32 - Aftermath of Nicaea

All right, well, hello. Long time no see. Been a while since we've done this.

It's been at least a month, and maybe more. And I leave for Colorado in a couple weeks, the week after my 35th wedding anniversary coming up.

I can't believe that one. I remember when I got married, it was 35. Seemed like an old fogey to me.

You're still a young married. You're still a young married, yeah, right. I'm so glad I got married young.

I was 19, she was 18. Of course, what she says about herself, she was actually not born yet.

It must have been a prearranged marriage or something. But yeah, we were young, and that's why we can have grandchildren.

And my granddaughter is now figuring out how to do ages. And she's figured out that all she has to do is add 50 to her age to know how old

I am. Because we were married, right? She was born two days after my birthday. So she likes going, when

I'm five, you'll be 55. And I say, that's right. And very good.

Get that math going. Get that math going early, because she ain't going to get that from her mom, I guarantee you that.

Wow. Facts are facts. Hey, you don't have to put that one out there.

You can know. We haven't started the church history section yet. So no, no, we don't. We're getting all of it.

Now, she can fight back. She has her own webcast. But all she goes, yeah, you better believe it.

That's exactly how that works. So anyway, I wanted to try to press on to try to get at least a few weeks in, because then

I go up to Colorado. In August, I'm doing most of the preaching. And then I leave halfway through August.

London, Johannesburg, Durban. September's Europe. October's Dallas. November's Washington.

And it just goes on and on. We're actually scheduling. We're actually organizing a trip for next year.

I'm going to try to only go overseas twice next year. Only twice. But one of them will be a world tour.

We might as well call it the world tour, because it'll go Phoenix, London, London, South Africa, South Africa, Sydney, New Zealand, and then back.

So it will literally circle the globe. Let's just say my frequent flyer account's doing really good these days.

It's looking pretty good. But if we're ever going to finish church history before we ourselves are history, then we have to press on.

So if you'll recall, and I was trying to remember, my best recollection and John's best recollection is we spent a lot of time on the

Council of Nicaea. And see, George wasn't here when I was asking. So then

I snuck in a lesson on baptism for one week before I left.

And so my recollection is that what we need to look at is what happened after the

Council of Nicaea and then move on from there. Does that sound about right, Brother Soto?

You're just staring at the book there. Do you have the baptism lesson?

I do. And before that was Council of Nicaea, Homo Ossuus, Doctrine of God, all that kind of stuff?

OK, good. So what is extremely important to remember, if you're visiting, we are, as you can tell, in the middle of a church history series that we've been doing for quite some time now.

And we did this once back in the 1990s. I got through it in 52 lessons. We're already on lesson 32.

And we're nowhere near where we were then. So we're going a lot more slowly this time. Sorry about that. It's either age or something.

I don't know, one of the two. There's been more church to have history. No, no, no, no. No, it has nothing to do with it.

We're going much more in depth than we did the first time around, actually. And I've not had too many complaints about that.

But it's extremely important to remember that when we talk about the

Council of Nicaea, we talk about one of the ecumenical councils.

Now, what's ecumenical? Well, it comes from a term that reads worldwide, involving the entirety of the world.

And historically, most people identify seven ecumenical councils. Obviously, from our perspective, while we would appreciate especially the first four, you get much past that.

And you start getting into some fairly odd things that I know there are some Protestants that say,

I accept all seven ecumenical councils. Well, what they mean by that is as far as the major creedal statements made, they might agree, though I don't know how they handle

Second Nicaea. But anyway, but as far as the canons and decrees and the rest of that stuff, there's just no way you can be a

Protestant and agree with all seven ecumenical councils as far as what the council's actually taught.

But Nicaea, first one, but you need to realize nobody at Nicaea had any idea of what an ecumenical council was.

And once you have the state involved, and Constantine had called the council, he attended the council.

Now, he had very little to do with the deliberations or the conclusions. You'll find all sorts of silliness online about how he's the source of the term homoousius and stuff like that.

There's just absolutely no evidence of any of that. But once you start just a little bit of interaction, a little bit of connection, then from this point onward, when we start talking about what the emperors want theologically, when we start talking about basically the government siding with certain individuals and theological issues, this is going to become more and more and more prevalent.

Eventually, who is the Archbishop of Constantinople, who is the

Bishop of Rome, all of these things will have tremendous theological and political ramifications from now on, from now on.

And it eventually leads, approximately 600 years later, so it's not like it happens overnight, is very much a part of the deep, deep, deep corruption that overtakes the

Roman Sea and what you have for about 100, 120 years, what's called the pornocracy, just the utter corruption and degradation of the

Bishop of Rome and the See of Rome, the Chair of Peter in Rome, as Rome enters into its darkest period and the bishopric is sold to whoever the highest bidder is, and there aren't very many high bidders at that particular point in time.

So no one at the time of the Council of Nicaea could have foreseen this. And we look back and we invest in these councils' authority that at the time, they never dreamed that they really would eventually be seen as having.

And when we look at Nicaea, I'm always reminded of what Augustine said sometime early in the fifth century,

I don't know, somewhere around 405, somewhere in there. I'd have to look up the specifics. But he was writing to an

Arian. Maximin was his name. And he said to him, he said,

I cannot quote the authority or force the authority of the

Council of Nicaea upon you. And you cannot force the authority of the Council of Ariminum upon me.

Ariminum was a council that was held, I don't know, 15, 20 years later, that had more bishops at it than Nicaea did.

But it undercut Nicaea and denied the full deity of Christ.

And Augustine recognizes this contradiction between councils.

And he says, instead, let us come to what is common to both, that is, to the inspired scriptures.

And so Augustine, only less than 100 years later, is going to recognize the necessity and the centrality of scripture in deciding these issues, knowing that councils have disagreed on these matters.

Well, why would there have been councils after Nicaea that would disagree on these matters? Well, there are a bunch of them. In fact, one person described the period after Nicaea as being the roads being filled with galloping bishops going from one council to another.

Why? Well, because for a period of time,

Constantine is supportive of the decisions of the Council of Nicaea.

And there are three bishops that are banished, including Arius. The other two Egyptian bishops that would not sign the creed.

They're banished by governmental authority. And yet, there are still people.

Remember the three groups we described? I drew them on the board. There are still people in that middle group, the

Homo Eusebius group, that are a little flaky, a little not overly firm in their perspective.

And some of them, which we would call semi -Arians, become friendly with Constantine.

And so they're sort of putting things in his ears. And when

Constantine goes, his sons divide the empire up again. And that always leads to some form of disaster and eventually a civil war and fighting and so on and so forth.

And so one of his sons is a full -blown Arian. One of them is sort of semi -Arian. And so what happens is you have the

Arians coming to recognize that, you know what? If we can sort of get the government on our side, then we can progress theologically through the use of external force.

Now, this had never happened before. We had had divisions. We had had the

Donatist controversy. Well, the Donatist controversy is actually ongoing at that point. But the Novatian schism and things like that, there had been people who had been banished from the church by councils.

But the government had never been involved in these things before. Now that's changing. And the reality is you're never going to, until after the

Reformation, and even for a long period after the Reformation, it's still the same. I mean, the 30 Years' War, all these types of things, very much still state and church, very much intermingled and intertwined and so on and so forth.

But at least the Reformation laid the groundwork for a free church.

And eventually, you will again have theological issues being dealt with without governmental interference.

Certainly within the United States, in our own history, we know that there have been a number of theological controversies that have been dealt with where the government had absolutely, positively nothing to do with the outcome or with enforcing the decrees of a particular denomination or whatever else it might be.

That's a free church situation. But from Nicaea onward, that becomes the minority, not the majority experience.

And that complicates everything. And it's going to get a little tiring after a while, to be honest with you, to deal with all the politics that will become a part of what we're dealing with and that intertwining that takes place at that point in time.

So what happens, in other words, is there is an Arian resurgence after the

Council of Nicaea. The Arians didn't give up, even though Arius himself does begin to fade from the scene.

The Arians, within only a few years of Nicaea, gained the ascendancy, primarily through political machinations, to such an extent that Athanasius, who became bishop in Alexandria a few years after the

Council, I believe it was 328 off the top of my head. Over the next 20, 30 years,

Athanasius was forced out of his church five times by political action, normally enforced by police or by soldiers.

Sometimes they're coming through the front door while he's escaping out the back. And he has to live with the monks out in the desert.

He runs the church by secret epistle. The soldiers are looking all over the place for him.

Whether it's a true story or not, we don't know. But the story was told a number of times of soldiers that were out looking for Athanasius.

And they were paddling up the Nile River. And a group of monks are going the other direction.

And Athanasius is in the back of the boat with a cowl over his head. And the soldiers yell over, have you seen

Athanasius? And Athanasius yells back, he's not far. Just keep on going. And so he has to live his life in this cycle of kicked out, restored, kicked out, restored, kicked out, restored, depending on the political winds of the day and what's going on at that particular time.

And what is really important is that once these councils, like Ariminum and Sirmium, meet and reverse

Nicaea and take a moderating view, a middle view, so Jesus is sort of like God but not truly

God, they excommunicate Athanasius. So you have the power of the gathered church excommunicating him and making him an enemy of the faith, according to the church.

And when you look at the big names, there was only one really that stood with Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers.

But he was a very aged man and really couldn't do much and died during this period of time anyways.

And even the Bishop of Rome was kicked out of Rome and he wanted so much to get back that he signed the

Arianized Sirmium Creed. So even the Bishop of Rome gave in during this time period.

And Jerome, writing in the 5th century, would make the statement that the world awoke and was shocked to find itself

Arian. And so we always have to keep this in mind.

This is normally ignored, especially by the cults and isms that love to go after the

Council of Nicaea and say, ah, it's the only reason you believe in the Trinity is it was forced on you by Constantine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, if that's the case, then could someone explain to me why it is that very shortly after the

Council of Nicaea, it was no longer the majority view and for a number of decades in the middle of the 4th century,

Arianism reigned supreme in the vast majority of churches. And this is the time period where you get the saying,

Athanasius contramundum, Athanasius against the world. He stood pretty much alone.

And if you read his writings, if you read his writings against the Arians and on the incarnation, and they're excellent writings.

They really are excellent works to look at. It's, to me anyways, rather exciting.

I know that just basically says I'm weird. But to me, it's rather exciting to read someone from the middle of the 4th century arguing for the deity of Christ the same way

I do with Jehovah's Witnesses today, from the same text, making the same points. To me, there's something of that continuity.

It's not just us today dealing with that. This is something that's been dealt with for a very, very long time. But it was the very political nature of the actions of the

Arians that eventually led to their downfall. They were brutal to their opponents, which hardly showed the spirit of Christ.

And once they had power, they began to turn on each other. They did not have the theological argument.

They did not have the theological underpinning. Eusebius of Nicomedia, an

Arian, he was the one who had close ties with Constance, who was one of the

Constantians. I'm sorry, he's the one who took the east after Constantine's death.

Councils were called with frightening regularity, some defending Nicaea, others moving to a semi -Arian compromising position.

So confusing did this become that, well, I didn't realize

I had this in front of me. I gave it to you from memory before. But here is the direct quote from Augustine to Maximin.

I must not press the authority of Nicaea against you, nor you that of Ariminum against me. I do not acknowledge the one, you do not the other, but let us come to ground that is common to both, the testimony of the

Holy Scriptures. That was pretty close. That was a fairly close quotation. I mentioned

Hilary of Poitiers, Athanasius, they're deposed. Hoseus is deposed.

Liberius was the bishop of Rome who was compelled to sign the Arianized Creed and to admit fellowship with the

Arian leaders so as to regain the papal chair. And this is important, during this time a number of Arian missionaries went north into the

Germanic and Scandinavian areas, spreading Arian theology in their wake. The resulting beliefs would trouble the church for centuries to come.

And in fact, once Rome falls, it is Arianized Goths and Arianized tribes are the ones that invade and finally take

Rome. And for literally hundreds of years, Arianism remains the primary perspective in those areas.

With the death of Constantius, however, and the internal infighting of the Arians and semi -Arians, the

Nicene party having demonstrated their faithfulness against even military force, regained the ascendancy.

And the Council of Constantinople in 381, known as the Second Ecumenical Council, reaffirmed

Nicene orthodoxy and ended, at least on an official basis, the Arian conflict.

So you have, between 325 and 381, a tremendous amount of conflict that continues on.

So the idea that the church even believed that there was one bishop in Rome that could just answer all the questions and tell us what to believe.

Didn't believe that. Well, a council can determine. No, didn't believe that either.

And so when you encounter someone who looks back over and says, well, you see, you know, you wouldn't have all these differences if you just did it like the early church did it.

I'm not sure you want to do it the way the early church did it when you look at what happened after the Council of Nicaea.

It was a pretty messy thing for a long period of time. But you would think, well, you think about the conflicts that we have today.

And because of social media, because of the speed at which communication takes place today, we can have conflicts that glow white hot and then no one's even thinking about it two, three years later, sometimes two, three weeks later these days.

I mean, people's attention spans are really short. That just simply wasn't the case back then.

You think about it, decades, decades of fighting after the

Council of Nicaea. And you would think, well, well, everybody must have been pretty tired of that after that.

They must have turned their attention to something else. Not exactly. Because what happens is, all right,

Athanasius and everybody else. If you're going to say, then, if you're going to affirm the term homoousios, that Jesus is fully

God, he's not just a creature that's exalted or adoptionism or all the other things that are out there, then what is the relationship between the divine deity and the human in Christ?

This becomes the next question. And this will be the question from 381 to the middle of the fifth century, the 450s.

So you've got another 70 years. Now, thankfully, it's not quite on the level of the

Nicene stuff. You don't have the Roman soldiers running around doing theological stuff.

Rome's falling at this time. The Roman legions are pretty much no more. And the former

Roman Empire is breaking up into parts. And so on and so forth. We'll talk a little bit more about that later on.

But there are a number of questions, of course, that suggest themselves to our minds when we think about the divine and the human in Christ.

And I'm afraid that the vast majority of modern evangelicals have not, in any way, taken much time to look at this particular subject.

Now, I did. What I'll do is I'll just direct you to this so that we don't have to spend five, six weeks on it.

But about a year and a half, two years ago, somewhere around that time frame, maybe a little bit more.

I don't remember anymore. But I did a two and a half hour dividing line on Christology and on Eutychianism and Historianism and all the isms that develop at this particular time period.

And so if you are interested in really getting in depth on that, then you can take a look at that.

But basically, we can sort of break it down into, if you're thinking about the terminology that we use is the, uh -oh, where the kids play.

Yes, where the kids play. When I looked at the thing, it didn't look good.

There we go. The hypostatic union.

Whoa. There's a progressive rock song by a group called Grey Level called

Hypostatic Union. It's actually really good. It's like 13 minutes long, and it's filled with all sorts of theology.

But anyway. Shilin has a song called Hypostatic Union. Shilin has a song called Hypostatic Union. Well, that's good. Hypostatic is not the easiest word to rhyme, however.

I've noticed. Anyway. Hypostatic union is meant to not positively define how the divine nature and human nature in Christ are related.

But as is the case with almost anything, it's absolutely unique. What we're basically doing is saying, it's not this.

It's not this. It's not this. Therefore, it's this. But since this is absolutely unique, how do you describe something that's absolutely unique?

We generally learn by saying, had dinner yesterday afternoon with the family and with little

Clementine in January. And so when you talk with Clementine, she's four.

And she'll ask questions. And how do you answer a four -year -old's questions?

Very frequently, by analogy. Well, it's sort of like this. What does that taste like? Well, it tastes a little bit like chicken.

Everything tastes like chicken, evidently. And especially if you can fool a kid into thinking it tastes like chicken, to get him to try something new.

But we do analogy. It's like this. It's like that. There's only one problem.

As we noted with the doctrine of the Trinity, any analogy to the created order is automatically going to break down.

Because if God's nature is like the created order, then it's not actually unique. And so you can try to illustrate certain aspects of things.

But any illustration is going to break down. Well, the incarnation is absolutely unique as well.

So pretty much the best that we can do is to say, well, it's not that. And it's not that.

And it's not that. And it's not that. And so you sort of, it's like the truth is in the center.

And what you can do is negate all the stuff out here. And what you're left with is what's in the center.

You haven't really positively defined it. Because our language, our experience, really struggles to do anything like that.

But that's sort of what we're left with. And so, for example, one of the errors that was condemned during this time was that there is an intermixture of the divine and the human in Christ.

So the idea being that the divine nature and the human nature became intermixed together so that you now have a third substance that has never been known before, almost a demigod type thing.

And Christian theology said no, because now you have a new creature that is neither truly

God nor truly man. If the human nature is altered and is no longer human, then you don't have substitutionary atonement.

You don't have a man giving his life. And it's no longer, Jesus is no longer truly deity, because he's a demigod type thing.

So no, there can't be an intermixture. Well, another really famous issue at this time was

Bishop Nestorius. And Nestorius may be the victim of bad press and bad enemies.

I know something about this. I really know something about this. Even when the

Council of Chalcedon met in 451, and gave their definition, afterwards

Nestorius said, I believe that. And so sometimes the victors write the history.

And in this situation, Nestorius may not have been the originator of Nestorianism.

Let's just put it that way. There are Nestorians to this day in India and places like that.

Not very many, but there are a few that are still out there. And basically,

Nestorius objected to certain terminology.

During this time period, a very important word developed, which

I think I've talked to you about before, which I believe in modern Greek would be theotokos, yes?

Being the Erasmian pronunciation guy that I am, I would pronounce it theotokos.

But anyways. And tiktok means to give birth, so tokos, one giving birth.

The one who gives birth to God, God bearer. And initially, what the term was in reference to was not to marry.

I mean, it's applied to her, but the point is she is theotokos because the one who is conceived within her is truly deity.

So in other words, this would deny adoptionism. It's not that Jesus is just a guy who gets born and then gets adopted as the son of God later on.

The idea that the divine nature was joined to Jesus maybe at his baptism or at his birth or something like that.

The idea is that from conception, the hypostatic union already exists, and so the one who is born is truly

God. So that term originally was a Christological term.

It originally had to do with who Jesus was, not who Mary is. So when modern

Roman Catholicism uses this term as an exaltative of Mary, they've removed it from its historical underpinnings and its historical basis.

But Nestorius said, nah. Now, I'm not sure how you say that in Greek, but nah.

He was like, no, I can call her Christotokos.

I can call her Christ bearer, but I can't call her theotokos. And so what was attributed to Nestorius was that the human nature of Christ and the divine nature of Christ are somehow so separated that when

Jesus is born, he's not truly the God -man. And Nestorius says, that's not what

I meant. He was just simply saying, this is not a biblical term, and I'm not going to go there.

And so when the Council of Chalcedon met, here is the creedal statement that they produced.

And it was primarily aimed, well, it was aimed not only at Eutychianism, Nestorianism.

Again, it's that sort of trying to negate everything around the middle. It says, following the

Holy Fathers unanimously teach one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, complete as to his

Godhead, and complete as to his manhood. Truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.

Let me stop right there for a second and explain why I said that. Another of the errors was that Jesus didn't have, all he had was a physical body from the human nature, but no human soul or rational humanity.

That the Logos just simply replaced the spiritual aspect. So just a human body indwelt by God.

There were people who took that perspective. So you could, sort of in a sense, it's not really come up, but that's almost, it's got some close parallels to what the

United Pentecostal Church says today, in a sense. I'm not sure what they would do, because the

Son is, from their perspective, a creature. So I'm not sure exactly how the different ones handle,

I'm sure I've read at some point in the past, how they handle the relationship there and whether the Logos has replaced the, hard to say.

That'd be interesting. But anyways, there are those people who had said, and there's various forms of Polynarianism and so on and so forth, where the

Logos replaces the rational element of the human being. So basically, you've just got a zombie body with a divine nature inside.

So that's why I say, truly man of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, consubstantial with the

Father as to his Godhead, and consubstantial also with us as to his manhood.

You can see why, if that weren't the case, you really wouldn't have atonement.

I mean, God just sort of popping on a man suit and coming down and doing something is not what we're talking about when we talk about.

Think about how deprived our doctrine of justification and righteousness would be if Jesus did not fulfill

God's law through his entire life. Because our confession of faith speaks of the imputation of Christ's righteousness, both an active and passive obedience.

And that passive obedience is his obedience to God's law his entire life, that perfect human life that was given.

If you just pop on a man suit and come down and die, there is no passive obedience to that law to be imputed.

So, like unto us in all things yet without sin, as to his

Godhead, begotten of the Father before all worlds, but as to his manhood in these last days born for us men and for our salvation of the

Virgin Mary. Now, if you're familiar with the controversy that erupted right at a year ago in evangelical circles, well, it erupted into public notice and been around for a while.

Then you know, as to his Godhead, begotten of the

Father before all worlds. What does that mean? And many people hear that and automatically associate the term begotten with a temporal time -based act a long, long, long, long time ago.

The idea still being that there is a essential subordination of the son to the father.

When people hear the term begotten, that's the automatic thought that crosses their mind.

But when it says before all worlds, the point is this is a timeless relationship. This is a relationship term, not a creation term.

And so the idea is that the father is always the father and the son is always the son.

There is not a time when the father wasn't the father. There's not a time when the son was not the son. It's the intimacy of the relationship, not the idea that it came into existence at a point in time that is emphasized by that phraseology begotten of the father before all worlds.

But as to his manhood in these last days born for us men and for our salvation of the

Virgin Mary and then the term Theotokos is used, the mother of God, the

God -bearer. One and the same Christ, son, Lord, only begotten, known in or of two natures without confusion.

They're not confused with one another. Without conversion, so the divine doesn't change into something else, the human doesn't change into something else.

Without severance and without division. So these were against Eudaiches, against Nestorius.

These were, again, see what's going on here? Without this, so not that, without this, without that, you're denying the things out and about without actually defining positively what you've got in the middle.

The distinction of the natures being in no wise abolished by their union but the peculiarity of each nature being maintained and both concurring in one person and hypostasis.

So what are they saying? One person, two natures. One person, two natures.

Not two persons, two natures. One person, two natures. We confess not a son divided and sundered into two persons but one the same son and only begotten and God the word, our

Lord Jesus Christ, even as the prophet said before proclaimed concerning him and he himself has taught us and the symbol of the fathers has been handed down to us.

And so there you have in language what I was describing on the board, it's not this, it's not this, it's not this, it's not this, it's not this, and while it's not any of those things, that leaves this.

So without confusion, without conversion, without severance and without division. That's the negative definition of what the hypostatic union is.

And when people say, well, how many

Christians actually understand that? Well, let's, well,

I'll just ask you all while I get a sip of water. Before I read that just now, how many had read the creed from the

Council of Chalcedon sometime in the past? One, two, three, about three?

So if we, even if we just limit ourselves to what we would call

Bible -believing churches, conservative Bible -believing churches in America today, if we were to catch everybody on their way out trying to race the

Methodists to lunch, and they would take the time to stop long enough to answer a question, and we were to ask for a definition of the hypostatic union, what kind of percentage are we talking about?

Pretty small. So is this just something that's interesting in church history, something we really shouldn't be overly concerned about?

Well, there's a difference between ignorance of sound doctrine and positive profession of false doctrine.

Have to make that distinction. There's a lot of people that are ignorant of sound doctrine, no question about it.

But if you think about it, if you embrace any of these errors, consistently they will be will lead to further error.

So if you adopt adoptionism, or at least

Nestorianism as it's been historically defined, not as Nestorius would, I think, probably have wanted it to be known.

Eutychianism, if you start talking about intermixture, Eutychius is a demigod, or the idea that the logos takes over the rational part, all of this leads to fundamental problems consistently with the rest of the gospel.

Now how many people, now here's many people's salvation. Vast majority of people are never pushed to be consistent in their theology in the first place.

So most people have a very basic, simple faith that Jesus died on the cross, made atonement for sin,

I've repented of my sins and believe in him. He rose from the dead, he's coming again.

He's not just Michael the archangel or some creature, he's truly the son of God. And as to anything beyond that, how any of that relates to how, who

Jesus is relates to the gospel and things like that, most people are never pushed to do that, they're never pushed to think about that.

Now that's a problem because the world does ask questions. Remember we talked a little bit briefly about Celsus, one of the early enemies of the

Christian faith, and the enemies of the faith, they take the time to read our stuff and they come up with objections.

And if we haven't thought those objections through, our answers are often going to be significantly less than useful.

But that's where most people find themselves. And so, are these issues important?

Well, of course they are. But when you confess their importance, then what happens is people start running around going, so, have you thought about why

Eutychianism is so evil recently? People start going, no idea what you're talking about.

And it's scary when people jump on a hobby horse and start riding down the road, because they've figured something out.

We have to be very, very careful, very, very quickly, because we're out of time. The word begotten, what begotten means?

Created? No, no, it's a relationship. It has the same meaning as that begotten.

It's certainly related, that's a huge area of controversy right now, it's a huge area of discussion, but what

I said was, it's speaking of an eternal relationship, not one that began in time. The point is, it's not something that started, it would be the imperfect tense.

Is this where rationalism comes from, I see? Yes, yes, yes, yeah, right, right.

Big things there, we'll pick up at this point next time. All right, need to close in prayer.

Father, we do thank you for the time you've given to us to once again think about these important things. We ask that you would encourage us to recognize that we stand amongst many.

You have been faithful in building your church. May we learn from them, may we be faithful as you continue to build your church, even this day, we pray in Christ's name, amen.