There have been some recent posts that indicate some users misunderstand the use of the early church fathers by their colleagues. Some quick facts:
- The early church fathers provide the historical data available for tracing doctrine and practices through time and place. They do not speak with one voice - they provide most of the historical data available - heretical as well as orthodox and everything in between. And they speak to geographic divergences.
- Among the most influential data they provide is the development of the canon and quotations from early Christian literature - canonical and not. The quotations are useful in text criticism ... think of the recent thread on the forums on whether phrase was original or added to a verse. The quotations provide some insight into the contents of "lost works".
- There is, to the best of my knowledge, no Christian group that considers the church fathers to be inspired. There are, however, a few works that some groups consider or have considered canonical while other groups do not. An example: the Didascalia Apostolorum in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project.
- There is, to the best of my knowledge, no Christian group that uses the church fathers to "create doctrine". However, much of the Church uses the fathers as support for doctrines believing "all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all." (from Commonitorium (Vincent of Lerins)).
- There is a large gap in the Western world's understanding of the early church fathers due to the comparative absence of documents from the Oriental Orthodox. We are currently seeing a surge of interest in these sources (often in Syriac) along with the current political situation destroying the institutions most apt to house them.
- There is a current growth of interest in reception history (see Blackwell Bible Commentary which I desperately want in Logos) which requires early church fathers for the first third of its data.
The use of the church fathers should not be divisive - historical documents are what they are. The selection of which fathers are "orthodox" or what Father X meant when he wrote Y may be. If you have no interest in history, that's fine too; there are others who are interested.
