You hear it a lot as an explanation: "Just go back to the Fathers." Why do people become Catholic? They went back to the Fathers. I suppose that's true. But it's important to know what it is about them that we're supposed to be looking for. There are patristics scholars everywhere, after all.
Obviously, in any particular area of interest or time period within the patristic age, you can find leaders with divergent opinions on a great many things. There are some pretty fierce disagreements among them, too. If you wanted to make a surface case against the claim of the Catholic Church--that it is the Church Christ founded--you could do it.
But what is it that they really tell us? They tell us where and how to locate the Church to which they submitted, and why.
That's really the nature of the dispute between Protestants and Catholics: the nature of the Church and how to find it. It's really stupid to pretend that the visible expression of ecclesiastical authority and its decisions matter, when the very legitimacy of that community depends on a conception of the Church that is fundamentally invisible.
But in Christian life, we know that truth has to be concretized by people. That is, if some ecclesiastical assembly doesn't possess an ultimate authority to at least adjudicate the questions before it, it is irrelevant as an authority.
The real dispute between historic Protestants and various fundamentalists is that the fundamentalists are more honest: they don't need a thin veneer of deference to history and authority to cover their hermeneutic of rupture.
Obviously, in any particular area of interest or time period within the patristic age, you can find leaders with divergent opinions on a great many things. There are some pretty fierce disagreements among them, too. If you wanted to make a surface case against the claim of the Catholic Church--that it is the Church Christ founded--you could do it.
But what is it that they really tell us? They tell us where and how to locate the Church to which they submitted, and why.
That's really the nature of the dispute between Protestants and Catholics: the nature of the Church and how to find it. It's really stupid to pretend that the visible expression of ecclesiastical authority and its decisions matter, when the very legitimacy of that community depends on a conception of the Church that is fundamentally invisible.
But in Christian life, we know that truth has to be concretized by people. That is, if some ecclesiastical assembly doesn't possess an ultimate authority to at least adjudicate the questions before it, it is irrelevant as an authority.
The real dispute between historic Protestants and various fundamentalists is that the fundamentalists are more honest: they don't need a thin veneer of deference to history and authority to cover their hermeneutic of rupture.
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