Ignatius of Antioch: Who Reads Him in Context? (Final)

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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And so to just simply rip this one section where he's talking about how to recognize false teachers, recognize the docetics, avoid them in the fellowship of the church, detect them when they have snuck in, and do they not sneak in?

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Is that not the very nature of heresy? To take this one sentence, tear it out, and wave it around like a banner saying,

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Ignatius was a Roman Catholic to believe in transubstantiation, is to demonstrate that either you really, really, really could care less what

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Ignatius actually thought. You're just a new convert, and you know what? As a new convert, you're in the honeymoon stage, and facts are irrelevant to you as long as it sounds good.

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Hey, as long as it's in the service of the Roman Church, then baby,

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I'm gonna tell you that's what he said. That's the new convert thing.

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Now, how do we explain those who are not new converts, and those who've had plenty of time to read this, and maybe even those who quote from other sources that would talk about the docetics and the background, and they have no reason to be ignorant to these things.

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What about them? I don't know. It seems that they have other reasons and other motivations for doing what they're doing.

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For some of them, quite honestly, it could simply be, look, I've always heard that way. It fits the church. There's no reason to think beyond that.

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If so, fine, wonderful. But the point is that when we hear these things, when we hear people throwing this stuff out, 99 percent of the time, the evangelical

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Protestant doesn't even know where to go to find out if the context has been violated, if anachronism is involved, and 99 .9

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percent of the time, that Protestant has not given a second thought to what level of authority any particular church father is to be given in the first place.

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I mean, there are writings contemporaneous with Ignatius that theologically are horrific, that have almost no connection with God's inspired

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Word. The Bible tells us that there are those who are untaught and unstable, who pervert the

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Word of God to their own destruction. They existed during the days of the apostles, and there's nothing in the Bible that says that after the last apostle dies,

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God is going to make sure that none of these people can ever write a book. In fact, they're very busy writing books today and filling the

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CBA with them. Are they not? They've been at it for a long time. So if they existed today, if they exist today, they existed back then too.

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So many Protestants just have never sat back and thought, well you know what,

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I need to evaluate the early church writers in the very same way I evaluate modern writers.

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I can't just simply, just because someone lived in the second century doesn't mean that they had any particularly deep knowledge of the things of the

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Gospel, even if they had heard something about Christ. So why in the world do we, just with this blank, numb look on our face, just go, well, if Tertullian said it, then you know, well,

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Irenaeus said it, then therefore, so what? I mean, some of these folks didn't even have access to the entirety of the

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Bible. Many could not look at the Old Testament in its original language.

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All they had was the Septuagint. There's all sorts of advantages that we have that for some reason people don't even factor them in.

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And so the combination is, I see it all the time. I see Protestants that go, well, you know, I've never read the early church fathers before.

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It does look like they're talking about things like the Mass and things like that. Well, of course they are. Why do you think that means what modern

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Rome thinks it means? Read the early fathers within their own context.

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And even when you find them believing things, I can read Augustine and I can appreciate many of the things that Augustine said, especially when he's fighting against Pelagius.

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But when he was fighting against Donatism, he said a lot of dumb things. I mean, he's the one who utilized

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Jesus' language, compelled them to come in, to allow the emperor in Rome to send troops to suppress the

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Donatists. That's not what Jesus was talking about. Do I have to somehow go, well, the great church father

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Augustine said it, therefore, maybe that's what Jesus meant. What? What is this?

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What happened to discernment? It is an amazing thing to watch.