We focus our attention this Advent on Luke 2:10–11: “The angel said to [the shepherds], ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord’” (Luke 2:10–11). And the question for us is this: how does the Lordship of this newborn baby boy make possible the fearlessness and greatness of your joy this Christmas and as 2022 begins?

And I do mean you — not just the shepherds — because it is clear from this context and this gospel, as we will see, that the fearlessness and the greatness of the joy is not just for the shepherds. It is for everyone who says, “Jesus is Lord!” and is glad to have it so. We know this because of the word for at the beginning of Luke 2:11. This word signals that calling Jesus “my Lord and my God” (John 20:28) is the foundation of Christian fearlessness and great joy.

Luke 2:10 tells us that fearless, great joy is coming into this world, and Luke 2:11 answers the questions, How can it come? How can it be sustained in such a world? Because this baby boy is not only a Savior — not only the Christ, the Messiah — but is the Lord.

What makes the fearlessness and the greatness of your joy possible in 2022 and beyond is not just that this baby boy will be a Savior, and not just that he will be the long-awaited Messiah, but that he is the Lord. This is the foundation of your fearlessness and the greatness of your joy this Christmas and in the coming year.

Imagine someone says to you, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling! It’s falling on your family. It’s falling on your church. It’s falling on your city. It’s falling on your nation. It’s falling on the world. Don’t you realize the sky is falling?” What will be the foundation of the fearlessness and the greatness of your joy as you go merrily on your way to do more good until Jesus comes?

So that’s our question: How does the Lordship of this newborn baby boy make possible the fearlessness and greatness of your joy this Christmas and in the coming year? Here are six wonders of Jesus’s Lordship that answer this question.

1. Jesus the Divine Lord

The fearlessness and greatness of your joy is possible because Jesus is a divine Lord. When we say, “Jesus is Lord,” we mean no less than “Jesus is God.” Luke says this in many ways in his gospel. I’ll mention only four.

God from God

First, Luke uses the word Lord interchangeably with God in reference to Jesus. Take just the first two chapters for example. The word Lord occurs twenty-seven times, with twenty-five of them referring to God.

Look right here in our text: “An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them” (Luke 2:9). Two verses later he says, “Unto you is born Christ, the Lord” (Luke 2:11). No hesitation. No qualification. The Lord (God) sent his angel, and the glory of the Lord (God) shone — and the child born is the Lord.

In Luke 2:26, Jesus is called “the Lord’s Christ,” and here in Luke 2:11 he is called “Christ the Lord.” That’s virtually the same as the apostle John saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Jesus is “the Lord’s Christ,” and Jesus is “Christ the Lord.”

Born of a Virgin

Second, the divine lordship of Jesus is the point of the virgin birth. Look at Luke 1:31. Gabriel tells Mary she will have a child. Mary asks how that can be (Luke 1:34). Here’s how the angel answers in Luke 1:35: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy — the Son of God.”

This is not the crass slander of Christianity that claims God the Father had sex with Mary, and that’s why Christians call Jesus the Son of God. This is the Holy Spirit making clear that no human father will be needed because he is going to work an unfathomable miracle in Mary’s womb so that there will be a child with two natures, divine and human: Jesus the God-man, Jesus the Lord.

Greater than David’s Son

Third, in Luke 20:41–44, Jesus will go on the offensive to challenge the Jewish leaders with his identity. He says, “How can they say that the Christ is David’s son? For David himself says in the Book of Psalms, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”’ David thus calls him Lord, so how is he his son?”

No answer. Because the point was that already, in the Psalms, the Holy Spirit was pointing to the fact that the Messiah, the Christ, would be vastly more than a human son of David.

Worthy of Worship

Fourth, where does the Gospel of Luke leave us at the end? What are we doing as we walk away from this inspired display of the Lord Jesus? Luke 24:51–52: “While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” They worshiped him! That’s the point of Luke’s Gospel: Worship him with great joy! Cherish him as your greatest treasure!

So, the fearlessness and greatness of your joy this Christmas is possible because Jesus is a divine Lord. “Jesus is Lord” means “Jesus is God.”

2. Jesus the Historical Lord

The fearlessness and greatness of your joy is also possible because Jesus is a historical Lord. What I mean by this is that the accounts of Jesus’s birth, life, death, and resurrection are not mythical. They are not like Greek mythology. They are rooted in world history — the kind of history you can read and know about whether you are Christian or not.

The life of Jesus does not take place in Middle-earth or in a galaxy far, far away. It takes place “in the days of Herod, king of Judea” (Luke 1:5). Mary was from “a city of Galilee named Nazareth” (Luke 1:26). She came with Joseph to Bethlehem, a town about five miles outside Jerusalem, because “a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria” (Luke 2:1–2).

And John the Baptist began his ministry “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene” (Luke 3:1–2).

What’s the point of all these secular, historical references? The point is that Jesus was just as real as if he had been born when Joe Biden was president of the United States, when Tim Walz was governor of Minnesota, and when Jacob Frey was the mayor of Minneapolis. He was not, and is not, mythical.

So, the fearlessness and greatness of your joy is possible because Jesus is a historical Lord.

3. Jesus the All-Governing Lord

The fearlessness and greatness of your joy is possible because Jesus is an all-governing Lord. From a boat during the storm, his disciples cry out, “‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he awoke and rebuked the wind and the raging waves, and they ceased . . . and [his disciples] marveled, saying to one another, ‘Who then is this, that he commands even winds and water, and they obey him?’” (Luke 8:24–25). The answer is obvious: the one who made them.

Then there were the demons: “Demons also came out crying, ‘You are the Son of God!’ But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak” (Luke 4:41). And then there were the diseases of every kind: “All those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to him, and he laid his hands on every one of them and healed them” (Luke 4:40). No failures.

What about our great enemy, death? “[Jesus] came up and touched the [casket] . . . And he said [to the dead man], ‘Young man, I say to you, arise.’ And the dead man sat up and began to speak” (Luke 7:14–15). What about the so-called “self-determination of the human will” in coming to know Christ? “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Luke 10:22).

Jesus the Lord governs all natural events. No demons can do anything but by his permission. He can heal any disease. He can and will raise the dead. And it is he who opens the blind eyes of the human heart to know God.

Luke loves the all-governing Lordship of God, which is shared by the God-man Jesus Christ. Why else would Luke begin his gospel with God’s amazing reversal of the butterfly effect? The butterfly effect is the theory that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil may cause a tornado in Oklahoma because of a thousand unknown links working in a causal chain. But God reverses the butterfly effect, using something as massive as a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico to cause a single Chinese university student in Beijing to stumble into Christian fellowship and be saved.

So, don’t you think Luke was smiling as he began his Gospel with this story? God chose a virgin, and her betrothed, who were living in Nazareth. Their family line was from Bethlehem, where the Messiah must be born. To get this virgin to the proper birthplace, he puts it in the mind of Caesar Augustus — the most powerful person in the world, living over a thousand miles away — to call for empire-wide registration, involving millions of people, at exactly the moment when it would get this one obscure, pregnant Jewish girl from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

“The events of history are not about nations and industries. God governs the world for the sake of his children.”

God did all this to fulfill his prophecy. That’s amazing. That’s our all-governing God, and that’s the Lord Jesus. And he is doing that today. Do you think the great events on the stage of world history are about nations and industries? They’re not. They are about you. God governs the world for the sake of his children. Jesus governs the world for the sake of those who say, “Jesus is Lord!” and mean it.

4. Jesus the Everlasting Lord

The fearlessness and greatness of your joy is possible because Jesus is an everlasting Lord. As the angel Gabriel said to Mary in Luke 1:31–33,

You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

He will reign forever. His kingdom will have no end. If you are the subject of his Lordship, you will live forever. He will raise you from the dead. He will bring you with him into everlasting life. His power to govern all things for your good will never end. Never. You can never be lost if you are his.

5. Jesus the God-Glorifying Lord

The fearlessness and greatness of your joy is possible because Jesus is a God-glorifying Lord. Look at these five verses in Luke:

The lame man who Jesus healed, after the man was lowered through the roof, “went home, glorifying God” (Luke 5:25).
The crowd who saw Jesus heal him “glorified God and were filled with awe” (Luke 5:26).
When he raised the widow’s son from the dead, “fear seized them all, and they glorified God” (Luke 7:16).
The woman whose back had been bent over for eighteen years was straightened, “and she glorified God” (Luke 13:13).
When the blind beggar received his sight, he “followed [Jesus], glorifying God” (Luke 18:43).

We don’t need to make our way through the rest of Luke’s Gospel to see the God-glorifying purpose of the birth of this Lord.

In Luke 2:12, the angel gives the shepherds a sign. The angel says, “This Savior, this Christ, this Lord — you will find him ‘lying in a feeding trough.’” I cannot help but think that the shepherds, at that point, would have been totally confused: Savior, Christ, Lord — plus dirty, smelly feeding trough. But before they can venture to ask this angel for clarification, the sky fills with armies of angels praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest” (Luke 2:14).

“The mission of the Savior is to show the world that God is infinitely great, beautiful, and valuable.”

The Savior is born. The Messiah is born. The Lord of the universe is born. And before you can layer your perplexed interpretation on top of it, Mr. Shepherd, here’s the point: “Glory to God in the highest” (Luke 2:14). The point of this birth is that God is glorious. The mission of this Savior and this Messiah and this Lord is to show the world, and the powers of darkness, that God is infinitely great and beautiful and valuable. Glorious.

But we should ask a question. Since God has sent a Savior to save man, and a Messiah to fulfill all the promises made to man, and a Lord to rule all things for the good of man — why don’t the heavenly armies say, “Glory to man in the highest”?

Why not? Because the universe was created to display and uphold and communicate the glory of God. If we displace God as the ultimate end and goal of creation, history, and redemption, we don’t gain status. We lose God. And then, losing God, we lose joy. Great joy. This brings us now to the sixth wonder of the Lordship of Jesus.

6. Jesus the Happy Lord

Finally, the fearlessness and greatness of your joy is possible because Jesus is a happy Lord. Not only this, but he is the perfect embodiment of his Father’s happiness. When the angels say, “Glory to God in the highest!” (Luke 2:14), they are obeying God — that’s what he wants said! — and it is a happy shout. This is a glad night. And the gladness started in heaven.

Luke completes the picture of God’s gladness later in his Gospel. Only Luke records the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son (Luke 15), and Jesus tells all three parables to explain why he eats with tax collectors and sinners. He does it because he embodies his Father’s happiness in saving sinners.

Here’s Luke 15:9–10: “When she has found [her lost coin, representing Jesus finding a lost sinner], she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’” And Jesus adds, “Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” Look carefully to the wording. It doesn’t say, “There is joy among the angels.” It says, “There is joy before the angels,” joy in their presence. This is God’s joy. That’s God’s happiness.

Then comes the parable of the lost or prodigal son. He has squandered all the father’s inheritance. He heads home, hoping to be a taken-care-of slave. “While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). And then the Father says, “‘Bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate.”

And, as if to make it crystal clear, the father says to the grumbling older brother: “It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:32).

In Luke’s inspired view of the all-glorious, God-glorifying God, what makes God happy? What makes the Lord Jesus happy? The joy of his people as they rediscover the happy goodness of their Father. This is a parable about the glory of the Father and the awakening of a blind son to that glory — namely, the beauty of his Father’s happy goodness.

Fearless (and Happy) Under Fallen Skies

When the angels say, “Glory to God in the highest” (Luke 2:14), this is not at the expense of God’s people. This story is the joy of God’s people. Seeing and savoring and being caught up into this glory is the salvation of God’s people. This glory is the fulfillment of all the messianic promises. This glory is the overflow of the happy Lordship of Jesus.

Bethlehem’s mission statement didn’t come out of nowhere: “We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ.” We got it, in part, from Luke’s Gospel: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” (Luke 2:14). God gets the glory. We get the peace. We get the fearlessness of great joy within his glory.

“The Holy Spirit frees us from the deceit that self-lordship is the path of joy.”

As the angel says, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people” (Luke 2:10). Will the fearlessness and the greatness of this joy be yours this Christmas? You can’t take away your own fear, and you can’t create your own joy. The apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 12:3, “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.” It is a divine miracle when a sinful, self-exalting human being says, “Jesus is Lord!” and means it.

The Holy Spirit works this miracle by the word of God. This is why our submission to the Lordship of Christ is a free act. The Holy Spirit opens the eyes of our hearts and frees us from the slavery, from the deceit, that self-lordship is the path of joy. He fixes our gaze on Christ and causes us to leave our fears and leap for joy. Great joy.

So, if someone says to you, “Don’t you know the sky is falling?” you will say, “Perhaps, and if it is, my divine, historical, all-governing, everlasting, God-glorifying, happy Lord Jesus — he is in charge of the sky falling. And he will make it serve the great and fearless joy of his church. So why don’t you come on in? Everyone is invited: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13).

The late R.C. Sproul was fond of inverting a particular biblical passage in order to bring home a theological truth. For instance, in seeking to press upon his hearers the horrors of God’s wrath, Sproul would turn to the Aaronic blessing:

The Lord bless you and keep you;     the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. (Numbers 6:24–26)

Sproul turns the blessing inside out, transforming it into a curse:

May the Lord curse you and abandon you.     May the Lord keep you in darkness and give you only judgment without grace.May the Lord turn his back upon you and remove his peace from you forever.

His point in doing so was to press home the reality of God’s judgment and the wonders of Christ’s cross, modifying the familiar words so that we marvel at God’s grace in sending Christ to bear the curse in our place. Years ago, inspired by Sproul’s example, I engaged in my own inversion, this time transforming the Bible’s most detailed description of human rebellion into a vision for the Godward life.

The Godless Life

In Romans 1:18–32, Paul paints a picture of the consequences of human idolatry and ingratitude on human life and culture — the wages of a godless life. God’s wrath is revealed against our ungodliness, by which we suppress the truth of his sovereignty, power, and nature. In refusing to honor and thank God, who gives us every good gift, our minds fall into vanity and our hearts are darkened. Our rebellious folly is manifested clearly in the dark exchange that we make — trading away the glory of the immortal God for created things.

As a result of this foundational rebellion and false worship, God gives us over to impurity, lies, dishonorable passions, and a debased mind. The result extends to every area of human life. The individual is corrupted in mind and heart, in thinking and willing. The effects of rebellion extend from the inner man to the outer man, from the soul to the body. Our sexuality is corrupted, as sinful desires reign and ungodly passions distort the relationships between men and women.

From there, our corporate life is affected. “They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (Romans 1:29–31). Family, friends, and society are all twisted by our debased minds as loving fellowship and community are torn apart and reoriented by our shared rebellion.

The Godward Life

So then, if this is a horrifying picture of human rebellion and ungodliness, what might the opposite be? Could an inverted Romans 1 give us a renewed vision for the Godward life?

The pleasure of God is revealed from heaven upon all godliness and righteousness of men, who by their righteousness celebrate the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. For because they know God, they honor him as God and give thanks to him, and they become fruitful in their thinking, and their humble hearts are enlightened. Having become fools for Christ, they have thereby become wise, and are receiving the glory of the immortal God and seeing that glory reflected in mortal man, birds, animals, and creeping things.

Therefore, God restored them in the desires of their hearts for purity, to the honoring of their bodies among themselves, because they gladly received the truth about God instead of lies and worshiped and served the Creator, who is blessed forever, rather than the creature. Amen.

For this reason, God renews their desires and delights and passions. For the women glory in the masculinity of men, and the men likewise revel in the femininity of women, and husbands and wives are consumed with passion for each other, men and women honoring the marriage bed and receiving among themselves the due reward for their obedience.

And since they see fit to acknowledge God, God reorients their renewed minds to do what ought to be done. They are filled with all manner of righteousness, goodness, contentment, benevolence. They are full of gratitude for other people’s gifts, brotherly love, peace, truth-telling, magnanimity. They are edifiers, encouragers, lovers of God, courteous, meek, humble, inventors of good, obedient to parents, wise, steadfast, compassionate, merciful. Because they know God’s decree that those who practice such things will receive eternal life, they not only do them but give hearty approval to those who practice them.

By turning the chapter on its head, we discover a fundamentally different vision for human life — one that begins, not with God’s wrath, but with his pleasure.

Going Godward Together

As we together turn our lives, ambitions, and worship Godward, we celebrate the truth, rather than suppress it. God’s revelation in creation and conscience and the Scriptures is the same, but now it leads us to heartfelt worship and gratitude to God through Christ. Such worship includes renewed and fruitful minds and humble and enlightened hearts, as we wisely and gladly receive the glory of God in and through the things that he has made.

Worship and thanksgiving spill forth from our souls to our bodies, as we offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God (Romans 12:1). This worship and gratitude reorient our sexual lives so that our renewed desires lead us into marriages, families, and fruitfulness. Rather than a war between the sexes, in which we despise, reject, and scorn each other, men marvel at the glory of women, and women admire and rejoice in the strength of men, as our families live beneath the blessing of God.

And then our reordered desires spill over the banks of our families and flood every aspect of our social lives, forming communities and cultures united by deep love for God and others. God’s law is our delight. Evil gives way to goodness, covetousness to contentment, and malice to benevolence. We cast off fellowship-killing envy and instead give thanks to God for his blessings to others. Strife ceases and peace reigns. We put off malicious lies and instead speak the truth with magnanimous hearts. Instead of using words to tear down and destroy, we build up and encourage. Insolent pride turns to meekness and humility. By God’s pleasure and grace, “foolish, faithless, heartless, and ruthless” becomes “wise, steadfast, compassionate, and merciful.”

This is the way of life that God has set before us — the Godward life — and it was not without great cost. God himself, in the person of his Son, took our flesh and dwelled among us, and gave himself for us, to turn the curse inside out and make it a blessing. And he plants this seed in every regenerate heart through the new birth, as we see and savor the goodness and grace of Christ. And as he pours out his grace upon us, this glorious vision multiplies in churches and homes and communities around the world, for his glory and our joy.

Orthodoxy comprises a range of autonomous churches, the Russian and Greek being the most prominent. During the first millennium of the church, the Latin West and the predominantly Greek-speaking East drifted apart linguistically, culturally, and theologically. Rome’s claims to universal jurisdiction and its acceptance of the filioque clause led to severed relations in 1054. Many countries in the East, overrun by the Muslims, had limited freedom. Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, while in the twentieth century, Orthodoxy in Russia and Eastern Europe endured under Communist rule, suffering intense persecution.

Orthodoxy is emphatically not to be identified with Rome. Ecclesiastically, it has no unified hierarchy, no pope, no magisterium. It lacks the barrage of dogmas of the Roman Church. Its doctrinal basis, such as it is, is the seven ecumenical councils, referring principally to the Trinity and Christology, the vast majority of which Protestants embrace. While at the popular level some Marian dogmas are accepted, they are not accorded official status. Nor is there a requirement for converts from Protestantism to renounce justification by faith alone. Particularly distinctive is its dominantly visual worship; icons fill its churches. Its ancient liturgy, rooted in the fourth century, is central to its theology and life.

If Orthodoxy differs so significantly from Catholicism, how closely does it resemble Protestantism? A brief overview of Orthodoxy reveals several points of alignment, some significant misunderstandings, and a few major disagreements with Protestantism.

Learning from Orthodoxy

First, Protestants can learn from many positive elements in Orthodoxy.

The Orthodox liturgy, for starters, is full of Trinitarian prayers, hymns, and doxologies. The Trinity is a vital part of their belief and worship. This finds biblical precedent as Paul describes our relationship with God in Trinitarian terms: “Through [Christ] we . . . have access by one Spirit to the Father” (Ephesians 2:18).

Another positive element in Orthodoxy is their teaching on union with Christ and God. Crucial to Orthodox theology is deification, in which humans are indwelt by the Holy Spirit and transformed by divine grace. Orthodox theology has maintained a focus on the union of the three persons in God, the union of deity and humanity in Christ, the union of Christ and the church, and the union of the Holy Spirit and the saints. In some forms, Orthodoxy’s focus on deification enters the realm of mysticism. But in other strands, exemplified by the Alexandrians, Athanasius (295–373), and Cyril (378–444), it is the equivalent of regeneration, adoption, sanctification, and glorification viewed as one seamless process.

In addition, unlike the Western church, the Orthodox Church has enjoyed freedom from concerns raised by the Enlightenment. Due to its historical and cultural isolation, Orthodoxy has experienced no Middle Ages, no Renaissance, no Reformation, and no Enlightenment. Until recently, it was not preoccupied with critical attacks of unbelief, which in the West have sometimes bred a detached, academic approach to theology divorced from the life of the church. This is evident in Orthodoxy’s firm belief in the return of Christ and heaven and hell, topics often sidelined in the West due to possible embarrassment.

Finally, the Orthodox Church keeps together theology and piety. Asceticism and monasticism have had a contemplative character. The knowledge of God is received and cultivated in prayer and meditation in battle against the forces of darkness. Since the Enlightenment, Western theology has centered in academic institutions unconnected to the church. Orthodoxy has profoundly integrated liturgy, piety, and doctrine.

Points of Alignment

Beyond these positive elements in Orthodoxy from which Protestants can learn, there are many areas of agreement between Protestantism and Orthodoxy.

The ecumenical councils’ declarations on the Trinity and Christ show the extensive agreement between Orthodoxy and classic Protestantism, despite disagreement on the filioque.

With different emphases, the Orthodox and evangelical Protestants agree on the authority of the Bible, sin and the fall (although the Orthodox do not accept the Augustinian doctrine of original sin), Christ’s death and resurrection (although the atonement is regarded more as conquest of death than as payment for the penalty of the broken law), the Holy Spirit, the return of Christ, the final judgment, and heaven and hell.

Although the Reformation controversies passed the East by, occasionally Orthodox fathers talk of salvation and of faith as gifts of God’s grace, while the Orthodox liturgy repeatedly calls on the Lord for mercy to us as sinners, as does the famous Jesus prayer. At root, justification has not been an issue and so has not provoked discussion. Similarly, there are echoes in the West of deification — in Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and some Puritans — for, understood in the way Athanasius and Cyril did, deification is no more incompatible with justification by faith than are sanctification and glorification.

Additionally, the Orthodox doctrine of the church stresses its unity, the parity of bishops and of all church members, underlying its opposition to Rome. This is a model close to Anglicanism.

Significant Misunderstandings

Historically, however, Protestant and Orthodox believers have often misunderstood one another.

To start, Protestants tend to misunderstand the Eastern understanding of icons. Nicea II (AD 787) emphatically denied that icons are worshiped. Following John of Damascus (675–749), the council distinguished between honor (proskunēsis) given to saints and icons, and worship (latreia) owed to the indivisible Trinity alone. Icons are seen as windows to the spiritual realm, indicating the presence in the church’s worship on earth of the saints in heaven. Moreover, the idea of image (eikon) is prominent in the Bible. The whole creation reveals the glory of God (Psalm 19:1–6; Romans 1:18–20). Reformed theology, in general revelation, views the whole world as an icon.

No problem exists with intercession among saints as such, for we all pray for and with living saints; we have prayer meetings. However, the Bible does not encourage us to pray to departed saints, for there are no grounds to suppose that they hear us. Rather, Scripture directs our hope to Christ, his return, and the resurrection (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18).

On Scripture and tradition (the teaching of the church), both sides appeal to both sources. There is an overwhelming biblical emphasis in Orthodox liturgy, while the Reformation had a high view of the teaching of the church. The issue is not the Bible versus tradition, but rather which has the decisive voice. For evangelicalism, the Bible is unequivocally the word of God (2 Timothy 3:16), while all human councils may err.

From the Orthodox side, many confuse the Protestant doctrine of predestination with Islamic fatalism. The Bible teaches both the absolute sovereignty of God and the full responsibility of man, God’s decrees not undermining the free actions of secondary causes. As such, the Orthodox idea that the doctrine of predestination short-circuits the human will, and is effectively monothelite, is misplaced.

Many Orthodox polemicists also accuse evangelicals of ignoring the church’s part in Scripture. However, the classic Protestant confessions attest that the church is integral to the process of salvation, the Christian faith being found in the Bible and taught by the church. Both Scripture and the church are originated by the Holy Spirit. Church and covenant are integral to Reformed theology. Orthodoxy often confuses classic Protestantism with today’s freewheeling individualists.

Major Disagreements

Beyond these points of alignment and misunderstanding, significant differences do exist.

First, the East tends to downplay preaching. Largely due to the impact of Islam, and despite Orthodoxy’s heritage of superlative preaching (Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen, among others), their liturgy is more visual. Sermons are part of the liturgy, but the focus is more on the icons and the symbolic movements of the clergy.

Next, the relationship between Scripture and tradition differs. For Orthodoxy, tradition is a living dynamic movement — the Bible existing within it, not apart from it. This was the position of the church of the first two centuries, with the Bible and tradition effectively indistinguishable. Later developments in the West placed tradition over Scripture (medieval Rome), or pitted Scripture against tradition (the anabaptists, some evangelicals), or put Scripture over tradition without rejecting it (the Reformation, the Reformed churches). For Orthodoxy, Scripture is not the supreme authority.

A third distinction is found in what’s called the Palamite doctrine of the Trinity. Gregory Palamas’s distinction between the unknowable essence (being) of God and his energies has driven a wedge between God in himself and God as he has revealed himself, threatening our knowledge of God with profound agnosticism. It introduces into God a division, not a distinction. The Christian life easily becomes mystical contemplation.

Along with Rome, the East venerates Mary and the saints. Orthodoxy considers it possible, legitimate, and desirable to pray to departed saints. But there is no biblical evidence that this is possible.

Finally and most crucially, Orthodoxy has what we might call soteriological synergism. The East has a vigorous doctrine of free will and an implacable opposition to the Protestant teaching on predestination and the sovereignty of God’s grace in salvation. This puts Orthodoxy further away from the Reformation than is Rome.

How Far Away Is the East?

Compared with Rome, how far away from Protestantism is Orthodoxy?

Orthodoxy is closer to classic Protestantism than is Rome in a number of ways. Both were forced into separation, and both oppose the claims of the papacy. The structure of the Orthodox churches is closer to Anglicanism than Catholicism. Orthodoxy does not have the same accumulation of authoritative dogmas as Rome. Its stress on the Bible opens up a large commonality of approach.

In other ways, Orthodoxy is further removed from Protestantism than is Rome. Protestantism, with Rome, is part of the Latin church, shares the same history, and addresses the same questions. Its faith is centered in Christ; the East’s is more focused on the Holy Spirit, along with a more mystical theology and practice. As Kallistos Ware puts it, Rome and Protestantism share the same questions, but supply different answers; with Orthodoxy the questions are different.