Gnostics, Catholics, and Montanists

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Speaker: Ross Macdonald Chapter 4 (Needham, 2000 Years of Christ’s Power, vol. 1) Sunday Evening Study

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All right, so we are now in chapter four of Needham's study, and chapter four has three main focuses, three main foci,
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Gnostics, Catholics, and Montanists. Who here, just by show of hands, who here has heard of Gnostics or Gnosticism?
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Even if you don't know what it is, you've heard the term. All right, that's pretty good. Same question. Who here has heard of Montanism?
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Okay, all right, a lot less. That bears out pretty well.
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I think Gnosticism is something that is sort of recycled under the sun and is still with us in various forms, but Montanism, as you'll see tonight, may in fact be something that is still within us.
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That's sort of an open debate that even Needham raises. But we're looking at chapter four, Gnostics, Catholics, and Montanists.
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One of the most serious spiritual threats the Christian church has ever faced arose in the middle of the second century, roughly in the lifetime of Justin Martyr.
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We closed our study two weeks ago with the martyrdom of Justin Martyr, when he actually became not just Justin of Rome, but Justin Martyr.
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And this threat was the Gnostic movement. Now, in the New Testament, we have what we could call proto -Gnosticism.
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It's not exactly a full -fledged or articulate form of Gnosticism like you find around this time in the second century, but you certainly have things that seem like Gnostic ideas if we read between the lines or we look at what the
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New Testament apostles are reacting to in places like Colossians and in 1 John.
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But whatever proto -Gnosticism may have been or may have argued, you have fully developed an articulate
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Gnosticism widespread in the middle of the second century. Now, most of what we understood about Gnosticism was just reconstructed through the church fathers writing against it.
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That was true for about 1 ,800 years, where we would look at writings of Irenaeus, who we'll be talking about, or Tertullian, or Eusebius, and we would just try to reconstruct what the
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Gnostics had to say. But we didn't actually have any of their writings until 1945 in the town of Nag Hammadi in Egypt.
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A farmer, actually a group of farmers, discovered a large earthenware jar, and there was a collection of 13 codices, which would be the book form kind of wrapped in leather.
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These were written in Coptic, which is an ancient form of language.
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It's a proto -Egyptian language. And this has been called the Nag Hammadi corpus.
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You have here what you could find on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. Notice the Nag Hammadi scriptures,
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I'm not a big fan of that. The sacred Gnostic texts, again, not a big fan of that.
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But it shows you the kind of allure that this has. And ever since its discovery in 1945, it's been republished, and it's fascinated and pulled a lot of scholars, especially rather secular biblical scholars that are not committed to things that evangelicals are committed to.
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There's a way that the Nag Hammadi writings have become part of a larger conspiracy theory. And you'll find that this is often true of the way that the
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Gnostic writings are being recirculated and used today. When we speak of Gnosticism or the
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Gnostic movement, you must not think of it as a singular movement. This was no monolithic organization.
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There was an astonishing variety of sects within the Gnostic movement.
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They all had their own peculiarities and belief systems and structure, but they're held together by a few common threads.
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Several general Gnostic teachings held in common. The thing that they all hold together in common is they believe in a special knowledge.
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And that's where we get the word Gnostic from. In Greek, the word gnosis is knowledge.
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So they were always appealing to the fact that they had received a special knowledge, a secret knowledge that only they had access to.
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And this gnosis, this special knowledge was all that was needed to actually enter into eternal life in the heavenly state.
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So they all claim to have this knowledge. They said that it was passed down from Jesus secretly. It was not something that was available to the scriptures that the churches were circulating.
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It was taught secretly and it was maintained and passed down accordingly to their various sects.
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And so Jesus, they argued, had privately taught the secret knowledge to his apostles and had been passed on and handed down to the
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Gnostics. The secret knowledge or gnosis of the
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Gnostics was concerned with the true way of salvation. That's true of all sects, of all cults, right?
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We know the truth. We know the secret way. We know the way that no one else knows. We know the way of salvation that you can't get from the big church or from that notorious bishop.
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According to Gnostics, the whole physical world of space, time, and matter was evil. And here's where we see this term again.
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All Gnostics, though there were a massive variety of them, all of them were decidic. They did not believe that Jesus actually was human.
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They had various ways of articulating this, but the idea is if He's fleshly, if He's human,
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He's a part of space, time, and matter, then He's not pure. He's not divine. He's not heavenly. So there's this absolute antithesis between that which is composed of matter and that which is spiritual.
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We have here Needham's summary. The material world, Gnostics taught, had not been created by the supreme
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God, but by an inferior and foolish being called the demiurge, which is the
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Greek word for architect. They identified the demiurge with the God of the Old Testament, and therefore they regarded the
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Old Testament as an evil and an unspiritual book. They held that the human body was part of this evil material world, and salvation meant escaping from the body and from the world of space and time in which our body holds us prisoner.
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So for the Gnostics across the board, matter is evil. The only thing that has value is the soul, and the way of salvation is your soul escaping the body, escaping the world of matter and space and time.
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For Gnostics, humanity's great problem was not sin. The problem was our ignorance of our true spiritual nature and destiny.
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They argued that Christ solved this problem by giving us back this lost secret knowledge of who and what we really are and where we belong, not on the earth, not as dust of the earth.
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And of course, the condition that we are in is not because of sin, but rather just by virtue of the demiurge's evil creation.
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In order to return to the supreme God and reach the heavenly homeland of beauty and light, the soul, according to Gnostics, had to travel after death through the spiritual realms above this physical earth, and these realms were controlled by hostile demonic stars and planets.
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So to make the journey safely, the soul needed to possess this secret knowledge of the Gnostics. Some Gnostics viewed this knowledge in a very crude way as a series of magic passwords or spells.
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Others saw it in a more philosophical way as an inner awakening of the soul, an enlightenment about one's true spiritual identity and the way back to the spiritual homeland of heaven.
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Gnosticism, of course, was a formal religion. They called themselves Christians, they claimed to be the true
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Christians, and they were a formal developed rival to Catholic orthodoxy, and as such, that has vanished.
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Where is the Gnostic church today, properly speaking, capitalized? Well, it's gone.
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It hasn't been around for quite some time, but these broader beliefs, these buzzwords like enlightenment, inner awakening, my soul,
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I'm not really what this body says I am. I actually need to transcend my body and my creaturely creation and capacity, right?
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These things have persisted still. I have in the top corner there a Christian writer, Peter Jones.
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He's written on this through his ministry, Truth Exchange. This is a somewhat dated book, but it still holds true. He was seeing even decades ago that Gnosticism is alive and well, that there's various forms of it that are infecting certain
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Christian understanding like gangrene, and to the degree that you have heaven as an escape from world and matter, you have the gangrenous effect of Gnosticism.
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And so he wrote this really helpful little book, The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back, a more popular level account.
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Some of you are familiar with this best -selling multinational hit,
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The Da Vinci Code. Tom Hanks starred in a movie based off the novel. This is essentially repackaged
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Gnosticism, and you see within that the conspiracy element of, well, actually, there's a secret knowledge that is perverted by the
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Gospels and the Orthodox apostolic tradition. So subtle elements of the New Age movement and even pop conspiracies show a total overlap with this ancient heresy.
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Gnosticism is still with us. Here are some of the significant
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Gnostic teachers. Of course, there's, you know, 40, 50 easily that were all active and had various views and forms, but perhaps the most significant according to Needham, Basilides, who was there in Egypt, in Alexandria, a major center of learning, a major port for the
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Roman Empire. Valentinus in Rome, you have Valentinian Gnosticism. Basilides and Valentinus were both very similar.
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Marcian was somewhat different from them, as we'll see. He was a little more textually based and less prone to a lot of the wild claims about the eons and the principalities that Valentinus and Basilides were.
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Marcian is the arch -heretic of the second century, as Needham says.
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This is the supreme false teacher, the supreme Gnostic, and he taught in Rome around 140 to 155.
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There you have Marcian the heretic, Marcian hereticus. He was the son of a bishop. He broke away from the church, established his version of Gnosticism, and by the time of his death, he had followers all over the
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Roman Empire. They had their own church hierarchy. They were Marcianite bishops, Marcianite elders, or presbyters.
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Marcianites were persecuted and martyred alongside the Christians. The Romans were pagan. They weren't going to take the time to distinguish the finer points of theology.
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If you're claiming to be Christians, we'll persecute you as Christians. And so as Needham says, it wouldn't have been uncommon for both
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Orthodox Christians and Marcianites to find themselves in the same prison cell awaiting death for their faith.
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But the Orthodox disowned the Marcianites and called them Satan's martyrs. Marcian's teaching was much less strange and complicated than that of most
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Gnostics. He didn't speculate wildly about angels, eons, and the origin of the universe.
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What Marcian did do was carve up the Bible. Now, of course, the Bible is being circulated in various forms.
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You don't quite have Athanasius' Festal, you know, quite yet. That's a little ways off toward 367.
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You have various aspects of canonicity that are tied to this apostolic once -for -all delivered faith.
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But Marcian creates his own canon. He wanted to prove that the God of Judaism, that demiurge, that evil architect, was not the heavenly
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Father of Jesus Christ. And so he made his own New Testament. He threw out everything that had a
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Jewish scent to it. And so he only kept Luke's gospel, although he got rid of the first two chapters.
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That was far too Jewish as far as the genealogy is concerned. And he kept Paul's letters except for the pastorals.
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And within that, he also had several cuts and edits. Anything that was putting Judaism in a favorable light would be cut out, carved out by Marcian's canon.
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Enter the challenger to the arena, Irenaeus of Lyons. So he's in southern
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France. Perhaps the greatest heretic of the second century was
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Marcian. The greatest father of the second century would be Irenaeus. Here you have the greatest challenger and the greatest victor to arise at the same time.
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You can see God's wisdom in that. Irenaeus was the first great Christian theologian of the patristic age.
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He was born into a Christian family in Asia Minor. Notice Marcian also was born to a bishop in a
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Christian family in Asia Minor early in the second century. And here's what's fascinating. As a youth,
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Irenaeus was taught by Polycarp of Smyrna. Two weeks ago, we talked about Polycarp.
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He was the martyr that said, for 86 years, I've served my master and he's never done me wrong.
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And then he was brutally executed in the arena in front of 87 ,000 Roman spectators.
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That was Polycarp, the martyr. And here's Irenaeus as a boy, he was sitting under the sermons of Polycarp.
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Now as an old man at the age of 86, as he said, when Polycarp died a martyr's death, he had, of course, come full circle as the bridge between the apostolic era and now what is really the full swing of the second century.
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So Polycarp is sort of this figure that holds together the apostolic foundation to the first generation of Christianity.
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And so in his own youth, Polycarp had been taught by the apostle John himself.
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So think, you have Irenaeus, who as an elderly man is reflecting on being a boy and sitting under Polycarp, who as an old man was reflecting on being a boy and sitting under John the apostle,
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John the beloved. When Irenaeus shares about his mentor
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Polycarp, he shares this and I put in bold the things I'd like to emphasize. Can I have someone read
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Irenaeus for us? We really want to pay attention to the words in bold. Who wants to be
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Irenaeus that can speak nice and loud? Marie, deep voice.
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Blessed Polycarp used to sit when he preached his sermons, how he came in and went out, the manner of his life, what he looked like, the sermons he delivered to the people, and how he used to report his association with John and the others who had seen the
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Lord, how he used to relate their words and the things concerning the Lord he had heard from them, about his miracles and teachings.
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Polycarp had received all this from eyewitnesses of the Word of Life and related all these things in accordance with the
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Scriptures. I listened eagerly to these things of the time, by God's mercy, which were bestowed upon me, and I made notes of them, not on paper, but in my heart, and constantly by the grace of God, I meditate on them, faithfully.
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So notice what he's appealing to. He's remembering that Polycarp would reflect on what it was like to hear the testimonies about Jesus' teaching,
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Jesus' activity, his miracles, from those who were eyewitnesses. And that's not just John the
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Apostle, but many others who had seen the ministry of the risen Lord. And here again, you get the idea that there is this apostolic tradition, this eyewitness tradition, and it sounds a lot like what
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Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 15. I'm simply passing on to you that which I have also received.
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And he appeals to the eyewitnesses that were there to see the life and death and resurrection of the
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Lord. He relates to the teachings that he says are in accordance with the
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Scriptures. So hold these two things together. The eyewitness testimony about the Lord's teaching and the
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Lord's activity, the miracles that verify His divine identity, and all this is from eyewitness testimony, but it's related in accordance with the
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Scriptures. So you see, even in just this little reflection, two things coming to the fore.
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Scripture is based upon the actual verifiable eyewitness testimony of those who saw and could bear witness to these things.
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And within that, there's a certain authority of the record and the circulation of the writings that pertain to that eyewitness testimony.
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And so you have both the eyewitness and the Scriptures emerging as significant features of Irenaeus' thought.
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And this is very important for how he's going to argue against the heresies of his day. So he writes against the heresies.
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In fact, that's the Latin title of his great work. It's one massive work.
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It's often distributed in five volumes. If you kids are looking for quiz questions next week, that would be one of them.
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And he writes against the heresies, adversus heresies. He is one of the greatest minds of his age.
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This book has survived. He would have written it most likely in Greek. It's survived in Latin translation.
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It's come down to us completely intact. And it's absolutely priceless because it shows us what early
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Christians believed and how they were responding to heresies in their day. He also wrote another book, a rather shorter book in comparison, called
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The Proof of the Apostolic Preaching. Again, you can see his main concern is to hold on to this apostolic faith that he has received.
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The things that John laid down for Polycarp, that Polycarp laid down for Irenaeus, this is what he's seeking to lay down for others, that they all might stand in the things that are true.
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Needham writes, we learned several things about Irenaeus from his anti -Gnostic writings. He was well -educated.
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He knew both Greek philosophy and Greek poetry. He had a thorough knowledge of the Old Testament. And he was familiar with most of the documents which we know as the
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New Testament. In fact, the only letters that we have in our New Testament that he doesn't cite from are
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Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, and Jude. So you have, again, look at the function of eyewitness testimony, a faith, an apostolic faith being passed down in accordance with the
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Scriptures. This is in the middle of the second century. Gnostics, this is
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Irenaeus' argument. Here's how he's putting down the heretics. He pointed out
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Gnostics claim they had a secret knowledge passed on from Jesus and the apostles. But Irenaeus pointed out none of the
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Gnostic sects agreed on what that secret knowledge was. You have 50 different versions of the secret knowledge.
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So whose secret knowledge is it? Irenaeus argued that there were many churches which the apostles had actually founded or ministered, yet none of these apostolic churches knew anything about a so -called secret knowledge.
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On the contrary, they all taught the same Orthodox gospel which contradicted Gnostic beliefs.
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So he's saying you say that you have this alleged secret knowledge. You all disagree on it.
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It's supposedly been preserved and yet when we go to the places that the apostles ministered and the very churches that they founded that are still active, there is no secret knowledge.
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No one's talking about these things. Pretty good argument.
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Irenaeus demonstrated from the Bible that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the same
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God and that the creator of the universe is not some inferior demiurge but the heavenly father of Jesus Christ.
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Irenaeus argued that salvation did not come through any secret knowledge but through the life and death of Christ.
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He interpreted Christ as the second Adam who by his perfect obedience had reversed and canceled the disobedience of the first Adam.
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Irenaeus defended the goodness of creation. It was not the evil product of a demiurge but the noble workmanship of the heavenly father.
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He also affirmed against Gnostic docetism that Christ really took flesh, became a real man, really died, and really rose again.
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So Irenaeus' writing was devoted to maintaining the apostolic witness he had received, the faith once for all delivered.
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I don't know if I'm besmirching our departed Irenaeus in putting that but this is all he wants to do.
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Please, please, please keep holding on to the apostolic faith.
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Who wants to read a little excerpt? This is a small chunk of what he was writing in, especially the latter two -thirds of that great work against heresy is where he really develops his own doctrine, his own theological response.
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The first two volumes are largely just doing his homework. I understand this whole complex and diverse system.
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I know it inside out. He establishes that and then he responds to it in the latter two -thirds.
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This is just a small little chunk of his theology. And again, as different as the past 1800 years of church history has been, as foreign as it may feel to look at a patristic icon of Saint Irenaeus, I want you to see the common faith, the faith once for all delivered that we still confess today.
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Who would like to read Irenaeus for us? Greg. He was to destroy sin and rescue humanity from guilt, had to enter into the real condition of humanity, had been thrown into slavery and was held fast by death.
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He had to be human so that death might be slain by a human, and so that human beings might go forth into the slavery of death.
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For as through the disobedience of one man, the first man, fashioned out of the virgin soil, so many were made sinners.
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So it was necessary that through the obedience of one man, the first man to be born of a virgin, that many should be justified and receive salvation.
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That could be Sinclair Ferguson, right? And this is in the middle of the second century. So you notice that he's tying in this affirmation of creation and God's intention for a fallen creation in terms of redemption.
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And he's showing the necessity of the fact that this promise God made in Genesis 315 has been fulfilled in the person and work of Christ.
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This is the only man to be born of a virgin. Why is that significant? Because he's not actually carrying on the effects of the fall.
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He is the yes and the amen of that proto -evangelium, that gospel promise given to Eve after the fall.
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And what does that promise ultimately mean for us? That we would be justified and receive salvation.
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So you see this beautiful picture and development of how he's responding to Gnosticism in the same way that we might not be responding to Gnosticism and yet this is the very faith that we confess.
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The response of Irenaeus in the early church to Gnosticism had a great effect on the way the Christian faith developed in the patristic age.
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It prompted the church to place a strong emphasis on apostolic tradition. We saw that again, the eyewitness testimony, that which
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I've received, and that actually points toward a rule of faith. So the apostolic tradition is beginning to be pressured by heresies like Gnosticism, and that apostolic tradition, that steadfast orthodoxy is developed into a rule of faith.
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The rule of faith is simply this granite block of apostolic teaching in the midst of the shifting sands of a lot of heresy and conjecture.
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The rule of faith is a summary of the apostolic teaching. Brian Litvin defines the rule of faith as this, a confessional formula fixed neither in wording nor in content, yet following the same general pattern that summarized orthodox beliefs about the actions of God and Christ in the world.
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Its theological flow moves from the one creator, God, to His Son, Jesus Christ, who was prefigured in the
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Old Testament and openly revealed in the New. He was born of a virgin, ministered, suffered, died, rose again, and ascended to heaven.
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The apostolic spirit -led church awaits His return to resurrect the dead and dispense eternal punishments or rewards.
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So that's Litvin's definition of the rule of faith that's often appealed to in this context of the second century through Irenaeus and ever after.
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The rule of faith used in the Roman church developed into what has become well known in the West as the Apostles' Creed.
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Donald Fairburn points out, the Apostles' Creed underwent a long history of development, not reaching its final form until the early eighth century.
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Some call earlier versions the Old Roman Creed and reserve the name Apostles' Creed for the document as it developed from 400 to 700.
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Instead of a single creed with a fixed form throughout Christian history, there were many creeds with variations in wording and these creeds gradually assumed fixed forms.
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And the goal here is you want to see that the pressures of heresy and the need to maintain apostolic orthodoxy are what are driving the church toward a rule of faith.
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What is it that the apostles have laid down? What is the faith once for all delivered that we are called to contend for?
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So we have the Roman Creed or the Apostles' Creed. You'll note how similar this is to the
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Nicene Creed that we'll close with this evening. This is the final form in the early eighth century.
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But you have various forms, even going back to the second century, where you have most of this language with perhaps different word order or a few phrases added or taken away.
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Not because of any disagreement, but because these doctrines, this rule of faith was being developed in response to pressures and demands both within and without.
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I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only son, our
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Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried.
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He descended into hell, either later development with a lot of controversy. On the third day, he rose again from the dead.
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He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. From there, he will come to judge the living and the dead.
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I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.
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Amen. This is essentially what Irenaeus is getting at through five volumes of responding to Gnosticism.
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This is the apostolic faith. Now, the rule of faith also helps us define
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Catholicity. I was torn between this or the...I got a little giggle, that's good, or the princess bride meme.
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You keep using that word, but I don't think you know what it means. Catholic to us is a word that we distinguish ourselves against.
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I'm not Catholic, I'm Protestant. I'm not Catholic, I'm Baptist. But, of course,
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Catholic in the context of the Roman creed, Catholic in the sense that we're talking about this period in church history, it's simply meaning universal.
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That is what that Greek term, Catholicos, means. It means universal. And so, Catholicity is that which we have in common across the expanse, that which we have in common, you could say, globally, universally.
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And so, the rule of faith that's being developed through the second century, through the third and the fourth century, that rule of faith also helps define or give contours to the church
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Catholic, the church universal, those who are truly believers and those who are truly not.
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The church acquired a new name for itself from the Gnostic controversy. It called itself the Catholic church.
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As in the Apostles' Creed, I believe in the holy Catholic church. It is essential not to confuse
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Catholic with Roman Catholic. We give the title Roman Catholic to that branch of the
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Western church, which in the 16th century, so think about that, we're in the 200s about, right, 150s to 200s.
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In the 1500s, only as a result of, say, the Council of Trent, do you have something recognizably
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Roman Catholic in church history. So, we have to be very careful about not reading
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Roman Catholicism as we know it today, post -Reformation, back into the early centuries of the church.
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We give the title Roman Catholic to that branch of the Western church, which in the 16th century, rejected the
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Protestant Reformation. It was only at that point in history that what we today think of as Roman Catholicism really came into being, as Rome defined its theology and practice much more clearly in opposition to Protestant views.
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But here, in the context of the early church, by calling itself Catholic, the early church was setting itself apart from Gnosticism.
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The result of the Gnostic controversy was that the early church developed a number of special features, an emphasis on orthodoxy, unity, tightly controlled church organization and discipline, and the importance of standing in the line of apostolic tradition, which developed into the doctrine of apostolic succession.
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These features gave the early church its unique identity as the Catholic church. And I would add to that, rightly understood, we still confess and ought to confess the one holy
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Catholic and apostolic church. Let's talk about Montanism.
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This is the last thing we're going to talk about this evening. We talked about Gnosticism, we talked about Catholics, and now the last tripartite division,
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Montanism. Montanism is named after Montanus, who was a young convert to Christianity.
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He came on the scene in the region of Asia Minor. Notice how all these things come out of Asia Minor, known as Phrygia, and this was known as the
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Phrygian view or the Phrygian heresy, a few decades after Marcion was teaching, AD 170.
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And he began to prophesy. He was joined by two prophetesses, self -proclaimed,
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Priscilla and Maximilla. They claimed that the Holy Spirit was speaking in a new way to the church directly through them.
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They appealed to John 14 and 16, where the Holy Spirit is spoken of as the helper or the parakletos in Greek, paraklete.
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And that's how they referred to the Holy Spirit. Or also in John 16, the spirit of truth. Jesus says, you're not able to receive these things, but I will send you the spirit of truth who will reveal these things to you.
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And they believe that in their giftedness and their prophetic activity, that they actually had received the spirit of truth and now would be able to reveal to the church that which the church needed for guidance and for doctrine.
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So the spirit of truth had now come to the church in Montanus, Priscilla and Maximilla, and was now leading believers into the promised fullness of truth.
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Montanus referred to their movement as the new prophecy. Montanus taught a severe moral code.
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Among the distinctive teachings of the new prophecy were an absolute ban on second marriages in every circumstance, an obligation to frequently fast, only to eat dried food.
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I hope you're a big fan of beef jerky. Like I love beef jerky, but exclusively, oh boy.
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The veiling of virgins, the rejection of forgiveness for serious sins committed after baptism, yikes, and commands from the paraclete that Christians must never seek to escape persecution and martyrdom, but must embrace them eagerly.
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You have to embrace it. You must never flee. You must never run away. You must never go to the hills of Jerusalem.
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You must never be let down the wall in a basket. You must always face the music. It was in this area of ethical behavior, rather than theological doctrine, that Montanism produced new revelations.
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So that the key there is they weren't claiming to have these divine oracles so much as this new divine way, a new ethical code that would lead
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Christians into the way of truth. That's a really important point. The Montanist prophets offered no new doctrinal revelations.
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Their main message was the nearness of the second coming of Christ. As Maximilla prophesied, after me, there will be no more prophecy, but the end.
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A lot of familiarity throughout church history with groups that claim to have some divinely inspired revelation of God's coming.
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You think of the great disappointment of 1844, right? And I imagine the scene with just different costumes is what it looked like.
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Well, the sun's starting to set. Suppose we turn in for the night. I love the
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Montanism for dummies, by the way. Great choice. Visions, revelatory dreams, speaking in tongues, whether this was unutterable language or known languages, prophetic utterances of prediction and of divine comfort and rebuke, and other extraordinary religious experience also abounded among the
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Montanists. They renamed their community in Phrygia, Jerusalem. They may have believed it to be the spot where Christ would descend from heaven and reign over the earth.
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Now, how did the early church receive Montanism? Again, it's just like Gnosticism before the
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Nag Hammadi Corpus. We actually don't know, we don't have a lot of access to what the Montanists wrote.
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A lot of it is largely reconstructed through Tertullian, who was a
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Montanist, though he was a great father and important leader in the early church. So the early reception of Montanism, and with that, you shouldn't say
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Montanism as it became, or as it might have been in certain fringe areas, may not have been the
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Montanism that Tertullian embraced. But you get the sense that in the early encounters with Montanism, several of the leading figures in the church were somewhat cautious.
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You could say open, but cautious. Irenaeus advocated a rather gentle approach. Tertullian actually just became one.
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If you can't beat him, join him. But eventually, in time, this reception became rather divisive.
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And the division seemed to be between, do we move after the way that this alleged spirit of truth, this paraclete, seems to be moving and giving all sorts of divine miracles and examples of activity, or do we need to be unifying ourselves around the apostolic faith once for all given?
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And so with later reception, broadly speaking, ordinary Christians were highly suspicious of the
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Montanist prophecies, visions, speaking in tongues, the cult of martyrdom, and the general state of religious intensity and enthusiasm.
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Needham says, to Catholics, Montanists seemed like spiritual drunkards. To Montanists, Catholics seemed like spiritual corpses.
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So the Catholics, like, what are you guys doing? This is all unfettered enthusiasm.
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But to the Montanists, you're just a dead faith. You need the
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Holy Spirit. I was at a cookout, and a fine brother,
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I'm sure, who goes between a few different charismatic churches, and he said, oh, tell me about the church where you're at.
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I said, oh, it's just an independent Baptist church, you know, a foreign Baptist church. And he's like, oh, okay.
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He says, I want to tell you, I just got to tell you, the thing that's the biggest for me is the Holy Spirit. And he's kind of, you know, looking at me like, do you believe in the
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Holy Spirit? I'm like, yes, I do. I fully agree with you. And he's like,
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I'll tell you, you really need the Holy Spirit. I'm like, amen, brother. I know what to tell you.
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I know you think I'm missing something. I know you're looking at me like that. You see the same tension in the second century.
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Boy, it seems very familiar to us today, doesn't it? So what was the end of Montanism?
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Well, in Asia Minor, the apostolic need for unity and organization and orthodoxy won out.
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At the end of the day, for all of its virtues and strengths, Montanism was just too loose and it was able to,
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I think, it was not able to actually withstand a lot of the challenges of the second century church.
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In Asia Minor, the church excommunicated all Montanists in a series of local councils of bishops, the first such councils we know of in church history.
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In spite of Irenaeus's advice for caution, Montanism was condemned in Rome as well. And once you have it condemned in Rome, that pretty much seals the fate everywhere else.
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Montanism survived until the fifth century in Africa and the sixth century in Phrygia.
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It all but went extinct as a formal aspect of the early church.
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Many of the Montanist prophecies did not come true. For example, we remember that Maximilla prophesied, after me, there will be no more prophecy but the end.
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Maximilla died about AD 179 and the end didn't come. Such things weaken the credibility of all
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Montanist prophets and their utterances. The rise of Montanism forces us to ask important historical questions about the supernatural gifts of the
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Holy Spirit in the age of the apostles, prophecy, tongues, miraculous healings, the kind of things you read of at Pentecost or in the book of Acts or even in Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth.
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Whether they continued in the church after the first century, the evidence, according to Needham, suggests that these gifts did continue in the church but that they were far less common in the second century.
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Montanism would probably not have created the sensation it did create if these spiritual phenomena had been part of the normal Christian life among believers.
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I think that's a rather helpful argument, right? This made a splash and was attractive to a lot, most likely because these kinds of experiences and phenomena were not typical and were not universal among the church at that time.
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Not long after the age of the apostles, the supernatural gifts of the Spirit probably ceased to be part of the ordinary life of the average church.
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There were still traces of them, signs and wonders, among a few, as Origen said, but already by his time,
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Christians were looking back to the first century AD as the great period of extraordinary spiritual gifts.
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This at least would explain why Montanism aroused such enthusiasm among those who believed in its divine origin.
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They saw it as a fresh outpouring of the Spirit. More than this, they interpreted it as a sign of the nearness of the
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Lord's return, which of course added to the excitement, right? These gifts are being wrought out by us because the
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Lord is about to return. And so He's giving us these signs, He's using the phenomena, He's verifying our prophecies, and therefore
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He really is about to return. That's the idea. So the question is, how do we understand the spirit of Pentecost, both lowercase s and capital
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S? This is an icon of the apostles receiving the descent of the
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Spirit at Pentecost. In Greek, you have He Pentecoste, the Pentecost. The spirit of Pentecost.
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Montanism, Needham writes, was the first manifestation of a particular form of Christianity, which has appeared several times in the course of church history, right?
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It's not just with Montanists and then again at the Azusa Street Revival of 1906. You have a lot of examples through this.
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You have this preceding in the Middle Ages with Hildegard of Bingen. You have this during the
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Reformation. You have this in the 18th century with William Irving. You have a lot of examples of this, though far and few between throughout church history.
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Today, we would call it Pentecostal or Charismatic. Many modern Pentecostals and Charismatics actually look back to the
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Montanists as their spiritual ancestors. However, there are differences. Not many of today's
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Pentecostals and Charismatics would share the Montanist enthusiasm for fasting, celibacy, and martyrdom.
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But these were essential to Montanism and also a lot of beef jerky, I think. Part of the new prophecies revelation of how true
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Christians were to live in the light of Christ's imminent return. So I don't know.
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Is this really what's going on? Is Montanism behind all future forms of the
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Charismatic phenomena or Pentecostalism? You be the judge. But here's some questions that Needham poses.
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This is really what the church was trying to understand. And in my mind, these questions get at why the hegemony and hierarchy of the
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Western Catholic Church ended up prevailing. So again, if you're situating yourself in the second century, this is what the church is grappling with.
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This is why Apostolic Orthodoxy prevails. How could the Apostolic writings be the final rule for Christian beliefs and practices if the
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Montanist prophecies were genuine with their new revelations about how Christians were to live? You see that tension?
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Do we rely simply on what the apostles laid down and all we do is cling to it and defend it and continue to pass it down?
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Or do we no longer need to cling to it because we have a new revelation that we are to follow? That's a tension. And why should bishops devoted to maintaining the
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Apostolic tradition be so important in church life if the Holy Spirit himself was present in his
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Montanist prophets to lead and to guide? They have a conflict with how the church establishes authority to maintain
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Apostolic Orthodoxy. Do you actually go with what is becoming Apostolic succession?
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Or do you go with that, you know, the phenomena of spiritual gifting and those who claim to have utterances from the
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Holy Spirit? That's another tension. Finally, arising out of all this, Montanism created division and controversy at the very time when the early
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Catholic church and its bishops were striving for unity and stability against the Gnostics. This was a threat.
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This was a movement that jeopardized the ability to have Apostolic unity and stability.
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So it's another tension that I think explains why Montanism did not survive. And yet, this movement of Montanism would play into the church's need with further deviations and heresies to come to articulate a biblical doctrine of the
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Holy Spirit. And this, to me, is a really important point. What you've seen in the
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Apostolic Creed, and frankly, if I gave you the version of the Nicene Creed that was established in 325 and not the later revision of that at Constantinople, you would notice that we have a lot to say about God the
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Father. We have a lot to say about God the Son. The only thing we say about the Holy Spirit is I believe in the
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Holy Spirit. That was from this time going up to 325.
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That's the most they would confess. And so you get the sense that because of this movement of Montanism, a lot of the church fathers are beginning to grapple with how do we understand the presence and power and work of the
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Holy Spirit? How do we articulate, in other words, a theology of the Holy Spirit? And so you can see in God's providence that he uses the crooked stick of Montanism, if we could call it that, to begin to draw the straight line of pneumatology or the doctrine of the
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Holy Spirit. And so that is all we have other than questions now.
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So we've got a little bit of time for questions before we recite the
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Creed. I can go back to slides if that would be helpful at all.
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I really love that Leo one that's classic, but I don't know. I'm sorry if the memes are throwing people off.
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I get a kick out of it. Yeah, that's something that I believe we're going to be getting to.
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And so I want to be brief about it now. But of course, this is not just a claim against Mormons or Jehovah's Witness, but even in our discussions with Catholics, like Roman Catholics, not
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Catholics in the way that we're trying to think about it tonight, but Roman Catholics. The idea is one of the reasons you must rely on the authority of the
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Roman Church is we tell you what the canon is. We establish the canon. And so their view could largely be summarized as the church has built the canon.
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And the Protestant view would be like, no, the canon has built the church, right? The apostolic faith is the foundation upon which the church is built.
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That apostolic tradition is contained in and has been inspired by God in the canon, which there's various aspects of how we understand that canon, even across historical development.
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But essentially, that is the central claim. Is there a church or tradition that has authority over the canon?
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Or does the canon, the church actually rest upon the authority of the canon? That's the issue at stake.
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And so I think we can maybe speak to the particulars of how we identify what we could call canonicity when we get there.
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But you should know, as I said, you know, Irenaeus, right, working with this incredible, expansive knowledge of the
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Old Testament and almost all of the New Testament. But that's still, you know, the latter end of the second century is a long way away from the
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Festal Letter of Athanasius. And what you see as documents that show early Christians really getting their hands around the canon that is approved of and seen as apostolic by all.
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And so that takes some time to develop the list, but that doesn't mean that they weren't appealing to scripture or did not view it authoritatively until that time.
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And that's why I had that little excerpt from Irenaeus. He's even talking about eyewitness testimony.
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He says, these things were shared in accordance with the scriptures. Where does that phrase come from?
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It's just what Paul says, you know, and he was, you know, I receive,
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I pass on that, which I've also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures. And so they have this understanding and they're keying into it's always in accordance with the scriptures.
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But of course, access, you know, circulation, these things are all part of canonical lists and ways that the church is able to hold.
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So we'll get to the arguments in particular, but you're putting your finger on a really important point. Yeah. Yeah.
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Maybe, maybe not. You know, we don't know.
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What we're saying is there seems to be throughout church history, these kinds of encounters and movements where the claim is it's a fresh outpouring of the
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Holy Spirit and there's various phenomena that, you know, could be seen to be credible.
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And yet there's also a lot of things that are rather disconcerting. And the church has always struggled with how do we understand and receive these things?
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What are we to do with this? And so we have to understand that God is moving in a dynamic way throughout church history and he's using heresy and error and he's also using divergences and traditions within the church, various traditions that are outcropping all of that somehow corresponds to his larger will for the church and the kingdom to advance.
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Somehow this all corresponds to the one holy Catholic and apostolic church. And at some level, as Needham alludes to, a lot of modern day charismatics or Pentecostals would appeal to Montanism as perhaps their antecedent.
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Like we have a stake in the early church in the same way that we would go back to the second century and say, like the reformers, these fathers are ours.
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They were holding on to doctrine just like we were. And so how closely we identify that I think is less important than acknowledging the fact that this is a phenomenon that happens and recurs throughout church history.
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And like we've seen when it happens and as it happens, we have to grapple with it and make sense of what do we do about this?
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Those tensions that the church was dealing with at the end are still the same tensions that we deal with today in terms of charismatic phenomena, right?
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These tensions still exist and the church has to grapple with it. I don't know.
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Do I look like an imam? Did she say something about Muslims? Oh, okay.
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Any other questions? We have a little bit more time. Sister, yeah. Are they, were they saying the same thing?
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You know, I'm always thinking of 1 Corinthians 14. I spent some time kind of buzzing in it, you know, where it says, oh, well, you know, there's going to be times only a few make sure there's an interpretation.
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And I was in churches where they sincerely believe that that's, you know, for this time too.
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And even apostles, there's apostolic hymning for the rest of it. So were they, did the
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Montanists feel the same way? Like that the Holy Spirit would speak fresh and new in these ways, like a word of prophecy.
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Someone will have the interpretation of this atonement, that kind of thing. I don't know fully. My sense from reading
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Needham and looking at a few articles related to Montanism, as Needham is keen to point out, we shouldn't think of it as a new doctrine that's being revealed, so much as a new way or ethical code, a conduct.
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And they're saying this is the divine conduct that the Spirit has now given us. And this is what he requires. And basically, you know, the
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Lord is going to return. So you need to start adopting these things. Right. This is the way. Right.
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And so that was the main, you know, you know, revelatory, you know, function.
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I think they would say is kind of this ethical deposit. And there you can start to see a lot of differences. Like, you know, the
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Montanists, of course, like as he as he mentions, they were largely celibate. They had a very different understanding of sexual ethics.
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They had a certain cult of martyrdom. They, you know, they in many ways, glorified and glamorized martyrdom.
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And I mean, views like if you've committed a grave sin after your baptism, there is no forgiveness.
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Another thing I would distinguish them from modern day Pentecostalism is modern day Pentecostalism has a doctrine of a spirit baptism, a baptism in the
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Holy Spirit subsequent to receiving regeneration or receiving the indwelling of the
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Holy Spirit. That that wouldn't have made sense to a Montanist, that doctrine. So there's a lot of significant differences.
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But the question is really how do these charismatic, how do these spiritual gifts enter the church into on the one hand, how are we to make sense of this apostolic faith once we're all delivered?
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And the fact that as far as we know, these phenomena aren't largely experienced. So there is something like Tertullian is going.
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I think there's really something here. But then on the other hand, I think the
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Lord is using this and allowing this because the early church has worked out a lot about the doctrine of God, the
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Father and God, the Son. But they have precious little to understand about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. When you get to the 300s, you have a major controversy over this called the
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Numatomachian controversy. Those who are fighting and resisting the idea of the Holy Spirit being a person, you know, within the triune
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Godhead. You might have time for maybe one more and then we'll we'll recite the creed and sing the glory of Pontry.
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Any questions about Gnostics or the word Catholic or any of these other things?
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Brother, sure. Like this chapter talked a little bit about the church in Rome and here, the church of a particular region.
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I know we're on the first two chapters talked about kind of like the government of the church, but like we know like is that is that like multiple worshiping bodies that all kind of interrelate?
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Is it like one giant group of people? Would that be like the church of Massachusetts or something?
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Yeah, I mean, of course, you already see in Irenaeus the sense of the absolute centrality of Rome.
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Now, that's just true geographically. Right. At least at this point of the Roman Empire, Rome is the center.
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Now, as we head toward the fourth century, an interesting development there is, you know, Constantine moves the his capital to Constantinople.
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And you have essentially the split between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire. And part of that was just for governance.
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Roman Empire is so vast that it's very hard to centralize that kind of authority structure.
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It's a lot easier to divide it. And essentially you then have in subsequent centuries rulers over the eastern or the western aspects of the
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Roman Empire. That eastern part of the Roman Empire continues on under what we now call the
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Byzantine rulers. And that's Byzantium. But that's really just the Eastern Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire gets sacked and eventually corrodes and collapses in Augustine's day.
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But the Eastern Empire, so you figure, you know, in the fifth century, you know, late fourth, early fifth century, the
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Roman Empire, as we think of it, collapsed. But a better way to understand that is the Roman Empire in the west collapsed.
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The Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire in the east, that continued all the way to 1453 until the
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Ottoman Turks defeated them. And so in 1453, you still had people saying I'm a
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Roman. They call themselves Romans. It shows you the absolute vast prowess of Rome, right?
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This is the epicenter of the whole, you know, world as it were, effectively. And so the church in the capital of the world empire has an automatic significance.
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All of the lights, all of the authorities, the noblest men will gravitate toward that as a center of learning.
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The church takes on a lot of prominence. Bishops in any major city had prominence and churches in area cities that were on the fringes around those parts would appeal to those cities.
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But in a sense, by the time you get to the second century, the Bishop of Rome has all of the grandeur and authority of Rome.
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And Irenaeus has some rather troubling passages in which he seems to, you could almost read it as if he's giving a certain origin of authority to the
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Bishop of Rome. But it's better to understand this is a very garbled translation with a lot of textual history.
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It's better to understand that what Irenaeus is appealing to is the fact that Rome has maintained apostolic tradition.
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It has an apostolic foundation. I don't think he's privileging the Bishop of Rome so much as asserting the apostolic continuity of the
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Bishop of Rome. And again, you do have the development of apostolic succession. So how do you think of Rome as a whole?
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Well, there would have been a Bishop of the Church of Rome, but you're right to say it would probably look like the multi -campus model because you couldn't get all the believers in the second century into a building big enough to house them.
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So you'd have a whole host of bishops and presbyters that were functioning under the
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Bishop of the Church of Rome. And they would have been scattered and gathered throughout that whole city. All right.
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Does anyone else have a messy desktop like me? I'm like, where did I, where did I put, where in the world did
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I put that document? Somewhere I have it.
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I might just have to look it up. Downloads.
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Come on. Here we go. Okay. All right.
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Let's recite. If I, I'll have to scroll when we get toward the bottom. All right, but we'll just start here.
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All right. We'll recite, then we'll sing the Gloria Patri. Well, actually, before I do that, can
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I have someone close us in prayer before we do this? I realize we're going a few minutes over and then we'll close fully with the
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Gloria Patri. Any volunteers? Marty.
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Thank you so much, Father, for blessing us for this study. I want to thank you for our brother and his preparations.
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Lord, what a blessing it is to look back throughout history and see your hand in it all.
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See the different men who had to fight different fights all to protect your truth.
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Father, we pray that we would be men and women who desire to stand firm in that same truth.
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We pray that you would continue to teach us these things, help us grow in our understanding of our history.
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To help us to stand firm moving forward. Again, we thank you so much and we pray these things in Christ's name.
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Amen. Amen. We believe in one
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God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.
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And then one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only begotten, begotten of the
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Father before all ages, light of light, very God of very
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God, begotten, not made of one essence with the Father by whom all things were made, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the
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Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate and suffered and was buried.
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And the third day he rose again, according to the scriptures and ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the
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Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.
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And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the
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Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.
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And we believe in one holy, Catholic and apostolic church. We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
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We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.