Robert Webber: The Ancient Fathers’ Way of Reading and Preaching Scripture
Ancient-Future Worship (2008)
There are three very significant quests taking place in the church today. First, I speak of the longing to discover the roots of the faith in the biblical and classical tradition of the church. The Bible is, of course, the final authority on all matters of faith and practice. Yet I draw on the foundational interpretation of the church fathers and the creeds and practices of the ancient church. These are sources in which Christian truth had been summarized and articulated over against heretical teaching.
Second, this series of books is committed to the current search for unity in the church. Therefore, I draw from the entire history of the church together with its many manifestations – Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant – particularly the Reformers and evangelicals like John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards. I weave insights from these traditions into the text so the reader will understand how other deeply committed Christians have sought to think and live the faith in other places and times.
Finally, I use these biblical, ancient roots together with insights and practices from Christian history to constitute the foundation for addressing the third issue faced by today’s church: How do you deliver the authentic faith and great wisdom of the past into the new cultural situation of the twenty-first century? The way into the future, I argue, is not an innovative new start for the church; rather, the road to the future runs through the past.
These three matters – roots, connection, and authenticity in a changing world – will help us to maintain continuity with historic Christianity as the church moves forward.
Irenaeus, the most influential church father of the second century, sets forth the centrality of Christ to God’s story in his work, On the Apostolic Preaching. He does not present Christianity in the way we have come to think of it, as a system of theological beliefs. Rather, he follows the example of the great speeches in Acts, recounting all the various deeds of God culminating in the exaltation of His crucified Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the bestowal of His Holy Spirit and the gift of a new heart. Irenaeus, like Ignatius, bishop of Antioch (AD 110) and Justin Martyr (AD 150), both of whom preceded him, follows the Christocentric reading of scripture. Irenaeus reads the entire scripture as the story of God. It is the story of how God rescues and redeems a fallen creation through Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit, while the Old Testament foreshadows Jesus, who fulfills all the typologies of the Old Testament.
While the early church fathers and mothers were Christ-centered in the reading of scripture, they do not neglect the Father and the Spirit, but are firmly Trinitarian. The sovereign Father sends the Son to redeem, to rescue the world from the clutches of the evil one. The Spirit is the one who breathes life into the world and gives life to all the events and persons who prefigure Christ. He is present in the church and in God’s people providing us with a conscious and intentional life of Christ to all who live in His name. This method of interpretation, used by the early fathers, was known as a figural reading of scripture. A figural reading will read the scripture as a whole. It will connect persons and events of the Hebrew scriptures with the events and persons of the New Testament in a rich and compelling way that will draw on the imagination. Unfortunately, during the Enlightenment and thereafter, figural reading was dismissed and disregarded.
The modern way of reading and preaching the Scripture which replaced it has proven to be problematic. We moderns have stood over the New Testament texts with our historical, literary and linguistic tools searching for the one single meaning the authors intended to convey. Perhaps we have limited our search to finding the author’s intent because we fear the more experiential and postmodern approach to texts called “reader response criticism.” This theory disregards the author’s intent and argues that the meaning of the text is the meaning the reader takes away from it. This highly subjective approach to reading is the other side of the pendulum to the modern problem of privileging reason and science. If a text means whatever a reader thinks it means, it has no real meaning – or else a thousand meanings.
So, here we are in the postmodern world, stuck between two dead ends. Is there some pathway that will lead us away from extreme objectivism on the one hand and extreme subjectivism on the other? There is, but to find this path we must reverse the Enlightenment approach to our reading. Instead of using our hermeneutical tools to verify the Bible, or cull from it the principles of living, we need to step into the Bible, put ourselves within the Scripture, and allow it to interpret all of life including our daily living and world history. But how do we do this?
We must read and preach the Bible as true, turning away from our dependence on historical or scientific verification. The Bible stands on its own as an interpretation of the world and is self-verified by its internal structure and content. What steps must we take to read the Bible as true so that it remembers God’s saving activity in history and anticipates God’s reign over all creation?
1. Read and Preach the Bible with an Ancient Mind-Set.
I don’t underestimate the difficulty of doing this. Most of us have been shaped by a Greek mind-set. Like the Greeks, we are given to intellectual analysis. Like the Greeks, we want to categorize and systemize everything in life, to understand it, to control it. We stand over the Bible and become the judges of its truthfulness. But we must remember that the roots of Christianity are Hebrew, not Greek. Jesus was a Jew. So were his disciples - and Paul. If we are going to sit within and under the Bible as the ancients did, we must turn our backs on the Greek way and begin to read the Bible holistically, relationally and passionately.
The fathers did not see life as a split between the sacred and the secular. For them, everything is sacred. God is everywhere, at all places, in all times. There is no escaping the presence of God, for God’s Spirit is the one who gives life to all of life. This holistic mind-set sees God as involved in all history from beginning to end. God calls forth Israel and the church. God is present in the Exodus event and the Christ event. God gave Israel direct signs of His presence in the pillar of smoke, in fire, in parted waters, in tablets of stone, in a tabernacle beautifully appointed, in sacrifices, in the Sabbath, in festivals, in prophets, priests and kings. In the church, God’s presence is in the assembled people, in their song, Scripture, water, bread, wine and oil. Affirm that God is disclosed in every detail of human existence. Then, stand inside the Bible and let it teach you.
2. Read and Preach the Bible Relationally and Passionately.
The Hebrew mind does not describe God intellectually in the abstract as though God were an object to be studied. Instead, he is always pictured as the God who enters into a relationship with his creatures. When Israel wanders away from God, its apostasy and sin is always described as a broken relationship – a broken marriage, an unfaithful spouse, an erring child. The New Testament images of God and the church continue with the same emphasis on relationship. The church is the “body of Christ,” the “bride of Christ,” the “community,” the “household of faith,” the “fellowship of faith.” Reading Scripture from inside the story of God revolutionizes it from a mere factual story (to be proven or mythologized) to a commentary of God working in the world to accomplish his own vision.
Furthermore, to stand within the Bible and live under it, we must learn, like the Hebrews, to read the Bible passionately, with the heart. The intellect dissects, analyzes, sifts and makes judgements, while the heart listens, sees, feels, loves, fears and believes. References to the heart throughout the Hebrew and early church scriptures are too numerous to recount. As Luke says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
3. Read and Preach the Bible as Metaphor.
The Western approach to translation is primarily that of the Romans – precise, terse, and factual. This kind of language gets parsed, diagrammed, dissected, and analyzed. But the Hebrew language is more imaginative, ambiguous, and evocative. Language is more than the words that make up sentences; it also includes forms and styles of communication. For example, when we read the Bible with a Western mind-set, we tend to reshape the various forms of Hebrew imagination into propositional statements. But the Hebrew way of communicating cannot be reduced to propositions that can be managed and controlled. The Hebrews speak through metaphors that draw on the senses. To look is to “life up the eyes,” to be angry is “burn in one’s nostrils,” to be stubborn is “stiff-necked.”
At least one-third of the Bible is poetry. We sometimes forget that the Bible was not available to the ancients. In their world, the Bible had to be committed to memory and passed on by word of mouth. Poetry lends itself to memory. Hebrew poetry is full of parallelisms, similes, personification of nature, imitations of sounds, as well as rhyme and meter. The ancient way of communication is through story-telling. The whole history of Israel is a story - about the beginnings of the world, about the fall, how a rebellious people unfolded culture, of God’s interaction with Abraham and the patriarchs, about how God rescued the Hebrew people from Pharaoh, how God formed them into a people and gave them a law to learn by, the tabernacle and its sacrificial system to worship by, the exile to test them, and the Promised Land as their place of dwelling.
The entire history of the Hebrew people is the story of how God prepared the world to receive his Son, whose story fulfilled all the images and prophecies of the Hebrew people, so that through their history the Messiah would come to complete the story of the world. The Word is not mere fact but the spring of divine life interpreting all of history. Where this kind of reading and preaching of Scripture is seriously and effectively done, the people who live in the wasteland of Biblical neglect, thirsty and hungry for the Word to interpret and guide their lives in a crumbling world, will find a way to be there and drink deeply from the well of God’s narrative.
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Robert Webber was, at the time of his death, Myers Professor of Ministry at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois, and served as the president of the Institute for Worship Studies in Orange Park, Florida. His many books include the entire Ancient-Future series.
Coming Next: Randy Woodley: For Love of the Land - Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview (2022)