Heresy is always a distortion, a misrepresentation of experience. Distortion of spiritual life, or incorrect spiritual life generates heretical teaching, and heresy leads to incorrect life, to spiritual catastrophes. For example, someone might say: a mother’s love for her child is manifested in beating her with a stick ten times a day and starving her. Until no one said this, there was no need to describe a mother’s love for her child. But as soon as such words were spoken, we say that this is heresy, that these words, this teaching does not describe the true love of a mother for her child. Having condemned heresy, we try to find words to describe these ineffable relations, to express this experience, which is impossible to describe…
Thus, Holy Scripture – the Word of God (description of the experience of knowing Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit – V.A.), addressed to the members of the body of Christ, which is the Church (the Church, those who in the Holy Spirit are in the mysterious unity of the Father and the Son, about which the Lord prays in his prayer to the Father: ‘… that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in me, and I in You…’ and in order to, preserving hope, endure to the end, because only such will be saved – receive the inheritance: deification by grace!)
Now we can answer the question: what, or about Whom does Holy Scripture, particularly the Bible, speak? The Lord Jesus Christ says: ‘Search the Scriptures – (in the context of the Savior’s words, it is understood as the Scriptures of the Old Testament – V.A.) they testify of me’, ‘Know (in the sense of Knowing, not rational knowledge – V.A.) the Truth, and the Truth will make you free’, ‘I (the Lord Jesus Christ – V.A.) am the truth’. Thus, all Holy Scripture speaks about
Christ, points to Christ; Christ is the main and only ‘theme’ of Scripture.” “What does the Old Testament comfort us with, according to the Apostle Paul? The Old Testament calls for patience with the consolation that Christ, the Messiah, will come. The Old Testament lived as a proto-Gospel: ‘The seed of the woman shall crush the serpent’s head.’ The Old Testament lived with Christ who was to come into the world. The New Testament lives with Christ who has already come and is here with us, forever and ever. In the language of antinomy (the tension of ‘already and not yet’), it can be said that the New Testament lives in anticipation (hope – V.A.) of the return of Christ who has already come, anticipating when ‘God will be all in all,’ as expressed in the collective prayer of the Church: ‘I await (eagerly – V.A.) the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come,’ ‘Come, Lord Jesus, maranatha.’ Every eighth day, every Sunday, celebrating the Resurrection of the Lord Savior, the Church, gathering at the Lord’s Table, at the Holy Eucharist, experiences, lives the ‘second’ coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, ascending in the clouds (in the Holy Spirit – V.A.) to meet the Lord who is coming. Therefore, all Scriptures of the Church (tradition in the plural, as a form of expressing the experience of the Church – life in the Holy Spirit: the Bible, the Writings of the Holy Fathers,… in a word, theology, the knowledge of God, the unity with God expressed: in words – Holy Scripture, sounds – music, colors – icons, paintings, in stone – sculpture, architecture, in gestures – rituals, etc. – V.A.) about Jesus Christ the God-Man, about God and about the true Man, revealed by Christ and in Christ.
Therefore, the Bible is not an ethics manual, not a collection of moral, behavioral prescriptions, dogmas. The Bible is the revelation of the divine mode of existence, possible only in Jesus Christ and given by Christ: ‘no one comes to the Father except through the Son,’ ‘no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him,’ ‘Jesus Christ – the Way, the Truth, and the Life.’ Jesus Christ – the Hypostasis, the Personality, – ‘the goal,’ ‘the target,’ ‘the means’; ‘all things stand by Him, for Him, in Him, and through Jesus Christ reach the goal of existence – deification, adoption, resurrection. God created man so that man could become god by grace, which was accomplished in Christ and revealed to us in the deified human hypostasis – the Most Holy Theotokos, who already lives the divine mode of existence, infused by grace into the flow of Divine Triune Life.
And ethics, commandments, rituals, prescriptions, which we find in the Bible, have existential, ontological meaning, as those that, in the language of a sin-warped, distorted world (in cataphatic statements, in a language that man understands, expressing the experience of knowing the creaturely world by sinful man – V.A.) in their language, with concepts they ‘know’ and ‘understand what it is about,’ point out, reveal the personal, hypostatic, Divine way of existence – as Being, Life of the Holy Trinity. Thus, commandments, prescriptions, rituals, as such, only correlate with Christ, are read in the context of Christ, and are existentially, ontologically understood only by Christ. ‘The veil is taken away by Christ.’ Therefore, the Law was given to people not to fulfill it, but to try to fulfill it and learn in this continual labor that by their own powers, people cannot fulfill the commandments, the Law. The Law pointed to the Messiah and led to Jesus Christ, in whom alone it is possible to fulfill the commandments, that is, to live the Divine Life, to occur as a unique, unrepeatable, god-like personality, a creaturely Hypostasis of the Church. Christ is the completion, the fulfillment, the possibility of realizing the Law as hypostatic being. Old Testament prophets, authors of the biblical books of the Old Testament did not know what they were prophesying about (testifying). They communicated with God as much as they could – God was external to them, so they could only ‘see’ the back, ‘the back’ of God, not the Face, the Hypostasis. In various images, symbols the Existing Lord God revealed to them the mystery of the New Covenant, the mystery of salvation, and prepared humanity for the Incarnation, which is not possible without human participation – the ‘Yes’ of the Most Holy Theotokos, the fruit of millennia of Old Testament preparations. The Old Testament is the shadow of the New Covenant, so understanding the shadow or knowing the voluminous object that casts the shadow is possible only in the direct contemplation of the object. Only in the context of the New Covenant is the Old Testament read and understood. Only in the New Covenant, in Jesus Christ, do all biblical symbols throughout become understandable and truly become true symbols, as communion and deification, symbols that not only indicate but manifest the Kingdom of God (for example, the Eucharist, where symbol and reality are one – V.A.).