James interviews Dr. Nick Needham and then we Play the Castle Church Sermon

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:37

Greetings and welcome to the Divine Line. My name is James White. We have a lot to get to today, and so we're going to dive right into it.

00:43

My apologies for us not being able to do the program yesterday. That's when we announced we were going to do it. Bill Gates had other interests, however, and the computer that streams this to you said,

00:57

I've got updates due, see y 'all later. And then it was like 1%, and then like 2%, and we weren't able to do it.

01:05

So that's all right. Thankfully, our special guest that we've been telling you about for a while is able to join us today at the same time.

01:14

And so we are joined there from Inverness, Scotland, by Dr. Nick Needham.

01:20

Dr. Needham, I guess it's good afternoon for you, yes? It's 5 o 'clock in the afternoon.

01:26

5 o 'clock in the afternoon, and you are at the College. Tell us a little bit about the

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College. How long have you been there? Where is it located? Let people know sort of where you're coming from.

01:36

Right, this is the Highland Theological College, which is a confessional college based on the

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Westminster Confession of Faith, but with liberty of conscience for Baptists, all those naughty bits in the

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Westminster Confession that we don't believe in. We're located just outside of Inverness in a place called

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Dinwall, it's about 12 miles out of Inverness. And the College was founded back in 1994.

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I've been teaching here since 1999. For five years,

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I was a full -time tutor here, teaching all the church history modules. But then in 2004, my own church decided to set me aside as their full -time preaching elder, which

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I am still at the moment. That's in Inverness Reformed Baptist Church. So I'm now part -time at the

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College, but I do still teach most of the church history modules here. Well, good.

02:34

Obviously, I did have the opportunity of coming up there. In fact, so my first visit was in 2005.

02:42

So was that sort of a transitionary period at the Church there, because I believe some others were still there, or...?

02:54

That must have been a year after I was inducted as the pastor. Yes. I was still getting used to it.

03:00

Yeah. I still am getting used to it. Well, that is a lifelong process. And I do have a picture that Roger Brazier took of me next to the lake, and I'm pointing at Nessie.

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And so I... Oh, yes. You can't really make her out real well, but I tried to get some money off that picture, but I guess there's a lot of those.

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Do you ever get asked, when people figure out the connection between the school and where it is, about that particular subject?

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Not very often. And I'm an agnostic, I suppose, myself, on the existence of the

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Bible. It seems scientifically very unlikely there is anything. But on the other hand, you've got all these strange, credible eyewitness testimonies, so I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

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I've never seen it myself. Well, there you go. I do have to tell a story. I don't know if you remember this, but I think the second time

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I came up there, I even took the time to do some research, and I bought a tartan tie, the official

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Inverness tartan. And when I wore it,

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I asked some folks after the service, and they all just sort of looked at me and said, nobody up here really cares about that stuff.

04:21

Is that sort of how it is, unfortunately? About tartans and ties?

04:27

Yes. Oh, people in the more conservative churches here do care very much about ties.

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I was rebuked once because I turned up without wearing one. It was in my pocket, and I hadn't put it on yet.

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As for the tartan side of things, I think that's probably more an American preoccupation, to be honest, rather than a

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Scottish one. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry about that. Now, you're somewhat of a transplant yourself, aren't you?

04:59

Indeed. I am English, not Scottish. I was born and brought up in London, and I first came up to Scotland way back in, oh dear,

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I don't even like to say how long ago it was. A very long time ago, I came up to Edinburgh University, where I studied theology.

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That's where I did what we used to call the BD, the Bachelor of Divinity, which doesn't exist anymore.

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It's just a BA in these days. And having done my BD there, I stayed on for another five years to do my

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PhD in Edinburgh University. So that meant I'd been in Scotland for nine years, solid, studying.

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So that kind of cemented my relationship with the country, really, and I've been here most of the time since.

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So now I've gotten to spend a lot of time in London. Whereabouts did you grow up? Well, I grew up south of the river in a place called

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Plumstead near Woolwich, which you may not have heard of. I haven't been there, even though the church that I last spoke in was, quote -unquote, south of the river as well.

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But just such an incredible, incredible city. Do you get to get back there once in a while, or are you stuck up in the cold?

06:17

No, my family still lives in southeast London. That's my sister, niece, and my nephew, and my two grandnieces.

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So I get back to see them about three or four times a year, but that would be between April and October. I just don't venture back during the winter months.

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It's not worth it. There are too many problems with weather and trains breaking down and so forth.

06:43

Well, I imagine it might be getting a little cold there. I mean, it was near freezing here in the desert southwest this morning, so I don't know what the weather's like there, but we finally have some cold here.

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Now, you went up there to do your studies. So, PhD in church history, you know, most church historians are sort of odd ducks.

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What causes someone to want to study church history?

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What grabbed hold of you and said, this is where you need to go? Yeah, well, that's quite interesting, because when

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I was at school, I had no interest whatsoever in history, and I dropped the subject as soon as I possibly could.

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But when I was converted, almost instantaneously, I developed a thirst for church history.

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My thinking was, in becoming a Christian, I've joined a people, the people of Christ, and now

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I want to know all about their life story. So that was there right from the word go. I was instantly plunged into the study of church history as a kind of corollary of my conversion.

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That's how it began, and it's just remained with me ever since. I can't understand people who are not interested in the history of their spiritual community, to be honest.

08:10

Well, that means you can't understand, unfortunately, a very large portion of folks.

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Now, maybe not so much in the

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United Kingdom, you know, in Scotland and London. I mean, you're surrounded by history. I mean, you can't escape it.

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It's chiseled into the walls around you, though I think most Londoners just walk past that stuff and never really take much interest in it, unfortunately.

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But here in the United States, I have often said, and unfortunately, the only reason it's humorous is because it is so very, very true, but the vast majority of folks' church history began with Billy Graham.

08:54

And so, your experience is, I want to know what

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Christ has been doing with His people all these years. Absolutely. For most everybody else, that's something that has to be explained, maybe cajoled, maybe even use a little bit of a guilt trip, you know, just to say to people, what, you think you're the first person the

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Holy Spirit's been working with? Don't you think you might have something to learn from somebody else?

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Doesn't that strike you as making Americans just a little bit self -centered?

09:38

Well, I wouldn't load Americans with a peculiar burden of guilt.

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The problem is universal, probably, and I have encountered it quite a lot over here.

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And to some extent, I might not be the right person to try and deal with that, just because I don't understand it.

09:57

It doesn't resonate with me at all, that kind of ahistoricism. As I said, my very conversion seemed to me to be a joining of a people.

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And I could not conceive of not wanting to know about what this people had been doing and experiencing over the past 2 ,000 years.

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So, I might not be the right person to deal with that, although I have tried in various talks

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I've given here and there to encourage people to take an interest in the history of the

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Church, quoted things like, you know, a nation without a history is like a man without a memory, and we are the nation of God.

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If we don't know our own history, we're suffering from a kind of amnesia. Amnesia is unnatural and harmful.

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Let's get ourselves out of that state of mind. Well, now, what was your focus in your

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PhD work? What was your specific narrow field? Oh, yeah, well, it was very narrow, of course, as PhDs tend to be.

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I looked at the life and theological work of a 19th century

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Scottish theologian named Thomas Erskine of Linlatham, who

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I came across when I was doing my BD. I was reading a book by C .S. Lewis.

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I forget which book it was now, but in each chapter of the book, he headed the chapter with a quotation.

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And one of the quotations was by someone, Erskine of Linlatham. And the quote was,

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I think, those who will not have God for their religion make religion into their

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God. And I thought, that's quite a nice, snappy quotation. But who on earth was Erskine of Linlatham?

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So I did a bit of research into who he was, and I became interested in him. So when I got the opportunity to do a

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PhD, I thought, well, let's see if I can do my PhD on Erskine. Let's see if I've got an original thesis here.

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So basically, what I did was an intellectual biography of the man. I plotted the development of his thinking through his published writings.

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Basically, he began as what you could call an evangelical Calvinist, and he ended, unfortunately, as a typical

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Victorian liberal, believing in the universal fatherhood of God and the universal salvation of all mankind.

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So I was looking at, how did he get from the one to the other? What was this process, and can we see it emerging in different stages?

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So that was what my thesis was about. Well, now that raises a real interesting question, and that is, okay, for a lot of folks, when you say we're a part of a people, they look back through the history of the church, and they see a tremendous number of concepts and thoughts expressed that would be troubling from an orthodox perspective, of course, depending on how you define and delineate the term orthodox.

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That's one of the reasons that a lot of conservatives struggle with even what they might consider an over -interest in church history.

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Or if someone comes from a fundamentalist background, one of the reasons that church history is primarily ignored within fundamentalism is you encounter way too many people that didn't look like us, and act like us, and believe like us, and worship like us, and dress like us, and talk like us.

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So how did you deal with that? First of all, when you were converted, what kind of a church were you a part of?

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Same type of church, you're an elder in a Reformed Baptist church, right? Yes.

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No, I began as an Anglican. I worshipped in my local

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Church of England parish church for several years, where the curate, that's the kind of second -in -command under the vicar, was an evangelical.

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I'm not quite sure, to be honest, what the vicar was. He was a believing man, but I'm not quite sure how you would describe him theologically.

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But the curate, who was evangelical, ran the youth group. So of course I was young at the time, so I gravitated towards the youth group, and the evangelicalism of that group was undoubted.

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It was only a few years after that that I began to drift away after I discovered

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Reformed theology, of which not much was in evidence at this particular church.

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And so that set me off on a quest for a church where I would feel more spiritually at home, and that ended me up in a

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Reformed Baptist church. But I personally didn't have that sense of looking at troubling ideas when

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I was looking at Erskine of Lynn Latham. I guess right from my conversion I'd been exposed to all kinds of eclectic ideas, and I'd had to forge my own way towards what

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I considered to be a sound understanding of the faith. So I was quite used to interacting with folks of different opinions, different backgrounds, and different periods in history as well.

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So I didn't actually have that troubling problem that other people do seem to have. Well, yeah, other people do seem to have that.

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That seems to be, in my experience, one of the barriers in my trying to get people to really do much reading is if you, for example, if you just pick up the

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Holmes edited edition of The Apostolic Fathers or something like that, even in something that early, you're going to find quite a range.

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I mean, you've got some great stuff. You've got, I mean, I love reading

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Ignatius, and there's just some incredibly deep theology there, and,

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I mean, his references to the deity of Christ, and I love that.

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I love that text where you have the Father, the Son, the Spirit. The Spirit is the engine, you know, raising up the cross, and all this kind of stuff.

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But then there's some other stuff that, let's just be honest, isn't all, you know, isn't exactly going to thrill us with its depth or even its orthodoxy from our perspective.

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That seems to be really problematic for people. You're saying that was not something, you know, was it just simply your upbringing?

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Was it just simply the Anglican middle road type thing? What is it that gave you the ability to filter and to go, hey, we live in a fallen world.

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There's going to be people who have different opinions. A lot of people over here, once they're exposed to that, just go, eh, nobody really knows what the truth is.

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Look at all these people, all these different opinions they had. Let's just simply, you know, not worry about it anymore.

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That's sort of where they go. You didn't do that. Was it the context that kept you from doing that, or what?

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Difficult question, but I think if I try to answer it with as much memory of my early

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Christian life as I can muster, then my memory is becoming increasingly fallible. But at around about the same time, very soon after my conversion, and by the way, the chief influence in the process of my conversion was

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C .S. Lewis. His writings were what convinced me of the intellectual truth of Christianity, coming from basically a background of atheism and agnosticism.

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So under God, I know an awful lot to C .S. Lewis. But quite soon after my conversion,

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I discovered around about the same time, maybe not exactly the same time,

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I discovered firstly Bettinson's two volumes, The Early Christian Fathers and The Later Christian Fathers.

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I'm sure you know those. Collections from the writings of all the major fathers, father by father, and within each father, he arranges it like a systematic theology.

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So it's topical, what this particular father taught about God, the Trinity, creation, the fall, redemption, the church and sacraments, the last things and so on.

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Now, as far as I can recollect, I devoured those two volumes and found them almost immeasurably helpful in my understanding of the basics of the faith, particularly the

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Trinity and the Incarnation. So right from almost the word go,

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I would say I owed a lot to the teaching of the early church fathers. But around about the same time,

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I also discovered the Reformation. I can't remember now how that happened, but I discovered in particular the two great giants of the

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Reformation, Luther and Calvin. I remember reading Calvin's Institutes, I remember reading

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Luther on the bondage of the will. So those two foci became quite important for me, the fathers and the reformers.

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And of course, the fathers are not necessarily identical with what the reformers are saying, and Luther isn't necessarily identical with what

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Calvin is saying. So from that very early point in my Christian life,

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I had these three elements overlapping in my thinking, patristic theology,

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Lutheran theology, and Reformed theology. So maybe that was what enabled me to have an attitude of sifting and filtering and thinking things out for myself, rather than just having some monolithic outlook sort of imposed on me.

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So maybe that was it. Well, it would seem to—someone like myself didn't have that kind of a background, and so it's something that I had to develop.

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Again, studying church history is going to force you to recognize that people have not always looked like me and thought exactly like me and spoken exactly like me, etc.,

20:24

etc. Thank goodness, eh? Very much so, yes. Well, they didn't have coogies back in early church, so that was definitely a—

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Rich just yelled something from the other room, and I'm not really sure what it was, but I'm not going to worry about that. He's just trying to distract me.

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But the idea being, though, that I've been talking a lot recently about what are foundational and definitional things over against adiaphora, things that do not define.

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And I think a lot of people listening—and certain people even within our own ranks—that would hear names like C .S.

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Lewis. Oh, oh, but he said this and he said that. People who have a very small list of adiaphora and a very large list of absolutely foundational and definitional, those that have more of a fundamentalist streak in them, automatically start going, uh,

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I'm not so sure about this guy. And they're the same ones that I would think would struggle with the continuing validity or relevance of reading the early church or any part of church history,

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I suppose. Somehow you avoided the twin terrors of either going into a form of fundamentalism that would cause you to reject everyone in the ancient church who didn't look exactly like you, and then the other side being, well, there can't be any one truth.

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I mean, because if you're an elder in a Reformed Baptist church, there's a confession of faith, it's a pretty, you know, a pretty full statement of faith.

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You've managed to keep that balance. Any words of wisdom to try to help the rest of us try to keep that balance as well?

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And it is the 1689 Confession, yes, in my church, so it is quite detailed.

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Um, I don't know, I mean, if you take that, that fundamentalist, as you call it,

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I mean, we don't have an awful lot of that kind of American fundamentalism in the United Kingdom, but if you take that attitude that you were just describing there, where you've got an awful lot of doctrines and positions that are considered non -negotiable, and perhaps very few that are considered to be adiaphora, or things indifferent, then,

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I mean, you have to ask yourself the question then, don't you? If this is

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Christianity, this dotting every i and crossing every t of a fundamentalist outlook, if that's what

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Christianity is, then how come it hasn't existed for very long? What was happening the previous 1800 -1900 years?

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I mean, was there no Christianity before this? What about the Lord's promise, I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it?

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There's actually a theological principle involved here, that when Christ founded his church, he promised that the gates of Hades never would prevail against it.

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So there always has been a church of Christ on the earth, and if that's the case, it becomes us to discern it, to see where it was and what it was doing, and how things that have been said and done in the past have unavoidably shaped the present, because we can't escape from that legacy.

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But when it comes to the early church fathers in particular, I don't see how we can really avoid saying that they were the ones who, in the providence of God, laid all the foundations for our understanding of the

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Trinity and of Christology. So if they got that right, which

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I think they did, they can't all have been a load of, you know, irrelevant people whose ideas we can just scorn or ignore, because we today are still standing on their shoulders regarding the doctrine of God and the doctrine of the person of Christ.

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And I myself still derive a huge amount of blessing and benefit from reading the fathers, even though I don't necessarily agree with every single thing that any particular father said.

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I think I'm running out of steam here, but maybe you'd like to chip in and contribute something yourself at that point.

25:16

No, well, it is interesting. It seems that that then would be behind. I have a set of books sitting here next to me called

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Two Thousand Years of Christ's Power, and now,

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I currently have four volumes. Isn't there a fifth in the works? That's a terrible series of books.

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I don't know why you've got those. Of course,

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I wrote them. That's why they're so terrible. The first four volumes take the story up to roughly the beginning of the 18th century.

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So volume one is the early church fathers. Volume two is the Middle Ages. Volume three is the Renaissance and the

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Reformation. Volume four is very, very roughly 1550 or thereabouts to 1740 or thereabouts.

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So that's as far as the series has got thus far. And yes, there is theoretically another volume in the pipeline where, of course, inevitably the dominating subject of the fifth volume is going to be the

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Great Awakening, or as we call it, the Evangelical Revival. To be honest,

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I haven't actually started writing that volume yet. The last year, I've been preoccupied with other things.

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But that volume is scheduled to be written, and I have a committee breathing down my neck to make sure that I do begin to write it and even finish writing it.

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So hopefully, within the next few years, volume five will appear. It will begin with the

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Great Awakening. I'm not quite sure where this volume is going to end. It certainly isn't going to bring the story up to the present day.

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It's probably going to stop somewhere in the 19th century, I would imagine. Well, doesn't it get dangerous when you start getting close to the period of your

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PhD dissertation, because then the book has to be like 8 ,000 pages long just to cover everything?

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Well, one problem is that the further you get, or should I say the nearer that you get to the present day, the more information you have on your hands.

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There's this continual information explosion, which became absolutely atomic or nuclear once the printing press was invented.

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And of course, the other thing is that the closer you get to the present day, the more

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Christianity branches out into different storylines. So sort of having a multiplicity of information, you've got a multiplicity of stories to try and tell, which is why each volume gets fatter than the previous one.

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And the other thing is that the nearer you get to your present day, the more difficult it is to have a sense of historical perspective.

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So I certainly don't intend to bring the story—when I get to the last volume, I don't intend to bring the story beyond the impact of the

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Second Vatican Council. That's going to be my cutoff point. Oh yeah, I would imagine so. So when did you first—Volume 1—when did you start this whole project?

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Right, well, this project was the result of time that I spent teaching in Nigeria.

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I taught in the Samuel Bill Theological College, which is the denominational college of the church in Nigeria.

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Quite an interesting denomination. It has a Presbyterian form of church government that practices believers' baptism.

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I believe there are one or two others like that in the world, but there aren't many of them. Now, the

28:59

Nigerian students, English was their common language. There are many tribal languages in Nigeria.

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So in order to communicate with each other, they need a lingua franca, and that's English. But it's not a particularly sophisticated kind of English.

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I mean, it's good and it's workable, but it's not sophisticated. And so I was landed with this problem.

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What shall I ask my students to read? What texts shall I ask them to read in church history?

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Because on the one hand, you've got these really good, solid, scholarly, academic books full of superb research and thoroughly historically grounded and reliable.

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But the range of English used in these books is rather too high for my

29:50

Nigerian students. On the other hand, you've got books that are written at their level, books that are written in accessible

29:57

English and are presented accessibly. But to be honest, the kind of history presented in those books is not particularly well grounded in historical scholarship.

30:09

So there seems to be a gap here. Maybe I can fill it. That was the idea that I had.

30:16

So when I got back from my time in Nigeria, I floated that idea to a friend of mine, who at that time was involved in Grace Publications, which is a

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Grace Baptist, a Reformed Baptist publishing house over here. John Appleby, who went to be with Christ not so long ago.

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I said, look, I've got this idea, a church history series, which is well researched historically, which is academically credible, but it's pitched at a level that the average person in the pew should be able to understand, as long as they're ready to sit down and read it as a piece of hard work.

30:58

Do you have any ideas who might be prepared to publish a work like this?

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Because, I mean, I don't know the publishing world. You're involved in the publishing world. Do you have any suggestions? So John Appleby said, yes, we'll publish it.

31:12

So that set me off. And within a few years, I'd written volume one on the early church fathers, and that came out,

31:20

I believe, was it about 1998? I think that was first published. And ever since then,

31:27

Grace Publications have been behind the publication of this series until recently, when for various reasons that are far too complex to go into, the project is now with Christian -focused publications.

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And all the volumes, was it last year, have been reissued in hardback. And they're all revised versions, apart from the most recent one, which hasn't had a chance to be revised yet.

31:53

But volumes one, two, and three are not only in hardback for the first time now, but they are substantially revised.

31:59

Yeah, I love the format. They're doing a great job. They look great together. We've certainly been recommending them to folks.

32:07

And yeah, at first, it was these fairly large paperbacks when

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I first saw them. And I like the new format a lot better.

32:19

So do I. Yeah, yeah, they look great. And we're trying to, you know, people are always asking for resources, you know, what can

32:27

I get? And so we've certainly been seeking to direct folks to that set.

32:33

It'll be very helpful to them. Now, so as far as your publications goes, would you consider that the central aspect of what you've done?

32:47

You know, is that really where you want to keep focusing your attention in the future? Obviously, if you've got volume five to do, you're going to have to be focusing your attention on that in the future.

32:55

But was that something you had planned or just sort of jumped out at you because you saw a need?

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It was the inspiration provided by that experience in Nigeria. I had no idea, however, that the series was going to be so long.

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I mean, my first idea was to do it in one volume. That soon became impractical once I'd started writing, because I realized

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I already had enough to fill one volume dealing purely with the early church period. And then

33:27

I started saying to people, it would be a three -volume work. And then that idea was scotched when

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I wrote volume three, and it didn't get beyond Reformation. So then I started telling people it would be a four -volume work.

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And now that idea has been scotched as well, because volume four only goes up to the 18th century.

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So, I mean, who knows how many volumes there will be? Maybe it'll have to be called Three Thousand Years of Christianity by the time

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I finish. So there is that ongoing work. But I do dabble in other things.

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I occasionally write articles or chapters in other books, multi -authorship books.

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So there's a book on the doctrine of justification coming out. I thought it might perhaps be out this year to celebrate the 500th anniversary, but it hasn't come out.

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It's edited by Matthew Barrett, and it's quite an exhaustive treatment.

34:24

It's got a systematic theology section on justification, an exegetical section, and a church history section.

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And for my sins, I was tasked with writing the chapter from Augustine through to the end of the

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Middle Ages, which was mind -boggling for me, and might well be mind -boggling for anyone who ends up reading that chapter themselves.

34:51

So there is that kind of thing. And then my most recent thing, as you'll know, was my little book of readings from the early church fathers, which took quite some time to try to gather that material together.

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So that finally came out, when was that, October maybe? That finally came out.

35:12

It's in a series done by Christian Focus, these daily readings handbooks in a kind of nice pseudo -leather design.

35:19

So they have books like daily readings from Matthew Henry, from George Whitfield, from the Puritans.

35:25

So they approached me and said, how about doing one on the early church fathers? So I mean, obviously

35:30

I jumped at that, because it's a kind of a dream come true, really, for me, given my appreciation of so much of what the fathers said and achieved.

35:41

So there I've got each month is given over to one specific father. So I chose my 12 favorites, and within each month

35:49

I've tried to give a spread of readings on topics like the nature of theology itself, the doctrine of the

35:58

Trinity, the person and work of Christ, general edifying passages to be applied to the believer's own life, and then lastly, the last things, heaven and hell.

36:10

So as I say, that's now out, and personally speaking, if all my works perished except one,

36:18

I'd rather have that one survive, because that isn't me speaking. That's the best wisdom of the fathers speaking in that particular volume.

36:26

Ah, well that's interesting. I'm holding it for folks here. Yeah, I wanted to get to that next, the early church fathers daily readings.

36:34

Now, you did crush me, though, just a little bit there, when you—this isn't real leather? I'm really hurt now.

36:40

I thought that was pseudo -leather, or it'd be 10 times more expensive if that was real leather.

36:46

Probably so. Obviously over here, Crossway Publications has made this leatherette -type thing extremely, extremely popular.

36:56

But anyways, we've got January, we've got John Chrysostom, John the

37:02

Golden Mouth, we've got—February is Irenaeus, March is

37:09

Gregory the Theologian. How would we know him? That's different. Is that just Gregory? That's not

37:14

Greg—because you've got Gregory of Nysa. It's Gregory of Nazianzus. Nazianzus, okay. Gregory of Nazianzus. In the

37:20

Eastern Church, he's called Gregory the Theologian, and since he's an Eastern father, I decided to give him his

37:25

Eastern name. I see, okay. All right, that'll help people understand that one, because we've got Gregory of Nysa down below, so sometimes we've got to keep them separated.

37:34

We've got Saint Cyprian in April, Basil of Caesarea in May, Jerome in June, Gregory of Nysa, July, Augustine gets, well,

37:44

Augustine gets August. That was purposeful, wasn't it? It was. Cyril of Jerusalem for September, Ambrose, October, Cyril of Alexandria for November, and currently reading with the great

38:01

Athanasius in the month of December. Now, I'll be perfectly honest with you.

38:07

I'm a little bit on the biased side. November would be slim pickings for me.

38:14

I don't know. I'm not sure why in my readings

38:20

Cyril has, has...I've got other favorites, shall we say.

38:25

But we all have our favorites this direction and that direction.

38:32

But... We all have our theological blind spots, James, and you've got Cyril of Alexandria, obviously.

38:38

Okay. Well, I think he had a few as well, but maybe it's just simply how he interacted with others.

38:44

But so, I guess there's a whole series of these, but it would be a great way of introducing folks, obviously a little late on the

38:54

Christmas season, but a great way of before the New Year, maybe something to give to your elders, your pastors, some daily readings, some introduction to church history topics and things like that.

39:08

And it's very, very well done. And I was glad,

39:13

I guess when I got mine in the mail initially, I made reference to the fact that mine wasn't signed and your publisher evidently heard this.

39:26

And so we received two copies and the one that I have now, it has the signature in it.

39:32

I'm hoping it's yours. It is mine. It is mine. Genuine.

39:40

I mean, you know, the publisher could have done it. I probably wouldn't have asked, you know, so I'm glad to have that.

39:48

And it's worth its weight in gold. So obviously

39:54

Volume 5 is going to be taking up a lot of your time, but are there other writing projects that you have coming up?

40:05

No, nothing specific in the way of writing projects, but people may like to be reminded that I teach at the

40:15

Highland Theological College, so we've got a whole new semester coming up in which I'll get the first -year students for the first time.

40:23

And that's always our largest body of students, the first years, for various reasons.

40:31

I was going to say, you might want to expand upon that a little bit. We whittle them down over the years.

40:38

Well, there's an element of that, but it's only in the first year of our

40:45

BA that subjects are compulsory. Once you get to the second year, you choose.

40:51

And so obviously not all of them are going to choose to carry on with church history. So given that we have one year in which all the students are going to do church history, we decided the thing that they should know about would be the

41:04

Reformation. So first -year church history, Reformation, so there will be that coming up.

41:11

And I also teach the medieval church history module in the second semester too.

41:18

So I have two classes running, and all those wonderful essays that I have to mark and grade.

41:24

And then there's the ongoing discipline of sermon preparation. I have to preach three sermons a week, Wednesday, Sunday morning, and Sunday evening.

41:33

So I've got things that keep me going even when I'm not working on a literary project.

41:38

So y 'all haven't given in to the No More Sunday Night movement across the world yet, huh?

41:47

Well, that is beginning to catch on among even Reformed evangelicals in the

41:54

United Kingdom. I'm not in our particular congregation, and I'm not aware of any

42:02

Reformed church in Inverness that has gone that way. But I've got a very good friend who lives in Edinburgh, and he was telling me that that's definitely the way the evangelical churches in Edinburgh are going.

42:15

Drop your evening service. Yeah, yeah, it's popular. I mean, we are absolutely encased in stone in our own group, so they would have to board up the doors,

42:29

I would imagine, to get us to not have our Sunday evening services. But it does seem to be more and more the case around the world.

42:39

But I'm not 100 % certain of all the reasons for that, especially in light of the fact that we have more ease of transportation now than we've ever had at any time in the history of the

42:48

Church. But, you know, each age of the Church, as you well know, is different along those lines as to what their practices were.

42:58

When I was doing my PhD on Thomas Askin, he spent a good number of years doing the

43:05

Continental Tour, as people were wont to do back in the 19th century. And one of the things that he remarks on in his letters is that Continental Protestants, can you believe it, don't have an evening service on Sunday.

43:20

So maybe it was a peculiarly British and American thing, I'm not sure.

43:26

That's possible, you know. I've never looked into it, I must admit, the practices of—well, you said you're going to—now, what

43:34

I did find interesting, you said you're going to be teaching both Reformation and Medieval. It would—it seems to me that if you just jump into the

43:44

Reformation period, when I was—we had a tour in Germany back in late

43:54

September, and that's when I got the opportunity of preaching at the Castle Church in Wittenberg, and we went to the

44:00

Wartburg Castle, and we shot a little video at the

44:07

Terror Hole at the Wartburg Castle, the

44:14

Terror Hole, Fritz Erba, where Fritz Erba was imprisoned.

44:21

And since it's so far down, the entrance at the top was called the

44:27

Terror Hole, because you literally lowered the prisoner into this pure darkness, this dungeon, and so they would experience terror as they went down through that hole into that darkness, because there are no windows in that tower.

44:45

It's just an amazing thing to consider living down there, especially the fact that he survived for seven years is astounding.

44:53

—story by Edgar Allan Poe, really, isn't it? —Yeah, in some ways. Well, and then to think the fact that they brought

45:00

Lutheran ministers in to attempt to convert him from up at that hole.

45:06

I'm not really sure, you know, when you think about it. You know, I know what they're trying to do,

45:12

I mean, and that—you know that's your only way out. You're not going to get out any other way, but at the same time, if you're really trying to convert someone by actually convincing them the truthfulness of what you're saying, that's a rather strange thing to think about.

45:25

But be it as it may, we shot a video up there in that little teeny tiny room that surrounds that hole.

45:34

They've got a light down in the actual dungeon, so you can just see how amazingly far down it is.

45:42

I was just really struck by the nexus of that room—oh, goodness, sorry about that.

45:54

It's the school's keyboard anyways, right? —It is.

46:00

It's not mine, but I don't mind what happens to it. As long as it by how close that dungeon was to Luther's room where he translated the

46:23

Bible while hiding from imperial forces. And just how close in time they were, and yet the role of sacralism, state church, that's really what caused me to start thinking so much about that while we were there at the

46:37

Wartburg. And I was very thankful that the folks who were doing the tour were able to so quickly arrange to bring our people up to record something there.

46:47

But one of the things I was going to mention to you was when we began our tour, the first night while we were in Berlin before we started,

46:56

I gave somewhat of a lecture, and I was talking about the fact—I sort of in passing mentioned now,

47:01

I realized that I would not be a welcome person in Luther's Wittenberg, I would not be a welcome person in Calvin's Geneva.

47:12

And even though someone like Martin Butzer was maybe a little bit more broad -minded,

47:17

Butzer's writings on the Jews, for example, in 1538 or so, were very strident, very strong, very common in that time period.

47:30

And I—the folks that were doing the tour took me aside afterwards and said, you do realize how unusual it is for someone to say the things you were just saying?

47:44

And I'm like, well, what do you mean? How can you address this topic without talking about those things?

47:50

And I sort of became very concerned that especially during this Reformation period, which isn't past,

47:58

I'm trying to tell folks, you know, it's—okay, okay, so October 31st came and went.

48:04

Now we get to have 500 anniversaries of all sorts of cool stuff. We've got the Augsburg Disputation, and we've got, you know, we've got

48:12

Worms coming up, and the Heidelberg Disputation, Marburg Colloquy, we've got all sorts of cool stuff to be looking forward to.

48:19

But for most folks, like, ah, okay, we did our celebration, let's move on from there. I've been trying to say to folks, look, we can't have a cartoonish view of what took place in the

48:32

Reformation. We need to recognize who these men were, what made them tick.

48:39

We need to recognize that the Reformers were not, in and of themselves, you know, superheroes with a big red

48:45

S on their chest. They, you know, we have to let them be who they were, which

48:52

I guess is the same thing about the early Church as well. But it just struck me, being over there, and being in those places, just how important it is that we do history in a,

49:05

I think, a responsible fashion. And even we who, you know, everybody wants to look back in history and see themselves.

49:12

We all want to look down to the well and see ourselves staring back at us, and we have to be very, very careful.

49:17

It ends up perverting history. Anything you want to add to that? No, I do agree with that.

49:24

We're all caught up in not only the flux of history, but the flux of fallen world.

49:30

So history itself is fallen. Everything is distorted one way or another, even in the

49:36

Church. And I often say to people, let's suppose the world lasts for another few hundred years.

49:43

People, Christians in the future, are going to be looking back at us and saying, how on earth could they have believed that?

49:51

How on earth could they have practiced that? And we don't see it, because we have our own historical blindness to our own context.

50:00

So yes, every age has its own virtues and its own vices, and it's extremely hard to think yourself out of that.

50:07

Well, you had mentioned earlier that as you get closer to the current time period, you lose that historical perspective.

50:15

And I've often said that the primary reason—well, I'm teaching Church History at PRBC right now.

50:21

We've been at it for, I don't know, about 46, 47 lessons so far, and we're only in the medieval period someplace.

50:30

And in the introduction, I said to folks, this is one of the few times—Church

50:36

History is one of the few opportunities that we have to see ourselves in a mirror, because we're too close.

50:44

We're too close to our current controversies, we're too close to what's going on in our own lives, we really don't have the perspective.

50:53

But if Christ has been building His Church, then we can look back and, for example, the subject of persecution.

51:01

When you look at the first schisms in what was called the Catholic Church—and obviously

51:07

Catholic with a different meaning than Roman Catholic today—those schisms were almost all due to the reaction to the subject of persecution and how you handled that particular issue.

51:21

Well, we have lots of Christians under persecution today, and yet the vast majority of Christians have never even stopped to think, huh,

51:31

I wonder how people before us handled these issues and these subjects. And so we keep having to repeat the same things over and over and over again.

51:39

We all know the old saying, if you forget history, you're doomed to repeat it. Well, it unfortunately is extremely true, and we end up—I don't know, from my perspective, it seems to me there's a tremendous amount of arrogance on the part of modern

51:54

Christians to think that we can just simply get along just fine without having any consideration whatsoever concerning those who live the faith before us.

52:04

It seems like an amazingly arrogant attitude. It does, and it's also interesting, of course, that when you go back to those attitudes to persecution and how to deal with persecution in the early

52:21

Church and with people who lapsed under persecution, the attitudes were not monolithic.

52:27

You had a kind of an extreme right -wing approach that anybody who lapses under persecution, that's the end, they can never be forgiven, they can never be received back into the

52:38

Church. Then you had a kind of an extreme left -wing view, to use that terminology, whereby, well, if they lapsed under persecution, as long as they profess repentance, just immediately let them back in, everything is forgiven.

52:53

And then you had the more middle position that was taken by most people that, well, you can allow people back into the

53:02

Church who lapse under persecution, but you can't just let them back in kind of by waving a magic wand over them.

53:09

They have to show sincerity and repentance before allowing them back. So you get these different approaches, even back then.

53:17

You know, our forefathers weren't—they didn't all think in the same way. No, they didn't, and, you know,

53:24

I've often said we need to let the early Church fathers be the early Church fathers. We can't try to turn them into something they weren't.

53:32

I think that's, honestly, one of my strongest criticisms of Roman Catholic theology today is that they attempt to create a monolithic consensus dogmatically on the part of the early

53:46

Church. It just simply didn't exist. And so you end up forcing them into a form that they never actually had, but Protestants do the same thing in reverse, just not as dogmatically.

53:57

They don't allow them to be what they really were. And as you said, if the

54:03

Lord were to tarry, I don't remember the day when I realized, you know,

54:09

I've written some books now. I might want to extend the same type of grace to those who've come before me as I would like to ask of those who are to come after me, you know?

54:22

When you actually start seeing yourself in the flow of history, it completely changes the perspective you have as to how you're to treat others.

54:33

But that's where eschatology comes in, because it does seem to me that there are certain eschatological perspectives that diminish any type of desire to actually place yourself in Church history.

54:47

If you're the last generation, hey, why polish brass on a sinking ship, you know?

54:55

Yes. And what you just said, was that about looking back on your own books? I mean, I often think that as a preacher.

55:03

In fact, if I look at a sermon I preached 10 years ago, I think, oh, well, you know, if I was preaching that sermon today, it's not quite how

55:10

I would put it any longer. And I do agree with your point there about the early

55:15

Church Fathers. They were neither Protestants nor Roman Catholics. They were the early

55:21

Church Fathers. They were patristic. And it's not right,

55:27

I think, to try to mold them according to some modern preconception, foist an identity on them that's actually alien to them.

55:34

We have to listen to them for what they were, I agree. Well, and then you have to carry that into the modern context as well, and that's where you get into trouble with the fundamentalist -type mindset that says, you know, anybody that doesn't look like me who's alive,

55:49

I can go ahead and get rid of them and kick them out of the kingdom. And yeah, it causes all sorts of problems.

55:56

Well, Dr. Needham, I, first of all, thank you for being willing to actually be on a program with me that's sort of dangerous.

56:06

I'm not, you know, there might be certain people that are going to be doing exposés on you now and all sorts of things like that.

56:14

It's a wild and wooly place here in the United States, and you've now wandered into the midst of all that.

56:23

Into the lion's den, yes. Yes, into the lion's den. Before I get cut off, can I just say hello to a few people?

56:29

Oh, sure. My friends Stephen Barton, Al Shook, Cara Devereux, and Alan Howe.

56:37

Hello. There you go. That will keep them happy. What's that? That will keep them happy.

56:44

Oh, no, Rich was yelling through the window at me, so I was trying to figure out what it was he was saying, but...

56:50

The inaudible Rich, yes. Yes, sort of like in the Peanuts cartoons, the teacher.

56:58

That's Rich over there. But for those who are still wondering, once again,

57:05

The Early Church Fathers, edited by Nick Needham in Daily Readings, that's available. You can find that online.

57:11

And of course, 2 ,000 Years of Christ's Power, the first four volumes. You might want to pray for Dr.

57:17

Needham's zeal to press forward to accomplish

57:24

Volume 5 as quickly as possible so that we all can get to read that as well.

57:31

So Dr. Needham, thank you very, very much for joining with us. And your friendship has been a great encouragement.

57:39

I do want to get back up there. I would love to have the opportunity to be there once again.

57:46

It's been quite some time, but I certainly know my way around the airports in London.

57:53

So I should... Hey, I got myself all the way up there all alone once, so I can do it again.

57:59

So we just need to find the time to do it. And it would be great to see you again. You're very welcome.

58:05

Anytime. All right. Thank you very, very much for joining us. God bless you. God bless. All right. Thank you. Okay, folks.

58:12

There is Dr. Nick Needham. And I hope you found that discussion of church history to be interesting.

58:18

What we're going to do to close out the program today is

58:23

I had really what could only be described as a great

58:33

Christmas present for myself just last evening. It's been a couple of months since I had what you might call a bucket list opportunity.

58:48

To preach from the high pulpit in the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

58:55

And some of you have seen some of the pictures of that. But it was recorded in HD, or maybe even 4K, now

59:05

I think about it. But I only had a certain amount of time.

59:10

It's not the normal length of a Reformed Baptist sermon. It's just under half an hour. But I tried to raise issues that would be very important today, given the context that I had the opportunity of speaking in.

59:25

And so I would like to play for you at the end of the program here today.

59:30

I mean, we're talking church history, and you don't get much more historical than this. I'd like to play for you the sermon from back in September from the

59:39

Castle Church in Wittenberg. And I hope it'll be a blessing to you.

59:44

And share it. It's on YouTube with others as well that might find it to be helpful to them as well.

59:51

This is how we'll close out from Wittenberg, Germany. Words have gone forth from this pulpit in centuries past that completely changed

01:00:03

Western civilization. And what made those words so powerful was their basis in Scripture.

01:00:11

And so I believe it is appropriate for us to begin with a reading of Scripture. If you have a

01:00:17

Bible or wish to turn on an electronic device, I'm going to be reading some verses from the book of Colossians.

01:00:24

Paul's epistle to the church at Colossae, Colossians chapters 1 and 2, beginning in Colossians 1 .13.

01:00:34

For he rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

01:00:43

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.

01:00:58

All things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

01:01:06

He is also head of the body, the church, and he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he himself will come to have first place in everything.

01:01:15

For it was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in him and through him to reconcile all things to himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross, through him,

01:01:26

I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven. In the next chapter, the apostle referred to Jesus Christ in these words, resulting in a true knowledge of God's mystery that is

01:01:37

Christ himself, and then listen to these words, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

01:01:46

And finally, later in chapter two, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ, for in him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form.

01:02:06

We gather in this historic place to consider what happened long ago, but we also recognize in so doing that much has changed since the events that we memorialize as we consider

01:02:22

Martin Luther and the events of his life. It's a different time and we recognize it's a different world, but why?

01:02:29

What specifically has changed? Let's think a little bit about what people were willing to give their lives to 500 years ago, and maybe this will shed some light upon what has changed in our own experience.

01:02:46

Let's think about some of the events in Luther's life. We know about what happened when he is on the road and the summer storm blows in quickly, the lightning strike nearby, and the oath that flowed naturally from a miner's son's mouth,

01:03:05

Saint Anne, help me and I will become a monk. This was not a considered opinion on his part, but you see, he followed through with the oath that he made because in that day people believed that the words they spoke had transcendent meaning.

01:03:24

They lived in a world that had transcendent meaning. They believed they themselves had transcendent meaning, and therefore when you say you're going to do something, you do it.

01:03:38

A little bit later, when Luther offers his first mass, when he officiates at that first mass, he is taken back by the awesomeness of what it is he is being asked to do because in his faith at that time, he believes he's actually handling the body and blood of Christ, and already he recognizes his own unworthiness to do anything like that.

01:04:03

Who am I to handle the body and blood of Christ? And so he is fearful.

01:04:08

He's not like many of his day that simply ignored the great power that was allegedly his.

01:04:16

He is concerned about his own sin, and he's concerned that what he's been taught is actually true.

01:04:23

He wasn't told to just simply psychologize away his own fears.

01:04:29

He recognized that of what he believed was true, there was reason for fear.

01:04:36

We have heard about Luther's fear of God's judgment. We have heard of the time that he spent in the confessional, and we have understood that how could a monk need to spend an hour, two hours, up to six hours in a confessional?

01:04:52

Here was a person under tremendous conviction, and yet he was not finding peace in the sacramental system of his day.

01:05:01

He did eventually find peace, and where did he find it? He didn't find it in abandoning truth.

01:05:08

He found it in embracing a truth that had become covered over. And for the benefit of where we are and possibly any of our

01:05:19

German -speaking friends, I want to, when I quote from Martin Luther, first give you his actual words, and then

01:05:25

I will translate for you. But I want you to hear what he said, how he eventually overcame that fear of judgment.

01:05:33

These were his words. Was his death worthwhile or was it not?

01:06:22

If his death was worthwhile, it follows that righteousness does not come by the law. Why was Christ born anyway?

01:06:27

Why was he crucified? Why did he suffer? Why did he love me and give himself for me?

01:06:34

It was all done to no purpose if righteousness is to be had by the law.

01:06:40

He came to understand the personal nature of the work of Christ in his behalf.

01:06:47

He came to understand the perfection of the work of Jesus Christ.

01:06:53

And this is what gave him boldness. This is what gave him boldness. It was not in this place, but in another place where he stood before the

01:07:04

Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. And yes, he did ask for that 24 hours to consider.

01:07:12

But when he had to finally give the answer, he stood before Charles and he said he could not go against conscience.

01:07:21

Lest you show me from Scripture and from plain reason where I have erred in my writings, then

01:07:30

I cannot recant these things. Here I stand. I can do no other. What would cause a man to stand in a situation?

01:07:40

He knew the danger he was in. He knew about Jan Hus. He knew that Jan Hus had been given the imperial safe conduct only 100 years earlier.

01:07:50

He knew that it was a very thin promise upon which he rested at that particular point in time.

01:07:57

He knew that his life hung in the balance, and yet he said, I cannot recant.

01:08:02

What causes a person to have that kind of confidence in the gospel of Jesus Christ?

01:08:11

These are questions that Luther did answer over his life. I want to give you another quote from him in answer to this.

01:08:19

He said, Die Lehre des Evangeliums nimmt den Menschen allen Ruhm, Weisheit, Gerechtigkeit und so weiter und teilt das alles allein dem

01:08:29

Schöpfer zu, der aus nicht alles macht. Es ist viel sicherer,

01:08:35

Gott so viel zuzuteilen als den Menschen. The gospel is true because it deprives men of all glory, wisdom and righteousness and turns over all honor to the

01:08:50

Creator alone. It is safer to attribute too much glory unto

01:08:56

God than unto man. Luther knew the temptations, and he had come to understand what would give him the boldness to even give his life for this message of grace and salvation that he experienced.

01:09:13

But I want to ask you to go with me for a moment back to this very room just a little less than 500 years ago.

01:09:25

Because on right around the Christmas season, Christmas Eve as I recall, while Luther was at the

01:09:34

Wartburg, Andreas Karstadt announced that he was going to allow those people in the congregation to partake of the supper in both kinds.

01:09:46

Now for many of us that's a little bit confusing, but you need to understand that after the advent of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the cup had been withdrawn from the laity for the simple fact that, well, it was very difficult to protect it, and it was too easy to spill.

01:10:03

And so people had only been able to partake of the bread. Only the priest partook of the cup.

01:10:11

And so Karstadt said, I'm going to do this. And so this room was filled with people.

01:10:18

And the reports that are given to us is when it came time to distribute the elements, which would have taken place right down here.

01:10:26

There was such a crush, such a rush to partake of both the bread and the cup that some people dropped the elements upon the floor.

01:10:35

Other people in the congregation were absolutely scandalized by what was going on because not in any of their lives had anything like this happened.

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As far as people could remember all the way back, this was something new and revolutionary. Think about how different the world is today.

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In most of our churches, when we have the Lord's Supper, do we have people rushing the altar to partake?

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Or is it much more of the reality that in most of our churches, the

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Supper is an add -on, once in a while, barely thought about? What has changed?

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Think about what it would have looked like right here to have those people surging forward to partake of the elements of the

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Lord's Supper, so desirous to do so. What has changed?

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None of this makes any sense to us today. Let's be honest. As we think of the bravery, we think of the commitment of men and women who were willing to stand before kings and princes and say, no,

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I will not stay with the old ways. There is something that is even older than the old ways, and that's the original ways of the gospel.

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It's what we have right there in the window, right up there across from me, that we reckon that a man is justified not by works of the law, but by faith alone.

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And that message changed people. Have we stopped preaching that message today? Well, we must admit that in many contexts, we have.

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We must admit that many of those who consider themselves, in some sense, the children of Luther, no longer have the passion or the beliefs of Luther when it comes to justification, righteousness, faith.

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But there are many of us who still preach that message. And I will confess, as I have traveled around the world, when

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I do seminars, when I do teaching on the subject of justification by faith, it does not cause men's hearts to stir the way that it did in this room 500 years ago.

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What's changed? Has the message changed? No, the message hasn't changed.

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But the audience has changed. Not in the sense that the audience today does not need to hear that message.

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The audience today does need to hear that message. But what has changed is us.

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Because if you were thinking with me as I mentioned those incidents in Luther's life, possibly, maybe, it crossed your mind, man, he was really radical.

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I mean, do you really risk your life? Do you really risk your life in such a way that when someone says, are these your books?

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If you do not recant them, you're going to die. You know how agonizing it is to die by fire at the stake.

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And yet you will say, no, you must prove me wrong. Can you be so confident of that message?

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For many of us, we look at what the Reformers were willing to risk.

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We even look at what some of the Anabaptists were willing to go through at the hands even of the

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Reformers. And what we are told by thinking about what happened in the past is that something has changed about how mankind looks at the world and what is really worthwhile.

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And evidently, we have become very self -centered. We have become very focused upon ourselves.

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We have become very focused upon our happiness, our fulfillment.

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And as a result, have we become more happy, more fulfilled? The reality is what has changed tells us much about how we must adjust as Christians, not the essence of our message, but the context and the words we use to communicate it to others.

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You see, the people of Luther's day lived in God's world. Look around you right now.

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Do you notice something about the architecture? I'm looking down upon you, and you're looking up.

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You can't help but look up. Even if you weren't looking at me, even if you didn't want to see the source of the voice, by the very nature of the building, your eyes are drawn upward to something greater than yourself.

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By the very structure of the building, you are being told that you are a part of something so much bigger and so much greater and something, because of the nature of the building, that's going to continue to be important even after you are gone.

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So much of today's world is focused upon a worldview where once you're gone, nothing else matters.

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We don't have to worry about passing something on to the next generation. We don't have to worry about what the world's going to be like in the next generation.

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It's all about me and my fulfillment. People that back then did not think that way.

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They lived in God's world. They lived in a created, ordered, meaningful world, where man not only had a purpose, but had a creator and a judge.

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You hear those words? God's world, a created world, an ordered world, a meaningful world, which meant that you could live in that world, and that meant that you had meaning.

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Not just as an individual, but as you related to others and as you were related to eternity itself.

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This life wasn't going to be all there was. There was much more.

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So much more. How that changes mankind. To recognize you have a creator.

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Luther understood that. He understood that someday he would stand before him, and so he needed to have a relationship with that creator that was going to allow him to face death, not with confidence in himself because he knew that would never, that would never avail.

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He knew God was holy, so what kind of confidence could a person have before a holy

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God? Only an alien righteousness could avail, and that was the righteousness provided in and through Jesus Christ.

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He knew that there would be that judge, and so we needed to have something outside of ourselves.

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Truths in that day had meaning, meaning worth loving and dying for.

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I'd like to suggest to you a world that does not have truths that are worth loving and dying for.

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It's not much of a world to live in, and yet the worldview that has now been adopted by the vast majority of western culture is a world that tells us there is no transcendent meaning, there is no objective truth, there are no truths worth loving, and therefore there are no truths worth dying for.

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And so that's why I began with the text that I read in your hearing just a few moments ago.

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You would think standing in this pulpit you would speak of justification, righteousness, you'd preach from Romans, you'd preach from Galatians.

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All those words, all those books of revelation from God, vitally important today.

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We must understand what it means to be made right before God, but there's a problem. You see, the only people who are ready to hear about righteousness from God are people who believe that there is a

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God that is going to demand righteousness of them. That's what's changed.

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That's why we don't have people filling these these pews, pushing in here to hear

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God's truth. When you've been robbed of the true reality that God has revealed his truth, then you are left with the crumbs of secular humanism.

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You're left with the crumbs of a man -centered world that cannot possibly satisfy anyone.

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And so you see I began with Colossians 1 and 2 because while we must continue to stand firm for the doctrine of justification, the truths that were written down for us in inspired scripture nearly 2 ,000 years ago, because we know man is always going to try to find a way to insert himself into the work of salvation.

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We must stand firm on those things, but we must realize that those words will fall upon deaf ears because you see there was a preparation to the gospel that was natural in the days of Luther and what happened in here that is no longer a part of what the people around us are raised with and understand.

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I was thinking about the fact that shortly after Luther was buried right here, his old nemesis

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Charles V stood in this very room. If you know the history you know that very shortly thereafter

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Charles came in with his armies and he came into this place and he he stood right here.

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He looked at that that crypt and there were many who encouraged him, dig him up, burn him.

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That's what they had done to Wycliffe. That's what they had done to Wycliffe. They dug him up and burned his bones to ashes and threw them in the

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River Swift. So many wanted to do that to Luther as well. Charles refused and we're not exactly sure why.

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I theorize that Charles saw in that man who stood before him so many years earlier someone who had true faith.

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Someone who had touched something that he could not conceive or understand because Charles was primarily a politician and I think there was fear.

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I think there was fear in his heart of touching what might very well be the remains of a holy man and find himself standing before God needing the message that Luther had so clearly proclaimed.

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But he stood right there. Oh the temptation must have been great but you see even Charles was a man of the day.

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He knew that someday he would stand before his creator and his judge. The problem is today we speak to people around us who do not believe they have a creator.

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If they don't have a creator there is no law that they have broken. If there is no law that they have broken there will be no judgment for their sin.

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But it also means there is no transcendent meaning to their lives.

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And we see the result all around us in the brokenness and the emptiness. My friends those words

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I read to you from Colossians chapter 1 are not just a theological discussion of the fact that Jesus Christ, the one we call

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Jesus Christ, is actually the eternal creator. And he was eternally the divine second person of the trinity that the condescension of God that he would come into his own creation it is truly an astounding an amazing message.

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But you see you must understand something. While we have to stand firm on that doctrine as well for there are many who would deny these things today.

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What the incarnation likewise tells us is that the men 500 years ago were right.

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They were right to love truth. They were right to be willing to die for truth.

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They were right to crowd into this room in the cold of that December wanting to partake of the

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Lord's Supper in its fullness. They were right. How does the incarnation prove they were right?

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Because Jesus doesn't enter into a make -believe world. He entered into this world and the incarnation demonstrates

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God's promises are true and God will fulfill his promises to his people.

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We are his creatures. You know how we know that? Our creator has shown himself.

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He's shown himself. We can have true knowledge of who he is.

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It's not just a matter of our making up a God in our own image.

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God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ and that means our lives have transcendent meaning.

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Transcendent meaning. This is the message this generation needs to hear.

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This is the message this land needs to hear. Every land needs to hear. As we turn away from the divine and fix our eyes solely upon what is upon this earth, we turn away from what could be the greatest happiness that we could ever know because we turn away from knowing our creator and our maker.

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It is wonderful to be in this place and to consider what God did in the past.

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You see my friends, in many ways we have degraded greatly from the

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German peasants that filled this room so long ago. They knew something that we no longer know.

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They saw something about this world that we have been deprived of and so our prayer must be

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God bring revival and that revival means reveal yourself. Reveal to the people of this land, first of all to your church, but to the people of this land the fact that they are your creatures, that you are their creator and that therefore they must have a relationship with you and it must be a relationship that you have ordered, that you have ordained and he has done that in and through the person of Jesus Christ.

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It is an honor to stand here but you know why it's an honor? To know that over the course of 500 years the gospel hasn't changed.

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The gospel hasn't changed. Its power is still the same. Man's need is still the same.

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We may need to speak differently. We may need to address different issues but the reality is the gospel that changed the people in this room 500 years ago can change the hearts of every person in it today.

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It's still a powerful gospel. It's still what God has done in Jesus Christ. Let us rejoice in it and redouble our efforts to make sure that all around us know who

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Jesus Christ truly is and what he's accomplished. Let's pray together.

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Our gracious heavenly father we gather in this place and once again thank you for what you have done, what you did much longer ago than the events of this building, what you did on a hill outside of Jerusalem.

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We thank you for the gospel of Jesus Christ. We thank you that in eternity past Father, Son, and Holy Spirit covenanted together to bring about triune glorification in the gospel and we get to be benefits that the beneficiaries of that gospel.

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But Lord we live in a in a dark day. We live in a day where many do not even lift up their eyes to consider their creator and their judge.

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May we be lights. First of all, may you make sure that that light shines brightly in our hearts.

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May we see clearly our meaning in this world and then may we be used to bring that message to others.

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God have mercy upon this land and upon every land. May the gospel go forth in power as it did once from this very place.