Ignatius of Antioch: Who Reads Him in Context? (#4)

Alpha & Omega Ministries

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:13

Let no one be misled, even the heavenly beings and the glory of angels and the rulers, both visible and invisible, are also subject to judgment if they do not believe in the blood of Christ.

00:31

Now if you stop right there, what's he talking about? Is he talking about sacraments?

00:37

Is he talking about transubstantiation? Up to this point, what is the consistent interpretation?

00:43

That Jesus Christ truly was flesh and bone. That he shed blood upon the cross of Calvary.

00:52

That he was truly man, right? I mean, if this was the end of the letter as we saw it, let's say that the epistle was lost and the last page fell off or something like that, and it ended here, would anyone reading what came before come to this section and understand anything other than what has been said all the way up to this point?

01:23

I don't think so. So that is very important to recognize.

01:31

They do not believe in the blood of Christ. The one who accepts this, let him accept it. Do not let a high position make anyone proud for faith and love or anything.

01:38

Nothing is preferable to them. Now note well those who hold heretical opinions about the grace of Jesus Christ which came to us.

01:49

Note how contrary they are to the mind of God. Now who is he talking about? Is this shifting over to someone new?

01:55

Is this some new context? Some new false teachers? No, of course not. When he talks about the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, he is still talking about the incarnate

02:05

Lord, the connection between the fact that if he is not truly human, there is no gospel, there is no salvation, you can't have a suffering

02:13

Messiah who only seems to suffer but doesn't really suffer, etc., etc. They have no concern for love, none for the widow, none for the orphan, none for the oppressed, none for the prisoner or the one released, none for the hungry or thirsty.

02:27

Now he is saying these false teachers, they are just like the ones described in scripture. Look at 2

02:33

Timothy 3, the description of those people there is very similar to this. False teachers, they sneak into homes, they take captive women who are laden down with sins and they are always teaching and they never come to acknowledge the truth, and so on and so forth.

02:50

And then all of a sudden, no introduction, nothing whatsoever to say, okay,

02:56

I am shifting subjects now, anything like that. Here comes the quote.

03:04

They abstained from the Eucharist in prayer because they refused to acknowledge that the Eucharist is the flesh of our

03:10

Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the Father by his goodness raised up. Now if there had never been a doctrine of transubstantiation, if there had never been a fourth

03:24

Lateran council, and think about it, did these words have a particular meaning in the year 200, say 100 years after they were written?

03:34

Of course they did. Can we know that meaning without reference to something that happened a thousand years later?

03:41

Well, we should be able to. If words and language communicates anything, this had a meaning when it was written.

03:48

Should we interpret these words in light of what happened a thousand years later? No, not if we want to be fair to Ignatius.

03:54

And so if that had never happened, what would these words mean? Well, remember,

04:01

Ignatius is warning against false teachers. He's saying, don't bring them in, don't greet them, don't meet them.

04:09

He's describing them and now he gives us another description of them. And it's one thing to say they don't care for widows, they don't care for the poor, you know, you can't always see that part.

04:20

But there's a way of detecting these false teachers. There's something they won't do. They abstain.

04:28

They will not participate in the Eucharist and prayer.

04:35

Now Eucharist is a wonderful biblical term. It's a wonderful biblical term. It really is.

04:42

It's been stolen from us because of its misuse within Roman Catholicism and the attachments that have been made.

04:48

But it just simply means the giving of thanksgiving and became attached to the supper and to the giving of thanks to God for the sufferings of Jesus Christ.

04:58

The wonderful word. And so the early church had the Eucharist and prayer. This was part and parcel of their service, of their worship.

05:07

But the Docetics will not partake in that. Why? Why would a Docetic refuse to partake in the life of the church where you have the remembrance and proclamation of the true body and blood and suffering of Christ?

05:26

Well, it's obvious. When Jesus would say, this is my body, this is my blood.

05:32

When he institutes the supper and he gives the bread and the wine, and this is the same words that Paul uses in 1

05:40

Corinthians chapter 11, and you have the entire establishment of the supper and the anamnesis, the remembrance of Christ therein.

05:51

If you don't believe he had flesh and blood, you're not going to participate in something that is based upon the reality of those things.

06:01

And so here is a means, Smyrnians, of recognizing these false teachers. They abstain from the

06:08

Eucharist and prayer. Why? Because they refuse to acknowledge that the

06:14

Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ. Why would they do that? Because they don't believe in transubstantiation?

06:21

No, because Jesus Christ didn't have flesh, which suffered for our sins and which the

06:29

Father by his goodness raised up. Remember, the Gnostics, the Dosetics, what was it that in Acts 17 caused the people, they listened to Paul up to a certain point, and then

06:41

Paul said one word, and that one word made them go, oh come on,

06:48

Paul, who is this babbler? What nuttiness is that? What one word was it? Anastasis.

06:55

And what's that? Resurrection. See, to them that was absolutely, positively silly.

07:02

Silly! Why would it be silly? Because Anastasis means that which died coming to life again.

07:11

And for the Greeks, for a dualist, and for the Dosetics, salvation was being freed from the evil physical body.

07:21

And so the idea of resurrection, the idea of Jesus' flesh being raised again, not to be made present through some magical ceremony, but raised to the right hand of the

07:38

Father, that's what Augustine taught. That's why Augustine said that the church on earth is deprived of the physical presence of Christ because his physical body is in heaven.

07:52

And so that's why they would not participate in this. Not because they were denying transubstantiation in the mass, a concept completely foreign to Ignatius, nowhere to be found within this letter, nowhere to be found within the worldview.

08:12

The reason of their rejection goes back to their rejection of the physicality of the

08:18

Incarnation, the Resurrection, and that is the only thing that you can honestly and with integrity derive from reading