The Well of Questions

This is my response to Mark Saucy’s recent article in the Spring 2008 edition of Sundoulos, Talbot Theological Seminary’s alumni publication. I will let slide my irritation over the fact that this edition is entitled, ‘The Growing Faith of Ukraine’, a rather impertinent and backhanded comment about the faith of the Ukrainian Orthodox, and move directly into my response. For the sake of clarity, Saucy’s remarks will be in bold. For those of you who live around Biola University, I encourage you to get a copy and read Saucy’s article for yourself.

For one thing, there is less nationalistic flavour to American Orthodoxy. As the Epanagoge, a 9th century classic expression of Byzantine Church-State synergy relates, Orthodoxy does seek to identify itself as the ‘soul’ of the State. Such identification translates in the mind of many nationalities into a blurring of political/cultural and religious boundaries.

Saucy is right here, but contrary to his implied conclusion that this wedding of the political/cultural with the religious is wrong or misguided, I actually think we Americans are greatly impoverished by our lack of it. The dialectical opposition between the political/cultural and the religious (one could also call this the ‘secular vs the sacred’) is a Modern phenomenon and is rooted in Modern presuppositions - presuppositions which certainly aren’t Christian. Before the Empire was baptized into the Faith, Christianity was its own autonomous culture (much like its Jewish predecessors) with its own government and constitution. That’s why it was such a threat to the pagan Roman Empire; it was itself a competing power, demanding absolute allegiance – in all arenas of life – to Christ the crucified Lord of Glory. Thus, there is no dialectical opposition between the political/cultural and the religious, between the secular and the sacred; there is only the recapitulation of all in and through Jesus Christ.

The dismissive attitude to the apostle Paul by Russian Orthodox apologist Deacon Andrei Kuraev, “Certainly the word of the Savior himself means more than the word of an apostle,” is as unpalatable to American Orthodox as it is to us.

Actually, this statement isn’t unpalatable at all. Everyone, including Protestants, concedes that there is a hierarchy of importance in the Scriptures. No one would say that the book of Ruth is as important, as crucial to the Faith, as the Gospel of John. Yes, the Gospels hold preeminence in Orthodoxy because Christ Himself holds preeminence. This is not to say that the Apostle Paul and Jesus have opposing messages; they certainly don’t.

The point of these [“historically contextualized forces” that shaped the Tradition in areas including liturgical praxis, the veneration of Mary, and the supposed neo-Platonization of theology] and many more examples like them is the question of the authority of Holy Church Tradition in the Christian life and the way doctrine developed following the apostolic period. It is precisely why the Protestants called for a single authority of Scripture in their sola Scriptura mantra. Without an authority outside the human condition, all of us are going to tell the King’s Story in ways slanted somewhat to the times in which we live.

There are several problems with this. First of all, Saucy is ambiguous in his use of doctrinal development, so I don’t really know how to answer him. That phrase, the development of doctrine, is thrown around a lot and it means different things to different people. Contextually, it seems like he understands the notion rather simplistically, in that any sort of change implies a departure from apostolicity. For instance, in his example of the Orthodox veneration of Mary he sees her role as being ‘very different from the New Testament’, and cites what he calls the ‘curtain of silence’ regarding Mary in the first four hundred years of the Church. This is a rather strange assertion, given that several Fathers (including the 2nd century bishop of Lyons, Irenaeus) refer to Mary as the New Eve, not to mention the patristic references to her as ‘Theotokos’ and the documented prayers to her from the faithful from as early as the late 2nd century. I also believe the New Testament makes it clear enough that she is the fulfillment of the Ark of the Covenant, and if the Ark of the Covenant received such veneration from the Old Testament faithful, then of course Mary, who gave flesh to God, nursed Him and cared for Him, would deserve even greater devotion and veneration.

Premised upon his ambiguous use of the development of doctrine is the need for an authority external to the human condition, ergo sola Scriptura. But this of course begs the question as to how the scriptures are to be interpreted, with individual interpretation locking one ever further within the human condition. Ironically, what Saucy sees as an escape from the boundaries of the human condition, as an authority existing outside of it, is actually no true authority at all. (Please do not misunderstand me: obviously the scriptures are authoritative, but only as understood within the life of the Church) They are not truly authoritative because their only authority lies within one’s individual acceptance of a given interpretation. If, say, one does not individually accept a given interpretation of the scriptures, then that interpretation is not binding on the conscience, and therefore not truly authoritative. Sure, the scriptures may be hypothetically authoritative, but the exercise of this authority lies in interpretations that are infallible. With the sola Scriptura principle there are no infallible interpretations, only fallible ones, and thus Saucy’s call for an authority external to the human condition found in the scriptures apart from the life of the Church (which is the ‘pillar and ground of the truth’) falls on its face.

To be fair, he does try to address the issue of interpretation:

Despite the fact that Scripture never sanctions any interpretive lenses other than itself (see Is 29:13; Matt 15:4-9; 2 Tim 3:16), the Orthodox point of view does call for further reflection about the nature of the New Testament as tradition in its own right. Simply put, the difference here is that Protestants understand the New Testament as unique apostolic tradition which does not begin a Story; it finishes it. The apostles were Jesus’ uniquely commissioned emissaries to establish and build the Church (Matt 16:19; Eph 2:20), but their witness is not merely to Jesus. Theirs is a witness to Jesus as the culmination of God’s kingdom plan that has been unfolding since Eden’s garden (Eph 1:9-11). This is the biblical, apostolic tradition that makes Protestants not look forward from the apostles to the Church’s tradition for interpretive norms to understand Jesus as much as it makes them look back to the Old Testament’s theological norms, promises and life Jesus satisfies.

Here Saucy tries to defend the Protestant analogy of faith – that scripture interprets scripture – and cites several passages that supposedly teach this, but all three are certainly a stretch. The first two, briefly summarized, say that God is displeased with those who teach ‘the tradition of men’ over His own commandments. But this doesn’t support the Protestant analogy of faith; these passages having nothing to do with interpretation. The third, from 2 Timothy, says that Scripture is profitable for teaching, reproof, etc.; and again, it has nothing to do with interpretation.

He also speaks of the Old Testament being the tradition upon which Christianity is established, which I would agree with, but despite his efforts toward alleviation, the fundamental problem of interpretation vis-á-vis authority still exists. And actually, I think he has it exactly backwards here. The apostles did not use the Old Testament as the interpretive lens through which to understand Jesus; no, their witness of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus – the ‘Christ event’ itself – was the interpretive lens through which the Old Testament was understood and found its ultimate meaning. The apostolic interpretive lens of the Old Testament is their experience with the crucified and risen Christ. And - beautifully, in my opinion - nothing has changed here. The correct interpretive lens of all the canonical scriptures, including the New Testament, is only in and through experience with the Risen Christ by way of participation and communion with His Body, the Church – the ‘fulness of Him who fills all in all’. It is only in and through the Church that the scriptures can be rightly understood.

The apostolic, biblical tradition established in the Old Testament is also why the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura sees no lack of information in the New Testament that the Church through its Tradition must shore up. It is true the NT contains precious little on the forms of the apostolic worship. But maybe this is the whole point! Maybe it is precisely the point of the Church’s coming to maturity from the Old Covenant to the New that fixed and detailed liturgical forms become of secondary importance.

I can do no better than to quote from the masterful and formidable liturgical historian, Dom Gregory Dix. Dix’s words, taken from The Theology of Confirmation in Relation to Baptism, are specifically poignant here:

We know now, too, that the Apostolic paradosis [tradition] of practice, like the Apostolic paradosis [tradition] of doctrine, is something which actually ante-dates the writing of the New Testament documents themselves by some two or three decades. It is presupposed by those documents and referred to more than once as authoritative in them. This paradosis of practice continued to develop in complete freedom from any control by those documents for a century after they were written, before they were collected into a New Testament ‘Canon’ and recognised for the first time as authoritative ‘Scripture’ beside and above the Jewish ‘Scriptures’ of the Old Testament, which alone formed the ‘Bible’ of the Apostolic Church. Now that the history of the Canonisation of the New Testament is better understood, we can begin to shake ourselves free from the sixteenth century — or rather the mediaeval — delusion that primitive Christian Worship and Church Order must have been framed in conscious deference to the precedents of a New Testament which as such did not yet exist. The purely occasional documents now found in it do not contain, and were never intended by their authors to contain, anything like the Old Testament codes of prescriptions for the rites of worship. That was governed by the authoritative ‘Apostolic Tradition’ of practice, to which it is plain that the scattered Gentile Churches adhered pretty rigidly throughout the second century. I am not for a moment seeking to question the authoritative weight of the New Testament Scriptures for us as a written doctrinal standard. I am only trying to point out that there is available another source of information on the original and authentic Apostolic interpretation of Christianity, which the Scriptures presuppose and which must be used in the interpretation of the Scriptures. I do not deny that in time the recognition of this fact will be bound to lead to some considerable readjustment of ideas for more than one set of people. But tonight all I would say is that the liturgical tradition can be shewn to be older in some of its main elements than the New Testament Scriptures, and that down to the end of the second century, at least, it was regarded as having an ‘Apostolic’ authority of its own independently of them. We cannot look, therefore, for any attempt in this period to conform the practice of worship to them artificially. Nevertheless, the two do illustrate one another in a remarkable way.

Longing for the formalism of the Old Testament is longing for a bygone day. It is an unfortunate re-Judaization of the New Covenant that also crept into the early patristic Tradition, as church historian Jaroslav Pelikan points out.

Setting Dix’s scholarship aside, Pelikan does not understand this ‘re-Judaization’ of Christianity in terms of liturgical praxis, rather it’s in Christianity’s appropriation of Jewish idioms and concepts, which he saw as the maturation of Christianity in its self-understanding apart from Judaism. Not to mention one must not forget that Pelikan converted to Orthodoxy several years before he died.

Stay tuned!