of Church teaching clearly indicates its Gnostic nature.

The Church created the Bible. The Bible did not create the Church.

Until the 16th and 17th Centuries, that is, when radicals, cut off from an authentic sacerdotal priesthood, had no choice but to invent their own flavors of Gnosticism based on their misreading of the Christian Bible. The newly available printed Bibles really did create those churches, in a twisted sort of way.

Protestants will fight you on this. You will hear all kinds of things from them. For example, the New Testament is the eternal Word of God that dropped from Heaven fully formed. (That is Christ, by the way, Who is the eternal Word of God, and not a collection of books.) Arguing for the NT as a purely divine action, divorced from human history, doesn’t work. Even the hardest shell Baptists imagainable know it doesn’t work.  They know that the Bible arose within living communities, and that the Church selected the books to include, even if they desperately try to avoid admitting that. It is a hard argument to make that the Church which collected, preserved, and canonized the New Testament was, simultaneously, in deep apostasy.

The low-church know that they believe and follow all kinds of traditions that are not recorded in the Bible. Some of these are authentic (names of the Gospel writers, the composition of the canon), but many aren’t. They are also aware, on some level, that their preferred interpretations of scripture are not, in fact, actually scripture. They are traditions of men far removed from the Early Church, and any real study of history will show them that.

The Bible is neither a liturgical handbook nor is it systematic theology. The books of the New Testament were meant to be read within the Church and interpreted by the Church through the leadership of the Holy Spirit with the guidance of Holy Tradition. Any attempt to understand the scriptures outside the Church leads to unavoidable error, which is why we have 30,000 plus denominations in the US alone.

Once a Protestant sees the error of “scripture alone”, he can’t unsee it. Trust me, I’ve been there.

3) How did the first Christians worship?

Modern low-church Protestants don’t think much about how the Early Church worshipped. Not deeply, anyway, as most just assume the Early Church worshipped exactly the way they do. Even the Evangelicals who are very into the Jewish / Hebraic Roots of Christianity, and so realize that Jews use liturgies, usually can’t connect the dots. Early Christian worship is simply a blank space many Protestants never try to fill in.

The earliest Christians in Jerusalem continued to worship in the Temple and met, on the first day of the week, to celebrate the Eucharist. When away from Jerusalem, they would have participated in the Synagogue on the Sabbath instead of the Temple. Eventually the Church separated from the synagogue and the Temple (even before it was destroyed), but Orthodox Christians continued the traditions of both in their worship.

This is simply historical fact. The early Church worshipped liturgically centered around the Eucharist. There were no altar calls, praise and worship bands, pop songs, guitars, choreographed dance routines, or excited pastors jumping around. Coming face-to-face with that fact has caused more than a few low-church Protestants to convert to Orthodoxy.

The video below is a great introduction to Orthodox Worship as the continuation of Old Testament worship.

The Eucharist especially is a stumbling block for many low-church Protestants. They are cut off from a valid, sacerdotal priesthood and so deny the Eucharist, even though it was instituted by Christ and confirmed by the Apostle Paul in his 1st Letter to Corinthians (Chapter 11):

23 For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread:

24 And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.

25 After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, this cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.

26 For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.

27 Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.

28 But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.

29 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.

30 For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.

31 For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.

32 But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world.

33 Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another.

34 And if any man hunger, let him eat at home; that ye come not together unto condemnation. And the rest will I set in order when I come.

Protestants, out of necessity, have misinterpreted the Biblical references to the Eucharist in a “spiritual” manner as referring to the teachings of Christ, and not to the actual Bread and Wine. Therefore, engaging in Bible quote battles is usually not going to avail much for anyone. Protestants often have an ironclad belief in their interpretation of scripture, especially on this topic.

But it gets harder for them with ante-Nicene writers such as St. Irenaeus. This is from his 2nd Century work Against Heresies:

When, therefore, the mingled cup and the manufactured bread receives the Word of God, and the Eucharist of the blood and the body of Christ is made,(14) from which things the substance of our flesh is increased and supported, how can they affirm that the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God, which is life eternal, which [flesh] is nourished from the body and blood of the Lord, and is a member of Him?-even as the blessed Paul declares in his Epistle to the Ephesians, that “we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones.”

The ante-Nicene Patristic writings are not in the canon of scripture. That was a decision made by the Orthodox Church. Even so, they were preserved by the Church and are accorded great authority for their early Christian witness. These writings testify to a 1st and 2nd Century Church that was already hierarchical, liturgical, and centered around the Eucharist. These historical facts present a difficult challenge for Protestants, especially for those who teach that the Church only went “apostate” during the 3rd or 4th Centuries.

Conclusion 

Protestants in America are getting nervous about Orthodoxy. Many of them have friends, family, and former pastors that have converted. They clearly see us as a threat. Expect the attacks to continue. While it is frustrating, we need to remember that our job is not to win arguments or put other people down. The Holy Spirit must soften their hearts and prepare them to authentically receive Christ through His Church. All we can do is be examples of Christian holiness, and perhaps get as many Protestants as possible interested in learning more about the Early Church and the authentic roots of Christianity. For many of us, learning the real truth about historic Christianity was all it took to get us into the catechumenate.

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

Oh hi there 👋
It’s nice to meet you.

Sign up to receive awesome content in your inbox, every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.