Hermeneutics and Homiletics: The Early Church (1st-5th Centuries), Part 1

With regard to hermeneutics and homiletics, I envision the early church era as commencing with the generation after the Apostles, most notably Clement of Rome, and concluding with the life and works of Augustine. To be sure, scholars define this epoch in various ways and most extend it beyond the life of Augustine, but there is near universal consensus that this man, like no other, both synthesized the previous centuries of development in hermeneutics and homiletics and set the course for the next seven centuries (see, e.g., Bray, 77; Hall, 7; Kannengiesser in McKim, 1-13). As Beryl Smalley put it, “St. Jerome gave the medieval scholar his text and his learned apparatus; St. Augustine told him what his aim should be” (Smalley, 23). 

Several issues are unique to this period and help put into perspective what transpired during this time. First, the apostles died and thus left the early church to face questions of who would lead them and what their sources of authority would be.

Second, the early church needed to distinguish themselves from Judaism without dividing themselves from the flow of salvation history that was part and parcel of Judaism. In other words, they were called by God to proclaim to the Jews the dissolution of the first covenant and the establishment of the second covenant in Christ, and also to hold out the hope of Christ to those whose own sacred texts prophesied his coming—for their good. This calling demanded that the early church demonstrate and justify the relationship between the Old and New Testaments by showing how Christ is the fulfillment of the Law and prophesies and promises of God, how the God of the Jews is the God of the Christians, and how the Old Testament is authoritative for Christians while its laws are not binding upon them.

Third, the early church needed to distinguish itself from the pagan mystery religions and Hellenistic philosophies of the day, while at the same time holding out the hope of Christ to the Hellenistic world. By the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, they had to demonstrate the intellectual credibility and superiority of the gospel, the emotional appeal of the gospel, and the rationale for rejecting one’s own culture and family to embrace this mysterious man who died and yet is dead no more.

Fourth, the early church had to defend the gospel against opponents who rose up from within their ranks like Marcion who rejected the Old Testament and the God he thought it portrayed.

All of these crises forced the early church to think carefully about its sources of authority and how those sources spoke to its crises. Through the leadership of men like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, the church ultimately agreed that the Scripture itself is the final authority over the doctrine and life of the church, and that the Scripture is defined as the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. While it is true that the canon was not formally adopted until the Council of Nicaea, it is also true that these sixty-six books made up the functional canon of the early church and guided her as she spoke the truth in love to the Jews, the Hellenistic world, and the heretics in her midst (see Dockery, 45-73, 95-97).

Furthermore, these crises forced the church to think carefully about its hermeneutical methods. They did not start from scratch in this regard but rather drew both on Jewish methods which tended to emphasize a literal approach to interpretation and on Greco-Roman methods which tended to emphasize an allegorical approach to interpretation. While some early church fathers made moderately successful attempts to break from the molds of these traditions and form a via media, these two streams of influence would serve to shape the history of hermeneutics and homiletics for centuries to come (Dockery, 15-16).

On the one hand, in Alexandria and under the influence of the prominent Jewish philosopher Philo, Clement of Alexandria and his brightest student, Origen, developed a Christianized version of the allegorical method. The early church largely agreed that there is both a literal sense and a spiritual sense to the Scripture, but Origen in particular took this idea to new heights, or depths, depending on your point of view. 

In his “Homily on Leviticus” he writes, “I published three books [on Genesis] from the sayings of the holy Fathers concerning the letter and the spirit…For the Word came into the world by Mary, clad in flesh; and seeing was not understanding; all saw the flesh; knowledge of the divinity was given to a chosen few. So when the Word was shown to men through the lawgiver and the prophets, it was not shown without suitable vesture. There it is covered by the veil of flesh, here of the letter. The letter appears as flesh; but the spiritual sense within is known as divinity. This is what we find in studying Leviticus…Blessed are the eyes which see divine spirit through the letter’s veil” (Homily in Leviticus, i. I, in Smalley, 1).

With this basic philosophy in mind, Origen sought with passion and intensity to understand the literal sense of Scripture and then press into the allegorical sense, that is, the superior sense. And while he argued that the two were inextricably bound to one another, the allegorical often outshone or even replaced the literal. It is difficult in so short a space to communicate the vast influence this philosophy of interpretation had upon the Christian church, but as she often does, Smalley gets right to the point with but a few words: “To write a history of the Origenist influence on the west would be tantamount to writing a history of western exegesis” (Smalley, 14).

Be that as it may, Origen is, to my mind, an enigma, for on the one hand, he seems to have a high view of Scripture and thus takes every letter, word, and sentence very seriously. He memorized large portions of the Bible and pressed others to do the same, insisting that they could not rightly understand the Word of God unless their minds were saturated with the Word of God. He commends and promotes the Scripture with the passion of one who is profoundly persuaded. 

Yet on the other hand, he seems to have a low view of Scripture in that he argues that it is at times obscure and even laced with falsehoods, which means that it must be explained (or even excused) by means of allegory. This manner of thinking led him, for example, to deny the bodily resurrection of Christ and argue that, because of the mighty mercy of God in Christ, one day all would be saved, whether in this age or the one to come. I have had only the briefest exposure to his writings, but at times he seems embarrassed by the Bible and the God it portrays, and at times he grossly and tragically misinterprets its meaning (see Dockery, 82-97; Hall, 132-155; O’Keefe and Reno, 93-107).

Next Monday I will sketch out the contours of a movement that rose up to oppose and supplant Origen's approach to Scripture and practical Christianity, but for now I would encourage you to reread this blog and ensure that you're tracking with the flow of the argument, for again, Smalley is correct in saying that Origen had a stunningly great influence on the history of western exegesis, that is, hermeneutics and homiletics.