Reading the Fathers

There has been a lot of talk lately about protestants embracing their roots and turning to the Fathers of the Church for wisdom and guidance. If you need some evidence of this pick up the latest issue of Christianity Today or any one of magazines/journals that deal with the theological trends within protestantism. This marked interest in patristic reading (reading of the Fathers) is especially obvious when one looks around Asbury. There are a good number of students here that continue to express interest in patristic studies. Maybe I'm more aware of these individuals because this is my pet area of interest, maybe part of the trend on campus is fueled by the recent readers, or maybe it is just a part of this macrocosmic event happening in protestantism. Either way, the reason for this trend is unimportant to this post.

The reason I bring up this trend is because I find it disconcerting. This is something I've been thinking about for the past few weeks, but I recently was given some words to describe it by talking with my friend Nathaniel. I guess it's odd that I find this trend concerning because I'm such a lover of patristic studies and reading the Fathers has fed my soul for the past four years, so let me explain myself.

I find this trend concerning because of the way in which many people, especially at Asbury, approach the Fathers. This new found resurgence of the patristic witness at Asbury, in the Emergent communities, and in protestantism in general tends to approach the Fathers as nothing more than another source from which to feed personal agendas.

What I mean is that a plethora of individuals are reading the Fathers and Mothers of the faith, but that they approach them as if they were just another contemporary theologian that can be easily discarded if one disagrees with them. I would say these new readers treat the Fathers as just another Rob Bell, but fearfully Rob Bell is given much more respect and is more highly valued than any of the saints of old. These saints, who have died for the faith, who have lived through imperial exiles, who have loved the church even unto their last breaths are being treated as if they were peers, as Nathaniel aptly assessed.

In my opinion it is criminally prideful and nigh heretical for one to consider the Fathers and Mothers of the church as peers that can easily be used to profit one's theological agenda and then discarded like an old sweater when they disagree with how we want to live or think. As I have said these men and women are the ones who have preserved the Faith for us. They have fought, bled and died for that which they have passed on to us. They are not our peers! They are worthy of respect and honor and deserve to be considered our mentors and spiritual fathers and mothers.

Granted not all of the early church sources agreed on everything, of course there are matters of holy opinion, but we cannot be so willing to disagree with these men and women. They are the continuation of the cloud of witnesses talked about in Hebrews, they are those who preserved the faith that is the foundation on which the church was built, and it is their blood that serves as the seed of the church.

My argument is that we cannot claim the heritage of these Fathers and Mothers without accepting them as authoritative for our lives. We must give them the right to speak into our lives and allow them to have the authority to dictate how we must conform our lives to the Faith.

Granted my beloved Orthodox friends would likely agree with me and then argue that I am guilty of the problem that I lay out since I have not become Orthodox. I don't want to get into that issue right now, but nevertheless my point stands and protestant scholars, students, and lay people cannot continue to pretend that they are embracing the Fathers when they treat them as peers and do not allow them to speak authoritatively into their lives.

Without getting into a mess of tangential issues I think this goes to one of the roots of the Protestant problem. One of the beauties that I have seen in the time spent with my Orthodox friends is that the Orthodox church approaches the Faith as something handed down to which individuals and the Church itself must conform. The Faith is alive and exists in its fullness within Orthodoxy, but it is authoritative and something to which we must conform. Protestantism, on the other hand, seems to view the Faith as something fluid that must conform to personal belief. Thus there is no standard of authority save one's own belief system which dictates what the substance of the Faith is. I believe this is part of Protestantism's biggest problem and the reason why the Faith continues to be torn apart within Protestantism. And part of the reason why individuals think they can critique the Holy Fathers as if they were peers.

Yes, protestants are beginning to discover a great wealth of spiritual wisdom. This must be a good thing, but it saddens me beyond belief that these Holy saints of the church are treated with so much disrespect.

I often get chided for the fact that almost all of my deepest spiritual fathers and mothers have been dead for hundreds of years. But I must argue what better father and mother can one have than those that have been affirmed and validated by the church for hundreds and hundreds of years. They can dictate how I should live in holy pursuit of God any day because they are the ones who's writings have survived the test of time and the test of the Church and as such I will think long, hard, and prayerfully before I dare disagree with these holy saints.

May we all have such mentors that will encourage us to pursue God even unto death!

- Ben