im curious what brought you to orthadox faith? Were you raised Orthadox and it was all you ever knew or was it a specific encounter/decision?
@honeyworships
I grew up Evangelical in Britain. The first seeds came from going to an Evangelical free school and taking very anti-Catholic history classes, where the Reformation was presented through a lens of "violence by Catholics against Protestants was an inexcusable atrocity, but violence by Protestants against Catholics was justifiable and necessary". That made me sympathetic to Catholicism and unsympathetic to Protestantism. Me rejecting young-earth creationism was also important, since their argument is that they just read the Bible on its face, when they actually don't (for example, they insist the world was created perfect, when the ending of Genesis - "fill the earth and subdue it", paralleling "and the earth was formless and void" - implies the world was incomplete), made me realise the problems of the "just read the Bible and see what it says" theology I grew up with.
However, the first real shift started happening after I had my born-again experience, and in the period after got really into C. S. Lewis. He impressed me with two things: firstly, he was able to talk about theology in a way that wasn't just quoting Bible verses, but was using Christian doctrine as a framework to look at other issues, and secondly, his view of salvation as not just "getting out of Hell free" but as being refashioned into the Image of God as your vices are slowly purged away and your natural self is revealed (which, though I didn't realise it at the time, is the Orthodox doctrine of theosis).
Then I joined social media, and started discovering (a) arguments for Catholicism and (b) the beauty of it, in particular Theophilia and Clamavi de Profundis. In addition, I was particularly disturbed to learn that Martin Luther had attempted to remove my favourite book of the New Testament, the Epistle of St. James, because it contradicted his theology, and that the idea that baptism forgives sins is pretty clearly taught in the New Testament despite the fact that Evangelicals deny it. I also remember looking up the Orthodox Old Testament as a test for "did Catholics add books or did Protestants remove them?" and finding out that Orthodox have even more Old Testament books than Catholics (such as 3 and 4 Maccabees, 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh), swinging the balance of evidence to "Protestants removed them."
One of the final blows was learning about the New Perspective on Paul. In sum, it's a view that originated in late-20th-century Protestant biblical scholarship that St. Paul in Galatians and Romans wasn't preaching justification by faith alone, but that membership of God's people in the New Covenant is secured by following Christ, not by following Jewish law. And, while it's not identical with the Catholic and Orthodox views of salvation, it is compatible with them, and certainly more easily than with traditional Protestant ones.
For a while, I was in a kind of limbo where I was privately praying to saints and affirming the canonicity of books like Tobit and Sirach and denying that salvation was by faith alone, but sticking in my church because I didn't want to upset my family, and thinking of disagreements with Catholic theology to avoid joining.
Then I started writing an Eastern European character who was going to Confession, so I started researching Orthodox Christianity. During the process, I finally understood the nature of priesthood and Marian theology, and since it didn't have the Papacy I had no real objections left. I went to my first Orthodox service on the 20th August 2023, started catechesis in autumn of that year and was baptised on Lazarus Saturday (the day before Palm Sunday) in 2024.
Thanks be to God. Holy guardian angel, pray for Honey and for me a sinner.
