OzSpen
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I meant two things:
1) Some of them - like Tertullian or Origen - were (it seems) more wrong on certain issues than the others.
This is (of course) a very hard matter to judge. OTOH, those Fathers are still worthy of respect, and still well worth reading & studying; Origen is an excellent instance of this. St Cyprian’s admiration for Tertullian (who became a Montanist) is well known.
One can be wide of the mark on certain issues and still be of great value and be a standard of accuracy in others. I think this is a matter of degree. For instance, Saint Augustine is (deservedly) of great authority in the Western Church; even in those Churches that do not accept his teaching on double predestination.
(2) Taken as a group, throughout the whole period from about 70 AD to about 750 AD, the Fathers, whatever their individual errors of whatever kind, are rightly honoured and valued as witnesses to orthodox Christian doctrine and piety.
It is an act of piety to recognise their service to Christendom. Just as God-breathed Scripture can be useful in the Church without being totally inerrant, so also can they. The final judge (under God) of their fidelity to the Faith to which they witnessed, is not any one of their number nor them as a body, but the Church Universal of which they were members.
One can acknowledge their value for theology, doctrine, and Christian practice, without supposing that there is nothing more to be learnt in the interpretation of the Bible than they have supplied. One can regret the fondness of many of them for allegorisation (as in St Augustine of Hippo, St Gregory the Great, or Origen) while accepting their doctrinal conclusions. And they remain of value, even though most of the Western Fathers had no Greek or Hebrew, & most of the Easterners, no Hebrew.
The Reformers had some advantages the Fathers lacked; & their successors in 1950 knew much more about the Biblical world than either. All have their limitations - and so do expositors and scholars now, & of any time.
That the Fathers and their mediaeval and later successors, including ourselves, had & have all sorts of limitations, is simply a fact. It is not in any way to depreciate them, or their successors.
Jamie,
We have the advantage of comparing our reading and writing with the whole canon of Scripture, an advantage which Tertullian, Origen, and other Early Church Fathers did not have.
I find great benefit in reading the ECF, without agreeing with Origen's allegorical method of interpretation.
I pray that God will use the principles of Irenaeus's Against Heresies to evaluate the heresies of John Dominic Crossan and the Jesus Seminar. I completed my PhD in 2015, which examined the presuppositions of Crossan that led to his conclusion that Jesus' resurrection was an apparition. My first book, based on a portion of the dissertation, is coming off the press in the new year, published by Wipf and Stock - How to Ruin Your Education and TV Viewing: Five Lessons from Crossan.
I expect to write another book with a tentative title, Crossan's Crushers of Contradiction, in which I deal with some of the heresies Crossan promotes in his "philosophical crushers" (Ben Meyer's language).
Oz
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