We do not partake of Communion because the New Testament says so. The Christians of the first centuries recognized the New Testament because in its pages they recognized the same spirit that they had felt at their Suppers. And to oppose the book of the Church to the life of the Church, to her Tradition, is still illogical.

In the end, it is a question of what Christ left behind Himself: a book about Himself or Himself?

Protestants say that Christ left a collection of memories of Himself; the Catholics, that He had left the Pope as His deputy.

The Orthodox assert that He Himself simply remained with us "always, even to the end of the age."

Protestants seal Christ's mouth and say: "Do not add a word!" For Protestants, a book is the only way to communicate with God, the only way to know God, the only door through which they allow God to enter human life.

Orthodoxy says that the Spirit breathes where and how it wills, and this breath of His is imprinted in the history of Christianity as Tradition. Christ transmits Himself, and not His merits, which the Father agrees to consider as ours and attributes them to all generations.

Among other oddities of Protestantism, one can note the one-sidedness of the doctrine of "salvation through faith."

10. The most difficult stage of the conversation is the discussion of the question of what exactly in Protestantism causes criticism from the Orthodox.

If our disagreement is not in the rites, then in what?

If Orthodoxy does not merge with Protestantism, but perceives its spread in Russia with obvious pain, then from the point of view of the Orthodox there is something in Protestantism that they assess as something mortally dangerous. What is it that in the perspective of Christian theology, which looks at everything under the sign of "for our sake and for our salvation," in the perspective of the salvation of the soul, turns out to be a fatal flaw of Protestantism?

This is the question of the Eucharist. Orthodoxy believes that we must truly become the Body of Christ, and only then will our resurrection be a "resurrection unto life."

Protestantism believes that the Eucharist is nothing more than a symbolic rite reminiscent of the teaching of Christ.

The entire life of Orthodoxy is built around the Liturgy (just as the life of Protestants is built around the preaching of the Gospel). And from the Orthodox perspective, the denial of the Eucharist is not just a distortion of one of the lines of Christ's teaching, but something much more terrible: it is the rejection of the very gift of salvation, the substitution of words about Christ for the sanctifying and saving communion of Christ. This is the substitution of God's gift for human words about the greatness of this gift.

There are some Protestant communities that claim that they recognize the Eucharist as a sacrament. But here we must distinguish between two questions: one is what people themselves think about their actions, and the other is whether their actions are really as grace-filled as they seem to be. In Protestant communities there is no apostolic succession, which means that there is no continuous stream of agapes, the breaking of bread, the sacraments pouring from the apostles to us through all the centuries. This means that there is no participation in the Apostolic Eucharist, but only self-activity, imitating the Apostolic Sacrament...