Who were the church Fathers?

As modern day Christians we tend to see ourselves as individual Christians bound by the 21st century and within our specific denomination. We tend to believe that, that's all Christianity is and has always been. This is more a evangelical protestant mindset than a catholic or orthodox one. However Christianity is more than 2000 years old, we live in a tiny spec of Christian history and we tend to forget the existence of billions of Christians who came before us. The most notable of which are the Church fathers.

The apostle John wrote five of our New testament books and is known as Jesus' most beloved disciple.

He passes away around the year 99 AD, 66 years after our Lord Jesus was crucified. Similarly to how the apostle Paul had a man he discipled called Timothy (to whom 2 of our new testament books are written to 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy ) the apostle John had his own two disciples of a similar nature, Ignatius and Polycarp. 1 Timothy 2:1-2 You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, 2 and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also. We see that Timothy was taught under the apostle Paul and was told to pass on what he learnt to others. Now imagine a certain topic from Paul's books that Christians disagree about, which from my previous blog entry we know are numerous, If we had a letter from Timothy that stated what the correct interpretation of Paul was, wouldn't that be as authoritative as Paul clarifying it himself? If your answer is yes than you understand the importance of the Church fathers

If we have surviving copies of the books of the apostles in our bibles today, why wouldn't we also have the copies of the books of the disciples of the apostles? Well we do have their books particularly, that of Ignatius and Polycarp, John's disciples as well as Clement of Rome who died around the same time as the apostle John and is mentioned in Philippians  4:3 by Paul and likely learnt under the feet of the apostle Peter and many more fathers who i cannot get into in this article. Needless to say the writings of these men are very important to interpreting our Bibles today.

So how do we use the church fathers in ecumenical dialogue? There are generally three categories of Church fathers; The Apostolic fathers who lived from 33 AD to 200 AD these are men who knew the apostles and learnt from them or knew people that did, The Patristic fathers who lived from 200 AD to 604 AD and the Medieval fathers from 604 AD to the 1500s during the dawn of the Protestant reformation. As you can imagine that as we get further away from the time Jesus died the historically reliability of the Fathers decrease however the Patristic and Medieval fathers are still important as they show how the church throughout her history interpretated certain biblical passages. Such that if you interpret a biblical passage in a way that no church father has thought of for 1500 years , it is most likely a heresy and probably not what the apostles meant. I will reference the fathers in my future blog as supporting evidence for or against a certain position but not as the authorities on their own as our ultimate authority is still God's word alone. Thanks for your time.