Session 3: Expansion & Division | Our Family Story: Charting Again the History of Jesus’ Church

All right.

Good to see everyone again.

Let me remind you that this is built on the back of the scriptural study.

It's always about scripture, it's always about what is God doing and how do we know what God is doing.

And that comes from the Bible.

We do not have access to seeing Jesus face to face on a day-by-day basis, but we know Jesus is there in heaven and always with us in spirit.

But the Bible tells us what's going on.

And if you recall, I suggested there are six words we can use to talk about the Bible.

And I want to keep repeating this because it's very important to see that the history of the church is built on these six principles that come right from Scripture.

Number one, it's the mission of God.

The story of the Bible says that we are humans, are the children of God, made in God's image, and that we have lost our way and we have left home.

We have been removed from God's presence, or we have removed ourselves from God's presence.

But the great mission of God is to bring all of God's children back home again.

The second word is manager or method, and what God has chosen to do, and this is the story of the Old Testament, is to make use of one particular family among the many families of earth.

These are all God's children, but to focus on one manageable-sized family, the family of Abraham, and to give a special attention to that family, eventually planting that family in a strategic spot which could influence all of the other peoples of the earth, all of God's children, to regain a sense of their place with their creator, with their heavenly father.

The third idea is the managers, those who give shape to that community.

And there are actually six individuals or groups.

They are Moses and then Joshua and then the elders of the people, and then the judges of the book of judges, and then the kings who take over after the judges, Samuel being kind of the last judge.

And then when the kings fail in their leadership responsibilities, the prophets.

And that's where we have the flow of the Old Testament.

That leads us to the fourth idea, and that's the meltdown in the Old Testament.

The meltdown is basically the way in which this mission of God seems to stall.

The people of Israel, the family of Abraham, they don't have the capacity or they don't have the will to follow through, and the kingdom shrinks and it gets ripped in pieces and it's torn apart by other nations, and then eventually all that's left is a remnant people, the people of Judah who are taken and displaced and put in Babylon, and then after 70 years are allowed to go back home.

Many of them go back home, not all of them go back home, but that's the re-establishment of God's people in what we know as Canaan or the Levant or the place right along the eastern Mediterranean coast.

That people, because they were the people of Judah, become known as the Jews.

And this will become the family from which Jesus will emerge.

And that's really the fifth word for the Bible.

That's the miracle.

When the Old Testament mission of God seems to stall and maybe even to be in failure mode, suddenly God does the thing himself, and God comes miraculously in the person of Jesus to be us and divine, God and human at the same time to accomplish the work of salvation and to re-energize the mission of God.

And here's where there is a change, and this is the sixth word, mutation.

Because instead of it being a renewal of the nation of Israel, it becomes a community that is dispersed to the ends of the world.

This is the church, and this is the communities from which we are drawn and in which we participate around the world.

Also, part of that change is that while the Old Testament prophets saw this one great day of the Lord coming in which God would accomplish everything, wipe out sin and bring salvation to a remnant community and usher in the perfect eternal kingdom, Jesus actually split it in two so that the mutation is the changing of God's strategy, not the changing of God's mission.

But instead of people going to Israel to find God, now the community of God is spread among the nations.

And that's why each of us is located in our various regions and why we are the ones who continue to talk about the mission of God.

Now, what we looked at in the last two sessions is how the first 300 years of that mission was a struggle, but it was a fascinating and exciting struggle because, in spite of all the opposition, both initially from the much of the Jewish community and then in major ways from the Roman Empire, which controlled the world of that day into which Jesus was born, the church grew and multiplied extensively among the peoples around the Mediterranean Sea.

Also, by way of trade and by mission efforts, the gospel went to the east so that it extended as far west as the entire Mediterranean basin, but also as far east as the Silk Road took it to India and China.

The Christian church was spread rapidly across that midsection of planet Earth involved with Africa, Asia, and Europe.

And it was beginning to stretch north and south.

And that's where we went to last week, where suddenly things changed when Constantine became the emperor of Rome.

In a very short while, he changed the way in which society generally interacted with the Christian church, so much so that instead of being a persecuted minority on the edges and fringes of society, and many times having members who were of the lower classes of society, the slaves and the servants and the outsiders, suddenly, with Constantine's endorsement, Christianity came to the center of Roman identity and life.

And it would remain there for about 400 years.

Christianity would be tied very closely to the Roman Empire.

Today I'd like to talk about five things.

And each of these in series, they're interconnected, but they talk about things that happened in that next 400 years.

One of those is simply the establishment of Rome as the center of everything, including the church.

When Constantine brought peace and took away the persecutions of the church, what happened is that he went on to endorse the church as the most respectable way of seeing the world and experiencing and expressing religion, but he also meddled in the affairs of the church, so much so that he began to think that he, as the emperor, had a right to settle differences and difficulties within the church around the Mediterranean world.

That was the start of the councils.

Now there would be eventually 22 councils in the West to date, and only seven of those, the first seven of those, well, not even the first seven, because there was one council that was actually rejected by a later council, and so it kind of disappears from history.

But there are seven ecumenical councils that are understood by the whole church globally, wherever we are, to have given wisdom and direction to the establishment of Christian teachings, Christian theology, definition to the scriptures, a way of life for the church.

A lot of things were given to us through those seven ecumenical councils.

But they began by Constantine, the emperor, claiming that he had the right and the privilege to determine that.

So Rome began to meddle in the affairs of the church.

And also with the transition, remember that Constantine believed he was God sent to be not only the savior of the Roman Empire, but also the savior of the church.

He saw that vision, at least he later reported this, that on the night before the biggest battle that would net him the entire Roman world, he saw this sign in the skies, in the heavens, in the sun, of the shooting rays, and the two letters, key and row, which were the first two letters of Christos in both the Greek and the Latin language.

And he believed that he was sent by Jesus to take over the Roman world, but also to give life and health and direction and stability to the Christian church.

Well, in so doing, he handed over to the churches right after that, not only this peace and stability, but he handed over to the churches, the basilicas, which were the king's buildings in every major center of the Roman Empire.

And they became the sort of collecting spots for worship, public worship.

The church had not had the ability to worship publicly.

Now they were given buildings, and these buildings then translated into what the at least the Western Roman Catholic branch of the Christian Church would know as the central worship spots and identification places, the basilicas.

Also, the Roman Empire was divided into parishes, small pieces of area territory that were sort of given under the leadership of one local ruler, and then dioceses, which were the extended collection of parishes.

All of these terms and words now filtered into the Christian church, and they became the way in which the Christian church began to organize itself.

And that leads me to the second major theme for today, and that's the rise of Rome.

What happened is that Constantine moved his capital city from Rome, which had historically been the center of the Roman identity and empire, and the Roman Republic before that.

He moved the center of government over to Constantinople, Istanbul today.

In the vacuum that was created in leaving Rome, the one stabilizing force seemed to be the Christian church, since the Christian church had taken over the mannerisms of the Roman Empire, had taken over the public buildings of the Roman Empire, had taken over the collection of hierarchy of officials of the Roman Empire.

All of these things the church just kind of moved into and assumed.

And it wasn't long before people were talking about Rome as being the heartbeat or the center of the Christian church.

Now, those in the East were not so pleased with that or so sure about that.

And so we have this division between East and West.

But in the West, the Christian church kind of took over the local governing of the Western Roman Empire.

And when the legions of Rome were no longer able to contain the movements of new peoples in, the Goths and the Visigoths from northern and eastern Europe, these peoples would come in, the Huns, the Vandals, and sweep by sweep until the Huns remember him.

They would come across and they would attack Rome because Rome had this reputation.

But instead of destroying Rome entirely, almost invariably these peoples were highly influenced by the strength of the organization of Rome as now expressed through the church.

And during the next several hundred years, what happens is that Christianity becomes the stabilizing force for the Roman Empire in the West and actually becomes the manner in which these new peoples invading this area begin to think about God and gods and religion and life.

Over the next several hundred years, Western Europe will largely become Christianized.

Now, not necessarily in ways that we would necessarily hope for, but they will become Christianized in the way of Christendom, the Roman Empire retaining its corporate identity, but now filtered through the hierarchy and structures of the church.

So the church will sort of take over mid to Western Europe, and we will call that time the period of Christendom.

It will come to its greatest expression in people like Charlemagne Charles the Great, who in 800 is crowned as the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire is gone, but the church has taken its place.

Now, this changes the way the church self-perceives.

It will lead eventually to the idea that Christianity and Europe are one and the same thing.

So that you can't live within Europe without, in some measure, responding to the Christian church, not necessarily in all of its message or its doctrines of salvation, but in terms of its structures of authority.

This will give rise to things that we still cope with today.

What's the nature between the church and the government?

What's the relationship between the two, and how do we manage those things?

Especially in regions where Christianity is dominant, there is a sense in which people have to live according to a Christianized society.

And that society is not necessarily itself driven by the original principles of Jesus and the mind of Jesus and the heartbeat of Jesus.

So it's a real tension that goes on.

The third thing I want to think about is the relationship between East and West.

While the councils were one way of finding unity among the spreading, broadening church, they also began to point out unique differences between the mindset of the East and the mindset of the West.

The mindset of the West was largely shaped by the law and order Roman sense of structures and government.

And that's why we have largely this sense of canon law and structures and government that still give shape to one of the biggest branches of Christianity on planet Earth, the Roman Catholic Church.

The Roman Catholic Church is part of the large family of Jesus, but the Roman Catholic Church, as it comes to institutional expression, continues to carry with it some of the structuring or all of the structuring, essentially, that was part of the Roman government.

And it has to do with finding your place and staying in your place and listening to the word or the law that's given from the top down.

Many of my students are Roman Catholic.

And many times I will talk with the classes about what Jesus is about or what the Bible says.

And sometimes I'll have Roman Catholic students come to me after class and say, I'll have to check this out because I'm not sure what the church says about this.

And so the idea is that the top authority is not even necessarily scripture or even reflections on Jesus' words, but what does the church say about this?

In the East, something different was taking place, and we know this.

Like one of my classes right now, I have an a Greek Orthodox student.

And this person says, Wow, I'm learning a lot about the Bible.

You know, we never talked about the Bible in our church.

It's more a reflection of our culture, and this is more of the mindset of the East.

In the West, it is the structure and the government and the authority.

And in the East, it's more the community as it gathers.

And this is one of the reasons why, even through the changes and challenges, particularly of the rise of Islam, one of the most stable groups of Christians around the world has been the Coptic Christians of Egypt.

Copt is actually an older form of the name Egypt.

But these people became so much a part of their culture and then saw Christianity as the means of identity that to this day they were almost impervious to the Muslim invasion.

And part of that gives rise to what we call the Orthodox Church.

The Orthodox Church is more of the Eastern expression of Christianity, in which communities and societies are not built from the top down, but they're built by cultural expression of connectedness.

While the church in the West became the institution that gave truth, in the east, it was more the community itself that reached for truth through the worship of Christians.

And this became one of the places where the East and West were somewhat divided.

They couldn't quite agree on the exact wording.

In the West, they wanted Jesus to be the one from heaven who comes and gives authority, while in the East they said Jesus is the human who shows us how we can experience God.

There was a difference in the way in which they even understood the role of Jesus in the church.

And the church itself, in the West, was more to give structure and to outline the things that we do as Christians.

And in the East, it was much more the church is the gateway into eternity, that worship is always taking place in eternity in heaven.

The angels are constantly worshiping before the throne of God.

The throne of God is there.

And the church is the means by which the door stays open so that we can see and experience God.

And so you will see a different way of living out or experiencing or expressing Christianity in these two major groupings of the Christian church.

Their theology is the same.

There is one Christian theology.

There's God, there's humanity, there's sinfulness, there's salvation in Jesus Christ, there's the Spirit, there's the teachings of Scripture.

But the way in which the communities function with regard to these things began increasingly to separate.

And then eventually they began to divide on the basis of two specific things.

We call this the icon controversy, but it was really larger than that.

You know how it is even in our politicized societies that there are cultural differences among us, but we will pick one particular issue or another particular issue and say, well, that's the issue, and we'll have to fight about that.

And so in this case, the cultures were gradually moving in separate directions.

And then with that, they began to choose one and maybe two things that were going to be at the heart of our controversy or our fighting with one another.

The major one that came to light was what we call the icon controversy.

And here we have to think about the second commandment.

In the Ten Commandments, all the way back from Mount Sinai, shaping the lives of ancient Israel and carrying on to the present, we have the Ten Commandments, which are sort of a summary part of that great covenant God made with Israel.

And the second commandment says, You shall not make for yourselves any images, any likeness of things that are above or that are on the earth or that are under the water in the waters under the earth.

You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, it may jealous God.

Etc.

etc.

You know what it says there.

So in Israel, there weren't any representations of God.

In fact, when they tried to do it at Mount Sinai with the golden calf, that became a symbol of their waywardness and their alienation from God.

And so there were no images made of God, but there were also attempts to refrain from other kinds of pictures and statues and things like that.

The Israelite religion did not have that as its expression.

Now, Judaism is the ongoing continuation of a part of Israelite religion.

So you would have the same within Judaism.

And Christianity is born out of Judaism, and it carries with it that whole history of ancient Israel.

And so the idea was there that in the Christian church, in the Christian religion, we don't make images.

But that all was debated and discussed.

And over time, images and Christian art began to take expression.

Now, why did they do that?

In part because of what Paul says about Jesus being the very image of God.

We cannot see an unseen God, an invisible or distant deity, but we can see a man, and Jesus is a man, and so Jesus brings the fullness of deity into our visible range.

And so there was a question in the early church: can we represent God, or at least can we represent Jesus?

And in the West, there was a sense that we have to focus on the work Jesus did.

Now, this will change over time, so that by the time of the Reformation, the Western church will have lots of paintings and images and carvings and statues, not of God, but of Mary and of angels and Joseph and Jesus and all of those kinds of things, even to the extent where we have the crucifix, where the idea through which we see Jesus is Christ on the cross.

The reformers will react against that once again.

You see how these things change over time.

But the West and its start said we don't make pictures, we don't do representations, we don't have statues, we don't do that.

In the East, there was a different way of thinking about this, and that's that it is precisely because people don't read that we need to have pictures.

When we're very young, we often have picture books, we see images.

And so in the East, the idea is that we don't worship these things, but we need to have these pictures because these pictures are the teaching tools of the church.

And they become, and that's this is why in the Orthodox uh community, what you'll see is they're often very bright and shiny with gold and silver, because the idea is that through these pictures we are reflecting or seeing the light of heaven, and the Eastern Church would say this is precisely what we need in order to fully appreciate and understand eternity.

The West says, no, we need the laws, the East says no, we need the images at the center of our worship and our communities.

And then it was pitted on one more thing, and this became how we begin to talk about leadership.

And in the West, there was this sense with Imperial Rome that there's got to be one top dog.

There's got to be one person at the head of it all.

And who is the one at the head?

Well, since Rome itself has resurged in potency and power because of the Christian church, the person who's there ought to be the one who's in charge.

And so there was a growth in the idea that the bishop of Rome has greater significance.

But this was coupled with a theology.

And what was the theology?

The apostle Peter spent the last years of his life, probably about a decade or a little less, in Rome and became the leader of the congregation in Rome.

And then we go back to the Gospels and they say, at one point, Jesus asked the disciples, Who do people say that I am?

And they said, Well, some say you're the prophet, and some say you're Elijah, some say you're Jeremiah, some say this, some say that.

And Jesus said to them, And who do you say I am?

And Peter said, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And Jesus said to him, You know, it's not flesh and blood that's revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven, and I say, You are the rock.

That's what Peter means.

You are the rock, and upon this rock I will build my church.

So in the West, the idea of the Bishop of Rome, coupled with the fact that Peter could be seen as probably the last apostolic leader of that church and the one that Jesus had singled out for special commendation.

You know that throughout the church, this is variously understood.

But within the Roman Catholic framework, this is on the man Peter, the church is built.

Whereas many of us believe that it's on the testimony that you alone are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

On that testimony, the church is built.

But needless to say, the different interpretations lead to different outcomes.

In the East, they said, no, Jesus had 12 disciples, and all of the disciples were important.

There may be times when Peter stood up, but there were times when Jesus said to him, Get behind me, Satan, that Peter had not said the right thing, and Peter had denied Jesus at the crucifixion or at the trial of Jesus and all of these kinds of things.

So the Eastern Church said, We understand, we understand that Peter's important, but he's not the only guy.

And so in the East, the structures of the church were more developed around the continuity of the apostles' teaching in the various communities.

And so you have the patriarchs within each of the communities, those who continue the traditions of the teachings of the apostles.

A little bit of a different way of looking at it.

And this led culturally to ways in which people would talk about Jesus, their understanding of the Holy Spirit.

You may have caught that term that was used in the writings filioqua.

In the Nicene Creed, we have the idea that Jesus, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

That's filioqua in the Greek and Latin languages.

But in the East they say, well, the Spirit proceeds from the Father, but can operate independently from the Son.

And so you can have an ecstatic experience of the Spirit, just as Saul, first king of Israel, had an ecstatic experience of the Spirit, apart from directly knowing Jesus.

And so there was this sense that we're not going to limit the spirit to just Jesus saying, hey spirit, go there, or hey spirit, do this, that we have the independence of the members of the Trinity.

The Father does what the Father wishes, the Son does what the Son wishes, the Spirit does what the Spirit wishes.

They are all in harmony with one another, but let's not limit the Spirit to just where Jesus points his finger.

And so in the East, there was this sense of ecstatic experience within the community that could go beyond just the preaching of the word or the administration of the sacraments.

This leads to the idea that worship is central in the Eastern Church, but worship is not necessarily something that needs to be understood by everybody so long as those who are given the obligation of the church, they're ordained to those offices, they keep the doorway open to eternity.

And the smells and the bells and the chants, all of these things remind us that there's a gateway here between heaven and earth, and we circle around it and we involve ourselves as much or as little as we want.

We don't have to understand it.

We just have to know that it's constantly being experienced.

Whereas in the West, it became more of a legalistic thing, so that you do this, you do this, you do this, and it even became channeled in what became known as the sacramental theology.

Increasingly, in order to hold its authority over the communities of Europe, the Western Church would raise the significance of the sacraments.

In raising the significance of the sacraments, it was not just two times that we know for sure Jesus commanded these things, baptize those in my name, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and eat the meal remembering me.

There's clear testimonies in all of the gospels that Jesus commanded these things.

Those become central.

But what the church in the West began to perceive is that we need to be the source, the monopoly for all of the things that the people need.

They have to come to us.

And so the idea of the sacraments was expressed and extended so that we go all the way from baptism to last rites or extreme unction.

And that at each transitional stage along the way, as well as a lot of daily activities through confession and the mass, the church owns and operates the monopoly.

You must come to us in order to receive and process your salvation.

You can live how you want, we'll judge you about that, but in the end, you will not get to heaven or the next life apart from us.

We hold the monopoly.

That's the sacramental system that developed in the West and more of the community sense of the presence of God through the liturgy in the East.

Here's the third thing, and that's Augustine.

Augustine became the first really major theologian of the church.

He was born in North Africa.

He's an African.

He was born near Carthage.

Hippo was his town.

Hippo means horse.

He was born, his mother was a Christian, his dad was not.

He was groomed to become a lawyer, but he found himself loving rhetoric and the communication arts.

And he eventually wanted to become a teacher.

He went to Rome.

And while he was there, he didn't really like what was going on because teachers wanted their students to pay them for their education.

He thought teachers should give their education.

And he saw his fellow students and they weren't all that interested.

They were just out to get degrees or whatever.

And so he was disillusioned with the process of teaching.

But he did hear about a great preacher and he loved words, he loved expressions, he loved communication.

And that person was Ambrose of Milan, up in the north.

So Augustine went up to hear the preaching of Ambrose, and he was so overwhelmed and convicted that under the preaching of Ambrose up in Milan, he became a Christian and he changed his life.

He had been living with a woman for some years.

They had a child together, and it finally came to him that he was supposed to be married and he was supposed to be father to the boy.

And so they made plans and all of them started heading back to North Africa.

He got there first, and on the way, his his friend, his uh girlfriend, whatever she was to him, she and the child, they got sick and they died, or they there was an accident in which they died.

And Augustine was so crushed, he felt that the world had come apart on him.

He began to teach in a small town in North Africa, Hippo, back at his hometown and school.

And the local bishop said, Boy, the church is growing and we need help, and could you help us?

And so Augustine agreed to be an assistant to the priest or the pastor or the bishop of his church.

And then what happened is that the bishop died just a couple of months later.

And everybody said, Well, Augustine, there you are, and he took over.

He never had a seminary education, he never had a theological education, but he took over and he had such an astute mind and he read so much and he thought so deeply that Augustine became the major theologian of the early church.

And there is no one who can study theology today except by at least wrestling with the way that Augustine stated things.

And Augustine was a very sharp person.

You just have to read his confessions to see how deeply he thought about the journey of his own life and how all the way God had guided him.

Very powerful read and something you should read sometime before you die.

It's a great book.

But he also talked about other things.

He wrote manuals of instruction for newcomers to the Christian faith.

He wrote about the Trinity.

How do we understand the Trinity?

And I explained that last time.

He tended to start with the one, there's one God, and then talk about the three ways in which this one God becomes known to us in significantly different ways.

So the one becomes three in the persons of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

He also wrote about the Roman Empire.

He lived from 354 to 430.

This was just after Constantine had done his thing and moved the empire and all of that.

But Augustine became the great theologian of the church.

And one uh there were three particular things that Augustine helped the church work through.

One of those was the Donatist controversy, where before Constantine became emperor, there was a great persecution, the Decian persecution around the empire.

And in North Africa, it was along the lines of give us your scrolls of scripture and we'll know that you're no longer a Christian.

And some had done that.

And then after peace came, very soon after that, with Constantine, then those people who, those leaders in the church who had given their scrolls to the governing authorities and let them take them away, they wanted to come back and be reinstated as pastors and as church leaders.

And there was a group in the church, the Donatists, who said, No way, you lost your place.

You lost your faith.

You gave it up, and now you want to come crying back again.

You should have been strong during that time.

And there was a controversy.

What do we do with people who leave the faith for a time or recant on their faith or show a period of time in which they don't live according to the teachings and the lifestyle of Jesus?

What happens if later on they come back?

Can they be reinstalled, reinstituted?

And the Donatists said, no, this is you have to stick true to your confession or you have lost it entirely.

And the others, under the kind of mandate of Constantine, said, Well, you may have to go through some re-education classes, but then you can be reinstated.

And it became so much of a controversy in North Africa that there were actually two Christian churches for a time, like right in the same areas.

There was the Donatist Christian Church, and then there was the Restorationist Christian Church.

And both thought that they were the right ones following in the teachings of the apostles.

Now, what happened is that the authority of Constantine, along with money for rebuilding the churches, came down on the sides of the Restorationists, and Augustine theologically came down on the side of the Restorationists, and so that won the day.

So that was the Donatist controversy, that those who lapse in faith can be restored to faith should things change and should they give evidence of a new testimony of life.

We still have this with us today.

Can those who do heinous crimes and then go to jail and then have some kind of conversion story, can they now become reinstated or installed for the first time in the Christian church as equal members with others?

It's an ongoing controversy, but it goes all the way back to that time.

A second thing that Augustine was involved in was the Pelagian controversy.

And there was a pastor, his name was Pelagius from the British Isles, and he came to Rome thinking that it would be better for him to express his faith at the center of the universe, the Roman Empire of the day.

But he got to Rome and he found that Rome was a dirty city, and that those who were supposed to be the leaders in the church weren't doing things well.

They had become filthy rich and careless and no longer paid attention to the people that were in their congregations and they were in it for the money for themselves.

And Pelagius began to kind of wag his finger and with a smile on his face, began to teach, you know you can do better, you know you should be doing better, you know that you can follow the teachings of Jesus.

And so his way of teaching the Christian faith is come on, folks, just put your heart and soul into it.

You know that your identity is in your own hands and you can choose the right.

Too many of us have chosen the wrong.

Now we can choose the right.

Well, he pushed that to the extent of uh people thinking that he said, we're born without any direction, right or wrong.

We're born sort of neutral, and through the choices we make, we either become bad people or good people, and we have the capacity to change the one that we do.

In other words, he gave the impression that salvation can be something we somehow control ourselves.

And it didn't fit well with others who looked at Ephesians chapter 2 and said, by uh where Paul says, by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not through works, lest any of you should boast.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

And Augustine was called in to give some assessment, and Augustine was the one who said, Well, because of sin, our very wills are contaminated, and we do not have the capacity within ourselves to do good unless we are regenerated or renewed by the Holy Spirit of God.

So this became two poles in the expression of Christian understanding of our capacities.

And this continues to run through the church, and we think of it in some of our circles in terms of Calvinism and Arminianism, saying that Calvin was Augustinian and Arminianism is Pelagian, or we think about John Wesley and George Whitefield.

George Whitefield was a Calvinist and John Wesley, John and Charles Wesley were Arminian.

And so we have the difference even within Calvinism between Baptists who really function on our choices, and Presbyterians and Reformed who say it is the grace of God which transforms us.

It is not an ended conversation, but there was this tension between Augustine and Pelagius that kind of articulated the two points of views, and we continue to talk about this today.

The third thing that Augustine did was in the aftermath of some of the discussions of the controversy, the councils, regarding what is the nature of Jesus, what is the character of the Trinity.

Augustine wrote one of his famous books.

It's called On the Trinity, and he tried to define what the Trinity was about.

Augustine was also involved in something, one of his greatest books that we read still with great interest is.

The city of God.

And here Augustine wrestled with what's the nature of the eternal kingdom of God, which involves planet Earth and involves us, the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God rules over all.

My kingdom is an everlasting kingdom.

All authorities and powers bow to me.

Jesus is head over all of principalities and powers.

And at the same time, we live in countries, in societies where we have kings and rulers and parliaments and prime ministers and presidents and congresses and all of that.

What's the relationship between the two?

And remember that Augustine was writing these things, especially as the Roman Empire had moved out of Rome, the church had taken over, and the Western Roman Empire was kind of collapsing.

How could it be that God, who used the Roman Empire to extend the reach of the kingdom of God, how could it be that the Roman Empire was now deteriorating?

What's the relationship between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world?

And Augustine's The City of God is very powerful in reflecting on that.

One of the things that Augustine gave us out of all of these reflections is the idea of just war theory.

There are three major ways in which Christians have talked about their possible involvements in warfare and organized killing and all of that.

Obviously, killing murder is wrong.

God says, do not kill.

But we all know that there are wars and there is a need to defend borders.

And if someone breaks into my house, I have a right to defend myself, even to the point where death might be involved in that.

And that's when killing is not necessarily murder.

But what about the organized killing machines of countries?

Here we're talking about police.

Here we're talking about military.

Here we're talking about weapons of war.

For the third first 300 years, Christianity was essentially pacifist, like the Amish today.

That Christians who believe in the kingdom of God do not involve themselves in human war activities, including police, including carrying weapons designed to kill other people, but especially not in involving themselves in the military units of any nation.

That's one way.

Jesus brings peace.

And even if we are killed in the process, we do not turn and strike.

We do not lift up any weapons against anyone else.

A second possibility is that Jesus is in charge.

So if you're living with Jesus, then you have a right to go and kick another person.

You have a right to impose.

And we'll see this taking shape next time when we look at the crusades.

What we find is that Christianity took on this militaristic front, and we see it expressed sometimes in things that are coming out of the United States today, that we're a Christian nation and we have a right to impose Christianity or at least the values of Christianity on others, and we ought to do so by weapons of war, and they don't understand, and so we can do this to that.

So those are polar opposites.

Complete pacifism or ride the success of Jesus into military action.

Well, Augustine gave a third way, and this is something that is very much in the news today in the United States and elsewhere around the world, that because of the continuation of human depravity, we will all experience evil, we will experience uh fighting, we will experience weapons of war, we will experience death and dying.

What do Christians do to participate in the necessary activities of human societies to provide safety and stability?

And Augustine was of a mind that we can involve ourselves in policing actions, that we can be part of police to ensure safety and stability in communities.

But then he also began to think about military.

And according to Augustine, wars could be legitimized if they were if they were initiated by governing authorities that had legitimacy, and if they were done for right reasons, and if they had a goal in mind of bringing a restoration of peace, and then there were also things that were attached to it, like what kinds of weapons do you use, and can civilians be attacked in these times of war?

But the seven basic rules that we today talk about as just war theory, they were begun by Augustine.

So he was quite quite a figure in all of that.

In any case, if you study theology, you need to at least reflect on what Augustine did to help build the understanding, the theological understanding of the Christian church.

Now, I want to get to a couple more things before the end of this session, and one of those is the reaction to all of this stability and this becoming the vehicle or sort of the corporate structure of structure of Western society.

And there were three major pushbacks against that.

One of those we talk about as monasticism, the rise of monasteries and monks and people who took vows of celibacy, of chastity, uh that's the same one, but of poverty, of chastity, and of obedience.

Those three things poverty, chastity, and obedience.

And this was the rise of monasticism.

Now, why did that happen?

Because as soon as Constantine brought stability to the Roman Empire and incorporated Christianity into that, everybody was becoming Christian, at least culturally, at least in name.

You couldn't do business without being part of this new movement of Christianity.

Christianity became the dominant force of culture and society in the Western world during the fourth century, during the 300s.

Everybody became Christian.

But you know that when everybody becomes Christian, it means different things to different people.

And there were some who began to say, boy, you know, this isn't like the good old days.

Like the good old days when you really had to make choices if you were Christian.

I mean, it could be your life at stake, and would you remain true to Jesus?

When there was some pressure against you, and you had to make choices that made your testimony real and true.

And out of that, monasticism was born.

Now it started early on in the Christian church with the hermits, the word in Greek and the word in Latin for becoming or going out into the wilderness was ermatos, which then gives us our word hermit.

And so we have people who said, I don't want to be part of the bigness of society.

I want to go off and live by myself and just commune with God.

And so those were the hermits.

They could only do this not in these northern areas or deep southern areas of our globe where there are harsh winters and you can't live outside.

But Egypt was a perfect place for this where there was stable weather year-round.

And so people, predominantly men, there were some women, but predominantly men, would go live in the deserts for a while, and they were called the hermits.

And because their expression of Christianity was more serious, more stringent than the rest of us, sisters and brothers, people started calling them fathers.

Here's where we get the idea of the desert fathers.

They are hermits who go to have a private relationship with God.

Now, what happened is that other people saw that and said, Boy, I wish I could do that, but I can't.

But they would go live in towns near the desert fathers, and they would see if maybe they could bring some food out to the desert fathers because they didn't have a job or a livelihood and they needed others to supply their food.

And they would ask these people for a word of wisdom, or they would ask these people to pray for them because obviously they were higher in the spiritual rank.

Please pray for me.

And the gathering of these people became sort of obnoxious.

They were kind of like religious paparazzi who come and they cling to the celebrities.

And out of that grew the desire to create communities to give organization to those who couldn't be alone with God for all their time.

How do we then create communities where together we try to be more in tune with God?

This gave rise to the monastics.

And the monastics over time realized they needed some order.

Pecomius was the first of these, and he had been, he grew up in a non-Christian home, but about the time of Constantine, he was conscripted into the Roman army against his will, but he learned discipline in the Roman army.

And when he got out of the army, he took his discipline and his Christian faith and put them together and created the first monastic community.

And they took these three vows.

I will not have private ownership of property, so I give up my consumerism.

I will remain single and celibate because these things are a kind of constant lure for me, and I need to be focused on the true value, and that's God.

And I must learn obedience.

I must read the scriptures and I must pray and I must guide my life in such a way that it will be in tune with God.

Now, there were very uh various attempts at building these communities.

Not always did they work out very well.

By the time several centuries had passed, the one who gave real strong shape to monastic communities was a guy named Benedict.

And even today we still talk about Benedict's rule.

And Benedict is the one who said, Well, we've got to keep people busy and we've got to keep them focused on praying and working.

And so he created the schedule of hours, three-hour time blocks throughout a 24-hour day.

And every three hours we all meet together for prayer and worship.

And in between, we have a schedule of sleep and preparations and of chores and group work and recreation, etc., all the way around the clock.

That was the development of monastic communities.

Now, monastic communities immediately gathered people together out of the Christian community who were really dedicated to Jesus.

And so these people began to be used as those who would be leaders in the church, which often corrupted them, and then we went through cycles of reform.

But what the monasteries gave to the church was a renewed dedication to doing it right and not being contaminated by the world.

But they also gave us two more things.

One was a sense of learning that led to the development of schools and universities and colleges around the world.

We get that from the monastic communities.

And secondly, a sense of mission.

It was the monastic communities that began to send out members of their own to other places that did not yet have Christianity.

So mission and schools came out of the monastic community.

Briefly, two other movements along with that.

Some also, there's monasteries, but there's also the mystics.

And the mystics said we have to lose our contamination to this world and rise above it through kind of a mystical engagement with God.

And so mysticism came in and it's still practiced.

In fact, kind of interestingly, within Islam, the Sufi branch of Islam was highly influenced and developed by Christian mysticism.

There's a real chain of connection there.

A third thing that developed, monasticism, living separated from the world with the vows, mysticism, and then mendicantism.

And here we have to think later on of Dominique and Peter Valdo, Peter Valdez, and people like Francis of Assisi, who say we don't separate from the world.

That wouldn't be the way of Jesus, but we have to be in the world.

We have to take those vows, the vow of poverty, the vow of chastity, the vow of obedience, but we have to live in the world serving others.

And so we have the church beginning to reach back into society, but avoiding the structures in order just to be people who change people's lives through touching and caring for them.

Now, this is all happening in that next 400 years of the church's life.

We have the 300 years of persecution and marginalization, then we have Constantine, and then we have 400 years of these developments.

What happens though is about near the end of that, a guy named Muhammad is born, and he will change everything once again, and we will face the rise of Islam leading to the crusades, which will become the way in which we begin to redraw the map of the world.

But those are all things for the future, and I think you have enough to think about for this time, so we'll bring it to an end right there.