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.

Hence the difference between the Protestant and Orthodox attitudes to Tradition. From the perspective of Protestant theology, which denies Tradition and the creative meaning of church history, it is difficult to explain why the book of Acts is included in the Bible. Why are the stories about the life and sermons of the Savior supplemented by the first church chronicle? Why talk about the actions of people when it has already been said about what the Sole Mediator has done?

The Bible is historical. This is the history of the people, not the life of Moses. It is this historical breath and trust in the action of God in the history of people that Protestantism lacks. In his historical anti-church nihilism, he asserts that there is no need to peer into the breath of the Spirit in people, let us study only the word of God and let us not be interested in how people heard this word of God. But the word of God is still addressed precisely to people...

The history of mankind has been preparing for the reception of the Gospel, and in history, in people, the gifts for the sake of which the Gospel was given have sprung up and continue to sprout. The anti-historical nihilism of the Protestants can be accepted only on one assumption: if we consider that Scripture is a meteor that swept across the earth's sky in an instant. From the supra-historical heights, the whirlwind of Revelation once burst into us, left traces fixed by the New Testament texts, and once again soared into the ahistorical and pro-human distances. People have only one thing left: the study of those signs that remain from the Visitation. The fire burst out, scorched, melted the rocks, left strange streaks on them and hid. The meteorite has long finished its flight. The Gospel fire went out. Christ left, and left only a book in His place. Everything that we know about Christ and about God is known to "geologists" only from a book. From the Gospel. Theological geologists can study the apostles' accounts of how God changed their hearts. But they do not believe anyone else's testimony about the same Fire. The rest of the people did not always correctly (from the point of view of the last geo(theo) commission) understand the meaning of the words bequeathed to us. Geologists, having no personal experience of contact with that fire, study this meteorite funnel, these strange streaks on ancient rocks, and based on the features of this or that unusually melted rock, they build their assumptions about what kind of fire it was and where it could have come from.

The Gospel for geo-theologians is only an object for study; it is passive material, a passive text that lies and waits for an intelligent and understanding reader (it has been waiting for its Baptist and Adventist interpreters for centuries, patiently enduring the violence of the Orthodox and Catholics).

What if the gospel lives on its own? If it is active? What if it does not wait for the reader, but creates him by itself? What if "Thy grace, O Lord, walketh in the wake of the foolish and the lost, and cries out to the foolish, Be not foolish in your sins"? [218]. What if Christ is really in our midst, and continued to do no less things in the third century, in the ninth or nineteenth century, than in the first century? "God does not dwell in temples made with hands," and that is why Orthodoxy does not believe that the Holy Spirit was locked within the walls of the upper room of Zion, that the gift of Pentecost is inaccessible to anyone except those who were lucky enough to be in that house at that hour. But if "Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever" (Heb. 13:8), and if the Spirit works not only in the upper room of Zion, then it means that the gifts of the Spirit could manifest themselves in other people, not only in the apostles.

From the point of view of Orthodoxy, the book of Acts is precious because it confirms the promise of Christ ("I am with you... I will give you the Comforter") came true. His gift turned out to be effective: God is with us. God was not only with us, but He is. God is with us not only in the days of His earthly flesh, but also after. And after He had lifted up from the earth the Body born of Mary, He left here His Body which He had created for Himself at the Last Supper. God is with us, because by His Body He made His community, His Church (Col. 1:24). And the Book of Acts is the first ecclesiological[219] treatise, the first contact with the mystery of the Church. This is a story about the work of the Spirit in people. Has it really stopped? For Protestants, the book of Acts closes the history of the Church. In the future, they see only a history of wanderings, distortions and betrayals (which strangely ceased only with the appearance of their community). For the Orthodox, the Book of Acts reveals the history of the Church.

Hence, in the words of L. Uspensky, "one should not simplify the problem: if something did not exist in the first centuries of Christianity, this does not mean that it is not necessary in our time" [220]. And, therefore, if Gregory the Theologian says something that John the Theologian did not say, this is not necessarily a distortion of the Apostle's word. The Church is a living organism, and development is characteristic of the living. And so the Baptist claim that they have returned to "apostolic simplicity" is unconvincing: you cannot force an adult to get back into the cradle and wear children's clothes, no matter how cute they may be. Christianity is already adult. It is two thousand years old, and this tree, which has grown over two millennia, cannot be cut back to the size and shape of the sprout from which it began at the dawn of Christianity.