After a hiatus we are back to our reading through and engaging with the text of Lewis Ayres’ Nicaea and its Legacy. We come now to the third point of departure that Ayres’ discusses in the opening chapter of the book: theology and the reading of Scripture (31-40). As Reformed Protestants we should be keen to see what the author has to say about the standard Scriptural reading strategies of the early church fathers leading up to the time of the Trinitarian controversy in the fourth century.

Ayres begins the section by noting that the latest scholarship on the early church has cast Adolf von Harnack’s charge of the inappropriate “Hellenization” of the church’s theology in more negative light

Recent scholarship has argued that characterizing the fourth century as the culmination of Christianity’s “Hellenization” is misleading. This is especially so if Hellenization is understood as resulting in a philosophically articulated doctrinal system only distantly related to the words of Scripture. The revisionary scholarship to which this book is indebted has tried to demonstrate the ways in which exegetical concerns shaped the theologies with which we are concerned here (31).

The author goes on to note why early church exegesis is so harshly judged.

These negative judgements have usually resulted from comparisons between early Christian and modern academic exegetical practice, comparisons that assume the former is a deficient form of the latter. An implied comparison between fourth-century exegesis and modern historical-critical modes is also frequently embedded in reference, for instance, to post-Reformation divisions between allegory and typology, or to some ways of distinguishing Alexandrian from Antiochene exegesis (particularly those which assume that Antiochenes were more interested in the historical, that they were somehow more modern).

We need to assess the early church hermeneutical and exegetical practices on their own terms rather than subjecting them to the standards of other eras. I would be in general agreement with the author in terms of getting at just what the practices were. At other times I have noted we need to recognize the distinction between the historical question (what was said and done?) and the normative question (is it right or is it Scriptural?). Was the early church guilty of importing pagan notions uncorrected into Christian theology? Was the Reformation and post-Reformation distinction between allegory and typology a distinction without a difference? Did Antioch and Alexandria really embody totally distinct exegetical approaches? These are all interesting and important questions.

Was the early church guilty of importing pagan notions uncorrected into Christian theology?

The first question has to do with the use of pagan thought in Christian theology. Is that what the church fathers as a whole thought they were doing or actually did? Is it wise to do that? This is another way of wrestling with the relationship and priority of natural revelation and special revelation. It is also another way of relating philosophy to theology, faith to reason, and the antithesis to common grace. We must note with all seriousness that the antithesis came before common grace in the scheme of things. The fall created the antithesis between belief and unbelief. Yes, it is true that the reality of common grace means that unbelievers do know things after a fashion and that we Christians can learn things from unbelievers. But insofar as they deny the connection of everything in creation to the triune God of Scripture and refuse to accept that God determines the meaning and significance of every last thing in the cosmos, to that extent, their knowledge will be corrupted and truncated and distorted. This is why Augustine in his On Christian Teaching talks about plundering the Egyptians and baptizing the truth that we gain from pagan thought. That is why Cornelius Van Til said that while the king of Lebanon could provide timber for the Jerusalem temple, only God could provide Solomon with the blueprints. The question remains, what did the early church fathers think they were doing? It would be best to treat each father on his own terms as I imagine there were a variety of opinions and practices. Von Harnack shared the anti-metaphysical bias of his age and so created a procrustean bed and whatever was too small he stretched and whatever was too big he hacked off according to his Ritschlian (Kantian) standards. In reality I suspect the best of the fathers thought they were using the terminology of Greek philosophy while cleansing the said terminology of its pagan roots much as the New Testament uses the word theos for God, a word used with regard to Zeus and no doubt other gods in the divine pantheon. We have to look at each instance and each theologian carefully. It can be the case that we fail to untwist the twisted truth found in pagan thought.

Was the Reformation and post-Reformation distinction between allegory and typology a distinction without a difference?

The second question has to do with the Protestant rejection of the so-called quadriga or fourfold sense of Scripture. While the schematization is of later development, our forebears in the Reformed faith no doubt recognized that it had its seeds in earlier hermeneutical practices. Ayres says that the fathers understood the idea of the plain sense or sensus literalis or literary sense of the text of Scripture or what he describes as knowing the “way the words run” (32) but that they also assumed that the text could “have a variety of functions in the education of the Christian mind” (33). Ayres challenges the distinction made between allegory and typology. In our setting we would say that typology is divinely intended and implanted meaning that resides in the text connecting an earlier OT text involving persons, places, events, and institutions to later OT texts or NT texts, especially culminating in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Typology as properly conceived is grounded in redemptive history as well as the literary sense of the text whereas it seems that allegory cuts itself loose from the historical referential moorings of the text. I concede that in practice it is not always easy to see the difference between allegory and typology. And it is likely that various fathers of the church did both intentionally and unintentionally.

Did Antioch and Alexandria really embody totally distinct exegetical approaches?

On the related question of whether there was a hard and fast distinction between the hermeneutical practices of the schools of Alexandria and Antioch, the current scholarship appears to be calling the clear cut distinction between the two schools overwrought. Alexandria was not committed to unalloyed allegory and Antioch was not tied to only historical concerns. Do we see these tendencies at work in the work of the fathers? Yes. But as Ayres points out, these characteristics were shared by both schools. Sometime back there was a two-part article in the Westminster Theological Journal that argued the same thing. Alexandria and Antioch do not represent two diametrically opposite schools of biblical interpretation. This is where reliance only on secondary literature can be problematic. We can’t be experts in everything so we do rely on the expertise of others to keep us up to date on scholarly developments insofar as they assist us in understanding what were in fact the conditions on the ground in the ancient church.

Ayres argues for the figural reading of Scripture which at its best is a trained sensitivity to the theological, historical, literary, philosophical, linguistic, and cultural features of the text. Figural readings are dependent on the historical foundation of the biblical text (37). Ayres is correct to point out that the bifurcation between exegesis and theology, which is so common in biblical studies these days, was not a working assumption of the fathers (38). Pre-critical exegesis has much to commend it and I for one am happy to recover as much of the theological mindset of pre-critical exegetical practice as we can. Related to this are the guides that arose in the early church: the analogy of Scripture, the analogy of faith, and the scope of Scripture. The analogy of Scripture has to do with comparing Scripture with Scripture and allowing clearer passages to shed light on less clear passages. The analogy of faith was a more synthetic idea where one gains a sense of the whole so that we never fall into the trap of not allowing one part of Scripture to enlighten another. And the scope of Scripture has to do with the telos or goal of the Bible, which is Jesus Christ himself (see Ayres’s discussion on 39-40).

We have now come to the end of the author’s bird’s eye summary of the book and with the next segment we will delve into the deep structure of the book and the history and theology of the fourth century Trinitarian controversy.

Is Origen the Root of All Kinds of Hermeneutical Evil?

Renaming the Series

This week we rechristen this blog series Standing on Giants’ Shoulders since that reflects more the character of what I am trying to accomplish with this series. Because this is a renaming of the Criterion series we can still number this entry 5. Today we come to the second point of departure for Lewis Ayres’ Nicaea and Its Legacy. We will be covering material from pages 20 through 30.

Origen the Brilliant Alexandrian

Many of you will no doubt be familiar with the name of the early church father Origen (circa 185-251) who hailed from Alexandria in Egypt. Perhaps he is best known as an early practitioner of textual criticism (he created a six version Bible known as the Hexapla) and for his subordinationistic tendencies and for his being declared heretical by subsequent church councils (he is also known as possibly mutilating his body from an overly wooden interpretation of Christ’s words about eunochs, but that is fodder for another post).

Origen’s Complexity

Ayres’ concern in this section is to consider Origen’s subordinationism. This tendency is to view the Son of God as a kind of lesser deity than the Father. It is a Trinitarian question. By now we expect Ayres to argue for and typically demonstrate far greater complexity on the question than is usually assumed. Ayres rightly stresses familiarity with the context (and this includes the tradition of said theologian, 20). Clearly the Arian heresy is subordinationist in that Jesus is not even God but an exalted creature. But can we directly lay the blame for Arianism at the feet of Origen? Ayres’ briefly answers that such a view is “implausible” for three main reasons (21).

1. Origen influenced theologians on all sides of the conflict including those within Alexandria and beyond in Egypt and Palestine.
2. No theologian adopted Origen’s system wholesale.
3. Origen’s theology which “in some ways subordinates” the Son to the Father shares this feature with his contemporaries (21).

Origen Among the Theologians

Origen was an extremely influential theologian in his day, perhaps analogous to the pervasive influence of Karl Rähner at Vatican II such that he was called the ghost of Vatican II. Ayres notes

Origen commented on a huge amount of the biblical text and at every turn he was determined to display the capacity of the Scripture to illumine the story of creation and redemption, and the ways in which the text draws Christians into a process of purification and salvation. For Origen the text yields its message in degrees as purity of heart and attention to the Logos grows. To serve these he developed several styles of intertextual practice, allowing texts throughout Scripture to illuminate each other and the whole. Many of these interpretative practices are used throughout the fourth century (21).

Origen was in the air, so to speak. Getting down to specifics, Ayres points out that Origen argued for the correlativity of the Father and Son. That is, they presuppose each other. The Father could not be the Father without the Son and vice versa.

Introducing an argument that will be developed in the fourth century, Origen argues that Father and Son are ‘correlative’ terms. The name Father implies the existence of a child, and if God is truly called Father, the Son’s generation must be eternal. The Son’s existence thus seems to be essential to God being what God from all eternity wills to be. Thus we see that while the Father is superior to the Son, Origen works to make the Son intrinsic to the being of God: subordinationism is an inappropriate word for describing this theological dynamic (22-23).

A Nuanced and More Specified Species of Subordinationism

I would respond that while our understanding of what subordinationism means might need more nuance or specificity than we normally give it, Origen still is subordinationistic in a significant way (the use of the language of the Son being by the Father’s will is troubling to me). Ayres goes on to note that for Origen the Son while correlative with the Father (i.e., eternally generated) and while the Son was not temporally after the Father, he was a “distinct being dependent on the Father for his existence” (23). Post-Calvin we could ask whether Origen has in view here the derivation of the Son’s divine being or person. Calvin will argue, understandably many years after Origen’s time, that the Son is autotheos as to his divinity but he derives his personhood from the Father.

Ayres also points out that Origen shied away from ousia (substance) language because it smacked of materialism to him (24). Origen appears to have begun the use of hypostasis with regard to the existence of the three persons of the Godhead being concerned to stress the equality of the persons with regard to their distinctness as individuals (25). Origen, we are told further, held that the Son did not share the simplicity of the Father (26) either. As Ayres notes after discussing Rowan Williams’ consideration of Origen’s understanding of the relation of the Father and Son (especially in how the Son reveals the Father) in his study of Arius, “Origen’s account of shared but graded divine existence offers an initially clear, but complex language to describe this relationship” (26). It is this graded existence which has yielded charges of subordinationism by others methinks.

Origen also spoke of the Son as from the will of the Father and not of his essence (27). However, as Ayres hastens to add, given that the Father’s will is eternal means that the Son’s existence is eternal as well. This would certainly mark Origen out as distinct from Arius who argued that there was a time when the Son was not. Origen also spoke of the Son as created. But he clearly distinguished between the creation of the Son and the material world (27). Ayres goes on to comment on the complexity of Origen’s Christology, “Origen’s account is, then, complex. He speaks of the Son as inferior to the Father, and yet his explanation of this inferiority turns, at many points, into an account of the necessity of the Son within the divine life” (28). Ayres is right to carefully note how Origen should not be confused with Arius (or our understanding of Arianism) at this point. But I would once again note that Origen’s thought is still a species of subordinationism even if a more nuanced and complex form.

We Need to Understand the Exegetical and Hermeneutical Practices of the Day

Ayres concludes this initial look at Origen’s influence on the fourth century Trinitarian controversy by noting the need for students of the controversy to familiarize themselves with the exegetical and hermeneutical practices of the day,

Origen’s theology thus encountered criticism but influenced many across the theological spectrum. His theology shaped many of the theological trajectories found in the early fourth century. While Origen may, however, serve as a temporal point of departure for understanding fourth-century theology, the constant ground of all fourth-century theologies is a conception of the reading of Scripture and the practice of theology. Narrations of these disputes tend to assume that readers are familiar with the exegetical practice of fourth-century Christians and understand how it may be understood as the core of early Christian ‘theology’. This seems to me a considerable mistake (30).

We will turn to Ayres’ discussion of the grammatical and figural readings of Scripture practiced by fourth century theologians in our next blog post. We will find that treatment interesting and highly relevant to present day concerns. I conclude this blog entry by noting that Ayres has brought to light greater specificity to our understanding of Origen’s subordinationism, but he has not convinced me that the term is altogether inappropriate when applied to Origen. If the term is reserved for views which place the Son outside of the Godhead then yes, the term no longer applies. However, allowing for gradations of existence within the Godhead (as over against the distinction of the persons) seems to me to be a species of subordinationism. Among other things, this compromises the voluntary nature of the plan and execution of redemption and specifically the Son’s part in that. I am not suggesting this was even on Origen’s radar. I recognize the difference between intent and result. I also recognize that Origen is early in church history and we need to be fair to him as we place him within his historical setting. While we would agree that there has been growth in the church’s understanding of the relation between the Father and Son since Origen’s time and that we need to be careful about holding him to the standard of a later development, it is equally true that once the church has come to conclusions on some point of theological dispute or development, there is no benefit in going backwards. Still, having said that, Origen had the Word of God which is not principially shackled by any historical or cultural context. To say that Origen was a man of his times and circumstances is not to say he was a prisoner of his times and circumstances. That would be the error of historicism.