Iconology and Imperial Captivity: A Case Study of the Metamorphosis of Theology in the Byzantine Church

One of the popular myths of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman branches of the Church is that their present theology is in substance unchanged from the early Church and exists in continuity from then to today as the Consensus of the Fathers, or the Consensus Patrum. This rhetoric of unbroken continuity is attractive, but ultimately flawed and misleading, as the present study will show. Despite the many virtues of the Roman Church of the West and the Orthodox Church of the East, what we will call the Byzantine or Imperial Church, it must be admitted on all sides that the truth must prevail regarding the central claims through which they assert the superiority and exclusivity of their positions.

The position which will be examined here is the Byzantine Church’s stance towards icons. As will be shown, history is clear that the early Church was for centuries aniconic, and only adopted the religious use of icons after the imperialization of the Church, which is to say after the creation of the Byzantine State Church. In studying this topic, however, a key distinction must be made, and that is the difference between iconoclasm and aniconism. Iconoclasm refers to the removal and destruction of religious imagery, which is to say a total rejection of it. Aniconism is that which distinguishes between religiously themed visual art, on the one hand, which it accepts as legitimate, and the religious use of such art for the purposes of symbolic, semiotic, or representative veneration, on the other hand, which it rejects. Too many discussions of this topic get bogged down by failing to keep clear this distinction, and although there are variations within these two positions, this simple distinction is sufficient to establish our argument. 

As such, early architecture that has religiously themed art on its walls does not serve as evidence for iconodulia, iconodulia being the religious veneration of representative images. Specifically Byzantine iconodulia is the necessity of venerating such images. Nor would the veneration, say, of the text of the Gospels serve to positively assert the case for iconodulia. Moreover, neither the making of the sign of the Cross, nor the veneration of the bare sign of the Cross (for it is a sign-symbol, not an image-symbol), serve as positive support for the Byzantine theory of iconodulia. None of these fall necessarily within the clear prohibition against bowing to images as defined by the 2nd Commandment, and so cannot be cited as support for Byzantine iconodulia. Lastly, the special command of God to, say, erect statues of cherubim or set up a bronze serpent, did not include any permission to religiously venerate them, so likewise cannot be evidence for Byzantine iconodulia. In this we ought also to observe that there is no meaningful distinction between the terms idol and icon, for as will be shown below these are functionally interchangeable terms meaning, respectively, form and image, both equally having the semiotic theory of representation ascribed to their religious use.

Another point which is worth attending to here at the beginning is that we will not be addressing the argument for or against icons from a philosophical-theological perspective. The logic of the argument for icons is thus not relevant to this study. The reason for this is clear enough, that the argument at hand is the historical claim by the Byzantine Church, that their position represents that of the Consensus Patrum in unbroken continuity from the early Church. As such, the argument here will be principally historiographic in nature, touching on theology only insofar as it bears witness to historical development.

In beginning to look at the earliest Christian statements regarding images, as Moshe Barasch demonstrates in his work, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea, “what these early Christian apologists have to say about the images of the gods is so similar, actually unified” (Barusch, New York University Press, 1995, p. 98). According to his research, “Not a single one of these Christian documents composed between a.d. 140 and 180 suggests a deviance from the basic attitude of rejection” (ibid, p. 99). In fact, he found, “the rejection of divine images is complete” (ibid). The authors he examined from this period included Aristedes of Athens, Justin Martyr, Tatian, the Epistle to Diognetus, and Athenagoras of Athens. What he observed in his discussion of Aristedes sums up well the general early Christian attitude: “Worshipping images is a central criterion for distinguishing between pagans and Christians” (ibid, p. 97). His conclusion leaves no ambiguity, that, “in reading the texts of the apologists we do not find a single statement that, however interpreted, would oblige us to qualify the conclusion that the Christians of the time rejected sacred images. … the Christian apologists altogether condemned such images” (p. 100).

As is well known, Tertullian and Origen in the 3rd Century continued this consensus regarding the paradigmatic Christian rejection of iconodulia. But what might be less known is that Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus actually selected out and published Origen’s (a fortiori) rejection of Byzantine iconodulia, arguing that much less than God’s Commandments forbidding, even “common sense, nevertheless, forbids us to think that God is by any means corruptible matter, or that He is honoured when He is fashioned by men in forms of dead matter, supposed to pictorially or symbolically represent Him” (Basil and Gregory, The Philocalia of Origen, Chapter 19).

In this way it is shown that these two great Cappadocian Fathers maintained the Christian rejection of images, and with clear awareness of the theory of representative veneration. Of course, it should not need to be mentioned that the proof-texting Basil’s argument for the ontological representation of Christ to the Father, in his classic defense of the full deity of the Holy Spirit, was not an implicit endorsement of material semiotic iconodulia (Barusch, pp. 226-27). 

A little earlier in the 4th Century, Athanasius also maintained the consistent rejection of material representation. He even specifically mocked the theory of representative veneration when he wrote in Against the Heathen that, in olden times: 

“Graven images were worshipped by the commands of kings. Whom men could not honour in presence because they dwelt afar off, they took the counterfeit of his visage from afar, and made an express image of the king whom they honoured, to the end that by this their forwardness they might flatter him that was absent as if he were present.” (Athanasius, Against the Heathen, Part 1, ch. 11)

Clearly, the foregoing was the consistent Patristic consensus among Christians, and as Paul Alexander summarized: “No Church Father prior to the fourth century approved of Christian religious art” (The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in the Byzantine Empire, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1958, p. 215). According to Alexander, it was not until the first half of the 6th Century, perhaps with the work of Iohannes of Thessalonica and Leontius of Neapolis about a century prior to John of Damascus (d. 749), that there was a clear turn toward semiotic iconodulia (Alexander, pp. 33, 36). He found in the writings of Iohannes Philoponus, specifically his De opificio mundi (written some time between 529 and 543), that he “still considered the symbolic theory of images a pagan characteristic” (Alexander, p. 35), showing that Christians still published against what came to be the later Byzantine iconodulia.

But this raises the question: When did the symbolic theory of images originate? Alexander argued:

“To thoughtful pagans of all periods, and especially those of the Late Roman Empire, the cult statues were not gods, nor were the gods thought to inhabit them. They were merely set up to honour the gods, to remind mortal man of their existence and power, and to ensure that sacrifices and prayers presented to the statues would reach the gods themselves. This symbolical view of religious statues grew more complex as time went along until authors like Porphyry and Julian systematized the idea of divine representation.” (Alexander, p. 214)

In other words, the symbolic theory was ubiquitous in the pagan world, as the early Christian apologists were well aware, and so clearly among these Christians of the first three centuries the 2nd Commandment was not considered abrogated by the Incarnation, nor offset by the theory of representation, as borne witness by the Christian apologists above who clearly repudiated the symbolic theory which formed the substance of the later Byzantine position. It is important, then, to know the precursors to the Byzantine theory as espoused by John of Damascus.

As Alexander argued, the symbolic theory was known by Christian apologists as early as Aristedes, Justin Martyr, and Athenagorus in the 2nd Century (Alexander, p. 25), Origen also responding in the 3rd Century to Celsus’ symbolic theory, but among pagans it received perhaps its most sophisticated exposition. As Alexander states, “In Porphyry’s work the symbolic theory of religious images had reached its climax” (Alexander, p. 30). Porphyry (3rd Century) was an apologist opposed to Christianity (though much quoted by John of Damascus), but what is perhaps even more significant is that Julian the Apostate (emperor 361-363) picked up and expounded on this same theory of representative image worship in his infamous rejection of Christianity (Alexander, pp. 27-28). Of his pagan heritage he wrote: 

“... our fathers established statues and altars, and the maintenance of undying fire, and generally speaking everything of the sort as symbols of the presence of the gods, not that we should regard such things as gods, but that we may worship the gods through them.” (Alexander, p. 28)

This pagan symbolical theory almost completely prefigures the later Byzantine theory as championed by John of Damascus. As Alexander argues: 

“The development of the symbolic argument is clear. A direct tradition leads from the pagan theory of images to that of the Byzantine Christians.” (Alexander, p. 36)

“It is evident then at the beginning of the Iconoclast Controversy the Iconophiles were using in defence of their images all the arguments derived from the symbolic concept of the image which had been previously used by pagans in favour of their cult statues.” (Alexander, p. 39)

The theological metamorphosis in the Byzantine Church regarding icons is conclusive, and it shows decisively that the Byzantine Church cannot claim to possess the Consensus Patrum on the issue of its veneration of images, but a stark deviation from the unanimous first centuries of the Church regarding not icons merely, but specifically the symbolical theory of veneration.

It is astonishing that the Byzantine Church picked up the very kind of arguments used by those the Consensus Patrum opposed implacably for centuries, even those of the infamous Julian the Apostate, and imposing them with such vehemence as to pronounce, against all who would disagree or refuse to bow before and kiss man-made images of Christ, angels, and saints, an anathema, which they define as meaning "nothing less than complete separation from God" (2nd Nicaea, "The Letter from the Synod to the Emperor and Empress, from The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd Series, Vol. 14, p. 573).

Contrary to Nicaea 2, but in perfect agreement with the early consensus of the Church, regarding the immediate veneration of angels and men, a fact which speaks clearly to whether their images ought to be religiously venerated, the New Testament, states:

And I John saw these things, and heard them. And when I had heard and seen, I fell down to worship (προσκυνέω) before the feet of the angel which shewed me these things. Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book: worship (προσκυνέω) God. (Revelation 22:8-9 KJV)

“And as Peter was coming in, Cornelius met him, and fell down at his feet, and worshipped (προσκυνέω) him. But Peter took him up, saying, Stand up; I myself also am a man.” (Acts 10:25-26 KJV)

In conclusion, it would be most consistent with the Scriptures and the historic consensus of the Post-Apostolic era together with the first centuries of the Christian Church to return to aniconism by no longer offering semiotic worship in relation to man-made images, not only to those of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, but also to those of angels and men.

-Rev. Joshua Schooping

A Sanctifying Union with Christ: Sanctification and Cooperative Monergy

When God sovereignly and monergistically regenerates a person, He puts His Spirit into that person, giving them new life directly from His Life. He unites that person to Himself as He comes to indwell their heart, becoming the Life of their life. This is the doctrine of our union with Christ looked at from the perspective of God’s energies.

Yet, as God’s divine and holy energies work within and through the natural energies of the Elect, as the very Life of the Elect, they do not thereby become a second principle that gets added, as it were, alongside the natural energies. In other words, as God enlivens the otherwise dead human spirit with His Spirit, His Spirit remains the energy source for the new life of the believer. God is not merely giving “a shot in the arm,” nor is He applying “divine paddles” to restart the dead heart only to then leave it to run again as if on its own. God is thus the single energy, i.e. mon-energistic, source of the new and ongoing life of the Christian.

In this way the process of sanctification is still monergistic, although because the human spirit is made alive by God’s Holy Spirit it can now be said truthfully to cooperate with God. For when God gives new life to the soul, that soul is now enlivened to will and cooperate with God’s will. But this cooperation does not posit that man adds to the sanctification that is, and is in, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is Himself our righteousness and sanctification:

“But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30 KJV).

Therefore it is not merely that Christ gives us these things, but that He Himself is these things. In giving Himself to us we receive all these as a consequence. How? By His energies, for His energies communicate His Person, not merely His attributes. God is His essence and His energies, where His energies are Him in His ability to relate dynamically with His creatures, i.e. His ability to Personally commune with man while remaining utterly transcendent in His essential Being. 

As such, sanctification conceived as a process (having already received entire sanctification in receiving Christ) is the holy energy of God working in and through the Elect progressively. It is thus not “their” holiness, but God’s. And it is not synergistic in the sense that cooperation with God’s energies adds to what God has already perfectly and exhaustively supplied to faith. If one were to insist on using the term “synergism,” then, it would have to be conceived as passive synergism, which is here functionally equivalent to cooperative monergism. 

From the perspective of passive synergism, it is passive because working with God or co-laboring with God (1 Corinthians 3:9) is to yield to His will and operation, not to add one’s own will and operation to what is already perfect in Christ. As the Apostle Paul indicates: “For we are labourers (συνεργός) together with God: ye are God's husbandry, ye are God's building.” (1 Corinthians 3:9 KJV)

In other words, Paul is not saying that he is a “co-husband” with God, or a “co-architect.” Rather, whether having planted or watered, he states, “So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:7 KJV).

Thus we rather yield to His husbandry and His design, to His indwelling Spirit’s operation within us. God supplies the life, the operation, the will, the energy. 

Recall, this is not a discussion of monergistic regeneration, but monergistic sanctification. And so, similarly, from the perspective of cooperative monergism, it is cooperative because man’s will is truly enlivened and choosing, but in an active yielding to God’s singular power. Man is not enlivened by God to assert his will, but to trust and obey, to be one through whom the Holy Spirit produces His own fruit. Man’s very yielding for sanctification is made possible by God’s energy, for His grace is His Personal presence and power, so for man it is truly both monergistic and something with which he is willingly, yieldingly cooperative.

To conclude, the foregoing describes how sanctification functions monergistically. It is modeled by Christ in Gethsemane when He prayed: “not what I will, but what thou wilt” (Mark 14:36 KJV). The sanctified will is one that chooses to yield to God’s will, and so sanctification is the unfolding of God’s holy energy in and through the person and their personality, and not the product of self-will, self-development, or self-improvement. It is this holy monergy that allows the life in Christ to be one of Sabbath rest.

-Rev. Joshua Schooping

The Essence/Energies Distinction

The Essence/Energies distinction is “a means of explaining how God’s being is unknowable,” on the one hand, and yet, on the other, that truly “God does communicate Himself” (George Maloney, A Theology of Uncreated Energies, p. 60). It is the means by which God causes man to genuinely participate in His divine Life, His uncreated energies, given that God is also utterly transcendent and unknowable in His essence. In other words, it answers the questions: What do I receive when I am united with Christ and said to participate in the Divine Nature (2 Peter 1:4)? Do I participate in some one (or other) Attribute(s) of God, or do I more properly have communion with God in His very Person? How can God truly indwell the heart and remain God?

If this distinction is not made, then participation in the divine nature risks collapsing into man’s actually becoming/disappearing into God. The distinction thus, on the one hand, preserves union with Christ God while, on the other hand, guaranteeing that we retain our personal creaturehood, that our unique personhood is preserved in our union with Him. In short, it is the guard against monism.

The Essence/Energies distinction, it ought to be added, is not merely a rational deduction from abstract philosophical principles or categories, but in its essence is derived directly from the witness of Scripture (and confirmed in the experience of God’s children). In other words, it is a datum, a fact revealed in and gleaned from the Word of God, an item of Special Revelation. For example, as King David sings of God’s transcendence:

“O LORD my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and majesty. Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain.” (Psalm 104:1-2 KJV)

And yet as Christ speaks of our union with the transcendent God:

“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us ... I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” (John 17:21, 23 KJV)

And as the Apostle Paul writes of God’s transcendence:

“Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honour and power everlasting. Amen.” (1 Timothy 6:16 KJV)

And yet as he writes of our union with the transcendent God:

“For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” (Romans 8:15 KJV)

“Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.” (2 Corinthians 1:22 KJV)

“And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” (Galatians 4:6 KJV)

In conclusion, the Essence/Energies distinction is a theological framework for understanding how God is both transcendent and immanent, how He is unknowable and yet capable of indwelling man Personally. It also explains how God’s union with man in Christ doesn’t destroy human creaturehood, but instead preserves it, raising it to the divine platform in communion (unto theosis) all the while preserving one’s unique, created personhood in an eternal relation to God’s Triune Personhood.

-Rev. Joshua Schooping

The Jesus Prayer and Six Promises of God: The Sixth Promise

Parts I, II, III, IV, and V can be found here, here, here, here, and here, respectively.

The full form of the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” incorporates at least six biblical promises. These are:

1. Romans 10:9 — If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. (cf. John 6:40; Romans 10:10-13)

2. 1 Corinthians 12:3 — No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit. (cf. John 15:26)

3. 1 John 5:1 — Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him. (cf. Matthew 16:16-17)

4. 1 John 4:15 — Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. (cf. Romans 8:16-17; 1 John 2:23, 5:10)

5. John 14:14 — If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. (cf. John 14:13, 15:16, 16:23-24) 

6. 1 John 1:9 — If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (cf. Luke 18:14)

On the Sixth Promise

By confessing our sins to God, we not only offer them up in humility to be forgiven in Christ, but also offer our very souls to be cleansed. This is a twofold reality, and is grounded in the verse in 1 John preceding, which states, “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). In other words, the shed blood of Christ cleanses us from both the guilt and the stain of sin. Sin, which is an action, is also and more fundamentally like a progressive disease which inheres to and corrupts our souls unto death. In other words, sin is a spiritual sickness which produces sinful action. Just like how an infectious disease produces fever, so the infection of sin produces sinful action. Thus not only the symptom of sin's fever must be treated, but also the fundamental corruption of the disease of sin must be healed. And so the blood of Christ effects a double action: one which deals with the symptom, which is to say the fever of sin; and another which deals with the more fundamental cleansing, which is to say the underlying disease of sin. Both aspects are found through the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. The spilling of His righteous blood, which we receive in childlike faith as being given on our behalf, acts so as to objectively forgive the sin which we have committed. Not stopping there, it also works to restore us to cleanse us of all unrighteousness. This cleansing is the restoration of fellowship with God in Christ. What a mighty promise! And this is why confession is such a vital subject, and can never be treated flippantly as if it were optional, as if it were some superficial listing of mistakes, or as if it were simply a matter of regret for wrongs done. Confession must go all the way to the heart of the problem, the rupture of fellowship with God due to our hardened hearts and our stiff necks. Sin is such a corruption that God decided that the death of Christ on the Cross was the best way to deal with it. And so the forgiveness of sin and the cleansing of all unrighteousness came together at a great cost, and yet it is freely extended to all. Thus through confession not only does He promise to forgive and cleanse, but also to reestablish communion with Him as you walk in the Light that is Christ.

The Jesus Prayer and Six Promises of God: The Fifth Promise

Parts I, II, III, and IV can be found here, here, here, and here, respectively.

The full form of the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” incorporates at least six biblical promises. These are:

1. Romans 10:9 — If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. (cf. John 6:40; Romans 10:10-13)

2. 1 Corinthians 12:3 — No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit. (cf. John 15:26)

3. 1 John 5:1 — Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him. (cf. Matthew 16:16-17)

4. 1 John 4:15 — Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. (cf. Romans 8:16-17; 1 John 2:23, 5:10)

5. John 14:14 — If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. (cf. John 14:13, 15:16, 16:23-24) 

6. 1 John 1:9 — If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (cf. Luke 18:14)

On the Fifth Promise

At its core, asking something in Jesus’ holy Name means being in harmony with His will, which is also to say His greater wisdom, authority, and power. It is founded upon the divine promise given by Christ. This, being a promise, means that it can be relied upon to be upheld by His unwavering faithfulness. This excludes the idea that it is the reduction of Christ to being a genie. The word genie comes from an old Arabic word, jinn, referring to a kind of supernatural being, a term which came into English usage through translations of the Arabian Nights where a jinn was being manipulated to grant selfish wishes. God is not anything like a jinn, for He is the Almighty Creator of all, the thrice Holy One who maintains all things by the Word of His power (Hebrews 1:3). Moreover, as one who Covenants with His People, God does not promise to accomplish anything in His Name that is not also consistent with His holy nature and righteous character. We have to recall that the promise of Christ to do anything asked in His Name extends to those who are in and with Him. This occurs inexorably through the sacrament of holy Baptism, which is first and foremost a dying to self, a putting off of all worldly ways. Many people mistakenly think they can be a Christian and yet also at the same time a self-willed manmukh. An old Punjabi word, a manmukh is a person who follows their own mind and desires, without regard to God’s truth. This kind of person prizes their own thoughts, or the collective thoughts of their family or tribe, placing them above the revealed thoughts of God as given in His holy Word, the Bible, and as consistently maintained in the Church. This kind of person, when they encounter God’s promise to do something for His children when they pray in His Name, start to approach God as if He were simply there to guarantee that their selfish or tribal will is accomplished. When God resists their pride they end up blaming God for not obeying them, and so enter into all sorts of blasphemy. This precious promise of God is thus wholly for those who approach Him in faith as His obedient child. For in approaching God in Christ, it is not enough to simply be a socially “good” person, one must be His the Father's holy child by adoption into Christ Jesus His Son. But, if one approaches in humble faith, seeking God’s will and glory, then they can with all confidence ask in His Name, and He will do it. It may not be answered in an expected way, an obvious way, or an easy way, but it will be answered. For the most fundamental desire of a child of God is to be holy as He is holy, to seek to do His will in all things, and doing all for His glory.

The Jesus Prayer and Six Promises of God: The Fourth Promise

Parts I, II, and III can be found here, here, and here, respectively.

The full form of the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” incorporates at least six biblical promises. These are:

1. Romans 10:9 — If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. (cf. John 6:40; Romans 10:10-13)

2. 1 Corinthians 12:3 — No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit. (cf. John 15:26)

3. 1 John 5:1 — Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him. (cf. Matthew 16:16-17)

4. 1 John 4:15 — Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. (cf. Romans 8:16-17; 1 John 2:23, 5:10)

5. John 14:14 — If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. (cf. John 14:13, 15:16, 16:23-24) 

6. 1 John 1:9 — If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (cf. Luke 18:14)

On the Fourth Promise

He who confesses from the heart that Jesus is the Son of God has God abiding in him. In other words, God abiding in a man makes this confession possible. True confession is the result of God’s holy operation in the soul. And the opposite is also true: “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father” (1 John 2:22-23). In other words, those who do not confess Jesus as the Son do not have God as their Father, and in fact are opposed to the truth. And for a confession to be an authentic confession, it is not simply a matter of moving the lips, but having the heart moved by the Gospel. The heart moved by the Gospel is the heart moved by the power of God, for "the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth" (Romans 1:16). In this way the Gospel is the way of being in right relationship with divine reality. The Gospel is therefore not merely a religious message, and Christianity is not merely one way among others. There aren’t multiple true religions. One is either with Christ and God, or against Christ and God. For the whole world labors under the condemnation of sin, willingly bound to hell. But into this great spiritual slavery to evil God the Father sent His Only-Begotten Son. Christ is in this way the mercy of God extended. He is not merely a wise teacher, nor merely a miracle worker, nor merely an enlightened being. He is Himself Salvation, and He entered into the world in order to deliver those who believe in His Name. That is why Scripture says, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). And so it is not simply that Christianity is a better system of ideas. It is the reality of God’s Personal in-breaking into the world to save man from a very real bondage to sin unto death and from a very real bondage to a very real Satan. Thus it cannot be said that there is no salvation in any other name as if God loves only Christians. That view of religion fails to touch the depth of the reality of the Incarnation. Christ is Himself the love of God, who is God, who came into the world to save sinners via their incorporation into Him through confessed faith, for that confession is a participation, an abiding, in Him. This promise is therefore most wonderful, for “this is the promise that he hath promised us, even eternal life” (1 John 2:25).

Ancient Witness: The Authenticity of the Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel of Mark

Multiple and perhaps even most modern translations of the New Testament, such as the ASV, RSV, NASB (77 and 95), NIV, ESV, NET, and CSB, in some way indicate that Mark 16:9-20 are not original to Mark's Gospel. They do this in different ways, whether by placing these verses within square brackets and adding a footnote explaining their doubtful character, placing them in all italics, or perhaps inserting a note directly between verses 8 and 9 that says they "may" not be original. 

In this way they cast doubt on their trustworthiness, and as a consequence cast doubt on whether these verses are authentically God's Word. They do this further by stating that "some" early manuscripts do not contain them, or that there are no early witnesses to them, or they baldly say they were "added" or "inserted" at some later date. Thankfully, we can know that they are incorrect.

We can know because St. Irenaeus, providentially, referred to this section of Scripture directly and explicitly. A faithful Christian theologian and apologist, St. Irenaeus lived in the Second Century, was born and raised in Asia Minor, and became a bishop of Lyon, in Gaul. Thus he had deep experience in both the Eastern and Western geographical territories of the Roman empire, and so was in an extremely good position to be cognizant of what constituted the authentic ending of the text of Mark's Gospel. He wrote:

[T]owards the conclusion of his Gospel, Mark says: "So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God;" (Against Heresies, Book 3, Chapter 10, para. 5; Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, eds. Roberts and Donaldson, Revised by Coxe, (Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1885), pg 426 )

That is a direct quotation of Mark 16:19, which in the Authorized Version is translated:

So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God. (Mark 16:19)

Notice that St. Irenaeus does not simply quote this verse, but specifically describes its source as being from the conclusion of Mark's Gospel. For those who are interested in the Latin (the original Greek of St. Irenaeus' text is lost), it reads:

In fine autem Evangelii ait Marcus: "Et quidem Dominus Jesus, postquam locutus est eis, receptus est in cælos , et sedet ad dexteram Dei;" (Patrologia Graeca, vol. 7, Irenaeus, paragraph 188)

Interestingly, the foregoing Latin reads differently than the Vulgate (late 4th Century) rendering of that same Markan verse, indicating that this was not a later insertion into the text of Irenaeus: 

et Dominus quidem postquam locutus est eis adsumptus est in caelum et sedit a dextris Dei (Mark 16:19)

The resulting conclusion is necessary: Providentially, we have a definitive early witness from the Second Century that explicitly identifies Mark's Gospel as ending ("in fine") well beyond verse 8. Not only this, the verse being quoted by St. Irenaeus indicates Jesus' prior speech to the Eleven Disciples, which is also providentially to affirm the intervening verses between 8 and 19. This shows that the place (not the "insertion") of those verses into Mark's Gospel are certain and necessary, and that to cast doubt on their presence is problematic, to say the least. 

As a common logical fallacy is popularly summarized, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and so the fact that "some early manuscripts" may not contain those verses is not conclusive evidence that they were never there. And, as shown above, St. Irenaeus' witness to their positive presence at such an early date defeats the argument that they were a later insertion. 

Moreover, the translation into English of St. Irenaeus given above is from the year 1885, post-dating the doubt cast upon those verses by the famous textual scholars, Westcott and Hort, in their 1881 Revised Text (which is the grandfather of the eclectic Greek texts from which most modern translations are taken). This not only vindicates the Majority and the Received Texts on this point, but also means that the affirmation of the integrity of the last twelve verses of Mark has been available for over a century. And yet still the (false) claim persists that there is not a definite, reliable witness to their presence. 

Therefore, the modern translations which cast doubt on those verses would do well to remove any indication that they may not be original, or at the very least notate that they do indeed have some of the earliest and best Patristic witnesses to their genuineness (since the earliest extant copies of Mark's Gospel are well over a century after St. Irenaeus).