Basic patristics: Clement of Alexandria

The first significant Christian leader in the church of Alexandria is Clement a theologian who also functioned as the head of the noted Catechetical School of Alexandria, he is also best known as the teacher of Origen who would later succeed him when he was forced to flee the persecution of Christians by Septimius Severus.

Know more about Clement of Alexandria from the perspective of:

Roman Catholics>>>

Eastern Orthodoxy >>>

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Further reading: Clement of Alexandria's role in the Development of the Canon of the New Testament

Know your heresy: Docetism

Docetism, is a heretical sect that developed within the early church, its name is derived from the Greek word dokesis which means "semblance" they are particularly dangerous for the Christian faith because of their Christological understanding that Christ only "appeared" or "seemed to be a man”, which in a way denies Christ’s humanity. The danger as exhibited in history is that some Docetists even went as far as claiming that it was Simon of Cyrene who was crucified, while Jesus looked on from a place of safety. They also emphasized on the temporality of the human body and of the material world which puts forward a tendency to undercut the importance of the belief in resurrection of the dead and the goodness of created matter, which opposes the very nature of orthodoxy that stresses on the importance of the salvific work of God in Christ that transpired in the material world that we live in, which could be seen with their disengagement with the affairs of the world at large and their abstinence in partaking the sacrament of the Eucharist.

The Church responded with the assertion of the Scripture’s account of Christ as God Incarnate or God ‘in flesh’ (John 1:14; 1 John 4:13; 2 John 7). Early Christian apologists like Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus and Hippolatus who all wrote against it in the early part of the second century.

Learn more about it from the perspective of:
Roman Catholics >>>
Eastern Orthodox >>>
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Further reading: Docetism entry on the Early Church History in the World Wide Web

Know your heresy: Montanism

Montanism originated in Pepuza in Phrygia, a province of Asia Minor. Its first leaders were Montanus who claimed to have received a series of direct revelations from the Holy Spirit; Priscilla and Maximilla, who functioned as his prophetesses. Later on they were able to convert the Church Father, and onetime champion of orthodox belief, Tertullian of Carthage in Northern Africa who would later on become the most widely known defender of the Montanists.

Learn more about it from the perspectives of:

Roman Catholics >>>

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Further reading: The Montanists: Heretics or Primitive Christians?

Giving our ancestors a vote

During the 1970s Fr. Peter E. Gillquist a former Campus Crusade missionary established a network of house churches throughout the United States, aiming to restore a primitive form of Christianity, which was called the New Covenant Apostolic Order.

Researching the historical basis of the Christian faith, Gillquist and his colleagues found sources for this restoration in the writings of the early Church Fathers. This led the group to practice a more liturgical form of worship than in their previous evangelical background and eventually led them to embrace Eastern Orthodoxy.

The poverty of memory in the Christian church

Recently, I’ve been asked by someone in my local church if I would like to consider teaching a Sunday School series that focuses on biographical sketches of the Church Fathers.

I think it’s a good move for the church to recognize the contributions of the Church Fathers to the life of the Body of Christ, however I feel that one cannot stop with a mere study of Augustine, Athanasius, Origen, Iraneus or Clement of Rome. I believe the study should furthermore encompass that to go as far as to really study the drama of God’s History with His covenant people – that is the Church in its expression as the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic church that has been attested to in the Creeds.

I believe the study of church history in a local church setting is important in the sense that it brings every believer into a mystical family reunion whereas the Church is the household of God is not just a single nuclear family that merely comprises the local congregation but a multitude that includes every tongue and tribe from all nations.

Already I’m seriously pondering using Bruce Shelley’s classic Church History in Plain Language as the material because personally the book in its own way has helped me move away from a stunted perspective of ecclesiology towards a more wider view of God’s plan of salvation that encompasses our local church traditions and dogma.

Below is an interesting conversation with Bruce Shelley about the importance of studying church history.

"Surely one of the remarkable aspects of Christianity today is how few of these professed believers have ever seriously studied the history of their religion." - Bruce Shelley

The story of the history of the Church is a drama, a powerful drama. Why study it?

1) It gives you understanding. How did we get the way we are? A study of the drama answers that. The study of history can make you wise without gray hair and wrinkles (though one certainly cannot say the same about the writing of that history!)

2) The study of history introduces you to new friends. How else could you meet Augustine, John of the Cross, Martin Luther, John Wesley or Charles Finney? Only as you investigate the drama can you meet them.

3) You learn the price that was paid for you!

4) You avoid the pitfalls and the land mines of history. It has been said that he who is not a student of history is condemned to repeat it. The study of history is not done to exalt tradition. In fact, tradition can be enslaving. As Richard Halverson noted, "Tradition can be dangerous. It can not only modify the truth; it can replace it altogether." A study of history teaches us which traditions are suffocating and need to be avoided and which are so crucial that they must be preserved at all costs.

5) Studying history increases your effectiveness. You see what worked, what was effective. Mark Shaw said it all in the title of his book, Ten Great Ideas from Church History.

6) History enhances your endurance. When you see what those before you endured, you will be encouraged to persevere.

7) History will inspire you. Information may guide you, but inspiration keeps you going. A study of history can inspire. Hopefully, this one will.

8) History makes the dead come to life. My friend Harold Ivan Smith says "no person is dead as long as someone keeps saying their name or telling their stories." By telling this drama, the historical figures live once again.

9) The study of history humbles you by helping you to understand that there was life before you were born. John Wesley once said to Adam Clarke, "If I were to write my own life, I should begin it before I was born."

Copyright 2002, JimGarlow.com all rights reserved, used by permission

It is my prayer that as I will be a part of the journey of studying church history in my Sunday school class that we would learn from the church’s past so that we will no longer fall short in responding to the challenges posed to our faith today as I am confident that there is ‘nothing new under the sun,’ as far as the communal life of the church goes. Furthermore that the study of church history would cause to pause in awe and would be forced to bow our knees in worship to a God who has set Himself to establish a people who would bear witness to His name and His Son.

Some thoughts on Sola Fide

Sola fide.

Sola fide otherwise known as the Doctrine of Justification by Faith is the controversial doctrine that distinguishes most Protestant denominations from Roman Catholicism.

This basically sums up the rift that was opened between Luther and the Medieval Roman Catholic Church.

Historic Protestant theology upholds that the only instrumental cause of justification (or being made right with God), from the human perspective, is faith. While God is the ultimate cause of justification, Protestants believe that faith in Christ through the message of the Gospel is important. There are no works, no matter how meritorious they may seem, that can add to justification. This doctrine, according to Protestants, finds its roots in the teachings of Paul but was obscured in the middle ages and restored during the Reformation.

The rift is still there and the divide is still as great (perhaps even greater) than it was 500 years ago.

I remember the countless times that I’ve seen over-zealous self-proclaimed Evangelical Protestant Apologists would fire reckless words about Roman Catholics preaching what they call: “a gospel of works.”

This is a common scene (or better yet a: ‘sticky thread’) on the Bereans Apologetics Research Ministry online discussion board, where Born Again Christians in the board would go on and on in talking about how Catholics got it wrong when it comes to salvation where in retaliation Roman Catholic apologists would more than willing to oblige in a proof-text bout that costs both of them their witness to Christ whom they both proclaim to serve.

I confess that I am among those zealous Bible Christians who at one point in my life looked forward to debates like that on the Bereans forum, I admit that I rejoiced at the fact that I can proof-text my point enough to have my Roman Catholic opponent concede his point against mine.

Even as my ego is stroked by my apparent victory in such debates I am at the same time faced with the question of how do Christians enter into a relationship with God before Luther articulated it into the doctrine that we have now come to call as ‘faith alone’. In other words how do pre-Reformation Christians get saved before it was defined as receiving Christ as your personal Lord in Savior?

Going further I am compelled to ask if: "salvation also entails believing in the Doctrine of Justification by faith?"

Before you pick up stones and start branding me as a heretic let me first makes it clear that I myself am a staunch believer of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith Alone. However, I am also struggling with the question of Church history where whether we like it or not can trace a lineage to the Roman Catholic Church.

It is in that personal struggle with that difficulty in relating the doctrine of justification by faith alone with Church history that I am thankful that God lead me to a small bookstore called Bound in Tomas Morato, Quezon City where I was able to get a copy of Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright’s What Saint Paul Really Said for 40 pesos.

It is there he writes:

“There follows from this a vital liberating point, which I first met in the works of the great Anglican divine Richard Hooker, and for which I shall always be grateful. One is not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith. One is justified by believing in Jesus. It follows quite clearly that a great many people are justified by faith who don’t know they are justified by faith. The Galatian Christians were in fact justified by faith, though they didn’t realize it and thought they had to be circumcised as well. As Hooker said, many pre-Reformation folks were in fact justified by faith, because they believe in Jesus, even though, not knowing about or believing in justification by faith, they lacked assurance, and then sought to fill this vacuum in other ways. Many Christians today may not be clear about the niceties of doctrine; but however inarticulately, they hold on to Jesus; and, according to Paul’s teaching, they are therefore justified by faith. They are constituted as members of the family. They must be treated as such. This is not to say, of course that justification is an unimportant or inessential doctrine. Far from it. A church that does not grasp it and teach it is heading for trouble. It is to say that the doctrine of justification itself points away from itself. Believing in Jesus – believing that Jesus is Lord, and that God raised Him from the dead – is what counts.[1]”

It is fascinating to note that in my personal study of Church history that Born Again Christians seem to look at Church history in this manner:

1. Jesus finishes His earthly ministry then ascends into Heaven
2. The Holy Spirit comes to the disciples during Pentecost thus starting the Christian Church whose story was told in the Acts of the Apostles.
3. For a good number of centuries the Roman Catholic Church was there and it was evil and the supposedly ‘true church’ was re-established my Martin Luther and then we Born Again Christians in the present uphold the pure Gospel that was articulated by Luther as Faith Alone.

Please understand that I am not saying that all Roman Catholics are Christians but just the same not all professing Born Again Christians are Christians as well. All I am saying is that the problem with our ignorance of Church history puts us in a shaky foundation.

It puts us in a spot where we uphold a doctrine outside of its historical context as it was borne at the time when confession and absolution within the Roman Catholic Church could be bought by means of indulgences being sold, resulting in penance that’s borne out of a financial transaction rather than genuine contrition.

It is in this failure to recognize this context that we fail to explain it fully thus making us passionate apologists of something that we do not fully understand.

For me the beauty of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith Alone is that it is an available response for us to personally appropriate God’s saving work in Christ, who is the author and finisher of our faith. That’s why I believe that it is not the doctrine itself that saves, but the reality that the doctrine represents.

Note

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[1] Wright, Tom – What Saint Paul Really Said p. 159

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The Power of Words

Last Sunday I was blessed to have the opportunity to give a short talk on creative writing at Grace Bible Church. Below are excerpts from the presentation that I gave to the audience:

Words

Everything that we know or like, as in stories, movies, cartoons, etc. is written by someone.

We would think about Frodo of The Lord of the Rings or of Aslan of Chronicles of Narnia and we would not think that they simply spawned into existence they were created by someone who had a story in his or her head who decided to put it into writing using words.

It is words that break our solitary confinement and saves us from isolation.

Words are powerful. They are really very powerful and Biblically speaking it is so powerful that God’s Word became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, as Christ is the Word of God, (John 1:1,14 – Christ the Logos) as testified to in the entire narrative of the Bible. Moreover they are powerful enough to change the lives of men. (Hebrews 4:12)

And it is all because word communicates and it is because God is the first and greatest communicator and His Words in Scripture is His written communication to His intelligent creation.

Today, we will dwell more into words, as we would study them and try our best to use them to articulate our thoughts, feelings and our faith, as we will have a study of creative writing. Now I cannot guarantee that you will become good or shall we say ‘creative’ writers (as I also am not good), but what I can guarantee you is that in knowing the power of words it is my prayer that you will be challenged to write but also to read and understand the value of communication as it is creatively articulated.

Write it well

We write because we want others to read it.

Knowing that others would read it we must then know how to write well. Especially in this day and age where writing down our thoughts has sort of become a chic especially with the advent of weblogs or blogs, which honestly speaking a majority of them lack literary value as most of them tend to focus on the mundane and the disinteresting, because it just serves our vanity in which we believe that people are interested with our lives.

It is a sad truth that even if the Philippines prides itself with its proficiency in the English language we are also at the same time guilty of not being able to speak or for this matter write well.

Write for God

God gave us this talent so that we can use them to glorify Him and bring honor to His name.

If we would have a study of church history we will be surprised at how God used people to write down His will.

It is my prayer that as we would now take time to study the lesson that we will be led by the Holy Spirit to be challenged to not only write but write well for the Lord.

Note: The slides below serves as guide to the entire flow of the lesson as it was originally presented during the lecture.

click here to download the slides in Microsoft Powerpoint

why celebrate christmas?

A few days ago I stumbled upon a program of the INC, speaking of why 'christians. (pertaining to members of their sect) ought not to celebrate Christmas.
They argue that there is no mention of a command by God The Father (whom they acknowledge as the only true God, that is superior than Jesus, because to them Jesus is just a man since they don't subscribe to the orthodox Godhead that is defined in the Bible as the Trinity), and they concluded that since there is no biblical basis for such therefore it is not to be celebrated, another is that they emphasized as much as other groups that oppose Biblical Christianity that it is the Roman Catholics that invented the said celebration.
Well I have no arguments with them on the statement that its not commanded in the Bible, yes indeed the Bible does not command us to do so there are only two commandments that the Bible tells us to follow Communion and Water Baptism. But true enough there are also no commandments that tells us not to celebrate the Savior's birth and not to remember Jesus Christ. However we must understand that Philippians 2:9 records the fact that the Father exalted Jesus and given Him a name which is above every name. Let us also desire to exalt Jesus in every opportunity that we have and celebrating Christmas is one of them.
As for the allegations that Roman Catholics invented it well, I may have my reservations towards Romanists as well and based on what Church history tells us that the early Christians had celebrated it as early as 90 AD. and the organized Latin Christians (Roman Catholics) started in 313 AD so as to rival pagan feastivities. It goes to show that way before the advent of Roman Catholicism early Christians have already commemorated it.
Its also worth putting into account that those who promote the boycott of not celebrating Christmas to their members is the fact that instead of preaching love, joy and hope during the Holiday season, they preach hatred and disdain.
Lastly is that Christ is to be remembered not only during the Christmas season but the commemoration of His birth is also a time where it ought to be given emphasis on how we should re-evaluate our lives so as to understand the extent of what was given to us in Bethlehem some to 2 thousand years ago, another is that its our motives that count more as we celebrate Christmas rather than that of the rituals and above that commercial hype and the other good things that which a number of us give a high regard to during Christmas. Another is that celebrating Christmas is also an oportune time for evangelism because it arouses people who've not yet come close to Christ to ask that question of why it is important and why is the birth of Jesus a turning point in history in which the direction of history is now divided from BC to AD.
So why celebrate Christmas you ask?
I say why not?