Episode 72: Roberto De La Noval & Jordan Wood - How the Early Church Read the Bible (Reissue from Bonus)
In this week’s episode of Faith for Normal People, Jared talks with Roberto de la Noval and Jordan Wood about the church fathers, the development of doctrine, and how early Christians approached the Bible. They explore how figures like Augustine and Origen understood Scripture as something meant to transform people rather than simply provide literal answers, and why “problem passages” were often seen as invitations to think more deeply. Together, they invite listeners to see Christian tradition not as static or simplistic, but as a long, creative conversation about how to make sense of God, Scripture, and human experience.
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Hey, everybody. On today's episode, it's just me, Jared, and I'm talking to Roberto de la Naval and Jordan Wood about how doctrines came to be.
It sounds boring, but it is not. It is fascinating. You'll know Rob from our class called Universal Salvation is Not Modern, and he's a professor of theology at Boston College. Also with us today is Jordan Wood, who's also a theology professor at Belmont University. All right, let's dive into this conversation with Rob and Jordan.
Rob: For the church fathers, they grasped that understanding the letter of the text, the history, the story, you still have to make that spiritually relevant.
Jordan: What you see is that what usually ends up winning out and, and called orthodoxy is not the one that's explicitly stated in this verse or that chapter.
It's the one that can make sense of all the biblical data in the most convincing way while retaining all that data and its integrity.
Jared: Well, Rob, welcome back, and Jordan, it's great to have you on the podcast. All right. Well, let's dive in, 'cause I wanna talk about the development of doctrine, and h- how do we go from the Bible to some of the beliefs that the Church has held for a really long time?
And to do that, we gotta, we gotta wade through the muddy waters of the Patristics, which is maybe a word that not a lot of our listeners are familiar with. So can you just start by telling us what the patristics are, and why are they important to study when we're talking about doctrine and development and the tradition in the Christian church?
Rob: Sure. I can begin with a quick definition. Patristic is actually an adjective, um, and it just means relating to the fathers. So which fathers do we have in mind here? The church fathers. Now, trying to sort out the era of the church fathers, how long does that last, it's gonna depend on which scholar you talk to.
But I think a lot of people would agree maybe second century to eighth century, something like that. Um, Christian figures that figure in that area are gonna be called church fathers. And we say church fathers mostly because in antiquity, most of the people writing theology are men, though there are some women who are also theologians, like Macrina the Younger, who definitely could be considered a church mother.
But by and large, patristics refers to that era of Christian history, the patristic era, patristic writings. I don't know if Jordan wants to add anything to that.
Jordan: That was pretty crisp. Um, I will just say that, uh, I think maybe other than just it being some of the earliest centuries, uh, for the church and for doctrine and for, uh, reading the Bible, um, I think that going back to the church fathers has always had a sort of ecumenical appeal to many different traditions because this is the era where a lot of, uh, a lot of major fundamental doctrines of Christian faith that many different branches of Christianity hold to.
This is where you're getting debates over the Trinity. This is where you get debates over, uh, Christ and the nature of the incarnation. And so even something like if you're in a tradition that recites the creed, the Nicene Creed, you know, this, this, all this stuff is happening in these early centuries.
So I feel like a lot of the core doctrines or main sort of features of Christian belief in life, in a way, crystallize during this period. And so many different Christians of all different branches, you know, usually find some use in going back and, and, uh, reading and considering some of these people.
Jared: Good. Well, Rob, last time we talked, we talked some about this difference between biblical studies and, and theology. And so when we're talking about how doctrines develop, things like what you mentioned, Jordan, the incarnation, the nature of Christ, and, and, uh, the Trinity, we, we really, we can't talk about that without talking about this biblical studies and theology and how, what's that relationship between those?
'Cause I, I grew up in a tradition, interesting to even call it that, 'cause we didn't like tradition, so I wasn't, I told we didn't have a tradition, you know. But, um, I grew up in a tradition that said we don't really value tradition, like what the patristics were, you know, what was happening with the patristics, the, the church fathers.
And, uh, so we just go back to the Bible. So maybe can you say a little bit about why that's not an adequate way? If we're gonna tell the story of how we came up with these doctrines, we can't just say it comes from the Bible. And maybe talk about that through the lens of this difference between biblical studies and theology.
Rob: So I'd say contemporary biblical studies is a discipline that has three goals. One is reconstructing the text \of the Bible. Um, so the Bibles that you have in your hand, uh, the Bibles you're using at church, those are the products of biblical studies. Uh, namely a lot of manuscripts have been brought together and people have asked, "What is the most likely original reading? What are the autographs, the best that we can get to that?"
And putting together a critical text that's translated into multiple languages. And so we can thank biblical studies for the Bibles that we have and use today. Another aim of biblical studies is to interpret the texts that are in the Bible, and usually to interpret them within their original context to try to understand what the author or authors of those texts meant to communicate, and how those original audiences would have heard those texts, what they would have thought the texts were about, what they meant, what they implied.
And then finally, say a third aim of biblical studies is to give an account of the history of those meanings that we find in the scripture, the history of the text in ongoing context. And so, um, how was, uh, something in the Pentateuch or the first five books of the Old Testament received later in the Old Testament?
So biblical studies wants to understand the history there of even the development of scriptural theology, the theologies we find in the Bible. And so biblical studies has a pretty big scope, and, um, it's extremely important. Theology as a discipline, strictly speaking, I would say is concerned to understand God and to speak rightly of God and God's revelation.
So how do these two intersect? Well, for Christians and for Jews, um, God's revelation is going to be found in a significant, um, a significant sense in these scriptural texts. And so you will be doing theology if you're reading the Bible because the Bible's gonna be your source for receiving divine revelation.
Jordan: I would just say, too, from the, now, what, what's interesting about going back to the church fathers is that the way they read scripture and what they th- what they would call theology, I think you can distinguish them, but they really want to insist that they're inseparable. Now, we live in a time where I think, like, that's the idea that everyone has a lens, right?
Or everyone has a hermeneutic framework or something. That's not, that's not that controversial for the most part. Um, but I think they would have the a- they would, they would appreciate that, but they would have the added point that, uh, s- sort of picking up what Rob said there, that, like, they don't read this as, like, a literary classic or, or just, like, an artifact from the ancient Near East or wherever, the Mediterranean. They do read it as at least that, but they think that if they're gonna read it as inspired scripture, they're gonna read it as also more than that.
And so I think they would, they would maybe puzzle a little bit about, like, our distinguishing the two. Like, "Oh, I'm gonna do theology over here, and then I'm gonna go over here and write a biblical commentary," or you know, or do... I mean, I like to point to Origen, probably a guy we'll, we'll come back to a few times in this conversation.
In a way, like, his program, what he did kind of just is a nice demonstration, but he did everything from the Hexapla, trying to establish those texts, those manuscripts, as Rob was saying, all the way to then considering, you know, consulting with other people that commented on the text when he's reading the text.
But then he wants to eventually get to, like, you know, how do I see Christ in here? Or no matter what text of the Bible it is, what does it say, what is it eventually saying about the incarnation or about the Trinity or about my soul and its relation with God and prayer? So, like, he's sort of doing all of them, and you could take little aspects of them and sort of ask how they relate, and that's totally fine.
But I just think probably the, the biggest thing to say about from the patristic vantage is that these are all moments in kind of this ongoing, unbroken movement. Uh, in, in, in, in, in order to ultimately, I think for them, most of them would say in order to unify themselves with God, their intellect with God.
Whether they're trying to figure out what the manuscript says or whether they're trying to figure out what it means to say the Son and the Father are, uh, you know, co-equal d- in divinity or something like that. So, so yeah, they, they would wanna keep them all together.
Jared: Yeah, maybe I can, uh, just clarify.
So we might differentiate between biblical studies and a theological enterprise in the way that Rob has outlined it because we have the privilege of, you know, centuries of these fields being developed. You know, this has a particular aim. This is what biblical studies does. This is what theology does.
But for the Church Fathers and the ancient church, we hadn't, those were undifferentiated. We hadn't yet kind of laid out, this is the program of biblical studies, this is the program of theology. And so oftentimes, or practical theology, right? Being a pastor to a particular community, and so a lot of times those would be, uh, connected.
They, you wouldn't be, so it'd be a little bit anachronistic to go back and, and pick out, well, they're doing biblical studies here, they're doing theology here. We can do that, but that's not what they would have had in mind. They're, they're sort of doing all of that at once in the same way that, you know, science and philosophy would have been pretty undifferentiated for a while because we didn't have a specific program for how we do science until a little later.
Um, and is that what you're saying, Jordan?
Jordan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I, I don't know, I'm, I'm one who thinks, like, you know, some of the modern, uh, scholarly conventions and disciplines, you know, the distinctions are good and they bring clarity. I think it's interesting to put that in, in kind of a fruitful maybe tension or dynamic with the older, with the patristic view, 'cause they wanna emphasize the unity of all this.
'Cause for them, of course, it's like, it's almost as if their very act of reading and thinking reproduces the multiplicity and unity of creation itself.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jordan: And this is why they would often say, like, the same, the same word which is written, embodied in these, in these texts is also the word by which all things were made.
Yeah. And so they'll talk about the two books, books of nature, the book, book of the, of the Bible and so forth, so.
Jared: Maybe to add a, a point on that, I think, uh, a lot of modern, uh, thinkers around the Bible are, are starting to point out that maybe this disembodied, abstract way we treat the Bible sort of forensically, maybe there's something missing there, where, it- for the, the Church Fathers, they're sort of like, "Well, what would be the point of having this abstract understanding of the Bible without how we embody this in community or in faith or in our relationship with God," or whatever that looks like.
So I think there's something to that. But I wanna get to, uh, kind of working through some of this so we can see it in action, but I think the best place to start would be the Bible itself, right?
Whether we like it or not, this is where a lot of Christian theology is done. Um, we start with this revelation that we have in the Bible and what is it telling us, what is it not telling us, and we have a lot of debates about that. So how did the Church Fathers view the Bible, and what did they do with it?
Like, how did they, um, work with it as a way to do theology?
Rob: There's a really amazing text by St. Augustine writing, um, in the fourth and, um, fifth centuries, and he, he writes this book, um, called De Doctrina Christiana, on teaching, um, Christianity, on teaching, uh, Christian doctrine, on Christian teaching. And he talks about the Bible, and he says, "Well, look, the Bible is an instrument, and its goal is to get you to learn how to love your neighbor and to learn how to enjoy God above all things and to enjoy every single created thing in God.
That's what the Bible is for, and if in this life you happen to master that, by God's grace, you don't even need the Bible anymore. The Bible could just be useful for you to help teach others." But it's something remarkable to have an early Christian say, and it kind of stands in sharp relief to maybe some later, um, extremes of bibliolatry, right, this kind of worship of the scriptural text as, like, the heart of Christian life, where St. Augustine can say, "The Bible is ultimately an instrument."
In the hands of God for the good of the church, um, collectively and the good of the world and the good of individuals, so much so that he can say it's totally fine if you actually miss the meaning of what, let's say, Ezekiel meant to communicate in this text, as long as it's still the interpretation you get leads you to greater love of God and neighbor.
He says it would basically be like taking the wrong route, but ending up at the destination you wanted to get to anyway. And so you can see that Augustine there understands the distinction between what the original author meant to communicate, but he also has this broader notion of, well, there's a divine author here too, and the reason we care about the scriptures in the way that we do, we read them in worship, et cetera, is because we care about what the divine author is trying to say here and now.
And so he's able to have this kind of, quote-unquote, "biblical studies moment" where he says, "Yeah, look, I mean, this interpretation probably isn't what, you know, the author of the Gospel of John meant. But nonetheless, if it gets you to love of God and neighbor, you're good." And so you can see there, the scripture, what it is, we start coming at it for what its function is.
Its function is ultimately an instrument in the hands of the triune God to transform us into people who can love neighbors and really enjoy God, everything God has for us.
Jordan: What's, what's really great about that, um, is that if it's, if the Bible is primarily an instrument of God revealing himself to us and transforming us in the revealing, then in a sense, like for, for a lot of these writers, the Bible's very construction, or its constitution, what makes it up, mirrors our own.
And so there's a text where Origen, once again, he'll talk about how the Bible has a body, a soul, and a spirit. Just as we have sort of this visible aspect, our body, what people can see of us, but then we also have this interior, uh, invisible, you know, domain or realm or whatever you wanna say, um, that the Bible itself kind of has that, mirrors back to us our own constitution.
So there's like a lot of things you, there's a lot of places you can go from there. You can say, on the one hand, the Bible is one of these premier sites where God accommodates himself to us, comes to our level, meets us where we are, you know, all the way to its very constitution. I mean, we could pull back and say like, of course, if God is gonna speak to human beings in space and time, then it has to be, uh, recognizable to human beings in space and time, and as soon...
And of course, no human being is just in space and time, but in a certain space, in a certain time, which means a certain language, certain cultures, certain contexts, et cetera. And so that would be like the bo- the body of scripture. Where it's made visible, and this becomes like the first contact And then as we read it, like for them, as we read it, uh, as you study it in all these various different ways, eventually the, you, you want to move beyond the body to its soul or spirit or the invisible aspect, divinity.
Which then brings up another parallel that a lot of them will like, especially in the Greek East, the, uh, the, the Greek Fathers, the Eastern Fathers. They'll often compare the Bible to, like, another incarnation. Just as somebody could have come and met Jesus of Nazareth in the 1st century and not immediately think, "Oh, this guy is God. This is the guy who created the whole world."
Or, you know, uh, in fact, most people didn't think that. Um, you can read the Bible for them. You can read just its body, you could stay on the surface. Mm-hmm. But there are these divine depths, the spirit, the soul of Scripture, which you really ought to be drawn into through the process of reading and interpreting and thinking and contemplating on Scripture.
So I think that's another way to say what they think Scripture is, is, is, is as it were like another incarnation.
Jared: So what I'm hearing you say is there is what we would call, uh, and I, I use this very loosely, and I don't wanna get off on this rabbit trail, but the literal reading of the Bible. I really don't like that. For those listening, I put that in air quotes. But, uh, the literal reading of the Bible. But it's not that the, uh, church fathers would have been completely uninterested in that.
It was just that's only one part, and it actually is kind of the more superficial part of reading Scripture. That's sort of like, oh, yeah, yeah, there is an original context, and that's important. But we really wanna get to, like, the soul of this, which is maybe like, Rob, you're saying, that's where God's trying to speak to us in our time and our place and trying to transform our community into one that loves neighbor better, enjoys God better, enjoy.
So when we say things like reading the Bible literally, there's often the assumption that that's how it's always been done. And maybe it's not wrong that that's, there's some through line, but maybe it's just a matter of emphasis in terms of what's most important. Like you said, Rob, there, now there's certain traditions of Christianity, like more evangelical or conservative, where it's so much weight is put on that that's, like, the most important part of what the Bible is and what we're supposed to do with it.
Um, so can you speak to that interplay of kind of how maybe the common way of talking about reading the Bible literally and this idea that it's the most important or it's always been that way? I just think that's what a lot of our listeners hear. Um, maybe can you unpack it based on what you just said a little bit more specifically?
Rob: Sure. Uh, three points come to mind. One is in his homilies on the book of Joshua, Origen has these sidebars sometimes when he's talking about how Joshua conquers this city and kills these people in it, et cetera, and he says, "Well, somebody in the audience might say, 'What in the world does any of this have to do with my life? Who cares that Joshua killed these people and this city had this many inhabitants?'"
You can see that patristic exegesis is not some kind of highfalutin mystical, you know, rapture to understand these profound oracles. It's really based on if we're reading these texts as the word of the Lord, then what in the world does it have to do with me?
Why should I care about this archeology? I mean, it might be interesting to me, in a kind of abstract way. Maybe I'm a historian and it's interesting to me. But for the church fathers, they grasped that understanding the letter of the text, the history, the story, you still have to make that spiritually relevant.
Jared: Mm.
Rob: Otherwise, what are we doing here? Is it a history class? Well, no, it's not a history class. We're reading this with ears, the ears of our hearts open to hear something. Another thing I'd say is that there are many places in the scriptures, in the patristic exegesis or interpretation of the scriptures, where we would be really surprised by what they think the literal meaning of a text is.
So I, I share with you, Jared, this kind of, um, antipathy or anxiety about the word, um, literal. I think it's helpful to distinguish what we can call the literal and the plain sense of a statement. So for example, when I say, and when the scriptures say, "God is a rock," right? "God is my rock," pretty much nobody reads that and says, "Oh my goodness," like we're, it's being revealed to us that God is a stony substance. Right?
There must be a rock somewhere up there, right? But that is the literal meaning of the text, but it's not the plain meaning of the text. Right. Because you know that the referent of a rock is God, and so you immediately transfer into a different mode of understanding.
So what you think the referent of a statement is is going to really impact what you do with the literalness of it. What you think the plain meaning is. An example, um, from St. Augustine again in a commentary on the literal interpretation of Genesis, he's puzzling over what does it mean to say, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."
And he says, "Well, I know God created angels," and the story of Genesis doesn't explicitly say when angels appear. And so you also have this weird thing in the text where there are four days before there's a sun. So Augustine, you know, these discrepancies in the text were not novel to us in the 20th century, right? The church fathers were deeply aware of these things. And he says, "Well- If you think about movement and time, they're sort of related. And so if there were four days before the sun, maybe there was a kind of movement that wasn't exactly like our time.” Well, what movement could that be?
It's the movement of the angels either willing for or against God. And so what does Genesis 1:1 literally mean? It means God created the angels and the Earth. Nobody today would say that's the literal meaning of Genesis. But for Augustine, that's the literal meaning. Now, there's more we could say about, um, times where the literal meaning just needs to be chucked, and I kind of want to pass that to Jordan, um, 'cause I think he has interesting things to say about that.
Jordan: Yeah, well, this is sort of another, this kind of really drives home the point that what, what they thought the Bible was and was for. Um, many of them, you know, they will disagree with even each other. I don't want to pretend like everyone in the first, you know, 700 years always thought the exact same thing, and they will disagree with each other about how to exegete or best interpret certain passages.
But I do think there's, there's one thing I can say somewhat confidently that they don't really disagree on, and that is since the Bible is given for us rather than just to, uh, you know, take the old form, us for the Bible, um, since it's really for us and for our salvation, then, Origen will say, for example, that the Holy Spirit in the very act of inspiring the Bible has arranged for certain scandals to be planted on the surface, on the body, like, like blemishes on the body, in order to, to, like, intentionally trip you up so that then, then you'll be like, "Wait a second. What's going on here?"
Then you have to dig deeper. If all you ever meet is a smooth, perfect, aesthetically pleasing surface or morally perfect surface, you will never even, it will never dawn on you to go, try to go deeper or to think about, well, maybe there's more layers here, and what is the Bible anyway, and all these other things we've been talking about.
So actually, like, for him, for Saint Gregory of Nyssa, for Maximus, Saint Maximus Confessor, all these different people, they'll say that God, um, will intentionally make certain, um, uh, uh, lit- like liter- the literal meaning of certain passages scandalous. Scandal, of course, is just a Greek word that means stumbling block, in order to trip you up and make you go deeper.
Jared: Mm.
Jordan: And so, it's constantly like, what is all this stuff for? What is this stuff being, what is being given in the Bible? And so a- another last point here I'll just add is, uh, like, um, uh, there's this one figure called Dionysius the Areopagite, not the one from Acts, but whatever.
That's a different story. From the sixth century, he has a point in his work called On The Divine Names, which is really just like a treatise on what scripture is and what it's for and what it gives you. All the divine names come from scripture. And he says, in fact, sometimes some of the, the worst names or most offensive names that the Bible gives God, like when it compares God to a worm or something like that, uh, are the best suited and they're the most effective spiritually because there's the assumption that the spirit in you, or the logos, the reason in you, will in a sense rebel against this.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Jordan: And so what I, what I love about that is that it's like out, uh, out of the conviction that the Bible is inspired is the simultaneous conviction that, like, the reason in you is inspiring.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Jordan: And these two clash in a productive way in order to get you, you know, sort of on the way, on the path, and to think deeper and find the spirit of scripture or whatever we, you know, saying.
Jared: So is one example of that, just to, to bring it home, like when you, uh, when you talk about a scandalous nature, maybe you talked about the genocide, where it's sort of like, oh, well, we know, or we may say, you know, Genesis 1, there's a, there's a talking snake. Like, that should tip us off that maybe there's more going on, that we need to dig deeper and see, what's it representing?
What's it trying to tell us? Rather than just sort of running over it and saying, "Oh yeah, God, God condoned this," or, "God actually murdered all these people," and, oh, no, no, no, that's, that is meant to give you pause. If you run over that, you're actually kind of missing the point. That's an entry point.
It's sort of a portal into the spiritual or deeper meaning of scripture.
Jordan: Yeah. And, and it's, it's great 'cause it, it, there's, they'll talk about all these different ways that scripture can do that. It can be something as trivial as, like, uh, there's this text where Saint Gregory of Nyssa, he notices, and it's kinda more about the way the Septuagint has the text, but in Genesis 2 to 3, he says, uh, you know, it says that there are two trees in the, in the middle of the garden.
Mm. And the way it's phrased into Greek is, like, literally it says, like, in the middle, like the middle point.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Jordan: And he knows his Euclid and geometry well. He's, well, obviously, two physical things can't occupy the middle point.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Jordan: So, like, for him, that's a, that's a sort of minor scandal, right?
Yeah. But it can, it can go up to exactly what you said. Like, like sometimes God is, is depicted as actually wicked. And, and bloodthirsty. And there's this line I, I, I will never forget. It's the 15th homily on Joshua, that text that, um, Rob referenced from Origen. He begins it this way. He says, "I do not think the apostles would have handed down this text to be read in church as scripture if it was not meant to be read figuratively, because I have heard that Christ was the prince of peace, but here we have war."
And he goes and starts making these really rhetorically sort of wonderful contrasts. Um, and so this is, yeah, very much so, everything from, like, little, you know, infelicities on the level of, like, the image all the way up to, like, the actual scandal of, like, God's character.
Jared: Mm. That's wonderful. I think that's gonna be very, um, interesting for our listeners to kinda think about.
'Cause I, I do feel like a lot of us maybe did that kind of intuitively, and then we were sort of told, "No, no, no, that's, like, you can't do that. That's actually blasphemy," or, you know, "That's, that's gonna lead you down the wrong path." So it'll be, it's interesting that in- throughout church history, there are people saying this exact thing and, and promoting it and saying, "This is how we are faithful to the text."
Jordan: Yeah, just to put a point on that, it's exactly from their conviction that these texts are inspired that they refuse to read it. It's, this is the thing that almost all the second and third century church fathers faulted Marcion, was the first major church, uh, you know, controversy after the, after the, uh, after the New Testament, who wanted to get rid of all the Old Testament because of this, these sorts of problems.
The thing they did not say back to Marcion was, "Hey, you know what? You shouldn't question the Bible because it's inspired. It's the authority." No, what they said back to him is, "You don't know the spirit of the text, and therefore you don't really believe it's inspired. If you did, you would know in these cases you need to go deeper. Think it over.”
Rob: And to follow up on your point about blasphemy, right, um, the kind of alienation of your own moral compass that can happen in communities sometimes where people say, "Well, if, if you think there's a problem with genocide, then you're just thinking according to man's ways, not God's ways."
Well, a number of these church fathers would say, "Actually, it would be blasphemous to attribute these things to God." They're gonna go in the complete opposite way. They're gonna say, "Actually, your moral compass is revealing something true about..." So for example, St. Gregory of Nyssa will say, "It is impossible to believe that the same God who said in Ezekiel, 'This child should not pay for the sins of the father,' or who said in the Book of Jonah, 'Am I gonna destroy these children who don't know their left hand from their right hand?'
That that same God brought death to the firstborn Egyptian children who didn't sin themselves, their parents did. To say, to think that that actually historically happened is a blasphemy. And we ought not to believe that. But another thing I wanted to add to this too is that these church fathers really do believe that they're just following in the train of what they see in the New Testament.
Mm. So for example, when St. Paul is referencing the Old Testament text, "Don't muzzle the ox," right? St. Paul famously says, "Do you think God cares about ox, oxen?" Right? This text isn't about that. It's about something deeper. And so the church fathers are really just following the train of New Testament readings of the Old Testament and kind of furthering that and deepening it.
And so I think that's a really important point to keep in mind, because very often people will look at what the church fathers are doing and say, "Goodness, this is so alien." But of course they would say, "Well, we learned it from our master, Saint Paul."
Jordan: Yeah. In fact, that's, that's, that's the way, one way I, I sum it up, like, for my students when I'm presenting some of this stuff. I say, "Look, I was raised in a tradition," probably similar to you, Jared. I was raised in a tradition that said, of the way the New Testament authors used and read the Old Testament, "Well, they can do, like, they're exceptions because they're inspired." Right. Whereas the church fathers looked at them and said, "They're exemplars because they're inspired."
Jared: Hmm. Yeah, that's a great summary, uh, statement. I like that. Um, okay. Well, I kinda wanna keep going on there, but I think it would be helpful for people if we take a couple of these, uh, doctrines.
Because what you said is actually a good jumping-off point, where it's, we find it in the Bible itself, right? Like, we find this hermeneutic in the Bible itself, and I think we can probably translate that to some of these doctrines as well, where we have these things in the text themselves, but then it is up to, uh, the church fathers and ongoing conversation and debate to work out what does this, what does this mean?
So let, maybe we can start with the Trinity. You know, something small that's not of, of little importance in the history of the church. But I- it's such a big topic, and I think people know. You know, maybe you can start with kinda what is the Trinity. Don't wanna assume anybody knows what that means. But can you take us through how theologizing works, where we go from, well, in the Bible there's nothing straightforward, and I think some people would be, uh, maybe scandalized by the idea of, like, what do you mean?
Like, the Trinity is very clearly and obviously in the Bible, 'cause they've been through some apologetics seminar where they were sort of told, "Here's where it is, and here..." But from a scholarly perspective, take us through how we get from the Bible, which again, maybe there's parts and pieces or, you know, to use Saint Paul, we see through a glass darkly.
Like, it's kinda there. To this very articulate, you know, these very, uh, clear articulations of a doctrine of the Trinity.
Jordan: So I think, uh, one way to put this is that, uh, there are two sort of extremes that I think today we tend to go to- uh, go towards. Whenever we, whenever you just read the New Testament and you realize, for example, the word Trinity is not in there.
I mean, by the way, Trinity is just the idea that there is one God but in three persons, that they don't make up three different gods, but at the same time, God is, sort of, does have this Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They're three different whatever we mean by persons. Um, so that, you know, when Christ is praying to the Father in the Gospels, that is a real conversation.
That's a real relation there. Um, even though ultimately, uh, you know, orthodoxy will say that, um, you know, that doesn't mean there's, like, a division in God or sort of a bunch of different gods of different levels. Okay, but that's very far, because whenever, when I read certain texts in the Bible or my students do, and you have Jesus saying, "The Father is greater than I," or you have 1 Corinthians 15 where it's like, in the end, the Son himself will be subject to the Father. Um, that, these texts and many others really just sound like even, even if you wanna make Jesus sort of divine, um, He doesn't seem to be the high God.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Jordan: Um, and then you have other sets of texts that are, you know... and I know biblical scholars today continue to argue about them one way or the other as do theologians, but, you know, you, you've got some texts that seem to at least be a little, a little more ambiguous on that.
You know, "He who has seen me has seen the Father," or, um, you know, depending on how you interpret the beginning of the Gospel of John about, "Through Him all things were made," and so forth, uh, "Image of the invisible God," and so forth. Um, there are, there are sort of these different, these different texts, and I think, like, what, what you can do, what the temptation...
There's two different temptations to go to whenever you're like, "Well, when I read these texts, I don't really see the doctrine of the Trinity proclaimed." You won't find Trinity. You won't find three persons like that stated in the formula. Um, you can either go the route that you mentioned, which is, well, then we need to put on our apologetics hat, and we need to prove, read back into these texts exactly what we will later, uh, confess as our faith, and then you got that whole enterprise.
Or you can kinda go the exact opposite direction and be like, "You know, all that stuff was just later additions. It's all made up. It has no basis in the Bible."
Jared: So save us from these, Jordan
Jordan: Well, and I think the first thing to notice, especially if we're kinda thinking about how it actually happened among, you know, with the church fathers, is that those two seemingly opposite paths actually agree on what it would mean to have a biblical basis.
And what they agree on is that they need an explicit, literal statement that almost approximates to the fullness of later articulations, or else it isn't biblical.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Jordan: Now, we could go one direction and say, like, for all the reasons we've been talking about, what, you know, what the Bible is therefore dictates what you would mean by what biblical means.
But let's just not, let's not go that way, and let's just say, um, the way it actually developed throughout, uh, the Patristic era was you have some people who will point to some texts that support their view, and they'll say, "This is the biblical view. The Son is subordinate or lesser than the Father for all these texts right here."
Then you've got others that say, "No, the Son is, is the Father," and maybe will even go to the other extreme. There's this group called the Docetists, for example, who would say, like, uh, oh, well, like actually it's the Father manifested himself, but there really isn't even three persons. He just sort of, you know, created an image so that you can, he can interact with you, but, but, you know, there's really just this one God.
So these are like extremes, and then they'll point to all those texts that seem to make an extreme identification between the Son and the Father. And what you see through a bunch of twists and turns and details we won't go into here, what you see is that what usually ends up winning out and, and called orthodoxy is the view that can actually synthesize all of these texts in a convincing way, and you got to get into the details for sure to, to know whether or not it's convincing, but in a convincing way, and that would be what they might call the biblical view, is not the one that's explicitly stated in this verse or that chapter.
It's the one that can make sense of all the biblical data in the most convincing way while retaining all that data in its integrity.
Rob: If I can add something to that, Jordan, uh, to call back to something from the, the last time I chatted with you, Jared, this distinction, thinking about doctrines as hypotheses and the scripture as data, right? Um, you can imagine somebody saying, "Look, I know what hot and cold is, but I've never felt temperature," right?
Well, temperature is a way of understanding hotness and coldness in relation to some stable element, let's say mercury, right? But once you get to the higher viewpoint of, quote-unquote, the doctrine of temperature, it allows you to understand hotness and coldness in a variety of contexts. It massively expands your ability to work with the data of sense, and even some data that you can't access just through your own sense experience.
Similarly, something like the doctrine of the Trinity allows you to make sense of tremendous swaths of Christian scripture, Christian worship, Christian prayer, Christian experience in a way that I think is extremely compelling, really makes sense of the data. But you're not going to find that articulation in the Bible, in the same way that you're not going to find 98.6 tattooed on your arm when you take a look, right?
But you might feel hotness or coldness, and there's a relationship between what you're feeling, what the scriptures are giving us, and what ultimately becomes these doctrines. And so the attempt to turn back the clock is really an attempt to just say all those questions that we asked, that human, human curiosity and wonder asked in the face of the data of scripture, we just shouldn't have asked those questions. Just stick with the data that was given.
Well, that's not a very human way of receiving revelation at all. It's basically saying, "Stop being human." And so I really do think, as Jordan said, that these two extremes just collapse the very process of receiving divine revelation. Because divine revelation is always dialogical.
It's God speaks, we listen, we understand, we question, we respond. Um, so I think that's, that's something to kind of add to Jordan's great, um, exposition.
Jared: And there's, like, an expectation, it seems, uh, you know, and maybe you can speak to this because I feel like for a lot of folks, now we have things like, uh, science textbooks or history books, and we have this expectation that that's what truth is, and therefore, if the Bible is supposed to give us truth, why isn't, why doesn't it look like that?
So when you say revelation is dialogical, or it's a back and forth, that itself may be problematic for people. It's like, "Well, I don't want it to be like that. I want it to be like my science textbooks that sort of give me the whole propositional, syllogistic A plus B equals C formula for how all this Christianity works."
If it's supposed to be so important, this is, like, uh, you know, some of the most important things we can think about and talk about. We're talking about God and spirituality, and life itself. Why has it gotta be like this?
Jordan: Hmm. Um, great. That's, there's so many ways to go from there. I would one way to kinda connect it to something we said earlier then is, is this.
It's to say, like, again, I'm sorry to keep going back to him, but he really has this huge influence, so it sort of helps stand for the whole. In the prologue to his work on first principles, Origen actually explicitly says, "Some things that we really needed to know have been stated clearly in scripture."
There's a lot of other things that were, from his perspective, intentionally left vague and ambiguous. It's a similar kind of reasoning that he had with the scandals in scripture where, where he says, you know, he says the, you know, he'll attribute to the apostles. Perhaps as moderns, we might disagree.
We might, we might want to say, "Well, I don't know if Paul was intentionally trying to be vague here." Uh, but actually, personally, I don't think that matters as much because if you do have a sense that the, the, uh, ultimate intention behind scripture is God, then God can have that intention, even if maybe Paul necessarily didn't.
But, but nevertheless, where he says, "This is meant for those who are zealous to, to have something to work on."
Jared: Hmm.
Jordan: So the data is given, but it's really an invitation. And what, so there's this kind of very relational, um, interpersonal kind of task and agenda that's inaugurated by the Bible itself.
And again, it's this, this dynamism, this process is unfolding. Um, so you, you'll sometimes meet in the Church Fathers these, like, really big statements about the Bible. One I'm thinking of is from St. Maximus the Confessor, where it's a beautiful passage where he says the Bible is like a pond. And in the Bible, whenever you read it and meditate on it, you drink it up, but what you're doing is you're drinking up the word.
And just as the water you drink it, uh, becomes a part of the health of your body, so when you rightly drink the word from the Bible, the word takes flesh in your life. But then for him, what that means is other people's actual lives, good interpreters, good readers or thinkers or knowers of God, themselves become new manifestations, almost like extensions of scripture, because it's the same word that's inspiring both.
And then he ends the whole thing by saying, um, but there can never be one single interpretation of scripture, because it's naturally infinite just as God is naturally infinite. So that's a bunch of stuff, but I really think you can just make it really practical and say, like I say to my students, "Look, a lot of people get very unnerved when they feel like, 'Wait, what are you saying?
We want one meaning and one meaning o- only because that's secure. It's something we can grasp and control, like in a propositional form, or like the answers in the back of your math book.'" Uh, but I would actually say I would be more unnerved if that's all the Bible did, because it would mean it has no generative power, no spirit.
That would mean it doesn't really disclose God at all, just a bunch of sort of bumbling attempts to conceptualize God.
Jared: Mm. It reminds me of, uh, in the rabbinic literature, there's a parable of, uh, a king who is leaving two servants. We have a similar story in our New Testament. Um, it goes a little bit worse for the servants in the New Testament version.
But there's a, you know, a couple of, um, servants who are left behind with, uh, some flax and some wheat. And then when the, uh, king comes back, uh, one of them returns the flax and the wheat and says, "Here you go." Like, "I've preserved your wheat and flax. That's wonderful." Um, and the other one had spun the flax into a tablecloth and turned the wheat into a loaf of bread, and that was the servant who was praised for a job well done.
And the rabbis comment and says, "Thus, we should do with Torah." Like, that's what it's for. It's not there to be left as wheat and flax. It's actually for the people of God to spin it into something new and beautiful and useful. Um, and so that's what that reminds me of, um, is that we are invited to participate.
As, as, you know, as, as it seems like Origen would agree, we are here to participate in this dialogue. We are actually invited into the theological enterprise. We are partnering with God to make these things meaningful and new, and by these things, we mean even ourselves, right? We are part of that, that transformation or, or transformative power of scripture includes us.
Jordan: Exactly. I mean, and if you really believe that the, the intention driving the entirety of the Bible's composition through human beings, through the contingencies of history and all that, is God, then exactly what you said is right, that the very composition of the Bible already includes a reaction, so to speak, to the entire history or future that that Bible will inaugurate in all of its readers throughout all the ages.
And that there's a sort of reciprocity on that level in God's own will, his own intention, his own act of inspiration between what it is, like, he sort of objectively gives, and then the whole history of all the subjects who participate and act on it.
Rob: This connects with St. Augustine's riffing on the purpose of scripture as, as being fulfilling the greatest commandment, loving God and loving neighbor.
He follows Origen on, on this point that you note, um, Jordan, that the complexity of scripture is to give the zealous something to work on. But he also says the complexity of scripture is to allow us to have to rely on each other to understand the scripture.
And so the complexity and difficulty of scripture is actually meant to build up the church.
Now, sadly and ironically, very often it's led to the opposite effect. But we can see even in this conversation, your questions, Jared, our questions are building each other up by trying to figure out what is it that the church has been doing in reading the scriptures, and we do that in every local community, every church, every parish, every parent who explains the Bible to their kids, people in conversation.
The Bible cannot be fully understood as an act of divine revelation just by one person. And so the very difficulty of interpreting scripture means you're gonna have to have the Bible for normal people in order to build up the life of the church. Um, and that's, that's one of the beauties of the difficulty of the Bible.
Um, not something to be shied away from, not something to say, "Well, it should be far simpler. Let's collapse that difficulty," because at that point it's like, what is, what is there left for us to do?
Jared: Hmm. Well, that's a great note to end on, that, uh, you heard it here, Rob has said The Bible for Normal People is a necessary component of the Christian life, is what, that's what I heard. I don't know if that's what you said. So, but hey, we gotta end it here.
I could keep going on and on. We could talk about so many other things, but I think that, uh, talking about the Trinity was, you know, illustrated this point that, uh, I think a lot of people are, are wrestling with in terms of how do we get from the Bible, the data, to these doctrines, and because a lot of us grew out, uh, up being told that tradition's bad, we sort of lost a sense of how it works and how beautiful it can be, and how we can actually participate in that moving forward rather than just sort of saying, "Oh, that's, you know, that's not for me."
It is like, well, how do I participate and maybe, uh, generate something that's more life-giving, something that maybe a Saint Augustine would say would help us love our neighbor and love God better. So thank you both for coming on. It was a wonderful conversation.
Jordan: Thank you very much.
Jared: And now for Quiet Time.
Pete: With Pete and Jared.
Jared: All right, Pete. We're here to talk about this conversation I had with Roberto and Jordan. And the first thing I wanted to talk about with you is, you know, it's hard for me to break out of my assumptions about truth and how truth works. So growing up, I was always taught that, like, truth should always be relevant.
You don't need to work to keep it alive. It just is always true. Right. And so if it's hard to do that or you have to put some work into it, you're, it's probably not true.
But, you know, this conversation with Roberto and Jordan about tradition and how the ancient, the, the church fathers and church mothers seem to get it.
That this is a tradition that we have to keep alive, to keep it meaningful. We have to keep it to keep it relevant. Right. So what about you? Did you grow up thinking that this, that for Christianity to be meaningful, we have to do this work to keep the tradition alive? Or, like, how did you do that?
'Cause for me, it's been a growing thought of, oh, we have, we participate in this thing in a meaningful way.
Pete: Yeah. I mean, 'cause you had that particular background. And I didn't. Yeah. You know, I didn't grow up with parents who-
Jared: That's why I wanted to know. Did you, did you come up, up thinking about tradition as this true and meaningful thing that we participate in to keep Christianity meaningful and alive?
Pete: No. Okay. Not the tradition. No, I mean, when I started going to church, you know, it was more, truth is a simple thing and just do it, right? And, and th- that nuanced now and then in different places, but, um, the, the, you know, the, it's almost a dirty word to say make the Bible relevant.
It is relevant, and the history of the church will say, "Not really." Maybe something sort of, but, uh, it, you have to, there's so much of the Bible that's absolutely irrelevant to our lives. You know, going through the chapters of the Kings or reading Chronicles and that kind of stuff. I mean, it's not directly meaningful to us.
We, there's a step where we make it meaningful. That's called interpretation or hermeneutics, and without that, the Bible would have died a century after it was compiled, because it's written about a different time and different places where people weren't living anymore. And so how do we connect to this tradition?
You connect with it by being creative. I mean, people don't like that word. Let's use another word. You have to be intentionally, um, I'm gonna use the word creative. I can't think of a better word. You know, it, you have to be creative, and not just, again, it's not like anything you want, but it's more of a discerning-
Jared: Well, you, you have to connect dots
It's not like there's an infinite canvas. It is there are dots that are waiting to be connected between our existence and our lives, and the ancient text, and the traditions that connect those two points already.
Pete: Right. Yeah, exactly. So, um, yeah, so I, I, I was not really raised to think that, but in my young adult life, I definitely saw that, and I'm, I'm sure I bought into it, because that's what everybody says. And if that's your influence, that's what you do. And thank you, uh, ancient church for, for like, well, duh.
Jared: I mean, of course, one of the great insights of this episode, and just w- if you read the, you know, the church fathers and church mothers, they're not dummies.
I think that, sometimes we kinda get this idea as if they were primitive, and they thought in these ways. Yeah. It's like they noticed a lot of stuff.
Pete: They were philosophers.
Jared: Right. Right. Right. Yeah. And we, and we have inherited a lot that we take for granted, I think, in our, in our tradition.
And so, okay, that kinda leads us into the second thing. You mentioned, uh, you know, how we, how we read the text. And to make it meaningful, and to make it relevant. Can you say a little bit more from the episode about this idea of the irritants? And talk about how the church fathers saw these things that we, we pointed out in the podcast over the years, you know, we can call them like the problems in the text or these things that cause us question marks- Yeah ... about what the Bible is. And I think it's interesting how the church fathers handled it.
Pete: Yes, scandalous passages that, like, you know, I can't imagine God in chapter six of the Bible giving up and saying, "I just gotta start over again. Drown everybody," right? That is a scandalous passage.
Now, there are some who would come to that and say, "God is sovereign. Whatever God does is good, and right, and just, and you can't question it. Even if God contradicts himself in the Bible occasionally, you know, that still, it all hangs together." That's one way of doing it that I find, um, a complete dead end very quickly, and to think rather in terms of, okay, wow, this passage is weird, and I, I don't like God, how God is being portrayed here, and to say that honestly, and to say, "Okay, but I wanna respect this tradition, and is there a way of reading this that can bring some life out of it?"
And, you know, I, I think what people will say, Jared, pretty quickly is that, "Well, that's eisegesis. You're reading into the text." And I guess the response would be, I think everybody does that on some level. Right. And in fact, I think Paul did it. The New Testament writers did it.
They're, they're reading the text from a completely differently framed position because it has to make sense to their lives. And that's why reading the Old Testament and saying, "Well, this is talking about Jesus," when it's, it's not really. But it's, th- but that's the move that people make, and everybody makes that.
And that, that's, that's the big, dirty secret. No one actually does what they say they're doing.
Jared: And so, you know, the, thinking of the, the episode that the, the church fathers would see these as actually points that motivate you to think deeper. It's an entry point into a deeper way of reading the Bible.
Pete: And it's, it's not, I agree, and it's not, um, here's a twist I can give to this one verse. It, you enter into an existential moment of, of having to ponder and think. You know, just the flood story. You read that and you say to yourself, not so much, "How can I read this text to make it work?"
It's like, "I'm not sure I even understand this God here." Right. Okay, at that point, you're, you're beginning to think. Right. I'm gonna say this way. You're beginning to think like a Christian, in my opinion, you know? And, and to really engage the text and to be willing to debate with it, um, not from a point of superiority, but really from a point of being just confounded by it.
And how, how can you not do that? And again, the ancient church, and, you know, throwing into the mix here Second Temple Judaism, the, it's the same thing. They're just, uh, different words for it. They realize that immediately, and that these, these, quote, "problem passages" are invitations to probe.
Jared: Well, and I mean, Second Temple Judaism, they had a field day. Yeah. That, I mean, the amount of creative interpretation that explodes in the Second Temple, it's like, wow. They saw that not as something to tamp down and be ashamed of, but something to celebrate, and saw it as a way to expand the tradition.
Pete: And, and to answer the question for themselves, what is God doing now- Yeah ... in us, because the old days don't work anymore. And I know Isaiah talked about the Assyrian crisis of the 8th century. We're not living in the 8th century. Right. Right?
Jared: Well, I mean, I think it's a great point, of moments of crisis.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Jared: You have these existential moments where the old way of seeing it starts to not make as much sense. That's where, I mean, our Bible as we have it really took shape in a time of crisis. Of, like, we gotta figure out what to do with these traditions.
Pete: It’s crisis literature, the Bible itself. Yeah. And it's never like, "Hey, isn't this great?" You know? It's exile that drove it. It's, it's all these negative experiences. And, and, and, you know, there's a lesson to be learned there, right? Right. And not just thinking of the Bible as, again, a rule book or something.
Jared: Okay. Well, the last thing, just because we gotta tip our hats to a small book called Inspiration and Incarnation, you know? He mentioned just this incarnational analogy. That it, you know, I don't know if the ancient church fathers had some trademarks on this.
Pete: I think they did.
And I, I regret when I wrote that book back in 2005 that I didn't just footnote them all over the place, but I was in a different head space back then. I was never taught this in seminary.
Jared: Exactly. Yeah, it's a good example of exactly what we're talking about. Yeah. Which is like, well, that would've been good to know 'cause that would've helped.
Pete: It's Jews in graduate school who pointed some of the stuff out to me. It's like, why, why wasn't I taught this stuff? But, you know, the, the notion of the Bible's, um, I don't know what word to use, maybe authority, but also frailty at the same time. And others in the ancient world have used language of, um, humiliation.
You know, in the same way that Christ experienced humiliation, the text has moments of humiliation, like all that horrible violence stuff, for example. And, and to me, that's a much more, um, robust and I would say mature way of thinking about the nature of the Bible, that you have, um, this, this, again, Christology, right, incarnational analogy.
They have this divine human synthesis of some sort, and you can't really pull them apart very easily, you know? It's like asking what makes Jesus divine? Right. Well, he was raised from the dead. Now, people are raised from the dead. That doesn't make him divine. He forgave sins. Well, you can, other people can forgive sins.
Like, what makes Jesus divine? That's an ancient, old question. I think the, we, we should keep revisiting the Bible, thinking about what is, where do we find transcendent moments? Maybe I can put it that way. Right. And, and that can differ over time and, uh, but that, maybe that's more what it's for. Um, so and that, that reflects, you know, again, Jesus as, you know, Jesus as Lord, but also Jesus, uh, emptied himself of all that and, and became a servant even to the point of death, even death on the cross, as Philippians 2 says.
You know, like, yeah, that's called a paradox, and I think scripture is a paradox. I think the Christian faith is a paradox. Thank God it's a paradox 'cause the pressure's off. We don't have to, "I, I'll figure it out by tomorrow. I'm having my exams." You know? Right, right. It's like, come on.
That doesn't work, you know? It, that's, that's... I want nothing to do with that.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Right.
Pete: I want nothing to do with that 'cause that, that's, at that point, it, you, we've reduced it all to a, a, um-
Jared: Well, it's transactional ...
Pete: It's transactional. We've reduced it to really human limitations. Mm-hmm. And we always talk about God in human ways, but also acknowledging that those ways we talk do not exhaust the subject. Right. Right?
And, and I, the, for me, the incarnation, the mystery of the incarnation, which nobody understands, um, is, is part of that discussion. And the thing is that those guys, they were all over this stuff. Right.
Like, they were all over it. And I feel like, you know, just transporting people back, of course, if I were transported back, I'd probably be dead in 45 minutes. I don't know, I'd say something stupid. But, you know, but, you know, learning, learning the tradition in seminaries, I think is very important. Not just your tradition and why you're right and everybody else is wrong, but learning.
Look at this broad faith, and look at what people were thinking about. You know, I, we went through all the church fathers when I was in seminary. Mm. But it was about, here's basically what they said, and we went through the list of them.
But it's not like you didn't live there.
Jared: Well, it turns out most of them were Calvinists. It’s weird how that worked out. Calvin didn't even exist yet, but they were mostly all Calvinists.
Pete: Right. It's weird. But they didn't have a Calvinist view of scripture, that's for sure.
Jared: Yeah. So. We didn't read those parts.
Pete: Yeah. But anyway, thank you, ancient church. It was, it was a great episode, I thought, and, um, more like that. I, I think if, if the, if the Christian faith is gonna have a legitimate future, it's gonna be by tying into some of these grander themes of the history of Christian thought, and not defending, you know, is Adam real? And is evolution true?
And all that kind of stuff is like, you know, you're gonna lose people, and not for the right reasons.
Jared: Well, it's telling that, that certain traditions are more scandalized by the fact that there are two creation stories than they are that God condones genocide.
Like, that's problematic.
Pete: Yeah. I don't care if God kills who, do what he wants, but the Bible can’t have-
Jared: Don’t mess with my two. Anyway. All right.
Well, thanks everybody. Thanks. Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you wanna support what we do, there are three ways you can do it.
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