I recently had to write something on the pastoral theology and practices of the Early Church Fathers. Much of what they thought, wrote, did and understood now seems strange, from another world, unenlightened in the view of post enlightenment minds! And yet.
The pastoral heart is evident in many of the Church Fathers. The inevitable tensions between compassion and discipline, the intellectual and spiritual wrestling over the relationship between the life of grace, the struggle with sin, the holiness and mystery of the Triune God, and the nature of prayer, worship and Christian living as the proper response to the love of God in Christ.Their primary goal and foundational value was growth in the love of God, towards the perfect love of God and all inclusive love of neighbour.
The route to this love was a long training, an instilling of spiritual disciplines to train the personality in the fruits of the spirit, to educate the soul in self-critical ethical scrutiny, to co-operate with God in the restoring of the image of God, which though marred remains the defining truth of every human being. To be made in God’s image is to be able to know God choose the good and learn to love – it is to have the capax dei, to train the passions by spiritual discipline in order to love God with that balance of mind, heart strength and will.
Reading some of the Fathers today is an exercise in strangeness, but sometimes that's what a church which is now overfamiliar with God needs; and a church confident of the can do approach to theology can be reminded that living for God isn't about our can do, but about God's enabling grace; and a humbling corrective to theological and pastoral practitioners, that in the end we are all unprofitable servants, and what we seek to practice is a life rooted and grounded in the eternal love of the Triune God, seeking to know and make known the love that is beyond knowledge.
So we ignore the Fathers to our loss. In the history of the cure of souls they had their own spiritual psychology, their unique sense of the sacred, a profound sensitivity about sin but matched by a diamond edged view of grace sufficient to cut and shape character towards Christlikeness.
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