Principal Events of the Middle Ages (Part 2)

Church History — Steve Gregg

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Principal Events of the Middle Ages (Part 3)

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Principal Events of the Middle Ages (Part 2)

Church HistorySteve Gregg

In this presentation, Steve Gregg covers 15 principal events of the Middle Ages. He discusses the significance of Pope Gregory the Great's organization of the papacy during this period, as well as the Roman Catholic Church's embrace of icons and images, which eventually led to liturgical differences and controversies. Gregg also touches on the Crusades, their failure to recapture Jerusalem, and their impact on relations between Christians and Muslims. Additionally, he discusses the Roman Catholic Church's doctrine on the sacraments and its history of anti-Semitic actions in Europe.

Transcript

Tonight we're going to continue looking at some of the 15 principal events of the Middle Ages. Last time we took six of the 15. I inaccurately announced last time that we would finish it up this time, but it's just going to take too long.

So we will try to take four more of them tonight, and very possibly we can take the last five next time. The Middle Ages is the period generally that is regarded from the rise of the of the Papacy until practically the Reformation. And that would be from about 600 AD to about 1500 AD.

Now, the rise of the Papacy, not everybody agrees as to when that was. Some would make Pope Leo the first pope, and others would have other suggestions that they would make. But it seems like a lot of Church historians, seems like most Church historians, believe that Gregory the Great was the one who organized the Papacy into what it really was during the medieval period.

There were other men, bishops of Rome prior to the time of Gregory, who assumed to themselves the kinds of prerogatives that we later have developing full-blown into the Papacy. But the concept of the Pope, as it has generally been held since the beginning of the Middle Ages, was introduced by Gregory the Great. We talked about that last time.

We talked about several other important events. We talked about the rise of Islam and the impact that had on the Church. You see, the Church in the West, the Roman Church, was affected by the barbarian invaders, the Goths and the Visigoths and Vandals and those kinds of and Germanic tribes.

And the Eastern Church was affected by attacks from the Muslims. First, the Saracens or the Arab Muslims in the 8th century, or actually the beginning of the 7th century, and eventually the Turkish Muslims also. Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Empire, eventually was to fall to the Turks.

And that was, of course, significant. But those are some of the things we talked about last time. I want to come to the seventh on our list now, and that was the split between the Eastern and the Western Churches into two autonomous churches.

For most of Church history, the Church was regarded as one church throughout the world, although there were certain centers, certain major churches that were thought to have more authority than others. The Church of Constantinople and the Church of Rome were simply two of those. The Church of Alexandria, the Church of Antioch, and the Church of Jerusalem were also considered significant churches, but all the churches in the East, except for Constantinople, fell early to the Muslim invaders.

And that left only two major churches, and they were still considered to be one church. The church with its center in Constantinople, where the emperor had moved the capital of the empire, Constantine had done so back in the early 4th century, and then, of course, Rome, where the popes had assumed power much earlier, because with the departure of the emperor from Rome in 320-something, 330 A.D., to Constantinople, there was not a strong power in Rome stronger than the pope, and the popes assumed political authority in Rome much earlier because of that than they would have probably if the emperor had remained there. But eventually, the church in Constantinople, representing the eastern side of the Christian church and culturally fairly different from the Western church, split from the Roman church.

It really came down to a number of little and larger stresses between the two. Eventually, it led to the pope in Rome sending a delegation to Constantinople and serving a bull of excommunication to the patriarch of Constantinople. The patriarch of Constantinople returned the compliment and excommunicated the pope, and once that was done, it was rather hard to see the church as one anymore because the pope in Rome had excommunicated the patriarch in Constantinople, and the patriarch had excommunicated the pope, and they never really had a reconciliation after that.

Now, you might wonder what led to that kind of a schism. There are a number of factors. There's probably more than those that I've listed, but I think I've listed some of the major factors that led to the hostility and the rivalry and eventually the total separation of ways.

And after that, of course, the church in the east, we don't really usually call that the Catholic church, although it can properly be called the eastern Catholic church. We usually speak of it as the eastern Orthodox church today. But I've given you five reasons here in the notes that I've given you as to why some of the hostilities and such developed.

Some of these are very general and some are more specific. One of the first things was that for a few centuries, two or three centuries before this, there had been some stress points based on the whole idea of images and the use of images in worship. The word icon is another word for an image.

Some of us who use computers, especially Macintosh computers, and I guess Windows now, have come to use the word icon. Apart from the advent of the icon-oriented computer screens, we really haven't used the word icon much in normal speech, but an icon is an image. And from early times, the church began to use images to help to inspire their worship.

There were some critics of this, especially in Asia Minor in the early 700s. And one of the men who grew up in Asia Minor in the early 700s became emperor, and he became the emperor known as Leo III. And he apparently was influenced by some of the monks or whoever it was in the region where he grew up to say that icons should not be used in worship because they were idols.

Of course, you'll recognize this is generally the position that many or most Protestants take today also to the Catholic use of images. And I would be an iconoclast myself because an iconoclast was a person who believed in ridding the church of the use of images in its worship. And Leo III, the emperor, basically banished the use of images in the Eastern church, and so did his son.

I think it was Constantine V was his son, the next emperor. He also continued this iconoclasm, which iconoclasm just means the eradication of images from the church. But when Leo III did this, the Pope condemned that act because the Roman church consistently did use images.

And there was quite a dispute that arose, and this was even before the time considerably before the time of the split East West. It was in this in the 8th century that this took place. And one of the great champions in favor of keeping the icons in the church was it John of Damascus, that guy's name? He had another last name.

I forget his last name, but they called him John of Damascus because of his having come from Syria. And he wrote that icons should be used in the church, and he felt like it was blasphemous to say that they should not, because he taught that Jesus in the incarnation was the ultimate image. He was the image of the father, and that if God did not want us to have visual images to know him by, then God himself made a terrible mistake and did something that would be considered wrong in having Jesus come to the church.

He came down in a tangible form, and he taught that the images represent, they are not gods, and they were not to be worshipped, but they represent spiritual realities which cannot be represented otherwise, and they represent to our senses what can otherwise only be apprehended by the soul. And anyway, his arguments, John of Damascus arguments, pretty much won the day eventually. And even the Eastern Church went back to using icons for a while.

The controversy erupted from time to time after that. There was a queen that came up in Constantinople a couple generations after Leo who reestablished the uses of images in the Eastern Church, but then there were later iconoclasts, and it was just a problem that kept erupting in the Eastern Church. The Roman Church continuously embraced the use of images.

Those who were opposed to it, of course, argued that this was simply idolatry, and that to venerate an image or to make any image of holy things or spiritual things was the same as idolatry. It's possible that Leo III, who started this controversy, he may have been influenced by Israel's history, because he could see that Israel had gone into captivity and had suffered defeat at the hands of her enemies because of frequent relapses into idolatry. And at the time that Leo came to power in the East, Constantinople had been hit a couple of times by the Muslims.

And although they had not conquered Constantinople yet, they had done a lot of damage, and he could see that they were suffering there, and perhaps they were suffering the judgment of God for their idolatry or the use of images. That could have been how Leo was reasoning. No one knows exactly for sure what all motivated him.

But eventually, it was decided that in the East, raised images could not be used, but only flat images, only pictures could be used, whereas in the Roman Church, they were able to use statues and raised images and so forth. And that's how things eventually turned out. But it was this controversy over iconoclasm, or the use of icons or the eradication of icons, was one of the big tension points between the East and the West, which was a contributing factor to the split.

Another was the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit. Now, I haven't said this too much. You may have to tell me which was which, but in the West, I believe it was, the doctrine was taught that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son.

It was the other way around, from just the Father. OK, the earlier creed, followed by the Eastern Church, too, taught that the Holy Spirit proceeded only from the Father. And there were some Spanish theologians or clergy who introduced the notion that the Holy Spirit proceeded not just from the Father, but from the Father and the Son.

And this was something the Eastern Church would not buy into. And this became a big controversy also. Now, frankly, if I may editorialize a little bit, it's my commentary, so I can do that.

That sounds kind of petty to me. But I'm not to say that one of those views isn't true and the other false. I'm sure one of them is true.

But I'm not sure that the scripture is so explicit as to make that a cardinal doctrine. But it was something like many things in the early church, at least in the post-Constantine church, that became one of those real sticking points that people really wanted to make sure they got that one right. And the East and the West never resolved that.

They remain to this day in different camps on that point. A third point of tension was that the Pope in Rome wanted the patriarch of Constantinople to submit to his authority. And the patriarch of Constantinople thought, well, actually, I kind of had it the other way around.

I thought you should submit to my authority. And they kept having power struggles between each other. And frankly, neither of them was interested in submitting to either of the other one's authority.

So they just never got along about that. And the schism made it possible for them each to have authority in their own realm. And they kind of give up the power struggle.

A fourth issue where there was difference of opinion was that in the Eastern church, the patriarch was willing to be subservient to the emperor and to have the emperor have certain authority over clergy and in civil matters and so forth. But in Rome, the development of the idea of the papacy had already come to the point where the papacy was over the civil authorities. And so there was a difference of opinion as to whether the church leadership should be under the authority of the emperor or not.

In the East, they said yes. In Rome, they said no. And that obviously caused another big difference in them.

So these are some of the main differences. Also, there were some perhaps lesser differences. The two churches differed, for example, over the question of whether the clergy should be married or unmarried.

The Roman clergy were not to be married and the Eastern clergy were allowed to be married. Likewise, they differed over where the clergy should have beards or not. Can you imagine starting two denominations over that? It's been done over smaller issues than that, I guarantee you.

But the Eastern church thought the clergy should have beards. The Western church thought they shouldn't. And then there was also a difference over some things like whether they should use leavened or unleavened bread in the Eucharist.

So these kinds of things, liturgical differences like that, also were just irritations, I'm sure, at least, if not greater controversies. And these things just led to distrust. There were also simply cultural differences between these two.

So those are some of the issues that led to the split. And from then on, the Eastern church was never under the Pope, but they have their succession to their apostolic succession of the patriarchs. And in a sense, both groups can be called Catholic, although neither of them can really rightly be called Catholic, because the word Catholic means universal.

And neither the Roman church nor the Eastern church are universal. And before the split, it was conceivably correct to use the word Catholic of the church, because although there were differences of opinions and different locations, the church was still recognized as one throughout the empire. Ever since the split, really, the word Catholic is not precisely correct for either the Roman church or the Eastern church.

But in another sense, both are very much following in the Catholic tradition in the sense of what the great councils determined. They follow in the basic Orthodox views. We more commonly talk about the Western church today as the Roman Catholic and the Eastern church as the Eastern Orthodox church.

OK, that's what took place in 1054 A.D. Then about 20 years later. In 1073, there came to power a pope named Hildebrand. And he was also Gregory the something, what the sixth or the seventh, I forget which I forget what number he was of Gregory.

But he's also named Hildebrand. He was very influential in some significant ways. He reformed the procedure for selecting the popes.

Before that time, popes had been selected by the seven Roman deacons or sometimes elected by the aristocracy of the populace and sometimes simply appointed or approved by the Germanic kings. And Hildebrand changed things. He made it so that the popes would be elected by the College of Cardinals, which is the way that is still done to this day.

So he introduced that new way of deciding who the new who the successor of Peter would be. That's important to them because they believe in apostolic succession. Although I must confess that if I were a Roman Catholic, I would begin to wonder which procedure was the right way to determine who the real successor of Peter is.

Since any any way you do it, it is human agents that determine who the next bishop of Rome will be, the next pope will be. And one might wonder, well, which human agents have the real authority from God to determine that? And there were times when there were rival popes, sometimes there were as many as three popes in different parts of Europe at the same time, all claiming to be the true pope, all appointed by someone different. And that doesn't bother me.

I mean, that's kind of what I expect as a as a non-Catholic. I don't I don't I don't follow the idea of apostolic succession. And I've seen in Protestant circles, the same kind of problem, rival groups and so forth, and leaders who think they're the true church and all that stuff.

But but if I were Roman Catholic and wishing to hold to apostolic succession, it would be a concern of mine to know, well, which procedure really is the God ordained procedure and who really has the right or the authority to ordain the next pope since the pope has got to be and to have the authority of Peter and even more, even more than Peter ever claimed for himself. So anyway, that changed in the days of Hillbrand, Hillbrand, and he he set up the system that is currently used today. He also made some other changes in the church.

He abolished marriage of the clergy. He also abolished simony. Now, simony is the practice of selling church offices for money.

It's called simony because it's named after Simon Magus in Acts, chapter eight. Who offered money to Peter to give him the ability to lay hands on people so that they might receive the Holy Spirit? And Peter said, your money perish with you because you thought the gift of God could be purchased with money. The practice of purchasing offices in the church with money has gone on many times in many churches, certainly not just in the Catholic Church, but that practice is called simony.

It would, of course, follow that when that is done. That you don't always get spiritual men in church offices, just men who have the money to purchase them. The same kind of thing happened in the high priesthood sometimes during the time prior to the Maccabean period.

Sometimes Antiochus 50s would sell the high priesthood to the highest bidder, and it changed hands sometimes about, I think, two or three times in his day because one guy would outbid the other guy. Now, that's not the way that church officers are really supposed to be selected. As the writer of Hebrews says, the high priest in Judaism, no man takes his honor unto himself, but the one that's appointed by God, as Aaron was, and likewise of church leadership.

God does not desire that the church simply be led by whoever the highest bidder is. But there are certain qualifications for church leadership given in the scripture in 1 Timothy and in Titus, and some of those men might not have much money, and some of the people who have money might not have those qualifications. But there's tremendous corruption in the church through much of the period that we're talking about.

We talked about the reign of the harlots for a few generations there, where actual tremendous immorality was going on by the popes themselves. There was a lot of corruption, but a lot of it had to do with the use of simony, and Hildebrand abolished simony. He was adamantly opposed to it, and he went after it, and if he didn't fully abolish it, he did a good job of making it pretty rare.

He was definitely opposed to it. And another thing, a significant thing that Hildebrand affected was the whole issue of the investiture of secular, or of church leaders by secular rulers. Prior to his time, it was pretty much agreed that when a person was appointed to be an abbey or a bishop or a cardinal or something like that, that his authority would be, his spiritual authority was recognized by the pope, and his secular authority, his civil authority was recognized by the civil rulers.

And Hildebrand wanted to eliminate that second part, and he did. And there was a notable instance of someone trying to go against Hildebrand here, just to show how powerful the pope had become at this time. Henry IV was the German emperor at this time, and he ignored Hildebrand's decree that the secular rulers should not invest the clergy with office, and he went ahead and he appointed some prelates in Italy in the year 1075.

Well, Hildebrand the pope reprimanded him for that, and Henry convened a council at Worms the next year in 1076, where he sought to get enough power to depose the pope from office. He was not successful. Hildebrand excommunicated the emperor for that, and the emperor was pressured by his citizenry, especially the nobles, to actually make peace with the pope, because his citizens were Catholics, and they didn't want the pope to excommunicate the whole country.

And so they pressured the king to make right with the pope. Well, to do this, he had to actually go stand outside the pope's residence barefoot in the snow for three days before the pope agreed to see him, and there was reconciliation, and he was restored to the church. But you can see how powerful the popes had become when the actual emperor of the Holy Roman Empire would come and stand in the snow barefoot in the garments of a penitent outside the pope's residence just waiting for an audience, you know, and that's the kind of power the popes had for a while there.

So much for Hildebrand and the changes that he brought about. Let's go on and talk about the Crusades. There are a few things in church history that unbelievers often like to fixate on as evidence that the church is really, you know, corrupt.

And one of those things is the Crusades. Another is the Inquisitions. We'll talk about those next time.

I imagine that most people who would criticize the church for the Crusades may not know a whole lot about the Crusades. I must confess that until I began studying for these lectures, my knowledge of the Crusades was still very, very, very fragmentary, and yet it was sort of an embarrassment to me about the Crusades. Now, I myself do not believe that the church is to engage itself in warfare, physical warfare, to advance its interests.

The kingdom of God is not expanded in that way. It is expanded by the preaching of the word of God. And that is something that Jesus, although his disciples weren't quite on the same page with him some of the time, Jesus was not favorable toward using the military or the civil sword.

Of course, he didn't have the civil sword, but he didn't want to use the sword at all to promote his kingdom. But that changed, especially with Augustine. Augustine had taught that it is preferable to convert the heathen by influence and by evangelism.

But where that cannot be done, Augustine actually taught that it can be permissible to use the sword to bring about conversion or at least bring people under the authority of the church. And so from Augustine's time, which is around 400 AD on, the church has almost always sanctioned the use of the sword against infidels. And you'll remember that the Muslims who had arisen in the 600s actually conquered Jerusalem, which had been a Christian center.

There had been a church in Jerusalem that was one of the major churches. It was still there for a while, even after the Muslims conquered Jerusalem, but it was weak. It was not a major influence in Christendom.

And there were several crusades. They're sometimes numbered at seven, sometimes eight, depending on how you count them. Everyone knows which ones were the first ones.

That is, all scholars do who study it, but it's kind of hard to know how to number some of the later ones because there were quite a few little things that could be called crusades. But the first crusade was declared by Pope Urban II in 1095 in November. And he proposed getting volunteers.

He actually challenged the people to volunteer to go and to liberate Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Muslims who had taken it over, the infidels. Now, he got a lot of volunteers. I mean, there was a tremendous enthusiasm for this.

There are some people who say that a lot of the crusaders were in it for greed, hoping to take plunder, or for adventure. And there may have been some of that there, too. But very probably, a lot of them did it just out of religious zeal, just out of desire to do what they thought was the will of God and to take back the city of the patriarchs, or not of the patriarchs, but of David and the kings and of Jesus, where he was crucified and where the apostles had lived and so forth.

And they thought of it as a holy place, and therefore, they wanted to rescue it from the infidels who had taken it over. So there was this enormous response to Pope Urban and his desire to drive the... Actually, the Seljuk Turks were the ones who were holding... the Muslim Turks who were in Palestine. And so in August of the next year, in 1096, this great army, a lot of them were noblemen.

Although I read something interesting today, a lot of them were not. And a lot of them were just ordinary poor people, peasants. And even, it seems strange to me, I read there were wives and prostitutes and people like that who joined the crusades and went out to celebrate.

So it was really kind of a ragtag group, but they were big and strong, big group. And they had some tremendous victories, actually. They conquered Nicaea, which was in what is now Turkey today, in 1097, the year after they began.

They went down the next year in 1098 and conquered Antioch. And they conquered Jerusalem in 1099. So the first crusade was a tremendous success in terms of meeting their objectives.

They liberated Jerusalem and some of these other cities in Syria and Asia Minor from the Muslim infidels who controlled them. They did this largely successfully because the Muslim people were not united in those days. They were not very well united.

They were not very prepared for this. They were kind of taken somewhat by surprise and they were beaten apparently fairly easily. Although there were many casualties, I don't want to make it sound too easy.

But it was the only crusade that was really much of a roaring success. All the others were kind of let down after that. But after the first crusade, they set up the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem with its headquarters in Jerusalem.

And they set up what's called the Crusader States along the coast of the Mediterranean. And these remained under control of the Latin Church for some time. However, there arose a Muslim force that was united eventually.

And they came against the Holy Land again. And they did take back some of what had been the Crusader States. They took back Edessa, first of all, one of the five states, I believe it was.

And then they were, of course, coming against Jerusalem. And Jerusalem was in danger of being retaken by the Turks. And so a second crusade was called for.

And the Pope proclaimed a second crusade in 1145 to resist the recovery of the Holy Land by a united Muslim force. The King of France and the King of Germany, or the German King, who was actually the Holy Roman Emperor, they both actually participated personally in this and took their troops down. The King of France was Louis VII.

And the Holy Roman Emperor was Conrad III. And they led their forces down to Jerusalem in 1147. However, they didn't get very far, at least the German army didn't.

They were destroyed in an ambush in Anatolia, not far from Constantinople. So it was really just the King of France and his forces that made it down to Jerusalem. And they were not able to recover Jerusalem.

It was a failure. And the King of France took his remnant of what he had left of his soldiers back to France. And they just chalked that up to a failure.

There was a third crusade. The Muslim leader in this case was a man named Saladin, I imagine. I don't know how to pronounce it.

And he conquered Jerusalem in 1187. And so Pope Gregory VIII proclaimed a third crusade the same year. And the crusading armies included, this time, three kings.

There was the Holy Roman Emperor, whose name was Frederick I. There was the French king, Philip II. And the English king, Richard the Lionhearted. And this was kind of a miserable failure too, although not entirely a washout.

The German king, Frederick, actually drowned in a river on his way down there. So his troops turned back. And then the French king and the English king made it down there.

And they were not really able to rout out the Muslims from Jerusalem. So the French king left early with his troops. Eventually, Richard the Lionhearted, the English king, he was able to reestablish some crusader authority along some of the coastal cities.

But he was not able to recover Jerusalem. So that was not a complete success either. There were several other crusades.

Most of them didn't accomplish too much. There was one under Frederick II where, although he'd been excommunicated by the Pope, he went down on a crusade anyway. And he actually recovered Jerusalem, but not militarily.

He did it by negotiating. Jerusalem, by this time, had fallen into the control of the Egyptians. And he went down and, through negotiation, was able to recover some Latin power in Jerusalem.

And there were some other concessions that had to be made. But the succeeding crusades failed to accomplish the recovery of the whole of Palestine. One became permanently sidetracked by war against Constantinople.

That was the Fourth Crusade. The crusaders were on their way down there to recover Jerusalem. And they decided that they were hired by a Byzantine ruler who had been deposed to go back and recover Constantinople for them.

And so they got so caught up in fighting against Constantinople, they eventually sacked it and did horrendous things to it. And eventually they just forgot about Jerusalem and they never got out of Constantinople. That was a great crusade.

They installed their own emperor there. So that was the Fourth Crusade. And some other ones were kind of peculiar also.

I mean, like the one where Frederick II actually recovered Jerusalem after he was excommunicated by the Pope. And the funny thing is, I mean, funny, peculiar, is that although he succeeded where others had failed to recover Jerusalem, the Pope waged war against him while he was still away from home and on his own land and waged war against Germany. So he had to go back and try to defend himself.

He and the Pope didn't get along very well, although he accomplished more for the Pope, I guess, than the other crusaders had done, many of them. One of the crusades was against the Albigensis, who were also called the Cathars. We'll have something to say about them probably week after next.

One of the heretical sects that the Catholic Church tried to exterminate and did a pretty good job exterminating in one of their crusades. But these crusades, I just want to say, different people perhaps have different opinions about the crusades to this day. There are even some Protestants who believe that crusades, that is to redress a wrong for the Church or for Christians, to participate in a war which they inaugurate, which they begin in order to redress a wrong, that's a crusade kind of a war, that that is right to do.

And there's different views among Christians. I myself do not believe that it was good for the Church to go to war. There certainly is not a mandate in Scripture.

The Church is not given any mandate to keep Jerusalem out of Muslim hands, although we may be happy that it's not in Muslim hands today, but it's not our mandate to take our resources and go and shed the blood of the infidels. And I think that it was with the conversion of Constantine that things got really confused in the mind of Christians about this. From what I've read, the Church Fathers before Constantine were pretty much against Christians participating in war at all.

But when Constantine became a Christian, it began to look like the Roman Empire was Christian. And therefore, the Roman Empire's battles were Christian battles, especially if they were against the barbarians or against Muslims or against someone like that. So that it began to be, it began to seem that it was in the Church's interest and even necessary for the Church's survival to engage in battle.

If Martel had not stopped the Muslims at Tours, it's very possible the Muslims would have taken over all of Europe and what would become of the Church? Well, we don't know. We don't know. But Martin, no, not Martin at Tours, Hartel, Charles Martel, thank you.

Hartel is right there. Doug Hartel, okay. Let me get these names right.

These are guys we talked about a few weeks ago. I've got newer names on my mind right now. Charles Martel stopped the Muslims in Tours and basically rescued Europe from becoming a Muslim continent, it seems.

But we could speculate what would have happened had the Church been pacifist. You know, we might say, well, they would have been all wiped out. If the Church never engaged in war or if Christian people never engaged in war, common sense would tell us that probably we would have been, you know, wiped out by enemies.

But I'm not so sure that we are required to go by common sense in issues where we might have specific instructions. To the contrary. You see, I know of cases in the Old Testament, although God certainly did not forbid the Israelites to fight in war.

In fact, He commanded them to fight in war at times. There were specific battles that He commanded them not to fight in. And they won anyway because God routed the enemies.

There were times in the days of Jehoshaphat, for example, when God told them to just go out with their musicians and to worship God. And God turned the enemies against each other and they all killed each other. There were a few other cases that you can find in the Old Testament where God actually specifically told His people not to fight so they could see what He could do.

And so it's hard to know. I mean, I can only speculate. I can't claim to know.

But if the church had remained pacifistic as it was in the first three centuries, either we would have been overwhelmed by pagans, and there might not be a church day, or else we might have seen more miracles of providence done to protect the church on the part of God, like Israel saw on occasions. I cannot tell. It's only a matter to put out there as food for thought.

We cannot change history and we cannot go back and see what would have happened. And also, even if we would conclude that crusades are evil and that they're not the right thing for the church to do, I am not inclined to judge those Christians who participated. I believe that Christians throughout history, myself included, have always had some blind spots.

I think there were some enormous blind spots in the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. And I don't think God's going to bust people on things that were, I think, legitimate blind spots in their day. I just don't think there was anyone thinking differently.

I could be wrong. But I do believe that the crusades are a big black eye. And, you know, when Christians sometimes criticize the Muslim faith because it makes converts by the edge of the sword, the unbeliever often turns on us and says, Oh, yeah, well, the church has done its share of that kind of thing, too.

And that's true. The church has done its share of those kind of things. But there is a significant difference between the church doing it and the Muslims doing it.

When the Muslims do it, they're doing what their founders said to do. When Christians do it, they're not doing what their founders said to do. I don't know of any place that anyone could say that the teaching of Jesus encouraged going out and making converts by the edge of the sword.

One can find that Muhammad did encourage this and did believe in this. And so you can't criticize a religious system by what its followers do contrary to its founders' instructions. But you can certainly judge a religious system by what its founder did instruct them to do and what they do.

And if killing people to make converts of them or to recover territory from them is wrong, it is certainly wrong for Christians as well as for Muslims, I believe. But the difference is, I don't believe that the Christians were acting in the spirit of Jesus on these occasions. And I think that it has provided some occasion for embarrassment for Christians.

But I personally believe that a lot of the participants really loved God and really felt that they were doing the will of God. And I believe we'll probably see a lot of them in heaven to tell you the truth. But they were definitely very different-minded than I am.

And I think that most of us in our age are. Now, of course, if the Muslims came and invaded Oregon today, I would be... and they took it. I'd be surprised if there weren't Christian Americans in other parts of America who felt they should come and reclaim Oregon for America.

You know, I mean, same kind of crusade mentality. So, I mean, we just have not faced exactly the same things. And I'm not sure that we would react much better.

You know, it's a funny thing because Muhammad taught that if a Muslim dies involved in a jihad, in a holy war, that that's his instant ticket to heaven. And the popes taught the same thing about the crusades. In any case, we don't know what motivated all the people, but we know there were certainly some, no doubt, who were strongly encouraged by the promise of indulgence from the pope that if you died in a crusade or if you went on the crusade, that you'd be guaranteed heaven and your time in purgatory would be shortened.

These are some of the things that were promised. And so it's not really much different than what Muhammad promised his followers. So we can see, you know, the church kind of falling into some of the errors of the Muslims at the same time.

And for the same reason. They were both coveting the same piece of property. It didn't belong to either of them, really, by rights, but they both wanted it.

I mentioned that Frederick II, who was excommunicated by the pope, went down and by diplomacy, he regained Latin control of Jerusalem, but that only lasted for 10 years. It fell to the Egyptian hands in 1244, and it remained under Muslim control until 1917, when it was captured from the Turks by British General Allenby, of course, as part of the whole process of World War I. Okay, enough for the crusades. We have one other thing I want to talk about, and that is an illustration of how strong the pope's authority became.

And it is generally considered that Innocent III is the pope who reigned at the height, at the apex of the power of the papacy. And he was the pope from 1198 to 1216. The reason that he is considered to be the epitome of papal power is because he brought about every king around him under his control.

He did this by the threat of a papal interdict. Now, an interdict is where the pope actually suspends all administration of the sacraments to a people or can be to a whole country. And in Roman Catholic theology, you must take the sacrament to be saved.

You have to take it every week, or even more often. I mean, you can take the mass every day if you're a Catholic, but you have to at least take the mass every week. And there are other sacraments, too, believed to be necessary.

But if the pope would say, okay, all of our priests are going to stop offering the sacraments in Texas, well, then, to Roman Catholics in Texas, that would mean, well, we can't be saved then. And it was the threat of putting whole countries under the interdict that caused the pope to be able to make the kings do whatever he wanted them to do. And Pope Innocent III was the one who did this probably most effectively.

He succeeded in humiliating the kings of France and England, as well as the Holy Roman Emperor, by use of the threat of interdict. He forced Philip II, who was the king of France, to take back his divorced wife. He divorced his wife, and the wife went to the pope to intervene.

And the pope put all of France under the interdict. And so the king was pressured by his subjects and by his own care for his own soul, I guess, to go ahead and submit. And in great humiliation, he took back his wife and obeyed what the pope did.

He set a tremendous precedent for kings obeying what the pope had to say. He also forced King John of England to accept the papal appointee over the sea at Canterbury the same means. There was the king of England wanted to, he had his own selection to be the archbishop of Canterbury.

But the pope had his choice. And the pope actually sent his guy to England, and the king wouldn't receive him. And the pope threatened to put the king of England and the whole island under interdict.

And so the king of England submitted and allowed the pope to put his man in there. So we have, again, another instance of a secular ruler bowing to the pope and doing what he said, instead of what the king himself wanted to do. And he also interfered in the affairs of Germany.

He dictated the imperial succession there. And so really all the major powers of Europe submitted to the pope, not necessarily willingly, but sort of under duress. And that's the kind of papal power that came to be during this period of time.

There are over 16,000 of Pope Innocent III's letters that have survived. And by the reading of them, they are, of course, official documents and so forth. It is evident how thoroughly he was involved in managing the affairs of Europe, both of the church and of society.

In 1215, Pope Innocent III called for the Fourth Lateran Council to settle some doctrinal matters. Several things were decided at that point, many of which have, of course, continued to be official in the Roman Catholic Church. It was decided there that all laypersons must confess to a priest annually, at least annually, and that the doctrine of substantiation was adopted by the church officially there.

The doctrine of substantiation is the doctrine that the elements in the Eucharist, the wafer and the wine, actually become, they're changed in substance. That's why it's called trans-substance, you know, a change of substance, trans-substantiation, that these elements actually become the body and the blood of Jesus. And the need for this is justified by the Roman Catholic theology, by appeal to Jesus' words in John chapter 6, where Jesus said, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.

And they take that quite literally, and therefore they believe that the opportunity to do that comes at the Mass. It was also pretty much adopted the view that, well, the priest is the one who basically does the transaction, that turns the host, as it's called, the wafer, into the body of Christ by blessing it, by saying the Mass. And the priest, of course, then has something that would, you know, to a non-Catholic, we'd say like magical powers, you know, to change something into something it isn't.

And therefore, of course, if you have to eat the body of Jesus and drink his blood to be saved, you have no life in you. And if only the Catholic priest has the power to turn this ordinary wine and cracker into the body and blood of Jesus, and that's the only way you can do it and be saved, it's quite clear how this system would dominate the consciences of all those people who believe it, and how the Pope maintained tremendous rule over the souls of people for a long time. He also, at that council, seven sacraments were defined and officially sanctioned.

Most of them had been practiced earlier in the church, but they were all kind of, they were numbered and defined and officially sanctioned. The Catholic Church to this day still believes in seven sacraments. A sacrament is an outward act that signifies an inward reality.

In the minds of, I think the official position of the Catholics is that grace is conferred through the taking of the sacrament. So it's not just, now when Protestants, you know, when we take the Lord's Supper or we baptize, which are pretty much the only two things that Protestants regularly do that would correspond with any of the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, we don't necessarily teach, although some Protestants do. Let me just say, I don't personally believe that the Bible teaches that the taking of communion confers grace.

Now some people do believe this and some Protestants believe this, but I don't think the Bible teaches this. I don't think that we are given spiritual life by doing that. I'm just one of those people who takes the memorial view of the thing, that it's just a memorial of the body and blood of Jesus.

And likewise with baptism, I'm not of the opinion, although some Protestants do hold the view that baptism confers some kind of benefit, grace too. I believe that both of those acts are merely symbolic, merely memorials. The Catholic Church and some Protestants believe that they do confer some actual grace, some actual spiritual benefit to the person who does them.

And of course the Catholic Church adds five more sacraments besides. The seven sacraments are listed there in your notes. Baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, and of course the Eucharist is a Greek word for thanksgiving, and it's actually a reference to what Protestants might call the Lord's Supper, the communion or something like that, depending on your tradition.

Penance is another of the sacraments. We've studied some of the earlier men who introduced the idea of penance in earlier centuries than this. Extreme unction, which is the anointing of the sick and the saint of last rites over persons who are nearly dead.

Extreme unction finds a scriptural basis in James chapter five. And it's a rather interesting thing because a lot of Protestants and certainly Pentecostal and Charismatic Protestants take James chapter five as almost like a promise of healing. Because it says, is any sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church and let them anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord.

And the prayer of faith shall save the sick and the Lord shall raise him up. And if he has committed sins, they should be forgiven him. Now, as a Charismatic type myself, I was raised thinking of this as a promise of healing to anyone who gets anointed with oil by the elders.

Because, you know, it kind of sounds that way. The prayer of faith shall save the sick and the Lord will raise him up. But the Roman Catholic Church understands it differently.

Not that the prayer of faith will heal the sick. The scripture is the prayer of faith will save the sick and the Lord will raise him up. Does not necessarily have to mean off his sick bed.

That's also the same term that Jesus frequently is. I will raise him up in the last day. So that the Roman Catholic Church, based on that scripture, feels that if a person is sick unto death.

And of course, if they have some unconfessed sin or whatever, that they need to be anointed with oil in the name of the Lord by the clergy. And this will absolve them of sin and guarantee that they'll be raised up in the resurrection of the just. And so this is what is called extreme unction.

That's one of the sacraments in the Catholic doctrine. And then there is holy orders, which has to do with going into a monastery or into the priesthood or some kind of a special calling in ministry. And that is alternate to marriage.

Marriage is also the seventh sacrament. Some people marry, others go into holy orders. In the Roman Catholic Church, you wouldn't be in holy orders if you're married.

And likewise, you wouldn't marry if you're in holy orders. So and so those are not two for the same person, but those are for different callings. All right.

It was also decided to the shame of the Roman Catholic Church. And it's one of the perhaps the embarrassments of the Fourth Lateran Council today to modern Catholics. That it was decided that Jews in Europe had to stay in their ghettos and had to wear distinctive dress, including a badge that showed that they were Jews.

And so it was a tremendous anti-Semitic spirit that was there, very much like Hitler making the Jews wear their armbands or their patches. It was actually patches with the Star of David that Hitler required the Jews in Europe to wear. And the Roman Catholic Church at some points in its history has been very anti-Semitic.

In fact, there's been some who've said that Hitler was very much encouraged by an alliance with the Pope. In 1937, Hitler was commended by the Pope and received a signal because the Catholic Church has historically taken a fairly anti-Semitic approach. Of course, it's not just the Roman Catholic Church at that late time.

Some of the church fathers were not very kind in their speaking about the Jews either. John Chrysostom, for example. Luther, by the way, was not very kind to the Jews either.

Luther had some very unkind things to say about the Jews, like that they should all be driven out of Europe and their synagogues burned to the ground and things like that. So Christianity in Europe has not had a very good track record for being benevolent to the Jews, which is a shameful thing. And the fourth ladder in council, I think, was probably the first time the church actually made it official that the Jews had to live off in their own little ghettos and dress in a distinctive way that gave them identity, that showed that they were Jews.

That brings us up through the first ten of our fifteen. Next time we'll try to finish out the list.