Can Protestants claim the Church Fathers as their own, or is their theology “too Catholic?” Briefly, if Protestants cannot claim the Church Fathers, they either do not understand the Reformers or have become de facto Gnostics. For most evangelicals today, church history begins with the apostle Paul and then, perhaps, moves to Dwight L. Moody and then to Billy Graham. In between lay almost two millennia of doctrine and drift, of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. To reject the Catholic Church out of hand is to sever one’s connection to the history of redemption. Luther, for example, was loath to leave the Roman Catholic Church and did so only because he was forced to via excommunication. Luther and Calvin cited the Fathers liberally, and Calvin noted in his conflict with the Roman Catholic apologist Sadolet: “Place, I pray, before your eyes, that ancient form of the Church, such as their writings prove it to have been in the age of Chrysostom and Basil, among the Greeks, and of Cyprian, Ambrose and Augustine, among the Latins; after so doing, contemplate the ruins of that Church as now surviving among yourselves.” After doing so, Calvin was certain that “our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours” and that “all we have attempted to do is to renew that ancient form of the Church, which, at first sullied and distorted by illiterate men of indifferent character, was afterwards flatigiously mangled and almost destroyed by the Roman Pontiff and his faction.” (Tracts and Letters)
All Protestants should consider themselves “the real Catholics,” i.e., those who hearken back to the Fathers, some of whom Calvin refers to above. Here we might make a useful distinction between Catholic (meaning universal in scope, the Church worldwide) and Roman Catholic (the Church which in the development of the West became centered in the Bishop of Rome). Calvin – along with all Protestants who think this through and do their homework – know that the Roman Catholic church of the Reformation period did not drop from the sky like a meteor, smoking, fully formed, and solid. It grew and developed and morphed into what it was then. Calvin traces its beginnings of error with Leo the Great, who asserted the primacy of the Roman See, not for the first time, but with real, serious sanctions attached. Even then, it was not a lurching, 90 degree turn, but a gradual drift. The error of the Mass did not begin with the guy who succeeded Peter, but did not become official Roman dogma until the 11th century. The Catholic Church, the Church Universal, with its presbyterian government, for instance, where the ministers or bishops of the ancient parishes (e.g., Alexandria, Rome, Antioch, Jerusalem, etc.) were of equal authority in deciding church questions, did not obtain until the fifth century when Rome began to assert its primacy.
In other words, Protestants must demonstrate their connection to antiquity and the Fathers or they are just another a-historical heretical cult. In fact, I would assert that most Evangelical/Fundamentalist doctrine is not “Catholic” enough, but itself has drifted from Fathers like Chrysostom and Augustine. One must be careful (e.g., with Origen), but, in general, if one cannot embrace the 4 Ecumenical Creeds and the statements of the 7 Ecumenical Councils and the broad stream of teaching in the Church Fathers, he should re-examine his claim to orthodoxy and biblical fidelity. Indeed, the Fathers were not too Catholic, but, rather, the children of the Reformation all too often are not Catholic enough, and certainly not as Catholic as the first Protestants!
January 21, 2007
Categories: Theology . . Author: reverendbass . Comments: 9 Comments
The School of Hard Knox 