Having traveled to Moldova on several occasions in the last few years for missions work, I’ve become interested in the beliefs and teachings of the Orthodox Church. The picture attached to this post is one I took of the beautiful Orthodox Cathedral in Chisinau, Moldova. Many people who consider themselves Christians in Eastern Europe belong to the Orthodox Church so knowledge of its teachings is essential to missions work there. Sadly too, some of the persecution aimed at evangelical Christians in this part of the world comes from the Orthodox Church as well. I was therefore intrigued when I recently came across a theological website written from an Orthodox perspective. The site is called Orthodoxwiki and is set up along the same lines as Wikipedia and Theopedia.
The site was founded by a gentleman named Father John who’s a priest in the Orthodox Church in America out of Chicago.
Like the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church claims to be the one true Church, descended directly from the Apostles and founded on the Day of Pentecost.
My first foray into the site was a search using the word ‘salvation’. This brought up a page devoted to Orthodox soteriology. I knew already that Orthodox Christianity teaches salvation to be a process rather than an event and that one can never be sure of having been converted. Salvation is more a journey in Orthodox teaching, the goal of which is something called ‘theosis’. This site reinforced that teaching providing an explanation that was very clear and concise. In part it says:
“Salvation is the goal of Christianity, and the purpose of the Church. The theology of salvation is called soteriology. Orthodox Christianity strongly believes that God became man, so that man may become like God. This concept of theosis, rejects that salvation is a positive result to a legalistic dilemma, but a healing process. Orthodoxy views our inclination to sin as a symptom of a malady that needs treatment, not just a transgression that requires retribution.”
Needless to say the ways in which this paragraph is at odds with Reformed Christianity are many. The same page goes on to say of the final judgment:
“Christ will judge all people exclusively on the basis of how they have served him by serving each other, the least of the brethren.”
Next I did a search for ‘justification’ and received the following response:
There is no page titled "justification".
Now, to be fair, it could be that the information on justification has not yet been posted, however, given the way salvation is defined, the more likely scenario is that the concept of justification simply does not exist in Orthodox theology. Like Roman Catholicism, they confuse justification and sanctification. In fact, when I input the word ‘sanctification’ into the search function on the site, I was taken to the page on ‘theosis’ which the Orthodox see as the end state of the salvation process.
This coupled with their belief that the dead are judged on the merits of their service to God rather than on the righteousness of Jesus Christ leads one to the conclusion that Orthodox Christianity is ‘another gospel’, a gospel of works where man’s salvation is, if not totally dependent upon him, at least unattainable without his help and cooperation.
What a belief system teaches about the Gospel is fundamental to understanding the other teachings they espouse. I plan to delve further into the teachings of the Orthodox Church on other theological topics in future posts.
