Apostolic doctrine, therefore, is not the new and novel teachings of someone who calls himself/herself an apostle. Apostolic doctrine is the message of Jesus, His redemptive work, and His call to selfless discipleship that is found in the 27 books of the New Testament.

The “apostles’ doctrine” of Acts 2:42 is a reference to the original eyewitness accounts of Jesus by the 12 apostles. This “doctrine” consisted of their first-hand reports of His life, teachings, death, and resurrection. This was, at first, an oral message spread by the Twelve and those that heard them. It was later written down in what we know as the four gospels. Paul’s writings were later added to this original testimony and, with the addition of James, Jude, Hebrews, 1 & 2 Peter , 1, 2, & 3 John , and Revelation there came into existence what we know as the New Testament canon.

Canon, of course, refers to a measure or rule. As such, the twenty-seven books of the New Testament became the standard or rule against which all other teachings and revelations must be measured. Why? Because the New Testament canon contains the original, apostolic testimony and teaching. Hans Kung, the well-known Roman Catholic theologian and reformer, says,

The preaching of the apostles, as it has come down to us in the writings of the New Testament, is the original, fundamental testimony of Jesus Christ, valid for all time; being unique, it cannot be replaced or made void by any later testimony. Later generations of the Church are dependent on the words, witness and ministry of the first “apostolic” generation. The apostles are and remain the original witnesses, their testimony is the original testimony and their mission the original mission.

The Significance of the Twelve & Paul

Image: James Tissot

Although there are other apostles in the New Testament, it is obvious that the Twelve chosen by Jesus are a select company and occupy a unique place in God’s purposes for the Church. This is borne out by the fact that throughout Scripture they are referred to as “the Twelve”, a set number neither to be added to nor subtracted from (See, for example, Matt. 10:2; 26:14; Mark 9:35; Luke 18:31; Acts 6:2; 1Cor. 15:5). Their uniqueness is clarified by the fact that Jesus tells them that, in the age to come, they will sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Matt. 19:28).

Pastor Derek Vreeland gives a brief introduction to an important early church father.

Early Life

Irenaeus, from the Church of St. Irenaeus, Lyon, France.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Little is known about the early life of Irenaeus (c. 130-202). He was born into a Christian home in Asia Minor in modern-day Turkey. Most Catholic histories claim that he was born in Smyrna. (The dates of his birth and death have been debated.)

As a boy he sat under the teaching of Polycarp, who was a disciple of the Apostle John. Polycarp was martyred in 156 AD. The death of Polycarp is legendary. It is recorded that Polycarp was tied to a stake and asked to renounce his faith in Christ. He replied, “For 86 years I have been His servant and he has never done me wrong. How can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?” Polycarp was sentence to be burned at the stake by the Roman government. According to tradition, when the fire was lit, Polycarp was not consumed by the flames. A Roman guard stabbed him in the side and according to one eyewitness a dove flew out. So much blood poured out from his side that it put the fire out.

As a young man, Irenaeus was quite influenced by Polycarp. Irenaeus wrote,

I can tell the very place in which the blessed Polycarp used to sit when he preached his sermons, how he came in and went out, the manner of his life, what he looked like, the sermons he delivered to the people, and how he used to report his association with John and the others who had seen the Lord, how he would relate their words, and the things concerning the Lord he had heard from them, about His miracles, and teachings. Polycarp had received all this from eyewitnesses of the Word of life, and related all these things in accordance with the Scriptures. I listened eagerly to these things at the time, by God’s mercy which was bestowed on me, and I made notes of them not on paper, but in my heart, and constantly by the grace of God I mediate on them faithfully.[i]

His connection to Polycarp puts Irenaeus in a special category. Irenaeus was discipled by Polycarp who was discipled by John who was discipled by Jesus himself.

At sometime during Irenaeus’ early years he moved to Lyons in South France. Lyons was the capital of the Roman occupied France. It was a booming city known for its many merchants. The church in Lyons was planted by missionaries from Asia Minor. So for Irenaeus the church in South France was a kindred spirit with the church in Asia Minor.

Days of ministry

Location of Lugdunum in Gaul, renamed Lyons in the Medieval Period.

The Bishop of the church in Lyons was Pothinus, a native of Asia Minor. At sometime during the early 170s, Irenaeus became a presbyter at the church in Lyons. In 177, Pothinus sent Irenaeus on a mission trip to Rome. This was during the brutal persecution of the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius. The emperor was infuriated by the confidence and faith of Christians who had a greater peace than that of his Stoic mentors. Often Aurelius would crucify Christians along the roadsides through the Roman Empire. On one occasion, he surrounded his palace garden with crucified Christians and lit them on fire to light the garden at night.

Pothinus was martyred during 177 or 178 AD during a time of persecution in Lyons. Irenaeus was spared while he was away. When he returned in 178, he was installed as the second bishop of Lyons. From there he taught and wrote until his death sometime between 200 and 206 A.D.) As bishop, Irenaeus had that heart of a pastor. He was also a unifier. He was often called upon as a moderator when debates broke out in the Church. For example, there was a debate over whether Easter should be celebrated on Nisan 14 according to the Jewish Passover or on a Sunday, the day of the resurrection. Irenaeus continually submitted that the dates of religious holidays where not more important than maintaining the bond of love and unity in the Church.

Constantine’s Edict of Milan brought an end to the persecution of Christians, but that did not mean the Church was granted favor throughout the Roman Empire. What are the lessons for us today?

The impression is often left that with the Edict of Milan that Constantine issued in A.D. 313-314 which brought an end to the persecution of Christians, the Church was granted favor throughout the Roman Empire. Such was not the case. Constantine’s policy was only one of toleration. In A.D. 314, the coins that were issued throughout the empire during Constantine’s reign not only carried the image of the cross but also an emblem of Sol Invictus and Mars Conservator. These coins were issued year after year.

A third century silver disc of Sol Invictus (“Unconquered Sun”) that was the official sun god of the later Roman Empire. Image © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons.

The state of affairs was therefore of toleration and not of favoritism for a number of years. Persecution of Christians came to an end but there were still problems to be faced. The years between A.D. 313-4 and A.D. 475 were a period of stress and weakness but also a time of strengthening. The Roman pantheon remained and was honored chiefly by those in the military. There were military units that were also religious orders. Sol, the sun, was considered to be the God who brought about important victories. Other military units honored Mars. Various cavalries and infantries had their favorites.

Not only was there still the continuing presence of the Roman pantheon of Gods and heroes, but returning soldiers from the Eastern defense brought with them the cult of Mithra and its initiation rites. Because Rome had its eastern border along the Euphrates river with its main fortress, Dura Europas, facing the Persian city of Ctesiphon on the opposite bank, there was an opening for eastern ways to seep into the Roman empire. Gnosticism, a dualistic spirituality which considered the material world as evil and the spiritual world as good or divine, seeped through to the West as early as the late second century but gained ground through the third and fourth centuries. Gnosticism had a leech-like character and attached itself to anything that looked attractive. The Christian faith was one. As early as A.D. 185, Irenaeus, The bishop of Lyons in Gaul, attacked the Gnostics in his writing, Against Heresies. It was not enough though it helped to retard Gnostic spirituality.

Gnosticism and Mithraism were not the only ones to cross over into the Roman Empire. So did Manichaeism which was perpetrated by a Persian mystic named Mani who itinerated throughout the Persian realms and into parts of Roman East Africa, North Africa, and eastward to the Indus river valley. The man who saw through the errors of Mani was once attracted to his teachings, none other than Augustine. Soon after his conversion to Christ Jesus from a garden experience and the mentorship of Ambrose in Milan, Augustine attacked the teachings of Mani.

Augustine was important for the Church in more ways than his apologetic and polemic writings. One other contribution was the account of his way to Jesus, The Confessions, which had a wide reading within his own lifetime and which has been widely disseminated throughout the subsequent seventeen hundred years. Beyond the inspiration of the dramatic impact of the power of the grace of God in Christ Jesus, Augustine was the first to develop an understanding of the church as a counter-culture. This was done in his later writing De Civitate Deo (The City of God) composed at the time of the weakening of Rome in the West and when the Vandals and Visigoths invaded the western European sector of the empire. This is critical for the next issue of this writing.

Part 2 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts

Part 3 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts

Part 4 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts

Richard M. Riss presents evidence for the operation of the gifts of the Spirit throughout the Church Age.

The Moravians

The gift of tongues is sometimes associated with the Moravian Brethren, a remnant of the Bohemian brethren (followers of John Huss) who became newly organized after finding refuge on the estate of Count von Zinzendorf (AD 1700-1760) in Saxony in 1722, in a Christian community which they called Herrnhut. In 1727, Zinzendorf retired from government service to devote himself to leadership of this community. In August of that year, there was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Herrnhut. A Moravian historian wrote as follows:

Church history also abounds in records of special outpourings of the Holy Ghost, and verily the thirteenth of August, 1727 was a day of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We saw the hand of God and His wonders, and we were all under the cloud of our fathers baptized with their Spirit. The Holy Ghost came upon us and in those days great signs and wonders took place in our midst. From that time scarcely a day passed but what we beheld His almighty workings amongst us.¹¹³

Herrnhut, 1765, in what is today eastern Saxony, Germany.

This account of the Moravian revival is not specific with respect to the signs and wonders that took place in their midst. Although the gift of tongues was not endorsed by the leaders of the Moravians, their opponents believed that they spoke in tongues.¹¹⁴

John Wesley

The Moravians were a direct influence upon John Wesley (AD 1703-1791), the father of Methodism, whose conversion in 1738 took place shortly after long talks with Peter Boehler, one of the Moravian brethren. Wesley’s response to a book published in 1748 clearly indicates his position with respect to operation of the gifts of the Spirit in his own day. Dr. Conyers Middleton, fellow of Trinity College, had written a book entitled A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers, which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church. Wesley spent twenty days, from January 4 until January 24 of 1749, writing a letter to Conyers Middleton refuting his thesis that there had been no miracles in the history of the church after the Bible had been written. With respect to the gift of tongues, Wesley wrote as follows:

Section VI.1. The eighth and last of the miraculous gift you enumerated was the gift of tongues. And this, it is sure, was claimed by the primitive Christians; for Irenaeus says expressly, ‘We hear many in the church speaking with all kinds of tongues.’ ‘And yet,’ you say, ‘this was granted only on certain special occasions, and then withdrawn again from the Apostles themselves; so that in the ordinary course of their ministry they were generally destitute of it. This,’ you say, ‘I have shown elsewhere’ (page 119). I presume in some treatise which I have not seen. 2. But Irenaeus, who declares that ‘many had this gift in his days, yet owns he had it not himself.’ This is only a proof that the case was then the same as when St. Paul observed long before, ‘Are all workers of miracles? Have all the gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues?’ (I Cor. xii.29-30). No, not even when those gifts were shed abroad in the most abundant manner. 3. ‘But no other Father has made the least claim to it.’ (page 120). Perhaps none of those whose writings are now extant—at least, not in those writings which are extant. But, what are these in comparison of those which are lost? And how many were burning and shining lights within three hundred years after Christ who wrote no account of themselves at all—at least, none which has come to our hands?¹¹⁵

Wesley’s defense of the existence of tongues in history continues at considerable length, ending with the observation that the gift of tongues had been heard of within fifty years of their time, among the French Prophets. He wrote:

Since the Reformation, you say, ‘this gift has never once been heard of or pretended to by the Romanists themselves’ (page 122). But has it been pretended to (whether justly or not) by no others, though not by the Romanists? Has it ‘never once been heard of’ since that time? Sir, your memory fails you again: it has undoubtedly been pretended to, and that at no great distance from our time or country. It has been heard of more than once no further off than the valleys of Dauphiny. Nor is it yet fifty years ago since the Protestant inhabitants of those valleys so loudly pretended to this and other miraculous powers to give much disturbance to Paris itself. And how did the King of France confute that pretence can prevent its being heard anymore? Not by the pen of his scholars, but by (a truly heathen way), the swords and bayonets of his dragoons.¹¹⁶

Wesley was undoubtedly aware of the presence and validity of the gift of tongues in his day, for Thomas Walsh, one of Wesley’s foremost preachers, wrote in his diary on March 8, 1750, “This morning the Lord gave me language that I knew not of, raising my soul to Him in a wonderful manner.”¹¹⁷