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The Life of Our Fathers: An Introduction to the Bible in the Orthodox Church
The Life of Our An Introduction to the Bible in the Orthodox Church
Silviu N. Bunta
978-0-88141-789-0
Scripture has never been just a text. In the Orthodox Church, it is a way of life.
In The Life of Our Fathers, Fr. Silviu Bunta shows how Scripture functions in the Orthodox Church. Rather than giving a method to interpret Scripture, he points to the way Apostolic Christianity has always engaged biblical revelation—by living the ascetical and liturgical life of the Church. There is no distance between reader and text, and the Bible is not an object of study and analysis but a reality that we participate in through the life of the Church in her services and ascetical practices. As we put off the old man, and with it the crushing weight of our fallen egos, the words of Scripture become our own speech and we ourselves are transformed and made new.
Born from talks given to lay audiences, this book remains deeply accessible. It challenges common assumptions about how to approach Scripture, showing us a far deeper and richer path of participation. This is not a call to interpret better, but to live differently. For anyone seeking to understand how Scripture functions in the Orthodox tradition, The Life of Our Fathers offers a rare and timely guide.
Silviu N. Bunta
978-0-88141-789-0
Scripture has never been just a text. In the Orthodox Church, it is a way of life.
In The Life of Our Fathers, Fr. Silviu Bunta shows how Scripture functions in the Orthodox Church. Rather than giving a method to interpret Scripture, he points to the way Apostolic Christianity has always engaged biblical revelation—by living the ascetical and liturgical life of the Church. There is no distance between reader and text, and the Bible is not an object of study and analysis but a reality that we participate in through the life of the Church in her services and ascetical practices. As we put off the old man, and with it the crushing weight of our fallen egos, the words of Scripture become our own speech and we ourselves are transformed and made new.
Born from talks given to lay audiences, this book remains deeply accessible. It challenges common assumptions about how to approach Scripture, showing us a far deeper and richer path of participation. This is not a call to interpret better, but to live differently. For anyone seeking to understand how Scripture functions in the Orthodox tradition, The Life of Our Fathers offers a rare and timely guide.
166 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 14, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 14, 2025
I suspect this may end up being the most important text on the place and role of Scripture in my lifetime. Fr. Silviu has done an absolutely amazing task in recovering the role that Scripture played in the early Christian Church, and the role it should continue to play today, as not something to be studied, but something to be lived.
The book, adapted from a series of talks, guides the reader on a journey with a significant presupposition, more implied than stated, that the idea of Christianity itself is not based on mental assent to a series of doctrinal statements, but a way of life, based on the revelation (apocalypse) of the Creator, and the Creator's incarnation Jesus Christ. The conclusion reached is that rather than being a guide for life, the Scripture is inherently an expression of life, and of living. It is less a guidebook than a mirror, in which we see ourselves, and we see our flaws, our shortcomings, and our weaknesses.
Coming from an Orthodox Christian milieu, which is poorly understood if at all understood in Western Society, the stress over the textual content and meaning is relaxed a bit. It isn't necessary for the believer individually to have a correct interpretation of the Scripture, for that is (in the prayer of the Church) the nearly exclusive domain of the Bishops, for whom we ask of God to grant their continuation to "rightly divide the Word of Truth." That Truth, by the way, is not just the Scripture. That Truth is the person of Jesus Christ.
There are other works that do a very credible job at tracing the history of the canon of Scripture, the interpretation of the Scripture by others, and as such that isn't Fr. Silviu's reason for offering this work. This is a radically new (and yet ancient) way of how Scripture is applied and used in the life of the Orthodox Christian. It is now "essential reading" for those in my community desiring to know more about this critical topic.
The book, adapted from a series of talks, guides the reader on a journey with a significant presupposition, more implied than stated, that the idea of Christianity itself is not based on mental assent to a series of doctrinal statements, but a way of life, based on the revelation (apocalypse) of the Creator, and the Creator's incarnation Jesus Christ. The conclusion reached is that rather than being a guide for life, the Scripture is inherently an expression of life, and of living. It is less a guidebook than a mirror, in which we see ourselves, and we see our flaws, our shortcomings, and our weaknesses.
Coming from an Orthodox Christian milieu, which is poorly understood if at all understood in Western Society, the stress over the textual content and meaning is relaxed a bit. It isn't necessary for the believer individually to have a correct interpretation of the Scripture, for that is (in the prayer of the Church) the nearly exclusive domain of the Bishops, for whom we ask of God to grant their continuation to "rightly divide the Word of Truth." That Truth, by the way, is not just the Scripture. That Truth is the person of Jesus Christ.
There are other works that do a very credible job at tracing the history of the canon of Scripture, the interpretation of the Scripture by others, and as such that isn't Fr. Silviu's reason for offering this work. This is a radically new (and yet ancient) way of how Scripture is applied and used in the life of the Orthodox Christian. It is now "essential reading" for those in my community desiring to know more about this critical topic.
October 20, 2025
Fr Silviu is an academic and biblical scholar who takes exception with modern biblical scholarship shaping how we read the Scriptures. Generally biblical scholarship has turned bible study into a scholarly or intellectual pursuit and moved it away from reading the Bible to form a relationship with Christ, the 2nd Person of the Holy Trinity. The bible for Bunta is not mostly informational but rather transformational and spiritually formational. He is very critical of St Augustine's influence on Christian thinking, and he is also deeply critical of "the Christian West." Still, it is not clear to me how "the average" person would come to read the text as he envisions it, because that requires one to be trained as he is trained in languages and in a fair amount of theology. Will people get the right vision simply by attending Orthodox services and listening to the hymns? I think it is much more difficult than that as the ancient symbolism of the services and the theological depth of the hymns often makes them mysterious if not incomprehensible to the average person. Unlike generations of Christians in the past who were mostly illiterate, most modern people are geared toward intellectual comprehension, trained in skepticism and so don't attend the services without asking questions about meaning. Additionally, many people come to church with deep wounds which need to be healed, and he seems to advocate that wounds and suffering are what determines if one is truly repentant, while I think many come to the Christ to be relieved from their suffering. They want Christ's light burden rather than adding to their suffering.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews