WE BELIEVE THAT 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 the whole
history of salvation. And as such they express the word
of God in human language. We know, receive, and interpret
Scripture through the Church and in the Church. Our approach
to the Bible is one of obedience.
We
may distinguish four key qualities that mark an Orthodox
reading of Scripture, namely:
our
reading should be obedient,
it should be ecclesial, within the Church,
it should be Christ-centered,
it should be personal.
Reading
the Bible with Obedience
FIRST
OF ALL, when reading Scripture, we are to listen in a spirit
of obedience. The Orthodox Church believes in divine inspiration
of the Bible. Scripture is a "letter" from God,
where Christ Himself is speaking. The Scriptures are God's
authoritative witness of Himself. They express the Word
of God in our human language. Since God Himself is speaking
to us in the Bible, our response is rightly one of obedience,
of receptivity, and listening. As we read, we wait on the
Spirit.
But,
while divinely inspired, the Bible is also humanly expressed.
It is a whole library of different books written at varying
times by distinct persons. Each book of the Bible reflects
the outlook of the age in which it was written and the particular
viewpoint of the author. For God does nothing in isolation,
divine grace cooperates with human freedom. God does not
abolish our individuality but enhances it. And so it is
in the writing of inspired Scripture. The authors were not
just a passive instrument, a dictation machine recording
a message. Each writer of Scripture contributes his particular
personal gifts. Alongside the divine aspect, there is also
a human element in Scripture. We are to value both.
Each
of the four Gospels, for example, has its own particular
approach. Matthew presents more particularly a Jewish understanding
of Christ, with an emphasis on the kingdom of heaven. Mark
contains specific, picturesque details of Christ's ministry
not given elsewhere. Luke expresses the universality of
Christ's love, His all-embracing compassion that extends
equally to Jew and to Gentile. In John there is a more inward
and more mystical approach to Christ, with an emphasis on
divine light and divine indwelling. We are to enjoy and
explore to the full this life-giving variety within the
Bible.
Because
Scripture is in this way the word of God expressed in human
language, there is room for honest and exacting inquiry
when studying the Bible. Exploring the human aspect of the
Bible, we are to use to the full our God-given human reason.
The Orthodox Church does not exclude scholarly research
into the origin, dates, and authorship of books of the Bible.
Alongside
this human element, however, we see always the divine element.
These are not simply books written by individual human writers.
We hear in Scripture not just human words, marked by a greater
or lesser skill and perceptiveness, but the eternal, uncreated
Word of God Himself, the divine Word of salvation. When
we come to the Bible, then, we come not simply out of curiosity,
to gain information. We come to the Bible with a specific
question, a personal question about ourselves: "How
can I be saved?"
As
God's divine word of salvation in human language, Scripture
should evoke in us a sense of wonder. Do you ever feel,
as you read or listen, that it has all become too familiar?
Has the Bible grown rather boring? Continually we need to
cleanse the doors of our perception and to look in amazement
with new eyes at what the Lord sets before us.
We
are to feel toward the Bible with a sense of wonder, and
sense of expectation and surprise. There are so many rooms
in Scripture that we have yet to enter. There is so much
depth and majesty for us to discover. If obedience means
wonder, it also means listening.
We
are better at talking than listening. We hear the sound
of our own voice, but often we don't pause to hear the voice
of the other person who is speaking to us. So the first
requirement, as we read Scripture, is to stop talking and
to listen - to listen with obedience.
When
we enter an Orthodox Church, decorated in the traditional
manner, and look up toward the sanctuary at the east end,
we see there, in the apse, an icon of the Virgin Mary with
her hands raised to heaven - the ancient Scriptural manner
of praying that many still use today. This icon symbolizes
the attitude we are to assume as we read Scripture - an
attitude of receptivity, of hands invisibly raised to heaven.
Reading the Bible, we are to model ourselves on the Blessed
Virgin Mary, for she is supremely the one who listens. At
the Annunciation she listens with obedience and responds
to the angel, "Be it unto me according to thy word"
(Luke 1:38). She could not have borne the Word of God in
her body if she had not first, listened to the Word of God
in her heart. After the shepherds have adored the newborn
Christ, it is said of her: "Mary kept all these things
and pondered them in her heart" (Luke 2:19). Again,
when Mary finds Jesus in the temple, we are told: "His
mother kept all these things in her heart" (Luke 2:5l).
The same need for listening is emphasized in the last words
attributed to the Mother of God in Scripture, at the wedding
feast in Cana of Galilee: "Whatsoever He saith unto
you, do it" (John 2:5), she says to the servants -
and to all of us.
In
all this the Blessed Virgin Mary serves as a mirror, as
a living icon of the Biblical Christian. We are to be like
her as we hear the Word of God: pondering, keeping all these
things in our hearts, doing whatever He tells us. We are
to listen in obedience as God speaks.
Understanding the Bible Through
the Church
IN
THE SECOND PLACE, we should receive and interpret Scripture
through the Church and in the Church. Our approach to the
Bible is not only obedient but ecclesial.
It
is the Church that tells us what is Scripture. A book is
not part of Scripture because of any particular theory about
its dating and authorship. Even if it could be proved, for
example, that the Fourth Gospel was not actually written
by John the beloved disciple of Christ, this would not alter
the fact that we Orthodox accept the Fourth Gospel as Holy
Scripture. Why? Because the Gospel of John is accepted by
the Church and in the Church.
It
is the Church that tells us what is Scripture, and it is
also the Church that tells us how Scripture is to be understood.
Coming upon the Ethiopian as he read the Old Testament in
his chariot, Philip the Apostle asked him, "Understandest
thou what thou readest?" And the Ethiopian answered,
"How can I, unless some man should guide me?"
(Acts 8:30-31). We are all in the position of the Ethiopian.
The words of Scripture are not always self-explanatory.
God speaks directly to the heart of each one of us as we
read our Bible. Scripture reading is a personal dialogue
between each one of us and Christ - but we also need guidance.
And our guide is the Church. We make full use of our own
personal understanding, assisted by the Spirit, we make
full use of the findings of modern Biblical research, but
always we submit private opinion - whether our own or that
of the scholars - to the total experience of the Church
throughout the ages.
The
Orthodox standpoint here is summed up in the question asked
of a convert at the reception service used by the Russian
Church: "Do you acknowledge that the Holy Scripture
must be accepted and interpreted in accordance with the
belief which has been handed down by the Holy Fathers, and
which the Holy Orthodox Church, our Mother, has always held
and still does hold?"
We
read the Bible personally, but not as isolated individuals.
We read as the members of a family, the family of the Orthodox
Catholic Church. When reading Scripture, we say not
"I" but "We." We read in communion with
all the other members of the Body of Christ, in all parts
of the world and in all generations of time. The decisive
test and criterion for our understanding of what the Scripture
means is the mind of the Church. The Bible is the book of
the Church.
To
discover this "mind of the Church," where do we
begin? Our first step is to see how Scripture is used in
worship. How, in particular, are Biblical lessons chosen
for reading at the different feasts? We should also consult
the writings of the Church Fathers, and consider how they
interpret the Bible. Our Orthodox manner of reading Scripture
is in this way both liturgical and patristic. And this,
as we all realize, is far from easy to do in practice, because
we have at our disposal so few Orthodox commentaries on
Scripture available in English, and most of the Western
commentaries do not employ this liturgical and Patristic
approach.
As
an example of what it means to interpret Scripture in a
liturgical way, guided by the use made of it at Church feasts,
let us look at the Old Testament lessons appointed for Vespers
on the Feast of the Annunciation. They are three in number:
Genesis 28:10-17; Jacob's dream of a ladder set up from
earth to heaven; Ezekiel 43:27-44:4; the prophet's vision
of the Jerusalem sanctuary, with the closed gate through
which none but the Prince may pass; Proverbs 9:1-11: one
of the great Sophianic passages in the Old Testament, beginning
"Wisdom has built her house."
These
texts in the Old Testament, then, as their selection for
the feast of the Virgin Mary indicates, are all to be understood
as prophecies concerning the Incarnation from the Virgin.
Mary is Jacob's ladder, supplying the flesh that God incarnate
takes upon entering our human world. Mary is the closed
gate who alone among women bore a child while still remaining
inviolate. Mary provides the house which Christ the Wisdom
of God (1 Cor. 1:24) takes as his dwelling. Exploring in
this manner the choice of lessons for the various feasts,
we discover layers of Biblical interpretation that are by
no means obvious on a first reading.
Take
as another example Vespers on Holy Saturday, the first part
of the ancient Paschal Vigil. Here we have no less than
fifteen Old Testament lessons. This sequence of lessons
sets before us the whole scheme of sacred history, while
at the same time underlining the deeper meaning of Christ's
Resurrection. First among the lessons is Genesis 1:1-13,
the account of Creation: Christ's Resurrection is a new
Creation. The fourth lesson is the book of Jonah in its
entirety, with the prophet's three days in the belly of
the whale foreshadowing Christ's Resurrection after three
days in the tomb (cf. Matthew 12:40). The sixth lesson recounts
the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites (Exodus 13:20-15:19),
which anticipates the new Passover of Pascha whereby Christ
passes over from death to life (cf. 1 Corinthians 5:7; 10:1-4).
The final lesson is the story of the three Holy Children
in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3), once more a "type"
or prophecy of Christ's rising from the tomb.
Such
is the effect of reading Scripture ecclesially, in the Church
and with the Church. Studying the Old Testament in this
liturgical way and using the Fathers to help us, everywhere
we uncover signposts pointing forward to the mystery of
Christ and of His Mother. Reading the Old Testament in the
light of the New, and the New in the light of the, Old -
as the Church's calendar encourages us to do - we discover
the unity of Holy Scripture. One of the best ways of identifying
correspondences between the Old and New Testaments is to
use a good Biblical concordance. This can often tell us
more about the meaning of Scripture than any commentary.
In
Bible study groups within our parishes, it is helpful to
give one person the special task of noting whenever a particular
passage in the Old or New Testament is used for a festival
or a saint's day. We can then discuss together the reasons
why each specific passage has been so chosen. Others in
the group can be assigned to do homework among the Fathers,
using for example the Biblical homilies of Saint John Chrysostom
(which have been translated into English). Christians need
to acquire a patristic mind.
Christ,
the Heart of the Bible
THE
THIRD ELEMENT in our reading of Scripture is that it should
be Christ-centered. The Scriptures constitute a coherent
whole because they all are Christ-centered. Salvation through
the Messiah is their central and unifying topic. He is as
a "thread" that runs through all of Holy Scripture,
from the first sentence to the last. We have already mentioned
the way in which Christ may be seen foreshadowed on the
pages of the Old Testament.
Much
modern critical study of Scripture in the West has adopted
an analytical approach, breaking up each book into different
sources. The connecting links are unraveled, and the Bible
is reduced to a series of bare primary units. There is certainly
value in this. But we need to see the unity as well as the
diversity of Scripture, the all-embracing end as well as
the scattered beginnings. Orthodoxy prefers on the whole
a synthetic rather than an analytical approach, seeing Scripture
as an integrated whole, with Christ everywhere as the bond
of union.
Always
we seek for the point of convergence between the Old Testament
and the New, and this we find in Jesus Christ. Orthodoxy
assigns particular significance to the "typological"
method of interpretation, whereby "types" of Christ,
signs and symbols of His work, are discerned throughout
the Old Testament. A notable example of this is Melchizedek,
the priest-king of Salem, who offered bread and wine to
Abraham (Genesis 14:18), and who is seen as a type of Christ
not only by the Fathers but even in the New Testament itself
(Hebrews 5:6; 7:l). Another instance is the way in which,
as we have seen, the Old Passover foreshadows the New; Israel's
deliverance from Pharaoh at the Red Sea anticipates our
deliverance from sin through the death and Resurrection
of the Savior. This is the method of interpretation that
we are to apply throughout the Bible. Why, for instance,
in the second half of Lent are the Old Testament readings
from Genesis dominated by the figure of Joseph? Why in Holy
Week do we read from the book of Job? Because Joseph and
Job are innocent sufferers, and as such they are types or
foreshadowings of Jesus Christ, whose innocent suffering
upon the Cross the Church is at the point of celebrating.
It all ties up.
A
Biblical Christian is the one who, wherever he looks, on
every page of Scripture, finds everywhere Christ.
The
Bible as Personal
IN
THE WORDS of an early ascetic writer in the Christian East,
Saint Mark the Monk: "He who is humble in his thoughts
and engaged in spiritual work, when he reads the Holy Scriptures,
will apply everything to himself and not to his neighbor."
As Orthodox Christians we are to look everywhere in Scripture
for a personal application. We are to ask not just "What
does it mean?" but "What does it mean to me?"
Scripture is a personal dialogue between the Savior and
myself - Christ speaking to me, and me answering. That is
the fourth criterion in our Bible reading.
I
am to see all the stories in Scripture as part of my own
personal story. Who is Adam? The name Adam means "man,"
"human," and so the Genesis account of Adam's
fall is also a story about me. I am Adam. It is to me that
God speaks when He says to Adam, "Where art thou?"
(Genesis 3:9). "Where is God?" we often ask. But
the real question is what God asks the Adam in each of us:
"Where art thou?"
When,
in the story of Cain and Abel, we read God's words to Cain,
"Where is Abel thy brother?" (Genesis 4:9), these
words, too, are addressed to each of us. Who is Cain? It
is myself. And God asks the Cain in each of us, "Where
is thy brother?" The way to God lies through love of
other people, and there is no other way. Disowning my brother,
I replace the image of God with the mark of Cain, and deny
my own vital humanity.
In
reading Scripture, we may take three steps. First, what
we have in Scripture is sacred history: the history of the
world from the Creation, the history of the chosen people,
the history of God Incarnate in Palestine, and the "mighty
works" after Pentecost. The Christianity that we find
in the Bible is not an ideology, not a philosophical theory,
but a historical faith.
Then
we are to take a second step. The history presented in the
Bible is a personal history. We see God intervening at specific
times and in specific places, as He enters into dialogue
with individual persons. He addresses each one by name.
We see set before us the specific calls issued by God to
Abraham, Moses and David, to Rebekah and Ruth, to Isaiah
and the prophets, and then to Mary and the Apostles. We
see the selectivity of the divine action in history, not
as a scandal but as a blessing. God's love is universal
in scope, but He chooses to become Incarnate in a particular
comer of the earth, at a particular time and from a particular
Mother. We are in this manner to savor all the uniqueness
of God's action as recorded in Scripture. The person who
loves the Bible loves details of dating and geography. Orthodoxy
has an intense devotion to the Holy Land, to the exact places
where Christ lived and taught, died and rose again. An excellent
way to enter more deeply into our Scripture reading is to
undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Galilee. Walk where
Christ walked. Go down to the Dead Sea, sit alone on the
rocks, feel how Christ felt during the forty days of His
temptation in the wilderness. Drink from the well where
He spoke with the Samaritan woman. Go at night to the Garden
of Gethsemane, sit in the dark under the ancient olives
and look across the valley to the lights of the city. Experience
to the full the reality of the historical setting, and take
that experience back with you to your daily Scripture reading.
Then
we are to take a third step. Reliving Biblical history in
all its particularity, we are to apply it directly to ourselves.
We are to say to ourselves, "All these places and events
are not just far away and long ago, but are also part of
my own personal encounter with Christ. The stories include
me."
Betrayal,
for example, is part of the personal story of everyone.
Have we not all betrayed others at some time in our life,
and have we not all known what it is to be betrayed, and
does not the memory of these moments leave continuing scars
on our psyche? Reading, then, the account of Saint Peter's
betrayal of Christ and of his restoration after the Resurrection,
we can see ourselves as actors in the story. Imagining what
both Peter and Jesus must have experienced at the moment
immediately after the betrayal, we enter into their feelings
and make them our own. I am Peter; in this situation can
I also be Christ? Reflecting likewise on the process of
reconciliation - seeing how the Risen Christ with a love
utterly devoid of sentimentality restored the fallen Peter
to fellowship, seeing how Peter on his side had the courage
to accept this restoration - we ask ourselves: How Christ-like
am I to those who have betrayed me? And, after my own acts
of betrayal, am I able to accept the forgiveness of others
- am I able to forgive myself? Or am I timid, mean, holding
myself back, never ready to give myself fully to anything,
either good or bad? As the Desert Fathers say, "Better
someone who has sinned, if he knows he has sinned and repents,
than a person who has not sinned and thinks of himself as
righteous."
Have
I gained the boldness of Saint Mary Magdalene, her constancy
and loyalty, when she went out to anoint the body of Christ
in the tomb (John 20:l)? Do I hear the Risen Savior call
me by name, as He called her, and do I respond Rabboni (Teacher)
with her simplicity and completeness (John 20:16)?
Reading
Scripture in this way - in obedience, as a member of the
Church, finding Christ everywhere, seeing everything as
a part of my own personal story - we shall sense something
of the variety and depth to be found in the Bible. Yet always
we shall feel that in our Biblical exploration we are only
at the very beginning. We are like someone launching out
in a tiny boat across a limitless ocean.
"Thy
word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path"
(Psalm 118 [119]:105).
