Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church

The Heavenly Banquet

In this episode Charlotte Elia and Chad Rhodes discuss the tools and perspectives used by Origen, Cassian, and Augustine in the interpretation of scripture.

Chad: The thing that impresses me most and has really kind of changed the way I think about the scriptures is this idea that you see in the early church that in coming to the scriptures I can encounter the risen Christ, the person versus an idea that I learn about Jesus in scripture, which is certainly true obviously, but I encounter the living, risen Christ in it.

Charlotte: I think all three of these thinkers would look at the historical-critical method and say, "Okay, that's fine, but it's not enough. It's lacking something." It's lacking faith seeking understanding, ultimately. I mean, because it's really a set of tools you can apply to any text, ancient, modern, etc, but we're coming with different questions as people of faith, of what claims those texts or Christ within those texts have on us.