Show Me the Text: How the Fathers Put Scripture in the Driver’s Seat
Show Me the Text: How the Fathers Put Scripture in the Driver’s Seat
1. Catechumens, Prophets, and the Canon in Jerusalem
If you picture Cyril of Jerusalem teaching in the mid-fourth century, it helps to imagine the setting: catechumens gathered in a city still marked by Constantine’s recent building projects, within earshot of the Anastasis, being prepared for baptism in a Church that had only lately emerged from persecution. Cyril stands before them, but he is oddly anxious that they not trust him too much. “Concerning the divine and holy mysteries of the Faith,” he says, “not even a casual statement must be delivered without the Holy Scriptures.”¹ He presses the point so hard that he tells them explicitly not to give him “absolute credence” unless he proves what he says from the “Divine Scriptures,” because the salvation they confess “depends not on ingenious reasoning, but on demonstration of the Holy Scriptures.”²
Cyril even insists that the basic structure of Christology be received under this constraint. When he turns to the question of why Christ came down, he warns his hearers not to “mind” his argumentation—“for perhaps thou mayest be misled”—unless he can anchor each claim in the testimony of the prophets. They are not to believe him regarding the Virgin, the place, the time, or the manner of Christ’s coming unless they “learn from the Holy Scriptures” on each point.³ The contrast is almost ironic: the living bishop, who can be suspected, must yield place to prophets who spoke “a thousand and more years beforehand.” If they want the cause of Christ’s advent, he tells them, let them “go back to the first book of the Scriptures.”⁴
Here is a first, important pattern. Cyril does not oppose the Church and Scripture; he speaks as a bishop, within the Catholic Church, deploying Scripture constantly. Yet when he must decide where the final weight falls—on episcopal argument or on the written testimony of God—he sides unambiguously with the latter. In modern terms, the catechetical classroom is ordered by the canon, not by the charisma of the teacher.
2. Basil, Chrysostom, and the Scriptural Testing of Teachers
If we shift east and north to Caesarea and Cappadocia, Basil’s Moralia press the same point with his characteristic severity. In Rule 26 he writes that “every word and deed should be ratified by the testimony of the Holy Scripture” in order both to confirm the good and to “cause shame to the wicked.”⁵ The verb is telling: Scripture does not merely illustrate, it “ratifies.” Human speech and action may propose; Scripture disposes.
Rule 72 then turns that principle into ecclesial practice. Basil urges that hearers “who are instructed in the Scriptures” must examine what their teachers say, receiving only what conforms to Scripture and rejecting what is contrary—and those who persist in unbiblical doctrine are to be “strictly avoided.”⁶ The picture is far from a passive laity. Basil assumes that ordinary Christians, armed with Scripture, possess a genuine norm by which even ordained teachers are to be judged. One can almost hear him telling a congregation: “If I preach something you cannot find in the prophets, apostles, or evangelists—do not believe me.”
John Chrysostom, that inexhaustible preacher of Antioch and Constantinople, adds his own vivid imagery. In a homily on 2 Corinthians he rebukes his hearers for their inconsistency: in matters of money, they insist on exact figures and careful calculations, but in matters of doctrine they allow themselves to be “lightly drawn aside by the notions of others,” even though they possess an “exact balance, and square and rules for all things, the declaration of the divine laws.”⁷ His exhortation is blunt: “disregard what this man and that man thinks,” and “inquire from the Scriptures all these things.”⁸ The golden-mouthed bishop, in other words, refuses to let even his own eloquence become an alternative authority. His task is not to supplant Scripture but to drive his hearers back into it.
There is a quiet but real democratizing effect here. Basil and Chrysostom are not proto-congregationalists, of course, but they assume that Scripture belongs to the Church as a whole and that its authority operates through the testing judgment of the faithful. The “rule of faith” is not a private clerical possession; it is embodied in the canonical writings that the whole Church hears, reads, and, at times, uses to contradict its own leaders.
3. Jerome’s Banker and Optatus’s Testament
Jerome, writing from Bethlehem in the late fourth and early fifth century, famously compared the careful reader of Scripture to an “expert banker.” In his Apology against Rufinus he explains what a commentator actually does: he lays out the different interpretations of a passage—“some interpret this passage in this sense, others in another sense”—and then offers his own reading with supporting testimonies.⁹ The prudent reader, he says, compares these and “will judge for himself which is the more correct; and, like the expert banker, will reject the falsely minted coin.”¹⁰
Jerome’s image is striking for its implied anthropology: Christian readers are not spiritual minors who must simply accept whatever patristic giant stands before them. They are to weigh exegesis against the touchstone of Scripture and sift gold from counterfeit. That does not diminish the value of tradition; it does, however, subordinate every patristic voice—including Jerome’s own—to the text it expounds. An exegete is not a second canon.
Some decades earlier in North Africa, Optatus of Milevis was engaged in fierce controversy with the Donatists. In Book 5 of his Against the Donatists he frames the dispute in terms both sides would have felt viscerally. Between the Donatist “it is granted” and the Catholic “it is not granted,” he says, “the souls of the people tack and veer,” thrown about like ships in a windstorm.¹¹ Where can a judge be found? Not among Christians, whose zeal hinders truth; not among pagans, who do not understand Christian mysteries; not among Jews, who oppose Christian baptism. No earthly court is adequate.
At this point Optatus introduces the analogy that, once heard, is hard to forget. When a father is alive, he commands his children directly and no testament is needed. But when he feels death approaching, he transfers his will to written tablets, so that after his burial the brothers do not run to the grave but to the testament; “the one who rests in the burial-place speaks silently from the tablets.”¹² So too Christ: while present on earth, He gave commands by His own lips; now, having ascended, He speaks in His written testament, the Gospel. “Let his will be sought in the Gospel, as in a testament.”¹³
There is a small, almost offhand pastoral wisdom here. Optatus does not deny the role of bishops or councils. Yet when the brothers quarrel about the father’s will, they are not to dig up the past in the form of partisan memories or regional rumors; they must open the written document that binds them all. The ultimate court of appeal for the Church’s identity and unity is the canon.
4. Augustine and the Distinctive Supremacy of the Canon
It is Augustine who gives this intuition its most systematic articulation. His corpus is vast, and in the heat of contemporary confessional debates he is often conscripted into service for positions he would scarcely recognize. But on the question of Scripture’s authority he is remarkably consistent and remarkably sharp.
In his controversy with the Donatist grammarian Cresconius, Augustine addresses an appeal to Cyprian’s letters. He responds with a careful mixture of admiration and refusal. He does not hold Cyprian’s letters “as canonical,” but considers them “from canonical writings,” accepting whatever in them agrees with “the authority of the divine Scriptures” and rejecting what does not—“with peace to him.”¹⁴ He will not accept Cyprian’s view on the rebaptism of heretics because “the church, for which blessed Cyprian shed his blood, does not accept it.”¹⁵ The difference between Cyprian and an apostle like Peter, whose temporary judaizing he likewise rejects, lies not in personal holiness but in the level of authority: neither man’s letter is Scripture.
In Letter 93 he extends the point to a broader class of patristic writings. The works of bishops such as Hilary, Cyprian, or Agrippinus must be “distinguished from the canon of Scripture.”¹⁶ They are not read as if any testimony drawn from them is such that it would be “unlawful to hold any different opinion,” for it may be that they entertained views that truth itself corrects.¹⁷ By contrast, if a doctrine is “supported by the evident authority of the divine Scriptures, namely, of those which in the Church are called canonical, it must be believed without any reservation.”¹⁸ Here Augustine is unambiguous: only canonical Scripture compels unconditional assent.
He returns to the same theme in Letter 148, where he catalogs an impressive list of Latin and Greek fathers who have written commentaries on “the divine oracles.” He treats their reasonings with respect but insists that “we are at liberty” to condemn and reject anything in their writings that differs from what, by divine help, we discover to be the truth.¹⁹ He not only does this with others; he explicitly invites his readers to do the same with him. His own works, he says elsewhere, are “not a rule of faith or practice, but only a help to edification,” and may contain errors that later treatises correct.²⁰ That freedom of judgment, however, stops at the threshold of the canon. The Scriptures, he says in his reply to Faustus, have an authority that, from “a position of lofty supremacy, claims the submission of every faithful and pious mind.”²¹ If we are perplexed by an apparent contradiction in Scripture, it is not permissible to say, “The author of this book is mistaken”; the fault must lie in the manuscript, the translation, or our understanding.²²
In De Unitate Ecclesiae we find Augustine applying this to the very question of where the Church is to be found. “Let us not hear, ‘You say this, I say that,’” he writes, “but, ‘Thus says the Lord.’ There are the Dominical Books, whose authority we both acknowledge, we both yield to, we both obey; there let us seek the Church.”²³ Testimonies from outside the divine canonical books, he continues, must be “put out of sight” in this dispute.²⁴ He “would not have the holy Church demonstrated by human testimonies, but by divine oracles.”²⁵ Even Catholic bishops are not to be followed if, in anything, they hold views “contrary to the Canonical Scriptures of God.”²⁶
This does not mean Augustine despises councils or miracles or ecclesial continuity. In the same treatise he carefully ranks authorities: the canon stands above all; letters of bishops may be refuted; regional councils must yield to plenary councils; and even plenary councils may, in time, be corrected by later ones as new circumstances reveal what was previously hidden.²⁷ But none of these ever acquire the status of Scripture, which he describes elsewhere as setting “a rule to our teaching” such that we dare not “be wise more than it behooveth to be wise.”²⁸ The boundary line, he says, runs exactly “between all productions subsequent to apostolic times” and “the authoritative canonical books of the Old and New Testaments.”²⁹
One of Augustine’s more homely images comes from a sermon on Psalm 68, where he interprets “sleeping in the midst of the lots” as resting on the authority of the two Testaments. When anything from them is “produced and proved,” all strife should end in “peaceful acquiescence.”³⁰ In Sermon 340A he uses almost legal language: Christ, our purchaser, did not make His purchase without written “instruments”; the apostles, taking down His words, left us a “register” so that, when disputes arise, we may read and “relieve us of all grounds for quarrelling.”³¹ It is the same instinct as Optatus’s: when brothers disagree, they must open the document.
5. Cyril of Alexandria and Gregory the Great: Back to the Sacred Page
By the time we arrive at Cyril of Alexandria in the early fifth century, the battles over Christology are intense and politically charged. Yet in On the Unity of Christ, written in the heat of post-Ephesine controversy, Cyril’s instinct is to invite his readers not first into synodal archives but into the Bible. “Come, let us investigate the divine and sacred Scripture,” he writes, “and let us seek the solution there.”³² This is not to deny the importance of conciliar definitions—Cyril was hardly shy about citing Ephesus—but it reveals where he thinks the decisive argument must ultimately be grounded.
A century later, Gregory the Great, expounding Job in Rome, uses metallurgical imagery. Silver signifies the power of speaking; gold, the brightness of life or wisdom. Heretics, he observes, are filled with pride in the brilliance of their speech, but they are “not based firmly by any authority of the sacred books.”³³ Scripture for Gregory is like the “veins of silver” from which the preacher draws the material of his words. True preaching must “bring round every thing that he speaks to a fountain of divine authority, and in that set firm the edifice of his own speaking.”³⁴ When heretics eagerly “prop up what is bad of their own,” they inevitably broach things “not maintained in the page of the sacred books.”³⁵
Gregory’s comments are interesting for the way they assume Scripture as the shared court for intra-ecclesial debate. He does not tell his opponents, “You are outside the living tradition, therefore you are wrong”; he tells them, in effect, “You are not drawing from the veins of the sacred page.” The standard is textual, not merely institutional. Or, perhaps better, the institution is tested and shaped by the text to which it is bound.
6. Conclusion: Scripture as the Common Court of Appeal
Taken together, these patristic witnesses do not offer a neat slogan; they rarely speak in the later language of “Scripture alone,” and they would have found some modern dichotomies between “Bible” and “Church” perplexing. They lived in a world where Scripture was read in the liturgy, expounded in homilies, woven into creeds, and defended in councils. The canon did not float above the Church like some free-standing artefact. It was the Church’s book.
Yet precisely as the Church’s book, it possessed what Augustine called a “lofty supremacy.”³⁶ Cyril of Jerusalem commands catechumens not to trust even him without Scriptural proof. Basil and Chrysostom summon hearers to test teachers by the written Word and to distrust any eloquence that cannot be squared with “the divine laws.” Jerome likens readers to bankers who must detect counterfeit exegesis. Optatus and Augustine insist that the Church’s unity and identity must be demonstrated, not by rumors, councils, or even miracles, but by “divine oracles” and “canonical books.” Cyril of Alexandria, in the turmoil of Christological controversy, directs us back to Scripture for the solution; Gregory the Great tells preachers to quarry their sermons from the veins of the sacred page.
In short, when the stakes are high and the arguments heated, the Fathers consistently act as if Scripture is the final court of appeal to which all other authorities—even the most revered—must answer. They do not imagine an unchurched Bible, any more than they imagine a Church unruled by the Bible. Their instinct, again and again, is simple and profoundly unsettling to human pride: open the register; show me the text.
Endnotes
- Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 4.17, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 7 (hereafter NPNF2 7).
- Ibid.
- Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 12.5 (NPNF2 7).
- Ibid.
- Basil of Caesarea, The Morals 26, in Ascetical Works, Fathers of the Church 9 (hereafter FC 9), 106.
- Basil of Caesarea, The Morals 72 (FC 9:185–86).
- John Chrysostom, Homilies on Second Corinthians 13, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 12 (hereafter NPNF1 12).
- Ibid.
- Jerome, Apology against the Books of Rufinus 1.16, in St. Jerome: Dogmatic and Polemical Works, FC 53:79.
- Ibid.
- Optatus of Milevis, Against the Donatists 5.3, trans. and ed. Mark Edwards (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), 100.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Augustine, Contra Cresconium Grammaticum 2.32, PL 43:490; trans. Michael Woodward.
- Ibid.
- Augustine, Letter 93.10.35, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 1 (hereafter NPNF1 1).
- Ibid.
- Augustine, Letter 147.4, in Saint Augustine: Letters, FC 20:173.
- Augustine, Letter 148.15 (NPNF1 1).
- Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichaean 11.5, in NPNF1 4.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Augustine, De Unitate Ecclesiae 1.5–6, PL 43:394–95; trans. William Goode, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church, vol. 3, 164–65.
- Augustine, De Unitate Ecclesiae 3.5, PL 43:395; Goode, 3:164.
- Augustine, De Unitate Ecclesiae 3.6, PL 43:395; Goode, 3:164–65.
- Augustine, De Unitate Ecclesiae 11.28, PL 43:410–11; Goode, 3:165.
- Augustine, On Baptism, Against the Donatists 2.3, in NPNF1 4.
- Augustine, On the Good of Widowhood 2, in NPNF1 3.
- Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichaean 11.5 (NPNF1 4).
- Augustine, Exposition on the Psalms 68.14, in NPNF1 8.
- Augustine, Sermon 340A.11, in The Works of Saint Augustine, part 3, vol. 9 (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1995), 304–5.
- Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John Anthony McGuckin (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 72.
- Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job 18.25, in A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, vol. 2, parts 3–4 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1844), 343–44.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichaean 11.5 (NPNF1 4).
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