22 - Allegorical School - Cyprian

Well, it's pretty unusual for us to have, every time the door opens you hear water pouring outside and we have our first leak in the sanctuary.

I'm sure that's probably due to certain people crawling around in the attic, I won't mention who that might have been, but all

I know is that slate roof up there was made sometime in the early fifties, so it's going to be lots of fun to have that thing repaired or replaced, one of the two, so it could be an interesting spring, so anyway, we press on with our study of church history.

I know it's New Year's Day and you're supposed to have some sort of very insightful little ditty about the progress of history or whatever, but I sort of figure, well, you can't really look forward to the future if you don't have an idea of where you've come from in the past and that's one of the major problems that we face in our society, in our world today is very few people have that knowledge of the past and as such are very easily manipulated in having an odd view of the future and last week we sort of snuck an extra lesson in on the subject of the celebration of Christmas and the

Incarnation and things relevant there too, but I felt like it still did fit with the church history theme anyways and did fit sort of in the time period that we are looking at, but returning to where we were, we are looking at what's called the

Alexandrian School and we're looking specifically at an individual by name of Origen, if you've been with us then you know that we have been looking at the development of a catechetical school, a school of instruction, it wasn't so much at the beginning a place of buildings and staff and things like that as we tend to think of universities and schools today, most schools in the past were focused upon an individual and would grow up around a particular teacher, very often he would be peripatetic, he would be walking about gathering disciples and things like that and we had noticed the founding of the school by Pantanus and then

Clement of Alexandria takes over at that point and then we have upon Clement's removal

Origen and we are looking at some of the interesting elements of Origen's life and then we start looking at some of the both, well

I suppose contribution can be taken both negatively and positively, you cannot ignore

Origen, his impact upon church history has been great, but that can be both positive and negative and hopefully one of the things we are beginning to learn as we look back at church history is we have to avoid

I think one of the most common ways or mindsets that people adopt in looking at history and that is the idea of well, if this was a bad guy then we will just ignore him, we don't want to be sullied, we don't want to get our hands dirtied, well that's just not really an option because to understand for example what is going to happen at the time of the

Renaissance and to understand a phrase that will become important there and that was ad fontes, to the source, this was the great cry of Renaissance humanism and humanism did not mean then what it means today, certainly there is a relationship but the idea was that there was a deep necessity to go back to the original sources, well why would you need to do that, well because you had something developed during the medieval period called scholasticism and scholasticism was very much involved in learning what certain great theologians had said and so to be a great theologian you just simply were repeating what other theologians had said and this led to a stifling obviously of inquiry and of scholarship and you keep tracing things back and ask well why did that happen, why did that happen and eventually one of the primary people you run into is the influence of origin and while it was not his intention, this is something that is important to recognize, people in the past had huge impacts upon church history who had absolutely no intention to do the things they did.

Many of you are familiar with Dave Hunt, the late Dave Hunt and some of his books,

Woman Rides the Beast and things like that, he wrote a number of books on the subject of Roman Catholicism, well he took what

I would call the brethren view of church history, he was deeply influenced by the brethren movement and from his perspective you could look at Augustine and because things

Augustine said became central in the development of what would become Roman Catholicism, well then you can just dismiss

Augustine as the first Roman Catholic and you can make connections in church history that the individuals at the time of their lives would have had no earthly idea why you were condemning them or you know as we will see when we get into Augustine, his doctrine of the church was very important in Roman Catholicism whereas his doctrine of grace is very important in the

Reformation, there were reasons for this and yes things that happened in his life eventually were a seed that would develop into the

Inquisition, so can't you blast Augustine for that? No, Augustine had no concept, no earthly idea that the decisions that he made in his life centuries later would lead to something such as the

Inquisition, but it's very very easy looking backwards into history to put on the inquisitorial robes in essence and condemn people right, left, and center who at the time would have had no earthly idea how their words or their ideas would eventually develop especially as those words and ideas would then interact with things that took place after their lives or in far -flung places, so it's again it's not a matter of compromising but it's a matter of recognizing that history is not this nice clean simple timeline that so often we encounter and hence we need to be a little bit careful, so we look at origin and origin for example is very important as an early scholar of examining the text and recognizing that there were variations that existed in the text of his day and we mentioned the hexapla, the parallel columned text that he produced and how important that was and how difficult that would have been in his day given the materials that would have been available to him and the amount of time that would have gone into that, but the greatest area of origins impact seems to be in the area of exegesis or we might even

I think properly say eisegesis reading into the text rather than reading out of the text and that is origin presented an allegorical methodology of interpretation that often led to the most fantastic and wild concepts.

One could easily fill the rest of our morning with the reading of examples from origin of allegorical interpretation or interpretations that would become commonplace in later centuries, but this came to fruition in origin's mind and this is what was going on.

In allegorical interpretation there are three senses, three senses.

The first is the literal sense of the text which from origins perspective was the least important, the least important and so that which we spend so much time making sure that we understand, have an accurate knowledge of, what did the author intend to convey to his audience, what would the initial audience have understood the author to be saying, what was the context of both the author and the initial audience to which he is communicating.

These things origin considered to be, well since they were pretty much accessible to anyone with just a little bit of elbow grease, a little bit of insight, a little bit of study, then that's not that's not really overly relevant and you do see here

I think an influence of a form of Gnosticism.

The idea being that well there needs to be a special spiritual experience of these things that will not be accessible to outsiders and so if a well -intentioned honest -hearted pagan can read the text and conclude that such -and -such a verse is teaching such -and -such a thing, that can't be all that important because it doesn't require a special spiritual aspect of these things.

And so the literal was the least important. Then there would be the moral sense, the moral sense, and so the idea being that anywhere in Scripture there was some type of moral warning or lesson or being presented in that particular text.

Even if it was a, from our perspective, merely a historical accounting of a certain event, there still had to be a moral sense because this would be, this would require more enlightenment.

This would be the next stage of enlightenment. You've got the literal, anybody can come up with that, but then not everyone's truly moral so there's the moral sense and that's a little bit more important.

That takes a little bit more work to get to, but then you have the spiritual or allegorical sense which is the most important and this is only accessible to the spiritually minded individual and you can imagine that there are certain kinds of Scripture that are really susceptible to wildly abusive allegorical interpretation and the most obvious, the two most obvious kinds would be what we're doing on Sunday mornings right now,

Pastor Frye's working through parables and parables by their very nature scream for some kind of allegorical interpretation.

This represents this, this represents that and so you can start putting together incredibly fanciful applications at that particular point in time and of course the problem with allegorical interpretation is where you end up pretty much depends upon the initial interpreter's definition of what is represented by the various signs and symbols and so what that means is allegorical interpretation will yield five, six, a dozen, a hundred different interpretations of the same text because there is no objective set of rules that can limit what you can insert into that particular text.

The other form of literature found particularly in the New Testament that is primarily subject to these things is of course apocalyptic and so interpretation particularly of the

Book of Revelation again as we see in our day opens itself up for a tremendously wide variety of interpretations depending on how you sense the spiritual application and things like that.

Now what was most what was most difficult here is after origin the

Old Testament primarily becomes a book of allegorical stories.

The connection historically to the people of Israel, the intimate connection didactically, teaching wise, doctrinally between the

Old Testament and the Book of Hebrews and everything all those citations in the

New Testament becomes functionally broken in well it's interesting you will even find in medieval period in the medieval period where you have there's a reason that certain of those centuries were called the

Dark Ages because once the Roman Empire breaks down as I've already mentioned to you six or seven times already but during that time period in many places in Europe you would never travel more than seven miles in any one direction from where you were born and hence education and knowledge of other ways and other ways of thinking there's time periods there where literacy is almost stamped out even amongst the amongst the clergy in Western Europe and so it's easy to understand how during those time periods especially you'd have real difficulties but even then you will find some people writing commentaries and when they're dealing with the literal the easy part they actually still see the connections between what's in the

Old Testament and the new and things like that but you see that was so under the influence of origin diminished in importance it was sort of left off to the side as a whatever and when it came to the real meaning of the text well you know you had to go back and well this scholar said this and he's quoting this guy and you get this this tradition that builds up over time my goodness

I feel like I'm about to turn into a roast beef sandwich up here I've got it set at 70 for crying out loud well it's 74 so I guess it's just all right there just turn the fan on turn the stinking heater off it's on in the back

I can't turn it off back there so anyway yeah we're all bundled up and and and all the ladies are going oh no don't turn it off all the guys

I'm dying up here is this is the age -old issue of who controls the thermostat but anyway so we we have it's difficult to underestimate the negative impact upon the the normative teaching and preaching of the church that the ascendancy of the allegorical method of interpretation represents it really is difficult it had a truly deleterious effect upon upon the church so those three senses remember just about anyone could understand the literal that was hardly important new

Christians receiving instruction could understand the moral truths but only advanced Christians could understand and recognize the allegorical or spiritual element of each passage and it's it's fascinating to look at interpretation because what would then happen is if you're looking for the allegorical meaning it's real easy to see in parables and things like that for example things that were relevant to what was going on in your world at that time and so you would see in evil people in the parables the evil people you were being opposed in your day whatever those evil people would happen to be hundred years later it might be somebody else and so you have this constantly changing you can't have an objective standard that calls the church to repentance when it's just when interpretation has fallen into this kind of a problem so as a result obviously one could find anything one wanted in any given passage as a result origins theology was anything but Orthodox just a couple of things that we can and again

I guess in any summary of worth of origins beliefs given that not everything that he wrote has even been translated into English yet it's it's somewhat of a temporary summary but he did not believe the resurrection to involve material bodies he believed the pre -existence of the human soul he felt that redemption would be extended to all beings including fallen angels so there was a there was in the early church a fairly widespread form of universalism there were those who held to a universalistic perspective and here's where it becomes important his view of Christ now remember where is origin teaching initially he's in Alexandria and then once he's sort of kicked out of Alexandria he goes to a motor member he founds a school that becomes competitive with Alexandria in Caesarea and Caesarea but he has huge impact upon the theology in Alexandria and what he does and this is not a biblical distinction this is not even a correctly grammatical distinction in many ways but in his discussions of Christ he ends up distinguishing between the oz and ha between God and the

God with the article which we would translate as the word the and while he does emphasize that Jesus is deity he makes this distinction now if you're trying to be kind to origin trying to maybe you know extend some kind of charity maybe this is simply his way to try to make the distinction between the father and the son and how

Jesus can be described as as God and yet needs to be distinguished from the father because there's just it just makes mincemeat out of the

New Testament to identify the father and the son as one person maybe this is just his way of doing so but once again teachings can end up having consequences that you did not expect that the that that would have down the road and we are going to see this distinction end up having a huge impact because origin you know this this would become start becoming popular you know in the middle of the third century and what is going to happen at the very beginning of the fourth century in Alexandria Egypt you're going to have the rise of an individual who is going to become very popular there by the of course becomes the great father of Aryanism and the result of the rise of areas and his teaching areas teaches there is a time when the

Sun was not there is a time when the Sun was not so the

Sun is a creature he's a highly exalted creature but he is simply a creature and in light of that the great controversy that comes out of areas then is the

Council of Nicaea in 325 you didn't really have any competition here

Gary's not here no one no one so we will we will be seeing now now was it was it origins intention to do this could could he have foreseen this no but you know theology matters theological teachings have consequences and and there you go there you have a rather negative result in regards to origin all right let's leave

Alexandria for a little while and let's talk about one of the leading light in North Africa and that is

Bishop Cyprian we've mentioned him in some context before 200 to 258 are his are his dates there really isn't a question that the greatest figure in the third century in North Africa is

Cyprian the martyr Bishop of Carthage if you know your church history you know that though almost no one talks about Carthage today

Carthage was a major major power in in the ancient world you might be familiar with the

Carthaginian wars and Rome and so on and so forth his full name don't worry about writing this down but just for the enjoyment of it was facius

Sicilius Cyprianus a wonderful Latin Latin name there must have been fun to learn how to spell that but anyway he was a

Carthaginian trained in Roman law he was ordained bishop in Carthage only in 249 dies in 258 so here's someone who makes a pretty big splash in just under a decade that happened to a lot of folks back then even though you look at someone like Augustine Augustine ends up having decades and decades and decades of ministry so I guess it all depends but he's ordained bishop in 249 and what was 249 well remember there when we talked about persecution when does persecution break out

Empire wide but right at this time period that's exactly when this is taking place so the timing was fortuitous there from his perspective

I would imagine he ran the church in Carthage by Epistle during the

Decian persecution in 250 to 251 so in other words he fled and then he having found a safe place would answer questions and give decisions so on so forth via letter via Epistle the issue of confessors granting some of their merit to the lapsi caused him to return to Carthage and what does that mean well a confessor of course would be a person who undergoes persecution is faithful to their confession and but they do not give in and are not well the martyrs would be confessors obviously but then you had those who were imprisoned those who were beaten those who were who lost a limb whatever else it might be and yet survived and were released and as when periods of persecution would end or just when they were back into the fellowship these individuals would have a special place as someone who had suffered for Christ and had been faithful in their suffering and so what happened is what started happening in Carthage is you would have someone who let's say they they were whipped and imprisoned by the

Romans for a number of years for being a Christian and then somehow they survive and they are released they come back into the fellowship of the church and what would happen is interestingly enough while you would think that they would make up the very core of the hardliners when it came to how to deal with the lapsed remember that there were different kinds of lapsing you had the

Sacrificati and the Levitic and so on and so forth well what's interesting is very often confessors would be the first ones to actually be on the other side they had gone through it they knew what it was like and so they began developing this idea that since they sort of had a special place of having been faithful that they could sort of share some of the merit that was theirs with someone who had lapsed to keep them in the fellowship and to sort of overcome the negatives of their having lapsed and so this they were just simply doing because they felt like they had the right to do it and it was obviously causing tremendous dissension in the church because you still had hardliners who were going no this person's an apostate

I honor your service to Christ your faithfulness but that was your faithfulness that's not his faithfulness and so once again as we've seen so many times it is the church's response and reaction to persecution that can cause so deep such a deep division and it all goes back to the theology that underlies all of this and so this was not something that Cyprian could deal with by letter you know there's certainly only things you can do by email you know there are just other things you've got to look people in the eye and you can see how this would be one of them when you've got people who may have lost an eye as a confessor and yet they're doing something that Cyprian saying you don't you know

I appreciate your your kindness and your graciousness but you don't have the right to do this type of thing it's it's theologically inappropriate and so he has to return to Carthage because of this and remember what we've already discussed this so we'll see if anyone can outrun

Sean to their notes we've got see that see George is at a disadvantage because he's toward the back of the room and it takes longer for sound to travel to the back of the room and then and then back up to me so Sean has a bit of a of an advantage at this point but what was what did we talk about earlier in regards to Cyprian and his theology that was so important to this subject oh oh

Sean's going anyone remember this is where what it's where did

Cyprian and Augustine now of course they don't live at the same time period but theologically where did they have their disagreement what was so important in regards to persecution

I'm just gonna stand here because I'm getting sad go ahead

Sean if you'd like to oh no you're not oh now you're not oh I see you made fun of me so now

I don't recall making fun of you at all I I just said you had the advantage of being a closer that's that's all

I said well I know that Cyprian and Augustine disagreed about how to deal with well what later became the

Donatas controversy they took opposite sides of how to deal with that and what was the important phrase that defines the difference between the two the ex opera operato right this is yeah

I suppose so I suppose so X opera operato versus and that's that's

Cyprian that that's that's Augustine X opera operon

T I think is close enough that's Cyprian's view and what was this about again well it has to do with how the sacraments function how they work and from Cyprian's perspective

X opera operon T the person performing the sacrament their state of grace whether they are in proper relationship to God is vitally important a pagan could not perform a

Christian baptism because he's a pagan and so he's not in right relationship to God and therefore there can be no flow of divine grace and power through one who is himself in rebellion against God so a sacrament of baptism for example could not be properly engaged in or performed by an individual who is not right with God so if you hold this perspective remember what happened with the

Donatas controversy you have the idea that there was a individual who had lapsed who had given over the scriptures under persecution and he was involved in ordaining a bishop which is a sacramental act and so that bishops not a true bishop because one of the people involved in ordaining him was not in right relationship to God and so from the

Donatas perspective following Cyprian I can't follow that bishop because he was not properly ordained because of the theology of ex opera operon

TV the one doing the the sacrament his spiritual state is relevant to the effectiveness of that action and so what's going to happen much later because you're talking over a hundred years is going to pass before Augustine comes along and now he's dealing with this deep schism and split in the church in North Africa with the

Donatas having as many as 700 bishops at one point in time and he develops a different understanding and that's ex opera operato operon

T means the one operating operato is by the operation itself and so by the operation itself a sacrament is because it is a sacrament established by God not because of who's doing it and so eventually what happens in the adoption of ex opera operato through the medieval period is a

Buddhist priest can validly baptize someone as long as it's done in the

Trinitarian mode doesn't matter who it does who it is it's the action itself being done in the name of the

Father Son and Holy Spirit that makes it valid and this then becomes one of the key issues in the issue of succession and the bishops and so on so forth in North Africa that was the huge controversy that was that was going on and what was really difficult for Augustine was trying to overcome the authority of Cyprian because when you die as a martyr bishop disagreeing with someone like that can get you in deep trouble with the people who honor the memory and the authority of that particular individual so we have ex opera operon

T and ex opera operato and these both I'm sorry my

Latin is is rusty should be ease not a's it's right there in the notes in front of me but it is very small print so anyway of this question it's an irrelevant question biblically speaking the idea of sacramental efficaciousness well if you want to see where I fall on that look at the debate between myself and Doug Wilson in 2004 and what do

I mean by that well well I'm glad you mentioned that because right now this sort of seems like something that happened back in North Africa has it relevant to us today how many of you are familiar with the strong divisions that existed between the northern and southern

Presbyterians only 150 years ago if you've read

Darby Hodge you might be surprised to be reading a

Presbyterian and all of a sudden you're reading one Presbyterian and they will accept Roman Catholic baptism as being a valid baptism and then you read another

Presbyterian and they won't even think of it it's not it's not even close well they're both

Presbyterians what what happened and it really it does go back historically to some of these conversations in the early church because a northern

Presbyterian even to this day I have I have friends I have Presbyterian friends who are convinced that they must accept as a valid Christian baptism now this obviously gets us into subjects of Covenant and Pato baptism and stuff we don't have time to develop in the next three minutes which is all we have left but they will not ask for the baptism of a

Roman Catholic convert they will they will straightforwardly say

Rome has a false gospel the Roman Catholics need to be evangelized they will invite people to to embrace

Christ and and and leave the bosom of Rome the whole nine yards but they'll accept Roman Catholic baptism as a valid baptism why because it was done in the

Trinitarian mode ex operato it was done a

Trinitarian mode and therefore it's a valid baptism and so when

I debated Doug Wilson in 2004 the the thesis was focused upon the idea that Roman Catholics are are and that we don't we don't have seatbelts on our chairs so so hold on but are are unregenerate brothers and sisters in Christ and the idea from his perspective is you you do

Roman Catholic evangelism by grabbing them by their baptism they have been by their baptism they have been brought into a relationship that now they need to live in light of and they're not living in light of it because of what

Rome teaches but you grab them by their baptism and of course my perspective is

Rome doesn't have a gospel therefore there is no way of even defining any action including baptism in any meaningful fashion outside of the gospel you can't what is what is

Christian baptism without the gospel how can you even begin to talk about such things doesn't make a lick of sense but that's where that's where it comes from and so the northern and southern

Presbyterians this was their division as well and given your beard you definitely be a southern

Presbyterian now you're definitely in the right group there but even though they lost the war so you're you're you're in trouble there but anyway so it does continue to have relevance especially amongst those who have a sacramental theology and when

I say sacrament sacramentum the idea within Roman Catholicism especially of a of a mechanism of transferring grace through what is done allegedly commanded by Christ to be done and the the line of balance has to do with the concept of means of grace that God has ordained and then specifying channels of grace that then can be controlled by human action that's where I think you end up crossing biblical lines and and so on and so forth so this was all based upon a misunderstanding to begin with as far as the early development of the sacraments you didn't have the seven sacraments yet in the days of Cyprian but they're expanding they're growing and would continue to do so for quite some time right sometime okay all right out of time let's close the time of the word of prayer

Heavenly Father once again as we have looked back upon your work in the building of your church we ask that once again you would give us insight that we might learn from the good and learn to avoid the bad that we would be forced back into your word that we would be thankful for the work that you've done in those in the past and gain confidence you will continue to build your church in the future as well we pray in Christ's name