WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.320 I want to begin this session with a story of something that happened to me quite a few years ago now, but it sticks with me. 00:00:06.400 --> 00:00:12.400 It's very powerful in terms of my thinking about my faith and the faith of others. 00:00:12.640 --> 00:00:20.480 I was pastor of a congregation in London, Ontario, Canada, a number of years ago, and we were growing quite rapidly. 00:00:20.640 --> 00:00:30.960 We were a downtown church, so we reached people throughout the core area of the city, but also from the university, and then from many of the suburbs all over London. 00:00:31.120 --> 00:00:41.200 It was a very wonderful time in my pastoral ministry, a growing congregation with many diverse activities and a very diverse congregation. 00:00:42.479 --> 00:00:46.240 Every month we would have a new members' class. 00:00:46.479 --> 00:01:06.719 And at the new members' class, we would have eat a meal together, and then we would tell our stories to one another, and then we would talk about what it means to be a Christian and what it means to belong to this particular congregation and how we would work together to be the body of Christ and express the ministries of Jesus together. 00:01:06.959 --> 00:01:17.439 At one of those times together, a young couple was seated on my left, and I asked them to begin telling their story to the rest of us around the table. 00:01:17.760 --> 00:01:18.719 He started. 00:01:41.040 --> 00:01:50.000 He didn't like his dad's preaching, he didn't like the Christian church, he didn't like religion generally, and as soon as he could, he got away from home. 00:01:50.159 --> 00:01:58.799 He took on several different jobs and then he went back to university to get a degree, and he ended up graduating and going to law school. 00:01:58.959 --> 00:02:08.000 Well, the law school that he chose happened to be in London, and so he was there in our town, and he was midway through his law education. 00:02:08.719 --> 00:02:11.680 He said that he was at a party one night. 00:02:11.840 --> 00:02:22.800 Some of his buddies from the university had invited him to a party at a particular home, and while they were there, crowded house, much going on, much alcohol, many other things going on. 00:02:22.960 --> 00:02:26.240 He saw this beautiful young woman across the room. 00:02:26.479 --> 00:02:35.039 He was attracted to her and he went over to talk with her, and they had a great conversation together, so much so that the rest of the party took place without them. 00:02:35.280 --> 00:02:38.000 They stood there talking together almost all night. 00:02:38.240 --> 00:02:45.439 He was so intrigued by her that he wanted to get together with her again and to get to know her better. 00:02:45.599 --> 00:02:49.120 And so he asked her if he could take her out on a date. 00:02:49.360 --> 00:02:52.960 And then she stopped him cold with a question. 00:02:53.120 --> 00:02:55.360 She said, Are you a Christian? 00:02:55.680 --> 00:03:02.000 Well, he had long ago given up Christianity, and so he was quite uncertain how to answer that. 00:03:02.159 --> 00:03:06.080 But he said honestly, eventually, that no, he had been a Christian. 00:03:06.159 --> 00:03:08.719 His dad was a Baptist minister, but he didn't practice. 00:03:08.800 --> 00:03:13.120 And she said, No, I won't go out with you because I only date Christians. 00:03:13.759 --> 00:03:15.199 And that took him aback. 00:03:15.360 --> 00:03:19.759 He didn't know what to do with that, but he decided that he wanted to get to know her better. 00:03:19.919 --> 00:03:26.319 So he said to her that he would go to church with her and that he would try again. 00:03:26.479 --> 00:03:30.639 And that's when other friends encouraged them to come to our church. 00:03:30.719 --> 00:03:46.159 And that's where the two of them began to uh cement their relationship with one another, eventually having him baptized and making profession of his faith, renewing his Christianity, and then becoming a member of our church now. 00:03:46.240 --> 00:03:47.840 That's what he wanted to do. 00:03:48.560 --> 00:03:58.080 And that was a very interesting story, but then it all paled in comparison to her story because she got to tell her story next. 00:03:58.400 --> 00:04:13.599 She said, My mother was a teenager on the rice fields in Vietnam when the French soldiers came through and they raped her. 00:04:15.599 --> 00:04:17.600 Whoa, where was this going? 00:04:18.480 --> 00:04:42.000 It turns out that her mother was part of a rural family in northern Vietnam, that there were French mercenary soldiers there during the times when France occupied that part of the world, and the soldiers took their turns with the teenager that eventually would get pregnant, and the baby would be this woman. 00:04:42.639 --> 00:05:03.040 Now she said her grandfather, her mother's dad, was so incensed with what had happened that he actually chased down this roving French band of soldiers and demanded from the leader that the soldier, at least one of them, do right by his daughter. 00:05:03.199 --> 00:05:04.480 Well, what did that mean? 00:05:04.720 --> 00:05:13.199 His daughter was pregnant, and this troop leader decided that one of them must look after this young woman. 00:05:13.279 --> 00:05:20.399 And so one of them was forced to marry this girl's mother and take her over to Paris. 00:05:20.720 --> 00:05:33.519 The guy paid for several months of rent on an apartment and left a pregnant teenager in Paris and was never seen by her again. 00:05:34.160 --> 00:05:50.480 So this teenager from Vietnam, who's pregnant, is now trying to finish her pregnancy in Paris, and she gives birth to a daughter, and this daughter is the woman who's now sitting next to the meon by the table. 00:05:51.120 --> 00:05:55.360 And then she goes on to talk about how she came to Christian faith. 00:05:55.600 --> 00:05:57.759 She said that her mother was a Buddhist. 00:05:58.240 --> 00:06:03.519 She said that her mother practiced her Buddhism silently. 00:06:03.680 --> 00:06:22.800 They had a shelf on the wall in the apartment, and there were pictures of parents and grandparents, the ancestors, and a little holder for a stick of incense that she would light each day and allow the wafting of the fumes to be part of prayers to the ancestors. 00:06:23.360 --> 00:06:25.519 And the little girl was very precocious. 00:06:25.839 --> 00:06:28.480 They kind of grew up together, she and her mom. 00:06:28.639 --> 00:06:35.519 And when she was a young girl, she asked her mom if her mom could tell her about God. 00:06:35.680 --> 00:06:39.360 She'd been hearing about God in the streets of Paris. 00:06:39.839 --> 00:06:42.639 And her mom said, No, I don't know God. 00:06:43.199 --> 00:06:49.279 She said, I'm a Buddhist, I make my peace every morning with the ancestors, but I don't know God. 00:06:49.600 --> 00:06:52.560 But she said, there's a building down the street. 00:06:52.639 --> 00:06:57.279 They call it a church, and there are people there who are supposed to know about God. 00:06:58.319 --> 00:07:08.399 So the little girl would go down the street to this big, massive cathedral with its stained glass windows and the light pouring in in multiple colors. 00:07:08.720 --> 00:07:21.120 It was cool, it was holy, it was mystifying, and she would sit there sometimes for hours just thinking about what God must mean. 00:07:21.360 --> 00:07:30.160 And one day while she was sitting there, a man came by dressed in a uniform of sorts, and he said to her, Can I help you? 00:07:30.319 --> 00:07:35.040 And she said to him, Well, I'm trying to figure out who God is. 00:07:35.279 --> 00:07:37.279 And he said, Well, I think I can help you. 00:07:37.439 --> 00:07:39.040 He said, I'm the priest here. 00:07:39.199 --> 00:07:49.519 And he got her enrolled in the parish school, and she took the rest of her education under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church in Paris, France. 00:07:49.759 --> 00:08:08.160 She finished her education and went on to university in Paris, and she excelled in the French language, and she loved talking French and speaking, teaching others, and so she decided that she was going to get her doctorate in the French language, but she wanted to do so somewhere else in the world. 00:08:08.240 --> 00:08:20.319 And so she traveled to Canada because Canada has a large French-speaking population, and she was in her doctoral program getting a degree to teach French in Canada. 00:08:20.560 --> 00:08:30.959 And she was in London, Ontario, and she met this guy who came across the room at a party, and she said to him that she wouldn't date him unless he was a Christian. 00:08:31.199 --> 00:08:35.759 And now they were sitting at the table, becoming members of our congregation. 00:08:36.159 --> 00:08:40.320 He, a lapsed Baptist who was renewing his faith. 00:08:40.559 --> 00:08:49.039 She, from Buddhist background, through tragedies of circumstance, moved to Paris and then came to Ontario, Canada. 00:08:49.440 --> 00:09:01.840 And now they wanted to be members with these people who were from various places in life, and many of them Dutch immigrants after the Second World War at our congregation in London, Ontario. 00:09:02.080 --> 00:09:07.360 But before we went any further, she said to me, she looked me straight in my eyeballs. 00:09:07.600 --> 00:09:10.399 I could feel her driving deep into my soul. 00:09:10.639 --> 00:09:16.879 She said, Before we take one step further in this process, I need to ask you a question. 00:09:17.600 --> 00:09:22.559 She said, My mother is my best friend. 00:09:23.200 --> 00:09:25.840 My mother and I grew up together. 00:09:26.080 --> 00:09:30.559 My mother continues to live in Paris, and my mother is a Buddhist. 00:09:31.279 --> 00:09:32.879 She said, I'm a Christian. 00:09:33.039 --> 00:09:36.320 I believe in Jesus Christ as my savior and Lord. 00:09:36.559 --> 00:09:45.039 But she said, My mother is not a Christian, and she will never become a Christian, but she essentially led me to Christian faith. 00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:52.080 I want to know what you think and what your church thinks about what will happen to my mother when she dies. 00:09:52.399 --> 00:10:36.479 And if you say to me that she's going to hell, I'm leaving right now. 00:10:39.279 --> 00:10:39.839 Whoa. 00:10:40.639 --> 00:10:42.799 What do you do with something like that? 00:10:43.679 --> 00:10:48.079 Well, we've had lively conversations since that time. 00:10:48.319 --> 00:10:52.239 And we can talk about such things again down the road. 00:10:52.479 --> 00:10:59.679 But I want you to reflect for a little bit about some of the things that are part of that very true story in my life. 00:11:00.319 --> 00:11:03.039 For one thing, shifting populations. 00:11:03.279 --> 00:11:14.239 We looked at this last time, where after the time of the Reformation, the ongoing things in Europe, people populations began to shift. 00:11:14.559 --> 00:11:16.639 And exploration began to happen. 00:11:16.719 --> 00:11:23.039 And there was a sense of a growing awareness of a world well beyond the old Holy Roman Empire. 00:11:23.279 --> 00:11:39.199 And there was a new emphasis on personal choice, even in matters of faith, where it's not just that I'm born into a Christian family or I'm born into a particular community and that's my identity, but I have the possibility of choosing. 00:11:39.439 --> 00:11:43.439 Now, all of that emerged out of the Renaissance and the Reformation. 00:11:43.679 --> 00:11:48.239 The Renaissance took place in southern Europe more than Northern Europe. 00:11:48.319 --> 00:12:07.919 It was a kind of Italian rebirth of understanding things, new knowledge, really old knowledge recovered often because of the crusades where people went east and they came back with stuff that were that was part of the old culture of Europe, the old ways of learning and all of that. 00:12:08.079 --> 00:12:22.319 But there was a rebirth in the arts and the sciences and medicine and everything connected with that, leading to the great scientific revolution, where we have the development of telescopes and microscopes. 00:12:22.479 --> 00:12:29.439 We can see things in space and we can see little things that are in our bodies and in our blood and in the water and all of that. 00:12:29.679 --> 00:12:46.959 There was exploration, people sending out ships and rounding South Africa, establishing what would become this fight for the Cape later on between nations in Europe and peoples already living in South what we now know as South Africa. 00:12:47.199 --> 00:13:02.159 There was the spice trade, knowing that somewhere in Indonesia and in India, there was the capacity to grow wonderful spices that really brought flavor to bland food in Europe. 00:13:02.239 --> 00:13:04.239 And so there was a race on for that. 00:13:04.479 --> 00:13:20.719 There was a race to try to find the east by going west, and then suddenly people running into this brand new continent never before seen or heard of by Europeans, turns out to be what we now call the Americas, North and Central and South America. 00:13:20.879 --> 00:13:26.639 And then there was the discovery way down south of this lost continent, Australia. 00:13:26.959 --> 00:13:30.079 All of these things were happening at the same time. 00:13:30.639 --> 00:13:51.679 And what had been the old Europe, largely the Western Roman Empire, now taken over by the Christian Church, and then through the time of the Reformation up North beginning to break down and becoming nationalized and fractionalized, what happened is that there was the 30 Years' War. 00:13:51.919 --> 00:14:06.000 From 1618 till 1648, what was the remnant of the old Holy Roman Empire broke down and completely got splintered into various national groups. 00:14:06.159 --> 00:14:22.319 And these national groups fought with one another for so long, it was part of the old 80 Years' War that broke down the German Empire, and then the 30 Years' War that kind of took different groupings of the Reformation to fight against one another. 00:14:22.559 --> 00:14:33.439 In that 30-year war period, the redivision of national identities took place and the reconfiguration of what Christianity was about took place. 00:14:33.599 --> 00:14:37.439 And there was a growth of just simply despair. 00:14:38.000 --> 00:14:45.120 During that 30-year war period, some say up to 10 million people died. 00:14:45.359 --> 00:14:50.479 And of those, probably only a third were soldiers and combatants. 00:14:50.719 --> 00:15:07.279 The rest died because they were killed in warfare or disease was rampant, the bubonic plague made its reappearance, and there was famine because soldiers went through the countryside again and again, took everything, and people died of starvation. 00:15:07.519 --> 00:15:10.479 It was a horrible and demoralizing time. 00:15:11.039 --> 00:15:26.399 Out of that, really the biggest thing that happened nationally is that Sweden and France were the ones that were least affected negatively by this and gained the most in terms of organizational structure and military. 00:15:26.719 --> 00:15:34.879 France would then initiate its vast empire development and the northern kingdoms would too. 00:15:35.199 --> 00:15:44.959 And France's movement would spur on Spain, the development of Spain, and some searching for new places and England. 00:15:45.120 --> 00:15:50.159 So France and Spain and England tucked in between them is the Netherlands. 00:15:50.319 --> 00:15:56.639 They would go for the spice trade, and Indonesia would become part of their target. 00:15:56.799 --> 00:15:59.039 All of these things were taking place. 00:15:59.599 --> 00:16:25.919 While this expansion was beginning to take place, this global expansion, mainly out of Europe, and people thinking that the rest of the world was theirs to take, particularly Africa and the Americas and Australia, and then also Asia and European nations beginning to divide these up as if they had a right to do that. 00:16:26.159 --> 00:16:32.319 The whole idea of colonialization, colonization, that was beginning to emerge. 00:16:32.559 --> 00:16:44.239 Back home in Europe, what had happened is that there was such a demoralization that people no longer trusted the authorities that had been stable in the past. 00:16:44.399 --> 00:16:51.279 And there were two authorities in particular, they began to point fingers at and say, we cannot trust you. 00:16:51.519 --> 00:16:56.159 One was governments, particularly those ruled by strong people. 00:16:56.399 --> 00:17:00.639 In other words, those who were monarchies with kings and queens. 00:17:00.879 --> 00:17:02.239 We can't trust you anymore. 00:17:02.399 --> 00:17:04.720 You're leading us down a path of destruction. 00:17:04.960 --> 00:17:06.960 And secondly, the church. 00:17:07.279 --> 00:17:20.400 You have built armies within the Holy Roman Empire, and you have taken on territory and you have subjugated peoples and you have locked us blind, and we can't trust you anymore. 00:17:20.559 --> 00:17:30.000 And that led to the big thing that kind of blew up in Europe during the 160 and 1700s, something called the Enlightenment. 00:17:30.160 --> 00:17:39.120 Now there was an enlightenment a long time before, probably about a thousand years before, and that was in Asia. 00:17:40.079 --> 00:17:47.440 It was the enlightenment of Siddhartha Gautama, the one we call the Buddha or the Great One, the Great Soul. 00:17:47.680 --> 00:18:13.039 And here was a rather spoiled rich boy who didn't have much experience beyond the ease and wealth of his confined space in the family, who, through various means, had snuck into the larger world and begun to see people who were ill and people who were dying and people who were without resources and all of that. 00:18:13.200 --> 00:18:42.320 And out of that came his perceptions that led to Buddhism that the experiences of life cannot hold the meaning of life, that meaning can only be found in something transcendent, and it would create the eightfold path by which we divest ourselves of attachments to things that are material in order to find our way back into nirvana, to the merging of the consciousness into the oneness of all things. 00:18:42.640 --> 00:18:47.440 Basically, Buddhism and Hinduism would emerge out of that as well. 00:18:47.759 --> 00:18:50.400 That's the enlightenment of the East. 00:18:50.640 --> 00:18:53.279 But now there's an enlightenment in the West. 00:18:53.680 --> 00:19:02.960 And the enlightenment emerges out of Europe and it comes primarily out of Italy and France at the start, but it quickly spreads to other peoples. 00:19:03.200 --> 00:19:13.279 And the enlightenment amounts to a rejection of powers and force from above and even such things as revelation. 00:19:13.759 --> 00:19:28.240 The idea is that we have seen the powers destroy our communities, our nations, our vast region of Europe, and we have to push back against that. 00:19:28.640 --> 00:19:37.120 And so the age of reason emerged out of the age of technology, where there were new developments in science and all of that. 00:19:37.440 --> 00:19:39.200 Look what we can do. 00:19:39.600 --> 00:19:43.600 And the Enlightenment said we have the capacity to do this. 00:19:43.840 --> 00:19:51.440 It was in some sense triggered by David Hume, along with others in Scotland. 00:19:51.600 --> 00:19:56.240 And David Hume was kind of a radical in his community. 00:19:56.400 --> 00:19:58.799 They say he was a big-bellied guy. 00:19:59.360 --> 00:20:03.519 He ate a lot, and they say he was a wonderful conversationalist. 00:20:03.680 --> 00:20:10.640 Some years ago I was able to sit at a pub table where he supposedly had sat many years before. 00:20:11.039 --> 00:20:13.279 His writings are terribly dry. 00:20:13.440 --> 00:20:16.000 But here's what David Hume did. 00:20:16.320 --> 00:20:21.200 He would talk with people and he would say, So you're a Christian. 00:20:21.519 --> 00:20:23.519 So, hmm, interesting. 00:20:23.680 --> 00:20:25.840 What does your Christianity do for you? 00:20:26.000 --> 00:20:31.039 And they'd talk about, well, praying and worshiping and God and all of that. 00:20:31.279 --> 00:20:38.640 And then he would say to them such things as, well, imagine a neighbor of yours who doesn't believe in God. 00:20:39.039 --> 00:20:42.880 What would be the difference between your life and his life? 00:20:43.360 --> 00:20:48.080 And they would kind of fumble at that one a little bit because that was just kind of incomprehensible. 00:20:48.240 --> 00:20:50.480 Everybody believed in God, didn't they? 00:20:50.720 --> 00:21:04.160 But the more he pressed the issue, the more he tried to get people to understand that it wasn't so much that God and the church and theology and all of that was bad. 00:21:04.480 --> 00:21:06.400 It was just irrelevant. 00:21:06.720 --> 00:21:12.960 One could be the same person believing in God as one could be not believing in God. 00:21:13.279 --> 00:21:15.120 So why believe in God? 00:21:15.279 --> 00:21:16.880 What difference does it make? 00:21:17.120 --> 00:21:25.360 And he wasn't against the church, he wasn't against God, he wasn't against Christianity, he wasn't against religion, but he said it's simply irrelevant. 00:21:25.440 --> 00:21:29.600 And that became sort of the mantra for these Enlightenment thinkers. 00:21:29.840 --> 00:21:41.920 If we're going to talk about stuff that's relevant, we have to talk about stuff we can measure, stuff that we can codify, stuff that we can give a dictionary definition to. 00:21:42.000 --> 00:21:47.519 In fact, the making of encyclopedias really exploded in France during this time. 00:21:47.680 --> 00:21:52.400 There was the Encyclopedia, Diderot and others were the champions of this. 00:21:52.480 --> 00:22:00.720 They wanted to accumulate in printed volumes the entire knowledge base of the entire human race. 00:22:00.880 --> 00:22:01.759 It was really something. 00:22:01.840 --> 00:22:20.160 And that's where the idea of these world book encyclopedias that I read when I was a kid and Encyclopædia Britannica and all of those things, they got their start out of the French who said we need to figure out not who God is, but we need to figure out what we have the capacity for doing. 00:22:20.640 --> 00:22:23.680 And that led to a couple of other things. 00:22:23.840 --> 00:22:34.640 There was in Europe a growing sense that while there may be value in religion, it was mainly valuable in teaching ethics and morality. 00:22:34.960 --> 00:22:39.279 And Jesus himself was certainly a great moral teacher. 00:22:39.840 --> 00:22:42.560 And his ideas, they made sense. 00:22:42.880 --> 00:22:46.560 Do unto others that which you would have done unto you. 00:22:46.960 --> 00:22:48.880 Love others, care for others. 00:22:49.039 --> 00:22:51.759 That seems to be a good thing to do. 00:22:52.320 --> 00:23:08.640 But they also began to push back against things like miracles and resurrections from the dead and prayer being somehow effective in changing the mind of God and the affairs of human beings. 00:23:08.880 --> 00:23:16.640 And it really pushed toward a kind of deism where we believe generally that there must be a creator out there. 00:23:16.799 --> 00:23:19.039 I mean, look at the world we live in. 00:23:19.279 --> 00:23:27.759 It's got to be something that has some planning, and we ought to know the instructor's manual in order to live well. 00:23:28.080 --> 00:23:30.000 But why do we need to talk about God? 00:23:30.160 --> 00:23:31.600 Isn't that kind of irrelevant? 00:23:31.759 --> 00:23:59.759 And so Jesus even was understood more and more as a very wise teacher of the caliber and level of Socrates and others of the Greeks, and someone who was particularly perceptive about things, and we do well to follow his teachings, but he wasn't divine and he didn't do miracles and he didn't get up out of the grave on Easter. 00:23:59.920 --> 00:24:09.039 All of that was stuff that his followers kind of heaped on his legacy and turned into this myth of Jesus. 00:24:09.600 --> 00:24:18.960 Well, here's where the church is going because it has participated in the power machinations of the recent struggles. 00:24:19.120 --> 00:24:22.640 The church has become part of the enemy of humankind. 00:24:22.880 --> 00:24:26.640 We need to get back to Jesus and the simplicity of teachings. 00:24:26.799 --> 00:24:32.400 And so the Enlightenment wanted to take religion out of the mix. 00:24:32.640 --> 00:24:38.480 Let's get back to being humans, and we know we've got it in us to be the best we can be. 00:24:38.720 --> 00:24:46.240 So the Enlightenment began to reconceptualize a world in which humans can do awesome things. 00:24:46.480 --> 00:24:51.920 They need principles to guide them, and those principles are the wisdom of the ages. 00:24:52.240 --> 00:24:56.320 We can talk about gods, but gods are essentially irrelevant. 00:24:56.400 --> 00:25:08.720 And so deism is there, the idea that there must have been some creator spirit someplace that made this thing, but now it kind of runs on its own like a pocket watch. 00:25:08.880 --> 00:25:13.680 Maybe sometimes it needs to be wound up again, but basically it runs itself. 00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:15.519 We run ourselves. 00:25:15.840 --> 00:25:19.600 We are the vital answer to what humankind needs. 00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:29.200 This would ultimately lead to the French Revolution, which was the most profound expression of moving against all authorities. 00:25:29.360 --> 00:25:33.840 The two major authorities were the state and the church. 00:25:34.000 --> 00:25:46.640 And the French Revolution tried to overturn both of those systematically to the extent that it no longer allowed for monks and nuns to wear different clothing. 00:25:46.799 --> 00:25:50.320 It no longer allowed for tithing to take place. 00:25:50.560 --> 00:25:53.759 It confiscated all of the wealth of the church. 00:25:54.000 --> 00:25:58.160 It turned all of the church properties into state properties. 00:25:58.400 --> 00:26:07.600 It even set up an image of reason as the center of whatever future worship of humans ought to be. 00:26:08.160 --> 00:26:12.240 And the French Revolution seemed to be going in a good direction. 00:26:12.480 --> 00:26:20.400 In fact, in its movement in that direction, it vastly influenced what would become the United States of America. 00:26:20.560 --> 00:26:22.240 There was a kind of parallel there. 00:26:22.400 --> 00:26:38.880 You see 1776 as the date of the Declaration of Independence of the British colonies from the British machine, and you see 1789, the French Revolution, which creates this new nation-state of France, modern France. 00:26:39.120 --> 00:26:47.039 In both cases, the effects or the place of religion in society is marginalized. 00:26:47.279 --> 00:27:00.560 In the United States, it isn't taken out of the picture, but church and state are separated, and often seemingly for the good of both of them, that each of them can function in an independent way. 00:27:00.720 --> 00:27:05.039 And in France, it's basically outlawed altogether for a time. 00:27:05.279 --> 00:27:13.519 Well, what we'll find in both situations is that both will find quickly that they've lost something essential to their identities. 00:27:13.759 --> 00:27:20.799 And in France, you'll have this resurgence of domination by both church and state at the time of Napoleon. 00:27:21.039 --> 00:27:26.960 Napoleon will basically sweep through the French Republic and return it to a monarchy. 00:27:27.120 --> 00:27:31.920 And he will reinstate all things that are related to the Roman Catholic Church. 00:27:32.160 --> 00:27:35.759 And in the United States, there will be something similar taking place. 00:27:36.080 --> 00:27:58.240 In this case, it's called the Great Awakening, and there will be a second Great Awakening, and the proliferation of something called Methodism and the Methodist Church, which, although it starts in part in England, it really takes hold in the United States, leading to really vast reconfiguration of what Christianity is all about. 00:27:59.120 --> 00:28:09.279 What took place in Europe is that there came to a quick halt, this glorification of human reason following the French Revolution. 00:28:09.600 --> 00:28:27.519 For one thing, when we had no restraints from some kind of overlord authority, people went wacky in what they did, and mob madness ensued, to the point where you get a different ruler in and more heads are taken off by the guillotine. 00:28:27.759 --> 00:28:31.759 It didn't really depend on any sense or common sense anymore. 00:28:31.840 --> 00:28:41.120 It just depended on who was in charge, and there's something evil within all of us that begins to seemingly ruin society and lives around us. 00:28:41.360 --> 00:28:51.039 And in the French Revolution, unzippered from any sense of authority either from kings or from the church, society became kind of a mess. 00:28:51.200 --> 00:28:59.039 And that's where Napoleon could step in and try to reconfigure the old French society in a bit of a different way. 00:28:59.680 --> 00:29:10.080 We also had some of this taking place as the different denominations began to appear out of the old Roman Catholic expression of Christianity. 00:29:10.320 --> 00:29:35.279 Particularly, as I mentioned last time, the difference between the episcopal trust of hierarchy or the other form of congregationalism where the truth of Christianity is rooted in me, and then in between, somewhere, this Reformed and Presbyterian idea that the presence of Jesus is found in the gathered community of the congregation. 00:29:35.680 --> 00:29:45.600 And these three different forms of church understanding and the place of Jesus still in society began to fight with one another. 00:29:45.840 --> 00:29:50.160 That was part of the 30 Years' War and the wars beyond that. 00:29:50.480 --> 00:30:01.759 But in this movement against hierarchical authority, there was also the movement of nation-state sovereignty. 00:30:02.080 --> 00:30:04.480 We don't need the Holy Roman Empire. 00:30:04.640 --> 00:30:22.160 We are Germans, or we are Spanish, or we are French, and we have the right of self-determination, which led, along with that, to church groups saying, we're not part of that beastly large pseudo or false church. 00:30:22.400 --> 00:30:23.680 We are pure. 00:30:24.080 --> 00:30:43.039 It led to the idea of piety, that church is no longer resident in the structures of the big thing, that church is found in individual commitments to Jesus and our associations with one another. 00:30:43.360 --> 00:31:01.440 Piety took root in the Moravians, in the legacy of the Anabaptists who already had pushed back against the big Roman Catholic expression of the church, a sense that we aren't automatically born into the church. 00:31:01.600 --> 00:31:03.759 We need to make a confession. 00:31:04.080 --> 00:31:06.320 We need to have our lives changed. 00:31:06.480 --> 00:31:10.960 We need to become baptized as believers into the community. 00:31:11.200 --> 00:31:13.680 And then we have to hold one another accountable. 00:31:13.840 --> 00:31:20.799 We have to live separated lives with strict restrictions on things that might harm us. 00:31:21.039 --> 00:31:26.320 No alcohol and no playing cards and no participation in the military. 00:31:26.560 --> 00:31:32.799 And we live in separated communities away from the others who are bad influences on us. 00:31:33.039 --> 00:31:40.320 And that led to Anabaptist communities, the Mennonites and the Hutterites and the Amish. 00:31:40.480 --> 00:31:50.880 But it also led to groups that still remain in society, but now constantly challenged people that they were not automatically Christians. 00:31:51.039 --> 00:32:00.560 They were Christians rather on the basis of understanding repentance, that their lives were wicked and they needed to seek forgiveness. 00:32:00.720 --> 00:32:04.000 They needed to go through a conversion experience. 00:32:04.160 --> 00:32:16.240 And then they, separated from family, separated from friends, separated from culture and society, they individually had a new kind of relationship with God. 00:32:16.640 --> 00:32:24.240 And this would become part of the background of two individuals and kind of the movements that emerged out of them. 00:32:24.480 --> 00:32:28.240 One was a young theologian in the Netherlands. 00:32:28.400 --> 00:32:31.360 His name was Jacob Harmanzoon. 00:32:31.440 --> 00:32:35.680 He called himself Arminius, and he was a bright lad. 00:32:35.920 --> 00:32:39.360 His dad died before he ever knew him. 00:32:39.600 --> 00:32:50.799 His dad was actually a maker of weapons during this whole revolution of the communities where armaments became the kind of thing you could make a lot of money on. 00:32:51.039 --> 00:33:07.840 But his dad died when he was just a baby, and his mom died when he was just a couple of years old, and he was taken over into several different families and eventually raised by a kind of pious priest who had leanings toward the Reformation. 00:33:08.240 --> 00:33:17.120 In the end, he would go to school, he would take his degree in the liberal arts, and he was really kind of bent toward theology in the church. 00:33:17.200 --> 00:33:21.200 He was a very wonderful person that everybody liked. 00:33:21.519 --> 00:33:25.279 In the Netherlands, the main church was the Reformed Church. 00:33:25.360 --> 00:33:30.320 And so the people all kind of had a hand in determining how this young lad would go on. 00:33:30.400 --> 00:33:38.640 And he was, his education was paid for, and he was sent to Theodore Beza up in Geneva to learn the things of John Calvin. 00:33:38.880 --> 00:33:42.720 Calvin had died, Beza had become his replacement there. 00:33:42.960 --> 00:33:58.240 And one of the things that was going on is that Theodore Beza had taken the philosophy of Aristotle, his ability to kind of categorize everything, and applied that same kind of logic to theology. 00:33:58.960 --> 00:34:03.519 So Beza started talking about the different branches of theology. 00:34:03.680 --> 00:34:16.320 We know them today as the loci, the doctrine of God, the doctrine of humankind, anthropology, the doctrine of salvation, the doctrine of Christ, the doctrine of the church, and the doctrine of last things. 00:34:17.039 --> 00:34:20.799 Not a bad splitting of all of these things. 00:34:21.199 --> 00:34:29.920 But he went further and he began to try to define the manner in which the process of salvation occurs. 00:34:30.880 --> 00:34:37.920 Obviously, God is holy and perfect, and just as obviously we are imperfect. 00:34:38.400 --> 00:34:54.159 How did we get to this point where the holy God, who is in control of everything, is in charge of a world where those who are made in the image of God don't seem to act like God and seem to be very bad children? 00:34:54.319 --> 00:34:55.679 How did that happen? 00:34:55.919 --> 00:35:15.279 And they began, Theodore Bays and others, to try to figure out in what ordering it took place that God would allow such a thing, and also whether some of the decrees of God in the ordering of the manner in which evil entered this world could have happened in a different way. 00:35:15.359 --> 00:35:28.799 And so there were infralapsarians and supralapsarians, and people were arguing about whether one could defy the will of God and whether one had personal choice in these matters. 00:35:29.039 --> 00:35:42.239 And the upshot of it all was that this young pastor in training, he was asked to write a strong defense of the decrees of God as taught by Theodore Beza. 00:35:43.039 --> 00:35:45.279 He was a good pastor. 00:35:45.519 --> 00:35:48.079 He was a warm and caring pastor. 00:35:48.159 --> 00:35:51.519 He preached sermons that people actually listened to. 00:35:51.839 --> 00:35:54.879 He helped people transform their lives. 00:35:55.119 --> 00:35:57.519 He cared for the poor and the sick. 00:35:57.759 --> 00:36:13.599 He was a good pastor, but he could not bring himself to finishing that rebuttal against or this defense of Theodore Bayes' theology with regard to predestination and election. 00:36:13.839 --> 00:36:17.199 And that created some consternation in the Dutch community. 00:36:17.359 --> 00:36:23.440 And people were trying to say, you know, he's right, he's wrong, and they began to polarize on either side of that. 00:36:23.599 --> 00:36:30.239 And one popular guy stood up, and he was an antagonistic of Arminius, his name was Gomaris. 00:36:30.399 --> 00:36:37.759 Things led back and forth, and it actually split the entire Dutch population, for or against. 00:36:37.919 --> 00:36:58.639 Now, in the process, Jacob Arminius died, but the outcome became a grand synod, a gathering of church leaders, which produced the canons of Dort, or the canons of Dortrecht, in which there was an attempt to define both the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of humans. 00:36:59.279 --> 00:37:05.440 It's never been completely clear in anybody's mind what that relationship is. 00:37:05.599 --> 00:37:07.519 I have my own thoughts about that. 00:37:07.679 --> 00:37:12.480 I think that, for instance, I am a product of the genetic codes of my parents. 00:37:12.639 --> 00:37:15.519 In that way, I am a determined creature. 00:37:15.759 --> 00:37:25.359 At the same time, the very traits that my parents gave to me, I have used in my own unique way, and that's my own free will. 00:37:25.759 --> 00:37:31.440 So both come together in each of our lives, but theologically we begin to argue about that. 00:37:31.519 --> 00:37:46.239 And that led to the two major groups within Protestant Christianity and even spilled over into lingering parts of Roman Catholicism in terms of sovereignty of God and free will or free choice by humankind. 00:37:46.639 --> 00:38:05.279 Now we know them today as, in their broad terms, Calvinism and Arminianism, neither of which are good terms because Calvin wasn't as Calvinistic as some of the hyper-Calvinists are, and Arminian was probably never what an Arminian is called today. 00:38:06.159 --> 00:38:31.039 But this began to filter into other communities because the church in England, which was that kind of social revolution, this social reformation that didn't really have a clear sense of its purpose, it began to pay attention to what was going on in the Netherlands with regard to these conversations about theology within Calvinist communities. 00:38:31.359 --> 00:38:43.759 And it spilled over into England, particularly in the pious preaching of John Wesley, along with the great music of his brother Charles Wesley. 00:38:44.000 --> 00:38:46.799 They were born into a large family. 00:38:46.960 --> 00:38:50.480 Their dad was a high church Anglican pastor. 00:38:50.719 --> 00:38:57.039 Their mom was a dissenter or a low church Anglican, more of a free spirit. 00:38:57.519 --> 00:39:01.119 They had 15 children together, the parents did. 00:39:01.279 --> 00:39:02.879 Only nine of them survived. 00:39:03.039 --> 00:39:12.399 And then when John was only five years old, there was a fire that caught to the rectory attached to the church, and the place burned down. 00:39:12.639 --> 00:39:18.000 And one of John Wesley's brothers died in that fire. 00:39:18.239 --> 00:39:32.719 And John himself was snatched out of the fire at the last instance by two neighbors, one standing on the other's shoulders and reaching toward a window and just grabbing him out before the whole place collapsed in flames. 00:39:32.960 --> 00:39:36.000 And that stuck with John for the rest of his life. 00:39:36.239 --> 00:39:38.639 He had been snatched from the fires. 00:39:38.799 --> 00:39:51.039 And he began to think about the way in which we as humans are often snatched from the fires of ruin and self-destruction and how God, in God's grace, makes it possible. 00:39:51.359 --> 00:39:59.839 But we still have to choose to get out of the fire, and we still have to choose to jump into the hands of those who would try to save us. 00:40:00.079 --> 00:40:08.799 And so within the British context, this Calvinism and Arminiism controversy, is God totally in charge? 00:40:09.039 --> 00:40:10.559 Do we have free will? 00:40:10.799 --> 00:40:13.759 began to emerge as the Wesleyan movement. 00:40:13.919 --> 00:40:25.039 Now, John and Charles Wesley, in their time of study at Oxford University, they practiced their faith and they had a real and vibrant and vital faith. 00:40:25.199 --> 00:40:37.039 They had a structured theological knowledge from their dad, who was a high church Anglican, and they had a warmth of passion and transformation from their mom, who was a low church Anglican. 00:40:37.440 --> 00:40:44.639 But they practiced their piety with such regularity that people began to call them kind of a dirty word. 00:40:44.799 --> 00:40:52.399 They called them the Methodists, because they had such a regular method for the practices of their faith. 00:40:52.719 --> 00:40:56.960 They weren't entirely sold out to evangelism yet. 00:40:57.119 --> 00:41:05.839 That would happen later when, after finishing his pastoral education, John Wesley moved to North America, to Savannah, Georgia. 00:41:06.079 --> 00:41:08.159 Tried to be a pastor for two years. 00:41:08.319 --> 00:41:10.639 It did not work out well for him. 00:41:10.879 --> 00:41:20.799 And he was on the boat back to England when there was a storm on the seas, and everybody was sure they were going to be drowned, kind of like what happened with Jonah in the Old Testament. 00:41:21.039 --> 00:41:26.159 And the only people who were not at all afraid were this group of Moravians. 00:41:26.239 --> 00:41:29.599 They were the children of the Anabaptists. 00:41:29.839 --> 00:41:38.719 And they sat on deck of the ship while the ship was being torn, tossed back and forth, and they were singing hymns and offering prayers to God. 00:41:39.440 --> 00:41:51.359 And John was so amazed at the calmness of their life and talked with them and found that it arose from a deep sense of confidence that God was still in charge. 00:41:51.679 --> 00:42:03.519 And that became the start for John and Charles Wesley of a revival movement in which they began to pray for God to fill them with that kind of confidence. 00:42:03.759 --> 00:42:16.799 It would lead eventually to them not wanting to be removed from the Anglican church, but to be a Methodist revival movement in the Anglican church. 00:42:16.960 --> 00:42:22.559 And it really took hold when Methodist evangelists came to North America. 00:42:22.639 --> 00:42:27.440 And for a while, Methodism became the church of the frontier. 00:42:27.599 --> 00:42:33.119 It was the church that moved along with the expanding frontiers of the United States. 00:42:33.359 --> 00:42:38.960 But it was only symbolic of things that were taking place in Europe and other countries too. 00:42:39.279 --> 00:43:03.839 This sense that the real church doesn't happen in the big structures, that piety and personal attachment to God are the things that transcend even the logic of the Enlightenment, and that we need to recover a sense of private religion in the face of a kind of pagan and enlightened world. 00:43:04.079 --> 00:43:11.199 It kind of splintered Christian faith from public vocation and public structures. 00:43:11.359 --> 00:43:30.719 And so we splintered the church into congregations and denominations, often calling for people over against the godlessness of the enlightened world, where humans are totally in charge, to be themselves pious and godly. 00:43:31.119 --> 00:43:39.759 It would take many shapes in many different communions, and across the world, there would be this growing sense of revivalism. 00:43:40.000 --> 00:43:44.399 In the United States, it took the form of the first Great Awakening. 00:43:44.480 --> 00:43:48.079 Now, why a Great Awakening rather than a revival? 00:43:48.719 --> 00:44:16.319 Because New England, which was settled primarily by Puritans from Old England, people who were kind of displaced from the status quo, from the British society and from the big Anglican church, they became those who wanted to live pure lives and they wanted to establish a new community where God would be totally in charge. 00:44:16.960 --> 00:44:18.079 Kind of didn't work. 00:44:18.159 --> 00:44:21.279 It worked for a little while, maybe, but then it kind of slipped away. 00:44:21.440 --> 00:44:32.079 And now we were getting into second and third and fourth generation Puritans, and the kids were no longer participating in the life of the church, and the grandkids weren't being baptized. 00:44:32.239 --> 00:44:49.039 And then the preachers came through, and instead of trying to turn them from hedonism, from Idolatry to Christianity, they tried to awaken within them the divine presence that was always there. 00:44:49.119 --> 00:44:57.759 So the Great Awakening was an attempt to renew the Puritan commitments to God in the forms of the old church structures. 00:44:58.000 --> 00:44:59.440 It worked and it didn't work. 00:44:59.599 --> 00:45:05.519 What worked better was when the Methodists came through, and that was more in the south of the United States. 00:45:05.679 --> 00:45:09.359 And they preached you've got to turn from the world to Jesus. 00:45:09.519 --> 00:45:13.679 And so there was this dichotomy between what was secular and what was sacred. 00:45:13.839 --> 00:45:21.039 And we were all too much entangled in the secular world, and we had to become part of the sacred world. 00:45:21.519 --> 00:45:43.039 This kind of revivalism would set the stage for a lot of what American religion would be about, and American religion would then be transported back to Europe and to Africa and to Asia in many of the expressions of Christianity that would follow the expansion of colonialism and the great mission movements that we'll be talking about in the next session. 00:45:43.279 --> 00:46:23.279 But for now, what's going on is that the church is being reconfigured by a new sense of the enlightened capacities to push back against authoritative structures like the church and the government to create democratic institutions, the idea of the social compact where laws are not divinely dictated, but they are decisions made by meaningful adults who form compacts and democratic societies and representative republics and all of that kind of thing. 00:46:23.519 --> 00:46:45.519 And similarly, in the church, that we have to push back against a large Roman Catholic old Holy Roman Empire imposition with all of its forces upon us, and we have to reconfigure the church from the ground up in terms of personal decision making and personal piety. 00:46:45.759 --> 00:46:55.039 So we have the revival movements and we have the Great Awakening movements, which increasingly take on the character of what we will know as Arminianism. 00:46:55.199 --> 00:46:57.199 That is, you have a choice. 00:46:57.359 --> 00:46:58.559 You can make the choice. 00:46:58.799 --> 00:47:01.440 God has done the work, but you have to decide. 00:47:01.679 --> 00:47:05.440 God gets a vote, the devil gets a vote, you cast the winning vote. 00:47:05.519 --> 00:47:08.559 You can go this way, you can go this way, but it's up to you. 00:47:08.719 --> 00:47:10.000 You make the choice. 00:47:10.239 --> 00:47:37.199 And also the idea that the church is not so much a hierarchy in which the community of Jesus lives in fellowship with the Spirit of Jesus, but that the Christian church is now an assembly, an association of individuals who have made testimony about their faith, have become baptized, and now are sort of democratic stakeholders in these assemblies and these congregations. 00:47:37.359 --> 00:47:40.719 It goes from the bottom up rather than the top down. 00:47:41.599 --> 00:47:53.039 This is why I think that Presbyterian and Reformed church government is still a genius place that is neither of those two opposite ends. 00:47:53.279 --> 00:48:04.480 But it recognizes that the primary way in which Jesus functions in the world and in the church today is through the multiplicity of congregations where everybody matters. 00:48:04.639 --> 00:48:11.839 And it's not just a thing where I choose to be or I choose not to be, but there's something bigger that holds us together. 00:48:11.919 --> 00:48:13.359 It's body life. 00:48:13.599 --> 00:48:28.399 And that's part of theology, but that's sort of the middle ground and not really the middle ground, what Calvin would call the golden mean, where we don't go to the extremes of either individualism or corporate tyranny. 00:48:28.559 --> 00:48:33.199 Both of those are the extremes that undermine effective faith. 00:48:33.359 --> 00:48:39.839 And here's where people live within the context of the messiness of the body of Jesus. 00:48:40.079 --> 00:48:42.239 But that's another matter altogether. 00:48:42.480 --> 00:49:06.639 What we have coming out of the Enlightenment is the idea that the old structures have disappeared, that people have capacities and we have free will and free choice, and we can move even beyond our initial communities of family and residence and take our stake and choose our way in a much larger world. 00:49:06.799 --> 00:49:13.279 And this is what I was experiencing when I told you that story of my time in London, Ontario. 00:49:13.519 --> 00:49:44.079 We were talking with people from various parts of the world who were becoming part of a congregation that cared and that sought to be the embodiment of Jesus in the London community, in the London society, that had the ability to connect and hold to one another while having very different experiences of life and even the rejection of faith, but coming instead to reclaim faith in a new way. 00:49:44.559 --> 00:50:11.359 What will happen in the church is two things from this point, and that's where our last session will go: that out of Europe and out of the United States, in the dominance of their cultural expansion and their amassing of wealth and power, they will be the leaders in taking over the rest of the world, the rest of earthly territory on planet Earth. 00:50:11.440 --> 00:50:59.759 And they will carve it up and divide it, and they will begin to rule it as communities, political, military communities, commercial communities, but on the backside of that will go devout Christians who will say, somehow what we're doing is not right, and this thing has to be angled in a different direction, and that will be the great mission movement, which will seek to take this massive energy of overlordship in a new way into a resurgence of the communities of faith that we now know encompass the entire globe and all of the places where Europeans and Americans have unfortunately, at one time or another, claimed ownership of other peoples. 00:51:00.000 --> 00:51:06.079 There will be the movement of slavery and the abolition movement that comes out of that. 00:51:06.239 --> 00:51:10.960 There will be the idea of creationism versus evolutionism. 00:51:11.199 --> 00:51:35.599 All of that comes in our last time together, our last of these sessions, in which we'll see how these forces that begin to split during the time of the Enlightenment now take on new roles in their opposition to one another and in their formation of Christian identity, Christian societies, and the expression of Christian life in congregations and denominations. 00:51:35.839 --> 00:51:39.440 But the rest of that story lingers until our final session.