Myopic vision. . .

While reading a while ago I came across a quote by a well-known Roman Catholic exegete and Biblical scholar.  Raymond Brown, a name that should be well known to most of us, apparently wrote that it was his and a rather universal opinion that the exegetical method of the early church fathers was irrelevant to the study of the Bible today.  He likes patristics for the doctrinal words of the fathers but did not judge their reading of Scripture to be relevant or helpful to arriving at those doctrines.  In other words, he has separated Scripture from doctrine and written off the exegetical method of the fathers as completely alien and of no assistance to the modern exegete today.

I would suspect that most orthodox Lutherans would be appalled at such a conclusion -- even though I am sure that many on the liberal end of Lutheranism would agree and echo his sentiments.  We should rightly complain about the nearsightedness of such a reading of how the fathers read God's Word and condemn his judgment as less than scholarly and more than plainly wrong in its choices of lens through which the Bible is to be read.  Some of those who are reading this are probably asking me why I bother reading Raymond Brown.  I should be reading Luther, right?

That is the problem.  We Lutherans so often choose our own lens through which we look at things and although it is more modern than the early fathers, it is equally narrow.  We run the danger of making Luther the central focus of everything.  What Luther said about a passage or how he preached it often becomes the final word in our discussion.  How are we really being different from the narrowness of Raymond Brown and his own choice of blinders?  This may be what we do today but it is not the shape of historic Lutheranism.  After all, Patrologia was coined by Johann Gerhard, who published a book by the same name in 1653. 

The Reformers insisted that they were not disdaining or ignoring but rather returning to the pure doctrine that the Church had taught from the time of Christ all the way up to their time.  They began by returning to the Scriptures, drawing their teaching from Jesus Christ and His apostles and the written record of Gospel.  In addition, the Lutherans rediscovered the true and saving doctrine in the writings of the Early Church fathers and delighted to find in them their knowledge of Scripture, their devotion to God's Word,  and how this translated into the classic formulations of Christian theology.  Yet today we seem rather myopic in our vision of the fathers, choosing instead to go first to Luther and seldom moving past him into the earlier days of our Christian life.

I do not know when it happened but it has and this is a betrayal to the rich and profound legacy our Lutheran fathers had on the witness and vision of those who went before.  Read through the Lutheran Confessions and, outside of the Small Catechism, you find an appeal to the fathers written into every page.  Even the phrases and vocabulary of the fathers made their way into Lutheranism. We do not afford veto power to any age or generation of men but prefer to build upon the work of the faithful who went before us giving Scripture alone the norming power over it all.  With the claim of catholicity written into our confessional documents, we cannot afford to being and end all things at Luther alone.  This does not in any way diminish the value or importance of Luther but, just the opposite, follows his own example and the pattern of those who followed him.  So let us more generally affirm that we are students of the fathers as they were students of Scripture and that we learn from them in how they handled God's Word even as we admit that they are not infallible.