Who were the Church Fathers?

Question 13000.

The Church Fathers are the Christian writers of roughly the first five centuries whose works have survived, and for a lot of Baptists they occupy a strange middle ground. We suspect them of being Catholic, we cannot name more than two, and we have a nagging sense that we ought to know something about them.

I think that instinct is right. These men are not Scripture and they carry no authority over conscience, but ignoring them entirely leaves us poorer and rather more provincial than we realise.

Who the Church Fathers actually were

The earliest group, sometimes called the Apostolic Fathers, wrote within living memory of the apostles. Clement of Rome writes to Corinth in the nineties, Ignatius of Antioch writes seven letters on his way to be executed around 110, and Polycarp of Smyrna, who was reportedly taught by the apostle John, was burned at the stake in his eighties.

After them come the apologists of the second century, Justin Martyr chief among them, explaining Christianity to a hostile empire. Then the great controversialists, Irenaeus of Lyons answering the Gnostics, Tertullian in North Africa coining much of the Latin vocabulary the church still uses, and Origen of Alexandria, brilliant and erratic in equal measure.

The later Church Fathers include Athanasius, who stood almost alone against Arianism, the Cappadocians who refined trinitarian language, Chrysostom the preacher, Jerome the translator, and Augustine of Hippo, whose shadow falls over everything written in the West for the next thousand years.

Why a Baptist should care

The first reason is historical honesty. Christianity did not vanish between the last apostle and Martin Luther. When someone claims that a particular doctrine was invented in the fourth century or the sixteenth, the Church Fathers are the evidence that settles it, and often they settle it in our favour.

The second reason is apologetic. Sceptics regularly assert that the deity of Jesus was voted in at Nicaea, that the canon was decided by politics, or that the early church knew nothing of what we believe. Ignatius, writing before 115, calls Jesus our God without a hint of controversy, which is exactly what the New Testament itself does when Thomas falls at His feet, John 20:28. That is a useful fact to have.

The third reason is that reading them is good for us. They faced persecution, heresy and plague with a seriousness that makes most modern Christian writing look thin. Their prayers are better than ours, and reading the Church Fathers on suffering will shame most of what passes for devotional writing today.

What they got right

On the central matters they held the line, and at real cost. The deity of Jesus, the Trinity, the resurrection of the body, the authority of the apostolic writings and the reality of judgement are all defended vigorously by the Church Fathers long before any council formalised the wording.

Their treatment of the canon is particularly instructive. They did not create it. They recognised it, testing books against apostolic origin and the rule of faith, and their letters quote the New Testament so extensively that most of it could be reconstructed from their citations alone, and they applied the same test Paul applies when he tells Timothy to guard the deposit entrusted to him, 2 Timothy 1:13-14. My answer on the role of creeds and confessions covers that ground.

They also wrote against the heresies that keep returning in new clothes. Irenaeus on Gnosticism reads uncomfortably like a description of certain modern spiritualities, and Athanasius on the incarnation remains one of the finest short books in Christian literature.

The Fathers and the shape of doctrine

It is worth understanding how doctrine actually developed in their hands, because the popular account is badly wrong. Nothing was invented. What happened was that heresy forced the church to say precisely what it had always believed loosely, and each major controversy produced a sharper definition.

Arius denied that the Son was fully God, and Nicaea answered with language about the Son being of the same substance as the Father. Apollinarius denied that Jesus had a human mind, and the church answered. Nestorius and Eutyches pulled the two natures apart and mashed them together respectively, and Chalcedon answered both. Each definition is a fence around something the New Testament already said.

That pattern is worth grasping because it happens still. False teaching does the church one accidental service, which is to make us think harder about what we have always assumed. The Church Fathers are the record of that process in its earliest and most consequential phase, and their Greek term homoousios, meaning of the same substance, still does duty in every orthodox statement of the Trinity.

They also worked without most of the advantages we take for granted. No concordance, no printed Bible, no critical edition, frequently no complete New Testament in one place, and often under the threat of arrest. What they achieved in those conditions is remarkable.

What they got wrong

I am not going to pretend they were Baptists in togas. Infant baptism appears early and becomes standard. Views of the Lord’s Supper drift towards something more than memorial. A creeping clericalism separates ministers from the congregation in ways the New Testament does not support, and by the fourth century the church is entangled with imperial power in a manner that would have astonished Peter.

Allegorical interpretation is another problem, particularly in Alexandria, where the plain sense of the text is regularly abandoned for a spiritual meaning. That habit is responsible for a great deal of subsequent confusion, especially in the reading of prophecy, where Israel’s promises were spiritualised into the church.

Some of the Church Fathers also drifted on grace. Salvation begins to be described in terms that sound more like a process assisted by sacraments than a gift received by faith, and the seeds of much later error are visible if you look.

How to use them without over-trusting them

The rule is simple. The Church Fathers are witnesses, not judges. They tell us what the church believed and when, which is enormously valuable, and they do not tell us what we must believe, which belongs to Scripture alone. Paul commends the Bereans for examining the Scriptures daily to see whether even an apostle’s preaching was so, Acts 17:11, and that is exactly the posture to bring to any later writer.

That is the difference between the Protestant and the Roman use of these writers. Rome treats the consensus of the fathers as authoritative tradition alongside Scripture. I read them as I would read a respected older brother, gratefully and critically, testing everything by the text. My answer on whether Scripture is our only authority or our final one explains why that distinction matters.

It also cuts both ways when we handle the Church Fathers. Baptists sometimes quote a father when he agrees with us and dismiss him when he does not, which is the same selective habit we criticise in others.

Where to begin reading

Start with Ignatius, because his letters are short, urgent and written by a man walking towards his own death. Then read Athanasius on the incarnation, which is astonishing for its clarity and was written by a man in his twenties. Augustine’s Confessions is a lifetime’s book and worth every hour, though you will want to argue with him about grace and predestination before you are far in, and you should.

Read the Church Fathers in a decent modern translation rather than the Victorian editions that circulate free online, and read them with a Bible open beside you. You will find yourself disagreeing regularly, which is entirely fine, and you will be moved rather more often than you expect to be.

If you want the wider historical picture first, my answer on church history sets out why this material matters at all.

So, now what?

Pick one of the Church Fathers and read something they actually wrote rather than a summary of them. An hour with Ignatius on his way to the lions will do more for your sense of the early church than a whole shelf of modern books written about it.

And let them do the thing they are best at, which is to enlarge your sense of the body of Christ. Our congregations are small and our memories are short. These men prayed to the same Lord, suffered for the same name, and are waiting for the same resurrection. Whatever else the Church Fathers do for you, they will cure any suspicion that your own congregation is the whole of Christ’s body.

If believers two thousand years from now read what you wrote, would they find someone who took the faith as seriously as these men did?

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

Hebrews 12:1, ESV