26 - Intro to Ante-Nicene Doctrine of God

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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All right, well looks like we have a good group here this morning on a beautiful Sunday morning

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Might get a few more rain clouds floating over. That would be very nice.

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We could certainly use it. That's for sure I think we have one spot open up here and then start pulling the chairs out and put them alongside so this

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I believe is Since Sean is having to adjust sound back there.

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I believe this is number 26 in our church history series and we now get to the subject of the nature of God in the

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Period up to and including and will actually go beyond the Council of Nicaea, which was in We're getting better at that 20 years from now

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That'll be the one thing that you all remember from this church history series will be 325

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AD and You may not know what the significance of it is by then but 20 years from now.

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You will still remember there's something about 325 AD in fact if if any of you have ever seen

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What's called it used to be called the Erdman's set it's 28 30 38 volumes

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Really looks incredibly impressive on your shelf because there are different colors and it's just it's just a really really impressive thing if you can track it down on sale someplace, but it's the first 10 volumes are called the anta -nicene

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Fathers and then the last 28 are divided into two sections of 14 Nicene and post -nicene fathers and That terminology should make sense obviously it's referring to Nicaea as the dividing line between Really the print what would be called the primitive church the apostolic age the the anta before Nicene period and then after Nicaea And and it really is

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It's a dividing line for many reasons Theologically, but also especially in the relationship of church and state

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Nicaea marks a watershed that will be that no one at the time

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I think could have foreseen What the results of Nicaea would be as far as the relationship of church and state certainly nobody

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Attained the Council of Nicaea ever dreamed of a day when emperors would be caused to come barefoot to the

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Palace of the Pope because there was no Pope Nicaea But come barefoot to the

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Palace of the Pope To beg his forgiveness and have what's called the interdict lifted from their their nations the later popes extremely powerful popes after 1000

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AD would had a power that they utilized called the interdict where They could tell all of their their bishops their cardinals their priests

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Not to perform their duties In a certain country until the leadership of that country came to obedience to Rome Think about what that would be like around 1100

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AD You couldn't get married you couldn't get buried you couldn't have your children baptized

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When they were first born so you if they and of course Infant mortality is

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Super high so if you can't have your child baptized then they died then

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I'm not sure if they had developed exactly when the concept of limbo had developed, but it put huge pressure on the people the

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Secular rulers when Rome would use this power, so there was quite a while. There's quite a struggle between The the state in the church at that point because it had become a state church.

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I mean and it You can trace that that genesis back to Nicaea when after 250 years of persecution you have the state in the church getting together and That's sort of the beginning.

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No one like I said no one could have seen it, but anyway So Nicaea is extremely important but we want to look at the nature of God in the end to Nicene fathers and obviously this is an area of Great interest to me

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Because people often ask me doing what I do in engaging in Debates and dialogues and radio programs and all sorts of things that I do as an apologist

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What were the the two classes That you took that were most important to you in college and being able to do what you do and my answer is always been the same

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Greek and church history Greek and church history not systematic theology

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That's important The only reason I don't mention Hebrew is because the vast majority of Objections to the

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Christian faith are grounded in the New Testament and even when you look at Old Testament objections very often

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When the New Testament cites those texts citing it from the Greek Septuagint anyways But Hebrew is important as well, but Greek and church history

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Greek because so many people base their arguments upon a extremely poor method of interpreting the

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Bible Which very often is based upon a misunderstanding of an English translation rather than the original but the other is the fact that church history leaves

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Since we don't study it leaves us with this huge vacuum behind us, and it's so easy

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For people to come along and say well Christians haven't always believed what you believe and so who are you?

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To to say that who are you you'd even say there is a Christian position on anything

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But especially in the encounters that well it first started with the

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Mormons Some of you remember back long long long ago When I first came here,

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I had already written a couple books on Mormonism at that time just did We are we're already dealing with Mormonism actually

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I think the books came out right around the time that I came here and Mormons teach a very very very unorthodox strange view of God fully removed from any type of historical orthodoxy and Yet, they will claim that what they believe is what was taught by Christ and the

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Apostles but then the church went into a into into apostasy and So there hasn't been a

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Christian Church since time of basically the generation after the Apostles up until April of 1830 so What would it matter?

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What the Council of Nicaea said they didn't have the appropriate authority they didn't have the priesthood authority

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And they would say that the the doctrine of the Trinity was a development of Greek Greek philosophy in the same way the

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Jehovah's Witnesses Make the same argumentation Many of them are a little bit more knowledgeable when it comes to the issue of Early church writings even though as with all

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Jehovah's Witnesses their knowledge is mediated to them Through the

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Watchtower Bible and Tract Society and so the Watchtower Society has a long history long history of perverting the writings of the early church fathers and Presenting a very sterilized, but incredibly inaccurate

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Viewpoint to their people, but they will You know since they trust the Watchtower implicitly then they think well if I read it in the

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Watchtower, then it must be true They they are not encouraged to check out the context of the citations.

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They're given by the Watchtower Society. That's for sure and they will say that The Council of Nicaea invented the doctrine of the

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Trinity and and no one before that believed in it and The early

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Christians all denied the the deity of Christ and so on and so forth and the vast majority of Christians Just are not prepared to interact with them and then of course

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When you get into dealing with Roman Catholicism, they want to say see that was us back

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Then so you are dependent upon us for your doctrine of God, so how can you turn around bite the hand that feeds you?

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And of course one is Pentecostals and others will say yeah see the

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Roman Catholics are right You're you Protestants you you're inconsistent because you are

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Believing what Rome taught on this doctrine and and they were wrong about that just as they're wrong about so many other things

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That you would agree with us that they're wrong about and it becomes a royal Royal mess at times to try to keep all the differing viewpoints separated

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You've heard me say in this class already That about the only thing that I can think of where I think there is a universal

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Testimony from The early church writings about the only thing I can think of where they all agree is

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The fact there's only one true God. They're all monotheists Other than that You can find somewhere somebody somewhere

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That had some weird belief and of course the farther you go in church history the more

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Literature you have the more documentation you have then the more expressions you can find at that point and so The other and the real challenge

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I think for us is If you really believe in Sola Scriptura Then How do you deal with issues such as the

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Council of Nicaea and the idea of creedal statements

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What is the authority of a creed If it's not scriptural then we would say it is not the

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Anu stars it is not God breathed and if it's not God breathe that it has to have a

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Lesser authority a different kind of authority than what you would find in that which is

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God breathed but the argument was that a Statement that accurately represents.

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What is in scripture? Has the authority of scripture only insofar as it is consistent with scripture?

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But then that raises the issue of well who gets to decide what's consistent with scripture? We just in the opening ceremony read through a section of the london baptist confession of faith

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And interestingly enough even that section that we just read Said you can't bind on someone

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A belief that comes from man and not from scripture this destroys Christian liberty and Christian conscience

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Well there are Differences of opinion even amongst the people in this room as to exactly

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Where the line has to be drawn on? certain issues Regarding what

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Christian liberty should or should not include? Hopefully we don't disagree on what the definitional doctrines of the faith would be but I Can guarantee you?

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If you just took everybody in quote -unquote baptist churches now of course baptist unfortunately

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Is way too narrow a term? To really give us much doctrinal consensus

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Simply rejecting infant baptism is is not a pot an overly positive Delimited delineator of theological belief and There are lots of people who call themselves baptists that have very very wide -ranging beliefs, but We have to make decisions as to What is definitional of the faith and?

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I've been in many a baptist church where your specific Millennial viewpoint was included in that dividing line

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I mean if you want to see if you want to see some nuclear wars Theologically speaking

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Not not just between Premillennialists and everybody else because I don't know if you've all noticed but Amillennialists tend to just sort of sit back and watch the wars.

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It's just sort of like oh look the fights breaking out I mean just sort of sit back and like okay, whatever

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It's pretty much the posties and the pre's that you know lob lob You know in the Amill so sort of sit there watching the stuff going over top going.

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Yeah, whatever you know About the only arguments amillennialists get into is so do you describe yourself as a as an optimistic amillennialist?

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That that's so so if so if when you think about you've got the if you got the the posties over here and the pre's over here then the

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Amill's If you're optimistic you toward the posties, and if you're pessimistic you're toward the the pre

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Miller's I guess that's how it works or something. I don't know but I've been in churches honestly where it wasn't just that But some of the some of the most angry exchanges.

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I've seen between people within a camp so within within Dispensational premillennialism you've got you've got the pre pre mid and post

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Rapture views and man those folks will will send the other people straight to the pits of hell if you disagree with them on them and Hopefully most of us sit back and go whoa whoa whoa something

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Let's be a little careful. I don't remember when Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 1st Corinthians chapter 15

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He sort of summarized the gospel there. I don't remember that particular topic being really central to the definition of the gospel, but I've seen it happen.

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I've seen it happen and That whole area of you know what is what is what our first -order definitional truths?

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What are second -order truths that are extremely important, but upon which?

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You're not ready to go to the point of saying this is good cause a person to go to hell How do we how do we define these things well?

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It would seem fairly obvious that the nature of God is a first -order truth

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But functionally today is it I mean amongst

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Christians today? Is that the doctrine of God the nature of God I?

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know historically It was a first -order Absolute definitional truth, but let's be perfect honest ourselves is it today?

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How many Christians? Spend almost any time at all during the course of their week contemplating the nature of God It's sort of hard not to if you're praying

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It's so hard not to if you're reading your Bible But going about through your daily life

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How you know one of the one of the one of the disconnects here honestly one of the disconnects here is

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That on the one hand we confess that the doctrine of the

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Trinity is definitional of the Christian faith and clearly historically we have withdrawn all

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Fellowship from those that deny that doctrine so we can go back to post

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Reformation period the Sassanians bad people in our days Mormons Jehovah's Witnesses move

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Go all the way back to the Council of Nicaea kick those Aryans out etc. Etc We can we can see that But Functionally for us today, we can make that confession, but Don't we see a bit of a chasm between what we profess and what we actually live

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For a lot of folks obviously once you get into liberalism, it's like Who cares you know let's all just?

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hold hands and sing kumbaya, and it doesn't really matter what you think about God, but when we look back in church history

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We look at the fights And we look at the schisms and a lot of us in the background line go those people those people argued about some weird stuff

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I'm not sure that it's worth arguing about but Might that just indicate that they had a clearer view of things back then than then we do today

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Or maybe they just you know we might say well. We're you know us modern folks. We automatically know more than they did we have computers

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Is it funny with all our computers most most of our greatest People don't produce nearly the literature.

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It was produced by the great teachers and professors of the past We can type a whole lot faster, but it just seems like we don't say much in the process so People are willing to you know you look at Athanasius He gets kicked out of his church five times after the

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Council of Nicaea because he won't compromise the deity of Christ you go man You know why such dedication to these things why such a focus upon these things because today?

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We have people like TD Jake's running around The time magazine identifies is as the next

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Billy Graham Leader and evangelicalism he's not a trinitarian for crying out loud.

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I know he went to the elephant room and and Mark Driscoll didn't know enough to ask him the right questions and and and to those of us who know oneness

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Pentecostalism and know the Terminology we use we knew what he was saying We know what he was saying and a couple years ago.

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There was a group well You've heard of Phillips Craig and Dean you know beautiful musical singing group and yet They're not trinitarians and yet people want to be led in worship by non trinitarians.

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These are things that would not have made any sense whatsoever in the early church, and yet you see it all around us today and Even for those people who had never even oh, they would never give a thought

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To a compromise on that issue How much of that is just simply due to the fact that well?

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I have my beliefs And anybody else doesn't believe what I believe just looks weird to me, and I really don't think they're a

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Christian anyway Got to be careful because on the one side you've got the wishy -washy

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Whatever goes the other side you've got the old crusty. I have my beliefs and everybody else is going to hell except me anyways and Somewhere there's got to be a place where there is a vital biblically based clearly thought through not middle but a position that eschews the

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Legal narrow -minded legalism of the one side and the wishy -washy anything goes of the other side

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And I think the only way to really arrive that point is to think through carefully

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What is taught in scripture and what has happened in? history as well Let's uh

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Let's I suppose it would be helpful if we started off by Making sure that we're clear and understanding of where we're standing in regards to the

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Doctrine of God today so that when we look at what people were saying in the past we can have an understanding of how we got to where we are and Also be able to see that there were people who?

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There were people who had How do I how do I how do

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I put this? How do you deal with?

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people in the early church Who said things about the nature of God that we simply could not accept today?

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but they said it before the discussion took place that actually gave enough clarification the

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Same clarification that we possess today What do you do with someone like that? so a lot of the questions that were wrestled with beginning in the second century all the way into the beginning of the fifth century

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Lot of those questions built upon each other So what happens for example, and I'm going to go through with more detail

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Let me do I'm just trying to give you some some framework to put to hang this stuff on Big question at the

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Council of Nicaea is what is the relationship between the father and the son? The question is not monotheism

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Monotheism believe there's only one true God unquestioned that's just simply bedrock that's that is

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Fundamental to to everything the Bible teaches to everything that Christians believe there's only one true

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God Okay But then what do you do with this revelation in Scripture that gives us three divine persons?

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They're distinguished from one another the father has never called the son the sons ever called the spirit the spirits ever called the father

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Even in passages like John 10 30 where Gia says I and the father are one the verb is plural

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It's I and the father we are one So even there the distinction is clearly made so you have three persons and yet each is described in fully

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Divine terms Jesus is called God the spirits the spirit of God.

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He's the spirit of Yahweh They're all involved in creation. You have this body of revelation

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That is talking about one God and three persons described as God, but we can't believe in three gods, so what are you gonna do?

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and Nicaea is prompted by the teachings of a fellow by name of Arius Arius we were told was a good -looking fellow tall and good looks and he was a great singer and he could write songs and he started putting his theology in song music has always been an incredibly powerful means of Communication especially in the theological realm it really has that's why music is such an incredibly controversial issue

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In church history and why when you get to the Reformation you have many reformers that get rid of Musical instruments and so on and so forth.

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It's it's a it's a long assorted history in in in the history of the church, but Arius comes up with the idea that there was a time when the

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Sun was not There is a time when the Sun was not and so he believes that the

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Sun is the greatest highest exalted creature He'll even use the term

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God of him in a sense But he is not eternally existed as God and So sort of taking remember what origin said?

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What did I gave you just toward the end of we were talking about origin? I mentioned something that's going to come back to to haunt us about what he said about God, but if you recall

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He differentiated between the father as ha the us and the son is the us without the article so there was a implicit

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Subordination ism subordination to subordinate someone so arias arias takes us all the way and And presents to us a highly exalted

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Jesus But when you when you think about it you have a chasm You know on here's here's a chasm on this side is everything that is created on this side is the

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Creator and in arias's view Jesus is on this side of that chasm

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Everything has to be on one side of the other you can't be there's nothing in between either you're the creator, or you're created one of the two and So arias says

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Jesus is created Nicaea wasn't arguing about the biblical canon.

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I see it wasn't arguing about The person of the Holy Spirit the that subject had not yet come up and I see it was not arguing about well

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What's the relationship of the divine and human Christ that comes after this there's one thing they're talking about at Nicaea And once that's established

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And as we will see it took a while Anybody who thinks that well you have the

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Council of Nicaea and then after that everyone believes no In fact as we will see for decades after Nicaea it was arianism that ruled and reigned not

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Nicene Orthodoxy There were there were councils held after Nicaea they had more bishops at them than Nicaea did that contradicted

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Nicaea So the idea that a lot of people have the councils just got together, and then everybody just said

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Yes, sir, and It's not how it worked. It's not how it worked That may be what you read on the internet and stuff like that, but it's not what you read when you actually read serious church history, so Once Nicaea says

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Jesus is homoousios of The same substance as the father.

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He's not he's on this side. Not this side Then now the next questions that arise naturally are going to be okay

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Then what's the relationship of the divine and human in Christ? Does does

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Jesus absorb is Jesus 50 % man and 50 %

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God What about the the idea of personhood

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Does he have a a complete human nature, or is it just simply an animated body with God living in it

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These are Obviously these are questions that once you affirm

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The full deity of Christ these are questions that are then going to come up and the answers that are given

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Are almost always in this form if you if this is the truth here, okay?

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Sometimes what you have to do is Define what's in here by negating everything that's out here

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So for example The Orthodox Formulation of the relationship the divine and human in Christ is called the hypostatic union

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That's another thing that would if we were to someday maybe Shockingly and surprisingly have a final examination

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You know a big long thing. You know that would just be massively huge If that were some you know to happen it would be a shocking thing, but shocking things happen in life

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That would be a phrase that will undoubtedly be on it Hypostatic union yeah, it would definitely be be on a test like that anyway the hypostatic union

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Teaches that in Christ you have One person with two natures and That those natures are joined in that one person, but they are not intermingled or intermixed

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It's not 50 -50 100 100 one person two natures

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Well then Much of the definition ends up being something along the lines of saying

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Well the reason that we believe That Jesus has a human will is because if you don't have a human will you don't have a human person

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And you don't have a human person And you see how these are all built upon they start down here And then they build upward if you don't have this down here the rest of this just becomes mumbo -jumbo it really doesn't end up having much meaning and so a lot of the

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Utopianism and Nestorianism, and we'll look at all these these later on but a lot of these movements or Heresies or things that are identified over the next hundred years or so come about from people seeking to work through these issues well

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Let's let's throw one more complicating factor in here. What has happened between east and west

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By this point in time We've talked about it before what what's one of the dividing factors between the east and west this time?

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Mmm. No, that's after Nicaea that that's that's well after Nicaea What language are they speaking in the east?

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Greek what language are they speaking in the west? Latin Which means when the people in the east and the people in the west want to be doing theological conversation guess what you got to?

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have translation and That raises some serious problems and in fact historically we look back and we go

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Man if they had had Google Translate back, then we could have gotten this done a lot faster then then we did not only because of the communication speed but There were some real issues because of the fact that The Greeks would use one term and the

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Latins might translate that Greek Greek term by different words on their side and It did create it did create issues as well

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So there are a lot of really human factors and guess what there were even political factors.

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Yes, believe it or not I know that some of you oh are going to Get me a towel real quick.

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Thank you very much That was brilliant Thankfully, I'm wearing a black black suit so Can't really see it

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It's not as bad as my first spoke at the London Tabernacle I got soaked in a rainstorm on the way to preach and I literally was squishing while preaching it was great and if you don't know what the

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London Tabernacle is that's Spurgeon's Church, so that was that was one of my favorite memories of Of that experience was

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I was literally squishing while thank you very much Just put those there and this will it's

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Arizona. It'll be dry in about 14 seconds. So we'll be we'll be good Sorry about that so that will definitely cause you to lose track of where we're in that so Moses was in the bull rushes and and so Yes, oh, yes,

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I was gonna sit down to point out that sadly there were political issues too and One of the political issues that ends up having a lot of effect and this is where a lot of us get lost because who

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How many of us really have almost any knowledge of what was going on the ancient world?

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But Rome was crumbling the Empire was was was contracting was

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Dividing The Roman government was was dividing as well and the seat of power

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Began to move from the west to the east and eventually the seat of the authority moved from Rome to Constantinople modern -day

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Istanbul and That ended up actually having huge theological implications as well

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It had theological implications because people started appealing to the Emperor and they started playing the

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Emperor off against certain bishops even against the Pope of Rome once the Pope papacy really established itself and once the

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Emperor left Rome there was a power vacuum and guess who stepped into it the

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Bishop of Rome and so much of the secular authority legal authority that becomes foundational to later

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Roman Catholic theology Really comes historically because as long as the

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Emperor was in Rome the Bishop of Rome was You know primarily religious in nature

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Once the Emperor leaves everybody turns to the only other person left And that's the

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Bishop of Rome and all of a sudden He's wielding power that his predecessors never never had and of course the idea which is very easy to document

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Is that once? You and a few of your predecessors have had a power you start looking back at all your predecessors and they always should have had that power and so they start interpreting

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Scripture and history as if well Christ established the papacy in the words of Peter to Peter in Matthew chapter 16

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But that was actually a development over time that required things in history to take place before it actually

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All of a sudden somebody goes hey, I think we've always had this power. You know no. No actually you didn't but anyway, so all sorts of issues that Now let's just be honest.

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I don't know all of you. We've got a bunch of visitors. You're very welcome. Thank you for being here I think some of you are actually under the misimpression that I'm preaching today

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My Facebook note said next week That's next week not this week, but anyways you'll get better preaching today

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Because I'm not preaching I assure you of that but I don't know all of you, but for most of us when someone says

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That there are all these external things Involved in the development of theological formulations we get nervous

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Uncomfortable because Theological formulations should

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Should be pure and they should be arrived at by holy men who are

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Great students of scripture, and there should be no politics and and nothing else involved

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Right that's that's how we'd like it to be Do you remember any time in all of human history in all of God's?

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Dealings with his people that it's ever been that nice and clean Moses's day oh everything was great during Moses's day, okay, not so much

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Plagues fires locusts all sorts of you know ground opening up swallowing rebel rebels and stuff like that Okay, well

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David David right okay, not David Salton. No okay, not so okay. You get my point. It's always been messy

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Well the early church they had it well, okay had to get there the council and I see a council of a chapter 15 council

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Jerusalem and Paul asked to write against super apostles and and false teachers and and John has to talk about the

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Antichrist Yeah, it's always been fairly messy It's always been fairly messy and the modern mind wants to go well if it's been fairly messy

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Then no one knows what the truth is that doesn't follow That doesn't follow But That's what we've been sort of trained to think is that we've been trained to think in light of scientism and Scientism says here's here's the absolute facts, and here's our theorems and and here's our axioms

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And and you just go from there well it that doesn't work in history And it doesn't work in theology and and the

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Bible doesn't tell us that we're supposed to go that direction anyway, so You hear these things and What you're going to hear at the local university is

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This is why we understand that Christian theology is just simply the random

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Unguided Result of All these different historical political

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Theological forces, and that's why we don't believe that it's divine revelation at all That's what you're going to hear and One of my concerns is when we send our young people

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Into those universities that any knowledge of church history from a believing perspective. What are they supposed to do?

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How are they supposed to defend themselves? How are they supposed to have any basis upon which to to even? Properly analyze what's being said to them by people that we send them there and say now you listen to your professors now well

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Guess what I? Might want to cover your ears brother, but but but professors are just human being

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They're just human beings and And I don't know what you're gonna think about this either

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But in our day there is so much specialization That in my opinion so many who

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Can gain tremendous insight and depth and brilliance in one area because they are not broadly trained can become

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Extremely imbalanced in other areas when they try to speak to those other areas

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Because they have so much knowledge here But they've never been challenged to see how that how knowledge is related to all these other fields

40:54

Partly because you know there's no there's no place for a renaissance man anymore. What's a renaissance man ever heard that phrase?

41:00

There is a day in the renaissance. There was a time the renaissance where there were some people who basically possessed all human knowledge

41:07

They really did Because human knowledge wasn't that wide and there were brilliant brilliant people and so they could they could discourse on Art and culture and language and the sciences and medicine because it was all still very closely related

41:22

You just can't do that anymore there's just too much data and information in any one area for anybody to be able to do that anymore and So I have tremendous respect for scholars who recognize that You know someone like a

41:37

Richard Dawkins I'm sorry Having in -depth knowledge in the scientific field in the realm of genetics does not make you a historian and Most of the time when those people pretend they are they make stupid mistakes

41:51

Same thing with when Bart Ehrman gets into philosophy. He's not a philosopher Okay, so I have a lot of respect for people who recognize.

41:59

Hey, you know what? I Have tremendous knowledge in this area

42:05

But that makes me humble when addressing other areas Please do not transfer my expertise that I have here to every other area

42:15

And then there are some today who recognize that they back off and their expertise is in seeking to bring

42:23

Together the various areas of human knowledge But that means they can't go super in -depth in any one particular area

42:30

There's just no one that can do all that kind of stuff So it's sort of the way we've been taught is what makes us uncomfortable

42:38

When we start looking at church history and realizing there's a lot of factors here you know,

42:43

I'm doing a lot of study on the Reformation right now because we're doing a Reformation tour in September and Doing a lot of studying and Luther and stuff like that.

42:51

There are all sorts of factors involved in Luther's life all sorts of factors and not all of them were what we would necessarily be comfortable with and I've seen people just sort of struggling and with that with that that lack of comfort, but we need to get past that To get to the point where you can have real comfort in your faith

43:12

Because you've sort of exposed the areas of false assumptions that you've been operating on if you never get there

43:20

Then I don't know that we're ever really gonna be in a position to very comfortably and confidently

43:27

Interact with the criticisms of our faith and with the culture around us. So a lot of folks have made the decision

43:33

We're not gonna go there Most churches have purposely made the decision. We're not gonna go there We're not going to address these things and I could talk about these things because they make too many people uncomfortable and Just not gonna go there.

43:47

I don't see that as a real possibility, but it certainly is what has happened in a lot of places

43:53

I don't see how going through church history really allows that for us We need to deal with it as it really was.

43:59

Okay Didn't get very far in the topic today But hopefully that groundwork will allow us to move a little bit quicker as we as we dive into the subject

44:10

Let's let's pray together Heavenly Father we do thank you that you have

44:16

Threw out history dealt with us where we were You have been patient you have been long -suffering

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And we thank you that we can trust that you continue in that Provident act even today be with us now as we go into worship