IN the preface of volume II, Doctrine and Teaching of the Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Hilarion teaches the traditional and apostolic distinction between public and private teaching. What the apostles preached openly to all religions and philosophies and peoples was called the kerygma. On the one side, it was a basic form and outline of the gospel that could be accommodated or accompanied by commentary on similarities between pre-Christian ideas and Christian ideas. Preachers could draw from the commonly held ground in human wisdom or music and poetry. The canon of the holy Scriptures, the written letters of the Church could be included later in kerygmatic teaching once it was made known outside the intended communities they were written for by the apostles. On the other side, the Church also has unwritten, oral or textual interpretations, teachings, doctrines that are only really understood by those who are members of the Church, who are baptized, chrismated, participating in the mysteries. These are called dogmata. Any faith community of whatever denomination cannot write down everything that they hold to be true. Every denomination has certain structures or rules, whether spoken or unspoken. Not everything that we believe can be expressed in the Bible or in written words, St. Basil the Great teaches. But nowadays dogma has been associated exclusively with a kind of text of the Church, with litigious written and public statements, with what kerygma was once considered to be. It’s an important distinction to make when considering one’s own Orthodox faith and when interacting with non-Orthodox beliefs. What the archangel Gabriel heralded is a kerygma. What the Most Holy Theotokos and Virgin Mary kept hidden in her heart is like the dogmata of the Church.
Christ Jesus opened up and interpreted the scriptures for the apostles. The apostles followed Christ Jesus and He entrusted, as the Rock, to the apostles the work of building on this foundation the Church which has all the right interpretations and needs and wise ways of living. The apostles were further enlightened and blessed to set up churches to give us the mysteries through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth. So, the rules, canons, development of hierarchical organization, the right ordering of territories, catechesis, teachings, the whole New Testament canon itself, and the content and forms of musical worship in written texts come from the Church. Essentially, the Tradition of the Church has primacy to decide and discern the doctrines and teachings to be followed just as the apostles did. The Reformers effectively turned the scriptures into an absolute authority like Islam has with the Quran. Some protestants in the 16th c. kept the Bible, the kerygma, without the teachers and interpreters of the household dogmas. In 1546, in reaction to the Protestant Reformation, the Council of Trent was convened to proclaim authoritatively that there are two sources of dogma or doctrine in Roman Catholicism: the Scriptures and Tradition. That council unintentionally pits one against another with the primacy of the Pope as sole arbiter of interpreting or accepting interpretations on scriptural texts, canons, and tradition. So, there are very large differences between Christian denominations in its relationship to their own individual practices and the written word. For Holy Orthodoxy, as Philaret of Moscow and Metropolitan Hilarion teach, Tradition is the Church, and from it proceeds teachings, dogmas, theological decrees, canons, laws, and rules, structure, and ecclesial practices. People pass on a tradition. And people who are living in the Spirit of Truth will pass on right tradition. In the Orthodox Church, Scripture and Tradition then are naturally and always correlated.
The kerygma could be explored in much more detail. But some basic themes can be mentioned. Death is destroyed. Hades is vanquished. Healing is offered. Christ died on the cross and rose on the third day – His death, resurrection, and ascension that points to all of humanity’s resurrection. Sins can be forgiven through Christ Jesus. Freedom from passions and the Devil – our only enemy. The dogmata are interpretations of specific teachings, scriptures, and practices.
Furthermore, divine revelation precedes and leads to Tradition and Scripture, which is experience of wisdom and the Word of God and the Spirit acting in the people of God, and in the Church as witnesses. Wisdom belongs to the whole Church, not kept exclusively to a single bishop or individual above the Church. John Chrysostom teaches that there are no bad doctrines, just bad interpretations based on whether or not a person’s mind or nous is purified or not. V.N. Lossky teaches that “the natural world of human reason is enlightened by divine revelation, divine wisdom, divine truth that gives insight into nature and limits of reasoning.” In The Religion of Israel, the Hebrew biblical scholar, Yehezkel Kaufman, criticized the common opinion of biblical scholarship that hypothesized that Judaism as well as Christianity evolved out of paganism in a similar way that the model of Darwinian evolution theorized that all living things evolved out of one simple form of life. Kaufman, in contrast, argued that the religion of ancient Israel took a radical stand against the surrounding pagan cultures and religions, and rather than a biological evolution, it was rooted in divine revelation that relied on a God who is not just a Being like other beings but a God who is utterly beyond the gods and above creation itself. He interprets Judaism’s tradition of one God as wholly unrelated to any polytheistic or monotheistic (one god over other gods). In essence, the Hebrews had the idea of a meta-Being, a Being that is not comparable and above all categories of creation, human reasoning, divine creatures, above human and animal language, the laws of the universe, and time itself.
The revealed God is of the pre-existent realm; God creates out of nothing. God is revealed through the experience of the righteous and wise over the ages. Experience, unfortunately, is associated with subjective feelings, the powers of the soul, the unreliable, ever moving emotions. Orthodox Christianity also has a category that is above human reasoning called the nous (the heart, the mind). It’s our spiritual center of being unrelated to sensations of the body or soul; it’s where we encounter God and receive faith – the highest form of knowledge. Plato and Aristotle, in the Hellenistic tradition, interpreted reason as the most certain guide for truth in one’s soul because it didn’t change as did the feelings and opinions of peoples and cultures. Likewise, noetic prayer and directing our nous in divine services is higher than science, philosophy, intellectual capacity, and the feelings of the body and the powers of the soul. The experience of God is the divine being revealed to our noetic spirit or mind. The source of the scriptures is divine revelation, as recounted in the Old Testament and the New Testament, and from the Tradition of the Church. Holy Orthodoxy is completely distinct from other non-Christian religions and also from other Christian denominations. But the gods and natural divinities still reign today. In our devotion to nature, scientism is the prevailing doctrine of the world and how to live a good life. Theogony has turned into evolutionary biology. The Sibyl into psychologizing. The laws of the gods into the laws of the universe. Apotheosis into politicians, yogi spirituality, self-improvement gurus and celebrity culture. A pantheon of human ideas has been deified: buddhism, hinduism, nihilism, logical positivism, skepticism, virtue ethics, and hedonism just to name a handful of poly-philosophical traditions we have inherited in our global dialogue.