Can a person receive God's saving grace without the Orthodox sacraments? If not, then they are a legalistic requirement of salvation. The way you are defining them makes them sound more pliable than how the Orthodox actually understand them (God's grace is locked in the sacraments).
The sacraments are the
normative means of receiving grace, but not the rigidly legalistic category you constantly present them as. For example, the thief on the cross would have been baptized if he had heard the preaching of the Apostles and had the same repentance and faith, but the whole being-nailed-to-a-cross-in-the-process-of-dying thing precluded that.
There are countless examples in the lives of the saints of a Christian being tortured, onlookers observing this and declaring that they too are Christians, and being immediately martyred with no opportunity for baptism. These are commemorated as saints in the services of the Church so it's hard to get much more official than that. If these people weren't killed, they would have been baptized and entered the Church in the normative way. If they had professed faith but rejected baptism when it was possible, then they would not have been Christians. It's as simple as that. For 99.9% of us, who are not facing immediate martyrdom in professing faith in Christ, baptism is the normative manner of entering the Church. Exceptions don't disprove the rule.
This is not hard to understand. And it's not a problem for Orthodoxy, it's only a problem for a logic-obsessive bean-counting mentality that can't conceive of perceiving any of this outside of its myopic arbitrary parameters.
As if there aren't progressive Orthodox churches?
No. There are progressive individuals, some of whom make disproportionate noise on the Internet, but they don't speak for the Church no matter how they try to spin it. There is no equivalent to what just happened to the United Methodist denomination, for instance.
The chief saving grace that God has given for men to take hold of Christ by faith is the Scriptures.
So in other words, if you had the misfortune of living before the printing press made owning your own copy of the Bible viable, and/or the misfortune of being an illiterate person who couldn't sit down and read the Bible and decide for yourself what it means, then you're
shit outta luck. This cornerstone of Protestant epistemology could only spring from the minds of scholastic western European nerds with a crippling lack of perspective beyond the ivory towers. That's exactly why there's nothing like it before widespread and affordable printing emerged, resulting in people quickly taking universal access to the printed word as a given.
Here is what Cyril Lucaris, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople had to say about the Reformation:
This document is probably a forgery, found under remarkably dubious circumstances, but even if we grant that it's completely authentic and this Patriarch subscribed to Calvinist notions, so what? He's not the Infallible Supreme Pontiff of Orthodoxy. He can simply be wrong, and that has no effect on the Church.
If someone apostatizes, he demonstrates that he was never a member of the New Covenant.
In other words a Calvinist can never actually know he's saved and can merely be a deluded reprobate. This places him in a far worse position than the Orthodox. For instance, upon committing an act of fornication, the Calvinist might start to ask am-I-really-elect-or-reprobate, and conclude upon constantly falling into sin that they aren't really saved and give up, that God obviously hasn't given him grace. The switch, so to speak, is either flipped to On or Off, and if empirical experience suggests it's in the Off position, then you're screwed.
Meanwhile, an Orthodox in the same position knows that he hasn't been fated one way or the other. The issue is not whether God has fated him to salvation or damnation, but
his own problem, that he rejected the grace and help God offers in favor of following his own will, and can always get up and try again, and struggle to repent as long as he still has breath.
I don't know about anybody else, but I find the latter notion a lot less bleak, and a lot more hopeful. If you scratch beneath the surface, you find that in Protestantism,
especially Calvinism, you can't know that you're actually saved. You can be fervently faithful today and totally Believe In Jesus, but if in the future you fall away, your present seeming faith is total delusion.
Accounting for this is baked into Orthodoxy, where you can't pat yourself on the back for being faithful today because you could fall tomorrow, but rather have to keep on pushing, keep on struggling until the end. This is all quite different from the Pharisaical mindset St. Paul confronts.
In Orthodoxy, the concept of being saved from the wrath of God seems to be missing.
...The way you are defining them makes them sound more pliable than how the Orthodox actually understand them (God's grace is locked in the sacraments).
...You say you've repented, you say you're ontologically perfect, but you cannot even keep the Law that God has already set. Indeed, you cannot even keep it for one day. So what hope is there for you who seek to turn the Gospel of Grace into a New Law?
When you say stuff like this it's obvious to anybody who's spent even a short time in the Orthodox world that your knowledge of Orthodoxy is shallow and seemingly based on second-hand sources (eg., some Protestant apologist in a YouTube video trying to respond to Orthodoxy) and not spending any real effort to understand what Orthodox believe, just enough to try to cram a caricature of it into box of Calvinist argumentation.
Of course you're under no intrinsic obligation to study Orthodoxy in depth, and one from the Western world can't be faulted for misunderstanding Orthodoxy, as it has an outlook that is very different from that of the individualistic western mind and isn't something that will immediately be picked up, especially not just from reading about it. But
if you're going to opine on what you think we believe, as you've done on a regular basis for the last several years, constantly making these kinds of erroneous statements makes you come across as a bad-faith actor with an axe to grind.
Forget deep dives into dense theological texts, merely using an Orthodox prayer book and going to services and paying a
slight amount of attention would immediate disabuse one of these misunderstandings, if not outright misrepresentations, of what Orthodox actually believe. So all these accusations of Works Salvation and Boasting and yadda yadda ring hollow for anybody with actual experience.
