Session 2: Consolidation & Controversy | Our Family Story: Charting Again the History of Jesus’ Church

Last time we looked at the beginning of the Christian church, and the Christian church began in the first century.

The impact of Jesus changed the way in which many people around the world talked about time.

So that in the Western world at least, we have dated our time from the beginning or the coming of Jesus, the year of our Lord.

What happened in that first century is that Jesus came, taught, did miracles, died, came back to life, and ascended into heaven.

That was about the first third of that first century.

The disciples of Jesus became the first missionaries of that news, and they went to various places around the world.

A lot of that happened around the Mediterranean world because of the easy access through the Roman Empire.

And Paul became one of the key leaders along with that, knowing that his particular mandate was to those who were not Jewish.

The other disciples went to Jewish communities first, and some then stepped far beyond that.

We know that Matthew, for instance, eventually wound up in Ethiopia, where he was killed for his faith.

And Thomas went all the way to India and established the church there, and he also was killed for his faith.

John, the best friend of Jesus, lived to near the end of the first century and was able to fill in some of the details in his later writings, the book of Revelation and the Gospel of John, and what we call first, second, and third John, to help us understand even more fully who Jesus was.

And here was a man who knew Jesus firsthand.

The persecutions against Christians ramped up in the first century already.

They began with tensions within the Jewish community and then spilled over into the Roman Empire, where the Roman government increasingly saw Christianity as a threat.

That persecution ramped up even further in the second century, that would be the 100s, and into the third century.

And that's where we begin to see these people I ended with last time.

We call them the apologists because they tried to take the news about Jesus and communicate it across the lines so that people with different philosophies and religious faiths and cultures would be able to understand Jesus.

One of the things that happened in that time is that some of those uh apologists were deeply studied in Greek philosophy.

And immediately the idea, particularly from Socrates and Plato, the idea of the ideas, the ideals, the fact that for those forms of Greek uh philosophy, the ideas or ideals or forms were transcendent and held by the gods and associated with the gods, and that we lived in a changing and material world.

That idea sometimes connected with the Christian uh teachings and became something that the church would have to wrestle with for the centuries to come, even still today.

We'll talk more about that in the future.

But it began that process of how do we think about Christianity?

Now, in the second and third centuries, two things happened.

One was that the Roman Empire increasingly became dependent on its armies.

The shift from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire under Caesar Augustus was a time in which there was a sense that people still had a voice in their governments through the Senate, and that the emperor was really the first among equals in the Senate.

Well, you know how that goes.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Increasingly, the Roman emperors became participants in the Roman military, and they were no longer even necessarily Italians or Romans.

For a while, the Roman Empire was ruled by people who came up through the ranks of the army, and so, especially in the third century, the 200s, we have kind of military-controlled and military-supported leadership, which shifted a significant away from the republic.

In that time, there was increasing tension with Christians because in the first three centuries of Christianity, Christians were pacifists, and so they refused to play the power game that was essential to maintain the Romans, Roman Empire, and the emperors in their place.

That all ramped up in the third century, especially, and culminated right around the year 300 with Diocletian.

There were three years in which his persecutions were the most extensive and massive throughout the empire.

And uh that is the great persecution of 303 to 305.

It was also a time in which Diocletian himself was beginning increasingly to uh find the Roman Empire unmanageable.

Uh, sometime before there had been a move to separate it into east and west so that there came to be a Roman agent in the west, that would be Spain and France and all of those places in western northern Africa, and then another ruler in the east around the Black Sea and uh uh the Palestine and Egypt and that area.

So it's kind of split in two.

By the time of Diocletian, this had become formalized.

In fact, Diocletian had an emperor supporting him, or with him, or as counterparts to him in east and west, and under those were sort of the heirs apparent, and they were the Caesars.

So we had an emperor in Rome, and we had a Western emperor, and we had an eastern emperor, and then we had Caesars under each of them.

That on the one hand, and secondly, along with that was the increase in persecution of Christianity.

Well, all of that began to kind of collapse at the time of Diocletian.

He got tired of uh ruling and he wanted just to pull out of it all and go home and spend time in his vegetable garden.

That's that's actually true.

And he didn't plan for a good succession, and so the Western and the Eastern emperors kind of had to figure out what they were going to do, and then under them were the Caesars going to take over if something happened to them.

And in that vacuum, what rose up was uh a lot of infighting with regard to who would succeed.

That's where Constantine emerged.

He was actually the son of the Caesar in the West.

They lived in Spain, and his dad was passed over for going into the role of Western Emperor, and then Constantine himself, who had an ego that was enormous, he was passed over entirely for any position, and he couldn't take that.

And so he began the march that would eventually net him the western side of the Roman Empire, and eventually, then in a civil war, he took over the eastern side of the empire.

All that happened immediately after Diocletian's reign.

Now, the emperor in the east had done a strong measure of persecution against Christians, and in that persecution against Christians, um, there was a strong sense that this was not working because Christianity was growing so rapidly around the eastern Mediterranean parts, in Egypt and in all of Syria and the Levant, as it's called, that'd be Palestine and north, and into Asia Minor, which we now call Turkey.

A huge, rapid growth of Christianity.

The Eastern Emperor tried to push it down for a while.

That was part of the great persecution, and then by 311 decided that that wasn't working.

And so he issued the edict of toleration.

And that was what brought an end to persecution in the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

It was still going on in North Africa, and it was still going on in the West, but it was having mixed results.

Meanwhile, Constantine was on the rise and he was growing his army and moving toward Rome.

By 312, he had the last main battle in front of him that would net him the Roman Empire, or at least Rome itself.

He and Maxentius, who was also from this old hierarchy, they were the two that were battling at Rome.

And the battle that had to be fought was the battle for Milvian Bridge.

There was a river and a bridge that separated Constantine's army from the armies of Maxentius.

And that battle everybody knew would determine whether Constantine or Maxentius would be able to take over at least the Western Roman Empire and possibly on to the Eastern Roman Empire.

The night before that battle.

Now, here's a story that has become legendary, but it's a story we don't actually know whether it happened because the first reports of this story didn't appear until a decade after the events.

But there are several sources, including Constantine in his old age and Eusebius, who was the first great church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, remember right on the seacoast of Palestine, the city of Caesarea.

That's where Eusebius lived.

And he loved Constantine and he gushed about Constantine.

He wrote a biography of Constantine that practically raised him to high heaven.

And he was one who reported this.

And then later on, Constantine said, Yeah, yeah, that's what happened.

But the story is this the night before that battle for Milvian Bridge, Constantine was out there kind of looking at his troops and figuring out what was going to go on.

He watched the setting sun and the rays of the sun dispersed.

And he said he saw in the setting sun the letters key and row.

That'd be like an X and like a P in the English language.

These were the first two letters he knew this of the name Christos, Christ.

And he said he heard a voice that said, In this sign conquer.

And so he told his generals and his uh leaders of platoons all to paint this on the horses' gear and on their shields and everything else.

The next day, when they had the battle for Milvian Bridge, against all odds, Constantine won the battle.

They pushed Maxentius' troops away from the control of the bridge and they took over the city of Rome.

That became sort of the point at which the whole uh history of Christianity turned, and it would become something uh wildly different than the first three centuries.

In a few years, uh, including the year after Constantine did this, he went on to conquer uh the Eastern Emperor too, and became the emperor over all of Rome, reunited the whole Roman Empire all the way from Spain and even the British Isles on to Egypt and into Persia at a time there and all of uh northern Africa and uh beginning to press northward into the Germanic tribes of the north.

Constantine took over that whole region.

If 311 was the edict of toleration in the Eastern Empire, Constantine won that battle in 312, and by 313 he issued a comparable degree.

It's called the Edict of Nuns.

And that uh edict was a declaration that Christianity could not, would not, should not be persecuted anywhere in the Roman Empire.

Well, this immediately changed the atmosphere for Christians.

But Constantine even went further than that.

He was like a rather large presence and felt that everybody really belonged to him.

He was gracious, he he pretended or seemed to be gracious and benevolent, but he ruled rather stridently, and he ruled for about 20 years.

So this is something that went on for quite a while, 20 to 30 years.

What took place is that he immediately began to meddle into anything that seemed to be discordant or have some tensions.

And one of the things that had happened in northern Africa around Carthage, in what we would call Algeria today, is that the Roman leaders during the times of Diocletian and the great persecution, instead of killing a lot of the Christians, there they decided that they would uh target the leaders of the Christian churches and tell them to hand over the scrolls of scripture.

They figured if they could get the holy books and if they could get publicly people seeing that they're handed over to the government, and then the government can burn them and get rid of them and dispose of them, that that would indicate to the people everywhere that uh Christianity was not favorable and so you shouldn't participate in it.

Now, this created tension in northern Africa.

It created tension because there were some who were extremely um disturbed by this and said, We will never hand over the scrolls, nor will anybody who hands over the scrolls be considered a Christian by us.

You know, the tension kind of was under the surface until Constantine came to power.

And then some of those people, many of those people, almost all those people who were still alive and who had sort of handed over the scrolls and had said, okay, you're in charge and all of that.

They said, Well, we want back in the full uh Christian church and our leadership roles again.

And a group called the Donatists were very strict and conservative, and they said, Not a chance, you can't come back in.

You failed Jesus, you failed the church, and you have no place, and we cannot receive the sacraments from you.

We won't recognize you baptizing anybody or or officiating at the Lord's Supper.

You have lost your place in leadership, and you don't even belong in the Christian church.

And so there were actually two churches that were created out of this in North Africa, around Algeria today.

Uh, one was supposedly the returners, and the other was the Donatists.

And these created for a time, for a decade or more, they created separate but independent congregations, think denominations.

We're right, you're wrong.

We're right, you're wrong.

And there was a separation between these two, both claiming to be Christians.

This was really the first time there was kind of an official declared public break in the church.

Well, Constantine didn't like this, and he wasn't himself a Christian.

I mean, there are so many things about Constantine that are really a strange mixture.

For instance, he was a great conqueror of nations, and yet he tried to bring peace to the empire.

Um, he claimed tolerance for Christianity, but he murdered his own son, who he thought might be against him.

Um, he was not a theologian, but he gave the church some of the theological language it has used ever since.

His mother uh became the leading figure in identifying what are now called the holy sites of Christianity.

I mean the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity and the Mount of Transfiguration and all those things.

It was Constantine's mother who brought those things about.

He was not a Christian, but he called together the first general synod of the Christian church, the gathering of leaders from all over Christendom.

Um, he was himself not a Christian until just about at the end of his life when he divested himself of his royal robes and took the garb of a poor monk and was baptized almost just before his death.

Uh, there was a strange contradiction in Constantine, but at this time he wanted to settle this dispute in North Africa.

And he began to channel funds, get this, government funds, to the returners, not to the Donatists, the ones who were really strict and saying, you failed Christ, you can't be a pastor any longer.

No, he didn't channel any funds to them, he channeled lots of funds, money talks, right?

He channeled lots of funds to the returners, and they became the state church, essentially.

And then they began to fight with one another and even kill one another.

So here you have a battle in North Africa as to who's going to be the true church and whether you can be in it or you can't be in it, and who says, and all of that.

Constantine eventually took troops into the area and put down rebellions, and the returners won.

So that eventually, well, they stayed around in small places until the Muslims came in nearly four, five, six centuries later, and they were the ones who finally ended the presence of the Donatist, the strict, the true, the original church people in North Africa.

So it's a really strange thing.

But this gets Constantine thinking, and there's something else going on.

And now this is this is where this time of the Christian church's existence becomes very pivotal for what we have today.

Constantine moved over time the Roman government from Rome over to a new town he created.

It was a little fishing village.

It was on the isthmus.

Today we call it the grand city of Constantinople, or rather, Istanbul.

Uh, when I talked with one of the um residents of Istanbul, why it's called Istanbul rather than Constantinople, he said, it's because we're lazy.

He said, it is Constantinople, but we just kind of say Istanbul, and it becomes Istanbul.

And so Istanbul and Constantinople are one and the same.

This was a place where there were no water sources, no fresh water sources, and Constantine built a huge city.

If you ever get to Istanbul today, you should try to find uh the place that leads you into the huge cisterns that are in the stone underneath uh Istanbul.

And this was built over time.

Constantine began this and others, they opened this up incredible caverns where water was channeled in so that this city in a completely arid spot could live and thrive.

And Constantine built a city there, bridging east and west.

And once he had done that, several things began to happen.

Rome lost its ability to defend itself militarily, and it no longer had a close governing authority at hand.

What happened is that the church, which had a large presence in Rome, continued to stay there.

Also, during this time, Constantine had stopped the persecution, but he gave the church many gifts, including basilicas.

What were basilicas?

They were royal halls which were used for government business, including courts.

And when the persecution stopped for the Christian church, the Christian leaders, Constantine asked them, What can I do for you?

They said, Well, allow us to worship on Sunday and allow us to have places where we can worship in public, because they were not allowed to worship in public.

They met in homes.

He gave them basilicas.

Now, basilicas were the sort of seats of government in areas that were called dioceses.

And those dioceses were subdivided into parishes.

And the leader of Rome, the emperor himself, was called the pontifex.

Maximus.

And now you're beginning to see what happened.

The leader of the church in Rome increasingly became identified as Pontifex Maximus, and the churches were meeting in basilicas, and they had arch, they had dioceses and archdioceses and parishes.

You see that the Roman governing structures and even the rankings of people all filtered into the Christian church.

This became the government of the Christian church right up till the present in the Roman Catholic expression of it.

And it was one of the reasons that the Reformation would take place later, pushing back against this Roman imperial governing structure.

Here's another interesting thing.

Because it was a very expensive die, red and purple dies were limited by the Roman government only for high officials who were called cardinals because they wore red.

And now you see even that system moving into the Christian church and the entire administrative structure of the Roman Empire as the Roman government leaves Rome to go to Constantinople, the church takes all of that over and even lives into the names, the titles, the circumstances.

Everything is all about what used to be the Roman Empire.

Along with that, there was a growing discussion between East and West.

It was not an accident that the Roman government had decided that there was an Eastern section and a western section.

The Eastern section had been the old Greek empire.

It had established what we call the Hellenistic age, where everybody really who had anything to do with business or commerce or government spoke the Greek language.

Meanwhile, Latin, which has a lot of similarities to Greek, was the language of the Western Empire.

But languages are part of culture identification.

We cannot specifically express certain ideas from one language into another language because there are cultural nuances that happen in between those languages.

And that division of how we communicate also filled into the church.

Now, here's where there was a huge controversy beginning to bubble up, especially after peace reigned.

And it had to do with Jesus, who's the problem for the church.

I mean that seriously.

You see, Judaism was very clear.

It was based upon Old Testament Israelite religion.

And it was a clearly strongly monotheistic religion.

There is only one God, the great creator of all.

We know him as Yahweh.

There are no other gods.

Other gods are shams or or their uh powers that people try to create or or uh demons or angels or whatever like that.

There's only one God.

Great.

Jesus is a Jew.

Jesus says there's only one God.

Jesus believes in only one God.

And increasingly, people who know Jesus know that he self-identifies as God, but he is not the Father.

He prays to the Father, but he says, I and the Father are one.

Okay, here you've got a bit of a problem developing.

How do you talk about one God, and you talk about Jesus being the savior of the world, and he is the one who dies and rises from the dead as God, and he is not the Father?

He prays to the Father, and he says, I will send my spirit, who is God, to live in you, and that happens on Pentecost.

You see the problem that's developing?

How do you talk about the one?

And then how do you talk about the three?

And how do you keep a straight face while you're talking about these?

Well, that spilled over into the Christian church.

In the second through the fourth centuries, this is right at the time overseeing Constantine, there was a lingering debate among leaders of the church that we have come to call the Trinitarian debate or the Trinitarian controversy.

And the issue was basically how can you talk about one God and you talk about three who are God?

What is the nature of that?

And there were different ways that people began to try to resolve this.

For instance, there was uh Paul of Samosata or Samosata who said that uh basically what happened is that Jesus was a real, live Jewish human, completely human, but that God needed an agent on planet earth.

And so at the baptism of the good man Jesus, God shot down from heaven the spirit, the power of God to infuse and take over his existence.

And suddenly Jesus woke up and understood who he was and what his ministry was and uh how he was to be the savior of his people and all of that.

And that's why Jesus could do miracles and talk about his relationship with the Father and die and even rise to life again because the father was doing all of that.

But Jesus was a man who was taken over by a divine spirit and then brought into heaven as an agent of God after completing his work on earth.

It's called adoptionism.

Now, who thinks about such things today?

Well, this is not something that has disappeared because it has lingered on in a number of forms of Christianity, including Unitarianism, uh, where Jesus is the great agent of God, but Jesus is not actually divine.

So it lingers with us today.

Uh, more specifically, it continues on in Islam, which is highly adoptionistic with regard to that.

In fact, Islam has taken the best of Judaism and Christianity and kind of pared it down to get rid of all of the social and theological problems.

And in the end, Jesus becomes one of the three greatest prophets who have ever lived.

Not God, but one of the greatest prophets who have ever lived.

So that adoptionism continues to exist.

There was another way, um, Sibelius, a kind of self-important, pompous uh social leader, political leader who became a leader in the church after uh Constantine brought peace.

And he said, Well, you know, God is God, and God can do whatever God wants to do in whatever time and frame and way that God wants to do it.

And so he said that God simply was anywhere and everywhere, but chose to become visible to us in the person of Jesus, so that Jesus was not another person of God, but one of the modes in which God appeared.

He was a Christian, he was a leader in the church, but he said, uh, there's only one God, but God kind of flips around and appears in different forms at different times.

Now the great creator we cannot see, and now the person of Jesus who talks to us face to face and person to person, and now the empowering spirit of Pentecost that kind of enthusiasm and makes us bolder.

So that was Sibelius' solution.

And then there was a third solution, and this was probably the most ingenious and still probably the most prevalent even to our day.

There was a pastor around in Egypt, and his bishop was emphasizing the oneness of God, the oneness of God, that Jesus and the Father are one.

And his name was Arius, and he was a good pastor, and he was a great preacher, and he was great with children, and he wrote music.

He would write songs that reflected Bible stories to teach children these things.

And he tried to figure out how we can talk meaningfully about the oneness of God and the importance of Jesus all at the same time.

How can we safeguard monotheism and speak of the uniqueness of Jesus?

And here's what he came up with, and it's been echoed outer places over time.

He said, There is God, there has always been God.

God is not attached to time, so God transcends time.

There was no beginning of God, there is no end of God.

God is always.

But God was thinking within God's own self about how God might express and expand the possibilities of relationships and love.

And so God decided that there would be a world made.

But how was God to create this world?

And so God did kind of almost a trial run, and God made the son.

The sun is fully God in the same way that a child is fully the genetic print of parents.

We pass along our DNA to our children.

And in that measure, all of the DNA came only from one source, only from the Father, and was emptied into the Son.

So you might say, even though you can't say, the Son looks like God, sounds like God, acts like God, everything is like God, but he's not God.

And the big difference between the Father and the Son is that the Father has always existed, never had a beginning, never has an end.

And the Son began at a certain place long before this world happened.

But the son and the father together created this world.

So Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, but he has a beginning.

He is not eternal in the same way that the Father is.

Now, where does that show up today?

Well, that is the view of Jesus among Jehovah's Witnesses and among Mormons.

That Aryan view continues to exist.

Now, that became the most critical one against which others began to react, particularly a young deacon in the church named Athanasius.

And in order to assume his role as emperor over everything, including the church, Constantine decided to call a council, a conference, a synod, a gathering, a parliament of all of the leaders of the church.

And there were about 1,800 leaders in the church at that time, pastors and supervisors and all of that.

And uh, out of the all who were invited, and they were all invited at the expense of the government, to a seacoast town that had sort of the uh the vacation palace of the emperor Nicaea Nike.

Um it's still there on the edge of the Black Sea still today, um, but beautiful town.

And he called all of these people to come at his expense, travel expenses, eating expenses.

He provided uh all of the accommodations for them, all of the food, everything they wanted fully paid for by the government.

Well, only about, you know, uh 300 and some showed up.

But they had others with them.

They had their support staffs and they had some deacons and they had some others.

And so it turned out to be a gathering of uh probably around five, six hundred people gathered there at Nicaea.

And the issue on the docket was, and Constantine came and he presided, he called himself the 13th apostle, and he said that God had sent him to gather the church together and resolve these things.

And this group became the first what we call ecumenical councils.

Now, there are there will be eventually seven ecumenical councils which will shape the early statements of the Christian church everywhere around the world.

In the end, in the West, there would be more councils, so that now there are recognized in the West by the Roman Catholic Church at least 22 ecumenical councils, but the Eastern Church only recognizes seven, and Protestants generally recognize only those seven to have shaped the early statements of faith of the Christian church.

Um, at the start of that council, Constantine came in with a multicolored robe with lots of jewelry and a crown and all of that, and he said he was Christ's representative, that Jesus had sent him here to be the 13th disciple.

Jesus was now in heaven, and he was in charge now, and so he was bringing all these people together.

At the start of this, everybody knew that the main order of business was how do we think about Jesus?

How do we talk about one God and the importance of Jesus?

And Arius made his statement and others along with him, and immediately they were booed and hissed by the entire gathering, the Council of Constant, uh the Council of Nicaea, 325 A.D.

Everybody knew there was a foregone conclusion.

The government had sided with those who would eventually bring us what we call the Nicene Creed.

And the Nicene Creed would build upon the old baptism formula, which eventually became what we know as the Apostles' Creed, and talk about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as co-equal and all God.

And the Arians who talked about Father, Son, and Spirit, but Father was truly God, and Son became God, and the Holy Spirit emanated from God, that language they couldn't use.

Now, as Constantine, he didn't spend time with all of the sessions of the Nicene Council, but he did step in now and again, and he had a friend all the way from Spain, um uh Horius, who was his Cordoba bishop or pastor who came along, he kind of did the leading of the council.

But at one particular point, when they were debating language and two Greek words kept popping up, um, homoeusius and homoousius, and the one means like essence or similar, and the other means identical with.

He was the one who pushed in the direction of homoousius, and that became the language of the Nicene Creed, Homoousius.

And you think about the Nicene Creed, it talks about we believe uh there's a God who created all things, and we believe in Jesus, uh, very God of very God, begotten, not made.

You see where he's pointing to Arius of one substance, homoousius with the Father by whom all things were made.

Um, all of these ideas are kind of brought into the the Nicene Creed.

This becomes known as the Trinitarian controversy because the question is: who is Jesus?

We know that there was a man born in uh Palestine in Bethlehem who grew up and we came to know him as Savior.

But was he really God, or was he the agent of God, or was he uh the first creation of God?

And the Nicene Council and the Nicene Creed were both uh created in order to get the language that we know today: that Jesus and the Father and the Spirit are one.

There's one God and three persons.

Well, that led then to something afterwards, and and Arius and his followers, they kind of went into the background, but the Aryan view of these things continues on to the present, like I said, and it became more part of the Eastern culture and was hidden away in various communities until the time of the rise of Islam when that form of Christianity largely was executed and gotten rid of.

And so the Nicene expressions of these ideas have lingered because the Western Church survived, whereas the Eastern Church largely fell later to the Muslim onslaught.

But this stimulated a second controversy, and the second controversy is often called uh the Christological controversy.

If the Trinitarian controversy is how do we talk about Jesus within the context of monotheism, one God, the Christological controversy said, well, Jesus is God, okay, but what was the nature of his humanity?

And again, there were different expressions of that.

Um, some talked about it as adoptionism, you know, that a good man was given extra divine power.

And some talked about it him having two um identical uh characters or personas living within one body.

That was sort of notorious, and you'll run into his name sometimes.

And he was the first one we might think of this in terms of modern day expressions like Superman.

There's a guy, and when he wears glasses, everybody thinks he's Clark Kent.

And when he takes off his glasses and has a red cape, he's Superman.

And they're two sort of distinct but sharing the same body characters, and that's kind of how Nestorius saw things.

And Eudychus was his opponent, and Eudychus was more like, no, it's more like you take a blender and you take a picture of divinity and you pour some in, you take a pick picture of humanity and you pour some of that in, and here we are, you pulse it a few times, and and we get this thing.

It's not really human, it's not really divine, and so Jesus is this tertium quid, this thing in between.

And again, through several succeeding councils in Constantinople and Chalcedon and Ephesus and other other places, eventually these seven councils would come with the language that the Christian church has shared basically around the world, that uh there's one God, that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all equally God, and that Jesus is fully divine and fully human.

And this echoes the language of the New Testament.

It echoes John's gospel where Jesus says, I and the Father are one.

It echoes the Trinitarian baptism that Jesus urged on the church, baptizing people in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, each of them identified independently with their own names, but all of them together, being the one monotheistic God of ancient Israel.

It's in the blessing that Paul gives at the end of 2 Corinthians, where he talks about the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father and the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

So there's this sense that the church from its very beginning has known and understood this, it just needed the language.

Well, Constantine helped provide the language through these councils.

But along the way, there were things that began to change.

As I said, for one thing, the Christian church began to inhabit the old imperial Rome and take on the identity of the old Roman government.

This will become so strong that finally in the late Middle Ages it will breed what we have come to know as the Reformation, because many in the Christian church will fight against it over the years, and they will say that the institution has become a human enterprise and.

It lacks the create the reality of what Jesus and his disciples and his mission were all about.

Now, before we end this session, a couple of other things that come to mind.

One is how do we talk about the Trinity?

And I have had this in my experiences in church as a little boy, and throughout the years, and pastors preaching about the Trinity, and rightly so.

But there have been three, or I mean rather, two significant ways in which, beginning at that time, one of the people who lived a little bit after Constantine was Augustine.

And he was one who even wrote a book called On the Trinity.

And there were others who wrote books.

There were basically two different ways in which people tried to help the rest of us understand the Trinity.

The one of these is the psychological analogy.

And you think of one person, think of me perhaps.

Think of someone who exists as a singular, identifiable being.

Now, when I go to Hope College and I teach there or at Western Seminary and I teach there, my students call me professor or doctor.

I am always in a relationship with my students as a professor.

There is a kind of social organization and a certain inequity about my relationship with all of them.

And I can't have a truly one-on-one identical, even relationship with any of them because everything about me in those settings is professor to them.

Of course, when I come home, I'm the same person, but I'm a completely different person as well.

I am the husband of my wife, and we are equals in our relationship.

And I cannot act like a professor to her.

She can ask me questions and I can respond to them, but I can ask her questions and she can respond to them.

And there's no hierarchy of person in our marriage.

All of me is in that role of being husband.

It is everything about me.

I can never not be husband to Brenda, but I can also never not be professor to my students.

And well, then you think about another one, and there's our daughters.

They are married, they are living in other places.

But I am always to them dad.

I am always to them in this other social identity.

They cannot treat me in the same way that my wife does.

Even though we are equals in society, there remains this uniqueness about my relationship with our daughters, that I am always father to them, even when we have grown-up adult conversations.

But they are not in the same relationship with me as my students are.

My students cannot have relationships with me like my daughters, and my daughters can't have relationships with me like my wife.

But I am only one person, and yet the fullness of my identity is encaptured and expressed in each one of those identities.

Well, that was Augustine's, Augustine's expression of this: the psychological analogy.

How shall we talk about the Trinity?

Let's talk about a person who exists in three different roles, and all of this person is fully and completely engaged in all of those roles, but those roles are creatively different persons as others encounter them.

The psychological analogy.

They lived in Cappadocia, which is sort of central Turkey today, the high hills, the strange rocky mountains that are there, not tall, but uh filled with caves and kind of a unique uh formation.

Um, these three guys thought a lot about it too, and they had a different way of thinking about these things.

And it's something that's come to us that's called the sociological analogy.

And the sociological analogy starts with the three says, Look, the Bible is clear, the gospel is clear, uh, Jesus is clear, there is the Father, there is the Son, there is the Holy Spirit.

And instead of trying to think of how they are emanations of a single being, why don't we talk about them being unique and fully um identifiable and then talk about the manner in which they are unified?

And the way in which this goes is something that I can explain to you, and you can explain it to others, and you're probably not entirely alone in the places where you are right now.

But imagine yourself in a large gathering of people, maybe a church building on a Sunday morning, maybe a sports arena, maybe a sporting event, maybe in a mall or a grocery store or a marketplace, and you see lots of people around you.

Then I can ask you the question well, how many humanities are in this place?

And then you have to look around and say, Well, I know I'm human, and I think she might be human and he might be human, and I wonder, are they human?

Well, eventually you begin to realize that we're all humans in this setting.

Then the question is, are you fully human?

Well, I think I'm fully human.

I mean, I am a human being, right?

Is she fully human?

Well, she's fully human too, but she's so different than you are.

She is fully human, I am fully human, we are both fully human, but we are very fully human in very different ways.

This was the argument of the great Cappadocians.

They said, let's start with the three and acknowledge that they exist.

Then what is it that binds them together?

Well, these three are the only three that share whatever it is that divinity or godness is all about.

The three persons are uniquely and each completely and fully God, but they are the only ones who will ever be God, and all three of them share that.

Now, this becomes part of the teaching of the church over time, so that the only religion in the world that speaks of God in this manner is Christianity.

Judaism says there's God and there are people, and Jesus was a people.

And Islam kind of pears down Judaism and Christianity and says, Boy, have you got problems trying to think and trying to express yourself.

There's one God, and there are prophets, and among the greatest of those prophets is Jesus.

So you see how they've resolved these things, and Christianity continues to live in this very unusual thing, the only religion in the world that talks in this manner about God.

Well, that continued to um nurture the identities and the theological conversations of the Christian church, and they will be carried into the future.

In reality, Islam will in part react against the complexity of the idea of the Trinity and will become a much more logical inheritor of a monotheistic faith and its expression, saying, You guys have got something that's way too complicated.

You have three gods, we can't deal with that.

And Islam will, in some measure, take a logical turn and get rid of the Trinity in order to try to, in its own ideas, Muhammad's ideas certainly, express the same values or the same moral codes.

And that's what Islam will come into.

We'll we'll talk about Islam later.

One of the things, two of the things that we have to think about at this point, one of those is what happens to the church.

Increasingly, as the church becomes aligned with the Roman government, the church becomes part of Western civilization.

There will be an increasing tension between East and West, and eventually that will break down by uh the iconocl icons, icon controversy.

Do we use pictures of Jesus?

Uh, do they show a window into heaven?

The East would say yes, and the West would say no.

How do we talk about Jesus?

The East will have a little different way of talking about uh Jesus, and the West will have a little different talk about Jesus, and how do we structure the church?

And the East will say in communities, and the West will say through an organizational structure that basically reflects the Roman Empire.

And so the West will take on the old Roman Empire and will eventually become the Holy Roman Empire, self-designated, and there'll be all kinds of problems which continue to linger within especially Western Christianity to this very day.

What is the nature of church and state?

What is the relationship between the government and religious organizations?

How much are there possible Christian societies that can be under the rule of not only Jesus but temporal leaders, things like that?

And the Roman Catholic expression of this will become really the replacement Roman Empire against which Protestants will later on protest.

But a second thing that's going on here is that as Christianity took over the Greco-Roman world and as persecution stopped, there was an amalgamation of Greek wisdom or thinking, particularly Socrates and Plato, Platonic perceptions in uh organizing thoughts and uh looking at reality.

This will go into our creeds and our confessions and our theology, and basically over the next several thousand years, right up to the present, we continue trying to unravel some of the associations that were made at the beginning.

For one little thing, and we'll come back to this later.

Is the bread and the wine that's served at the Lord's Supper, or the Eucharist, or the Mass, does it actually become the physical body and blood of Jesus?

And here's what was going on the early church became influenced by Platonism, which said the real, the ideal is in heaven or in the transcendent, and these are mere reflections of all of that.

Like a table that we might call a table is not really a table, but a thing that has the properties of tableness.

And as far as we can imitate the true table in transcendent places, we can call it table, but it's not really table.

Well, what happened as Christianity went into the Middle Ages is that the third of the great uh Greek philosophers, his ideas increasingly took over.

That's Aristotle.

And Aristotle got tired of thinking reality is always transcendent and what we have here is always a reflection.

And he said, let's just call a thing a thing.

And switching from Platonistic theology to Aristotelian theology, the Christian church had a real problem because it had talked about this being the body and blood of Christ.

And by the time Aristotelian philosophy took over, that meant this is the body and blood of Christ.

Now, how do you explain that?

Because it seems like it's bread and wine.

Well, it must take place inside of you.

You see how these philosophies will begin to shape the way in which we even do theology.

What will happen though for the next several hundred years, really at least 400 years, is that because Constantine took over the church and the church began to take on contours of the Roman Empire, uh, it became establishment and it became powerful, and everybody had to become Christian.

And for about 400 years, it became the single largest Western institution.

And basically, even when the political governments rose and fell, the Christian church stabilized Western society and moved through all of Europe and northern Africa until it became essentially what has come to be known as kind of a Christianized world, for better or for worse.

But we're going to check on that next time when we pick up the story after uh the empire begins to crumble and fall.

So we'll talk about that later.