"I would say that in the minds of most people, [...] most Christians, their understanding of Church history kind of goes like this (and this may be representative of some of you as well): That the Apostle John was put on the isle of Patmos where he received a revelation from the Lord Jesus which he recorded for us, and which constitutes the last book of the New Testament. John then probably was released from Patmos, went back to Ephesus, and died shortly thereafter. And after the death of the Apostle John, Church history fell off a cliff and became Roman Catholic almost instantly, and it existed in this amorphous, dejected, heretical state for essentially the next 1400 years. There was a guy named Augustine or Augustin, and there was a guy named Aquinas -- and you've probably heard those names. There was a guy named Constantine, who debuted in The Da Vinci Code. And outside of that, nothing really happened. It was the Dark Ages, and it was completely enveloped in error and darkness.
Along came Martin Luther, a German monk in the 16th century, who, for reasons unknown to any of us, nailed 95 theses onto a castle door in Germany, sparked a Reformation, saved Church history, and gave us Protestant Evangelicalism. And after him came names like [John Calvin], and [John Knox], and [Charles Spurgeon?], and [Martyn Lloyd Jones], and [John F. MacArthur], and here we are. That's Church history, [... and] we are now part of the reformed conservative Evangelical Protestant Christianity.
Well I've got good news for you! There's a lot of things that happened in that 1500-year period before Martin Luther, and I think you're going to be encouraged over the course of this semester to find that Church history did not just drop off a cliff, that there were faithful men for many generations throughout Church history, really a line of faithful men all the way through to the Reformation, even during the High Middle Ages when things really started to get diluted and deformed even in Roman Catholic theology. So I think you're gonna find these first 1500 years to be fascinating, partly because most of you don't know anything about what happened during this period of time, and partly because you have misconceptions about what happened, and you've been led into thinking that the early Church Fathers [...] were somehow more Roman Catholic than they were Protestant, or that they somehow had twisted the Gospel into thinking that its salvation by works rather than salvation by faith alone. And we're going to spend quite a bit of time debunking that myth, and hopefully introducing to a heritage that belongs to you as a Bible-believing Evangelical Protestant Christian more so than any other branch of the Christian world today. It is your history, and it is not Roman Catholic history."
1:38 - 5:10
"God is at work in history. Conversely, history is a testimony to God's sovereign providence. [...] Think of Church history not as, again, a bunch of dates and dead people. Think of Church history as an exciting unfolding of the tapestry of God's sovereign providence as He fulfills His Gospel promises generation after generation after generation."
5:40-7:10
"It is another misconception about Church history that studying Church history and loving Church history is going to put Church history into a position of competition over and against the authority of the Bible. The reality is the more you study Church history the more you realize that the Church desperately needs an unchanging standard of truth if it is to remain pure and not get embroiled in compromise. So Church history, I've found, actually underscores a commitment to the authority of scripture; it does not compete against it."
7:38 - 8:10
"[...] Church is history is our history as members of the body of Christ. [...] When we study the history of the Church, we are not merely studying people, places, and events; we are the history of the bride of Christ, and we are part of that bride, we are part of the Church. When we study Church history then we come to see who we are, where we've come from, and how we fit into the flow of God's kingdom-work in the world. [...]"
9:41 - 10:17
"[... You] must be careful not to disconnect yourself from Church history. You are part of Church history. We have this temptation think of Church history as everything that happened before us, because we're not part of history, we're living in the Present, we're living in the Modern Age. (Which is kind of ironic, every generation thinks that it's the Modern Age.) The reality is [...] will continue to be part of Church history either until we go home to Heaven or until Christ comes back and Church history ends. [...] But in any case, for right now, we are part of Church history, and understanding our connectedness to those who've come before us is part of having a right perspective on what we are called to do."
11:07 - 12:10
"[...] 1 Peter 1:8 "Though you have not yet seen him, you love him; and though you do not see him now but believe in him, you rejoice greatly with joy inexpressible and full of glory." The New Testament is full of this idea of passing on the truth faithfully from one generation to the next generation. As Paul told Timothy, "Guard that which has been entrusted to you." And we see that principle lived out generation after generation in Church history. The doctrine of God's preservation of the truth, not miraculous preservation, but providential preservation, is illustrated throughout Church history. We see it specifically with the doctrine of canonicity, how the Canon was collected and defended over those first few generations of the history of the Church. [...]"
13:26 - 14:21
"Because, just as we are encouraged by the history of truth, we are also warned by the history of error. The New Testament is full of warnings about false teaching, [...] refuting it in the first century and warning that it would come in the centuries that followed. When we study Church history, we not only learn the history of truth, we also learn the history of error. We see for example where the cults originated, and we have the benefit of seeing orthodoxy defended and the truth being preserved. One of the interesting things that we'll see in the first 500-year period in Church history is really the origination of ancient heresies, almost all of which have been regurgitated in modern-day cults. We'll see Gnosticism, which shows up again, in form, as New Age theology, as Word of Faith theology, as Mormonism, as Christian Science -- Gnosticism's pretty much everywhere because it's the exaltation of human wisdom above the revelation of God. Then we have the legalism of the Judaizers, which shows really in cult groups like the Seventh-Day Adventists, which were very much a cult group when they started. We see the denial of the deity of Christ in the Arians (Arianism), and of course we see that regurgitated not only in Mormonism, but also probably most closely in the modern Jehovah's Witness-Watchtower movement. So learning a little about Church history and the history of error really equips you well when you're at home on a Saturday and your doorbell rings and two guys who look like seminary students but are holding bike helmets are standing there ready to argue with you about something as basic as the deity of Christ. [...] This stuff really is practical, I promise. It's not just learning about the past, it's learning about the past because it has import for the present."
14:24 - 16:26
Foxe's Book of Martyrs
"[...] There are countless illustrations of godly men and women throughout the history of the Church who remained faithful to the Gospel in the midst of persecution, in the midst of temptation, and the potential to compromise. [...] There's a lot of negative examples in Church history as well, and we're going to see some of those negative examples. We're going to see times when men who really knew much better defected to false forms of theology, to heresy; or when they gave in to what they really knew were unbiblical practices, and we're going to see the detrimental ramifications of that level of compromise, and I hope that will serve as a warning to you men as you think about your future ministries."
17:43 - 19:39
"Every Christian to a certain extent is called to be an apologist -- that's what 1 Peter 3:15 says, that we are called to give a 'defense' (the Greek word from which we get the word 'apologetics'), we are called to give a defense for the hope which is in us. And yet specifically Church leaders must be those who are equipped to defend and protect the flock from false teaching. Dr. McArthur in chapel on Tuesday said that part of protecting the sheep means hunting the wolves (I don't know if that's a quote but that's a summary of what he said). And that involves Apologetics. Understanding just a little bit of Church history gives you a huge advantage when it comes to responding to Greek Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Islam, or any of the modern American cults. And modern American cults would be anything from Seventh-Day Adventism to Christian Science to Scientology to Mormonism to Jehovah's Witnesses to the Word of Faith segment of broader Pentacostalism. Knowing just a little but of Church history, you can stand your ground and go toe to toe with any of those groups, because I guarantee you Church history is on your side. Now, the Bible more importantly is on your side, but isn't it nice to know that you don't have to give any ground to those who espouse error, in particular the Roman Catholics. Because it is a common Protestant conception that Church history belongs to the Catholics and the Bible belongs to us. Well, yes, the Bible belongs to us, and Church history also belongs to us. So don't give it to them."
20:46 - 22:28
"[...] I think it's important to realize that we're not the first generation to get it right. So remember that earlier generations of Christians lived much closer to the time of the Apostles, and that we should treat their writings seriously, and that we should take time to learn from them. It's important to realize that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves, our local congregations, or even the Evangelical movement as it exists today. We are part of something that's much bigger than just American Christianity, and I think that's especially important to those of us who were raised here in the United States. Because sometimes we think that Church history and American history are somehow synonymous. They are not. American history represents only 200 years of a 2000-year period of time in which God has been working through the Church.
To realize then forthly that every generation of believers is greatly affected by the time and culture in which they live, this is something that we'll see in Church history, such that they themselves do not realize the effects, and then in turn to ask ourselves what effect our own culture has on our application of Biblical truth. I think this is one of the most helpful things we can learn from Church history. We look at the early Church Fathers and we see them highly influenced by Platinism, and we think Platinism is absolutely and totally ridiculous, 'how in the world could they have allowed themselves to be so influenced by this clearly unbiblical philosophy? We look at the time of the Reformation, and we see some of the violence that characterized even Protestant reformers, and we think 'how in the world could they have allowed themselves to be so violent in their response to those with whom they disagreed?' And then we get to the twenty-first century and we act as through we are completely unbiased and unaffected by our own culture. If Christ tarries for another few generations, future generations of Church historians will look back on our time and they will point to things in our culture and they will say, 'how in the world could the Church have been so influenced by ... fill in the blank?' And it's, I think, a really useful exercise for us to ask ourselves, what are those things in our culture that we have allowed to so influence us that we're actually being unbiblical in these particular areas?'"
22:56 - 25:24
"What the Church is doing today when it tries to reinterpret Genesis 1-11 through a Darwinistic evolutionary paradigm is the exact same thing that guys like Clement of Alexandria and Origen were doing when they said the Bible should be interpreted allegorically in order to fit a Platonic philosophy. It's just that it's not Platinism, it's Aristotelianism, because the materialism that undergirds non-supernatural Darwinistic evolutionary thought is Aristotelian at it's core. So we're involved at integrating Greek philosophy into Christianity; we've just given it the name 'science' rather than the name 'philosophy.'"
25:57 - 26:39
"We all come to history with preconceived ideas, and the reality is that no historian can be entirely objective, it's impossible to be entirely objective. Well that's okay with me, because I'm not going to try to be objective. How's that for stating it upfront? I have a very clear goal in this class, and that is to show how Church history fits with what I believe the Biblical Gospel is and what I believe the Bible proclaims in terms of those priorities that God had in fulfilling the Great Commission. So I'm not really that interested in being purely objective, because pure objectivity is impossible to achieve anyway. So why try? So, we're going to come at Church history from a very particular viewpoint which is to say, [...] We believe that the Bible is our ultimate authority and we believe that the Biblical Gospel is a gospel of faith alone, in Christ alone, based on his work on the cross alone. [With that in mind], we will then interpret Church history[.]"
28:02 - 29:24
"[There] can be a tendency to be a little bit arrogant in our [speaking generally] approach[.] The contemporary temptation always is to think that whatever's happening now is better than what was happening way back when. And we have to approach history with a little bit of humility, recognizing that we have a lot to learn from men and women in the past whom God used mightily for His purposes. And when we sit at their feet, we can really benefit."
29:40 - 30:18
"Please make sure to include Biography as part of your regular reading."
30:46 - 30:53
"I just wanted to make a connection between what we are attempting to do in this class and what you will one day be doing -- maybe some of you already are doing -- in the pulpit. One of the primary, if not the primary, objectives at the Masters Seminary is to train you men how to preach. That preaching starts with interpreting the Word of God correctly, and then being able to take that correct interpretation and put it into a format in which you can deliver it effectively to the people of God through the power of the Spirit so that their lives are changed."
32:35 - 33:11
"For the record, the Protestant reformers themselves -- Luther, Swingley, Calvin, Knox, and others later, Chemnitz and others -- these men were very interested in what the Church Fathers had to say on things. In fact, if you read Calvin's Institutes he quotes from the Church Fathers almost as much as he quotes from the Bible. He quotes from Augustin over 100 times. So if you think that it is impossible or incongruent for a Protestant to also love Church history, then you don't understand really what Protestantism is, because the Protestant Reformation was about recovering Church history, not about abandoning it."
42:15 - 42:56
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