The Living Tradition An Orthodox Archive of the Church Fathers and Early Church

For Protestant readers

For readers coming from a Protestant church

The differences here are structural rather than item-by-item: they follow from a different account of where the Church is and how Scripture is read within it. This track works from the earliest sources and is careful not to treat 'Protestant' as one thing, because it is not.

  • Historical consensusBroadly agreed among historians working from the surviving evidence. Consensus can shift when the evidence or the method changes.

Awaiting official-source verification Content last reviewed 2026-09-04

What still needs checking (3)
  • Obtain the Westminster Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Augsburg Confession and the Book of Concord, without which no page here can state Protestant teaching in confessional words.
  • Obtain an OCA or other official Orthodox catechetical statement on Scripture, the Church and justification, so this track carries a tier A or B route.
  • Obtain tier D scholarship on the sixteenth-century background, which this track deliberately does not narrate.

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If you are Protestant, you already hold a great deal in common with Orthodoxy: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Creed, the authority and inspiration of Scripture, salvation by grace, the resurrection of the body. Orthodoxy is not a version of Roman Catholicism, and several things you may have been taught to object to in Catholic teaching are not Orthodox teaching either.

The differences that matter are less a checklist than a single structural question: what is the Church, and how does it read the book it gave you? Most of the specific disagreements follow from the answer.

Topics

  1. Scripture and Tradition Is Scripture the sole authority for doctrine, or is it read within a tradition that also carries authority?
  2. Which books, and who decided Why does an Orthodox Old Testament contain books a Protestant Bible does not?
  3. The Church and its ministry Is the Church a visible body with bishops in succession, or the company of all true believers wherever they are found?

Not yet covered

These belong in this track and are not here. They are listed so that their absence is a stated gap rather than a silent one, and so that nobody mistakes this for a complete account.

  • Justification, faith and works, which requires the Augsburg Confession and a careful account of theosis before it can be written honestly
  • The Eucharist: real presence is shared with some Protestant bodies and not others, so the page must be written confession by confession
  • Baptism, including infant baptism and its mode
  • The veneration of the saints and of the Theotokos, and the distinction between veneration and worship
  • Icons, which the Seventh Council addressed directly and which the archive can support well
  • Liturgy, and why Orthodox worship has the shape it has

Sources for this page

  1. Tier C The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (eds.); A. Cleveland Coxe (American ed.) Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book III; Ignatius, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans translated edition of primary texts The second-century evidence underlying this track. Source record

Tiers are explained in the methodology. No page on this site has been reviewed or approved by any bishop, priest, synod or seminary.