Ligon Duncan
Did the Fathers Know the Gospel?
Video
Audio
This morning is an address on church history. It’s not an address from Scripture. But the Word of God is our only final authority on rule and practice. So last night’s address is much more important than this one. This message is a study of the book of God’s providence.
When we study church history, we are studying the history of God’s providence with our people. If we don’t pay attention to the story of God’s dealings with them, we are missing out on much to learn from and be edified by.
It’s a good rule after reading a new book never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to three new ones.... Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes. We all therefore need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period.... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books....The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds and this can only be done by reading old books.So this morning’s message is a study on patristics, the earliest church history prior to the council of Nicaea (325 AD).
-C.S. Lewis
One view of the church fathers says that the reformers theology of grace was wrong. This view says that the church fathers were the closest Christians to Jesus and the NT and so their understanding of Christianity and the NT must be authoritative and determinative of how to really understand Christianity and when we read them we find an understanding of Christianity that does not square with our Protestant view.
Another view says that the gospel was lost during the early years of church history up until about the 1600’s and didn’t reappear appear until the days of the reformation.
Neither of these views is accurate, sufficient, or helpful. How should we read the fathers instead? We should read the fathers respectfully, carefully, and under the authority of Scripture.
Our greatest concern in studying the church fathers isn’t to read what they said about a particular doctrine and then state whether that doctrine is true but rather we learn what they said about doctrines in order to help us read the Scriptures and know what it says. They help us read the Bible better. But we should do so realizing that sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong.
A reading of the church fathers that helps us realize that they sometimes get it wrong is consistent with what Paul and Jesus tell us to expect. It’s consistent with the doctrine of total depravity because none of us gets it completely right.
The church fathers were best at polemics (refuting false teaching). They will serve us best where the truth of Scripture was under attack during their own time. If you read the fathers, when they wrote about doctrines that were not under attack they were all over the map and often got it wrong. But when they wrote about doctrines that were heavily under attack, they almost always got it right and gloriously so. Herersy served the church to help get the Bibles proper understanding rightly understood and communicated to the people of God.
The church fathers shows us how to respond to culture because they didn’t react directly to culture. They first went to Scripture and then from Scripture to the culture.
How do the fathers and the study of the fathers help us?
- They help us in the status of the Old Testament
- They help us in the status of the New Testament
- They help us understand the person of Christ
- The father help us against liberalism
- The fathers help us have a gospel motivation in living the Christian life. We cannot battle the desires of the flesh with a command. We can only battle the desires of the flesh with the power of the Spirit through the gospel.
Hebrews for the first couple hundred years of Christianity worked primarily out of the original Hebrew of the Old Testament because the Bible had not yet been compiled. The Bible of the earliest Christianity was the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible can teach us salvation through faith alone, by grace alone, in Christ alone (2 Timothy 3:15).
One of the things the Gnostics did was to reject the Old Testament. When the Gnostics did this, the way the church fathers pressed back was to show that not only does the Old Testament prove that Jesus is the Messiah who is sent from God but they show that the New Testament proves that the Old Testament is the authoritative Word of God because Jesus and Paul address it as such.
The church fathers helped to identify what should be included in the canon by asking whether each book bore the marks of apostolicity and inspiration. Was it written by an apostle? Did it bear the authority of God? They didn’t determine what goes into the Bible. But they confirmed whether something belongs in the Bible or not.
Did the fathers know the gospel? Yes and no. Yes, if you mean, “Was the gospel lost in the days of the early church fathers?” No, it wasn’t. Did the fathers speak of things like justification and imputation sufficiently enough for the understanding of the gospel to be sustained for the life of the church? No. Was what they said helpful? Yes.
This teaches us that we cannot assume the gospel. They’re like the man born blind. All he knew was that once he was blind and now he sees. He knew he that was changed. But what he knew wasn’t sufficient for living by grace for a lifetime. Whenever we assume that the gospel is known, we put the church at risk of losing it.
The reason the fathers weren’t as clear about doctrines like imputation and justification by faith alone as the reformers is because they weren’t fighting the same battle the reformers were in the 16th century. Their battles were different and they didn’t have to articulate these doctrines as precisely as the reformers did.
Where should we go if we want to begin reading the church fathers?
- Start with Augustine’s confessions.
- Then read the apostolic fathers.
- Then read Tertullian.
No comments:
Post a Comment