Kickin’ it with the OSB

As the web-log-o-sphere (at least the part that I frequent) is humming with feelings from discontent and worse to glee concerning the “Orthodox Study Bible,” I figured I might as well throw caution to the wind and contribute some comments. Having always been a fan of a little Bible study, when I started exploring the [...]

Read Full Post »

Name your favorite modern master of Biblical exegesis

…giving themselves up to the distorted meaning of allegory, have undertaken to give a majesty of their own invention to Scripture. It is to believe themselves wiser than the Holy Spirit, and to bring forth their own ideas under a pretext of exegesis. Let us hear Scripture as it has been written.St. Basil the Great

Read Full Post »

Christ among us

Churches, shrines, chapels, ikons, candles, processions, priests, bells, monasteries, travelling preachers, every day’s saints, fast seasons—everything is the repetition of the same idea, namely, that Christ is the ruler of life and we are His followers. Christ must be expressed everywhere, indoors and outdoors. Many Englishmen have remarked that the Bible is read very seldom [...]

Read Full Post »

Delivered unto us

Holy Scripture, then, is not an objectified ‘source’ of Christian truth and revelation, like the ‘theoretical’ texts which outline the impersonal and objective principles of an ideology. Nor are their two sources of objective authority, Scripture and Tradition, as Roman Catholic rationalism would have it. Prior to any written formulation, Christian faith and truth is [...]

Read Full Post »

The dawn of a better life

…I also loved to read the Holy Scriptures; and when, toward the end of the Old Testament, in its concluding chapters, I somehow had a sense of emptiness and peace, and the strict Romans were already present, a feeling of barely audible, barely noticeable, sweet expectation stirred within me. The dawn of a better life [...]

Read Full Post »

Self-Interpreting Scripture?

Spiritual knowledge is like a house built in the midst of Greek and worldly wisdom, in which house, like a tightly locked trunk, there is the knowledge of the divine Scriptures, and the unutterable treasure hidden in this knowledge of the Scriptures, that is, Divine grace. Those who enter this house cannot see this treasure [...]

Read Full Post »

The self interpreting Bible?

The interpretative understanding of the New Testament for Orthodoxy is not just a matter of using human logical capabilities. The interpretation presupposes first and foremost the correct understanding of the Church, which is the ecclesiological base upon which we build the interpretation of the texts, fulfilled with an ecclesiastical ethos and infused by the liturgical [...]

Read Full Post »

On the misinterpretation of Holy Writ

When, however, sociologist or ethicists, without having the Holy Spirit, study the works of the Fathers, they divide and separate them. And I think that this isolated, detached use of quotations from the Fathers-out of the ascetic spirit-in order to support our impure and human-centered thoughts is the greatest heresy. When we take the Fathers [...]

Read Full Post »

The Doctor is in

In the hands of neurologically sick people the Bible becomes a source of “uncontrollable fantasies.” And indeed religion is … most dangerous. Instead of being a manual for the cure of the sickness of religion the Bible becomes a book for the propagation of the sickness of religion. Fr. John Romanides

Read Full Post »