A Battle Over the Fathers

Lately I’ve run into several articles by Evangelical Protestant that in the course of appreciating the Church Fathers, which is a great thing to be welcomed, appropriate them as if they were modern American Evangelicals or at least not early Catholics. I’ve heard this in conversations with Evangelical friends, and saw a milder version of this appropriation at a conference I attended recently. The assumption seems to be “The Fathers are Ours! except when they’re wrong, then they’re yours.”

Apparently Father Hugh Barbour has had the same experience, written up in an article sent out by a young friend who’s entering the Premonstratensian or Norbertine abbey of which he is the prior. He writes, for example,

The Reformed Baptist author of the Christian Research Journal article claims, “The council had no idea that they (sic), by their gathering together, possessed some kind of sacramental power of defining beliefs: they sought to clarify biblical truth, not to put themselves in the forefront and make themselves a second source of authority.” This statement, though brief, is littered with errors.

First, even if the proceedings of the Council were nothing more than a debate on Scripture, it is thunderingly clear that the participants believed they had the authority to give the definitive interpretation of the data. According to the position of the Protestant apologist, the Church had no final interpretive authority; if an individual Christian believed the conciliar arguments to be unbiblical, he could reject them. How different this is from the position of the Council itself. The very end of the original Nicene Creed reads: “And whosoever shall say that there was a time when the Son of God was not, or that before He was begotten He was not, or that He was made of things that were not, or that He is of a different substance or essence [from the Father] or that He is a creature, or subject to change or conversion — all that so say, the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes them.”

Again, recall that the real issue is whether or not the Council believed itself to be the final authority in interpreting the data regarding Christ’s deity. Clearly, the Church that anathematizes (cuts off) those who disagree with its findings is a Church that believes itself to have the last word.

But there is another problem with the claim that the authority of Nicea rests solely on biblical authority. The Council did not declare that the doctrine it proposed was simply a restatement or clarification of the Scriptures, but that “the Catholic and Apostolic Church” believes it, and condemns the contrary. The Scriptures are not cited even once in the Fathers’ definition, hardly a likely thing had they been adherents of some “Bible only” ideology. To be sure, the Fathers of Nicea were certain that the orthodox doctrine was found in Scripture, but because they most assuredly did not hold to sola scriptura, it never occurred to them to separate the Church’s authority from the interpretation of Scripture. Rather, if anyone at that time held to a view akin to the “Bible only,” it was the heretical Arians, who rejected the Church’s definition because it used terms not found in Sacred Scripture, but rather taken from Greek philosophy.