Bible Backgrounds/Church History 2012

Okay, you've got this handout that has two parts and sometimes I'll break the handout into two parts because I have copyright permissions that are, you know, this is okay to copy on paper but not post on the internet. So that's why this one is broken up in the way that it is. Three pages that I have authorization to post on the internet and then four pages of things that I don't. Anyway, that's the way it's set up. Welcome. Make sure you get a handout there so you can track with us here. Today we're going to cover something that we're in no wise going to be exhaustive.

It's groups, movements, and organizations. It is, however, a topic that I have been long eager to teach on and share about because it's something that among Christians has been rather puzzling. You have there on the first slide these items here. The new groups, movements, and organizations start because of politics. That's quite unfortunate, frankly, but it's true. Geography. Personalities. How many different groups are named after the person who founded them? You've got Calvinism and Lutheranism and all those kinds of things. The person who founded them is frequently identified. Not always, but frequently.

Social differences. We'll see that. Different bases of authority. We believe in the Bible. We believe in the Bible plus something else. And oftentimes the plus something else is written by a personality, right? And then the personality becomes the basis of the difference. Different methods of interpretation.

And that's a biggie. And that can sometimes get combined with the personalities and the people who have written things. Failed attempts at reforms of organizations. Luther went and nailed 95 feces on the door at Wittenberg, and he was just having the idea, let's talk about this and see if we can reform it. Did they embrace it and say, hey, that's great.

Not so much, right? Methodism was started because the Wesley Brothers wanted to reform the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church just loved the idea, right? Not so much, right? So those are some of the prime reasons for new movements, groups, and organizations getting started. Oh, and by the way, Methodism didn't stay as one solid organization. They had a meeting of Methodist groups not that long ago, and there was 99 represented, and that wasn't all of them.

Okay, the next thing you got here, the Apostles taught that there is positionally only one mediator, one church, and one faith. Again and again that's taught in the New Testament. 1-1-1-1. The faith is referenced from Acts 6 on into the book of Revelation. The faith singular. There is one church. There is one mediator. Those things are taught consistently in the New Testament.

However, people haven't followed through with that. The unity of the body is by the Lord's doing, and so the life of Christ and the believer will not be will not act to live in that, excuse me, the life of Christ and the believer will act to live in that unity, so there is no value in trying to create unity on some other basis. Have you ever heard of, well, we're all different, we won't agree, but let's be unified anyway? You ever heard that? Any biblical basis for that?

No. There is not. Even in the New Testament, did the apostles have no problem at all with different people teaching different things and different leaders? Yeah. But, however, the apostles did have to deal with people coming up with, you know, I'm the head and I'm the leader and, you know, I have a different teaching. There's quite a bit of that. So we give some references there. Now, this is one, I have S1, that's the supplements in the back. These are the ones that are copied separately.

Over the centuries, Christendom has been on a pendulum swing from emotionalism, and along with that mysticism and empiricism, to intellectualism. There has been a tendency to kind of swing back and forth over the centuries between emotion, mysticism, experience, and that sort of thing, and intellectualizing the faith. So we show in a general way the pendulum swing that's taken place over time. This is our church history timeline that we've been using all the way along.

Gnosticism was one of those things that came along. Now, what's Gnosticism? Gnosticism is a couple of things. Gnosticism is one, that I have special knowledge and revelation that other people don't have. So that's part one. Part two of Gnosticism is that My physical life and my spiritual life are separate, so that whatever I do in my physical body doesn't impact or have any connection to my spiritual life. Those are the two teachings of Gnosticism. Today, one of the substantial Gnostic teachings is the Charismatic Movement.

I have a revelation for you. I'm going to come up to you and tell you this truth and that truth, and I subjectively got that, and I'm going to deliver that, and I'm going to do an end run around scripture. That's Gnosticism. And today in the charismatic movement, that's pretty popular. The Gospel of Thomas that we talked about previously is one of those Gnostic documents, one of the documents that is based on this idea of Gnosticism.

In the mid-2nd century there was a fellow by the name of Marcion. He was anti-Semitic and Marcion took the Gospel of Luke, he didn't accept the other ones, and he doctored it up and he picked among Paul's epistles, he was basically anti-semitic and so he doctored up the Gospel of Luke and picked among the epistles to have the ones that were least Jewish. And so that created another group. So this groups and movements issue by the second century, here's the Apostle John who has only been dead for decades.

And so these groups are beginning to start up. Then we have Gnosticism and Marcionism. I tried to make your slide there a little more readable, but I think in the end I probably should have just clipped off the title, because the print is a little fine. But here we can see it. Gnosticism reinterpreted the Old Testament spiritually, and Marcion rejected the Old Testament.

So interesting in terms of their approach and what they considered authoritative. The other movement during that time period was Montanism and he was probably the first dominant and prominent charismatic. He had two women following him and by the way that's a characteristic of the charismatic movement is women in leadership Two women following him, both of them left their husbands to follow Montanus.

Not a good sign, right? Two women following him, and they all came up with special revelations, including that Jesus was coming back. By the way, where is Jesus coming back to? He's going to come to the Mount of Olives in Israel, right? But Montana said, no, Jesus is coming back to what's now western Turkey, right?

Well, that happened to be where they were. So this was revelation outside of scripture, and in fact contradictory to scripture. And the behavior of these women particularly was contradictory to scripture. Leaving their husbands to follow this guy? Uh-uh. That doesn't fly.

So at any rate, Montanus was another leader of a different group. Those who were direct or second-generation disciples of John wrote that Montanus was a heretic. that they didn't accept his teaching. But today you have the Charismatic groups, various ones. What are some Charismatic and Pentecostal denominations?

Can you think of some? Assembly of God. My grandparents were Assembly of God. Vineyard is another one that's developed since about 1980. So most of those have developed in the last century or less. And by the way, one of the original charismatic groups in the United States is the Mormons. Joseph Smith was charismatic and also came up with additional revelations beyond the Bible, right? Pardon? Yes, lots of additional revelations beyond the Bible.

We step into the next time, 312 to 590. 312 is the time when Christianity was declared legal in the Roman Empire. You have some, it's called Imperial Church, that is the church that was under the Roman Empire. imperial church doctrinal controversies, and we have listed there Mani, Arius, Pelagius, Polinarius, Nestorius, and Eutychus. I'll make particular mention of Mani, Christian, Buddhist, and Persian ideas, and one of the reasons why that's important is that that was the group of Christians that Muhammad had contact with. So when Muhammad had an idea of, oh this is what Christians think and teach and believe, that was the group.

So his impression of Christianity was twisted. Oh boy, and we're still dealing with it right now. He called the Christians and the Jews, and the Jews that he had contact with were the ones who didn't move back to Israel from the Babylonian exile. He had contact with the Mani Christians and Jews, and he called those both people of the book. So that impacts us even today. We're fighting wars based on some of those impressions. Okay, there were others.

Denial of official church baptism proved fatal. There were actions before this, but this was an official declaration. Emperor Theodosius in AD 413, so this was late in the Roman Empire, issued an edict against the Anabaptists. Ana means re, so re-baptists. the Anabaptists, those who would baptize without official church authority or denying the validity of infant baptism, commanding that they should be put to death. That order of being put to death by the Catholic Church remained in place for over a thousand years. And in the 1500s, was still continued, and as we'll see shortly, the Lutherans and the Calvinists maintain that.

If you decided as a parent, or as parents, we're not going to have our infant baptized, you are put to death, and then they baptize your infant anyway. If they knew about it at all. This was the movement that had no name because you couldn't form a group very easily and live through it. But if you had concluded, no I don't believe in that, I believe that people ought to be baptized when they actually believe, you were put to death. It was fatal.

The church in the Roman Empire was split up between East and West, and there were several reasons for that, and it actually started before Christianity was legal. The Roman Empire... Do you imagine trying to rule an empire when the best thing you've got is to get messages back and forth by somebody on horseback? and the Roman Empire extended all the way from southern Britain, and it shows here to the eastern part of the Mediterranean, there was a period of time when it extended all the way to the Persian Gulf. Can you imagine trying to manage that? Well, that was tough, right? You couldn't just call somebody up on the cell phone and say, hey, do this and don't do that.

So they split the Roman Empire east and west and in fact over time that split became more and more significant. 284 was when they initially did it, totally split in the Roman Empire at 395. There were other differences as well including language. What was the major language in the eastern part of the Roman Empire? Greek, right? So Greek, like the New Testament is written in, was the major language in the eastern part. What about the western part? I see people saying Latin, right? So you had Latin as a major language in the west, Greek in the east. So you had those, and along with that, other cultural differences. Relations were strained by what's called the Filioque Controversy.

And believe it or not, here was the controversy that ended up splitting the Roman Catholic Church from what are called Orthodox Churches. You've heard like Eastern Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, etc. Russian Orthodox. The question was, was the Holy Spirit sent by the Father or the Father and the Son? Believe it or not, that question started the division between the East and the West. The truth is, if you look at John 15, 26, the answer is the Father and the Son. So in this respect, the Roman Catholic Church, and not the Orthodox Churches, was correct.

But that started the division. Isn't that amazing? That divided up the church in a big way. Relations were cauterized, that is, made total, by the schism of 1054, and each side, Roman Catholic and Orthodox, excommunicated the other. I'm excommunicating you. Actually, the Orthodox Church didn't call it excommunication, they called it anathematizing. They said that they anathematized the Bishop of Rome. Now, you have on the second page of your supplement the primary causes of the East-West schism, and I'll leave it to you to go through that on your own. There are more details to be given to it. We won't go through that ourselves.

But there were a number of differences that began to get fixed in place that made the shift between the Roman Catholic Church and these Orthodox churches. There are today something like two dozen different Orthodox churches. Serbian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Antiochian Orthodox. I talked to a fellow over the phone who had been a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Church and so there are a bunch of others, so about two dozen Orthodox churches.

Okay, now we're going to go in from 590 to 1517. The reason we put the 590 break in there, that was about the time that the first Bishop of Rome began to be called and act as the Pope. Ever hear that Peter was the first Pope? Ever hear that? Bonk. The list of popes for at least the first two centuries is entirely fabricated, Peter included. The evidence was that Peter, if he ever went to Rome, only did so in the last years of his life, maybe.

Now, there are movements within Within the church, monasticism was the idea that you're going to have these various monks, and asceticism, that is denying yourself various physical things, was put on high priority in the church, right? So various monks. Scholasticism, boy, we're just going to study and think and study and think and study and think. the Franciscans and other orders. Francis of Assisi, around the year 1200, went with some of the first Crusades and he was the one that founded the Franciscan organization.

However, they did have all sorts of strange teachings, some of which seem even contrary to the Roman Catholic Church. At one point in time they said that the Pope was the Antichrist. you know, rather phenomenal. They are also the source of the teaching you may have heard of, and that is that the seven churches in Revelation chapters 2 and 3 represent ages of the church age. So that actually originated with them. There were other different orders. Papal Schism, that is at times there were two and even three popes all claiming to be the pope at once.

I don't see anybody that looks very impressed with that. Anyway, calls for reform. You know, we've got to fix this thing. We've got to change this. Martin Luther made remarks about, you know, it's not very good to be a little boy in Rome because of the behavior of the Pope. Yeah, really awful, really awful. Pressures from Islam and the political domain split the Orthodox Church. Here in 1054, the Orthodox Church excommunicated the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. Less than 50 years later, they sent a message to the Pope asking for help. Send us help.

The Muslims are killing us. Literally. And that started the crusades. movements without. There were different groups, most of which you've probably never heard of. The Bogomils, Paulicians, the Paterines, the Albigenses. And by the way, the Albigenses was a group that the Roman Catholic Church said, they actually gave people assignments.

You must demolish any evidence that they ever existed. Kill them, destroy their towns and villages, Let it be such that there is no evidence that they ever existed. Turn their towns and villages to powder. The only reason we know anything about them is because of the writings of the Roman Catholic Church.

Waldensians. The Lollards. Now this is interesting. You ever hear of the Wycliffe Bible? John Wycliffe, by the way, inventor of the bifocals, John Wycliffe translated the Latin version of the Bible into English. And by the way, you probably couldn't read that English. But he translated the Latin version of the Bible into English and his group was called the Lollards. They would hang around like the town square and read the Bible and talk about it. Lolling about. The Hussites, this was Jan Hus in Czechoslovakia, or Czech, and the United Brethren, which is of all these a group that actually still has some names about.

Next group we're going to look at 517 to 1648, next time period. This is in large size on the third page in your supplement and it shows the major divisions from the time of the Reformation starting in 1517 when Luther began the Reformation in that time in Germany. So here's Martin Luther Based on the first man to spark a reformation, Lutheranism originally was very politically tied to specific noblemen and political entities. And that was one thing that during the Reformation period is something that we kind of lose track of, that it was very politically oriented.

Which political and military leaders will align themselves with me? So there were those who were Lutheran, and it wasn't just, you know, what do I believe? But it was a matter of, you know, who will pick up arms and defend what I'm teaching and saying.

Luther not only spoke out against the heirs of Roman Catholicism, he became aware of but railed against the Anabaptists, that is, those who would not baptize their infants, and the Jews. During the time of the Reformation, between four and five thousand Anabaptists, and we would be among them, right? Because we don't baptize infants, were killed, strangled, burned at the stake, drowned, because they didn't believe in that. And the Catholic Church, and the Lutherans, and the Calvinists all did it. It's one of the reasons why I'm reluctant to call myself a Protestant. Because those were the Protestant groups were the ones who killed the Anabaptists.

They participated. Yeah, Marilyn? The Anabaptists, I mean all the rest of the churches that you have gone on to the top, I've never seen an Anabaptist church. And the reason is because the Anabaptists in centuries before never came up with a name and they never formed any Anabaptist church organization. One thing is they got killed, right?

Now there were Anabaptist groups and we'll talk about some of those in a bit. Essentially we would have been among them. But, you know, what do we call ourselves? We're not a denomination. We're Hollyhills Bible Church. Right? Yeah? Okay, let's get there because that's a very good question and we're going to address that.

The last thing is what he didn't reject, he embraced. That is, Luther said, well, we need to change this and this and this. But he still interpreted Revelation allegorically. He still, you know, they have Lutheran nuns. They still had baptizing infants. All those things. So there are a lot of things about Lutheranism that at least originally were very Catholic. Because whatever he didn't reject, he embraced. He continued it.

Here is Coburg Fortress and Castle, which I saw a couple of times, went to a couple of times. back in the 80s on business trips. This is Luther's room in the fortress and I went in that room. Yeah, Tom? Did he have his table talks there? No, no. This was kind of his private, you know, prayer room, etc. Now, then there was the Reform.

John Calvin was the originator of that and Calvinism is one of the names that you'll hear. He operated out of politically supportive Geneva, although he was originally out of Paris. He proved to be the spark for more groups than Luther, and we'll see about that in a minute here. Calvin, like Luther, saw Israel as being replaced by the church, so maintained the continuity of the legalistic basis for spiritual development. There is its law. It's law-based, right? Not grace-based as we teach quite consistently at Holly Hills here. Now, this is going to get to Laura's question and Marilyn's question.

This offshoot of the Reformed Church was named because they re-baptized adult believers. In other words, if you were baptized as an infant, they said that doesn't mean anything, but if you believe now, we're going to baptize you again. They saw the infant baptism as of no effect and of no value. So hence the name Anna, which means Re, they were Rebaptists in that context. Unlike the Lutheran Reformed churches, they sought no political alliance, so they were persecuted.

And that was, I think, a big difference. Here's the Roman Catholic Church, very politically and militarily aligned. Same with the Lutherans. Same with the Calvinists. Very political and military in their standing and position on things. The Anabaptists saw that as a problem. They distanced themselves from it, and so therefore were victims of the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutherans, and the Calvinists.

No direct connection between the Anabaptists and the Baptists. They started as different groups, and the Baptists actually were a break off from the Reformed and Anglican groups. This offshoot of the Reformed Church was named because they re-baptized adult believers. And by the way, the Anabaptists were not just killed, some of them were tortured. One particularly, I recall, by Zwingli, put on the rack for not baptizing infants. Unlike the Lutheran Reformed Churches, they sought no political alliance. They were persecuted by these groups. Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed groups.

Here's an interesting statement by the fellow who led the Council of Trent, which is a kind of a counter-reformation meeting of the Roman Catholic Church, were it not for the Baptists, and they don't mean the Baptists like the Baptists that we think of today, but that's a reference to the Anabaptists, The Baptists have been grievously tormented and cut off with the knife during the past 1,200 years. They would swarm in greater numbers than all the Reformers. Notice there were a great many of them that lost their life and were otherwise driven off, even in greater numbers than the Reformers if they had ever had a chance to survive.

Okay, now we have the Anglican The legal church in England had been Roman Catholic, but with the Protestant influences and the English Channel, that's where we talk about one of the things that causes different groups is geography. The English Channel, as military isolation, Henry VIII broke away to allow an otherwise illegal marriage. He wanted, in the worst way, to get married to Anne Boleyn. The Roman Catholic Church said, no, you're already married and we're not going to annul this and, you know, that's it. He says, okay, we now have a separate church and it's now the Anglican Church and I'm the head of it. And, you know, you're not going to do anything about it because we've got the English Channel in the way and there's no way you're going to come here and militarily take over things. So there's the Anglican Church. Do you ever hear of the Mennonites? Simon Menno was his name.

Many elements of Roman Catholicism were retained because there was no reason to change it. The only reason you're changing it is so Henry VIII can marry Anne Boleyn. He was married to Catherine of Aragon and she was Catholic. Why would I want to see that change if I'm a Catholic? So we've got to break this off. It was his desire and it was also politically and militarily quite feasible and that's what he did.

So there's the origination of another church there. The 1611 King James Bible was Anglican. Basically, it was an Anglican Bible, and that's why it contained all sorts of notes that you and I would be shocked at, including things about unicorns. So yeah, that's lots of fun. Here's what happened. Quick story on the unicorns, okay? They looked at that and they said, what is that?

And it actually was a near-extinct species of wild ox in southern Europe. And within a few decades after it was first translated, that ox would become extinct. That particular species of ox would become extinct. Well, in the Greek Old Testament, they saw mono, which means one, right? Mono keros, one horn. That was how it was translated. And so they just, because they were really not experts in Greek and Hebrew, they were really experts in Latin, they went and took the Latinized form of it, and that's a unicorn, right? So there's the origin of the word unicorn. So anyway, 1611 King James Bible was Anglican. Now we have the Presbyterians.

John Knox was a proponent of military rebellion, if needed, to achieve religious freedom, which was beyond Calvin. Calvin did not teach military rebellion. John Knox, however, went to visit John Calvin and came back and started a revolution in Scotland. On the tales of a civil war to cast off the control of a Roman Catholic, Mary I, bloody Mary, Knox vigorously introduced the teachings of John Calvin in Scotland in 1560, about the same time as the Geneva Bible was developed.

That's the origin of the Presbyterian Church. Oh, by the way, the Presbyterian Church established churches in the United States, right? Guess which churches supported the American Revolution the most. The Presbyterian churches, right? Because that was a church tradition.

Baptist, one of several groups seeking freedom to worship and establish themselves separate from the Church of England, independent of the Anabaptists, John Smith, S-M-Y-T-H, Cambridge graduate discovered that the Greek New Testament made no reference to baptizing infants. So it was an independent conclusion of the same kind that the Bible doesn't talk about baptizing infants. What had happened, let me step back just briefly, in the year 220 the church started developing the teaching that baptism was effective spiritually in accomplishing something. It was about that same time that they also began teaching that taking the Lord's table or communion also did something spiritually.

And so that's how some of these practices got started. Okay, Methodist. Founded as a movement intended to inject spiritual vitality into the Anglican Church. Here's another attempt at reform, right? Does it work? No. Never does, rarely does. John and Charles Wesley, and mostly John was the teacher, Charles was the hymn writer. I think something like 6,000 hymns, something like that, lots of hymns. Established the church later in their lives as the movement grew outside the bounds of the Anglican Church, both in definition and geography, coming not only to Britain, but also the United States.

Methodism was influenced by Arminianism and Pietism. Now, the Arminianism was, you can lose your salvation. and man's will is primary and prominent and ahead of God's will. So that's Arminianism. Pietism was more of a mystical connection to God rather than directly through scripture. So those two influences came upon Methodism.

Now we look to 1648 to the present. 1648 we picked because that was the end of the Thirty Years War. Europe during the first half of the 1600s had 30 years of war and the death rate between the Calvinists and the Lutherans and the Catholics was getting so high they said we're not going to survive this. So they finally at 1648 established a treaty And so that's why we picked that time. Here is, and this is, I think I should put this like S3 or something like that. It is in your supplement.

This is a chart that shows a family tree of religious groups. This was put together by the Nazarenes, which is a break off from the Methodists, by the way. This was put together by the Nazarenes, which is why on this it has this special yellow kind of highlighted line there. Is there something special?

But the reality is some generalizations given don't apply in specific cases. This group here, the Pentecostal and Charismatic group, is a break off from Methodism and they actually should be connected. So the historical origin is not necessarily reflected in this chart. One other point that I would make is here in this part of the chart is where you would have us. Here's Independent Bible Churches and Plymouth Brethren. And that's where we would fall in terms of the doctrinal and historical background. The one difference I would have is they say Calvinist and we're not Calvinist. the generalization doesn't apply. How are we doing so far? Screaming along or just screaming? Okay, now from Methodism to third wave. The Methodists were an attempt to reform the Anglican Church. It didn't work as it usually doesn't, right?

And so they ended up starting some things that turned into what are called the Holiness Churches and several different Methodist groups, you may or may not be aware of it. Salvation Army, Methodist, about 1880. Break off from the Methodist Church. Church of the Nazarene, Methodist Church. Christian and Missionary Alliance. break off from the Methodist Church. So a whole bunch of different groups that don't necessarily have anything in the name that tells you that. Free Methodist, Wesleyan, all those names are Methodist break off groups. Next, the Pentecostal groups are frequently broken off from there.

I mentioned earlier my grandfather and my grandmother. were assembly of God, you know, pastors. My grandmother was a missionary to the cannibals in Fiji. My grandfather, before he got married, was with a traveling evangelistic group, the tent meetings, you know, the sawdust trail. Yeah, so anyway, that Part of my background there, not that I follow that, but then the charismatic movement.

Pentecostalism basically started as denominations in the 1920s. The main ones being the Assembly of God and the Four Square Church. We have one right down the street here. Amy Semple McPherson. My grandmother used to sing for her and Katherine Kuhlman. So you've got that group, and then the Charismatic movement started around 1960.

An Episcopal priest jumped the Pentecostal teaching that speaking in tongues is the evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit by going outside of the Pentecostal denominations and the teaching that Speaking in tongues is the evidence of the baptism.

It's basically any of these sort of, you know, miraculous extra biblical, or not extra biblical, but yeah, manifestations would be acceptable. And so it wasn't just speaking in tongues. You might have prophecies and you might have various kinds of experiences. It jumped into the Roman Catholic Church even. And then you come up with strange names like Baptocostals, right? Yes? I grew up in the Pilgrim Holiness Church, which I was told was a branch of the Nazarene Church.

Yes, which was actually Methodist. And that's one thing where the chart there doesn't show the historical connection. Yeah, and that's important to note. They showed the Pentecostal and Charismatic as a separate line, and in fact, historically, the Pentecostal and Charismatic groups broke off from the Methodists.

Yes, Marilyn? Charismatics come out of the Catholics, too? Yes. As a matter of fact, my dad's sister was Catholic Charismatic. So yeah starting in 1960 where it originally came in an Episcopal Church It jumped denominational lines and just about every denomination had somebody that went charismatic.

Yes Today you can get a list of Doctrine yeah, okay during all of this was there any kind of doctrinal statement for a you know, a New Testament belief or anything that listed all the different doctrines? When did that come about? Statements of doctrines? Yeah, like, you know, you can get a full statement of doctrine today that shows the primary beliefs of each group.

Well, of Scripture. Oh, of Scripture. The Roman Catholic Church, of course, has kind of kept their own statements, but that went, you know, Scripture along with tradition. My copy of the Roman Catholic Catechism is very marked up and whatnot, but they had that sort of thing.

And then when these churches developed, they developed, you know, the Reformation churches, they started developing their own doctrinal statements. Some churches, like the Churches of Christ, the Church of Christ you hear about, very reluctant to issue a doctrinal statement. You can hardly get it out of them. And they have reasons that they give for that.

Other churches, like the Westminster shorter and longer catechism was one of the things that was developed among some groups. Heidelberg catechism out of Germany was another Calvinistic statement of doctrine. So statements of doctrine have been around largely from the Reformation time onward. different between different groups. So were they based on scripture or were they based politically in someone's personal belief?

Yes. In other words, what would happen is the reasons that we gave in the first slide for here's why we have all these different groups. Those reasons were still in place, but for instance, since World War II, it's been increasingly common to deny that believers have a sin nature. But that's been since World War II.

The Heidelberg Catechism, which is a Calvinistic doctrinal statement, says that believers have a sin nature. So real interesting, the distinctions there. Why the difference? Well, it's not based on scripture. For all these other reasons we've listed in the first slide there, people have often developed different doctrines for reasons other than what scripture says.

Then finally, what we call third wave. Third wave began around 1980 with John Wimber and the Vineyard. John Wimber, we call it third wave because it's extra biblical manifestations. That is holy barking, holy barfing, holy mooing, mock birthing, all those different things. Those are third waves. So Pentecostal, the Pentecostal teaching was that speaking in tongues is the evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. That's Pentecostal. Charismatic says any of these kind of apostolic era manifestations are just fine and you don't have to be part of the Pentecostal denominations.

And then the third, that was in 1860, 1980 with John Wimber in the Vineyard was all sorts of manifestations whether they're in the Bible or not. So that's third wave and that's kind of been the latest in terms of the waves that we've seen. We have also revival meetings, shakers, which is a group you hear about mostly because of furniture.

The shakers was actually headed up by a lady And their teaching was very charismatic, but the group died out because they were celibate. But their ultimate test, and you're not going to believe this, their ultimate test of spirituality is that you could speak in tongues while dancing nude with someone of the opposite sex without getting stimulated. Bizarre! Yeah, I know, it's really weird. Mormons were originally very charismatic, a lot of speaking in tongues and obviously the extra revelations.

You had Schleiermacher, who was teaching around the year 1800, taught the idea that religion is basically mostly founded in just emotions. Kierkegaard was the one that developed initially religious existentialism, the idea that experience is the ultimate verification. The leap of faith idea was his.

And existentialism going along with that. Existentialism has been increasingly taught in the United States directly or officially since World War II. To give you an example, around 1970, about 10% of Christians claimed to be charismatic or Pentecostal. By 1995, that number was 60%. And it's not because the Bible teaches it and people were studying the Bible and saying, look at what the Bible says. It's because the culture teaches it. It's because the culture teaches it.

It's worldly, not spiritual. And that's a huge understanding to come to. Ephesians 4, 11-13, He gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and to the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. One of the things that you see in there, till we all attain to the unity of the singular faith, that's hard to reconcile with 30,000 Christian denominations and groups. Questions? Comments? Exasperations? Inspirations? Yes?

With all this information, where did the people that went through and We will cover the Crusades in more detail. It was initiated around the year 1100 by an appeal from the Orthodox churches who were being hit very hard by the Muslims. That's how it originally started. It continued on for a couple centuries approximately. And we'll actually go into that in a fair amount of detail later on. We'll have a whole one-page chart detailing all the different crusade movements. There were all sorts of crazy things that went on with that, although initially it was an attempt to fight back against the Muslims, all sorts of other crazy things went on.

One of the difficulties that European Christians, I put that in quotes, had was that they couldn't tell the difference when they went to the Middle East between a Muslim and a Jew. So they actually had instructions, kill them all. Kill them all. God knows which ones are his, just kill them all. So yeah, Crusades were a horrific time. And while there seemed to be some initial justification for it, a lot of it got lost in the translation, so to speak. Yeah.

Ah, when the Muslims started out, see, Muhammad died in 632, right? And so the Muslims initially had a difference in which family group wanted to head which direction. And that's the, you hear about the Sunnis and the Shiites, there's two different Muslim groups.

Instead of fighting each other, they decided, let's go and fight everybody else. And so they sent troops into Europe, which by 732 had reached just outside of Paris and tours France. They also went east into Asia, and that's why you have Muslim groups all the way to the Philippines. And they also went into North Africa.

Now the Muslim teaching is this. that you just slaughter them if they won't submit to Islam or if they will submit and pay a tax and agree not to proselytize. Don't spread Christianity. Then they'll stop fighting. The Coptics agreed. And so what happens is that's the group in North Africa that agreed to submit and pay the tax and not to proselytize. So they still exist because of family passing it on, but not because of evangelism. And they're one of the many Orthodox churches. The Orthodox Church was split up in part, you know, Coptic Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, because of the Muslims coming in and kind of breaking up the church continuity. Yes?

Isn't it oversimplified in the legalistic denominations to say that I think what it amounts to is all the reasons we gave in the very first slide are reasons why different groups started up. But you can say that most of Christendom does not understand that grace is the reigning principle, that grace doesn't need help from the law. Most of Christendom doesn't understand that. And so with that as a starting point, here's the law of Moses with 613 laws, and so all these different groups, they're not understanding. We're entirely and completely under grace. Grace alone, period. Not understanding that, there's plenty of room to argue over which rules do we follow.

So you'll have the Jehovah's Witnesses, which originally, in their Wake and Watchtower magazines, used to sell Christmas cards to raise money. In the late 20s, however, they said, you know, we don't celebrate Christmas anymore. They used to have a crown on the cross on the front of their magazines. And then they decided, no, Jesus hung on a pole.

So they came up with various rules and regulations, no blood transfusions and things of that sort. And it's just a matter of which group comes up with what rules, because if you're not going to accept grace as total and complete and absolute, or if you're not going to entirely abide by the law of Moses, what else are you going to go with?

You're going to argue over which laws do I have. And so depending on which political group you're with and what's the personalities and all that, you can argue until the very end about which laws do I abide by. And you can come up with new ones. The Jews, the Catholics, the Orthodox, and the Protestants have four different versions of the Ten Commandments. And just fitting with your question there, even the Ten Commandments is broken up differently by those four different groups. I say, who cares? Right? Who cares?

Lord, we thank you that we are entirely under grace and that as we look back on these 2,000 years of church history, your grace is still amazing. We thank you for it and we just thank you for this time looking at what people have done and as we get to share together what you have done. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.