Catholic doctrine today is nothing more than a slight of hand, a shell game in which the Early Fathers preached one thing but altered by the Church over the centuries ever so slightly to conform with their world view. Yet all the while Catholics maintain a pretense that they go back 2,000 years. One simply has to look at the division of the Eastern Church from the Western Church. Now the Church of Rome embraces the semi-Pelagius views of the Eastern Orthodox. Rome has left it's first love. If anything, TRUE Protestant (not what we have today) is the remnant of what the Early Church Fathers taught.
Sounds like Sola Scriptura to me. Would you agree with Jerome's statement?
From New Advent on the doctrine of the atonement:
The great doctrine thus laid down in the beginning was further unfolded and brought out into clearer light by the work of the Fathers and theologians. And it may be noted that in this instance the development is chiefly due to Catholic speculation on the mystery, and not, as in the case of other doctrines, to controversy with heretics.
Wow, such a statement. The Early Church Fathers SPECULATED on the meaning of the atonement. Yet 1800 years later they finally got it right.
And then the Church has the ADDACIDY to say they follow the Early Church Fathers. HA!
Luther and Calvin were radical Augustinians, but most evangelicals today have long departed from such views. Except on a narrow range of views the Reformers departed ways with Augustine, who was after all, a Catholic bishop. As for “semi-pelegianism”, the modern “big box churches seems to have gone past the “holiness”phase to methodism/evangelicalism to full-blown pelagianism.