Lecture 1: Historical Theology I - Dr. Nathan Busenitz

I personally get really really excited about teaching this class and this is I don't know probably the tenth time or so that I've gone through this class and I get excited about it every single time because I just love introducing students to the riches of church history one of the things that's so fun about teaching this class is the fact that I have it here number one as my first reason that most Christians most evangelical Protestants especially in North America are pretty much clueless when it comes to understanding the history of the church now that's really a tragedy but it's nonetheless true most Christians don't have any real concept of the flow or the details of church history and I would guess that that's probably true for most of you sitting here in this class at least for pre-reformation church history we do an okay job in conservative evangelical circles of digging into Reformation and post-reformation church history but what about the first 1500 years of the history of the church what about the first 3/4 of church history the first seventy-five percent of it those are probably big blind spots in your own understanding of how we got from the Apostles to then where we are today I would say that in the minds of the minds of most people the minds of most Christians their understanding of church history kind of goes like this and this may be representative of some of you as well that the Apostle John was put on the Isle of Patmos where he received a revelation from the Lord Jesus which he recorded for us and which constitutes the last book of the New Testament John then probably was released from Patmos went back to Ephesus and died shortly thereafter and after the death of the Apostle John church history fell off a cliff and became Roman Catholic almost instantly and it existed in this amorphous dejected heretical state for essentially the next 1400 years there was a guy named Augustine or Agustin and there was a guy named Aquinas and you've probably heard those names there was a guy named Constantine who debuted in The Da Vinci Code and outside of that nothing really happened it was the Dark Ages and it was completely enveloped in error and darkness Along Came Martin Luther a German monk in the 16th century who for reasons unknown to any of us nailed 95 theses on to a castle door in Germany sparked a Reformation saved church history and gave us Protestant Protestant evangelical ISM and after him came names like Calvin and knocks and Spurgeon and Lloyd Jones and MacArthur and here we are that's Church history now that might be your impression of church history the Apostle John dies church history falls off a cliff Martin Luther saves it and we are now part of the reformed evangelical conservative Evangelical Protestant Christianity well I've got good news for you there's a lot of things that happened in that 15 hundred year period before Martin Luther and I think you're going to be encouraged over the course of the semester to find that church history did not just drop off of a cliff that there were faithful men for many generations throughout church history really a line of faithful men all the way through to the Reformation even during the high middle ages when things really started to get diluted and deformed even in Roman Catholic theology so I think you're going to find this first 1,500 years to be fascinating partly because most of you don't know anything about what happened during this period of time and partly because you have misconceptions about what happened and you've been led into thinking that the early church fathers that's a way that we reference those early Christian leaders who came after the Apostles that they were somehow more Roman Catholic than they were Protestant or that they somehow had twisted the gospel into thinking that its salvation by works rather than salvation by faith alone and we're going to spend quite a bit of time this semester debunking that myth and hopefully introducing you to a heritage that belongs to you as a bible-believing Evangelical Protestant Christian more so than any other branch of the Christian world today it is your history and it is not Roman Catholic history all right so I think you'll be encouraged as we go through that so the first reason why it's important to study church history is because most Christians are absolutely clueless about church history and that's a real shame because the gospel has not been silent over the last two thousand years nor has the Lord been absent from working in his church that brings us then to a second reason why studying church history is so important because number two God is at work in history conversely history is a testimony to God's sovereign providence now admittedly we are outside of the realm of biblical history once we get past the first century of church history and yet at the same time the Lord has still been actively working in his church he has been actively working in convicting sinners of the truth of the gospel bringing them into conformity to his son Jesus Christ the Holy Spirit has been active in empowering believers for generation after generation and the gospel has gone to the ends of the earth even as Christ instructed his disciples in the Great Commission so studying church history is not so much about studying the lives of these individual people as it is studying a testimony of the faithfulness of God in working providentially through people to accomplish kingdom purposes and if you can't get excited about studying that then you really shouldn't be in seminary at all so studying think of church history not as again a bunch of dates and dead people think of church history as an exciting unfolding of the tapestry of God's sovereign Providence as he fulfills his gospel promises generation after generation after generation number three now you'll notice in the notes by the way that I've given a number of scripture texts for each of these reasons and that's because I want these reasons to be grounded in principles that come out of the scripture everything that we're going to do in this church history class we're going to take back to the Bible because the Bible is our absolute and ultimate authority in everything it's another misconception about church history that studying church history and loving church history is going to put church history in a position of competition over against the authority of the Bible the reality is the more you study church history the more you realize that the church desperately needs an unchanging standard of truth if it is to remain pure and not get embroiled and compromise so church history I found actually underscores a commitment to the authority of Scripture it does not compete against it anyway number three here a third reason why it's important to study church history is because Christ said that he would build his church to study church history is to watch his promise unfold so Matthew 16:18 a passage that is so badly misinterpreted by Roman Catholicism where Jesus said to Peter you are Peter and upon this rock not a reference to Peter rather a reference to Peter's confession the content of Peters confession upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not overpower to study church history is to see the reality of that promised unfold over two millennia of time when the gospel has been challenged when the gospel has been oppressed when the people who champion and believe the gospel have been persecuted and killed the gospel has triumphed nonetheless and the church has never been overrun by the power of hell isaiah 40:8 the grass withers the flower fades but the Word of God stands forever again realized or illustrated throughout the chapters and corridors of church history the reality that the truth of the gospel never fades away completely number four because church history is our history as members of the body of Christ I think this is important and I tried to hint at this on Tuesday about just reiterated today when we study the history of the church we are not merely studying people places and events we are studying the history of the Bride of Christ and we are part of that bride we are part of the church when we study church history then we come to see who we are where we've come from and how we fit into the flow of God's kingdom work in the world the Lord Jesus cares deeply about his bride and we should to you guys our cheer at the master seminary training to become pastors of local churches or perhaps to go into missionary work where you will plant churches or maybe even to go into classroom teaching work where you were trained other men to go work in churches everything that we are doing here is about taking the Word of God and bringing it to bear on the lives of the people of God within the context of the local church so why wouldn't you want to study the history of the local church you are training to be church men you should understand the history of what it is that you are attempting to do I mentioned on Tuesday that you must be careful not to disconnect yourself from true history you are part of church history we have this temptation to think of church history as everything that happened before us because we're not part of history we're living in the present we're part of the modern age it's kind of ironic every generation thinks it's the modern age but the reality is that you are part of church history and as I mentioned on Tuesday you will and I will we will continue to be part of church history until we either go home to heaven or until Christ comes back and church history ends but church history will extend from the day of Pentecost until the return of Christ and who knows given the events that are going on in the Middle East his return might be closer than we think but in any case for right now we are part of church history and understanding our connectedness to those who have come before us as an impart a part of having a right perspective on what we are called to do alright number five because the truth has been preserved and passed down through history when we study church history we not only confirm the fact that we believe that what we believe today is what the Apostolic Church believed but we also see how the truth was preserved throughout history so the Lord when he spoke to the Apostles he authorized them to give us the New Testament through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit there in John 14 15 and 16 and then the Apostles and trusted their teachings to their followers so you have get back in my notes Gavin second Timothy 2:2 Paul saying to Timothy the things which you have heard from me and the presence of many witnesses and trust these two faithful men who will be able to teach others also that's a principle that we're going to trace in the first few centuries of church history who are those faithful men and who are the others also you'll be glad to know we know some of their names and we'll introduce you to them in the upcoming week first Peter 1:8 though you have not yet seen him you love him and though you do not see him now but believe in him you rejoice greatly with joy inexpressible and full of glory the New Testament is full of this idea of passing on the truth faithfully from one generation to the next generation Paul told Timothy guard that which has been entrusted to you and we see that principle again lived out generation after generation in church history the doctrine of God's preservation of the truth not miraculous preservation but providential preservation is illustrated throughout church history we see it specifically with the doctrine of canonicity how the Canon was collected and and defended over those first few generations of the history of the church all right number six because just as we are encouraged by the history of truth we are also warned by the history of error the New Testament is full of warnings about false teaching and I've included some of those there for you refuting it in the first century and warning that it would come in the centuries that followed when we study church history we not only learn the history of truth we also learn the history of error we see for example where the cults originated and we have the benefit of seeing orthodoxy defended and the truth being preserved one of the interesting things that we'll see in this first five hundred year period of church history is really the origination of ancient heresies almost all of which have been regurgitated as modern day cults so we'll see Gnosticism which shows up again as in forms as New Age theology as word of faith theology as Mormonism as Christian science Gnosticism is pretty much everywhere because it's the exaltation of human wisdom above the revelation of God then we have the legalism of the Judaizers which shows up in really cult groups like the seventh-day adventists which were very much a cult group when they started we see the denial of the deity of Christ in the Aryans arianism and of course we see that regurgitated not only in Mormonism but also probably most closely in the modern Jehovah's Witness Watchtower movement so learning a little bit about church history and the history of error really equips you well when you're at home on a Saturday and your doorbell rings and two guys who look like seminary students but are holding bike helmets are standing there ready to argue with you about something as basic as the deity of Christ all right this stuff really is practical I promise it's not just learning about the past it's learning about the past because it has import for the present all right number seven and this is kind of related to number five because we have much to learn from those who walked with God and we see in church history we see their faithfulness in spite of persecution we certainly saw Christ promise that persecution would come and we see that persecution in a very vivid sense in the first 300 years of the history of Christianity within the Roman Empire we see areas of persecution later outside of the Roman Empire and of course then again during the Reformation we have more persecution foxes Book of Martyrs one of the most famous books ever written in English for Christians at least has a great deal of detail on the persecution that the early church faced we see an eagerness for Christ's return in every generation of church history we have Christian leaders and Christian church members who are praying desperately and eagerly and expectantly awaiting for the Lord to return and of course we can learn from the example of faithfulness to the gospel there are countless illustrations of godly men and women throughout the history of the church who remained faithful to the gospel in the midst of persecution in the midst of temptation and the potential to compromise when we get to a Phinehas for example and some of you have probably read John Piper's treatment on a Phinehas and his swans are not silent series Athanasius is such a vivid example of faithfulness he's known as the saint of stubbornness because over his entire life in spite of being constantly harassed he never gave in to the error of Arianism in particular but we'll get there number eight in the same way that we can learn much from those who have been faithful we can also learn much from those who failed at various points in this way church history functions much the same way as biblical history when Paul looked back to the Old Testament for example he specifically said in 2nd Corinthians 6 that what happened to the Israelites in the wilderness was recorded in part as an example for believers who would come later so these things happened as examples for us and in particular in that case as negative examples there's a lot of negative examples in church history as well and we're going to see some of those negative examples we're going to see times when men who really knew much better defected to false forms of theology to heresy or when they gave in to what they really knew were unbiblical practices and we're going to see the detrimental ramifications of that level of compromise and I hope that that will serve as a warning for you men as you think about your future ministries alright number nine and I guess I've hinted at this already a little bit but because being a faithful apologist often includes being a good historian and again we hinted at this on Tuesday but if you're going to enter into a discussion about the Trinity as a lot of evangelicals got involved in that discussion just this last year with the Elephant Room and Jake's and all of that stuff if you're going to enter into that discussion you need to know a little bit of church history in order to be able to interact intellectually at that level canonicity it's another great doctrine that involves a lot of church history but here's the thing the New Testament calls elders and pastors to be those who hold fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the apostolic teaching so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine that's the positive and to refute those who contradict every Christian to a certain extent is called to be an apologist that's what first Peter 3:15 says that we are called to give a defense it's a greek word from which we get the word apologetics we are called to give a defense for the hope that is in us and yet specifically church leaders must be those who are equipped to defend and protect the flock from false teaching dr. MacArthur and Chapel on Tuesday said that part of protecting the Sheep means hunting the wolves don't know if that's a quote but that's a summary of what he said and that involves apologetics understanding just a little bit of church history gives you a huge advantage when it comes to responding to Greek orthodoxy Roman Catholicism Islam or any of the modern American cults and modern American cults would be everything from seventh-day Adventism to Christian Science to Scientology to Mormonism to Jehovah's Witnesses to the Word of Faith segment of broader Pentecostalism knowing just a little bit of church history you can stand your ground and go toe-to-toe with any of those groups because I guarantee you church history is on your side now the Bible more importantly is on your side but isn't it nice to know that you don't have to give any ground to those who espouse error in particular the Roman Catholics because it is a and Protestant conception that church history belongs to the Catholics and the Bible belongs to us well yes the Bible belongs to us church history also belongs to us so don't give it to them okay so join me in my crusade not to give them any ground all right and then finally because number 10 a little bit of history helps 21st century pastors have a right perspective about their own place in the church age I believe that it's important for us to realize that we are not the first generation to get it right so remember that earlier generations of Christians lived much closer to the time of the Apostles and that we should treat their writings seriously and that we should take time to learn from them it's important to realize that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves our local congregation or even the evangelical movement as it exists today we are part of something that's much bigger than just American Christianity and I think that's especially important for those of us who are raised here in the United States because sometimes we think that church history and American history are somehow synonymous they are not American history represents only 200 years of a 2,000 year period of time in which God has been working through the church to realize then fourthly that every generation of believers is greatly affected by the time and culture in which they live this is something that we'll see in church history such that they themselves do not even realize the effects and then in turn to ask ourselves what effect our culture has on our own application of biblical truth I think this is one of the most helpful things we can learn from church history we look at the early church fathers and we see them highly influenced by Platonism and we think Platonism is absolutely and totally ridiculous how in the world could they have allowed themselves to be so influenced by this clearly unbiblical philosophy we look at the time of the Reformation and we see some of the violence that care characterized even Protestant reformers we asked ourselves how in the world could they have allowed themselves to be so violent in their response to those with whom they disagree and then we get to the 21st century and we act as though we are completely unbiased and unaffected by our own culture if Christ Terri's for another few generations future generations of church historians will look back on our time and they will point to things in our culture and they will say how in the world could the church have been so influenced by fill in the blank and it's I think a helpful exercise for us to ask ourselves what are those things in our culture that we have allowed to so influence us that we're actually being unbiblical in these particular areas just to mention one area you know I think the churches what we'll get to this when we get to second semester in quite depth but I think the church's attempt to integrate evolutionary science into the biblical account is one example of the ridiculous way in which the church sometime Kowt sometimes cows to the culture and what well we'll get there next semester I suppose I can't go off on it now but what the church is doing today when it tries to reinterpret Genesis 1 to 11 through a Darwinistic evolutionary paradigm is the exact same thing that guys like Clemente of Alexandria and Origen we're doing when they said the Bible should be interpreted allegorically in order to fit a play tonic philosophy just that it's not platonism today it's Aristotelian ISM because the materialism that undergirds non-supernatural Darwinistic evolutionary thought is Aristotelian at its core so we're still involved in integrating Greek philosophy into Christianity we've just given it the name science rather than the name philosophy all right we'll get there there are a few things that we should just mention in terms of how we approach church history and really these are ways that we approach history at all and the first two are really related selection and objectivity it is impossible to teach 2,000 years of church history and not be selective if we're going to cover that period of time in a one semester course we can't cover every detail of everything that happened that would be impossible so we select certain events and the events that we'll select in this class are events that mainstream historians have selected as being the most significant turning points but we recognize the fact that God's understanding of what might be truly important might be a little bit different than our own since God values faithfulness over impact and we usually look at church history in terms of who made the biggest impact I think God looks at church history in terms of who was most faithful but just to at the beginning state some of the limits upon which our study of church history is subject to secondly their objectivity we all come to history with preconceived ideas and the reality is that no historian can be entirely objective it's not possible to be entirely objective well that's okay with me because I'm not going to try and be objective in this class how's that for just stating it upfront I have a very clear goal in this class and that is to show how church history fits with what I believe the biblical gospel is and what I believe the the Bible proclaims in terms of those priorities that God had in fulfilling the Great Commission so I'm not really that interested in being purely objective because pure objectivity is impossible to achieve anyway so why try so we're going to come at church history from a particular viewpoint which is to say we believe that the biblical well first of all we believe that the Bible is our ultimate authority and we believe that the biblical gospel is a gospel of faith alone in Christ alone based on his work of the cross work on the cross alone so coming to it with those two presuppositions we will then interpret church history through that grid by the way those are two of the core principles of the Reformation in case you missed that Sola scriptura and Sola fidei but the Reformation didn't invent those principles those principles are found in Scripture and then we've already hinted at this but there can be a tendency sometimes for us to be a little bit arrogant in our approach and I'm saying us and just in a general sense of modern people the contemporary temptation always is to think that whatever's happening now is better than what was happening way back when and we have to approach history with a little bit of humility recognizing that we have a lot to learn from men and women in the past whom God used mightily for his purposes and when we sit at their feet we can really benefit just as a side note on that when you get done with seminary I don't know if I'll remember to say this later so I'll say it now when you get done with seminary and you have free time and you decide to take up that free time with a little bit of extra reading I know right now you don't have any time to do any extra reading and that's understandable that's by design but when you're done with seminary and you have time to do a little bit of extra reading please make sure to include biography as part of your regular reading it can be biblical biography it can be church history biography but make sure that biography is part of your reading and I know some great leaders in the conservative evangelical movement who not only have made biography part of their reading but have actually chosen essentially mentors in church history whom they've really sat underneath through their writings and attempted to model their own ministries after I think maybe one of the most outspoken examples would again be John Piper who makes Jonathan Edwards his ministry mentor you have mark Dever another t4g name that you might recognize who looks to one of the Puritans and I'm blanking on who it is at the moment but he looks to one of the Puritans as kind of his ministry mentor that's a great way to approach church history again I said on Tuesday if you like biography you will like church history because all church history is is a collection of great biographies of how the Lord worked in people's lives okay so as you're going through the material if you find somebody that you're like ooh that guy is really cool just kind of hang on to that you know tag it in your thinking and after you're done with seminary you can come back to studying a guy like Clement of Rome or Justin Martyr or John Chrysostom or gustan or you know guys during the Reformation and afterwards okay I have it as an addendum here I have as an addendum this section on church history and preaching and I want to just make a connection between what we're attempting to do in this class and what you will one day be doing and maybe some of you already are doing in the pulpit one of the primary if not the primary objectives here at the master seminary is to train you men how to preach that preaching starts with interpreting the word of God correctly and then being able to take that correct interpretation and put it into a format in which you can deliver it effectively to the people of God through the power of the Spirit so that their lives are changed that's the goal of the master Seminary that's why you guys are here I think it's important for me to connect this class and what you're going to learn in this class to the preaching process and four different ways in particular that I think church history becomes very relevant for preaching first is in the area of illustrations there are generally two kinds of illustrations that pastors preachers use in their sermons there are biblical illustrations biblical illustrations are awesome they come from the Word of God you can't get a better source than that biblical illustrations are wonderful because they are timeless you can preach a sermon today that uses an illustration from the Book of Daniel and ten years from now you can pick up those sermon notes and you can preach that exact same sermon with that exact same illustration you can preach it here in the United States you could preach it in Italy you could preach it in South America and you could use the same illustration it would not matter because biblical illustrations are timeless and boundary lists the other kind of illustration that people use a lot are contemporary event kind of illustrations and so maybe you use the Olympics in fact I preached a message not long ago where I use the Olympics as an illustration the 2012 London Olympics it was a great illustration because the Olympics were going on when I was preaching that message but even now only like five weeks later I could not preach that same sermon with that same illustration because people would be like totally disinterested ten years from now nobody's going to care about the 2012 London Olympics with regard to the spiritual point that I would be trying to make so contemporary illustrations are really helpful because they arrest people's interest they're fresh and new and and exciting but they go out of date very very quickly well there's good news with church history church history provides you with a source of lust rative material which is both timeless and fresh most people in the American Church in the english-speaking Church I think I can broaden it that much most people don't know anything about church history so you can use a church history illustration and it will captivate their imagination the same way that a contemporary current event kind of illustration will because it is completely fresh and new they've never heard the story of Athanasius being chased out of Alexandria and going and hiding in the Egyptian wilderness they've never heard the stories of most of the martyrs they've heard of Martin Luther but they don't know really anything about him except that he nailed something to a door so this is a great opportunity for you to introduce them to these individuals additionally church history illustrations are timeless you can use a Martin Luther illustration today and you can preach that same message in 10 years and use the exact same illustration you don't have to update your sermon so Churchill in history illustrations they are inferior to biblical illustrations for obvious reasons but they are both timeless and fresh meaning I would encourage you to when you prepare sermons try and include some church history illustrations it could even just be quotes and a lot of times you do hear good sermons that include a quote from Charles Spurgeon or Jonathan Edwards or John Calvin or John Knox or any one of the John's of the Reformation that's great that's a great way to include a little bit of church history and when you do that you are underscoring in the minds of your audience that what it is that you are telling them and preaching to them is something that is much bigger than them and much has a legacy that goes back all the way to the time of the Apostles so you're bringing that whole weight of church history with you when you do that so illustrations is a great use of church history and pretty much every time in Chapel that somebody uses a church history illustration I'm going to come up here and celebrate that fact with you after chapels over another way that church history can be used in preaching is by using commentaries from generations past again this is where I think we can sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that the newest commentary is always the best I would encourage you to stretch yourselves a little bit and use commentaries from past generations the material the commentary that has come to us has never been more accessible than it is today I mean you can go down to the library and look up any passage you want in the ancient Christian commentary series and you will be introduced to probably half a dozen ancient Church Fathers commenting on the passage that you're studying that's pretty cool you can go online and find that same material online you can use logoff and search for it in whatever Bible program you use so it's never been easier to incorporate this information into your Bible study process I'd encourage you to do it john chrysostom who will talk a lot about in this class fourth century church father preached verse by verse through the New Testament and most of his sermons are still intact so you go through the Gospel of John and you interpret your passage you can go back and see how a fourth century Christian interpreted that same exact passage and you know what 95% of the time if not more it's going to be exactly what you've come to conclude which is really really cool so incorporating that kind of knowledge again church history is not authoritative right we're just going to state that as our basic premise only the Bible is authoritative but what is church history it is a collection of generations of godly men who were searching the Scriptures and coming to conclusions based on their study of Scripture and when we when we listen to them we are listening to their own study of the text and I think we have a lot to learn from that all right a third connection between church history and preaching is the history of doctrine if the text you are preaching points to a larger doctor in church history is often an important component of that discussion so for example if you are teaching on the nature of God teaching on the Trinity church history suddenly becomes an important part of that discussion if you're preaching on the Canon if you're preaching on believers baptism versus infant baptism if you're preaching on the Protestant Reformation or Protestant theology even topics like eschatology you'll be interested to know this is a side note you'll be interested to know that every single church father who we know about was a pre millennialist up until about 250 AD clemente of alexandria was the first all millennialist he is also the father the allegorical hermeneutic not surprising but I mention that because I said eschatology that's really cool when you're preaching through revelation you get to revelation 21 to 6 and everyone in your congregation saying why no that's what the Bible says but my you know my reformed friend tells me that church history never interpreted that way you can say well that's not true for the first 300 years of church history premillennialism was absolutely the predominant view of the church it wasn't well we'll get into it later but it wasn't for a variety of reasons including the allegorical hermeneutic that suddenly amillennialism became the dominant view so church history becomes very confirming very affirming very helpful in understanding the way believers in the past have understood these same doctrines so use it it's a tool to be used don't be afraid of it I think too many Protestant evangelicals are afraid of church history for the record by the way the I use the word Protestant which is very much a post Reformation term I use the word evangelical which I see is a transcendent term that includes all true believers since the time of the Reformation time of a Pentecost but for the record the Protestant reformers themselves Luther Zwingli Calvin Knox and others later Chemnitz and others these men were very interested in what the Church Fathers had to say on things in fact if you read Calvin's Institute's he quotes from the church fathers almost as much as he quotes from the Bible he quotes from Agustin over a hundred times so if you think that it is impossible or incongruent for a Protestant to also love church history then you don't understand really what Protestantism is because the Protestant Reformation was about recovering church history not about abandoning it you can tell i'm always prone to go off on soapboxes i'll try and stop yep David churches she belongs to the Catholics yeah that's a good question why have the cat why have Protestants come to assume that church history belongs to the Catholics it seems to have been a development that's taken place in the last 100 years or so even in as late as the mid 1800s late 1800s you have Protestant treatises showing justification by faith in the early church fathers and so on and I think there have always been Protestants who have tried to continue to demonstrate that but part of it I think maybe is the rise of the independent church movement at least here in America where evangelical Christians have not only been divorced from not only been divorced from church history in a general sense they've been divorced from denominational history or history of any kind I I think a lot of it is just neglect that most and I'm talking about mainstream broad American shallow evangelicalism they don't really care about history at all in fact it's not about history it's about what's new I think if there's one word that describes modern cultural evangelicalism it's probably novelty they're always looking for the newest gimmick or fad to grow their church as fast and as big as possible so history really doesn't have anything to do with that so there tends to be this ignorance and that ignorant then gets played upon and twisted by Roman Catholics who are very concerned about church history because they're trying desperately to defend something that is not biblically defensible good question all right then in the area of apologetics whenever you're preaching about something that involves apologetic material and this is something that we've already discussed in brief but whenever you're dealing with something that involves apologetic material in your preaching it's always helpful to bring church history to bear and that could include the Roman Catholics the Mormons the Muslims you might be surprised to see the Muslims included in this list perhaps that comes as a little bit of a surprise I think you'll find by the time this class is over that Islam is really just a Christian cult in fact Islam is very very similar in some striking ways to Mormonism so in some ways Islam is the Mormonism of the seventh and eighth century or maybe better stated Mormonism is the American Islam of the 19th century but we'll get into some of those parallels a little bit later Muhammad took Jewish ideas Christian ideas and he tried to integrate them with Arabic legends and he created a synchronistic religion but in the quran itself there's quite a bit of reference to the law of moses the writings of david and the prophets and even the gospel of jesus it's it's classic it's a classic false religion technique appeal to prior true revelation in order to give yourself some level of credibility in expounding falsehood but we'll get there I've given some cautions in here and you can see those if you read through the notes on your own but again the point here is I don't want you to think of this class I really really don't want you to think of this class in the same way that you thought about whatever history class you took in high school or college where it was a bunch of names and a bunch of dates that you didn't care about and had no bearing on your life you only had to get through it in order to pass some tests or write some paper this is not that okay church history as I said on Tuesday church history is interesting and relevant and significant because it involves the church and it's not interesting because its history it's interesting because it's about the church and if you are here to serve and to love and to give your life to the church then you need to know about the history of the church and that's what this class is intended to do so love this class because you love the church not because you love history fair enough okay we'll transition from there then to just introducing our first century church history church history that is found in the book of Acts I like to tell my classes that God felt that church history was important enough that he included a book of church history as one of the 66 books that makes up your Bible and that book is found in the book of Acts so if you have your Bibles go ahead and turn to the book of Acts it is true that church history encompasses 19 centuries after the first century but it is equally true that church history encompasses that which is found in the book of Acts now in addition to these notes that I have here I also have a PowerPoint presentation and you have those slides on jewel as well as PDFs and I'm going to kind of go back and forth between the PowerPoint presentation and the Word document Adobe PDF version of the notes there's considerably more detail in those notes than there is in the PowerPoint Acts chapter 2 is where the church begins on the day of Pentecost and you know the story well the account well that the Apostles along with others were gathered in the upper room this is ten days after the ascension this is 50 days after the Passover so fifty days after the crucifixion and resurrection Pentecost a Jewish feast that took place 50 days after Passover and it was on that day in 30 ad that 120 were gathered in the upper room when the Holy Spirit came upon them and they began to speak with Bowl this and they began to speak in other languages this is in Acts chapter 2 verses 1 to 13 that is where the church begins as Christ said in Matthew 16 I will build my church future tense that promise begins to be fulfilled in Acts chapter 2 on the day of Pentecost okay a few key events here before we get to 30 ad these are events that help us determine the timing of the day of Pentecost as described in Acts chapter 2 there are generally three possible dates that are given by evangelical commentators for the day of Pentecost and with it of course the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord ad 30 ad 32 or ad 33 and I am pretty firmly convinced that ad 30 is the best choice not only because it's the choice taken in the MacArthur Study Bible but also because I believe that that's the only choice that really fits with all of the other dates that are given we know from archaeological data that Herod the Great who was the regional King within the Roman Empire when Jesus was born that he died around 4 BC and the dating BC before Christ obviously was done before that archaeological data was discovered so Jesus was born 4 BC at least by 4 BC since that's when Herod the Great died that would mean when Jesus was 12 years old around 8 ad that he traveled to the temple as a 12 year old which is recorded in the Gospel of Luke ad I'm sure you know this ad is a Latin phrase that means in the year of our Lord it does not mean after death sometimes people think that that the BC means before Christ and the ad refers to his crucifixion but that would have a 30-plus year gap in between his birth and his death that would mean that around 26 ad that our Lord would begin his public ministry Luke says in Luke 3:23 that he was about thirty years of age that is a significant age because in the Old Testament priests had to be 30 years old when they began their official service and there seems to be a connection there with Christ's role as priests as our great high priest so he was about thirty years of age when he began his ministry and so if he was born around 4 BC then 26 ad and his ministry lasts for three and a half years which then would put his crucifixion and resurrection in 30 ad in the month of March or April with the day of Pentecost in May or June of that same year so from the front end if you're going to go with 32 or 33 AD then Christ is more like 33 or 34 years old when he begins his ministry it seems like a stretch then for Luke to say that he was about thirty especially given the fact that Luke is such a careful historian so Luke's description of Jesus as being about thirty years old given the anchor date of 4 BC for the death of Herod would indicate that his ministry began around 26 ad which would then put the day of Pentecost around 30 ad now this also works from the back so from the front-end 30 ad seems to be the optimum date for the beginning of the church from the back end as well we know that the Jerusalem Council which is recorded in acts 15 took place in the year 49 or maybe 50 ad right around that time that's when it fits in the context of Paul's missionary journeys Paul in Galatians chapter 1 says that after he was converted he spent three years in Arabia and after those three years it was another fourteen years before he went up to the council at Jerusalem that's a total of 17 years well if the Jerusalem Council was an ad 49 that would put Paul's conversion Saul's conversion around ad 32 there's not enough time for Pentecost to also be an ad 32 and for the events of Acts chapter 1 to 8 to take place within that period of time so from both the front end and from the back end or working forward and working backward 30 ad seems to be the optimum date the day of Pentecost of course significant turning point in the history of the world the history of salvation the history of the church and I'm not going to make a big point of this right now because we won't get into Pentecostal history until we get to the 20th century which won't be until the very end of next semester but I think it's important for us to recognize that the tongues that were spoken in Acts chapter 2 were clearly authentic foreign languages and you have a list of those languages in verses 9 through verse 11 of these different tongues in which the gospel was proclaimed by not only the Apostles but also the others of the 120 who were gathered in the upper room and those true authentic foreign languages to Jews who did not understand those languages sounded like gibberish which is why they said they were drunk but to those who came from all parts of the world and truly did understand those languages they recognized that nothing less than a genuine unexplainable supernatural miracle had taken place I just think it's important at the outset of the church history that we emphasize that the beginnings of the church was authenticated by a true supernatural unexplainable miracle and not by a bunch of guys speaking gibberish okay and that's explicit in the text now that'll become relevant when we get to Pentecostal history in the 20th century but for now we'll leave it there and Agustin tells us that the reason and I think this is supported by the text but just to bring up a name from church history Agustin tells us that the reason they spoke in all of these different languages was to underscore the fact that the gospel was to go to all nations on earth and we really see the fulfillment of the Great Commission in the book of Acts or at least we see the direction in which church history is going towards that fulfillment maybe it's a better way to say it in acts 1 - 1 - 7 we see the gospel spread throughout Jerusalem and Judea in Acts chapter 8 we see the gospel taken to Samaria and then in Acts chapter 9 starting with the conversion of Saul and then Acts chapter 10 the conversion of Cornelius we see the gospel taken then to the ends of the world so go to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth that Commission stands as an outline of the book of Acts the gospel in Jerusalem in Judea the gospel in Samaria and then the gospel going to the uttermost parts of the earth alright this is just a line drawing of the tongues of fire there in Acts chapter 2 it's actually a woodcut from a Bible that was produced in the nineteenth century so the apostles receive the spirit in Acts chapter 2 and then with boldness they go to proclaim the gospel in Acts chapter 2 starting with Peters sermon on the day of Pentecost and then Peter preaches again in Acts chapter 3 they a lame man is healed in Acts chapter 3 and the preaching continues in Acts chapter 4 when Peter and John are arrested they're threatened they're released and the church just keeps growing in Acts chapter 5 Ananias and Sapphira lied to the Holy Spirit and are struck dead it's ironic to me that charismatic sometimes try and find a parallel to being slain in the spirit in that passage since the results for Ananias and Sapphira were terminal it's interesting in Luke's account that just prior to Acts 5 1 to 11 he mentions a man named Joseph who we all know better as Barnabas because he was also called Barnabas Barnabas had also sold land and given it to the church Ananias and Sapphira represent a contrast between Barnabas's authentic gift and their gift that was based on deceit the Apostles are put on trial again one of the very interesting things in Acts chapter 5 and we have to go quickly even though I would love to spend the entire semester just on the book of Acts but then you still wouldn't know anything about church history beyond the time of the Apostles so we can't do that but we have Gamaliel mentioned in Acts chapter 5 verse 34 and one of the interesting things is you know Gamaliel gives that kind of fragment was very pragmatic piece of advice like hey let's just leave these guys alone and if God's in it it'll succeed and if God's not in it it'll die without our help I think one of the things that's kind of interesting about that of course is that later in the book of Acts in acts 22 verse 3 we find out that Paul was one of the students of Gamaliel Paul did not heed Gamaliel advice I almost wonder if Luke included this because he would have gotten this information probably from Paul or maybe from one of the other apostles who of course was there but Paul was the exact opposite if Gamaliel was indifferent and kind of a hey let's just let go and let God deal with this mentality Paul was the exact opposite Paul was one who was indeed striving against God as it says there in verse 39 if it is of God Gamaliel said you will not be able to overthrow them or else you may even be found fighting against God and you have Luke introducing to us the concept that persecuting the church would be to fight against God which is essentially what the Lord tells Paul on the Damascus Road why are you fighting against me so kind of some interesting details that Luke includes for us there in Acts chapter 6 we have deacons chosen and this is because it has become too much for the Apostles to handle all of the day-to-day details of the church and I think we do have something of a paradigm here for the offices that are established and the way that those offices are to function you have the Apostles functioning really as the elders and pastors of the church and it says there that their goal their job is to devote themselves to prayer and to the preaching of the word and your job as an elder and a pastor is likewise to devote yourself to prayer and to the preaching and teaching of the word you bring alongside you faithful men as deacons who are willing to oversee the administrative tasks within church ministry I think you see that outlined here in acts 6 and I think you see it fleshed out in Paul's epistles to Timothy and to Titus but oftentimes the reason that pastors experience what is called burnout though I think that's kind of a bad psychobabble kind of term but the reason pastors sometimes experience burnout is because they're not sticking to their God ordained role of prayer and preaching they're trying to do what God has designed deacons to do so just as you think about your future church ministry don't fall into the trap of trying to do it all yourself that's not how God designed the church to work okay then in Acts chapter 7 one of those deacons a man named Stephen preaches and is martyred now Stephens martyrdom is going to become very significant to the flow of events in the book of Acts because in Acts chapter 11 Luke is going to pick up on the fact that as a result of this persecution persecution coming from Saul persecution coming as a result of Stephens martyrdom Christians flee from Jerusalem and from Judea and some of them go to places like Crete and some of them go to places like Cyprus and eventually some of them end up in a place called Antioch which is a city known as Syrian Antioch it's actually in Turkey today but it's just north of Syria it's on the coast it's the third-largest city in the Roman Empire at the time and as a result of their witness Gentiles start coming to Christ all of these events likely take place within the first two years of the church's existence and that again is based on the biographical data from Galatians chapter 1 Paul says it was 17 years three and then fourteen seventeen years between his conversion and the Jerusalem Council that puts his conversion around 32 or 33 which means that everything before Acts chapter 9 where he's converted takes place in the first two to three years of the church's existence now Luke is going to kind of broaden his timeline because the book of accent covers 30 total years but the first eight chapters focus on the first two years of the church's history

Channel: The Master's Seminary

Views: 103,773

Rating: 4.7402015 out of 5

Keywords: Historical Theology I, Lecture 01, Nathan Busenitz, The Master's Seminary, God, Bible, Truth, Preaching, Grace Community Church, Holy, Spirit, Gospel, Holy Spirit (Deity), Lord, Word, History, God (word), Salvation, Salvation (Christianity), Christianity (Religion), Sun Valley, California, Theology, Why Study Church History?

Id: BeMcRdXdwkc

Length: 65min 22sec (3922 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 10 2012