The Roman Catholic Church is known for making claims of possessing the fullness of God-given truth, beginning with the Lord Jesus Christ bestowing the authority of the "keys" to the Apostle Peter. According to this viewpoint, apostolic power has been carried on in a chain of apostolic successors. Roman Catholic clergy are thus said to have been entrusted with inspired oral tradition for the past 2,000 years. Moreover, it is oftentimes claimed by apologists for Rome that the church fathers were unanimous in their acceptance of various distinctive Roman Catholic dogmas, with Protestantism being a johnny-come-lately system of thought. These claims are shown to be false for a variety of reasons:
1.) Church history offers descriptions of what people have done in the past. Its purpose is not to prescribe what our beliefs ought to be. Further, it is improper to view church history in a monolithic way. Historical data is subject to interpretation. Church history contains all sorts of theological developments, schisms, and reforms. Those things contribute to the richness and diversity of thought within Christian tradition. With that being said, Reformation era concepts did not exist in a vacuum or originate out of thin air.
2.) Longevity does not prove truth. For instance, do Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism contain more truth than Christianity just because they are older religions? The fact that an institution has been around for a long time does not make its claims binding or authoritative. Further, the church fathers were anything but perfect people, disputing even over the most trivial of matters, such as whether to use leavened or unleavened bread during communion. There were several passages from the Old Testament and four gospels allegorized by these men beyond recognition as to their actual meaning.
3.) Even if we unanimously agreed to accept papal authority, that would only eliminate doctrinal conflict in a question begging, tautological sense. That would still not reveal to us whether we should be in communion with Rome (i.e. whether we are right or wrong in our decision making). A case for Roman Catholicism would still need to be made. We are not required to embrace ideas from people who lived before us just because they were believed to be true. There is nothing inherently good about clinging to the past for its own sake. Thousands of years worth of tradition can certainly be rejected, if there is strong enough evidence for doing so.
4.) Both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches make identical claims of having been established directly by Jesus Christ, but maintain contradictory teachings. They dispute each other's claims to authority. In fact, not a single known patristic author can be cited as agreeing with every uniquely Roman Catholic dogma.
5.) The church fathers sometimes contradicted each other, and even themselves. For example, Origen initially argued against self-castration, but later had himself castrated to avoid temptation. These men, no matter how godly or theologically gifted, were not inspired by God. They had their own ideas of what they thought was true, like us in contemporary culture. Sometimes church fathers made factual errors. For example, Irenaeus thought that Jesus Christ lived to be more than fifty years of age, despite gospel tradition indicating otherwise (John 8:57). They were just as human as the rest of us.
6.) Divine revelation exists independently of the writings of church fathers. They are not to be treated as a smokescreen to bypass exegetical questions. Further, we do not have to accept everything that patristic authors taught without reservation. Just as God never made Israel infallible to where the people could not stray into idolatry, so He did not make similar promises to preserve the church wholesale from doctrinal error.
7.) Even people taught directly by the apostles sometimes abandoned the faith (2 Timothy 4:14). Therefore, the argument that we should trust the church fathers because they lived closer to the time of Christ is a false one.
8.) We do not have every document written by each church father on every subject. Neither were we present in the early church to take surveys of what everyone believed. Our knowledge of this period is but fragmentary. This point alone demonstrates the Roman Catholic claim of unanimous acceptance of their dogmas in early church history to be vacuous.
Well said, Jesse!
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