The History Preceding the Reformation

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

We only have 1,500 years of history to get through in the next 45 minutes or so. I started off a couple days ago with 135 pages of notes, and I’ve got it trimmed down to 29, 26, which is from 35,000 words down to 9,000 words. Obviously, I’m not going to use all those words because 3,000 of them gets us 45 minutes. So anyway, it’s an interesting subject. And the thing that really got me as I started thinking about it is, what would I be? I tried to transform myself back to 280, 380, 800 AD. You’re the common Joe, and somebody gives you the gospel. And how much of the gospel is needed for you to be a believer? That’s really an important topic, I think, to think about church history, because we’re so blessed with so much information and so much teaching.

And to those of us that much has been given, much is required. So, initial faith comes from the Gospel, and discipleship are the key elements to the Christian’s ultimate survival. So Jesus left the disciples with Matthew 28, 18 through 20. And Jesus said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I’m with you always to the end of the age. That’s it. Told them to go out and teach them everything. And that really, in my experience, as I’ve said many times, that’s what happened with me.

A guy came to me with the gospel and discipled me along, and I’ve tried to follow that in that respect. And I think that that is the way the gospel is passed on. And in Acts 11, 25 through 26, so Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul. And when he had found them, he brought him to Antioch for a whole year. they met with the church and taught a great many people. In Antioch, the disciples were first called Christians. So that’s Acts 11. So what the apostles taught in practice became the basis for all later teachings and practice and the standard that they would be judged by. So the idea is that Christianity was a life-on-life transfer and that that’s the way it happens.

And Christianity has been able to adjust into the changing historical and cultural situations without altering the essentials of its message. And when the essentials get altered, you no longer have Christianity. For the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox comedians, the test of genuine Christianity became the apostolic church, especially the standard of Catholicity, which is the broad church. What are the ingredients of the true priesthood? And what and where is the church? How does the universal church convey salvation to mankind? What is the source and nature of authority of the true, holy Catholic church?

Church history, then, is the interpretation of the record of the origin and progress and impact of Christianity upon human society, based on organized data gathered by scientific method from archaeological documentary or living sources. It is interpreted and organized story of the redemption of man and the earth. And that’s by a guy named E. E. Carnes that wrote one of the books that I really like. It’s a very simple history. It’s got great pictures in it, woodcuts of Luther and cartoons of the guys during the Reformation. So the idea here is I’m trying to convey what is happening between when Christ is crucified around 33 ad and then all the way to 15 17 when the whole thing blows up again, and how Are you a true believer and how do you get that information if you’re born in?

900 in some village in England. How are you going to know what the gospel is? So we need to keep in mind there’s Christendom, there’s Christianity, there’s church. Okay, so Christendom, the part of the world where the fact of Christ predominates, this would be related to culture, especially in the Western world. There is a sense in which everyone in the Western world has been affected by Christianity, but they are far from Christians. Christendom began in the first Advent and will continue until the second Advent of Christ. Christ. And that’s what we like to call, as we’ve studied things, that Christianity is moving from the East to the West, coming up through Europe, and now it’s come to America, and then it goes to the East, that kind of thing through missionaries, that sort of thing. So Christianity, the part of the world in which mass numbers make a profession of belief in Christ and are inside the visible organized church. This began at the first Advent and will continue until the second Advent.

The church, the true invisible church is composed of all God’s redeemed people. Beginning at the Day of Pentecost, not all scholars agree that the church began on the Day of Pentecost, but most see the Day of Pentecost as the beginning of the full development of the church. All biblical Christians distinguish between the true, invisible church as an organism and the professing visible church as an organization. We are part of an organism, not an organization. Just because you’re a member of this church does not make you a Christian, okay? Your Christendom is what you believe, right?

In missions, church history is primarily a record of how Christ’s disciples through the last 2,000 years have taken the gospel to nations and obedience to the Great Commission to make disciples and instruct them in the Lord’s commands. Church history is also a record of how individual groups and movements have failed in their faithfulness to the Great Commission. So a lot of the discussion is a failure of what we’ve done. And I think it’s kind of interesting when I looked over the big history and our short history as a church, how we wanna correct what we see as failures that have happened even in our little small timeframe in this 2000 years.

So we wanna learn from our mistakes. Doctrine. Church history enables Christians to see the development of doctrine throughout the years within Christianity. This would enable the student to determine more accurately those doctrinal systems that are more closely related to the Bible and gain personal convictions on the mainstream of Christian doctrine. Thus a study of church councils theological thinking of various men becomes important. But church history will also give one a tolerance of others who do not agree with him doctrinally. Now this gets tricky. How far outside the loop can you be and still be a Christian?

Okay, and that’s why it’s important to know the fundamentals and what makes you a Christian. That you believe Christ died for your sins and that he rose again and that you can do that when you believe in what he’s done for you, for your sin. That’s the basic gospel. Now the study of heresy. While this is closely related to doctrine, it should be kept distinct, for there has been a development of heresy throughout the history of the church. Many of the heresies that confront the church today are merely repetitions of earlier heresies, met and exposed by the early church. There continues to be a a great need today for men to be able to distinguish truth from error.

It’s interesting that in that verse that Christians were in Antioch, they were looked upon as a heretical sect of Judaism. Heresis, the Greek word for heresy was used of early Christians because they were a sect of Judaism that believed Jesus was the Messiah. So just because you say the word heresis doesn’t mean it’s necessarily is a bad heresy. It’s a sect that believed that he was the true Messiah. The church organization. This shows how the church, which has a few in number, developed into a mighty organization. Church history exposed the Roman Catholic system as a later development in church organization.

This study reveals how the Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Congregation, Presbyterian forms of government developed. No student can become well-grounded in his beliefs without church authority, without a study of church history. It also helps one understand the history of the denominationalism, especially in America where there are great multitudes of different groups of professing Christians. So the conclusion is we need to study history in order to learn from the church’s past successes and failures. Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. We must keep on reforming. I think that’s one of my favorite things about what our church says, we’re reformed and still reforming.

And that goes about all the time when we discuss things and how we should react to different things and as we study how we should relate to our community and everything. We need to not be locked in some denominational structure that forbids us to reach out and do what good Christians should do in their community. Galatians 4, 4 says, but when the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his Son. From this time on, the world would never be the same. For Christ and Christianity were destined to make their mark upon mankind and alter the course of history. And of course, all hear his story history. The Apostolic’s age comes to a close with the death of the Apostle John, which is probably around AD 96. So at that time, after the writing of the book of Revelation, which was written by John during his banishment on Patmos, that was the end of the Apostolic age because he was the last apostle to stay alive. So now we have early church government was very simple but effective. The New Testament is quite clear

on the form of government exercised by the early church. It is essential to know what the Bible teaches about church government in order to adequately refute the Roman Catholic claims to government by the pope and a hierarchy. The Apostles, the original 12 Apostles, are said to be the foundation of the church with Christ as his chief’s cornerstone. Ephesians 2, The apostles were responsible for establishing local churches and appointing elders to rule. All ruling offices in the New Testament were by appointment, not by election. After passing the Apostle John, the Apostolic Office was apparently closed.

There is not one shred of evidence in the Bible for the passing of the authority from the first century apostles apostles to a ruling hierarchy as the Roman Catholicism claims. In other words, Peter’s not the first pope. Elders, presbyters, or bishops. This office was an appointed office, Titus 1 through 5, 1-5, and requires clear-cut qualification of ones who holds it. 1st Timothy 3-1 through 7, Titus 1-6 through 9. There was always a plurality of elders in one local church, Hebrews 13, seven and 17, Titus one, five, Acts 20, 17. The duties of the elders were to rule, oversee and teach the local flock of believers.

The New Testament makes no distinction between elders and bishop. This division came later in church, in the church history. Deacons, the office of Deacon was that of a server, Acts 6, who took up the menial tasks of ministry so the apostles and elders could get on with the work of leadership in the ministry and ministering to those in need, the qualifications for the Deacon are found in 1 Timothy 3. Independent local churches. The churches that were started by the apostles were local, autonomous groups with Christ ruling through the elders and the people. Each church was self-susaining and self-supporting and self-propagating.

They were indigenous churches. There were no hierarchies or denominations as we know them today. The simplicity of government in the early church was soon corrupted by man, and this has led to a great deal of confusion in God’s people. To the Eastern Church, which broke from Rome and the Western Church in 80-10-54, that’s a thousand years after the church started, never really went along with the idea of the papacy or Rome’s claim to be the one only true church. So the conclusion in this kind of thinking, before we get into the history of it, is that the Roman church builds its papal system, not on the New Testament or facts of history, but only on unfounded tradition.

Before AD 313, the Edict of Milan, the seeds of heretic hierarchy were already planted, and this laid the basis for the Roman Catholic Church, which gained complete control around AD 590. Now, the Edict of Milan was when Constantine declared that they could no longer persecute Christians, and then by 590, Popes had taken over and pushed that envelope. But it’s interesting, and we’ll see as we look into this, that Constantine, he just said you couldn’t persecute the church, and it was 395 before it was forbidden, and Christians were actually recognized as part of the Roman Empire. So what kept these people, what made them Christians?

And what seemed to have happened is, as they started these churches, there was no Bibles, remember, there was only apostolic letters and different things that were circulating around and people had copies of this and that, but they developed a creed that if you could sign on to the creed, you would become a Christian and part of that congregation. And the modern day Apostles Creed has a few more sentences than the old one, the old Roman symbol, that was read early in the fourth century. The Apostles Creed says this, we at the school have learned it, and I believe in God the Father Almighty, make him a heaven and earth, And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.

He descended into hell the third day, he rose from the dead, he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. From thence he shall come to judge, the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, Amen. Now, we should be able to agree with that. That’s a pretty short, but covers a lot of stuff, right? The resurrection, all that kind of stuff, believe that he died for our sins.

Now, immediately people started arguing about what’s going on and had different interpretations. So now, whose interpretation do we believe of what is the true gospel. The heretic Marcion’s canon may have impelled the true church to formalize a list of those books that considered be God inspired, books of the New Testament. So as remember, you got other letters floating around and you’ve got the Apostles Creed and other people are starting to add to it or detract from Christ’s godliness and that kind of thing. So all these things are starting to be debated. And it goes on and on. I mean, just talking about the different heretical sex at this time could go on for a couple teaching sessions.

But during this time, it was forcing people to say, no, this belongs in the New Testament. Remember, they had an Old Testament canon, but now the New Testament canon is starting to develop. And so people were saying, no, that’s not good because that contradicts itself and that kind of thing. happening as the church is developing. So they needed to formalize a list of books that were considered to be God-inspired books in the New Testament. Also the apologists of the second century constantly quoted Scripture to prove the heretics wrong, providing additional incentive to codify a list of books belonging to the canon. Now if you study the church fathers writings and We at ECS, we’ve read some of them and that kind of thing, but if you just get a compilation of the books of the church fathers, you get about 96% of the New Testament repeated by the church fathers.

So they keep saying the same things over and over, which then lend credence to the books that they include in the canon. Further and late in the second century, there were terrible persecutions against Christians and the state of Rome said that Christians would die for possessing any of the apostles letters. If Christians were going to die, they wanted to die for the inspired word, not some false letter. I think one of the greatest proofs about what true Christianity is, if you’re willing to die for it. And I think it’s really interesting that today in the Middle East, I just heard a thing It was actually on CNN that one Christian is martyred every six minutes right now in the world today.

Now most of the people being martyred I don’t think have near the theology that we have. They’re simple people that believe that Jesus died for their sins and they’re willing to have their head cut off or be burned in a cage or whatever. However, they’re being martyred today for a very simple but a powerful faith. And they believe it enough to die for it, which is a whole different thing than just sitting up and talking about, well, I think this book should be in the canon or I believe this. A whole other thing to die for your faith. So as heresy threatened the church, there was an ever increasing need to determine who were the true Christians, part of the universal truth.

True Christians identified themselves with a visible outward organization of the church. Many Roman Catholics and some Protestants believe that if a person is within the confines of the organized church, then he is saved. We don’t believe that, okay? Just because you’re a member doesn’t get you in. This leads to a doctrine of salvation by church membership or affiliation. Evangelical Christians also believe that there is no salvation outside of the church, not the local, visible organized church, but the true, universal, invisible church, which is the body of Christ. And that’s why we don’t have a problem praying for churches here in Marysville or in Georgia or wherever we’re praying for them, that those are true believers of Christ, and that’s the universal church.

And we need to remember that, that we’re not the church. You know, we’re trying to be as correct as we can, But we recognize we’re not the only place that’s preaching the gospel and part of God’s kingdom. Early in the second century, the church began to distinguish between elders and bishops. The other elders gradually became subordinate to the presbyter, who was their bishop, and the bishops who came to rule in the church were called monarchical bishops. So they started to segregate into geographic areas, and some dude would be over the other one. This is the point, this is the second century now, so we’re 200 already, church politics is starting to take over.

So I’m running your area of the country, you’ve got to do what I’m telling you. That’s trouble isn’t it? Because if you’re passing the faith on, the one true faith, you’re able to judge what we should be doing. But it starts to go south. Churches in some cities had a bishop before the city of Rome did. Around 8110, Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch. Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna. The bishops were supposed to be the successors, successors of the apostles, and had great authority in the church. Every bishop was equal in authority at first, but the bishops of the bigger and politically more powerful cities became the more prominent bishops.

This is nothing more than church politics. These bishops of big churches in large cities became known as metropolitan bishops. In other words, the city of the…they’re in charge of the city of that church. And that’s a heresy that you have today. You’ve got cults that say, we’re the one-trooped church of Boston, that kind of thing. By the middle of the third century, there were five bishops competing to be the controlling bishop of the metropolitan bishops. The Bishop was Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople in Rome, all claimed primacy among bishops. The bishops of the churches in these large cities became known as patriarchs.

Rome was the only major city in the West. So the Bishop of Rome went unchallenged in the Western section of the church. Now we’re only talking 300 at this point. And so Rome, just because the Roman Empire and that’s the capital city, starts taking over. The bishops of Alexandria and Constantinople and Antioch and their disputings would sometimes appeal to the bishop of Rome, a neutral bishop to help solve their differences. In almost every controversy, theological or practical, the bishop of Rome became the arbitrator. Around AD 185, Irenaeus wrote against heresies in which he stated that every church must agree with the church at Rome on doctrinal and practical matters. Crazy.

Now, they’re desperately trying to get some coordination to what they believe. So that’s to be admired. I mean, you need to have a standard. But when you start barking that you are the source and you don’t have any heresy yourself, look out, right? Because all of us, we don’t know everything. There was a strenuous opposition sometimes to the claims of the Bishop of Rome, especially in the East. But in the end, the churches in the West acknowledged his supremacy. With this acknowledgement, the papacy had come into existence. The Bishop of Rome became to be called Pope, a title derived from the Latin word papa, meaning father, and the church over which the Pope ruled as supreme head came to be known as the Roman Catholic Church.

By 8313, the foundation for the papacy was clearly set, and by 8590, the Roman Catholic hierarchy was fully entrenched. Okay, so During this time how was I supposed to just be a main believer and where did the guy that’s Disciples me get his information even though officially they have these structures you start reading the church fathers and You realize that the church fathers are depending on the scriptures to come up with their stuff So you start thinking or I would be thinking if I was a guy in those times Well, where am I going to get my information? How am I going to know what’s true? So, multiplied, thousands of Christians gave their lives for the Christian faith. During this time, they were being persecuted and killed. When Christian had to choose between Caesar and Christ, he chose Christ. This often meant he would lose his life.

From after 8068, after the death of Nero, to 90, there was a little bit of breathing room. There was a time when no persecution happened from 68 to 90. But after that, after 90, from 90 to 313, there was continual persecution of Christians. So if I’m a believer, I better really know what I’m doing. So I go to my, you know, church father, my leader or whatever, the leaders of these groups, like Irenaeus of Leon, he died in 202. He quoted in a book that he wrote against heresies, We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, and from those whom the gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and in a later period by the will of God handed down to us in the scriptures, to be ground and the pillar of our faith.

Now this is the same guy that said the Catholic Church was the prime thing, but what did he say they went to to get their information, the scriptures? So right away you start seeing these guys are saying the ultimate source is the scripture, and that’s where we get sola scriptura and we talked about that in another talk. Tertullian, he’s difficult to classify as they say. He was both an apologist and a polemicist. He’s regarded as the founder of Latin theology.

He is a real character and a fiery personality, to say the least. He attacked anyone who did not agree with him. Son of called Tertilian the Martin Luther of the early church. He hated philosophy with a passion and often spoke of miserable Aristotle. He had however grave faults that could be unfair and fanatical and vindictive. So his enthusiasm got in his way. But again, he wanted people to get back to the Bible. Origin was another interesting problem. He wanted to get back to the Bible, but he then went down the trail of faulty view of how to interpret the Bible. They believed the Bible to be inspired, but accepted an allegorical method of interpretation which goes behind the literal meaning for a deeper, more spiritual meaning.

And Origin is considered the father of that kind of interpretation. So that gets down to what we talked about in solo scriptura. Not only do you believe that the Bible’s the only thing, but how do you interpret it becomes problematic. If I can tell you, oh no, that word doesn’t really mean that, it means this, and then I take you down some crazy trail. Augustine is another one that constantly taught them to go back to the Scriptures, and sometimes he stays there, other times he goes off the rails with that kind of interpretation. So you got to be careful when you’re reading all these guys. And we’ve read a lot of that and seen where it goes.

It’s interesting. Clearly the doctrine of Sola Scriptura was championed by Christian leaders long before the Reformation. And that gets back to where I made my main point when we talked about Sola Scriptura, is it’s not only do you believe the scriptures, but how do you interpret it? Until 8313, the church as a whole was not really interested in deep doctrine. It was much more interested in practical Christian living in the spreading of the gospel. However, heresies forced the true church to search the scriptures and set forth systematic theologies. We can’t be too hard on these early churchmen, for they were pioneers in theology.

Many of these men were just out of paganism. Only portions of the New Testament were available and very few copies of the Old Testament. Only a handful of people were able interpreters of the Bible. And this is another whole problem. Think about you believe the apostles creed And then some guy says, well, I got this letter over here and you should read it. And so he reads you that and you go, whoa, that’s like crazy. Is that true? You know, what do I do? So it’s difficult. And I just have to look upon it. God is building his church in his own way. And we live in a time where we’ve been blessed with a whole bunch of information.

So I think we’re going to be held more responsible to sift through this than these people. But we do worship a merciful God and that if these people knew they needed a savior from their sins and they believe Christ was it, in my economy, I think that was enough to get them through, regardless of how bad the teacher is that they had, okay? Now that teacher is going to be held responsible in a whole different way than that common parishion, which should bring all of us to, you know, take it seriously. So, an understanding of Christian doctrine in its development is very important. Where little doctrine is taught, there’s great ignorance of the Christian faith.

The theory that doctrine is unimportant is only shallow and foolish. It is also crafty. It’s one of the devil’s best tricks. You don’t need to know about that. Don’t study that. That’s for us pastors, you know. Don’t ask me those questions. Just believe what I’m telling you. telling you. No, you can’t defend it. Don’t teach it. The interesting thing is that like views on the millennium and stuff, the millennium as far as we can tell from history, the early fathers in the first and second centuries were millennialists who believed that Christ would return to establish His kingdom on earth.

Thus they were pre-millennialists believing Christ’s return would precede His millennial reign. It wasn’t until late in the third century that pre-millennialism that was challenge on a large scale because many pre-millennials held such a carnal view of Christ’s literal kingdom that the heretical Montanus were pre-millennial and because of the vivid description given by them of a millennial epic of sensuous enjoyment, the doctrine of Christ’s second coming with which this was identified was de-emphasized by the church as a whole. So the Montanus, and they were tongue talkers, they were an interesting bunch that lived in a bunch of caves in southern Israel. They decided that when Christ would come back it would be pretty much like the Islamic, you know, 70 virgins, one big party. And the church fathers said, whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s not what the millennium’s about, but they didn’t do it so they said, forget it, we’ll just shut that down. So that’s, they moved on that. Modes of baptism started off right away. For at all converts out of

of heathenism, it’s fairly obvious that immersion was the most prominent mode of baptism. For the first three centuries, in order to combat the Aryan heresy, triune immersion became very popular. Tertilian, again we talked about him, when we are going to enter the water, but for a little before, in the presence of the congregation and under the hand of the president, we solemnly profess that we disown the devil and his pomp and his angels. Hereupon we are thriced immersed in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.” That’s a call out to the brethren out there. They still do that. They baptize Dribble. It will be our duty, however, to adduce your proofs out of the Scriptures as plainly as we do when we prove that He made His Word as Son to Himself. All the Scriptures attest to the clear existence of and the distinction in the persons of the Trinity and indeed furnish us with our rule of faith.

And that was against practices that were heretical. That was a book that he wrote. Then we get to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. And that’s in eighty thirteen when Constantine conquered the empire and he saw the cross up in the sun and everything. And he declared that he was a Christian. This edict permitted freedom of religion in the Roman Empire. It did not do away with paganism, but it made Christianity equal with all other religions. It did, however, put a stop to official persecution against Christians from the state, restoring the church all places of worship which had been confiscated and making good all losses.

Now the problem was that after that happened, the conflict between the church and state had granted the church a position and protection and aid. He turned, in turn he demanded the church to allow him to have a good deal to say about its affairs. So now all of a sudden Constantine weds the state and the church together. That’s a problem because the guy that has the gun runs the show, right? So you have to be very clever when the state’s running your church. Then the world invades the church. After 8313 it became acceptable to become a Christian for all persecution of the church had ceased. There were many material advantage to being a Christian.

So the Christian name became a passport to political, military, and social promotion. So all of a sudden, it was invoked to become a Christian. So whoosh, everybody becomes a Christian because of the empire’s Christian. The first major council was in the first century, the Jerusalem Council. There were four major councils in church history, which are of great significance. The Council of Nicaea, the Council of Constantinople, Council of Levisis, and the Council of Chalcedon. All of these were progressions to try to get the church back to its proper teaching. And they all fought over all kinds of different things and brought it back to basic Bible beliefs, those councils.

The school of Antioch during this time, they’re spraying up in Antioch, a most amazing school to train men in the Bible. Now this is the Eastern Church, this school, and it’s called the Anti-Cean School, was in direct opposition to the Alexandrian School. Alegorical interpretation was in the Alexandrian School, and these guys wanted the grammatical, historical study of the Scriptures in order to discover the meaning that they had, that the sacred writer had for those to whom he was writing. The school eventually passed out of existence because the spirit of the age was against literal interpretation. And why was it against that?

The political power was again in the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire got to run things. And so these guys went by the wayside. But they wrote a lot of stuff that corresponds with the way that we in this church like to see the reading of the scriptures. Then Eusebius, he was the first real Christian historian, and his most famous work, Ecclesiastical History, was written around this period, like 330. And we’ve read that in school, and you notice there, it’s kind of like reading Bead. You get all this crazy stuff, you know, somebody has a splinter of the cross and mixes it with mud and people get saved and all of that.

But Eusebius is actually, in his history, is arguing for the Trinity and more important things. So there’s a thread that comes through all these things. The fall of Rome was another big one, 476 AD. Rome, the Goss and the Visigoss and everything, overrun Rome, and now it spreads out. But there are still monasteries and monks and all these people that are still spreading Christianity throughout the empire. And monasticism grew strongly during this period. And these guys kind of, they had the libraries, they had the books and they were passing the information along.

And God still used for his glory all of these things during this time. And during this time, the monasteries were out there and Rome was fighting to get back its glory and everything and Mohammedism starts. In 711, the Islam religion had conquered Persia, penetrated into India, China, overrun Asia miners, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa and had conquered Spain, was threatening to move into all of Europe. Okay? Europe is a shambles, it’s a bunch of thetums there and Islam is moving.

And this meant, if this was to be as successful, this meant the end of Christian culture in the West. The Muslims were never able to take the Byzantine Empire, but they certainly took much of the territory of this and fair. Constantinople, while attacked and under siege a number of times by the Muslims, did not fall until 1453 when it was conquered by the Turks. So Constantinople stood on its own and they owned all the territory around it. The Muslims had to be stopped for the future of Europe and the church where it stakes. The Franks, under the leadership of Charles Martel, came forward to stop the onrushing invaders from Mecca. Charles’s army was called a Christian Army for most of the Franks gave a scent to Christian teaching.

The battle for Europe and the Christian church in the West was to be settled on the planes of Tours in 732. The battle of Tours took place and it was a bloody battle indeed until this time the Muslims had not lost one battle for over 100 years. So when they met Charles the Hammer they had Calvary and Charles had all his men stand very tightly around and the cavalry kept charging and they kept picking them off. And they stood in a bunch and they did it for the whole day and all these bodies piled up and they went out the next day to do it and the Mohammeds had turned and gone back to Spain. So he stopped them at that point.

A lot of people say that was a miraculous thing, got interviewed and just stopped them and had them go back. So Western history from 800 to 1073 now became the Dark Ages. And at that point, pretty much everything shriveled up into monasteries and some books being read like Bede and those kind of things. And the church in state from 800 to 1073 was the Holy Roman Empire, the feudal system, and the church divides in 1054. We don’t hear that talked about a lot, but the division of the church in 1054 is in many ways more serious than the break that came from the Reformation because they really challenged Rome’s authority at that point.

Rome then became the Roman Catholic Church in 1054. The height of the papacy came around from 1073 to 1303. The crusades, the Inquisition. The Inquisition became a necessity because the rapidly increasing groups in Europe that were crying for reform within the Roman Church. So Rome made the Inquisition to try to purify itself. But most of the people that were targets of the Inquisition were people that were going, wait a minute, why are we doing this? We would rather do this, it seems to say, in the Bible. But they went after them to keep them under their thumb with the Inquisition. In the Inquisition, the secular rulers, influenced by church leaders, at this point the church could kind of make the governments do what they wanted.

Remember the Pope had an army and all kinds of things. He actually administered the trials and torture and killing of the unrepentant person. So the Roman church didn’t kill them. government killed them, but they were doing it under the orders of the Roman Church. So the Roman Church therefore has not been willing to take blame for the excesses in which the history records. However, the Roman Catholic Church must take blame for they originated the Inquisition. The Inquisition was a big deterrent to all who had rise up against the papacy. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the Reformation did not come sooner. Well, think about it.

Burn it to steak or you know, what are you gonna do? Monasticism was popular during this time scholasticism. We’re studying that now and in Our reading because the scholastics the Greek manuscripts were coming back up people like Anselm Abilard Peter of Lombard Those people were bringing up these Greek things and writing about it and causing it to think about their theology Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was bad. You got to be very perceptive when you’re reading about these guys. But they started to attack the papacy and the whole Roman system at this point from the inside. The decline of the papacy starts in 1305 to 1517.

Pope Boniface VIII from 1294 to 1303. Boniface insisted that upon ridiculous claims over all temporal rulers and said, and said, we declare state and define and pronounce that for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pope is altogether necessary for salvation. So we now have opposition to the Inquisition, the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, people are going, they got all the money and they keep taking it from us. The immorality of the clergy, everybody in town knew that the clergy was not celibate and just all kinds of incredible stuffs going on during this time. And then the Crusades are going on, so the Church is taking people and trying to go and take back the Holy Land, which ends up to be a big nightmare because lots of people are getting killed.

And as they go across Europe, well, if we can’t kill the Muslims, kill some of the Jews on the way over for the Crusade. The Renaissance happens, which then starts people thinking in a humanistic way, which is not good. But thinking back to original sources and wanting to read the original language is a good part of that. The Babylonian captivity happened during this time, 1305 to 1377. There were 70 years when the pope ruled from Avion in southern France, and they were fighting about who was the real pope. And then the papal schism happened in 1378 through 1417. The death of Pope Gregory in 1379, Urban VI was an Italian was elected, the French Cardinals selected a fellow countryman, Clement VII, who returned to Avian, some nations of Pope of the Avian, some ones in Rome.

They fought over this all over Europe for a couple hundred years. They’re trying to decide who was the real Pope. So the conclusion of that period is that declining years of the hierarchy was time for the religious and political corruption and chaos. There’s a great need to reform within the Roman Catholic Church, But how and where would this be accomplished? God was preparing the world for the Reformation. The Reformation, which began in 1517, did not start like a thunderbolt out of the blue. There are many religious and economic and political factors that have been brewing for centuries. The Roman Church were corrupt and sterile.

And to challenge the authority of the Roman Church in the medieval period was a serious thing. But there were challenging groups. There were the Abaginses, a group that began in Bulgaria. They turned into the Cathari. They ended up with some heretical views, but they knew the church wasn’t true, so they were fighting. But then there were the Waldensons, and they were a group that followed Peter Waldo who believed that the Bible was the ultimate authority for the Christians, and they were very orthodox in doctrine and committed much of the New Testament to memory. They believed in lay preachers and would not take an oath to shed human blood.

They opposed the concepts of purgatory and prayer for the dead. They grew greatly in number in northern Italy in southern France during the 1200 and 1300s. So there were people out there that were preaching the true gospel and fighting this. And then you have the reforming men that some of the biographies have already been given and will be given like John Wycliffe, John Huss, and then Gil Rolomo Savana-Roller, who was a Catholic priest in Florence. And he is the guy that the bonfire of the vanities, He took all these possessions and burned them in the square in Florence. And as he was being burned at the stake by the Roman church, he said, this is 1498. So we’re getting close now. He said, I warn you, Oh, Italy, I warn you, Oh, Rome. The only thing that can save you is Jesus Christ.

So reforming groups within the church, the Roman church, there were councils that tried to turn the church. The great schisms that happened that we talked about the council of constants, accomplished nothing in the way of reform, but it was responsible for having John Hus put to death. This council did declare, however, that the council received its authority from Christ and that the authority of the pope was not their authority, even though they put Hus to death. So all these things are in turmoil during this time. And then a guy named John of Westville taught Justificathem by faith alone. He died in 1489. Erasmus was a great scholar, and his pins smoked against the corruption of the Roman Church.

But that was as far as it went. He never joined Luther in the Great Reformation. It was said that Erasmus laid the egg of the Reformation and Luther hatched him. So in conclusion, the last part of the Middle Ages due to the increased emphasis of the Remesants, men begin to look back at the history of the early Church by stunning the Church Fathers. They notice these fathers knew nothing about many teachings that were taught by the Roman Church. So these people, because the literature started to happen and they discovered these manuscripts, they started reading the Bible and the original Greek, that kind of thing started to happen.

So that’s it, I did pretty darn good considering. The one thing that I have at the end of this is it’s out of a book by Lorraine Betner on the heresies of the Roman Catholic Church and when they began. And it’s fascinating, this list. It goes, it has, on the list there are 45 things.

The last one in this book, there might be more that have been proclaimed. These have all been spoken as cathedra. The 45th is Mary proclaimed the mother of the church by Pope Paul VI in 1965. Then back to 1864, the infallibility of the Pope and faith morals and procain by the Vatican Council. 1864, the infallibility of the pope. 1854, the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary proclaimed by Pius IX, that’s 1854. But before that, you go from 1854 back to 1560, the Council of Trent, which was caused by the Reformation. So those heresies are modern ones, And it took them another 200 years, well, 300 years to get going on some more heresy.

But in the 39th one, as the Creta Popias supposed to the official creed in 1560, and then the apocryphal books added to the Bible by the Council of Trent in 1546 so that they could have biblical proof for the purgatory. And all of these things before that, There’s 37 things that happened during this period from when the church started to the Reformation. And like 8,300 prayers for the dead started to happen. Venerations of angels and dead saints, 375. Priestly began to dress differently from laymen, 500. Extreme Unction, 526.

Doctrine of Purgatory established by Gregory the first 593 so it took him a long time to make these things official prayers dedicated Marian Dean said Saints and angels 600 title of Pope or universal Bishop given the Boniface 607 kissing in the Pope’s foot 709 temporal power of the Pope’s convert by peppin you guys know weapon is king of the Frank’s 750 worship of the cross and images and relics 786 holy water mitts with a pinch of salt blessed by the priest 850 worship of st. Joseph 890 College of Cardinals established 927 So all these things it it starts rolling on itself and then there’s a whole group that just get crazier and crazier transubstantiation proclaimed by the Pope 1215 so as those things started to ramp up The people that are thinking are going wait a minute. How are we getting there?

What are we doing and of course they get burned at the stake for it and all the rest of it, but Then the Reformation comes Luther comes by faith alone, but he wasn’t the original guy remember all kinds of people saw that So that’s a lot of information. I’ll quit. I had a lot more I had 135 pages and 35,000 words when I started but it’s fascinating Fascinating and I would recommend anybody to delve into this stuff because as you read it you you realize all the people that have believed in the Gospel and died for it that have brought it us to where we are today And it’s it’s exciting to be in that line. So and I I again want to, I really think we have it right with reformed and still reforming because none of us are without heresy and we need to constantly keep examining ourselves and being more Christlike.

So with that, let’s pray and we can be gone. Father, thank you for the men that have studied this history and for all the things that have gone on and how complex it is and how hard it is to know from the limited resources we have about a lot of this stuff, but some of it we’ve got, you know, printed out. So we thank you for that, but most of all we thank you for your word, for that’s the basis of all of this, that’s how you’ve communicated to us. And through your son and his spirit allowed us to understand that. So help us never to forget that and to be forever thankful for that. We thank you for all that you do for us and of course we thank you most of all for your son and what he has done for us with his death on the cross. Amen.