Church History - Part 2

All right, good evening, welcome.

We're we're um a minute early, but uh not a bad thing.

We're gonna be pressing, we're trying to cover two hundred years of church history in 45 minutes, so we're gonna be hoofing.

But before we do, uh a couple thoughts uh in in order, or or in no particular order rather.

Um first one, and help me remember somebody remind us at the end, uh there is a one of the students at later in the evening the students break out into small groups.

Right now, one of them is sitting at these cafe tables, uh, and it was requested that we maybe not exit out of that door uh because the teenagers are distracted, which is understandable.

So it's just when we when we get done, I'll try and remember and y'all help me remember to just not go out that door.

Other than that, it is what it is.

Small campus.

We got a lot of people here on Wednesday night, no big deal.

Uh other bit, we are uh uh an email will go out.

We uh for those of you who may be aware, we once a month do what we have historically called a sun night of prayer.

Uh just through conversation and and prayer and and consideration, uh, we recognize that depending on how many things you do around here, that that's another thing that that you're feeling obligated or or some desire to come up again.

Uh while also, if you remember, if you're here the the very first night, we're gonna do a prayer night once a month in here.

And so we're gonna combine those.

It's not about losing either one of them.

It's also not about making, trying to lower the bar for prayer, but we just think that the the draw will be better because people are already here on Wednesday night, anyways.

And so just be looking for details about that.

We'll remind you.

Uh we're we're seeking to continue to honor that and to be a praying body while also trying to find the best way for everyone to have an opportunity to participate in those things.

So details to come.

Thirdly, before I pray, let me uh remind us if you weren't here last week, not a big deal.

Uh we we didn't even really get into the actual timeline last week.

We talked about why why study church history uh and then also the the context into which Pentecost happened and the church was birthed, the Jewish, Greek, and and Roman influence on that early church and what that what influence that had on how Christianity developed.

And then in just a moment I asked you at the end of last week to think about what are our modern religious, cultural, and political influences, just so that we're constantly, as we learn lessons from history, we're constantly aware of the influences that we bring into our Bible interpretation, our theology, and then therefore our Christian practice.

So we'll get to that in a moment.

The main goal uh over six weeks, I'm trying to cover a 2,000-year history of the church.

Christians historically have been a documentary people.

We write things down, we discuss them, we send extensive letters back and forth.

It would it it's a it's a silly task to try and be super detailed in the course of six one-hour sessions to get all of church history.

So I'm not even trying.

Uh the the listening guides, if you don't have one, I recommend that you get one.

They're on the table back there, they're broad.

There will be some dates, but my goal here is to give us a broad stroke understanding of what was going on in each era of the church and how that instructs us today, how that warns us today, how that encourages us today, and also give us a sense of responsibility because we are currently the now on the timeline of church history.

If Jesus tarries and doesn't come back for uh several hundred more years, somebody else will be doing this, and there will be a section of that about this era of the Christian church.

And so we have this responsibility to carry on the integrity of the gospel, and the best way to do that is for one to know the word and to be indwelled by the Spirit.

But it is also incredibly helpful to see how faithful brothers and sisters for two millennia have faithfully guarded the good deposits.

So the goal is let's get a good understanding in broad strokes of what has happened in the history of church.

How does it inform our current practice?

But if you are eager to know more and you want the details, uh certainly I can give you a bibliography.

But my my recommendation for now, we recommend this all the time, but the gospel coalition, the go so if you want to jot this down, I meant to put it in the listening guide and I forgot to type it in there.

The gospelcoalition.org backslash courses.

So you go the gospelcoalition.org backslash courses.

The TGC is a trusted resource.

We we we we're fine with you reading them.

They have this wonderful repository of like seminary professors have written and put together classes, lectures, notes, recommended reading, all for free.

There's a section on church history.

You you could spend the next five years of your life just going through the free stuff on thegospelcoalition.org backslash courses, then go down to church history.

There's uh recorded lectures, some of them are podcast style conversations, often there's discussion questions, there's recommended books and reading, super helpful.

That will give you the details.

I'm gonna get to some of it this evening, but a lot of what I'm talking about in details are meant to be examples.

So of here's a couple examples of a broad spectrum of things that were happening at this point in the church.

And tonight we'll talk about the initial church, the the what the what the apostles were doing in Pentecost.

Peter preaches, people believe, and the church is initiated, and immediately it heads across the world, immediately we see division, immediately we see diversity of thought.

What do we do with those things?

And we'll spend a little bit of time talking about uh uh the the what happened when all the apostles died.

They had a unique brand of authority.

They they were commissioned specifically by Jesus as witnesses, eyewitnesses to the resurrected Christ, even Paul, Jesus appears to him, and they were given uh some extra measure of authority.

We see the the apostles commanding the spirits, that what the things they wrote became scripture.

Those were the leaders of the first era of the church, but they were humans and they died.

So then what?

Then what?

In the vacuum of that leadership, what developed out of that?

And we'll we'll begin to look at some of that this evening, as well as talking about persecution that rolls into the church almost immediately.

We see it in the pages of the New Testament.

It's happening so quickly to the Christian church, we can't even finish the canon of scripture before we get into the church being oppressed and Christians in particular often losing their lives for their faith.

Now, there's details within all these things.

Each session, we'll talk about other things.

For example, in a couple sessions, we will specifically think about uh Roman Christianity, Roman Catholicism.

It's a major section of our church history.

How did they how did they have such a strong opinion on Peter as the archetypal leader of the church and the succession, the apostolic succession of the papacy and the pope?

That ties into the era we're talking about tonight, but it's too big a picture, so we'll we'll come back to some things.

So if you feel like I've skipped over some stuff, hang in there.

We'll probably come back to it just in the context of other conversations.

Let me pray for us and uh we'll we'll get going.

We got a long way to go.

Father, thank you for this evening in this place where we can gather midweek to encourage one another and to share meals and to study your word and in the context of this evening, study the history of your church, which you promised us that the gates of hell uh the gates of hell would not prevail against.

And so as we look back on our faith legacy, uh may we be encouraged by your faithfulness to hold us steady, especially as we read of how quickly we as humans complicated things and brought our our our presuppositions and outside influences and demands into what it means to be a Christian that you have held us faithful to orthodoxy and orthopraxy for 2,000 years.

We we thank you and we love you, and may this be edifying to us as a church.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Okay.

Uh last week, again, we discussed the the different contexts in which the church was born into.

It was a Jewish religious context.

Initially, the the Christians wouldn't have wouldn't have necessarily thought of themselves as a new religion.

They thought themselves as the people of God to whom the Messiah had come.

So there's there's some implications around how the church and church thought evolved out of Judaism.

Uh there was a Greek world.

Primarily, the New Testament's written in Greek.

They thought like Greeks, they educated themselves like Greeks, they wrote letters like Greeks.

The details of that are less important, but the idea being there are cultural influences that we bring to our understanding of Scripture, and it's not always a bad thing, but we need to be aware of them.

And there was the Roman influence, the political landscape within which Christianity was born.

And initially Rome had no concern about Christians.

They were seen as a sect of Judaism.

Judaism was already an authorized religion of Rome, so no big deal.

But eventually, as Christians grew in numbers and their at the time radical approach to faith became a problem for Rome, but also a convenient problem for some of the emperors.

And we'll get to that in a bit.

But I asked you at the end of last week just to think about what are, we'll take well just a couple minutes here.

We need to be aware that the same things are happening to us.

We are living in a specific cultural moment in history where we live.

Our answers are not the same as someone just even living in the other part of the country.

But what are our religious influences that affect how you think about Christianity?

What are our cultural influences that affect how you think about Christianity and our political influences that affect how you think about Christianity?

Again, they're not inherently bad things, but we would be well served, especially as we consider history, to make ourselves as much as we can aware of what am I bringing to the table and reading into Christianity based on what I the parts of me that I don't even think about.

Just those those cultural historical moments that are baked into us.

So brief, brief conversation.

I want to honor that I asked you to do it.

So if you have answers, I want to give time to that.

But let me just give you a couple examples to get the get the juices flowing.

We'll start with just religious context, which my Christianity and our Christianity, because we're in the same place, I think are affected by.

We all of us live, whether you were born here or not, you now live in the Bible Belt.

And things are changing compared to historical, what does it mean to be in the Bible Belt?

But we are still in the Bible Belt, and therefore there is still a cultural respect for Christianity, even if it's not practiced.

There is a cultural expectation to some degree that you attend.

There's a reason that this room swells on Christmas and Easter and Mother's Days, because there's it's still baked into the culture, this idea that we are culturally Christian, even if we're not religiously so, and that will affect how we think about our faith.

We often will have inherited our faith.

We blur the lines between uh biblical faith and our historical, this is the kind of church I grew up in, and therefore that's the kind of church that I think is the most right.

That could be right, that could be wrong.

But if we're never pausing to think, is my preference for church based on scripture, or is it based on my cultural context of the church I was born into?

We will miss things, or or we will make bigger deals of things that don't need to be, or we won't make a big enough deal about things that do need to be defended.

What are there things that y'all thought of just in the religious context that affect how you think about your faith?

What about denominationally?

Are any of y'all like lifelong Baptists?

Some of us, fair amount, I'm lifelong Baptists.

That affects how I think about Christianity.

I think about Christianity in a uniquely Baptist way.

I would like to think that I have searched that uh and I've stayed within the Baptist world because I think it's a good expression of our Protestant faith, but inevitably it shapes how I think about certain passages.

It's an interpretive model to some degree.

What other religious influences do you think you might have just wear and you don't even notice that you put that on every day?

I think everyone might be afraid to answer.

Okay.

Here's one.

Uh we live in the the shadow of Bellevue Baptists.

At one point, Bellevue Baptist was the largest Baptist church in the country by a long shot.

At its peak, under Dr.

Rogers, it was like 35,000 members, something like that.

Uh if you've never been up there, it's it's jaw-dropping.

Um so so for a long time, especially in this area, that was seen as this this must be the whatever Dr.

Rogers is doing must be the best way to do it because look how big that church is.

That will affect our cultural understanding of what church should be like and what faith should be like.

And I'm not, I like Dr.

Rogers, I listen to his sermons.

I don't have anything against the guy, and I can't find a scriptural mandate to grow the biggest church we possibly can.

I don't think that was his goal either, but without meaning to, living in this area, and you think about all the pastors who trained under him, Mid-America Seminary, under his influence, trained a lot of our local pastors.

We're going to be trained to think and to act and to operate, like Bellevue in the 80s.

We just are.

And so we'll, without, if we if we don't pause to consider those things, we'll we'll demand things that that Bellevue did then.

Uh and and it's not that they're bad things, it's just they're more culturally informed than they are scriptural mandates.

Does that make sense?

It's not about that that anything is inherently wrong.

It's just we need to be asking the right questions about what why do I think this?

But uh cultural, linguistically.

What's the language that we all speak?

English.

What what was the New Testament written in?

Greek.

Immediately, by nature of being born now and not being born then, we have a cultural divide, even just in reading scripture.

All of us, myself included, Michael included, Robert included, the the guys who've been to seminary, we we were taught Hebrew and Greek.

I still read it in English, frankly.

It's difficult to get so adept at reading in another language that you can switch to it primarily.

And then even then, there's there's turns of phrases, there's cultural implications for certain vocabulary that we will miss unless we take a minute to pause and think, okay, this is translated into a modern language.

And so there's going to be something that we miss if we don't look underneath what's going on.

We're not looking for hidden meanings, but but we want earnest and deep study.

That's why, in particular, we try not to make it a word study every sermon, but most sermons, one of us is making some comment about, hey, this is how they would have understood this sentence then, to help us wrap our minds around the cultural divide.

So it's not a bad thing to speak English, but it does create a certain approach to how we read scripture and we'll miss things.

We talk about in the Old Testament, it has said that uh Leah had weak eyes.

Uh that's how it gets translated in most literal translations.

It doesn't mean she needed glasses.

That was uh uh an ancient euphemism for she was less attractive, right?

So it's just that's a that's a one that my professor told me years ago just sticks with me.

That one sounds like a mean one to use, but it's the most obvious uh cultural difference.

So you read that in English and go, she needed glasses, but the context is uh you didn't want to marry her because she was the less attractive of the two sisters.

It changes how you read the passage.

What about uh political influence?

And I'm gonna guard this conversation fairly fairly closely.

Yeah.

Interesting thought.

Yeah.

Yeah, frankly.

I've like I I was in Maui during COVID.

The state mandated what we did, so there was no we didn't really have to make decisions, we just had to do what they told us to do if we wanted to meet, which was was five, wasn't that oppressive.

All of my pastor friends here on the mainland said that was among the most miserable seasons of their pastoring ever, because you couldn't win.

No matter which decision you made, you're gonna take off half the church.

So and that changes and affects a lot of the roles at churches are are forever changed after COVID.

We we have definitely, uh especially in modernity in the last five to ten years, a lot of political commentators have blurred the line between theologian and political commentators, and and now some of the most popular Christian books are not written by theologians, they're written by political commentators.

It doesn't make them wrong, um, but but we we cannot ignore that their primary role is political, and so there is going to be some influence in that theology.

It might be good influence, it might be poor influence.

We have taken, you used to be able to say, I am a conservative evangelical, and that only meant something religiously, and now to say that you're identifying how you vote.

It just influences again.

I'm not placing value on one or the other, but but taking a moment to be aware of what is the cultural and historical moment and how does it influence our faith.

So let me turn us into, with that in mind, recognizing that we bring presuppositions into our study of church history.

Let's look to in our listening guide on the inside page.

Number one says the Apostolic Era and the New Testament Church.

Again, I'm not getting at every detail.

I just want to give us a broad understanding of what was happening.

I'm gonna get real tied to my notes.

Last week I I do what I do when I preach, and I use notes, but I come up out of them, and then I went really long.

So I'm gonna stick to my notes.

My head will be down a little bit more, but it'll keep us more on track.

So in the apostolic era, meaning the time at which the apostles were the living and most direct leadership of the church, even as they were establishing elders and deacons.

At the time, the apostles were the primary leaders of the church.

The church was in Jerusalem, it's where Pentecost happened.

It was a predominantly Jewish culture.

Converts were coming from a Jewish population.

And again, they would not have initially thought of themselves as a separate group, but the tensions rise early.

We see in the New Testament that often it is the Jews that are running Paul and others out of town, or they are going to Rome to appeal to Rome, said, hey, these are these are not of us, please do something about it.

And within that, uh initial strains of Christianity emerge right out of the gate.

We see it in the New Testament.

You've probably, when I point this out, you're going to go, oh yeah, I've yeah, we've we've read about that in Acts.

It just never maybe occurs to us that in some ways there were denominations immediately, immediately, even at Pentecost, there there were three primary groups, even amongst the apostles, in terms of how to interpret and practice Christianity.

In broad strokes.

There were the followers of Jesus from his ministry in Galilee.

Those were uh traditionally led by Peter and the twelve apostles.

There were the converts out of Judea, they were led by James, who is the brother of Jesus.

He's sometimes known as James the Just.

And there were those from the Greek, they called the diaspora, the Dispersion, who were led by Stephen.

Again, don't get overwhelmed by the details.

My point here is immediate diversity.

Let me give you a bit more.

They each had different ideas about what to do with the law.

So Christianity begins in the Jewish context, and their holy scripture for thousands of years was the law.

So the Messiah has come within the context of Judaism.

So they go, what do we do with the law?

Is it fulfilled?

Is it not fulfilled?

Do we continue to practice the law?

Do we abolish the law?

We see those debates in the New Testament already, but there's groups.

There's groups even amongst the apostles.

Peter's group used typology.

It's this idea that Old Testament concepts and principles are types or foreshadowing of new covenant practices.

They had an emphasis on the Sermon on the Mount.

A lot of Jesus saying, You have heard it said, but I say to you, he was increasing the accountability to some degree, but he was interpreting the Old Testament law to its final state.

This is what I say is the right understanding here.

We see in Hebrews that there is a new and better Moses.

That's what we're talking about with typology.

Moses was a type of Messiah, but he was not the archetype.

That's Jesus.

That's how they thought about it.

James's group drew significantly from the Pharisees.

They wanted to keep the law in its entirety.

These were the Judaizers, you might know from scripture.

It's in uh willing to accept that the Messiah had come, but they believed that all the Gentiles and the converts should be circumcised and should follow the law.

We immediately have a break.

Those who Peter led said, yes, this is, we're gonna still observe the law to some degree, but it gives us examples of how to live it under the new covenant.

The Judaizers said we're gonna keep it exactly how it is, and now we've just added a messiah.

The um Stevens group saw the law as universal.

It was broad stroke examples to be given.

The temple was specific to that time, but now Jesus serves in that role.

And all three of these things contribute to Paul's view.

Paul had a synthesis of all four.

So we we just in the in the pages, before we even get to a history book, just what we have in the pages of Scripture, we immediately have kind of four significant streams of how people were thinking about their faith immediately after Pentecost.

Sometimes we get this uh there's always been diversity of thought and practice.

So so we first let's take a deep breath and not freak out when you see it happening around you.

Right?

This diversity was there when only a few thousand Christians existed.

Modernly, it's not uncommon to wring our hands about how many Christian denominations are in the world, but it kind of makes sense.

We see three major categories right away.

As far as we know, excuse me, uh it that Pentecost.

Sermon Peter gives the Bible records 3,000 people.

The numbers were added, but say we stick around that 3,000 number.

There's already three, but potentially four major streams of how do we think about and express this new thing that we are, Christians.

That's immediate within 3,000 people.

We skip ahead to today.

What was the number or the range I threw out last week of modern Christians?

Two to three billion.

Two to three billion.

Just humanly, it would make sense that we now have, depending on how you count it, some 10,000 denominate, whatever it is.

There is a mind-numbing amount of different expressions of the Christian faith modernly.

And that becomes a point of stress for some folks.

It can cause the, well, shouldn't there just be some pure strain of Christianity?

Sure, we'll get that answer when we get to heaven.

I think we'll might feel bashful about some of the things that we held very important, and maybe bashful about some of the things that we didn't chase hard enough.

But what we read immediately in Scripture is diversity was part of it.

It's not inherently holy to be diverse in thought about Christianity, but it's not inherently a reason to be concerned.

However, modernly, I hear a lot of people, it's becoming a popular, it comes and goes, uh, is currently popular now to uh question, particularly the high church traditions.

The Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, and the Eastern Orthodox Church are pressing on this hard right now.

It's it's they're not, they're pretty open about that they are running in an apologetics campaign to win converts from Protestantism, and they're doing a good job of it.

And part of what they point out is how um diverse and ununified we are.

Yeah, since forever, since forever.

But they're playing on to some degree in ignorance of church history.

They also have a different interpretation of church history.

I hope that you will hear me throughout all of this being generous to our Catholic brothers and sisters.

I think they're true believers, those who are covered in the blood of Jesus, they just take a significantly different approach to what it means to be Christian than we do.

I came out of my notes and said I wasn't going to.

To some degree, this is just how humans are.

If we're to pull a room right now about what Mexican restaurant in town is best, there'd probably be as many answers as there are people in here.

And you'd probably have a really strong reason for why yours is best.

Does it make any of us inherently incorrect?

Well, probably.

There is probably some metric by which one of us is the most correct.

Uh however, we we are agreeing that that might be our favorite kind of food.

There's still this common denominator that is this is Mexican food, and this is the best kind, and we can decide what it means to express that in the best way.

But also, we are informed by our historical and cultural moment, and out of that experience, we bring presuppositions.

Okay, presuppositions, just this idea, it's a common term in theology conversations, that we we are bringing thoughts into our thinking.

Uh my presupposition when I read scripture is that it's true.

Ever thought about that?

If your presupposition when you read scripture is that it's not true, and you and we read the same passage, I'm getting something totally different out of it than the individual who presupposes it to not be true.

Now, those presuppositions expand to all sorts of things.

Is God holy?

Is God loving?

Is God just?

Is God uh uh is he does God have the authority and is he still holy even when things happen that we would prefer not to happen?

These are all presuppositions that we bring to our study of our faith, and we do it with history as well.

We think back to our discussion last week, Christianity was born again into Jewishness, into Greekness, into Romanness.

Not only were there presuppositions, they were formed through three different types of influences and backgrounds.

So as we've just discussed, our experiences and those cultural influences affect how we move through modern Christianity.

And my suggestion here is that we take hope from these early differences of opinion because the church is still here.

The church is still here.

And as far as we can tell, the the gospel that we proclaim in this pulpit, it's not tootin our own horn, but the gospel we proclaim in this pulpit is the same gospel they were proclaiming in those pulpits.

There's a lot of diversity about how that plays out.

This would look very foreign to them.

They didn't have air conditioning, they didn't have commercial buildings where they gathered.

They were in each other's house.

Initially they started in the synagogues till the Jews kicked them out, then they had to meet in houses, then they were personal.

It would look different, but we are in 2,000 years of orthodoxy preaching the same gospel.

It should be encouraging to us, especially because we see at Pentecost immediate diversity, but there was a rallying point around Christ crucified.

It's the Orthodox understanding of Jesus as the Son of God, fully man, fully God, Savior and Messiah, his exclusive way unto salvation that all remains.

So are the debates and divisions always a good thing?

Of course not.

Sometimes we argue over silly things.

Often we argue over silly, silly things.

However, what we see through 2,000 years of varying opinions is that God has been faithful to keep the integrity of the gospel message true to that which was delivered to the apostles.

So what we can do is regularly stop and ask ourselves if our opinions and thoughts about the various expression of our faith now, is that because we think we're not honoring Scripture or are we not honoring our cultural influences and preferences?

It's a difference in the debate.

Are we arguing about the right things?

Are we focused on the right things?

Are we allowing secondary issues to cloud our eyes from seeing that we are still on the same page about who Jesus is?

Further, we should also be careful not to treat the diversity as inherent and as something to be celebrated just at face value.

If we take that too far, we end up with syncretism.

That is, we just take everything and Christianize it and call that good.

That's not right either.

Not all things are holy.

There was growing up when I was a teenager in Middle Tennessee, I can't remember exactly, it doesn't really matter, but they were billboards, a big church in town, billboards, they were very proud of this.

Their thing was we play top 40 hits as a way for, it's a it's a draw.

We have this great band, they play great covers, we get them in, and then we sneak a sermon on them.

And they had billboards to that effect.

That level of diversity is inappropriate.

That's not what we're the Lord says, worship me in this way.

Okay, there are certain things we've got to stand on.

It's not about diversity is great at all ends and in all ways, but we don't need to be afraid of it.

Even in the beginnings of the church, they still had much in common.

Common faith in Jesus.

They were communicating with one another.

There was not isolationism.

So we're engaging in the debates.

We see the letters back and forth and debate about no, this is the right way to think about it, or this is the right way to think about it.

In a couple sessions, we'll talk about what are now known as the ecumenical councils.

It's a theological term for the leaders from all the Christian traditions would travel so far.

It's far now.

It was far then, with no buses, trains, automobiles, those sorts of things.

They would gather and debate for days and weeks and months on end about what is the right understanding of this passage.

They care deeply about addressing their diversity and differences rather than isolating away from one another in that way.

It would be interesting if we could operate more in that way today.

Even from one church to the next.

There's there's just down get well, I can think of five churches that are that are all slightly different.

I know all those pastors were all friendly.

Uh we're good to go.

We share a common Jesus, but we don't all work at the same church for a reason.

We have particular convictions.

Even though different groups had varying opinions about how to think about the Old Testament, they all considered it the word of God, and they were diligently seeking to interpret it in the light of Jesus in the new covenant.

I think that's another thing to be mindful of when considering the differences of modern churches.

They shared common practices, these ancient churches.

They were all baptizing, they were all observing the Lord's Supper, they were gathering on Sundays.

That was almost immediate.

The Sunday became the Lord's day immediately, and they all put emphasis on the moral expectations of Christianity.

We talked last week about Christians understanding from the very beginning that their faith is one of congruency.

We don't want to just believe the right things, we want to act out our faith in appropriate ways.

We call that holy living.

Modernly, sometimes that gets accused of being legalistic, but from the very early moments, and we'll look at this in a moment, the letters that were being written initially were concerning right living.

They were defending doctrine, certainly.

They were defending the deity of Christ.

But much of the early letters, we see this in the New Testament too, but in the in the in the church leaders that immediately followed the apostles, they were writing letters to each other, mostly addressing this is the right way to live out your faith, to live in holiness, to be set apart and outside of the world.

Helpful things that they were doing immediately.

Now the church pretty quickly expanded beyond Jerusalem.

It went to Rome and to Antioch and to Ephesus, and we see Paul and the other apostles taking the gospel to the corners of their known and accessible worlds.

We'll discuss the details of that movement as they are relevant going forward.

However, we'll come back to them as the background is needed in understanding the topic.

For example, like I said, Peter goes to Rome, and it was thought that he served as an apostle, but also as a formal church leader there.

Several centuries later, Ignatius and others started calling him the Bishop of Rome, which, as far as we can tell, was not how he was operating or understood in that moment.

So we as Protestants and Protestant historians say that the Catholic tradition looks back and assigns Peter a role that he did not have.

Ask a Catholic that, they have a different opinion there.

We're going to honor that and be respectful of it, but we're Protestant, so I'm not going to be bashful about what we what we think of that.

However, Paul was there too, and he was also leading, and he also probably was operating in some bishop role there.

What do we do with that?

Obviously, there's the I will build my rock and we'll look at that passage.

But let's stop here just for a moment for a mental rest and for a little bit of a thinking through.

I mentioned last week that my main goal for this teaching series was to use our shared faith history to encourage, to warn, to instruct us as modern Christians.

So with what we have discussed, what we can learn from the initial diversity is that they still affirm the common faith, they stay in conversation with one another, and they stay aware of their presuppositions.

Things and lessons from church history that we can and should bring into modernity.

It is we're we're we're affirming a common shared belief in Jesus and the exclusivity of Jesus.

We are staying in communication.

This place is unique, DeSoto County is unique in that there's not a lot of competitive spirit here, and all of us, many of us get along.

There are pastors that we have reached out to who have no interest.

I'm not gonna name them.

I'm not dogging them, they just they would rather, and and they have a reputation for they don't talk to anyone.

And it it seems like such a miss of the of the great wealth that is rubbing up against one another for correction, for encouragement, for for sharing the care of the flock as people move and and uh around the county and through churches.

But we have this testimony of staying in conversation with one another.

And thirdly, again, we stay aware of our presuppositions.

What is it that I'm bringing to the table that I am um pushing upon my thoughts about Christianity that may not be inherently scriptural?

Now, let's um let's flip to this to the second page.

I didn't put page numbers on there, but the second page, number two, the sub-slash post-apostolic era.

There's a little bit of overlap there where the the post-apostolic writers began to send letters around before all the apostles were dead.

So it's not totally fair to call it the sub-apost apostolic era.

It's not totally fair to call the post, so I just put both on there.

Uh but the apostles were uniquely, again, chosen leaders that via the Pentecost instituted the church, but they were humans and they died.

So what after that?

We don't actually have a ton of information about what was happening in Christian circles during the first couple of centuries.

We think about the Pentecost happens, and there is a new grassroots religion that sparks out of it that is immediately persecuted, that is still trying to develop uh thought structures and leadership structures, and we have the apostles to lead that.

Uh, but but it was a time of development.

And so, within that, we just don't have as much historical content as we do for other eras of church history.

But what we do have is a um a collection of letters.

We're not going to discuss all of them tonight, I'm gonna give you a couple as an example.

But uh I'm gonna run through the highlights of a couple of these, is they give us the best insight into the life and the challenges of the church during this time after the apostles and before the church had really formalized and began began significant record keeping in later centuries.

This grouping of writings is known as the Apostolic Fathers.

That's just the like capital A, capital F, Apostolic Fathers.

Again, the Catholic tradition maintains that these were men who were direct disciples of the apostles, and they wrote the letters which hold their name.

Protestant historians argue that we don't actually have a lot of proof for that, and that not all of the authors were even direct disciples of the apostles.

However, even Protestant historians, and therefore we affirm these letters as helpful documentation of what was the church thinking, what challenges were they facing, and what were they doing during that time.

Uh we we uh just a difference in how we validate information.

Either way, again, Protestants don't deny the validity of the letters, and we further affirm that they were very influential in the early church.

So, as an example, that first one we see, under examples, strange looking word.

You can pronounce that one, the Didic.

The Didache is written, we think, a lot of times you'll see circa 100 AD as borderline arbitrary.

We have the content of the Didache, we we have little information about who wrote it, exactly when it was written, um, and exactly the extent to which it traveled.

However, we do know that it was uh extensively used amongst most of the Christian churches during that time.

The full title of the Didache was The Teaching of the Lord through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations.

And most basically, it was a manual for church life.

Many Christians during this era use the Didic like like our membership class.

If you've if you were here for the Wednesday night thing, we have produced now, it's it's a booklet on what does it mean to be a church member broadly, and what does it mean specifically to be a church member at Heartland?

And part of the membership process now is that you work your way through that book.

It's a fair amount of content.

But the idea is we want you to be well informed and well educated about what you are signing up for to be a member here.

We want to be very clear and train you up in the ways of, uh, especially for new believers, in the ways of Christianity and how we practice it.

Christians were doing that immediately.

Immediately they had a codified, here is our manual and our handbook.

You this is something you can Google and read it.

It's interesting.

Just search the dedique.

It contained specific instructions for moral expectations of Christians.

It gives details about how to do baptisms.

It included instructions for fasting, prayer, the Lord's Supper, Sunday gathering, how to elect local leaders, etc.

And but before we think, well, why don't we just use that document?

Well, the Heartland membership class, we just read the Didiche.

Uh we do that to some extent, but it's a primary source of information for all Christian traditions about how the earliest churches understood the practices of church life.

But again, like I said, we aren't entirely sure when it was composed.

Some scholars think it was written as early as 70 AD, which would have been very close to the Apostles.

Some date it as late as 180 A.D., which would have been several or a couple generations after the Apostles.

So while the document is incredibly helpful, we need to be careful about elevating extra-biblical.

That's a term for that, it's not inherently a negative term.

Extra-biblical is content that we have historically considered to be helpful, but not canon.

It's not authoritative.

So we need to be careful about the extent to which we elevate extra-biblical material to a place of authority.

Further, it was a common characteristic of early church literature that as church life and practice changed, the literature they used was updated to match.

Again, not that strange.

We we at our family meeting on this Sunday, we will present bylaw revision proposals.

Many of those are saying as our practices and our expressions of our faith have changed, we are updating our documents to match and as our educational tools.

It's not unusual.

It's probably how the Didache was used.

So something like the Didache is helpful, but we don't actually know if we have the original version.

Very few churches modernly even follow the practices to a T, even if they'd be willing to accept that we have an original manuscript.

For example, the the Didache's instruction for baptism are as follows: After an extensive instruction in the moral expectations of the Didache, candidates should be baptized in cold, living, meaning running water.

If you cannot find cold, then you may use living warm water.

If you can't find either, in extreme circumstances, you may pour in baptism.

As good Baptists, we would go, no, no, no.

Depends on what kind of Baptist you are.

Depending on the situation, I might pour too.

There's nuance to that.

The candidate should fast for one to two days before the baptism.

Then baptism should immediately be proceeded by participating in the Lord's Supper with the congregation.

All wonderful things.

And even so, we would be pressed to find those as prescriptions in Scripture.

Does that make sense?

Wonderful expressions, faithful, and there is wisdom, even biblical wisdom, to an orderly expression of a local church body.

That we even Paul seemed to understand you need to pick away.

And it's not pick away and be obstinate.

But there is to the value of the unity of a local body, with earnest intent and biblical study, we are picking an expression that this is the mechanics of how we think we should process baptism, for example.

But very rarely can we find something in scripture that says it would be lovely, it would end so many debates about someone says, I want to be baptized, we go, great, here's book, chapter, verse, do these things in this amount of time, answer these questions.

But but all we can do is faithfully express those.

But we have this sweet testimony that Christians were were earnestly seeking those answers from the very beginning.

Are they good expressions of the biblical witness to baptism?

Sure.

Was this common practice amongst first century Christians?

Apparently.

But that said, what is the most appropriate way to translate the use of a Didicai, a Didache style approach to modern churches?

Considering that we have no way to validate whether or not the apostles wrote the Didic, which is unlikely, although it's attributed to them, a lot of early writings were attributed to the apostles to elevate the authority.

Considering that it was common for the church to update its literature as practice changes, we should be wary of using these early documents authoritatively.

And the significant difference there being that the high church traditions, like the Catholic Church, are gonna are gonna place more emphasis on these extra-biblical sources.

So some of the practices that we see that seem strange to us have historic origins too, and good charity to those brothers and sisters.

We just would not validate the authority in the same way that some of those other traditions do.

So again, where is the value?

Well, for one, we we have an idea of what our faith forebearers thought about church life and practice.

I'm a proponent of engaging in historic Christianity.

Our faith should not be novel.

We're not asked in any way to be clever about our faith.

We're not asked in any way to update the Christian message.

Instead, the biblical testimony is guard the good deposit, leave it how you found it, but carry it forward.

While at the same time constantly measuring practice against the testimony of Scripture, keep in mind what what we currently consider the New Testament was just beginning to circulate at this time, but it had not been accumulated and accepted as canon, and that would have been later.

So the earliest Christian practices, including depending if the Didic was written around 70, were still waiting for the New Testament to finish being written, and then it would be centuries later that it would be recognized in totality as this is the canon of the New Testament.

And we'll get to that.

Early church fathers were reading those letters as scripture.

However, again, they were being passed around and they were developing theology at times without the benefit of what we now take for granted as a bound book with all of the scriptural witnesses all in one place.

It doesn't make them wrong, but it was something to be aware of, lest we put too much emphasis on documents like the Didiche.

Other uh just exemplary things, and I just picked ones that were interesting to me and that I thought would be helpful for the conversation.

You'll see here first and second Clement.

First and second Clement, these two letters are from, they are, uh they introduce themselves as this is from the church of God that sojourns in Rome to the church of God that sojourns in Corinth.

Immediately, we have insight into their mindset and practice.

These early churches understood themselves to be sojourners, foreigners in their homelands, in the world but not of the world.

At the early stages of the church, we get this idea that we live here, but we are not of here.

Here.

So they consider themselves sojourners at this location.

It's a wonderful thought that we could bring into modernity from the church who sojourns in South Haven.

We are from here, we live here, we love here, and we are not of here.

We have church history to remind us of those things.

In the world but not of the world.

Further, while the letters may have been written by a guy named Clement, perhaps they were sent with communal authority rather than apostolic authority.

Later Catholic theologians will ascribe to Clement the role of or the title of the third bishop of Rome.

We just can't affirm that.

We don't have anything outside of church tradition that suggests that.

Rather, it's someone by the name of Clement was the designated writer of the letters, but the church as a whole sent it to other churches as a whole.

Excuse me.

Later individuals would identify, or I touched on that, regardless of authorship or authority.

First and second Clement give us insight into the challenges of the early church.

Let me just give you a brief summary.

You can find full text articles of these letters.

They're fascinating.

And they're updated, they're translated into modern English, they're not difficult to read.

But 1 Clement, in part, was written to correct divisions amongst the Corinthian church.

They were at it again.

If you remember, we preached through 1 Corinthians.

Significant sections of 1 Corinthians are Paul saying, knock it off with the divisions.

Paul dies.

The church at Rome feels the need to write a letter to the church in Corinth, says, Hey, you're doing it again, knock it off.

They were deposing leaders.

They were unseating pastors with separatist groups, so the church leaders in Rome wrote to the congregation to tell them, again, knock it off.

Second Clement, primarily concerned with instruction in living a holy life according to Scripture.

In some total, the earliest Christians were dealing with things we are dealing with now.

In preparation to teach these things, as I'm reading back through church history, I am struck over and over again by the refrain of Ecclesiastes of the there is just nothing new under the sun.

We have modern expressions of these things, but but the earliest letters from one church to the other were addressing the same problems that plague us now.

Why the divisions?

Knock it off.

Hey, this is a call to holy living.

We are saved by Christ outside of our works, but we are saved unto good works.

We are, from the very moment the inception of the church, we are battling the humanness uh influence on our faith expressions.

The significant value of these early writings are adding to the experiential wisdom of our faith forbearers, as well as seeing how those interpretations played out.

We see how they were received.

But here's another way to connect it to our um uh to our modern experiences.

How often uh have we heard, maybe you have said, some variation of why are we so concerned with the details?

There's evangelism to do.

It's a common refrain, especially within the Baptist world.

Not always, not all Baptists, but it has been this rallying cry of let's quit.

I hear it at every annual convention.

Somebody gets on the floor and says, can we end this current conversation and just worry about the missionaries?

And I get it.

However, every era of Christianity has affirmed that the details matter.

To suggest that let's not worry about the P's and Q's, let's be about the work of making disciples, that's great.

But there is a prescribed way to make disciples and to train disciples and to live according to holiness.

And we have records of that throughout all of church history.

It's worth bearing in mind that the very first churches were being birthed directly out of Pentecost.

The structure, the ecclesiology, and the church practice of Christians was in development.

And so by the time of these writings, some of that stuff had settled already into orthopraxy, and it was it was influenced by persecution, by heresies immediately, geographical and cultural differences, all polled at the gospel message.

And so the early church needed to focus on being faithful to orthodoxy.

The mission is important.

However, it does not preclude or devalue the idea of guarding the integrity of the gospel where it has already taken root.

It doesn't take much for one leftward lean to become a full drift into heresy.

This is a basic thrust of all the writings, categorized broadly as the apostolic father.

So, what do we do with that as modern Christians?

What are the appropriate ways to utilize this part of history to the glory of God and to the advancement of the gospel?

A couple thoughts I have.

First, it reminds us that our battle for orthodoxy, right thinking, historical theology is ancient, and we are the current defenders of it.

That has been a heavy thought on me as I'm prepping for this, without being melodramatic, but I think there's an appropriate awareness that we should hold that we are the current generation of Christians.

In a 2,000-year timeline, we currently hold the torch.

What are we going to do with it?

The Lord has promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church.

We cannot screw this up beyond what the Lord can redeem and sustain.

However, I don't want to approach my Christian faith as the as uh what's the least I can do and still be found faithful?

I want to be active in my approach to it, it is our turn.

We need to be watchful and stay at the work of knowing, understanding, and living out our faith.

Uh second, by learning about our history, we can trace trace both God's sovereignty and his providence to preserve his church through the difficulties that humans create for it.

Certainly, there are uh the the influence of Satan, uh the the enemy is at work, but but we already know he will fail.

But we can bring our own issues into the unity of the modern church, but we can trace through how our faithful ancestors have sought to contend for both mission and doctrine throughout history.

We need not and we should not try and reinvent the wheel here.

So, last thought for this evening, or last category, let's let's look to the back.

And I know these are we're moving quick, um, but just layering in thoughts here.

Persecution.

We we can't talk about this era of the church, can't really talk about any era of the church without talking about persecution, but but persecution ironically had the opposite of the intended effect on the early Christian church.

Let me spell that out for us just a little bit.

Initially, the church was persecuted by the Jewish religious leaders.

I mentioned last week that the very early days of the Christian faith were seen as a sect of Judaism by Rome.

And Judaism was an authorized religion of Rome.

So for a while the government was unconcerned.

That whatever, you're good, that's an internal issue, you guys sort it out.

We see that in Acts.

We also see that played out in the Christians, in that Christians were beginning to be barred from the synagogues and Jewish life.

So churches and other places, namely Rome and Antioch, began to take center stage as perhaps the hub of Christian activity.

Paul clearly still saw Jerusalem as kind of the mother church.

He was returning there for verification and for debates.

But but as Judaism became antagonistic to Christians, they were forced out of Jewish circles and had to create a more distinct and unique identity.

We see that played out in uh but it did not take long for Rome to notice at that point.

But to some degree, why did Rome care?

There were not that many Christians.

Uh the Roman Empire was vast and powerful, and they had all kinds of religious groups within them, as I mentioned last week.

As the Roman Empire expanded, it was part of their policy to allow conquered peoples to keep their religion.

It was a way to keep the peace.

Says, as long as you do a little bit of civil worship to uh the Romanness that you are now, you can keep your religions, and that had worked for a long time for them.

So why did Rome care at all?

It was the um the radical expressions of faith within Christianity were at odds with the Roman civil expectations.

Uh some Romans viewed Christians as responsible for all manner of natural disasters and calamities because the Christians refused to make sacrifices to the pagan gods.

So any calamity that came was, well, these Christians are angering our gods.

Uh the animosity starts to build.

We see that start specifically with the Emperor Nero, N-E-R-O.

It was during his reign that both Peter and Paul were executed in Rome.

Nero historically is remembered as a bit of a crazy, uh, depending on what parts of his history you read, but Nero is an erratic, strange guy.

Uh in 64 AD, a fire breaks out in Rome, the capital city of Rome.

It burned for this fire burns for six days.

It entirely destroys, just levels about a third of the city, and it damages up to two-thirds of the city.

Uh tradition says that Nero sat in his window and played the violin while he watched Rome burn.

Uh pretty quickly afterwards, rumor started to sprout that because of Nero's craziness, maybe he started the fire.

Maybe Nero is an issue.

Uh, in response to that, Nero said, I know what I'll do, and he blamed the Christians.

So this was a this is a uh a specific time of Roman persecution of the Christian church.

Later Roman emperors would keep up that persecution, but ironically, it had the opposite effect.

It was during this time, at about the same time, uh, the the supposition is that Paul and Peter are ultimately executed.

They had been imprisoned, but they were moved into execution following the fire, or around the time when they were uh Nero was trying to pass the blame off onto Christianity.

Uh and and the the Romans had an easy time believing it again because there was already distrust beginning to develop where they would not bow to the civil religions of Rome.

And so the persecution begins, and it starts a two or three hundred-year uh uh sequence of the Roman political system suppressing or just attempting to suppress this new religion of Christianity.

Uh however, we we um we we get some opposite effects happening of what they intended.

The first is that we get uh this treasure trove of early apologetic writings from guys like Justin the Martyr, Origen, and others.

We'll talk about them next week.

Don't get hung up on the details.

But some of the apologetic writing, they were responding to the charges of Rome.

Rome was charging them of incest because of the brother-sister language of Christianity, and they were calling uh the communion time love feasts.

And so Romans said, look, they're incestuous.

Uh they they were charged with blasphemy, uh, with insubordination, all manner of things.

And so it burred this class of Christian intellectuals who were the first apologists, the defenders of the faith, early, early expressions of Christian theology and significant thought that says, here is the reasonableness of our faith and an explanation for what we are doing.

We still are influenced by those teachings today.

We'll discuss that to some degree.

The persecution fueled an intellectual bloom within Christianity, though out of necessity.

Second, it created a category of martyrs, people who died for their faith.

And it set the evangelistic efforts of the church on absolute fire.

They thought, we'll kill these people and it'll stop.

Or we'll kill their leaders and they'll be scared.

What happened was people saw the radicalness of their leaders that was, even upon the threat of death, I will not renounce the resurrected Jesus.

Because for Rome, it was, hey, we'll let you, we're not going to kill you if you'll just renounce what you're doing.

Or in some cases, hey, you can keep the Christian stuff, just worship our things too.

So early martyrs were put to death, again, with this idea of we'll quash this.

They were putting them in the Roman Colosseum with lions and letting the lions rip the Christians apart and eat them in front of the Roman uh witnesses.

They thought, this'll kill it.

And what happened instead is Christianity exploded.

It began the first significant growth after Pentecost in seeing the earnestness of the faith.

Matter of fact, we we later have to uh uh come back and correct because it swung too far in the other direction where people were trying to be martyred as some mark of extra faithfulness.

Please kill me.

There is a foolishness in that.

However, it embol the persecution from Rome emboldened the church in those early times in ways that they could not have anticipated, and in ways that the Lord used to spread his church, and now uh we have two, three billion Christians.

Ironically, too, we'll read of Constantine, a Roman Emperor, who converted to Christianity and made Christianity the national religion of the empire, some several hundred years later, 325, somewhere in there.

So for the the Neroes trying to kill him, Roman Emperor, a couple centuries later, Constantine says, I'm Christian, and so are all of you.

That's its own problem.

We'll get to that.

Now, I'm at the end.

Let me um set us up with another another discussion question just to keep you thinking about it throughout the week, uh, but also to start us next week, and you'll see that discussion prompt for next session.

It's the last point in our notes here.

Orthodoxy, so historic Christianity, the resurrected Jesus, has historically thrived under persecution.

This is just factual.

When we read through church history, we'll see it as we go.

Orthodoxy has thrived under persecution.

Therefore, how might peacetime have the opposite effect?

How might peacetime, when there is no pressure, when it is not difficult to be a Christian, what might be the effect on orthodoxy, on traditional Christianity?

It's not always a bad, it's not a trick question.

Sometimes it's a good thing.

It allows us times of peace to recollect and to gather and to grow.

Other times it makes us sloppy.

So let's take some time this week to think through uh that question.

We'll pick up with that next week.

Next week.

We're not starting the prayer night next week, right?

No.

So next week, another session here.

We will look at um the next several hundred years as quickly as we can, but we're gonna start layering in the development of theological thought in particular, um, the heresies that were popping up immediately.

We have Gnosticism that was mentioned in the New Testament.

Uh, there's several letters addressing Gnosticism.

So we have heresy immediately that the church was having to address.

This is these are these are uh opinions and expressions of the faith that were so far off base that if you believe them, there was a threat that you weren't actually saved.

We'll be specific about what heresies are.

We'll talk about the apologists, the martyrs, the developments, the early stages of the Roman papacy.

Uh try and get all that in next session.

So let me pray for us.

I remembered, please don't go out that door.

Let me pray for us, and then uh we'll be about our way and we're we're right on time.

But Father, thank you for this evening, and we thank you, um thank you for your church, uh, and we we thank you that that we get to be a part of uh uh a legacy uh of faithful brothers and sisters who have guarded the good deposits uh through persecution and and through times of peace, uh you have sustained the integrity of your gospel.

And thank you that that through thousands of years and across mountains and rivers and oceans it made its way from Jerusalem here to us, and and and and because of the faithful history of the church and your providence and sovereignty and your care and love, you have brought the gospel here to the people in this room through against all odds, according to any practical measures, we should not have ever heard the gospel, but we have, and thank you.

And so as we study the history of how it got here, may we do so with joy, may we do so sober-mindedly, looking for the lessons about what to avoid, uh what to run to, what to affirm, and we can equip ourselves with being the current torch bearers of the gospel and carrying it on to the next generation while we wait on Christ.

And we thank you and we love you.

Please carry us wherever we're going this evening safely.

May we honor you with our lives tomorrow.

We love you.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

You are dismissed exactly on time.