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.

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 could say nothing 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." 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[153]. 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"[154]. And, on the contrary, "God made man a participant in creativity," writes St. Ephraim the Syrian[155]. 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 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"? [156] What if Christ is really in our midst, and continued in the third century, in the ninth or nineteenth century, to do no less things 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 confined 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[157] 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 only reveals the history of the Church.