The Bible came from the Church, not the other way around. That’s the short answer. When we say Scripture is part of Holy Tradition, we mean the Church existed first, teaching, baptizing, celebrating the Eucharist, passing on what the Apostles handed down, and eventually some of that apostolic teaching got written down and became the New Testament.
If you grew up Baptist or non-denominational here in Southeast Texas, this probably sounds backwards. You’re used to hearing “the Bible alone” as the foundation of everything. But think about it historically. The Church was making Christians for decades before a single Gospel was written. Paul’s letters circulated to specific churches facing specific problems. Nobody had a bound New Testament sitting on their coffee table in the year 95.
So what did Christians do? They learned the faith from the Apostles and those the Apostles taught. They worshiped. They baptized new believers using a formula and a process that wasn’t written down yet. They celebrated the Eucharist. They sang hymns. They repeated the stories of Jesus and the teachings of the Apostles until those stories and teachings became part of their bones. That’s Tradition, the living transmission of the faith in the Church’s life.
The written Scriptures emerged from that life. John wrote his Gospel because the eyewitnesses were dying and the Church needed a lasting testimony. Luke researched and compiled his Gospel to give Theophilus “certainty concerning the things you have been taught”, notice that Theophilus had already been taught before Luke wrote anything down. The Gospels and Epistles were written to churches that already existed, already believed, already worshiped.
And here’s the thing: the Church had to decide which books were actually apostolic and which weren’t. Lots of documents circulated in the early centuries claiming to be gospels or apostolic letters. The Gospel of Thomas. The Shepherd of Hermas. Letters people forged in Paul’s name. How did the Church know which books belonged in the New Testament? Not by comparing them to the New Testament, it didn’t exist yet. The Church discerned the canon by asking whether these books matched the apostolic faith the Church already possessed and lived. The books that fit what the Church had received from the Apostles, that were used in worship, that bore the marks of genuine apostolic teaching, those became Scripture.
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware put it plainly: “The Bible is a tradition of the Church.” The Church is the subject here. We possess the Scriptures. We hand them on. We read them in our liturgical life and interpret them through the mind of the Fathers and the councils. The Bible isn’t some outside authority we submit to reluctantly. It’s our book, given to us by the Holy Spirit working in the Church.
This doesn’t mean we can twist Scripture to say whatever we want. The opposite, actually. Because Scripture is part of Tradition, we can’t rip it out of context and make it mean something the Church has never believed. When your coworker at the refinery pulls out one verse to prove the Rapture, he’s doing what Orthodoxy says you can’t do, treating the Bible like a self-interpreting text that any individual can figure out on his own. We say the Bible must be read with the mind of the Church, which means reading it the way the Fathers read it, the way the liturgy proclaims it, the way the councils interpreted it.
Fr. Thomas Hopko used to stress this constantly in his teaching. The Bible belongs in the ecclesial context. You can’t separate it from the Church’s sacramental life, from baptism and Eucharist, from the worship where we actually hear Scripture proclaimed and where it shapes us.
Here’s what this means practically. When you come to an Orthodox service, you’ll hear Scripture everywhere, woven into the prayers, chanted in the Gospels and Epistles, echoed in the hymns. We’re not a “Bible church” in the way that phrase gets used around here, but we’re utterly biblical. We just don’t treat the Bible like a constitution you can cite in isolation. We treat it like part of the living voice of the Church, which is what it’s always been.
If you’re exploring Orthodoxy and this feels strange, that’s normal. It takes time to shift from thinking of the Bible as the one foundation to seeing it as the Church’s central written expression of the faith we’ve always held. But once you see it, it makes sense. The Church wrote the New Testament. The Church preserved it. The Church reads it in worship and interprets it through the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Scripture and Tradition aren’t two different things competing for authority. They’re one living reality, and the Bible is the crown jewel of that Tradition.
Come to a Vespers service sometime and just listen. You’ll hear how we read Scripture, not as isolated verses to prove points, but as the living word of God proclaimed in the Church that gave it to us.
