Can You Read the Church Fathers & Stay Protestant? Worldview Is Changing How You Read Christianity

“The Fathers are our history too” sounds nice, but can you read St. Ignatius and stay Protestant? We dig into authority, bishops, Eucharist, and why lived liturgy shapes interpretation.

We live in a post-Enlightenment world, so we instinctively read everything through modern assumptions about proof, progress, and “what’s real.” That’s why so many Orthodox Christians, converts and cradle alike, feel a jolt when they open the Church Fathers or hear the services: the Church didn’t go through the Enlightenment, but we did. Jeremy Jeremiah, James St. Simon, and Mario Andrew sit down with patristics scholar, author, and Orthodox priest, Fr. Joseph Lucas, to name that tension clearly and offer a practical way forward: learn to become worldview bilingual so the patristic worldview can speak in its own voice.

Fr. Joseph Lucas is author of the wonderful book How To Read The Holy Fathers: A Guide For Orthodox Christians, and the wisdom of this book rings true throughout the conversation today.
We talk about why Orthodox Christianity is a worldview and why modern people often struggle with the Church Fathers because we have been shaped by the Enlightenment. We explore how liturgy, ascetic life, and the Church’s sense of continuity help us read saints’ stories and patristic texts for truth without forcing them into modern categories.

• worldview as the hidden framework that drives conclusions
• “worldview bilingual” as a way to name modern baggage
• why mysticism, miracles, and the Eucharist resist modern reduction
• how the Lives of the Saints work as a distinct genre
• why fact checking hagiography can miss the point
• Protestant interest in the Fathers and why mindset matters
• the Orthodox rejection of doctrinal evolution
• the Holy Spirit, patristic consensus, and stability across centuries
• how lived liturgy, fasting, and prayer shape real understanding

We dig into why Orthodox Christianity is more than a set of ideas to agree with. It’s a way of life that shapes how we know, how we worship, and how we interpret texts. That lens changes everything from how we approach the Eucharist and miracles to how we read the Lives of the Saints. If you’ve ever caught yourself demanding the “CNN version” of a saint’s story, we unpack why that reflex can miss the kind of truth hagiography is trying to deliver, and why trimming ancient texts to fit modern realism can quietly deform the faith.

We also wrestle with the growing Protestant interest in the Fathers, including the claim that they are “our history too.” The conversation gets specific about why different traditions read St Ignatius of Antioch so differently, what Orthodoxy means by stability rather than doctrinal evolution, and how the Church discerns a real consensus across centuries. Along the way we return to a simple test: the closer we are to the Church’s liturgy, fasting, prayer, and sacramental life, the more the Fathers stop feeling like museum pieces and start sounding like family.

Subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a friend who’s wrestling with the Fathers, and leave a review so others can find Cloud of Witnesses. What’s the hardest thing for you to read with a modern mindset: miracles, the Eucharist, or the saints’ lives?

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Transcript

Modern Minds In Ancient Church

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Although the church, the Orthodox Church did not go through the Enlightenment, we did. Like we as individuals, we as whether whether you you are from Eastern Europe or the Balkans or the Near East, um, or an Orthodox in the United States, and even if you're cradle, you have grown up in an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment world.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

Gavin Ortland uh is a well-known online Protestant uh apologist, you might say, who basically is encouraging his Protestant audience to embrace the fathers uh because he calls it their history too.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

One of the things that's behind the book is the idea that that the same Holy Spirit, I think I mentioned this early on in the book somewhere, the same Holy Spirit that inspired the prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament, the apostles of the New Testament, is the same spirit that indwelt and inspired the saints of the church of all times, all the fathers.

Welcome And How To Support

SPEAKER_02 0:58

Hi, welcome to Cloud of Witnesses. Jeremy Jeremiah here. We're really excited about this episode. This episode is created with you in mind. Please, if you're enjoying this content, give this video a like, hit that subscribe button, and most importantly, if you can, ring that bell. It does help others find this content as well. Cloud of Witnesses is all about making Christian content that is hopefully edifying to you and is building up the kingdom of God. Please stick around to the end if you can. Thank you so much for being here. Enjoy.

Why Worldview Shapes Everything

SPEAKER_02 1:29

Father, you you open the book um discussing something I feel is very important, and that is worldview. Um a book that uh I'm currently working my way through right now. I'm not sure if you've seen this or not. Uh Justin Marlar's uh Unseen Warfare, the art of unseen warfare. And he interestingly opens up his book similarly discussing the importance of worldview. Um and he says in his book, he says that a worldview a worldview is something that every human being has, whether consciously or unconsciously. It is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual. It is the one defining intellectual activity that underpins each person's life and informs what he or she will think about everything. And Father, you talk about worldview in your book as well and having the worldview of the fathers. Could you talk to us about that?

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Yeah, and I and I I first of all would like to concur with that statement from uh from uh Justin's book there. Um I feel like that has been that has been one of the uh things that I've been saying frequently for a long time, for at least 20 years, is that that Orthodox Christianity um is a specific worldview. In fact, I even refer to my catechism classes as worldview building. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's and uh and and with this, with the university students I have, I even tell them I'll do some exercises to show them that, first of all, that they have a worldview, because they don't really think they do, but they always do. I try to elicit out of them through some questions what their worldview is, and then I and then I show them how their worldview leads to certain conclusions, whether they want them to, what wanted to or not, right? And sometimes they're shocked to realize that some of the ideas they have lead to some horrendous conclusions if you follow them through to their end. So I think it's that's a huge starting point, is like it's that yes, we have a worldview. Um uh but one of the things that Father Bear said to me years ago um was very interesting, uh, that that I that really stuck with me was he said, he said, uh a lot of modern Orthodox people have a lot of problem reading the Fathers or going to the services and hearing the liturgical texts, because although the church, the Orthodox Church did not go through the Enlightenment, right? It

Enlightenment Baggage And Mysticism

SPEAKER_01 4:00

it remained, you could say, stable in this pre-Enlightenment ancient like uh or medieval style of uh of worldview. We did, like we as individuals, we as whether whether you you are from Eastern Europe or the Balkans or the Near East or an Orthodox in the United States, and even if you're cradle, you have grown up in an in a uh basically enlightened and post-enlightenment world, right? You have been inundated with scientific ideas, you've been inundated with scientism, you've been inundated with evolutionary concepts about the world. Um and and you you have to acknowledge that, you have to understand that, and then be able to become in some way a bit worldview bilingual, right? You have to be able to kind of recognize what baggage we have from this modernist worldview, and then be able to start sort of imbibing the patristic worldview to get orthodoxy at all, right? If you really want to understand it, or else you're just gonna try to conform it into some pattern that you already have, which is gonna be an incorrect pattern.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

That's such a good point. Um, that's one of those things that um I think some converts and even Protestants that we talk to struggle with um so much, is there's a certain level of mysticism that is still existent in the East that doesn't necessarily align up with um with Western thought, right? Or post-Enlightenment, such as how does the Eucharist turn into the body and blood of Christ? I need a formula, I need to check the chemical composition uh after the Holy Spirit has transformed it. And uh, it's hard to wrap their minds around it. Even the the concept of miracles or or holiness being an ontological reality. I think of the chapter that you wrote, uh, towards the end of the book, I'm kind of jumping to the end here, on the lives of the saints, um, and how you write about how they're

How To Read Saints’ Lives

SPEAKER_00 6:05

not necessarily meant to be understood as modern biographies, um, but understood almost eschatologically. Can you can you talk about that? I thought that was a very uh uh interesting concept.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yeah, yeah. One of the things, so yeah, we always want, because of our big modern worldview uh stuck in our in our heads, uh, we we have a tendency to want the CNN version, like the like the newscaster or Fox News, if you prefer, right? We want the newscaster on the spot, you know, um uh, you know, with the camera, this is how it looked if I film this, you know. We want to we want to move behind the the description and try to figure out what was actually real in this. That's a that's a very kind of modern worldview. Um and uh when it comes to when it comes to uh there are obviously different genres of writing. That's why I have that as a separate genre. Um The Lives of the Saints, now a good majority of them, the ones written definitely up through the fall of Byzantium and so forth, are going to be written in this medieval style or late antique style uh of literature. And the way the what we're trying to derive from this text is truth, right? And truth is is explained and described in different ways in the ancient world than it is today. Today, what is true is the supposed uh you know, uh news reporter uh outline of things in the proper chronological order, and what would you have recorded in a camera and this and that. Um, so it it it definitely throws us off to try to when you, for example, there's the one I forget which saint it is, but there's the story of the one saint who uh uh like a horse was two horses were decapitated or something. So he took the heads of the horses and put them back on the horse and and and God healed them, but he put the wrong heads on the horses or something like that. So they're two different color horse heads and the two two different horses or something. And we read that, go, oh, what is that? You know, but you know, approaching a story like that, what is this what is the intent of the story? Is it to tell us something about the biology of horses and whether this is surgically possible or this like that? Those are those are silly questions to ask of the text of trying to get behind the actual intent of the story to how scientifically accurate is that particular story. Um, a child who just hears it at face value and goes, oh, there's two different horses with two different heads. And this is something, you know, pointing to something of God's, you know, that you can you can derive a lot of different true things from that. The fact that God can work in all these circumstances, anything is possible with God, the fact that even though the saint made a little minor mistake of putting the wrong heads on the wrong horses, that God still responded to that because he responds to the good intention of the saint or whatever, you know, you can draw lots of conclusions from that. And none of them should be how scientifically or biologically accurate is this story, right? Or should we take this story and try to trim it to fit in with a modern mindset? Like that would be that would be a disaster if we started doing that.

SPEAKER_02 9:17

Father, the this conversation, it I think it reminds

Can Protestants Read The Fathers

SPEAKER_02 9:20

us immediately of of why your book is so important. Because not all of the fathers, the saints, you know, the the history of the of the Christian church is to be read in the same way. And and that's something that comes through loud and clear with your book. I want to draw your attention to, you might know the individual, um, uh Gavin Ortland uh is a well-known online Protestant uh apologist, you might say, um, who talks often um about kind of the nature of Protestantism in regards to church history. And he recently put out a video where he basically is encouraging his Protestant audience to embrace the fathers because he calls it their history too. And what I find so fascinating in conjunction with reading your book is Gavin Ortland and his Protestant followers, it seems to me they're not gonna get the same thing out of reading, for example, Saint Ignatius of Antioch as we read. And I'll be frank with you, sometimes I wonder how they read it at all because it's to me, it's so I I don't want to be too uh argumentative, but it's so uh shall I say, challenging, I would think, for a Protestant reader, you know, when he talks about do all things, you know, uh according to the bishop, and where the bishop is, there is there is uh the church and these types of things. Can you speak to the what's going on here, Father, in terms of how we approach the fathers and that how mindset matters, and of course, certainly denomination.

SPEAKER_01 11:09

So

No Doctrinal Evolution In Orthodoxy

SPEAKER_01 11:10

one thing that would be one thing that is unique to the Orthodox way in general, um, I would say, is that is we don't believe in doctrinal evolution. That is a this is a this is a uh a concept that is taken for granted, even when they don't uh admit it, it's taken for granted in um, well, even in Roman Catholicism to a certain extent, but also certainly within Protestantism. Um when you when you approach when you approach the the tradition of the church as something that you can pick and choose from, that you could that that that either one either it somehow develops over time and more things are figured out and we get smarter. That's what that's one way of looking at evolution, or that we ourselves, in whatever age, can be the arbiters of what's true. We can kind of decide, we can be the ones who make those decisions. You're both of those are some sense uh an idea that that doctrine is not something that um is is stable within the church, or that church life is not something that's stable. And therefore, uh they can they can possibly read St. Ignatius of Antioch, for example, and say, well, there's some there's some good things we can take from this, but we can kind of choose the things that over time we know better, we've learned more, they developed in their own way in our tradition, or they can say, uh, we know now we've decided that we have a better way of doing this or that. Or they can say, well, it disagrees with this other thing that happened later. We prefer that thing over this. There's a lot of subjectivity there. So the starting point for the uh the one of the things that's behind the book is the idea that that the same Holy Spirit, I think I mentioned this early on in the book somewhere, the same Holy Spirit that inspired the prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament, the apostles of the New Testament, is the same spirit that indwelt and inspired the saints of the church of all times, all the fathers. And the only difference between the enormous corpus of writings of the church fathers, all these works that we have, and the scriptures themselves, is that the scriptures have gone through a period of sifting and editing into one final canonical text, and we just have never done that for the most part with the fathers. We do have some specific more canonical texts like the Evergatinos or the Philokalia or something that are more like a selection of very specific texts for a purpose. But overall, we let kind of all the writings of the of the Holy Fathers stand, and then we see where that consensus is. Um, that and that consensus shows uh a stability both uh over the whole geography of the church from east through west, but also historically over time. There's a consensus over time that remains the same, that keeps getting passed on. So something like uh the structure of bishop, presbyter, deacon, that remains consistent throughout the entire life of the church from St. Ignatius forward. The Eucharist, as uh St. Ignatius calls it, the medicine of immortality, that remains a constant all the way through the history of the church. There is no real evolution that's happening. There's a there are new ways of expressing it, there are ways to defend it, new uh formulae that defend the faith once delivered to the saints, you know, uh in each in each era. But if we approach it to as trying to understand that this is our, like we can truly say, unlike Orland, we can truly say, yeah, this is ours, because we can see the same ideas, the same worldview, the same approach in a in a late first, early second century Saint Lake St. Ignatius, as we see in St. Pissius the Athanite, right, who dies in the 90s, right? Right. We can see it. We can and we're not just

Liturgy And Ascetic Life As Keys

SPEAKER_01 15:05

uh stretching things to fit something that doesn't exist. We can we see the same basic ideas, the same, the same essential worldview all the way through. And so, and so that that means that uh uh our reading of it is going to be rooted in the actual life that we live, right? It's not a set of concepts. Again, this is a very enlightenment idea that they have where that doctrine and theology are a set of propositions and concepts that they have to adopt uh and affirm rather than a complete way of life. So, someone who is not under the authority of their bishop going to the liturgy and experiencing the liturgical structure and receiving the Eucharist each week, they're not going to understand that world that St. Ignatius lived in, just as they don't understand the world that we as Orthodox live in today. When we actually are engaged in this life, this is something I actually mentioned as well, that that distinguishes an Orthodox uh scholar of the fathers from a secular one, an agnostic or atheist or non-Orthodox one, is that uh when we read about, for example, the ascetical life, we know what it's like to fast that way. We know what it's like to uh, you know, to follow this cycle of prayers that we that we've maintained for so many centuries. We know what it's like to do the things that it says in the text or to be present in the divine liturgy and have these themes jump out at us in the in the worship hymns. So, so living within the context of being an Orthodox Christian, we recognize our own. You know, we recognize, and by living the life to its fullness, like the more we're engaged in our ascetical life, in our liturgical life, uh on a daily basis, the more the fathers will really speak to us. Because that's a that's a way of uh uh you know, people using this term re-enchantment a lot the last few years. That is a way that we're getting we're being like re-enchanted, we're being, which I would mean to say like reintroduced to our worldview, right? Being put back into our worldview, our the pre-modern worldview uh of the church. And uh and the and so all these are going to work together to help us understand the the actual text of the fathers.

Patreon And Final Farewell

SPEAKER_02 17:26

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