[awareness]

Originally Posted by Evangelical

You believe the writers of the scripture, Peter Paul etc were just iron age men as well?

Not just, but yes, they lived during the iron age.

Originally Posted by Evan

Anyway, one reason we can consider them authoritative is because they used the Scripture authoritatively:

Who determines that?

Originally Posted by Evan

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/

What makes Geisler authoritative? From what I've seen of him he starts with a foregone conclusion, and makes everything fit around that. He certainly couldn't be considered objective.

Originally Posted by Evan

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.

This is true. Just like you we will use snippets of the church fathers to prove our point, or to win an argument.

But I don't know about this. Seems devotees often get their master wrong. There's plenty of evidence of this with the disciple in the gospels.

From them we can, if you will, get the firsthand stories, and accounts, as eyewitnesses. But with the church fathers we're getting at best secondhand reports, and more likely 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc. hand information. The scripture may be inspired, but not the church fathers. It may be inerrant, but they weren't. They created the RCC, and established Christianity as the state religion. Is that the kind of authority your are using and/or supporting?

Originally Posted by Evan

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.

Still, we can't lose sight of the fact that they were not inspired, and were flawed human beings, just like us.

Originally Posted by Evan

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.

Dennis Ngien who?

BY DENNIS NGIEN| FEBRUARY 3, 1997
Does God ever feel distressed?
The early Christian theologians said no. They accepted the Greek idea of divine impassibility, the notion that God cannot suffer since God stands outside the realm of human pain and sorrow. Philo, the Hellenistic Jewish theologian, had already assumed this in his understanding of Israel's God. Virtually all the early church fathers took it for granted, denying God any emotions because they might interrupt his tranquillity. The Council of Chalcedon (a.d. 451) declared as "vain babblings" the idea that the divine nature could suffer, and it condemned those who believed it.

Like most theologians of Chalcedonian and earlier times, Calvin—and Reformed theology after him—assumed divine impassibility. The Westminster Confession of Faith explicitly asserted that God is "without body, parts, or passions, immutable." Similarly, a contemporary evangelical theologian argues that when Jesus died on the cross it was his human nature that suffered, not the divine.