Bishop of Suh-myrna

Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, writes to the church of Philippi with mostly Scriptural encouragements and instructions for its members as I have read so far.

Philippi have followed the example of true love, to believe without seeing, and they will enter into joy unspeakable and full of glory.  A reminder: by grace they are saved, not of works but by the will of God through Jesus Christ.

Because of God's generous grace, Polycarp calls the church to gird up their loins as those who have forsaken the vain, empty talk and error of the multitude and who have believed in Him who raised up our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead.  At this, Polycarp confesses that he nor anyone can come up to the wisdom of the blessed and glorified Paul.

He goes into one more chapter of instructions before addressing all the positions in the Philippian church.  He reminds them that the love of money is the root of all evils.  Since we brought nothing into the world, and we carry nothing out, let us arm ourselves with the armor of righteousness.  "They are the altar of God."  I fully concur that every true follower of Christ is an altar to God.  He constantly must sacrifice his desires to live according to His righteousness.  He is a walking sacrifice and also a representative of Christ himself.

To the deacons of Philippi: be blameless before the face of his righteousness, as servants of God and not men.  Be temperate in all things.  "If we live worthily of him, 'we shall also reign together with him.'"  I interrupt this thought to express that Polycarp believes that those who receive salvation will live worthily of God, doing good works and obeying Christ.  He does not end that thought there: "provided only we believe."  He leaves no room for back door salvation for sincere people.  They will reign with Christ if only they believe.  This goes against today's Pope who denies the real need for Christ in saying that all people will be saved.  He'd be wise to listen to the blessed bishop of Smyrna

To the young men: they are also to be blameless in all things, to preserve purity.  Virgins are to walk in a blameless and pure conscience.  He addresses the youth group; young men and women are to walk blamelessly as the deacons do.  They must strive for purity from libertinism and always think of the word "blameless." 

Finally presbyters: He wants them to be compassionate and merciful to all, to bring back those who wander, visit the sick, widow, orphan, poor.  As presbyters are trained ministers in the church, they must provide for that which is becoming in the sight of God and man.  The deacons carry out the compassionate services of the church while the presbyters continue to teach proper theology and proper forgiveness.

All church members should be zealous in pursuit of that which is good.

As a disciple of John, Polycarp recalls the woes that John pronounced on church heretics.  "Whoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is antichrist."  Whoever does not confess testimony of the cross is "of the devil."  Whoever perverts God's word to his own lusts and denies resurrection or judgment is "first-born of Satan."  These are not mere harsh words but the truth.  People come into the church all the time to discourage people from enjoying their security in Christ's salvation and redirect the to look toward everything else for meaning.  Some deny Jesus's physical reality, some deny the Gospel.  Some insult his sacrifice by denying a resurrection or a final judgment.  Without judgment, they can continue to sin and justify it somehow because God loves all people.  Without a resurrection, there is no accountability for this life.

Wherefore, forsaking the vanity of many, let us return to the Word handed down to us and continue in fasting and prayer.  Don't listen to the charlatans, but persevere in our hope and earnest of our righteousness which is Jesus Christ.  Imitate his patience.  That takes a lot of waiting and no instant results, if any results.  Our goal is to hold Christ as our God and Savior, and not to try to imagine a world without his sovereignty.  This loyalty could possibly mean martyrdom as it did for Ignatius, Zosimus, and Rufus.  Those three had not run in vain but achieved the resurrection of the dead.

Except for a line from the Apocrypha, "Alms delivers from death" which really contradicts the idea that Christ delivers from death and nothing else, but continues his chorus of "blamelessness" as a testimony to the pagans. 

Polycarp is Next

I will go through Polycarp's letter to the Philippians next.  He was the bishop of Smyrna.  He and Ignatius both learned under John.  He taught Irenaeus who gives the best information about him.

He is known for being martyred for the faith at age 86.  The account of his martyrdom is also in this literature.  It has some supernatural things that may or may not be legend, but it's plausible as this wasn't too far after the age of the Apostles.  He is another one of my favorite people in ancient church history.

Mathetes: Knowledge and Life

Mathetes started chapter 10 of his letter to Diognetus proclaiming that to receive faith, a person must receive knowledge from the Father.

I thought he would continue with other steps, but he moves on to the Son and only implies the Spirit.

"For who that is rightly taught and begotten by the loving Word" would not want to converse with the Word and his disciples?  The Father sends is knowledge through Christ whose words are preserved in Holy Scripture and who is present in our corporate worship.  Jesus is always new.  He is "ever born afresh in the hearts of the saints." 

Mathetes lists all the results of Christ's lordship in the church.  He talks of Jesus, "through whom the Church is enriched, and grace, widely spread, increases in the saints, furnishing understanding, revealing mysteries, announcing times, rejoicing over the faithful, giving to those that seek, by whom the limits of faith are not broken through, nor the boundaries set by fathers passed over..." and he goes on and on.  There is no church without Christ.  He is everything to the Church; our supreme Lord and only Redemptor.

Mathetes ends his letter with an interesting idea.  I don't know if I agree with it but it is interesting.  He talks about the Garden of Eden and the two trees God planted in the center: Knowledge and Life.  God forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of Knowledge.  Then, Satan tricked them into disobeying God and stripped them naked before him.  According to Mathetes, knowledge and life are interconnect.  There is not one without the other.  He reveals to knowledge the way to life.  I think it is something to ponder.  What if Adam and Eve had obeyed God and never eaten from Knowledge?  Would they still have Life?  Perhaps God would have given them fruit from the tree as the days went by in Eden.  Maybe he did not want them grabbing the fruit for themselves.  Knowledge is a gift from the Father.  Anselm is right, we believe so that we may know.

Mathetes and proper worship

The letter is addressed to Diognetus, and according to Mathetes, he desires to learn the mode of worshiping God prevalent among the 1st century Christians.  Much like today, the primitive church worshiped in a variety of ways.  However, were these ways orthodox, approved by God, or are they pagan rituals incorporated into the true faith, thus corrupting it?

"Come, then, after you have freed yourself from all prejudices possessing your mind, and laid aside what you have been accustomed to..."  Growing up in church in Conyers, I was accustomed to a God who loves everybody the same way, who evangelizes to kids through pizza parties, who lets women preach as long as they believe the Scriptures, who gives fresh revelation to people, and who is too gentlemanly to get in the way of your free will.  When I grew up, I came to realize that some of that is true, but that most of this is consumer-driven to get people into church who will not respect Christ as the Sovereign Lord that he is. 

I was accustomed to women preachers and a very feminine faith.  The Bible shows how different men and women are, and men are to be the leaders of the Church.  They can let women assist them and enjoy their theological wealth, but men are the ones who are to lead the Church and return it to the system that saves all the elect men and women while still granting judgment where judgment is due.

Mathetes continues by recounting all the materials people worship even unaware.  There is the stone we tread on, brass, wood, silver, iron, earthenware.  In today's world it could be tattoos, cars, Kindles, rock music, Ipods, fun times, LifeWay, and so much more.  All of these idols are deaf, blind, and have no life.  They certainly cannot give or sustain life.

Mathetes narrows the standards more.  "Jews who worship God like pagans worship images are in error."  These people think that by rituals, offerings, contemplation, asceticism, traditional music, contemporary music, listening to non-Christian gurus who are nice but have no saving hope in Jesus, that they will impress God.  They do impress people who do not pay attention to God's command to not worship him like the pagans worship their gods (Deuteronomy 18).  They do not impress God.  Their hope is in everything but Jesus.  Jesus is the only one who can redeem you and bring you to God.

"You are sufficiently convinced that the Christians properly abstain from the vanity and error common to both Jews and Gentiles."  Christians stand out by their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life.  They consider themselves foreigners and sojourners in the lands where they were born with the hope that they belong to God's kingdom, not an earthly kingdom.  They do not destroy their offspring through everything from abortion to never spanking or disciplining their kids.  They know that "God, the Lord and Fashioner of all things...proved himself not merely a friend of mankind, but also long-suffering."

Nothing else could cover our sins but his righteousness.  The wicked and ungodly cannot be justified except by the Son of God.

"Having therefore convinced us in the former time that our nature was unable to attain to life, and having now revealed the Savior who is able to save even those things which is was impossible to save, by both these facts, he desired to lead us to trust in his kindness, to esteem him as our Nourisher, Father, Teacher, Counselor, Healer, our Wisdom, Light, Honor, Glory, Power, and Life."

He starts the next section with chapter 10 saying that people who desire such exclusive faith in Christ will receive first of all the knowledge of the Father.  The Father sends this knowledge and wisdom.  Mathetes will talk about the next steps soon.

Scholastics and Plato

The brilliant men of the Scholastic era divided into different schools of thought.  One sect followed Realism, based on Plato.  Plato believed that universals have an objective existence.  These things are only shadows of the unseen reality in another world.  Anselm took this to another level.  He became archbishop of Canterbury in 1093.  He is summed up in the statement, "I believe in order that I may know."

He is best known for developing Plato's ideas into the ontological argument for existence, and argument that sounds childish at first but one I have grown to love.  I will quote from the Cairns textbook.

"Man has many goods that he enjoys in life.  These goods are simply reflections of the one supreme Good through whom all exist.  Because infinite regress is unthinkable, the cause of all must be the One whom we call God."

"Anselm wrote that everyone has an idea of a perfect supreme being in his mind.  This idea must correspond to a reality that has an objective existence, for such a being lacking existence would not be perfect nor would it be that than which a greater cannot be conceived.  Because no greater idea than that of God as the perfect Supreme Being can be conceived, God must exist in reality."

Basically, everybody in the world has a concept of a perfect supreme being.  If they have this concept, then they must have that idea from a concrete evidence.  Therefore, God exists.  This also led to the idea that Christ's atonement was not a ransom to Satan, but a satisfaction of God's perfection which was violated by our sin.  It satisfied God's wrath.

Anselm lived from 1033 to 1109.  His ontological argument dominated the world until the time of Thomas Aquinas.  I think of recent days, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis has perfected the ontological argument in his apologetics about Noah's flood and dinosaurs/dragons.

Works righteousness or Bald Universalism?

I think this is one of those days I will simply have to take off my gauntlets and offend people that I dearly love.  I work alongside such people in fighting abortion and other social evils, and in doing so, I become attached to them, and I must be a true friend and proclaim what they do not want to hear.

I pray often for the Pope, that the Lord takes over his life and that he someday realizes that Christ has no vicar.  Until then, he is a charlatan, no matter how sincere.  Francis, however, now declares that all people can go to heaven even outside of the Church.

Even on a Roman Catholic standard, this should be blasphemy.  The pre-Vatican II belief of non-Roman Catholics being outside of salvation was more true to what the Bible teaches than the universal acceptance of all people at the expense of the truth.

So, here's a secret: Protestants and RCs alike preach works righteousness when they look to someone other than Christ for salvation.  And both sides of the argument are wrong.  If salvation is universal, then there's no reason to call people back to the mother Church.  There's no reason to oppose abortion or gay marriage because those people are basically good people and even victims.  There's really no reason to care for the poor and destitute because your intentions are at least honorable.

So, as a follower of Christ, do I not work to show my election?  Absolutely.  I go to church because there is no salvation outside of Catholicism.  I oppose abortion and gay marriage because I oppose people thinking that they know better than God how society should be organized.  I care for the poor and destitute because apart from grace, I am the same thing.  I cannot tolerate a universal shedding of Christ's blood for everybody without distinction because there are wicked people who will not see heaven.  And if Christ died for them, then it was a waste because their lives never changed and they will be in hell despite what Christ did for them.  No, there is no double jeopardy in hell, and Christ's atonement if not for everyone.  If it was, then we can rest and not care that people still live in atheism because they are basically good.

But we cannot go on pretending we believe the same thing and just try to get along.  Protestants and Roman Catholics believe significantly different things, and unless both sides accept God's only salvation through Christ alone, then we cannot be united.

Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus

I guess I will just reread all the ECFs of last year with hopes to read more of Philip Schaff's compilations afterward.  Next to bat is an anonymous epistle by a man who calls himself Mathetes.  He writes to another unknown man named Diognetus. 

Most people think that the author was another disciple of Paul, and that he did not live too long after the apostles had passed away.  People have guessed Justin Martyr, Clement, Apollos, and even Marcus Aurelius as authors.  Ultimately, people are not sure who wrote this or why he wrote to Diognetus.  I will simply have to read to find out if I agree or not.