Of course, avoiding the challenges of Protestants, from explanations with them is not always useful and not for everyone. So, despite the fact that this book is called "To Protestants about Orthodoxy", it is not intended only for Protestants. It is also for those Orthodox who intend not to shy away from the invitations and challenges of Protestant preachers, but to defend their Church by entering into discussion with them. In addition, it can be useful for those Orthodox people who simply want to know their spiritual tradition.

At the end of the Soviet era, it seemed to the people of the Church that the glacial atheistic period would end, people's souls would begin to freeze from the vulgarity of materialism and unbelief, and gradually the people would return to their spiritual history, to their traditions, to Orthodoxy. Without noisy actions, without propaganda obtrusiveness, but through the gradual warming of hearts in Russia, both stone cathedrals and temples of human souls will begin to revive.

During the years of persecution unheard of in history, the Russian Church lost more than 200,000 clergymen killed alone. More than half a million clergymen were repressed[1]. In Russia, there has never been such a number of ministers of the Church at the same time. The enormity of this figure means that several generations of priests were knocked out – not "natural" generations, but rather military "conscriptions", when another immediately took the place of the arrested altar servant.

A young man from a village studied with me at the seminary, in which a church had never been closed during the years of Soviet rule. But in the mid-20s, the Chekists loomed near the temple - and arrested a priest, a deacon, a warden, church singers, a sexton and a watchman. But the temple was not closed. People walked around, sighed and decided: why should the church stand idle, we must serve in it. And the walkers went to the bishop and asked to give them a new priest or to ordain one of the villagers themselves as a priest and deacon. The new clergy served for four years. And a black funnel arrived. All the "churchmen" were arrested again. And again, the temple was not closed. And again there were people who threw down a quiet challenge to the authorities and took upon themselves the cross of the priesthood... This story was repeated five times. And each time there were people who were ready to go to the chopping block for Christ's sake. They were knocked out. Alexander Solzhenitsyn calls it "artificial selection" that was carried out on the Russian people: knocking out the best, surviving the worst...

And so the crippled Church turned to the crippled people. Quietly, half-audible, without the glitter of the show and without the tinsel of slogan rhetoric... Too quiet. The megaphones of the consumer cult, supported by the speakers of foreign sects, drowned out the voice of the Russian Church. Foreign sects, including Protestant Christians, decided to take advantage of the weakness of the Church and the ignorance of people. They do not know Orthodoxy, they do not love it, and therefore they are determined to finish it off. What the Communists did not have time to do, the American missionaries are trying to bring to an end. Only instead of referring to Marx and Lenin, in their criticism of Orthodoxy they refer to the Old Testament: they say, you paint icons contrary to Moses and do not observe the Sabbath...

Following the Communists, American-Korean Protestants cultivate in the Russian people a rejection of the spiritual tradition that for a millennium inspired all the best that was in Russian culture and in Russian history. Protestants teach Russian Orthodox Christians that there is no need to pray for the repose of our fathers and ancestors. Protestants teach us that there is no need to baptize our children. They teach the residents of Russia to chant in unison: "Thank you, America, for being there."

And at the same time, their preachers are capable only of criticizing Orthodoxy in absentia. They can still stun a parishioner who really knows neither the Bible nor Orthodoxy. But to justify their attacks on Orthodoxy in the face of truly Orthodox theology is not. And, therefore, people to whom Orthodoxy is dear, to whom Russia is dear, must master the treasure of Orthodox thought, not to know about it from afar and admire it from a distance, but to enter into it themselves.

The problem of "Protestantism and Orthodoxy" is by no means simply a problem of the correlation between the two groups of citizens of Russia. This is not a problem of relations between the two Christian confessions. Orthodoxy is an internal problem of Russian Protestantism. This is the inner pain (sometimes conscious, sometimes only suppressed) of almost every Russian Protestant. By the very fact of his life in Russia, he is forced to constantly return to justifying his rejection of Orthodoxy. To do this, he must renew in his mind a certain image of Orthodoxy that is negative enough to inspire him with repulsion. But sometimes a fragment of the Orthodox world will come into his field of vision, which does not quite fit into this image: either the deep thought of some Holy Father or Orthodox theologian, with which even a Protestant cannot but agree, or the testimony of an Orthodox martyr, or the eyes of a living believer, praying, however, in front of Orthodox icons. Or even just suddenly explode the inner world with an acute feeling that you now walk around your native country as if you were a stranger, and look at its centuries-old shrines with the cold gaze not even of a foreigner, but of an enemy... And a person begins to think. In this work of thought, I would like to help my compatriots by offering them some information about Orthodoxy that foreign preachers and lecturers do not know or do not teach.

So, is Orthodoxy really worse than Protestantism? Is it true that Orthodoxy is held together only by the inertia of tradition and is itself unaware of its life and its practice? Do the Orthodox (as Protestants say) really only kiss the Gospel, but do not read it? In order for a person to be able to make a truly free choice, he must know not only the criticism of Orthodoxy by sects (from Tolstoyans and Roerichs to Pentecostals), but also the substantiation by Orthodox thought (yes, thought, thought, and not just "tradition") of the features of the Orthodox worldview and practice.

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The "Protestants" in this book do not mean the heirs of the Reformation, nor the German Lutherans, nor the Calvinists, nor the Anglicans. We are talking about those much later (and, accordingly, very recent) neo-Protestant formations, which, as a rule, arose in America and from there have now rushed to our Russia. Accordingly, the word "Protestant" in this book means precisely those people who are most often encountered by a resident of modern Russia under this name: these are Baptists, Adventists, Pentecostals, various charismatic ("neo-Pentecostal") groups, the "Church of Christ", as well as various "just Christians" (in fact, Baptists and charismatics who hide their confessional affiliation in order to make it easier to attract people who sympathize with Orthodoxy). That is, we will be talking about theologically undeveloped trends in Protestantism, whose preachers often declare with strange pride that they do not know theology, that it is not interesting and not necessary, because there is the Bible, and this is quite enough for them.

Conflict of Interpretations

In seminary folklore there has long been a legend (perhaps not for the first century) about a negligent student who was asked to translate from Latin the words of Christ: "The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak" (spiritus quidem promptus est, caro autem infirma). The student, who, obviously, knew grammar better than theology, proposed the following translation: "Alcohol is good, but meat is rotten"... Translation, and even more so interpretation, always depends on the spiritual experience of a person.

How many readings of Pushkin or Goethe exist! Even a one-day newspaper can be perceived differently. Any text lives in the co-creation of the author and the reader. The reader does not just consume the text, he revives it, creates it in his own way. Truly, "it is not given to us to foresee how our word will respond."