Earliest Church Fathers on the Neighbor

The reason why the earliest fathers are important, even more important than the later fathers who wrote during and after the fourth century, is because, for most Christian communities, everyone for the most part was considered a professed Christian. This is especially true after the decree of Theodosius in 380 that outlawed all other religion except Christianity but can be said of even the earlier time after Constantine's decree that made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. This remains true pretty much for Western culture up until the Enlightenment (i.e., until after the Reformation). This means that everyone who professed to be a Christian and a part of the church rightly would be considered a neighbor. It is only the earliest period and the period following the Enlightenment that helps us see what Christians have believed concerning the idea of the neighbor and why they have believed it.

Clement: ^“Therefore let our whole body be saved in Christ Jesus, and let each of us be subject to his neighbor, _⌊according to the gift given to him”^[1]

“However, then, we have fallen away and whatever we have done through any insidious plots _⌊of the opponent_⌋,  let us ask that we be forgiven. And those also who became leaders of the rebellion and dissension [i.e., of the church schism] ought to pay careful attention to the common hope. For those who lead their lives with fear and love, they themselves prefer to experience mistreatments rather than their neighbors, and to endure condemnation themselves rather than the harmony being handed down to us rightly and justly.”^[2]

In other words, Clement is saying that the church leaders wronged by the schism would rather be mistreated than to mistreat fellow Christians.

Ignatius: “Therefore you all, having received a divine agreement in your convictions,  have respect for one another, and let no one consider his neighbor according to the flesh, but _⌊always_⌋  love one another in Jesus Christ.”^[3]

“These people, while seeming trustworthy, mingle Jesus Christ with themselves like those who produce a deadly drug with honeyed wine,  which the ignorant one gladly takes hold of in evil pleasure, to his death.  Therefore be on guard against such as these. And so it will be for you, not being puffed up and being inseparable from God,  from Jesus Christ and from the bishop and from the injunctions of the apostles. ² The one who is inside of the sanctuary  is pure, but the one who is outside of the sanctuary is not pure. That is, whoever does anything without the bishop and the council of elders and the deacons, this one _⌊does not have a clear conscience_⌋.  Since I do not know of anything of such a kind among you, but I am protecting you, being my beloved, anticipating the snares of the devil.  Therefore you, adopting gentleness,  regain your strength  in faith which is the flesh of the Lord and in love which is the blood of Jesus Christ. ² Let none of you hold a grudge against his neighbor.”^[4]

Ignatius is talking about being slandered by other Christians and warning the congregation not to hold a grudge against their fellow Christians as these others have.

The Epistle of Barnabas: “You shall share in all things with your neighbor and you shall not say it is your own. For if you are sharers in the incorruptible, how much more in the corruptible?”^[5]

The Martyrdom of Polycarp: “For he waited to be betrayed as also the Lord, in order that we also might be imitators of him not only looking out for _⌊our own concerns_⌋  but also _⌊the concerns of our neighbors_⌋.  ⁵ For true and steadfast love is not only to desire oneself to be delivered, but all the brothers as well.”^[6]

Tertullian: “Recognise also in Him the Judge, and one, too, who expresses Himself on the safety of His followers with the same tenderness as that which the Creator long ago exhibited: “He that toucheth you toucheth the apple of my eye.” Such identity of care proceeds from one and the same Being. A trespassing brother He will have rebuked.⁸ If one failed in this duty of reproof, he in fact sinned, either because out of hatred he wished his brother to continue in sin, or else spared him from mistaken friendship, although possessing the injunction in Leviticus: “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart; thy neighbor thou shalt seriously rebuke, and on his account shalt not contract sin.”¹⁰ Nor is it to be wondered at, if He thus teaches who forbids your refusing to bring back even your brother’s cattle, if you find them astray in the road; much more should you bring back your erring brother to himself. He commands you to forgive your brother, should he trespass against you even “seven times.”^[7]

“He brings no accusation against men’s bodies, of which he even writes as follows: “Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor: for we are members one of another. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: neither give place to the devil. Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands (the thing which is good), that he may have to give to him that needeth. Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good for the edification of faith, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: but be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ hath forgiven you.”^8[8]

J

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^[1] Brannan, R. (Trans.). (2012). The Apostolic Fathers in English. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

^[2] Brannan, R. (Trans.). (2012). The Apostolic Fathers in English. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

^[3] Brannan, R. (Trans.). (2012). The Apostolic Fathers in English. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

^[4] Brannan, R. (Trans.). (2012). The Apostolic Fathers in English. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

^[5] Brannan, R. (Trans.). (2012). The Apostolic Fathers in English. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

^[6] Brannan, R. (Trans.). (2012). The Apostolic Fathers in English. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

^[7] Tertullian. (1885). The Five Books against Marcion. In A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, & A. C. Coxe (Eds.), P. Holmes (Trans.), Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian (Vol. 3, p. 407). Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company.

^[8] Tertullian. (1885). On the Resurrection of the Flesh. In A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, & A. C. Coxe (Eds.), P. Holmes (Trans.), Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian (Vol. 3, p. 578). Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company.

Love Your Enemy: The Relationship between Bad Hermeneutics and Apostasy

The Lord once said that if the eye is dark the rest of the body will be dark as well. What I think He meant by this in the context of Matthew is that if one loved something that was not the source of light and life, God Himself, then their whole lives would be captive to deception, and in judgment, they will be inclined to misinterpret reality.

The more I hear about what happened to the faith of many of my former Moody Bible Institute classmates, the more I realize that Moody failed to equip them properly to address the claims of liberal hermeneutics. If I hear one more person who supposedly learned the Bible claim that the Bible is a compilation of contradictory theological perspectives I'm going to blow a gasket. 

After numerous conversations and countless books and blogs making this claim, I think I've narrowed it down to a single caricature of Jesus created from misinterpreting Jesus' teaching to love your enemies. If Jesus taught that godly people, holy people, good people who follow God, must love their enemies in the sense that they are to love everyone, including those who are under judicial judgments and would murder their children, then He is saying that the Old Testament teaching to hate and kill those types of enemies is morally wrong. This means that the Old Testament that presents God as teaching this is wrong. This means that the Old Testament is wrong about God. If it can be wrong about God in this area, maybe it is wrong about God in other areas. From this premise, then, the person begins to look at liberal arguments concerning child sacrifice, polytheism, ethnocentricism, etc. and forms what he or she thinks is a robust understanding that the Bible is just filled with contradictory theological and ethical ideas. Hence, one is left to decide for him or herself which ideas are of the love Jesus taught and which ideas are contrary to the love that Jesus taught.

Liberalism basically stays there and is far enough for any orthodox Christian to consider apostasy but, of course, those who have more logical minds go further and argue that if Jesus claimed the Old Testament was the Word of God that cannot be broken up (Matt 15:6; John 10:35) in the way that liberals want to then Jesus is wrong too. If Jesus is wrong about that then maybe He is wrong about other things, and thus, the rejection of all of the Bible, both OT and NT, is brought to as much of a rejection of the Bible as having authority as any theological or ethical idea presented to the reader of Harry Potter. 

The problem, of course, is that Jesus was never contradicting the Old Testament. Jesus was never against what was commanded in the Old Testament, as though He considered any of it to be the immoral trappings of imperial domination. In fact, His entire message was about the imperial domination of God's Empire/Kingdom where only those who followed Him would remain and the rest would be utterly destroyed and removed from the face of the earth to a place of chaos He referred to as the Gehenna of Fire. 

Jesus wasn't an "enemy-loving" hippie as many try and make Him out to be. Instead, He was the conquering King who came to save His people, and only His people, from the wrath of God to which both the Old Testament and Jesus Himself attest. His command to love your enemies, in context, had nothing to do with people under judicial punishments that government needed to execute or destroyers out to murder your children. Instead, it had to do with Christians loving fellow Christians with whom they were at odds, Christians loving those within the covenant community who had slandered them, done evil toward them, etc. Instead of hating these who persecuted them within the community, they were to return good for evil, blessing for cursing, love for hatred. Jesus was never contradicting the morals and theology taught by the Old Testament, as He stated (Matt 5:17-19).

Once this is understood, and one looks closer at the liberal argument, it begins to fall apart. Jesus cannot be used as the springboard for rejecting Old Testament theology and ethics since He affirms it throughout His teaching and never rejects it. All that is left, then, is a host of assertions made by liberals that the Bible teaches polytheism, child sacrifice, ethnocentricism, etc. in some places and then monotheism, anti-child sacrifice, and anti-ethnocentricism in others. The problem with this claim is that liberals have to remove all of these texts from their actual biblical contexts and to appeal to what they may have meant or referred to before they were placed within their biblical contexts, thus creating a completely different Bible in order to argue for these contradictions. Child sacrifice, in biblical context, actually becomes child dedication and redemption through the sacrifice of animals or giving of money or the dedication of the levitical priesthood itself. Polytheism loses its implicature in a context of monotheism which makes it a rhetorical way of communicating God's transcendence over all false gods without claiming that other genuine deities on par with God actually exist. The ethnocentricism in context soon becomes religious exclusivism, not ethnic exclusivism. In other words, the very fact that liberals have to remove these from their biblical contexts in order to get a contradiction is an implicit admission that the Bible, as it stands, does not contradict itself and these elements mentioned are consistently taught throughout the Bible. 

This seems to be something that Moody should have taught but it, along with the rest of evangelicalism, was too busy supporting the misinterpretation of Jesus' words that would one day go on to destroy the faith of many.

But when all is said and done, it may be that these apostates simply want to believe this regardless of my pointing out to them the bad scholarship involved in supporting these positions. If one loves Marx more than Christ then he or she will not be able to shake the feeling of imperialism in both the Old Testament and the New. If one loves Sanger more than Jesus then he or she will not be able to get past the condemnation of anticreational sexual ethics found in abortion and the sexual revolution that currently has its fruition in the adoption of homosexuality and the like as morally acceptable behaviors.  If you love yourself more than God you will give yourself the moral high ground and judge everything in the Bible through that grid and then justify doing so because the Bible is "theologically contradictory" anyway. And that may be the real reason in the end that dumb arguments are adopted and made by even prominent scholars . . . because people love the darkness rather than the light.