Michael A.G. Haykin on the Church Fathers, Postmodernism, Christian Scholarship, and Piety
EDITOR’S NOTE: Below, Michael A.G. Haykin, professor of church history and biblical spirituality at Southern Seminary, and Aaron Cline Hanbury, managing editor of “Towers,” discuss Haykin’s newest book, Rediscovering the Church Fathers: Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church. Haykin explains the necessity of exploring the piety, evangelism and scholarship of the foreign country inhabited by the Fathers.
This is your 32nd book. With your teaching responsibilities and commuting to Louisville from the Toronto area, how do you manage to write as much as you do?
I try to make good use of my time. So when I’m in an airport waiting for a plane, I’m reading or I can be using a laptop. As I look back, a lot of my career, even in my 20s, I’ve been commuting different places to teach, and so I learned to use a lot of that time productively. Flying to Louisville, for instance, takes me about six hours, and it’s not always this way, but I can read during a lot of that time. Because I’ve flown so much, I’ve got access to the presidential lounge, so I’m using that context. So there is an enormous amount of reading I’ve been able to do. And because I don’t have any ministry responsibilities (i.e., pastor), a lot of my time is focused on academic work when I’m home. Another thing is that I’m an inveterate writer. I can’t imagine life without writing.
Okay, so why write Rediscovering the Church Fathers?
I think the problem that a lot of contemporaries have with the Church Fathers is that they don’t speak our language and their concepts are not always our concepts. It’s a given that the past is a foreign country, and to travel back into the past through reading various documents of the past is like going to another country. The foreignness of the Fathers is even more profound than say, the foreignness of John Bunyan or John Owen. So what I’m doing in the book is showing, “This is how you read these men.” This book is an introduction, but it’s not an introduction like you would normally think. An introduction that you would normally think of would be fairly comprehensive and cover that entire era from A.D. 100 to A.D. 500, give the main figures, the main ideas, etc. But what I’m doing in this book is offering a way of reading the Church Fathers, asking “How do we read them?”
Why is it important that we know about this foreign country of the Church Fathers?
Probably on a number of levels: First, the Fathers are the initial witnesses to the Gospel. Their priority in time doesn’t grant them any unique status in and of itself, but they belong to the same language family in which the Gospel was first preached by the apostolic emissaries as they went out in the Roman world; that world is their world. So their exegesis of the New Testament can be very insightful at times because they’re coming at it from the point of view of people who know that world better than we do.
Second, the great theological dogmas of the faith – the Trinity and the incarnation – are hammered out by the Fathers. So they give us landmarks that we would be very foolish to reject. I think especially for a lot of contemporary evangelicals who have a Baptistic kind of polity, which has basically wanted to be “people of the book,” they have shown no interest in the history of the church. The Fathers are very necessary for us.
Third, our Baptistic forbearers were quite convinced that the problem the church faced between the New Testament and the Reformation period was a wrong turn, or a number of wrong turns, toward the end of the Patrisitc age, at the onset of the Middle Ages (around 500). They wanted to go back and read the Fathers as elder brothers or read them as fellow witnesses to the truth. Therefore, they highly prized the Fathers. That’s one thing I point out in the book: it’s a fairly recent thing for people basically to forget the early church. Prior to the 19th century, the church had pretty keen appreciation for the Fathers. Since the 19th century, the whole creed that says “There’s nothing but the Bible,” has destroyed the bridge back to the Fathers, because we’ve seen ourselves as “people of the book” with no indebtedness to the Patristic period.
How did you choose which of the Fathers to cover in your six case-studies?
Well, I think the characters I chose cover a wide variety of types of themes and issues. With Ignatius of Antioch, you have one of the very earliest witnesses to the Gospel after the New Testament dealing with the critical issue of martyrdom. The body of the martyr is the boundary line of the church, in their thought. On one side is the church, and on the other side is the culture or the Roman world. So anyone who is going to look at that early period has to deal with the spirituality and theology of martyrdom. So Ignatius of Antioch fits that model.
The Letter to Diognetius is an evangelistic tract, apologetic in nature. This letter was very big between 150 and early 300s when it came to sharing the Gospel with pagans and defending the Gospel. Again the Letter to Diognetius fits that model there.
If anything, the Fathers are Scriptural theologians. They’re biblicists in one sense: they’re seeking to understand the Bible and to respond to the Bible, to see how the Bible deals with issues that arise in their day. Origen is a classic case because of his development of allegorical exegesis. And he is very suspect, so in some ways what I’m doing in my chapter is kind of a rehabilitation of Origen. Not so much in terms of affirming all of the things he argued for in terms of allegorical exegesis, but trying to understand him, asking, “Why did he move along this pathway, and what can that teach us?”
Worship is a central part of early Christian experience. So the argumentation I get into in Basil for the deity of the Holy Spirit is bound up with worship: the reason why the Holy Spirit is to be recognized as God is because He is worshiped. And so I touch on the whole area of the Eucharist there; the Eucharistic piety of two figures: Cyprian and Ambrose.
By the time you get to Basil, there has been a shift, obviously, from the church being persecuted, the church of martyrs, to not only being legally recognized, but also in the process of becoming the only religion in the Roman empire. So what does it mean to be a believer in a world where everyone is a Christian? Basil represents the church’s answer to that, which is monasticism. So the martyr is the paradigm of spirituality in the earliest period of the church. But in the second period, which begins with Constantine around 300 and runs all the way through to the Reformation, the monk is the paradigm or spirituality, a person who commits themselves to a celibate, acetic lifestyle. And so you have to deal with that. With someone like Basil, it’s very attractive. Because what he’s seeking to do is recapture the communal vitality of the early church found in passages like Acts 4, where it says “they had one heart and one soul.”
It’s important that the story of the early church not be a Romanocentric story, because we’re living in a world of global Christianity. So I’ve chosen the story of Patrick’s mission taking the Gospel to Ireland, Ireland never being part of the Roman world.
Did you leave anything out?
Probably a couple of areas I should have looked at but didn’t: one would be the whole area of preaching, using a man like Chrysostom; then maybe the Christological controversy in the fifth century about the nature of the incarnation.
While offering a few reasons for studying the Fathers, you write:
While history never repeats itself exactly, the essence of many of these heresies has reappeared from time to time in the long history of Christianity. For instance, postmodernity’s interest in spirituality though it rages against Christianity, has a numerous similarities to the lengthy battle against Gnosticism that occupied the church during the second and third centuries. Knowledge of the way that Christians in the past defended the faith against Gnosticism would provide helpful ways of responding to postmodern spirituality today (page 23).
Can you tease out the relationship between Gnosticism and postmodernity a bit?
I think a postmodern spirituality is a do-it-yourself spirituality; it’s very eclectic. And so, postmodernity, in terms of its spiritual expression, has a curious relationship vis a vis the body. On the one hand, there is very much an affirmation of a this-worldliness in terms of the importance of the body and the material realm in this life. So you have interest in environmental issues and you’ve got often a woman affirming that it’s her body, and therefore it’s a justification for abortion. But when it comes to the future world, the body suddenly gets junked. You look at a lot of postmodern spirituality – guys like Eckhart Tolle – and it teaches that the real you is not your body, it’s your spirit, it’s that divine spark which, after death, is going to rejoin God. This has enormous similarities to the Gnostics that the early church had to fight, for whom the material realm was irredeemable, irredeemably evil. Obviously there is a difference in the way a lot of postmoderns view the material realm and the way the Gnostics view the material realm, but in terms of what happens after death, there is a significant similarity: for postmodernity, the idea of the resurrection of the body, the restoration of the body and of this creation is not high on their agenda. And that’s similar to the Gnostics. The early church had to defend itself against this. On the one hand, they had to emphasize the goodness of the material realm, while on the other hand, indicate that it was flawed, it was fallen and therefore in need of restoration. And then they had to focus on the affirmation of the resurrection of the body.
You seem to present the Fathers not only as figures from whom we should learn academically, but also those whom are significant examples of piety.
What the Fathers can help us with is not simply thinking through various doctrinal positions, but also their walk with God and their own devotional practices and prayer life. There are paragraphs in some of the Fathers that are very powerful. And having read them because I’ve taught them and gone over them – I’ve probably taught about the early church 30 times or more. So much of it is pretty deeply woven into my thinking. And a lot of it has to do with their piety. So I think the Fathers can be enormously helpful when thinking through our own walk with God.
Your last chapter, “Walking with the Church Fathers: My First Steps on a Lifelong Journey,” is a biographical sketch of your study in Patristics. Why did you include it?
I felt that a good way to close the book would be to sketch out, “What has it meant to walk with the Fathers for me personally?” I think for me, doing church history is a very personal experience. I’ll give you a parallel: for Ignatius of Antioch, to be a disciple is to be a martyr – for him. He never once says that everyone else, if they want to be a disciple, they have to be a martyr. But for him it is. And for me, to be a disciple is to be a historian. So it’s not just some academic exercise, or even an academic exercise with some Christian overlay. But it’s a very personal journey for me.
Who is going to read this book – for whom are you writing?
I’m aiming at two main audiences: one is pastors and church leaders and Christian leaders in a variety of contexts who would awaken to the realization of the importance of reading the Church Fathers, as well as helping them to read the Fathers. And the second is seminarians, those training to be ministers, which would mean then that it needs to be read by seminary professors in order to be used as a seminary text.
And what would you like to be the effect of the book on its readers?
My hope is that readers cultivate over their Christian walk a growing awareness of the Church Fathers, so they would pick up Augustine’s Confessions, and it would become a part of their reading program, and it would be a book they would come back to a number of times. Or they would pick up the Letter to Diognetius or – and I don’t talk about this in there – the Homilies of Macarius Symeon or the Letters of Benedict. And these would be built into the warp and woof of their Christian thinking and also their Christian practice.
Where should readers begin their readings in the Church Fathers?
I think probably the best entry point is Augustine’s Confessions. Not that you’re going to agree with everything in there, but if there’s anything that has a modern feel to it, Confessions does. And then maybe the sermons of Macarius Symeon might be an interesting read, the Apostolic Fathers book, probably the Letter to Diognetius, the First Letter of Clement, Basil of Caesarea’s On the Holy Spirit and Athanasius’ On the Incarnation of the Word. But there is nothing that can be substituted for actually reading the Church Fathers. So the goal of the book is not so much “Okay, you’ve read it, great.” But the goal is “Okay, now I’ve got to graduate and go on and read the Fathers.”
Michael A. G. Haykin is Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has authored numerous books including: The Spirit of God: The Exegesis of 1 and 2 Corinthians in the Pneumatomachian Controversy of the Fourth Century (E. J. Brill, 1994); One Heart and One Soul: John Sutcliff of Olney, His Friends, and His Times (Evangelical Press, 1994); Kiffin, Knollys and Keach: Rediscovering Our English Baptist Heritage (Reformation Today Trust, 1996); ‘At the Pure Fountain of Thy Word’: Andrew Fuller as an Apologist (Paternoster Press, 2004); Jonathan Edwards: The Holy Spirit in Revival (Evangelical Press, 2005); The God Who Draws Near: An Introduction to Biblical Spirituality (Evangelical Press, 2007); The Christian Lover: The Sweetness of Love and Marriage in the Letters of Believers (Reformation Trust, 2009); The Empire of the Holy Spirit (Borderstone Press, 2010); Rediscovering the Church Fathers: Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church (Crossway, 2011). Haykin is the director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies and blogs at Historia ecclesiastica. Haykin is married to Alison and they have two children, Victoria and Nigel.
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