Augustine's Influence and Contemporaries

Church History — Steve Gregg

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Augustine's Influence and Contemporaries

Church HistorySteve Gregg

Steve Gregg discusses the influence of Augustine and his contemporaries in this lecture. He touches on the debate between Pelagians and Augustinians regarding infant innocence and the impact of sin. He also discusses the development of the institutional church and the influence of Apostle Paul on Augustine's philosophy. Finally, he talks about significant figures such as Patrick of Ireland and their role in spreading Christianity. Overall, the lecture highlights the complex history of Christianity and the important figures who shaped its theology and spread it across the world.

Transcript

In our previous lecture on Church History, I had a different handout and I wanted to... What happened is we were talking in our last one about defining orthodoxy and how the church had a series of six ecumenical councils from 325 A.D. up into the 600s, actually. There were six ecumenical councils and these were basically for the purpose of settling disputes over theology. The early disputes were about the nature of Christ.

One of the major disputes that arose that is still a dispute is over the deity of Christ. A principal antagonist to what would now be considered the orthodox view of Christ was a man named Arius. And Arianism is named after him.

And his view was exactly that of the Jehovah's Witnesses today, that Jesus was a created being, the most important and the most lofty of all created beings, and the first of the created beings, but not God. That he is not equal to God and not eternal with God. But that he had a beginning, just like the angels and all created things had a beginning.

This did not set well with Athanasius, who was a presbyter in the church of Alexandria. And there was a great dispute that arose. Both of them were eloquent proponents of their viewpoints.

Athanasius promoted the view that has come to be regarded as orthodoxy today, the Trinitarian view, or at least the view that Jesus was co-equal with God. And really the whole church throughout the empire began to divide over this question. So finally Constantine, the emperor, concerned about a rift in the empire, which by the way was officially a Christian empire, and therefore a rift in Christianity was a rift in the political empire as well, he called for the first ecumenical council at Nicaea.

And out of that came the Nicene Creed. And the views of Athanasius prevailed, and therefore we are today Trinitarians. Although Athanasius did not remain in favor perpetually, because after Constantine died, his son, the next emperor, actually was an Arian, and banished Athanasius from the empire, although he was the great hero of the Nicene Council.

He was the bad guy in the view of the following emperor. And later emperors and leaders that would rise up would either favor what had come to be called, and is now called the orthodox view, and others would favor the Arian view. So for some centuries there was quite an influence of Arianism.

In fact, one of the greatest evangelists among the Goths that we'll talk about in our talk tonight, was an Arian in his theology, and most of the Goths that were evangelized by him became Arians. Now today, because of our basic commitment, the commitment of the whole church, to the views of the Nicene Creed, we would think it a great tragedy if a whole continent was converted to an Arian form of Christianity. We call that today, Jehovah's Witnesses, and we consider that a cult.

But in those days, orthodoxy was not as well established, although the ecumenical council decided that Athanasius was correct, and Arius wrong, there were still many who attended that council, and many who did not attend it, leaders in the church who were still convinced that Arius was right. So the matter was not really settled for a very long time. And while Arius was condemned as a heretic, it's not necessarily the case, in my opinion, that all the people who were Arians were rebels against truth, or rebels against orthodoxy.

Their view came up before this decision was settled, and it wasn't easy for all of them to change their minds. Of course, the Jehovah's Witnesses have a little different background, and that they came up after the doctrine of the trinity had become well established in the church, and they simply rejected it again, on the same basis as Arius did. And there's still, of course, a great deal of controversy over it.

There were also controversies over the humanity of Christ, and whether Jesus had one nature or two natures, and whether he had one will or two wills. And one thing I pointed out in our last lecture is that as the church ceased to be persecuted, it seemed to have, or feel that it had the luxury to become more petty about things. And I'm not saying that some of these decisions don't have some weight.

Certainly the decision of whether Christ is God or not God is an important decision. But when you get on to the question of did Jesus have two wills or one will, and to what degree was his human nature subordinated to his divine nature, or his divine nature subordinated to his human nature, or whatever, these are issues that it's hard to imagine Jesus would have ever even brought them up as important issues to discuss with his disciples. If he ever did show concern about such issues, they're not recorded in Scripture.

And while it is always fascinating to gain a more precise view of Jesus or of the truth of Scripture, my own take is that a lot of these issues, even those that were wrong, were not wrong in such a way as to prevent them from loving the Lord or being saved in the sense that the apostles were saved when Jesus was here on earth. I don't know that the apostles had sorted all these issues out among themselves in their lifetime. I don't know that the issues that were issues to the church after the conversion of Constantine and the cessation of persecution of Christians, those issues, those petty things, it seems to me relatively, I don't know that they were issues enough for the apostles even to discuss them or concern themselves with them.

And therefore, I'm not sure that agreement on every one of those issues that were decided is really essential. In fact, some of the issues were decided on political grounds largely because of rivalries between the Alexandrian church and the church of Antioch or some other rivalry. And one bishop was more powerful than another, and his schools prevailed.

So there's still room for some disagreement with some of these issues, though not all of them. All I can say is that when it gets down to deciding, did Adam have a belly button or did Adam not have a belly button, which actually was never really discussed at any of the ecumenical councils to my knowledge, I mean, obviously one view is correct and the other is incorrect. And there's always some sort of person out there who thinks it's important to know and important to excommunicate everyone who doesn't agree on whatever the correct view would be proven to be.

And it seems to me that the church became more and more petty and concerned about hair-splitting issues. Now, I personally think on all of the issues that they discuss at these councils, I have an opinion. I have an opinion of who is right and who is wrong.

But I don't really see how my opinion should be pressed on everybody else as if being a Christian, being a follower of Jesus depends on their agreement on some of these issues. Anyway, the last controversy that we discussed in our last session was that between Pelagius and St. Augustine, or Augustine, as you can pronounce it either way, I guess. I'm not sure which is correct.

Pelagius, I introduced this briefly at the end of the last time, but I wasn't able to get into it as much as I would like to have. Pelagius was a British monk, and he migrated to North Africa where Augustine was, a bishop of the North African city of Hippo. And there he came into conflict with Augustine, and not only with Augustine, but with almost all the Orthodox Christians, of which Augustine was one of the champions.

Pelagius taught some things that Christians have not really taught much since the time that he was here. He taught, for example, that the sin of Adam didn't affect anybody but Adam. Now, of course, all of you, I'm sure, know of some other doctrine than that, that when Adam sinned, it affected the whole human race in one way or another.

There are differences of opinion as to exactly what way it affected us. There are some who believe that the sin of Adam conferred guilt on all the race automatically, because we were in him, we sinned in him, and therefore every newborn baby is born guilty of what Adam did. That's the view of most Orthodox people.

On the other hand, there are some who, like myself, question whether the Bible teaches such a thing as that. But we do believe that Adam's sin did affect the race in this direction of fallenness. That is, though I don't personally believe that the Bible teaches anywhere that a baby is born guilty of Adam's transgression, I do believe that the Bible teaches that babies are born with a tendency to sin, with what we call a sin nature.

Now, Pelagius denied both of these things. Pelagius not only denied that babies are born with the guilt of Adam's sin upon their record, he also denied that they had any propensity more toward sin than toward righteousness. Man is born neutral, just like Adam was before his fall.

That was Pelagius' position, that Adam's sin only affected Adam, and all people who have been born from Adam since that time have been born into a condition identical to that which Adam was in before his fall. Obviously, that view is no longer held widely in the Church, but it was fairly widely accepted among Pelagius' disciples in the early 5th century. He also taught that all men sin as a result of bad example of Adam and of society.

They don't sin because of an innate tendency to sin. They sin because they're influenced by the temptations of a corrupt society and of Adam's bad example. I have never quite understood how this argument could be pressed, because society is just people, and if people don't sin until society influences them that way, then it's hard to know exactly how society came to be evil when the people in it were basically not evil.

I mean, there probably is an answer that Pelagians gave that was sensible to them, but it's always seemed peculiar to me that people say men are all born naturally neutral, but society is innately corrupting when society is just basically people. Anyway, I guess I am here to comment on these views, but I mainly want you to know what the views were that he taught. He also taught that man can choose to do right and even live a sinless life without special aid from God.

Now, it should not be thought that Pelagius was denying that we need the grace of God. He just believed that everyone has the grace of God. He believes that God's general grace is given to all men to choose what's right, and therefore they don't need any special favors or assistance from God to choose what's right.

And, of course, this differs very much from what Augustine taught, which we'll talk about in a moment. Pelagius taught that grace is an enlightenment of man's reason, by which God seeks to assist man in making right choices, and that man can cooperate with God or not in that. Also, he taught that physical death is not a judgment upon sin, but it's just a natural result of being physically alive.

It's part of the life cycle. You're born, you live, and then you die. Animals do that, and they don't sin.

And so Pelagius taught that human death is not really a punishment for sin. It's rather just part of the process of having lived. You live, and then eventually your body wears out and you die.

Now, none of those views are held as orthodox today by mainstream Christians. I suppose that last viewpoint was in order to explain infant innocence, because infants die, too. There are babies who die.

And I have read Calvinist authors, and Calvinists, of course, are the opposite of Pelagian. We'll talk about Calvin eventually, but Augustine is the father of Calvinism, as we'll see. The debate between Pelagius and Augustine really crystallized the views that later came to be known as Calvinism.

But I have read Calvinist authors who argue that the fact that babies die and the fact that death is a punishment for sin, that is, it's not natural, it's penal, the wages of sin is death, proves that babies are born guilty, because God penalizes them sometimes, and they die the penalty of death, and that proves that Adam's guilt is transmitted to them. That is a Calvinist argument. That probably arose in the debate between Augustine and Pelagius, so Pelagius said, well, no, the fact that babies die has nothing to do with them being sinful.

It's not a judgment on them. It just has to do with the fact that the biological systems sometimes don't work right, and eventually they stop working. And so that was the Pelagian view, and it was fairly widely held.

Now, most of us, myself included, would find ourselves in disagreement with Pelagius on maybe all of those points, at least some of them, maybe all of them. But we shouldn't judge Pelagius too harshly, and I say that only as a rebuke to my own attitude. Many years ago, almost 20 years ago, I was in a debate with a Pelagian, a modern Pelagian, and I thought he was such a heretic.

The particular individual I debated with was a very immature person, and it was not easy to think of him as a brother anyway, but I tended to think of his defects in terms of his bad theology, and I tended to think very harshly of his theology. I have since met modern Pelagians who strike me as people who love the Lord and they love the Scriptures and they just understand it differently than some of us do, and I really can't condemn them, to tell you the truth. I might still say I disagree with them.

I might still condemn their viewpoint, but I am certainly not in the position to say that a person could not hold Pelagian views and still be a brother in the Lord. Now, in the days of these councils, the church wasn't all that gracious toward whoever was the loser in the controversy. Whoever won, his views became orthodoxy.

Whoever lost was banished from the empire unless he changed his views. And so there wasn't a lot of grace for differences of opinion, so that an increasingly narrow set of viewpoints decided by these councils became considered orthodoxy. And to a certain degree, I think most of us would agree with the views that became orthodoxy, but it should be understood that when we think of those who opposed what is now considered to be the orthodox view, they were not necessarily criminals against God.

They were people who sincerely, in many cases, believed that they were upholding what the scripture taught as they understood it. It's just that their views lost the debate and they got condemned and branded as heretics. And unfortunately for them, the church didn't have room for more than one opinion on things.

And the person who won the debate against Pelagius was Augustine. And Augustine taught, and obviously in reaction against Pelagius, that all men sinned in Adam and are born corrupted by a sin nature and guilty of Adam's transgression at birth. Thus, man is unable to choose to do good or to be saved apart from God's grace.

That is, because of the corruption that is in man at birth, he does not have the power to choose what is right unless God puts it in him to do so. Faith and perseverance, according to Augustine, are gifts that God unconditionally gives to those that he's chosen for salvation. This is, of course, the doctrine that Calvin taught also, and we usually call it unconditional election.

And finally, Augustine taught that salvation is thus, from beginning to end, all of God. Now, you can see that Pelagius' views tended to glorify man and man's ability to do what's right without needing an awful lot from God. And therefore, Pelagianism is viewed as a man-glorifying system.

In reaction to that, Augustine, I think rightly disagreeing with Pelagius, may have pendulum swung in reaction. Now, of course, a modern Calvinist would say Augustine didn't pendulum swing, he just came right on the mark, because what Augustine taught is what modern Calvinists teach to the letter. Calvin himself admitted that nothing he taught could not be found in the writings of Augustine.

So, in calling Calvinism Calvinism, we're really using a misnomer. Calvinism is really Augustinianism, and Calvin simply popularized it about a thousand years after Augustine. And so, these views were in tension, and the church sided with Augustine on it.

And I personally don't agree with Augustine or Pelagius on these particular issues fully. I would be what most Calvinists would call semi-Pelagian, but what most people who are more fair-minded call Arminian. Because Arminius was a guy who, he was not Pelagian, and he was not Calvinistic.

After a while, he was a Dutch theologian, we'll talk about him someday, weeks off from now. But Arminius taught things that were basically contrary to what Calvin taught. And Calvinists always called him semi-Pelagian, because he's part of the way back toward what Pelagius taught from where Calvin is.

But I believe that both Pelagianism and Calvinism are extreme caricatures of what the Bible teaches on the subject, and that Arminius was not semi-Pelagian any more than he was semi-Calvinist. He was halfway, somewhere in between, in the sense of, I believe, just finding the middle biblical road without extremes. But, of course, that's my own opinion, and everyone has their own.

But as a result of this debate, and as often happens in debates, people who would be otherwise moderate on a position become extreme on a position in polarization against their opponent. And that's what happened, and the church sided with Augustine, and for some time afterwards, the church was very much Augustinian, and still is, to a large degree. Pelagius was condemned several times.

He was condemned by a synod at Carthage in 412, and then he was later condemned by the Pope Innocent in 416, and then he was condemned by a general council of African churches in 418, and finally by the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431. So the guy got hit and hit and hit and hit again. Eventually, he was fully branded as a heretic.

That's really a summary of the things we were talking about last time. I want to now talk to you about Augustine's influence in another direction, and about some of the contemporaries of Augustine. Now, in these studies in church history, one thing I'm trying to do is, if possible, tell you the direction that the official institutional church developed as history progressed through the centuries, because the official church got more and more strictly defined as the centuries went by.

But my own position throughout is that the official institutional church is not exactly the same thing as the body of Christ. There is overlap. There are persons who are true members of the true church in the institutional church, and there are people who are not members of the true church in the institutional church.

That is, the institutional church has some true Christians and some not true Christians. Likewise, there are true Christians outside the institutional church in more unusual or less official kinds of gatherings, and there are non-Christians outside the church. So there are two spheres.

There is the institutional church and then there is the true body of Christ and those spheres overlap So that you'll find members of the true body of Christ in the institutional church But that doesn't mean that the institutional church is to be identified with the true body of Christ Which is the latter is defined in terms of spiritual? experience and commitment Whereas the institutional church usually is defined in terms of confessional Things do you confess to the creeds if you confess to them and you say you believe them then you can be in the institutional church But it takes more than just confessing the creeds to be saved you have to love the Lord you have to you have to be Regenerated you have to have the Holy Spirit you have to be a follower of Christ Those are all things the Bible defines as part of being in the church And so it's not identical But I think it's important for us as we study through the centuries of church history to see That there was something happening in the official church and Simultaneously there was stuff going on not necessarily In you know in in the official church might have been linked with it in one way or another But it was something that God was doing Additional to and maybe in a different direction from the direction the official church was going, but Augustine was the most Influential theologian in history in my opinion he has had more influence on the church than even st. Paul I Believe the Apostle Paul should have had more influence than Augustine, but unfortunately. I don't think that's the case I think in the institutional church the church has followed Augustine more than they followed Paul or even then they followed Jesus and Partly that's because he was the great hero of The big conflict with Pelagius, and he was a very eloquent Defender of Christianity, and you know one of the things that made Augustine pivotal in his influence was that Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410 AD Now that was not the final burning in an overthrow of Rome there were Several waves of invaders that came to Rome over over the course of the fifth century the final one was in Sometime I forget the exact year is 476 or something like that But in 410 the first of a series of barbarian invasions against Rome really took its toll and and Rome was captured by the by the Visigoths and Fell basically it was quite clear that Rome was no longer going to be the world power it had been It wasn't dismantled and burned yet, but it was no it lost its power as the as the queen of the of the cities of the world and Many of the remember Rome and the Roman Empire were Christian at that time supposedly I mean Constantine in the 323 And had you know basically made Christianity semi-official and Theodosius the later Emperor had made it official so when Rome fell it was Christian Rome that fell to the Barbarians and many Christians wondered you know what does this mean? This is the this is God's kingdom.

This is you know Christian Rome this is God's city There's been destroyed and there was a lot of discouragement a lot of confusion a lot of theories running around was this gonna be the end of the world They wondered how does this fit into eschatology and the view of end times and The man who really came up at that time to answer those questions was Augustine he wrote a book called the city of God where he said that Rome was the city of man, but the city of God is the church and the city of man is doomed to fall, but the city of God the church is eternal and Very classic work the city of God one of one of the most famous of Augustine's works He did some other very famous works as well of course But it was because his book the city of God Provided a philosophy of history It was it was the first philosophy philosophy of history ever written as a matter of fact And it's written by a Christian so he his thought you know Filled a felt need that the church had at that particular time of crisis And he became you know the great thinker and that everyone looked to in the church So his views of the sort that we would call Calvinist views were fairly readily accepted by the church But you know Augustine also contributed to Roman Catholic thinking as much as he contributed Calvinist thinking He contributed to the establishment of the Roman Catholic understanding of the church and the Calvinist view of salvation those are the two main Contributions in Augustine's theology to the to To the body of Christ one is he contributed a Calvinist view of salvation and a Roman Catholic view of the church now most Protestants appreciate the fact that he formulated Calvinism because probably the majority of Christians are Calvinistic in their thinking and they look to Augustine as a great You know Theologian because of his Calvinist views the Roman Catholics looked August in the same way not because of Calvinism because Roman Catholics are generally not Calvinistic, but because of his views about the church and He taught things that were very strictly Roman Catholic And he did a lot to propel the notions of a particular Roman Catholic sort About church and the need to be in the church now to to Augustine when he said the city of God is the church He was not speaking of the church as a spiritual fellowship of believers he was speaking of the church as The visible organization of the Catholic Church and That is one of the things that I think was not a positive development through Augustine even before Augustine It's time about you know almost a century before Augustine in 325 at the time of the Nicene Council Many Roman Catholic ideas had come to be accepted throughout the church and were pretty well accepted One was the idea that the clergy were priests Of course in the Roman Catholic Church the clergymen are called priests Well, I don't know if it's just a difference in words to you, but the concept is very different In the New Testament, there are no priests There are priests in the Old Testament But in the New Testament, there were no priests in the church there were apostles and prophets and evangelists and pastors and teachers there were elders and deacons, but no priests and The reason was simply this you don't need a priest when there's no sacrifice to offer You don't need a priest to officiate at an altar if there's no altar and no sacrifices in the New Testament All believers are spoken of as if they are priests and the altar and the sacrifice we offer are spiritual It says several times in the New Testament that we offer up spiritual sacrifices to God and we are a kingdom of priests So you don't need Certain officials or clergymen in the church to call themselves priests to officiate at some physical altar with a physical sacrifice But as you know, the Roman Catholic Church does have a physical altar and a physical sacrifice. It's called the mass and Every Sunday they offer the sacrifice of the mass which is the wafer and the and the cup which is offered as a Reoffering of the body and blood of Jesus again, and this was an unknown phenomenon in the early church The Apostles knew nothing of that practice There were no no need for priests But as soon as you you know start an offering again of a sacrifice you need some kind of a priest to officiate at the altar So by 325 there was already this development. I don't know, you know all the things that contributed to it but what had formerly been just a a society of spiritually minded people governed by older Christians called elders had now become a ritualistic religion that had an altar and a sacrifice and needed priests to officiate at it and so the clergymen in The church by that time were already thought of as priests Also the ruling bishops there were still bishops But they were not like the bishops in the New Testament the bishops in the New Testament were simply another word for the elders Elders and bishops are terms that are used interchangeably in the New Testament and in every church There were several elders.

The Bible says that Paul and Barbus appointed elders in every church and you'll Consistently whenever the New Testament speaks about the elders or the bishops. It always speaks plural elders or bishops of the church and Each church had several but in by 325 and even considerably earlier than that in the second century there were already the ideas of bishops Certain individuals called bishops who are rising above elders, you know And instead of them being interchangeable terms for the same guys There were still elders or presbyters, but there were certain guys elevated above them in a political sort of way Called bishops and that that's the rise of what's usually called the monarchial bishop a bishop who had a sort of a kingly role a ruling role That's why they're called monarchial There was already in 325 the Catholic view of apostolic succession if you're not familiar with that view That is the view that the Apostles when they died conferred an authority like their own on Other men who became their successors and when those men grew old and before they died they conferred the same authority on successors and So forth on down the line so that right up until the present according to the Roman Catholic Church the leaders of the church the College of Bishops and the Pope are have the same authority the Apostles had in the early church and therefore their decisions are Normative for the church you see whatever the Apostles in the first century said or wrote in their letters became normative became scripture for us and the idea of apostolic succession Holds that every generation of Christians has had Apostles as it were Persons whose opinions are normative for the church and that all people need to believe them or else be in rebellion against God That view is already in place before Augustine and also the view that the Bishop of Rome had some form of priority over the other bishops of the other churches and Therefore not only was a monarchial bishop of that city But sort of a bishop of the bishops one that other bishops of other cities Would look would come to and and defer to in some way and this view arose because it was said that Peter was the chief Apostle among the twelve and that he was the first Bishop of Rome and therefore whenever anyone said on the The throne as it were the Bishop of Rome in any age They were the spiritual successor to Peter the first Bishop of Rome and therefore had priority over the other bishops None of this of course has any support in the Bible at all None of it finds support in the teaching of Jesus or any of the Apostles Now that is of course Controversial because the Roman Catholics do use certain verses of Scripture to try to establish these points but I dare say that people who use Scripture alone and Not church tradition to determine what's true would never see those meanings in Those verses that they use in other words you come up with the idea first And then you have to find it in Scripture and try to shoehorn the verse into the concept you would never arrive at that concept simply from reading the verses and It's on that basis that I say that these ideas don't have the support of Scripture But they do have the support of very early church tradition and for those who think that church tradition has the same weight as Scripture And Roman Catholics that is their official position Of course then it carries the same weight as if it were in the Scripture now all of those Roman Catholic like ideas were already somehow introduced and fairly agreed upon before the Nicene Council So the good guys and the bad guys at that council would have all agreed on all those Catholic ideas But Augustine introduced some more ideas that have become pretty much Normative in the Catholic Church today He taught that the church is not a spiritual communion of believers, but it's the visible ecclesiastical organization of Catholicism That's what the church is outside of that church he taught no one could be saved regardless how great their personal faith or the holiness of their life is so Salvation under Augustine's teachings ceased to be an individual matter of a relationship with God That you personally can have because you believe in God like Abraham believed in God It was counted him for righteousness or David or any other person throughout history that has known God by personal faith And by a living relationship That's what the early church taught and what the Bible seems to teach about salvation But Augustine taught no you have to be part of this ecclesiastical organization You may have great faith and great holiness, but if you're on the outside of this organization, you're not saved So this began to redefine salvation for him now He wasn't the first to say that but he's he basically made that official through his influence he also Based on the words of Jesus in Luke 14 23 where Jesus said compel them to come in in the parable of the bridegroom and the feast and You know The guests were not coming in on their own and and so the messengers are told to compel them to come in Based on that scripture Augustine said it was okay, though. Not real desirable, but nonetheless Okay to use physical force the sword for example to compel conversions That is to make people come into the church if they were reluctant at the point of the sword or through force now He believed it was much better to do so by persuasion But he did sanction the use of physical force to make converts in this of course He set in motion a very terrible trend which in later years the Roman Catholic used with deadly Cruelty because the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades and many other Horrible abominations arose out of that same philosophy that if they won't convert on their own tell them, you know or or or coerce them and That simply isn't agreeable at all with anything that the New Testament teaches.

In fact, it's quite contrary to it It is not right. It is not even possible To cause someone to become a true believer in Jesus Christ because their life depends on it And if they don't convert, you know, they're going to be killed They may you can get them to say the right words But you can't really get their heart to change that change must come by conviction of the Holy Spirit God has to be drawing the sinner in order for him to be converted truly. But of course once you've decided that the Roman Empire is Christian and Anyone who's not a Christian is therefore not really loyal to the ideals of the Empire therefore a non-christian or a heretic is Considered to be a traitor to the Empire Then of course capital punishment, which is always right for traitors according to most laws of most lands becomes the appropriate thing to use on heretics and And for about a thousand years after Augustine's time the church had its Inquisitions and so forth by which it killed and tortured many many people whose views did not agree closely enough with the official Party line and that has to be traced back to mr. Augustine He's going to have to wear the responsibility for that before God for a long time.

Maybe forever He also promoted the Catholic belief in the authority of tradition as Equal to the authority of Scripture that is that the what the ecumenical councils decided what held the same? Authority as if Jesus had said or Paul or the Apostles had written it Now, of course, this is a view that the Roman Catholics hold today, but Protestants generally don't it's one of the distinctives between Catholicism and Protestantism Protestants believe that the scripture alone holds ultimate authority as the Word of God and that councils of men can sometimes be mistaken and You can't always you know judge Orthodoxy by what a council of bishops decides because they may have their own personal agendas and they may not be inspired that the Bible is inspired and Therefore the scriptures alone are the rule of faith and practice. He also taught and enforced the doctrine of purgatory and The efficacy of the sacraments now this is a very strange thing because the doctrine of the sacraments taught by Augustine and The Roman Catholic Church ever since is that salvation or grace actual grace is conferred through doing certain rituals When you're baptized or when you take the mass or when you do certain other things they're called sacraments and thought that by doing these actions a Special grace comes to you and that salvation is partly conferred through the sacraments faith and the sacraments and penance and some of these other things are Considered to be part of the necessity of salvation now that unfortunately for the church for a thousand years all Christians were taught that this is true and It is still held by many Christians to be true and that is the Roman Catholic position It's strange that Augustine would say this because he himself had a dramatic conversion that was strictly by the grace of God He was a he was an immoral young man living in fornication and so forth when he got converted and he got dramatically converted and changed and became a monk and None of that happened through the use of sacraments. He was saved by the grace of God alone In fact, his doctrines of salvation are very Calvinistic About it's the only were saved by grace alone and yet his doctrines of the church Teach that the church alone could administer the sacraments and without being attached to this church.

You can't receive the sacraments or be saved For years afterwards and even till this day in the in the Catholic Communion If You the worst thing the church can do to you is excommunicate you which is cut you off from the sacraments If you can't keep if you're not welcome at the sacraments You can't be saved according to the Catholic view and if the church doesn't want you there and says, okay We disapprove you so thoroughly that we excommunicate you and you're not a communicant at the sacraments You can't come and therefore you can't be saved The church holds that power in Catholic thinking and also Augustine Believed in and enforced the use of relics a relic is an old thing that had some imagined sacred value Perhaps there's something to lift one's faith or whatever The Catholic Church in later years would sell relics Splinters alleged to be the splinters of the cross Were sold it is said that if you could recover all of the splinters Alleged to be from the cross that the Catholic Church sold you could build a skyscraper with it but the idea is that you know, the the toenail clipping of Peter or something like that the eyelash of Mary or something would would have some kind of special I Don't want to say magical power because they'd object to that use that word But that's what sounds like to me that it has some special way of bringing special blessing Almost seems like a magic Charm or something? I'm sure that the Catholics don't think of it exactly in the way that I'm using the term magic charm But to a large degree, it's hard to tell the difference Anyway, these are beliefs that Augustine introduced. So Protestants like Augustine because of his Calvinism and Catholics like Calvinism Augustine because he was he contributed to the Roman Catholic theology More than any man prior to his time and probably since that time now That's the direction the official church took under the guidance of Augustine and those who agreed with him In Augustine's time and shortly before it there were some very important movements that were sort of independent Of what the official church was doing. I'm not saying that these people Had no contact with the official church in many cases the people I'm talking about were bishops and and involved but they were not going the same direction as The official church some of them left bishoprics in order to pursue the call of God in their lives And I want you to become acquainted with four of them tonight.

I've given you a wrench of them in the notes These people were all roughly Contemporary with Augustine a little some of them a little bit before him, but their life spans overlapped his a Very relatively unknown fellow in church history, but very significant was Ophiuchus Ophiuchus lived from 311 to 383 and he is sometimes called the Apostle to the Goths Now one reason we don't hear too much of Ophiuchus probably is we don't hear much about the Goths. They don't exist anymore and There's some ancient Ethnic group that we don't have any you never hear about them in the news You know, nothing's going on in Gothic lands anymore because there are no Goths, but of course the Goths were a major race of the Barbarians that were outside of the Roman Empire and Ophiuchus Evangelized them. He himself was born among them north of the Danube River and In his teenage years.

He was sent to Constantinople to study and at age 30 He was consecrated as the Bishop of Constantinople. That was in the year 341 So he became a bishop there now. I remember Constantinople was sort of the it was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire Rome was the capital of the north of the Western Roman Empire and Rome actually fell Not in his lifetime, but shortly afterwards, but the Eastern Roman Empire lasted much longer with Constantinople as its as its Capital so the church in Constantinople was a very significant church.

It'd be sort of like a church in Washington DC today he was the bishop there and He retreated from that position and left the position of his bishopric there to go back to Cappadocia Where he had come from and a minister among his own countrymen now, he was a goth himself and His first language was Gothic but also through his education he had learned Greek and Latin and He's probably the first man who did what the Wycliffe Bible translators do today He went back to the Goths and the Gothic language had never been reduced to writing. It was just a spoken language like many tribal languages today in many tribal peoples and You probably know what Wycliffe Bible translators do they go into some place like that The language doesn't exist in writing and so they learn the language verbally then they find they find some characters or they either borrow characters from existing languages or make up some of their own to represent the sounds and Then they teach the people how to read their own language and then they translate the Bible into their language so they can read the Bible It's a very long process. I think the typical Wycliffe Bible translator spends 20 to 30 years On the field doing this it takes a very long time.

Well, that's what Ophelius did with the Goths and That was sort of his life's work during many of the years of his life. He He reduced the Gothic language into a written form and Then he translated the Bible from the Greek version into Gothic and Although that you know, no one speaks Gothic anymore and you can't really Buy a Gothic translation anymore yet museums do have Some scraps of the Gothic Bibles that he translated, but he was apparently the first to do that kind of a thing For seven years he served as a missionary very dedicated among the Visigoths and the Goths beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire and he had tremendous success thousands of people were converted so much so that the Pagan chief of the Visigoths was threatened and began to persecute and slaughter the Christians the converts in large numbers because they were coming to Christ and they wouldn't renounce their faith and Many martyrs were made at that time Because his converts were suffering martyrdom in large numbers Ophelius got permission from Constantine the Emperor to move a great body of these Christians From Gothic lands into what would be today Bulgaria. I'm not sure how it was pronounced back then Moesia and That was within the Roman Empire and therefore there be protection from these Gothic chiefs that were killing them so here we have a Precedent for Christians in mass Leaving their homeland in order to live in another country because persecution was so great this kind of thing happened Later in church history many times many times persecution has driven whole Christian communities out of their own land Into another country and we'll read of some of the interesting cases of those as we go through church history But that's an early instance of it We'll feel this wasn't really officially a monastic He's a little early to be a really in the monastic movement, but his lifestyle was very similar to monastic lifestyle living ascetic and kind of separate from The big city and so forth he'd left the big city where he had been a bishop in order to evangelize these rustic people on the fringes of the Empire he was really a pioneer missionary and a Bible translator Now he was Aryan in his beliefs he was not Orthodox and He did live for the most part after the Nicene Council, so he rejected the Nicene Creed but he loved the Lord and It's very hard to say that his converts Many of whom sealed their testimony with their blood It's hard to say that they're not in heaven today Just because they didn't share the Nicene beliefs I personally disagree with his Aryan beliefs.

I believe is wrong But it's interesting that many influential Christians were Aryans in the old early centuries of the church another really important Christian worker at that period of time Almost the same years a little just slightly different years of the lifetime of Ophelius was Martin of Tours and Martin of Tours was influential in Gaul, which is of course modern France In some of the same ways that Ophelius was among the gods Now Martin was born not in a Christian family even though the Roman Empire was Christian Not everyone was Christian in it and his parents were not converts they were pagans and he is born in Pannonia, which later would be known as the Yugoslavia and His parents while he was still a youth later moved to Italy where his father served as an officer in the Roman Army Now Martin didn't really want to join the army and there's some Different things I've read some books suggest that he had become a Christian already before he was 15 I don't know how he became a Christian since his parents would not say but perhaps in Italy he encountered Christians there because officially at least Christian but It's not clear whether he became a Christian before or after went in the army, but he reluctantly went into the army when he was 15 years old that his father's of course encouragement who was an officer and There's a story told about Martin that on a particular day in winter a cold winter's day in Amiens in northern Gaul that he met a beggar and Martin took his own cloak and his sword and he cut the cloak in half and gave half of it to the beggar and That night he had a dream and in his dream. He saw Jesus wearing that half a cloak that he had given to the beggar and Although I believe he had Christian beliefs before this time he had not been baptized shortly after that time he was baptized as a Christian and he left the army and He went to France to be taught in the faith and become a clergyman become a preacher now He became a strong opponent of Arianism. And while he was contemporary with Ophelia's they'd labored in different areas If they had met each other there would have been a strong Disagreement among them because Ophelia's was an Arian and Martin was anti-Arian and strongly so but they both were very used of God in their own way of bringing people out of paganism and to Christ in fact After he was trained he went back to Italy.

He'd been trained in France He went back to Italy where his mother was still living and he converted her Remember she was a pagan. So he had the privilege of leading his own mother to the Lord and That was just the first of many He the priest of Milan Or the bishop of Milan was named Octavius and he was an Arian and because Martin was anti-Arian the bishop drove him out of my land, which is in Italy and So he returned to Gaul or France where he had been trained and he established the first monastery in that country in 360 AD now from that monastery Martin gathered young men as Disciples that he trained and influenced and led them and took them out in the countryside To witness to the country folk in the region of Tours France, which is why he's known as Martin of Tours These country folk had largely been neglected by the church's evangelistic efforts before and They were scattered. So, you know, it was not a concentrated population and they were not easily reached but he and his companions Went out and had a tremendous impact on these country folk led many many people to Christ and they You know, he was sort of I mean, we don't know all the details But I think if we lived in his time, we would have to say he was, you know leading it or having a revival, you know and hundreds if not hundreds of thousands Of people came to Christ through his influence and those of the people that he was leading around He convinced multitudes to convert and he tore down the pagan temple in the city of Tours which had been the official religion in Tours and he built a Christian Church on the site where the pagan temple had been and The dedication of his church was accompanied by exorcisms he had to exorcise the demon From where the pagan temple had been and he did that and Tours became a Christian city He became the bishop of Tours Although it was kind of against his will to do so.

He was appointed over his own protest in 372 and He personally not just you know by appointing and sending people out like a bishop might do, you know He might sit in his ivory tower and send out missionaries, but rather than do that. He personally went out and evangelized the previously neglected countryside and many Miracles are attributed to him His ministry is believed to have been accompanied by miracles now some church historians would speak of these as legends And perhaps some of these are legendary, but see most church historians don't believe in Miracles after the times of the Apostles and and so they probably just assume they're all legends I assume that if there are stories of miracles accompanying this man's ministry There's not really any reason to doubt that there were miracles there might be some specific miracles that he didn't do that got added to the list as Legends, but it would appear there was a miraculous Ministry as well as an anointing in converting people at the time of his death most of the surrounding tribes had been converted by him and his followers, so While the church was developing in the direction of Roman Catholicism, there were these guys sort of on the outskirts Martin became a bishop in the church reluctantly Ophelia's had been a bishop and left that position both of them became monastics as it were and and very evangelistic and had tremendous impact converting almost whole countries Will feel us among the Goths and Martin in Gaul among the French people of Gaul Now there's a real interesting guy Had a tremendous impact in Spain his name was Priscillian and He is still regarded by many church historians as a heretic But there's strong reason to question because some of his writings have recently emerged not too recently last century emerged and What he wrote does not sound very heretical at all And it seems very possible that he's branded as a heretic by people whose views we would regard as her Heretical you know I mean what he actually taught was very contrary to what the Roman Catholic Church was teaching in his day But not very different than what Martin Luther taught and if Martin Luther had lived in his day and had been executed as Priscillian was Priscillian became the first Christian to be martyred for or to be executed as a heretic But the Catholic Church would have liked to have executed Martin Luther as a heretic too, but many of us would not call him a heretic Because we have a different Position we come from then the Catholic Church. It's possible had we known Priscillian.

We might have been on his side of controversy also Priscillian What did not become a Christian till he was an adult he was a rich Spaniard and He was well educated and a very eloquent speaker a powerful speaker and tremendous influence on people he studied philosophy initially but he was disenchanted with philosophy after a while and He eventually converted to Christianity and He began to give Bible studies, he just began to expound on the Bible and give practical Application of how people should live according to Scripture His views however were very different than those of the Roman Catholic Church and got himself into trouble He led a real popular movement, and he was a layman he was not a bishop initially and Many people were converted by his preaching and by his practical expositions and his followers Came to be called Priscillian although. They just called themselves Christians. It was their Rivals and their enemies that called them Priscillian after him Priscillian But they they are known to have only called themselves Christians And he was appointed bishop of the Church of Avila in Spain, but the Spanish clergy generally didn't like him Something he was teaching really bothered them.

They accused him of Manicheanism Now Manicheanism we studied in an earlier lecture was started in Persia by a guy named Manny who is more or less Gnostic and Definitely a genuine heretic who I mean in no sense was an Orthodox Christian But once Manny was condemned and Manicheanism was condemned The Catholic Church often used that label to accuse people who were Disagree with them on almost any point because Manicheanism Was sort of like saying Mormon or Jehovah's Witness or something like that today? It was just it was a label that would definitely immediately elicit a negative response from Orthodox Christians And so he was he was accused of Manicheanism although. There's no real evidence from his writings that he ever taught Manicheanism He was accused of teaching dualism Which is the Gnostic idea? perfectionism and He is accused of denying the humanity of Christ Which would also be a Gnostic idea? Now Priscillianism was condemned therefore at the synagogue of Saragossa in 380 and Priscillian was banished from Spain however He did come back to Spain in 384 four years later with an imperial proof approval from the Emperor and The opposition was renewed against him at the Synod of Bordeaux Where Priscillian's opponents joined with the evil Bishop Ithacus? accused him of heresy immorality and sorcery now It's really hard to know what the basis of these charges was because most of his writings have been stamped out And he was called a heretic, and you've got to remember the the winners in the conflict write the history the victors write the history and in this case We find that he was he lost this controversy And the Roman Catholic Church wrote the history about him, and it's hard to know to what degree the history is legitimate obviously if Priscillian was Guilty of heresy and immorality and sorcery Then there's every reason for the church to oppose him as it did Although I don't think it was right for them to burn him as they did but The fact is that he may not have been guilty of any of those things what is known of his writings sound very unlike the accusations That were made against him well He appealed when he was accused of heresy by the Synod of Bordeaux he appealed to the Emperor Maximus But Maximus wanted to be on good terms with the Spanish clergy who didn't like Priscillian and so he approved of Priscillian's being executed and Priscillian became the first Christian executed for heresy I said he was burned but he was actually beheaded with six others Who were also called Priscillian that's a typographical error where it says Priscillian's there now even though the Catholic clergy Executed Priscillian and six others for heresy There were other leaders in the church who disagreed with that decision among them Martin of Tours Martin of Tours protested the execution of Priscillian Another person who did was Ambrose the Bishop of Milan who is the one who led Augustine to the Lord very famous Bishop Ambrose and These men believe that the Catholic clergy in Spain were wrong and they opposed it but the King wanting to please the Spanish clergy went ahead and did it so I mean the fact that Martin of Tours and Ambrose both opposed the execution of Priscillian raises serious questions as to whether his Condemnation under these charges more of a political thing by his local opponents or whether he really taught such things as that were really heresy anyway, Priscillian's writings after his execution were systematically sought out to be destroyed and Mostly they were however some were found That apparently they didn't get There were many people Who however had been converted under Priscillian's preaching and still? Were loyal to him after he died. They were still called Priscillian's and for a couple centuries After his death there were people in Europe called Priscillian's the Emperor Maximus who had him executed was later overthrown and the popular sentiment of the public was in favor of Priscillian after his death and Ithacus the wicked bishop who was largely responsible for condemning him was deposed of his position, but that didn't bring Priscillian back But it may be that Priscillian was actually a very godly Revivalist and Bible teacher his writings some of them were found in 1886 and Some of the things he taught Would definitely be considered heresy by the Catholic Church, but would not necessarily be considered heresy by you or me For example Priscillian taught that the scriptures were the sole rule for Christian doctrine behavior Where's the Catholic Church taught that tradition? Held equal weight with Scripture Priscillian didn't accept that Priscillian taught that Christians must live a holy life and That has to be the outflow of personal communion with Christ in other words He didn't believe that the sacraments are the basis of a relationship with God But that on a personal fellowship with Jesus in the holy life Was essential the fact that he taught this very strongly makes it very doubtful that the accusations of his immorality and sorcery were true accusations He also taught that the communion with Christ is entered through personal living faith in Christ and he also taught that no spiritual distinction exists between clergy and laity He believed that since all Christians have the Spirit of God any might teach the word of course He was himself a layman when he began teaching the word.

He was later made a bishop, but then executed So Priscillian is a controversial character but My impression from what little is known as writings is that he was falsely accused of heresy Wrongly killed and that he was just leading a real revival movement Leading a lot of people to Christ and making disciples in Spain and it offended the Catholic Church because he did it in a different way than the way that they approved The last person I want to talk about tonight is much better known by most of us at least we know his name Because there's a day every year that the Irish celebrate in memory of him and that is of course Patrick of Ireland the Apostle of Ireland now the dates of Patrick's actual life are very controversial Some of the sources I checked said he was born around 390 and there was no date given for his death there's other sources that say that some research has indicated he may have lived as much as almost a century later than the traditional date so we don't really know for sure the exact date, but he was Apparently his lifetime was roughly sometime in the 5th century Around the same time as these other guys His story is very interesting and we have we know much more about Patrick than we do about so he's others because he wrote his own testimony his own confessions of his life and Assuming his story to be true and it probably was because he's a very saintly man Very interesting guy he was born in Britain with in a Christian family his parents were Christians But he was kidnapped When he was a teenager He was 16 and there were some raiders that came through Britain and took captives he was one of them and he was sold as a slave in Ireland and He was out tending livestock For his owners on the hillsides for six years. He was he was a slave there had been kidnapped He was a herdsman sort of like David out on the hills And it was although he had not paid much attention to his Christian the Christian faith of his parents before this time because he was Taken captive and isolated and so forth. He drew near to God And he began to have dreams and visions and these dreams and visions began to really guide his life In a big way he was told in a dream at one point while he's not tending the sheep After six years he was told in dreams that there was a ship Laying at anchor waiting to take him away back home to Britain and so he walked 200 miles To the to the place that he dreamed of and there was the ship ready to set sail Initially the captain of the ship didn't want to give him free passage to Britain But he talked him into it and so he did he sailed to Britain and got to go home He didn't immediately get home to his parents because the the ship landed in a part of Britain.

That was very Desolate and there weren't many people and there wasn't much to eat And when they landed in Britain both Patrick and the crew of the ship almost starved to death Because of lack of food, but Patrick prayed for food and a herd of swine appeared in the path before them and they Arose and killed and ate and did not complain about the unclean food I guess what God has cleansed they were not going to call common Now he managed after this to find his way back home to his parents and His parents of course were very glad to see him alive He'd be about 22 years old at that time and they urged him to stay in Britain But he really wanted to be in the ministry and he had a dream one night and in this dream a man gave him a letter and he opened the letter and it said on it the voice of the Irish and As he read the letter in the dream. He heard Irish voices and They were saying we beseeched the Holy Youth to come and walk once more among us and he believed from this dream that he was called to go back to Ireland the land where he had been a captive and To evangelize there because Ireland and the British Isles in general were not Christian in those days. They they were pagan They had come under Roman Political power, but they had not really Converted to Christianity there were some converts by the way in Britain, but they were of a Roman Catholic sort But their Ireland was still very much pagan and given over to Celtic religion his elders in His church did not want him to go to Ireland, but he managed to go anyway, and he got himself ordained as a missionary bishop to the Irish and he went over there now the The religion of the Celtic people in Ireland at the time or the Celtic people was polytheistic they believe many gods They believed in fertility It was a fertility cult and therefore they were involved in sexual immorality as parts of their religious rituals And they also practiced infant sacrifice Which tells you you know? Well how much he had his work cut out for him? But he ministered there among them for 30 years and he never did return home to Britain Spent the rest of his life in Ireland Where apparently he died now his ministry in Ireland was apparently very supernaturally charged He had what we would normally call the power encounters with the pagan priests duels of the mirror miraculous and so forth and I don't know all of the Details of this but quite a number of miracles are attributed to Patrick in fact.

There's a legend may be true That the reason there's no snakes in Ireland is because Patrick Got rid of them all that there were there were poisonous snakes in Ireland before he was there But one of the miracles he did was I don't know how he did it I don't was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin taking the flute and leading all the rats off a cliff, but apparently Patrick is Attributed with actually banishing all the serpents from Ireland and many other miracles are attributed to him now. He was not well liked Among the pagans who didn't convert and He was attacked many times beaten up by robbers and by other persecutors. He was also opposed by other clergymen of the Roman Catholic sort because he was more of a free agent type and did not seem to promote the Roman Catholic style of religion and He experienced a great deal of Opposition in different ways the Roman Catholic clerics often accused him of rusticity or being too rustic Because he didn't have higher education He argued that the reason he didn't have higher education was because during his teenage young adult years He was a captive and he didn't have a chance to get an education But he didn't feel like that should keep him from being in the ministry And I would tend to agree with him since I don't have any higher education either And a lot of people didn't like the Apostles Jesus People like that and they were yet nonetheless called to the ministry Now he was also accused by other clergymen of doing it for the money and having mercenary motives But he said in response to him that he never took any money at all For the ministry from his converts even sometimes offending his converts because he wouldn't receive gifts from them now It's not known how he did survive whether just ate fruits and berries on the hillside or whether He was supported by the church in Britain that sent him out That's a possibility.

But in any case he was not certainly exploiting his converts for money at all He claims that he spent the price of 15 slaves in bribing administrators and buying protection from Kings apparently his life was Endangered so much by those who attacked him that he had to buy off Kings and administrators to protect him and bribe them Now, I don't know if I don't know how everyone here feels about paying bribes I know that I've known people who are Missionaries and go into foreign lands and they they simply refuse to pay bribes to officials even though bribing is very fairly common practice It's just against their Christian convictions It's you know, the Bible certainly says it's wrong to take bribes And if it's wrong to take bribes, it probably is wrong to give them Although that's a to give a bribe depending on what you're hoping to do to if you're hoping to Taking bribes is to pervert justice You know, that's what the Bible condemns the Bible condemns a ruler who takes bribes because he does it to can to pervert justice In a land where justice is not going to be done unless the officials are bribed The the officials may be corrupt before God, but the person paying the bribe might be doing the right thing I don't know. It's it's a hard call ethically there, but he paid bribes. He said to administrators and Kings to protect him and So forth that might not have been advisable from a strictly spiritual point of view But perhaps if we were in his position, we might be strongly tempted to since getting beat up all the time and attack He is the most successful Missionary to the Irish and therefore, of course the Irish still celebrate him as the one who converted the island of Ireland He approached chiefs and Kings and got them converted eventually he converted thousands of people and He also was a monastic But but a different kind of monastic.

He didn't follow a monastic lifestyle just as an end in itself A lot of monastics did they just thought being in a monastery was the epitome of spirituality But he followed a monastic lifestyle for the purpose of training people in the Word of God and Of just living an austere life to get the gospel out In other words not not depending on a great deal of comforts for himself. He trained disciples. He traveled with them and He left them to oversee the churches that he established.

He was like him an apostle to Ireland He knew of God's mercy and grace unlike some of the monks in different Roman Catholic monasteries And he was not legalistic. He was a joyful guy saying a lot He believed that he's led by the sovereignty of God's providence And he believed in the power of the gospel which was a something the Roman Catholic Church was less and less emphasizing the power of the gospel to save and He also knew and quoted frequently the scriptures judging by his autobiography So we can see that while Augustine Was Taking the official church more in the direction that Roman Catholicism later took There were on the outskirts of the ordinary church sometimes even condemned by the by the official church Revival movements going on in various lands with Ophelia among the Goths Martin among the Gauls or the the French Priscilla among the Spanish and Patrick among the Irish or the Celtic people and so God was moving with these kind of Offshoot guys who were not really in the mainstream at all of what the official church was doing some of them were heretics by definition of the official church But it's hard to know exactly to what degree we would in hindsight regard them as heretics because sometimes Their views are much closer to ours than they are to the Roman Catholic Church, which is probably why they got themselves branded Anyway, this takes us pretty much through what was going on in the 5th century In the coming lectures, I'm going to want to talk to you about how the Roman Catholic papacy arose and I don't want to spend the proportionate time talking about the papacy that the number of years It lasted would warrant. We've taken a very long time.

Just getting up through the 400s ad and Or even into the 400s at the end of the 5th century in our consideration But there were about a thousand years of the rule of the papacy that I don't want to spend the proportionate length of time on It's too depressing We will talk about it somewhat. We'll take a few sessions on it, but we'll cover that thousand years relatively quickly Compared to the first 400 and Then we'll come to the Reformation and we'll slow down a little bit and talk about some of the significant things there Is it because I don't think anything significant happened during those thousand years? No, it's just too depressing and Not very many good things happen But there were movements even during the Dark Ages so-called Which were branded at the time as heresies and heretical sects, but were probably evangelical Christians by today's standards As we would judge them the Waldensians and the Albigensians and many others were there that were persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church during those centuries and The Inquisitions were largely directed against these groups, but they were almost certainly Bible believing Christians They simply were on the outside of the Institutional church, and that's what got them into big trouble Well, we'll stop there Without belaboring this time period anymore But we'll continue as I say to talk about the rise of the papacy in the official Church and some of the resistance movements That were probably what we call evangelicals today when we come next time