Quote:
Originally Posted by awareness
Some of those early church fathers you are falling back on got fired. Including your favorite boy Athanasius.
The early church fathers were just men, living in the iron age. Why should we listen to any of them, or consider them authoritative?
They invented the RCC.
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You believe the writers of the scripture, Peter Paul etc were just iron age men as well?
Anyway, one reason we can consider them authoritative is because they used the Scripture authoritatively:
No one reading the apostolic and other early Fathers can’t help but be stuck by their extensive and authoritative use of Scripture. Just seven major Fathers from Justin Martyr to Eusebius cites 36, 289 verses from the New Testament–every verse but eleven (most of which are from 3 John). Irenaeus alone cites nearly 2000 verses (1819 to be exact) (see Leach, OBHGI, 35-36).
http://normangeisler.com/tag/early-church-fathers/
On the topic of modalism quotes of Athanasius was the favorite of people on here. People will quote Athanasius and perhaps other early church fathers on here when it suits them.
They are not as authoritative as Scripture obviously but there's a difference between rejecting a doctrine because the Bible denies it (which in this case, it doesn't) and rejecting a doctrine because the Bible doesn't say it (and ignoring what the early church fathers, even the Reformers like Luther say). So far the only argument I have seen against it is that "the bible doesn't say it". The Bible does not deny it, in which case the weight of the early church fathers, Luther, Wesley and others, must count for something.
Dennis Ngien (Professor of Systematic Theology at Tyndale University College and Seminary in Toronto and Research Scholar in Theology at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University. ) in a book "A Faith Worth Believing, Living, and Commending" writes
"Evangelicals should not be offended at the thought that the death of the
crucified Christ involved not only the humanity of Jesus but also his deity".
"Here is no surrogate. God Himself died a real death".
"The greatest marvel of the gospel is that the divinity was present in the Cross".
"If we take the Trinity and Incarnation seriously and recognize that this human Jesus is the second divine person, there is no suffering closer to God than the suffering of the human Jesus. Thus the human suffering of Jesus is really God's own suffering: God suffered as we do".
What has been happening in recent years in Christianity, although for some time I guess, is a denial of Jesus's divinity and people's reactions to "God's death" is a symptom of that. A heresy which the early church battled was that Jesus was not human. Today it is the opposite - that Jesus was not divine. Only Witness Lee (and possibly others) have stressed the God-man aspect of Christ, which in my view is fair and balanced.