Protestants teach Russian Orthodox Christians that there is no need to pray for the repose of our fathers and ancestors.

Protestants teach us that there is no need to baptize our children.

They teach the residents of Russia to chant in unison: "Thank you, America, for being there."

Protestants are capable only of criticizing Orthodoxy in absentia. They can still stun a parishioner who really knows neither the Bible nor Orthodoxy. But to justify their attacks on Orthodoxy in the face of truly Orthodox theology is not. And this means that people to whom Orthodoxy is dear, to whom Russia is dear, must master the treasure of Orthodox thought – not to know about it from afar and admire it from a distance, but to enter into it themselves.

The problem of "Protestantism and Orthodoxy" is by no means simply a problem of the correlation between the two groups of citizens of Russia. This is not a problem of relations between the two Christian confessions.

Orthodoxy is an internal problem of Russian Protestantism. This is the inner pain (sometimes conscious, sometimes only suppressed) of almost every Russian Protestant.

By the very fact of his life in Russia, he is forced to constantly return to justify his rejection of Orthodoxy. To do this, he must renew in his mind a certain image of Orthodoxy that is negative enough to inspire him with repulsion. But sometimes a fragment of the Orthodox world will come into his field of vision, which does not quite fit into this image: either the deep thought of some Holy Father or Orthodox theologian, with which even a Protestant cannot but agree, or the testimony of an Orthodox martyr, or the eyes of a living believer, praying, however, in front of Orthodox icons. Or even just suddenly explode the inner world with an acute feeling that you now walk around your native country as if you were a stranger, and look at its centuries-old shrines with the cold gaze not even of a foreigner, but of an enemy... And a person begins to think.

In this work of thought, I would like to help my compatriots by offering them some information about Orthodoxy that foreign preachers and lecturers do not know or do not teach.

So, is Orthodoxy really worse than Protestantism?

Действительно ли Православие держится лишь инерцией традиции и само не сознает своей жизни и своей практики?

Действительно ли православные (как говорят протестанты) лишь целуют Евангелие, но не читают?

Чтобы человек мог сделать действительно свободный выбор – он должен знать не только критику Православия сектами (от толстовцев и рериховцев до пятидесятников), но и обоснование православной мыслью (да, мыслью, мыслью, а не просто «традицией») особенностей православного мировоззрения и практики.

В этой книге, собственно, нет критики протестантизма. Есть защита и объяснение Православия.

Под «протестантами» в этой книге понимаются не наследники Реформации, не немецкие лютеране, не кальвинисты и не англикане.