Church History - Part 1

Chick, check.

Good evening.

I'm gonna I used to when we first way back, I don't know, several years ago, started this Wednesday night thing, I used to teach down here, and then there became a lot of people and then a stand up there, but uh it seems like there's a little less interest in church history, so I'm gonna stand back down here.

I'm gonna try and be really interesting tonight, so you guys go sell it for me for session two.

I love church history.

I I hope to convey that enthusiasm to you all and whoever else may come in the future sessions.

Uh it is more than an exercise in timelines and facts and figures.

It is the it is the history of our of our faith.

There's beautiful encouragement and correction and instruction as well as warnings throughout church history.

Further, it bolsters our ability to stand firm on that which we are we are called to guard, the gospel.

We we see how others have guarded it and faithfully passed it to us.

And being at least uh reasonably informed about how it got to us will help us reasonably continue to take it to others until Jesus comes back.

The importance of church history is that we can know who we are, not just who we are as Heartland, not just who we are as the history of Heartland or even the history of a Southern Baptist convention, but just who are we as people who follow Jesus?

And at one time was this offshoot, this sect of Judaism that grew to what is today between two and three billion people of the some eight billion total population.

Christianity is the predominant worldwide religion.

How did we get here?

I'm gonna try and cover some of that for us in the course of six weeks.

Six weeks is not enough, but six weeks is plenty to survey and give us the contours, and and and for those who it sparks an interest, I will give you my bibliography and you can dive off into all the books that are this big, and some of them are this big, and some of them focus on on small sections, but there is a wonderful, wonderful uh uh uh store and library of our history that I encourage you to lean into.

Let me give you a little bit of a review of where we're going and then I'll pray.

This evening is mostly introduction.

Why would we study history?

I have more to say than what I just said.

Why would we study history?

What's so important about studying church history, even as church members, certainly for us as church leaders, but but as church members, knowing our faith history, why is that important?

What are we to do with it?

How do we to interpret historically what we have in our in our record books?

Uh we're going to talk about tonight the context into which Christianity was birthed at Pentecost, what was happening in the world, what was happening politically, culturally, linguistically.

How is it that that uh uh uh this tiny little offshoot grew into the predominant and dominant world religion that it is today that we believe to be true, and which we are given in this history to take our turn and guarding it and passing it along.

Next week and the weeks forward, the five weeks after that, we will get into the details.

Tonight is, while you have a listening guide, this will be the last night that it's this small and this sparse.

From next session forward, it's leaning into dates and details, although I try not to make that the point.

I am going to provide a more detailed listening guide so it's just easier to follow.

I'm also structuring each of the lessons where I'm not lecturing for 60 minutes.

I'm shooting for 35 to 40 in the evening and leaving time for us to discuss to some degree, to think through what we've learned, because I don't also want this to just be uh a trivia game.

There's a point to understanding where we've been, and we need to interpret where we've been to see clearly where we're going.

So we'll get to things like what is called the post-apostolic era.

After the apostles died, then what?

Who took over?

We had these 12 men who were had had an extra measure of authority.

When they spoke and they wrote, it was considered scripture.

And so when they all inevitably died as humans, what then?

Who took over?

What happened within the church?

What was the leadership structure?

Where did it go?

And how did it get to the corners of the world?

We'll consider uh the imperial adoption of Christianity, uh, where Rome initially tried to persecute and stamp out the Christian church.

By the time, uh about three centuries later, Emperor Constantine made it the national religion of the empire.

How in the world did we get there?

From Nero trying to destroy them to an emperor several generations later saying, this is what you all have to believe now.

It's a fascinating arc, just in the first 300 years of our history.

We'll look at what is known as, don't worry about all the vocabulary right now, I'll have it for you in weeks to come, ecumenical councils, meaning immediately, even in the New Testament, as soon as Pentecost happens, we the book of Acts records a diverse approach to how to practice this Christianity.

It's not that we didn't know what to do, it's not that they weren't sure where to go, but but Christianity was born into, and Pentecost happened, into a diverse group of people and a diverse uh uh hub of culture, and then it immediately took off into other places.

What do we do with then trying to come up with a singular creed and confession?

What do we believe together?

We'll talk about Roman Christianity and the in the papacy, the Pope.

Uh questions like uh during the the predominant time of the Roman Catholic Church, were there any other kinds of Christians, or was it just Roman Catholicism?

Where did we get where did the Roman Church get the idea of the Pope and why don't we engage with that?

We'll talk about the Reformation, ultimately, where we sitting here as members or or attenders of Heartland Church, you are in a Protestant church this evening, uh a protestation, a protest to what things that were happening within the Catholic Church in the 1500s, uh, and the lead up to that.

There is pre-Reformation, there's post-Reformation.

We as Baptists were born out of the Reformation.

We'll do a whole session on just Baptist history.

We'll look specifically at the Southern Baptist Convention as well, but the Baptists have been around for 500 years.

Did you know that we're that old?

Uh we we have we have old confessions.

I sometimes quote that we we use, there's confessions from the 1600s that we as Baptists still reference as part of our faith heritage, specifically within our denomination.

And uh I don't mind being frank on the front end.

I have an agenda here.

The agenda is to instruct us and teach us, but also to give us an idea that uh, or a picture at least, of here we are sitting in 2026 at Heartland Church in an air-conditioned building.

I'm using a microphone.

I have this phone in my hand that I'm referencing the time with with my watch.

I've done research on the internet to prepare for this.

Things look a lot different now.

But what about the parts of our church that are historic, that are, as we'll see in a moment, orthodox and orthopraxy?

How do we as Heartland Church express a historic faith in a modern context and honor both of those things faithfully according to Scripture?

Well, we we make ourselves aware of church history and understand how others dealt with those questions, contextualize the gospel faithfully throughout cultural changes, geographic locations, and language differences.

This is my goal for us to see a clear line colored by diversity and divisions and agreements throughout the last 2,000 years to give us some further sense of this is who we are.

This is who we are and this is where we're going.

Uh without I I feel like uh teaching a history class is just without meaning to, I will fill it full of cliches.

Let me see where we've been so we can see where we're going, kind of thing.

Uh, but but it's important.

So let me I'm gonna stop trying to sell you on it and and let's move into it.

But first, let me pray for us uh and and we'll begin in earnest.

Father, thank you for this evening.

We thank you for this place where we can gather.

We thank you for our church family and an opportunity that in between the the Sundays where we gather to worship you, uh, as the gathering, we we have this midweek point where we can come together in fellowship and share meals and visit, uh to stir one another up to the good works for the rest of the week.

And in this context, to to try and learn from one another and and with this topic in particular, learn from the brothers and sisters who have faithfully carried the gospel message from Pentecost uh until 2026, and we can learn how to faithfully carry it forward ourselves.

So please honor and bless that effort.

We thank you and we love you.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Okay, two major categories here that I'm gonna work through, and at the end I have a bit of a discussion uh exercise.

We don't need to do it all together, but it's something I want you to think about this evening and then into next week.

But for the first half, we're gonna do why church history.

We see these kind of funny words, orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

Uh further why church uh study church history for encouragement, for warning, and for instruction.

So maybe begin with these O words.

Uh don't be, again, too concerned with catching all of it.

We're gonna return to all of these things in every session, but I'm setting this up this evening for some basic vocabulary and the in the structure of which I'm gonna prepare all the other lessons.

So, first, what why would we study church history or Christian history?

Uh, one being orthodoxy.

And uh if you your brain might attach that to Eastern Orthodoxy, to Jewish Orthodoxy, that there it gets used in denominational ways, but there's a technical sense of the word which is just right teaching, R-I-G-H-T teaching, orthodoxy, right teaching, and then orthopraxy as right practice.

We in church history think of orthodoxy and orthopraxy as what is the historic, correct understanding and execution of our beliefs.

Not only how have we historically thought about it, but how have we historically lived that out.

And we use those orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

And let me attempt to help you understand the importance of these things.

With orthodoxy, the Christian message, the gospel, is historic and it's unchanging.

It's unchanging.

Certainly, Christians throughout history have appropriately sought to contextualize the message, but the message doesn't change.

The culture, history, language, the the moment in history moves along, but the gospel message is unchanging.

It's unchanging.

Jesus crucified and ascended in conquerings in grace of salvation by grace through faith.

There is a historic ancientness to the gospel that has to be immune to the cultural moment.

We want to contextualize it.

I'm not preaching in Latin because none of us speak it.

Although the church did for hundreds of years, we contextualize the gospel message to the moment around us, but we we remain orthodox in our understanding of what the gospel is.

As soon as we start to contextualize the gospel message itself, trying to change it to be uh acceptable or better heard, then we have left orthodoxy and we would be remiss to, uh, or we would be better served to inform ourselves of the history of how we have uh throughout 2,000 years taken a message from all kinds of contexts and kept it faithful and true.

Within our commission to make disciples and to carry the gospel to the end of the earth, we are to take the gospel that was given to the apostles who gave it to the church, and we're to take that gospel forward.

Not our version, and not an updated model, but that which we can look at first John, the the the first John begins with that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.

So there's an apostle saying, Listen, we are passing something on to you that we have seen and we have heard and we have touched, we are witnesses to the verity, the truth of this gospel claim.

And here in the recording of 1 John, he says, I'm laying this down for you faithfully, pass it on to the next set of folks.

We've seen it, we testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father, and made manifest to us that which we have seen and heard, we proclaim also to you.

What we saw and we heard, not what we think and what we desire.

What we saw and we heard, we've witnessed it.

The gospel message should not be novel.

If Robert or Michael or myself, any preacher up here becomes novel with the gospel message, Scripture says, even if an angel were to do that, let them be accursed.

There is a historosity to the things we preach.

From the church's very beginnings, there is an orthodox understanding of who Jesus is and what he accomplished.

There is immediate diversity.

We see even in Acts, there there are the Jewish Christians, the Gentile Christians.

We see Paul and Peter, even Paul and Barnabas.

There are disagreements in the first stages of the church of how are we supposed to live this out.

But what we see all throughout, regardless of the differences in practices or in the specifics, it is Christ crucified.

That is the unifying language of all the New Testament epistles.

And we see it in the early writings of the what we're calling the post-apostolics.

So the guys that took over after the apostles were speaking of this same gospel, and it has been carried faithfully.

Let's not let it stop with us.

Paul encourages Timothy to guard the good deposit entrusted to you from 2 Timothy 1.14.

That is the gospel.

He calls it a good deposit, and we're called to guard it.

It's been entrusted to us.

In 2 Thessalonians 2.15, Paul addresses threats to the gospel message already, immediately, but there are threats to the uh Orthodox understanding of Jesus.

Paul addresses it and says, Stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.

We have under uh historically understood this to mean stand firm upon the orthodox understanding of the gospel, according to the teachings of the apostles, as found in the words of the New Testament.

We just boiled down what is orthodoxy, the teaching of the apostles as recorded in the New Testament.

We take all of Scripture as a whole, but what we're communicating in the gospel message and the gospel hope, we have the largest testimony of it in the apostolic writings of Acts forward, including the gospel narratives, but but we see how it was carried forward in the book of Acts.

We see it implemented in the epistles and so on and so forth.

Now, we are some 2,000 years away from the Apostolic Age, the world is much different, and Christianity has flourished.

Again, there is somewhere between two and three, that's a huge margin.

I'm I'm saying that casually, but but somewhere between two and three billion, which is a difference of one billion, that's an immense, that's an immense measure here, but but as an estimation of the total some odd eight billion people, two to three of them identify as Christian.

Again, messy, messy data.

Well, what what does that mean?

But but in the grand scheme of things, Christianity has flourished, especially in relation to the early days, and yet we carry the same heritage of responsibility we find in the records of the early church.

Make disciples, guard the gospel, hold to the traditional understanding of our faith.

We have a 2,000-year history of just that, and we should we should pay attention.

Let's look at orthopraxy.

If orthodoxy is right teaching, and we want to be committed to right teaching, orthopraxy is right practice.

From the beginning, Christianity was a faith of uh congruency.

In other words, the Christian the Christian teaching and message and the gospel is inherently action-oriented.

You believe and now go make disciples, you believe and now love your neighbor as yourself, you believe and love the Lord your God, and you believe and love your enemy, and you believe and take care of the widows and the poor and the vulnerable.

It is an actionable faith, and we see that early.

Pentecost happens in Acts 1.

In Acts 2, I'm misquoting that, but in Acts 2, at the end, we see them already moving into praxy, into praxis.

They were gathering, they were devoted to the teaching, they were sharing meals together, they were selling what they had so that no one would go in need.

There was immediate practice of the Christian faith, and throughout all of Christian history, there has been some sense of understanding that this faith compels me to action.

It compels me to action.

Now there's a lot of debate about what the action should be, but we still have orthopraxy, which is what is in 2,000 years, what are the common denominators that each generation of faithful believers, guided by the Holy Spirit, uh faithfully hemmed in by the Lord, who, in his good will, is going to see his gospel carried forward until he sees fit to send Jesus back?

How have they exercised our faith?

It is, I think, ignorant and arrogant to approach our faith in a vacuum.

I will figure, I'll read the Bible and I'll live it out.

That's fine, that's good.

It's a good impulse.

Hear me all the way out.

But but there is, we can we can become generationally arrogant if we don't bother or if we further resist looking at how our forebearers have understood these texts and lived them out.

We don't need to reinvent the wheel.

I would recommend that we don't try.

The wheel has has been made.

And our task in that situation is then to take that orthopraxy.

What if we always understood this to be the actionables of the Christian faith?

How does that look in our context in this age, in our language and our political system?

Those are the works that are to be moved, but but we want to look for historic, how have we done this?

Not only should we desire to think historically, we want to act historically.

Orthopraxy asks the question: how have we historically lived out our orthodoxy or out of our thinking?

Perhaps the most common way that you will hear this expressed, you will have heard an appeal to orthopraxy, whether you realize it or not.

Most frequently, and we do it here to some degree, we'll reference Acts 2, verses 42 through 47.

Acts 2:42–47

I just referenced that a moment ago, but this passage says, and they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship to the breaking of bread and prayers.

It goes on and on to describe, it's our first real kind of extended look at what the early Christians were gathered and doing.

And so often, and we again we do it here, and I've heard it at every church I've been around, there is an appeal to orthopraxy, whether a purpose or not, that says we want to be an Acts II church.

We want to be like that first century church, and that's wonderful.

I'm not I'm not leading into a Gaicha moment that's good.

Uh, but too often we'll try and skip that 2,000-year testimony of faithful brothers and sisters who have also lived that out.

And we go, well, I'm just gonna go back and figure out how Acts 2 looks now with no context, with no historical record, and without bothering to ask how have we thought about it up until this point.

Not everyone does that, but that is a bit of a risk of hoping for orthodoxy without doing the work of looking into it.

Most Christian denominations hold this passage up as some sort of ideal.

Uh we in we intend to, again, quote this in his appeal to orthodoxy, but there there is a sense in which we we imply that if we could just figure out what that first congregation was doing, then we could model our church and have some kind of pure expression of the body of Christ.

That's a wonderful desire, but informed by Christian history, uh it's difficult.

It's difficult because we we are told the broad strokes of what they were doing.

But for me personally, I know about you, I would love to know what kind of bread were they breaking.

If it's it's a it's a bit of an endless sequence of questions.

If we're trying to jump straight to purity and skip the historical context, it's great.

And again, history helps inform our efforts.

It also humbles us.

Let me give you a couple examples of how how approaching orthopraxy in the wrong way can go sideways.

And I'm going to be specific about denominations that I think have done that.

I hope uh I know most of you, uh, and even if you if I don't know you, trust my spirit in this.

I'm not dogging these denominations, but uh I just I've looked, I these are I'm speaking of denominations that I've been close to, I've worked in them, or I've grown up around them, and so I'm speaking with some amount of experiential authority as well as study, but but some ways in which orthopraxy can get kind of out of hand.

In the turn of the 18th century or the 19th century, uh there were Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists who got sick of all the denominationalism, said, We got to get back to the pure church, we've got to get back to Acts 2.

Never mind everything that can we're just gonna ignore all context and head straight back to the pure church of Acts 2 and the New Testament, and we are just gonna try and literally apply every verse and passage that we can find.

It later became known as the Restoration Movement, uh, the the Campbell Stone movements, and and out of that came the Church of Christ.

Uh there's churches of Christ around, the independent church of Christ.

My wife grew up in an independent church of Christ, uh, and the churches of Christ are the disciples of Christ.

Now, ironically, uh, those three didn't exist at the beginning.

The first effort was let's go back to the pure church, uh, regardless of historosity.

We're just gonna go right back to Acts 2, model a church around that, and then pretty quickly they schismed and became three separate denominations.

They were trying to get away from denominations and pretty quickly became three separate ones in and of themselves.

But some characteristics of that.

Is language like uh where the New Testament is silent, we are silent.

Um, they don't like the term theology because it's not in scripture.

They'll use doctrine because doctrine is mentioned.

Uh not uh not all churches uh practice in the same way, but traditional churches of Christ will uh have no instruments because there's no instruments referenced in the New Testament.

They will be very particular and literal in their application of certain passages around women speaking in church, uh how you are to dress.

Uh again, I'm I'm being as charitable as I mean this charitable.

I I I grew up uh the token Baptist friend, and all my friends were Church of Christ at the same church of Christ, and one of their dads was the preacher.

Uh and they earnestly, I I've had lots of conversations with them.

They they are seeking, and it's laudable, to be just a pure Acts II church, but they won't use instruments on Sunday morning because they aren't mentioned in the New Testament, but the AC is running and the preacher uses PowerPoint, and right it and we can be so obsessed with orthopraxy that we kind of miss the point.

Of orthopraxy, I think, to me, is the expressions of Jesus' commands rather than the literal interpretation of every detail.

Are we loving our neighbor?

Are we loving our enemy?

Are we loving God?

Are we making disciples?

One of them asked me one time, show me where Peter busted out a guitar solo, and then I'll put an instrument in my band.

But we can take orthopraxy too far to where it becomes the point, and I think some of those traditions make orthopraxy the point.

The other bit is ignoring orthopraxy altogether.

I've told this story to some degree, and I'm gonna be quick this evening, but the church I served in Maui is Baptist now.

When I got there, they were part of the United Church of Christ that's unaffiliated with the Church of Christ.

The United Church of Christ's slogan is God is still speaking.

What that means is the canon of Scripture is not closed, and your testimony, your experience with God has as much biblical validity as the letters of Paul and Peter and John and others.

That sounds hyperbolic.

Living in the Bible belt, we're so insulated from that.

But uh, but I I had to go to the training to be licensed within that denomination so that I could then take them out of that denomination.

It's kind of an ironic turn of events, but that they had totally abandoned orthopraxy out of we are now more enlightened than 2,000 years of Christians, and now we know better.

Devastating, devastating, and all at the expense of abandoning orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

And by the time we left, I was hearing them talk about Jesus is not the only way.

It is a slippery slope.

Drift is inevitable, and so vigilance is necessary.

Just in Protestant history, just in the Baptist history, that there is the downgrade controversy.

Charles Spurgeon, who we like to quote as a wonderful preacher, was embroiled in what is called the downgrade controversy.

The Baptists in Britain at the time were denying the inerrancy of Scripture, the exclusivity of Christ for salvation, and Spurgeon spent a certain section of his career battling against the drift, the drift away from orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

And this is the 1800s.

He inevitably had to or ended up leaving the Baptist Union in Great Britain at the time over it.

But we we remember him as the preacher, but he stood firm on orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and us as Baptists have benefited from his legacy in that way.

More recently in our lifetimes, we have the conservative resurgence.

We frame that in the positive light because it was successful.

We call it the resurgence because it resurged.

But the Southern Baptist Convention through through part of the mid-1900s was drifting towards liberalism.

The seminaries were starting again to, some of the professors were questioning the inerrancy of scripture, again, the exclusivity of Christ, and Baptists had to rally together around orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

It's not my opinion in your in your opinion.

The ways in which the gospel has maintained fidelity throughout history is brothers and sisters willing to say we stand on the historic faith.

It's not my idea is better than your idea.

It is who do you think you are trying to change the idea?

This is the gospel.

This is the living word of God, it is our great hope.

And so we defend it.

But informing ourselves through history gives us warnings and encouragement and instruction.

So let's move into these categories here.

But other reasons to church study church history, it's encouraging.

At the end of the first century, we think, we think, there were ish 7,500 Christians.

If you Google that, you're gonna get all kinds of numbers.

There weren't inherently like religious censuses at the time.

It's difficult data.

But as a rough estimate, after what, 70 years after Jesus' death, we've had 70 years of taking the gospel.

There were about 7,500 of them, and now again, two to three billion.

What happens?

What how did we go from something that was seemingly like this might make it, it might not, to the dominant world religion?

We will trace that throughout her church history, but it's it's encouraging.

The early church faced severe persecution.

Uh Nero and other Roman rulers attempted to wipe them out.

So by all practical and pragmatic measures, the Christian faith and the message of the gospel should not have survived.

It shouldn't have worked.

There were other people doing things like this, and they were all quashed.

The gospel of Jesus Christ survived and flourished and thrived, and we are now the benefactors of, again, 2,000 years of faithful guarding of the good deposit so that we also could hear the saving message of the gospel and then carry it on to others.

Church history is so important.

As believers, we attribute that again to the truth claims of the gospel, that the Holy Spirit changes people's lives.

The apostles, down to the man, were killed for their faith because they would not denounce the gospel.

And we read in 1 John and others, it's because they said we've seen it and we've touched it and we've tasted it and we've lived it, and we are indwelled with the Holy Spirit.

This was more than another religious spinoff.

This was something different and world-changing.

And the next 2,000 years of world history is inevitably touched by Christianity.

It's not just our history, it's the history of mankind, really, in many ways, over the last two millennia.

These men, the apostles, saw what they saw.

They were indwelled with the Holy Spirit, and they were willing to die for those things.

Dying for our faith, maybe that's not the most encouraging part of reading Christian history.

Fair warning, as we go through other sessions of Christian history, a lot of people die for it.

However, it is encouraging insofar as how many generations of people have said this is worth the ultimate cost because I believe in its truth and I will defend it and I will not deny it.

Even within our specific denomination or our Protestant tradition, again, being Baptists, I mentioned this before, but we have written and preserved histories of our distinctive interpretations of Scripture that date back to the 1600s and a little before.

Knowing and interacting with our history brings encouragement because it reflects the faithfulness of God and Christ to his bride, to see him keep his promise that the gates of hell will not overcome the church.

I I pastorally, and I I know that the other two preaching pastors are in the room at the moment, and there's other elders in here too.

It's not uncommon to have conversations and listen, listen to the news for a minute, and things get real hand-wringy.

Christian history reminds us of either it's gonna be okay or Jesus is coming back.

It's a wonderful benefit of having at least a cursory arc understanding of church history.

Things have been much worse for the church than they are right now, significantly worse for the church than they are right now.

And the church has has prevailed under the sovereignty and the providence of God, the faithfulness of the gospel.

And again, either we're gonna still be okay or Jesus is coming back and we'll be even better.

Church history gives us that encouragement.

Peter preached a sermon 2,000 years ago, 3,000 people came to faith, and we have inherited that tradition.

Pentecost happens, Peter preaches, and here we are.

What a wonderful history that we share.

Praise God.

In a world in a cultural moment where right now, next and new are viewed as the best expression of humanity.

Right now, in this cultural moment that we live in, innovation is of the greatest value.

We look at the data center up here and across the country.

At its core, those operations are how quickly can we advance and how quickly can we get to the next thing.

And in church history, we we reminded of the beauty and the importance of those things which are unchanging and are not innovative.

There is nothing inherently holy about new and next and different.

The history of our faith roots and grounds us in the ancient nature of what we believe.

The world changes around us.

What was fact 20 years ago isn't always fact today.

But the unchanging message of the gospel delivered to us by the apostles helps us plant our feet firmly in that unchanging hope of the gospel.

And we see that through the study and the awareness of our faith history.

What else?

Why else would we do it?

Warnings.

We have warnings.

There is the cliche, those who don't what uh study history or doomed to repeat it or don't know his the cliche is popular for a reason, okay?

And it happens within the church world too.

Church history provides us with warnings.

As I mentioned earlier, humans are prone to drift.

The history of the church is full of drifts that need to be corrected before they became heresies and that had to be labeled as such.

Let me rattle off just a few examples.

We'll talk about these in more detail in the coming weeks.

But first we we look at a warning like from 1 Peter chapter 2.

1 Peter 2 · chapter mention

He wrote, But false prophets arose among the people.

This is this is first century.

We have had seemingly no time for false prophets to arrive, but they're already there.

False prophets arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction, and many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.

Even in the church history recorded in the New Testament, while the apostles were still alive and at work, drift heresy wolves had started to attack the message of the gospel.

Immediately there is work to do to preserve orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

Do you think that's still happening?

Ernest question.

Yes, of course.

Of course.

And we have new ways in which it reaches us.

But the ways and the efforts and the tactics of the wolves are not novel.

They're not novel.

There's new ways of providing them to us.

Open Facebook and you can hear heresy immediately.

Google anything, and somebody will boldly give you an answer that has nothing to do with orthodoxy.

We have so much opportunity to be deceived and to read false prophets.

They don't even need to come in among us physically anymore.

However, the dangers are not novel.

They're not new.

And if we're informed by church history, we can identify the untruths and the lies much quicker.

If we are aware of church history, the warnings will help you spot the deception and respond to it with clarity.

Because there's nothing new under the sun.

I have yet to confront a theological error or a heresy that was that was novel, that was new.

There's new ways of expressing it.

But just as a pastor, as a Christian, but but particularly in my role as a pastor, and I know these other two brothers would would affirm this, we're hearing the same heresies from like the first century.

They're just wrapped in modern language.

And often I'll try and respond people gently by saying, hey, look, I know you think you're onto something here.

I know you think you found something new.

But for one, it's heresy.

And two, somebody already thought of that one, like 1900 years ago.

And what that does for us when we're informed and we're aware of historic ways in which the wolves have attacked the church, we identify them quickly.

They don't have a chance to take roots.

We recognize what is false because of our focus on orthodoxy.

We're so dialed on what has 2,000 years of right thinking becomes quite unshakable.

It's the gospel, certainly, and the Holy Spirit that convicts us concerning truth and righteousness.

And we have the testimony of 2,000 years of faithful brothers and sisters to say, yes, this is true.

We can use the warnings of those who have come before us to be found faithful in the return of Christ and to pass on with faithfulness to the next generation, the message of the gospel.

We also study church history for instruction.

This is kind of on the nose after the first two points, but church history is recorded, meaning historical theology is recorded.

We can see how we arrived at current thought processes and theological schools.

Many of us benefit from Christian content that's available on the internet for the most part.

If you have a favorite preacher, you can access his latest sermon at any given moment.

You can take in whatever Robert and Michael and I have to say and then leave and go listen to Piper and the archive of MacArthur and everyone else that you think is a wonderful preacher.

You can go at we just this amazing time of access.

However, even that is not inherently novel, because you can also do that with most of the great thinkers and theologians throughout the history of the entire church.

Christians write things down.

It's kind of a charming part of how we seem to approach our faith.

We record things, we write it down, we debate it.

As early as the third century, people were walking, walking for hundreds of miles across the region to gather together to debate what was true and what was not.

And then they took it back out to the immense effort they put into defending not only orthodoxy and the gospel, but then recording it for our benefit.

This week I read a letter that someone wrote to the church in Ephesus that was after the biblical account, but but still in the first and second century, and we have that letter.

You can just go read it.

It's beautiful.

It says, Ephesus, great job.

Wonderful.

We have the deep writings of all these church fathers, and we can go to them for instruction.

Church history is so much more than dry documentation of historical data, it's the history of who we are.

So now let's take a minute, let's move into this second category.

I'm gonna try and speed up a bit.

Uh move into this second category that is the historical and the cultural context of the early church.

And we see, I've kind of uh tipped you off here, there's three concentric circles, but even to call them concentric circles is a bit of a misnomer because there is an entanglement in which how uh Pentecost happens into a Jewish context that was tempered by Greek culture and language that had relatively recently been dominated by the Roman Empire and the law and the and the practices and the pragmatic things that Rome brought with it, all had an effect on how the gospel entered the world and went to the corners of creation.

And it's fascinating.

And in understanding how the gospel initially entered the world, it helps us better think about what are the current cultural, historical, political influences that we are considering as we try to maintain this orthodox historic understanding of the gospel.

So let me um move through uh the these thoughts Jewish, Greek, and Roman.

If we underestimate the influence of a cultural moment, we will miss all sorts of things.

The idea of consulting historic and cultural context, it's natural to our approach to Bible study.

We we several years ago did a how study the Bible thing.

Uh inherent to that is what's the historical context, what's the cultural context, how did the language play a role here, what was the geopolitical climate at the time.

This idea is baked into our Bible study, whether you realize it or not.

You hear us preach this way frequently, regardless of the preacher, we'll say things like, at that time and in this way, these people would have understood this like that.

And it brings us understanding to passages of scripture.

So the idea of looking at context is not new, but what about in the historical record?

Excuse me.

The same is true considering church history.

There's all kinds of ways in which we can think about historical and cultural contexts and how they've shaped Christianity.

But again, for the sake of this evening, let's think about it in terms of the providence and the sovereignty of God.

Don't get hung up on too many of the details.

These are always things, make a note if you're interested, go to further study.

I'll bring a bibliography at some point.

You can order the books if you'd like.

But for now, let's think about the Jewish, Greek, and Roman context as it relates to how God used them.

Or as far as we can observe and faithfully make observations, how has God used these cultural contexts?

Three of them.

Jewish, first is the religious context.

The church was born out of Israel.

Literally, Jesus was Jewish.

Jesus was the prophesied Messiah, the fulfillment of Jewish promises and covenants.

Excuse me.

I forgot I had this microphone on, that was really loud.

We are so Christianized and westernized that we have a hard time remembering that even though the first half, that the first half of our holy book we share with Judaism, like more than half of this book we share with another major world religion.

And we know that objectively as I say that, all of you are going, yes, of course.

But but in our culture and context, Christianity is so westernized and so Christian, it's its own identity now that we forget that it was birthed out of Judaism.

It was born into the context of the Jewish faith.

Ethnically Jewish Christians who responded to that first movement of the gospel would have considered Jesus the Messiah rightfully.

And therefore, the natural and prophesied next step in their faith.

They probably wouldn't have even thought of themselves as going against their faith.

They said, the Messiah's here.

We've been learning about this our whole life.

He's here.

For a particular cross-section of early converts, they wouldn't have almost even thought of it as conversion.

It's just here's the promised Messiah.

I'm a Jew, and here's our Savior.

Wonderful.

Now, to get any further, it gets us more into historical theology rather than just a historical record.

But let me come back to just the timeline and layer in some of the ways in which Jewish context was subject to the other two contexts.

Remember, I mentioned that there were three main ones.

In the Greek influence, we have the language, the education systems, and the philosophical ideas were dominant.

Alexander the Great had come through that area some four centuries earlier, and they were the dominant empire of the time until the Romans really took over.

And so it's undeniable that Greek influence was heavy in that area.

You'll hear terms like Greco-Roman, talking about this cross-section where the Greek world was still very present but fading, and the Roman world was new but growing.

This is the moment in which the gospel is born.

We read of Paul interacting with and debating with Greek philosophers.

The New Testament writers used almost exclusively the Greek language.

And Greek thinking, philosophy, often shaped the development of Christian theology.

We've heard of Aristotle and Plato.

I'm not going to ask you what they taught, just have you heard of Aristotle and Plato.

We'll get to that later.

But speaking to the Greek influence and how much we contextualize even that early expression of the gospel.

Excuse me.

That's not to say that we have some synergized theology that's like part Christian and part Greek, but the thought systems and the structures provided the lattice work for even how the letters were structured, the style of rhetoric, how was Paul trained to speak and to write under Greek education systems, interacting with Greek philosophies through a Jewish religious context and under Roman rule.

There's layers of context into which the gospel is born that sets the trajectory of Christian history in a very particular direction.

Again, we'll get to that in future sessions.

Let me give you some examples, though, of how this plays out.

Augustine.

Augustine is we uh maybe you've heard uh Confessions, City of God, those are his two most significant works.

You can buy a book that Augustine wrote in the 400s.

You can buy, I mean, it's not a first edition, but you can get on Amazon and get an English translation of a book Augustine wrote.

Augustine shaped Christian thinking for centuries.

He still influences Christian thinking.

And Augustine, undoubtedly, in part by his own testimony, was influenced by Plato.

Augustine lived from 350 to 430 AD.

Plato, the Greek philosopher, 420 to 340 BC.

The Greek philosopher.

Have an influence on how Christian thinkers express themselves.

Again, not a synergy of like Greek pantheon of gods and Christianity, but but the thought structures were very Greek.

Excuse me.

Later, Thomas Aquinas, again, you might not know the name, but we live in his legacy in a lot of ways, heavily influenced by Aristotle.

Aquinas is making the rounds again.

The seminary I graduated from had a big debacle about how much we should still be using Thomas Aquinas, and that was two years ago.

And Thomas Aquinas was writing and thinking and living in the 1200s.

Church history inherently informs our current debates as well as it's bringing in Greek influence all the way into the modern era and how we consider our faith.

I'll continue to draw our attention to those influences as we go.

So don't stress having all this memorized, but knowing our history helps us to understand and own our faith in deeper ways.

Excuse me.

One final thought about the Greek context before we move on.

The language itself.

Almost the entirety of the New Testament was written in Greek.

Greek served as kind of the de facto official language of the church for almost three centuries after Pentecost.

It was Greek.

The New Testament is written in Greek, the correspondence after the official language of the Church of Rome before it was Latin was Greek.

It's a popular quip to suggest that ancient Greek then is the most precise language ever conceived, and therefore God orchestrated the gospel to be delivered into a Greek-speaking world so he could be very precise with revelation.

That's common.

You've probably heard that taught.

I have passed that along.

I was digging into that this week.

We're now not quite so sure that's the most helpful way to frame that.

It's not inherently true by most metrics.

In many ways, English is more complex.

Other languages may be more precise.

However, Greek was and certainly is a very expressive language.

It's incredibly difficult to learn because there's 18,000 ways to express a singular word.

Am I really mad or kind of mad?

It is expressive and specific.

It also was the language of the Gentiles, to which the gospel was also for, who would not have spoken Hebrew.

It is the it is the the the excuse me.

I lost my place in the notes.

We're still required to be careful of the cultural divides when translating.

I think the more helpful way to think about Greek was it was used by it, it was predominant, it was widespread, it was understood by many, and it was the language of the Gentiles.

Sorry, I'm I know I'm coming back up, I've got to catch my notes again.

It was the language of the intellectuals, not that that's the most important thing, but but Paul engaged in debate with the intellectuals in Greek, in specificity.

It provided a medium by which the gospel moved forward throughout that world and at that time.

So not just do we have the influence of Greek, but we Greek as the vessel and the vehicle for which the gospel first made its way into the corners of the world.

Let's think about Rome for a moment.

Roman influence and culture were also part of this world in which the gospel was born.

Approximately 60 to 70 years before the birth of Christ, the Roman Empire was expanding, and at that time it had consumed the region in which Jesus' earthly ministry happened.

The Roman occupation had not been there all that long in the grand scheme of history, still a lifetime, but they hadn't been there that long.

But the Roman system at the time allowed conquered peoples to keep their cultural and religious customs.

They had to add some civic duties to honor Rome, but Rome allowed for Christianity to even begin.

It was a moment in history where the ruling empire would have even allowed it to begin, the providence and the sovereignty of God to place it in that moment.

Roman rulers initially saw Christianity as just a sect of Judaism, and so while they kept an eye on it, it was probably allowed to flourish in part because of the relative religious freedoms that Rome allowed for conquered people.

Further, just some perhaps interesting ways in which God providentially orchestrated that moment in time.

Jesus was hung on a cross that was distinctly Roman.

The crosses we think of in this way, they didn't have four by fours or home goods stores and sawmills to make it this way.

There probably would have been a tree that stayed there and you carried the crossbar and they hung you on the tree.

Prophetically, in Deuteronomy 21, it is said that Jesus would take the curse of the tree for all people.

So we have some, depending on how you want to date Deuteronomy, 12 to 6 to 1800 years prior a prophecy, that in the in the fullness of time, Jesus would take on the curse of the tree.

The gospel is born into a political system that executes people on a tree.

This is interesting imagery.

But the cultural context of Rome allowed for this.

Rome built roads that the apostles walked.

Never before had the world been so connected than at this moment when the gospel was put into the world and Pentecost poured out the Holy Spirit and the Gospels took off on sandals and feet.

On roads.

It's kind of novel.

Roads that stretched across countries and across vast stores of the world, Roman soldiers during peacetime kept those roads safe.

Never before were there roads, and never before was it so safe to travel than at the moment when the gospel was proclaimed, go take it to the ends of the world.

What a wonderful moment and providential care that God has expressed through the cultural context and the historical moments that we find ourselves.

Roman law provided the legal protections that kept a lot of the apostolic missions going for as long as they did.

Somewhat ironically, Paul and Peter are killed in Rome by Rome, but it was their it was Paul's Roman citizenship that even got him there.

He probably would have been dead a fair amount, a significant amount of time before that had he not been a Roman citizen and appealed to the protections of the Roman government.

Fascinating cultural moment that helped the gospel move forward.

In all of these contexts, the history of the church records the providence of God, not only to introduce the gospel through the person and work of Jesus, but he tied together the context of the world around it in ways that ensured the spread and exponential growth of our great hope, the message of Jesus.

So next week we'll start moving through the actual timeline.

I'll have larger notes to go with this, fill-in-the-blank style slides to go with it.

It's a lot of content.

But we'll be using dates, names, places, the time for good notes.

I'll have extensive slides.

I intend to leave a little bit of time at the end of each session.

We've got seven minutes.

We don't have as much time to discuss it at the moment, but let's catch it on the front end of next week.

We've just taken some time to think about what was between the Jewish religious culture through the Greek linguistic and the cultural influence that Greek had in the education, the teaching, the philosophy, and then the political system of Rome and the protections as well as the execution methods that contextualize the gospel in that first century.

We have our own answers to that now.

So if you would, uh maybe as homework.

Next to your, on this bottom half here, where it says Jewish, I put these in parentheses on purpose.

I think it might be a helpful thought exercise to take a moment this week and think about what are your, for your faith now, what's the religious context?

That maybe sounds like a silly question.

Uh the context is I'm a Christian, I go to Heartland Church, that's it.

But the the religious context is that we live in the Bible Belt.

What influence does that have on our faith?

That we live in a place where there's 160 plus churches in this county.

There's quite a few of them on this road.

I passed three of them on the way to my house, and I'm a preacher.

What is our religious context and how does it affect our understanding of the gospel?

Some of this is going to be hard to pull ourselves up and out of because if this is all we've known, it's hard to recognize context when we when we've only ever been in the context, but it's it's a helpful exercise.

What is the cultural and linguistic uh uh influence of this current moment?

What is our culture and how does our culture influence your faith?

An example?

We celebrate innovation.

I need a new phone.

I went to the store and got incredibly overwhelmed by uh how many great new features they all have, and none of them, it's just all newer, better, faster, bigger, more expensive.

And I left going, can I can you just fix this one?

But but but we celebrate innovation and movement forward, and but our our our faith says be historic and unchanging.

How do you think that maybe influences how what you bring in on a Sunday morning?

How do you think that influences how you think we should practice Christianity?

Perhaps in a culture where we are influenced by bigger, better, faster, we're bringing that into our orthopraxy and expecting subconsciously that we are constantly innovating in our programs and our systems?

It's not inherently a bad thing to be asking questions.

But how does our culture influence our faith?

Thirdly, I'll be extra guarded and careful with this one, but how do our politics, and not your voting habits, but the political moment and the political history, the the tension, the the ballots, the platforms upon which candidates run, the the divides between red and blue?

I'm gonna be really guarded about that conversation, but but in a in a helpful discussion of how is the political moment influencing how we understand our faith?

And asking the question: does my faith inform my understanding of the moment, or does the moment uh interpret how I think about my faith?

Questions we need to ask when considering church history.

It's nothing new.

We have the wonderful testimony of brothers and sisters throughout history who have lived in all kinds of contexts, in all kinds of political moments, in cultural moments, different languages, different parts of the world.

And here we have orthodoxy still, orthopraxy.

We we know beyond the shadow of a doubt we are still within reason practicing the same, preaching the same gospel and practicing the same gospel.

But it is not by happenstance.

We must be on guard to guard the good deposit.

That's my hope and my goal in the weeks to come, is that we fill in some details and get an understanding of how have we gotten here and what does it take to guard the good deposit so that we can faithfully carry it forward.

Further, what does it mean in 2026 that we are a Protestant Baptist church expressing ourselves in a in a building that the original group of Christians could never have conceived of?

How do we do that faithfully uh while while contextualizing the gospel?

Do me a favor, try this exercise.

Uh I I have some prompts.

We'll take a couple minutes at the beginning of the next session to discuss it before we move on.

Um but let me pray for us uh and then we will go about our evenings.

Thank you for being here.

I haven't, it's been since before sabbatical, probably March since I've done this.

It's exciting.

Um thank you.

Let me uh let me pray.

Father, thank you for this evening.

Uh please smooth out whatever confusion I might have caused.

Um please give some value to um my word count this evening, not not for my own renown, but just for the edification of the flock that is before me.

Uh as we seek to be historic, uh and not for the sake of being historic, but for the sake of guarding the good deposit, you you gave to those first disciples the the message of the gospel, the hope of Christ.

And through faithful generations and the power of the Holy Spirit, it has been brought to us here in this place on the other side of the world, 2,000 years later, uh in a culture, in a context that was unimaginable to the people at the time, and yet we still have the saving message of the gospel.

Thank you.

Help us to, through our study, better equip ourselves to engage our role in the timeline.

We are currently, we're up.

We're in the batter's box.

It's our turn to guard the deposit.

So help us to look in faithful hope to those who have come before us to encourage us, to warn us, to correct us, and to spur us on uh in orthodoxy and orthopraxy and all of this to your glory and your honor and your praise and to the advance of the gospel.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Okay.

You are dismissed.