Learning Christ

7. Word and Silence

256 7 Word and sIlence A Primer in Learning Christ As Ignatius of Antioch sees it, the economy of redemption is fundamentally an economy of revelation. God has redeemed the world by “manifesting himself humanly for the newness of eternal life” (Eph. 19:3). When human beings appropriate God’s self-revelation through faith and love, they become “children of the light of truth” (Phld. 2:1) and “imitators of God” (Eph. 1:1). And if they endure in this way of life to the end, they “attain God” (Magn. 1:3). Because God himself is unity, the unity of Father and Son in the Spirit, imitating God involves embracing unity in all its dimensions. Jesus Christ is the historical manifestation of this unity . In his life, death, and resurrection we see all the dimensions of unity in their perfection: the union of flesh and spirit, the union of faith and love, and, above all, Jesus’ own union with the Father. To appropriate this multidimensional unity, therefore, Christians must “become imitators of Jesus Christ, even as he is of the Father” (Phld. 7:2). In its essence, then, redemption is a matter of χριστομαθία, or “learning Christ” (8:2). The Ignatian letters are a kind of primer in χριστομαθία. Assuming the role of fellow student and teacher’s aide, the bishop of Antioch exhorts his readers and himself, “Having become his disciples [μαθηταί], let us learn [μάθωμεν] to live according to Christianity ... we endure, in order that we may be found to be disciples [μαθηταί] of Jesus Christ, our only teacher.”1 The Christian already is a disciple, is learning to become a disciple, and hopes to prove to be a true disciple in the end.2 But if Chris1 . Magn. 10:1, 9:1. 2. Eph. 1:2, 3:1; Tral. 5:2; Rom. 4:2, 5:1 and 3. Word and sIlence 257 tianity is χριστομαθία, not simply learning from Christ or about Christ but learning the very person of Christ, Jesus is not only our teacher but is also the truth that we are attempting to learn. We assimilate something of this truth by “adorning ourselves in the commandments of Jesus Christ” (Eph. 9:2), by learning and heeding “the precepts of the Lord and of the apostles” (Magn. 13:1). But even this recourse to his words is not enough. We must also have a personal encounter with the Lord himself. We must look to his life in the flesh, to the deeds by which he revealed the Father. It is not enough to possess “the word of Jesus” (λόγος Ἰησοῦ); we must also possess Jesus himself, the one who is God’s Word (αὐτοῦ λόγος).3 We encounter him personally in the eucharist, but the eucharistic flesh, Ignatius teaches us, is none other than the historical flesh that suffered and was raised (Smyr. 7:1). All roads, then, lead us back to the historical event of Jesus Christ. Surely we cannot “learn Christ” unless we know how to interpret the life of Christ. This is why Ignatius’s primer is laced with interpretive creedal narrations of the Christ event. To learn Christ, then, we must know how to interpret the Christ event, which is the centerpiece and summit of the historical economy. This chapter and the next will deal with the life of Christ as it is presented in Ignatius’s letters, which is to say, under the aspect of mystery. A mystery is a historical event in which the incomprehensible God, without forfeiting any of his incomprehensibility, makes himself known and available to human beings. The Christ event, with its two great pillars of incarnation and paschal mystery, is the definitive μυστήριον by which “our only teacher” reveals the invisible Father and invites us to become his disciples (Magn. 9:1). Moreover, the dimension of mystery is located not only in the Christ event proper but in the whole ecclesial process by which that event communicates divine truth and life to us and finally brings us to God. If Christianity is a matter of imitating Jesus as he imitated the Father, our lives too must take on the dimension of mystery. As the vita Iesu brings the eternal mystery of God into the realm of human history, so the vita ecclesiae brings the mystery of the life of Christ into our lives. I will touch on aspects of how this happens in the present chapter but will defer a thorough examination of Ignatius’s ecclesiology to chapter 9. One of the ways Ignatius attempts to...