Everybody needs a lens. The Bible is not self-interpreting. The proof that the Bible is not self-interpreting is that intelligent, pious men from all traditions come up with radically different ideas about what the Bible says.
Dr. Herman Middleton: I recently had the privilege of spending some time with Archpriest Lawrence Farley of St. Herman of Alaska Orthodox Church in Langley, British Columbia. Fr. Lawrence runs the blog No Other Foundation and has written many books especially on topics relating to Holy Scripture. WE had some great conversations, and he generously agreed to sit down for an interview. We're going to be releasing episodes from this interview over the next weeks and months. So please subscribe to get notified of when they are available.
HOW DOES THE ORTHODOX APPROACH TO SCRIPTURE DIFFER FROM THAT OF WESTERN CHRISTIANS?
By "Western Christians," I assume, probably, one means Protestant Evangelical Christians in particular. I am not sure that Roman Catholic contemporary approaches to Scripture differ as much from ours as theirs do, and most of the people that I talk to share my experience of being a former Protestant Evangelical Christian. So, when talking about Western Christians, those are the Western Christians that I'm kind of talking about.
In my own experience as a Protestant Evangelica converted to Christ in the Jesus Movement in 1970 or shortly thereafter, thousands of years ago, they had the idea that the Bible was kind of like a set of key instructions for assembly. You know? This is how you live. Assemble this, and do this. It's the modern version of what, in their former tradition, they would call "the regulative principle of worship." I got this from a dear friend of mine who is a member of the Free Church of Scotland. The regulative principle of worship says that the Bible gives you the instructions as to how to worship - and of course, other things as well, how to live, what to believe - but, in particular, in worship, if it doesn't say "do it," don't do it. What's not prescribed is proscribed. What's not, you know, what it tells you to do, do. If it doesn't tell you to do something, it's forbidden, which gives you a fairly stripped-down liturgical tradition, as you might imagine. You sing Psalms, you pray, you preach, and. . . Don't kiss anything, essentially, no Gospels or icons or things like this. But even even if it's not quite so rigorously and systematically thought out, in Evangelical tradition, they still have the understanding that the Bible tells you all that you need to know. And, of course, by "The Bible," they have taken the Bible out of its original, historical, ecclesiastical context, and it's the book.
I remember there was an Evangelical Charismatic Pentecostal by the name of Winkie Pratney (his actual name, I think. Well, it's hard to imagine that his mother actually named him Winkie, but at any rate . . .). Winkie Pratney was an inspired youth pastor, and he said, "When God came to save us, He gave us His Son, and He gave us His book." I though, "Interesting." It was almost like you had two Incarnations, Christ and His twin, possibly. He wouldn't have said that, but that was the idea. The Scripture was decontextualized, taken out of it's original ecclesial context, and now, it's the Book. So, it's almost a two-pronged revelation: Christ and the Scriptures with the Church nowhere in sight.
The normal Evangelical Protestant, Western way of reading the Scriptures is [that] you kind of read the Scriptures as if it, more or less, fell from Heaven a little bit, and it's authoritative because it's inspired. They don't ask too much about what that means, but you get the impression that the authors who wrote it - it was inspired because, when they wrote it, the inspiration switch was on. St. Paul's just kind of walking around, being St. Paul, and then *click* turn on the inspiration switch and write Romans, and then *click* turn it off and just go back to being a fallible St. Paul.
So, again, taken out of its original historical context.
This means that it is taken out of the flow of history and that using history, using the Fathers, using, for example, the Apostolic Fathers as the prism with which to view the Scriptures is just simply gone. It's gone from that context.
When we're talking to a Plymouth Brethren person about the Eucharist, what does the Bible say? Both agree that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God, and what the Bible says, Christians believe, but what does it mean? Since it's not self-interpreting, you gotta interpret it. Our lens would be the consensus of the Fathers because we are putting the Bible back into its ecclesial context. The Bible is read by the Church, was written by the Church, and the Church worship and life forms the context out of which you read the thing. So, I would say that the Scriptures talk about the Eucharist as the Body and Blood of Christ. It is the real Body and Blood of Christ, not just some symbol, but the real Body and Blood of Christ, not through molecular transformation, but spiritually - which is to say, in reality! - it is the real Body and Blood of Christ. As confirmation of this, I was appealing to the words of St. Ignatius of Antioch, bishop of Antioch who was martyred in about 107 or so, therefore his ministry was in the later part of the 1st Century, and I was saying that St. Ignatius talked about the Eucharist as the Flesh of Christ, the Body of Christ, which was conceived by the Virgin and crucified and glorified.
His response was that St. Ignatius's epistles aren't in the Bible. Again, he'd been radically decontextualized. So he could just simply be dismissed, and put out of the room, and the door locked behind St. Ignatius, and then you just go on with interpreting the Bible however you liked more or less like John Darby and the Plymouth Brethren and things like that.
But my point wasn't that St. Ignatius's epistles were in the Bible; my point is that St. Ignatius's epistles were written in the flow of history in which the Bible was written. So, St. Ignatius would've gotten this doctrine from somewhere. The apostles went throughout the world teaching the Church things about Christ, things about salvation, things about righteousness, things about sin, things about the Eucharist, how to do the Eucharist, what it meant, how often you did it. And this teaching would be received by the Church and reflected in the ministry of St. Ignatius. I mean, he didn't make this idea up by himself or dream it up from reading the Bible after [unclear] coffee or something like this. He got this idea from somewhere, namely, from the apostles as part of the apostolic tradition, as the Orthodox would say.
The apostles not only gave this tradition orally, which is where St. Ignatius got it, but they also wrote stuff like 1 Corinthians so that there is a harmony between what the apostles wrote and what the apostles taught orally, which was preserved in the churches so that the Church's oral tradition, which is enshrined in its liturgy and in the writings of the Fathers and stuff like this, has to be consistent with what they wrote because the apostles had both wrote and taught so that the stuff that stuff that the fathers got from the apostles, especially early (and you can't get too much earlier than St. Ignatius of Antioch, whose life was contemporaneous with the last of the apostles). . . He would've got this idea from them. So that becomes the lens through which you need the Scriptures. To put the Scriptures back into their ecclesial context means that the Church received the Scriptures in the same way it received the oral teachings of the apostles, and we can receive what that oral teaching was because Ignatius said it, and Clement of Rome, and all of the other early apostolic fathers taught the same thing so that their consensus becomes the lens through which you read the Scriptures.
Everybody has a lens through which you read the Scriptures. It can be the Augsburg Confession. It can be the Westminster Confession. It can be the 39 Articles for a smaller lens. It can be Thomas Aquinas. Whatever. It can be, you know, what your latest Pentecostal televangelist says, but everybody's got a lens to interpret the Scriptures because the Scriptures isn't one book. The Scripture is a library. So, I mean, what's the message of the Bible? That's like saying, "What's the message of the Library?" I mean, you need some sort of a lens to make coherent sense out of the library.
So everybody needs a lens. The Bible is not self-interpreting. The proof that the Bible is not self-interpreting is that intelligent, pious men from all traditions come up with radically different ideas about what the Bible says. You have thousands and thousands of Protestant denominations. You have the Orthodox interpretation. You have the Catholic interpretation. And it's not the case that all the stupid people are in this church and all the smart people are in that church. So you should choose the church with smart people in it. No! You've got smart, pious, good people throughout all the traditions who are disagreeing. So the fact that all these people, who are equally smart and pious, disagree proves that what they're interpreting is not self-interpreting. That's why you've got all these different interpretations.
So everybody needs a lense. And the Orthodox say that the lens is the apostolic tradition, is the consensus patrum, is the consensus of the Fathers. There's a Scottish University of the Fathers. They disagree about lots of stuff which makes their broad and impressive agreement that they had, the consensus, that's all the more impressive and significant. It's ecclesiastically significant, and it's, I would suggest, exegetically significant as well. That becomes the lens through which we can read the Scriptures so that, when St. Paul talks about the Eucharist and says, "the bread which we break, is it not a κοινωνία" - a sharing and participation in the body of Christ - "this cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a κοινωνία" - a sharing an participation on the blood of Christ? What does that mean? When you have all of the Fathers from various climates say, "It means that the Eucharist IS the blood of Christ, not merely symbolic or emblematic, but it is the blood of Christ," you know that they have the real stuff. That's what St. Paul means. That's the lens through which we experience it.
So I would suggest that that would be the main difference between the Evangelical reading of the Scriptures and the Orthodox reading of it. In Evangelicalism, there is no consistent unified lens. They have accepted the idea that the Bible is self-interpreting and that any clear-thinking individual can just open the Bible and understand it. So they say we don't need a lens, and so each man becomes his own lens. You don't need a pope to tell you what it means. Each man is, effectively, his own pope, if I may say it like that. That's why you have this, I would suggest, confessional chaos in Protestantism - all different denominations, each coming up with different interpretations because there is no standard authority. The Roman Catholic Church would have the magisterium as the authority to tell you what the faith is and what the Scriptures mean. The Orthodox have the apostolic tradition, the consensus of the Fathers. But that's the main difference. We have an ecclesial lens for reading the Scriptures, and everybody else in Evangelical Protestantism has an individualistic lens; each man does what is right in his own eyes, to coin a phrase. I would suggest that would probably be the main difference.
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