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Question: I have a question that I have been meaning to write about and if you can help me understand, I will be eternally grateful.It is about the early church fathers. How much credence can we give them? I mean, are they really the early church fathers? Do they have apostolic succession, not in terms of the way the Catholics believe, but is there a history of their being converted and discipled by the original apostles, and thus, carry on the work that was started by Christ? Is theirs truly a history of the early church? How much of it is valid and where does the validity stop?
You see, I want to read their writings just to help me in my witness, especially if it helps me reach out to Catholics (like my family, who believe that the early fathers validate the Catholic church), but I don't want to do that if it has no real validity or even if their validity is in question. Are they a Catholic concept?
Answer: Your question evidences your quest for knowledge and accuracy. That is commendable. I want to try a short answer that I hope will address your question. Also, I want to assure you that I am far from being anything close to an authority on the church fathers.
First, the church today (the Protestant church) is deeply indebted to the church fathers. Of course, it wasn't their lives and works alone, but the way the Holy Spirit used men throughout the centuries to preserve the faith as it was once delivered to the saints. I could summarize our indebtedness as follows:
1. The canon of Scripture (the fact we count the books of our Bible today inspired and we reject the many spurious books in spite of their claims as uninspired). I want to be quick to caution that no one man or group of men at any particular moment decided which books would be in the Bible. That isn't so. But over a period of time God used scholarly church fathers to reject apocryphal and pseudopigrapha books from being accepted as part of inspired Scripture. Often they did so as they withstood heresy in the church because the heretics tended to tout the spurious books that supported their apostasy. That leads to our second indebtedness.
2. The pure, orthodox theology. The fact is that heresy would have inundated the church if some godly men had not withstood it. We can't play the what-if-game well knowing the sovereignty of God, but what if there had been no Athanasius? He withstood the corruption of the doctrine of the Trinity. Others withstood advancing heresies that stripped Christ of deity. Admittedly, there were many unorthodox church fathers. Yet, I feel there is value in studying the orthodox ones. Even a few of the mystical ones yield some real insight. The safeguard is to use the orthodox theology that emerged from their work as a criteria as one goes back to study them. Again, I believe that the Holy Spirit worked through many different men at different times, places, and circumstance to make sure the Truth was preserved. However I don't believe there was one linear, successive conduit such as the Catholic church.
Concerning the Catholic church (Catholic simply meaning universal). Study of history will bear out that the Catholic church was not always what it was in the Medieval age nor what it is today. Many judge the Catholic church of all ages through the lens of Medieval atrocities. I'm in no way defending what I believe are the heresies of the Catholic church. I'm simply saying that there were early church fathers that one might deem a part of the Catholic church who were true men and scholars of God. Martin Luther was a Catholic even after conversion. In other words, church fathers must be judged by their individual merits rather than by their affiliations.
About Apostolic Succession: There is really no evidence, that I know of, of such. Any attempts to establish Apostolic Succession are based on quite shaky and possibly spurious traditions. For example, one great church father, Iraneus was said to be in succession from the Apostle John. Iraneus was said to be the disciple of Polycarp who was the disciple of Apostle John. Much as been made of this. However reliable historical accounts indicate that Polycarp heard Apostle John preach when Polycarp was merely a small boy -- not as a disciple of John.
To me, one value of knowing something about the early church fathers is seeing that there is no new thing under the sun. Many heresies of today were faced by early church fathers (such as Arianism, denying Christ's deity, and Modalism, God is but one person). They very accurately and Biblically dealt with these errors. Their writings can be a big help to our apologies (defenses of orthodoxy). I'm not sure how much a study of them will help with evangelism unless to clear up some misunderstandings of church history or to show the diabolic roots of some heresies that are stumbling blocks to one's reception of the truth. Research would also probably reveal church fathers in the so-called Catholic church who spoke against the Romanism that exists in the Catholic church today.
It is good to know history. Knowing where one comes from helps one to know where one is going. However, ultimately we each have a personal responsibility to bring ourselves under the authority of the Word. It is our final criteria of what is truth. Although study of the church fathers is most helpful in understanding theology (and that is important for the preservation of the truth), the most convincing approach in evangelism remains, not the argument for orthodoxy, but the testimony of what Christ has done for me -- "This one thing I know, I once was blind, but now I see."
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