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The nature of Holy Scripture is defined by several important factors. Among them are the historical origins of Scripture, the variety of its books and contents, its theological subject matter, as well as the role and uses of Scripture in the life of the Church. Orthodox scholars have written on these matters and related questions from a general theological perspective. Their contributions have underscored significant aspects of the Bible such as its revealed character, inspiration, authority, interpretation, and relationship to tradition. These issues will occupy our attention in various ways throughout the present work. Our purpose in this first chapter is to provide an initial statement on the nature of Scripture based on the principle that theological affirmations about such matters as biblical revelation and inspiration must be grounded in the actual contents, historical composition, as well as the canonical formation of the Bible. Thus the nature of Scripture is here examined in terms of (1) the origins of the Jewish and Christian Bibles; (2) the relationship between the Old and the New Testaments; and (3) the divine and human aspects of Holy Scripture.

Scripture constitutes an entire library of sacred books written over a period of about fifteen hundred years, from the fourteenth century B.C. to the first century A.D.. The various biblical writings were composed in Hebrew and Greek, and some parts in Aramaic, by many authors who lived in particular historical contexts and addressed important issues of their religious communities. The first reference to an authoritative holy book, "the book of the law" (2 Kg 22:8), which modern scholars identify as being essentially the Book of Deuteronomy, connects its origins with the Temple and the priesthood at the time of King Josiah (640-609 B.C.). Another reference places a "book of the law of the Lord" (2 Chr 17:9) about two hundred years earlier at the time of Jehoshaphat, ruler of Judah (873-849 B.C.). Scholars’ conjecture that the written sources behind the earliest books of the Bible, namely Genesis and Exodus, may go back as far as the fourteenth century B.C. At the other end of the biblical library, the Book of Revelation was written most likely in the late first century A.D. during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Domitian (81-96 A.D.). In this case the author clearly identifies himself as John, a Christian prophet, who wrote from exile on the island of Patmos and claimed explicit authority for this book of prophecy (Rev 1:1-11; 22:7-19).

Most of the scriptural books, however, did not claim authority as sacred books at the time of their composition. Such authority was accorded to them over many generations, indeed centuries, within the respective religious communities of Jews and Christians. In these communities, primary religious authority was attributed to living persons, patriarchs, priests, prophets, apostles, and above all Jesus of Nazareth, who in their own witness spoke and acted on behalf of God. Readers of the Bible should take special note of the fact that the foundational nature of biblical revelation is personal, while its written expression is by comparison secondary. The great moments and acts in which God made himself known involved powerful, experiential events that changed the lives of concrete persons in the context of their specific communities. Before any accounts of them were written, these revelatory events and experiences were remembered, celebrated, interpreted, told and retold by word of mouth over long periods — in the case of the Old Testament for centuries and in the case of the New Testament for decades.

Thus, behind the written Scriptures lies the dynamic reality of the oral religious traditions of the Jewish and Christian peoples. These oral traditions, maintained and developed through worship, instruction, and custom, were kept alive by God's people, and sustained the identity of God's people, guiding their beliefs and practices. Eventually they were committed to writing. The Hebrew Scriptures were written from about 1450 B.C. to 150 B.C. and the New Testament books from about 50 A.D. to 100 A.D. In each case, the sacred literature recounted the original events in layers of interpretation — primary, secondary, and tertiary — within each faith community. A startling variety of books were produced, Genesis as well as Ecclesiastes, the Gospel of Mark as well as the Epistle of James. In some instances, notably that of the Apostle Paul, we encounter individual known authors who contributed significantly to the written biblical tradition. Yet all these books organically emerged from the life of Israel and of the Church, serving their concrete needs of worship, instruction, daily guidance, and self-identity. From this perspective we can appreciate the profound fact that the books of the Bible are, by their very nature, books of faith — both in that they were fruits of the life of faith, as well as in that they fostered and still foster the life of faith.

Not only were the individual books products of the faith community but their gradual gathering into a sacred collection involved, as well, a dynamic process of reception and selection within the ongoing life and tradition of the Jewish and Christian faith communities. As central as the Bible eventually became for Judaism and Christianity, we should remember that "Abraham did not have a Bible, any more than Jesus or Paul had a New Testament." Only slowly did books gain the status of sacred authority and came to play an important role in both reflecting and determining belief and practice. The biblical writings were selectively preserved and gradually gathered into sacred collections in the religious communities of the Jews and the Christians over many centuries. No other justification can be given for the respective Jewish and Christian Bibles except the choices of these religious communities themselves. When you say Hebrew Bible you say Synagogue. When you say Christian Bible you say Church.⁵ These sacred collections are called canons (from the Greek κανών, meaning “rule” or “standard”). The Jewish canon of the Bible was completed by the first or second century A.D. and the Christian canon of the Bible, which includes the Old and the New Testaments, by the end of the fourth century.⁶

During the first century A.D., and prior to the emergence of the New Testament as part of Holy Scripture, Jews and Christians largely shared the same sacred writings deriving from the Jewish tradition. Although they interpreted them differently, they referred to them by the same titles. The term Bible comes from the Greek, βίβλος or βιβλιον (meaning “record,” “document,” or “book”) and was first used by Greek-speaking Jews to refer to the Hebrew Scriptures.⁷ The etymological roots lie in an Egyptian word for the papyrus shrub and its bark used for writing in the ancient world since the sixth century B.C. The New Testament authors employ this terminology in a few instances to refer to individual writings such as the Book of Isaiah (Lk 3:4) or the five books of the Law attributed to Moses (Mk 12:26; Gal 3:10). Once, the term occurs in the plural βιβλία (2 Tim 4:13). The same terminology is also found among the Church fathers, though somewhat rarely, for the entire Christian Bible. The expression "The Bible" (meaning "The Book") came to prevail in the Western Christian tradition.

The more frequent term for the sacred books was Scripture (Greek, γραφή) or the plural Scriptures (Greek, γραφαί), deriving from the verb γράφω, meaning to carve, inscribe or write. Whereas the word βίβλος seems to imply a stress on the material on which something is written, the word γραφή places the emphasis on the act and content of writing.⁸ The New Testament authors use this terminology numerous times to refer to particular passages or generally to the Scriptures (Mk 12:10; Lk 24:27; Acts 8:32, 35; Gal 3:8, 22; Rom 15:4). The apostle Paul calls them “holy scriptures” (αγιαι γραφαί, Rom 1:2) one time. The terms "Holy Scripture" and "Holy Scriptures" came to prevail in the universal Christian tradition as titles for the entire Bible of the Old and New Testaments.

The Jewish people, as was noted, wrote and collected their own Scriptures. In the Jewish community, the Hebrew Scriptures have been classified from ancient times according to three divisions, the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Law, also called the Law of Moses or Pentateuch (from the Greek Πεντάτευχος, literally, “five-volume work"), consists of the first five books of the Bible traditionally attributed to Moses. The Hebrew title is Torah, usually translated as "Law." But the term carries far richer meanings in Hebrew, including divine law, instruction, revelation. Although their focal center is God s Law given on Mt. Sinai, the books of Moses have a larger scope embracing as well the account of creation, the patriarchal epics, and the story of the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt. The Prophets, in Hebrew Nevi'im (literally, "announcers" or "mouthpieces" of God), comprise numerous books from Joshua to Malachi not arranged chronologically. These include the historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. In both the Jewish and Christian tradition Moses, Joshua, and Samuel are all regarded as prophets, inspired leaders and spokesmen on behalf of God. The third broad category of books, the Writings, in Hebrew Kethuvim_, makes up a diverse collection of books from the Psalms to Chronicles which, include prayers and songs, didactic and philosophical meditations, historical and apocalyptic narratives. In the Jewish tradition the Bible is called Tanakh, an acronym based on the first letter of the Hebrew words for Law, Prophets, and Writings (TNK).⁹ Jesus and St. Paul referred to the two major divisions, "The Law and the Prophets" (Mt 7:12; Rom 3:21). The three divisions are echoed in the words of the risen Christ who, on the way to Emmaus, explained "the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms" (Lk 24:44) to Cleopas and another unknown disciple. The list of books in the Jewish Bible, as selected and arranged by the rabbinic teachers perhaps at Jamnia¹⁰ toward the end of the first century A.D., or more likely during the second century, as shown in Fig 1 bellow.

The early Christian community was made up of Jewish and Gentile members. Both saw themselves rooted in the Jewish heritage and claimed to be special heirs to it. The early Christians therefore retained the Hebrew Scriptures, what eventually came to be called "Old Testament" in the Christian tradition, as the only Bible they knew, with two important differences. The first was the adoption of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures called Septuagint (Latin septuaginta and Greek έβδομήκοντα meaning “seventy”).¹¹ This term goes back to a tradition of Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria about seventy or seventy-two Jewish elders who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek some two or three centuries before Christ. The story is told in a Jewish work, The Epistle of Aristeas, written in Greek by an unknown Alexandrian Jew in pre-Christian times. Its intent is to affirm the authority of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures accomplished over generations by Greek-speaking Jews and serving their needs in the Greek city of Alexandria. This version of the Scripture is most quoted by the New Testament authors and became traditional in the ancient Church. It remains the official version of the Old Testament in the Orthodox Church.

The second difference is that the early Christians adopted a larger number of Jewish writings than the official list compiled by the rabbinic teachers at Jamnia or later. These additional books were in circulation from pre-Christian times in the Greek language among Greek-speaking Jews who regarded them as valuable. These books express the diverse beliefs, practices, and hopes of many Jews during the time of the Greek and Roman dominance of the ancient world. However, because they carried neither sufficient antiquity nor authority in the Jewish tradition, they were left out of the Hebrew canon by rabbinic leaders who intended to unite and consolidate Judaism after disastrous wars with Rome during the first and second centuries.

But the Christians esteemed these writings and preserved them. In the East, they became known as Readable Books (Αναγινωσκόμενα, literally, “readable”) and in the West Deuterocanonical ("of secondary authority"). Although their precise number varies, these writings are part of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic canons of the Old Testament. With the Reformation, Protestants adopted the Jewish canon and eliminated these books from the Bible. They designated them as Apocrypha, a pejorative word meaning "hidden books," a term which in the ancient Christian tradition was applied to still other books whose authority was rejected by the Church. These latter books, such as the Book of Jubilees, the Martyrdom of Isaiah, and the Assumption of Moses, were nevertheless preserved by Christians on account of historical and religious interests. They carry no canonical authority but certainly bear historical value because they attest to the beliefs and practices of their authors and their specific religious groups. These books are still designated as Apocrypha in the Orthodox Church, but are called Pseudepigrapha (literally, "falsely titled") by Protestants.¹² Thus, by and large, what Protestants call Pseudepigrapha the Orthodox call Apocrypha, and what Protestants call Apocrypha the Orthodox called Readable or Deuterocanonical. Many current Protestant Bibles, for reasons of openness and scholarly interests, regularly feature the Readable Books as "The Apocrypha" or "The Apocrypha-Deuterocanonical," albeit as an appendix.

In addition to the Readable/Deuterocanonical books, the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Bibles contain extensive passages in the canonical books of Esther and Daniel not found in the Hebrew version of these texts. Although traditionally these passages are part of the canonical books, the Protestants placed them among the "Apocrypha" according to their nomenclature and call them "Additions" to the Greek versions of Esther and Daniel.

In the case of Daniel, these passages include the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Youths, the story of Susanna, and the story of Bel and the Dragon. In the case of Esther, they include shorter passages too numerous to mention here.¹³ The inclusive interests of the Eastern tradition extended to additional texts that are taken up in the Orthodox Bibles. Among them are the Prayer of Manasses and Psalm 151. The Slavonic version alone includes Esdras 2. The Greek version alone includes Maccabees 4 as an appendix.

In total, the Hebrew Scriptures contain thirty-eight books, Ezra and Nehemiah forming one book. The Jewish tradition developed and maintains its own numbering and sequential arrangement of these books.¹⁴ The Protestant Old Testament numbers thirty-nine books separating the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah according to ancient Christian tradition. The Roman Catholic Old Testament, including seven Deuterocanonical Books and the Epistle of Jeremiah joined to Baruch, totals forty-six books. The Orthodox Old Testament maintains the most inclusive canon of the ancient Church which embraces, together with the ten Readable Books, forty-nine books. In addition, a few other writings mentioned above, such as the Prayer of Manasses and Psalm 151, are accorded some value within the Orthodox tradition.

It should be noted as well, that the sequence of the scriptural books varies in the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Bibles, something easily ascertained by any reader comparing current editions of the Bible from these traditions.¹⁵ Two significant differences deserve the reader's attention. One is that the Orthodox and Catholic Bibles integrate the Readable and Deuterocanonical books within their respective Old Testament canons, whereas the Protestant Bibles put them in an appendix. This fact indicates a remaining difference of views regarding the canonical authority of these books. The second is that the official Orthodox Old Testament continues to be the Greek Septuagint version, whereas the current Protestant and Catholic Bibles are translations of the Hebrew original called the Masoretic text.¹⁶ Finally, readers of the Bible should be aware that the "Apocrypha" of the New Testament are entirely different books, outside of the New Testament canon, which were written mostly during the second century A.D. and later.¹⁷

The terminology "Old Testament" and "New Testament" emerged among Christians during the first century and was applied to the two parts of the Christian Bible by the end of the second century. The key word testament, derived from the Latin testamentum, translates the Greek διαθήκη and the Hebrew berith. The English and modern Greek words are no longer quite appropriate. Contemporary readers usually take the word "testament" to mean a document for the disposition of an estate, as in the last will and testament. However, the correct meaning from the Hebrew word is covenant, meaning a bond, agreement, or alliance between two partners. The meaning of covenant in the biblical perspective is the sacred bond between God and his people, established by God s saving action and freely offered to his people as a permanent relationship of mutual love and fidelity. The "Old Covenant" is founded on God s deliverance of Israel from Egypt and his gift of the Law on Mt. Sinai. The "New Covenant" is grounded in the sacrifice of Christ -God s supreme act of salvation as a renewal of the covenant with his people (Mk l4:24; 1 Cor 11:25; Heb 8:8, 13; Jer 31:31-32).

The first to coin the expression παλαιά διαθήκη (“old covenant”) in conscious contrast to καινή διαθήκη (“new covenant”) was St. Paul in 2 Cor. 3:6, 14. However, as the context clearly indicates, the apostle had in view the Exodus story of Moses and the Sinai Covenant and not yet the entire Hebrew Scriptures as "Old Testament." The expressions "Old Testament" and "New Testament" were not applied to the sacred books until the end of the second century. For the apostle Paul and the early Christians the "new covenant" was neither a book nor a collection of books but rather the dynamic reality of the new bond between God and Christian believers based on the person and saving work of Christ.

The writing of letters, gospels, and other books by the apostles and their followers occurred during the first century in various regions of the Mediterranean world. Their gradual collection as authoritative books of the Christian tradition took place primarily during the second century. This complex process is known as the formation of the New Testament canon occurring in parallel with the formation of the Old Testament canon. In both cases the process continued for several centuries with considerable diversity and disputes over the selection of books based on tradition, authorship, and content.

The works of St. Irenaios, Tertullian, and a document called the Muratorian Canon attest that by the end of the second century Christians widely acknowledged twenty-two of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament as belonging to the new library of sacred books of the universal Church. For many generations the contested books continued to be 2 Peter, Jude, 2 and 3 John, the Book of Revelation, and to a somewhat lesser degree Hebrews and James. It was near the end of the second century that the appellation παλαιά διαθήκη (“Old Testament”) came to be applied to the Hebrew Scriptures, first by Melito, bishop of Sardis, in Asia Minor.¹⁸ One can suppose that the counterpart καινή διαθήκη (New Testament), applied to the new collection of Christian sacred books, was also in currency at that time, but extant references occur somewhat later in third-century authors such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen.

The so-called "closing" of the New Testament canon is usually dated with St. Athanasios the Great (367) who lists all the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.¹⁹ The number twenty-seven is, nevertheless, not a matter of dogma. The ancient Syriac Church selected only twenty-two books for its New Testament without causing division. The Ethiopian Church embraced more than thirty. St. John of Damascus in the eighth century listed twenty-eight books.²⁰ Should one of the lost letters of St. Paul be discovered in the future, no sound reason could prevent it from inclusion. The "closing of the canon" is a firm but not rigid principle in the Orthodox Church because the classic Christian tradition never dogmatized the exact number of scriptural books and always valued many other writings and liturgical texts in addition to the canonical collection of the Scriptures.

The relationship between the Old and New Testaments, as that between Christianity and Judaism, is complex.²¹ The foundational starting point is the statement of Jesus that he came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them (Mt 5:17). Christ's work was a renewal and completion not a rejection and abolishment of the Jewish heritage. Jesus lived fully within the traditions of his people. He accepted the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures and pointed to the ten commandments as a way to eternal life (Mt 19:16-19). However, Jesus, by his authority as well as his example, opened a new perspective on the Scriptures and the Jewish tradition. The new perspective is summed up by his reinterpretation of the Mosaic Law (Mt 5:21-48) and his teaching of unconditional love and forgiveness as the highest principles of God's kingdom beyond legal strictures (Mk 2:l-28).

In the light of Christ's resurrection and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, St. Paul and other New Testament authors built on this perspective. For them, the center of revelation was no longer the Law of Moses, but the Ressurected Christ in whom the resounding "Yes" of God's promises found fulfillment (2 Cor 1:10). They established Christ and the gospel as the criteria for the use and interpretation of the Old Testament. Above all, they read it as a book of prophecy foreshadowing the ministry of Jesus, the new covenant, and the inclusion of believing Gentiles into the people of God. While they accepted the authority of the traditional Jewish Scriptures, they also developed new positions of truth and conduct. Just as Jesus had set aside some written and oral traditions of the Law, such as the granting of divorce and the ritual washing of hands (Mt 5:31-32; Mk 7:1-23), so also St. Paul and the early Church put aside certain significant aspects of the Law, notably circumcision and the food laws as requirements for Gentile Christians (Gal 2:11-21; Rom 10:4; Acts 15:1-21). Yet for all Christians, the Hebrew Scriptures remained the inspired word of God written for their instruction and encouragement (Rom 15:4-5; 1 Cor 10:11) and profitable for correction and training in righteousness (2 Tim 3:16).

It is true that some later Christian authors held in varying degrees disparaging views of the Jewish legacy. Apostle Paul in his Letter to the Hebrews referred to the old covenant as obsolete and completely ineffectual (Heb 7:18; 8:13; 10:1-10). The author of the Epistle of Barnabas (9:4) claimed that circumcision commanded by God was never meant to be physical but only spiritual. The Christian heretic Marcion in the second century rejected the Old Testament altogether. By reason of his theological schema opposing "Law" and "Gospel" Martin Luther regrettably injected negative perceptions of the Old Testament and the Jewish heritage in some traditions of Protestantism. For example, a famous Lutheran biblical scholar once assessed the Old Testament as "a history of sin."

Over against such views it must be affirmed that the Old Testament is an essential record of revelation and an integral part of the Christian Bible. The Law of Moses, though no longer a criterion of salvation for Christians, is God's revealed Law, holy, good, and spiritual according to St. Paul (Rom 7:12-14). The great apostle never thought that either Jews or Jewish Christians should cease observing God s Law, only that the Law could no longer be imposed on Gentile Christians as people of God under the new dispensation of Christ and the gospel. He fully acknowledged the gifts of the Jewish heritage (Rom 9:1-5). While he believed that Christ alone was God s unique servant to both Jews and Gentiles (Rom 15:8-9), he categorically rejected the notion that God had abandoned the unbelieving Jews (Rom 11:1, 11, 29). With his apostolic authority, he warned Gentile Christians not to look with prideful contempt toward the Jewish people because they are still God s beloved people despite their state of disobedience as regards Christ (Rom 11:13-29). The destiny of the Jewish people, according to Paul, is best left in Gods care and inscrutable wisdom (Rom 11:30-36).

In Orthodox perspective, the "Old" in the Old Testament implies no diminution of its revelatory character. The Church fathers in their theological interpretation of the Old Testament found in certain passages, such as the account of the visitation of the three angels to Abraham and Sarah (Gen 18), intimations of the mystery of the Holy Trinity. As St. Paul had earlier perceived the eternal Christ at work in the Hebrew Scriptures (1 Cor 10:4), so did the Church fathers behold Christ as the agent of revelation in the Old as well as the New Testaments, for example when speaking to Moses from the burning bush (Ex 3). The Holy Spirit descended upon the prophets and was active in Israel. Abraham, Moses, and the prophets were "friends of God" receiving direct revelations. The glory of God shone on the face of Moses (Ex 34:30; 2 Cor 3:7). The righteous figures of the Old Testament from Adam to Job, from Abraham to Moses, from Elijah to the Maccabean martyrs, are honored as saints in the Orthodox Church with specific feastdays dedicated to them. Readings from the Old Testament are integral to the worship of the Church. The hymnology and liturgical prayers are filled with the language of the Old Testament and references to God s savings actions on behalf of his people. In Orthodox iconography, a famous icon of the Resurrection depicts the risen Christ bursting the gates of hell "and lifting up by each hand Adam and Eve surrounded by other righteous figures of Israel. Has the Church then wholly cooped the Hebrew Scriptures as its own and taken them away from the Jews? Christians have no doubt been tempted to draw such an inference. But this plainly contradicts the apostolic authority of St. Paul who declared that "the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Rom 11:29). St. Paul took it for granted that the Jewish people are under God's care and would continue to live by the divine covenant given to them until the "mystery" of their unbelief was resolved by God himself (Rom 11:25-36). The Hebrew Scriptures are a gift to both Jews and Christians. From their own perspectives, both Jews and Christians understand themselves and claim to be the people of God faithful to their respective covenants. Although they read the Scriptures in a different light, the Jews from the standpoint of the Law and the Christians from the standpoint of Christ, Christians and Jews can serve in mutual respect as God s witnesses to one another and to the world according to their own calling. Christians are to be grateful sharers grafted on to the rich "olive tree" of the Jewish heritage that they "might glorify God for his mercy" (Rom 11:16-24; 15:9), If they call the Hebrew Scriptures "Old Testament," it is not to devalue its revelatory significance. Rather, it is to affirm their own understanding of the gracious acts of the living God, the Father of Jesus Christ, and to bear witness to their own experience of the new covenant in Christ which fulfills the first covenant.

We call the Bible "Holy Scripture." Its sacred character derives not only from its role in the life and worship of the community of faith, Church or Synagogue, but also from its intrinsic nature and claims as witness to the revelation of God. The term revelation (from the Greek άποκάλυψις, Rev 1:1) denotes “uncovering,” “disclosure,” and “communication” of something hidden or previously unknown. The fundamental claim of Scripture, rooted in direct experience of God by privileged witnesses, is that the true God and Lord of the universe has chosen to make himself known to human beings in various ways, especially through actions and words. The living God, though searched for in shadowy ways from time immemorial, would have remained essentially unknown apart from his own acts of self-disclosure and communication toward humanity.

Scripture is called “the oracles of God” (τα λόγια του θεού, Rom 3:2) and the word of God (λόγος θεού, Lk 8:21; Jn 10:35; cf. Rom 3:2) because it communicates the knowledge God has chosen to make known through inspired authors. Words are means of communication through which we give shape to our deep thoughts, articulate them, and are thus able to communicate with others. Ideally, words are vehicles of truth. They seek to interpret reality and to bring the meaning of life to full light. It is no small matter to consider that Scripture in profound ways bears testimony to the treasures of God's thought, that is to say, insights and truths about the ultimate meaning of the whole of reality. From a religious rather than a scientific standpoint, that is exactly what Scripture claims to do. And it tells us that God's word, living and active, strikes with spiritual power, like a two-edged sword, piercing one's innermost being (Heb 4:12; Eph 6:17).

What does God desire to communicate through the testimony of Scripture? What central aspects sum up the religious and theological essence of the Bible as Gods "communication book?” The Church fathers taught, and modern scholarship has confirmed, that readers should be attentive to the σκοπός, the comprehensive aim or purpose of Scripture, so that its parts can be seen in terms of the whole and the whole in terms of its parts.²² From a holistic perspective, Scripture provides knowledge about God and his dealings with humanity in three significant and related ways.

First, the Bible bears testimony to God's saving activity in history, a process which has been called sacred history or' the history of salvation. Some believers often understand this notion in a somewhat naive way, identifying the entire biblical story with literal history. However, the Bible was not written as technical history. The actual course of events and the dynamics of human interactions were far more complex than the story the Bible tells. This view does not deny any factual basis to the Bible, but only emphasizes that the narrative of Scripture represents the interpreted experience and religious memory of God's people over many generations. God's saving activity involves the whole range of human struggles to which the Bible honestly attests. At the core of this struggle are significant moments of God's revelation to key figures such as Abraham, Moses, the prophets, John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, and many others. God's saving activity is also defined by great acts of deliverance as understood, interpreted, and celebrated among God's people. The Bible calls these divine acts the “wonders” (τα θαυμάσια, Ex 3:20 LXX) or the “great deeds” (τα μεγαλεία, Acts 2:11) of God, such as the Exodus, the giving of the Law at Sinai, the entry into the Promised Land, Christ's incarnation, death and resurrection, and the gift of the Spirit on Pentecost.

These moments of revelation and acts of deliverance, culminating in the person and ministry of Jesus, constitute the bedrock of divine revelation and the essence of the Bible as Gods saving message.

Second, the Scriptures communicate God's truth and wisdom about creation and humanity, sin and salvation, moral right and wrong, heaven and hell. The chief truth and commandment is to acknowledge and worship the one, living God (Ex 20:1-6). "Let justice roll down like waters" (Am 5:24), the prophet Amos cried out on behalf of God, calling for social justice. Jesus taught: "Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness" (Mt 6:33). St. Paul envisioned that "the creation itself will be set free from bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God" (Rom 8:21). Knowledge about these matters is conveyed, again, from religious and theological, not scientific and strictly historical perspectives. It is mediated through a rich diversity of description of events and examples of conduct, narration of stories and collected teachings of wisdom, dreams and oracles, commandments and exhortations, psalms and prayers. It comes to us with varying degrees of clarity and accuracy through human experience and human words that often require careful interpretation. Nevertheless, Scripture in its overall σκοπός, whether by narrative or instruction, gives abiding testimony to God's saving truth which it views as light and life (Ps. 119:105).

Third and most importantly, Scripture communicates knowledge about the mystery of the living God himself — who he is and what his attributes are. Ancient peoples believed in all sorts of deities and paid homage to them in myriad ways. It is erroneous to claim that they all worshiped the same god by different names and in various ways. While the Bible attests to the truth that there is but one true God, human beings have nevertheless created countless of idols of material and conceptual gods throughout history. Holy Scripture proclaims the "true" God precisely in deliberate contrast and opposition to the "false" gods of paganism.²³ The true God is the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who guided his people in history and most fully revealed himself in the Son and the Spirit as a Triadic God (Mt 28:19; 2 Cor 13:13). He is the "living" God because he is the Lord, Yahweh ("I Am Who I Am," Ex 3:14), a personal God who, moved by love, lives and acts among his people with grace and truth. Not all pages of the Bible present God's character with equal clarity. But the total witness of Scripture proclaims and exalts the true God, the King of glory, a moral Lord, who commands justice and righteousness and who rules with love and mercy. Moreover, he desires to share his life — he yearns for covenantal fidelity and intimate communion with personal beings created in his image and likeness. In the end, the Bible points not to itself but to God. Its supreme testimony and greatest challenge to readers is the invitation to an intimate encounter and personal life with God.

It is also important to underscore that Scripture as God's communication is primarily addressed to God's people who nurture communal knowledge of God. God chose to make himself known to concrete persons such as Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Paul and Lydia. His saving acts and words called forth a response and established relationships between God and such persons as well as between such persons and others who received their message. Those who answered the call sealed their relationship with God and with one another in mutual faith and loving obedience. Likewise Gods great acts of deliverance were directed to the people of Israel and to the followers of Jesus. Their response was integral to the corporate covenant between God and his people. We can say that God's saving acts and words created these personal bonds and established the community of God's people itself. Holy Scripture emerged as "bones of bones and flesh of flesh" from the life of the faith community. As a book of faith and a book of the Church, Scripture constitutes the word of God not in the abstract but the word of God addressed to his people. Corporate knowledge of the living God is the dominant theme of the Bible. God's word and those who receive it, Holy Scripture and the people of God, belong inseparably together. It is in this communal faith context that the words of Scripture become the "living word" of the living God in worship, preaching, teaching, guidance, and mission.²⁴

Thus, the essence of the religious value and theological content of Holy Scripture as divine revelation is summed up by its testimony to God's saving activity, God's saving truth, and God's personal character. Scripture is the word of God insofar as it communicates to us knowledge about these crucial matters. However, such knowledge about God and his purposes is conveyed through human beings who spoke and wrote in human languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. How is one then to understand the relationship between God's word and the human words in which the Bible is written? In what sense is the Bible the word of God? God neither has nor needs a physical mouth to make known his will. Did he perhaps miraculously create sounds to be heard as Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek words by human subjects? Did he touch the minds of persons to convey his will, who subsequently communicated his messages to others in their own ordinary language and frame of reference? Or both? What about the interpretations of original revelations by later generations enshrined in the written biblical tradition? To what degree do the words of Scripture represent actual words of God? How does one begin to comprehend more precisely the truth that the Bible is the word of God in human words? The way one answers these questions determines one's view of Scripture, of inspiration, and of revelation. It also discloses where one stands in the spectrum of biblical interpretation from fundamentalism to radical liberalism.

In the Orthodox perspective, Holy Scripture is the record of revelation rather than direct revelation itself. To read about creation in Genesis is not the same as being present at creation. The prophet Isaiah personally beheld the Lord enthroned in glory, but in Isaiah 6 we have an account of that revelation, not the awesome revelation itself. The apostles and other devoted followers of Jesus experienced the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost but in Acts 2 we meet a written description of that event, not the event itself. To be sure, the record of revelation is inspired, sacred, and canonical, but nevertheless it is still a record written by concrete human authors and in particular human languages.

Georges Florovsky has written that "the Bible is intrinsically historical ... [in it] we hear not only the voice of God, but also the voice of man ... Herein lies the miracle and mystery of the Bible, that it is the Word of God in human idiom."²⁵ The voice of God and the many voices of human beings combine in the single text of Scripture. No word of God is recorded except in human words. Divine revelation occurred neither in a vacuum nor as pure gold untouched by human contingency. God utilized ordinary human agents with their limitations of language and knowledge to communicate aspects of his will and purposes to limited subjects. The great thinker Origen called the Bible God's “baby talk” to humanity. St. John Chrysostom perceived Scripture as an expression of divine “condescension” (συγκατάβασις).²⁶Τ1ιΐ5 view of Scripture presupposes a dynamic understanding of revelation and inspiration involving a process of personal divine-human interaction.

The most striking parallel to the twofold nature of Scripture is — by way only of analogy rather than by strict correspondence — Jesus Christ who is himself called the incarnate Word of God (Jn 1:1,14). Although he was the eternal Logos and Son, the incarnate Christ was seen and touched; he spoke and acted in fully human ways, including the experience of hunger, frustration, and fear; yet he was without sin (Heb 4:15; 5:7). Just as the mystery of the one Christ is expressed in his divine and human natures, so also the mystery of Holy Scripture, the verbal icon of Christ, unites divine and human aspects. The divine aspects are to be found in Scripture's saving message about God, humanity, the gospel, the Church, grace and works, as well as the hope of the coming kingdom. This saving message is not merely an announcement of abstract concepts but a present reality as God's word which, when proclaimed and received by faith, becomes a living and transforming word through the power of the Spirit. The human aspects are to be found in the specific human languages of the Bible, the different kinds of literary forms and skills of the biblical authors and editors, as well as in their cultural and conceptual limitations which are intrinsic to all human endeavors.

It is not possible neatly to separate the divine and human elements of Scripture. The reader must engage the biblical witness in its totality and distinguish between central claims pertaining to salvation and subsidiary matters of history, chronology, language, and culture. That Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ and risen Lord is a truth of far greater magnitude than the historical question of the origin and development of christological titles. The hope of the resurrection of the dead and of the coming kingdom is far more important than the exact nature of these events as reported in various biblical books. To affirm that St. Paul experienced a true theophany of the risen Christ is one thing, to recognize that we have differing descriptions of this experience in Galatians and Acts is another. The Bible exhibits a tremendous variety in details as, for example, in the double accounts of the genealogies of Jesus, the Beatitudes, and the Lord's Prayer in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Questions can also be raised about cultural values and traditions reflected in Scripture pertaining to the institution of slavery, the role of women and children, and other social conventions. Where the line should ultimately be drawn and when it must be drawn between the saving truth of Scripture and its human expressions, especially in instances of major or controversial issues, becomes a matter of theological and normative interpretation in the life of the Church. Such issues, which have caused crises in Church history, raise questions that can be resolved not by expert interpretation alone but by the total ecclesial sense of what is God's will according to the spiritual receptivity of God's people.

In light of the above, therefore, the concept of the Bible as the word of God pertains primarily to the saving message of Scripture and cannot be applied literally to the exact words of each biblical verse. The latter view would virtually render the Bible a kind of massive computer printout of the mind of God, a gross misconception. Such understanding would entail insuperable difficulties especially concerning the scientific inadequacies and historical discrepancies in Scripture, which would inevitably be attributed to God. Moreover, from a theological viewpoint, the mystery of the living God cannot be strictly identified with the letter of Scripture. God is both revealed and hidden because he transcends human language and understanding. Accordingly, sufficient allowance must be made for the human factor in the reception of revelation and the composition of the biblical writings. Each author must be granted one's own personality, cultural framework, conceptual understanding, literary skills, and spiritual insight as an active contributor to the divine-human interaction. This position may be described as a dynamic view of the inspiration of Scripture.²⁷

Orthodox theology holds to a personal and dynamic, rather than mechanistic and verbal, concept of inspiration. God did not merely dictate words or propositions to passive authors, but rather he impacted personally their whole beings, allowing them actively to comprehend, interpret, and convey his will to others according to the limitations of their understanding and language. It is important to note that the inspiration of the Holy Spirit embraces a far deeper and broader process than the composition of single books. Inspiration involves the entire community of faith, the life of a particular author, the composition of particular books, as well as their gradual gathering into a sacred collection. While all Scripture is “God-breathed” (θεόπνευστος, 2 Tim 3:16), it is not equally so, because of the variability of human receptivity. The inspirational character of the Book of Isaiah cannot be compared to that of the Book of Ecclesiastes, nor the inspirational character of the Gospel of John to that of the Epistle of Jude. Those who emphasize the literal authority of Scripture, often conservative and fundamentalist Protestants, debate the concept of inerrancy. They advocate essentially a Bible without error and are thus compelled to provide artificial defensive justifications.²⁸ Many seem to bypass the historical complexities and to attribute to Scripture an absolute character that properly belongs only to God, thus seemingly lapsing into a kind of bibliolatry. The Roman Catholic view of inspiration may be expressed by the term infallibility, following the etymological sense that Scripture "does not fail" for the essential saving purposes for which it was given by God.²⁹ In the Orthodox tradition, perhaps the most appropriate expression is the sufficiency (αυτάρκεια) of Scripture, an expression used by St. Athanasios to affirm the fullness of saving truth provided by Scripture.³⁰

The question of authorship of scriptural books exemplifies the differing implications between dynamic and rigid views of inspiration. Those who incline toward a dictational view of revelation and inspiration are also concerned about securing the traditional authorship of the biblical writings. Those who hold to a dynamic view of inspiration are less anxious about authorship because they see God's guidance over the whole process, from the original moments and events of revelation to the formation of the biblical canon. Similar inferences may be drawn from differing perspectives on the relationship of the Bible to the believing community from which it came. Those who attribute to the Scriptures an absolute authority apart from or above the believing community may passionately defend authorship by eyewitnesses. In so doing, they desire to uphold the veracity of the Bible which must stand "alone," as if heaven opened to convey specific propositional statements and truths to individual authors. Those who recognize the dynamic relationship between Bible and believing community are less worried about traditional authorship because they view the whole life of the faith community as the ultimate context of inspiration and of sufficient teaching for salvation.

From an Orthodox perspective, the question of authorship is important but not critical. The ultimate theological criterion of truth is the life of the Church. In the Orthodox tradition, there are numerous valuable patristic writings, hymns, prayers, and other liturgical texts either by unknown or disputed authors over whom patristic and liturgical scholars debate without great anxiety about their findings' impact on the life of the Church. In the ancient Church, the authorship of a number of New Testament books, such as the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation, had already been freely debated for several centuries. It need not, therefore, be a cause of spiritual or theological confusion that modern scholars, for historical and literary reasons, continue this debate and even enlarge upon it. Such debate becomes pernicious only in cases where scholars, or other uninformed readers of the Bible who are conditioned by fundamentalist presuppositions, think that either the saving message of the canonical Scriptures or the theological value of ecclesial tradition are undermined by questions raised about the traditional authorship of the biblical writings. Whatever the historical complexities for or against the traditional attribution of authorship — and sound theology allows freedom for balanced historical research — the Church has embraced a variety of writings in its sacred canon and thus affirmed their value as multiple testimonies to God and his saving message. The essential value of the biblical documents lies in their theological content rather than in the historical circumstances of their composition.

By academic study we mean the formal and systematic study of Scripture at the level of universities, colleges, and theological schools which have flourished in Western Europe, North America, and now all over the world.⁴³ Such study presumes to be scientific in that it is conducted on the basis of a system of standards and methods developed by a long-standing academic tradition in the liberal arts and humanities. This academic tradition deserves careful consideration not only for its impressive accomplishments, but also for its disruptive effects pertaining to all traditional approaches to the Bible. The liberal tradition of biblical studies, complex and diverse as it is, constitutes in fact a new tradition and represents a new community, that is, a community of scholars with their own interests and presuppositions which go beyond particular methodologies. The ideology of academic scholarship has often yielded radical judgments about the authority of Scripture as traditionally held by all Christians. Moreover, the dominance of scholarship has imperceptibly given rise to an intimidating supposition that only scholars can truly know the Bible, a notion as arrogant as it is foolish. The following sketch of biblical criticism is amplified by a more extensive assessment of contemporary biblical scholarship in Chapter Five.

The prevailing academic study of the Bible, conducted as scientific scholarship on the basis of historical and literary criticism, is a product of the modern world. It is closely linked with the birthpangs of modern Western civilization marked by the Reformation, the religious wars, the rise of science, intellectual reaction to rigid forms of both Catholicism and Protestantism, and with the embrace of reason as the primary way to truth and human progress.⁴⁴ Given the elements of freedom from church authority and of the use of autonomous reason, biblical criticism could first develop only within the Protestant world, yet not without bitter acrimony and further cross-sectional divisions among Protestants into liberal, conservative or evangelical, and fundamentalist camps.⁴⁵ From the beginning, biblical criticism advocated a detached, rational reading of the Bible, "like any other book," and fostered a hostility toward traditional Christian beliefs. It sought to discover the "pure natural religion' of Jesus over against the distorted religion about Christ created by the Church and its doctrines, which had presumably caused controversies and wars. Central teachings of the New Testament, such as the deity of Jesus as Son of God and the miracles recorded in the Bible, including Jesus' resurrection, were viewed with marked skepticism. These and similar ideas, hostile to traditional Christianity, can be traced back to the English rationalists such as John Locke (1632-1704) and the German G. E. Lessing (1729-1781). They were developed and refined in various ways by numerous German scholars such as J. S. Sempler (1725-1791), Ε C. Baur (1792-1860), J. Wellhausen (1844-1918), A. Harnack (1851-1930), R. Bultmann (1884-1976), and still surface today through the work of the American Robert Funk who is the driving force behind the radical "Jesus Seminar."⁴⁶

Biblical criticism did not advance in linear fashion but through diverse dynamics and various schools such as the Tubingen, the "history of religions," and the Bultmannian. Nor have all liberal biblical critics been radicals. As biblical criticism gained acceptability in mainstream Protestantism, the hostile edge of the earlier critics was tempered, subtly hidden, or even justified in the name of scientific research. Some mainline Protestant scholars have themselves raised their voices in criticism of biblical criticism in its technical, historical, and philosophical extremes.⁴⁷

The field as a whole, granted its brilliant historico-philological findings, has been marked by rationalist ideology and a distinct strain of Enlightenment radicalism. As William Baird puts it, "the history of NT criticism from the end of the 18th century through the first two thirds of the 20th is largely a recital of the Enlightenment themes with variations."⁴⁸

It is not surprising that biblical criticism did not readily find receptive ground within the Roman Catholic Church.⁴⁹ Although one of the earliest pioneers was the French Oratorian priest R. Simon (1638-1712), a convert from Protestantism, Catholic biblical studies remained defensive until the second half of the twentieth century. Two great Catholic scholars appeared in the early twentieth century, M. J. Lagrange and A. Loisy. Lagrange, who was founder of the Biblical School in Jerusalem and the journal Revue Biblique, convincingly demonstrated that critical biblical research could be conducted without necessary opposition to faith and Church. Loisy, a gifted philologist and exegete, fell into critical extremism and was excommunicated (1908) as a leader of the Modernist heresy. Earlier, the Pontifical Biblical Commission (1902) had been established to keep a watchful eye on biblical exegetes.

The cloud over Roman Catholic biblical scholars was not lifted until the papal encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), the charter of the modern Catholic historical-critical study of Scripture. On the basis of that document and by the encouraging guidance of the Biblical Commission, Catholic biblical scholarship has come to full maturity during the last fifty years through the work of numerous scholars such as the French P. Benoit and J. Danielou, the Belgians L. Cerfaux and A. Descamps, the Germans J. Schmid and R. Schnackenburg, and the Americans R. Brown and J. A. Fitzmyer. These scholars have shown that front-line critical biblical studies can be conducted apart from philosophical biases and extreme positions. However, tensions between liberal and conservative scholars, as well as doubts and attacks on biblical criticism, continue to exist within the Roman Catholic Church, not least because of the radical tendencies of some scholars.⁵⁰

In the Orthodox Church, critical biblical studies are still largely derivative due to the absence of many universities in Orthodox countries and the consequent lack of long-standing academic traditions for the advancement of all disciplines. In Russia, the tremendous intellectual ferment centered around numerous academies and the promise of an amazing revival in arts and sciences in dialogue with European developments were tragically cut short by the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) .⁵¹ Greece, after four centuries of Ottoman rule, gained political independence in the early nineteenth century and was the only Orthodox country aside from Cyprus to escape Communist rule in the twentieth. In Greece, with the establishment of two national universities in Athens (1837) and Thessalonike (1926), the foundations were set for systematic studies in all areas, including theology, with relative freedom of inquiry and apart from direct ecclesiastical supervision.

In biblical studies, a number of scholars emerged, most of them trained in Germany, such as E. Zolotas, N. Damalas, E. Antoniadis, V. Vellas, P. Bratsiotis, V. loannidis, and S. Agouridis, who collectively have produced substantial critical work within Orthodox theological parameters.⁵² The future growth of Orthodox biblical studies cannot occur apart from an overall assessment of their labors.⁵³ Orthodox biblical scholars in Greece and elsewhere are seeking to clarify the nature and role of critical biblical studies within the Orthodox Church in terms of three focal issues: a) the historical-critical method; b) the patristic exegetical tradition; and c) the liturgical dimension as a hermeneutical perspective.⁵⁴ Substantive progress in these areas and ecclesiastical support for academic research can provide hope for the next level of growth in Orthodox biblical studies in the spirit of a "Neopatristic synthesis" proposed long ago by Georges Florovsky.⁵⁵

Scientific biblical research, whether carried out within Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox circles carries a double burden. On the one hand, it has the task of objective study of the biblical writings in their own historical and communal settings in order to provide fresh access to the original intentions and voices of their authors as they perceived and expressed the word of God in all its cultural contingency and theological depth. In this regard, academic research has produced an astonishing array of tools and riches for biblical study. It has also demonstrated amazing success in clarifying innumerable literary, historical, and theological issues, including the crucial issue of the relationship of Scripture and tradition discussed earlier in this chapter. Balanced academic study of the Bible, no less than similar study of the classic Christian tradition, holds, in part, the promise of renewal for the churches and contemporary society in ways that transcend divisive differences through a positive and holistic understanding of creation, humanity, and life.

However, the serious shortcomings of the academic use of Scripture must be recognized as well. The spirit of modern biblical criticism and modern Western theology in general, although it does not necessarily have to be so, is derived neither from Scripture nor the classic Christian tradition, which are based on prayer and ecclesial life, but primarily from Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment philosophy. Biblical scholarship has often rendered itself irrelevant to the life of both Church and society by a gravitational pull toward historical, philological, and technical preoccupations. Worse, when lapsing into hypercriticism or falling captive to philosophical presuppositions, biblical criticism has tended to consume its own subject matter, the substance and value of Scripture, until there is virtually nothing left. In obvious accommodation to culture, the upshot has been the wide promotion of skepticism toward the very authority of Holy Scripture, a treatment of the Bible as a kind of cultural monument from which to glean supporting references for desirable goals and one-sided ideologies. J. Christiaan Beker, a mainline Protestant biblical scholar, critiques the prevailing biblical studies with these words:

In view of this state of affairs, it is no surprise that biblical critics have provoked charges of outright heresy and have caused deep alienation first among Protestants and then, to a lesser degree, among Catholics as well. Some prominent Protestant biblical scholars, notably Brevard S. Childs,⁵⁷ have labored hard to recover the sense of biblical authority so necessary to the vitality of the Church. Without rejecting the achievements of scholarship, and certainly without going back to a pre-critical stage, Childs has drawn attention to the canonical nature as well as the theological witness of Scripture. Most Roman Catholic biblical scholars have succeeded in conducting critical research while remaining faithful to their doctrinal tradition. The primary example is Raymond E. Brown who has written on the most sensitive subjects, including the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, and the Petrine authority.⁵⁸ Taking on literalists on the one hand and radicals on the other,⁵⁹ Brown has ably shown through his many works and commentaries that freedom of research is not compromised by faithfulness to classic Christian doctrine. He has defended critical studies and has carved out what he calls a "centrist position" on principle that historical critical methodology can be kept distinct from extraneous philosophical ideological assumptions.⁶⁰

In the case of Orthodox scholars, strong ecclesial and doctrinal anchors have largely spared the Orthodox from turmoil. In Orthodoxy, patristic and doctrinal interests hold sway, while the gradually increasing number of biblical scholars enjoy relative freedom to do their work. As they strive for the growth of biblical studies in their own tradition, Orthodox biblical scholars are still learning from their Western colleagues but they ought to be cautious about repeating their errors. They are wise to take cognizance as well of Evangelical scholarship with which they share considerable theological ground. Evangelical scholars present not only a sharpened critique of liberal biblical criticism,⁶¹ but also positive contributions in contemporary biblical research.⁶² In this manner, Orthodox biblical scholars may keep in perspective the wider world of the modern academic study of Scripture in order both to welcome its contributions as well as to guard against its shortcomings. The erudite legacy of the great Church fathers and the spirit of freedom within the Orthodox tradition provide hopeful foundations for the continued advancement of Orthodox biblical scholarship.

From this angle, as well, one should evaluate the intent of Canon 19 of the Quinisext Council "in Trullo" (691), which admonishes Church leaders to preach and teach God's scriptural word not according to their own minds but following the fixed interpretations of the fathers.¹⁹ A close reading of this canon clearly indicates its contextual concerns: 1) correct interpretation in controversial matters; 2) possible lack of exegetical experience or skill by Church preachers; and 3) risk of departure from Church doctrine. The canon by no means precludes creative work, given skilled interpreters who remain within the Church's doctrinal heritage. In the Greek tradition, later fathers and saints such as Symeon the New Theologian (d. 1022), Nicholas Kabasilas (fourteenth century), and Kosmas Aitolos (d. 1779), show no hesitation in reading and interpreting Scripture directly without constant reference to the Church's earlier fathers, yet they remain faithful to the doctrinal conscience of the Church.

In the case of St. Symeon, we note a distinctly creative and charismatic interpreter within the tradition. On the basis of his direct reading of Scripture, especially the Gospel of John and the Letters of Paul, as well as his own mystical experiences, Symeon literally shook up the religious establishment of Constantinople and was exiled on account of it.²⁰ Appealing to the evidence of the New Testament St. Symeon insisted that all Christians, most especially clerics and theologians exercising leadership and teaching functions, must have an apostolic experience of salvation, indeed an adult renewal experience based on a baptism of the Holy Spirit, in order properly to fulfill their responsibilities. While controversial in his own times, he is acknowledged as one of the greatest theologian saints in the Orthodox tradition.

Many studies have been written on the various approaches and methods of patristic interpretation, including grammatical exegesis, allegory, typology, and the concept of θεωρία (“spiritual insight” or “spiritual vision”).²¹ These methods and approaches must be seen in the light of their purposes and interrelationship in the total task of interpretation as an ecclesial ministry. Allegorical exegesis, practiced especially in Alexandria, sought a deeper spiritual meaning in the literal words of Scripture, usually in order to: 1) transcend difficulties in the biblical text; 2) provide a Christian interpretation of the Old Testament; or 3) offer a variety of edifying teachings within the framework of the doctrinal unity of the Church. Perhaps the most exaggerated example is the Epistle of Barnabas, a second century document possibly from Alexandria. For the unknown author of this work, the whole system of the Jewish ritual had no literal but only spiritual value. The command to fast from foods meant abstention from wickedness. Circumcision was intended as spiritual circumcision of the heart. Not to eat swine and other unclean animals and birds were prohibitions about not consorting with people who behaved in the manner of such creatures. The temple of true value was not the Jerusalem Temple but the temple of the heart alone.²² Such allegorizing developed in a far more sophisticated fashion in Clement of Alexandria and Origen who distinguished several levels of interpretation without necessarily denying the literal and historical meaning of the biblical text.²³ These and other later interpreters used allegorical exegesis not only to overcome difficulties in Scripture but also to celebrate the perceived mysteries of revelation and draw out their relevance for Christian nurture. The value of such interpretations, however fanciful at times, lies not in their accuracy as historical exegesis but in their usefulness for the edification of Christians within the doctrinal framework and the common life of the Church.

Typological exegesis differs in that it does not seek a timeless spiritual meaning but engages the historical perspective according to the biblical pattern of promise and fulfillment. Practiced especially in the Antiochene tradition, it is a theological and historical method of affirming the unity of the Old and New Testaments, and how events and figures of the former were fulfilled in the latter. For example, St. Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews writes that the ritual of the Mosaic Law was but a “shadow” (σκιά) of the future “realities” (πράγματα) to come in Christ (Heb 10:1). In typological exegesis, the Old Testament “shadow” or prefigurement of something or someone is called τύπος or “type”. Its fulfillment in an event or person of the New Testament is called άντιτυπον or “antitype,” meaning reality. Among the early fathers, Justin Martyr features massive typological interpretation of the Old Testament in both substantial and trivial matters. For example, the Passover lamb of the Exodus (Ex 12) is a type fulfilled by Christ through his death on the cross.²⁴ But the twelve bells of the high priests robe (Ex 39:25)? as well, are a type fulfilled by the same number of apostles. The inclusion of Gentiles into the Church through faith in Christ was anticipated by the prophets but, equally, through such subtle details as the mention of two animals in Gen 49:11 and Zech 9:9 (a female donkey and its colt), which were types fulfilled by Jewish and Gentile followers of Christ.²⁵

Typological exegesis confirmed the Old Testament as a Christian book, affirmed the unity of the Bible, and also served as an effective polemic against Marcion and his followers who rejected the Old Testament altogether. Typology is closer to Scriptures own historical schema of promise and fulfillment, and was widely practiced among the Church fathers. Prominent Old Testament figures such as Jacob, Moses, and Joshua were viewed as types fulfilled by Christ. Events such as the Exodus, the crossing of the Red Sea, Israel's wandering in the wilderness, and the entry into the Promised Land, were understood as types fulfilled by events in the ministry of Christ and the life of the early Church. The prayers and hymnology of Eastern Christianity are replete with typological figures and images derived from the patristic exegetical heritage. The value of typological exegesis is to be found in connection with the theological interpretation of the Old Testament on the basis of Christ and the gospel, an inescapable issue for the Christian evaluation and reception of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Several important qualifications must be made about the use of allegory and typology by the Church fathers. First, these methodologies were interpretive tools used by both Greek and Jewish authors in pre-Christian antiquity. We also have significant examples of them in the New Testament itself (Mt 2:15; 13:18ff; Jn 3:14-15; Heb 10:l).²⁶The apostle Paul employs the very terminology of "allegory" and "typ^e" ^m linking Old Testament persons and events to New Testament counterparts (Gal 4:22-27; 1 Cor 10:1-13; Rom 5:14). Such interpretations have apostolic origin and were not mere inventions of the Church fathers. Rather, the later Christian interpreters followed and elaborated useful lines of interpretation already set in the New Testament.

Second, sharp distinctions can be drawn neither between allegory and typology nor, for that matter, between the Alexandrian and Antiochene exegetical traditions. The differences are a matter of emphasis, at times extreme, but never mutually exclusive. Both approaches are fundamentally metaphorical and symbolic, and both seek to derive the maximum spiritual and theological value from Scripture as a Christian book for doctrinal interests and pastoral edification. In the hands of the best interpreters, neither approach was intended to abandon the literal and historical basis of Scripture; nor was the Church ever prepared to do so. An Alexandrian such as Origen, given to allegorizing, was also a philologist, while an Antiochene such as John Chrysostom, practicing mainly literal-grammatical interpretation, was also capable of both typological and at times allegorical interpretations.

Third, the developing tradition among the great exegetes moves toward literal-grammatical interpretations as shown by the works of both the Alexandrians, such as Athanasios and Cyril, as well as the Antiochenes, such as John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Theodoret of Kyros. This movement was quite likely due to the inevitable need for precision of discourse in doctrinal controversies.²⁷ A comprehensive view of patristic writings seems to indicate that doctrinal discourse reflects contextual and grammatical exegesis, while homiletical or pastoral discourse may freely indulge in allegorical and typological interpretations. St. Basil the Great, who is consistently attentive to the literal-grammatical meaning of biblical texts, is arguably the best example of sober biblical interpretation in both pastoral as well as doctrinal writings.²⁸

Fourth, whatever the specific methodological approaches used by the Church fathers, one must keep in view Panagopoulos' caveat that methodology was for them secondary to the substance of the scriptural witness. While the question of method could remain open, the more essential concern was how to do justice to God's saving activity as attested by Scripture, and how existentially to appropriate the soteriological value of the sacred writings.

It is clear, then, that the modern interpreter must look for the essential strength of the Church fathers which consists in their biblical theology and their hermeneutical perspective or φρόνημα (“spirit” or “mindset”). The definitive traits of this hermeneutical perspective may be summed up as: 1) a strong view of the authority of Scripture and the basic historicity of the saving events; 2) concentration on the theological and salvific message of the Bible ultimately centered on Christ; 3) interpretation based on contextual reading of the part in the light of the whole, seeking the σκοπός of the text; 4) philosophical sobriety about the capacity of philological analysis to control or define the mystery of God; 5) commitment to the doctrinal sense of the Church; 6) acknowledgment of biblical interpretation as a ministry of the Church; and 7) recognition of the interpreter's own personal stance of faith as essential to authentic interpretation.

The last of the above points has to do with the patristic understanding of θεωρία (literally, “vision of God”).²⁹ This technical term may be translated "spiritual insight," "spiritual vision," or "spiritual receptivity." It is not simply a concept but above all an experience. It does not only refer to fine discernment of the theological teachings of Scripture but also to the spiritual stance of the interpreter guided by the Holy Spirit. Broadly speaking, θεωρία pertains to the whole of Christian life and understanding transformed and inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is the crown of a life of repentance, forgiveness, cleansing from sin, purity of heart, prayer, and love. It may be described as a prayerful sense of awe and wonder in the presence of God, his creation, the great acts of salvation, the Bible, and all things. In the dynamic state of θεωρία, the beholder may be deeply stirred by a green leaf as much as by a brilliant star; by a simple act of human kindness as much as by a great truth in the biblical narrative.

In the reading of Scripture, θεωρία is experienced like a ray of light accompanying one s understanding of the text according to St. Isaac the Syrian,³⁰ or a sudden awareness of the Lords presence while pondering something in the Scriptures according to St. Ambrose.³¹ St. Symeon the New Theologian has written an entire discourse entitled On Spiritual Knowledge, an excellent example of the spiritual reading of Scripture.³² θεωρία is a gift of the Spirit which does not impede reason, but rather enriches it by infusing it with insight into what really matters in the Bible and by conveying to the reader the saving power of that which matters. It is a state of dynamic inspiration, a moment of illumination, an act of personal revelation in which the written word becomes the living word of God and its value is existentially actualized in the life of the interpreter by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

This patristic model of charismatic interpretation would be hopelessly romantic and superficial unless placed in the context of the struggles of self, Church, and history. The Church fathers knew of neither cheap grace nor cheap scholarship. The struggles to overcome personal sin through genuine repentance and to grow toward spiritual maturity in the likeness of Christ were ever before them. Far from viewing the Spirit's effects mechanically or magically, they acknowledged the arduous work behind biblical study, preaching, and teaching. For them, personal faith and prayer in no way canceled the careful use of reason. The Cappadocian fathers viewed reason as a gift of God, indeed as "the highest faculty" which marked the very image of God in human beings.³³ But they also recognized that, as Gregory of Nyssa puts it, "subtle dialectic possesses a force that may be turned both ways, as well for the overthrow of truth as for the detection of falsehood."³⁴ Faith, as well as love of God and love of God's people, could be relied on to guide reason toward constructive ends.

Moreover, moments of "inspiration" could also be caused by self-deception and demonic instigation. The authenticity of one's gift of interpretation must therefore be tested in the life of the Church. A willingness to consider other views and openness to change one's mind are required.³⁵ Above all, the interpreter must have genuine regard for the integrity of the Church's faith. The struggles of the Church itself, not infrequently caught up in theological and administrative controversies, provided no great comfort. Yet, hope burned invincible that in the end darkness would not overcome light. This assurance was grounded not in human capacities but in God s grace and faithfulness. The Lord himself had promised that he would always be with his people and that the gates of hell would not prevail against his Church, which is both responsible for and accountable to the gospel and its effective proclamation in the world (Mt 16:18; 28:20).

In modern times, the patristic hermeneutical vision was broken in two ways, through the Reformation and through the Enlightenment. The Reformation, as a protest movement against perceived abuses and distortions in the Western Christian tradition, established the foundational principle of "Scripture alone" (sola Scriptura) and thereby rejected in principle the interdependence between Bible and tradition. We now recognize, of course, that the Protestant "scriptural principle" is a polemical one, a corrective to the excesses of tradition, and does not stand of itself. Neither the Bible, nor faith, nor grace, nor Christ, ever "stand alone." Primacy yes; singularity no. The simple reason is the necessity of the receiving human subject, the necessity of interpretation, which inevitably cause the interpreter to carve out, consciously or unconsciously, his or her own tradition of interpretation.

The Reformers, on the one hand, by their rejection of the authority of the Church and, on the other hand, by their double, related emphasis on sola Scriptura and the right of individual interpretation, created a new tradition, in fact, eventually many interpretive traditions as the fragmentation of the Protestant movement proceeded. One can, of course, argue that the Western medieval Church had already distorted the interdependence of Scripture and tradition by heavily tilting the balance toward tradition, which stifled the voice of Scripture. If and when the beliefs or practices of the Church, whether Western or Eastern, become perceptibly removed from or inconsistent with Scripture's witness, then the principle of interdependence becomes unconvincing and meaningless in practice.

Eastern Orthodox theologians have mused whether the Reformation could have occurred in Eastern Christianity. From an Orthodox perspective, the hermeneutical position of the Reformation is attractive but imbalanced. On the one side, it is clear that Luther and Calvin marked a return to classic patristic hermeneutics.¹⁹ They recovered the authority and centrality of Scripture in the life of the Church. They stressed the central aim (σκοπός) and the unity of Scripture, which they located in Christ. They insisted on the primacy of reading Scripture contextually in the light of Scripture. They discerned an interplay between letter and spirit, between abstract theory and spiritual wisdom, given that the mystery of God must be approached with faith and prayer and cannot be resolved into a rational system. They acknowledged and developed the principle of accommodation, that is, that along with its inspired character, the Bible also reflects human limitations.

On the other side, the rejection of the final hermeneutical authority of the Church in matters of faith, expressed not through the papal magisterium but through representative councils voicing the doctrinal discernment of the whole Church, amounts to a hermeneutical crisis. The principle of sola Scriptura and the concomitant right of individual interpretation drive a wedge between the authority of Scripture and the unitive theological tradition of the Church, thus creating a hermeneutical impasse. The hermeneutical question in its peculiarly Protestant expression emerged as an intractable theological and ecclesial problem. The history of Protestantism amply shows that the various Protestant traditions established their own hermeneutical perspectives within which they read the Bible, but found no hermeneutical way to maintain unity in diversity. The Reformations rediscovery of Scripture is welcome but the "dogmatic" position on sola Scriptura is highly problematic. The "scriptural principle," without the balance of an "ecclesial principle," recoils upon itself and becomes self-defeating. It destroys any possibility of an integrative hermeneutic because, in the absence of a final hermeneutical authority, individual interpretation reigns supreme. The historical developments in Protestantism, including Protestant Orthodoxy, Puritanism, Spiritualism, Millenarianism, Pietism, as well as modern mainline confessions and fringe groupings give evidence of the hermeneutical diversity and confusion in Protestantism.

The patristic hermeneutical vision was broken in a second and even more radical way by the Enlightenment, through its impact on Protestant theological and biblical studies.²⁰ Specifically, the convergence of developing Enlightenment rationalism and historical criticism, both based on the scientific principle of analogy, raised the hermeneutical question in a different and most radical form. Previously, the hermeneutical problem centered on the question of ecclesial or individual discernment as final hermeneutical arbiter. Now the hermeneutical problem shifted to the question of revelation or reason as the final hermeneutical criterion. In the Enlightenment heritage, the presumptuousness of unbridled reason, against which Luther had emphatically warned, eventually led to a wholescale rejection of the revelatory authority of Scripture. Lessing debunked the central truths of Scripture because he was an enlightened "man of the eighteenth century" and perceived an ugly chasm or ditch between the revelatory claims of Scripture and the new thinking of intellectuals like himself. With the rise of science, the emergence of historical criticism imitating the scientific method, and the secularization of Western culture, gradual accommodation to Enlightenment thinking systematically undermined the authority of the Bible and caused among Protestants "the crisis of the Scripture principle."²¹

The hermeneutical impact of the Enlightenment on Protestantism had shattering repercussions. Deep fissures appeared among conservative and liberal Protestants and shades thereof, dependent on the degree of acceptance of or resistance to the new thinking. On the one hand, the Western religious heritage, through its rigid views of Scripture and its authoritarian control of society, fueled the new questioning of authority and the desire for emancipation. On the other hand, the biblical debate between conservatives and liberals was cast, according to Walter Brueggemann,²² in the Enlightenment categories of scientific accuracy or historical precision, which were alien to the Scriptures and, one might add, alien as well to the classic patristic tradition. Sharing implicitly the same presuppositions, one side excessively relativized while the other side excessively absolutized the authority of Scripture. As Protestantism traumatically reformed into fundamentalist, conservative or evangelical, and liberal camps, with differentiation among them, the implicit or explicit diversity of hermeneutics was accentuated.²³ The consequences can hardly be overestimated. They concern heavy charges of heresy against liberal Protestantism by Karl Barth and others.²⁴ They involve questions about the very vitality and future of Protestant Christianity in the modern and post-modern world.²⁵

One might have thought that liberal Protestants on the common basis of critical reason as a standard of truth could have worked out an integrative hermeneutic but, to no avail. On the contrary, it is within the liberal tradition of Protestantism, where the individualism of the Reformation was transformed into a wilder form of individualism through the Enlightenment stand on autonomous reason ("reason alone!") that one finds virtual hermeneutical disintegration.²⁶ Earlier, if the medieval Church had distorted the patristic interdependence of tradition and Scripture one way, the Reformation did so in the opposite way. Later, the Enlightenment proceeded to destroy the patristic interdependence of faith and reason. Thus, curiously, the 'tyranny of the church' ... [evolved] into the 'tyranny of the academy' over the voice of the Bible."²⁷ It is clear that once Lessing's ugly ditch between biblical and modern thought is posited in substantive terms, applied even to the very notion of revelation of a personal God, there is no rational way to bridge the chasm. There is an a priori denial of what is to be demonstrated. The Reformation rendered the hermeneutical problem intractable by its rejection of the ecclesial principle in favor of the scriptural one. The Enlightenment rendered it intractable by its rejection of the scriptural principle itself, that is to say, the very categories of revelation and faith as authoritative ways of knowing, in favor of autonomous reason as the criterion of all truth. In its hermeneutical impact, the Enlightenment, it should be noted, drives not only Protestant but also Roman Catholic scholars insofar as they consciously or unconsciously come under the sway of Enlightenment presuppositions.

Great hermeneutical thinkers in the liberal tradition such as Ε Schleiermacher, W. Dilthey, and R. Bultmann have labored mightily to bridge the alleged chasm between Scripture and modern thought, not content with the extreme rationalists to cast the Bible to the heap of ancient mythology. These herculean efforts, intellectually impressive and stimulating in themselves, have not yielded compelling and lasting results because they give away too much philosophical ground to the Enlightenment. Having surrendered the classic Christian view that the Bible provides sufficient and true knowledge about God and his purposes, they could not make up the difference by brilliant hermeneutical theories. Critiques of these theories and new proposals by H. Gadamer, P. Ricoeur, and D. Tracy redress the balance by underscoring the importance of a hermeneutical dialogue with the theological subject matter of Scripture.²⁸ However, following in the liberal tradition, these corrective proposals too seem to grant excessive weight to the so-called "distance," not only cultural but also theological, between the Bible and modern thought, which is presupposed as the primary hermeneutical problem. Unacceptable ambiguity is left about the truth of Scripture and normative hermeneutical access to it. These refined hermeneutical proposals are cogent as epistemological theories, that is, they explain the dynamics of the transference of meaning in human rational terms. However, they give insufficient attention to the revelatory authority of Scripture in its relationship to the Church, as well as the role of faith and the Holy Spirit as critical elements in receiving and actualizing the saving message of Scripture. Liberal scholars themselves have continued to question the whole enterprise of biblical criticism and its implicit or explicit hermeneutics.²⁹

In recent years, various related and unrelated hermeneutical perspectives have been pursued. One set of variant efforts is represented by the "new literary criticism," such as structural, narrative, and reader-oriented, following precedents in the study of literature.³⁰ Their purpose is to grant a kind of independence to the text of Scripture and to recover the meaning of Scripture as religious literature in the context of contemporary readers. Another set of efforts, represented by feminist and liberationist thinking, has been called "advocacy hermeneutics" because of its ideological grounding in contemporary political and socio-economic struggles.³¹ All these approaches endeavor in their own ways to bridge the presupposed distance between the Bible and modern readers, but apart from the Enlightenment concern for "scientific" verification of truth. However, they still operate on the basis of either the primacy of reason or contemporary ideological interests in order to glean whatever relevant meaning from the Bible may be found, given its enduring cultural authority as a literary classic or historical source of diverse values. For now, these new directions have added to the hermeneutical pluralism. Their merit has been more of a corrective rather than of a programmatic nature. While their lasting impact remains to be seen, they have not presented a compelling integrative perspective in hermeneutics. Like previous liberal Sisyphian efforts, they seem to be pushing up the mountain another version of Enlightenment epistemology, only to have the hermeneutical rock roll back down again.

Orthodox scholars have long recognized the importance of the hermeneutical question in its various dimensions-exegetical, theological, and ecumenical.³² Their literary output has primarily dealt with general aspects of the question as Orthodox thinkers have worked toward an explication of Orthodox hermeneutics. Virtually all have written from within the security of the tradition. For the Orthodox, the hermeneutical problem does not have the burning urgency it does for Western Christians because the Orthodox presuppose the problematics of neither the Reformation nor the Enlightenment. Of course, the influence of the Enlightenment heritage through science, education, technology, and secularism strongly affects all Christians, including the Orthodox everywhere. But Orthodox thinkers sense that they have theoretical and practical tools to countenance contemporary culture as long as they do not capitulate to the presuppositions and false dichotomies of Western problematics. They perceive that for them, the burning hermeneutical problem is not at the level of theoretical principles, which nevertheless need clarification, but at the level of life. Their catchword is όρθοπραξια, right practice, which embraces a wide vision of renewal according to authentic Orthodox ecclesial and theological principles (ορθοδοξία), including giving full voice to the witness of Scripture through sound scholarship.

Nevertheless, a vital Orthodox witness cannot occur apart from efforts to formulate an explicit hermeneutic in both general and specific terms. For the Orthodox, Georges Florovsky has established the broad framework of discussion by defining the ethos of the Orthodox Church in terms of "a neopatristic synthesis ... the task and aim of Orthodoxy theology today.³³ According to Florovsky, the "neopatristic synthesis" embraces inseparable theological and spiritual dimensions. One dimension is doctrinal which is anchored on the christological and trinitarian mysteries apprehended and celebrated as saving truth. The other dimension is spiritual, which is anchored on a recovery of "the mind of the Fathers," a discerning, creative vision rooted in faith and the new creation within the life of the Church, the body of Christ. The two dimensions are inseparable because the ultimate truth is not an abstract principle but a person, Christ. Theologizing must be done, in the words of St. Gregory the Theologian, “in the manner of the Apostles, and not in that of Aristotle (άλιευτικώς ουκ άριστοτελικώς).”³⁴ Florovsky wrote: “Apart from the life in Christ theology carries no conviction, and, if separated from the life of faith, theology may easily degenerate into empty dialectics, a vain πολυλογία (verbiage).”³⁵ Florovsky himself embodied this neopatristic vision in both his fidelity to the tradition and his scholarly pursuit of truth.

On biblical topics, Florovsky expounded dynamic views of Scripture, revelation, inspiration, tradition, and Church in a patristic key.³⁶ On the grand scale of theology, his contributions are classic. He underscores the authority of Scripture as revelation while he points out the authority of tradition as "hermeneutical principle." For him, tradition does not "add" something to Scripture but discerns and actualizes its true meaning. Tradition as living tradition functions as a hermeneutical principle not only through the normative rule of faith, that is, the transmission of inherited doctrines, but also through the actualization of the saving message of Scripture in catechesis, preaching, and the entire life of the worshiping

Church, "a continuous life of truth." He quotes with approval Ellen Flesseman-van-Leer:

However, Florovsky does not engage the hermeneutical question in its modern discussion and does not himself show how theologizing according to the mind of the Church fathers can creatively address new questions and arrive at renewed answers. He does not critically discuss questions such as the Enlightenment influence on modern theology or the nature of historical studies.³⁸ Much less does he take up specific questions such as the comparative role and validity of literal-grammatical, typological, and allegorical approaches to Scripture. What exactly is the authoritative role of Scripture on tradition and by what means is it applied? What is the relationship between the homiletical and critical interpretations of the Bible? What of the misinterpretations and misapplications of Scripture in the popular tradition of preaching? And how can we deal with contemporary issues, let us say, about gender and sexuality, in an authentic Orthodox way? Florovsky has left such challenges to others who are also grounded in the patristic principle of the positive relationship between Scripture and tradition, and who have tried to advance the hermeneutical discussion in greater detail. It is appropriate to review, under the light of these considerations, the hermeneutical efforts of several contemporary Orthodox scholars in Greece and the United States. Our purpose is positive, that is, to develop a structured position of Orthodox hermeneutics through constructive critique and interactive discussion, both of which are evidence of maturing scholarship.³⁹

Some twenty years ago, Panagiotis Andriopoulos, an instructor at the University of Athens, took a bold leap into modern hermeneutical thought with his voluminous and perceptive work entitled To Πρόβλημα τοϋ«Ίστορικοϋ Ιησού» εν τη Συγχρόνω Ερμηνευτική της Καινής Διαθήκης υπό το Φως της θεολογίας Κυρίλλου του Αλεξανδρείας [The Problem of the "Historical Jesus" in Contemporary New Testament Hermeneutical Thought in the Light of the Theology of Cyril of Alexandria].⁴ Given the traditional character of Greek theological studies, this was a rare and rather striking intellectual incursion into Bultmannian problematics. After a review of the hermeneutical thought of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, Andriopoulos took on the hermeneutics of Bultmann and his students in relationship to their discussion of the "new quest" of the historical Jesus. In parallel, he presented the christological thought of Cyril of Alexandria. Although incisive in his descriptive accounts of both, his comparative work was inadequate because he did not sufficiently engage the question of their disparate contexts and differing epistemological presuppositions. He ended perplexed about how the Bultmannians, given the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura, could have come up with such unacceptable christological conclusions.⁴¹ He did not seem to perceive that Bultmannian problematics were crucially determined by the Enlightenment heritage and the consequent "crisis" of the authority of Scripture in Protestantism. By assuming that "modern man" needed something like Bultmannian hermeneutics to countenance "genuine questions" of modernity, Andriopoulos did not discern the particular philosophical grounding, nor the passing value of Bultmannian thought as Western scholars had already done. Despite his impressive and laudable efforts to grapple with modern hermeneutical thinkers, his is an example of the difficulties of Orthodox attempts to engage highly defined issues in pluralistic Western theology without due attention to larger epistemological issues.

Savas Agouridis, a professor of biblical studies in Thessalonike and then Athens for many years, and a stimulating thinker among contemporary Greek intellectuals, has tackled the hermeneutical question from various angles in his numerous works.⁴² The centerpiece of his hermeneutical thought is a lengthy work entitled Ερμηνευτική των Ιερών Κειμένων [Hermeneutics of the Sacred Texts].⁴³ His achievement has been to raise the hermeneutical question in the light of contemporary life. He offers challenging and often eloquent explorations of the themes of Church and society, Scripture and tradition, revelation and history, patristic and modern biblical studies, theology and spirituality, liturgy and biblical scholarship, all with a passionate, prophetic tone.

Nevertheless, Professor Agouridis' hermeneutical achievement is ambiguous. Despite his many insightful observations, his work suggests an overall need for greater clarity and integration of thought. He accepts that the "agonizing" hermeneutical problem is caused by the "distance" between biblical and modern thought, but does not seem to recognize the extent to which this conceptualization of the question is due to negative aspects of the Enlightenment, which he rejects elsewhere in passing.⁴⁴ Because he is committed to historical scholarship, he rightly distinguishes between exegesis and interpretation, and highly values freedom of research; yet, he finds that the realm of worship expresses the essence of Scripture without indicating the epistemological relationship between liturgy and critical study.⁴⁵ He affirms that tradition is the bearer and guarantor of revealed truth, but neglects to discuss the interdependence of tradition and Scripture in view of Scripture s authority in and for tradition.⁴⁶ He holds that essential theological truth is disclosed at the experiential and communal rather than rational levels, but takes no account of the hermeneutical function of the rule of faith, the doctrinal sense of the Church, and does not seem to perceive that his own perception of the hermeneutical question is partly fed by a rationalistic perspective.⁴⁷ In substance, he contends that the decisive Orthodox answer to the hermeneutical problem lies in an ambiguous combination of the eschatological vision of the liturgy and the concept of universal history held by Pannenberg, but without attempting to bridge the epistemological gap between their respective hymnic and philosophical modalities of thought.⁴⁸ A haunting combination of grandness and frustration seem to mark Professor Agouridis' efforts. While he engages relevant broad themes, he does not specify the critical aspects and the crucial points of the hermeneutical problem. Clearer formulation of Orthodox hermeneutics must be sought through a more nuanced discussion of the various hermeneutical levels as well as the hermeneutical factors of faith and reason, Scripture and tradition, Church and modern culture in specific terms.

Father John Breck, an American Orthodox biblical scholar, has devoted several pieces to the hermeneutical discussion. The primary contributions are two articles published in 1976 and 1983 and his book The Power of the Word in the Worshiping Church, which appeared in 1986.⁴⁹ A subsequent lecture to a mixed Christian audience summarized his thought.⁵⁰ Father Breck's main purpose is to find an Orthodox way between fundamentalist and historicist approaches to Scripture. He, too, rightly distinguishes between exegetical and interpretive levels and perceives that the main hermeneutical problem lies at the interpretive level. For him, historical-critical methodology is in itself neutral. He thus grants full weight to rigorous scientific study for both discovering and contemporizing the message of Scripture, "the very ground of Orthodox faith and life."⁵¹ However, neither historical critical studies nor Western hermeneutical approaches have proven adequate to the task of conveying the power of God's word. The decisive hermeneutical answer, according to Professor Breck, is to be found in the patristic teaching of θεωρία, the act of receptivity or spiritual vision of God's saving presence and action testified by the biblical word and supremely actualized in the Church's worship.⁵²

Certain similar questions can be raised about Father Breck's hermeneutical thought as in the case of Agouridis. Father Breck, too, assumes an unqualified notion of the chasm between biblical and modern thought, and thus speaks of the need to render Scripture's message meaningfully to the "modern mind" and "a world of instinctive skepticism."⁵³ But it is not at all clear that "scientific study" as such can accomplish this task of contemporization, that is, to convey effectively the meaning and power of Scripture to modern readers. On the basis of what criteria and in what forms are we to seek relevance with modernity? Father Breck takes into account neither liberal Christianity's failure on account of its accommodation to modern culture nor the epistemological problems raised by the Enlightenment as widely discussed, for example, by Evangelical scholars.⁵⁴ His comparative paradigm of the hermeneutical bridge between Scripture and modern man — the sermon for Protestants, the papal magisterium for Roman Catholics, and the Holy Spirit for the Orthodox is far too general.⁵⁵ It passes over not only the hermeneutical pluralism among Protestants and Roman Catholics alike, but also the fact that all Christians value the Holy Spirit, the sermon, and forms of authoritative interpretation.⁵⁶ Professor Brecks main focus is on the patristic θεωρία, which is indeed a valuable but one-sided hermeneutical anchor. In his understanding of θεωρία while rejecting allegory, Professor Breck wholly justifies typology without critical reference to superficial typological interpretations in the tradition. He also rightly connects θεωρία with the liturgical dimension, which he discusses at length in his book. The difficulty is that θεωρία is essentially a spiritual vision, as Professor Breck himself ends up affirming, and not an exegetical method. As an all-embracing spiritual receptivity, θεωρία qualitatively effects ones approach to Scripture and everything else, but it cannot swallow up the discursive task of dealing with the "intellectual contours" of Christian truth in the phraseology of Florovsky. In his reading of the Church fathers, Professor Breck does not grant sufficient critical difference between θεωρία as an exegetical method and θεωρία as inspired perception, a distinction comparable to discursive and mystical theology or between theological reasoning and doxological expression. Certainly, Athanasios, Basil, and his brother Gregory, however much they worked within an all-embracing spiritual vision, also interpreted Scripture in reasoned contextual and grammatical terms, especially in their discursive debates with heretics. Although the two dimensions cannot be separated, they do involve distinguishable hermeneutical operations; one cannot cancel out the other.

Consequently, the technical term should not obscure the fact that, as spiritual vision, θεωρία is nothing other than the horizon of living faith — the faith commitment and spiritual openness — that apprehends the transforming saving power of the biblical word released by the Holy Spirit, whether through sermon, individual reading, or corporate celebration in worship.⁵⁷ All Christians, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestants affirm this truth. Despite the lack of liturgical richness among many Protestants, it is not true that the emphasis on the sermon, that is, the Bible and its exposition, renders "the Word" a "purely verbal phenomenon."⁵⁸ All traditional Christians hold to the teaching concerning the inner illumination by the Spirit. All nurture verbal and contemplative dimensions and should seek a right balance between the two. On the Orthodox side, "eucharistic fulfillment" without verbal explication of biblical truth can become distorted in ritualistic ways. Faith, prayer, attentiveness to the biblical word, whether read, heard or preached, as well as corporate worship and committed Christian living, all these make up the spiritually receptive realm in which the Holy Spirit transforms the biblical word into a living word for all Christians.

Let us fully grant that the Church fathers, following the biblical authors, elaborated diverse typological and allegorical interpretations from the perspective of an inspired "theoretic" vision. But from the same perspective, they also provided a mass of straightforward interpretations applied to faith and practice. The bulk of these, as in Chrysostom's homiletical commentaries, are given without one-sided reference either to θεωρία or the eucharistic vision, which may well be presupposed, but are not explicitly invoked or necessary for the understanding and application of biblical instruction. Moreover, in the milieu of hellenistic higher philological and philosophical education, the Cappadocian fathers inclined toward careful contextual and grammatical exegesis, especially in connection with the doctrinal controversies that put the question of syllogistic precision and coherence into the forefront.⁵⁹ Therefore, the perspective of θεωρία, whether explicit or implicit, yielded an abundance of literal-grammatical, typological, as well as allegorical interpretations among the Church fathers.

If both allegory and typology issue from a "theoretic" perspective, why then dismiss the former and take pains to justify the latter? Are they really so different as methods to validate the one and reject the other? Also, why neglect the numerous straightforward instructional and ethical interpretations, which are neither allegorical nor typological? Why not, for clarity's sake, distinguish the literal, allegorical, and typo* logical interpretations and call them by their right names as representing various methodological approaches, and leave θεωρία in its proper spiritual and mystical function of appropriating the transcendent, saving power of God s word, which is in itself weighty? If Antiochene θεωρία inclined to take the biblical text and history more seriously than did Alexandrian θεωρία, this fact alone neither transforms typological interpretation into historical-critical exegesis nor renders allegorical interpretation useless. Both allegory and typology go beyond the level of contextual-grammatical exegesis and must be appreciated at the hermeneutical level of their purpose and function. While both can lead to exaggerations, both also have their respective merits, but neither as historical-critical exegesis.

The hermeneutical conundrum in Father Brecks thesis may be clarified by distinguishing two epistemological dimensions at the interpretive level, one primarily discursive and critical, the other primarily contemplative and intuitive. In support of θεωρία as perception of divine truth inspired by the Holy Spirit, and in advocating “theoretic” exegesis as the ideal for interpreters today, Father Breck looks to the purpose and function of liturgy. He writes: "Just as the Jew participates in the Exodus at every Passover festival, so the Christian participates in the crucial moments of Christ's life and ministry,"⁶⁰ that is, in the Church's worship. However, worship is a realm of spiritual appropriation, not intellectual evaluation of the truth of a community's sacred traditions. By its very nature, worship is a contemplative interpretive level on which any religious community celebrates and perpetuates its sacred texts and the experience of God enshrined in them. It can yield Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish "theoretic" interpretations. Crucial as worship is for its own purpose and function, it cannot substitute for critical theology, that is, for the discursive approach to truth as abundantly evidenced by the doctrinal debates, which at the forefront were syllogistic rather than "theoretic appeals in the interpretation of biblical texts by fathers and heretics. Nor can one, as a way out of the conundrum, refer to patristic appeals to the authority of the liturgical tradition for the explication of doctrine because such explication occurred at the level of discursive theology.

Following the Church fathers, then, one can hardly endorse critical biblical study and anchor one's hermeneutic one-sidedly on spiritual perception, which anyone can claim. Of course, neither should one underestimate spiritual perception as a decisive mode of personal and corporate appropriation of the saving truth and power of Gods word. But such appropriation, if it is not to lapse into unacceptable subjectivism, must be closely related to and anchored on the "intellectual contours" of the biblical witness by some methodology involving concentrated syllogistic activity based on the patristic interdependence between faith and reason. Since all methods in principle seek to provide functional access to the conceptual meaning of biblical texts, no method as such can be either absolutized or eliminated, whether literal, allegorical, typological, or any of the contemporary scholarly methods, but each assessed on its own purpose and merits. The crucial question is not only one of spiritual receptivity but also of theological truth.

From this perspective, if one is not to yield to uncontrolled diversity and ecclesial disunity, the critical hermeneutical factors are what the Church fathers long ago discerned: the truth claims of Scripture which, when disputed, must be authoritatively interpreted according to the doctrinal consensus of the Church. Strangely, neither Professor Agouridis nor Professor Breck take up for critical discussion the doctrinal connection in hermeneutics.⁶¹ Yet, the Archimedian hermeneutical reference is precisely the quest for truth, normative theological truth, which functions both as the unitive framework and the ultimate measure of the various methods and diverse interpretations of Scripture. It is in this same quest for normative truth that the contemplative and the discursive, the mystical and the rational, faith and reason are critically inseparable when engaging the sharpest hermeneutical question of all. On what terms can tradition as living and creative tradition authentically encounter new circumstances and new knowledge? That is to say, by what criteria can we discern and define what is normative for faith and practice not merely in the distant past but also in the challenging and open-ended present as new issues arise?

The hermeneutical position of Father John Romanides, the final one to be reviewed here, in part answers the last questions. Such questions could be addressed if one could point to a living authority which would combine in itself the mystical and the discursive, the transcendent and the practical, and thus act as normative criterion and unfailing discernment of Christian truth in the ever changing present and unknown future. This is exactly the hermeneutical position of Father Romanides, who constructs an entire theological and biblical hermeneutic based on the model of the charismatic saint.⁶² The following paragraphs summarize his position.

For Professor Romanides, the saints par excellence were the prophets and the apostles, those who had direct experiences of God in a continuous and dynamic state of glorification, which is called by the Church fathers θεωρία or θέωσις by grace. According to Professor Romanides, the sublime revelatory experiences of the prophets and the apostles were beyond speculative concepts and images, granting to the beholders immediate knowledge of God and enabling them to guide others toward God infallibly through concept-bearing words and images appropriate to the level of understanding of their hearers. This tradition of the vision of God and participation in the divine glory is a living tradition in Eastern Christianity, continuing in a presumably limited number of known and unknown saints today — an ongoing Pentecost that constitutes the highest revelation and knowledge of God. An intriguing point by Father Romanides is that the true meaning of sola Scriptura is none other than θέωσις, deification by grace, summing up the unity and identity of the direct experience and knowledge of God among prophets, apostles, and saints. The same unitive experience is the “key to opening the Bible's secrets ... [without which] the Bible remains a hidden mystery even to biblical scholars,"⁶³ whether Orthodox or not. For Romanides, only the true saint ("saint alone?") — the one who has moved beyond the stage of purification and has reached the stages of illumination and perfection — can unerringly interpret biblical revelation at the level of words and concepts by virtue of enjoying the "same species of knowledge" as did the prophets and the apostles themselves.

Professor Romanides' hermeneutical proposal vigorously claims interdependent theoretical aspects and practical applications,⁶⁴ that is, it advocates a unity of the mystical and the practical. On the practical side, one can find today unnamed saints who have attained θεωρία, are wholly liberated from the enslavement of sin, the devil, and selfish love; and who, in God's glory and selfless love are infallible witnesses and instructors of the ways of God. They are theologians in the classic sense of the word-authoritative knowers and spokespersons of God not by speculative reason but by direct experience of God in the manner of the prophets and the apostles. Such persons and only such persons, who have been cleansed of their evil passions and have reached at least illumination and the discernment of spirits, if not actual θέωσις, can be true guides in biblical interpretation. All others are only “so-called theologians,” presumably impostors and perverters of truth in varying degrees. According to this “θεωρία — based theology,” learning and application go together. The student must attach himself to a teacher who has experienced illumination. The teacher, as spiritual father, can guide the student but cannot actualize in him θεωρία, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit alone. Nevertheless, all this means that

On the theoretical side, Father Romanides offers equally important observations. He raises the question of the critical presuppositions of theologizing as such. According to Father John, the Augustinian approach to Scripture and theology departed from the biblical and patristic experiential model and lost sight, as well, of the decisive distinction between Creator and creature. It assumed in platonic fashion the existence of eternal archetypes or uncreated universals, and thus presupposed a real similarity or analogy between the uncreated and created orders of being, as if both belonged to a single system of truth, which could be penetrated by the human intellect. In specific moments of inspiration, so Augustine taught, according to Professor Romanides, God infallibly conveyed what he wanted to the biblical authors in concept-bearing words and images that the authors themselves did not necessarily fully understand. In this Augustinian perspective, the Bible was identified with created forms of divine revelation. Revelation itself was erroneously identified with the very words of Scripture. Consequently, the human intellect, ever probing the world of immutable divine truths, could gradually gain higher knowledge of the eternal archetypes, including the mystery of the Holy Trinity — a knowledge that could be even superior to that of the prophets and the apostles themselves. This Augustinian epistemology, according to Professor Romanides, is the fatal substructure of all Western speculative thought, which necessarily cracked in modern centuries as philosophical nominalism and scientific study of the flux of all things "weakened the idea of unchanging and immutable truths so dear to western philosophical and theological systems." In these terms, one could also quite likely explain the general collapse in Western culture of belief in the existence of absolute truth, law, and moral norms as criteria of thought and conduct.⁶⁶

Here is how Professor Romanides sums up his hermeneutical position:

Professor Romanides' hermeneutical thought is incisive in both its biblical focus on the direct experience of God, which is the heart of biblical revelation, as well as in its philosophical sophistication, a radical liberation of thought from platonist epistemology. As regards the latter, to affirm that truth must be sought in personal and relational terms rather than abstract and eternal archetypes, is simultaneously relief from the anguish of a philosophical dead-end and, as well, the opening of new horizons in the search for lived truth. As regards the former, to lift up the significance of the immediate and direct experience of God is to engage the substance of Scriptures witness and, as well, the essence of the common human odyssey. For nothing is more profound and urgent than for each human being to gain personal intimations of the living God.

Indeed, the personal-experiential and the nominalist-philosophical perspectives are integrated in a most intriguing way by Professor Romanides, a way that simply rings true and gives his thought a powerful and attractive unity. It is certainly a worthy witness of the great Church fathers who, as philosophical sophisticates in their age, increasingly turned their back to Plato and deliberately followed the biblical way of knowing God. Not the least of Professor Romanides' merits is to remind modern scholars of the essential continuity and coherence of biblical and patristic theology. In his own efforts to exorcise the platonist ghost that always drives persons to relate more to abstract truths and absolutes values rather than the living God himself, he has clearly discerned what is the core of patristic thought, namely, the scriptural content and vision. The way of the fathers is the way of Scripture. One could add that faithfulness to Scripture was precisely the driving force that pushed back the horizons of platonism in the thought of ancient Christian thinkers, an interesting way of thinking about how "Moses overcame Plato," that is, how platonist ontology gave way to biblical personalism.⁶⁸

However, the hermeneutical proposal by Professor Romanides is burdened by one-sidedness in its own way because of certain unnecessarily extreme claims that detract from the value and persuasiveness of Father John’s thought. On the philosophical level, leaving aside the question of the interpretation of Augustine to experts in this area, a radical kind of nominalism must be tempered with the consideration that "concept-bearing words and images" carry a certain stability of meaning. While rejecting the idea of eternal universals and archetypes, one must still take account of the biblical and patristic view that there are in Scripture clear and abiding teachings about God and his ways accessible to all. One does not necessarily have to adopt platonist metaphysics about immutable truth to affirm that the Bible, at the communication level of words and images, contains abiding insights, principles, and truths concerning such things as God and idols, grace and free will, love and hate, honesty and lying, forgiveness and retaliation, justice and exploitation, giving and selfishness, hope and despair.

One does not have to read very far in the theological and practical writings of the Church fathers, such as Basil and Chrysostom, to see the massive authority they attached to the letter and plain meaning of Scripture as secure instruction about God and his will for all. These fathers relied heavily on the clarity and stability of meaning resident in the biblical text they derived by grammatical exegesis and assumed that any reader could follow without esoteric techniques. To claim that "the Bible is not inspired" as it stands is to fly into the face of the whole patristic tradition and undercut Scripture s plain witness to God's dealings with all people. To seem to claim that stable and secure meaning at the level of words and images cannot at all be gained by ordinary human understanding is to undercut at once human communication, scholarship, as well as the hope of meaningful dialogue and possible reconciliation between disputants, whether orthodox or heretical. We are not saying that the plain meaning of words and images available to all is everything but that it is an integral part of that same truth about God and of God, which all are invited to seek.

The central difficulty of Professor Romanides' proposal is the extreme convergence on the charismatic saint who seems to be raised above the Bible, above the Councils, and even above the Church. We do not question the rich and valued tradition of spiritual fathers in Eastern Christianity.⁶⁹ Nor do we question the foundational role of the key biblical figures and of the great saints in the total life of the people of God. What we do question is the exclusivity of the charismatic model, which seems to raise the saint to a theological super figure. One is tempted to compare the vagueness of the ideal saint of whom so much is required to the vagueness of the Protestant emphasis on the word of God to which similar superiority is attributed.

But who are these supreme saints who enjoy an exactly identical experience of God and can communicate unerringly between them and with others who are not blessed with θεωρία? After the experience of the transfiguration of Jesus, John and James were not above looking for special honors in the coming kingdom they apparently still awaited in earthly form (Mk 10:35ff). Despite their unarguable stature, the apostles Peter and Paul could have a striking difference on an important matter of ecclesial life, which compelled Paul to face up to Peter publicly (Gal 2:11-14).⁷⁰ The Book of Acts also reports "a sharp contention" between Paul and Barnabas over John Marks instability which caused their separation in missionary work (Acts 15:36-41). If such disputes occurred among the apostles, one would not be hard pressed to provide numerous examples from among the Church fathers themselves. In fact, most heretics could be described as charismatic figures.

What evidence does Professor Romanides provide for the above hermeneutical model? Three references from St. Gregory the Theologian about the impossibility of conceiving God and the necessity of spiritual cleansing when seeking knowledge of the sublime mystery of God.⁷¹ He also refers to the verb θεωρέω (“observe,” “perceive,” “behold,” etc.) used in the Gospel of John in connection with seeing and knowing Christ. Father Romanides takes the liberty of translating this verb as a noun (“may have θεωρία,” Jn 17:24) and thereby injecting in it the technical patristic meaning. But the noun is never used in the Gospel of John and only once in the entire New Testament and there with a different nuance (Lk 23:48), hardly sufficient scriptural evidence for a technical, heightened understanding of θεωρία. In fact, the Fourth Gospel offers an abundance of gnosiological terms (είδέναι, γιγνώσκειν, πιστεύειν, βλέπειν, όράν, θεωρεΐν, etc.), all of them applied indiscriminately to Christ's relations to all, believers and unbelievers.

With regard to Gregory, the intent of the first two cited orations is that, duly cleansed, "let us philosophize within our proper bounds"⁷² because "the divine nature cannot be apprehended by human reason."⁷³ Gregory is talking about proper use of reason fulfilled by faith.⁷⁴ His appeal to mystical knowledge is over against Arian and Eunomian rationalism, not the ordinary use of reason in gaining biblical knowledge about God, which is available to all. Gregory himself makes ample use of both reason and rhetoric gained from his classical Greek education, not least in his use of the Greek notion of θέωσις which, to be sure, he fills with biblical meaning. All this is by no means to deny that the experiential and mystical dimension is unimportant in either the Fourth Gospel or Gregory. On the contrary, we affirm its importance in both. However, it is to point out that neither the Fourth Gospel, nor Gregory, in their overall witness raise the charismatic believer or saint as the infallible criterion of the knowledge of God and about God above Scripture and above the Church. The total testimony of the Bible and the fathers does not support such an exclusive model as a hermeneutical criterion.

In biblical and theological hermeneutics, we cannot be satisfied with a proposal that seems to suggest that the authoritative charismatic figure is beyond critique, a position open to the charge of arbitrariness and subjectivism. The charismatic figure is important in the Judaeo-Christian tradition but cannot be separated from the people of God, the realm of the faith community whose corporate character is the prevailing point of reference. The apostolic advice is: "Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world (Jn 4:1)." Among the Church fathers, St. Symeon the New Theologian advocated, as perhaps no other Orthodox saint, the unerring wisdom and even sinlessness of the beholder of Christ's glory, and himself claimed to be such. Nevertheless, despite his strong statements about the spiritual blindness of all others, he invites his hearers, who had not yet beheld the glory of the risen Christ, to judge for themselves the truthfulness of his own words. For example, he writes: "This, in my opinion, is the truth of the matter, and such is God s counsel toward us ... You, on your part, must see and test that which we say."⁷⁵

Charismatic claims must be tested out by the communal tradition and the life of the Church as the final criterion. Experience of God belongs to the whole Church and not only to an elite group, which would smack of gnosticism. Personal mystical cognition has significance, especially for the beholders of the glory of God, but cannot exclusively either dominate or absorb access to knowledge of God available to all. For otherwise, not only would the faithful be deprived of their role of guardians of the faith but also the Church would be cut off from communication with the world to which it is charged to preach the gospel meaningfully. Rather, a hermeneutical model is needed that takes into account a greater balance between faith and reason, mystical cognition and scholarship, individual and faith community, Church and culture, according to the testimony of the Church fathers.

From the Orthodox side, John Panagopoulos is a strong advocate of holding together the exegetical and transformative dimensions of "the same biblical text" according to the model of the classic doctrine of Christ as "the one and same person" in two natures.⁴³ By means of a patristic hermeneutic, which he calls "christological, biblical, and ecclesial," Panagopoulos seeks to accommodate the pluralism of historical and literary methods and results under a unitive christological focus established exegetically from the New Testament and actualized in the life of the Church. For him, because Scripture is a historical document open to scholarly study through the accepted critical historico-philological standards, it cannot be absolutized as a self-sufficient holy book of eternal divine truths to be mined by theological reason. Rather, it is a record of revelation, that is, an interpretation of soteriological events and soteriological realities (τα πράγματα) to which Scripture bears written testimony and which are actualized in the community of believers, those who in faithful repentance receive the Spirit and constitute the body of Christ. Thus, primacy belongs not to the historical, biographical, ethical, or religious information derived from Scripture but instead to the soteriological mystery of Christ and his blessings, which can be known to the extent that the believer participates in that mystery “co-ascending” with Christ to the mount of the transfiguration. Neither is the Church master (κυρίαρχος) of Scripture, nor is Scripture the criterion judging the Church, according to false Western alternatives. Rather, Scripture and Church are identical in witness and function, manifesting the mystery of Christ. The Church is “the living Bible of Christ” (Χρίστου βίβλος έμψυχος)⁴⁴ because it is in its faith and practice — above all in its worship — that the fullness of Christ is actualized.

Panagopoulos formulates an ecclesial hermeneutic in idealistic terms. Would that the Orthodox Church in its visible life, that is, its institutional forms and the actual ways of its people, be the manifest fullness of the mystery of Christ! We Orthodox affirm that it is so and it should be so. But then, openly or subtly, we are challenged by the question: how are we to explain the reality of disputes in ecclesiastical politics and the obvious secular values among many Orthodox faithful, seemingly so distant from the spirit of Christ? Perhaps one answer is that the Church in practice has assumed, for many centuries, to be the master of Scripture and has not sufficiently allowed Scripture to be its primary guide, as the great Church fathers require for whom the authority of Scripture was direct and indisputable.

Did not Orthodox saints and fathers, from John Chrysostom to Symeon the New Theologian and Kosmas Aitolos, exercise a prophetic critique on the actual life of the Church on the basis of Scripture? Or, are we to assume that the visible Church and its countless written and oral traditions are not at all prone to error contrary to the implication of Florovsky s dictum that tradition has to do with truth rather than antiquity? Sorely missed in Panagopoulos' thought are hermeneutical elements on which to base a healthy critique of the Church in its actual life and practice. By virtually identifying Scripture and Church, and surrendering the dominance one-sidedly to the Church, the hermeneutic of Panagopoulos idealizes the Church and seems to silence the voice of Scripture. One wonders, then, on the one hand what happens to the patristic balance between Scripture and tradition, and, on the other hand, what is the purpose of biblical scholarship if not to keep the critical and prophetic voice of Scripture alive in the Church.

We agree with the fundamental thrust of Panagopoulos' hermeneutic but would insist that a greater balance between Scripture and tradition, as well as faith and reason, is a more accurate patristic hermeneutical position. The patristic concept of the “sufficiency” (αυτάρκεια)⁴⁵ of the Scriptures according to their revelatory authority and canonical status must be given more weight. While the Church is the final authority in the interpretation of its Scriptures, it is also supremely accountable to Scripture s inspired witness, a matter of utmost seriousness for the faith and practice of the Church. Among other things, this means holding to an integral connection between the cognitive meaning of the text at the exegetical level and its spiritual meaning and power at the transformative level in order to avoid subjectivism and arbitrariness.

In their many works, Athanasios, Basil, and Chrysostom for the most part derive their understanding of and teach the “soteriological realities” (τα πράγματα) from and through the biblical text, whether in matters of doctrine or daily living. They avoid the extremes of literalism and allegorism. They do not view Scripture as a deposit of platonic truths but they certainly derive clear and abiding teachings from it, which they fully expect God s people to obey. Moreover, these teachings pertain not only to doctrine but also to practical matters such as ownership and the use of property, leadership and the appropriate attitudes and conduct of shepherds as they tend to God's flock. It is somewhat paradoxical that, while recognizing that Athanasios marks a definitive departure from the platonic worldview as it influenced Alexandrian allegorism, Panagopoulos, in his overall hermeneutical thought, seems to incline toward an Origenist position by his excessive emphasis on the charismatic, mystical dimension of scriptural interpretation.⁴⁶

In this connection, Orthodox biblical scholars need to pay closer attention and do greater justice to the nuanced positions of their Roman Catholic and Protestant colleagues. In particular, many Evangelical scholars such as Donald G. Bloesch, Gordon D. Fee, and James I. Packer, appear to have the closest affinities to Orthodox scholars, at least pertaining to Scripture. These and other Evangelicals form a kind of "golden mean' between fundamentalism and liberal Protestantism, working out their own kind of "neo-patristic synthesis" within the diverse world of Protestantism. To be sure, such Evangelicals need to rethink the "ecclesial principle" as expressed by the Orthodox tradition, and some are doing so. However, pertaining to the "scripture principle," leaving aside sola Scriptura and "inerrancy" as slogans, these Evangelical scholars, in their affirmation of the authority of Scripture and their demand for the visible actualization of its evangelical content and spirit in the concrete life of the Church, appear to be even more "patristic" than many Orthodox who think of the patristic heritage as their own inheritance.

For example, J. I. Packer centers an incisive critique of modern hermeneutical theories precisely on the integral connection between the cognitive and personal dimensions of the biblical word.⁴⁷ For Packer "to set propositional and personal revelation in opposition to each other is ... to enmesh oneself in a patently false antithesis."⁴⁸ The extreme in the former case depersonalizes biblical revelation into a kind of conveyance of "information one finds in official memoranda or company reports" and renders "evangelical rationality in interpretation to look like a viciously self-reliant rationalism."⁴⁹ The extreme in the latter case is to lapse into subjectivism. According to Packer, the critical error in modern hermeneutics since Schleiermacher and all who are dependent on his philosophical surrender or truth to the scientific method — and who, one might add, tend to think only of their own hermeneutical positions as being "modern" — is the abandonment of the classic Christian idea that Scripture provides true cognitive knowledge and instruction from God and about God. Once divine revelation is understood essentially in terms of feeling, religious consciousness, or imaginative understanding, the flood gates open to all kinds of subjective religiosity and empty theological speculation.⁵⁰ The end is predictable: the debunking of all hermeneutical systems on the premise that the possibility of accurate transcultural communication between the ancient and modern world is virtually non-existent.⁵¹

For Packer, revelation is wholistic and personal, and thus "embodied not only in propositions ... but also in the attitudes, wishes, invitations, appeals, and reactions that they [God's spokesmen] expressed by the way they put things."⁵² Yet Packer, does not underestimate the cultural distance between modern and ancient people regarding such things as manners, attitudes, and assumptions. He takes note of H. J. Cadbury's warning of long ago about the peril of "modernizing" Jesus. However, according to Packer, skepticism about transcultural empathy and understanding is untenable unless one is prepared entirely to undercut the study of all religion, history, and literature. The deepest human experiences, such as love of a spouse, admiration for a hero, and knowledge of God are communicable across historical and cultural divides by empathetic understanding to those who are receptive. As much as Schleiermacher must be given his due, however, Gadamer s corrective is both appropriate and substantial. "Distancing" must precede "fusing" of cultural horizons in order both to understand Scripture on its own terms and to allow Scripture by its impact to extend or redraw our own horizons. Nevertheless, valuable as Gadamers hermeneutical reflections are, so Packer states, they do nothing to bridge "the theological Grand Canyon that yawns between the evangelical and the Schleiermacherian views of Scripture"⁵³ pertaining to true cognitive knowledge of God gained by sound exegetical work.

We agree with Packer's critique about transcultural communication but would add the following qualification. Packers critique applies chiefly at the level of historical understanding involving reason and empathetic imagination. This is a necessary and important part of human communication but secondary to the transformative appropriation of Scriptures saving message by the grace of the Holy Spirit, a truth with which we are sure Packer would agree. In the previous presentation of St. Symeon's views, it is extremely important to mark that Symeon was not talking merely about a cultural transference of the "religious understanding" or the "religious experience" of a particular biblical author in human terms, although he assumed that such understanding was generally possible in that the theologians of his time had indeed acquired sufficient informational knowledge of what the biblical authors experienced and taught. Rather, he was talking about the believer's own direct and personal experience of the risen Lord and his blessings in the present, actualized by initiative of the Holy Spirit, as the believer engaged the witness of Scripture and responded to the saving good news. Symeon's thesis was precisely that a theological expert could have correct conceptual knowledge by leaning on the "mere study of Scripture," but could woefully lack the experiential transformation granted by the Lord himself through the Spirit. He was astounded that churchmen and theologians could intellectually traffic in God's word but show no signs of the new life in Christ through living faith, genuine repentance, and prayerful obedience to the Lord.

Therefore, at the transformative level, the crucial hermeneutical point is not to relive the exact personal religious understanding or religious experience of Peter or Paul according to the hermeneutical ideal of Schleiermacher. Rather, the point is to open oneself to the Lord's active presence here and now as one encounters God's saving word and thus to be transformed by the Lord's living word in the context of one's own background, personal circumstances, and intimate understanding intellectually and emotionally. Packer himself affirms that the correct application of biblical knowledge is not a strictly rational process because the Holy Spirit, "the great hermeneut," leads and enlightens us in biblical study interpreting God's word in our minds and hearts.⁵⁴ The substantive continuity in the salvific experience between the biblical author and the contemporary believer is the Holy Spirit, whose nature and saving action cannot be essentially different in one age from another, but who acts contextually and intimately in the life of each believer. From the human side, the principle of transformational evaluation, one to which St. Symeon frequently appeals, is the Lord's: "You will know them by their fruits" (Mt 7:16). The Orthodox and Evangelicals would, of course, agree that an authentic contemporary experience of Christ, granted its peculiarly personal aspects, can neither be apart from the apostolic framework of scriptural truth nor yield different fruit than the fruit of the Spirit as attested by Scripture. Though distinguishable, the cognitive and transformative dimensions of God s word can never be disjoined.⁵⁵

Next to the primacy of the biblical text, the second controlling reference at the transformative level is the community of faith, the Church, which is charged to "test the spirits" (1 Jn 4:1). We have already underscored the decisive hermeneutical function of the community of faith at the interpretive level where the ecclesial community inescapably selects, assesses, and develops norms of faith and life on the basis of its interpreted reading of Scripture. The Church is a critical "hermeneutical agent" at both the interpretive and transformative levels. During the last generation, the convergence of ecumenical discussion on the ecclesiological issue, that is, the nature of the Church not only in theory but also in practice, has been both welcome and promising. After all the biblical scholarship of the twentieth century, scholars and theologians can no longer in good faith minimize either the historical or theological importance of the community of faith in the formation of Scripture from the oral proclamation of God's word to the canonization of the Christian Bible through tradition, including church officials and councils.

The same is equally true about the actualization of God s living word in the Church's concrete communal faith and life.⁵⁶ Indeed, the biblical text itself in countless places underscores that faith and life according to the biblical tradition is communal rather than individualistic.⁵⁷ The reality of the community, “the Church of God” (ή εκκλησία του θεού, 1 Cor 1:1; 1 Tim 3:15), is a constitutive part of God's good news of salvation in incarnational concreteness.⁵⁸ With a touch of humor, Orthodox Christians, having learned from Protestant biblical scholars, now ask their Protestant brothers and sisters, especially those who hold to the authority of the Bible, to go back and underline those biblical passages about the Church and its life that they have apparently missed.⁵⁹ However, apart from humor and beyond sloganeering on all sides, the biblical witness itself requires that committed followers of Christ discuss together biblical teachings concerning the Church as well as the gospel, canonical order as well as inner illumination, sacramental life as well as justification by faith. All this applies simultaneously at the exegetical level of Scripture s witness, at the interpretive level of the normative forms of teaching worked out in various faith traditions, as well as at the transformative level of the immediate encounter with God and his gracious presence in the life of the faith community.

At the transformative level, we meet not abstract ecclesiology, important as this is, but the actual life of the Church, its worship and practice, its leaders and faithful, women and men, with all their particularities of circumstances, values, attitudes, and conduct. We have a right according to the witness of Scripture to behold, without being superficially idealistic, tangible expressions of the new humanity in Christ in the total praxis of the Church from worship and prayer to administration and finances, from theological scholarship to pastoral care. Whatever the problems of the Christians at Corinth, the Apostle admonished them that they were God s temple in which God s Spirit dwelt (1 Cor 3:16), the sacramental body of Christ (1 Cor 10:16-17; 11:27-29; 12:12). In Romans, he expounds justification by faith (3:2Iff.) and renewal through baptism (Rom 6:3ff), demonstrated by the transformed personal and corporate existence of believers “who have come alive as from the dead” — ώσεί εκ νεκρών ζώντας (Rom 6:13; cf. Rom 12: 1ff)!

What are the visible expressions of the "new creation" in the contemporary Church? Without signs of the renewed humanity, humbleness, holiness, justice, unity, love, and care for the downtrodden, the Church's witness to the accomplished work of Christ is seriously undermined and appears hollow to believers and unbelievers alike. The entire praxis of the Church — liturgy, preaching, teaching, order, pastoral care, moral conduct, service, witness, and mission — cries out for "hermeneutical reflection." Exegetical hermeneutics is reflection on how to glean the authentic message of Scripture in all its nuances. Interpretive hermeneutics is reflection on how to arrive at the normative theological and moral aspects of the biblical witness. Transformative hermeneutics is reflection on how the saving message of Scripture and its normative aspects become living truth, God's living word, in the praxis of the Church. Although all three hermeneutics are necessary and integral to each other, the third is supremely important as the proof of the pudding. Whatever the exegetical methods, whatever the theological truths, and whatever the hermeneutical theories about communication and transference of knowledge, the actualization of God's saving work as attested by Scripture occurs at the level of actual life here and now as both clergy and lay pray, repent, think, and work, always looking for the Lord's personal presence and guidance in all things.

Transformative hermeneutics is critical in function as well as substance, seeking both spiritual discernment and existential access to new life. It calls the Church to be itself in, but not of, the world, a spiritual movement as well as a historical institution. It drives the Church to mission and service, which can be accomplished to the degree that the Church itself demonstrates unity in Christ and radiates the newness of the Spirit. The Church can try to hide from its own eyes but not from the eyes of the world, and certainly not from the eyes of God. The Church will inevitably have a hermeneutic of praxis; better to have a reflected and explicit hermeneutic, one that can be measured over against Scripture's witness. A dichotomy between praxis and their is inadmissible. Some gap between ideal and reality is part of the human condition in which we live eschatologically and see provisionally (1 Cor 13:12). But if the gap strains faith and truth, the community becomes a scandal to its own members and a spectacle to the world. The Lord speaks to his followers in each local church: "You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its ^taste, how can its saltiness be restored" (Mt 5:13)? Similar words °* the Lord may be found in the early chapters of the Book of Revelation, applicable corporately to local churches themselves.

Transformative hermeneutics becomes decisive also in dealing with doctrinal differences and new questions under the inspiration of the Paraclete, whose function is to lead the Church to new insights and new actions amidst the struggles and divisiveness within its own life and that of the world. We have already mentioned that the most challenging aspect of the hermeneutical problem is that, while normative forms of faith and practice are grounded in the tradition of the past, the living community itself affirms its identity and tradition anew by means of reinterpretation in the face of new challenges. The total hermeneutical process, just as life itself, remains open-ended until the coming of the Lord. For each faith community, the crux of the hermeneutical challenge lies in the present, as circumstances change and new questions arise.

Discussion of issues, whether old or new, is never foreclosed among God's people. Debate and controversy may be signs of growth and vitality, not always confusion and disruption. Besides, God sometimes tears down in order to build up. Living tradition is creative and necessitates newly defined positions on old and new questions — faith and doctrine, word and sacrament, gender and liberation, racism and social justice — as long as these positions are consistent with the witness of Scripture and the core theological tradition of the Church which, under divine inspiration, has set canonical boundaries to the biblical tradition itself. However, what is consistent or inconsistent is not only a matter for experts to decide in formal deliberations. It is, above all, a matter of spiritual discernment involving the whole Church, lay and clergy in their respective ministries, being equally responsible before God and unceasingly invoking the present guidance of his Spirit, who is the very source of new life and correct discernment.⁶⁰ But the Spirit neither works mechanically, nor imposes itself on leaders and people. The Spirit radiates the wisdom and glory of Christ where it finds receptive and obedient hearts. In this manner, the Spirit is the chief interpreter, prompting critical assessment of the Church's entire heritage and inspiring discernment toward renewed witness by the Church in its ongoing communal, ecumenical, and cultural context.

Transformative hermeneutics exposes this significant fact: the hermeneutical problem is ultimately a spiritual issue for the Church itself, a matter of its own ongoing health and renewal in Christ.⁶¹ Ecclesial renewal in the concrete sense has necessarily to do with living persons, each of us in particular, clergy and laity together, as we believe, repent, struggle against sin and the devil, grow in the new life in Christ, and seek to live in the kingdom of love. The tangible witness, criterion, and interpreter of transformative truth is the transformed Christian, not in splendid isolation, but in communion and mutual accountability with one's brothers and sisters, and in solidarity with the suffering world. The way to transcend our traditional differences and to converge in varying degrees of common witness in the third millenium is what Gordon D. Fee terms a "redemptive hermeneutic" based on "the gospel and the Spirit," a hermeneutic that calls us "to be simultaneously both affirming and critical of our tradition(s)," while holding to the common theological tradition of classic Christianity.⁶² However, according to Fee, this goal cannot be achieved without a mutual willingness to be open, to reexamine, and to understand our traditions more deeply in the light of how we perceive each other, and above all without the integrity and readiness to change as needed through the leading of the Holy Spirit.⁶³