Eastern Orthodox

Orthodoxy is a liturgy before it is a theology, and Orthodox writers say so first. The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom is sung on most Sundays of the year from a fixed text, almost always unaccompanied, in a church covered with icons. Very little is chosen by the priest and nothing is projected on a screen. If you want to know what Orthodox Christians believe, the usual advice from inside is to come and stand through it.

The East’s word for how salvation works is synergy, from the Greek for working together, and it is not a compromise between two Western options: it predates the argument entirely. God’s grace does everything, and the person must genuinely cooperate with it. Behind that stands a larger claim called theosis, that salvation is not only forgiveness but real participation in the life of God. Athanasius put it in the fourth century: God became man so that man might become god, which means becoming by grace what God is by nature, not sharing His essence.

Scripture belongs to the church that produced it, and is read alongside the councils, the liturgy and the Fathers rather than against them. There are seven ecumenical councils; the seventh, at Nicaea in 787, settled that icons may be venerated, on the argument that God Himself took a body that could be painted. The Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ, and the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672 was willing to use a Greek word equivalent to transubstantiation while insisting that the how of it stays a mystery.

On the gifts of the Holy Spirit the sketch leans continuationist, because nothing in this tradition ever announced that God had stopped. Healings, miracles and holy people who see what others cannot are part of its ordinary expectation rather than a special movement within it.