01 - Why Church History

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Why on earth would we study church history? Let's just be honest with ourselves.

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For the majority of people who are called evangelicals today, church history pretty much goes back to Billy Graham.

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What is he, 104 now, something like that? So he is in his, I think, his late 90s, if I recall correctly.

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Very elderly. But certainly in my own upbringing,

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I do not personally recall any particular emphasis upon church history.

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And if you were not raised within a Reformed -style church, certainly in the more fundamentalistic

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General Association of Regular Baptists, as we were, got some

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Garves over there, church history was not an issue.

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There was no emphasis upon a recognition of where we stood in church history.

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Or if there was, how many of you have seen the little Trail of Blood booklet?

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You've never seen? I was first given one of those probably in the late 1970s, probably early 1980s at North Phoenix.

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Someone handed me one of those. The landmark Baptist, the Baptists have always been around.

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It's almost the Roman Catholic idea of apostolic succession, except for Baptists. And I had no earthly idea how to even evaluate something like that, because again, the idea of church history for many, and I use this term any more advisedly,

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Protestants, is, well, they're all just a bunch of Roman Catholics up until the

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Reformation. And even then, even with the Reformation, well, then they're a bunch of Lutherans or something, or a bunch of Presbyterians.

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And so there was just a real antipathy toward the idea, even though theologically we would say

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God had been building his church, it was just this little itsy bitsy, can't really find it in most time periods type thing that was hidden away until the modern period where now we can be out there in the open, and so on and so forth.

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And so the idea of studying church history had no theological grounding in my upbringing.

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And I'd like to try to provide a little bit of a theological foundation for taking Bible study time to study church history.

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Is this just simply something that Calvinists do because we like to talk about, well, we like to talk about Wycliffe and Huss, and that's all just sort of the preamble to our hero

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Martin Luther, who would have probably killed any of us, and Ulrich Zwingli, who probably would have killed any of us, and John Calvin, who would have at least banished any of us.

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That type of thing. Is it just the preamble? Is it just so we can get to the

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Reformation part and eventually, for some people, so we can get to the Anabaptists, who were only barely

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Orthodox on a lot of things? That type of stuff. Is that what it's all about? I don't think so.

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There does seem to be in scripture a fair number of texts that, for example, in Romans chapter 15,

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I don't think we've quite gotten there yet, or if we did, it was a day I wasn't here. But in Romans chapter 15, we have the discussion of these things took place for our edification.

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They're an example unto us, and we are to look back. And it's sort of hard. I mean, remember, we went through Hebrews.

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It would have been impossible to understand a lot of what the writer of the Hebrews was saying if you couldn't understand the history of the

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Jewish people and go back. And there's all these references to what God did in this person's life and God did in that person's life.

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And therefore, we should learn from this particular lesson. And so we have all sorts of examples of even the patriarchs.

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They were to put up a stone pillar at a particular place.

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Why? As a reminder of what God had done in someone's life at that particular place.

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We sing the song. And I always talk about it in the second line. Here I raise my ebenezer, which we call an ebenezer.

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And we automatically start thinking about the Christmas carol, and I wonder how Scrooge got into one of our hymns anyways.

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And actually, the ebenezer is a stone of help. It's a reminder of what

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God had done in our lives, putting up one of those pillars and saying, God did something in my life, and this is something to remind me of that.

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We need reminders. I mean, my goodness. I have on my Apple devices,

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I have the Reminder app. And I just have to use that thing and throw stuff in it.

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It doesn't actually mean I do what I put on there. But eventually, you just get used to seeing it, so you don't see it anymore, and it just doesn't work anymore.

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But I still need to use it, and it's helpful to me. We need reminders, or we become very focused upon our own little world.

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It becomes very easy to define all of reality just based upon my little experience here.

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And it helps to recognize, first of all, the world's a whole lot bigger than here.

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There are actually people in the world who could care less about Donald J. Trump, or Ted Cruz, or Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders, or people like that, though you would be shocked, by the way.

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I'll bet you half the people in here, I'll bet you more than half the people in here, couldn't name the prime ministers of Australia, Canada, and the

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United Kingdom. I'm not sure that I could. I know Trudeau's back in Canada, because he's really weird. But it's amazing how much attention is paid on our elections outside our borders.

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When I travel, people are always, tell me about this guy, or tell me about that guy.

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I heard this, and I heard that. They follow our elections really, really closely. It's a sort of freaky thing.

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Unfortunately, especially in Europe, it's extremely slanted. And I go over there and go, what are you people talking about?

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Even my conservative, Bible -believing friends will start saying things, and I said, you listen to MSNBC way too much, because that's basically all they have.

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But anyway, so it helps to widen our perspective to know the world's bigger than that.

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But it also helps us temporally to look back.

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It's sort of not possible to look forward, so at least outside of a few things in Scripture.

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All right, George, we're starting church history, so we almost waited for you, because we're going to need you to write down a date we started.

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And I'm not sure if you've got a new notebook you can use, or whatever, but just to let you know.

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The only way that we can, since we can't look into the future so much, is look into the past.

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And theologically, you would think that would be one of the first things we would do. I mean, I've always believed, even when

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I didn't think church history was relevant, I've always believed the promise that Jesus gave us, he was going to build his church.

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The gates of Hades would not prevail against that, which, by the way, when you think about it, really doesn't make any sense the way we've always thought about it.

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We've always thought that the church would be in a defensive mode. Actually, the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.

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It means we're marching in there, not them marching in here. It's an offensive thing, not a defensive thing.

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But anyway, theologically, I would have understood that, yeah,

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Christ is building his church. So why doesn't it immediately follow, then, well, if he's been doing that for 2 ,000 years, then

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I've got 2 ,000 years of history to look back upon of Christ building his church. And it would seem wisdom to recognize, well, he was always dealing with people who had abiding sin.

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He was always dealing with people who were in a fallen state. So I bet we've made the same mistakes over and over and over again, haven't we?

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And maybe if we take the time to look back, we might be able to learn some things to where we don't make the same mistakes all over again.

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And I suppose in the back of my mind, I would have recognized the reality of the fact that there have been great controversies in theology.

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But honestly, I think most of us, when we come into the faith initially, we sort of have the idea that what we believe, sort of like what we believe about the

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Bible, that it floated down from heaven on a silken pillow with leather binding and gold edges and thumb indexing and pretty ribbons bound in there as well.

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Well, it didn't. It came down in a very different fashion than that.

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And in the same way, theology, we would like to think that there is just some great, huge, divine theology book someplace.

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And we all just make reference to it. And it's really quite simple. And there aren't any questions. And there was never any development or increase in understanding or anything like that at all.

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But that's not how it worked either. I mean, when you think about it, you have this incredible claim that we're making, that God Himself entered into His own creation and has established this church.

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And this church is made up of men from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

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There's no longer the Jew -Gentile distinction. We're all to be one in Christ Jesus. And it's for every race, every color, every tongue.

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There's to be no geographical boundaries, no ethnic boundaries, no nothing.

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I mean, this is an incredible thing. And so it's going to have to go out into that world.

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And you think about someone like a Peter, who's a Galilean fisherman.

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Let's say he, well, the understanding historically is that he ended up going to Babylon at some point.

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You think maybe once you leave the narrow confines of ancient

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Israel, you start going other places, you start going to places where Greek philosophy is prevalent, that people are going to start asking questions about what you're teaching that will be different than what would be the prevalent questions there in Israel.

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So the questions are going to be phrased and put into world views that maybe you've never run into before.

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And how are you going to answer those questions? Are you going to demand that they abandon who they are and adopt a completely

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Jewish world view so that they can understand solely all those questions from a

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Jewish perspective? And so now you've got nice, simple answers. You can just go straight back to apostolic preaching and just repeat the answers to it.

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Well, that's not going to work if the gospel is, in fact, intended to go into all the world.

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And so obviously, there are going to be missteps.

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There are going to be times when maybe even a well -known

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Christian leader comes up with some bad answers for various reasons, sometimes not nefarious.

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But certainly, there are times we look back upon maybe an early church writer and we go, well, in light of later reflection and deeper biblical exegesis, that really wasn't necessarily the best answer.

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But at the same time, what that tells us, then, is that we need to look at anyone in church history and we need to try to interpret them within the context of the time they lived.

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We stand on the shoulders of giants, whether we understand it or not, whether we can name

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Athanasius and place him at the right time and the right century and understand what his role was and whether we know anything about these names.

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If you've received a year's worth of teaching in the church, whether you know it or not, you have benefited from those men, even if those men's names were never mentioned.

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Because the things that they struggled with and the things that maybe they spent their entire lives focused upon have become a part of the fabric of the faith that has been delivered to you.

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And even in the way it was explained to you. I mean, some of you have grown up in this church. Not many of you, but some of you have grown up in this church.

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And so you've been in the Sunday school classes. They're in a meeting right now. And various teachers have taken the time.

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Mr. Porter and Mr. Smith, for example, with some of the older teenagers, have gone through sections on systematic theology or apologetics or things like that.

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And maybe there wasn't a specific historical element to the systematic theology part.

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But there was, whether you knew it or not. The influence was there. And even some of the language that we use very clearly came from a point of conflict in history where clarification came about because there had to be clarification.

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Biggest example of this we'll get to in really a matter of weeks was the first ecumenical council, ecumenical meaning worldwide.

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And that term has different meanings depending on who you talk to it. But the first truly major sort of representing the entire church visible council,

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Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. And the issue of the council was the teaching of a man named

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Arius who taught that there was a time when the sun was not.

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There was a time when the sun was not. So the sun was godlike.

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The sun was invested with divine power. But the sun, when you think of the chasm that exists between everything that's created and everything that's not created, he's on the created side, not the not created side.

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So he is not eternal. He is the most exalted creature there is.

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But he's still a creature. That is what Arius taught. And many were those who were opposed to him.

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But it was discovered fairly quickly that Arius, bright fellow,

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I guess, allegedly he was quite good looking and liked to write music that promoted his perspective.

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And if you want to promote a perspective, write music. People can remember music. I mentioned yesterday a terrible, horrible thing.

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This must be why I wasn't able to catch up to Gary in the race yesterday. But about halfway through, I got a song stuck in my head.

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I got a song stuck in my head. And it was, Let It Go. Now let me tell you something.

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There are a lot of songs that get stuck in your head. That is not one of them that you want stuck in your head. It really, because the cold has bothered me, normally.

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And I blame my granddaughter for that particular disaster that overtook me yesterday.

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But yes, music is a very, very effective way of communicating something, even if it has no meaning whatsoever.

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As that song has no meaning at all. But you still can't get it out of your head, no matter how hard you try.

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It's just horrible. See, what happened is I pulled over the side of the road and beat my head against a cactus for 15 minutes.

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And that was the difference between us. Right there was 15 minutes was trying to get Let It Go out of my head. So Arius, anyways, back to Arius.

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Arius is a sharp guy, musically inclined, obviously got a lot of people on his side, thinking this is the proper way to go.

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And so they had to get together, and they discovered that Arius could find a way around almost any verse in the

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Bible. You present almost any verse in scripture that teaches the deity of Christ.

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And as long as you're inventive enough, and as long as your ultimate authority isn't a consistent form of exegesis, you can find a way around it.

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And so the Arians could say, we affirm every single verse that you show us in this way.

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And so the term that the Council of Nicaea ended up using was a very controversial term.

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But they found an unbiblical term. It's not a term found in scripture. But it was the only way that they could pull the mask off of the

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Arians. The Arians could not say, yes, I agree to that. And so they used this term.

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They said, it's based on this biblical teaching, and this biblical teaching, and this biblical teaching, but it's not itself found in scripture.

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But it is the only way to absolutely say, we're saying this, not this.

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And so orthodoxy for the Council of Nicaea was defined on the basis of the term homoousius versus homoiousius, a single letter difference.

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Single letter difference. But homoousius, meaning of the same substance. Homoiousius would be of like substance.

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So in describing the substance of the Son, is he of the same substance of the Father? Is he truly deity? Or is he of a like substance?

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Highly exalted, but not truly deity. And so what is the illustration here?

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The illustration here is that very often definitions, the very definitions that we use today were forged in the fires of controversy.

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When an issue comes up and it becomes a controversy, that's when you get a special focus upon examination of the scriptures, and what the scriptures teach as a whole, and how to formulate this.

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And really, the first 500 years of the Christian era are filled with key controversies, some of which truly are central, some of which demonstrate that there is a great apostasy going on and aren't central at all.

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Yes, sir? Homoousius. We're going to be covering, trust me, we're going to be covering the

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Council of Nicaea very deeply in a few weeks. This is just an illustration right now. Just guess at it and see how close you get once we get there.

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Yeah, homoousius and homoiousius were the two. And then there's heteroousius, which means of a completely different nature.

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But the point is that these terms, they come out of controversy.

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And many of the terms that we just simply take for granted, they themselves had an origin in time as far as coming to have the kind of significance we have, that we give to them today.

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A lot of people ask me when I do public debates, or we've just booked the flights for next month.

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I'm going to be gone the first half of May to Cape Town, Johannesburg, London, and Belfast.

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And in all those places, I'll be doing things where I'll be answering questions that pop my head in groups and debates with Muslims and stuff like that.

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And people say, what classes that you took in Bible college and seminary have been the most useful to you in doing what you do as an apologist?

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And my answer has been the same for decades now. Greek and church history.

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Greek and church history. Greek, Hebrew to a lesser extent, but I'll be honest with you.

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90 % of the apologetic questions, especially, have to do with New Testament things. Or even if they have to do with Old Testament things, they have to do with the

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Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament. So Greek is far more important along those lines.

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I'm not trying to diminish the importance of Hebrew. I'm just simply saying apologetically. But then the other, most people are a little surprised.

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They think systematic theology or something like that. Well, yeah, it's important. But to me, the amount of times that church history gets twisted and then used as a club against Christians is amazing.

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It really is. And the only reason it works is because we almost never talk about it.

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I mean, amongst Bible -believing Christians, church history just is not a focus.

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And so people can come along, and sometimes they'll use facts. They'll actually be truthful, factual information.

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But then they put it into a false context and turn it into a weapon against us. And so if someone says, well, yeah, but the

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Doctrine of the Trinity wasn't worked out until the fourth century. So how can you say it's really relevant? That's a half -truth that has been twisted out of its context.

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Were there Christological controversies all the way up to the Council of Chalcedon? Yes. Does that mean that the

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Doctrine of the Trinity is irrelevant or even non -definitional? No. But since we don't know much about the controversies, since we don't necessarily know what the relationship is between biblical theology and systematic theology and how creedal formulations are developed and things like that, we very frequently end up being silenced basically by our own ignorance, not by the weight of the actual argument that's being used against us.

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And so it's especially irrelevant today, even more so than when

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I first taught church history the year after I graduated from seminary at Grand Canyon College back then.

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Or had it become Grand Canyon University? I forget if it had made that transition. It's hard to even recognize the place anymore.

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It's so huge. But I first taught church history at Grand Canyon when

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I was scholar -in -residence there about 1989, 1990, somewhere around in there. And I could tell when the students came in that they were just sort of expecting to take notes, take some tests, and survive.

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Thankfully, when I was in seminary, I had a tremendously good and gifted church history teacher.

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And he made the subject not only understandable, but you could tell he was passionate about it.

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You could tell that this was something that really meant something to him. And I appreciated the fact that he had been to Europe, and he had been to some of these places, and he could tell stories about stuff.

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And now I've had the opportunity to do some of that. I'll be debating on the subject of Roman Catholicism in Wittenberg next year for the 500th anniversary.

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I've stood at the castle church door in Wittenberg, Germany. It's Wittenberg over there. But anyways, when we talk about Zwingli and the

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Anabaptists and the third baptism, anybody know the third baptism? Third baptism was drowning, because the

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Anabaptists had been baptized as infants. And then they were called Anabaptists, which means to be baptized again.

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Of course, they reject that terminology. They didn't believe they were baptized properly the first time anyway. They had been baptized from Zwingli's perspective a second time.

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So the third baptism is where you drown them. And the drownings of the

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Anabaptists were done primarily off of a particular bridge, which is still right there in the heart of Zurich.

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And I walked over that bridge. Just what? When was I in Zurich?

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I forgot when that was. Sometime last year. I think it was last year. What was that?

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Remember December? I don't know. It was pretty nippy. Sorry? It was in the fall sometime.

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Anyway. So I stood at that spot where the Anabaptists received their, and we walked through the building where the trials were held.

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It's a little creepy, to be perfectly honest with you. And the vast majority of people walking past those spots today have no earthly idea, no earthly idea of what took place there or why.

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And even most Christians anymore would think that it really doesn't matter. It doesn't have any particular meaning anymore.

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The fact of the matter is it does. It has a lot of meaning, because it has been a part of what has formed our identity and our character.

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And if we don't know these things, then we don't possess the tools to be able to detect tradition even within our own beliefs.

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History provides us with an exceptionally important tool to be able to recognize when we are being influenced by forces that we may not even know existed, but they are historical forces.

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They are voices from the past that continue speaking to this day. And everyone has them.

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The less you know about history, the less you can identify the force and the weight that those voices have.

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And that's a bad situation to be in, because most of the people that I know of and that I've experienced who are the most enslaved to tradition are the very same people who have extremely skewed views of church history.

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For example, Dave Hunt, the late Dave Hunt, and I wrote a book, He Against Calvinism, I Defending Calvinism.

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And if you ever listened much to Dave Hunt, he would talk a lot about church history. But from a scholarly perspective, it was this incredibly twisted, unfair, only see what you want to see on the page version of church history, because he had such strong traditions.

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But he didn't know he had strong traditions. And in fact, those of you who've heard the encounter he and I had years and years ago on the radio station here in Phoenix when

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I was interviewing him, at one point I said to him, Dave, that's just your tradition speaking.

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His response to me was, James, I have no tradition. And so someone who can honestly, and he meant it, can honestly say,

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I have no tradition, is the greatest slave there is to tradition. Because if you think you don't have any, you have no way of filtering it.

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You have no way of identifying it. You have no way of analyzing it. You have no way of asking the question, is this really a biblical teaching or not?

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And so Hunt was also really well known for attacking people in church history in a very unfair manner.

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He detested Augustine. He said Augustine was the father of Roman Catholicism and blah, blah, blah, blah. He would use genetic fallacy, where if Augustine said something he disagreed with, that meant, and then you've got this whole long line of things that turns

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Augustine into this terrible, horrible person. One of the things that hopefully I will communicate to you over and over again during the course of this study is that we have to examine people in church history in the light of when they live.

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Applying our modern standard to them is simply unfair, and there's no one sitting in this room that would feel overly good if someone three or 400 years from now decided to analyze your life in light of their circumstance.

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That's unfair. They may know things you don't know. You may know things they don't know.

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The idea of that kind of anachronism, stepping outside of the actual context and importing things that, you know, when

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Augustine did what he did in regards to Donatists, another issue we will get into, the result over centuries of time, you could literally say was the

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Inquisition. Augustine didn't know that. Augustine could not have foreseen how his words would be used, how the context and culture would change.

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And so to hold him accountable as if he was going, oh, let's start the

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Inquisition, is just absurdity. And yet, there are books filled with that kind of stuff sitting on the shelves of Christian bookstores, or these days, digitally stored on Amazon's hard drive.

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However, you end up getting that kind of information. Church history is also one of the only ways that we can gain some kind of perspective in looking at ourselves.

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In looking at ourselves. And that may be uncomfortable to a lot of us, to look at ourselves.

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But church history sort of functions as a mirror that we can hold up to ourselves.

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And because, look, we are so close to the controversies of our day, that trying to step back and gain any perspective so as to see things from another viewpoint, or another angle, or anything like that, is really, really difficult when we are in the heat of the moment, when we only know what we know.

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And we think we know enough to be able to make sound decisions. But the fact of the matter is, maybe on some issues, we don't.

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And so what's one way in which we can maybe get some perspective but to use the mirror of church history?

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Because, look, when you think about it, while the early church didn't have the technology that we have, they're a human being.

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They're made in the image of God. They're indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God. And what's the purpose of God in their sanctification but to conform them to the image of Christ?

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So you can change the clothing. You can change the language. You can change the technology.

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You can change the politics. But there's still going to be some tremendous parallels.

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And it's pretty much the same process being worked out but in different circumstances.

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And so I'm not saying that you can always. I mean, in one way, we face issues that almost no generation before us has faced.

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What do you do with designer babies? What do you do now that we have mapped the human genome?

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What do you do to deal with the advancement in the hands of secular

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God -haters of technologies that could produce either a super race or the walking dead?

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One of the two. What do you do with the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of absolute loons, such as the head of North Korea?

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I mean, people that are just certifiably insane, evilly insane. I mean, the current leadership of North Korea makes

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Hitler look like a youth group leader. I mean, it just, this guy's a nut.

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And he's got nuclear weapons and rockets. Do not see a good end to this.

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OK? You know, this is not a good thing. OK. Nuclear proliferation and DNA splicing and CRISPR technology, not something that Augustin dealt with.

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OK, I get that. But through history, there have been advancements, for example, in science.

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And we can look at the stumbles, the falls, the face plants, as well as the successes, and how the church responded to these things.

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Of course, in the midst of all that, we then have the question of, what was the church?

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I mean, that's a big question today. That's a very amorphous term.

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What defines the church? Can we identify the church historically? How do we differentiate between what would be called the external church, or the professing church, and the institutional church, over against the true church, which we would identify as the saints of all ages?

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When did Roman Catholicism arise? How do you even define Roman Catholicism?

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Even today, I mean, I think it was a lot easier to define Roman Catholicism 100 years ago than it is today. I mean, when you've got two popes alive today, who clearly do not believe the same thing on a fundamental level, what does that mean?

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How do you even define Rome today? And when did Rome come into existence? And how much bad theology can a true

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Christian actually believe? These are important questions. And they're questions people struggle with.

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And even amongst Reformed folks, we draw those lines in our minds, but very frequently, not so much in a way that if we applied them historically, we would be consistent.

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For example, we know that the Reformers loved Augustine. They quote

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Augustine all the time. But let's not fool ourselves. You would be somewhat lost in Augustine's church, at least the first few

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Sundays. And Augustine would have had certain beliefs, or at least certain, maybe not dogmas, but concepts and ideas that you would have gone, what?

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Where'd you get that? And he'd probably think the same thing about us, too. And so how are we in the same church?

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Are we in the same church? I mean, there are some who would say, oh, no, no, no, no. But the Reformers certainly didn't believe that.

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The Reformers did not believe that they were founding a new church. They didn't believe that the church had simply passed away.

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So how do we define what the church is? What's the level of doctrinal accuracy that is necessary for defining the

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Christian church? Can we even tell, necessarily, from reading the writings of the ancient church exactly where someone was?

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What's the ability of someone's written work to really reveal where their heart is?

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I mean, these are all issues that enter into our consideration of the generations that have come before us.

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And I would think that most of us would just naturally recognize the necessity to extend some grace in the study of church history.

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Because most of us don't think about the fact that someday, unless the

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Lord returns, we will be a part of church history. And as such, it's real easy for us to go, well,

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I don't want to be judged by those who come after me in an unfair or ungracious manner.

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Some of you are going, no one's going to care about me. Well, OK, but you don't know that.

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I mean, when we do think about some of the figures of church history, some of them were spectacularly unknown people who, in unusual situations, became very, very well known.

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Things were thrust upon them. And that may not happen to you, but the fact of the matter is, if you just sort of set that aside, you recognize the need for someone to honestly, adequately, and fairly analyze what you believe in light of what you knew, not on the basis of what someone else is going to come up with when they're wrong.

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And so that is, I think, an absolutely necessary attitude for us to have.

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So all that requires the study of church history. Now, not everything in church history is overly exciting. We get to the

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Reformation. I love taking time to walk down the various rows of relics in the castle church in Wittenberg.

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And we talk about how, if you stop before this particular spot in the castle church, there, on display, is a feather from the wing of the angel

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Gabriel. And you stop, and you bow, and you pray before that station, before the feather from the wing of the angel

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Gabriel, and you receive a certain indulgence, a certain number of days out of the suffering of purgatory, a transfer of merit from the satharis meritorium into your own account, so that you may not suffer in purgatory for his life.

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And then you walk down the row, and you stop, and here is a true thorn from the crown of thorns.

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Yes, yes. And so you pray again, and then you go to the next.

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And I've kept this one just for you. You come to the next, and here is a genuine portion of one of Jesus.

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That's indeed part of the cloth diapers of Jesus. Right here, you pray before it, and you receive indulgence.

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And the catalog is absolutely fascinating. There is a stone from Mary's house.

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Well, all of Mary's house was transferred by angels to Loretto, Italy.

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You didn't know this, but carried. I mean, just big old hunking angelic transport right over to Italy, and all sorts of.

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So there's some things in church history. Some of you are looking at me. No, no, seriously, I mean it. Some things in church history, really interesting.

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Some other things, especially right toward the beginning, are so foundational, they're a little tough.

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They're a little tough, I'll have to admit. We got to know something about the Greek context into which the gospel went.

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We got to know a little something about Stoicism, Epicureanism, da, da, da, da, da. Got to do it.

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Not everything's equally interesting or exciting. Yes, sir. Just a little bit past.

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I've never taught past then, and so we'll pretty much get just past the period of reference.

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Yep. Anything else from the introduction?

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Have I at least sold you on the fact that it'd sort of be good to spend some time covering this, even though we spent, what, 11 years or something?

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Yeah, it's interesting. You can frequently find parallels, but I'll be honest with you.

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I don't know until the modern period that anyone could have ever dreamed up the prosperity gospel stuff, because until the modern period where you've got such ease of life, the idea of name it and claim it, always be healthy stuff, just wouldn't have flown very well, even though the amazing thing is that some of the places that it works the best today are places like South Africa, where it's huge in Africa.

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It's extremely destructive to faith in Africa. And you would think, but it's an escape mechanism. It's, hey, might as well believe this, because my reality is no better than that anyway, so why not?

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But generally, what you can do is you can find parallels. We will encounter the

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Montanites in the early church, and really strong parallels to what's on,

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I never mentioned the station, but between 20 and 22. And really, really strong parallels as far as prophets and stuff like that.

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But it's normally more on a conceptual basis than a specific thing. I mean, the Aryans, for example, very similar to Jehovah's Witnesses, but they were more

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Orthodox than Jehovah's Witnesses. Jehovah's Witnesses did not deny the personality of the Holy Spirit. So there can be differences, but it's more of a conceptual thing.

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There's a lot of stuff. You look back and go, ah, yeah, that's still happening today. Definitely, definitely.

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Real quick. Not particularly.

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It's not really my area of study. It can get pretty complicated, and it would take a lot of preparation.

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And by the time we get done with all this, most people are going to be ready to get back to typical studies. All right.

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There we go. There's lesson number one in the books. Let's close the time. Father, we thank you for this day.

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We ask now as we go into worship that you will settle our hearts and our minds, that we will focus our attention upon your truth, that you will meet with us, and you'll be honored and glorified in all things.