Orthodox and Protestant

What you'll notice

You brought your Bible. It's the one with your notes in the margins, and you're holding it the way you'd hold a ticket. Then you look around. There's no hymnal in the pew, no screen, no bulletin with sermon blanks. The Scripture readings are chanted from a gold book on a stand, and nobody else is turning pages. The choir sings for most of the service without a note of instrumental help. People kiss things. The sermon is fifteen minutes and comes in the middle. At the end, nobody asks you to come forward, raise your hand, or pray a prayer.

Under all that, the Bible is everywhere: a psalm at the start and the end, verses traded between priest and choir, litanies and prayers built from Scripture phrase by phrase. Nobody hands you a copy, because nobody needs one.

What it's called

"Protestant" covers a great many churches, from Lutheran and Anglican to Baptist, Pentecostal, and nondenominational, and they differ from each other as much as from the Orthodox. This page names a tradition when it quotes one. The Orthodox never went through the Reformation, so the two vocabularies don't map neatly. What you may call sacraments or ordinances, the Orthodox call Mysteries (the Church's sacraments). What you may call sanctification, they fold into theosis (becoming by grace what God is by nature).

What's actually happening

What we share

The center. Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, crucified and risen, the only Savior. The Holy Trinity. The authority of Scripture as God's word. For many Protestants, the Nicene Creed, said word for word. Baptism in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Love for the Psalms, for the Gospels, and for prayer. A great many Orthodox converts came from Protestant churches and will tell you they didn't leave behind the Jesus they met there. They found more of the house He lives in.

Where we differ

Stated as each side would state it.

Scripture and Tradition. For the classic Protestant confessions, Scripture holds all that salvation needs, and no tradition may be added to it.¹ The Orthodox rank Scripture just as high and read it within the Church's Tradition, and their Old Testament is the Septuagint, a few books longer than yours. Scripture and Tradition has the full account of both.

Sacraments as mysteries. Many Protestants, especially in Baptist and free-church traditions, understand the Lord's Supper as "a symbolic act of obedience";² Lutheran and Reformed churches teach a real presence of different kinds. The Orthodox call the sacraments Mysteries. In them God actually does something: the bread and wine become Christ's Body and Blood, baptism really joins you to His death and resurrection, and chrismation really gives the Spirit.

Liturgy. Worship in the Orthodox Church follows set texts, largely unchanged for centuries, and centers on the altar rather than the pulpit. The idea is that the Church shouldn't have to invent its prayer fresh every week. It inherited one.

The saints. The Orthodox ask the saints to pray for them, as you'd ask a friend; Mary and the Saints explains why. And yes, they call the priest "Father"; Ordination and the Clergy Family takes up Matthew 23:9.

Salvation. The Reformation confessions picture justification as a verdict: for Christ's sake, by faith, God pardons the sinner and credits Christ's righteousness to him.³ The Orthodox also confess forgiveness by grace alone, but their first picture is a hospital and a family, not a courtroom; Saint Athanasius summed up the Incarnation as God becoming man so that we might share His divine life.⁴ Salvation as Healing walks that road.

Why there's no altar call

The altar call is younger than you might think; it spread with the American revivals of the 1830s and the "anxious bench" associated with Charles Finney. The Orthodox have no equivalent, and not because they don't want converts. In Orthodox practice, coming to Christ is a path rather than one decision made in a moment: inquiry, catechesis, baptism or chrismation, then a lifetime of repentance, Communion, and growth. The invitation is real; it just comes over coffee, and lasts as long as you need. The Path In describes the steps.

Why it matters

Because the differences are about the same Christ. An Orthodox Christian and a Baptist both believe Jesus rose bodily from the dead and will come again; they disagree about where you meet Him now and how He changes you. That's a family argument about the house, and both sides should be able to have it without slamming doors.

It matters practically, too. Much of what puzzles a Protestant visitor (the set prayers, the kissing, the bread and wine taken so seriously, the saints) follows from those differences. Once you see that the Orthodox believe the Mysteries really do something, the rest of the morning starts to make sense.

Field Note: "So can my Baptist grandmother be saved?" It's usually the first question. Orthodox Christians are sure where the Church is; they're far more careful about saying where God's mercy isn't. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, describing the range of Orthodox opinion, gives two camps. A more moderate one says, "We know where the Church is but we cannot be sure where it is not," leaning on Saint Irenaeus: "where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church."⁵ A stricter one holds that those outside Orthodoxy are outside the Church, while still leaving the sincere to God's mercy.⁶ Neither is a council's verdict, and the argument is alive in American parishes right now. Both agree that judging any particular soul, your grandmother's included, belongs to God. Saint Justin Martyr, around 150, taught that the Word had sown seeds of truth in every people, so that "whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians," while the seed is still not the thing itself.⁷

Where it came from

The Reformation was a Western argument, begun when the Orthodox had already been apart from Rome for centuries. In America the meeting has mostly been between neighbors, and the neighbors have been generous. When Isabel Hapgood made her English service book for the Russian Church in America in 1906, she used the King James Version for the Scripture lessons and the Book of Common Prayer's Psalter for the psalms, and she took what she called the "incomparable rendering" of the Prayer of Saint Chrysostom from the Episcopal prayer book.⁸ The traffic has run the other way since: about two thousand evangelicals entered the Antiochian Archdiocese together in 1987, and converts from Protestant churches are now part of nearly every jurisdiction (A Short History tells it).

What you do

If you're Orthodox: honor the faith your Protestant friend already has. Many of them know their Bibles better than you know yours, and you can learn from that. Talk about Christ first. Let the differences come up when they ask.

If you're visiting: a Bible in your hand is welcome, though the readings take some finding. Stand when others stand, sit when you need to, and ask anything at coffee hour. Communion is reserved for Orthodox Christians, for reasons Can I Take Communion? explains; the blessed bread at the end is offered to visitors in most parishes (The Cross and the Bread). Nobody will ask you to make a decision today.

Go deeper

• John 17; 2 Peter 1:3–4; 2 Thessalonians 2:15.
• Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation (NPNF2 4).
• The Westminster Confession, the Augsburg Confession, and the Thirty-Nine Articles, read in their own words.
• Scripture and Tradition and Salvation as Healing.

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