As a Fundamentalist I had discovered while I was in college that it is possible to dismiss the entire Church as having gone off the rails by about A.D. 95. That is, we, with our open Bibles, knew better than did old Ignatius of Antioch or Clement of Rome, who had been taught by the very apostles themselves, just what the Church is and what it should look like. Never mind that our worship services would have been unrecognizable to them, or that our governance would have been equally unrecognizable; we were right, and the Fathers were wrong (about bishops, and about the Eucharist). That settled the matter.

Lead, Kindly Light by Thomas Howard