In continuing the blog series on Ignatius of Antioch’s Christology, we have seen that Ignatius believed that Christ must be human to provide a sacrifice (himself) sufficient for salvation on behalf of the fallen human race. However, the created-human race offended an eternal, transcendent God and stands no chance to redeem themselves before God. So, in the mind of Ignatius, God must save man from God. Therefore, Christ must also be God. These two natures in the Son were not preexistent, only the Son’s deity, but find their cosmic union in the incarnation, or the birth of Christ, sometime around 4 B.C.

For Ignatius, the incarnation combines both the humanity and deity of Christ and makes possible the redemption of humanity. It is hard to miss his theology on the incarnation in his letter to the Ephesians; he writes, “There is only one physician, who is both flesh and spirit, born and unborn, God in man, true life in death, both from Mary and from God, first subject to suffering and then beyond it, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Ign. Eph. 7.2). It is the one physician, namely Jesus Christ, who can make us whole, who is in both realities of existence that Ignatius explains through his antithetical statements. In the first antithesis, Schoedel argues that the “two dimensions” are the “kernel of the later two-nature christologies.”[1] Jesus is the “born and unborn” and “from Mary and from God,” which opposes early on the ideals of Arianism, that being, Christ as the first and greatest of all of God’s creation. Ignatius would not have it and would argue that in his “unborn-ness” he could not have been created, thereby concluding the Godhead of Christ. It is the “divine and human attributes [that] are predicated of one and the same subject, and such an attribution finds its legitimacy in the reality of the incarnation.”[2] Ignatius continues to describe the incarnation of Jesus Christ, who is “both from the seed of David and of the Holy Spirit,” as “God’s plan” (Ign. Eph. 18.2; see also Eph. 20.2); and means to “bring the newness of eternal life” to which had already “began to take effect” at the virgin birth (Ign. Eph. 19.3).

So for Ignatius, the cross point of Christ’s deity and Christ’s humanity is the virgin birth, with little emphasis on Mary (though she plays a significant role in God’s plan).[3] Ignatius is convinced that their “unshakable faith,” placed on the bloody cross of Christ must be grounded in the fact that “he is truly of the family of David with respect to human descent, Son of God with respect to the divine will and power, truly born of a virgin…” (Ign. Smyrn. 1.1). This was especially true for the Smyrnaeans since they were head-on with the Docetists who could not fathom the “Son of God” being born of a woman.[4] As mentioned above, the incarnation through Mary was God’s plan (Ign. Eph. 18.2). So, it is of value to note, in the following verses, Ignatius’s “three mysteries” that were realized only to God and kept from Satan. These mysteries are: “the virginity of Mary and her giving birth…also the death of the Lord” (Ign. Eph. 19.1). These three, having salvific renditions, for Ignatius, should not be separated, as the birth was meant for suffering and death. As Ignatius states, “He was born and was baptized in order that by his suffering he might cleanse the water” (Ign. Eph. 18.2). These three serve as a core of the gospel message, as he encourages, “three mysteries to be loudly proclaimed” (Ign. Eph. 19.1). Mainly because Ignatius argues that the destruction of evil powers began “when God appeared in human form” (e.g. the virgin birth) and resulted in “the abolition of death” (at the cross) (Ign. Eph. 19.3). Again, the focus on the virgin birth is not on Mary but on the human purity to cleanse sin and the divine power to save that is attributed to Christ in the incarnation and should be seen as the root of Christian orthodoxy as we know it today.

In conclusion, one can see the Christology that is developed by Ignatius is well established and articulated in great depth. For what took the church centuries to accumulate, Ignatius seems to have established the foundation of the later Christological agreements. The Jesus he loved and served up till his death was the anticipated Messiah foretold in the Old Testament. And this Messiah was to take away the sins of God’s people through a merciless and violent act of humanity. But to Ignatius, this is only possible if the Messiah is both God and man. To view Christ as one without the other holds serious repercussions regarding salvation and the truth of the Gospel. So, Christ must have two natures, as seen in Ignatius’s antitheses, which both collide at the incarnation of Christ found in the virgin birth.

 

 

 

[1] William R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 60.

[2] Thomas G. Weinandy, “The Apostolic Christology of Ignatius of Antioch: The Road to Chalcedon,” in Trajectories Through the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers, edited by Andrew Gregory and Christopher M. Tuckett (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005), 82. It is also noted by the author that Christ being the subject of divinity and humanity was not originated by Ignatius, but that he must have adopted and expounded on this Christology (81).

[3] On the discussion of Mary in Ignatius’s letters, Foster notes, “references to Mary serve the related purposes of affirming the real humanity of Jesus” (Paul Foster, “The Epistles of Ignatius of Antioch,” in The Writings of the Apostolic Fathers, edited by Paul Foster [New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2007], 100).

[4] Foster, 101.