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The Road Home

For the believer who was taught to trust nothing before 1500, walking back one trusted voice at a time

The letter, read aloud
14 minutes 17 seconds · in the author’s voice

Many believers were taught, without anyone quite saying it, that there is little worth reading between the apostles and Martin Luther. Before 1517 there was Rome, and Rome was the problem, so the centuries in between were best left alone. If one name is allowed through the gate, it is usually Augustine, and everyone else is "Catholic."

This letter is not an argument against anyone who was taught that way. It is a road, and it starts where such a reader already stands: with the Reformers themselves, and with the men they trusted. It walks back one voice at a time, and at every step it lets the voices speak for themselves. It also says, at the start and not at the end, where the road goes further than the Reformers went, so that no one feels led somewhere they did not agree to go.

The prophet put the invitation simply. "Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls" (Jeremiah 6:16). The verse ends on a warning: "But they said, We will not walk therein." Asking for the old paths has never been the easy part.

1. The ground we already share

Start with what is not in dispute. The Reformers did not throw away the early church’s creeds. They kept them. The Lutheran Book of Concord of 1580 opens with the three creeds of the early church, the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed, before a single Lutheran confession is printed. Calvin gave a long part of the first book of his Institutes to defending the Trinity in the terms the early councils had settled.

So a Reformed or Baptist reader who says the Nicene Creed on a Sunday is already reciting the words of the fourth century, written by bishops who had never heard of Luther or Calvin. That is the first stop on the road, and most readers are standing on it already without knowing its age. The creeds, and what they guard, are set out on What the Early Church Confessed.

2. What the Reformers said about the Fathers

The idea that the Reformers despised everything before them does not come from the Reformers. It comes from later readers. The Reformers claimed the early church as their own, and they said so in writing.

John Calvin opened the first edition of his Institutes, in 1536, with a letter to Francis I, King of France. His enemies were telling the king that the Reformers were enemies of the Fathers. Calvin answered them directly, and he meant "the writers of the earlier and purer ages":

He went further: "we do not hold them in such contempt, but that, if it were consistent with my present design, I could easily support by their suffrages most of the sentiments that we now maintain." Then he listed the landmarks the Fathers had set which Rome itself had moved, and in his notes he named the men behind them: Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, Cyprian, Epiphanius and others. He ended the list by saying that if he named every case, "Months and years would be insufficient for me."

Calvin also put the Fathers in their place, and this matters for the rest of the road. In the same paragraph he wrote that "while we make use of their writings, we always remember that ’all things are ours,’ to serve us, not to have dominion over us, and that ’we are Christ’s’ alone." He was quoting Paul: "For all things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s" (1 Corinthians 3:21-23). The Fathers are teachers, not masters. Scripture judges them. That is the Reformers’ own rule, and it is a good one.

Inside the Institutes the Fathers are everywhere. Calvin wrote that he had "always, indeed, been exceedingly pleased with this observation of Chrysostom, that humility is the foundation of our philosophy" (II.2.11), and in the same place he gave Augustine’s famous answer that the first, second and third rule of the Christian religion is humility. He cited "that assertion of Cyprian, so frequently celebrated by Augustine, ’That we ought to glory in nothing, because we have nothing of our own’" (II.2.9). On the Trinity he pointed back to the second century: "whoever will diligently compare the writings of the fathers, will find in Irenæus nothing different from what was advanced by others who succeeded him. Justin Martyr is one of the most ancient; and he agrees with us in every point" (I.13.29).

Martin Luther did not want a party named after him at all. In 1522 he wrote to his own followers, who were already looking down on ordinary Catholic folk for not being good enough "Lutherans":

He was pointing at the same chapter Calvin used: "For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?" (1 Corinthians 3:4-5). A reader who calls himself by a Reformer’s name is doing the one thing that Reformer asked him not to do. That is the whole of The Label and the Man.

The Lutheran confession presented at Augsburg in 1530 did the same. Defending its teaching on grace, it said: "And lest any one should craftily say that a new interpretation of Paul has been devised by us, this entire matter is supported by the testimonies of the Fathers. For Augustine, in many volumes, defends grace and the righteousness of faith, over against the merits of works" (Article XX). On the cup in the Lord’s Supper it called Cyprian and Jerome as witnesses (Article XXII). It even named Ambrose, for a book now known to be the work of Prosper of Aquitaine, a disciple of Augustine; the mistake is worth admitting, and the appeal still stands. The Reformation, in its own documents, stood on the early church and claimed it. The whole Confession is on the site, and it is short enough to read in an evening (The Augsburg Confession, /faith/library/augsburg-confession/).

3. The door that is already open

For many readers the door to the early church is already open, and they walked through it years ago. Their name for it is Augustine.

Augustine died in 430, more than a thousand years before the Reformation. He is a Father of the church in every sense of the word. He was baptised in Milan in 387 by its bishop, Ambrose, whose preaching had brought him to faith. He quoted Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage who was martyred in 258, so often that Calvin called one of Cyprian’s sayings a sentence "so frequently celebrated by Augustine." A reader who trusts Augustine is already trusting a man who trusted the church before him.

The best-known Reformed teachers of our own time have walked the same road back. R. C. Sproul, who is widely respected across the Reformed world, wrote a history of the free-will debate called Willing to Believe (Baker Books, 1997). After its introduction, its first chapter is on Pelagius and its second is on Augustine. Only then does it come to Luther and Calvin. Whatever a reader concludes from that book, its shape makes the point: the question did not begin in 1517, and a careful Reformed teacher did not pretend it did.

So the chain can be walked in steps, and each step is a man the previous one respected: from Sproul to Calvin, from Calvin to Augustine, from Augustine to Ambrose and Cyprian, and from there to Irenaeus and Justin in the second century, and to the apostles they learned from. Respect for a teacher is not agreement with everything he taught. It is only the willingness to keep reading.

4. Where the Reformers stopped

Here is the honest part, set down before the road goes any further. On some questions the earliest church stood somewhere the Reformers did not, and anyone who follows the Reformers back to the Fathers will find it.

Calvin said so himself. "Although the Greeks, beyond all others, and among them particularly Chrysostom, have exceeded all bounds in extolling the ability of the human will, yet such are the variations, fluctuations, or obscurities of all the fathers, except Augustine, on this subject, that scarcely any thing certain can be concluded from their writings" (II.2.4). And on one saying of Chrysostom he was blunt: "The observation, therefore, so frequently repeated by Chrysostom, that ’Whom God draws, he draws willing,’ we are obliged to reject" (II.3.10). Calvin’s own book is the witness that the early Greek Fathers held the will to be free and grace to be received. He knew it, and he parted from them there.

The same is true on baptism and the Lord’s Supper, where the earliest writers speak in ways that neither a modern Baptist nor a modern Presbyterian will find entirely comfortable. And the Reformers could not agree among themselves on the Supper. At Marburg, from 1 to 4 October 1529, Luther and Ulrich Zwingli agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and parted over the fifteenth, the presence of Christ in the Supper. The Reformation divided over the very meal that was meant to make it one.

The Reformers were also men. Luther, who in 1522 would not let his name be made into a party, wrote in 1543 a long and bitter treatise against the Jews, On the Jews and Their Lies, which later centuries used for evil. Saying so does not cancel what he did well. It is the same rule Calvin applied to the Fathers: good men, under Scripture, and never above it.

None of this is a reason to stop walking. It is the reason to walk with open eyes. The road does not lead to a man or a century. Paul’s own test is the one this whole road answers to: "mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned" (Romans 16:17). The doctrine the Romans had learned came from the apostles. The question on every step of the road is the same one: is this what was handed down, or something added later?

5. Stops along the road

The rest of the road is already written, and it can be walked slowly, one page at a time:

There is no hurry. The Bereans were praised because "they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11). They did that with Paul himself. A reader can do it with Calvin, with Augustine, and with anyone on this page.

6. Home is a Person

The road home does not end in a century. It does not end in Geneva or Wittenberg, in Milan or Carthage, or in Rome. The early church was not the goal of the early church. Christ was.

"Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6). The Fathers are worth reading because they stood closer to the apostles who walked with Him, and the Reformers are worth reading because they tried to clear away what had grown up between the church and Him. Both are signs on the road. Neither is the house. What they both point back to is "the faith which was once delivered unto the saints" (Jude 3), and that faith was never a system. It was a Man, crucified and risen, and the people who knew Him.

And the road home has a promise at the end of it, because of who is waiting there. The son in the parable did not have to finish the journey by himself. "And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him" (Luke 15:20). Whoever starts back, from whatever century they were taught to stand in, will find that the Father has already started toward them.