Church History Part 4

Good evening.

Welcome.

The if um if you don't have one of the listening guides or on that pub table in the middle, you don't have to have one.

It's a lot of content.

It just kind of helps you pace with where I am if you if you drift off.

Uh but let me pray for us.

I'll review just a bit, get us back up to speed, and then we will cover about a thousand years of church history this evening.

So we'll we'll we'll move with intention.

But would you pray with me?

Father, thank you for this evening.

Thank you for uh this place where we can gather midweek as a church family and and uh and spend time together.

We thank you for the recorded history of your church.

As we consider it, help us to do so with your glory in mind, uh, with our Christ-likeness in mind, uh, and with your mercies poured out on us uh to keep us from error or uh poor poor conclusions from what we should be learning this evening.

But in all of it, may we uh may we learn to love you more and and be encouraged and uh and and warned by our forebearers of the faith as we we look back over church history.

We thank you and we love you in Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, for the listening guides, uh the the I'm not gonna call out the topics as they change, but I've written them in order that I'm gonna go.

And each one of those, I've just left space for you.

You decide what's important for you to take notes of.

I'm gonna try and be a bit more narrative and tell the story of the timeline this evening because we so far in three sessions I've made it 250 years.

And tonight, in one session, I wasn't being silly.

I'm gonna try and cover a thousand years.

We we need to make a big jump forward to stay on schedule.

This is also intentional.

So, up to this point, this is the fourth session, up to this point we have discussed what to why we would study church history?

Uh, we we for encouragement, for correction, for for seeing what we've done wrong in the past, seeing what we've done right in the past, uh, identifying patterns, historic patterns.

Scripture itself tells us there's nothing new under the sun, and so even modern challenges of the church, in some form or fashion, most frequently have been faced by the church in the past, and so considering just uh a summary look at where have we been and how did we get here is helpful to us in terms of discovering our faith heritage.

We also have in mind uh a desire to understand how we got here, that Heartland Church, uh what we believe, how we practice church, is not in a vacuum.

Nor uh, depending on how you hear us talk about our the supremacy of scripture at Heartland Church, about how we we operate according to Scripture, where Scripture is clear, we want to move with clarity, where Scripture seems to be charitable or less clear, we will be charitable and less clear in our expressions.

But but we aren't in no way, if if we've done so, it's unintentional.

We we we do not have an ecclesiology or a polity, a church structure or a church governance that Robert and I and the elders looked in scripture and in our vast intellects drew out what is Heartland Church.

We are drawing on the history of this church, we're drawing on the history of the Baptist church, we're drawing on the history of all of Christian up to this point, and identifying what is orthodoxy, what is historic right teaching around the gospel, and what is orthopraxy, what is historic right practice and the expression of our theological convictions.

And so looking through church history will help give us an understanding of how we got here and hopefully help us to further understand that the things that we do now, even us as Heartland Church on a Sunday morning, throughout the life of the church, throughout the week and throughout the calendar, where we are getting those historical precedents and how we are having to contextualize them to the modern moment.

And that is well served by looking at how the church has contextualized throughout history.

So what we've covered, excuse me, is up till about 250 A.D.

We've talked about the persecution, the Pentecost comes, the church is instituted, we see immediate diversity of how they talk about the gospel, of how they approach church life, even in the different categories and groups of Christians led by various apostles throughout the region.

We talked about the Apostolic Father era, meaning those letters like the Didiche and 1st and 2nd Clement.

What were the churches doing and thinking during this time?

We read of early persecution from emperors like Nero in the 60s AD, uh, and up in uh some of the theological developments up through the 200s, particularly the apologetic work where Christians were having to just defend their existence.

They were a new religion in a world where ancient was better, the older, the more valid.

And so you have a new religion fighting for validity, having to defend themselves against false accusations.

We considered uh early theological development, early development of responses to heresy in particular, so much of what we consider orthodoxy and what we almost take for granted as right teaching now was still being developed during that time.

It's not that they were making up the teaching of the gospel, but they were coalescing how they spoke about what they had witnessed, what they had tasted, what they had seen in the resurrected Jesus.

And so this evening we'll pick up right about 250 and we're gonna move through ish 1200.

I'm obviously got to move quickly.

Also, I think it's obvious, but it is worth stating, I am not covering with any significant fine-tooth comb the totality of church history over six one-hour lectures.

And so if you're enterprising and uh and you enjoy reading, I I can give you the titles of the books I'm using for study.

They're not it's not so heady that it's they're difficult to read.

I find them, I'm finding myself just reading the church history books uh in the evening because I enjoy it, and I think you might would too.

So, all that to say, let me run us through what at least I have identified as what I think are the most helpful things to know about the history of the church from 247 in particular, 247 through about the crusades in the 1200s or finishing up in the 1200s.

So, in the year 247, that's A.D., the city of Rome turned 1,000 years old.

That's crazy.

That we we think of, we just celebrated 250.

There were a thousand.

It's impressive.

And to mark the occasion, the emperor at the time, a guy named Decius, throws a huge party throughout the empire.

Now, if you'll remember, Rome is a a government and a nation of civil religion.

Emperors are deified, the Roman pantheon of gods, meaning like the the multitude of gods in the Roman mythology are believed to be responsible for the natural phenomenon of the world, the sun god, the ocean god, and so on and so forth.

So pagan rituals, sacrifices, other idol worships were common, and they held a place of prominence during this 1,000-year anniversary celebration.

Of course, they're making sacrifices to their gods who they believe have founded and sustained the Roman Empire for a thousand years.

And because of these sacrifices, the Christian population did not participate.

Now, at this point, uh Christians are not under significant persecution like they were under Nero and others.

It's about 250.

They're living in relative obscurity, but their numbers have grown.

And so for perhaps the first time, the individual or the the other Roman citizens were taking notice of what the Christians were doing and also what they weren't doing.

So at the big party where everyone's celebrating, the Christians have separated themselves because they are not going to participate in the pagan rituals.

That wouldn't be a problem, except for right after the thousandth year anniversary, plague breaks out in Rome.

Awful.

Runs rampant through at least the city, out into the empire, and the Christians get blamed.

Just from what we've talked about so far, why do you think they blame the Christians for the plague?

They weren't making the sacrifices.

Hey, these guys are making the sacrifices to our gods, who, by the way, have sustained us for a thousand years.

This plague must be the Christians, and therefore it was not a large intellectual jump to get back to persecution.

And so the church is back under pressure.

Decius, in order to uh uh maintain a decorum of political properness, says, okay, I'm gonna go about this by by starting this new program where uh if you made the appropriate sacrifices according to the civil religion of Rome, you would get a certificate that said, I have completed my sacrifices.

The problem with that was many Christians refused to get the certificate, and so if you didn't have it, persecution ensued.

Now, Decius's rule was a time of great persecution, but the pressure relieved a bit after his death, but his treatment of Christians had rekindled this distrust and of violence that echoed the emperors of the first century.

But what happens next, I think, is fascinating.

In 284, so we've we've jumped ahead about 40 years, Diocletian, D-I-O-C-L-E-T-I-A-N, Diocletian takes the throne over the Roman Empire.

And at this time, the Roman Empire is vast, enormous.

Hard to fathom that a singular nation covers so much of the world, but it's so big that Diocletian, in his wisdom, and secular scholars consider this to be have been a wise move.

Diocletian says, I'm going to split the empire into Eastern and Western, and I'm going to appoint a co-emperor to help me administrate the empire so that my influence, my authority, and my intention doesn't have to get spread so far.

This is the first of several significant decisions that would be made that would reverberate through the church in centuries later.

But for now, this is just a Roman decision.

A couple more that would follow mark the turning point of the church's relationship with the Roman Empire.

Diocletian splits it, but then his successor, a guy named Galerius, wants to reconquer the Eastern Empire and rule all of Rome himself.

Okay, so we still have some classic monarchial, one of them is good and wise, and the next one is greedy and uh uh grabby.

And we see that throughout read the book of Kings and Judges.

No one is immune to this.

And so Diocletian does something wise, Galerius does something unwise, and and Galerius's efforts to uh weaken the Eastern Empire, he kidnaps his co-emperor's son, who is a kid named Constantine.

The name Constantine is in your notes.

At this point, Constantine is a kid, he's the child of the Eastern Empire, the Western Emperor has the gall to kidnap this guy.

Now, uh, late in Constantine's father's life, he's ill.

So Constantine can uh convinces Galerius, hey, let me go visit my dying father.

And for some unknown reason, the emperor who's kidnapped this kid says, Yeah, go visit him, but promise me that you'll come back to your kidnapping, right?

So he sends him off.

Uh and surprise, Constantine doesn't come back.

And not only does he not come back, his father dies, and he sends a message back to the West demanding to be recognized as the new emperor of the Eastern Empire.

Uh Galerius doesn't like this and most likely would have marched on Constantine with military force, but he gets sick and dies.

It's not an uncommon demise to conflict during this time.

It can be that someone is at the top of their game and they catch an illness and they die and it's over.

Galerius dies.

Constantine is still in power, but not to worry, Galerius's successor, a guy named Maxentius, I wouldn't stress too much about the names.

I'm just using them to color in the word picture here.

The Western Emperor Galerius dies, his successor Maxentius, he's gonna go defeat Constantine and take back the Eastern Empire.

The squabble is continuing just with new players.

Problem is, Constantine just whoops Maxentius on the battlefield.

And so Maxentius is retreating back to Rome.

Rome at the time was considered, and historians affirm, that had Maxentius stayed in the city, it was it was uh what's it impregnable.

The Constantine forces could not have taken Rome if he had stayed in Rome.

But Maxentius was also not popular in Rome, so he feared that if the population got caught between him and Constantine, they would just spit him out to Constantine anyways.

So he marches outside of the city to fight, loses, dies when he tries to return, and Constantine becomes emperor.

Now, the otherwise that would just be part of Roman pagan history, except for on the night before Constantine goes to battle with Maxentius, tradition records that as he's praying to the sun god, S-U-N god, Constantine's a pagan Roman, he's praying to the sun god for favor in the battle against Maxentius.

Tradition states that Constantine has a vision from Christ that says, make this symbol on the shields of your army.

And then he, along with the symbol, sees a vision that says, by this sign you will win.

So Constantine, a pagan, sends word throughout his army and they paint the Cairo on their shields.

Have you ever seen the X and the P?

I should have put that in here, the X and the P.

If you saw it, you'd probably recognize it.

That's Cairo.

It's the first two letters of Jesus' name.

Constantine paints that on the shields of his army.

They go to battle, they win what is uh strategically an impossible fight, and Constantine miraculously attributes that to Jesus, someone who he's never worshipped before.

He marches in as the new total emperor of all of Rome, having uh accredited Jesus with his victory.

Okay, he claims to have had a vision from the Christian God.

The Christian God seems to have handed him a victory that secured him the entire Roman Empire, and so Constantine is going to be most concerned with Jesus.

Constantine seems to have taken on Christ more as his personal patron.

He may have earnestly believed in Jesus.

Maybe he even professed orthodox Christian beliefs, but there was an obvious syncretism and synthesis of his pagan pantheistic mindset around I need to keep the appropriate God pleased for the goal that I want to accomplish.

And frankly, I'm not encouraging this type of belief in Jesus, but if the guy thinks he had a vision from Christ that said, do this and you will win, and then he won, he's gonna pull Jesus in as you're my, I might keep all my other gods, but you're like the main one.

You won me all of Rome.

Now, uh what what that lead would would sh, what that would lead to is and shape the way the church and state would relate to one another for the next 1200 years.

This is about 325.

At first, one of the uh, excuse me, Constantine seemed to understand that the the growing influence of Christianity.

It's growing.

The population, the numbers, they're large, they're starting to gain some social standing, they're creating influence in their circles.

Constantine understands this, and again, even if he was earnestly a Christian, he understood the growing political advantage of uniting his empire under religions.

So, one of the uh there's several ways in which um he does this.

The first year after he is emperor, he issues what is called the Edict of Milan, and amongst many things, the Edict of Milan was a freedom of religious expression document from Constantine to Rome.

It wasn't specifically for Christians, but it specifically benefited Christians.

One of the quotes from the Edict of Milan reads, Our purpose is to allow Christians and all others to worship as they desire, so that whatever divinity lives in the heavens will be kind to us.

So we hear this sense of let's cover all our bases, including Christianity.

What Constantine, it would seem, feels like it would be foolish to preclude something that I think maybe help us one, even if he hasn't gone so far as monotheism around Jesus.

Now, the ways in which Constantine more directly influences the church and sets the church on this path towards this inextricable blurred line between church and state are multiple.

The first one is uh one of the heretical Christian subgroups had been at odds with the broader church, the the great church as it was known at the time, the Orthodox, orthopraxy church.

There was a heretical subgroup who had been at odds about the issue of who could appoint and ordain elders.

Now the subgroup eventually goes to Constantine, the emperor of Rome, and asks him to settle the debate.

That's unprecedented to this moment in time.

We're in the mid-fourth century, and the church has approached a civil magistrate and said, solve this dilemma, uh, this matter of ecclesiastical authority within our church.

Please do that for us.

And Constantine weighs in, uh, and he sides with the great church.

A secular civil leader is given church authority.

In many ways, there is no turning back at this point.

Later, a heretic named Arius caused another great major stir within the Christian communities.

Him, amongst others, were suggesting heretical explanations of the hippostatic union.

The hyppostatic union is the fancy theological term for how we discuss how Jesus was fully man and fully God.

What does that mean?

What does that look like?

It was the source of most of the debate during this time around theological points.

Was Jesus fully God or did he just seem to be?

Was he fully man or did he just seem to be?

Did he take on man or was he born as it was just in the appearance?

A lot of debates.

Arius is one of the particular torchbearers for the opposition at that time.

Seeing the Christians divided, Constantine goes, This isn't good for the empire.

They were also starting to divide against Eastern and Western preferences, making it a further threat.

So once again, Constantine, the civil leader, steps in to the matters of the church, and Constantine calls the first council of Nicaea.

The first council of Nicaea produces the Nicene Creed.

The Nicene Creed is a document that's printed in your handout.

It's still a document that Catholics, Protestants, all church traditions still affirm to most degree the orthodoxy statement that is the Nicene Creed.

That Nicene Council was called by Constantine, not the church leaders.

Now, again, we don't know.

Nobody has the diary of Constantine.

We don't have the field notes from his advisors.

But the best we can tell, Constantine understood Christianity to be of a political advantage.

Maybe he was an earnest believer, but he primarily was a civil leader, a political leader, and he was a savvy one and knew that a unified, peaceable population was good for him and good for the empire.

And so he says, hey, y'all need to get together and sort this out.

And so we get the Council of Nicaea.

I have included the most commonly used version in listening guides.

You can, if we have time at the end, we'll come back to that and consider it in full.

But I just wanted you to have it.

You can see the development.

It moves in the structure of the Trinity.

It affirms God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, and gives details for why.

And all of those are responses in particular to heretical positions that have been brought to the Council of Nicaea.

Interestingly, if you'll remember our discussion around Tertullian, Tertullian lives a hundred-ish years before this, is the first one to coin the word Trinitas to develop the early thinking around what we now understand to be the Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And later, some hundred years, they're referencing Tertullian among others as they develop this Trinitarian statement.

That again, modernly, there are churches in this county that read the Nicene Creed during their service every week as a statement of this is our historic and ancient faith.

It's a beautiful piece.

Read it if you never have.

We'll discuss it in detail at the end if we have some if we have some time.

Again, first kind of unified and broadly used creedal statement that we see galvanize the church under a central set of beliefs.

Orthodoxy is being articulated, it's being developed, and now it's being institutionalized.

This comes out of the institutional meeting of the Council of Nicaea called by the government of Rome.

We're seeing a shift, even in how the church structures and operates from organic house persecuted underground faith to institutions are starting to develop.

Not inherently sinful, but it changes the trajectory, and we'll see that in several ways.

And it serves as a rallying point at large during the reign of Constantine.

Now, after the council, Arius and any others who refuse to sign this new creed, they're exiled.

So the church pronounces them heretics, but what is also unique and kind of strange.

Jarring when you consider it.

The church considers them heretics and excommunicates them.

Constantine considers them exiles and banishes them from the Roman Empire.

So at this point, if you are not affirming the orthodoxy of the gathered council of Nicaea, you have the consequence of the church, and you also lose your political, civil, and perhaps your address and exile from your political location.

For the first time, the church and its influence is all-reaching in ways that I hope you can see some issue there.

You can see the issue already of infiltrating church and state and how those things start to influence one another, and maybe already starting to see the opportunity for corruption and for the exercise of power in both directions.

The council of Nicaea was a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it produced one of the pillars of extra-biblical orthodoxy in the Nicene Creed, meaning, as far as summary statements of scripture and expressions of the general belief system, the Nicene Creed's importance is difficult to overstate.

Now, on the other hand, it furthered the precedent for civil authority within the church.

The dissenters not only were anathema to the church, which has biblical systems for governing itself and removing members, but you could also now be excommunicated for heresy, dissension, and exiled from your nation and home.

Perhaps you think that's not a bad thing, but consider the implications.

Your religious beliefs were now tied to your political position in society.

And that's within and under the umbrella of the gospel.

The gospel, by the way, which we are told not to be partiality or to express partiality through, and it just begins to blur the line in ways that the genie does not get put back in the bottle for a long, long time.

After the council, the infighting among the Eastern and the Western churches does quiet down.

So the council is a success by everyone's standard who's counting at the time in that cross-section of the Melma.

The church gets a clarifying statement.

Constantine gets a peaceable Christian population across the entire empire.

It answered the questions.

However, after things had settled, some of Arius's followers began to clamor for his return and his exile.

And Constantine, in an act that perhaps hints at his desire to unify, even at the expense of doctrine, thinks, yeah, let's bring him back.

Everyone seems to be over it.

It's his first major miscalculation as a as a kind of the governmental liaison to the Christians.

He said, they won't think anything of it.

Let's bring the heretic back.

It re-kicks the hornet's nest within the church.

And now the civil involvement in the church affairs has redivided the church because the civil influence prioritizes its main purpose, the society, not the church.

Constantine is his first priority is Rome, not the church.

He seems to mostly have supported the Christians because he perceived their benefit as a unified group to the good of his empire.

And in return, he had the support of a large cross section of the population.

For the record, we still see that in politics today on all sides.

There's not a subtle jab at any particular party.

There is earnest religious politicians and there are pandering religious politicians.

It's ancient.

It's ancient.

We see it in Rome.

It's not unique to our time.

But what we can do historically is see where that goes wrong to guard against it.

So Constantine eventually dies.

The Eastern and the Western churches are still quarreling over Arius at this point, among other issues.

And Constantine's nephew, Julian, takes the throne.

Julian is no fan of Christians, but he does not persecute them.

So there's a little bit of a backtrack insofar as the benefits that the church is enjoying under Constantine.

A place of honor, a place of priority.

They're gaining political influence.

Julian comes to power.

He does not persecute them in the physical torment and killing sense, but he removes their privileges.

Further, he brings back all of the exiles.

He pardoned all of the dissenting Christians whom Constantine and the church had exiled during the previous administration.

So all of a sudden, the church, after getting used to political and civil priority and protection, is back on its own, and all the dissenters and heretics are headed back to the city, back to the churches, back to so division.

It's a clever move on Julian's part, if you're anti-Christian in that moment, to cause problems without being persecutive.

One emperor in his own way contributed to the unity of the church.

The next emperor in his own way sought to reverse it.

And it worked for a while.

But here's a beautiful picture of God's faithfulness throughout the history of the church.

He preserves her.

As we look through the timeline, the historical timeline of the church, there's multiple times where we go, this has to be it.

This has to be the end.

Either Jesus is coming back or the gates of hell have prevailed.

And over and over we see the Lord preserve.

Remember from the previous sessions, how from the earliest church letters were addressing one another.

They were writing like, the church that sojourns in Corinth, we write to the church that sojourns in Rome, and vice versa.

That's how they were addressing their letters to one another.

It spoke to their understanding and their identity as we live here, but we are not of here.

Now we fast forward to the time of Constantine and then into Julian, that mindset has shifted.

What it means to be Roman and Christian is blurring.

And no longer are they thinking of themselves as sojourners.

And so when the support is pulled away, there's problems.

The church was born into, and Paul canonized it theologically, the church is born into earthly homelessness.

It says we are citizens of heaven.

We live here, engage here, honor your leaders, render onto Caesars, be a good citizen.

But you do not, but you are not an eternal, you are not priority citizen here.

And when Rome and the church had started to intertwine, it made it difficult for Christians to see the difference.

Then Julian reverses the trend.

The church is thrown into upheaval again, and what we see is church leaders like Athanasius call all the leaders back to Nicaea for another council.

So we've got another council of Nicaea, this time called by the church leaders, because they have no political or civil support anymore.

It was the church rather than the state.

So they gather again, they redeclare Arius a heretic.

They double down for the second time, and they banish him again from the fellowship of the great church.

Now, further, the Second Council of Nicaea saw the beginnings of reconciliation between the Eastern and the Western churches.

We have a record of them coming to understandings amongst one another.

It's like in the Second Council, they're starting to go, I see what you're saying, I understand what you mean.

In part, I think what we're tracking is in the absence of favor with the world, the church must put aside squabbles to insulate in the appropriate, healthy, survival ways.

And at times it helps galvanize orthodoxy, it helps encourage understanding and patience with one another.

And so we see a beautiful trend of unity come back to the church despite Julian's efforts.

The Lord was merciful and gracious in giving the church unity, more unity than they were, than even when they were politically thriving under Constantine.

However, Rome and the church would soon start intertwining their stories again.

But before we get there, there's at least one side quest story that I think is important for our understanding of the development of the church during this era.

Monasticism had long been a popular practice against Christians, even from the beginning.

Monasticism meaning that thing that monks do.

They live a monastic lifestyle, isolation, alone, intentionally depriving themselves.

Sometimes it's poverty, and sometimes it's other things.

Modernly we're aware that there are monks who live in community, monasteries, convents, their schools and urban centers that are ran by monastic societies.

We're used to the idea of monks that live around us, even if they live very differently from us.

However, to this point in church history, around the 400s, the monks had been around for most of it, but they were commonly solitary.

They lived out in the desert in caves alone, and they were obsessively and aggressively aesthetic in their tendencies, meaning.

They were influenced much by Greek theop uh philosophy, uh Gnosticism, if you'll remember, in certain ways, in which the flesh and the material is seen as bad or less than good, and so they neglected or deprived themselves on purpose.

Many Christian monks during the first several centuries renounced material things, so vows of property, but they also sought to deprive themselves of any physical pleasures, anything they considered to not be absolutely vital for their survival.

So basically, there's people living out in the desert, purposely not bathing, because that would have been vain to take care of yourself, purposely staying right on the verge of starvation, because anything more would have been gluttony, purposely seeking to meditate only on the work of God because any other thought was at best profane and at worst sinful.

One of those individuals was a man named Jerome.

Jerome was tormented by his worldly thoughts.

Some of them were explicit.

It's almost wild to read of someone from that era speaking in that way.

Some of them were more benign.

We go, man, that's just like normal human thoughts.

Jerome was obsessed with the idea of purifying his mind of any thoughts but the word of God.

So he goes out to the desert and he commits himself.

I'm going to learn Hebrew, and then I'm going to transcribe scripture in Hebrew.

And that's just how I'm going to occupy my days alone in a cave, obsessing over the scriptures.

Two years in, he heads back to town.

Two years in, he heads back to town.

He gets connected with a wealthy Christian heiress who finances a project for him, and the church in Rome says, Hey, we have something for you to do with all this pent-up energy and this obsessive uh uh attention to linguistics and scripture.

Why don't you write us a Latin version of Scripture?

It's a side project.

And he does it.

This seemingly random monk who wanders in out of the desert is tasked with writing uh the Bible in Latin.

He does.

This guy is named Jerome.

He is later canonized as a saint, and the the Roman Catholic Church for centuries would use the Latin Vulgate, the Vulgate, as one of their documents.

And it and it's a part of the trajectory towards Christianity becoming specifically Roman, especially through much of the Western world.

A guy named Jerome.

I came out of my notes, I've got to find where I was.

Sorry.

Okay.

Now, returning to our timeline.

There we are.

Julian is no longer emperor.

The Christian influence throughout Rome begins to regain traction at the civil and political level.

And in the 300s and the 400s see a period of immense numerical growth within the church.

We have uh interestingly pretty good records of people being pretty open about this is socially beneficial to me.

This is the new in-vogue thing, and therefore I am Christian.

Uh, folks that don't even hear the way that they wrote about their experience with Jesus.

Same today.

There is a social benefit still, especially in the Bible Belt, to being in church.

Think about how many connections you have in life because of your church members.

That's not inherently sinful.

However, we need to be careful of counting all numeric growth as a good thing.

And during this time, it was in vogue in Rome to be Christian.

Again, relatively benign, but what's happening during this era is the church's fundamental characteristics were altered as their number and their influence grew.

For four centuries, Christians had been persecuted, held in the margins.

And in a world that's working against you, your group identity will remain rooted in intangible things.

If you are the pariah socially, your identity is not around your institutions and your stuff.

It is around something deeper and intangible.

It's who you are.

Your group will remain rooted in intangible things, orthodoxy, orthopraxy.

There was no institution of the church in the ways that we think about it today.

There were no church buildings or denominational headquarters.

There were houses where people met.

There were safe houses where they met during times of persecution.

The clergy, the church leaders, and the lay people, church congregants, held similar social and civil standings.

They were outcasts and sojourners.

The most brilliant minds and Christian leaders were sojourners and outcasts along with their congregations.

But when the winds shift and the empire becomes friendly to the church, the church was for the first time able to institutionalize.

In a lot of ways, it's what just launched it through the rest of the world is this institutionalization of the church and the conglomeration of resources.

In a lot of ways, it's how the Southern Baptists talk about the value of the cooperative program.

We are institutionalized together for the pooling of resources for the good of the gospel and missional work.

On the surface, wonderful.

But let's see what happens here.

Nothing inherently sinful, but you can see how radically different that approach feels to what the church had been since its inception.

Adding to the shift was this changing geopolitical landscape of the known world.

So by the 5th century, we're talking about the 400s, early or late 5th century, outsiders, barbarians, had begun raiding the outer colonies and the holdings of the Roman Empire.

It probably felt inevitable to Romans.

Rome felt inevitable to Romans.

But by the fifth century, cracks are starting to form, and raiders from the outside are starting to come in.

Primarily at first, again, the barbarians.

It was the beginning of a major decline in the Roman Empire and its power.

And as the raiders moved through the empire, civil leaders were deposed, or they fled in fear, or they were killed.

So the Christian leaders, with their newfound social standing, with their ability to organize and to lead groups of people, found themselves filling the leadership gaps left by the civil officials that were ran out of the outer colonies by the invaders.

And so we see early examples of Christian leaders, almost by happenstance, getting thrown into political authority and community engagement, just by nature of here's a respected leader.

The Roman guys have left.

Hey, Pastor, will you take care of things around here?

It starts relatively innocently.

The Christian leaders throughout the empire, bit by bit, we see the groundwork being laid for what would eventually become the Holy Roman Empire.

It was a world superpower led by church leaders.

But we're not quite there yet.

There's many significant theological developments during this era.

Monasticism, again, that thing that monks and nuns do, that begins to evolve into what we think of more modernly.

Monasteries and convents start popping up in city centers.

Furthering the church's influence on society is they fed the homeless, they educated the population, they grew, they made, they sold, they became significant and then later influential and high-standing members of the community.

They brought education and philanthropy.

There are all kinds of societal institutions that are uniquely Christian or were uniquely Christian in comparison to what the Roman government was offering.

In other ways, church leaders like John Chrysostom, which by the way, Chrysostom means Goldenmouth.

This guy was such a good preacher.

He is forever known as John Goldenmouth.

That's a wild compliment.

It's a wild compliment.

He was such a good preacher, they named him Goldenmouth.

Anyways, prominent leader within uh he John withheld communion from like the politically powerful individuals in Rome because he had had accounts that they were, uh they were had been being promiscuous.

And John had the nerve to say, I know what you've done, you may not approach the table.

And up till that point, had you tried that in Rome at any other point in history, you're probably beheaded, or you disappear, or or you're you're exiled, or you're considered a heretic.

These individuals buckled to John Chrysostom, repented, and were let back to the table.

One famously paid him or paid the church a vast sum of money for him to stay quiet about it, to which he got in the pulpit, thanked them for the money, and then preached against the sin.

It was just a wildly different time and shift in the Christian's authority and safety within the Roman Empire, that John Chrysostom could even speak that way, much less lead that way.

Then we have Leo, Leo III.

Leo was the bishop of Rome during the mid to late 400s.

He gains notoriety first from his work called The Tome, T O M E.

It's a theological position paper that refuted the popular heresies of the day.

It sets the theological tome for all of the church for centuries.

Leo III writes something called the Tome, T O-M-E.

It's in refutation to heresies.

He can't go to one of the councils where they're going to meet, so he writes this letter and says, Here's my thoughts.

Will you take it and let them know?

It turns out to be one of the most significant documents in church history.

But, perhaps more impressive, especially for our conversation this evening, uh he's a thought leader, but he gains notoriety uh in a different way.

He saves the city of Rome twice, the entire city.

So the same barbarians that earlier in this century have started to press the bounds of the outer Roman Empire have now made their way to the capital city.

And Attila the Hun, like from Mulan, Attila the Hun, that was a real guy.

He gets to the gates of Rome.

All the civil leaders have fled or have died or have been captured, and it's just Leo.

At this point, he's the bishop of Rome.

They were kind of sort of starting to develop thinking around Pope, but it wasn't fully developed.

He's just the pastor of Rome, and Leo walks out the front gates to negotiate with Attila the Hun.

It's a wild moment in church history where a very kind of pop culture part of history that we recognize crosses with the early beginnings of the Roman Catholic Church.

And Leo, very famously, this is recorded in secular histories as well, convinces Attila the Hun to not enter Rome.

Attila turns and leaves.

We don't know what was said, we don't know what agreement was made, but the church has turned away the barbarian horde from the gates of Rome.

So you can see a further development in the lore of Christianity within the Roman Empire.

Here's the the leaders of Christianity just saved us again.

He does that with a till of the hun.

Later, the vandals come through.

Same thing.

Leo walks out, says, Hey, can we talk?

Now this time they enter the city and they vandalize it per their name.

They took things, but Leo convinced them not to kill, not to harm, and not to steal things that they needed for survival.

What was this guy?

He's a master in a good thing.

He had two significant raiding hordes who were crushing the Roman Empire, get to the city of Rome, meet with Pope Leo III, and go, never mind, we're good.

It is impressive.

It's objectively impressive, and it further institutionalizes the church within this kind of gray area where what is Rome and what is the church?

We're starting to lose sight of some of the differences there.

Obviously, this is a seismic shift in the church and state's relationship.

The bishop has just saved the capital by operating as a civil authority.

The next era of the church, from about 500 to 1200, gets particularly messy, at least from our modern Protestant perspective.

And as we look back, in many ways we think this is the sin of man, but it's also inherently part of what comes with blurring the line between church and state in a way that they depend upon one another, you start to compromise in either direction.

For example, we'll get to there in a moment.

Just in the timeline, let me just touch on this and we'll come back to it at the end.

In the 600s, so we're about at the 600s, a man named Muhammad is born.

Probably more than one, but the prophet Muhammad is born, and he would rise quickly to power and influence as a prophet, a prophet of Allah.

He would quickly gather supporters and under the banner of Islam and Muslim followers rapidly coalesce into a fighting force and they march on Jerusalem, conquers that area, and begins to spread out among the region.

So the Crusades, which wouldn't happen for several hundred years, the Crusades are the set the stage for Christian war.

While the mechanisms pulling together the church and state continue to weave the two worlds together, we're hurtling towards what becomes just a really, really awkward.

Awful dark spot in church history.

We'll get there in a moment, but that's laid in the foundations here in the timeline.

We've had this unbelievably fascinating moment with Leo and Attila the Hun, and now a couple hundred years later, uh Islam is on the scene.

Now, around 800 AD, we're skipping ahead again a couple hundred years.

The Roman church is in need of a new bishop.

At this point, they are thinking of them as the Pope.

They had institutionalized and they had begun amassing wealth and influence.

The church in Rome has begun its growth as the superpower and the head of the, especially the Western Church.

So, as such, the local nobles see great benefit in selecting or influencing who sits in that papal seat.

Somewhat famously, during this transition in the 1800s, some of the nobles had a preferred candidate.

They would have benefited them.

But instead, Leo the, is it ninth?

I don't have it in front of Leo the Ninth in your notes.

1X.

Leo the Ninth is chosen instead.

In retaliation, this is crazy.

In retaliation, those nobles send mercenaries who cut Leo's tongue out of his mouth.

They don't kill him, they cut the tongue out of his mouth.

At this point, the Western Empire of Rome has fallen to the Franks and others who are establishing new kingdoms.

We've skipped ahead in the timeline.

The Western Empire has fallen.

We're electing a new pope.

The nobles didn't like who won, and so they cut the guy's tongue out.

Wild.

To further silence him, those nobles go to the new Frankish king, King Charles, and they say, hey, this guy Leo, who's about to be the Pope, was embezzling money from the church.

Conveniently, he can't defend himself.

He doesn't have a tongue.

Leo historically could have appealed to the emperor, he could have written the letter, but the emperor no longer exists, the empire had collapsed.

This was new management.

But turns out King Charles quite liked Leo and he pardoned him.

Can you imagine the nobles in that moment?

Uh-oh.

It feels very Haman Nebuchadnezzar, right?

He pardons him.

So in return, Leo, who's now the Pope, that he's the head of the Christian church, declares King Charles the first Holy Roman Empire and renames him Charlemagne.

Perhaps you have heard that name.

Charlemagne is the first Holy Roman Emperor.

Another monumental dot on the map of church history.

What I just stated was that a pope, a church leader, crowns and installs an emperor in the secular world, and everyone accepted it.

It was another monumental shift forward in the authority and the power of the institutionalized church.

When Leo, the tongueless pope, declared, This is the emperor, I have changed his name, and he is now the Holy Roman Emperor, and I am the vicar of Christ.

And so together we see a significant shift as the church just barrels forward in power and authority and growing wealth.

Fascinating chapters of church history.

It's not to say that every pope was corrupt or ill-intended, but but for the next several hundred years after Leo, the papacy was subject to all manner of disgraceful candidates and corruption.

I'm going to say it again.

I have Catholic brothers and sisters and friends who I believe to be as earnest as the day is long.

Protestant history has our fair share of stinkers too.

For now, at this point in church history, I'm just bagging on the Catholics because that's who is who is the major players here.

As an example, during the mid-800s to the mid-900s, one woman in Rome, an incredibly wealthy heiress, was the mother of one of the popes.

Later she had one of the popes assassinated.

She was the mistress of another pope, and her grandson became yet another one.

One woman.

Clearly, she had some influence on who was becoming the pope.

The fourth pope, her grandson, the corruption had become so grotesque at this point that in celebration of his impending election as pope, he famously gave a toast to the devil and mocking of the Christian religion.

And then they install him as pope because he's a useful idiot, frankly, and he plays the role.

So we're seeing it's not every leader, it's not every pope, but but the corruption is inevitable at this point when the full power of the empire is matched and strings are pulled by the full power of the church, and those two are becoming very difficult to differentiate.

Now, around 1000, Pope uh Leo IX sought reform.

I skipped ahead.

Wrong Leo.

Now we're on Pope Leo IX.

He's a different guy.

He's seeking reform.

So again, good popes.

I have no interest in painting Roman history as unilaterally corrupt.

Interestingly, the attempts at reform further develop the Roman Catholic views on clergy.

So Leo IX, although the idea had been set up by earlier leaders, he's the one who institutes a ban on priests marrying and having kids.

Initially, that's an anti-corruption move.

Bishops and priests were handing their jobs to their offspring as a sweet deal, whether or not they were qualified or had any business in those roles.

And so, to stop that correction, Leo says the priests may no longer marry or have children.

He was also instrumental in further developing the thought of the papal authority over the entire church.

In Leo IX, we see a significant development as the vicar of Christ and as the head of all of the universal Catholic Church.

It's not that no other Roman bishop had thought that to that point, but Leo was instrumental in developing that idea broadly.

The Western Church accepts this.

They're good with it.

Rome has long since been seen as the seat of the Christian church in the West.

However, the Eastern Churches largely reject this notion.

And here's where we see really the true beginnings of the separation and the formal development of the Eastern Orthodox churches.

So it's not that there's nothing until Luther.

Excuse me, the turn of the millennium as well, ironically, also over papal authority.

We just don't have time to dig too far in that direction, but it's important on the timeline.

The last thing we need to consider this evening is the crusades.

It's a heavy way to end, but this is where we are.

The crusades were considered holy wars.

I have these in parentheses in my manuscript because I don't want to give validity to the idea of a holy war where we're not hearing the audible voice of God in that way like they were in the Old Testament.

It's between Christians and Muslims, primarily over the control of Jerusalem.

At that time, pilgrimages were common practices for Christians seeking to prove their religious zeal.

And at times they were even linked to the salvation equation.

You need to take a pilgrimage as part of proving your seriousness as a Christian.

To impede someone's pilgrimage, then was to threaten their salvation.

You don't want to stop or slow down someone on a pilgrimage.

And there was no greater pilgrimage than to Jerusalem.

But you'll remember that 400 years earlier, Muslims had moved towards Jerusalem, had captured it, and had slowly been spreading out across that part of the world.

As Muslim dominance spread throughout the eastern regions, they began to control the roads in and out of Jerusalem.

But for a long time they still allowed Christians to enter, but they were taxed heavily for the privilege.

In 1095, the Pope, Urban II, who's in your notes, makes a speech that from what we can tell, even Urban did not intend the result.

Part of the quote from that speech read, Your Eastern brothers have asked for your help.

Turks and Arabs have conquered their territories.

I, or rather the Lord, so we're seeing a Pope identifying himself with the mouthpiece of the Lord.

I, or rather, the Lord beg you, destroy that vile race from their lands.

And it was the shot heard round the worlds.

Okay, the the the the first soldiers, the first militias ready to go to war for the crusades were just people who heard the speech.

There was no formal gathering initially.

It was just people going, yeah, that sounds good.

Famously, someone took a bunch of farmers and they got slaughtered.

These were hardened, battle-trained individuals in the Muslim army.

The crusades were almost an accidental beginning in a speech from Urban II.

But the crusades are bloody and violent.

The First Crusade was successful insofar as Christians retook Jerusalem, but the accounts of the battle are horrific.

Truly horrific.

I the all like this week in prep, like making myself read through documentations, historical records of the of the battle at Jerusalem during the First Crusade, and it is awful.

It's awful.

On both sides, but the Christians win, they burn synagogues, there's Jews inside the synagogues.

One account reads that the Muslim blood was so deep it was up to their shins.

Just awful things that we go, okay.

The if if we if we crayon color a picture of the crusades as some holy march towards Jerusalem, the historic land of our people, fine.

Even so, the temple, according to scripture, is here and it's without what are we doing?

And then we read of what we were doing to each other in the name of our religions, and it is gut-wrenching.

Look into the crusades just as a sobering reminder of what can happen when we get spun up into violent fervor, thinking we're doing something righteous.

There's four of these things.

The Fourth Crusade, I'm talking about all of them, but the Fourth Crusade didn't even, they didn't even get to Jerusalem.

So the Fourth Crusade, one, they win it, then the Muslims take it back, then they go again.

On the fourth one, they're like, we gotta go get it again.

They go to head out, they realize they don't have enough funding.

Half the soldiers didn't show up, and so they strike a deal with someone who uh uh wants something from them in return.

So we will fund, we'll send you soldiers, we'll send you the money you need, but on your way to Jerusalem, you need to stop by through Constantinople and depose the Eastern uh uh Empire's leadership for us.

We want someone new in there.

It was a bit of subterfuge, CIA level.

I'll pay for it, but you gotta do some of my dirty work on the way.

Uh uh the the Western leadership, the church leadership, the civil authorities said, do not do this.

They understood the silliness of it, but the army had left.

They left, they're on their way to Constantinople, somewhere along the lines, uh wires get crossed, and they ransack the city.

This is Christians within the Roman Empire.

They haven't even made it to Muslim territory yet.

They get ahead of themselves, ransack Constantinople.

It forever, it's the final nail in the coffin that divides the church into East and West.

It's a divide that still exists today.

Many of the history books say what happened during the Crusades still colors the way the world thinks about how Christians, Muslims, and to some degree Jews interact.

Just the violence of that era.

Uh, and violence that became so manic it was just getting thrown at each other.

It's a dark spot.

It's a spot of particular uh uh corruption, and it's also what will bring us into next week where we start to see the first whispers of what would come to be known as the Protestant Reformation.

The Protestant Reformation happens, the well, the 95 thesis gets nailed to the door in 1517.

But but a lot leads up to that.

It's not that Luther wakes up one day and says, let's revolution.

There's pre-reformers, there is unrest.

Even at this time, people are starting to murmur, hey, we have lost the plot.

By the end of the crusades, many Christians are looking around at the devastation and what has become of the church and going, something has to change.

And so next week we will look through about 1250, 1300, up through the Protestant Reformation, consider how we got to the theological tradition that we're from, and then the final session.

I want to spend all of our time.

Who are we as Baptists and what have we been historically?

For this evening, we are done.

I'll leave you on a heavy note, but I tried to lift us out just a hair.

We are done for this evening.

Let me pray for us.

Um we're actually done just a few minutes early.

It's not the worst thing.

Uh, I'm gonna pray for us if we're done early, as always.

If you'll just be mindful that some of the students, small groups meet in the lobby there.

Occasionally you can get those teenagers to engage you, and it's a real bummer to cut them off when we when we come out.

So if you'll just stay in here to socialize, or if you if you need to go do so quietly, please.

Uh, would you pray with me?

Father, thank you for this evening.

We thank you again for uh uh inspiring and and and guiding faithful brothers and sisters throughout our history to record our history so that um so that we can look back and see where we've been.

We we we can be encouraged by the highs and and we can be soberly warned by the lows.

Help us to rightly parse and apply the hist the lessons of history to our modern lives.

Uh and ultimately, may we look first for your divine providence and care, uh, your your sovereign sustenance for your church from from the moment that the incarnate Christ stepped onto the earth, to the moment he institutes the church, to the moment that the the Spirit has poured out on us at Pentecost, to now here in 2026, when we stand in such a long legacy of faithful brothers and sisters.

Father, we thank you for your goodness and for your glory.

Uh please carry us home safely this evening.

May we glorify you with our lives tomorrow.

We love you.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

You are dismissed.

Have a good evening.