Francis Chan and Church History, Leighton Flowers and Romans 3

The Importance of Church History for Christian Thinking

You've probably heard the line before, a little Greek is a dangerous thing. They're not talking about what kind of food you're eating or anything like that. They're talking about normally having just a small amount of knowledge of the Greek language in regards to Christian theology and apologetics and things like that, and certainly we've all seen examples of that.

The same thing is true when it comes to church history. A little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. But sometimes no knowledge at all can be much worse than that, and we are certainly in a day when the millennial Z-Gen generations have been given a worldview that fundamentally disregards the importance of history.

History has become a tool to be used to shape the thinking of the younger generation rather than a source of wisdom. The younger generation seems to think that those that came before us, since they did not have the technology that we possess today, therefore could not possibly make meaningful decisions, as if technology is the mechanism by which you make meaningful decisions.

And so we've all seen with horror, I think Jay Leno started doing it and now everybody does it, people walking on, especially university campuses, asking basic fundamental historical questions of people.

And they can't identify who the vice president is, they don't know who the vice president before the vice president was, they don't know who most of our current leaders are, and certainly as soon as you start going more than five years back in history, identify a certain war, battle, great leaders of the past, influential people that actually formed and shaped the way that we think and act today, no earthly idea.

As soon as a people becomes disconnected from their history, they are easily controlled by demagogues and totalitarians, and that's exactly what we're seeing happening in the West. Well, in the Church, this shouldn't be.

We have the command of Scripture. When you look at Scripture, you are automatically forced to be looking back at the examples of those who came before you. You have the promises of God, he's going to build the Church, therefore it's just utter foolishness on our part if we do not take the time to look at what the Holy Spirit has done in the lives of those who came before us.

And yet, there are entire segments of what would broadly be called Protestantism that do, as a regular aspect of their theological thinking, denigrate the witness of the past. When I was raised, there was no emphasis upon Church history.

The only time I heard Church history was in regards to defending a particular kind of eschatology. The fundamentalist, I have met more than one fundamentalist that honestly believes that, you know, the whole, if you've never seen it, I don't know where my copy is, it's stuck in a box someplace, but the trail of blood, the idea that the Baptists have always existed as Baptists, and I've honestly met people that really thought that the Apostles wore three-piece suits and a tie and used King James Version of the Bible and sang, blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.

And they really, really did believe that. They have been, they've had communicated to them the idea that, well, when you think of the fundamentalist mindset, anything that differs or varies from my experience of Christianity is non-Christianity, is anti-Christianity.

And therefore, if the early Church writers were different in almost any way, then they couldn't possibly have been true Christians because we exhaust the category of true Christians. So, once those folks, if those folks are exposed to the truth of history, to the truth of differing views of Baptism in the past and differing views of the Lord's Supper, His administration, its meaning, the form of the Church, I mean, there are certain people that are truly troubled and disturbed when they discover that one pastor hired by a group of deacons is actually not how the Apostles set up the New Testament Church.

And it's like, just shocking, stunning to them that that would be the case. And the fundamentalist mindset automatically pushes back on that and says there must be something wrong with this person and starts looking for ad hominem argumentations against this person, not the position they're saying, not the facts that they bring forth from history, but you attack the person.

So, this really helps to explain a lot of what we see in social media and the internet today and the abysmal level of conversation and discussion that takes place. All of this to say that there is much to be learned from the video clip that surfaced a couple days ago from Francis Chan.

Now, I don't, I've never met Francis Chan. My understanding is Francis Chan's a graduate of Master's Seminary. So what? So what? I don't understand why it is that there are still so many people that go, well, he went to such and such an institution, therefore, therefore what?

What does that mean? Well, he should know this. Well, look, let's say you go to the best seminary in the planet, most balanced, best professors. The fact is you're going to get out of that experience what you bring into it.

There are people that can skate through. There are people who are going to be so distracted with other things. They're only going to get a partial understanding of what they're being taught. They may still pass, but it may not stick.

I mean, most of it depends upon the person, what their specific situation was, etc., etc. The idea that where you go determines your scholarship is just, we've got to get rid of this idea, folks. I mean, we are still honoring graduates of Princeton.

Why? All of the Ivy League schools, all the big schools have become ideological brainwashing centers. They're not places where you're taught how to think. They're places where you're taught what to think.

Why do you invest any kind of special... I said to a friend of mine recently who hasn't spent a lot of time in social media, so doesn't realize what's going on, ventured in, brilliant guy. He just wants to talk certain kinds of scholarship.

Within one day, he's got people coming down on him like a ton of bricks. He's like, what did I say? He said, you don't have to say anything. The fact that you breathe on the internet means that there are going to be people that are going to come after you because you don't breathe at the same rate they do.

I mean, really, that's true. I said to him, the motto that I live by, you invest in the criticism of any individual, the amount of weight that their life work earns them. So I look at a person, I look for what they've accomplished in life, consistency over time.

Can they stay in a church more than six months or a year? You are not a mature Christian if you cannot do so. Now, you may live someplace there's only one Christian church. I'm talking if you're in a place.

There are certain people that just they can't get along with anybody. I look at a person, I go, what have you done in life? If a person has accomplished something in life and then they have criticism, I'll hear what their criticism is.

I'll give consideration to it. But that also means the vast majority of the stuff you encounter on the internet is just noise. It's just noise. There's no reason to even give it a second thought. And yet a lot of people are eaten up by it.

And I've just learned, you will be eaten up by it. Those likes and dislikes, who cares? First of all, you should only be concerned about what God knows, what you've done. In my heart, this is why I did X, Y, and Z.

God's going to judge, that's going to be the final analysis. But when it comes to other human beings, what have you done in life? Show me what you've accomplished, and then I'll consider what you have to say.

Otherwise, you know, even in the church, we've embraced this idea that everybody's opinion is equal. No, they're not. And we don't live that way. There is no way that if I start hearing a sound in my relatively new car, that I'm going to drive over to my favorite Mexican restaurant and ask the cook to come out to take a look at it.

Okay? I mean, the way cars are anymore. I mean, I've got a Subaru, and I love it. I mean, I've heard about them for years and years and years, and I knew lots of people that had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles on them.

And I rented one. You know how rentals are? They give you what they give you. Here, it's in this spot. Okay, whatever. And it was supposed to be an economy. I was a super forester. I loved it. I mean, I love gadgets.

I'm a gadget guy. Everybody knows that. And this thing has got enough gadgets to keep me happy forever. Um, I feel like I'm flying a Star Trek shuttle. Every time I get into it, here we go, you know, and you know, the sensor is saying all this kind of stuff.

Well, even if the guy at the Mexican restaurant can, can change a tire, he ain't got the equipment to deal with all the sensors and everything else going on in my vehicle. So we do not treat everyone's opinions as the same.

You start having, uh, heart issues, you're going to go to a cardiologist because you recognize everyone's opinions, not the same. So, but this, I, but when it comes to religion, everybody's opinion is the same.

No, it's not. No, it's not. And nobody actually functions that way. Um, but there are a lot of people who try to, to do so. So back to Francis Chan, just because he went to a good seminary, uh, doesn't mean anything.

Um, you can have a good education and then the things that happen to you afterwards cause you to, uh, move away from that, to move away from where you once were. And that can be a purposeful move on your part.

It can be something you don't even realize is happening. Um, there's, there's lots of different forces that can be behind all of that. So we've got a short clip to listen to. I want it to be educational for us because these are important issues.

And it's similar to some of the things that we were talking about with the Jay Dyer thing on the last program. And once again, I just remind folks, um, there's a 13 part series, uh, in response to Jay Dyer on his comments on Calvinism, um, on the, on our website from back in 2009, just put Jay Dyer in and it'll, all 13 parts come up.

Turgeon Fan wrote that. Uh, take a look at that. But these, there seems to be a lot of, just over the past couple of weeks, I've encountered many people who would claim some type of reformed standing where they've been reformed for any period of time or not.

I don't know, but who are all of a sudden saying, well, how do we respond to this? And it's a basic question from the Reformation. It's a basic question that Luther dealt with or Calvin dealt with or, or whoever, uh, dealing with issues of church authority, form of the church, stuff like that.

And it's, it, it again is demonstrating to me the fact that there are many people who, because of the nature of how we learn things today via computers, often embrace positions without a recognition of what that position means in any other area of their faith system.

Because it used to be you learn stuff from books and books took time to, to read because books addressed things much more in depth and much more broadly. The internet by its very nature is fractured. You rarely see the big picture, the connections between areas, because the nature of how much information is available on the internet, those connections can become even less clear because of the clutter.

And as a result, a lot of people have embraced a form of Reformed soteriology without embracing Reformed thinking. And of course, since I'm not, I'm a Credo Baptist, I'm a Paedo Baptist, every, uh, good, truly Reformed person is saying, including you, the difference being that I actually know what the issues are and have engaged them numerous times.

Uh, and I've actually read Calvin and Turretin and the rest on the subject of baptism. And so I know what the issues are. And we tend to actually read those guys. You don't read us. You never do. I can count on one hand the number of good Presbyterian brothers who've actually read Reformed Baptist works and covenant theology and baptisms.

It just doesn't happen. It's just extremely rare. Um, so anyway, be it as it may, uh, the point is that there's more to being Reformed than the five points. There's an entire theology that stands behind the five points, that the five points don't really make any sense if you don't have that understanding of God as the sovereign creator who is glorifying himself.

There, there is no reason to expect someone to, to embrace Reformed theology if they think man is the center of all things and that the primary reason God created was to save men. Primary reason God created was to glorify himself.

Mankind is the gracious object of his salvation, but mankind is not the central aspect of these things. And if you think otherwise, you're just, you're not even going to give a second thought really to any serious analysis of, of Reformed thinking, Reformed theology.

Um, so the point being that when you read books that introduce you to Reformed theology, they will almost always, at least books that were written more than 20 years ago, will almost always include historical foundations for you to understand where this came from.

Um, that doesn't, okay, I, I know Reformed people of my generation who didn't do the homework they needed to do, and likewise, when we did the tour prior to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation back in 2017, um, pretty much everybody in my tour group, with just a few exceptions, were very surprised to learn some of the things they learned about Luther, Luther's connection to the medieval period, um, how, um, various aspects of that time period deeply influenced his thought and his life and, and, and so on and so forth.

Um, so I'm not saying that everybody has done this, but it was much more common in the past to recognize and understand the deep connection to history. Uh, I remember when I was early 20s, uh, right after I graduated from, I was just about to graduate of seminary, so that would have been, what, uh, 20, 23, well, no, actually mid -20s.

Um, anyway, I ran down to Tucson. There was a real well-known, um, church historian back then. I think he's passed away since then, but, uh, certainly retired, but that had a, a well-known six-year PhD program at the University of Arizona.

I said it, sat in on a doctoral, uh, seminar, and it was about Calvin's interaction with Sadaletto, the Roman Catholic bishop, and it was all about his, his letter, you know, taking it apart, and it was just fascinating.

It was just, that's how you're supposed to do things. You, you don't just read the letter, you, you want to know who he's responding to, what that guy had said, what the situation in Geneva was, you know, that, that's just, the connection to history has always, for me, been extremely important, and I've tried to communicate that to others.

You have to understand where these things, what all this came out of. Well, one of the things that caught my attention about the Francis Chan thing is that he is mouthing arguments that I have heard by those on the road who are either, here's, here's the two terms, either swimming the Tiber or swimming the Bosporus.

Those are the terms I used on Facebook. I'm not sure how many people caught what the issue was. Swimming the Tiber, probably a few more people would know that, but the, the Tiber River forms the western boundary of the ancient city of Rome, and so there is the Milvian Bridge, and I've got a picture of me on the Milvian Bridge.

I would like to get a new picture. I, I should mention this to Mike. So, Mike, if you're happy to catch this, the last, the only time I've been in Rome before, and I took a picture staying in the Milvian Bridge, was when I was the heaviest.

I was in weightlifting days, but I was past the healthy part of my weightlifting days. I think it was 2004, and I was big, really big, and so I'd like to, I'd like to get a new picture on the Milvian Bridge because I won't be taking up nearly as much of the frame as I did 16 years ago.

So anyway, if you swim the Tiber, then you're, you're entering into Rome. Bosporus is the, is the, sort of, technically anyway, is the body of water that separates east and west, so going into eastern orthodoxy, some form of eastern orthodoxy.

There can be Greek orthodoxy, which would mess up the boundary of the thing there a bit, but anyway, the, the point is Russian orthodoxy, eastern orthodoxy. Swimming those bodies of water is metaphor for entering into one of these two systems that claim to be the apostolic church.

Both sides, and not so much in their leadership today, but historically have viewed themselves as the embodiment of the continuation of apostolic succession, and I argue that apostolic succession is to stand in the teaching of the apostles.

Historically, what that came to mean was a claim of genealogical ecclesiastical authority through the continuation of particular bishops, however you defined that. Rome had to define that in some pretty wild ways, given the history of the bishop of Rome, the pornocracy and everything else took place historically, the Babylonian captivity of the church, all that kind of stuff.

And, of course, it's taken in a significantly more nebulous liturgical faction, fashion by the eastern orthodox folks, but both make a claim to a continuation of apostolic succession and therefore apostolic authority.

People making that trip speak like Francis Chan is currently speaking. And what you will hear is you will hear him saying, well, for 1500 years it was always done like this. There is almost nothing that that is true about.

It's almost nothing that is true about. You'll hear it all the time. When John Paul II died, and I know most people don't remember this, but there was this, for days, every Roman Catholic apologist theologian on the planet managed to get their five minutes of fame on Fox News or whatever else it was, and what they were constantly talking about is the 2000-year tradition of the church, the 2000-year tradition of the church, as if there is this constant, consistent thing that's been going on without break for 2000 years.

Now, the church has been, but the stuff they were talking about had not, and anybody who knows church history knows that that wasn't the case, knows especially that the, and this is something that orthodox would agree with me on, that the primacy of the Roman bishop is a later development that is not primitive in any way, shape, or form.

And so, when you hear people utilizing that kind of argumentation, then you know that they're reading a particular spectrum of literature and information that is going to bring them to a particular conclusion.

So, we'll talk a little bit more about that as we listen to the specifics, so let's, I will try to link to the video. We can't show you the video today due to technical issues. We'll just be listening to the audio, but I'll try to remember to link to the video because it, like I said, it popped up, I think just yesterday or the day before,.

All over the internet. Taking of the body and blood of Christ somehow in some real way.

Now, what's really funny is he's standing outside casually dressed with a music stand and a microphone, and I can see a guitar or something case in the background and a door and a plain wall. So, this is not what I would call liturgical setting, okay?

This is about as cash as you're going to get, but the whole thing is going to be about the body and blood of Christ, and that's what he's starting off about.

Taking of the body and blood of Christ somehow in some real way. Again, I'm not making any, like, grand statements. I'm just saying some of the stuff I didn't know. I didn't know that for the first 1 ,500 years of Church history, everyone saw it as the literal.

Body and blood of Christ. Okay, that's just simply a wildly false statement. I mean, okay, I don't know Francis Champ. I don't know if he slept through church history class. I don't know if his church history class actually went through a discussion of what the difference between transubstantiation or real presence is or what real presence would have even been interpreted.

Does he understand the influence of Aristotelian categories of accidents in presence, accidents in substance, sorry, in the development of the doctrine of transubstantiation after 1 ,000 AD? Does he even know the development of the pyx monstrance and saboreum and tabernacle in the early Medieval period within Roman Catholicism?

Does he know that in the early Church that consecrated hosts were not kept and were not worshipped? That was a development that comes along at a later point in time. Has he read meaningful documentation that demonstrates the differences of opinion that existed between people like Fulgentius or Cyril of Alexandria or Caesarea?

There's so many... Anybody who makes this kind of statement is reading a very narrow band of literature that is meant to produce conversion. It's not serious history. But how many Christians have read serious history upon this?

I mean, I was an unusual seminary graduate because I was already involved apologetics. I was already involved apologetics. I was already doing debates. Well, no. I actually got my... I graduated from Fuller in 89 and I did the first debate in 90.

But we were already doing the trips up to Salt Lake City, so I already was engaged with Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, and Jehovah's Witnesses, so I already knew the importance of Church history to all of this stuff.

But the vast majority of seminary graduates, the vast majority of master's seminary graduates, are not going to have any reason while in seminary to be looking carefully at that assertion. That is, was there a universal belief for 1 ,500 years?

Let's ignore Gottschalk and let's ignore Augustine. Okay, ignore Augustine, that's the end of that. There's, you know, Augustine taught directly that the Church has been deprived of the physical presence of Christ.

So you've got to understand his Eucharistic doctrine within that context. They were not Aristotelians. A spiritual presence of Christ would be just as real to major portions of the early Church, would be more real than a physical presence would be.

So there's just, it is childishly simplistic to make this kind of statement, but I don't know that Francis Chan knows any better. I don't know who speaks into his life, I don't know. But I'm just here to tell you, there is so much wrong with that statement that you, why are you making it?

You know, when you repeat that kind of thing, then you end up misleading others in that kind of assertion.

And it wasn't until 500 years ago that someone popularized a thought that it's just a symbol.

And nothing more. Okay, that's, that is not even, that's not even an accurate representation of Zwingli's view. Because Zwingli, again, take a look at the Marburg Colloquy, take a look at any serious discussion amongst the Reformers.

At Marburg, they agreed on 14 out of 15 points. This was the one point, or was it 13 out of 14? This was the one point that they couldn't get to. And you read the actual reports from the discussion, and you recognize that Zwingli actually convinced a number of people of his position.

But to reduce even Zwingli's memorialist position to nothing more is to do him injustice and to not be being honest with history. And certainly, it sounds like what he's saying is that this is what all the Reformers believed.

It's not what Calvin believed. It's not what Pharaoh believed. It's not Ocolumpatius. And we can just, we can go down the road and demonstrate that a bare memorialism, which does exist in many evangelical churches today, is not what the Reformers believed.

And I have criticized, not so much on this program, because I don't think it's necessarily the function of this program to do this, but I am on record criticizing the evangelical de-emphasis of the Supper long before Francis Chan videos popped up saying something like this.

And in fact, if you want clear evidence of that, at the end of 2019, the last about four or five, about four times, I think it was four or five, I forget how many it was, four or five times I preached at Apologia Church.

What did I preach on? The Lord's Supper. And I preached specifically first on the biblical teaching from Matthew and 1 Corinthians, primarily. And then I went straight through the chapter in the London Baptist Confession of Faith on the Lord's Supper.

And if Francis Chan has ever read the London Baptist Confession of Faith on the Lord's Supper, he could never stand there and say what he just said, as if you've either got the 1500 years of the ancient church all agreed, they didn't, and now Protestantism, and it's nothing more than a mere memorial, and they all agree, which they don't.

I have criticized the de-emphasis in evangelicalism on the Supper. I've criticized when it's simply made something you do out of tradition once a quarter without any explanation of its importance, its meaning, anything along those lines whatsoever.

I obviously believe that the local body has the right to determine frequency of observation, issues along those lines. I fully understand the people who, for example, do it once a month and say that weekly is too often, and I hope that those people understand the arguments of people that would say, no, it needs to be done weekly.

I mean, there's certainly an apostolic argument made from that. Pretty obvious in the New Testament it was done weekly, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be done that way today. I understand what the arguments are.

The issue is it has to be taken seriously as one of the two ordinances of the church commanded by the Lord Jesus himself. Almost all of our statements of faith, if we have a statement of faith even long enough to cover it, almost all of our statements of faith make that statement.

Baptism and the Lord's Supper need to be understood, need to be seen as central, need to be seen as identifying us. Extremely important stuff. So if Francis Chan's experience... See, what happens is when you get an evangelical...

Man, I'm really going long on this. I've gotten through 30 seconds of what the guy said. When you have an ahistorical evangelicalism of whatever form, fundamentalistic, whatever your eschatology is, when you get disconnected from history, then you become liable to discovering that there were other perspectives in the past that you've never seen before.

And if you're already somewhat dissatisfied with your current experience, all of a sudden, ooh, that looks neat. That looks cool. You see, we actually set our people up for this kind of conversion syndrome when we don't...

See, the mindset from a lot of people... I was told this, especially toward the end of my Bible college years in the seminary, when I started realizing just how much broader things were than what I had thought.

I had a lot of people tell me, you know, just don't talk about that kind of stuff. That can unsettle people. Well, there's a cost for not unsettling people in the context of faith because, you know, just ask the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Back years ago, they could control all the in and the out, all the in and the out. Then television came along, and then videotapes came along, and then the internet came along, and now they can't control that.

And that has fundamentally changed. They've lost millions, millions of people because their entire system was based on the ability to control all the information going in and out. Can't do that, and we can't do that either.

So, if we don't place... if we do not lead our people to be satisfied with where they are in the choices they've made and the place they stand confessionally, knowledgably, knowing what the arguments are for paedo-baptism, knowing what the arguments are for differing forms of church government, knowing what... knowing the best Rome argues, not just the worst, not just the twisted, but the best they have to argue.

Make them to be an intelligent, knowing, confessional people rather than just people who are afraid to hear any other perspective because it might be different enough that they might go, oh. If they're used to listening to other perspectives and critically analyzing them and remaining firm, that's one thing.

But if they've never done that, they hear another perspective, you know, if the pastor was mean to them last week, they might go, hey, I'm gonna throw all this stuff out and go this direction. That's what the Emergent Church was.

The Emergent Church movement was simply fundamentalists going, I'm tired of all this. Throw the baby and the bathwater out. Let's put everything back out on the table. The Bible is the Word of God, the Trinity, the cross.

Let's put it all out there and rethink everything. That's what the Emergent Church was about, which is why it died as well. But that's what it was about. Some of you have never even heard of the Emergent Church.

It's already pretty much dead. But it was a big thing, you know, 15 years ago. So, all this to say we have to educate our people properly to appreciate truth and to be able to analyze these things in an appropriate fashion.

I didn't know that. I thought, wow, well, that's something to consider. And while I won't make a strong statement, I will make a statement about this.

By the way, saying that everyone for 1500 years believed X, when you're wrong about that, is a strong statement. If you're trying to say, I'm not gonna make strong statements, you already are. You already are, and you're in error about it.

It was at that same time that for the first time, someone put a pulpit in the front of the gathering. Because before that, it was always the body and blood of Christ.

So, what he's saying is, well, I'm sorry. Let me see if he made, there was a statement he made. Let me back up just a second.

Body and blood of Christ, that was central to their gatherings. For 1500 years, it was never one guy and his pulpit being the center of the church.

There it was. Okay. One guy and his pulpit. Okay. I don't know if, less than 1 of the audience today will remember, what was that guy's name? Oh, anyway, I think we covered it on Radio Free Geneva. The guy was a rabid anti-Calvinist.

Rabid, and I mean rabid, not rabbit, rabid anti-Calvinist. And he came out with a video about how bad R .C. Sproul was. Because at R .C. Sproul's church, which R .C. designed, the pulpit was not in the center.

If I recall, it's on from the pulpit side, it's on the right-hand side. From the people's side, I think it's on the left-hand side, if I recall correctly. Now, if you go into, for example, I was just in the cathedral in Parramatta, down outside of Sydney in Australia, and most...

Okay, look at the videos from the Anglican church that we've done, who were three debates in, in Durban, South Africa. You'll see the same thing there, the ones with Yusuf Ismail. You'll see two pulpits.

One is generally on the left, is where the preaching is done from. The one on the right is where readings are done from, generally. If you look at the church, I think it was also... Was that Australia?

Oh man, which trip was that? Anyways, I did some videos with some guys... Where was I? I know it was overseas, but I'm not thinking it was Australia. I'm thinking it was somewhere in Europe. Anyway, we recorded in a small church, but again, I was on the right...

From the audience side, I was on the right-hand side, and the pulpit was on the left-hand side, but there was a lecturer on the right-hand side, and so there's... What this demonstrates, to me, anyways, is Francis Chan hasn't been around a whole lot to realize that that's not a universal type thing.

Secondly, when you say for 1500 years, again, Christians couldn't even build churches until sometime in the 2nd century, then only rarely, there was no absolute consistency of architecture, of anything that we can even safely assume was built to be a Christian church until after the time of Constantine, and what you do need to recognize is that there was a massive shift in the Reformation that reflects the early church.

There is a reason why John Chrysostom was called John Chrysostom. You know what John Chrysostom means? Chrysostom means golden mouth, golden tongue, golden mouth stone. He was a preacher, and that meant oral preaching, and there were a number of men in the early church that were known for that, but something major happened.

If you know something about church history, this is, again, we're... Gotta learn church history, people. There was something called the Fall of Rome, and with the end of the Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome, travel became much more difficult.

When you have a peaceful period with great control, as you had under the Romans, you had a large amount of freedom, and hence you had freedom of travel, hence freedom of commerce, education, literature.

When Rome falls, travel becomes extremely dangerous and rare, so much so that by the medieval period, by 1100, the average person in Europe never travels more than seven miles any one direction from where they are born.

Their experience of the world is extremely small, and this is why they envisioned the biblical stories. When you see them painting about David, he's riding a horse in armor with his knights, because that's all they knew.

They had never been to the Holy Land. They never knew anyone who had been to the Holy Land. The Crusades started changing some of that when people would actually come back and say, hey, things are a lot different over there.

But the point is that with the Fall of Rome, you enter into a period of time where literacy declines greatly, and learning declines greatly. Then you have, only two centuries later, the rise of Islam and the loss of major Christian centers.

Carthage, North Africa, which had been Christian areas, are no longer Christian areas, at least as far as the majority of the people there. So, this does bring a fundamental change to Christian worship.

Well, there's numerous things that bring fundamental change to Christian worship. These are external things that make a fundamental change. The rise of a concept of an external tradition makes a huge difference.

The rise of allegorical interpretation shuts out the Old Testament from having any meaningful impact upon the development of Christian theology, in many instances. And you put all this together, and by the lowest point of the medieval period, the proclamation of the gospel has become a minor side element, being done by a rather unlearned man to even more unlearned men, which gave rise to the stained glass window.

Those were ways of communicating the gospel story, because you're talking to people who can't read. They don't have the scriptures, and I'd encourage to have the scriptures any longer. That is controlled by the Church.

It's in a language that most people can't read. Remember what happened to Wycliffe when he wanted to translate the Bible into English, a vulgar tongue? They eventually dug up his bones, burned him, and threw him into the River Swift.

So, you have all sorts of contextual issues. The rise of tradition, the diminishment of the centrality of the preaching of the gospel, the issue of illiteracy, um, all of these things do lead, in the Reformation, to a radical change.

Following after Wycliffe and Hus, Luther has a massive emphasis upon the provision of the scriptures in the language of the people to the people, and the centrality of the preaching of the whole counsel of God from scripture.

You can thank Luther for that. Now, Luther does not, as a result, have a diminishment of the importance of the Supper, but there is a refocusing away from the massive abuses of the altar that especially became introduced at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.

But 200 years before that, with the rise of the doctrine of transubstantiation, you do have a much-needed correction in the refocusing upon the preaching of the scriptures and the Word of God. But this is a simplistic, oh, everybody back then, it was the body and blood that was the center.

No, it was the priest. I mean, if you really knew Roman Catholic theology in the period prior to the Reformation, then you would know the focus was on the priest. The people didn't even get to partake except of the bread.

The wine had been removed from them because of the doctrine of transubstantiation, it was too easy to spill God. The priest was partaking in the wine in the part of the people as their representative up at the altar, where an alter Christus was making Christ present upon the altar as a re-presentation, an unbloody sacrifice.

That's what had developed by the time of the Reformation, and that is a blasphemy against the finished work of Christ. It truly is, remains that way. Now, the irony today, I don't see how Francis could actually believe that.