Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity, 2 Volumes, (Francis M. Young) - Review

 

DOCTRINE AND SCRIPTURE IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY. By Frances M. Young. Foreword by David F. Ford. Two Volumes. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023, 2024.

                Restoration traditions, like the one I am part of, often assume that by the second century CE, things went off the rail, and Scripture was relegated to a lower level of authority. The truth is that early Christian theologians, though they might make use of Greek philosophy in their interpretations, sought to engage with Scripture. In recent years, efforts have been made to re-engage with and make use of the interpretations of these early theologians beginning in the second century. That doesn’t mean their interpretations are always correct or somehow infallible, but they can be useful in understanding the Christian faith. After all, even if Scripture is the foundation of Christian Theology, it has to be interpreted. The process of interpretation ultimately led to doctrinal formulations such as the doctrine of the Trinity.

                Below, I offer my review of the two volumes in Frances M. Young’s work Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity, both of which have been published by Eerdmans Publishing Company. These two volumes explore several areas of theology that emerged during the first six centuries of the church’s existence. These doctrines include God's role as Creator, Christology, the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, and doctrines that were defined in the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople. As I noted above, the question that emerges regularly concerns the relationship between Greek philosophy and Scripture. There are those, often Restorationists, who see the developments after the second century as corruptions of the original pristine doctrines in the New Testament. But, while there was development, the question is: Did the early Christians seek to be true to Scripture even as they dealt with important issues, such as whether the God of Jesus was the Creator (Marcionism)? These volumes appear at an important moment in that in 2025, the Christian community will (if they choose) commemorate the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. This review can serve as part of my ongoing reflections on the council and the creeds that were created during the fourth century.

Before we get to the volumes, I need to introduce the author. Frances M. Young is an emeritus professor of theology at the University of Birmingham and a fellow of the British Academy. Young is an ordained minister of the Methodist Church in England and the author of several books, several of which focus on early Christianity.  The foreword was provided by David F. Ford, emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University. Now to the volumes at hand.

The first volume is titled Scripture, the Genesis of Doctrine (2023). This first volume focuses on the theological developments that led up to the decisions made in the fourth and fifth centuries concerning the Trinity and leading up to the development of creedal definitions of the doctrine of the Trinity in the fourth century and the fifth-century debates over the two natures of Christ. This volume, therefore, sets the stage for what is to come, including modern debates over the development of doctrine, such as Newman's ideas, or whether we see the Hellenization of the Gospel. One of the key elements of this volume, which serves as a foundation for the second, is the idea that early Christianity was "school-like." We think of Christianity as a religion, but in its early stages, like synagogues, the focus was on teaching, such that bishops took on the role of teachers. The doctrinal developments of these early years emerged out of these schools.

The earliest debates focused on responses to Marcionism and Gnosticism (Valentinian), out of which the earliest summations of scriptural thought were summarized in various rules of faith. Irenaeus and others focused these developments on God's role as creator, thus the idea of Monarchianism. Young draws on several theologians of this early period, including Irenaeus, Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, and in the summary at the end of the volume on Augustine's text Teaching Christianity (Vol. I/11). As she works through these early theological works, Young seeks to show how early Christian leaders/theologians sought to ground their doctrinal developments in Scripture, even as they drew on the philosophical resources of their time. As such, she sets up what is to come in Volume 2, where she focuses on the disputes of the fourth and fifth centuries that resulted in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition of 451.

It is often assumed that early Christian theology, especially from the fourth century onward, was focused on philosophical categories. It is even suggested that it was the heterodox folk (e.g., Arians) who were the true biblical theologians. The truth is that theologians, including Cyril of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, and Augustine, sought to ground their theologies in Scripture. Now, it is true that they did not employ modern historical-critical methods, but they appealed to Scripture in their disputes. The question often hung on the interpretation of texts.

We now turn to the second volume in this two-volume work. It is titled Scripture in Doctrinal Dispute (2024). As I noted above, this volume illuminates the important debates that took place in the fourth and fifth centuries, from Nicaea to Chalcedon. While Nicaea and Constantinople focused on the Trinity, the disputes that took place in the years following Constantinople focused on Christology. It is important to point out that all the disputants in the fifth-century debates over the two natures of Christ accepted the Nicene-Constantinople Creed's ruling on the Trinity. The question that led up to Chalcedon, which not everyone embraced, concerned how Christ could be at the same time both human and divine.

Foundational to this discussion is pedagogy, such that the church is seen as a school, with the major church leaders/theologians serving as teachers. Thus, the nature of the disputations is rooted in pedagogy. These teachers sought to interpret and apply theologically the teachings of Scripture, which by this time had reached canonical completion. These debates emerged out of disputes taking place in the second and third centuries about the nature of God. The conclusion leading into the fourth century was that God is One, such that there is no distinction between the Creator and the God of Jesus. With that assumed, the fourth-century debates that included Arius and Athanasius, leading to Nicaea, focused on the nature of the incarnation. As Young notes, "The fundamental issue between Athanasius and the Arians was whether the Logos incarnate in Jesus belonged to the divine or created order, a question that was bound to shatter the traditional Logos-theology and create what we know as the christlogical problem" (p. 26). In this volume, Young explores how scripture was deployed in seeking a solution to this problem.

After setting the scene in Chapter 1, in Chapters 2 and 3, Frances Young focuses on the debate over the Trinity. These chapters are titled "Three Names, One God?" Chapter 2 is Part 1, while Chapter 3 is Part 2. In Part 1 (Chapter 2), Young focuses on the debates between Arius and Athanasius. She does this by exploring the literature that emerged during the controversies that led up to Nicaea. These sources include Athanasius's "Orations against the Arians" (340s), which, according to Young, "effectively constructed 'Arianism' —sharpening up the issues at stake in the complex debates of the time by turning tensions into a binary conflict, tracing its roots back to the pre-Nicene dissension between Arius and his bishop." What these disputes did was demand new concepts that moved beyond the old Monarchian solutions to the doctrine of God the Creator. Then, in Chapter 3, Young focuses more specifically on the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, especially the developments produced by the Cappadocians—Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory Nazianzus. She writes that these two chapters, taken together, "confirm that the articulation of this doctrine [Trinity] was a process of argument and that that argument was not least about the fundamental meaning of scripture" (p. 108). While the council at Constantinople resolved the question of the Trinity, it opened up more questions regarding the incarnation. Thus, the question was: "How could one homoousios with the Father, truly God in every sense, so as to be utterly transcendent and not a creature, accept change, become a creature, be incarnate, be born, suffer, and die?" (p. 108). These questions led to the next stage of debate, which led to Chalcedon.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on "Two Natures, One Christ?” This discussion is divided into two chapters (parts 1 and 2). In Chapter 4, the focus is on the diverging exegeses that emerged after the church embraced a doctrine of the Trinity. Two parties emerged: the Antiochene and the Alexandrian. Young points out that both sides had soteriological concerns. On the one hand, there is the Alexandrian position that has roots in the theology of Athanasius that led to the miaphysite formula (one nature). The key figure on the Alexandrian side was Cyril of Alexandria. A key Antiochene figure was John Chrysostom. They both offered exegetical works. John on Hebrews and Cyril on the Gospel of John. The two sides shared many things in common but had differences of interpretation; the differences become starker in Part 2, The focus here is on the debates that centered on the break between Nestorius and Cyril over whether Mary was the mother of God (Theotokos) or only the mother of the human Jesus (Christotokos). Both rested their views on the Nicene Creed but interpreted Scripture differently, with different assumptions. Nestorius would be declared a heretic, but the debate continued. The issue centered on whether Christ had one nature (divine) or two natures (human and divine), and if the latter, how this occurred. Was it a union of natures (one nature) or a conjunction? Ultimately, both sides sought to defer to Scripture, but the question hinged on how one properly interpreted Scripture. The differences often centered on differing texts. But when they appealed to the same passages, such as Philippians 2, they would emphasize different parts. Theodoret, the Antiochene theologian, focused on Paul's statement that the one in the form of God took the form of a slave, while Cyril focused on kenosis (emptying himself). Chalcedon sought to provide a solution, but it did not resolve the question for all.

In the final chapter, Chapter 6, Young explores the relationship between doctrine and scripture, which had emerged in the earlier disputes. She focuses on Augustine's book On the Trinity. She suggests that Augustine demonstrated that "for early Christian thinkers in general, correct doctrine determined the right reading of scripture" (p. 271). This includes appeals to Christological readings of the Old Testament theophanies. The guide to right interpretation was the Rule of Faith. But it works in reverse as these theologians, including Augustine, used proof texts to prove their points.

The point of these two volumes of Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity is not to determine who was correct in their interpretations but to show how the disputants made use of Scripture in their debates. We might not accept their interpretive methods today, and yet they offer us insight into how doctrines emerged and developed. This volume is scholarly and dense. Yet, Young does an excellent job bringing out the variances such that we gain a better insight into the methods and concerns of these early theologians. These two volumes, Scripture, The Genesis of Doctrine, and Scripture in Doctrinal Dispute, are dense but rich in theological resources. At the same time, it is true that early Christian theologians didn't use the historical-critical method. They were quite aware of the human elements that help form Scripture. We can thank Frances Young for helping us discern this truth so that we might consider how they might speak to us today when it comes to reading Scripture.