Polemics, Church History

All right. The handout that we have is a little unusual in that we've got two pages of regular handout and many more than that in supplemental handouts. Okay. And so what we'll do on the screen is there will be a one if it's on the first page there, which the top one that's got nine slides per or two, which is a little farther back. And then the ones in between we'll have marked with an S at the lower corner for a special handout. And there are more special ones than there are regular ones.

Questions? Okay. What we're looking to address this morning is how did we get here? This is, if you will allow it, a condensation of what we studied in church history for 26 weeks all into one week. So anyway, get ready, fasten your pew belts, and here we go. The Word of God, that is Jesus Christ, is revealed in the Word of God, the written Word of God.

New groups and movements and organizations start because of politics, sometimes even official politics, as you look through church history, sometimes because of church politics. Groups start because of geography, things that are geographical. The Orthodox churches, for example, had a whole lot more impact from having to battle the Islamic forces than did the Roman Catholic Church.

Personalities. We'll take a look at that here in a little bit. Big influence on different groups and who led who based on personalities. Social differences. The Orthodox Church was influenced by the Greek background, whereas the Roman Catholic Church was influenced by a Latin background. That, you know, was one of the things that made a difference between the two groups.

Different bases of authority. We would say the Bible only, and other groups might say the Bible plus our special revelations, the Bible plus our traditions, the Bible plus what this guy says, because we really like what he says. See? Those kinds of things. Different methods of interpretation.

When we went through Revelation, chapter 7, it says 144,000, and it gives 12,000, and it lists the tribes. The groups who interpret allegorically say, oh, that represents the Christian denominations. I don't know why that's specific. specific 144,000, 12,000. Why name the tribes, the Jewish tribes, if that represents Christian denominations? But anyway, that's allegorical interpretation.

Failed attempts at reform. Luther tried to reform the Catholic Church, not to start a new religion. Calvin was a reformer attempting to reform the Catholic Church, which was pushed away not to start a new religion. The Methodists were wanting to reform the Anglican Church, not to start a new religion. The intent in many cases was simply to reform what was there. When the reform efforts were rejected, that began a new movement.

Here's the timeline, 30 being the beginning of the time of the Church and the Apostles, after the ascension of Christ. Up through 96 AD, the death of the Apostle John, the last living apostle. During New Testament times, there were divisions and divergent teachings.

We have a list here of some. The truth is, if you go through the New Testament epistles, this was done. There was one seminary professor who said to his class, I want the class to break up into groups of about three or four students in every One of you, I want you to study and I want you to tell me what's the main theme of the New Testament epistles. And all the groups came back and they said, the main thing that you see in the New Testament epistles is correcting error.

Correcting error. And so this is because there were divisions and divergent teachings. Nancy, the ladies are studying on Tuesday night in 1 Timothy. Why was Timothy sent to Ephesus? to correct the false teachers. He says, I sent you to Ephesus to correct the false teachings. There is just repeated reference to dealing with errors. The whole book of Galatians. starts from the outset, after he gets through saying, hi, my name is Paul, all of a sudden, guns blazing, dealing with the false teaching, the error.

As we step into the time right after the apostles, so here's the New Testament completed, and up to 312, that's the time when Constantine, the Roman emperor, declared Christianity legal. That period of time is what we're looking at next here. Now, the apostles made it clear that elders were overseers, were shepherds, which is the word that is translated pastor, which is just the Latin form of shepherd, okay, that those are the same, and that a bishop is not a position higher, which is that, that's episkopos, overseer. That is not biblically a position higher, but right about the time John went home to be with the Lord, Clement of Rome, and Ignatius both started acting as bishops above what was biblically justified.

Here is Clement of Rome writing to the church at Corinth. And by the way, he addressed every subject that Paul addressed in First Corinthians except for tongues. And he wrote this letter to a church that was hundreds of miles away that he had no biblical authority to dictate to them as to what should happen. Ignatius was here in the Eastern Mediterranean and wrote over into Asia Minor to a church there hundreds of miles away, telling them, starting to act as a higher authority over other churches. This was a position that only the apostles had where they could address other churches. What scripture leaves in place is elders over each individual church and no higher hierarchy and structure. Nonetheless, now here's another one.

Marcion in the mid-second century, this is the century right after the Apostles, he comes in and says, I don't like Jews. So he starts a New Testament where he takes only the Gospel of Luke, trimmed down to have anything Jewish cut out of it. And 11 of Paul's epistles with those, you know, selected in order to avoid Jewish things. So he had a church and his own little kind of mini New Testament that was specifically non-Jewish, because he didn't like Jews. So is this, think about this, is this accepting the Bible as the Word of God? What's wrong with it? What's that? Right. It's the Bible minus. In other words, it's clipping something out because you want it to say what you want it to say.

Okay, so here's Marcion, the anti-Semite. Here is Montanism, which is about that same period of time, is an expression of, they had prophetic and charismatic special revelations. Several of the New Testament, excuse me, several of the post-New Testament Christians wrote saying, this guy is, you know, not correct. Nonetheless, it had various charismatic expressions. He said that Christ was not coming back to Israel, but to Asia Minor. Of course, that's where he was, so that seemed to fit. So this is where Marcion was the Bible minus. This guy is the Bible plus, right? The Bible plus what? Plus our own special revelations. Here's something else.

Infant baptism. How many of you know people who have had their babies baptized. They've been down that path, okay? By 220 AD, infant baptism was being considered as a valid practice in the church. References prior to that time are debatable, so it's one that was the clear point. It was over a century after the New Testament was completed when that began to be an acceptable practice. It was not something that the apostles had written into the New Testament Nor was that accepted in the decades immediately after the New Testament was closed. Now, about 220, also the Lord's Supper was seen increasingly as a re-sacrificing or a continuing sacrifice of Christ, not just a remembrance. Now, one of the things you go through Hebrews, it says, sacrificed once for all.

Yes, Art? The Armenians were actually kind of towards the end of the Reformation period, because there was some life overlap between Arminius and Calvin. I would have to say they're kind of at the tail end of the Reformation. Obviously, a pretty big conflict between the two of them, a conflict that even continues to this day. Oh, they were not reformers in the sense of having a desire to reform the Catholic Church.

You're correct. In other words, if you if you look at it, the Reformation started from an intent to reform the Catholic Church. And by that time, the Armenians had kind of given up on that because the Catholic Church had long since rejected. So, yeah, thank you for bringing that point out.

They were during the Armenians were during the period of the Reformation towards the tail end, but clearly not at that point in time attempting to reform the Catholic Church. Something to notice here, by 250 AD, so here's about roughly 150 years after John went home to be with the Lord, we see that the church has a priest and an altar and a sacrifice, all of which the book of Hebrews says has been set aside. So isn't it amazing how all of a sudden it's starting to slip into this? Did I see a hand go up? Okay. Now, once Christianity was accepted as an allowable, and then shortly thereafter, the official religion of the Roman Empire, here are some of the names of different movements of errant doctrine.

Mani, Manichaeism, was one that was a combination of Christian, Buddhist, and Persian ideas. By the way, Muhammad, who of course wrote the Quran and the Hadith, Muhammad had contact with Jews, because remember there were Jews still in Babylon, and he had contact, and this was the brand of Christians he had contact with, the Manichaeans. Muhammad's concept of what Christianity was, was very distorted because his contact with Christians was a mixture of Christian and Buddhist and Persian ideas, a very strange concoction. So anyway, that's what we're battling today, is Muhammad's impression of what Christianity is.

Yes. Is this monarchy, is that similar to the Renaissance? There are some similarities to it in that Renovare, Nancy's bringing up the question, Renovare, which has like Richard Foster and others of that ilk, basically I would brand it a Christian Buddhism that's being presented among a lot of Christians today. Arius is the idea, God the Father is God, Jesus is a created being, and the Holy Spirit is a force. That's the teaching now of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

So it's a long-standing heresy. It fell out of existence and then brought back up into existence through the Jehovah's Witnesses. Pelagius. Man is not born sinful. A kind of a humanism, if you will. So there are different teachings here that have some sort of a rebirth or existence even today.

The Roman Empire. in 284 AD was administratively divided into two so that you'd have kind of separate administration because one thing is you couldn't get the emperor on the cell phone and just call somebody. And so the difficulty that they had was trying to administer this empire that was spread all over the place. Lots of people, lots of things, and it just took a while to get information back and forth. Well, so what they did is they administratively separated it By 395, what was begun as an administrative division became a complete division, so the empire divided completely.

That also is one of the reasons for why the eastern part became Orthodox, that is, like the Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, the Greek Orthodox, those are all descended from that eastern division. The western division is what became Roman Catholic. So this East-West division explains quite a bit. When some of these doctrinal controversies arose, the Orthodox, the Eastern group, and the Western group started squabbling.

And the initial squabble was over this issue. Was it the Father who sent the Holy Spirit, or was it the Father and the Son? That was the initial squabble. And the Eastern Church got very upset because they weren't asked when the decision was made that it was the father and the son. And so they continue to hold that it's just the father. Then in 1054, it got heated up to the point where the Eastern Bishop and the Bishop of Rome, we call the Pope, each excommunicated each other.

You know, you're kicked out. No, you're kicked out, okay? So, massive excommunication. That's right. Yeah, you're done. Here are some of the causes. You've got this as a special handout in your set there. I'll let you take a look at some of that. It notices some of the differences, and we brought out that when different groups start, they're usually a multitude of reasons. That's the first slide on the first page. Politics can be geography, personalities, all these things can play a part, sometimes several at once. And this is certainly true.

Lots of influences to bring about the division between the Eastern churches and the Western churches. Okay, from 590 there up until 1517, which is the beginning of the Reformation, There were movements within and movements without. Within, there was different kinds of monastic orders. Scholasticism was actually the foundation of our modern universities and seminaries and Bible colleges. Franciscans and other authorized orders. St. Francis of Assisi, which by the way, came up with some really extraordinary declarations. It was St. Francis' order that initially called the Pope the Antichrist. Papal schism. At one point in time there were three popes. So lots of things occurring there.

Calls for reform among different groups, but of course it's roundly repressed. And pressures from Islam and political domains split the Eastern Orthodox Church. That's why we have the Roman Catholic Church, which generally has solidarity, although it has all kinds of splinters. But there are over 20 Orthodox churches. Greek and Serbian and Antiochian and, you know, Coptic and all these different Orthodox churches. There are also movements outside of that, the Bogomils, Politians, Paterines, Albigenses. By the way, at one point in time, there were about 60,000 Albigenses.

The Roman Catholic Church put out, basically they had bounty hunters. They told the bounty hunters, we will pay you good if you wipe these people out. And the only remaining evidence we have of their existence and what they said and taught was what was recorded by the Roman Catholic Church, because the bounty hunters did a very good job. They killed every last one of them and burned every record of them. You can find nothing but ashes. Waldensians was another one. The Lawlords was the ones that came under Wycliffe. They got called the Lollards because they would loll about in the marketplace telling the gospel.

The Hussites, and this is one that actually has follow-on movements in Eastern Europe. And by the way, I was talking, or IMing, emailing, with Elishka Novakova, who was here until just a few months ago. She said a follow-on group from these Hussites are now making a new translation of the Bible into Czech, which is very good, because the old one is antiquated. And the United Brethren. So these were outside movements that began during this time. So there are movements within, movements without. Many of them very repressed. Others of them continuing to this day. Now, 1517 to 1648 was the beginning of the Reformation period. Now here's something interesting.

The Eastern churches never had a Reformation. It was the Western Church that had the Reformation. So that's something interesting. The Eastern Church didn't have this, you know, Protestant movement or anything of that sort. The Protestant movement moved into the areas of the Eastern Churches after they had already begun. The Eastern Churches themselves never had a Reformation like we have seen.

Okay, here's something, and you have this as a large chart. so that you can follow on and realize what's in your handout is really hard to read by itself. So you have this as a large chart right there. And so you can hold that, you know, in front of you if you like. I'm going to track through here, for example, is a Lutheran. Now, what's one of the things you notice? What about the name? One of the things we said frequently, one of the things that will start a group is personalities. What is this? Martin Luther. Okay. So what do you have?

Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, I follow Paul, I follow, you know, Apollos, I follow Peter, right? I follow Martin Luther. So here you have this very instance that Paul cautioned about. The so-called Protestant church actually originated following the same biblically warned against thing, and it's continued to this day, a church named after a man. And so this would be one.

He tied himself to specific noblemen and political entities. Those who wanted to push away from the Pope gravitated towards Luther. Even if they didn't necessarily believe everything that he said, they figured this is a good opportunity for us to bust loose from the control of the Pope. And Nancy and I went and visited one of the castles in Coburg in Germany, where Martin Luther had been given some refuge. It was one of the places where the nobleman had given him a place to be safe from the onslaught of the Catholic Church. Luther did speak out vigorously, not only against Roman Catholicism, but also the Anabaptists and the Jews.

And that's one thing I think is probably, you'd have to say, is a negative thing about some of the things that he said. What we believe, For example, we would say that infant baptism is not truly biblical. What we believe is something that he railed against. He spoke vigorously against.

One of the things going through seminary, they had us read his commentary, Martin Luther's commentary on Galatians. And he would be commenting on Galatians and all of a sudden he'd break off into some rant about the Anabaptists. And that happened repeatedly. He really spoke out against them. He also spoke with rather vicious and violent words against the Jews.

And that was used as a propaganda tool by Hitler's political machine. Another thing to point out, what he didn't reject, he embraced. Because his intent was not to start some new group with everything brand new, the intent was initially Look, you guys just need to reform what you've got. Because that was rejected, what happened is there were aspects of Catholicism that he continued to embrace. What were some of those? What were some things of Catholicism that the Lutheran Church continues even today to embrace?

Yes. Lent. Yes, they continue to embrace Lent. Anything in the Bible about Lent? Yes. Pardon? Yes, infant baptism is another one. It was carried over from the Roman Catholic Church. In 413 AD, the Roman Emperor made it a capital punishment for parents not to have their infants baptized. So the bottom line is, your infant is going to be baptized.

Do you want to be alive with that or not? That was the choice. So it had begun to get very well established. It had gotten very well established as a practice by Luther's day, and he didn't reject it. So he accepted it. Yeah. Anything else? Sure. They still rely on a lot of ritual and the leaders of the churches still do a lot of the garb and that kind of thing. So a lot of the external things are still retained.

They also, by the way, retained the amillennial view or the allegorical interpretation of scripture. So they will look upon, for example, a lot of revelation as simply allegory, rather than a statement of what's actually going to happen in the future. Martin Luther looked upon revelation as just a description of the difficulties that the church will go through, relevant to his own time. By the way, he even established a date for the coming of the Lord. Okay, so that was one of the things. Let's take a look at another one, the Reformed Church.

John Calvin is one who's under the head of this, operating out of Geneva. He was able to go to Geneva in a place that, even to this day, is militarily tough to attack, over in Switzerland. And he actually started a lot more groups than Luther did. Calvin, like Luther, saw Israel as being replaced by the Church, so maintained the continuity of a legal basis for spiritual development. Calvin said, you're going to follow the law and that's how you're going to continue on spiritually. So very much an implementation of law, legalism, was his standard.

How about the Anabaptists? This is actually, although it does not have the organizational continuity, this is actually the group that we would say we broke off from. This is an offshoot of the Reformed Church, not because they somehow broke off peacefully, because actually Calvin tried to get these guys drowned whenever he could. But they refused infant baptism, and those who had been baptized as infants were re-baptized as adults. So that's Anna, re-baptist, okay?

So that's the intent there. Unlike the Lutheran and Reformed churches, they sought no political alliances. Some of them have gone off to be pacifists. This is the Mennonite. They've become pacifists. But the original intent was, we don't see a biblical basis for being aligned with some political and military organization. That was their thought. And so they rejected what Luther and Calvin did, and that is to get a political and military alliance going. So while the Lutherans and the Calvinists got in big military battles with the Roman Catholics, the Anabaptists did not.

They were persecuted severely. Records that we have indicate probably 4,000 to 5,000 of them were killed by Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. It's one reason why I personally tend to shun the title Protestant, because the Protestants would have killed us. So I'm going to say, are you Protestant? Well, not actually. Because those who were Protestant, the Lutherans and the Calvinists, would have us dead. That's what they did by the thousands.

There is, by the way, no direct connection, although the conclusion was the same, between the Anabaptists and what was later the Baptist denomination. What happened is they were separate in terms of their family tree connection, but they reach the same conclusion, Scripture doesn't allow or call for infant baptism. They separately reach the same conclusion and end up with a similar sounding name.

Now, here's Anglican. The Anglican Church, of course, continues. The Episcopal Church is basically an offshoot from that. The Church had been part of the Roman Catholic Church was broken off by Henry VIII. He wanted to carry on an illegal marriage, Mary Ann Boleyn. The Catholic Church would not abide by it, so he basically broke it off and established a separate Anglican Church. He had the luxury to do that because there was this nice body of water separating him from the mainland. It was really tough for anybody to get across there.

Yeah, question. Yeah, here's what's strange is that in the chart, in one sense, you would take it all the way back to the Catholic Church and to the bottom line. In the other sense, though, there were Reformed influences that brought it about. So that's why they've shown the chart here. The truth is you got a combination of things. They broke away directly from the Catholic Church. They had been Catholic. There were reformed influences that came in that added to and contributed to that. Yeah. Yeah.

We understood from teaching of the Episcopal Church, number one, that Henry VIII, it wasn't so much that he got dissatisfied with Anne Boleyn. It was a matter of heirship that none of his wives could have a son, and he was concerned about the sonship. The other thing is that the Episcopal Church or the Church of England had a serious problem with the Roman Catholic Church on issues such as transubstantiation and they believed that the scripture was the sole purpose for salvation and some of these theological or doctrinal questions. Right, so essentially that's what we're pointing out here, that there was a Reformation influence aside from just the direct break off. Yeah, that's correct. Our other point too is well taken, and that's that Henry VIII had more than just a, I want to marry, but it's also a, I need an heir kind of an issue.

Yeah. You had a question? Oh, I love rabbit trails. Yeah. Okay, so she asking the question of the trip about the Church of Christ Right, that's actually later and we will look at that in a bit if that's okay. Yeah. Oh, no, it's fine No, it's a good rabbit trail. We'll touch on that just shortly. Yeah, good good question Let's take a look at the rest of it. Many of the elements of Roman Catholicism were retained whether they have they continued the infant baptism They continued the amillennial allegorical kind of interpretation. So, like the Lutheran Church, what they didn't reject, they retained.

The 1611 King James Bible was basically an Anglican production. Now, the Presbyterians, and that was more directly a break-off of the Reformed Church, John Knox, visited John Calvin, came back and initiated a civil war, basically. Calvin was his tutor. On the tales of the civil war, he cast off control of the Roman Catholic Mary I, and then he vigorously introduced the teachings of John Calvin.

So this was, the Presbyterianism is basically a break off, but very cooperative break off from Calvinism. then you have the Baptist group, which again that's different from the Anabaptists, not so much in belief as it is in origin, and breaking off from the Anglican group, although there were some Baptist groups on the main continent as well. They were seeking freedom of worship and to establish themselves independent of the Church of England, so there was a A definite desire to break off there was not the same cooperation with it. Independent of the Anabaptist, John Smith, Cambridge graduate, discovered that the Greek New Testament made no reference to baptizing infants.

And so this was a discovery that helped launch the early Baptist church. Now we have the Methodists, okay? Founded as a movement intended to inject spiritual vitality into the Anglican church. but it was rejected, so then later on resulted in the Westleys, and we're going to be singing one of Charles Wesley's hymns this morning. The Westleys established this church later in their lives because it grew outside of the bounds of anything the Anglican Church itself would accept.

And it also grew outside of the definition and geography of what the Anglican Church was. Influenced by Arminianism, this is a question that was asked earlier, Jacobus Arminius, one who introduced some ideas that were, I would say, somewhat in opposition to Calvinism. That is, God is sovereign in every absolute detail. Also introduced Pietism, which is a sort of a mysticism and subjectivism.

Now, stepping in from 1648 to the present, let me say 1648 was the piece of Westphalia after the Thirty Years' War in which basically the main continent of Europe, they had slaughtered each other so badly that if this thing continued they would all be dead. They finally said, hey, let's stop fighting, but we'll just kind of freeze whatever religious orientations we've got within our own domain. That's why the 1648 number.

This chart, and this begins to address your question about the Church of Christ. This chart here is a chart actually Noreen Bruns brought to my attention. I'm glad she did. It's a neat little chart. They packed a lot into it. The top part of it includes a lot of non-Christian religions, kind of summarized.

But the bottom part of it has a lot of these groups, and obviously what you see emphasized there, because this was produced by the Nazarene Church, which is a Wesleyan break off. This was produced by the Nazarene Church, so they've got a little yellow line that leads down to them. But the handy thing is they showed all these other groups.

And right in here, one of the things you notice is here are, in this break off, are independent Bible churches. So while some of the summarizations, for example, they'll say Calvinist, well, we wouldn't put ourselves there, but that's That would be where we fall. Notice here's a Plymouth Brethren right next to it. Here is the Churches of Christ, Disciples of Christ and Christian Church right here. So it's another break off from that group. The Churches of Christ that you see around, we've got one down the street right here, broke off in the 1800s.

And it was an attempt to establish things more like the New Testament era. But what's strange is What they didn't reject, they accepted. So they have a lot of things that are an attempt at being more like the New Testament, but at the same time will also have some teachings that carry over from Catholicism.

Yeah. I'm trying to make sure I understand you. Oh, United Church of Christ is different. I'm trying to remember. United Church of Christ over here is actually under the Reformed. So the United Church of Christ, and we have one of those over on Florida, okay, and another one at the corner of Hamden and Colorado. The United Church of Christ is actually out of the Reformed and Presbyterian group. Whereas, the Church of Christ is a group that started in the middle 1800s.

Like I mentioned, that is an attempt to start something that's supposedly New Testament, but they retain things out of the Roman Catholic background. You must believe and be baptized. You must believe and stay a member of their church, things of that sort. Yes, Marilyn? That's the Church of Christ.

What they say is look, the New Testament, you know, doesn't talk about instruments. And so they and they try to pull out various things from church history, saying that instruments should not be allowed, you know, we don't get to use instruments till we go to heaven. That doesn't work.

So quite so well, there'd be Several New Testament references to instruments, and in Colossians 3.16, that passage, you know, Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, the Psalms means to strum. So Paul himself made reference to it. There was no prohibition against using spiritual instruments in worship.

But that is, you wrote right what you're talking about. Other questions? That's right. In other words, what they did is they made everything, you know, we're the right ones, you know, and the other people aren't. Well, yes, that's right. The other thing is that they also carry on a lot of the amillennial and allegorical interpretation, which is not New Testament times. They can't really support that. But what they got that from is more from the Roman Catholic background. Yes. Oh, which one?

Oh, that's United Church of Christ, which is different from the Church of Christ. It is United Church of Christ is Church of Christ is different. No, it's the it's the Church of Christ, this one over here. And by the way, there's also disciples of Christ and Christian church thrown in the same box.

But the truth is, they're different organizations. This is very simplified, and realize that in any simplification, you're going to get some things that you would really need to look at the details to get it understood well. For example, independent Bible churches, we are one of those, but we're not Calvinist. So don't take this chart and try to establish anything too categorically.

Recognize that if you people have looked at this in more detail of late have come to conclusion that they're in excess of 30,000 denominations There was a conference not too long ago of the 99 largest Methodist denominations Okay, so I mean we're talking real confusion here Let's move on and let me show you something.

Here's one about the Presbyterians, and we could do this for a lot of different groups. Here's the Presbyterians since about 1700, right in here. And one of the things to note, this, where you've got circles, is where you've got groups joining. And over here, where you've got the rectangles, is where you've got separations.

So you got joinings and separations, and joinings and separations, and the whole thing becomes one crazy flow chart. And by the way, this is outdated because another one started here in the late 90s. Yes. Oh, yeah, it's just, it's nuts. Yeah, you try to find your way through it. Some of you may have some connection.

This one in here, what happened is that the flagship seminary for the Presbyterian Church was Princeton Theological Seminary. Towards the turn of the 1800s into the 1900s, that turn of the century, there began to be a shift towards liberalism, a loss of the sense of the full inspiration of scripture, a loss of the sense of the truth of scripture as our final authority. And because of that, there are increasingly, and notice, several break-offs from about 20 into the 30s and some of those for example included like Francis Schaeffer that name you might recognize was one of the guys involved in one of those break-offs they established separate churches they established separate seminaries because they saw Princeton Theological Seminary is going off track and and they're right I mean it was really headed off track that Princeton Theological Seminary has a seminary gay group now. So, I mean, they're quite off track.

At any rate, that's the reason for this kind of rapid succession of new churches here. And then, you know, some joinings and then one that's over in here that was about 96 or 98, another one that was established to put more ritual back into things. So, yeah, Art?

Ah, one of the things that happened in the in the US is we had, especially during the 1800s, a unique environment that set up for the establishment of lots of churches and the establishment of a number of cult groups. Some of the major cult groups today began during the 1800s. You look at Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventists, the Christian scientists. And we'll not take a look at that here, but interestingly, a lot of it also in New England, a lot of those cult groups coming out of New England.

One of the things that you have is with freedom, you also have the responsibility to establish and compare things with God's word. If you fail to do that, if you fail to look at God's word, people can be drawn having the freedom to do so into all kinds of directions. Yes. That's that's what we're looking at is what does God's word say not what is this guy want to lead us into. What is that group want to lead us into. And those we mentioned early on personalities end up being a big factor.

Mormonism who started that. Joseph Smith personality issue right. And then following up with that, Brigham Young, they got cities and universities and things named over in Utah based on the guys, the people. You start Christian Science, Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy, to put all the names in there. Again, personality issue. Seventh-day Adventists, Ellen G. White. You got personalities looking at starting this, and that pattern carries on with a lot of them.

You think it's like some of the religious science and pardon all the Scientology yeah more and more invented stuff Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of things where it's it's very much science of mind religious science Christian science a lot of them are essentially a neo Gnosticism where it's, what can the human mind conceive of? What special revelations do we have? Yeah, science is a misnomer.

Here's another one from Methodism to the Third Wave. Methodism is the founding, and I don't have the detail in there, but the Nazarene Church is part of that holiness group that you see there. The first, second, and third waves are these. Just after the 1900s, you have the Pentecostal groups breaking off, who explicitly said, the gift of tongues is a sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Then you have charismatic groups starting about 1960, where it jumped denominational lines. And then you had initially an Episcopal priest was the first one. And then it went over to the Catholic Church, Lutherans, He had baptocostals and all kinds of mixed up things.

And then finally about 1980, the start of the third wave of that. So that's the continuation. You have in parallel with that, here's for example, the revival meetings from the Shakers from the late 1700s. That was the group that basically didn't sanction marriage. Yeah, not very many left, partly because they don't reproduce. They don't have marriage.

Also Mormonism was one out of that same vein. Mormonism has a lot of these kind of expressions. Parallel with that is also the philosophical movement of existentialism. That is, my experience is the validator of what is true. Another impact to look at is the pendulum swing in church history. You see an S there, so a large chart that carries over this idea. And what you have there is a back and forth swing in church history that shows impacts.

For example, monsonism was more of an emphasis on emotions and experiences. Gnosticism tended to shift over towards the intellectual, then monasticism Again, more towards emotional and experiential. And then back and forth scholasticism, which is the founding of our modern university and seminary and Bible college systems, started in the 11th through 14th centuries under Catholicism. Then the swing back into mysticism in the 14th through the 15th centuries. The Reformation orthodoxy was an intellectual movement in general tendency. and then swinging back to pietism and Methodism, then to liberalism, which was more intellectual, and then finally, in her own, in her Pentecostal and Charismatic movement.

So this pendulum swing has continued on over the centuries. And so this is the latest. If this continues, and it's interesting how it has, then what's likely to happen next? A swing back towards intellectualism, if it continues. You know, we don't have a guarantee that it will.

Okay, World Council of Churches would be more oriented towards the liberalism. That would be more their roots, isn't it? They have gotten so general and vague that it is very approximately and foggily Christianity, but it's become very humanistic. There is no sense of scripture as the inspired word of God, per se. It's more, these words are inspiring. And so it doesn't have quite the same sense. But you would put their root in liberalism. They were the ones, for example, 1952, a year Nancy and I were both born, that was when they came out with the RSV.

That was the National Council of Churches, revised standard version. And then here, the last one here is the interpretation of scripture. The literal understanding of scripture, understanding scripture literally, has, we show on the top chart, that sort of genealogy. The authors of the Old Testament wrote, they intended to write literally and where they used, they would use figures of speech. They would tell, you know, things that we would call something in the nature of a parable or something of that sort. But it was intended to be understood, first of all, from a literal standpoint, unless the context indicates otherwise.

That was continued on through Christ and the apostles, and the churches in Syria and Asia Minor and the Jews continued interpreting in a more literal sense. Antioch and Ephesus were the last places to get kind of blown away by the allegorical interpretation. There was Jews and a few in the Roman Catholic and oppressed churches who continued allegorical teaching, excuse me, literal teaching. into the Middle Ages and then starting at the Reformation, some Protestants and Jews continuing on with literal interpretation. Allegorical interpretation has its origin in the Greek philosophers who are skeptical of the truth of their own myths. They interpreted their myths allegorically because they said this can't possibly be meant to be taken literally.

Plato One of the well-known Greek philosophers was one who expressed exactly that view. That view was carried on into the Church Fathers by origin in the middle third century and by Augustine. It was an understanding of allegorical interpretation of scripture. Finally, in the Roman Catholic Church, it was the official approach and the Orthodox churches.

I have a commentary on Revelation written by a Coptic Orthodox clergyman, if you will, and very interesting reading, but it's all very foggy. Very foggy. You know, he'll read about winds and that has to do with, you know, shifting and drifting, you know, populations and just very, very strange. Everything has to be taken, you know, fairly loosely.

That was carried into today by the Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican, and Methodist groups. And to address your question, the Church of Christ. They used the allegorical interpretation to understand predictive prophecy. So very interesting. They look at the prophecy about Christ's first coming literally. They look at prophecy about Christ's second coming allegorically. Yeah?

Basically what's happening is they're carrying on a tradition that was begun by the Greek sceptics. It was begun by people who didn't believe their own religious documents. That's the basis of allegorical interpretation. It was begun by the Greek skeptics who didn't believe the religious documents that they had. The Christians and even some of the Jews picked that up.

Okay, that's the quick coverage. We've covered 2,000 years of church history, all in less than an hour, and squeezed 26 weeks of church history into this short period of time. The main idea is to recognize as we go through these polemic kinds of issues, because we'll be looking, for example, in more detail at things like Scientology and Mormonism and some of the different issues that come up, that you have the same pattern. You have people, you have politics, you have geography, you have, you know, do you like to follow that guy? Those kinds of patterns explain and re-explain the starting of all these different groups, throughout the centuries, even into our own day. One of them was in that box. Let me back up to it. One of them was in this box here. Churches of Christ, Disciples of Christ. Disciples of Christ is the denomination that had Jim Jones. Jim Jones was a guy I remember eating across the table from at PTA meetings. He was a minister of the Disciples of Christ.

So he would be out of that group. But what happened is he really ended up getting people to follow him, a personality. And so hundreds went down to Guyana and took the poison Kool-Aid with them. It was all, again, a matter of personalities. Today you have a group nicknamed the Moonies, right? What is it? It's following a personality. So you see it's the same story over and over again.

And here you look back, you know, here's the church at Corinth in the New Testament. Messed up church. No question about it church with all kinds of immaturity. What's the first issue Paul addresses? I Am of Paul I am of Peter I am of Apollos Following a man. So what is the church done for the last 2,000 years followed a man? Amazing, huh? Nothing new under the sun