Introduction

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. PHILIPPIANS 1:21

Some time early in the second century, probably between the years 107 and 110, a Christian bishop was taken out of the city of Antioch in Syria under military guard. He had been condemned to die in the arena at Rome. The journey was long, overland across what is now Turkey and then by sea, and on the way he was allowed to see the Christians who came out to meet him. In a few snatched days at two of the halts, Smyrna and Troas, he wrote seven letters. Then he went on to Rome and died there. His name was Ignatius.

That is nearly all we know about him, and it needs saying at the very start. We do not know where or when he was born, how he came to faith, how long he had been bishop, or on what charge he was arrested. We have no sermon of his, no treatise, no record of his trial and no reliable account of his death. We have seven short letters, written in haste by a man with weeks to live, and a few lines about him in later writers. Everything in this book is built on those letters. Where they are silent, it is silent too.

Why so short a book

This is therefore a shorter volume than others in the series. Ignatius’s whole surviving work runs to about twelve thousand words in English — a little shorter than the Gospel of Mark. It would be wrong to stretch it. So there are eleven teaching chapters here rather than the usual eighteen, and each of them stays close to his own pages. The reader who finishes this book will be able to read every word Ignatius left in an evening, and should.

Why he still matters

Yet those seven letters are among the most precious documents the early church has left us. They were written within a generation or so of the last of the apostles, by the leader of the church in Antioch where the disciples were first called Christians. And they were written under sentence of death, which strips a man’s writing of everything but what he believes most.

What did he believe most? He believed that Jesus Christ was really born, really suffered, really died and really rose, in real flesh, and he would not let anyone make that less. He believed that the church must be one, gathered around one table and one Lord, and he could not bear the thought of it splintering. He believed that faith and love are the beginning and the end of the Christian life. And he believed that to die for Christ was not the end of his discipleship but its beginning.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. JOHN 1:14

The one thread

If there is a single thread through everything Ignatius wrote, it is this: Christ is real, and so the Christian life must be real. He uses one word again and again. Christ was truly born, truly persecuted, truly crucified, truly raised. The false teachers said He only seemed to suffer; Ignatius answered that in that case his own chains only seemed to bind him, and he was dying for nothing. From that one conviction everything else follows. Because the flesh of Christ is real, the bread of the church’s table matters. Because Christ is one, His people must be one. Because Christ really died and really rose, a man may walk towards the beasts in hope. And because Christianity is a matter of being and not only of saying, Ignatius was impatient with every religion of words. “It is better to keep silence and to be, than to talk and not to be,” he told the Ephesians.

How this book is arranged

The second chapter tells his life, or as much of it as can honestly be told. The eleven that follow each take one of his key teachings, from the reality of Christ’s flesh and the Lord’s Supper, through the order and unity of the church, martyrdom, faith and love, and the silence of God, to humility, prayer for all and his counsel to the younger bishop Polycarp. A conclusion draws the thread together, and a reader’s guide points you to the letters themselves.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Ignatius would have understood why. He wrote so that people would stand firm, love one another and hold on to Christ. So read a chapter, stop at the questions, and pray.

Reading him with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and Ignatius needs reading with care at three points in particular.

First, his longing for martyrdom. He begged the Christians at Rome not to try to save him, and wrote of the beasts in words that can make a modern reader flinch. We must remember that he was already condemned and already on the road; he did not go looking for arrest. The early church itself, within fifty years, was warning believers not to hand themselves over to death unbidden. His eagerness is the eagerness of a man making sense of an end he could not escape. It is not a pattern for seeking death.

Second, his teaching on the bishop. Ignatius presses obedience to the bishop harder than any other early writer, and many later Christians have read his words as if he were describing the diocesan bishop of the fourth century or the sixteenth. He was not. He was speaking of the pastor of a single city’s church, and his reasons were practical and urgent. Christians who are not episcopalian can learn much from him, but they should not be told that they must read him as a later age did, and episcopalians should not claim more from him than he says.

Third, his language about Judaism. Ignatius wrote sharply against Christians who wanted to keep up Jewish practices, and one of his sentences is among the bluntest in early Christian writing. His target was a party inside the church, not the Jewish people; but the tone of such words, and the use that later ages made of them, must be read with sorrow and not repeated.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

None of this is said to diminish him. It is said so that you can trust the rest. On the reality of Christ, on the unity of His people, on the life of faith and love, and on the courage to be a Christian and not merely to be called one, Ignatius speaks with a clarity that nineteen centuries have not dimmed.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Set aside an evening this month to read all seven of Ignatius’s letters straight through, as their first hearers would have heard them.

2. Ask yourself honestly whether your faith is more a matter of talking than of being. Name one place where your words run ahead of your life.

3. Write down in a sentence what you believe about the real body of Jesus: born, crucified, risen. Then ask what difference it makes to your week.

4. Think of a Christian of another tradition whom you find hard to understand. Pray for them by name, as Ignatius prayed for churches he had never seen.

5. Resolve to read this book a chapter at a time, and not to move on until you have prayed its prayer.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, You were truly born, You truly suffered, You truly rose, and You are truly with Your people now.

Thank You for Your servant Ignatius, who held to You on the road to death and wrote to strengthen churches he had never seen.

Where he was faithful to Your Word, teach me through him; where he was carried too far, give me the grace to see it and to hold fast what is good.

Make me a Christian in deed and not in name only, and keep me in Your one church until I see You. Amen.