Early Church Wisdom

The Church Fathers have much to offer contemporary Christians.

A Patristic Treasury: Early Church Wisdom for Today, edited by James R. Payton, Jr.

Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Anglicans have long held the Church Fathers in high esteem. … For most of evangelicalism and other segments of Protestantism, though, reference (and certainly deference) to the Church Fathers has been notable mostly by its absence.

I was raised in just such a church – call it low-church Protestant.  It was a wonderful church, but I don’t recall a single mention or reference to a Church Father.  I suspect there was mention of Augustine, but not much else.  Shortly after Augustine came Luther and Calvin, as we know – and shortly before Augustine, the apostle John!

Protestant Reformers in the sixteenth century did reference many of the early Church Fathers, but this pattern has dwindled over the years to a trickle…or less.

Payton notes that this lack of reference in such Protestant churches has begun to change.  I know it has with me – and well before picking up this book.  Over the last several years I have slowly grown into paying attention to just what was said and written in the first seven centuries or so of Christendom (some of my public work on this can be seen here).

[The Church Fathers] are regularly lauded but rarely read.

This is often the case even in those traditions that claim strong affiliation to the earliest Church.  Of course, there is a lot to read.  Payton cites one compilation that consists of four hundred volumes and one-hundred-thousand pages of dense Greek and Latin text.

Impossible to get through.  I read a short work by Athanasius and it was packed with such wisdom and thought that I could probably spend a year just studying and re-reading this. 

It strikes me that, in general, a driver of this change in the broader society is a search for transcendence as an anecdote to the materialistic worldview that has driven us to a meaning crisis.  Traditional Christianity, especially represented in Eastern Orthodoxy, has done a good job of taking advantage of this search (and I mean this only in a positive way).

Payton sees this change as nothing but positive.  Not in a triumphalist sort of way.  In any case, I don’t know anything about which tradition or denomination he calls home, but he is Professor of Patristics and Historical Theology at McMaster Divinity College and Emeritus Professor of History at Redeemer University, where he taught for thirty years – I believe a Baptist Seminary and a Reformed University, respectively.

Payton has been recognized in the Catholic Historical Review for his work in fostering intellectual dialogue between the Evangelical and Eastern Orthodox Christians.

He certainly welcomes this change, this dialogue.  The Church Fathers lived in an environment of different cultures, languages, societal challenges (talk about culture wars); yet they found a way through – together.  Something that Payton believes would be helpful for Christians across all traditions today.

So, just what is meant by the term “Church Father”? 

The designation is an honorific.

There are four tests to qualify, according to Payton: antiquity (the first seven centuries or so), holiness of life, orthodox teaching, and ecclesiastical approval.  To be called such was a stamp of approval, that the individual Father could be read with confidence and profit.

He lists a dozen or more reasons why one should read these Church Fathers.  I will only mention a few:

·         Their works give us access to early Church thought and practice.  Some of them knew the apostles, all of them lived in a time and culture closer to that of Christ than we do.

·         The period was a critical time for Christianity; significant doctrinal clarification took place, usually due to dealing with heresies.

·         They gave us a picture of what it meant to think and live as a Christian – something perhaps quite valuable to us in our post-modern period; doctrine was meant to be experienced, not just contemplated.

·         It will open our eyes to where we have come from.

Perhaps most interesting to me: they read Scripture without all of the blinders that have developed since – the cautions and reactions we have, given our theological and doctrinal upbringing and views.  They show no particular unease when encountering passages that treat both faith and works, or grace and human effort, or solid assurance and warning against apostasy. 

Given the broad landscape in which these Church Fathers lived – culturally, geographically, through seven centuries – it is remarkable to see the consistency they showed in the writing and thought.  Not to say there was uniformity.  But compared to later periods, and especially today, there was broad consensus on the key issues.

Then again, this strikes me as somewhat a self-selecting criterion.  Keep in mind: to be considered a Church Father, one had to be considered in conformity with orthodox teaching and be ecclesiastically approved.  In other words, there is consensus because in order to be considered a Church Father, one had to fit into the acceptable and, ultimately prevailing, window.

Be that as it may, most Trinitarian Christians of today embrace the broadest strokes of this consensus (as will be seen when we come to some of these statements of faith).  Therefore, for those in this group, there is much to be gained by such studies.

The format of the book is pretty straightforward.  Payton has organized the book into chapters, one for each Church Father considered.  These are basically in chronological order, although obviously this cannot be so cut and dry. 

He separates these chapters into two broad groups: pre and post Constantine, or pre and post Nicea.  He identifies the apostolic Fathers – those that knew, or likely knew, one or the other of the apostles; they were concerned with nurturing this fledgling movement.  Then came the apologists, writing regarding those who opposed the Christian faith.  There was then a Roman Group, an Alexandrian group, and a North African group.

Then came Nicea.  Greek Fathers and Latin Fathers: in the fourth and fifth centuries, all dealing with controversies regarding the Trinity and Christology; in the sixth through eighth centuries, those in the west were dealing with collapse while those in the east had new Christological controversies to address.

Payton’s presentation is straightforward: a brief introduction of the individual Father (or document, in some cases), followed by selected sentences or passages from the work.  He does not comment at all on the specific passages:

I have culled out selections I have found to be devotionally stimulating, doctrinally thought-provoking, or epigrammatically striking. 

I will try to avoid using these snippets to draw any broad, general conclusions (and Payton warns against this).  His work is intended as a quick tour.  Inherently, any book of selections (and this is true of everything I write when working through a book) will inherently be influenced by the choices of the one doing the selecting.

Payton offers one last bit of counsel: we need to be open to where these Church Fathers are in time and place:

We must not expect the Church Fathers to speak with the sort of terminology or nuance that developed subsequently in Church history…

Frankly, I will find this refreshing.  How much we have complicated some very simple teaching (simple to understand, quite difficult to live, as my work the Beatitudes should make clear)?  Instead of getting bogged down in everything that divides Christians doctrinally, what about a focus on what unites us?

Conclusion

I am not quite sure how I will present this work – how I will interact with it in each blog post; the book is in a different format than anything that I have worked with before, consisting solely of isolated sentences and paragraphs from the dozens of early Church Fathers.  I imagine my approach will develop and change as I progress through the book.