The Pillar and Ground

My Journey Toward the Orthodox Church

I have not abandoned the gospel. I have come to understand more of its fullness and how the good news is truly good. It is not merely something to which we mentally assent. It is something we can touch, taste, see, hear, pray, and live.

I did not set out intending to become Eastern Orthodox. For years, I argued against Orthodoxy. I regarded it as an ancient holdout of theological errors, a religion that favored form over truth and human cooperation over the sovereignty of God. Yet the more deeply I pursued Christ, the Incarnation, salvation, and authority, the more I found myself being led toward the historic Church.

Five years ago, I would have described myself as a committed Reformed Baptist. I was passionate about Scripture, the determining will of God, Christian hospitality, and presuppositional apologetics. I believed Scripture was the sole infallible rule of faith. I understood the Church primarily as the elect, those who had been effectually called by God. I viewed both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy as synergistic religions that had departed from the purity of the gospel.

I had not been raised Reformed. I began as a nondenominational Christian. What drew me into Reformed theology was its coherence. It took Scripture seriously, defined its doctrines carefully, and attempted to bring difficult passages together into a consistent system. I was influenced by Jonathan Edwards, John Owen, Greg Bahnsen, R. J. Rushdoony, and, to some degree, John Calvin.

Presuppositional apologetics especially appealed to me because it taught that no one reasons neutrally. Everyone begins with assumptions and ultimate commitments that shape how everything else is understood. Reformed theology also seemed to possess a high view of authority, worship, and the sovereignty of God.

I did not begin moving toward Orthodoxy because I stopped caring about those things. I began moving toward it because I started applying those same standards to my own theological system.

My first serious encounter with Eastern Orthodoxy came about six years ago when a friend began converting. I debated him and many others, both online and in person. I also met and argued with Orthodox priests. My introduction to Orthodoxy came through conflict, not attraction.

I thought it was an old religion preserving heretical ideas beneath layers of liturgy, hierarchy, icons, saints, and tradition. Still, I could not entirely dismiss it. Its claims concerning authority, historical continuity, and worship remained in my mind.

The first major shift in my thinking did not begin with icons or the authority of the Church. It began with Christology.

As I studied the Incarnation, the Transfiguration, the uncreated light, and the divine energies, I began asking what it meant for the Son of God truly to assume human nature. Even within the framework of penal substitution, if Christ is to stand in the place of humanity, He must assume the full humanity He came to save.

That led me to St. Cyril of Alexandria.

What affected me most was his explanation of the hypostatic union. Christ cannot be separated into two acting subjects, one divine and one human. His divinity and humanity remain distinct, but they are never divided. The one who is born, suffers, dies, rises, and ascends is the eternal Son of God in the flesh.

Once I began to see Christ in this way, other doctrines started to change.

If salvation is found in Christ, and Christ assumes our humanity, salvation cannot be reduced to an external legal declaration. It must also involve the healing, restoration, and transformation of human nature through union with Him.

That raised new questions. What is sanctification? What is the Church? What does it mean to participate in Christ? What does it mean to be joined to His Body? How are the Incarnation, baptism, the Eucharist, and salvation connected?

These questions pushed me further into the Fathers and the life of the early Church. I found that they often began with the Incarnation, participation in Christ, healing, and the restoration of humanity rather than with the later categories of the Reformation.

Something also changed in me that I cannot describe as merely intellectual. Doctrines I had once found distasteful became tasteful. I did not simply begin tolerating Orthodox teaching. I started to affirm it and find it beautiful. The intellectual questions mattered, especially the Christological ones, but it also seemed that God was changing what I loved.

Christology opened the door, but the question of authority eventually became unavoidable.

As I listened to debates among Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, and Protestants, I became increasingly interested in normative authority. The issue was no longer simply whether someone could interpret Scripture correctly. The deeper question was who possesses the authority to make an interpretation binding upon the Church.

A Protestant can interpret a passage correctly. That is not the point. The question is whether a private interpretation possesses normative authority.

Protestants often say that Scripture is the final authority, but Scripture must still be interpreted. Even the Westminster Confession recognizes doctrines derived by good and necessary consequence. Yet determining what is good and necessary requires reasoning outside the bare words of the text.

Who, then, has the authority to bind the Church to that conclusion?

Presbyterians have elders, courts, and confessions. Baptists have pastors, congregations, and statements of faith. Lutherans and Anglicans have their own authorities. Yet none of these bodies can bind the universal Church. Another group can simply interpret Scripture differently and establish another confession.

Eventually, the individual decides which church, confession, or interpretation is correct. Even when someone submits sincerely to elders, he retains the right to decide when those elders have departed from Scripture. The individual conscience remains the final court of appeal.

I began to see that Protestantism did not eliminate tradition or human interpretation. It relocated them. It multiplied traditions while often denying that they were traditions.

Presuppositional apologetics had taught me that everyone works from within a paradigm. Yet I had not fully applied that principle to Protestantism itself.

No one approaches Scripture without assumptions. We depend upon translators, lexicons, scholars, pastors, historical judgments, and inherited theological categories. We all receive a tradition. The real question is whether that tradition is apostolic and whether it has authority.

I eventually concluded that we must return to the authority of the apostles who delivered the faith to the Church.

The apostles did not merely leave behind texts and instruct Christians to reconstruct the Church from them. They preached, baptized, ordained leaders, celebrated the Eucharist, exercised discipline, and established visible communities. The New Testament was written, received, proclaimed, and preserved within that apostolic life.

The Church was not produced by a completed New Testament canon. The canon was received within a Church that was already worshiping, teaching, baptizing, and celebrating the Eucharist.

This did not lower my view of Scripture. It taught me to understand Scripture as part of the apostolic inheritance entrusted to the Church.

The question of the visible Church therefore became central.

An invisible collection of the elect cannot assemble in council, ordain bishops, exercise discipline, baptize, or celebrate the Eucharist. The Church is spiritual, but it is not therefore invisible. It is a real body of people with real leaders, real sacraments, real discipline, and real authority.

I came to believe that this visible body is what St. Paul calls the pillar and ground of the truth.

My reason for becoming Orthodox can therefore be stated simply: I want to fall under the authority of those who are the pillar and ground of the truth, the visible Body of Christ, the Church.

One of the hardest matters for me to reconsider was the relationship between God’s will and man’s will.

I had long believed that if God is truly God, His decree must override the will of man. I did not want a weaker view of divine sovereignty or a salvation that originated in man.

What I found in the East was not a denial of God’s initiative. God calls, gives, regenerates, heals, and sustains. Man does not create grace or place God under obligation. Yet God also created human beings capable of genuinely responding to Him.

Throughout the Old Testament, God acts first, but His people are called to obedience. Their response does not create the covenant or cause grace. It is their participation in what God has already given.

I came to see baptism in a similar way. In the early Church, regeneration and the gift of the Holy Spirit were consistently connected with water baptism. Baptism is monergistic in the sense that God is the one acting. A person does not regenerate himself. God works through the means He established in the Church.

The Christian life nevertheless requires perseverance, repentance, obedience, and cooperation with grace. This is synergia, not because God and man contribute equal portions, but because grace heals rather than destroys the human will.

The Incarnation again became the pattern. Christ saves humanity not by abolishing humanity, but by healing and restoring it.

By the time I attended the Orthodox Paschal service, I had already felt for some time that I was no longer truly Protestant. I had concluded that Protestant authority claims could not finally hold together. Pascha did not create that conviction, but it made it present to me in worship.

I had attended an Orthodox service years earlier mainly as a historical pursuit. It had not particularly moved or convinced me. This time was different.

Standing in the Paschal service, I was struck by its awe and reverence. As the Church celebrated the Resurrection, the liturgy seemed sweet to me. What I had once regarded as empty form now seemed full of Christ. The doctrines I had been studying were no longer only ideas in books or subjects of debate. They were being confessed, sung, prayed, and embodied before me.

My heart seemed to affirm in worship what my mind had already begun to confess.

I do not believe an emotional experience can prove a theological claim. Yet I also cannot deny what seemed to be the work of the Holy Spirit. I was no longer looking at Orthodoxy as a foreign religion from the outside. I was seeing the faith I had been searching for expressed in worship.

Christianity began to appear more tangible because the Word Himself had become flesh. Christ entered material creation. He was seen, touched, heard, crucified, buried, and raised bodily.

It therefore made sense that Christian life would involve bodies, water, bread, wine, oil, incense, fasting, feasting, gestures, images, and physical gathering. The form did not replace the truth. The form existed because the Truth had taken flesh.

This journey has also entered my home.

Some of the hardest moments have been the conversations with my wife. These questions are not an isolated theological exercise for me. Every conclusion affects her, our children, our relationships, and the spiritual life of our household.

My wife continues to struggle with parts of this journey, while also being willing to trust my leadership. That has not made the decision easier. It has made the weight of it much greater.

In those conversations, I have become more aware that spiritual leadership is not merely the right to make a decision. It is a responsibility before God. I must be certain that I am not leading my family according to curiosity, pride, or a desire to win an argument. I must ask whether obedience to Christ requires this path.

I do not want to drag my family through endless uncertainty. I also cannot remain somewhere merely because leaving is difficult.

I am grateful for much of what I received through Protestantism and the Reformed tradition. I was taught to love Scripture, take doctrine seriously, care about worship, and examine the presuppositions beneath every worldview.

In many ways, the principles that led me into the Reformed tradition continued to carry me until I reached conclusions the Reformers would not have accepted.

I still believe presuppositions matter. I still believe neutrality is impossible. I still believe Christianity must be coherent and that authority and right worship are essential.

What changed was that I finally turned that critique upon my own paradigm.

I began asking whether sola Scriptura could justify itself without relying upon traditions and authorities it claimed not to need. I began asking whether competing confessions could provide the normative authority necessary to bind the Church. Most of all, I began asking where Christ had placed His authority.

I concluded that He placed it in His Church, the visible Body established upon the apostles and enlivened by the Holy Spirit.

This is also what I hope my children learn from my journey.

The pursuit of God is lifelong. We are called to follow the Way, even when the path is difficult. Christ has not left us alone to construct the faith for ourselves. He has established a Church in which we may worship, pray, repent, receive grace, and be brought closer to Him.

Christianity is not merely an intellectual pursuit. It is physical and daily. We pray, fast, forgive, repent, worship, receive, and persevere. There is hope in Jesus Christ, and that hope is found in His Body.

I do not expect everyone who reads this to agree with me. I do hope they will question their own presuppositions and place them under scrutiny.

Everyone approaches Christianity from within a paradigm. Everyone inherits traditions. Everyone is shaped by a time, place, culture, and set of philosophical commitments that may remain largely unnoticed.

No one simply reads the Bible without interpretation. No one reasons without presuppositions. The question is whether our assumptions are true, whether our tradition is apostolic, and whether our authority was established by Christ.

I have not abandoned the gospel. I have come to see it as fuller, richer, and more tangible than I had imagined.

The good news is that the eternal Son of God became man, assumed our full humanity, entered death, defeated it, rose bodily, and joined us to Himself. It is a gospel we hear in Scripture, confess in the Creed, enter through baptism, receive in the Eucharist, and live through repentance within the communion of the Church.

Truth does not merely demand intellectual agreement. It demands obedience.

I did not set out looking for Eastern Orthodoxy. I set out trying to understand Christ more faithfully. The further I followed Him into the mystery of His Incarnation, the more I found myself being led toward His Body, the Church.

Having come to believe that this Church is the pillar and ground of the truth, I can no longer remain outside of it.