Early Fathers

As some folks start to learn about church history and things, they get pretty excited about traditions and liturgies and icons and all that stuff. This often makes them prone to uncritically embrace anything someone bearing the name of Church Father, much to their detriment. But let's roll back for a moment:

When you dig into early Christian writings, you do find a lot of weird stuff. By golly, it looks like Christians in those days were a pretty diverse bunch of people who could really go all over the map theologically! Something I have found particularly notable is the rather rapid decline of Pauline theology. Some would say "How dare you say that the theology of the Holy Fathers is anything other than that of Paul?" But to them I would say that theology also involves a certain manner of speaking. For the most part, the early Christian writings we still have today show little influence of Pauline language. You'll find good amounts of John and more than a shade of Plotinus, though. We do see Pauline language in I Clement, but this epistle also demonstrates some flexibility in the way dikaioo and its related vocabulary was used by Christians--compare 30:7 with 32:4, for example. But we must also remember how little survived to our day. Much was destroyed as the Roman empire was dismantled, and later monks preserved those writings that they thought worth preserving. What did Christians in those times say that we don't know about?

Anyway, we do see diversity and change. The era of holy theological inerrancy just plain didn't happen. The second and third centuries are eras like any other--unfortunately full of ordinary humans living their lives. They could be legalistic, petty, moralistic, arrogant, shortsighted, prejudiced, and uncritical.

Just like us.