Gerald Bray says yes. I’ve been reading through essays in Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation (vol. 5 in Zondervan’s The Scripture and Hermeneutics Series), and Bray’s contribution, “The Church Fathers and Biblical Theology” is a particularly interesting contribution. Towards the end, Bray avers that “ontology” is a central issue in the debate between whether the church fathers are relevant to contemporary Biblical studies. After all, whereas most of the church fathers asked questions of an ontological sort, modern interpreters often fail to appreciate this endeavor.
Here are some great quotes (Note: all emphases mine):
The heart of the issue here is the significance of ontology for biblical interpretation. For the church fathers this went without saying, and the essence of their hermeneutic is rooted in ontological considerations of one kind or another. Who and what is God? How does God stand in relation to the universe that we call creation? What is wrong with this creation, and how must it be put right? The answers given to these and related questions form the heart and substance of patristic theology. Those answers came from the Bible – indeed, from the Bible alone. But modern interpreters might ask – was the Bible designed to provide them? Can the Fathers be accused of having distorted Scripture’s principal intention(s) by making it supply answers to questions raised within a hermeneutical grid that is fundamentally alien to the text itself? The short answer to these questions is that if ontology has a legitimate place in biblical theology, then the Fathers of the church can be integrated into that tradition of biblical interpretation and regarded as legitimate dialogue partners even today.
Pg. 33
Bray goes on to note the importance of ontology for the relevance of Christianity to the pagan world to which it witnessed in the New Testament and early church periods:
The ontological agenda which resulted from these assertions was intrinsic to the success of the Christian mission. One might almost say that if they had not been in the Bible, they would have had to be invented for the message of the Bible to have taken hold in a pagan world. But if the theology of the Bible lacked an ontological dimension, would any ancient pagan have been converted to Christianity? What attraction would a Jewish sect have had to people for whom its entire mental universe was fundamentally alien? Without a doctrine of creation, it is hard to see how the biblical message could have claimed any kind of credible superiority over its various pagan rivals, and a doctrine of creation implies an ontology. The Bible has a doctrine of creation and therefore it contains ontological assumptions that are intrinsic to its message. Here, if nowhere else, we are on solid ground if we say that if the modern mind fails to appreciate this, then it is our generation, and not the Fathers of the church, who are mistaken in their interpretation of Scripture.
Pg. 34
Thus Bray concludes:
Modern theology, and not least modern Biblical theology, has done its best to escape from the ontological, and even to deny that it is present at all in the Scriptures. But the Fathers of the church, whatever their other limitations may have been, saw more clearly than many moderns on this point. At a time when the ancient foundations of our culture are being increasingly questions, and issues involving ultimate reality are increasingly evaded, Christian interpreters of the Bible need to hear the Fathers’ voice more than ever before. It is a voice which will point them towards ontology, the end of which is the supreme Being of God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Pg. 38
Bray has given us a helpful way to avoid epistemological arrogance on the one hand (assuming that present day ways of thinking are superior) while also showing a direct link between ancient and modern ontological assumptions. We can learn from the church fathers not simply in an effort to understand what “those guys thought way back then,” but in order to see how we – as Christians who do indeed find matters of ontology to be important – can actually learn from and appropriate their discoveries to our own studies.
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