10 - Diognetus - Ignatius

This is actually the second Sunday school class I have taught this morning. I taught a church history

Sunday school class for a church in Minneapolis at 7 o 'clock this morning via Skype.

That was the first time I've done that, so we've been up for a while today. And since I've got both services, we're going to be doing a lot of talking today.

So that was interesting. I believe this is our tenth class on church history, and we're still looking at the apostolic fathers.

We'll spend most of our time today looking at Ignatius, but before then, I want to look at a small fragment.

Difficult to know exactly. We don't know who wrote it. We don't know when, really, it was written.

There are a number of guests, pretty much in the second century all the way through to the time of Constantine.

Probably the best guess would be around 150ish, so maybe a little bit after Ignatius.

There's no name attached. It's not complete. It's simply called the Epistle to Diognetus.

Some people call it Mothetes, because the author does call himself a disciple, which is Mothetes in Greek.

I think it's one of the more important fragments, and I think once I read to you this section, you'll see why.

I would think it's one of the more important fragments. This is section 9.

We only have 10 sections, so it's toward the end. But just hear these words from the

Epistle to Diognetus. Having thus planned everything already in his mind with his son, he permitted us during the former time to be borne along by disorderly impulses as we desired, led astray by pleasures and lusts, not at all because he took delight in our sins, but because he bore with us, not because he approved the past season of iniquity, but because he was creating the present season of righteousness, that being convicted in the past time by our own deeds as unworthy of life, we might now be made deserving by the goodness of God, and having made clear our inability to enter into the kingdom of God of ourselves, might be enabled by the ability of God.

And when our iniquity had been fully accomplished, and had been made perfectly manifest, that punishment and death were expected as its recompense, and the season came which

God had ordained, when henceforth he should manifest his goodness and power, oh, the exceeding great kindness and love of God, he hated us not, neither rejected us, nor bore us malice, but was longsuffering and patient, and in pity for us, took upon himself our sins, and himself parted with his own son as a ransom for us, the holy for the lawless, the guileless for the evil, the just for the unjust, the incorruptible for the corruptible, the immortal for the mortal, for what else but his righteousness would have covered our sins?

In whom was it possible for us lawless and ungodly men to have been justified, save only in the

Son of God? Oh, the sweet exchange, oh, the inscrutable creation, oh, the unexpected benefits, that the iniquity of many should be concealed in one righteous man, and the righteousness of one should justify many that are iniquitous.

Having then in the former time demonstrated the inability of our nature to obtain life, and having now revealed a savior able to save even creatures which have no ability, he willed that for both reasons we should believe in his goodness, and should regard him as nurse, father, teacher, counselor, physician, mind, light, honor, glory, strength, and life.

Once again, it is very common for us to hear from people that things we have come to believe and hold firmly to in regards to God's electing grace, justification by faith, imputation of sin, the great exchange, these things, that these were not believed on in the early church.

Well, they may not have been themes of the epistle of Barnabas or the shepherd of Hermas or something like that, but that doesn't mean there weren't people who didn't believe these things.

And very clearly, these are words that you would not be surprised to find being preached in a

Reformed Bible conference today, to be perfectly honest with you. I mean, you had everything there.

You had God's purposes. You had God's sovereign decrees. You had the sinfulness of man.

You had the inability of man. You have imputation. You have substitution.

You have justification. In whom was it possible for us lawless and ungodly men to have been justified, save only in the

Son of God? Oh, the sweet exchange. Oh, the inscrutable creation. Oh, the unexpected benefits that the iniquity of many should be concealed in one righteous man.

The righteousness of one should justify many of their iniquities. This is Romans. This is meaningful gospel theology expressed probably sometime in the middle of the second century.

Unfortunately, it's fragmentary. We don't know who Diognetus was. We don't know who the author was, things like that.

But when you hear, because I'm afraid because of the advent of the

Internet and things like that, things are just repeated so often they become accepted as if they're truthful.

And very often we are told that these doctrines developed at a later time.

That just simply isn't true. I have a feeling Friday night I'm going to hear that repeated in regards to God's sovereignty and salvation in a certain debate

I'm doing in Southern California on Friday. But as common as it is, there is very clear evidence that that is not the case at all.

And the documentation is there. Now again, what we have is very fragmentary during this time period.

After the completion of the New Testament, it's very fragmentary. And so I just remind you of what it would be like if 2 ,000 years from now, all electronic versions of our communication stuff had been wiped out by some massive

EMP or something. And someone digs up the remains of the

Berean Christian bookstore and determines this was an ancient Christian library. It's almost as bad as when you think about it.

We've dug up some garbage pits in Egypt and have attempted to create the ancient world's theology out of a garbage pit.

There might be some parallels there when you think about it. But 2 ,000 years from now, people would be thinking that Benny Hinn and Joyce Meyer were the leading theological lights of the day.

And I guess in some churches that would be true, but that would not actually provide a meaningfully balanced understanding of Christianity in our day.

So we get these snippets and we can look at them. And when

I read these words, here's someone who is very firmly rooted in New Testament teaching, not just quoting from Romans and Galatians and things like that, but understanding the relationship between them.

And if this is as early as 150 AD, how can anyone maintain this wasn't being taught?

Now, were issues such as the atonement, substitution, the nature of justification, the key disputed issues of the day?

No, they weren't. Disputation and debate brings clarity.

And these were not the primary issues that you don't really start getting into some of this until the

Pelagian controversy in regards to such things as original sin and issues like that.

So could you find a number of counter citations from other pieces of history?

You could. Unless you're trying to turn everybody in the early church into yourself, that shouldn't be surprising.

Because you look at what's available in literature today and you're going to have the good, the bad, the ugly, everything in between.

You're going to be able to find it. And so it shouldn't surprise us that in light of what has come down to us.

And remember, undoubtedly there were other books that were written, but if the Romans were destroying the manuscripts of scripture, a

Roman soldier can't tell the difference between the Didache and the Epistle of James.

So it's really not surprising at all that the literary remains of the period of time when the church is under persecution, which is from Nero in about 64 all the way up to the

Peace of the Church in AD 313. It comes and goes. It ebbs and flows.

We'll talk more about it. But it's not surprising in light of especially the empire -wide persecution taking place between 250 and 313 that so much

Christian literature was destroyed. What's actually surprising is that we have as much of it as we do. When you think about the writing materials and all the wars that have taken place.

Is someone sending you and me subliminal messages, Brother Callahan? Check these shirts out.

I mean, what is this? I even bought this shirt this week just because I wanted to wear a green shirt this morning.

So I'm not sure if there's something going on here, but I just noticed that and I'm just sort of like, wow. But you don't have a bow tie on.

So there's at least no one will confuse us for twins in that way.

But anyway, I just looked over there and was like, whoa, what is this? Need to start sending notes out to the elders.

OK, what color are we not all wearing at the same time this week? This is getting a little weird.

Anyway, so there's the Epistle to Diognetus. You know, write that one down someplace and and, you know, go from there.

Now, Ignatius, Ignatius of, ouch, Ignatius of Antioch. For those of you who know, me and a bee got together on early, early

Friday morning. I was trying to do a hundred mile bike ride, left two o 'clock in the morning. Remember what happened

Friday morning? When I left, the radar was perfectly clear. It didn't stay that way.

And so I was trying, I was trying to outrun the rain and running around, dodging thunderstorms and stuff.

And somewhere along the lines, me and a bee got together. And this is actually looking much better in comparison to that.

It's only about twice the size of the other hand now. It was much, much worse yesterday. It was just, oh, it was disgusting.

It was, it was just like, get this thing away from me. It's disgusting. They tell me that you, the more you get bit, the more you get stung, the worse your reaction gets each time.

So I'm a little concerned about that because this happened really fast. And if it happens again,

I may have to start carrying something with me to keep myself alive. I don't know. Anyway, it's it's much better today.

It still looks really freaky. So don't stare at it. Anyway, Ignatius.

Ignatius is, his dates are about A .D. 35.

So he's born probably right around the time of the death of Christ. And he dies 107 -108

A .D. He was the Bishop of Antioch.

And of course, Antioch, major, major center of the

Christian faith. The New Testament plainly tells us he was martyred under the

Emperor Trajan. He was condemned to death by the Roman authorities and sent to Rome.

While on his way to Rome, he wrote seven epistles, six to churches and one to Polycarp.

There are other Ignatian writings that were not written by Ignatius.

So it was not uncommon, especially in the first five to 800 years of church history, for people to write what we would call forgeries, where if they wanted their message to have more authority, they would attach the name of a greatly respected individual to that letter.

And this does raise the issue of the use of forgeries in church history.

There is a long, long history of this, unfortunately. And one of the reasons that forgeries were able to have success up until the

Enlightenment, the Renaissance, period of Reformation, was because of the concept of anachronism that I've already mentioned to you.

Especially during the medieval period, once people developed, well, once people basically lost the opportunity of meaningful education and literacy, and travel, you know, the

Pax Romana had allowed for a tremendous amount of travel. Once the average person did not move more than seven miles any one direction from where they were born, the world became a pretty small place.

And it became difficult to detect anachronism.

If you think the world has always been the way it is now, and you read something that was originally supposed to have been written 700 years earlier, and you see elements that you'd be familiar with in your experience, you just assume that if you're familiar with something in your experience, it's always been.

And so you wouldn't have the ability to recognize if someone had made a mistake, and in their forgery had assumed that people 700 years earlier would have known about X, Y, or Z.

Once anachronism became recognized, then you had the beginning of critical analysis of ancient texts.

So, for example, we're going to run into later a fellow by the name of Lorenzo Valla. And Valla, a child of the

Renaissance, I don't know if he was just riding through the fields one day,

I don't know if an apple fell on his head, I don't know what exactly prompted this, but Valla was going, you know, we have a lot of copies of Latin Vulgate.

And we keep making copies of Latin Vulgate because we need copies of Latin Vulgate. But Jerome wrote commentaries on pretty much all the books of the

Bible. And we don't use Jerome's commentaries all that much. So it'd be really interesting to look at Jerome's commentaries and see what text

Jerome has in his commentaries. And compare that to what we have in Latin Vulgate and see if anything's changed.

Because there'd be more steps of copying in the Vulgate than there would be in Jerome's commentaries, which, you know, most people aren't sitting around reading all day long.

And so there'd be fewer steps, fewer generations of copying in Jerome's commentaries.

And so he set about doing this. Can you imagine what an exciting project that was? Especially when you have,

I'm sorry? Yes. Oh, yeah, okay, you're weird. And so can you imagine doing it without electrical lights and showers and things like that?

I mean, I just can't imagine what. Control F. Control F? Fine. Oh, oh,

I was going to say, what? Yeah, it would have been a pretty major project.

But people didn't have much else. You know, they didn't have to keep checking Facebook and Twitter and stuff like that.

So for some reason they got things done. And so he does this study and he finds out, you know what?

The Latin Vulgate we have today has been changed. Now, it's not like some, when we say changed, it's not like it was originally about somebody other than Jesus or something.

But there have been textual corruptions in the Vulgate. Even in the official version the church uses.

But so controversial would have been his conclusions that he refused to publish them because he didn't want to die.

He didn't want to get tied to a stake and be turned into a crispy critter. And he only shared his conclusions with some people.

And one of those people that read his work was Desiderius Erasmus. And Erasmus published

Vala's work posthumously. And I think under an assumed name, too. Because Erasmus didn't want to die either.

But this was just, this way of thinking was just coming back.

It's not that it had never existed before. The Greeks and Romans understood things like this. But there was a reason why it's called the

Dark Ages. And there was a collapse of classical education in the vast majority of Europe.

And so, anyway, how in the world did I get onto all of that? I've forgotten.

That was an interesting rabbit trail that we just ran down there. So that's fine. Oh, I was talking about the fact that Ignatius, yes.

Wait a minute. Let me make the connection and then I'll answer your question. I was talking about the fact that there are pseudo -Ignatian epistles.

And we can recognize them now as not having been written by the true Ignatius. So be careful.

Again, you'll see people quoting from that material online as if it represents Ignatius. And it really doesn't.

The Jehovah's Witnesses have done that. They have a long history of doing that. And you'll see why here in a moment because of Ignatius' actual teachings being utterly incompatible with anything the

Jehovah's Witnesses believe about Jesus. Yes. Right.

Right. And Vala went, wow, this is interesting. It's changed.

And, you know, the change is due to ecclesiastical usage and so on and so forth.

But, yeah, he, and to even think that way, indicated that the Renaissance was impacting the way that men were thinking.

And obviously we know, we'll talk about this later on, Enlightenment, the Renaissance, positive and negative.

There were positive results. We have much, I think, stronger biblical scholarship as a result, but also negative because it really did lead fundamentally in thought to what we see in Europe now, which is a fully secular state and a fully secular worldview.

So, anyway, so what letters do we have? Well, let's see if we've got a full list up here that I can just rip them off to you here.

No, we don't. So we have, he wrote to the

Ephesians, to the Magnesians, to the

Troleans, the Romans, the Smyrnians, and to Polycarp.

And the Philadelphians? Ah, and the Philadelphians.

I skipped over it. It's a short one. Lots and lots of stuff worth reading in these letters.

But let me just give you some of the key ones. In his epistle to Polycarp, and I was reading that last stuff, spend a lot of money on these things, might as well use them so you can see.

Ah, look at that. To Polycarp, section three, await him that is above every season, the eternal, the invisible, who became visible for our sake, the impalpable, the impassable, who suffered for our sake, who endured in all ways for our sake.

Now remember, this is approximately 107 or 108 AD. So the very beginning of the second century.

And almost anywhere you go, especially in public universities, sorry, we know, we know about the history of people in public universities.

You're going to be told rather confidently, based upon a certain accepted theory, that high views of Christology, high views of Christ developed over time.

And in fact, remember I think I've shown you in previous presentations a little manuscript

P52. It's just a little, about yea big. It's written on both sides.

It's from John chapter 18. Back in the 1870s, if you had gone to university in Germany, you would have been told very confidently that scholarship had clearly come to understand that the

Gospel of John was written no earlier, no earlier than 170, 180 AD. So 150 years after the death of Christ.

And why? Well, because we understand now the concept of development of theology.

Evolution. It was Darwin applied to mental thought.

And given the high, high view of Christ in John, we know that took many decades to develop.

And so John was not written by a contemporary of Jesus. It had to have been written much, much later than that.

Then in the 1930s, you know, a guy's thumbing through fragments in a cardboard box in the basement of a library in London and comes across this little fragment.

And when it's dated by the four greatest living papyrologists separate from one another to about 125

AD, and it's the Gospel of John. And ironically, the section where Pilate and Jesus are talking, what is truth?

You know, so much, so much for the theories, because now, you know, you can't have a fragment of the

Gospel of John that's 50 years earlier than when John was written. And so all the assured results of scholarship went out the window and John gets pushed back at least to the very end of the first century.

And all those theories go out. So when you listen to this right around that same time period, 108, you have in Ignatius an incredibly highly developed

Christology. An incredibly highly developed Christology. And you see that in the words to Polycarp to the

Smyrnians. Section one, I give glory to Jesus Christ, the

God who bestowed such wisdom upon you. Jesus Christ, the

God who bestowed such wisdom upon you. Section two, for he suffered all these things for our sakes that we might be saved, and he suffered truly, as also he raised himself truly.

So Christ's role in his own resurrection. Jesus says I have authority to take my life back up again.

Here you have that expressed by Ignatius to the Smyrnians.

Section six, let no man be deceived, even the heavenly beings and the glory of the angels and the rulers visible and invisible.

If they believe not in the blood of Christ who is God, judgment awaiteth them also.

So there's only one way of salvation, it's the blood of Christ who is God. Wow, do

I have time to look at that right now? Let me mention this quickly because I don't, if you want to delve into this more fully, on my

YouTube page there are about, lost track how many, three, four, five videos where I have dealt with this subject in more depth.

But in our encounters with modern

Roman Catholic apologists, Ignatius becomes one of the battlegrounds.

Why? Well, again, as I said, I don't have any vested interest in making

Ignatius into a mirror image of me, because he wasn't. But the dogmatic teachings of the

Roman Catholic Church, at least in the past, frequently asserted that their novel teachings are actually the ancient teaching of the church.

And so when your dogma says, this has always been the way it is, then you've got to go back to these earliest sources and find evidence.

And so you end up reading the early church fathers through the lens of, I am told this is true, so I need to find this in the early church fathers.

Especially when it comes to the concept of the Eucharistic sacrifice of the

Mass, which is the central aspect of Roman Catholic teaching. And so, when writing to the

Smyrnians, Ignatius makes reference to certain false teachers.

Now, we know pretty much who these false teachers were. They were the early Gnostics. And we've talked about Gnosticism many times before.

I have emphasized the fact that Gnosticism was a dualistic system.

That which is physical is evil. That which is spiritual is good. So, Jesus becomes a phantom.

He only seems to have a physical body. Dachain, he only seems to have. So they're called the

Docetics, who said that Jesus manifested what looked like a physical body, but, you know, if Jesus and the

Apostle are walking down the seashore, there's only one set of tracks. Not because Jesus is carrying the disciples, because Jesus doesn't leave tracks in sand, because he only seems to have a physical body.

And so, if the New Testament writers are warning about this, then it's not surprising that the generation thereafter is still dealing with this.

And so, here's section 6.

But mark ye those who hold strange doctrine touching the grace of Jesus Christ which came to us, how that they are contrary to the mind of God.

They have no care for love, none for the widow, none for the orphan, none for the afflicted, none for the prisoner, none for the hungry or thirsty.

They abstain from Eucharist, which means Thanksgiving, and prayer, because they allow not that the

Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which flesh suffered for our sins, and which the

Father of His goodness raised up. They therefore that gainsay the good gift of God perish by their questionings.

But it were expedient for them to have love, that they may also rise again. It is therefore meet that ye should abstain from such, and not speak of them privately or in public, but should give heed to the prophets, and especially the gospel, wherein the passion is shown unto us, and the resurrection is accomplished.

So, people look at this, and they take the developed theology of transubstantiation, a term that does not appear until after 1000

AD, that requires Aristotelian categories of accidents and substance even make sense.

Read it back in here and go, ah, see, right there. The heretics denied transubstantiation.

That's what they're denying. Actually, the heretics denied that Jesus had a physical body. Therefore, they do not partake of the supper, because why?

Well, why would you? You can't, how can you commemorate the body and blood of the

Lord Jesus Christ when he didn't have body and blood? That was, if you're being fair with Ignatius and go, alright, so, heresies in the days of Ignatius would be what?

We have no evidence that anyone was teaching the concept of transubstantiation.

By the way, please, always differentiate, especially those of you, I know a lot of you have Roman Catholic friends and relatives.

You must differentiate between two phrases, real presence and transubstantiation.

Those are two different things. They use them synonymously. They are not synonymous. In the early church, you have a strong belief that Christ is truly present with his people in the supper, but that does not mean they believe in transubstantiation.

Since Rome has now brought those two things together, they anachronistically read it that way. But you see, in the mind of the early church, well, how many of you are former

Roman Catholics? Okay, that's about a third, a quarter, a quarter to a third.

If you're familiar with Eucharistic practice in Roman Catholic churches, the host, once it has been consecrated and has been changed into the body, soul, blood, and divinity of Jesus Christ, is kept in a special container.

The tabernacle, monstrance, pics, ciborium, there's different words you use, whether it's mobile or fixed or if it's set up for adoration and so on and so forth.

Very, very complicated. After 1100, 1200 or so, there's this explosion of debate and confusion about what to do if, for example, you drop a piece of the consecrated bread.

What do you do? Well, what if you drop it and a mouse grabs it and runs off?

Well, the mouse has now got God. Okay? We've got to do something about this. Or if you spill some of the wine, the priest has to lick it off the floor because this is the blood of God.

Stories start developing about bees that would steal a piece of the host and put it in the center of their hive and you'd open the hive up and all the bees are bowing to the host and the hive and just all sorts, which you find none of that in the early church.

Nothing. Nothing like that in the early church because they just did not have that idea. In the early church, they would take the host to the sick who could not come to church.

But they didn't carry it along, they didn't worship it, and once you distributed it, if you had anything left over that no one wanted to eat, you threw it out.

So they didn't treat it as if they were carrying God around. The point was that Jesus is truly present with his people in the supper.

However, that didn't mean that the substance of the bread and wine had been changed.

That is a much, much, much, much later development. And so, you know, every once in a while,

I'll flip on over to EWTN 1310 here in Phoenix. And I was actually,

I need to remember, I haven't written it down, I've got to download last Friday's Catholic Answers live program, the first hour.

Because there was a guy on, and this guy called in. I could tell the guy was sort of going, you know, don't really believe this.

But he says, so if a priest leaves the Roman Catholic Church and is defrocked or leaves of his own free will, are you telling me that he can still turn bread and wine into the body of God?

And the guy says, you bet. Yeah, exactly. Because once you're ordained as a priest, the terminology they use is there is a mark placed upon the soul where you are given the sacramental power of performing the miracle of transubstantiation, and it cannot be taken away.

So even if you become a heretic, you still have the power to change the elements in the body, soul, blood, and divinity of Jesus.

So that was Friday I was listening to that as I was getting gas at QT. Yes?

Well, we'll get to that. We will cover that probably sometime in 2017. No, seriously.

You know, I'm going to Brisbane, Sydney, New Zealand. Yeah, it'll probably be 2017.

I've got a little more traveling yet to do this year. But just very, very briefly, there's more than one understanding amongst modern day

Lutherans, because you need to understand that there are liberal Lutherans, conservative Lutherans, and then historically, there are many

Luthers. And modern Lutheranism is much more modern Melanchthonianism than it is

Lutheranism. Philip Melanchthon was Luther's successor. And in many ways, modern

Lutheranism is more Melanchthon than it is Luther. But very briefly, in general, and you're going to find

Lutherans are going to disagree with this, but in general, the concept is that Lutherans believe what's called the ubiquity of the body of Christ.

They believe that the characteristics of his divine nature transfer over to his human nature.

So that his physical body becomes omnipresent. So that Jesus is present in, above, and around the elements.

So the elements are not changed. There's no transubstantiation. But because of the ubiquity of the body of Christ, Jesus is physically present in the supper because his physical body is omnipresent.

And so it's frequently been called consubstantiation instead of transubstantiation. And that's why in the

Marburg Colloquy, 14 out of 15 points of theology were agreed upon by the Lutherans and the

Zwinglians, but that was number 15. And allegedly Luther wrote on his desk,

Hoc es corpus meum, this is my body, and would not, and it all blew up over that one issue.

So that's what you're referring to. What you're referring to there. Yes. Yes. Cannibalism.

Well, the response was to affirm the spiritual presence of Christ, but it never crossed anyone's mind.

You've got to remember, the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation requires you to be a student of Aristotle.

That everything has accidents, which is what we perceive it by externally, and substance, which is what makes it real, but which is not accessible to our senses.

That's not, that wasn't, that wasn't in their world at that point in time. Plato had sort of,

Aristotle would come back into Western thinking through the Muslims and our interaction with the

Muslims. So it wouldn't cross their mind to even address that because that's not, they wouldn't be interpreting the allegation within that context.

So their answer was spiritual, not physical. And they didn't even address the rest of it because it would be another 700 years down the road before someone came up with, let's combine

Aristotelian categories with Christian theology and voila, all of a sudden we have this whole new thing, which has bees worshipping pieces of bread and hives.

Yeah, that's where it went. So, okay. Wow. We jumped off of Ignatius there and didn't get very far, but we will, we will press on with the,

I put my piece of, I'm going to use the piece of papyri that I passed around as my bookmark from now on so we know where we are and won't get lost that way.

So let's close with a time of word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we do thank you once again for the mercy and grace you've shown us and giving us this opportunity to gather in freedom and peace and comfort to consider the history of your work with your people.

Lord, we ask that we would learn with wisdom. We would be able to look at our own situation and be able to be wiser in how we handle our interactions with the world by looking at what those before us have gone through and how they respond.