How Do We Know God? Revelation and Holy Tradition

Before anything can be said about what God is like, a harder question has to be faced: how could anybody possibly know? A finite creature is trying to speak about an infinite Creator. It is not a difference of degree, as between a clever man and a stupid one. It is a difference of kind, as between the painting and the painter, and no amount of staring at the paint will produce the man. The Orthodox answer to the question is short, and everything else in this course depends on it: we know God because God has spoken. Revelation is not a human achievement. It is a divine gift, and our part in it is to listen.

What cannot be known, and what can

Orthodox theology begins by insisting on something that sounds like defeat. The essence of God — what God is in himself — is unknowable, not merely undiscovered. It is not that we have not yet worked it out; it is that a creature cannot contain the uncreated, and will not be able to in eternity either. The Fathers therefore spoke of God by denial as much as by assertion: infinite means not finite, immortal means not mortal, ineffable means not sayable. This is called the apophatic or negative way, and it is not agnosticism. It is precision about the limits of language.

And yet the same Fathers say, in the same breath, that God is genuinely known, genuinely encountered, genuinely participated in. Saint Gregory Palamas gave the distinction its mature form in the fourteenth century, though it is much older than him: God is unknowable in his essence and truly knowable in his energies — in his acting, his shining-out, his self-giving towards us. The sun cannot be held in the hand, and its light warms the hand all the same, and the light is not something other than the sun. What reaches us is really God, and it is not all of God, and both halves of that sentence have to be kept.

This is why the Orthodox Church has no interest in proving God the way a proposition is proved. Arguments from design and causation have their place and the Fathers used them, but nobody was ever brought into the Church by a syllogism, and the Church has never pretended otherwise. What she offers instead is a claim of a different order: that God has made himself known, in history, in particular places, to particular people, and finally in a person — and that the offer is still open, on the terms it has always been open, to anyone willing to be changed by the answer.

The first word is his

Every page of Scripture assumes that God speaks first. He walks in the garden and calls; he calls Abraham out of Ur; he speaks from a bush that burns without being consumed; he gives a law on a mountain in smoke and thunder; he sends prophets for a thousand years who all begin with the same four words — thus saith the Lord. Not one of these is presented as a discovery. Nobody in the Bible works God out. Somebody is going about his ordinary business, and God interrupts.

The Church distinguishes two ways in which he does it. General revelation is what God shows to everybody everywhere: the creation itself, which is eloquent about its maker, and the conscience, which accuses and excuses in every culture that has ever existed. Saint Paul takes this for granted in the first chapter of Romans, and so does the psalm that says the heavens declare the glory of God. It is enough to make a person restless. It is not enough to tell him God’s name, or what God wants, or whether God can be approached without being destroyed.

Special revelation is what God says in words and deeds to a particular people so that it can be carried to everybody: the covenant with Abraham, the Exodus, the Law, the prophets, and finally — this is the whole point of the Letter to the Hebrews — a Son. The sentence with which that letter opens is the compressed form of everything in this article: God spoke to the fathers in many parts and in many ways by the prophets, and in these last days has spoken to us by his Son. Revelation culminates not in a book but in a person, which is why Christianity is never quite a religion of a book in the way its neighbours are.

Why it took so long

A reasonable objection surfaces early: if God meant to reveal himself, why the two thousand years of prophets and false starts and exiles before he did it properly? Why not begin with the Gospel? The Fathers answer with the word pedagogy. Revelation is gradual because the recipients had to be made capable of receiving it, and a people cannot be taught the Trinity while it is still learning that there is only one God and that he cannot be carved.

So the Law comes first, and it is severe, and much of it is about washing and food and who may touch what. Saint Paul calls it a tutor — the household slave who walked the child to school and was not himself the teacher. Its whole function was to form a people who could tell holiness from convenience, and then to hand that people over. The prophets push the same education further, insisting that the sacrifices God commanded are worthless without mercy, which is a very strange thing for a religion to say about its own rites and which no religion invents about itself.

By the time of Augustus there existed a small people, in a small province, who believed that there is one God, that he is good, that he acts in history, that he has promised something, and that he cannot be bribed. Nowhere else in the world was that combination available. Into precisely that place, and not another, the Word was born. The Church reads the whole Old Testament as that long preparation, which is why she never followed Marcion in throwing it away, and why a third of the hymns you will hear on a great feast are about people who died before Christ was born.

What Holy Tradition actually means

The word tradition has been badly damaged by ordinary English, where it means an old habit nobody has got round to abolishing — the tradition of turkey at Christmas. That is not what the Church means. The Greek is parádosis, from a verb meaning to hand over, and the Latin traditio is the same word: what is handed over from one pair of hands to the next. Holy Tradition is not a body of extra information supplementing the Bible. It is the whole life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, handed on, of which the Bible is the supreme written expression.

Put concretely, Tradition includes the Scriptures; the Creed; the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils; the Liturgy and all the services; the writings of the Fathers; the canons; the icons; the lives of the saints; the fasts and the feasts; and something harder to list, which is the accumulated instinct of a body that has been at this for two thousand years and recognises its own faith when it hears it, and recognises a counterfeit even before it can explain what is wrong. Vladimir Lossky called Tradition the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church; that is the most accurate short definition anybody has managed.

Notice what follows from that definition. Tradition cannot be simply a list, because a life cannot be simply a list. It can be described, and its monuments can be enumerated, but the thing itself is the handing-on, and it is happening now, in the parish hall on Saturday evening, as much as it happened in Antioch in the second century. When a grandmother teaches a child to cross himself, Tradition is occurring. It is not a museum of what the Church used to think.

Scripture inside the Church, not beside it

Here is the fact that unsettles most newcomers from a Protestant background, and it is a matter of plain history rather than of Orthodox polemic. There was a Church before there was a New Testament. The Apostles preached for twenty years before the earliest letter was written; congregations were baptising, breaking bread, ordaining and excommunicating for a generation with no Gospel in writing. And when the writings existed, they circulated alongside a great many other pious documents — gospels of Thomas and of Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, letters of Clement and Barnabas — with no label distinguishing them.

Somebody decided. The canon of the New Testament — these twenty-seven books and not those others — was settled by the Church, gradually, in the same centuries and by the same bishops who settled the Creed, and the first surviving list identical to ours is in a festal letter of Saint Athanasius in 367. The Church did not confer authority on the Scriptures; she recognised them, the way a man recognises his own mother’s handwriting. But she did the recognising, and there is no way to hold the Bible as the sole authority without also holding that the body which identified it was competent to do so.

So Orthodoxy does not set Scripture against Tradition, and it does not set Tradition above Scripture. Scripture is the heart of Tradition: it is read at every service, chanted, quoted in nearly every hymn, and the Gospel book itself is carried in procession and kissed as an icon of Christ. What Orthodoxy denies is that the Bible can be safely read by a man alone in a room who has decided in advance to owe nothing to anyone who read it before him. That is not reverence for Scripture. It is confidence in oneself.

Saint Paul gives the principle directly, and in a single verse he puts both halves together: hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or by our letter. Oral and written, one deposit. The man who wrote a large part of the New Testament saw no competition between what he wrote down and what he had said out loud.

How the Church reads her own book

Given all that, how is Scripture actually read in Orthodoxy? Four habits govern it, and none of them is a technique so much as a posture.

• It is read in church first. The ordinary place for Scripture is aloud, in the assembly, framed by hymns that interpret it. The lectionary puts particular readings on particular days, so that the Church hears the raising of Lazarus on the Saturday before Palm Sunday and not at random.
• It is read as one book about one person. The Old Testament is read christologically — the rock in the wilderness, the bronze serpent, the three young men in the furnace are heard as speaking about Christ, because that is how Christ himself and the Apostles read them.
• It is read with the Fathers. Not because a Father cannot be wrong, but because the agreement of many of them across many centuries and languages is a far better instrument than the private certainty of one reader in one decade.
• It is read in order to be obeyed. The ascetic tradition is unanimous that a passage is not understood until it has been acted on, and that a man who reads a great deal and does nothing will become confused rather than wise.

This is also why the Church is unbothered by the ordinary findings of biblical scholarship in a way that surprises both her friends and her critics. That the Psalms had editors, that Isaiah may come from more than one hand, that the evangelists arrange their material differently — none of this touches anything the Church has ever claimed. Inspiration in the Orthodox understanding is not dictation; God did not overrule the personalities, vocabularies and memories of the writers, any more than the Incarnation overruled the body it assumed.

Which Fathers, and how much weight

Orthodoxy quotes the Fathers constantly, and a newcomer reasonably asks who they are and whether they can be wrong. They can. Not one of them is treated as infallible, and the Church has quietly declined to follow several of the greatest on particular points — Saint Gregory of Nyssa on the final restoration of all things, Origen on a good deal, Saint Augustine on original guilt as the West later developed it. A Father is not an oracle. He is a witness, and witnesses are weighed together.

What makes a Father is roughly four things: holiness of life, orthodoxy of doctrine, the approval of the Church over time, and antiquity — though the last is elastic, since Orthodoxy has gone on producing Fathers, and Saint Silouan of Athos died in 1938. The authority lies not in any one of them but in their consensus: where the Fathers of many centuries, languages and temperaments say the same thing, the Church regards the matter as settled, and where they differ, she is usually content to leave it open.

This is a genuinely different instrument from the two the West built. It is not a magisterium, because no living office can add to it; and it is not private judgement, because the individual is not the court. It is more like the way a language decides what a word means — by enormously wide use over enormously long time, which no single speaker can overrule and no committee can decree. Slow, unspectacular, and extremely hard to corrupt.

Telling Tradition from habit

An honest question follows immediately: if Tradition is this large, how does anybody distinguish it from mere custom? Orthodox life is full of practices that vary from country to country — how many prostrations, what is eaten at Pascha, whether the choir stands left or right, whether women cover their heads. Are these Holy Tradition? Mostly they are not. They are traditions with a small letter, and the Church has always been able to tell the difference, even when individual Orthodox people are bad at it.

The test is universality across time and place. What has been believed everywhere, always, and by all — the phrase is Saint Vincent of Lérins’, from the fifth century — is Tradition. What has been done in one province for three hundred years is a custom, honourable and worth keeping, and not a doctrine. The Creed is Tradition. The Liturgy is Tradition. The particular tune your parish sings it to is not, and a Greek parish singing a different one is not thereby in error.

The confusion matters pastorally, because a convert who mistakes custom for dogma becomes rigid and unhappy, and usually insists on being more Russian than the Russians. The old counsel is worth keeping: in the essentials, unity; in everything else, a great deal of freedom; and in all of it, ask your priest rather than the internet, because he knows both the rule and you.

The Creed: Tradition in two hundred words

If somebody demanded the whole of Holy Tradition on one page, the honest answer would be the Creed. It was written by two councils, at Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381, and it is recited by the entire congregation at every Liturgy — not by the choir on their behalf, and not by the priest, because it is the faith of the baptised and they say it themselves.

Read it as a map and it tells you what the next nine weeks of this course will cover. One God, Father, maker of everything visible and invisible. One Lord Jesus Christ, God from God, of one essence with the Father, incarnate, crucified under a named Roman official, risen on the third day, ascended, coming again. The Holy Spirit, Lord and giver of life, worshipped together with the Father and Son. One Church. One baptism. The resurrection of the dead. Not a word of it is decorative; every clause was written because somebody had denied exactly that clause.

And notice what is absent. There is nothing about how the atonement works, nothing about predestination, nothing about the mode of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, nothing about church government beyond the four marks. The Church defined what had to be defined and left the rest open — which is itself a teaching about Tradition. It is not a system that explains everything. It is a fence around a mystery, put up only where somebody had already fallen off the edge.

Why this cannot be settled privately

Underneath this whole discussion is a question about where certainty comes from, and it is worth putting bluntly. If each reader is his own final authority over the meaning of Scripture, then there are as many Christianities as there are readers, and the last four centuries have demonstrated this on a very large scale. If a single bishop is the final authority, then the faith of the whole Church can in principle be changed by one man, which the East has never been able to accept. Orthodoxy answers with neither: the guardian of the faith is the whole body, clergy and laity together, over time.

That is a slow and untidy mechanism, and it is meant to be. A council proposes; the Church receives, or fails to. Several councils that looked ecumenical at the time — with emperors, delegates and signatures — were quietly not received, and are now remembered as robber synods. No committee could arrange that. It is the sort of thing that can only be done by a body that is genuinely alive and genuinely indwelt, which is exactly the claim the Church makes for herself.

For the individual believer this is enormously freeing. You are not required to reconstruct Christianity from first principles, and you are not required to be clever. You are required to be teachable. The faith comes to you the way a language comes to a child — from people who already speak it, in a household, by being used — and like a language it is yours entirely, and none of it is your invention.

Private revelations, and why the Church is careful

One more question belongs here, because it arrives sooner or later in every catechumen’s mind. If God still speaks, does he speak to me? Orthodoxy answers yes and then spends a great deal of energy on the qualification, because this is the point at which sincere people most often come to grief.

God certainly acts in individual lives, and the Church is full of accounts of it: dreams that turned out to matter, words heard at the right moment, a conviction that would not go away. What the Church refuses is to treat any of this as public revelation. Nothing given to one person can add to, correct, or override what was handed to the Apostles — and a private experience which contradicts the faith of the Church is, for that reason alone, to be distrusted whatever it felt like.

The ascetic literature is remarkably blunt about this. Beginners are told not to seek visions, not to pray for them, and to regard any that come with suspicion rather than gratitude, because the one thing a deceiver imitates best is consolation. The test the Fathers give is not the intensity of the experience but its fruit: humility, ordinary kindness, obedience, an increased willingness to forgive. Anything that leaves a man convinced he is now important has failed the test, however luminous it was.

This is not coldness. It is the same care a doctor takes with a drug that genuinely works. The Church has seen too many people wrecked by certainty about a private message, and too many others quietly sanctified without a single unusual experience in fifty years, to be impressed by the spectacular. What she offers instead is the thing she has always offered: the Scriptures read in the assembly, the mysteries, a confessor who knows you, and a rule of prayer small enough to keep.

What is asked of you this week

Nothing in this article is an argument for switching off your judgement. The Church has never asked for that, and the saints who are most revered are often the ones who argued hardest. What is being asked is smaller and harder: a willingness to be taught by people who are not present to defend themselves, most of whom are dead, and to hold your own first impressions a little more loosely than the age you live in considers dignified.

In practice, this week, it means three things. Read a Gospel slowly. Come to a service and let the readings go over you. And when something strikes you as strange — and something will — write it down and bring it on Saturday, rather than settling it alone. That habit, more than any amount of reading, is what Holy Tradition looks like from the inside.