“When you read the Church Fathers, you find something that is, to many people including myself, rather surprising. You very often see distinctively Catholic idea *right from the beginning*.”
Incorrect. What you find is that people who read church fathers thru a modern lens can see pretty much whatever they want. There are passages showing they believed in a spiritual approach to Eucharist, and passages from the same authors showing a more literal approach.
Augustine wrote 4 books on how to develop your own personal interpretation of scripture. He argued that difficult passages of scripture should be interpreted by other passages of scripture - not by resorting to the ‘church’ interpretation. Did that make him a Protestant?
No, but both Protestants and Catholics can read modern phrases into writing that had nothing to do with it.
When they wrote of the Catholic Church, they did NOT mean the Roman Catholic Church, with the Pope over all. When someone under Rome’s jurisdiction talked of the Bishop of Rome being supreme, it didn’t mean supreme over other jurisdictions.
It is also obvious that many church fathers had some pretty screwed up doctrine. You don’t have traditions passed down from the Apostles. You have traditions that developed over hundreds of years as various men tried to explain their beliefs.
My reply is to put those traditions to the test of scripture, which seems fair enough if they are to be given equal regard. What is the canon? Which writings are traditions, and which are not? For scripture, the tests were acceptance by all the believers, and intimate association if not directly coming from the hand of an Apostle.
So when people go from praying for the dead - which I’ve done, since the God who knows the future before it happens knew I was going to pray that prayer before the person died - to a belief in Purgatory, with temporal punishment for sins which were forgiven but still need punishment...sorry, that is a leap from faith into denial of the power of God.
All believers didn’t accept Purgatory - see the Orthodox Church, or various others outside Rome’s influence. No Apostle taught it. All scripture denies its basic premise - that God punishes in the afterlife those whom he has forgiven.
Real presence? I see no indication it was widely taught or even thought about by church fathers. And why believe a church father writing in 350 AD over the words of Christ, or the Apostles?
Those who believe tradition is equal to scripture ought to show tradition meets as rigorous a test as scripture. Where is the Apostolic authority for traditions developed hundreds of years later?
You mean like the words of John 6 and 1st Corinthians 11?
The reality is that NOBODY even questioned the Real Presence until Calvin came along.
No, no, and no. People like to see this issue confused because it suits their ideological position. But let me set this straight right here and right now vis a vis the Eucharist, because I don't have time to go through all your disputed doctrines.
There are passages that take a literal approach to the Eucharist, yes. There are passage that take a spiritual approach, yes. HOWEVER. There are NO passages, NOT ONE in all the Fathers, that *repudiate* the literal sense in favor of the spiritual.
The REPUDIATION is the problem. You find me a quotation from a Church Father that reflects the strong language of the Black Rubric of the Book of Common Prayer, where it flat out says that the worship of the host is idolatry, then we can talk. No Father says that.
But I've made a pretty thorough study of this issue, and I can tell you flat out that even the Fathers who said things like "The Eucharist is a symbol" nevertheless made clear that they believed it wasn't ONLY a symbol. So it's not just a matter of reading into it anything you want.
And I notice you did something a little cute there. You said "Why listen to someone from 350 AD"...deliberately skewing the date to one after Constantine. I cited absolutely no one that late. I cited ONLY people from about 90 to 200. Two of them, Ignatius and Clement, very likely sat at the feet of the Apostles themselves (John and Peter respectively).