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."

But all the more inevitable are differences in readings when it comes to the Bible, a book from which we are so far removed both in its spiritual level and in its historical and cultural environment. Therefore, whoever speaks of the Scriptures, his speech tells us no less about the Scriptures than about the Gospel. The choice of commented passages and the comment itself, the tone of the conversation, and the final conclusions all depend on the person's experience and culture. And the fact that we have not one Gospel, but four, and they are called "the Gospel according to..." – this in itself suggests that any retelling of the Good News of Christ is inevitably interpretive. One can even say with great intensity: if someone could read the Gospel in its entirety every day, then he would read a different book every day, for he himself changes, including under the influence of reading the inspired text (on this is based the Church's requirement of regular reading of the Scriptures).

But people listen credulously to preachers who declare: "We preach only the Gospel. We carry a simple and true understanding of the gospel. We live only and strictly according to the Gospel. Open your eyes, take in your hands the Gospel that we will give you, and read. We will give you obvious comments, and you will see that the Orthodox have simply distorted the words of the Gospel..."

These preachers are called Protestants.

Everything that a person touches, he makes "his own", he imposes on everything the inevitable imprint of his life and spiritual experience, he understands everything in his own measure.

Just as man's perception of the world is inevitably subjective, so is man's perception of the biblical text inevitable. However, only a philosophically ill-mannered mind will see in this circumstance a pretext for radical skepticism and relativism. Yes, we cognize the non-human world in a human way. But still, we learn. Yes, we perceive the Word of God in a human way, but we still perceive it. Theology knows the ways to extinguish the background noise of our all-too-human interpretations in order to cleanse them of the Purpose that the Revealing One Himself put into His word.

Since I am not writing a textbook on hermeneutics (the art of interpreting Scripture), I will only point out the most obvious ways to protect the Text from human bias.

The first of them is to remember that we are working with books that have come down to us in a multitude of contradictory manuscripts. This is very important and very joyful: God has entrusted His message to the rivers of human history. He did not throw a book carved on a diamond to us. He allowed His word to be carried across the earth and through the ages by human hands. It seems that everything that is handed to people is unreliable. But the Gospel was not lost[2].