How Western Christianity Drifted Step-by-Step Away From Orthodoxy

When we examine the history of the Church and current situation, we can observe that mankind has slowly drifted from knowing the living Incarnate God, Jesus Christ, as absolute Truth and began creating substitutes. In the West, after the Church split into East and West in 1054, faith in the Traditional (Orthodoxy) Church’s life was weakened, people began to move away from a Heaven centered life and replace God with something more human centered—first through philosophy and reason, then through endless divisions, and finally through a “god” of progress, science, or personal choice.  Fr. Seraphim Rose reminds us, the tragedy is that modern man has not lost his need for God, but he has exchanged the true God who saves for an idol of explanation and control in a secular society. A heavenly focus was lost.  Below is an attempt to create a brief outline how this change took place.

1. Orthodoxy: God revealed and worshiped

• In the original Church founded by Christ, God is known personally, through Christ, and faithful participated in His divinity in the life of the Church.
• They envisioned a future life in Heaven as their central concern: union with God (theosis).
• Knowledge of God was not a human construction but based on revelation, faith, humility, and ascetic struggle to prepare for this heavenly future.
• Their worldview was sacramental: everything is filled with God’s presence and oriented toward eternity, but their life was centered in the Church where God’s presence was concentrated for their healing.

2. The Great Divide: Rome separates from the East in 1054

• Pope of Rome becomes the Vicar of Christ in West
• Human centered reform is initiated by Pope.
• Church becomes a state and even calls an army and engages in War
• Looses original culture of the East and becomes a centralized clerical institution.

3. Scholasticism in the West: God becomes an object of Reason

• After the schism (1054), the West developed a different spirit. A shift to a human centered church based on the authority of the Pope emerged.
• With figures like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas, faith increasingly became framed in terms of logic, categories, and rational demonstration. Reason become more powerful than revelation.
• The emphasis shifted from mystery and communion to explanation and systematization.
• God was still confessed, but more and more as the “God of philosophy,” a belief, not a lived experience.
• This is the beginning of what Fr. Seraphim calls the “new god”—not encountered in humility but thought about in abstractions.

4. Renaissance & Humanism: Man at the center

• The Renaissance 15th - 17th century revived classical humanism.
• Attention shifted from God’s saving work to man’s capacities: art, science, philosophy.
• Faith was still present, but God began to fade into the background as culture glorified man’s reason and creativity.

5. Reformation: Fragmentation of Christianity

• The Protestant Reformation (16th century) reacted against abuses in Rome (now separated from the Eastern Church), but it also rejected Tradition and the sacramental fullness of the Church. Church was no longer accepted as source of authority for Truth. 
• “Scripture alone” placed authority in a text interpreted by the individual mind.
• Christ was reduced to an external legal transaction (penal substitution), and salvation was less about transformation and more about justification.
• This further secularized the Christian worldview: once you separate Bible from Church, interpretation becomes subjective, leading to endless denominations. Instead of an infallible leader like the pose each individual be an infallible to discern the Truth.
• Thus the Christian West lost a unified vision of God and salvation. Truth became relative.

6. Enlightenment & Deism: God as Watchmaker

• Philosophers of the 17th–18th centuries (Descartes, Locke, Voltaire, etc.) sought a purely “rational” god.
• Deism presented God as a distant architect—He created the universe but no longer acts within it.
• Revelation, miracles, sacraments, praying to saints and even salvation were dismissed as irrational.
• Religion was retained, but only as a moral framework for society, not as communion with God.
• God becomes fully recognizable as an idea, not a divine all-powerful Creator of All. A Heavenly focus is lost as organizing principle of society.

7. German Idealism & Romanticism: God as Idea or Spirit

• Kant and Hegel developed God as a philosophical necessity: either as the guarantor of morality (Kant) or as the unfolding Absolute Spirit (Hegel).
• God is no longer transcendent but absorbed into thought, history, or human progress.
• The living, personal God revealed in Christ is almost gone—replaced by concepts.
• Christian faith becomes mental requiring Bible study and only an affirmation of belief for salvation. Social justice and conforming to moral standards of society become the norm, fully a human centered religion.

8. Modern Secularism: The “death of God”

• By the 19th–20th centuries (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud), the “god-idea” itself was discarded.
• Nietzsche declared the “death of God”—meaning Western man no longer believed in the Christian God, nor even in the Enlightenment’s rational substitute.
• Science and technology now take the role of the “new god,” promising explanation, power, and progress.
• Hope for a better world placed in technological progress and material well being.
• Our current secular worldview is the end of this process: life without transcendence, lived as though man is autonomous and salvation is a distant thought or discarded entirely..
• We find a world focused son technological process and material well being but still, many seek for something more.

Putting it all together:

• Orthodoxy: God is Being, revealed in Christ, worshiped in humility. Salvation is communion with Him. Life focused on a future in Heaven.
• Scholasticism: God becomes an object of rational thought.
• Reformation: God’s Church is fragmented; authority shifts to the individual.
• Enlightenment/Deism: God is reduced to a distant watchmaker, useful only for “explanation.”
• Idealism: God is an Idea or Spirit, constructed by the proud mind.
• Secularism: Even the idea of God is abandoned. Man seeks meaning in science, business, politics, or self-expression. Heaven is no longer a focus of life.

This is what Fr. Seraphim explains in his book, Nihilism: modern man still feels the need for “explanation” but has lost a knowledge of the Heavenly realm and a desire for salvation.

Seraphim Rose wrote in 1960s: 

A "new god" is clearly required by modern man, a god more closely fashioned after the pattern of such central modern concerns as science and business; it has, in fact, been an important intention of modern thought to provide such a god. This intention is clear already in Descartes, it is brought to fruition in the Deism of the Enlightenment, developed to its end in German idealism: the new god is not a Being but an idea, not revealed to faith and humility but constructed by the proud mind that still feels the need for "explanation" when it has lost its desire for salvation.

From: Nihilism:The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, p 25