Early Church Fathers and WCF

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Michael

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I suppose this could be put a few ways but which of the Early Church Fathers held beliefs most closely to those presented in the Westminster Confession of Faith?

I'm speaking of the confession as a whole. Most everyone would suggest for instance that Augustine's soteriology matches well with the confession. However can we glean from the rest of his writings that he would have taken little or no exception to the totality of it? And what of others?
 
Michael said:
I suppose this could be put a few ways but which of the Early Church Fathers held beliefs most closely to those presented in the Westminster Confession of Faith?

I'm speaking of the confession as a whole. Most everyone would suggest for instance that Augustine's soteriology matches well with the confession. However can we glean from the rest of his writings that he would have taken little or no exception to the totality of it? And what of others?
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William Cunningham, in his 2 volume HISTORICAL THEOLOGY notes that the Church Fathers can be cited for support by Calvinists and anti-Calvinists alike. Thus they could be cited both FOR and AGAINST The Confession of Faith by those who wished to do so.

The reason for this, as Cunningham states it, is that the Fathers said what Scripture said, the way that Scripture said it and left it at that until a crisis, error or controversy pressed them to articulate the truth in such a way and with such comprehensive lines as to exclude the threatening false teaching. – Cunningham, Historical Theology, vol. 1, pp.179 ff.
 
With all due respect to Mr. Cunningham there were many church leaders in the first millennia who wrote things plainly contrary to our confession today. However I am more interested in those who did not. Or at least not as much.
 
I think you'd need a true "expert" on one or another Church Father to answer those questions. This is a project beyond the powers of most supersmart academicians. It requires the mastery of at least one entire corpus (one man's body-of-work) and reams of related writing.

Here's the most important fact to remember: These folks loved the Bible, they quoted the Bible all the time, they based their arguments for the things that they had to contend for on the Bible.

I think it would be unfair to demand of them that they have statements in print that dovetail with 1200-1600 years of additional theological reflection (and hard-fought battles) on any biblical subjects that they were committed to in principle, but were not in position to have to write with precision.

It would be just as misguided to expect Paul or Timothy or Polycarp (1st - 3rd generation Christians) to automatically and unreservedly "subscribe" to a Creed with the word "Trinity" in it. How would they even know what the term meant without getting up to speed?

And yet, what right-thinking Christian wouldn't hope that Paul, Timothy, and Polycarp would be "on his side" in present-day debates, being anachronistically Trinitarian and all that?

The fact is, in the Fathers there is a great deal of uncritical and uncomplicated reliance on the simple statements of Scripture, with little apparent interest in how it all "sounds" or coheres in a kind of stitched-together theological quilt. The job of turning that humble, "home-spun" product into an artful masterpiece is the task of the church, that began in the first generation and continues today.

I doubt that it is possible to get to a "systematic" and thoroughgoing statement of faith from the first couple centuries, apart from the lines that have come together in the Apostle's Creed. When further statements are made, they build on that Faith. Because of anachronism, it is clearly impossible to bring (for example) a Cappadocian Father into our age, and expect him to acknowledge our Confession if he did not study it, and did not have some idea of the history of theological conflict in the intervening ages. It is hard enough for us to put ourselves back in those days, in order to understand what intellectual currents drove the ancient theologian's choices of terms and arguments. But at least we possess the history that has passed between us.

The best way to understand even one Father or another (assuming you were unsatisfied with secondary literature) would be to read all the things he's ever known to have written, and then copiously around and about him in time--other writers of his age, cultural studies by the best anthropological investigators of his era, and the history of thought that influenced the time he lived in. Then, after doing a PhD's worth of study, you might be able to offer a tentative window into the mind of a "representative thinker" of the early church.



The issues of "defining the Faith," when they touch on what the church has taught down through the ages, often ends up sounding like two groups of people contending for the "title" to the inheritance of the past. For many in hierarchical denominations, having the name and buildings from the past, they think the default setting is that they own the past. This is one of their major arguments against upstarts, who have no awareness of history and no defense against the "where was your church before ???" argument.

But that argument is useless against a person who knows that owning the property of the past is not the same thing as owning the mind of the past. It is powerless against those who know that what those churches teach today often bears little resemblance to the plainest statements of faith from the Fathers they claim to revere. In other words, the present day RC or EO churches claims to adhere to the Apostolic Faith are just as open to scrutiny as the claims of churches that have "broken" at places with the entrenched, "official" churches--oft allied and supported by money and power, over against the Spirit and Truth.

So, the argument is not properly over whether Augustin or Athanasius would subscribe to the WCF in his day, but whether he might if he lived among us. And on that score, we have as much a right and more to expect a fellow-believer (such as one of them) to adhere to us, as the other side would like to think such a one should adhere to them, despite that side's defection from the authority of the Bible at many vital points. The Bible still says the same things it ever has; and our ability to master it (or be mastered by it) is measured by our commitment to the God who reveals himself in it.
 
Thank you kindly for your response, Bruce.

I wholeheartedly agree with much of what you’ve said. And for me the topic is really an awkward thing to post as a question in the first place. It doesn’t necessarily seem fair to judge the intricacies one person’s understanding in the church against the view of another 1000 years later on an issue that has since been thoroughly attacked, examined, and built upon over time. However, on the simplest of levels I can’t help but think that some basic comparisons can be made. For instance, if one church father gathered from scripture and was in obvious agreement with the view of transubstantiation in the Lord’s Supper it would only seem right to say that they do not hold the same view of the sacrament as the confession later on [even if they did not know of the word “transubstantiation’]. Now perhaps they would if they lived at a later time and with the privilege of a deeper investigation of the issue...but that is pure speculation.

So my query here is more about the plain and simple. I understand that without the breadth of trials, resources, and study aided by the Holy Spirit throughout the ages of the Church that any one person may be left handcuffed, so to speak, in their efforts to articulate the fine doctrines of the faith. But if you were to ask a RC or EO apologist to show the common thread of their theology back through the early church, they are very quick on the draw--and rightfully so in a lot of cases [albeit all too often in error]. So is our Reformed response boiled down to “it will take a PHD’s worth of contextual study?” Are there no saints of old in the church that we can go to and say, “Look, they have always plainly believed the same thing?” Or is the whole matter a point of progressive understanding or articulation?

---------- Post added at 06:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:33 PM ----------
Semper Fidelis said:
Michael,

Have you read Calvin's Institutes? He quotes the Church Fathers throughout.
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Yes, I have. Are there any particular Church Fathers that he quotes that you would recommend as mirrors of our confession?
 
Michael said:
Are there any particular Church Fathers that he quotes that you would recommend as mirrors of our confession?
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Augustine

Augustine is so wholly with me, that if I wished to write a confession of my faith, I could do so with all fulness and satisfaction to myself out of his writings. (Src: A Treatise on the Eternal Predestination of God)

Where is DTK when you need him? ;)

AMR
 
I seriously doubt any of the Church Fathers will come even close to the WCF. From the 2nd-century on, they all held to episcopal church government. Apostolic succession of bishops was a huge plank against Gnosticism and Montanism. Also, they all believed in baptismal regeneration, so much so that Zwingli declared that on the power of the baptismal water, all the doctors of the church had erred. Some of them did not have the same canon of Scripture as the WCF. Few would have articulated clearly a penal substitutionary view of atonement, though I don't think they denied it either. Most of them from the 3rd century on believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary. None of them, as far as I am aware, made a conscious distinction between justification and sanctification.
 
Bruce,

I need to beg your patience on this because I’m not sure I’ll be able to articulate it well...but here goes.

I think it would be unfair to demand of them that they have statements in print that dovetail with 1200-1600 years of additional theological reflection (and hard-fought battles) on any biblical subjects that they were committed to in principle, but were not in position to have to write with precision.
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Here’s the thing. There are a lot of things articulated by the ECFs that we as Reformed Christians are in complete agreement with today. And then there are some other things that we view quite differently after, as you put it, 1200-1600 years of additional theological reflection. Now I don’t mean to speculate beyond practicality here but how exactly are we supposed to view our confession today in light of that? Is it most simply a marker or milestone in the growing understanding of the Church’s faith? Or is it essentially a punctuation mark by which the future is to be conformed? I say “essentially” because we of course leave the confession up for the possibility of revisions, however major adjustments are incredibly unlikely.

It seems that if someone today held firmly to the beliefs of the majority of ECFs they would not be fit to subscribe to the WCF. We know not when our Lord Jesus will return to consummate his Kingdom but if he were to come in 2000 yrs how would our confession today likewise stand? Would we be a dot on a timeline of progressively maturing understanding that is [benevolently] unfit of confessing what our future brethren have come to believe? Or would we stand in more implicit unity with them? Or would our unity simply find its essence in the "mindset" that we share throughout the ages when approaching God's Word? I suppose I am only asking for opinions at this point.

Anyhow, I’m not sure if I could have worded that any better but I look forward to your response [and those of others].
 
Michael, we still hold to the confessions (the creeds) that were devised by the early church. In 2000 years, the faithful church will still believe in one God, the Father almighty, that though the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, yet that there are not three gods but one God, etc. And in the same way, in 2000 years the faithful church will still believe that the books called Apocrypha are no otherwise to be made us of or approved than other human writings, that God unchangeably foreordains whatsoever comes to pass, that all the elect are effectually called, etc.
Westminster does not contradict the earlier creeds – it adds to what we confidently confess, but it doesn’t contradict the confident confession of yore. If there is another age of theological advance and confessional incorporation of it, the new confessions might extend the territory on which the church defines its borders, but it won’t contradict the earlier lines, at least not on basic points.
 
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Hi Ruben,

Thank you for your response. You always seem to add valuable insights.

The point of my question here is not to dig deeper between the Confession and the Creed(s) alone but rather between the Confession and the common faith and practice of the ECFs. I understand that the bare essentials of the faith will be common to all in the Invisible Church.

You mention the Apocrypha. The very place of Scripture [and extra-scriptural material] in the realm of authority in the Christian life is but another distinction between our understanding now compared to then. So yes, we build upon the past. Yet often we've built to the point of disagreement...sola scriptura vs tradition, baptismal regeneration, the Lord's Supper, etc. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that the Reformation has sought to recover the essence of the faith as opposed to building upon errors, but the differences remain stark in many places.
 
Michael,
Here's my best effort:

It's as good to speculate how we would "fit" into the ECFworld, as is it to speculate how they would fit into the 21st century church. Why shouldn't it make as much sense as anything to think that were Athanasius alive today--and had all the benefits of a modern theological education, access to church history, and a readable Bible--assuming that he was the same kind of person (first a lover of Christ and the Bible) that he would stand with us?

It is so terribly anachronistic to bring someone from another time into this one, or project ourselves backward into that one. Because, we cannot fathom just how much we are products of the time and circumstances in which God settled us. Providentially, THIS is the optimal time (so far as I know) for me to live; for in any other time, perhaps I would have ended up an unbeliever. Change one thing about my childhood, and maybe I'm an atheistic or theistic evolutionist IN MY OWN TIME. But that's not what happened.

All we can really say is that we understand that certain theological errors are not FATAL to one's faith. And some of that has to do with where God has placed us geographically and temporally. There's the big-picture, and the small-picture. Some people today are very "childish" or "childlike" in their faith. They only know that they get fed a diet every week in church, and they don't deeply interpret that faith. Are they being fed good diet or bad? Will it sustain them, or won't it? They may not know that 'til Judgment Day.

Here's the big picture: the ECF's were living in the "infancy" of the NT church. They were "children" in their Providential location. God put them there, and that's all there is to it. That observation in no way belittles them, or shortens their INTELLECT. These were giants of faith and learning, when we compare men-to-men. But there's this other layer, this "temporal" layer.

One great Providential "problem" the early church had to face was that in about two generations, they lost a portion of their "Old Testament" mind. They lost the ability in Hebrew. Jerome almost singlehandedly resurrected (for a time) Hebrew scholarship. But worse than the language problem was the devaluing of the OT. The ECF stumbled in how to relate to OT revelation--not entirely, because they were trying to "find Christ" there, but "allegorical" exegesis displaced true "typology." Now, if you have for all intents/purposes a truncated canon, your overall biblical theology is going to suffer also. So, the ECFs are laboring under a variety of social effects that impact how they get into the Bible.

The Jews had joined the Romans in persecuting the Church in the first century. This drove the initial wedge. Then, the Jews were persecuted wildly by the pagan Romans, and their country wiped out. Hebrew writing, and probably even study of the OT even in Gk., is bound to be minimized culturally in the church. Then, the church is wildly persecuted by Rome for two more centuries, and the writings that they care most to save are the NT writings. These are social effects that work their way out in priorities for the church to study the Bible.

Then, there is the order of the heretical attacks on the church. The church has to prioritize its in-depth study and defense of the truth. The best minds leave other important studies for the most pressing studies. So what happens in those other areas? Variety, and inevitably mistake and error in the nature of the case. But this or that problem is not as DEADLY as the problem of the deity and humanity of Christ. Get those wrong, and the other problems will not have a chance to kill the church off--it'll already be dead.



That is a lot to chew on, I think, so I'll just leave you with this illustration:
Back to the "church-as-child" analogy, the big-picture (similar to the big-picture OT Israel as God's "son"). A kid gets fed every day. He doesn't know diddly about how that food gets to the table, he just likes to eat. And the big-picture is that God sees to it that the church gets nourished.

That same kid doesn't have a very well-formed picture of the world either. He's wrong about lots of things, or better put, he's mixed up about many things. He has some facts in his head and some fantasy, and its not easy for him to tell the difference. He's not even thinking about it. But he knows where the table is. And when he's set before him a bowl of gravel, he spits that out, and tries to find his bowl of porridge.

Meanwhile, he grows and he sorts out his thinking on lots of other things. He gets settled on many things, like who's in charge, how do I fit in this scheme, time to change my diaper, car-seat means environment change, etc. But for a long, long time, he got it in his head that he'd like to fly like a bird, as soon as he could. If he's prevented from going out, and climbing up on a roof, chances are he won't try flapping his arms and jumping--until he's learned a little bit about gravity and his limitations. God doesn't Providentially give the church more than she can handle, and he lets it keep some mixed up notions, because its more important to get the bowl of porridge vs. bowl of gravel thing right.

Why didn't God just zap the church with perfect knowledge? "That's how I would do it!" That's the silly question lots of people ask. He didn't (obviously), and trying to sell the idea that all the childish notions of childhood were somehow "instinctually true" and accurate is ridiculous. Rome and EO often sound like they say this sort of thing. Or, Rome (more than EO I think) admits that ideas have morphed over time, but still the church didn't have ANY WRONG notions, at the start, just LESS FORMED but still the same as today. Of course, EO also holds wrong notions, not least for which reason she was strongly influenced by Greek/Gnostic philosophy early on. When generation after generation no reformation happens, no getting back to the Bible for corrections, no church will grow properly. This was the benefit of the Reformation--getting back to reading and understanding the Bible.

But maybe then, the child still thinks for a long time that he's like a magnet, and the earth is like a big refrigerator, that's why he's stuck to it. You can see that if he grows up, thinking he can learn to fly by jumping off buildings, or thinking that he's attracted to the earth like a magnet to a fridge, eventually that's going to create problems for him. He needs to think clearly on these things.

And he does so how? By learning. By a system of learning, that is integrated to the world of reality. He keeps at it, and he corrects. Because the basic instruction set is reliable. Unless he tosses it over, and chooses a flattering instruction set that validates his errors.


Hope this is a helpful bit. I haven't time to review it.
 
Thank you so much Bruce for taking the time to write that. You are right, it is a lot to chew on. The diagram is excellent though.

I am going to pause from this thread to give what you've posted some time to digest.
 
Bruce, one of the problems that we (conservative Christians) often run into is a contradictory, or at least awkward, mix of primitivism and developmental theories. On the one hand, our commitment to sola scriptura makes us highly susceptible to assuming that the whole Christian religion was there perfectly from the beginning, and all we have to do is pass on what the first generation of Christians passed on. Much of Christianity has held this view.

On the other hand, we have this view of doctrinal development. The Church, through meditation and reflection on Scripture, through experience, and through conflict with heretics grows more and more to understand faith, hope, and love. We are compelled to believe this because the facts of history (on virtually any interpretation) will not allow us to maintain a static concept of tradition, in which one generation merely transcribes what the previous generation whispers.

Now, that seems to leave us with an odd cataclysm, a gap theory of doctrinal progression. In the beginning, there was Jesus and the Apostles. They knew everything. They could answer any question. Then, *BAM*, we're into the era of the church "babies" and need to spend the rest of history rebuilding. There's something about that I can't buy.
 
Charlie,
I think you've got your finger on it. I wouldn't buy that product either. There's something askew about asking even the Apostles to give us a "Trinitarian" symbol, for example. I don't think we should describe the NT as a "systematic" theology textbook. Precisely because it wasn't issued to us in that manner, the form our doctrine takes is organic to it.

In other words, that which is the real "seed-to-tree" is the "genetics" of the Scripture itself. The writers are preserved perfectly from error in their writing (and I would say, preaching of Christ, generally). This is not a "transferable" quality to the church. Infallibility rests in the Scripture.

On the other hand, I think that the apostles probably did have better theology (overall) than their students. And why not? they were taught by the infallible Teacher, but they were not free from error in perspicuity or transmission (other than the written Word)--exhibit A=Peter @ Antioch. They were imperfect on the details of their own grasp of what had been granted them.

But they did not "miss" on the GOSPEL of Christ, on that substance. They gave us the fourfold witness. And they taught the church a proper hermeneutic. And they left us with Paul's genius, his biblical-theological-to-logical/systemic grasp of the connection between the facts and the meaning of Christ's mission. Romans alone, as the written expression of the Pauline gospel-kerygma, is possibly the single most important compendium of doctrine, tying the OT and NT together, in the NT. And that is not to downplay any of the other, vital books. (What would be do without Hebrews! Galatians!)
 
Isn't this rather what you would expect? On the one hand, you have Christ - the perfect ectypal theologian, full of truth, who certainly could answer any question. He gives an adequate revelation to his representatives (who couldn't have answered every question, and who had no special advantages in connection with philosophical concepts or the subsequent development of terminology, but who were not without all insight into the revelation they received).

But then begins the theological endeavor, carried on now by the uninspired. They are working with the revelation that has been left, but they are not making that revelation themselves. Their insights must start from the ground floor. Indeed, in one way we all have to start from the ground floor since we aren't born with a knowledge of theology; but the reflection and insight of the past, and the patterns of instruction they have established serve as shortcuts (or as barriers to blind alleys), and so progress is possible. But this progress is always tending towards a more faithful, exact, and extensive appropriation of the revelation already give. There is a vast gulf between the NT and the other early writings of the church (just as there is a vast gulf between Jeremiah and Wisdom). The one is revelation; the other is appropriation, which involves restatement, summarization, organization. Different presentations of the Biblical evidence are made: some are found wanting, some are found positively erroneous, some prove acceptable, some are so good they can't be improved. And this process naturally moves from one point to another. When you've reached a definition so just and scientific that tampering with it simply rearranges words or damages the meaning, that effort of scientific formulation can move on to another point.

Naturally increasing clarity (as well as differing prevailing sins) means that attitudes current in one epoch find little place in another. I hope future ages do not have quite the same blindness to materialism that we do. But I think C.S. Lewis spoke wisely when he said:
The earliest Christians were not so much like a man who mistakes the shell for the kernel as like a man carrying a nut which he hasn't yet cracked. The moment it is cracked, he knows which part to throw away. Till then he holds on to the nut, not because he is a fool but because he isn't. Perhaps the boundaries of nut and shell were not precisely laid out; but they had a grasp on where the nut was, and were not deprived of it.
 
py3ak said:
Isn't this rather what you would expect?
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Well the struggle here is that it all went downhill in the span of a single generation.

As an example, let's say that my pastor was shepherded by a man who was taught by J. Gresham Machen. If pastor explained to me Machen's view of Docrine X based upon what he read and heard from first hand accounts, I would feel very comfortable describing it with confidence. Yet in the early church it seems that many things took a left turn in an awful hurry. Was this a result of things just being too disorganized? Obviously there were outside influences involved. And of course the cannon was not yet formed so the church operated mostly from tradition and the spoken word. But even that begs the question as to why the church tradition in a variety of doctrines was almost uniformly different from what we find in the WCF.

The Book of Acts tells us that Christ spent forty days with his disciples after the resurrection. It’s very difficult to imagine how forty days worth of instruction from God himself in human form, risen from the dead, could have been so broadly confused or corrupted in the breadth of a single generation.

Am I over thinking something here?
 
Michael said:
py3ak said:
Isn't this rather what you would expect?
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Well the struggle here is that it all went downhill in the span of a single generation.

As an example, let's say that my pastor was shepherded by a man who was taught by J. Gresham Machen. If pastor explained to me Machen's view of Docrine X based upon what he read and heard from first hand accounts, I would feel very comfortable describing it with confidence. Yet in the early church it seems that many things took a left turn in an awful hurry. Was this a result of things just being too disorganized? Obviously there were outside influences involved. And of course the cannon was not yet formed so the church operated mostly from tradition and the spoken word. But even that begs the question as to why the church tradition in a variety of doctrines was almost uniformly different from what we find in the WCF.

The Book of Acts tells us that Christ spent forty days with his disciples after the resurrection. It’s very difficult to imagine how forty days worth of instruction from God himself in human form, risen from the dead, could have been so broadly confused or corrupted in the breadth of a single generation.

Am I over thinking something here?
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Perhaps your experience is different than mine. I have no problem believing that the truth can be lost in a generation. Norman Shepherd and Peter Enns both taught at Westminster less than a generation after Machen...

Also, did you know that the Reformed Church in the United States is what remains of the Eureka Classis of the old RCUS? In 1934, the RCUS began a series of mergers which led to... the UCC. Compare the two today and ask yourself how quickly error can creep into the church.
 
Michael, in addition to Bryan's point, I don't think those who heard Christ's teaching for 40 days were the ones forgetting things. It was the sub-apostolic men. Secondly, I think it is very important to distinguish between imprecise statement and embracing of error. Obviously in early theological statement you find a lot that is imprecise, perhaps misleadingly worded, etc. But I don't think that necessarily implies that they embraced the errors that could be drawn out of their words.

Think about it like this. When Arius begins to teach his nonsense, he is vigorously opposed; and part of the conflict is over what predecessors had taught. In that rough and tumble the word homoousion began to be used to distinguish. Arians could say they agreed with the statements of Scripture, but they didn't interpret them in a way that could be summed up as homoousion, so that term was a useful delimiter. Now large numbers of people who didn't know that word, still held to the truth; but now they had a precise way to state it, a way that excluded false understandings as that earlier formulations hadn't. But does that mean all the earlier people held to error, or at least were unclear? I don't think it does: they held on to formulations of the truth that were capable of bad interpretations because they valued the truth in them, not because they were trying to be ambiguous or because they embraced error. That's why I quoted Lewis' remark about the kernel and the nut.
 
Still, the problem is that we can trace a fairly consistent theological trajectory, carefully mapping continuity and discontinuity, from the 2nd-century onward. Yet, if we were to believe this "gap" theory, we would have to believe that more theological change and innovation took place in 1-2 generations after the apostles than in the 3 centuries following.

I think I'm more comfortable with what Bruce describes - the New Testament simply is not a systematic theology. I don't know that Paul understood the Trinity any better than we do, or that he would be able to understand the discussions we have now. But I also think that he had a hold of some principles and experiences, not to mention piety and Spirit, that would let him sniff out true from false if given a chance.

In essence, I think much of the appeal to tradition in the early church fathers is made up wholesale. Really, if a Father says, "We have received from the apostles," that usually means that they have run out of good arguments.
 
Charlie, I'm not quite sure if you're replying to me or not. I agree that the NT is not a systematic, though I think it certainly contains the seeds and provides an impetus for it. But I think Warfield is right on the money to believe that the revelation of the Trinity was made in deed. Paul knows the indwelling Spirit, he knows the ascended Christ, and he knows that through Christ he has access to the Father by the Spirit. What he would make of ousia and hypostasis is not as important as that; but that knowledge would indeed lead him through the labyrinth of subsequent discussion if he had opportunity to review it.
A systematic had to be developed as a way of doing justice to all the statements of Scripture. And part of that was developing the categories that enabled you to satisfactorily fit in every kind of statement. What I am maintaining here is that while it might not have been clear to most people that statements about God might concern the essence, or the subsistences, or a particular relation, their lack of clarity on the conceptual boundaries doesn't mean we should conclude they were unorthodox.
When a child speaks about the Trinity, we are sure that there is much crudeness of conception in the statements, and almost certainly some quasi-spatial imaginations that are less than helpful; but we don't conclude the child is unorthodox on that basis. We hope in time (and with regard to our own crude ideas as well) that we will throw away the shell and keep the kernel; but until we're able to do that, by all means let's hang on to both.
 
I disagree with the thesis that it all went horribly wrong within a generation. The issue arises because of the marked contrast between apostolic and sub-apostolic writings. There is an heavenly prudence in that contrast. It enables the church to distinguish inspiration from non-inspiration, divine authority from mere human authority. Look, instead, at the churches of the New Testament. The apostles dealt with numerous problems which continued to trouble the church into the next generations. The churches never were perfect. They were always characterised by the quality of being more or less pure. As time progressed the "more" and the "less" developed their own distinct structures and these perpetually strove against each other. In some things the less pure degenerated to such an extent as to cease to bear any mark of the pure bride of Christ. We celebrate the reformation because it established and maintained what we consider to be the pure marks of the church. It was not a new church but the continuing witness of the old church through the ages. There is nothing in the Westminster Confession which is altogether new. Every teaching has its historical precursor in the struggle of the ages.
 
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