The Faith of our Fathers

THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

      The other day as I was driving to work I was scanning through the stations on the radio. I paused at one station as I heard a choir singing the old hymn Faith of our Fathers. This used to be one of my favorite hymns when I was a boy. I remember hearing the choir sing it so beautifully on a Billy Graham crusade back in the 50’s.

      Years ago when I listened to it as a Free Will Baptist, I never gave much thought to the words. But now I began to wonder about the meaning of the words. The first thing that came to mind is how could I have just accepted the use of the term “fathers” when my tradition then taught me to “call no man father”. I remember how we would recoil at addressing a priest as father and even make fun of it, but when WE sang it in the hymn it seemed to be ok. Somehow the injunction against calling anyone father didn’t apply to us, and we seemed oblivious to our inconsistency.

      The second thing I thought about as I listened to this old hymn once again was a question that popped into my mind. What is the faith and who are the fathers referred to in this hymn? The faith of what fathers? In the hymn we pledge to be true to it till death. Surely, then we should know what faith and what fathers we are pledging to, shouldn’t we? Is it the faith of Billy Sunday, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, William Tennent, Benjamin Randall or Alexander Campbell? There’s quite a divergence of faith among these men so which one is the faith of our fathers?

      Or is it the faith of the earlier fathers such as Martin Luther, Charles Wesley, John Armenius or John Calvin? As a Free Will Baptist, when we sang Faith of our Fathers, we certainly were not pledging ourselves to the faith of Charles Wesley, since we rejected the doctrine of a second work of grace known as entire sanctification as held and taught by Wesley. Nor were we pledging to be true to the faith of Alexander Campbell since he taught baptismal regeneration. We couldn’t have been singing about the faith of Martin Luther since he also held the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, baptized infants and taught that Communion is not symbolic but the true body and blood of Christ which conveyed grace to the communicant. And he also taught there is only one true visible Church, which we certainly didn’t believe. And we would never pledge our lives to the faith of John Calvin since he taught a limited atonement, double predestination and that anyone who had been saved could never loose their salvation. So what fathers and what faith were we singing about?

      It couldn’t have been the faith of the Apostolic Fathers since we knew nothing about them or their faith and if we had we would have rejected their faith outright as contrary to the Christian faith.

      So what is the faith and who are the fathers of this old hymn?