Reading the Holy Fathers Through a Historical Hermeneutic

The Heroes of Scripture Called Out as Strangers in a Strange Land, Brought together as a Mosaic of Grace and Formed into a Book

Distinguishing Platonic Cultural Categories from Christian Truth

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

Four Ways of Reading and Applying Texts:

1. Historic - Reading texts as a product of known historical contexts

2. Theoretic - Reading texts through later theological speculation

3. Metaphoric - Reading texts as a reflection of contemporary theological understanding

4. Literalistic - Reading texts as directly reflecting contemporary situations

The various schools of Christian thought have divided primarily along these styles of interpretation. Origen, finding the historic interpretation to reveal conflicting accounts, turned to a heavily theoretical and mystical interpretation, which allowed him to also account for his contemporary culture’s philosophy. Diodore of Antioch and Theodore Mopsuestia, however, found scripture to be a reliable historic document, and applied literalistic contextualization to its meaning, making their form of theology anti-metaphorical and against the process of anagogical “theoria”, instead focusing on the application of types to practical experience. 

I propose that the subject of the Early Church Fathers’ observation and contemplation, which employed the images, terms, and techniques of Neoplatonism and the Classical Pagan Tradition, was not a Platonic Reality of the Created Universe, but was the proven and universal structure of Culture Itself! If the Platonic ethos of their observations are contextualized within a cultural thought world, a platform of shared visions and elision of meaning, then there is not a contradiction between Christian philosophy and the Scientific Aristotelianism that can be proven as the only approach the explains our material reality. Concepts where words take on characteristics and invoke realities and subtleties of the mind are not dismissed, but are placed within the context of the laws of culture, shared definition, laws, and the Archetypal Mind that is shared by the educated and connected members of a society. 

Directionality of Contemplation, "Catharsis/Purification”, “Worthiness" and “Visions of Divinity” are all culturally prepared and dictated processes that all shared common traits within the Fathers, starting in the formation of educated manhood, social life of the city, and ending in a vision of the world through the Eucharist, in the Desert, as a singular figure, a fully-realized individual, who contemplated Oneness, Silence, and Eternity. The Skenosis and Henosis that obviously came to replace the Holy Peoplehood of the New Israel was based more on concessions to cultural paradigms and reality within the Greek mentality, than a revelation of Truth within its original cultural context - that of the Semitic Mind and the Culture of Family-Oriented Judaism! 

If this is a cultural process and the outworking of life through a series of chiastic phases, then its universality and similarity in the Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian and Islamic Traditions does not pose a problem. It is describing a human construct, a universal psychic architecture that is the characteristic of man in the Proto-Man, all of us “In Adam", a shared psychology that creates and affirms a uniquely human reflection of the universe. The similarities are no longer threats, but stepping stones for understanding the true depth, beauty, and singular value of the human person in relation to other persons, and posits a way in which this full life can be connected to and reflect the reality of the Christian Story, the Unique, Axial Personhood of the Creator in Christ Jesus. 

Salvation is then, not an expression of this full human experience, our potential to grasp the presence of the ineffable and reflect the glory of the creation, the horizon of eternity, in our minds eye - but it becomes an apophatic hope in divine and continued life. While we may have visions of light that are indeed reflections of God, it is not this experience which “saves” us - it is God, in Essence, Himself, who is continually beyond our intellect and perception, Who is our ultimate hope of recreation, resurrection, and salvation. His promises, through Christ, His Righteousness, through the direct interaction of the Holy Spirit, are the Fruits of His Presence, His Grace, in our lives. The Reality of His Word, His Will, of His Promise is the Power and the Hope of our Eternal Life in His Love!

That the Early Church Fathers did not understand or think about their own culture is obvious. They took their own words and the meanings applied to them by their close associates and teachers as the universal definitions, and fought with one another dogmatically over words that both had assigned different definitions - “Ousia, Homousia, Hypostasis, Physis.” Had the words been given clear definitions, many of the debates would not have occurred. This could only happen if they did not understand the process of culture, meaning in language, and the very literary process that was applied by the Fathers to the function of the “Word” Himself - Impartation of Knowledge through Incarnational (Bounded, Defined) Communication/Revelation. In many ways, they had inherited the Greek and Roman mentality of thinking of their culture as the ONLY culture, and applied the idea of “Barbarian” (babblers and those who could not communicate) to the cultures outside of their own, including, very anachronistically and paradoxically, the Jews themselves. This not only impaired their own message reaching other cultures, but combined their culture with their truth (since they only understood the Gospel through their culture) and made the propagation of their culture and authority paramount (equal to the Great Commission) for those within the Greco-Roman Christian mentality. The reality of cultures like China and India never fully impacted the reality of the Church Fathers, and never shook their own confidence in the link between their obviously “perfect” outward cultural forms and the eternal and heavenly truths that God had established in Heaven. Thus, the Church mediated a Roman-based "City of God", and the true cultural situation in which the Church flourished lacked both context and humility. Instead, the Church became comfortable with exclusionary and authoritarian definitions of “Catholicity”, which lead to further break-down, dispute, and eventual heresy and broken communion. Eventually, many "Catholic" systems fought with one another for preeminence, rivaling the number of schismatics and heretics of the first four centuries of Christianity. 

The way into the future for Apostolic Christianity, as we return to the condition and attitude of the Early Church, is to embrace the Gospel as above culture, and the teachings of the Early Fathers in their Cultural and Historical Context. Realizing that what they observe is a direct manifestation of their philosophical surroundings, not just of their historical or linguistic milieu. They contemplate and see forms that exist within the culture itself, and report the fruit of their contemplation and observations in a Platonic language and within a philosophical form that is so universal amongst Greek Fathers (to a different extent for the Latin Fathers), because what they saw really existed in their culture. And, to a smaller degree, exists in every culture. Their Climactic view WAS the view of the pre-Christian philosophers. Their contemplation and “oneness” was the path of the Stoics. Their views on sexuality and celibacy were influenced by Manichean, Gnostic, and Pagan Virgin-order categories. In many cases, the world views that they espoused were reactions to, rather than affirmations, of abuses. These negative cultural reactions created a synthesis that was not the meaning of the original text or the original Church, but they provided a way for the Ancient Fathers to deal with their situations. In this way, acculturation and contextualization were universal, and even though their doctrinal results were different (compounding over time to create division and separation), their motivation was the same. 

This pure motivation, this attitude of Christian life lived, contextualized, and apologetically propagating what has been passed down, has always been the process of the Gospel, which is perfect, in an imperfect human mind and the cultural forms that those human realities create, is the living Tradition, the “Paradosis”, which expresses God’s Presence and Spirit amongst men! 

Division is an expression of entropy, or passibility, of loss. Division and schism happen throughout all human structures, especially with the passage of time and the spread of organizations over space. This human frailty represents the opposite of divinity, or the strength and unity of the Godhead, and it is this weakness that has proven to be a challenge for those who believe the Church to be a divine institution, filled with the Holy Spirit, kept form the “Gates of Hell”, to explain… leading to the insistence that one group has been preserved while the other group has “fallen away”. How does a view of entropy and development within the Church explain and compensate for this difficulty? We know that the Holy Spirit dwells in us, working out our redemption, even in the midst of our imperfection. How does this, and the biblical definition of salvation work together to show the Church as a the Divine Human Life? Simply, the only solution is Christ Himself! He is the juncture between weak, fallible humans and Almighty, infallible God. Church unity breaks down and teachings become pride-filled when He is not what is being taught, or where others, who are not the originally and only "Bridge and Mediator" take central stage, becoming a focus that distracts and minimizes the presence and power of Christ in our lives. For the ancient Churches, Fathers and Saints can obscure. For Protestants, refusal to obey Christ's Sacramental and Ordinal Commands become problems, and the Ordination, Right Order, and Administration of Baptism and Eucharist are obscured or lost! 

The central issue here is the inability to distinguish between God and Man, and this happens only when we have lost sight of the Truth of Incarnation Itself - Christ, Fully God and Fully Man, is our Only Meeting Point with the Father! He is, therefore, our only hope of salvation, and revealed and lived in the power of the Holy Spirit, which He sends us from the Father! Christ is our unity, because He is One, we, being joined to Him are One. Only in the Christological reality of His Person can we establish any unity. This unity is established in baptism. This is a theologically recognized fact for all parts of Christ’s Body. The unity of Baptism should also be expressed by the unity of the Eucharist, but this, tied as it is to the administration of the Bishop, rather than to the Community of Faith, the Body of the Baptized, is not possible while misunderstandings and doctrinal disputes remain. 

Therefore, the study of Church History and the Fathers is not a waste of time or a heretical turn from a true Protestantism of Christianity, or a plunge into heresy by denying the infallibility of the Fathers, but a study of how Christianity inculcates in Culture, what is the Cultural, Formal Core of the Christian Experience, what has transcended change and is truly above Cultural definitions, and how Christianity should approach the thought-worlds and worldviews of today!

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