What church is true?

Priest George Maximov. "A question that the Protestants never ask."

Priest George Maximov

When we – Orthodox Christians – talk about the faith with a Protestant, we can hear a variety of questions from him. Those about icons, about the baptism of babies, about the veneration of saints and so on. But there is one question that they will never touch themselves. But it is this question that is the most important, where a fundamental difference between us lies. This question is the teaching about the Church.

What is the Church of Christ? Any Protestant will immediately say that the denomination, to which he currently belongs, is the Church of Christ. Then the question is: when did your denomination appear? The range of answers will vary from the last year to the beginning of the Reformation. Well, where had the church of Christ been before that time?

Many Protestants look at the church history like this: there were apostolic times, and then there was the apostolic Church. And then, allegedly already from the II century, there were distortions in the teachings of the Church. Many bluntly say that the Church lost its apostolic creed because it brought all sorts of false practices and ideas into its purity. It may even be said that "the true Church was destroyed by paganism"[1]. So, starting from the XVI century, from the time of the Reformation, it was them, the Protestants, that allegedly returned the pure apostolic teaching. Well, from the XVI century – if we talk about the "old" Protestants: Lutherans, Calvinists. And “new” Protestants, such as the Baptists, Adventists, and Pentecostals, for example, appeared later. Since Protestants are known for being fond of speaking that it is them and their denomination that faithfully follow the Bible in their faith, we will consider their views on the Church precisely through the prism of the Holy Scripture. Let's see if this Protestant idea about the disappeared Church is consistent with the Bible.

The Thought "from God" Began Dictating what to Do

From the book of Hieromonk Joachim (Sabelnikov) "The Great Watch".

Own cell notes of hieromonk Jerome Solomentsov. The events before the death of the monk Claudius.

Monk Claudius was a native of the Kherson Governorate, Nikolayevsky district, a son of an Orthodox peasant; his secular name was Kodrat Ivanovich Moshkov. When he was 20 years old, he asked his parents for allowing him to become a monk, and after receiving their blessing, he went to Jerusalem in 1864 and lived there at the Russian mission for three years, performing the duties of a church reader in the mission’s church. Tired of the local rumor, he left Jerusalem and went to Athos, where he decided to join the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon, and there he performed various obediences: he was an archondar (the monk helping to accommodate guests of the monastery), sang in the choir, wrote commemorative lists. Later, he was sent to Constantinople, where he stayed at the metochion. Tested with monastic obediences carried out by him well and flawlessly, he was tonsured to the lesser schema and named Claudius during the Great Lent of 1871 before his departure to Constantinople. At the end of 1873, he was transferred from Constantinople to a monastery, where he began as usual, with the blessing of the elders, to go to the choir, where he was an assistant to the senior choir singer, and during his free time from worship services, he continued to record names in commemoration lists. Thus, he lived quietly and calmly, continuing to perform the monastic obediences assigned to him until the beginning of 1876, and at the beginning of that year, he fell into great temptation from the lack of advice and concealing his thoughts, and this happened in the way described below.