Florovsky Georges, Holy Scripture – Church – Tradition, Pournaras, Thessaloniki.
The translation by late professor G. Tsamis and the circulation in Greece of the study by the outstanding contemporary orthodox theologian Fr. Georges Florovsky has been a landmark and for many a criterion for our indigenous theological self-consciousness. This is not so much because it was one of his most widely read books, but because it is a subversive reading in terms of established domestic perceptions about the “source or sources of faith” and the priority or not of the Bible over the Holy Tradition.
The Holy Scripture, as the content of the Old and New Testament, which is the revealed God in His relation to man, the historical incidents of its writing, the ways and methods for its interpretation, are dealt with in the first part of the book, as these preoccupied, historically, the people of God from the beginning of their historical course. Even though the Scripture is “a book sealed by seven seals”, the tug-of-war between its historical and allegoric interpretation tends to unite, in the thought of Florovsky, in an open synthetic super-methodology that salvages history and Revelation.
A necessary precondition is to recover the “missing biblical belief” of a living, even unknowingly, tradition which preaches the dogmata and the chief fraudulent dogma that “the Redeemer is not human, but God Himself”. We are called upon to avoid the Scylla of the philological-religious and scientific absolutification of the Scripture, as well as the Charybdis of its “spiritual”, unhistorical, unearthly version.
We must constantly keep in mind that the revelation was realized in the Church, which constitutes the unique arc of salvation and in which the antinomy of freedom and authenticity is nullified by the unmediated experience of spiritual life. The ecclesiastical authority equals to the perseverance and empirical presence of this spiritual life.
Through an extensive presentation of the nature, function and importance of the ecclesiastical catholicity, its position as new creation comes to the negotiation of a rather prickly problem. That of the ecclesiastical tradition.
The Vincentian definition of Tradition, presents, through its minimalistic apophthegms, the last as permanence and stability of the ecclesiastical faith and life. A stability and unanimity, which is, however, dynamic and everlasting and must every time solve hermeneutic problems and reformulate the canon of faith as canon of worship and truth. Thus, we return to the issue of the Church as interpreter of the Scripture.
The study closes with some views on the value and way of appeal to the “authority” of the Fathers, as well with some views of Gregorios Palamas on the patristic tradition, with his attitude towards theosis as head of the spear.