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So too, growing numbers of serious Christian readers of the Bible have become persuaded that we can't hope to know what Moses "means" without seeing how he was read by Jesus, Paul, Irenaeus, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Newman, and Barth. The particular lineup of midrashic commentators can change, of course. The point is the exegetical humility of reading the Scriptures through the saints—an appropriate response to the humility of a God who bends toward us in Christ and gathers his people in a communion of saints. The real question will be whether and how this way of reading takes root in local pastors' preaching and in lay people's expectations. For if it remains interesting only to scholars, then it deserves to be flicked away, like a barnacle on the hull of the church's ship. But if we can add a few more saints to lists like the one I gave above (my grandmother, say, and a few old ladies from the churches I've served), then we may be on to something. As St. Athanasius famously said, "If you want to know the minds of the saints you must live the lives of the saints." The church, thankfully, has never been deprived of saints. These and similar books will help us in the mind-department.
Baker's Evangelical Ressourcement series seeks to show that the early church's import for Protestants is not less "integral" than "it is for Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy." With D. H. Williams' volume Tradition, Scripture, and Interpretation the series succeeds admirably. The book is a companion source-volume for Williams' previous book, Evangelicals and Tradition, but is plenty readable on its own.
Williams is a highly esteemed patristics scholar teaching at the Baptist Baylor University, which makes him an odd duck on several counts. And in trying to introduce his evangelical readership to patristic biblical exegesis he's taking on quite a task. Yes, the fathers were as devoted in their biblicism as any 20th-century evangelical. It's not hard to find sentiments like Cyril of Alexandria's throughout the patristic era: "Do not simply take my word when I tell you these things, unless you are given proof for my teaching from Holy Scripture." But as Williams ably shows, the fathers not only didn't believe in the Reformation slogan, sola scriptura, they wouldn't even have understood it. From their perspective, "a radically Biblicist view might easily be driven by a desire to avoid the truth of the church's teaching," Williams argues, and indeed heretical groups in the early centuries were often eager to "prove" their points by citing chapter and verse.
In a fine introductory essay, Williams describes tradition as "the memory of the church." As Augustine shows in his Confessions, we are who we are only through our memories. It is not less so with the church. Williams uses a historian's scalpel to open this wound in his evangelical patient: the Bible is not actually older than church tradition. The writings of the first fathers precede the uniting of the biblical books in one volume as we have it today (the first list of the books of the Old and New Testaments that matches our own Bibles comes from St. Athanasius in 367, though the key books were in place long before). St. Clement of Alexandria speaks of "Scripture" simply as what we think of as the Old Testament, which for him demonstrably sets forth Christ without ambiguity! Even after the formation of the biblical canon, tradition still functioned as a hermeneutical rule: "an approach for interpreting the Bible by investigating and following the ancient consensus of the fathers."
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