Church over Scripture?

Is the Church's Authority Foundational to Scripture, or is Scripture the Foundation of the Church?

By Bp. Joseph Boyd and Gabriel Ng (Ancient Church of the West) 

In the Old Testament, the Prophets brought the Word of the Lord. It was the Dabar, that which "filled the scroll" and "not one word could be added or taken away." The retelling or historical record of that prophetic word was a story, a "generation," a "genealogy" called a Toldoth, which was not the word of the prophets, but communicated that word in a story form. 

When Jesus Christ came, He was associated by the Apostles with the Word. This was not the "Dabar" of the prophets, but with the creating intellect of the "Logos," the point of metaphysical truth that had been intuited by Heraclitus of pre-Platonic Greek philosophy. This was used by the Apostle John to explain how Christ was "in" and "with" the Father, how Christ was "one" with the monotheist Jewish God of Scripture and Prophets, and how, as Paul would develop, "In him all things live and move and have their being" and how "in him all things consist." The "Words" were two different things, two different cultures, and one was God expressing himself through prophets, the other was God expressing Himself through Incarnation - a Greek, pagan concept, unsupported by Jewish Law or Biblical Precedent, unless Scripture is interpreted to show theophanies of a pre-incarnate Christ to Adam, Abraham, Moses and Aaron.

This Christological view has everything to do with the question of Scripture, because, just as "Incarnation" was a foreign concept to the transcendent God of the Jews, a concept that came from Greek Paganism, so was the idea of "Word" as a deity or as a creative process. To the Jews, God's Word was His Law because, essentially, God's law was a command. The Commandment was simple - it was always repent, turn back, be reconciled to God through obedience and love! 

Now, to the Early Christians, this was the message, too, with one difference. Christ was God, and through our repentance, culminating in baptism, we would be given the Spirit of God, too, which would, in effect, make us the same as Jesus through the Love, Mercy and Grace of God. The only difference was that we were not born God, but could serve God as "temples of the Holy Spirit." In this way, Christ was the prototype of our salvation. However, based on the "Word Language" of the Gospels, there was a tendency to see this as an endorsement for all the Greek philosophy behind it. The meaning of "Word" in the Old Testament was adjusted to this Greek philosophical understanding, and "Christian Hellenism" came into being. 

This is important, because, through this process, the Hellenes not only equated their culture and philosophy with Christ and with all revelation, but the process of reinterpretation and accommodation began to be seen as "Orthodox Scriptural Interpretation." Therefore, the Greek Mind accommodating the Hebrew Scriptures to this Greek hermeneutic structure was interpretation. And, since it was different than its original, apparent meaning, the interpretation itself must be inspired! The missiological and inculturation apologetics process surpassed the original context of Christianity. 

The crux of this issues in the current age is the misidentification of canon with Scripture. Canon was never officially decided by the Eastern Church, and only insinuated canonically by the early Western Church. There are no mechanisms in history for recognizing a universal canon - only individual Fathers recommending different lists of books. None of them agree. Therefore, the statement "the Church canonized the Bible" is factually inaccurate, as is the common terminology “the received Canon of Scripture." This argument also convolutes the meaning of "interpretation" through the application of "allegory," which later came to be seen as interpretation. Clear Scriptural interpretation is as the Scripture and the Apostolic Fathers taught, historical, literal, typological and anagogical - meaning that Scripture can have a deeper, typological meaning, but a new meaning cannot be brought into the text and imposed as its original intent. It can be an outworking of truth in our lives, but it cannot be confused with the original. If this proper order is forgotten, the later usurps the former, the ensuing culture redefines the original, and Scripture is remade from the outside by a process of subtle redefinition, and the Mystical Theology of St. Denis the Areogapite replaces the Epistles of St. Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles. 

I used to believe the narrative of Church canonizing Scripture, until I actually did some study on biblical history and re-read the Pauline Epistles. The Early Church did give us the Gospels, long before there were "Fathers" in the Apostolic Age. But, what teaches us the contextualization of Scripture, allows the Gentiles to participate in the Gospel, and overturns the Old Covenant, dismissing the interpretations of "Peoplehood" and “Ritualism,” redefining the whole locus of the Faith from physical to spiritual, was St. Paul’s understanding. St. Paul withstood the Judaizing Apostles and taught a Gospel that, while fundamental to the establishment of the Church amongst the Greeks, is often forgotten by many Christians within the Hellenic Tradition. 

Without St. Paul's resistance to the "Orthodoxy" of the Jewish Church, there would be no Church. Textual studies have also shown that later narratives of a unified Apostolic Foundation of the Church, as if the Apostles left Jerusalem and evangelized the world, are largely unsubstantiated. St. Paul and his disciples were the ones that evangelized the Gentile world, and the followers of the Jewish Apostles, faithful to the Hebrew interpretation of Scripture and Messiahship, largely became the heretical "Ebionites" that the later Greek and Latin Fathers describe in their writings. 

I now realize the importance of a free and unfettered Spirit, a God whose work cannot be contained in human habitations and who cannot be honored or appeased with sacrifices made by human hands. He has prepared the sacrifice for us, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins. St. Paul's Gospel was simple, "By Grace are you saved, not of works, or you would boast, but it is the gift of God." And, "If you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart, you will be saved." Salvation is of Christ, and our attempts to make a managed process out of it, for the purposes of identity or control, is ultimately illegitimate… because it was not revealed for man to control, but to submit to and take part of in a living relationship with God. The Church is called to obey, to repent, to confess, to baptize, to celebrate the Holy Eucharist, and to suffer as martyrs in the world in anticipation of Christ's literal and historical Return, and His Unending Kingdom! We can only repent and accept: we cannot decide or manage. We cannot reserve for the Church what is only God's to give. God makes us His Church, and how He does so is a mystery, wrapped up in the unfathomable depths of Bread and Wine becoming His Body and Blood. But we must obey. He says we must be baptized, so we are. He says to receive the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands from the Apostles, so we find those who have received this blessing, who are faithful to its responsibilities, and we bow our heads for the laying on of hands. He says we celebrate His Supper until His coming, receiving His very Body and Blood, and so we do! The Church does not define God while it contains Him, but we celebrate His Commands in our obedience. When pastoral issues get confused with this simple metaphysic of God's declaration of salvation and our obligation to obey it, we fall into pride, stubbornness and disobedience of the most difficult kind - a systematically unrecognizable lack of repentance that we believe, tragically, is righteousness. We must not forget that the Gospel of Old and New Testaments was fundamentally disruptive to human power, human pride and to our own desire to be God. If we are too comfortable, something's wrong! 

As history has consistently taught us, Churchmen wave like the waves of the sea, tossed back and forth by the winds of culture, style and controversy. Therefore, the authority of true Fathers, and of faithful Bishops and Presbyters should be rooted in the Church’s deep encounter with Scripture, like that of the Apostolic Fathers, who spoke nothing but Scripture and to whom Scripture was the end of every argument; not as later Alexandrian Philosophers taught, by stretching the imagination, associating concepts and ideas from paganism with Greek words used in the various translations, and cutting and pasting Scripture so that it agrees with Plato, Plotinus and Proclus! Unfortunately, instead of following St. John Chrysostom's historical/literal paradigm, we instead follow Sts. Clement, Cyril and a reinterpreted, Palamite understanding of Chrysostom within Byzantine Orthodox world, because of the ease with which it can make Scripture serve the State Church. Orthodox often believe that we have a "synthesis of Antiochian and Alexandrian interpretations,” but the heart of the Ancient Apostolic and Pauline interpretive method, so clearly exposited by the Apostolic Fathers and the Antiochene School, along with a historically accurate memory of the "Canonization of Scripture," is now largely lost to us to us - much to our detriment and an imbalance in our appreciation for Scripture within the Orthodox Church. 

Summary

Logos was first used by Heraclitus, brought over into the Jewish context by Philo of Alexandria, and then used as an explanation for how Christ was the “Word of God” by St. John the Apostle. This was completely legitimate and good because it does not change the Gospel, but, due to this use, elements of Greek philosophy that had also developed out of Heraclitus’ views, clearly developed by Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, came to be seen as equally important to Christianity. This synthesis changed how the Gospel was perceived and how it was carried out into the world. This led to an obscuring of the Biblical worldview and a wholesale embrace of Greek philosophical terms and categories that are incompatible with both the Old Testament’s self-understanding and the Apostolic Fathers’ reliance on textual Scripture for authority. It can best be pictured in how the Biblical worldview of life-giving covenants actuated in blood, connecting life to life and allowing God’s holiness to be transferred to His creation through Eucharistia/Thanksgiving, gave way to a mysteriological view of contemplation and taboos, in which God’s grace could be polluted and adulterate by improper ritual action. In Ezekiel 47, the water flows out of the Temple and makes all things holy. In the mysteriological Greek categories of contemplation and illumination, people abstain from Holy Communion because they are not worthy enough to partake, because they have not reached the high pinnacle of divine contemplation. In Scripture, holiness flows downhill and reaches all corners of the world through God’s mercy. Christ touches beggar, leapers, and the unclean, and is not defiled! Holiness “goes out of Him!” As Neo-Platonism and Christianity elided (due to the bridging effects of Logos terminology in St. John’s Gospel, allowing the Greek philosophers to be fully incorporated into the new Christian economy), the engine of sanctification moved away from interaction and connection and becomes increasingly centered on isolation, inhibition and shielding of a gnostic mystery. To be cloistered and cut off is seen as holiness. The more isolated and inaccessible one became, the more holy one was perceived to be, and anchorites and hermits were glorified as the Christian ideal. Thus, just after the Hebrew wall of partition was torn down and the Temple curtain was ripped in two by the finished work of Christ on the Cross, new Greek curtains were drawn and an iconostasis wall built around what used to be a Christian family table, excluding all but the professional priestly class, made holy through ritual purity - fasting and permanent abstinence from sex. The old Gentiles became the new Jews, only this time without the possibility of a new St. Paul to steal the holy fire of the Gospel and give it to the unworthy, huddling, unwashed masses of new Gentiles. 

St. John's use of Logos serves to elevate Christ's lordship above the Jewish people to include all the Gentiles, but the Neo-Platonic synthesis restricts, rather than expands, this lordship and narrowly establishes the concept of holiness to embody gnostic and ascetic ideals.