Reading the Old Testament with The Ancient Church
Heine, Ronald E. Reading the Old Testament with The Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought. Grand Rapids, Michigan: BakerAcademics, 2007.
Although I am not particularly interested in the Church Fathers (CFs), there is something about their interpretation of the Bible, and in particular the OT, that fascinates me. Sometimes reading the CFs on particular issues or passages helps us understand the shape of our own hermeneutics. I also find quite interesting that people who value the contribution of the CFs tend to pick and choose the portions that they find helpful and almost ignore all the other things they have to say on other passages (often less palatable to our modern sensitivities). I will be honest, I haven’t read any complete work of any of the CFs, but I have read many of their sermons and commentaries on specific passages. Although I value their contribution to the development of Christendom and fight against heresies, I do not find them to be very helpful. This is especially true of their reading of the OT. That’s one of the reasons why I picked up this book.
Ronald Heine wrote a very readable book on the CFs’ attitude and interpretation of the OT. I thought it was brilliant of him to start by outlining the Christian attitude and disagreements over the role of the OT in the Reformation, Enlightenment, Romantic and Modern periods. By doing this, it was obvious that there was a huge contrast between these periods and the CFs who never questioned its central role in the life of the church.
They did not all agree on how it should be read in order to speak to the church but, with the exception of Marcion and perhaps a few Gnostics who were not church fathers, they never thought that it should be dismissed as uncanonical or treated as second-class literature in comparison with the New Testament (29).
Heine wrote something about all the 3 divisions of the Hebrew bible (this is my observation as he never claims to use this tripartite division on purpose). In the Torah, he talked about the law and the “reimagining” of the Exodus. Several texts were covered in the prophets including Isaiah 7:14 and praying with the Psalms. Although the book is a collection of a series of lectures, I thought the book flowed really well.
The book helped me appreciate the struggle of the CFs in applying the OT to their new reality. However they were to interpret the OT, it was God’s word and it was treated as such. I was also surprised to realize how little discussion was actually based on the Hebrew text. Heine spent a few pages talking about the different versions available to the fathers and that although Origen knew a little Hebrew, it was Jerome who came to master the language and challenged the use of the LXX. I wish Heine would have spent a lot more time on this subject, but this would probably make it a different kind of book.
Although I enjoyed the book, I kept feeling that the way that Heine portrayed the CFs in this book didn’t quite match with my experience in reading the little I have read of them. Yes, the fathers revered the OT as the word of God and fought against heresies but their interpretation of several passages seemed to be so far away from their Jewish and even NT context that sometimes it is a stretch, in my opinion, to say that they were being faithful to the biblical text. I say this because I notice how ruthless people can be when they hear fanciful preaching but tend to make excuses when it comes to the CFs. This bothers me.
There was hardly any discussion or critique of their interpretation and no interaction on how those passages are interpreted today and why. The closest you get to different interpretations is the chapter on the prophets where Heine shows how the Jews would interpret those same passages. Maybe I am reacting to the book this way because I am enjoying James Kugel’s book “How to read the Bible” where Kugel shows how specific passages were interpreted by the Ancient interpreters and how critical scholarship understands the same passages today. Perhaps I was unfairly hoping for a different book.
Anyway, this is a great introduction to those interested in the CFs and the OT.
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By Phil Sumpter, September 21, 2008 @ 1:54 pm
There’s a lot of work going on on patristic hermeneutics and it’s finding a bit of a come back. The idea is that you “pierce” the text to the ultimate reality to which it only fragmentarily witnesses. Reading Jesus into the OT, for example, is legitimate because it approaches the text from the context of the fullness of revelation found in the whole canon. Though not literally present, he’s “ontologically” present. I think that these kinds of considerations ought to lie at the heart of current Christian attempts to work out a “theological hermeneutic,” as I mentioned in my own post The need for ontological categories in biblical exegesis. I posted a brief bibliography of the subject here.
By Maer, September 24, 2008 @ 11:23 am
Phil – I read your post with much benefit. If I read your post correctly, it seems that we can say that the Church Fathers’ exegesis is helpful not least because they are getting at the heart of the reality to which the text points. In other words, we need to think “about the content of their particular message in the context of the content of all the messages contained in the Bible.” This makes sense. My only observation, as far as patristic exegesis is concerned, is that it seems to me that the particularity of the message often gets short shrift and the hermeneutical spiral suffers in the process. Thank you for pointing me to your bibliography, I have become a fan of Chris Seitz and you will be happy to know that I will be reading Childs’ intro to the OT soon. Perhaps we can interact more then.