In order to defend Orthodoxy in Russia today, one needs more firmness and readiness to endure insults, slander and attacks than to scold Orthodoxy. In order to accept, fulfill and apply to oneself the norms of church-Orthodox life, faith and asceticism, one needs more determination, consistency, I would say, more perseverance and discipline of protest than to run to "evangelical" gatherings and cabbage parties in houses of culture. I know the most educated young people whose natural thirst for protest for a young man is expressed in the fact that they regard the Orthodox church as a citadel besieged by the spirits of this age (the spirit of their parents). And the thickness of age-old traditions, the cement of canons and the stones of dogmas are for them fortress walls that protect them from the service of the vulgarity of the age. Who said that it is necessary to rebel against the present only in the name of a "bright future"? And in the name of Tradition, is it not possible to rebel against the current total dominance of modernism?

In general, Protestants have found a good name for themselves. I even hope that one day they will suddenly compare their life with their name and indignantly grieve in their hearts: "Where is our protest? What have we exchanged the fervor of the Gospel faith for? What is left in us for which the world can still hate us? Have we become too much of a part of the post-Christian civilization of the new America?" [205].

Unfortunately, I cannot call myself a Protestant. And even my protests against the state implantation of occultism in Russia do not give me the right to such a self-designation. For the term "Protestantism" is a technical term and acquired its very concrete meaning long before I was born. I cannot call myself a Protestant, firstly, because in 1529 at the Council of Speyer I did not sign the "protest" of the minority, and secondly, because on the main point of the Speyer schism I am on the side of the traditionalist majority: I consider Communion to be a valid sacrament, and not just a symbol. I understand that the Reformers protested against the Catholics. And on some points, as an Orthodox, I fully agree with their anti-Catholic protests. But on the whole, I still cannot agree with the program of the Protestants, with what is specific to their confession. And therefore I cannot call myself a beautiful word "Protestant".

Well, life is not reduced to protest. Sometimes you have to start with a resolute and defensive "no!", but then it's time to move on to a creative "yes". From the denunciation of falsehood to the confession of truth. To Orthodoxy. The Church is not "a protest against falsehood," but something more positive: "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. 3:15).

And Protestants still do not have sufficient grounds to look at the Orthodox world from top to bottom. The diseases that we suffer from are also in them. But some medicines that are in the Orthodox tradition, unfortunately, do not exist in Protestantism.

History After Christ: Waste or Hoarding?

Protestantism differs from Orthodoxy and Catholicism in that of the two sources of spiritual knowledge – Scripture and Tradition – Protestantism recognizes only the first. Sola Scriptura. Only the Scriptures. This slogan of Protestantism is attractive only until you think about what exactly has been left out of this sol. What is excluded by this formula? Living the Scriptures is wonderful. But what goes out of sight of a person who reads only the Gospel? "Legend is leaving. In reality, this means that the philosophical and religious outlook of an ordinary convinced Protestant is much narrower than the circle of knowledge of a convinced Orthodox: he selects one Bible from the church library, declaring everything else to be an unnecessary speculation. Augustine and Chrysostom clearly turn out to be burdensome reading, interesting only for historians. Orthodoxy is a library; "Evangelism" is the religion of one book. The Baptists do not see the point in the Liturgy, which means that the choirs of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff were written in vain, and Gogol should have thrown into the oven not only the second volume of Dead Souls, but also the manuscript of his Meditations on the Divine Liturgy. Since the icon is something other than the Gospel, it inevitably follows from the principle of Sola Scriptura that St. Andrei Rublev is nothing more than an idolater...

Therefore, the position of Protestants in relation to Orthodoxy turns out to be culturally nihilistic. If even Greece is called by the newspaper "The Protestant" (this is the country in whose language the Gospel was written!), then Russia is all the more perceived by American missionaries as a desert in which, before their arrival, if there was any Christianity, then everything was completely infected with "medieval distortions." "We, Russians," writes the modern preacher of Baptism P. I. Rogozin in his book, which is as ignorant as it is aggressive, "who adopted Christianity nine centuries after its founding, inherited it from Greece already at a time when Christianity was heavily polluted, influenced by various state systems and saturated with Byzantine paganism. By accepting Christianity not from the original source, but as if from second hand, we have joined all its 'ready-made' age-old accretions and errors" [206]. Well, yes, if the Slavs accepted the Gospel from the hands of Sts. Cyril and Methodius are dirty "second hands", but modern Russian disciples of Billy Graham undoubtedly received the Gospel "first hand".

The Baptist magazine clarifies the list of generic defects of Russian Orthodoxy: "What were the features of Greek theology adopted by Kievan Rus and expressed in the church structure? It should be borne in mind that over the thousand years of the existence of this historical church, it has largely departed from evangelical Christianity. Already by the time of the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea, in 325, in the practice of the Church there were commemorations of the dead and prayers addressed to them, baptism of children and the cult of the Mother of God. But the main digression was the following: the idea of a universal visible church consisting of bishops[207]; the belief that the sacraments magically have transforming grace in themselves; the formation of a special class of clergy, who alone could teach these sacraments. What were all these deviations from the Gospel's sound teaching and simplicity based on? On the recognition of the complete incomprehensibility of God by human reason[208]. From this followed the necessity of some kind of mystical ritual or magical action in order to somehow approach the unknown God, and therefore there was a need for special ministers for the performance of the sacraments, a class of clergy, and special buildings – temples that would be the House of God.

Elementary logic leads to the inevitable conclusion that there have been no Christians in Russia since the time of Prince Vladimir: after all, Baptist dogmatics forbids the baptism of children, and in Russia for a thousand years generations after generation in childhood passed through the baptismal font. And so it turns out that Sergius of Radonezh and Dostoevsky, Seraphim of Sarov and Pavel Korin, the hieromartyr Patriarch Tikhon and those whom Klyuchevsky called "the good people of ancient Russia" – all of them were not Christians, for they were baptized in childhood.

The Baptist historian L. Korochkin has already said in his brochure "Christianity and History" that Alexander Nevsky cannot be considered a saint (unlike, say, any Baptist) on the grounds that in defending Russia from the Crusaders (why was this necessary?!), he killed people, and Basil the Blessed was not a "fool for Christ's sake", but simply mentally ill. And what cruel sinners the Old Russian iconographers appear to be can be understood from a letter from a Protestant neophyte sent to me at the Theological Academy: "I used to believe very much in icons, in their infallible holiness, I prayed before them on my knees, I turned with prayers not only to God, but also to the saints who had died. It happened that I would fall asleep with the icon on my chest. I am an artist by profession and allowed myself to paint icons, sometimes I sold them and gave them to people. I didn't know before reading the Bible how disgusting what I was doing... When I read all 17 prophets, where they unanimously call on people to believe in the Living God, I suddenly realized the horror of my fall. I rushed to the icons, tore them from their places, and without any confusion and without a shadow of a doubt threw them into the melted furnace. "Lord, forgive me! I have humiliated you with my idolatry. May my hands — who draw idols — dry up, let my tongue dry — trusting in the dead, let me go blind and never see icons." Now I understand that I am not on the same path with the Orthodox Church... To put a model of Jesus Christ crucified on a tree in the temple of the Living God is blasphemy and idiocy. I am one of the few who have separated myself from the common flock, or rather, whom the Lord has separated"[212].

And a hundred years ago, Protestants preached the same sharply negative attitude towards Orthodoxy: "At the International Missiner Conference of Students in London, it was decided to enlighten the whole world with Christianity during the life and work of the present generation. Among the pagan countries that it was decided to enlighten are also Russia and Greece" (St. Nicholas of Japan, diary entry 14.2.1901)[213].

According to Protestant logic, it turns out that with the death of the last apostle, the last Christian died. No, more strictly: the minute the last of the New Testament writers put an end to his last message, people again became far from God. God cannot and has no right to say anything more to people. And the people could never again say anything about their hearts, about what was going on in them during their journey to God, beyond what was sealed with the Bible cover. "If anyone adds a word to this book..."

This is how Protestants think. The Protestant and Orthodox worldviews differ more than the question of icons in their attitude to history. Protestantism is an ahistorical worldview. The history of people, the history of the Church, is leaving it. Nothing accumulates or happens in history. God stopped speaking with the writing of the last New Testament book, and people themselves are incapable of anything good: "by nature man is not only a child of evil, but also a criminal and even a criminal" [214]. The patristic tradition never saw humanity as a collection of amnestied criminals, and therefore had a different attitude to the fruits of human creativity: "We alone of all creatures, in addition to the intellectual and logical essence, also have the sensual. The sensual, combined with the logos, creates a variety of sciences and arts and realizations, creates the ability to cultivate fields, build houses, and generally create from non-existent (although not from complete nothing, for only God can do this). And all this is given to people. Nothing of the kind ever happens with angels," said St. Gregory Palamas[215]. And in fact, an angel is a messenger. The postman is not expected to creatively alter the telegram entrusted to him, which is why a thousand years before Palamas St. John Chrysostom confirmed: "It is not an angelic work to create"[216]. And, on the contrary, "God made man a participant in creativity," writes St. Ephraim the Syrian[217]. That is why Tradition is possible: God is able to create outside the Bible, and man is capable not only of sin, but also of cooperation with grace.