My Charter Is Jesus Christ

For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. ROMANS 10:4

Two dangers troubled Ignatius on his road. One was the teaching that denied Christ’s real flesh. The other, which he met in Magnesia and Philadelphia, was a pull back towards the practices of Judaism: the keeping of the Sabbath and, it seems, other observances of the law, urged on Gentile Christians as though they were necessary. His answer to both was the same. Everything must be measured by Jesus Christ. This chapter looks at what he said, why he said it, and how it should be read with care.

The problem in Magnesia and Philadelphia

We do not know exactly who the teachers were. Some may have been Jewish Christians; Ignatius’s remark that it is better to hear Christianity from a circumcised man than Judaism from an uncircumcised one suggests that some of them were Gentiles who had taken up Jewish customs. What they seem to have had in common was the conviction that faith in Christ was not enough, and that believers needed to live by the old observances as well.

This was not a new struggle. It was the struggle of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, fought again a generation later in a different province.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. GALATIANS 5:1

What he said

Ignatius’s words to the Magnesians are sharp. “Be not seduced by strange doctrines nor by antiquated fables, which are profitless. For if even unto this day we live after the manner of Judaism, we avow that we have not received grace.” And a little later comes the sentence that is the bluntest in all his letters: “It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism.”

It is worth noting that this passage contains the earliest known use of the word Christianity, which Ignatius sets over against Judaism. He says that “Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity, wherein every tongue believed and was gathered together unto God.” His point is that the faith of Israel pointed forward to Christ and was fulfilled in Him, so that to go back to the old forms is to go backwards.

He puts this in terms of the Lord’s day. Those who had once lived in the old ways, he says, had come to a new hope, “no longer observing Sabbaths but fashioning their lives after the Lord’s day, on which our life also arose through Him and through His death.” For Ignatius the first day of the week, the day of resurrection, had become the centre of Christian time.

Upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them. ACTS 20:7

The prophets were His disciples

It would be wrong, though, to think that Ignatius despised the Old Testament or the faith of Israel. The opposite is true. He honoured the prophets deeply. “The divine prophets lived after Christ Jesus,” he told the Magnesians, meaning that they lived in His way and by His grace, and were persecuted for it. They were, he says, His disciples in the Spirit, waiting for Him as their teacher; and when He came, He raised them from the dead.

To the Philadelphians he wrote with real warmth: “we love the prophets also, because they too pointed to the Gospel in their preaching and set their hope on Him and awaited Him; in whom also having faith they were saved in the unity of Jesus Christ.” The patriarchs and prophets are inside the church, not outside it. Christ is “the door of the Father, through which Abraham and Isaac and Jacob enter in, and the Prophets and the Apostles and the whole Church.”

Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad. JOHN 8:56

His quarrel, then, was not with Israel’s Scriptures but with any use of them that led away from Christ.

The charter

This brings us to one of the most remarkable passages in the letters. At Philadelphia, Ignatius tells us, he met people who said, “If I find it not in the charters, I believe it not in the Gospel.” By the charters they meant the ancient Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. When he answered, “It is written,” they replied, “That is the question” — in other words, they disputed his reading of the texts.

Ignatius’s reply is magnificent: “But as for me, my charter is Jesus Christ, the inviolable charter is His cross and His death and His resurrection, and faith through Him.”

He does not mean that the Scriptures do not matter. He was ready to argue from them. He means that Christ is the key to them, and that the cross and resurrection are the fixed point from which everything else is read. The argument about texts could go on for ever; the fact of Christ could not be moved. That is how Jesus Himself taught His disciples to read the Scriptures.

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. LUKE 24:27

And he adds: “the Gospel is the completion of immortality.” The old covenant was good, the priests were good, but better is the High Priest, Christ Himself, to whom the hidden things of God are committed.

Reading him with care

Here, as the Introduction warned, the modern reader must be careful. Ignatius was writing about a controversy inside the church, over what Gentile Christians should practise. He was not writing about the Jewish people as a people, and nothing in his letters calls for hostility towards them. But his sharpest phrase — that it is “monstrous” to practise Judaism — sounds very differently in the ears of those who know what later centuries of Christian contempt for Jews produced. Later writers took the tone of such sentences much further, and the church has much to repent of. Christians today should not borrow his words to speak of Jewish people or their faith.

It is also worth remembering what Paul, who fought the same battle over the law more fiercely than anyone, said about his own people.

Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved. ROMANS 10:1

And Paul reminded Gentile believers that they were branches grafted into Israel’s olive tree, with no room for boasting.

Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee. ROMANS 11:18

The true lesson of Ignatius here is not a lesson about Judaism. It is a lesson about Christ. Any teaching that adds something to Christ as necessary for salvation, whether it comes from the old law or from modern religion, must be tested by the charter of His cross, death and resurrection.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read Galatians 5:1–6 and ask whether you are relying on anything other than Christ for your standing with God.

2. Take one passage of the Old Testament you know well and ask how it points to Christ, as Ignatius said the prophets did.

3. Make the Lord’s day a true day of resurrection this week: begin it by remembering that Christ is risen.

4. Examine the way you speak about Jewish people. Put away any trace of contempt, and pray for them as Paul did.

5. Write down Ignatius’s sentence, “my charter is Jesus Christ”, and use it as a test the next time you are drawn into an argument about religion.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, You are the end of the law for righteousness to all who believe, and the charter of our faith.

Thank You for the prophets who looked for You, and for the patriarchs who rejoiced to see Your day.

Keep me from adding anything to Your cross as though it were not enough, and keep me from contempt for any people You have made.

Let Your cross, Your death and Your resurrection be the fixed point of my life, and let all my reading of Your Word lead me to You. Amen.