The Spirituality of the Early Church with Dr. Alex Fogleman

[00:00:03] Welcome to thatllpreach. We have got a guest on today, Dr. Alex Fogelman. He's the assistant research professor of theology at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Legion.

[00:00:15] He also serves as the project manager for the Global Flourishing Study. He's got a PhD in patristics and historical theology from Baylor, and we are excited to talk about the patristics today with Dr. Fogelman. Alex, thank you for joining us on the show.

[00:00:30] Thank you so much. It's great to be here. So you've got an office, you've got all these books behind you, which means you're a very smart guy. And you've devoted a lot of time to studying the church fathers, patristics, church history, all those kinds of things.

[00:00:45] And you're a Protestant, which is very refreshing, which is great. And I appreciate that you're doing that. And just give us a little bit of background, how you got interested in the topic of patristics. Why that became a labor of love for you?

[00:00:59] Why that became a field of study that you wanted to put a lot of energy into? Yeah, thank you for that. The book's question has always been a thing. That was kind of actually my way into both the church fathers and through academic study more broadly.

[00:01:18] I didn't do kind of an undergraduate or degree in the humanities, in religion or theology. It was a business major actually. But I was also engaged in getting married at the time.

[00:01:36] And my wife would say like, you know, it'd be great if you just did your book reading during the day, like if that was your job. And then at night, you know, you can have a more attentive focus conversation and hang out with me.

[00:01:52] Yeah, he could spend time with me. Exactly. Yeah. So unfortunately, the joke has been on her just a little bit, but she's been very, very encouraging.

[00:02:03] But my introduction to the church fathers was around that time. It actually came through reading kind of some of the spiritual writers like Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, those kind of folks that really drew from the broad history of the church.

[00:02:24] But I was especially intrigued by the way that they opened up some of the early church fathers like Augustine and drew on him as a way to really understand the spiritual life

[00:02:37] and understand what it meant to encounter Christ and to follow Jesus as an apprentice or as a disciple. So it was through reading some authors like that that I encountered the writings of the church fathers.

[00:02:56] And I originally thought, remember when I was thinking about seminary and graduate school and theology, I was also reading like an N.T. Wright and New Testament theology, really, really loved that kind of stuff, you know, doctrine of justification.

[00:03:15] And I just distinctly remember thinking though at some point like why would anybody study the church fathers? Like they're so irrelevant. Like they're not the Bible. So like you just study the Bible the most because that's the thing.

[00:03:31] Or you just study something like contemporary, something relevant to the present day. And I remember deliberately thinking who would study the church fathers? And so naturally here I am. But I read especially kind of the writings of St. Augustine early on.

[00:03:52] I just thought, you know, I'd love to read more of the church fathers and so I'll just read all of Augustine's works. Then I'll go on and read other stuff after that. Well, of course there's no end to reading Augustine.

[00:04:06] You know, anyone who claims to have read them all as a liar is one of his famous biographers said early on. But what I found was just kind of a deep affinity and really a motive of discipleship through the church fathers. They became mentors, teachers.

[00:04:29] It's one of my friends says trustworthy people to think with. So not that I, you know, you have to agree with everything they say or slavishly imitate everything that they do. But I just came to see them as very trustworthy thinkers, biblical expositors.

[00:04:51] You know, they are closest to the Bible in terms of the sort of reading sensibilities and how they understand the nature of God and salvation in the church. And so there is a way in which that proximity has been really fruitful, really edifying and really just enriching.

[00:05:13] You know, I mean, it's like reading someone from a different country as it kind of CS Lewis would put it. They make their own mistakes, but they're not our mistakes.

[00:05:25] So spending time with them is like being in a different world and then coming back to our own world and seeing everything with new eyes. So that was my kind of experience reading the church fathers.

[00:05:40] You know, when you talked about the foreignness of the church fathers that is such a common experience.

[00:05:46] You read back and things that they're dealing with from some of the earlier ones dealing with Christianity being the sort of upstart sect of Judaism and then dealing with what that new identity looks like.

[00:05:57] And then thinking about Augustine and what a heavyweight he is, but he's living in a certain time in place and having to deal with the fall of Rome and he's having to deal with all these kinds of issues within the church.

[00:06:08] And it's amazing when you sit back and you're like, these are real people. I mean, these are real living. These are not abstract entities.

[00:06:16] These are real people trying to wrestle with Christianity in the midst of all kinds of historical issues and sometimes, you know, times of turmoil and things like that.

[00:06:26] But that foreignness, I remember having the same thought because I'm like, man, some of their interpretations are a little weird, you know? And then you have NT Wright and you have Second Temple Judaism and you've figured it all out and you've all this stuff.

[00:06:39] And it feels like the contemporary interpreters have more of an understanding because of our access to those documents that maybe they didn't have in the early church. But it seems like that might be a little bit of an overstatement.

[00:06:53] What are some things that you think we can learn from the early church fathers? Recognizing that we know some things that they didn't. What are some things that we can learn from them in the modern day? Yeah, that's a great question.

[00:07:07] There are ways in which people read the church father. I think partially because our disciplines, academic disciplines and theology are so segregated like, you know, people don't really read. If you're a Bible scholar, you don't really read much beyond the second century say.

[00:07:27] And most of what you have is kind of caricatured. And so, but increasingly there's more people that read across disciplines and there's been some interesting work, I think.

[00:07:44] I think of a recent book by a friend of mine, Matt Thomas, who writes about New Perspective on Paul for instance. And so he looks at the old perspective, 16th century reformers, their understanding of justification.

[00:08:03] And then he looks at the new perspective of Dunn and Inti Wright and those guys. And then he reads the second century, second and third century, a lot of mostly second century on the patristic perspective on Paul.

[00:08:18] And he's like, they're more like this new perspective than we would often be imagined. So he calls it something like the New Old Perspective or something. So there's ways in which when we're read without some of the biases that kind of some early 20th century theologians would have,

[00:08:45] namely that the early church quickly was Hellenized by the Greek culture. That's a lot of the critique from the 20th century going back to German liberal Protestantism. Adolf von Harnack, you know, most famously popularized this idea of the Hellenization of Christianity.

[00:09:11] And so what we need to do as good historians is to go back to shed all of that, the husk and just get back to the kernel of this original Jewish understanding.

[00:09:26] And, you know, that kind of mentality is still very strong, still very, very pervasive in a lot of different parts of the study of the Church Fathers.

[00:09:37] But largely that's now shown to be mostly mythical and not many kind of serious students of the early church in the New Testament see such a view that early Christianity was Hellenized.

[00:09:55] So one of the things that allows us to do is read the Church Fathers more in alignment rather than in disjunction with the New Testament writers, especially.

[00:10:08] And so now there's much more just attention to the ways in which, you know, St. Paul's writings, for instance, in the way that he's reading,

[00:10:21] especially scripture, the way he's reading the Old Testament, for instance, in the way that which he uses terms like allegory or typology or these things that earlier generations would say, you know, Paul's doing this very Jewish thing.

[00:10:37] Origin in the third century when he's doing allegory is doing something totally different in its Greek and it's bad. And now again, that's like no one would make that kind of claim. I hope not.

[00:10:53] But so what that again, what that allows us to do is see the way, especially I think in terms of biblical reading, the Church Fathers allow us to engage the scriptures as a means of encountering Christ. And it opens up this really deeply Christological understanding of scripture.

[00:11:18] Like they are really intentional about seeing Christ, not just referring text about Christ but perceiving and encountering Christ in the scriptures.

[00:11:33] And at the same time, because it's not just learning about Christ or seeing how text refer to Christ somewhere else, but seeing scripture as something in which to truly encounter Christ, scripture reading is also deeply transformative for the Church Fathers.

[00:11:49] So there's no there's not a lot of kind of just academic curiosity, just investigating knowledge for the sake of acquiring knowledge. They're always pushing their readers and parishioners to encounter the living God in the text.

[00:12:08] So I think there's tons to learn from the Church Fathers, there's tons of ways in which they can help us.

[00:12:15] But I think in terms of this sort of unique convergence of theology, reading the Bible and spiritual transformation and encounter is something in the inseparability of those things is something that we can do. And I think that's something I think we have a lot to learn from.

[00:12:33] Well, the Fathers often talk about it and I think you've done some work in this. There's this phrase that comes up in the traditional lot, participation.

[00:12:42] And I feel like today that's making a comeback. Everyone's talking about participation in Christ. What does that mean? How do you explain what that actually means to your average layperson? Yeah. I have another friend who just loathes that term and it's associated term sacramental.

[00:13:03] Yeah, he just it almost kind of means everything. And then you wonder what it actually means. That's right. That's right. So I was one of the main theologians writing today who's sort of championed this term as my former mentor, former professor at Regent College, Hans Borsma.

[00:13:26] I still consider him a mentor and friend. And so he's really tried to help contemporary Christians, especially evangelicals understand, participate the doctrine of participation or the meaning of participation what he'll sometimes call a sacramental ontology.

[00:13:52] And briefly what it is, is just a way of understanding all of created realities as having a share in or an integral link.

[00:14:05] So he calls it, he'll use a language of real presence drawing from kind of sacramental theology proper to help us understand the way in which all of the world is as Gerard Manley Hopkins has put it charged with the presence of God.

[00:14:28] But it's also just in terms of the kind of New Testament language of all things are created in Christ. They have their existence in the Logos, in the Word of God and are oriented, have a kind of telos towards, back towards Christ.

[00:14:47] You know, it's a just a philosophical way of saying what the scriptures say that in him we live and move and have our being.

[00:15:00] So it should be said to that different writers talk about this in different ways. There's not necessarily a uniform way of talking. And then there's been a lot of interest and I don't know this, this literature as well but a lot of New Testament scholars look at the, they'll look at Paul's

[00:15:19] writings and look at what Paul means by participation.

[00:15:23] If the background of a lot of this is still those is still these worries about Hellenization and the influence of Greek philosophy, because the basic idea of participation, the Greek term for this is either methexis, which has that it begins with that root word

[00:15:43] of meta, which means with or or the word participation goes from the Latin word. It means to have a part in something.

[00:15:54] You know if you think of a participle as a, you know, grammatical term you have it's doing two things at once it's both a noun and a verb so it's sharing into two different things.

[00:16:07] But the idea, the way that the sort of philosophical conception of it is how do we have things in the world created things.

[00:16:18] And how can, how are those things connected to these are simply other things so how are you know at a very basic level. Why do we have all of these different kinds of things that we call cats.

[00:16:33] You know we have these tiny little house cats and these things and then we have, you know, lions and then but we both call them cats. So like, why do we, why do we do that?

[00:16:45] Is there something beyond up above, as it were that those two things share in of felinity catnice, which is a funny thing to say but essentially how do these two different individual things.

[00:17:05] How, how are they both share in something that is external to them, but still gives them gives them meaning and definition and form and things.

[00:17:13] So that's a sort of like material example but you know the other question would be more like, I mean where this sort of hits home is like, you know when we say something is true, or we say something is good.

[00:17:29] Are those labels actually referring to something that is more objective, that is real beyond their individual expressions. Or are these just a common term that we variously used to apply to this thing or that thing.

[00:17:54] So it's a way of talking about how different things have a have a fundamental coherence and unity.

[00:18:02] But it's also a way of things of understanding how there are sort of essentially what we would say today is objective truths or objective realities in the actual things of the world.

[00:18:16] Or is it all just kind of individual atoms kind of bobbing around and hitting off one another into to deal with this, all of this multiplicity that we see. We're just giving arbitrary names and labels to the differences in the things that we see.

[00:18:36] So I find it to be a quite helpful way of expressing this. People that don't like that term typically don't like it because they don't like Plato, they don't like platonic philosophy and they see that as an unhelpful intrusion into the faith.

[00:18:57] And that has to do actually with a separate set of issues that Christians have always been skeptical about Platonism for which is a sort of devaluation of the body, a devaluation of the resurrection of the flesh.

[00:19:13] And Christians, you know, all throughout the early centuries they all share this secret for all their differences. They all share a clearly positive use of the language of participation while rejecting all of the Plato's doctrines about, you know, escape from the body and these sorts of things.

[00:19:37] So Christians have always been able to say, because it's not just Plato that thinks like this, like all of Plato's heirs have a, you know, are wrestling with these issues about how we can say that individual things participate or share in other things.

[00:19:55] So it's not just Plato but typically that's the name associated with this idea. Now, how did the fathers disciple their congregations and the people that were reading their texts?

[00:20:08] And how do you actually do that? Like, how do you, you know, conceptually you understand that, you know, think about Plato's forms or that, you know, what is there an actual objective grounding of the things that we say are good.

[00:20:20] Or we're just giving labels to phenomenon or something like that. But there's actually something real that is called good. But on a practical level, how do you do that? How do you do that thing called participating in Christ?

[00:20:33] Yeah. Yeah. So there's it's a it's also a helpful category for understanding kind of the doctrine of creation.

[00:20:42] And this is something, again, Christians continue to wrestle with. But they understand the doctrine of creation to say that it's also it's implicitly a doctrine about God, just to say that there's only one God and anything that exists was created by God.

[00:21:05] Like, there's nothing that was created by, you know, the devil or there's no creative agency. There's no power of life in anything except for God. And so that's that's a way of saying that all things that exist exist because they participate in God.

[00:21:26] I mean, as closely the doctrine of participation for early Christians is closely linked to the doctrine of creation. And in fact, and this this becomes an issue in the fourth century over the debates about the nature of Christ.

[00:21:44] Because many in the early church were happy to say that Christ is God because he participates in the Father. He shares in the Father only the Father is really God. But Jesus is God because he participates in God.

[00:22:05] But then the Orthodox, well, I should say that before the fourth century, that was normal to talk that way. That was not problematic. You could say creation shares in God. Jesus and the Holy Spirit share in God.

[00:22:21] And that's not problematic. Like, they share in different ways, you know, but they are both related to God through participation. By the fourth century, that way of talking is is going to change. They're not going to say that the word or the spirit participate in God.

[00:22:42] They're going to say that the word and the spirit are consubstantial, as we say in the Nicene Creed. Hamausias, same substance, not a sharing and a higher substance.

[00:22:55] And this is the way that they will first argue about the nature of Christ and then they'll apply the same logic to to the Holy Spirit. So it essentially becomes a way of actually protecting the distinction between the creator and creation,

[00:23:17] which is ironically what a lot of like reformed Christians who don't like the doctrine of participation do. Like today, people that are worried about the doctrine of participation worry that it confuses the creator creation distinction. But in the early church, that language, and particularly its Christological implications.

[00:23:38] It was a way to preserve to say that Christ and the Holy Spirit are distinct from their on the creator side of the line. They don't like all the rest of creation participate or share in God.

[00:23:52] So it's interesting. The way that the language functions is quite different at our own time. So that's part of the way that they discipled early Christians.

[00:24:03] I mean, the the doctor of creation is fundamental. It's the first thing you teach really it comes first in the rule of rule of faith. And it's even it's the first thing that's a part of any kind of moral teaching.

[00:24:18] So there's this really wild early second century text called the Shepherd of Hermes and this visionary kind of apocalyptic style of writing. And that's one that if you just get you give to your first time like reader of the church fathers, they're like, what is this?

[00:24:37] But there's a part where he is giving these sort of moral things. It's kind of like a version of the two ways, the way of life and the way of death. It's very common in early Christianity.

[00:24:52] But it starts like the very first thing is this doctrine of creation. There's only one God creator of all things and that God's not contained by anything but contains everything else. So really that that it's a doctor of creation. It's a doctor of monotheism.

[00:25:08] It's kind of an implication of monotheism. So this often becomes the primary way that Christians are discipled. It's got this is why the early Christians are so adamant against idolatry. And so why it's so difficult to kind of wean people off of their idols, right?

[00:25:32] What Christians call idolatry is this simply, you know, kind of pagan religion. This is the way that people encounter the gods in the ancient world.

[00:25:43] And so part of discipleship is about becoming untethered from all of the ways that people encounter the gods because the Christians will say you're not participating in the gods.

[00:25:59] You're participating in demons and that's bad for you. That will hurt you and that hurts your societies and your families and everything. So they're part of discipleship. And why this is why this is a discipleship issue?

[00:26:13] It's because this doctrine participation is a way of untethering us from the idols that we seek, you know, false gods. And so, yeah, so I see looking at the early church, I see their discipleship plan is all about this. It's closely related to all this doctrine participation.

[00:26:37] So it's not just a doctrine. It's tied up with just the very way that we encounter God. So it's huge prayer. It's our ethical life. It's all of it is related to this way that they understand the doctrine participation.

[00:26:55] When you talk about discipleship, so I, you know, I've been reading some stuff about, you know, baptism in the early church and things like that. And there's some interesting stuff there, but it's amazing how important catechesis is.

[00:27:09] We talked a little bit about this before the interview and you've done a lot of research on this. And I think catechesis is sort of, I mean, making a comeback in more broader circles. People are talking about that more.

[00:27:20] And what are some things that the fathers emphasized about catechesis or maybe to put another way, what can we learn from the fathers with regard to training people in the faith? What was the significance? What would that look like for them? Yeah, that's great.

[00:27:38] I'm a part of that movement of trying to make catechesis cool again. It was it not only the early church but throughout Christian history. Catechesis was fundamental. Most basically catechesis refers to laying a solid foundation in the faith.

[00:28:00] So the fourth century catechist theologian, a serial of Jerusalem compares catechesis to a building. It says you lay down the foundations. You lay down it piece by piece as everything in its proper order, right? And he's thinking about the creed at that point.

[00:28:21] But he talks about catechesis is laying a foundation for faith. Typically it would, you know, at one level it looks like teaching the creed, teaching the Lord's prayer and teaching the ethical life.

[00:28:36] You know, usually Augustine sums it up with the twin commandments of love of God and neighbor. Later on in the Middle Ages and in the Reformation, especially in the Reformation, people would use the Apostles Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the 10 Commandments.

[00:28:55] Those would be the three staples of catechesis. And those are still enshrined in many of the famous catechisms from the Reformation and afterwards. But before that, catechesis was more about less about a text and what you would learn and more about a process of conversion.

[00:29:18] In some cases it would be a two to three year process. You would say, hey, I'd like to become a Christian and I say, great, you know, let's check our calendars for Easter of, you know, 2025 or 26.

[00:29:36] And for the next two, several years we're going to have you be a catechumen. And your job in that time is just to hear. Catechumen means something like a hearer or literally in Latin it would be an auditor, you know, someone who hears, Audientes.

[00:29:59] And so you're hearing, you're learning the faith, but you're also learning the habits of this Christian community because the Christians just live differently than the rest of the world. They care for the orphans in the widows, they care for the poor.

[00:30:20] They reject a lot of the all the pagan practices like the basic, a lot of the things that are built in to the basic structure of ancient Roman life. And they say, you know, and they have completely different, you know, sexual ethics and that sort of thing.

[00:30:43] There's one one early Christian tax that says early Christians, they share everything except their wives. And that's a way of getting at their, they're extremely generous and then they share with others and you see this in the book of Acts, you know,

[00:30:59] this sense that they want to share, have their goods and commons live life together. It's kind of fellowship. But at the same time they, you know, compared to the Roman world, they have, you know, very different sort of family ethics, family life, moral ethics, that sort of thing.

[00:31:15] So that just takes time to learn. And yes, you know, you can learn to memorize the creed in a couple of weeks maybe, but it takes a little while to get unhooked from these systems of these other kinds of participation, you know, these participation, what Paul,

[00:31:37] you know, why does St. Paul say that it's bad to participate in idolatrous worship, you know, and food sacrificed to idols?

[00:31:45] He's like, it's not that those demons are real or those gods are real compared to the one true God, but participating in it and he uses the word koinonia, a word for sharing. Participating in idol meals is a participation in the demonic.

[00:32:03] And so that two to three year period of catechesis is a process of becoming Christian, of learning that process.

[00:32:15] Gerald Sitzer is a great writer on this and he talks about like a bridge, you know, you just need, and the bigger the gap between the pagan world and the Christian world, you know, the bigger that bridge is going to need to be.

[00:32:31] So it allows the Christians to remain the integrity of the faith and not compromise their beliefs or their ethics in the surrounding culture.

[00:32:40] But it also allows them to go out in mission into evangelize and to bring the faith to these new cultures that have never heard of Jesus before.

[00:32:52] So it allows them to sort of maintain the integrity of the church and its life and confession of faith and moral life, while also being highly missional and highly evangelistic in ways that the Jews really weren't.

[00:33:05] The Jews kept the integrity of their faith but they weren't really going out and evangelizing the nations. That's a fairly distinctive thing that Christ brings and in charges his followers to do.

[00:33:18] So yeah, there's those twin poles of maintaining the distinctiveness and the integrity of the gospel with the missional evangelical impulse to go out and preach the gospel to all the world.

[00:33:31] It's fascinating the idea of it viewing more like a process where one of the hard things is trying to read modern categories or even 16th century or even medieval categories back into the church fathers because for them, it seems like conversion.

[00:33:45] And it's a practical thing where they're like someone want you know they convert from paganism and it's like okay you want to be a Christian.

[00:33:51] You need some time to understand what our communities like what that means, and they're not so much as like you know you pray to prayer you did this thing.

[00:33:59] Boom you get the status. You mentioned a little bit about justification earlier you had this interesting comment about new perspective, and the person that you mentioned wrote a book or an article about the second century fathers being more

[00:34:12] a perspective than we usually thought and that's a whole can of worms about what that you know there's so many new perspectives and all those types of things but I remember when I was reading Augustine, we read him in seminary.

[00:34:25] I went to RTS Orlando they were really great on learning about theology before the Reformation. And so I read a lot of Augustine and I always enjoyed him but Augustine was one of those guys where it's like he's like C.S. Lewis everybody wants to claim him.

[00:34:38] And you know it's like if you read Augustine he's like the Calvinist you know he started it all you know the Calvinist before Calvin.

[00:34:48] But Roman Catholic say well no this guy is Roman Catholic satiriology and ecclesiology and all that stuff and other people will say he ruined everything you know he's a very controversial figure.

[00:34:59] But how would you tease out the ancient view of salvation and faith because with Augustine he's got these strong statements about grace, you know, John Calvin quotes him a lot but then it seemed very clear that he holds to some kind of

[00:35:18] he has a very sort of what we would call justification, sanctification today. He has sort of a mixed together view of that and I have heard one of the critiques of reading the Fathers is that they're they're sort of borderline works righteousness ish.

[00:35:36] And so maybe just to sum that up how would you describe maybe specifically Augustine, but also just in general what is the tenor of how they would explain faith and salvation and what that actually means.

[00:35:50] Yeah, that's a huge question obviously and I'm not going to get you but so far. But anyway, but your I think your first point is right that that we are not helped by applying 16th century categories to or late medieval categories especially to the Fathers and then saying where they fall on the line.

[00:36:18] You know, same thing could be said for the doctrine of the sacraments. You know, you know, are they memorialists or they, you know, transubstantiationists and you know, you're not.

[00:36:31] You're going to find what you're looking for all too often and and that get that good as you know long histories of ways of reading the church fathers. And you're right especially Augustine is, you know, claimed by both Protestants and Catholics.

[00:36:53] You know, I think it's BB Warfield who has some some good line about the Reformation being nothing but the outworking of the victory, the Protestant victory of Augustine's doctrine of justification over the Catholic Augustine's doctrine of the church or something like that.

[00:37:12] It's a great, you know, it's a good one liner.

[00:37:17] So they both mostly claim to him there has been some good against some good recent work done on justification and even Alistair McGrath's you know, book on justification that just keeps like undergoing new additions and things that's like on its fifth or sixth edition is largely be been because of this

[00:37:37] ways of rereading the early church on the on doctrine justification. But essentially they are there, you know, especially somebody like Augustine who's very concerned about the doctrine of grace and original sin. And so he's he's primarily engaging with Pallagius and people that are similar to Pallagius.

[00:38:06] And in the questions become about original sin. You know, is this are we born with original sin or is sin something that we sort of were born more neutrally and we can choose what to do one way or the other.

[00:38:22] Well what what Pallagius in turn is doing is building on now at that point centuries of monastic literature. And in the earlier debates, especially around issues of things like Gnosticism in the second and third century.

[00:38:41] That kind of worldview the Gnostic worldview is is seen by early Christians one of the reasons it's so problematic is because it seems determinist determinist you're either kind of have the divine spark in you or not. You can't really exercise virtue.

[00:39:00] You're not really encouraged in that system to exercise virtue and to practice the good deeds of charity and faith. And so early Christians are are suspicious of those ways of threatening actually human agency and the denial of of human action that's in that.

[00:39:21] That's why you get someone like, you know, Pallagius who takes that line further and seems to be to just denying original sin. And so, so you have different conversations going on in different parts of the church fathers.

[00:39:41] If you're over somewhere in modern day Turkey and you're reading the Cappadocia fathers like Gregory of Nissa, you know, they're talking about they don't have the same problems. They're not arguing against Pallagius. They have different things they're talking about.

[00:39:53] So they're more, they're more happy to talk about things like a more synergistic, you know, account of justification. And to us that's to a Protestant at least that sounds scary, you know, that sounds like works, works righteousness. But again, he's not talking they're not talking to Pallagius.

[00:40:12] They're not talking about that Gregory you can, you know, Gregory also has Nissa has this in some places sound very much like he's has this understanding of original sin.

[00:40:23] And so this will be one of the ways that sort of Greek and West are going to corner corner part ways and but the the main theme so there's a lot of like clearing clearing the hedges that the tin says,

[00:40:39] the things that need to be done when you're just trying to go to the church fathers and say, All right, what do they say about the doctor investigation. So there has to be a little bit of that attentiveness to what are they actually talking about.

[00:40:54] And this is one of the great benefits of reading a church father today is we have so many of their works. And so we can see, try to just follow what they're doing and see who they're talking to, what they're trying to do.

[00:41:09] What what is common what is the sort of general tenor of their works is that they say that we are justified by by grace is an active grace, you know, we, I guess, was often quoting Paul, what do you have that you did not receive.

[00:41:30] You can see that as an again an entailment of the doctrine of participation, right because it's Dr. participation is a way of understanding all of your life as as gift, rather than as something that you own you you know, you have control over.

[00:41:50] So once again, this the doctor participation is now also a part of these questions about justification, because if you don't have this sort of competitive understanding and this is some of the technical language that scholars were used about this

[00:42:08] and this is a more competitive versus non competitive wills.

[00:42:13] So in this more non competitive agency understanding of things which the doctor participation more easily allows you to do, you can understand how it is God's work in justifying you and God's grace in allowing you to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling

[00:42:35] and sense. So in the more competitive understanding what's often called associated with late medieval ideas of volunteerism. You have this idea that, you know, it's either God's action or my action and to raise one is to lower the other.

[00:42:55] So it's a more competitive view of divine action and human agency, but the more sort of participatory understanding how it lets you just say more easily. Is it God's actions or my actions and you can just say yes, you can just keep going going up.

[00:43:12] And that allows you again to again to appreciate what those early anti-nostic Christians were doing, which is allow you to encourage you towards devotion towards good works towards care for the poor care for the orphans and widows.

[00:43:29] All the things when Paul's in the in his letters telling people what to do, like how to live. Giving them ethical injunctions and telling this like he can do that with straight face while also telling them that salvation is a gift.

[00:43:47] It's not something that you earn it's something that is that is given to you. So I think if you can help, I think this is so important for pastors today. I get I don't think pastors need to give you know lessons in medieval or ancient metaphysics.

[00:44:05] But if you you can begin to create to talk in ways that help people understand that faith, a custom would say faith working through love. In ways that Luther is not not quite happy with or the later Luther's not quite happy with that.

[00:44:25] I think that what the fathers allow you to do is is it wholeheartedly affirm the priority of grace and also allow you to encourage you against narcissism to be human to exercise virtue and love and to do all the things that God's called you to do.

[00:44:49] So it's both, I think a very liberating and empowering way of understanding our place in the world.

[00:44:56] I remember reading again, I think one of Augustine's lines by the beginning confessions or I don't remember but it was something like God command what you will and will what you command. Right. And I thought that man that's that's that's a strong line. That's a great thing.

[00:45:10] And I think that that's something I realized early on where one of the hard things today is that even in the scriptures when we talk about salvation, it's a broader category than legal justification. That's right.

[00:45:23] It's certainly that's a core component of it but there are I mean, I think the Apostle Paul speaks about salvation and different tenses, you know what has been accomplished what is being what is happening.

[00:45:34] And then the idea of salvation being the full reconciliation of man to God, the full renewal of all things. And so maybe the father's at a wider breadth of what salvation meant that we don't in common evangelicalism have ever have a sense of.

[00:45:52] But yeah, Augustine is really, really helpful on that you mentioned sacraments a little bit.

[00:45:59] And, you know, this is again, I think in Protestant and Catholic debates and even maybe around high church and low church and all that stuff is just everybody kind of reads a view of the sacraments back into the early fathers.

[00:46:17] If you took those debates aside and we just went in a time machine and went back to the time of Clement and Ignatius and you know, Augustine or whatever all those guys, you know, I know they live, you know, ages apart but what was their understanding of the sacraments,

[00:46:33] specifically baptism, the Lord supper. How do they understand the mechanics of those. And what role did they see those sacraments play in the life of the church.

[00:46:46] Yeah, if they if I could just sum it up in one word. I would say that they see the sacraments as medicinal. I thought you were going to say participation. Again, yeah, okay medicinal. Okay, medicinal. And yes participation is in the is in the background of this.

[00:47:12] But they understand the sacraments in medicinal terms as is even Ignatius in the second century will say, we'll call the Eucharist something like the medicine of immortality.

[00:47:27] And making one thing I didn't say about sort of patristic ideas of salvation is this also related to this idea of what we often call deification or theosis. This is summarized in Irenaeus and anathanasis they use the line that God became man so that man might become God.

[00:47:47] What they're essentially doing is, it's a way of articulating how the problem is not just a legal category of sin and justification but the problem is also relatedly death and life. They were created for life, but they were also created created mortal.

[00:48:13] And what Christ does is restore life to the dying. He does this in word indeed. He does this in his teaching, but he also does this and this is one of the reasons that he heals people. He heals their bodies because he has the power of life.

[00:48:33] And that comes through again, through giving people the words of life. But it also again, it's not just about their knowledge or their heads but he comes to in fact be for them the life of the world.

[00:48:47] And so the early Christians often understand the sacraments especially the Eucharist as the medicine of immortality of the way of sharing in, participating in the life that Christ has.

[00:49:03] So they would, one of the biggest differences between medieval and patristic sacramental theologies is that you have this, it starts in the ninth century. You have the first sort of debate about Christ's presence. Is it real presence or is it symbolic presence?

[00:49:29] And that sort of kicks off this train of medieval thinking about this, that the reformers are going to kick back against.

[00:49:36] So one of the biggest differences is that after that period, after the ninth century, the question of the sacraments becomes about the relation of the historical and ascended Christ to the elements of bread and war.

[00:49:55] And so that's the question of the sacraments, whether it's wine or water or oil. Whereas in the early church, the relationship was the question of Christ, the elements and you, the people.

[00:50:13] So they're one of the things that you'll immediately notice when you go back and if again you set aside the medieval questions and try to just say, well what are they doing with this?

[00:50:24] They are more interested in understanding how these elements join you to Christ, how they link you with Christ, how they give you like what Paul says, a coinonia in Christ.

[00:50:40] And they'll say, because again they'll say it's not just ideas in your head but actually the life of Christ in your body. So Augustine will look at his congregation, he looks at these congregations and said, become what you see here, become the body of Christ.

[00:51:01] And so it's an exhortation to be what you receive. You receive the body of Christ, be what you receive, be the body of Christ. Augustine calls this the Todus Christus or the whole Christ, head and body together. And then so that's one way of doing it.

[00:51:20] Just an amazing passage on the Eucharist comes from Gregory of Nisa, 4th century church father. It comes in a treatise of his called the Catechetical Discourse. It'll work your way through the end of it, but it's amazing.

[00:51:39] It's a treatise given to Catechus to help teach people what it is. But he has this incredible account of the medicinal character of the Eucharist and how when we eat food, that food, if I eat a piece of bread, I digest it.

[00:51:58] It becomes a part of my body. Well, in the same way he'll talk about the Eucharist, you receive the Eucharist and if this Christ's presence, that's Christ's life. Like you're absorbing that life into your body. He does it again.

[00:52:14] He's drawing on ancient medicine in a way that food digest into the body and becomes part of the body. So he takes all that up and then understands the Eucharist in these ways.

[00:52:27] So medicine of immortality is just a wonderful phrase for thinking about how they approach the sacraments. So they're thinking about it's doing something to you, but they're not really thinking about what's being done to the elements. Again, you can find that.

[00:52:44] You can find if you're looking for transubstantiation in Cyril of Jerusalem or Ambrose of Milan, you can find that in Roman Catholics. I've done that throughout the centuries. So they do think there's something different about these sacraments. It's not just, you know, no one talks about it.

[00:53:06] It's just a symbol or just a memorial, right? Like nobody's really using that language. They do think that something's happened. So I mean transubstantiation wasn't invented in the 12th century. You know, like there's precedent for that understanding. But at the same time, that wasn't the debate so much.

[00:53:30] There's more debate about baptism in the early church about again related to Augustine. And this is a different debate.

[00:53:40] Well, there's two different debates Augustine has one with the Donatists who are the more schismatic group and another which is about the church and who has the authority to baptize. And do you need a pure minister in order to administer a valid sacrament? So there's a question there.

[00:53:59] And then with the Pelagians, which is this again is a question about original sin and what does baptism wash away?

[00:54:07] If you have little babies that are being baptized and there are there are people that are bringing these weeping mothers that are bringing their dying children to the church to get baptized.

[00:54:17] You know, they say, well, that little baby hasn't committed any sins like he's not stolen from the poor and robbed people. And you know, he hasn't committed these active sins. So what's baptism doing unless it's washing away something called we call I got some will call original sin.

[00:54:42] So there's more. There's more debate about baptism in the early church. And then there is about the Eucharist. But they certainly in both cases that they're thinking that this is this is there's something special something unique going on here.

[00:55:00] If we go back to the language of participation, there's kind of ordinary participation that everything shares in God in some way otherwise it just has no existence. But what what we see in the sacraments is a is a heightened or more charged form of sacramental presence.

[00:55:20] So these give us a clearest example of the sacraments, the presence of God in these physical elements in ways that's different from the more general understanding of how everything participates in God. A lot of things that you said about the Lord supper and the Eucharist.

[00:55:39] I think about passages in Calvin where he's talking about the true feeding on the true body. I mean, he has that metaphor of eating and clearly it's more than just a symbolic act. There is something happening in there.

[00:55:51] Okay, so you mentioned baptism and I've always been curious about this because, you know, with what the it does seem like the early church held to some form of baptismal regeneration.

[00:56:05] But by I think I would define that as how you defined Augustine's view where the washing of the water was an act of God in which original sin is washed away. And that's the actual point of the new birth, the point of a new heart of regeneration.

[00:56:23] And then there's a whole question of what happens when you sin after that.

[00:56:27] And that's a little weird, you know, as a Protestant because, you know, I know Luther held to some baptismal regeneration, but it brings in the question, you know, like assurance of salvation, all these types of things. Maybe that's a whole can of worms.

[00:56:41] But is it fair to say that they viewed baptism as regenerative? And I don't know if that's what you hold, but how would a Protestant kind of look at that if... Yeah, they don't hold that. One of those kind of areas that I've...

[00:56:57] I don't know the like either the the reformation or even have to admit like the contemporary debates well enough to say, you know, does Augustine agree with the reformers on this? Because again, it's that kind of like we're bringing those, you know, we're bringing our contemporary questions.

[00:57:18] Well, if we put them aside, yeah, how would they... What would they say baptism is and what does it do? Yeah. So I think it is, you know, certainly right to say it's a washing away of sin. It is an introduction into the family of God.

[00:57:40] They use a lot of the family of God language. You become a son of God, lowercase s in the son of capital S. And so they understand that that rebirth, new birth, they're happy to use a host of these languages. They also use a language of enlightenment, right?

[00:58:06] Of they are, you know, receive the spirit in a new way. So they again, like salvation, they use a much broader linguistic set of terms than just illegal ones. They'll use illegal ones, but they also will understand these as much, much different categories.

[00:58:37] They also use a language of citizenship, you know, kind of, you know, Paul's language of your citizenship is in heaven. There's some great passages in John Chrysostom, another four-century writer where he makes this very explicit comparison between, you know, you becoming a new citizen, your names.

[00:59:01] He uses the technical term for becoming inscribed as a citizen of a new city. You know, citizenship is a huge deal in the ancient world. He says that, you know, but it's so it's such a different kind of world.

[00:59:14] It's such a strange place that you need someone from that new city to come to the new person and help them like learn the new mores of the city. And that's part of their being.

[00:59:26] So new citizenship language, new family, you know, you're belonging to a new family, illumination and but certainly yes, washing away new it is new birth. New life. You know, Paul uses this language of the neophyte.

[00:59:47] It means like something literally means something like new growth, like a new plant. And that becomes by the fourth century one of the technical terms for the newly baptized. So they're neophytes. They're the newly planted, you know, the new photons, you know, if you will.

[01:00:08] But so yeah, whole, whole range of vocabulary to describe this radical transformation.

[01:00:14] You know, they certainly were whatever else will say they don't see, you know, baptism is like, you know, switching alliance from the Methodist to the Episcopalians, you know, they see it as this radical transformation from being the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.

[01:00:31] David Bentley Hart just puts it somewhere is like a radical transformation in their cosmic station. You know, so he is a great turn of phrase. Yeah, of course. But it's helpful to try to get at that the more dramatic cosmic, cosmic political familial transformation that happens.

[01:00:54] Every time I read David Bentley Hart, I have to have like a dictionary next to me. Some of the words I'm like, I don't know if you made that up.

[01:01:03] Maybe bring it to a close because a lot of stuff that you're talking about has to do with the life of the church. You're talking about the family metaphor.

[01:01:13] You're talking about this idea of incorporation into this body, you know, the Augustine idea of, you know, be what this represents to you. How did the fathers understand the church?

[01:01:26] I mean, I remember reading 1st Clement and he's talking about bishops and everybody goes back to that and everyone fights about the polity in the early church. But how did they view the life of the church, especially how the church functioned with regard to authority?

[01:01:44] Yeah, the emphasis on bishops that you see very early on, you know, second century, those are, there's stuff that they're working out in the second and third century about who's where is authority lie.

[01:02:03] And in some cases, the question is going to be, does it lie with the people who are the patrons of the church? Like those who have the money, who are like opening up their homes to the church?

[01:02:16] Or is it going to be more with those who are teaching the faith and who are passing on the faith that's been delivered? From the apostles.

[01:02:27] So we again are going to bring our suspicions as Americans to the early church and, you know, hey, we threw off the king, you know, we got rid of monarchy. Why do they seem so okay with it?

[01:02:45] And this idea of authority. So we're kind of naturally allergic to a lot of forms of authority, even though we realize we can't live without it. But what that office is, is especially primarily a teaching office.

[01:03:00] I think this is one thing that we've really forgotten about the role of bishops and the role of authority more generally is that mostly because again, we've kind of seeded education to the world.

[01:03:14] To schools, to these sorts of things. So we've really lost this conception of the teaching office of the church and of pastors.

[01:03:24] And I think one thing we would see in the early church is a real affirmation that pastors are teachers and what they're doing and why they have authority is to pass on the faith. Yes, they are meant to embody the unity of the church, bishops are.

[01:03:43] Like they are meant to say that it's not just a unity of ethereal doctrine and doctrine that can just be abstracted out of things and people. But again, to hold, it's a way to try to hold together the embodied and spiritual life of the early church.

[01:04:00] So it's a unity. Ideally, the idea of bishops is to be a unity of doctrine and human lives like these are again, this is not narcissism. It's a sharing of real life together.

[01:04:16] You see a very early example of this already in the New Testament when Paul's writing letters to different churches and then he's asking them to be sent around.

[01:04:27] Right? So he's already like, you the Ephesians, then you send this letter to Laodicea or whatever and then you send it on. And then he's always greeting people in different places and he said, tell so and so that so and so said hello.

[01:04:40] And give each other a greeting. He's forming this idea of you could call this Catholicity if you will. He's forming this Catholicity already in that. And so what leaders are doing is giving embodied witness to the unity of the body of Christ.

[01:05:02] And again, in both their teaching, what they teach and this is why teaching is so important in the early church.

[01:05:08] This is why passing on the rule of faith in Catechesis is so important is because it's about not just it's not just about the people, but it's also not just about the teaching. It's people and teaching together.

[01:05:24] And so that's what kind of the church as an authoritative structure to use a term is trying to do. But more generally than that, you don't you see plenty of Christians, early Christians talking about this, but more often when they're talking about the church,

[01:05:48] if you were to ask an early Christian to write about the church, you know, they probably wouldn't give you a lesson in Episcopal authority and structure.

[01:05:59] They would point to scripture in all the places that it talks about the body of Christ, the people of God, the temple of the Holy Spirit.

[01:06:11] They would see the church as a place where God's plans and his purposes and his will is being done on earth as it is in heaven.

[01:06:21] They see the church as a school of discipleship, a place of where the effects of the fall are being undone, where life, where immortality is being eaten and tasted. And so they see the church as another famous image is the church as a hospital for sick people.

[01:06:49] Jesus doesn't come to call those who are well, but those who are sick. And so reading allegorically, they'll see that, you know, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, when the Good Samaritan drops off the guy at the end and tells the innkeeper to take care of him.

[01:07:08] They'll see that as a picture of what the church is. It's a place where life happens. It's a great way to sum it up. The place where life happens. I think that's something that I think should hold true in every age.

[01:07:27] We think about the church, maybe just a couple thoughts from you about if you're a layperson, you want to get started in reading the church fathers. What are some good pointers? Just a couple brief, you know, here's some advice if you want to start digging in to somebody.

[01:07:44] Absolutely. Yeah. I don't do what I did and just think you'll just read all of Augustine and then move on to the next right. Rookie mistake, rookie mistake. There's there are several great points of entry.

[01:07:57] I mean, reading a set of figures called the Apostolic Fathers in the second century. And there's people like Ignatius and folks like that. And I think that letter to Diagnetus is just a really wonderful entryway into kind of patristic thought.

[01:08:19] And I do love reading Augustine, although it's funny. I've heard a lot of Augustine scholars talk about like, how'd you get into reading Augustine? They're like, I don't like Augustine. No, he's not always a great entry point. Some people read the Confessions and it changes their life.

[01:08:35] And other people are like, yeah, that was weird. Probably a mix of both. There's a great set of volumes out of St. Vladimir's Sumerian press called Popular Patristics. So it's in my background there. Those little, if I'm doing this right, it's those.

[01:08:56] They're these nice little volumes very more affordable. Nice to read. They're usually good translators. So there's a couple of really good series now that people want to read these things in English or sometimes they'll have like the original language in the English on joint pages.

[01:09:17] Athanasius is on the incarnation. I mean, that's just that's just good, just good stuff. And writers like Gregorio of Nissa, I think again are just his text Life of Moses is a kind of allegorical reading of Moses's life.

[01:09:39] And it's wild but it will lift the wings of your soul. So yeah, I think there's a number of just, but I would say just start reading the fathers like they're not.

[01:09:52] A lot of people will encounter them in kind of older translations and so their styles seems really archaic and old but that's often because of the translator not because of the thought.

[01:10:03] And so the first kind of admission would be or even encouragement and just to say that take up and read, read haphazardly read like what sounds interesting.

[01:10:18] If you want to do more critical readings, you can figure that out along the way but again there's, but there's there is so much a kind of wealth of texts that are that are available out there.

[01:10:33] That the reader can feel encouraged like they don't need a degree in order to read the church fathers.

[01:10:39] They can they can dive right there are great introductions to the to the church fathers my supervisor, DH Williams has written several I think really helpful introductions to reading the church fathers.

[01:10:54] Hans Boersma's book heavenly participation while it's not on patristics is a good introduction to that the thought world that sacramental ontology. One of the best introductions is a book by Robert Lewis Wilkin called the spirit of early Christian thought.

[01:11:11] And it gives a really great view of the theology but especially the spirituality and community of the early church and really gives again a sense of the spirit of early Christian thought, kind of what what animates them what makes them tick so reading

[01:11:29] those will give you, you know, an idea of the of the broader kind of, you know, social imaginary of the early church and what would be good but I would I would just say also just just take up and read.

[01:11:44] It's been great advice and I think I think you're right. Something that was really encouraging is they're actually not as unreadable as you might think they are they're actually quite readable. They're weird they're strange they'll challenge you but not because of the language.

[01:11:59] Right, right, right, right. Alex, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate your work in this area taking the time to answer all these questions and it's a broad, you know, range of things we could talk about.

[01:12:10] I question about origin and all this stuff and we couldn't get to all that so I have to have you on again sometime but next time. Yeah, yeah, next time.

[01:12:17] But yeah, thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate you sharing sharing your insights and your knowledge about the subject. Absolutely. My pleasure is great to be with you.