Protestants
often make reference to what they call Biblical Christianity. For them this is the Church in all her
purity, as free of errors as she will ever be, the Church guided by the Bible
alone. Furthermore, there are three
marks by which one may know that he is part of Biblical Christianity:
The Reformers were clear:
The one true holy and apostolic church is present where (1) the word of God
(and the Gospel) is preached and taught; (2) the sacraments of the church are
rightly administered (namely baptism and the Lord's Supper) and (3) church
discipline is faithfully exercised.
The
only problem with this is that, as others have pointed out, the most
fundamental doctrine of Protestantism, the authority of the individual
conscience as the final judge over what is true and right and what is not,
overturns all the finery laid out on the table of Biblical Christianity. If John Doe Protestant one day has an
epiphany that the Book of Ruth is not historical fact but simply an allegory,
who has the authority to discipline him?
Is his conscience supreme, or is it not?
Is the individual believer an absolute king and priest, or is he subject
to those wretched ‘intermediaries’ between himself and God, such as pastors,
councils, creeds, etc.?
The
Bible alone is not a safe foundation to build the Church upon, as the whole
history of Protestantism has shown, with schism upon schism mounting up to the
heavens. Even the version of the Bible
most Protestants read from is actually an incomplete version, for it is missing
several Old Testament books (the so-called Apocryphal books), thus making the
foundation of their sects all the more unreliable.
What
is astonishing is that some Protestants actually admit that the Protestant
‘church’ is a mixture of truth and error:
The first mark of the
church is the pure preaching of the Word of God and sound doctrine, for without
this, the church could not possibly exist. Such a mark houses a certain amount
of flexibility since some true churches are more pure or less pure than others.
The Westminster Confession of Faith states, “The purest churches under heaven
are subject both to mixture and error.”[3] Though some churches have a purer
understanding of the Word than others, the Scriptures demonstrate this mark as
essential to the visible church from a host of passages.
--Dr C. Matthew McMahon, https://www.apuritansmind.com/pastors-study/the-three-marks-of-the-true-church-by-dr-c-matthew-mcmahon/
This
is a sad commentary on the inability of Protestantism to know and practice the
fulness of the Faith.
But
there is hope for Protestants who want more from a church than a gathering of
men and women ‘subject both to mixture and error’. There is something far better than Biblical
Christianity. It is Orthodox
Christianity, the Church whose foundation truly is the Lord Jesus Christ, and
one may recognize her from the four characteristics listed in the Nicene
Creed: one, holy, catholic (or
universal), and apostolic. St Justin
Popovich of Serbia (+1979), describes them as follows (bolding added):
The attributes of the Church are innumerable because her
attributes are actually the attributes of the Lord Christ, the God-man, and,
through Him, those of the Triune Godhead. However, the holy and divinely wise
fathers of the Second Ecumenical Council, guided and instructed by the Holy
Spirit, reduced them in the ninth article of the Symbol of Faith to four—I
believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. These attributes of the
Church—unity, holiness, catholicity (sobornost), and apostolicity—are derived
from the very nature of the Church and of her purpose. They clearly and
accurately define the character of the Orthodox Church of Christ whereby, as a
theanthropic institution and community, she is distinguishable from any
institution or community of the human sort.
The Unity and Uniqueness of the Church
Just as the Person of Christ the God-man is one and unique, so is the
Church founded by Him, in Him, and upon Him. The unity of the Church follows
necessarily from the unity of the Person of the Lord Christ, the God-man. Being
an organically integral and theanthropic organism unique in all the worlds, the
Church, according to all the laws of Heaven and earth, is indivisible. Any
division would signify her death. Immersed in the God-man, she is first and
foremost a theanthropic organism, and only then a theanthropic organization. In
her, everything is theanthropic: nature, faith, love, baptism, the Eucharist,
all the holy mysteries and all the holy virtues, her teaching, her entire life,
her immortality, her eternity, and her structure. Yes, yes, yes; in her,
everything is theanthropically integral and indivisible Christification,
sanctification, deification, Trinitarianism, salvation. In her everything is
fused organically and by grace into a single theanthropic body, under a single
Head—the God-man, the Lord Christ. All her members, though as persons always
whole and inviolate, yet united by the same grace of the Holy Spirit through
the holy mysteries and the holy virtues into an organic unity, comprise one
body and confess the one faith, which unites them to each other and to the Lord
Christ.
The Christ-bearing apostles are divinely inspired as they announce
the unity and the uniqueness of the Church, based upon the unity and uniqueness
of her Founder—the God-man, the Lord Christ, and His theanthropic personality:
"For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus
Christ" (I Cor. 3:11).
Like the holy apostles, the holy fathers and the teachers of the
Church confess the unity and uniqueness of the Orthodox Church with the divine
wisdom of the cherubim and the zeal of the seraphim. Understandable, therefore,
is the fiery zeal which animated the holy fathers of the Church in all cases of
division and falling away and the stern attitude toward heresies and schisms.
In that regard, the holy ecumenical and holy local councils are preeminently
important. According to their spirit and attitude, wise in those things
pertaining to Christ, the Church is not only one but also unique. Just as the
Lord Christ cannot have several bodies, so He cannot have several Churches.
According to her theanthropic nature, the Church is one and unique, just as
Christ the God-man is one and unique.
Hence, a division, a splitting up of the Church is ontologically
and essentially impossible. A division within the Church has never occurred,
nor indeed can one take place, while apostasy from the Church has and will
continue to occur after the manner of those voluntarily fruitless branches
which, having withered, fall away from the eternally living theanthropic
Vine—the Lord Christ (John 15:1-6). From time to time, heretics and schismatics
have cut themselves off and have fallen away from the one and indivisible
Church of Christ, whereby they ceased to be members of the Church and parts of
her theanthropic body. The first to fall away thus were the gnostics, then the
Arians, then the Macedonians, then the Monophysites, then the Iconoclasts, then
the Roman Catholics, then the Protestants, then the Uniates, and so on—all the
other members of the legion of heretics and schismatics.
The Holiness of the Church
By her theanthropic nature, the Church is undoubtedly a unique
organization in the world. All her holiness resides in her nature. Actually,
she is the theanthropic workshop of human sanctification and, through men, of
the sanctification of the rest of creation. She is holy as the theanthropic
Body of Christ, whose eternal head is the Lord Christ Himself; and Whose
immortal soul is the Holy Spirit. Wherefore everything in her is holy: her
teaching, her grace, her mysteries, her virtues, all her powers, and all her instruments
have been deposited in her for the sanctification of men and of all created
things. Having become the Church by His incarnation out of an unparalleled love
for man, our God and Lord Jesus Christ sanctified the Church by His sufferings,
Resurrection, Ascension, teaching, wonder-working, prayer, fasting, mysteries,
and virtues; in a word, by His entire theanthropic life. Wherefore the divinely
inspired pronouncement has been rendered: "…Christ also loved the Church,
and gave Himself for it; that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing
of water by the word, that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church,
not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and
without blemish" (Eph. 5:25-27).
The flow of history confirms the reality of the Gospel: the Church
is filled to overflowing with sinners. Does their presence in the Church
reduce, violate, or destroy her sanctity? Not in the least! For her Head—the
Lord Christ, and her Soul—the Holy Spirit, and her divine teaching, her
mysteries, and her virtues, are indissolubly and immutably holy. The Church
tolerates sinners, shelters them, and instructs them, that they may be awakened
and roused to repentance and spiritual recovery and transfiguration; but they
do not hinder the Church from being holy. Only unrepentant sinners, persistent
in evil and godless malice, are cut off from the Church either by the visible
action of the theanthropic authority of the Church or by the invisible action
of divine judgment, so that thus also the holiness of the Church may be
preserved. "Put away from among yourselves that wicked person" (I
Cor. 5:13).
In their writings and at the Councils, the holy fathers confessed
the holiness of the church as her essential and immutable quality. The fathers
of the Second Ecumenical Council defined it dogmatically in the ninth article
of the Symbol of Faith. And the succeeding ecumenical councils confirmed it by
the seal of their assent.
The Catholicity (Sobornost) of the Church
The theanthropic nature of the Church is inherently and
all-encompassingly universal and catholic: it is theanthropically universal and
theanthropically catholic. The Lord Christ, the God-man, has by Himself and in
Himself most perfectly and integrally united God and Man and, through man, all
the worlds and all created things to God. The fate of creation is essentially
linked to that of man (cf. Romans 8:19-24). In her theanthropic organism, the
Church encompasses: "all things created, that are in Heaven, and that are
in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or
principalities, or powers" (Col. 1:16). Everything is in the God-man; He
is the Head of the Body of the Church (Col. 1:17-18).
In the theanthropic organism of the Church everyone lives in the
fullness of his personality as a living, godlike cell. The law of theanthropic
catholicity encompasses all and acts through all. All the while, the
theanthropic equilibrium between the divine and the human is always duly
preserved. Being members of her body, we in the Church experience the fullness
of our being in all its godlike dimensions. Furthermore: in the Church of the
God-man, man experiences his own being as all-encompassing, as theanthropically
all-encompassing; he experiences himself not only as complete, but also as the
totality of creation. In a word: he experiences himself as a god-man by grace.
The theanthropic catholicity of the Church is actually an
unceasing christification of many by grace and virtue: all is gathered in
Christ the God-man, and everything is experienced through Him as one's own, as
a single indivisible theanthropic organism. For life in the Church is a
theanthropic catholicization, the struggle of acquiring by grace and virtue the
likeness of the God-man, christification, theosis, life in the Trinity,
sanctification, transfiguration, salvation, immortality, and churchliness.
Theanthropic catholicity in the Church is reflected in and achieved by the
eternally living Person of Christ, the God-man Who in the most perfect way has
united God to man and to all creation, which has been cleansed of sin, evil,
and death by the Savior's precious Blood (cf. Col. 1:19-22). The theanthropic
Person of the Lord Christ is the very soul of the Church's catholicity. It is
the God-man Who always preserves the theanthropic balance between the divine
and the human in the catholic life of the Church. The Church is filled to
overflowing with the Lord Christ, for she is "the fullness of Him that
filleth all in all" (Eph. 1:23). Wherefore, she is universal in every
person that is found within her, in each of her tiny cells. That universality,
that catholicity resounds like thunder particularly through the holy apostles,
through the holy fathers, through the holy ecumenical and local councils.
The Apostolicity of the Church
The holy apostles were the first god-men by grace. Like the
Apostle Paul each of them, by his integral life, could have said of himself:
"I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20). Each of
them is a Christ repeated; or, to be more exact, a continuation of Christ.
Everything in them is theanthropic because everything was recieved from the
God-man. Apostolicity is nothing other than the God-manhood of the Lord Christ,
freely assimilated through the holy struggles of the holy virtues: faith, love,
hope, prayer, fasting, etc. This means that everything that is of man lives in
them freely through the God-man, thinks through the God-man, feels through the
God-man, acts through the God-man and wills through the God-man. For them, the
historical God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ, is the supreme value and the supreme
criterion. Everything in them is of the God-man, for the sake of the God-man,
and in the God-man. And it is always and everywhere thus. That for them is
immortality in the time and space of this world. Thereby are they even on this
earth partakers of the theanthropic eternity of Christ.
This theanthropic apostolicity is integrally continued in the
earthly successors of the Christ-bearing apostles: in the holy fathers. Among
them, in essence, there is no difference: the same God-man Christ lives, acts,
enlivens and makes them all eternal in equal measure, He Who is the same
yesterday, and today, and forever (Heb. 13:8). Through the holy fathers, the
holy apostles live on with all their theanthropic riches, theanthropic worlds,
theanthropic holy things, theanthropic mysteries, and theanthropic virtues. The
holy fathers in fact are continuously apostolizing, whether as distinct godlike
personalities, or as bishops of the local churches, or as members of the holy
ecumenical and holy local councils. For all of them there is but one Truth, one
Transcendent Truth: the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ. Behold, the holy
ecumenical councils, from the first to the last, confess, defend, believe,
announce, and vigilantly preserve but a single supreme value: the God-man, the
Lord Jesus Christ.
The principal Tradition, the transcendent Tradition, of the
Orthodox Church is the living God-man Christ, entire in the theanthropic Body of
the Church of which He is the immortal, eternal Head. This is not merely the
message, but the transcendent message of the holy apostles and the holy
fathers. They know Christ crucified, Christ resurrected, Christ ascended. They
all, by their integral lives and teachings, with a single soul and a single
voice, confess that Christ the God-man is wholly in His Church, as in His Body.
Each of the holy fathers could rightly repeat with St. Maximus the Confessor:
"In no wise am I expounding my own opinion, but that which I have been
taught by the fathers, without changing aught in their teaching."
And from the immortal proclamation of St. John of Damascus there
resounds the universal confession of all the holy fathers who were glorified by
God: "Whatever has been transmitted to us through the Law, and the
prophets, and the apostles, and the evangelists, we receive and know and esteem
highly, and beyond that we ask nothing more… Let us be fully satisfied with it,
and rest therein, removing not the ancient landmarks (Prov. 22:28), nor
violating the divine Tradition." And then, the touching, fatherly
admonition of the holy Damascene, directed to all Orthodox Christians:
"Wherefore, brethren, let us plant ourselves upon the rock of faith and
the Tradition of the Church, removing not the landmarks set by our holy
fathers, nor giving room to those who are anxious to introduce novelties and to
undermine the structure of God's holy ecumenical and apostolic Church. For if
everyone were allowed a free hand, little by little the entire Body of the
Church would be destroyed."
The holy Tradition is wholly of the God-man, wholly of the holy
apostles, wholly of the holy fathers, wholly of the Church, in the Church, and
by the Church. The holy fathers are nothing other than the "guardians of
the apostolic tradition. " All of them, like the holy apostles themselves,
are but "witnesses" of a single and unique Truth: the transcendent
Truth of Christ, the God-man. They preach and confess it without rest, they,
the "golden mouths of the Word." The God-man, the Lord Christ is one,
unique, and indivisible. So also is the Church unique and indivisible, for she
is the incarnation of the Theanthropos Christ, continuing through the ages and
through all eternity. Being such by her nature and in her earthly history, the
Church may not be divided. It is only possible to fall away from her. That
unity and uniqueness of the Church is theanthropic from the very beginning and
through all the ages and all eternity.
. . .
--The rest is at http://archangelsbooks.com/articles/church/AttributesofChurch.asp .
Biblical
Christianity is a distortion of the true Christianity of the Orthodox
Church. To define Christianity by the
Bible alone, by only one part of the Church’s Holy Tradition (which is what the
Holy Scriptures are, one part of that Tradition, though an important one), is
akin to defining a human being by only one part of him: a toe, a white blood cell, a kidney. Because of that severe distortion,
Protestantism will always be in upheaval.
But the Orthodox Church, the Church of the Apostles, is ever waiting for
them, ever inviting them to the Heavenly Banquet of the Divine Liturgy, to the
union with the divine-human Body of Jesus Christ in which the Fulness of the
Holy Ghost dwelleth, to the Glory of God the Father. Amen
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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