At this point, I brought up the Eastern Orthodox stance on this issue and cited St John of Damascus to show how their position is an innovation. They simply closed their ears and told me that I see the Church Fathers as infallible and then suddenly cited St Augustine
Calvinists, and not only Calvinists, frequently go so far as to claim that the Protestant Reformers were guided by the Holy Spirit (for instance, in selecting which books were the "real" Bible, or in determining how to interpret Scripture, etc). That's pretty much the only way you can
interpret the events of the Reformation if you're a monergist. Since the Reformers, in this view, were guided by the Spirit, their decisions and the Confessions (even if not everything the individual reformers wrote) are therefore infallible, or at least as close to infallible as you can get aside from the Scriptures themselves.
That line of reasoning is severely flawed, though. If the Reformers were guided by the Spirit, then the Church Fathers cannot have been, since frequently the two are at odds (for instance, when Calvin threw the Church Fathers under the bus
, or when Knox did the same by claiming the men of Calvin's Geneva were the
most righteous Christians since the Apostles themselves).
Why would the Holy Spirit leave the church in the 2nd, 4th, or 8th century and then suddenly swoop back in to "reform" in it in the 16th? That doesn't make much sense, unless you claim it was to "fulfill prophecy" (historicists
would say exactly that). But it's still a problematic assertion because the Jesus said he would send the Paraclete (Spirit) to guide the Church, but didn't say anything about it ever leaving.
So really, the dispute is over who the "real" Fathers of the church are. Are they the men who lived in the first few centuries, many of whom personally knew the apostles, were part of churches they founded, and/or lived in the same cultural environment as them? Or are they a bunch of 16th century Northern Europeans who had a bone to pick with the Renaissance Popes, and who thought they