500: Sola Scriptura

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Father in heaven what a blessing it is to be in this church father the prayer of this pastor's heart and of this congregation's heart is that you would use our humble seaside church here to make a difference not just in our local community but all around the world father may your spirit come into these messages may your spirit come into the hearts of the people who are here so that we will see a really synergistic thing happening father a powerful growing reverberating local ministry that is also a global ministry in terms of its reach father you have brought us on a journey it's been a three-year long journey and here we are and we are thrilled to be clay in your hands putty in your hands malleable so father we give you full permission to shape to mold to craft if need be to rebuke and to correct us but father whatever you do with us just make us into vessels of honor make us into people that you can use for the up building of your kingdom and father now as we turn our attention to Scripture and especially as we think today about history and the role scripture has played in history may we have our understanding of what it means to be Christians and what it means to be Protestant Christians increased be with us now father as we open the text of Scripture and as we open the pages of history may you open us is our prayer in Jesus name let everyone say amen amen all right well we are still just barely in the year 2017 and who knows what significant event we are celebrating the 500th anniversary of ok very good the Reformation Protestant Reformation what we're going to talk about today are the two words that you see there on your screen Sola scriptura by a raising of hands how many people know when they hear that latin phrase how many know what that means raise your hands nice and high very good Sola scriptura and you'll notice that there's a prefix here 500 and the reason is we are celebrating from 1517 to 2017 the 500 year anniversary of really the catalyzing of the Protestant Reformation when a young Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther nailed his theses of protest to a cathedral door in Vinton burg Germany and we're gonna talk about that today Sola scriptura now before we get actually into the historical sweep and most of what we're gonna do today is going to be history we're gonna be taking a look at the flow of history and not just history as it has happened but history as it was predicted history is what did I say everyone as it was predicted or as it was prophesied in Scripture so notice here on the screen tragically numerous biblical prophecies and passages anticipate a widespread what's that next word there a widespread apostasy in the Christian era now that word apostasy is a word that you don't hear very much doesn't come up in usual vernacular common vernacular what the word means is a divorce or a separation what we're suggesting here is that there are many passages in Scripture that actually predicted that prophesied that anticipated that there would be a divorce in the Christian era that there would be a departure from the church that Jesus had established and there are many passages in both the old and the New Testaments in which we find this departure predicted right now I've just put enough put a few of them up on the screen for you here passages such as Daniel chapter 7 to 9 and for many of you when I say that Daniel chapter 7 8 and 9 you'll get a word picture you'll get a portrait in your mind already you know what I'm talking about there right the the beast that come up out of the sea in Daniel chapter 7 the lion and the bear and the leopard and the and the terrible beast right and then Daniel chapter 8 and also 9 you'll know what's being talked about they're all anticipating a widespread departure and divorce in the Christian Church in the New Testament Matthew chapter 24 and it's parallel passage Luke chapter 21 our passages where Jesus says really crazy things really radical things like this jesus said the time will come when men will kill you and think they're doing a service for God let's just let that sink into your mind Jesus says the time will come when people will kill other people and they will say I'm doing this in the name of the god of scripture Acts chapter 20 is is a passage where we find the Apostle Paul gathering together one of the churches that he had been instrumental in planting the church in Ephesus and he had said he said to the church at Ephesus that after his departure Grievous wolves would come in among the church not sparing the flock and all of the Ephesian elders that would have heard Paul's stern warning they would have thought automatically that that the warning that Paul was given giving was a warning against Rome and against this external military threat in fact the Apostle says also from among your own selves men will arise speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after themselves the thing that Paul was warning against was not primarily an external threat but an internal threat a betrayal of the very truth of the good news of the gospel and of the church one of the most pregnant and probably complicated passages in the writings of Paul is found in 2nd Thessalonians chapter 2 that whole section there where Paul describes the man of sin and and this divorce or this apostasy also first John chapter 2 and 4 were where John actually coins the term many scholars believe that that John coined the term Antichrist right that wasn't a term he borrowed from somebody else that was his term it was uniquely Joe he said there's gonna come a power that will so oppose Christ it will be like an antichrist usurp the very place of Christ and of course the book of Revelation is the historical trajectory of the church as john was there on the island of Patmos writing down he said this is what's going to happen to the church and if you've read the book of Revelation let's be honest it's a little scary right it wasn't this beautiful Eden a calcium picture where everything's just going to be totally fine and the church is going to sail off into the sunset and so in each of these passages Daniel Matthew Luke acts Thessalonians John in Revelation all of them are saying the same thing Paul was saying it Jesus was saying it John was saying it troublesome times are coming a departure is coming a difficult time is coming now I want to begin by actually quoting a book the very book that was instrumental in my own conversion to Christ back at about 1995 I began to attend attendez probably not the right word I began to go to a local vegetarian restaurant I was a purple haired punk rocker and was really passionate about eating a vegan diet right I was a vegan and this was a vegan restaurant that opened up in my town which was the sort of heart of the what we call the beef Belt in the United States and so it's a bit of an anomaly to have a vegetarian restaurant in the heart of the beef bill and so we would go to this restaurant me and my group of punk rockers and these people were the weirdest people I'd ever met in my life now the funny thing about that is is that we came in you know dressed like punk rockers with purple hair blue hair green hair piercings and tattoos and we thought they were weird and what made them so weird frankly was that they were so friendly they were so wholesome they were so there was something like a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel right like just straight out of Little House on the Prairie you just plop them down in this vegetarian restaurant I'll never forget after they got to know our names and we would come in and out of the restaurant they say things like here comes brother David brother David I used to make fun of them I used to say hey sister Mary and she'd say you're catching on Mary and Tom owned that restaurant and I went to that restaurant for about two years before finally moving away and going to another town that didn't have such a lovely vegetarian restaurant but before leaving they gave me a book called the great controversy in this book the great controversy written more than a hundred years ago by a woman named Ellen White is actually a book that goes through those very passages that we just had up on the screen through those passages in Paul and in John and in Revelation and in Daniel that shows the trajectory the history of the church in advance that book the great controversy had a determinative impact on my life and I went from being a 24 year old purple haired punk rocker who was studying medicine to being somebody who was just absolutely passionate about the gospel passionate about the Bible passionate about Scripture it literally changed I did a u-turn in the whole direction of my life I want to start by reading him a statement from that book Ellen White writes the voice of loser that echoed in the mountains and valleys that shook Europe as with an earthquake summoned forth an army of Noble apostles of Jesus and the truth they advocate advocated could not be silenced by fire by tortures by dungeons by death and still the voices of the noble army of martyrs are telling us that the Roman power is and noticed this next slide here the predicted apostasy the what to words everyone the predicted apostasy the prophesied the anticipated the looked for departure not just that there was a departure not just that there was a divorce but it was anticipated it was predicted it was prophesied the predicted apostasy of the last days the mystery of iniquity which Paul which Paul saw beginning to work even in his day quoting here from the passage that we mentioned just a moment ago 2nd Thessalonians chapter 2 so this idea that there would be a widespread departure within Christendom is not something that the church members and historians have said retro actively only it's not like we're just looking back at history and saying well that that did shape up in a certain way right since the establishment of the church by Jesus some 2,000 years ago it would be fairly easy to look back over what has happened and say as historians say I'm not minimizing the historical task it's not an easy task but comparably easy to say that that is what happened but as a very different animal a very different situation to be over here in the time of Jesus in the time of Paul and the time of John or even earlier in the time of Daniel and say this is what it's going to look like this is what's going to happen one is history and the other is prophecy and here in this book great controversy what we're being told that this Roman departure which were going to get to in just a second was the predicted apostasy the anticipated apostasy now if you're not familiar with church history and some of this is a little bit tough for you maybe you're not a history buff like I am I know we have a few history buffs in here Gordon's a history buff and I know some others of you are as well but if you're not I can give you the basic shape of church history in in 30 seconds and it's just four simple chapters okay the church was formed by Jesus you might remember Jesus said that on this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it so the church is formed by two of course the church actually predates Jesus going back into Israel but that's another story we're not gonna deal with that right now in terms of the resurrection of Jesus the outpouring of the Holy Spirit 3,000 being baptized on the day of Pentecost the church was formed and you would think that from that start with all of the power and inspiration of the Spirit that the church would go from strength to strength and just opportunity to opportunity and that sort of happened in the first hundred to two hundred years during the Apostolic period and just the period immediately after the Apostolic period the church actually did go more or less from strength to strength but if you can imagine a plane that's sort of on the tarmac right you have a plane and it's just getting ready it's going down the runway and it takes off the take-off is the resurrection of Jesus and the subsequent outpouring of the Holy Spirit it just looks like everything's gonna be great and that plane gets right up to cruising altitude and it remains at cruising altitude for just a bit but but no sooner does it gets a cruising altitude then there begins to be some problems with the engine some problems with the navigation system and the plane begins to go down and that's what you see here on the graph right the shape of church history is not just that the church was formed in the wake of the resurrection of Jesus in the apostolic period but that shortly after reaching cruising altitude it began to be deformed so we're calling this the second chapter or the deformation of the church that deformation would not just be a momentary problem in fact it would be something analogous to to the church plummeting to the plane plummeting almost to crashing into the very ground right it just comes screaming out of 30,000 feet in the air and it's just being massively deformed this is a catastrophic dangerous situation it looks like the wheels have completely come off in that period that deformational period we're going to talk about today that's information the departure the divorce would become so profound and so amazing and such a radical difference from the church that Jesus had established what would happen is there would begin to be Christ for Reformation hey this isn't this isn't the church that Jesus established this doesn't look like the church that the Apostles established and so they began to be these Reformation alloys and the battlecry of those the sort of watchword of those early Reformation Allah rise was the phrase that we're talking about here today Sola screw torta which simply means only scripture only the scriptures and when those cries for reform from within the church began to echo in first in university halls and and then in various countries and as the as the church began to write itself it began to make its way back up but that didn't happen just in a moment in the same way that the the deformational period was incremental and cumulative the Reformation would also be incremental small steps you're not just going to go from from this period of gross medieval darkness right back to true apostolic purity in one step an analogy that I've used that has some strengths and a few weaknesses is imagine that you're a reasonably fit person that begins to slack on exercise and begins to eat instead of eating one cookie or two cookies you begin to eat a box of cookies or you'd say biscuits right you began to eat a bag of chips and you begin to drink a lot of sweet drinks and sodas right you can get away with this when you're a teenager right you get to be in your 30s 40s and 50s you can't get away with that anymore right even some teens can't get away with it and what happens is if you do that long enough you just you will begin to put on weight and if you do it if you do it seriously enough severely enough you can become obese right so you could go from a period of you could go from a state of relative fitness to to obesity in probably a year or two or three or four and let's just say that one day you woke up you looked in the mirror like whoa I barely recognize myself this this isn't what I'm this isn't how I remember myself it myself this isn't consistent with my own image of myself and let's just say that you purpose in your heart is I mean I'm not gonna live this way anymore I want to get healthy again well you don't just go to the gym one time and suddenly you're back to what you were before you began those incremental habits no in the same way that it took you time to get into that hole it's going to take you what to get out of it it's gonna take time and the church is similar in the same way that the church through centuries of tradition and a neglect of the scripture as it went down down down it would only be a return to Scripture down here at dear that's the term that's used the lowest point the opposite of the zenith which is the highest point the nadir down here at the very bottom people began to say enough with traditions enough with the church councils enough with the priests and the Pope's in the Cardinals what does scripture say and those Reformation Alcoa's began to turn the ship but here again it didn't happen in a moment and that's that third chapter Reformation as the church begins to go up you can sort of think of three and four I've put them up as two things Reformation restoration but really they're the same thing restoration is just more Reformation so they're not two different things it's just if you cumulatively get enough Reformation suppose you will reach a period of apostolic restoration so that what the church looks like down at the end will be similar to what the church looked like at the beginning and so this is church history in 30 seconds or less the church was formed by Jesus in the wake of his resurrection and through the Apostolic preaching under the outpouring of the Spirit reached cruising altitude became d-formed in the medieval period those Reformation alized in the 14th and 15th centuries began a process that is leading what language did I say there everyone is leading the church to full restoration of apostolic purity if you wanted to attach dates to these four chapters formation deformation Reformation restoration some general dates that you could attach would look like this right the formation period would be eighty twenty seven which is the baptism of Jesus the resurrection of Jesus at eighty thirty one any of those dates would work up to eighty three twelve now you might be thinking why eighty-three twelve that's what we're gonna talk about in our next presentation why eighty-three twelve what's so significant there and the short version is this was the year in which Constantine the Great became the first Roman Emperor to profess Christianity right that begins the that's the end of the formation period that then begins the medieval period from the fourth century to the 14th century a period of some thousand years sometimes called colloquially the Dark Ages though that term isn't used much anymore now usually just called the medieval period right through that that's where we're going down down down and then the Reformation I've got two dates up there for you 1331 or 1517 there's lots of different dates that can be used and this is one of the things when you start looking into history you start studying history and especially as you start trying to explain history you realize that history doesn't happen in these little punk til your events history happens of course just like your life is happening like a narrative there are important dates in your life and in my life August 16th is a very important date it's the anniversary of my birth April 4th is a very important date it's the anniversary of my wet of my wedding to Violetta so all of that yes but life doesn't happen in these sort of punk chillier episodic moments life happens as the narrative and if somebody was going to write a biography of my life or of your life two biographers might tell your story slightly differently right in histories the same way history is told by historians and so it's not always easy to put a precise date and so 1331 is the year that John DeWitt cliff the Morningstar the Reformation was born that's a very important date we'll talk about that a little bit in a little bit 1517 is the date that is so significant for us this year because it's the 500th anniversary of 1517 and that was the year that Luther the Augustinian monk posted his theses of protest 95 theses to a cathedral door in Wittenberg okay so that's sort of the the commencement of the Reformation appear ëadd that extends to 1844 which is another presentation we'll give and then finally Reformation a restoration remember is not two separate things its Reformation restoration if you continue with enough Reformation we will eventually attain through sticking to Scripture Sola scriptura that apostolic simplicity and purity can the church say Amen okay great bit of a history lesson today Bruce Shelley in his excellent book church history and plain language says this the movement the Christian movement started the fourth century as a persecuted minority it ended the century as the established religion of the Empire the advantages for the church were real enough this is describing the church in the wake of the conversion of Constantine but there was a price to pay Shelly says oh it was really good looked really good at the outset right but there was a price to pay what was that price mr. Shelly Constantine ruled Christian bishops as he did his civil servants and demanded unconditional obedience to official pronouncements even when they interfere with purely church matters there were also now the masses who streamed into the officially favourite Church prior to Constantine's conversion the church consisted of convinced believers now many who came were politically ambitious religiously disinterested and still half rooted in paganism now you can sort of get a feel for the shape of this I'll show you a chart just a second when he talks about people streaming into the Christian Church he's not exaggerating this threatened to produce not only shallowness and permeation by pagan superstitions but it also created the secularization and misuse of religion for what are those next two words there for political purposes the use of religion for political purposes and this chart here is a simple chart that diagrams as best as we can tell what you might call the post Constantinian growth of the church okay so let's just go back to our to our formation of information restoration Reformation restoration here we are in the establishment of the church by Jesus right and so the church is formed and we're sort of saying that's the first two three centuries the church then has the significant event that takes place right at the beginning of the fourth century and you can see that here this this chart here depicts the percentage of the Roman Empire that were Jewish or Christian okay so you can see down there it's like 2 to 3 percent 2 to 3 percent the vast Roman Empire Jewish Christian peoples are somewhere between 2 to 3 maybe as high as 5 percent of the Empire but then notice what happens here right at about 80 383 12 to be precise in the years and decades immediately after 80 312 the the percentage leaps to 70 percent of the Christian of the Roman Empire well what had happened well the very thing that Shelly just identified when Constantine professed Christianity it now became the officially sanctioned and favored church and Hagen's and religiously disinterested and politically ambitious people began to stream into the church now one way to think about it is this way when the church in some of those early especially the first two centuries there were significant persecutions Nero Diocletian deci on some significant persecutions in those early centuries there the church had survived persecution the question going forward would be could the church survive popularity I want to say that again the church had survived persecution but could it survive popularity now let's talk a little bit more about this post Constantinian growth another major factor that happens is that Constantine in AD 330 decides to move the seat of the of the Empire the the imperial city of Rome he decides to move the seat of the Empire some 1500 kilometers due east to Byzantium or the city of Constantine Constantinople what we today call Istanbul now this is remarkable because what's going to happen you can just imagine is that this is an eastward move what direction everyone Eastern hold on to that for just a moment that will become very important for us historically okay so Constantine is gonna move the imperial seats all of the political power and prestige all that had formerly been associated with Rome is now in some sense being transferred to a new location there's a new empire city of the empire now and that's Constantinople the city of Constantine now what that's going to do is it's going to create a power vacuum in the West right who's in charge if that has been the seat of the Roman Empire for centuries now that now that the seat of the Empire has moved what happens and the answer is is that there's going to be a power vacuum created and someone is going to step into that power vacuum we're gonna see that isn't just a bit back to Bruce Shelley in his church history in plain language whatever Constantine's motives were for adopting the Christian faith and this is debated hotly by scholars was it an authentic conversion was it just a politically motivated conversion whatever Constantine's motives for adopting the Christian faith the result was a what is the next word there everyone a decline a decline in Christian commitment the stalwart believers whom Diocletian killed were replaced by a mixed multitude of half converted pagans right well he said whatever the reasons for Constantine some say it was political ambition others say no it was a genuine conversion I lean strongly toward the fact that - toward the idea that it was just politically motivated right by this point the Roman Empire is already beginning to fragment it won't it'll just be about two centuries before the Roman Empire dissolves completely in 84-76 and so there were external factors that were putting a lot of pressure to try and come up with something that would bring some degree of unity and of homogeneity to Rome and Christianity was the thing I believe that it was a political move now here's a need to sort of help you to understand the landscape of Christianity in the 2nd 3rd and 4th centuries in order to understand these next slides we today take mass communication for granted right we can just watch a television show we can pick up the paper we can go on Twitter or Facebook and we just have the whole world of information immediately available to us ok this was not the case of course in the 2nd and 3rd centuries so what would happen is is that that you tend to have sort of isolated pockets of information and of culture so that different areas were we're much more separated or even you might say isolated in some sense most people in the ancient world for example would die within about 25 miles radius of where they were born right the idea that today I'm just gonna get on a plane and I'm gonna travel to Papua New Guinea I'm gonna fly to the United States I'm gonna take a trip to Ethiopia or I'm gonna go to Austria right we just take that for granted but in the ancient world you lived and died pretty much in your local area and for that reason local areas local regions local cities began to take on their own unique flavor well Christianity was a part of that and so of course the founding of Christianity takes place in Jerusalem as it slowly but I should even say slowly as it begins to spread by some standards slowly and by other metrics not so slowly but as Christianity begins to spread it goes to the north of Africa places like Carthage Alexandria and it begins to spread up to Rome and what you end up happening is sort of a sort of a three or four-way three or four-way friendly competition to put your own cultural impress and your own take on Christianity sort of to put to put your impress on what Christianity looks like and each of these different centers of Christian influence have their own flavor right Jerusalem had a very strong Jewish flavor also with Antioch and Alexandria began to have sort of its own flavor under the influence of people like Origen and others and then Rome began to have its flavor and then later Constantinople and if you can just sort of imagine you know four people up here and they're all holding hands so there's fraternal connection there they're all Christians but but everybody's sort of vying they're jockeying to put their interpretation their culture their imprint on Christianity well in this sort of competition between Jerusalem here in the north of Africa here and Rome here and Constantinople here Rome is gonna win out Rome is going to win Rome is going to become the Bishop of Rome is going to become the one who will slide into that power vacuum in the Imperial City the former imperial city and the question is how how does that happen or to put it in really simple common nomenclature you would say how do you make a pope what's the recipe for a pope right there's recipes for pies and there's recipes for cakes and there's recipes for lasagnas but how do you make a pope okay I'm gonna teach you how to make a pope right here this is what history tells this is how you make a pope one of the first things that began to happen in the third and fourth centuries is that the passage that I quoted earlier Matthew chapter 16 began to be used upon this rock Jesus had said to Peter upon this rock I will build my church and and that verse began to be used not in the general sense of God's church being built upon the rock of Jesus but being built up on the smaller rock of Peter which gives birth to the second idea here the idea of apostolic succession now actually there is some truth to apostolic succession a little bit of truth in this sense in pre literary times pre-modern times where they didn't have the technologies that you and I take for granted the way that stories in the way that truths in the way that narratives were ston we're an oral tradition right you told your children you told your children's children and then they told their children and their children's children and the sort of oral culture in which literacy rates were very low far less than 10% right literacy was something that only the nobles and and the scholars had mostly the common person could not read today literacy rates for example in Australia or America would be higher than 90% right but in those days you passed this information on through an oral tradition so in a sense it was true that that Peter had disciples that he would have taught and John had disciples that he would have taught and of course Jesus had disciples that he taught and then those disciples would have taught and then those other disciples would have taught but but it began to go a step further where it wasn't just the passing on of information not just the passing out of teaching it was the passing on of the keys to the kingdom that some almost quasi magical thing was bestowed upon Peter by Jesus that Peter then bestowed that then bestowed that then bestowed I was just recently in Europe as many of you know and I went to one of the many cathedrals that I went to is a Cathedral called st. John st. Paul's outside the walls in Rome and when he walked into that feat Cathedral just absolutely brilliance and in all of its gold and opulence and if you look all the way across the entire ceiling there are there are hundreds of of different little portraits and they are all the succession of popes from Peter I went right I got a picture of it there's Peter followed by Linus followed by it followed by you just go right down you come all the way down and there's Pope Francis this idea that there was an uninterrupted apostolic succession that Peter received something from Jesus the keys of the kingdom were given proprietarily and uniquely to G to Peter and his successors this idea began to gain circulation remember that four-way competition who's going to emerge will it be Jerusalem Antioch that emerges will it be Constantinople that emerges that puts there impress on Christianity will it be the north of Africa that puts there impress or will it be Rome well the answer is Rome number three the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul Rome was where some of the most significant persecutions in the early Christian world took place in Rome a very persecuted Church and therefore a venerate Church a church that everybody looked up to Paul even in the book of Romans he writes and he says your faith is spoken up through the whole world your obedience is spoken up through the whole world and the fact that Peter and Paul were martyred there this just gave the the church in Rome a certain prestige Rome's population base of course is going to contribute Rome was the imperial capital which we've discussed the Latin language versus the Greek language was a very important element that I don't have time to develop right now but the short version is is that the Greek language has many more words the Latin language many fewer words and to put a Christian Creed or a doctrine in Latin actually made it easier for everybody to agree because that Latin single Latin word would encompass a number of meanings where the precise meaning of different Greek words were debated endlessly number seven Rome's location to the north and the West now remember just a moment ago I had that slide up there and we showed that an 83 30 when Constantine moved the seat of his empire what direction did he move it he moved it he moved at 1500 kilometers a thousand miles to the east now if you just can imagine in your mind's eye a map of the growth of the Christian Church if you can put your slim down at the bottom right hand corner of that map you put your rusul 'm right here this is the this is where the church began this is where the Holy Spirit was out port on the day of Pentecost here's Jerusalem what way did the church grow right I'm facing you guys so this is going to be to the one what directions have I mean I'm getting confused here because I'm backward here's rusul 'm in the bottom right hand corner so this is gonna be your West am i right anyway you get the idea I'm so turned around right now this is key the church grew to the north and the west the church grew to the north and the West when you think about the growth of the Christian Church it grew north and west in other words toward Rome and then up into what was called Gaul and what we call Europe the church did not really grow to the east because the Persians were slow to convert number one and number two after you have the rise of Islam in the 6th 6th and 7th centuries now a 7th century all of a sudden you're not moving east at all in fact the church is increasingly moving to the north and the West in terms of Christian conversions Christian growth the church the growth of the church well this becomes very significant because that's where Rome is located right where Jerusalem's in the far east of the Christian Empire Rome is in the far north and the far west missionary outreach into Europe which is to the north and the West the various barbarian invasions that begin to pick apart and fragment Rome Muslim conquests which I just mentioned a goat now pushing from the east the leadership of Pope Leo the first who would actually go and save Rome from Attila the Hun and then later the head of the Vandals gasps Eric the Vandal and then finally the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire Justinian issued a decree that the Bishop of Rome was the head of all churches and the official persecutor of heretics so what happens is is that that sort of friendly fraternal four-way competition between Jerusalem and Antioch Caen and Constantinople in Rome in the north of Africa places like Alexandria in the 2nd 3rd century while it's a sort of friendly jocular everybody trying to put their impress on Christianity by the time you get to the 5th and 6th centuries Rome has won and won decisively this is why the church came to be called not just the Catholic Church listen carefully the word Catholic just means universal what it means is is that the people in the north of Africa believed the same thing that the people did in Jerusalem and Antioch the same thing that they believed in Constantinople and the same thing that they believed in Rome the word Catholic just means universal everybody believing the same thing everybody believing in the life death and resurrection of Jesus in fact the the establishment of the Nicene Creed in 880 325 and the Council of Nicaea was designed to try to get everybody on the same page and for the most part the church was Catholic that just means universal everybody agreed the same thing there all were more or less on the same page that's the first century second century 3rd century but as soon as you get into the 4th and 5th centuries as Rome begins to emerge they win that competition there listen carefully now you might hear this now for the first time with new ears you have not now just the Catholic Church you have the Roman Catholic Church that is to say the Rome version of Christianity this isn't The Jerusalem version of Christianity this isn't the Alexandrian version of Christianity this isn't the Constantinople ian's version of Christianity this is the Roman version of Christianity which comes to be called simply and colloquially the Roman Catholic Church or the medieval church so when we talk about the formation the deformation as the church begins to depart from Scripture and from apostolic simplicity and purity it begins to go down the primary driving factor that causes the church is they departure from Scripture that causes the church to deform is a departure from Scripture a departure from what everyone scripture where traditions and councils and creeds and the ways of man increasingly distanced from Scripture well Scripture is where the truth is and scripture is where the power is and so if you're departing from the source of truth and you're departing from the source of power well then you're going to become spiritually obese you are going to go through a period of deformation I'm going to talk about that more in our next presentation now as this begins to happen as the church begins to depart from Scripture a major factor begins to happen in the wake of the demise of the Empire of Rome I mentioned ad 476 earlier right by the time we get to the end of the fifth century toward the end of the fifth century Rome as you think about it in the movies Rome as you think about it and Ben Hur Rome as you think about it in some of the movies that have made Rome famous or some of the novels that have made Rome famous that Rome is gone right now you have a number of fractured city-states and geographic regions that is held together the primary binding agent is Christianity and who's the head of the Christian Church well it's the Bishop of Rome and so the Bishop of Rome begins to have a significant amount of influence over the kings and the leaders of the state and here's just a quick shotgun portrait of that when we talk about the post Constantine II and deformation of the church we have to talk about things like this Pope Leo the first saving Rome from being sacked by the Huns and the Vandals and 452 Gregory the first is the first medieval Pope there's that medieval word the the the Middle Ages 8590 Pope Zacharias the first crowns one of the kings of the Franck's Pepin the short I get that in your mind this is the Pope putting the crown of authority putting the crown on the Emperor church and state connecting Pepin the short successor he was one of the kings of the France France was Charlemagne and Pope Leo the third crown Charlemagne as Roman emperor of the Holy Roman Empire Pope Gregory the seventh excommunicates Henry the fourth over what's called the investiture controversy in 1077 now that's a fascinating little point I just want to say a quick word on the word invest or investiture in this context means - clothes - clothes and the controversy was who gets to clothe the priests well of course the church said hey we are the ones who clothed the priests we're the ones who decide who our priest we're the ones who we're the ones who clothes clothes as well the investiture controversy who gets to place the garments of priestly duties and the garments of kingly duties and and the church said well that is our Divine Right and Henry the fourth said no that's my right I choose no and here you begin to have this controversy over who gets to clothe who and here's a woodcut that depicts the clothing of the priests by the king and the king by the priests cancer and is one of his books as the age of the investiture controversy may be rightly regarded as the turning point in medieval civilization this controversy over who's calling the shots here is the church calling the shots or the state it was the fulfillment of the early Middle Ages because in it the acceptance of the Christian religion by the Germanic peoples reached its final and decisive stage the greater part of the religious and political system of the High Middle Ages 1000 about 1300 emerged out of the events and ideas of the investiture controversy Norman cancer church kingship and lay investiture now you see what's happening here you have you have two things that are happening simultaneously not two different things the two sides of the same coin one is a departure from Scripture and the other is an increasingly cozy and confused relationship with the states by the time we get to 1200 Pope Innocent the third claims the church's power over all of Europe's kings and finally Pope Boniface the eighth crafts what's called what was a papal document called unum sanctum which means one Holy One Holy One holy containing the most extreme statements of papal spiritual supremacy ever made in 1302 part of the document and units the part of the document of unum sanctum by Boniface the eighth said it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the what to the Roman pontiff not the Alexandrian pontiff because there wasn't one not the pontiff in Jerusalem because there wasn't one not the pontiff in in Constantinople but the pontiff in Rome if you want to be Christian you have to take the Roman stamp of Christianity the Roman version of Christianity the Roman style of Christianity it is necessary for salvation I don't know how that settles with you that's it's all kind of wrong with me and people began to say in just about a hundred years after that that doesn't sit with scripture either that doesn't sit with Scripture either Carlos heir in his book Reformation is published by Yale University Press in 2015 writes by the 15th century despite many setbacks and dismal shortcomings the Pope at Rome could claim universal jurisdiction over all of Christendom even over the whole world a major theme throughout the medieval period from Richards Robert C Waltons church history backgrounds is the increasing power of the church in relationship to the power of the state perhaps due to the authority vacuum created by the demise of the Roman Empire we've talked about that medieval Pope's wielded greater and greater authority Pope's crowned monarchs in the Carolingian era Gregory the seventh triumphs momentarily over Henry the fourth of Germany that was the investiture controversy innocent the third humble the kings of England and France and Boniface the eighth made the most strident claims of the church's supremacy over the state and so what we have is not only a departure from Scripture but an increasingly confused and cozy relationship with the state which would later lead people like Jay a wily a Protestant historian to say the noon of the papacy was the midnight of the world when things were going swimmingly well for the medieval church things were not going well for the rest of the world if you were among the elite if you were among the clergy if you were among the hierarchy things could be all right but if you weren't in the in-crowd the noon of the papacy was the midnight of the world and as the departure from Scripture came increasingly prominent a departure from scriptural teaching became increasingly common and here's just a shotgun review of some of those doctrinal departures from Scripture Latin was the only Latin could be used in prayer and in worship they said in 8600 they began to pray to Mary to the Saints and the angels in 8600 kissing the Pope's feet in 8700 the veneration of the cross and images and relics and 8786 the College of Cardinals to elect the Bishop of Rome was established a 927 the canonization of the dead as Saints in 995 mandatory mass attendance in AD 1000 the celibacy of the priesthood in 1079 the rosary and repetitious prayer in 1090 indulgences to reduce time and purgatory which will become huge for Luther in just a moment what's called transubstantiation which is right at the heart of Catholic teaching in 1215 the idea that when you take the Eucharistic bread into your mouth it becomes the literal body of Jesus the literal flesh of Jesus trans substance it changes substance and this can only be received by a priest through the mass in the church which you can understand now if you are excommunicated or you are cut off from access to the Eucharist if you are cut off from access to the priest and the mess you're cut off from God you can just imagine the power that the church wielded in the medieval period and it was Lord Acton who would later observe many centuries that would later observe power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely he said that about the Bishop of Rome none other than the Bishop of Rome tradition has claimed equal with Bible in 1545 and the apocryphal books were added in 1546 as a result of the Council of Trent Carlos heir in his book again Reformation slowly but steadily these unorthodox reformers these people called the walled ends Ian's I was just recently with Gordon and Carolyn and Scot and Lynn and about a hundred other people touring through the tota pilikia Valley the walled Enzian valleys and there were people even though the the Roman imprint and the Roman impress was large in Christendom and large in Europe there were people who hid out in the Alps and in other locations who resisted the homogeneity of Roman Catholicism they said not for us we're gonna stick to Scripture and that's who air is speaking about here slowly but steadily these unorthodox reformers of all ten ziens were violently suppressed until only a few remained in remote regions of the Alps I had a privilege to visit some of those regions I went into a cave with Gordon and and and others into a very cave in which 36 Waldensian pastors were burned alive by the papal armies one of the very few Western heretical movements to survive total extinction these mountain folk would eventually join the Protestant Reformation in the 1530s at which time they came to be seen as forerunners or spiritual ancestors a sure sign of the fact that the true church was never totally extinguished by Rome says err who is himself a Catholic historian by the way later John Wickliffe in 1332 1384 that's the date remember when we have that the beginning now of the Reformation period I said it could be either sort of 1330 1331 all the way up to 1517 those are good dates John Woodcliff expressed some of the very same reforming ideas which raises a question if Wickliffe is saying what these walled Enzi and resistors were saying where are they getting it from were they listening to it online well what had they had they have a subscription where they read no how did they know because they were getting it from Scripture the Wold indians were passionate about scripture Wickliffe was passionate about scripture the very same reforming ideas as the Wold indians with greater clarity and precision than ever before for wit cliff that genuine head of the church was Christ not the Pope and the supreme guide for all doctrine ritual and ethics was what are the next two words the Bible anything that did not square with Holy Writ therefore was to be rejected wit Cliff's teaching would make their way into the hands of another academic John HUS 1372 1415 HUS was teaching and preaching in the vein of Wickliffe well where did he get this idea from did he get it from audible did he get it from YouTube no he got it from Scripture John HUS in Bohemia and he began to attract a large following he would later be burned at the stake convinced that the Bible was the ultimate authority and that the church needed to be brought back in line with Holy Scripture Sola scriptura HUS challenged tradition and the church hierarchy and so not only to the church depart from apostolic and purity and simplicity and plunge down into this deep darkness in the medieval period not only that but there began to be these Reformation or cries as people began to do something like this they began to look at scripture and look at the church look at scripture look at the church the Conscription look at the church look at scripture look at the church and they began to say hey this doesn't square with this this and this are not adding up and so the cry was increasingly not tradition not the counsels but what does scripture say what does the Bible say and Luther the catalyzer and the best-known figure in the Protestant Reformation would coin this phrase Sola scriptura Sola scriptura is not only an historical reality it is a methodological reality how do we arrive at truth how do we arrive at salvation how do we come to know God as our Father and Jesus as our Savior Luther would say through scripture through the Bible what does the Bible say don't talk to me about the priests or the Pope's or the Cardinals or the councils what does scripture say the church on the eve of Reformation had a number of factors that are beginning to influence as we're down here at the bottom Spirit a number of things are beginning to happen in Europe that are actually changing the whole landscape of economics and many things are happening socio-economic change is increasing encroachment from the Islamic Turks in the east nationalism is increasing people don't just want to send their tax money away to Rome Germans say well but the German money's good for the Germans and the French say the French money is good for the French and the Spanish say the Spanish money is good for well they always said it was pretty much good for the for Rome but many increasingly nations were saying we want to keep our own money and there was an emerging humanism Carlos err again by the beginning of the sixteenth century - sparked despite all the cries for reform the Catholic Church again he's a Catholic historian listen to this the Catholic Church was as rife with problems as the world itself during the course of the 15th century the abuses and failings of the church became more conspicuous more openly discussed and more deeply resented by a wider spectrum of people also after 1450 the invention of the printing press not only allowed for the wider dissemination of information and reforming ideas but also speeded up the process of consciousness-raising among both laity and clergy at the very top in Rome the papacy itself seems to be the epitome of corruption in office controlled by worldly men who seemed to embody sin rather than Redemption from it earlier we talked about how do you make a pope and we just gave a brief overview of how do you make a pope well the next question would be what's the recipe not for a pope not for a cake not for a pie not for a lasagna but how do you make a Reformation and the answer is you need four ingredients you need a mess a message a means and a man the church has to be a mess you can't have Reformation Allah rise if there's not a need for Reformation and the church was a giant mess clerical abuse and corruption and radical departures from Scripture coupled with an increasingly cozy and confused relationship with the state people began to say hey the church is a mess people like Wickliffe and HUS and later Luther began to cry out and say the Bible and the church do not comport they are not consistent and so there was a mess but you also needed a message and the whole of the message could be summarized in just two words that simple Latin phrase Sola scriptura and when Luther would later stand before the deed at firms where he would stand before Charles v the Emperor of the world he would stand before Charles v and he would be told to come to her Kent you have to recant dear Kent are these your writings yes these are my writings you must recant and he refused to recant he said like I can't go along with the post or the councils or the Creed's I have you have to show me Sola scriptura show me from the Bible well Luther could have said all of that but if there wasn't a means if Gutenberg had not had invented the printing press whereby the the great truth could get out to the world you and I would be none the wiser and Luther would have been none the wiser in fact I've read reports that say that within within one month of Luther's posting his theses of protests to the door you just have to understand historically how tectonic this was how game-changing this was within a month of Luther going and nailing those theses of course that part is actually disputed whether or not he physically nailed them but for our purposes here Luther nails those theses to the door and within a month they had been distributed over the whole of Germany by the printing press by the by the fact that you could now quickly and easily and cheaply make copies of things if Luther had come around a hundred years before he would have never gotten off the ground and you would only probably know about him if you were an historian but the fact that we know about him is that the Internet of the day the worldwide web of the day could take that information and distribute it very quickly there was a means and finally you needed a man who would stand up and speak truth to power and Luther that young unlikely Augustinian monk was just a man and his battle cry and the battle cry the Reformation was so simple Sola scriptura ironically it would be the construction of a building that would spark the destruction of the church's medieval reign pope julius ii had a dream and his dream was to build st. peter's basilica bigger and better than ever in fact he was gonna be lit so big that it was gonna take it was gonna take more than a century to complete the construction and it was gonna be so it was gonna take a lot of money and in order to get that money they were gonna have a number of plenary indulgences indulgences were a part of the catholic faith where you could go and literally purchase an indulgence for yourself or for a loved one who had passed away and gone away to purgatory and and they were basically monetizing as I just recently was in Rome and for those of you that have been to Rome and been to the Vatican it's simultaneously beautiful and really not beautiful because you have this whole beautiful aesthetically pleasing lovely paintings lovely sculptures and all of that's there but when you realize that the reason that it's there is that you've monetized guilt you've monetized fear you've monetized shame you've monetized religion and so hope Julie has had this great idea that he himself couldn't complete but he would hand the baton to a guy named Pope Leo the tenth and Pope Leo the tenth would give permission to to a veritable army of preachers to go out into Christian Europe and to begin to sell these indulgences and one of them would come by destiny unsuspecting just outside Vinton burg where he would preach his sermons and some of Luther's own church members would go and purchase these these indulgences they would bring them to Luther and say look look I purchased this indulgences Mike my mother or my whatever or me I we're now free of sin and Luther would say those indulgences are not worth the paper they're written on and so what a really fascinating an ironic way the building up of this great cathedral the building up of this great Basilica would actually be the thing that would catalyze a series of events and bring about the demise of the medieval churches reign and it all boiled down my friends it all boiled down to just two words Sola scriptura Luther was not the only reformer but he was the most prominent of the Reformers and others would later follow in his steps we'll talk about that in subsequent presentations but I want you to just soak in today the power of this book that you have in your hand a book that it's so easy to take for granted a book that is so easy to neglect compared to the super wild and exciting and brand-new app iPhone or maybe you're a galaxy person whatever it is it's just the television and the computer and the sport events and there's just so much more interesting than Scripture or are they if this is a book that can change the course of the world if this is a book that can change the course of civilization this is a book that can change the course of your life for the better it can change the course of your family's life it can change the course of your neighborhood this is a book that is far more interesting and exciting than any movie than any novel than any video game friends I say to you what Luther said to Charles the fifth and so many others centuries ago scripture and scripture alone amen how many people want to respond with me and say I I need to receive this message I need to receive the message of the importance the centrality of Scripture in my own life not just as an historical reality but I need to receive this message into my life today anybody out there need to receive the Sola scriptura message father in heaven we pause here to remind ourselves that we are standing on the shoulders of giants father this was a phrase this was an idea this was a revolutionary concept that turned the world upside down that ordinary people common people people just like us could go to the text of scripture in their own language whether German or or in the English language and they could read it and in the reading without going through a church or a priest or a pope in the reading and by the spirit they could connect directly with you and father today forgive us where we have taken this so easily and so blithely for granted father I pray that there would be a revival among us of a primitive passion for Scripture father may scripture find its place its rightful place in our lives in our homes and in our families is my prayer in Jesus name let everyone say Amen [Music] [Music]

Channel: Kingscliff Church

Views: 3,913

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Keywords: David Asscherick, reformation, christianity, protestantism, martin Luther

Id: sFJg09XcN1o

Length: 58min 30sec (3510 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 01 2018