Orthodoxy and Protestantism

"Protestant" covers an enormous range — Lutherans and Reformed, Anglicans and Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, and countless others — and no single description fits all of them. What they share is a common origin: the Reformation that began in Western Europe in the sixteenth century, when reformers protesting abuses and doctrines in the medieval Latin Church broke with Rome. Because this happened five centuries after the East–West schism, the Reformers were reacting to the Western Church alone; most had little or no knowledge of Orthodoxy, which stood outside the quarrel entirely.

Two convictions became watchwords of the movement, and fairness requires stating them as their adherents actually hold them. Sola scriptura — "Scripture alone" — means that Holy Scripture is the final and supreme authority for Christian doctrine, above popes and councils; most classical Protestants prize the early creeds and Fathers, but do not grant them Scripture's ultimate authority. Sola fide — "faith alone" — means that a sinner is justified, set right with God, by trusting in Christ's finished work and not by earning it through good deeds; classical Protestants insist that genuine faith bears the fruit of good works, while denying that those works are the ground of salvation.

The Orthodox reply is not to caricature these instincts but to locate what it sees as missing. On the first, Orthodoxy holds that Scripture is the Church's book, written within her, canonized by her, and rightly read only within her living Holy Tradition — so that "Scripture alone," cut loose from the Church that produced and interprets it, has in practice yielded not one reading but thousands. St. Paul tells the Thessalonians to "hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle" (2 Thessalonians 2:15) — Scripture and the Church's handed-down life together, not the one against the other.

On the second, Orthodoxy does not oppose faith to works as rival routes to heaven; it refuses the whole frame of a courtroom transaction. Salvation is understood as union with God and the healing of a sick humanity, in which faith, grace, and the whole transformed life are one movement — the concern the entry on faith and works takes up. Beyond these lie the further differences that follow: most Protestant bodies do not keep apostolic succession or the sacraments as Orthodoxy understands them, do not venerate icons or ask the prayers of the saints, and do not honor the Virgin as the Church has from antiquity. Orthodoxy sees these not as optional extras but as belonging to the fabric of the faith once delivered.

For all this, Orthodox Christians are not taught to despise Protestants, in whom they often recognize a real love of Christ, a knowledge of Scripture, and lives of genuine devotion. Orthodoxy has taken part alongside Protestant bodies in the ecumenical movement, while declining to pretend that the differences are settled or small.

One development deserves mention without exaggeration. Over recent decades a real number of Protestants — including whole congregations and not a few pastors and scholars — have become Orthodox, drawn by the search for the early Church, its worship, and its unbroken continuity; the convert movement in America owes much to them. It is a movement worth noting soberly and gratefully, not as a scoreboard. Every such reception is one person's homecoming, and the Church receives converts the way the father in the parable received his son — with joy and without boasting.