The Church Fathers

[anvilhauler]

The easy way to extinguish the nonsense that some claim as the teachings of the "church fathers" is to only ever refer to the apostles who wrote the letters in the New Testament as being the church fathers because they were the ones who were right there at the beginning of the age of the church and they alone under the guidance of the Holy Spirit wrote the material for what was going to be the doctrines of the New Covenant.

Any who claim that any others are the "church fathers" only need to be informed that the church fathers wrote that many others were going to come along after them with heresies and if they choose to look and do some study then they will see that written in the Bible.  All doctrines must be tested against the doctrines written by the church fathers (apostles) as we have in the Word of God and if they don't follow those doctrines then who ever is saying or publishing anything to the contrary needs to be corrected and if they refuse correction then they must be exposed as false teachers and avoided.

[creationliberty]

That's a good point. Thanks.

[Jeanne]

Funny, we were just talking about the so-called early 'church fathers' in our call yesterday!


You brought up a very good point. People need to understand that the only thing these other 'church fathers' started was the Roman Catholic Church.

[Kenneth Winslow]

Early church fathers, concordances, commentaries lexicon's and Greek and Hebrew dictionaries are frequently used as excuses for believing in promoting unbiblical doctrine.

[A]

Early church fathers, concordances, commentaries lexicon's and Greek and Hebrew dictionaries are frequently used as excuses for believing in promoting unbiblical doctrine.

If I'm not wrong, "biblical seminaries" promote such things. I know of such learned people that openly teach about Codex Vaticanus, [insert corrupt Bible] as the real text, even openly teach about early "Church Fathers" such as Origen who taught weird stuff, all sorts of unbiblical doctrines.

Here's some of Origen's beliefs I found, which could be helpful for someone reading this.

-Origen believed that man was divine.
-He believed in the pre-existence of souls(As with Pythagoras)
-He taught that everyone, including the Devil, would eventually be saved.
-He described the Trinity as a "hierarchy," not as an equality of Father, Son, and Spirit.
-He believed in baptismal regeneration.
-He believed in purgatory.
-He taught that the Holy Spirit was the first creature made by God.
-He believed Christ was created.
-He taught transmigration (this is the belief that at death the soul passes into another body).
-He denied a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation, taught that it was a "myth" and taught that there was no actual person named "Adam."
-He taught that Christ "became" God at His baptism.
-He taught, based on Matthew 19, that a true man of God should be castrated,  which he did to himself.(Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven.. completely out of context)
-He denied the physical resurrection of believers.
None of this is found in the Bible after all. The only familiar place I would find it in is in Paganism/Gnosticism.

If anyone actually studied the Bible for real at those seminaries they'd denounce not only Origen, but probably every other "church father".

[Kenneth Winslow]

It sounds like Origen was an early church father of todays New Age church. Certainly not the church of Christ.

[strangersmind]

The greatest men of Christ are the ones you don't here about. While the "church fathers" where busy  writing how man can get his best life now, the great men of God where out teaching doctrine and dieing to bring the knowledge of truth unto the people of christ.

[MeganIA]

You are right on this. I found some books that included writings from the first 3 centuries in the churches. I have had a suspicion that a few of them were either translated or forged by the Roman Catholic church. Some of the language included words only used by them. God has not hidden His word, so we do not need anything else to understand it. Any extra materials I have purchased over the years are collecting dust on the shelf.