Regula Fidei by Blowers PDF

DOCTORES ECCLESIAE
THE REGULA FIDEI AND

THE NARRATIVE CHARACTER
OF EARLY CHRISTIAN FAITH
Paul M. Blowers
Opening a fresh inquiry into the nature of self-definition in earliest

Christianity, Rowan Williams has recently argued that "the struggle
over 'orthodoxy' in the antenicene period is the struggle over which
kinds of criteria will prevail in communities calling themselves Chris- What kind
tian." 1 To the extent that the Rule of Faith (regula fidei), so often of rule was
considered a precursor of the later catholic creeds (namely, the the Rule
Apostles' Creed) played a central canonical role in that period, ongoing f Eaith ?
research in the history of Christianity in the first three centuries con
tinues to throw us back to the question: what kind of rule was the Rule
of Faith? How was it definitive and authoritative among Christian
communities when a Christian biblical canon was still in formation and
when the episcopate was not yet fully networked as an ecclesiastical
and magisterial infrastructure?
Paul M Blowers, Associate Professor of Church History, Emmanuel School ofReligion,

Johnson City, TN 37601.
1 Rowan Williams, "Does It Make Sense to Speak of Pre-Nicene Orthodoxy 7 " in The Making of
Orthodoxy Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, ed Rowan Williams (Cambridge Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 8
PRO ECCLESIA Vol. VI, No. 2 199

Adolf von Harnack's original thesis that the regula fidei was a kind of
hard copy of primitive baptismal confessions, a traditionalizing of the
gospel, and even, as propagated by Irenaeus against the Gnostics, "a
revealed system of doctrine and history" already well on its way to
thorough hellenization, has been generally rejected in more recent
Some studies scholarship. Studies like those of J.N.D. Kelly on the creeds and H.E.W.
have viewed Turner on orthodoxy and heresy rightly discouraged facile identifica-
the Rule as tion of the Rule with a creed and attempted to understand the broad
a principle and dynamic contexts in which the core of early Christian faith was
of tradition patterned and gradually formalized. Some studies have viewed the
signalling Rule as a principle of tradition signalling the church's authoritative
the church's possession of (and so too unanimity in matters of) the true faith, a
authoritative theory troublesome insofar as three of the four principal antenicene
possession of exponents of the Rule of Faith were non-bishops, two of whom (Ter-
t he true faith, tullan, in his Montanist period, and Origen) had famous tensions with
the episcopate. Other studies have understood the Rule as a doctrinal
principle internal to or latent in Scripture, the canon of truth behind
and so too "in" the emergent canon of Christian Scripture, the key to its
interpretation a theory which certainly has at least partial corrobora-
tion in Irenaeus and Tertullian. Still other studies, again with
2 Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, vol 2, trans Neil Buchanan (Boston Roberts Brothers,
1897), pp 27-31
3 Ibid, pp 245-247 For a recent critique of Harnack's view of the Rule, see Eric Osborn, "Reason
and the Rule of Faith in the Second Century AD," in The Making of Orthodoxy, pp 42-43
4 S e e J N D Kelly, Early Christian Creeds ,3rd ed (London Longman, 1972), and H E W Turner,
The Pattern of Christian Truth (London Mowbray, 1954) The equation of the Rule with a baptismal
confession has also now been largely rejected, on this point see Gerald Bray, Holiness and the Will
of God Perspectives on the Theology of Tertullian (Atlanta John Knox Press, 1979), pp 97-104
5 See in particular Damien van den Eynde, Les normes de l'enseignement chrtien dans la littrature
patristique des trois premiers sicles (Pans Gebalda & Fils, 1933), pp 281-323 Van den Eynde,
having located and analyzed all major references to the regula in Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hip-
polytus, Clement, and Origen, concludes that the Rule is "l'ensemble des doctrmes, considres
comme immuables, qui distinguent les glises d'avec les hrsies Synonyme de vrit et de
foi, la rgle de la vrit est cependant une expression plus technique elle exprime au mieux
la nuance de fixit et d'immutabilit qui s'attache la notion de doctrine chrtienne C'est le
contenu, suppos identique, de la rvlation, de la parole crite et de la doctrme traditionnelle
De plus, ce n'est que la partie principale et invariable du dpt apostolique, celle dont la
ngation ou alteration constitue l'hrsie Toutefois les Pres prsentent de prfrence la rgle
comme l'object de la tradition et de la catchse de l'glise, non pas qu'ils les identifient
absolument, mais parce que, leurs yeux, la tradition et l'accord des glises est la premire
norme de l'enseignement chrtien" (pp 312,313)
6 Indeed, at least one of Tertulliano renderings of the Rule comes after his Montanist
"conversion" (Adversus Praxean 2 1-2) See Osborn's criticisms ("Reason and the Rule of Faith,"
pp 43-44,57-58) Osborn notes additionally the historical problem of Irenaeus' and Tertulliano
attempts to guarantee the Rule through the doctrine of apostolic succession of bishops "they
had little warrant in history, but they projected back from the present reality of a church
universal to the kind of history which could have produced it" (pp 57-58)
7 Cf Johannes Kunze, Glaubensregal, Heilige Schrift und Taufbekenntnis (Leipzig Dorfflmg &
Franke, 1899), esp pp 92-185 Here Kunze defines the Rule as a baptismal confession used
polemically agamst heretics, intrinsically united with Scripture, of wnich it is both a comple-
ment and an explanation "regula fidei u a ist das antiharetisch gewendete, aus der heiligen
Schrift ergnzte und ausgelegte, Taufbekenntnis, diese, die Schrift selbst, miteingeschlossen,
oder auch regula fidei ist die gegen die Hretiker zur Einheit zusammengefasste heilige Schrift
alten und neuen Testamentes, insofern sie den im alten Taufbekenntnisse ausgesprochenen
Glauben zum Inhalte hat, dieses, das Bekenntnis selbst, miteingeschlossen" (p 185) Cf Turner,
200 Paul M. Blowers

legitimate evidence from the antenicene Fathers, have viewed the Rule
as the core of Christian doctrinal truth which stands on its own in
relation to Scripture, through which it is communicated, and to church
tradition, through which it is interpreted. In perhaps the most recent
study, Eric Osborn insists on the role of reason in the Rule, as implied
in the term regula itself. The Rule of Faith, says Osborn, was for three
of its premier exponents (Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of
Alexandria) a rule of strategic argument from, by, and for the integrity The ongoing
debate over the
of the Christian faith, in which "limit, logic, definition, simplicity and
truth" were tied up with the unity of God and the oneness and emergence of
universality of the church. heresy and
The ongoing debate over the emergence of heresy and orthodoxy in orthodoxy in early
early Christianity, part of which has been in response to Walter Bauer's Christianity
thesis on the early extent of heterodoxy and the lateness of "or looms in the
thodoxy," certainly looms in the background of modern studies of the background of
regula fidei. Much attention has understandably been given to the modern studies of
categorically negative or restrictive nature of the Rule, the (exag the regula fidei.
gerated?) claims to its universally-binding character amid the stagger
ing diversity of earliest Christianity. The presumption in some studies
is that the early presence of counter-systems and counter-myths was
the primary catalyst behind the formation and maturation of the Rule.
William Farmer, for example, has credited Marcion's counter-regula as
The Pattern of Christian Truth, pp 350,352 "The Rule may be either an internal or an external
standard of reference [in relation to Scripture] or, more probably, partake of both " Turner
denies any direct identification of the regula with a baptismal creed, seemg it more likely
functioning as a guide to catechists than a test for neophytes Ellen Flesseman-van Leer, m her
Tradition and Scripture in the Early Church (Assen Van Gorcum 1953), pp 178-185,194, identifies
the Rule as the immanent or "real content of revelation, the fundamental tenor of the one
message of Scripture," such that to follow the regula exegetically is to interpret single passages
of Scripture in the light of the meanmg of the whole Once again, however, the Rule is not only
embedded m Scripture, it is embedded m the church as well Cf also Alfred Bengsch,
Heilsgeschichte und Hellswissen Eine Untersuchung zur Struktur und Entfaltung des theologischen
Denkens im Werk 'Adversus Haereses' des Hl Irenaus von Lyon (Leipzig St Benno-Verlag, 1957),
59 "fur Irenaus die Glaubensregel die Norm der Schnftmterpretation ist [und] ist fur ihn
offensichtlich eine Zusammenfassung der wichtigsten und entscheidenden Schriftaussagen "
Also opting to see the Rule as a principle of scriptural mterpretation is R F Refoul m his
Introduction to Tertullian Traite de la prescription contre les hrtiques, Sources Chrtiennes [SChr]
46 (Pans Cerf, 1957), pp 51-53
8 See most notably Bengt Hagglund, "Die Bedeutung der 'regula fidei' als Grundlage theologis-
cher Aussagen," Studia theologica 12 (1958) pp 1-44 Hagglund (pp 33,35ff) identifies the Rule
with the very content and totality of the Christian faith which has Christ himself as its source
() "Die 'regulafidei'setzt voraus, dass der Inhalt des christlichen Glaubens vom Anfang
an eine Einheit bildet Keine nachtragliche Systematisierung, kerne Notwendigkeit der
Haresiebekampfung haben das Lehrgebude der christlichen Theologie geschaffen, wenn auch
die verschiedenen Ausfuhrungen dieses Lehrgebudes sekundr sind Denn der Inhalt des
Glaubens hegt ursprnglich als eine Totalitt, eine zusammenhangende Ordnung vor, die
mit der regula fidei und mit dem in der Schrift bezeugten, gttlichen Heilsordnung
zusammenfallt " Cf also J Waszink, "Tertulliano Principles and Methods of Exegesis," m
Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition, ed William Schoedel and Robert
Wilcen(Paris Beauchesne, 1979), pp 24-26 "for Tertullian the regula fidei and Holy Scripture
exist beside each other as autonomous magnitudes "
9 Osborn, "Reason and the Rule of Faith," passim, and esp pp 57-58 On the connection of
regula and ratio in Roman legal tradition, significant especially for Tertulliano use of the term,
see Bray, Holiness and the Will of God, pp 102-103
PRO ECCLESIA Vol VI, No 2 201

ultimately the most important catalyst to the solidification of the
catholic regula fidei of the second century, with its bold affirmation of
the oneness of God, Creator and Father of Jesus Christ. More recent
studies, however, on the dynamics of unity and diversity, orthodoxy
and heterodoxy, on the interrelation between Scripture and tradition
in antenicene Christianity, and on the formative role of narrative in
early Christian faith, have provided good reason to look again at the
nature, authority, and function of the regula fidei. In what follows my
The Rule of Faith purpose will be to examine, in the light of recent scholarship, and
served the through probing again into the antenicene sources themselves, the
primitive formation of the Rule of Faith in the context of a root struggle for
Christian hope "Christian" identity understood precisely as identification with and
of articulating "in" a narrative in the early Christian communities. Without denying
and authenticating the inevitable role of the various renditions of the Rule of Faith in theologi-
a world- cal polemics, my main focus is its narrative and dramatic dimension. My
encompassing premise here is that at bottom, the Rule of Faith (which was always
story or associated with Scripture itself) served the primitive Christian hope of
metanarrative articulating and authenticating a world-encompassing story or metanar-
of creation, rative of creation, incarnation, redemption, and consummation. I will
incarnation, argue that in the crucial "proto-canonical" era in the history of Chris-
redemption,and tianity, the Rule, being a narrative construction, set forth the basic
consummation, "dramatic" structure of a Christian vision of the world, posing as an
hermeneutical frame of reference for the interpretation of Christian Scrip-
ture and Christian experience, and educing the first principles of Christian
theological discourse and of a doctrinal substantiation of Christian faith.
Underlying my investigation, admittedly, is an interest in a set of issues
that continue to weigh heavily on Christian theology and hermeneutics
today: the nature of the authority of Scripture for the church; the
capacity of the diverse forms of discourse in Scripture (principally
narrative discourse) to convey theological concepts and to supply the
precedents of doctrinal definition; the hermeneutical possibilities and
risks involved in "telescoping" the Bible as a whole in terms of a rule
of faith or a creed; the challenges to Christian communities to retain
and yet transcend their own particularity in recognizing a traditional
rule of faith or an ecumenical creed; the extent to which any such regula
or creed, in providing the contours for an "orthodox" interpretation of
Scripture, could yet allow for diversity of insight into, and appropria-
tion of, its meaning. Writing as a historian of early Christianity rather
than as a systematic or hermeneutical theologian, however, my prin-
cipal project is less to launch headway into the contemporary debate
on these issues than to explore the beginnings of the church's struggle
(consciously and unconsciously) to develop a wisdom about them.
10. William Farmer, "Galatians and the Second-Century Development of the Regula Fidei," The
Second Century 4 (1984): pp. 143-170.
202 Paul M. Blowers

THE STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY-THROUGH-NARRATIVE
IN EARLIEST CHRISTIANITY
N.T. Wright, in the first volume of his New Testament theology, has
carefully demonstrated that what held earliest Christian communities
together, the unity deeper still than their ethnic, geographical, and
confessional diversities, was the fact that
they told, and lived, a form of Israel's story which reached its climax in
Jesus and which then issued in their spirit-given new life and task. Their
diversities were diverse ways of construing that basic point; their
disputes were carried on not so much by appeal to fixed principles, or
to Jewish scripture conceived as a rag-bag of proof-texts, but precisely
by fresh retellings of the story which highlighted the points at issue.
Their strong centre, strong enough to be recognizable in works as
diverse as those of Jude and Ignatius, James and Justin Martyr, was not
a theory or a new ethic, not an abstract dogma or rote-learned teaching,
but a particular story told and lived.
It was a story beginning with the one God, Abraham's God, who
turned out to be not only the Covenant-keeper with Israel but the
Creator of the universe and Lord of the nations whose most decisive
apocalyptic and cosmic-redemptive action was realized in Jesus of It was a story
Nazareth. The apostolic churches were well aware of the peculiarity of beginning with
their monotheistic theology long before Marcion appeared with an the one God,
alternative reconstruction of the Christian story that promised the Abraham's God,
removal of calumnious links between Abraham's God and Jesus' who turned out to
Father. From the outset the very scandal of "Christian monotheism," be not only the
on which the apostolic communities staked their liturgy, their sacra Covenant-keeper
ments, their preaching, their "past" and their future, was precisely the with Israel but
storied claim that the Creator-God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the the Creator of
God of Israel's prophets, was also the God who sent his servant Jesus the universe
and raised him from the dead (Acts 3:12-26), the God who was actually and Lord of
in Jesus Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19), thereby the nations whose
vindicating Jesus himself as sovereign Lord (1 Cor. 8:6; Phil. 2:9-10, etc.). most decisive
Attempts to set out the core of the Christian faith in the form of a regula apocalyptic and
arose from complex centrifugal and centripetal forces at work among cosmic-redemptive
churches that claimed apostolic status but remained distinguished by action was
significant differences of tradition-history, hermeneutics, theological realized in Jesus
conceptualization, and patterns of symbolism. Indeed, these were of Nazareth.
communities that were striving to tell their own stories at the same time
that they were participant in the construction of a unifying worldview,
an embracing metanarrative of salvation in Jesus Christ. The shared
challenge of "Christian" identity was to reconstruct the story of Jesus
11 Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, vol 1 in his Christian Origins and the
Question of God (Minneapolis Fortress Press, 1992), 456

the Christ in its dramatic fullness as both the cosmic story a narrative
comprehending the destiny of all creation and all peoples and as the
genuine "final act" to the peculiar sacred story of Israel. Rowan
Rowan Williams Williams has rightly insisted on the need to align the historical pos
has rightly sibility of "pre-Nicene orthodoxy" with the fundamental quest for
insisted on the "Christian identity" in this period. Accordingly, before we ask just how
need to align the the true faith was lost or gained, we must take full account of the Sitz
historical im Leben of the dispersed Christian communities themselves, the
possibility restrictions on their sense of being a new "race" {genos), inhabiting a
of "pre-Nicene common world, and having a shared past and collective memory.
orthodoxy" Before we speak of "orthodoxy" per se we must address issues of basic
with the correlation and accountability sustained by networks of personal con
fundamental tacts among Christian communities as mission communities, "resident
questfor aliens" devoid of a purely "locative" center of religious identity. Once
"Christian again we are back to communities of moral discipline and formation
identity" seeking to find their identity in, and accountability to, an originating
in this period. and integrating moral "story," the universal drama of redemption
narrated in the Hebrew scriptures and the emerging gospel traditions
and apostolic writings. We are back to Christian communities for
whom, prior to the closing of a Christian biblical canon, sacred "scrip
ture" (using William Graham's thesis that sacred "scripture" is a much
larger reality than written text) itself shapes belief and practice less as
written than as oral text, as a word heard and "memorized, sung and
chanted, read aloud, recited, retold, and woven into the texture of their
language, thought, and being as auditory facts." Within this setting,
as Rowan Williams further observes, the Christian "canonical narrative
tradition" was a kerygmatic tradition the principal object of which was
less the communication of principles and injunctions than the bringing
of the hearer into 'dramatic' relation with the subject of the story
offering the hearer a new self-definition determined by his or her stance
12 For a full discussion of the struggle of the apostolic communities to find their identity
foundationally through story or narrative, see Wright's highly detailed analysis, ibid, pp
371-443, on the centrality of narratio in second-century Christian sources, see Basil Studer,
Trinity and Incarnation The Faith ofthe Early Church, trans Matthias Westerhoff (Edmburgh
& Clark, 1993), pp 22-24
13 Williams, "Does It Make Sense to Speak of Pre-Nicene Orthodoxy 7 " pp 5-10
14 Ibid, pp 11-14 Cf Robert Markus, "The Problem of Self-Definition From Sect to Church,"
in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, vol 1 The Shaping of Christianity in the Second and Third
Centuries, ed Sanders (Philadelphia Fortress Press, 1980), esp pp 5-8 Markus argues that
it would be premature to view the Rule of Faith, together with the "apostolic tradition" or the
canon of the New Testament, as "criteria of orthodoxy" strictly speaKing, smce they actually
met a more fundamental need of demarcatmg Christian "identity" m relation to the diversity
of sects in the Greco-Roman world Particularly m Tertullian, the issue of "orthodoxy" collapses
mto that of survivability in a religious milieu teemmg with competing sects Early on, says
Markus, "Orthodoxy is what is acceptable m churches which satisfy the criteria of a true
church "
15 See Wayne Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality (New Haven Yale University Press,
1993), pp 189-219
16 William Graham, Beyond the Written Word Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion
(Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1987), 7
204 Paul M. Blowers

toward Jesus, offering a place within the story itself, as recipient of
forgiveness and of judgment, as colluding with the betrayal of Jesus and
sharing in the power of the risen Lord. As in the Deuteronomic formulae
of the Old Testament, the addressee of the words uttered in the narrative
past is the hearer in the actual present.... The transforming encounter
with Christ is renewed and deepened in the repeated hearing of the
story, in words and in ritual enactment: there is more growth to be
undergone towards the stature of Christ, and the hearing of the story is
part of the work of Christ's 'spirit' generating that growth. But for that
hearing to go on being a hearing of the same story, canons of authoriza-
tion are necessary for those who tell or enact it; otherwise the story loses
its distance or difference, and so its converting power, by becoming
simply a story I choose to tell to myself. It may be that the very nature of
the basic Christian narrative carries the notions of canon and orthodoxy with
it, in the sense that it resists schematization into a plan of salvation that can
be reduced to a simple and isomorphic moment of self-recognition in response
to illumination17
THE RULE OF FAITH AND THE AUTHORITY OF THE CHRISTIAN

NARRATIVE: IMMUTABILITY AND VARIATION, UNIVERSALITY
AND PARTICULARITY
Whether or not one accepts the thesis that the Rule of Faith was
"imposed" on Scripture by the church as a summary of right doctrine
It was a drama
or as a principle of interpretation, it is doubtless true that the earliest
gradually
exponents of a Christian regula regarded it as representing the kind of
unfolded with a
authority which "Scripture" (broadly speaking) conveyed: essentially
coherent plot,
the authority of a story, or a divine gospel (Gal. 1:11) enshrined within
climaxing in the
a grand story, with God himself as the primary narrator. It was a drama
coming of Jesus,
gradually unfolded with a coherent plot, climaxing in the coming of
who held the
Jesus, w h o held the secret to the story's ending. A n d yet the
secret to the
dnouement, while "certain" insofar as the earlier plot of the story
story's ending.
pointed to it, remained mysterious, enlisting the crucial participation
of the "audience" of the drama, that is, the audience's own "perfor-
mance" in the drama's last act. With the Rule of Faith, from the outset,
17 Williams, "Does It Make Sense to Speak of Pre-Nicene Orthodoxy 7 " 16 (emphasis added)
See also idem, "The Literal Sense of Scripture," Modern Theology 7 (1991) pp 121-134 Here
Williams likewise insists that Christianity inherently takes for granted that "meaning" is
necessarily unfolded diachronically, as in a narrative "Christian language takes for
granted that meanmgs are learned and produced, not given in iconic, ahistoncal form It
grows out of a particular set of communal and individual histories, and its images and idioms
are fundamentally shaped by this fact And, m workmg through concepts like penitence,
conversion and hope, m its commitment to the freedom of God and God's grace to draw
historical realities mto a future as yet undetermined, it resists the notion that the understandmg
of faith can be only a moment of interpretative perception with its own synchronic integrity
and completeness, as opposed to a process with strong elements of risk and provisionahty "
18 On the way that scriptural authority continues to function in the church precisely as story
or drama, see Wright, "How Can the Bible Be Authoritative 7 " Vox Evangelica 21 (1991)
pp 7-32, and esp pp 18-19 On the early Christian problem of "endings" to the biblical story,

we have to do with a norm of Christian faith and practice which, like
the "canonical narrative tradition" in its fullness, had as its most basic
The Rule of Faith and positive thrust the faithful hearing and interpretative "perfor-
itself provided mance" (doctrinally, ritually, pastorally, ethically etc.) of the story
in its most within the church. The danger is to lose the Rule of Faith in a larger
substantive morphology, to view it purely in a "documentary" relation to later
renditions creeds and canons of orthodoxy without keeping in precise focus its
a basic digest properly religious function for second- and third-century Christians.
of the After all, the Rule of Faith itself provided in its most substantive
Christian story, renditions, variations notwithstanding, a basic digest of the Christian
story, rehearsing in binitarian or trinitarian clauses the acts of the
principal players in the drama of salvation: the one God who created the
world, the Son of God who became incarnate, was crucified, exalted, and
would prospectively come again in judgment; the Spirit who inspired the
prophets and who sanctifies the faithful in the present.
William Countryman has argued that the regula fidei was actually an
"oral text" given to performance, not in primitive Christian baptismal
liturgies or in preaching but ostensibly in catechesis. He suggests that
the variable renditions of the Rule make sense if the Rule was recited,
in the manner of the ancient epics, with variant embellishments con-
sidered by the performer-catechist to be appropriate to the occasion.
This is a provocative thesis but it does present certain initial problems.
In the first place, as analysts of oral cultures indicate, the greater the
brevity of an oral text, the more easily it is memorized and traditioned,
and the more unlikely it is to admit of variation in rendition. If the Rule
see Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality, pp 174-188,192-195, and Frances Young, Virtuoso
Theology The Bible and Interpretation (Cleveland Pilgrim Press, 1993), pp 81-87 Young's larger
study here develops at length the paradigm of the Church's interpretation of its sacred and
self-involving narrative as "performance " This paradigm was deftly articulated by Nicholas
Lash in his essay "Performing the Scriptures" in Theology on the Way to Emmaus (Cambridge
Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp 37-46, cf also David Ford, "System, Story, Performance
A Proposal about the Role of Narrative in Christian Systematic Theology," reprinted m Why
Narrative7 Readings in Narrative Theology, ed Stanley Fiauerwas and L Gregory Jones (Grand
Rapids Eerdmans, 1989), esp pp 202-204 Ford uses the concept of "performance" in conjunc-
tion with the whole "ecology" of processes at work in the Christian reception and mterpretation
of Scripture, and especially "a process m which lexis and praxis are the mam focus and m which
dramatic and narrative content are taken seriously "
19 See Frances Young, The Making of the Creeds (Philadelphia Trinity Press International, 1991),
pp 8-12, cf Rowan Greer, Broken Lights and Mended Lives Theology and Common Life in the Early
Church (University Park, Perm Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), pp 2-7
20 For the most substantive appearances of the Rule, see Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 1 10 1
(SChr 264 154-158), 1 22 1 (SChr 264 308-310), 3 4 2 (SChr 211 116), Epideixis 3, 6 (Ancient
Christian Writers, no 16 49-50, 51), Tertulhan, De praescriptwne haereticorum 13 1-6 (SChr 46
106-107), De virginibus velandis 1 (ed F Oehler, QS F Tertulliani quae supersunt omnia [Leipzig
Weigel, 1853], 1 pp 883-884), Adversus Praxean 2 1-2 (ed Ernest Evans, Tertulliano Treatise
Against Praxeas [London SPCK, 1948], pp 90-91), Origen, De principiis Bk 1, Pref 2-8 (SChr
252 78-88) Most of these texts, as well as some alternative forms of the Rule m other authors,
were assembled m the still valuable Bibliothek der Symbole und Glaubensregeln der alten Kirche,
2nd ed , ed August and Ludwig Hahn (Breslau E Morgenstern, 1877), 1-12 On the major
recensions of the Rule, see also van den Eynde, Les normes de l'enseignement chrtien, 281-313,
and Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 76-88
21 William Countryman, "Tertulhan and the Regula Fidei," Second Century 2 (1982) pp 208-227
206 Paul M. Blowers

of Faith was for its principal exponents a universally-binding "short
w o r d " for or miniature body (; corpusculum) of the totality
of the apostolic faith, it would not seem intrinsically or commonly to
have admitted of additions, embellishments, or deletions, particularly Vanants in
as "performed" orally in pre-baptismal catechesis where consistency rendition
would have been imperative. Indeed, Irenaeus and Tertullian are inevitably
notoriously insistent on the Rule's originality, immutability, and ir- stemmed from the
reformability though some (including Countryman) have con needs of the local
sidered these primarily rhetorical assertions aimed at bolstering the churches to
Christian communities' confidence in the apostolic integrity of the Rule. combat heresy
Countryman rightly begins, however, with the fact that variant rendi and so also from
tions of the regula fidei in and among antenicene authors do show u p the interests of
differences of structure, wording, and length. He reconciles the "im local bishops to
mutability" and "variability" of the Rule by pointing to the dynamic safeguard the
Sitz im Leben of catechesis, in which the Rule provided a kind of exposition of
"course-outline," a core syllabus of Christian doctrine with relative apostolic doctrine
latitude for teachers to expand upon its different aspects. Variants in within their
rendition inevitably stemmed from the needs of the local churches to proper
combat heresy (in which case catechists would accentuate certain jurisdictions.
doctrinal nuances to make a point), and so also from the interests of
local bishops to safeguard the exposition of apostolic doctrine within
their p r o p e r jurisdictions (since the Rule " w o u l d normally be
proclaimed where interpretation could also be given"). N o rendition
of the Rule could alter the apostolic faith but its exposition was natural-
22 See Irenaeus, Epideixis 87, citing Rom 9 28 The phrase "short word" (verbum breviatum),
derived from Paul's reference to the word () that God would finish and shortly execute
( ) on the earth was also used to describe later creeds as summaries of
the apostolic faith Cf Origen, Comm in Rom 719(PG14 1154A),Eusebius,fl/? Faustus of Riez,
De symbolo 1 (PL Suppl 3 583), Rufinus of Aquileia, Expositw symboh (CCSL 20 133-134), John
Cassian, De incarnatione 6 3-4 (CSEL 17 327-329), see also Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 40 45
(SChr 358 304), who refers to the baptismal rule of faith as "an epitome of salvation" (
) On this tradition, see also Henri de Lubac, The Christian Faith An Essay on the
Structure of the Apostles' Creed, trans Richard Arnandez (San Francisco Ignatius Press, 1986),
31ff
23 Irenaeus,Adv haer 194(SChr264 150)
24 Cf Irenaeus, Adi; haer 1 10 2-3 (SChr 264 158-166), Tertullian, De virg vel 1 (ed Oehler, 1
883-884) In De praescr haer 13 6 (SChr 46 106-107), Tertullian specifically ascribes the Rule to
Christ himself (Haec regula a Christo)
25 Countryman ("Tertullian and the Regula Fidei, pp 211-214) analyzes in detail the three
principal renditions of the regula in Tertullian He sees them as addressed to diverse audiences,
and thus admitting of variations or accentuations appropriate to the particular needs of each
audience The Rule in De praescr haer 13 1-6 provides the more comprehensive rendition
expressing the antiquity of the apostolic faith, addressed primarily to orthodox believers
already familiar with its content, therein we see a fundamental bipartite affirmation of the one
God/Creator and his Son that highlights the Son's redemptive acts (close to the pattern of the
apostolic kerygma m Acts), to which is appended an affirmation of the Spirit as "sent" by the
Son to lead the faithful In De virg vel 1 3, Tertullian is more specifically addressmg virgins
whose behavior in church is improper, and insists here on the irreformability of the regula, he
thus offers a short and sweet affirmation of the one God/Creator and the Son in his redemptive
deeds, with no further mention of the truth Finally, in Adv Prax 2 1-2, from his Montanist
period, Tertullian offers again a tripartite (or trimtarian) affirmation of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit aimed particularly at countering the monarchianism of Praxeas and his sympathizers
26 Ibid,pp 222-226

ly given to some expansion and contraction. "When familiar heresies
threatened, the performer could point to the 'unalterable' regula which
believers had 'always' known. When some new and ingenious theologian
produced a new threat, against which the existing regula had no defense,
the performer could quietly revise the regula in order to counter it."
Certainly Tertullian in no way saw his allegedly "variant" renditions
of the Rule as genuinely divergent. For him it was the recent heretics
who changed the regula, or w h o truly added to it or subtracted from it.
The church, as the original depository of the apostolic faith and the
community in which the Christian canonical narrative tradition had
taken shape, knew better. It could instinctively discern the genuine
The Great Church elements. Over and beyond Tertullian, however, the issue of varia
committed itself tions in the rendition of an "immutable" Rule of Faith in the second
not to a century is less vexing when we consider that variability was intrinsic
universally to the early Christian canonical narrative tradition from the beginning.
invariable One only need look, for example, at the obvious variations in the
statement of faith narrative summaries of the apostolic faith in the sermon material in
but to variable Acts, variations which cannot all be explained away by reference to
local tellings of a different (viz. Jewish and Gentile) audiences in the foreground of Acts,
particular story and variations which clearly in Luke's mind do not compromise the
that aspired to fundamental kerygmatic integrity of the apostolic faith. In primitive
universal confessional material in the New Testament and in the Apostolic
significance. Fathers, as well as in the later emerging renditions of the Rule of Faith,
one finds binitarian (christocentric) and trinitarian formulations side
by side, such as would be expected of churches gradually processing
and assimilating the impact of Jesus' teaching and identity. 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. Analogously, Nicholas Lash has spoken of the
27 Ibid, pp 225-226
28 Countryman too acknowledges this ('Tertullian and the Regula Fidei," 217) "Somehow
both Tertullian and his audience have come to know the general and necessary structure of the
regula and also that they have some notion what embellishments and variations on it are
acceptable and what would somehow constitute a given performance as a new and different
composition "
29 Cf Acts 2 14-39, 3 13-26, 4 10-12, 5 30-32, 10 36-43, 13 17-41 C H Dodd charted the
variations m an appendix to his The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments, new ed (London
Hodder & Stoughton, 1944) More recently, see Marion Soards, The Speeches in Acts Their
Content, Context, and Concerns (Louisville Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), esp 182-208
Despite their variability, "Luke weaves speeches mto the narrative of Acts," writes Soards,
"and creates emphases so that the speeches articulate a distinct worldview" (183)
30 Even as late as Gregory Nazianzen m the fourth century, we find a basically binitarian
construction of the Rule of Faith, though a general affirmation of belief in the whole Trinity is
presupposed, see his Orat 40 45 (SChr 358 302-308) See also de Lubac, The Christian Faith, pp
62-72, who rightly determines that the evidence does not mdicate a pure evolution of a
christological faith mto a trinitarian one
31 Interestingly, even after the ratification of the first allegedly "catholic" symbol m 325, the
creed of Nicea did not suddenly supplant local baptismal confessions or local renditions of the
Rule of Faith, instead, the tendency throughout the Eastern churches was for local baptismal
symbols to be retamed and then interpolated to conform with Nicene orthodoxy See Kelly,
Early Christian Creeds, pp 254-262
208 Paul M Blowers

later catholic creeds as "abbreviated statements of a story which, as the
autobiography of the narrators and of the Christ 'in whom' they seek to
tell their story, is a particular story and which yet, as the story of the origin,
course and destiny of the world, purports to express what is universally
the case/' "Bearing the narrative character of the Creed in mind," Lash
further asserts, "...the difference between telling a story briefly and telling
the same story in more detail, and at greater length, is not always best
described by saying that we have 'added' something to the tale."
Returning to William Countryman's analysis of the second-century
Rule of Faith, another problem arises from his rather straightforward
comparison of it to an epic. Unlike the Iliad or other ancient epics, the
church's regula fidei was an epitome of a much wider "scriptural"
tradition, a broader body of received texts for which it purportedly Frances Young
served as an authoritative summary or digest. It was not a full-length insists that the
narrative delivered in epic style; here a more apt analogy might be regula fidei in its
Stephen's tragic narrative of Israel's history, climaxing in the execution various renditions
of her last and greatest Prophet, God's own Righteous One who held in a writer like
the key to the salvation of the world (Acts 7:2-53). Frances Young insists Irenaeus are
that the regula fidei in its various renditions in a writer like Irenaeus are hardly simple or
hardly simple or straightforward synopses of the scriptural story; they straightforward
do not themselves qualify as genuinely narrative constructions. A synopses of the
resum of the "plot" of Scripture, says Young, would rather begin with scriptural story.
God the Creator, and subsequently outline the Fall, the call of Abraham
and the patriarchal cycles, the descent into Egypt and the Exodus, the
conquest of the Promised Land and Israel's early history and dis-
obedience, the ministry of the prophets, the Exile and Restoration, the
life and acts of Jesus, and the church's mission and eschatological
vision. Instead, with Irenaeus' versions of the Rule of Faith in Against
Heresies, we have "abstracts" of Christian doctrinal principles, or
frameworks of theology, set forth within a particular Christian com-
munity in terms of a "plan of salvation" which elicits the true meaning
of Scripture in the particular context of a fierce struggle with Gnostics
and Marcionites. Young's point is this:
Proper performance of Scripture for Irenaeus depends in the end not on
canons of interpretation offered by the scriptures themselves, nor on a
sense of context within the flow of an overarching narrative history, but
rather on 'the plan of salvation', on what we might call the Christian
kerygma, on a framework belonging to the particular community
which designates these books as authoritative, a framework related to
these books but 'extra' to them, a framework passed down openly in a
32. Nicholas Lash, "Theologies at the Service of a Common Tradition/' in Theology on the Way
to Emmaus, p. 29.
33. Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles' Creed (Notre Dame,
Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. 16.
34. See Young, Virtuoso Theology, pp. 48-53.
I
tradition guaranteed as ancient and reliable, but honed and refined by
theological argument, modified by controversy, thought through in a
systematic way to meet the needs of the times. The extent to which this
'novelty7 was apparent to Irenaeus himself may be questionable; yet his
creative performance of the repertoire involved selection, development
and clarification, unconscious though it may have been.
One can scarcely dispute the fact that the Rule of Faith was not merely
extracted from Scripture but honed within ecclesial tradition, or that it
projected a kind of "framework" or "plan of salvation" on the basis of
which the churches could perform their scriptural interpretations in
concrete circumstances. From the standpoint of second-century Chris
tianity, however, Young overstates the extrinsic, particularistic, and
non-narrative nature of the regulafideiby insisting that it in no way
represented interpretative canons rooted in Scripture or a "sense of
context within the flow of an overarching narrative history." Indeed,
Far from being the presupposition of Irenaeus' whole theology of revelation is that the
imposed on church here and now, in its current witness, dwells in one and the same
Scripturefrom narrative world with the scriptural witnesses themselves, "prophets
without, the and apostles." There is a coherent trinitarian and christocentric
regula fidei bears perspective in "Scripture" (broadly speaking), discerned and tradi-
out the true tioned by the church, that sets the stage in advance for what a "faithful"
dramatic hearing and interpretative performance of it will be. Early authorities
narrative of like Irenaeus envision the church as by definition one catholic body
Scripture within receiving Scripture, already and always bound up in the process of
the church interpreting Scripture, and not just the sum total of particular com
universal, which munities of interpretation standing equidistant from a body of sacred
is its ever writ, entrenched in differences of language and tradition, and inevitab
contemporary ly imposing their own peculiar readings. Far from being imposed on
context. Scripture from without (in the manner that the Gnostics impose their
own abusive hermeneutical rules on the Bible), the regulafidei or
"canon of truth" ( ) as Irenaeus sometimes calls it
bears out the true dramatic narrative of Scripture within the church
universal, which is its ever contemporary context. We shall return to
this point momentarily.
Irenaeus and Tertullian alike relate the Rule to God's economy
(; disposition dispensatio), indicating not simply the truth-con
tent of revelation but God's overarching arrangement in divulging that
truth through a trinitarian and christocentric plot, or, strategy as it
35. Ibid., pp. 60-61.

36. See Denis Farkasfalvy, "Trophets and Apostles': The Conjunction of the Two Terms before
Irenaeus," in Texts and testaments: Critical Essays on the Bible and Early Church Fathers, ed. W.
Eugene March (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1980), pp. 109-134; and idem, "Theology
of Scripture in St. Irenaeus," Revue Bndictine 78 (1968): pp. 319-333.
37. Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 1.9.4 (SChr 264:150); 2.27.1 (SChr 294: 264); 4.35.4 (SChr 100: 876). Cf.
also van den Eynde, Les normes de l'enseignement chrtien, pt. II, ch. 7; Turner, The Pattern of
Christian Truth, p. 348ff.
210 Paul M. Blowers

were. That plot is at once irreducible, properly basic to Scripture and
apostolic tradition; but again, the fullness of the plot is still an object
for the church's discernment. In other words, the church's interpreta The church's
tive performance of Scripture is continuous with the scriptural plot interpretative
itself as belonging under the same larger economy, or within one performance of
overarching "context" that comprehends the whole history of God's Scripture is
self-disclosure from creation to judgment. Herein the struggle with the continuous with
Gnostics is not just a battle of straightforward or atomized doctrinal the scriptural plot
propositions, which presumably Irenaeus could have tendered in the itself as belonging
debate. It is more fundamentally a contention of "our story versus theirs,"
under the same
a collision of metanarratives, one Christian and one (or more) not. larger economy, or
Irenaeus indicates this in a celebrated passage in his Against Heresies, within one
where he argues that the Gnostics' intrusion of an ulterior narrative on overarching
Holy Scripture perfectly parallels the manner in which certain im- "context" that
posters take authentic Homeric verses out of order and chain them comprehends the
together to form a new narrative, an extraneous and alien whole history of
(argumentum). Though numerous possible meanings of this term have God's
been proferred ("subject matter," "general scheme," "groundwork," "ar self-disclosure
gument"), its best rendering here in Irenaeus, as Richard Norris and from creation to
Robert Grant have lately argued, is "story-line" or "plot," precisely as judgment.
in dramatic or rhetorical usage. Irenaeus' whole point is that the
38 See Irenaeus, Adv haer 110 3 (SChr 264 161-162) Tertulhan, Adv Prax 21-2 (ed Evans,
90-91), opens the rendition of the Rule of Faith with theses words "We, however, both always
and still more now, as better instructed by the Paraclete, that is, the bringer of all truth, believe
the only God, to be sure, yet under this dispensation which we call an 'oikonomia/ that "
39 See William Loewe, "Irenaeus' Sotenology Transposing the Question," m Religion and
Culture Essays in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, Sj,ed Timothy Fallon and Philip Riley (Albany
SUNY Press, 1987), pp 68-169 Loewe writes "What was at stake between Christianity and
Gnosticism was, m an oral-narrative culture, the true story about God and humanity By
constructing the Christian story around the notions of divme dispensation, recapitulation, and
the Pauline Christ-Adam typology, Irenaeus elaborated a myth wmch expressed simultaneous-
ly the Christian faith and his own creative originality In a word, Irenaeus met the Gnostic myth
with a Christian countermyth, a narrative expression of the role of Jesus m the story of God
and God's redemptive dealmgs with humanity" (p 169) In the "world of Irenaeus's narrative,"
the identity of the one God is no mere cognitive or speculative issue, for it is m this story that
a particularly identified God lays claim to numan moral commitment and, mdeed, discipeship
(pp 171-173) Also on Irenaeus' theology as an elaboration of the Christian story of recapitula-
tion m Christ, see Rowan Greer, Broken Lights and Mended Lives, pp 21-43
40 Irenaeus, Adv haer 19 4 (SChr 264 150) Here Irenaeus provides an example of such a novel
cento connecting various authentic Homeric verses There has been some scholarly debate over
its origin Jean Banilou, m his The Gospel and Hellenistic Culture (Philadelphia "Westminster
Press, 1973), 85, suggested that it was put together by Valentmus himself to use as an allegory
of the Gnostic redeemer myth Robert Wilken, m a separate study of "The Homeric Cento m
Irenaeus, 'Adversus Haereses' 1,9,4," Vigihae Chnstianae 21 (1967) pp 25-33, argued mstead
that Irenaeus merely picked up the Homeric cento mdependently ancfused it as an illustration
of the outrageous way that Gnostics twist and rearrange passages of Holy Scripture, and force
their doctrinal system on it
41 SeeW C van Unnik, "An Interesting Document of Second Century Theological Discussion
(Irenaeus, Adv Haer 110 3)," Vigihae Chnstianae 31 (1977) pp 206-20/ Bengsch (Heilsgeschichte
und Heswissen, 52) translates the term "foundation" {Grundlage), m conjunction with the
christocentnc, salvation-historical Hauptthema of Scripture
42 See Richard Noms, "Theology and Language m Irenaeus of Lyon," Anglican Theological
Review 76 (1994) pp 289-292, and Robert Grant, "Rhetorical Terms m Irenaeus' Theology,"
Studia Patristica Papers of the Twelfth International Conference on Patristic Studies (forthcommg)
Noms and Grant both cite Sextus Empincus, who allows, as one of three technical meanings
of the Greek term , the development of events m a drama The meaning fits the overall
argument against the Gnostic m Book 1 of Adversus Haereses

heretics have violated the integrity of the true plot that underlies all of
Scripture; they have imposed a new plot of their own fancy. He accuses
them, as Norris explains, of dividing thought and language by creating
an unhealthy opposition between their own hypothesis, which runs off
into extravagant speculation (venturing even to transcend [super-
gredior] God himselr ), and the actual language of the church's Scrip-
ture. The church's Canon of Truth meanwhile elicits the true hypothesis
of Scripture, its genuine story-line, while still safeguarding the
mystery of the God who authors that story. The church's exegesis
thereby remains confident but not presumptuous.
Earlier in his discussion Irenaeus had argued that the Gnostics jumbled
elements of Scripture like the gems in a mosaic and came up with a
rival picture, but this artistic analogy is not nearly as compelling as
the dramatic or poetic one. The latter appears again in Tertullian, who,
in censuring heresy, mentions those charlatans who have created their
own story out of lines from Virgil; and he notes once more the calamity
For Irenaeus and of the Homerocentones. Scripture, with its abundant and diverse
Tertullian alike it "resources" content-wise, is wide open to the same kind of abuse. But
is imperative to God, Tertullian argues a fortiori, intended Scripture to be arranged this
identify the Canon way precisely to furnish heretics their materials, since "there must be
of truth or Rule heresies" (1 Cor. 11:19). Clearly every heretical travesty is but a foil
of Faith as for the true story of Scripture, insisted upon by Tertullian more in terms
Scripture's own of an impeccable logic foundational to the scriptural revelation and
intrinsic internal to the mind of the true church.
story-line in order
to avoid the For Irenaeus and Tertullian alike it is imperative to identify the Canon of
Gnostics' Truth or Rule of Faith as Scripture's own intrinsic story-line in order to
double-talk. avoid the Gnostics' double-talk, their propagating of one myth on the
philosophical level while still trying, on another level, to communicate it
with pieces of scriptural narrative. Thus when Irenaeus expounds the Rule
of Faith for his friend Marcianus in his Epideixis (Demonstration of the
Apostolic Preaching), he does it literally by retelling the biblical story and
indicating the underlying nexus between its constitutive elements as
though he were unfolding the sequences of a drama. The story of creation,
paradise, and the fall presents a prelude. There follows a long exhibition
of redemptive history (christological excurses notwithstanding), begin-
ning with the antediluvian 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
43. Cf. Adv. haer. 2.25.4-2.26.1 (SChr 294: 254-258); the accusation is more explicit in Adv. haer.
4.19.1 (SChr 100: 616) and 5.31.1 (SChr 153: 389).
44. Ibid. 1.10.3 (SChr 264:162). See also note 64 below.
45. Norris, "Theology and Language in Irenaeus of Lyon," pp. 292-295.
46. Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 1.8.1 (SChr 264:112-116); 1.9.4 (SChr 264:150).
47. Tertullian, De praescr. haer. 39.5-7 (SChr 46: pp. 143-145).
48. See Osborn, "Reason and the Rule of Faith," pp. 53-57.
212 Paul M. Blowers

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.
Frances Young once more refuses to see even in this longer elaboration of
the Rule of Faith by Irenaeus a genuinely nanative re-presentation of
scriptural truth. She suggests that in its selectivity and its imposition of a
particular framework (a "plan of salvation") on the texts, this elaboration
serves, in a manner parallel to typological interpretation and the tradition
al apologetical "proof from prophecy," ultimately to collapse the whole
content of Scripture in relation to the Christ event. Certainly Irenaeus
was sophisticated enough to discern an overarching sequence in Scrip
ture, a sometimes broken sequence with "anticipations, repetitions,
recapitulations, reversals, ups and downs." And he was doing what
Christian communities in every age must do, reading Scripture in the light
of their own experience. But Irenaeus' scheme for digesting Scripture, like
Origen's, still assumed a particular semantic configuration which to a
severe degree "flattened" the text and intruded an ending in Christ that
did not do full justice to the "open-endedness" of the Christian story. Irenaeus himself
Young's underlying criticism here is that Irenaeus, Origen, and other shows little doubt
ancient Christians, despite having many sophisticated hermeneutical that there is
instincts, were still with their regulae caught up in the particularity of already a stability,
their own reconstructions of the biblical story, and thus insufficiently a fundamental
open to the prospect of new imaginings of that story. narrative
wholeness and
Be that as it may, Irenaeus himself shows little doubt that, not consistency,
withstanding some variations in the details included in any given in the
rendition, there is already a stability, a fundamental narrative whole of Scripture,
ness and consistency, in the of Scripture, and thus in the and thus
church's Rule of Faith. That is universally manifest, although in the church's
it is visibly authenticated only in those Christian communities Rule of Faith.
worldwide, rooted in the apostolic tradition, which have come to tell
this particular story of the faith in their confessional, ecclesial, and moral
commitments. Wayne Meeks is close to the mark in suggesting that in
the exposition of the Rule of Faith in the Epideixis we have Irenaeus'
serious attempt to represent the central story of Scripture as a story not
only of Israel but of the entire cosmos, a "moral drama" universally
formative of Christian identity and Christian virtue. Indeed, the
49 See Joseph Smith's thematic reconstruction of the Epideixis in his translation, St Irenaeus
Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, ACW 16 (Ramsey, J Paulist Press, 1952), vi-vn, pp 15-19
50 Young, Virtuoso Theology, pp 59-60
51 Ibid, 67ff,pp 79-84
52 Ibid,pp 86-87
53 Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality, 210 Meeks summarizes Irenaeus' plot-structure in
the Epideixis "Its beginning pomt is the creation of the world and the primal innocence and
subsequent disobedience of the first human couple, as told in Genesis Its climax is the incarnation
of the Word and Son of God, its dnouement, his coming again to judge all humankind "

bishop of Lyons makes clear in the Epideixis that what counts for new
disciples of the Christian faith is not only that Scripture's own narrative
plot be faithfully discerned and transmitted by believers, but that it be
evidenced and incarnated in the very thoughts and actions of those
who transmit it and who, in effect, make the stoiy their own. As Irenaeus
tells Marcianus, the Rule of Faith received in baptism first of all
admonishes us to remember that we have received baptism for the
remission of sins in the name of God the Father, and in the name of Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, who became incarnate and died and was raised,
and in the Holy Spirit of God; and that this baptism is the seal of eternal
life and is rebirth unto God, that we be no more children of mortal men,
The Rule in effect but of the eternal and everlasting God; and that the eternal and ever-
offers the believer lasting One is God, and is above all creatures, and that all things
a place in whatsoever are subject to Him; and that what is subject to Him was all
made by Him, so that God is not ruler and Lord of what is another's,
the story but of His own, and all things are God's; that God, therefore, is the
by commending almighty and all things whatsoever are from God.
away of life
framed by The Rule in effect offers the believer a place in the story by commending
the narrative a way of life framed by the narrative of creation, redemption in Jesus
of creation, Christ, and new life in the Spirit. It immediately sets the believer's
redemption in contemporary faith and future hope into the context of the broader,
Jesus Christ, transhistorical and trinitarian economy of salvation. Thus Irenaeus
and new life concludes that the Rule is in its fullness "the drawing u p of our faith,
in the Spirit. the foundation of the building, and the consolidation of a way of life."
The handing on of articles of belief and the inoculation of the believer
against heresy and apostasy inevitably figured prominently in the
transmission of the Rule of Faith, but the most basic issue remained
that of Christian identity, identification with and in a particular story
that transcends all local particularities and aspires to universal sig-
nificance. As Irenaeus states at the conclusion of the Epideixis, not only
is the "preaching of the truth" and the "manner of salvation" predicted
by the ancient prophets, ratified by Christ, and handed over to tradition
by the apostles, but so is the whole attendant Christian "way of life."
Not that the Rule is an ethical or existential principle per se, though
Tertullian explicitly speaks of the faith deposited in the Rule as carry-
ing with it a "law" of fidelity and the "salvation which comes from the
observance of that law," while Origen relates it to a "rule of piety"
54. Irenaeus, Epideixis 3 (trans. Smith, ACW 16:49).

55. Ibid. 6 (trans. Smith, ACW 16: 51, emphasis added).
56. Ibid. 98 (trans. Smith, ACW 16: 108). Cf. Adv. haer. 4.26.1 (SChr 100: 712), where Irenaeus
describes the Bible itself as an "account of Christ" (de Christo sermo) that prefigures Christianity
as a "new vocation" (nova vocatio). On the theme of discipleship as central to Irenaeus7 whole
exposition of the Christian story, see Loewe, "Irenaeus' Soteriology," pp. 170-177.
57. Tertullian, De praescr. haer. 14.4 (SChr 46:107).
58. Origen, De princ. 1.5.4 (SChr 252:184); 4.3.14 (SChr 268:392); Horn, in Gen. 6.2 (SChr 7:188).
For more instances of this phrase in Origen, see Van den Eynde, Les normes de l'enseignement
chrtien, p. 309, n. 6.
214 Paul M. Blowers

and Gregory Nazianzen much later will see it as bestowing "a new
Decalogue" of doctrine and piety. Rather, the substantial integrity of
the Rule is further evidenced in the moral and spiritual fidelity of those
who receive it and live under it, who faithfully carry on the Christian
story in their own virtuous lives.
THE RULE OF FAITH AND HERMENEUTICS: PROSPECTS FOR

DEVELOPMENT IN CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING
Clinging fervently to the regulafideias a traditioned faith, an original

and immutable compendium of the truth of Scripture derived from
Christ and already pre-digested, as it were, by and for the church is
not, to second-and third-century writers like Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cle-
ment of Alexandria, or Origen at all inconsistent with the idea of
continuous growth in understanding and appropriating what is admit-
tedly a mysterious and multifaceted revelation of God in the Hebrew
Scriptures and in the Gospels and apostolic witnesses. If Irenaeus, for
example, defending God's oneness and truthfulness, and the impos-
sibility of his apostles spreading false doctrine, seems overconfident of Creation and
the public and self-evident nature of the Rule in Scripture, he is no Scripture
less confident of the broken and constricted nature of human coherently bear
62 witness to God's
knowledge of the truth. Eternal truth is necessarily accommodated gradual unfolding
and modulated. of his global plan
Creation and Scripture coherently bear witness to God's gradual un-
folding of his global plan centered in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, centered in the
yet certain mysteries in the divine economy remain for the church to incarnation of
fathom more fully amid the constraints and contingencies-turned-op- Jesus Christ.
portunities of its historical existence. After having recited the regula
fidei as a universally traditioned Christian principle in Book 1 of Against
Heresies, and doubtless sensing in the foreground the urgency of in-
dividual Christian communities worldwide, marked by their "dis-
es
similar languages" (loquelae dissimiles), to fathom the meaning of the
faith, Irenaeus insists that, when it comes to exploring the depths of
59. Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 40.45 (SChr 358:304ff).
60. By Augustine's time, at which point the focusing of the church's catechesis on fixed creeds
is a well-established practice, the bishop of Hippo still insisted that instruction of new converts
to Christianity must at bottom entail effective dramatizing of the heart of the biblical narrative,
rehearsing the momentous movements, the six grand "epochs" of creation and redemption out
of the text of Scripture itself, with the more particular details of the scriptural stories being
woven into its larger, panoramic story. Augustine suggests that only by this didactic model
will the catechist, as a good narrator, be able to pique the interest of catechumens and truly
engrain the grand scriptural narrative in their memory, sufficient to form them in charity, pure
faith, and a good conscience, which is the goal of all catechesis. See his De catechizandis rudibus
3.5-4.8; 6.10-7.11; 18.29-25.49 (CCSL46:124-129,130-133,153-173).
61. See Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 2.27.1-2 (SChr 294:264-268); 3.3.1-3.5.2 (SChr 211:100-126).
62. Ibid. 2.28.2 (SChr 294:270-272).
63. Ibid. 1.10.1-2 (SChr 264:154-160).

revelation, truly intelligent interpretation will be measured not by
inventing new truth (like the Gnostics) but
by bringing out more fully () the meaning of
whatever was said in parables and adapting () it exactly to
the plot-structure of the Truth ( ); and by recount
ing in full God's activity and economy which he effected for humankind
(
) 64
Irenaeus mentions here a number of prospective topics which may
demand this unloading, or "bringing out more fully" (
) the meaning of scriptural mysteries and accommodating
them to the of the whole (=the regula fidei), all in the name of
probing the depth of the riches of God's wisdom, his unsearchable
judgments and inscrutable ways (Rom. 11:33). Speculative inter
The hypothesis of pretation, within the compass of the regula, is but an unleashing of what
Scripture, like the I r e n a e u s calls the full " p o w e r of the t r a d i t i o n " (
plot of a dramatic ). 6 6
narrative, unfolds
Georges Florovsky has written that the regula fidei purported to trans
in a dialectic of
mit not so much "a fixed core or complex of binding propositions" but
disclosure and
"continuous life in the truth ... (and) an insight into the meaning and
concealment.
impact of the revelatory events, or the revelation of the 'God who
acts.'" It is at once the Rule of the Faith and o faith. The dramatic
paradigm is therefore an effective one. The hypothesis of Scripture, like
the plot of a dramatic narrative, unfolds in a dialectic of disclosure and
concealment. At no point during the performance, even when it comes
64 Ibid 110 3 (SChr 264 162), emphasis added I have opted here (with Noms, note 40 above)
to translate as "plot structure " When speaking of "parables" Irenaeus is indicating
those less straightforward, perhaps cryptic, passages of Scripture which the Gnostics normally
have simply perverted for their own purposes, but which hold deeper meanings thoroughly
consistent with the Church's regula fidei On this specific text, see also van Unnik, "An
Interesting Document of Second Century Theological Discussion (Irenaeus, Adv Haer 1 10 3),"
pp 203-209
65 Adv haer 1 10 3 (SChr 264 162-166) Irenaeus includes in this selective list of topics the
patience of God toward fallen angels and human beings, why the one God created some
creatures temporal or earthly and others eternal or heavenly, why the invisible God appeared
in manifold forms to the prophets, why he made several covenants with the human race, and
what the nature of those covenants was, why God "consigned all thmgs to disobedience that
he might have mercy on all" (Rom 9 2), why the Logos became mcarnate and suffered, why
the Son of God came in the "last days," the Beginning () in the end (cf Heb 1 2, Col 1 18,
Rev 3 14), the unfolding of what Scripture has to say about the eschaton and future events,
why God made the Gentiles, who were without hope, partakers with the samts (Eph 2 12,3 6),
how the corruptible body will put on incorruption (1 Cor 15 54), the meaning of "Those who
were not a people are 'my people', and she who was not my beloved has become 'my beloved'
(Hos 2 25, Rom 9 25), together with the meaning of "the children of the barren one are more
numerous than those of her who has a husband" (Isa 54 1) See van Unnik, "An Interesting
Document of Second Century Theological Discussion (Irenaeus, Adv Haer 110 3)," 211-226,
who rightly concludes that these topics do not necessarily follow directly from the regula fidei,
but rather indicate "mysteries" of the faith, arising from the reading of certain biblical texts
which prompt questions of "why" and "how "
66 Irenaeus, Adv haer 1 10 2 (SChr 264 159)
67 Georges Florovsky, "The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church," in Bible, Church,
Tradition An Eastern Orthodox View, Collected Works of Georges Florovsky 1 (Belmont, Mass
Nordland, 1972), 80
216 Paul M. Blowers

to the "audience's" own participation in the final act, the "end of the
ages" in which the church already dwells (1 Cor. 10:11), is their perfect
human comprehension. It remains for the principal characters in the
drama, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who have already brought it to a
climax, to grant perfect knowledge of the mystery of the outcome. Yet
amid the concrete exegetical and theological challenges of interpreting
this drama, Irenaeus expresses confidence that the Rule will safeguard
the faithful amid the daunting theological questions that are bound to
arise when the church reads Scripture. They will already be sufficiently
grounded, as it were, as the God of all mysteries continues perpetually
to open up his inexhaustible truth; the clear and the obscure in Scrip-
ture will gradually begin to fit together, and "through the many voices
of the texts a single harmonious melody shall resonate in us, praising
with hymns the God who created all things" (per dictionum multas voces
unam consonantem melodiam in nobis sentiet, laudantem hymnis Deum qui
fecit omnia). Such is the revelatory plan of the God who created
temporal things to help humanity come to maturity and to the eventual
fruits of immortality, and who gave a foretaste of eternal things "that
in the coming ages he might show the exceeding riches of his grace" The Rule of Faith
(Eph. 2:7). Meanwhile, Tertullian argues, the heretics, for all their does not provide
"skill" (exercitatio) in investigating Scripture, are seekers and inquirers immediate and
into the scriptural mysteries, but have no grounding. It is not so much obvious answers
their exercitatio or their curiositas per se that impeaches them, as the fact to all prospective
that their exercitatio and curiositas are not antecedently rooted in the theological and
church's witness. exegetical
For Irenaeus, Origen, and other antenicene theologians and exegetes, questions.
Scripture is the very oracle of God but it takes the form of a complex What it does
of histories (or dispensations) and stories, diverse grammars of faith provide is the
and testimony, many-layered configurations of types and symbols; fundamental
they indeed acknowledge its dark passages, dissonant elements, even makings of a
mixed signals. Though the Rule of Faith renders this complexity cosmic and
coherent and sets forth the skopos of Scripture as trinitarian revelation, evangelical
it does not provide immediate and obvious answers to all prospective narrative upon
theological and exegetical questions. What it does provide is the fun- which basis the
damental makings the dramatic elements or "turning points" of church must
a cosmic and evangelical narrative upon which basis the church must aspire to articulate
aspire to articulate its doctrine and to "narrate" its own historical its doctrine and to
existence and mission. In this connection Rowan Greer proposes a "narrate" its
helpful definition of the Rule of Faith as the "framework" or "context"
own historical
for interpreting and enacting Christian truth.
existence
From one point of view, the Rule of Faith was limited as a unifying and mission.
framework for interpreting Scripture. It did not settle the question of
68. Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 2.28.3 (SChr 294:274-278).

69. Ibid. 4.5.1 (SChr 100:424-427).
70. Tertullian, De praesc. haer. 14.3-14 (SChr 46:107-108).

method, nor did it solve problems of detail in the theological, moral,
and spiritual exposition of the Bible. But from another point of view,
what seem to be limitations are precisely what enable the task of
interpretation. Built into the patristic understanding of exegesis is the
conviction that the Christian's theological vision continues to grow and
change, just as the Christian life is a pilgrimage and progress toward a
destiny only dimly perceived. The framework of interpretation, then,
does not so much solve the problem of what Scripture means as supply
the context in which the quest for that meaning may take place. 1
Again, this "context" provided by the regula fidei is a universal context,
not to be parochially defined by any single interpretive community;
the context is precisely the salvation story in its totality. It is the full
Irenaeus and
domain of divine action, the full scope of the divine "economy"
Origen had as
() which was discussed earlier in terms of the "strategy" or
their primary
"plot" of the Trinity's self-revelation in creation and redemption.
heuristic task not
Within this context, patristic exegesis, as represented in Irenaeus and
to atomize the
Origen, operates concomitant with the liturgical, sacramental, and
biblical revelation
kerygmatic "enactment" of Scripture as dramatic rehearsal, and as
in propositions,
construction of a grand vision of past, present, and future "in Christ."
but to elucidate
As preeminent figures in early Christian exegesis, Irenaeus and Origen
the narrative of
had as their primary heuristic task not to atomize the biblical revelation
salvation in
in propositions, but to elucidate the narrative of salvation in Scripture,
Scripture, and the
and the continuation of that narrative, the resolution of the plot as it
continuation of
were, in the church's life and experience. Their work is that of "narra
that narrative, the
tive augmentation," to use one modern theologian's description of how
resolution of the
a soteriology is constructed. Irenaeus' careful exposition of the
plot as it were, in
economies of God in Scripture is well known. But Origen too, despite
the church's life
his critics' claim that his "anagogical" interpretation reduces the bibli
and experience.
cal history to a Platonic myth of emanation and return, ultimately stays
"within the Rule," honoring the narrative framework of Scripture
through his vision of a divine discipline leading fallen humanity
progressively toward a transcendence and stability from which free
beings will ultimately never lapse. If for his critics his allegory at times
71. Rowan Greer (with James Kugel), Early Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1986), pp. 198-199 (emphasis added).
72. See Denis Farkasfalvy, "The Case for Spiritual Exegesis/' Communio 10 (1983): pp. 344-345;
also idem, "In Search of a 'Post-Critical' Method of Biblical Interpretation for Catholic Theol
ogy/' Communio 13 (1986): pp. 290-291.
73. In this connection, see Willy Rordorf, "La Bible dans l'enseignement et la liturgie des
premires communauts chrtiennes," in Le monde grec ancien et la Bible, d. Claude Mondsert,
Bible de tous les temps 1 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), esp. pp. 80-94; also Jean Danilou, The Bible
and the Liturgy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956; repr. ed. Ann Arbor:
Servant Books, 1979). Rowan Williams has lately explored ways for the contemporary church,
in the name of the "literal" (and diachronic) meaning, to recover the "dramatic" reading of
Scripture. See his "The Literal Sense of Scripture," p. 125ff.
74. See Michael Root, "The Narrative Structure of Soteriology," reprinted in Why Narrative?
Readings in Narrative Theology, pp. 263-278.
75. See, int. al., Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation, pp. 155-176; Maurice Jourjon, "Saint Irne lit
la Bible," in Le monde grec ancien et la Bible, pp. 145-151.
218 Paul M. Blowers

threatens to subvert the historical with the eternal, the history of Israel
with the history of souls, it is, as Samuel Lachli argues, mainly because
his spiritual exegesis seeks to draw the struggle of humanity directly As Gerald Bostock
into the economy of salvation and to trace that fuller "history" which notes of Origen's
is the redemptive movement from creation to eschatological consum- allegory, its whole
mation. Or as Gerald Bostock notes of Origen's allegory, its whole purpose is exactly
purpose is exactly "to build a bridge between ancient history and "to build a bridge
modern experience... [wherein] the facts of history set out in the Bible between ancient
have to be part of a total narrative, and symbols likewise must be part history and
of a total world-view." Origen doubtless has this cosmic and es- modern experience
chatological perspective in mind when, defending the higher spiritual ... [wherein] the
sense of Scripture, he holds up the standard of the "rule of the heavenly facts of history set
Church" ( ). out in the Bible
It is a profound sense of "economy" that motivated this interpretative have to be part of
enterprise. really implied for these early Christian exegetes a total narrative,
a quasi-geometric or vertical configuration and not just a linear-tem and symbols
poral pattern in the perceived event-fulness of divine revelation. It likewise must be
presupposed an arrangement (or "strategy" as we have termed it) part of a total
wherein the saving events recorded in Scripture, already mysteriously world-view."
interconnected with each other vis--vis the incarnation of Jesus Christ,
were coming to fruition in all their eschatological newness in the life
and destiny of the church (cf. 1 Cor. 10:11). Stephen Crites aptly
describes in this connection the profound "figurai imagination" at the
heart of early Christian hermeneutics:
Through this figurai interpntration of its events, the great story made
up an extraordinary unity. The devastating modern question, how
events that transpired long ago and far away can have redemptive
significance here and now, presupposes the linearity of the modern
historical sense, according to which the present is alienated from the
past, and indeed only causal relations can exist among historical events.
Traditional Christians would have found the question scarcely com-
prehensible, because they shared none of its assumptions. It is difficult
to find a geometrical analogy that will sufficiently brmg out how
different their sense of historical unity was from the linear analogy. We
would need to explore solid geometry at least, for this sense of history
76 Samuel Lauchh, "Die Frage nach der Objectivitat der Exegese des Orgenes/' Theologische
Zeitschrift 10 (1954) pp 184-192 Defenders of the purpose of Origenian allegory have been
numerous, many of them offermg reassurance that Origen's real mterest is never simply to
repudiate the literal historical record, but to get at that "history " which bmds time and eternity
Cf Henri de Lubac's classic Histoire et Esprit L'intelligence de l'Ecriture d'aprs Origene (Pans
Aubier, 1950), esp pp 278-294, Henri Crouzel, Origen The Life and Thought of the First Great
Theologian (San Francisco Harper & Row, 1989), pp 61-84 More recently see Gerald Bostock,
"Allegory and Origen," Journal of Literature and Theology 1 (1987) pp 39-53, also the analysis of
patristic allegory by Andrew Louth, "Return to Allegory," m his Discerning the Mystery An
Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford Oxford University Press, 1983), pp 96-131
77 Bostock, "Allegory and Origen," 41
78 Deprinc 4 2 2 (SChr 268 300) For the various views on the meanmg of this phrase m Origen,
see van den Eynde, Les normes de l'enseignement chrtien, 306-308, also Albert Outler, "Origen
and the Regula Fidei" (1939), reprmted m The Second Century 4 (1984) 140

has thickness. Distinct as biblical stories and one's experienced story
are on the surface, each spinning its own web, yet they are linked in
such a way that each supplies a layer of meaning under all the others.
Perhaps a musical analogy might better express this intercommunica
tion of narrative patterns: each new melodic movement recalling or
anticipating others, and containing their thematic material in its har
The catholic
monic thickness. In some such way traditional Christians employed the
creeds, like the figurai imagination to their own lives, individually and corporately,
Rule of Faith on engrafted into the great story.
which they were
built, sought to
capture the FROM RULE TO CREED
narrative
wholeness of The Rule of Faith, as a digest of the Christian story, set out the "context"
Scripture in a or framework for patristic exegesis of the Bible; and we cannot forget
coherent that it did the same for the emergent catholic creeds. After all the most
. basic thread linking the Rule with early baptismal confessions and to
the later creeds, especially the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds but other
intermittent creedal statements as well, is a narrado, a rudimentary
plot. Stephen Sykes rightly cautions that the creed is the "bare-bones"
of a story, and not in a literary sense a thoroughgoing narrative. Yet
it does admit of the raw elements of a setting (the fallen state of
humanity, from which perspective creation has been introduced in the
first place); a theme (redemption through the work of Christ); a plot (the
story of Christ's deeds themselves) and a resolution (in the eschatologi-
cal clauses). The catholic creeds, like the Rule of Faith on which they
were built, sought to capture the narrative wholeness of Scripture in a
coherent . Indeed, with the multiple emergent creeds of the
The nature of fourth and fifth centuries, the need was constantly felt not just to
early Christian publish revisions of dogmatic nuance in the clauses but to give the
creedal whole narrative, the connecting episodes of the drama of creation and
formulation was redemption. For along with the importance of the confessions and
such that to retell creeds in inoculating believers against heresy was the continued intrin
or "confess" a sic acknowledgment of their critical role in giving identity to the
creed was baptized faithful.
to place oneself
The nature of early Christian creedal formulation was such that to retell
in its story.
or "confess" a creed was to place oneself in its story. The early baptis-
79 Stephen Cntes, "Unfinished Figure On Theology and Imagination," in Unfinished Essays
in Honor of Ray L Hart, ed Mark C Taylor (Chico, Cal Scholars Press, 1981), pp 159-160
80 Cf Frances Young, The Making of the Creeds, 12, Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God,
pp 4-16
81 Stephen Sykes, 'The Role of Story in Christian Religion An Hypothesis," Journal ofLiterature
and Theology 1 (1987) 21
82 Ibid,pp 21,22
83 E g , bishops struggling with the implications of Ananism in synods at Antioch (341),
Serdica (343), and Sirmmm (357) in the period between the ecumenical councils of Nicea (325)
and Constantinople (381), felt compelled still to phrase creedal formulations only m a basic
"narrative" whole, not simply to publish individual emendations in the clauses
220 Paul M. Blowers

mal creed was destined to be called a symbolon, in the sense of a
distinguishing sign, the emblem by which a convert was marked out
or identified in the act of baptism. The whole order of initiation in the
faith, being the principal matrix of creedal forms, was already struc
tured as a grand unfolding drama or narrative action with the baptis
mal interrogation, or t h e redditio of t h e C r e e d , i m m e d i a t e l y
subsequent to the renuncio of Satan, as the summary event of the
catechetical process before the act of baptism itself. The purpose was
not only that the baptizand be able to recite the story accurately, but
that he or she had committed it to memory, thoroughly internalized it
so that it could be constantly rehearsed, as perpetually instilled in the
conscience. In the highly-charged narrative setting of baptism, recital
of the creed was a speech-act par excellence, a feature enhanced all the
more in the eventual declaratory form which began the principal
clauses w i t h the first-person credo/credimus ("I believe..."/"we
believe..."). In the act of recital, the panoramic past history of creation
and redemption, the present moment of confession and commital, and
the future consummation previewed in the creed itself all converged. The creed
Analogously in the ancient eucharistie liturgies, the anaphora, though deliberately
not a creed per se but containing a central recitation of the great church's oversimplifies
faith, provided the narrative backdrop, the redemptive story, within or collapses,
which the ongoing communal celebration of the eucharist, and the and so transcends,
reinforcement of communal identity, were to be set. the conventionally
Exploring the narrative dimensionality of a creedal structure more dissociated
deeply, we find that, in effect, the creed deliberately oversimplifies or frameworks of
collapses, a n d so t r a n s c e n d s , t h e c o n v e n t i o n a l l y d i s s o c i a t e d eternity and
frameworks of eternity and linear time. It presents, in Paul Ricoeur's linear time.
84 Cf Rufinus, Comm in Symb Apost 2 (PG 21 337ff), Cyprian, Ep 69 7 (CSEL 3, pt 1 756),

Augustine, Serm 212(CCSL38 1058), Nicetas Remesiana, Explan symb 13 (PL 52 873) On the
beclouded origins and usage of the term symbolon see Kelly's analysis, Early Christian Creeds,
pp 52-61, and Josef Jungmann, The Early Liturgy to the Time of Gregory the Great, trans F A
Brunner (Notre Dame, IN University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), 96
85 Hippolytus, Trad apost 21, ed Gregory Dix, The Apostolic Tradition of St Hippolytus of
Rome (London SPCK, 1937), pp 35-37 Here the confession-through-interrogation is directly
connected with the triple immersion itself
86 Cf Ambrose, De sacramente 2 6 16-2 7 24 (SChr 25 82-88), idem, Explan symb 1 (SChr 25
46), Egeria 46, Augustme, Ad catech de symb 1 (CCSL 46 185) On the variations m this whole
process, see E J Yarnold, "Baptismal Catchses," m The Study of Liturgy, rev ed (New York
Oxford University Press, 1992), pp 91-95, and Thomas Finn, e a , Early Christian Baptism and the
Catechumenate, 2 vols, Message of the Fathers of the Church 5-6 (Collegeville, MN Liturgical
Press, 1992)
87 Cf Ambrose, Explan symb 9 (SChr 25 56-58), Augustme, Serm 58 11 (PG 38 399ff)
88 As Stephen Sykes notes of the baptismal initiation ("The Role of Story in the Christian
Religion," pp 23-24), "the ritual delivery of the story to the catechumen entails his or her entry
into an interlocking series of dramas, each of which has a past, present and (most significantly)
a future The eschatology of baptism is the assurance that the baptismal communitas will be
realized m the Kmgdom of Heaven, where many shall come from east and west and sit down
in holy equality with Abraham and Isaac The story involves the personal identity of the
baptized m the sense that its end is assured, its resolution is embraced m hope "
89 See Irnee-Henri Dalmais, "Thmes bibliques dans les anaphores eucharistiques de langue
grecque," in Le monde grec ancien et la Bible, pp 95-106
PRO ECCLESIA Vol. VI, No 2 221

The Creed terminology of the phenomenology of time, a "refigured" or "narrated
effectively time" that nonetheless communicates itself in terms of the (normal)
conflates the human experience of time, with its "intentionality" toward objects or
dimensions of goals. James Heaney, undertaking a narrative-critical analysis of the
divine eternity, Apostles' Creed using Ricoeur's model, notes how the Creed effective-
human ly conflates the dimensions (or "intentionalities") of divine eternity,
temporality, and human temporality, and post-temporal "eschatological" existence
post-temporal and so too the events of creation, incarnation/redemption, and
"eschatological" judgment/consummation, in a single, synchronic "narrative
existence and present." God the Creator is confessed as the agent of a genuine
so too the events prehistoric cosmic occurrence. Linked to him is Jesus Christ the Son,
of creation, whose miraculous incarnation by virgin birth, a temporally unknow-
incarnation/ able event, is immediately followed by the recognizably historical
redemption, and event of his passion (substantiated by the reference to crucifixion
judgment/ "...under Pontius Pilate"), leading to the descent into hell as another
consummation, event defying spatio-temporal comprehension. Christ's resurrection
in a single, from the dead is imaginable, but his exaltation at the right hand of the
synchronic Father and the prediction of an apocalyptic return in judgment again
"narrative takes us beyond the bounds of temporal reference. In the third section
present." of the Creed, then, the reciter's own current frame of reference, the
social-temporal context of confession and identification, is brought into
relation to the rapid changes of temporal attention in the first two
sections of the Creed. The story in the first two sections seems to end
abruptly with the final judgment, and gives way now to a recitation of
the church's doctrines (from belief in the Holy Spirit to the resurrection
of the flesh and the life everlasting) which, although paralleling the
story as a separate unit, still stands in a "synchronous" narrative
relation with it. As Heaney concludes, "reading the Creed as narra-
tive reveals that it conflates rather than distinguishes times from one
another, identifying prophetic past, present, and future as a single state
of temporal transcendence in the present."
Ultimately, of course, this kind of narrative-critical analysis should not
be adopted as a grand means of circumventing the problems of more
traditional historical-theological investigation of the Rule of Faith and
the later creeds. It is best applied with the other methods. Yet such
analysis serves to demonstrate the persistence of narratio beyond the
scriptural revelation itself, as fundamental to the church's whole inter-
90. See Ricoeur's Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), esp. pp. 82-87.
91. James Heaney, 'Tabor and the Magic Mountain: Time and Narrative in the Apostles'
Creed," Philosophy and Theology 4 (1990), p. 393.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., pp. 393-394.
94. Ibid., p. 394.
95. See Sykes' criticisms of the limitations of narrative analysis as a kind of "theological"
analysis in "The Role of Story in the Christian Religion," pp. 24-26.
222 Paul M. Blowers

pretative enterprise, its discernment of the plot () of Scripture
and its ongoing "processing" ( , as Irenaeus
calls it) of the fullness of that revelation. The notion of a "narrated time"
or "metanarrative" in the creedal story, linking and integrating the
dimensions of the eternal and the historical, serves in the language of By the Rule of
contemporary hermeneutics to refocus the rich concept of a divine Faith early
lying behind the whole development of canons of Christian Christians placed
truth and experience in the second and third centuries. Moreover, themselves under
"performance"-based hermeneutical models, variously articulated by the discipline of a
a number of contemporary Christian theologians to elucidate the com comprehensive
plex media by which the Church brings to bear its Holy Scripture, can schema which
be quite useful in describing the larger ecology of interpretation in early they dared to
Christianity wherein theology, ecclesial and liturgical life, ethics and believe was more
ministry all intersect as "enactments" of the cosmic, prophetic, and than simply a
evangelic story at the heart of the Christian Bible. By the Rule of Faith provisional
early Christians placed themselves, in the full scope of their perfor statement of
mance of the biblical message, under the discipline of a comprehensive Christian truths.
schema w h i c h they d a r e d to believe was more t h a n simply a
provisional statement of Christian truths. Here in effect was the divine
play, the "theo-drama" in which the church, and the whole of the
creation, lived and moved and had their being. Hans Urs von Balthasar
has captured the gist of it this way:
The good which God does to us can only be experienced as the truth if
we share in performing it (Jn. 7:17; 8:31f.); we must "do the truth in love"
( [Eph. 4:5]) not only in order to perceive the truth
of the good but, equally, in order to embody it increasingly in the world,
thus leading the ambiguities of world theatre beyond themselves to a
singleness of meaning that can come only from God. This is possible
because it is already a reality for God and through God, because he has
already taken the drama of existence which plays on the world stage
and inserted it into his quite different "play" which, nonetheless, he
wishes to play on our stage. It is a case of the play within the play: our
play "plays" in his play.9
CONCLUSION
Some theological critics today would doubtless consider it one thing

altogether to say that the Rule of Faith (or later the Creed) was a
narrative construction that shaped "Christian identity" (i.e., identifica
tion with and in a cosmic drama of salvation; integration into the
pilgrimage of the people of God, etc.) and quite another to say that the
Rule of Faith represented the doctrinal content of the Christian faith, or
96. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, trans. Graham Harrison
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), vol. 1, p. 20.

the foundation on which to develop Christian "orthodoxy" in quasi-
systematic terms. Distinctions of this kind have, of course, been made
with respect to the content and authority of the Bible itself. Toward the
end of her book on patristic biblical interpretation, Frances Young flatly
Perfect vision is concludes that "Scripture itself provides paradigms of pilgrimage, of
rather an progress and set-back, of faith and hope, rather than concepts,
eschatological doctrines, or definitions." The Fathers, she suggests, were on target
prospect than a when they respected the mysterious, elusive, forward-pointing nature
present possibility of Scripture, when they beheld the Bible in all its complexity, inner
for faith. tensions, and rich interpretative possibilities, when they read it with a
view to mimesis-, inevitably they imposed on the Bible when they
invested too much hermeneutically in provisional rules of faith or too
readily extrapolated doctrines from the Bible that were not "literally"
there. By such an account, the power of the text of Scripture tended
to be subverted whenever the Fathers claimed frameworks of inter
pretation and dogmatic principles born of particular contexts to be
universally binding or perpetually privileged.
"There is no hope of a perfect hermeneutical key or control: pluralism
is inevitable," writes Young. For the Bible is inspired and authoritative
in different ways; and it is multivalent, given to ever diverse interpreta
For patristic tions or "cadenzas" of performance. In respecting the Bible's rich
interpreters in "textuality" (the postmodern equivalent of what the ancients would
general, the Bible call its rhetorical power), the church can progress in discerning the
is not only mystery of God's revelation only by generously countenancing that
kaleidoscopic, it is diversity in a spirit of open-ended discussion and debate. Perfect
telescopic. And it vision is rather an eschatological prospect than a present possibility for faith.
is telescopic not
only in pointing But the tendency here to set in tension the textuality of the Bible, as a
Christian pilgrims literary complex that draws its readers into a spiritual pilgrimage
toward their true traversing its manifold configurations of meaning, and the properly
doctrinal normativity of Scripture for determining the objective core and
spiritual telos,
substance of the Church's faith, would have struck early Christian
but in providing
exegetes and exponents of the Rule of Faith as altogether odd. For
an objective
patristic interpreters in general, the Bible is not only kaleidoscopic, it
groundwork for
is telescopic. And it is telescopic not only in pointing Christian pilgrims
the journey.
t o w a r d their true spiritual telos, b u t in p r o v i d i n g an objective
groundwork for the journey. With all its internal diversity, especially
97 Young, Virtuoso Theology, 182 Cf Sean McEvenue, "The Spiritual Authority of Scripture,"
m Religion and Culture Essays in Honor ofBernard Lonergan, S J ,esp 208ff McE venue similarly
suggests that the authority of Scripture is a spiritual authority, implicit, subliminal, affective
"Has the authority of Scripture been applied, not to what Scripture said, but rather to what the
texts do to the reader without our advertmg to its influence7 Should we look to affects rather
than ideas 7 to conversion rather than truths 7 The answer must be 'yes' in some degree, no
matter how painful such an admission may be to scholars trained for exact definitions, and for
objective data "
98 See Young, Virtuoso Theology, esp pp 111-159,182-186
99 lbid,pp 160-182
224 Paul M. Blowers

as regards its narrative content, Scripture points to a particular objec
tive or skopos, and it hangs together within a larger plan or economy, a
panoramic metanarrative that holds the key to its doctrinal truth. We
have seen that the Rule of Faith epitomized that metanarrative as
authored by God the Father, as climaxing in the work of his Son Jesus
Christ, and (according to its trinitarian renditions) as reaching full
fruition through the Holy Spirit. As was emphasized earlier in this
essay, the Rule did not, any more than Scripture itself, purely and
simply atomize "the faith once delivered" into propositions, since "the
oneness or identity of the Christian faith, the way things hang together
in the Christian scheme of things, has more in common with the The Rule projected
oneness of a story with a single plot than with the oneness of a a shared Christian
catalogue or list of objects of belief." The Rule projected a shared vision, out of
Christian vision, out of which a universal discipline of Christian self- which a universal
understanding could be authorized and sustained. discipline of
Again, it was the Rule of faith and of the faith alike. Paralleling the Christian
primitive baptismal confessions whose stereotyped phrases it some self-understanding
times echoes, the Rule sets out positively (and not, in the first instance, could be
polemically) the basic doctrinal framework of the Christian vocation. authorized and
Even in the fourth century, Gregory Nazianzen still refers to the rule sustained.
of baptismal faith as a "new Decalogue" ( ), the "foun
dation of dogma" ( ) on which baptized
believers ground their piety. The Rule had remained a consistent
touchstone by which the churches could test their internal and external
witness to Jesus Christ, sharpen their collective memory, and articulate
their ongoing experience of life "in Christ" or "in the Spirit." Cer
tainly it is impossible to imagine the Rule of Faith having any effective
authority in the churches apart from that growth process of testing and
articulation which was continuous from the very beginning of the
Christian mission, a process that was well underway before the per
ceived threat of full-fledged counter-rules issuing from the Gnostic
schools and from Marcionism.
Meanwhile the fact that the Christian Rule of Faith was itself open to
some variation and refinement in its rendition in the churches, that
those renditions often reflected particular doctrinal disputes of the
time, and that no one received version of the Rule was singularly
capable of obviating significant debates of interpretation and theology
100. Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, p. 7.

101. Oratio 40.45 (SChr 358: 304,306).
102. Cf. Rowan Greer's comments on Irenaeus and the Rule in Broken Lights and Mended Lives,
4: "The key word to use in describing Irenaeus' point of view is 'witness.' Scripture and the
Rule are apostolic in the sense that they preserve the original experience of the church and
testify to Christ. They do not possess authority in and of themselves, even though they may be
thought to be inspired by God's Spirit. Final authority rests in Christ, while Scripture and the
Rule function to give access to that authority. In this way the church's experience is, first of all,
its appropriation of the past."

emergent among the churches, should not be seen as finally com
promising its basic integrity and viability in an era when the very terms
of "canonicity" in Christianity were still a matter of debate. Assuredly
there were constraints on the extent to which such a rule was an
effective norm in the ecclesial dynamics of Christian communities
where multiple structures of authority were operative and multiple
Both Tertullian matrices of interpretation were in place. There were real differences of
and Origen, perspective among the early exponents of the Rule of Faith, and among
together with all the communities they represented, which cannot be conveniently belit-
its early tied. Too, there were differences in the very way that the Rule's
exponents, are exponents themselves recognized the precise nature of its authority.
confident that Tertullian, for example, appeals to it as the absolutely original bottom
the (earthly) line, the objective foundation and infallible logic that informs true faith
regula fidei and gives the lie to heresy. H e is thoroughly committed to a fixed
accesses the hermeneutical circle between Scripture and the Rule. For Origen, on
church to the the other hand, it is a Rule which, while providing the bases for, and
mind of constraints upon, the church's interpretation, still sanctions new inves-
Jesus Christ, tigation, new vision-casting, in view of the abundant ambiguities and
spiritual mysteries imbedded in Scripture and in view of the sheer
inexhaustibility of divine truth. Indeed it appears that for Origen the
earthly regula, however sufficient, points beyond itself to the finally
perfect standard of the "rule of the heavenly church."
Whatever the limitations on it, however, both Tertullian and Origen,
together with all its early exponents, are confident that the (earthly)
regula fidei accesses the church to the mind of Jesus Christ. Without the
Rule there is no center of gravity, no a priori starting-points (),
of Christian understanding. Without it the church is fated like the
Gnostics to endless curiosity, to an "infinite regress" in seeking after
the heart of divine truth. Numerous historians have only been
willing to visualize a complex of diverse regulae, not one regula, opera
tive in Christian communities of this period. But in the overall
landscape of antenicene Christianity, the variations in accent among
those renditions of the Rule of Faith that laid claim to catholic authority
give the impression of a viable harmony, not a cacophony. The Rule
appears in retrospect to be larger than any one of its individual rendi
tions. The mounting pressure of heterodoxy expressing itself ec-
clesially and institutionally as well as hermeneutically and doctrinally
103. See Osborn, "Reason and the Rule of Faith/' pp. 48-57, for extended comparisons of
Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian.
104. See De princ. 4.2.2 (already cited above, n. 78); also Outler, "Origen and the Regula Fidei,"
140. On Origen's larger fidelity to, and freedom within, the regulafidei, see Robert Daly, Preface
to Hans Urs von Balthasar, Origen: Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings
(Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), xvii-xviii. As Daly says, Origen's
hermeneutical circle is "open and expansive" rather than purely constrictive: "he was con
tinually bringing in new insight and understanding to the church's understanding both of the
Bible and its own rule of faith."
105. See Osborn, "Reason and the Rule of Faith," pp. 52-53,54,57.
226 Paul M. Blowers

may have induced some second-century writers to exaggerate the
pure traditioning and uninterrupted history of a catholic Rule, but a
maturing solidarity in Christian identity and self-understanding is
discernible in this period, commensurate with a hard-earned balance
of fixity and flexibility, conformity and freedom, unity and diversity.
Such was not achievable solely by churches fixing upon a canon of The regula fidei
sacred Scripture, or by the bishops' exercise of strong pastoral and was authoritative
magisterial oversight; to a great extent it was rendered possible by for early
those churches finding consensus on a common rule of intelligibly Christians because
Christian truth within a shared "narrative world." it preserved a
The regula fidei was authoritative for early Christians because it particular story
preserved a particular story (this story as opposed to another) as the as the ground and
ground and canon of faith. But therein also lay its properly doctrinal canon of faith.
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
narrative than by its "thickness," the sudden collapsing of divine
eternity and h u m a n history in an economy initiated and fulfilled by
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Its narrative flow () as such
runs through this thickness. Only God himself principally by the
strategy of 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 great
the ecumenical councils, and to great Christian thinkers of the fourth anti-Nicene
century and beyond of the caliber of the Cappadocian Fathers, theologians were
Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, and Thomas Aquinas to ad already quite clear
vance the search for suitable language and precise theological means on the fact that
to negotiate Christian faith between oikonomia and theologia, between the scriptural
the prophetic and evangelic narrative of divine self-revelation in his meta-narrative
tory and the ineffable reality of the Triune God. is itself the
organizing
For our purposes, it is imperative to reiterate that the great anti-Nicene principlefor
theologians were already quite clear on the fact that the scriptural all theological
meta-narrative is itself the organizing principle for all theological inquiry and
inquiry and doctrinal exposition. Irenaeus' theological logic is but a doctrinal
working out of the implications of the basic incarnational story-line of exposition.
Scripture. Origen, so long reprehended for being the first Christian
106 See F Torrance, "The Implications of Oikonomia for Knowledge and Speech of God in
Early Christian Theology/' in Oikonomia Heilsgeschichte als Thema der Theologie (Hamburg
Herbert Reich, 1967), pp 223-238, also de Lubac, The Christian Faith, pp 105-113 De Lubac (zfod,
113) quotes Newman m his 1841 essay "The Tamworth Reading Room" "Christianity is a
supernatural history, almost a pageant, it tell us what its Author is by telling us what he has done "

thinker to systematize the gospel on the basis of Platonic metaphysics,
has in some more recent scholarship been rehabilitated as a theologian
and churchman striving to research and bring out more fully the
implications of the Christian story, the economy of creation and
redemption at the heart of the Bible's complex narratives. At times,
Origen conceded, he was led to speculate and offer hypotheses which
he himself well knew were tentative and open to testing. The challenge
for the antenicene theologians was, as it is even now, long after Nicea
and Chalcedon, to enlist the conceptual and systematic models suffi
cient to achieving doctrinal coherence and comprehensiveness while
still opening the way for the Word to speak in the contextual moment
in all its potency () and apocalyptic newness as a gospel story
that raises human beings above their constricted perspectives and
crucifies their broken knowledge. D
107. See, in particular, Rowan Greer, ed., Introduction to Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom,
Prayer, and Selected Works, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), pp.
17-28; cf. also Peter Gorday, Principles of Patristic Exegesis: Romans 9-11 in Origen, John Chrysos-
tom, and Augustine, Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 4 (New York and Toronto: Edwin
Mellen Press, 1983), pp. 86-102.
228 Paul M. Blowers

^ s
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DOCTORES ECCLESIAE

THE REGULA FIDEI AND

Opening a fresh inquiry into the nature of self-definition in earliest

Paul M Blowers, Associate Professor of Church History, Emmanuel School ofReligion,

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204 Paul M. Blowers

THE RULE OF FAITH AND THE AUTHORITY OF THE CHRISTIAN

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35. Ibid., pp. 60-61.

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212 Paul M. Blowers

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54. Irenaeus, Epideixis 3 (trans. Smith, ACW 16:49).

214 Paul M. Blowers

THE RULE OF FAITH AND HERMENEUTICS: PROSPECTS FOR

Clinging fervently to the regulafideias a traditioned faith, an original

PRO ECCLESIA Vol. VI, No. 2 215

216 Paul M. Blowers

68. Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 2.28.3 (SChr 294:274-278).

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218 Paul M. Blowers

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220 Paul M. Blowers

84 Cf Rufinus, Comm in Symb Apost 2 (PG 21 337ff), Cyprian, Ep 69 7 (CSEL 3, pt 1 756),

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222 Paul M. Blowers

Some theological critics today would doubtless consider it one thing

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100. Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, p. 7.

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226 Paul M. Blowers

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228 Paul M. Blowers

The ATLA Serials (ATLAS) collection contains electronic versions of previously

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