Православие и протестантизм

In his work “Holy Scripture and the Church,” Father Hilarion expands his thoughts on the relationship between Holy Scripture and the Church, familiar to us from his test lecture in 1911, and reveals the groundlessness of one of the basic principles of Protestantism—“Scripture alone.” In the works of Archimandrite Hilarion, Protestantism looks even sadder than Catholicism. Here the alienation of the Church already turns into collaboration with the devil, as the author expressed it in the words of St. Vincent of Lirinsky: “When we see that some bring prophetic and apostolic sayings to refute the universal faith (they also talk about the contradiction between the Church and the Holy Scripture), we should not doubt that the devil speaks through their mouths” 193. The author builds his anti-Protestant polemic on the following thoughts: “Christ did not write... He did not come to earth to write... Christ created the Church. The Church existed even when there was not a single book of the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament. Obviously, the books of Holy Scripture do not constitute the essence of Christianity, because Christianity itself is not a teaching, but a new life created in humanity by the Holy Spirit on the basis of the incarnation of the Son of God. Therefore, it would not be insolence to say that a person is saved not by the Holy Scripture, as a book, but by the grace of the Holy Spirit living in the Church... The gracious power of the Holy Spirit acts in the Church in many different ways: in the sacraments and sacred rites of the Church, in common prayer and common love, in church services; as the inspired Word of God, it also acts through the books of Holy Scripture.” 194 Here it becomes especially clear that for Archimandrite Hilarion the doctrine of the Church is not so much a section of theology as a primary principle, the quintessence, the most necessary condition of theology, since the Church is a theanthropic organism in which man, created in the image of God, restoring natural unity, is likened to the Holy Trinity and becomes God by grace. The Church, as the fullness of the One who fills everything in everything (Eph. 1:23), is revealed not only as the custodian of Revelation, Sacred Tradition, but also as Sacred Tradition itself, because it was founded and transmitted to us by the Son of God, and as Revelation itself, because only in it and through it is God revealed to us in His grace-filled energies. Understanding this meaning of the teaching about the Church for Bishop Hilarion reveals the foundations of his unshakable firmness in the raging sea of ​​schisms during the Bolshevik persecution of the Church. The Holy Scripture, according to Archimandrite Hilarion, “is the inviolable and inalienable property of the Church as one of the manifestations of its life” 195. This view of the Holy Scriptures is close to the views of St. Silouan of Athos, which are accepted by modern Orthodox theology. “Tradition,” wrote Elder Silouan, “embraces the entire life of the Church so much that the Holy Scripture itself is only one of its forms.” 196 With regard to Protestantism, the author makes the following conclusion: “An extra-church attitude towards Scripture inevitably leads to absurdity and the loss of the Holy Scripture itself,” since it makes impossible the criteria for the truth of 1) interpretation, 2) apostolic transmission of the teachings of Christ, 3) the choice of the canon of sacred books 197. From this comes the conclusion that is already familiar to us: “Outside the Church, there is no Holy Scripture, and there cannot be” 198. Hilarion (Troitsky), schmch. Sacred Scripture and the Church // He. Without the Church there is no salvation. P. 26. Sophrony (Sakharov), archimandrite. Elder Silouan: Life and Teachings. – M.: Orthodox community, 1991. P. 81. Hilarion (Troitsky), schmch. Sacred Scripture and the Church // He. Without the Church there is no salvation. P. 49.