Very interesting early church document. I loved the typology sections. I’m always a sucker for typological interpretations. Maybe it’s the fact that iVery interesting early church document. I loved the typology sections. I’m always a sucker for typological interpretations. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s basically a platonic way of interpretation where lower physical forms represent higher spiritual truths. Or maybe it’s the fact that it is often employed by New Testament authors interpreting scripture, either way I’ve always found them to hit me the hardest. They are often the key to unlocking immense biblical depths and for me they are often the most impactful. I find myself bummed out by the modern Protestant shying away of interpretative categories like types and allegory in favor of an extremely modern and academic, dry textual criticism and skepticism. It can rob the Bible of its mystical and spiritual depth, and I mean that for myself too. I find myself, simply as a product of the modern world leaning heavily in this direction more often than not.
But what I find so fascinating and refreshing in early church fathers is their eagerness to see Christ in the entire Bible and in their lives and in their biblical interpretation through allegory and typology. Christ permeates every inch of what they say and what they do, of how they interpret the Bible, and I think it reveals some major differences in worldview between the early church fathers and the church today. There was for them a prioritization of the spiritual world and spiritual interpretation before the material world and critical text analysis.
And before anyone pulls out their pitchfork, I don’t mean to say that biblical hermeneutics is bad. On the contrary, I think we are blessed today with the advancement of biblical scholarship to the extent that we can dig so deeply into the text and understand it contextually from so many different angles. But, I suppose it is the problem with any science in general, it serves the purpose of explaining so many things to us about whatever it is we are studying, in this case the text, but cannot explain to us the spiritual meaning, wisdom, or application to be found in the text.
We have our priority set on textual meanings it seems, while the early church had the priority set on spiritual meanings.
Just as they had a blind spot maybe in their exegetical interpretation, I think we have a blind spot in our spiritual interpretation.
The sweet spot is probably somewhere between the two. Maybe in Augustine. . ...more
Loading...
