(The following comprises Part Two of the Saturday series on Secondary Illuminations of Scripture by Deborah J. Shore)
In the early centuries of the Church two of the most influential theological centers were Alexandria and Antioch in present-day Egypt and Turkey respectively. The way that theologians in these two cities approached scriptures was rather polarized. While key doctrines developed or articulated in their early forms by Alexandrian church fathers such as Clement, Origen, and Athanasius have been integral to the faithful Church of proceeding ages, Antiochene hermeneutics have come to rule the day in conservative evangelical churches.
Alexandria’s allegorical-spiritual method of hermeneutics was already established before Christ died on the cross and the Church and its thinkers emerged. The Jewish scholar Philo, greatly influenced by classical Greek thought, was at its helm, although he was by no means the first Jewish scholar to develop multi-layered mystical traditions surrounding the Torah. Those go back centuries.
To Philo, the literal interpretations and historical facts of the Scriptures were actually of least importance. He and Christian exegetes who followed in his steps thought that the texts had a “bodily” meaning, which is the literal historical-grammatical reference, a “soulish” meaning, which is the moral import (for instance, Jewish abstention from particular foods might hold a hidden moral principle regarding not eating with wrongdoers), and finally a spiritual meaning. To Christian exegetes like Origen this spiritual meaning would typically be a revelation about Christ or the Christian’s relationship with God. It was a mystical layer that the Alexandrian exegete should strive to uncover as of highest value (I am indebted here to Roger Olson’s The Story of Christian Theology, pp. 106-7, 202-4, 294).
This didn’t mean Alexandrians were careless with the text. In fact, Origen’s greatest works included a systematic theology and a Bible in six columns that compared versions and pointed out variants, omissions, and additions. Although he made speculations that conservatives would consider incorrect today, he gave the tradition of the apostles and the church the right of way and was tortured to his grave for the orthodox faith (Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1, 78-81). Another Alexandrian, Athanasius, is widely touted for almost single-handedly saving the church from a heretical doctrine of the Trinity.
We’ll discuss Alexandrians and Antiochenes a bit more next week.
No doubt this will seem woefully simplistic to some of you theological historian types, but I hope I’m doing the topic justice as we progress.
Fwiw, I shan’t come out on the side of a spiritual-allegorical read but, rather, between the poles.
Beautiful!…….. Roger Olson’s “The story of Christian Theology” is a great work to have,Calvinist or Arminian. I must admit that I do have issue some some of the works of Origen.
I think almost all conservatives/evangelicals/orthodox today would have issue w/ some of Origen’s points. We tend to give the earliest church fathers slack with gratitude for their boldness in forging an intellectual path and for the clarity they brought to some issues that we still agree with them on, lol. And church fathers on both sides of any given issue seem to have relied more heavily on contemporary philosophy than on Scripture at times.
If you haven’t read Gonzalez, I’d highly recommend him. He is a shockingly fast read too, given the length of the volumes. He just writes really well. I’m tempted to get his history of theology volumes to supplement Olson.
Very interesting, Deborah. Looking forward to next week’s installment.
Gonzales is good. Origen is one of those guys you read that makes you go, “Wow, that was insightful” and then “Hey, Origen smoked crack.”
HAHAHA!
I call that the “John MacArthur Effect”.
ha ha. Oh my. That’s… fantastic.
How can a guy be so splendid one moment, and then absolutely ridiculous the next?