Theopedia

John Chrysostom

Overview

John Chrysostom (347-407) was a presbyter and preacher at Antioch before serving as bishop of Constantinople from 398 until his deposition and exile in 404.12 His byname, from the Greek chrysostomos, means “golden-mouthed,” a recognition of his skill in the pulpit.3 The Eastern and Western church both count him among the church fathers, and his own homilies remain a source Reformed writers have drawn on directly, both to correct Rome’s later doctrine of confession and to state the priority of grace over merit.45

Life and Ministry

Chrysostom was born in 347 at Antioch in Syria. His father Secundus, an army officer, died in his infancy, and he was raised by his widowed mother Anthusa, who devoted herself to his education; his tutor in rhetoric and law, the pagan orator Libanius, was reportedly so struck by her piety that he exclaimed, “Bless me! what wonderful women there are among the Christians.”1 Baptized by Bishop Meletius of Antioch around 369 or 370 and made a reader soon after, Chrysostom spent six years, from 374 to 380, in monastic withdrawal in the mountains near Antioch following his mother’s death, writing his earliest works, including On the Priesthood, during this period or shortly after.16

Meletius ordained him deacon around 380 or 381, and Bishop Flavian of Antioch ordained him presbyter in 386. He preached at Antioch for the next seventeen years, delivering, among much else, his twenty-one Homilies on the Statues during the unrest that followed a riot against imperial taxation in 387.6

On the death of Nectarius, bishop of Constantinople, in 397, Chrysostom was chosen as his successor against his own wishes and brought from Antioch under military escort to forestall resistance to his removal; Theophilus of Alexandria, later his chief opponent, consecrated him on February 26, 398, under pressure from the imperial court.2 As bishop he sold the episcopal household’s plate and furniture for the poor and local hospitals, imposed ascetic simplicity on his own household, disciplined clergy over improper cohabitation with “spiritual sisters,” and supported Gothic Christian mission and Bible translation. These reforms, together with his preaching against clerical and aristocratic excess, drew growing opposition among the clergy and the court.2

In 403, Theophilus of Alexandria, exploiting a dispute over Origen’s theology and enlisting allies including Epiphanius of Salamis, convened a synod of thirty-six mostly Egyptian bishops “at the Oak,” a suburb of Chalcedon, on twenty-nine charges. The synod deposed him and he was briefly exiled; public outcry and an earthquake that alarmed Empress Eudoxia led to his prompt recall.7 The peace did not last. That September, Eudoxia dedicated a silver statue of herself near the cathedral for public celebration; Chrysostom denounced the festivities and was reported to have compared her to Herodias. On the vigil of Easter 404 imperial troops forcibly removed him from the cathedral during the baptismal service, and Emperor Arcadius signed a formal banishment edict that June. Pope Innocent I protested the synod’s irregularity and refused to recognize the deposition, without effect on the emperor.8

Chrysostom was exiled to Cucusus, a remote village on the border of Cilicia and Armenia, where he wrote most of his 242 surviving letters, seventeen of them to the deaconess Olympias. Ordered moved to the still harsher Pityus on the Caucasus, he died on the three-month forced march, at a martyr’s chapel near Comana in Pontus, on September 14, 407, in his sixtieth year; his last recorded words were “Glory be to God for all things, Amen.”9

Theological Contribution

Divine incomprehensibility against the Anomoeans

Chrysostom preached five homilies, On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, against the Anomoeans, an extreme offshoot of Arianism that claimed the divine essence was fully knowable to human reason. Calvin cites these homilies as an attempt, in his judgment ultimately unsuccessful in silencing that party’s “sophists,” to hold that God’s essence exceeds what created reason can grasp even while Scripture makes God genuinely known.10

The atonement as a court of law

Commenting on Christ’s statement that “the ruler of this world” would be cast out (John 12:31), Chrysostom developed a distinctive version of the classic or Christus Victor account of the atonement, cast in the imagery of a law court rather than a ransom or a battle. Satan, he argued, had a real right to kill Adam and his sinful posterity, since all had sinned and earned death, but Christ had not sinned; killing him was therefore an injustice that exceeded Satan’s rights and left him liable to judgment.

Why did he put into the mind of Judas to destroy me? … How then is the world judged in me? It shall be said to Satan, as if a court of justice were sitting, Well, you killed all people because you found them guilty of sin. But why did you kill Christ? Is it not clear that this was wrong? Therefore the whole world shall be avenged in Christ.3

On this reading, Satan’s unjust overreach in killing the sinless Christ is what voids his legal claim on humanity and results, in Chrysostom’s own courtroom image, in the devil being “dethroned and all his victims freed.”3

Confession, grace, and merit

As bishop of Constantinople, Chrysostom repeatedly taught that confession of sin and repentance belong between the sinner and God alone, not before a human witness:

Tell your sins, that you may efface them: if you blush to tell another what sins you have committed, tell them daily in your soul. I say not, tell them to your fellow-servant who may upbraid you, but tell them to God who cures them. Confess your sins upon your bed, that your conscience may there daily recognize its iniquities.4

Calvin cites passages like this one, along with Chrysostom’s own statement that “it is not necessary to confess before witnesses” since “God alone” need see the penitent confessing, as evidence that Constantinople’s church, continuing a practice his predecessor Nectarius had already ended, did not treat auricular confession to a priest as a requirement Scripture imposed.4

Chrysostom likewise resisted any account of salvation that let works generate a claim on God. Calvin quotes him directly against the later scholastic doctrine of merit: “If any works of ours follow the free calling of God, they are return and debt; but the gifts of God are grace, and beneficence, and great liberality.”5

Historical Significance

Chrysostom’s homilies became a resource the Reformers turned to directly against Rome. Calvin invokes his teaching on private confession repeatedly in the Institutes to argue that obligatory auricular confession to a priest was a later development rather than the practice of the patristic Constantinopolitan church, and cites his statement on grace and merit as patristic support against the doctrine that good works place God in anyone’s debt.45

His fall from office turned less on any doctrinal charge than on the enmity of an empress and a rival metropolitan able to enlist imperial force against him: secular power, not a church council acting freely, decided the case, and Rome’s own protest of the synod’s irregularity carried no weight with Constantinople’s court.78

Chrysostom’s record also includes a genuine controversy rather than an unmixed legacy. While a presbyter at Antioch, he preached a series of homilies, later known as his Discourse against Judaizing Christians, against Christians who continued observing Jewish festivals and synagogue worship alongside their own. Robert L. Wilken’s monograph John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century examines the rhetoric of these homilies as a subject in its own right.11

Related Doctrines

Further Reading

References

  1. Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 9 (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1889), Prolegomena, pt. 2. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9, Prolegomena, pt. 7. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 11, “Binding the Strong Man,” 124, quoting Chrysostom, Homilies on St. John 67.2 on John 12:31 (NPNF, 1st series, 14:249-50). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 4, 541-542. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. Calvin, Institutes, book 3, chap. 15, 96. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9, Prolegomena, pt. 6. ↩ ↩2

  7. Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9, Prolegomena, pt. 8. ↩ ↩2

  8. Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9, Prolegomena, pt. 9. ↩ ↩2

  9. Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9, Prolegomena, pt. 10. ↩

  10. Calvin, Institutes, book 1, chap. 13, 129. ↩

  11. Brian John Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 56n53, citing Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). ↩