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The Orthodox Church refers to itself as the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. I acknowledge that anyone who is not orthodox is not part of the Church, but are non Orthodox 'Christians'? Or are they followers of Christ intellectually?
Answer to Question 42.
What do you mean by intellectually? Those who follow Christ outside of the Orthodox Church follow a faith that has been adulterated to satisfy someone’s idea of what he considers should be the Christian faith. Of all the Christian churches, only the Orthodox Church has existed since the time of Christ. Every other Christian church is an offshoot of the Orthodox Church. The Roman Catholic Church broke away from unity in 1054. The Protestant churches were established during the Reformation, which began with Martin Luther in 1517. (Most of today’s Protestant churches are actually offshoots of the original Protestant offshoots, or offshoots of offshoots.) Only the Orthodox Church existed in the tenth century, in the fifth century, and in the first century, faithfully teaching the doctrines given by Christ to the apostles, omitting nothing. Martin Luther chose to reject Christ's Church to justify his new theology. That theology being that the Bible is the sole infallible rule of faith, all by itself. And the Authority that Christ gave his Church does not exist. The “Bible Only” doctrine allows every church to believe and interpret anything it wants about the Gospel of Christ and is responsible for the 1000s of different denomination and non-denominations that exist today. They are simply someone’s idea of what Christianity should be because he doesn’t want to accept tradition.
Same member
Thank you Father. I'm already aware of everything you have said. I'm just asking whether non-Orthodox are Christians or not. How should we refer to them? Followers of Christ? Or just heterodox?
Answer
Officially they are heterodox, but we can still call some of them Christians if they believe that Jesus Christ is God. What we cannot call them is a church: there can only be one church of Christ because the church means the body of Christ which cannot be divided. There are some groups like the Jehovah Witnesses who claim they are Christians, but deny Jesus is God and say that he is the first creation of God. If someone cannot believe that Christ is God then he has no right to call himself Christian, because if Jesus was only a man then he could not save us and following him would all be in vain. |
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