Papists had long warned that exposure to the patristics would inevitably lead him to Rome, but the theologian reportedly finished Augustine, Athanasius, and the Desert Fathers and merely became more difficult at dinner parties.
BOSTON — In a development that has reportedly confused both Roman Catholics and people who thought the early church was supposed to function as a kind of automatic on-ramp to the Vatican, a renegade Protestant announced this week that he had spent years reading the church fathers, the desert fathers, and a wide range of ancient Christian writers, yet remained stubbornly, and in some cases aggressively, Protestant.
The theologian, whose reading habits have been described as “deeply suspicious” by former friends and “the exact sort of thing that should have corrected him by now” by several papists, reportedly began with Augustine, moved on to Athanasius, then spent a season among the desert fathers before concluding that the ancients were not, in fact, a hidden supply chain for converting anyone with a library card into a Roman Catholic.
“I was told that once I really encountered the fathers, I’d have no choice but to submit to Rome,” the theologian said while adjusting his glasses and preparing another footnote. “Instead, I discovered that they were even more interesting than that, which is to say they were still not American evangelicals, and also not bishops from the Council of Trent.”
Sources say the man has become increasingly difficult to classify, having developed the alarming habit of quoting early Christian writers in support of Protestant positions without first apologizing for it. This has led to confusion among Roman Catholics, who expected the fathers to function like a theological trapdoor: read one paragraph from Athanasius and, in the words of one online apologist, “the next stop is confession.”
Instead, the theologian reportedly read broadly, noticed that the ancient church was not a neatly packaged mirror of modern Roman claims, and emerged from the process with his Protestant convictions not only intact but sharpened. “He was supposed to become receptive to Rome,” said one frustrated critic. “Instead he became the kind of Protestant who knows more Greek than is healthy and now won’t stop talking about continuity.”
Reformed observers, while not surprised, noted that the whole episode exposed a recurring Catholic assumption: that reading old Christian books is basically a controlled demolition of Protestantism. In practice, they said, it often produces the opposite effect — namely, a Protestant with a stronger ecclesiology, a deeper respect for the early church, and a renewed sense that “the fathers” is not the same thing as “the papacy.”
At press time, the theologian was reportedly preparing a lecture on the desert fathers, which critics feared would only make him more Protestant, while papists continued to insist that if he had only read one more saint, everything would have finally clicked.
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