The following is for those interested in exploring the differences between Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism in an honest and non-polemical manner, particularly as it relates to foundations of faith and authority. I hope you will enjoy and I would be interested in your comments.
Catholicism- Reason and Revelation (scripture and tradition)
1) Thomas Aquinas- CONTRA GENTILES, BOOK ONE: GOD
2) Catholic Encyclopedia
Protestantism- Sola Scriptura
1) Epitome of the Formula of Concord
http://bookofconcord.org/fc-ep.php
2) Westminster Confession
Orthodoxy- The Ecclesial Event
and the Eucharist in turn establishes our opinion.”
IRENÆUS, Against the Heretics: Book IV, Chapter XVIII
Christos Yannaras: Concerning “Source” and “Sources”
Elements of Faith, T&T Clark (Chapter 7)
In radically disputing the objectified “authority” of the papacy, Protestantism proposed the Bible as the exclusive source of Christian truth. The Bible contains the complete truth of the revelation of God in an objective and definitive way. It is a text which makes the word of God directly accessible to us as an objective given without our needing supplements to revelation or intermediaries for faith and the reception of the divine word. The Roman Catholic “counter-Reformation” objected to this absolutization of the authority of the Bible by Protestantism, proposing that there are two sources of Christian truth: the Holy Scripture and the Sacred Tradition. The “college of bishops” expresses and administers the Sacred Tradition, but only by means of its “infallible” head, the Pope of Rome, who is defined as the “visible head of the whole Church” (visibile caput totius Ecclesiae). By his sanction, the ecclesial Tradition acquires genuine authority. All those ways by which the revelation of God is formulated and interpreted constitute this Tradition: Ecumenical Councils, opinions of the Fathers, liturgical practice, creeds, and rules of life.
Whether the Scripture alone or the Scripture together with the Tradition, it is still a matter of the source or the sources by which the individual derives the truth “from the object”; it is a matter, that is, of the need for objective authority, the need of western man to be assured individually that he possesses an indisputable truth— even if this assurance is achieved by his submission to an idolized schematization of the “infallible”, to the authority of supernatural revelation, or to the authority of science, to the divine inspiration of the texts of Scripture or, later, of the texts of Marx or any other ideology, to the “infallibility” of the Vatican or to the “infallibility” of Moscow or any other “see”. The history of western man is a dialectic of submission and rebellion, where rebellion means in each case the choice of a different authority, consequently of a new submission, while the goal remains always the same— individual security, the protection of individual certainty about the truth to be believed.
Aside from the blood which was spilled (by the “holy wars”, the “Holy Inquisition”, the tortures which were established as an “investigative method in the trials of heretics”), enough ink was spilled to defend the authority of the Vatican, the “infallibility” of the Pope. Blatant forgeries of history were enlisted: that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome, that he exercised a primacy of power over the other Apostles and subsequently bestowed this power to his successor Bishops of Rome, that Constantine the Great assigned the government of the western Roman state to the Pope with imperial rights (“pseudo-Donation of Constantine”), that very ancient canons treated the Pope as the supreme head of ecclesiastical— and also of political— power (“pseudo-Isidorean Decretals”), that Cyprian already in the 3rd century preached the papal primacy (“pseudo-Cyprian writings”) and many others. But ample ink has been spent as well by Protestants to defend the inspiration of Scripture, the immediate revelation of God within the biblical text alone. It has been maintained that the writers of the Bible were simply passive instruments without their affecting the writing, even by influencing the style or punctuation of the texts; they merely lent their hand writing mechanically what the Holy Spirit dictated to them. And this because only such a rational inspiration could assure supernaturally and without contradiction the infallible authority of the texts and give to the faithful the certainty that the Bible could possess the truth.
Within such a climate, scientific dispute about the historical credibility of the Scriptures or the supports for the Tradition took away the foundation of “faith”, that is, of submission to authority. Western man had to choose between atheism and the emasculation of his reason, or to accept compromise with a censored version of the gospel narrative, stripped of every “supernatural” element, suitable only for morally uplifting use, or even for political exploitation.
The life and practice of the undivided Church, like its historical extension in the theology and spirituality of the Orthodox Churches, knew neither one nor two sources of infallible authority. This does not mean that it disregarded or underestimated the meaning and the authority of the Holy Scripture and the Sacred Tradition. But it refused to separate truth from the realization and experience of the truth, the realization of life “in truth”. Before any formulation, the truth is an event: the historical realization of the triadic mode of “real life”. It is the body of Christ, the Church. The event of life which is the Church precedes both Scripture and Tradition— as his divine-human hypostasis precedes the teaching of Christ, and without this hypostasis of life the gospel word remains, perhaps, a wonderful teaching, but unable to save the human race from death.
Scripture and Tradition define the truth and revelation of God to people without exhausting them. The words “truth” and “revelation” do not mean for the Church some “supplement” to our knowledge unattainable by our scientific or other reasonable method; they are not some “articles of faith” which we must accept without contradiction because they have been given to us in a “supernatural” way, such that no one would dare to dispute them. For the Church, truth and revelation refer to God who reveals himself to people as “real life”. And life cannot be revealed with concepts “about” life, but only as an existential realization accessible to man. God’s mode of being incarnate in an historical person— in the Person of Christ who realizes life free from death— is the truth and revelation of life. Christ is “the way and the truth and the life” (Jn 14.6) and remains “yesterday and today the same” (Heb 13.8) as the way and mode of existence of his body, the Church. We know, consequently, the truth and revelation not simply by reading the Holy Scripture and the “credal” texts of the Tradition, but we verify these texts with our participation in the Church’s mode of existence, in the way of the triadic prototype of life. We transform our individual approach to the texts into an ecclesial communion of the truth which the texts mark out. Outside of this communion, the ecclesial mode of existence, there exists neither truth nor revelation, but only some religious knowledge better or worse than other analogous knowledge. In order for us to know the word of the Holy Scripture, we must study it incarnate in the ecclesial Body of Christ, in the persons of the saints, of our spiritual fathers who “give us birth” into the life of the ecclesial communion.
The reading of the Holy Scripture in the undivided Church and afterwards in the Orthodox Church constitutes an act of worship: that is, an act of communion of the ecclesial body. We communicate with the word of the Apostles who became 11 witnesses” and “observers” of the “manifestation” of God (they heard and saw and handled his historical revelation), we communicate with them by reading their texts, not as historical information, but accepting their testimony as a confirmation of life and unity of the Eucharistic body. Every Eucharistic gathering is also a revelation in practice of the gospel word; it is the realization of the life of people, living and dead, according to the model of the triadic unity, beyond corruption and death. This is the Gospel, which we celebrate every time in the Eucharist by accepting the reading of the word of the Apostles as confirmation of our direct experience there.
The gospel word of the Apostles is a word and revelation of Christ, not because Christ dictated it to them by some form of mechanical “inspiration”, but because the Apostles wrote down the relationship of life which they realized with Him, the same relationship of life which constitutes the Eucharistic body in unity. They wrote down the word and revelation of this relationship which means as much the events or “signs” which reveal the mode of existence which this union renews as the didactic indication of the limits and presuppositions of God’s union with man.
When the Church in the Eucharist lives the miracle of life freed from every natural necessity, then the miracles of Christ which the gospel narrative recounts are nothing but particular manifestations and details of this miracle itself. If the initial miracle is true— if the created can exist in the mode of the uncreated— then no other miracle is impossible, then “ the limits of nature are conquered”, the limitations and necessities which govern the created are lifted. Then “the blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, deaf hear, the dead are raised” (Lk 7.22). For the Church, the gospel narratives of the miracles of Christ were never apologetic proofs which coerce reason and demand faith in the divine-humanity of Christ. But they were “signs”, signs which point to that event which the Church experiences every time “in the breaking of the bread”: Life becomes imperishable and the mortal immortal in a manner “most becoming of God”.
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