The Heart of His Letters

When you read the seven letters, it helps to know what to listen for. Ignatius wrote in haste, and his thoughts tumble and repeat. But under the urgency, the same few concerns return again and again. Three, above all, run through everything he wrote: the unity of the church, the reality of Christ, and his own longing to reach God through death. Hear these, and you will hear Ignatius.

Unity under the bishop

The theme that presses hardest is unity. Ignatius was terrified that the churches would splinter — that false teachers and rival gatherings would pull the flock apart once the steadying voices of the apostles were gone. Against that danger he called the Christians to gather as one, around their bishop, their elders, and their deacons. Do nothing on your own, he urged, that divides the body; do nothing that belongs to the church without the one set over it. As he wrote to the Smyrnaeans, it was not lawful to do aught of things pertaining to the Church apart from the bishop.

To the same church he gave a line that has echoed down the centuries:

Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be; even as where Jesus may be, there is the universal Church.

That phrase, the universal Church, is a small landmark in Christian writing. The word Ignatius actually used was the Greek katholikē — meaning whole, universal, the church everywhere rather than any one congregation. It is the earliest surviving use of that word for the church, and the same Greek word later came into English as catholic. Here it carries no party meaning; it simply names the one whole people of God, wherever they are found.

The reality of Christ, and the medicine of immortality

Ignatius wrote against a specific error. In his day some teachers, later called docetists, claimed that Christ had never truly had a body — that he only seemed to be born, to eat, to suffer, to die. To Ignatius this was a deadly lie. If Christ's flesh was not real, then his death was not real, and the whole hope of the gospel dissolved into appearance.

So he insisted, over and over, that Jesus was really born, really crucified, really raised. And he tied this to the shared meal of the church, the breaking of bread, which mattered precisely because the flesh of Christ was true. To the Ephesians he described that bread with a famous phrase:

breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality and the antidote that we should not die but live for ever in Jesus Christ.

The medicine of immortality — that is how Ignatius thought of the church gathered at its table around a Christ who was truly flesh and truly risen. The unity he pleaded for was not mere organisation. It was a matter of life, of holding fast together to the real Christ who alone could carry them beyond death.

A longing to reach God

The third theme is the strangest and the most personal. Ignatius did not merely accept his coming death; he longed for it. He had come to see his martyrdom as the way he would at last belong wholly to Christ — the road on which he would finally reach God. This is why, as we will see, he begged the Roman Christians not to save him. He feared their kindness more than the beasts.

It is important to hear this rightly. This was Ignatius's own conviction, formed in his own extremity, as a condemned man already on his way to die. He is not laying down a rule that every Christian should seek death; he is a particular man, in a particular hour, making sense of the end he could no longer avoid, and finding in it not terror but hope. Read as his own, it is one of the most moving things in the early church: a man walking toward the beasts and calling it the beginning of life.

Unity, reality, and the longing for God — carry these three with you. When Ignatius writes about bishops and bread and beasts, he is always, underneath, writing about the one whole church, the one real Christ, and the God he was hurrying to meet.