0:01 why on earth would we study church history let's just be honest with ourselves for the majority of people who are called evangelicals today church history pretty much goes back to uh billy graham what is he 104 now something like that uh so he is in his i think his late 90s if i recall correctly very elderly um but for certainly in my own uh my own upbringing um i do not personally recall any particular emphasis upon church history and if you were not raised within a reformed style church
0:48 certainly in the more fundamentalistic um general association regular baptist as we were um i've got some garbs over there um uh church history was not was not an issue uh there was no emphasis upon a recognition of where we stood in church history or if there was how many of you have seen the little uh trail of blood booklet anyone ever seen i i was first given one of those uh probably in the late 1970s probably early 1980s at north phoenix someone handed me one
1:35 of those the landmark baptist the baptist have always been around there is the it's it's almost the roman catholic idea of apostolic succession except for baptism um and uh you know and i had no earthly idea how to even evaluate something like that because again the idea of church history for many and i use this term anymore advisedly protestants is well that's all they're all just a bunch of roman catholics uh up until the reformation and even then even with the reformation well then they're a bunch of lutherans or something or a bunch of presbyterians and uh so there was just a
2:24 uh a real uh antipathy toward the idea even though theologically we would say god had been building his church it was just this little itsy bitsy can't really find it in most uh time periods type thing that was hidden away until the modern period where now we can we can be out there in the open and and so on and so forth and so the idea of studying uh church history uh had no theological grounding in in my upbring uh and i'd like to try to provide a little bit of a theological foundation for taking bible study time to study church history um is this just simply something that
3:11 calvinists do because we like to talk about um well we like to talk about wickliffe and huss and and uh that that's all just sort of the preamble uh to our hero martin luther who would have probably killed any of us um and ulrich swingley who probably would have killed any of us uh and john calvin who would at least banished any of us um you know that type of thing um is it just a preamble is it just uh so we can get to the reformation part and eventually for some people so we can get to the anabaptists who were only barely orthodox on a lot of things um that type of stuff you know is is that what it's all about i don't think so uh there does seem to
3:59 be in scripture uh a fair number of texts that uh for example in romans chapter 15 i don't think we've quite gotten there yet or if we did it was day i wasn't here but uh in rome chapter 15 we have the discussion of of these things uh took place uh for our edification they're an example unto us and we're to look back and it's sort of hard i mean remember we went through hebrews uh it would have been impossible to understand a lot of what the writer of the hebrews was saying if you couldn't understand the history of the jewish people and go back and and there's all these references to what god did in this person's life and god didn't that's person and therefore we should learn from this this particular lesson and so we have all sorts of examples
4:46 um of even even the patriarchs they were to put up a a stone pillar at a particular place why as a reminder of what god had done in someone's life at that particular place we sing the song and i always talk about it in the second line um here i raise my evinate sir which we call an ebenezer and we automatically start thinking about the christmas carol and one wonder how scrooge got into one of our hymns anyways and um actually the evan acer is a stone of help it's a it's a reminder of what god had done in our lives is putting up one of those pillars and saying god did something in my life and this is a remember
5:31 something to remind me of that we need reminders i mean my goodness i have uh on my on all my apple devices i have the uh reminder app and i just have to use that thing and and throw stuff in it doesn't actually mean i do what i put on there but you know eventually just get used to seeing it so you don't see it anymore and it just doesn't work anymore but i still need to use it and and it's helpful to me we need reminders uh or we become very focused upon our own little world um it becomes very easy to to define all of reality just based upon my little experience here and and and you know it it helps to recognize first of all the world is a whole lot bigger than here
6:18 there are actually people in the world who could care less about donald j trump or ted cruz or hillary clinton or bernie sanders or people like that though you would be shocked by the way you know i'll bet you half the people in here i bet you more than half people in couldn't name the prime ministers of australia canada and the united kingdom i'm not sure that i could i know trudeau is back in canada because he's really weird um but uh it's amazing how much attention is paid on our elections outside our borders when i travel people are always tell me about this guy or talk about that guy i heard this and i heard they follow our elections really really closely it's a sort of freaky thing uh unfortunately
7:04 especially in europe it's it's extremely slanted and i go over there and go what are you people talking about because even my conservative bible-believing friends will start saying things and i said you listen to msnbt nbc way too much uh because that's basically all they have but anyway so it helps to widen our perspective to to know the world's bigger than that but it also helps us temporally uh to look back it's sort of not possible to look forward um so it at least outside of a few things in scripture all right george we're starting church history so we we almost we almost waited for you uh because we're gonna need you to write down uh you know day we started and i'm not sure if you've got a new new notebook you can use or whatever but
7:51 just uh just just to let you know um the only way that we can since we can't look into the future so much is look into the past and theologically you would think that would be one of the first things we would do i mean i've always believed even when i didn't think church history was relevant i've always believed the promise that jesus gave us uh he was going to build his church the gates of hades would not prevail against that which by the way when you think about it really doesn't make any sense the way we've always thought about it we've always thought that the the church should be in a defensive mode actually the gates of hades will not prevail against it means we're marching in there not they're marching in here it's it's it's an offensive thing not a defensive
8:36 thing but anyway uh you know theologically i i would have understood that yeah christ is building his church so why doesn't it immediately follow then well if he's been doing that for 2000 years then i've got 2 000 years of history to look back upon of christ building his church and it would seem wisdom to recognize well he was always dealing with people who had abiding sin he was always dealing with people who were in a fallen state so i bet we've made the same mistakes over and over and over again haven't we and maybe if we take the time to look back we might be able to learn some things to where we don't make the same mistakes all over again and i suppose in the back of my mind i
9:23 would have recognized the reality of the fact that there have been great controversies in theology but honestly i think most of us when we come into the faith initially uh we sort of have the idea that what we believe you know sort of like what we believe about the bible that it floated down from heaven on a uh on a on a silken pillow with leather binding and gold edges and thumb indexing and and pretty ribbons uh bound uh in there as well well it didn't uh it came down in a in a very different fashion than that and in the same way um theology
10:09 we would like to think that there's just some great huge divine theology book someplace and we all just make reference to it and it's really quite simple and there aren't any questions and there was never any development or uh increase in understanding or anything like that at all but that's not how it worked either i mean when you think about it you have this this incredible claim that we're making that god himself entered into his own creation and has established this this church and this this this church is made up of men from every tribe tongue people and nation there's no longer the jew gentile distinction we're all to be one in christ jesus and it's it's for every race every color every tongue there's to be no geographical boundaries no ethnic
10:57 boundaries no nothing i mean it's this is a this is an incredible thing and so it's gonna have to go out into that world and you think about someone like a peter uh who's a galilean fisherman uh let's say he you know well the understanding historically is that he went ended up going to babylon at some point uh you think maybe once you leave the narrow confines of ancient israel you start going other places you start going to places where greek philosophy uh is is prevalent that people just start asking questions about what you're teaching
11:44 that will be different than what would be the prevalent questions there in israel so the questions are going to be phrased and put into world views that maybe you've never run into before and how are you going to answer those questions are you going to demand that they abandon uh who they are and adopt a completely jewish world view so they can understand uh solely all those questions from a jewish perspective and so now you've got nice simple answers you can just go straight back to apostolic preaching and and and just repeat the the answers to it well that's not going
12:29 to work if the gospel is in fact intended to go into all the world and so obviously there are going to be missteps uh there are going to be times when maybe even a well-known christian leader uh comes with some bad answers for various reasons sometimes not nefarious but but uh certainly there are times we look back upon maybe an early church writer and we go well you know in light of later reflection and deeper biblical exegesis that really wasn't necessarily the best answer but at the same time
13:16 what that tells us then is that we need to look at anyone in church history and we need to try to interpret them within the context of the time they lived we stand on the shoulders of giants whether we but whether we understand it or not whether we can name athanasius and place him at the right time in the right century and understand what his role was and and whether we whether we know anything about these names if you've ever if you've received a year's worth of teaching in the church whether you know it or not you have benefited from those men even if those men's names were never mentioned because the things that they struggled with and the things that maybe they spent their entire lives focused upon
14:02 have become a part of the fabric of the faith that has been delivered to you and even in the way it was explained to you i mean some of you have grown up in this church not many of you but but some of you have grown up in this church and so uh you've been in the sunday school classes in a meeting right now and uh uh various teachers have have taken the time mr porter and mr smith for example with some of the older teenagers have gone through uh you know sections on systematic theology or apologetics or things like that and and maybe there wasn't a specific historical element to the the systematic theology part but there was whether you knew it or not the influence was there and even some of
14:49 the language that we use um very clearly came from a point of conflict in history where clarification came about because there had to be clarification biggest example this we'll get to in really a matter of weeks was the the first ecumenical council ecumenical meaning worldwide and that term has different meanings depending on who you talk to it but uh the first truly major sort of representing the entire church visible uh council council of nicaea in 325 a.d and the issue of the council was the teaching of a man named arius
15:37 who taught that there was a time when the sun was not there was a time when the sun was not so the sun was god-like the sun was invested with divine power uh but the sun when you think of the the chasm that exists between everything that's created and everything that's not created he's on the created side not the not created side so he is not eternal he is the most exalted creature there is but he's still a creature uh that is what aries taught and many were those who were opposed to him
16:23 but it was discovered fairly quickly that arius brightfellow um i guess allegedly he was quite looking and uh like to write music that uh promoted his perspective and that if you want to promote a perspective write music people can remember music i mentioned yesterday a terrible horrible thing this must be why i wasn't able to catch up to gary in the race yesterday but about halfway through i got a song stuck in my head i got a song stuck in my head and it was let it go now let me tell you something uh there are a lot of songs get stuck in your head that is not one of them that you want
17:09 stuck in your head uh it really the because the cold has bothered me normally okay so um and i i blame my granddaughter for uh for that particular um disaster that overtook me uh yesterday but uh yes music is a very very effective way of communicating something even if it has no meaning whatsoever has that song has no meaning at all but you still can't get out of your head uh no matter how hard you try it's just just horrible i i i see what happened is i pulled over the side of the road and beat my head against the cactus for 15 minutes and that's what that was the difference between us right there was 15 minutes was trying to get let it go out of my head um so arius anyways back to aries uh arius uh aries is a sharp guy musically inclined
17:57 obviously got a lot of people on his side thinking this is this is a you know this is the proper way to go and so they had to get together and and they discovered that the arius could find a way around almost any verse in the bible uh you present almost any verse in scripture that teaches the deity of christ and as long as you're inventive enough and as long as uh your ultimate authority isn't a consistent form of exegesis you can find a way around it and so the aryans could say we affirm every single verse that you show us in this way and so
18:44 the term that the council of nicaea ended up using was a very controversial term but they found an un biblical term it's not a term found in scripture but it was the only way that they could pull the mask off of the aryans the aryans could not say yes i agree to that and so they used this term they said it's based on this biblical teaching and this biblical teaching this biblical teaching but it's not itself found in scripture but it is the only way to absolutely say we're saying this not this and so orthodoxy for the council of nicea was defined on the basis of the term homo usus versus homo usus a single letter
19:32 difference single letter different but homo osis meaning of the same substance homo usa should be of like substance so in describing the substance of the sun is he of the same substance of the father is he truly deity or is he of a like substance highly exalted but not truly deity and so what is the illustration here the illustration here is that very often definitions the very definitions that we use today were forged in the fires of controversy an issue comes up and it becomes uh a controversy that's when you get an a a special focus upon examination of the scriptures and what
20:18 the scriptures teach as a whole and how to formulate this uh and really the first 500 years of the christian era are filled with key controversies some of which truly are central some of which demonstrate that there is a great apostasy going on and aren't central at all yes sir homo usus what we're going to be we're at we're going to be covering trust me we're going to be covering the council of nicely very deeply in a few weeks if this is just an illustration right now just guess at it and see how close you get once we get there um yeah homo lucius and homo usus were the two and that is hetero ocs which means of a completely different
21:04 uh different nature but the point is that these terms uh they they come out of controversy and many of the terms that we just simply take for granted um they themselves uh had an origin in time as far as as coming to have the kind of significance we have that we give to them today a lot of people will ask me when i do public debates or uh we're getting we've just just booked the flights uh for next month uh i'm gonna be gone the first half of may uh to uh cape town johannesburg london and
21:50 belfast and uh in all those places i'll be doing you know things where i'll be answering questions just off top my head and in groups and debates with muslims and stuff like that and people say what what to what what classes that you took in bible college and seminary have been the most useful to you in doing what you do as as an apologist and my answer is always has been the same for for decades now greek and church history greek and church history um greek hebrew to a lesser extent but i'll be honest with you 90 of the apologetic questions especially have to do with new testament things or even if they have to as old testament
22:37 things they have to do with the greek septuagint translation of the old testament so greek is far more important along those lines i'm not trying to diminish the importance of hebrew i'm just simply saying apologetically but then the other most people are a little surprised they think systematic theology or something like that well yeah it's important but to me it just the amount of times that church history gets twisted and then used as a club against christians is amazing it really is uh and the only reason it works is because we almost never talk about it i mean amongst bible-believing christians um church history
23:23 just is not a focus and so people can come along and they will sometimes they'll use facts they'll actually be truthful um factual information but then they put it into a false context and turned into a weapon against us and so if someone says well yeah but you know the doctor the trinity wasn't worked out until the fourth century so how can you say it's really relevant that's a half truth that has been twisted out of its context um were there christological controversies all the way up to the council of calcidon yes does that mean that the doctrine of the trinity is irrelevant or even non-definitional no but since we don't know much about the controversies since we don't
24:10 necessarily know uh what the relationship is between biblical theology and systematic theology and how creedal formulations are developed and things like that we very frequently end up being silenced basically by our own ignorance not by the weight of the actual argument that's being used against us and so it's especially irrelevant today even more so than when i i first taught church history the year after i graduated from seminary uh at grand canyon college back then or had it become grand canyon university then i forget if it had made that transition uh it's hard to even recognize the place anymore it's so huge but um uh i first
24:57 taught church history at grand canyon when i was scholar in residence there about 19 89 90 somewhere around in there and uh i could tell when the students came in that they were just sort of expecting to take notes take some tests and survive um thankfully when i was in seminary i had a tremendously good and gifted church history and he made the subject not only understandable but you could tell he was passionate you could tell that this was something that really meant something to him and i appreciated the fact that he had been to europe and he had been to some
25:42 of these places and he could tell stories about stuff and now i've had the opportunity uh to do some of that i'll be uh debating on the subject roman catholicism in wittenberg next year uh for the 500th anniversary um i've stood at the castle church door in wittenberg germany it's bittenberg over there but anyways when we talk about zwingli and the anabaptists and the third baptism anybody know the third baptism third baptism was drowning because the anabaptists had been baptized as infants and then they were called anabaptists which means to be baptized again of course they reject that terminology they didn't believe they were baptized properly the first time anyway so they've been baptized from their the
26:29 from zwingli's perspective a second time and so the third baptism is where you ground them and uh the drownings of the anabaptists were done primarily off of a particular bridge uh which is still right there in the uh in the heart of zurich and uh i walked over that bridge of just what was i was in zurich sometime last year uh i think it was last year what was that remember december i don't know it was pretty nippy um sorry it was in the fall sometime yeah anyway uh so i i stood at that spot where the uh anabaptists received their uh and we walked through the building where the the trials were held it's a little creepy uh dude perfectly
27:15 honest with you um and the vast majority of people walking past those spots today have no earthly idea no earthly idea of what took place there or why and even most christians anymore would think that it really doesn't matter it doesn't have any particular meaning anymore uh but the fact matter is it it does uh it has a lot of meaning because it has been a part of what has formed our identity in our character and if we don't know these things then we we don't possess the tools to be able to detect tradition even within our own belief
28:01 history provides us with an exceptionally important tool to be able to recognize uh when we are being influenced by by forces that we may not even know existed but they are historical forces they're they're voices from the past that continue speaking to this day and everyone has them the less you know about history the less you can identify the the force and the weight that those voices have uh and that's a bad situation to be in because most of the people that i know of uh that i've experienced who are the most enslaved to tradition are the very same people who have extremely skewed views of church history uh for example dave hunt the late dave hunt and i wrote a book um he against
28:48 calvinism by defending calvinism and and if you ever listened much to dave hunt he would talk a lot about church history but from a scholarly perspective it was this incredibly twisted unfair only see what you want to see on the page version of church history because he had such strong traditions but he didn't know he has strong traditions and in fact those of you have heard the encounter he and i had years and years ago on uh the radio station here in phoenix um when i was interviewing him uh at one point i said to him dave that's just your tradition speaking his response to me was james i have no tradition and so someone who can honestly and he
29:34 meant it can honestly say i have no tradition is the greatest slave there is because if you think you don't have any you have no way of filtering it you have no way of identifying you have no way of analyzing you have no way of asking the question is this really a biblical teaching or not and so uh hunt was also really well known for attacking people in church history in a very unfair manner he he detested augustine he said augustine was the father of roman catholicism and blah blah he would use genetic fallacies uh where if augustine said something he disagreed with that meant and then you've got this whole long line of things that turns augustine this terrible horrible person one of the things that hopefully i will
30:21 communicate to you over and over again during the course of study is that we have to examine people in church history in the light of when they live applying our modern standard to them is simply unfair and there's no one sitting this room that would feel overly good if someone three or four hundred years from now decided to analyze your life in light of their circumstances that's unfair they may know things you don't know you may know things they don't know uh the idea of of that kind of anachronism uh stepping outside of the actual context and importing things that you know when when augustine did what he did in regards to donatists
31:07 another issue we will get into um the result over centuries of time you could literally say was the inquisition augustine didn't know that augustine could not have foreseen uh how his words would be used how the context uh in culture would change and so to hold him accountable as if he was going let's start the inquisition is just absurdity and yet there are books filled with that kind of stuff sitting on the shelves of christian bookstores or these days digitally stored on amazon's hard drive however you end up getting that kind of
31:53 information church history is also one of the only ways that we can gain some kind of perspective and looking at ourselves looking at ourselves um and that that may be uncomfortable to a lot of us to look at ourselves but church history sort of functions as a mirror that we can hold up to ourselves and because look we are so close to the controversies of our day that trying to step back and gain any perspective so as to
32:40 see things from another viewpoint or another angle or or anything like that is is really really difficult when we are in the heat of the moment when we we only know what we know and we think we know enough to be able to make sound decisions but the fact matter is maybe on some issues we don't and and so what's one way in which we can maybe get some perspective but to use the mirror of church history because look when you think about it while the early church didn't have the technology that we have um they're human beings they're made in the image of god they're indwelt by the holy spirit of god
33:25 and what's the purpose of god in their sanctification but to conform them the image of christ so you can change the clothing you can change the language you can change the technology you can change the politics but there's still going to be some tremendous parallels and it's pretty much the same process being worked out but in different circumstances and so i'm not saying that you can always i mean in one way we face issues that almost no generation before us in space what do you do with designer babies what do you do now that we have mapped
34:12 human genome uh what do you do to deal with the advancement in the hands of secular god haters of technologies that could produce either a super race or the walking dead one of the two what do you do with the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of absolute loons such as the head of north korea i mean people that are just certifiably insane evilly insane um i mean the the current leadership of north korea makes hitler look like a a youth group leader
34:58 i mean it it just the these this guy's a nut and he's got nuclear weapons and uh and rockets do not see a good end to this okay you know this is this is this is not a good thing okay nuclear proliferation and dna splicing and crispr technology not something that augustine dealt with okay i get that um but through history there have been advancements for example in science and we can look at the stumbles the falls the face plants as well as the successes and how the church responded to these
35:43 things of course in the midst of all that we then have the question of what was the church i mean that's a big question today that's a very amorphous term uh what defines the church can we identify the church historically how do we differentiate between what would be called the external church or the professing church and the institutional church over against the true church which we would identify as the saints of all ages when did roman catholicism arise how do you even define roman catholicism even today i mean i think it was a lot easier to find roman catholicism a hundred years ago that is that i mean when you've got two popes
36:30 alive today who clearly do not believe the same thing on a fundamental level what does that mean how do you even define uh rome today and when did rome come into existence and how much bad theology can a true christian actually believe these are important questions and they're questions people struggle with and even amongst reformed folks uh you know we we draw those lines in our minds but very frequently not so much in a way that if we applied them historically
37:16 we would be consistent for example we know that the reformers loved augustine they quote augustine all the time but let's not fool ourselves um you would be somewhat lost in augustine's church at least first few sundays and augustine would have had certain beliefs or at least certain maybe not dogmas but concepts and ideas that you would have gone where'd you get that and he'd probably think the same thing about us too and so how are we in the same church are we in the same church i mean there are some that would say oh no no no but the reformers certainly didn't believe that uh the reformers did not believe
38:02 that they were founding a new church they didn't believe that the church had simply passed away so how do we how do we define what the church is what's the level of doctrinal uh accuracy that is necessary for defining the christian church uh can we even tell necessarily from reading the writings of the ancient church exactly where someone was can we what's what's the ability of someone's written work to really reveal where their heart is i mean these are all issues that enter into our consideration of the generations that have come before us and i would think
38:48 um that most of us would just naturally recognize the necessity to extend some grace in the study of church history because most of us don't think about the fact that someday unless the lord returns we will be a part of church history and as such it's really easy for us to go well i don't want to be i want to be judged by those who come after me in an unfair ungracious manner some of you are going no one's going to care about me well okay but you don't know that i mean when you when we do think about some of the figures of
39:34 church history some of them were spectacularly unknown people who in unusual situations became very very well known um things were thrust upon them and uh that may not happen to you but the fact of the matter is you if you just sort of set that aside you recognize the need for someone to honestly adequately and fairly analyze what you believed in light of what you knew not on the basis of what someone else is going to come up with later on and so that is a i think an absolutely necessary attitude for us
40:19 uh for us to have so all that requires the study of church history now not everything in church history is overly exciting we get to the reformation i love taking time to walk down the various rows of relics in the castle church in wittenberg and we talk about how if you stop before this particular spot in the castle church there on display is the feather from the wing of the angel gable and you stop and you bow and you pray before that station before the
41:04 feather from the wing of the angel gabriel and you receive a certain indulgence a certain number of days out of the suffering of purgatory a transfer of merit from the sitharas meritorum into your own account so that you may not suffer in purgatory for israel and then you walk down the road well the row and you stop and hear oh here here is a true crown here is a true thorn from the crown of thorns yes yes and so you pray again and then you go to the neck and i've kept this one just for you we you come to the next and here is a genuine portion of one of jesus
41:51 that's indeed part of all the cloth diapers of jesus right here you pray before it and you receive indulgences and the catalog is absolutely fast there's a stone from mary's house well all of mary's house was trans transferred by angels to loreto italy uh you didn't know this but uh carried i mean just you know big old honkin angelic transport uh right over to italy uh and all sorts of so there's some things in church history so if you're looking no no seriously i i mean it um some things church history really interesting some other things especially right
42:38 toward the beginning are so foundational they're a little tough they're a little tough i'll have to admit we got to know something about the greek context into which the gospel went so we got to know a little something about stoicism epicureanism got to do it not everything's equally interesting or exciting yes sir just a little bit passed i've never taught past then and so we'll pretty much get just just past the period of reformation yep anything else from the introduction right have i have i at least sold you on the fact that sort of be good to spend some time covering this uh even though we spent
43:26 what 11 years or something yeah it's interesting there there you can frequently find parallels i'll be honest with you i don't know until the modern period that anyone could have ever dreamed up the prosperity gospel stuff because until the modern period where you've got such ease of life um the idea of name it and claim it
44:14 always be healthy stuff just just wouldn't have flown very well even though the amazing thing is some of the places that it it works the best today are places like south africa um where it's it's huge in africa it's extremely destructive the faith in africa and you would think but it's an escape mechanism it's it's hey you might as well believe this because my reality is no better than that anyway so why not um but generally what you can do is you can find parallels uh we will we will encounter the montanus um in the early church and really strong parallels to what's on i never mentioned the station between 20 and 22 uh and really really strong parallels as
45:01 far as profits and and uh and stuff like that uh but it's normally more on a conceptual basis than a you know specific thing i mean the aryans for example very similar to jehovah's witnesses but they were more orthodox than jobs job's witnesses did not deny the personality of the holy spirit so there can be differences but it's it's more of a conceptual thing yeah it can be there's a lot of stuff you look back and go yeah yeah that's that's still happening today definitely definitely real quick not particularly uh it's not my not really my area of study
45:46 it can get pretty complicated and would take a lot of a lot of preparation uh and by the time we get done with all this most people are going to be ready to get back to biblical studies all right there we go there's lesson number one in the books let's uh close the times probably we thank you for this day we ask now as we go into worship that you will settle our hearts and our minds that we will focus our attention upon your truth that you will meet with us and you will be honored and glorified in all things bring christ amen
