Icon of the Apostle Paul

Orthodoxy takes a different approach to Holy Scriptures than Protestantism or Catholicism in the main. It approaches Scripture as both literal and symbolic, and also does not identify the Bible, as a book, with revelation. In popular parlance, it could be considered more mystical in its approach, not Scholastic, although it is at once theological, mystical, and empirical. In a similar way, the Orthodox sense of the Eucharist avoids Catholic and Protestant efforts to explain the mystery in a dichotomy of “real” and “symbolic.”

Father John Romanides, a prominent Greek Orthodox priest and writer-academic in the 20th century, offered thoughts on Orthodoxy and the Bible:

“The authority for Christian truth is not the written words of the Bible themselves, which cannot in themselves either express God or convey an adequate cocnept concerning God, but rather the individual Apostle, Prophet and Saint who is glorified in Christ and united in this experience of glory to all the friends of God of all ages.

“Thus the Bible, the writings of the Fathers, and the decisions of Councils, are not revelation, but about revelation. Revelation itself transcends words and concepts although it inspires those participating in divine glory to express accurately and unerringly what is inexpressible in words and concepts. Suffice it that under the guidance of the Saints, who know by experience, the faithful know or should know that God is not to be identified with Biblical words and concepts which point to Him albeit infallibly, when studied under the guidance of those having reached theosis [oneness with uncreated divine grace]. The faithful know very well that it is a heresy to believe that Biblical concepts expressed in words could be penetrated by the believing intellect for the acquiring of an intellectual comprehension of God, under the guidance of the Fathers. Biblical knowledge concerning God leads to supra-noetic, supra-intellectual, and supra-sentient knowledge of God, which is both contained in the Bible, but at the same time is above the expressions concerning God in the Bible.”

“For the Fathers authority is not only the Bible, but the Bible plus those glorified, to with the Prophets, Apostles, and Saints. The Bible as a book is not in itself either inspired or infallible. It becomes inspired and infallible within the communion of Saints who have the experience of divine glory described in, but not conveyed by, the Bible. To those outside of the living tradition of theoria the Bible is a Book which does not unlock its mysteries.

“I cannot see how one can avoid the conclusion that this is in perfect accord with the understanding of the scientific methods in use today.Every science has its own language, which can be understood only by those initiatived into the specialty in question, by those who are already specialists. How can one begin understanding what theoria means if he is not in touch with the living tradition of theoria? And the living tradition of theoria is not made up of books about theoria only, but of those who have theoria and therefore know both what these books are about and how to teach others to read them. The Bible is such a book, the writings of the Fathers are such books, and the decisions of the Councils belong also to this class of documents, since they are produced by the Fathers working collectively.”

[Emphasis and some punctuation added; citations below

Additional commentary:

Orthodox Christianity is experiential and empirical in terms of the lives of those holy saints who experience oneness with uncreated grace, and the potential for all in the Church to journey toward theosis through a synergy of grace and ascetic struggle. Ultimately, as Jesus Christ our Lord said, He is the way, the truth, and the life. We find ourselves by losing ourselves in Him, not by asserting ourselves in an abstract intelectual or conceptualizing way into Scripture as fallen mortals. The Orthodox sense of grace as uncreated, also called the uncreated energies or glory of God, and as the activity of the Holy Trinity as a whole, informs this Orthodox understanding of Scripture as well.

The words of the Word, the logoi of the Logos, articulate the uncreated energies of God in Creation as well as in Holy Scripture. This involves a sense of natural law in Orthodoxy as the love of God in the human heart, the action and reception of grace in the heart, rather than understanding and manipulating some matrix of abstract rationalistic laws. The latter has led to the attempted “deconstructing” of Scripture in the very Western traditions that wrongly identify it with revelation. The Orthodox reading of Scripture first and foremost is liturgical, not subject to efforts to probe Scripture “scentifically,” except in the empirical spiritual science of Orthodox praxis. Scripture is understood as formed in the mystical Body of Christ, the Church, including its canon, which for example in the case of the Old Testament differs slightly in order and number of books between Russian and Greek traditions, given that Holy Scriptures generally in Orthodoxy (whle involving canonically recognized books) have not been treated as a “Book” or Bible in quite the same way as in modern Western Bible culture– traditional Orthodox scripture books would be divided more into separate volumes, for example, and generally be iconographically adorned rather than leatherbound.

One way to think about the difference technological. As the printing press developed mass publication of the Bible, the actual volume became viewed as an object with a text that was revealed in and of itself. It could be studied and analyzed apart from the key elements in Orthodoxy of noetic prayer (involving the nous or “eye of the soul”), liturgics, and ascetic practice, all connected with the Holy Apostles, Prophets, and Elders of the living Church Tradition, relating the reader directly to the light of Pentecost, in effect. This abstraction of the text has continued now with electronic digital editions, so that now the text can be studied even more abstractly. In Orthodoxy, Scripture is inseparable from the Church, and requires study in the light of the uncreated energies of God in the living Tradition.

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The quotations above are from Fr. John Romanides, in Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos, Patristic and Scholarly Theology in Perspective: Based on the Spoken Teaching of Father John Romanides (Levadia: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 2023), quoted in The Orthodox Patristic Witness Concerning Catholicism: Testimony from the Lives and Writings of the Saints and Elders, Decisions of the Ecumenical Councils and Other Authoritative Sources, ed. The Uncut Mountain Press Team (Uncut Mountain Press, 2024), 767-768 (first two paragraphs), 774 (last two paragraphs).