Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 181:721 (Jan 2024)
Article: Periodical Reviews
Author: Joseph W. Lee

BSac 181:721 (January-March 2024) p. 114

Periodical Reviews

By The Faculty And Staff Of Dallas Theological Seminary

Joseph W. Lee,

Editor

“The Rule of Faith: Getting the Jigsaw Puzzle Right,” Karl Olav Sandnes, ST – Nordic Journal of Theology 77.1 (2023): 22–39.

Sandnes is Professor Emeritus at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society in Oslo, Norway. In this article, Sandnes argues that ancient rhetoric—with its attendant emphasis on composition, arrangement, and order—was decisive for Irenaeus and Tertullian in their presentations of the rule of faith. Given this assertion, Sandnes aligns the story of Scripture told in the rule with the work of ancient historians recounting their ancient tales.

In particular Sandnes highlights the role of ancient cento composition, which compiled “new texts or stories by using lines picked from the ancient epics” (23). Sandnes believes that the rule comprises a biblical narrative—admittedly not an original claim. But by linking the rule with cento composition, he highlights a helpful analogy to appreciate the mechanics of what fathers like Irenaeus and Tertullian were doing in composing the rule.

Turning first to Irenaeus, Sandnes highlights the early chapters of Against Heresies, in which the bishop of Lyons defines false teaching as coming from those who “falsify the words of the Lord and make themselves bad interpreters of what was well said” (23). Sandnes helpfully interprets this to mean that false teachers “keep the good words of tradition, while altering their interpretation” (23). The Irenaean distinction between words and meaning or form and content happens in the context of narrative. Essentially, Sandnes argues that “the rule of faith is simply the narrative plot deduced from Scripture” (25). This creates an opening to illustrate the mechanics of his process through a close look at cento composition.

Through examining Irenaeus’s Greek terms (via Sources chrétienne’s reconstruction from the Latin), Sandnes highlights the significance of narrative as well as the right ordering of that narrative. Irenaeus criticizes the gnostics over issues such as “arrangement,” “continuity,” and “disjoining pieces that belong together” (26). Irenaeus famously employs the concept of a mosaic to make clear his objections to the gnostics, where the gnostics used all the tiles but rearranged them from a picture of a king to one of “a dog or a fox” (26). Sandnes notes that Robert Wilken has seen the cento idea here, but the latter believed it to be only an analogy for Irenaeus. Sandnes believes it is much more, arguing that “the cento is not left behind, but is intimately co...