You make good points, all well taken. Church fathers aren’t perfect, they don’t bring us the Church, the Church brings us the fathers.
Catholics don’t take nearly the narrow view of Church fathers that some here, trying to put words in our mouths, would have folks think. If so, we would never bring up Origen and Tertullian.
The Lutheran view of Luther might serve as an example of how Catholics may view the ECF.
The problem, Mark, is that in most situations when the fathers are discussed, neither side is willing to let the church fathers simply be the church fathers, without reading our modern presuppositions into them. This can be seen, for example, when a church father uses the word “tradition.” It is assumed by modern Roman Catholics that the father meant tradition the way
they mean tradition. These sorts of anachronistic readings do nothing to further any serious study of the topic. When a situation is presented where a father patently disagrees with modern Catholic interpretation, as can be seen with the reaction to Mt. 16:18, it is either dismissed, assumed to be presented with a bias, and dismissed out of hand because it doesn’t fit the presupposition. A far greater theologian than anyone on this forum, Pope Benedict, brings this out with his usual brilliance in Principles of Catholic Theology:
“Whereas the theology of the Eastern Churches has never aspired to anything but patristic theology, the attitude of the Reformation toward the Fathers was, from the beginning — and still is — ambiguous. Melanchthon strove emphatically to prove that the heritage of the ancient Church, which had been abandoned by medieval Catholicism, was restored in the
Confessio Augustana; Flaccius Illyricus, the first great historian of the Reformation, followed in his footsteps, and the work of Calvin, with its radical reliance on Augustine, takes the same direction. By contrast, Luther’s attitude to the Fathers, including Augustine, was always more critical. The conviction seemed to grow even stronger in him that the defection from the Gospels occurred at a very early date. It will suffice to quote one typical text: “I say this because I myself wasted and lost much time on Gregory, Cyprian, Augustine, Origen. For the Fathers, in their time, had a remarkable attraction to and liking for allegories; they used them constantly, and their books are full of them. . . . The reason is this, that they all followed their own conceit, mind and opinion, as they thought right, and not St. Paul, who wanted to let the Holy Spirit act there from within.” Even here, the Fathers seem to be discredited for their use of allegory, and the study of them seems to be regarded as a waste of time by comparison with a direct attention to the word of Scripture.
In many respects, a decision about the role of the Fathers seems, in fact, to have been reached today. But, since it is more unfavorable than favorable to a greater reliance upon them, it does nothing to lead us out of our present
aporia. For, in the debate about what constitutes greater fidelity to the Church of the Fathers, Luther’s historical insight is clearly proving itself right. We are fairly certain today that, while the Fathers were not Roman Catholic as the thirteenth or nineteenth century would have understood the term, they were, nonetheless, “Catholic”, and their Catholicism extended to the very canon of the New Testament itself. With this assessment, paradoxically, the Fathers have lost ground on both side of the argument because, in the controversy about the fundamental basis for understanding Scripture, there is nothing more to be proved or disproved by reference to them. But neither have they become totally unimportant in the domain, for, even after the relativization they have suffered in the process we have described, the differences between the Catholicism of an Augustine and a Thomas Aquinas, or even between that of a Cardinal Manning and a Cyprian, still opens a broad field of theological investigation. Granted, only one side can consider them its own Fathers, and the proof of continuity, which once led directly back to them, seems no longer worth the effort for a concept of history and faith that sees continuity as made possible and communicated in terms of discontinuity.”
Ratzinger goes on, of course, to insist that “only one side can consider them its own Fathers” but the admission that Ratzinger has made exposes one of the central weaknesses to much of the patristically-directed Roman apologetic effort in the English-speaking world today. We can agree with Ratzinger that the Fathers were “catholic” as that term is properly understood, and we can also agree with him that they would not be considered “Roman Catholic” by modern (or even medieval) standards. We too willingly acknowledge that the Fathers were not distinctly “Protestant” - they were who they were, often differing in significant ways from one another.
These facts ought, however, to point us to the need for an even earlier source of authority - the written Word of God contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. By such an established authority we can evaluate the claims of apostolicity of the various competing claimants to the catholic and apostolic faith.
