A Tour Of Church History

Andrew Grey leads the adult Sunday School session from 5th July in a 'Tour Of Church History'.

Church History Tour: turning points…

With thanks to Matthew Roberts, Trinity Church York

Our aim: to understand the story of…

“one holy catholic and apostolic church”

against the magnetic pull of the world

Church fathers: defining orthodoxy against many heresies, including

Arianism: Jesus is not God “there was a when he was not”

➔ 325 Council of Nicea → Nicene Creed

Pelagianism: we’re not really sinful

The split between the Greek east… and the Latin west

1053 “filioque” = “and the Son”

The authority of the Pope

The Reformation: Christ alone… or Paganism?

1517 Martin Luther’s 95 Theses Against Indulgences

Scripture… Grace… Faith… Christ… God’s glory… ALONE

1545 Roman Catholic Council of Trent

Different groups within the Reformation church

Radicals, e.g. Anabaptists – rejection of “catholicity”

The “Reformed”: all of church & life to be reformed & ruled by Christ

The “Lutherans”: emphasis on justification

The Church of England:

Hybrid = Reformed / Lutheran / ? Catholic /

Vulnerable to Arminianism free will, God not sovereign

“Latitudinarian” party = don’t worry about beliefs

What is the church? during the Civil War… commonwealth… and restoration

Episcopalians / Presbyterians / Independents / Baptists

Also: radicals Quakers, Ranters etc – listen to inner light, not Scripture

1662 “Great Ejection” of 2,000 Puritan ministers → non-conformists

The importance of experience

1738 John Wesley “strangely warmed” → Methodists

Evangelicals: authority of the Bible, and necessity of conversion

When a man called John Wesley went to a meeting of Christians in

Aldersgate St in London. He was a Church of England clergyman. At this

meeting just near the Barbican, he had an experience in which he said “I

felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for

salvation.” He understood this as his conversion.

Liberalism

1799 Friedrich Schleiermacher “On religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers”

= “the Enlightenment is right… but we can save Christianity by saying it is

all about our feelings.”

- A form of romanticism

- Authority of Scripture replaced by Authority of feelings

- New version of Pelagianism (humans are basically good) and

of Arianism (Jesus is not truly God)

How does God work and speak?

Pentecostal: 2-stage conversion, tongues, prophecy, healing

Diagram: https://www.immanuelbrentwood.org/Publisher/File.aspx?ID=404633

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

When you look at the church in our country and the church around the world, it's a bit like a zoo, isn't it? You go to the zoo, and there is this cacophony of different uh voices, and that sometimes puzzles people, both Christians and folk outside the church. So, how did the Church of Jesus Christ uh end up looking like it did? Now, I asked you to think about and just really quickly list all of the denominations and Christian groupings that you can think of. Just shout things out. Presbyterian, great, good start. Right. Nate, come on, come on. Baptist, somewhere over here. Pentecostal, charismatic, Anglican, charismatic. We can say charismatic and pentecostal, kind of go together. Yep. Lutheran, yep. Lutheran. Brethren, yep.

unknown 1:00

Moravian.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Moravian. Interesting. Very good. Thank you. We're not going to be talking about them today. What was that?

unknown 1:05

Greek Orthodox.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Greek Orthodox? I heard another voice somewhere.

unknown 1:09

Methodist.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Methodist, thank you. Um Church of England. Well, so we've said Anglican. So Anglican began as a word in the 19th century, but that describes the broader family of the Church of England. Yep. What else? Coptic. Thank you. We're not going to talk about the Coptics today. United Reformed Church. Yep. Yep. Anything else? What's that? Congregationalists. I was waiting for someone to say that. So Congregationalist slash independent. Yeah, that's really important. Yeah.

unknown 1:41

Roman Catholic.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Yeah, have we said Roman Catholic? We haven't said Roman Catholic. Thank you. Yeah, Roman Catholic. Brilliant. Okay. My aim this morning is to give a really rapid and simple overview of 2,000 years of church history at a very superficial level. Now, why do this? The Church of Jesus Christ is infinitely precious to the Lord Jesus. And we are part of it. So it's a responsibility on us, I think, to understand this thing that is so precious to the Lord Jesus. Now, almost everything that I'm sharing this morning I have pinched, okay, from Matthew Roberts, who's the Minister of Trinity Church York, to whom I am very, very grateful. Let me pray, and then we will begin. Let's pray. Lord Jesus Christ, you are building your church, and you tell us that the gates of hell will not prevail against her. So we praise and bless you for this body of yours of which we are a part. Please would you teach us, teach our minds, warm up our hearts, that we would be increasingly faithful and wise church members. And we pray in your name. Amen. Amen. Now here on this diagram, basically there is a timeline. Look along the top. From the start of the New Testament church. Imagine year one or year 33. Now, of course, actually, the church really began with God's grace to Adam and Eve after the fall in the Garden of Eden, and then with the promises to Abraham. But we are we're looking at the New Testament church. And on the very far left, you can see a description of the church. Every time we read the Nicene Creed, we read the words, I believe, one holy, Catholic, and apostolic church. So that is the church that the Lord Jesus founded. There is only one of them. She is holy, that is to say, she is set apart for, she is sanctified to God. She belongs to Him. Catholic means in the right meaning of the word that there is a single universal nature to the church. And apostolic, the church is built on the teaching of Christ's apostles. So that is the church that we found that we find in the scriptures. Now, as long as the church has existed, there has been the pull of sin, the world, and the devil to abandon Christ and to believe lies instead. And on the very bottom of the diagram there, uh in red, imagine that being like a magnet pulling the church downwards. And you can see very broadly three phases in history that have exerted a magnetic pull on the church. Firstly, Greek philosophy, then European paganism, and then the Enlightenment. So not everything about Greek philosophy was bad, but it did become very problematic. You'll see the date 410, that's when Rome was sacked by the Goths, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and from then on the dangers to the church looked a little bit different. From 1641, there's another big change. So 1641 is when René Descartes said, I think, therefore, I am. And so we're talking about the Enlightenment here. So it's all about thinking that we can work stuff out starting with ourselves. That is the essence of the enlightenment. Maybe I believe in God, maybe I don't, but I will get there starting with me. And it's got three big principles: individualism, it's all about me. Rationalism, it's all about uh my reason, my thinking, and uh romanticism, that is, it is all about my feelings. So there's obviously plenty more going on, other things that tug at uh the Church of Christ, but those are three great and very important dangers. So, one holy Catholic and apostolic church. Now, even in the New Testament, you can see the pull of the world. Think about the very early uh days of the New Testament. We read even in the pages of the New Testament about false teachers. We read about people who believed that Christ had not come in the flesh. That's likely a Greek idea. Flesh is bad, so how could God come in the flesh? And there are lots of pulls on the church in these early centuries. Then in the year 325, one of the great ecumenical or worldwide councils of the church, and they were tackling a heresy that partly came out of Greek philosophy. Is Jesus God or is he less than God? And they produced the Nicene Creed, which we still read in church to this day. So Jesus is God from God, light from God, very God from very God. He is begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Now it takes a few years to shake down, but then there is a split between those churches that accept Nicaea and those who don't. Now, this branching of the church, and you can see a line that goes, the plummets straight down, that's the Arians, the followers of Arius. So he was famously punched in the face at the Council of Nicaea by uh Nicholas of uh Myra, who became Saint Nicholas, as in Santa Claus. So he was a good guy. Uh probably shouldn't have punched him in the face, but there we go. There's a whole great story about that. Now, the Arians, you see them plummet all the way down below a thick line. Now, that line is the line between people who are Christians, however accurate or inaccurate their understanding of the Christian faith may have been, and those who have completely crossed into non-belief. So Aryans do not think that Jesus is God. The Aryans do not disappear. They were a force for quite a while, and they had spiritual grandchildren. So think for one moment. Which person believed that there is one God, that the Christians had quite a lot of stuff right, but also their Bible had a load of stuff wrong, and Jesus is certainly not God. So which person thought that? Muhammad, exactly. Now, Muhammad, uh Islam, or Muhammadism, as uh Christians for centuries simply called his faith Muhammadism, is actually a Christian heresy. The teaching of Arius and Aryan Christians directly influenced Muhammad. That is where Islam comes from. Our next heresy. The Pelagians. You can see that next line coming down. The Pelagians' strapline really was we are not all that sinful. And they were a terrible influence upon the church. They were opposed by people like Augustine. Now you can see Pelagius, Pelagianism leaving the line and heading downwards. I've not shown it going to any one place in particular, because actually Pelagianism has gone everywhere. It chimes really naturally with the sinful human heart. So Pelagianism was always a curse and still remains a curse in the Church of Christ. Then 410, Rome falls to the Goths. No longer is Greek philosophy quite such a big deal. The church carries on, but with the kind of draw of a slightly different kind of paganism. It remains united as a single organism, but it does also slightly start to broaden again. Now we're kind of accelerating through time. By the way, the timeline on the top is not to scale. So we're thinking now of 700 years from 325 all the way to 1053. During this period, there's a growing tension between the Eastern churches who speak Greek and the Western churches who speak Latin. And this split finally becomes concrete in 1053. And the Eastern Orthodox churches separate off at this point. Now the word Orthodox simply means right teaching. So we are Orthodox with a small O, but it is used specifically of the Eastern Orthodox big O churches from this point. The presenting issue in 1053 was something called the Filioque Clause, a Latin word, which means of the Son. So does the Holy Spirit proceed from or of the Son as well as from the Father? And the West said yes, of course, and the East said no. But actually the real issue in 1053 was to do with accepting the authority of the Pope. The West did, and the East did not. Now, over the next centuries, the Western Church powers on, and it's worth remembering this: this is our church. These are our fathers in the faith. Now, over these 500 years, the Western Church became increasingly called the Catholic Church. It called itself the Catholic Church. They said of itself, we are the universal church. And this church does continue to have lots of really faithful people in it, but it also becomes more and more and more pagan in lots of different ways. Organizationally, it is one, but increasingly its teaching becomes a complete and utter mess. So this is the world of medieval Roman Catholicism. It gets worse and worse till 1517. That's the year when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses against indulgences to the church door at Wurtemberg in Germany. He made this great protest, and not only him, but he led it, this great protest about how the gospel had been polluted. And it leads to the Reformation, these great truths of grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, the glory of God alone. And how do you know it all? Through Scripture alone, rejecting these Roman uh doctrines that have grown up over the previous centuries. You're saved by good works. The Pope can give us truth from God, and there is this massive rupture. One part of the church says, we will reform just as much as we can to get back to the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and the Roman Church says no, and they double down. And that's why I've put that date up there, 1545. And that's really important. The Roman Catholic Church called the Council of Trent, and what they decided, the Tridentine decrees, they still apply in the Roman Church to this day, and they sharply defined what the Roman Church believed against the teaching of the reformers. So, yes, they they still believe in things like the Holy Trinity, but and this is why I've shown the line is going down, plummeting down, things like prayer to saints, Mary is the queen of heaven, uh adding extra books to the Bible, uh, indulgences, purgatory, and so on. Now, these ideas were already floating around in the medieval church, but they were solidified and formalized at the Council of Trent. So, really, the Church of Rome, and just sort of side note, we are part of the Catholic Church. So it's it's very naughty of the Roman Church to say we are the Roman Catholic Church, as in as if uh anyone outside of the Roman Church is outside of the church, and that is actually formally still what the Roman Church believes. But the Church of Rome is defined by its reaction to the Reformation more than anything else. Now, it's worth saying, if you're going to reform the church, how do you know what to do? Uh, up to this point, the church uh in the main only had a Latin New Testament and not a very good translation of the Greek original. But in God's providence, around this time and just before, people had started learning Greek and Hebrew again. Uh, manuscripts had been available from the Greek East after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It fell to the Ottomans, the Muslims, and manuscripts suddenly were shoved into the West, and people like Luther and Calvin and others could learn and then read the Bible in its original languages. So praise God for his providence and the way he shaped history to lead to the Reformation. But the Reformation, it is not just one group. We can really distinguish three or even four groups within the Reformation. There were radicals, uh, radical reformers, and they included the group called the Anabaptists, now called Anabaptists because they believed in baptizing people again, but the Anabaptists were nothing to do with modern Baptists. It's slightly confusing because of the name. They were basically heretical, uh, and they believed one of their most distinguishing features was that everything that came beforehand in the history of the church was wrong. And they, from nowhere, and they uniquely could work out what the Bible meant. And they were dangerously wrong. Now they've largely disappeared from the story of the church, though they did to some extent spawn groups like the Amish in America, you know, big beards, no cars, that sort of thing. They did also spawn along the way a man called Faustus Sachinus, who's extremely bad news in the history of the church. He rejected the Bible in many ways and the god of the Bible. He led to a modern heresy floating around in the church, still called Open Theism. That movement in turn led to the Unitarians. They rejected miracles, they rejected the Trinity, and then the Deists. The Deists, they did things like Start America, uh, among other things. There were good guys who helped shape America, Presbyterians included. They're also deists. That is, God made everything, and then he shoved off. He completely withdrew. So we basically live in a functionally godless universe. And unsurprisingly, their descendants are actually modern atheists. Because it's not, it's not a big step, is it, from an absent God to no god. So don't think that atheism is anything other than a development from a Christian heresy. Now, back to the mainstream Reformation. Right at the top you can see the Reformed. Slightly confusing. Reformed is a subset of Reformation. Those two things are not exactly the same. So imagine a great big circle, Reformation, and within it are various smaller groups, and there is that subset. It's a bit like a fried egg, isn't it? And the yoke is the reformed. The reformed are Christians who consciously stand in the theological tradition of John Calvin and people like him. They would be distinguished from the Lutherans, followers of uh Martin Luther. Now, one difference between Reformed and Lutheran is actually practical, it's geographical. Lutheran churches tend to be found in Germanic and Scandinavian countries. Reformed churches tend to be found in places like Switzerland, France, Holland, and Britain initially, and wherever those countries then exported people around the globe in subsequent centuries. But there are doctrinal differences too, and I'm just going to focus on one difference between Reformed and Lutheran. And it's how big do you think the reform project needs to be? So if you're a Lutheran, you think you really need to reform your understanding of how people are saved. The doctrine of justification by faith. That is the key doctrine. But there is no need to reform, for example, the government of the church. And so Lutherans would carry on with a very similar structure to the Roman church, bishops, archbishops, and so on. The reformed churches, on the other hand, would say, yeah, justification is absolutely critical, but everything must be reformed. All of doctrine, all of church practice, how the church is run, how civil government and the magistrate and kings and princes operate, it is all under the lordship of Christ. But the Reformed and the Lutherans are definitely part of the same church, even though there was sometimes tension between them. Now, I've shown Lutherans going down, not because they've sort of plummeting towards um oblivion and hell, which is really the bottom below the line, but I couldn't think of a way to show them otherwise. Essentially, we need a three-dimensional diagram that shows going down as well as outwards. So if anyone would like to do that for me, that would be super. I want now to focus on uh England and the century running up to 1642. So that was the beginning of the English Civil War. Now, who who started the Church of England?

unknown 18:54

Henry VIII.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

Henry VIII, yes, yes. It started under a bit of a cloud, let's be absolutely honest. Not for the most of pure motives. The Church of England was born under Henry VIII. Uh, eventually, a process of uh reformation happened in it, in God's providence, but that reformation process was only ever incomplete. I've shown it between the Reformed and the Lutheran, because in some ways, doctrinally, the Church of England is a hybrid Reformed and Lutheran Church. It always included some people who wanted to keep some Roman ideas. It was also very vulnerable to something called Arminianism when it came along in the early 1600s, denying that we're saved by God's grace alone. So God's uh so Arminius, that false teacher, he insisted on the centrality of our free decision. We choose. So he rejected the sovereign grace of God. And later on in the Church of England's story, there arose something called the latitudinarian party. So latitude, breadth. It doesn't really matter what you believe or what you do. But at the other end of the spectrum were the Puritans. So the Puritans, you can hear you can hear it in the name, pure, more pure. The church needs to be reformed more. She is not pure enough. Now, these tensions were going on uh between mainstream Church of England and the Puritans when the Civil War broke out in this country in 1642, King versus Parliament, and the king starts to lose, and basically the Church of England becomes a bit of a free-for-all. And what happened in any specific church in this country basically depended on the beliefs of a given local minister. From 1642 to 1662, there is loads and loads of discussion and debate, and lots of different ideas about what is the church. That's probably the main thing that's fought over and contested. What is the church? Remember, too, at the very bottom of the page, that the Enlightenment is now kicking in. A growing emphasis on individual people deciding things, deciding things on our own without God's revelation and help, not just being told what to do by those over us. And that then stretches the church into different views of how the church should work. So, Church of England, follow that line. Episcopalians. So episcopos means bishop. So if you say episcopos while you're brushing your teeth, it sounds like bishop, right? It is government by uh bishops and archbishops, and connected to it, above them, the authority of the king. So king, bishops, church members. Now, lots of people are not happy with that, but they are still actually within one church at this point. Uh, you've got Presbyterians who think you need to have a council of elders to govern the church, because that's what you see in the scriptures. There are independents and congregationalists. Uh, they believe that individual congregations should govern. themselves. And that is the central aspect of church order. There are others who say something slightly different. No, it's actually about the conversion of the individual and being marked by baptism. And so this is the beginning of Baptists. And remember, no connection to Anabaptists. So you've really got these four groups jostling within the one church in England. You do also, you can see a line going down just below Episcopalians, you also get total splinter coming off here. Radicals, groups like the Ranters and the Quakers, later on, the Shakers. Their essence was we do not need the Bible, we do not submit to any external authority because of the inner light within. Take the Quakers, for example. Still to this day, they will sit in a circle in silence and wait for a person to share a new thought that occurs to them. And obviously, this is deeply connected to the new individualism and romanticism of the Enlightenment. And very quickly, these radicals stop being Christian at all. So Quakers, they do not recognize the Trinity, they strongly reject doctrines of sin, the atoning death of Christ on the cross. They might be very nice people, but they are basically no different to modern-day atheists. So the Civil War ends, Parliament wins, King Charles I, he gets his head cut off, and then Oliver Cromwell runs the country until very thoughtlessly he dies in 1658, and the country is plunged into super instability. And so Charles' son is invited back in 1660, Charles II. Now that man was a liar and a fraud. He was a very wicked guy. He promised the Presbyterians that the church would be properly reformed, and so they supported him, and he betrayed them utterly. And then in 1662, he required that every minister in this country swear an oath of loyalty to the Anglican prayer book which he had published and to accept the bishops which were in charge of the church. And it was essentially a power play by the king. He controlled the bishops and he was requiring everyone to submit to him. And 24th of August 1662, sometimes known as Black Bartholomew's Day, 2,000 Puritan ministers were thrown out of the church, the great ejection. So they lost church, they lost the legal ability to pastor, they lost their homes, many were imprisoned. Some carried on regardless, men like John Willis. He was the minister at Ingotstone, the parish church up the road. And that is the church. Well, what did he do? He actually ran an illegal Presbyterian church. He got caught. He wasn't put to death. We know that, because when the act of toleration was passed, he was actually licensed as a Presbyterian minister. And then out of that church, down a few more years, eventually began the congregation, which then met on what we now call New Road. Interesting, isn't it? Everyone who refused to join the Church of England in 1662 was thrown out. It was illegal. But they all organized themselves, the church in England, into these distinct groups. Presbyterians, independents, and Baptists really all descend from the Puritans and adopted clear Reformation ideas, but with different opinions about how the church should be governed. And this is an important word for us to understand. At that moment, in 1662, they all became nonconformists, sometimes called dissenters. So they would not conform to the Church of England on the 24th of August, 1662. I am a nonconformist minister. Now I want us to jump forward to the year 1738, when a man called John Wesley went to a meeting of Christians in Aldersgate Street in London, just near the Barbican. He was a Church of England clergyman. And at that meeting, he wrote about it, he had an experience in which he said, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation. And he understood this as his conversion. Now Wesley was enormously right about something that you must have heartfelt faith in Christ. You personally must repent and believe. And this actually, of course, was a great emphasis of the reformers and the Puritans. And those who agreed with Wesley, at this point in time, they get a new nickname. They get called evangelicals. And we find evangelicals among Presbyterians, Independence, Baptists, and even some in the Church of England. Wesley's followers, though, they get kicked out of the Church of England and they become known as Methodists. Slightly strangely, it's because Wesley, as a young man at university, he had been exceedingly zealous about matters of personal godliness. And this was years before his experience on Aldersgate Street, and he developed a highly methodical approach to holiness. Anyway, the name sort of stuck. Now, the evangelicals, this is a good thing. So our church, it is a Reformed Presbyterian and Evangelical church. But I want you to notice notice that line and that date, 1799. We travel to Germany, and there is an evangelical there, or a pietist, as they called them in Germany, and his name is Friedrich Schleiermacher. And he writes a book called On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. What a telling name. Now, he takes Wesley's thing, you must feel faith in the heart, and he goes a step further. He says, it is feelings alone that matter. Feelings alone are true. Doctrines do not matter. Historical truthfulness does not matter. Feelings alone matter. Now Schleiermacher thought he was saving Christianity. There were cultured despisers of the Christian faith, the Enlightenment rationalists, people who say it is not logical, so I won't believe it. Miracles, resurrection, Trinity, virgin birth, creation, it's all a load of rubbish. And Schleiermacher thinks, you're right. How can I save Christianity? And he says, Well, it is the feelings of being a Christian that is the only thing that we can actually know, and that's the only thing that matters. And this is the obvious beginning of theological liberalism. People who follow Schleiermacher are liberals. They believe that we have freedom to believe and freedom to do whatever we want. And really sadly, there is a kind of connection between evangelicalism and liberalism. People who rightly think, as we do, that what we feel about Christ really does matter, you're actually vulnerable to thinking. And the feelings in my heart are all that matter or all that we can know to be true. Schleermacher has had an immense impact. Basically, what happens is that the liberals down there, they then infect a massive chunk of people in every mainline denomination. And it is an abandoning of the gospel and of anything recognizably Christian. So you will find liberals among Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans, Lutherans. They might say the right words, but they don't actually believe God's truth anymore. And that is why under every denominational label there is today, you will find two different religions. This is why labels are not always very helpful. Now I'm not saying that's the case of every single individual denomination. So something like the IPC is trying very hard to be faithful to what is one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. But you will also find, e.g., in the United States, other denominations that would say, yes, we're Presbyterian too, and we think there's certainly no God as He's presented to us in the Bible. Jesus was just a normal man, and actually very little the Bible has to say is true. But we're still Presbyterian. So you will find faithful and you will find heretical congregationalists and Baptists and Lutherans and Anglicans. Sadly, you will find almost no faithful Methodists in the UK. For the last few years, it's been a requirement of Methodist ministers that they support gay marriage or they leave. It's actually a requirement. The Church of England, to be honest, so Church of England, Episcopalians, Anglicans, the Church of England as a as a label is now really meaningless. It doesn't tell you about what a church within it actually believes. So there are a reformed evangelicals in the Church of England. God be praised, these are our friends. There are also wicked liberals. There are also others whose doctrine and practice is basically Roman. It's worth saying, too, that since World War II, even the better bits of the Church of England have had clergy who are privately Baptist or functionally independent. It's a kind of anarchy. Someone mentioned before the Brethren. What about the Brethren? There's the Brethren. That's a bit of a surprise, if you can see on the chart. They were actually a 19th-century splinter from the Church of England. In time they became much closer to the Baptists. They've always had very many uh faithful Christian people in them. And the impetus behind the Brethren was a desire to get rid of any kind of hierarchy within the church. So no ministers, let alone bishops. What about uh the Pentecostals? One key feature of uh Wesley and his followers was his two-stage experience of conversion. So you're a Christian, and then the Holy Spirit makes you really a Christian, and Wesley added, and you become completely sinless. So his doctrine of perfectionism. Now, Wesley's perfectionism troubled the church for quite a while because it was rubbish and also pastorally very harmful. It largely disappeared, but the two-stage thing did not, and that's actually where Pentecostalism comes from. Mainly from churches established by Methodist missionaries in the United States. The two-stage conversion process was a key feature to which certain other necessary experiences were added, like uh tongues and prophecy and healing. And so there are distinct Pentecostal churches and groups, but you'll also find those emphases, sometimes just under the label charismatic, in many other denominations. Well, there's our chart uh complete. Maybe the million-dollar question that's worth asking is this why does the Lord allow this story to unfold? I don't know if you find yourself thinking that. Why does he allow such differences? The New Testament predicted that false teachers would arise, so we shouldn't be surprised by it. We've we've always meant to distinguish truth from error. It's worth reflecting, too, that near the beginning of the story there was organizational unity in the church for many centuries under Rome, but it was polluted and actually disastrous. What about differences among the faithful? How should we feel about that? On the one hand, a fractured church is a tragedy, it's a genuine tragedy. On the other hand, the clarity that followed the Reformation was actually a blessing. Having different faithful churches is not actually a disaster. It's worth saying, too, that differences on things like church order are unavoidable. A church, a denomination, has to take a view on things like the sacraments or government. They're not first order issues, but they're not indifferent things either. How should we personally respond to something like this? Now, it's wrong to say that we shouldn't care about what people believe. That might be one response. You look at this kind of apparent chaos, and you think, well, isn't it better just to dial down belief? Surely everyone who says that they are Christian is fine. Well, actually, biblically, that's untrue. On the other hand, it is very wrong to despise fellow Christians because they are not like us. Just remember who we are. We are one part of the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. That's why personally, as much as possible, we want to embrace faithful Christians wherever we find them. Especially our brothers and sisters in the Reformed churches. I'm a very happy member of a local preaching group in which there are Church of England, Anglican Mission in England, Independent and Congregationalist Baptist and Presbyterian pastors with different views and a whole bunch of different things. We love each other, we pray for each other, we help each other in ministry. Whilst at the same time, I or they they each minister according to their particular uh convictions. I'm going to stop there. Questions.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

Fascinating, thank you. Is this a red thing? Oh yeah. Well, it can't be that we that be that, but as long as you don't go over into the black line, then you're generally okay.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

So the answer is yes and no. So there is a red line. If you're there, you're not a Christian. You're on the road to eternal damnation. So there is a there is a line between truth and damnable error. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 35:49

And the line below Catholicism.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

Yeah, so Roman Catholicism is a really tricky one to know how to categorize. So if a person believes everything that the Roman Catholic Church teaches, to the exclusion of scriptural truth. And by the way, praise God, there are lots of there are lots of Christians in Roman Catholic churches, loads. But they are Christian despite the distinct teachers of Roman Catholicism. So if you have gone down the road of I am saved by my works, uh my mediator is Mary and the saints, you cannot be saved. So technically, there's still a it is a Christian heresy rather than a non-Christian religion. Um the the stuff near the top, there are sort of I've tried to I've tried to put groups in terms of their logical relationship, not necessarily ranking them.

SPEAKER_01 36:37

That point about being um your 3D, that feeds into that, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 36:42

Thank you. Yes. You've got to imagine it on two three planes, don't you?

SPEAKER_01 36:46

I wonder if between Presbyterian and Lutheran, you you've kind of well, a bit different, there will be various opinions on where the 3D bit goes, but you could argue, I mean you could even argue that probably Luther would have owned the name evangelical, but you you know, so potentially you've got a 3D evangelical sort of later potentially code.

SPEAKER_02 37:17

Presumably they're trying to go all the way back to the internet.

SPEAKER_00 37:22

I must be honest, I don't I don't really know much about such groups. Ah. So we're essentially not knowing much about those groups, I have come across such groups, perhaps under under different names, you bump into them all the way through church history. You bump into people who say everyone before us was wrong. It's incredibly dangerous. So there's plenty of error, but God has preserved his church, and the Bible encourages us to learn from our fathers in the faith. You know, there is a historical stream of which we are a part. So I think for anyone to come along and say, right, draw draw the wipe the slate clean. Everything from I don't know, the close of the canon and the end of the Bible through to now was wrong. We are the first right group. You hear that, it's like, run a mile. I mean, it's lunacy. I mean it's worse than lunacy, it's actually really wicked. It's so dangerous. Yeah, Christadelphians, uh, they are unorthodox, uh, yeah, with respect to things like doctrine of the Trinity, person of Christ, uh, necessity of salvation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's I mean, there are there are in God's mercy you will find strange inconsistencies. Sometimes you're saved by your inconsistency, actually. Um, but yeah, formally the Christadelphians are unorthodox. Last question. Oh, crumbs. Uh the very first Pope. Uh I can't remember the first person. So in the in the early centuries, there was a growing uh emphasis on the church in Rome as the leader of the churches around the known world. There were also other cities, um Alexandria and Constantinople and other places, that and there was a sort of a degree of rivalry somewhere along the line, and I can't quite remember when exactly a bishop of Rome decided I'm a bit more than just a bishop now. I'm afraid I can't quite remember who or when that was. But there was this kind of growing impetus to kind of arrogate power to himself and become a bishop above everyone else. I can't remember, remember who or when, I'm afraid. Church history is so important and it's so encouraging to read. It definitely was not Peter. The Roman Catholic Church would look at Matthew 16, you know, upon this rock I build this church, Peter, and they would say, There, there's our first Pope. No, it's not. The rubbish, absolute rubbish. Um, the church is built on the apostolic word. There is no such thing as um you know the continuity of persons, there is only the continuity of doctrine. So the church is to hand on the doctrine from generation to generation, like in a relay race. It's not a kind of you need an uninterrupted uh line of uh popes. Let me pray. Please ask me other questions. Next week, God willing, we're gonna think about um Eastern Orthodoxy and then the following week Roman Catholicism. That's the plan. So it's just things that are uh actually on the on the up today, and we need to understand why. So let me let me pray. Uh Father, we thank you for your superintendence over the history of your church. We thank you for our fathers and mothers in the faith. Thank you for their faithfulness. We thank you for the martyrs. Uh, we know that the the blood of the martyrs is indeed the seed of the church, and we are blessed and here because of them. Uh we pray for ourselves, uh, asking that we would be faithful, that we would pass on the baton within our church, within our families, uh, passing it on to our children and their children. And we pray that in Jesus' name. Amen.