In this first volume of a two-volume project exploring early Christian hermeneutics, Frances Young examines doctrinal development in the first five centuries.  This volume focuses on the broad relationship between doctrine and scripture, and the second volume will look specifically at the doctrines of Christ and the Trinity as they relate to the scriptures. 

Noting the approaches of both Newman and Harnack, she suggests that doctrines arose as believers tried to make sense of the scriptures, that scripture and theology developed together.

Young argues that it may have been inevitable that scripture should generate doctrine.  Early Christian theologians worked within their contexts to articulate what the community had received from the apostles.  Christians, like other groups, operated in networks of schools in the early centuries.  These schools were like others of their time in that teachers advocated a particular lifestyle but different in that they welcomed the poor, slaves, and women.  Christians emphasized the importance of faith early on and identified as “believers.”  

Biblical texts were also important to Christians early, in part because so many Christians were also Jews.  Codices of scriptural texts were popular among communities of believers.  Young presents detailed close readings involving Marcion, Justin, Valentinus, and Irenaeus, whose concerns pushed Christians to define which books were scripture and also to explain more clearly what the gospel meant in the terms of their Greco-Roman world.   

Young’s discussions of Origen are pivotal; for Origen, doctrine determines right reading (with Jesus and Paul’s words as the hermeneutic), and right worship of the true God is crucial to anything else a Christian might do or claim.  In First Principles, speaking of the Holy Spirit, Origen moves clearly from scripture to doctrine, showing that he is following the apostolic tradition as it has emerged in the debates of the second century.  Origen’s view of haereseis is that they are alternatives to be explored so that the true and genuine might be revealed by way of contrast–a perspective very different from that of heresy even a century later.

In her chapter on creedal formulations and Cyril, Young traces the overall “ecology” within which Christians found the key doctrines of the Trinity and Christology, “already so related to other theological themes as to create a whole based on a coherent reading of scripture.”  She points to ways in which Christians were profoundly countercultural, as with the early Christian insistence that God had created the material world.

Overall, “doctrine provided the key to correct scriptural interpretation.  Yet that doctrine was itself distilled from scripture in a process of making sense out of it, turning its narratives and prophecy, psalms and wisdom into propositions that articulated the truth revealed.”  The canon of scripture came from the Christian network of schools and was determined as the rule of faith was also worked out and clarified.  They developed concurrently and “were coherent with one another.”  

A brief review cannot do justice to Young’s detailed readings of patristic thinkers in their contexts.  I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in patristic theology, the development of the scriptural canon, or systematic theology.  In particular, those who study Origen, Cyril, or Augustine will want to consider her work here.  Her second volume of Christology and the Trinity will complete this project in an important way.