The Fathers

What profit?  Here's a few ideas:

1. The doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation are basically hammered out in the early church.  By tracing the controversies, we can learn how and why the creedal formulations of these doctrines is important.

2. The pre-Constantinian context of much patristic theology offers a paradigm of how Christians can operate as a minority ina hostile or indifferent society.  I am often struck by the difference between the early church apoligists approach to the Roman Empire (`don't persecute us because Christians actually make the best citizens') with the modern approach of `don't mess with us, we're Christians' where Christianity can sometimes look like little more than a cultural idiom for protesting Communism, secularism etc.

3. The very alien nature of the world in which the Fathers operated challenges us to think more critically about oruselves in our own context.  We may not, for example, sympathise much with radically ascetic monasticism; but when we understand it as a fourth century answer to the age old question of what a committed Christian looks like at a time when it is starting to be easy and respectable, we can at least use it as an anvil on which to hammer out our own contemporary response to such a question.

4. As Protestants, we cannot claim to understand the historical development of our own tradition unless we come to terms with patristic theology: Luther, Calvin, Owen and company were deeply read and heavily influenced by patristic writings.

If I had my time over again, I would have studied patristics rather than Reformation; the evangelical Protestant world has a dearth of good patristic scholars.  Michael Haykin and Don Fairbairn are notable exceptions; but we have not done well in this field as a whole; and we have neglected it to our own impoverishment.