Springfield Reformer:
Thanks for the protestant commentary on this. This is one of those vague passages as it could mean all of the OT prophets were fathers [beyond the ones specifically names as such, Abraham, Isacc, David in the NT] and broadens the usage of the term to all of the OT prophets who lead the OT Jewish people and term fathers, if I read Gill correctly, also refers to all spiritual fathers for all ages. So does he believe that spiritual father is restricted for usage within dome defined age, or does it go beyond the NT period into early Apostolic Church. As the article I linked earlier pointed out, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons used the term “fathers” as did Saint Clement of Alexandria in the 2nd century, so those 2 at least, seemed to think the term spiritual father could indeed be applied to men like Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch, etc.
And as you do acknowledge, Paul as a father is acceptable as he was involved in the conversion, pastoring and shepherding of souls. A parish priest called father is, from the Catholic perspective, doing the same. It is the parish priest who is the ordinary minister of the sacrament of baptism, which as I think you know, from the Catholic perspective, is a sacrament that gives Grace and removes original sin and makes one an adopted son or daughter of God. So just on that point, a parish priest functionally in terms of their pastoring ministries is in essence equivalent to what Saint Paul was to say the Corinthians.
Hey no problem with your views, I am not trying to play a gotcha game. I stand by the Catholic position but at least you have the objectivity to recognize that reading MT 23:7-9 in English today and thinking it can only mean X is problematic as you do recognize words, even in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, etc, can have different meanings and do change over time.
Remember Gill is addressing this as Peter quoting a hypothetical group of yet to be born mockers in the last days. So there’s no prerequisite that these “fathers” are internal to the church or even the faithful OT believers, but may simply represent the ancient peoples generally. The mockers being quoted are unbelievers, so it stands to reason they would not necessarily limit themselves to church history, but would rather be talking about human history generally.
This is actually the case with modern evolutionary skeptics, who have argued against the global flood, and also reject the apocalypse, because they reject that God intervenes in human history with these large scale judgments. In fact, many Protestants think these skeptics are probably at least a partial fulfillment of Peter’s prophecy.
As for the Father versus father controversy, I want to ask you to acknowledge something. I’m not asking you to agree, but just recognize this, that we are not saying, none of us, that these terms are off limits for descriptive use, only for use as ecclesiastical titles, which is a very narrow application. None of us has ever denied that Paul could teach or be a spiritual father to those he actually helped find faith in Christ. We only deny that such descriptive terms should evolve into formal religious titles, because as Augustine suggests, this can lead to pride and even idolatry. No one ever called Paul “Rabbi Paul,” or “Father Paul,” etc. That’s our point, and if you make it out to be more or less than that, you are not faithfully representing our actual argument.
Now I’m an attorney (plus a few other things), and I can tell you it’s cool to have that “Esq.” appended to your signature line in Outlook. But as a Christian I can also recognize the temptation to pride, to regarding oneself to being in some superior clique that can look down on others, and the badges of pride, titles and such other indicators of status, contribute directly to that temptation.
That’s what I think Jesus was getting at. It’s a narrow command but extremely useful, not hyperbole at all. He doesn’t want pride in the church leadership. He wants a servant heart. But the prohibitions are real. If you have a role in someone’s life as father, someone you actually know personally, then use of the right term to describe that role is fine. But not as part of your name. You may be revered, but you cannot be “Reverend.” You may be a father or teacher to someone, but you are not allowed to be “Father CT,” or “Rabbi SR.”
Anyway, I’m not asking you to agree, but I think it would be very helpful if you could at least acknowledge that this is our argument. Because then we could stop going on these defensive rabbit trails of “that’s not what we said,” and we could get down to addressing what we think is the real point, why you allow your clerics to bear such titles, when it would be so easy to comply with this command of Jesus by just using people’s names, as exampled by Paul, Peter, and everyone else in the New Testament church.
Peace,
SR