"Far too many Evangelicals in the modern day know next to nothing about these figures [the church fathers]. I will never forget being asked to give a mini-history conference at a church in southern Ontario. I suggested three talks on three figures from Latin-speaking North Africa: Perpetua, Cyprian, and Augustine. The leadership of the church came back to me seeking a different set of names, since they had never heard of the first two figures, and while they had heard of the third name, the famous bishop of Hippo Regius, they really knew nothing about him. I gave them another list of post-Reformation figures for the mini-conference, but privately thought that not knowing anything about these figures was possibly a very good reason to have a conference on them! I suspect that such ignorance is quite widespread among those who call themselves Evangelicals" (Michael Haykin, Patrick Of Ireland [Scotland: Christian Focus, 2017], 9-10)
That ignorance causes major problems in interactions with Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, atheists, Muslims, and other people whose beliefs and practices are highly relevant to the church fathers. The situation isn't as bad everywhere as Haykin's experience in Ontario, but it doesn't have to be so bad in order to be a significant problem.
I wrote an overview of how to study the church fathers several years ago. And I'll have more to say about the earliest fathers later this week.
How informed should every Christian be on the Church Fathers? I like to know as much as I can about many important things...just seems it’s hard to know when it ends regarding ones thoroughness and weight invested on any given subject. I don’t have Facebook, Netflix, cable TV and most modern things that typically consume valuable time from the average North American. But even at that, it seems there’s always that one more important thing one feels should/could be done that there’s not enough time for. I’ve never heard of Perpetua either until reading that post today...sigh :)
ReplyDeleteI don't think there's some threshold at which point you know enough, but in my limited experience, the problem is that most people are just at zero. No knowledge of history. No knowledge of Church fathers (if they've heard the term). No knowledge of textual criticism. Zilch. You don't need to necessarily be an expert, but knowing a little can be of help to detect when someone is pulling a fast one over you. For example, by claiming Matthew isn't properly quoting Isaiah because Isaiah didn't use the one and only word in the Hebrew language that could translate as virgin. There's a bit of hyperbole in it, but that is how an actual article from last December read.
DeleteEyezayah,
DeleteTheFlyingCouch already made some of the relevant points. And here's an exchange you and I had a few months ago on this subject. Given the largeness and complexity of life, we shouldn't expect there to be one point for everybody "when it ends regarding ones thoroughness and weight invested on any given subject". We don't have to have a point in mind where we can stop loving God more, stop learning more about him, etc. in order for it to be appropriate to call on people to do things like love God more and learn more about him. If you weigh 500 pounds, and I mention the importance of keeping your weight down and recommend some ways of doing it, there's not much sense in your responding by asking for a highly specific number of pounds you should weigh. I don't have to know of a highly specific number in order to make a reliable judgment that 500 pounds is too much. And I don't know some of the details relevant to the best weight for you (your exact height, other aspects of your health, etc.). It probably would be a poor use of my time, attention, and other resources for me to try to get all of that information about you and sort through all of it on your behalf. It would be better for you to do that work. But my ignorance of whether you should weigh 170 pounds or 180 pounds or whatever else doesn't prevent me from being confident that you should weigh some triple-digit number of pounds less than 500. Similar points can be made about exercise, financial issues, learning more about history, political involvement, spending more time with your spouse, and other subjects in life. We can know some things about a subject without knowing everything. I gave you some examples of that in our previous discussion, and I mentioned that you do the same thing you're objecting to in my posts. I also mentioned that the Bible does it. All of us do it. It's unavoidable. That's part of the nature of life. We can't be exhaustively specific. If you're going to maintain that we shouldn't try to change something in our lives, give recommendations to other people, etc. unless we have exhaustively specific information on what the objective should be, then your life is going to be unlivable. You aren't abiding by that standard, and it's not even possible to abide by it.
If you just want general principles about what constitutes going too far in the other direction, such as giving too much of your life to studying the church fathers, then I would repeat what I said in our discussion a few months ago. Read the threads I linked there. In those threads and other ones of a similar nature over the years, I've addressed concerns that have been raised about supposedly asking too much of people, being too negative, being legalistic, etc. As I've explained in those threads and elsewhere, the fact that there are dangers in two different directions (expecting too little from people and expecting too much from them) doesn't mean that the two dangers are of equal significance. Given what I've documented about the nature of our culture and other factors involved (human nature in general, the fact that holding people to too high a standard tends to do less damage than holding them to too low a standard, etc.), it makes sense for us to give more attention to the danger of overly low standards than we give to the danger of overly high standards. How many people do you know who are even close to giving too much of their lives to studying the church fathers? Given how vastly outnumbered such people are by the individuals who aren't studying the church fathers enough, it makes sense to approach the subject as I did in the original post in this thread. General observations like I made in that post allow for exceptions. But the exceptions in this context are few and far between. And the post I linked on studying the church fathers provides a broad range of options rather than expecting everybody to do a lot or expecting everybody to do the same amount.
DeleteOne of the points I've often made over the years is that the more people there are lifting the burden, the lighter the burden will be for each person. This is true not only in patristics, but also in philosophy, history, science, the paranormal, ethics, etc. If more Christians (and non-Christians) would grow up and do the work they should be doing in these contexts, then the people taking on these issues would have less of a burden to carry.
Where isn't it bad, out of curiosity? I think the church I've found has some good qualities, but the views of people in my group could be summed up as "apologetics? meh, God does the work, we're fine".
ReplyDeleteThere are some individuals and groups who seem to give adequate attention to patristic issues, though they're few and far between. But my original post in this thread refers to places where the problem isn't as bad. In other words, there's a problem, but less of one.
DeleteRegarding apologetics, for those who are interested in how to respond to individuals like the ones TheFlyingCouch referred to, see here.
Thanks for your response Jason. You give me good points to reflect on. I’ll try to balance my concern/objections better.
ReplyDeleteBtw, I weigh about 185lbs, but could stand to lose about 5-10 :)