Nathan MacDonald on the Rule of Faith

Nathan MacDonald (lecturer of OT at St. Andrews but currently working away at the University of Gottingen) has a robust rejoinder to readings of the Rule of Faith as an overarching narrative of Scripture. This appears in the forthcoming issue of Journal of Theological Interpretation 3.2 (2009): 267-84 in a piece entitled: "Israel and the Old Testament Story in Irenaeus' Presentation of the Rule of Faith". The abstract reads:

"In recent years, it has become common to point to the early church's Rule of Faith as evidence for the reading of Scripture as an overarching story. Appeal is typically made to Irenaeus' account of the Rule of Faith with particular importance being attached to the rehearsal of the Rule in the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching. It has been argued that in Irenaeus' Demosntration the lacuna between the statements about God the Creator and the salvific events of the life of Christ are filled out with the story of God's dealings with Israel. This article rexamines Irenaeus's understanding of the Rule of Faith and argues that accounts of this sort are mistaken and invovle a misreading of the Demonstration. Irenaeus does not present a metanarrative that extends from creation to consummation; rather, he works with a two-part OT canon and shows how both parts prefigure and predict salvation in Jesus Christ. This article concludes with a reconsideration of the relationship between narrative and the Rule of Faith and how Israel is to be figured into Christian faith".

A good follow up to my Paul Blower posts previously!

Paul Blowers - Rule of Faith 3

"The regula fidei was authoritative for early Christians because it preserved a particular story (this story as opposed to another) as the ground and canon of faith. But therein also lay its properly doctrinal authority and its sanction of constructive theology. Reading through the principal renditions of the Rule of Faith, or through the Apostles' Creed of a later time, one is less struck by the pure linearity of the narrtive than by its 'thickness,' the sudden collapasing of divine eternity and humanity history in an economy initiatied and fulfilled by Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It's narrative flow as such runs through this thickness. Only God himself - principally by the strategy of the incarnation - can fully penetrate the thickness and make sense of its complexity. Yet from the church's faith-perspective, the economy stakes out a way of access, however restricted, to the very Godhead. It can rightly be argued that the Rule of Faith provided at least the groundwork of a trinitarian ontology which honored the mystery and integrity of the Three Persons just as it envisioned the destiny of creation within their extraverted life. It would be left to the ecumenical councils, and to great Christian thinkers of the fourth century and beyond - of the caliber of the Cappadocian Fathers, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, and Thomas Aquinas - to advance the search for suitable language and precise theological means to negotiate Christian faith between oikonomia and theologia, between theprophetic and evangelic narrative of divine self-revelation in history and the ineffable reality of the Triune God."

Paul Blowers - Rule of Faith 2

"For Irenaeus and Tertullian alike it is imperative to identify the Canon of Truth or Rule of Faith as Scripture's own intrinsic story-line in order to avoid the Gnostics' double-talk, their propagating of one myth on the philosophical level while still trying, on another level, to commnicate it with pieces of scriptural narrative. Thus when Irenaeus expounds the Rule of Faith for his friend Marcianus in his Epideixis, he does it literally by retelling the biblical story and indicating the underlying nexus between its constitute elements as though he were unfolding the sequences of a drama. The story of creation, paradise, and the fall present a prelude. There follows a long exhibition of redemptive history (christological excurses notwithstanding), beginning with the antediluvia stories of obedience and disobedience, then moving on to the patriarchs, the lawgiving, the exodus and conquest, the message of the prophets - all told, a history of promises fulfilled in the recapitulative work of Jesus Christ. Irenaeus completes his exposition in the Epideixis by setting out a host of ancient prophecies fulfilled in Christ, and at last displaying the glory of the new covenant and the prospective new life in the Spirit opened up to the Gentiles" (pp. 212-13).

Paul Blowers on the "Rule of Faith" - 1

I'm reading through Paul M. Blowers article "The Regulae Fidei and the Narrative Character of Early Christian Faith," Pro Ecclesia 6.2 (2007) and here is the first of a few quotes to follow:

"My premise here is that at bottom, the Rule of Faith (which was always associated with Scripture itself) served the primitive Christian hope of articulating and authenticating a world-encompassing story or metanarrative of creation, incarnation, redemption, and consummation. I will argue that in the crucial 'proto-canonical' era in the history of Christianity, the Rule, being a narrative construction, set forth the basic 'dramatic' structure of a Christian vision of the world, posing as an hermeneutical frame of reference for the interpretation of Christian Scripture and experience, and educing the first principles of Christian theological discourse and of a doctrinal substantiation of Chrsitian faith" (p. 202).

The Unity of Scripture - The Rule of Faith?

According to Irenaeus (Haer. 3.4.1-2), the rule of faith is: "one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, and all things therein, by means of Christ Jesus, the Son of God; who, because of His surpassing love towards His creation, condescended to be born of the virgin, He Himself uniting man through Himself to God, and having suffered under Pontius Pilate, and rising again, and having been received up in splendour, shall come in glory, the Saviour of those who are saved, and the Judge of those who are judged, and sending into eternal fire those who transform the truth, and despise His Father and His advent." Strictly speaking, Irenaeus calls this the "ancient tradition" which he says even the illiterate Barbarians have accepted.

The regula fidei is a summary of Christian teaching in narrative form. P.M. Blowers ("The Regula Fidei and the Narrative Character of Early Christian Faith," Pro Ecclesia 6 [1997]: 208) writes: "The Great Church committed itself not to a universally invariable statement of faith but to variable local tellings of a particular story that aspired to universal significance." It may be the case, then, that the narrative of the regula fidei is itself birthed from the narrative of the biblical witness to the act of the triune God in Jesus Christ and this is what constitutes the unity of Scripture.