Understandably, Theodore of Mopsuestia isn’t a household name. And maybe it shouldn’t be (it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue). All the same, this condemned church father can help us read our Bibles rightly if we would have discerning ears to hear and open eyes to see.
First, let’s put his heresy charge on the table. Though he was involved in several theological debates during his lifetime (350-428 AD), Theodore was never regarded as a false teacher during his lifetime. He was good friends with John Chrysostom while they attended school together, and even enjoyed Emperor Theodosius’ favor as a plain-sense preacher. He served as the bishop of the church in Mopsuestia, not far from Antioch where he had studied, for over 25 years, and was beloved by the people he served.
After Theodore’s death, two church councils took issue with his writings. At the Council of Ephesus in 431, the bishops at the meeting opposed Theodore’s writings because they believed he de-emphasized the full deity of Christ. In 553, over a hundred years after his passing, Theodore was formally denounced as a heretic by the Second Council of Constantinople. According to the council, good ol’ Teddy Mop had wandered into Christological heresy by teaching a form of Nestorianism, that Christ was two persons, not one. Because of political rivalries, Theodore’s association with the school at Antioch, and because of the changing nature of the word “nature” in Greek, Teddy found his posthumous head on the Orthodox chopping block and was summarily condemned.
Now, having reviewed the evidence, I don’t think Theodore did teach that Christ was two persons. He famously referred to Christ as “indwelling of good pleasure in one person” and said that Christ’s divine-human unity could be expressed as “both natures are united and that one person is effected by reason of the union.” Fred McLeod has published a helpful volume making this argument, and I find his case compelling. I commend it to you if you’re all that interested.
Regardless of whether you think Teddy Mop was a christological heretic (and I don’t think he was), there’s still a gift to be gleaned from his writings because of his consistent hermeneutic. Theodore’s followers gave him the title “The Interpreter” because of his insistence on a literal, grammatical, historical approach to reading the Bible which he explained clearly throughout his writings. Over and against the strong allegorical impulses emanating largely from the bishops of Alexandria, Theodore urged Christians to stick with the plain, ordinary sense of every biblical text.
We need that same reminder – to read God’s Word plainly – just as much today. And we can find just such a reminder in Theodore’s writings. In particular, he wrote a treatise called Against the Allegorists that’s full of helpful summaries of biblical hermeneutics. Below are some of his statements from that work and others that can help us read our Bibles well.
Here’s Teddy’s take on how many layers of meaning there are to any given biblical text:
“There is but one sense in all the words present in the divine Scriptures.”
That is, the Holy Spirit didn’t hide a secret, second layer of meaning in the words of Scripture that the human authors didn’t know about. Whatever the author intended, that is the one meaning of that text forever, and it’s precisely what we’re after when we interpret Scripture. You don’t need a special set of glasses, a decoder ring, or a fancy Ph.D. to read the Bible. All you need is to listen to each author and find the one meaning that he intends.
When it comes to reading the historical books of the Bible, here was the bishop’s advice:
“So we are careful not to be found going beyond the narrative element of what has been written.”
To find the author’s intent in a narrative, Teddy argued, look no further than the actual story itself. If the details of a story become a springboard into some fanciful allegorization (like Origen’s reading church polity into the decks on Noah’s ark), then you’ve left the text behind entirely. Theodore was certainly aware that the biblical authors wrote narratives with theological implications in mind, but he advocated that we never extract our theology from a text by ignoring the text itself.
One key to guarding against a spiritualized interpretation, according to Theodore, was to make sure that your answer was falsifiable, and thereby proven from the text itself. Here’s how he said it:
“For it is the task of an interpreter, especially one who is accurately explaining [the text], not only to affirm what he says with authority but also to reject through his words the contrary opinion.”
If we can’t say both positively what a text means and negatively what it doesn’t mean, then we don’t understand it. Truth is always on a razor’s edge, which means that in order to say “Yes, and amen,” you have to say “No, no way” as well. We need to be able to articulate what the Bible doesn’t say to clarify what the Bible does say. And if we can’t be proven right by showing what’s necessarily wrong, then it’s likely that we’ve wandered into imagination instead of interpretation.
And to stave off any who would be tempted to flirt with allegorization of a text, here’s what Theodore said about the church father Origen and his allegorized writings:
“[Origen] would never have willingly shown an interest in any interpretation filled with the insane blasphemy of the pagans, once he studied the true intent of the Scriptures and inquired into what is the meaning of every word… all the words of divine Scripture and to have found in them, as it should be, the invisible truth of the Church’s teaching.”
Over and over and over again, Theodore reminded his people (and us today) that the only right way to read the Bible is to look for the one, clear, plain meaning of the words on the page. To Teddy, anything more was just superstition.
So, when you’re doing your devotions this week, or in your Bible study, or listening to a sermon, remember to heed the advice of this old, excommunicated church father: “When I interpret [a passage], I fully respect its text…” Give honor to God’s Word by interpreting it with the author’s intent as your clear focus, and you’ll follow in the footsteps of the good bishop from Mopsuestia.