24 - Monasticism and Sacralism

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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All right. Well, I imagine we'll have a few people coming in a little bit late, despite the fact that I announced on Wednesday night the marathon.

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I forgot about it, so I had to backtrack all the way back up to Bethany Home and around, so that's why

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I was a little bit late, but I was, by the way, inserting. If you already picked up your bulletin when you came in,

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I put bulletin inserts again in, and they're back on the back for the few of you that already got your bulletins, unless you already had and kept the insert from last time, it's the same one.

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So if you got the insert from last time, it's no big deal. Yeah, so you're good. So what we will be continuing in the service this morning, the work in John chapter 10.

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So if you want to grab that, if you don't have it from, I don't remember when it was last time we did it.

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All right. Church history lesson number 24. We had begun to consider the development of monasticism, and I remember when

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I first took church history, I had actually started to take a church history class in Bible college, but the book was so liberal and the teacher was so liberal,

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I just couldn't hack it, and so I dropped the class, one of the only classes I ever dropped in college, actually.

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But thankfully, once I got to seminary, a few things changed.

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I had a very, very, very good church history professor, and yet, despite all that, the reality is that I was raised in a very conservative, fundamentalist, independent, fundamentalist

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Baptist background, and it was very difficult for me, and it may be very difficult for most of you, to even invest effort or time to think about any forms of monasticism.

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The problem is that if you take that perspective, pretty much anything from the 3rd and 4th century up through the

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Reformation is going to become disjointed and disconnected and difficult for you to understand, because so much of what happens, especially during the medieval period, is the result of monastic impulses,

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Reformation impulses, and all the reformers were, were, you know,

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Luther was an Augustinian monk, and it's hard to understand

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Luther's table talk, for example, if you don't have some idea of what the monastic life was like, because he makes reference to it all the time, and so many of the reformers came out of one of the monastic movements, or when the counter -reformation begins to happen, and there was a counter -reformation, primarily led by the

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Jesuits, but many of the monastic movements had an impulse to defend the church, and so it's really hard to understand a lot of what happened.

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Most of the major writers were involved in some monastic order for nearly a thousand years, over a thousand years, and so it's, it's a prejudice on our part that we have to get over, and we can recognize, and, and should recognize from the start that there is a fundamentally unbiblical impulse in separating oneself from the world, in the sense of going and living in a tree somewhere, and you might say, well that's silly, no, there were people who lived in trees, there, we'll talk about the pillar saints here in a moment, there.

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What is, what is a monastery, but a walled -off place where you can pretend to be super spiritual?

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Don't, don't, you know, people are gonna hear that and go, oh you're just such a terrible, horrible person. It depends on how you define spirituality.

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I am not questioning, I mean, there, there are people who gave their lives, dedicated themselves,

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I mean, I, it's pretty tough to get up at 2 o 'clock in the morning and pray, and then again at 4 o 'clock in the morning, and to fast, and to do all these things, and there were people who very sincerely thought this was the way to true and great spirituality, and it's real easy to just dismiss them, and then go on your way, and, and spend the entire morning service thinking about the

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Dallas Green Bay game coming up, you know, real easy to do, but it is not a balanced biblical impulse to see the church as being removed from the world, and we need to understand, well, why, what would have started this?

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Because the Apostles didn't start any type of monastic movement, there's no evidence whatsoever that any of the original churches that they founded had any idea of, well, priests, or monks, or a monastic life, or anything like that, so what happens?

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And a lot of the later monastic movement is related to sacralism, sacralism, and this is going to come up a number of times, especially when we get up to the

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Council of Nicaea where this really starts, starts in a small way, and grows over time.

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Once you have a state church, once under Theodosius in about 380,

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Rome becomes officially, the Roman Empire becomes officially a Christian Empire, for the next, well, all the way through the

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Reformation, because one of the big questions, one of the big issues that we'll be dealing with at the time of the Reformation, is how did someone like a

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Luther go from standing before Charles V with his life hanging in the balance in 1521, pleading for the right to follow his conscience, to four years later in Wittenberg, allowing the death penalty to be used against Anabaptists?

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How does that work? It's real easy for us to do the hero worship thing on a surface level, and then when we really start thinking about the complexities of what was going on, it doesn't work real well.

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How did that happen? Well, it was, how was it that Zwingli, meeting with the earliest scholarly

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Anabaptists, Balthasar Hubmeier and other people in that time period, how could

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Zwingli and Hubmeier, how could Zwingli recognize the necessity of sola scriptura, reject so many of Rome's practices based upon applying sola scriptura, and yet when it came to infant baptism, he for a while recognized there wasn't a biblical basis.

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But, under pressure from the church council in Zurich, he accepts, eventually, the death penalty for Anabaptists.

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I've stood on the bridge in Zurich where many Anabaptists were given what's called their third baptism. Infant baptism, the baptism they received as an

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Anabaptist, and then drowned by the state. And, how does that happen fairly quickly?

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It's sacralism. The world in which the reformers lived had, for a thousand years, been a world where if you were the citizen of the state, you were a member of the church, they were identical things.

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And, what's most important to recognize is by the days of the Reformation, the baptismal records of the church were the basis of the tax rolls of the state.

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So, you stop baptizing infants, and the state does not like this, because the state likes its taxes, and likes order, and likes unanimity.

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And, religion was seen, religion starts becoming seen, well, I'll take this back.

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Religion was seen as holding the Roman Empire together under the

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Caesars. What did you have to do? Remember, what caused the persecution? You had to offer the pinch of incense upon the altar, and say what?

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Caesar curia, Caesar is Lord. Now, they didn't care if you worshipped other gods.

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But, what brought that unity was that the society as a whole had that commitment that gave unity, and so Rome was

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Rome practiced sacralism. And so, once Theodosius makes the

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Roman Empire Christian, then you have this massive influx of people to Christianity who've never heard the gospel.

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So, you have this, what eventually, and this is a major problem today in many places, you have nominalism.

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The concept being in name only, in name only.

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So, you have all sorts of quote -unquote

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Christian countries that have become extremely secular over just the past couple of decades, because they were nominally

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Christian to begin with. Italy, a huge example of this, obviously.

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Many of the Muslim nations are nominally Muslim. People may say the prayers, but there's no practice, so and so.

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It's just in name only. And so, nominalism becomes the watchword, because there's, you know, you could,

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I suppose if you have some certain eschatological views, you might argue with me about this, but I see no evidence in scripture that it's the intention of the

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New Testament church to be the state. And so, once that happens, things are going to change.

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And the later monastic impulses often come from the fact that people look around at the church, and they go, where is the fervor?

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Where is the faith? Where is the life? Where is the spirituality? It's just, it's dead.

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It's formalism. It's just what people do, because they're a part of this culture. It's just routines, and so on and so forth.

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And so, someone will break away, and they'll have this tremendous idea of discipline, and prayer, and fervor, and zeal, and so on and so forth, and they'll start a new monastic movement.

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And all the major monastic orders, that's how they started. And you'd frequently have reformations going on within them, because over time, people would donate to those orders, and they'd start getting involved with worldly stuff, and the fervor would cool, the zeal would cool, and then there'd be another one, and then there'd be another one.

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This is the history of the medieval period, and a lot of it's related to this idea of sacralism.

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And then, when we get into Calvin, we all know that the most devastating argument against the biblical doctrine of predestination election is to scream,

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Servetus! How many of you know why I just said that? How many of you don't know why

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I just said that? So, you don't know who Miguel Servetus is? You have not been doing enough arguing with Arminians on Facebook.

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All I need to do is assign to all of you, find an Arminian on Facebook, and argue with them, and you'll discover who

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Servetus was. Miguel Servetus is put to death by the city of Geneva for his, well, it wasn't specifically for his denial of predestination election.

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He was actually an anti -Trinitarian heretic. We'll get into it, but the big argument that is made against Calvin, Calvin could not possibly have been a

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Christian, because Calvin killed Servetus. Well, Calvin didn't kill Servetus, but Calvin was involved in the prosecution of Servetus as a heretic, and Servetus was burned at the stake.

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Now, of course, Rome was torching folks right and left, and in fact, had tried to burn Servetus, but he had escaped the night before his burning in his nightclothes by jumping up on the top of the toilet and jumping over the fence.

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So, Rome was torching people right and left, but since this was a non -Roman

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Catholic state, the Lutherans had been doing it, they had been doing it in the Swiss cantons. It's not like it was the first time it had happened, but it happened that one time.

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That name has become extremely famous because he was extremely intelligent. He's credited as the first person to discover, in the

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West, the circulatory system, the blood system of the body. So, he was a brilliant medical doctor, as well as a theological nutcase.

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Sometimes those two go together, sometimes they don't. But, anyway, we have to end up dealing with this, and it all goes back to Sacralism, because Luther, Calvin, is a second generation reformer, and for the past, basically, 1 ,200 years, the experience of everyone has been the

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Sacral State, the Church -State Union. And, when we start talking about the rise of the papacy, and we start talking about, especially, the struggle for supremacy, from the turn of the millennium through about the 1300s, between church and state, where kings and popes are battling it out, and normally the popes are winning, but not always, it all goes back to this relationship between church and state, and where it starts.

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And, the monastic movements after Nicaea, very much related to that.

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A rebellion against the nominalism, and the deadness, and it just becomes regular.

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And, this is important to us today. You look at Europe, and you look at what has happened to Europe, and the speed with which it has happened.

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Now, World War II had a lot to do with that, had a lot to do with that. But, there was obviously no foundation, even that society at that time, to be able to survive the horrors of World War II.

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And, now you see the result, this rejection of everything that was its history. And, we see the dead state churches in those nations, and they are dead.

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There is not an orthodox, living state church in Europe.

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If it's the state church, it's the dead church. Did you all see the video this week, of the

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Episcopalians in Glasgow, Scotland, who had the nice Mormon lady in to sing Tajweed from the

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Quran? And, she did the recitation from Surah 19,

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Surah Maryam, that specifically denies the deity of Christ and the Trinity. And, there's all the Episcopalians sitting there in all their long flowing robes in the cathedral in Glasgow, with a

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Muslim chanting Tajweed from the Quran, denying the central aspects of the Christian faith.

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Well, it's not a central aspect of the Christian faith, those men, anymore. It's dead.

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It's dead formalism. It just exists as a shell. And, if we don't see what led to all of that, then we're never going to be able to place it in history.

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And, some of the weirdest, strangest interpretations you get of history, are from people who don't realize that what's going on today, has something to do with what happened yesterday, and in the years, and generations, and centuries before.

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But, all of that wide arc of discussion there, to get us back to the fact that monasticism has its origins in a time when the church was under persecution.

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Not a time of nominalism. Now, there were periods of nominalism, briefly, in that time period, when persecution would wane.

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And, we will talk a little bit about, hmm, where do

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I get to that? Somewhere, did we, we haven't talked about the montanists, did we?

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A little bit, when you talked about Tertullian a bit. Okay, I did talk a little bit about, yeah, okay,

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I think that's the only, I think it is the only time. Well, remember montanism, sorry about that. Montanism was a reformation movement, a spiritualizing movement, that grew out of someone feeling like the church of his day just wasn't fervent enough in its zeal.

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And, that's going to happen a lot down through history. If you don't recognize the cycle, then you'll see it in your own lifetime, if you actually look around.

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But, especially if you have the eyes of history. So, when we talk about the rise of monasticism, it begins with the hermits.

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The hermits, or they're also known as the anchorites. And, this pretty much starts in Egypt.

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They're also called the Desert Fathers, the Desert Fathers. And, I mentioned to you

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Anthony, who lived for 106 years.

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So, maybe monasticism, fasting once in a while is actually good for you.

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You know, it's just, you live 106 years. 250 to 356,

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Anthony lived on an island in the middle of the Nile. And, that, you know, would be a fairly small world to live in.

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But, from their perspective, not traveling and limiting yourself, that was part of the bodily discipline.

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To live in a cave, or as we're talking about here, the pillar saints, that's part of the bodily discipline.

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And, since he lived in one place, then he would have disciples that would come. And, they would begin to ask of him spiritual insight.

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And, as the number of these people grew, obviously their authority within the church would become, well, eventually troubling to bishops.

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And, to people in official ecclesiastical authority. Because, they very rarely held church office, but they wielded spiritual power.

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And, as we saw, when Cyprian, for example, had to return to Carthage, why? Because the confessors, people who had suffered, were messing around with areas that weren't supposed to be part of their area of authority.

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I mentioned that these individuals would not, for example, someone would not lay down, accept any bodily comfort, wouldn't use pillows or blankets, wouldn't bathe.

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All this really going back to a Gnostic idea of the body being bad, the spirit being good.

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So, this is sort of the spirit demonstrating that you can allow the body to decay and putrefy, basically.

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And, that's not affecting you, because the real you is the spirit and so on and so forth. And, that there is a, you know, that's not a biblical concept.

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But, it became popular. And, I mentioned last week, for those of you who missed this wonderful visual, for you to remember, that some of the saints would demonstrate their authority over their bodies by allowing bugs to crawl through their teeth.

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And, that this would not bother them. They would be talking to you about your spirituality while bugs are crawling through their teeth.

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And, this was an illustration. George, you're really looking at me like we need a waste paper basket, quick.

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Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Then, you had the pillar saints.

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The pillar saints. And, since, you know,

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I'm not trying to make fun of this guy. But, I used a Latin phrase on the dividing line last week,

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I think. It's the Latin phrase, Satis Pacio. Satis Pacio. It means self -suffering.

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It's the suffering you undergo in purgatory. And, this guy on Twitter contacts me and says,

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I'm trying to find what you said to look up. I've Googled for half an hour. And then, when he spelled what he thought

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I had said, it was so far off that I said, oh, that's why

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I have to write stuff on the board. Okay, all right, I get it. The pillar saints, such as Simon Stilotes, or in English, Simon the

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Stylite. Which does not mean he was stylish,

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I can assure you of that. Simon lived from 390 to 459, so he's a little bit farther down.

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He became a hermit near Antioch while still a teenager.

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So, imagine what this is like, a teenager. And so, he's sitting on this, on a little mound.

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And, he starts to build it up. So, he gathers a little more dirt and gets it a little bit higher.

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And, the higher he gets, the more he has to compact it and things like that. And, since that's where he lives, that's where he lays down at night,

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It's a little bit dangerous if you're living on a pillar to try to stand all the time. That would not work well, especially if it's windy.

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It would be packed together, and I don't want to get too graphic, but you could provide some moisture to help it hold together and things like that.

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So, he started building up this pillar. And, it gets higher and higher.

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Eventually, what happens is people realize this young man has not left this place.

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And, of course, if you're up on the pillar, it's sort of hard for you to be working, buying food, things like that.

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You have to have disciples to bring you food. And, of course, they'll basically exchange the food for spiritual guidance and leadership and insight.

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And so, he starts building this pillar up. Anyone want to guess how high

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Simon's pillar eventually was when he died? He didn't fall off, by the way.

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Well, let's just say history does not record whether he ever fell off. That's not a part of my notes, anyways.

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But, anyone want to guess how high? Six stories. Wow. Six stories.

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What's that, about 60 feet? About 60 feet. And so, his disciples would come.

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And, of course, he had to have a rope. And, he would bring food up and,

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I guess, let waste down. And, maybe once in a while, you know,

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I mean, it can get cold even in Antioch. I suppose it might snow there about as often as it snows here.

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But, you know, something along those lines. But, he received visitors, disciples.

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And, his views greatly influenced the religious views in the area. He was a force to be reckoned with religiously around Antioch during that time period.

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Simon Stilotis. Now, where do you get that from scripture?

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I don't have a clue. But, once you buy into the idea of the body -spirit separation type stuff, you can see where that comes from.

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Well, eventually, you had the development of cenobitic communities.

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Because, being a monk by yourself is a bit of a bummer. And, it's a little lonely, discouraging.

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Not a lot of people can do it. And, he discovered that when maybe three of you were in the same cave and sort of worked together and encouraged one another, that was a little bit easier.

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And so, this is really where you get the beginning of the communal monks, which becomes much more the standard monastery, monastic life type situation that you would envision during the medieval period and things like that.

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One of the big names early on in the giving of direction to how this should be done was a fellow by the name of Pacomius, P -A -C -H -O -M -I -U -S,

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Pacomius, the end of the 3rd century. And then, Basil of Caesarea, who we will see later on as a very important person in the early

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Christological controversies, had a great impact on the formation of communities, which eventually led to the establishment of formal monasteries.

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At first, it wouldn't be a formal monastery in the sense of a building or something like that.

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It would just be a large cave or series of caves or something like that where the individuals would get together, but eventually would lead to the founding of monasteries.

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Now, this also gets us into another area, and that is the degradation in this early period of the view of what we would call here the external or visible church in regards to sexuality.

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Specifically, marriage over against celibacy and also a very unhealthy devaluation of women.

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The idea of celibacy, you would think that people would get the idea after a time.

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Like I said, we've had earlier movements that began, that emphasized celibacy, and they died out.

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This is the natural way of things. You don't have kids to pass your views on to.

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Generally, they don't last long periods of time. And yet, we know primarily in the

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Western areas, because Eastern Christianity continues to have married priests to this day, but you had the development of a celibate clergy.

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Now, again, this is development. This takes place over time. It doesn't happen one night.

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It doesn't happen one day. It doesn't happen in one year. There's a lot of things that have to come together to form what we have today in what

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Rome calls not a dogma, but a discipline. Rome would say that there are dogmatic foundations for her denial of marriage to her priests, but would insist that it is a discipline and not a dogma.

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Dogma being something you have to believe, a discipline being something that is best to do for the highest level of spirituality.

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By the middle of the second century, the interactions of the church with the surrounding cultures of the day resulted in a view that indicated that celibacy was a road to a more spiritual life, because celibacy became equated with spiritual power, your ability to reign in and to control the lusts of the flesh.

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But quickly, the problem of sexual scandal arose and had to be addressed at the council of, I love this, this is one of my favorite early church councils in 306, the council, are you ready for this, of Elvira.

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And half of you are going, Elvira. I don't think there's any connection, it was

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Oak Ridge Boys? Between the Oak Ridge Boys and this particular Elvira. They're kind of old enough.

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No, no, no, they're not that old. This is 306, not 1906.

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So, the council of Elvira and Nicaea had to address these issues as well.

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As soon as celibacy becomes the thing, there are going to be people who claim it, but aren't it.

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And that's just, it's going to become so common that by the time of the Reformation, it's an accepted thing.

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You can be a celibate priest with a concubine and kids. And it's just, it's been that way for so long, that it's like, eh, whatever.

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By the end of the 4th century, priestly celibacy began to be enforced in some, but not all, areas.

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The Eastern churches never adopted the requirement, and while the West did, the working relationships between priests and women for the next 1 ,000 years of the

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Reformation beyond involved sexual activity. And so, one of the biggest names at the time of the

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Reformation is, of course, Desiderius Erasmus. And Erasmus was the illegitimate son of a priest.

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And for him to become a priest himself, he had to get a special dispensation from the Church because of that parental problem that was his.

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But no one considered it any major league big deal because there were just so many that it was recognized that that's just the way things were.

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And it was recognized, maybe not, maybe whispered a little bit more than talked about openly, but especially after the period called the

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Pornocracy in the 10th century, everybody knew that the Bishop of Rome had multiple women, multiple concubines, and that the

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Vatican was a debauched place. It was well known.

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Part of the push for celibacy had to do with the declining view of women, again due to the easily observed departure from biblical backgrounds and standards.

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While in the New Testament we find women as co -workers with the apostles, and even in Acts being called prophetesses in a couple of places.

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And while we find a high view of marriage in the New Testament, even to the point of likening Christ's relationship to the

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Church, to marriage, these views were eventually allegorized away. And what allowed you to do that?

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Origin. Origin and the allegorical methodology. If there's something that doesn't fit your theology, you just allegorize it away.

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And replaced with a viewpoint that saw the physical, now you wonder who came up with this, that saw the physical attractiveness of women as a temptation to sin, and hence it was of the devil.

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This becomes, this is, when we get to Jerome, well actually, that's the next illustration, so we'll do that in a second.

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Celibacy becomes the ideal, and marriage becomes an impediment to the higher life.

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And so if you're a married man with children, it is just given that you have settled for a secondary spirituality.

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A secondary spirituality. And again, what does this illustrate? It illustrates a moving away from the scriptures as the, well,

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Sola Scriptura and Tota Scriptura, and illustrates what happens when philosophy, forms of philosophy, the views of society, end up determining how you read the scriptures that are there.

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As an example, Jerome and Paula. That's two, that's three words.

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Jerome, the great biblical scholar, and Paula. Now, this is 347 to 419,

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I think are the years for Jerome. And we'll be looking at Jerome more later on, because he had a huge impact in, well, he's going to translate the

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Latin Vulgate, which becomes the text of the Western Church, all the way up through the

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Reformation, and even to the point where the King James translators, it can fairly be said, were far more comfortable with Latin than they were with Greek.

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And even the advertisements, in the beginning of the 17th century, even advertisements for the

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Greek New Testament would be printed in Latin. So, Jerome's work, just absolutely, massively important.

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But in regards to this subject, Paula entered the monastic life, so there was already a female monasticism at this point in time, entered the monastic life under the influence of Jerome after becoming a widow.

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So she had been married, her husband died, she becomes a widow, so under the influence of Jerome, she enters the monastic life.

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She had had five children, one rather young, that she left to others to care for, making a pilgrimage to Palestine where she visited the recently rediscovered cross.

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So there's the rise in the fourth century of what will eventually become the trade and relics and things like that.

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The stone to the tomb, and the manger. So here in the fourth century, already these things are, well hey, you go over there today, they'll show you the same things, in multiple places.

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She then went to Egypt and prostrated herself before the desert fathers. She returned to Bethlehem and founded there a monastery for Jerome where she was abbess until 404

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A .D. She was tremendously generous, giving away all her personal funds and ending up indebting her daughter to a tremendous degree by the time of her death, having borrowed money at high rates of interest just to give it away.

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Paul became an example of the perfect nun, and many followed in her footsteps.

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Physically attractive, she did everything she could to hide and deface her beauty.

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She said, quote, I must disfigure my face, which I have often against the command of God, adorned with paint, torment the body which has participated in many idolatries, and atone for long laughing by constant weeping, end quote.

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She felt it was her duty to be as non -woman as possible so as to not cause men to stumble.

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So, it is, I think, important to recognize the impact that this type of development has for a long, long, long, long time.

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I mean, it really is. Most secular historians are not going to bring this out for other reasons, but the beginning of the women's movement, and not the negative aspects of the women's movement, but the positive aspects of the women's movement, is found in the

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Reformation. It is the Reformation that recovers a biblical view of marriage as the picture of the relationship of Christ with the church.

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It's the Reformation. You know, who did Luther marry?

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Catherine Von Bora was a former nun that escaped from the monastery in a pickle barrel. And, very early,

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Luther began preaching against these unbiblical vows. And, we will see

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Catherine, or Katie, his dear Katie, was absolutely central to Luther's survival, who had deep bouts, deep bouts of depression.

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And, it was only Katie who got him through those things. It's so long until we get to Luther.

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I'll go ahead and tell his story now, because you won't remember it by the time we get there. But, once Luther was in the basement in the dark, just in the deep throes of depression, and Katie comes down and she's wearing clothes of mourning.

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She sits down, weeping with Luther. And, Luther looks at her and goes,

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What's wrong with you? What happened? She says, Oh, God is dead.

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He says, You foolish woman. God can't die. And, she looks at him and says,

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Then, what are you doing? And, he's like, Stop ruining my foul mood by reminding me of truths that I already know.

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That kind of thing. So, it's really the

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Reformation. So, you're talking, when people want to, this is where you have to be able to define what

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Christianity is. You need to understand, for the vast majority of the world, Rome is Christianity.

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And so, Rome's history is Christian history. And therefore, there was a lengthy period of time where, in opposition to biblical truth, women were devalued.

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And so, the women's studies programs all over the place, are going to just hammer away on that.

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And, you can't deny it. It's true. But, you also have to say,

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It's true because it was unbiblical. They weren't practicing Sola Scriptura and Tota Scriptura.

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And, when you do, you get a balanced view that would not include these things. But, don't fall for the temptation.

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To deny what the reality was, just simply because, Wow, it looks bad. No, it was bad.

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But, why was it bad? And, why shouldn't it have happened? And, what are we doing today that demonstrates we recognize why that was bad, why it was wrong, and that we're not going to do the same thing today because of the source of authority that we have.

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That's why we do exegesis. That's why we do the things that we do in regards to handling the

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Word of God. So, Paula, Jerome, not a good thing. Not a good thing at all.

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Hate to stop at that point, but the next part in our outline, Mary, the ideal woman.

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Mary, the ideal woman. The rise of Mariolatry. That'll be the next topic. But, I'm not here for a while.

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So, it'll be a little while until we get to that one. Let's close the Word of Prayer.

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Father, we do thank you for this time, and we do ask, especially in light of what we have studied today, that once again, we would be focused upon your

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Word as our source of truth, balanced handling of it, recognition of its supremacy.

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May that even mark what we do as we go into worship you now and open your Word in the service.