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.

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" [158]. 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.

It is natural for a person to express the most important things in his life through the forms of art, and it is impossible to forbid any religious painting only on the assumption that the apostolic community did not know it! It is natural for man to seek the realization of his faith, it is natural to strive to bring into the possession of reason what he has acquired in the experience of Revelation – not in order to test Revelation with reason, but in order to teach reason to live with Revelation, so that the experience that is given to the heart may be made the subject of intellectual consideration. And if the Church did not immediately use philosophical tools to explain its faith and hope, this does not mean that all the achievements of post-apostolic theology should be abolished. Christ compared the Kingdom of God to a growing seed, a tree, a leaven. And why blame the tree for the fact that it did not remain a seed, but absorbed all the complexity of the world and man! The tree left behind by Christ "behind Himself" sprouted through history, absorbing its juices and dissolving them with the currents of Heaven. And only a person who is ashamed of Christ and the mystery of the Incarnation of God can say that the Church has "tied herself in vain" to "this world."

Yes, the Scriptures are the norm of Christian faith and life, it is a tuning fork. But can a tuning fork replace the entire choir? Does the multiplication table replace the real work of a mathematician? Does the publication of a textbook of Russian grammar veto the appearance of Pushkin's poems or Dostoevsky's novels? It is impossible to contradict the canon. But you can't contradict the rules of the Russian language either. Does the establishment of rules of speech make the subsequent development of literature superfluous? Does the recognition of Paul's Epistles as inspired make us disparage Augustine's Confessions?

What does Orthodoxy mean in general? It is the Gospel plus the grateful acceptance of its impact on those people of different times, cultures, and peoples who have fully opened themselves to Christ's message. Orthodoxy is trust in history. For the Orthodox, it is inconceivable that the experience of revelation and communion with God, which the apostles had, then suddenly became inaccessible. This "new teaching" seems strange to us, that Christ forgot His disciples for a millennium and a half and left them in error in matters of importance for salvation (for this contradicts the dogma of the Creator's love for mankind).

Orthodoxy is alien to total suspicion, which believes that "there was one Christian in the world and he was crucified." Orthodoxy believes that in the space of two millennia of Christian history there were many people who heard the Gospel with their hearts and did not distort it either in their lives or in their preaching. In the classic book of monastic spirituality, in "The Ladder", it is said that "a monk is one who holds only to God's words and commandments in all times and places and deeds"[159]. And, according to the remark of Archpriest. According to John Meyendorff, the Church in her "Symbol of Faith" calls herself apostolic, and not patristic, because the holy father becomes the one who in adequate words was able to preach the original apostolic faith in his time and manifest the Gospel life in himself.

For the Orthodox worldview, the Gospel parables about the Kingdom of God are very dear. These are parables about the patience and humility of God. The Kingdom of God does not come "in a noticeable way," it does not simply invade history from outside, it is thrown into the human world, but gradually matures and sprouts within this world. Such are the parables of the grain, of the leaven, of the "mustard seed."

And especially dear to the Orthodox heart are the farewell words of Christ: "Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matt. 28:20). From these "all days" Protestant ecclesiology is forced to exclude those days that have elapsed between the time of the apostles and the appearance of the denomination in whose name the Protestant preaches (in the mild version this is the time from the Emperor Constantine to Luther, in the hard version – from the apostles to, say, the emergence of the Pentecostals).