I pray God to bless your endeavours. Thank you for posting this article. Being a craddle Orthodox (Romanian) living in Protestant lands (Australia), I have witnessed the unfathomable mercy of God. One of my very good friends is now a former Anglican cum Presbyterian fellow, who was a teacher of Religious studies in an Australian High School. When at Uni, studying “religion”, he was struck by the oddity of the curriculum that stopped all studies of Christianity at the fourth century mark, only to resume it at the sixteenth! He started in earnest to study the history of Christianity in the gap centuries and in due time he ask to be baptized in the Orthodox Church! Keep in mind that he came from a solid background of Presbyterian missionaries in the Pacific and for a while he was involved in the works of the Anglican Church! He is the “translator” for many Orthodox Australians (craddle Orthodox, but with little knowledge, if at all, of the assumptions of the surrounding Protestant environment in which they, by necessity live and work). He is engaged in a patient work of conversion. So there is hope for Protestants!

That’s not the kind of inerrancy I’ve heard from so many Protestants, but it makes more sense. My slow journey out of fundamentalism was a bit like Bart Ehrman’s – we both lost faith because of the crazy beliefs people have tortured out of the text using their own understanding. His scholarship on NT criticism destroyed his simplistic Protestant view of the Bible. Orthodoxy would’ve saved him the psychic shock.

What about the layers of meaning that Origen and others found in the Scriptures? Can we read it non-literalistically and still be Orthodox when reading the Hebrew Bible?

The apostles were authoritative witnesses of what Christ did and taught, so we trust their writings. They were full of the Holy Spirit (“inspired”) in their teaching and writing. So what the apostles and prophets wrote, we can trust. The text of Scripture is the foundational, most central part of the whole body of faith and practice we receive.

In a lot of places, the early apostolic communities and the saints who grew up in them wrote commentaries, prayers and hymns that illumine how they read and applied the apostles’ and prophets’ writing. Where there’s early and clear consensus, that shapes our own understanding; where there isn’t (e.g. early chapters of Genesis), we still trust those passages to be authoritative and profitable for healing souls, but we can’t argue for any kind of inerrant interpretation of them.

Sometimes the original reading is irrecoverable. We use a Byzantine (of course) NT text and a family of LXX Greek texts for the OT, and where there’s variation within those text traditions, that’s fine. What matters is what the Church in all generations has done with the scriptures – how they’ve been used in practical ways to heal souyls and to limit dogmatic speculation.

It’s probably not an exclusively Orthodox observation, but inerrancy is about the text – and ultimately about the Author of the text – not about anyone’s reading of the text. Nobody would buy into the media’s artificial “Bible vs. Science” dichotomy if they weren’t married to a particular model of “verbal plenary” inspiration and an English Bible text tradition.

Hope you enjoy. Directly after reading that one, I read Becoming a True Spiritual Community, by Larry Crabb, which was an excellent follow-up. Looking at what the church COULD be, if we got past all this stuff, and could just love each other, in our brokenness. What if we could be safe with each other, rather than safe from each other? What if our desire to actually obey Christ elbowed out the religious pressure to behave like good people?
As much as Pagan Christianity opened my mind to some interesting things, Larry Crabb’s book broke my heart.

Some things I’d hope the authors note… the earliest Christians were Jews, used to worshiping in synagogues; Justin Martyr and many others described how that liturgical life developed in the early Church. And while the modern Protestant model of pastor as unitary executive is foreign to pretty much all Christianity before the Radical Reformation, we do have accounts from first-century witnesses like Ignatius who put the New Testament descriptions of servant leadership into context for us. How did first-century Christians worship, order and grow their communities, and so on? It’s not hard to ask them – they were pretty prolific writers :-)

One place where I expect I’ll differ from Viola and Barna is on the role of Scripture. The New Testament was written to churches that were already functioning (or dysfunctioning) and the recipients of the Epistles only needed the apostles’ corrective notes. The NT doesn’t provide a blueprint for creating (or re-creating) the Church; it’s not meant to, since the NT comes after the Church already existed.

Anyway, I’ll give The Pagan Church a serious read and see about writing a review. Thanks for the recommendation!

This piece does have an unfortunate “us vs. them” attitude though, which I would imagine makes the reading difficult for those Protestants feeling slapped in face by the content, let alone the content’s presentation.