Theologians You Should Know

An Introduction: From the Apostolic Fathers to the 21st Century

Michael Reeves

• Verlag: Crossway
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781433550898
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: Religious Biographies

Whether you realize it or not, you are the beneficiary of centuries of careful study and reflection on God's Word. The writings and teachings of figures from the past are crucial to what the church believes today. But just like intriguing guests of honor at a dinner party, these theologians can be intimidating to get to know.

Introducing you to the lives and thought of figures such as the Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Karl Barth, and others, this book makes the writings of these significant theologians accessible and approachable—opening up for you the riches of church history and enlarging your vision of God and his plan for the world.

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Only Let Me Reach Jesus Christ!

The Apostolic Fathers

By the end of the first century AD, Jesus’s 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 favor 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.”4

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’s 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 96–98), then 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’s most gruesomely fascinating account, though, is of Judas. Papias believed that the two New Testament accounts of Judas’s end (Matt. 27:3–10; Acts 1:15–19) 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.5

Clement of Rome

1 Clement

Perhaps the oldest complete work in the Apostolic Fathers, written around AD 95, is an anonymous letter traditionally attributed to Clement, Paul’s coworker (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 and replaced in a church coup.

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 had appointed a proper ecclesiastical order: God commissioned Christ, who commissioned apostles, who commissioned bishops, who commission deacons.6 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” 7 ). 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 monarchial episcopalism in the n...