The History of Trinitarian Theology

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The schedule says I have 9 to 10 a .m. If you look at your watch, I don't have 9 to 10 a .m. I got 45 minutes to cover all of the development of the
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Trinity in history. Yes That ain't happening so And I'm always the guy to count at a conference that gets us back on schedule
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So I'm not gonna be the guy that gets us off schedule. So we will be finishing promptly in 44 and a half minutes approximately
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Whether I've gotten through almost anything at all or not If you are familiar with what is broadly known as the
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Nicene Creed When I teach church history if you ever take that class
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You can know for a certainty that on the final examination One of the dates that you must know that you must have memorized
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I don't care if you tattoo it on your forearm, whatever you got to do to remember the
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Council of Nicaea took place in 325 AD And the
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Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with the canon of scripture. Just keep that in mind Despite what you will see online despite what you will read on numerous blogs and everything else
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The Council of Nicaea did not invent the Trinity the Council of Nicaea Did not determine the canon of scripture
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Or any of the other many myths that are out there on the subject of the Council of Nicaea, but what we do read from the final deliberations of that Council are words that many of us know and specifically the focus and the great
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Controversy comes out in these words We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ after having said we believe in one
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God the Father creator of all things in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God begotten from the
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Father only begotten that is from the substance of the Father God from God light from light true
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God from true God begotten not made of one substance and that term one substance is the
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Keyword of the entire Council in Greek homoousius with the
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Father Through whom all things were made now, how? Did we get there?
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From the simple beginnings that might be recorded in the gospel of Mark well
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If you go to almost any school today if you go to almost any university including
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Christian universities You will be told that it was an evolutionary process and there can be no question that there is an element of development that you can see through the history of the doctrine of the
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Trinity for a very simple reason and That is if you look at a map remember
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We all have maps in the back of our Bibles who still do if you have actually a paper Bible But the sad thing is when you when you get the electronic version
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They don't have the pretty maps anymore because they're very big I guess I don't know But but I used to spend especially during boring sermons a lot of time learning geography
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Because it was colorful and you had something that didn't have anything else to look at So and if you look at those those maps and you think about history
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What happens is the gospel begins to spread out across the known world now
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We know much more about the Gospels progress in what would be called the Roman Empire into the area around the
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Mediterranean Both in North Africa and then on the the northern aspect of the Mediterranean Then we do as it went east and that's a shame.
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It did go east. There was a flourishing Christian Church In the far far east by the the 7th 8th 9th centuries and it just disappeared
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It's one of the great mysteries of history. But anyway The the gospel goes out and as it does it encounters
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Many different cultures and as it encounters different religious movements different worldviews different cultures different questions
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With differing emphases are asked of the faith that require Christians to give answers for the hope that's within them when the message initially goes out primarily to the
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Jewish people you have a Jewish context and so you have a tremendous amount of Consistency that you can derive from the fact that well where we're talking about the
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Old Testament scriptures What is the Bible of the early church, but the Greek Septuagint the Greek translation of the
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Old Testament? There is no New Testament yet because it's still being written
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And so as that message goes out amongst the Jews, there's gonna be primarily Jewish issues as to who the
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Messiah is and the relationship with the Messiah To God and how he was sent and so on and so forth but then as it goes out into the
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Roman world, you begin encountering Greek philosophy and All sorts of other questions now begin to be asked that we don't have divine revelation on in the sense of We don't we can't go to the book of Acts and and encounter an in -depth conversation with with someone representing
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Aristotle or Pythagorean concepts or stoic or epicurean, you know
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Some people will see some elements of that in Acts chapter 17 obviously in places like that But we we just don't have what we'd like to have in divine revelation itself in the sense of all these kinds of interactions with different perspectives and so when we consider what the
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New Testament gives us as it reveals God and then we look down through history and we get to the
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Council of Nicaea and we have these words and we have the assertion that the Son is of the same
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Substance with the Father that he is begotten not made which means that whatever you do with begotten
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It is not a creation concept It is a relationship Concept homoous with the
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Father through whom all things were made. Well, how did we get there you go to any university? I've been told well, you know
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Actually, you know Jesus was just a guy. He was just a man And he had you know, there's lots of people who claim to be the
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Messiah but after his death the stories about resurrection starts going around and and Especially this guy named
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Paul comes along and he he basically creates modern -day Christianity by coming up with a religion that would be attractive to the
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Romans which at that point I try to stifle the laughter as as Common as it may be that is just so totally absurd
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Yeah, I I think the crucified Messiah was the Lord of the universe.
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Yeah, that's gonna be really attractive to the Romans It wasn't it was a scandal. It was foolishness
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It was ridiculousness in their in their eyes, but that's what you're gonna be told That's and unfortunately as you sit on the plane,
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I've you know, I've got a flight back home tomorrow The person next to you that's probably what they've been taught now.
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That's probably what they've read That's probably what they've heard and that's probably then the lens through which they're gonna be hearing anything you have to say to them and so we have to keep in mind what's being said out there, but That's not what we believe when
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I say we I'm talking about believing Christians It's it's amazing. I remember attending a debate
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In Scottsdale, that's one of the only debates. I wasn't either debating in or moderating
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I was just actually sitting in the audience. It's a very strange feeling. I felt very out of place and It was a debate between dr.
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Robert Gagnon and a former fuller seminary professor
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Dr. Daniel Kirk and And during the course of that the the less conservative of the two
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Made the statement that well, we know that what we need to do today was talk it was on the subject of homosexuality normalizing homosexuality in the
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Presbyterian Church and he says what we need to do is we need to recognize that Jesus was a first century man and that we need to learn to think beyond the categories of what
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Jesus could ever have thought in and recognize that that that he could be wrong because he was just a first century man and I went up to him afterwards and I and I and I basically said so am
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I missing anything here? You would not in any way affirm Nicene Orthodoxy, right?
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He says well, you don't think the disciples thought Jesus was God. Do you? Yeah, actually
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I do pretty plain pretty obvious actually to me, but so when
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I say we Unfortunate that that doesn't define much anymore because if you have people who
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Were were teaching for the first seminary I attended and graduated from or saying well, you don't think that the apostles thought
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Jesus was God Do you that's where it gives you an idea of where we are and and there are many mainline denominations today
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Where if you actually believe what the Council of Nicaea said, there's no way you'll ever get hired there Because they consider that just to be so backwards and so foolish and so ridiculous
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You need to accept this evolutionary idea The doctrine the Trinity is a much later development had nothing to do with the
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Apostles or anyone else now So we have to balance two realities first of all We have the reality of the fact that as I said last evening
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The Trinity is a divine revelation that finds its greatest explication its greatest reality in the incarnation of the
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Sun and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and So the Old Testament points toward this you have the tremendous passages that I'm not gonna do right now because that's what's coming up next
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But Isaiah 9 6 especially seeing so far beyond What Isaiah could have imagined in regards to the nature of this one who is coming you have that Old Testament?
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revelation and then the New Testament is not the revelation of the Trinity the revelation of Trinity takes place between the two the
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New Testament now is just soaked in that language because every person writing it is a
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Trinitarian it is the common faith of the people. How do you go from there?
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then to what we have in the Council of Nicaea and they will say well
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It was a very natural process. We would say it's a very supernatural process we have to recognize the divine nature of the
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Revelation and then recognize was their development in the language that the church had to use
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To explain her faith as that faith goes out into the world and the answer is yes,
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I mean When you think of the second century Christian writer
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Justin Martyr Justin Martyr Obviously that was not his name when he was born
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Think about that for just a second you'll get it the coffee will kick in you go. Oh, okay. Yeah, right All right was not a prophecy from his from his mommy and daddy that this kids toast
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Nothing like that Justin was a martyr and anyone who's a martyr you sort of hesitate to Bring much criticism, but you have to read his materials in a balanced way and he's a fascinating fellow and he does not have 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 years worth of church history and tradition behind him
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I wonder how well any of us would do if all we had was what he had Which did not even include a completed
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New Testament canon at that particular point in time It's real easy for us by the way to judge people in the past I Love teaching church history and one of the things
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I try to try to communicate to people is if you want to be judged Fairly by people 50 years from now, you might want to extend the same type of fairness to people who live before you
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It's so easy for us to judge people in the past based upon what we know now rather than Putting yourself in their situation.
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What information did they have? What pressures were they under and then trying to judge them along those lines?
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There's a lot of an unfair material out there especially in regards to the early church writers who did not have as much as you and I have and the all the
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Vocabulary and all the advantages that we have we stand on the shoulders of Giants I don't care if you have ever read a single word of Irenaeus of Lyon or Ignatius of Antioch or Justin Martyr Tertullian or Cyprian of Carthage I would recommend them to you.
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By the way, they don't necessarily sound just like us Why should they they lived a long time ago?
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They're dealing with different situations But you may not have read a word of them, but you owe a lot to them
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Whether you know it or not The language you use the length the language you just pick up you may be a fairly new
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Christian But as you're listening to other Christians speaking, you're picking up a vocabulary. You're picking up a tradition where did it come from it has a history and one of the one of the tragedies in my in my opinion of the current church today is that the vast majority of Christians, especially the vast majority of conservative and One of the greatest critiques
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I have of the fundamentalist movement having been a Fundamentalist my entire life when I was growing up as a into my teenage years is we had no appreciation of church history at all
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We just figured that was just a bunch of Catholics running around and why should we worry about them? And that was wrong.
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It was completely in error and It cuts you off from the reality of the there is this thing in the
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Bible about Jesus said I will build my church And he just took a break until Billy Graham, you know Why should we worry, you know about any of that stuff it's like no no, but how many of you know people
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That think like that. Oh two of you good. Okay. Nobody else has ever met. Okay. Yeah I guess
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I should have said how many of you have thought like that yourselves and then yeah Okay, how many of you are still thinking that way we will have a conversation afterwards.
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Okay So That's that's my church history sermon. We we need to Study church history, but we need to do it
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Without our theological pitchforks out waiting to skewer everybody who doesn't look like us because most of them don't
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Just be aware of that reality and we shouldn't expect them to we go into it going
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Well, I think I'm just gonna need to find that everybody looked like me back then Well, they didn't and you don't need to find it in that in that particular fashion
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So very quickly, how do we get there? Well, let me start Actually in the New Testament And let me just give you an example of what
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I'm talking about turn with me to first Corinthians chapter 8 And I don't know if anybody else is gonna get to this.
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I don't want to step on anybody else's feet, but You have such tremendously deep
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Theology behind the words of The New Testament itself that often we we don't see it we miss it and there are gems just laying on the ground in front of us that we just go walking by and End up picking up.
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Well, I think of Pastor Downs I follow him on Facebook and So I know
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I know two things about Pastor Downs from following him on Facebook First of all, I lost a lot of his respect last night when he said well
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We will have some of my freshly brewed coffee to which I responded. I detest coffee At which point
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I was disinvited from all future conferences Which but it's true
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I tried my daughter was a manager at Starbucks I tried to learn how to and I couldn't do it.
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So it just doesn't work sort of like that in Chinese food That's just not gonna go together but he also
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Spends a great deal of his time now running around outside with a metal detector Just found himself a
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Civil War bayonet buried in the ground someplace and so we can all congratulate him on that He will show you many pictures of it more than his kids but pictures of it if you if you request and ask but but so it's sort of like, you know if Pastor Downs is out there and he's looking for something and You can see what's in the ground and you see there's an entire musket right there
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And he's goes over here and he finds a pop bottle cap and that cap and that's all he ends up with for today
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Cuz he he just didn't see what was over there. That's how we are with so many of the gems in Scripture They're right there, but we get distracted by something over here or something over there and we miss what is really really important Let me give you an example in first Corinthians chapter 8 you have a discussion of eating food sacrifice to idols
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Oh, yeah, that's a big central issue for us today. Yeah. Yeah You know those meat markets that are right next to the pagan temples here in in Virginia Well, there are a few pagan temples other like the governor's mansion.
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But anyways It's pretty easy in Virginia right now,
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I hate to say that easy pickings, but anyway
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You know we We go. Okay. Yeah in Corinth, you know there were temples everywhere and and So much meat was offering sacrifice to idols and it was sold in a meat market and there were people who used to be involved in that kind of worship and so they were stumbled if they if they had to eat the meat that had been offered to us but An idol that they had once worshipped.
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Okay, I get that and there's neat application. You can make to that and other things and Okay, fine.
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And so we go on by But notice what happens first of all in verse 5 for even if there are
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Legominoid they always so -called gods keep that in mind because the Mormons use the
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King James version of this text To try to say that there are many gods that there really are many gods.
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I mean Mormonism is as far removed from biblical Christianity as anything ever ever ever could be
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In the fact that it is the most polytheistic religion I've ever encountered in the in the in the thinking of mankind the
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Hindus have only 330 million gods That's nothing in comparison to the infinite number of deities in in Mormonism quite true
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There's no there's there's not a question about that, but they like to use this Whether in heaven and earth
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As there are gods many and lords many and so they go see gods many lords many there you go
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There are lots of gods lots of lords Obviously, that's he's talking about so -called gods all the different idols of the peoples and so on and so forth
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But then and depending on what translation you have verses verse 6
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May be set off as poetry And then sometimes it may be not does the
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ESV set it off as poetry. No does anyone set it off as poetry Okay, no
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English translations bummer in the Greek. It's in the Greek Nessie Olin text. It's set off as poetry So which which translation is that Holman Christian?
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Well, hey, oh Oh, it's a Greek New Testament. Oh, you're cheating
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Someone just let us know he's reading the Greek, too Okay, so what was
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I saying Moses in the bulrushes and But notice what is in but to us
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Heist they asked one God hapater from whom are all things and we unto him
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Kai heist courios one Lord Jesus Christ through whom are all things and we through him
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Now we read that and we go well, that's nice to remind Christians of you know,
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God the Father and God the Son that's nice but you see if you were a
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Greek speaking Jewish convert You would read those words and you would be stopped dead in your tracks
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You would be stunned You know why you'd be stunned What does every?
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Orthodox Jew Say every morning upon rising from sleep
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Shema Yisrael Yahweh Eluhenu Yahweh Akkad. They'll never say Yahweh. They'll say
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Adonai instead But they say the Shema Shema Yisrael here.
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Oh Israel Yahweh is our Lord. Yahweh is our God Yahweh is one and This is the defining
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Prayer from Deuteronomy 6 of the Jewish people as the defining prayer of monotheism
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But when you look at that in Greek and then read what Paul writes here
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What would stop you in your tracks is he is plainly taking the very words of the
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Shema from the Greek translation of the Old Testament and he is expanding them out in light of the incarnation
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And so you have the word God which is used in the Shema you have Haise one which is used in the
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Shema You have the term Kudios Which is the Greek not translation not transliteration, but replacement for the divine name
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Yahweh It is Kudios in the Greek rendering there and yet you've split them up So that you now have
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Haise Theos the father from whom are all things and we for him and Haise Kudios that's
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Yahweh God now, that's the Lord Jesus Christ through whom are all things and we through him and So the monotheistic
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Jew who knows his Old Testament is Absolutely stunned but you'll notice Paul does not go now by the way everybody
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Get your get get you deep in the seats now because I'm about to show you something. You've never heard of before That's not what he's doing.
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He says but to us We are you know, but you know, not all men have this knowledge, but we do
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In other words the way that Paul does this clearly indicates that he expects he expects the
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Corinthians to go Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, we know that we should should have thought about that This is already the faith of the
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Corinthians. This is not something he's having to write to them to go Hey, I you know forgot to tell you about this when
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I was with you, but we happen to be Trinitarian Let me just explain it to you in two verses No, he's not doing that.
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He can use this type of language because it's already the faith of the
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Saints Otherwise this little illustration saying yeah, but to us remember this part already taught you this and in the past This is already our common faith this wouldn't work unless that's exactly what he had already done and So when you can take the defining prayer of the people of God and then put it into this letter just in passing
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It's not like you build up to it for three chapters and you lay all these foundations you do all this stuff
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And now here's this big thing that you've never heard of before. That's not what he does That's not what he does.
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It is already the common possession of the Christian people to believe that you can take the
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Shema and Expand it out without changing it without contradicting it without introducing a new
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God. This isn't a new God This is the one God that every Jewish person had prayed to in the past who has simply revealed himself to a much greater degree in the incarnation and Now in the outpouring of the
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Holy Spirit as well. And so you have this kind of deep Theology and we're
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I'm gonna be looking at the references to the deity of Christ this afternoon You're gonna have stuff from the Old Testament here coming up in the next hour
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We're gonna be you know, looking at all these things you have this type of background But it is that which the people of God had already possessed
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So if that is their common bond then as the gospel goes out, what would you expect to happen?
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Well When we look at the history of the church, we have to keep the whole
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Reality of what the church experienced in mind and this again is where so often in the modern context we fall apart
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Because we don't know a lot About those early years. We don't Part of the reason is because we are
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Protestant now that that's not to say that Roman Catholics have a really good knowledge of church history because if they did that Pope thing would be a problem, but Because I mean historically it is it there
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Why have a Council of Nicaea if all you have to do is go to the Pope and say yo How about this this stuff going on here that that's simply not how the early church function but as a reaction against Protestant against Roman Catholicism many
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Protestants having seen Early church fathers elevated and given positions of authority that they would never have claimed for themselves
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We tend to just simply forget about them Ignoring the fact that the scriptures themselves say
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That Christ would build his church and therefore we only prove ourselves to be arrogant
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If we do not ask the question Well if Christ had been building his church for 2 ,000 years I might be able to pick up some real wisdom because it seems to me that the church is gonna be facing the same questions over and over and over and over and over again and Just in passing may
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I point something out? I see persecution coming In the
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Western in the Western nations, it's already happening. Has the church ever been persecuted before?
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How did the church respond how many of us would really feel that we've got a solid grasp
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In understanding how the church responded to persecution in the past Most of us don't
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It was one of the most divisive forces in the early church
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Was the reason was the response to? persecution Not so much just during the persecution itself, but especially afterwards some of the major divisions
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There was a massive division in North Africa Between the Catholics and Catholic did not mean
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Roman Catholic back they wouldn't even know what Roman Catholic meant back then Catholic meant universal between the
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Catholics and the Donatists in North Africa it had existed for Over 300 years
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When almost everybody in North Africa as far as Christianity was forced underground by the rise of Islam In Augustine's day when the
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Donatists got together they had 700 bishops Gathered in council. That's how large a division it was and it all went back to how the church responded to persecution
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Is that gonna happen to us well if we don't know our history and if we can't learn from history It's not good to start from scratch as to how you respond to persecution.
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It might be good to be figuring these things out now Before we find ourselves in a jail cell trying to figure it out
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We have more freedom to think about it now than we will then Bit as it may back to the subject of talk.
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Sorry about that The church You would expect if we look from anachronistically from where we are backwards
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The church should be totally focused upon the things that we think they should be focused upon But they lived in a different world than you and I live in and between the time of Nero and 313
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AD they are under persecution Now that persecution for those first Periods from Nero all the way up to about 250
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AD Comes and goes so there might be bad persecution one part of the
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Roman Empire and nothing in another part of the Roman Empire All dependent then starting in 250 it becomes
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Empire wide all the way up to the pieces of church in 83 13 Which is only 12 years for the
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Council of Nicaea, which was in 325 AD remember you cannot leave this room until you have that memorized just so you know, okay, so so Persecution is causing a
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Lot of the attention that would be focused on other things to be focused upon The nature of the church and what the fellowship the church is and how you're a member of the church and and things like that No, it's not that there was not at the same time a lot of discussion of the nature of God because there was in fact by the time you get to the
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Council of Nicaea and really by the time you get about a 125 years later
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Council of Chalcedon 451. So in the middle of the 5th century pretty much every view except the wackiness of Mormonism Pretty much every view already has representation.
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So you've got you got the oneness people today You had the dynamic monarchians and the Sibelians and the
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Patrapassionists in the early church You obviously always had polytheism
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There was always polytheism out there just very rarely ever anybody who called themselves a Christian that called themselves polytheist
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But you also had the subordinationists that were those are the Aryans those are the people who put
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Jesus on a lower level interestingly enough the Monarchians and the Sibelians and the oneness folks came first They were they were there a second third century and then the subordinationists come after that So the
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Jehovah's Witnesses are later on the scene Obviously not Jehovah's Witnesses, but you get the idea
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They will claim some of those people as their own But basically by the middle of the 5th century you pretty much have all of the perspectives that we're still dealing with today
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So it's amazing we can actually learn things from those early Christians and how they themselves
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Responded to those same types of arguments and it's always thrilled me anyways to read
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Especially Athanasius Athanasius is one of my favorite of the early church writers Bishop of Alexandria.
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He was at Nicaea He was a bishop at Alexan at Nicaea, but he became a bishop about three years later kicked out of his church five times
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Because he would not deny the Nicene faith wonderful phrase Athanasius contra mundum
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Athanasius against the world Because pretty much he was alone for a long time. Most people don't realize
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That the decades after the Council of Nicaea did not see a bunch of people going Oh Council of Nicaea ecumenical council
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We agree with everything. That's not what happened for the next 40 years the
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Aryans reigned supreme and For 40 years. It looked like Nicaea would be done away with that Nicaea would be banished
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That but Nicaea would be identified as heresy. There were church councils held that condemned Nicaea So much for using
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Councils as your final authority given that you can come up with all sorts of councils to conduct other councils
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Athanasius stayed firm During all of that even when the Bishop of Rome Liberius gave in Athanasius did not in fact
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The story is told that once the Roman soldiers are looking for him He had been kicked out of his church like I said five different times one time by 500 soldiers coming in the front door while he's going out the back door and They're out looking for him on the
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Nile and tradition says Athanasius was a little dark ugly, dude and So These these
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Roman soldiers are in a in a boat on the Nile They're going one direction and Athanasius is with some monks going the other direction and they yelled over to him
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Have you seen Athanasius from under his hood Athanasius yells back. He's near Never did catch him
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So he's just one of my favorites I love read read his contra ariannas is his work against the
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Aryans and Especially if you spend as much time as I have dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses and people denying the deity of Christ It's just so cool to read someone going to the same text and saying the same things from 1 ,700 years ago
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To realize the connection that you have the common faith that you have there That doesn't mean by the way, it doesn't mean that that means every single thing
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Athanasius ever said I just go. Yes, sir Because he wouldn't want me to do that You've got to cultivate the ability as a student of church history to be able to read people the past Thank God for their lives.
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Thank God for how many of them were martyrs thank God for how many of them loved
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Christ and yet be discerning about what they said and Realize sometimes they did not have the advantages that you and I have and you might have a better insight
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Does it make you better than them? It should make you more thankful that you live in the day that you do and you've been given the freedoms you've been given
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That's all. I just don't understand people who who just basically well, I don't that early church father
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He didn't have the same eschatology as I do. So I just don't think he was a Christian You're gonna be a little surprised when you get to heaven
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You've all seen that that joke or that visual of you know some guys just arrived in heaven and he's being being given a tour and Find toward the end they come to you know, we got a closed door back there
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Okay, so they come to this one thing. It's this quiet, please and they're walking by and the guy the guy goes, what's that?
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He goes Those the Baptists they think they're the only ones here And they'll be really bummed when they find out they're not that's the whole point so Anyways, there's a lot
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I could say about that. But if I had said
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Presbyterians, I'd be in real trouble, but I'm smart I know where I am And I I need a ride back to the airport tomorrow
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On my way Just find the other Baptists that got kicked out too so we can all go together
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Won't be the first time but so let's not talk about that A little bit of persecution in the past, but we still have a real problem with that Anyways, so with that said what you have to do in looking at the history
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The church is to recognize all the things that are going on that the church is facing and some people want to think that all of the church's
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Effort and attention should have been focused upon this or upon this or upon this whatever my important subject is
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Well, they were actually paying attention to all sorts of things But especially when you know
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The the Roman soldiers are coming in and destroying your church and and taking your pastors away and things like that.
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That's gonna impact How much time you can spend on certain things? I think of Cyprian of Carthage a brilliant brilliant man, but He doesn't get to live all that long because his head is separated from his body by a
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Roman sword under persecution and If he had had 30 years or 40 years might we have come to expect more balance in this particular area or that particular of course
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But he's only bishop for a relatively short period of time and most of the time he's either hiding for persecution
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Or he's under house arrest or he's he's having to deal with people coming back into the church that lapsed during persecution
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Got to keep those things in mind got to keep those things in mind Let's not treat history as if it was a
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Non living thing, but our time is going by way way way too fast
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And I knew it wouldn't get anywhere, but I do want to read you a couple of incredible quotes
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One of my absolute favorite quotations in all of the patristic literature is
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From Ignatius of Antioch now Ignatius dies between 107 and 108 In Rome under one of the initial heavy persecutions of Christians and so he dies right beginning the second century
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He's an early Christian martyr. We know about him because he writes seven genuine letters
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To churches and to polycarp as he's going to Rome now. There's a bunch of fake stuff.
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That's written later on You have to be careful the Jehovah's Witnesses once tried to fool their people by quoting only from the fake materials of Ignatius rather than genuine works of Ignatius But in his genuine epistles
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I Just strongly recommend the reading of them to you and remember do not interpret them anachronistically
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He says things in there that can easily be twisted if you're looking backwards instead of putting him in his own context
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But when you put in his own context, it's just brilliant stuff and very challenging stuff to us today
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I mean these people did not love the world They did not love the world.
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They understood when John said if you love the world love the Father's not in you I mean we need we need that example.
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We need that exhortation But when he wrote to the Ephesians now in his epistles
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Minimally ten times and probably fourteen times Ignatius refers to Jesus Christ simply as God our
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God Jesus Christ just straight up Just straight up now.
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Remember this is 107 108. This is this is this is 200 plus years before Nicaea and then listen to these words again for Someone stop the clock.
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Um this is hard for us to do but Try to disengage your 2019
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I know all this stuff mine Transfer yourself back to a time period where this man has only a few of the
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New Testament epistles It doesn't have the whole thing yet It hasn't been collected yet.
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It's happening. But not this is this is so early. Okay, so he's in the generation after the Apostles All right that some of these men knew the
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Apostles themselves and So listen to these words
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I mean John had just died only a matter of years earlier. So you've got an immediate apostolic connection here
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Listen to these words right into the church at Ephesus Ignatius says there is one physician of Flesh and of spirit
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Generate and ingenerate God in man true life in death both from Mary and from God first passable and then impassable
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Jesus Christ our Lord now even in the modern period even today after Nicaea and Chalcedon and and and all the centuries that have elapsed
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Sadly, I hear significantly less deep more shallow inaccurate descriptions of the person of Jesus from pulpits all the time and Yet here at the beginning of the second century
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You have the two natures of Christ clearly understood by Ignatius clearly understood
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He is the flesh and of spirit Generate and ingenerate God in man
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That's very close to the Anthropos the God -man God in man true life and death both from Mary and from God true man truly
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God first passable and then impassable probably in that context after the resurrection
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Jesus Christ our Lord This is an incredibly high
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Christology and it is within the first generation after the Apostles You go to local university.
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You're gonna be told that took hundreds of years it didn't not for Ignatius and We have this and then this and this is what
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I have to wrap up with because time has just failed me. I'm sorry, but About 70 years later
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About 70 years later. You have Milito of Sardis Milito of Sardis toward the end of the 2nd century
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Milito of Sardis Preaches a sermon in which he says these words
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He who hung the earth in place is hanged He who fixed the heavens in place is fixed in place
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He who made all things fast is made fast on a tree The Sovereign is insulted
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God is murdered The King of Israel is destroyed by an
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Israelite hand This is the one who made the heavens and the earth and formed
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Mankind in the beginning the one proclaimed by the law and the prophets the one and fleshed in a virgin
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The one hanged on a tree the one buried in the earth development after Nicaea Something it came much much later or a primitive belief primitive belief and so When you think about the historical aspects of these things
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Recognize that when you see development in Terminology Introduction of phrases like you're not going to find the phrase hypostatic
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Union in the New Testament, but Ignatius understood the concept didn't he as Clearly as you and I well, he probably never had to face the questions that you and I have to face
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But that doesn't change the fact that the divine truth had been revealed and Only if we take a naive view of history and ignore all of its context
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Will we end up taking the position that so many of those who oppose the faith? Want to adopt for themselves and they're never consistent on this
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They're never consistent about this if they have a religious faith themselves They are never consistent in applying the same standards to their own position.
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They can't they can't do it keep that in mind when you hear those kinds of Objections coming out there's so much more that we could talk about but my time has been exhausted and I am
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Both Jeff and I are prompt individuals And that means my time is up.