The Ancient Faith I Never Knew: Discovering the Protestant Heritage

11th century mosaic of Church Fathers from St. Sophia of Kyiv

Growing up in the Bible Belt in the bosom of the Methodist Church, I received the “faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). Nursed and content within this plot in the garden that is the Church, I rejoiced to receive nourishment and light from above without concerning myself with the various colors, trellises, smells, and sights further afield in God’s great seedbed. I heard the Scriptures proclaimed, received the sacraments, learned and confessed the Apostles’ Creed, and even sang the Gloria Patri. With great gratitude I became a member in the body of Christ, but little did I know this aging body has her own story to tell. 

I was richly instructed in Christ’s love for sinners, but my catechesis, and particularly my knowledge of crucial elements of church history, was sorely lacking. I knew the Apostle Paul founded churches up and down the Mediterranean, that Philip and the other Apostles fanned out in every direction to evangelize the nations, and that eventually there was a Church leader named Augustine. After that, however, everything was a blur. My teachers implied that the body of Christ had been very much like a patient on life-support, frozen in a coma and awaiting either eventual death or a blood transfusion. Once Luther and Calvin came along (never Cranmer, Andrewes or Hooker), the blood donor was found and the transfusion was completed. Now the Church, like Lazarus coming out of a 1500-year slumber, finally came to herself, gingerly standing on her own two feet again.

Many living in the West today, a place of eroding traditions and fracturing communities, are increasingly looking to “go back to their roots”, whether it be native dress, indigenous practices, or even reconstructed religions. Such a trend, however, is not absent within the life of the Church. In fact, it appears to be booming, with throngs of evangelicals, Baptists, Presbyterians and others flocking to more liturgical traditions like Anglicanism, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. When confronted by the seemingly historical vacuity of much of American Protestantism on the one hand and the glorious riches of the apostolic deposit found in these “historic” traditions on the other, many convert with great zeal and no little enthusiasm. Many simply see that the only way forward in the life of the Church is a movement that also looks backward, back behind the modern malaise of the Church, back behind the Reformation into medieval and ancient Christianity.

In my own spiritual journey I have experienced this disorientation with my own Protestant tradition, as well as a kind of intoxicating draw away and “up the candlestick.” Studying religions at a state university and working at a Methodist campus ministry, I felt like I was being pulled in two directions: First, I was drawn toward critical readings of Scripture with a heavy dose or Protestant liberalism in the form of process theology. Second, I was drawn toward evangelical doctrine and practice. I was of two minds theologically.. While my faith was sustained and even blossomed in this time it was also ensnared by false epistemological presuppositions in the academy and undernourished with shallow and feeble roots in the college ministry. Curiously, as I saw many friends and classmates to my left jump on the train of biblical criticism for as long as they could ride it (not a few arriving at agnosticism or atheism by the end), and others to my right  ride the wave of stomp-and-clap evangelicalism, I noticed that both of these paths almost wholly ignored the first fifteen centuries of the Church. At their worst both tended to read Scripture in a historical vacuum, often individually, never stirring that great giant, the body of Christ, from slumber to remember her spiritual and salvific encounters with Scripture in ages past. Perhaps, I thought, remembering had to do with gathering up members across space and time. Perhaps on the Lord’s Day when we hear the words “do this in remembrance of me” we are participating within the great cloud of witnesses, the Communion of Saints.

In the intervening years between University and beginning my pastorate I have tried on every ecclesiological hat to see if it could fit—I went to mass, went to weekly Anglican/Episcopal Eucharist, and even some Orthodox Divine Liturgies all without ever leaving the bosom of the Methodist Church. Not only was I in love with the “strange new world of the Bible,” but after a few afternoons perusing the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (ed. Thomas Oden), retreating to a few monasteries in my region, and immersing myself in a number of “high church” liturgies, I found myself within what could be called the “strange new world of the early Church.” I longed to listen to the Scriptures alongside the Church Fathers down through the centuries, not evaluating the Fathers as a scientist does a microbe, but fellowshipping and worshiping with them as brothers and sisters. And yet given my best knowledge, I was in the wrong family— in order to be siblings with them, I mean “real” siblings, I thought I had to go to Rome or Constantinople or perhaps Canterbury, but certainly not Epworth. In order to have continuity with the Church of St. Augustine, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. John Chrysostom, I would have to jump ship, swap jerseys and transfer to the “right” team. I crossed my fingers every time we recited the Creed when we came to the words “the holy catholic Church”, assuming that the body of which I was a part had little or no claim to catholicity. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, I fought and sought and felt caught… and then the epiphany came. I, like the Magi, saw Christ’s light shining in ever-surprising places, encompassing those both near and far, both native shepherds and far-off gift-bearers.

One day I was in my campus minister’s office sharing in confidence this spiritual crisis when he stopped me and said: “You know what, you sound a lot like John Wesley. You’re in the right place.” At first these words stung.  It was uncomfortable, and yet it woke me up from a kind of hazy sleep. Perhaps here, as a Methodist, I am both Protestant and yet within the “catholic” (universal) Church with all its riches and peculiarity. Later I set my sails for Duke Divinity School where I would hear Stanley Hauerwas say things like, “I’m catholic, just not Roman Catholic” and had an inkling of what he meant. I discovered that what united the Body of Christ wasn’t simply a branch theory or apostolic succession or the papacy or the patriarchate, but our unbroken liturgical life glorifying the holy Trinity revealed in the Scriptures, the Creeds, and the Sacraments. In other words, our life together in Christ’s Body, by virtue of common faith and practice under “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Ephesians 4:5) need not depend on questions like “who was your bishop,” but rather on questions like “Whom do you worship?” and “in whose name were you claimed in Baptism?”

There has been renewed attention given to classical Protestantism’s doctrinal continuity with the early Church, not least in recent publications and social media, as for example found in the viral YouTubers Rev. Dr. Jordan B. Cooper (a Lutheran seminary dean) and Rev. Gavin Ortland (a Baptist pastor). It appears a new generation is hungry not simply for  “garden-variety” Christianity, but one that takes into account the breadth of the tradition. I came to find that many of the  Reformers sought to read Scripture alongside rather than against or without the Church Fathers. 

Central to the Reformation, I discovered, was a kind of ressourcement movement seeking faithfully to  realign the Church of its day with that of the ancient Church. I was stunned to find that Luther and Calvin, among many others, went back to retrieve earlier understandings of Scripture,  leading to many of our most cherished Reformation doctrines today. Looking back to the Church Fathers myself, I marveled at sayings from great defenders of orthodoxy like St. Cyril of Alexandria (150-213 AD) who wrote this about the authority of the Scriptures: “They that are ready to spend their time in the best things will not give over seeking for truth until they have found the demonstration from the Scriptures themselves” (Stromata 7:16:3). St. Jerome, sounding perhaps a bit like what we might expect from Martin Luther, declared, “Those things which they make and find, as it were, by apostolical tradition, without the authority and testimony of Scripture, the word of God smites” (ad Aggai 1). If we did more research, we would find many more Church Fathers saying similar things about Scripture’s normative authority in the Church’s life (e.g., St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, St. Athanasius, St. Basil, Irenaeus, Cyprian, etc). Scriptural reflection accompanied by patristic exegesis (particularly St. Jerome) also paved the way for the Reformation’s restriction of the Apocrypha within the canon of Scripture (see for example Article VI of the 39 Articles of the Church of England) as well as its critique of the authority of the Papacy (e.g., Optatus, Against the Donatists , Book 1, Chap 10).

Revisiting the history of the Reformation, I stumbled upon the important distinction between the so-called “Conservative Reformation”(Anglicans and Lutherans) and the “Reformed” Tradition of the Reformation (Calvinists, Anabaptists, etc.). Methodism is largely rooted in the former. I discovered that in the “Conservative Reformation” there was a commitment to adhere first to Scripture and then secondly to Church tradition when it did not clearly contradict Scripture (e.g., use of Creeds, vestments, lectionary, liturgical processions, patristic exegesis, etc); in the Reformed Tradition, only that which Scripture condones would be condoned; otherwise it could be excised. 

Were we to be John Wesley’s apprentices, we would notice that his scriptural interpretation is often informed by the Church Fathers’ teachings and might be inspired to follow his lead. Constantly in his sermons his exegesis is underscored by figures like St. Augustine, St. Macarius the Great, or St. John Chrysostom, to name a few. I was astonished to find that the people called Methodists not only had an Anglican heritage that lays claim to the early Church’s forms of worship, polity and exegesis, but continues to honor this heritage  under the tutelage of a patristically-Protestant radical named John Wesley. 

Being “patristically” Protestant might have once been an oxymoron for many but has now become increasingly popular and, more importantly, charts a path for Church renewal. Just as all those years ago a light shone on those magi, on those shepherds, to “guide their feet into the way of peace,” so too have I found Christ’s light shining in surprising places. I have come to hear Christ’s voice, speaking in and through Scripture, to echo in a thousand places and shimmer on this ocean of light called his Church— each sparkle, each saint in the past, illuminating and adorning the great light from above, Christ the Sun of Righteousness. I smiled, knowing my campus minister was right.

Each flower in His garden gives glory to the Gardener, even as each plot is renewed by cross-pollination from the next. The Body of Christ is not, as Saint Paul reminds us, all the foot or all the hand, but many parts in one Body— unity in diversity, one and many. We can confess with joy, without hesitation, standing on Epworth’s sunkissed earth: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church.” 

Stephen Fitch is pastor of Shiloh and Bethel United Methodist Church in Liberty, NC.