Show Yourself Approved

When I was first an "evangelical" convert, I was certain that God was calling me into ministry. I felt it the way you feel a fire — a real, warm, undeniable pull toward the pulpit, toward the study, toward standing before people and opening the Scriptures. I wanted to become a pastor. I wanted, in that phrase we all learn to say, to do something for God. And I want you to know before I write another word that I do not tell this story to look down on anyone. I tell it because I was there, and because I was wrong in a way I could not see at the time.

Through a series of providential circumstances — doors quietly closing, seasons rearranging themselves, a slow and almost embarrassing clarity — I came to understand that this was not God's will for me. And what unsettled me was not merely that I had misread the direction of my life. It was why I had misread it. When I finally looked underneath the calling I was so sure of, I did not find the love of God waiting there. I found ambition. I found pride wearing the clothing of zeal.

That is a hard sentence to write about your own younger self, and I imagine it may be a hard one to read if you are where I was. So let me be as honest and as gentle as I know how to be.

It was not money. I want to say that plainly, because it would be too easy to caricature the ambitious man as a greedy one. My hunger was subtler than that, and I think more dangerous. What I was really after was the satisfaction of my own ego — the deep pleasure of making an impact, of being the one through whom something happened in the church and in the world.

I loved studying the Bible. I loved teaching it. I still do. But if I am honest, the engine underneath that love was intellectual: the thrill of understanding, the delight of an insight, the quiet flattery of watching others receive what I had figured out. My desire to teach the Scriptures grew far more from my own curiosity and my own fulfillment than from any humble desire to serve. I had made a ministry out of the thing I enjoyed, and then baptized my enjoyment with the language of calling.

And here is the thing about that kind of self-deception: it feels exactly like devotion. From the inside there is no obvious difference between I long to serve God and I long to be significant, and God is the arena in which I will be significant. The words are the same. The prayers sound the same. Only the root is different, and the root is buried where you cannot easily look.

When I came into the Orthodox Church, I began to see that my private ambition was not simply a personal flaw. It was, in a strange way, the very logic of the tradition that had formed me.

The Protestant world I came from rests on sola scriptura — Scripture alone, read and interpreted by the individual believer, standing above every church tradition and every authoritative structure. On paper this sounds like humility before the Word. In practice it means something quieter and stranger: that my own interpretation of the Bible is the final court of appeal. If no external authority may correct me, then my reading, my lens, my judgment sits enthroned above the whole history of the Church. And to seat your own mind above the collected wisdom of the saints and councils — however sincerely, however innocently — is, at its root, a movement of pride.

I do not think most people feel this as pride. I certainly did not. It feels like conviction, like faithfulness, like taking the Bible seriously. But consider the word we use for a self-chosen teaching set against the Church's received faith. Our English word heresy comes from the Greek hairesis — which means, simply, a choice. The heretic is not first a liar or a villain. He is a chooser: a man who has selected his own interpretation over the one handed down. The tragedy is that he usually chooses in good conscience.

St. Vincent of Lérins, writing in the fifth century, saw the difficulty clearly. Scripture is deep, he observed, and precisely because it is so deep, people do not all receive it in one and the same sense — one man understands a passage this way, another that way, until it seems there are as many readings as there are readers. That is not a reason to abandon Scripture. It is the reason we need the Church to read it with us. The safeguard he offered has echoed ever since: hold to the faith believed —

That single line undid something in me. My interpretation, however clever, was mine — recent, local, and alone. The faith of the Church was ancient, universal, and shared. Once I saw the difference, I could no longer pretend that my private reading was the same thing as the apostolic deposit.

I want to walk carefully here, because what follows is my own reflection and not a charge I am able to lay against any particular soul. But I think the first chapter of Romans teaches us something about human nature that reaches further than the subject Paul was addressing. Paul says of those who do not believe that the truth about God is not actually hidden from them at all:

This is a remarkable claim. The skeptic says he rejects God because the evidence is insufficient — because there has not been enough revelation to warrant his surrender. Yet Paul insists that in his heart of hearts he already knows. His conscience bears witness to the very God his intellect denies. There is a split running through him: what he tells himself he believes, and what he actually knows and is suppressing.

What I take from this is not mainly a lesson about atheism. It is a lesson about how the human heart works. A person can hold a sincere intellectual position and still be, at a deeper level, resisting a truth he does not want to face. The mind can build an honest-seeming case for something the soul quietly knows to be a refusal.

And so — and here I am speculating, and I want to name it as speculation — I wonder whether something similar can happen to those of us who set out to teach. On the surface, a Protestant pastor may believe with his whole conscious mind that he is bringing glory to God, serving his flock, planting his church for the Kingdom. I do not doubt his sincerity for a moment; I shared it. But it is at least possible that beneath that sincerity there runs the same kind of quiet suppression Paul describes — a heart that senses it has stepped outside the Church that Christ and the apostles founded, and yet presses on, doing what it believes is good while doing harm to those who listen. If the atheist can know and not-know at once, perhaps the well-meaning teacher can too.

I offer that gently, and only as a possibility to pray over — not as a verdict. I would rather be wrong in charity than right in contempt.

The Fathers understood that the great danger in the Church is rarely open wickedness. It is the ambition that hides inside good work. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on Ephesians, named the thing directly: what most surely tears the Church apart, he said, is the love of power. And then he added a warning so severe it should stop every one of us who has ever wanted a platform:

He goes on to say something almost unbearable — that not even the blood of martyrdom can wash out the sin of rending the Church. Think of that. A man may do ten thousand glorious things, may even die for the name of Christ, and still stand guilty if he has split the Body. This is not the language of a small quarrel. It is the measure of how seriously heaven takes the unity we hold so lightly.

The remedy the Fathers offer is not more brilliance. It is submission. St. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to be killed for Christ around the year 107, wrote again and again to the young churches with the same simple counsel: do nothing without the bishop. Not because bishops are impressive men, but because the Christian life is meant to be received, not invented — handed down through the ones the apostles appointed, and the ones they appointed after them.

This is precisely the check that sola scriptura removes. When there is no one you are bound to submit to, your gifts have no governor. Your intellect, your charisma, your love of the Scriptures — all the very things I was so proud of — run without a rein. And a gift without submission does not stay a gift for long. It becomes a throne.

Paul left Timothy with a charge that every pastor and every Bible teacher has taken to heart:

That is the whole ambition, rightly understood — not to be admired, but to be approved: a good worker who handles the word of truth without shame and without distortion. I wanted that once, and I want it still. But I had quietly assumed, as I think most of us do, that "the word of truth" simply is the Bible, and that if I mastered the text I had fulfilled the charge. I no longer believe that is all Paul meant.

Watch how the same apostle speaks elsewhere. To the Thessalonians he writes: stand fast and hold the traditions you were taught, "whether by word or our epistle" (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Word and letter — the spoken and the written — both binding, both named "tradition," both to be held. Paul plainly did not shrink the deposit of faith down to what he had written; much of it he had spoken, and that spoken teaching carried the very same authority.

And notice what he tells Timothy directly. Paul had preached in Ephesus for some three years, night and day (Acts 20:31), and he charges his disciple to "hold fast the pattern of sound words which you have heard from me" (2 Timothy 1:13) — and then the crucial line: "the things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also" (2 Timothy 2:2). What Timothy is to guard and pass on is not first a book. It is the sound words he heard from Paul's own mouth, entrusted now to faithful men who will hand them on again. This is living tradition, deliberately transmitted from the apostle to his appointed successor and onward down the line.

So when Paul tells Timothy to rightly divide the word of truth, that phrase is wider than the pages of a Bible Timothy did not yet hold complete. It is the whole apostolic deposit — written and spoken together. And that means a worker who wishes to be approved cannot rest in the Scriptures alone. He must also know, and honor, the tradition those Scriptures came wrapped in.

There is a plain historical reason this matters, and it is the one that stopped me cold. Where did the Bible itself come from? The canon — the settled list of which books are Scripture and which are not — was not lowered from heaven bound in leather. It was received, weighed, and finally recognized by the Church, and not until the fourth century. For the first three hundred years no complete New Testament sat on any shelf. Most local churches held only portions — a few of Paul's letters here, one or two Gospels there — and they knew which writings were apostolic because the tradition of the Church told them so. Without that tradition there is no canon; without the canon there is no Bible. The very book held up as the sole authority was itself handed to us by the Church's living memory.

I say this not to diminish the Scriptures — God forbid — but to be honest about how we received them and how we are meant to read them. If you truly want to show yourself approved, study will not be optional, and it will not be enough to study the text alone. You will have to study the Church that carried it: her worship, her councils, her Fathers, the unbroken history that runs from the apostles through the fourth century and long beyond. And if your knowledge of that history begins only at the Reformation — if all you hold is a single interpretation handed to you, of a story you have never examined for yourself — then it is at least worth asking, gently, whether you are yet rightly dividing the word of truth. For that word was never the written Scriptures only. It is also the living tradition the apostles spoke, and guarded, and handed on.

So let me speak now, as plainly and as kindly as I can, to the pastor or teacher who has read this far — and perhaps to the men I once sat under, whom I still love, and who I believe truly think they are laboring for the Kingdom of God.

It is possible to be sincere and mistaken at the same time. It was true of me. I ask you to consider — only to consider — a few uncomfortable questions. How much of the first fifteen hundred years of Christian history do you actually know? Not the caricature, but the real thing: the councils, the Fathers, the worship, the unbroken life of the Church that existed long before the Reformation and never went away. Do you know what Christ and the apostles truly handed down, or have you inherited an interpretation of an interpretation, and mistaken it for the original?

Who sent you? It is the gentlest and the most searching question I know to ask. Not are you gifted — you may be enormously gifted. Not are you sincere — I have no doubt that you are. But who sent you? By whose authority, in what unbroken line, do you stand up to teach the flock of God? If the honest answer is that you sent yourself — that you felt a fire and followed it, as I did — then I am not here to condemn you. I am here to tell you that there is a place to lay the fire down.

And perhaps you will tell me you did not send yourself — that a mentor sent you, that a pastor laid hands on you, that a good and godly man saw something in you and set you apart. I believe you. But notice that the question does not vanish; it only takes a step backward. Who sent him? And who sent the one who sent him? Follow that line honestly, all the way down, and ask where it ends. Does it reach the apostles in an unbroken succession — or does it stop, somewhere back there, at a single charismatic and gifted man who simply broke away from a body that had itself broken away from another before it? Because if the line ends in a schism rather than a succession, then whatever authority you carry was never handed to you. It was declared. And a man cannot give what he was never given.

You may answer that none of this finally matters — that your authority does not rest on any human chain at all, but on the Word of God alone. Amen. I love the Scriptures too, and I will not speak a syllable against them. But hear me gently, because this is the hinge of the whole matter: no one reads the Bible from nowhere. Every one of us comes to the text already carrying a set of presuppositions — about what the words mean, which passages govern which, and what the whole is finally supposed to add up to. The question was never whether you read through a lens. You do; we all do. The question is whose lens it is. Where did your assumptions actually come from — a Reformer of the sixteenth century, a seminary of the twentieth, a conference the year before last? And are they the same presuppositions the early Church carried as it read these very Scriptures, sang them, and was martyred for them? If your framework for reading the Bible would have been unrecognizable to the very Christians who received it from the hands of the apostles, then it is worth asking, quietly and without defensiveness, whether the framework is really the Bible's — or your own, inherited far more recently than you have been led to believe.

The Orthodox Church is still here. The same Church, in visible and unbroken continuity with the apostles — the one that gave us the Scriptures you love, that fought for the Trinity and the divinity of Christ you preach, that has never stopped offering the same faith it received. There is no shame in humbling ourselves before it. The shame would only be in refusing, out of the very pride that so nearly cost me my soul.

I laid my calling down, and I found that I had lost nothing worth keeping. I only stopped serving myself in the name of God, and began, slowly, to be served by the Church that Christ built. If a fraction of what I have written unsettles you, do not argue it away too quickly. Sit with it. Ask the Lord who it was that sent you. And if you cannot answer — come and see.