A Universal Apology Point Ten: IGNORANCE OF THE FATHERS

IGNORANCE OF THE FATHERS

I am recounting the several reasons I have for accepting that the Catholic Church is what she says she is. I had become convinced that any denomination with no continuity to the historical church could not be the eternal Church.

At this point in my investigations, I ran into a very odd and unexpected problem. The people to whom I turned to help me in this search—and I freely confess that I merely mean average amateurs like myself, not professors of theology—knew nothing about the history of the matter.

Aside from St Augustine, none of them even knew the names of the Fathers of the Church.  When I asked them about Arius and Photius, no one knew who I was talking about. They knew the Nicene Creed, but apparently they thought Luther or Calvin had written it. They had never heard of the council of Nicaea, or regarded it as insignificant. They did not know what the Ecumenical Councils were. They had no idea where the Bible came from or when it had been canonized.

At least one faithful Christian scorned me for having any concern with the history of the Church. I thought this a paradox, for that faithful Christian was a member of a sect whose entire claim was a specific claim of historical fact, namely that the Church once possessed, and then lost, the exact teachings of this sect.

Another faithful Christian told me specifically not to read the Early Church Fathers, on the somewhat elliptical reasoning that, since the Fathers knew the Apostles personally, or knew their immediate disciples, they had nothing but misleading opinions about the scriptures those Apostles entrusted to them: whereas men living over a thousand five hundred years afterward, across the gap of lost records and the oblivion of history, speaking another language and from an entirely alien cultural milieu, could grasp the subtle nuances and shades of meaning of the Apostolic writings in a fashion the immediate disciples of the Apostles, who read the words in their native tongue and spoke to the authors face to face, could not.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.