No Martyr Outside the Church

Against people of this kind the Lord cries out. He holds his straying people back from them and calls them home, saying: “Do not listen to the words of the false prophets, for the visions of their own hearts deceive them. They speak, but not out of the mouth of the Lord. They say to those who throw away the word of God, ‘You will have peace,’ and to everyone who walks after his own will, ‘Everyone who walks in the error of his heart — no harm will come to him.’ I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. If they had stood on my foundation and had listened to my words and taught my people, I would have turned them away from their evil thoughts.” Again the Lord points out these same men and marks them, saying: “They have abandoned me, the spring of living water, and have hacked out for themselves broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” [a]

There can be no baptism but one, and yet they think they can baptize. They have walked away from the spring of life, and yet they promise the grace of living, saving water. Among them people are not washed but made filthy; sins are not cleared away but piled higher. A birth like that produces sons for the devil, not for God. They are born of a lie, and they do not receive the promises of truth. Fathered by treachery, they lose the grace of faith. They cannot reach the reward of peace, because they have broken the Lord’s peace with the madness of discord.

And let no one fool himself with a hollow reading of the Lord’s words, “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them.” Men who corrupt the good news and misread it quote the last words and drop the ones before them. They remember one part and cunningly bury the other. Cut off from the church themselves, they cut a single passage in half. [d]

For when the Lord wanted to press unity of mind and peace on his disciples, he said: “I tell you that if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask for, it will be given you by my Father who is in heaven. For wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am with them.” He was showing that the most is given, not to a crowd, but to the agreement of those who pray. “If two of you,” he says, “agree on earth” — he put agreement first. He made the concord of peace the condition. He taught that we are to agree firmly and faithfully. But how can a man agree with anyone when he does not agree with the body of the church itself, or with the whole brotherhood? How can two or three be gathered in Christ’s name when they are plainly cut off from Christ and from his good news? We did not withdraw from them; they withdrew from us. And since heresies and schisms have arisen since, out of their setting up separate places of worship for themselves, they have abandoned the Head and the Source of the truth.

But the Lord is speaking about his church, and he is speaking to those who are in the church. If they agree, if they do what he commanded and warned, then even two or three praying together with one mind — only two or three — can obtain from the majesty of God what they ask. “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name,” he says, “I am with them” — that is, with the simple and the peaceable, with those who fear God and keep God’s commands. With people like that, though they be only two or three, he said that he was. It was the same way he was with the three young men in the fiery furnace: because they stood toward God in simplicity and were of one mind among themselves, he breathed on them in the middle of the surrounding flames with a breath like dew. It was the same way he was there himself with the two apostles shut up in prison, because they were single-hearted and of one mind. He himself worked the bolts of the cell loose and set them back in the marketplace, so that they could announce to the crowd the word they were faithfully preaching.

So when he lays it down among his commands and says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am with them,” he is not dividing people off from the church — he is the one who founded the church and made it. He is rebuking the faithless for their discord, and commending peace to the faithful by what he says, and showing that he is with two or three who pray with one mind rather than with a great many who disagree; and that more can be obtained by the united prayer of a few than by the divided pleading of many.

It is the same when he gave the rule for prayer. He added: “And when you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your wrongs as well.” And he calls back from the altar the man who comes to the sacrifice in the middle of a quarrel. He tells him first to make it up with his brother, and then to come back in peace and offer his gift to God. For God had no regard for Cain’s offerings, since a man who through envious discord had no peace with his brother could not have God at peace with him. [h]

What peace, then, do the enemies of their own brothers promise themselves? What sacrifices do they imagine they are celebrating, when they set themselves up as rivals of the priests? When they gather, do they suppose they have Christ with them — men gathered outside the church of Christ?

Even if men like that were killed while confessing the Name, the stain would not be washed out even by blood. The deep and inexcusable fault of discord is not cleansed even by suffering. A man cannot be a martyr if he is not in the church; he cannot reach the kingdom if he abandons the church that is to reign there. Christ gave us peace. He told us to be in agreement and of one mind. He charged us to keep the bonds of love and affection unbroken and unspoiled. A man who has not held on to brotherly love cannot show himself a martyr. The apostle Paul teaches this and bears witness to it, saying: “And though I have faith enough to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And though I give away everything I own to feed the poor, and though I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, it does me no good. Love is long-suffering; love is kind; love does not envy; love does not behave badly, is not puffed up, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil; it loves all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” [j]

“Love,” he says, “never fails.” She will always be in the kingdom; she will last forever in the unity of a brotherhood bound to her. Discord cannot reach the kingdom of heaven, or the rewards of Christ, who said: “This is my command: that you love one another as I have loved you.” A man who has broken Christ’s love by faithless dissension cannot reach them. Whoever has no love has no God. Here is the word of the blessed apostle John: “God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.” Those who refuse to be of one mind in God’s church cannot live with God.

They may burn, handed over to flames and fires; they may lay down their lives, thrown to the wild beasts. That will not be the crown of faith but the punishment of treachery; not the glorious end of a brave devotion but the ruin of despair. Such a man may be killed. Crowned he cannot be. He calls himself a Christian in the same way the devil often pretends to be Christ, as the Lord himself warns us: “Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am Christ,’ and they will deceive many.” Just as that one is not Christ, though the name he uses deceives, so a man cannot turn out to be a Christian either if he does not stay in the truth of Christ’s good news and of the faith.

To prophesy, to drive out demons, to do great things on earth — all that is certainly high and admirable. But a man does not reach the kingdom of heaven merely for being found in all of it, unless he walks by keeping to the straight and right way. The Lord denounces it and says: “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons, and in your name do many mighty works?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you who work lawlessness.’” What is needed is righteousness, so that a man may stand well with God the judge. We have to obey his instructions and his warnings, so that what we have done may receive its reward. [o]

When the Lord wanted, in his Gospel, to set out the road of our hope and faith in a short summary, he said: “The Lord your God is one God, and you shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and all your strength. This is the first command; and the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commands hang all the law and the prophets.” In one teaching he taught both love and unity. He gathered all the prophets and the law into two instructions. But what unity does a man keep, what love does he hold to or even think about, if he is savage with the madness of discord, splits the church, destroys faith, wrecks the peace, scatters love, and profanes what is sacred?

This evil, my most faithful brothers, began long ago, but by now the destruction it does has grown, and the poisonous plague of twisted teaching and of schisms has begun to sprout and put out new shoots. Even this had to come as the world goes into its decline, since the Holy Spirit foretells it and warns us through the apostle, who says: “In the last days dangerous times will come. People will love themselves; they will be proud, boastful, greedy, blasphemers, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without natural affection, unwilling to make peace, slanderers, without self-control, savage, haters of good, betrayers, reckless, swollen with self-importance, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, keeping a sort of outward shape of religion but denying its power. These are the men who creep into houses and take captive foolish women loaded down with sins and pulled about by all kinds of cravings — always learning and never able to arrive at the knowledge of the truth. And as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also resist the truth. But they will get no further, for their folly will be plain to everyone, as theirs was too.” [s]

Everything that was foretold is coming true. As the end of the world draws near, these men have arrived as a test of the men of this time and of the times themselves. Error deceives while the enemy rages more and more. Stupidity puffs a man up, envy sets him on fire, greed blinds him, godlessness twists him, pride swells him, discord embitters him, anger drives him headlong.

Still, the extreme and headlong faithlessness of so many should not shake us or unsettle us. It should strengthen our confidence in the truthfulness that foretold the whole thing. Some men have turned out this way because it was predicted in advance; so let the rest of the brothers watch out for the same sort of thing, since that too was predicted in advance. The Lord teaches us so, and says: “But you, watch out. See, I have told you everything beforehand.” Brothers, I beg you: keep away from men of this kind, and drive their damaging talk away from your side and away from your ears as though it carried the contagion of death. As it is written, “Fence your ears about with thorns, and refuse to listen to a wicked tongue.” And again, “Bad company ruins good character.” The Lord teaches us and warns us to get away from such men. He says: “They are blind guides of the blind; and if a blind man guides a blind man, both of them fall into the ditch.” [t]

Whoever he may be, a man who is cut off from the church is to be turned away from and avoided. He is twisted, and he sins, and he stands condemned by his own verdict. Does he imagine he has Christ, when he works against Christ’s priests, when he separates himself from the company of Christ’s clergy and people? He is carrying weapons against the church; he is fighting against what God set in place. An enemy of the altar, a rebel against Christ’s sacrifice; faithless toward the faith, profane toward what is holy; a disobedient servant, an undutiful son, a hostile brother. He looks down on the overseers and abandons God’s priests, and dares to set up another altar, to make another prayer with words no one gave him, to profane the truth of the Lord’s offering with false sacrifices — and not to see that a man who fights against God’s arrangement is punished by God’s own visitation for the recklessness of his daring.

That is how it went with Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, who tried to claim for themselves the power of sacrificing, against Moses and against Aaron the priest. Punishment for the attempt came at once. The earth broke its own fastenings and gaped open into a deep pit, and the split in the ground as it drew back swallowed the men where they stood, alive. Nor did the anger of the outraged God strike only the ringleaders. Two hundred and fifty more had shared in that madness and thrown in with them in that boldness, and fire that came out from the Lord consumed them in a swift revenge — surely to warn and to show that whatever those wicked men had attempted, in order to overturn God’s arrangement by human will, had been done against God. [x]

It was the same with King Uzziah. He carried the censer and violently claimed the right to sacrifice against God’s law; and when Azariah the priest stood up to him, he would not obey or give way. He was thrown into confusion by God’s anger and defiled on his forehead by the mark of leprosy — marked by an offended Lord on the very part of the body where those who please the Lord are signed. And the sons of Aaron, who set strange fire on the altar, which the Lord had not commanded, were snuffed out on the spot in the presence of an avenging Lord.

These, without a doubt, are the men imitated and followed by people who despise what God handed down and go looking for strange teachings, bringing in doctrines of human devising. The Lord rebukes and reproaches them in his Gospel, saying: “You set aside God’s command so that you may keep your own tradition.” [y]

This is a worse crime than the one the lapsed appear to have fallen into — and they at least stand as penitents for their crime and beg God, making full amends. In their case the church is sought out and appealed to; in this case the church is fought. There, it is possible that there was compulsion; here, the will itself is committed to the wrong. There, a man who has lapsed has injured only himself; here, a man who has tried to start a heresy or a schism has deceived many by dragging them along with him. In the first, one soul is lost; in the second, many are put at risk. The one certainly understands that he has sinned, and mourns it and weeps over it. The other is swollen in his own heart, pleased with himself in the very crimes he commits: he separates sons from their Mother, lures sheep away from their shepherd, throws God’s holy rites into confusion. The lapsed man sinned once; this man sins daily. And in the end, the lapsed man who afterwards comes to martyrdom may receive the promises of the kingdom, while the other, if he is killed outside the church, cannot reach the church’s rewards.

And no one should be amazed, dearly loved brothers, that even some of the confessors go this far, and that some of them go on to sin as wickedly and as gravely as this. Confessing does not set a man free from the devil’s traps. It does not guard a man who is still placed in this world with permanent safety from the world’s temptations and dangers and assaults and attacks. Otherwise we would never see in confessors the frauds and the sexual sin and the adulteries that we do now see in some of them, with groaning and grief. [ab]

Whoever that confessor may be, he is no greater, no better, no dearer to God than Solomon — who kept the grace he had received from the Lord as long as he walked in God’s ways, and then, once he left the Lord’s way, lost the Lord’s grace along with it. That is why it is written, “Hold on to what you have, so that no one else takes your crown.” And surely the Lord would not have threatened that the crown of righteousness might be taken away, unless, when righteousness goes, the crown has to go with it.

Confessing is the beginning of glory, not the full earning of the crown. It does not finish our praise; it starts our standing. And since it is written, “The one who endures to the end will be saved,” whatever comes before the end is a step by which we climb toward the summit of salvation, not a finishing line where the whole result of the climb has already been won. [ac]

He is a confessor — but after his confession his danger is greater, because the enemy has been provoked further. He is a confessor — and for that very reason he ought to stand all the more on the side of the Lord’s Gospel, since it was through the Gospel that he won glory from the Lord. For the Lord says: “From the one to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom more standing has been given, more service will be demanded.” Let no one be ruined by a confessor’s example. Let no one learn injustice, let no one learn arrogance, let no one learn treachery, from the way a confessor behaves.

He is a confessor: then let him be lowly and quiet. Let him be modest and disciplined in what he does, so that a man called a confessor of Christ may imitate the Christ he confesses. For Christ says, “Whoever lifts himself up will be brought low, and whoever humbles himself will be lifted up.” And he himself was lifted high by the Father because, as the Word and the strength and the wisdom of God the Father, he humbled himself on earth. So how could he love arrogance, when by his own law he laid humility on us, and himself received the highest name from the Father as the reward of his own humility?

He is a confessor of Christ — but only so long as the majesty and dignity of Christ are not blasphemed by him afterwards. Let the tongue that has confessed Christ not turn to speaking evil. Let it not be turbulent. Let it not be heard grating with insults and quarrels. Let it not, after words of praise, shoot out a snake’s venom against the brothers and against God’s priests. But if afterwards he becomes blameworthy and offensive; if he squanders his confession by an evil way of life; if he stains his life with disgraceful filth; if in the end he abandons the church in which he became a confessor, and cuts through the concord of unity, and trades his first faith for a later faithlessness — then he cannot flatter himself, on the strength of his confession, that he has been picked out for the reward of glory. From that very fact he has only earned a heavier punishment.