Pope's Study of Church Fathers Not Just for Catholics
Interview With Theologian David Warner
Benedict XVI's Wednesday-audience series on the Apostolic Fathers can give us hope for unity among Christians, says a Catholic theologian who was once an evangelical Protestant minister.Q: How have the early Church Fathers been influential in your own life, first as a Protestant minister and later as a Catholic?
Warner: I left the Catholic Church during my high school years. A far-ranging search led me away from the Church and toward a Christianity of my own invention.
After three years of wandering, I re-embraced Trinitarian theology and had an evangelical conversion to the divinity and lordship of Jesus Christ. This was the beginning of what turned out to be a rediscovery of, and return to, what the Nicene Creed calls the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church."
Again and again during my 18-year sojourn through various streams of Protestantism, I kept coming back to study the early centuries of Christianity.
While teaching a survey course in Church history, I became convinced that I was incompletely joined to the one Church directly established by Christ and witnessed to by the Fathers.
Reading the Apostolic Fathers and the second-century apologists forced me to come to grips with the thoroughly "Catholic" elements of early Christianity.
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Q: Why would non-Catholic Christians be any more interested in the Fathers of the first couple of centuries than in later saints and doctors of the Church?Warner: In the Apostolic Fathers and the earliest bishops and apologists, we have the earliest links in the chain that connects today's Christians with the Twelve.
Quoting a second-century bishop, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Benedict XVI reminded us that St. Clement, the third bishop of Rome in succession from St. Peter, had the first apostles' "preaching in his ears, and their tradition before his eyes."
Pope Clement had no qualms about asserting his extra-local apostolic authority, teaching and correcting the Church of Corinth, in distant Greece.
Other great bishops whom Benedict XVI explores, like St. Ignatius of Antioch, and St. Polycarp died as martyrs for the truth they knew they had received directly from the original apostles who had taught them.
I remember reasoning while still a Protestant minister, that if Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp and Irenaeus could not get it right after just one or two generations, then what hope did I have for believing that Jesus was who the New Testament claimed he was, or that he had founded a Church that would kick in the gates of hell, and be led by the Spirit of truth until his return?
In the end, I wearied of trying to be my own pope, and returned to the Church of the Fathers.
For me, this is the money quote:
I remember reasoning while still a Protestant minister, that if Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp and Irenaeus could not get it right after just one or two generations, then what hope did I have for believing that Jesus was who the New Testament claimed he was, or that he had founded a Church that would kick in the gates of hell, and be led by the Spirit of truth until his return?
Either Jesus instituted a unified Church that "the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against" (Mt 16:18), or we're all on our own to figure it out for ourselves. Which one sounds more like God? If Jesus meant what He said, then He founded a Church that would stand the tests of time, and that Church's founding is recorded just before this above quote: "I will build my church" (ibid).
Early Christians, as Warner notes, considered themselves members of a Church that looks remarkably like the one we see in the Catholic Church today. We can either follow their example or run the risk of falling prey to the traditions of man. (Col 2:8)