Are the Church Fathers 'Lutheran' or are the Lutherans Patristic?

http://catholica.pontifications.net/?p=1519

Please follow the above link to a fascinating conversation which addresses many of the concerns and critiques offered for one's consideration in my earlier post on confessional Lutheranism.

The debate is simply this: do confessional Lutherans submit the protestant confessions to the judgement of the ancient Fathers and their authoritative interpretation of the Catholic Faith, or do confessional Lutherans read the Fathers in such a way as to squeeze the Patristic Tradition into the matrix of the Book of Concord? Anglicans are very familiar with this debate. For instance, Father Arthur Middleton in his excellent work Fathers and Anglicans demonstrates how the Caroline Divines tried to make the Fathers into proto-Anglicans and how the Tractarians tried to conform the Anglican formularies to the higher authority of the Fathers. That in-house struggle and debate continues to this day...