There is a moment that happens in almost every conversation about right division, and it does not arrive as an argument. It arrives as a memory. You have shown a man from the text that water baptism was not given to the Body of Christ, or that the Sermon on the Mount was not preached to him, or that the promises he has been claiming were made to a nation he does not belong to. He does not answer the verses. He goes quiet, and then he says something like this:

My grandmother believed that. She was the godliest woman I ever knew. My father taught me that. This is what our family has always believed. This is the faith of our fathers.

And the conversation is over, because you cannot cross-examine a dead grandmother, and he knows it.

I want to take that sentence seriously, because the man saying it is usually not being clever. He is being loyal, and loyalty is not a vice. But the sentence does no work at all as an argument, and the fastest way to see why is to look at the hymn the phrase comes from — where it came from, who wrote it, what he meant by it, and what has happened to it since.

The Hymn Everybody Sings, and the Verse Nobody Sings

Faith of Our Fathers was written in 1849 by Frederick William Faber, and his life is worth laying out in full, because every part of it bears on what the phrase meant when he wrote it.

He was born on 28 June 1814 at Calverley in Yorkshire, where his grandfather was the vicar. The family was of Huguenot descent and held strict Calvinist views — which is to say he began about as far from Rome as an Englishman could begin. He went up to Oxford, took a scholarship at University College and was afterwards elected a fellow there, and came under the preaching of John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement. He was ordained deacon in the Church of England in 1837 and priest in 1839, and in 1843 he was given the living of Elton in Huntingdonshire.

What he did at Elton is instructive. His first act as rector was to travel to Rome to learn how best to carry out his pastoral charge, and he then introduced to an English country parish the keeping of feast days, auricular confession, and the devotion of the Sacred Heart. The village had a strong Methodist presence, and they packed his church on Sundays to contest the direction he was taking it.

Then, in November 1845, he followed Newman out of the Church of England and was received into the Church of Rome by Bishop William Wareing of Northampton, taking eleven men from Elton with him. (John Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology dates the secession to 1846; every other account I could find gives November 1845, and I have used that.) He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest and said his first Mass in April 1847. In 1849 he established the London Oratory, and from 1850 until his death on 26 September 1863 he was its provost.

His Marian devotion was not incidental to any of this. It came upon him during an illness so severe he was given the last rites, and it shaped the rest of his life and most of his hymn-writing. He translated Louis de Montfort's True Devotion to Mary into English. He wrote Mother of Mercy, Day by Day, and O Purest of Creatures, and O Turn to Jesus, Mother Turn — that last one calling upon Mary on behalf of the souls in purgatory.

And in 1849 he published Faith of Our Fathers in a collection whose title tells you everything about the hymn's intent: Jesus and Mary: or, Catholic Hymns for Singing and Reading. His stated aim in the preface was that English Catholics should have hymns of their own for congregational singing, as Newton and Wesley and Cowper had given the Protestants. And he wrote this one in memory of the Catholic martyrs of England — the men who died under Henry VIII and Elizabeth, which is to say, Catholics martyred by Protestants.

Protestants sing the first verse and the refrain without a tremor:

Faith of our Fathers! living still In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword: Oh, how our hearts beat high with joy Whene'er we hear that glorious word.

Faith of our Fathers! Holy Faith! We will be true to thee till death.

The dungeon, the fire, and the sword in that verse are the ones the Protestant authorities used. The third verse is the one that never gets sung in a Baptist church, and here it is as Faber wrote it:

Faith of our Fathers! Mary's prayers Shall win our country back to thee: And through the truth that comes from God England shall then indeed be free.

Mary's prayers shall win our country back. That is what the faith of the fathers meant to the man who coined the phrase — an England restored to the papacy through the intercession of Mary. There is no ambiguity in it and no need to strain at it. He said what he meant.

He Wrote It Twice, and Then Everyone Else Rewrote It

Here is where it becomes genuinely instructive, and this is the part that turns a piece of hymn trivia into an argument.

Faber himself wrote two versions. One of four stanzas for England, and one of seven for Ireland. And when he re-aimed the hymn at a second country, he changed the theological claim in the third verse to fit the new circumstances. Set the two side by side:

England: Faith of our Fathers! Mary's prayers Shall win our country back to thee: And through the truth that comes from God England shall then indeed be free.

Ireland: Faith of our Fathers! Mary's prayers Shall keep our country fast to thee: And through the truth that comes from God O we shall prosper and be free.

England had left Rome, so Mary must win it back. Ireland had not, so Mary must keep it fast. Same fathers, same faith, same refrain — and the doctrinal claim adjusted to suit the audience in front of him.

The Irish version does two further things worth noticing. It appeals past Mary to the saints as combatants: Faith of our Fathers! guile and force / To do thee bitter wrong unite; / But Erin's Saints shall fight for us, / And keep undimmed thy blessed light. And its closing stanza states the argument this whole study is about, in verse, as plainly as anyone has ever put it:

Faith of our Fathers! days of old Within our hearts speak gallantly: For ages thou hast stood by us, Dear Faith! and now we'll stand by thee.

For ages thou hast stood by us, and now we'll stand by thee. The ground of the loyalty is stated outright, and it is duration. Not that the faith is true — that it is old, and that it has been ours a long while. There is no other reason given in the verse, and none is felt to be needed.

That Irish version then travelled somewhere Faber never intended. It was sung at hurling matches into the 1960s — which is to say the hymn had become a badge of nation and tribe, sung by crowds at a sporting fixture. The words had not changed at all. What they now meant to the men singing them had changed entirely.

Then it crossed the Atlantic. In America it acquired a different tune — St. Catherine, by Henri Hemy, in place of the Sawston sung in Britain and Ireland — and in 1853 two Protestant editors, Hedge and Huntington, took the Marian stanza out. The lines that Protestants now sing run one of two ways:

Faith of our Fathers! we will strive To win all nations unto thee, And through the truth that comes from God, Mankind shall then be truly free.

Mary is gone and a missionary aim is put in her place. The fathers who prayed to her are still being pledged loyalty by people who would repudiate everything she stood for in their theology.

Then a Congregational minister in the United States, Arthur B. Patten, wrote Faith of Our Mothers — the fathers exchanged for mothers, the martyrs for the nursery: Faith of our mothers, living still / In cradle song and bedtime prayer; / In nursery lore and fireside love, / Thy presence still pervades the air. Prison, fire, and sword have become the cradle and the fireside. And one of its later lines is worth pausing over — In truth beyond our stumbling creeds. The hymn about being true to the faith till death now explicitly places the truth past anything anyone could actually state.

And in Korean Protestant churches the third verse is simply left out. No replacement is offered. The verse that says what the faith actually is has been removed, and everybody keeps singing.

So the hymn has been aimed at Rome, at England, at Ireland, at a hurling crowd, at Protestant missions, at motherhood, and at nothing in particular. Through every one of those changes the refrain has never changed. Faith of our Fathers! Holy Faith! We will be true to thee till death.

Read that refrain again and ask the only question that matters about it. True to what? The verses have been rewritten to say four different things and in one version to say nothing at all. The vow is fixed and its object is a blank, and every man who sings it fills the blank with whatever he already believed when he walked in.

That is not a criticism of the tune, and I am not asking anybody to tear a page out of a hymnal. It is a demonstration. The phrase travels between Rome and Geneva and the Sunday-school room without the slightest friction, and it travels that easily for one reason: it names no doctrine. It names a relationship. And an argument that names no doctrine cannot be checked, cannot be corrected, and cannot be wrong — which is exactly why it feels so strong and settles so little.

If you want the fuller case that a hymn is doctrine set to melody, I have made it in Mis-Aligned Doctrine Through Songs. Here the hymn is only the door. What is behind it is a way of arguing, and the Scripture has a great deal to say about it.

Paul Had a Faith of His Fathers, and He Says So

Nobody in Scripture had a stronger claim to a religious inheritance than the apostle Paul, and nobody states the claim more precisely. Read his own account, and stop before the last four words:

"For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews' religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it: And profited in the Jews' religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous…"

Zealous of what? Of God? Of the Scriptures? Of the law? He tells us, and it is the phrase the whole verse has been building toward:

"And profited in the Jews' religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers." (Galatians 1:14 KJV)

The traditions of my fathers. Not his own inventions. Not a system he chose off a shelf as an adult. Something received — through family, through nation, through the religious world he was born into — and held with an intensity that outran everyone his own age.

He says the same thing standing on the stairs at Jerusalem: "brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers, and was zealous toward God, as ye all are this day" (Acts 22:3). And before Agrippa: "after the most straitest sect of our religion I lived a Pharisee" (Acts 26:5).

Now hold the three statements together and count what he actually had. He had the pedigree. He had the training, under the most respected teacher of his generation. He had the strictest sect of the one religion on earth that God had actually instituted. He had a documented record of outperforming his peers in it. And he had sincerity that cost him something: he was so serious about it that he was willing to hurt people over it.

And notice what his zeal was fastened to even so. Not the law God gave — his own word is the traditions of my fathers. The genuine article was in his hands, and what he was exceedingly zealous of was the accumulation men had built around it. That is worth marking, because it is the ordinary case and not the extreme one: a man may hold a real deposit from God and still have his devotion attached to what men added to it.

And every bit of that was aimed at destroying the work of God.

That is the sentence to sit with, because it dismantles the appeal in one stroke. Zeal is not evidence. Sincerity is not evidence. Antiquity is not evidence. Family devotion is not evidence. A man may inherit a religion, love it, excel in it, suffer for it, and be exceedingly wrong — and the more exceedingly zealous he is, the more certain he will feel that he is not.

Michael Hammond, writing on this very verse, puts his finger on why the grip is so hard to break. These traditions were inherited. They were not invented by Paul personally. They were received through family, culture, and religious environment. They carried emotional weight and social consequence. Which is why religion is such a strong bondage — it is not only a set of beliefs, it becomes a person's entire identity. Argue with a man's doctrine and you have argued with his doctrine. Argue with his inheritance and he hears you arguing with his family, his childhood, and himself.

The Word Is Being Used in Two Different Senses

There is a small point of vocabulary here that clears up a surprising amount of confusion, and Justin Johnson makes it well.

When we say the faith of our fathers, we are not using the word faith to mean trusting God. We are using it the way people say the Catholic faith or the Buddhist faith — meaning a system of doctrine, an institution, a body of belief. The two senses look identical on the page and are nothing alike underneath. One is a man resting on Christ; the other is a religious apparatus that a man belongs to.

That is why the slogan can be defended so warmly while nothing inside it ever gets examined. The speaker feels he is defending trust in God — the word certainly sounds like that — when what he is actually defending is a system, unexamined, because it came to him attached to people he loved.

The List Paul Counted Loss Begins With What He Never Chose

Then there is Philippians 3, and it holds a detail that is very easy to read past.

"Though I might also have confidence in the flesh. If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; Concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless." (Philippians 3:4-6 KJV)

Look at the order of that list, because it is not random.

Circumcised the eighth day — he was eight days old. He had no say in it whatever. Of the stock of Israel — an accident of birth. Of the tribe of Benjamin — the same. An Hebrew of the Hebrews — a household that kept the language and the customs when many did not, and he was a child in it.

Four items, and Paul chose none of them. They were done to him, or he was born into them. Only after those four does the list arrive at anything he did as a man: the sect he joined, the zeal he showed, the record he built.

And what does he do with the whole of it?

"But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ," (Philippians 3:7-8 KJV)

He counts the inherited half loss right along with the earned half. He does not carve out an exemption for the part he received from his parents, and it would have been the easiest exemption in the world to make. He could have said his heritage was at least a head start. He said it was loss.

Notice too what he is measuring it against. Not against a better heritage, not against an older tradition, not against a purer family. Against a Person and the knowledge of Him. Anything a man is resting on other than Christ is on the wrong side of that ledger, and it makes no difference at all whether he built it himself or was handed it as a boy.

Where the Scripture Puts the Appeal to the Fathers

Now, the sharpest examples of this argument in the Bible are found in God's dealings with Israel, and I want to say plainly how they are being used before I use them. Those passages are the historical record of what this way of arguing has actually done. They are not commands addressed to the Body of Christ, and I am not converting them into any. The doctrine for us comes from Paul, and it comes shortly. But the record is the record, and it is worth looking at, because God has left us a specimen of this exact argument preserved in full.

It is in Jeremiah 44. The prophet has confronted the remnant of Judah in Egypt about burning incense to the queen of heaven. Here is their answer, and read it as an argument, because that is what it is:

"As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the LORD, we will not hearken unto thee. But we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem: for then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil." (Jeremiah 44:16-17 KJV)

Take it apart. First they refuse the word of the LORD — openly, with no pretence about it. Then they give their reason, and the reason is as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes. The appeal is to ancestry, and it is reinforced by rank and by place: our fathers did it, our kings did it, our princes did it, and it was done in Jerusalem itself. Everyone who mattered, everywhere that counted, for as far back as anyone can remember.

And then, in the same breath, they add the second half of the argument: then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil. The good old days. Things were better back when we did it this way. (That half of the argument I have taken up on its own in The Former Days Were Not Better, because it is a whole study by itself.)

So here is the appeal to the fathers, the appeal to the authorities, the appeal to the majority, and the appeal to the golden age — all four, in two verses, defending the worship of the queen of heaven, and offered as a settled reply to a word from God.

It is not an isolated case. God traces the mechanism elsewhere in as many words. Of Judah's idolatry: "and after Baalim, which their fathers taught them" (Jeremiah 9:14). Of the mixed nations settled in Samaria: "So these nations feared the LORD, and served their graven images, both their children, and their children's children: as did their fathers, so do they unto this day" (2 Kings 17:41) — three generations named, and the transmission is the whole explanation. Of Judah again: "their lies caused them to err, after the which their fathers have walked" (Amos 2:4).

And then there is the verse that names the whole problem in six words. Jeremiah looks ahead to the day the Gentiles come to the LORD, and he records what they will say when they arrive:

"O LORD, my strength, and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of affliction, the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit." (Jeremiah 16:19 KJV)

Our fathers have inherited lies. Not invented them — inherited them. Which means they had fathers too, and it went back further than anyone could see. That is the honest description of what an inheritance can be, and it is spoken not with contempt but as the first clear-eyed thing a man says when the truth finally reaches him.

And God Commands the Opposite in as Many Words

If the appeal to the fathers were sound reasoning, we would expect God at some point to endorse it. He does the reverse, twice, and both times He is speaking to a nation whose fathers had received their religion by revelation directly from Him. If an ancestry were ever going to settle a question, it would have settled it there.

To the generation in the wilderness:

"But I said unto their children in the wilderness, Walk ye not in the statutes of your fathers, neither observe their judgments, nor defile yourselves with their idols:" (Ezekiel 20:18 KJV)

And to the generation that came back from the captivity:

"Be ye not as your fathers, unto whom the former prophets have cried, saying, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Turn ye now from your evil ways, and from your evil doings: but they did not hear, nor hearken unto me, saith the LORD." (Zechariah 1:4 KJV)

Walk ye not in the statutes of your fathers. Be ye not as your fathers. Again — these are words to Israel under that covenant, and they are not a command handed to the Body of Christ. But notice what they establish about the God who spoke them. He is not a God who treats descent as a warrant. He never once told a man that a thing was true because his father held it, and He twice told a whole nation the opposite.

The Lord Jesus said the same to Israel's teachers when He was among them, and the record is worth setting down: "For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men" (Mark 7:8), and "Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered" (Mark 7:13). Which ye have delivered. The very word for handing a thing down is used to describe the ruin of the word of God. Tradition is a delivery system, and what is being delivered is a separate question entirely.

The Same Appeal, Turned Inside Out

There is a second form of this argument, and it is the one that will occur to a reader who has followed everything so far and thinks he has found the way out. It runs: fine — then I will simply own the right fathers and disown the wrong ones. Not Faber's fathers. Not the ones who prayed to Mary, or the ones who burned incense to the queen of heaven. The good ones. The faithful line.

The Lord Jesus answered that version too, and He answered it in the same chapter where He was addressing Israel's teachers directly.

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets." (Matthew 23:29-31 KJV)

Read what they claimed, because it is exactly the manoeuvre. If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them. They were repudiating the bad fathers. They were building monuments to the good ones — the prophets — and paying for the upkeep. On paper they had done precisely what the escape route recommends: sorted the ancestors, kept the faithful, disowned the murderers, and aligned themselves publicly with the right side of the family.

And the Lord's reply is that the sorting was itself the evidence against them. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Luke records the same exchange and makes the mechanism plainer still: "Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the deeds of your fathers: for they indeed killed them, and ye build their sepulchres" (Luke 11:48).

Why does honouring the prophets convict them of siding with the men who killed the prophets? Because a prophet was standing in front of them at that moment, saying something they did not want to hear, and they were preparing to do to Him what their fathers had done to the others. It is easy to venerate a prophet after he is dead and the argument is over. What their fathers had actually done was reject a living word, and that is what these men were doing, in the very act of decorating the tomb. Which is why the next sentence lands the way it does: "Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers" (Matthew 23:32).

Again — this is the Lord speaking to Israel's leaders in Israel's program, and it is not a command handed across to the Body of Christ. But the reasoning is worth carrying, and this is why: honouring the right fathers is not the same thing as believing the right thing. You can pick the good ancestors, name them accurately, defend them warmly, and still be doing the identical thing the bad ones did — if the word in front of you is one you will not receive.

So the escape route is closed, and it was never really an escape. Choosing which fathers to own is still choosing fathers, and the choosing is still being done by you, on grounds you have not examined, in order to avoid examining them. The problem was never that a man picked the wrong ancestors. It is that the question of what is true was handed over to ancestry at all.

Now the Doctrine, and It Is Paul's

That is the record. Here is what is written to us, and it settles the matter without borrowing a syllable from anybody else's mail.

Paul had already told the Galatians where his gospel came from, and he was emphatic that it did not come down a line:

"But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ." (Galatians 1:11-12 KJV)

Not after man. Neither received it of man. Neither was I taught it. The whole passage is a denial of transmission. And it is not incidental that the very next thing he does, three verses later, is to describe the inherited religion he had to be pulled out of. The chapter sets the two side by side deliberately: a message that came straight down from the risen Christ, against a religion that came sideways from his fathers. That the message came direct is what makes it authoritative; that his fathers' religion came by inheritance is precisely what made it worthless as a guide.

Then he puts the standard where nobody can move it:

"But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed." (Galatians 1:8 KJV)

Weigh what has just been placed under the curse. Not a heretic. Not a stranger. Paul himself, and an angel from heaven — the two most impressive credentials imaginable, an apostle and a celestial being — should either of them bring another gospel. If Paul's own authority cannot carry a message that fails the test, then no grandmother's can, no denomination's can, no council of fathers can, and no unbroken line of anything can. The curse is on the message, and the identity of the messenger does not soften it by one degree.

And so the instruction to us is not hold what you were given but test what you were given: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Prove all things — not the things a stranger tells you while exempting the things your father told you. The Bereans are commended for doing this to an apostle who was preaching the truth (Acts 17:11), and Paul commends them; he does not take offence. And where a man's word and God's word are set against each other, Paul does not weigh them at all: "let God be true, but every man a liar" (Romans 3:4).

There is one more consideration, and for the Body of Christ it is decisive. The doctrine we hold was "kept secret since the world began" (Romans 16:25) and "in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men" (Ephesians 3:5). Whatever the ages before Paul had, they did not have this. So an appeal to the antiquity of a teaching, in the very area where God has told us the teaching is not ancient, is not merely weak. It is pointed in the wrong direction. There is no older path behind Paul to go back to, and a man reaching further back than Paul for the Body's doctrine is reaching into the period when God had not yet said it.

But Some Fathers Handed Down the Truth

Now I have to stop and say the other half, because without it everything above is not only harsh but false.

Paul did not despise a godly inheritance. He honoured one by name, and the two women he named were a mother and a grandmother:

"When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also." (2 Timothy 1:5 KJV)

Unfeigned faith. The genuine article, not the pretence — and it dwelt first in Lois and came down through Eunice to Timothy. Three generations of it, traced by an apostle, with evident gladness. So whatever else is true, the family line is not being written off. God has used it, and He uses it still.

But look at what Paul actually commends about that household, because he tells us exactly, and it is not what people usually hear:

"But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus." (2 Timothy 3:14-15 KJV)

From a child thou hast known the holy scriptures. What those women handed the boy was the word of God. That is why Paul tells him to continue in it. The instruction is not continue in it because your mother taught it to you; it is continue in it, and here is why you may — you have known the holy scriptures from a child, and you know of whom you learned them. The inheritance is honoured because of what was in it, and Paul names the contents.

Which brings the whole matter to a single sentence.

An Inheritance Is a Conveyance, Never a Credential

A family line, a denomination, a childhood church — these are pipes. They carry what was put into them. Lois and Eunice put the holy scriptures into a boy and he grew up to be Timothy. The households of Judah put Baal into their children and their children served Baal. In both cases the mechanism was identical and the results could not have been further apart, because the mechanism never determined the content.

So the fact that a thing was handed to you tells you precisely nothing about whether it is true. It tells you only that somebody before you held it. And the one procedure that could tell you whether it is true — opening the Book and checking — is the exact procedure the appeal to the fathers exists to prevent. That is the whole function of the argument. It arrives at the moment the checking is about to begin, and it stops it, and it stops it in the gentlest possible way, by making the checking feel like disloyalty.

"Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15). That is addressed to you, and it does not come with an exemption clause for anything you were taught before you could read.

The Tradition Paul Does Command, and How to Tell the Difference

None of this makes the word tradition a term of abuse. Paul uses it approvingly:

"Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle." (2 Thessalonians 2:15 KJV)

And two verses in Colossians sit close enough together to make the distinction unmistakable. Here is the tradition he forbids:

"Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ." (Colossians 2:8 KJV)

And here, two verses earlier, is the tradition he commands: "As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him: Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught" (Colossians 2:6-7).

Both are received. Both are taught. The difference is not the handing down — it is the source and the content. One traces back to an apostle who got it by revelation from the risen Christ and wrote it down where you can read it. The other traces back to men, accumulated, unexamined, and defended by the age of the pile rather than by anything in it. The first is after Christ; the second is explicitly not after Christ, and Paul says so in the verse.

Which gives you a test you can apply in about a minute, and it does not require you to be a scholar. Can you find it, addressed to you, in Paul's epistles? If you can, it does not matter in the slightest whether your grandmother held it — hold it because it is written. If you cannot, it does not matter in the slightest that she held it either. She is not the standard, and she would not have wanted to be. (On why the deposit is fixed by who delivered it rather than by how old it is, see Following Paul Is Following Christ.)

The Question That Ends the Argument

When the sentence comes — this is the faith of our fathers — there is one question that answers it, and it is not an unkind one. Ask it gently, because it is not a trap.

Which fathers?

The men Faber had in mind died for the Mass and the papacy. The men the Reformers had in mind died opposing them. The men your denomination has in mind broke away from somebody, and those men had broken away from somebody else. The Pharisees had fathers, and had sorted them carefully into the ones they honoured and the ones they disowned. The women in Egypt had fathers, and they cited them to Jeremiah's face while refusing the word of God. Every one of those groups sang, in effect, the same refrain, and every one of them meant something different by thee.

There is no such thing as the fathers. There is only a particular set of men holding a particular set of beliefs, and the moment you have to name them, the argument stops being an appeal to loyalty and becomes an ordinary question about doctrine — which is what it always was underneath, and which can be settled from the text.

Behind which fathers stands the real question, and it is the only one that has ever settled anything: where is it written, and to whom?

If You Are the One This Costs Something

I want to finish by speaking to the man who has read all of this and is not arguing with any of it, and is quietly sick about it — because he is the reason the article exists.

You have seen it now. You have seen that what you were taught cannot be found where you were told it would be. And the first face that comes to your mind is not a theologian's. It is your mother's, or a pastor who was kind to you when you were fifteen, or the woman who taught you to pray. And it feels like the price of the truth is thinking badly of her, and you would rather stay confused than pay that.

You do not have to pay it. Two things are worth saying plainly.

The first is that you have not been asked to judge her, and you are not able to. What a person rested on before God is not something you can see. If she trusted Christ and His finished work for her, she is His and her position was never touched by how much she had sorted out — that is the whole point of a salvation that rests on His work rather than ours. Right division does not take her from you. If anything it tells you where she is with more confidence than the system that raised you ever could.

The second is that being wrong about a doctrine is not the same as being false. Paul was wrong on a scale none of us will ever match, and he was sincere the entire time — and God saved him anyway and made him the apostle of the very grace he had been attacking. If sincere error disqualified a person, there would be no Pauline epistles. Your people were doing what they had been given. Most of them never had the question put to them.

But you have. That is the only thing that has actually changed, and it changes nothing about them.

Loyalty is not a fault, and God is not asking you to stop loving anybody. He is asking you to stop putting them where only His word belongs. "Let God be true, but every man a liar" (Romans 3:4) is not a low view of men. It is an ordinary view of men and a right view of God — and until a man can say it about the people he loves most, he cannot really say it at all.

The faith worth being true to till death is not the one that came down to you. It is the one that came down to Paul, from the risen Christ, and has been sitting in front of you in a Book the whole time, waiting to be read.

© 2026 Edward R. Cross