Initially Luther and Calvin concentrated on the persona of Jesus Christ: “There is no other way – Christ alone is the Way and the Truth. Without Him it is impossible to find God… Only through the incarnated Christ can one learn to know God… because by sending us His Son He revealed to us His will and His heart.” In the small Lutheran catechism it says that “Luther is a dear and blessed teacher of the Holy Scriptures, who transformed the church of God by reinstating the purity of teaching and the correct performance of sacraments in Christianity.”

However, this struggle for the purity of the Church was joined by an unclerical element – namely, rebellion against the papacy out of political, economic and personal motivations. This had a most detrimental effect on the development of the Reformation and on its teaching. Having set himself the task of reviving the Church teaching in its apostolic purity, Luther and his followers were unable to master this task, because many centuries separated them from the beginning of Christianity, because they did not have live spiritual experience, and because they lacked the knowledge of the writings of the early Church Fathers. The medieval scholastic education, on the other hand, presented a distorted image of Christianity. Their sole source of interpretation was their own personal opinion.

The Orthodox Church always rejected the documents and facts that were fabricated by Rome in abuse of Holy Tradition and were foreign to the word of God. The Protestants, however, moved away completely from apostolic tradition and rejected the spiritual experience of holy teachers of the Church and the decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, retaining as their sole guide in faith the Holy Scriptures, which they interpreted arbitrarily.

Lack of knowledge of and rejection of Church Tradition in principle became the main source of all the Protestants’ fallacies, because the word of God includes all three – the Bible, the Gospel, and Tradition. “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle,” – proclaims Apostle Paul (2 Thess. 2:15). The holy Apostle John says: “There are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written” (John 21:25). “The apostles did not pass on everything through writing, but many things orally; however, both the one and the other are equally worthy of belief. For this reason we consider tradition to be also worthy of belief,” – says St. John Chrysostome. Other Church Fathers regard Tradition in a similar manner: St Basil the Great, St. Irineus of Lyons, blessed Augustine, and other holy men of the first centuries.

By rejecting apostolic tradition in principle, the Protestants are not consistent. They have accepted, on the basis of Tradition, the canon of holy books, the profession of major Christian dogmas – the trinity of Persons in God and the incarnation of the Son of God, – and they acknowledge three ancient creeds in which these dogmas are revealed. At the same time, though rejecting the authority of ancient Church Fathers, they have set up the authority of new German theolo-gians: Luther, Calvin, and others.

The Lutherans affirm that the salvation of man and his deliverance from sin is achieved by God Himself and not by man’s works, solely through faith, whose granting depends entirely on God, on His wish. The grace of God, acting upon a man, imbues him with belief in Christ, and this becomes the sole criterion for salvation – faith makes a man righteous. The distinguishing feature of such a belief is that man does not doubt that he will receive God’s grace. Through his faith man becomes a holy, righteous and justified child of God. Such, briefly, in the teaching on justification by faith, which is the foundation and the starting point of the entire Protestant dogma.

The Holy Scriptures do not give us any basis for accepting this Lutheran teaching, since it conceals within itself elements that lead to a destruction of Christian morality. Such a dogma contradicts the word of God and issues from a misunderstanding of the holy apostles’ words. Luther based his teaching on a literal misinterpretation of Apostle Paul’s individual words, taken out of context and separated from the apostle’s whole train of thought: “Man is justified by faith independently of his lawful works” (epistle to the Romans), “man is justified not by lawful works, but solely by faith in Jesus Christ” (epistle to the Galatians). In saying these words, Apostle Paul was not setting himself against good deeds, but against the false self-conceit of Jewish teachers, who believed that salvation was attained by external deeds in accordance with the law of Moses: circumcision, the keeping of the Sabbath, the washing of hands, etc. The same Apostle Paul says in his epistle to the Romans that on the day of His righteous Judgment the Lord will judge each man according to his deeds. And from Apostle James we hear the following: “What doth it profit though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?… For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” The Lord Himself says that even corrupt people can have faith in terms of acknowledging existing religious truths, but that such faith is not sufficient for salvation: “Not every man that says to Me: Lord, Lord, shall enter the heavenly realm, but the one that obeys the will of My Heavenly Father.”

In rejecting the extremes of Roman-Catholic teaching, Luther himself went to the extreme: he not only rejected God-given priesthood and the sacraments, but also the apostolic concept of the Church. Luther says that the true Church is the one where God’s word remains intact and the sacraments are given correctly. But where is the criterion of the soundness and purity of the word of God and the correctness of the performance of sacraments, if Luther himself rejected the spiritual experience of the ancient Church, rejected Holy Tradition and conciliar church wisdom, replacing them with arbitrary concepts?

“Spiritual priesthood, – says Luther, – is an attribute of all Christians. All of us are priests, i.e. all of us are the children of Christ, the High Priest. Therefore, we have no need of any other priest besides Christ, since each one of us has been appointed by God Himself. Through baptism we all become priests.” Every person can preach the word of God in church and perform sacraments. Pastors and superintendents exist only to keep order. They are chosen by the community from among people capable of teaching the members of the community. After such people are elected, the elders place their hands upon them. There is no place here for apostolic succession, nor for the grace of priesthood, but this is simply an administrative appointment to the position of preacher.

Such an assertion diverges completely from the method and understanding of the role of priesthood in the early Christian Church, and it is not true that the Lord Jesus Christ and the apostles did not establish the Church in a definite manner. In fact, for 40 days after His resurrection the Lord conversed with His disciples about the “Kingdom of God” (Acts of the Apostles), i.e. about the establishment of the Church – a community of the faithful. To the apostles alone did the Lord give the right to perform sacraments and to teach the faith to others: “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matt.28:18-20). Also the right to administer people, leading them to salvation: “As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you. And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and saith unto them: receive ye the Holy Ghost” (John 20:21-23). The apostles themselves testify that it was not the community of faithful, but the Lord Himself Who summoned them to the apostolic labor of serving Him not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father (Gal. 1:1).

The apostles preserved and successively passed on this order and mode of church life that was established by the Lord Himself; they themselves ordained bishops and presbyters.

Luther’s teaching on justification by faith alone led to an altered outlook on sacraments, which for Lutherans have only a symbolic meaning, and their power resides only in the individual’s personal certainty that he has been justified. The Lutherans have retained only two sacraments, rather, their external form, – baptism and communion, which had been transmitted by the Saviour Himself. However, their teaching is peculiar and foreign to ancient tradition. False spirituality is revealed among Protestants in the form of mysticism, a pretense at direct communion with God, by-passing established sacraments and services.

The Protestants have arrived at negating the idea of contact between the living and those who have departed to God, negating the need for praying for the deceased, and the saints’ intercession for us. The grounds for such a negation are purely rationalistic: why pray when God’s destinies cannot be changed, and especially since Christ has already fully atoned for us before God? Such teaching leads to moral passivity.

Protestantism, in its widely spread liberal form, has transposed the importance of church experience to personal feelings and pious sentiments. If so, then one may very well ask – why do we need the grace and power of God? Salvation has been achieved and has been imputed to me. Are miracles then necessary, even the miracle of the resurrection? In the early 1940s the Protestants removed from their religion the teaching on the Son of God and our salvation through Him. In the beginning of the 20th century, 80% of the pastors of the city of Hamburg denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. Recently the Lutherans have even started electing women to the position of pastor. For fairness’ sake it should be noted that Lutheranism has always sheltered different movements, while now voices can be heard saying: “We have no church.” Among some Lutherans there is a noticeable interest in Orthodoxy.

Thus, from Luther’s time the Lutheran movement has rejected the importance of live church experience – the Holy Tradition, has rejected the worship of the Virgin Mary and the saints, prayers for the dead, the administrative establishment of the Church, the holy sacraments, the icons, the sign of the cross, – and considers faith alone to be sufficient for meriting the Heavenly Kingdom. This distorted Lutheran Christianity creates a chasm between it and the true, holy, conciliar and apostolic Church.