docetism – Forging Ploughshares

“Who Do You Say That I Am?”: The Hypothesis of Scripture as Encounter with Christ

The identity of Christ is the unifying point of Scripture but this identity is synonymous with the presence of Christ in the reader or believer. That is, Christ’s identity pertains directly to the one doing the identifying, as his identity entails his presence in the life of the one rightly answering his question.[1] Christ’s life and presence are rendered in his identity and this identifying realization. This entails circularity (reading Scripture through the Gospel, his identity, and the Gospel through Scripture), but revolving around Christ as it does and including the life of the believer as it does, it is on the order of the circulatory system of the human body. What is circulated is the life and presence of the one around whom it revolves. One reads through the lens of the identity of Christ, but this exegesis of and through Christ pertains directly to the “you” doing the exegesis as this constitutes the encounter with Christ. So, the hermeneutical lens of the apostolic preaching (the Gospel or the analogy of faith), not only produces a symbolic coherence, bringing together the types and tropes and context of the Hebrew Scriptures in Christ, but as applied to Scripture it concerns the exegesis of Christ (not the exegesis of Scripture), the encounter with Christ, or the presence of Christ in the life of the exegete.

This describes the authority of Scripture as it takes hold through the identity of Christ in the life of the believer. The author or authorization or authority is immediately present in the one answering, “Who do you say that I am?” This is not simply an historical judgment or a critical assessment of a set of texts or an acknowledgement of institutional authority. The authority of history, Scripture, and Church pertains indirectly to the fundamental and primary authority found in the identity of Christ as this directly pertains to the believer. The particular nature of the presence of Christ in the believer is mediated through the Christ of history, the Christ of Scripture, and the Christ of the Church, but these are not substitutes or alternative authorities, but the authority derived from the Gospel, which immediately takes hold in Christ’s presence in the believer (again, an admitted circularity).

To place the primary authority in history or the historical truth of the Gospel may imagine a Christ subject to history rather than history subject to and relativized by Christ. Certainly, there is no extracting his death and resurrection from history as this history is part of his identity but his identity is determinative of this history and not vice versa. Temporality, the past, the situation of his life does not take precedence over his life or determine his identity. There is a history of Christ, in which time and history and humanity are interwoven and inseparable from the person of Christ encountered in the Gospel but the history per se is not primary. The truth of his history is a necessity, but this historical truth is not the fulness of the truth as it takes hold in the life of the believer. History, and even the history of Christ, is not the presence of Christ found in his identity.

So too with Scripture: to place primary authority on the text or the book, may miss that its authority is derived from Christ. Christ is not subject to Scripture any more than he is subject to the Church or to history. Where Scripture is made primary, Christ may be made to fit the context and circumstance of its writing rather than the other way round. Christ is the unifying center, the very hypothesis of Scripture, and the reality of his life, death, and resurrection precedes Scripture in both the Old and New Testament. Christ and Scripture are no more separable than Christ and history, but it is Christ and his identity that constitute Scripture as an authority.

So too the Church: to place primary authority in the institution or in the hierarchy, or in the body of believers, may be to miss that the Church derives its authority from Christ and the Gospel. Life in the body is constituted by Christ and the identity of Christ located in the apostolic preaching. This preaching cannot be separated from the Church any more than it can be separated from Scripture and history but so too with this authority; to make the Church the authority will be to miss the immediate import of Christ’s identity. The apostles and the Church do not determine Christ but are determined by him. Christ cannot be made to fit the authority of the Church as the Church derives its authority from who he is. Apostle corrects apostle not because one is more authoritative than another, but because the apostles and the Church are authoritative only through the Gospel and through maintaining the apostolic tradition.

Who do you say that I am is not a question to be answered apart from history, Scripture, and the Church, but none of these are themselves the answer. The question demands that “you” answer and the answer and its power and presence take hold within this same you. Historicism, biblicism, and institutionalism, misconstrue the nature of authority and truth and thus they misidentify Christ and misplace his presence. The believer does not have a primary relation with history, with Scripture, or with the Church, but with Christ. He is present in his identity but no one but a “you” concludes to the presence and relationship of this identity. This may all be dismissed as circularity, but at the heart of this circular reason is the singular truth, which I presume is the truth of the Gospel – the identity of Christ.

The modern errors, like the original heresies which challenged the early church (in the New Testament and among the church fathers), shares in kind the fact, as John Behr puts it, “that in none of these approaches is God really ‘with us’ (cf. Matt 1:23).”[2] Some began to teach that Christ was a mere man, adopted by God as a Son (adoptionism). He is representative, at best, of the divine. In Docetism God is not really with us in our humanity but only appeared as a man. Instead of denying the deity of Christ, the deity is fully acknowledged but his humanity is a mere likeness and not the reality. Again, there is a failure of presence in his humanity and ours. And the third tendency acknowledged both the divinity and humanity of Jesus, but separated the deity from the humanity. Thus, the human Jesus may have experienced death and human passions and emotions but the deity of Christ is thought to be removed from such things. In essence, each of these false teachings is a denial of the cross, or in terms of presence, God cannot be said to be present in pain, suffering and death. God is not really Immanuel, God with us, in the false conceptions of his identity.

The cure or counter to this false teaching (or this failed presence) will emphasize either the humanity or deity of Jesus, or the reality of the resurrection, affirming what the false teaching would deny, but then, in each instance, this affirmation speaks directly of a specific presence that bears fruit in place of the lost presence. That is, as the writers of the New Testament and the apostolic fathers are challenged by the various heretical misidentifications of Christ, the hypothesis of his identity is honed to speak directly of God’s saving presence in place of a particular form of absence. So the example from Corinthians (worked out below), deny the resurrection and one is left with vanity and nothingness, a useless faith that misses the living hope and victory of faith. The counter focus then, is on the hope of the resurrection as entailed in the reality of his resurrection and this translates into resurrection life enabled to defeat the futility of sin. In the example of I John (developed below), deny the humanity of Christ, and the story of Christ in the Gospels, and his ethical teaching and human sojourn are traded for an abstract spirituality without ethical responsibility. Emphasis on the humanity of Christ entails then a focus on his ethical teaching and walking as he walked to abide in his presence.

Paul sums up the gospel as Christ dying for our sins, being raised on the third day, and then appearing to the twelve apostles (I Cor. 15:3-4). The identity of Christ is linked to his ongoing presence to the apostles through his death, burial and resurrection, interpreted in light of the Scriptures. Death is the prime obstacle or the opposite of life and presence, and Christ defeats death and this is the basis of his presence – a resurrected presence. This is what Paul delivered to the Corinthians and by which they stand and are saved (I Cor. 15:1), but by denying the bodily resurrection the Corinthians are turning faith into an empty vanity. Paul describes Christ’s resurrection appearances, enumerating who experienced them and extending resurrection experience to the faith of the Corinthian believers, which they are nullifying. Apart from the resurrection, life and presence are exchanged for death and vanity. Paul says it amounts to being left in sin. With resurrection belief the sting of death, a life of sin, is overcome: “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord” (I Cor. 15:57-58). The reality of resurrection defeats the reality of death and this translates into a specific experience of victory and hope through Christ.

Christ’s presence is specific to the particulars of his resurrection. He is not present as an abstract generalization – a spirit of the universe – but he is the resurrection and the life; an identity that pertains to one making the identification. Paul leaves out the teaching and life of Jesus in his Corinthian formula, probably because of the peculiar denial of the resurrection in Corinth. The Corinthians had a form of the faith, perhaps acknowledging Jesus earthly walk and teaching. The story of Jesus however, is not rendered secondary due to the resurrection but becomes part of the life that is conveyed. As Paul says to the Ephesians, they must “learn Christ” (Eph. 4:20) and the way to learn Christ is not simply learning facts and propositions (though this is not excluded), but by laying aside the old self and putting on the new self (Eph. 4:21-24) so that one enacts in their life course Jesus’ death and resurrection, inclusive of the content of his teaching. The story has a particular shape, and the teaching of Jesus (e.g., on neighbor love and nonviolence, etc.) is captured in the manner of his death and resurrection. We do not read the events of Jesus’ life and his teaching as in normal biography, as facts and history removed from us, but we recognize the ethical implication, the form of relationship with God and others, which his resurrection implies. His story and his life is one we share, and his presence continues in us in his form of life – summed up as resurrection life. Thus believers are “strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Eph. 3:16).

John is faced with the docetic teaching that Christ did not come in the flesh, and so his concern is not a defense of the bodily resurrection but the bodily or corporeal nature of Jesus. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life” (I Jn. 1:1). This life was manifest in the flesh – the flesh of the Son – and in those who “saw it” (1:2). The life was simultaneously “with the Father” and “made manifest to us” as we have seen with our eyes and we have heard with our ears and we have touched with our hands (1:1-3). Jesus was human and corporeal and not a mere human similitude or likeness. And it is on this basis that fellowship with God and his Son is established (1:3). John emphasizes abiding in Him more than accepting the fact that he abides in the Christian. Docetism may have taught moral license to do with the body as one might. But John binds the presence of Christ to “keeping His commandments” to walking “in the same manner as He walked” and to perfecting the love of God in one’s life by “keeping His word” (2:4-6). Like Paul, John speaks of a rule of faith which renders outside teachers and authorities unnecessary: “you have no need for anyone to teach you . . . as His anointing teaches you about all things” (2:27). Jesus was anointed with the Spirit and he has anointed his followers with the Spirit and the Spirit, as promised, guides into all truth. Christ abides in you and you abide in him if you walk as he taught. Christ is present and this presence takes on a particular ethical shape in those who abide in his life and presence.

Perhaps in the midst of persecution there was greater need to speak of the fulsomeness of the divine presence. Peter writes of becoming “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). In Athanasius’ formula, “He became man, so that we might become god.”[3] Ignatius of Antioch, on a forced march to Rome and martyrdom, speaks of Christ “being now in the Father” even “more plainly visible.”[4] Now his is not a mere earthly presence but an immediate presence of the Spirit. For Ignatius Christ “is our true life” and this reality is realized in facing the reality of a torturous death with Christ: “But, [in fact,] he who is near to the sword is near to God; he that is among the wild beasts is in company with God; provided only he be so in the name of Jesus Christ. I undergo all these things that I may suffer together with Him, (Romans 8:17) He who became a perfect man inwardly strengthening me.”[5] Ignatius imagines in the details of his martyrdom complete identity with Christ: “Allow me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.”[6]

Answering the question, “Who do you say that I am?” entails naming an identity that becomes one’s own, such that the life and presence of Christ are realized as one’s life course takes on the shape of Christ.

[1] This is the conclusion of Hans Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Fortress Press, 1975).

[2] John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology: The Way to Nicaea, Vol. 1 (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 78.

[3] Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54.

[4] Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans, 3.2.

[5] Ignatius, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, 4.

[6] Ibid. Epistle to the Romans, 4.

The Lost Gospel of Ignatius of Antioch

There is a New Testament and patristic understanding, sometimes lost to modern theology, which organically connects Christ’s death and resurrection to salvation. That is, the predicament of death, with its corruption, inherent deception, and loss, is directly addressed in the life giving truth of the work of Christ. In the modern equation, in which resurrection is a seal of sacrifice accepted, resurrection is not intrinsically connected to either forgiveness or purification and Christ’s death is simply the payment of a penalty. For example, in Calvin’s explanation: “We have in his death the complete fulfillment of salvation, for through it we are reconciled to God, his righteous judgment is satisfied, the curse is removed, and the penalty paid in full.”[1] Once Christ’s death is set in a legal framework, his death addresses a problem in the mind of God rather than a reality inherent in death. Yet, this organic connection of Christ’s death and resurrection to the predicament of death is an understanding repeated and developed in the earliest theological writing of the post-New Testament age. Ignatius of Antioch is working with categories presumed in the New Testament and early church, linking death with corruption and which makes of resurrection, as well as the life and death of Jesus, purification, release from bondage, and forgiveness. The danger is that this understanding is obscured by theological developments from Augustine to Calvin which shift the theological focus to issues of sovereignty, determinism, law, and total depravity.

When he writes his series of letters to various churches, Ignatius is headed to Rome where he knows he will be martyred. This march toward death informs his comparatively simple theology describing the necessity to embrace death with Christ. For Ignatius, fear of death is the corruption or disease which Satan wields so as to give death the final word. His journey and his letters are a demonstration of how one can put off the corrupting power of death by reversing the instinct and orientation to flee, rather than take up the cross.

As he explains to the Ephesians, the death and resurrection of Christ are the medicine that provides the cure for the corruption and sickness of sin in its death denying orientation. Death is corrupting precisely in that the sinful, like the false teachers, would deny its reality and would consider the fleshly embodied world as unreal. They would assign prime reality to the soul and spirit and pass over the flesh and the reality of death, and in denying this reality they transmit the original disease. For these false teachers, “He only seemed to suffer, as they themselves only seem to be [Christians].” Ignatius grants that it may happen exactly as they believe: “as they believe, so shall it happen unto them, when they shall be divested of their bodies, and be mere evil spirits.”[2] To lose the body and to become a spirit is an evil and damnable state. The docetists, who deny the reality of the flesh of Christ, “labor under an incurable disease” in that they deny the reality of the cure of the “Physician” who “is the only true God.”[3]

Ignatius explains the cure straightforwardly: “For ‘the Word was made flesh’ [John 1:14]. Being incorporeal, He was in the body; being impassible, He was in a passible body; being immortal, He was in a mortal body; being life, He became subject to corruption, that He might free our souls from death and corruption, and heal them, and might restore them to health, when they were diseased with ungodliness and wicked lusts.”[4] Life and immortality are not innate to man, but come from God. “For were He to regard us according to our works we should cease to be.”[5] God was manifested in Christ “for the renewal of eternal life.”[6] Christ is “the constant source of our life, and of faith and love.”[7] He “breathes immortality into the Church”[8] and “apart from whom we do not possess the true life.”[9]

Ignatius is reflecting the teaching of Hebrews: the defeat of death equals the seizure of the kingdom of Satan, as the devil reigns over a captive humanity through death (Heb. 2:14-15). He is following Paul’s notion that “sin reigned in death” (Rom. 5:21) and “the sting of death is sin” (I Cor. 15:56).

According to John Romanides’ explanation and expansion upon the theology of Ignatius, “Because of the tyrant death man is unable to live according to his original destiny of selfless love. He now has the instinct of self-preservation firmly rooted within him from birth.” Romanides builds upon this to say, “Because he lives constantly under the fear of death he continuously seeks bodily and psychological security, and thus becomes individualistically inclined and utilitarian in attitude.”[10] Though this may put a modern twist on Ignatius, it gets at his understanding of why the “abolition of death” is an undoing of sin and a defeat of the devil.[11]

For Ignatius, death and life are two fates: “Seeing, then, all things have an end, these two things are simultaneously set before us — death and life; and every one shall go unto his own place.” There are two kinds of coin, and each coin has stamped upon it either the character of the world or the character of God, and the sole difference is that “the believing have, in love, the character of God the Father.”[12] Those who deny Him have become the “advocates of death rather than of the truth.”[13] There is life and truth or death and a lie, but there is no means to life apart from the truth of Christ.

It is by Christ alone that man has life. He is the door to life “by which enter in Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the prophets, and the apostles, and the Church. All these have for their object the attaining to the unity of God.” These too “proclaimed the Gospel, and placed their hope in Him, and waited for Him; in whom also believing, they were saved, through union to Jesus Christ.” [14] They pointed to this one in whom “is the perfection of immortality.”[15]

Ignatius tells Polycarp, his friend, to strive as an athlete for the prize of “immortality and eternal life” and he tells the Trallians that “by believing in His death you may escape death.”[16] He warns the Smyrnaeans that those who deny Jesus had a natural body simply succumb to death, and he equates belief in his suffering in the body as the equivalent of resurrection: “But he who does not acknowledge this, has in fact altogether denied Him, being enveloped in death. . . . Yea, far be it from me to make any mention of them, until they repent and return to [a true belief in] Christ’s passion, which is our resurrection.”[17]

Death is corrupting in that it poses a moral orientation which unleashes the fleshly passions, as the mortality of the flesh reigns unchallenged. In this sense, there is no division between the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Christ, in that in each he is combating the same foe. The corruption of death is overcome in his life, in his passion and taking up of death, and in his resurrection. On the other hand, the false teachers are “dumb dogs,” “raving mad,” and their bite is poisonous as they inflict the original lie, which would obscure how it is that Satan and death ensnare and enslave.[18] The truth of life in Christ exposes the lie of Satan positing a death dealing lie.

What is remarkable in this understanding are all of the things that are not only missing but if they are added, will obscure Ignatius’ understanding. There is no consideration of a legal framework or of future punishment. Rather, sin is a disease which Christ cures by uniting his immortality with his mortal body. Christ became subject to corruption which is simultaneously a physical and moral state, as is evidenced in those who are spiritually corrupt. Their corruption is not only that they are subject to death, but in denying this reality they make themselves completely corrupt, as evidenced in their foolishness and vanity, leaving them subject to death. (Ignatius puts heavy emphasis on the importance of meekness, “by which the prince of this world is brought to nought.”[19])

As he puts it in the letter to the Trallians, “Abstain from the poison of heretics.” Partaking of heresy is like eating poisonous herbage. So he says, “use Christian nourishment only.” Ignatius claims you can either turn to the nourishment of Christ or to poison, with the result that you will die. Or more fatally, one can ingest the poison of heresy, imagining it is the word of Christ: “For those [that are given to this] mix up Jesus Christ with their own poison, speaking things which are unworthy of credit, like those who administer a deadly drug in sweet wine, which he who is ignorant of does greedily take, with a fatal pleasure leading to his own death.”[20] The result of sin is that one becomes completely subject to death, physically and morally.

Ignatius does not speak of future punishment, and he knows nothing of limited atonement or individual election. One either entrusts herself to the love of Christ or attempts to take in “herbage of a different kind.” These “unbelieving, say, that He only seemed to suffer” and it can be said of them “they themselves only seeming to exist.”[21] They have given themselves completely over to unreality through the delusion of death.

The docetic claim, that Christ did not come in human flesh, is directly from Satan, according to Ignatius, and is equivalent in its effects to the original lie of the serpent. “Flee, therefore, those evil offshoots [of Satan], which produce death-bearing fruit, whereof if any one tastes, he instantly dies.” It is evident that such men are not planting good fruit, “For if they were, they would appear as branches of the cross, and their fruit would be incorruptible.” In denying the embodiment of Christ they deny the reality of the passion, and thus they leave themselves subject to the deadly passions (death resistance) which Christ defeated. “By it (the cross) He calls you through His passion, as being His members. The head, therefore, cannot be born by itself, without its members; God, who is [the Savior] Himself, having promised their union.”[22] The true branches springing from the cross, enflesh themselves with the clothing of Christ, such as meekness and love, in which they “become the imitators of His sufferings.” These are the salvific fruit stemming from faith; specifically, faith “that is the flesh of the Lord” and “love, that is the blood of Jesus Christ.”[23] Living in faith is, by definition, to live by the flesh and blood of Christ.

There is no room here for a disembodied, in the head alone, sort of faith. Living by faith and love connects one to the incarnate, fleshly, humanity of Christ by means of which he can “continue in intimate union with Jesus Christ our Lord.” This union can be disrupted through the heretical tendency, which is a type of the sinful tendency, of denying the reality of Christ’s enfleshment. The alternative is to trust in his works in the body which bring about life in the face of death. The ‘flesh and blood’ of Jesus directly counters the “deadly disease” of “depravity,” “foolishness,” “evil,” and “vanity.”

I arm you beforehand by my admonitions, as my beloved and faithful children in Christ, furnishing you with the means of protection [literally, ‘making you drink beforehand what will preserve you’] against the deadly disease of unruly men, by which do ye flee from the disease by the good-will of Christ our Lord.[24]

As Mako Nagasawa notes, Ignatius links ransom language to cleansing: “When He gave Himself a ransom for us, that He might cleanse us by His blood from our old ungodliness, and bestow life on us.” Life is purification and cleanliness, just as death is corruption. For Ignatius the ransom, while addressing the work of Satan, also “concerns ridding human nature of ‘the depravity that was in us.’ Jesus did for us what we could not do for ourselves: heal his human nature, and rid it of sin, by uniting it perfectly with God. He can therefore do in us what we cannot do by ourselves.”[25]

Ignatius, according to Nagasawa, reflects (and quotes) the participatory thought of 2 Peter: “He (Peter) reminds them of the power and promises of Jesus, that ‘you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust’ (2 Pet.1:4). The term ‘corruption’ occurs two more times in Peter in connection with false teachers (2 Pet.2:10, 19), who ‘indulge the flesh’ (2 Pet.2:10) and ‘entice by fleshly desires’ (2 Pet.2:18).” One can either follow the dogs and pigs (2 Pet.2:22) or overcome this corruption through “purification” and healing by participation in ‘the divine nature’ in and through Jesus Christ (2 Pet.1:9).[26]

This divine nature, the cure to the predicament of death, is imparted throughout his incarnation and is made available through the fact that his flesh and blood are shared. Church historian Philip Schaff writes of Ignatius’ theology, “The central idea is the renovation of man (Eph.20), now under the power of Satan and Death (ib. 3, 19), which are undone in Christ, the risen Savior (Smyrn.3), who ‘is our true life,’ and endows us with immortality (Smyrn. 4, Magn. 6, Eph. 17).’27 Jesus’ new humanity is the ‘cure’ for our corrupted humanity. It is what the eucharist points to: the ‘cleansing remedy to drive away evil.”[27]

Again, what is missing, is the notion of wrath as a legal category (removed from death), the notion of a limited atonement, or any hint of a monophysite or monthelite will or any discussion of will. Augustine’s notion of original sin, focus on God’s sovereignty, focus on human free will or total depravity, and individual predestination, change the landscape of theology to such a degree that by the time of Calvin, even those Arminians who would oppose him were caught up in the same web. They are seemingly unable to extract themselves from the world put into place by Augustine and Calvin. Thus, they pose the innovation of prevenient grace to combat total depravity, and are left with a focus on voluntarism in which the issue of human will and God’s will is the dominant factor in the universe. What they did not have access to was the world of Ignatius and the New Testament.

In the description of Romanides, for Ignatius death and its corruption are the condition God would destroy through the incarnation, and next to the will of God and the good, there is only the temporary kingdom of Satan, who exercises his power through death and corruption. Man is oppressed by the devil but is still free, at least in regard to will, to follow one or the other. “The world and God has each his own character – the world death, and God life (Ign. Mag. 5.) . . . It exists now under the power of corruption (Rom. 8:20-22), but in Christ is being cleansed.”[28]

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.xvi.13

[2] Ignatius, The Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 2.

[3] Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians 7.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians 10.

[6] Ignatius, Ephesians 19.

[7] Epistle to the Magnesians 1.

[8] Ephesians 17.

[9] Epistle to the Trallians 9.

[10] John S. Romanides, The Ecclesiology of St. Ignatius of Antioch, http://www.romanity.org/htm/rom.11.en.the_ecclesiology_of_st._ignatius_of_antioch.01.htm

[11] Ephesians 19.

[12] Magnesians 5.

[13] Smyrnaeans 5.

[14] Philadelphians 5.

[15] Ibid. 9.

[16] Epistle to Polycarp 2

[17] Smyrnaeans 5.

[18] Ephesians 7.

[19] Trallians 4.

[20] Ibid, 6.

[21] Ibid 10.

[22] Ibid 11.

[23] Ibid 8.

[24] Ibid, 8. Comments on the translation are those of Mako A. Nagasawa, “Penal Substitution vs. Medical-Ontological Substitution: A Historical Comparison” Documents/atonement/article-penal-substitution-vs-ontological-substitution-historical-comparison.pdfignatius.pdf

[25] Nagasawa, Ibid.

[26] Nagasawa, Ibid.

[27] Philip Schaff, The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series 2, Volume 4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1867), p.37. Quoted in Nagasawa.

[28] Ibid. Romanides.