REV. DR. EUGEN J. PENTIUC
Scripture, most especially the Old Testament, is an untamable textbook. Holy Tradition in all its avatars—conciliar statements, writings of Church Fathers, liturgy, iconography, ascetic teaching, etc.—functions as its guiding handouts. Following this analogy, one may note a certain complementarity. Handouts summarize and explain the salient points of a textbook. Similarly, Tradition, based on Scripture, complements the latter by condensing and illuminating its content. Nevertheless, the handouts, however complete they may appear, will never be able to exhaustively elucidate all the angles of scriptural trove or provide an all-encompassing summary of Holy Writ. The handouts do necessarily depend on a textbook. If the latter can stand by itself, the handouts always need the textbook as their irreducible point of departure and reference.
Hence, one may speak, as St. Gregory of Nyssa did, of the centrality of Scripture. Scripture is central not just because it is the basis for all the further handouts, i.e., the manifestations of Tradition. The centrality of Scripture consists also in its very nature—namely, its “untamable” character. The “handouts” of Tradition are counterparts to an unbridled textbook. Of course, there are “sections” of the Tradition that come closer to Scripture in their untamable depths. For instance, in some contrast with the discursive vein of conciliar statements and most patristic commentaries, iconography and hymnography may be regarded the most flexible, creative and poetic expressions of Church Tradition. Yet the truth remains that there are two rhetorical modes, one of Scripture and one of Tradition. The rhetorical mode of Scripture is based on ambiguities, apparent contrasting statements, and anecdotic language, whereas the rhetoric of Tradition has often tended toward reductive organizational schemes and precise definitions.
In contrast with Tradition’s greater tendency to define, Scripture has invariably remained always the same untamed, and untamable, source of wonder. It does not explain so much as it offers a lavish array of ways of thinking and doing. Scripture is an open textbook, an endless reservoir of wisdom in the making. But above all Scripture is a living and ever-refreshing means of communication with God, its primus auctor (first/ primary author). According to St. Paul’s statement, the “whole Scripture is God-breathing” (2 Timothy 3: 16). The verbal adjective, theopneustos, usually rendered “inspired;’ has an active meaning, hence my translation “God-breathing.” Scripture is not, nor does it claim to be, a complete “recording” of God’s mind. Rather, it is a means through which God re-creates us each time when we approach the Scripture, as he did on the sixth day when he breathed his breathing of life on the dust and the dust became a “living breath” of God (Genesis 2:7). The Lord re-creates each reader of Scripture as a partner in dialogue with Him, the source of life.
Let us consider an example of this untamable character of Scripture and its relation to the guidance offered by Tradition. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) has always been a central part of Christian theological discourse. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed states, regarding God the Father, that He is the creator of “all things visible and invisible.” Creatio ex nihilo is implied by the use of Hebrew verb bdra: “to create” (always referring to God as the subject of creation) in Genesis 1: 1, “In the beginning God created (bdra) the heavens and the earth.” Clearly stated, this idea appears later on in the second book of Maccabees (dated second-century BC). In 2 Maccabees 7:28, a mother urges her son facing persecution, “I implore you, my child, look at the earth and sky and everything in them, and consider how God made them out of what did not exist (ouk ex onton), and that human beings come into being in the same way.” In fact, the phrase ex nihilo originates here, drawn from Jerome’s rendition of the Greek phrase ouk ex onton in his Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate.
Creatio ex nihilo, a good example of biblical interpretation in the form of a long-lasting and influential theological idea, presents God as the omnipotent being who created everything out of nothingness, as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed proclaims it. Nevertheless, this is only one dimension of the teaching on creation found in the Old Testament.
Rev. Dr. Eugen J. Pentiuc is Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. He is a Senior Fulbright Scholar and Lilly Faculty Fellow. He has published several books and numerous articles in the areas of biblical studies and Near Eastern languages and civilizations. Fr. Pentiuc has just completed his latest book, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, to be published by Oxford University Press.
~Praxis, “Theology Matters,” Vol. 12, Issue 1, Fall 2012
