Scripture read with ancient eyes
By Uwe Siemon-Netto, © 2001, United Press International, August 10, 2001
If you believe that the post-Enlightenment era is almost over, here’s a major piece of evidence to support this notion: Some of the finest Bible scholars in the world are now proposing a whole new way of reading Scripture.
And guess what? It is the very ancient way of the Church fathers. It is a far cry from the literal reading of the Bible fundamentalists keep insisting on, at least according to a stereotype. And it is just as distant from the historical-critical method that had its roots in the period after the Renaissance, but was really unleashed in the early 19th century.
This “new” method bases Biblical interpretation on a secular understanding of history. That kind of exegesis essentially follows five steps: (1) determining the text; (2) exploring the literary form of the passage that is to be interpreted; (3) looking at its historical situation, called Sitz im Leben; (4) investigating the meaning that the words had for the original author or reader; (5) understanding verses in the light of their total context and the background out of which it emerged.
Ultimately, this almost universally applied method “made Biblical studies at the Western universities captive of modernity’s biases,” according to Thomas C. Oden, one of America’s leading professors of systematic theology.
He does not object to the historical-critical approach as one among several means of exegesis. “But it has narrowed the impact and meaning of Scriptures,” he told United Press International, “and it resulted in deflating them and in diminishing their power.”
For a review of the most recent addition to the series, Genesis 1-11, click here.Oden, who teaches systematic theology at Drew University in Madison, N.J., is heading a group of scholars from around the world who edit the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (InterVarsity Press, 27 vols. at $27.99 per volume for subscribers).
“My students prodded me to do this,” Oden said.
Since 1995, he and his colleagues from a host of denominations – Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox – have labored on this magnificent project. They resurfaced what church fathers have had to say about every verse from Genesis to Revelation, and the Apocrypha.
What has emerged in the first eight volumes so far (19 more will follow) are texts of often spectacular poetry giving theological insights contemporary Christians have not been privy to.
There were largely two reasons for this, Oden suggested:
1) Those texts were out of step with the natural reductionism practiced in the academy.
2) When Latin and Greek ceased to be taught routinely in high schools and colleges, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, the educated laity was deprived of a direct access to these writings, whose authors lived in the 2nd to the 8th centuries.
“Yet, many of the classical commentaries went un-translated,” said Oden, calling this “an embarrassment of modern publishing.”
In other words, Oden said, “brilliant voices in which we hear the voice of God” were silenced. “These ancient commentators were not captive to modern assumptions and they were resistant to the intellectual assumptions of their own times, which were rife with idolatry and the faithlessness of the church even then.”
As an example of the “Spirit-inspired” elegance with which a church father commented on a Biblical text, Oden pointed to three potential ways to read Mark 14:30: “And Jesus said to him, ‘Truly I say to you, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.'”
“The stereotypical fundamentalist would just focus on the simple fact that the cock crowed twice,” Oden said. “The historical-critical exegete would first look at the Greek term for the crowing of a cock, then at its cultural significance, and then initiate an inquiry into layers of political, cultural and economic analysis with respect to cocks crowing.”
But here is what Augustine (354-430 A.D.) wrote: “God knows in us even what we ourselves do not know in ourselves. For Peter did not know his weakness when he heard from the Lord that he would deny him three times.” Augustine thus makes a theological as well as a psychological point: God knows man’s limitations of which man himself is not aware.
Later in the text, Mark reports (14:72b), “And he broke down and wept,” on which St. John Chrysostom (c. 347-407 A.D.) comments thus: “In this respect we must marvel at Mark, because not only did he refuse to hide Peter’s fault, but he wrote the account in greater detail than the others. And it is for this reason that he is called Peter’s disciple.”
As Oden pointed out, here lies the difference between a church father and a historical-critical exegete with a reductionist bent: While the latter would look for evidence that the evangelist might have been less than truthful, the former sees in the admission of Peter’s disciple to his master’s weakness proof of the veracity of the story.
As St. Eusebius (c. 260-340 A.D.) wrote in a very subtle commentary on the same passage: “Mark writes these things, and through him Peter bears witness, for the whole of Mark is said to be a record of Peter’s teaching. Note how scrupulously the disciples refused to record those things that might have given the impression of their fame. Note how they handed down in writing numerous charges against themselves to unforgetting ages,” Eusebius wrote.
According to Oden, “We now know that there is virtually no portion of Scripture about which the ancient Christian writers had little or nothing useful or meaningful to say.”
Some of these treasures from the distant past had never been translated before; others were only now turned into an understandable English. The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture is directed not so much at pastors as at the educated laity, Oden said. He called the laity an “awakening, hungry and robust audience.”
He stressed that the commentary’s editor included Christians of all stripes: Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, mainline and evangelical Protestants. “What they are hungry for is not historical or critical analysis. What they are hungry for are preachers who can take a sacred text and make it live for them without distorting its original meaning and content.” The hunger, Oden insisted, was for what one can find in these first-millennium commentaries: “the history of the people of God, the history of salvation – which is what Scripture was all about – not personal experiences.”
It seems the lay people aren’t the only ones starving spiritually. Oden related that their way of thinking has now also reached the halls of academia: “Scriptural scholars are beginning to see the limitations of natural reductionism, which is a major change from 10 years ago.”