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In recent years, more and more evangelical Protestants have been looking at the early church fathers—that group of Christian teachers stretching from just after the apostles through approximately the first five centuries of the church—to see how they read their Bibles and did their theology.

"Exhibit A" in this resurgence is the Ancient Christian Commentary series edited by Thomas C. Oden and published by InterVarsity Press—a 28-volume set that places side by side with the text of each Bible book the key exegetical writings of the early church.

In what might be seen as a book-length preface to that series, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers, Christopher Hall of Eastern University guides readers into the "far country" of those early interpreters. Who better, we thought, to provide orientation for CH readers?

Why should Christians today care what the church fathers—Athanasius, Irenaeus, Augustine, and others—had to say about the Bible? Shouldn't we just interpret the Bible for our own times?

The phrase Tom Oden taught me is "The Holy Spirit has a history." The church does not thrive in the first century, fail in the second, then revive in the sixteenth. The Spirit never deserts the church as it reads the Bible.

He is present in every century, guiding bishops and pastors of the church, particularly as they encountered readings of the Scripture that at first glance might have seemed plausible, but in light of the larger tradition—the Rule of Faith, the liturgical tradition, and so on—didn't make sense. It is the Fathers who provided the framework to protect that apostolic tradition down through the years.

So, since God has always been present with his church, our education as Christians will be stunted if we don't expose ourselves to how he guided the church in its foundational years.

Tom and I sometimes think of church history as a triangle sitting on an edge, where you have the apostolic period, then the time of the early fathers—then building on that, the medieval, Reformation, Enlightenment, and finally the modern. The weight we want to give to each period decreases as we move up the triangle.

Part of Tom Oden's project is to push people into the early patristic period; it's the most formative time for exegesis (biblical interpretation), theology, and many other facets of the church. Today it is as if the triangle has been inverted. The tendency has been to spend all one's time on modern sources and commentators.

What do we miss when we do that?

The Fathers worked only a few generations after the apostles. They read their Bibles in light of the Rule of Faith, an outline statement of Christian belief that circulated in the second century, stating the essential contents of the faith. This Rule, thought to have originated in the time of the apostles, was established to guide exegesis and ward off heretical readings.

They also knew how the Bible had been used in worship since the apostles, and they grew up reading, chanting, hearing these texts themselves.

Their minds were like Origen's: he had absorbed every word from Genesis through Revelation. The Scripture was like his own mental Rolodex, wrapped around certain key themes: especially Christ's incarnation. So when he read, for example, an obscure text in Numbers, the Rolodex started spinning, because he was expecting to find Christ there.

The Fathers are important because they're much nearer than we are to the apostolic world, in which Scripture had shaped the church.

Modern scholars tend to analyze the text in detail, exhaustively studying its language and context.

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December (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47