Dr. James White and Pastor Jeff Durbin discuss the Early Church Fathers:

Transcript:

James White: They (Roman Catholic Apologists) wanna say, we aren’t really trying to retrieve the early church, and in a sense, they’re correct, because I don’t wanna retrieve the mess at Corinth. Okay. Which continued in Corinth, as we see in First Clement. What I want is the apostolic witness.

Jeff Durbin: Right.

JW: That is the issue. And in a sense, Rome agrees with that, they just simply say that the apostolic witness is not limited to Scripture. You have sacred tradition as the overarching banner. You have the written element of that and you have the oral element of that. And that’s where the issue is.

There’s this oral element and our argument is, you simply cannot demonstrate in any way, shape or form, that what you have defined on the basis of tradition was actually delivered by the Apostles to the first generation of Christians. It’s just not possible. And so that’s where, that’s where everything becomes discombobulated between the two.

But the point is that the Reformation, they were not saying, we’re gonna to start something new, you’ve messed things up so badly, we’re gonna start something new. They weren’t saying that.

They were saying these accretions, these editions of taking place over time where you get someone trying to do something good but they go off track and then that gets built upon by the next person, built upon by next person. And pretty soon you’re in the next County as far as – away from apostolic truth is concerned.

And so there has to be a mechanism of correcting that kind of thing. And once you make the church, the infallible interpreter of both the Bible and tradition, there’s no way of correcting the church any longer because the church now becomes itself infallible.

But this is very, very important because I don’t know about how many you’ve talked to, but I just have lost count of how many people I have talked to and said, “Well, once I started reading early Church Fathers, that’s when I found out I need to become a Catholic because they were Catholics like me, and all the rest of this stuff.” And I’m like, “What exactly were you reading? What exactly were you listening to? What do you do about this?” And I just point out one place and they’re so uncomfortable when they encounter just how variegated and how wide the opinions were.

And I’m like, okay, so if this becomes your authority, if this becomes the lens through which you read Scripture, no wonder you’re gonna deny the perspicuity of Scripture.

JD: Where the Roman Catholics and Protestants, Roman Catholics and the Reformed need to sort of mutually have a certain feeling of frustration with the Fathers. I feel it, and I’ve seen it with Roman Catholics I’ve engaged with, frustration they will have. Where you’ll look at a person and we’ve already said this, but you go, “That’s amazing. That sounds just like Jesus. It sounds just like Paul.” And then he walks to next page – faceplant, “You’re like, that’s frustrating.” And the Roman Catholic has to, if they have integrity, if they have honesty, they have to say they feel the same frustration that these fallible uninspired men, yeah. They say the stuff that I like…

JW: But…

JD: … And then they faceplant.

JW: But dogmatically, they have to believe Satis Cognitum said a long time ago, that the teachings on the papacy are the constant ancient faith of the church. They’ve been told, this is what we’ve taught all along. It’s not and that’s why I’ve said and I think I said this…

JD: And it could be demonstrated that it’s not.

JW: And I said this, I think I said this on my program yesterday. I said, I have for years said show me a single Bishop at the Council of Nicaea, first ecumenical council, an important topic, Nicene Creed (all the rest of that stuff)… show me a single Bishop at the Nicene Council that believed what a modern Roman Catholic has to believe ‘De fide’ by faith as in dogma. And they can’t, because there’s nobody there that believed what a modern Roman Catholic has to believe.

Now there were variances even amongst them, but the point is that the men who gave us the Nicene Creed did not believe in the Bodily Assumption of Mary and Immaculate Conception and Papal infallibility – if they believed in Papal infallibility, why were they even getting together? It doesn’t make any sense. And the whole idea that, well, the Nicene Council could only have been accepted if the Pope approved it, that’s rubbish. That is pure anachronism. So they have to massage the data. And that’s why I’ve said, hey when I teach Church history, I can let the early Church Fathers be the early Church Fathers.

JD: Just be honest about it.

JW: Just, just be who they were. I don’t have a system saying to me, you need to make them all into your mirror images back then or your entire system is actually false.

JD: That’s the point. Having the integrity to say, ‘they’re frustrating.’ An honest Roman Catholic in an honest Reformed person should say that. There, it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating coz there’s moments of great glory and moments of great..

JW: Right.

JD: Big face-plants.

September 11, 2014, at Flatirons Baptist Church in Boulder, Colorado.

Dr. James White: Dates, Doctrines and Dead People:

Lessons from the Early History of the Church. Session 1:

Session 2:

Session 3:

Session 4:

Michael J. Kruger is professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, 2012). He blogs regularly at Canon Fodder. In an article at The Gospel Coalition he writes:

Skeptics commonly criticize core Christian beliefs by claiming that they were not really held by the earliest Christians. Instead, we are told, these beliefs were invented post facto by the institutional church.

The classic example of such an argument has to do with the divinity of Jesus. The earliest followers of Jesus didn’t really believe that Jesus was divine, this argument goes; it was only the later institutional church, under political pressure from Emperor Constantine, that insisted Jesus must have divine status. Thus, some argue, the belief that Jesus is God is not really, well, Christian.

Substitutionary Atonement

This same sort of argument has also been applied to other doctrines, particularly the substitutionary nature of the atonement. Critical scholars, led by the classic work of Gustaf Aulén, have long argued that the earliest Christians did not believe that Christ died as a substitute for sinners. Instead, they say, these Christians believed what is known as the “Christus victor” view of the atonement—the idea that Jesus’s death on the cross (and resurrection) conquered the Devil and other forces that held people in bondage. On this view, Christ did not die in place of rebellious sinners but instead rescued victims from a fallen world.

If Aulén is correct, then when did the substitutionary view of the atonement arise? Peter Carnley embodies the typical critical approach when he says that the substitutionary view “was not known before Anselm’s time.” Thus, Carnley claims, it was not until the Middle Ages, when Anselm wrote Cur Deus Homo (Why the God-Man?), that Christians began to believe Christ died in place of sinners.

No doubt these sorts of scholarly arguments can explain why alternative theories of the atonement have gained popularity in recent years, while the substitutionary view continues to be vilified as un-Christian. Rob Bell does precisely this in his book Love Wins, where he roundly rejects the substitutionary view in favor of other options.

But is it really true that the substitutionary view of the atonement was not found before the Middle Ages? Not at all. Such a claim can be readily refuted merely by examining the writings of the New Testament itself—particularly the letters of Paul. However, it is also worth noting that key elements of the substitutionary view were held by some of the earliest Christian writers. One example is the author of the Epistle to Diognetus from the early second century. The Epistle to Diognetus was written by an unknown Greek author as an apology for Christianity. Below are some excerpts from the author that affirm key aspects of substitutionary atonement. Continue reading →