Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers

It is very humbling to read this book while studying in seminary where much of what is advocated here are not being practiced. I have learned a lot and thirty for more!

This book is far better than one would think at first. Written in an engaging style with a clarity that is often lacking in academic works makes this very enjoyable to read.Hall has presented a well written and researched book of immense value to those who are pursuing the understanding of doctrine, ​as well as the development of doctrinal stances from the earliest days of the Christian church.

I have read the church fathers some, but not nearly enough. After reading Hall's book I want to study them more in depth. I'm actually convinced that there are great insights to be found for youth and parent ministry by studying the early leaders of the church.

This is a wonderful book. It opened my eyes to the Christian writers of the third to sixth centuries. We contemporary readers are not the first to see some of the difficulties in Scripture and seek to find ways to make sense of God's revelation for a particular time. These ancient writers are shown by Hall to offer some genuine insight for followers of Christ today.

This book and the entire series provide great insight into the church fathers.

Well reasoned and illustrated corrective to the modern myopic outlook on "the meaning" of the Bible..

:)

The book opens up with a case for why we should read the church fathers and Hall summarizes that we read the church fathers because they are family and that church history didn’t begin with us. He writes to primarily to protestants, it seems, as he points to Luther and Calvin who engaged with the church fathers at the dawn of the reformation. Hall makes very valid points in his opening chapters regarding the modern evangelical tendency to reflect ideology from the enlightenment or postmodernism, which basically results in “solo scriptura”. I found this particular section to be a breath of fresh air as he points out how hermeneutics and church history have been affected by these ideologies (albeit, briefly). Hall also challenges the protestant’s fear of tradition as he notes on page, 31, “The deep-seated protestant suspicion of tradition and its confidence in the ability of renewed reason alone to understand scripture will lead many to shy away from investing time and energy in exploring patristic thought, believe it better to focus on the world of the bible.” While such commentary from Hall seems irrelevant to the contents of the book, I found it to be refreshing in that Hall tells Christians to step out of the comfort zone of their non-tradition, “tradition.” In retrospect, his presentation before the ‘core’ material is appropriate given that Hall preps the everyday Christian to understand that the Church Fathers differ from themselves, and then moves onto the primary sections of the book. When introducing the Church Fathers, Hall briefly discusses the important women in church history, and while some other reviews charged him with being “politically correct” in doing so (because of his saying that there are church mothers) I didn’t catch that vibe when reading the book. It seems as if Hall wanted to merely point out that there were many faithful women in the church who were admired by others.This book focuses on how some major Church Fathers viewed, interpreted, and utilized scripture. It also gives you insights into the thoughts and world in which the early church operated to some extent. You see the diversity of personalities, and viewpoints, and realize that while there are differences, we have a lot of similar struggles. It is a fascinating read as Hall goes into “Four Doctors of the East” and four Doctors of the “West”, highlighting the different contexts in which each father operated. He provides brief biographies, circumstances, goals, and roles of the church fathers he has selected to show how they viewed and used scripture. After going through the eight fathers he chose, he explains the exegetical tendencies of Alexandria and how those in Antioch responded. All-in-all, the meat of the book is one of insight into the minds of the eight fathers he provides and this book becomes a helpful pre-requisite into reading and understanding the church fathers when examining their writings.One thing that I did notice, which is probably the only negative of the contents, was what looked like advocacy for unity between Protestants, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Roman Catholicism. What I mean is that within the book, Hall discusses how each one views the Fathers and tradition and makes the point that we should all tolerate tradition so that we properly understand where others are coming from. While Hall points out errors in Roman Catholic teachings here and there, he doesn’t seem to separate himself from them. The issue I had was that this toleration was never fully explained and thus, from my perspective, could have been seen as “we should be united despite our important doctrinal differences”. This, I believe, plays into what is called Proto-Orthodoxy, which Hall introduces briefly in the beginning of the book. Given that I haven’t looked into proto-orthodoxy yet, I haven’t had time to evaluate or assess it.All in all, if you’re new to church history or the church fathers and wanting to enjoy the world of the church fathers and learn more about them, this book is for you. You will be challenged and stretched while growing in appreciation of those who have been faithful Christians long before our time! You won’t agree with everything you read, which is to be expected, but I think you’ll appreciate the read regardless. It is a good primer, though, will not be exhaustive. As one who has read a fair amount of church history, the contents were not particularly new, but a bit more in depth. I highly recommend Christians still check out this work and become a bit more familiar with the “family of faith”, even if perhaps you are familiar with church history.Review originally featured at Christisthecure.org

Good

A guide to the study of the church fathers from a Christian publisher like IVP is an interesting thing. The format and cover of the book make it uniform with their excellent series of translations of the Fathers, and the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series, derived from the catenas.Now I bought this book after attending the Oxford Patristics Conference. There I became very aware that the study of the Church Fathers was something that many Christians were interested in, but also that this interest was being exploited as a tool for proselytism by Catholic and Orthodox people. This has happened before. It was at Oxford in the 1800's that the young evangelical-raised John Henry Newman started reading the Fathers, and as a result started the Oxford Movement and ended up a Roman Catholic Cardinal. There are risks, as well as rewards, the study of the church fathers, and most of them arise once we treat the Fathers as an authority.Where did the idea of using the Fathers as an authority come from? Well, the Fathers could not easily argue from the authority of the newly composed New Testament against the earliest heretics. For these heretics were not above forging "gospels" in the names of one or the other of the apostles, just to make their case. Tertullian in "De Praescriptione Haereticorum" 8 warns that trying to use scripture with these people will merely give the Christian a headache; as the heretic trickily ducks the issues and plays games with words. So instead the Christians of this early period relied on the visible connection of each church with its founding apostle. This was a dangerous game which was to have unfortunate consequences in the medieval period. Of course today we cannot do this. Also, in our own day, the authority of the NT is far greater.The use of "the tradition of the church" was abused in the medieval church. It led to endless additions to the Christian faith, based on the principle that "the Holy Spirit" speaks through the church and the fathers as well as the bible. The end result of this process was a faith that was utterly unbiblical, and indeed anti-biblical. One example was the burning of John Huss at the Council of Constance for seeking to return to the bible, after he was lured to attend under a false promise of safety. Martin Luther stated that among the teachings of Huss condemned at that council were teachings which were biblical and apostolic. The Fathers and Councils were men, fallible men, who could and did err. This observation, which was particularly obvious in 1520 in the aftermath of the Borgia Pope and a Papal Rome filled with brothels, is one of the founding pieces of the protest of the evangelicals, of the return to the bible of that period. Any study of the fathers must start with awareness of this particular pitfall.But there is no reason why Christians should not see what other Christians have had to say about the bible, however. The early Fathers, living as they did in the ancient world, often have interesting insights to make into the meaning of the biblical text. Not infrequently their explanation is wrong! So it is with us all. But the fact that they thought so is often itself interesting and revealing, and explains a way of looking at the text that might otherwise pass us by.There is, therefore, a real need for a guide to reading the Fathers for modern Christians, and particularly to help us locate useful and interesting material from them. That guide needs to warn against the tendency to medieval thinking.So what does Dr. Hall have to say to all this? Not much.Before we criticise a book, we must always ask who the intended audience is. This book is from IVP, so you would naturally presume that it was directed to Christians. But this does not seem to be the case. It seems to be directed to people studying theology for a degree at some semi-liberal institution. Few of us would be foolish enough to do such a course; and the book, in consequence, is nearly useless for the purposes mentioned earlier.The first chapter is "why read the Fathers?" I have above indicated a few reasons. But Dr. Hall instead starts talking about the opinions of Robert Wilken and RC theologican David Tracy, as if most people will know either. The chapter gave me nothing that I could use.The next chapter was worse: "the modern mind and biblical interpretation". I have no idea what this is doing in a book of this title at all, I'm afraid. Much of it was taken up with the journey of a liberal theologian who eventually worked out that the poisonous 60's hedonism might not be such a good idea, but seems to have discovered patristics rather than Jesus as a response. It is not my purpose to critique such a journey; but few of us will be interested in it.The third chapter finally broke my patience. It is entitled "who are the fathers?" After five lines of nothing, we are confronted with "What of the 'mothers' of the church?" That piece of anachronistic political correctness ended my interest in struggling through this book.I suppose it is possible that there is something useful in this book, although for whom I do not know. But I would avoid it.So ... why might we want to read the Fathers? Firstly, they sometimes have interesting things to say about the bible, about how it came into being, about early heresies and how people go off the rails. Secondly they lived in the ancient world itself, and anyone who is a Christian and interested in the ancient world will find all sorts of useful snippets in fellow-Christians who lived there. It's like being able to read something written by someone living in Middle-Earth, who was a Christian, if you like! Thirdly, if you know your way around the patristic literature, you can avoid being deceived by a great deal of twaddle about early Christianity. On the other hand, most patristic literature is really boring. So you have to know what exists, and how to search it, and not get led astray by ideas that were harmless in embryo but had evil consequences 5 centuries later.There is still a need for a book on this subject that someone educated, interested in history, but not a specialist, can read and enjoy. Sadly this is not it.