[jkepler]

Do you have evidence of this claim?

One Protestant ministry I find helpful equips protestants to understand the Christian gospel and contemporary paganism by drawing on the rich heritage of Irenaeus's apologetic defense against the pagans of his day. That particular ministries entire idea was seeing the connection between global paganism and gnostic belief in the first centuries of the church, realizing that Irenaeus had already done the heavy theological lifting, and the current need was to learn from him (and other church fathers) and recontextualize their insights for the church today.

For many protestants I've known, the church fathers and the ecumenical councils are seen as helpful, but never carrying the same authority as the Scriptures. The authority of councils and creeds is derived from the Bible, not the inverse.

[Mikeb85]

> Do you have evidence of this claim?

I mean, there's like 1000 Protestant sects and they're all seperate so good luck, but the vast majority don't recognize writings of saints...

Here's a nice article explaining what the early church fathers got wrong from an evangelical perspective: https://bible.org/article/theology-adrift-early-church-fathe...

Just go to any Evangelical or American Protestant heavy website and see how they treat writings that aren't scripture...

[cafard]

In a couple of places, Jaroslav Pelikan quotes Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield's Augustine and Calvin (a book and an author I've never heard of elsewhere) as saying "the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church." A selection of Luther's writings shows numerous entries for Augustine in the index--not all for support, it is true.

A dip into Calvin's Institutes of Religion turns up references to Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Gregory Nazianzus, Basil, Chrysostom, and Bernard of Clairvaux.

[edit: the sentence on Calvin]