On Why Orthodoxy Is Special

By Fr. Seraphim Johnson (+2009) in response to a question from an Orthodox Christian

Question: Lest we begin taking it for granted and grow fainthearted, could you please explain some of the things that make Orthodoxy special?

Fr. Seraphim’s Answer:

Our Lord Jesus Christ became a human being to make it possible for us to repair the damaged relationship with God that resulted from the Fall. But He didn’t just come in that one time and place—He left a body behind to bear witness to Him; to teach others to follow Him, just as the disciples followed Him; and to provide the means to make it possible to follow Him in obedience to God the Father. This is the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church has maintained unchanged the teaching which our Lord gave to His disciples, so that we today have the great privilege of knowing what it was He taught in all its fullness. It is amazing, but you can look at books from more than 1500 years ago that were written to teach the Christian Faith, and they are still accurate and applicable in the Orthodox Church today, but nowhere else. No other church has maintained the Apostles’ teaching so faithfully and completely. When we listen to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, it is just as if we are sitting at the feet of our Lord Himself, hearing Him instruct His immediate followers.

As Orthodox Christians we also have the amazing assurance that our bishops and priests are in the direct line from the Apostles themselves. They have a continuous succession through laying on of hands (ordination) and through maintaining the Apostolic doctrine, the teaching of the Apostles. These two things together are necessary to share in the grace which our Lord gave His Body, the Church. And only the Orthodox Church can honestly claim to have them both.

Because of this Apostolic inheritance, when we are present at the Divine Liturgy, we are actually able to share in the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, just exactly the same way the Apostles did at the Last Supper. We become literal partakers of the Divine as we receive the Lord in this Holy Mystery. The Mystery is assured only because the whole Faith taught by our Lord has been maintained in Orthodoxy and because the clergy remain in that direct succession going back to the Apostles. What a privilege this is for us! Just to be present at such a Mystery is awesome and frightening, even if for some reason we cannot actually receive the Body and Blood of our Lord that day, but how much more overwhelming it is to be allowed to share in the Divine life through Holy Communion!

Orthodoxy also does not leave us alone before God. It offers us a whole army of examples, the saints. As we study their lives and their faithfulness to Christ, we see many examples of how we should live if we too are to be faithful to Him. And we have the assurance that their example is a correct one, one which will not lead us astray, because they have been verified and vouched for by the Orthodox Church. We also have access to an incomparable wealth of spiritual instruction and guidance, written not as dry theory by academics, but resulting from the living experience of union with God through the deepest prayer. This instruction—found in the writings of the Holy Fathers, the Philokalia, and the biographies, memoirs, and notes of many saints right down to the present time—gives us an assured way to follow if we also wish to grow in love for God and union with Him, and the works themselves have the power to warm our hearts and make us want to be more like the saints.

To sum it up: only Orthodoxy offers us a sure and reliable way to come to know and follow our Lord Jesus Christ, a way that connects us unbreakably with the Apostles and the Saints of the Church throughout its whole history. It makes it possible for us to share in the wonder of the Apostles as they came to know our Lord, and it gives us the opportunity to overcome the awful effects of the Fall, to restore our relationship with God in the way offered by our Lord. This possibility is the reason to be Orthodox, and it should be a source of great joy to all of us. It also should inspire us to use the great gifts we have been given in Orthodoxy to become the saints that God intends us to be.