Session 6: Religious Wars | Our Family Story: Charting Again the History of Jesus’ Church

Last time we took a look at the Reformation.

The Reformation was kind of a watershed moment in the history of the Christian church.

It changed the way that the church perceived of itself, at least in groups and segments, and it splintered the church in a way that not even the divide between the East and the West had done much earlier.

For the first time, there was a truly different sense of what was going on and how God was acting among his people on planet Earth.

We'll take further look at that today in a variety of things, but there will be five topics in particular that I plan to address in succession.

One is geography, the second is ecclesiology, the third is the sacraments, the fourth is war, and the fifth one is migration.

So we'll take those five themes and develop them as happening or evolving out of the Reformation and moving us into what we tend to call the modern era.

The Reformation itself, as we took a look at last time, had some precursors.

We talked about four of them, kind of reforming movements, because the church had become a big business and a big institution.

And there were many who said that the church no longer reflected the relationship between Jesus and his disciples, that simplicity, that teaching, that transformation, that touching, that healing, all of those kinds of things, that the church had become a corporate entity among the governments and the corporations of planet Earth.

And so the Reformation pushed back against that, those four different movements, at least, that led up to it.

Two people in particular, John Wycliffe in England and Jan Huss over in Bohemia, both beginning to talk about the nationalization of the church and also the divesting of the church from all properties and wealth and power, earthly power.

And then the Reformation itself taking place in four specific kinds of movements over time, each of which added a different piece to the mix, and each of which had a kind of different outcome.

What we have at the culmination of the Reformation is really a territorial segmenting of the church.

Now we go back a little bit because, first of all, the church in the east and the church in the west from earliest times began to look at the world through slightly different eyes.

While the Romans considered themselves to be cousins of the Greeks, and you can see this in Virgil's Aeneid, where he talks about the formation of the city of Rome and the brothers Romulus and Remus, and the cousins that are really the Greeks.

And you can see all of this taking place even in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

There's a close relationship between the Greeks and the Romans.

In reality, the Greeks leaned toward the East and had more of a corporate identity.

The people served the higher powers.

And you can see this even in the philosophies of Greece, particularly the philosophies of Socrates and Plato.

Socrates was a great teacher.

He didn't write anything down.

His greatest student, Plato, wrote a lot of stuff down.

But for Plato and Socrates, the reality, the ultimate reality, was transcendent.

There were the forms and the ideals that were beyond the reach of material substance.

They were locked and in place in heavenly realms or transcendent places, and they gave shape to things here that were changing every day.

You can see how this quickly adapted itself to some of the early teachings of the Christian church in the sense that Jesus was ascended, and Jesus is perfect, and Jesus is salvation, and Jesus is God, and Jesus is ideal, and we are formed and shaped by Jesus.

So the transcendent is the real, and the things here are changing and malleable and all of that.

In the Roman world, however, there was much more of a kinship with Aristotle.

Now, Socrates taught Plato, Plato taught Aristotle, but Aristotle was brilliant in his own way, and he was a slightly different kind of person.

For Aristotle, he was kind of tired of the transcendent always being blamed or accused of giving shape to things, and nothing here mattered.

So Aristotle kind of turned his attention to stuff here.

Let's name stuff, let's categorize stuff, let's put things in their useful positions to one another.

And this tended to grab hold better in role.

And so you have Greece and the Greek church expressions more shaped and have finding affinity with the Platonic and Socratic way of looking at life and Aristotle's philosophy actually giving more shape to the Roman and Latin existence.

And so there was a tension in the early church as it grew into the Roman Empire.

The eastern parts of it, including the empire itself, tended to be more Greek thinking and we serve the gods, whereas the Latin and Western part of the Roman Empire tended to think more in terms of Aristotelian practicality and organizing and making sure everything had its place, and kind of the gods serve us.

And these two mindsets will eventually kind of pull the church apart into East and West.

What will happen, unfortunately, is that about the time that this schism was taking place, the uh nation or the beliefs of Islam were on the rise, and they would eventually walk all over and almost destroy the Eastern Church.

What was left was the Western Church.

Now, almost, I said, in Egypt, the expressions of Egyptian Christianity were rooted deeply into the soil of uh Egyptian culture.

We call it Copt, but it is a form of the ancient word for Egypt.

And the Coptic Church is probably the oldest and best expression of early Christianity.

Now, what happened along the way is because it became part of the Eastern Roman Empire, it began to be shaped by what eventually we come to know as Eastern Christianity or Orthodox Christianity.

So there is a lot of similarity between the Coptic Church and the Orthodox Church.

They rubbed shoulders and they live close together for a long time.

There is another group that grew up along the way.

While the Eastern Church was experiencing the pressures of Islam, cutting out many branches and all of North Africa, basically overrunning that whole territory, there was one group that managed to survive sort of north of everything else.

In the 900s, Prince Vladimir of what we would call Kiev or Kyiv today, the capital city of Ukraine, that was the center of Russian identity in those days.

All of these things were still in flux and being formed in one way or another, but that was the heartbeat of Russian, growing Russian identity.

And Prince Vladimir said, we have to find ourselves a centering point.

We have to find ourselves a religion that matters.

And he sent emissaries to different places.

He sent them to the Islamic world.

He sent them to Rome.

He sent them to Constantinople.

And the emissaries came back and they each reported on what they found in the religious expressions of various peoples.

It was the people who came back from Constantinople that really impressed Prince Vladimir.

They said to him, we could not understand the language, but when we stood in the church, and this was the great Hagia Sofia, the big church that's at the heart of Istanbul today, or right there on the mound, that's the old Hagia Sophia church that's become a Muslim mosque, and it's become a museum over time, and now it was a mosque, and it's it bounces back and forth.

But it was that great building.

They said we stood there and the worship surrounded us, the music and and the incense and the tinkling of the bells and the chanting and the songs and all of that.

And we did not know whether we were on earth or in heaven.

And so the Prince Vladimir believed that the expression of Eastern Orthodox expressions of Christianity were probably the most beautiful and beneficial.

And so in Kyiv or Kiev, that was adopted as the official religion.

And that's the start of what we call the Russian Orthodox Church.

Now, the Orthodox Church was the name given to the Eastern branch of the Christian Church, but in that division between Roman Catholic expressions of Christianity and Eastern Orthodox expressions of Christianity, Islam kind of wiped out this, except that Russia was beyond the scope of where the Muslims had taken their kingdoms.

And so, in a sense, Russia saved the Eastern Church.

And so every branch of Christianity in the East that survived the onslaught of the Muslim expression of taking over the world basically came under the care of the Russian Church.

And two particular branches in history survived.

One was the great Russian Orthodox Church, and the second was kind of the Greek expression, the Greek Orthodox Church, which resisted to a great degree becoming Muslim as well.

That's the start of what we call the modern Orthodox Church.

Later on, what will happen is that in the north, as the Mongols and the Huns and others are invading the northern spaces, Kyiv will be ravaged several times and the center of the church will move over to a couple of places and eventually end up in Moscow.

And when Moscow becomes communist in the 20th century, what will happen is that Russian Orthodox Christians in other places, particularly North America, will say that what's going on has been taken over by the communist government and they will declare a separate Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia.

And so we have kind of two competing Russian Orthodox churches that both claim to be sort of the successor to the old Eastern Orthodox branch of the Christian church.

A second part of geography has to do with what's happening in the old Holy Roman Empire.

This is the western part of the Roman Empire.

And what takes place, this stays pretty much beyond the range of Islam, except that for a time out of North Africa, Islam came into Spain, took over Spain, and then was pushed back into North Africa.

This area at the time of the Reformation experiences some splintering geographically as well.

And all of this will have an impact on how we know our Christian territories and expressions today.

The North was heavily influenced by Martin Luther.

One of the problems of Christianity in the northern areas of Europe is that they felt as if Rome was trying to grab money out of the North to pay for building projects in Rome.

And ultimately, although there were many theological things going on at the time of the Reformation, one of the reasons that the northern political rulers supported Martin Luther and protected him in this time of Reformation was because they were sick and tired of sending their money across the mountains, Ultramontanism, they called it, sending our money across the mountains down to Italy, down to Rome.

We need to keep that money for ourselves and develop things here.

And there was a growing network of commerce and industry around the Baltic Sea.

It would be this commercial entity called the Schmalkaldian League that would give rise to an adoption of Luther's perspectives on Christianity, Reformed Christianity, Reformational or Protestant Christianity.

But it would take on Martin Luther's own name so that around the Baltic Sea, you have the predominance of what we call the Lutheran expression of Christianity.

Now, what we'll do later on is trace the migrations of those people.

And so you see that wherever people went from Norway and Sweden and Finland and some of the other places, Estonia, places around the Baltic Sea, Denmark, these all became, and Northern Germany, these all became largely expressions of Christianity within the framework of Luther's protests.

So the clergy were no longer prevented from marrying.

Martin Luther himself was a monk and had taken a vow of celibacy, but he began to see that that was an artificial thing that the church had said at one point, and it was not mandated by Jesus himself.

So Martin Luther got married to a former nun, and that became the practices.

No longer do we have unmarried clergy.

And some of the other things that Martin Luther protested against, the church owning so much property and territory, the Pope, one single person having sort of the authority over the corporate enterprise.

That was out.

And so we get this Lutheran community geographically around the Baltic Sea.

And following those people, you will see where the Lutheran congregations are planted in other places, particularly in North America and other places where the Lutherans went.

Geography.

Another thing happened, and that's that John Calvin really had a major influence, first in France.

He was from Paris.

And the people who followed John Calvin's perspectives on protesting and seeing the church in a different way than its Roman Catholic corporate expressions, they became known as Huguenots in France.

And that was really a thriving branch of the Christian church for a long time.

But then in political wars, at a point where it was seen, it seemed as if the French governing authorities were going to side with this Huguenot branch, they turned tail at one point and they stomped out virtually all expressions of the Huguenot expression of Christianity.

Huguenot Christianity was found especially in the middle and upper classes and also in the trades and the guilds.

And many of these people were killed.

The St.

Bartholomew's Day massacre is a famous one from history.

And many of them moved north and across Europe, particularly into the Netherlands and Belgium, and some places to the east of that in Prussia.

So we have this branch of reformed Christianity that starts thriving and then is stamped out, but moves into the northern lowlands, where Calvinism is also the growing way of understanding Christianity.

And there it will become not Huguenot, but Reformed.

And that will be primarily in the Netherlands and in Belgium, into Hungary, and also into Switzerland.

So we have this kind of center part that geographically understands Christianity in what will become known as the Reformed way of thinking.

There will be three documents in particular that will give shape to that.

One will be the Belgic Confession, one will be the Heidelberg Catechism, and one will be the canons of Dort.

These three will be mirrored later in England, where there is another branch of Reformed Christianity as John Knox studies under John Calvin and takes it back to Scotland and to the British Isles.

There it will become known as Presbyterianism, and there will be the Westminster documents, the Westminster Confession, the Westminster shorter catechism, the Westminster Longer Catechism, the Book of Common Prayer, and things like that.

The rest of Europe to the South and to the West will remain primarily under the renewed Roman expression of things.

Following the movements of the Reformation that we looked at last time, there is a kind of counter-revolution, a counter-reformation that's centered around a new church council, the Council of Trent.

And that council of Trent will sort of dig in and it will reaffirm sort of the late medieval corporate structures and practices of the church as it's expressed out of Rome.

Papal infallibility.

It'll even press the issue, the seven sacraments.

It'll talk about the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

I mean, it will dig hard and really produce the key elements that are associated with Roman Catholic Christianity to this day.

So we have the Lutherans in the north, we have this long strip of Eastern Orthodox that's connected a little bit to the Copts, and then we have Reformed Christianity under Calvin and leading through the Low Countries in the north of Europe and then over into England.

And then we have Roman Catholicism, and then we also have Anglicanism, which does a dance with Calvin's perspective of Reformed Christianity, but also does a dance with Roman Catholic expressions of Christianity while not bowing to the authority of the Pope.

So we have kind of a strange thing happening there.

In any case, what we have by the 16th century is that the old Roman Empire has largely been taken over by Christianity.

Christianity has basically caused the Roman Empire to survive and kept it in a sense free from the total wipeout produced by the movements of Islam.

And then after the Reformation, it splinters into some rather significant groupings.

And that's where we'll next find our second theme for this session, and that's the idea of ecclesiology.

So what does the church mean?

Well, we have the New Testament expressions of that.

We have Jesus talking about the church as his bride and some of his parables.

The rest of the New Testament will use the language of the body of Christ.

We'll have this image of Jesus coming to restore the worlds in the book of Revelation and claiming the church as his bride.

So there's this kind of dynamic representation of the church.

What happened at the time of the Reformation in particular is that while the church had taken on two major corporate expressions, the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic expression, now people were beginning to challenge the right of those corporate expressions of Christianity to actually be legitimate at all.

This was part of the target of the early reformers, Huss and Wycliffe.

This was part of the Lutheran uh Martin Luther's challenge to the church.

How can you be church and own so much property and wield armies and Be the sort of the thing that controls all of society.

This was certainly John Calvin's approach, that the church was the invisible expression of the body of Christ, which sometimes connected with visible entities, but the visible entities were themselves uncertain in terms of their expression of true Christianity.

We find, for instance, in the Belgic Confession the idea of the true church and the false church.

And here we're talking about the invisible church that is the gathering of all of Jesus' people everywhere, which is beyond all denominational barriers, and the false and sometimes visible church that begins to express itself as a corporate entity and takes on a mirror image of corporate structures like corporations and like nation states with armies and wealth and buildings and all of these legalities.

And so there's a growing tension between these two.

And that will get us into an understanding of how the church begins to have different connotations within different communities.

The Lutheran expression is that the corporate structure is probably bad, and we need to be a worshiping community.

The Reform says that the kingdom of God supersedes the church.

The kingdom of God is everywhere and everything, and the church is one way in which the kingdom of God comes to expression, and it needs to preach Christ and it needs to comfort people, but it also needs to influence society without itself becoming a corporate entity in society.

And then we have some who move even further than that.

And that's what we call generally the Anabaptists.

And these were the people that were kind of a tailspin off Luther and Calvin's reforming movements.

They began to sense that all corporate structures were inherently evil and wicked.

And because of that, anything that tried to tie church or the body of Christ with a corporate structure was inherently bad.

The church had to recover its sense of simply being the people of Jesus who lived simple lives, who did not involve themselves in building kingdoms, who witnessed through their lives and their simplicity and their humility to the grace of God, they lived simply.

And that became sort of the anabaptistic expression where the corporate was entirely gone.

Now, these different ecclesiologies, these different ways of understanding what the church is about, they gave shape also to the manner in which people began to see how Jesus is present in the church.

And that gave rise to three specific ecclesiologies or three specific ecclesiastical governing structures.

The old structure was modeled after the Roman Empire.

Christianity for the first couple of centuries had been persecuted.

Christians were outsiders.

They were people who existed in cultures but were not of cultures.

They were the people who believed in Jesus, believed in forgiveness, believed in God's way of doing things, and met simply and talked about these things and were often persecuted because they failed to participate in some of the religious life of communities.

But once Constantine came along, almost immediately the residue of Christianity within the larger Roman Empire began to fall into the corporate structures of the Roman government.

And it was particularly true when Constantine moved the capital from Rome to Constantinople.

And basically the western part of the Roman Empire became governed by the church.

So the church moved into the corporate identity of Rome, and that's how the Roman Catholic expression of Christianity developed.

It was hand in fist, tied together, knit together with what Rome used to be.

And that's how the structures came into being.

That's the episcopal form of church identity.

Virtually the antithesis of that is the Anabaptist movement.

And the Anabaptist movement said all of that is completely human, that has nothing to do with Jesus.

That's governing structures and that's buildings and that's corporate identities and that's wealth and that's power and that's armies.

And that is simply not what Jesus is about.

So the opposite identity of ecclesiology is the Anabaptist identity, which is that of simple Christians living simply and building no structures.

And so in the far end of the Anabaptist, we eventually call it kind of congregational church identity and polity.

Individuals have a relationship with God.

And then because we are in connection with Jesus and the rest of Jesus people, we form assemblies, but those assemblies don't have hierarchical structure.

Instead, this is where things happen on the local level and in my life and in what we do in humble obedience to Jesus every day.

That's the congregational way.

But the reformers were aware that the church had to have some kind of corporate expression.

And particularly Paul's writings to the Corinthians, particularly 1 Corinthians, indicated that there needed to be some kind of leadership roles and there needed to be some kind of corporate structures.

And so a third way, in between sort of the Roman governing model, the episcopal model, and sort of the Jesus lives in my heart congregational model, something became known as the Reformed or Presbyterian model.

And here the emphasis is neither on the immense corporate structure giving shape to the church, nor on the local community or local individual simply being a pious follower of Jesus, but on the power of the community, the congregation, the nature of the church coming to expression in community, where Jesus is the head of the body, but the body is very visible.

It's bigger than any individual member.

And the spirit lives in that community like the spirit of God lived in the temple.

We are the temple of God.

And the spirit gives a variety of gifts, and these gifts then help shape the body.

And so some are leaders and some have gifts of this or that or the next thing.

The best way to see the life of the church, the life of the bride of Christ, the continuing expression of Christianity, is not in corporate structures, and it's not merely in individual piety, but in congregational manifestation of the messiness of the body of Christ.

Now, those congregations, as we see in the New Testament already, they form entities of their own, but they are in connection with other entities like that.

And the question is, what's the nature of those connections?

Do some of the connections supersede congregational authority, or do the congregations form the top entity of that?

Do congregations supersede the authority of the individual?

You see the messiness of this, but that's ecclesiology.

And those three major ecclesiologies began to emerge at the time of the Reformation.

They in turn would give rise to different forms of sacramental identity.

This is the third of my topics for this session: the sacraments.

What happened over time in the corporate structures of the Roman Catholic Church is that the church became, like the Roman government, the dominating force of society, and we can't have competing governments.

And the government itself needs to provide for the care of all.

And in that context, there was an idea that developed, and this is the sacramental system, that the church has the monopoly on people's spiritual identities and their movements in society and their processing into the next world when they die.

And around this was built the idea of the sacraments.

Now, originally, that term is not found in the New Testament, but the sacrament, the idea of sacrament, was a term in ancient Latin that involved when people gathered the first militias for the army of the Roman Republic.

And someone would say, I want to lead a troop into battle on behalf of our government.

That person would then build his own troop, and the people in his troop would take an oath that they would follow and they would obey the leadership of that person.

And in order to pledge that oath, typically they would hand a piece of clothing over to that leader.

That piece of clothing, typically a sandal, but it could be other things as well, typically that would be understood to be a sacrament.

So a sacrament in its original context was an oath taken by someone to be with someone else through thick and through thin.

And that pledge was confirmed and visualized by a specific manifestation, something you could see and touch and feel.

It wasn't until the third century, till the 200s, that the term was first used for baptism and the Lord's Supper.

It's very clear in the New Testament that Jesus says, go make disciples and baptize them.

And baptism was present in the world of Jesus' day.

And Jesus takes this meal, this Passover meal that he has with his disciples, and he says, You do this regularly and remember me.

So those two things are very clearly part of the New Testament.

It wasn't until the third century that Tertullian said, that's kind of like a sacrament.

And what he was doing is saying, Jesus makes a pledge to be with us, like those Roman soldiers took a pledge to be with their commander, and Jesus confirms that pledge with visible things, the water of baptism or the bread and the cup of the Lord's Supper.

These become visible tokens of a pledge, an invisible pledge.

That was later developed a little bit further by Augustine.

But along the way, what happened is that the Roman Catholic expression of Christianity took on its role as being the governing body of the entire community, the entire region, the old Roman Empire, and then took upon itself the need to process everything that took place and added to these two rites that Jesus had commanded, other rituals that also involved certain oaths and activities.

And so it wasn't enough that someone was baptized into the church, but one needed to be confirmed.

And that became another one.

And that led to first communion.

And so communion itself was another one.

And then since we process life and go up and down and have our successes and our weaknesses, we need penance and absolution.

And then one of the big movements of our lives is going into marriage.

But then again, the church says that its clergy can't marry.

So it parallels marriage and holy orders.

And then, of course, we all get sick and eventually die.

And so there's this one that floats around for a while.

Sometimes it's called last rites, sometimes it's called extreme unction.

Eventually, now it's been settled to the sacrament for the sick and dying.

And so it goes across life.

And these were added as rituals.

And it was not until the 1400s, the very time of the Reformation, the 15th century, just about the time of the Reformation, that finally these things were solidified as the sacraments of the church.

Well, for 1400 years, they had not been officially endorsed in that way, but now they became the absolute expression of the church, and the church owned the monopoly.

In the Reformation, what took place is that these reformers, these protesters, were saying, wait a minute, Jesus provides salvation to us, even though the church may not have a direct hand in all of that.

And when we want to remember Jesus, we can do so without some official from the church coming into our homes or into our businesses and saying, I want to make sure you do it right.

And so we have the church being tugged back and forth as these three forms of ecclesiology grow, and it begins to affect the manner in which the sacraments are expressed.

And looking at each of the sacraments, then, or at least the two, that all Christians everywhere recognize, it was the Anabaptists who said, well, babies shouldn't be baptized because they have no knowledge of what Jesus did.

And here's where we get into a rather interesting thing because there are actually two forms of baptism already in the early days of the Christian church in the New Testament.

There is the baptism practiced by John the Baptist.

He was addressing his fellow Jews, the males among whom were already circumcised and identified as part of the family of the covenant and the females by their attachment to the males.

But he was saying to them, You haven't been living responsibly.

It's time for you to take things into hand.

You gotta devote yourselves, get baptized, show people that you're gonna stand up for your faith and you're gonna live as if this stuff matters.

So John's baptism was essentially what in my circles and some other circles is called profession of faith or confirmation, where someone who was brought into the community as a child or an infant now takes on adult affirmations of that.

And what the what the Anabaptists now said is that's what baptism should be.

It should not be to children who don't know what's going on.

And so they rejected their having been baptized in the church as infants, and that's why they were called Anabaptists.

And that began the sweeping movement into the modern church of what's sometimes termed believers' baptism.

Now there's a second form of baptism in the New Testament, and that's the one that the church has continually practiced, and that's why typically there's children's baptism or baptism of the infants of believers.

And this has to do with the idea that baptism is not a sign of our faith toward God, but a sign of God's gift to us.

And think about it this way: we have three daughters.

When our daughters were born, imagine that we said, well, well, we don't know what they're going to turn out like.

Maybe we shouldn't give them names because it may not reflect who they are or who they become.

Let them pick names when they get older.

And certainly let's not give them the family name, the Brower name.

Can you imagine what they might do to the name if they besmirch it, if they do crazy things?

We shouldn't consider them browers until they've earned the right to be browers.

Well, we wouldn't do that because we believe that children come into this world as part of the family unit.

They belong to the family, and part of our responsibility is to say they are us, even if they don't yet know it.

And that's kind of what the church's baptism is about.

That all who come into the community of Jesus come in by way of baptism.

It's sort of the gang colors, it's sort of the initiation rite.

It has nothing to do with individuals' testimony.

It has everything to do with God's testimony.

You are mine, you belong to me.

Whether in your adult years you come into the faith, or as a child you're brought in with your parents, all who are part of the community are baptized.

And so that becomes a tension in the Christian church as to how we view this thing.

Do we affirm the way of baptism of John, which was kind of a profession of adult commitments?

Or do we go the way that circumcision had indicated participation in the community, even with children who did not know what the community was all about?

And everything in the New Testament seems to point in that direction.

Do we have the children of believers being baptized as participants in the community?

Or does the community only get formed when some have understood these things as adults and then are baptized?

The bulk of the church carried forward the idea that all who participate in the community, including the children of believing parents, should be marked with the sacrament of baptism.

But we have the Anabaptist reaction that moves into the Baptist communities and Pentecostal communities that emerge out of the time of the Reformation.

Also, with regard to the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist or the Mass, the question there is: does this actually give Jesus to you?

And again, the church was caught up in the division.

Do these things actually give us Jesus or do they symbolize Jesus' commitments to us?

And so during and after the time of the Reformation, people began to debate whether the elements of the Mass or the Lord's Supper actually turned into the physical body and blood of Jesus, transubstantiation, which became the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic branch of the church, or consubstantiation, the official way in which Luther saw it, that somehow it's not exactly the physical body and blood of Jesus, but the physical body and blood of Jesus is present wherever the spiritual body and blood of Jesus is.

And so it is in with and under.

Or is it spiritual presence that the physical presence of Jesus has been taken to heaven, but his spiritual divine identity is extended.

Far beyond the limits of his physical body and therefore is spiritually at the table and in the elements?

Or is it simply a remembrance, a memorial, some token that reminds us, oh yeah, there was a Jesus.

So there are at least four different ways in which this ecclesiology further divides the church in terms of how we look at the sacraments themselves.

Well, that leads us to a fourth topic for this session, and that's the topic of war.

Because the church of the Middle Ages in Europe became a very large government, governing entity, corporate structure with lots of money and lots of land to protect and use to generate more money, and therefore it required armies.

And the church, although it had begun as pacifists prior to Constantine, virtually everything we know about the early Christians is that they were pacifists, and if soldiers became Christians, they would leave the army.

That the church believed in Jesus' terms to turn the other cheek.

We believe in life, so we do not kill.

Even if it means we ourselves will be killed, we will not retaliate.

The early church was pacifist, but given the structures of the Roman Catholic entity, the church became militant.

And so we have this scene ultimately in the crusades, where the church directly creates armies to send against the armies of the Muslims.

We raise money to support honor guards.

We raise money to support the Swiss guards that protect the Pope to this day with their unique uniforms and the way in which they have their headpieces and all this.

The church took on corporate structures and became very assertive, very aggressive.

There had been a strong stream within the church that said, hmm, while nation states need to defend themselves and Christians participate in nation states, can we say that the church inherently should own and operate armies?

And so there was pushback against that.

And it started with Augustine and was developed by Aquinas and others.

It was called the just war theory.

Kind of fascinating that this has become news in these last days with regard to the manner in which political and religious folks are talking about whether the United States can engage in certain forms of war.

And is this blessed by God?

It's all part of contemporary society.

Well, just war theory said this: because we live in a broken world, there are going to be problems and difficulties and challenges.

And those difficulties and challenges need to be addressed in some way by policing and probably military actions.

So nation states are just inherently bound to raise up armies.

And even Paul seems to acknowledge that in Romans chapter 13, where Paul says that the government has been instituted by God to preserve some kind of peace and order.

Romans 13 · chapter mention

So respect the government, even it has the power of the sword.

So there is inherent in Christianity a recognition that military actions and techniques to hold peace or create peace are somehow necessary.

What's the relationship between the church and these things?

Well, the just war theory said that nation states can only go to war for an appropriate reason if it is in defense or in recovering from invasion.

Sort of like if you are in your home and someone comes and breaks in, you have a right, perhaps even an obligation, to defend yourself and your property.

Try to use the least force possible.

You do not immediately have a mandate to kill the other person, but you do have a right to protect yourself and your family and even your home from invasion by others.

And the war should stop when the end has been achieved, that things go back to a kind of stasis.

The invasion is put down and the boundaries are restored and peace is reestablished.

The goal to war should always be peace and the hope and the healing and the peacefulness of the citizens of every realm.

That's just war theory.

And then there were the Anabaptists.

And they said, Jesus says, turn the other cheek.

Jesus says to his disciples, when the Roman contingent comes to arrest him, put down your swords.

Jesus could have called ten thousand angels to destroy the world and to set him free, but he died in penance and alone on the cross without calling out the battalions of heaven to protect him.

That's the way of Jesus.

So now following our ecclesiology and our sacraments, there are three different ways in which Christians have begun to assume Christians might or can be involved in military actions.

Triumphalism says we are on God's side.

God rules, God's way rules, Jesus is our general, Jesus has all of the forces of heaven.

We go in God's name and we do God's righteous bidding wherever God calls us to do it.

And our our our battles, our wars are always righteous and just.

Crusades, things like that.

The second way is the way of the just war theory.

We live in a compromised and broken world, and Christians need to influence governments everywhere to deal justly and wisely with armaments and weapons and battalions and armies and the movement of people and nations.

We don't do it easily, but there are times when we recognize we need to be involved in military and policing actions.

And it is not wrong for Christians to participate, but Christians must always recognize war itself is a system of failure.

It is not a solution to anything.

And it must be done only so that some kind of peace and hopeful prosperity is brought to any particular people.

And the pacifists, the Anabaptists, who say the way of Jesus is the way of peace.

We will not serve in any capacity as police officers or military personnel.

We will be part of the medical operations, we will be part of the cleanups, we will be part of promoting peace and arbitration, but we will not participate in military actions.

So that's the fourth of the themes that I wanted to talk about today.

And that leads us finally to number five.

And number five is the idea of migration.

We started out with the geography of where the church was and how the differing areas seemed to sort of develop slightly different expressions of their understanding of Christianity.

And then these expressions of Christianity were identified with certain perspectives about ecclesiology.

How do we clearly identify the church and how does it take on shape in our world?

And that led to the sacraments and how the church is involved in processing the important moments of Christians' lives.

And that leads to talk about war.

Do Christians participate in the military systems of nation states or not?

And how is that to be understood?

And that leads us back to geography.

Because following the Reformation, there were horrendous wars in Europe.

And the wars were basically produced out of the old, early, medieval Roman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Christian Church, Roman Catholic expression of Christianity.

This is our territory.

We rule here, we're the church here, we own this territory, and you don't, so you have to get out.

And it kind of splintered the map of Europe and beyond with regard to how the thing would be divided up.

And typically the losers moved.

Large portions of the Anabaptists who refused to take up arms, get this.

People in those days, even people from the Reformed movement, but certainly the Roman Catholic movement, they would capture these Anabaptists and they would say, You don't believe in Jesus anymore.

Yes, we do.

Well, you don't believe in the church anymore.

Yes, we do.

Well, you don't believe in the sacraments anymore.

Well, you got us there.

You don't want to be baptized?

We're going to baptize you until you are going to be baptized.

And they would tie people, Anabaptists, to chairs on long poles, and they would dunk them in the water, and they would keep dunking them in the water until they either recanted and said, Okay, we'll get we'll get on your side, or they would drown.

And so you baptized people to death.

So there began to be these pushes, and the Anabaptists, every time, lost out, and they migrated across Europe to safe places, Prussia and Poland.

And then many of them came to the Americas and two places in particular, Western United States and Western Canada, and then also down into Brazil and Mexico, some places there.

And we have big colonies of Mennonites and Amish and other forms, Hutterites of the Anabaptists.

The Reformed people moved out of France when the St.

Bartholomew's Day massacre took place across Northern Europe.

Many of them became amalgamated into the Reformed movement.

The Reformed movement itself kind of was in northern Europe and participated in the breakaway from the Holy Roman Empire fighting against Spain.

And many of them then later on migrated to different places to South Africa, to Australia and New Zealand, and to the United States and Canada.

In the British Isles, the Puritans and the dissenters moved first to the communities of like Amsterdam, where the reform people had created sort of sheltered communities of refugees.

And then later on, many of them moved over to North America, especially as the British took over vast portions of the United States, what would become the United States.

And so the entire area that's still called New England became the place of refuge for the Puritans.

And that's why Protestant Christianity has long been at the heartbeat of the United States identity because many of the founders were deeply associated with that.

And that was connected especially to Calvinism and Puritanism and to Presbyterianism.

And so there's reason for these to take place.

What we're going to look at next time is the other big movements, and these will be the movements of colonialization.

And that's where we'll find that because of Portugal's rule of the seas, at one point Brazil becomes Portuguese and speaks Portuguese to this day.

And places where Spain, which ruled the seas also at one time, wherever Spain went, particularly Central and South America apart from Brazil, it remains Roman Catholic or becomes Roman Catholic.

And wherever the Protestants move, they influence other communities in that way.

And what will happen is this kind of dual thing called colonialization and mission.

And they'll piggyback on one another and recreate the configuration of every nation on planet Earth.

There is excitement because Christianity is on the move.

But there is an awful lot of pain in Europe and in the Middle East and in Africa and in the colonies everywhere because of the difficulties of this changing understanding or splintered understanding of the Christian church and how that comes to expression in individual and congregational and corporate structure life.

But we'll get into more of that next time.