#66 From Jesus to Today's Denominations: Church History, Heresy & Authority + Dr. John Woodbridge

Jesus lived, he died, he rose, and then what? If Jesus founded the church, why are there so many denominations?

Nero was an emperor in 64, he lit Rome up with fire, but he blamed the

Christians. They were put on crosses, dogs went after them, they were persecuted rudely.

So who's keeping them united? Bishops around the Mediterranean Basin prosecute the blue of the church.

If I was living as a first century Jew during that time, what powers, politics, events directly impacted these theological decisions?

Some of the movements claim to be Christian, but will be - Hello, hello.

Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the

Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding

God easier. These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion.

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Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get to the show. Hello, hello. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm the host for Biblically Speaking.

I've got a couple of questions today when it comes to the timeline of church. Because if you're a Christian and you're listening, okay, we started with Jesus, but there's so many denominations out there.

Today we're going to explore what happened between then and now. Because if Jesus founded the church, why are there so many denominations?

What happened? Jesus lived, he died, he rose, and then what? What did the apostles do?

What happened after the apostles died? What started the split in churches that we now know today?

This is going to tackle those questions today with a very respected voice in church history.

If you know me and you know any of these episodes, I love historical breakdowns. I love the context of understanding what was going on beyond the pages of the

Bible that adds value and enrichment and reasoning to the splits that we saw throughout history.

Today we have Dr. John Woodbridge. You are a research professor of church history and the history of Christian thought at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

You taught at Northwestern, the University of Toulouse, and the Sorbonne. I think

I'm saying that totally wrong, but your expertise spans evangelicalism, the

French Enlightenment, and the history of biblical authority. Welcome to the show, Dr. Woodbridge. Thank you very much.

It's a real honor to be here with you, Cassian. I mean that. The honor is all mine.

I am so excited to understand the historical timelines here and how we got to where we are. How did you find yourself focusing on this personally?

I was raised in a Christian home, but left the faith when I was in college.

And as it turns out, I started studying history. And it's too long a story to get into for today, but it was studying history.

I like to go to old bookshops. And I went to one, I was studying at the University of Toulouse in France.

I picked up a book by a Roman Catholic. His name was Daniel Rose. Title of his book was

Jesus Christ and His Times. And I read it, and he talked about Tacitus and Pliny the

Younger, and I was not a believer. And I was struck by the fact that Tacitus and Pliny the

Younger spoke about Jesus, and they were pagan historians, and they had no reason whatsoever to keep the

Jesus myth alive. So that stunned me, and I thought Jesus probably actually lived. These pagans didn't have any reason to believe he did, or to hold onto that.

And so God started to work in my life, and it was in a Roman Catholic church in Toulouse, and I walked in one evening in a pelting rainstorm, and I said,

God, if you exist, help me out, because I don't believe anything. And that was the start back. So I got into this field.

I was in the area of history already, but then became very interested in Christianity. Oh, wow.

So how did history before Jesus and history after Jesus, what was that like?

Well, history before Jesus was, I was trained technically as a historian in Europe, and very much oriented towards what was known as the

Now School, social and economic history, so that I did my work from the point of view of explaining things in terms of horizontal factors, because, and then it turns out that we now know that we have to be very careful.

We can't explain everything by horizontal factors, and people don't always do what they should do, given their background.

And so this made a tremendous difference, looking at history, because there became another factor in history, and that's

God. And then the question is, how does God relate to talking about history when you've been trained more or less towards the left of Marxist historiography?

So I like how you put that historical understanding versus vertical and understanding the

God's work within history and how he can kind of shape the timelines and how people act and events.

That's right. Okay, well, speaking of God, let's get right into it. I kind of think on a horizontal timeline, and it's

Jesus lives, he dies, and then he ascends. What happens to that Christian community after his resurrection and ascension?

What do people do, and how did it look? Yes, that's a very good point to raise initially.

I wish we had far more documentation on early Christianity than we do. What we do have, we have the scriptures, and then we have a group of people who are known as the apostolic writers, and we have apostolic apologists.

So we're so much limited in terms of what we can say from a Christian point of view. We obviously know the

Roman background and so forth, but in brief summary, let's say, let's pick up in the 90s.

John passes away, and so your question comes to the fore. What was the church like?

And already it had been suffering persecution. In other words, Nero had done a number on the

Christians in Rome by 64, and that's very important to understand that because the

Book of Romans takes on a whole different light when you understand the Neroan persecution, and you go into Romans 8, where Paul says, nothing can separate us from the love of God.

He's writing that book to the Romans who are suffering things. So persecution has already hit, and in the 90s, it hits again, and underneath a man named

Domitian. So one element of what the church is facing is already rounds of persecution.

A second issue that they're facing is the fact that most of the early Christians were Jews, and so consequently, as you know, the

Council of Jerusalem and so forth, the issue comes up as should the Gentiles be reached, and questions are coming up in the latter part of the first century about what should be the strictures for Christians?

Should Jewish customs still hold on to the Christian? And that takes us right into the Book of Galatians.

So by the time you get to 100, you're working, the Christians are dealing with the question of how do they relate to their

Jewish brethren who, if they don't happen to be Jewish, and then they also have to deal with Rome.

The question then comes up towards 100, what were the beliefs? And I'll cease and desist because I get off on this too much.

We love a self -aware guest. But the point is that we already start, by 100, we start to know what they're believing in.

There's a work we could talk about a little bit. It's called the Didache. It comes out towards 100 or thereabouts, and it tells us what they believe, but that's a start.

Okay, okay, yeah, that's, I definitely wanna get into that. But you're thinking, okay, so the church is

Jewish, the church, the people that are still believing what Jesus was teaching, but they're undergoing mass persecution.

Who's leading? Because you would think that once people start getting killed, they would kind of scatter, they would kind of give up.

So who's keeping them united? Right, that's a really good question. The key point,

I think, comes in some regards with Paul's admonition to Timothy. Pass on the word to faithful people.

So there are faithful people. The question is, who are these faithful leaders? Just your question.

And we get a sense of who they are already in scripture because in Acts 20 and also in the pastoral epistles, the leadership turns out to be individuals who are called presbyteros or episkopos.

In other words, either presbyteros or bishops. And that's the vocabulary for the leadership in the church.

Basically, the words at presbyteros and episkopos, the words are used simultaneously for different positions in the leadership of the church.

Was that, were those words that were used in like other church settings or were those brand new words for this specific

Christian movement? They probably have some backdrop in Judaism. I don't,

I'm not as familiar with that as I should be. But the word presbyteros has to do, ultimately will be presbyter.

Episkopos means bishop. So what's gonna happen between those letters in scripture, when we get to the first century, a gentleman whose name is

Ignatius of Antioch, he's gonna be the individual who's gonna change the format, taking the, this is a little complicated, but taking the episkopos, the bishop, and making him higher than the presbyter.

So you start to have in the first century in terms of leadership, bishops who are over presbyters.

Now, presbyters going laterally, they become priests. So that by, in the first century in terms of leadership, you start to have around the

Mediterranean Basin, groups of individuals who are called bishops. And they're around the

Mediterranean Basin, and they have underneath them, the presbyters. This is really quite a development.

And this makes a lot of difference in terms of the way you think about the authority of the church.

For the Orthodox, this is exactly bread and butter for them. And as they think about it, also for Protestants as well, that the early church had bishops, they were the dominant forces.

Now, from a Roman Catholic point of view, the argument will be that the Bishop of Rome was already in development there.

But see, there's where you have a discrimination. You talked about divisions between Roman Catholics, Roman Protestants, and Orthodox.

The Protestants and Orthodox more or less have the same interpretation, that the early bishops, they constitute the authority of the church.

And that's called what is known as mono -episcopacy around the Mediterranean.

But when they get together, that's a new concept that comes into being. It's called collegial episcopacy.

All the bishops together, the sessiprian, constitute the glue of the church. And so when bishops get together and they decide something, that becomes the authority structure for the creeds.

So that's when in Nicaea, Constantine calls the bishops together. What gives the authority to Nicaea, and these councils that we're talking about?

It's these bishops. These bishops were post -death of the apostles. Yes, these are the trouble.

See, I'm obviously biased. I'm an evangelical Christian, in the sense that I think the Bible talks about bishops and priests together, but this big move that takes place between scripture and Ignatius, when you start to separate things out so the bishop becomes important.

Ignatius is going to suffer persecution. He's a great Christian man. You know, he's taken to, he dies in an arena in Rome, but he's going to say, nothing can really happen without the bishop.

So the bishops become very, very important. And they become, in orthodoxy, they become the patriarchs ultimately, backdrop.

But in the Western church, they are the bishops. And then as it turns out, their authority creates the context for these creeds.

Now, consequently, in terms of the Roman Catholic way of things, thinking that this is not quite right, because the

Bishop of Rome is supposed to be over all of them. And that's where the disputes ensue.

And from an orthodox point of view, and from a Protestant point of view, I think most orthodox historians or Protestant historians would say, full -fledged sort of Roman Catholic way of things doesn't really become dominant until the fifth century, when the papacy emerges.

So if I were orthodox, I would say on your program, I would say, we never submitted to the

Catholic church. And Protestants would say, we never submitted to the Catholic church. And the Catholics would say, oh, yes, you did.

We're in charge. So that's sort of part of the structure. Okay, this perfectly leads into my next question.

Thank you. Okay, so we have divisions here. And I think it's really important for me is like, okay, we've got

Jesus, apostles, and then we've got these group leaders, these bishops that start coming. When did the major divisions start?

How did we even get to a point where we're discussing Protestant versus Catholic versus orthodox, and what was causing these splits?

Because you would think that we all just witnessed everything of Jesus. We have the writings in front of us.

We have leaders kind of guiding us forward in this faith. Why are we splitting off? Where did these different beliefs even come from?

Yes, as you may remember, there are already divisions that are talked about in scripture itself.

You know, the Corinthian church, there are splits there. Paul tries to deal with them.

Then the Bishop of Rome, his name is Clement, in the 90s, he writes a letter to Corinth, a

First Clement letter. And he's still dealing with divisions already. Their divisions seem to have come very, very early on.

And it gets down to the issue of interpretation of scripture. But then there's another issue as well, and that is very early on, what is known as heresy kicks in.

And so some of the movements that will emerge to bring about splits will claim to be

Christian, but will be, in point of fact, heretical. So that some of the splits that we're talking about in the early church, sometimes they're between pretty conservative

Christians, but sometimes the splits are often with these other groups of Valentinians. There are all kinds.

Irenaeus says there are over 200 views, 200 types of Gnosticism. So the church faces all of these groups.

So then the question comes up, and your question is really good. What do you do about that? And so that's part of the backdrop for having creeds.

And that's part of the backdrop for having what are known as rules of faith.

How do you get over divisions? And so the question comes up then, how do we know for sure this is what the

Christian faith is? And very early on, and this is pretty, for me personally, it's pretty exciting because your question is so good.

How do you know it's the real deal? The real deal is that the Christians, they led by the

Holy Spirit, I believe, Irenaeus, Tertullian and others, they draw up rules of faith and say, this is it.

So when I teach this class in this church history, I read these rules of faith. And again,

I'm biased as an evangelical, but when I read the rules of faith, I think, wow, we could use that in our church.

That rule of faith is, the rule of faith of Tertullian says, all those who believe.

It talks about all the things that most of us would believe in.

So these rules, because of the problems we just talked about, you raised, that's how people then are able to, in one sense, try to deal with splits.

One will be rules, and the other thing will be to have bishops, to have authority structures for people who are in authority to say, this is what's right, this is what's wrong, because these difficulties take place.

And in God's grace, I mean, it's amazing. We're talking about something that's less fun to talk about, but the church is growing like crazy.

I mean, when you read the letter of Pliny the Younger to Trajan in the early part of the second century,

Pliny is saying, look, Christianity, he's from Bithynia, which is in Turkey, today's

Turkey, Christianity is spreading like crazy. By the time you get to the latter part of the second century

Tertullian will say to pagans, we've only left you your temples.

Christianity is spreading dramatically. So despite all this other stuff, the gospel is going forward in these various places.

Wow, okay, so we have this split, and I understand that.

There's kind of this pagan world that people are existing, and of course, there's gonna be Gnostic and heretical interpretations of the word.

That's kind of splitting out these different denominations that the Bible itself addresses. But then you have the

Catholics and the Orthodox and the Protestant, all of which are slightly different, but all rooted in these rules of faith, these creeds that you discuss.

It sounds like those worked, though, despite these changes. There's a small jump from these are heretical beliefs to these are the rules of faith, and we're gonna stay

Protestant, we're gonna stay Orthodox, we're gonna stay Catholic. Which one came first?

Does it matter? No, in some regards it doesn't matter because Protestants see themselves as Catholics.

I'm a Catholic. We believe that it's church universal. I am? I would say I'm Protestant.

I guess I didn't know that. No, I'm a Protestant, but Catholic, the key issue is the adjective

Roman. In other words, the word Catholic has to do with the universal. You believe in the church.

There is a church that is universal to which believers adhere. But when you put the adjective in, the

Roman, that localizes things. It takes it down to a particular group of people the same way with Orthodoxy.

So then your question comes up, and it's a very good question. And so if I just, just a few words on it.

By the way, you know, we're dealing with big time stuff. And I mean, this has a lot to do with a lot of things, but I gave a lecture once at a

Catholic seminary because on these issues. And the provost came up to me afterwards.

And when it's a provost, you listen to him. He came up to me, he's a Catholic. And he said, John, you're talking about these divisions, just like you and I are,

Cassian. And he said, do you know where the real part of the difference come?

I said, I thought I did, because we can talk about what happens between Orthodoxy and Catholicism and so forth.

You know, there are divisions theological. The Orthodox are very concerned about what is known as the filial clause.

There are all kinds of issues that they're concerned about. But this provost said to me, he said, it gets down to St.

Augustine. I said to St. Augustine, how so? He said, particularly the issue of sin, that Augustine, you know, who writes in the early fifth century, he will argue that we were impacted by sin in a dramatic way.

And he, in Latin, he actually comes up and says that we cannot help with sin. And so this provost was telling me that that is a key issue in terms of the split issue.

Because in Orthodoxy, there is, at least as I understand it, and I worked in Orthodoxy somewhat, there is a goal to live the

Christian life and to come to be more like Christ, work towards perfection.

And that whole idea of working towards perfection, you work hard at it, and the

Orthodox are wonderful in many regards on this with their liturgies and singing and with emphasis on the book of John and the

Eucharist and so forth. But from an Augustinian point of view, I think this

Catholic was trying to tell me, that becomes a very difficult thing because you may be minimizing the full impact of what sin does, the goal of perfection, yes, but coming close to achieving it.

That's a pretty hard thing to do, given our sin nature. And the same thing will be true in some regards, from a

Catholic point of view, is working on our salvation. So some of, and talking about Christians now,

Christians have different views in some regards of what's capable for us as believers, whether we can work on our salvation, and that means that we actually win our salvation.

And that's why, in my own, came from unbelief, one of the things that was so striking to me is it is, that's before a lot of people who are

Catholics and Orthodox, is John 5, 24. And these are written that you may know that you have eternal life.

That idea of knowing that you have eternal life, that transfixes the concept of being able to work towards winning your salvation.

And so for, I worked with evangelicals and Catholics together for 30 years, these wonderful people.

And one of the issues that's at stake is this is working out your salvation, but then not being overconfident as an evangelical or anybody else, but your salvation is available to you.

And that is the same thing for Orthodox folks as well. Talking about splits between evangelicals,

Orthodox. And - So it doesn't really matter on which one came first? No, it really doesn't matter which one came first, first because in one sense, the issue is most will uphold the creeds.

So the point, a lot of this comes down to in terms of your own person, personhood, to your own beliefs.

I mean, Luther, for example, will argue that, that Europeans are basically

Christian up to the 12th century, that's Luther. That the gospel was there in various places, even in Catholicism from his point of view.

And so to say there's this one time where everything splits is really,

I mean, people have often said that in history books, 1054, the split. But boy, there are a lot of other things that happened beforehand, and a lot depends on individual churches and people.

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Thank you so much. Now back to the show. Got it. I think one of the things that really fascinate me about the

Bible is like, what was happening beyond the pages? Like if I was living as a first century Jew during that time, and of course we're recording our faith and we're participating our faith, was there other factors at play that maybe didn't make it into like the pages of the

Bible, but if you lived at that time, you would have been aware of them and experiencing them that clearly had an impact on the development of history.

And I guess my question is like, during this time of the church forming and the church splitting into these different denominations, what powers, politics, events were happening at that time that directly impacted these theological decisions?

Like, was there decisions by the emperor that kind of gives context to what was happening in the

Bible? Oh, absolutely. I mean, to talk about impact, it's

Nero. I mean, starting off with these unbelievable - Who is Nero? I don't actually know that name.

Nero was an emperor in 64, and he decided that there needed to be a new building program, and probably this is his thought, in Rome, and so he lit

Rome up with fire, but he blamed the Christians. And so he blamed them, and they were put on crosses, dogs went after them, and they were persecuted rudely.

And that's why when Paul wrote, as I was mentioning earlier, to the book of Romans, the book of Romans, and he writes to the

Romans, and they receive the wonderful chapter, Romans 8, nothing can separate us from the love of God.

The book of Romans takes on a whole new, at least it did for me, a whole new flavor, going back to your topic of knowing what's going on in a larger world.

That shapes a lot more what you're thinking about in terms of reading Romans.

You read Romans 8, persecution. You read Romans 1 and 2, where Paul talks about how perverse

Rome is, and so forth. So for Christians, living a lifestyle that would be different than the

Roman system, and see, for the Christians, they faced this, as you probably may remember, they were charged with all kinds of things.

They were charged with cannibalism, as you may remember, because they had the

Lord's Supper. They were charged with licentiousness because they were to kiss each other, and so forth.

All kinds of things that they faced, so that the apologists who come out, talking about the larger context, the apologists of the second century, what do they have to do?

They not only have to defend that Christianity is true, but they have to defend Christian lifestyle because of your topic, that is, what's going on in the

Roman world, because from the Roman point of view, there's a wonderful book by a man named

Wilkinson. It's called The Christians as the Romans Viewed Them, and in that book, he points out the

Romans were really bothered by the Christians because they had these secret meetings, and having secret meetings, that was associated with sedition.

The Christians wouldn't participate in the Roman games, so you have all that going on, and then the question comes up, well, how could they spread?

And that takes us right into the world of persecution, and the fact is that the early

Christians had a, I wish I were like them, they really believed that when you die, you go to heaven, so that when you,

I mean, I believe that too, but they were really ready to go. Consequently, they were very difficult to put down and spreading because they were willing to die.

So the first, we have coming in and talking about your topic, the persecution, first of all, you have persecution by the whim of the emperor,

Nero, Domitian, and so forth. Then you have persecution laterally by people who don't like the

Christians, and then ultimately, you have the first sort of serious world Roman persecution takes place under Decius.

So the world situation, really, in terms of the Romans and others, that does affect the

Christian life in a dramatic way, but the thing that is so stunning to me personally is that Stertullian says, the more you mow us down, the blood of the martyrs is a seed, and so Christianity spreads.

So, you know, we teach church history, people say, wouldn't it be wonderful to be back in the early church?

Yeah, maybe for some parts of it. Yeah, maybe for some parts, but man,

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Take a breath, slow down, and dwell in the good things. Now, back to the show. Is there even a time in Christian history that you would wanna go back to other than now?

Wow, that's a good question. What's the golden age of Christianity, if not today? Well, frankly,

I've never even thought about that. Jesus, just when Jesus, just go back to that time.

Right, no, but I have to tell you, I think for me personally, if you were gonna give an illustration, which was amazing,

I think, 1857, 1858, an awakening went through the whole United States.

It's not talked about much in our history books.

I think I've taught at secular universities, as you said. It's not there, but you talk, think about a person like Dwight L.

Moody. He says he could only really wish to go back to 1857, 1858. Now, there are other illustrations of this.

What happened in those years? Wow, what happened? Is that a young man whose name was

Jeremiah Lamphere decided to pray, and so what he did was he sent out a pamphlet, made pamphlets, passed them out in New York City, and he invited people to a prayer meeting in October of 1857, and businessmen came.

It's known as the Noonday Prayer Meetings. They started between 12 and one o 'clock. They started to pray, and then using the telegraph system, the prayer meeting started to go out through New York, from New York to Boston, and across the

United States, and probably a million individuals came to Christ between 57 and 58, right before the

Civil War, so that there have been these times, and again, I had never quite thought about it personally, but to have been there is absolutely stunning, and the fact that Moody wanted to be there gives at least some justification for wanting to be back there.

So it was kind of like this mass movement of people starting to pray? They prayed, but how did they pray?

They met from 12 to one, the businessmen did, in these meetings, all across the country, you know,

Wisconsin, any state, there were these prayer meetings, and what did they do? They had signs up, and the sign said, you can't talk for more than five minutes, you can't get into any controversial issue about theology, what you can only do is say a verse, say a song we should sing, but also, we wanna know if you have prayer requests, and so they started to pray for people, their husbands and wives who were not

Christians, and that lit a fire that went right across the United States, and so the chief church for this was the

Fulton Street Church in New York City, it's down Wall Street, and that launched something that's one of the most amazing awakenings that's ever came to America.

So I never thought about thinking about going back to that, but that would be a wonderful time.

And in fact, the power of the Holy Spirit was so great that when people got on the docks of New York City, they sensed it, the whole areas of town were impacted by this, down in Georgia, they closed down some of the prison because there were no takers,

I mean, it's that sort of thing. Whoa, oh my gosh, that was a great answer, thank you.

I didn't know any of this, this is insane. Well, it is insane in the sense that, if one were gonna make a

PR piece for doing church history, one of the things

I would put in it is to tell the stories of God at work in great power, and particularly in revivals, because sometimes,

Jonathan Edwards said this, if you want revivals to take place, the question, you need to talk about them.

People, sometimes we have scripture, but then they wonder if scripture, quote unquote, really works, but then to see

God in power, so telling the stories of God at work, I've done this for a number of years, it's really, it's so encouraging to people in the churches to see

God at work and it encourages them to pray. Wow, wow, that was a great answer, thank you.

Okay, so going back to the timeline, we have these divisions in church, could you help me understand what were the key distinctions between each one of the splits and even how that ties into the

Reformation with Lutheran, you mentioned that earlier. Yes, let's start off with the, with Roman Catholics.

The distinctives, are you talking about the distinctives of the various groups, is that it? Is that what you're concerned? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For Roman Catholics, obviously the key issue, and it's understandable, is the role of the

Pope. The Pope is the teacher of the church, and that is in the

Catholic catechism, he is the teacher, but the person who informs him in some regards in terms of giving guidance in terms of theology at the

Council of Trent, 1545, 1563, St. Thomas Aquinas' work was given to shape

Roman Catholic theology. So this becomes a very distinctive aspect of Roman Catholicism, the authority of the

Pope, and the Pope is deemed to be infallible, and this takes place at Vatican I in 1870 and 1871, and that's a major distinctive of Roman Catholicism, and it's one which the

Orthodox do not accept, and obviously the Protestants do not accept it as well, so that is a key factor.

A second factor that's - So people looked at that, they said, hey, as a Catholic, I'm okay with the

Pope being elected, kind of like the leader of these bishops, now we have a Pope, he's infallible, and he,

I'm not Catholic, so I'm speaking from a place of ignorance, how do you not, I mean,

I don't want you to represent the Catholics, but it's like, how do you look at that and be like, I thought God was that? Well, you are, you're saying something pretty strong, and that is a key issue in terms of, it takes us back to the authority of the

Pope, if we're talking about that, that authority comes from what is, generally speaking,

Matthew 16, 18, and thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and so from a

Catholic point of view, that's the seed that plants in the tree, it is, goes right on, right on through up to the present, where if, from a

Catholic point of view, this is fine, and one of the reasons it's fine is because the argument will be, there's so many divisions in Protestantism, we want somebody to tell us what the case is, now the fact of the matter is, an area which

I've been working off a lot is Catholicism, there are many divisions in Catholicism, there are liberal

Catholics, and there are conservative Catholics, I taught in the Catholic division at the

University of Paris, I was in that division, so I'm quite familiar with the fact that there's division between very liberal

Catholics, some of whom don't even accept the authority of the Pope, and then there's some

Catholics on the very conservative side, who don't accept Vatican II, so this is one thing that is important,

I'm not talking behind anybody's back because we're working with folks all the time on this, that there's a range within Catholicism over these issues, and a lot has to do with to what extent do you accept the authority of the

Pope, so that's one of the key issues. A second issue of great moment has to do with the topic of tradition, because from a

Protestant point of view, as you may know, Luther came along in 1523, facing

Charles V, said, you know, unless I'm persuaded by scripture,

I'm not going to accept something, and he turned down councils, and he turned to the Pope, because he said both of them have erred.

From the Catholic point of view, the whole idea of in Protestantism of sola scriptura, that is not helpful, because as it turns out, in the early church, tradition is very significant.

The question is, is what is this role? In the early church, there was a stance taken by a man whose name was

Vincent Lorenz, and towards the fifth century, and he was concerned about this issue of tradition, and the point he was concerned about was that there were so many different views coming down to our topic, coming down, how do you know what is the right view interpreting scripture?

And he came out with what was known as the Vincentian Canon, and the Vincentian Canon set up three criteria for knowing how to interpret scripture, what has been believed by all people, at all times, everywhere.

Those became the three criteria, because he wanted us, there was a lot of people who were taking scripture and taking it different directions, so this became what

I would call small T, tradition to help interpret scripture, it's not scripture, but it's the rules of faith, they do help to understand,

Timothy George has a great line on tradition, it's like guardrails, they keep us helping to understand, but they're not scripture and so forth, but what happens in Catholicism, by the time you get to the 12th century, small

T becomes big T, in other words, big T being tradition, but this means what the church teaches, and many practices of the church, and that big

T keeps on going from 1200 on up, to the Council of Trent, so this is gonna be a major distinctive for Catholicism, at Trent, 1545, 1563, one of the canons of Trent says, that tradition and scripture are equal, and this becomes a major, major distinctive, between Catholicism and Protestantism, and it becomes really part of the key issue, another issue that's very distinctive, has to do with salvation, between Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox.

And these are all just based on different interpretations of the word? No, no,

I wouldn't say that, in the sense, well, hold it, maybe you're right to say it that way, again, it's probably my own biases, but I think tradition of big

T, is not something that you find in scripture, so I'm not saying that I wouldn't,

I don't think it's an interpretation of the word, because it stands alone as a major development, in terms of warrant for Catholic beliefs.

The other issue that is very important, it relates to the Bible and the Catholic distinctive, has to do with Luther, Luther is a very good

Catholic, as you may remember, born in 1483, goes into a monastery, wants to serve the

Lord, does everything the Catholic church tells him to do, and yet he's miserable. And so he goes to his confessor

Stalpitz, and Stalpitz says, look, think about Christ, and when you think about Christ, well, why do you do that?

Because Luther said he hated God, the father, and that was part of the problem in the 16th century, people thought

God was the avenging God, throwing lightning bolts and so forth, but the Luther became much more interested in Christ, but he became also a professor of theology in 1512, and when he started to read scripture, he ran into Romans 117, and Romans 117 reformed his view of what salvation was, he thought the church had not taught him correctly, because what is grace, what happens is that Christ, in tremendous grace, he takes our sins through imputation, so that we're judged righteous if we believe in him, whereas in Catholicism, the question would be, it's understandable,

Catholics really do want to work out their salvation, and so forth, the question then is, do they believe in justification by faith alone?

They believe in justification for sure, but not alone, because they wanna add love, and consequently, we're talking about these distinctives, this is why evangelicals and Catholics have so much we share together,

I mean, we're conservative, virgin birth, authority of scripture, so many things, but it's in these areas, they're pretty sensitive areas, and I hope we're talking about them in an appropriate fashion, there really are these differences in terms of how salvation comes about, authority and so forth.

I feel like there's a big jump between what we were discussing before with the creeds and the divergence, and the kind of how we see, you know,

Luther, you said like, it was like 1500 years almost, or would you say like 1400 years? Would that make sense?

Between what the apostolic, the divisions that we have at the beginning that kind of happened within like the first 100 years after Jesus's death, and then these bigger divergence of like the creeds and the 1500s, what was happening in the faith for those, for that millennia?

How is the church progressing? It takes you into what is known as medieval theology, and so in other words, the question, as you're talking about unpacking

European history, I'm very glad you raised this point, it's an excellent point,

Cassian, that the question comes up, when do you end up with sort of the early church?

Most people say around 600, but from 600 up to 1300, there is the so -called

Middle Ages. Now people - Was it just persecution? I'm sorry for interrupting. Was it just persecution between like that, year 100 to year 600?

That was just persecution, figuring it out, dealing with rulers?

No, because in the sense that we have to be, there was persecution, but it was not every day when a person got up every morning and said,

I'm not gonna get persecuted today. I mean, people did live and so forth, but you're absolutely right to raise these points.

There were the various councils and there was Constantine, where you started to have church and state work together so that the

Catholicism that's in the Middle Ages is very much church and state related, and that continues even up through the

Reformation so that many of the reformers hold on to church and state, and that explains why some of the

Northern European countries are Germany, Norway, and so forth, still have church and state relations.

So then the question comes up about the Middle Ages, what is developing there? And sometimes they're called the

Dark Middle Ages, and part of the reason for that is that so many various tribes came into Europe, invasions took place, and consequently -

And invasions took place, consequently, you only start to have the recovery, if you will, of civilization in two different bursts, one in the 7th and 8th century, which is known as the

Carolingian Renaissance, and it's in that timeframe trying to recover culture. Charlemagne makes people who are a little bit older copy books of scripture, and that preserves the

Christian scriptures, the Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century. If we didn't have that, we would have lost a lot of antiquity, a lot of the biblical stuff, because of these invasions and so forth going up to the 9th century.

Then things plunged down again, civilization went, you know, with various groups coming into Europe, and it's only in the 9th and 10th centuries that you start, in the 11th century, you start to have the recovery of scholarship again, so that people, rather than studying with a particular individual, you start to have the formation of the universities.

Oxford, Paris, the university I studied at, the

University of Toulouse, many of these universities begin to start there, and when that takes place, that takes us into the new world of scholarship for Christianity, and that era is called scholasticism.

That's the timeframe when you have individuals like Thomas Aquinas coming along later on, who's actually buried in Toulouse, France, but before that, you have

Anselm and others, so theology is moving forward, and scholastic theology is moving up into the world of Thomas Aquinas, who sets the stage for Catholicism with his amazing works.

He was a great, great man. Unfortunately, he's called the dumb ox, but that's certainly not true, but he wrote these works called the

Summas, Summa Theologica, Summa Contra Gentiles, they're really big, big books unpacking theology in Latin.

When I was in grad school, I had a class from an orthodox professor who said, Mr. Woodbridge, have you ever read any of the

Summas of Thomas Aquinas? I didn't even know what Summa was, and I'd heard of Summa wrestling, but I never heard of Summas.

It means a summary of theology, so I went to the library and picked up these big books, so there's a huge amount of scholastic theology, and it's in that timeframe that one of the key dividing points between Protestants and others emerges with what is known as the doctrine of transubstantiation for Catholics.

That's when Aquinas then becomes the major figure for Catholicism, and Luther will become the major critiquer of Aquinas later on, particularly when this doctrine of transubstantiation becomes a defining point for Catholics.

Now, that's a lot said fast, but there's a lot of stuff. But then the church, you said, officially developed within the year 600.

Patristics, the study, patristics means the study of the fathers.

I should have been more clear about that. Oh. The period - The fathers being who? The fathers being the apostolic fathers, like Ignatius, the people we've been talking about,

Augustine, and so forth. That era is known as the patristic era, and it's divided when you study the field with Nicaea.

So when you're studying patristics, you study the antonycing fathers, that's all the fathers up to 325, and then the post -Nicaean fathers.

So that patristic era, that basically some people were running up to 700, some will say to 600.

But then this Middle Ages come along, and then they're interrupted, they're interrupted in some regards, they continue actually for quite a while, by what is known as, not just the

Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth century, but towards 1300, another

Renaissance comes along, and that's associated with Petrarch. And what does Petrarch do? This is very important for Protestantism.

Petrarch is really concerned about the loss of culture in Europe. What had happened is,

Greek had basically disappeared in Europe. Most people who were writing, and if they could write at all, only about two or 3 % could write, who were writing in Latin.

Petrarch wants to recover Greek culture, and so he develops what is known as the theme of ad font, back to the sources.

So Petrarch and some of his colleagues in Italy, they go and try to recover classical writings, and some of the classical writings they find are from Cicero, or from other people, but also from scripture.

But one of the great things that happens then in the 14th century, with this search for antiquity, going back to the font, is that Byzantium, from the

Eastern Church, a man named Chrysaloros, comes over from Byzantium to Florence, Italy, and he brings

Greek with him. And bringing Greek back to the West, was one of the big contributions of the

Byzantine Church. Why so? Because the Western Church did not, only a few people in England, a few people knew

Greek. But it was with Greek, that opened up the door for the Protestant Reformation.

Because the Roman Catholicism had largely been based on the

Jerome's Vulgate in Latin. And so, you had to know Latin to understand scripture.

But, when you Greek, the Bible is written in Greek. Large parts of it is semi -Aramaic, and so forth.

And it's talking about the New Testament. And so, when Chrysaloros brought in Greek, Luther will say, that was springtime.

That was springtime, because with Greek, one could go back and see what scripture taught, and when, this is a

Protestant point of view, you have to realize, that as Luther did his exegesis, he found out that, say, in the seven sacraments, one of the sacraments is penance, that Jerome's Vulgate got it wrong.

The Matthew passage actually says, have a change of mind, be converted. It doesn't say do penance. And so, the knowledge of, this is why the reformers didn't see themselves as revolutionaries.

They saw themselves as recoverers. They saw themselves as recovering the rules of faith of the early church.

They saw themselves as going back to scripture as it was, with the

Greek text. And so, consequently, there used to be the old expression, no

Greek, no reformation. I mean, that's overstated completely. But because of the recovery of Greek, that's why in Protestant schools, there's so much emphasis on Greek, Hebrew, and so forth, to get back to the text, and why people are so concerned about the

Bible, because they wanna get it right, because of the recovery of these languages. Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my gosh. There is, I feel like we're barely scratching the surface, Dr. Woodbridge, and it's already been an hour, so I don't -

I'm sorry. I went too - No, no, no, no. No need to apologize. I think that I would need days to understand everything you know.

So, for the church -going Bible study

Christians like me, the Sunday school Christians, what do you think - What do you think -

What do you wish more Christians knew about their spiritual heritage? You having a grander scale of it, what are some things that really do make a difference?

Several things. Just quickly. One, Luther says the

Bible's the most important book in the world. The most important book in the world, and again, this is a perspective, because it's the only book that tells us about our salvation.

It's the only book that tells us how to live, and what is the good life? The good life is described in Psalm 1, meditating upon scripture.

So, that's the first point, that sometimes as believers, we sort of neglect the

Bible. We don't realize how significant it is for our own salvation, but also for our own living.

But the second point I would reiterate is the power of scripture. Billy Graham, he wrote a wonderful article called

Biblical Authority and Evangelism. He lost a sense of the power of scripture.

Out in California, he took a Bible and put it on a stump up at a forest home, and said,

I accept this as the word of God. And the power issue that we sometimes forget as Christians has to do with what

Hebrews talks about. The word of God is more powerful and sharper than a two -edged sword.

I think, you know, in talking about, you know, sort of ordinary evangelical people, I'm one of them too, actually, is to have a sense of the power of the word of God to transform people's lives, and that the power of conversion, in other words,

I hate to say this, but it's probably wrong, because I say a lot of wrong things, I'm sure.

But one of the things, one of the advantages of having an unbeliever is you know the difference between being a

Christian and not being a Christian. Sometimes we can sort of be enculturated Christians and not understand the power of the transformation that takes place in a person's life.

And for me personally, I knew, you know, the difference between one side and another side.

Yeah. Go to some points. That was a really good point.

I love that. It's such a benefit to be an unbeliever, it's an advantage to be an unbeliever because now you know the difference.

The bad part about it was I was really hostile. I mean, I, unfortunately, unfortunately,

I sort of get a kick out of it, I shouldn't have, but I actually took on one of the major evangelicals, I won't mention his name, and I actually said to him in his office, do you actually believe

Christianity is true? That's how bad I was. And so I'm a person of, a very grateful person of God's grace because as a rebel,

Lord had mercy on me to track me down in France. There was no missionary working on me.

There was no one I knew of. This is an act of grace because I was in the deep weeds.

Whoa. But now, you know, just for the glory of his kingdom, you're able to speak to that darkness because you were in that.

I try. Wow. Dr. Woodbridge, it has been a pleasure to speak with you today.

I'm so grateful for the time that we had. For people that wanna know more about you, work with you, learn from you, where's all of your work or classes that people can get involved in?

Wow. Wow. Or maybe a book that you wanna promote?

Oh, a promote. See, that takes me back to my Marxist days of economics being determinative of things.

No, we've, there's several things that one's written. One would be the

Zonervan Church History Two. We've written a major church history book and so forth.

Another one that Colin Hanson and I did was on the history of revivals where you could read about the 57, 58 awakening and John Edwards and so forth.

I've done a lot of technical work in Europe. But if you just happen to look up one's name, you'll see a number of books.

We're now, we also did a book called Hitler on the Cross here, so we've done a lot of different stuff.

Whoa. Okay, I'll link all of that in the show notes below for anybody that's listening and wants to get involved. But I can't thank you enough for your time today,

Dr. Woodbridge. Thank you so much for coming on the show. You are always welcome back. Oh, thank you so much, Cassie.

And I'm really very grateful that you're doing this thing. This is very helpful for Orthodox Catholics.

And hopefully it's done in a very good spirit. This is not trying to take down anybody.

Of course, of course. This has been such an illumination into our history that unfortunately we don't have enough time for on a

Sunday, but with people like you, it's possible for us to understand our faith. So thank you. You're welcome. Thank you so much.