33 - The Council of Chalcedon

Alpha & Omega Ministries

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

Comments are disabled.

00:00

Last week, we were looking at the aftermath of Council of Nicaea.

00:06

We started looking at the Christological controversies that took place. And we were talking about in 451, and you'll see this on various, so I figured these are the ones we leave out for the kids.

00:27

And unfortunately, the good ones are in the back. So I'll just have to, well, let's see what this one looks like.

00:35

Yeah, it's very nice. Fake pens, they're back in the back, we'll live.

00:40

Council of Chalcedon, C -H -A -L -C -E -D -O -N, you'll see it referred to a lot.

00:47

There was a Chalcedon report, I think that's, who was the Chalcedon report?

00:53

That was Rushtoon, okay, Chalcedon report. This refers to really the last of the major theological

01:02

Christological councils where you have various errors specifically identified.

01:10

We mentioned a few of them last week. We talked about Nestorius and his dislike of the term theotokos, he preferred

01:20

Christotokos. Eutychianism, Apollinarianism, all of which fundamentally had an issue with what we call the hypostatic union.

01:31

And as we think about those particular definitions,

01:38

I think it's appropriate to ask the question, how far can you take this?

01:44

Because there isn't a definition of the hypostatic union in those words in scripture, right?

01:55

I mean, you can't look up hypostatic union. And there are a lot of people who think that as long as it's a theological term that we use, it's in the

02:03

Bible somewhere. And I remember the Bible study at church,

02:10

I was a member of years ago, where somebody asked the question, well, where is the word Trinity in the

02:15

Bible anyway? And we're all sitting around looking through our index in the back or something like that.

02:22

And the question becomes, how far is it valid to say, well, we have these divine revelations.

02:32

We have, for example, the description of Jesus as if the rulers of this age had known, they would not have crucified the

02:40

Lord of glory. Crucify the Lord of glory. How do you crucify the

02:45

Lord of glory? Well, obviously, you put that together with John 1 .14.

02:52

And obviously, one of the issues here is, can you legitimately put together texts of scripture in such a way as to create a systematic theology?

03:04

There are many people today that say, no, you cannot. And most liberal denominations have pretty much abandoned any type of belief in a systematic theology, because they don't believe that the scriptures are sufficient in and of themselves to allow you to do anything like that.

03:21

But if you do see all the scripture as divine revelation, and it goes back to your understanding of scripture, then we can take particular elements that are found in plain teaching that the word was made flesh.

03:36

Teaching of the deity of Christ, teaching of the fact that when

03:42

Christ speaks to the Father, not my will, but thine be done. Well, there's a distinction of wills.

03:51

There's still only one divine will, and yet, because of the incarnation. So you put all this together, and there does come a point where beyond a certain place on the map, you're starting to get into a lot of speculation, basically.

04:12

And if we affirm that God has not chosen to reveal to us everything that we could ever ask, and that really is,

04:23

I think, something that needs to be considered, and that is, does

04:28

God have the right to say, you will believe this, hold us accountable for that, and then say, but all these questions you wanna ask beyond that, it's not for this life, maybe someday in the future, maybe in the eternal state, whatever it might be, but not in this life.

04:53

And there are a lot of people that chafe at that. There are a lot of people that are very impatient with the reality that there is a limitation in regards to the content of divine revelation and scripture, and certainly we recognize when we talked about the

05:10

Gnostic Gospels, how often those people wanted to go beyond what was written, and they wanted to speculate about things that scripture never gives us any indication of, and that almost always ended up in error.

05:21

Even if someone had at least ostensibly a good reason for starting the string of speculation, it almost always ended up in a royal mess.

05:32

And so these are things we have to consider, and as we saw last week, basically when we talk about the

05:38

Chalcedonian definition of Christ, what we're doing is we're trying to protect a central core of truth that is biblical from various speculations around it that become imbalanced.

05:50

And that again raises the question of, well, man, if everybody has to have a perfect knowledge of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, who then shall be saved?

06:01

Because there's a pretty small number of people down through the history of the church who've had an accurate knowledge of the hypostatic union.

06:10

But the issue is not how much knowledge you have, but your submission to the knowledge you have been given.

06:20

And it really comes down to if truth has been revealed to you, are you going to submit to that truth, or are you going to prefer untruth?

06:28

This is where really a lot of the dividing lines come from. And so in reality,

06:36

I think most people would admit that that council is pretty much as far as we've gone.

06:44

I mean, yeah, at the time of the Reformation, there were some interesting issues were raised.

06:49

Those of us who are reformed need to realize that, as we'll see when we get to the

06:55

Reformation, there was what was called the Radical Reformation, the

07:00

Anabaptists, and some of them became non -Trinitarian.

07:07

Basically, there is an impulse, and it's something that the reformers fought against.

07:14

But there's an impulse that once you throw off Rome, why don't you throw off everything that Rome taught?

07:19

Well, Rome didn't teach everything wrong. Rome, for example, teaches there's one God. Well, they happen to be right about that.

07:26

So a lot of people get the idea that, well, if a religious system that I don't like teaches anything, it must be wrong.

07:34

Well, if they teach the sky is blue, what are you gonna do? So there were people who went too far at the time of the

07:45

Reformation, and it's pretty well known that Calvin, for example, rejected some of the developments of what we would call post -Nicene orthodoxy.

07:58

So if Nicaea is what year? Some of you are a little slow there.

08:05

Some of you are visitors, so we'll let you slide. But I'm looking for a little more response on the date of the

08:14

Council of Nicaea. Now, Council of Chalcedon would be on the test too, but it's not up there.

08:21

451, that's right. It's not all the way up there with Nicaea, because I will continue quizzing you on the date of the

08:29

Council of Nicaea till we are done with church history. So you need to make sure that it's right there on the tip of your tongue.

08:38

Anyway, what were we talking about again? Yeah, so the

08:44

Council of Chalcedon, 451. We really, between Nicaea and Chalcedon, you have the period of what's called post -Nicene orthodoxy.

08:55

So you've got, for example, the great Cappadocian fathers, Basil the

09:00

Great, Gregory of Nyssa. They were writing incredibly in -depth treatises on the doctrine of God, the person of Christ, addressing these issues.

09:13

And certain orthodoxies developed during that time that Calvin, in the

09:22

Institutes, is willing to take issue with. For example, one of, and these have come back up.

09:31

I mentioned a controversy that came up a year ago, publicly anyways. It's been sort of brewing under the surface for quite a while, in regards to the relationship of the son to the father.

09:43

Last year, the controversy is called the essential, well, there's different ways, but the essential subordination of the son to the father or functional subordination or, it's the idea that the terms father and son, which historically we've understood to be relational terms, actually reflect a ontological, on entos being being, so an ontological subordination within the

10:19

Godhead of the father to the son. And so that these individuals would say that it's not the son just freely choosing to be subordinate to the father, freely being the one who is sent.

10:33

But there is something about him being the son that would make it inappropriate if the father had chosen to come.

10:42

And what Calvin was concerned about, and what he emphasizes in the institutes is, see,

10:56

Josh? I think the pens are on top of the refrigerator. Would you be willing to grab those for me?

11:05

Cuz the ones up here are decoys. They are simply meant to fool the kids.

11:14

I guess the idea being eventually they'll just give up trying to use them. And, but you'll notice we're starting to run out on the good side here, too.

11:35

Alta Theos, Alta Theos, how would you translate

11:41

Alta Theos? Yeah, from Greek, Alta Theos, exactly.

11:51

Calvin emphasized that each of the divine persons is

11:58

Alta Theos, self -God, fully

12:06

God in and of themselves, not derivatively from another divine person.

12:14

The idea being that in some of post -Nicene times, post -Nicene orthodoxy, the idea became that the son's participant.

12:26

Now remember, we've already covered a lot of this, and if you weren't here, you have two concepts that are important to remember.

12:33

You have personhood and you have being. These aren't much better than the other ones.

12:42

And the being of God is what makes God God. The persons, father, son, and spirit, each fully share the one being as God.

12:53

You don't take the being of God and chop it up into three parts, okay? The father isn't one -third

12:58

God, and the son one -third God, and the spirit one -third God. The being of God is simple and indivisible. You can't chop it up.

13:06

And so each of the persons shares fully in the one being that is

13:12

God, but they are distinguished from one another. And they're distinguished in two different ways. They're distinguished economically, that is, how they act toward us.

13:20

So when we look at creation, we look at redemption, we can tell the difference between what the father does, and the son does, and the spirit does.

13:26

So that's called the economic trinity. We recognize the father does certain things, and the son does certain things, and the spirit does certain things.

13:34

They're different, and so we can recognize them that way. But was there a differentiation before creation, before there was redemption?

13:42

How could you tell the difference between father, son, and spirit before? And even that's a time word, we recognize limitations here.

13:51

But before creation, how could you tell the differences? Well, the post -Nicene

13:58

Orthodoxy used the terms father, and then you have son.

14:05

And so this relationship is a reciprocal relationship, because if you're a father, you have a son.

14:14

If you're a son, you have a father. It goes both directions. And since this is an eternal relationship, it's not one that starts in time.

14:22

It wasn't that, remember the Arians had said there was a time when the son was not. So there was a time when the father wasn't the father.

14:29

That had already been decided, no, that's not true. Jesus has eternally been God, this is an eternal thing. So this is an eternal relationship, but they speculated a lot, especially on the term begotten.

14:40

So they used the term begotten of this relationship here. And then the spirit proceeds from who?

14:52

Well, in the East, the spirit proceeds from the father alone.

14:59

In the West, the spirit proceeds from the father and the son. And almost nobody in the

15:06

West even cares about this. Everybody in the East cares about it a lot, a lot.

15:14

This is weird, because it's a debate that is really only debated by one side, unless you live along the border someplace and have to have a lot of interaction with Eastern Orthodoxy and Eastern Christianity, and then you'd get into it.

15:30

But let's face it, the vast majority of Christians in the

15:37

West have no earthly idea what in the world this particular argument concerning spiration, concerning the procession.

15:48

And in fact, the assertion is, and there's good ground for it, that the West added to the

15:56

Council of Nicaea's Creed. The idea of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the father and the son, the phrase and the son being the filioque clause.

16:09

Filioque in Latin means and the son. That's years and years later, in 1054, years and years later, in 1054, the great schism is going to take place.

16:37

And between the East and the West. And there's gonna be a lot of reasons for it.

16:44

In the East, you have married clergy in the West that have become something you couldn't do, and of course, you've got multiple patriarchs in the

16:53

East, and you've got the Pope in the West, and there's a lot of political stuff and all the rest of that stuff. But theologically, one of the key issues is the filioque clause, whether the spirit proceeds from the father and the son, or from the father only.

17:06

In the East, proceeds from the father only. So the idea of procession that marks the spirit off is different.

17:15

The father doesn't perceive maybe, the son doesn't perceive maybe. The son's marked off by being begotten, and it's sort of reciprocal, and the father is the one who begets, and so on and so forth.

17:28

So what has happened recently is the assertion, and what's interesting is a lot of people have traced this to the egalitarian controversy.

17:42

Now, do you understand what the egalitarian controversy is? It has to do with the debate between complementarians and egalitarians.

17:55

Now, we all know where our church stands on this, right? Yes, no, maybe?

18:01

Everyone's sitting there going, I wish my phone would ring. That way I'd have an excuse to be distracted and not answer your question.

18:09

He's looking at me, no. We're talking about the relationship of men and women, their roles in the church, creative roles, etc.,

18:18

etc. And an egalitarian says, there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, you're all one in Christ Jesus, and therefore, any type of gender -specific roles in the church or in the family really don't exist.

18:39

So, eldership, diaconate, whatever, you can have female bishops and archbishops and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

18:50

The complementary perspective, the complementarians, believe that there is specific intentionality that is good in God's creation of man and woman, and that our unity before God in Christ does not destroy but enhances those gender roles.

19:12

So, a complementarian would say that the two genders complement one another, but that the biblical reality that, for example, the qualifications for the elder are very specifically and very clearly for men, is not just, yeah, well,

19:31

Paul just didn't get around to writing the qualifications for the female elder, or something along those lines.

19:40

And so, what's interesting is, the leading people promoting the idea of an eternal, functional subordination of the son of the father in regards to the being of God, are complementarians, who are saying, well, look.

20:01

The egalitarians look at the Trinity and say, there's no distinctions in the essence.

20:09

And so, if we reflect God, there should be no distinctions amongst us. And so, it's been complementarians who have said, well, there actually is something about father and son that shows a, that while they are equal, they're different in this particular way.

20:28

So, one of my concerns has been, and I've voiced this a number of times, even though I sort of stayed out of the firefight last year, personally, though where I stood was fairly clear.

20:42

I'm a little concerned when we start trying to figure out the relationships in the divine trinity as a reflection of the relationships of human beings.

20:54

I think that's backwards. Now, none of the people would say that that's what they're doing, but it does seem to have been prompted by this egalitarian, complementarian debate going on right now, and that has been going on for a century.

21:11

So anyways, back to Calvin here. Calvin looked at the period after Nicaea, and Calvin firmly believes in three divine persons, and equality to persons, everything else, what he is concerned about is understanding this idea of being begotten as not meaning that the son participates in the being of God only in and through the father.

21:47

Because you could argue that for some of the post -Nicene writers, only the father is autotheos.

21:57

The son is not autotheos, the spirit is not autotheos. And for Calvin, he's like, if you go there, there's really no way to maintain a full belief in the deity of Christ.

22:09

It's the subordinationists are gonna get you eventually, if the son and the spirit are not autotheos.

22:16

And so Calvin defends the idea that whatever you understand by begotten, it does not mean the son is not autotheos, he is autotheos.

22:24

Yes? The what?

22:36

The credo. Yeah. Okay. But doesn't mean that they give the example of like,

22:56

I'm a son. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

23:02

That was very commonly used in the early church. Yeah. Right.

23:10

You understand what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. Yeah, what - That expression for the - Right, what the gentleman's referring to is the fact that many of the post -Nicene fathers, what they likened this relationship to was the son and light.

23:24

And that for us to even know of the sun's existence, we only know of it because of the light that comes from it.

23:31

And there is an intimate relationship between the sun and the light. All those things are true, the problem is they're analogies.

23:37

And all analogies can break down if they're put into a context other than what we intended them to be used in the first place.

23:44

And one could argue that the atomic reaction that produces the light is different from the resultant light itself.

23:54

So I mean, anybody can, you can still say the light is different from the source of the light and all the rest of that stuff.

24:01

Calvin's real concern, because he had to deal, he was dealing with people who denied the

24:06

Trinity in his day. His concern was that we don't give away the store before we even start the argument, which he saw some of the post -Nicene fathers doing.

24:27

And timeless without beginning. So in other words, if you could place it, and the brother speaks

24:33

Greek, so let me put it in that terminology. So as long as it's not an aorist, it's an imperfect.

24:42

Continuous action in the past without reference to origination over against aorist point action, simple expression.

24:49

And so yeah, most definitely, that is exactly what was intended.

24:56

But it's very hard to communicate that to people. This is one of the major problems in communicating with my Muslim friends. This idea for them, sun, just carries with it automatically the idea of a point in time origin.

25:09

And it's really hard to get people past that, and it's necessary to do so.

25:15

So it's interesting to me, we're talking about arguments that were taking place post -Nicene, post -Nicaea.

25:23

They're still happening today. And it's not because the people that are arguing about it don't know about those books that were written way, way back then.

25:32

It's just, well, which would be better? If we had no more discussion about it, or the fact that discussion keeps coming up because people are thinking about it?

25:42

You know, it might be like, well, I'm just glad we're all experts on this subject. No, the fact of the matter is, we're not.

25:47

So it's actually a good thing that the discussion continues on. It means we're still thinking. It means we're still reading.

25:53

It means we're still alive. And it's not just some dead orthodoxy that has just simply passed down without anybody ever thinking about it or ever being concerned about it.

26:03

So these are some of the issues. If we have time, I don't know how long we're gonna go when we get into Calvin.

26:13

But years and years ago, my goodness, this was years ago. I did a series of studies with Alvin Omega through that section of the

26:23

Institutes of the Christian Religion on the Trinity, and it was great stuff. That's one of the things I've said about Calvin that I say specifically not about myself, and that is that the ink on the

26:37

Institutes still smudges, the ink on the

26:42

Institutes smudges. And what I mean by that, of course, is he had the ability to address things and to choose what he was going to address that just is timeless.

26:55

When you listen to him writing about, for example, the radicals of his day, these exuberant people that go beyond the scriptures, it's like he was watching

27:05

Channel, the one between 20 and 22. It's like he was sitting there watching it while he was writing this stuff.

27:14

And just not many people have the ability to write a book that 450 years later, coming up on 500 years later, cuz it first came out,

27:26

I think, in 1535. So not too long till we'll have the 500th anniversary of that too.

27:33

It is still incredibly relevant, and just not dated so much.

27:39

Anything that I write just becomes dated, not the case with the Institutes.

27:44

It is an amazing work along those lines, and if you haven't read it, I would highly recommend it to you.

27:51

It's not a short read, obviously, in its final 1559 version, but it is well worth it.

27:58

So anyway, we basically have not gone beyond this, but we do continue to discuss it, and that's a good thing.

28:08

I think it's an appropriate thing that we continue to discuss it, not that it's good to have falsehood, but that if we're not discussing it, that means no one really is passionate about it or cares about it anymore.

28:21

And that's not a good thing either. Now, totally shifting gears, put the clutch in.

28:28

Next topic. What is amazing is, and I think

28:34

I've mentioned this to you before, it is not until really Athanasius' writing, you remember

28:42

Athanasius, Bishop in Alexandria, who stands for Nicene Orthodoxy, whose 39th

28:52

Festal Letter, it's the first time we have the New Testament, fully in the order we have it today, etc.,

29:00

etc., it's not until his writings, so we're talking the middle of the 4th century, that you can have really the first place we can go, there is an entire book or at least full section of a book on the atonement, on the atonement.

29:17

There just isn't anything up till then. And that makes a lot of us really wonder.

29:28

And one of the books that I had to read in church history class, and I think it might have been assigned for another theology class too, is

29:36

Louis Burkhoff's book, I think it's called The Development of Christian Theology or Christian Doctrine, one of the two.

29:44

And I think there's actually a copy hiding in the pastor's office someplace. I think I've seen it in there under the dust and stuff.

29:53

But it's a very useful book. It's not the most exciting book in the world to read.

29:59

Most church history books are not, unless you're excited about the subject. But it was extremely, extremely helpful.

30:08

But also for someone with my background, extremely challenging.

30:15

And what I mean by that is if you are born and raised in a fundamentalist stream of thought, the idea of development of doctrine over time is very uncomfortable for you.

30:38

For example, how many of you in here have seen a little red book called

30:45

The Trail of Blood? Anybody seen The Trail of Blood? You've seen it.

30:55

Ed, you've seen it. You've got to have seen it. You've not seen it?

31:01

Really? I am stuttering. No, no, not talking about Mao's Little Red Book.

31:12

No, no, no, not, no, no. It is particularly popular amongst

31:21

Baptists, landmark Baptists. And I remember being given a copy of it when

31:27

I was a teenager. And fundamentally, it is a book that argues that the

31:35

Baptists are the first Christians, and that there has always been a Baptist church.

31:41

And we've always been the true Christians, and we were the ones that were being persecuted by everybody else.

31:49

And so you grab hold of every sect and group through the history, the

31:56

Donatists and the Waldensians and all these people. And you grab hold of them and you say, actually, they were us.

32:05

They were identical to us. And it's this idea, this trail of blood, these martyr

32:13

Baptists, all the way back to John the Baptist really was.

32:21

Type idea. And that really does represent how people want church history to function.

32:33

We want it to be nice and clean, black and white. These were the ones who believed exactly like us all the way down through church history, and everybody who doesn't look like us and act like us and believe identical to us, well, they're just, that way we can kick everybody out of the kingdom so that when we get to heaven, we're not gonna have to worry about those other people.

32:58

It's just all gonna, you've heard the joke about someone being shown around heaven, and it's normally

33:05

Saint Peter doing it. I'm sure Peter's not gonna be doing anything like that at all. But they're showing them various places where various people are, and then they come to a closed door, and Peter goes, no, don't open that door.

33:22

Why is that? He says, well, that's where all the Baptists are, and they think they're the only ones here. So, you could really apply that to almost anybody, but I think there are certain kinds of Baptists that that would have more application to than others.

33:41

We Reformed Baptists do actually tend to be a little bit more small C Catholic than some of our independent fundamentalist brothers.

33:49

We have actually been known to talk to Presbyterians.

33:56

That's, for some people, that's a definite sign of pure liberalism, and you're on your way to eventually becoming a

34:05

Methodist, or something like that, if you do that. But I kid, but only slightly.

34:14

But only slightly. There are those that have very, very narrow definitions of who's getting to heaven and who's not, and dangerously add a lot of stuff to the gospel.

34:28

A lot of stuff to the gospel, including eschatology stuff and things like that, that becomes a little bit scary.

34:35

So anyway, when you read books like the

34:40

Development of Christian Doctrine by Burkoff, you are forced to realize things that you've already been forced to realize so far in this class.

34:53

But on a wide range of things, and especially on the subject of the atonement, you're really forced to deal with the reality that a lot of what was believed on this subject in church history was, from our perspective, just really downright silly.

35:15

And you go, how could something so important have been so badly misunderstood?

35:22

How could you have, we're gonna discover the recapitulation theory and the ransom to Satan theory, and we'll look at a couple of these.

35:32

Well, we'll get into them here in a few minutes, maybe. But how, it's like, didn't they have the

35:38

New Testament? And you get to this point, and it's really easy to sit back and go, what was going on?

35:47

And again, we need to remind ourselves, you and I, we have been deeply influenced by many of those who've come before us.

35:56

Our vocabulary has been provided to us through conflicts of literally centuries.

36:05

And you may not know the conflicts and even the lives that were given that went into providing you with the vocabulary and categories, theology that you have.

36:27

But it happened. That's what studying church history reveals to you. And so, it's real easy for us to sit back with all that reflection and all that vocabulary and all those categories that have been refined and defined and provided to us to go, well, isn't it obvious?

36:50

Isn't this easy? How could these people have been so dumb? But that's where books like Burkhoff's make us a little uncomfortable in challenging that mindset and making us go, okay, well.

37:10

All right, that wasn't the central area of theological thought during the persecution of the church.

37:21

And then once the persecution ended, the primary focus was on Christological issues.

37:27

And then by the time you could start turning to what would be seemingly the next logical area of controversy or study, which would be, well, if this is who

37:39

Christ is and this is he and his two natures, then what did he accomplish, what's happening in the world?

37:47

Roman Empire has fallen, fallen apart. We're going into what we somewhat, in an inaccurate way, identify as the

37:55

Dark Ages. But it was a period of tremendous societal and educational decline, where literacy rates, which had been much higher during the

38:09

Roman Empire, crash. So the vast majority of your clergy from the 7th and 8th centuries onward are illiterate, let alone the people.

38:22

I mean, again, medieval period, average person never traveled more than seven miles one direction from wherever they were born.

38:30

It's a small world, very small world. And so at the very point where the next natural progression of research and analysis would have been issues related to the atonement, who's got the time to do that when you're just working yourself half to death just to get enough food to survive?

38:57

I mean, under the Roman Empire, you would have had cities and universities and schools, well, not universities, but schools.

39:06

And with cities, you get food coming in and you can have places where people write and do scholarship.

39:15

As the cities disintegrate, because everybody has to go out in the countryside and start farming for themselves, education, further advancement in theological application, it's gonna be very, very slow if it's gonna be happening at all.

39:37

And so there's a reason why, when you ask the question, well, what about the doctrine of atonement?

39:45

There seems to have been so many what would seem to us to be shallow views. And there is, in my opinion, it's not something you'll see a lot in the books, but I'm pretty convinced of this.

39:57

I think one of the main reasons is because of the decline in understanding of the

40:07

Old Testament that resulted from the split between Christianity and Judaism.

40:12

In other words, once the synagogue and the church were completely separate, and we see in the

40:20

New Testament that was a process. This hardening of attitudes developed to the detriment of the

40:32

Christian side, because knowledge of the Old Testament backgrounds of the New Testament became almost non -existent.

40:39

We talked about origin and his allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament and stuff like that, where it basically became a storybook.

40:46

And hey, let's be honest, for a lot of people, even today, the Old Testament's pretty much just a storybook. It's great for flannel graph, but theology, who really needs it for that?

40:58

And so, especially the Book of Hebrews, which you've heard me say it before, and we preached through the whole thing, deepest source of specific exegetical teaching on the subject of the intention and purpose of the atoning work of Christ, you've gotta have an

41:19

Old Testament background to it, and once you've allegorized the Old Testament away, Book of Hebrews becomes really, it's just not the most popular book in the

41:27

New Testament, and it still isn't today because of that. So I think a lot of that contributed to the rather troubling and problematic views on the subject of the atonement that were there.

41:46

The general view of the earliest writers, though difficult to ascertain with certainty, is that the atonement of Christ redeems men from the power of the devil.

41:54

The atonement redeems men from the power of the devil, but what does that mean?

42:01

Well, let me give you a quotation from Burkoff. I mentioned him. Let me read him to you for a second.

42:07

Let me see if I can convince my iPad here to do me a favor of giving me some larger fonts.

42:15

I love larger fonts. That's, how did anybody do this? I guess you just made sure you had your glasses on.

42:23

Irenaeus, who stands midway between the east and the west, agrees with the apologist.

42:29

Remember Irenaeus? We talked about him, his anti -Gnostic writings, and we, the apologist, just to murder people like that. Agrees with the apologist in contemplating man as enslaved by the powers of darkness and looks upon redemption partly as deliverance from the power of Satan, though he does not look upon it as a satisfaction due to Satan.

42:50

His idea is rather the death of Christ satisfied the justice of God and thus liberates man.

42:56

At the same time, he gives great prominence to the recapitulation theory. Recapitulation theory, the idea that Christ recapitulates in himself all the stages of human life and all the experiences of these stages, including those which belong to our state as sinners.

43:17

By his incarnation in human life, he thus reverses the course on which Adam, by his sin, started humanity and thus becomes a new leaven in the life of mankind.

43:28

He communicates immortality to those who are united to him by faith and affects an ethical transformation in their lives by his obedience and by his obedience compensates the disobedience of Adam.

43:43

Tertullian pretty much follows this line as well. So this recapitulation idea is so much a part of Irenaeus' thinking that remember when

43:56

I told you that the first place we have anyone who ever says the apostles taught this, this is an apostolic tradition.

44:02

It was Irenaeus, remember? Remember what it was? Irenaeus said that the apostles had taught that Jesus was more than 50 years old when he died.

44:13

That's the first example of apostolic tradition in the writings outside the

44:18

New Testament. And none of us believes that today, which is sort of funny. If the very first example, we all go, it's sort of hard to think that 1800 years later you'd get something right.

44:29

But anyway, why would Irenaeus have wanted to emphasize the idea that Jesus was more than 50 years old when he died?

44:36

Well, the recapitulation theory states that Jesus has to go through all the stages of life, so he had to have been an old man.

44:43

He had to have at least entered into some type of aged existence for him to have done this recapitulation work, where he's undoing what

44:53

Adam did by doing it right himself, basically. And so that's where this comes from, that idea it comes from.

45:02

And so fascinating, someone's theology resulted in their saying that the apostles had taught it but wasn't in scripture.

45:09

Hmm, I wonder if we'll see that again. Nah, I'm sure it only happened once. Actually, we're gonna see that happen over and over and over again.

45:18

So we'll stop there with Irenaeus and Tertullian, basically the recapitulations theory.

45:24

We'll get to the ransom to Satan theory next up, as we talk about the view of the atonement in the early church, all right?

45:34

Let's close with a prayer. Father, once again, we do thank you for the opportunity of looking backwards. We ask that this time would be useful to us in grounding us, so as we look forward, we can do so appropriately, see where our traditions have come from, test them by scripture, and do all things to your honor and glory.