The modern scholarly skeptics are not the only ones who’ve downgraded the Fathers. Some aggressive Protestants have been making pretty much the same argument since the Reformation, but with a twist. They rejected the Fathers’ teaching when it contradicted Protestant commitments, as when some of them wanted to reject the papacy and others wanted to reject bishops in general. In these cases, they argued that the Fathers had corrupted Scripture. But they also accepted the Fathers, when they could push