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Once the Apostles had departed from this earthly scene, theological leadership in the church passed to a body of men known collectively as the early church fathers. Many of their writings have survived for us to read today.
The first generation of the early church fathers are known as the Apostolic fathers. The name was coined at a time when it was thought that these men had direct contact with the Apostles. It is now thought that only a few of them enjoyed this privilege. Readers find, when studying these Apostolic fathers (men such as Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna), that they generally lack the theological vision and creativity that we have come to expect of theologians. Their theology often reads like a plodding enunciation of obvious biblical truths and endless quotations from the New Testament without necessarily any profound penetration into its meaning.
This is not, however, to deny that many noble and beautiful things are found in this first generation of Christian writers. One of the most exalted productions of this period is the anonymous Epistle to Diognetus, perhaps written in the first half of the second century. The Epistle contains meditations on the work of Christ that have thrilled and enchanted readers up to the present day:
God revealed how His love had such a regard for the human race that He did not hate us, or thrust us away, or charge our sin against us, but showed great longsuffering and bore with us. He Himself took upon Himself the burden of our sins; He gave His own Son as a ransom for us, the Holy One for transgressors, the Blameless One for the wicked, the Righteous One for the unrighteous, the Imperishable One for the perishing, the Immortal One for mortals. For what else could cover our sins except His righteousness? Who else could have justified wicked and ungodly people like us, except the only Son of God? O sweet exchange! O unsearchable work! O blessings that surpass all expectation! A single Righteous One has swallowed up the wickedness of many; the righteousness of One has justified a multitude of transgressors!
When we come to the closing decades of the second century, we meet the first genuinely great theologian among the early church fathers, Irenaeus of Lyons (flourished c. 175–95). Irenaeus’ magnum opus was his Against Heresies, a lengthy work written against Gnosticism. Within that context, Irenaeus developed a strongly Christocentric theology in which Christ is simultaneously God incarnate and the second Adam who reverses the calamity brought about in the first Adam.
We could call Irenaeus’ outlook a two-Adams theology. The first Adam was relatively childlike and showed his weakness in succumbing to satanic temptation. All humanity was implicated in his fall. But the second Adam, both human and divine, resisted where the first had yielded and progressively undid the character and consequences of Adam’s sin by lifelong holiness and obedience. Irenaeus saw Christ’s lifelong obedience as having a twofold significance: It sanctified human nature at every stage (from childhood onward) and—through obedience unto the death of the cross—paid the debt of human sin on humanity’s behalf.
He did away with the results of human disobedience that came, in the beginning, through the fruit of a tree. He did this by becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Thus, He set things right again after the disobedience that took place through a tree, and He did it through the obedience He accomplished on a tree. Hereby He clearly manifested God Himself, the One we had offended in the First Adam, when Adam disobeyed the divine command. In the Second Adam, however, we are reconciled and made obedient even unto death.
Many of the other theologians of the second century come into the category of “apologists”—defenders of Christianity against the various misunderstandings and misrepresentations that clustered around it in the minds of pagans. Among the great apologists were Aristides, Anaxagoras, Melito of Sardis, Theophilus of Antioch, and Justin Martyr. Their true influence was not so much in persuading pagans as in helping to strengthen their fellow Christians in their sense of the truth and the rightness of the faith they professed. When believers read the apologists, they probably came away feeling that faith required no loss of intellectual or moral integrity.
Justin Martyr deserves a special mention among the second-century apologists, simply because he has left us a fairly full account of how Christians worshiped in that immediately post-Apostolic age. Modern readers might be struck by two features of this worship:
1. The strong emphasis on Sunday, “the first day of the week” (John 20:1), as the proper day of worship, set apart and hallowed by Christ’s resurrection on this day. Justin fashions an intimate connection between the first day of the week in the Genesis creation account, when God said, “Let there be light,” and the day of the Savior’s resurrection, when in a far deeper and more significant way God once again said, “Let there be light!” For when Christ rose from death, He vanquished and dispelled the darkness of the tomb. This day, Justin observes, is therefore universally kept among the churches as the day of worship.
2. The central place given to the Lord’s Supper in early Christian worship. It was not relegated to an add-on every few months. It was integral to the worship every Sunday. Justin also records that the supper was understood as in some way conveying Christ’s body and blood to the faithful. He does not describe the “mechanics” of how this works; he simply sets it forth as a thing most surely believed. In the Reformed tradition, Justin’s belief is preserved by the careful wording of Westminster Confession of Faith 29.7.
At the end of the second century and on into the early third, the eloquent and fiery Tertullian of Carthage (c. 155–220) impacted like a huge meteor the theology of Latin-speaking Christians. His writing was prolific; it was particularly influential in helping Christians articulate the fundamentals of belief in the Trinity and the incarnation. This is not to say that Tertullian got everything right (his Trinitarianism was primitive compared to the precision of the Nicene Creed). But he asked the right questions, pointed in the right direction, and coined some enduring terminology. To Tertullian the church owes the terms Trinitas (Trinity), persona (person), and substantia (substance), which became pivotal in Latin theology.
Tertullian is a fascinating figure. Though he helped shape Latin theology so deeply, the later church refused to give him the titles of “saint” or “father.” This was owing to Tertullian’s ardent sympathy with a schismatic movement known as Montanism (the charismatics, so to speak, of the second century). He used hard words against nonsympathizers. Tertullian is a case study in how a theologian can be both right and wrong.
At around the same time as Tertullian’s ministry in the Latin West, the Greek East saw the life and work of Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215). Clement in some ways was the opposite of Tertullian—gentle where Tertullian was fiery, unsympathetic to Montanism, and (in particular) optimistic about finding truth among the Greek philosophers. Tertullian famously set reason and revelation in antithesis: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (Athens, the cradle of Western philosophy, here stood for human reason’s efforts in the pagan mind at comprehending reality.)
Clement, by contrast, saw the activity of the Logos—the second person of the Trinity conceived in terms of “cosmic reason”—as pervading all creation. It was almost inevitable that the philosophers, attuning themselves to reason, would glimpse some of the light of the Logos. (Clement referred to “the noble and half-inspired Plato.”) We may, however, think that Clement stated this view with dubious force when he claimed that what the Law and the Prophets were to the Jews, philosophy was to the Greeks.
Clement’s theology and spirituality were summed up in his three great treatises, Exhortation to the Greeks (a work of apologetics), The Tutor (an instruction manual for the new Christian), and Stromata. The last title literally means “carpetbags” and is a strange treatise that seems deliberately to meander all over the place, as Clement offers his view of the ideal Christian.
Clement’s greatest work may have been to set the stage in Alexandria for the far more impactful ministry of his pupil Origen (c. 185–253). But that takes us beyond the chronological limits of this article.
Perhaps we can summarize the life and work of the earliest fathers of the church in the following way. After the Apostles laid the church’s foundation, these fathers shaped the basic moral and theological outlook that would enable the church to meet the unprecedented challenges of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries. The ministry of Cyprian, Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Cyril of Alexandria, and Augustine is unthinkable without the work of their predecessors in the faith. So often, under the providence of God, we stand on the shoulders of those who went before us.