Yakov Krotov

HOW TO UNDERSTAND RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY: AUTHORITY

Here is the the Protestant view on religious authority formulated by the Protestant (Fairbairn): "Our insistence on the responsibility of individual believers themselves to seek truth in the Bible and to serve as a check on potential misuses of Scripture by a person or group of people. If a group proclaims a false interpretation, other Christians who have access to the Bible can recognize the error and correct it."

Such a view can be easily adopted by the Russian Orthodox as well. We shall only point out that bishops and councils are also "groups"; negatively, we shall point out that the history of Protestantism is a history of endless failures of different groups "to correct" each other's interpretations. But in the present context it is more interesting to note that the Orthodox tradition (and Catholic also) includes in the entity of "persons and groups" not only those alive but also the dead and unborn. They also are present in the plenitude ("pleuroma" in Greek) of the Church as the plenipotential judges and creators of the tradition.

Certainly that makes the hermeneutic problems twice as complicated as in the Protestant tradition. But I also am aware that the Protestant tradition in itself is not as simple as Fairbairn or other Evangelicals proclaim it to be to members of Russian Orthodoxy. "Orthodox Christians see no need for such checks and balances [as Evangelicals] because they believe the Church as a whole has the authority to determine what is true," writes Fairbairn.

Actually it is quite the opposite: Orthodoxy created a much more complicated system "of checks and balances" having included in them sacraments, saints, and Christ Himself! We haven't "removed human and sinful elements from the concept of the Church," we have surrounded these elements with a great amount of balances. The Orthodox do not hope that the problem of authority can be resolved easily. But we hope that God as the Head of the Church can resolve it by His will. Of course the thinking "that the Church is God's direct manifestation in the world" (Faibairn's absolutely correct formula) is part of the feeling that eternity is constantly manifesting itself in time.