I have been read­ing Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick’s book “Ortho­doxy and Het­ero­doxy” which I HIGHLY rec­om­mend. From that I would have to say, sadly, no.

A quote from his book (p. 80–81):

“The Luther­ans, it seemed, had hoped to find int he Ortho­dox East an ally against their com­mon enemy int he Roman papacy. Because the Reform­ers under­stood them­selves not as inno­vat­ing in doc­trine but rather as purg­ing the West­ern church of inno­va­tions, and because it was believed that the East had retained its purity against the papacy, these Luther­ans prob­a­bly believed they would dis­cover that the Ortho­dox were in fact the­o­log­i­cally Lutheran.

” Over the course of eight years, let­ters were exchanged between Tub­in­gen and Patri­arch Jere­miah, dis­cussing the­ol­ogy and­prac­tive within their respec­tive com­mu­nions. To the Luther­ans’ dis­may, how­ever, the patri­arch even­tu­ally asked them to stop wrrit­ing to him about the­o­log­i­cal mat­ters, because it was clear to him that they would never be able to agree. There was, of course, much taht they had in com­mon, but there was much on which they dif­fered, namely: the role of tra­di­tion, monas­ti­cism, the pro­ces­sion of the Holy Spirit (the Luther­ans con­fessed the Fil­ioque), free will, pre­des­ti­na­tion, jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, the num­ber of sacra­ments, how and when bap­tism and chris­ma­tion were to be admin­is­tered, the nature of the Eucharist, whether the Church and the Ecu­meni­cal Coun­cils could be infal­li­able, the ven­er­a­tion of saints and their icons and relics, and the cel­e­bra­tion of feast days.”

This book not only dis­cusses the dif­fer­ent beliefs, but how they came to be — prod­ucts of think­ing at the time, reac­tions to the pre­vi­ous beliefs, etc. It allows you to not only under­stand WHAT var­i­ous Chris­t­ian groups believe, but gives an idea of how they got there — or “where they are com­ing from.” You can really see that if you start with one wrong idea, even­tu­ally the flood gates open to lots of wrong ideas.

Every Ortho­dox should read it as well as any­one search­ing for the truth.

In the epi­logue, Fr. Andrew says that “sin­cere fol­low­ers of any reli­gion con­tinue to fol­low it because they believe it to be true. For any reli­gious believer, such belief is never founded on con­crete evi­dence. …all reli­gious belief — in fact, all belief whether reli­gious or not — is founded upon faith.” “Words in any book, even one as pow­er­ful as the Bible, can only ever help to map out the path or to clear away some of the obsta­cles. This lat­ter goal, the clear­ing of obsta­cles, is really the point of this book.” “The only authen­ti­ca­tion of the Gospel is the One to whom it points. And once it is authen­ti­cated within the human per­son, it is up to him to either act on it or not. Con­ver­sion is always and act of the human will and also always a mir­a­cle. The truth of the Gospel is made appar­ent through divine inter­ven­tion. Our job is to preach the Gospel.”

There were dis­cus­sions between both the Luther­ans and the Ecu­meni­cal Patri­arch as well as cer­tain Reformed the­olo­gians and the E.P. The Lutheran/Greek dia­log is very well doc­u­mented but the Reformed/Greek dia­log is more shrouded in mystery.

Luther was quite open to the Ortho­dox because his main com­plaints against the Romans were all things that Rome had inno­vated since the schism between Rome and the East.

The Patri­arch the Reformed the­olo­gians were deal­ing with (Cyril Lukaris) is often called “The Protes­tant Patri­arch,” so those dialogs, even if they would have been suc­cess­ful, would have been doomed from a larger Ortho­dox perspective.

Clas­si­cal Protes­tantism (which still exists within pock­ets of Pres­by­ter­ian and Lutheran sem­i­nar­ies) is remark­ably sim­i­lar in the­o­log­i­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties to Ortho­doxy. I was edu­cated in such an envi­ron­ment and felt more com­fort­able with the area Ortho­dox parish than I did with my Pres­bytery right out of seminary.

Of course Protes­tantism took a nasty turn with the rise of the Enlight­en­ment. It became far more ratio­nal and with the rise of ratio­nal­ism it lost its con­nec­tion to the tra­di­tion which the Reform­ers had in favor of fig­ur­ing it out on our own. (I call this the Berean Heresy because the poor Bere­ans get blamed for ques­tion­ing every­thing an author­ity has to say in favor of fig­ur­ing it out by myself with my own rea­son — see Acts 17:11).

This Enlight­en­ment influ­ence cer­tainly affected main­line Protes­tantism over the long haul with the devel­op­ment of Clas­si­cal Lib­er­al­ism, but it destroyed the Evan­gel­i­cal move­ment from the start as they turned to Gnos­tic sen­si­bil­i­ties. (This is doc­u­mented in excru­ci­at­ing detail in Philip J. Lee’s “Against the Protes­tant Gnos­tics” pub­lished by Oxford.)

I grew up in the Bible Church (which I’ve come to dis­cover was thor­oughly Gnos­tic). I smelled a rat and became Pres­by­ter­ian. I would argue that it is very mis­lead­ing to equate Evan­gel­i­cal­ism and Protes­tantism. Evan­gel­i­cal­ism is both so close to the truth and yet so fun­da­men­tally Gnos­tic in its sen­si­bil­i­ties that it is a com­pletely dif­fer­ent ani­mal than the Reform­ers. As a result Evan­gel­i­cal Churches are clas­sic hereti­cal churches (along the same char­ac­ter as the Arian parishes of old) where authen­tic Chris­t­ian faith can be nur­tured and encour­aged within a broader con­text of very bad teachings.

The biggest prob­lem with Protes­tantism and Evan­gel­i­cal­ism both is that since there is no mages­terium, no out­side author­ity (except the Bible, which can mean any­thing because I can inter­pret it all by myself, like the Bere­ans), both move­ments are chameleons. As soon as you say, “This is what Protes­tants believe,” you will get a half dozen author­i­ties (not inter­net author­i­ties, but real author­i­ties) who will prove you wrong.

So, while your first post about this was quite frankly offen­sive because it tried to speak for Protes­tantism but said things that were so thor­oughly un-Protestant (but very Gnos­tic), your sec­ond post nailed right on the head because it said, “This is what I believed at this moment.” That’s about as close as you can get to nail­ing Protes­tantism down.

I was wait­ing for some­one else to reply first. The Luther­ans were actu­ally in dia­log with the East in the 16th/17th cen­tury (can’t remem­ber which). It broke down because the Luther­ans wanted the Patri­arch (Jere­mias??) to agree with their points. He basi­cally said no, you’re not Ortho­dox if you believe those things and please, stop bad­ger­ing me to relent. You can find some of the let­ters online. It was a dia­log between the Patri­arch of Con­stan­tino­ple and Tübin­gen Luther­ans. A more schol­arly Lutheran could prob­a­bly give you a bet­ter low-down.

I per­son­ally don’t think the Calvin­ists were ever very close. Calvin was a lawyer — it wasn’t inter­ested in mys­tery, just a good argu­ment for his beliefs. But, that is my opinion.

I think Deb means this … http://orthodoxyforlutherans.blogspot.com/2010/09…

debd is right. The dia­logue with the Luther­ans never went any­where. Even­tu­ally, patri­arch Jere­mias wrote this:
“There­fore we request that from hence­forth you do not cause us more grief, nor write to us on the same sub­ject if you should wish to treat these lumi­nar­ies and the­olo­gians of the Church in a dif­fer­ent man­ner. You honor and exalt them in words, but you reject them in deeds. For you try to prove our weapons which are their holy and divine dis­courses as unsuit­able. And it is with these doc­u­ments that we would have to write and con­tra­dict you. Thus, as for you, please release us from these cares. There­fore, going about your own ways, write no longer con­cern­ing dog­mas; but if you do, write only for friend­ships sake. Farewell.”

Inter­est­ingly enough, the Greek trans­la­tion of the Augs­burg Con­fes­sion was rather “irreg­u­lar” in that it took quite a bit of lib­erty to make Lutheranism sound more Ortho­dox. A good sum­mary of this exchange can be found here: http://www.stpaulsirvine.org/html/sixteenthcentur…

Regard­ing Calvin­ism, it was explic­itly con­demned by the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Jerusalem_(…

I am not aware of any dia­logue with the anabap­tists (as to be expected, they were harshly crit­i­cal of epis­co­pal author­ity), nor with the Eng­lish reform­ers (who were mostly Calvin­ists any­way, their litur­gi­cal pro­cliv­i­ties aside).

Let’s not for­get there is a group out there who state that the “real” church existed con­cur­rently with the “insti­tu­tional” church from the very begin­ning — they refuse to call them­selves Protes­tant, but their beliefs are pri­mar­ily Protes­tant (no sacra­ments, no liturgy, no “tra­di­tion”, etc.) — if you google “bap­tist suc­ces­sion­ism”, you will find this the­ory prop­a­gated in a well-known book titled “The Trail of Blood”. The the­ory has been refuted by a Bap­tist col­lege pro­fes­sor in Ohio, but it nonethe­less has quite a fol­low­ing. So, in essence, they beileve they are the “true church” held together by, accord­ing to them, their con­ti­nu­ity of faith from the beginning.

Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff. And glad that I was able to amend my first post in a way that removed the offense. I cer­tainly wasn’t try­ing to be offen­sive, though I was being my usual flip­pant self. But there’s a “pop cul­ture” in Amer­i­can Chris­tian­ity that is highly col­ored by some rather ques­tion­able Chris­t­ian teach­ings and the whole thing tends to emanate from the Protes­tant side of things.

It’s not all bad, though. The con­ven­tional Christianity-lite that most peo­ple are exposed to may be lack­ing in ways, but at least it has kept Chris­tian­ity extant in a cul­tural sense (as opposed to ‘post-Christian’ Europe).

(Quick apol­ogy about the delay in these com­ments show­ing up. I’m still adjust­ing to the new tem­plate, and I keep for­get­ting that there are a lot more com­ments that won’t appear automatically. )

So really, there’s not much rea­son for doubt: Even at the time of the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion, there wasn’t a chance that Protes­tants could’ve ended up Orthodox.

Many thanks to every­one for indulging me in that one. Once I real­ized that Protes­tantism has got­ten too spread out to even refer to cat­e­gor­i­cally, it made me won­der how things stood when it was a much smaller and more defined subset.

I can cer­tainly under­stand the impulse to do this. Took a lit­tle look at the chart they came up with — http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7… — but I can’t make much sense out of it.