The Old Testament In Eastern Orthodox Tradition

Generally, for the Old Testament books the Christian tradition simply accepted the Jewish collection of books that were considered authoritative by their use in the community. However, since the Jewish canon was not officially set, some books were in use within Judaism that had not yet reached the status of being authoritative. That fact allowed different branches of the Christian church to take slightly different views of some of these books, primarily those that dated to the intertestamental period of the first three centuries BC. For example, some writings were accepted in the Western Church that were not as readily accepted in the Eastern churches (see further below).

The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox tradition

However since there was as yet no official New Testament canon, the early Christian churches were more open to these newer writings. Many were widely circulated and read in churches throughout both western and eastern areas of the Church. Over time, various Christian communities and traditions came to acknowledge some of these as authoritative.

Dear sir tell me where the Bible tells us to pray to Mary or the saints pray repetitive praysUse a wool cloth with beads to help us prayWhere in the Bible is it mentioned about eleborate ceromonies in the worship and the need for clergy to wear elaborate clergy garbs or that Mary is born immaculately and is co redemtrix or the pope is infallible and supremacy I applies to all Christians and what about indulgences and purgatory and kissing images and statues of saints and MaryNon of this is found in the Bible your church and the Roman Catholics try to say traditions and equal to the BibleDid not jesus when he refuted in the book of Mathew the traditions the saducees held which. Blocked the widows and orphans from obtaining heaven and salvation jesus said the cup is beautiful on the outside but inside it is full of corruption and inquity this is how the eastern and Roman Catholic Churches look beautiful and other worldly with its bells and smells and beautiful hymns but spritualy dead and bankrupt

What the fundamentalists never quite understood was that biblical exegesis is always done on the basis of certain metaphysical assumptions. They did not grasp the need to reform the erroneous metaphysical assumptions of modernity on the basis of special revelation. They never quite caught up to the historic orthodox tradition that existed from the fourth to eighteenth centuries! So, contemporary Evangelicalism falls short of the Protestant orthodoxy that produced the great confessions of the Reformation.

Since metaphysical realism is a deduction from biblical revelation and necessary for an adequate statement of Christian orthodoxy, we must go back before the Enlightenment to the period of Protestant scholastic orthodoxy to pick up the thread of the Great Tradition and build further on the foundations of the tradition handed down to us from the church fathers, medieval schoolmen, and Protestant reformers.

Note: I have been giving this question a great deal of thought as I continue to work on the third volume of the Great Tradition trilogy on metaphysics. The central problem in writing a systematic theology today is modernity\u2019s rejection of the classical metaphysics with which creedal orthodoxy is bound up. Modern metaphysics is inhospitable to metaphysical realism, proofs for the existence of God, and classical theism. Can we take our starting point within modernity and still do orthodox theology? Is the Christian doctrine of creation compatible with nominalism, mechanism, and materialism? Does Chalcedon\u2019s two natures doctrine make sense without a concept of \u201Cnatures\u201D as distinct from bodies? Have any major theological traditions succeeded in being both orthodox and modern? Below are my current musings sparked by such questions.

During the first five centuries of church history, the Platonic tradition was integrated with biblical revelation and the result was the Christian Platonism of Augustine. Augustine\u2019s thought, in turn, served as the foundation of medieval scholasticism and, thus, of Christendom itself. Historic Christian orthodoxy is a metaphysical account of reality, that is, an account of God and all things in relation to God. Christian theology unifies knowledge of the world derived from metaphysical analysis with special revelation.

It cannot be stressed enough that the Enlightenment, not the Reformation, was the true rupture with classical tradition and historic Christian trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy. The Reformers had a decline narrative in which the church had been going downhill in the high to late middle ages and so they favored the \u201Csounder scholastics\u201D of whom Augustine, Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas were examples. Often the Protestant scholastics evaluated how sound a particular writer was on a particular point by comparing him to Augustine, which is a way of judging the tradition by its fidelity, or lack thereof, to its origins. The Christian Platonism of the Great Tradition was not rejected by the Reformation. Some extreme statements that seem to dismiss Aristotle can be found in Luther\u2019s works, but these were moderated in Luther\u2019s later work and corrected by his successors. Protestant scholasticism was a reform, not a rejection, of medieval scholasticism. Protestantism is essentially conservative rather than modern. 041b061a72