THE REVIVAL OF PATRISTICS

 The Revival of Patristics

 

Stephen O. Presley June 3, 2025

 

On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual North American Patristics Society meeting entitled “The Future of Patristics.” This conference is the largest and most important for American scholars interested in ancient Christianity. Kannengiesser’s talk was something of a state of the union address for the discipline. With the skill of a seasoned academic, he synthesized the dramatic expansion of the study of early Christian studies in the twentieth century, which he characterized as “a patristic revival.” This renaissance of the Fathers—comparable to the Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century and the Jansenist and Benedictine revivals of the seventeenth century—points to the deeper cultural longing to connect with the religious heritage that once united us. Whether we recognize it or not, the twentieth century was a widespread ad fontes movement, when Western civilization went looking for its identity in the ancient world. 

The language of “revival” is no overstatement. Those who participated, and are participating in, the patristic revival of the twentieth and now the twenty-first century were motivated, whether consciously or subconsciously, by something Kannengiesser termed “a hermeneutic of European foundations.” The two World Wars, coupled with the dramatic technological revolutions and other social disruptions of the twentieth century, caught traditional institutions in the crosshairs and sparked a cultural gravitational pull toward the ancient church. The fruit of the larger “hermeneutic of European foundations” has also manifested in a variety of more practical movements, such as the classical education movement and the rise of civics centers that are popping up at universities across the country. These kinds of movements suggest that the revival of patristics was “only an episode in a far more outreaching shift of Christian life to something beyond post-Reformation and post-Enlightenment modernity.” 

We can see Kannengiesser’s prophetic words coming true as the membership of various denominations has slowly evaporated. Some have expressed hope that the tide will turn in the other direction—I pray that is the case—but for the past fifty years, there has been a slow, steady decline of religious communities and institutions. A parade of recent publications have documented the decline of the mainline denominations and the fracturing of evangelicalism into a thousand shards. In the modern period, all the major post-Reformation denominations are experiencing massive ruptures, with dwindling numbers and delayed maintenance of their crumbling institutions. Traditional evangelical institutions are struggling too. The recent news of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School closing its doors and relocating to a school in Canada is symbolic of the larger transitions happening; one of the most important evangelical seminaries of the twentieth century can no longer survive as an independent institution.

But what are the prospects of this return to the ancient church? One key feature that characterizes this modern revival is a return to the Bible. While this has taken the form of debates about methods of interpretation, the fundamental question for the early Church Fathers was not “how do we read the Bible,” because they lived outside a Christendom, where the patterns of life were pagan. They were much more concerned with demonstrating why we read the Bible. For the Fathers, the Bible provided the reality that governed them. The Fathers gathered around the table of the Scriptures and feasted together on the Word of God.

For the Fathers, the Bible was a culture-shaping text that envisioned a flourishing community looking to the Bible for a rule of life and living in the love of God and neighbor. The secret ingredient in the revolutionary rise of Christianity in the ancient church was the Bible—a point Kannengiesser recognized too. Modern critical interpreters of the Bible have analyzed it to death and imposed a chasm between what Kannengiesser called “today’s scientific exegesis of Scripture” and “the real people in all the churches.” While many have tried to traverse this chasm, the postmodern world is ushering in new challenges, especially technological ones, that are widening this divide. 

For the past twenty years, I have lived in both the worlds of evangelicalism and patristics, trying to make sense of both communities amid the complete revision of the institutions of Western civilization. When I look to the Fathers, I find that the Bible is, to borrow Northrop Frye’s phrase, the “great code” of Western civilization. The Bible in the early church, Kannengiesser concluded in his lecture, “served, in fact, as one of the irreplaceable keystones of Western traditions.” 

Looking back to the early centuries of the church, it is easy to see that the Bible is a culture-shaping text; it creates a vision of life and community that promotes human flourishing. The Scriptures were absorbed into the lives of the faithful, and through their lives, they became the leavening agents that transformed society. This story is told in countless books: Just skim Tom Holland’s Dominion, and you’ll see how much the church has shaped the West. Dependence upon the Bible is the underlying thread uniting all the essential institutions of Western culture. 

Through a unified reading of the prophets and apostles, the Fathers imagined a vision of life, or what Charles Taylor has called a social imaginary, with a synthetic view of God, the world, and the human person that are all journeying together toward the coming kingdom of God. The ancient Christians called others to join them on this journey because they recognized that only those who conform to the vision of life offered in Scripture will experience true human flourishing. 

This is where the Fathers can help us. For too long, we have been beholden to what Michael Legaspi calls the “academic Bible” and have ignored the “scriptural Bible.” The academic fixation on critical methods has dissected Scripture, killing the vibrant, holistic vision of life offered in its pages. We need the vision of biblical theology to bind us once again. When the people of God gather around the Bible, they share a common confession, a common metaphysic, and the patterns of a spiritual and liturgical life that performs the teachings of the Scriptures. “The church,” R. R. Reno observes in The End of Interpretation, “schools us to read Scripture well.” Through careful catechesis, liturgy, and preaching, the people of God learn how to inhabit the world as Christians and, consequently, shape our inherited cultural institutions in virtuous ways. This is what I hope the revival of patristics will ultimately produce. I hope that it will lead us back to the Scriptures, for there we find the story of the coming kingdom of God, and our place within that story.

https://firstthings.com/the-revival-of-patristics/