Martyr

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

— Matthew 5:10

A martyr is a Christian who is put to death for confessing faith in Christ rather than renouncing it. The Greek word behind the term, martys, means “witness”: a martyr’s death is itself a testimony, sealing with blood a confession first made with the lips. Scripture narrates Stephen, “the first Christian martyr,”¹ dying this way (Acts 7:54-60), and treats such deaths as something Christ himself foretold his followers would face for his name’s sake (John 15:20).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to martyrdom. The wider Reformed confessional family does address a question close to it, however: how the church should regard its own honored dead. The Second Helvetic Confession states plainly that “the true God alone is to be adored and worshipped,” and applies this directly to the saints and martyrs: “we do not adore, worship, or pray to the saints in heaven… neither do we give to others the honor that is due to God alone.”² This is not indifference to their memory. The same chapter goes on:

We do not despise the saints or think basely of them. For we acknowledge them to be living members of Christ and friends of God who have gloriously overcome the flesh and the world. Hence we love them as brothers, and also honor them; yet not with any kind of worship but by an honorable opinion of them and just praises of them. We also imitate them.²

The confession extends the same principle to a martyr’s physical remains, rejecting the veneration of relics and quoting Augustine’s own judgment against turning the memory of the dead into a cult:

Let not our religion be the cult of men who have died… They are therefore to be honored by the way of imitation, but not to be adored in a religious manner.³

Biblical Basis

Jesus warns his disciples directly that the world’s hatred of him will fall on them too: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you… If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:18, 20). Paul states the same expectation as a general rule rather than an exception: “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12), and tells the Philippians that suffering for Christ is itself something “granted” to believers, alongside faith, as a gift (Phil. 1:29).

Scripture narrates the pattern before it states it as doctrine. Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, is dragged out of Jerusalem and stoned while praying for his killers’ forgiveness (Acts 7:54-60). Herod Agrippa I has James, the brother of John, “killed with the sword” not long after (Acts 12:2). Revelation pictures the pattern continuing to the end: John sees “under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne,” crying out to God to judge and avenge their blood, and each is given a white robe and told to wait a little longer, “until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete” (Rev. 6:9-11). Charnock reads their cry not as a plea for personal revenge but as zeal for God’s own glory, delayed by God’s patience rather than refused: God “had others to write a testimony for him” before the age of judgment arrives.⁴

Doctrinal Significance

Tertullian, writing at the end of the second century, drew a paradoxical lesson from Rome’s persecution of the church: “the blood of the martyrs is the seed [of the church],” a line that became, in Barrows’s words, “the maxim, as true as trite” for how the young church actually grew under pressure meant to destroy it.⁵⁶ Rather than extinguishing the faith, each execution became itself a public testimony that drew others toward the God the martyr died confessing.

Reformed theologians also reckoned with an edge case the doctrine of baptism raises: what became of a believer executed for Christ before receiving water baptism. Two independent systematic theologies name this “the baptism of blood.” Pictet explains it as the case “of those, who being not yet baptized with water, were baptized as it were in their own blood,” citing Basil’s homily on the martyrs and Christ’s own words to James and John about being “baptized with the baptism that he was to be baptized with” (Matt. 20:22).⁷ Charles Hodge states the same category in his own systematic theology: “the martyrs were baptized with blood.”⁸

Historical Development

Christian martyrdom begins within the New Testament’s own narrative, with Stephen (Acts 7) and James the son of Zebedee (Acts 12:2), and continues into the postapostolic church with dated, named figures. Barrows records that Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, “suffered martyrdom A.D. 107, or according to some accounts, 116,” and that Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna and a disciple of the apostle John, “suffered martyrdom about the year 166.”⁹

The church’s memory of its martyrs developed its own religious practice alongside its theology. Bavinck dates the beginning of this directly:

From as early as the second century… the martyrs in the Christian church soon became the objects of religious veneration. Altars, chapels, and churches were built at sites where they had died or their relics were interred. After the fourth century this veneration of the virgin Mary, angels, patriarchs, prophets, and martyrs was extended to include bishops, monks, hermits, confessors, and virgins, as well as a variety of saints, their relics, and their images.¹⁰

What began as veneration of martyrs specifically widened, by the fourth century, into the broader medieval and Roman Catholic cult of the saints, with its own graded categories of devotion.¹⁰ This later, broader development is the practice the Reformation confessions, including the Second Helvetic Confession quoted above, would go on to reject.

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic teaching and devotion, as it developed from the veneration described above, holds that martyrs and other saints in heaven may be honored with invocation: prayer asking for their intercession before God. This practice, and the Reformed rejection of it, is treated at length in its own article, Invocation of saints; the Second Helvetic Confession’s own statement above gives the wider Reformed family’s position on the narrower question of how a martyr’s memory itself should be honored.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t calling certain Christians “martyrs” as a class imply their deaths earned them a status other believers lack? Confessionally, no additional merit attaches to the death itself. The Second Helvetic Confession’s own language is instructive here: martyrs are honored “by an honorable opinion of them and just praises of them” and by imitation of their faith, the same terms in which any faithful believer’s example is honored, not a distinct category of merit earned by the manner of death.²

If martyrdom itself can supply what baptism signifies, does that undercut the necessity of the ordinance? The “baptism of blood” category answers a narrow question about God’s own freedom to save apart from the outward sign in a case where the sign was providentially unavailable, not a claim that baptism is optional in the ordinary course of Christian discipleship. Pictet and Hodge state it as an exception recognized in an extraordinary case, not a substitute rule for believers generally.⁷⁸

Related Doctrines

References

Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State (1787), “State IV, The Eternal State”: “Stephen, the first Christian martyr, though stoned to death, yet but fell asleep.” ↩
Heinrich Bullinger, The Second Helvetic Confession (Zurich, 1566), chap. 5, “Of the Adoration, Worship and Invocation of God Through the Only Mediator Jesus Christ.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Second Helvetic Confession, chap. 5, quoting Augustine, De Vera Religione. ↩
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God (London, 1853), discourse 14, “On God’s Patience.” ↩
Tertullian, quoted in Brian John Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 104-136: “the blood of the martyrs is the seed [of the church]” (semen est sanguis Christianorum). ↩
Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 149-165: “Hence the maxim, as true as trite, ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.’” ↩
Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), 399-434. ↩ ↩²
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), chap. 20, “The Means of Grace”: “The martyrs were baptized with blood.” ↩ ↩²
Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 36-58. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 23, “The Intermediate State.” ↩ ↩²