The Church as the Interpreter

The correlative of “Scripture within Tradition”: because Scripture and Tradition are one organic whole and not two parallel sources, the Church herself is the living context in which Scripture is rightly read. This file traces the ancient roots of that principle — Irenaeus and Tertullian against the Gnostics, the “rule of faith,” the canon as an act of the Church — and states its meaning and its limits: not the abolition of the reader’s mind, but its formation within the mind of the Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Principle: Scripture Is Read Where It Was Written

If Scripture is the Church’s own book, born within her and canonized by her discernment, then it is read rightly only within the same living context. This is the Orthodox principle of interpretation, and it is the practical face of the doctrine that Scripture and Tradition form one whole rather than two sources. The Bible is not a self-contained system dropped from heaven to be decoded by the private reasoner; it is the deposit of a living community, and its meaning is disclosed within the community’s continuous experience of the God who inspired it (Florovsky, “Revelation and Interpretation,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Nordland, 1972; Breck, Scripture in Tradition, SVS Press, 2001, on the ecclesial context of interpretation). Fr. John Breck states the governing conviction: Scripture is properly interpreted “within the Church, guided by the same Spirit who inspired it,” according to the “mind of the Church” (Breck, Scripture in Tradition, 2001).

This is not a claim that the Church stands above the word of God as its master. The Church is under the word; she does not create revelation but receives it. But she is the word’s proper home — the “pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15) in which the truth is upheld and handed on. To read Scripture “in the Church” is to read it with the Fathers, in the Liturgy, according to the rule of faith, and in the communion of the saints, rather than in the isolation of private judgment (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, pp. 199–201; and see The Consensus Patrum).

The Ancient Roots: The Rule of Faith against the Gnostics

The principle is not a modern Orthodox invention but the Church’s earliest defense of the Scriptures against heretical misreading. In the second century the Gnostics quoted Scripture copiously; the problem was never that they lacked texts but that they read the texts by an alien key. St. Irenaeus of Lyons answered them not by pitting text against text but by appealing to the “rule of truth” (regula veritatis) received in baptism and the apostolic faith preserved in the churches of apostolic foundation. He compared the Gnostic method to taking the tesserae of a mosaic that formed the image of a king and rearranging them to make a dog or a fox: the pieces (the scriptural texts) are genuine, but the “hypothesis” — the ordering pattern — has been falsified (Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.8.1; I.9.4; trans. ANF I). The true pattern is the rule of faith held in the Church; Scripture read outside that pattern can be made to say anything.

Tertullian pressed the same logic to a juridical point in his Prescription against the Heretics: the heretics have no right even to argue from the Scriptures, because the Scriptures belong to the Church, whose faith and rule determine their reading; possession precedes interpretation (Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum 15–19; trans. ANF III). And St. Vincent of Lérins, in the fifth century, framed the enduring question: since Scripture “on account of its very depth” is understood by different people in different senses, “it is very necessary… that the line of prophetic and apostolic interpretation be directed according to the standard of the ecclesiastical and catholic sense” (Vincent, Commonitorium 2.2; trans. NPNF II/11). In each case the argument is the same: Scripture is supreme, but it is not self-interpreting, and the Church’s rule of faith is the standard by which its true sense is discerned from its counterfeit.

The Canon Itself as an Act of the Church

The deepest illustration of the principle is the canon. The list of books that constitute Scripture is nowhere given in Scripture; it was established by the Church over the first four centuries through the discernment of Tradition, weighing apostolic origin, orthodoxy of content, and — decisively — liturgical use, the books “read in the churches” (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39, 367; and the fuller treatment in The Orthodox Church and Holy Scripture). The very existence of a Bible is therefore already the fruit of the Church’s interpretive authority. This is the point at which sola scriptura is felt by Orthodox and Catholics alike to be circular: one cannot make Scripture the sole and self-sufficient authority when the identity of Scripture is itself a determination of the Church’s Tradition (Florovsky, “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church,” 1972; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, p. 199). The Church did not stand under a canon that fell ready-made; she recognized her own voice in these books and, by that recognition, gave the canon its bounds.

One Organic Whole, Not Two Parallel Sources

It follows that the Orthodox picture is not two authorities — Scripture and an interpreting Church — laid side by side, but a single organic reality in which the inspired text lives within the interpreting community as its native environment. Florovsky’s insistence bears repeating: Tradition is not “a second source” supplying what Scripture lacks, but “Scripture rightly understood,” the Church’s own continuous grasp of the meaning of her own book (Florovsky, “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church,” 1972). The Church does not add to Scripture; she reads it. When she confesses the homoousion at Nicaea, or the Theotokos at Ephesus, or the two wills of Christ at Constantinople III, she is not appealing to a fund of extra-biblical information but articulating, against error and in new words, what the Scriptures have always meant within her life (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, Fordham, 1974, on the councils as the Church’s reading of Scripture; see The Councils as Tradition).

This organic unity is what allows Orthodoxy to escape the dilemma that structures much Western debate. It need not choose between an inspired text and an interpreting authority, because it does not experience them as rivals: the same Spirit who inspired the Scriptures dwells in the Church and guides her reading, so that text and interpreter are two moments of one Spirit-given life (Breck, Scripture in Tradition, 2001; Lossky, “Tradition and Traditions,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, SVS Press, 1974, on Tradition as the light in which Scripture is read).

The Limit: Formation, Not the Abolition of the Reader

The principle is easily caricatured, and honesty requires marking its limit. To say that the Church interprets Scripture is not to say that the individual Orthodox Christian may not read the Bible, nor that scholarship, philology, and the personal study of the text are excluded. Orthodoxy has a rich exegetical and scholarly tradition and warmly commends the personal, prayerful reading of Scripture (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 200–201; and the treatment of modern biblical scholarship in The Orthodox Church and Holy Scripture). The principle is not that the reader’s mind is abolished but that it is formed — that the Orthodox reader reads as a member of the Body, with the Fathers and the Liturgy and the rule of faith as the givens within which personal understanding grows, rather than as a sovereign individual erecting a private system against the common faith. The safeguard against private interpretation is not the silencing of the reader but the reader’s incorporation into the mind of the Church (Breck, Scripture in Tradition, 2001; and see The Fathers and the Mind of the Church).

Nor does the principle license the Church to read against the plain sense of Scripture at will; the Fathers held that the Church’s interpretation unfolds Scripture’s meaning and never contradicts it, precisely because the same Spirit stands behind both. The Church is the interpreter, but she is the interpreter of a word she confesses to be God’s, and she reads it in reverent submission, not in mastery. The interpreter and the text are bound in one obedience to the one Spirit.

References

Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (“Revelation and Interpretation”; “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church.”)
Breck, John. Scripture in Tradition: The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. (Interpretation within the Church, by the Spirit, in the mind of the Church.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Reading Scripture in the Church; the personal reading; pp. 199–201.)
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies I.8.1; I.9.4; III.1–4. Trans. ANF vol. 1. (The rule of truth; the mosaic image; the apostolic churches.)
Tertullian. De praescriptione haereticorum 15–19. Trans. ANF vol. 3. (Scripture belongs to the Church.)
Vincent of Lérins. Commonitorium 2.2. Trans. NPNF II/11. (The ecclesiastical and catholic sense as the standard of interpretation.)
Athanasius of Alexandria. Festal Letter 39 (367). (The canon and liturgical use.)
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. (The councils as the Church’s reading of Scripture.)
Scripture: 1 Timothy 3:15; Acts 8:31.