Church History Part 5

Just a grown-up.

Which way does the battery go?

Let me uh um well welcome.

Uh thank you for coming on such a nice day after so many hot ones.

Uh the let me give a couple announcements, maybe not the right word, but calendar um reminders if you want to put this in your phone now.

Uh it it's on it'll be if it if it's not already, it will be on the website, on Facebook, all that stuff, but just so that you're hearing it.

Um this week and next, normal programming for us.

Uh we'll finish up between we're we're only in about 1100 AD.

We gotta I gotta get us to now by the end of next week, which is the plan.

We'll be fine.

But we're two more weeks of church history, then it's uh DeSoto County fall break.

There's a team going to Bolivia.

We just there's no programming of any sort.

No, not for us, not for the kids, no dinner, none of that stuff.

So that's October 7th.

October 14th, the Wednesday that we come back will be an Ask the Pastor evening.

That will also the there historically we have um had encouraged folks to email us questions.

We're doing it differently this time, there'll be a form.

If you've signed up for anything else at church, it's just the same system, it'll take you through there, and then there's some prompts to kind of frame some questions, give categories for questions.

Uh just to for clarity, that is this semester.

If you weren't here for the first couple weeks where we were talking about this semester, instead of one extended topic throughout the whole semester, we've done like six week chunks, so church history, uh a prayer night once a month, ask the pastor a couple times during the semester, uh, and then the next series will be an apologetic series from uh that Robert will teach.

Uh one of the one of us may cover one of those sessions, but largely that will be his material.

So for Ask the Pastor, it does not have to, the questions do not have to be about this content that we've been covering, although it would be a good opportunity if if there was something that I that I hit too quick or not at all that you feel like is important for the scope of conversation there.

But also we want to use it as it's not the right framework for this, but uh a palette cleanser to to give you a rest off of hour-long lectures about church history.

So the questions can be to your heart's desire.

However, if you want to ask them about the material we've covered so far, that's great.

Okay, let me pray for us, and then we'll look at tonight's content.

Uh, and then I'm hoping to wrap up a bit early so that we have a little bit of room for some discussion before we move into the the last session next week.

Uh please join me in prayer.

Father, thank you for this evening.

We thank you for uh uh a very uh uh abrupt changing of the season.

Uh we're thankful for for the reprieve from the heat, but also um, as is seems to be on my mind every time the season changes, we're we're thankful for the reminder that that you hold creation in your hands and you and you guide it and you change it according to what we need and and what is good to sustain us.

And and may even the the changing of the forecast be a reminder of your of your control and your goodness over our lives.

And this evening, as we consider the history of your church, the good and the bad, may we do so with charitable minds, uh seeking to understand our brothers and sisters from the past uh for the for the good of our our current uh spiritual uh well-being.

Uh may also we consider the past with discernment and recognizing that um uh sin is sin and wrong is wrong, uh and we must learn from the the warnings of the past as well.

So give us clarity and and accuracy there as we consider those things this evening.

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

Amen.

Okay, so to this point, we've talked through 11-ish hundred years of church history.

We've discussed why study it.

We'll we'll hopefully talk about that a bit at the end in terms of applying some of those motivators, what I think are motivators for studying history, among other things, we find encouragements uh and uh emboldening stories of the past, and we also find warnings.

And through this particular, if you were here last week uh and then through this week, there there seems to be, at least for me and and and as I have learned church history throughout the years, this section from 500-ish AD to about the Protestant Reformation, so 1500 A.D., there's about a thousand years there in the middle that is particularly messy, maybe unfair, but uh uh as you hear of the events that we discussed last week, and then particularly this week, there is a human intrigue to this part of church history that is both gripping, if I can manage to tell it in such a way, and also devastating in this era.

It brings us a lot of lessons.

There's some encouragement, but there's a lot of warnings as well.

Last week we looked at sort of the rise of uh in power and influence of the Roman Church, the Roman Catholic Church.

Sometimes we'll, and maybe throughout already, you've heard me refer to it as the Roman Church rather than just the Roman Catholic Church.

If you'll remember last week, uh, not that you should necessarily, but if you read through that Nicene Creed, there is a part that affirms one uh Catholic Church, lowercase c.

Uh in the broad vocabulary, Catholic is a term for the universal church, and then Big C Catholic is a proper noun for that church tradition.

So sometimes you'll just hear the Roman church uh for particularly those who would like to maintain some use of the word Catholic and not the church tradition sense, just in the universal sense.

The influence and the numbers are growing up in the Roman Empire through the lattice that the empire provided.

If you're here during those sessions, uh through a succession of various Roman emperors and just a sequence of events, the church, particularly the Western Church in Rome gains incredible influence.

It's not just influence for a church, it is literal political and civil places of authority.

Uh as the Roman Empire began to cramp uh cramble, crumble to invading forces, uh the civil leaders of Rome were killed, they abandoned their posts, and that created vacuums of leadership that the clergy filled.

At this point, they're they're they're seen as leaders, and so as the civil leaders have to leave, the church leaders move in.

This, among other variables, this is still in review up until this week, uh, this among other variables eventually lead to the papacy, the the ruling seat of the Roman Catholic Church.

The term would be the papacy.

Uh at this point, it holds vast influence and political power over the Western world, meaning essentially like the Western cultural world, not just everything inevitably to the West, but Eastern and Western uh uh cultures as two large categories.

There were leaders and sections of time during this era that were fine.

Uh we may disagree with the theology of the church at this time or of particular teachers or popes.

We may not affirm the same leadership structure, but I think it's good to hear reassert, especially because we're going to talk about how awful things started going.

I want to assert that I am not suggesting North that we should consider every Christian during this era as corrupt or heretical or disingenuous.

However, the corruption among the leadership became more frequent and more obvious in ways that it's not interpretation from a Protestant perspective.

It was observed by the population and written down, the levels of corruption.

In just a bit, we'll we'll arrive at the Protestant Reformation.

That spans a timeline of years.

It didn't just happen in one moment, but but we often point to the year 1517 as the impetus or the starting point, or that's what gets celebrated as the anniversary of the Reformation.

If you're familiar with that, and if you aren't, don't worry, that's the point of this class.

But if you're familiar at all with the Protestant Reformation, you might be intentionally otherwise under the impression that a guy named Martin Luther wakes up one day and says there should be another church outside of the Catholic Church, and he nails his 95 thesis, and out of a vacuum comes Protestantism.

But that is incorrect and uh it cuts out the hundreds of years that led up to this.

Now, why am I telling you this now when we're only in about the 1100s or so on the timeline in the ark?

I want to make sure that I'm I'm clear in drawing a picture of our Protestant understanding of our history.

By the 1100s, the Eastern churches, which we would now consider the Orthodox Church, and that's Capital O.

Again, if you've been in all the sessions, we've talked a lot about orthodoxy as a concept, right teaching, central teaching, tracing the faith of the apostles throughout history.

What has the church always agreed upon?

Things like Jesus as the Son of God, uh the only way to salvation, the Father, Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity, those sorts of really, really, really core doctrines as Orthodoxy.

What we mean by the Eastern Orthodox Church is the proper noun.

So throughout the evening, I will bring that up, and I just don't want us to get pulled in one direction or the other.

But by the early 1100s, the Orthodox churches of the East had just outright rejected and separated from the Western Church, the Roman Church.

They had already had issues with the Pope claiming authority over them.

And this had the final straw was the Crusades.

If you'll remember kind of the last of the discussion from last week, the first couple of crusades, the Christians march on Jerusalem.

By the Fourth Crusade, they go to Constantinople on their way to Jerusalem.

Constantinople is the seat, it still is the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

And Christians ransacked, Christians from the West ransacked the Eastern Christian outpost of Constantinople, essentially moving with military force church against the church.

That was the final straw.

And so you get the most formal and significant split-off of the Eastern from the Western Church in the 1100s.

There's already trouble brewing before we get to the Protestant Reformation.

That's not to say that what happened between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church was somehow the Reformation Part One.

The Eastern Church already had its own identity, had long since denied the authority of the Roman Pope over the matters of their church, but by the time of the Crusades and the military force used against them by the West, they were over it.

So there's already some of the simmering difficulty and challenges amongst the Roman Church well before we get to Luther and others.

I don't want to misunderstand or to misrepresent the influence in the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but that is kind of the end of its story for us in the context of our discussion.

The Protestant Reformation was not in response to the Eastern Church.

It was specifically in response to the Roman Church.

It's not to say that we are theologically aligned with Eastern Orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy maintains a lot of the doctrines and teachings from Catholicism that we would reject, iconography and emphasis.

They would not deny that Scripture is authoritative, but they would say that church tradition and other teachings of the apostles are also authoritative, that there's one true church, that the institution and the archbishops of the Orthodox Church have authority in ways that we would deny.

However, the Orthodox Church by the 1100s is no longer a significant part of the rest of our story, but it's naive and unhelpful to discount their influence.

We just historically have not interacted much with our Eastern brothers and sisters.

Now, when we talk about Protestantism, which is the Christian tradition that we exist in, we are talking about a broad group of theological concepts and scriptural interpretations that stand in protest.

The Protestant Reformation, they stand in protest to specific doctrines of the Roman Church during this era.

It's not during every era, and we would still to this day identify significant differences that we have with the Roman Church.

But there is a unique moment that is building here.

In just a moment, I'll go through some of the high points that led up to the Reformation proper as we think of it with Martin Luther and others.

But again, historically, not much thought is given to the Orthodox Church among these types of discussion.

But I think there is a bit of a movement right now that I think warrants just a brief discussion before we return to our focus on the Western Church.

The Orthodox Church, like the Catholic Church and most Protestant churches, seeks to emulate the first century church.

It's a lot of repetitions of the word church, but in three broad categories, and this is a bit of an oversimplification, but if we're thinking of Catholicism, uh Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, now again, Anglicans might argue for their own deal and Coptic Christian, but just three big categories.

All of those churches, in their most earnest expression, claim the same thing, that we are seeking to express ourselves as purely from Scripture and from the first century and as unadultered by time as we can.

All three traditions claim the same thing with three significantly different outcomes.

And that tracks in a lot of ways.

You'd hope for that kind of seriousness of thought.

If I believe in the Christian God, and I believe that the Christian faith is the ultimate explanation of the world and of eternity, and if I believe that the gospel message is the only hope for humanity, and I take seriously the words of Scripture that speak strongly to Christians living out a particular lifestyle, it makes sense that believers are seriously interested in practicing their faith with purity.

All three categories.

And purity is often looked at as the source of a thing.

How good is it is measured by how pure is it, and meaning how much like the very first version of this are we.

So the Roman Catholic Church has long claimed to be the one true church, holder of authority of Christians and the formal and true representation of Christ on earth.

They believe their papal leadership and the bishop structure to be the best interpretation and application of Scripture.

Whether or not you believe that with charity, the most earnest Catholic believes Catholicism to be the most faithful expression of the Christian faith.

Same with Eastern or Orthodox believers.

The Eastern Church believes the same, that they are the most direct line back to that first century group of believers.

And they too, in earnest form, believe they're the truest expression.

And the same is true for us.

We Robert and I and other preachers get in this pulpit and not infrequently suggest that we have a desire for Heartland Church to exist and to operate according to Scripture.

We are making the same functional claim, even as an individual body within a larger faith tradition, which is we want to pursue what we see to be the pure expression of our faith.

So why am I bringing this up, especially before we actually start talking about history?

One, I think just a little bit of context.

Two, it should give us context to think about the great splits in the church throughout history.

First between Western and Eastern, uh, and then 500-ish years later, between the the there's a split within the Western church itself, which births the tradition we now sit in here in this room tonight, which is Protestantism.

Three, I hope it encourages some charity of thought as we consider other Christian traditions.

The story is not flattering for the Roman church tonight.

Um and and I'm not an apologist for those other traditions.

I'm a Baptist, I'm a member of a Protestant church, um, and I pastor in the Protestant tradition because I, in my understanding of scripture and in my interpretation and application of it, I think this is the I think this is the right expression.

I think this is as far as we can know, Protestantism is as close as it gets.

And even so, when we're considering historical missteps, we want to keep in mind some amount of charity for our brothers and sisters from other traditions.

Uh what I'm not suggesting is that these are all valid ways to think about and express your Christian faith, and you should just roll the dice and pick one.

That's also unhelpful, unwise, and non-committal.

Have some convictions.

Don't have convictions for the sake of convictions, but have some.

That said, be convinced of your beliefs, hold them with charity when considering them against another.

So let's return to the timeline.

Um, let's talk about the various ways that the papal authority began to further encourage other Roman Catholics to call for reform, and that's during the 1100s.

Again, the the murmurs and sometimes the shouts of this needs to change were happening well before Luther and Calvin and others were even born.

The Western Roman papal led church during the 1100s and 1200s was getting especially messy.

The the Roman church started seeing heretics everywhere.

Uh they it was the boogeyman, which is difficult because there are heretics everywhere.

But but but during this period, we see the beginning of what is now known as the, it depends on how you uh which historian are reading, the inquisition.

There was the Spanish Inquisition, there was the Great Inquisition, but this one is the Inquisition, the Catholic Inquisition.

The Catholic Church would from that point on be in some fort uh some form of inquisition for the next 600 years.

So what's meant by that?

In an Inquisition from the Roman Church, the church, using its civil and political authority and influence, established judicial hearings and investigative bodies that merged the ecclesiology of the church with the with the civil structures and punishments of the government, and they sought out heresy, dissension, and apostasy.

Now, apostasy is a theological term for simplification, but abandoning the faith.

So you could get called in by the Inquisition for saying, I actually don't believe in Jesus.

It's uh an interesting thought.

Heresy eventually becomes a civil offense of similar consequence as treason against the Empire of Rome.

So the charge of heresy under the Inquisition would bring you expulsion from the church and exile from your country.

The influences and the cogs of power have become so overlapped and intertwined that they're almost indistinguishable.

So if you were teaching a false gospel according to the Roman Church, again, you'd be you'd be charged with heresy and treason all at once.

Civil leaders, not just the clergy, the civil leaders of Rome, this speaks to the influence that the papacy had over just the run-of-the-mill political guys in town.

The civil leaders were expected to participate in the audits for heresy among their populations and report those individuals to the clergy.

And the civil leaders could be punished if the church leaders found out they knew of a heretic and had not reported it to the church.

Things were getting authoritarian.

So at this point, the church is using the state to enforce itself.

It's just it's a strange time in the history of our faith.

Just again, the uh the emperor was called the Holy Roman Emperor.

Popes during this era, whether they were good or corrupt, and there was a mix, for uh there were times where the Pope was just a blatant uh uh what why is this guy the leader of the church?

And at other times there were popes who tried to reform the church themselves.

A lot of times those guys got ran out.

Uh one pope from the history of this timeline here, we won't talk about him specifically, but refused the regalia of the papacy and instead uh went barefooted and wore his friar-like monk robes, and and that wasn't going to work because he was expecting the other clergy to give up some of their opulence as well, and they got him out pretty quickly.

But so so through again, throughout all of this, it's it's a time of significant corruption with small efforts of reform and change that eventually snowball into the Protestant Reformation.

Uh I think an obvious question perhaps at this point is to ask what was the state of the church and the congregants during this time?

And in the ways that we think about it now.

Like what's now there's research centers and we use technology to send out polls to ask congregations uh uh questions about theology and their feelings and thoughts and preferences around church to measure what what at some level we're trying to get some read of how many people sitting in our seats uh seem to get what's going on here.

That sounds condescending, I don't mean it that way, but we're trying to measure the health and the validity uh of a churchgoer's faith at some level.

How do we do that here?

We can't, but I think it's a good question considering how corrupt everything was.

What is the validity of Christian professions of faith during this era?

Let me clarify my theology here.

I think you'll know it, but but just to say it.

Only God knows who is truly saved and who is not.

Uh, and we have biblical grounds for seriously examining our faith now throughout history.

So I think there's a couple things to consider here.

If presumably during this era, we think about if I if I displease the church.

I also displeased the government.

Those were now one and the same in this particular time.

It would have been incredibly difficult not to play nice with the Catholic Church, which included attending Mass, giving to the church, knowing the right things to say to avoid the attention of the Empire.

Starts to feel a little Star Wars.

Been watching those recently with the kids, so it's on my mind.

Remember, the clergy held significant and at times total political control.

There's no separation of any note of the church and state.

And so your status within the church could and would affect your status within the rest of your existence as a citizen, as an employee, as a business owner, as a taxpayer.

Further, the Roman Church never updated the language of the Mass.

It stayed in Latin long past when Latin had become the common tongue of the people.

So I don't know if it was last week or two weeks ago, we talked about Jerome in the Latin Vulgate.

In around 400, a monk in the desert wrote a Latin version of Scripture, and at that time that was the language of the common people, and it was celebrated by the church.

We fast forward 800-ish years, and the Latin Vulgate had become the holy language of the church, and masses were in Latin only, and the average congregant did not speak that language anymore.

So you've got immense political and societal pressure to be amongst the church.

Then you go to church and you don't even know what they're saying.

So you're observing a religious function more so than participating in the sainthood of believers, is in how we would consider those things.

By the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the empire had changed so much that for many church attenders, they were soon, again, attempting worship services that were beautiful but did not inherently include them.

And so you have to consider what is the churches were probably full of the citizens, uh, how many of them were regenerate, considering uh you might be exiled from your country if you if you weren't participating in the right ways.

And and this is this is a uh a very summarized, quick, unnuanced look at hundreds of years.

It's it's certainly there were probably people figuring out how to operate outside of that, but but this was the most common approach here.

Again, there's people in heaven that were alive during that time.

I'm not suggesting that there were no true believers, but you can see how when when you when the church uh when the church's authority starts to blur the lines with the church and state, and then the state can enforce the doctrines of the church, I think it is right for us to question the validity of conversions under that model.

If for no, I mean there's other problems there that we'll see, uh, but but amongst them we would be mindful of.

Uh, yeah, I would be motivated to say I believe in Jesus too, if the alternative was I lose everything about my life.

I'm not uh uh we we start to see the confluence of disjointed unhealth within the Western Church.

Churches full of people who probably didn't have much of a choice but to profess belief in Christ, whether or not that was genuine.

The clergy is in full swing with the inquisition, so again, you can get hauled off uh even for apostasy, denouncing of the faith.

So you're incentivized not to say that you don't believe, that the inquisition could come for you if you if you didn't believe.

They're coming out of a crusade era that left them with a really poor reputation.

The Eastern Christians who observe some of what happened during the Crusades in Jerusalem wrote in several places, I have never seen such barbarism as from these brothers wearing crosses on their chests.

This is during the era when there were nations called the barbarians raiding and destroying towns and villages.

And the witnesses to what happened from the Western churches marching in the Crusades was I have never seen such cruelty.

It's a devastating era in the church.

But but all this again is building the tension and the unrest amongst the general population of earnest believers.

Uh the leaders of the Roman church are increasingly insulating themselves in wealth and corruption.

Again, this is all brewing hundreds of years before Luther.

Uh but let's pause just for a moment uh in that line of thinking about corruption and brewing unrest to mark another significant development within the Christian world during this time.

It begins with a guy named Anselm and culminates with Thomas Aquinas.

Those names or the last names are in your listening guides.

This feels maybe random that I'm talking corruption, and now we're gonna pull back and talk theology a bit.

But I think it's a helpful reminder again that even in considering history, uh the lessons to be drawn from church history are complex and nuanced.

Because in the midst of what potentially in some ways is, if not the most, it is in the Hall of Fame of most corrupt eras in the history of the church, produces two thinkers that entirely change the way we theologize, even in the Protestant tradition, even though both of them come out of Catholicism.

So first is Anselm, and the next is Thomas Aquinas.

I don't have a lot here, but just to kind of color in some concepts here for us.

Anselm is a archbishop in Canterbury.

But the conversations were becoming um, excuse me, hyperbolic in a way that Anselm felt they were unhelpful and were heading in directions that um that didn't benefit the church.

This is an oversimplification, but he felt that his congregation and those who he was hearing from uh were so uh obsessed with God's power and wondering how far he could take it, the suggestions of, or questions like, could God make a circle, a square?

Um could God make up, down?

Uh the the most perhaps common brain teaser from this era, and I've used it as a thought exercise in other topic classes in here, is questions like, could God have made, should he pleased or desired?

Could the Ten Commandments have been their opposite?

Does God have the power to say thou shalt kill, thou shalt steal, and that be the moral ethic?

And and historically, the argument there is uh driving towards the unchanging, inherent nature of God, and so the answer to that brain teaser historically is no, God, it's it's meant to be a little bombastic.

No, God couldn't change it.

And you go, there's a little bit of a what?

You suggesting God can't?

And then you say, well, it's because the the law and what God spoke to Moses and to his people were an expression of who he was and his character, and so things like thou shalt not kill comes from the very unchanging character of God.

That thinking and that thought process is born out of Anselm and Aquinas, and I'll try to describe that here a little bit.

Anselm's response was uh the beginning of what is now known as the scholastic and the rational thought processes within Christianity.

It's where the academy really begins in Christian history.

Depending on who you talk to, even the academic designation of doctor begins here as a church term.

So doctor of the church.

The the later Christians had such influence on higher education and formal learning that that term the doctor, which was used for teachers and particularly sharp uh uh theologians of the church, started getting applied to masters of other uh like people who were really, really sharp in other academic fields, just random trivia.

We we were doctors first.

So Anselm starts uh this response to uh the idea that God can be rationally understood.

These brain teasers and these thoughts of what could God make um different about our current world through his power, Anselm's response is no, no, no, God is rational and reasonable, and he created our minds, and therefore our minds can understand him and perceive the world through that ration and reason.

It is part of how he connects with us.

So, what does that mean?

Most basically, again, God operates and can be understood in observable ways that are reasonable to the human mind, which flows from the idea that he reveals himself to us.

He intends us for uh for us to know him, he gives us intellect and these powers of reason and observation, and so in the mind of Anselman, and later more fully developed by Aquinas, and therefore, by reason and rationality, we can understand and perceive God.

And the way in which the world works is a reflection of who God is and his orderliness.

All relatively reasonable thoughts and and still influence how we consider the world as Protestants.

Now, we would reject some of Aquinas's justification and a theology.

He's very Catholic in those ways, but in terms of how he uh philosophied uh theology, we are still very much in his influence.

Uh it forever changes the trajectory of Western thinking in the church.

Much of Anselm and Aquinas' work was influenced by Aristotle.

So Aristotle is a pagan Greek philosopher from a thousand years earlier.

Uh and Anselm, particularly in the Reformers, and even now you'll hear people, um, uh Aquinas rather, Aquinas speaks highly of Aristotle and brings Aristotle's concepts of reasonable, uh, re uh rationality and reasonableness into his arguments for uh how that can be a way of understanding God.

That is quickly attacked by the reformers, it's still pointed to today as hey, that's great.

Aquinas, Aquinas is a good thinker.

Uh, this theological framework that we use comes from a pagan philosopher, and so just for the route, that's not really the point of discussion this evening, but uh uh Aquinas changes how he thinks or how we think, and there is, and we think back through history and how things develop, it's complicated.

Again, I I'm suggesting that uh, and depending on who you read, Aquinas ends up on the list of all-time most influential, maybe not best or or most important, but influential, meaning he shifted, uh a paradigm shifts within the church.

Uh, throughout all of church history, if we're calling that 2,000-ish years, Aquinas is on everyone's top five lists.

So it's hard to overstate this guy's significance.

And he is living, working, writing, and teaching during an era when the when the Roman church and the papacy is in moral corruption and on decline, just as a somewhat to make you aware of Aquinas and Anselm, but but also to draw attention to the complexity and the nuance of thinking through church history and doing so with a bit of charity, that even in the midst of difficult things, the Lord is is is working to sustain his church.

Now, what does that have to do with uh our growing tension in the Roman church in the 1200s?

So Aquinas and Anselm set off the scholastic age of the church, deep philosophical thinking and writing, fascinating stuff, again, hugely influential, and in a church world of an increasing divide between the clergy and the congregants in power and wealth and institution and language, with the extreme intellectualism comes at a poor time for the congregation in general.

Uh it served mostly to further alienate the average attendee from the religious world that they were expected to be a part of.

And all this happens, then things get worse.

So things are about to get so much worse.

The arc of Roman influence has been in decline for centuries.

We talked last week that about 800 or so, the barbarian tribes, the Huns, the Vandals, and others are by the 800s are starting to press on the outer uh uh edges of the Roman Empire.

By the 1200s, where we are now, 12 and 1300s, the the empire is shrinking down to the city of Rome.

It has broken off into nations, France is developing, England is developing, and where there was an emperor over an empire, there are now kings and lords, the the political and geopolitical structure and nature of the world is changing rapidly around them.

And as the arc of Roman influence is in decline, it created an opportunity for the clergy in the Middle Ages to kind of pick up the structure and the shell of Rome and use it for the influence and benefit of the church.

But by the end of the 1200s, the remains of the old Roman Empire are now, again, nations ruled by sovereign kings.

The Holy Roman Empire is starting to track down in a similar arc.

It's following the decline of the secular empire.

One Pope during this time sends out a decree to all of the worlds that he is the authority of all Christians across all nations, and that the Pope, him in particular, should also be in charge of all the worldly leaders.

And that went over unwell.

Okay.

At a time when the church is already losing respect and the corruption is very in your face.

We have a pope in frustration, sends out a bull, a papal bull, a notice to the world essentially that says, I'm in charge, stamps his feet.

That doesn't help public relations.

Popes tried that in the past with no luck, but this time it happened in a powder keg of a power struggle.

The king of France took such offense to this claim that he kidnapped that pope and he killed him.

So think about the the shift and what and who was the most influential and who was the most untouchable.

For generations leading up to that pope, that script would have been flipped.

The Pope speaks and the worldly rulers move through the thrones.

And now we're as we're really starting to see the fissures and the cracks and the weaknesses and the influence of the Roman church.

A king kills a pope.

He kidnaps him and kills him.

The next pope, fearing for his safety, moves the papal seat to another city, just leaves Rome entirely to Avignon.

And for 72 years of church history, the papal seat of Rome is not in Rome.

So again, these might feel like random details, but I'm trying to color in just specific things that are giving you a sense of how this, what had become a behemoth of an institution, is starting to shake and crumble with the winds of corruption, frankly.

It is their their downfall.

Many historians call this the Babylonian captivity of the Roman Church because the corruption reached just a fever pitch during this time in the late 1200s into the 1300s.

Priests were very openly selling clergy positions to wealthy citizens, auction style.

It's crazy.

It's a wild thought.

It was an open secret that many of those priests sworn to celibacy, uh, had indulged physical desires and had parented children.

They were not inherently trying to hide it in a lot of cases.

They were never openly married, but but as I read those parts of history, it feels like I like um, this sounds weird.

I like mafia documentaries.

Not because I like the mafia, but it's just fascinating to read particularly of the brazenness.

At the peak of the mafia's influence, they could stand on the corner and commit a crime and they would just say, I'm not committing this crime, and everyone just went along with it.

That feels like the the I'm not comparing the papacy to the mafia, but the the some would.

That is the the feeling of this era.

It is wanton, brazen, you can't do anything about it level corruption.

Indulgences were being sold on the street.

Uh, during this era, the Catholic doctrine of purgatory was weaponized against congregants in particular.

As a broad stroke summary, here as not a Catholic theologian, I'm gonna try and be charitable in this, but that there is the purgatory, is that there's a state between earthly death and heavenly eternity called purgatory, where you deal with the undealt with stuff of life before continuing on to heaven and at times into hell.

So perhaps if you had unrepentant sin, or if there was something that you had not served penance for or had not otherwise made right with the church, according to the doctrine of purgatory, you're there for a bit in a state of uncertainty or at least waiting to kind of pay off your debt.

Indulgences, uh, in the kind of simplest definition, were hey, if you give us some coin, I can help you with the purgatory thing.

And and uh again, it sounds weird.

I'm not advocating for Catholic doctrine, but with with charity, if you earnestly believe in purgatory, you also earnestly believe that the priesthood or the clergy has a a unique or an extra particular connection through prayer and influence and authority with the divine, indulgences kind of makes sense.

So it'd be easy as a Protestant, especially living now, going, why was anybody paying those?

But it but if you were convinced that either you, so you're making an investment for your future, I'll pay you now so that you can pray for me later in purgatory, or imagine a priest coming to you in the wake of a loved one's death and saying, Hey, they may or may not have, hint, hint, uh, have some things that they didn't settle up with us.

I wouldn't want anything bad to happen to them, but for the low, low price of, I'll put in a good word, that this is, again, uh uh uh perhaps Catholics would not appreciate that summation, but that is our Protestant understanding of what was happening.

Luther in particular raged against the indulgences.

It was one of his particular peeves.

All this is all this is happening, uh at the same time just boiling uh powder keg.

Uh uh you you could buy those indulgences for yourself, the more the better.

But again, commonly suggested that you're you're you you should um you you should uh deposit into those coffers.

Next, 1337, the the king of England claimed to be the rightful heir to the throne of France.

That kicks off the Hundred Years' War.

Uh again, just layering in.

Just uh just think about just the the one thing after another.

The Hundred Years War pops off.

It's not at the scale of a world war.

I don't want to compare it to that, but it but it would have affected most of that region of Europe.

So that's under a centuries-long, or not a centuries, a century-long war during this time.

We have significant, very public and known corruption.

The papal seat isn't even in Rome.

Church attenders can't understand what's happening in service.

They're being hit up for indulgences by clergy that they know to be greedy and corrupt.

And then ten years into a 100-year war, the black plague breaks out.

That is a wild time in just world history, but in particular the history of the church.

So it's corruption, it's an increasingly felt divide between clergy and the average congregant.

It's war, uh, and all of a sudden, here comes the black plague.

In three years, the black plague killed a third of Europe.

It's something like 23 to 24 million people in three years.

And there was just nothing, they had no idea what to do with it.

Uh just devastating to the population in the midst of war.

The plague finally subsides, the corruption's still there, the war is still there, the tension is just uh almost palpable.

Imagine the state of the church at the crossroads of multiple awful things.

For one, and they sound weird for me to go here first, but we can celebrate that God kept his promise and that the gates of hell did not overcome the church.

Because to just in my kind of lumbering, clumsy summation of just the highlights of what was facing the church during that time, if this was just a pragmatic organization that would rise or fall like an empire, this would have been it.

This just would have crushed the church.

But we have this promise from Scripture that God will sustain.

And so in some ways, we are encouraged that in this kind of among the darkest hours of our Christian history, here we are still uh enjoying the legacy of faith as the Lord carried the church through that through that time.

And we see an increase an increasingly clear picture of the ways in which just everything was aligning for a major movement within the church in the form of the Protestant Reformation.

Still not quite there yet.

Coming back to the timeline.

Let's talk about two more characters that exist um in what is now kind of considered the pre-Reformation era.

That's John Wycliffe and Jan Hus.

J-A-N-H-U-S.

Looks like Jan Hus, but he was a he was uh uh from the uh Bohemia, now the Czech Republic.

So it was Jan Hus and John Wycliffe.

Uh first is Wycliffe.

He lives uh before Jan Hus and is is first on the timeline.

Wycliffe was a professor at Oxford in the late 1300s, so this is this is all happening about at the same time.

Everything we've talked about in the last 20 minutes is happening in about the same era.

Wycliffe is a professor at Oxford, and he begins suggesting, which snowballed into teaching, that the true church did have authority over matters of faith and practice.

It says, Yes, I agree with you, Rome.

The church, the true church has authority over matters of faith and practice.

But Wycliffe very dangerously taught that the church was the gathered believers.

Not the Roman papacy.

This is the first significant, it's not that Wycliffe was the first one to suggest this understanding of what is the church, but Wycliffe is the first one to be remembered for it in a significant way and to teach it in a way that drew the attention and the response of Rome itself.

Wycliffe and his supporters believe that the collective reading and interpretation of Scripture by the congregation is necessary and inherently biblical in order to, amongst other things, have uh to foster the personal relationship with God.

He wasn't denying the authority or the goodness of the church, but he was challenging the papal authority and saying that the people can't even read their own scripture to hold you accountable.

If they knew what you were not reading to them from scripture, they'd be upset, kind of concept, was Wycliffe's message.

And so he and his followers begin to translate scripture unauthorized into common languages.

That makes Rome furious.

Really ticks them off.

They charge Wycliffe with heresy twice, and just through kind of happenstance, call it Providence of the Lord, whatever it may be, that there was a natural disaster and then a political upheaval that stopped both trials, and Wycliffe died.

I can't recall how he died, but Wycliffe died not at the hands of the Roman Church, but they were trying.

So Wycliffe starts this significant.

Now he's building on the tension and the calls for the reforms from others, but but he hits at a at a at a culturally unique moment in the history of the Roman Church where people were maybe most willing to listen to the idea of, hey, maybe there's uh, yeah, maybe we need to figure out what these guys are like this can't be right.

Like it took that level of pressure for for the general populace of the church to look at the leadership and say, this cannot be right.

Wycliffe dies.

Then comes Jan Hus.

I'm just gonna go with Hus for the rest of it because it feels weird to do the accent thing.

But uh, in about 1407, Wycliffe's ideas have spread to Bohemia, which is now in the area of the Czech Republic.

It's gone from England across the way.

They're picked up by this professor and priests.

Jan Hus is a priest in the Catholic Church and a professor.

He's a respected academic and intellectual.

And Hus goes, hey, I think Wycliffe has a point here.

And Hus takes it a step further into preaching this.

He's a priest with a pulpit.

He expands on Wycliffe's ideas and was further suggesting that the church was only authoritative insofar as it was leading and operating according to Scripture, and that Christians were only obligated to obey the church and her leaders insofar as they were operating according to Scripture.

He was not denying that individual believers should submit to the church as a whole, but he had a fundamentally different idea of what constituted the church, and he was very publicly and from his pulpit challenging Rome in that way.

Rome did not like that.

So they arrest Hus.

They tell him, hey, come on to Rome, we need to talk about this.

On the way to Rome, they just stick him in a jail and ultimately kill him for heresy.

The church couldn't kill him, so they charge him with heresy, they turn him over to the state, the state executes him on other charges.

When they kill Jan Hus, they go and dig up, this is 30, 40-ish year, I think 30 years after Wycliffe has died.

They go exhume Wycliffe's body, pull out his remains, bring the bones to where Jan Hus is killed, and they burn Wycliffe's bones as an extra good measure of that's enough of this common language thing.

Uh and I think they they clearly seem to think that would solve the matter.

Uh that just really generally ticked off the congregations of hold on, these men were saying that maybe we should understand what you're saying.

Uh, and in response, you you killed one guy and dug up a dead guy of 30 years and burned his bones.

Uh just the powder keg moment.

I'm just repeating that phrase.

I should have written down some synonyms, but but what we can see by the time we get to Martin Luther, when he nails the 95 thesis to the door of the church in Wittenberg, it is it is the crescendo of something that has been building for hundreds of years.

And in a lot of ways, we are still living in the tension of the kind of unending nature of the Reformation, that the work is not done, that we always are seeking to be on guard for what we would call scriptural fidelity, for gospel verity, just fancy terms for it.

We want to remain accurate and pure and forever uh uh updating and purifying.

And so there in some ways is is still a spirit within Protestant and uh Protestantism that is uh constantly looking for uh returning to baseline.

It comes out of centuries, really, uh of categorized uh discontent and corruption from a clergy who had garnered too much power, had blurred the line between church and state, that power had corrupted to a point of many of the clergy and the practices of the church were unrecognizable according to scripture, and so we are then on the doorstep of the Protestant Reformation, which we will talk about more significantly next week, as well as we'll talk about um Protestant Reformation, then we'll spend a significant amount of time tracing Baptist history specifically.

Uh the Baptists date back to uh nearly the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, not there, but but we're we're an old denomination as well.

We just don't think of it that way.

We're not good at Baptists aren't good at remembering their history, so we'll see what we can do there.

We've got 10 ish minutes.

Uh three of those will be for closing prayers.

We've got seven ish minutes.

I want to take a minute um to to try and get us to think about from this era or from other eras that we have discussed, encouragements and warnings, parallels.

I think it's a helpful time to remind ourselves of cliches around uh history repeating itself and those who don't pay attention or doomed to repeat it.

The biblicalisms of there's nothing new under the sun, uh, every new heresy is an ancient one restated.

Uh so just of what you've heard, take a minute.

Let's just think together for a few minutes, if you're bold enough to speak out loud, about something encouraging maybe from our from our history, uh a warning perhaps, and then maybe uh not that we're comparing ourselves to the Roman church in the twelve hundreds or so, but but uh are there parallels you see where where we should be careful based on things we've learned in the past?

Uh saw the same thing from a different perspective.

Others claimed that the the church was being punished for the cruelty of the crusades and the corruption within the church.

Yeah, so being careful about jumping to proclamations of judgment from God.

That's uh selfful.

What about um in particular?

I think to me, what's inescapable, and I'd even I didn't even try and write to this theme, it just is is there as you read church history.

As the church and the state start to start to meld in the ways that the Roman church did with Rome uh and others, um seemingly that creates more problems than right.

It's not uncommon throughout history.

There's been waves of if we were just had more political influence, things would be, and then we and then we have this idea of how good that would make things if Christians got to decide those sorts of things.

What what might be, we're not, it's not shot for shot.

It's not that every time you put in A, you get B.

However, uh human nature has not changed.

So so what might we learn from the history of the church and the state interacting that that should give us pause, encouragement, or otherwise uh some sort of lesson?

There's like a technical term for it, like kind of generational arrogance, that this assumption that every generation is incrementally smarter, better, and more compassionate than the previous one.

And perhaps in some ways that's true, but I think that's mostly our hubris telling us that inherently the new thing or the next thing is better than the previous thing.

Well, what will happen then uh is we'll look at uh church history and go, thank God that we're not so naive or we're not so whatever.

We are the same humans, prone to the same sins.

We have different opportunities given just the the the way the world is now.

Uh but but uh seemingly aside from any theological uh argument or or or kind of biblical studies, one, and I think I could spit one out that's pretty strong for for keeping the to for to not meld the two because it will inevitably lead to corruption.

There just seems to be an observable, almost thousand percent batting average of when you see an attempt at a human-based theocracy, theocracy meaning uh the the the deity is the functional leader of the nation.

So Israel of the old covenant was a theocracy.

Uh God was in charge.

In the right form, we see the era of the judges and the king.

They they wanted something other than a theocracy, ironically, and now we say we want what they had, which when humans try and do that, said I am the representative of God, and therefore I can be the proxy leader of a theocracy.

Ten times out of ten you end up with corruption and something other than the orthodox expression of that faith.

That's not even unique to Christianity, to Martin's point.

Uh also not to pick on Islam, because again, we've done we've done it as as well.

Uh we see it with civil religions.

Uh the uh I'm underversed here, but my understanding is a lot of dictators even modernly deify themselves amongst their there's there's some some amount of cult, like a the civil cult they call it, worship to those leaders.

Um it's it seems to lead to corruption.

Uh another thought there um to layer in.

I'm I'm not comparing, please don't quote me here, and it's recorded, so I'll correct you.

I am not calling the Roman Catholic Church a cult.

Um I don't think that.

I watch a lot of Mafia documentaries and then a lot of cult ones.

Uh every single cult starts out with an individual who seems to perhaps earnestly believe that they are some incarnated deity and that there is a purity, uh they're going to return to some pure form, uh, the uh an expression of faith.

It's a secret knowledge.

Most of that is Gnosticism in some way, interestingly.

Uh and then by the end of the documentary, they're always they always have like a Rolls-Royce and three houses, and they've taken everyone's wives.

Just again, anecdotal, but in the interest of this conversation, the the the the blurring of the line between I'm in charge of every asset or facet of your life in an authoritarian way, and biblically centered Christ-like church leadership, when those get blurred, corruption comes out.

And so I think modernly uh we you'd have to just be ignoring everything to miss that there is a movement amongst Protestantism now that that suggests that if we had more political influence, perhaps even political power, that that would inherently be a good thing for the church and for the kingdom.

And and you look at church history and go, I would, I, I, I think I would beg to differ.

Regardless of how good you think your argument is now in theory of this, if we could just get to this point where our faith and the politics of this nation are whatever you think is the appropriate amount of overlap, that would be in that I just know that would be it would be different this time.

We have no data to suggest that that wouldn't also inherently lead to corruption.

I also uh to my uh Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey.

He didn't come in on a war horse with an army behind him.

Uh I think there is an inherent, he says, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render under God what is God's.

He says, respect and give honor to the civil authorities.

God puts them over.

There, I think, in scripture, uh, as would my brothers affirm that there is a biblical separation of church and state.

And we have this anecdotal data set that suggests anytime we violate that, it's not a good look for us, just generally speaking.

It's not the only lesson to be learned.

I think that's perhaps the most culturally relevant one at this moment in terms of what's getting talked about and what's popular to talk about amongst our churches, and it that has crossed over from the Roman church into Protestantism.

But let me uh let me pray for us uh and and we'll go.

I apologize, I took most of the discussion time for myself.

Father, thank you uh for this evening.

We thank you for uh the recorded history of your church.

Um may we uh may may as we read of kind of the awful things that happened to the church and the awful things that happened from the church, um, may it uh certainly help us to feel the right amount of displeasure there, uh, but also help it to be primarily a sobering reminder to us that these were humans uh prone to sin just as we are.

Um and we don't look with um excuses or with glossing over, but we but we remember with compassion uh and and the rights.

Uh Father, help just help keep us aware that we are all prone to um to self-service.

And so uh it is your grace and mercy uh that gave us what we believe to be uh righteous reform and revival within your church uh through through the faithful work of believers, even during times when when the church was at its its darkest hours.

Uh so we celebrate your goodness in sustaining the church.

We pray for clarity.

Uh where I have perhaps unintentionally been inaccurate or or less uh specific than I should have been, please uh please cover that over with understanding.

Uh uh and and we ask that you um bless this time and carry us home safely.

And may we honor you with our lives tomorrow.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.