Feasts of Faith: Reflections on
the Major Feast Days
A Light to the Gentiles: Reflections on the Gospel of Luke
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The source
of Orthodox dogma is divine revelation. The Reformation in the west focused
attention on the channels and depositories of revelation, and both the
Papal apologists and the exponents of the new Protestantism tended thereafter
to express themselves in terms of Scripture and Tradition, or of Scripture
alone, as the primary fonts of revealed truth. 1 This uncautious phraseology
penetrated parts of the east, and some popular catechisms designate Scripture
and Tradition as the two sources of Orthodox dogma.” It is a tribute
to the vigor of contemporary Orthodox theology that Father Sergius Bulgakov
perceived the error in our time, and effectively disarmed it. Whatever
disturbing significance his emphasis may have for the separated Christians
of the west, it liberated Orthodoxy at one stroke from any dependence
on a borrowed heresy sufficiently malignant to distort our basic orientation
to the Holy Scriptures, and so radically poison all theological development.
The first concern of anyone
involved in the creation of Orthodox educational material will be with
the right relationship between the Holy Scriptures and the totality of
Orthodox dogma. Our immediate spiritual ancestors sometimes borrowed the
western duality: Scripture and Tradition. For much of the west the primacy
lay with an independent or self-sufficient Scripture. The Westminster
Confession of Faith2 makes a typical Reformed declaration: “The authority
of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth
not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God. (who
is truth itself,) the author thereof; and therefore it is to be received,
because it is the Word of God . . . so as in all controversies of religion
the Church is finally to appeal unto them” (i.e. the Old and New
Testaments). Spiritual leaders who were forced by circumstance to disavow
fifteen centuries of Christian experience could overlook the error implied
in all such confessional statements. The Church cannot do so.
It is refreshing to turn to
Bulgakov. “Holy Scripture is a part of the tradition of the Church.
It is that tradition which affirms the value of the holy books in the
Church . . . The Church has given us the Bible through tradition, and
the Reformers themselves received the Bible from the Church and by the
Church, that is to say by tradition.”3
The fellowship of believers,
old Israel and the Church, truly wrote, edited and limited the extent
of the Holy Bible. The function of the fellowship was negative, exclusive
in response to need. Seen in the perspective of instrument and product,
the Church and the Scripture reveal a distinctive Orthodox relationship.
The Church is tradition, eternally preceding, and in time producing, completing
and developing Scripture. In this proper environment the Scripture lives
as a part of a creative organism with its ultimate fulfillment in an eschatological
future. Scripture surrenders all self-sufficiency in order to participate
in a greater reality, in which it gives life and direction, and is reciprocally
enriched and invigorated by an ever-progressing and constantly deepening
understanding in the Holy Spirit.
In the Church both the moribund
Bibliolatry of classical Protestantism and the anti-Biblicism of the Counter-Reformation
are impossible. Unfortunately, either or both may be influential in limited
periods and areas; and while such novel approaches will not ultimately
disfigure, or finally cripple, the Orthodox witness, they may temporarily
blight the full flowering of the life of Christ. It is precisely at this
point that the Orthodox educator will refer to his standards of discrimination.
Granting the necessity of accepting and utilizing the Bible in its only
proper context, the Church, how, specifically, is the Scripture to be
presented? What role will it play in the educational program?
The answer is so obvious it
is frequently overlooked. The ordinary Orthodox Christian, even the believer
with the most casual and perfunctory devotional life, is presented with
the Scripture by the Church in a very special and significant way: it
is solemnly read to him imbedded in a complex of prayers and hymns themselves
intricately tied into a series of rites directly related to the annual
systematic liturgical commemoration of the history of Salvation. Ideally
the reading is accompanied by some comment adjusting the eternal message
to contemporary needs. But even without this, the lectionary pericopes
are read in a service which, at best, is largely a poetic commentary on
the appointed lessons. Main themes are emphasized, cross references made,
conclusions drawn, and the whole is designed to expound if not fully exhaust
the implications of the text. In the rite celebrated there is more; there
is the Church reliving, or transcending space and time to confront in
mystery, the event narrated in the reading. Except for this last element,
the rite provides the full pattern for the use of the Bible in Orthodox
Christian education programs.
There is a second and secondary
use of the Bible by the Church, and it too bears on training programs.
This is the private or non-liturgical reading of the Scriptures. It is
a commonplace that the writings of the Fathers are virtual mosaics of
Scripture fragments. The patristic use of Scripture typically evidences
an exhaustive knowledge of the text, and infrequently, given the viewpoint
of the Fathers can we suggest additional or more appropriate references.
This use of the Bible by clergy and people is characteristic of all ages
in the Church; the large and numerous Greek and Slavonic editions testify
to this, and a Church school which does not provide the habit of personal
Bible reading would fail in an important duty.
Nevertheless, private use
of the Bible does not suggest private interpretation to the Orthodox,
and it is appropriate that the reference to the Church in Kraeling’s
exhaustive The Old Testament Since the Reformation should be a paragraph
on the seventeenth century laws prohibiting the unrestricted reading of
the Bible to the laity.4 The interpretation of Scripture, even as a guide
to personal faith and ethical conduct, is unthinkable apart from the fullness
of tradition: a principle which would normally be imparted with the habit
of Bible reading. The Holy Spirit abides in the covenanted fellowship,
and personal experience, to be fruitful, is confirmed by the Spirit.
With these general principles
as guide, Orthodox educators can make practical use of the Bible in materials
and methods. The rite offered as model by the Church is didactic in the
best sense: speaking to the soul. Within the limitations of the school
room, lesson materials cannot do this, obviously, but they can employ
the techniques which motivated the inspired authors of the rite. What
does this involve? First, there is direct presentation of selected texts
with a commentary which makes full use of parallel Scripture passages
enriched from non-Scriptural tradition. Scripture is, therefore, neither
replaced nor paraphrased in the first instance. It is presented unadorned
and then amplified; but it is not offered without the fixed commentary.
(Aside from the Great Feasts, the daily lections may be related to the
rest of the office in a very general, or only accidental, way; the thesis
presented in this outline supposes that the ideal is the unity apparent
in the offices of the major commemorations.) The present Syrian series
follows this pattern, although it is now felt that the commentary is too
western in connotation, and the approach somewhat academic, and a new
series is partially completed. For comparative illustration it may be
noted that the present Carpatho-Russian material uses Scripture very indirectly,
while the current Greek series, in the earlier grades, is utterly lacking
in traditional support. Orthodox conditioned by the west must avoid the
twin dangers of forgetting that the Bible is the book of the Church, and
neglecting or minimizing it, or, on the other hand, overemphasizing it
in deference to Protestant exaggerations. The Syrian approach, Scripture,
dogma and liturgy, is ideal if the presentation develops a smoothly homogenous
lesson.
The Church gives us these
simple and general, but wholly adequate, principles. A few practical problems
involved in our use of the Bible require some additional attention, here
and in our educational programs.
Prominent among these difficulties
is sectarian use of the Bible. This ranges from the appeal made to our
people by lingering fundamentalists who replace the Church-as tradition
with the Bible, to the influence on our teachers of the readily available
and popular books of men like Fosdick. Our teachers, and by all means
the authors of our materials, should be familiar with the ideas of the
fundamentalists, especially such indiscriminating Scripturalists and aggressive
proselytizers as Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists,
and the more palatable but no less non-Orthodox opinions of men like Fosdick,
who might call his position “beyond modernism,” and the neo-orthodox
Protestants who are increasingly influential on the authors of popular
guides to the Bible. The unchecked use of non-Orthodox manuals in our
teacher training courses, directly related to the scarcity of Orthodox
books, can deflect our tradition at the source.
There are problems inherent
in the form of the Bible, which must be met by those who teach it. Within
the framework of a lesson series we can select texts which are intrinsically
attractive and useful. In private reading, and always for the more energetic
and curious pupils, there is the question of dullness and disedication
in the Old Testament, and what we may reverently call – “sketchiness”
in the New. Orthodox understand that the New Testament was not written
in a vacuum; often the skeleton it offers must be clothed for the believer
with the flesh of tradition, and here again we meet constantly the attitude
so well stated in the sixth of the Thirty-nine Articles: “Holy Scripture
containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not
read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any
man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought
requisite or necessary to salvation.” This classical anti-traditionalism,
a pitfall when the developed faith and practice of the Church is referred
to the New Testament, ignores the fact that the choice is always between
varying traditions, never between tradition or no tradition.
While the preparation necessary
to respond constructively to these inherent difficulties is the proper
evidence of teacher training, our present circumstances would seem to
require that authors or editors of educational courses provide some specific
guidance where tradition must supplement the text.
Our teachers are presumably
formed by the general psychological atmosphere of an Orthodox community.
In matters of faith this will be characterized by extreme conservatism.
The spirit of the Church is credulous in the best sense. It cultivates
an awareness of spiritual reality which engenders an expectancy sympathetic
to ideas and events outside of ordinary sense experience. This spirit
may be strong enough to inhibit proper discrimination in the use of the
sacred books. The believer will unconsciously assume that the Church requires
literalism in the interpretation of the Bible. There may arise, for example,
a certain resistance to the current scientific theories regarding the
origin and evolution of the universe and life. The Christian bodies with
a longer history of contact with western scientific thought will have
solved what was once called “the conflict between religion and science”
in various ways. It is regrettable that some of the solutions proposed
in American Orthodoxy have been based on outmoded western Christian positions,
when the patristic witness is not only proper to the Church, but objectively
sounder in all respects.
A brief general survey can
but hint at innumerable important aspects of the Bible in the religious
education program. A case in point is the integration of the so-called
“Apocryphal” books which a Protestant liberal can now say, “Some
of them are actually as valuable and as truly inspired as some of the
books that were retained, or more so.” In the Church the books called
Apocryphal by the Reformers are an important, even essential, part of
the Bible. Their general unavailability in English versions leads our
authors and teachers to ignore them.
The question of English versions
itself deserves attention. If our children are to live with and know the
Bible they must use some one of the English versions now in print. Ideally
the American Church should have a version of its own, and the Greek Archdiocese
recently announced the preparation of an English New Testament by over
a dozen American Greek scholars. As the initiator of another approach
to an American Orthodox version the writer must admit a certain modesty
in regard to the readiness of our largely foreign-born community for English
literary achievements of the caliber demanded by this particular task.
The Syrian Archdiocese is now preparing official New Testament lectionaries
based on the Revised Standard Version. The National Council of Churches,
the copyright proprietor, has agreed to the use of the RSV, and authorized
all modifications required by Orthodox tradition. The Church is thus presented
with an opportunity to appropriate a first rate scholarly and literary
work.
Because of the position of
the Septuagint as an “authorized version” in the New Testament,
the liturgical books, and the subsequent history of the Eastern Church,
there would be some ambiguity involved in the adaptation of the RSV, or
any other English Version, based on the Hebrew. The two currently available
English translations of the LXX are unsuitable, and a valuable contribution
to the American Church in the Biblical field would be a new translation.
The need for a Psalter is especially urgent.
Undoubtedly there are many
additional matters which would be properly treated in an exhaustive survey,
but reference must be confined to the main theme of this paper: The Church
has developed a technique for the presentation of Scripture to the faithful
in her offices of public prayer; that technique is the proper pattern
for the use of the Bible in Orthodox Christian education. The application
of this method will depend on the creativity of the authors of our lesson
materials, but the general principle has almost the force of formal declaration
of the Church.
In conclusion, we may hope
for that illumination of our hearts with the pure light of divine knowledge
to the understanding of the gospel teachings, the fear of the commandments,
and the victory over all carnal desires, of which the Prayer Before the
Gospel in the Divine Liturgy speaks. For the study of the Scripture leads
us on holy ground, where we meet the Master Himself and are taught by
one having authority.
1 — In the past
half dozen years it has been generally conceded that a misunderstanding
of the Tridentine decree on Revelation by Melchior Cano misled several
generations of Papal theologians.
2 — Ch. 1. secs
iii & viii are quoted.
3 — The Orthodox
Church, pp. 21ff. The Italics are Bulgakov’s.
4 — Pages 34-35.
From
Word
Magazine
Publication
of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America
November
1957
pp.
227/250
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