"Does this also extend to justification? IOW, do you believe that if someone is outside your church they won't be saved?"
Orthodoxy has no opinion on this. We just don't know as we don't know whither the Spirit will go. We can say that salvation is found within The Church. Its quite another thing to say, as I think the Latin Church does, or did, that it is not found outside The Church.
"Orthodoxy has no opinion on this. We just don't know as we don't know whither the Spirit will go. We can say that salvation is found within The Church. Its quite another thing to say, as I think the Latin Church does, or did, that it is not found outside The Church."
This seems to be a hard concept for many outside Orthodoxy to understand about us. On the one hand, we are almost fierce in our clinging to Orthodoxy, being convinced that it is the Church and the ark of salvation.
On the other hand, we absolutely refuse to offer any opinion about salvation outside the canonical boundaries of the Orthodox Church. Some, such as Bp. Kallistos (Ware), have copied the traditional R.C. formula of "there is no salvation outside the Church, but there are many people who will be saved who are not in the visible Church -- this means that they *really* were/are members of the visible Church but just don't know it."
I remember discussing this with an Orthodox priest during my catechumenate, asking him about what Bp. Kallistos had written. His reply was shocking to me at the time -- he pointed out that the classic statement of "there is no salvation outside the Church" was that of St. Cyprian of Carthage. He suggested the probability that St. Cyprian was probably just plain wrong about that, and that if one simply starts from the premise that St. Cyprian was wrong, everything becomes pretty straight-forward.
As the years have gone by, I have become more and more convinced that that priest was right and that Bp. Kallistos was wrong. To accept St. Cyprian's statement means that an Orthodox Christian either has to believe that all non-Orthodox Christians will go to hell, or he must believe that the Church is something amorphous and, shall we say, invisible.
If one simply acknowledges that we cannot know where the Spirit is *not* found, and that God is perfectly free to save whoever he wants to outside the Church, thank you very much, then one is forced neither into the amorphous gyrations required to show that people who aren't in the Church really are in the Church even though they don't know it (the equivalent of an invisible Church) nor into a rigid exclusionary attitude that does little but create dangerous pride amongst those Orthodox Christians who hold to it.
Anyway, that is just MHO.
"Orthodoxy has no opinion on this. We just don't know as we don't know whither the Spirit will go. We can say that salvation is found within The Church."
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Why would you say salvation is found within the church?
As I read SCRIPTURE salvation is found by believing in JESUS CHRIST. I go to church to give glory to my SAVIOR and for fellowship.