These kingdom values seem upside down to most people. Can a person be a follower of Christ without following Christ? Jesus ' teachings are so revolutionary. What if Jesus really meant every word he said? Well, Dean, it's good to be together again and to talk this morning. I guess we're going to be talking about First Clement. Yeah, you know this one really takes me back, David. You know I think of I pulled it out, you know the old what do you call that gray or whatever color this is.
You know And these markings in here are like 30 yeah, there you go. And you have the tape because these things fall apart. Yeah, mine's taped. It's falling apart. And yeah, all my original markings, which go back to 1985 when I first was reading the early Christians and having no idea that this was going to change my entire life. I mean, this was just academic interest. You know Theological interest was all it was. This takes me back to your living room and Tyler you know 30-something years ago.
And just some of the wrestling you know through Clement and through the apostolic fathers, you know with all the different things that we are wrestling through of the claims of orthodoxy, you know the apologists of Catholics and apologists of all these different things. And you know looking at the Calvinist responses and the evangelical responses and all that and all those notes and all it just brought me back a lot, a lot of good memories. Yeah.
Those were fun days searching for truth and trying to understand where the church went, what our response should be today. And yeah, I don't know. There's absolute answers to a lot of those questions. You can just try to make the wisest choice based on all of the evidence and go forward from there. Yeah.
Well, I guess that kind of brings up a topic you know in with Clement of Rome and the Apostolic Fathers in general is the whole concept of anachronisms, you know that reading you know history back onto an earlier historic moment. And Clement of Rome and Didache and the Apostolic Fathers in general are loaded with that.
And so what I have found, I guess, you know through my years of this is sometimes you have to have almost a dogmatic ambiguity that you're not going to allow yourself to get trapped into being forced to make a decision that 1,500 years later, or even more, 700 years later, 1,500 years later, are forcing onto the text. And so if it's ambiguous, then there may be a reason why it's ambiguous in making some sort of a definition that puts out all other possibilities is just not being fair.
It's not reading the text, honestly. And so starting with the Apostolic Fathers, that's why I'm loving this study here I think is so crucial because if we can be at home with them and you know you listen to the things that they think are important, there are a different list of things that they think are important than the later apologists and later different heresies and this type of thing go on. So anyway, there's a freshness in the apostolic fathers that I think it's precious and we have to be sure to keep.
Yeah. I was blessed and I think you were probably in the same situation. So when I read First Clement, that would have been the very first writing I would have read of any early Christians outside the New Testament. My only preconceptions were my understandings of the New Testament. I didn't have all of this later dogma to read back into First Clement because I'm just coming straight from the New Testament, just like it is. It was written as far as we know around AD to 96.
This is like almost contemporaneous with the Gospel of John with the Book of Revelation and all of that. We're really, really talking early here. And just for the sake of our listeners, if they're not familiar with it, what we know is first Clement is actually a letter from the elders or prespiters in the church in Rome written to the congregation in Corinth.
First Clement is a misnomer because it implies there's a second Clement, which there is a work called Second Clement, but it's a sermon, and it wasn't from Clement. That was a mistake made somewhere in the early centuries. And so you get this first and second Clement, and there really is no Second Clement, just First Clement, so. Yeah. Yeah. I have the quote from Eusebius here.
Sebius mentions that the letter was esteemed and read publicly says, " We know that this epistle also has been publicly read in very many churches, both in former times and in our own day. " So, yeah, it's an interesting little passage there from Eusebius. Yeah.
And the interesting thing that I would not have caught in my first reading, but just later you know really rereading and studying the early Christians, that term that it was publicly read in the churches meant it was read in the Sunday service as Scripture, that a number of churches viewed this as part of the New Testament canon because they viewed Clement as a disciple of Paul. And this is based on Philippians 4:3. Let me just read this.
I've got it here on my screen where Paul writes, " Yes, I also ask you, also true companion, help these women who have labored side by side with me in the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers whose names are in the Book of Life. " Wow. That's good. We don't know. We do not know for certain that this is the same Clement. But the early Christians, at least from Origen on and maybe before then, they seemed to identify him with this Clement that Paul talks about, who was his fellow worker.
They viewed any book written by the apostles or by a companion of the apostles as scripture. So that's why some churches view this as part of the New Testament. We know now today it definitely is not. We'll talk about that later. Other ones thought, " No, that's too much of a stretch or whatever. " And so, yeah, it did not make. The canon, which was definitely providential guided by the Holy Spirit, because there is a scientific error in this letter that we don't see that kind of thing in the inspired scriptures.
Yeah, to me, it's very interesting how the Holy Spirit guided things so that this is the earliest work after the New Testament rather than the last work in the New Testament. Yeah, with a mistake in it. Yeah. That's excellent. When this was first found was when they discovered what's known today as Codex Alexandrinus. And this was back post Middle Ages when Charles I was king of England. So this would have been a little bit after the Tudor period. It would have been during the time of, well, James I was his father.
So we're talking about the 1600s, and it was given as a gift to King Charles I of England. And it today is in the British Library. And yeah, I was able to see that I don't know when it was 20 years ago or something when Deborah and I were there and were in the British Library. It was amazing because it was in the evening and literally no one was in there except me and Deborah. So we had the run of the place to ourselves. You know I'm looking around and it's like, what does this sign say? Codex, Alexandrinus.
I had no idea that's where it was kept. You know And I about fell over. And there were a lot of other just fascinating things. The Magna Carta, you know a lot of other works like that in the British Library. That's not our only copy of Clement. So later, they found there was another ancient manuscript that the patriarch of Jerusalem had. And then that was taken up by the Orthodox scholar. How do you pronounce his name? Bryennios. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So then he brought it to light from there.
So that's always nice when you have two Greek copies of an ancient manuscript. And then they started finding, " Oh, well, yeah, here's a Latin copy. Here's a Syriac copy. Here's a coptic. " So it was obviously quickly spread among all of the major languages, which those would have been the Big Four. Greek, Latin, Syriac, which is the same as Aramaic, and then Coptic, which is what so many of them spoke in Egypt. So yeah, it's amazing. This book was definitely viewed or letter viewed very highly. Yeah, it's amazing.
When I was there, you know digging around the library in Istanbul, you know and digging into all this, you see Bryennios talking about this, he discovered this and Barnabas first and began making commentaries on it. And then he later realized he had the Didache. And so it was because the Didache was completely gone. Right. But you know with this, he had something that he had to go by and was beginning to make commentaries. And that's where he just keeps realizing he made one more fantastic discovery after another.
You know where we got this work. And so, yeah, it's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And then once they found and this has been true with First Clement, once they find a work, like the Didache, then they start finding all these other copies because people didn't write on their you know first Clement or I mean, you know it's just you know a work. And the name Clement doesn't even appear in it.
So yeah, you don't always know what a work was until, like I say, once they realized this is the Didache that was spoken of by the early Christians, then they started realizing, " Oh, here's another copy of it contained in a large manuscript. " And yeah, so now we have a number of copies of the Didache. First Clement, like I say, was a little bit easier to identify. Do you want to just relate what the letter's about, why it was written to the church in Corinth? Sure, sure.
And I was about to say, I wonder if we're on the verge of like an explosion of some of these discoveries in the sense that you know with textual recognition from AI and be able to find and read texts and that kind of a thing, now all it takes is to have those digital copies. And you can actually look through, you know just in my own studies, I've been like reading some old German stuff and Dutch stuff you know for my studies.
And it's just crazy what you can now read, you know even script, German script, Dutch script, translated and all that kind of. So now if you can start getting that all over the world, text and manuscripts that are there, are we going to start seeing some things together and everything? And that could be exciting. We're in another exciting Yeah, and I bet we will. The whole field has exploded. So when I started my study, you know that 10 volume set Ante-Nicene Fathers, that was pretty much it.
I mean, there were a few other works put out by the Catholic University of America. You know, in 1985, if there was an internet, it was a private thing for the military or universities. When people didn't have access to it, there was, yeah, so little interest. I mean, it's why I wrote a book to start with because like no one had heard of these people. No gay people in the academic. Yeah, they knew about all this stuff. They just didn't share it with the rest of us. You know But now it is everywhere on the internet.
So many excellent websites you know with early Christian writings, so many people translating works that never had been translated into English. And my students, I always try to make them understand how like when I was studying this stuff in your living room, you know and I wanted to go check something, you know we would drive to that SMU library in Dallas. And that was like what a two and a half hour drive was to SMU.
And so you know I'd go there for like, I don't know, 10, 15 cents a piece, you know then record those or maybe copy them off and then go back so I could go home and study them and all that kind of a thing. I mean, it was just crazy. Now you think you know on your phone, you got you know literal manuscripts, check textual differences, and all that kind of thing. It's great. It's an exciting time to be into historical theology and what we have just coming out right now. Yeah.
So yeah, just about the general idea of it. So yeah, what we have here is trouble in Corinth. So they've been doing well. Corinth has been going, prospering, and they mentioned that even, you know, that they've done well, but now they're getting into some more contention again over ministry and factions and that kind of a thing. And there seems to be some trouble and there's people asking for help.
And so in that idea of asking for help is one of the biggest things that you just get loads of anachronisms being pushed on to the book of this epistle. And I think it's safe. It's really good to say right from the beginning, " Let's let this epistle to the Corinthians speak for itself. " It doesn't even mention Clement. You know And allowing it to have something that we can get the spiritual richness of it and get everything out of it. Because you've got Roman Catholics that force things on it.
You've got reformers that reforce thing on it. You've got certainly the Orthodox that forced things on it. You've got Anglicans that force things on it. And all of it is not letting it just breathe and speak for itself. We've got trouble. And so some of the elders, the presbyters, elders in Rome, are now riding and saying, " Hey, guys, you can't do this. You've got to do things orderly. You've got to do these things. " And they're making the arguments that this is wrong and trying to encourage us in that.
In that, it's remarkably long. And you see BBC even mentions you know it's long. And it is remarkably long when you consider you know how difficult it would be. Did Clement have scribes? They were able to write this so they could just you know talk like Origen did or something? You know I don't know if we know that.
But in it, you get all these great topics that you know not just do they deal with this, but he seems very pastoral type letters, very trying to get to the heart, trying to get to and then so you get all these things about faction and all these things about pride, all these things about faith and works and all these things, resurrection, the elect and all these things come pouring out of it. And we get in the added plus. You know So anyway, I think that's an amazing part of it. Yeah. Like you say, it's easy.
Now, I don't think modern-day Roman Catholic scholars would claim that Clement was a pope. Some of them would. Others would recognize there was no pope at this time. But yeah, Catholics have read their history back into it and say, " Well, see, here you have an early example of the pope intervening in a matter. " But I'm going to just read how it starts off. It says, " The Church of God which sojourns at Rome to the church of God sojourns at Corinth. " No mention of the pope, all of that.
And then it says, " We feel that we have been somewhat tardy in turning our attention to the points respecting which you consulted us. " So yeah. Rome isn't just sticking its nose into the business of Corinth or claiming to have authority over Corinth. They're just saying, " You consulted us. We're a little slow in getting back to you. " But yeah. And then when you read it, it's all an appeal. None of it is an order.
Like, " Okay, now we command this or that, " or, " We've sent representatives who are going to remove these new elders and put the old ones back in. " There's none of that. It's a request. A sister church to another sister church. Exactly. Yeah. And in that language right there from the beginning, you're right comes out very nicely.
And then even referring here at the end of that chapter, you know for you did all things without respect of persons and walked in the commandments of God being obedient to those who had the rule over you and giving all fitting honor to the presbyters among you. And it's interesting. You know Again, the later apologists trying to really try to say, " Oh, he's forcing this sort of you know episcopal thing and all that.
" He's talking about a general presbytery, and you've got to at least acknowledge that, that there's ambiguities. And I grant that it could be read in different ways, but I think it's safe to say that here is that he's talking about just elders in general, even about the authorities that they have in the church. So not pushing some kind of, yeah, a tight, Episcopal type of thing. Whether it's there or not, he's certainly not pushing it. Yeah. I guess I don't see it at all. I see, like you say, elders or prespiters.
Depends on your background. Probably in a lot of churches from our listeners, we would know them as elders. So it is interesting. There's the plurality. This was not written to the bishop in Corinth, no reference to any bishop, just to the prespiters or elders. They're actually written to the whole church. But then when you get into it, you see it's dealing with elders, and it's sent by the elders in Rome plural. So...
Before you dive into our first topic here, one thing I think is important when you are reading other people's discussions on these patristic writings, there's a big difference between and you've always taught this. There's a big difference between an apologist and a historical theologian. A big difference. Yeah. We've given before is a title attorney versus a trial attorney. Right.
And I think that's really important because when you're looking at a title attorney, you've always given the example, you just want to look at all the different evidence and say, " Okay, it means this, it means that, it doesn't mean this, " or, " We don't know. " You can't make conclusions that are not in the text. But a trial attorney is trying to prove some kind of a point. And most of the popular level reading books or the internet blogs and trolls and all that are usually always apologists.
They're trying to prove some point. If you go deeper, you find in the Orthodox and the Reformed and the Roman Catholics. Usually you find historical theologians that are very honest. And they're saying, " Yeah, it says this, and of course, this is my view, but there's ambiguities here and they own that.
" And I think you know now reading this 30 years later, from when I first read this, I know in my own life to be able to read this with a greater maturity feels a lot better and to own the ambiguity, own the things we don't know, and not try to force on to hear things that aren't there. And that's a good point.
It is hard because when you try to be, like you say, a title attorney, and then everyone else are being trial attorneys, and yeah, they're just picking their evidence, proof texting, and you're trying to be intellectually honest, and it makes it look like your case is weak and theirs is strong. I just had and this would be one of my readers, definitely a friend, somebody who's on my side.
And he said, one of the problems he found in my writings, he said, " You'll make a good point, David, a really strong point, and it's wonderful. " But then your next sentence, you kind of take it back. And I see what he's saying. The problem is I'm trying to be intellectually honest. And sometimes, yeah, you just can't be as dogmatic as maybe you would want to be. And so I'm trying to let the reader know it's not just black and white. You know There's evidence this way, but there's other evidence.
And like I say, most people, they just want the type of guy who's dogmatic and see this is what it is, rather than somebody who's trying to point out, you know there are two sides to this. I remember, and that reminds me of I've repeated this before. Years ago, we were in I think it's when our church was in Dallas, and there was a brother in the church there that had moved to Dallas. And he wanted you to say that we were the one true church.
And if I recall, it's the only time it may be one of the only times since, certainly for the first time, but hopefully the only time since that I've ever heard profanity in the middle of a brother's meeting, when he was so angry, said, " Why did I move down here with his extra expletives? " you know And it was like to him, his mind was, he needed the carnal power of this thing of being able to say, " Everyone else is wrong, and I'm the one true church.
" And since you wouldn't give that to him, it just absolutely infuriated him. Yeah. Oh, I remember that. You and I sitting there. And I think he started the conversation with, " What the blankety blank is going on here? " And I mean, it's like, " No. " yeah But yeah, he was from a background of a church that claimed to be the one true church.
And so when you have that in your background, you want to look for another church making that claim because it appeals to our vanity, to our flesh, that, " Hey, we're part of the one and no one else is. We don't like having to acknowledge, well, the Justin Martyr quote I like to use so much. They're talking about the millennium in the dialogue with Trypho the Jew.
Trypho says, is it true that you believe Jerusalem is going to be rebuilt and the forefathers, Abraham and them, are going to be resurrected and all of this. And Justin says, " Yes, as I've told you, this is what I believe. But there are other Christians who are true and faithful Christians who think otherwise. " yeah When I first read it, it just blew my mind. This intellectual honesty, this absolute look, I don't have to be dogmatic. I feel this way.
Others feel different, and they are true and faithful Christians just like I am. And I thought, wow, that's so different than the attitudes I had ever seen in my own spiritual journey up to that point. One thing on that, though, what they are dogmatic about is not the speculative theology of what all the degrees of election are the, I don't know, a million different things you could debate. What they were dogmatic on seems to be just the simple teachings of Jesus Christ.
You know Are you putting to practice inhumanity Jesus in His way, His kingdom? Are you establishing this on earth? That seems to be what comes out. We'd love to debate all day long on the millennium and the election and this and whatever. But doing that is the hard part. And that's the part that the early fathers seem to be the most dogmatic about. Yeah. And so what I tell people and it's hard to grasp, these guys were not liberal in the sense that we think of it. Exactly. They were arch conservative.
But you can be arch conservative and be open-minded. You do not have to be closed-minded. But they were not open on the question of disobeying Jesus Christ. That was an absolute. But like you say, unspeculative theology wow, those were secondary issues that you were free to have a different opinion on as a general rule. You know If you stuck to what's in the Apostles ' Creed, which is so basic, if you don't believe the Apostles ' Creed, it's because you don't believe the New Testament.
I mean, that's all there is to it. And it's hard for us to wrap our brains around that because we've all grown up in settings where you know the statement of faith will be just pages and pages you know of this doctrine and all of that. And their statement of faith is this little apostle's creed you know that fits on a half of a page. Yeah, yeah. That's good. I wanted to mention just some of the historical items that we learned from 1 Clement.
And one of them that surprised me is you read Paul's letter, you know 1 Corinthians, and you get the idea. And it's so often expressed this way today that, " Oh, this was a carnal church. " Yeah. Corinth, yeah, they couldn't do anything right. Well, here the church in Rome is saying, " You have such a wonderful reputation. " So obviously, when they were rebuked by Paul, they accepted that rebuke. They changed.
You know Their reputation now, whatever, 30, 40 years after 1 Corinthians was written, was that they were this faithful church that everyone respected. And so it was a big shocking thing that they have this mutiny or schism, whatever you want to call it. Another thing very interesting is that this is the earliest reference we have that Peter and Paul were both martyred. And apparently in Rome, although Clement doesn't say it was in Rome, he just mentions that they were both martyred.
And this is the earliest reference to that. Okay. Yeah, that's excellent. Another one, and I mentioned this in the Romans commentary that I did on what the early Christians believed in Romans. Clement mentions that Paul preached in both East and West, and now I'm quoting directly from him. He says, " Having taught righteousness to the whole world and having come to the extreme limit of the West. " Now, the open question when you read the book of Romans is Paul says he's going to Spain.
Well, did he ever make it to Spain? The scriptures don't reveal. But Clement, by saying that he went to the extreme limit of the West, he saw him by the West of the Roman Empire. Well, technically, that would have been Britain. It's possible Paul went there. But it would certainly seem that he did make it to Spain, or Clement would have said he made it as far as Rome, and that was it. You know So it's sort of interesting that point.
Again, it doesn't change any history, but it does indicate that Paul likely did make it to Spain and that he preached in what we think of as Western Europe to some degree. Yeah, that's fascinating. That's excellent. On the canon of Scripture. So you know I'm reading this for the first time. I've been raised on traditional Bibles. Well, I say that. I was raised largely on the New World Translation of Jehovah's Witnesses. By the time I was reading this, I was used to the NIV and the New American Standard.
And of course, the King James. All I knew from the Old Testament was the Masoretic text. You know Every translation I had read, including that of Jehovah's Witnesses, is based on the Masoretic text. And so I'm reading this. And I think you just mentioned the quote where he talked about God or maybe it was in a private conversation where God divided the nations according to the number of angels.
Yeah And I remember looking at that and thinking, " I thought it said according to the tribes of Israel, " or something like that. And then I looked in the footnote and it said, " Oh, it's quoting from the Septuagint. " And that's the first time I realized that the early Christians were using the Septuagint as the Old Testament. Now, I didn't know that just from this one quote, but then when you read the other books, you start seeing all of them. That's all they quote is the Septuagint.
Generally speaking, there might be a straight quote here and there from the Masoretic text. So that was really new to me, that the Septuagint was the Old Testament of the early Christians. And then years later, I realized, " Oh, it's the Old Testament of the New Testament Christians as well. " And so it's the earliest witness we have of that after the New Testament. On that thought, now I remember you mentioning something. You can clarify this.
Years ago, I remember you talking about that when you read the translation, okay, are they translating in the Scriptures that are being quoted by Clement, or did they put a different version of the Scriptures in there? In other words, is this a version of Clement's version of the copy of the Scripture? Or is it something put back in by the translators? Do you know what I mean by that? Yes, I do. And in the New Testament, that is the case.
When the early Christians quote the New Testament, they will always follow the King James and the Ante-Nicene Fathers. You see, that works fine. There are many examples, though, where when you read what the early Christian writer is saying, it's clear that they are understanding the Greek differently than the way the King James translators translated it.
And you know I would say the translator should have followed the line of thought of the early Christian writer, but that must have been an editorial decision that you follow the King James. But in the Old Testament, I think they're just directly translating the early Christians because they're always quoting from the Septuagint. It would not have worked to pull in the King James because often I mean, the Masoretic text from the King James, because often it wouldn't even fit the context.
The difference would be you know somewhat remarkable. Exactly. Okay. So that's fascinating because in this treatment in Clement of Rome, he gets into a good chunk of Isaiah 53, and it does seem definitely to follow the Septuagint version other than the Masoretic. So yeah, that's excellent. Yeah. The other thing that you know I'm going to scandalize some people if they're you know just now getting equated with the early Christians is he talks about Judith.
He's giving examples of humble heroes of the faith, and he mentions several men, and then he mentions Esther, and then he mentions Judith. And I'm thinking, Judith, what in the world? You know I didn't think you know Christians read you know because Judith is one of the books of the so-called Apocrypha. And now he doesn't quote from it, but he mentions her as being a real person like Esther. Yeah, yeah. Amen. And I was stunned. I mean, I never expected to see that.
And I was curious if I would see any more references to the so-called Apocrypha, or more correctly, the Deuterocanonical books. And then, yeah, you find the early Christians are always quoting from them. And for many of our listeners, if you go to the writings of the Anabaptist, the early Anabaptist, the writings like Martyr's Mirror and Menno Simons. Yeah. They're quoting all the time from these same books that are called later we're called The Apocrypha, or we're trying to. Right. Absolutely. Yeah.
So anyway, a lot of interesting revelations. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so David, let's then look at you know what's considered you know the big issue you know that's in chapter 44, and it's this whole thing on ordination. And you've got everyone from you know all different churches claim and force their interpretation usually on this. I've heard, I mean, Lightfoot mentions a very strong Presbyterian argument through it. I see congregational views to this, and I could see the evidence of this.
There's also, of course, the Roman Catholics trying to force a papal thing by forcing Clement into this, and the Orthodox apologists love to do theirs. But let's see what it says here. So the idea, he gives the context of the strife and the Old Testament way of priesthood and how Moses did things. And then he gives us this as the way that says, " Guys, what you're doing is not orderly. " So let's look at it. I'll read right here, chapter 44.
Our apostles also knew, in other words, Moses knew that this was going to happen now. Our apostles also knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife on account of the office of the Episcopate. And the word Episcopate means just overseer. So there's going to be a strife in this oversea.
For this reason, therefore, in as much as they had obtained a perfect foreknowledge of this, they appointed those already mentioned and afterwards gave instruction that when these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed them in their ministry. So first of all, he just basically says that when the apostles die, they've set it up that other people should go in after them. There's no big description on how that should have happened. There should people that follow after them.
We are of opinion, therefore, that those appointed by them or afterwards by other eminent men with the consent of the whole church and who have blamelessly served the flock of Christ in a humble, peaceable, and disinterested spirit and have for a long time possessed the good opinion of all cannot be justly dismissed from the ministry. For our sins will not be small if we eject from the Episcopate those who have blamelessly and wholly fulfilled its duties. And so there it is. And so that is the big points there.
And there's lots of ways you can read this in English and in Greek. And there's thousands of pages of dissertations written on people trying to prove one way or the other. But I think if we let it just speak for itself, we have to ask the question, what is the whole thing about? What's being argued? What's the context here is that he's thinking that these are godly men that are being removed. And the emphasis on the congregation, on watching their life and conduct seems to be the most obvious stress thing.
Am I wrong? He's not saying, " Who you saw bishops come in? You saw me put my hands on them. " And you know he's making the argument to their life and conduct, going through details on that. Speaking of the whole congregation involved with this, and that seems to be the obvious reading. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And we were looking at this like title lawyers because we did not have a position we had to defend. We were in a small independent house church.
We were free to go Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, you know Anabaptist, Independent, whatever. So we were just trying to find out what was it like in the beginning. And yeah, we read and reread and reread this passage and analyze it. And some of the things we noted is, like you say, it's talking about the conduct of the ministers. He says by inference that if they were ungodly, then the congregation had the power to remove them. He said the problem is they were doing their jobs well.
For a long time, the long history of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we concluded that the type of ministry you see at the close of the apostolic age was congregational. They had the authority to put men in and to remove them. The ones who had been appointed earlier, which in this case were not necessarily by the apostles, but by ones maybe who had been appointed by the apostles. But ordination isn't the issue. It's the conduct of the ministers here and the orderliness of things. Absolutely.
But it's interesting that what the Trump card would have been if the Orthodox or the Roman Catholic position is true, would have been, " These men you put in do not have apostolic succession. Therefore, your communion is invalid because you appointed them without apostolic succession. " Never says that. The issue was you didn't have any reason to remove these other people. If you had, it would have been a different matter. But since you didn't have a reason, he says, " Listen to the majority.
The majority of the congregation wanted the original ministers. " He said, " You guys need to listen to the majority, not to Rome or to something else, but to the majority of the congregation. " And that consensus government is hugely important.
You know And I think it's one of the things, again, when you're really looking for, I don't know, when you're kind of looking for a cult that you want it to have this dogmatic thing, the whole thing of wanting it to try to come down to just one person, that congregationalism sounds, first of all, sort of too sloppy. You know But if you think about, you know people say, well, was Jesus a failure? I mean, He called us to be one.
You know And so therefore, I've got to find this one true church, whether that's Jehovah's Witness, whether that's Mormons, whether that's Orthodox, whether that's Coptic Orthodox, whether that's Russian Orthodox, whether that's Roman Catholic, you know whatever it is. But if you think about it, and I think it's a very important point in the Scriptures and in the Apostolic Fathers, never, including in the Scriptures, did they experience what the later apologists are trying to claim even existed?
I mean, you went from Galatia to Jerusalem, and you see the Apostle Paul making huge concessions, even after the official council of Acts 15, you know of the circumcision of keeping a vow and doing because the brothers in Jerusalem were at a different place. And so to try to turn this into some sort of monolithic authoritarian thing is just ridiculous. So we see here, and you're right, and later on in the chapter there or later on in the work, he again makes the appeal to the majority, the consensus.
And that's what we get in Acts 15. We get the Holy Spirit saying it's good to the Holy Spirit and to all of us. And this concept of us coming together in this consensus is very important. I have also the Didache, which is the other written around the same time. And again, it mentions, and it would match very perfectly to what Clement of Rome explains here as far as the ordination.
When it mentions how you would do ordination, Didache 15, it says, " Appoint for yourselves, bishops and deacons, worthy of the Lord, men who are humble and not greedy, and who are true and proven, for they carry out the ministry of the prophets and teachers among you. " So that idea of pointing for yourself, bishops and deacons, again, kind of matches to the Spirit that we see in Clement of Rome here. And you're right.
Which self-respecting apologists of today would not just simply say, " You're invalid, " but the fact that they're making the character, their point here, is at least, let's be honest, at least a big shortcoming and a whole and what's otherwise supposed to be given as a tight explanation for apostolic succession or these type of things that later apologists try to force onto the text.
And it matches the early congregational sense of the church hearing from God, choosing men from among them that were holy and righteous, and then ordaining them. Yeah. And you know you and I, as I think most of our listeners know, both ended up in Anabaptist churches. And this wasn't accidental.
I mean, it was taking all of the history into account on top of the New Testament, the New Testament being the only inspired source of authority, only final authority, but looking at the historical understanding of the New Testament. And it's interesting, the first Anabaptists, a number of them were very well read in the early Christians. A Pilgram Marpeck would be an example.
He quotes the early Christians back to the Catholics who are trying to quote them to uphold the Catholic position, and he quotes the early Christians back to them. Look, you can proof text to the early Christians like you can the Bible. But for the most part, they were just trying to follow what they saw in the New Testament, which were congregational churches. And yeah, it's what we see in the earliest works of the early Christians as well. Now, these are congregational churches that work together.
And that's sometimes been the problem today is I was going to ask you to hit that. So it's not like they're not accountable to each other. Right. Congregational doesn't mean independent, not listening to anybody. Yeah. Keep going on that. Yeah. Yeah. So what is neat you see in the early church is this mutual accountability of, " Okay, this is what we're doing, but we are willing to talk to a sister church.
" In fact, Irenaeus says, " If we're not sure how to do something, we go to one of the churches that was founded by the apostles to see what their practice is. Not because they have authority to command us what to do, but we want to do things right. " And we see, do you all have a tradition of how you handle this particular issue that you know perhaps came down from the apostles?
So that humility of wanting to learn, you know to wanting to make sure you're understanding the Scriptures correctly, that should be our same spirit today. And it's why you know we're doing this podcast looking at the early Christian writings. It's not that they are inspired or anything, but of wanting to do things the way it was done by the apostles and the early writings right after the New Testament at least give us a clue to that.
They provide us with the best commentary we could possibly have on the New Testament. Right. Yeah. Amen. And I think that's really important. And so seeing this difference is important. Even Ignatius, who then clearly does speak on three different offices in the way he describes, he makes a huge difference between that level of authority between the apostleship of those apostles and the later people. And that authority is different in his letter to the Romans.
Again, to the Romans, he says in chapter 4, this is from Ignatius, " I do not like Peter and Paul issue commands to you. They were apostles. I am a convict. " yeah So yeah, yeah it's a beautiful understanding there. And if you try to somehow make this some kind of authority that they have that kind of apostolic authority, you're really not being true to the text of the people that were expressing them. Yeah.
So with Ignatius, we have our earliest witness of the threefold kind of ministry, bishop, elder, or Presbyter, and Deacon. And yet, interestingly, when he writes to Rome, the other churches, he addresses their bishop. When he writes to Rome, he doesn't mention any bishop. So most scholars would acknowledge that at that point in time, and Ignatius was writing about the year 105, something like that, that Rome still had the more primitive system of just elders and deacons.
And again, I don't personally think one form or the other necessarily matters to God. It's how the church is functioning. Is it functioning? Is it teaching the apostolic doctrines? Are the members living godly lives? If so, yeah, I don't think he cares whether you have a bishop and then ministers and deacons or whether you have just a bishop and deacons. That's my own or just elders and deacons. That's my own personal opinion.
And someone just asked me a few weeks ago, " Well, Dean, how would you then do ordination? Are you just going to have would you not even bring in people from the outside? " I said, " No, actually. I mean, I'm about to go to Greece. We're going to ordain a brother there working in Greece. " And so again, we're also sending another bishop from Mine Road. He's going to come over and he's going to do the you know ordination with me.
And so it's like, no, the things that are in place here, it's not independent in the sense that you're isolated. It's independent in the sense of authority and how the Spirit works through the congregation in those sorts of authority. I come up with a phrase and I think about this of how we are autonomous, but yet accountable. We are Catholic, that is with a small C, but congregational.
And that combination of being autonomous but accountable, universal, being Catholic, but yet congregational seems to answer the way we see in the New Testament. It certainly answers the way we see in the Didache, and it appears to be here in Clement of Rome. And I think it's a powerful way.
And it's in that that I think when Jesus Christ is speaking and commanding us to be one, when the Apostle Paul is speaking to the Corinthians in chapter 1 and commanding them to be in a full agreement, it's within that congregational setting that I think we have the highest level of expectation of the unity of the church. When we try to make this international and put leaders and military and emperors over that, it got really bad. And I think that the simplicity of this we see in Clement of Rome is a blessing here.
Yeah. And you know we've tried to live that out in our congregation, I'm sure, imperfectly, but of being autonomous, I mean, we were an independent church. But when we ordained our elders, we brought in the elders from our sister church, Shippensburg Christian Fellowship, which we're a mission outreach of it. And so we brought them we wanted them there for the ordination, not to pass on Apostolic Succession, per se, but to show the accountability, the connectedness to each other laterally, horizontally.
But then we also are interested in being connected vertically to God and also to the church through all the centuries. So it's why we look at the historic faith in that we don't want to be a cult just taking the Bible and coming up with some kind of new doctrine. I mean, I get people writing me literally every week, and they just made these wonderful discoveries in the Bible that no one has ever seen before. You know And they're so sincere, but it's like we got to quit doing that.
Look, the faith was once for all handed down to just go back and see what was it? How did they live it out? How did their churches work? And let's try to do as close to the same as possible so we have that connectedness with the past and then the horizontal connectedness with other churches around us. Yeah.
And that accountability is so needed you know and having that agreed upon accountability you know where people can come in and speak to your church, just like Clement or the elders of Rome here are saying to them, " It doesn't have usurping authority. It's powerful. " The Uliaman's letter to the churches in trouble that I always like to bring out at conferences and such would follow the Spirit of Ignatius and Clement of Rome you know and this type of a thing perfectly through.
I think you know somebody would say, " Well, Dean, look at Ignatius. Doesn't it sound like like an Amish church to me? Don't go to any evangelical services. Just go to something under your bishop. " you know I mean, we add so much on top of them to force them into something else. But I think the primitive Christianity here is beautiful, and it comes out very practical and good advice for us.
Yeah, I think, well, we probably need to bring today's session to a close, but maybe our next podcast we can pick back up on first Clement. We want to talk about what this letter reveals on salvation. What did the church in Rome, which is interesting because this is a church where Paul and Peter both preached. They were the ones who received the letter to the Romans. You know And this is just a few decades after that letter was written. What did they believe about salvation?
What did they believe about predestination or election? So let's talk about that next time. And then I think it'll be interesting to talk about the Phoenix bird. That's brought up so often by people who want to trash first Clement and say, " Oh, it's full of mythology and all of that. " And yeah, I think we'll see they were actually in tune with the scientific knowledge of their day, which happened to be an error. But this is what the brilliant, educated people of their day believed.
And so it gives a whole different light to the situation. So yeah. Until next time then. Look forward to it. Okay. God bless