Church Fathers Website

For some, all religions are basically the same. From an atheistic perspective, religions evolved as social constructs from various cultures to help explain ourselves to ourselves. Since the world can be a very scary and mysterious place, people just made-up different kinds of gods a long time ago to help us feel better about things.

Even for those who claim to believe in a higher power of some kind—like “The Force”, it is often a faith that is devoid of reason, which results in blind superstition. This quote sums it up better than I ever could:

“There is a widespread idea today that it does not matter what our conception of God is like; how vague it is, how confused, even how distorted. ‘We all worship the same God’ has become almost a shrug of the shoulders, dismissing the responsibility of knowing God as he reveals himself to be, as if to know truly is no difference to us.”^[i]

But Catholicism is distinctive from other religions in several ways in terms of how “God reveals himself to be”, and one key distinction is the “historical basis”. The Church Fathers are part of the historical continuum of Christ’s successors. The continuous teaching & broad consensus among the Fathers on all the basic tenets of the faith, from Baptism to the Eucharist to the role of Tradition is nicely shown at this website. The teachings on each topic are also listed in chronological order which gives that sense of harmony over the first 1000 years of the Church.

In terms of the entire history, it of course starts with the Jewish tradition. God reached out to man and revealed Himself publicly, and in a big way, to both believers and non-believers when establishing the nation of Israel. But isn’t that just a bunch of myths? Consider that history not only reveals the past, but also conceals it! When there were no recording devices or structured print media, what did people do? Important things were eventually written down of course, but information was also passed on via the spoken word. I think it is fair to judge the authenticity and value of whatever has been passed down through the ages by studying its fruit.

The Jews received and passed on the greatest moral code in history (The 10 Commandments) which the world still lives by today—more or less. The Jews also taught us that God is one, a person, a creator, eternal, perfect, faithful, and loving, reaching out to bond with man via covenants over and over again. This notion of god or gods did not come from the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, or anyone else in history; no one else even came close.

The Jews were expecting a savior to “make things right” with a final covenant, and God went public once again in the person of Jesus through many public miracles and a public resurrection with many witnesses. Jesus was tangible, historical, visible, and authoritative, so it stands to reason that his Church would also be tangible, historical, visible, and authoritative. Jesus authorized his Apostles and they in turn authorized their own successors.

If the modern-day successors of the Apostles and Church Fathers were to be rejected, we’d end up with all kinds of teachings as numerous as they are wrong.

Could you even imagine?

“All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never get there.”^[ii]

[i] Caryll Houselander, The Mother of Christ, (London: Sheed and Ward, 1978), p. 48.

[ii] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2001), p. 84.