Scripture, the Genesis of Doctrine: Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity
Whoever has reflected on the relationship between scripture and doctrine will appreciate the following dilemma: a searching soul wants answers to existential questions about God, the world, and one’s place in it and opens the Bible in the expectation of finding them there. But where in this rather sprawling collection of disparate books does one even begin? The pastors among us can probably recall an awkward moment or two when we groped hesitatingly for answers to give to someone who came to us with just this question. For we know all too well that soon after one begins to read, one discovers that the Bible gives no obvious, clear, or consistent response to our existential questions.
This is the dilemma that the early church faced in its formative centuries, one perhaps that was even more pronounced insofar as these books were contained not in one volume but in haphazard collections of scrolls or codices and whose canonical status took time to be determined. The remarkable fact, however, is that the church did succeed in formulating statements of doctrine concerning God, creation, fall, redemption, and eschatological renewal on the basis of scripture before the end of the second century.
How do we account for the process whereby statements of doctrine emerged alongside scripture as central to the formation of Christian faith and practice in the early church?
This is the question that animates Frances M. Young’s Scripture, The Genesis of Doctrine, the first of two volumes under the series title Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity. In the second, Scripture in Doctrinal Dispute, available in August 2024, Young carries forward her study of the process whereby doctrine developed into the fourth and fifth centuries, during which the doctrines of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ were established at the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, respectively.
Many seminary students, pastors, and professors are no doubt familiar with Young’s work. She is a prolific scholar who has published widely in biblical studies, early Christian history and theology, hermeneutics, disability studies, Christian spirituality, preaching and poetry. Those who have benefited from her previous books, as this reviewer has, will welcome the present volume together with the second one to follow, since they represent a veritable harvest of her key insights into the “overall sense-making” of the Bible during the early Christian centuries (xviii). In his generous forward (xiii-xxii), David F. Ford does not hesitate to call these summative volumes Young’s magnum opus.
Ford’s characterization is appropriate. Scripture, The Genesis of Doctrine by itself is a large, magisterial survey of the arguments advanced by early Christian writers over the meaning of scripture, arguments that generated dogmatic discourse early on. After mapping out the social and cultural context in which the early Christian communities formed in the Roman world of the late first and second centuries (14-43), Young introduces the controversial figure of Marcion, who (in)famously rejected the Creator God of Genesis. For Young, Marcion serves as an “excellent starting point for considering the contentious questions of the time” (44), to which Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria were among the first of these key writers to respond (55-64). There follows an instructive chapter in which Young shows the interaction between gnostic teaching and nascent classical Christian doctrine through a reading of the “Gospel of Truth,” one of the original gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1946, and Irenaeus’s Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching (74-109). Subsequent chapters provide analyses of Origen’s First Principles, which demonstrate Origen’s defense of Christian doctrine at critical points against that of Marcion and the gnostics (110-155); the Catechetical Homilies of Cyril of Jerusalem, which show how affirmations of basic Christian dogma by this time served less as criteria by which to expose gnostic heresy than as tests of orthodoxy (156-225); and Augustine’s On Christian Teaching, which bears out what Scripture, the Genesis of Doctrine is all about from the beginning—the “school-like” character of early Christianity, in which the teaching of the truth was “absolutely central to its activities” (226-247).
Young’s excellent summaries of these early Christian writings amply reward the effort spent on reading them. But in presenting them as she has, she means to challenge what has characterized the approach of modern scholarship to the relationship between scripture and doctrine in the early centuries of Christianity. She observes that this relationship was problematized with the rise of historical consciousness and the application of the historico-critical method to the study of these writings. For example, no New Testament scholar would ever claim that the doctrine of the Trinity as codified at Nicaea is found in the New Testament. We have realized that the thought forms of fourth-century gentile Christians were very different from those of first-century Jewish followers of Jesus (2).
But this realization has resulted in a gap between doctrine and scripture on which it had always been presumed to rest. Young identifies two options of the modern approach proposed to close that gap. The one stresses continuity between them, while the other discontinuity.
The first is represented by John Henry Cardinal Newman. In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman argued that the seeds of later dogma are already implicit in the earliest kerygma. Later doctrine is already latent in the New Testament (3-7).
The second is represented by Adolph Harnack, who argued that dogma was the product of the “Hellenization” of the simple gospel, a process that severed the link between scripture and doctrine (7). Opposition to the gnostics was the driver. At the hands of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus, among others, the gospel was transformed into Greek ideas and modes of thought. Athanasius erased almost every trait which recalls the historical Jesus of Nazareth (9). The task of historical criticism is to sift out these accretions to reveal the simple gospel buried beneath them.
Young concedes that these options contain partial truths. But she also shows how a reexamination of the historical evidence itself compels a reappraisal of them. Brief statements of Christian doctrine enshrined in baptismal formulae—comprising the rule of faith—were received as apostolic together with the scriptures at a very early stage. The former, according to Young, “bear the marks of a Christian in-language” shared with those who wrote the New Testament itself, demonstrating that “there never was a gap between scripture and basic Christian teaching” (244). And the “development of a distinctively Christian doctrine of God and creation shows that early Christian theologians were not captured by Greek philosophy,” but “challenged and radicalized philosophical assumptions,” precisely because their thinking was “shaped by scripture” (73).
Perhaps even more convincingly, Young argues that an appreciation of a postmodern approach to history can help us overcome the modern estrangement between scripture and doctrine, enabling us to rediscover how the two have the kind of coinherence that the early Christians assumed them to have (xxiv). The modern approach assumes a distinction between the “experience” of the “fact” of Jesus and the “religious response of faith” to it. Development of doctrine is a process whereby “second order” discourse emerged (11). But the postmodern approach denies this distinction. There are no “facts” without “interpretation.” Even if a “bare event” in the past were actually accessible to us, it would “make no sense without context or interpretation” (11). Religious response is inextricably bound up in the experience of the “fact” of Jesus (12). Therefore, doctrine is not in the strict sense “second order” discourse but rather “continuous” with the “Jesus-responded-to-and-understood” by those for whom he was significant (12). In this perspective, it is just not possible to draw a distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” Young welcomes the postmodern turn insofar as it shifts our attention to the text itself, renewing our respect for its vital function in forming and expressing the identity of the early Christian communities as they sought to make sense of their faith.
For Young, all this has potential for the church today. To be able to recover from the early church the coinherence of scripture and doctrine could promote “greater ecumenical consensus about the unity of tradition and scripture” as well as help restore a “sense of continuity in identity” in the teaching of the church across the centuries (246). Accepting from the early church that the rule of faith provides the key to unlock the meaning of scripture could inspire renewed confidence that the “unifying story of fall and redemption” is one in which “all humankind can potentially find its meaning, its identity, and its future” (246-247).
This is certainly a grand vision with which this reviewer is sympathetic. On the other hand, it seems difficult to entertain the hope today that the church is ready to embrace it anytime soon. The rule of faith does serve to clarify the doctrines central to Christian belief, enabling the church to guide people into an understanding of the overarching narrative of the Bible. This remains indispensable to the work of catechizing those received into the church, both children and the newly converted. But it is hard to see how it relates to issues that claim so much of the church’s attention today. In his book The Bible in a Disenchanted Age, R.W.L Moberly points out that the issues surrounding sexuality and gender, for example, have proved so vexatious and difficult to resolve, because their relationship to the central doctrines of the faith remains unclear and has been construed in more than one way. Moberly also rightly observes that the contemporary understanding of women and their roles, which has arisen from emancipation movements in the Western world during the last two centuries, finds no support in the early Christian writings, not to mention the New Testament itself. As a result, what counts today for many Christians as faithfulness to scripture and tradition is far from straightforward.
Young is aware that our readings of scripture today are very different than those of the early Christians, whose writings she has so competently surveyed in Scripture, The Genesis of Doctrine. But for her this does not exempt us from the task of reviewing their interpretations, re-evaluating their justifications for them, and asking how far they remain valid for us today. Will this “return to the sources” enable the church today to appropriate their doctrinal readings, centered on Christ and the Triune God? This is a question that she promises to explore further in volume 2 of her Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity (247). It will be worth our while to continue reading.
Thank you, Christopher, for this illuminating review! Nudges me towards the not inconsiderable venture of reading this and her subsequent work as well as further exploring her other writings.
Very helpful, thanks.
Thanks so much for this revealing and encouraging review.