A question worth asking slowly
Someone raised in an evangelical or non-denominational church who begins attending an Orthodox liturgy usually arrives at the same question within a month or two. The Bible is carried in procession, censed, kissed and read aloud at every service. Standing alongside it, however, are councils, canons, Fathers and a great deal of inherited custom. Where does authority actually sit? The question is a fair one and it deserves a straight answer rather than a slogan.
Two answers are on offer. One is the Reformation principle usually called sola scriptura. The other is the Orthodox account of Holy Tradition. They are genuinely different, and this article will not pretend otherwise. But the first has to be stated the way its own best defenders state it, because a position knocked over in caricature has not been engaged at all.
What sola scriptura actually claims
The principle holds that Holy Scripture is the final and sufficient rule for Christian faith and life: everything necessary for salvation is either set down plainly in Scripture or may be drawn from it by sound and necessary reasoning. The Westminster Confession of 1646 puts it in close to those words in its opening chapter. No council, bishop or custom may bind the conscience as Scripture binds it.
Notice what the claim is careful to say. It concerns the last word, not the only word. Scripture is the court of final appeal; other authorities may teach, advise and persuade, and they are expected to do so. What they may not do is overrule the text to which they are all themselves answerable.
The passages most often cited are 2 Timothy 3:16-17, where Scripture is called God-breathed and profitable so that the man of God may be complete and equipped for every good work; Acts 17:11, where the Bereans search the Scriptures daily to test what the apostle has told them; and the Lord's rebuke in Mark 7 to those who set aside the commandment of God in order to keep a custom of their own. These are serious texts and no Orthodox reader should wave them away.
Why it was formulated when it was
The principle did not arrive out of nowhere. It was hammered out in a Western Church that had lived through the papal schism that began in 1378, when rival claimants excommunicated one another and for a period three men each called himself pope; through a long argument about whether a council stood above a pope; and through a traffic in indulgences that struck many sincere people as the sale of what cannot be sold.
In that setting, asking where the court of appeal lies is not an academic exercise. If the visible authorities contradict each other, and some of them are plainly for hire, a Christian needs ground to stand on that is not simply the assertion of whoever holds office this year. The Reformers found that ground in the text of Scripture. Whatever one finally concludes about their answer, the pressure that produced it was real and the men who felt it were not frivolous.
What its best defenders do not mean
It is often assumed that sola scriptura means the Bible and nothing else, interpreted by me. Its more careful exponents have consistently denied this. The historian Heiko Oberman distinguished two late-medieval attitudes to tradition, one treating Scripture and tradition as a single stream and the other as two independent sources, and argued that the Reformers meant to recover the first rather than to abolish tradition as such.
Keith Mathison's study The Shape of Sola Scriptura, published in 2001, built on that distinction and argued at length that individualist biblicism, in which every believer is his own final court, is a later mutation rather than the Reformation position. Calvin quotes Augustine on almost every page of the Institutes. The Lutheran confessions appeal to the Fathers. Reformed and Anglican churches confess the Nicene Creed. Most Protestant readers of this page received their doctrine of the Trinity from a fourth-century council and will say so if asked.
So the disagreement is narrower and sharper than it first appears. It is not tradition against no tradition. It is a disagreement about what tradition is, and about whether the Church's handing-on of the faith is itself part of how God gives that faith, or only a record of a gift completed elsewhere.
What Orthodox Christians mean by Tradition
Tradition, in Orthodox usage, is not a shelf of old opinions. The word renders the Greek paradosis, a handing-over. What is handed over is the whole life of the Church as the Holy Spirit lives in her: the Scriptures, the creed, the councils, the liturgy, the prayers, the icons, the fasts, the lives of the saints, and the way in which all of these are understood together.
St Paul uses the word without embarrassment. “So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15, RSV). Spoken teaching and written teaching sit in one sentence, under one verb, with no hint that the second has replaced the first. The Orthodox Church has never found a reason to separate them.
Writing in the 370s, St Basil the Great made the same point with a list of examples. In On the Holy Spirit he asks who taught us in writing to sign ourselves with the cross, to turn east at prayer, to bless the water of baptism and the oil of chrismation, to baptise with three immersions. His answer is that these things reach us from the unwritten teaching of the apostles, and that to discard everything lacking written warrant would injure the Gospel in its very vitals.
Scripture as the written heart, not a rival
None of this demotes the Bible. In the Orthodox account Scripture is not one authority among several jostling for position; it is the written heart of the whole. Nothing else in Tradition may contradict it, and everything else exists to carry it, guard it and open it. The Gospel book rests on the altar. It is carried in procession, censed and kissed. No canon and no custom is treated that way.
The other half of the picture is 1 Timothy 3:15, where the apostle tells Timothy how to behave “in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (RSV; the King James has “the pillar and ground of the truth”). That image is architectural. The Church is what holds the truth up where it can be seen. Read this way, Scripture and Church are not competitors but one gift in two aspects: a book that came out of a worshipping community and is still read inside it.
Which is why Orthodoxy has never developed anything resembling an office that can issue new doctrine. Tradition, as Orthodox Christians understand it, has no power to add; its entire claim is to have kept. When the Seventh Ecumenical Council defended icons in 787, the argument was not that a fresh insight had arrived but that the practice was as old as the faith and followed from the Incarnation.
The honest worry: does tradition become a licence?
Here is the objection, and it is a good one. If the Church may appeal to unwritten apostolic teaching, what stops anything at all from being introduced under that heading a thousand years later and declared ancient? The Reformers believed they had watched exactly this happen, and they built their principle to prevent its happening again. A reader who raises this is not being awkward. He is being careful, and the Orthodox answer had better be a real one.
Tradition, in the Orthodox account, is not a mechanism for adding but a test for recognising, and it is a demanding test. St Vincent of Lérins, writing in Gaul in 434, gave the rule that is still quoted: hold the faith “which has been believed everywhere, always, by all”, which he unpacked as universality, antiquity and consent. A teaching that cannot show all three has not shown itself to be Tradition, whatever its age and whoever its champions.
Orthodoxy also distinguishes sharply between Holy Tradition and local custom, and the Fathers were blunter about bad custom than many of their modern admirers. A phrase associated with St Cyprian of Carthage runs that custom without truth is simply error grown old. Usages come and go: a Greek parish and a Russian parish in the same city will differ in a dozen visible ways without either supposing that the faith is at stake.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, an American convert raised in a Protestant family, warned about the same danger from inside. Introducing the life of St Paisius Velichkovsky, he described Christians who follow an unexamined custom and absorb whatever has come down to them without ever asking where it came from.
He counted that as a serious danger rather than a small one, and his prescription was a return to the sources, Scripture and the Fathers, rather than an appeal to whatever people happen to be doing. That instinct is not far from the one the Reformers were acting on. The two accounts differ over where each expects to find the sources still intact.
The followers of unenlightened custom are themselves innocent; they merely accept what has been 'handed down' to them.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, Introduction to Blessed Paisius Velichkovsky: The Man Behind the Philokalia (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994 [1976])
Where the two accounts genuinely part
They part over one question: whether the Church that received and recognised the Scriptures can be trusted as their keeper and interpreter. Sola scriptura answers that she cannot be trusted finally, because she has erred and may err again, and that the text must therefore stand over her. Orthodoxy answers that Christ promised the Spirit would guide her into all truth, and that the promise was never made conditional on her officers behaving well in any given century.
Each answer carries a cost, and both sides know it. The Orthodox position asks a great deal of trust in a visible community full of sinners at every level, and Orthodox Christians have given the world ample reason to ask hard questions about that. The other position has to account for sincere readers of one sufficient text reaching incompatible conclusions about baptism, the Lord's Supper and the ordering of the Church. Thoughtful Protestants have wrestled with that difficulty honestly for four centuries. Neither problem is a debating point; each is a real weight.
State the difference plainly and it stops being frightening. Orthodoxy does not hold that Scripture is insufficient, and Protestantism does not hold that history is worthless. The parting is over the standing of the Church herself, and everything else follows from that.
A door left open
Nothing written here is meant to close a conversation. Fr. Seraphim held the traditional Orthodox conviction that the Church is one and that her sacraments are given within her; he said so plainly and it would be dishonest to soften it. He also refused, firmly and repeatedly, to pronounce on where any particular person outside the Orthodox Church stands before God, and he thought that when others fail to see Orthodoxy some of the fault lies closer to home.
In a letter of November 1980 to an enquirer who had asked whether she might go on calling her Protestant and Catholic family Christians, he passed on a formulation he credited to Fr. Dimitry Dudko: that we should regard the non-Orthodox as people to whom Orthodoxy has not yet been revealed, as people who are potentially Orthodox. That is the sentence this parish would rather end on than any argument.
If you have read this far and disagree, you are welcome at the Sunday liturgy in Kovan all the same, and welcome to bring the disagreement with you. The Gospel is read aloud in the middle of the church, facing the people, before anything is said about it. You can watch what the Orthodox actually do with their Bible and judge from there.
perhaps it is our fault for not living and teaching the Orthodox Faith in a way they can understand
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works (St. Herman Press, 2003), ch. 84