This
assumption is wrong. Not in every detail. But in ways that are significant,
measurable and deeply challenging to the comfortable certainties of the modern
church.
The
early church fathers, the theologians, bishops and teachers who wrote in the
first three centuries of the Christian era, left behind an extensive body of
literature that gives us direct access to what the earliest post-apostolic
church actually believed, practised and understood about the faith it had
received. And when you read those writings carefully and honestly, you
encounter a Christianity that contradicts many of the assumptions of modern
evangelicalism, that challenges many of the claims of Roman Catholicism, and
that calls every serious believer in this generation to a profound and humbling
reexamination of what the faith they have received actually consists of.
Before
we go into what the fathers believed, we need to understand why their testimony
matters so much.
Why the Church Fathers Deserve Serious Attention
Their
Proximity to the Apostles
The
argument for taking the early church fathers seriously begins with geography
and chronology. These were not theologians writing centuries after the fact,
constructing systematic theologies from a distance. Many of them were
personally connected to the apostles or to men who had known the apostles
directly.
Polycarp
of Smyrna was personally discipled by the Apostle John. He was not merely
influenced by John's writings. He sat with him. He learned from him. He heard
him speak about Jesus, about the resurrection, about the Holy Spirit and about
what it meant to live as a disciple. When Polycarp wrote about the Christian
faith, he was writing from within a living chain of transmission that stretched
back directly to one of the men who had walked with Jesus.
Ignatius
of Antioch, who wrote seven letters on his way to martyrdom in Rome around 107
AD, was appointed as bishop by the apostles themselves according to the testimony
of Eusebius and Origen. He knew Peter. He was part of the apostolic
generation's direct sphere of influence.
Clement
of Rome, whose letter to the Corinthians dates to around 96 AD, is mentioned by
Paul in Philippians 4:3 as a fellow labourer whose name is in the book of life.
He may have known Paul and Peter personally.
This
proximity matters enormously. The faith these men described was not a
theological reconstruction assembled from texts alone. It was a living faith
received through personal relationship and direct transmission from those who
had been eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word.
Their
Seriousness About the Faith
But
beyond proximity, there is something else about the early church fathers that
the modern church needs to sit with in genuine humility. These men did not
treat the Christian faith as a Sunday activity, a cultural identity or a source
of personal comfort and blessing. They treated it as the most serious, most
costly and most glorious thing in all of human existence.
Ignatius
of Antioch, being transported to Rome to be fed to lions, wrote letters to
various churches along the way. In his letter to the Romans he pleaded with
them not to intercede for his release. He said: I am the wheat of God, and I am
to be ground by the teeth of wild beasts, that I may be found pure bread of
Christ. He saw his martyrdom not as a tragedy to be avoided but as the ultimate
expression of the faith he had given his life to.
Justin
Martyr was a philosopher who converted to Christianity in the second century
and spent the rest of his life defending the faith intellectually before
emperors and pagan philosophers. He was eventually executed around 165 AD for
refusing to offer sacrifice to Roman gods. His two Apologies and his Dialogue
with Trypho are among the most important early Christian documents outside the
New Testament.
These
men did not hold a casual, comfortable, benefits-focused Christianity. They
held a faith they were willing to die for, slowly and publicly, in front of
crowds that jeered rather than mourned. And their understanding of that faith,
forged in proximity to the apostles and sealed in their own blood, deserves to
be taken seriously by a generation that has made comfort its primary
theological value.
The early church fathers understood the Christian faith as something worth living and dying for in a way that most believers in this age have never been challenged to consider. Their deficiency in understanding is our inheritance. And recovering what they held requires the humility to acknowledge how much has been lost.
 |
The chain from Jesus to the apostles to the fathers was short, direct and personal. What they received was not theory. It was living transmission. |
What the Church Fathers Actually Believed
On
Salvation: Conditional Security, Not Eternal Security
One
of the most significant and most surprising discoveries for any modern
evangelical who reads the early church fathers carefully is that the doctrine
of eternal security, the once saved always saved position, is essentially
absent from their writings. What you find instead, consistently and repeatedly,
is a view of salvation that is real, powerful and genuinely transforming, but
that also maintains the possibility of departure through wilful and sustained
sin.
Clement
of Rome, writing to the Corinthians around 96 AD, one of the earliest Christian
documents outside the New Testament, wrote extensively about the importance of
repentance, obedience and continued faithfulness as conditions of salvation. He
did not present salvation as an irrevocable transaction that runs independently
of the believer's ongoing response to God.
"Let us therefore approach him in holiness of soul, lifting
up pure and undefiled hands unto him, with love toward our gentle and
compassionate Father who made us an elect portion unto himself."
— Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter 29
Justin
Martyr wrote in his First Apology around 155 AD:
"Those who are found not living as He taught should know
that they are not really Christians, even if His teachings are on their
lips." — Justin Martyr, First Apology, Chapter 16
This
is a direct and unambiguous statement that genuine Christianity is not merely a
confessional position but a lived reality. A person who claims the name of
Christ but does not live according to His teachings is not genuinely Christian
according to Justin Martyr. That is not the language of eternal security. That
is the language of conditional faith.
Irenaeus
of Lyon, writing around 180 AD in his massive work Against Heresies, described
apostasy as a genuine and serious possibility for genuine believers and did not
suggest that those who departed had simply revealed they were never truly
saved:
"God has preserved the freedom and the self-control of man,
and at the same time He exhorts us... This is why He has given good counsel to
all to observe sobriety and to do justice, that we may not be condemned but
receive salvation." — Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, Book 4,
Chapter 37
Origen,
writing in the early third century, was explicit that believers could fall from
grace through sustained wilful sin. Tertullian, who coined the Latin term
Trinitas, also held a clearly conditional security position throughout his
writings.
The
consensus of the early church fathers on salvation was not that a person who
genuinely comes to faith is permanently secured regardless of subsequent
choices. It was that genuine faith produces genuine transformation and that
continued faithfulness in cooperation with God's grace is the normal expression
of that genuine faith. This is not salvation by works. This is precisely what
Paul described in Philippians 2:12: work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
The fathers read Paul the same way.
On the
Lord's Supper: A Weighty and Sacred Act
The
early church fathers treated the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist, with a reverence
and theological weight that would make most modern evangelicals deeply
uncomfortable. This does not mean they all held the Roman Catholic doctrine of
transubstantiation. But it means they were nowhere close to the casual,
memorial-only view of communion that dominates much of modern evangelical
practice.
Ignatius
of Antioch, writing around 107 AD, less than a decade after the death of the
Apostle John, described the Eucharist in terms that clearly go beyond a bare
memorial:
"They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because
they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ,
which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up
again." — Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the
Smyrnaeans, Chapter 7
Justin
Martyr, writing his First Apology around 155 AD, described what happened in the
weekly gathering of believers with striking detail:
"We call this food Eucharist, and no one else is permitted
to partake of it, except one who believes our teaching to be true and who has
been washed in the washing which is for the remission of sins and for
regeneration, and is thereby living as Christ has enjoined."
— Justin Martyr, First Apology, Chapter 66
The
early church treated the Lord's Supper as a weighty, sacred and transforming
act that required genuine faith, genuine repentance and genuine commitment. It
was not something casually distributed to everyone in attendance as a routine
closing ritual of the Sunday service. It was reserved for genuine believers who
had been baptised and who were living according to the faith they professed.
On
Baptism: Connected to Regeneration
The
early church fathers held a view of baptism that is significantly more weighty
than the purely symbolic ordinance view that dominates much of modern
evangelicalism. For the fathers, baptism was intimately connected to the new
birth, to the forgiveness of sins and to entry into the community of faith.
This does not mean they believed that the water itself mechanically saved
regardless of faith. But it means they did not treat baptism as a mere public
declaration of a decision already made.
"As many as are persuaded and believe that what we teach
and say is true, and undertake to be able to live accordingly, are instructed
to pray and to entreat God with fasting, for the remission of their sins that
are past, we praying and fasting with them. Then they are brought by us where
there is water, and are regenerated in the same manner in which we were
ourselves regenerated." — Justin Martyr, First
Apology, Chapter 61
Tertullian,
writing around 200 AD, devoted an entire treatise to baptism that described it
as the sacrament of water by which the sins of our earlier blindness are washed
away and we are released for eternal life. Again, this is not mechanical water
salvation without faith. But it is a very different understanding from the
merely symbolic baptism that many modern churches practise.
The
early church's high view of baptism reflects their understanding that entry
into the Christian life was a serious, costly and transforming event, not a
casual decision followed by a certificate of church membership.
On
Eschatology: Premillennial and Without the Rapture
The
eschatology of the early church fathers is one of the clearest areas in which
the modern church has departed from the earliest post-apostolic tradition. The
predominant eschatological view of the early church fathers was what we would
today call historic premillennialism: the belief that Christ will return bodily
to the earth, that this return will be preceded by a period of tribulation and
persecution, that Christ will then reign on the earth for a literal thousand
years, and that the final judgment and the eternal state will follow.
What
the early church fathers did not teach, with any consistency or clarity, is the
dispensational premillennial framework with its pre-tribulation rapture that
dominates modern evangelical eschatology. The rapture, as understood and taught
in most modern evangelical churches, the idea that believers will be secretly
caught away before the great tribulation begins, is essentially absent from the
writings of the early church fathers.
Irenaeus,
writing around 180 AD, gave one of the most extensive early discussions of the
millennium and consistently described the church as going through tribulation
rather than being removed before it:
"It is therefore more certain, and less hazardous, to await
the fulfilment of the prophecy, than to be making surmises, and casting about
for any names that may present themselves, inasmuch as many names can be found
possessing the number mentioned; and the same question will, after all, remain
unsolved." — Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, Book 5,
Chapter 30
Justin
Martyr stated plainly in his Dialogue with Trypho that he and all right-minded
Christians believed in a literal resurrection of the dead and a literal
thousand-year reign of Christ in Jerusalem before the final judgment.
The
early church expected to go through tribulation. They did not expect to be
removed from it. And given that many of them were experiencing severe
persecution at the time of their writing, their eschatology was not
theoretical. It was the lived conviction that sustained them through exactly
the kind of suffering that a pre-tribulation rapture theology tells modern
believers they will never have to face.
The Roman Catholic Claim to the Church Fathers
The
Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the most consistent and most sophisticated
user of the early church fathers in contemporary theological debate. Catholic
apologists regularly appeal to the fathers as evidence that the early church
was Catholic, that the distinctive doctrines of Roman Catholicism such as the
authority of the bishop of Rome, the veneration of Mary, the doctrine of purgatory
and the sacrificial nature of the Mass are rooted in the earliest Christian
tradition.
This
claim deserves a direct and honest engagement. Not a dismissive one. Because
the Catholic claim to the fathers is not entirely without foundation. And any
response that pretends otherwise is not intellectually honest.
What the Fathers DO support that aligns with Catholic
claims: The fathers
do support a high view of the Lord's Supper with more theological weight than
most modern evangelical practice. They do support an episcopal structure with
bishops having genuine authority. They do show a high reverence for the
physical elements of baptism connected to the new birth. They do venerate
martyrs and show early forms of the honour given to significant figures in the
faith.
What the Fathers DO NOT support that Roman Catholicism
claims: The fathers
do not support the supremacy of the bishop of Rome over all other bishops. The
doctrine of papal infallibility has no basis in their writings. The immaculate
conception of Mary, the bodily assumption of Mary and the doctrine of purgatory
are absent from the writings of the early church fathers. The developed Marian
theology of Roman Catholicism emerged centuries after the patristic period.
The
key text that Roman Catholicism uses to establish papal supremacy is Matthew
16:18 where Jesus says to Peter: upon this rock I will build my church. The
Catholic claim is that this establishes Peter as the first pope and his
successors as supreme universal bishops. But the early church fathers read this
text differently. Many of them, including Origen, Tertullian, Augustine and
Chrysostom, interpreted the rock not as Peter personally but as the faith Peter
had just confessed: thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. The rock is
Peter's confession, not Peter's person.
Furthermore,
Peter himself in 1 Peter 5:1 does not claim supreme authority over the other
apostles. He calls himself a fellow elder alongside the other elders. And Paul
in Galatians 2:11 publicly opposed Peter to his face when Peter acted
hypocritically. A supreme universal bishop does not get publicly rebuked by a
colleague in a letter that becomes part of the authoritative Scripture of the
church.
The
honest conclusion is this: the early church fathers are neither fully Catholic
nor fully Protestant. Both traditions have selectively read them, drawing on
the passages that support their positions while ignoring the passages that
challenge them. The Catholic Church uses the fathers more systematically than
most Protestants but often overstates the degree of continuity between the
fathers and developed Catholic doctrine. The Protestant tradition has largely
ignored the fathers, which has created a theological amnesia that leaves modern
evangelicalism rootless and unanchored in the broader tradition of the faith.
The early church fathers are neither Catholic nor
Protestant property. They belong to the whole church. And reading them
honestly, without the agenda of either tradition, is one of the most humbling
and most enriching things a serious believer can do.
What the Modern Church Has Lost and Must Recover
Reading
the early church fathers with honest eyes produces, in any genuinely humble
believer, a deep sense of loss. Not nostalgia for a golden age that never
existed. The early church had its own problems, its own heresies, its own
failures and its own falling short. But a genuine recognition that something
has been diminished, that the faith received and lived and died for by those
first and second generation believers was deeper, costlier, more serious and
more genuinely transforming than much of what passes for Christianity in the
modern world.
The Loss
of Theological Depth
The
early church fathers were not professional theologians in the modern academic
sense. Many of them were bishops and pastors responsible for ordinary
congregations of ordinary believers. But the theological depth of their
writing, the careful engagement with the full range of Scripture, the
willingness to think hard about difficult questions without shortcuts or
slogans, puts the output of most modern Christian media to shame. The average
sermon in an early Christian community contained more theological substance
than most modern believers encounter in a year of church attendance.
The Loss
of a Costly Faith
The
early church fathers wrote from within communities where Christianity cost
something. Where professing the name of Christ was not a cultural default but a
costly choice that could and sometimes did lead to imprisonment, torture and
death. The faith they described was not a lifestyle enhancement or a source of
personal wellbeing. It was the most serious thing in their lives, more serious
than their safety, more serious than their comfort, more serious than their
social standing.
The
modern church largely operates in a context where Christianity costs very
little. And the faith that costs nothing tends to produce very little. The
correlation between the depth of the early fathers' understanding and the depth
of their suffering is not accidental. They understood the faith deeply because
they had paid deeply for it.
The Loss
of Community and Accountability
The
early church as described by Justin Martyr, Ignatius and others was a genuine
community with genuine accountability. The Lord's Supper was not distributed to
everyone regardless of how they were living. Baptism was preceded by a period
of instruction and genuine conversion. The bishop and the elders knew the
condition of the souls in their care. The community of believers was a genuine
community, not a weekly gathering of people who were otherwise strangers to
each other.
The
modern church's individualised, privatised, consumerist model of Christianity,
where each person constructs their own spiritual life and the church is primarily
a service provider rather than a genuine community of mutual accountability,
would be unrecognisable to the early church fathers.
The Call
to Humble Recovery
The
appropriate response to all of this is not despair. It is humility. The kind of
humility that says: we have lost something. Not everything. The gospel is still
being preached. The Holy Spirit is still at work. People are still being
genuinely saved and genuinely transformed. But something has been lost in the
transmission. The depth of understanding, the costly seriousness, the genuine
community and the theological richness that characterised the faith of the
early centuries has been significantly eroded by two thousand years of
compromise, comfort-seeking and institutional drift.
The
believer of this age who wants to know God deeply, who wants to hold the faith
with the kind of grip that can survive whatever comes, who wants to understand
what the apostles actually passed on to the generation that received it
first-hand, has an enormous resource available in the writings of the early
church fathers. Not as a substitute for Scripture. Not as an equal authority
alongside Scripture. But as a window into what the earliest post-apostolic
church understood the Scripture to mean, lived out in communities that were
willing to die for it.
"Thus
saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where
is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls."
— Jeremiah 6:16 (KJV)
Ask
for the old paths. The early church fathers walked them. And their footprints
are still there for any believer humble enough to follow them back to the
source.
Back to the Text. Every Time.
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