Alexander Schmemann

1. The Beginning of the Church (28 pages)

Page 18

The New Testament.

We have seen that acceptance of Christianity had always been regarded as acceptance of the evidence about Christ given by the apostles, the witnesses to His teaching. The apostles interpreted their mission as service or preaching of the Word. Moreover, the Church itself is nothing but the acceptance of this Word, so that the growth of the Church is defined as the growth of the Word. “But the word of God grew and multiplied” (Acts 12:24). “So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed” (Acts 19: 20). For the Church, the Word of God meant not only the expression of absolute truth in human language, but primarily the appearance of God Himself and the revelation of His divine life and strength. In the Old Testament God created the world by His Word, maintained life in it by His Word, and began its salvation by His Word.
God not only spoke His Word, He acted through it. The prologue to the Gospel of John has been interpreted as an attempt to introduce concrete Judeo-Christian teaching to the abstract philosophical mind. Yet it is wholly rooted in the biblical perception of the Word as divine life, divine action. “And the Word became flesh.” This meant not only that in Christ God revealed to man a new doctrine and imparted a new and absolute truth, but that divine life itself had come into the world and had become the life of man. The preaching of the Word of God by the apostles, therefore, was something more than the evidence of eyewitnesses about Christ’s life. It not only told about Christ, but transmitted Christ Himself; it led men into His life and united them with it.
In this understanding of the Word of God there is an organic link between the preaching of the apostles and baptism.

This total dependence of the Church on the Word of God does not mean that it depended solely on its written account in the New Testament text. The image and teachings of Christ as proclaimed by the apostles were not a truth mastered once and for all; “the word of God is quick [i.e., living] and powerful . . .” (Heb. 4:12), and is constantly proclaimed in the preaching of the bishop. Christians commune with it in the sacraments and are inspired by it in prayer; it is the source of the unanimity that links them. In all the sources we find reference to the words and teachings of Christ, which were obviously known to all from the very start.

When records of the apostolic preaching began to appear, since this was evidence of the Word of God, it acquired the same significance as the tradition about Christ in other forms, such as preaching, liturgical prayer, and preparation of new converts for baptism. Since they already possessed the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament, Christians naturally added these writings to them as their completion, interpretation, and fulfillment.

It is impossible for us to present here even briefly the history of these writings, which has aroused such endless disputes among scholars. One point is obvious: whatever the “sources” of our four Gospels and the relations between them; whatever ingenious hypotheses scholars may have created in their efforts to reconstruct their genesis; they were received by the Church — that is, were recognized — because their content coincided with the image of Christ and the content of His teachings that the Church already knew. The Church did not “sanction” the New Testament writings; it recognized them as the Word of God, the source of its existence from the start.

 

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