“the constant tradition that is linear”
But of course it is not, if you are any kind of serious student of Church history. If you just want to buy an easy to understand rubric, without looking under the hood, sure.
I am a serious student of church history.
Question 1) Did the Church Fathers ecclesiology reflect the Catholic and ORthodox hierarchical Model or the modern American Protestant fill in your blank independent Pentecostal, Baptist, or whatever model
Question 2) Did the Church Fathers have a view of Sacraments like the Catholic Church and Orthodox Model or the the modern American Protestant fill in your blank....?
Question 3) Did the Church Fathers view justification similar to the Catholic Church and Orthodox model or this Penal substitution imputed grace that only covers man rather than transforms him?
In summary, I could go on and on, but the to the degree that Modern Protestantism is consistent with the Church Fathers, it is on those points not different than the Catholic Church and Orthodox Church. Those that have a higher view of Sacraments, Traditional Anglicans, Lutherans and Some Reformed are because they retained on that point more of the truth, those that have no sacraments at all are implicitly Gnostic
It is you and your cohort that reject history, and create a religion fashioned by your own ideology or an ideology far removed from the early Church.
You can’t refute anything in my previous post regarding the High Sacramental theology of the Church Fathers regarding, in the major point of my post, the Sacrament of Confession. Even the translations by Schaff over at CCL when you read the footnotes admits, begrudging, the Catholic theology in the Fathers. Lightfoot, the great Anglican Patristic Scholar and all the other Protestant Patristic scholars that were his peers, Harnack, Zahn, and Funk, along with Scaff etc, when they did the translations into English were so astonished by the Catholicity of the early Fathers they hedged at publishing them or said, they can’t be accurate because they are too Catholic. Of course, they were honest enough scholars to understand the style of Greek that those writings were written and all of the Protestant Patristic Scholars of the 19th century [and they were very good translators, for the record] all now agree that those early writings of St. Ignatius, St. Clement of Rome, the Didache are authentic.
And again, the reason those letters were all questioned by the Protestants was because of the Clear Catholic Theology in them relating to a hierarchical Church, Single Bishop, Sacramental Theology, particularly the Eucharist, etc.
In closing, given my Sicilian Italian ancestry, I will now sing a song for you, OOOOOOOO SOLA MEOOOOOOOOOOOOO, OOOOOOO, SOLA MEOOOOOOOOOOOOO [Note, I am Singing, not yelling, for the record]