Holy Scripture is a call to communion with God in the Eucharist: ‘taste and see that the Lord is good,’ not books for neutral, aesthetic reading, and piously performing rules: read two, three chapters daily!?
Holy Scripture is a trumpet call to war, to struggle ‘not against flesh and blood, but against the spirits of wickedness in high places’ (Christians have long forgotten this symbolism of war, spiritual warfare, and replaced it with the absolutized symbolism of a hospital and treatment of diseases, where we are only sentimental sick, paralytics (feeble – V.A.), who need to be pitied and pampered; every symbol that points to Divine reality performs its function well until it begins to be absolutized, to be ‘so and not otherwise.’ Thus, if the Church is a Hospital, then it is at the front, in the trenches, like a military hospital, where they do not rest, convalesce, but bandage wounds and again into the fight… – V.A.).
Holy Scripture is a reminder (not a story about the Kingdom of God, about which one can only say: ‘come and see,’ ‘taste and see’ – V.A.), comfort, encouragement, advice from the more experienced on the path to the Kingdom of God. A reminder that by great tribulations we must enter the Kingdom of God, as unanimously testified by all authors of the Holy Books. There are Christians who do not know if there is a Holy Spirit (rationally, this term is known by pagans too, and when necessary – they quote it. – V.A.). When they were baptized, they were infants (babies – V.A.), or even if adults, but not proclaimed, not properly prepared. They do not remember their own Pentecost, were not consciously at the table of the Divine Eucharist and do not know who they are in Christ. They need to renew the promises of baptism in confession and repentance, having previously ascetically labored in fulfilling the Gospel commandments, to recognize their feebleness, maimedness, poverty and go to Christ, who gives Himself to everyone in the Eucharist. Therefore, they need to remember (not rationally, but existentially, ontologically: ‘do this (the Eucharist – V.A.) in remembrance of Me’ – says the Lord, giving the command to the disciples; this does not mean – remember, that I was and did such; remember – abide in Me, be in the relationship of the Father and the Son, ‘in the Only Begotten Son to be only begotten sons’ – V.A.) Christ in the Eucharist and themselves in Christ. And having returned to the Church, ‘joining the chosen flock,’ to live the Churchly Eucharistic life, from Eucharist to Eucharist, from strength to strength, living a correct spiritual life. Someone may ask: ‘If there is the Eucharist, then is Scripture not needed?’ If you have a spiritual father who has reached perfection, a spirit-bearing elder who knows God – it is not needed. ‘But now there are no spirit-bearing mentors!’ – says St. Ignatius. Now Holy Scripture (in a broad sense, as the embodied knowledge of God of the Church – V.A.) is extremely necessary. For spiritual guidance, we are left an invaluable treasure – Holy Scripture, and life according to the advice (not commands and blessings – V.A.) of the more experienced, knowledgeable creations of the Holy Fathers. ‘There will be many who will want to enter the Kingdom of God and will not be able,’ ‘he who endures to the end will be saved,’ says the Lord. ‘He who competes unlawfully will not receive the prize,’ says the apostle Paul. Therefore, we ‘working out our salvation with fear and trembling’ must check ourselves, test ‘whether we are in the faith of Christ,’ ‘examine ourselves,’ verify our experience with the experience of the deified, who going to the Kingdom of God, described to us in the Word of Scripture some landmarks, signs, boundaries (dogmas, decrees – V.A.), principles, so that we could orient ourselves by them and verify our location (and not forget that they described the unspeakable, unsayable in human, sin-distorted, language; but language differs from language…)
Holy Scripture is the Word of God, conceived by man in the experience of knowing God, communion with God (God and man – V.A.), in the Holy Spirit and born and embodied in words, sounds, colors, stone, gestures, rituals. Therefore, first – the experience of communion with God, and then Holy Scripture as the expression of this experience in the Word (word, music, colors, sculpture, architecture, etc. – V.A.). Holy Scripture is the testimony of eyewitnesses: ‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us – that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.’ Therefore, such precious to us Scripture, the testimony of eyewitnesses (and we ‘witnesses’, and we were in Baptism, Chrismation and the Eucharist in the Kingdom of God, but some of us slept, some were unconscious; therefore deeply somewhere in the depths of the heart, in the secret places (hiding places – V.A.) of the subconscious, the memory of the Kingdom is preserved, therefore our hearts burn when we read the Scripture, although the mind may be fruitless, because the fruit can be only in the meeting with Christ in the Breaking of the Bread of Life – the Eucharist. – V.A.), that by listening to it we stir up zeal and ourselves partake of the reality (‘which no ear has heard, nor eye seen, nor the heart of man imagined’ – the Kingdom of God: the Life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – V.A.) about which the eyewitnesses testify, who have experienced, ontologically in communion (where reality, Truth and I – are One. – V.A.) have lived and live. Therefore, those visitors of the ‘third heaven’, filled there with Divine Love, when they ‘return’ to ‘normal’ state (in the sinful, individualized, discursive form of existence; in the state of separation and necessity – V.A.) want (cannot but preach – V.A.) to share the will of God and thoughts (the will of God: ‘that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of Truth’) and call everyone to taste and know how good the Lord is, to know that God is Love, and only Love. These mystics, heralds of Eternal Life: apostles, prophets, teachers,.. driven by Love, begin, try through the visible, to speak about the invisible (for example: with colors – about sounds, with meters – about kilograms – V.A.), the finite – about the infinite, the creaturely – about the uncreated, the word – about the unspeakable, the temporal – about the eternal, the perishable – about the imperishable, through nature to point to the hypostasis, explain the personality… They begin to theologize – to embody the experience of knowing God, to clothe and express in the word the diverse cultural heritage of the time (language, music, architecture, rituals… For example: baptism – a ritual not of Christian origin – during the time of Jesus Christ ‘in the flesh’ and in the apostolic period of the Roman Empire, baptism was performed on everyone and everything in the name of a certain new owner, whose property became what or who was baptized in his name; for example, a slave, after being purchased at a market from another master, was first of all baptized in the name of the master (new owner – V.A.), that is, submerged (this is literally what the word ‘baptize’ means) in water, in special baptisteries or another body of water, given a new name, to which he was to respond from then on, and the old to forget, dressed in new clothes, and the old burned; that is, to be baptized in the name of someone – is to become his property. Therefore, to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ or the Holy Trinity – means to become a slave, property of God: