READING THE BIBLE FROM THE ORTHODOX CHURCH PERSPECTIVE

 (published in Ecumenical Review  51 (1999), pp. 25-30).

 To address the issue of reading the Bible—or any issue of that matter—“from the Orthodox Church perspective” is not an easy task at all. In the first place, whenever an Orthodox person is asked to speak about the “Orthodox” or the “Orthodox Church” perspective, he or she is thrown into a very strange and difficult situation. For what can really be an “Orthodox perspective” at a time when the very attribute “orthodox” is widely understood as having more or less negative connotations?

Secondly, in ecumenical contexts the Orthodox find it perplexing, even unacceptable, to be considered and dealt with time and again alongside “women”, “youth” and people from certain geographical regions. Why not, for example, “Reading the Bible from the Roman Catholic Church perspective”, or from the “Anglican”, or the “mainstream Protestant”, or even the “evangelical” one?  Is it because Orthodoxy, largely unknown to the non-Orthodox, is normally approached as something “exotic”, an interesting “Eastern phenomenon” vis-à-vis  the “Western mentality”, provoking the curiosity and enriching the knowledge of Western believers and theologians? If this is the case, it would be better that it stop being presented at all. According to an eminent Orthodox theologian, we have  played this role for long enough. Orthodoxy means the wholeness of the people of God who share the right conviction (orthe doxa) concerning the event of God's salvation in Christ and his Church, and the right expression (orthopraxia) of this faith. Everyone is invited by Orthodoxy to transcend confessions and inflexible institutions without necessarily denying them. Orthodoxy is not to be identified only with those of us who are Orthodox in the historical sense, with all our limitations and shortcomings. The term is given to the  Church as a whole over against the heretics who, of their own choice, split from the main body of the Church. The term “Orthodoxy” excludes all those who willingly fall away from the historical stream of life of the One Church, but it includes all those who profess their spiritual belonging to that stream. Orthodoxy, in other words, has ecclesial  rather than confessional  connotations.

A third more important obstacle is that it is almost impossible to deal with Orthodoxy, even in the conventional sense. On what ground and from what sources can one really establish an Orthodox perspective. The Roman Catholics have Vatican II to draw from; the Orthodox do not. The Lutherans have an Augsburg Confession of their own; the Orthodox do not. The Africans, the Asians or the Latin Americans, have their emerging theologies to refer to. This is lacking from the Orthodox, whose only ambition is to witness authentically to the traditional  apostolic faith. Thus, the only authoritative sources the Orthodox possess are in fact common to the rest of the Christians: the Bible and Tradition. How can one establish a distinctly Orthodox Church perspective on a basis which is common to non-Orthodox as well?

Despite these obstacles, the Orthodox have sometimes joined delegates from other churches in signing agreed doctrinal statements concerning the Bible, which under certain theological conditions can lend authority to any Orthodox reading of the Bible. One such joint statement, from the Moscow Conference held in 1976 between the Orthodox and the Anglicans,  forms an excellent summary of the Orthodox view: 

The Scriptures constitute a coherent whole. They are at once divinely inspired and humanly expressed. They bear authoritative witness to God's revelation of Himself in creation, in the Incarnation of the Word, and in the whole history of salvation, and as such express the word of God in human language. We know, receive, and interpret Scripture through the Church and in the Church.

However, the essence of Orthodoxy, vis-à-vis  Western Christianity in its entirety—that is Roman Catholic, Anglican and Protestant—goes even beyond such theological affirmations: I would dare to say it is a way of life; hence the importance of its liturgical  tradition. This is why the Orthodox give the Liturgy so prominent a place in their theology. The Church is first of all a worshipping community. Worship comes first, doctrine and discipline second. The lex orandi  has a privileged priority in the life of the Christian Church. The lex credendi  depends on the devotional experience and vision of the Church. Confession, therefore, and witness through Bible come only as the natural consequence of the eucharistic communion experience of the local communities.

Post-modernity has challenged the priority of texts over experience—a syndrome still dominant in modern Christian scholarship; the priority of theology, iin the conventional sense, over ecclesiology, and the priority of faith over the communion experience of the Kingdom of God. The dogma, imposed on all scholarly theological output after the Enlightenment and the Reformation, that the basis of our Christian faith cannot be extracted except from a certain depositum fidei,  most notably from the Bible (to which usually Tradition was added), can no longer be sustained. More careful attention is paid and more serious reference is being given to the eucharistic communion experience that has been responsible for and has produced this depositum fidei.

Recent biblical and liturgical scholarship has come to an almost unanimous conclusion that the Eucharist in the early Christian community was “lived” not as a mystery cult, but as a foretaste of the coming Kingdom of God, a proleptic manifestation—within the tragic realities of history—of an authentic life of communion, unity, justice and equality, with no practical differentiation (soteriological and beyond) between Jews and gentiles, slaves and free people, men and women (cf. Gal 3:28). This was, after all, the real meaning of the Johannine term “eternal life”, as well as St. Ignatius’ controversial reference to the Eucharist as the “medicine of immortality”. A particular issue like the reading of the Bible cannot be detached from the ecclesial eucharistic community.  Without denying the legitimacy of the Bible’s autonomous status within the world literature or the importance of its private reading, the Orthodox have always believed that the Bible acquires its fullness only within this ecclesial eucharistic community.

It is thus no exaggeration to state that the liturgical—more precisely the eucharistic— dimension is perhaps the only safe criterion in ascertaining the way in which the Orthodox approach the Bible, the way they read the Bible, the way they know, receive, and interpret the Bible, the way they are inspired and nourished by the Bible. Those who have attended an Orthodox liturgy will have realized—perhaps with astonishment or even shock—that the Bible is normally not read but sung in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, as if the Bible readings were designed not so much in order that the faithful might understand and appropriate the word of God, but in order to glorify an event or a person. The event is the eschatological kingdom, and the person, the center of that kingdom, Christ himself. This is one reason why Orthodox, while traditionally in favour of translating the Bible (and not only) into a language people can understand, are unfortunately reluctant to introduce common-language translations of the Bible readings in their Divine Liturgy. In the Orthodox Divine Liturgy it is not only Jesus Christ in His first coming, who speaks through scripture, it is the word of the glorified Lord in His second coming that is also supposed to be proclaimed.

Ecclesial, liturgical and personal

The “Orthodox perspective” on reading the Bible is therefore first and foremost ecclesial and liturgical. The “eucharistic and trinitarian” approach to all aspects of theology and mission is the approach most widely followed by Orthodox today. Eucharistic theology gives preeminence to the local communities and—believe it or not—to the contextual  character of Christian life. Trinitarian theology, on the other hand, points to the fact that God is in God’s own self a life of communion and that God’s involvement in history aims at drawing humanity and creation in general into this communion with God’s very life.

The implications of these affirmations for the proper way  of reading the Bible are extremely important. The Bible is not primarily read in order to appropriate theological or doctrinal convictions or to set  moral, social or ethical norms; rather it is read in order to experience the life of communion that exists in God. Historically, this is how the Bible was approached by monastics and ascetics in the Orthodox tradition: as a means for personal spiritual edification, as a companion to achieve holistic personal growth, to reach deification (theosis), in other words to share the communion that exists in God. This means that the Orthodox Church’s attitude to the reading of scripture is in addition personal. The faithful consider the Bible as God' s personal letter sent specifically to each person.

Nevertheless, while the words of scripture are addressed to us human beings personally, they are at the same time addressed to us as members of a community. book and ecclesial community, Bible and Church, are not to be separated. In the West the authority of the Bible was imposed or rediscovered (in the Protestant and Roman Catholic tradition respectively) to counterbalance the excesses of their hierarchical leadership, the authority of the institutional church. In the East this task—not always without problems—was entrusted to the charismatic and the spiritual. In the West, where more emphasis was given to the historical dimension of the Church, this solution was inevitable; in the East, where the Orthodox theology has developed a more eschatological understanding of the Church, the true guardian of the faith is the people, the members of the eucharistic communities. A dynamic encounter of the East with the West—and with the South—will not only enrich both approaches to the Bible; it will also enhance and broaden the different understandings of catholicity.

This interdependence of Church and Bible is evident in at least two ways. First, we receive  scripture through and in the Church. The Church tells us what is scripture. In the first three centuries of Christian history, a lengthy process of testing was needed in order to distinguish among what is authentically “canonical” scripture, bearing authoritative witness to Christ's person and message, what is “deutero-canonical” or “apocryphal,” useful perhaps for teaching but not a normative source of doctrine, and what is “non-canonical”. It was the Church which decided which books would form the canon of the New Testament. A book is not part of Holy Scripture because of any particular theory about its date and authorship, but because the Church treats it as canonical.

Second, we interpret  the Bible through and in the Church. If it is the Church that tells us what is scripture, equally it is the Church that tells us how  scripture is to be understood. We read the Bible personally, but not as isolated individuals. We read it as members of a family, the family of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. We read it in communion with all the other members of the body of Christ in all parts of the world and in all generations of time. God does indeed speak directly to the heart of each one of us during the scripture readings, but this is always done within a framework and with a certain point of reference. The framework is the Kingdom of God, “realized” proleptically in eucharistic Divine Liturgy (cf. again the custom of singing the gospel, as well as the apostolic readings), and the point of reference is the Church.

Because scripture is the word of God expressed in human language, there is a place for honest critical inquiry when reading the Bible. The Orthodox Church has never officially rejected the critical inquiry of the Bible. We make full use of biblical commentaries and of the findings of modern research. In our attempt to grasp the deeper meaning of the word of God we make use of a wide range of methodologies. In our struggle to make it relevant to our time we can easily even accept the contextual approach to the Bible, believing that “every text has a context,” which is  not merely something external to the text that simply modifies it but constitutes an integral part of it. Therefore, certain biblical sayings, which clearly show the influence of the cultural and social environment of the time of their writing (for example, those referring to women and slavery), are valued according to, and measured over against, the ultimate reality of the Gospel, the inauguration of the Kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). Even  inclusive language can be legitimated, so long as it does not contradict the fundamentals of the Christian faith, not to mention of course that any idea of rewriting the Bible can hardly be accepted. It is quite interesting that in its long tradition the Orthodox Church has never decreed any dogma or doctrinal statement not clearly rooted in the Bible.

However, we submit our individual opinions, whether our own or those of the experts, to the Church, not in the form of a juridical or scholarly magisterium, but always in its communal dimension and with the view of the eschatological character of the Church  as a glimpse and foretaste of the coming Kingdom. In other words in the Orthodox Church objectivity and the individual interest are always placed at the service of the community and of the ultimate reality of God’s Kingdom. It is of fundamental importance that the Orthodox approach the Bible as the inspired word of God, always in a spirit of obedience, with a sense of wonder and an attitude of listening.

Christological

In addition to the ecclesial perspective in reading the Bible, in the Orthodox Church the christological perspective in reading the Bible is also affirmed. Scriptures constitute a coherent whole. This wholeness and coherence lie in the person of Christ. He is the unifying thread that runs through the entirety of the Bible from the first sentence to the last. Jesus meets us Ôn every page. "In Him all things hold together" (Col.1:17). Without neglecting the “analytical” approach, which breaks up each book into its original sources, the Orthodox pay greater attention to how these primary units have come to be joined together. We see the unity of scripture as well as the diversity, the all-embracing end as well as the scattered beginnings.

In reading the Bible the Orthodox prefer for the most part a "synthetic" style of hermeneutics, seeing the Bible as an integrated whole with Christ everywhere as the bond of union. This christocentrism, however, has never developed into a christomonism, which led Christian mission early this century to a kind of “christocentric universalism” which created many problems, frustrations and deadlocks in making an authentic and effective Christian witness among people of other living faiths. In the Orthodox Church, with few exceptions, Christology has always been interpreted through pneumatology. In other words, Christology was always understood in a constitutive way by reference to pneumatology. It was this “trinitarian” understanding of the divine reality and of the Church’s missionary attitude that prevented the Church from intolerant behaviour, allowing her to embrace the entire  “oikoumene” as the one household of life.

This christological and therefore "incarnational", perspective on reading, understanding and interpreting the Bible has given rise within the Orthodox world to the legitimacy of a pictorial presentation of the Bible and at the same time to a witnessing to the gospel through icons. This form a witness to the gospel especially through icons using Byzantine art and technique is exceptionally efficient and effective for disseminating the profound meaning of the Christian message, by stressing its transfigurative and  eschatological dimension. For in the Orthodox Church icons are not only "the book of the illiterate", but also "a window to the heavens". What they actually express is not a dematerialization, but a transfiguration of the world, human beings and nature alike. For in icons the material and cosmic elements which surround the holy figures (divine and saint alike) are also shown transformed and flooded by grace. The Byzantine icon in particular reveals how matter—in fact the whole of creation, human beings and nature alike—can be transformed: not just to the original harmony and beauty they possessed before the fall, but to the much greater glory they will acquire in the Kingdom to come. For icons, though depicting worldly schemes,  are not concerned with the world we live in but foreshadow the coming Kingdom of God. As in the Eucharist, so too in icons, the same interaction of past, present and future is manifest, and the same anticipation by this world of the world to come is present. 

If any conclusion is to be drawn from this very brief and sketchy analysis and reflection, it is perhaps that the Kingdom-of-God dimension of the mission of the Church—so much praised in the history of the ecumenical movement but surprisingly left in the margin at the present stage of our churches’ ecumenical journey—is somehow guaranteed by the eucharistic perspective  which characterizes the Orthodox reading of the Bible.

        (Bibliography: Bishop Kallistos Ware, “How to Read the Bible,” The Orthodox Study Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers Nashville 1992, pp. 762-770; P. Vassiliadis, Lex Orandi. Studies of Liturgical Theology, EKO 9 Paratiritis, Thessaloniki 1994; P. Vassiliadis, Eucharist and Witness. Orthodox Perspectives on the Unity and Witness of the Church, WCC Publications/Holy Cross Press Geneva/ Massachusetts 1998).