Reading About the Early Church
After mentioning one or two of the early church Fathers in my preaching or teaching, I’m often approached by someone asking how an interested layperson can begin their own exploration of these great saints and writers. Here’s what I tell them.
The single best volume introducing the early church (by a wide margin) is University of Virginia scholar Robert Louis Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. This is not a church history, but an elegant introduction to the patristic mind and spirit.
Early Christian writers were constantly engaging with Scripture, but their way of reading is nothing like the historical-grammatical method I was taught in seminary. In Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible, John J. O’Keefe and Richard Reno introduce and defend a way of approaching the text that is much closer to the apostles.
There are a couple manageable ways to introduce some patristic interpretation into your own reading of Scripture. One is to acquire IVP’s Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture set, which compiles short reflections by different early Christian writers on each passage of Scripture. (This will probably be both cheaper and easier to use if acquired digitally in Logos or Accordance.) Just be aware that some of the authors they quote are of dubious orthodoxy, if not actual heretics. More than once I’ve found a great quote in this resource and then realized it was by Pelagius.
A free alternative is CatenaBible.com. Click the Settings icon in the top right corner to limit yourself to “Early Fathers” and then click on the Bible verse to see what
Many patristic works were translated into English in the late nineteenth century and are now freely available online. Unfortunately the archaic English makes them difficult to read. If you can, it’s worth spending $20 or so for the newly-translated volumes in SVS Press’s Popular Patristics Series.
Here are some good entry points to reading the Fathers for yourself:
St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation is a splendid overview of the gospel as the early church understood it. The SVS translation includes a famous foreword by C.S. Lewis, entitled “On the Reading of Old Books,” in which he extols the benefits of allowing “the clean sea breeze of the centuries” to blow through our minds.
St. Irenaeus of Lyons knew the bishop Polycarp, who was in turn a disciple of the Apostle John. Irenaus is the first true Christian theologian after Paul, and given his close links to the apostles, deserving of our respect. He wrote his massive Against Heresies against the bizarre teachings of the Valentinian Gnostics, who sound like the Mormons on LSD. Selections from this multi-volume work are collected in The Scandal of the Incarnation, edited by the great Catholic theologians Hans Urs von Balthasar. “For the glory of God is the living man,” writes Irenaeus, “and the life of man is the vision of God.”
Assumed for centuries to have been lost to history, a copy of Irenaeus’s On the Apostolic Preaching in Armenian was found in a Yerevan monastery library in 1904. This slim volume is a small biblical theology in which the whole Old Testament is read as pointing to Christ. I’ve updated the English of the old translation and made it available for you for free in EPUB format here.
St. John of Damascus is considered the last of the patristic authors. He lived under the Muslim conquest (his grandfather was the official who surrendered the city to the Saracens) and is the first Christian author to write about Islam. John’s An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith sums up and synthesizes the teachings of the Fathers who came before him, and is the closest thing we have to a patristic systematic theology. Be sure to get the new SVS translation which was published in 2022.
St. John Chrysostom (“the Golden Mouth”), who briefly served as Archbishop of Constantinople before offending the Empress, was one of the most brilliant preachers in Christian history. Chrysostom may be less theological than some of his brilliant contemporaries, but his sermons have endured because of their practical and moral force. A good taste of Chrystotom’s preaching can be found in the collection On Marriage and Family Life.
St. Augustine, was a brilliant mind and a towering figure in Western Christianity, and his Confessions are a masterpiece of spiritual self-reflection before the face of God. This classic iis available in many translations; I enjoyed this racy contemporary version by Sarah Ruden.
After that, of course, you have a lifetime to spend exploring the profound theology and spirituality of the early church fathers.
