Truly Born, Truly Crucified, Truly Raised

Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God. 1 JOHN 4:2

If you read Ignatius’s letters one after another, one word begins to ring like a bell. Truly. Christ was truly born. He truly ate and drank. He was truly persecuted, truly crucified, truly died, truly raised. Ignatius does not use the word decoratively. He uses it as a man uses a hammer, driving the same nail again and again, because he was fighting a teaching that would have taken the nail out altogether.

The teaching he opposed

In the churches of Asia Minor there were teachers who said that Christ had not really come in the flesh. He had only seemed to. The Son of God, they reasoned, could not be touched by birth and hunger and pain and death; such things were beneath the divine. So the body the disciples saw was an appearance, and the suffering on the cross was a kind of show. Later writers called this teaching Docetism, from the Greek word for seeming. Ignatius has no technical name for it. He simply says, again and again, that these men claim Christ “suffered only in semblance”, and then adds, with a flash of bitterness, that they are themselves “mere semblance”.

The error was not new. The apostle John had already met something like it, and had drawn the line without hesitation.

For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist. 2 JOHN 1:7

What made it dangerous was that it sounded reverent. It seemed to protect God’s greatness. It spared Christ the shame of the cross. It could even appeal to a certain kind of spirituality that thinks the body does not really matter. Ignatius saw straight through it. A Christ who only seemed to suffer only seemed to save.

The creed in his letters

Against this teaching Ignatius sets out, in letter after letter, what amounts to a short creed. To the Trallians he wrote that they should be deaf when anyone spoke to them apart from Jesus Christ, “who was of the race of David, who was the Son of Mary, who was truly born and ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died”. To the Smyrnaeans he wrote that Christ was “truly born of a virgin and baptized by John”, and “truly nailed up in the flesh for our sakes under Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch”.

Notice what these lines hold. They name His mother and His ancestor. They name the Roman governor and the Jewish king. They anchor the gospel in history, in a real family and a real province in a real year. The faith Ignatius confessed was not a myth or a parable of the spiritual life. It was news about something that happened. Luke had done the same when he set the coming of John the Baptist in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, and Paul when he gave the Corinthians the list of witnesses who had seen the risen Lord.

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. 1 CORINTHIANS 15:3–4

The same holds for the resurrection. It was not enough for Ignatius that Christ’s spirit lived on. He insisted, writing to Smyrna, “I know and believe that He was in the flesh even after the resurrection.” He recalls that the risen Lord told Peter and his company to take hold of Him and handle Him, and see that He was not a bodiless spirit, and that He ate and drank with them afterwards. The wording he gives is not quite the wording of any of our Gospels, but the scene is the one Luke tells.

Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. LUKE 24:39

Why it mattered to him

Why did Ignatius care so fiercely? Partly because he loved the truth. But he also gives a reason that could only have come from a man in his position. If Christ only seemed to suffer, he asks the Trallians, “why am I in bonds? And why also do I desire to fight with wild beasts? So I die in vain.” He makes the same point to Smyrna: if these things were done in semblance, then he is a prisoner in semblance too.

It is a startling argument, and a deeply moving one. Ignatius’s chains were real. The beasts waiting in Rome were real. If Christ had not really suffered in the flesh, then a real man was about to be torn apart for a phantom. His own body, on its way to death, was bound up with the body of Christ. The reality of the one gave meaning to the other.

If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. 1 CORINTHIANS 15:19

There is a pastoral reason too. Ignatius noticed that the people who denied Christ’s flesh also neglected human flesh. Writing to Smyrna he says that they “have no care for love, none for the widow, none for the orphan, none for the afflicted, none for the prisoner, none for the hungry or thirsty.” Whether he means this as a strict description or a general charge, the connection is sound. A faith that despises the body will sooner or later despise hungry bodies. A Saviour who took flesh sends His people to feed and clothe and visit.

One physician

The fullest statement of his faith about Christ comes in the letter to Ephesus, in a line that reads almost like a hymn: “There is one only physician, of flesh and of spirit, generate and in-generate, God in man, true Life in death, Son of Mary and Son of God, first passible and then impassible, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Every pair in that sentence holds together what the false teachers wanted to pull apart. Flesh and spirit. Born and unborn. God and man. Life and death. Mary’s son and God’s Son. Able to suffer, and then beyond all suffering. Ignatius did not have the careful language of the later creeds, and some of his phrases would be framed differently two or three centuries on. But he had grasped the heart of what the councils would later defend: that Jesus Christ is one person, truly God and truly man, and that both halves of that confession must be held with equal firmness. He can even write, with a boldness that startles, of “the blood of God”.

Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. ACTS 20:28

To Polycarp he put the same wonder in a string of opposites: the Eternal, the Invisible, “who became visible for our sake”, the Impalpable, the Impassible, “who suffered for our sake”.

Holding it today

The Docetists of Ignatius’s day have long gone, but the temptation they gave in to has not. It returns whenever Christians treat Jesus as an idea rather than a person, a symbol of love rather than a man who was nailed up under Pontius Pilate. It returns whenever the resurrection is reduced to a feeling in the hearts of the disciples. It returns, more quietly, whenever we live as if our bodies were outside the reach of the gospel, or as if the hungry and the imprisoned were none of our concern.

Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil. HEBREWS 2:14

Ignatius’s answer is still the right one. Hold to the plain facts. He was born. He suffered. He died. He rose, in the body, and He lives. Everything else in the Christian faith hangs on those facts, and a man may walk into the arena on the strength of them.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read the Apostles’ Creed aloud and underline every phrase that ties the faith to history — a name, a place, an event. Thank God for each.

2. Ask yourself whether you think of Jesus more as an idea or as a person. Spend ten minutes today reading one of the resurrection chapters in the Gospels, and picture it as it happened.

3. Ignatius linked a denial of Christ’s flesh with neglect of the hungry and the prisoner. Choose one practical act of care for someone in bodily need this week.

4. If you are suffering in your body, bring it to the Christ who truly suffered in His. Tell Him plainly what it is like.

5. Learn by heart 1 John 4:2 and use it as a test of any teaching about Christ you meet.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of Mary and Son of God, You were truly born, You truly suffered, You truly died and You truly rose.

Thank You that You did not save us from a distance or in appearance, but came in real flesh and bore real wounds for us.

Keep me from every teaching that would make You less than You are, and from every habit of heart that forgets the bodies You made and loved.

Let my faith rest on what You have done, and let my life show that You are alive. Amen.