Want To Learn Church History?

So 325, that first, what's called the First Ecumenical Council, is one way of dividing things. But you also have what are called the apostolic fathers. And these would be the writers that are in that very first generation that would have been alive during the apostolic period.

And then that transitions into what are called the apologists. And then moving on in there, the apologists are in the middle of what's called the second century. And please remember, we were reminded back, I was reminded back, wow, 19 years ago, the year 2000, that a lot of people struggle with understanding which century is which.

I don't know if any of you remember that. But we were entering the 21st century. But there were a lot of people going, no, it's 2000. So that would be the 20th. No, the last one was the 20th. There was a lot of confusion there.

But there still is when we think about the early church. Because when we're talking about the first century, we're talking up through the year 100. And second century would be 100 to 200, and so on and so forth.

And a lot of people associate the number with the first number of the century, and it doesn't work that way. So we have to keep that in mind when we're talking about what was going on in the first century, how we have, the only thing we have from the first century is pretty much the New Testament, some fragmentary allusions and some other works.

And possibly, some people place Clement's epistle to the Corinthians, the Didache, in that first century. Others would place them in the beginning of the second century, so 105, 110, somewhere around there.

Ignatius, Clement, and the Fragmentary Nature of Apostolic Fathers

So Ignatius, for example, dies at the beginning of the second century. But he knew, at least, he knew some of the apostles. He was alive in his youth during the apostolic period. And so reading the apostolic fathers does not mean you're getting a completely balanced view of what was believed at that time.

And the other thing to remember is we live in a day where communication is so easy and so fast. This is a new thing. This has not been the way things were. Folks, I remember when I got my first pager.

I thought that was pretty cool, because your belt would vibrate, and you'd start looking for a payphone. Pull over and find a payphone, and get money out, and put it in, and call someone. OK, so we thought that was, I thought that I had pretty much arrived when I got my first pager.

So it's so easy for us to assume communication abilities. When you don't have that ability to communicate at the same speed, you don't have the ability to travel at the same speed, then things change more slowly.

And that means you'll get more variation across the Roman Empire in regards to what's believed in one area over against another area. Now, there is communication, and people do go back and forth. But it's at a much slower pace than we have today.

And we have to keep that in mind. So one of the main things I'm going to constantly be harping on is we can't take our modern situation and just slide it back into that time period, because we will end up really making a mess out of things and not understanding what's going on.

So when we look at what we have from the period of the apostolic fathers, we have to keep in mind it's fragmentary. I read to you last time from the epistle of Mathetes, the disciple to Diognetius. We don't have all of it.

We only have a portion of it. What was said before that? What was said after that? We don't know. Best we can do is say, he affirmed these things in what we have. That's the best we can do. So sometimes we have entire epistles.

We have all of Clement to the Corinthians. We have all of each one of the epistles that Ignatius writes as he's going to Rome to be martyred. He writes to various churches and to an individual. And so we have all of those letters.

They're not fragmentary. But did he write other ones that we don't know about that could have shed some more light on things?

Maybe.

Were other people writing letters at this time period? And we don't, we will never know until eternity itself what they said or why they said it.

Of course. Of course.

So we have to keep all that in mind. It helps to keep us from making dogmatic conclusions about things when we keep in mind what kind of information we have. So with that in mind, I'm not gonna get to any of this reading if I don't stop giving background.

The Didache as a Practical Church Discipline Manual

But background's so important. It's normally where people end up missing things. But one of the, the first thing I wanna work through is, and because I'm the only one with a book, this has sort of become story time with Uncle Jimmy.

So if you all would like to come down here on the front and put your little blankets down and get your graham crackers, we can, okay, I realize none of you are old enough to remember that. But that's how we did things when I was in kindergarten.

We put the blankets down, we got graham crackers and milk. And we had to be quiet because the dinosaurs were going by normally at that time of the day. So, but, okay, all right, some of you are going, yeah, that must have been really rough.

Yeah, thanks a lot. Actually, that was back when we were still having drills because the Russians were gonna bomb us. But that's a whole different subject. The didache, the term didache is the teaching, also a term for doctrine.

And it is the teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles by the 12 apostles as the fuller title of the didache. And it is dated by some as early as the late first century, and then others to as late as 150.

So that's your timeframe basically that you're looking at in regards to the didache. The didache is not meant to be a overly doctrinal work. It is primarily a book of discipline. It is meant to, I mean, think about it.

If you didn't have 2000 years of church history to draw from, all you have at this point is the apostolic preaching. You don't have a New Testament. You may have a couple books from it, but they do quote from a few books.

You have a few gospels, but you don't have the whole thing yet. Even though it's been written, it's gonna take time for it to be collected, put together. And we'll talk about canonization issues at some point in the future, because it's pretty important.

But I mentioned last time, Dr. Kruger's stuff is the best on that. But you have to answer the question, well, how are we supposed to do church? What's the way to do things? And so there would be a need for a very practical collection of material as to how to do church.

Now, this is only gonna tell you how somebody was doing at one particular time. This is one of the problems is people wanna take this and go, ah, that's how we should do it for all ages. No, this tells us how they did it in one place at one time.

And that's very important. We can get a lot of information from it. But that doesn't mean that it becomes the norm. Or it also doesn't mean that this particular group of people whoever wrote this down, had some kind of infallible knowledge of what New Testament teaching was.

They may not even have the whole canon of scripture. Your understanding of the church might be a little bit deficient if you didn't have Ephesians or Hebrews. And some of those books fought for inclusion in the canon for centuries.

So keep all those types of things in mind.