3 Myths and Misconceptions About the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches

As I continue to explore and experience Eastern Orthodox Christianity with the likely eventuality of joining the Eastern Orthodox Church in mind, I have investigated their faith, practice, and doctrine as well as the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, for which I have also developed a fondness. The more I learn, the more my original notions regarding both of these beautiful churches have been completely swept away. I cherish and am thankful for my Christian upbringing in the Southern Baptist Church and tradition. I would not trade it away if I could. I'm glad my parents brought me up to love Christ, rely on his grace, and meditate on Holy Scripture through which God reveals great wisdom.

But in my upbringing I must admit that I was very misinformed about Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy (though the latter was hardly on the radar screen and barely received notice). Many Protestants, particularly evangelicals, have painted very inaccurate caricatures of these two older traditions. I don't think that it is something that is done maliciously and intentionally to discredit Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, but the result of misinformation and a genuine desire to correctly preserve the faith. Though I think the result has been disunity and disrespect between brothers and sisters in Christ, which is very sad to me.

I remember wincing in pain (and still do) when I heard unfair characterizations of Southern Baptists as ignorant rednecks or intolerant prudes. I would wince in even more pain when I saw one of those few (that stick like a thorn in the side of every faith and background) who live up to the false conception of Baptists and give people a reason to think what they do about Baptists. I concede that such exceptions exist in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, but I want to correct three areas of misconception regarding these churches for which such exceptions really are exceptions and not the rule:



1. The Roman and Eastern Churches practice rituals to the point of spiritual emptiness. As a child, this was something I remember taking as unequivocally true about Catholics, that their religious life was dominated by rituals and that these rituals get in the way of a real relationship with Christ, that worship becomes more about the concrete act of practicing the ritual than actually worshipping Christ and enjoying a daily, personal relationship with him. While I concede that there are probably Catholics who do go through the motions without actually living out a relationship with Christ, evangelicals need to humbly remove the beam from their eye that they may remove the speck of dust in the eye of their Catholic and Eastern brethren in Christ.

There are certainly just as many evangelical Christians who also go through the motions, attend the Sunday service, sing the hymns, and bring fried chicken to the pot luck dinners (very, very good chicken by the way!) but do not actually love and live the life of Christ. Such a problem is not unique to any particular form of worship. Satan's legions who seek our destruction and our own unlimited potential as fallen beings to be stupid and wrong can cause us to take any good and wholesome form of worship and ruin it by making it an end in itself or the means to some worldly end rather than a means of glorifying and loving God. Lukewarm Christians are not exclusive to Roman Catholicism and I don't think it can be fairly argued that Roman Catholic worship by its very nature has a unique propensity to produce lukewarm Christians.

On the contrary, I find the Latin and Eastern forms of worship to be fuller, richer, and more engaging than what I have experienced in Evangelical Protestantism, making the reality of God and my relationship to Him more real and tangible. Crossing yourself, lighting candles, bowing and prostrating: all of these are very powerful and meaningful gestures of worship and confessions of faith. Making the sign of the Cross over yourself is a powerful visual and physical confession you make with your hands that you are saved by the Cross of Christ and belong to Jesus now. I must admit that I always secretly wanted to do it when I was younger, sensing intuitively that it was a powerful and reverent gesture.

Every aspect of Latin and Eastern worship services is designed to use all the senses and to turn them all towards Christ. In Eastern Churches (and more traditional Roman Churches) the priest does not face the congregation as they worship, but faces forward toward the altar and God with his back to the congregation. Instead of a choir in the front facing the congregants, they are usually on the side or in a loft at the back facing forward- they are not there to entertain the parishioners, but to worship God. Such worship is radically theocentric (God-centered) as opposed to many evangelical churches that worship in a way that I believe is more anthropocentric (man-centered), and often more directed toward the entertainment of the congregation than the worship of God. After attending Eastern Orthodox services, I now cannot escape the feeling when I go to a Baptist church, that they are there for me, rather than for God.

2. Roman Catholic and Eastern Christianity are "works-based." Christians in these traditions have a bad reputation for believing that they can affect their own salvation by the merit of their own works and good deeds, rather than by trusting in grace through faith in Christ. While I agree that there are probably Christians in these traditions that strive for their salvation by "being good people" (and note that such Christians likely exist in all traditions), these traditions both unequivocally deny that we can obtain salvation by our own merit. This belief once took the form of the Pelagian heresy, which taught that Christ merely set a good example by his acts, and we are all responsible to emulate his example and thereby achieve salvation by our own merit.

This heresy was condemned as false by St. Augustine, that greatly revered doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, and this condemnation was formalized and codified at the Third Ecumenical Council, which is recognized and affirmed by both the Roman and Eastern Church. It is simply not true that either of these Churches teaches we can merit our own salvation. One of the most Roman Catholic documents ever written was the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent, which postured as a response to the Protestant Reformation. A fellow Christian who is currently investigating the Roman Church just as I am investigating the Eastern Church, told me to read what this council had to say about justification. I was shocked. This Counter-Reformation document had the following to say, "For, if it be a grace, it is not now by works, otherwise, as the same Apostle says, grace is no more grace." Follow the link and read the entire thing if you like. You'll be just as shocked as I was if you share my previous misconceptions.



Part of why these churches get this false reputation, is that they are less focused on justification than the Protestant churches and more focused on sanctification (this is even more true of the Eastern Orthodox Church). In other words, it's not just about "getting saved." Salvation does not happen in an instant of justification. The entire package and process of salvation includes not only the substitutionary atonement of Christ's death for our sins (which is greatly emphasized by Protestants), but the redemptive and regenerative power of Christ's resurrection and offer of new life to us. Christianity is more than just "getting saved." I do like the Methodist theologian, John Wesley's take on salvation when he said (as I have heard it attributed to him), "I was saved, I am saved, and I am being saved."

In Eastern Orthodoxy, I have been introduced to the idea that we not only are credited as righteous despite our sin because of Christ, we are actually made righteous despite our sinfulness. We will actually be righteous beings ourselves, fully restored to our former glory before the Fall- I would even say to a state that surpasses our former glory, because Christ had not yet come before the Fall. We will truly become sons and daughters of Light and Heaven. And this process of deification or theosis, starts and progresses in this life. But remember that while Orthodox Christians strive to become little Christs, they do so in Christ and by his power and grace, without which none of us could ever merit salvation on our own. Far from damaging my reliance on Christ and his grace, such a view and practice has resulted in my constantly relying on Christ every day and every hour to grow into him. Never before have I ever lived in such utter dependence on God, in such a close relationship with God, and in such constant and genuine prayer to God than after I had discovered the rich treasures of Eastern Christianity.

3. Roman and Eastern Christians worship Mary and the Saints. This is also simply false. They worship God alone, and they venerate Mary and the Saints. A merely rhetorical distinction contrived to escape criticism? No- there is a very clear difference between the two. Let me use an illustration that an Orthodox friend once told me: Imagine a pilot in World War II flying his plane over enemy territory, preparing to make a bombing raid on their camp. He knows that enemy fighters will scramble to intercept him and that there's a good chance he'll get shot down and killed. He has a picture of his wife, which he looks at lovingly. He kisses the picture and says to her, "I love you." I don't think any reasonable person would criticize his actions or misconstrue them to mean that he thinks the picture is his wife or that he's worshiping his wife.

Just as this man loves and venerates his wife, and just as such an act is not and could not possibly be construed as worship, it is possible (and I think important and profitable) that Christians can love and venerate the Saints of the Church for the way their lives uniquely and powerfully manifest the Kingdom of Heaven here and now, pleasing and glorifying God. Such an act is not worship, but fellowship and love between members of the same body. While all Biblical Christians will acknowledge that we are all saints, it is not improper or inappropriate to use the word in the narrower sense to refer to such saints as those described above. And it is not improper to look to their example and to ask them for their prayers.



We ask each other for prayers all the time. I asked a deacon at the Church I attend to pray for me just recently. I am always asking my close Christians friends to pray for me. If I could, I'd love to ask Billy Graham to pray for me and it would give me great comfort to know that a man with whom the Spirit of God is so powerfully present is praying for me. And to ask him to pray for me is not an act of worshiping him. Can any Baptist reading this honestly say that it wouldn't give you comfort to know Billy Graham were praying for you? Similarly, Roman and Eastern Christians ask Mary and the Saints, other exemplars of Christian piety and devotion, to pray for them.

They believe the Saints can hear our pleas for intercession and prayer because they believe as the creed says, in "the Communion of Saints," that all Christians in all places and times (and those that have passed beyond space and time) are united as part of the same mystical organism, the Body of Christ, that they are bound together in a way that transcends the limits of space, time, and matter and can freely exchange love and intercession, sharing together in the eternal worship of God by glorifying Him and ministering to each other. This may seem strange to you and you may disagree with it or some parts of it (though I think it is Biblical, the correct teaching of the Church, and one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard), but it is not and cannot be fairly characterized as the worship of the Saints or Mary.



Having written these things, let me say that my hope and prayer is for continued love and cooperation between Christians of all traditions; acknowledgement of the great unity we all have in Christ and even in major areas of doctrine and practice, a unity that is much greater than our differences; and greater efforts at mutual understanding and fellowship in the spirit of love and ecumenism. There is so much that is good and beautiful about all of the Christian traditions. My prayer is for the unity of the Church and my hope is that we can all charitably examine ourselves and our brethren and seek the unity that Christ so fervently prayed for future believers to have:

"I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me."

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