What we can learn from the church fathers that will enrich our own Bible study.
| posted 10/20/2004
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But the Fathers were immersed in the ecclesial practice of the text-they insisted that you can't understand what the text is about if you are divorced from the life of the church.
What are the competing schools of Bible interpretation in the first centuries of the church? And are some of these more useful than others as models for us today?
The "schools"-Alexandrian, Antiochian, and so forth-are not so much wholly separate camps as interpretive communities that emphasize certain things more thoroughly than others.
The Alexandrian school emphasized the role of allegory. The Antiochians, though they did emphasize the historical referent of the literal reading and occasionally got angry with the Alexandrians, also shared the Alexandrians' assumption that biblical meanings are multi-layered.
The Antiochians certainly are helpful, reminding us to credit the literal sense. But even at Antioch they practiced both literal and contemplative ways of reading the text. They expected to find Christ there just as the Alexandrians did! They had their own understanding of theoria-a contemplative reading of the text grounded in its historia.
What is theoria?
It's a spiritual meaning, inherent in the literal framework of the text, which takes the reader to higher plane of contemplation. Eastern Orthodox folks are very familiar with this way of reading the Bible.
In Antioch, the higher theoria of the text remains subject to the text's history in a way that Alexandrians did not feel constrained by. For example, as an Alexandrian reads a text about the construction of the temple, he asks, What spiritual principle might this symbolize? and might not be deeply concerned about the history of the temple itself. The Antiochian takes seriously the history, language, and culture of the text-but then would expect that as he studies along these lines the Spirit of God would lead him to a higher contemplation of deeper spiritual realities.
I can't think of a single Father who would say the Bible is not a multi-leveled or -tiered text. Augustine and Origen and the others would all say that certain texts just don't make sense literally. There are some dangers in this assumption, of course, but also some rewards-and most evangelicals are not used to thinking this way.
Say you hear a sermon on something out of Judges-say Ehud kills a wicked king in Israel. An evangelical would study that text, getting all the historical background, what kings were like, what weapons were like, what the words meant-and the first 10-15 minutes of the sermon would deal with that context. But sooner or later even evangelicals need to ask: What does this text mean for me as a Christian?
That's what an Antiochian exegete would mean by the spiritual side of the text: putting our gospel glasses on-where is Jesus in this text? How does Christ speak to us here? What can we learn about Christ, the church, this present evil age from that historical narrative? This is what evangelicals do, too, in sermon application.
