Evangelicals and the Church Fathers
I’m in that tunnel called final week of class (which has only one exit: directly into the Final Exam Tunnel), but I’ll try to get some little things up now and then to keep the ol’ blog alive.
Carl Trueman, professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary, has a brief but fascinating post on the Reformation 21 blog in which he lists four reasons why evangelicals ought to pay more attention to patristics (study of the “fathers” of the pre-Medieval church). Number three was most intriguing to me:
The very alien nature of the world in which the Fathers operated challenges us to think more critically about ourselves in our own context. We may not, for example, sympathize much with radically ascetic monasticism; but when we understand it as a fourth century answer to the age old question of what a committed Christian looks like at a time when it is starting to be easy and respectable, we can at least use it as an anvil on which to hammer out our own contemporary response to such a question.
Wish I had time to flesh out some of the possible implications of that insight.
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