Protestants also accuse the Orthodox of ritualism, of performing actions the meaning of which the parishioners do not understand. But at least we know that there is a meaning in our sacraments and rites, and – as far as the sacraments allow explanations – we try to explain them to the people. But Protestants commit a number of actions, the meaning of which is basically unclear to them. For example, the breaking of bread, ordination and baptism.

These actions, as sacred and necessary in the life of the Church, are prescribed by the authority of Scripture. But why? Protestants, according to their theologians, do not have sacraments. It means that there are just symbols, just rituals. "A rite can be called an external ritual established by Christ in order to be performed in the Church as a visible sign of the saving truth of the Christian faith. Neither in baptism nor in the Lord's Supper is there any special manifestation of grace"[144]. According to the Baptists (a community that took its name from baptism!), "baptism is considered not a sacrament, but a rite symbolizing the initiation (acceptance) of a person into the church, his washing away of sins, the promise of a good conscience to God and obedience to Him" [145].

But if someone simply wants to promise God his conscience, he can do it himself, at home, without witnesses: simply and in silence turning to the Creator. And even in the public sphere, there are many "rites of acceptance" and many ways of taking an oath ("promise of conscience"). If baptism is reduced to an oath, if "baptism is our public witness before men and before God,"[146] then how does it differ from the oath of a young pioneer: "I, in the face of my comrades, solemnly promise and swear to serve wholeheartedly the ideas of the New Testament..."? Except that the "comrades" are different... Why baptize in water? Why does the entrance to the Christian community lie precisely through the waters of baptism? Why ordain priests? Maybe it is enough just to hand them the appropriate certificates? Why commune with bread and wine? Why "remember" Christ's suffering with food? [147] You can remember the sufferings of Christ by watching a video.

A Protestant will indignantly retort, "But we baptize, ordain, and celebrate the Supper because Christ has ordained it!" Is there any mystical significance to these actions? If you do them simply because you have been ordered to do so, and you cannot explain to yourself the meaning of what you are doing, then it is you who can be accused of the most fanatical ritualism[148].

There is, however, something among Protestants that I sincerely envy. This is their name, trade mark (English "trademark, brand name" - Ed.). I would also like to call myself a "Protestant." This is a very beautiful, courageous word, consonant with the modern fashion for dissidence. But where is there more protest and rebellion – in modern Protestantism or in modern Orthodoxy? Any person notices in Orthodoxy (condemning or admiring) an amazing reluctance to bend under the wind of modernity and rebuild according to the requirements of newspapers and fashions. Orthodoxy is a protest that has carried through twenty centuries the ability to bold modernity. It is impossible to accuse Orthodoxy of collaborationism, opportunism, and worldliness at the same time, and at the same time to scold it for its inability and unwillingness to modernize. I know that among those priests and Orthodox intellectuals who defend the Church Slavonic language, many feel in the denial of the Russian language precisely the aesthetics of protest. There was its own beauty in pre-reform Catholicism. There was a beauty in the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century, in the age of liberalism, Catholics adopted the outrageous dogma of papal infallibility. It is precisely because it is outrageous that it is beautiful. But today they have lost their admirable stubbornness, their certainty that they are standing on the rock of Peter and on the rock of salvation – and have become less interesting.

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 legends, 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?" [149].

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 Schism in Speyer, I am precisely 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? – Tradition 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 "Reflections 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 "Protestant" "a country closed to the Gospel" (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." 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". Elementary logic leads to the inevitable conclusion that there have been no Christians in Russia since the time of Prince Vladimir[151]: after all, Baptist dogmatics forbids the baptism of children, and in Russia for a thousand years generation 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 in his brochure "Christianity and History" has already said that Alexander Nevsky cannot be considered a saint (unlike, say, any Baptist) on the grounds that, defending Russia from the Crusaders (why did he have to do this?!), he killed people, and Basil the Blessed was not a "fool for Christ's sake", but simply mentally ill.