They’re not different in the way you might think. Scripture isn’t one thing and Tradition another thing sitting beside it. Scripture is part of Holy Tradition.
Think of it this way. Holy Tradition is the entire living faith of the Church, everything the Apostles handed down and everything the Church has lived and breathed for two thousand years under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That includes the Bible, but it also includes the Divine Liturgy, the teachings of the Church Fathers, the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils, the Creed we say every Sunday, and the whole life of prayer and worship that makes us Orthodox. Scripture is the written, canonical heart of that Tradition, but it was never meant to stand alone.
If you grew up Baptist or at one of the big non-denominational churches around Beaumont, this probably sounds strange. You learned that the Bible is the sole authority, sola scriptura. Just Scripture, nothing else needed. But here’s the problem with that: somebody had to decide which books belonged in the Bible in the first place. Somebody had to preserve those texts, copy them, translate them, and interpret them. That somebody was the Church, living in Tradition, guided by the Holy Spirit. The Bible didn’t fall out of the sky with a table of contents.
The Orthodox Church believes Scripture must be read with the mind of the Church. We don’t approach the Bible as isolated individuals trying to figure out what it means on our own. We read it inside the community that wrote it, canonized it, and has been interpreting it for two millennia. That’s what Tradition does, it gives us the context, the interpretive lenses, the guardrails that keep us from wandering into heresy or private opinion masquerading as biblical truth.
Fr. Thomas Hopko used to say that Tradition is the life of the Holy Spirit within the Church, and Scripture is contained within that Tradition. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware put it even more bluntly: Scripture belongs to the Church, not the Church to the Bible. That’s not disrespecting Scripture. It’s recognizing that God gave us Scripture through the Church and gave us the Church to understand Scripture.
So what exactly is in Holy Tradition besides the written Bible? The liturgical worship we celebrate every Sunday. The writings of saints like St. Athanasius, St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom. The Nicene Creed. The canons of the Seven Ecumenical Councils. Icons. The sacraments. The apostolic succession of bishops. The rule of prayer and fasting. All of this together forms one coherent whole, one Tradition, and you can’t pull Scripture out of that whole and expect it to function properly on its own.
Here’s a concrete example. When we read John 6 and Jesus says, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you,” Tradition tells us He means it literally, that’s why we receive His actual Body and Blood in the Eucharist. We don’t need to guess or debate. The Church Fathers, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the unbroken practice of the Church for two thousand years, all of Tradition, interprets that passage for us. Scripture and Tradition work together, or rather, Scripture works within Tradition the way your heart works within your body.
This isn’t some abstract theological point. It matters when you’re standing in the nave at St. Michael’s on a Sunday morning. You hear the Gospel read, you smell the incense, you see the icons, you receive Communion, you say the same Creed Christians have said since 381. All of that is Tradition interpreting and embodying Scripture right in front of you. The Bible isn’t locked in a glass case. It’s alive in the Church’s worship and life.
If this feels like a big shift from what you grew up with, that’s normal. Most people coming into Orthodoxy from Protestant backgrounds wrestle with this. We’re taught to trust the Bible but not the Church, as if those were two separate things. Orthodoxy says they’re inseparable. The Church gave you the Bible. The Church preserved it through persecutions and heresies and schisms. And the Church, by the Holy Spirit, still reads it and lives it today.
You don’t have to figure out the Bible alone. You have two thousand years of saints and councils and liturgical prayer to help you. That’s not a burden. It’s a gift.
