Orthodox Christianity Vol II, Chp 6: God in the Old Testament

Our forefathers in the Old Testament sought to see God’s face and know His name; it is essentially a personal, not an abstract seeking of God. It’s not a philosophical system that the mind constructs in order to ascend to God. When Moses asked to see God’s glory and he saw His “back,” he experienced a revelation of God’s name, YHWH, in His glory. The holy name of YHWH, however, was never an answer to the question that Jacob had asked after he wrestled with God, which he himself named “Penuel” (face of God), nor was it a direct answer to Moses’ question after he saw the burning bush and asked for God’s name. Names were important for the people in the Old Testament because it revealed the essential characteristic of a person so that a bond could be created, such as making covenants and prayers. God comes to us personally in different actions and experiences at our human level through names. For example, the Lover of Mankind, the Merciful, the Savior, the Lord of Hosts. Even so, our words fail to label exactly who God is by name. We cannot classify God into our categories, and our eyes are not entirely capable of seeing God directly. We can experience God’s presence in many ways on earth. In the Old Testament, this mystical presence of God was often called the kabod of God (the glory of God) or Shekhina in Hebrew. This glory was shown as the burning bush, the whispering wind, the pillar of clouds in the desert, a thundering storm, the fire of the holy mountain, and the tabernacle’s mercy seat of God. Solomon’s temple was, in fact, built around the worship of God’s name, YHWH. Much of Orthodox liturgical worship is built around a person’s name too. We hymn that God’s presence has come to dwell in the Most Holy Theotokos and Virgin Mary, and now we are the temples of God and the tabernacles where He dwells. In this way, the names of God begin to stand in for His glory and mysterious appearances to mankind, which deserve our utmost reverence. The divine names all foreshadow the ultimate appearance, Jesus Christ Himself, the Word Incarnate. On a more profound theme, the Old Testament examples of seeking God’s name, face, and presence shows us that humanity has forgotten God; but, the Lover of Mankind, has not forgotten our names and our world. The Holy Trinity spoke even to Moses in the burning bush as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” This passage recalls that God is not of the dead, but that He fills all things with His living presence. In addition, it recalls that Moses was also still living and not forgotten when he appeared at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. 

Orthodox Christianity Vol II, Chp 5: The Revelation of a Personal God. Theology and Knowledge of God

In the summer of 2020, English Catholics renewed their devotion to the Theotokos, whom they call “Our Lady” at a shrine in Walsingham. That feudal term harkens to the Middle Ages when English Christians believed that England was “Mary’s Dowry.” That personal language and relationship is what helps us to keep close to each other and it deepens our knowledge of God and our faith. Marriage can be treated as simply a business contract, a wise economical choice for the common good of the family, or the fulfillment of our own personal desires. Friendships can be sought after on Facebook or other media outlets. These aren’t very personal revelations. But Orthodox theology preaches a personal God, who gave us not an organization or earthly kingdom, but a personal place to worship the Holy Trinity called His Church. Likewise, when we pray to God for the deliverance of our most personal problems, we call the Most Holy Virgin Mary in the Akathist “Our Lady of the Inexhaustible Cup.” 

 The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have different degrees of divine personalness, while the most impersonal of beliefs could be considered atheism and agnosticism, which became increasingly popular even among the learned Greeks and Roman. Metropolitan Hilarion starts with Abraham because of the personal nature of his experience with God and the content of prophecies and promises that were given to him, which were traced genealogically to Jesus Christ Himself. Orthodox Christianity has always held the seemingly paradoxical belief that God became man in Jesus Christ. That was a cornerstone kerygma that caused philosophical and religious bewilderment among Jews, Greeks and Muslims. In the scholastic tradition of the west, Thomas Aquinas exemplifies the approach of tending to resolve and answer all difficult theological questions and paradoxes through logical proofs and argumentation in the style of Socratic dialogues or Aristotle’s dialectics. Scholasticism was also a method for proving God's existence to Muslims and pagans. Western theologians became aware of apophatic (via negativa) and cataphatic theology. Orthodoxy, however, teaches that the faith, like that of Abraham and of our own, is of a kind “exceeding both thought and reason,” says St. Maximus the Confessor. Existential poet and writer, Søren Kierkegaard argues similarly that as Abraham had so much faith that he could suspend the ethical dilemma of sacrificing his only son, Isaac. Christians too who have much faith let the rational tensions and thoughts of the mind dangle in front of God. If Abraham had deliberated too much, it wouldn’t have made sense for him to make an act of faith. Orthodox Christians, therefore, are called to enter the mystical realm of prayer and listen to God ex silentio so that we might experience the Holy Trinity by faith just as our spiritual forefathers have done for millennia. Prayer that waits in faith for God to reveal Himself is one approach. Rational inquiry that seeks to unravel the mysteries is another approach. 

Orthodox Christianity Vol II, Chp 4: The Contents and Authority of Tradition. The Legacy of the Holy Fathers

Texts do not impart understanding or enlightenment in themselves, automatically, to people who read them. We aren’t required to live in a different history to understand them. But they are central in the liturgical tradition of the Church, and they are “dogmatic” and authoritative. Christ Jesus imparted the traditions and founded both worship in the Church, which we receive as the liturgy, and the Church itself. Elder Joseph (Francis), for example, searched for eldership, since he realized that becoming a monk and living on Mt. Athos wasn’t enough. He needed some person to teach him the ways of noetic prayer. Jesus Christ did not come to revise texts or sift through translations of manuscripts, although he did preach and read from the Hebrew Scriptures, especially concerning the prophecies made about him and the people of Israel. Prophets experienced God first and wrote down the visions later, and prophecy never ended with the New Testament. It was even a “gift” to be used for building up the Church. 

Metropolitan Hilarion makes several other important points. First, people, or more specifically a genealogy, has authority, not simply texts alone. The holy Fathers of the Church are linked to the holy apostles. Second, this apostolic and patristic tradition in Orthodoxy does not focus on “preservation” but on a living witness of the Gospel that continues to produce holy Fathers. There were no golden ages that ceased. The Holy Spirit works through the Church in all ages, which is a cosmic and whole view of the world. Third, the holy Fathers wrote down theological opinions called in Greek theologoumena that are not dogmatic.  Lastly, the writings of modern Orthodox theologians as well as the “Confessions” that appeared in the 17th c. in response to Catholics and Protestants must be checked against the patristic tradition of the Church. 

 The Gospel never simply stood alone as a text, though texts were written down most importantly by the apostles and continued in the writings of the holy Fathers, as they received it. The apostles received Jesus Christ. The content of the Bible is as much important as the form. This “legacy” means that the tradition and teachings of the church fathers is the continuation of the apostolic church. They are teaching the same Gospel. Just as the apostles received Jesus Christ, so too the fathers of the church receive the contents and authority of tradition. The liturgy is authoritative because it is the worship founded by Jesus Christ. Texts, then, “become authoritative” because the written words are a part of worship. It is the texts that conform to the Gospel and tradition, not vice versa. The genealogy that runs from the laity, clergy, monastics to the holy Fathers to the Apostles to Jesus Christ forms authority. Texts can be added by the Church as long as they conform to the Gospel and tradition of Orthodoxy, whether eastern or western in perspective. The true author, a Latin word etymologically related to authority and action, of the Gospel and traditions of the Church is Christ Jesus. Genuine authority, then, is identified with a people who follow Christ Jesus’ Gospel; He can even speak through dreams, visions, worship, poetry, animals, fathers, mothers, children, and elders. Texts, as well as sacred objects in the liturgy, become sacred when they are used in liturgical worship and when they help Christians to live the contents of Holy Scripture. 

Orthodox Christianity Vol II, Chp 3: The Contents of the Bible and Biblical Criticism

The previous chapters have laid the groundwork for understanding the details of Orthodox Christian doctrines in scripture and tradition. Christ Jesus founded the Church and the Church proclaims the Gospel publicly and within its liturgy. We find that Orthodox teaching is of divine origin. These teachings can only be interpreted and understood within the context of Orthodox Church. The Holy Spirit guides us in the Church to know and teach the spiritual meaning and application of scripture and tradition, which have different levels of meaning established by the holy fathers of the Church (literal, allegorical, anagogical). All of this is based on the experience of God and it is given according to the degree that we ascend closer to God and not based on speculation or a purely literary framework like classical literature. Important prophetic elements are a part of the written and unwritten traditions of the Church. The order and the content of the Bible with a canonical status already distinguishes Orthodoxy, Catholics, and Protestants in their worship and in teachings; however, all three groups have no major differences in terms of the New Testament Scripture tradition, although the Revelations of John is a controversial book that distinguishes Protestant doctrines from the interpretations of Roman Catholics and Orthodox Church.

 In 90 A.D., the Sanhedrin established the Jewish canon in Jamnia, Galilee. For Orthodox Christianity, the primary criterion that determines the canonicity of the Bible’s contents is the books that are incorporated into liturgical worship. For Protestants, some may vary between ancient manuscript traditions and Masoretic text or for others a form of biblical criticism or scholarship. For Catholics, it is the apostolic tradition and what has been approved for instructing the faithful such as catechesis, homily, and pastoral preaching (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2nd ed., Article 3, Libreria Editrice Vaticana).

Orthodox Christianity Vol II, Chp 2: The Holy Scripture in the Orthodox Church

We experience the Holy Scriptures as the “living breath” through the Holy Spirit. Written accounts came after personal encounters with the living God over the course of thousands of years. As the Word became flesh, so the Holy Spirit gives life to the letter of the word and the written accounts of experiencing God. In a similar way, the letter of the Law, that once guarded Jewish tradition, was made alive through the Word that became flesh, the Incarnate Jesus Christ who gives all meaning to the Holy Scriptures. The connection between the letter and Spirit, the Law and the Messiah, the whole New Testament and Jesus Christ is like the inner and outer workings between our flesh and spirit. For us, both are born at once. But the spirit is eternal, and the flesh decays. We could even venture to say that, as Orthodox Christians, the body is in the spirit, rather than the spirit being in the body, as Jean-Claude Larchet describes that interrelationship in the patristic tradition. Likewise, the written word doesn’t necessarily limit the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures. The spirit expresses itself through the word. Christ is the cornerstone of interpretation and “liturgical worship,” and the Gospels are even used as a representation of Christ Himself in the healing rites of the Church, for instance. 

 The historical, philological, and textual criticism approach may add some useful bits of information to the cultural context of Holy Scriptures, but those disciplines ultimately lack the Church’s spiritual interpretation that is required for knowing what it means. To take a purely historical analysis of Scripture to arrive at spiritual meaning would fall short of the truth because the Church not only has continued the traditions and teachings of Christ, but the Church has the Holy Spirit as her guide. Whereas former methods attempt to eliminate, crystalize and organize complexity from the bottom up, the latter approach, in the Church’s experience, calls on the Holy Spirit to illuminate, enlighten and enliven not only our intellectual understanding of scriptural truths but to clarify how we should live and act in a chaotic and complicated world below. 

Three major approaches to understanding Holy Scripture developed early on by the church fathers: the literal application, allegorical, anagogical method. These interpretive methods require that the Scriptures contain the mysteries, that the prophecies about Jesus are true, and that the Holy Spirit by grace leads us toward salvation, when we deepen our understanding through reading the Scriptures. So, all three methods are in a sense literary, requiring the reading or hearing of these books and letters, and are applicable to our lives directly. 

Orthodox Christianity Vol II, Chp 1: Scripture and Tradition

In today’s written and high-tech culture, our experience of Holy Scripture and Tradition, both of divine origin, can differ from the experience of previous generations of Christians. Before the advent of new forms of media, Christianity passed on the physical form of the Scriptures by manuscript (writing books by hand) and Christians were attuned to the Scripture through the hearing of the word, either in the liturgy or whenever books or letters were read aloud to others as it was the norm in antiquity, and even read aloud to oneself. Before the widespread tradition of manuscripts, oral tradition was the main vehicle for the apostles and the first Christians until the writing of the Gospels was taken up. Memory and the hearing of the words of Christ were normative for a long time before portable, personal Bibles were widely available. By the creation of that gap between a modern, technological culture and an oral and manuscript culture, where writing and listening were very important skills, this false opposition between Scripture and Tradition is brought up by Metropolitan Hilarion in this chapter. 

From what St. Basil the Great says, teachings were preached out loud to all, called a kerygma, or were kept by Christians in the “household of faith,” called dogmata, both originating within the Church. Another essential aspect of Scripture and Tradition is the prophetic connection between the Old Testament and the Gospels. This “typological” interpretation, also known as foreshadowing or predicting events, is how a reader can make sense of the Old Testament, which sees the events of the New Testament as fulfilling prophecies made a long time ago. That may be a hindrance to some readers today because it requires a belief in miracles, and not only eye-witness accounts of Jesus and the biblical events. In this way, all dogmas of the Church are contained in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testament, and the Scriptures originate from the Church. The memory of oral tradition is also an integral part of the Gospel teaching as it was given to the apostles in unwritten form by Jesus Christ Himself and written down in the Church. In all, then, Scripture isn’t simply a matter of literary acquisition and Holy Tradition isn’t an unnecessary addition to the Gospel in Orthodoxy. Other rival claims to interpret Jesus Christ, Tradition or Scripture outside the Church’s own interpretation would be considered a distorted plagiarism to the early Church.