Holy Scriptures - The Bible in the Orthodox Church

It is the traditional teaching of the Orthodox Church that the Bible is the scripture of the Church, that it has its proper meaning only within the life and experience of the people of God, that it is not a thing-in-itself which can be isolated from its organic context within the church community, in which and for which and from which it exists. The Bible is the book of the Church. It has no proper standing in itself apart from those who have written it and interpreted it, the people whose vision and action it is meant to inspire and instruct.

Once the Bible has been constituted as the scripture of the Church, it becomes its main written authority, within the Church and not over or apart from it. Everything in the Church is judged by the Bible. Nothing in the Church may contradict it. Everything in the Church must be biblical; for the Church, in order to be the Church, must be wholly expressive of the Bible; or more accurately, it must be wholly faithful to and expressive of that reality to which the Bible is itself the scriptural witness.

The Bible lives in the Church. It is an essential element of the organic wholeness of the Church. Without the Church there would be no Bible. The Church has selected and canonized some writings—some and not others—as the true expression of divine revelation, the authentic witness to its divine experience and doctrine. The Church evaluates and interprets those writings which it has chosen, both in a conscious way in expressions of varying degrees of formality and authority and in a more "lived" and unreflecting way in its on-going teaching, worship and life. The Church gives the Bible its life as a book. It provides its existential context, purpose and significance. It makes the book come alive. To isolate the Bible from its vital churchly setting, and to analyse it purely as a thing-in-itself as if its meaning were contained sealed within its covers as a self-enclosed and self-exhaustive phenomenon capable of being fully understood and appreciated directly by anyone in a strictly "worldly" context, would be to violate the book and to make its full significance incapable of being properly and correctly discovered. This is not to say that the Bible is completely and totally useless if read, for example, as "living literature" or even as a "sacred book," and that it cannot speak directly to men who are outside the life of the covenanted people of God. Certainly the Bible can be read outside the life of the Church, and certainly it can and it does enlighten and inspire men who are not members of the church family. But even though this happily is the case, it cannot be concluded from this that this is the way the Bible is meant to function in accomplishing that for which it was written. The Bible was compiled by the Church and for the Church. And the Church itself is not understandable without it, both the Church of the Old Testament, with the scriptures of the law and the prophets, and the Church of the New Testament, which fulfills the old and still lives on toward the Kingdom with its own sacred writings at the very center of its doctrine, worship and life.

Revelation and Inspiration

The Orthodox Church has always claimed that the Bible is the Word of God, that it is not merely the product of men or of the Church understood as an exclusively human institution. The Church obviously has realized that although God is the author of the Bible, the book is equally the work of men, of many different men in different times and places. Until now, however, there has been no clearly formulated doctrine of how the Bible is to be understood as being at the same time the Word of God and the word or words of men. The classical formulation of this question in terms of revelation and inspiration arose outside the Orthodox tradition and was imported into Orthodoxy through the westernized schools of recent centuries.5 One might rightly ask whether these categories have aided or hindered an Orthodox clarification of the problem. It might be more fortunate and fruitful to treat this question from the viewpoint of what the Church has already clearly confessed about the relation of the divine and the human, particularly in reference to creation and salvation, both in terms of christology, from which insights and formulations have also overflowed into the area of ecclesiology, and in terms of the doctrine of man's eternal deification towards God through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

The Bible and Knowledge

As a manifestation of God, the deepest meaning of the Bible lies not merely in what it tells about God, but in how it yields true knowledge of God by bringing man into living communion with Him. In the Church the Bible exists as a vehicle of man's union and knowledge of divine reality and of all reality in God. The Bible can be called a symbolic book in the literal sense that it brings together into union the divine and the human. It can be called a mystical book in the sense that it participates in the mystery of Christ, the mystery which is Christ and the Church, indeed the mystery of all that exists. Within this mystery, the Bible is the logical instrument which unites God and man on the level of word, which in the tradition of both the Bible and the Church of old and new covenants does not imply mere information or communication of data, but revelation and presence of the subject himself. In the biblical tradition God is present in and through His Word; He is identified with it. One who is in contact with His Word is in contact with Him. It is the same with man. The word is a self-manifestation, a revelation, a presence, a power, a mode of communion and union between hearer and speaker. And yet it has in itself also a certain subsistence of its own, a sort of self-independence once pronounced which allows it all the more to be that which it is and to perform its function.

The word makes possible a living relationship with its subject and so makes possible what the churchly, biblical tradition has always understood by knowledge, namely the conscious awareness of being in a living relationship and existen-tially concrete communion with the object known; a state or action which requires for its integrity spiritual qualities in the knower other than those of a purely mental character, and also an ontological correlation between the knower and the object known. In relation to God, man can truly know God because he is created in His image and likeness to hear His Word and to live and to know by His Spirit. Thus there is an essential "built-in" condition in man, built in by God Himself, which allows man truly to know God and to fulfill his existence through this very knowledge.

The Bible in the Church

The Church is not to be understood here as a human institution, an organization among many human organizations. It is to be understood as the theandric life of progressive union with God through Christ, the incarnate divine Logos, in the Holy Spirit. In its sacramental-spiritual life, the Church is exactly this. It is for this reason only that everything in the Church exists—including the Bible. In this sense the Church is not opposed to the world of God's creation. It is opposed to the world of sinful passions and death, however, which is not the natural world of God's creation. The Church is the world—the world as God created it to be and the world as God has saved it to be. In the Church the possibility is given to see and to know and to live as man must naturally live: in communion with God, all men and the entire cosmos, through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

From: All The Fulness of God by Fr. Thomas Hopko, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY, 1982