Clement of Rome

Apostolic Father · Pastor at Rome · d. c. 100

Clement pastored the church in Rome from about 90 to 100; he was serving there, as Nathan Busenitz notes, while the apostle John was exiled on Patmos. Some have identified him with the Clement of Philippians 4:3, though that cannot be confirmed. His one surviving work is a letter from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth, written in the mid-90s to address the same kind of division Paul had rebuked forty years earlier.1

The letter is the earliest Christian writing that survives after the New Testament. It quotes the Old Testament some 150 times, treats Scripture as true and given by the Holy Spirit, and shows that Clement knew Paul’s letters, including Romans. In one important passage he explains that believers are justified by faith apart from works:2

And so we, having been called through His will in Christ Jesus, are not justified through ourselves or through our own wisdom or understanding or piety or works that we have done in holiness of heart, but through faith, by which the Almighty God has justified all who have existed from the beginning; to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.3 Clement of Rome1 Clement 32

Tradition says he died about 100.

His Legacy

Roman Catholic tradition counts Clement as the fourth pope (some lists the second), and later defenders of the supremacy of the bishop of Rome appealed to his letter, since Rome there corrects another church. Yet the letter is written in the name of the Roman congregation, not of a single ruling bishop, and it speaks of the church’s leaders as bishops and deacons. Gregg Allison notes that evangelicals cite it, with Polycarp and the Didache, for a twofold ministry of elders and deacons. And Busenitz finds in it an affirmation of “the gospel of grace from the earliest period of post-apostolic church history.”4

Church Fathers

Notes

  1. Nathan Busenitz, Forerunners of the Faith Teacher’s Guide: 13 Lessons to Understand and Appreciate the Basics of Church History (Chicago: Moody, 2020), 38. ↩
  2. Michael J. Vlach, “Historical Theology I: A.D. 100–1600” (course notes, TH 507, The Master’s Seminary, Fall 2007), “Clement of Rome”; Busenitz, Forerunners of the Faith Teacher’s Guide, 38. Summarized. ↩
  3. Busenitz, Forerunners of the Faith Teacher’s Guide, 38. ↩
  4. Vlach, “Historical Theology I,” “Clement of Rome”; Gregg R. Allison, Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), citing 1 Clement 42; Busenitz, Forerunners of the Faith Teacher’s Guide, 38. ↩