A Kentucky drystone masonry fence has no mortar. The artisan places the stones so that their own weight and peculiar shapes hold them together from within. At first sight the stones can seem ill-fitted. Small stones occupy odd spots, loose fill can be seen spilling out. But the stones are placed to shift over time. Weather, oddly shaped stones, shifting ground, incidental damage, rather than undermining the fence, actually compact it together through the years, so that the fence grows even stronger and more beautiful. These fences have stood for over 150 years. Sometimes I feel my own thoughts to be ill-fitted, uncemented, and loose, but I trust under the pressure of the years and the forces of life, they can somehow fit together as well...
Take Scripture Literally-5
Who Cares What Augustine Thought?
©Lawson G. Stone, 2005
Sorry for leaving you hanging there on the last article. I've had panic-stricken e-mails all week, begging me to resolve the great dilemma with which the last article closed. Okay, maybe you weren't that anxiety stricken. I had a few other e-mails, though, asking WHO CARES WHAT AUGUSTINE THOUGHT? Why should it matter? Wasn't he a Catholic? Didn't he just allegorize the Bible? Didn't he just impose his doctrinal views by force on the unsuspecting text? Wasn't he corrupted by Constantine's leveraged buy-out of Christianity that lowered the curtain on apostolic Christianity until the protestants arrived?
Since I still haven't got an answer to the bigger question, I thought I'd say a bit about why we should care what St. Augustine (and other ancient interpreters) thought. I am a big fan of the concept "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" That is, if someone is going to advise me about something, it's nice if they actually know what they're doing. Well, the early church deserves our respect. Between the first Easter and the Fall of the western Roman empire, the early church did something amazing. Three things, actually. First, they evangelized the entire known world. Cultures existed of which the early Christians knew nothing. But every culture they knew, they tried to reach for Christ. Some thrived, some flopped. But from Ireland to China, the early Christian movement had proclaimed the gospel to every culture known to the believers. They did this despite persecutions, despite being a marginal sect, without the help of cultural anthropology, faith-promise pledging, or even PowerPoint. They lacked our technological and travel prowess, had no printing presses. Early Christians even had to invent the "book" (i.e. the codex rather than the scroll) just to get the Bible into a portable form. But they did it. And I'll bet that their success in evangelizing every known culture derived at least in part from the fact that they read and studied the Bible. Whatever else we might say about the early church's hermeneutic, it fed, enabled, and energized the moral fulfillment of the Great Commission for that generation. Do we want to duplicate their achievement in evangelizing our world? If so, maybe we need to listen to them and pay attention to how they studied the Bible!
Second, the early church formulated the fundamental doctrines of the faith, in the form that we still treasure. Many fail to grasp their debt to the early church on the most basic points. For example, how do you get saved? Many would cite Rev. 3:20 and say "invite Christ into your heart." But that meaning is not present in Rev. 3:20. Jesus addresses his words of invitation not to the unbeliever, but to the church! A backslidden, lukewarm church became so alienated from Christ that he depicted himself as outside it, knocking on the door like some homeless person begging for a meal. In context, Rev. 3:20 has nothing to do with salvation. And yet, early Christians intuitively found here an image that strikingly portrayed what actually happened when lost people put their faith in Christ, especially since baptism was typically followed immediately by the convert's first Eucharist, in a closed room with the non-baptized still outside, giving "I will dine with him and he with me" graphic and personal meaning. So this verse became part of the tradition, a tradition affirmed by people who do not even realize that they didn't get this application of the verse from the Bible, but from the tradition.
Or consider another image of salvation: being "born again" in John 3. We think of that phrase capturing the experience of a "real" sinner--the addict, the adulterer, the criminal--who finds Christ and discovers a whole new life of freedom, purity, and peaceableness. But wait: when Jesus spoke of being born again, he wasn't talking to a reprobate with a profligate lifestyle, but to Nicodemus, arguably the most godly man in Jerusalem! Jesus does not identify a single sinful behavior in Nicodemus' life. The call to a new birth comes to one who is moral, religious, devoted, and hungry for the truth! When Jesus does talk to "real" sinners like the woman at the well, he talks...doctrine! He debates with her about the true sanctuary (shades of Deuteronomy!). He discusses what will happen when the Messiah comes (surprise!). He discusses the spirituality of God. We read nothing of a challenge to be born again. So what happened? Why do we use "born again" for night-to-day types of conversions? We did not get it from John 3, that's for sure. We inherited this wonderful image from the early church. Early on, the Christian movement found the gospel's power to transform lives powerfully expressed by the new birth image of John 3. So they used it, and we use it today, not because it is the obvious, contextually conditioned meaning of John 3, but because we received this language from the early church.
The early church also wrestled with the great questions posed in the Bible, but not really answered completely there. How can Jesus be God and man at the same time? Was Jesus two people in one body? Was he one person with two tendencies? Such questions naturally arise from reading the NT, but the Bible does not really give us summary answers. Somebody had to figure it out. The early church did that. Or take the trinity: is the Holy Spirit "God" or just a divine influence? Is the Holy Spirit a person? How do the Father, Son, and Spirit interact and inter-related? How can they be eternal if one is begotten and the other procedes? The Bible forces these questions on us, but does not provide a comprehensive answer. Somebody had to figure it out. The early church did that. And their answers stuck. We still try to improve on the answers arrived at by the earliest councils of the church, but somehow, when it's all done, we feel like we've simply re-invented the wheel.
And guess what: at the core of all their debates about Christology, the Trinity, the ordo salutis, etc. was an ongoing discussion about how to interpret the Bible! Indeed, church historian Rowan Greer in his essay in Early Biblical Interpretation has claimed that the debate about how scripture is to be interpreted, especially how the OT is to be read, definitively shaped the more famous debates about Jesus, the Trinity, and Salvation. In a day when we seem to be rethinking so many theological issues, I wonder if we have something to learn from them about how to read the Bible?
Third, the early church did something that I find utterly breath-taking, though some of you will disagree with me on this point. Typically, historians like to depict pre-Constantinian Christianity as a naive, "hebraic" religion, while later Christianity morphed into a gigantic system contaminated by Greek philosophical ideas and corrupted by Roman power. I'm not so sure. I am impressed by Wolfhart Pannenberg's thesis in an article entitled (get ready) "The Appropriation of the Philosophical Concept of God as a Dogmatic Problem of Early Christian Theology" (found in his Basic Questions in Theology vol. 2). He shows that in fact, early Christian thought was so vibrant, alive, and energized, that it could actually claim as its own inheritance the intellectual and cultural heritages of both Greece and Rome. That Christian thought could commandeer the language and ideas of the very cultures who thought to dominate it, demonstrated the power and vitality of Christian thought.
To me, this makes sense: The NT clearly expects the Christian Faith to transcend its Jewish origins; to go beyond them without leaving them behind (Marcion's mistake!). As a religion charged with a universal mission, the Christian faith had to be able to translate itself, without loss or corruption, into the thought forms of other cultures. And this is what happened. Did the early church corrupt the faith? I don't think so. They knew what we, in our frenzied "contextualization" or "demythologization" forget: the hermeneutical task is to translate the gospel to make it accessible, not to transform the gospel to make it acceptable. The corruption and error that occurred later was not the fault of having appropriated Greek or Roman theological ideas: they were the result of simply comforming to the world and letting Christianity become enculturated rather than retain its quality of being potentially indigenous to any culture because it is ultimately alien to all cultures.
You've already seen me coming. I think the early church did the right thing. And today we need to learn how to articulate the substance and detail of the faith in terms that are accessible to our neighbors around the world. We need to learn how to make use of the tools and ideas that the culture provides without corrupting the gospel. And guess what: I bet the early church learned to do this in part by studying the Bible! Somehow, their study of the Bible energized and guided their encounter with Greek and Roman culture and thought. Maybe, just maybe, we could learn from them about how to study the Bible in such a way that we can confront our own culture with both relevance and integrity. Does any one of my readers think the church is really doing great in this department? That we need no advice, no guidance, no examples?
People like Justin Martyr, Irenaus, Origen, Augustine, Jerome, and others were right in the middle of these three massive achievements of early Christianity. Justin was a debater and apologist. Irenaus, living in Lyon, France, brought a global-conciousness to the framing a "great church" theology that would express the universal faith through culturally indigenous forms. Origen confounded Jews and Pagans in debate, but was beloved by his greatest adversaries outside the faith--though reviled by many inside! And Augustine was the "purpose driven pastor" of the late 3rd to 4th century, preaching to throngs of seekers and believers alike, shouldering both pastoral and administrative burdens though his first love was, in fact, scholarship. None of these leaders were perfect, nor can we plop their approaches and solutions down in 2005 and expect them to work. Still, how they went about the study of scripture had everything to do with the unquestioned excellence and faithfulness with which they fulfilled their vocations. As we seek to extend their achievements, I wonder if we can afford to ignore not just their witness of faith, but their insights into the craft of interpreting the Bible?
Well, I need to get back to figuring out how Augustine reconciles his high esteem for the "meaning Moses intended" in Genesis 1 with his sanguine uncertainty about whether he actually found it. I knew I was in trouble when I started this...
