Orthodox Christianity
What Orthodox Christians believe, and how the faith is actually lived through the year.
Orthodox Christianity is the faith of roughly 220 million people, kept in an unbroken line from the Apostles. It is best understood not as a set of doctrines to be read but as a life measured out by a calendar: fasts and feasts, liturgy and saints, repeated year after year.
Core beliefs
- One God in three Persons — Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
- Christ fully God and fully man, incarnate of the Virgin Mary.
- Salvation as theosis: real participation in the life of God.
- The seven Mysteries, with the Eucharist at the centre.
- Scripture read inside Holy Tradition, not against it.
- The intercession of the Theotokos and the saints.
The shape of the year
Everything turns on Pascha. Great Lent prepares for it, Pentecost flows from it, and the fixed feasts of the Menaion run alongside. Four great fasts — Great Lent, the Apostles' Fast, the Dormition Fast and the Nativity Fast — plus most Wednesdays and Fridays, structure the Orthodox year.
The sacramental life
An Orthodox Christian is baptised, chrismated and communed as an infant. Confession precedes communion, marriage is crowned, the sick are anointed, and the departed are prayed for. The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom is served most Sundays of the year.
Jurisdictions, one faith
The Orthodox Church is a family of self-governing churches — Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Greece and many more — in full communion, sharing one faith, one chalice and one calendar structure, even where the calendar reckoning differs.