23 - Cyprian

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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All right, we continue in our study of church history, number 23, which means we're getting close to halfway through the first time

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I did this, but we're nowhere near close to halfway through the material, so we're going a little more slowly this time.

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Maybe that's a function of age or something, I don't know. But we are currently looking at Cyprian, the

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Martyr Bishop of Carthage, and last week, once again, we reviewed his view of the sacraments, ex opera operato and ex opera operanti, his view being ex opera operanti, and then

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Augustine comes along with ex opera operato later on. That becomes the official view of the medieval

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Roman Catholic Church. Now, Cyprian had a number of different issues that he is relevant to, and one of them is his name comes up, and this is,

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I think, rather fascinating. His name comes up in regards to papal supremacy, and if any of you listen to The Dividing Line, you know that I have mentioned on it recently that I expect there to be an inordinate amount of discussion of the

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Reformation and issues Roman Catholic over the course of the next 10 or 11 months or so, because of the fact, of course, of the traditional observation of the beginning of the

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Protestant Reformation, October 31st, 1517. Now, I've said more than once that's somewhat of a subjective date.

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Nothing just starts one day. It's not like everybody was just all happy and cool with Roman Catholicism on October 30th, and then, boom, here comes

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Martin Luther, and he's nailing stuff to church doors as if that was somehow unusual.

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It wasn't. It was extremely common. He wasn't trying to start a Reformation or anything like it, so why we date it there?

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I think we'll probably have another little stint of discussion come 2021, which sounds like a long way down the road, but it's not.

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Just a short hop, skip, and a jump ahead, because of the anniversary of Luther's appearance at the

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Diet of Worms, and the Here I Stand, I Can Do No Other speech that is delivered there.

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But in that process, I have mentioned that one thing that's really concerned me, even just over the past couple of days, is there are good reasons not to be a

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Roman Catholic and to stand against Roman Catholicism. There are very good reasons, but there are really bad reasons, too.

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Unfortunately, a lot of my fellow non -Roman Catholics seem to have the idea that, well, if it's the

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Pope or if it's Rome, it doesn't have to be a good reason. The Pope's evil.

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He's the Antichrist, you know? Any reason is a good reason.

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This concerns me greatly because, first of all, it's just a fundamental violation of Christian truthfulness.

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If you follow he who is the truth, then your arguments should be truthful no matter who you're arguing against. The use of falsehood in the argumentation against falsehood is not an option for a

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Christian. It just isn't, unless you're a pragmatist and figure, well, hey, as long as it works.

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I can't even begin to conceive of how anyone could believe that, but there are a lot of people that clearly do. You have to have the right reasons, and of course, secondarily, if you're using the wrong reasons, you're setting yourself up for a good, sharp

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Roman Catholic apologist to come along and, if not convert you, then convert people you've been talking to that can expose the fallacious nature of your argumentation.

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But man, I tell you, there is anti -Catholic bigotry, just as there is anti -Protestant bigotry amongst

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Roman Catholics, but there are some non -Roman Catholics. If you even suggest that something has some connection in some way to Roman Catholicism, they are on you like a duck on a

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June bug. We saw in the Radical Reformation the

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Anabaptists, and Anabaptists, it's down the road, we'll get to it, we won't get that far, but that term is almost worthless in accurately describing such a widely multifaceted movement that, it's sort of like, well, let's just be honest, describing

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Baptists, Baptists doesn't really describe almost anything.

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There's nothing in the term Baptists that even necessarily implies Trinitarianism for that matter, and there are non -Trinitarian

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Baptists today, but I don't have anything in common with them. So the term

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Anabaptist really only looked at one little narrow slice of something that had heretics and true believers all mixed in together and things like that.

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But anyway, some of the Anabaptists, some of the Radical, what's called the Radical Reformation, went so far as to say, hey, we're rejecting everything of Rome, so let's make sure that we reject everything of Rome, and that includes the

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Trinity and all sorts of stuff like that. You know, Rome came up with the Trinity, so why should we believe anything like that, and so on and so forth.

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One of the major mistakes is how many people think that Rome, that the early church was the

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Roman church. Nobody back then would have had any understanding of that. Cyprian would never have understood how someone could ever use the term

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Roman Catholic. It just wouldn't have even crossed his mind. This man was called

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Pope by the deacons at Rome. In one of the letters the deacons at Rome wrote to Cyprian, they called him

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Pope. Well, he was the Bishop of the church in Carthage. So even that term had not yet come to mean what it would mean in later centuries, obviously.

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And so there's just such a tremendous amount of naivete when it comes to church history that that's how

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Jack Chick made his money on all the Alberto Rivera comics and stuff like that. So, for example, in a few weeks, we'll be looking at the

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Christological controversies of the early church, and one of the terms, and I know

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I'm sort of wandering here for a second, but this just happened and so it's on my mind, sorry.

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One of the controversies of the early church, now in modern

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Greek you would use long O's there. Theotokos, right? Theotokos. Right. This is the phrase, the word,

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I'm sorry, that literally means God bearer or as it is understood today, mother of God.

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Now, obviously when I hear a Roman Catholic referring to Mary as the mother of God, praying to her, seeking her intercession, so on and so forth, this is idolatry.

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There is no question about it. Mary does not hold the position of being the object of prayer, being the one through whom benefits of grace and mercy are given to the world.

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Mary is not the neck that turns the head of the grace of God, as has been said by popes and so on and so forth.

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All the rest of that stuff, I've written a book on the subject, still available, idolatry.

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But, and this is where a number of my friends just jump off the track, that does not mean that this term historically did not have an orthodox meaning.

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Because you see, when that term was first used, it wasn't about Mary. It was about Christ. It was a statement that said that when

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Christ was born, he was truly the God man. There was no adoption.

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It wasn't the idea that, one of the views of the early church was that Jesus was just a man who was adopted as the son of God or became indwelt by the son of God at a later point in time or something along those lines.

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This came out of what's called the Nestorian Controversy, we'll get to it, I'm just using it as an illustration right now, the

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Nestorian Controversy, where there was a concern, and Nestorius said he wasn't saying this, this is one of those places where church history is a little, the winners write the stories sometimes, and in this one, it may have been more political than it was theological, but the reason that this was adopted was to say that when

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Jesus was born, the hypostatic union was already a reality, and so Jesus was truly deity.

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It's not something he grew into, was added to him at some point in time, etc., etc. So the term specifically had to do with who

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Jesus was, not who Mary was. Mary was just the one who gave birth to him, but at the time of the birth, he was truly

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God, and that's an absolutely, fundamentally orthodox belief. And so God -bearer was a historically accurate term, and when it's used in its historical context, it's not objectionable.

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What happened over time with the exaltation of Mary, and again, it's this situation where you've got all these streams that come together over time, and eventually when they come together, they put together something that's an error.

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So you get this stream that had its orthodox beginnings, and then you get the exaltation of Mary, and the idea that Mary has access to merit and stuff, and once it all comes together, well, now you've got a problem.

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The same thing with purgatory. Purgatory starts with a little something here, and then something starts developing two centuries later, and something starts developing a century after that, and they eventually all come together and you get the doctrine of purgatory.

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That's why, like I said, you just can't buy these lists that say, date this developed, date this developed, because it's just not how history works.

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It's just not how it functions. And so it's important to note, in regards to this term, that if you go nuts on this and say, oh, that's terrible, no one can ever use this term, something like that, the

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Roman Catholics came up with it, this is long before Roman Catholicism, just a second, it's long before Roman Catholicism, and it had an orthodox meaning, and you're decrying of its later use, and the exaltation of Mary as the mother of God, and the queen of mercy, and all the rest of this stuff, will actually be sharpened and more accurate when you recognize where it came from, what its orthodox origins were, and then can focus upon the non -biblical evolution that takes place into its modern form, but a lot of people don't know that part, and that's where they just, they subject to this, and then what the sharp

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Roman Catholic apologist does is come along and say, oh, so you're a Nestorian heretic, you don't really believe in the deity of Christ, you don't really believe in the hypostatic union, and now they've got you completely off, and now you're defending something you weren't expecting to be defending in the first place, and shouldn't be defending, but it's because you haven't made the proper distinctions and clarifications, and as we know in our political world today, making proper distinctions, not switching genres, and all that kind of stuff, in other words, clear critical thinking, not something that happens a lot in politics, and sadly, not something that happens a lot in theology either.

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It should, but it very frequently does not. Yes, sir? How is it to be understood on Luke 1, 43, when

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Elizabeth calls Mary the mother of my Lord? Well, I'm not sure what you mean.

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I mean, she's, Mary's the mother of Jesus, so she's the mother of her

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Lord, yeah. He wasn't born yet. Yeah, but she, the baby left in the womb at her greeting, she is well aware of the fact that Mary's bearing the

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Messiah, so she recognizes who this child is going to be. I see.

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I see. Not necessarily the mother of my God. Well, how much did

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Elizabeth understand the hypostatic union? I don't think that that was yet something that would be an object of revelation.

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All right. Okay, thank you. All right. Yeah. So, do you understand what I'm saying here? Anybody? I don't want you lost, because I understand, especially, well, you know,

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Brick's a former Roman Catholic, so you hear these words, you hear these terms, and they carry, there's probably a bunch of you in here are former

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Roman Catholics, but you, distinctions need to be made, or we end up gutting our own faith.

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And we can see it easily when someone says, well, Rome came up with the Trinity, therefore the Trinity's false. No, A, Rome didn't come up with it, but Rome can say true things.

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If the Pope says the sky is blue, you don't have to argue the point, unless it's, you know, black and midnight, or something like that, but the point is, we sometimes get into this mindset that we are so opposed to something that they cannot possibly say anything that's true.

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And as a result, our criticisms of their falsehoods become very much watered down, because of the fact that we don't make the proper distinctions.

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And it's just a matter of clarity of thought, and it's something that, it comes out in church history, and it comes out in church history because of, here's an example with Cyprian.

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What do I mean? Well, I've mentioned some of the early schisms, I mentioned the Novation controversy in Rome, and there was a split in the

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Church of Rome, again it was in regards to how you dealt with lapsed people in persecution, and stuff like that.

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Now, when that took place, the Bishop of Rome was named

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Cornelius, and Cyprian sided with Cornelius against the rebels, against the people that were bringing about the schism.

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And he wrote a fairly short book called On the Unity of the

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Church. On the Unity of the Church. Now, modern

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Roman Catholic apologists will lift sentences, phrases, paragraphs from Cyprian's work in defense of Cornelius, as evidence of an early belief in papal supremacy, because Cyprian is writing in defense of the

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Bishop of Rome, and so he says a lot of flowery things about the

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Bishop of Rome. And so they'll go, see, here you have someone outside of Rome who recognizes the supremacy of the

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Bishop of Rome, and here's some of the things he said. And in fact, if you go on the

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Catholic Answers website, or any of the other Catholic apostolates that deal with apologetics,

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Catholic Answers is the largest. I think there's St. Joseph Catholic Radio, and a few places like that, but anyways.

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You will find in their bookstores, or you can get it on Amazon, it's called

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Jurgens, it was edited by a guy named Jurgens, and I think it's The Faith of the Early Fathers, it's a three -volume paperback set, red, green, blue covers.

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And I call it the Roman Catholic quote book. It is not, it's almost, not quite as bad, but it's a little bit like the old

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Reasoning from the Scriptures book that came out in the 80s for the Jehovah's Witnesses. It's sort of the source book you turn to, you can sort of look up a topic and, ah, here are my quotes, here are my proof texts for this, that, and the other thing.

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It's not a fair or balanced selection of citations from the early church fathers, it has a real bent to it.

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And so what you'll get in something like that is quotations from Cyprians on the unity of the church.

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But what they then won't either don't know or won't mention, very often it's because they don't know it, is that Cornelius dies and his successor is named

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Stephen. Stephen is Bishop of Rome, oh there it is, oh that's great, nothing like hitting your screen and going, you know, three months backwards in the process.

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Stephen is Bishop of Rome, 254 to 257.

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And so Stephen is, well, here's what

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J. N. D. Kelly said about Stephen. J.

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N. D. Kelly is a very, very well -known church historian. Stephen emerges as an imperious and uncompromising prelate.

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Fully aware of his special prerogative, his rival bishops did not hesitate to put the blame for splitting the church on him.

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It is interesting that he was accused of glorying in his standing as bishop and of claiming to hold the succession from Peter on whom the foundation of the church was laid.

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He was, in fact, the first pope, so far as is known, to find a formal basis for the

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Roman primacy in the Lord's charge to the apostle Peter, cited in Matthew 16 -18. Now what does that mean?

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That means Stephen is the first bishop of Rome to make reference to Matthew 16 -18 and say, that's me, and that's only me.

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So, we're in the middle of the third century before we even have the bishop of Rome starting to make the claims that are now just fundamentally accepted by all

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Roman Catholics in regards to the bishop of Rome himself. And I've mentioned, I think some of you may remember back in, what was it, 2004,

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I think, I went to Italy and I visited the Vatican. And if you, when you're inside, you look up at the

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Coppola, such a gaudy, gaudy place. But up around the inside of the dome there, in gold, not gold paint, but gold, in Latin is

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Matthew 16 -18, the Petrine promise. It's way, way up there,

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I think it's fairly safe, pretty tough to get to that. Maybe the

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Mission Impossible guy could get to it, I'm not sure, but it seems to be fairly safe up there.

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But this is absolutely foundational to all of the papal pretensions, is what's going on in Matthew 16 -18 is you're

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Peter, and on you, I will build my church. And that then being fulfilled in the successors of Peter, only in the bishop of Rome.

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And so, Stephen's the first guy that's going to come up with this, and the first guy who's going to make this type of a claim for himself.

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Now Cyprian finds himself now in opposition to the successor of the guy that he was supportive of immediately beforehand.

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And so he rewrites on the unity of the church. There's two editions of On the

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Unity of the Church. And so, in Jurgens, you'll find the first edition cited about the bishop of Rome and all that wonderful fun stuff.

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You won't get the second part, you won't get the second being cited, where those passages disappear and now you've got criticisms of the bishop of Rome.

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When Stephen tried to interfere in what the bishops of North Africa had done in regards to a particular issue,

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Cyprian, leading the council of North African bishops, wrote the following. Well, this is what the council wrote, but Cyprian was the head of that council.

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Neither can it rescind, this is referring to the bishop of Rome, neither can it rescind an ordination rightly perfected that Basilides, after the detection of his crimes and the bearing of his conscience even by his own confession, went to Rome and deceived

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Stephen, our colleague, placed at a distance and ignorant of what had been done and of the truth to canvass that he might be replaced unjustly in the episcopate from which he had been righteously deposed.

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And so the North African bishops say, you want to put

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Basilides back into the position of bishop because he went to Rome and convinced you to do that?

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No, we're not going to allow you to do that. Now obviously the North African bishops had never heard of the modern

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Roman Catholic concept of the infallibility and supremacy of the bishop of Rome over all churches. In fact, what we need to understand is there is something called the, in Latin, the

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Cathedra Petri. How many Latin students do we have in the audience?

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Yes Hermione? Chair Peter. You got that too, that's good.

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Cathedra Petri, the Chair of Peter, the Chair of Peter, so now you know what a cathedral is.

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It's the Chair of Peter. No. A cathedral, what makes a church a cathedral church versus a regular church is that the bishop has his seat of authority in that church.

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So that's where the term cathedral came from, it was the bishop's church. Yeah, except religiously.

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So the Cathedra Petri is the Chair of Peter and Cyprian believed in the

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Cathedra Petri and he believed that Stephen and Cornelius sat upon the Cathedra Petri.

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But here's what you won't hear from your Roman Catholic apologist friends, Cyprian likewise said that he sat upon the

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Cathedra Petri and that every bishop in the church sat upon the Cathedra Petri.

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The point was the Cathedra Petri is a position of authority that every bishop in the church holds because that's how the church has been set up.

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It's not the specific and only prerogative of the Bishop of Rome.

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Every bishop sits upon the Cathedra Petri. So back in, oh what was it, 93, 94, somewhere around there, maybe even 95, but I had started writing so it was somewhere in that time frame.

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We did a debate, a two -man debate, me and Rob Zins versus Robert St.

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Genis and a guy named Scott Butler on the issue of the papacy in the early church at Boston College and it was a long four, some hour debate.

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It's available on YouTube like everything else is available on YouTube. And one of the things, one of the points

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I made was that Roman Catholic apologists fall into the Peter syndrome, which means because they're looking backwards and they have this dogma that has been handed down to them, they look back at the early church and anything that can fit into that dogma, they'll grab, even if it means completely misrepresenting what the original intention of the author was.

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And so any type of exalted language about Peter at all will be seen as absolute evidence of the truthfulness of the papacy.

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Anything that would be in opposition to that is just private opinion and just what this early church father had to say.

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So it's this Peter syndrome and if you don't believe me, all you gotta do is turn to 1310 on the

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AM dial, EWTN radio here in Phoenix and listen in to Catholic Answers Live or a couple of programs like that and you will hear it over and over and over again.

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Not only will you hear constant attacks on sola scriptura, but you will hear this type of abuse of the early church and we'll see it a number of other times.

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So Stephen, very important along these lines, and then notice this, the seventh council of Carthage.

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It's called the seventh council of Carthage. Under Cyprian's direction, the following words were written.

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For neither does any of us set himself up as a bishop of bishops, nor by tyrannical terror does any compel his colleague to the necessity of obedience, since every bishop, according to the allowance of his liberty and power, has his own proper right of judgment and can no more be judged by another than he himself can judge another.

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Now what do you think that was in response to? That's in response to Stephen and the bishop of Rome.

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No bishop of bishops. What's the bishop of Rome known as today? Bishop of bishops. It's one of the titles that's used.

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So remember, when someone says, ah, you know, Peter is the one fulfillment, Cyprian saw all bishops, not just the bishop of Rome, as standing in Peter's place as successors to the promises of Christ, all of the bishops fulfill that particular perspective and that runs directly contrary to that of modern

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Roman Catholic theology and, of course, on the issue of ex opera operandi and ex opera operato, that's the same as well.

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Now Cyprian was beheaded by Roman authorities on September 14th,

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A .D. 258. While imprisoned prior to his death, he wrote to fellow

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Christians, imprisoned in the mines. That was one of the things that the Romans would do.

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If we're going to lock these Christians up, we might as well get some free, cheap labor out of them.

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If they die down there, it saves us a sword thrust or an arrow or something. And so he wrote to fellow

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Christians imprisoned in the mines, and here are some of his words. Here are some of his words.

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It's a fairly lengthy quotation, but I think it's worth listening to.

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Cyprian to his fellow bishops, also to his fellow presbyters and deacons and the rest of the brethren in the mines.

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Martyrs of God, the Father Almighty and of Jesus Christ our Lord and of God our preserver, everlasting greeting.

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Could I be silent and restrain my voice in stillness when I am made aware of so many and such glorious things concerning my dearest friends?

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Things with which the divine condescension has honored you, so that part of you have already gone before by the consummation of their martyrdom to receive from their

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Lord the crown of their deserts. Part still abide in the dungeons of the prison or in the mines and in chains, exhibiting by the very delays of their punishments greater examples of the strengthening and arming of the brethren, advancing by the tediousness of their tortures to more ample titles of merit to receive as many payments and heavenly rewards as days are now counted in their punishments.

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I do not marvel, most brave and blessed brethren, that these things have happened to you in consideration of the desert of your religion and your faith, that the

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Lord should thus have lifted you to the lofty height of glory by the honor of his glorification, seeing that you have always flourished in his church, guarding the tenor of the faith, keeping firmly the

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Lord's commands, in simplicity innocence, in charity concord, modesty and humility, diligence and administration, watchfulness in helping those that suffer, mercy in cherishing the poor, constancy in defending the truth, judgment in severity of discipline.

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But that, being first severely beaten with clubs and ill -used, you have begun by sufferings of that kind, the glorious firstlings of your confession, is not a matter to be execrated by us.

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For a Christian body is not very greatly terrified at clubs, seeing all its hope is in the wood.

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The servant of Christ acknowledges the sacrament of his salvation, redeemed by wood to life eternal.

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He is advanced by wood to the crown. But what wonder if, as golden and silver vessels, you have been committed to the mine that is the home of gold and silver, except that now the nature of the mines has changed, and the places which previously had been accustomed to yield gold and silver have begun to receive them.

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Moreover, they have put fetters on your feet and have bound your blessed limbs, and the temples of God with disgraceful chains, as if the spirit also could be bound with the body, or your gold could be stained by the contact of iron.

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To men who are dedicated to God and attesting their faith with religious courage, such things are ornaments, not chains, nor do they bind the feet of the

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Christian for infamy, but glorify them for a crown. O feet blessedly bound, which are loosed, not by the smith, but by the

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Lord! O feet blessedly bound, which are guided to paradise in the way of salvation! O feet bound for the present time in the world, that they may be always free with the

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Lord! O feet lingering for a while among the fetters and crossbars, but to run quickly to Christ on a glorious road!

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Let cruelty, either envious or malignant, hold you here in its bonds and chains as long as it will.

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From this earth and from these sufferings you shall speedily come to the kingdom of heaven.

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For that it is His doing that we conquer, and that we attain by the subduing of the adversary to the palm of the greatest contest.

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The Lord declares and teaches in His gospel, saying, But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what you shall speak.

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For it shall be given you in that same hour what you shall speak. For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your

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Father which speaketh in you. And again, settle it therefore in your hearts not to meditate before what you shall answer.

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For I will give you a mouth of wisdom which your adversaries shall not be able to resist. In which indeed is both the great confidence of believers and the gravest fault of the faithless, that they do not trust

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Him who promises to give His help to those who confess Him, and do not, on the other hand, fear

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Him who threatens eternal punishment to those who deny Him. What now must be the vigor, beloved brethren, of your victorious consciousness?

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What the loftiness of your mind, what exultation in feeling, what triumph in your breast, that every one of you stands near to the promised reward of God, are secure from the judgment of God?

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Walk in the minds with the body captive indeed, but with a heart reigning, that you know

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Christ is present with you, rejoicing in the endurance of His servants, who are ascending by His footsteps and His paths to the eternal kingdoms.

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You daily expect with joy the saving day of your departure, and already about to withdraw from the world, you are hastening to the rewards of martyrdom and to the divine homes.

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And behold, after this darkness, the world the purest light, and to receive a glory greater than all sufferings and conflicts, as the apostle witnesses and says, the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.

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And because now your word is more effectual in prayers, and supplication is more quick to obtain what is sought for in the afflictions, seek more eagerly and ask that the divine condescension would consummate the confession of all of us, that from this darkness and these snares of the world,

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God would set us all so free with you, sound and glorious, and that we who here are united in the bond of charity and peace, and have stood together against the wrongs of heretics and the oppressions of the heathens, may rejoice together in the heavenly kingdom.

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I bid you, most blessed and most beloved brethren, ever farewell in the Lord and always and everywhere remember me."

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Those are some of the words of the martyr Cyprian before his beheading by a

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Roman soldier, as he wrote to the Christians imprisoned in the mines.

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We have many brothers and sisters imprisoned likewise today. It's a good reminder that we should be praying for them regularly and to recognize that it has never been

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God's will that his church live on beds of ease. This was not the first time that Christians had suffered in church history, and it certainly would not be the last time either.

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But it is a sobering reminder, I think, to all of us who so can easily, well,

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I will speak only for myself, I will not speak for anyone else, but it is so easy to slip into a mindset of complaint and discontent when things happen in our lives, start questioning the goodness of God, and yet the reality is most of us have it really easy.

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Most of it happens really good. We are not chained in a mine, expecting to die almost any day.

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These people were, and what tremendous words of encouragement, especially the wood of the club, the wood of the cross, taking gold and silver out of the mines when it is actually the mines that are now receiving the gold and silver of the saints.

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Just things I would not think to say because I have not been there, but here was

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Cyprian himself in chains, awaiting his own death, and amazing words, amazing words.

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So it is easy, again, it is very easy for people to look at some of these early figures and only see, well, he believed in ex -opera operante, that is terrible,

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I do not want anything to do with him. Well, if you take that attitude, good luck finding almost anybody in church history that looks like you.

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You are going to have to draw a really small circle and stand on one toe, and eventually you will probably find something to disagree with yourself about too, so then that will be a real disaster.

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Alright, now somewhere down the road I am going to throw in, it is just sort of difficult right now with some of you know that, let us see, the 17th, so a little over a week from now

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I will be heading out on a full two week long trip back east, doing a debate with a

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Roman Catholic before the G3 conference in Atlanta, and then doing some dialogues in Memphis with Dr.

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Yasir Qadhi, a real well -known Muslim scholar, and then speaking at the

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Deep South Founders Conference, and now we just added a day to the trip, because there is a film coming out at the end of the month called

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Unpopular, and I am really hoping it is going to be a very valuable tool, evangelistic tool, it is what it is designed for, and there are three of us that contributed to it, myself,

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Paul Washer, and Emilio Ramos, and Paul Washer talked primarily about issues of repentance,

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I talked primarily about issues of the cross and atonement, and Emilio sort of did the fill -in stuff from there, and so they have asked me to stay overnight in Dallas, I was going to be flying through Dallas anyway, so it is going to be a long trip, and so I am not sure when

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I am going to be able to get to this, but I want to throw a section here specifically on baptism in the early church,

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I think it is something that needs to be covered fairly well, I think, so I have got a few weeks that I can fit it into that it wouldn't be out of place.

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So before we get to that though, I want to just begin a new section in the outline, if you are making notes or something like that, this would be the section entitled development of monasticism, the development of monasticism, and it is here where a lot of folks, especially with my background, this is really where disconnection takes place, and I was raised in a very strong fundamentalist

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Baptist mindset, and so the idea of monks and priests and things like that, that is just so far out there that you might as well be studying

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Buddhism or Hinduism, but the reality is, Luther, obviously, was a priest before his conversion, and even after his conversion, continued to wear the robes, you can't look at the

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Reformation without a recognition of what that history was, and always have to ask yourself the question, would

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I have gone as far as they even did, it is really easy from our position to sit and say, oh, they should have seen more of this, and so on and so forth, but the history of what is called

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Christianity includes, as a very important part of that, something called monasticism, and there is no question that Biblically speaking, this doesn't come from Biblical exegesis,

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God never called us to run away from the world and build up walls and hide out and do the things that monasticism became known for, and so we can very honestly recognize the influence of external sources, but we also have to recognize the influence that these people had on the broader body, which would have included

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Christians, unless you are going to buy the idea that the church, like the Mormon idea, the church ceased to exist somewhere in the second century, and was reestablished in April of 1830, there were

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Christians in there, and they were influenced by these things, so we need to understand what happened.

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Now monasticism is not unique to Christianity, it existed prior to the

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Christian movement, almost every religion, almost every religion, has some kind of monastic impulse to it, whether it's the

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Hindus or the Buddhists, even Islam has not so much monks, but those

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Sufi style expressions that want to get away from the world and focus upon spiritual things.

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Some of the New Testament precepts that were used anyways, pointed to, included

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John the Baptist, living out, eating them locusts, that must have been yummy, and wearing the funky clothes and so on and so forth,

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Jesus and disciples, wandering, not having a particular place of living, and then

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Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, you would be like me, and so on and so forth. Some of the philosophical influences include in Platonism and Gnosticism.

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First came the hermit or the anchorite, hermit or the anchorite, seen especially in the

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Desert Fathers, and I'll close with this, we're going to run out of time here, but Anthony, who lived 250 to 356, that's 106 years, which evidently indicates this may have something to do with longevity,

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I don't know, but Anthony lived on an island in the middle of the Nile, so had actually built something up, but in other words, the separation from the world.

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His spirituality attracted others, so soon you had hermits all over the desert in Egypt, and they would demonstrate their spirituality by their dominion over their bodies.

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Some would never lay down, they would prop themselves up, because the lay down was to give in to the idea of bodily comfort.

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They would not engage in hygiene, and so, for example, stories are told that one of the examples of the great spirituality of some of these individuals was their ability to continue talking to you without being distracted by the bugs crawling through their teeth.

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This was a demonstration of your supremacy over your disconnection from the physical body.

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That's why some of the background of this is really Gnostic, dualism, the disconnection, that's not a

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Biblical concept, and abusing the temple given to you in that way, not a balanced

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Biblical perspective, but the layperson goes,

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I couldn't do that, I'm obviously not as sold out as this person is, and this is just in the very earliest period of the development of this concept.

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So, with that wonderful picture in your mind, we will pick up with the further development of Gnosticism next time.

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All right? All right, let's close the Word of Prayer. Once again, Father, we thank you for the freedom we've had to look back into history, and we ask once again that you would help us to rejoice in truth, be discerning in regards to error, and always rejoice that you indeed are building your church.

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We thank you for that truth, and the fact that we live here today, we exist here today, we worship here today, because of the fulfillment of that promise.