Introduction
Over the last few years, there has been a peculiar amount of interest among Protestants in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.
Some have dabbled. Some have converted.
There are a variety of reasons for this—an epistemology within which perceived beauty indicates or tracks truth, a desire for mystery and experience rooted in history as opposed to the charismatic movement, the allure of the ancient, and the appeal of an ultimate theological authority, among others.
These things aren’t necessarily bad.
In the Reformed world, “ressourcement” or “retrieval” of the Early Church Fathers in particular (ECFs) has played a particularly central role in fueling this phenomenon, with retrieval of the medieval schoolmen—especially Aquinas—playing a secondary role. Having observed this pattern for a while, I’ve noticed an unspoken presupposition that dominates efforts to “retrieve” the theological insights of the ECFs for today.
That presupposition is something like the following: the task of giving the theology of the earlier church its due in our quest for orthodoxy can be achieved by honest and neutral reflection on historical sources.
The primary contention of this article is that this presupposition is false.
Indeed, just as there is no “neutral” with regard to worldview, there is no “neutral” with regard to how one understands ancient documents, assigns value to their witness or uses them in theological formulation. In point of fact, while many readers will have slept through a history of philosophy class, many others will be shocked to learn that one of the sub-branches of philosophy is the philosophy of history, where questions like, “What constitutes a historical explanation?” “Can we separate history from its interpretation?” “Can history yield objective truth?” and “What counts as historical evidence?” are central subjects of discussion.
In what follows, I’ll lay out seven considerations for engaging historical theology through an explicitly Protestant lens, while hoping to clarify that such an approach is no more problematic than typical Orthodox and Catholic approaches that feign methodological neutrality on the way to sensationalistic conclusions like Newman’s famous one-liner: “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant” (John Henry Newman, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine). My hope is that the kind of Protestant who is bewildered by reading the word “Tradition” in early Christian writings or disturbed by the fact that they hold views contrary to the ECFs will find conceptual architecture freeing them from feeling as though they are committing intellectual sin in retrieving early sources or, worse, feeling the need to avoid them altogether in order to preserve a flimsy theological framework.
Three quick notes: 1) While not every consideration is uniquely Protestant, in my experience, each consideration is particularly important for Protestants to keep in mind, and many of them are regularly overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant 2) As you'll see, these considerations are not exclusively philosophical or theological and in some cases, are not even controversial 3) Space does not permit a full-throated defense of each consideration. Because of this, I’m happy to more or less state each consideration and let readers dig deeper into each claim on their own time.
1. The Clarity and Authority of Scripture
The clarity of Scripture does not mean that every part of Scripture is equally clear or that everyone will be able to understand the Bible at equal depths. Nor does it imply that there will be no disagreements about theology and practice within the church. What it does imply, however, is that God has revealed what we must believe and how we must live before him in such a way that is understandable to ordinary Christians reading the Bible in the context of the church without the need to appeal to special, authoritative interpreters. The Bible is clear in this way because of its own purpose as special revelation in conjunction with God’s excellence as a communicator (see Mark Thompson’s A Clear and Present Word).
There is no doctrine of the clarity of church history or historical theology, which are not God-breathed like Scripture (2 Tim. 3:16).
The authority of Scripture is not uniquely Protestant and hardly requires explanation on account of its source and infallibility. However, combining clarity and authority has major implications for “retrieving” the Fathers, chief among them being that when they are at odds, the fruit of careful and corporate interpretation of Scripture should be preferred in theological construction over historical practices or theological positions claiming apostolic origin in the absence of a biblical foundation. On account of its authorial excellence yielding clarity, a methodological bias toward Scripture in the task of appropriating historical theology is the hallmark of synthesizing Scripture and church tradition Protestantly.
2. Development vs. Departure Is Determined by the Corporate Body
Every tradition acknowledges the historical development of doctrine as the church sought to clarify and tease out the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). From a Protestant perspective, the Christological and Trinitarian formulations of Nicaea, Constantinople and Chalcedon, for example, simply crystallized apostolic teaching about the Son and the Trinity. But how are we to adjudicate instances when what is claimed as development or clarification actually appears to be a departure from the apostolic deposit? Examples are legion, but the anathematizing of those who do not venerate icons at Nicaea II (the Seventh Ecumenical Council) and Vatican II’s Lumen gentium 16 (suggesting that those who have never heard of Jesus—and potentially even Muslims who “with us [Roman Catholics] adore the one true God”—can still be saved) are both low-hanging fruit. Are these developments or departures from apostolic Christianity? Who’s to decide?
The Protestant answer is clear: the corporate body of ordinary believers. The diligence of the “more noble” Bereans who checked Paul’s claims against Scripture (Acts 17:11) is a great example of the principle in action. Furthermore, Paul tells the Galatians that if he or an angel from heaven subsequently proclaimed something different than what he taught, they shouldn’t believe it. Wow! He thus held them responsible for determining when a supposed clarification or development by someone claiming divine authority was actually a departure deserving of an anathema (cf. Gal. 1:6–9). Critically, absent from the Galatian instance is any suggestion that the elders or church leaders were uniquely tasked with discerning and rebuking such error.
If a council of people were wrong, that is very sad indeed—and regardless of one’s view on icons, for example, everyone believes that councils of people have been wrong (e.g., the Second Council of Ephesus in 449, aka the “Robber Council” via Pope Leo I). Protestants, however, do not feel beholden to following their errors and instead, like good Bereans, take Paul’s admonition seriously in wading through claims of doctrinal development.
3. “Early” Doesn’t Entail Less Error
Students of the Greek New Testament are aware of a frustrating phenomenon: the most significant textual variants often occur in the earliest manuscripts. There is a loose analogy here related to retrieving theology from the Fathers, where it is often thought that after John died the church existed in its purest form before later corruption.
False.
Anyone who has read Galatians, John’s letters, or the Corinthian correspondence knows that very serious theological error has always been present in the church. Why would people expect less error after the death of the last Apostle? In certain cases, earlier may indeed imply less opportunity for error, but the “early therefore accurate” principle as a general rule is one that the New Testament itself simply won’t allow. Remember, Irenaeus—writing in the second century as one of our most valuable patristic witnesses—believed that Jesus lived well into his 40s (Against Heresies 2.22.5).
He was just wrong.
4. “Early” Doesn’t Imply Unanimity of Opinion
Sometimes Protestants uninitiated in historical theology are led to believe by their Catholic and Orthodox interlocutors that when the church was young, it was at the very least unified. Again, and related to the prior point, this is simply not true. Hear the words of J. N. D. Kelly to the would-be student of historical theology from chapter one of his universally respected Early Christian Doctrines:
“In the first place, he must not expect to find it characterized by that doctrinal homogeneity which he may have come across at other epochs. Being still at the formative stage, the theology of the early centuries exhibits the extremes of immaturity and sophistication. There is an extraordinary contrast, for example, between the versions of the Church’s teaching given by the second-century Apostolic Fathers and by an accomplished fifth-century theologian like Cyril of Alexandria. Further, conditions were favourable to the coexistence of a wide variety of opinions even on issues of prime importance. Modern students are sometimes surprised at the diversity of treatment accorded by even the later fathers to such a mystery as the Atonement; and it is a commonplace that certain fathers (Origen is the classic example) who were later adjudged heretics counted for orthodox in their lifetimes.”
5. Widespread Patristic Agreement Doesn’t Imply Authoritative Truth
Take charging interest on loans, for example. This practice was universally condemned by the early church and was condemned explicitly by the Roman Catholic Church for over 1,700 years. And yet, not only do Protestants reject this condemnation, but charging interest on money loaned to another is now permissible under official Roman Catholic dogma.
Paedocommunion (i.e., infants receiving communion) was widespread by the fourth century and was the nearly universal practice in the East, and yet the vast majority of Protestants, along with Roman Catholicism, reject the practice. It still remains standard practice among the Orthodox, however.
Finally, consider capital punishment. While some ECFs were made nervous by the prospect of Christians participating in the process itself, that the state could execute criminals enjoyed nearly universal support. But in 2018, Pope Francis amended the Catechism of the Catholic Church (claiming “development” from a long-accepted tradition of endorsement) to reflect that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” (CCC, no. 2267).
The bottom line is that the Protestant who is told by their Catholic friends that widespread, early (and even abiding) agreement on a particular doctrine constitutes decisive evidence for its soundness needs only to point to church history itself to indicate the opposite.
6. The Earliest ECFs Enjoyed Less Canonical Access
In the early church—not necessarily unlike today—the apostolic deposit circulated in both written and verbal form. One drawback to weighing patristic theology, however, is that there are good reasons to believe that many of the earliest ECFs wrote without knowledge of significant portions of the New Testament. To be sure, it does not necessarily follow from the absence of citation or allusion that an ECF was not aware of a particular New Testament book. On the other hand, consider how bizarre it would be to comment on and interact with numerous New Testament books but say nothing about others if one had equal access to them! What non-arbitrarily explanation could be offered? The best explanation is that as the apostolic deposit was formally collated over time and canonized, many of the earliest ECFs were simply not aware of certain parts of its content.
The import for appropriating the ECFs for theology is sobering, but should not be wielded proudly, triumphally, or naively: the average Christian has better access to the New Testament than most of the Early Church Fathers.
Surely that factors meaningfully into our “all-things-considered” theological construction.
7. The ECFs and Most of Church History Have Lacked 21st-Century Bible Analysis Capabilities
Very few ECFs had a working knowledge of Hebrew. Few Latin Fathers had a commanding knowledge of Greek. None of them had the ability to instantly search for and identify every instance of a particular syntactical construction via Bible software or find how many times a certain Greek word was used in the Septuagint. Simply put, with regard to studying the Bible, we now stand at a place in history that is wholly unmatched. How Clement and Jerome would have longed for Bible Works or Logos (sorry, Olive Tree)! Once more, this realization should not be taken lightly or render us guilty of Lewis’s “generational snobbery.” But the fact remains that between the fruits of textual criticism and technology, we now have an ability to analyze and reflect on the contents of Scripture that is far superior to any previous generation of church history.
Again, surely this staggering grace affects our theological methodology as we seek to engage early Tradition.
Conclusion
Much more could be said and should be said. Perhaps I’ll be the one to say it at some point. But my hope for now is that this minimalistic framework of considerations is helpful for Protestants seeking to think well about the integration of history and exegesis in theological formulation. Appropriating the theology of the ECFs in our doctrine is fertile soil for Protestants, too.
And we should not at all be ashamed to engage in that task Protestantly.