42 - Western Expansion of the Church

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Let me mention, I do know that it is October of 2017, and the problem is, we are recording this church history series, and if we totally mess it up order -wise, that's going to be a problem, but I do intend to spend a few hours on the dividing line, probably starting this week, talking about doing some of the

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Reformation stuff, honestly partly to provide somewhat of a counterbalance to the fact that, in my humble opinion anyways,

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I'm hearing a lot of imbalanced presentations regarding the

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Reformation, even from those that shouldn't be doing it, or should know better, and in my opinion, if you don't tell the whole story, including all the warts and the politics and everything else that was involved, you end up with a cartoon rather than the reality of what took place, and so I'm probably going to be doing a number of hours on the

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Reformation, so if you feel like you're getting gypped because we're going to be somewhere in the medieval period, we're going to be getting close, we're not going to get to the

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Reformation until toward the end of the year or early next year, then you might want to catch some of those programs on, they're on Sermon Audio just like all our stuff is, so just a matter of going to a different spot, and you should be able to pull those up.

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Part of the problem is so much of what is said about the Reformation sort of operates on the assumption, certainly sort of the way

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I was raised, not purposefully, but just by default, that, well yesterday

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I was listening to a radio program, a couple of you know who

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Chris Arnzen is, Chris arranged all those, called the Great Debates on Long Island we did back during the late 1990s into 2000s on the subject of Roman Catholicism, and he arranged other debates on other subjects, but that particular series that we did, and he is a convert from Roman Catholicism, and so he was asked by Justin Brierley, who is the host of the unbelievable radio broadcast on Premier Christian Radio in London, to be on a program where he told his story of his conversion to, out of Roman Catholicism, and then another guy into Roman Catholicism, even though the guy was an

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Anglican, so I'm sorry, in England that doesn't seem to me like that big of a jump, but anyway, and in listening yesterday to the resultant mini -debate that took place,

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I was reminded, the former

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Protestant, quote unquote, basically said that our position is that no one knew the gospel until Luther, and I, you know,

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I mean that's a misrepresentation, if you've ever read any of Luther, you know Luther never said that, and you know that the reformers very strongly emphasized their connection to the early church,

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I started reading a book yesterday, got about halfway through it, out of the

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Master's University, Master's College, Master's Seminary, anyway, called

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Long Before Luther, I'd known this was coming, but I wasn't able to get a hold of a pre -release copy of it, but it's out now, and it's a, basically an argument that the primary elements of the

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Reformation message on the nature of the gospel, justification by faith, imputation of Christ's righteousness, can be found long before Luther, and you might want to pick it up, it's very interesting,

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I have it on Kindle, but I'm going to be ordering the hard copy of it, just simply for the number of citations and quotations in it, by Busenitz is the last name, but it just struck me how often, even in his book, he was quoting

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Calvin and Luther and others, and their citation of the early church, so they didn't pretend that they were coming up with something new, they thought they were going back to what was apostolic, and yes, their emphasis was upon the

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Bible first, not upon anybody else, but the idea that I was raised with, basically, was the medieval church was just simply purely apostate, there were no

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Christians, and that's not what the reformers believed, and when you find, and here's what causes us to struggle, and to think, we're going to be getting into the medieval period here, we're going to be looking at the expansion of the western church, starting with Patrick, which actually takes us back, before Islam, but we're looking at a different area, but when you find medieval writers, who not only affirm that they are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and speak of the imputed righteousness of Christ, but they also believe things that we don't believe, they go beyond that, where do you draw the line?

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And one of the temptations that I've had to struggle with in studying church history and teaching church history,

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I don't consider myself a church historian, a church historian is someone who, that's their field, that's what they do, that's what they read,

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I'm first and foremost an apologist, but the

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PhD program right now, I'm a textual critic as well, so those are the areas that I'm reading in, and reading scholarship in regularly, and all the rest of that kind of stuff, but I do a lot of reading in church history, and I've read hundreds of books in church history, so it's an area that I'm at least familiar with, and one of the struggles that I have in trying to filter out the traditions of my background is the tendency to want to try to remotely judge the salvation of individuals who lived hundreds of years before me, based upon my standards today, and what

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I know today, and I've had to come to recognize that's not something

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I can do, I think there's someone much better qualified to do that, leave it in his hands, but at the same time, we do have to struggle with the issue of true church, false church, where do you draw the line, how much error is too much error, and we've already talked about, you look at someone like Justin Martyr, he said some things that we'd go, but he probably didn't even have

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Paul's writings, how good would your theology be if you didn't have Paul's writings, how do you, where do you go there, how do you handle things like that, how do you handle someone who confesses all the core truths, and yet goes beyond that to these things out here, and especially in our day, the lines are pretty clearly drawn,

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I mean, we've got, the past has given us clear delineation of the difference between saying that grace alone and faith alone saves, or faith has to be infused with these good works and merits, we've been through all this stuff before, yeah we have, but how many people today have any idea, how many people today have ever read the

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Cairns Decrees of the Council of Trent, or anything like that, these are all things that make, it's one of the reasons that church history can be so horribly abused by people today, if it's even looked at at all, but the point being that so much of what we hear today just sort of has

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Luther just popping into existence, he didn't, he came from a background, he was deeply influenced by medieval theology, he never got rid of all the influence that medieval theology, even though he very purposefully rejected certain elements of it, still, you are who you are, and when you think of the people who were so influential in eventually directing him to peace, such as Staupitz, you just wonder, where were

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God's people during that time period? I have no question that the dude running around in Rome in armor with the 47 concubines wasn't one of them, but were there not simple people with a simple faith in other places?

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These are some of the issues you deal with, and so as we talk about the expansion of the Western church, and we see a general encroachment of tradition, and sub -biblical teachings and practices, especially as we see, and what's the big term,

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I think it's a term that we need to be tracking through history, as we see the rise of sacralism, the state church, the union of church and state, which we need to remember, the

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Reformation is a sacral reformation in its magisterial form, so in other words,

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Luther, Zwingli, Bucer, Okalempadius, Calvin, second generation, these were all sacral reformers, they're magisterial reformers, they are reformers of a state church, and they were all, to the man, opposed to a free church, opposed to what is unfortunately called either the

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Anabaptist movement or the Radical Reformation, unfortunately, both those terms are used of such a wide variety of perspectives that it boggles the mind, but they were not seeking a free church.

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They opened the door to it, their work eventually led to it, but that was still centuries in the future, and Baptists continued to die at the hands of both

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Protestants and Roman Catholics into the early 1800s in Europe, and so this is something we have to keep in mind, and we've already sort of established the beginning of sacralism in the sense of the beginning of development with Constantine's role at the

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Council of Nicaea, 325. That doesn't mean that the church of 325 was a sacral church, but that was just a start, and then you see more and more connectivity and interaction until, you know, you see what

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Augustine did with the Donatists, remember, and allowing the state to be involved in suppression of the

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Donatists, and that's the next step, and so I'd say in the West by the 7th century you've got a pretty strong sacral situation, and the

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Reformation is still 800 years plus in the future at that point, and so that was the heritage of the

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Reformers, and where did it all come from? If we don't have the background, and most people, let's just be honest,

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I mean, medieval church history, please, there's a yonner, but that's a big chunk of time, and if you ignore it, you really do end up with Luther as a cartoon figure with a hidden S on his chest, you know, and that's just not the way it was, and it concerns me a lot what

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I'm hearing from a lot of folks, at this time, I'm hearing a lot of cartoonish presentations about Luther and the

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Reformation, that if you accept that and get all excited about that, and rah, rah, here

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I stand, you know, and you get your Luther is my homeboy shirt and stuff like that, and then someone comes along and talks about the role of politics, and what happened in the

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Peasants' Revolt in 1525, and how recalcitrant and just immature

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Luther was at the Marburg Colloquy, and the fact that the second -to -last sermon he preached in Eisleben was, it wasn't as badly anti -Semitic as it's made out to be, but, and it was very much in line with popular sentiment of the day, but still, it was in line with popular sentiment of the day, which wasn't good.

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You have all of that stuff, and someone comes along, and all of a sudden, your heroes are not heroes anymore, and if you've connected that with the entirety of the

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Reformation without knowing the context, well, it's easy to get disillusioned. So this background stuff may not be, you know, all that thrilling, but it is necessary.

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It is important to recognize, and I believe

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Christ has always been building His church, and it's not always easy to see exactly what the borders of that always look like.

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You know, here in the United States, we've had nice, clear lines for a long time, but this isn't the only nation on the planet, and in other nations, even to this day, the lines aren't nearly as easily drawn as they are, as they are here.

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So anyway, with that background, we talk a little bit about the expansion of the

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Western church, so the church going West, and we talk about Patrick.

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Ah, yes. Irish Christianity. Patrick, you know. Three, Patrick.

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389 to 461. His father was a deacon, a son of a priest.

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Patrick was kidnapped by Irish pirates at the age of 16, and he was made a, he was forced to work as a shepherd in Ireland for six years.

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At 22, he escaped to England, and after a two -month reunion with his family, said he had to go back to Ireland to minister to the

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Irish, and his memoirs end at that point, so everything else comes from tradition and stories that are told, so on and so forth, which tell us that he went to Rome to learn

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Latin, and then went to Ireland. He planted small monasteries in unpopulated areas, like on small windswept islands, and there are a few small windswept islands off the coast of Ireland, I can guarantee you that.

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Couldn't have cost much to buy that land. I'm not sure how you build much on a small windswept island, but anyway, that's what he did.

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There are many myths and legends about Patrick. He is credited with founding

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Celtic Christianity, or if you're in Bostock, Celtic Christianity, I guess, which did not have extremely close ties with Rome, and so the

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Celts celebrate Easter on a different day than Rome. All we know for certain is that Patrick was very missions -minded, and that he established so many missions -minded areas there in Ireland that he had a tremendous impact upon the rest of the history in that particular area.

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Then we have someone named Columba, and his dates are 521 -597.

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He's primarily known, he is a Celtic Christian who went to Scotland, where he spent 34 years ministering in Scotland and founded a monastery at Iona, which is very important in the history of the faith in Scotland.

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And it was from Iona that a man named Idan came forth.

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Well, came forth, I'm not sure what that means, but he dies at 651, and he goes south into England, and he set up the monastery at Lindisfarne, which is an island off the east coast of England, which ends up being very important in the faith there.

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Now, English Christianity, in the history of the

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Roman Church, Gregory I, or Gregory the

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Great, became pope in 591.

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I'm sorry, 590. Don't want to steal a year from him there.

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He was both a political as well as spiritual leader.

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He is important for a lot of reasons. He really, he wrote, he was really far ahead of his predecessors up to his time period as far as being a theologian and organizer.

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One of the things that is interesting to me is in some of his books, he specifically denies the canonical status of the major books of the

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Apocrypha. Specifically, I believe it was 1 Maccabees. And he specifically says, though not canonical, and then he quotes a story from it.

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Rome likes to say, well, you know, we have this universal tradition, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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Well, tell that to Pope Gregory the Great. Well, the reason we mention him here, also,

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Gregory the Great is important as a stepping stone in the later full development of the

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Doctrine of Purgatory. And once again, okay, you're talking around 600 here.

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It's going to be 840 years later before you have the formal, final, dogmatic definition of Purgatory at the

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Council of Florence. But you have these steps. And as with so many things in church history, you have different streams that lead into a final position.

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And this is one of the steps early on. It doesn't mean that Gregory would have even had a concept of what was eventually defined as dogma in the middle of the 15th century.

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But same thing with Augustine. Augustine, when he allowed the government troops to suppress the

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Donatists, had no idea that that would eventually end up in the Spanish Inquisition.

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But historically, as we look back, we can see the path. But Gregory saw stolen, as it was called at the time,

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Angle children in a slave market in Rome. And they were little, you know, little white cherubs, you know.

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They weren't as dark as the people in Italy would tend to be. And his heart was taken with him.

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And he found out where they came from. And so he commissioned a man by the name of, sorry, church history sometimes does repeat names and cause us confusion.

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Augustine, different one, to go to England as a missionary.

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And when Augustine comes to England, he builds a monastery in a very, very important place called

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Canterbury. Not Canterburg, which is what

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I just wrote. I don't know why my right hand went into rebellion. Or as my dad used to say, my tongue got in front of my eye teeth,

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I couldn't see what I was saying. Anybody else ever heard that one? I think it's a

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Midwestern thing, I guess. I don't know. So Augustine builds a monastery in Canterbury.

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And he wins Ethelbert, king of Kent. And you win the king, and you tend to win the entire realm.

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Because once the king converts, then everybody else is like, okay. Now, you and I would go, hmm, that would tend to lead to a fair amount of nominalism.

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Yes, yes, it would. Yes, it would. But at the same time, while that would tend to lead to nominalism, there is also a much different worldview amongst people then.

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If my king follows this person named Jesus, then I should listen to why

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I should follow this person named Jesus. So it's real easy for us to go, but we're a bunch of individualistic

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Westerners. And these weren't individual, they're in the West, but the Western culture that we follow, post, quote, unquote, enlightenment is not what they were living in at that time.

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So again, consider that as well.

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But what happens now is you have the tradition coming from Patrick and Celtic Christianity, and now you've got this much more

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Roman -based, because Augustine's sent by Gregory, much more Roman -based form.

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And what would be the major differences? Well, there wouldn't be that much, but how often have we seen the date of Easter being a controversy?

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Remember in the early church, Victor and Irenaeus and all that stuff, many, many lessons ago now? Well, here we go again.

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Now we're hundreds of years down the road, and there's another controversy over which day you celebrate

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Easter. Most of us don't even know when it's coming anyways today, so we really don't care too much.

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So in 1663, you have the

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Council of Whitby, which is basically over this competition between Celtic Christianity and Roman Christianity, and the

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Celts basically lose, and they pull out of England, and they go back to Ireland, or I suppose there's still

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Bastions up in Scotland as well. And so this is some of the background.

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So what's going on in England, Ireland, and Scotland at this point in time, which of course becomes so much a center of our attention at later periods of time.

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Now around this time, we also have expansion into the area of modern -day

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Deutschland, Germany. There had already been missionaries that had gone up into this area in the middle fourth century who were

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Aryan, and so there will always be an issue because the

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Aryans basically got there first, and Aryan as in Arius, as in denying the deity of Christ.

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But this area was primarily inhabited by Druids who were pagans by nature.

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If you want to see a modern representation of what they look like, if you've seen the movie

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Gladiator, in the opening scene, the Romans are taking on this Germanic tribe, and they're scary -looking dudes, and that's sort of be the modern -day representation.

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They worshipped nature, especially as it was seen in trees and especially in oaks.

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Oak trees were extremely powerful in their representation of the natural forces.

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And so we have a man by the name of Boniface, Boniface, 680 to 754.

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I didn't take a picture of it, but at one of the many places we visited in Germany two weeks ago,

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I noticed a painting. It was earlier on in the trip.

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I noticed a painting of this incident in history. I might have taken a picture of it. Now I think about it.

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I'll have to look. But it commemorated this particular incidence.

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Boniface applied to the Pope for authority to go to the Germans as a missionary. He was sent in 718.

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He gets there, and he finds, he starts to understand Druid theology, and he adopts the missionary methodology of power.

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Now, Boniface is today used as an example of imperialism, insensitivity of Christianity, all sorts of things like that.

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He's considered to be somewhat of a bad guy, because what he did is he finds out that they have a particular locus of worship of a particular tree, the oak at Geismar, the oak at Geismar.

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All right. Oak at Geismar.

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And so he decides to demonstrate the superiority of the, because the

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Druids, it's power. It's a competition of deities.

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And so this is a very holy place, the Druids. And so he goes there, and I don't know if everybody was, you know, off at a soccer game or just what that allowed him to do this.

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But he goes to the oak at Geismar, and he cuts the thing down. There must not have been anybody around, because I would assume if there are people standing around, they would have probably stopped him from doing this.

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But he just takes a big old axe, and he cuts down the oak at Geismar. I'm sure in the name of Jesus.

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And basically says, my God's more powerful than your God. And he was, as a result, elevated the archbishopric.

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Now, history doesn't tell us exactly how successful he was as far as converting

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Druids, but evidently if he was elevated to archbishopric, there must have been some positive result of that particular event.

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Now, it is interesting that there was a British missionary who helped

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Boniface, and her name was

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Leoba. She died in 779. That's an

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I there, L -I -O -B -A. She was sent to a nunnery where she met

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Mother Teta, who taught her to read. She was renowned for her learning, mastering Latin and French as well.

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It was said that she was never without a book except at prayers or when asleep. So here is a woman missionary in the 8th century, famed for her learning, and certainly a violation of the standard no one could read at the time idea.

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Though at this period of time already, given the decline of Roman schools after the fall of Rome, much of literacy was focused in the church, in monasteries, nunneries, places like that.

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That's where much of the learning is now focused at this particular period in time.

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After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, you basically have a tremendous amount of confusion.

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What happens over time is you're going to have invasions, you're going to have movements of peoples, you're going to have kingdoms that come together and create small little empires, and they're going to rise and fall.

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There's going to be a lot of warfare going on, and this takes place for quite some period of time.

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Around the beginning of the 6th century, we have a man by the name of Clovis, who is a

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Germanic chieftain who invaded Gaul in the late 400s, and he founded what is called, and this is important for no other reason than when you read a lot of fiction today,

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I think Dan Brown picked up on this stuff in The Da Vinci Code and all, these guys end up popping up all the time.

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If you missed this part in school, now's your chance to get back on speed.

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But Clovis founds the Merovingian dynasty. Merovingian.

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I can't even spell it right, but it sounds so good. Merovingian dynasty.

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Or the Kingdom of the Franks. And Clovis' wife,

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Clotilda. What a name, I love it. Clotilda. I say we start, you know, let's start a movement to start using early medieval names again, you know, with our next generation of kids.

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Clotilda. Clotilda, there you go. Hey, that, you two, you're a historian.

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So there, I mean, Leoba's nice, Leoba's nice.

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Clotilda, Clotilda, pushing it a little bit, little bit, little bit. Sounds a little bit like a, like a 1982

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East German Olympian or something, Clotilda.

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Some of you are not old enough to know why I just did that, but that's okay. Um, she converted to Christianity and Clovis followed her in 496.

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Um, now as often happens, uh, for example, this happened in, um, in the

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Disney movie Brave. Um, he divided his kingdom amongst three inept sons.

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Um, maybe that's where the story came from. I don't know if you've ever seen that. So if you have little kids, you've seen that Disney movie.

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Um, I love it of course, cause it's filled with Scottish accents, but, um, um, the, a man by the name of Pepin of Harastal, Pepin of Harastal, who was the, um, mayor of the palace, took advantage of this and basically took over for himself given that Clovis's sons were bozos.

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Um, that's a technical historical term, bozo. Uh, I'm sure you've probably done some papers on bozoism in early medieval, uh, history.

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Um, and he becomes the founder of what is called the

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Carolingian, Carolingian, Carolingian dynasty.

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Um, Pepin had close connections with the

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Roman church. And what's very important is that he had an illegitimate son.

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And you need to know who this guy was, uh, because I, I mentioned him really quickly in passing in the introduction on the

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Islamic section. Yeah. His, uh, illegitimate son's name is

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Charles Martel and Martel means hammer

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Charles, the hammer sounds like a WW. Well, it used to be

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WWF. And then the wildlife people messed it all up. So I don't know what it is now, but it sounds like a professional wrestler, but why is

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Charles important? Well, Charles Martel becomes King in seven 14 and big date in history is seven 32.

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I even made it big. See how big I made that seven 32. Why is that important?

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Uh, because that is when he leads his forces and defeats the

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Muslims at the battle of tours, which stops, which ends the century of Islamic expansion.

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Because remember Muhammad dies at six 32 and Islam expands, expands, expands, expands for 100 years.

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And then pretty much exactly 100 years later at the battle of tours, Charles Martel turns them back and begins the process of, and it takes hundreds of years, but driving the

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Muslims back down out of France into Spain and eventually out of there as well.

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Um, that's where you get the Moors and all the rest of that story that you're probably familiar with. So that's where the hundred years ends.

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And Charles, the hammer, uh, is the man that leads them in their defeat of the

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Muslims at the battle of tours. Uh, he is succeeded by a man named

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Pepin the short. I don't make the names up folks.

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They just, um, who took the name, the King of the Franks and Pepin the short isn't all that important except that, uh,

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I guess I should write in here, even though it's, we're running out of space here. Uh, Pepin the short, but it's

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Pepin the short son that is, uh, that is important and certainly a name of someone that you've heard before and his son's name you cannot see behind this.

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Uh, so I'm going to have to assume that you have written all this down before, uh, because we're gonna have to get rid of it here.

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If you're a slow writer, you're going, oh no, but if you're that slow, well, sorry. And Pepin the short son is named

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Charlemagne and Charlemagne's dates are 742 to 814.

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So I said 742 and I wrote, just getting my, my fingers going faster in my brain, which isn't difficult to do.

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Charles the great Charlemagne. He had a long white hair from his youth.

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Sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine? It's sort of like, sort of like one of the

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Elves, you know, in, uh, you know, uh, in Lord of the Rings. He had long white hair from his youth.

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Was nearly seven feet tall. That always helps if you want to be king, you know, when you can look down on everybody, uh, that, that sort of helps too.

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Uh, tremendous athlete, star of the NBA, obviously. Uh, very pious, quite a scholar, loved literature.

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His capital city was Aachen, which became a almost Renaissance area at that point in time.

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He doubled the size of his kingdom during his reign. Uh, he drove out the

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Lombards from Italy in aid to the Pope in 800. And as a result, the

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Pope then crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans. Now what's really interesting, and I don't know if you've heard anything that contradicts this, but he was so popular and it was recognized that no one who would take over from him would ever be as great as he was.

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Um, so when he died, they left his body on the throne for 100 years.

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Interesting non -form of burial. Um, and I would imagine he probably didn't look all that great after just a matter of weeks, but, um, yeah.

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Um, and I don't know about you, but if I was like his successor, that would sort of bum me out a little bit.

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You know, I would just automatically feel somewhat slighted, uh, at that point, but there you go.

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Uh, yes, sir. A really big thing. Yeah.

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Uh, the problem is that this is right toward the beginning of the pornography.

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So the, the papacy is going to go into a trim, into a tailspin decline over the next couple of hundred years.

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So people might look back on that later on and it's going to come out of the pornography and shoot for the stars before it goes back down again.

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Um, but yeah, I mean, people are gonna look back on that and say, see, he did this, he did that. This is probably around the same, you know, same time when the forgeries are being made and stuff like that.

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So, yeah, but we're going to see a total tanking of the papacy here over the next couple of hundred years and what's called the pornography.

45:20

You can guess what that means if it's called the pornography. Um, pretty bad in Rome. Uh, really, really is.

45:28

Now we're out of time, but we will pick up with Charlemagne because he introduces, uh, institutes what's called the

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Carolingian Renaissance, which is very important in maintaining a lot of our historical records and works of literature.

45:40

And it's a, it's a bright spot in the middle of a dark period, uh, in the centuries after, uh, the fall of, uh, the fall of Rome, but something that we should know about.

45:51

And it's important in having maintained stuff for us even to this day. Okay. All right, let's close our time with a word of prayer.

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Father, once again, we thank you for this opportunity, uh, to think back on what has happened in history.

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And we recognize sometimes, Lord, we need to look at, uh, just simply events in history. So we have a context to be able to consider your movements in, uh, guiding your people and the progress of the gospel in this world.

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Uh, we ask that we would, uh, go into this service with hearts desirous of hearing from your truth and being made better servants of yours.