Patristic Fundamentalists

How literally did the Church Fathers take Scripture?

The last 2 weeks have seen a debate very relevant to our subject here.

The Church Fathers were not literalists

Jeremiah Carey

is an Orthodox Christian writer who I did not know prior to this article, but I really enjoyed perusing his Substack. I get the impression he is on the less conservative end of Orthodoxy, but as I know little about intra-Orthodox political squabbles, I could be wrong.

That article was followed by this one today by

Michael Warren Davis

, a well known conservative Catholic.

In Wisdom You Have Made Them All

Let’s get ready to rumble…

Google Gemini really doesn’t want to create pictures of actual people, especially engaged in violence. This was the closest approximation of Michael and Jeremiah it would produce. My apologies to both men for the “unlikeness”.

Like Michael, I have no interest in arguing about the age of the Earth, and I lament how this has become a litmus test in American Evangelical circles. For a guy who doesn’t want to argue about it though, Michael seems very wedded to a particular position. I’m not — my faith is based in the incarnation, not in backdating a bunch of begats in Genesis, and the mechanism of Creation is way above my pay grade anyway. Michael might categorize me as a future squish liberal though.

The question of how to interpret Scripture is critical, and both these man make good points. However, oddly, both ignore that their faith traditions have a solution: the capability of an “authoritative” interpretation.

Catholics have a Pope! If Pope Francis declares ex-cathedra that “the Earth is 6800 years old”, Catholics are required to uphold this as true, even against all scientific evidence.

The Orthodox system is less monarchical but arguably more robust. My understanding is that the Orthodox could, even today, convene an ecumenical council to make authoritative determinations about questions like this. Maybe Katja here can confirm this?

Protestants can not do this, and it is simultaneously one of our greatest strengths (affording true liberty of conscience and belief) and our greatest weakness (dividing the Body further). This debate was present even at the Reformation. Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms:

“Unless I am convicted of error by the testimony of Scripture, or by manifest evidence, I cannot and will not retract, for we must never act contrary to our conscience.”

This sounds so simple, and that’s why it’s appealing. Luther’s Catholic persecutor Johann Maier von Eck made a great point though:

“Not one of the heresies which have torn the bosom of the church has not derived its origin from the various interpretation of the Scripture.”

I’m not saying the Pope was right to persecute Luther, but 500 years of denominational schisms within Protestantism have born out Eck’s fears. He was right.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because I wrote about it 2 years ago:

Fundamentalism (whether religious or political) always appeals to our desire for certainty. But certainty about God can never be. Human language and reason are not sufficient to think about or describe God. Our senses and words are rooted in our world not in His. Any thoughts we have of Him will be incomplete, any description necessarily metaphorical. Again, the Orthodox seem to get this better than we in the West do.

While I think I come down mostly on Jeremiah’s side here, Michael makes a really good point at the end of his article:

These days, even traditional Christians tend to trust scientific authorities over religious ones these days. We will say things like, “Science and religion must complement each other. And that’s true!” Yet, whenever the two appear to contradict, we assume that the scientists must be right. Or, rather, we say that science must be right in the “literal sense,” and Scripture in the “symbolic sense.”

Yet this is the same exact logic that Modernists employ to undermine other traditional doctrines: the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, traditional gender roles, sexual morality, and so on.

I don’t think walking away from literalism in Genesis requires that you walk away from it everywhere in Scripture, but Michael’s correct: it sure makes it easier.

I don’t have the answer, and this blog is still about my search for that answer. But I have concluded that Milton’s approach can never work. John Milton (Paradise Lost author) summarized Protestantism succinctly:

“Every true Christian, able to give a reason of his faith, hath the word of God before him, the promised Holy Spirit, and the mind of Christ within him.” ¹

This turns sola scriptura on its head, since by such a standard, no Biblical interpretation, whether literal, allegorical, or downright insane, can ever be discounted. If I say the Holy Spirit told me the reference to “waters of the deep” in Genesis 1 means there’s a subsurface ocean on which the crust of the Earth floats… I must be believed!

And that’s lunacy.