African Christianity: Alexandria and Carthage

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Speaker: Ross Macdonald Chapter 5 (Needham, 2000 Years of Christ’s Power, vol. 1) Sunday Evening Study

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So, chapter five was talking about Africa. When the
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Romans spoke of Africa, they were not talking about Africa as we think of it today, as the continent entire, or even anywhere close to what we would call sub -Saharan
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Africa. They usually meant the northern coast, especially toward the northeast.
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That was Roman Africa. And so the modern nations today of Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, in chapter five,
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Nedim is talking about Africa, a little bit broader than that, yet still not the whole continent. He's really talking about Africa, both in the northeast and in the northwest, all around the
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Mediterranean. So this includes present day Libya and Egypt. In Roman times, of course, this was all part of the prize, as it were, of the
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Roman Empire, and Egypt in particular was significant to Rome because it was Rome's breadbasket. Rome was the first million -person city in antiquity, and it was not to be met again until London in the
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Victorian times. So no city contained a million people within itself between Rome, circa the first century, and London, circa the 19th century.
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That's pretty amazing. So how do you feed a million stomachs in Rome? You send a bunch of grain freighters back and forth to Egypt.
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Egypt is vital as a breadbasket, as it were, for the Roman Empire. Within Egypt, of course, you have the city of Alexandria in the northeast, and we're gonna talk about two important figures from Alexandria tonight, and then
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Carthage in the northwest, two figures that are very prominent from the church in Carthage. And then something that Needham didn't get into, but I'm really excited to talk about at the end, is
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Perpetua, who was a martyr from the church in Carthage at the beginning of the 200s.
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Now, here's the really significant thing. Now, we've been focusing a lot on the early church in terms of what's happening in Rome, or at least in the places very close to Rome, the very heart of the empire.
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And now, here in chapter five this evening, we're looking at Roman Africa, and Roman Africa is just as, if not more significant than even
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Rome itself in terms of the shape of Western Christianity in the early centuries of church history.
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That's something that's kind of surprising. You think, what actually shapes the past 1 ,900 years of church history?
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Well, it's obviously Rome and everything that's happening in the Roman Empire, beginning in Jerusalem and then extending even to Rome itself.
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But when you get to the 200s and 300s, it's actually Roman Africa that is as significant, and in some ways, perhaps more significant, for what
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Western Christianity will become. Robin Jensen talks about African Christianity in this way.
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Three of the most influential theologians of the early Christian period, all of them decisive for Latin Christianity or Western Christianity, were
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Africans. Tertullian was the first to write in Latin and left an extensive body of work that covered nearly the entire creed.
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Cyprian wrote on the sacraments of this church and the role of its officers, which set the terms of debate for the following millennium.
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Some of his writings were appreciated in the Greek church as well. A century later, Augustine drew upon both of these predecessors to develop a theology characteristic of Western Christianity.
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We're not talking about Augustine tonight, but he is a giant among men in the early church, and we will get to him before we get to chapter eight, but we will be talking about Tertullian and Cyprian, as well as Origen and Clement of Alexandria.
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Who here, just a show of hands, who here has heard of Alexandria, the ancient city of Alexandria? All right, that's pretty good.
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I think we've all heard of it. Of course, it was renowned. Some of its architecture made it to the status of the ancient wonders of the world, and it was a vital capital.
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It was the capital of the Roman presence in Egypt. If Rome was the empire's legal and administrative capital,
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Alexandria acted as its intellectual and cultural capital, as well as being one of its most important trading points.
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So it's really important to understand, there's a lot of things that are taking place on the northern coast of Africa that are influencing
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Rome, just as much as things happening in Rome are influencing the northern coast of Africa.
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So it's not everything coming out of Rome affecting everything else. There's things that are happening in the farther reaches of the empire that are actually impacting
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Christianity in Rome. We don't know anything about the beginnings of Christianity in Alexandria.
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The New Testament says that Apollos came from there, in Acts 18. Probably the
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Christian faith established itself in Alexandria as Jews began to spread through this dispersion, what we call the
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Diaspora, and they actually scattered into the farthest reaches of the Roman empire, and that would have included
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Egypt and a major port city like Alexandria. The library of Alexandria was universally recognized as one of the largest and most important libraries in the ancient world.
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I'm trying to think of what the equivalent would be, but I don't think any library rivals its significance. This was the place.
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This was Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, all in one. This was the place to go if you were going to establish yourself as an intellectual or as a scholar.
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This is where philosophers would go to debate, to write treatises, to do research. This is where archivists would go to dig into the past and create historical annals, and one of the great tragedies of history is that the library of Alexandria is lost to us in time.
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That, of course, is sort of a imagined image of what it might have been like. It was probably far more impressive than even that, if we can believe that.
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I'd love to have a home office like that. Remember what also is taking place in Alexandria.
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We talked about the Gnostics two weeks ago. The Gnostic movement had roots in Alexandria because you had, again, philosophers, intellectuals, all sorts of mystery cults.
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All of this was really, in some ways, stemming wherever there was culture and debate and philosophical intrigue.
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So the Gnostic movement began in Alexandria as well, at least according to two of its most prominent leaders, Basilides and Valentinus.
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They both came from there. There's our little graduates from AU. I don't know what their team would be.
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Bulldogs, maybe. Clement of Alexandria. This is a very important figure to deal with.
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Clement was a convert to Christianity in adult life and traveled widely throughout the empire to learn from various Christian teachers.
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The one who impressed him most was an Alexandrian named Pantinus, a Stoic philosopher who had become a
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Christian. After missionary work, which took him as far east as India, Pantinus became head of a
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Christian academy of philosophy in Alexandria, where he tried to show that Catholic Christianity, again, that's
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Christianity that maintains this apostolic rule of faith over against Gnosticism, that Catholic Christianity was better than Gnosticism at dealing with life's great intellectual questions.
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Clement stayed with Pantinus and in about AD 190 took over the leadership of the Christian academy.
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The first great Christian teacher in Alexandria whose writings have survived is Clement of Alexandria.
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He appeared on the scene around 170 or 180 and then seems to disappear after 202.
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Usually 215 is kind of the last traces of Clement of Alexandria. Probably died in the midst of persecution.
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Clement's belief in the universal presence and activity of the logos, logos, that is the Greek term for word.
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Think of John 1, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. That's logos.
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And the early Christian theologians are trying to understand how to make sense of the relationship of Jesus Christ to God the
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Father. And these early fathers in Alexandria make a lot out of the idea of the logos, especially because this was already an element within larger philosophical discourse.
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This idea of the word or reason or the principle, the organizing principle of truth, of life, of light, what have you.
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So Clement's belief in the universal presence and activity of the logos made him appreciate truth and goodness wherever he found them.
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Even in pagan philosophy, he referred to the noble and half -inspired Plato. So here we have, as it were,
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Clement mirroring a statue of Plato. I want to say, giving, and you're going to see there's a reaction both for and against this, even among the fathers we're going to be looking at this evening.
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But I do want to give Plato his flowers where it's due. I think it's somewhere in the Republic where Plato says, what would happen if a truly just man were to dwell among us?
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And this is, he's writing, of course, centuries prior to the Lord Jesus. And his answer is, if a truly just man, if a truly righteous man were to dwell among us, we would crucify him, we would kill him.
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That's Plato. So you can see why some of these early church fathers are going, you know, Plato, for a pagan, not bad.
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You did pretty good to kind of think through some of these aspects. We have to be very careful, as Tertullian will make us ask the question, what does
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Athens have to do with Jerusalem? His books overflow with quotations from the philosophers and the poets of Greece.
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Few Christians were better equipped than Clement to meet the pagan intellectuals of Alexandria on equal terms and present the
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Christian faith to them in a way they could understand and honor. So that's Clement of Alexandria. Clement's positive approach to Greek philosophy involved him in some controversial ideas.
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When he contrasted simple faith with advanced spiritual knowledge, faith often appeared to men
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Orthodox Christianity, while knowledge meant Greek philosophical knowledge. Clement freely used both
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Platonic and Stoic ideas and writings in discussing the Christian view of life. He argued that philosophy prepared the
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Greeks to receive Christ just as the Old Testament prepared the Jews. The Logos had always been at work among all peoples, leading them by different paths toward the knowledge of the one true creator,
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God. That's Clement's view. Even in opposing the Gnostics, Clement seems to have absorbed some of their attitudes.
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For instance, Clement defended the goodness of marriage against Gnostic criticism, but he still could not believe that the ideal
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Christian husband and wife would ever have sought more than the pure purpose of producing offspring.
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If you're understanding what's being said there, that's very significant. Augustine is gonna take that thread up and in some ways anchor it into Western Christianity.
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And so that's where you get the idea of clerical celibacy. In some ways it has to do with the repudiation of certain things that God has designed for his purpose.
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Origin of Alexandria. So notice we're looking at someone else from Alexandria again.
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Here's a Dutch print of Origen teaching some of the katakumen, some of the students of the faith that we'll be talking about in a moment.
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From his childhood, Origen displayed such spiritual purity of character and such a thirst to understand the
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Bible that his father Leonides often tiptoed to the young child's bed at night and kissed his sleeping son's breast where it seemed so clear that the
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Holy Spirit of God had made his temple. So here is a child, perhaps like Samuel himself, who just seems to have this incredibly intimate relationship to God from a very young age.
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And Origen's father, of course, was a very devout man himself. He died as a martyr in AD 202.
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Origen would have been a teenager. Here is not an image representing that, but just some of the things that we don't often read when we read the accounts of martyrs is the effect that had on their family and their offspring.
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Here you have, I believe, a Victorian painting or a Victorian -era painting of a mother bringing her child to see her father's site.
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And this is a venerated katakum for a martyr. So her husband, the father of her child, has died as a martyr, and she's bringing the little one to see where his remains are.
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This is kind of behind the scenes of martyrdom. And in some ways, this is even how Origen is growing up as a teenager.
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His father was martyred. Origen tried to join his father in martyrdom, and the only reason he wasn't able to do so was his mother hid his clothes so he couldn't leave.
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Mommy said, I've lost one. I'm not losing two. That was Dan Hume's image, by the way. Throughout his life,
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Origen owned few clothes, maybe ever since mom hit him. Ate little, accustomed himself to sleeping on the ground, and was known to walk for miles without sandals.
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And we're gonna see this is also a thread that runs through Christianity at this time, is often those who take to themselves ordination vows take on a certain level of poverty or certain ascetic tendencies to deny certain goods and conveniences that others enjoy in life.
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We're gonna see this as a thread that runs through early Christianity and starts connecting dots toward the monastic movement.
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Demetrius of Alexandria was bishop in Alexandria at the time. He was a bishop from 189.
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He died about 231. He appointed Origen to be the head of a school for instructing those who wanted to be baptized.
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These students were called katakumans from the Greek kataketa, which means to teach.
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Katakumans would have been instructed for probably somewhere between two or three years, at least that's where it landed a little bit later in the 200s.
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When Origen became the head of this katakuminate, he was only 17 years old.
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That's how intelligent and devout he was. All right, we have any 17 -year -olds in the room or someone close to that?
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All right, you ready to be the head of the Christian Academy in the capital city? No, I mean, that is a tall order, right?
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This was an incredibly devout man, an incredibly knowledgeable man. And by the way, the position that he took at age 17 was the position that Clement of Alexandria had.
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And so he was, as it were, apprenticed by Clement of Alexandria and then took the position of his master.
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Origen and Demetrius quarreled bitterly when Demetrius tried to control what went on in the school.
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Remember, Demetrius is a bishop. Single bishop leadership had been fully established in Alexandria only since about 180.
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Demetrius becomes a bishop in 189. So only for about a decade has there been a single bishop that's actually ordering and, as it were, controlling the church in Alexandria.
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He's absolute authority as a single bishop over the church in Alexandria. When it comes to the academy,
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Demetrius appointed Origen as a teenager and thought Origen will play ball. He'll do things the way that I want to do them.
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I'm the bishop, I have the authority. And Origen said, this school's independent. This is not directly under you.
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I'm the head of this school. And so they had this sort of wrestling match back and forth. Demetrius was trying to increase the scope of his power by taking charge of the catechetical school and Origen resisted defending the school's independence.
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This is really important because where we're gonna end tonight, the last father we're gonna talk about is Cyprian of Carthage.
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And essentially, this idea of how do we understand the role of presbyters in distinction from bishops, we saw that now really coming out of the 100s, that you have the idea of a bishop, and now that bishop is saying,
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I'm gonna have complete sway and control over the church. And there's really no one that will be able to withstand that or have independence against that.
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And that's even causing friction on how bishops relate to other bishops. That gets Origen excommunicated by Demetrius in the
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Church of Alexandria, because he ends up being ordained in the Church of Caesarea. So how do bishops relate to other bishops?
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What's the jurisdiction? How does this create a church hierarchy as a result of these kinds of debates and issues?
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This is all coming out of this period of time in this place. Origen writes a very important work, probably the most important work he ever wrote,
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Contra Celsus. Celsus was a Platonist. He was not a
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Christian, though he studied Christianity very carefully. He studied and was well aware of the difference between Catholic Christianity and Gnosticism.
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He knew how they differed, and he was critical of both sides. He approved of some things in Christianity, but he rejected
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Jesus as an imposter and as a sorcerer, and accused the apostles of inventing the myth of the resurrection.
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His main problem, and we're gonna see this again, his main problem with Christians was their refusal to accept the established religion of the empire.
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Caesar must be worshipped. The pantheon of the gods of Caesar must be worshipped. And this is where the persecution throughout the 200s is being pressed.
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And so the argument is, you Christians are actually antisocial. You don't come to the festivities. You don't come to the games.
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You don't worship the gods. You don't even honor Caesar. You're antisocial. You're disobedient. You're suspicious.
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You're lawbreakers. You're up to no good. So Origen writes against Celsus in 248, this great work, one of his most important writings, and he's answering point by point.
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And when it comes to that aspect about Christians being disobedient and antisocial, he insists
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God's law is always above human law. Christians are not trying to overcome the pagan rulers of the empire by force.
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Origen argued, where the empire's laws conflict with God's laws, Christians are going to disobey the empire and follow
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God and face the music. Whatever comes out of that, they're willing to deal with. But God's law is always higher than any ruler's law, any empire's law.
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It's not that we're antisocial. It's not that we're disobedient. We're faithful. We're faithful to God as you must be,
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O Caesar. So this is, we're back here in the 2020s.
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Nothing new under the sun, right? One of Origen's most far -reaching services to the
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Catholic Church, again, lowercase C, was his insistence that the logos, that's the word,
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God the Son, as we'll come to understand, the logos and God the Father were two distinct persons.
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Now we take this for granted, but the word person is really a technical term. Personae in Latin is simply the term for a mask, an actor's mask, a face.
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But that's only earlier in Latin. By this point in time, it doesn't really convey that same meaning.
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So they're not meaning a mask. In fact, the church would never use person if it meant anything close to a mask because that plays right into the heresy of modalism.
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God's just putting on different masks. That's not anywhere where Origen is going in his understanding between two persons.
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It's not one being exchanging masks. It's rather two distinct persons, two distinct personalities.
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An understanding of the Trinity was circulating at this time, which came to be known as Sabellianism, after an obscure Roman theologian named
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Sabellius. According to Sabellians, God's oneness, the fact that there's only one
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God, required Christians to believe that God was only one person. This is what Sabellius taught, Deuteronomy 6.
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Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one. All right, if there's one God, then
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Christ is being worshiped as God. Then somehow, God the
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Father and God the Son are just the one God in different ways, or the one God in different modes.
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That's the idea. Because you can't have more than one God. You can only have one God. Or they're right, you can't have more than one
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God. But they're wrong in thinking that the one God exists in different modes. And so Sabellianism is sometimes called today modalism.
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You have oneness Pentecostalism. That's a modalist heresy, T .D. Jakes, for example.
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That's a modalist heresy. According to Sabellians, God's oneness, the fact that there is only one
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God, required Christians to believe that God was only one person. The Father and the Logos, they claimed, were really the same person.
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It was God the Father who became flesh as Jesus Christ. Sabellians said this because they believed wholeheartedly in the deity of Christ, and felt that God would split apart into two gods if Christ was a distinct person from the
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Father. And so they argued that God was only one person who acted now as Father and now as Son, just a different mode.
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Origen taught, fought vigorously against this teaching. He insisted that God the Father and the Logos were two distinct persons who enjoyed a personal relationship with each other, loving each other, communing with each other, acting toward each other.
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In explaining and defending this concept, Origen was the first Christian theologian to teach the doctrine of the eternal generation of the
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Logos. The Father is not the Son, but there was never a time when the Son was not.
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That's how later theologians will explicate that. And you have this in seed form with Origen. The Son is, what do we say today?
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Eternally begotten of the Father. What makes Him the Son is that He's not the
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Father, but He's eternally begotten of the Father. Was there a time when that Son was not? No, He is the
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Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Okay, according to Origen then, the
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Logos did not belong to creation. He was uncreated. Notice my thumbs up. Eternal, divine, a distinct person from His Father.
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A big way he's getting there is not only the baptismal formula of Matthew 28, the one name of the
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Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, but also Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, praying to His Father, communing with His Father in that intimate way.
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He was uncreated, eternal, divine, and a distinct person from His Father. This doctrine of the eternal generation of the
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Logos was very important for the development of the Catholic Church's understanding of the Trinity. And the church was deeply in debt to Origen for insisting on it and explaining it, right?
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This is still Orthodox Trinitarianism today. Thumbs up. Now, we're about to be very critical to Origen for good reason, but let me just pause before we get there.
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If you're living in the 200s and you know that there is one God and that Jesus is
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God, and I give you a Bible and say, tell me how this is so, 9 .9
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times out of 10, you're probably gonna end up a heretic. So let's just appreciate that Origen can actually get this far, all right?
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It's easy to go, wow, what a, I can't believe what he's about to say. Well, if we were living in that time,
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I think we could have a lot more respect and honor for what he was able to develop in terms of a right biblical doctrine of the
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Trinity. Yes. No.
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No, although here, here, we would actually hold this in common with Roman Catholicism.
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But it simply meant, this is universal church understanding of the Trinity, and here it's coming out of this time set.
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But here, in fact, as Western Christians, as Protestants, as the Reformed, we essentially share almost all that the
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Roman Catholic Church has to confess about the nature of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Trinity. So take that for what it's worth.
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Of course, the Nicene Creed, holding that all together. We confess the Nicene Creed as Orthodox in this way, where we differ as on matters pertaining to salvation, justification, and whatnot.
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But very good catch. Now let's go for the thumbs down. So he gets this right.
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The father is not the son, nor is the son the father. The son is eternally begotten of the father, uncreated, eternal, divine, a distinct person from the father, who loves the father, has communion with the father, and does all for the sake of the father, even as the father does all for the sake of the son.
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He gets that. Now, where does he go wrong? Alongside his teaching on the uncreated and divine nature of the logos,
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Origen also maintained that the logos was not God in the same absolute sense as the father is.
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Origen thought that the divine nature existed perfectly in the father, but that when the father transmitted his nature to the logos, it became a degree less than perfect, just as light loses its brightness by a degree after it shines forth from its source.
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Logical, yes. Heretical, also yes. And of course, part of the reason is because every earthly analogy fails to actually comprehend the triune
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God. There is simply nothing analogical in all that is that corresponds to how
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God is, to what he's like. And so every analogy has to break down. I mean, how many
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Sunday school lessons have been ice cube, water, steam? That's modalism, that's a heresy, right?
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That's water in three different modes. No, no, that's a very bad explanation of the Trinity. How about the egg shell and the egg yolk and the egg white?
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That's tritheism, that's three different, right? No earthly analogy can fully capture the incomprehensibility of God.
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Every analogy fails at some point. And here, Origen's analogies begin to falter on what is a right biblical understanding of how to understand the
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Father and the Son. And the Nicene Creed, as we'll see, does not follow in that error from Origen.
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So here we're villain. For a lot of these fathers, the same is true with Tertullian, it's kind of a little bit of both.
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We got really far and we couldn't get far without them, but then we have to jettison a lot of the things that they also taught.
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Origen's theology had a profound effect on the Eastern church. In the great Arian controversy of the fourth century, which by the way, that's where we're ending our study in October, in chapter eight, the
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Arian controversy is what leads to the Nicene Creed, when Arius is beginning to teach things about the relationship of God the
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Father to God the Son. And so that controversy is going to be where the Nicene Creed is actually wrought out of scripture in the apostolic rule of faith.
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So all sides appeal to Origen during this Arian controversy in the fourth century. They all claim his authority.
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We're just following what Origen laid down. Despite this great reverence for Origen among Eastern church leaders, few followed him in his more obviously unorthodox views.
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Another view he had is universal salvation. The idea is that in the end, no one will actually be consigned to hell.
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Hell may be a very long time, but eventually hell will remove all of the dross and sin from everyone who is sent there and all will be, as it were, returned to God.
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So he also is a very early source of a universal understanding of judgment, a universalist understanding of judgment, which is really to say there is no judgment.
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Yes? Will he get that from Greek philosophy? It's possible. I actually haven't read enough of him to know the sources that he's drawing that from.
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I mean, there's several passages that universalists appeal to from scripture, not necessarily philosophical concepts, but certainly there's something about the idea of God as creator and therefore what redemption must mean, something about the agency of man in relation to that,
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God's overarching purpose to glorify himself and be all in all and so forth. But as the church is ever having to do is to go into the scriptures and say, are these things so?
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And that Berean task persists throughout church history. I think we were reading on the
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Tuesday group that he also had this view of our resurrection bodies being spherical. There's some big ball.
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We have arrived. Perfection. No, thank you. I actually would like even this body more than that.
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I don't want to be a big ball. Thank you. Richard Sulin had this to say about origin.
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He is credited with writing the first complete dogmatics, first principles, as well as contracelsus in many ways is just dogmatic theology in response to a critic.
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He wrote the first critical text, the Hexapla, which is a six -fold text dealing with Greek translations as well as Greek transliterations of the
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Hebrew. The first systematic biblical exegesis. He wrote a host of commentaries and homilies, which would be like short sermons.
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Origin startles us by the tenacity of his scholarship and the sheer volume of his literary output.
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The Hexapla was itself 6 ,500 pages in length. I've had to write 30 -page term papers in my life and that's enough to make me wilt.
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6 ,500 pages of work. It's incredible. To this are thousands of additional pages of commentaries, homilies, the earliest complete body of Christian sermons we have in existence, scholia or detailed notes of scripture, most of which have been lost.
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For these works, Jerome called origin an immortal genius and the greatest teacher of wisdom and knowledge in the church after the apostles.
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And also a heretic, unfortunately. Even at an elderly age, he courageously endured torture from which he died a confessor's death in the city of Tyre in 254.
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In spite of his inimitable devotion to Christ in his church, he was ultimately condemned by the church as a heretic. Epiphanius of Salamis, a little bit later after this, a century later, called origin the father of Arius, which is condemned by the council of Nicaea and the root of all other heresies.
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And he was condemned by the emperor Justinian in 543 and denounced as erroneous by the second council of Constantinople in 553.
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So he began well and then everyone sort of lost appreciation for him.
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So thank you and goodbye. We don't want the door to hit you on your way out, but we're glad you came, at least for a little while.
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Let's move on to Carthage now. There were two chief ethnic groups inhabiting the northwest of Africa.
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Again, present day Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. The Coastland people, the descendants of the Phoenicians, you read about, of course, in the
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Old Testament prophets, the significance of Tyre and Sidon, even in Jesus' teaching. Tyre and Sidon would long have repented, all right, from Matthew 21.
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And of course, Carthage becomes a very prominent city, one of the arch rivals to Rome in its early Republican stage.
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You had a series of the so -called Punic Wars between the Roman Republic and Carthage, where some of the great heroes of the
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Roman Republic emerged. And I forget what senator came in with a peach freshly plucked from Carthage, and the insinuation, this is how close they are if we don't destroy them, and Carthago delenda est was the statement,
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Carthage must be destroyed. And Carthage was destroyed. And then it became, as it were, a vassal seaport city for the
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Roman Empire in due time. The great leader, Hannibal Barca of Carthage, right, marching his troops through the
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Alps. Roman soldiers had never seen an elephant in their lives, and they had to face them as legions in combat.
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These are some of the glory days of Carthage prior to the coming of Christ. Well, now we're well into the 200s on the other side of Christ's incarnation.
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And in Africa, you have the merger of these descendants of the Phoenicians along with the Berber people who are native to Africa.
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And this is all merging with Latin culture because of the influence of Rome and the strong notion of Hellenism because Rome was philohellenic.
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They loved Greek culture. They loved Greek literature. And so you have all these streams merging in Carthage. We know nothing of the origins of Christianity in Northwest Africa before 8180.
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We don't have any evidence at all of Christian influence. In that year, however, we do have a report of 12 martyrs, the
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Sicilian martyrs who were put to death in Carthage in the Roman amphitheater there.
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So that is the earliest record we have of Christian presence in Carthage. It's actually 12 martyrs.
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Seven men and five women. Tertullian. We actually talked about Tertullian two weeks ago.
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He was one of these church fathers that embraced Montanism. He was a Montanist for a while. What version or flavor of Montanism he received and championed, it's hard to say.
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Montanism was not monolithic by any degree. Tertullian of Carthage.
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The first great Christian writer in the Latin language was a native of Carthage called Tertullian. He was born about 160, received a high standard of education in Greek and Roman culture, converted to Christianity at about the age of 30.
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Tertullian had a very high and strict ideal of the Christian life. He recommended frequently fasting, taught that a
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Christian could only get married once. Even if their spouse died, they would have to remain unmarried. A Christian who committed a serious sin after baptism could be forgiven only once.
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By the way, he felt that he could not be forgiven after his baptism due to his sin, but he hoped for mercy in the judgment seat of God.
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Above all, Tertullian glorified martyrdom, teaching that if a Christian ran away or bribed a magistrate to save his life, he had betrayed
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Christ. Tertullian's fierce moral zeal made a soul burn with sympathy for the
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Montanists. For Tertullian, the focus of unity in the church was not the local bishop, but the sanctifying presence of the
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Holy Spirit. Now we're gonna look at another figure in a moment from Carthage, and that's Cyprian.
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There's a lot of overlap here, but here is where they're very different. For Cyprian, the bishop defines the presence of the church.
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The bishop is the unity of the church. Where the bishop is, that's where the church is, is his famous quote.
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For Tertullian, it's not that the bishop is what holds the church together, but rather the sanctification of the
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Holy Spirit. And this idea of actually having a rigorous righteousness is not just unique to Tertullian.
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The writings in Roman Africa at this time are not very interested in going out to evangelize the heathen, so much as focusing on the righteousness that Christians are called to live in.
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And that stokes enough contrast and curiosity that people are coming to the Christians in droves. Very interesting dynamic there, maybe perhaps telling for us today.
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I don't know why he looks like a Muslim imam, Dan, but we'll go, this looks like an
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Al -Qaeda video. Tertullian was one of the most warlike spirits ever to enlist in the army of Christ.
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I asked Dan, give me a picture of Tertullian that looks like John Knox at the pulpit. That's pretty good.
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Not as good of a beard as Knox had, but we'll take it. His hawkish, fire -breathing personality perfectly expressed the uncompromising hostility of the
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Northwest African church towards the pagan society of the Roman Empire. They were not interested at all of sort of compromising or seeking to be seeker -sensitive.
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It was all about living hard and fast in the righteous calling of Christ, even if that meant your own blood being shed.
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That was African Christianity, and Tertullian was very much the John Knox of that kind of reformation.
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Tertullian's first Christian book, his greatest work, the Apologeticum, appeared in AD 196. He argued that the
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Roman government should stop persecuting the church because Christians paid their taxes and prayed for the emperor and for the welfare of the empire.
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It's what scripture commands Christians to do. However, he was equally insistent that no Christian could actually take part in any of the affairs of pagan society.
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We're not coming to your festivals. We're not burning incense to you. We will offer nothing to your gods. We won't go to your games.
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We won't go to your shows, but we pray for you and we pay our taxes, and if you're gonna persecute us, we're not gonna cause an armed uprising.
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This is essentially what he's laying down. The ball is in your court. We're not changing any of these practices.
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Do what you must. Kill us? You should leave us alone. We're actually the best citizens you have. We teach our own not to steal or to rob.
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We teach them to be obedient to their masters. We pray for you. That's a lot better than burning incense to you. We actually pray for you, to the god and maker that you're gonna stand before in judgment.
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Tertullian's hostility to pagan culture meant that he took a very, very different approach to Greek philosophy compared to Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, the two figures we just looked at.
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Justin and Clement saw Christianity as the fulfillment of Greek philosophy, that to which the
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Greeks were always seeking to grasp, but it had to be revealed to them in the fullness of Christ's arrival.
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Platonism pervaded Origen's theology, but by contrast, Tertullian called Christians to be on their strictest guard against pagan philosophy.
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It was spiritually dangerous, always threatening to poison and corrupt the purity of Christian truth.
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Tertullian asked, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem? And his answer would be, nothing whatsoever.
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He wrote a book against Praxeas. Praxeas denied that there was any real personal distinction between father, son, and Holy Spirit, what we just saw from Origen.
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The father is not the son, nor is the son the father. They are different persons. Well, Praxeas was also a theologian that denied what
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Origen taught, denied what Tertullian is going to teach. He said, no, the father is the son, and the son is the father, just a different mode of the one
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God in relationship to us. He simply acted out these three different roles, father, son, and spirit.
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Against this, Tertullian developed many of the ideas and language which the church soon accepted as essential to the
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Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. So this is all from his most important work, Contra Praxeas.
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And get a load of this. Tertullian was the first Christian writer to use the word Trinity. That's pretty cool.
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Of course, that Latin term Trinitas was already a word around, but he was the first to coin it as a technical term to understand
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God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. He also employed the
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Latin words substantia, or substance, and persona. So these words were already being used, substance versus person.
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He's developing it in the larger contours of a Trinitas. So here you're, you know, how do you get the three and the one?
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Tertullian is saying, why not both? It's the three one, or the Trinity. Not a unity, but a triunity, the
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Trinity. Tertullian said that in one substance, there are three persons.
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One substantia, one God, existing eternally in three personae, three persons.
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That is Orthodox Trinitarianism. We'll see it in the Nicene Creed at the end of the night. We maintain it even 1800 years later.
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So Trinitarian theology is well in progress. We're still in the 200s. We're in the mid 200s. Nicaea is coming up in 325.
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There's still things to work out, but in full swing as heresies are cropping up and fathers and theologians are pouring into the scriptures, they're coming up with ways to get their minds around what scripture is revealing.
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This idea of a Trinity. How is there a three in oneness? How is there a one in threeness?
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How do we actually hold these things together? And you have theologians being moved and led by the inspiration of scripture and by the guidance of the
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Holy Spirit to develop this kind of theology. Tertullian applied the same thinking about substance and person to the relationship between the divine and human natures of Christ.
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That's going to be very important as we head to Chalcedon later in the sixth century. Jesus Christ, he said, was one person who united in himself two distinct substances, a divine and a human substance.
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What we would say is a nature, divine and a human nature. The two substances were joined together, but not mixed up, not confused.
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Each retained its own distinctive properties. Christ was therefore fully and truly God, fully and truly man, at one and the same time in one single person.
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That is Orthodox Christology. Coming right out of Tertullian. Now our last figure before we get to Perpetua, Cyprian of Carthage.
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Thasius Tichilius Cyprian was born in about 200, probably in Carthage. Upper class and very rich.
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In fact, you see the threefold name. That was a sign that you were of upper crust in Roman society.
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There, Cyprian, of course, and as we'll see, Perpetua was of a higher status. One of the few women in church history that we know her name and she has two names.
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I mean, she was high class, an elite status. Here, this threefold name, the
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Prinomen, the Nomen and the Cognomen, shows that Cyprian was very wealthy and he was. He was a famous lawyer, a professor of rhetoric and he converted later in life, 8246.
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And when he converted, he gave away his entire fortune to the poor. There seems to be, this is more of a side note, but there seems to be something about the ability of the elite to be literate, to be scholarly, to be trained and well -educated, and also their ability to be patrons with their wealth, with their skill and learnedness, to be patrons for those that would come.
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Even when they gave away that wealth and that kind of economic influence, they seemed, if they were converting to Christianity, to be able to retain it as bishops.
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And so very often you have the wealthy, not as a snub, but in terms of the most educated and skilled, the most trained.
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Those are often those who rise into the ranks of the bishopric in the early church, as most of the church is illiterate at this time.
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They're not able to read nor to write. And so they can't go to the libraries and they can't enter into the philosophical debates, nor can they respond to the critics or even the
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Gnostics. Disgusted with the corruption and immorality of pagan society,
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Cyprian searched for something purer and nobler and he found the answer in Christ. And this is amazing to me.
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Within two or three years of becoming a Christian, his outstanding qualities of character, his gentleness, love, and peaceable spirit led to his election as Bishop of Carthage.
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The leader of the Church of Carthage, the Bishop of Carthage, wasn't even a Christian four years prior.
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That's amazing, that's amazing. And the greatest influence on Cyprian was
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Tertullian, who we just spoke about. Cyprian called him the master and used to read his writings every day.
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Cyprian himself had a fairly simple, literal understanding of the Bible. In contrast to Origen and a lot of these very fanciful methods of interpretation, he was really ingrained and in line with the
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Old Testament. He was the first of the church fathers to set forth a doctrine of communion or the
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Eucharist as a sacrifice, a sacrificial feast. And this view ever after Cyprian becomes more and more developed and enters into Western Christianity.
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This sacrificial mass, this Eucharistic mass. It is easy to misunderstand Cyprian's teaching.
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He did not think that the Eucharist was a fresh sacrifice for sins. His teaching was that through the
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Eucharist, Christ presented himself to God the Father as the one who had made the once for all sacrifice for the sins of his people on the cross.
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And by eating the bread and drinking the wine, believers were united with that perfect self -offering of Christ, once for all accomplished, so that he presented both himself and his people and the congregation to the
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Father. Cyprian's main concern was not the doctrine of communion, however, but Christian unity.
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Why? As soon as persecution ends, it's a lot harder for the church to stay unified.
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And so when we get to the mid 250s, around 253 to 260 and persecution begins to wane and there's about 40 years of peace,
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Cyprian's main concern is how can we actually maintain orthodoxy and unity? Now there's not pressure that's actually keeping us unified, keeping us pure.
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And so the authority and power and influence of the bishop becomes that much more important without sustained persecution at this time.
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Where the bishop is, he said, there is the church. In Cyprian's theology, the difference between the apostles and the bishops faded away almost entirely.
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The apostles were the first bishops. The bishops were the new apostles, not invested indeed with apostolic infallibility, but possessing absolute disciplinary authority over their congregations and clothed with supernatural power to administer the life -giving sacraments.
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So Cyprian is a milestone on the way to Roman Catholicism leading into the Middle Ages. Who does he defer to?
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If you are viewing bishops as not another word for pastor or elder or overseer as the
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New Testament teaches, but actually saying that the bishop is something over and above and even beyond presbyters, and then a single bishop comes into view, and now there's a single bishop over a region, over a city perhaps, or an area.
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Well, if your view is that the bishops are just the apostles, and the apostles were just the bishops, then who's the bishop of all bishops?
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Peter. And so where is Cyprian going with this? He says, although the church of Carthage is independent and it's under its own bishop, they defer and they almost look first to the bishop of Rome.
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This is where you're starting to see the development of the papacy, the Roman papacy. From Cyprian's doctrine of the church, it followed that the sin of schism, leaving the
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Catholic church and its apostolic bishops was infinitely serious. Again, persecution's not keeping everyone together, keeping everyone orthodox.
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So now the bishops have to flex muscle that persecutors won't. The Catholic church alone was the true church of Christ.
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All others were false. At the time, that's probably a fair statement, by the way. Catholic church defined over against Gnosticism.
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And the Holy Spirit worked only in the Catholic church and its ministry. Therefore, in one of Cyprian's most famous sayings, outside of the church, there is no salvation.
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He stated, whoever stands apart from the church and is joined to an adulteress, in other words, a non -Catholic church, is cut off from the promises given to Christ's church.
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And he who leaves the church of Christ is not attained to the rewards of Christ, but is an alien and an enemy. You cannot have
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God as your father unless you have the church as your mother. If anyone was able to escape the flood outside of Noah's Ark, then you can escape judgment if you are outside the doors of the church.
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So this is how Cyprian is viewing an unpersecuted church heading into the latter 200s.
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Where Needham ends, I'm not going. Needham ends by talking about the schism that emerges as a result of those that had been persecuted.
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And it actually said, we no longer believe in Christ or we will worship Caesar. And then they say, we actually made a mistake.
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We wish we hadn't done that. And now that the persecution's over, can we come back? And the issue about what to do with the so -called lapsed, the lapsi, those who caved in because they were afraid of persecution, but now that the persecution's over, they say, we're sorry, can we come back?
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And there were different bishops that handled that question differently. Some were lenient and soft in saying you may come.
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They had certain consequences or forms of discipline. Others said, you can never come back. And so this is an issue that ends up creating a schism between bishops, a schism in the church.
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And he ends not talking about Donatism, which I believe he'll get into, but Novationism. I'm not gonna summarize that.
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If you're interested in that issue, the last two pages in this chapter cover it. What I wanna talk about is persecution and then close with perpetua.
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So we're coming to the end of the 200s now. Here's a little snapshot about how the 200s went. Septimius Severus was the
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Roman emperor at the very beginning of the 200s. He did not go out of his way to find and hunt down Christians that were already practicing as Christians.
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What he tried to do was create policy to track down and persecute those who were either proselytizing or becoming proselytes.
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So in other words, those who were trying to make converts or those who were being converted, that's where he tried to aim his persecution.
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That's very important for perpetua's story. He was the emperor and that was the policy when perpetua was martyred.
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A little bit later when we get to the middle of the century, the persecution under Decius was overwhelming.
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Decius is the first empire -wide persecution of Christianity. Thankfully, as horrific as that was, he died in battle shortly after his reign.
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His successor Valerian began being somewhat neutral toward Christians, but then in 257, that all began to change again.
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As punishment for following the Christian faith, at first, he either exiled them or sent them into the mines, which was basically a slow death sentence.
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Then he issued a second edict and the punishment was simply death. This went all the way to 260.
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He also died in battle. His son Gallienus ended the persecution and allowed there to be decades of peace all the way up to Diocletian, where the persecution is absolutely intense.
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It's a bonfire all throughout the Roman Empire. So this is gonna be where we're gonna close tonight, the martyrdom of Perpetua.
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This is a very famous painting. It's actually an art museum in Baltimore painted by Jean -Léon
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Gérôme, who's just a tremendous historical painter. And this is called The Christian Martyr's Last Prayer.
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You see here, of course, this amphitheater, this stadium with the roaring crowds. It may be hard to see, but those torches are actually
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Christians being burned to give light to the arena. And here you see some of the big cats being released onto the sand of the arena floor.
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And here you see this huddle of Christians with perhaps the most senior among them, maybe a presbyter, maybe a deacon, offering prayer in that classic standing pose.
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And Gérôme actually says in his notes, whenever an animal, if you go to a bullfight in Madrid, whenever they're first let out of the arena, they sort of stalk and soak in the environment before they aim at the matador.
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And he said, I tried to capture that moment's hesitation where the lion is first taking in the spectacle of the arena before he's about to charge toward the
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Christian circle of prayer. Perpetua wrote her prison diary from Carthage around the year 202, 202 to 203.
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In that account, there's a prologue and a conclusion that are written by a later narrator or editor, giving the information that she couldn't give.
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And then on either side between that are several chapters of her own diary entries, her own writing, the words of Perpetua herself.
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And so I'm going to quote from the beginning with the narrator giving us the introduction to Perpetua, and then
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I'm going to read some of the sections in between. I would actually ask someone to read, but for the next two, tonight and the next one, our normal audio guy is gone, and he usually is handling how to get other people reading onto the recording.
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Since we're not going to do that easily without him, I'm just going to do the reading tonight and next week. I would actually prefer to hear it from someone else, but just for the sake of recording for the people that aren't here.
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This is the editor introducing Perpetua. A number of young catechumens, remember, these are people that are being catechized in the
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Christian faith so that they can be baptized. Normally baptisms were done on Easter. It was generally a two to three year process of being a catechumen.
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A number of young catechumens were arrested. Revocatus, his fellow slave, Felicitas, Satyrus, and Secundulus, and with them,
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Vibia Perpetua. You should know, as far as ancient writings, we have almost no firsthand accounts written by women.
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Greek has very scant. Sappho, the poet, I mean, very scant.
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Hypatia of Alexandria later on in the later centuries. In Latin, there's virtually nothing.
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So Perpetua's account is remarkable in a number of respects. It's remarkable just by virtue of knowing this woman and having her handwriting in the ancient world.
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I can't tell you how incredibly rare of a phenomenon that is. And this, of course, was something circulated and celebrated by the
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Christians. Also, as I said, for her to have a twofold name, there's no one else in the account that has a twofold name.
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This is showing her elite status. She is a wealthy, well -to -do woman, probably her father an unbeliever, having some sort of formal stature with the local government.
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She was a newly married woman of good family and upbringing. Her parents were still alive, and one of her two brothers was a catechumen like herself.
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She was about 22 years old and was still nursing her infant son, who here is close to 22? All right.
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Are you really that close to 22? All things relative. I don't think, don't go to the bar anytime soon.
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I don't think you'll pass. And Mary, you're close. You're somewhat close, right?
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Okay, Peter, you don't count, wrong gender. But I'm just looking at Mary. I mean,
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I know you're close to 22, brother. We'll give you credit,
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Mary. But you're holding your infant daughter, right? To just think of your age, and there's something about a teenager that says,
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I'm willing to die for this, right? When you get married and when you have a child, all of a sudden you have a lot more to live for.
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It's no longer about you. It's not just what you're willing to do, but it's what that loss is going to mean for the others that you love, the others that you want to be there with.
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That's perpetua. She's 22 years old. She's a young wife. She just has a little son, a little baby. She's still nursing.
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While we were still under arrest, she said, my father, out of love for me, was trying to persuade me and shake my resolve.
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Father, I said, do you see this vase here, for example? Yes, I do, he said. And I told him, could it be called by any other name than what it is?
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And he said, no. Well, so too. I cannot be called anything other than what I am, a Christian.
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We walked up to the prisoner's dock. All the others, when questioned, admitted their guilt. In other words, she's saying a lot of the others that went with them as Christians just said, oh yeah, we're wrong, we promise we won't do it again.
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And they all leave. Now she's coming up. When it came to my turn, my father appeared with my son.
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So here's her elderly father weeping for her. And he's holding her baby to her.
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Dragged me from the step and said, perform the sacrifice, have pity on your baby. Hilarionis, the governor, said to me, have pity on your father's gray head.
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Have pity on your infant son. Offer the sacrifice for the welfare of the emperors. I will not,
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I retorted. This is her prison diary after she went to the dock for judgment.
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Are you a Christian, said Hilarionis? And I said, yes, I am. On the day before when they had their last meal, which is called the free banquet, they did not celebrate a banquet, but rather a love feast.
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We learned about that on one of the first weeks, the agape that the early Christians celebrated together. They spoke to the mob with the same steadfastness, warned them of God's judgment, stressing the joy that they would have in their suffering and ridiculing the curiosity of those who came to see them.
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Saterus said, will not tomorrow be enough for you? Why are you so eager to see something that you dislike? Take careful note of what we look like so that you will recognize us on the day.
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And so everyone would depart from the prison in amazement and many of them began to believe. The appointed time came and the women were placed before a mad heifer.
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So you get the idea that they, perhaps as a show of relative decency in the manner of execution, that they chose not a bull or a large cat, but just a mad heifer to sort of trample and crush the women.
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Meanwhile, the men had to face leopards and wild cats and whatnot. First, the heifer tossed
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Perpetua and she fell on her back. Then sitting up, she pulled down the tunic that was ripped along the side so that it covered her thighs thinking more of her modesty than of her pain.
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Next, she asked for a pin to fasten her untidy hair for it was not right that a martyr should die with her hair in disorder lest she might be seen to be mourning in her hour of triumph.
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At another gate, Saterus was earnestly addressing the soldier, Pudens. As the contest was coming to a close, a leopard was let loose.
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And after one bite, Saterus was so drenched with blood that as he came away, the mob roared in witness to his second baptism.
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He said to Pudens, remember me and remember the faith. These things should not disturb you, but rather strengthen you.
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Perpetua, however, had yet to taste more pain. She screamed as she was struck on the bone.
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And then she took the trembling hand of the young gladiator and guided it to her throat. It was as though so great a woman, feared as she was by the unclean spirit, could not be dispatched unless she herself were willing.
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That's the account of Perpetua. And as Tertullian says, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
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And this is how the whole account ends. Think of this account being circulated throughout
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Northwestern Africa and even the churches throughout the empire. And here's how it ends. Ah, most valiant and blessed martyrs, truly are you called and chosen for the glory of Christ Jesus, our
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Lord. And any man who exalts, honors, and worships him as his glory should read for the consolation of the church, these new deeds of heroism, which are no less significant than those of old.
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For these bear witness to one in the same spirit who still operates and to God, the father almighty, to his son,
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Jesus Christ, our Lord, to whom is splendor and immeasurable power for all of the ages, amen.
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And notice what we have there in the 200s at the very feet of the martyrs, the father, the son, the spirit, the truth.
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So the Roman empire, now as we're heading to the end of the 200s, Diocletian becomes an emperor and anywhere there is
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Rome, there is a persecution of Christians. And as the flames of persecution spread, so spreads the