Purify Your Bride

As a protestant I was always a little embarrassed by the fundamentalists who insisted that there could be absolutely no truth in evolution. Creation must have happened in 6 24-hour days. Now they didn’t want to come right out and tell you that religion and science were in conflict so they always had a few creation “scientists” who were there to show that evolution really had a bunch of problems people were ignoring. It kind of gave it a veneer of scientific credibility. They poked a few holes in some scientific theories but they vastly overstated the significance of the problems they found. The evidence for evolution or some theory like it is vast and is not the product of some conspiracy of scientists. They never came close to showing that it was but they convinced a lot of fundamentalist Christians, like George Bush, that this was the case.

I am reminded of this kind of scholarship when I read protestant reviews of the early church fathers. Dave Armstrong reviews one such piece here. Protestants know that being anti-history is wrong the same way they know being anti-science is wrong. Still, rather than abandon a position that is in fact unhistorical, they cling to some pseudo-scholarship. They pick and choose little pieces of evidence that helps their cause. They make some valid points but they don’t come close to overturning the vast evidence that the ECF’s were very Catholic. Anyone who understands the full weight of all the evidence knows this but they are very aware that most protestants don’t don’t read other church historians. They tell them what they want to hear and they will believe it.

So how does this pseudo-scholarship work? Well, heresy is often described as taking one Catholic truth and emphasizing it to the point of destroying other Catholic truths. Sola Scriptora and Sola Fide are no exception. Truth from scripture and salvation by faith are two basic Catholic truths that the ECF’s affirmed frequently. However they must be balanced against other truths. God reveals Himself in the bible but that does not give individual Christians the right to ignore church councils, to disobey bishops and popes, and to split the church. That is what Sola Scriptora involves. The ECF’s understood this well. They frequently and strongly affirm that God’s truth is in scripture and we must study it constantly if we want to know God. You can take these quotes and try and argue that this means they would side with Luther and Calvin and break up the church over a disputed biblical interpretation. The trouble the ECF’s never say anything like that. That part is tacked on based on a hand waving argument. What you do see is ECF’s opposing heretics and chastising them for ignoring tradition and the magisterium and clinging to their own view of scripture. The trouble is that heresies you have no sympathy for are hard to equate with heresies you find quite reasonable. If you factor out your own opinion and just look at the opinion of the church as a whole the parallel is exact. It is just very hard to do that. We tend to think we are right and view everything through that prism. We assume the ECF’s would think the same way.

Sola Fide is very similar. Salvation comes through faith. This is true. The ECF’s said so quite strongly. But that does not mean that sacraments have nothing to do with salvation. It does not mean there is no such thing as mortal sin. It does not make penance and purgatory false doctrines. That is what Sola Fide says. The ECF’s did not say that. Still when they say salvation comes by faith you can try and infer they must have reject things like baptismal regeneration. Often you have to ignore quotes where they address that question directly because those quotes flatly contradict your thesis. This is no issue for the pseudo-scholar because they know very few of their readers will be aware of these.

This relates back to the idea many protestant converts have addressed. That is that protestants think very much in terms of the “either or”. It is either tradition or scripture. It is either salvation by faith or by sacrament. The Catholic church and the ECF’s often embraced the “both and”. The logic sounds very strong to the protestant mind. You and your audience have already subconsciously eliminated the possibility of A and B. Therefore you can just show A and assert not B and get away with it.