Name your favorite modern master of Biblical exegesis

...giving themselves up to the distorted meaning of allegory, have undertaken to give a majesty of their own invention to Scripture. It is to believe themselves wiser than the Holy Spirit, and to bring forth their own ideas under a pretext of exegesis. Let us hear Scripture as it has been written.
St. Basil the Great

Christ among us

Churches, shrines, chapels, ikons, candles, processions, priests, bells, monasteries, travelling preachers, every day's saints, fast seasons—everything is the repetition of the same idea, namely, that Christ is the ruler of life and we are His followers. Christ must be expressed everywhere, indoors and outdoors. Many Englishmen have remarked that the Bible is read very seldom in the home in Russia and Serbia. That is true. People read the Bible more in symbols, pictures and signs, in music and prayers, than in the Book, Our religion is not a book religion, not even a learned religion. It is a dramatic mystery. The Bible contains the words, but in this dramatic mystery there is something higher and deeper than words. Slav Christianity is something greater than the Bible. Looking at an ikon, a Russian mujik perceives the Bible incarnated in a saint's life-drama. Mystery of sin, mystery of atonement, mystery of heroic suffering, mystery of the daily presence of Christ among us in holy wine, in holy bread, in holy water, in holy word, in holy deed, in every sanctified substance, even in matter as in spirit, mystery of communion of sins and of virtues—all are recorded once in the Bible, and all are recorded and repeated also in our daily life—that is what we call our Slav Orthodoxy. We take the mystic outlines of the Bible and do not care about the details. In those mystic outlines we put our daily life, with its details of sins and sufferings.
St. Nikolaj (Velimirovic)

Delivered unto us

Holy Scripture, then, is not an objectified 'source' of Christian truth and revelation, like the 'theoretical' texts which outline the impersonal and objective principles of an ideology. Nor are their two sources of objective authority, Scripture and Tradition, as Roman Catholic rationalism would have it. Prior to any written formulation, Christian faith and truth is a fact, the fact of God's incarnation and man's deification. It is the unceasing realization and manifestation of this fact, its tangible embodiment in history--in other words, it is the Church

This order of precedence is a fundamental precondition for approaching the ethics of the Gospel--and, for that matter, the whole teaching of Scripture. The Gospel finds its manifestation in the fact of the Church; and if we overlook this fact, we are left with nothing but a disembodied teaching whose significance may be exceptional, but is bound to be relative. (As we know, Scripture formed the basis for all the heretical distortions of the event of salvation, and many who reject Christianity have devoted serious study to the text of Scripture without abnegating their rejection.)

Prior to any written formulation, the historical reality of the Church is the 'gospel,' the 'good news'--the news of incarnate truth and salvation. For this reason, we cannot think of the Bible as the 'founding charter' of the Church, containing theoretical 'statutes' for the Christian faith and a code of 'commandments' for Christian ethics. Christianity is not made up of 'metaphysical' convictions and moral directives which always require a priori intellectual acceptance. The Gospel of the Church is the manifestation of her life and her experience: and this experience was set down by the eyewitnesses of the resurrection, of the beginning of man's salvation: '...even as they delivered unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word' (Lk 1:2).
Christos Yannaras

The dawn of a better life

...I also loved to read the Holy Scriptures; and when, toward the end of the Old Testament, in its concluding chapters, I somehow had a sense of emptiness and peace, and the strict Romans were already present, a feeling of barely audible, barely noticeable, sweet expectation stirred within me. The dawn of a better life seemed to be awaiting the whole world. There was no light as yet, and one felt both sad and relieved. Then a poor child was born in Bethlehem....How good it is in these dry deserts, where only palm trees grow and people walk about barefoot in light robes! And already Peter was weeping in the night when the cock crowed, and I wept with him; all grew dark, the dead rose out of their graves and walked into town, the curtain in the temple was rent….Before me is a picture....Christ manifest himself for a minute to a couple of disciples, who were on their way to Emmaus. Some poor little town, this Emmaus; three smallish men are hurrying out of some valley, their robes blowing behind them; to one side are rocks, and in the distance looms an agglomeration of small houses with flat roofs. How deserted it all seems! As though after dinner when it is no longer hot, you might enter a large green garden which no one is using and where the shadows cast by the trees grow more and more elongated. As though the person closest to one had departed from the house and from this garden, in which he could have strolled had he wished. And something new was about to begin, was about to glimmer….But what was it? Even then I could not explain it, nor can I do so now.
Konstantin Leontiev

Self-Interpreting Scripture?

Spiritual knowledge is like a house built in the midst of Greek and worldly wisdom, in which house, like a tightly locked trunk, there is the knowledge of the divine Scriptures, and the unutterable treasure hidden in this knowledge of the Scriptures, that is, Divine grace. Those who enter this house cannot see this treasure if the trunk is not opened for them, but this trunk cannot be opened by any human wisdom. This is why people who think in a worldly way do not know the spiritual treasure which lies in the trunk of spiritual knowledge, And just as someone who lifts this trunk on his shoulders cannot by this alone see the treasure which is inside, so also even if someone were to read and learn by heart the divine Scriptures, and could read them all like a single psalm, he cannot by this alone acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit, which is hidden in them. For just as what is hidden in the trunk cannot be revealed by the trunk itself, so also what is concealed in the divine Scriptures cannot be revealed by the Scriptures themselves.
St. Symeon the New Theologian

The self interpreting Bible?

The interpretative understanding of the New Testament for Orthodoxy is not just a matter of using human logical capabilities. The interpretation presupposes first and foremost the correct understanding of the Church, which is the ecclesiological base upon which we build the interpretation of the texts, fulfilled with an ecclesiastical ethos and infused by the liturgical grace of the sacraments. In the Orthodox interpretation it is not the method which is most important, but rather the faithful life of the interpreter in the Church.
Konstantin Nikolakopoulos

On the misinterpretation of Holy Writ

When, however, sociologist or ethicists, without having the Holy Spirit, study the works of the Fathers, they divide and separate them. And I think that this isolated, detached use of quotations from the Fathers-out of the ascetic spirit-in order to support our impure and human-centered thoughts is the greatest heresy. When we take the Fathers out of the spirit of asceticism, of repentance, we divide them. And every division is a change for the worse. All of the heretics did the same. They used the passages without understanding them, without having the prerequisites of interpreting them correctly. We should therefore carry out the "watchword" which prevails in our times - "return to the Fathers" - not only by studying the texts of the Fathers but also by making the effort of acquiring the life of the Fathers. We should live in the holy Church, live with the holy Mysteries and the holy virtues, stop being individuals and start living like persons, as worthy members of Christ.
Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos)

The Doctor is in

In the hands of neurologically sick people the Bible becomes a source of "uncontrollable fantasies." And indeed religion is ... most dangerous. Instead of being a manual for the cure of the sickness of religion the Bible becomes a book for the propagation of the sickness of religion.

Fr. John Romanides