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“As long as a city is encircled with walls all around,” wrote John Chrysostom, “it mocks its besiegers and remains in perfect safety. But once a breach is made in the wall, no larger than a gate, the circuit is no more use to it, though all the rest stands safe.”

It is the same, he says, in the church: “As long as the nimble wits and the wisdom of the shepherd encompass it like a wall all around, all the enemy’s devices end in his own shame and ridicule, and the inhabitants remain unharmed; but when someone manages to break down a part of this defense, even though he fails to destroy it all, from that moment practically the whole city is ruined through that one part.”

As a “shepherd,” Chrysostom tried to defend the faithful with faithful preaching. He was especially concerned about three questions that troubled the church at the end of the fourth century.

Chrysostom began preaching just after Arianism, a teaching that denied the full deity of Christ, had been officially condemned (by the Second Ecumenical Council in 381 and by Emperor Theodosius). After fifty years of ascendancy, the political power of Arianism was gone, but it remained influential at Antioch and Constantinople.

Chrysostom argued that such heresy is produced by following human reasoning rather than the true sense of Scripture. It may arise from not reading the Bible, or from something more sinister: “The desire to rule,” he once said, “is the mother of heresies.”

In his attacks on Arianism, Chrysostom cared as much about the Arians’ moral defects—their vanity and self-seeking—as about their misunderstanding: “They are like some labyrinth or puzzles which have no end … and have their very origin in vanity.… Ignorant of heavenly things, they involve themselves in the dust cloud of countless reasonings.”

Chrysostom defended the right use of reason. But he believed Greek culture, which reveled in rationality, produced speculation about Christian realities that led to doctrinal errors such as Arianism:

“For nothing causes such dizziness as human reasoning, all whose words are of earth and which cannot endure to be enlightened from above. Earthly reasonings are full of mud, and therefore we need streams from heaven, that when the mud has settled, the clearer portion may rise and mingle with the heavenly lessons.”

Chrysostom, by the way, distinguished between heretics, who misunderstand doctrine, and false prophets, who are morally corrupt and can do no good: “Do not make an issue of the various heretics of different hue and color. They all proclaim Christ even if they lack something in orthodoxy. They all reverence the One who was crucified under Pontius Pilate in Palestine.”

To refute the Arian arguments, Chrysostom interpreted biblical passages to show the equality of the Son with the Father. The Scriptures that seem to support the Arian position (those that show Jesus as human), he attributed to “the condescension of the Incarnation,” that is, the accommodation of Christ to his human nature.

The very fact of the Incarnation, argued Chrysostom, proves both the humanity and divinity of Christ: if he were not God, he would not have humbled himself but would have clung to his higher status!

In Chrysostom’s time, Judaism was the creed of an existing nation, venerable for its antiquity even when exiled from its homeland. A significant Jewish community existed in Antioch, and the holiness of the synagogue in which the one God was worshiped and where the sacred books were preserved made a deep impression on Christians.

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