45 - Crusades and Medieval Doctrines

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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We press on. I mean, we are actually making progress, shockingly enough. We will complete this someday.

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And in much less time than the Synoptic Gospels. Much less time. That was a decade.

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So we're going to finish this off before you know it. But we are still in the medieval period.

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And I believe, where did our official note taker go?

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Oh, there he is. Oh, well. Well, OK, we're on number 45. But we were at Innocent III, I believe.

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Yes, yes, yes, yes. We were looking at the expansion of papal power.

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Remember that after the pornography, the old saying, you can only go up from here.

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Once you hit rock bottom, the only place to go is up. And that's what, indeed, happened with papal power.

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And you remember Gregory VII, Hildebrand, and his disagreement with Henry IV, and how

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Henry had to come to Canossa, which was where the pope's retreat was, and made him wait for three days in the snow before letting him in.

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And then Henry crawled on his knees, asking for forgiveness from the pope. This might be considered to be one of the high points in papal power, as far as the idea of the two spheres of authority and the supremacy of the spiritual over the political.

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I think up until recent years, the papacy has always sort of hearkened back to these days and wished for the good old days, shall we say.

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And it's sort of like Muslims look back on that century after Muhammad, a century of expansion as the golden days.

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And many of the papalists look back on these days and, ah, wasn't it great when the pope had his due.

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The next of the great popes to look at is someone that you do need to keep in mind.

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That is Innocent III. I've always found, as I mentioned last week, the use of the taken name,

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Innocent, for anyone to be somewhat problematic.

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Innocent III, like I said, I didn't grab the pretty pens back there.

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Kelly's working on Sunday mornings now. Her shift changed, and so now I could use whatever color

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I want. Nobody would get to complain. But Innocent III, and his dates are 1161 to 1216.

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1161 to 1216. So what's it like to sit in a history class when you're doing it all the time?

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Is it just the same old thing? Same old, same old? Yes. It's a relief not to have to be doing that yourself. He becomes pope in 1198, so right at the beginning of the 13th century, right before the beginning of the 13th century.

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He was elected at 37 years of age. His view of the papacy can be seen in his likening.

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And this is very important in their thinking. I mentioned the two spheres. And so Innocent likened the papacy to the sun and the civil authorities to the moon.

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So as we know, the moon actually does not produce any light of its own.

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It is simply reflecting a greater light. And hence, from his perspective, this would indicate to us the reality that the papacy is actually the source of all authority, and that the civil authorities merely reflect that greater authority that is actually seen in the papacy.

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Like Gregory before him, Innocent had conflicts with secular rulers.

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For example, John of England disputed the appointment of the

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Archbishop of Canterbury. The chief, really the chief prelate in England.

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And so Innocent excommunicated John. And then he used what is called the interdict.

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Now this was a really specifically and nasty card to play, play to perform, whatever you might say from the clerical or religious side.

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What the interdict involves is the pope saying to all priests that they are to suspend all of their activities within a particular area.

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And so that would mean no religious services, no baptisms, no confirmations, no burials, until the king gave in.

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Now that wouldn't have nearly the impact today that it did then.

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But realize that from their perspective, the baptism of the child, there's a huge amount of infant mortality.

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This is before the plague, but there's still a huge amount of infant mortality. And so if your child can't be baptized, then your child is being banished to hell.

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And final rites before death, burial, Christian burial. I mean, you would think, looking at things from our perspective today, that this would make the pope look really bad in everybody's eyes.

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But there wasn't anything they could do about that. The pope spoke. What it did is it put huge pressure upon John, upon the secular ruler.

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And so John caved in, gave a papal tax of 1 ,000 marks, and made

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England a vassal state to the papacy. And so here's

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Innocent III, and he has tremendous power, wields tremendous power, even in the secular realm.

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We will see that he also engaged in some pretty amazing statements, religiously as well, at a later point in our study.

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And then finally, the last of these incredibly powerful popes,

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Boniface VIII, and let's see, 1234 to 1303.

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He struggled with Philip of France and Edward I of England. Philip and Edward were at war with one another.

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That's really not unusual for England and France, historically speaking. The issue revolved around a tax upon the clergy to help pay for the war.

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The papal bull, clericus laicus, forbade clergy to pay taxes to a temporal ruler.

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Edward replied with parliamentary action. Philip forbade money to go from France to Italy.

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So in other words, these kings now started using economic retribution toward the pope.

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And so what happened is Philip invaded Italy, and took

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Boniface prisoner. He was eventually released, but Philip kept a papal legate as a hostage, basically.

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And so you sort of see a downturn now at this point, where the response from the secular rulers is to use military force.

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And even though there would be a time, there was time coming when the pope would wear armor and lead an army, it was never a very large army.

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And so Italy and France, obviously, close neighbors.

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You can invade and do things, and that's exactly what takes place. You can sort of see a rise, and then the beginning of the downturn of the authority of the papacy at this particular period of time.

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Also during this period of time, and of course, the question always is, how do you organize dealing with historical subjects?

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If you can't do it strictly chronologically, because so many different things are going on in so many different realms, that you sort of have to cover things topically, generally.

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But we also have, during this time period, something we all know about, but not a lot about.

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We've heard about them, and they are called the Crusades. Hear a lot about them today, in light of the rise of militant

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Islam. It's interesting, it's not until the last, literally, decades that Muslim writers have started to use the

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Crusades as a religious thing. Up till then, it was just, from their perspective, it was just military campaigns, and just the sort of way things were.

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They've learned to use it, because of people in the West, they've learned to use it as a argument against Christianity and things like that.

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But at the time, they just viewed it as not so much religious as it was political. The Crusades last for about 200 years, about 1 ,100 to 1 ,300.

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The stated purposes was to win back land lost to the Muslims, especially in Palestine, but also in Spain and France.

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There were Crusades in Spain and France as well, because, as you recall, the

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Muslim expansion went across into what would be Spain, Portugal, and up into France.

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The expansion was ended, and the Crusades ended 732, Battle of Tours, Charles Martel, the hammer, and all those guys up there, and their whole dynasty, and all that kind of stuff.

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Anyway, and so there is a pushing back of the Muslims out of mainland

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Europe there in Spain, Portugal, those areas.

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What caused the Crusades? Well, the Seljuk Turks invaded Palestine, attacked

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Christians who were on pilgrimages to Jerusalem and other of the holy places. If you think that only today there is a lot of tourism in Israel, that's the case.

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It's been that way for a long time. And so in 1074, Gregory called for a crusade.

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Emperor Alexius from the east appealed to Pope Urban for help in 1095.

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So this is only, what, 50 years, around that 40, 50 years, 40, 40 years after the

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Great Split. It must have been a little bit embarrassing for Emperor Alexius to appeal to Pope Urban for help, but they did.

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There was, at this time, a European famine which made things difficult.

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Most of the crusaders, therefore, that went on the crusade, at least initially, were from the upper classes.

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There was also a real strong desire for trade in Europe at this time, especially material coming from the east, such as silk, pepper, cinnamon, things we take for granted had to come from the east.

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And the Muslims were threatening the trade routes that went through this particular area.

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So never forget economics. It's always lurking in there someplace.

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And things were boring in Europe during the Middle Ages. So you've got to admit, for a lot of these folks, it was a love of adventure.

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The pope promised, and it is true. You've heard this story, that if one wore the cross and were to die during the

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Crusades, that they would skip purgatory. In other words, they would receive a plenary indulgence and go straight into the presence of God as long as they were wearing the cross, and hence all the pictures of the paintings of the crusaders.

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The cross is very prominently there. And it's not overly shocking that most

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Muslims today believe the Christians actually worship the cross in light of the history that has existed down through the years.

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The first crusade began under Pope Urban in 1099.

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Now, realize, you can't, it's not like, even when everybody knew we were going to be invading

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Iraq, it still took time. Even with modern transportation and all the rest of that stuff, it still took time to stage the army and the materials and everything else, put it all together.

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Can you imagine when everybody's on horseback? And it literally takes months just to travel from one nation across a couple other nations to another nation, whatever else it might be.

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And so things just obviously can't move as quickly in the ancient world as they can today.

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The people were spurred on by the preaching of such notables as Peter the

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Hermit and Walter the Penniless. How would you like to have the name Walter the

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Penniless? I guess that was supposed to be a good thing. The journey was very long, fighting the

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Turks all the way. I mean, it's long ways from France and northern

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Italy and central Europe across, all the way down into Muslim lands there.

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They arrived at Constantinople and finally did arrive in Jerusalem and established the

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Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was sort of discussed. And what was that name of that movie?

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Kingdom of Heaven, is that what it was called? Yeah, Kingdom of Heaven. I'm not sure how many years ago that came out, but it was sort of what was being discussed there.

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And that Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted until 1187, so quite some time, quite some time.

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It was a medieval feudal kingdom, but the First Crusade basically was successful.

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But it left the people there in somewhat of a precarious situation.

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And so the Second Crusade was organized, but failed miserably.

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Bernard of Clairvaux was involved in getting it organized, but it became involved in many petty wars and finally an ambush in the gardens of Damascus in 1147.

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And it was a total failure. But then you have probably the most famous one.

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It's called the King's Crusade. Began in 1189 and ended in 1192.

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And this was the one led by Philip Augustus of France, Richard the

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Lionheart of England, and Frederick Barbarossa, the

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Holy Roman Emperor. So that's why it's called the King's Crusade. This was all the lovely people were involved.

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And the crusade was plagued by problems. Eventually, Philip took his army home.

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Said, enough of this. This isn't nearly as fun as I expected it to be. We're going home.

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Not enough pastries here. He was from France, remember? Now, it's interesting.

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Frederick Barbarossa was in his battle armor and fell off of his horse in a river and drowned.

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I don't want to fall into the water wearing armor. I don't think it floats well.

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And it'd be horrible to be trapped inside that stuff. And just knowing, I ain't getting out of here.

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This is, I've only got a few seconds left. And here we go. But they kept going under Richard the

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Lionheart. And they got within sight of Jerusalem. They could see it.

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But only got concessions from the Muslim leader to allow pilgrimage and pilgrims to enter in, and so on and so forth.

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But did not actually make it all the way to Jerusalem. The Fourth Crusade used the idea of, now, what's the problem?

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What's the problem? Here. It's a long ways to walk. It's a long ways to ride a horse.

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It's a long ways to carry food. It's a long, it's just too long. The Fourth Crusade used the idea of sailing to Egypt, rather than fighting through all the land routes.

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And besides that, the Muslims are figuring out there's only a certain number of ways to get here. So let's fortify these areas.

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Good strategy, poor economics. They got to Venice, but not to Egypt.

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The city -state of Zara was causing Venice some problems. And so the

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Venetians promised if the Crusaders would take Zara, then they would take them to Egypt.

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The Crusaders said, OK, and that's what they did. They took out the poor folks at Zara.

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And here's one of the great, massive blunders of history.

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Since they were in the neighborhood, they sat Constantinople while they were at it, too. Now, when

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I say massive blunders, Constantinople had stood as the gateway to Europe, holding back

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Muslim forces since the eighth century. And so if the

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Crusaders come along, and because there is animosity between the

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Venetians and these city -states like Venice were in constant competition for money.

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It was trade routes. It was all economics. And they owned the sea lanes. They had the navies.

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Since they used the opportunity to damage Constantinople to enrich themselves, then it's only going to be a couple centuries till the

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Muslim armies are at their gates because of the foolishness of their ancestors. But that's what happened.

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And they weakened Constantinople. And as you know, Constantinople falls in the middle of the 15th century and is very important, as we will see, to the

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Reformation and what took place during that time period. Then we had the

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Children's Crusade. This was made up of boys 18 and younger, led by Stephen and Nicholas.

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They felt that all the other Crusades had failed due to spiritual impurity, which probably wasn't an overly bad theory when you really think about it.

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And so they thought, let's take innocent young people.

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And because we're spiritually pure, then God will bless us.

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And we will just be able to walk right into Jerusalem and free it from the infidels. They marched to Genoa, where Stephen and Nicholas had promised that the

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Mediterranean would part for them. Now, that does solve all of your transportation issues when you think about it.

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Don't have to worry about ships going to Egypt. Don't have to worry about land routes. If the

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Mediterranean just splits for you, you just walk on through, and that sort of works.

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They get to Genoa, and you walk up to the seashore, and the

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Mediterranean didn't split for them. So the Genoese offered them three ships for transport, which they got on.

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And two of them disappeared. The third went to Egypt and sold everybody on it into slavery. So the

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Children's Crusade didn't go very well. The results of the

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Crusades, the object was not achieved, obviously. By 1291, the Crusader states had all collapsed.

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Feudalism in Europe was weakened by the movement of knights and lords who had to sell off land to be able to support themselves on their trip.

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This did help with the rise of the middle class. When feudalism breaks down, you've got these people that have some money, but not a lot.

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But they're no longer just scraping by, digging in the dirt.

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This new class established free cities that were not under the authority of a lord specifically.

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Hence, you start getting some semblances of democratic government or representative government and city councils that we'll end up seeing a lot of in the

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Reformation, especially in Zurich. Good example of something along those lines. Trade was enhanced, especially for Italy.

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And there was also a decrease in morality at this time as well.

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War tends to do that, and it didn't really matter if you had a cross on your shield or not.

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The Crusaders were not, as a group, the most holy of individuals one might recognize.

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So there you have a brief, very, very brief. There's much more that could be said. There's lots of movie fodder and everything else in that.

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But we press forward into some of the doctrinal development during this time as well, which might interest some of you a little bit more than some of the history.

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We've talked about this briefly before, but one issue to see is the development of purgatory and the treasury of merit.

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We mentioned earlier that Gregory I, Gregory the Great, the pope back 600 years earlier than this,

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Gregory the Great really pushed forward the idea of purgatory based upon 1

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Corinthians chapter 3 and some apocryphal works, which even he recognized were apocryphal works. Though, again, it's important to emphasize that purgatory as it exists, well,

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I was about to say as it exists today, but that's not really a fair statement either because I'm not 100 % certain that the current pope actually believes in purgatory.

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I don't think he believes in purgatory the way the Council of Constance defined it, or the

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Council of Florence, I'm sorry, defined it in the 15th century. But when you think of the fully developed doctrine of purgatory that would have been prevalent only 60 years ago within Roman Catholicism, the idea of literal suffering, indulgences, the scapular, the promise, if you wore the brown scapular, if you died wearing the brown scapular, that Mary would descend on the

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Saturday after your death to deliver your soul from purgatory, sort of hard.

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Today, a lot of Roman Catholics like to say, well, the church has never formally said that there's really time in purgatory.

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And it's like, yeah, look, if Mary is going to descend on the Saturday after your death, sort of hard to miss the time element of that.

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And for centuries, indulgences were measured in days, months, hours, weeks, so on and so forth.

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And it's really easy to try to spiritualize that later on. But it's painfully obvious what was believed at the time.

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Today, there's a lot of spiritualization of all of that, especially in Western Catholicism. I mean, you go to a lot of places in the world today, and that's not there, but certainly in the leadership.

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Anyway, Gregory I had made great strides, but there was still a lot to go until you get to the final doctrine of purgatory in, say, the 15th century, which was pretty much fixed until modern times when nothing is all that fixed anymore.

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You had the development of the doctrine. So we've got purgatory here.

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And then we have super irrigation. That is not super irrigation.

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Now, you might say, were you trying to be funny? No, but I did hear a radio debate between a

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Catholic apologist and a non -Catholic apologist where the non -Catholic apologist kept talking about super irrigation.

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And eventually, the Catholic apologist, I have to give him credit, he held off for a while.

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But eventually, the non -Catholic guy got nasty enough that he finally just went ahead and said, by the way, you've mispronounced it the entirety of this time.

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It's not super irrigation like you're overwatering the crops. It's super irrigation.

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It's a different word. And he was right. I mean, the guy he was debating, well -known for an ego the size of Mount Rushmore.

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But anyway, that's neither here nor there. Super irrigation developed out of the concept of purgatory.

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And it meant that when Christ or the apostles, the martyrs, died, their good works outnumbered their penitential debt.

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And so it's all based on, and we've discussed this briefly before, but it's all based upon this idea of temporal punishment for sin.

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If you commit a mortal sin, a mortal sin destroys the grace of justification, and you're no longer the friend of God.

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And you have to be re -justified. You lose, if you were justified by baptism, and you lose that grace of justification by the commission of mortal sin, so you have to be re -justified through the sacrament of penance.

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But then there are temporal punishments upon your soul for the sins you committed that have to be worked off in this life.

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And if they're not worked off in this life, then they have to be worked off in the life to come. Venial sins do not destroy the grace of justification.

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You remain justified. But there are temporal punishments for them as well.

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And if you have not suffered enough in this life, have not done penance properly in this life, then that's what purgatory is for.

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You can't have the temporal punishments cling to your soul when you die and go straight into the presence of God.

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So there must be a place of cleansing. And that cleansing is through suffering. And it's not through the sufferings of Christ, through your own sufferings.

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It's called the concept of satispassio, the suffering of atonement. And so the idea that developed during this time period was that one of the popes taught that Christ only needed to shed a single drop of blood to redeem the whole world.

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But since he shed his blood copiously, then there's all this extra merit that results from the shedding of his blood.

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Then Mary, likewise being sinless, had a tremendous amount of extra merit.

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And every saint, if you're a saint, and this is, again, mentioned this earlier.

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But in Roman Catholicism, you have two different kinds of saints. They recognize that the church doesn't know all the saints down through the ages.

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There are people who have died that will only know were saints later on. And then you have those who've been canonized by the church.

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Well, the church is just recognizing particular individuals in that way.

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They're not making them saints by that process. And there's many saints that have lived that have not been canonized by the church.

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So there's two different ways of looking at sainthood. A saint, technically, is a person who has more merit when they die than they have penitential debt.

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So in other words, the scales are even or tipped in your favor, one of the two.

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It's not negative. They're either even or positive. And so you don't have to go to purgatory. You're already cleansed.

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And so you can go directly into the presence of God. That's what a saint is. Well, what about those who scales tip positively in their side?

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They've got more merit than they actually need. Well, what happens to all this extra merit?

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Well, that's what the concept of supererogation is. And that is that all that extra merit of Jesus, Mary, and the saints goes into what's called the thesaurus meritorum.

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The thesaurus meritorum. I guess that's a cool phrase to be able to throw around at Thanksgiving parties or something,

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I guess. Say that again. Thesaurus meritorum.

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A little bit low for you there. What are you doing sitting in the back, bro? You trying to hide from people, or that?

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Or when you start putting your hand up, she can grab it and hold it down so that you're not doing a

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Hermione Granger in the front row. Anyway, the thesaurus meritorum, treasury of merit.

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And so all that extra merit goes somewhere. And it's controlled by the church. And it's controlled by the power of the keys.

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And so this is the idea that then gave rise, once you've got the thesaurus meritorum, well, what if the church makes a withdrawal, a transfer of funds, so to speak?

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Well, a withdrawal from the treasury of merit credited to an individual's account, basically, is called an indulgence.

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Ah, we are getting close to the Reformation, aren't we? An indulgence.

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And so that's the theology behind the concept of indulgences, which continues in the

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Roman Catholic Church to this day, as I mentioned before. Even Pope Frankie, just last year, during the

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Jubilee year, it had been the tradition during Jubilee years that there were certain cathedrals in the world.

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I think there were only like 12 of them. Maybe even five. I don't remember the exact number.

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But a very small number of cathedrals around the world that if you walked through these certain doors that are only open during the

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Jubilee year, all you got to do is walk through this door, you receive a plenary indulgence, say, a complete remission of all the temporal punishments of your sins up to that point in time.

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So you could almost wish that you walked to that door and get hit by a bus. Because then you're no purgatory for you.

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You're straight in. Well, Frankie, it became pretty clear that last year, those cathedrals were not getting much in the way of pilgrimage traffic.

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Not anything in comparison to what they had before. So he designated a whole bunch of others.

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Let's just throw open the doors to the Treasury of Merit. He's a good socialist. Why not? Bankrupt the thing.

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And so he's big into indulgences, plenary indulgences, and all the rest of that stuff, which you would go, well, that must mean he believes all that.

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And that's not really how it works. From his perspective, it's probably much more of just a very spiritualized type thing.

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The idea that there's actually a ledger of merits and demerits and stuff like that would not really fit into his thinking,

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I don't think. But anyway, indulgences remain, at least officially, the teaching of the church to this year by a long shot.

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You also have, as we will see in the Reformation, the relics trade, relics.

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It frequently shocks American Christians, because the

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US is so young. When we were over a few months ago in Germany, you'd visit these castles.

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And they're talking about stuff that happened hundreds of years before the founding of the

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United States. And you're visiting castles that are so much older than anything here, other than Indian ruins someplace, up the

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Montezuma's well, the Montezuma's castle, or something like that, would be as old as these things. But they're not nearly as grand, shall we say.

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Anyway, when you go over there, if you go into some of these

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Roman Catholic cathedrals, a lot of American Christians are like, there are skulls everywhere, and there's bones, and this is really weird.

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And it's the relics. And it's not nearly as shocking for them as it is for us, but we mentioned hagiolatry, hagios, the saints, hagioi, the holy ones.

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So hagiolatry, the veneration and worship of saints, that belief in the early church led to the rather gross collection of relics.

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A church that had many relics, or a good collection of relics, would have more status than one that had fewer.

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And you could boast that, well, our church has the left femur of St.

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Thomas, and that made your church more spiritual than somebody that only had the left toe of Pappius, or something like that.

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And so the collection of relics, and certainly you go into some of the

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Eastern churches, and entire rooms filled with pretty much all the bones of all the monks that have ever been in the nearby monastery.

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And most of us are just repelled by that. But for many of them, that's an indication of how long they've been in the faith, and a testimony to the continuity of the faith, and things like that.

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Just ways of thinking that you and I just sort of go, it's creepy, but they would look at us and go, what's with you people?

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So you have hagiolatry, the value of relics, and we will see when we get to Desiderius Erasmus that Erasmus loved to poke fun at the relic trade.

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I think his best quip by far was pointing out how many true pieces of the cross there were in Europe.

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He said, if you collected all the true pieces of the cross in Europe, you could build a ship with them. So he was undoubtedly quite correct about that, but also gave good insight into the fact that everybody knew this really wasn't a true piece of the cross.

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And the nails, the nails from the cross, there were tens of thousands of them.

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And it couldn't have, all you had to do is visit two or three collections before you started getting the idea.

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Might have to be somewhat skeptical about this, but skepticism was not the spirit of the age.

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Looking at the clock there, I am unfortunately in a difficult spot here, because the last two items here are rather important, in my opinion, and that is the development during this time period of the concept of the sacrifice of the mass.

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This is, I think, one of the most important doctrinal issues, and the formulation of the final orthodox concept of what we call transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the mass takes place at the

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Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, with the use of this specific

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Latin phrase, transubstantiation. In light of that,

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I don't want to rush it, but I would say that when I am often asked, when do you think the

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Roman Catholic Church came into existence? You know me, I have a strong aversion to that kind of question, as if one day there wasn't one, and the next day there was one.

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These are all matters of development over time. But if I am correct in understanding that the most definitional aspect of Roman Catholic theology is the sacrifice of the mass, then

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I would have to say 1215 is probably the best date. Wycliffe, for example, recognized that transubstantiation was a novelty, that it had only been defined barely 170 years before his day.

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And he was correct in recognizing that. And so what developed up to that, people such as Eratremnus, Radbertus, Gottschalk, great name,

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Gottschalk, that's a wonderful, wonderful term. Great name for a dog.

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I'm not sure I'd do a kid, but I think a dog named Gottschalk would be right on.

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But anyway, we will make that our next subject of discussion, and that'll get us into scholasticism and the rise of universities, the

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Inquisition, witchcraft, mysticism, and then pre -Reformation reformers.

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So we're moving on. We're going to get there. And we're going to get it done someday.

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It will happen. All right, let's close with a time of prayer. Father, once again, we do thank you for this opportunity of considering the past, of recognizing those who have come before us and their difficulties and trials, trues and untrues.

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We ask that we would be prepared in our hearts and minds to go into worship, Lord, that you would be honored and glorified in all that takes place in this next hour.