Mothra said:
Doc Holliday said:
Mothra said:
Doc Holliday said:
EO has an entire psychospiritual taxonomy for how sin takes root and how you fight it. We see sin as a disease, not a legal debt.
How do you guys handle your habitual sin, your passions, your pride, your ego etc.?
From my experience, if you're not fasting in some manner, not praying daily, not reading scripture, not confessing, not talking about your sin with others…you're gonna get cooked. It's not enough to just remember the gospel, believe harder or join an accountability group: that's not going to cut it.
If you're not fighting sin or you think the Holy Spirit is going to just automatically change you without any synergy or effort on your behalf…you WILL have dead faith. You will either be delusional about your salvation or you'll completely reject Christ. The person who stops fighting eventually stops praying. The person who stops praying eventually stops meaning it. The person who stops meaning it eventually stops altogether, and usually tells themselves a story about intellectual reasons why.
The warfare isn't separate from the faith.
I am sure you will be mortified, but I agree with you on this subject a lot more than you might expect - especially that sin is not just a legal category, that it embeds itself in habits and desires, and that passivity is spiritually deadly. The way the EO treats sin is not unique to EO. My own reformed congregation views sin similarly and treats it similarly.
Where we disagree is not whether Christians must fight sin, but what grounds that fight. Protestants do not believe the Holy Spirit "automatically" sanctifies people without effort. That's yet another one of your mistaken assumptions (as an aside, is your knowledge of Protestantism limited to watching Robert Tilton?). Protestant theology has always taught active, serious, disciplined resistance to sin: daily prayer, Scripture, confession of sin to God and to trusted believers, and deliberate cultivations of godly habits. The difference is we see that as the fruit of grace already given.
When you say "it's not enough to remember the gospel or believe harder," I would respond: remembering the gospel is not intellectual recall, but instead a daily reorientation of the self. The gospel doesn't merely forgive guilt; it redefines identity. The Protestant answer to pride, ego, and habitual sin is relentless exposure of the self to grace that undercuts any sort of self justification.
You're absolutely right that the person who stops fighting eventually stops praying. My Reformed congregation would wholeheartedly agree. Where we push back is on the idea that liturgical frameworks are somehow only capable of sustaining the fight. I know enough Orthodox Christians to also know those who go through the motions of fasting, confession, and prayer while remaining deeply unchanged, just as there are Protestants who drift into presumption. No tradition has a monopoly on vigilance.
I was protestant before Eastern Orthodox and have been to multiple churches: non denominational, Baptist, and evangelical. I've been in a handful of megachurches, small churches and in between. I've been told I can't lose my salvation. I've been told that I'm totally depraved and that I can't even cooperate with God if I wanted to, that I should be thankful that I'm one of the elect by God's choice, not mine. I've been told the same things yall are telling me too. The more different types of churches you go to…the more you realize nobody is really on the same page. There's no dogma and that was the problem for me.
The ascetic infrastructure of fasting, regular confession, liturgical rhythm, and embodied practice exists precisely because the Church learned over centuries that serious intention without structured means produces inconsistent results. The system exists because human beings are embodied, habituated creatures who need more than correct doctrine to actually change.
Going through the motions of confession and fasting while remaining fundamentally unchanged is a genuine failure mode. No tradition has a monopoly on vigilance, you're right.
But here's where I think the deeper disagreement lives. You said sanctification is the fruit of grace already given. If the fight is downstream of something already secured, what exactly is at stake when someone stops fighting? I'm not asking rhetorically.
The Orthodox answer is that unresisted passion disorders the nous and progressively destroys the capacity for communion with God. The stakes are real and present, not just inconsistency with your positional status.
Thanks. This helps me better understand your position. With respect to Protestantism, I would submit that you are committing what I would call a category error. Your argument assumes, implicitly, that Protestantism should function like Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism - as a single, unified ecclesial body with a common authority structure, defined dogma, and an internally consistent set of beliefs. This is where I believe you err.
As you should know, Protestantism is not one church or sect but a broad historical family of traditions that arose from the Reformation and developed along distinct theological, ecclesial, and devotional lines. Undoubtedly, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, nondenominational, etc. differ substantially from one another, often selfconsciously so, and they do not pretend otherwise. Given this fact, pointing to doctrinal disagreement across various Protestant churches does not demonstrate a failure of Protestantism, in general. It might expose a failure of a particular denomination (indeed, I think there are many). But the idea that Protestantism is somehow doctrinally wrong because of fracture does not a strong argument make because it is based on a category error.
As I've said in other posts, my beliefs are likely much closer to Orthodoxy than the current Methodist church, and I flatly reject many of its current positions as completely heretical. Does that mean Protestantism has failed? Of course not, because Protestantism is not a single ecclesial body, and never has been. The various Protestant churches you attended were never attempting to speak with one voice, nor do they claim to represent the same theological tradition. Expecting uniformity across them imposes an Orthodox or Catholic standard of ecclesial identity onto a movement that explicitly operates under different assumptions. You may judge that model inadequate, but you should at least try to first describe it accurately.
But perhaps we can discuss something we agree on - the need for vigilance in battling sin. While I am generally familiar with Orthodox belief, I truly am curious what it is about the ascetic infrastructure of Orthodoxy that you believe makes it more vigilant in the war against the flesh. I've said on these boards before I have been a part of what I would call a recovery group for years that assists men battling sex and porn addictions, and I have taken some pretty extreme actions in my battle against that. At this point in my life, it is more an accountability group than anything, and an opportunity to encourage younger men in their struggle against sin.
What is it about Orthodoxy that you believe better equips men for such battles against the flesh? Is there something about the ritual that you believe helps you, personally, in whatever issue you are dealing with?
That's a fair viewpoint of Protestantism and yes I do think that model is inadequate. I don't know that its even accurate to call non denominational, reformed or other churches outside of the mainlines as genuinely protestant. Its something else entirely. I see the fracturing and lack of dogma as the logical conclusion of removing the "pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15). Without a fixed dogmatic boundary, I think language itself loses its ability to bind a community together because the same words (like "grace," "justification," or "marriage") begin to mean radically different things depending on who is speaking. I noticed this a lot.
Think about this: Before Adam sinned, did he need salvation?
If we define salvation strictly as "forgiveness for a crime" or "rescue from hell," then the answer would be no, Adam was innocent. But if we define salvation as Theosis, the movement from a "natural" state to a "divine" state...then Yes Adam did need salvation before he sinned. Even before the Fall, Adam "needed" salvation because he needed to be lifted out of his created, finite nature and brought into the uncreated, eternal life of God: union with God, so he refused to fall. This movement, from being a biological creature to a "god by grace", is the very definition of the salvation the Church offers us now.
If Adam needed "salvation" (as Union) before he even sinned, it proves that the Christian life isn't just about "getting back to zero" or returning to a state of innocence. It's about moving toward a state that even Adam in Paradise had not yet achieved. The "infrastructure" of the Church: the sacraments and the ascetic life, isn't just a repair kit for a broken world, it's the
ladder that was always intended to take humanity into the Divine.
Its anchored in the words of Christ in John 10:34, where He quotes Psalm 82:6:
"I said, 'You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.'". Also 2 Peter 1:4
, which says we are called to be
"partakers of the divine nature." A Protestant often thinks of salvation like Adoption. A judge signs a paper, and now you are legally part of the family. Orthodoxy says: Yes, it is adoption, but it's an adoption that rewrites your DNA. You aren't just "called" a son of God: you actually start to take on the "features" of the Father. You aren't just "forgiven" for being a sinner: you are being cured of the "sickness" of death and sin. Its a much deeper view of salvation and it faces a completely different problem.
Christ's Resurrection was not just a spirit returning to a body; it was the total "deification" of human matter. Because His human nature was perfectly united to His Divine nature, death could not hold Him. The reason many Orthodox saints do not decompose (or do so very slowly, often emitting a sweet fragrance known as the "odor of sanctity"). We see in the Bible that even the hem of Christ's garment or St. Paul's handkerchiefs could heal people. This is why we take physical things serious: the Eucharist, relics, icons etc.
If your body is just a "container" for your soul, then sin is just a bad thought. But if your body is a Temple, then sin is desecration. We aren't just being pardoned for a crime; we are being invited to live the same life that God lives. Imagine how that will dramatically change your behavior and how you comport with reality.
