Transcript
John Lennox (0:01)
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Mike Bird (0:59)
Will that be cash or credit? Credit. 4 Galaxy S25 Ultra the AI companion that does the heavy lifting. So you can do you get yours@samsung.com compatible select apps requires Google Gemini account. Results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy the Ask NT Write Anything Podcast hello and welcome to the Ask nt Write Anything podcast. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, and I'm of course joined.
Tom Wright (1:28)
With Tom Wright from Oxford in England. Hello.
Mike Bird (1:32)
Well, Tom, it's great to be with you and to have our listeners. And once more, we've got a couple of good questions this week covering everything from patristic exegesis, the church fathers in the Bible, and whether the apostle Paul was really an apostle. So let's go to our first question. This is from Joshua Grieve or perhaps Greva. I don't know. Apologies to Josh if I'm not pronouncing that right, but he's interested in biblical interpretation and the early church, and this is what he asks. Could you discuss the role and significance of the church fathers, you know, patristics in biblical exegesis? How might their perspectives complement or contrast with contemporary evangelical approaches, especially in relation to sola scriptura versus a more orthodox or historical approach to scripture? So Tom, how do the church fathers stand up in the exegetical metrics compared to contemporary evangelical and scholarly interpreters? Good question from Joshua.
Tom Wright (2:41)
Yes, great question. Thanks Joshua. Though it gets a little complicated towards the end of your question because you talk about the contrast with contemporary evangelical approaches in relation to solar scripture versus more orthodox or historical approach. Now, I'm not sure whether Orthodox was a capital O there, meaning as in Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox, or whether it just means in the great tradition of the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian definition and then the historical approach, which many would see as actually conflicting with a Nicene or Chalcedonian approach. So let's just try and line those things up. In the second century you've got people like Ignatius of Antioch and then Justin Martyr and then ultimately Irenaeus and then on to Tertullian and people like that who are aware of the great scriptural body of knowledge which is available and wrestling with it and trying to make sense of it, not least in connection with the flow of thought of their times and the life of the Church under persecution from Rome and all the rest of it. And as they are doing that, as far at least as Irenaeus and Tertullian, they are broadly speaking, very much thinking within the Judaic tradition, which is going back to the Hebrew Bible, the tradition of creation and new creation, of God rescuing humans in order that the whole creation might be rescued. Then in the third century you start to get with people like Origen and Clement of Alexandria, you start to get a Platonic strand coming into the Church which says, actually the main thing about this is that Jesus is showing us the way whereby our souls can be saved so that we will leave this world and go and be with God in heaven and and perhaps even see God. The so called beatific vision, as it's called in later Latin tradition. Now these two systems contrast quite sharply. Peter Brown, the great church historian, has recently written a book called the Ransom of the Soul in which he's mapped out how those two ways of doing it fell out in terms of the church of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th centuries, not least interestingly in relation to how the hope for the ultimate life that we are promised went. The Church's attitude to money, that's a whole other topic which I'm not going to get into. But it's very interesting how Brown shows how they go together. But the point is this, that if you read the Bible as being a textbook for how your soul gets to heaven, then there's all sorts of things going on, especially in the Old Testament, which don't seem directly relevant because the Old Testament basically isn't talking about going to heaven or about the soul for that matter. It's talking about the God of creation who's called the family of Abraham, and their long twists and turns to bring about the redemption of his creation through the arrival of his Messiah and the gift of his Spirit. And the New Testament joins exactly in that stream. But Then if you're in the third or fourth century and you think this text must really be about going to heaven, then the way that you cope with that from origin onwards is by allegory. And so you do with the Old Testament what Philo of Alexandria, in roughly contemporary with St. Paul, did with his Old Testament, which was to interpret it as an allegory for the great spiritual truths. Interestingly, Philo there was copying, or at least on the same track as philosophers like Plutarch, who were doing that with the great Homeric epics, because they were looking back at the Greek traditions for what the gods were getting up to on Mount Olympus, or intervening with wars and that sort of thing, or having affairs with other gods or goddesses or humans or whatever. And Plutarch, as himself a pagan priest, was shocked at the thought that the gods would really behave like this. So he allegorized his Old Testament, that is Homer and the other early poets, in order to say, they're really teaching you about virtue and about the truths of the spirit and about the truths of the soul. So Philo is doing with the Jewish tradition what Plutarch is doing with the Hellenistic or Greek tradition. And Origen, and many, many of the early fathers beyond that at least flirt with the same kind of interpretation. Now, because they are rooted in the Bible themselves, they know perfectly well that the Bible climaxes in Jesus resurrection and in the promise of resurrection. So Origen does believe in resurrection. He hasn't, as it were, spiritualized that away, though that's always a temptation for people in that period, especially in the Gnostic movements. But then all the way on through Augustine, who was him in all sorts of ways, still quite a Platonist, and many other fathers of that period, you have the sense that they are doing their best to take the biblical truth and express it in the language and philosophy of their day. But as has been pointed out again and again, if you look at what they do say in the Nicene Creed or in the Chalcedonian definition, where you get this definition of Jesus as fully divine and fully human. You can look at the portrait of Jesus, Jesus himself, in those great documents, the creed and the definitions, and you would never be able to deduce from those pictures of Jesus the Jesus that we've actually got in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, where he is this very vividly portrayed human being who is funny and friendly and sharp and demanding and shrewd and a great storyteller, et cetera. You'd never have known that. And I can't help Feeling that when you look at the patristic world and the theories of Christology of who Jesus was that are developed there, you have a sense that though they obviously know the stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, they read them in their liturgies all the time. There's a disconnect going on. And from that point of view, I want to say that history matters and that going back to trying to understand what the Gospels mean in terms of the real world of the first half of the first century A.D. with all the turmoil in Judea and Galilee, with Roman rule and with different cultural influences and so on, this is where we've got to go. I would say that's a historical approach to Scripture. And part of the problem then, with the evangelical view of Sola scriptura is that it has tended to do with its Protestant and evangelical traditions what the early Fathers were doing with their Platonic view of the soul, namely, that the people who were fussing about sola scriptura from the 16th century to the present have often had a very definite soteriology in mind where sinners who need to go to heaven, so how are we going to get saved from our sin, et cetera, et cetera. And then sola Scriptura is brought in to say, here's a scriptural proof text for this point. Here's a scriptural proof text for that point. You can see this classically in, say, the Westminster Confession, where the Westminster Confession has all these doctrinal points with footnotes which are simply Biblical references, but they're biblical references taken out of context because the Bible itself is not giving you the framework of thought that the Westminster Confession was giving you. And so, from my point of view, I have always tried to take the Bible as seriously as I can. That is one of my core commitments for my whole life is to say, the Bible is the book God wants us to have. Now let's do business with it and see what happens. But I have found again and again that the Bible tells a story and issues an invitation which is subtly different both from what, say, the Greek Fathers from the third century onwards were doing and from what much of the Protestant and evangelical tradition has been doing, particularly in terms of the going to heaven narrative, because the Bible is telling the story of God coming to be with us. Now, that is much more revolutionary, actually, than simply saying, let's look at the orthodox view, let's look at the father's view, etc. Etc. In other words, I honor the Fathers because they were doing business with a very difficult text and they were doing so often under the threat of persecution and determined to hold the Church together when it was in danger of falling apart, with Antioch and Alexandria disagreeing about this and that. And they go back to exegesis and say, scripture is where we've got to be and stay. But I would say to them, just as they might want to say to me, yeah, but there's depths in Scripture which you're not yet plumbing. Please go back and let's reread and so on. Now I have to say, the allegorical exegesis that may have done for some people in the third and fourth and fifth centuries, the danger with allegory is that it can spin out of control. So the medieval church were quite clear that you only build an allegory on what is actually the literal sense. The problem then is that the literal sense of Scripture doesn't always actually say what the medieval church thought it said. So we are constantly in a dialogue. And as a would be orthodox Christian, I want to say the original meaning of Scripture matters, but I don't imagine that I can just take a flying leap back to the first century as though nothing has happened in between. And I honor those, the great exegetes. I mean, Calvin was a great exegete, even though I disagree with several aspects of his theology. So I want to learn from all these people, but I want to critique them in terms of the original sense. And the mantra that I've developed over the years, and Mike, you may have heard me say this before, is we must stop giving 19th century answers to 16th century questions and start giving 21st century answers to 1st century questions. And as we do that, we are in dialogue with the great teachers of old, the people who have prayed these texts and loved these texts and transcribed and commented on these texts before us. We honor that. And they would say to us now, please go on doing it and do it even better than we did. And if we need correction, so be it. That's what I think sola scriptura really means.