Introduction

Christians of the twenty-first century stand upon a millenia-old foundation of blood and blood-earnest struggles unlike any other movement in history. Every other idea, philosophy, or religion of humanity that in its time once captivated the most fervent spirits and wrested into its service the sharpest intellects of humankind has soon disappeared as suddenly as it came. Not so with Christianity: from that first day in which, according to his promise, the resurrected Christ poured out his Spirit upon the twelve apostles, there has been an unbroken succession of men and women devoted to the unchanging gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ with an intensity of commitment unexplainable by any who have not likewise known the soul-entrancing beauty of the Good News of Christ, the God-Man.

What rivers of blood have poured from the veins of old men and young boys, tender young women and stooped-over grandmothers, those bold in personality and those timid and shrinking by nature, and all because, having once devoted themselves to this Savior of men, they could never again turn aside, no matter what the cost! What brilliant thinkers have poured out all the energies of their youth and old age alike into their pursuit of the unsearchable depths of the person and work of this Savior, and never exhausted the subject! What golden-tongued preachers and orators have stirred up masses of ordinary people to acts and lives of good works and piety unthinkable to those who have not the same spirit! What fiery polemicists have torn and rent every skulking wolf of heresy, stripped them bare, knocked out all their lying teeth, for the preservation of the flock of God!

Seeing that these things are so, and knowing but the merest fraction of the earnest and devoted lives and works of so many generations before us, who in dependence upon the same Spirit of God have sought the unchanging truth of the Gospel, it is beyond argument that the historic myopia plaguing much of modern Christianity, particularly among the various denominations and branches of Protestantism, is utterly at odds with the nature of Christianity – which is, after all, a religion founded upon nothing but the solid, historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ, and thereafter built up through its generations in real history, by real men and women, who really did and thought and believed those things they considered to be in continuity with the apostolic teachings and traditions, as recorded in the inspired Word of God.

To ignore or despise the witness of the Church in the first several centuries after the ascension of Christ, therefore, is foolish at best, and may render one susceptible to damning heresies, at worst. Today, as with the early Church, there are heresies afoot which do despite to the Gospel of God’s free and sovereign grace, and overturn the only sure foundation of our eternal salvation. But many of these heresies have already been soundly refuted, some two thousand years ago – and yet, people perish for a little ignorance of history!

But not only have the church fathers something very relevant and very profound to say to the ever recurring heresies concerning the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ; they also may have much more to say to the Roman-Protestant controversies than many Protestants have sometimes been aware. Rome has a long history of earnest interaction with these fathers – so much so, in fact, that to many Protestants, the church fathers are simply “Catholic” authors, not in the appropriate sense of the term (that is, by virtue of the fact that they speak with the approval of and in essential agreement with the acknowledged, universal Church, as it existed and thought and taught up to their period of history); but rather, in that common sense of the term which would see them in agreement with the dogma of the Vatican – that is, in the sense that would view them as “Catholic” in opposition to and mutual distinction from “Protestant”.

Of course, this is anachronistic: many of the doctrines of the Vatican did not develop until many centuries after these church fathers lived and died; and while isolated statements and passages may evince the seed-form of ideas, practices, or doctrines that have since become the entrenched dogma of Roman Catholicism, yet the whole tenor and mindset of all their writings may often be utterly opposed in principle to the ways in which those ideas have since developed. Many early writers, considering an unrelated subject, have said things unclearly or unwisely which later generations, combating new heresies, have found necessary to clear up. In such cases, it is never a legitimate method of argumentation to wrest those miscontextualized snippets into service in a doctrinal battle that had not yet arisen in their own day.

But the sword cuts in both directions: if it is not allowable to Rome, neither is it allowable to Protestants to use the fathers in historically insensitive ways. But given the nature of the debate, which is over concerns that have largely arisen long after the fathers died, this is often a difficult principle to put into practice. It is much easier to take a phrase or paragraph and exuberantly claim, “See, this father is saying precisely what we are saying!”. In some cases, perhaps, this may be true; but in most cases, it is simply not the case, for the fathers in question are addressing altogether different issues. What they say may and probably does have some bearing on the question; but it is not a direct answer to the question. Rather than reading them, therefore, as though they were addressing the questions of a sixteenth-century debate, we ought to read them, first and foremost, on their own terms; and only then bring those principles which they themselves teach to bear upon a later, related debate. This is much more difficult a process; but ultimately, it is the only honest and helpful way of proceeding1.

Before you read a line of this anthology, therefore, and especially if you are a Protestant seeking ammunition for polemics against Roman theology (not that this is wrong in and of itself), and not just someone with no firm convictions as yet, or a wavering Protestant who is thinking of turning to Rome and wondering if the Vatican has a real case for its claim to be the true Catholic Church, in apostolic succession from the first twelve, I have a caution for you, from Alexander Pope: “A little learning is a dangerous thing”! This anthology, by its very nature, is prone to being misused. If I did not believe the potential benefits to outweigh the risks, I would not even publish it; but given the equally dangerous and much more pervasive problem of historical naivety, I have decided that these risks are less substantial than the possible help it may afford many persons, who are genuinely struggling with these issues and who have rightly realized that if, in the first seven centuries of Church history, nobody ever said the things that Protestants have claimed are central to the gospel, then Protestantism must necessarily be on very shaky ground. That is just what certain Roman apologists would have you believe; but any honest and careful searching of the evidence reveals a much different and more nuanced reality. This compendium of the fathers will give no one a full-orbed understanding of what their struggles were and why they expressed themselves the way they did; but I think it will prove beyond cavil that the fathers were not generally opposed to the core Protestant doctrines, but on the contrary often expressed themselves in ways that, if not directly in support of, are at least very compatible with those doctrines which a new era and a new controversy drove the Reformers to formulate in precise terms, just as a millennium before, other controversies drove the fathers to formulate orthodox trinitarian theology in precise and unequivocal terms.

So much for the introductory vindication of the project’s validity and cautions against its misuse; it now remains only to describe it in short. In essence, this is a categorized and lightly annotated selection of usually brief quotations from the church fathers on topics which are either of importance to the debate between Rome and Protestantism, or else enlightening with respect to some currently popular understanding of the atonement or any other theological topic, which is at odds with the historic Protestant understanding. The editor and compiler of these quotations believes the historic Reformed faith to be a basically scriptural and catholic (i.e., in continuity with the teachings of the universal Church from the days of the apostles to the modern era) system of doctrine; and that, while many of the fathers may have had weaknesses and blind spots, as theologians of every age are prone to, which led them in some superficial respects to have some things in common with the modern Roman Church, yet, in reality, the gist of their beliefs are more alike in spirit to the Reformers than the Roman apologists. To use the words of the great Genevan Reformer, John Calvin, “I know that the old writers [i.e., the church fathers] sometimes speak rather harshly; and, as I have just said, I do not deny that they have perhaps erred; but those of their writings that were marred with a few spots here and there become utterly defiled when they are handled by these men’s unwashed hands [i.e., the hands of the medieval schoolmen, who were instrumental in developing many of the doctrines of the Roman Church in Calvin's day]”.

In addition to the categorized quotations and annotations, there will also be a very brief introduction to each of the major headings under consideration, in which it will be attempted to give an explanation of the history and controversies surrounding the production of the works there excerpted, in order to preclude, inasmuch as possible, any misuse of the fathers due to a wrongly anachronistic reading of them. It should be remembered, however, that for a proper evaluation of the doctrine of the fathers, it is necessary both to be well-acquainted with their history and to read in total entire works and bodies of works, and not just a few short selections alone. If this list only proves that Rome’s presumption to have the fathers’ on their side is not so cut-and-dry as some like to make out, and thus drives some questioner to a more rigorous examination of early church theology, which goes far beyond the bounds of this volume, it will have accomplished its intended purpose.

A few final points: one issue upon which the fathers spoke with unanimous consent, and to which we would do well to listen carefully, is the way in which they approached the Old Testament scriptures as a thoroughly Christian document, which everywhere and in every way testified of Christ. The fathers’ hermeneutic, although it has sometimes (regrettably) been made the subject of much disdain, was in reality quite as variegated as Protestant hermeneutics today; and yet, in the various ways in which they approached the scriptures, they all sought the same end of seeing Christ and his work in the entire corpus of Old Testament writings – a goal which they had in common both with Christ and the apostles who wrote the New Testament scriptures. Because I believe there is much we might learn from them in this respect, I have included a few discussions of hermeneutics, as well as a few examples of Old Testament exegesis, and a selective list of passages in which the fathers saw either direct prophecies or types of Christ in the Old Testament.

It being a very loosely valid suggestion that the earlier fathers had a lesser distance from the apostles, and thus an inroad to addressing and bringing out apostolic concerns without the weight and complications of many controversies which followed the death of the first twelve, I have considered it advantageous to distinguish the fathers who lived and wrote before the Nicene Council from those who lived during and afterwards; which I have done by giving the names only of the Ante-Nicene fathers in all capital letters; and furthermore, unless some specific reason drove me to do otherwise, I have listed the selection of quotations in a basically chronological order.

Finally, the quotations provided are usually taken from the series of Ante-Nicene Fathers (ed. by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson); the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series (ed. by Philip Schaff); and the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, (ed. by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace). Occasionally, when a quotation I have employed is not included in these series, I have provided my own translation from the Migne Patrologia Graeca or the Migne Patrologia Latina; these rare exceptions I have indicated in the footnotes.

I do not need to remind the reader that the issues here touched upon and the outcomes which their belief or rejection may effect are eternal in duration and vast beyond all expression in their importance and gravity. Heaven and hell hang in the balance; and what’s more, the very glory of the Most High God, which we with our lips profess to defend, we may be found out on the Day of Judgment rather to have blasphemed and despised, if we prove to be in error on these, some of the most weighty of all controversies in history. Let us be driven to a spirit of humility and supplication, therefore, before we ever delve into these fathers, whom we respect as men of God before us who by their careful, Spirit-reliant wrestlings may preserve us from some great blasphemy and the eternal perdition into which it may plunge us.2

Synopsis of Subjects Considered

I. Authority

  • Church Government
  • Apostolic Succession
  • Supremacy of Rome/the Papacy
  • Tradition

II. The Scriptures

Canonicity

  • How/by what authority the canon was determined

  • The extent of the canon

Authority of Scriptures

III. Justification and Sanctification

  • Justification by grace alone
  • Justification through faith alone
  • Imputation of the righteousness/active obedience of Christ (also, infusion of righteousness/“justification” as “make” vs. “declare” righteous)
  • Sanctification

IV. The Atonement

  • Penal Substitution
  • Other models of the atonement

V. Additions to the Sole Sufficiency of Christ’s Work

  • Prayers for the dead/purgatory
  • Supererogatory works/condign merit; penance/indulgences
  • Prayers to the saints; intercession/mediation of the saints
  • Marian doctrines
  • Veneration of relics/icons

VI. The Sacraments

  • Their number
  • Baptism: its significance, efficacy, mode, and subjects
  • The Eucharist: its significance and efficacy

VII. Hermeneutics

  • Discussion of hermeneutical principles
  • Examples of literal/grammatical hermeneutics
  • Scriptures seen as either types or direct prophecies of Christ
  • Scriptures used in support of the doctrine of the Trinity

VIII. Asceticism

  • Cautions against
  • Reasons given in support of

1. I am thankful to Dr. Richard Bishop for wisely impressing some of these principles upon me.
2. This project is only in the very beginning stages of its formulation, and by no means ready for actual publication. In the meantime, any feedback regarding the nature, scope, or progression of the design; the content of the footnotes; or
suggestions of further useful quotations is welcome.

Leave a Reply