Genesis 1-11: Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture
Review by Robert P. Mills, August 10, 2001
For nearly a decade, Thomas Oden has been involved an international, evangelically ecumenical effort to bring the wisdom of ancient Biblical commentators to postmodern laypeople, pastors and professors. The result is the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (ACCS), a projected 28-volume project being published by InterVarsity Press. (For story on ACCS series, click here.) The most recent addition to the series, which released its first volume in 1998, is Genesis 1-11. Edited by Andrew Louth, it contains not only the catena-style commentary that is the series’ trademark, but an important 24-page general introduction by Oden, the project’s general editor.
‘Distinctive approach … peculiarly displaced’
Like the other volumes in the series, this commentary presents a chain (catena) of comments on a verse or passage of Scripture by various writers from the first few Christian centuries. For example, after the editor’s overview, the first comment on Genesis 1:1 is from Origen, who is followed by Augustine, Basil the Great, Nemesius of Emesa and Chrysostom.
As a result, this commentary does not provide an exhaustive exegesis of each passage. Rather it offers the distilled insights of the most able and faithful early Christian thinkers. “It is regrettable,” writes Oden, “that this distinctive classic approach has been not only been shelved but peculiarly misplaced for several centuries,” this despite the fact that such commentaries have “venerable antecedents” in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant traditions. Oden attributes the displacement of the catena style and the disparagement of the ancient authors to “modern chauvinism, naturalism and autonomous individualism.”
Among the criteria Oden lists for selecting which patristic excerpts to include in these commentaries are “passages that have enduring relevance, penetrating significance, crosscultural applicability and practical applicability” and “those comments on Scripture that will assist the contemporary reader to encounter the deepest level of penetration of the text that has been reached by its best interpreters living amid highly divergent early Christian social settings.”
That many of the selections are from sermons rather than commentaries reflects the series editor’s intent to be useful for those whose ministries include preaching and pastoral care.
In the beginning
For pastors and laypeople unfamiliar with the series, Genesis 1-11 a good place to start. First, Oden’s general introduction establishes a framework for understanding the approach of the entire series.
Moreover, as Louth notes in his introduction to this volume, “The early chapters of Genesis had arguably a greater influence on the development of Christian theology than did any other part of the Old Testament. In these early chapters the Fathers have set out the fundamental patterns of Christian theology.”
And then, of course, there are the comments on the first 11 chapters of Genesis, which cover the period from creation to the death of Abram’s father Terah. Consider just a sampling:
Ambrose on God’s creation of light: “Suddenly then, the air became bright and darkness shrank in terror from the brilliance of the novel brightness.”
Origen on the image of God: “For the form of the body does not contain the image of God … But it is our inner man, invisible, incorporeal, incorruptible and immortal, that is made ‘according to the image of God.’ For it is in such qualities as these that the image of God is more correctly understood.”
Augustine on Satan’s temptation “You shall be as gods:” “Whoever seeks to be more than he is becomes less. Whenever he aspires to be self-sufficing, he retreats from the One who is truly sufficient for him.”
Bede the Venerable on the dove returning to the ark: “And by a most beautiful conjunction the figure is in agreement with the fulfillment – a corporeal dove brought the olive branch to the ark which was washed by the waters of the flood; the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a corporeal dove upon the Lord when he was baptized in the waters of the Jordan.”
By opening such windows on how the earliest Christian theologians understood the opening chapters of the Bible, this volume complements the more technical works of contemporary evangelical scholars. It also reminds us all that there is much we can learn from those who for centuries faithfully guarded and delivered “the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3).