Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church
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ISBN: 978-1-4335-2357-1
Verlag: Crossway
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Michael A. G. Haykin (ThD, University of Toronto) is professor of church history and biblical spirituality at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies. He has authored or edited more than twenty-five books, including Rediscovering the Church Fathers: Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church.
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REDISCOVERING THE CHURCH FATHERS
A Vital Need for Evangelicals
Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old. MATTHEW 13:52 A few years after I had completed my doctoral studies in fourth-century pneumatology and exegesis and had started teaching at Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto, I came to realize that I would have to develop another area of scholarly expertise, for very few of the Baptist congregations with which I had contact were keenly interested in men like Athanasius (ca. 299–373) and Basil of Caesarea (ca. 330–379). At a much later date, when I had developed a keen interest in British Baptists and Dissenters in the “long”eighteenth century and was giving papers and lectures in this subject, I was increasingly conscious that while fare from this second area of study was quite acceptable to evangelical audiences, a cloud of suspicion hung over the whole field of the ancient church. The truth of the matter is that far too many modern-day evangelicals are either ignorant of or quite uncomfortable with the church fathers. No doubt years of their decrying tradition and battling Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy with their “saints”from the ancient church have contributed in part to this state of ignorance and unease. Then, too, certain strains of anti-intellectual fundamentalism have discouraged an interest in that “far country” of church history. And the strangeness of much of that era of the ancient church has proven a barrier to some evangelicals in their reading about the early centuries of the church.Finally,an ardent desire to be “people of the Book”—an eminently worthy desire—has also led to a lack of interest in other students of Scripture from that earliest period of the church’s history after the apostolic era.Well did Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892)—a man who certainly could not be accused of elevating tradition to the level of, let alone over, Scripture—once note,“It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others.”1 Past Evangelical Interest in the Church Fathers Thankfully, this has begun to change.2 We who are evangelicals are beginning to grasp afresh that evangelicalism is, as Timothy George has rightly put it,“a renewal movement within historic Christian orthodoxy.”3 We have begun to rediscover that which many of our evangelical and Reformed forebears knew and treasured—the pearls of the ancient church. The French Reformer John Calvin (1509–1564), for example, was a keen student of the church fathers. He did not always agree with them, even his favorites, like Augustine of Hippo (354–430). But he was deeply aware of the value of knowing their thought and drawing upon the riches of their written works for elucidating the Christian faith in his own day.4 In the following century, the Puritan theologian John Owen (1616–1683), rightly called by some the “Calvin of England,”5 was not slow to turn to the experience of the one he called “holy Austin,” namely Augustine, to provide him with a typology of conversion.6 Yet again, the Particular Baptist John Gill (1697–1771) played a key role in preserving Trinitarianism among his fellow Baptists at a time when other Protestant bodies—for instance, the English Presbyterians, the General Baptists, and large tracts of Anglicanism—were unable to retain a firm grasp on this utterly vital biblical and Patristic doctrine. Gill’s The Doctrine of the Trinity Stated and Vindicated7 was an effective defense of the fact that there is “but one God; that there is a plurality in the Godhead; that there are three divine Persons in it; that the Father is God, the Son God, and the Holy Spirit God; that these are distinct in Personality, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.”8 But a casual perusal of this treatise reveals at once Gill’s indebtedness to Patristic Trinitarian thought and exegesis, for he quotes such authors as justin Martyr (d. ca. 165), Tertullian (fl. 190–220), and Theophilus of Antioch (fl. 170–180). One final example of earlier evangelical appreciation of the Fathers must suffice. John Sutcliff (1752–1814), a late eighteenth-century English Baptist, was so impressed by the Letter to Diognetus, which he wrongly supposed to have been written by justin Martyr, that he translated it for The Biblical Magazine, a Calvinistic publication with a small circulation. He sent it to the editor of this periodical with the commendation that this second-century work is “one of the most valuable pieces of ecclesiastical antiquity.”9 Who Are the Church Fathers? In an entry on “patristics” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, a standard reference work of Christianity, the church fathers are described as those authors who “wrote between the end of the 1st cent. . . . and the close of the 8th cent.,” which comprises what is termed the “Patristic age.” These authors, this entry continues, defended the Gospel against heresies and misunderstandings; they composed extensive commentaries on the Bible, explanatory, doctrinal, and practical, and published innumerable sermons, largely on the same subject; they exhibited the meaning and implications of the Creeds; they recorded past and current events in Church history; and they related the Christian faith to the best thought of their own age.10 In another major reference work dealing with Christianity’s history and theology, Christianity: The Complete Guide, it is noted that while there is no official list of the Fathers, there are at least four characteristics that denote those meriting the title of church father: their orthodoxy of doctrine, their being accepted by the church as important links in the transmission of the Christian faith, their holiness of life, and their having lived between the end of the apostolic era (ca. 100) and the deaths of John of Damascus (ca. 655/675– ca. 749) in the East and Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) in the West.11 Recent study of the Fathers, this article goes on to observe, has tended to broaden the category of church father to include some figures many in the ancient church viewed with suspicion—namely, figures like Tertullian and Origen (ca. 185–254). This article also notes that, owing to the rise of feminist historiography, scholarship of this era is now prepared also to talk about church mothers (“matristics”).There is no doubt that feminist concerns have highlighted the way in which much of church history has been taught from an exclusively male perspective. But the problem with this category of “matristics” is that there are very few women in the ancient church who can be studied in similar depth to the Fathers since they left little textual remains.12 In the chapters that follow, I briefly note the role played by Vibia Perpetua (d. 202) and Macrina (ca. 327–ca. 379), for example; but, though I wish we had more detail about these fascinating women, any examination of them is bound by significant textual limitations. Reading the Church Fathers for Freedom and Wisdom13 Why should evangelical Christians engage the thought and experience of these early Christian witnesses? First, study of the Fathers, like any historical study, liberates us from the present.14 Every age has its own distinct outlook, presuppositions that remain unquestioned even by opponents. The examination of another period of thought forces us to confront our innate prejudices, which would go unnoticed otherwise. As contemporary historical theologian Carl Trueman has rightly noted: The very alien nature of the world in which the Fathers operated challenges us to think more critically about ourselves in our own context. We may not, for example, sympathise much with radically ascetic monasticism; but when we understand it as a fourth century answer to the age old question of what a committed Christian looks like at a time when it is starting to be easy and respectable, we can at least use it as an anvil on which to hammer out our own contemporary response to such a question.15 For instance, Gustaf Aulén, in his classic study of the atonement, Christus Victor, argues that an objective study of the Patristic concept of atonement will reveal a motif that has received little attention in post-Reformation Christianity: the idea of the atonement as a divine conflict and victory in which Christ fights and overcomes the evil powers of this world, under which man has been held in bondage. According to Aulén, what is commonly accepted as the New Testament doctrine of the atonement, the forensic theory of satisfaction, may in fact be a concept quite foreign to the New Testament. Whether his argument is right or not—and I think he is quite wrong—can be determined only by a fresh examination of the sources, both New Testament and Patristic. Then, second, the Fathers can provide us with a map for the Christian life. It is...
