The Church Fathers (also called the fathers of the church, the early Christian fathers, and various other terms with “fathers” in them) is basically what we tend to call the most influential leaders and writers of Christianity from the first to seventh centuries. The adjective we use to describe their stuff is patristic, which comes from the Latin for father, pater.
Contrary to popular Protestant myth, the beliefs, issues, and practices of Christianity were not settled as soon as the New Testament was completed. The Church Fathers were the ones who had to sort these things out. It took the successors of the Twelve and of Jesus’s family—the bishops that Paul and the other apostles had appointed over the various city churches throughout the Roman Empire—to deal with things as they came up. It took regular people, actively empowered by the Holy Spirit, with living relationships with Christ Jesus, to lead the church forward. Still does.
Why do many Protestants prefer to skip the Fathers, and believe and teach that the bible handled everything, or give all the credit to the Holy Spirit instead of the Fathers? Well, to be fair, a whole lot of credit should go to the Holy Spirit; the Fathers couldn’t have done squat without Him. But at the same time, the Spirit partnered with these Fathers, so a certain amount of credit goes to them for being obedient followers of Jesus.
Still: The reason many Protestants focus on the bible and ignore the Fathers is because history is messy. The Fathers weren’t perfect individuals. They made mistakes, as everyone does. Some were so focused on obeying the bishops that they went overboard. Some never quote the bible without quoting it out of context. Some were so focused on refuting the Pharisees’ teachings on Jesus that they come across as downright anti-Semitic. Some taught inaccuracies, untruths, or even heresy. Sometimes they contradict one another. There are all sorts of reasons why the writings of the Fathers never made it into the New Testament.
But without these guys there’d be no New Testament, and many of the controversies that they settled would continue to be unsettled, and make Jesus’s already-fragmented church even more fragmented than it is. These are the guys who paved the way for Christianity as it is today. So we ought to give credit where credit is due—and know a bit about them. There’s some good stuff in their writings.
Now, while a lot of Protestants go to the one extreme of skipping them, other Christians go to the other extreme of over-venerating them. To them, the Fathers are saints (which they are) who could do no wrong (which they couldn’t). The stuff I said earlier about the Fathers not being perfect, going overboard, misquoting bible, being anti-Semitic, or even teaching heresy? To some Christians that’s blasphemy. It’s as if I told a C.S. Lewis fan, “You know, Mere Christianity has some serious flaws in its reasoning.” To them, just saying such a thing automatically means there’s something wrong with me, and how dare I critique God’s anointed.
Look, if they can stand up to the scriptures, clear reasoning, and the general consensus of the rest of the church, they’re fine. If they can’t, they can’t. That should be true of every Christian, not just the Fathers. The Fathers don’t get a special pass because they’re predate us, or because of their solid reputations and piety, or because they have a lot of fans. They’re not saints because they understood God perfectly; they’re saints because of His grace, and from the looks of some of the things they wrote, they needed His grace. And they’d be the first to say so. So let’s not worship the Fathers. Save that for God.
In the meanwhile, there’s a lot that can be learned from them, which is why from time to time I’m going to post some of their teachings under this heading. I don’t plan to limit it to Fathers before the seventh century; I’ll include Christians all the way down to the 20th, where appropriate. And of course I’ll include the Church Mothers.
In the meanwhile, if you want to read the Fathers on your own, go for it. I own a set of their writings, but my favorite website to find their stuff is the Early Church Fathers page at Christian Classics Ethereal Library. The only downside to those translations is that they were made in the 19th century, when the custom was to translate things into scholarly English instead of common English. Still, if you’ve got the vocabulary (or the patience) there’s a lot of good stuff in there: Stuff that’s been influencing the rest of Christendom since the very beginning.