THE FATHERS KNOW BEST Your Essential Guide to the Teachings of the Early Church Jimmy Akin SAN DIEGO 2010 NIHIL OBSTAT: I have concluded that the materials presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors. Bernadeane M. Carr, STL 5 October, 2010 IMPRIMATUR: In accord with 1983 CIC §3, permission to publish this work is hereby granted. + Robert H. Brom, Bishop of San Diego 5 October, 2010 With the exception of quotes from the Church Fathers, all Scripture selections are taken from the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1965, 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. If any copyrighted materials have been inadvertently used in this work without proper credit being given in one manner or another, please notify the publisher in writing so that future printings of this work may be corrected accordingly. © 2010 Catholic Answers, Inc. All rights reserved. Except for quotations, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, uploading to the Internet, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Catholic Answers, Inc. Published by Catholic Answers, Inc. 2020 Gillespie Way El Cajon, California 92020 (888) 291-8000 (orders) (619) 387-0042 (fax) www.catholic.com (web) Cover design by Devin Schadt Typesetting by Loyola Book Composition Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-93-391954-6 Contents Foreword by Marcus Grodi PART ONE I. Introduction 1. About This Book 2. About the Fathers II. The World of the Fathers 3. The World at a Glance 4. “My Witnesses in Jerusalem” 5. The Second Holy Land 6. Greece and Rome 7. The Far West 8. North Africa III. Ad Fontes!—“To the Sources!” 9. Know Your Fathers 10. Know Your Councils 11. Know Your Writings 12. Know Your Heresies PART TWO IV. God 13. The One True God 14. God Has No Body 15. The Trinity 16. The Three Persons of the Trinity 17. The Divinity of Christ 18. The Eternal Sonship of Christ 19. Filioque V. Creation 20. Creation out of Nothing 21. Creation in Genesis VI. The Sources of Faith 22. The Canon of Scripture 23. Apostolic Tradition VII. The Church and the Pope 24. The Catholic Church 25. Apostolic Succession 26. Peter the Rock 27. Peter’s Primacy 28. Peter in Rome 29. Peter’s Successors 30. The Authority of the Pope VIII. Morality 31. Mortal Sin 32. Abortion 33. Contraception and Sterilization 34. Homosexuality 35. Astrology IX. Sacraments and Worship 36. Baptism as a Means of Grace 37. Baptismal Regeneration 38. The Necessity of Baptism 39. Trinitarian Baptism 40. Infant Baptism 41. Confirmation 42. The Real Presence 43. The Sacrifice of the Mass 44. Confession 45. Bishop, Priest, and Deacon 46. Women Priests? 47. The Permanence of Marriage 48. Sabbath or Sunday? X. Mary, the Saints, the Miraculous 49. Mary, Full of Grace 50. Mary, Mother of God 51. Mary, Ever Virgin 52. Intercession of the Saints 53. Ongoing Miracles 54. Private Revelation XI. The Last Things 55. Salvation Outside the Church 56. Reward and Merit 57. Purgatory 58. Hell 59. Reincarnation? 60. The Resurrection of the Body 61. The Antichrist Translations Used Documents Used Scripture Index Notes Foreword For the first forty years of my life, it never crossed my mind that I needed anything else but the Bible to know what I needed to believe to be a faithful Christian. When I was in seminary and preparing to become a Protestant pastor I studied the history of Christianity, but with a certain slant that skirted any acknowledgment of the historical importance of the Catholic Church. For me, as well as most of my fellow seminarians, the important history essentially ended with the closure of the New Testament and picked up again with the sixteenth century Protestant reformation. I certainly knew of some significant Christian figures and events from those “lost” fifteen hundred years, but for me and the congregations I pastored, all that was important was the Bible—which had been “saved” from the clutches of the “Whore of Babylon” through the courage of the Reformers. The few references I had read from the writings of the early Christian writers (I don’t remember referring to them as early Church “Fathers”) were selectively chosen to demonstrate that the early Church was more like Protestantism than Catholicism. Then, by God’s grace, my eyes were opened to the problems of Protestantism. Without question, it was my discovery of the witness of the early Church Fathers that most opened my heart and mind toward the Catholic faith. Fortunately, God provided helpers to assist me in finding and working my way through the few available collections of the Fathers, most of which were out of print and some badly skewed by anti-Catholic translators. Through their witness, the Catholicism of the early Church became so obvious that my family and I knew that if we were to follow the truth then we had no option but to become Catholic. After his Resurrection, Jesus gave his Apostles what has traditionally been called the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:19–20). What they taught was the Gospel. This Gospel, however, included far more than the minimalist outline of Christ’s saving sacrifice on the Cross preached by so many modern Christian evangelists. It also included far more than what can be gleaned from the New Testament Gospels and Epistles, which themselves allude to this wider apostolic teaching. In Second Thessalonians 2:15, Saint Paul exhorted his Christian brethren to “stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.” To the Corinthian Christians, he wrote, “maintain