How many times I have heard, for example, that in "our age" the concept of sin must be changed if it is to be relevant to modern man. How many times we have heard that in "our age" we cannot speak of the Devil. Yet I am absolutely convinced that sin is exactly the same for me as it was for Saint Paul, and that if there is no Devil, Christianity is no longer the same religion it was for nearly two thousand years. It is not enough to speak, as some Western theologians do, of the "demonic." It is not enough to identify sin with alienation. And it is at this point that Orthodoxy has a tremendous responsibility, for it is fundamentally the belief in unchanging realities, it is the denunciation of all "reductions" as not only doctrinally wrong, but existentially destructive.
Thus, the first condition for anything else is simply faith. Before anything else is possible, before I can speak of myself as belonging to this or that generation, as immigrant or native, of our age as technological or post-industrial, etc., there is this one fundamental reality: man standing before God and finding that life is communion with Him, knowledge of Him, faith in Him, that we are created literally for God.
Without this experience and affirmation, nothing has meaning. My real life is in God and in heaven. I was created for eternity. These simple affirmations are rejected as naive and irrelevant today, and in spite of all its Christian terminology. Western Christianity becomes more and more a man-centered humanism. At this point, no compromise is possible, and everything depends upon whether Orthodoxy will remain faithful to its God-centeredness, to its orientation toward the Transcendent, the Eternal, the Divine.
Fr. Alexendar Schmemann: "The Mission of Orthodoxy", 1968.