2,000 Years at a Glance

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Roman Catholic Theology 03

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I want to welcome everyone to this new series at Sovereign Grace Family Church, the series is entitled Church History, examining the creeds and confessions of the church through the ages and why they matter.
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Tonight we are going to be looking at lesson number one, which is church history at a glance.
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The goal of tonight will be to simply examine the overarching theme of church history from the time of the birth of the church to today.
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In the small book of Jude in the New Testament, there is an important verse which is good to begin our study this evening regarding the false teachers of his day, Jude said these words in Jude verse 11, remember it is only one chapter.
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He says, woe to them, for they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam's error and they perished in Korah's rebellion.
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That is an important verse because it demonstrates to us the value of understanding history.
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This was a time when Jude's contemporaries would likely not have had their own copy of the scriptures, personal copies of the scriptures were almost unheard of at this particular time in history.
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Yet the people of God were expected to know their history, even without having a Bible of their own to study.
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They were expected to know who Korah was, who Balaam was and who Cain was.
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They were just it was just known, you know, who Cain is, you know, who Balaam is, you know, who Korah is.
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It's just expected that you would know your history.
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Such is a good place for us to begin this study as it shines a light on the fact that we also are supposed to know our history.
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We are beginning tonight in this study of church history and church history is a subject which many people are very ignorant of, even many people who call themselves Christians.
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There was a Peanuts cartoon.
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You remember Peanuts with Charlie Brown and Lucy? Well, Charlie Brown and Lucy were talking and Lucy was writing at her desk and Charlie Brown came to her.
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He says, what are you doing? And she says, I'm writing about church history.
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And she turned to start writing and she says, my pastor was born in 1945.
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Because to her, that's what church history was.
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Church history began with her pastor's birth or, you know, whatever.
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And that's how far back the history of the church went.
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Well, beloved, that type of myopic view of church history is a negative consequence of what I have called and what many others have called the anti intellectualizing of the church.
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The church has become a place where the intellect has been subverted and the emotions have been raised.
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The focus has become on how I feel more than what I think.
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And as a result, what has happened is Christians have become very ignorant of the doctrines which we are supposed to espouse and particularly ignorant of the history that goes along with those doctrines.
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For many years, the church has been so focused on feelings and emotions that it has shied away from the depth of theology and the pursuit of scholarship, which it once had.
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Something I think people forget is that the great learning centers started as seminaries.
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They started as places to train pastors.
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It started as places to train the men of God to understand the word of God.
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Princeton Seminary.
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You know, we don't even think of that anymore.
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We think of Princeton as an Ivy League school.
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We don't think of it as being a place where men go to study the word of God.
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But that's what it was.
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And this is something that is often forgotten.
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The ones really investing in these areas of scholarship have largely started to be, sadly, from the liberal perspective.
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And as a result, we've had a radical departure from orthodoxy, which has occurred as a result.
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It seems like anymore, any time you hear the term scholar, it begins with the word liberal scholar rather than a biblical scholar, a conservative scholar.
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It's so much liberalism has found its way into the studies of Scripture.
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And as a result, we have seen many negative consequences.
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We have a responsibility as the people of God to study and understand our history.
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The old adage is true, and I'm sure you knew I was going to say this at some point.
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Those who cannot remember the past are what doomed to repeat it.
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Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
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So this study has a very simple purpose.
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This study is designed to acquaint us with some of the most important events of the past two thousand years of church history.
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We are going to do this by examining some of the great creeds and confessions which have been established down the ages.
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We will not be able to study everything about history.
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We will not be able to study every important character of history.
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There's two thousand years of history.
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Unless we want to spend the next two thousand years studying it, there's certainly going to be some parts that we have to leave out.
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But we're going to focus on the most important part.
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The church history has peaks and valleys, and we're going to focus mainly on those things, those peaks of time which bring about the most change.
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I want you to look with me, if you will, at the handout that I gave you, the second handout, which is the outline of the 14 lessons.
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This is what we're going to study over the next however many weeks.
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There are 14 lessons.
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That's not to say that we'll do a lesson a week, because if we do, I will be amazed.
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But there will be 14 lessons and the lessons are as follows.
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We're going to do church history at a glance.
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That's what we're doing tonight and it will probably bleed into next week.
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Lesson two will be the creeds and confessions which are found within the Bible.
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That's when we're going to start talking about why creeds and confessions are important and show that they are not on biblical, but they're actually found in scripture.
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Lesson three, we're going to look at the creeds and confessions in the early church.
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That will be from the Didache to the Apostles Creed.
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If you don't know what those things are, you will learn in this course what those things are.
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Lesson four, we're going to look at the Nicene Creed, which resulted from the Council of Nicaea in 325.
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Lesson number five, we're going to look at the Council of Chalcedon.
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Lesson six, the Athanasian Creed.
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Lesson seven, the Canons of the Council of Orange.
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Lesson eight will be the creeds and statements from 8600 to the Reformation.
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That's also known as the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages.
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We're going to look then at the battle cries of the Reformation in lesson nine.
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Lesson ten, we'll look at the Council of Trent.
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That is the anti-reformation council of the Roman Catholic Church.
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When the Reformation happened, the Council of Trent was the response.
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And I call it here.
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They're doubling down on Harrison.
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They they decided to double down on their false teachings.
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Not only do we believe these false teachings, but we're going to have a whole council and affirm these false teachings and essentially anathematize the reformers.
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Lesson 11 will be the canon of the canons of Dort, which are very important in reformed theology.
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Lesson 12 will be the great denominational explosion.
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In that lesson, we'll learn about the different denominations and where they come from.
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We won't dig into each one specifically, but we'll look at the major denominations, Presbyterianism, Episcopalianism, Methodism, Baptists and such and see where they came from and why.
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Lesson 13, we're going to look at the abstract of principles.
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The abstract of principles is one of the best simple outlines of Christian theology that I believe has ever been penned.
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It's very simple, but it is a it is a it is a more modern work.
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It's from the 1800s, but it is a simple statement of faith.
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It was actually one of the ones that we used when we based our statement of faith for the church.
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That was one of the ones we looked at was the abstract of principles.
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It's such a such a very important document.
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Finally, we're going to look at modern controversies.
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We're going to finish this course by saying, where's the church today and what battles are we fighting today? So that's the outline that for the next few months, that's what we're going to do.
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And if you guys are if you have a notebook that you're keeping these in, make this the first page and this will this will kind of give you what you are looking at and what you should expect in the weeks to come.
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So tonight we are going to look at church history at a glance to help us establish the framework for understanding the details of history as we dig into them in the weeks to come.
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All right, you have your worksheet there with your blanks on it.
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I know a worksheet filled with blanks is very difficult to look at.
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So let's fill in the first blank.
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The first blank is anyone.
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Well, let me ask this.
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Does anybody know the answer? The church began at I know, you know, because we talked about this earlier.
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Does anyone know when the church was born? The kids know this because I taught it earlier in our youth or in our young people's study.
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The church began at Pentecost.
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Well, the book of Acts, yes, Acts chapter two, verses one through four, when the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind and it filled the entire house where they were sitting and divided tongues as a fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them.
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And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the spirit gave them utterance.
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That moment in time is when the church.
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Was born because this was the promise that Jesus had given, he said, when I go away, I will send to you another comforter, all those percolators, all those being another of the same kind and percolators, one who walks beside one who's called to be beside the paraclete is sometimes the term to choose for the Holy Spirit.
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He comes and lives within us.
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He comes to be with us.
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He he takes that ministerial place that Christ had when he was here on the earth.
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That's what happened at Pentecost.
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When is Pentecost? Pentecost is 50 days after Resurrection Sunday, seven weeks, forty nine.
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And then that's that fiftieth day is the day of Pentecost, Pente being five.
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If you think of like, you know, five point star called a pentagram, the five Pentecost is 50 days after Resurrection Sunday.
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The spirit's coming and how empowered the apostles and gave birth to the church.
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The word church in the Bible comes from the Greek word ecclesia, the Greek word ecclesia means the called out ones meaning to go out or to come out.
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We talk about exit.
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That's when the same word to exit out, to go out and to call.
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So the ecclesia is those who have been called out of the world, those who have been called out by God.
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That's the church.
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That's who we are.
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Anytime it talks about the church at Corinth or the church at these different places, the church at Philippi, the church of Colossae, it's the ecclesia, the called out ones.
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So we talk about the birth of the church.
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It's the birth of this age where that we're in.
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These people would come and say we are the ones called out by God to follow after Christ.
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We are the ecclesia.
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We are the church.
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The church is made up in the beginning of converts from Judaism.
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The first and early Christians are Jewish converts.
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If you look back at Acts chapter two, it says how many does anybody remember how many were baptized at that first preaching of the Apostle Peter? Three thousand souls were saved.
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Three thousand people were baptized on that day.
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That's a massive thing to have occur.
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Three thousand people were baptized and they became part of the body of Christ.
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And as I said, these all would have been Jews.
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And as a result, the early church was considered to be a sect of Judaism.
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That's what it was considered to be.
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In fact, for a long time, it was considered just to be a Jewish heresy.
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It was not considered to be a new, positive, powerful religion.
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It was considered to be the Jewish religion was already not a popular one with the world.
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Here is this is a sect of an unpopular religion.
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And Christianity grew out of Judaism.
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We know that because the Messiah is the Messiah who is the Messiah of the Jews.
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Christ is the Christ of the Jews might be more appropriate to say that Christianity is Judaism completed.
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Christ came to fulfill the Old Testament law.
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He came to fulfill the commands of the Old Testament and established a new covenant.
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Where does the concept of covenant and new covenant come from? It comes from the Old Testament scriptures.
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The Old Testament scriptures tell us there's this one who is coming, who's going to establish this new covenant.
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And it's Christ who is the one who establishes this new covenant.
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This is why many Jewish converts, many people who are Jews who call themselves Christians now, they call themselves completed Jews.
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Because Christ completes what was begun in the Old Testament, Christ is the fulfillment of the promises of the Old Testament.
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Christ is the completion of what was started in the Old Testament.
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So we began there, the church is born at Pentecost.
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The next blank that you have on your sheet is the expansion, the expansion of the early church.
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It was not long after the establishment of the church that the gospel went out to the Gentiles.
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And that is when it began to flourish and began to grow.
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The Bible says that a partial hardening came over Israel.
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Says this in Romans chapter 11, verse 25, it says, lest you be wise in your own sight.
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I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers.
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A partial hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.
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That's an important verse because it tells us something.
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It tells us that the Jewish people, in rejection of their Messiah, received from God a hardening of their hearts.
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And that is why many of you today know many Jewish people who absolutely repudiate the idea that Christ is the Messiah.
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They reject the idea that Christ is the Messiah.
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I sat at dinner one night with a man not two seats down from me.
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A man across from me said, Jesus is in the Old Testament.
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This man was a Jew.
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He said, no, he is not.
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He was firm to say, I don't believe that.
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I don't believe Jesus is in the Old Testament.
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I'm a Jew.
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And to me, that is false.
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That hardening, which I could hear in his voice, the vitriol, which I could hear in his voice, is prophesied right here in Scripture that there is a hardening on Israel.
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But what happened as a result? God expands the gospel to the Gentiles, people who had prior to that not been a part of the covenant.
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Prior to Christ, the Gentiles were dogs.
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The Gentiles were unworthy of attention.
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The Gentiles were unworthy of the Word of God.
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But Christ opens up the temple.
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He opens the Holy of Holies to expand out into all the world, both Jew and Gentile.
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The early church was primarily Jews, but it did not take long before the expansion went out to the Gentiles.
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And it went out first through the evangelist Philip, who went and preached to the Samaritans in Acts chapter eight, verse five.
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Then Peter went and preached to Cornelius and Acts chapter 10, the Roman soldier.
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And then the apostle Paul went and preached all throughout Asia Minor.
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And it says in Romans 11, 13, he calls himself the apostle to the Gentiles.
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He said that was his purpose.
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God called him to the work of bringing the gospel outside of the Jewish world so it would no longer be understood as simply a small sect of Judaism.
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A small Jewish heresy.
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But then it would go out beyond that and it would reach out into the Gentile world.
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And that was Paul's mission to go out and preach to the Gentiles.
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This ministry, this time of ministry among the apostles, went until all of them had died.
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Many of them were imprisoned or martyred.
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Some of them were imprisoned and then martyred for their faith.
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After their deaths, the scriptures of the New Testament were considered to be closed.
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That's something we need to understand.
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After the apostles died, the last apostle being the apostle John, after John died, there was no more writing that was accepted later by the church to ever be considered canonical because it would not have apostolic authority because it was not written during the time of the apostles.
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There were later works that came, but these works were never considered part of scripture.
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Clement, the Shepherd of Hermes.
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These are works that are extra biblical.
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We can still read them.
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We can still learn from them.
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The Didache, which we are going to look at.
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These are all important works.
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But because of the timing, because many of them came after the time of the apostles and did not have apostolic authority, these were not considered to be part of Holy Scripture.
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The apostles held a very important and unique, functional place in the history of the church.
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That's why I don't like I don't allow any more in my heart anyone to be called apostle.
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I have met people who call themselves apostle.
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I've met people who put the title of apostle in their name.
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But an apostle, in a sense, is simply is simply the one who has been appointed to be a representative of another.
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But we say, who are the apostles? Well, in one sense, we're all apostles and that we're all representatives of Christ.
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We're ambassadors for Christ.
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But when we talk about the apostolic age, when we talk about the apostolic authority, we're talking about the original apostles who saw Christ's ministry, who walked with Christ and who lived with Christ.
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The only one who did not, who was called an apostle, who did not live and walk and minister with Christ was Paul.
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And what did Paul call himself? The apostle who was born out of season, he was he recognized his apostleship was specific because Christ had appeared to him there on the road to Emmaus.
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He had appeared to him and called him to this very specific work.
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And it was different, his ministry and everything differed because he had this special appointment.
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And what was his appointment to be the apostle to the Gentiles? All right, now we talk about the writings of the New Testament, there's also an additional writing that is not included in the New Testament, but is important for this time period.
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And that's what we call the writings of the early church fathers.
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I've already mentioned Clement, but there are others.
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There's an entire library of writings, which is called the writings of the early fathers of the early church fathers.
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Much of them were written in the second century.
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That's the one hundredth.
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OK, and that's an important they're important documents from history, but they're never to be put on par with scripture.
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That's one of the great failures of the Roman Catholic Church, is they take much of those writings, they put them on par with the scripture.
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The church has never done that, but the Roman Catholic Church does because it helps support some of their fallacious traditions.
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Another historical event during this time of great importance is that the.
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City of Jerusalem fell in 1870, if you might want to make the note on your sheet that Jerusalem fell in 1870.
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As a result, there have been no sacrifices held among the Jewish people since that time.
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I have believed for quite some time and I still continue to believe that that was a demonstration of God's judgment.
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That when Jerusalem fell in 1870, fell under the under the the Roman Empire, they came and destroyed it, destroyed the temple.
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Melted down the gold, I mean, just destroyed everything.
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Jesus said not one stone will be left upon another.
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And that's what they did.
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And I believe that that is a not only a fulfillment of Jesus's prophecy, but it's also an act of judgment from God, because up until Christ came, there was a reason for sacrifices.
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What did all the Old Testament sacrifices do? All of the Old Testament sacrifices pointed to the sacrifice of Christ.
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Once the sacrifice of Christ is completed and it's a once for all sacrifice, there is no more need for that sacrifice to happen.
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And I believe that's why the temple at that point was destroyed.
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And I do not believe it will ever be rebuilt.
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There are some who believe it will be rebuilt in the end times.
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My belief and again, we're not arguing eschatology during this time, but I do not believe in the rebuilding of the temple.
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I do not believe the necessity of the rebuilding of the temple.
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Some believe it's necessary for the return of Christ.
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I don't necessarily believe that.
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And I believe that the reason for its destruction was because God will not have the once for all sacrifice of his son mocked by the continual sacrifice in the temple, because that's what it would be.
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That sacrifice is done.
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It's completed.
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It's over to continue.
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The sacrifices would be to mock the once for all sacrifice, which was done.
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OK, yes, sir.
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Is that the reason the Jews have the temple? The Jews don't call it is the reason that they're still looking.
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Well, actually, they don't have a temple now.
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They have synagogues, which are local meeting places.
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But the temple, the only thing left of the temple from 1870 is one wall, which is partially held together.
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And that wall is called the Wailing Wall.
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They go there daily and pray that God would bring the temple back, that God would establish the temple again.
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But they don't have where the temple stood is now a Muslim mosque.
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There is a golden dome that you can see from a far distance.
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You can see the pictures of Jerusalem.
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And that, again, is a shame of shames to know that what was once a place where God's people worshipped and where God's sacrifice was made is now being an homage to a pagan deity, a law as a pagan god.
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But, yeah, there is no temple now where they go to worship.
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They might they call it they may use the phrase temple, but their synagogues, their local meeting places, they're not the temple.
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The temple has not been rebuilt.
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There have been attempts and desires to rebuild, but there has not been a rebuilding of the temple.
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In the centuries following the establishment of the church, a larger hierarchy within the church began to develop.
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There began to be, rather than simply local churches with local bodies of elders, which is how the church was established and how it was put together by the Apostle Paul, that there would be local churches and those churches would be governed by the presbyters, by the elders of the church.
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What began to happen was hierarchical authority began to take place within the church.
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That happens, people want the power structures and they want to know who's in charge of whom and who's going to be telling who what to do and those things.
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And that's what happened as a result.
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And as those hierarchies began to develop, so, too, began to develop false teachings.
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And by the by the time that the second century arises and remember, the second century is the one hundredth.
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This is the end of the apostolic era, the apostolic era.
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I don't have this in your notes.
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The apostolic era ends with the death of John.
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That is eighty ninety five around there.
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OK, so you have Christ lives until somewhere around 30.
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The first scriptures are written somewhere.
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The first New Testament scriptures written somewhere between forty five and fifty, depending on how you date first Corinthians and James, because they're the oldest of the New Testament works.
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Then you have the last book of the New Testament being the book of Revelation, either written before eighty seventy or after, depending on how you date Revelation.
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But we know that John was banished to the island of Patmos.
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He lived out his days and he died around the time of ninety five.
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So now that's the end of the first century.
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The second century begins.
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The church is expanding out.
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There's expansion going out.
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There's persecution coming from Rome and there's false teachings, many false teachings go and begin to go.
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I'm going to list to you a few of these.
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We'll be going over more of these in the weeks to come.
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And let me just tell you some of the false teachings.
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One of the false teachings that was very popular at this time period was called adoptionism.
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Adoptionism was the idea that Jesus was born a mere man.
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He did good works.
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So God adopted him as his son.
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OK, that's called adoptionism.
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There's civilianism.
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Civilianism is that God is not three persons, but that God is one person in three modes of being.
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It's also called modalism.
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He was the father in the Old Testament.
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He was Jesus during the Gospels.
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And now he's the Holy Spirit.
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And he simply manifested in these three different ways.
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But he's not three people.
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We cannot we don't talk about the father having a relationship with the son or the son having a relationship with the spirit because they're all three the same person.
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That is called civilianism or modalism.
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There is monarchism, monarchism focused on the uniqueness of the father, his invisibility, and said basically that the relationship between the son and the spirit were both subservient to the father, the monarch he is.
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And this is what monarchism and it basically sets up within the Godhead a an understanding of God as the God, the father is the only true God and the others as simply created beings.
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Yes, very similar.
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It would later it would later be Arianism would grow out of that.
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And that's the Jehovah Witnesses are very akin to the Aryan heresy, which would come in the fourth century or late third, early fourth century.
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There was what's called patricianism or patricianism, and that is that Christ, when he was on the cross dying, you know, the passion that that was the father dying for the sins of the world, not God, the son.
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It was another type of modalism that is called patricianism, Gnosticism.
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How many of you ever heard of Gnosticism? That's that that gained some more popularity when Dan Brown, Dan Brown wrote the book, The Da Vinci Code.
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He was it was all about Gnosticism and how Jesus really was a Gnostic and his teachings were Gnostics.
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The Gnostics believed that there is a special type of wisdom, a special type of mystical wisdom, which is only received through special revelation.
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And you get that through these mystical ways, doesn't come to you through the scripture.
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It's mystical exercises bring about this sort of mystical, special gnosis or knowledge.
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And that's where Gnosticism comes from.
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There was Marcianism.
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Marcian was an early heretic who believed that the Old Testament God was evil.
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So he took the scriptures and he took his little pen knife and he cut out all about the Old Testament God.
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He cut out all the New Testament references to the Old Testament God and he created his own Bible.
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In fact, the first listing of New Testament books that we have was a result of of the battle against Marcian's false teachings.
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He was saying, this is the Bible, this one that I've basically cut up and made a God in my own image rather than understanding that I made a God image.
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Marcian made I wrote a sermon one time called The Marcians Are Coming.
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The Marcians are coming because I think they're here today.
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I think that's the problem with the modern church.
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They want to cut the parts of the Bible out that they don't like.
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Well, that's what Marcian did.
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That's not a new heresy.
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That's been going on for 2000 years.
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Marcian was one of the early heretics that did that.
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He didn't like the Old Testament.
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God considers him to be an evil God, an evil deity.
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So he cut him out.
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So that was one of the early heresies.
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Montanism, Montanism claimed to receive new prophecy from the Holy Spirit, which superseded the teachings of Paul and even the teachings of Christ.
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They're receiving new heresy, new revelation from God, which superseded what was written in the scriptures.
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So as you can see, and I just gave you a handful, I just listed, what, seven or eight.
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And that's just that is not a drop in the bucket of what the church was having to deal with in the first century, second century, rather the 100s.
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These are all things that were being dealt with in the early church.
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This is why there were the early apologists, men like Justin Martyr, who came and fought the battles for truth.
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Because they were fighting against Clement, fighting against these false teachings.
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We think sometimes we sometimes live in a somewhat of a historical bubble and we think that all the bad that's in the world just sort of cropped up in our life, kind of cropped up when we became Christians or kind of cropped up when we, you know, became adults or whatever.
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But this this history shows us that these false teachings, these heresies, these bad things have been since the beginning and will continue till the end.
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This was also a time of great persecution for the church.
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The early church was persecuted.
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And by the way, this is something that atheists, many people, I've heard them recently.
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Actually, many atheists have begun denying this.
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They've denied that Christians have ever really been persecuted.
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And because they say we have a persecution complex, we have a we have a victim mindset and that we've created these things and they they absolutely they decry things like Fox's Book of Martyrs.
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If you've never read Fox's Book of Martyrs, it is an interesting book because it does tell the history of many men and women who died for their faith.
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And it is a it is very serious.
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When you read through it, you'll break your heart of how many people died and how they died.
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But the persecution of the early church was a real thing.
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I want to read to you from the writings of a man named Tacitus.
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Tacitus was a Roman historian.
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OK, Tacitus was a Roman historian.
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This is what he wrote.
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He's talking about Nero.
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Nero is a first century emperor in Rome.
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He, by the way, you know, the story of Rome burning.
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Some people believe that Nero himself started the fire.
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But the belief is also or the history tells us that Nero blamed the Christians.
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Nero blamed the Christians and as a result, led persecution against them for the burning.
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And this is what Tacitus wrote.
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He said, besides being put to death, the Christians were made to serve as objects of amusement.
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They were clad in the hides of beasts and torn to death by dogs.
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Others were crucified.
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Others were set on fire to serve to illuminate the night when daylight failed.
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Nero had thrown open his grounds for the display and was putting on a show in the circus where he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or drove about in his chariot.
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All this gave rise to a feeling of pity, even towards men whose guilt merited the most exemplary punishment, for it was felt that they were being destroyed, not for the public good, but for the but to satisfy the cruelty of an individual.
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End quote.
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Nero was horrible in his persecutions and they were terrible persecutions.
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Tacitus tells us just a little of what happened.
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Official persecution of the church ended with the edict of Milan.
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If you want to make note of that, the edict of Milan made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire.
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It was signed by Emperor Constantine after he went through a supposed conversion experience.
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Now, why do I call it a supposed conversion experience? Well, there was great speculation as to Constantine's conversion because of his behavior and his beliefs and his doctrines after he supposedly converted to Christ.
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It was obvious, though, that even though we could argue all day as to whether or not Constantine was really a Christian, it's obvious that Constantine's conversion is what led to the Christianization of Rome.
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Because his successor, Theodosius, is his successor.
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He is the one who made Christianity the official religion of Rome in 381.
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In fact, by the 400s, to be a Roman and to be a Christian were synonymous to be a Roman and to be a Christian were synonymous by 400.
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Yes.
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Yeah, that there's there's a historically it is believed what Constantine said, that he had seen visions and that he believed that Christ had saved him.
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And that was the that was why he was that's why he went through a supposed conversion experience.
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As I said, my my reason for saying supposed is not because I have really the right to go back and say, I know what a man 2000 years ago believed.
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But his behavior afterwards and his belief system afterwards, his siding with the Aryans and the Aryan heresy was indicative of where his heart was.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Something happened that changed his view.
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Whether or not it was conversion is up for speculation.
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But certainly he was it was actually the Aryan resurgence, not the Aryan heresy.
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Now you make that clear.
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He sided with the Aryans during the Aryan resurgence, which is after the Council of Nicaea.
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And that's a serious I shall make sure that that's clear.
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All right.
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So as I said, by 8400, to be a Roman and to be a Christian were synonymous.
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Romans were Christians and Christians were Romans, which is what gives us the next blank, which is the rise of the Roman Church, the rise of the Roman Church.
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Emperor Constantine had supposedly converted in 312, and there was an ironic shift as a result.
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The shift was from Christians being persecuted to now in Rome you would be persecuted if you weren't a Christian.
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How interesting.
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That's an ironic shift to go from Christians persecuted to being persecuted for not being a Christian.
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As a result, many people entered the church who were not really converted to Christ.
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This was the birth of cultural Christianity.
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It was the birth of cultural Christianity.
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You know what cultural Christianity is, right? People who grow up in the church, they're members of the church, but they're not really members of the true church.
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They're not really baptized in their heart.
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They may be baptized physically, but not in the heart.
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That's the same thing that's happening in Rome at this time in history.
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Through the next few centuries, Christianity spread far and wide and church councils were held in an attempt to establish official doctrinal positions.
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In the centuries that followed, Rome claimed to have apostolic succession and thus claimed to have authority over the whole church.
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And guess what came as a result of that? The Bishop of Rome began to call himself Pope, Holy Father, the head of the church.
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We're getting we're getting there.
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That's that's where we're headed.
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The Bishop of Rome calls himself Pope.
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He calls himself Holy Father.
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And that did not sit well with the Eastern Church.
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That's my next line to answer your question.
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That did not sit well with the Eastern Church, which was based in Constantinople, not Rome.
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And as a result, that led to a huge divide, which was known as the Great Schism, the Great Schism.
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That is S-H-S-C-H-I-S-M, the Great Schism of the church.
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In 1054, in 1054, the Roman Catholic Church separated from the Eastern Orthodox Church and both churches excommunicated each other.
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How do you like that? I will excommunicate you, you excommunicate me, and now we are a church divided.
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From 1095 to 1204, the Roman Catholic Church led the Crusades, which were meant to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim invaders.
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By the way, this wasn't in the notes, but Islam is the 7th century religion.
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It was during the 600s, the life of Muhammad.
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So this is many years after this, this is now we're in 1095, the Crusades are happening.
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The Roman Church had grown, the authority of the Roman Pontiff had expanded.
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There was an understanding that the Roman Catholic Church was the church in the Western world.
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If you were part of the body of Christ, you were by necessity part of the Roman Church.
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And all of the claims that came along with it, the claims of papal superiority, the claims that he had power over all areas of life.
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The Pope was the head of the church.
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False teaching, but it was the understanding of the church at that time.
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And there was a great deal of corruption therein.
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And it was out of that Roman church that the great light of the Protestant Reformation would be born.
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And that is the next thing on your sheet is the reformation of the church, the reformation of the church.
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The reformers were called what they were called Protestant.
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The word Protestant, the root of the word Protestant is protest.
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And what did the reformers protest? Rome, they protested the Pope, they protested Roman authority over the church.
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One of the first names associated with the Reformation is the name John Wycliffe.
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John Wycliffe was in the 1300s.
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Wycliffe was a brilliant scholar.
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He was a member of the Roman Catholic Church, but he chose as a teacher at Oxford to write against.
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What the church had been teaching, he wrote against the doctrine of transubstantiation, and that resulted in him being put out of his teaching role at Oxford.
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He was not allowed to teach because he had gone against the church.
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He decided to translate the Bible into English.
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He translated the Latin Bible into English.
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That's a second generation translation, by the way, because the Bible wasn't written in Latin.
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It was written in Hebrew and Greek.
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It was translated into Latin in the fourth century by Jerome.
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Here he chooses to translate that translation into English, the first one to be translated into the common tongue, the common English tongue.
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Wycliffe died.
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He wasn't martyred.
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However, after his death, a council was convened to condemn him.
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His bones were dug up.
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They were burned and his ashes were poured into the River Swift in the condemnation, posthumous condemnation of John Wycliffe.
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Wycliffe had a series of successors in the Reformation.
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John Huss was one of Wycliffe's successors.
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John Huss died by being burned at the stake.
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If you are familiar with the term your goose is cooked, that comes from John Huss.
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John Huss was called the goose.
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That was his name.
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The nickname, the term your goose is cooked, comes from the term which John Huss was burned for having taught the doctrines of the Reformation.
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After John Huss, there was Martin Luther.
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Luther was called a Hussite because they believed he was teaching the same teachings as John Huss.
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After Martin Luther, there was John Calvin and Eurich Zwingli, who led the Swiss Reformation.
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Martin Luther led the Reformation in Germany.
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John Calvin and Eurich Zwingli led the Reformation in Switzerland.
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The students of Zwingli went on to influence and become the Anabaptist movement, and then came William Tyndale.
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William Tyndale translated the scriptures from Greek and Hebrew into English.
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And he became what was known as God's outlaw because he was a smuggler of that English Bible.
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And he, too, was burned at the stake, not only for having translated it, but for having disseminated it to so many.
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His last words while being burned at the stake was, God opened the eyes of the king of England, opened the king of England's eyes.
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And it was not a hundred years later that the King James version of the Bible was first written, translated and printed.
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Authorized by who? The king of England.
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His answered prayer was the 1611 King James Bible.
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It's amazing.
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Yes.
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Leaving for the first time the king of England.
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There's a lot going on in the far western world, our world.
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Yes.
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And all this is working together.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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It is difficult to overestimate the impact that the reformers had on the church.
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It really is difficult to overestimate it.
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The Roman Catholics would decry their work and say that it brought untold division to the church.
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And the reformers would argue that while, yes, the reformation did bring division to the church, that that division was necessary because the truth was being kept from the people.
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It was being held in the church.
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It was being hidden from the people.
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And someone said, you know, to Luther that this would divide the church.
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And he said, if it divides the church, so be it.
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By keeping it held within the church has not kept us from heresy.
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It's not kept us from from from false teaching.
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So that leads us to the reformation.
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Now, I only have two more blanks.
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If you can indulge me another five minutes, I think I can complete tonight.
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So, well, there's only two more major headings and then the three, the subheadings.
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So let me let me just finish out tonight and this will make me this will keep us on task.
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And I like this.
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If you indulge me just a few more moments to finish history.
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The next is the missionary age of the church.
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The missionary age of the church was birthed out of the Reformation from the 1700s to the 1900s.
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There was unprecedented growth and an upturn in missions around the world.
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Colonization had opened many people's eyes to the need for missionary work and industrialization had increased economies so that people could actually pay for missionary work.
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So there was this great expansion in the gospel going to worlds where it had until that time been unheard of.
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This was also on the heels of the Great Awakening, which began here in America by the preaching of men like Jonathan Edwards.
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That was also what gave birth to this new missionary age where these men were going out and preaching the gospel in places where it had not been heard of before.
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As a result, during this time period, churches were established throughout the world.
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New churches were beginning, and also there is the spread of denominationalism, because as churches begin to be established, doctrinal differences begin to be seen.
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And we begin to see many denominations cropping up as a result came after the Reformation and during this time of the missionary expansion of the church.
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And finally, the last major subheading of your notes is the modern church, the modern church.
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It is hard to describe the modern church.
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The religious landscape of the world is changing rapidly.
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It's changing almost daily.
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So to say the modern church is or the modern church isn't X, Y or Z is kind of hard to do.
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But there are a few trends which I want to share with you.
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And this is going to end our lesson tonight.
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I want to share with you what I see as trends in the church that have resulted in the last hundred years and continue even to now.
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The first is the rise in ecumenism, ecumenism, e-c-u-m-e-n-i-s-m, ecumenism, sometimes called ecumenism.
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What is ecumenism? Ecumenism is the desire to break down denominational walls and try to find peace between divided groups within Christianity.
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Even the Roman Catholics have tried to mend fences where they were once divided.
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There was a try.
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It was an attempt to mend with the Eastern Orthodox Church, a try to bring back together what is divided.
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The problem with ecumenism is that ecumenism always involves compromise.
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And something that we cannot compromise is truth.
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We can compromise on the color of the carpet.
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We can compromise on how tall the steeple is.
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We can compromise on whether or not we have guitars in the church.
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But we cannot compromise on the truth.
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I will never call the Pope Holy Father.
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I will never call the Bishop of Rome Pontiff or Vicar of Christ because I believe such is blasphemy.
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And as a result, I will never be truly united with the Roman Catholic Church.
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And that's what ecumenism attempts to do.
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It attempts to remove the divisions, but in doing so, it removes the truth.
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R.C.
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Sproul tells a wonderful story, and just give me a moment.
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I love to tell this because it's such a funny thing.
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You know, Ligonier Ministries has offices.
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You can actually go there and visit their offices and things.
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And years ago, a group of people came to Ligonier Ministries and said, we have divided denominational walls.
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We have we've broken down denominational walls and we are all united in Christ.
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We've got Roman Catholics and Episcopalians and we've got Presbyterians and Baptists.
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And there was about 30 of them that came to the offices and wanted to share with him this great movement of the Holy Spirit where there was a division that all these divisions were now lost.
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And R.C.
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Sproul, in his, you know, he's a very witty man.
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His response was, he said, that's great that you found the secret.
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He said, but let me ask you a question.
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Is man justified before God by faith alone or not? And he said, within five minutes, they were all in each other's throats.
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Within five minutes, they were all they were back to the back to arguing with each other.
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Because what ecumenism does or ecumenism does is it tries to whitewash the truth.
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It tries to paint over the divides.
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And beloved, they may try to paint over the divides, but the divides are there and they're purposeful and they're there for a reason, because the Bible tells us there will always be a divide between truth and error.
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There will always be a divide between truth and error.
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So I think the rise in ecumenism is a negative thing.
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The second is the rise of emotionalism, the rise of emotionalism.
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I mentioned earlier in tonight's lesson, there is a rampant anti intellectualism which has infected the church.
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Many people are more concerned today with how they feel than what they believe.
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And as a result, doctrine has taken a major backseat in the concerns of daily living.
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A pastor is today much more popular if he gives solid advice on how to get a promotion at work than he is if he provides a sound explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity.
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Do you hear what I said? He is much more popular if he can tell you how to get that promotion at work or how to get that better parking place or how to get that raise than if he can clearly enunciate the doctrines of the Trinity, the doctrines of Sola Fide, the doctrines of grace, so much more popular.
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Why? Because we've become so committed to this self-help Christianity, we've become so committed to this emotionalism that we have departed from our intellectual pursuit.
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The Bible says we're supposed to renew our what? To renew our mind.
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Thirdly, there's a decline in evangelicalism, E.V.A.N.G.E.L.I.C.A.L.I.S.M.
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Evangelicalism.
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The term evangelicalism comes from the word evangel, which is also the word for gospel.
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And evangelical is a person who believes in and follows the gospel of Christ.
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Unfortunately, this term has been used so loosely by politicians and the media that it's really lost its meaning.
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As a result, fewer and fewer people are properly defining themselves as evangelicals because the name has lost what it once was.
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If you can stand up and say you don't believe the Bible, you don't believe that Christ is the only way to heaven, you believe that all kinds of sin are OK in the eyes of God and call yourself an evangelical, then the word has no more meaning.
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It doesn't mean anything anymore.
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And that's why I said the decline in evangelicalism, there's a decline in the understanding of what that means to be a gospel promoter, to be a gospel liver is what an evangelical is supposed to be.
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But the word itself has lost all meaning because it has been adopted by so many and has become a platform for politics rather than an understanding of what it means to be a person who is committed to the gospel.
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Now, I want to mention one positive trend.
57:41
I gave you three negative trends that I see the rise in ecumenism, the rise in emotionalism, the decline in evangelicalism.
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Now, there's one final one.
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The final one is the positive trend that I see in the church, the modern church, and that is the rise in reformed theology.
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There is a rebirth in the desire to go back to scripture and to see the scriptures from a scholarly perspective, a biblical perspective that has risen.
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And I, as young as I am, and I know today is my birthday, but I can still call myself young.
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As young as I am, I have seen this happen, which means it's really relatively a new thing, because 10 years ago, 15 years ago in the church, you didn't hear words like reformed theology, doctrines of grace, total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints.
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You didn't hear names like Calvin and Luther and Zwingli and all these other magisterial reformers.
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You didn't hear their names being as widely espoused as you do now, because there is my generation.
58:59
There's a lot of bad things you could say about my generation.
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I don't know if I'm generation X, Y or Z at this point.
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I don't know what I'm with, but there's a lot of bad things you can say about my generation.
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But one thing my generation did see and has responded to is the cultural Christianity which preceded us and had a desire to go back to the truth, because as many of you know, what has preceded this generation is a cultural Christianity.
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And it wasn't a biblically centered Christianity, but rather it was one that was centered on culture and society and social structures.
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And the church has become a clubhouse, not a church house.
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And my generation, many of the new pastors who are coming out of seminary now see that and want to see it changed.
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And there's revival, which has come in certain parts of the United States and certain parts of the world as a result.
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So that's a blessing.
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Yes, there's decline.
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Yes, there's horrible things happening in the world, but we mustn't ever forget that God's remnant is out there and he is bringing his gospel to bear among his people.
01:00:09
He is bringing that truth among his people.
01:00:11
So praise him for that.
01:00:14
So that's the conclusion of tonight's lesson.
01:00:17
We see the negatives.
01:00:18
We see the positives.
01:00:19
We see where we are starting next week.
01:00:21
We will begin lesson number two, which will be the creeds and confessions which are found in the Bible so that we'll begin to understand better why creeds and confessions are important.
01:00:35
Let's pray.
01:00:36
Father, thank you for your word.
01:00:38
Thank you for this time of study.
01:00:39
I pray that you would use it to encourage and enlighten your people and to build up your church.
01:00:45
In Christ's name we pray.
01:00:46
Amen.