"Knowing this first, that all prophecy of Scripture is unamenable to [literally "not to become of"] 
private interpretation." [2 Peter 1:4]

    Is it reasonable (or is it arrogant?) to imagine that a contempo- rary Christian having little knowledge of the Levantine, Greek-language-and-Hebrew culture--a person of the third millennium thinking in terms of the premises of a vastly different frame of reference two millenniums ago--can do what it has taken many thousands of very holy and learnëd people living in the ancient Greek-language culture to do?   Each generation has stood on the shoulders of the preceding under the inspiration of the all-holy Spirit (John 16:13)  to draw out implications inherent in the words of Scripture, to sort out and reconcile apparent contradictions, to arrive at a consensus concerning basic beliefs, and to create a systematic unity of the whole in accord with the framework (The Greek- language paradigm) of the Apostolic and Patristic writers?
     The only way the Bible could be known to be inerrant is for those who have decided what books should be included in it or excluded from it to be inerrant--no individual, certainly.  The Bible was finally assembled and ratified by the Orthodox Church sitting in holy Synod in the latter fourth century (about when the Orthodox Creed was also finalized).  The only reliable interpretation of the Bible's contents is that exhibited in the consensus of the very same group that codified the Bible in the first place--a group still thinking in the categories of the Greek-language paradigm of the authors of the canonical books of the New Testament.   The basic view of reality as energetic sounds striking modern, but the West misrenders the energy terms of the New Testament and Fathers and Mothers of the Church and hence is bereft of the idea, as it obtained among the Apostles and Patristic authors.  The Orthodox Church--or, more specifically, the consensus of the Orthodox Fathers and Mothers writing about doctrinal matters and holy practices--is the body that has just been characterized.    

     It is a task of Orthodoxy today to adapt English in such a way as to enable Patristic thinking to be expressed in English in a manner faithful to the categories of the ancient Greek-language paradigm--something that has seldom been done with a high degree of success in the past.  (SEE HERE.)  This task clamors for and is now re- ceiving attention--side-by-side with missions--in New World Orthodoxy.  If little is being officially done to adapt the fasting regulations to contemporary notions of what is healthy eating and what is luxurious eating--and to make a clearer distinction between monastics and laity who do not live in groups having cooks knowledgeable of such rules--that is minor in comparison with the sacred texts of the Bible.   When this page was first written, one was almost without hope that the terminological issue would be remedied.  Now the situation has a much more sanguine look.   With most American Orthodox now native-speakers of English, there is reason to hope that the task of adapting English to the needs of translating Apostolic and Patristic thinking in ways that will adequately express the concepts of the original Eastern paradigm of the early Christians (and of later Orthodox Christianity) is on the way to being achieved. 

     Besides the complete obscuration of the energy nouns, verbs, and adjectives in the Bible and Patristic writings--see Philp. 2:13, Gal. 5:6, and many more passages--the most egregious misrenderings in the West are those that confuse the nouns pair with the endings -sis (-tis after -s-) and -ma.  The -sis are energetic feminines denoting activities (rather like English gerunds, but without "tenses" and "voices"); the -ma forms are neuters expressing the result of the activity of the paired -sis form.  Western translations misrender ktísis "creation" as though it were ktísma creature (see 2 Cor. 5:17, Gal. 6:15, and indeed Col. 1:15) and (h)omoíosis "assimilation" (Gen. 1:26) as though it were (h)omoíosis "likeness."  LOGOS and SOPHIA--Christ the Creator of the Cosmos's title, the "Reason and Wisdom" of God, appears in the unbalanced mistranslation of "Word and Wisdom."  Besides its silliness and its display of  ignorance over what Greek-speaking  philosopher's of Jesus's time meant by the term, one would have to suppose that the created cosmos  is "wordy" (rhematikós) rather than (what the Greeks said) logikós "rational."   (Lógos didn't mean "word" in ordinary uses; Greek had rhêma, léxis, etc. for that meaning, but could use logos the way English uses word for "signal" in "Give 'em the word" or "promise" in "They broke their word.")  The philosophers and important Fathers (above all, St. Maximos the Confessor) understood that the Creator-LOGOS left some sort of logic or order in the  ktísmata that He has created and constantly recreates; these were rendered correctly into Latin as rationes ("reasons" with small "r").  The Orthodox reject the disingenuous shifting back and forth between Word (an allegëd title of the Creator) and Word (Bible and preaching) in some prominent Protestant writings.  They seem to think the cosmos is "wordy" because created by a "Word"!   See also this page.
     If obscuring the energy words yields a false view of reality, the confusing God the alleged Word with the Word in the sense of Scripture and/or preaching that is so common among Protestants changes the emphasis on the Creator to a human-aimed activity.  What anthropologists call "word magic" is not unknown.  These and yet other reasons make it incomprehensible why an Orthodox person would call God the Son a "Word."   But then, if the non-native-speakers of English that formed Orthodox thinking in the New World could call théosis "Divinization" (partaking of the uncreated Energies of God's Being)  apothéosis (pagan "Deification" or making a human god in essence), it's no wonder they could come up with the absurd rendering of sýmvolon písteos (the creed) "standard of belief" and "symbol of belief/faith"--though it doesn't "symbolize" anything.
     Note that the Fall (through the sinning of our first ancestors) resulted in the loss of the Omoíosis Theõ "Assimilation to God" that energized the potential of the Icon (Image) of God in created human beings, the potential of reason (lógos) and freewill (exousía)--as the Fathers taught.  Without this potential, humans would be animals:  It didn't get lost.  But without the energization of that potential by the uncreated Energy of Grace, reason and freewill cannot adequately serve God and please him (Philp. 2:13 in Greek).  [See the forthcoming booklet by Orchid Land Publications, Why the non-Orthodox cannot understand how Western Christianity has diverged from Eastern Orthodox Christianity.]