A few nights ago, I stood in the back of an auditorium with a small group of non-Orthodox questioners. They had listened to the story of my journey from Evangelical Protestantism to Eastern Orthodoxy. Then on the way out of the hall they accosted me, ever so politely, and started grilling me, again, ever so politely, about specific elements of Orthodox doctrine. One of their major concerns was the Orthodox attitude toward that doctrine which is the backbone of Protestant Evangelical theology: sola scriptura. The belief that the Bible alone is the sole foundation of doctrine, the sole spiritual authority in the Christian life is deeply ingrained in much of Western Christianity. If the Scriptures say something is true, then it’s true; it must be obeyed. Any doctrine not clearly and specifically spelled out in the Scriptures must be rejected as falsehood.

Now, Orthodox Christians revere the Scriptures. We pray the Scriptures. Our worship is filled with the Scriptures. We believe the Bible contains the inspired words of God, spoken through his holy servants. But, unlike our Evangelical Protestant counterparts, we do not hold the words written on its pages to be the sole foundational authority in the Christian life. Instead, we look to the One who inspired those words, the Holy Spirit of God, as the bedrock of our faith. On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit took up residence in the Church, living out the life of the Holy Trinity within its members. The Spirit embraces us in a holy dance, making us aware of his presence within us. He invites us to do more than just ponder the words of the Bible and apply its principles to our lives. Through a variety of means, the Spirit reveals the Godhead to us in a living way, giving us the opportunity to participate in the activity of the Holy Trinity.

Orthodox Christians understand the holy Scriptures to be an especially powerful expression of the Holy Spirit in the Church, but we know he also reveals himself by other means. In fact, that’s the definition of what we call holy Tradition. It is those elements of the Church’s life through which the living God has always and in every place made himself known to us, in us, and through us. Together with the holy Scriptures, these include the liturgical services of the Church, the writings of the holy Fathers, the Spirit-inspired directives of the great councils, and the holy icons, our mystical windows to heaven.

The ancient Church of the apostles has always realized that the Book in which the Spirit writes the entire will of God for us, that great Book which contains the whole story of our relationship with the living God, is not a book of pages and ink. The Book which contains the complete truth about our relationship with God is not made of paper but of flesh. It is a book of hearts and living experience.

Ironically, the Scriptures themselves teach us that the Scriptures are not the bedrock repository of Christian truth. In his first epistle to St. Timothy, St. Paul instructs his young protege that the pillar and ground of the truth is not the Bible; it is, he says, the Church of the living God. That’s 1 Timothy 3:15. According to St. Paul, it is the Church, the body of Christ in which the Spirit of God manifests the Holy Trinity’s life, which is the foundational authority and standard of truth. The Scriptures are certainly important, but their authority and truth is not independent of the Church’s authority and truth.

You see, God didn’t send the New Testament down from heaven on the day of Pentecost. He send the Holy Spirit to indwell the members of the body of Christ. In fact, the epistles and gospels sprang from the Church’s living encounter with the Holy Spirit. He directs all things in the Church, including the Church’s relationship to its holy writings. This is especially obvious in the apostles’ own attitude toward the Scriptures. They most definitely did not hold to sola scriptura. Now, those steeped in the Protestant Evangelical tradition may disagree with me. Often they appeal to St. Paul’s admonition to St. Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, which reads:

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Sola scriptura advocates argue that if the Scriptures can make us “thoroughly equipped” and “complete,” doesn’t that make them our only necessary authority, our only source of truth? The problem is this passage only proves sola scriptura if one has already assumed that sola scriptura is right. If we actually let the Scriptures inform us as to how St. Paul’s words here must be taken, then we see that these verses can in no way serve to support the sola scriptura position. Let me explain.

First of all, we must be clear about what St. Paul is referring to here when he speaks about Scripture. He can only mean the Old Testament. After all, the holy Scriptures he has in mind, he says, are the ones that St. Timothy has known since childhood. That’s verse 15. When St. Paul writes this letter, apostolic epistles have only been circulating in the Church for a little over ten years. As for the gospels, well, conservative Bible scholars date them much earlier than their liberal counterparts, but even by their estimates at the time of this epistle to St. Timothy, the earliest gospels are just being written. It will be decades before the various writings which we call collectively the New Testament will become widely read, and several hundred years of ongoing debate and deliberation will pass before the New Testament canon as we know it is compiled and ratified by the Church in the late fourth century.

Recognizing that St. Paul is speaking to St. Timothy about the Old Testament in this passage gives us a means of testing just how sola scriptura the apostles were. All we have to do is examine how the teaching of the apostles stacks up to the teaching of the Old Testament Scriptures. When we do that, of course, we discover that what the apostles taught in many important ways countermands the Old Testament Scriptures; it goes completely against them. So clearly the apostles could not have believed in sola scriptura. Let me give some examples of what I mean.

Consider, for instance, St. Paul’s teaching about the Christian’s relationship to the Old Testament Mosaic law. In Galations 4:9-11, we read:

But now, after you have known God, or rather are known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements to which you desire again to be in bondage. You observe days and months and seasons and years. I am afraid for you, lest I have labored for you in vain.

And also in Colossians 2:16-17, we read:

So let no one judge you regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ.

In these passages the Apostle Paul establishes an important and, in many places in the early Church, controversial truth. The feasts and sabbaths that were central to Jewish worship are not spiritually essential in the new covenant of the Spirit. Christians have no obligation to observe them. There were Jewish factions in the fledgling Church that protested this, and the truth is, if the apostles and early Church had operated on the principle of sola scriptura, those Jewish traditionalists could easily have claimed the authoritative spiritual high ground.

In the 23rd chapter of Leviticus, the Old Testament passage that delineates each of the sabbaths and feasts of the Jewish economy, one word appears over and over again. “All these holy days,” God says, “are to be observed forever.” We read that in Leviticus 23:14, 21, 31, and 41. If the Scriptures are the sole authority on which all Christian teaching must be based, how could St. Paul have taught the Church that it is no longer necessary to celebrate holy days that the Scriptures say must be kept forever. It seems that the apostles held to some principle of guidance for the body of Christ that is more basic, more fundamental than the Scriptures.

What is that principle? Well, we’ll talk about that when we come together again next week.