Is Patristic Exegesis Still Usable?
In a recent article discussing John Keble’s defense of patristic exegesis, Ephraim Radner suggests that in our own post-modern age, with its professed love of diversity, its penchant for popularized exoticism, and its interest in religious or “spiritual” experience, early Christian ascetical practices and the Fathers’ non-historical mode of scriptural interpretation may seem less controversial than they did to Keble’s Victorian contemporaries. The issue for us is rather how broadly important, how relevant to the present life and faith of all the Christian Churches, figural scriptural interpretation still is. Radner pointedly asks whether we can maintain a vision of God’s reality, of God’s presence and activity in the world, without centering our faith on a vision of creation and a figural mode of recourse to the Bible essentially akin to those of the Fathers.
Clearly any suggestion such as this raises disturbing questions for the contemporary believer. Despite the vogue of post-modern theories, most of us can no longer think of the world and of the human community except in radically historical terms; we cannot prescind from our knowledge of what is involved in natural and human causality, our sense of the cultural conditioning of language and thought, our assumption of the perspectival character of the perception and communication of truth. Unless we choose to approach the Bible as fundamentalists, we cannot escape being aware that the texts that constitute our scriptural canon have undergone a complex evolution to reach their present form and arrangement, and that the meaning any given passage may have had for its original hearers may be very distant from the meaning we find in it today as Christians.
Yet we are becoming more and more aware that the interpretation of the Bible simply on the basis of a religiously neutral historical scholarship holds out relatively little interest or promise to the community of faith; if we are to receive it as more than a collection of documents on ancient Near Eastern religion—if we are still to take it as Scripture, in fact as a single “Bible” or book of Scripture, which as such is normative for our faith—then historical exegesis must somehow be united more firmly and continuously with theology, with the reflective attempt to make sense of the worshiping community’s Rule of Faith, in a single interpretive practice. In addition, as we become more aware that a credible faith presupposes real unity among Christians, as we become more conscious of the theological misuse of scriptural texts in the past to shore up sectarian interests, we can hardly escape concluding that Christian exegesis must not only become more theological but more theologically ecumenical, if it is to nourish the Church.
In this quest, historical criticism will obviously continue to play an indispensable role in any sophisticated modern interpretation of biblical texts. That role, first of all, must be to free readers from the same destructive literalism that Origen recognized as the basis of most false interpretation of the Bible—taking the apparent “face value” of a biblical text so seriously, so much in isolation from the rest of the canon, that one invests it with a meaning at odds with both its probable “original” sense and its traditional Christian application.
Secondly, historical criticism can help to free us from the narrowly polemical readings of certain texts—Matthew 16:18 in Catholic-Protestant debates about the papacy, for instance, or John 15:26 in Orthodox-Western controversy about the origin of the Holy Spirit—which overload their contextual meaning with interpretive histories that only perpetuate Christian division. But beyond the liberating effect of returning ad fontes on any discussion of Christian reform, some sense of the historical trajectory of meaning borne by a biblical passage—from its reconstructed “original” form and content, through its various stages of redaction and interpretation, to the life of the present Church—seems to be an indispensable prerequisite for any honest, intellectually plausible treatment of the text in contemporary exegesis. Having a historically sophisticated sense of where a text “comes from” allows us, in a culture conscious of history, to be appropriately discerning when we read that text in a Christian scriptural perspective. It makes us realize the “distance” the text has traveled to be God’s Word to us.
A more positive perception of early Christian exegesis, however, as not merely “pre-critical” but as thoroughly and—in many cases, at least—successfully theological, can open our eyes to what seems to be the other, less fulfilled need in biblical interpretation today: its need to recapture an understanding of its own role within the Church, and of its centrally theological task as reading not just texts, but sacred and normative texts, texts that relate to the overarching story of Jewish and Christian faith. We need to rediscover the implicit sense of the mutual dependency between theology and biblical interpretation, of the fluid, often imperceptible border between them, that characterized the patristic era; we need to recognize that theology, in all its forms, is really always a remote preparation for preaching—that is what distinguishes it, after all, from the philosophy or the phenomenology or the history of religion—and that Christian preaching has traditionally been chiefly a matter of expounding biblical texts for the present life of the Church.
We need not only to approach the text of Scripture with a sense of its historical origin, and of the historical context of all meaning; we also need to approach history with the conviction that God is present and active within it as its fundamentally real, although fundamentally transcendent ground and source: that although God is not, in his own being, historical, he is constantly to be found in history as the condition of all intelligibility. We need to become more conscious of the fact that the Church has always received the Bible as the book about Christ, simply because it was only the use of the Jewish biblical canon that enabled the disciples of Jesus to interpret his death and resurrection as being “for our sins, in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3) and because it is only the Church’s faith in the risen Jesus as the Christ that has permitted it to receive and recognize this hodge-podge of texts as a “Bible” at all. We need, most of all perhaps, to recover a “hermeneutics of piety” for our exegesis, in a mode appropriate for our own life of Christian faith: a way of approaching biblical texts that has its roots in our commitment to the faith of the worshiping Christian community, that is nourished by the continuous word of the centuries that have preached that faith to us, that asks of any proposed new application of the biblical message, “Does this seem appropriate to what we know of God? Does this fit in with the full Mystery of our salvation in Christ, as we have received and experienced it in the Church?”
It may be that the only way of fulfilling this need for theological exegesis and exegetical theology, in the immediate future at least, would be for the academic establishment to allow two branches of biblical studies to emerge, of parallel authority in the “guild”: a secular approach to scriptural interpretation, open to non-believer and former believers, as well as to believers who prefer to approach the Bible simply on historical terms; and an explicitly theological approach, which asks not simply textual and historical questions, but questions of how Christians might hear and use biblical texts today, in the context of the whole tradition of a biblically grounded Christian faith.
It is in this latter context that early Christian interpretation, grounded in its strong sense of God’s long history with humanity, can offer us at least parallels and models for reviving our exegetical imagination. It seems unlikely that many modern Christians will find that they can simply turn to patristic commentaries and homilies to supply their need for a more theological style of exegesis than what has been easily available in the recent past. Still, a greater familiarity with early Christian interpretation may at least lead the modern scholarly reader to reflect more radically on the hermeneutical conditions for reappropriating the Bible as the book of the Church, and stimulate her or him to develop new strategies for reading it in a Christian—and thus, in some sense, a figural—way, in a historically minded age.
Ephraim Radner, in the article I mentioned above, sees Keble’s defense of patristic exegesis as part of a crucial, larger nineteenth-century battle over faith in a real, historically present God—a battle which still has its urgency today:
Indeed, one way of describing Keble’s larger rhetorical maneuver in Tract 89 is to see it as a trap for exposing Protestant apostasy vis-à-vis Scripture as a whole: anti-mysticism, or the scriptural constrictions of a popularly assumed anti-catholicism, must surely end by subverting any deeper sustaining theistic premises one might otherwise continue to presume. If, that is, the breadth of divine Providence is such as orthodoxy claims and has always claimed, then the shape of the Scriptures, and their relationship both to the larger world, its history, and the moral form of its readers must be congruent, in a basic way, with patristic exegetical practice. So that if that practice is genuinely rejected, so too must be any pretense to holding orthodox theistic convictions.
Whether any new translations and publications of early Christian biblical commentary can help rekindle an interest in the kind of theological reading of Scripture the Fathers practiced, so that modern exegetes may “go and do likewise,” is a question only time will answer. Renewed contact with ancient Christian Psalm commentary, however, does seem to be a promising place to begin. For it is in reflecting on these complex, historically puzzling, often passionate Hebrew prayers, as words given also to the Church so that we, too, from our faith in the Lord Jesus, may speak to God, that the Fathers seem to have sensed most clearly how Scripture involves and transforms us. To see the Psalms as a mirror both of the rest of the Bible and of our own inner moods and desires, Athanasius realized, allows us to engage ourselves fully as actors in the same biblical drama, and to resonate inwardly with the life-giving harmony that the Word continually bestows on the world. He ends his Letter to Marcellinus with an exhortation:
Paul, too, encouraged his own disciple to act this way, when he said, “Think of these things, remain committed to them, that your progress may be manifest.” You must think about these things, too, and when you read the Psalms with understanding as I have described, led on by the Spirit, you will be able to grasp the meaning that is in each of them. So you will imitate for yourself the kind of life that those holy men led, who were filled with God and spoke these things to us.
To read them with that same understanding ourselves seems worth the effort, even if it promises to change a good deal of our inner world.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Biblical Interpretation and Doctrine in Early Christianity: Collected Essays (Eerdmans, 2025). All rights reserved.