Patristic and medieval writings on the Bible are some of the greatest untapped gifts that the Christian tradition has to offer not only the modern preacher, but any Christian that seriously wants to grow. When we dig into the depths of those bygone saints, there’s an incomparable wisdom waiting to be discovered. That said, this rose is not without its thorns. These older writings come with their fair share of challenges. The realities that Christians were fighting against in those eras can be vastly different from the things that we fight against today. At times, they’re worried about things that we see as deeply normative (theatre, sin after baptism, leaving a church on bad terms). In other places, they’re doing battle against ideas so bizarre that it seems impossible that their notes could be relevant to us (the possibility of Jesus lacking any physical body, the influence of long-dead religions, the shame of someone avoiding martyrdom). On top of that, the way they read their Bibles was often very different. Often, they appear to play “fast and loose” with the Biblical text, noting conclusions that don’t make much sense by our standards. So why bother with it at all?
What are some of the biggest gifts in patristic exegesis? Of course, one could argue that their use of allegory and spiritual readings is strong enough to make it worth investigating on its own, but overuse of those techniques are exactly what make so many of us Protestants uncomfortable with them to begin with. Rather than claim the controversy as a benefit, there are three far less controversial gifts that any Christian, regardless of background, denomination, or preference, can expect to find if they delve into patristics.
1) They find depth in passages we take for granted.
If we are reading for the “plain sense” of Scripture (as most of us Protestants strive to do), there are a handful of passages that don’t contain an overabundance of edification. For example, Song of Songs 4:1 reads, “Your hair is like a flock of goats descending from the hills of Gilead.” In most modern settings, people use this verse as purely an element of description, often noting that cultural standards of beauty and even the nature of compliments change over time. After all, who today would long to have hair like goats going down a mountain, much less receive a compliment that their hair looks as such? The reading highlights cultural differences appropriately, but fails to bring any spiritual edification to the listener or broach the question, “Why does God want us to hear this?”
The Venerable Bede (the man who popularized the use of “BC” and “AD” in historical records) is a commentator from the Early Middle Ages that illustrates what depth older Christians found in little passages like this. He wrote,
[I]f goats and the hair or skins of goats always signified the foulness of sinners and never the humility of penitents, that animal would by no means have been reckoned among the clean [animals], nor would it have been said in praise of the bride: “Your hair is like a flock of goats.”
-Bede, On the Tabernacle, 2.3
Goats are typically described as representative of sinners in the Bible, so why should it be tied to beauty in this passage? Because the penitent sinner is beautiful to God, and we should all strive to be as such. Small passages like this can sneak by modern Christians because we don’t expect to find anything, but older writers leave no stone unturned in their efforts to find God’s word for us in every verse.
2) They connect Scripture in ways that we don’t expect.
Not only do these older texts often find big things in small places, but they connect Scriptures in ways that we might not expect. I hesitate to use the word “creative,” since a good theologian seeks to reveal what is already in the text, not innovate, but this connective instinct of patristic and early middle ages Bible readings might seem something like healthy creativity to us. These are authors that lived in primarily oral cultures. Books were expensive, and Google didn’t exist. They memorized things far more extensively than a modern person, and consequently could connect Scriptures in ways that are both unexpected and insightful to us.
Origen of Alexandria is a theologian that’s particularly apt at this. There can be little doubt that Origen ultimately deviated from the path of Orthodoxy, but his tremendous contributions to early Christian theology can’t be overstated. On Song of Songs 1:1 (“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,”), Origen writes,
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth”—that is to say, may pour the words of His mouth into mine, that I may hear Him speak Himself, and see Him teaching. The kisses are Christ’s, which He bestowed on His Church when at His coming, being present in the flesh, He in His own person spoke to her the words of faith and love and peace, according to the promise of Isaias who, when sent beforehand to the Bride, had said: Not a messenger, nor an angel, but the Lord Himself shall save us.
-Origen, Commentary on Song of Songs, 1:1
Origen ties the opening of Song of Songs, a passage about a woman longing for the kisses of her groom, to the Church’s delight at seeing the incarnation of God in Christ and longing for his loving words spoken to it. If ever there is an appropriate metaphor for the incarnation, God’s embodied presence with his people, it’s hard to imagine one more appropriate than a kiss. The people of God longed for the presence of Christ, and ultimately were met by Him in ways more intimate than so many other religions would expect! While this may still feel too far from a plain sense of text for some, if we abandon any sense of metaphor in Song of Songs, we end up with a simple story about a man and a woman in love. Origen’s instinct to integrate that story into the greater narrative in Scripture may not be expected, but it helps us understand why this book may have been canonized to begin with.
3) Their comfort with abstract thinking often exceeds our own.
Previously, I used two examples from Song of Songs, which might be considered “loading the deck” in favor of the ancients and their comfort with finding meaning in passages that tend to challenge historical-critical readings, but their contributions aren’t just limited to areas where plain text readings require caution. Augustine of Hippo, that great father of Christian Orthodoxy, wrote on the book of Genesis multiple times across his life, sometimes focusing on plain-text, literal meaning, and sometimes delving into more abstract realities that lay beneath the surface. This particular passage, covering Genesis 2, is distinctly allegorical and plumbs the depths of the human psyche in ways that would make modern psychological figures like Freud and Jung think twice. At this point in the work, he’s already stated that Adam represents higher reasoning (the soul’s deep wisdom), Eve represents lower reason (the ability to make rational decisions and manage earthly resources appropriately), and the snake represents appetite. Here is his grand conclusion:
[T]he serpent did not eat from the forbidden tree, but only incited to eat… So too in one man, the sensual motion of the soul is set against the reasoning of wisdom… bodily things are sensed, but eternal things are understood through wisdom.
-Augustine, The Trinity, Ch. 3
What he reads, in some places, as a story about one man and one woman sinning long ago he now reads as a roadmap for the human soul. It’s now a story about all of us. We are all tempted by the world around us, and our mind takes in the world around us and offers it up to our soul to make an ultimate choice as to how we respond. The psychological impact of this would make Jung or Freud do a double-take, but finding ways to show that inclination to sin in all of us like our forefathers is not only faithful, but deeply revealing about the human psyche.
Why should you wrestle with patristic and early medieval writings?
The insights offered up above are distinctly non-modern. They may feel strange, but they’re also both rational and faithful to the Scriptures. Whether for preaching or individual reflection, there’s a wonderful depth on display here that can be taken up and applied in our lives. Older texts are a challenge, and there are reasons to go in with eyes wide open, but the way they see big things in small places, the way they weave the Scriptures together cohesively, and their comfort with abstract thinking gives us tools that make the challenge more than worth the effort.
Classic Theology 