No Method but Christ
An Overview of Spiritual Interpretation and Patristic Exegesis
When I try to explain to people why we need to recover patristic interpretation, the biggest obstacle I face is the desire of my interlocutors to establish the one, true meaning of the text. When I assert that there is no such thing, I provoke raised eyebrows: I must be playing fast and loose with the biblical text, making it echo my preconceptions. My insistence that biblical texts have multiple, even innumerable meanings contradicts our modern objectivism. My defense of patristic allegorizing likewise elicits fears of arbitrariness and subjectivism.
My interlocutors’ apprehensions are not entirely misguided. Some readings of the biblical text are plain wrong; to impose our own meanings upon the text would be an egregious misuse of the divine Scriptures. The subjective factor in interpretation is a tricky matter, requiring careful negotiation. Postmodern reader-response criticism all too easily takes identity politics as its starting point, insisting that our location—socio-economic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—does and must shape how we read the Scriptures. Recent titles such as Reading while Black, Women and the Gender of God, and Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations all illustrate the tendency to let one’s background and context shape one’s interpretation of the biblical text. Those who question my advocacy of patristic hermeneutics make, therefore, valid observations. We are not to take control of the biblical text; it is meant to master us.
All too often, however, my interlocutors assume that the only way to counter such contextual readings of the Scriptures is by doubling down on historical exegesis: We must read what the text objectively states. For decades, many evangelical biblical scholars have identified primarily as historians rather than theologians. Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart’s standard textbook on biblical interpretation, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, states unambiguously: “The aim of good interpretation is simple; to get at the ‘plain meaning of the text,’ the author’s intended meaning.” Iain Provan aims to arrive at the right reading of the text—witness the title of The Reformation and the Right Reading of the Scripture. Tremper Longman III rejects the traditional christological reading of the Song of Songs with the observation, “There is absolutely nothing in the Song of Songs itself that hints of a meaning different from the sexual meaning.” Each of these authors, in his own way, borrows from Benjamin Jowett’s infamous maxim of 1860, that we must interpret the Bible like any other book—seeking the one true meaning of the text according to authorial intent.
I often begin my defense of patristic exegesis by asking how we read a poem. The point is not to dissect the grammar and syntax so as to arrive at the stable, objective meaning of the poem. Poems aim at the heart, not just the head. They engage us most existentially not at the level of the verbal DNA but on a deeper or higher plane, which words cannot quite reach. Think of the poet who, when asked to explain the meaning of a poem he had just recited, responded by reciting it again. Poems would be pointless if discursive prose could adequately recapitulate them.
What, then, does patristic exegesis do? How did the Church Fathers read Scripture? We must be careful with these questions, for the Fathers did not have a method which they applied to the text so as to arrive at a proper interpretation. As Andrew Louth makes clear in his book Discerning the Mystery, the application of a method to biblical interpretation presumes a mindset that was alien to the Fathers: We assume that, much as the natural sciences have a method, so too does biblical exegesis. That may be true for modern, historical approaches to the biblical text, but it is not how any of the Fathers would have gone about their reading.
If what we want is a method (perhaps a patristic one) so as to arrive at authorial intent or avoid misinterpretation, premodern interpretation will massively disappoint. For one, the Fathers differ widely in their approaches. Moreover, many of them, in their homilies and commentaries, will proceed to offer two, three, or even more possible readings of the same text, by no means always ranking them. St. Augustine sometimes solicits his congregation’s help when he cannot find a meaning that satisfies him. The Fathers did not shy away from the subjective element. They seemed to have had proleptic insight into Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion that meaning is not an objective datum but an event that occurs in a meeting between the two horizons of text and reader.
It is often at this point in the discussion that eyebrows are lowered. My interlocutor ask how, then, the Fathers went about their exegesis. I explain that, above all, the Fathers assumed that both Scripture and the history behind it were objects of divine providence. God was the ultimate author of both. The Fathers assumed that we could read the Scriptures canonically as one book. Just as we expect regular (sometimes predictable) patterns of speech and action from people we know, we may expect God’s character to show up in the similarities of types and words.
For instance, whenever God theophanizes (unveils himself), he nonetheless remains the hidden God; immanence does not undo transcendence. When the disciples are struggling with the wind and waves on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus, walking on the sea, “would have passed by them” (Mark 6:48), the typological and verbal clues are unmistakable. A similar “passing by” occurred when God appeared to Moses by the cleft in the rock (Exod. 33:19, 22; 34:6) and to Elijah on the mountain (1 Kings 19:11). Job, too, recognizes this interplay between divine veiling and unveiling: “Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not: He passeth on also, but I perceive him not” (Job 9:11). The same verb, “passing by” (parerchomai), is used each time. And, of course, we know what the psalmist knew: “Thy way is in the sea, And thy path in the great waters, And thy footsteps are not known” (Ps. 77:19). Jesus passing by his disciples on the waters is God rescuing them and us from the chaos of the deep. Verbal clues, similarity in action, and theological overlap combine to make for a typological reading of the text: In “passing by” his disciples, Jesus does not ignore them, but rather comes to them as the very appearance of God.
We can make the same point in linking the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen. 22) to the crucifixion of Christ: Both Isaac and Jesus are beloved sons of their fathers, and both carry the wood for their own offerings and voluntarily give themselves up to death. Again, similarities in actions, objects, and words, as well as similarities in theological meaning, combine to make for a typological web. And those who attend weekly Mass would naturally see the Eucharist as typologically linked to both the cross and the binding of Isaac. Those of us who are exposed to Sunday morning lectionary readings will recognize that this is how the lectionary functions. The Old Testament reading, the Psalm, and the Gospel reading are for the most part carefully chosen: The similarities in words, concepts, people, actions, objects, and theology allow us to map the passages onto each other, and so to open up the riches of the biblical text.
Twentieth-century scholars, notably Jean Daniélou and R. P. C. Hanson, often distinguished sharply between typology and allegory. They saw the former as the historical correspondences among objects, events, or persons. Type and antitype, so they thought, were linked chronologically, or horizontally. The historical anchoring of both gave typology its objectivity and justification. St. Paul’s interpretation of Christ as the Second Adam (Rom. 5:12–21; 1 Cor. 15:22) was warranted, given that both type and antitype were historical figures. By contrast, these scholars thought of allegorizing as the imposition of another (allos) meaning onto the words of the biblical text. Those practicing allegory allegedly tried to escape the historical or literal level by moving upward to the realm of the spirit: Scholars thought of the two levels as vertically stacked atop each other. As such, allegorizing was an inherently arbitrary mode of interpretation. For example, when Church Fathers allegorized Rahab’s scarlet cord (Josh. 2:18) as a reference to the blood of Christ, this was thought to be an arbitrary imposition of an alien meaning.
The truth is that the readings of Adam and of the scarlet cord are quite similar. Neither Paul’s nor the Church Fathers’ use of the Old Testament is strictly exegetical—if by that term we mean the uncovering of the original intent of the human author. Both Paul’s linking of Adam with Christ and the Church Fathers’ linking of the scarlet cord with Christ’s blood have a subjective element. That is to say, in both cases, theological presuppositions (Vorverständnis) inform the search for a deeper meaning in the biblical text or in its historical reference. Faith convictions compelled both Paul and the Fathers to recognize a spiritual element in the text that they would otherwise have missed. I am assuming here, of course, that this element was present all along, and that it is the Spirit who intended Paul and the Fathers to discover a christological meaning in the text.
The most obvious similarity between Paul’s understanding of Adam and the Fathers’ interpretation of the scarlet cord is that both are christological. In neither case does a scientific method guide the exegesis. But the subjective element is not therefore arbitrary. Both Paul and the Fathers were constantly looking for Christ in the Scriptures.
Most patristic scholars today do not distinguish sharply between typology and allegory. Indeed, I think the distinction is largely useless—particularly because most definitions of the term “allegory” are themselves arbitrary, boiling down to “If an interpretation strikes us (arbitrarily) as arbitrary, we’ll call it an allegory.” In actual fact, all good allegorizing is typo- logical; it always seeks Christ as the deeper meaning of the Scriptures. Both the antitype in typology and the spiritual meaning in allegory open up for us the new covenant reality (res) of Christ and his Church. Patristic exegesis, like Pauline exegesis, is a search for Christ. As a patristic trope going back to Irenaeus in the second century put it: Christ is the treasure hid in the field (cf. Matt. 13:44). The task of the exegete is to find him there and dig him up. Since he is already present there, the search is anything but arbitrary. Sacramental reading discovers Christ; it does not impose him on the text—though, of course, some exegetes are more skilled than others in their search for the treasure.
One of the most striking elements in patristic exegesis is that it sees in typology more than just similarities of chronologically separate words, people, or events—say, between Adam as the head of man- kind and Christ as the head of the Church, or between the scarlet cord that saves and Christ’s saving blood. It recognizes sacramental identity. To understand this point, we must take note of one of St. Irenaeus’s key insights, namely, that God’s primary intention with the world was the perfection of humanity in Christ. Christ was not an afterthought, a reaction to Adam’s sin, but God’s initial plan: God created Adam so that Christ would have someone to redeem. We might also say that for Irenaeus, Christ was the archetype (the original) and Adam the type patterned upon him. Adam was chronologically first, but Christ was ontologically and theologically first.
Because Christ was God’s first intention with creation, everything before and after Christ is typologically patterned on him. We are, therefore, meant to see Christ as really present in Adam, Isaac, Joseph, and so on. And we are meant to display the real presence of Christ in everything we ourselves do. Again, it is God’s providence that warrants this seeing and displaying of Christ, for both those prior to and those after the coming of Christ are patterned on him and disclose his sacramental, real presence. If any commonality characterizes patristic exegesis, it is the notion of sacramental presence.
Let me conclude with a beautiful example of sacramental interpretation, taken from Melito of Sardis’s homily On Pascha (ca. 160–170): “This is the Pascha of our salvation: this is the one who in many people endured many things. This is the one who was murdered in Abel, tied in Isaac, exiled in Jacob, sold in Joseph, exposed in Moses, slaughtered in the lamb, hunted down in David, dishonored in the prophets.” Melito leaves no doubt: Christ as the archetype was really present already within Old Testament types, and in their suffering he already suffered.
The Church Fathers may not provide us with a scientific method. And theological presuppositions (not identity politics) do shape their reading of the text. The presuppositions are those of the tradition of the Church—its liturgy, its creeds, its practices. At the heart of all these is our incarnate Lord. He, therefore—the archetypal theophany of God—is the one who we know will come to us in our faithful reading of the Scriptures.
Appears in First Things February 2025 issue.
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Fantastic article!! It is clear that one must bring subjective context into reading scripture but it must be such that it connects the reader with true things
I thought the example of a poet reciting his poem afresh when asked its meaning was spot on — scripture must be taken in its wholeness and by getting to pedantic and scientific with it we risk alienating ourselves from its deepest meanings
Great question, John. Many thanks! I would say that many people who read the biblical text almost exclusively historically have a great deal off academic background invested in their position. Also, the search for the one true meaning of the text is thoroughly wedded to a modern metaphysic. If you try to shake those kinds of trees, people get upset.