Theopedia

Clement of Rome

Overview

Clement of Rome, also called Clement I or Clemens Romanus, was a bishop of Rome and one of the Apostolic Fathers, best known for a letter to the church at Corinth, commonly called 1 Clement, written around AD 95-96.1 Ancient tradition held that he had known the apostles: the church historian Eusebius suggested he was the Clement named by Paul in Philippians 4:3, though Elijah Porter Barrows judged that identification a question best “left undecided.”23

Life and Ministry

Little can be said of Clement’s life with confidence beyond his association with the Roman church at the end of the first century. Ancient writers represented him as identical with the bishop of that name, and Barrows notes the further, more tentative, tradition connecting him to the Clement Paul greets among his fellow workers in Philippians 4:3.3 Later Roman Catholic tradition counts him among the earliest bishops of Rome and, on some tellings, Peter’s successor there. John Calvin took up that succession claim directly: “these authors are not agreed as to who was his successor. Some say Linus, others Clement,” and Calvin concluded that the “variety of opinions” surrounding the period is such that “credit is not to be given rashly to anything we read concerning it.”4 Herman Bavinck reaches a similar conclusion by a different route: the bishops’ lists preserved in Hegesippus, Irenaeus, the Muratorian Fragment, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius show that at the end of the second century “Peter was not yet considered a bishop of Rome,” and that the common tradition instead credited Peter and Paul jointly with founding the church and charging Linus with its oversight; only later, under Victor I or Zephyrinus (AD 180-217), did tradition shift to make Peter Rome’s first bishop.5

Theological Contribution

Clement’s one securely genuine work is his letter to the Corinthian church, occasioned by a “wicked and unholy sedition” there that had gone so far as to depose some of the church’s own ministers.6 Writing in the name of the Roman church, Clement urged the Corinthians toward love and unity, comparing the church first to an army marked by rank and obedience and then to a body whose members serve one another for the good of the whole.6 Philip Schaff, quoted by Barrows, judged that the letter “evinces the calm dignity and the practical executive wisdom of the Roman church in her original apostolic simplicity, without the slightest infusion of hierarchical arrogance.”7

The letter is also an early witness to the apostles’ own authority and to the reception of Paul’s writing. Michael Kruger points to Clement’s direct appeal to Paul: “Take up the epistle of that blessed apostle, Paul… To be sure, he sent you a letter in the Spirit concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos,” a clear reference to 1 Corinthians that assumes the Corinthians’ own familiarity with it.8 Clement elsewhere calls the apostles “the greatest and most righteous pillars of the Church,” tracing their authority back through Christ to God, and the letter makes likely allusions to several other Pauline letters besides 1 Corinthians.9

A second work, commonly called 2 Clement though it is better described as a homily, was traditionally attributed to him but is not his. Eusebius already treated the attribution with suspicion, writing that “it is clear to us that this is not equally known with the first, for we know that the ancients have not made use of it.”10 Barrows concludes it is “generally acknowledged to be spurious,” possibly one of the anonymous homilies later attached to Clement’s name; Ronald Heine’s glossary of early Christian writings independently dates it as “a Christian homily from the mid-second century,” decades after Clement’s own lifetime.11

Historical Significance

1 Clement, together with the otherwise unrelated 2 Clement, was copied at the end of Codex Alexandrinus, one of the great early manuscripts of the Greek Bible, alongside other early Christian writings judged useful for the church without being counted as Scripture.12 Kruger reads the letter’s own appeal to Paul’s authority as evidence that Paul’s letters, and the apostles generally, were already recognized as authoritative within a generation of the apostolic age.8

Roman Catholic tradition has also claimed Clement as evidence for an unbroken papal succession from Peter. Reformed writers have answered that the historical record for the earliest Roman bishops, Clement’s own place in it included, is too uncertain to bear that weight: Calvin found the ancient sources on Peter’s successor already in disagreement by his own day, and Bavinck traced how the very idea of a Roman bishop’s succession from Peter developed only gradually, over the century following the apostolic age, rather than standing as established fact from the beginning.45

Related Doctrines

Clement’s letter bears on the doctrine of the inspiration of the Bible as early evidence for the reception of Paul’s writings, and on the papacy and Roman Catholicism as a contested piece of evidence in the question of Roman succession from Peter. He is distinguished from the later Clement of Alexandria, an unrelated figure of the same name.

References

  1. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 6, “The Corporate Reception of the Canon.” ↩

  2. Steven Tshombe Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 122, citing Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.15. ↩

  3. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), “Appendix to Part III,” 511-12. ↩ ↩2

  4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 4, chap. 6, “Of the Primacy of the Romish See,” 362-63. ↩ ↩2

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, “Appendix to Part III,” 512. ↩ ↩2

  7. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 1, 460, quoted in Barrows, Companion to the Bible, “Appendix to Part III,” 512. ↩

  8. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 6. ↩ ↩2

  9. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 6. ↩

  10. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.38, quoted in Barrows, Companion to the Bible, “Appendix to Part III,” 512-13. ↩

  11. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), glossary entry “2 Clement.” ↩

  12. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 6, discussing Codex Alexandrinus’s inclusion of disputed-but-useful books alongside the received canon. ↩