the bible in the orthodox church

8/2/2019 The Bible in the Orthodox Church

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The Bible in the Orthodox Church: Page 1

The Bible in the Orthodox Church

Stephen Hayes

IntroductionI am not a biblical scholar, but a missiologist, and so I will leave it to othersto go into the details of the writing of the scriptures and the development ofthe canon of scripture. What I have to say is more concerned with culture,not just because culture is something that interests missiolgists, butbecause one of the biggest differences between Orthodox Christians andWestern Christians, and especially Protestant Christians, in the way weapproach the Bible is a cultural one.

To put it briefly, and no doubt simplistically, the Protestant tradition (ortraditions) are shaped by the Bible, but the Bible was shaped by Orthodox

tradition.

Let me see if I can explain that.

Tradition

Talking about tradition tends to make ProtestantChristians uneasy, and for some, tradition standsfor everything that has ever gone wrong with theChristian Church. A verse that springs to manypeoples minds is Mark 7:8, which speaks oftraditions of men, and many have quoted that

verse to me to try to convince me that tradition isa bad thing, a very bad thing.

But there are other places in the Bible wheretradition is clearly seen as a good thing. In IThessalonians 2:15 St Paul urges the brethren tohold fast to the traditions they have been taught,and he urges Timothy to pass his teaching on tofaithful men who will be able to teach others also (IITim 2:23).

That is the essence of tradition, for tradition means

to hand something over, to pass something on, todeliver something to someone. The Greek wordused for this isparadosis, and whether it is good orbad depends on what is handed over to whom. It isbad tradition to hand over pearls to swine, or holythings to dogs. It was bad tradition when Judashanded over Jesus to the police.

In times of persecution those who handed over holy things, like thescriptures or communion vessels, to the authorities, were called traditores,from which the English word traitor comes. That refers to bad tradition.

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So tradition may be good or bad, and good tradition is handing over, passingon, the Christian faith, as St Jude urges his readers to contend for the faithonce delivered, or traditioned to the saints. Faith can mean both what isbelieved, and the act of believing, and so tradition can mean both what ishanded over, and the act of handing over. And for Orthodox Christians the

Holy Scriptures are part of this tradition, part of what is handed on.

We do not speak of two sources, of Scripture andTradition. There is onesource, one tradition, and the Holy Scriptures are at the core of it.

Two cultures

Orthodox culture and Western culture, especially Protestant culture, arevery different in this respect, and it is this difference that I shall try toexplain.

Modernity

Nowadays we hear a lot about the differences between modernity andpostmodernity, the differences between modern and postmodern culture.But to understand the difference between Orthodox culture and Protestantculture one must go back to premodern culture.

Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment

When we speak of modernity, or modern culture, we are usually referring toWestern culture as it has been shaped by three movements or intellectualcurrents: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

In my youth there was a fashionable cultural theorist, Marshall McLuhan,

who pointed out that modern culture, modernity, is above all a print culture.He wrote several books expounding his theories (in print), and one of themwas called The Gutenberg galaxy. In another book, The medium is themassagehe tried to escape from the constraints of the print medium to tryto get his message across. One of his theories was that the advent ofelectronic media would change culture in our time as profoundly as printhad changed it in the sixteenth century. Television would usher in thepostmodern age.

The Gutenberg Galaxy

The Gutenberg galaxy meant, among other

things, that reading, including reading thescriptures, could become, above all, aprivate affair, an individualistic affair.

Printing meant that people could havetheir own copies of a book, called TheBible, and read it on their own, in private.

Early modern Europe saw the rise ofindividualism. It was not seen only inprinted books. If you look at Renaissancepainting, you will see that there was anobsession with perspective. Andperspective represents, above all, an


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individual and individualistic point of view. And this in turn gave rise to thenotion of privacy.

The new electronic media tend to override these perspectives, and give riseto what McLuhan calls all at onceness. In our time people tend to have afoot in both camps: there is a modern concern with privacy, but it tends toget erased with social media like Facebook, and people argue about privacyissues without being altogether clear what the issues are.

For McLuhan printing is a ditto device, a ditto device, a ditto device, the firstform of mass production.

And printing, for the first time, made it possible forthere to be a book called The Bible, a book that youcould hold in your hand, wave around, open andread, or thump to emphasise a point. And theappearance ofThe Biblein print coincided with the

rise of Protestantism. Protestantism was shaped bythe Bible, by the existence of this book, by theavailability of printed Bibles.

But before the invention of printing there was nobook called The Bible. It did not exist. TheOrthodox Church did not have The Bible. TheOrthodox Church did not speak of the Bible,because there was no such thing. What theOrthodox Church had, and spoke of, was not theBible, but the Holy Scriptures. And that is a huge

cultural difference, which I ask you to try toimagine.

You can see something of the difference in many Protestant statements offaith, which usually begin with the Bible and what they believe about theBible. The Orthodox symbol of faith, however, has a different starting point.It starts, I believe in one God

Orthodoxy holistic

Orthodox culture is holistic. The Bible is not separated out as a discretebook. Rather the Holy Scriptures are woven into the life of the church, read

and heard, not just in the reading aloud from the scriptures, but in thehymns that weave the words of the scriptures into a pattern that is greaterthan the sum of its parts. This is reinforced by the holy ikons, and by thegathered people, who together become something that they were notindividually.

Manuscript culture

Before printing, books were expensive, and each had to be laboriouslycopied by hand. So in most churches there was no Bible. If there were booksof scriptures they were arranged in the order in which they were read inchurch. Collected copies of various books of Scripture were comparatively

rare, and very expensive, used by scholars, rather than by ordinaryChristians.

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The Canon of Holy Scripture

Septuagint

When we read about The Holy Scriptures in the New Testament, it isprobable that what was referred to was the Septuagint, and most of thequotations of the Old Testament found in the NT are from the Septuagintversion. And for the Orthodox Church the Septuagint is the AuthorisedVersion, though in fact the canon of the Old Testament has never beenexplicitly defined.

Council of 1672

A Council in Jerusalem in 1672 made a list of some Old Testament books,but this is not an official definition for all the Orthodox Churches, and wasmainly a response to some developments in the West. .

New Testament

When people speak of the Canon of Holy Scripture, they usually mean adefinitive list of approved books, an officially designated list.

Marcion

But the first such list was not drawn up by the Church, but by a heretic,Marcion, who tried to censor the Scriptures to suit his own teaching. Butbefore Marcion there was a Canon, or Rule, or Measure, the rule of Faith.

In Acts 2:42 we read that the first Christian converts, baptised on the Day of

Pentecost or shortly thereafter, continued in the apostles teaching andfellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers. And Orthodox Christiansbelieve that the Orthodox Church has continued in those four things fromthat day to this. It has continued in the apostles teaching, passed on, as StPaul said to Timothy, to faithful men who were in turn able to teach others.And this teaching was known as the Rule or Canon of Faith. And eventuallythe apostles teaching came to be written down, either by the apostlesthemselves, or those who had been taught by them. And inso far as they didthat, these writings came to take their place alongside the Septuagint, theOld Testament scriptures, as the Holy Scriptures of the Christian Church.

As one Orthodox writer, John Meyendorff (1978:16) puts it,There cannot be any question about two sources ofRevelation. It is not in fact a formal dictation of certain formallydefined truths to the human mind. Revelation in Jesus Christ isa new fellowship between God and man, established once andfor all. It is a participation of man in divine life. Scripture doesnot create this participation; it witnesses, in a final andcomplete form, to the acts of God which realized it. In order tobe fully understood, the Bible requires the reality of thefellowship which exists in the Church. Tradition is the

sacramental continuity in history of the communion of saints.In a way, it is the Church itself.


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Athanasius

The first list of books of the New Testament, as we have them today, wasdrawn up by St Athanasius in AD 367. That is interesting from our point ofview, because he was an African theologian, and probably a black one (hisenemies called him the black dwarf).

The Bible in Liturgy and Worship

Some years ago an Orthodox priest had a job lecturing in the ChurchHistory Department at Unisa. He invited his colleagues in the ChurchHistory Department to attend the baptism of his son, and one of them, aBaptist, spoke to me after the service. He was amazed, he said, at howscriptural the service was. We Baptists, he said, like to think we arescriptural, and give great importance to the Bible, but I have never been to aservice as scriptural as that.

At the beginning of the Divine Liturgy the priestmakes the sign of the cross over the altar-tablewith the Gospel book, saying Blessed is theKingdom of the Father, and of the Holy Spirit, nowand ever and unto ages of ages, and the peoplerespond Amen.

As Fr Alexander Schmemann (1966:33) says:

In the language of the Bible, which is thelanguage of the Church, to bless theKingdom is not simply to acclaim it. It ios to

declare it to be the goal, the end of all ourdesires and interests, of our whole life, thesupreme and ultimate value of all that exists. To bless is toaccept in love, and to move towards what is loved and accepted.This acceptance is expressed in the solemn answer to thedoxology: Amen. It is indeed one of the most important words inthe world, for it expresses the agreement of the Church to followChrist in his ascension to his Father, to make this ascensionthe destiny of man.

And the Gospel book symbolises the gospel, the Good News of the Kingdom,

the hearing of which has brought us to this point, and which is preservedand transmitted in its written form in the Holy Scriptures.

Later in the Liturgy the Gospel book is carried in procession by the deaconwhile the people sing. Usually the sing the Beatitudes from St MatthewsGospel, about the blessings of those who are called to be part of theKingdom, but on some days other things are sung.

Conclusion

For Orthodox Christians, therefore, the Bible is not seen as somethingseparate and distinct. It is contextual| in the sense that it is holistically

woven into the life of the Church. If you were to remove it, there would benothing recognisable left.


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The Orthodox frame of reference is different from the Western one, andthis affects the place of the Bible as well as everything else.

To summarise (Bajis 1991:6-7):

Orthodoxy is communal

Orthodoxy is intuitive

Orthodoxy is holistic

Orthodoxy sees the church as a living organism of which Christ himselfis a member

Orthodoxy sees the Christian faith as relational, personal and exp-eriential

Bibliography

Bajis, Jordan. 1991. Common ground: an introduction to EasternChristianity for the American Christian. Minneapolis: Light & Life.

Cronk, George. 1982. The message of the Bible: an Orthodox Christianperspective. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimirs Seminary Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1967. The Gutenberg galaxy. London: Routledge &Kegan Paul.

Meyendorff, John. 1978. Living tradition: Orthodox witness in thecontemporary world. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimirs Seminary Press.

Schmemann, Alexander. 1966. The world as sacrament. London: Darton,

Longman & Todd.

Stephen Hayes

[email protected]

http://khanya.wordpress.com

2012-03-06

the bible in the orthodox church

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