This comment was left on our Church Youtube Page featuring the debate over the gospel on May 22, 2025 at the Rialto Theater in Morrilton, AR. I want to give a refutation, but it was too long to just post on YouTube! Here is the comment, and then the refutation:
“The early church fathers provide the certainty that the Catholic church has understood things in the same way that the people nearest to Jesus believed. Much similar to a game of telephone, the people closest probably have the best understanding of the teachings (and therefore the inspired word) of Jesus.”
This is wildly inaccurate. For example, the church father Irenaeus, discipled by Polycarp, discipled by John, taught Jesus was close to 50 when he was crucified. Irenaeus was much closer to Jesus’s time period than I was. But guess what? He’s absolutely wrong about Jesus’s age at the crucifixion.
It’s foolish to think whatever the church fathers taught is correct. Furthermore, even in the New Testament you have churches like Corinth or Galatia with direct access to the apostles, going astray. We have plain evidence in the Bible that just because someone was “close” to an Apostle, doesn’t not necessarily mean that what they taught or believed was true. This is why God gave us an objective infallible standard in the Scriptures.
On other note about church fathers is that sometimes that did get things right! Clement of Rome, as one example, said: “We…are not justified through ourselves or through our own wisdom or understanding or piety, or works that we have done in holiness of heart, but through faith, by which the almighty God has justified all who have existed form the beginning; to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.”
Rome cherry picks quotes and interprets them like she does the bible which is through the magisterium’s warped view. And even when she is consistently shown to be wrong she goes back and makes the appeal to the magisterium so that her reasoning is ultimately circular and amounts “to trust us because we said so.” It reminds me of the COVID days where we were told to just “trust the experts.”
Rome claims an unbroken doctrinal stream from the apostles to the present, but the historical record shows something quite different. And this is easily researchable in these days. You don’t have to take Rome’s false word for it any longer!
So, rather than a continuous stream, we see scattered, disconnected ponds—doctrines that emerge centuries after the Apostles, only later gathered and labeled as ancient. Rome dips its cup in these ponds when convenient to prop up its falsehoods, interpreting the statements of churchmen through a lens that supports its system.
Frankly, the Roman Church as we know it today, with its centralized papal authority and intricate system of dogmas, was not present at Nicaea in 325, nor did it exercise the supremacy it now asserts. Transubstantiation wasn’t defined until 1215, and it did so using categories from the pagan philosopher Aristotle. The canon of Scripture wasn’t dogmatically fixed for Rome until the Council of Trent in 1546. Even later came the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and the Assumption of Mary (1950)—doctrines unknown to the early church. This historical reality stands in stark contrast to the biblical gospel, the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3), grounded not in evolving tradition but in the finished work of Christ. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone.
-Allen S. Nelson IV