BEGINNINGS AND EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY#

Theology may be defined as rational reflection on the data of Christian faith. The basic teachings of the Christian faith had been proclaimed in the apostolic age. Those teachings were presented and some effort at interpreting them had been made in the New Testament documents. The Apostolic Fathers sought to preserve this faith and further interpret it.

The beginnings of Christian theology may be found in the Apologists of the second century, who sought to explain Christian teachings to non-Christians by using the philosophy of the day. At the turn from the second to the third century the Church Fathers furthered the process of philosophical reflection on Christian doctrines. Only now, in addition to addressing outsiders (they continued to write apologetic works), they wrote for those inside the church with a twofold purpose: to refute false teachers and to strengthen believers in their faith.

So, in broad terms, there is a progress in Christian literature:

• Addressing insiders by expounding the faith (New Testament and Apostolic Fathers)

• Addressing outsiders by using philosophy with little appeal to the New Testament (Apologists)

• Addressing insiders by using philosophy and rational arguments as well as dealing with the Bible as a whole in order to develop a theological understanding of Christian doctrine in opposition to heresy (fathers of the old catholic church).

As early participants in the development of Christian theology, the old catholic fathers often took positions that were found inadequate by the standards of later thought.

• Only Irenaeus, Cyprian, and Gregory Thaumaturgus are consistently regarded as saints.

• Possibly three (certainly Novatian, probably Hippolytus, and possibly Tertullian) were in schism from the main body of the church

• one was later explicitly condemned as a heretic (Origen)

Yet, they were themselves decisive in the refutation of competing forms of the Christian faith.

• Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus wrote major anti-heretical works

• Clement and Origen developed a philosophical theology that incorporated what was appealing in Gnosticism but subverted its unorthodox premises.

FATHERS OF THE OLD CATHOLIC CHURCH

Irenaeus#

Irenaeus was a key figure in the orthodox defense against Gnosticism. He was also an important bridge figure between the sub-apostolic age and the development of the old catholic church, for as a youth in Smyrna he had listened to teaching by Polycarp, a reputed follower of the apostle John. He went West and became a presbyter in the church at Lyons in Gaul, which had close contacts with Asia Minor.

In 177 Irenaeus carried a letter to Rome, attempting to mediate in the controversy over Montanism. During his absence, there occurred the persecution described in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons that took the life of the aged bishop Pothinus. Irenaeus succeeded him as bishop. He continued to live up to his name “irenical” by writing to bishop Victor of Rome to mediate in the Paschal controversy.

Still belonging to the Greek period of the church in the West, Irenaeus’s works survive mainly in translation.

• His principal work, known as Against Heresies but described by himself as “Five Books of Unmasking and Overthrow of the Gnosis Falsely So-Called,” apart from some passages quoted by later writers, survives in its entirety only in an early Preaching, literal Latin translation.

• His Demonstration [or Proof] of the Apostolic which survives in an Armenian translation, gives an instruction to be delivered to new converts based on the biblical story of God’s saving activity set within a Trinitarian context.

In advancing his own theological interpretations in order to defend the mainstream church and to refute heresy, Irenaeus was a “traditional innovator.” Irenaeus’s theology is based on unity. Against Gnostic and Marcionite dualism, he stresses the one God, who is Creator and Redeemer; the one Lord Jesus Christ, the same pre-existent being who became incarnate; and the one history of salvation that is the plan of the one God centering in the one Christ. He is the first major author known to us to argue from Scripture as a whole, witnessing to the emerging New Testament canon and insisting on the harmony of the Old and New Testaments as successive covenants in God’s plan of salvation.

Irenaeus’s argument from apostolic succession for the validity of the church’s teachings, and his appeal to the canon of truth as the proper standard for the interpretation of Scripture, were lasting contributions to the catholic understanding of the ministry of the church and tradition.

He was typical of the old catholic church in anticipating doctrines that were to assume greater importance in the future:

• The apostolic succession of bishops

• The rule of faith [apostolic tradition] as the standard for interpreting the Bible

• The appeal to the material elements of the eucharist as embodying spiritual realities

• A place for Mary (the new Eve) in his theology of recapitulation.

Irenaeus was thus both a “biblical” theologian and a “catholic” theologian.

Tertullian and the Church in North Africa#

Tertullian, who flourished in Carthage in the first two decades of the third century, was the most prolific Christian writer in Latin before the fourth century. He began writing in Greek, but as the Western church became increasingly Latin in its language, only his numerous Latin works survived, a fact that assured his continuing influence (in contrast to Hippolytus of Rome, who wrote only in Greek and fell into obscurity).

Tertullian is commonly regarded as the prototypical rigorist and legalist for his approach to Christian living and manner of argumentation, but for the best appreciation of Tertullian’s intellectual formation one must see him as a Latin rhetorician. He was converted to Christianity as an adult in the late second century; he was married, perhaps a presbyter, and active in the church at Carthage.

About 207 Tertullian was attracted to Montanism, and he became an outspoken exponent of its more rigorous approach to disciplinary questions related to Christian behavior. On the basis of Augustine’s later report that he brought Tertullianists back into the Catholic Church, it has been thought that Tertullian led a faction that broke away even from the Montanists, but “Tertullianists” may have been a term for the Montanists in North Africa and it is not even certain that Tertullian’s support of Montanism ever led him into actual schism from the church.

Tertullian’s literary fame rests on his ability to coin sharp, original, technical phrases. His crabbed, abbreviated Latin is often difficult to read, but he was witty, vigorous, and incisive. He set the language of the Western church on such key concepts as original sin, person and nature in the Trinity, sacrament, merit, and others.

Some of Tertullian’s writings may be singled out for comment.

• His literary masterpiece is usually regarded as his Apology, the greatest Latin apologetic for Christianity before Augustine. He has many of the arguments found in Justin Martyr, but his legal knowledge acquired in the practice of rhetoric makes him more cogent.

• Another apologetic writing, On the Testimony of the Soul, argues that, although “one becomes a Christian and is not born one,” yet common human language and attitudes witness to Christian truth.

• Tertullian’s tracts against Roman customs, such as On Idolatry and On the Crown, include a rejection of military service by Christians, a position he shared with other leading Christian thinkers such as Hippolytus, Origen, and Lactantius.

• Tertullian’s anti-heretical writings are particularly important for the information they contain about alternative interpretations of Christianity and the development of orthodox theology. His Prescription Against Heretics attempts to preempt the heretics’ case by arguing from a Roman legal principle in order to claim that the Scriptures belong to the church, and so only catholic Christians have the right to use them. The rule of faith preserved in the tradition of the church is the right key to understanding them.

• Tertullian’s argument Against Praxeas employed the terminology of “three persons” (tres personae) and “one substance” (una substantia) that, when combined into one formula, became the accepted way in Latin to express the doctrine of the Trinity.

• Against Marcion is his longest work. Tertullian defends the oneness of God and the goodness of the law. The polemical purpose should be recognized, but the outcome makes Tertullian an “Old Testament Christian” in whom the Sermon on the Mount becomes a new law. (But, as has been observed, Tertullian himself never turned the other cheek in an argument!)

• The treatise On the Soul is the first Christian writing on psychology. Drawing on Stoic anthropology, Tertullian understands the soul as “material,” but of a higher and finer grade of matter than the body.

• On Baptism, the earliest extant writing on this subject, opposes a small group of Gnostics who denied the necessity of water baptism.

• On Repentance is important for its description of “second repentance,” the humiliating disciplines imposed in “confession” of post-baptismal sin in order for a sinner to be restored to the fellowship of the church (which are worth submitting to because “temporal mortification removes eternal punishments”).

In his Montanist period, Tertullian rejected the church’s practice of allowing forgiveness of post-baptismal sins. Tertullian’s practical works from this period take an increasingly rigorist position on moral theory and practice.

Tertullian had a great influence on a leader of the Carthaginian church in the next generation, Cyprian, who moderated Tertullian’s views into a form less sectarian and more churchly.

The Church in Alexandria and Clement of Alexandria#

Alexandria, founded in the fourth century BC by Alexander the Great, was the second city of the Roman Empire. It was the home of Hellenism, where Greece and the Middle East met.

The city was also home to the largest Jewish community in the Greco-Roman world. Jewish Hellenism planted deep roots in Alexandria. There the Septuagint—the Bible of the old catholic fathers—was produced. There too Philo, the Jewish philosopher, in the early first century had attempted the harmonization of revelation and philosophy. This task of accommodating Scripture to Greek philosophy was inherited by the Alexandrian Christian philosophers, who—in contrast to Tertullian’s question—sought to show that Jerusalem was Athens.

The introduction of Christianity to Alexandria is shrouded in darkness. The later Alexandrian church preserved a tradition of its founding by Mark, disciple of Peter, and in its early history links were maintained between Alexandria and Rome. There also were links with Palestine. If the variant reading in the Western text (Codex Bezae) of Acts 18:25 rests on historical information, then Apollos first learned teaching about Jesus already in Alexandria. Some early Christian literature, Barnabas and the apocryphal Gospel of the Egyptians, may have been written there.

The church at Alexandria early showed some distinctive characteristics:

1. Gnosticism was greatly influential there. Hellenistic Jews may have drifted into a Jewish Gnosticism. Certainly a number of Gnostic teachers were active there, including Basilides, Carpocrates, and Valentinus. Some contemporary scholars have suggested that the early history of the church in Alexandria was suppressed by the orthodox because the earliest form of Christianity there was “Gnostic.” Clement and Origen sought to develop an orthodox Gnosticism in place of its heretical form.

2. There were wealthy members of the church in Alexandria. A growing number of converts recruited from the well-to-do leisure class were apparently disturbed at the words of Mark 10:17–22. In response, Clement’s sermon Who Is the Rich Man that Is Saved? explained that Jesus did not condemn possessions as such, but only the love of money.

3. The polity of the church differed from that developing in the church elsewhere, or at least maintained an older pattern longer than other churches did. The twelve presbyters elected and appointed one of their number as bishop. Teachers maintained an independence in Alexandria longer than elsewhere, perhaps because the bishop was not so strong a figure as he became in most churches.

The term “school” is used in three senses, and all three are applicable to the ecclesiastical use of the phrase “school of Alexandria.”

• It may refer to pupils grouped around a teacher, as Justin or Valentinus in Rome and Clement in Alexandria.

• It could refer to a group of thinkers holding similar opinions (a “school of thought”). The special concerns of the Alexandrian school in this sense were maintaining free intellectual inquiry in the church, exploring the relations of faith and reason, the allegorical interpretation of Scripture, and the Logos Christology.

• The “school of Alexandria” also refers to the organized program of catechetical instruction developed in the church there. It is disputed whether the work of Clement and his teacher Pantaenus was already under direct church control or, as is more likely, was a private undertaking like “school” in the first sense.

Origen, while under commission from bishop Demetrius in Alexandria, abandoned his teaching of the classics and devoted himself to the study and teaching of Scripture. This program was under strong episcopal supervision. Later Origen brought in Heraclas to help with the catechetical work so that he could devote himself to advanced instruction, something of a private “university.”

Clement of Alexandria#

Clement was born (c. 160) of non-Christian parentage. He represents the educated and cultured convert to Christianity. A seeker, like Justin, of philosophical truth, he found—after a period of travel around the Mediterranean—a Christian teacher who gave a vigorous interpretation of Christianity in a philosophically acceptable manner. This “Sicilian bee,” as Clement describes him, was presumably Pantaenus, who settled in Alexandria. Clement continued his work and was recognized as a presbyter. He left Alexandria in 202–3 during a persecution under Septimius Severus and spent his later years in Cappadocia, dying about 215. His spirit as a learned and broad-minded man of culture and a conservative moralist has been caught in the phrase “a liberal Puritan.”

Clement’s three great works form a trilogy.

• The Exhortation to the Greeks (Protrepticus) is an apology, drawing intimations of Christianity from Greek philosophy and literature.

• The Instructor (Paedagogus) is the first Christian work on ethics. Jesus Christ as the teacher (in his capacity as the divine Logos) instructs in morals and Christian conduct in society.

• The Miscellanies (Stromata) is a “patchwork” of reflections on various aspects of Christianity in relation to intellectual concerns of the day.

Some of the work is tedious, but it is enlivened by profound thoughts. The center of the work is the description of the true Christian Gnostic, who seeks knowledge not for the purpose of salvation, but for its own sake. In the ideal Gnostic the vision of God is attained. Becoming like God is a moral action, possible through grace.

Clement suggested three different theories concerning the validity of philosophy for believers:

1. His most original suggestion was that, as the covenant was given to the Jews, philosophy was given to the Greeks. It was given to the Greeks not by the Logos, however, but by angels—and so was an inferior knowledge.

2. What truth the Greeks had was taken from the Scriptures. This view had been suggested by Jewish thinkers and was taken over by several Christian apologists.

3. What truth existed among the Greeks came from God and could be rightly claimed by Christians for their own use. “Plundering the Egyptians” (based on Exodus 12:33, 36) was an idea later popularized to justify Christians taking over whatever was of value from pagan literature and philosophy.

Furthermore, Clement saw philosophy as having three uses for the Christian: (1) to unmask philosophers’ errors, (2) to make the content of the faith more precise, and (3) to help one pass from naïve to scientific knowledge.

Clement’s view on the relation of faith and reason has been described as a “double faith” theory. One kind of faith is simple assent to the teaching of Scripture that gives an immediate sort of knowledge; this faith, when demonstrated by reason (rational faith), is gnosis—a knowledge that is not different from faith, but a different sort of faith. Clement affirmed the equality of these two forms of faith against the extremes both of Gnosticism, which gave a higher value to gnosis, and of those believers who rejected philosophy.

The significance of Clement’s position may be seen by contrasting it with the views of Tertullian and Origen.

• Tertullian had a “single faith” theory that gave preeminence to simple faith (the search for philosophical demonstration reduced faith’s merit).

• Origen’s “single faith” was the opposite: rational faith is superior to simple faith and is of more merit.

Where this material fits in the transmission of the canonical Gospel is uncertain. Was it (1) an early form of the Gospel later edited out, perhaps because of heretical misuse; (2) an interpolated form of the original Gospel; or, as Clement thought, (3) one of two editions issued by Mark himself?

The manuscript of the letter breaks off at the point where Clement offers his interpretation of the episodes in contrast to the use being made of the passages by Carpocratian heretics.

Origen in Alexandria and Caesarea#

Origen was the most prolific Christian writer before Augustine. He was a pioneer in the scholarly study and interpretation of the biblical text, a creative thinker with a prodigous memory, who remained a ferment in Christian theology for centuries.

Origen was born into a Christian family in Alexandria about 185. We know something of his life and anecdotes from his youth because Eusebius of Caesarea, who belonged to the Origenist school, preserved much about Origen in the sixth book of his Church History. Origen’s proud father, Leonides, thankful “to be the father of such a boy,” was said many times to stand over the sleeping boy, uncover his breast, and kiss it with reverence, “as if a divine spirit were enshrined therein.”

The persecution under Septimius Severus (202–3) claimed Leonides as a martyr, and Origen was spared a similar outcome because his mother hid his clothes so the modest youth would not leave the house. He contented himself with writing a letter to his father in prison urging him not to yield to the persecutors out of concern for the family.

Origen received a good education, not only the basic literary studies of the Greek world, but also in philosophy, studying in the same atmosphere out of which came Neoplatonism.

Origen supported the family by secular teaching, but at the age of eighteen he was entrusted by bishop Demetrius with teaching inquirers, so he devoted himself to studying the Scriptures, sold his secular books, and lived austerely off the proceeds.

As Origen’s studies progressed so did his fame as a teacher, and he was called on to make many trips for speaking and teaching, including an audience with Julia Mamaea, the mother of emperor Alexander Severus. On one trip to Palestine the bishops invited him to interpret the Scriptures publicly in the church at Caesarea although he had not yet received ordination to the presbyterate.

Bishop Demetrius—whether from jealousy, a desire to strengthen the authority of the bishop, or concern for the orthodoxy of some of Origen’s speculations—increasingly made trouble for Origen. The bishops in Palestine, criticized for allowing Origen—as a layman—to preach in church, on a later visit laid hands on him. Demetrius now brought up the matter of Origen’s castration, which was considered to disqualify a man from church office, and called him home. The difficulties were so great that Origen in 232 moved to Caesarea, where he continued his teaching.

Among those who came to study with Origen was Gregory (later known as Thaumaturgus), whose Panegyric to Origen gives a vivid picture of Origen’s teaching. In florid style, this important document for Christian education describes the wide scope of instruction—dialectics, natural science, geometry, astronomy, philosophy, ethics, theology, and Scripture. Origen encouraged his students to read all the philosophers except those who did not believe in God. Employing both lectures and the Socratic method of questioning, he communicated more, in Gregory’s tribute, by example than by precept.

In the persecution under Decius in 251, Origen suffered imprisonment and torture, which likely hastened his death some time thereafter. Pamphilus inherited his library at Caesarea and—along with his student Eusebius—wrote an apology in defense of Origen. That library was the foundation of Eusebius’s own historical and theological works.

Much of Origen’s study took the form of interpreting the biblical text—scholia or notes on difficult passages, homilies preached on the books of the Bible, and large-scale scientific commentaries on biblical books. Most extensively preserved of the commentaries is the Commentary on John, of which nine of the thirty-two books survive. It was never completed; an indication of the detail is shown by the fact that it took ten books to reach the end of the second chapter of John.

In On First Principles 4, Origen outlined a tripartite hermeneutical principle, finding three levels of interpretation of Scripture corresponding to the three parts of human nature:

1. the bodily sense is the literal, historical meaning of Scripture;

2. the psychic (soul) sense refers to the moral teaching;

3. the pneumatic (spiritual) to the allegorical or eschatological interpretation that reveals the mysteries of the faith.

Origen’s basic distinction, however, was between the literal and the spiritual or non-literal, the latter of which might have multiple applications. In actual practice, his exegetical procedure was to go from the linguistic meaning to the meaning “hidden under the letter.” The latter was first of all the Christian doctrinal sense, and then the moral practice dependent on that teaching, as well as its eschatological implications.

For Origen, the Scripture, as inspired by the Spirit, always has a non-literal meaning, but may not have a literal meaning (if the latter spoke anthropomorphically about God, legislated irrational laws, or recorded impossibilities in the historical narrative).

Origen’s usage varied, but from his formulations there was later developed a fourfold meaning of Scripture: historical (literal), moral, allegorical (doctrinal), and anagogical (eschatological).

Origen’s intellectual framework was a kind of Neoplatonism, which was just emerging at his time.

• If one thinks in Platonist terms that there is a true spiritual world of which this material world is only an imperfect imitation, then allegory is a congenial method of interpretation, for one looks at “material” texts in order to see a true spiritual reality behind or beyond them.

• If, instead of such an ontological view, one takes a more historical perspective of before, now, and after, such as the Hebrews did, then typological interpretation (fulfillment in history) is more likely to develop.

Origen’s Against Celsus, the longest and greatest of the Greek apologies for Christianity in the ancient church, raised Christian apologetics to a higher level. Origen responded to Celsus’s detailed as well as general criticisms:

• Christians welcomed bad and ignorant people

• Christians immodestly claimed that everything was made for human beings

• Christians had an exclusive claim to truth

• Christianity introduced a new religion that was hostile to traditional society and its religion.

In addition to the usual Christian arguments from fulfilled prophecy and miracles, Origen developed the moral argument for the truth of Christianity in order to counter the charge that the miracles of Jesus were worked by magic. Jesus and his followers, unlike the magicians of the time, did not receive any earthly reward or gain for their deeds, but instead brought benefits to others. The growth of Christianity in spite of opposition and persecution was a further proof of its divine power.

Two shorter works show Origen as not only a deep thinker and learned interpreter of Scripture, but also as a concerned churchman and spiritual guide. The Exhortation to Martyrdom and On Prayer discussed basic expressions of spirituality in the early church, one for the elect few and the other for all Christians.

Origen, furthermore, produced the church’s first systematic theology, On First Principles, comparable to works at that period on first principles of philosophy.

At the beginning Origen lays down the “rule of faith” delivered to the faithful as the foundation of Christianity: the one God, Christ Jesus both God and man, the Holy Spirit who inspired the prophets and apostles, resurrection of the body with rewards and punishments for souls, free will, existence of evil and good angels, and inspired Scriptures with both obvious and hidden meanings.

There was an element of subordination in Origen’s thinking, because the Son is derived from the Father. The subordination becomes more explicit in regard to the Holy Spirit, whom he described as the chief of spirits.

Origen employed the words that became the orthodox language to discuss the Trinity: Origen used ousia and hypostasis as interchangeable, but they became the words respectively for the oneness and the individuality in the Godhead.

Origen also speculated about matters for which he became controversial in his own time and for which he was later condemned (in the sixth century). He gave a more spiritual definition to the nature of the resurrection body than was becoming common in his time. Origen considered the possibility of the pre-existence of souls as explaining the fall of human nature and the separate circumstances of human beings. Moreover, his understanding of God’s saving purposes allowed for universal salvation.

Hippolytus and Callistus in Rome#

Ancient sources transmit contradictory information about Hippolytus (c. 170–c. 236). Was he presbyter or bishop, at Rome or Porto, a churchman or a schismatic? Modern scholars have complicated the situation by postulating that the works attributed to Hippolytus come from at least two different authors.

Moreover, the apparently successful reconstruction in the twentieth century of the influential Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus is now being called into question. The common material from the church orders dependent on this document will be drawn on in the next chapter in describing the life and worship of the church in the second and third centuries.

A still plausible interpretation is that Hippolytus was a presbyter in Rome who went into schism when Callistus was elected bishop, was exiled—along with the later Roman bishop Pontianus—by the emperor Maximinus Thrax to Sardinia, where they both died, and was reconciled (or at least his followers were) to the main church and so treated as a martyr.

For our purposes now, the questions of Hippolytean authorship may be passed by in order to focus on one work that has been attributed to Hippolytus, The Refutation of All Heresies, and one episode described in that work, the conflict of the author with two bishops of Rome, Zephyrinus and Callistus (Heresies 9.7). No passage in Christian literature gives such a vivid impression of the social realities of the early church.

The conflict of Hippolytus (if that be the author’s name) with Callistus illustrates the difficulties within the church at Rome in the third century in becoming truly inclusive (i.e., “catholic”). Both Hippolytus and Callistus were victims of persecution, but their similarities end there. They came from different social classes

• Hippolytus an educated Greek-speaker with contacts in the Greek East

• Callistus a former slave who rose to prominence by his wits.

They became personal rivals within the Roman church.

Hippolytus and Callistus especially differed in their Christology.

• Hippolytus represented the Logos theology of the Greek apologists, a position Callistus branded as “ditheist” (a charge that really stung).

• Callistus then tried to affirm both the unity of God and the separate suffering by the Son, an attempt Hippolytus judged a failure as alternating between the teachings of Sabellius and Theodotus (see below).

The disagreement that broke fellowship concerned church discipline: What sinners could be reconciled to the church and on what terms, and what was to be the church’s attitude on social and moral questions?

Hippolytus took the rigorist position that certain sinners, such as murderers and adulterers, could not be reconciled to the church (some sins only God could forgive). Instead, Callistus claimed to be able to forgive such and readmit them to the fellowship of the church. Hippolytus charges Callistus with conniving to condone adultery and murder, yet by reading between the lines in some of the details of the account it is possible to attain a more sympathetic understanding of Callistus’s policies.

• According to Roman law, for instance, the marriage of a free woman with a slave was not recognized. The greater number of Christian women than men in the free classes led some to choose a Christian slave as a mate. Hippolytus considered such unions “adulterous,” but Callistus took an important step in social ethics in recognizing marriages not sanctioned by law.

• When some of these women sought abortions rather than have their children considered illegitimate (such abortions were regarded as murder and unforgiveable by Hippolytus), Callistus was willing to extend forgiveness.

Both Hippolytus and Callistus defended valid principles: Hippolytus the ideal of the church as a pure community and Callistus the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation. Both men made mistakes: Hippolytus a personal vindictiveness and lack of love for sinners, and Callistus acting in a high-handed manner, being too quick to forgive, and condoning abuses accompanying his measures.

These differing understandings of the nature of the church, which came to conflict on the treatment of those guilty of serious post-baptismal sins, had disturbed the Christians in Rome since at least the days of Hermas. The conflict was resumed a generation after Hippolytus and Callistus when their respective views were taken up again by Novatian and Cornelius.

THE RISE TO PROMINENCE OF THE CHURCH AT ROME#

By the end of the second century, the church at Rome was beginning to assert itself as the leading church in the Christian world. This situation was far from finding institutional expression and did not mean that everyone was prepared to follow Rome’s lead.

Yet the way in which so many prominent teachers found their way to Rome and sought acceptance of their teachings in Rome, and the involvement of Rome in the controversies that affected Christians at the end of the second century, do show the increasing influence and importance of the Roman church.

A number of factors contributed to the increasing prominence of the church in the capital:

1. Administrative ability of the bishops—they may have been undistinguished theologically, but they acted prudently in holding the diverse elements in the church together.

2. Size of the church—the Roman church grew enormously in the second and third centuries, both through people moving in and through conversions, and it had international contacts.

3. Capital city—people naturally looked to Rome for leadership, a political habit that influenced thinking in the church.

4. Orthodox reputation—in a century of considerable theological variety, Rome maintained a reputation of steadiness and balance in preserving the apostolic traditions.

5. Charity—the Roman church acquired considerable wealth and used it to care for its poor and send money to the relief of Christians elsewhere (money attracts authority).

6. Influence in high places—it is difficult to assess whether evidence from the end of the first century indicates the presence of Christians in senatorial families or only in their households, but by the end of the second century there is no doubt some Christians held positions of influence with the government.

7. Only apostolic church in the West—controversy had given prominence to contacts with the apostles, and Rome was the only church in the western part of the empire with confirmed direct contact with apostles.

8. Martyrdom of Peter and Paul—these apostolic contacts with Rome were not of the ordinary kind, for the two chief apostles had not only been there but had honored the city with their martyrdom and thus the site of their bones.

The church at Rome was Greek-speaking from its beginning, for Rome as the capital had many nationalities represented in its population. It maintained close ties with Alexandria, Corinth, and Carthage.

Victor (c. 189–c. 198), if his name is an indication, may have been the first Latin-speaking bishop. The Latin-speaking element increased through the third century, but it was not until the fourth century that the liturgy (always the most conservative feature of church life) completed the transfer to Latin.

After Peter and Paul, a host of prominent Christian teachers—orthodox and others—found their way to Rome: not only martyrs like Ignatius, but also teachers as diverse as Justin, Marcion, and Valentinus. Therefore, it is no surprise that some of the important controversies affecting the churches at the end of the second century set off sparks in Rome.

PROBLEMS FACING THE OLD CATHOLIC FATHERS#

In addition to their principal problem of defending orthodox faith and practice against the challenges of heresy and schism, the old catholic fathers faced other problems.

Paschal Controversy#

The Paschal controversy is significant for indicating the increasing importance of the church of Rome. The point at issue was the date for commemorating the events of salvation connected with the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Some churches, especially in the province of Asia, were called—by those who disagreed with them—Quartodecimans (“those who observed the fourteenth of the month”). This name came from their practice of observing an annual remembrance of the passion of Jesus on the date of the Passover (Pascha in Greek). In the Jewish calendar that date was the fourteenth of Nisan, which might fall on any day of the week. Most of the churches had abandoned the Jewish calendar and remembered the death and resurrection of Jesus on the Sunday after the first full moon of spring.

The earliest documentation for different customs is Irenaeus’s reference to bishop Sixtus (115–25) of Rome not making a test of fellowship over the different customs (Eusebius, Church History 5.24.14). He further records a visit of Polycarp to Anicetus (155–66) in Rome, in which they disagreed on the Paschal observance yet maintained peace with each other. Anicetus yielded celebration of the eucharist in the church to his distinguished visitor from Smyrna (ibid. 5.24.16). According to Irenaeus, Polycarp claimed the precedent of John and other apostles on behalf of the Quartodeciman practice, and Anicetus appealed to the example of the presbyters before him.

Others like Irenaeus tried to mediate, contending that different customs did not threaten the unity of the faith. Councils of bishops were held in many different places, and the Asian churches were isolated on this issue. The great majority declared that the Lord’s resurrection should be celebrated on no day other than Sunday and that the paschal fast should end on that day.

The Quartodeciman practice did not end, but it was increasingly marginalized. Different methods of calculating which Sunday was to be observed persisted until the Council of Nicaea in 325 (and in some places until later).

The Paschal controversy demonstrates several points of importance:

1. The dependence of the church on Jewish customs was evident, but their influence was waning, especially in those regions where the Jewish presence was less felt or where the church wanted to distance itself from that presence.

2. The lack of a uniform apostolic tradition indicates there was no apostolic authority on the custom. The controversy illustrates the problem of following what was old but lacked explicit (written) apostolic authorization. An annual remembrance of the resurrection likely goes back to apostolic times, but the attempt to establish a uniform practice revealed the absence of a verifiable apostolic sanction.

3. The strong feeling for the importance of the resurrection and for Sunday witnessed to the centrality of the event and its indissoluble connection with a certain day. The weekly Sunday observance had been so established in Christian practice that this superseded any other calendrical considerations.

4. The transfer of leadership from Ephesus to Rome was symbolized by the outcome of the controversy.

Patripassianism#

The Logos Christology advanced by the second-century Apologists was not the only interpretation of Jesus Christ put forward in the early centuries. The Gnostics presented Christ as an emanation from the spiritual realm (variously described). Traces of an angel Christology (Christ as “the angel of the Lord”) also find expression (e.g., Hermas). According to Tertullian, however, the most threatening idea was Modalism, also known as “Patripassianism.”

The old catholic fathers, countering Gnostic speculation, stressed that the Supreme Father is the same as the Creator. Irenaeus used the terminology of the Logos, but differed from the Apologists in allowing only one stage (the generated Word existed from eternity) instead of two stages in the pre-existent Logos. Moreover, instead of using Word and Wisdom as two terms for the pre-existent Christ, he distinguished them, applying Wisdom to the Holy Spirit and speaking of them as “the two hands of God.” Thus, in countering the Gnostics, the old catholic fathers refined further the Logos Christology of the apologists.

Other approaches to the relation of Jesus Christ to God placed more emphasis on the oneness of God than on the threeness. Indeed, the problem for the early church was not (as it seems for many contemporary believers) how three can be one, but rather how one can be three. Early Christianity came out of a strong affirmation of the oneness of God in Judaism—although Judaism included speculations about other divine entities.

A number of other theories, however, were advanced to defend monotheism while worshipping the Redeemer Christ alongside the Creator God.

Monarchianism (“one rule”) was a common word for monotheism, and two principal forms of a strict and literal monotheism were put forward in the second century. Modern scholars have distinguished these by the terms Dynamic Monarchianism and Modalist Monarchianism (to this latter alone the term Patripassianism applies).

MONARCHIAN TEACHERS

Dynamic Monarchianism#

Dynamic Monarchianism was a development of early Adoptionism, wherein Jesus was so worthy that God adopted him as a son, either at the resurrection, at his baptism, or in foreknowledge of his virtues at his birth. Some early expressions could be found in the Gnostic orbit with Cerinthus and apparently were combined with Docetism in the Gospel of Peter. “Dynamic” in the name comes from the view that the power (dynamis) of God rested upon Jesus.

In the later second century, exponents (the two men named Theodotus and their circle) combined the view with a rationalist concern for the moral, human development of Jesus and an effort to give the precision of mathematics to Christian theology. This intellectual approach, opposed to the philosophical formulation of the Logos, communicated a different motivation from that of the earlier expressions of Adoptionism.

Paul of Samosata (third quarter of the third century) gave the most sophisticated and most plausible presentation in this line of development. He was willing to use the term Logos, but in an impersonal sense as equivalent to God’s Wisdom in the Old Testament. Jesus was born of the virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit; the Wisdom that had dwelt in others resided supremely in Jesus.

Since this impersonal Logos was united with Jesus, Paul of Samosata was not strictly speaking an “Adoptionist.” Paul employed Trinitarian formulas, for in the Father there was always his Logos and his Spirit. The term “Son” applied to the person of the human Jesus.

Paul was an important Roman official in Antioch and became bishop of the city. Some of his practices that aroused criticism from his opponents—maintaining a bodyguard, use in the church building of a high throne and small chamber for private meetings, replacing the psalms addressed to Jesus Christ with hymns to himself sung by a chorus of women—may have come from his civil position or from his transferring those practices to his role as bishop.

Synods in Antioch, climaxing in 268, secured his condemnation. Paul of Samosata was able to maintain control of the church building, however, until an appeal by his opponents to the emperor Aurelian secured a judgment. The judgment stated that the property should belong to those in communion with the bishops in Italy and Rome. This was the first occasion on record of an appeal to civil authorities to decide a dispute among Christian factions over ownership of church property.

Modalist Monarchianism#

According to Tertullian, Modalism offered a greater religious threat than Dynamic Monarchianism, because large numbers of ordinary believers were naïve Modalists. Modalism is the name for the view that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were successive modes of activity and revelation of the one God. This teaching was what ancient authors referred to as Monarchianism, or in a derogatory sense, “Patripassianism” (“Father suffering”).

The term “Patripassianism” was used because one implication of the Modalistic identification of the Father and the Son was that the Father suffered on the cross. This idea is perhaps possible (if not so starkly stated) in biblical thought, but it was clearly unattractive in the prevailing philosophical sentiment of the day.

The most important representative of Modalism was Sabellius, who became so influential that he gave his name (Sabellianism) to the doctrine in the East. The crucial difference between Sabellius and the Logos Christology was that for Sabellius the one God revealed himself successively as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whereas for the Logos theologians these distinctions in the Godhead were simultaneous distinctions.

Philosophically minded Christians in the tradition of the Logos Christology developed an internal Trinity to combat Gnosticism, pagan philosophy, and the various forms of Monarchianism. This development revolved around the Logos and Hellenistic thought.

• Tertullian represented the Western emphasis on the unity of God by identifying “God” with the Father and by identifying the Son and Holy Spirit with the same substance as God, but like the Greek fathers he found the source of deity in the Father. His differentiations between the persons in the one divine substance were associated with God’s saving plan (hence, the designation “economic Trinity” is sometimes employed).

• Origen represented the Eastern tendency to emphasize the distinctions between the three by emphasizing their functional differences. That is, from the one Father were derived the Son and Spirit, who had a relative subordination to the Father but were one in nature with him.

All the possible alternatives in explaining the relationship of Jesus Christ to God were present by the end of the second century. Little was expressly said about the Holy Spirit, for the doctrine of Christ bore the brunt of controversy. Early thinkers may have been “Trinitarian” in thought, but they were “binitarian” in passion.

Persecution#

Relations of Christians with the government and pagan society continued to provide the setting for the work of the old catholic fathers. The problem was how to be law-abiding in the face of a deified empire requiring worship of the state.

The church did not turn revolutionary in spite of provocation. Instead, one old catholic father died as a martyr (Cyprian), one died in exile (Hippolytus), and another suffered such tortures in persecution as to die shortly thereafter (Origen).mIn addition, three wrote exhortations to martyrdom (Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian). Two wrote treatises on the evil aspects of pagan society, especially the public games (Tertullian and Novatian). Three wrote apologies (Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen) that in literary style, comprehensiveness, and cogency of argument constituted the greatest apologies for Christianity to come out of the pre-Nicene period. Furthermore, internal tensions produced by persecution brought Hippolytus and Novatian into schism and provoked the major ecclesiastical problems confronting Cyprian.

Although sometimes taking the stance that Christians were really the best citizens and would provide the basis for the best society, the general attitude in this period was one of sharp separation from the state, represented in the view that Christians could not fill magistracies or serve in the military (Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen).

Nevertheless, the early third century brought a period of peace that began to weaken these sectarian sentiments, as the church grew in numbers and began to attract favorable attention in the highest government circles.

Penance and Polity#

Persecution brought into tension two conflicting ideals of the church.

• “Rigorists” saw the church as the saved people separated from sin

• “Laxists” saw the church as the instrument of salvation (a hospital for sick souls).

The former position is represented by Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Novatian; the latter by Callistus, with Cyprian attempting a mediating position but rejecting the consistent “rigorist” view.

These competing interpretations of the nature of the church were reflected in the dispute over the discipline that should be meted out to the lapsi, those who had “fallen” away from the church in times of persecution.

• The rigorists wanted to keep them in a state of discipline for the rest of their lives, saying that God could in the end save them if they were truly penitent but the church could not presume to offer its forgiveness by restoring them to full communion.

• Laxists wanted immediate forgiveness in order to strengthen the faith of weak members by restoring them to the life of the church.

By the end of the second century the procedure for public confession and repentance was generally established. When a person who had fallen away returned to the church, a public confession of sin was made; repentance was expressed by wearing mourning clothes, weeping, and fasting; request for the prayers of the church was made while kneeling or prostrating oneself before the church; prayer was offered; and restoration to fellowship was shown by the laying on of the hands of the clergy and admission to communion. It was often stated that only one such formal “second repentance” was available.

Four stages of development in thinking about the nature of the church may be discerned:

1. All members are saints—reflected in the New Testament. Montanism involved an effort to reclaim this view.

2. The clergy must be saints. The Novatianists and then more explicitly the Donatists represented this position.

3. The church embraced “saints” (martyrs and confessors) and “sinners.” This view was taking shape in the mainstream of the third-century church, and in the fourth century found expression in the distinction of monks from ordinary church members.

4. The sanctity of the church belongs not to individuals, but to the sacraments of the church. Augustine articulated this later stage in the development.

In the second century the bishop had presided at worship and the presbyters had largely been responsible for church discipline. By the mid-third century (Cyprian), however, the bishops secured control of discipline and with the growth of city churches presbyters were delegated liturgical functions in the separate assemblies.

Sacerdotal language became increasingly common during the third century for the bishop and his functions. With the transfer of the bishop’s role in worship to presbyters in “parish” churches, the priestly interpretation began to be extended to them as well.