Is the Orthodox Church Catholic or Protestant?

In the true meaning of the word, the Orthodox Church is the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” of the New Testament. Here the word “catholic” is used in its original sense of something that is “whole, universal, not confined to one area.” But in the common understanding of the word “Catholic” (meaning “Roman Catholic”), the Orthodox Church is neither Catholic nor Protestant.

To better understand this, it is necessary to comprehend the timeline of Church history. For roughly the first thousand years of the Church’s existence, there was but one Church — the Orthodox Church. Indeed, the word “orthodox” means straight or correct teaching. Though there were various heresies that the Church encountered throughout its early history, the Church itself held to the “straight path,” or to Christian orthodoxy. It wasn’t until the year 1054 when the Roman Church separated itself from the path of Orthodoxy that there existed any major division within the Body of Christ on earth. But after leaving the True Path, Roman Catholicism itself later began to experience through the Protestant Reformation the same kind of division it originally visited upon the One Church. Most of the early Reformers (and many who followed after them) had become disenchanted with the direction the Roman Church had taken, and these great men of faith made valiant efforts to return to the True Path of the Christian faith. But having been separated from Orthodoxy for 500 years or more, many of these Protestant leaders in the West were not even aware that the Church in the East had maintained the original doctrines of the Church since the beginning. While we applaud the noble efforts of many men and women of faith through these centuries, they did not return fully to the original Orthodoxy the Western Church had left centuries before.

To someone looking at Orthodoxy from the outside, it might appear that Orthodoxy is closer to Catholicism than to Protestantism. But this assumption would be based principally on the externals of Orthodox worship. Because Roman Catholicism came directly out of Orthodoxy, it retains some of the same outward forms that were present in the ancient Church, particularly in the area of corporate worship. But in truth, as one nineteenth-century Russian theologian described it, the Catholic and Protestant churches have more in common with one another than either do with Orthodoxy. Because Orthodoxy is the original Church, it must be examined on its own merits and not so much in comparison with other faiths.