Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 69:1 (Spring 2007)
Article: Historical And Theological Studies
Author: Donald Fairbairn

WTJ 69:1 (Spring 2007) p. 1

Historical And Theological Studies

Patristic Exegesis And Theology:
The Cart And The Horse

Donald Fairbairn

Donald Fairbairn is Professor of Historical Theology at Erskine Theological Seminary, Due West, South Carolina, and part-time Professor of Historical Theology at Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven, Belgium.

This article grows out of two dominant perceptions that I have developed through my work with theological students and teachers. The first of these perceptions is that there is strong and growing interest in patristic interpretation of the Bible among evangelical biblical scholars and theologians. The second perception is that virtually all biblical studies students and professors I have encountered are working from a model for understanding patristic exegesis that is inadequate and does not reflect what patristics scholars have been writing about patristic exegesis for the last several decades. I have in mind the model that divides patristic exegesis into two competing—and largely mutually exclusive—schools, one based in Antioch and the other in Alexandria.

Now I should hasten to add that the inadequacy of such a model is not something that biblical scholars and theologians could necessarily have recognized themselves, and I hope that nothing I am about to write will be taken as a criticism of contemporary biblical scholars. Rather, the prevalence of this model is an unfortunate example of the way the scholarly arena sometimes works. What patristics scholars were saying seventy or eighty years ago about patristic exegesis has worked its way into the historical theology, church history, and hermeneutics textbooks in the last forty or fifty years. As American patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser recently pointed out, a great deal of work on patristic exegesis done by biblical scholars from about 1950 onwards treated the literal and figurative senses of biblical passages not as interpretive options for the texts under investigation, but rather as general exegetical methods, and these methods were bound to local “school” requirements. Kannengiesser concludes, “The rhetorical and philosophical culture of Antioch inspired the local masters of biblical exegesis with a sense of the value of historical Old Testament narratives, which was different from the treatment of such narratives taught to Christian exegetes on the basis of Philo of Alexandria’s legacy”1

WTJ 69:1 (Spring 2007) p. 2

Now that this model has become entrenched in the textbooks, people tend to assume that it is right, and rarely do theologians or scholars of modern hermeneutics go back to read the monume...