You have indeed hit here upon a seeming paradox. Part of the answers I believe really do lie in history. I know that many of us, myself included, have referred to scriptures and the writings of the earliest church fathers… and there is good reason for that. It occurs to me that the disconnect here may lie in the fact that we have read those writings, some of us extensively, while you have not; at least I believe not extensively. John Henry Newman has said (paraphrasing, since I don’t have the quote handy) that to know the history of Christianity is to become Catholic. This is someone who, if you read his early writings, was vehemently anti-Catholic… yet converted himself to Catholicism.
Having brought him up in the same paragraph as the Church Fathers, here’s one quote from him on those same men:
“The Fathers are primarily to be considered as witnesses, not as authorities. They are witnesses of an existing state of things, and their treatises are, as it were, histories, - teaching us, in the first instance, matters of fact, not of opinion. Whatever they themselves might be, whether deeply or poorly taught in Christian faith and love, they speak, not their own thoughts, but the received views of their respective ages.”
{Primitive Christianity, 1833-1836, in Essays and Sketches, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948, p. 126}
This I think is pertinent here because the writings of those great men show us a reflection of what was believed and taught during their times, and they date from St. Polycarp, who himself as a child sat at the feet of St. John, the Apostle, all the way to St. John of Damascus, who died in 749. One thing I’ve seen pointed out from multiple sources is the fact that we see several things time and time again in the writings of these church fathers.
Given how unbelievably conservative the Church (when I use capitals I am referring to the Catholic Church) has always been, and how reluctant she has always been to embrace any new ideas, it should be noted that some of the viewpoints that are so vehemently argued against by many non-Christians today were proposed as a basis for proofs against heresies by many of these men! For them to do that, it must have been understood by their audiences that those things were understood by all of their contemporaries to be true. Some examples are the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the Divinity of the person of Christ, the authority of the Bishop of Rome (i.e. the Pope), etc. Let’s not derail the discussion by debating those points here in this thread, but it is an interesting perspective to consider, if nothing else.
~Steven
