The Breeze of the Centuries

Michael Reeves

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844744152
• eBook ISBN: 9781844746590
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Is 'newer' really 'better'? We often assume so, but if we do treat the past as inferior we will ignore the legacy of history, and thus will find ourselves stranded on the tiny desert island of our own moment in time.
In particular, this applies to Christian theology, which should be thought, and lived, corporately by the church down through the ages.
The remedy to 'chronological snobbery' is, as C. S. Lewis put it, 'to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds'. Such is the motivation behind Michael Reeves' introduction to a selection of influential or significant Christian theologians.
This accessible and informative volume covers the Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas.
Each chapter begins with a brief biography and some background, then surveys each theologian's major work or works, gives a timeline for historical context, and ends with guidance for further reading.

1. ONLY LET ME REACH JESUS CHRIST!
The Apostolic Fathers

By the end of the first century AD, Jesus’ apostles were all dead and Jerusalem and its temple had been destroyed. It was a crucial time of transition for Christianity, made all the more difficult by the hostile notice the Roman Empire began to pay as it saw what looked to it like a subversive new sect in its midst.

The writings of the Apostolic Fathers are the most important books for understanding those first generations after the apostles: how they thought, lived and died. The collection of the Apostolic Fathers consists of about ten authors who wrote from around the end of the first century to the middle of the second, put together by scholars and termed the Apostolic Fathers. However, as a group they are a real mixed bag: some are works by eminent figures of the time such as Polycarp of Smyrna; others are anonymous; they come from different genres (letters, works of apologetics, a sermon, an apocalypse, an account of a martyrdom, instructions on church order); and they represent a wide diversity of theologies. Perhaps the best way to understand them is to see them not as the best theology of the time, but as representative best-sellers of the generation after the apostles. As such they are not only significant but instructive.

We will examine each of the works normally included in the collection in order to see what they say and also to see what they tell us about earliest post-apostolic Christianity and its theology.

Papias

According to tradition, Papias, the bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, was the disciple of the apostle John who actually wrote out John’s Gospel as the apostle dictated it. He wrote a five-volume work of his own, An Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord; however, today only fragments of his work survive. During the second century, Papias was widely held in high esteem; yet, largely because of his characteristically second-century belief in a literal, future millennium, he fell out of favour with subsequent generations who tended to understand the millennium more symbolically. The great third- to fourth-century church historian Eusebius dismissed Papias for this reason as ‘a man of exceedingly small intelligence’.5

Papias is valuable today for one reason in particular: he demonstrates for us the importance of oral tradition for early post-apostolic Christianity. It is clear from what survives of his work that an enormous number of oral traditions were in circulation concerning the life and sayings of Jesus and his apostles. It is also clear that such oral traditions were by no means distrusted as mere hearsay; instead, they were valued because they could be probed easily for veracity. For instance, Papias records that John and Philip went to evangelize Asia Minor, Philip settling with his family in Papias’ own town of Hierapolis (where, according to tradition, Philip was martyred). John, he tells us, settled in Ephesus, was then exiled for a while to the island of Patmos, was recalled by the emperor Nerva (ad 96–8), whence he returned to Ephesus, there to be killed as the last of the apostles, in fulfilment of Mark 10:38–39. Mark, he tells us, wrote his Gospel based on Peter’s testimony (Mark being Peter’s disciple and companion in Rome [1 Pet. 5:13]). If true, it adds an exquisite poignancy to Mark’s graphic account of Peter’s betrayal of Jesus. Papias’ most gruesomely fascinating account, though, is of Judas. Papias believed that the two New Testament accounts of Judas’ end (Matt. 27:3–10; Acts 1:15–9) could be harmonized by understanding that Judas did not die by hanging himself, but was cut down before he choked to death. Then he lived on, only to die when falling, so bloated that he burst open:

Judas was a terrible, walking example of ungodliness in this world, his flesh so bloated that he was not able to pass through a place where a wagon passes easily, not even his bloated head by itself. For his eyelids, they say, were so swollen that he could not see the light at all, and his eyes could not be seen, even by a doctor using an optical instrument, so far had they sunk below the outer surface. His genitals appeared more loathsome and larger than anyone else’s, and when he relieved himself there passed through it pus and worms from every part of his body, much to his shame. After much agony and punishment, they say, he finally died in his own place, and because of the stench the area is deserted and uninhabitable even now; in fact, to this day one cannot pass that place without holding one’s nose, so great was the discharge from his body, and so far did it spread over the ground.6

Clement of Rome

1 Clement

Perhaps the oldest complete work in the collection, written around AD 95, is an anonymous letter traditionally attributed to Clement, Paul’s co-worker (Phil. 4:3) and the third bishop of Rome after Peter. It was written to the ever-problematic church of Corinth in order to address a number of issues that were causing disquiet there. One of those issues was still the resurrection of the body: the Corinthians clearly had not taken the message of 1 Corinthians 15 to heart! The main problem, however, was that the old concern of disunity had led to the church’s elders being ousted in a church coup and replaced.

1 Clement argues that the takeover was entirely wrong, being motivated by pride and greed, and that the ousted elders must be restored. According to the letter, the move was a rebellion against God, who has appointed a proper ecclesiastical order: God commissioned Christ, who commissioned apostles, who commissioned bishops, who commission deacons.7 It is arguable whether or not this is a reference to the doctrine of apostolic succession as it would come to be formulated (after all, here the elders were said to have been appointed ‘with the consent of the whole church’8). What is clear, though, is that the role of the church elder has a significance in 1 Clement that it does not have in 1 Corinthians: church unity now seems to be sought more in the elders than in the Spirit.

Advocates of Episcopal church government argue that 1 Clement is evidence of a very early and natural evolution of episcopalism. The fact that Clement was himself bishop of Rome is also used by advocates of papal supremacy to support their theory by suggesting that he wrote with authority to another church because of his position, even though there is no internal evidence in the letter to suggest this.

At the other end of the interpretative spectrum are those who see an almost complete discontinuity between a New Testament radical congregationalism and a monarchical episcopalism in the next generation. On this reading, earliest apostolic Christianity had no concept of eldership, churches being charismatic commu­nities with no need for such leadership, meaning that the pastoral epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) must be dismissed as later ‘deutero-Pauline’ books because of their concern for church offices. Stimulating this kind of interpretation was a seminal work published in 1934 by Walter Bauer entitled Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Bauer’s claim was that an originally diverse Christianity soon began to be dominated by just one authoritarian group, found in Rome. The Roman church then rewrote history, setting its own beliefs as the standard of orthodoxy and labelling all dissent as heresy. Bauer’s thesis was seriously flawed (if power bought the title ‘orthodox’, how could those emperors who were Arian be dismissed as heretics?), yet it initiated what is today a ­prolific trend for describing orthodoxy as mere authoritarianism.9

2 Clement

The second letter of Clement is misleadingly titled: it is neither a letter, nor is it by Clement. It is a sermon, quite possibly preached by one of the Corinthian elders who were restored to their offices following Clement’s ‘first’ letter. The sermon has to do with a call to repentance, to think of Christ as God and to believe in the resurrection. Its greatest value for us, though, is probably its treatment of Scripture: it contains the earliest example (outside the New Testament) of a passage from the New Testament being referred to as ‘Scripture’ alongside the Old Testament.10 It reveals that there was a clear and early understanding of a New Testament canon of Scripture.

Ignatius of Antioch

One of the most remarkable and memorable figures of the first post-apostolic generation was Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in Syria. Strangely, we know almost nothing about him until he explodes on to the historical scene just a few weeks before his martyrdom in around AD 110. During a citywide persecution, he and some other Christians were arrested and sent to Rome to be thrown to wild beasts in the arena. En route, under armed guard, he dashed off seven letters to the churches he would pass through: the churches of Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Philadelphia, Smyrna (as well as one to Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna), and Rome. The letters really were dashed off (their style shows that they were written hastily and under considerable strain); nevertheless, they make for fascinating and illuminating reading. They are the last words of a man with only weeks to live, and yet, to quote Bruce Metzger, are filled with ‘such strong faith and overwhelming love of Christ as to make them one of the finest literary expressions of Christianity during the second century’.11

As he wrote, Ignatius had three main concerns on his mind. The first was that the churches be unified under their respective bishops. On this issue, Ignatius is so strongly Episcopalian he makes Clement appear positively Congregationalist in contrast. For Ignatius, the church finds its unity through the bishop, and therefore he writes, ‘you must not do anything without the bishop and the presbyters’; indeed, it ‘is not permissible either to baptize or to hold a love feast without the bishop’.12 This is because, for Ignatius, the bishop represents Christ to the church, and thus to meet without the bishop would be to fail to be Christ’s church: ‘For everyone whom the Master of the house sends to manage his own house we must welcome as we would the one who sent him. It is obvious, therefore, that we must regard the bishop as the Lord himself.’13

The second concern on Ignatius’ mind was the problem of false teaching. In particular, Ignatius had two types of false teachers in mind: Docetists and Judaizers, both of whom denied in their own way that Christ had come in the flesh (cf. 1 John).

The Docetists maintained that Jesus was entirely divine, and that he only appeared to be human (the name ‘Docetic’ comes from the Greek word dokeō, meaning ‘to seem’ or ‘to appear’). Perhaps the most notorious Docetic teacher was Marcion, who taught that the good Saviour-God of the New Testament is a different being to the bad Creator-God of the Old Testament. Jesus thus had nothing to do with the evil Creator-God’s physical world, and so could not actually have had a physical body, been born, have eaten, died and so on. In stark opposition, Ignatius would boldly speak of ‘the blood of God’, for if the divine Christ had not truly assumed our humanity, then he could not have died for our sins.14 In fact, Ignatius’ entire motivation in accepting martyrdom was based upon his belief in the real incarnation of Christ: Ignatius longed for martyrdom because then he would be copying Christ, but if Christ did not really suffer in his body, then Ignatius could not be copying him at all. ‘If that is the case, I die for no reason,’ he wrote.15 Instead, Ignatius wanted his life and death to proclaim that ‘There is only one physician, who is both flesh and spirit, born and unborn, God in man, true life in death, both from Mary and from God, first subject to suffering and then beyond it, Jesus Christ our Lord.’16 It is hard to read such material and not be incredulous of the claim that Jesus’ full divinity and full humanity is a later, fourth-century invention.

The other type of false teacher Ignatius was eager to arm Christians against (particularly in Magnesia and Philadelphia) was the Judaizer, who taught that Christians must abide by Jewish customs, especially circumcision and the Mosaic Law. For a time when Christianity was only just beginning to be recognized as something distinct from Judaism, this was a most pressing issue. Ignatius argued that the Judaizer’s teaching misunderstood the very nature of the Old Testament: ‘if we continue to live in accordance with Judaism, we admit that we have not received grace. For the most godly prophets lived in accordance with Christ Jesus.’17 The mistake of the Judaizers was to fail to see that Old Testament believers were themselves Christians, saved by nothing else than by trusting in Christ.18 The Jewish Scriptures existed to proclaim Christ and his gospel. As we will see, this was to be the issue of issues for many Christians of the day, who saw that the entire legitimacy of their faith depended on the Hebrew Scriptures being inherently Christian. If they were not, then Judaism, not Christianity, was true.

Ignatius’ third concern as he wrote his letters was, understandably, his own death. This surfaces most clearly in his letter to the Romans. The point of his letter is to beg the Christians in Rome not to try to help him escape death when he arrives, for he is eager to be martyred:

I implore you: do not be unseasonably kind to me. Let me be food for the wild beasts...Bear with me – I know what is best for me. Now at last I am beginning to be a disciple. May nothing visible or invisible envy me, so that I may reach Jesus Christ. Fire and cross and battles with wild beasts, mutilation, mangling, wrenching of bones, the hacking of limbs, the crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil – let these come upon me, only let me reach Jesus Christ!19

This enthusiasm of his is so inexplicable to many modern commentators that he is all too often written off as a psychotic. In point of fact, however, he is profoundly rea...

Table of contents

• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: SNOBS, BUMPKINS AND DINOSAURS
• 1. ONLY LET ME REACH JESUS CHRIST! The Apostolic Fathers
• 2. TO ARMS Justin Martyr and Irenaeus
• 3. AGAINST THE WORLD Athanasius
• 4. LOVING WISDOM Augustine
• 5. FAITH SEEKING UNDERSTANDING Anselm
• 6. THE DUMB OX Thomas Aquinas
• INTERMEZZO
• Notes