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The Church Fathers Are NotThe Church Fathers (Part Two)
Proper Evaluation of History
God promised the preservation of scripture, but not the preservation of history. Since God promised the preservation of scripture, He insures that with a high level of divine intervention. The Bible says much about this. Since God doesn’t promise to preserve history, we must judge history in a different way. We must weigh it.
The history of the people and events of history differs in nature than the history of Christian doctrine. Believers can open the Bible, which God preserved, and compare the history of Christian doctrine with what the Bible says. Especially the doctrine found in what people call “the church fathers” diverges from biblical doctrine and practice. Biblical doctrine and practice and the church fathers have many dissimilarities.
An important part of good historical evaluation is observing historical influences on beliefs, practices, and methods. The Bible itself helps with this ability in a sufficient way. Already in the first century, external factors affected what the church believed. This is all over the New Testament. Keeping false doctrine out of the church required and requires tremendous vigilance.
The Trajectory of External Influences on the Church
New Testament Times
If one just looked at an epistle like 1 Corinthians, chapter after chapter chronicle both external and internal influences on the church at Corinth. People over emphasized the effect of baptism in chapter one. They also devalued preaching as a method for what Paul calls “signs” and “wisdom.” In chapter two, people were placing higher value on naturalism over supernaturalism. Greek philosophy that denigrated the place of the physical body led to acceptance of sexual sin in chapters five and six. The same kind of false teaching on the body led to mass denial of bodily resurrection in chapter fifteen.
One could keep moving through the entire New Testament and do something very similar to the samples of the previous paragraph. God wants us to see how false doctrine and practice enters the church and then takes hold. Revelation two and three chronicle seven churches and varied degrees of departure from the truth, even to the extent that the Laodicean church in Revelation three had already apostatized. Jesus and John tell history as a warning with the seven churches about both the internal and external attacks.
The Roman Empire and Greek Philosophy
The persecution of the Roman Empire affected churches in the first century. This parallels with anything and any place where persecution occurs. People accommodate the pressure and change from biblical belief and practice. The pressure of Sodom affected Lot and his family. The world itself corrupted Demas (2 Timothy 4:10).
Many other external factors changed and change thinking. This is why Paul warns against philosophies and traditions of men (Colossians 2:8). Theologians like Origen invented their own subjective approach to interpretation of scripture. Many others accepted then Origen’s way. Some read so much Greek philosophy, available during the period of the church fathers, that they took on the thinking of the Greek philosophers. Include Augustine among those. Greek philosophy doesn’t mix with the Bible and improve it. It corrupts it.
When Paul says “wisdom” in 1 Corinthians 1-2, he, like James in James 3:15, meant human wisdom, which could be intellectualism, naturalism, rationalism, or human reasoning. The false teachers that Peter battled as seen in his second epistle judged according to their own reasoning, attempting to conform their theology to that.
Syncretism
An important term to understand is “syncretism.” Wikipedia gets it right when it says in its entry on syncretism:
Syncretism is the practice of combining different beliefs and various schools of thought. Syncretism involves the merging or assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths.
People mix two different philosophies, ideas, concepts, or beliefs and out of the two becomes something brand new, a hybrid, which contrasts with the ones from which it came. The false worship of Israel arose from syncretism, mixing Israel’s divine, scriptural worship with pagan or idolatrous worship practices.
Comparison with the True Church
The church doctrine and practice of the church fathers does not look like the church in the New Testament. The church fathers represent a path that diverts from the true path of the New Testament churches. As I wrote in part one, almost entirely they read as proto-Roman Catholic. Roman Catholicism came from somewhere and this is easy to see. It’s no wonder that for centuries Roman Catholicism did not want people to read the Bible on their own. When they read it, they would see the differences.
It is easy to see in history what happened when people were reading the Bible and comparing it with Roman Catholicism. People left Roman Catholicism. They knew that wasn’t the truth. Based on reading scripture, they separated from Roman Catholicism. As well, true churches never joined that path in the first place. True churches always existed and people joined with them who left Roman Catholicism based on reading or hearing scripture. They also needed courage because Roman Catholicism through the years would kill them for disagreeing.
Roman Catholicism and the Church Fathers
Roman Catholicism preserved the church fathers. They served Roman Catholic mission and goals. Roman Catholicism uses the church fathers as their evidence of a historical trail. Roman Catholic apologists point to the church fathers as evidence of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.
The authority and military of the Roman Empire served Roman Catholicism. The denomination itself took on qualities of an Empire and enforced the doctrine and practice. Ultimately, it would not allow for challenge. This produced an inauthentic history of a church. It never was the church. The Roman Catholic Church always was a pseudo-church, posing as one. It keeps people fooled and strapped into false religion. The church fathers offer a major contribution to the deceit and destruction.
Today evangelicals embrace the church fathers. They point to them as a part of their own history. This supposes that God used Roman Catholicism to keep the truth. It isn’t true and it doesn’t even make sense. This doesn’t just provide a cover for the error. It sends people down the wrong path.
The Example of Baptismal Regeneration
A good example of the deceit and danger of the church fathers relates to the teaching of baptismal regeneration. The church fathers taught baptismal regeneration. The Bible doesn’t teach that. It teaches against it. Roman Catholicism among other kinds of deeds and rituals requires baptism as a condition for salvation. Protestants did not make a full turn from Roman Catholic doctrine with their acceptance of infant sprinkling. This dovetailed with the Roman Catholic view that the church was the worldwide kingdom of God on earth.
In Matthew 16, Jesus told Peter that He was building His church on the gospel. His church has a true gospel. The church fathers undermined the gospel and the church that arose from that teaching was a false one. It was Roman Catholicism and its state church.
More to Come
Calvinism, Unconditional Election and Baptismal Regeneration
Did you know that there is a connection between the heresy of the baptismal regeneration of infants and unconditional election and reprobation in Calvinism? In the chapter “Calvinism is Augstinianism,” by Kenneth Wilson, in the book Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique, ed. David L. Allen & Steve W. Lemke (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2022), Wilson notes:
The major influence on Augustine’s AD 412 reversion to his prior deterministic Manichaean interpretations of Scripture was the arrival of Pelagius and Caelestius near his North African home in late AD 411. Augustine previously admitted (AD 405) he did not know why infant baptism was practiced (Quant.80). But the conflict with Caelestius and Pelagius forced him to rethink the church’s infant baptismal tradition and precipitated his reversion to his pagan DUPED [Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Eternal Destinies, that is, unconditional election].26 Caelestius had argued that infants did not receive baptism for salvation from sin but only for inheritance of the kingdom. Augustine’s polemical response to Caelestius in AD 412 was logical: (1) Infants are baptized by church tradition; (2) water baptism is for forgiveness of sin and reception of the Holy Spirit; (3) some dying infants are rushed by their Christian parents to the bishop for baptism but die before baptism occurs, while other infants born of prostitutes are found abandoned on the streets by a church virgin who rushes them to the baptismal font where the bishop baptizes them; (4) these infants have no “will” and no control over whether or not they are baptized to receive the Holy Spirit to become Christians. Therefore, God must unilaterally and unconditionally predetermine which infants are saved by baptism and which are eternally damned without baptism (unconditional election).27 God’s election must be unconditional since infants have no personal sin, no merit, no good works, no functioning free will (incognizant due to the inability to understand at their age), and therefore, no choice.
In his next work that same year, Augustine concluded if this is true for infants, then unbaptized adults also have no choice or free will (Sp. et litt.54–56). The Holy Spirit was received in water baptism, transforming the person into a Christian with a free will. Since humans have no free will before baptism, God must unilaterally choose who will be saved and infuse faith into those persons. Augustine taught even when “ministers prepared for giving baptism to the infants, it still is not given, because God does not choose [those infants for salvation]” (persev.31). Infant baptism became the impetus for Augustine’s novel theology when he reinterpreted that church tradition and reached a logical conclusion. By doing this he abandoned over three hundred years of church teaching on free will. According to the famous scholar Jaroslav Pelikan, Augustine departed from traditional Christian theology by incorporating his prior pagan teachings and thereby developed inconsistencies in his new anthropology and theology of grace, especially his “idiosyncratic theory of predestination.”28[1]
So the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election and reprobation is connected to Augustine’s doctrine of baptismal regeneration of infants and the damnation of all infants who are not regenerated in baptism. Since the infants cannot choose whether or not they will be baptized and receive forgiveness through baptism, their eternal salvation and damnation is by God’s will alone; they have no free will to receive Christ or reject Him, as in the large majority of modern Calvinists who follow Jonathan Edwards in his work against the freedom of the will. The infants that are tormented forever because they never were baptized are unconditionally reprobated, and the infants in paradise because they were baptized are the unconditionally elect. Since this is (allegedly) true for infants, it must be true for everyone else as well—eternal salvation and damnation is by God’s unconditional choice alone—an Augustinian innovation in Christendom which was reproduced by John Calvin and the Reformed tradition. (Of course, John Calvin also believed in baptismal regeneration.)
Let me add that the book Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique, ed. David L. Allen and Steve W. Lemke is valuable for mature Christians and church leaders, and it contains many valuable and Biblically sound criticisms of Calvinism. However, there are a diversity of viewpoints represented in the book, including not just non-Calvinist Baptists who still believe in eternal security, for example, but full-blown actual Arminians such as Wesleyans who affirm the terrible false teaching that true believers can be eternally lost. Because some chapters in the book are written by actual Arminians, I would not recommend the book for new Christians who might over-react against Calvinism and adopt Arminian heresies. Pastors or other mature Christians who are simply not going to become Arminian can gain a good deal of profit from the book.
–TDR
26 Wilson, 285. See also Chadwick, Early Christian Thought, 110–11.
27 Augustine, Pecc.mer.1.29–30. In contrast, ca. AD 200, Tertullian had rejected infant baptism, stating one should wait until personal faith was possible (De bapt.18).
28 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 278–327, quotation at 325.
[1] Kenneth Wilson, “Calvinism Is Augustinianism,” in Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique, ed. David L. Allen and Steve W. Lemke (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2022), 222–223.
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God and the Bible Are Dispensational (Part Three)
The Bible did not come in one neat tidy package. God delivered it progressively through men over a period of 1500 years during history in real time, even using forty different men as human authors. As God revealed scripture, it did not come with a separate interpretive handbook and glossary for defining terms. He expected and presumes people will get it through plain reading.
As God imparted scripture through inspiration, people understood who were hearing in that day. The Old Testament audience did not need the New Testament to ascertain the writings. When He delivered more, past writings become better understood in a fuller way, bringing even greater knowledge of God’s message.
God’s Word has one meaning, yet many applications. People knew the meaning as God revealed scripture. He required the original audience to believe and practice what He wrote.
Satanic Attack on Dispensationalism
From the very beginning, Satan directly and then through the world system attacks scripture in several ways. He does this in one key manner by corrupting the meaning of God’s Word. Satan twists and also confuses the meaning. He does not want people to know with certainty what God says. Change of meaning abolishes or invalidates the authority of scripture.
Satan wants people to think and act in a different way than what God said. He does this in an incremental fashion, where people drift or move further away from scripture. The doctrine and practice of the Bible changed over the centuries through a modification of its meaning. By changing its meaning, it becomes at first a slightly different book and finally a very different one. This fulfills what Satan wants, but also satisfies the innate rebellion of man.
Changes in the meaning of the Bible relate to contemporary events and movements in history. Rather than adapting to what God said, people conform what God said to their desires or will. In a plain reading of the New Testament, churches were autonomous assemblies under the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ through His Words. Satan and his system attacked them in vigorous and violent fashion.
Individual churches were vulnerable to fear of the fierce opposition of the Roman Empire. This disposed them toward reorganization favoring extra ecclesiastical hierarchy. Many moved toward greater cooperation and confederation. Prominent churches took on more dominance and authority for their leaders.
Philosophies of Men
In Colossians 2:8 Paul warns against philosophies. The New Testament addresses various heresies arising from human philosophy. Preserved early Christian writings trace the invasion of extra-scriptural thinking into the church. Doctrine and practice changed through intertwining neoplatonic philosophy with scripture. The church became something bigger than local.
The church at Rome at the center of the Roman Empire took on enormous prominence. Emperor Constantine I gave Christianity legal status in the Empire with the Edict of Milan in 313AD. When Constantine became the sole emperor of the Roman Empire in 324, Christianity became its official religion. Christianity became a state church for the Roman Empire when Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380AD. This is the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Empire was Catholic or Universal, so its state church became Catholic too.
Allegorization and Spiritualization
For a true church, local only, to become universal, allegorization or spiritualization of scripture must occur. This developed over three centuries with a unique influence, it seems, from a theologian, Origen of Alexandria. This allowed for modification of meaning to allow change in doctrine and practice. About a hundred years after Origen, Augustine further systematized allegorization of scripture, now known as covenantal theology. The Bible could become a vessel in which to pour ones own doctrine and practice by allegorizing it.
Allegorization or spiritualization gives a lot of leeway with interpretation, making it highly subjective. Someone can read what he wants into the text of scripture. This affects the authority of the Bible.
The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was led by men raised as staunch Roman Catholics. They reformed Roman Catholic doctrine, however, still preserving much allegorization and spiritualization. More than Augustine, they composed a hybrid of allegorical and literal interpretation, now still referred as covenant theology. The immediate spiritual offspring of the Protestant Reformers further systematized an approach to the interpretation of scripture. Their system of interpretation justified a state church, something not seen in the Bible. They could find it by spiritualizing the church.
Amillennialism
In the main, the church could become an actual kingdom through spiritualization, a view of the future called amillennialism. The theologians of Roman Catholicism removed the distinctions by unifying Israel and the church. The church replaced Israel. They adapted the Old Testament prophecies of Israel and the kingdom for fulfillment in the church. Instead of a future fulfillment of the New Testament prophecy of Revelation, they spiritualized it as fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD.
Liberal theology easily proceeded from amillennialism. Liberals take the same approach even further, making almost everything in the Bible to mean what they want. They see now and in the future a spiritualized kingdom, a progressive social order. Jesus, the cross, the resurrection, and the gospel all take on their own meaning, most often related to advocacy of social issues. Modernism dovetailed easily and nicely from covenant theology.
Growing In and Out of Favor
Even though God and the Bible are dispensational, dispensationalism grew out of favor in mainstream teaching. In recent times, institutionalized theology portrays dispensationalism as of recent origin, arising with Darby in the 19th Century. Premillennialism, a literal interpretation of Christ’s kingdom, traces to the first century with the apostles. However, believers responded to covenant theology with a systematization of a literal interpretation of scripture in the 19th century. The Protestant system of covenant theology itself is of historically recent composition.
I contend that the rising popularity of covenant theology above dispensationalism traces to its allure to human pride. Men ascertain from God’s writings their secret meaning. This allows for a wide variety of contradictory belief and practice. Men like it when they’re free to do what they want, justified by what “God said.”
More to Come
Henry II Versus Thomas Becket
Who was right in what is called the Becket Controversy? I’m not asking if the knights of Henry II should have killed Becket at Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170. I’m asking which side was right. A controversy bubbled into the English Reformation, which would say that Henry won in the end.
Thomas Becket’s dad, Gilbert, fell on financial hard times. He needed the employment of his twenty-something son. After succeeding in a first job as a clerk, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald of Bec, noticed him and then engaged him in many different notable capacities. When Henry II needed a new Lord Chancellor, Theobald recommended Becket. Henry hired him in 1155. Becket was essentially England’s second man and very loyal to his boss.
Henry II established common law in England. Russell Fowler writes:
Henry came to believe that justice was not only a fair resolution of disputes and punishment of the wicked, but it was also equal access to this justice. And these courts, staffed by his experienced and accountable judges, for the first time roved the land applying uniform rules and following the guide of recorded precedent in deciding similar cases.
Becket went right along with Henry under his employ. Henry expected him to continue when he appointed him Archbishop to replace Theobald in 1162.
The Roman Catholic Church functioned as a powerful entity in England, maybe greater than the King. Henry could not enforce common law on criminal priests operating with immunity under a different jurisdiction. This undermined the vision of Henry for the nation. He hoped Becket would help him, who instead betrayed him.
When Becket became Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, he defended the interests of the Pope in England. While Henry applied the law in a uniform manner among varied classifications, he could not include officers of Roman Catholicism. His former loyal assistant would not cooperate and this sabotaged his effort.
Without judging the outcome of the death of Becket, which side was right? The English Reformation occurred under a later King Henry, who became head of the Church of England. Today in Canterbury Cathedral, where the shrine to Becket once stood, a candle remains lit. The Church of England memorializes a Roman Catholic Archbishop with a candle.
I had two interesting visits in England, one to St. Augustine’s Abbey and the other to Dover Castle. The Pope sent Augustine to proselytize England in 598 from Canterbury, which originated the center of Christendom there. While my wife and I looked at the ruins, which included Augustine’s burial place, we spoke with a retired Anglican priest, now tour guide. I asked about the great respect for Becket all over Canterbury. One comment he made was that the state Church of England is less a state church than the non state church of the United States.
A fortification existed in Dover, England for the Romans as early as AD 43. Military planned both the Dunkirk evacuation and the Normandy invasion in miles of tunnels built under Dover Castle. In between first century Rome and World War 2, Henry II built the castle visible today between 1179 and 1189, the largest in all of England perhaps only second to Windsor.
Dover Castle is about thirty minutes from Canterbury by train, a very easy and beautiful ride. In a bit of irony, Henry II built up Dover Castle to protect and even accommodate important pilgrims to the shrine of Thomas Becket. This helped continue a good standing with the Pope, who canonized Becket as a saint in 1173. He built a chapel to Becket in the Great Tower, the centerpiece of the Castle. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales in 1387 about the varied characters making their way via this route. Henry VIII destroyed the shrine to and the bones of Becket in 1538, as well as ordering the termination of all further mention of his name.
I asked a tour guide at Dover Castle about Becket. I wondered out loud who supported Henry and who Becket in England today. He smiled and said that it probably depended on who you were and what you did. The controversy continues.
Populist support opposes the immunity of a religious hypocrite flouting common law. Of all people, the law should punish church officers. This may be why a 2006 BBC History poll called Becket the second worse Briton of the previous millennium behind Jack the Ripper (see also here and here).
When my wife and I visited Salisbury Cathedral, there we saw one of the four remaining original copies of the Magna Carta, a document signed by King John, the son of Henry II, in June of 1215. At least another copy sits for display in the British Library in London. The Church of England keeps its candle lit for Becket and houses the Magna Carta, perhaps two pieces of contradiction. This foundational document, a heritage of liberty in the United States, says everyone is under the law, a particular notion rejected by Becket in his rebellion against Henry II.
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