Welcome to Church History and Theology, a study where we glean wisdom from those who came before us. Come lay aside today's concerns for a bit and join in a study of the Church throughout the ages. Our forebears have shaped our faith in countless ways. Let's go look into one of those influences today on Church History and Theology. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to Church History and Theology. My name is Timothy Easley, and welcome to the episode on Ignatius of Antioch. A marvelous discussion, I think, that we're going to have this evening, and something that has been the result of a lot of work on my part. On a side note, I just want to say thank you for your patience. This summer has been the busiest and most transition-filled summer of my life. I got to finish, as many of you know, I got to finish my dissertation. and after turning that in now I feel like an enormous weight has lifted off of my shoulders and now also transitioning from pastoring a church to teaching in the academic setting. I'm actually a teacher of history now and I have several classes in history through world history, church history, modern and several other things. So it's been a very, very filled couple of months here of transitions and preparing for the school year and beginning the school year here now, already into September. And so I appreciate your patience with me in this transition, and we should be able to settle back into the saddle here and work on a more normal schedule of release. So thank you again for your understanding with all of that. Ignatius of Antioch. Oh, I can't tell you how much frustration I've had in preparing this episode. It started out with a bit of a wonderment of mine back a little bit over a year ago, something that a professor of mine in college back years ago, kind of an offhanded remark he had said regarding the difficulties we have in knowing exactly who Ignatius of Antioch was and what he wrote exactly. And that, you know, you know how it goes, you hear something like that, and then it sits in your memory. And then years later, you come and you try to teach on it to many people that are that are eager to learn. And then so you look into it and go, you know, what was he referencing? And that's kind of where my mind went about a year ago, because as we started season two, I looked forward and I was like, you know, I still have that little asterisk sitting in the early second century, something that is just like it just gets stuck in your craw. And you're like, how do you how do you assess this? How do you look at this? And I don't want to teach something that isn't accurate. I want to teach something that I have a relative surety of. And this one was particularly annoying to me. And so I was like, you know what, I'm going to look into this as good as I can. And boy, I tell you, that's about the last time I'm going to do that because it developed into kind of an obsession about this topic. And I felt like every single layer of research I went through, I just got more and more into the weeds. and not weeds that just obfuscate the truth, but just show us how difficult it is to know what in the world is going on with this person that we know of as Ignatius of Antioch. Well, before I really get into the difficulties about all of this, you know, the importance of knowing what we have, but also, I mean, if you've been following along, you know that, you know, as we enter the second century and as we have to reflect back on the first and second century, we understand that as we come after all of that, It means that those stories and a lot of those letters have passed through times where people were intentionally making changes, sometimes for pious ends and with, at least to their own minds, good intentions, and then some not really for pious ends but for self-serving reasons and sometimes with abuses in mind. And this is particularly frustrating, but it's not new to any student of history that delves into, specifically delving into primary sources, especially ones of a religious nature, especially ones that are attached to somebody that others hold in high esteem. For instance, for a long time throughout church history, the figure of Clement of Rome, who wrote the letter of 1 Clement that we read here in one of the resource episodes, had multiple letters written in his name. Homilies, entire sermon series, and even a letter called 2 Clement that to this day is still known as 2 Clement, even though we know It was not written by him personally. First Clement was, at least in some ways, understood to be written by him, or he wrote it down, or he was one of the elders, at least their secretary, or he was actually one of them. Trying to rebuild this, it means hacking through a jungle of tradition to try to understand what in time and space actually occurred. You know, because I think you know this about me. One of the last things I want to understand is what somebody else wants me to believe about history. I would rather know with all of its dirt and grit what actually happened rather than, you know, what somebody 100 years after that person or 200 years after that person would want me to think about that event that came before them. Such is the difficulty with religious tradition, especially in the Christian world, especially as it passes through latter centuries. When we are trying to rebuild what goes on, sometimes it gets so frustrating and sometimes it feels like the answer is just beyond your reach. So if you, if you, if you read a bit more into it, or if you get a bit more of the context, then you can have a clearer picture of what's going on. And usually that's true. With Clement of Rome, the more we looked into Clement, the clearer things got. But what is so odd is with Ignatius of Antioch, the more you learn about his textual tradition, the more you learn about the critical studies that go along with this, the less clarity you tend to get, at least from the beginning. And I think that is more an issue of people not thinking that there are massive concerns and issues going on with the story of Ignatius. The story of Ignatius is one, if you are not familiar, is actually a fairly well-known and well-received tradition across both East and West in the churches these days. He is considered a very hallowed saint with regards to his tenacity, his forthrightness, and his fighting against certain docetic and earliest forms of Gnostic views of Christ himself. For some, he is seen as supporting their view of the Eucharist, though that is plainly erroneous. Nobody in the second century held to medieval concepts of the Eucharist, regardless of what things may you be able to make him say or not. But even beyond that, some have held him up as the earliest version of the concept of the Episcopal office, and several other things that he is unique for doing and saying. And more than that, if that wasn't enough, him being a martyr, places him at an advisory role in tradition that is outsized. This is something that I think many of us can understand on some levels, but then on others we have to sit back and start assessing whether or not our natural tendency to trust what somebody has said simply because they are a martyr makes them somehow more right. And that is more of a theological question, and well, we can be grateful that this is church history and theology, so we can address that as well. And here, let me actually address that issue. In some ways, not in some ways, in many ways, the input, the opinion, especially as you get to the late 2nd century, early 3rd, and even mid 3rd to late 3rd century, basically from about halfway through the 2nd century to all the way up to the Edict of Milan in the earliest 4th century. There was a development of opinion with regards to those who were called confessors. Now, we will deal with this massively when we get to those places here during the next year. But the opinion of a confessor in some places was actually seen as more correct or more reliable, if you will, than even that of the Episcopal office. Because of this, those who, and when I say confessor, this is somebody who was persecuted for their faith in Christ, but did not die. And their ongoing role in the church is one that gains a very outsized influence in the next century after Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius of Antioch being very early second century, or the early 100s. Now that's important to understand because somebody who is, uh, who ultimately became a martyr, their words or their letters or their influence, or even their opinions before they gave their life is seen as more important, not just than those who lapsed. That's a, that's a bigger discussion that goes on, uh, about a hundred years after this, but even more than the Episcopal office. And that kind of struggle of dependability or of clarity, both in theology and in the order of the church's ecclesiastical role, in all of these things, it really becomes an issue of understanding who has what say and what influence where. And for those who tow a party line, you don't really have to worry about it much. But if you have people that are addressing this or that, or if you look back into history and you find somebody who would be a great candidate to support this or that, someone like Ignatius of Antioch would, or someone like Clement of Rome, because of his faithfulness in this or that, would make a very tantalizing candidate. And we know that people did this with Ignatius. His role as an early presbyter or an early bishop, as his letters call to himself, in the city of Antioch is not even as significant as his role as a martyr in the early church, one of the absolute earliest after the age of the apostles. And one of those that we actually have letters written by him that came down to the early church and then were changed. And we know that they were changed. The difference that we have amongst discussions is which ones are the originals if we even have them, right? So this is still just by way of introduction to the complexities of studying someone like Ignatius because the reality is we don't have anything outside of his letters that is reliable as far as his life. We have no archaeology to back this up. We have no contemporaneous accounts of this. Even the story of his being arrested, put on trial during the Trajanic reign in the early 100s, and then shipped under armed guard through Asia Minor all the way to Rome to be thrown to the lions That story is very thoroughly dependent on his letters. And so when we, when we start to deal with that frustration, how do we know the story is reliable? If the story comes from the letters and we know that many of the letters are not reliable, the question then comes into how do we know his story at all? And this is some of the difficulty, obviously, if we have somebody that is a martyr in the early church that people are emulating, that means we have an authentic kernel of truth somewhere in here. and identifying that is enormously difficult. And if you've been through seminary and you heard about Ignatius or I know there's even several history teachers that listen to this and those of you who are just curious about history and whatnot and you've run into this before, Ignatius of Antioch is a fine subject to talk about, but I would encourage you to expand your knowledge about what is currently going on in studies regarding Ignatius, because it has been an issue not fully settled, though it was taught for a great deal of time that it's been settled. And more recent challenges, especially after certain discoveries throughout the 20th century that have cast more light on the nature of Gnosticism throughout the second century has shown us a bit more detail about the type of thing that some of his letters seem to be written against or being used for specifically. And also some anachronisms that are in the accepted collection of his letters that then start to call in more questions about what the authentic original writings of Ignatius of Antioch were. So I'm going to give you what I think. After digging into all of this, I'm going to give you what I think went on, okay? And here's what I think went on. And you can rake me over whatever coals you want to, but here's where I'm going to stand. There are several collections of the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, and this has been an argument very long in the making. There has been, ever since the time of the Renaissance, discussion and disagreement over the very nature of Ignatius, his writings, who he is, and what exactly happened. If you are familiar with John Calvin's Institutes and you see his reference to the writings of Ignatius, supposedly, in his era, he cast doubt on everything because in his day, only what is known as the long recension was being put forward and it was being published. And those are plainly not from the second century. early or late. Those are plainly late 3rd, 4th century, very long-winded interpolations of a shorter collection of letters. Depending on how you lay them out, that in and of itself is very complicated. Anywhere up to 15 letters that we're talking about here that were part of the long recension. It was more in number and each of them were longer, And so it called into question all these things, and that makes perfect sense in the 16th century why John Calvin would be reading these and going, this doesn't fit the 2nd century at all. Any person familiar with the patristics can see that. End of discussion. Nobody really disagrees with John Calvin on that point any longer. with the knowledge of what is called the middle recension, matching in list at least, what Eusebius wrote of in his Ecclesiastical Histories. Again, Eusebius is working just with what he can see too. But that it matched and that we have recensions that match up to the seven letters, that is typically, if you went through seminary, you went through somebody else's course, what you would run into. It would be the seven letters written by Ignatius of Antioch. The classic seven, as you will, is referred to as the middle recension in the Greek. It's the shortest version of the Greek, and it is generally considered to be the most accurate collection, and that is the seven, meaning the one to the Romans. the one to the Ephesians, the one to the Magnesians, the one to the Trallians, the one to the Philadelphians, the one to the Smyrnaeans, and the one to Polycarp, who was the bishop of Smyrna. I could sit here and tell you all the issues I have with that seven letter collection occurring in 110 AD. There are some anachronisms. There's also some just plainly pastorally incorrect theology. And now I say that and I can already hear people getting pitchforks together. He's a martyr. I'm not. How dare I question these things? Yes. The problem is, is there is no biblical warrant to say that because somebody gave their life in service to the gospel, which I fully believe Ignatius of Antioch did, that he is somehow correct in everything he did. That does not in any way make you right with regards to this or that doctrine. We weigh these things by scriptures, not by somebody went to the lions and they said this, therefore it's correct. That's not how theology is done. For instance, his expressions regarding the authority of the bishop are things that are not stated in scripture at all. And if they did come from his hand, which I have significant doubts of, If they did come from his hand, he is plainly wrong on this. Also, additionally, something that is more plainly issuous on just the pastoral side of things is his voracious hunger for martyrdom. To the point of which that if the lions are not going to eat me, then I'm going to go frustrate them so that they will. The pursuit of martyrdom. at any cost because you want it so bad is not a Christian virtue. I want to be really clear on this because there are some who would look at this and see in that great virtue rather than, if God has me to be martyred, I will accept that as a gift. I will accept that as a gift, but I will not take it if it is not gifted to me. You can see even in the way he describes some of these things in his letter to the Romans, that it does not match the way that even Jesus expresses. If someone persecutes you in this town, you pray for them, but you just go to the next town. You don't run into their clubs. If they brandish a sword, you don't run up to it and run yourself through with it and then call yourself a martyr. It doesn't work that way. That's not how we are told to do these things. Even when it comes to this idea of martyrdom, no matter what the case may be, you can hear the words of Christ against that. In Matthew 10.23, for instance, when he is expressing to them, when Jesus is expressing to his disciples, when they persecute you here, flee to the next town. Don't run into all of this. And we even see it exemplified in the apostles, in the apostle Paul, when he is persecuted somewhere, unless the spirit specifically tells him to go back into that town, he goes to the next town. What if they don't accept our message? The apostles ask the Lord, and what does Jesus say for them to do? Shake the dust from your feet, don't seek retribution, and go, preach it somewhere else. They have not. They have not rejected you, they have rejected me. This isn't about theatrics and it is not about some overt martyrdom zeal, which is actually condemned in the early church even later on because it became such a problem in the late 2nd and early 3rd century. And so here's part of what I am saying. When you look into the classic story of Ignatius of Antioch, I would take, first of all, the opinion of someone like Philip Schaff and say there is a real problem with the entire story of Ignatius. To quote Philip Schaff on this, he says the entire story of Ignatius is more legendary than it is real. And all of his writings are under grave suspicion of fraudulent interpolation or additions. And this is true even today. It doesn't matter how many times someone comes back and says yes, but then the scholarly consensus is the seven-letter recension that Lightfoot came up with in the 19th century. I understand that has been the consensus for a long while, but I will say you might want to catch up on some of the scholarship as of late because there are some really really good challenges being put forward on that and saying, look, we need to reconsider the shortest recension from the Syriac as most likely closer to whatever it was Ignatius actually wrote. And you would actually find what I suspected in the very beginning. Things like the overt, direct, overwhelming support of certain aspects in the seven letters for things that don't really belong in the early 2nd century. This overwhelming power of the bishop. is much more muted. A much lower version of his story of travel from Antioch to Rome. Ones that makes a little bit more sense in the second century. Even to the more muted language regarding certain aspects of the Docetic belief system or whatnot. It's more complicated than I want to get into on this episode. But I just want to say this, the story of Ignatius, as it comes down to us, must have an asterisk in your mind and a bit of a question mark. And just because he has said something, or even if he did write all seven of the middle recension exactly as they show up to us today with no differences whatsoever, then there are some problems with his theology that we need to consider in light of scripture. And that's okay. If we lived in the early second century, we'd have problems in our concept about some of these things as well. And whether or not he was an ecclesiastical bishop in a monarchical sense, which is anachronistic, he would be completely alone in the earliest second century with that kind of a structure put in place. Nobody had that structure in place. And so even if you do accept this, you have to accept that this is something that's more of a novel creation, legitimate or otherwise, is a question for someone else, that developed starting in the East and then worked its way to the West. It didn't start in Scripture. And so whether he's the beginning of that or as I suspect, a very early interpolation in the late 2nd century or even the earliest 3rd century to argue for this ecclesiastical episcopate this early in history. that we actually have not the exact copies of his letters that early on, but that there is whoever Ignatius fully was and whatever he exactly wrote is much shorter, I think, than what we have. That's where I stand. And I think his seven-letter recension is itself an interpolation and an addition to what he originally wrote. I think the three-letter collection of the Syriac would be most accurate to what he actually wrote. And that is what I released a little bit earlier in the year of the of the short recension of Ignatius, that's why I read that one, rather than the middle recension. One, the middle recension is considerably long, but I do not believe it accurately reflects Ignatius of Antioch. I think it reflects what people wanted to use his memory for. And again, as we said even when we were working through the episode that was on Paul and Thecla, That, we know, comes from the late 2nd century, a place where hagiographies and interpolations were being made in the name of people who either lived or did not live in the earliest church. They were doing so in support and trying to use support in development of their specific beliefs. Obviously that one, for instance, was used to support the concept, the erroneous and unbiblical concept, that somehow a celibate life was higher and better than a married life, as far as for the Christian was concerned. Those types of things were stories being told about the earliest church, about people who either did or did not exist, in order to establish their legitimacy. Well, The thing is, is that people did the exact same thing with Ignatius. Everyone agrees that people did that with the long recension. I simply take it another step further and say, yeah, but the middle recension seems to be the exact same thing. There are things about the second century that do not work in the middle recension, in the earliest parts. And so my teaching on Ignatius will simply be this. Ignatius of Antioch was a leader in the church in Antioch. That is undisputable. He wrote letters or letters to churches or just to a church. There's even a theory that the letter to the Romans itself might be the only thing he actually wrote and even the earliest short recension is an interpolation. All I can say is this, he wrote a letter or letters on the way to being martyred. and whether he was martyred in Rome or whether he was martyred in Antioch it seems that it would make sense that it would be martyred in Rome but that begs kind of a bizarre question because that doesn't really fit the reign of Trajan either the whole story is bizarre uh so How much can we really know? Well, again, I'll go back to what Philip Schaaf says in his history of Christianity. The story is much more legendary than it is real. There's some kernel of truth here. But his story for us in church history and theology, this is not just me trying to mess up stuff like this. I'm trying to understand what actually went on in the early second century. And he, Ignatius of Antioch, is one of the hardest of them all to fully understand and grasp. And so what I will say on this is, while I was originally planning on releasing all sorts of, you know, this research and that person writing this or writing that, I'm not really going to really work into that. I'm just going to tell you as I am concluding it, like I would with anyone else. what we have tells us of the importance of staying faithful and of staying united to the leadership that God has given to us. And that is how Ignatius of Antioch would indeed agree with me on that, even though he would disagree if we are right about his letters, on the nature of that leadership and its structure. There are certain things about it that do teach us. If I am right on this, then a lot of the teachings that we find in the seven-letter recension do come from the second century, but just later on, and the early third century, which means that we have a really early statement about some of these things in really expanded formats, and they'll come up again when we deal with kind of more the end of the second century, when I think the seven-letter recension came from. And it tells us a bit more about, I would say, the wishes of what the 180s would want the early church to look like in the face of Gnosticism. And that means that when we talk about the seven-letter recension of Ignatius of Antioch, I have to, I don't know that there's any way to avoid this, I have to connect it with the time and the space and the world in which Irenaeus of Lyon is writing in the 180s. And that is not me saying that he interpolated this or anything like that, only that it seems to arise from the same need. This idea of this apostolic succession that Irenaeus claims, which we know is not true, that there is some singular bishops going all the way back to the earliest church. There just isn't. We know that to be the case. But it sure is helpful in the face of a challenge like Valentinian Gnosticism, where they just have churches cropping up that have no real claim back to the apostles, right? And even if you do have a claim back to the apostles, I'm going to simply point out that we're going to see in the Quarter to Semen controversy that it doesn't matter. because the side that lost in that controversy had a much more apostolic witness than the other side did, but the other side had ecclesiastical power. And there you see how it typically breaks down. Whoever tends to have more influence or more people or more of a voice tends to win some of these arguments. And you can claim apostolic tradition all you want, but you know, That'll be an example where we see ecclesiastical muscle wins over apostolic tradition any day of the week. And all of that to say, Ignatius of Antioch was a leader in the early second century. My opinion is not that we have seven letters of his, but we have maybe three, maybe one, depending on how you actually work that out. And exactly what the original kernel is, I tell you, honestly, I finally had to stop looking into it all because it was so frustrating to me. And that's kind of the annoyance that we have with church tradition as well, is the stories of these faithful people, which I believe Ignatius of Antioch was a very faithful Christian with regards to these things, imperfect like all of us and yet faithful, marvelous, and praise the Lord for a brother like him. But his letters that have come down to us have come down to us through the filter of people wanting to turn him into something he was not. And that is what interpolations do. Whether they did it for pious ends, or out of love for Ignatius, or out of desperation to defend the church, it doesn't really matter. Because even if you do something with good intentions, which I think the interpolations that were made to the original letters of Ignatius were done with good, maybe desperate, I would say probably just desperate intentions. Even if they're done with good intentions, you can't anticipate how much that's going to affect. You know? It's kind of like a butterfly effect. You think you've got something understood, so you make changes to it, and then it affects things. And all of a sudden, everyone thinks that an ecclesiastical office like the bishop goes back to the apostles because somebody interpolated an early letter to say so. Well, I mean, that becomes really problematic because if the ecclesiastical office does something evil or carries out something that has no check or balance to it whatsoever, what are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to follow men rather than God? What if they go against the scriptures, which happened many, many, many, many times? You know, what do we as Christians have an obligation to do? Do we just keep on following a blind person who's leading us into the ditch? No. We hold ourselves and we hold our leaders accountable to scripture. None of us are above it. God sanctifies his people through his word. His word is truth, and these things are marvelous to our eyes. So if we have a man who is looking at the world and saying, look, and we'll find this in some of his letters, you know, you are to obey the bishop as you would obey God. Like, it would be on a level like this, and that was used throughout history to support this concept of the role of the bishop in the life of the Christian. to have an obedience that is almost unquestioning, because wherever, to quote the Middle Ascension, wherever the bishop is, there is Christ. And that is problematic theology, because that is not how the scriptures put it forward. Christ is in our fellowship. He is in our midst. Even when two or three are gathered together, even for the purpose of something as church discipline, we see from Christ's own lips, there Christ is in the midst of them. That Christ is to be honored in our hearts as holy. That where we are, where Christian fellowship is, there is Christ in the midst of us. It is not attached to the bishop. And so I will say this, even if the seven letter ascension is authentic, that kind of thinking is problematic. Even if he intended it with good intentions, whether he or whoever wrote that, it was used to do things that were harmful to the gospel. And the idea that a bishop is right because of his office or that a bishop is somehow insulated from that. I mean, you can just follow that line through church history all the way down to the doctrine of papal infallibility in the 1800s. The idea ultimately that the Pope himself, the Bishop of Rome of all places, is when he speaks as cathedra, infallible. You don't have that without this kind of being one of those foundation stones to that end. And here's the thing. I want Ignatius of Antioch, whoever he exactly was, to speak. And all I'm going to say in this episode is whoever he exactly was is almost entirely hidden from our eyes because of all of the abuses that his writings endured over the centuries. But if he said these things, then those things are, they had problematic outcomes in church history. If he said certain things against Docetism, then the development of Docetism took place earlier in the 2nd century, then makes sense with what we currently know. Some people have tried to place... This should tell you how much we don't even know about him from external sources. Some people say, you know what, then he just didn't live in the 110s, say. Must have died in the 140s. Some push him even later than that. uh, you know, trying to make sense of how is it he was able to anticipate all of these issues that came up later on? Well, I think the simplest answer is he wasn't able to do that. And the simplest explanation we have is not to move his life later, which all throughout antiquity, everyone is unanimous that he died during the reign of Trajan. Not to put his life later, but to say, hey, whatever his original writings were, they were changed in the second half of the second century. Doesn't that make more sense than to try to push his life later, which would violate all other sources that we have from origin and otherwise. That makes the most sense to me, and that the Syriac short recension is the closest we have to the original, at least until someone digs up something else. This is part of the frustration, is the way that the early church and even the medieval church and the earliest imperial church saw martyr heroes like this, is that using them to accomplish good ends was not always seen as a bad thing. If you ask me, if somebody, let's say I'm known later on in life and my name carries something with it. When I die, please don't change my writings to back you up, even if it's something right. I would rather have been known for being wrong about something yet still faithful rather than being used for something I never said. And that's part of the frustration with Ignatius of Antioch as we can clearly see here. That opens up that concept of martyrdom. And this is going to be one of the more pastoral things I want to say about this. There is a certain zeal towards martyrdom that comes in the early church, specifically as we get to the end of the second century and becomes a real issue as we turn that century into the third. And that is people that are more interested in being martyred than in developing Christian graces with patience. It is one thing to follow Christ and to say, I will follow him to the very death. But it is quite another to say, I will follow Christ in life and in death any which way he desires to have me live or die. Those are two very different approaches. One, it is easy to say, and for those of you who were like me as a teenager, to say, I would give my life for Jesus. I would desire martyrdom and I can remember a time even in my own life when I desired to actually die as a martyr. I read Fox's Book of Martyrs when I was 15 and I was inspired by those things. But as I've grown up as a Christian, I've realized that it is much easier to die for Christ than it is to live for Christ and die for Christ. And I think there's a good wisdom found in the early third century church's answer to this question and something that really comes up for concern. It's not just about whether or not we will die for Christ and stay faithful to the end. The question is, are you going to be faithful on an average Tuesday? and then be faithful to the end. Because the road to the end, if it's just from here to Rome and then we are to die in a couple of weeks, it is easier to stay faithful in a couple of weeks than it is to do so for 40 or 50 or 70 or 100 years. And so that kind of zeal we have to be very careful about of saying, oh man, I'm going to do this or that, and I'm going to do this or that for Christ. And it's always gotta be something flashy, or it's gotta be something on the levels of martyrdom, or it's gotta be something on the levels of going to some unknown tribe somewhere and doing the first thing. Look, God calls people to that, and I don't wanna rain on anyone's parade with that. But if your goal is to live a flashy life and die quickly for Christ, to be an Ignatius of Antioch or something like this, and that's what you want to do, and you do not want to use each day to die to Christ every day, then I would say you've got something backwards. Because while you may think that you are ready to die for Christ, at the real cornerstone of it all is most of us will have to learn how to die to Christ and die to self every day for decades, and then die slowly, hopefully surrounded by family and friends, or maybe not. And then someday our names will be forgotten by all but our savior. And will that be content for us? Will that be enough? I can say for me, I would rather die forgotten. I would rather people do not remember my name. I would rather people know Christ. And I would rather live a life of gratitude and of praise to God and die alone, honestly, after years of faithfulness that God has graciously blessed me with. If he so desires to take me in a series of persecutions or in a car accident or in cancer, then Thanks be to God all the same. I pray that you are encouraged by such a thing. I know this is a little bit different of an episode, but I want to say I wanted to at least address it. If you want to see a little bit more in depth on this, I did get to join James White on The Dividing Line back in February, and we talked a little bit more nerd stuff about this, some of the more recent studies that have come out and opinions about some of these things. stuff that doesn't really fit the tone and timbre of what I have here. So I want you to understand that at the end of the day, Christ is on his throne, and regardless of who said or did what, the scriptures are foremost in developing our theology, our ecclesiastical structures, as well as our practice and our attitude. I would encourage you all to seek the fruit of the Spirit, not the fruit of zeal. Zeal will eventually wear out unless it is satiated with the patience and the self-control that comes by the Spirit of God to the Christian's life. I do wish the Lord's blessings for you all. We will be back here in a couple weeks with the next episode. Lord's blessings. you