Canon, creed and bishop

Guard what was entrusted

In his second letter to Timothy, Paul charged him:

And the things that you have heard me say among many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be qualified to teach others as well.

2 Timothy 2:2

From Paul to Timothy, from Timothy to faithful men, and from them to others: four generations in a single verse. Paul told Timothy to "Guard the treasure entrusted to you" (2 Timothy 1:14), and Jude urged believers to "contend earnestly for the faith entrusted once for all to the saints" (Jude 1:3). With the apostles gone, the second-century church had to keep that charge, and it did so with three things: the Scriptures that gathered the apostles' writings, the creed that summed up the faith, and the bishop who taught and guarded it. The ideas of these years are the Theology course's After the apostles: the apologists and Irenaeus; this lesson follows the people and the events.

Ignatius and the bishop

Around 110 Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in Syria, was taken in chains to Rome, and on the way he wrote to churches in Asia Minor, to the church at Rome and to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. In the churches of Asia Minor to which he wrote, one bishop served the congregation with presbyters and deacons, and he told them to do nothing that belongs to the church apart from the bishop. To Smyrna he wrote that where the bishop is, there the people should be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic church Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8. Faced with division and false teaching, what he sought was unity under one bishop at one Eucharist.

Church offices did not take the same shape everywhere from the start. Paul told Titus to appoint elders in every town and then called them overseers (Titus 1:5-7); Wesley comments, "These were the elders, or bishops, that Paul approved of" Wesley. The Didache, from around 100, says only, "Appoint, therefore, for yourselves, bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord" Didache 15.1. Historians differ over when one bishop leading the church of each city became the pattern everywhere. Either way, what Paul asked of an overseer was not rank but a blameless life, and that he "hold firmly to the faithful word as it was taught" (Titus 1:9).

Marcion and Irenaeus

In Rome Marcion, from Sinope on the Black Sea, took another road. Gripped by Paul's gospel of grace, he came to see the God of the Old Testament and the Father of Jesus as two different gods, and in 144 he broke with the church at Rome. His Bible, known to us from those who wrote against him, left out the Old Testament and held only a Gospel cut down from Luke and ten letters of Paul. His churches spread widely and lasted long. Some scholars think Marcion's list pressed the church to define its own; others that the churches were already gathering and reading the same books.

One early list of the books read in the churches is the Muratorian Fragment, found in Milan in the eighteenth century. Most scholars date it to the late second century, but some to the fourth The Muratorian Fragment. How the New Testament books came to be received as the canon is told in the doctrine course's The canon: which books are Scripture and in How did we get the Bible?.

Irenaeus, who had seen Polycarp at Smyrna in his youth, served the church at Lyons in Gaul and became its bishop after the persecution of 177; around 180 he wrote Against Heresies. He was answering Marcion and the Gnostic teachers who said the apostles had passed a secret knowledge to a few, and his answer had three parts. The first was Scripture: the apostles preached the gospel, "which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith" Against Heresies 3.1.1. He goes on to tell how Matthew, Mark, Luke and John came to write their Gospels 3.1.1.

The second was the rule of faith that the whole church confesses. Though scattered to the ends of the earth, the church keeps the one faith received from the apostles: in God the Father, maker of all things; in Christ Jesus his Son, who became flesh to save us; and in the Spirit who spoke through the prophets Against Heresies 1.10.1. The churches in Germany, Spain and Gaul, in the East, in Egypt and Libya believe the same, he writes, "For, although the languages of the world are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same" 1.10.2.

The third was the succession of bishops. Had the apostles kept hidden mysteries, they would have entrusted them to the men to whom they entrusted the churches, and the bishops the apostles appointed in the churches, and their successors, can be counted down to the present 3.3.1. As his example he listed the bishops of the church at Rome, founded by Peter and Paul, from Linus to Eleutherius, the twelfth from the apostles, in his own day 3.3.3. Even without the apostles' writings, he argued, their tradition would suffice: whole peoples without Scriptures of their own believe, "having salvation written in their hearts by the Spirit, without paper or ink" 3.4.2.

The creed, and the churches today

By the late second and early third centuries the church at Rome asked those coming to baptism, in turn, whether they believed in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and from that confession grew the creed scholars call the Old Roman Creed. Shaped over centuries, it became the Apostles' Creed the Western church confesses together; the story that the twelve apostles each wrote a clause is a later legend. Irenaeus's rule of faith and the Apostles' Creed share one frame, in three parts: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The traditions read this age with different emphases. The Catholic Church teaches that the apostles' office passed to the bishops, and that the bishop of Rome, Peter's successor, keeps their unity; it reads Irenaeus's words about the Roman church's "pre-eminent authority" as an early witness to this 3.3.2. The Eastern Orthodox hold that the bishops, in succession from the apostles, each lead one eucharistic people and together keep one faith; they read the passage as the honour of the first place given to an ancient church the apostles founded. The work survives whole only in Latin translation, so even the passage's original sense is debated.

Most Protestants see the true apostolic succession in the apostles' teaching handed on in the Scriptures, and note that Irenaeus called on the bishops as witnesses because they taught the same faith in the open. Among the churches of the Reformation, the Anglicans and some Lutheran churches, such as the Church of Sweden, have kept the historic succession of bishops. How the churches understand church order today is the doctrine course's What the church is.

The second-century church met false teaching with letters, books and preaching. Later, when it held power, the church punished those it judged heretics with sword and fire, a story remembered with repentance in The Inquisition and heresy. On Jude's call to contend for the faith, Wesley adds, "Yet humbly, meekly, and lovingly" Wesley. The apostles' faith is no secret but open to the whole church, and it is now ours to receive and to entrust to the next generation. The next lesson, Constantine: from persecution to toleration, tells how the persecuted church came under the emperor's protection.

Practice