I find this short bit in your next to last post refreshing.
Quote:
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For my own part, I hesitate to respond categorically, "Yes, I am saved." Such an answer suggests that my salvation is already here and now an accomplished fact, a fully realized and completed actuality.
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This is a way of putting my wandering somewhere between Calvin and Arminius that I am working through. I am not sure that I would hesitate to say "Yes, I am saved." Yet I think I am beginning to understand that salvation may not be simply some line in the sand in the past.
As for the orthodoxy thing, I will say one more thing then let it go.
At its core, I find the "Orthodox" to be no less orthodox than many others. And in some cases more so. But, in a different way, it has elevated things above their place in worship, and even in power. The RCC has elevated Mary and the enumerated Saints while the EO elevates icons and practices which are, at best, not proscribed. To be honest, I find the things that I would have a problem with less troublesome than those of the RCC. But the insistence that any of them (EO, RCC, or any "protestant" group) is so much better than all of the others is not a sound conclusion.
I think the argument about the name "protestant" is pretty much a strawman. We may have protested the RCC's grievous errors, but they essentially kicked anyone who did not shut-up and go along to the curb, so what were we to do? The fact that you just ignored the whole mess is not much different than the way the RCC has mostly ignored everyone else. It doesn't make you better, or worse. Just not discussing it. And standing at odds with the RCC (ignoring everything that went on afterwards) does not make the EO right. It was a schism that neither would reach out to mend. That is the reason that the EO was not even considering the errors of the RCC in the 1400s and after. They just stuck to their guns and went on as if the others weren't there.
Casting of any group as the "original" is meaningless. The question that all have to consider is what they are doing about it
now besides asking everyone else to go their way. That is not an exclusively EO, RCC, Baptist, Methodist, Reformed, Charismatic, etc., etc., problem. It is all of our problems.