Inspiration and the Spirit in Tradition

“Who spoke through the prophets” is the Creed’s only statement about the Spirit’s relation to Scripture, and the Church has never enlarged it into a theory. This file sets out what the Orthodox tradition does and does not claim about inspiration, distinguishes the dictation imagery some Fathers use from the account of divine condescension that most of them prefer, and shows why the same Spirit who inspired the text is required to read it — which is what the doctrine of Tradition means.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What the Church Says, and How Little of It There Is

The Creed says of the Holy Spirit that he “spoke through the prophets” (τὸ λαλῆσαν διὰ τῶν προφητῶν). That is the whole of the conciliar teaching about the Spirit and the Scriptures. No Ecumenical Council defined a doctrine of inspiration, no council specified a mechanism, and no council promulgated a theory of scriptural inerrancy. The Orthodox Church has a canon, a lectionary, and a hermeneutic; she does not have a dogmatic constitution on biblical inspiration, and it is worth registering how unusual that is by comparison with the confessional statements of the Reformation and with the Roman documents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The scriptural basis is two verses. “All scripture is given by inspiration of God (θεόπνευστος), and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). And: “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). Theopneustos is “God-breathed” — a word about origin, not about method.

Two Patristic Idioms

The Fathers describe inspiration in two registers, and the difference between them is real.

The instrumental idiom. Some early writers use imagery in which the human author is passive: Athenagoras compares the prophets to instruments played by the Spirit, “as if a flautist were to blow into a flute” (Athenagoras, Plea for the Christians 9; trans. ANF II), and Hippolytus and others use similar figures. Read in isolation this yields a dictation theory in which the writer’s mind contributes nothing.

The condescension idiom. St. John Chrysostom’s characteristic term for the manner of revelation is synkatabasis — condescension, God’s accommodation of himself to human capacity, as a father lisps to a child or a teacher pitches his lesson to his pupils. Chrysostom applies it constantly in the Homilies on Genesis to explain anthropomorphic language about God, and the principle generalizes: Scripture speaks humanly because it is addressed to men, and the human author’s own idiom, culture, and limitations are part of the accommodation rather than an interference with it (Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 2–3, 13, 17; trans. Hill, FC 74, 82, 87). St. Basil’s insistence that the Spirit does not abolish the prophet’s own faculties, and the anti-Montanist writers’ argument that the true prophet is not beside himself, belong to the same register (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V.17; trans. NPNF II/1).

The Church has never chosen between the two idioms by decree, but her practice has chosen. She reads Scripture with attention to what the human author is doing — Chrysostom’s exegesis is minutely attentive to Paul’s rhetoric and to Moses’ pedagogy — which is not how one reads a dictated text (see Chrysostom and the Exegetical Homilies; The Patristic Mind).

[Disputed: whether a doctrine of scriptural inerrancy is required by Orthodox teaching. (a) A body of modern Orthodox writing, much of it under nineteenth-century Western confessional influence, affirms inerrancy in terms close to the Protestant scholastic formulations. (b) Other Orthodox writers hold that the Church has defined nothing on the question, that the Fathers' own exegesis presupposes accommodation and human authorship, and that the category of "inerrancy" imports a modern framing — see the survey of Orthodox positions in Theodore G. Stylianopoulos, *The New Testament: An Orthodox Perspective*, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1997, and the treatment in Kallistos Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, rev. ed. The Church has issued no conciliar definition either way; this collection reports the absence of one rather than supplying it.]

The Same Spirit Reads

The point at which Orthodox teaching becomes distinctive is not the origin of the text but its reading.

St. Paul says that the veil remains on the reading of the old covenant and is taken away in Christ, and that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:14–17). The Lord opens the disciples’ understanding that they might understand the Scriptures (Luke 24:45). The Ethiopian eunuch, reading Isaiah aloud, is asked whether he understands and answers, “How can I, except some man should guide me?” (Acts 8:31). In each case the text is not self-interpreting; something must be given for it to be read.

What is given is the Spirit, and he is given in the Church. This is the whole of the Orthodox argument about Scripture and Tradition, and it is not a claim that the Church stands above Scripture or supplements it. It is the claim that the Spirit who inspired the prophets is the Spirit who dwells in the Church, and that the reading which is the Church’s reading is the reading given by the one who gave the text.

Vladimir Lossky’s formula for Tradition is the sharpest modern statement: Tradition is “the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, communicating to each member of the Body of Christ the faculty of hearing, of receiving, of knowing the Truth in the Light which belongs to it, and not according to the natural light of human reason” (Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974, “Tradition and Traditions”). On this account Tradition is not a second source of doctrine alongside Scripture but the mode in which Scripture is received — which is why the Orthodox refusal of the two-source model is not a compromise between Rome and the Reformation but a different question altogether (see Scripture within Holy Tradition; Paradosis: The Living Memory).

The Canon as a Pneumatic Act

If the Spirit gives the Church the reading, he also gives her the book — and the history of how she came to have it is untidy in a way that has to be stated.

The New Testament canon was not settled by an early council. St. Athanasius’ Festal Letter 39 of 367 gives the first surviving list of the twenty-seven books as we have them, and it is a bishop’s paschal letter, not a conciliar act (see Festal Letter 39). Before and after it the lists vary. The Apocalypse was received slowly in the East, is absent from some Eastern canon lists, and — a fact worth stating plainly — has never been assigned a place in the Byzantine lectionary, so that the Orthodox Church reads at her services from every New Testament book except the one that describes the worship of heaven. The Old Testament canon of the Orthodox Church is wider than the Hebrew and is not uniform across the local churches.

[Disputed: the standing of the wider Old Testament canon and the reception of the Apocalypse. The lists in Athanasius (367), in the canons attributed to Laodicea, in the eighty-fifth Apostolic Canon, and in the Quinisext's ratifications are not identical, and modern Orthodox usage varies among the local churches. The source-critical detail and the range of practice are set out at [The Formation of the Canon](../../the-orthodox-scriptures/02-the-canon-of-scripture/the-formation-of-the-canon.md) and [The Wider Old Testament and the Anagignoskomena](../../the-orthodox-scriptures/02-the-canon-of-scripture/the-wider-old-testament-and-the-anagignoskomena.md); this file does not adjudicate what that collection reports.]

The Orthodox account of this is not that the Spirit dictated a list. It is that the Church, indwelt by the Spirit, recognized over time the books in which she heard her own voice — a process closer to recognition than to decision, distributed over centuries and across churches, and secured not by an act of authority but by reception. That this is the same logic by which councils are received is not a coincidence, and it is the subject of the companion file (see It Seemed Good to the Holy Spirit and to Us).

The Boundaries of the Claim

Three distinctions keep the doctrine from expanding beyond what the Church actually holds.

Inspiration is not the same as impeccability of transmission. The Church has a text with variants, and Orthodox scholarship works on them. Nothing in the doctrine of inspiration requires that every manuscript be identical, and the Church’s own liturgical text of the Psalter is the Septuagint’s, which differs from the Hebrew in numbering and often in sense (see Text, Numbering, and the Masoretic Question).

The Fathers are not inspired in the sense in which Scripture is. The Church reads the Fathers as witnesses to the mind of the Church, and she judges them: a Father may err, and several honoured Fathers hold opinions the Church has not received. The consensus of the Fathers is authoritative; no individual Father is a source of revelation (see The Consensus Patrum).

And the Church’s hymnography is not Scripture, though it is Spirit-given. The Church sings texts of great theological density composed by named poets — St. Romanos, St. John of Damascus, St. Cosmas, St. Andrew of Crete — and treats them as carrying her faith. They are received as Tradition and are subject to correction by it; when a troparion has said something the Church could not confess, it has been altered. The distinction between the canonical Scriptures and the rest of what the Spirit has given the Church is real, and the Church has maintained it while treating both as hers.

Why This Belongs to Pneumatology

Because the alternative is a Church that possesses a book and an institution, and consults them. The Orthodox claim is different and more demanding: that the Spirit who spoke through the prophets is present now in the assembly that reads them, and that Scripture, canon, council, liturgy, and the mind of the Fathers are not five authorities to be balanced but the several forms of one life. Whether that claim is coherent depends entirely on whether the Spirit is a person who acts, which is where this collection began (see The Spirit as Hypostasis).

References

Athenagoras. A Plea for the Christians 9. Trans. ANF, vol. 2.
John Chrysostom. Homilies on Genesis 2–3, 13, 17. Trans. Robert C. Hill, Fathers of the Church 74, 82, 87. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986–1992.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History V.17. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1.
Athanasius of Alexandria. Festal Letter 39 (367). Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4.
Lossky, Vladimir. “Tradition and Traditions.” In In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Stylianopoulos, Theodore G. The New Testament: An Orthodox Perspective. Vol. 1, Scripture, Tradition, Hermeneutics. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1997.
Breck, John. Scripture in Tradition: The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2001.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
Scripture: Luke 24:45; Acts 8:31; 2 Corinthians 3:14–17; 2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:21.