Read this carefully

The following is excerpted from the book Formation of Christian Theology. Volume 1: The Way to Nicaea, by Fr John Behr, dean of St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary. I found this quotation on Fr Milovan's blog Again and Again, and though it is very hard reading, it is worth reading, and what it is saying about holy and divine scripture is, if I understand it correctly, the truth. There are a lot of dubious and exaggerated pronouncements being made in Orthodox Christian circles these days about what the Bible is and how we should understand it, always in contrast to what many believe is Protestant fundamentalism. But these pronouncements are as ignorant and divisive as their makers claim the beliefs of their opponents to be.

Here, at last, is an Orthodox wording of the place of the Holy Scriptures that is not divisive, one that places all parties where they belong, at the feet of the Only Teacher of mankind, Him who is before all The Word of God.

(Italics in the quoted text are mine.)

“…The picture of an originally pure orthodoxy, manifest in exemplary Christian communities, from which various heresies developed and split off, as it was presented for instance in the book of Acts and, in the fourth century, in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea, has become increasingly difficult to maintain, especially since the work of Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. And rightly so: the earliest Christian writings that we have, the letters of Paul, are addressed to churches already falling away from the Gospel which he had delivered to them.

“…Debates certainly raged from the beginning about the correct interpretation of this Gospel; it is a mistake to look back to the early Church hoping to find a lost golden age of theological or ecclesiastical purity – whether in the apostolic times as narrated in the book of Acts, or the early Church, as recorded by Eusebius, or the age of the Fathers of the Church Councils, or the Empire of Byzantium. Nevertheless, the Gospel was delivered, once for all.

“However, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Gospel of the Coming One and accordingly the citizenship of Christians is not on earth but in heaven, from which they await their Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. In life manner the Gospel is not located in a specific text; what came to be recognized as ‘canonical’ Gospels are always described as ‘The Gospel according to…’ The Gospel is not fixed in a particular text, but, as we will see, in an interpretative relationship to the Scriptures — the Law, the Psalms and the Prophets.

“Inseparable from the debates about which works were to count as Scripture was the issue of the correct interpretation of Scripture. Not only was there a commitment to a body of Scripture, but there was also the affirmation that there is a correct reading of Scripture, or more exactly, that there is a correct canon for reading Scripture, a canon expressing the hypothesis of Scripture itself.

“Even if it was expressed in many different ways and its articulation continued to be refined, a process which continues today, nevertheless there was a conviction that there is one right faith; and this conviction that there is one right faith, one right reading of the one Scripture, is intimately tied to the confession that there is one Jesus Christ, the only Son of the one Father, who alone has made known, ‘exegeted’ (John 1:18), the Father.

“The assertion that there is such a thing as right faith came to be expressed, by the end of the second century, in terms of the canon (rule) of faith or truth, where canon does not mean an ultimately arbitrary list of articles of belief which must be adhered to, or a list of authoritative books which must be accepted, but is rather a crystallization of the hypothesis of Scripture itself. The canon in this sense is the presupposition for reading Scripture on its own terms – it is the canon of truth, where Scripture is the body of truth.”