Borrowed Voices: The Use and Abuse of the Church Fathers

The phrase "Apostolic Fathers" is younger than the King James Bible. William Varner notes that it was never used in church history until J. B. Cotelier published a collection under that name in 1672, and that William Wake's English translation followed in 1693.¹ That small fact is useful to keep in mind, because "the fathers" is a category the church built after the fact. It means the pastors, bishops, apologists and theologians of roughly the first seven or eight centuries, ending with Gregory the Great (d. 604) in the Latin West and John of Damascus (d. c. 749) in the Greek East. The older textbooks gave four marks: antiquity, orthodoxy of doctrine, holiness of life, and the church's approval. That last mark is why Origen and Tertullian sit awkwardly on the list. The corpus is enormous. Migne's Patrologia Graeca runs to 161 volumes and the Patrologia Latina to 221. Most English readers meet the fathers in the 38 volumes of the Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, a Victorian project whose translations still sit on most pastors' shelves (and whose footnotes still carry some Victorian opinions). The earliest layer includes Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, the Didache, Barnabas, Hermas and the Epistle to Diognetus. After them come Justin and Irenaeus, then Tertullian and Origen, then Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Chrysostom, Cyril, and towering over the Latin half, Augustine.

Why read them? They stood close to the apostles in time, language and culture. They fought the battles that gave us the words homoousios and hypostasis, and they read Romans in Greek as native speakers. Hall's Learning Theology with the Church Fathers, a companion to his earlier Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers, works through the great doctrines as the fathers argued them. He treats these writers as older brothers who prayed, preached and sometimes suffered for what they wrote, and whom we learn from rather than simply cite.² Hebrews 13:7 already points this way: "Remember those who led you, who spoke the word of God to you; and considering the result of their conduct, imitate their faith." Imitating them is a different act from obeying them, and the history of patristic study turns largely on whether readers keep that distinction.

The three great branches of Christendom answer that question differently. Rome, at the fourth session of Trent in 1546, received Scripture and the unwritten apostolic traditions "with an equal feeling of devotion and reverence" (pari pietatis affectu ac reverentia). It also forbade interpreting Scripture against "the unanimous consent of the fathers."³ Eastern Orthodoxy has no single Tridentine moment. It speaks of Tradition as the Spirit's continuous life in the church, and Georges Florovsky's call for a "neopatristic synthesis" in the twentieth century made the fathers the Orthodox theologian's native habitat. Protestants inherited a principle from the fathers themselves. Vincent of Lérins, writing in 434, conceded that Scripture is "sufficient, and more than sufficient," yet argued that its many interpretations required a further rule: what "has been believed everywhere, always, and by all people" (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est).⁴ Kelly adds that Vincent was codifying a long development, and that Cyril and Theodoret still made Scripture the court of final appeal. Theodoret summed it up this way: "I yield obedience to Holy Scripture alone."⁵ The Reformers took Theodoret's side of that tension. The Second London Confession (1689, 1.10) places "decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers" under the Holy Scripture, "the supreme judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined."⁶ Calvin filled the 1536 dedication of the Institutes to Francis I with patristic citations to show that the Reformers, and not their opponents, stood with the ancient church. Reformed Baptists have that same inheritance, whether we use it or not.

Then come the abuses, and they run in two directions. The first is canonization. The fathers become a second Bible, and "unanimous consent" is asserted where it does not exist. Anyone who has read Origen next to Tertullian, or Jerome's letters to Augustine, knows how rarely the fathers agreed about anything below the level of the creed. Kelly, who was no Protestant polemicist, admits that heresy can often cite precedent, and that looking closely at the past sometimes reveals serious disagreement.⁷ The second abuse is contempt. Some readers skip from Patmos to Wittenberg as though fourteen centuries of the Spirit's work never happened. Or they build an imaginary succession, like J. M. Carroll's Trail of Blood (1931), which enlists Montanists and Paulicians as proto-Baptists because they were persecuted. The first error makes the fathers masters. The second makes them strangers, and a stranger can be made to say anything.

That second danger shows up in the most sophisticated places. Gustaf Aulén's Christus Victor (1931) claimed that the fathers held a single "classic" view of the atonement and that Anselm's satisfaction theory was a medieval side-track. James David Meyer tested that claim against fifteen fathers and concluded that Aulén's thesis "is more imposition than exposition."⁸ The evidence reaches back to the second century. The Epistle to Diognetus marvels at "the sweet exchange," in which "the sinfulness of many should be hidden in one righteous person, while the righteousness of one should justify many sinners."⁹ Aulén set Irenaeus against Anselm, while Irenaeus himself speaks of Christ "propitiating indeed for us the Father against whom we had sinned."¹⁰ Donald Fairbairn has taken apart a similar scheme that divides patristic soteriology into a legal West and a deifying East, calling the two-pattern model "misleading and dangerous."¹¹ Eschatology suffers the same selective reading. Charles Hill's Regnum Caelorum tried to reverse the older consensus that the earliest fathers were chiliasts, and Brian Collins has examined how much weight Hill's reconstruction can bear.¹² As a premillennialist I have a stake in that argument, which is exactly why I need to read Papias and Justin for what they say before I recruit them.

The balanced approach begins by admitting that every tradition, including the one that claims to have none, reads Scripture through someone's spectacles. The question is whether those spectacles can be corrected. Scripture is the norma normans, the rule that rules. The fathers belong among the normae normatae, the ruled rules, and they carry real weight: when the church across East and West confesses the Nicene faith, a Baptist who departs from it is almost certainly wrong. Their authority is ministerial. It rises and falls with their faithfulness to the text. Kelly observes that this is how Cyril and Theodoret regarded their own predecessors, whose authority lay in having explained so faithfully what the biblical writers meant.¹³

Method follows from this. Read whole works before anthologies. A florilegium of snippets is how Aulén happened, and it is how most internet patristics happens. Date and locate each writer, since second-century Rome is not fifth-century Antioch, and a homily is not a treatise. Learn the genre and the opponent, because Athanasius sounds different when he is catechizing than when he is fighting Arians. Weigh consensus by counting witnesses across regions and centuries, and state plainly where they are silent or divided. Test everything by the text they were trying to serve, in Greek where possible. Then do what Hall models throughout his book: pray with them, since their theology was usually written by pastors for congregations who might be martyred.

My own habit, for what it's worth, is to keep one father open next to the commentaries during a writing session, for example Chrysostom on Paul. He rarely settles an exegetical question. He almost always embarrasses my stubborn heart. That is probably the best use of the fathers: they give no new revelation, but they help us see that the faith we hold was already held, sung and died for by others. Irenaeus answered heretics in Lyon by pointing to what the churches had received. We can do the same, with an open Bible between us and them.

Notes

William Varner, The Apostolic Fathers: An Introduction and Translation (London: T&T Clark, 2023), 1.
Christopher A. Hall, Learning Theology with the Church Fathers (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002); see also Christopher A. Hall, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998).
Council of Trent, Session 4, "Decree concerning the Canonical Scriptures" and "Decree concerning the Edition and Use of the Sacred Books" (April 8, 1546).
Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2, quoted in Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 40 (PDF copy); J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th rev. ed. (London: A&C Black, 1985), 50.
Theodoret, Eranistes 1 (PG 83:48), quoted in Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 49.
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), 1.10.
Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 50.
James David Meyer, "The Patristic Roots of Satisfaction Atonement Theories: Did the Church Fathers Affirm Only Christus Victor?" Tyndale Bulletin 71, no. 2 (2020): 293, 299.
Epistle to Diognetus 9.5, trans. Michael W. Holmes, quoted in Meyer, "Patristic Roots," 302.
Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.17.1 (ANF 1:544), quoted in Meyer, "Patristic Roots," 303.
Donald Fairbairn, "Patristic Soteriology: Three Trajectories," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50, no. 2 (2007): 289.
Brian C. Collins, "Were the Fathers Amillennial? An Evaluation of Charles Hill's Regnum Caelorum," Bibliotheca Sacra 177 (April–June 2020): 207.
Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 49.