Let no one be deceived. Even the heavenly things, the glory of the angels, and the rulers both visible and invisible: if they do not believe in the blood of Christ, judgment awaits them as well. Let the one who can receive this receive it.
HermasTeaches: Faith is joined to obedience and choice
fl. c. 140 AD · Shepherd, Mandate 1
First of all, believe that God is one — who created and framed all things, who brought all things from non-being into being, who contains all things and alone is uncontained. Trust him, then, and fear him; and having feared him, practice self-control.
Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by land, language, or customs. They do not live in their own cities, use a peculiar dialect, or practice a marked-out way of life.
But because man has been of free decision from the beginning, and God — whose likeness he bears — is of free decision, counsel is always given him to hold to the good, which is completed in obedience to God.
As I was thinking and going over in my mind the memory of Octavius, my good and most faithful companion, such sweetness and affection for the man clung to me that I seemed in some way to return to the past, not merely to call back by recollection things already finished and run their course.
So Caecilius smiled, for the flow of his speech had eased the swelling of his indignation, and said: "Does Octavius dare to answer this? He is a man of Plautus's family, and as he is the foremost of the Christians, so he is the last of the philosophers." "Stop applauding him," I said.
Yet many people either avoid this work as a public exposure of themselves or put it off from day to day. I presume they are more mindful of shame than of salvation, like those who, when disease has settled in the more private parts of the body, avoid the doctors' knowledge and so perish along with their embarrassment.
This also is defined in the church’s proclamation: that every rational soul is of free choice and will; and that it has a struggle against the devil and his angels and opposing powers — because they strive to weigh it down with sins, while we, if we live rightly and wisely, try to throw off that kind of burden.
God left aside, it prefers the age’s luxuries. This the Lord most of all drives his beloved to avoid; he forewarns them to be cut off wholly from the age. If he called them sons, let us stay in his holy things; why do we go outside following adulterous shows?
But because they frequently press on us that place where it was said: I and the Father are one, in this too we will defeat them equally easily. 2. For if Christ were the Father, as the heretics think, he ought to have said ‘I the Father am one’.
10.1. Let us grant the very chiefs and fathers of the aforesaid opinions—do they not say what they say as trusted to their own suspicions? For did Heraclitus see that things come about by conversions of fires, Thales by condensation of waters, Pythagoras that numbers combine, Plato incorporeal forms, Democritus…
Men of great and excellent talent, when they had given themselves wholly to learning, whatever labor could be spent they poured—despising all private and public actions—upon the study of seeking truth, thinking it far more splendid to investigate and know the reason of human and divine things than to cling to building…