The (Interpretive) Fathers' Blessing

J. Patout Burns has recently added a phenomenal selection to the Church's Bible Series, on the book of Romans.  In this the product of some 14 years of careful research, he has combined the insights of Origen, Rufinus, Pelagius, Chrysostom, Ambrosiaster, Augustine, and Theodoret, running from beginning to end of Romans.  The Church's first five centuries consisted of fierce debates over the meaning of Romans.  The book has incredible worth, for me, on a couple of grounds:

1)  It dispels the notion that what we have in the patristic heritage is something "theological," while what modern commentators are interested in is something "historical."  Judgments in the patristic period may be right or wrong (and they are right far more often than modern arrogance would often be happy to admit), but the church's first interpreters were keen to demonstrate and argue about meanings they believed the texts to carry in se.  Not always, but often, Augustine intends to state something about what Paul meant.

2)  Relatedly, their historical acumen is combined with explicit theological commitments.  To be sure, these commitments add difficulty along with their coherence.  But they also demonstrate what should be the obvious fact that there is no interpretation without such commitments, spoken or not.  Their detailed, careful, painstaking scholarship on the words of the text force the question on modern interpreters:  how can somebody reading this carefully make what seems to be such a mistake?  We are forced to deal with coherence as an (hermeneutically) imposed phenomenon.  We never fail to read something into our texts.

The question a volume like this raises, for me, is one that vexes many interpreters.  If the patristics are going to be understood as in any way especially useful, then there must be away of appropriating their work that goes beyond the mere "conversational" approach that many scholars advocate.  That is, modern scholars who agree on the importance of Rezeptionsgeschichte generally think that such interpretations are helpful merely to serve the purpose noted in point two above.  Enter Augustine or Origen, to challenge modern assumptions, and then we can go on with our work.  This, of course, is better than nothing.  On the other hand, scholars are ingenious in devising ways to circumvent or dismiss one another.  Even a historically chastened interpreter will find ways to do gymnastics around the interpretations delivered to us by the past.  What then is the real use of history of interpretation?

If we are not merely to use the ancients as foils to dislocate modern arrogance, should we instead adopt a knee-jerk conservatism?  They said it, so it is so?  And if neither of these are satisfactory, is there really some particular usefulness to the Patristics at all?  What is to be gained by reading the Fathers, in terms of radically differing hermeneutics and so on, that could not be gained by reading a secular commentator of the modern age from Sri Lanka?

This is, for me, a not-so-open question.  I am quite sure that reading the Patristics is profitable, but I am also quite suspicious of a conversational reading that allows their readings only to "edify" me when they agree with things I am already willing to see.

Perhaps, then, what reading the Patristics does more than anything else is to raise the theological question, rather than merely the hermeneutical one, to the reader?  Perhaps, I wonder, reading the Patristics either 1) raises the question of the Holy Spirit and divine superintendence of (even my own) Scriptural interpretation or 2) shows the ancient readers to be really of no greater worth than a diversity of intelligent modern interpreters.  Perhaps, if the Fathers have a blessing to give us, it is the blessing of their risk of incoherence if what they proclaim is not true.  Perhaps the value of patristic interpretation is the value of theological interpretation itself and nothing more.  That is, the great Christian exegetes either leave us the inheritance of God's presence in the reading of Biblical texts, or else, having given everything in the hope of God's truth, they have no other silver or gold to bequeathe us.