On Orthodoxy East and West

Despite the fact that Scripture never sanctions any interpretive lenses other than itself (see Is 29:13; Matt 15:4-9; 2 Tim 3:16), the Orthodox point of view does call for further reflection about the nature of the New Testament as tradition in its own right. Simply put, the difference here is that Protestants understand the New Testament as unique apostolic tradition which does not begin a Story; it finishes it. The apostles were Jesus’ uniquely commissioned emissaries to establish and build the Church (Matt 16:19; Eph 2:20), but their witness is not merely to Jesus. Theirs is a witness to Jesus as the culmination of God’s kingdom plan that has been unfolding since Eden’s garden (Eph 1:9-11). This is the biblical, apostolic tradition that makes Protestants not look forward from the apostles to the Church’s tradition for interpretive norms to understand Jesus as much as it makes them look back to the Old Testament’s theological norms, promises and life Jesus satisfies. In the Old Testament are the powerful, wide, and rich motifs of covenant and kingdom that in Christ give the necessary contours to the life the Church is to model. This is the tradition the apostles bore witness to and so founded the Church. Therefore, to say that the Church gave us the Bible is for Protestants putting the cart before the horse, a confusion of categories. It confuses the Truth itself with a particular medium of the Truth. It is something like saying that Jesus did not exist before his story was put to papyrus by the Gospel writers.

The apostolic, biblical tradition established in the Old Testament is also why the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura sees no lack of information in the New Testament that the Church through its Tradition must shore up. It is true the NT contains precious little on the forms of the apostolic worship. But maybe this is the whole point! Maybe it is precisely the point of the Church’s coming to maturity from the Old Covenant to the New that fixed and detailed liturgical forms become of secondary importance. For the believer who is a temple filled with the Spirit of the living God himself (1 Cor 6:19) response to God is more principled than codified, as Jesus himself said (John 4:22-24). It is inexorably charismatic, full of “body life,” and Christ-centered. And this we do see in the New Testament church with abundance (1 Cor 14:26)! So rather than rue a lack of form in the NT, Protestants welcome this phenomenon as yet another harbinger of the fullness the believer enjoys in the Holy Spirit. Longing for the formalism of the Old Testament is longing for a bygone day. It is an unfortunate re-Judaization of the New Covenant that also crept into the early patristic Tradition, as church historian Jaroslav Pelikan points out.⁹

A final clarion of the Reformation denied in the Orthodox Tradition is salvation sola fidei, by faith alone. Here again Protestants see more of the all-too-human side of the early patristic tradition and not enough of the biblical, apostolic one. “I am being saved” is how Orthodox answer the old Gospel query, “Brother, are you saved?” In this he reflects the fundamental future orientation of salvation in the Orthodox Story. Salvation ultimately is the completion of the process of theosis—a matter of becoming like God (in his moral characteristics) and fellowshipping with him forever. Orthodox now walk the road of “becoming saved” by faithful participation in the life of the Eucharistic community, the Church. For Protestants this amounts to a collapsing of justification into sanctification because it neglects the past tense of the believer’s salvation.¹⁰ Paul addresses the past tense and its relation to faith alone very clearly in his letter to the Romans. The first five chapters establish that peace with God, reconciliation, and justification became the believer’s possession at the moment of faith. Note the past tense orientation to Paul’s words:

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God …. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation (Romans 5;1-2, 9-11 ESV).

So the believer can rejoice now because she has confidence of having already escaped God’s wrath by faith in Christ. She is accepted, reconciled, justified, and at peace with God because the hammer’s blow for her sin was taken at the cross, and it was taken by Jesus. This is indeed Good News.

Only armed with the confidence in the new status gained by faith alone in chapters one through five can discussion of the daily process of “Christianizing the Christian” or sanctification properly begin, as it does in Romans chapter six. This is how our telling of the Story must go, too. Salvation’s present and future for us are always couched in salvation’s past. Otherwise the good works that are supposed to flow from new life subtly become works that create new life, faith in Christ fades into faith in Church administered rites, other “means of grace” supplied by Church Tradition gain a sense of urgency that is absent from the New Testament, and the assurance of salvation remains elusive. Biblical scholar N. T. Wright puts his finger on the core of it all, however, when he writes “where confidence before God is founded upon Christ’s work alone, there is no need for sacramentals, devotion to Mary, rote prayers, and sacramentalism in general.” ¹¹

Wright’s words may set us back on our heels a bit for their bluntness, but that is what grace does. It’s a blow square in the face of the way we naturally operate. In the fullness of the New Covenant revelation of the apostles’ witness no human-shaped tradition, Orthodox or Protestant, holds any weight. May God give us grace that in our telling of the Great Story to our generation we listen and find the profit that we should from one another, but all hold fast to the witness of grace and truth our Lord delivered from the Father in heaven. “He who comes from above is above all” (John 3:31).

Mark Saucy (MDiv, Talbot; PhD, Fuller) has been Professor of Theology at Talbot since 2007, and serves as Director of Talbot’s extension program at Kyiv Theological Seminary. Before coming to Talbot he and his family served in theological education for thirteen years with SEN D International in Kyiv, Ukraine. Living in Ukraine stimulated Mark’s interest in patristics and comparative theology with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Mark lives in Whittier with his wife Bonnie and two sons, Ben and Josh, and enjoys the Sierra Nevadas and cycling.