Why Orthodoxy is True
S.L. Hudiev

Contents

1. What is the content of our faith?
2. How do we know the Gospel is true?
3. The Resurrection of Christ
4. The sacrifice of the cross as a testimony of love
5. Transformed lives
6. Why the Church?
7. It is from the Church that we know about Christ
8. The Holy Scriptures of the New Testament speak constantly of the Church
9. Christ links eternal life to the sacraments of the Church.
10. Why Orthodoxy?
11. Continuity of the Church’s ministry since the time of the Lord Jesus
12. Continuity of faith
13. Apostolic Succession
14. Why we are Orthodox

Most of us associate Orthodoxy with the characteristic appearance of the clergy, the architecture of churches, the music of church hymns, frescoes and icons, and all that characteristic decoration by which it is easy to identify an Orthodox church in any country of the world. Judging by these external signs Orthodoxy looks like just another religious tradition. In the most different cultures people erect temples where specially trained ministers — most often, in special clothes — solemnly recite sacred texts and make various rites.

The question of why Orthodoxy is true arises by itself — and it is a very good and important question that deserves a detailed answer.

What is the content of our faith?

We can say that in some way all religions are similar — about as similar as all books. They are always stapled pieces of paper between two covers. How are they different? The content. So it is with religious traditions — they may be similar in their covers, but they are about different things.

The center and content of the Orthodox faith is a concrete super-historical and yet historical Person — our Lord Jesus Christ. Even people very far from the Church have seen His image — and He is often depicted crucified on the Cross.

The Cross is one of the most recognizable images of our civilization. But in the first century before the time of Christ’s suffering on the Cross and death (and among non-Christians afterward), the cross was not a revered religious symbol. It was an instrument of terrible and shameful execution, specifically devised to kill all hope. Look, here is the one you hoped for, dying in agony and humiliation, life draining out of him drop by drop — and no one can come to his aid. When Jesus died on the Cross, even his closest disciples — the Apostles — were left discouraged and broken. Their Master was dead, their hopes seemingly dashed.

But then there was an event that changed their lives forever, and changes people’s lives to this day — He rose from the dead, He literally, bodily, physically rose from the dead, He is not in the tomb, the apostles saw Him alive, and not just a glimpse and not from afar — they communicated for forty days, and ate with Him.

The main feast of our tradition is Easter, when we solemnly celebrate his resurrection from the dead. This is the message proclaimed by the Apostles, which the Church has been repeating ever since — “Christ is risen and has given us eternal life!”

As St. Paul says, “God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power” (1 Cor.6:14). Through the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God gives us forgiveness of sins and eternal life. If we accept this gift, we will enter into eternal and blessed life, where there will be no more evil, sin, and death, but eternal and endless joy.

How do we know this?

First of all, from the words of Jesus himself. He says in the Gospel: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life.” (John 6:47) “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and” (John 11:25:26).

Who is He to make such promises? The Gospel says — and this is the center of our faith — that in Him we meet not just a teacher or prophet, but God Himself.

Jesus says that He was with the Father before the world existed (John 17:5), that He and the Father are one (John 10:30), that he who has seen Him has seen the Father (John 14:9), that He came down from heaven (John 6:38)

The Bible speaks about this mystery many times and in many ways, directly and indirectly — the man Jesus Christ is at the same time God incarnate. As it is said in the prologue of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made … And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father” (John 1:1-14).

“The Word” who ‘was God’ and through whom ‘all things began to be’ became ‘flesh’ i.e. man.

Through the Lord Jesus we learn that God is one in essence and a trinity in Persons — as He tells the Apostles, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Mt 28:19).

How do we know that the Gospel is true?

From among the arguments that can be made for the truth of the Gospel, in this article we will focus on three — the historical authenticity of the Resurrection event, the sacrifice of the Cross as evidence of God’s love, and the salvation that is manifested in the lives of specific people.

The Resurrection of Christ

The history of the origins of Christianity — and the writings of the New Testament texts — is explored through a discipline called biblical studies. Among biblical scholars are Christians of various denominations, Jews, and non-believers. Although there is some disagreement among scholars, they all agree on a number of historical facts.

First, Jesus Christ existed as a historical person. The so-called “mythological theory” that denied His historical reality is not supported by any of the experts — including non-believers. As Bible scholar Bart Ehrman (a non-believer, he self-defines himself as “an agnostic bent on atheism”) writes in his book “Was There a Jesus?”: “None of these works [denying the historicity of Jesus] is written by a specialist in the New Testament and early Christianity who teaches at a major, or even marginally notable, accredited, theological seminary, university, and college in the United States and Canada (or elsewhere in the world). As far as I know, of the thousands of experts on early Christianity working in these institutions, not one doubts that Jesus existed”

Second, Jesus died on a Roman cross, a fact that no one doubts either. As the same Ehrman writes, “The Messiah was expected to overthrow his enemies — and if you were going to come up with a Messiah, you would come up with a powerful Messiah. You wouldn’t come up with someone who was humiliated, tortured, and killed by his enemies.”

Third, soon after His horrible death, the disciples began, with unbreakable conviction, to proclaim and preach that He had risen from the dead — and threats, persecution, and torture and execution could not silence them. It was out of this preaching that the Church grew.

Of course, unbelieving scholars — the same Ehrman — deny the reality of the Resurrection itself. But no one denies that the Christian Church was born out of the fervent belief of the disciples that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

How do we explain this belief? From the outside it looks extremely strange. Death on the Cross is a more than convincing way of demonstrating to the followers of the executed man that they were tragically mistaken in their expectations. The one whom they had taken for the Messiah, the Savior sent by God, not only saved no one, but was himself powerless in the face of his enemies, who tortured and mocked him with impunity, and killed him in the most shameful and disgusting manner.

The Gospel itself is very harsh on the apostles in this regard, and does not hide their deep discouragement and confusion after Jesus’ death.

Something must have happened. Something that convinced them that their Master, whose ministry ended in such a horrible death, was in fact not only the Messiah foretold by the prophets, but also the Lord, the Savior, the Judge of the living and the dead.

Of course, people who are strictly committed to a materialistic view of the world will stand on the fact that anything but such a supernatural event as the Resurrection happened — which, in their understanding of the world, could not have happened because it could never have happened.

But if we don’t find materialism convincing — and we have good reason to — we have no reason to reject the most obvious explanation: the Apostles are telling the truth. Christ really did rise from the dead.

And if this is true then God is clearly at work in the story of Jesus, who thus puts his seal of approval on all that Jesus said and did. If so, we can rely on God that the testimony of Jesus’ words and deeds that we find in the New Testament has come down to us in the form that he intended.

The sacrifice of the Cross as a testimony of love

Another argument has to do with the fact that the Lord’s sacrifice on the Cross is the ultimate demonstration of love. People love the biblical words “God is love”, although many people do not remember where they come from — I have seen them attributed to Leo Tolstoy or some Indian teachers. In fact, these words belong to the Apostle John, and he speaks them in light of the Savior’s sacrifice on the cross:

“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:8-10)

Indeed, in human relationships, love is shown in sacrifice — what sacrifices are you willing to make for those you love? We are willing to sacrifice our time and money day in and day out for our family — and maybe even accept suffering and death for those we truly love.

The Gospel tells us that God’s love was demonstrated in sacrifice — He became man for our sake and for our salvation, in all things like us except sin. God, by nature immortal, good and perfectly, immensely happy (“blessed” as we say in the Church) came down from heaven and became human — vulnerable, needy, open to fatigue, hunger, thirst, fear, and finally, excruciating pain and death.

The Creator of creation accepted the most agonizing and shameful death at the hands of His creatures.

Nothing compelled Him to do so; He did so completely freely in order to restore His fallen and rebellious creatures to the eternal and blissful life for which they were created.

In Jesus Christ, the proclamation that God is love takes on flesh and history.

If we seek a loving God, we find him in Jesus Christ.

Transformed lives

Another argument has to do with the fact that Christ saves specific people, here and now. Sometimes people think that salvation is something pertaining only to the afterlife and therefore basically unobservable. This is not quite true. Salvation is a reality that one enters (or refuses to enter) already in this life. As St. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians, “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).

The members of the Corinthian congregation (or at least some of them) lived clearly immoral and even criminal lives — but then a profound change took place in their lives: they were no longer fornicators, idolaters, etc., but were “washed, sanctified and justified.”

Such changes take place in the lives of people who have believed in Christ even now — drunkards and drug addicts leave their vice, criminals who served their time in prison become law-abiding citizens, fornicators become faithful and caring fathers of families. There are examples of this in the ancient hagiographies of the saints, and right around us.

It is not a matter of people “finally coming to their senses” — very few people are able to turn off the crooked path simply by an effort of will, and they themselves do not say that “we finally got our act together, and…”. They turned to Christ and experienced the grace of God, which breathed new life into them.

Why the Church in particular?

“All right,” the reader may say, “Christ is the Savior. But what does that have to do with the Church?”. The thesis “Christ is separate and the Church is separate” is quite popular. But it is erroneous for a number of reasons.

It is from the Church that we know about Christ

First, the only way we have learned about Christ at all (or rather, the way Christ has reached us) is through the Church. We have come to know of Christ through generations of people passing His name from mouth to mouth, offering prayers to Him, seeking fellowship with Him, building temples to Him, reverently copying the Gospels and the Scriptures in general — and reading them in worship services.

Of course we read about the Lord Jesus in the Gospel — but the Gospel itself has reached us as a book of the Church and solely because of the Church and its mission. Even people who attacked the Church’s faith — like Leo Tolstoy — had to take the Gospel precisely from the Church because there was nowhere else to take it — even non-Orthodox communities use the Bible that reached them because of the Church.

The Holy Scripture of the New Testament itself originates in the Church and it is by the Church that it is recognized as the word of God. Its very text indicates that the Church came first — it existed before the apostolic epistles, Acts and the Gospels. When the apostle Paul writes his epistles (which are the earliest of the documents that make up the New Testament), the church communities to which he addresses are definitely already in existence — although the familiar text of the New Testament has not yet developed.

The New Testament Scriptures continually speak of the Church

Second, the New Testament constantly testifies to the Church. Christ does not say, “I will write a book”; He creates a community, the people of God with whom He abides and through whom He works in the world. As He Himself says,

“I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Mt.16:18)

In the New Testament, Christians are by no means a set of proud loners standing alone. They are always members of a particular community, the Church. The word “Church,” “ekklesia” in Greek, can be translated “assembly,” in the Christian context as “the assembly of the called,” the disciples of Christ. Thus, the New Testament is not speaking here of any assembly — the Church has certain characteristics that we find already in apostolic times.

The Church is Apostolic — it goes back to the Apostles whom Christ chose and to whom He said, “He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me.” (Luke 10:16)

Scripture compares the Church to a building erected on the apostolic foundation:

“Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.” (Eph. 2:19-22)

The members of the Church form an organic unity, which is called in Scripture “the body of Christ”. As the Apostle Paul writes,

“[God] he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” (Eph.1:20-23)

To belong to Christ is to belong to His body, the Church. The Apostle continues:

“That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; but speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.” (Eph.4:14-16)

It is telling that Christ addresses the persecutor of the Church, Saul — who is to become the Apostle Paul, with the words “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” (Acts 9:4) Saul cannot persecute Christ directly — He has already ascended — but Christ so identifies Himself with His Church that to persecute the Church is to persecute Christ.

Christ links eternal life to the sacraments of the Church

The necessity of belonging to the Church is emphasized in particular by the fact that Christ instituted the Sacraments — above all Baptism and the Eucharist — and it is to them that He links His promise of eternal life. As He says of Baptism.

“He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” (Mk.16:16)

None of us can baptize ourselves — it is from the Church that we must receive Baptism. Although in some exceptional cases (for example, in the face of near death, when a priest is unavailable) Baptism may be administered by a layman, he himself must be Baptized — that is, he must be a member of the Church.

Christ institutes the Sacrament of the Eucharist — when, under the guise of bread and wine, we partake of His Body and Blood. As the Gospel tells us, “And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” (Luke 22:19-20)

He says that participation in this Sacrament is necessary to obtain Eternal Life:

“Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.” (John 6:54)

You cannot celebrate the Eucharist alone; moreover, you cannot celebrate it simply by gathering with a friendly group. You can only do it in the Church — as we will discuss further on.

Why Orthodoxy?

There are many congregations that worship Christ and recognize Scripture. They all attach the name “Church” to themselves, receive new members through Baptism, and do some form of breaking of bread in remembrance of Jesus.

Why should we choose the Orthodox Church?

Because it is precisely the Church that the New Testament speaks of. How can we determine this? By a number of attributes, some of which we will look at.

The continuity of the Church’s ministry since the time of the Lord Jesus

First, we can point to the continuity of her existence and salvific activity. Christ says to His disciples, “I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” (Mt.28:20) There has never been a day in history — from apostolic times until now — when Christ has not been with His disciples, and therefore there can be no rupture in the history of the Church when the Gospel would be forgotten for centuries — and then remembered by one or another leader who would return to the “original Christianity”. The Church, as a community that preaches the Gospel and celebrates the Eucharist, has existed continuously since its foundation by Christ in the first century.

The continuity of faith

Second, the Church maintains the continuity of faith. Scripture instructs us to “contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). The faith was handed down to us “once,” and it has remained unchanged ever since. Sure, its forms of expression may change, and new threats to it may demand new responses. But the very content of the faith does not change — in the first, second, tenth, fifteenth and twenty-first centuries, the Church retains the same faith, reflected in a multitude of testimonies, from New Testament texts to modern catechisms.

Whatever century we take — we will find Orthodox Christians who express their faith in prayers, interpretations of Scripture, liturgical and teaching texts.

Apostolic succession

Thirdly, the Church preserves apostolic succession. Let’s explain what we’re talking about. As we see in the New Testament, the Church has a certain hierarchical structure – Christian communities are headed by Bishops (Phil.1:1, 1Tim.3:2, Tit.1:7), who perform the Sacraments and instruct the people in the faith.
Although, in some cases, Bishops could be elected by the community, their powers were not based on this, but on ordination, a special Sacrament performed by the Apostles and then by their successors, that is, by the next generations of Bishops. In this Sacrament, not only authority was transferred, but also special gifts of the Holy Spirit, which allowed the Bishops to fulfill their ministry.
The Holy Spirit, as we read in Scripture, is given through the laying on of the Apostles’ hands (Acts 8:17), and the apostles ordain «elders in every church» (Acts 14:23). For example, the Apostle Paul writes to his disciple Timothy: «Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery.» (1 Tim.4:14), «I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands.» (2 Tim.1:6) Another disciple of the Apostle, Titus, should set up «elders in every city» (Tit.1:5)
Since the time of the Apostles, these gifts of the Holy Spirit have been transmitted through a chain of ordinations that is continuous in the Orthodox Church and connects any Orthodox Bishop and priest with the Apostles.

Why are we Orthodox

Thus, we are Orthodox because we believe in our Lord Jesus Christ and follow His words, «I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.» (Matthew 16:18). Both the Holy Scriptures and history indicate that this is an Orthodox Church that preserves the intact continuity of faith and episcopal ordinations.