Polemics - Discernment - Polemics: How we get here?
Vern Peterman · Jul 19, 2015
Defense of the Faith, No. 28
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492659472489

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

One of the things we're going to be looking at here is the various movements, organizations, whatnot. There are approximately 30,000 Christian denominations, and that includes groups that are just cult groups, groups that most of us would think are pretty whacked out, but nonetheless that fits into the figure. Some of the major denominations have a fairly large number of offshoots, break-off groups. If we say Methodist or if we say Presbyterian, that doesn't represent one denomination, that represents what you could call a family of denominations, not that those families get along. Some of the groups, movements, and organizations start because of And we have here politics.

Politics on a grand scale, politics sometimes on a more micro scale. Geography can play a part, and I'll give an example here that includes several of these. Personalities, social differences. of varying kinds, including languages, different languages, other cultural backgrounds, different bases of authority. Well, we accept this is our authority, yeah, but we accept this is our authority, right? So, different bases of authority, different methods of interpretation, and failed attempts at reform of organizations. Let me give some examples that might be helpful.

The Catholic Church at one point in time extended its power into Britain, and then King Henry VIII wanted to marry Anne Boleyn. Since the Catholic Church would not allow that, Henry VIII took a measure that changed things, and it included several of these differences. Since he had the English Channel there to provide a nice separation, he said, we're no longer in this country a part of the Catholic Church, we're establishing the Anglican Church, and is now separate from Catholicism, not under the authority, and I'm getting married to Anne Boleyn. And so he could do so, it was politics, geography, personalities, not quite so much social differences, different bases of authority, he established a different basis of authority, separate from the Pope, different methods of interpretation, they shifted more in the reformed direction. rather than purely just Catholic. And then it wasn't a failed attempt at reform, but failed attempts at reform. What instances were attempts at reform that ended up establishing new denominations? Can you think of some of those?

Martin Luther was a key one, right? And so he was actually just wanting to start up a discussion And the Roman Catholic Church said, nothing doing. And Martin Luther then aligned himself with various noblemen, and was kept, for most of the time, safe by these noblemen. And it ended up, years later, after Martin Luther was dead, in the Thirty Years War, in the first half of the 1600s, ending in the Peace of Westphalia.

But that was a failed attempt at reform. Another one was the Methodist Church was established, trying to reform the Angleton Church. I'm not aware of very many attempts at reform that worked. They almost always get rejected and then establish another movement altogether. I can think of maybe just one where it sort of worked. But that seems to be historically unusual.

Now, so you have these various timelines, what we're going to do is take a look at what are some of the things that caused splits and changes in the church. One of the things we see, and this is only a partial list, even in New Testament times there were divisions and divergent teachings.

Here you have the apostles, they're trying to establish the faith, right? And so what do you have? Various people coming in before the New Testament is through being written. Various people coming in with other teachings. And so a lot of the New Testament epistles are in order to try to establish this is apostolic doctrinal teaching, this is the faith, and this other thing is not. Most of the New Testament books have some passage, and we've only just listed a few, some passage that deals with these errant doctrines.

So now, one of them that we come across early in church history is the New Testament teaches elders who are overseers who are shepherds. And what's odd is that the naming of these things as they ended up divergent. What you see there is elders equals overseers equals shepherds. And that can be shown in the New Testament. We have kind of a chart there showing those passages.

But the word for elders, we get our term Presbyterian out of that. And the word for overseers is episkopos. And so you get the Episcopal name after that. But more than that, an Episcopos was taken as a bishop, and contrary to the New Testament, bishops were very soon after the New Testament era seen as over and above elders in multiple churches. What happened about the time that the New Testament was being completed with the Book of Revelation, You had Clement acting as Bishop of Rome.

And he wrote a letter to the Church of Corinth, starting to command them, you do this and you do that. And he covered every topic that Paul covered in 1 Corinthians, except for tongues. Very interestingly. And he is the one who put forth the idea, so far as we have record, that a bishop would be above multiple churches and he acted on that. He in fact should have been reprimanded publicly because of what he did and corrected and instead his teaching became then the teaching that ended up developing all the various churches that have bishops and popes. The Catholic Church, the Orthodox Churches, by that I mean Serbian and Greek Orthodox, and Tychean Orthodox, and all those. And so you have that pattern that goes on with the Methodist Church, goes on with the Anglican Church, and on and on. That pattern is not biblical. And it's often called apostolic succession. Does the Bible teach apostolic succession? The Bible does not teach apostolic succession. The Bible teaches doctrinal succession. Timothy, you, among many witnesses, entrust these truths to faithful men who will in turn teach others also. And then I have an example of Ignatius. He was another one that put forth this idea of bishops.

It's unbiblical, but that's what he did, and they established the pattern. Ignatius wrote and said, it is not permitted to baptize or hold a love feast apart from the bishop. For that he should have been soundly and publicly reprimanded. Instead, Clement and Ignatius established the pattern, which was unbiblical at the outset. And the church, instead of reprimanding these men for this heresy, they instead went and embraced the heresy and then that established the pattern for churches around the world.

You had another heretic who was influencing things, Marcion. Mid-2nd century, Marcion had edited versions of Luke and 10 of Paul's letters. and he was anti-semitic, so he wrote minimally about Israel by his editing and selection. So that was another deviant version of Christianity. Another one was Montanism. Montanism was a Pentecostal charismatic movement, led by Montanus.

His women in assistance, Priscilla and Maximilla, left their husbands in order to join him. So how biblical is that? In order to join him, and it established the pattern in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches where the women are not carrying out their proper role in the church, or in the family. Nancy and I have seen attempted marriage counseling situations where this tradition is carried on and the women are carrying out an improper role in the church and in the family.

There are other issues with it and that's because you have revelation outside the Bible Montanus was teaching that Jesus was going to come back, not to Israel, but to Asia Minor, where he lived. So again, this is additional revelation, contrary to Scripture. In numerous respects, no check back to Scripture, but additional revelation that actually conflicted with Scripture in numerous ways. Now, here's some Imperial Church doctrinal controversies that developed over the early centuries.

One is Mani. It was a Christian, Buddhist, and Persian ideas. There was, in the time of the Roman Empire, the Silk Road. Ever heard of the Silk Road? It is a trade route coming over from China and India and bringing not just goods but also ideas from the East. That influenced Mani and his followers. And by the way, Muhammad wrote about Christians that he encountered as well as Jews. The Christians that he encountered were followers of Mani. So he actually had a deviant form of Christianity that he was exposed to. It wasn't biblical Christianity, it was moneyism. And the next we have Arius, Christ is not deity.

Interestingly, Arius went, after he was reprimanded by the other bishops, he went around spreading his false doctrine with catchy tunes and getting groups together and having choirs singing the false doctrine. So, catchy tunes. Interesting marketing approach. Pelagius was also reprimanded.

He said, man is not born sinful, but becomes so. Apollinarius, Christ was not fully human. Leaning more towards divine. With a human appearance, but not fully human. Nestorius. Christ is not unified human and deity. They remain as separated rather than unified. So it's like these two people. And then the last one we have listed is Eutychus. Christ is neither human nor divine, but instead of a third kind.

So you have various heresies coming about. Before we move on, let's look at another set of heresies that developed. Because of the changes that were made by Clement and Ignatius, where they established bishops, which was a distortion, and then you lost the biblical teaching on what is an elder, overseer, and shepherd.

They began to use the Latin term, which we have tended to adopt in English, and the Latin term comes into English as pastor. We use the term pastoral as an idea, but ultimately it's shepherd. Shepherds, pastors, began by about the year 170 to be called priests. Now we're back into the Jewish system, right? And then that's the basis for the use of the term priests and Catholic and other similar traditional organized churches.

And then by 220 AD, the Lord's Table and baptism both began to be seen as not symbolic of spiritual reality, but as spiritually effective. In other words, I get baptized not because I am saved, but now I get baptized under that teaching in order to be saved.

And instead of God doing the saving, the church then is seen as doing the saving. We baptize you. So the church, instead of being a body brought together by God's action. This is 1 Corinthians 12, 13, the Holy Spirit places us into the body of Christ. Instead of one being saved and being placed into the body of Christ, that way, as a work of God entirely, the Church is then seen as the agent of salvation. And you cannot be saved apart from the Church. And so it then sees the church as the one doing the saving instead of God doing the saving.

It sees the church as the organization through whom salvation comes, not the body of people who have been saved by God and therefore placed by the Holy Spirit into the body of Christ. So, then we have, let's look at the slide that says, East-West Church Division.

What happened is, think about it, if you didn't have some kind of a cell phone or something, even a telegraph would have helped. It is cumbersome to deal with the extent of the Roman Empire. At one point in time, the Roman Empire went all the way down, here it just shows the Red Sea, but at one point in time it went all the way down to what is now Kuwait. on the eastern side, and then all the way up to southern Britain. So that whole entire stretch of land, imagine trying without today's technology to coordinate things between those, to get things communicated from one extent to the other. Whoa, quite a task.

And so, administratively, the Roman Empire, before there was the influence of Christianity or Constantine, it was divided up in 284 AD into two separate administrative districts. Two separate administrative districts. And then, by 395, they were completely, Rome was completely divided into those two separate districts, with no attempt to coordinate between them. So this was part of the breakup of the Roman Empire.

It became so cumbersome to try to manage things. Relations were strained by the filio controversy. Was the Holy Spirit sent by the Father or the Father and the Son? One of the things that you see, there's a line there where they had East and West. What What were some of the things that influenced the separation?

In the East, the prominent language was what? Greek. Greek generally as was spoken and written during New Testament times. So in the eastern part of the Empire, Greek was the dominant language. In the western part, what was the dominant language? It's Latin. So you have just the language differences themselves would make for issues. So you have Latin in the West, Greek in the East as a part of the differences.

So what you had here, the filial controversy, which was in fact unnecessary, relations were strained in this filial controversy, and the question was, was the Holy Spirit sent by the Father or the Father and the Son? Now, first of all, what's the correct answer? Huh? The Father and the Son is the correct answer, right? Because you have Jesus explaining in John, 14, 15, and 16 about the Holy Spirit, and Jesus says in that set of passages that He is sending and the Father is sending.

So biblically, that was the correct answer. Father and the Son, and that's the position that the Catholic Church took, what ended up becoming the Catholic Church took. The Orthodox churches took the other position, and so that began the split. The Catholic Church from the Orthodox Churches. By Orthodox, I mean Serbian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Antiochian Orthodox, etc. Is there a specific verse that specifically states that? Yes, and I would have to look that up. I'll look it up later. John 14, 15, and 16 is where Jesus tells about the coming Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit will be sent.

And that began, believe it or not, to split between the churches, and it was actually one that should have been easily resolvable. Relations were cauterized by the schism of 1054 when each side excommunicated the other. Boom, you're excommunicated, you're excommunicated. So at any rate, they were cauterized and then reversed. because it was only shortly after this that the Muslims began attacking in the east with another wave. This was another wave in the east of the Muslim attack and so the church in the east said help and so the Catholic Church came in with the Crusades. So this was the East-West division. The various Orthodox churches will sometimes use the term Pope for their leader. And so you have various Popes. There have been, even in the Catholic Church, as many as three Popes at once.

Yes? Just a quick side note. John 14-16 is where Christ... 14-16? Okay, thank you. Alright, so let's take a look at The second part there, movements within and without. You have movements within these established churches, particularly the Catholic Church is what we've got listed here.

You have monasticism. In monasticism, the general idea is if you deny yourself various luxuries and possessions and things of that sort, that that's somehow more spiritual. And so you have different monastic groups who will vow, you know, silence, vow poverty, you know, things of that sort.

The idea of being deliberately denying yourself is somehow more spiritual. Is it? Is denying yourself automatically more spiritual? No. What did Paul say? I have at times been in want and at times been in plenty. He didn't see the plenty as somehow, you know, that's bad and being poor is good. He didn't make a spiritual equivalence there. Scholasticism, so the idea is you get real heady.

One of the major issues that kept the Catholic Church stuck and also inhibited the development of science on the basis of Christian worldview, was that the Catholic Church was embracing the teachings of Aristotle. And the teachings of Aristotle, of course, were just stuck, and where those were wrong, it pushed out Christian assumptions. It is only in the period of time when you had guys like Galileo and Kepler and those early scientists who were Christians. I won't call them Christian scientists because that's confusing. Those early scientists that were Christians then looked at things from a Christian worldview and not Aristotle's worldview. And then science could develop on the basis of Christian assumptions. But scholasticism, the idea of I'm going to go and do a lot of thinking and reading of scholars and that sort of thing was another movement.

The Franciscans and other authorized orders. That's an order under Francis of Assisi, started roughly the year 1200. The Franciscans, a very interesting group, at one point in time said that the Pope was the Antichrist. It's just kind of amazing that they got away with that. That is where the teaching came that the seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 are different periods of time. And it's funny, whoever carries on that teaching always thinks that now is allowed to see him. As long as that's been taught, and the Franciscans were the ones that originated it, The time that we're living in now, whenever that was, is the Laodicean era, within the church age.

So then you had papal schism, you had again sometimes two and as many as three popes at once, so you had a very confusing situation with that. So that's been a problem. Calls for reform at various times, although those were often met with violence. Calls for reform, you're probably going to either have a war or somebody is going to die and that will be the end of it.

Pressures from Islam and political domains split the Eastern Orthodox Church. Pressures from Islam, Muhammad died in 632. Islam went in three directions. They went into Asia, and that's why you'll find pockets of Islamic groups all the way to the Philippines.

All the way into Indonesia, into India. So they went there. They went into North Africa. And in North Africa, you ever see these, like, shriners, and they've got these red fezes? That's Christian blood. that those fezzes have on them. That's why they're red. That's from North Africa attack.

The Muslims then went into Europe. They got finally turned around just outside of Paris in Tours, France by Charles Martel, Charles the Hammer. He said, Christian Europe good, Muslim Europe bad. And they pushed them out, in great part, except in certain pockets. And Spain was the place where they really held on. The Moors was the Muslim group there. And also in parts of southern Europe, we've got areas like Bosnia and that. Pockets of Islamic influence still in Europe.

Then you also had movements that didn't claim to be a part of the church. You had the Bogomils, the Paulicians, the Paterines, the Albigensians, Waldensians, Lollards, the Hussites, and the United Brethren. Most of these groups do not exist anymore. Exceptions to that are the Hussites and the United Brethren are still some of those. Possibly in October I might be teaching at a couple of those over in Poland. But we'll see here. So most of these groups are gone. Why are most of these groups gone? Can you think of a reason why most of those groups would be not in existence today?

The Spirit wasn't behind it. What's interesting is that the Roman Catholic Church would say, this is a heretical group. They would go in and wipe out any evidence of their existence. In some cases, the only things that we know about some of these groups is what was written against them by Catholic officials. because the Catholics would go in and they'd send in people to kill everyone of them, burn their villages, burn anything that they had, make sure every evidence of them was turned to powder. So that was it. That's how you deal with heresy. So now we have a breakdown between some of these main denominations. First one we have noted there in the chart is Lutheran. Martin Luther gave his 95 theses, he nailed on the door of the church at Wittenberg. And that by the way was ordinarily, this is how you start a conversation. So, by nailing him up, he wasn't declaring war. This is how you start a conversation. And so, that was his intent. But the reaction was BAAAAA!

And of course, initially he had some difficult time dealing with them. He ultimately ended up being protected by some noblemen throughout Europe who wanted to separate from the Catholic Church, and they thought this was a great opportunity to not be under their thumb. One of those I visited at Coburg in Germany. I went to Martin Luther's room right there. So this was the first man to spark what became known as the Reformation. Obviously not the only one, but the first one, and that was in 512.

Luther not only spoke out against the errors of Roman Catholicism, he became aware of and railed against the Anabaptists and the Jews. I have this commentary on Galatians and he'll be writing about Galatians and all of a sudden just spin off on this tirade against the Anabaptists. And the Anabaptists, basically we would fall under that category because it means only adult baptism. Luther wrote two books against the Jews in which he spoke with great violence.

Yes? What's interesting in that period of time when publishing hit is this commentary like that started getting put into the Bibles as notes running along. My former boss Orville had a Bible from... I don't know. It's from about that era. I can't remember what he used to name for it. You're talking about the Geneva Bible? The Geneva Bible, yeah. And all over it is these diatribes against the Papists and how heretical and terrible they are. But because it was right next to the text of Scripture, it had a massive influence on thinking outside of what a discerning mind would want.

Yeah, and I think you bring up a good point, and that is we need to be careful about our study Bibles because the Bible is inspired. The study Bible notes are not. And so if there is something that is off track, either factually or because it's not biblical or whatever, in the study Bible, we need to be able to say, this is not correct. People will often ask, what study Bible do you recommend? And I'll say, well, I think the Ryrie Study Bible is good, but be careful about a few of the notes. And it's because these notes, same with the Geneva Bible, these notes oftentimes contain statements that are not necessarily well founded and well thought out.

Why do we have the King James Bible, by the way? 1611, this is politics. King James got a hold of the Geneva Study Bible, that's the one Randy's talking about, and he saw some notes in there that sounded like it undermined his authority. And he was livid. So he authorized this 1611 King James, basically out of an emotional reaction against the Geneva Bible. And that's how the King James Bible got started.

It wasn't because the translation was all that great. There are places where it's good, there are places where it's terrible. But, and it's again, we need to look at what does the Bible say and be careful about things that come from human beings and out of political, emotional, geographical issues. Okay, so the next one here is the Reformed.

So with the reform, John Calvin operating out of politically supportive Geneva, the Swiss have been able to stay out of wars because of their geography and topography and their neutral stance and even Hitler didn't take them on. I'll go into Russia and I'll go into all kinds of places but he wasn't foolish enough to take on the Swiss. And so it was a protected place militarily, geographically, where John Calvin could make whatever pronouncements he wished and not have anybody come back at him. He actually proved to spark many more groups than Luther. Calvin, like Luther, saw Israel as being replaced by the Church.

And so there's a replacement theology, it's sometimes called. So maintain the continuity of a legalistic basis for spiritual development. So the Reformed Church, even, you ever hear of the Westminster Catechism? They will have built within it legalism. everything's based on law, so not grace-based.

Both Luther and Calvin held to infant baptism and so therefore those who did not observe or regard infant baptism as effective, again this got started back in 220, those who did not regard infant baptism as effective were then persecuted so that during the time of this Reformation some people will call themselves Protestants who don't agree with the Catholic. I don't like that title and the reason is because the Lutherans and the followers of John Calvin persecuted folks like us who don't practice infant baptism to the point that between four and five thousand Anabaptists died were either drowned or burned to death because they didn't regard and practice infant baptism. And many of those burnings and drownings were carried out by Lutherans and Calvinists and followers of those guys. I think the other thing is, whatever of the Roman Catholic Church they didn't agree with, they continued to embrace. So they said, well, we don't like the Pope, and we don't like this and that, but we'll still do the infant baptism thing.

And they also interpreted revelation allegorically. Can you say that again? Because I think you didn't say that. OK. Whatever they didn't disagree with? They continued to embrace. Yeah. They continued to embrace. And one of those is allegorical interpretation and also along with that the idea that there is not going to be a rapture, there's not going to be a tribulation, there's not going to be a millennial kingdom. Christ is just coming back at some end point in time and everything gets all resolved and the church and Israel get kind of mixed up. One replaces the other instead of seeing them as eternally separate. So the interpretive approach of the Reformed and the Lutheran folks tends to remain in agreement with the Catholics.

So as far as a name goes, fundamental beliefs like this church, typical beliefs, what name would be applied there? Evangelical Christian? I think we would say it's Biblical Christianity. Because all of these, what you see is the Roman Catholic Church had Scripture plus Tradition. And where there's a conflict, the Roman Catholic Church goes for the Tradition over Scripture.

Unfortunately, what happens is wherever the Lutherans and the Reformed groups following John Calvin, wherever they didn't reject something, they continued to embrace the Tradition. So they essentially agreed with the Roman Catholic Church. One of the things that both of them did was make themselves with political alignments. So the Catholics had their political alignments, the followers of Luther had their political alignments, and the followers of John Calvin had their political alignments.

John Knox, who founded the Presbyterian Church, visited with John Calvin, and then went back home to Scotland and started a revolt to throw out the Catholic rule. And then to start the Presbyterian Church, so that's the roots of the Presbyterian Church, is a revolt that started with a visit to John Calvin.

Anabaptist simply refers to Those who do not practice infant baptism, so adult baptism, we would fall under this group. Although we wouldn't necessarily agree with all those who, in every doctrinal point, we would say baptism is something that someone who has made a decision to put their trust in Christ for salvation expresses symbolically and externally. by being baptized.

And so the truth is, in the 5th century, the Roman Empire made it capital punishment if you didn't baptize your infant. You're going to baptize your infant, or if you don't, we'll kill you and then baptize your infant and give your infant to somebody else. So this actually went on for centuries. on into the Reformation period, only it's now the Lutherans and the followers of John Calvin who are carrying out the persecution in addition to the Catholic Church. Yes?

Okay, so infant baptism, that means that The parents decide their salvation issue, right? You're baptized as infants and that means that they're saved always? In the Roman Catholic system, you baptize as an infant in order for them to be saved, right? And of course it's considered a great tragedy if the child dies before you're getting baptized. So this is the Roman Catholic system. Again, it's the means of entering salvation. But what happens after that in the Roman Catholic system depends on things ultimately that that person who is being baptized as an infant will decide.

You have to avoid venial sins, which will decrease your merit. You have to avoid mortal sins, which will cause loss of salvation. And then you have to do all the right things to accumulate merit in the Catholic system. Insufficient merit means you're going to spend time in purgatory.

But you may, like Sister Teresa, have an excess of merit, which can be transferred to someone else. And then you have indulgences, right? You pay money to the church and that will decrease your time in purgatory. And some even had special indulgences by giving to the building of St. Peter's, in which if you gave the right amount, you had no chance of going to purgatory.

So anyway, it's a very complicated system, but it depends on things that you do and don't do, and you might commit a mortal sin and lose everything. Let's take it for instance. It is at least hypothetically possible that the Pope who's making these ex-cathedra statements and establishing doctrine and teaching and tradition, it is possible that the Pope could commit a mortal sin in the last five minutes of his life and go to hell. So it becomes very complicated, but it's very works-oriented. Yes? I don't know. I would have to check on that one.

And there are, when we say Lutheran, because what you have is, if I have this term Lutheran, there are all kinds of different subdivisions of the Lutheran church. And you've got some that are very liberal and some that are very conservative. The Missouri Synod is the most conservative one that I'm aware of. But I'm not clear on which group teaches what.

OK, another one we talked about previously. Oh, point to make. Anabaptists and Baptists, though it sounds similar, are actually very separate derivations. There's no real connection between them. Now, next, Anglican. We talked previously about Henry VIII broke away in order to carry out what would have been an illegal marriage under the Catholic Church with Mary Ann Boleyn. And so there you had a break off. That's ultimately where we get the Anglican Church and related to that is the Episcopal Church. Anybody been to an Anglican church service? Okay, Nancy and I have been to a few of them just to kind of see what they're about. It's essentially taking the Catholic Church, flopping it off at the head, and there's no connection to the Pope and that hierarchy.

It's also then some influence from the Reformed, because that was one way that Henry VIII could establish a different basis. He'd go to the Reformed guys and get some influence there. So it's a combination. Basically, the Catholic system was influenced from the Reformed folks.

And again, whatever is not rejected continues to be embraced, including having bishops and all that sort of thing. So many elements of Roman Catholicism were retained. And by the way, this is C.S. Lewis, his background is Anglican. So very interesting as you go through his books and what not, you see that influence there.

So the 1611 King James Bible was Anglican. Basically an Anglican Bible. And again, I gave the background, it was King James just livid with some of the notes in the Geneva Bible which appeared to undermine his authority and so that's how it got authorized and it got authorized with the apocryphal books in there it got authorized with everywhere that it said Israel in the Bible text You'd see the notes up at the top and it would be translated the church. So the original 1611 has the church is Israel. Everything about Israel is actually about the church. Forty years ago when I was in the service and we used to go to the Anglican churches to do brass rubbing and stuff.

We never saw anybody there. All these churches that are set up and you got the cemeteries next to the church and the door would open and all that stuff. You can go in those churches and there's never anybody there? And this was where? In England? Yeah.

And this is something throughout Europe, a lot of these old church structures have basically emptied out of people. You have the church there as a historical item, and they actually have government money going into them to keep up the physical facade. But in many cases, yeah, there's nothing going on.

I was in what was then West Germany some 30 years ago and I actually went to a Lutheran church that was alive. And it was really astounding. These people were actually genuine. But a great many of the Lutheran Catholic Churches, Reformed Churches, Anglican Churches, emptied out. You might have some old folks that are still there, but pretty much gone. They can serve sometimes as a sort of a county clerk. serve that function, you know, and you can elect to go through that system or just a secular system. But it really makes no spiritual difference.

Yes. Which shows to me Satan's purpose in all this stuff. Yeah. I mean, that's the goal. Yeah, the more divisions, the better. And you end up having, you know, because of all these different divisions and subdivisions and other things than scripture, making the decision, you end up having systems that ultimately are falling apart, not successful, don't sustain themselves, and the gospel is lost and biblical teaching is lost. All we've got is a bunch of traditions and buildings and graveyards. Then you have the Presbyterian.

John Knox was a proponent of military rebellion if needed to achieve religious freedom, which went beyond Calvin, his tutor. So guess which denomination of churches was most influential in encouraging the 13 colonies to rebel against Britain? Presbyterian.

It wasn't the only, but it was one of those that, because of its background and how it got started, was most encouraging to the original 13 colonies to start rebelling against Britain. Is Fort Knox named after him? I don't think so. But anyway, that's John Knox.

He spent some time at John Calvin, went back to Scotland, started a rebellion against Mary, Queen of Scots, and that's the origin of the Presbyterian Church. On the tails of a civil war to cast off the control of Roman Catholic Mary I, Knox vigorously introduced the teaching of John Calvin in Scotland beginning about 1560. So then we have the Baptists, one of several groups seeking freedom to worship and establish themselves independent of the Church of England.

About two or three ships after the Mayflower, one of my ancestors, Robert Jennison, had been a vicar at Colchester in England. And he started looking at these, you know, and decided, I'm not going to be a vicar anymore. And so he moved to Holland for a little bit and then to Massachusetts. That was the early 1600s. So there's a part of that move there, rebelling against the Anglican Church.

So the Baptists, independent of the Anabaptists, John Smith, Cambridge graduate, discovered that the Greek New Testament made no reference to baptizing infants. Which it doesn't. Not once. Not ever. So this conclusion was arrived at independently, not by influence from the Anabaptists.

So now we have different kinds of Baptists. We've got single A, double A, and triple A Baptists. So you've got your Baptists, and then your Baptists, and then your Baptists. Right? Okay. Morgan? So, do Baptists believe in infant Baptism? No, they do not. In other words, they were one of those groups breaking off from the Anglican Church, saying that there is no validity to infant baptism. The New Testament makes no reference to it. But the Anabaptists do? The Anabaptists do not practice infant baptism. The Baptists do not practice infant baptism.

My point being that they arrive at that conclusion separately. Yes. But they do bring kids forward and they call that what? Dedication? Yes. They'll have a baby dedication, right? So that's some way of kind of continuing covertly the practice. So here's our second bell.

Here we have the Methodists, founded as a movement intended to inject spiritual vitality into the Anglican Church. As we mentioned earlier, it was an attempt to reform the Anglican Church. Most attempts at reform don't work and end up establishing, at least at the time, one denomination. So here we have the Wesley Brothers.

And what you will see, and we won't have time to look at in any detail, is a family tree of religious groups, as should be attached to your handout there. And at the lower left there, we have various Wesleyan churches that include the Wesleyan Church, a free Methodist church. The Salvation Army is a Methodist group, a Methodist break-off. And the Church of the Nazarene is a Methodist break-off group.

So you have all those and that is not all. This is a quick summary. I mentioned 30,000 denominations and there's no 30,000 denominations on this chart. So we won't have time to take a look at this. One of the things I will say is sometimes a summary chart like this ends up stating things simplistically or stating things that wouldn't be true of individual churches. For example, independent Bible churches are part of the Anabaptist group that's right above Plymouth Brethren. And in our cases, we're not Calvinistic. and a lot of our teachings are closer to the original Plymouth Brethren churches. So even though we're an independent Bible church, there's some things there that are a little different from what you'd see in the chart. Other thoughts, questions?

Alright, let's pray. Lord, we thank you that with all this confusion you have, in fact, made clear what is the gospel to be believed so as to be saved. And you have, in fact, made clear here is what your word says. And we thank you for that. We thank you that the Holy Spirit sent by the Father and the Son does indeed work in our hearts and work through his word that we might know the truth. And we thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.