Why Reading the Bible Alone Turns You Into a Heretic

On the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Six Ecumenical Councils, we confront a question that causes enormous confusion in the world today, which is what Christianity actually is. In the West there is a very clear teaching that the Holy Scriptures are inspired by God and without error, and this is true, but it runs into a problem that most people never consider. There was no codified canon of the New Testament for the first three hundred years of the church. The books that make up the New Testament were gathered together and settled by an ecumenical council, at a time when there were extra writings in circulation and even books that some wanted included that were left out. You cannot say the New Testament is inspired by the Holy Spirit while rejecting the authority of the very council that determined which books belong in it. You cannot have one without the other. The same fathers who gave us the canon of Scripture also gave us the creeds, and both came from the same guidance of the Holy Spirit. This is why the approach of "me and my Bible" so often ends in heresy. When people take up the Scriptures alone, apart from the councils, the writings of the saints, and the teaching of the church, they do not arrive at the pure faith. They fall back into the very errors that appeared in the early church and were condemned long ago. They end up holding that Christ was created, which is Arianism, or that God appeared first as the Father and then as the Son and then as the Spirit, which is modalism, or that the person of Christ is somehow divided, which is Nestorianism. Many well known preachers today, when examined, are found to hold these exact heresies without even knowing it, because they do not know how to rightly divide the word of truth. The reason they cannot read the Scriptures correctly is not a lack of intelligence or sincerity. It is that they do not possess the illumination that comes only through the church. St. Paul says that those who do not possess the grace of the Holy Spirit cannot properly understand the Scriptures. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit comes through baptism and chrismation, through the laying on of hands, and the baptismal service speaks again and again of the holy illumination of the soul, the body, and the mind, so that the understanding of the faith becomes deeper and richer. The early church understood this so clearly that the catechumens were dismissed before the Nicene Creed, because a person needed to be baptized and inside the church to truly understand the theology. Even St. Paul, after seeing Christ face to face on the road to Damascus, went away to study and then went to Jerusalem to confer with Peter and confirm that what had been revealed to him was sound. If the apostle who met Christ Himself sought confirmation from the church rather than trusting his private understanding, then the notion that you need only your Bible and nothing else was never the Christianity of the apostles. To affirm the Nicene Creed is to say that you stand in the lineage of Christians, receiving what has been handed down, rather than reinventing the faith on your own and calling the result Christianity.