[sword-devel] Early Church Fathers

[Jerry Hastings]

At 04:50 PM 4/19/2001 -0400, Bruce Ramsland wrote:
>The Fathers of the Church are the Apostles.
>They already have references in the Bible.

I know how you feel about this. For years as the operator of a BBS that had 
these kind of files online, I tried to refer to these kind of writings as 
simply early church writings and I avoided the word fathers. But,  Early 
Church Fathers, Apostolic Fathers, and such, have a long tradition of use 
and are the names of some of the printed collections. It is very awkward to 
not use the term "fathers." I gave up trying to avoid it. Perhaps I should 
have just used a lower case "f". But, I was using "Fathers" as a shortened 
version of the titles of these collections. And generally I capitalize book 
titles. I am sorry my use of "Fathers" offended you. It was not meant as an 
endorsement of any doctrine for or against applying it to any group of men.

Jerry