Author: His Eminence John Zizioulas Metropolitan of Pergamum
The problem of hermeneutics is of crucial importance not only for dogmas, but also for the Bible itself. I would say that in essence it is the same problem. Just as the Bible is a dead letter without interpretation, so dogmas petrify and become museum, archaeological objects that we only preserve and describe if we do not proceed to their interpretation. It can be said that dogmas are actually an interpretation of the Bible.
The interpretation of dogmas or the Bible consists of two parts:
A) An attempt to understand correctly (and not anachronistically – which is difficult, good historians are needed) the historical reality in which the dogma (or the relevant Scripture) was formulated. This implies answering the questions:
• What problems did the Church face in this particular historical time.
• By what means did it deal with these problems: what kind of written or oral tradition did it have at its disposal, since each council takes into account the previous tradition;
• What was the vocabulary and concepts used by the cultural environment of the era. For example, in the 4th century the term “consubstantial” was used, which is not used in the New Testament, while the 14th century had other concepts.
• What kind of experience (from worship, asceticism, etc.) did the Church have (for example, the testimony in the New Testament, the icons of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, hesychasm, etc.)
All these things must be taken into account in order to form knowledge of the historical environment. Without this precise historical basis, any interpretation is risky. Just as one cannot interpret Candle. Scripture without first conducting an accurate and objective, as far as possible, study of the historical environment, so it is with dogmas. It is necessary to see what were the problems that led to the formulation of a given dogma, what philosophical and philological material the Fathers worked with, and what experience (liturgical, ascetic, etc.) gave rise to the formulation of the dogma. A good dogmatist must also be a good historian.
B) The attempt to identify and express contemporary problems that require interpretation, namely:
• Any new heresies or new questions of concern to man, always of a fundamental nature (for example, today’s “Jehovah’s Witnesses”, etc., but also technology, ecology, etc.).
• What is the vocabulary and categories that modernity uses (we have seen that the Fathers were also contemporaries of their time and did not fixate on the letter of the New Testament, but added the term “consubstantial”).
• The liturgical and ascetic life of the Church (which in essence cannot differ from the old, but can have different forms and accents, for example, martyrdom, mental-heart prayer in the form practiced in hesychasm, the influence of monasticism on the “secular” services of the Church – the Hours, etc. – and the gradual separation, incomplete and inconsistent, of the “secular” from the monastic worship – all this shows changes in the accents in the liturgical and ascetic experience, which cannot but affect the interpretation of dogmas.
In order to make a good interpretation, the dogmatist must be not only a good historian, but also a good philosopher (i.e., with a philosophical thinking and knowledge of contemporary philosophy), and also to have a pastoral attitude (to love man, to be considerate of his problems, etc.). He must also know the liturgical experience and life of the Church and its canonical structure, because these elements also express the dogmatic faith of the Church.
All this, of course, cannot be accomplished by one person in an original way – i.e., to be an original researcher of all this – but he must, if he wants to be a good dogmatist, keep up with the latest positions of experts in these fields.
What is the relationship of dogmas to Holy Scripture?
The relationship of dogmas to Scripture is hermeneutical. The problem posed by Western theologians after the Reformation, i.e. whether we have one or two “sources of divine revelation,” as they were called, reflects the specific problem between Roman Catholics and Protestants due to the fact that the latter rejected the authority of Church Tradition and introduced the principle of “sola scriptura.”
The problem was introduced into Orthodox theology by the so-called “Orthodox confessions of faith” of the 16th century. Thus, depending on the divergence of the “confession” (Mogila – Roman Catholicism, Cyril Lucaris – Calvinism, etc.), an answer was given and is still given by the Orthodox. The West was driven to this approach mainly for two reasons that do not apply to Orthodoxy:
• The West lacks the idea that revelation is always personal and never logical or rational. God reveals himself to Abraham, Moses, Paul, the fathers, etc. Therefore, the question of a new revelation or a supplement to revelation, or even an increase in revelation, as has been posed in the West (cf. Newman) and has even been expressed by Orthodox theologians, never arises.
• In the West, the objectification of Scripture and the Church, and so one begins to speak of “repositories” of truth. But in the Orthodox tradition, both Scripture and the Church are testimonies to the ways of experiencing truth, not “minds” that conceive, record, and transmit truths. This is so because truth in the Orthodox tradition is not a matter of objective logical propositions, but of attitudes and relationships (personal) between God, man, and the world. For example, I do not know the truth when I intellectually know and ultimately accept that God is triune, but when I myself am existentially involved in the triune existence of God, through which all existence is made sense—mine and the world’s. Thus, an ordinary woman who is a true member of the Church “knows” the dogma of the Trinity. The same applies to Christology, etc.
Therefore, if the Revelation of God is a matter of personal experience and of the wider participation of man in a network of relationships with God, with others and with the world, which sheds new light on the whole of existence, then the Scriptures which bear witness to this revelation are as complete in terms of the content of the Revelation as any other form of such Revelation since the formation of the biblical canon. And here the following clarifications must be added immediately:
Although in all cases of such personal and existential Revelations we are talking about the Revelation of the same God, the ways of these Revelations are different. For example, on Mount Sinai we have the revelation of Moses of the same God who reveals himself to us in Christ, but not in the same way. In Christ we have the possibility not only of seeing or hearing God, but also of approaching Him, of touching Him, of feeling Him, of communicating with Him physically. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life.” (1 John 1:1 ).
The epiphanies in the Old Testament, and therefore those in the New Testament, although they have the same content, are not revealed in the same way. And since, as we have said, Revelation is not a matter of objective knowledge but of personal relationship, the manner of Revelation is essential because it introduces new relationships, that is, new ways of being. (The question of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments is historically very old in patristic theology and was resolved mainly through the theology of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who significantly corrected the teaching of St. Martyr Justin the Philosopher about the Logos. Later, this relationship was formulated perfectly by St. Maximus the Confessor with the principle: “The things of the Old Testament are a shadow, the things of the New Testament are an image, and those of the future state are the truth”).
Therefore, in the person of Christ we have a unique way of Revelation, which is characterized by communion through the senses (sight, touch, taste, etc.), according to what is said in 1 John 1:1: “and our hands have handled it,” and not simply through the mind or heart. Therefore, this way is defined by the Fathers as the highest and most complete. Nothing higher than the Christophany can reveal God: “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
Thus the New Testament, which describes the experience of people who had this bodily communion with God (“what we have seen and our hands have touched”), makes sense of both the epiphanies in the Old Testament and those after the era of the Scriptures. The Fathers, such as Irenaeus and others, claim that after the incarnation of the Word we have a fuller and new form of revelation compared to the Old Testament.
This superiority, as far as the disciples of Christ are concerned, is due to the tangible and bodily communion with Him. As far as the later Church is concerned, it is realized through the Sacraments and especially through the Divine Eucharist, which preserves this bodily communion (see Ignatius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Alexandria, etc.).
Whoever worthily participates in the Divine Eucharist “sees” God better than Moses.
Thus the entire life of the Church draws the revelation of God from the historical person of Christ, as attested in the New Testament. Therefore, the New Testament has the meaning of a supreme and primary dogmatic teaching, in relation to which all other modes of revelation (including the Old Testament and later dogmas) represent its interpretations – in the deepest existential sense of interpretation, as we defined it above, that is, ways of experiencing being as a new relationship between God, man and the world.
Conclusion: Neither the interpretation of the Old Testament nor that of the dogmas can bypass the historical fact and the person of Christ, because this would mean introducing a new, fuller and higher mode of revelation than that of Christ. From this many specific conclusions follow, but I note the following:
A. The Divine Eucharist, as the highest tangible relationship (and therefore knowledge) with God, remains the perfect form of revelation in the personal, existential sense (“and our hands have handled it”).
B. The vision of God (theoptia), whether through holy icons or through ascetic experience, is always a contemplation of the uncreated light in Christ and never independent of Him – that is, it is essentially a Christophany. (This must be emphasized in order to avoid misunderstandings, which, unfortunately, are increasingly increasing.) It is enough to cite as proof the argument of Saints John Damascene and Theodore the Studite and the others for icon veneration, that the incarnation is what requires icons to be venerated as forms of God’s revelation, as well as the hesychasts, who understand the uncreated light as the Tabor light – i.e. the radiance of the historical body of Christ.
Returning to the relationship between Scripture and dogmas, we note that every dogma, regardless of the topic it refers to (even the Holy Trinity), is essentially an explanation of the reality of Christ, through which God reveals himself as an experienced existential relationship, that is, truth. It is no coincidence, for example, that the First Ecumenical Council, although it laid the foundations of triadic theology, did so on the occasion and on the basis of the truth about the Person of Christ – the same applies to all subsequent Ecumenical Councils, even when they considered different topics.
This means that the apostolic experience, attested to in the Bible, constitutes the first and fundamental dogmatic teaching, which the other dogmas only interpret. Consequently, no dogma can contradict this experience, but only clarify it. Apostolic experience and tradition are of decisive importance for dogma.
Thus, a continuity of dogmas arises, a relationship between them, which can be likened to icons of Christ painted by different people in different eras and with the tools that each era provides. This relationship has both an external dimension – fidelity to the previous tradition and ultimately to the Bible, and an internal dimension – preservation of the same existential relationship between God, man and the world that was realized and revealed in Christ.
Excerpt from: Lectures on Christian Dogmatics {Μαθήματα Χριστιανικής Δογματικής (1984-1985)}.
We acknowledge The European Times for the information.
