No. We don’t.
Orthodox Christians love the Bible. We read it in every service. We chant the Psalms, proclaim the Gospels, and structure our entire liturgical year around the Scriptures. But we don’t believe in sola scriptura, the idea that the Bible alone is the sole authority for Christian faith and practice. That’s a Protestant doctrine from the Reformation, and it’s foreign to the way the Church has always understood Scripture.
Here’s the thing: the Bible didn’t fall from heaven with a table of contents. The Church gave us the Bible. The early Christians lived and worshiped for decades before the New Testament was even finished being written. They baptized, celebrated the Eucharist, ordained bishops, and died as martyrs, all before anyone had compiled the 27 books we now call the New Testament. When disputes arose about which books were genuinely apostolic and which were forgeries, the Church decided. Councils met. Bishops compared notes. They asked: What do we use in our liturgy? What did the apostles hand down to us? What reflects the faith we’ve always believed?
The canon of Scripture came from the Church’s Holy Tradition, not the other way around.
Scripture Within Tradition
So what do we believe instead? We believe Scripture and Tradition go together. They’re not two different sources of truth competing for authority. Think of it this way: Holy Tradition is the whole life of the Church as the Holy Spirit has preserved it from the apostles until now. Scripture is the crown jewel of that Tradition, the most precious part, but it’s never been separate from it.
Holy Tradition includes the Bible, yes. But it also includes the Divine Liturgy, the decisions of the seven Ecumenical Councils, the writings of the Church Fathers, the Nicene Creed, the canons, the icons, and the lived faith of Christians across the centuries. All of this together forms one coherent whole. You can’t pull Scripture out of that context and expect it to function properly on its own.
St. Paul himself tells the Thessalonians to “stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle” (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Notice that? He doesn’t say “only what I wrote down.” He says the traditions, plural, whether spoken or written. The apostles passed on the faith in multiple ways, and the Church has guarded all of it.
Why Not Bible Alone?
I know this sounds strange if you grew up Baptist or Church of Christ here in Southeast Texas. You’ve probably heard “the Bible says” your whole life as the final word on everything. But think about what happens with sola scriptura in practice. You get thousands of denominations, all reading the same Bible, all claiming the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and all coming to different conclusions about baptism, communion, church government, and salvation itself. First Baptist and Calvary Chapel and the Assemblies of God church on the other side of town all have the same Bible. They don’t have the same faith.
That’s because the Bible needs the Church. It was written by the Church, for the Church, and it’s meant to be read and understood within the Church. When you remove Scripture from the Tradition that produced it and has always interpreted it, you lose the guardrails. Private interpretation takes over. And that’s not what the apostles intended.
The Orthodox Church reads Scripture the way the Fathers read it, the way the councils interpreted it, the way the liturgy proclaims it. We don’t approach the Bible as isolated individuals trying to figure it out on our own. We read it as members of the Body of Christ, guided by two thousand years of the Spirit’s work in the Church.
What This Means Practically
Does this mean we think the Bible is less important? Not at all. Walk into any Orthodox church and you’ll see the Gospel book enthroned on the altar, venerated with incense and kisses. We hear more Scripture in one Divine Liturgy than most Protestant services include. The difference is we don’t treat the Bible as a self-interpreting instruction manual that anyone can pick up and understand correctly without the Church.
If you’re visiting St. Michael for the first time, you might find this unsettling. You might wonder if we’re adding to Scripture or treating human traditions as equal to God’s Word. But we’d say it differently: we’re receiving Scripture the way it was always meant to be received, within the living Tradition of the Church that Christ founded. The Bible is the inspired, authoritative Word of God. We just don’t believe it was ever meant to stand alone.
Fr. Thomas Hopko used to say that for Orthodox Christians, the question isn’t “What does the Bible say?” but “What does the Bible mean?” And to answer that second question, you need the Church. You need the Fathers, the councils, the liturgy, and the consensus of the faithful across time. You need Tradition.
That’s not less than sola scriptura. It’s more. It’s the fullness of the faith once delivered to the saints.
