Reading With the Early Church

When the modern Christian opens her Bible to study a passage, she’s been trained — sometimes formally, often just by the air she breathes — to read it like a historian or a literary critic. She wants to know what the original author meant, who the original audience was, what the words meant in the original context, what cultural or political background lay behind the text. She’s been taught that responsible reading means historical reading. The text means what it meant. To read it well is to recover, as carefully as she can, the original sense.

This is good reading. The whole project of this book has, in many of its chapters, been an effort to help her do exactly this — to hear what the first audience heard, to recover the cultural setting, to feel the weight the original words carried. There’s nothing wrong with reading scripture historically. It is, by and large, how scripture was meant to be read.

But the historical reader isn’t the only kind of reader scripture has ever had. For the first fifteen hundred years of Christian history — from the apostolic age through the Reformation — the church read scripture differently than the modern Christian does. The fathers of the early church, the monastics of the medieval period, the great preachers and theologians and saints, all read scripture in a way that was richer than historical reading, layered in ways modern reading has partly forgotten. They read it as a sacred text whose meaning unfolds over time, whose deeper coherence the church recognizes communally, whose center is Christ. They weren’t careless readers. They weren’t bad historians. They were doing something else.

Some of what they did isn’t recoverable by modern readers, and probably shouldn’t be. Their world wasn’t the modern world. But some of what they did is recoverable. Some of it is, in the deepest sense, still alive in the Christian tradition, even when modern Christians don’t realize they’re encountering it. And recovering a few of the moves the early church made when they read scripture can open the text for a modern reader in ways pure historical reading can’t.

three breadcrumbs from the early church

There are three places where the early church’s way of reading is still present in the Christian tradition, even when modern Christians don’t realize they’re seeing it.

The first is in the way the New Testament reads the Old. The Gospel writers and the apostles read the Hebrew scriptures as saturated with Christ. Matthew sees the flight to Egypt as a fulfillment of Hosea’s out of Egypt I called my son. Paul calls Adam a type of the one to come (Romans 5:14). The writer of Hebrews reads the entire Levitical priesthood as a shadow of Christ’s high-priestly work. John presents the bronze serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness as a foreshadowing of the crucified Christ (John 3:14). The early church didn’t invent this kind of reading. They inherited it. The New Testament itself, on nearly every page, reads the Old Testament as something more than historical record — as a text in which Christ is everywhere present, sometimes by direct prophecy, sometimes by pattern, sometimes by foreshadowing.

The second is in the way the church has prayed the Psalms. From the earliest centuries, Christians prayed Psalm 22 — my God, my God, why have you forsaken me — as the voice of Christ on the cross. Jesus himself quoted the psalm from the cross (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34). The early church read the whole psalm as his — every line. The casting of lots for clothes. The piercing of hands and feet. The thirst. The praise that breaks out at the end. The church read the psalm as a window onto what was happening at Calvary, with Christ’s voice speaking through David’s words a thousand years before. Psalm 22 isn’t the only psalm read this way. Psalm 2 (you are my Son, today I have begotten you), Psalm 110 (the Lord said to my Lord), Psalm 16 (you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead) — all read by the early church as the voice of Christ, and all quoted by the New Testament writers in exactly that way. The Psalter, for the church, has always been Christ’s prayer book.

The third is in the way Christian churches have always confessed scripture inside a framework. The Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the rule of faith that preceded both — these were never meant to add to scripture or to replace it. They were meant to orient the reading. The church confesses one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord — and then reads scripture inside that confession. The reading isn’t arbitrary. It’s bounded by what the church has always confessed. A reading that contradicts the rule of faith — that denies the divinity of Christ, or the unity of God, or the goodness of creation — fails the church’s basic test, whatever it claims to have found in the text. The early church developed this discipline in response to the Gnostics, who quoted scripture with abandon but read it outside the apostolic confession. The rule of faith isn’t a limit on the reader. It’s the recognition that scripture is read inside a community with a memory.

These three patterns — Christ-saturated reading of the Old Testament, the Psalter as Christ’s voice, scripture read inside the church’s confession — are everywhere in the tradition. They’re visible in the liturgy. They’re visible in the lectionary. They’re visible in every hymn that quotes a psalm as if it were sung by Christ. They came from the early church. And the early church developed them, and refined them, and handed them down, with great care and great effort, over the first five centuries of Christian history.

the fathers as a reading community

The standard accessible introduction to how the early church thought is The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God by Robert Louis Wilken, emeritus historian of Christianity at the University of Virginia, where he held the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship. Wilken — a former Lutheran minister who converted to Roman Catholicism — wrote the book to introduce ordinary readers to the world of the church fathers. Yale University Press published it in 2003. The book has been praised by Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and evangelical readers — endorsed by Timothy George of Beeson Divinity School, by the Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson, by the Anglican scholar Rowan Greer at Yale. Wilken’s argument, in the book’s opening pages, is that the energy and vitality of early Christian thought arose not from the philosophical systems of the surrounding pagan world but from inside the life of the church — from worship, from Christian poetry and prayer, from the Bible read in community. The fathers weren’t primarily defending the faith from outside critics. They were figuring out, together, how Christians should think.

Among the fathers Wilken treats, and the fathers any introduction to early Christian reading must treat, six figures stand out as central to how the early church read scripture.

Irenaeus of Lyons, in the late second century, wrote Against Heresies (around the year 180) in response to the Gnostic movements that were threatening to fragment the church. The Gnostics quoted scripture endlessly, but they read it in ways that severed the Old Testament from the New, denied the goodness of the material world, and turned the gospel into an esoteric system available only to the spiritually elite. Irenaeus’s response was the rule of faith — a summary of what the apostles had taught, handed down through the bishops and the church’s life, and serving as the orientation for reading scripture. The rule of faith wasn’t an alternative to scripture. It was the recognition that scripture is read inside a community with a memory. Irenaeus’s regula fidei is the parent of the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. Every time a modern Christian recites those creeds in worship, she’s participating in the discipline Irenaeus articulated.

Origen of Alexandria, writing in the early third century, was the most prolific biblical scholar of the early church. He produced commentaries on nearly every book of scripture, homilies on the Pentateuch, the Hexapla (a six-column parallel of the Hebrew Old Testament with various Greek translations), and On First Principles — the first systematic Christian theology. Origen taught that scripture has three senses, paralleling the human person: a bodily or historical sense (what the text plainly says), a moral sense (what it teaches about how to live), and a spiritual sense (what it reveals about Christ and the heavenly realities). The three senses, for Origen, weren’t in competition. The historical sense was the foundation. The moral sense built on it. The spiritual sense, available to the mature Christian reader, opened up the deepest meaning of the text. Origen’s three-fold reading would become four-fold in the medieval church (with allegory and anagogy distinguished), but the basic insight — that scripture is layered, that it carries more than the surface — comes from him.

Athanasius of Alexandria, the fourth-century bishop who fought against Arianism and defended the full divinity of Christ, read scripture above all Christologically. The Old Testament, for Athanasius, was the book the Word of God spoke into being. The Word was present at creation. The Word spoke to Abraham, to Moses, to the prophets. The Word became flesh in Jesus Christ. So when Athanasius read Genesis, or Exodus, or Isaiah, he read with one eye on Christ — not by forcing the text but by recognizing that the same Word who is fully revealed in the gospels is the Word who has been speaking from the beginning. Athanasius also wrote, in his Easter letter of 367 AD, what is now the earliest known list naming the twenty-seven books of the New Testament as we now have them.

The Cappadocians — Basil of Caesarea (c. 330-379), Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329-389), and Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395) — were three fourth-century theologians from Cappadocia (in modern central Turkey) who shaped Christian doctrine on the Trinity. They read scripture with deep philosophical sophistication and pastoral seriousness. Gregory of Nyssa, in particular, developed a model of reading scripture as a journey of the soul into the mystery of God — a journey that never quite arrives, because the depth of God is infinite. Reading scripture, for the Cappadocians, wasn’t just decoding information. It was being drawn deeper into the life of the Trinity.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430), the great Western father, wrote more about scripture than any other patristic author. His Confessions are a sustained meditation on his own life as scripture read him. His On Christian Doctrine set out principles for reading scripture: read with the rule of faith, read with the love of God and neighbor as the test of any interpretation, read carefully, read prayerfully. Augustine famously held that any reading of scripture that doesn’t produce love is, at best, incomplete. Augustine read scripture as Word — as God’s address to the soul, the soul’s slow and faltering response — and his way of reading would shape every Western Christian theologian who came after him, from Aquinas to Luther to Calvin to the modern interpreters who are still arguing with him.

John Chrysostom (c. 347-407), archbishop of Constantinople, was the great preacher of the early church. His homilies on Matthew, on Romans, on John, on Hebrews, fill volumes. Chrysostom’s reading was, of the fathers we’ve named, the most literal and the most pastoral. He worked through the text verse by verse, attending closely to what the words said and what they would have meant to the original hearers, and then asking what they meant for the congregation in front of him. Where Origen reached for the spiritual sense, Chrysostom often stayed with the moral and pastoral. Where Augustine reached for the theological depths, Chrysostom often stayed with the practical urgencies. Chrysostom shows that the early church wasn’t monolithic. The fathers were a community of readers, not a single voice. They disagreed with each other. They corrected each other. They read together, across generations, and together they handed the tradition down.

These six aren’t the whole story. There were others — Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian, Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose, Jerome, Cyril of Alexandria, Ephrem the Syrian, John of Damascus, and many more — each contributing to the church’s reading. But Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Augustine, and Chrysostom together cover the central five centuries when the church learned to read its scriptures. The modern Christian who wants to know what the early church saw can begin with any of them.

what is recoverable

Not everything the fathers did is recoverable for the modern reader, and modern New Testament scholarship has rightly criticized some patristic excesses — the more extreme allegorical readings that lost touch with the text, the antisemitic readings that some of the fathers fell into, the philosophical frameworks that no longer carry. The modern Christian doesn’t need to read like Origen. But the modern Christian can learn some things from how the fathers read.

Three moves, in particular, are still alive in the Christian tradition and recoverable for any reader who wants them.

The first is typological reading — the recognition that the Old Testament, beyond being history, is also a vast pattern of foreshadowings of Christ. Adam is a type of Christ — the first man whose sin brought death, paired with the second man whose obedience brings life. The Passover lamb is a type of Christ — the lamb whose blood marked the doorposts so that death would pass over, paired with the Lamb of God whose blood marks the people who pass from death to life. Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice is a type of Christ — the beloved son carrying the wood up the mountain, paired with the beloved Son carrying the cross up Calvary. The New Testament does this reading first; the fathers extended it; the church has been doing it ever since. The modern Christian who reads the Old Testament and sees only ancient history misses what every Christian generation before her has seen — that the Old Testament isn’t just history. It’s the long preparation for what would arrive in Christ.

The second is reading with the rule of faith — reading scripture inside the church’s confession of who God is and what Christ has done. The rule isn’t a limit on reading. It’s the recognition that scripture is the church’s book, read in the church’s life, oriented by what the church has always believed. A reading that contradicts the basic Christian confession — the unity of God, the divinity of Christ, the goodness of creation, the resurrection of the body — has gone wrong somewhere, even if the reader can produce a plausible-sounding argument for it. The creeds aren’t added to scripture. They’re the keys to its lock.

The third is reading as part of a long community. The modern Christian reads alone, or with a small Bible study group, or with the most recent commentary in front of her. The fathers read together across centuries — Augustine answering Origen, Chrysostom listening to Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa building on Basil, Cyril of Alexandria standing on the shoulders of Athanasius. The modern Christian can read the same way. She can read scripture not as if she were the first to do so but as the latest reader in a two-thousand-year-old conversation. The fathers are still there, in the commentaries, in the prayer books, in the creeds, in the hymns. She can read with them. They won’t lead her astray. They are the readers who built the tradition she has inherited.

The modern Christian reads in a different age, with different tools, and to different ends than the fathers did. But the readers who built the Christian tradition weren’t strangers to her Bible. They were doing the same thing she is — sitting with scripture, asking what it means, asking what it asks of them, asking how it points to Christ. And one of the most beloved prayers of all of them, the one that has been said by Christians in every century since it was first written, is a prayer about exactly this — about finally finding what was always there.

Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! You were within me, and I was outside, and I sought you out there. I rushed, deformed, among the lovely things you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you. You called, you cried out, you broke through my deafness. You shined, you blazed, you scattered my blindness. You breathed your fragrance, and I drew in my breath, and now I pant for you. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

— Augustine, Confessions X.27.38

The Beauty was always there. The fathers knew. The fathers built the tradition that would help every Christian generation since to see it. The modern reader who turns to the fathers turns to readers who have already done much of the seeing for her — who can show her, across the centuries, what was there the whole time. The recovery isn’t a return to the past. It’s the recognition that the past has never stopped reading along with us.