Why the reformers read the fathers.

The Reformers taught "Sola Scriptura, which meant every person became their own Bible interpreter, right?

Wrong. We asked noted Reformation scholar David Steinmetz of Duke Divinity School about this. In this excerpt from our interview, he reminds us that the Reformers strove to ensure their own interpretations of Scripture matched those of the Fathers.

"The Reformation is an argument not just about the Bible but about the early Christian fathers, whom the Protestants wanted to claim. This is one of those things that is so obvious nobody has paid much attention to it--then you look and you see it everywhere.

"The Reformers use the Fathers all over the place. We know Calvin read Augustine, and we discovered recently that Luther read Jerome--he had copies annotated in his own hand. The index of Calvin's Institutes is filled with an enormous number of quotations from the Fathers. And in the first preface to that work, addressed to Francis I, Calvin did his best to show his teachings were in complete harmony with the Fathers.

"The Protestants did this because they were keen to have ancestors, They knew that innovation was another word for heresy. 'Ours is the ancient tradition,' they said. 'The innovations were introduced in the Middle Ages!' They issued ...