Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Niels Christian Hvidt on Post-New Testament Prophecy

  

The church Fathers of the first two centuries knew nothing of an end of revelation and wrote only little on its completion. They were more interested in highlighting the fact that Christ had promised he would come again, and they awaited Creation’s full participation in the fullness of God revealed in Christ.

 

The Fathers made no sharp distinction between themselves and the apostles, and they did not clearly separate between apostolic and postapostolic heritage. Hence, in its origin, the transition from the normative constitution of the apostolic heritage to its tradition was subtle.

 

This does not mean that they showed no interest in the criteria of true revelation. Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, pseudo-Barnabas, and Polycarp of Smyrna saw a difference between themselves and the apostles. These authors regarded the apostles as the immediate and therefore particularly authoritative witnesses of Christ and of the Gospel, and this heritage had to be kept pure. At this moment in history, the Deposit of Faith had not yet received its authoritative expression in Holy Scripture, as the Christian canon was only formed in the middle of the second century; only after the Council of Nicaea in 325 did theologians begin using the concept ‘‘canon.’’ Even so, the aforementioned patristic authors heralded an authoritative and universally valid truth, inherited from the apostles, which, in its substance, equals the fullness of God revealed in Christ although received normatively in the testimony of the apostles. Hence there was from the beginning a close relationship between the revelation in Christ and its authoritative apostolic testimony. (Niels Christian Hvidt, Christian Prophecy: The Post-Biblical Tradition [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 188-89, italics in original)

 

 

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