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 analyze 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 existentially 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
