16 - Apologists - Justin Martyr

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We are in lesson number 16 in the church history series.

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Last week, well the week before we were looking at the persecuting emperors, then last week we looked at the responses to persecution in the early church.

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Notice that this was a matter of great division in the church, that this caused tremendous strain and difficulty and schisms.

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What were the two schisms that we mentioned last week that resulted from the response to persecution?

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What was the one that was centered in Rome? Anyone remember? Novationist schism.

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And then the one in North Africa involved, it was called the Donatist controversy, that's right.

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So we were talking a little bit about Cyprian's theology of the sacraments and the concept of ex opera operanti and ex opera operato.

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And ex opera operanti, the idea that the person performing the act had to be a

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Christian because the act was dependent upon that person having the proper relationship to God.

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And over against that, the concept that Augustine would champion, ex opera operato, that the act itself was what was efficacious, not the person performing it.

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The reason for this division that takes place in North Africa is that during the persecution, toward the end of the great persecution, the

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Diocletian persecution, there were certain men who became trodditors, they gave over the scriptures, or at least they were accused of it.

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Obviously, there were situations where people were accused of things, they denied it, others said they knew they had done it, etc.,

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etc. That could even become an issue. And at least one of these trodditors was involved in the consecration of Bishop Cecilian of Carthage in 311.

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So there's a man, he's accused of being a trodditor, and yet he is one of those involved in laying hands upon a man and setting him apart as Bishop Cecilian in Carthage in 311.

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So those holding to ex opera operante would say

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Bishop Cecilian is not properly set apart because one of the men that laid hands upon him was an apostate, was a trodditor, and therefore the ordination would be ineffective and inappropriate.

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So those who did not accept this consecration ordained a bishop whose successor in 316 was named

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Donatus. So they ordained a bishop and his successor becomes much better known than he was, so it becomes known as the

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Donatus Controversy because Donatus was the better known bishop in the early days of this movement.

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Since the Catholics, and remember Catholic means kata halos, according to the whole, or universal.

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That's all it means. And so that term, in this day, if you had said kata halos and then had put any geographic descriptor,

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Rome, Carthage, Jerusalem, Constantinople, whatever, no one would have understood what you meant because kata halos, by its very nature, can't be joined with something that then restricts it.

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You can't have a restricted universal. That's why

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Roman Catholic, which develops long, long, long, long after this, is really a contradiction in terms.

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It's the universal faith centered in Rome, but no one in this day, you will not find anyone using the term

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Roman Catholic in this day because the development has not gotten to the point where anyone could really understand that kind of a concept as yet.

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We look back upon it from our day and it's different. But anyway, the people who follow

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Sicilian in North Africa, they considered him a departed saint and affirmed they were in communion with him.

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The Donatists rejected the Catholics as being in communion with Christ, and so a division takes place.

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And the Donatists eventually develop a, how would

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I put it, an entire way of viewing themselves as the separated pure ones.

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They would even, the way you could always tell a Donatist church in North Africa is it would be purely in white.

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So it would be painted white to separate it from the

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Catholic churches. And it's hard for us to really grasp how great a scandal it was in North Africa to have what we would call two denominations.

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And it is, I think, important for us to realize that in the history of the

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Christian church, going past divided buildings or congregations, the vast majority of the time period of the

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Christian church, that was not something that anyone had ever experienced. It's important to realize, for example, how radical in the thinking of what we would call

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Reformation Europe, Renaissance Europe, the idea of any type of division whatsoever would be.

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This was as radical as anything you could possibly think of. When you're talking about the first generations, the

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Reformation, it's real easy for you and I today. We've got

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Reformation Sunday coming up, end of October, we're almost there, and good old

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Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli and all that cool stuff, both of whom probably would have executed all of us.

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But anyway, very true. We think about those things and we sing

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A Mighty Fortress and rah, rah, rah, which is fine and they're important, vital things to talk about in regards to Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide and all that kind of stuff.

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But what we normally don't understand and don't think about, we sit here and go, you know what,

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I would have been with the Reformers, I would have been there before them, you know,

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I would have seen all this stuff in Scripture and I would have been leading the way.

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And the fact of the matter is, that is highly unlikely for any of us.

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It was a radical thing, it was a scary thing. We talk about how, for example, and I've had, within the past two weeks, there was some

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Presbyterian fellow online that identified me as a radical Anabaptist. And if you're familiar with what the

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Anabaptists believe or what the Anabaptists today, you'd see all sorts of fundamental differences between us.

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I mean, I recognize some levels of connection, but it seems like a silly thing to say.

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But from their perspective, when we get to the Reformation, what we're going to see is there were radical elements that just threw off everything.

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And when we look at what happened in Munster and, you know, establishing polygamy and becoming non -Trinitarian and just basically saying, you know, if it was bleak before, it's out of here.

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We get to put everything on the table and rethink everything and come up with new ways of thought, just total radical.

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That's how a lot of people viewed Luther and Zwingli and Calvin. And a lot of what they did was because they felt the pressure of people looking at them and going, are there any limits?

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Because this was such a radical thing to have a division like this.

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And it was in North Africa as well. But even then, what was really the difference between the two was you could go through one city and pass a

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Donatist church and then pass a Catholic church. That pretty much ended.

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And in medieval Europe, you'd never pass in one city, you'd never pass these things. And even when the

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Reformation took place, what would happen is all the churches would either become part of the Reformation or remain with Rome.

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But the idea of having a city where you'd have different churches to go to was too scandalous to even be thought of, even be considered.

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It could never happen. So for example, most of Germany went with Luther. But then in 1525, you have the

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Peasants' Revolt. Luther stands against the peasants and loses almost all of southern Germany. And when you go to Germany today, you pass a certain line.

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And in northern Germany, they're Lutheran. Pass a certain line, they're all Catholic. Now, of course, in modern day, most of them are secular, so it doesn't really matter anymore.

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But the point is, looking at the older buildings, you can just see this strong line of division.

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Because even at the time of the Reformation, the idea of being able to walk past one church, denomination, just wasn't something that people would think about.

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So it was a tremendous scandal in North Africa. And what's important is, when we get to Augustine, remember the

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Donatus Controversy. Because even though he comes nearly a full century later, because this is 316 or so, he's dealing with this very issue at the end of that century.

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So it's probably 70, 80 years down the road. It is still a live and vital issue.

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And it's the first great controversy that he writes on and he deals with. And his ecclesiology, his doctrine of the church, will be determined by his interaction with the

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Donatists. And that's why the Roman Catholics can quote him in their favor at the

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Reformation, is they're quoting from his anti -Donatist stuff. The second great controversy he's going to deal with in his life is the

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Pelagian Controversy. And it's from that you get his emphasis upon election and free grace and so on and so forth.

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And that's where the Reformers were quoting from. And the two are sort of contradictory.

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But there is an example of one of the greatest theological minds in history ended up contradicting himself because of the great controversies that existed in his life.

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And it's, I think, something very important to understand. So, Donatus Controversy, like I said,

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I think briefly last week, there was at one point, I think Augustine mentions that when the Donatists gathered together in his day, they had 700 bishops in one meeting, which would mean there were a lot of Donatist churches.

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Basically, they all disappeared once the Muslims took over. So, you figure you've only got around 300 years until the century of Islamic expansion and the taking over of North Africa.

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And that's the state of what takes place in North Africa during that time. And it all goes back to persecution.

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It started with the church's response to persecution. Now, the response to attacks, you can have governmental attacks.

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Sweaty Roman soldiers, they're just trying to kill you. That's one kind of persecution. But, as I mentioned, there was also the beginning of attacks from philosophers, pagans.

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There was even a period of time, you have, for example, the emperor called

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Julian the Apostate. When you have an attempt to go back to paganism, to reject the beginnings of embracing

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Christianity. On the part of the Roman Empire. And so, there were many philosophers and advocates of the old forms of religion that once Christianity started to become extremely popular and well known, there's going to be attacks.

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There's going to be published works. And it is interesting to read at least what's left of many of these.

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Many have been destroyed by the ravages of time. Or by the Index Prohibitorum.

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The Index Prohibitorum was a list from medieval

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Catholic history of, as you can tell by the

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Latin, Index Prohibitorum, the prohibited books. And that was a reality of medieval and Reformation, well, all the way up into modern times.

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There's been an index. And of course, Luther's writings were put on the index and Zwingli and so on and so forth.

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But that goes back a long ways. And so, many of these books ended up being destroyed over time.

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And so, often we have to recreate what they said by the responses written to them by Christian writers.

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And what I'd like to be able to say, and Christian writers are always perfectly accurate and completely fair in their analysis of what people are saying about them.

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Unfortunately, believe it or not, the internet did not begin the idea of sensationalism or imbalanced response.

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So, at times you have to be somewhat careful. All the way back to the days of Irenaeus when he's writing against the

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Gnostics. Yeah, he got most of it right. We found a lot of Gnostic writings since that day.

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But still, there are some things where it's like, well, it might have been a little fairer in how you analyze something and things like that.

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So, polemic, rhetoric. I mean, rhetoric was a... You know, it's funny.

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You did have athletes and things like that in the Olympic Games and things like that.

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But if you really wanted to make money and be well known back then, being able to give speeches, rhetoric, was something that was studied.

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All through human history until only a recent period of time. I can guarantee you, listening to the presidential debates, which the next one is going to be really interesting, rhetoric is no longer seemingly taught or studied by almost anyone.

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Long history in Greek and Roman Empire. And it was not long before the

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Christian Church had to begin producing its own rhetoric and its own apologetic.

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Now, everybody knows in here, I would imagine, what apologetics means.

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The appearance of the term apologia that is found in 1 Peter 3 .15

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and so on and so forth. I'm not going to go into all that right now.

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But it had a long classical history. And there were a number of books that were named apologia.

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And, you know, Socrates and Plato, they all used the term when they were giving a reasoned defense for their philosophy, their life, their actions, whatever else might be.

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And so the group of early church writers we look at now were called the apologists.

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They responded to a number of attacks upon the church. The earlier writers were concerned about the continuing matter of the

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Jewish attack upon the faith. So the first guy we're going to look at named

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Justin Martyr. He is engaged in dialogue with Jewish individuals about the validity of the claims of the

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Christian faith. Later writers centered their attention on the Roman persecution of the faith, endeavored to give a defense against the accusations that were common against the

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Christians at the time, most of which were based upon misapprehensions and misunderstandings.

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So a lot of it was just simply a matter of clarification, saying, no, we don't believe that at all. But some of it was.

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Yes, we do believe that. We do believe there's only one true God, for example, in the defense of monotheism and things like that.

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Other apologists addressed their comments to the philosophical thinking of the age. Generally, those apologists writing in the

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Latin West were pragmatic and legal in their tone. Those in the East are more philosophical in their concerns.

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And that just represents, it's just a, there's a different way of thought that remains to this day.

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I mean, the nature of our interactions with Roman Catholicism are extremely doctrinal, legal, forensic, logical, rational.

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We have our statements of faith. We put our statement of faith versus their statement of faith, and you do exegesis and stuff like that.

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That's a Western way of thought. People in the East just don't do that. It's not that they are less intelligent.

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It's a different way of thinking. And that's why interaction with Eastern Orthodoxy takes a very different form, if you read historically, than dealing with something in the

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West. There is a different way of thought. You don't have laid out paragraph 14 subsection 2 statements of faith from Orthodoxy.

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Orthodoxy wouldn't understand why you would even want something like that. For them, the liturgy and the prayers and the traditions are all you need.

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And that's the only basis upon which to talk, which is what makes it really difficult, extremely difficult.

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For us to try to get into that mindset, because it just doesn't click with us.

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And that's also why the East, for example, has absolutely no time to waste on people like Augustine.

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Augustine is just really looked down upon in the Eastern Church. And, of course, most

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Western Christians can't begin to fathom John of Damascus or any of the

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Eastern writers either. You just read them and you sort of go, okay.

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But that's the way it is. So, Justin Martyr. Let's look at Justin Martyr. As I said before, that's not the name he was given at his birth, obviously.

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I can just see his mom naming him Justin Martyr. He was born in Samaria, but was of heathen descent.

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He was educated in the Greek style. He was thoroughly familiar with the

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Greek philosophical systems, having studied Stoicism. Then having studied with a peripatetic philosopher.

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Do you know what a peripatetic philosopher is? Sometimes I call myself a peripatetic teacher, because I like to walk around.

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And so peripateo, to walk. And so a peripatetic philosopher was, and there were a lot of them back then, would be someone who would basically, well, some people even try to find parallels with Jesus.

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Be someone who would collect disciples and you would walk from place to place and sort of beg.

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Well, he wouldn't beg. His disciples would beg. And then they'd pay him for the privilege of getting to learn at his feet, literally at his feet while walking.

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And so you wouldn't be located in one place. You'd be traveling from city to city and countryside to countryside.

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And as you're walking along, it's not quite the Forrest Gump methodology, but there is somewhat of a connection.

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Generally, the philosopher would say much more than Forrest did. I'm tired.

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That really would not be worth your investment of your time. So there were many like this.

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And Justin had studied under a peripatetic philosopher, then with a

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Pythagorean, and finally with a Platonist. So he studied Plato and Pythagoras and the

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Stoic philosophies. And so he was well trained. In Platonism, he found what he was looking for and was quite content until one day while taking a walk along the seashore, he encountered an elderly

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Christian man. I'm not sure if someone's made a movie out of this yet.

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I'm not sure that I'd like them to because Christian movies do tend to be a little bit on the cheesy side, generally.

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But he's walking along the seashore. It sounds like a story, and it is, but it actually happened.

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And he encounters an elderly Christian man. In the ensuing conversation, Justin's faith in the wisdom of man was shaken, and he was pointed to the prophets of the

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Tanakh, the Old Testament. So it is interesting to me that Justin, even in all of his writings, it's fairly obvious because we're talking the middle of the second century here, did not have a completed

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New Testament canon available to him. And I just would encourage anyone to think for a moment.

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There are imbalances in Justin's theology, granted.

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We have imbalances in ours, and we've got the entire New Testament. What if you didn't have the entire New Testament?

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What if you had less than what you have? Again, it's just one of those things that over the years

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I've been more and more aware of in reading church history, is it's real easy to judge and condemn from the nice, comfortable spot that we're in, but far better to leave that to the

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Lord, really. It doesn't mean you just gloss over errors in teaching, but you just realize, you know,

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I wonder if I didn't have half of Paul and all of Hebrews, how balanced would

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I be, or the people around me? This is one of the questions I like to ask, anyways. Though he never saw this man again,

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Justin was converted as a result of their conversation. You sort of wonder who that guy was. Interestingly enough, the

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Old Testament prophets were the means of the conversion of other notables in the early church, such as Tatian, Theophilus, and Hilary.

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By the way, it's one L, and it's a guy. Hilary of Poitiers. I realize there's an automatic negative stench attached to that name, but don't let that move forward through time.

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And I do not know of any early church father by the name of Donald, so we don't have to worry about that either.

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So we can just put that off to the side. Justin devoted himself to the defense of the

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Christian faith. He held no church office. So that's rather interesting. Most of the writers are going to be bishops or priests, minimally, as that office develops, not at this time period, but later on.

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But Justin held no church office. He stayed in no one place, so it wasn't

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Justin of, like I just said, Hilary of Poitiers. So you know where he was from.

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And Athanasius of Alexandria, and Augustine of Hippo, and Ambrose of Milan.

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There's almost always a name place associated with the individual.

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It's just Justin Martyr. And so he was sort of a peripatetic Christian philosopher, in essence.

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What's really important to remember is he continued to wear the pallium.

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What was the pallium? The pallium was the cloak of the philosopher. So there was actually sort of a, well

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I wouldn't call it a uniform, but it was a recognizable way of dressing that said,

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I am a philosopher. And so Justin continued to wear the pallium and did not see a conflict in that.

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And this is just going to be the beginning of what is eventually going to be another major issue.

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Really throughout church history, it remains quite relevant today, that really will be sort of summed up in the, ironically in the words of Tertullian, who himself also wore the pallium.

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And yet it's Tertullian who said, what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? What does

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Jerusalem have to do with Athens? So in other words, what is the proper relationship between philosophy and the gospel?

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And the apologists really do introduce us to the reality of the fact that this is an issue that is alive and vital in every single generation.

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Some generations think about it widely and deeply, and other generations don't even know that it's there, but are deeply influenced by it one way or the other.

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Some of you who listen to my program know that it's a topic

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I deal with a lot because the fundamental division in apologetic methodologies was summed up for me by the words of William Lane Craig a few years ago at a conference.

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He had just gotten done speaking at a plenary session, and he comes outside and he's surrounded by all these young guys that are just, you know, they want to take pictures and ask questions and stuff like that, and that happens a lot at places.

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And he happened to stop near a table where a friend of mine was manning the table. And he was listening to what

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Craig was saying to the young man, and one of the things he said to them was, I want you to understand if you want to do apologetics and you want to do it well, you need to stop reading so much theology and read more philosophy.

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And when you listen to his theology, when you map it all out, he represents a perspective that has a philosophical apologetic at its core, and then the theology is made to fit the theological apologetic.

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And the philosophical apologetic, I'm sorry, the philosophical apologetic. I believe the exact opposite of that.

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I believe that your theology must determine your apologetic. I have often used the illustration of a

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Civil War general, a very well -known Civil War general by the name of Robert E.

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Lee, and probably one of the most brilliant military minds the

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United States has ever produced, he and George S. Patton, though they could not be more totally separate from one another in character.

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Patton couldn't get through two sentences without using an expletive, and Lee was a very devout Christian. And yet, if you were to say to General Lee, General Lee, defend, which is what doing apologetics is, the first words out of General Lee's mouth would be, defend what?

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In other words, the kind of defense that he's going to offer is going to depend upon the object that he is supposed to defend.

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And so, in the war, you had the

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Battle of Fredericksburg. And if you've studied it, you know that Lee was in charge of the defensive setup there.

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And knowing what he was up against, he pulled his forces out of Fredericksburg to the outlying area because he knew that it would be impossible for him to hold the city, and it would also result in the utter destruction of the city as well.

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And so he found an incredibly defensible line, and though highly outnumbered, and this was still during a time when the

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South had significantly inferior weapons in comparison to the North. The North had rifled muskets, the South had smoothbores.

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You could almost throw a smoothbore musket with the same effectiveness as shooting it.

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But despite that, they inflicted a crushing defeat upon significantly greater numbers from the

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Union Army at Fredericksburg. Why? Because he chose the line of defense based on what he was defending, what his goal was.

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And it just seems absolutely essential, from my perspective, that you have a clear understanding of what it is you're seeking to defend, and that your apologetic must be consistent with what you're seeking to defend.

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And so I have serious problems with Elaine Craig and his perspectives, and have criticized him many times, and I take tremendous heat for that.

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And that's why I'm not invited to the big conferences that apologetic organizations put on, because how dare you criticize

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William Lane Craig? He's this stalwart defender of the faith. Well, actually, he's the stalwart defender of the following thesis.

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The preponderance of the evidence points to the greater probability of the existence of a god.

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That's what William Lane Craig defends. The preponderance of the evidence points to the greater probability of the existence of a god.

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And that's not what the apostles defended. That's not what they proclaimed. And Christopher Hitchens, who

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I never debated. We were six weeks out from our debate in New York when he got his diagnosis of cancer, unfortunately.

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But Christopher Hitchens has rightly recognized that there is a huge chasm between the probable existence of a god and the existence of the triune god,

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Father, Son, Holy Spirit, revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ, resurrection, and everything else. And unless you're an incrementalist, which

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Craig and others are, well, we'll get you here, and then we'll get you here, and we'll get you here, and eventually, hopefully, we'll get you down to the point where you're actually, you know, make a confession of faith, but it's better if you're a little closer.

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And there's a lot of folks going, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I just go, I seem to remember the

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Apostle Paul saying, when you serve those which are by nature are no gods, there seems to be a complete break there, a thing of repentance and bowing the knee to Christ and things like that.

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Anyway, that's what he defends. Now, when we look back, go back to history here for a second, if you're just a martyr, and your primary area of training is

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Greek philosophy, and you don't even have all the New Testament, when there are gaps in what you've got, what are you going to fill it with?

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Well, the only thing you've got. And so, you will hear one of the constant criticisms of the

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Christian faith today is, well, the Trinity and all this stuff, that developed later under the influence of Greek philosophy.

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All you believe came from the Greek philosophers. The Logos came from the

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Greek philosophers, because Greek philosophy was filled with discussions of the Logos. And it was! And there were

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Jewish philosophers like Philo and Alexandria, who prospers right around the time of Paul.

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Deeply influenced by Greek categories of thought. There is absolutely no way to deny that, starting with Justin, you see

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Greek philosophical categories of thought in Christian theological writing.

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Cannot deny that. But, what does that mean?

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Does that mean that the actual New Testament message has been lost, and now it's just been replaced with some kind of patched together

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Greek philosophy? Or, is this something we would expect to have happen, in the sense that, as the

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Gospel goes out into the world, it's going to encounter questions that it needs to be able to answer in the language of the people asking the questions.

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And so, if someone is asking questions in the category of God's being, then, do you...

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And this is going to be a question that everybody gets to struggle with. And it's going to be a big question of the

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Council of Nicaea, which took place in... Thank you very much, Gary. I'm just making sure you're still conscious after our little jaunt yesterday.

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Gary and I got up in the morning, and, what was your final distance? Right at 100?

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100 .1. You saw that I did some loops. I did 105. So, we did over 100 miles yesterday with...

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And yours was closer to the accurate, around 5 ,600 feet of climbing. So, if you look at either one of us today, and we just sort of look like we're looking right through you, there's a reason for that.

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I was 1 ,000 calories short yesterday after all that, and that was trying to eat as much as I could, and I just couldn't eat anymore.

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I was like, put the food away. I can't do it. Anyway. 325 .80.

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Some congratulations on that. You notice I didn't try to ask you that while we were climbing. That would probably be cruel and unusual punishment, and probably elder abuse along the way, too.

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Anyway, in 325 at the Council of Nicaea, this comes to the fore again, because how do you expose the

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Arians? What kind of language do you use to make sure that you can write a statement of faith that they simply cannot agree to?

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And the choice is made to use a non -biblical word that they cannot agree to.

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Now, you're going to say that biblical word accurately represents what's in Scripture. Okay. But there are people,

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Church of Christ, Campbellites today, that say, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't use...

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You've only got to use the very words of Scripture. But the words of Scripture were delivered to a particular people at a particular time, and does that mean that you cannot then answer questions in another place, in another culture, all the rest of these things?

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And how do you balance maintaining absolute fidelity to the once -for -all delivered -to -the -saints faith while making it understandable to people from cultures all over the world?

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Because you're commanded to go into all the world to do that. That has not been an easy issue for people to deal with, and church history shows us that there have been people who have been imbalanced in both directions.

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In other words, there have been times when basically Christians have demanded that cultures just abandon all their ways of thought and just embrace a, well, certainly happened under British rule in certain places,

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British way of thinking, which isn't necessarily a biblical way of thinking. Sorry to all my British friends.

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And then on the other side, you see people doing this cultural accommodation thing where the core disappears, and you just try to make

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Jesus look like an Indian guru or a South American medicine man or whatever, and obviously the balance is found somewhere in the middle, but even the apologists will show us not everyone always found the balance, and we don't necessarily ourselves today either, because we very rarely thought about these things.

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So it is interesting, like I said, he continued to aware of the pallium.

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He said, everyone who can preach the truth and does not preach it incurs the judgment of God.

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This is during a time of persecution. Remember his last name. He spent time in Rome where he met and debated the heretic, and this may not be the first time

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I've mentioned him, but now you're going to get sick and tired of hearing this next guy's name,

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Marcion, M -A -R -C -I -O -N, Marcion. Justin Martyr debated him.

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Marcion, for the next 200 years, if you wanted to write a book, it was almost always like one of the books you had to write was against Marcion.

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I've lost track of how many books were written over the next two centuries against Marcion. So there's your first reference to him.

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You will get tired of him. We'll talk about him a little bit more, but he met and debated the heretic Marcion, and in Ephesus he conversed with Trifo the

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Jew, and his writings, his dialogue with Trifo the Jew, really are some of the most insightful and interesting of the few things that have come down to us from Justin, especially how he deals with Old Testament prophecies and their fulfillment in Christ and Christ's relationship to the

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Father and stuff like that. That's really, really important.

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There is no way to cram all the rest of this in in 30 seconds, so I'm going to hopefully remember where I was there, maybe grab a little section of Trifo for next week if I can remember to do so, and we'll pick up with Justin and his dialogue with Trifo.

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Let's close Word of Prayer. Father, once again, we thank you for the opportunity to look back.

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We ask that this would allow us once again to see ourselves to cause ourselves to engage in self -examination, to think through the issues that have been wrestled with before, to learn from error, but also to have balance in how we approach these things.

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We ask you to be with us now as we go into your worship. May you be honored in all that takes place.