Scripture within Tradition

The Orthodox account of the Bible’s place: Scripture is the supreme written expression within the one Holy Tradition — born from the Church and read in the Church — and it is therefore neither a second source of revelation set beside Tradition (the Latin “two-source” theory) nor a self-sufficient text standing over the Church against her Tradition (sola scriptura). This file presents the Orthodox position fully and names the Roman Catholic and Protestant positions fairly, as METHODOLOGY §4 requires.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Question and the Three Answers

Few questions have divided Western Christendom as sharply as the relation of Scripture to Tradition, and Orthodoxy’s answer is easiest to see when set beside the two Western answers it rejects. The three positions may be named at the outset. (1) Protestant sola scriptura holds that Scripture alone is the final and sufficient authority for faith, and that all tradition must be judged by it and, where it conflicts, corrected by it. (2) The Roman Catholic “two-source” theory — a widespread post-Tridentine reading — holds that divine revelation is transmitted through two channels, Scripture and Tradition, each conveying truths, with the Church’s Magisterium as the authoritative interpreter of both. (3) The Orthodox position holds that there is one source, the one Tradition, of which Scripture is the inspired written core: Scripture is within Tradition, the supreme written expression of the single life of the Church in the Spirit (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, pp. 195–199; Florovsky, “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Nordland, 1972).

The rest of this file expounds the Orthodox answer and, per the repository methodology on live disputes, represents the other two fairly.

Scripture Born from and within the Church

The Orthodox starting point is a historical and ecclesiological fact: the Church is older than the New Testament. The community of the risen Christ existed, preached, baptized, and celebrated the Eucharist for two decades before the earliest New Testament writing, and for well over three centuries before the canon of the New Testament reached its settled form — St. Athanasius’s Festal Letter 39 of 367 being the first surviving list of exactly our twenty-seven books (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39; and see the treatment of the canon in The Orthodox Church and Holy Scripture). The Scriptures were written by the Church, within the Church, and for the Church; and it was the Church, exercising the discernment of Tradition, who recognized which writings were inspired and canonical and which were not (Florovsky, “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church,” 1972; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, p. 199).

From this it follows that Scripture is not a self-standing authority over against the community, but the Church’s own book, “the supreme expression of God’s revelation to man” precisely as the written deposit of Tradition (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, p. 199). Orthodoxy holds the Scriptures in the highest honor — the Gospel Book is enthroned on the altar and venerated with incense and kisses, and the services are saturated with the Bible — but it honors them as the Church’s Scripture, inseparable from the life that produced them and reads them. As Florovsky put it, “Scripture needs to be explained. It is revealed in theology. And this can be done only by the Church” — not because the Church stands above Scripture, but because Scripture and Church are inseparable members of the one Tradition (Florovsky, “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church,” 1972).

Against the Two-Source Theory

The Orthodox rejection of the “two-source” theory is not a rejection of Tradition — quite the reverse — but a rejection of the parallelism the theory implies. To speak of Scripture and Tradition as two distinct sources, each supplying its own quantum of revealed truths, is to treat Tradition as a reservoir of doctrines that Scripture happens not to contain, and thus to set the two side by side as complementary but separate deposits. Florovsky argued that this misconceives the ancient understanding: “Tradition was not… an independent instance, nor was it a complementary source of faith…. Tradition was actually ‘Scripture rightly understood’” (Florovsky, “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church,” 1972). Tradition, that is, has no content that competes with or supplements Scripture as a second body of information; it is the mind of the Church within which Scripture is rightly heard. Scripture and Tradition are not two things to be added but one organic reality (see The Church as the Interpreter).

It must be said carefully and fairly that the “two-source” reading, though long dominant, has been contested within Roman Catholic theology itself, and that the Second Vatican Council deliberately declined to endorse it. [Disputed: whether Roman Catholic doctrine teaches "two sources" of revelation. (a) The post-Tridentine textbook tradition, and a common reading of Trent's decree (Council of Trent, Session IV, 1546, which speaks of the Gospel's truth being contained "in libris scriptis et sine scripto traditionibus" — "in written books and unwritten traditions"), was widely understood to teach Scripture and Tradition as two partly-independent sources. (b) But Vatican II's *Dei Verbum* (1965) deliberately avoided the "two-source" language, teaching instead that "sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture make up a single sacred deposit of the word of God" flowing "from the same divine wellspring" (*Dei Verbum* §§9–10). The leading modern Catholic theologian of Tradition, Yves Congar, argued at length that the genuine patristic and Catholic view is not two parallel sources but the one Gospel transmitted in two modes, and that the "two-source" reading was a hardening peculiar to the Counter-Reformation (Congar, *Tradition and Traditions*, Burns & Oates, 1966, esp. the historical volume). On this newer Catholic account the remaining difference from Orthodoxy narrows considerably — a convergence Orthodox observers have noted with interest, while continuing to locate the decisive authority differently (in the papal Magisterium rather than in the conciliar and receptive life of the whole Church). The compendium reports this as a genuinely disputed and evolving matter, not a fixed opposition.]

Against Sola Scriptura

Against the Protestant principle, the Orthodox objection is that sola scriptura removes Scripture from the very context that gives it its meaning and its canon. Florovsky pressed two points. First, the principle is historically self-undermining: the Church determined the canon of Scripture by the discernment of Tradition, so that to receive this collection of books as Scripture is already to stand within a tradition of reception; Scripture cannot certify its own table of contents (Florovsky, “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church,” 1972; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, p. 199). Second, “Scripture alone, interpreted by the individual,” in practice subjects the sacred text to “arbitrary private interpretation,” dissolving the unity of the faith into the multiplicity of readers — the very fragmentation, Orthodox writers observe, that the history of Protestantism has borne out (Florovsky, “Revelation and Interpretation,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972; and see The Church as the Interpreter). Scripture, on the Orthodox view, is not obscure — it is clear enough for salvation — but it is not self-interpreting: the eunuch’s question, “How can I [understand], unless some one guides me?” (Acts 8:31), is taken as the paradigm of the reader who needs the Church.

Here too fairness requires precision about what the best Protestant theology actually claims. [Disputed: the meaning and merits of sola scriptura. (a) In its polemical popular form, sola scriptura is taken to mean "the Bible alone, with no place for tradition, creed, or the Church's teaching authority" — and it is this form that Orthodox (and Catholic) critics chiefly answer. (b) But the classical Reformers and the confessional Protestant traditions distinguished sola scriptura from the individualist "solo scriptura" or "nuda scriptura." For the Reformers, Scripture was the *norma normans non normata* — the norming norm not itself normed — and thus the final authority; but they retained the ecumenical creeds, honored the Fathers, and expected Scripture to be read within the believing community and its confessions. On this account sola scriptura asserts Scripture's *supremacy* and sufficiency as the final judge, not its isolation. Named proponents of this careful reading include the Reformation confessions themselves and their modern expositors (e.g., Heiko Oberman's distinction of "Tradition I" — the single exegetical tradition of Scripture-in-the-Church — from "Tradition II" — a second, extra-scriptural source; Oberman, *The Harvest of Medieval Theology*, 1963). The remaining and real disagreement with Orthodoxy is not over whether Scripture is honored but over *where final authority and infallibility lie*: in Scripture as judged ultimately by the individual conscience and the confessions, or in Scripture as inseparable from the Spirit-guided Tradition and reception of the one Church. The compendium marks this as the substantive point at issue and does not caricature the Protestant position.]

The Orthodox Synthesis: One Source, Supreme Written Expression

The Orthodox position can now be stated in a single formula: there are not two sources but one, and within that one source Scripture holds the supreme place. Ware puts it exactly: Scripture and Tradition are not “two distinct sources of the Christian faith” but form “a single and undivided whole”; Scripture “exists within Tradition” and is “the supreme expression” of it (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 198–199). To ask whether a doctrine comes “from Scripture or from Tradition” is, on this view, a false alternative, like asking whether the meaning of a sentence comes from its words or from its language. Tradition is the language within which Scripture is the supreme utterance; the words are supreme, but they say nothing apart from the tongue in which they are spoken and heard.

This is why Orthodoxy can be at once the most biblical and the most traditional of the Christian confessions without contradiction. It reveres Scripture above every other written text — no council, no Father, no canon stands on the level of the inspired word — and it reads that supreme word only within the living Tradition that gave it, discerned its canon, and continues to interpret it by the same Spirit who inspired it. The next file takes up the correlative point: that this single Tradition means the Church herself is the interpreter of her own book.

References

Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Scripture within Tradition, the single undivided whole, pp. 195–199.)
Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (“The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church” — “Scripture rightly understood”; “Revelation and Interpretation.”)
Congar, Yves, OP. Tradition and Traditions: An Historical and a Theological Essay. Trans. Michael Naseby and Thomas Rainborough. London: Burns & Oates; New York: Macmillan, 1966. (The one Gospel in two modes; the Counter-Reformation hardening into “two sources.”)
Council of Trent, Session IV (1546), Decree on the Canonical Scriptures. (The “libris scriptis et sine scripto traditionibus” language.)
Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), 1965, §§7–10. (The single deposit from one wellspring.)
Oberman, Heiko A. The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. (“Tradition I” and “Tradition II.”)
Athanasius of Alexandria. Festal Letter 39 (367). (The first list of the twenty-seven-book New Testament canon.)
Scripture: Acts 8:31.