This is a guest post by Jason Kettinger. For the past ten years Jason Kettinger was a member of the Presbyterian Church in America. He received baptism in 2001, and spent his college days as a fruitful member of Reformed University Fellowship, before graduating from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a degree in political science [...]

There are some ancient Christian doctrines that only the Catholic Church has retained. One such doctrine is her teaching on contraception, which was the unanimous teaching of the Church Fathers, and which all Christians shared for nineteen centuries until the Lambeth Conference of 1930. At that conference the Anglican Church decided to permit the use [...]

I. The Reformed Position: The claim in the Westminster Confession of Faith that all controversies of religion ultimately are to be determined by the Holy Spirit speaking in Sacred Scripture contradicts the testimony of the Church Fathers, who repeatedly teach the necessity of judging such controversies by way of the Church and Sacred Scripture. The [...]

June 4 is the feast of St. Optatus, a fourth-century bishop of Milevis, in Numidia, about ten miles from the Mediterranean Sea on the coast of northern Africa in what is now Algeria. He was a convert to the Catholic faith, and an African by birth, according to St. Jerome. He died around AD 385, [...]

Yesterday (May 24) was the feast day of St. Vincent of Lérins, a soldier who became a monk at the monastery in Lérins, and wrote his famous Commonitory in AD 434, three years after the third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus, and seventeen years before the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon. Because Protestants generally accept both those [...]

Readers of this website are by now thoroughly familiar with Keith Mathison’s book The Shape of Sola Scriptura. His thesis has already received ample criticism (see articles by Cross & Judisch, Liccione, and Judisch), and I do not wish to add to that particular discussion. In this post, I would like instead to grant Mathison [...]

This article is intended to be a resource showing the support for the doctrine of Transubstantiation in the Church fathers, and not a robust defense of the doctrine as defined by the Council of Trent.1 The Church fathers did not believe in a mere spiritual presence of Christ alongside or in the elements (bread and [...]

Today, November 23, is the memorial of St. Clement I, pope and martyr. St. Clement was the third bishop of Rome, after St. Peter. He is known to us mostly through his famous letter to the Church at Corinth. Here I present a brief summary of what we know from later Fathers about St. Clement, [...]

Today is the memorial of St. Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch who was martyred in Rome in AD 107. What does St. Ignatius reveal to us about the Church? According to the early fourth century Church historian Eusebius, St. Ignatius was the second bishop of Antioch (from approximately AD 70 to 107) after Evodius, about [...]

It is with pleasure that I announce to you a new website – www.churchfathers.org. Designed to be a user-friendly resource of quotes from the Church Fathers organized in topical fashion, this website can be used to phrase questions about what we believe, and what we don’t believe, by looking at our faith through ancient eyes.