1. The all-holy Trinity is differently conceived in East and West.  Among several basic differences is the way the divine Unity is conceived:  The Orthodox Tradition holds that the unity of the Trinity is based on the Father as the Source of all being—though the Son or Reason and Wisdom of God has created every created thing, as the Apostles John and Paul taught, and constantly re-creates (Heb. 1:3) it all to keep it from falling back into noth­ingness.  The West finds the divine Unity in the one Essence and maintains that the all-holy Spirit proceeds from two Causes; it is a substantialist view that is at odds with the Eastern personalist view and undermines the Unity of the Persons in the Trinity.  

2. For the Orthodox, infants do not inherit Adam’s guilt or sin; Rom. 5:12 twice mentions ‘amartía (a state of separation from the Assimilation to the Divine), not ‘amár­tēma “a sin.”  The idea of “merits” that can be  transferred from one person to another are alien to Orthodoxy.  The Orthodox do not teach a substitutive (or imputative) rôle for what Jesus Christ accomplished on the Life-giving Cross.  With the New Testament, they teach that there is an ontic unity of worshipers with Christ when they participate in His uncreated Life or Energies (Grace), so that all that He has done in His earthly life is really shared by His members.  This is Divinization (théōsis), a union of energies, not a pagan Deification (apothé­ōsis) or union of essences.

3. The soul is not immortal by nature; it is immortal through Grace.  The Resur­rection of the soul takes place at Baptism.  (In the case of the Old Testament Saints, it took place during Christ’s sojourn in Hades.)  The necessary Resurrection of the flesh will take place on the last day, though the all-pure Theotókos had a special resur­rection when her body was carried off by Angels three days after her death.

4. Jesus is YHWH, as He Himself affirmed in John 8:58, and as St. Elizabeth asserted in Luke 1:43; cf. also Justin Martyr’s Trypho and St. John Chrysóstom’s Discourses 15 and 74.  Jesus’s pre-Incarnational appearances took place in the Garden of Eden; at the giving of the Ten Commandments; in the fiery furnace; etc.  [One has learned that some Evangelicals agree with this Orthodox teaching.]  The Creator is the LÓGOS or Reason of God for St. John the Theologian, Evangelist, and Prophet; St. Paul called the Creator the WISDOM or SOPHÍA of God (wisdom is practical rea­son).  Because it has been created by the LÓGOS, the cos­mos is logikós (“intelligible”)—the basis of science.  If, counter­fac­tually, the Creator had been a Word, a cosmos described as logikós would need to be “wordy,” and Rom. 12:1-2 would be recommending “wordy Worship.”  St. Maximos the Confes­sor accepted the old teaching that created things are formed with lógoi, rational traces that mirror the Energies of the LÓGOS.

5. God did not do something so counternatural as to impose death on the humanity that He had created (Yezekiel 33:11 [cf. 18:23], 18:32; 33:11; Wisdom 1:13-14, 2:23-24; and I Tim. 2:4):  He rather let satan impose death to forestall anyone’s sinning perpetually. 

6. The basis of reality in Orthodoxy is energy (as it was conceived in the centuries  preceding and following Christ’s lifetime on earth).  Since the cosmos is energetic, it evolves, as Great St. Vasil taught (in ‘Exaemeron), from simpler to more complex.   He taught (Letter 188.15 to Amphilókios) that life began in the waters.

7. Revelation takes place through real time, not in a virtual development* that assumes it was all there at the beginning and is only apprehended over time.  Though the few dogmas do not change, the doctrines or teachings that energize dogmas with meaning build on one another over time in a self-consistent and genuinely revelatory rôle.