Category Archives: Early Church Fathers

Let The Fathers Be The Fathers

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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.

The Church Fathers on Justification

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Four quotes:

Tertullian (c. 155-230): God will “impute righteousness to those who believe in him, and make the just live through him, and declare the Gentiles to be his children through faith.”

Basil of Caesarea (330-379): “The is perfect and pure boasting in God, when one is not proud on account of his own righteousness but knows that he is indeed unworthy of the true righteousness and is justified soley by faith in Christ.”

Marius Victorinus: “We know that a man is not justified by the works of the law but through faith and the faith of Jesus Christ… It is faith alone that gives justification and sanctification.”

John Chrysostom (c. 347-407): God’s grace “has allowed Him that did no wrong to be punished for those who had done wrong… Him that was righteousness itself, ‘He made sin,’ that is allowed Him to be condemned as a sinner, as one cursed to die, so that we might be, not just ‘righteous’ but ‘righteousness,’ indeed the righteousness of God.”

The Apostolic Fathers and their quotations of the deutero-canonical books

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Turretinfan (on facebook) writes:

Some Roman Catholics will try to appeal to the Apostolic Fathers to defend the Roman Catholics’ view of the canon of Scripture. The Apostolic Fathers were writers from the first generation of Christians after the apostles, and their works do reflect a working knowledge of the Old and New Testaments.

Schaff’s “Apostolic Fathers” volume lists 16 references to the deuterocanonical books (or sections). When we look more closely, that number shrinks further.

Both of the references to Tobit are actually references to a single quotation in Polycarp’s Epistle to the Phillipians (10:2), where Schaff quotes Polycarp as writing “alms delivers from death,” which would appear to be taken from Tobit 4:10 and 12:9. The Greek text of Polycarp only exists through 9:2. Thus, all of chapter 10 is from a Latin edition, and we have no real way of knowing how literal or free the translation was.

The first reference to Judith is part of a string citation to the statement that Abraham was called “the friend” of God. Obviously, this is a statement that is found in several places in the canonical scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments, and is not a clear reference to Judith 8:19.

The second reference to Judith is from Clement’s first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 55. Here, the author of the epistle refers to Judith as an example of bravery “The blessed Judith, when her city was besieged, asked of the elders permission to go forth into the camp of the strangers; and, exposing herself to danger, she went out for the love which she bare to her country and people then besieged; and the Lord delivered Holofernes into the hands of a woman.” The author does not explicitly say that Judith is Scripture, and alludes to her bravery alongside that of Esther.

The reference to Baruch 4:36 and Baruch 5 is also a single reference taken from Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book V, chapter 35. Irenaeus does not quote the material as being from Baruch, but rather as being from Jeremiah. Of course, because Baruch was traditionally included with Jeremiah as one book, this makes sense if Irenaeus was just treating Baruch as being part of the canonical book of Jeremiah.

The longer (and consequently more questionable) version of Ignatius’ Epistle to the Magnesians (chapter 3) makes allusions to portions of Susanna, which was traditionally included with the canonical book of Daniel.

Irenaeus, in Against Heresies, Book IV, at 26:3 quotes a portion of Susanna, referring to it as Daniel.

The reference to Sirach 4:31 is just in the editor’s comments, and does not refer to the text.

The reference to Sirach 19:4 is a quotation from the Epistle to Hero, chapter 6, which is a spurious work formerly misattributed to Ignatius.

That leaves only references to Wisdom of Solomon, of which there are six.

The first reference is found in the Epistle of Barnabas, at Chapter 6, where a comment about binding the just is found amongst Scripture quotations. However, this statement is actually instead a reference to Isaiah 3:10 in the Septuagint, which we can be pretty sure about, because the immediately preceding material quoted is from Isaiah 3:9.

The second reference is found in I Clement 3, where the author uses the phrase “envy, by which death itself entered into the world,” which is reminiscent of Wisdom 2:24.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies II, 28:9, provides the third and fourth reference. The editors here suggest Widsom 9:13,17, but the language of those verses doesn’t seem to be present. At best, there is some similar theme about how earthly people can’t be expected to provide heavenly knowledge.

1 Clement 27 provides the final two references. The author writes: “He established all things, and by His word He can overthrow them. “Who shall say unto Him, What hast thou done? or, Who shall resist the power of His strength?”” This doctrine seems to be taken from Job 9. For example, Job 9:12 asks the question “who will say unto him, What doest thou?” Similarly, Jeremiah 32:17 “Ah Lord God! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee:” Wisdom 12:12 says “For who can say to you, “What have you done?”” Likewise Wisdom 11:21 states “For great strength is always present with you; who can resist the might of your arm?”

The bottom line is this. Some of the deuterocanonical books (for example, the books of the Maccabees) are not referenced at all. Some references are only in the more questionable portions of the works or in the spurious works. At least some of the authors seem to have thought that Jeremiah and Daniel included the Deuterocanonical portions, but this is more of a textual critical issue than a canonical issue. Finally, we do have reason to think that some of the early writers were familiar with and maybe even learned from the deuterocanonical books. Nevertheless, they do not quote from them as Scripture in any of the cases where they are used. The one such reference asserted by the editor’s of Schaff’s edition is a mistake, where the father clearly had in mind Septuagint Isaiah.

Keep in mind also that the same writers sometimes quote things as though they were Scripture, when that’s not the conclusion we would draw. For example, the Epistle of Barnabas states: “What, then, says He in the prophet? “And let them eat of the goat which is offered, with fasting, for all their sins.”” (Chapter 7) While Leviticus 4 mentions a goat sacrifice for sin, this seeming quotation cannot be traced to the canonical or deuterocanonical scriptures.

Ultimately, our standard is not “What did the apostolic fathers use,” but it is nevertheless revealing that they did not use those texts as Scripture or call them Scripture, as they did with the canonical scriptures.