Oh, and as Columbo Would Say . . .

. . . "just one more thing."

Another thing I've been up to is setting up a blog on the Church Fathers in conjunction with my forthcoming book The Fathers Know Best.

CHECK IT OUT!

I've got a lot of cool stuff planned for it. In fact, just yesterday we taped a series of web videos with little-known facts and surprising stories about the Church Fathers. I'll let y'all know when they're out. Hope you enjoy them! (And the rest of the fascinating material I'm going to get into. :-D)

Here's a sneak peek of a near-final cover design for the book . . .

Frs 

Click to embiggen.
 

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

18 thoughts on “Oh, and as Columbo Would Say . . .”

  5. For those who are interested in reading the writings of some of the Church Fathers in their entirety, the Christian Classic Ethereal Library (CCEL) has an extensive (although slightly archaic in translation) selection. They also have an extensive selection of writings from or commentary about the early Church (although with a Protestant flavor).
    These books can be downloaded in a variety of formats suitable for ebook readers.
    The Chicken

  7. I have to say, I thought you were being colloquial when you said “embiggen”, and I see that my Firefox spellchecker doesn’t even have it in its dictionary. But I see it is a word, opposite of ensmallen.
    And the book looks interesting as well.

  8. “Embiggen” seems to me to be a perfectly cromulent word.
    I’m looking forward to seeing the book, Jimmy.

  10. I’m waiting for the updated version of Mass Confusion to make some purchases, among them would be the booklet Jimmy wrote on the Jack Chick tracts.

  11. EXCELLENT cover.
    I do have a few questions, though, that I am hoping you can answer, Mr. Akin, or perhaps one of your commenters. How effective is it really to rely on the early Church fathers for support of Catholic teachings? Many of them disagreed with each other; many of them explicitly identify themselves with strands of thought that we consider heretical today; many of them actually argue AGAINST some of our Catholic teachings. At least, this is what I am hearing from our Protestant brothers and sisters. Provided that they are right, couldn’t appealing to the Church fathers for support of Catholicism actually backfire?

  12. Brian, I don’t know the extent of disagreements among the Church Fathers, but I think it would show even more the need for the teaching authority of the Pope and Magisterium. If even the early Church Fathers couldn’t agree on some issues, then what does that say for the Protestant belief in the sufficiency of scripture alone? As I recall, there were disagreements as to what books even belonged to the canon of scripture — which Martin Luther also disagreed with and then went ahead and changed.

  14. At least, this is what I am hearing from our Protestant brothers and sisters. Provided that they are right, couldn’t appealing to the Church fathers for support of Catholicism actually backfire?
    No. It is only when there is universal (or near universal) agreement among the Church Fathers that said agreement is then taken to be a reflection of the agreement within the Church on that topic. Thus, the disagreements do not help or hinder the definitions within the deposit of faith.
    The Chicken

  15. The Fathers also demonstrate that many Catholic distinctive beliefs and practices were in existence long before they were supposedly imported from paganism by Constantine or invented by some pope to gain power, etc.

  16. Yes, you won’t find perfect agreement on every issue, but you will find pretty near universal agreement on some issues in particular. The Eucharist, for example, is a topic about which you will have to look hard to find too many disagreements with Catholic teaching on.
    Then there are things which are not talked about in and of themselves by the fathers, but which are so universally accepted that they permeate their writings. For example, the existence of bishops is something which the fathers don’t… “explicitly” talk about (in other words, you don’t find people back then saying “There are bishops” or whatnot), but which one gathers from their writings was as much a part of their lives as oxygen. A Protestant has to answer the question of why they don’t have bishops when it was so clearly a core component of the early Church.
    Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the fathers had orthodox periods and heretical periods – that is, periods where the Church in their lifetime considered them heretical. Tertullian is a good example, as well as Origen. They both started orthodox, and their early writings are good. You will find heretical stuff in their later writings, and sometimes folks will try to point to that as evidence that the fathers believed differently from the modern Church, but the fact is that even in their own day, they were considered heretics in their later periods.
    God bless,
    Shane

  17. Thank you for the responses guys. Very helpful.
    One more question: is this book even necessary? I thought there was a multi-volume set called “The Faith of Our Fathers” which is about the same thing.

  18. I call Catholic Answers and put my name down for a copy of the book. Greatly looking forward to it! I know it will be a prime resource in my own apologetics work. Thank you for your hard work in this area.

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