Orthodox

“Whoever goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.”

— 2 John 9

Orthodox, from the Greek ortho (“right”) and doxa (“belief”), names right Christian belief: teaching that agrees with what the apostles handed down and the church has publicly confessed since.¹ The earliest Christians measured this by an unwritten “rule of faith” summarizing apostolic teaching; the church later fixed the same content in the ecumenical creeds, so orthodoxy means holding what those creeds confess about the Trinity and the person of Christ.¹² As a proper name, Orthodox also designates the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox communions specifically, and appears in some Protestant denominations’ names, such as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.²

Confessional Witness

Christ’s deity and the Trinity, the doctrines the ecumenical creeds were written to settle, are basic to historic Christianity rather than a Reformed or Baptist distinctive, so the creeds themselves state Theopedia’s confessional position before the 1689 London Baptist Confession restates the same content in its own words. The Nicene Creed confesses the Son as “God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial… with the Father,”³ and the 1689 LBCF restates the same doctrine in its own chapter on the Trinity: “three subsistences, the Father, the Word or Son, and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided… but one God.”⁴ Craig Carter groups the ecumenical creeds with the Reformation-era confessions, including the 1689’s own predecessor documents, as a single, continuous witness: “the hard-won fruit of extended contemplation of Scripture by faithful teachers down through the history of the church.”⁵ The 1689 has no chapter of its own titled “Orthodoxy,” since the term names a standard of right belief that runs through the whole confession rather than one doctrine within it.

Biblical Basis

Scripture treats false teaching as something believers must actively guard against, not a matter of indifference. Paul instructs Timothy to “guard the deposit entrusted to you,” warning that “some, by professing [knowledge falsely so called], have swerved from the faith” (1 Tim. 6:20-21). Jude urges his readers “to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), and John states plainly that denying “the teaching of Christ” forfeits fellowship with God altogether, while abiding in it secures both “the Father and the Son” (2 John 9-10). Titus 1:9 makes competence in “sound doctrine” a qualification for church office. Roland Weisbrot notes that Irenaeus, confronting Gnostic teachers who claimed secret apostolic traditions of their own, appealed to precisely this Jude 3 standard: the church’s public, apostolic faith, “received from the apostles and their disciples,” which she “carefully preserves” and hands down “with perfect harmony, as if she possessed only one mouth.”⁶

Historical Development

The patristic rule of faith

Second-century Gnostic teachers claimed secret traditions of their own, distinct from what the apostles had publicly taught.⁷ Irenaeus of Lyons, writing Against Heresies around AD 180, answered this by appealing to an apostolic “rule of faith,” which he held was “entirely public and accessible to everyone,” transmitted openly to the churches the apostles founded, rather than reserved for an inner circle.⁸ Scripture itself, in Irenaeus’s own phrase, was “the foundation and pillar of our faith,” and the rule of faith functioned to guard its right reading against Gnostic distortion, not to stand alongside it as a second source of revelation.⁹

The ecumenical creeds and the name “Orthodox”

The church later fixed the same apostolic content in fixed creedal form, chiefly at the fourth- and fifth-century ecumenical councils that produced the Nicene and Chalcedonian settlements on the Trinity and the person of Christ. A. A. Hodge traces the later East-West schism, which began in the seventh century and was completed in the eleventh, to causes chiefly political and ecclesiastical, with doctrinal and ritual differences playing only a secondary role.¹⁰ The Eastern church nonetheless claims the name “Orthodox” for herself specifically because those original ecumenical creeds were produced within her own division of the ancient church, in her own Greek language, and because her theology has since remained “absolutely unprogressive,” content with “the literal repetition of the old formulas.”²

Opposing Views

Eastern Orthodoxy

Eastern Orthodoxy holds the doctrinal decisions of the first seven ecumenical councils alongside a small number of later confessional standards of her own: the 1643 “Orthodox Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Greek Church” of Peter Mogilas, approved by all the Eastern patriarchs; the 1672 Confession of Dositheus, adopted at the Synod of Jerusalem; and, from the nineteenth century, Metropolitan Philaret’s Russian catechism.² A. A. Hodge reports that the Synod of Jerusalem’s decrees teach “substantially though less definitely the same doctrine as those of the Council of Trent as to the Scriptures and Tradition, good works and faith, justification, the sacraments, the sacrifice of the mass, the worship of saints, and purgatory.”² Sharing the ecumenical creeds with the Reformed confessions, on this account, does not by itself settle the questions the Reformation later raised about the church’s other doctrinal standards.

Objections and Responses

Wasn’t orthodoxy simply the party that later won a political contest, not a category the earliest church could have applied reliably at all? Walter Bauer argued this at length in Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1934): before the fourth century there was no single Christianity but “a wide variety of Christianities,” each with its own doctrinal beliefs and each vying to be the dominant version, so that “orthodoxy” could only be applied once one party’s canon and creed had prevailed; on this view the canon caused orthodoxy rather than the reverse, and later claims that the winning books matched Jesus’s own original teaching were simply after-the-fact justification.¹¹ Michael Kruger grants Bauer’s premise that early Christianity was genuinely diverse, citing the New Testament’s own warnings against Gnostic, Judaizing, and other early errors (Gal. 6:12; Col. 2:11-13; 2 Pet. 2:1; 1 John 2:19; Jude 4-8; Rev. 2:6, 15), but denies that no reliable standard existed before the fourth century.¹¹ The earliest church had the Old Testament, already recognized as authoritative Scripture and sufficient by itself to rule out a Gnostic system like Marcion’s, which depended on rejecting it.¹¹ It also had a core of already-recognized New Testament writings and the rule of faith itself, the same public, apostolic standard Irenaeus appealed to against the Gnostics of his own day.¹² Kruger concludes that these three sources gave the pre-Nicene church a real, workable basis for distinguishing right teaching from wrong, well before any council made that judgment formal.¹²

Related Doctrines

References

Roland Weisbrot, “The Role of the Regula Fidei in the Twenty-First-Century Religious Landscape: How the ‘Rule of Faith’ Can Help Address the Existential Issues of the Postmodern Christian Community,” Themelios 50, no. 2 (2025): 313-28, at 313-14: the rule of faith functions as “the primary hermeneutical key for defining doctrinal language in the church, establishing central truths as boundaries for orthodoxy in submission to the authority of Scripture.” ↩ ↩²
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 122: the Eastern church “arrogates to herself, pre-eminently, the title of ‘Orthodox,’ because the original oecumenical Creeds defining the doctrines of the Trinity and the Person of Christ were produced in the Eastern division of the ancient church and in the Greek language.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 7, “The Biblical Character of Pro-Nicene Theology.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩
Carter, chap. 1, “Classical Orthodoxy and the Rise of Relational Theism.” ↩
Weisbrot, 319, quoting St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.12.1-2 (ANF 1:333). ↩
Weisbrot, 318. ↩
Weisbrot, 319. ↩
Weisbrot, 319. ↩
Hodge, chap. 7, 121-122: “This great church divided, from causes primarily political and ecclesiastical, secondarily doctrinal and ritual, into two great sections, the Eastern or Greek Church, and the Western or Latin Church. This division began to culminate in the seventh, and was consummated in the eleventh century.” ↩
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 4, “The Divine Qualities of the Canon.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Kruger, “Conclusion.” ↩ ↩²