Category — Patristic

It may seem paradoxical, but confessional faith maintains catholicity. The opposite of a fully engaged and rigorous framework of theology is simply chaos — intellectual, ecclesiastic and social. But, even worse, the unwillingness or suspicion towards any kind of confession ends with a sort of false humility that is in fact perfidious prevarication, as Cyprian so alliterally put it.

Tightening up is good. This is not to say that there will not be development and improvement. In fact, the tightening up process is where reformation happens. Jettisoning what has already been gained is not good. This is just the old radicals in robes again. They are father haters.

The trouble is at the social level, the place in which the conversation happens. The catholicity of the faith starts with the ecclesiastics, not the members of the church. Agreement and unity must begin with the bishops, as Cyprian put it:

“And this unity we ought firmly to hold and assert, especially those of us that are bishops who preside in the Church, that we may also prove the episcopate itself to be one and undivided. Let no one deceive the brotherhood by a falsehood: let no one corrupt the truth of the faith by perfidious prevarication. The episcopate is one, each part of which is held by each one for the whole”. — Treatise on Unity, Chapter 5

And the second commandment of the Teaching; You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, Exodus 20:13-14 you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, Exodus 20:15 you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft, you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten. You shall not covet the things of your neighbour, Exodus 20:17 you shall not forswear yourself, Matthew 5:34 you shall not bear false witness, Exodus 20:16 you shall not speak evil, you shall bear no grudge. You shall not be double-minded nor double-tongued; for to be double-tongued is a snare of death. Your speech shall not be false, nor empty, but fulfilled by deed. You shall not be covetous, nor rapacious, nor a hypocrite, nor evil disposed, nor haughty. You shall not take evil counsel against your neighbour. You shall not hate any man; but some you shall reprove, and concerning some you shall pray, and some you shall love more than your own life.
— Didache, Chapter 2

I love how direct and unqualified this is. Lord, make me more naive, as a child. Make me shrewd and innocent, make me tremble and rejoice. I hate this body of death. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Maranatha…

Psalm 19:2-3 contains what appears at first glance to be a contradiction.
Day to day pours forth speech,
And night to night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words;
Their voice is not heard.

The challenge is to clear up the apparent contradiction, while still maintaining the dialectic that is built into the poem — one which some translations try and flatten out with the non-existent qualifier “where” in verse 2. The language may seem paradoxical, but it is here that something special is found.

If verse 2 is understood as the denial of a kind of speech, that is the logo-centric type, the contradictory tension is lifted. In this regard, there is silence. The kind of speech which is the creational order is understood in a naive sense, as an immediate, intuitive knowledge that transcends the νοῦς. In this regard, it does pour forth speech, but not the kind heard by the ears or understood by our analytical powers.

The content of this kind of talk is found in verse 1:

The heavens are telling of the glory of God;
And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.

The content is the same — albeit the mode of transmission as well the receptor are different — and no less articulate and meaningful than the written Word.

“Now our very eyes and the Law of Nature teach us that God exists and that He is the Efficient and Maintaining Cause of all things: our eyes, because they fall on visible objects, and see them in beautiful stability and progress, immovably moving and revolving if I may so say; natural Law, because through these visible things and their order, it reasons back to their Author. For how could this Universe have come into being or been put together, unless God had called it into existence, and held it together? For every one who sees a beautifully made lute, and considers the skill with which it has been fitted together and arranged, or who hears its melody, would think of none but the lutemaker, or the luteplayer, and would recur to him in mind, though he might not know him by sight. And thus to us also is manifested That which made and moves and preserves all created things, even though He be not comprehended by the mind.”
— Gregory Nazianzen, The Second Theological Oration

“Woe to him that receives; for if one having need receives, he is guiltless; but he that receives not having need, shall pay the penalty, why he received and for what, and, coming into straits (confinement), he shall be examined concerning the things which he has done, and he shall not escape thence until he pay back the last farthing (Matthew 5:26). But also now concerning this, it has been said, Let your alms sweat in your hands, until you know to whom you should give“.
— Didache, Chapter One

“To me, there nothing more important in a preacher than that he should have a systematic theology, that he should know it and be well grounded in it. This systematic theology, this body of truth which is derived from the Scripture, should always be present as a background and as a controlling influence in his preaching”. — Martyn Lloyd-Jones*

“But when proper words make Scripture ambiguous, we must see in the first place that there is nothing wrong in our punctuation or pronunciation. Accordingly, if, when attention is given to the passage, it shall appear to be uncertain in what way it ought to be punctuated or pronounced, let the reader consult the rule of faith which he has gathered from the plainer passages of Scripture, and from the authority of the Church, and of which I treated at sufficient length when I was speaking in the first book about things. But if both readings, or all of them (if there are more than two), give a meaning in harmony with the faith, it remains to consult the context, both what goes before and what comes after, to see which interpretation, out of many that offer themselves, it pronounces for and permits to be dovetailed into itself”. — Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book III, 2:2

Lloyd-Jones is silent in regards to conciliar systematics, but Augustine was not. The silence is not a denial necessarily, just an assertion of the individuality that Lloyd-Jones prized so much. I think Lloyd-Jones would admit that he was dependent on church councils, despite himself.

*Thanks to Mr. Wilson for the quote from Lloyd-Jones. All italics mine.

“His epitaph is Athanasius contra mundum, “Athanasius against the world.” We are proud that our own country has more than once stood against the world. Athanasius did the same. He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, “whole and undefiled,” when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those “sensible” synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away”.

— CS Lewis, Introduction to On the Incarnation

“But for the searching of the Scriptures and true knowledge of them, an honourable life is needed, and a pure soul, and that virtue which is according to Christ; so that the intellect guiding its path by it, may be able to attain what it desires, and to comprehend it, in so far as it is accessible to human nature to learn concerning the Word of God. For without a pure mind and a modelling of the life after the saints, a man could not possibly comprehend the words of the saints”.
— Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 57:1-2

“We will begin with the creation of the world and with God its maker, for the first fact you must grasp is this: the renewal of the creation has been wrought by the self-same Word who made it in the beginning…

In order to affect this re-creation, however, He had first to do away with death and corruption. Therefore He assumed a human body, in order that in it death might once for all be destroyed, and that men might be renewed according to the image”.
— Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 1:1, 3:13

“Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day”.
— 2 Corinthians 4:16

What is apparent is that God does not simply erase us and start over, but remakes what is essentially new through the fall into something old again. God is a revivalist.

I quoted Irenaeus (c. 202), in a previous post regarding the question— one being asked by many people these days— “What is the Gospel?”. There are literally hundreds of answers floating around, and men are leading conferences based around the single question. The results? “Here’s my Gospel”… “Oh yeah, well here’s my Gospel”… and so it goes.

Any way, my point is, for some reason everyone wants to reduce the thing to an easily digestible series of steps or literary snippets. But, why did the Apostles not think this necessary? They just wrote the four accounts and left them to the church. They expected us to read them and digest the multi-faceted contents. In the totality of these four aspectual accounts, we get the Good News. Perhaps it is high-time that we do stop trying to reduce the size and substance of the four— even refuse to do “Gospel presentations”— and instead demand that the entirety of the Apostle’s testimony be heard. Otherwise, we are reducing the maximal nature of the Word of God. Just start reading and save your conference allowance for a good movie.

“τετράμορφον εὐανγγελιον” (fourfold or four-form good news)

Irenaeus did not so much abstract a short-hand definition of the Gospel, as point to the four books— Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — as being the Gospel.

In other words, the question, “What is the Gospel?” would be answered in this way: “These four books”. So, answering the question for someone would entail sitting down and reading aloud the four accounts. How revolutionary. Just read and interact with the text.

Paul, of course, gives us many instances of the shorthand version— but these are derived from the accounts of the four.