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.
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