Fr. Sergei Bulgakov wrote that “Pharisees of all times have wanted to turn ‘predaniye’  into either dead archaeology or superficial laws — dead letters which jealously demand respect for themselves.” Below is an attempt to explain how Orthodox theology views the work of the Holy Spirit in the era of the Church of Christ – the era of the New Covenant.

Over the centuries traditions and predaniye have formed the backbone of the inexpressible riches that can be found in Orthodox worship.  But we must not stop with pleasantries; the paragraphs below discuss why the Orthodox believe it a theological necessity to recognise the significance of predaniye as the Spirit lead tradition of a living organism — the Christian Church.  Several Orthodox fathers and theologians have expressed this view with unmatched eloquence and are therefore heavily drawn upon for purposes of explanation.

Predaniye in Orthodox Theology
In the first book of God’s Law (Zakon Bozhii), as used by the Orthodox Church, it is written that “God himself, through various people specifically chosen by him for such purpose, reveals to us that which we must know.   That which people have learned from God and then pass on to others is called ‘predaniye.’”  The most central example of predaniye is Holy Scripture, but predaniye is wider than that, for it encompasses the entire life of the people of God.  It is the predaniye of the Old Covenant, which was perfected and completed in the birth of Jesus Christ, and the predaniye of the New Covenant, or Christ’s life with the Christian Church  — the era in which we now find ourselves.

John Chrysostom said that “the Church is in a constant process of renewal.”  He meant that doctrines (or dogmas) of our faith are constantly being clarified to us.  The Holy Spirit guides our steps at every point of this journey and he does this through the Church, and specifically through the Church’s property, whether that property be intellectual, emotional, supernatural, material, etc.  Fr. Alexander Men’ noted that when Orthodox theologians speak of the Church as one of tradition, many take this to mean that the Church is a thing of dead, collected items from the past.  This is a grave mistake, for the Christian Church is still developing with the help of that very Holy Spirit which she was given 2000 years ago.

We live in a created, material world of time, space and matter; God uses history and matter to illustrate eternal truths for our sustenance.  When Fr. Men’ defines Church predaniye, he says that it includes Holy Scripture, the writings of the Church fathers, the writings of theologians, liturgical texts, architecture, iconography, Christian art and simple traditions (such as crossing oneself) – it is the entire property of the Church.  The fact that predaniye is historical does not in any way diminish its significance, rather it shows how flexible and adaptable and, in fact,  undefeatable Christianity really is – ready to stand up to any test of any time period, ready to solve any problem.

Predaniye – Living Power of the Holy Spirit
Notwithstanding the super-historical content of God’s truth (and existence) or the immutability of his character, God smashed through a window in time and space with the birth of his son, Jesus Christ.  And Christ has not left us.  From the moment of his birth we have lived in the apocalyptic era of history, “when God stands before man, here and now.”  (Fr. Men’)  Christ promised to be with his Church until the end of the age (Mt. 28:20).  In the second chapter of Acts we see how Christ came back to his Church at Pentecost, “and suddenly there was a sound from the Heavens, like the blowing of a violent wind, and it filled the house where they were.  And they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.  And all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” Based on this text, we have no reason to believe that the Holy Spirit is going to be any less effective than Jesus himself was during his life on earth because the Spirit is, in fact, Christ with us.

If we believe that during the apocalyptic era God is present in human history, we understand that the Holy Spirit is bringing eternal truths to us in ‘human language’ inside history. God is constantly opening himself to us though his Holy Spirit – new eras yield new perspectives and clarify our understanding of God’s eternal truths.  Fr. Sergei Bulgakov writes that “the possibilities for new doctrinal development are inexhaustible.”  This understanding of predaniye is sharply at odds with Vincent of Lerins’s Maxim, ‘quod semper, quod ubique, ab omnibus creditum est.’ (in 434 Vincent of Lerins wrote, ‘the Catholic Church believes only in that which was always believed by everyone, everywhere and always.’  But Orthodox theologians explain that doctrinal development occurs only inside the Church of Christ.

Predaniye – Property of the Church of Christ
Perhaps one of the strongest illustrations of the fact that the living power of the Holy Spirit resides in and with the Church of Christ is that the church fathers were able to compile and defend the Holy Scriptures in the form we now call the Bible.  Notwithstanding insignificant differences in various versions and translations – the central doctrines remain firmly intact. The Church Fathers (Athanasius, Origen, Augustine, Jerome, Tertullian and others) put the Bible together over time between the 1st and 5th centuries, by corresponding with each other by post, by leaving their writings for future centuries and by meeting at infrequent councils.  Orthodox theologians believe that it would be silly to claim that the holy inspiration that helped these men put the Bible together simply stopped at the moment they had compiled the book.  Fr. Bulgakov writes, “the Church gives us the Bible as the Word of God in a Canon of holy books, and the certification of this fact is the affair of predaniye – only the transcendent can give witness about the transcendent.”   But Bulgakov doesn’t stop there, he goes on to say that the Bible taken as a book stops being the Bible.  The Bible can only be properly understood if it is understood as the Holy Scriptures of the Church of Christ.

And what is the Church?  Orthodox theologians do not believe that it is simply an invisible union of all believers known only to God, because the Bible repetitively insists on the unity of all believers in a wider sense.   In his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul writes, “I beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with long-suffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling – one Lord, one faith, one baptism...” The Bible clearly instructs us to strive for unity in the context of the Church, which is the body of Christ.   “God composed the body … that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care for one another.  And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honoured, all the members rejoice with it.” (1 Cor. 12:25-26)

Orthodox theologians believe the Church to be more than an invisible union of believers because unity is God’s command and a task to which human will must be applied; it is ecclesia, the coming together of all the component parts.  As Fr. Men’ writes, “the Church came into the world on the day of Pentecost to a group of believers not because the apostles were in any way ideal people, but because they became filled with the Spirit of the Living God; they lived together, remaining true to Christ’s covenant.”  Fr. Bulgakov writes,  “faith in predaniye as the source of the Church’s teaching stems from faith in unity and the continuance of God’s one and only Church.”  People, hearing God’s call to unity in the New Testament, may nevertheless underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit’s work in the environment He has asked for.  But we are told,  “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” (Rom. 10:17)

In the Orthodox understanding, it is very dangerous to underestimate the role of unity/collectivity in relation to the work of the Holy Spirit.  Bulgakov puts it best when he says that “to individually approach the Word of God is, in itself, a contradiction of its entire idea – it’s like a round square, because it means separating oneself from the rest of mankind and putting oneself in a place of direct relationship with God, upon which one cannot help but begin to pray ‘My father,’ rather than ‘Our father,’ as we were taught.”

Predaniye – Imbued with Heavenly Authority
Because predaniye comes to the Church by the Holy Spirit, it is imbued with heavenly authority.  Isn’t it amazing that the early Church of the New Testament existed almost entirely without Holy Scripture (compiled, as we have it) yet did not fail to carry out Christ’s command, “Go ye, therefore and make disciples of all nations.” (Mt. 28:19)  Jesus didn’t command that the apostles wait for the Bible to be compiled, he said ‘go.’  Christians are called upon to understand that God’s plan for his Church is far wiser than any plan we ourselves could think up.  By his Holy Spirit He is opening eternal truth and eternal life to us inside time and space.  In the Holy Scriptures, breathed themselves by the Holy Spirit, we learn about the Spirit and how to recognise His work.  Past creation by the Holy Spirit helps us to understand God’s further revelations to us by the Spirit.  The process of knowing God’s truth is not simple, because the Church is the unity of transcendental and mortal life and although the heavenly, or transcendental root is unchanging in its perfection and completion, the mortal or human portion is developing inside time and space.

Such an abstract system certainly has the potential to scare a person who is looking for a simple life plan or a list of rules next to which check marks can be placed upon completion.  But our God is a God of inexhaustible power, about whom Isaiah wrote, “Do you not know, have you not heard?  The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth neither faints nor grows weary.  His understanding is unsearchable.” (Is. 40:28)  We must believe in his omnipotence, that through predaniye He supplies us with sufficient strength to live in his truth.  Any other life would be rebellion against God and repugnant to Him.  Isaiah also instructs God’s children to  “stop trusting in man, which has but a breath in his nostrils.”  (Is.2:22)

Predaniye – An Indispensable Arbiter
To understand predaniye in the Orthodox sense is to believe it is knowledge given to the Church by the Holy Spirit, and thus imbued with heavenly authority.  Thus, predaniye:
• Defends already existing predaniye (such as Holy Scripture) from misinterpretation or wrong use,
• Constantly reminds us of the fact that the Church is a living organism in the Holy Spirit.

It follows that to underestimate or deny the significance of predaniye (or any portion thereof) either betrays a doubt of God himself (as well as his eternal, constant and unchanging omnipotence) or will eventually lead to the festering of such doubts.  A person who is trying to believe feels himself to be incomplete in the presence of such doubts, even if they are only in his subconscious. Experiencing a level of discomfort, our stunted believer has only his own devices (his own interpretation of God’s Word) to turn to, which, nine times out of ten, leads him to some brand of legalism.

The History of the Christian Church repetitively illustrates that legalism leads to schism, and vice versa.  For instance, the Reformation did not stop at correcting the 16th century errors of the Roman church but began a long and drawn out practice of breaking off which increased in speed and hasn’t stopped to this day.  It has its crowning glory every Sunday morning when, for example, millions of people across the United States march into thousands of ‘independent’ churches, all of which worship blissfully free of any connection to each other.  Many people, when dissatisfied with a minister or style of worship, simply go “church shopping” and abandon their old congregation in search of those who are more similar to themselves.  And off they go to a more homogeneous group where they will not have to exercise their Christian love quite so often.  This has yielded some bad fruits; perhaps the most dangerous are pride and arrogance.  The main cause of all this trouble is likely to be the total lack of any feeling of unity between Christian groups.  And holding hands for a day in order to serve some half-baked political issue does not count.

Much of protestant theology and practice is sadly bereft of any striving for unity.  It isn’t at all strange then, that Protestants are also notorious for undervaluing the significance of predaniye (other that the Holy Scriptures themselves).  But it is strange that the unity record among Protestants should be quite so bad as it is, given that definitions of the Church by modern, leading protestant theologians do mention unity.  J.I. Packer, a prominent American evangelical theologian, defines the Church as ecclesia, the place of God’s presence, the temple of the Holy Spirit, that exists through Jesus Christ.  He explains that the Church is one, holy, catholic (universal), apostolic and invisible.

It seems that the protestant underestimation of the significance of unity may be tightly linked to a misunderstanding of the significance of the Church’s predaniye.  Much modern protestant theology tends to stress the idea that the Church is invisible to an extent that (when using their understanding of the phrase invisible church) cannot help but downplay the significance of outward and visible unity.  It is common for modern Protestants to understand the “invisible Church” to mean, “a group of saved believers, the names of whom only God knows,” and never to reach an understanding of the fact that the Church is invisible because her predaniye is invisible (even visible objects are imbued with invisible and holy power).  As such, many people who trust in Christ fail to understand that:
• The Creative Word of the Church, Jesus Christ, defines the Church; and the Holy Spirit, breathing life into the Church,  realises Christ’s definition,
• The Church is invisible in that Christians must have complete faith in this Creative Word.  As Christians, we say that we believe in one holy and apostolic Church, and in his letter to the Hebrews Paul writes that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the certainty of things unseen.” (Heb. 11:1)  We need faith not in that which we see, but in that which we don’t see.

To understand the invisibility of the Church in this way is to recognise the significance of the Church’s predaniye in the Orthodox sense.  “Faith is the eye of the soul.  That which needs to be understood and can’t be understood by means of reason can be understood by means of faith.  Faith doesn’t contradict reason, it completes reason.” (Zakon Bozhii)  Of the Church’s predaniye, Fr. Bulgakov writes, ‘”Whilst being invisible, it remains living and active.”

Georgia Jansson Williams