The Church Fathers can be intimidating.
That’s it- I said it. They can be intimidating. Especially for Lutherans.
First of all, they use different mediums to express their ideas: whether it’s the commentaries of Origen, the exhortations of Augustine, the orations of Athanasius and the Cappadocians, or the poetry of Ephraim- it’s all different from Pieper’s Dogamatics. And so, it’s a bit intimidating to sort it all out.
Second of all, they prefer different metaphors than ours. We live post-Anselm- you can bet that, when talking about salvation, we definitely prefer when people use the language of forensic justification. When Irenaeus speaks of recapitulation, when Origen speaks of enlightenment, when Athanasius speaks of triumph, when Augustine speaks of healing- these make us uncomfortable. With the experiences of the Reformation debates still in the back of our minds, we see Popery and Fanaticism at every turn. In our post-reformation world, we are afraid to figure out who is for us and who is against us in the early church: and so, it’s a bit intimidating to sort it all out.
Third of all, they use different philosophies than we do. For many Lutherans, the law of the land will always be some form of Luther’s Occamism, or perhaps something even more modern than that. We do not deal in forms or substances anymore. We have met Kant. We have heard of Hegel. Kierkegaard has made his mark on the soul, as have the rest of the modern philosophers. And so, it would seem that an unpassable gulf has opened up between us and the figures whose worldviews depended on Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Epicurus. It’s a bit intimidating to sort it all out.
And finally, their society is different than ours. We do not live in Roman times. We live after the agricultural and industrial revolution. We live under a mixed-market economy. Written Word is the cheapest form of word. We have the internet and global politics. The circus maximus and the bath spas have been replaced by instigram and twitter. We pay farmers to let their crops die. We voluntarily join the military. The mortality rate is significantly lower. And furthermore, the society around us becoming post-religious. It feels like, at the end of the day, we really have nothing in common with these Christians of old, who believed in dog-headed people and angelic intermediaries. Their entire way of life is strange to us- and it’s a bit intimidating to sort it all out.
But there is something we have in common with these Christians: we all have “one Lord, one Faith, One Baptism.”
It is the work of Dr. Thomas A. Von Hagel of Concordia Chicago that convinces us that we should think about the Early Church not as something alien and far away: rather, we should think about them in the context of Family. The uniting factor: we have all been called by God in the waters of our Baptism to the Christian faith. And so, despite the different times in which we live, despite the different philosophical or theological language we use, or the different mediums by which we write, we are all grafted into the mystical body of Christ- the most beautiful, holy, intimate communion by which we are unified for all of eternity.
The implications of this insight is very clear: if we are all one family, bound together in Christ, our hermeneutic for all of our interactions with the Early Church must be interactions guided by love.
We must stop using the Fathers as if they were stones to through at one another in current controversies.
We must stop making fun of the Fathers for not being as “enlightened” as we are, especially in the realms of science and theological articulation.
We must be quick to praise and slow to judge their lives and teachings.
And when they do err, we must forgive the fathers’ mistakes, always giving them every benefit of the doubt.
Let us thank God for the Father’s examples, both of what to do and what not to do. There is much richness in their wisdom, and there is much purity in their conduct and living. However, there are also matters they failed to deal with. And there are matters that they failed in dealing with. If we are to benefit from their successes and avoid their shortcomings, we must study them diligently and compassionately, always seeking to understand, always seeking to forgive, and always seeking to be corrected, in both our discourse and life. Families may not always be functional- they may not always understand each other, or even like each other. But by the very virtue of being family, we are called to love one another.
May God’s Love for us in the person and work of Christ be the catalyst for love for our family- our whole family- this day and always.
