Key Times Periods in Church History

As we step through this, what we're going to be doing is looking at glimpses of each of these segments of church history. We've broken them up into six sections. Most of you should have this printout. One or two binders may be missing it because we're still trying to catch up with the number of folks that are in the class. But it's these breakdowns that we're looking at. And so we're going to step through each period of church history this morning, kind of looking at highlights of each of those segments of time. Some things you'll look at and you'll say, boy, there's some things you sure missed, Vern, and we will.

And the reason is because there's no way we can cover it all. We will be catching up to some of those things as we go through the rest of the weeks, not looking at individual segments of time, but looking at certain topics within those periods of time. All right?

First thing we'll look at is the apostolic period, the time from the death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seeding of Christ, and really starting with the day of Pentecost, the beginning of the Church, then up through the death of John the Apostle. So that's about 30 to 96 AD. That's the first period of time there. And this is amazing because this is God's sovereignty, God's arranging things, to set the stage for the church. And what you'll see here is there are three influences that set the stage for the church, that made it so that the gospel could go out and be communicated. Alright? The whole set. Grab the whole set. There we go. Okay.

What you see here, first of all, this is the Roman Empire, and look how far it extended, all the way from the Persian Gulf on the one hand to England on the other. A massive empire that stretched out farther than earlier empires. And that was one thing that the Lord had set up, and you look at it, a Roman Empire? The Lord's going to use that?

Yes. And that's one of the things that have been set in motion. And we'll take a look at why that was an important thing here. This was the Roman Empire, smaller in extent, because it got extended over time during the New Testament era, showing some of the roads that were in place. Now, this is amazing.

They made all these roads with no machines. This is all handwork, digging by hand, stones by hand, everything by hand. They would dig down way down the ground and build up from there in order to make these roads. Many of these roads are still in place.

54,000 miles, enough to circle the globe two times. And the main purpose for those roads is get the troops there fast. That was the main reason. Moving troops, moving the logistics for the troops, the food, the supplies, all the engines of war. They could move quickly and that was why they built them. What they didn't know they were doing is setting the stage for travel of the gospel. 54,000 miles of roads worth of travel for the gospel.

When Paul traveled along, you look at the routes that he took, it's the road system. The other thing is Alexander the Great in about three centuries prior to the New Testament era, had gone in and conquered the eastern part of what was to become the Roman Empire, and actually all the way to India, which you see there is the Indus River on the east end. And so he established it with the Greek language being universal. And the next thing you see there, we kind of summarize the influence because there's one I haven't touched on yet.

The Roman Empire provided political stability and excellent roads on which to carry the gospel. There was political stability so that even though the Roman Empire had some things to concern themselves with, they weren't worried about things constantly getting shuffled and changed around. Within the Roman Empire, they could move and travel as they wished. The next thing is the Greek culture brought, it didn't just bring a common language especially to the eastern part of the Roman Empire, it brought a language that was very well structured. for explaining the truth of the gospel.

Isn't that amazing? It's a language that has some precision in it. It has discernment and distinction between different, for example, categories of love. The ability to say that you have been justified and to be able to put that in a perfect tense where it's a completed past action. That was a special thing to do in the entire eastern portion of the Roman Empire. was saturated and everybody understood the Greek language.

The last thing was the spread of the Jewish culture. The Jews scattered around, although they were minority in many places, they were allowed. And what they would do is talk about the Old Testament, because that's what they knew, right? And so even those who didn't have a background in the Old Testament were given a background by the Jews. And when Jews became believers in the church, they were able to explain that background to the others that didn't understand it. So it was a perfect setup. The government, the roads, the language, and the Old Testament background, all laid out, gospel-ready.

The next thing, the apostles wrote letters and histories. As they wrote and they put things on papyrus, that's from a reed that grows down in Egypt, they put things on papyrus, write on these papyrus letters and send those about, they would write histories, and there was, at this point in time, lots of papyrus made available. That was a big industry. Lots made available so that they could write out the New Testament letters and make copies.

This is, for example, and we'll be taking a further look at this. Have you ever heard somebody say, oh, the Bible is just full of all kinds of stories and myths and people came up with legends and just made up stories about Jesus? Look at this description of the way Luke tells it. In so much as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting to me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the exact truth about the things you've been taught." Does that sound like I made up a legend? Does that sound like, oh, we got this eventually and cooked up a story? I don't think so. Something else?

The evidence in the wording here indicates Theophilus was most likely a Roman bureaucrat in the legal system, and so coming up with stories was not a good idea. It was Luke, and especially the Book of Acts, were likely submittals to Theophilus, the Roman bureaucrat, in defense of Paul. Coming up with something that's unverifiable and untruthful and pure legend is not going to fly. It's got to be standing on solid facts.

Anyway, we'll look more at the character of the New Testament as we look at how we got the Bible, and we'll take a closer look at that. You have in your package there, here's my code. I've got the page number for the first parts of your handout. Behind that is where you see an S. It means you've got a special handout, single page, in the group that is this right here. And what that does give you is a listing of the times when the books were written.

Because the whole numbering system we have, like year 2003, that didn't come until centuries later, centuries after the New Testament. So they didn't write down, I'm writing this in 73 AD. They didn't do that. How we date them has to do with historical evidence at the time.

So what you'll frequently see is not a specific date, but a range. And that's fine. There's no problem with that. If you see a date that is much later than these, or in the case of the book of Revelation, much earlier, somebody's got an agenda. And it's probably not a good one. You will find people that have other theories and ideas, but they're pushing something. These dates that you see here are dates that take the scripture seriously. You can take a look at that on your own there.

Another question is, what happened to the apostles? Whatever happened to those guys? It turns out Judas, we know from scripture what happened to him. He didn't get very far. He kind of fell short. The next one is James. We know from the book of Acts that he was killed with a sword. The rest of them we don't have direct indication from scripture, historical record, what happened to these guys.

So you have another handout, again, see here's this. You have another handout there entitled, Whatever Happened to the Apostles? And it outlines what happened, not from biblical record, but from history, other documents that we have in place. There are varying degrees of reliability in those documents. So take them as is. And I think what I've handed you says that.

Basically, it looks like the apostles went far and wide. Thomas, it appears went all the way over to India. I mean, that's amazing. But I talked to a fellow who was a pastor over in India, and he said the people there say, yeah, we were established by Thomas.

I mean, they look at it that way. That's their thought. Yes? I had a student in Philadelphia who was from India. He verified that. I mean, he came to me and told me that Thomas was the pastor. Yes, it's amazing. They're adamant. They say, yes, Thomas did come here and he's the one, and it's amazing. And other written accounts seem to confirm that. So there is indication that it's debatable that the gospel even got to England within the first century.

So it is phenomenal what happened with these 12 guys that had no 13, that had no, you know, they weren't super bureaucrats, they weren't supermen of some sort. You've got Paul, who was fighting contrary to the Christians up until what we read in Acts chapter 9. Phenomenal changes, amazing changes. The next segment we want to look at, it appears that John died from a collection of evidence in 96 AD, about a year after writing the Book of Revelation.

From that period up until 312, we have a period of ongoing and increasing persecution of the Church. This is what we call the Early Church Era, getting out of the Apostolic Era into the Early Church Era. Christianity by 100 AD, and this is just a few years after John has died, had extended basically into these areas.

We know of established churches either from scripture or extra-biblical references in these locations. And this green line here is the extent of the Roman Empire. There were, we know for example the instance that Helmut shared about, like Thomas taking the gospel to India, so some places off the map here. But in general, most of the churches established were right around the Mediterranean and mostly on the eastern end of the Mediterranean, by 100.

What's interesting, too, is John didn't just say, OK, I'm done, and he's gone, and the Lord takes him. He had spent time discipling people. And we even have some record. And again, there's this F. It means you've got a handout that corresponds to this. we have direct documented evidence that John discipled Polycarp. You see the code here is the wide band indicates there's direct association and that's virtually certain by the documents. So John discipled Polycarp, Polycarp discipled Papias, Polycarp discipled Ignatius, Polycarp discipled Irenaeus, and then there are probable associations here as well, and a less likely association between John and Ignatius. So we have documents from each of these people and direct evidence in terms of their relationships, and it's interesting to look at those and to examine that and see the discipling process going on. Now, here's a chart that I put up here somewhat reluctantly, and here's why.

You find in the Apostolic Era, about the year 100, which is the end of the Apostolic Era, starting the early Church Era, about that time, less than 1% of the Roman Empire was Christians. The figure has been variously estimated at about 0.3 to 0.6%. Not very many. It would be unusual to run into a Christian if you were just kind of talking to people. Real unusual, and a lot of the Roman bureaucracy had just begun to hear that there was such a thing. They were thought of as just a sect of Judaism, in great part. Now, as they broke into this era, by the time the year 200 came around, somewhere around 3% of the Roman Empire was Christians.

This part here, where we get into the next section, the Imperial Church, you see the line going up. And I apologize on your handout here, it showed up real light. But I wouldn't take that too seriously, because what happened once Christianity became legal and actually enforced, you notice this line right here? See where from there it goes straight up?

That's where if you had a pagan church, you're in trouble. And so people said, well, gee, that's a lot of hassle. I think I'll become a Christian. Okay? So because things reversed, that line went straight up. I wouldn't take that number too seriously in terms of how many are actually going to be with the Lord when the day comes. But just in terms of people who raised their hands and said, yeah, I'm a Christian, the number went way high because the cost of not being one began to be expensive.

Let's look a little farther here. This is the early church writers and writings, and we'll be going into this a little bit more, but a couple of things to note. After this period of time of the apostolic era, we do have a great number of writings. This is a small sampling. Later on, I'll be offering a CD. It's the equivalent in books of about six to nine feet of books on one CD. And a lot of those, we have a great number of early church writings, a very large number. Massive, massive volume of early church writings. And so this is just a very small sampling. At the same time, most of the events chronicled in here, those are various cults and aberrant teachings that are shown in the middle. And something we'll look at shortly here that's very important, the empire divides East and West in 284.

These people, of course, and we've looked at some of them earlier in the chart that you have, these people were contemporaries and frequently corresponded with each other. Clement of Rome, for example, wrote a letter to the Church of Corinth. We read about Justin Martyr and his connections. What we don't see on there, for example, is Polycarp, and he was involved with discipling several.

So if we were to put everybody on here, there would be lots and lots of lines, and lots of continuity, lots of information. This is big. This is big. You do have a copy, and it's fairly readable in smaller form in your handout. What happened in 284 is, Diocletian came on board and he said, hey, you know, this empire is getting a little tough to handle. Let's split this thing up administratively. So they divided it. And there's the dividing line.

Thessalonica became one of the eastern capitals. And that's, of course, the same city where Paul had written, right? A couple centuries earlier. And then so you have the eastern half. And then you have the Western half. Now let's ask this question. Why would there be an Eastern and Western half? Is there some rationale that you can think of? Why would they divide it up that way? It's an Eastern and West long, you know, in that dimension. Okay, so that's one and you're right about that. Good. What's another?

Where was the Greek language located? What you see is the Greek language and culture is typical of this half, the Latin of this half. This half here had to deal with things to the east. Basically a lot of the pre-Mohammedan empires and the Romans kept having to fight those people off. And then on this half you had the barbarian tribes that were up in here. Different enemies, different languages, some variation in culture made it tough to keep the empire pulled together. And also because, Heidi is right, the eastern and western extent made it tougher to respond to things. If I'm in Rome and something's going on over here, to get news back and then to get back to here, here's what we do, is too long.

So they said we've got to break this up. That did administratively break up the Empire, but as we'll see, it ended up having a huge effect. The division of the Roman Empire had and continues to have major impact upon the character of the Church up to this day. That decision, I mean, all he thought he was doing was, hey, let's break this up administratively.

It impacts us now, many, many centuries later. The Roman Empire went from western and eastern halves in 284, eventually actually dividing as two empires by 395. A little over a century, it actually split up the empire in two. Two separate controls. The control was difficult even before this final dividing. We'll see that in a minute.

The western and eastern churches' connections to the Roman Empire beginning in 313 meant that as the empire split, so increasingly did the Church. In the Western part, you see the development eventually of the Roman Catholic Church, and in the Eastern Empire, the Orthodox Churches. And the bottom line is, the reason for those churches' development separately is because of the Roman Empire splitting.

That's the bottom line. And as you look at how they split, why they split, where they split, And we'll go through it all. That's where the division came about. And it started before the churches were even connected, but ended up resulting in the churches being split.

The Roman Empire was called the Pontiff Maxim. Recognize the name? And the divided empire was further subdivided into areas. Each of those areas was called a diocese. And the man who was in charge of each of those diocese areas was the vicar. we have in our English vocabulary, vicarious, right? The idea is this vicar is vicariously for the emperor carrying out the administration of those areas. Here's the Pontiff Maxim coin, see that? P-O-N-T-I-F. That's a Roman coin, so the title comes from the Roman emperor's title.

Now, the Orthodox Church continued to move apart from the Roman Catholic Church, culminating in the mutual excommunications in 1054. You're excommunicated! No, you are! That was the way it happened. Each side excommunicated the other, and that really nailed it. Before that, things were a little raw. Now they were totally severed. Then, here's the strange thing, we'll get into more detail with the Crusades.

A few decades after this, the Eastern Empire got attacked by the Muslims, the Eastern Orthodox Church asked for help from Rome. Rome came in and said, we'll help, and they ended up slaughtering Eastern Orthodox people, and the Muslims, and the Jews. But anyway, we'll get into that.

The Roman Catholic Church operated totally differently from the Orthodox Church. The way they operated was different, they were in different cultures, different geographical domain, and that's why, as we'll see later, it was the Roman Catholic Church that had the reaction we call the Reformation and Protestantism, and the Eastern Orthodox Church did not. It's because of the way they dealt with things and because they operated differently.

Let's look at this next section, the Imperial 312, when Constantine said, okay, Christianity is legal. Remember he had divided things, things have been divided now, so when he said Christianity is legal, what part of the Roman Empire did that apply to?

The western part. So the eastern part, even though it was supposed to be in cooperation, they said, no, we're still persecuting Christians. And we'll read an account of that later, not today. Alright, here's Constantine. He declared Christianity illegal in 312.

How it happened, supposedly, he was heading into this battle and he had this vision. In this vision he said, under this sign conquer. And he saw the cross. So he told all his soldiers to paint a cross on their shield. Remember those shields we saw in the overhead? Paint a cross on your shield. And they went and won the battle.

He says, that's it, I'm a Christian. So, that's how it came about. The very next year, he declared Christianity the official religion, and then, 11 years later, the only legal religion. Boy, that is quite a reverse. Can you imagine these Christians? They've been going through horrible, horrible persecutions. There were 10, okay? Hold your fingers up. 10 persecutions, okay?

During the time that the Christian church was under persecution, Now, it was totally reversed, and from 312 to 324, a dozen years later, it had gone from Christianity being completely illegal, and you're going to die for being a Christian, to the other way, if you're not a Christian, you're going to die. Pagan priests were crucified, because they weren't Christians. If you were at a pagan temple, they shut them down. They said, you're a pagan priest? Out to the cross. You're done. A complete reversal. That's why you see that number going straight up, but I don't believe it. Were these people actually believers? I seriously doubt it. They simply were feeling the pressure.

From Constantine's declaration, there was a history of the Christian Church written by Eusebius. Here's a printed form, and by the way, there's a bunch of books up here you can take a look at. Please don't take them, because I need them to continue on here. This is Eusebius' History of the Christian Church. You can take a look at that. I'll be including this on CD. Probably reading on a computer screen would drive you nuts, but it's good for research.

Anyway, he wrote that, and that was done under the order of Constantine. And then he said, make 50 copies of the Scriptures. It was some compensation for having destroyed many more than that. So anyway, make 50 copies of the Scriptures. So they pulled things together and made 50 copies right then. By order of the Roman Emperor.

They actually eventually included the Old Testament as well. And by year 400, they had pulled together the Old and New Testaments and translated them into Latin. So because then the Western Empire could relate to that more easily. Since only about 10% of the Roman Empire's people were Christians, pagan temples were converted to Christian church buildings were eventually shut down. So they take a temple, they say, okay, this is the Temple of Artemis. like in Ephesus, right? Now it's a Christian church. And so they would do that. Or they would just say, sorry, we're just taking this thing down. It's a pagan church and we're not going to have this anymore.

Councils were sponsored by the Roman Empire in order to resolve doctrinal issues. Think of why would the Roman Emperor want doctrinal division resolved? Why? You're the Roman Emperor. Okay. Why would you want to avoid divisions? Yeah, political control. So he would say, hey, we're having a council. I'll supply the Kool-Aid and we'll have a council here. So they'd set up councils and draw these church leaders together and pull them together in different places.

Just to kind of step through the various things here, here's an example of a pagan temple that we know was converted to a church. You ever see a cross like this with a circle? The connection seems to be the circle was originally the circle for the sun god. And instead of taking it off, you put the cross over the top of it, and everybody's happy.

Okay? Okay. Now, here are some of these councils. And what's interesting, in these councils, as you track through them, and you've got, again, if you see this F, you've got a copy that's more complete than this. It's got much more detail than this, okay?

What this shows is two things. One is good things happen at these councils because they got some things squared away, and in truth, they did really well at figuring some things out. Some of the things like which books were in the New Testament, and that had already been something fairly well established, but at least they said, okay, this is it. Doctrinal issues about was Jesus fully God and fully man and things like that. They got some things really well squared away. As time went on, however, they also got more and more messed up.

And we'll track that. What's that? Yeah, like National and World Council. Yes, like that. For example, in Ephesus, they're saying, okay, here are the number of books we got in the New Testament, and here's what they are, and that sounds good. That was also the council where it was held in Ephesus, where they had the temple of Artemis, and they changed the temple of Artemis to a Christian church. And Artemis was now given a new name, Mary. Okay, we'll go on here.

Continued decline of the political unity and military power of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire started going downhill, and things getting worse and worse, breaking up as time went on. Increasing role of the Bishop of Rome in military and government matters of the western portion of the Roman Empire. Case in point, during the 400s, called the 5th century, there were no less than three barbarian invasions of Rome. The city of Rome couldn't defend itself.

So what they did is they sent the Bishop of Rome out to talk to the leaders of the invading army. And they said, don't come and rape and burn, just take stuff. And so that's what they did. And people thought that was wonderful. And so now the Bishop of Rome becomes a hero because the army sure isn't. The soldiers were not. By that time, they could hardly pull together a group of soldiers that could defend things. The degradation in the Roman Empire had gone that far. So several different times, the Bishop of Rome ended up going out and negotiating with the attacking hordes and saying, you know, kind of be nice. You know, don't be too nasty to us.

Expansion of Christianity into the lands and peoples more distant from the boundaries of the old Roman Empire and increasing number of those who called themselves Christians. On the one hand, you've got this increasing number of people calling themselves Christians, and it's very dubious whether a lot of them were. On the other hand, you did have people going out into some more distant places and carrying the gospel. An interesting kind of conflict, isn't it? Furthermore, what happened because of the increasingly oppressive nature of the church, because of its connection to the government, many Christian groups kind of stuck out on the edges because that's where they could exist and maintain themselves without the severe persecution from the organized church. Okay, now stepping into the next year of 590 to 1517. This is Europe in the time of Gregory the Great, 590 to 604.

He was the first one to be called Pope. There were other bishops of Rome prior to that, but he was the first one to be called Pope. And what you notice is that the eastern portion of the empires is off to this side. Basically, the connections are all in this end and extending even up into Scandinavia and up into the British Isles as well. So there's extensive influence by that point in time. Gregory the Great, this is the one who was called Pope first and from then on there was a continuous lineage. Now something else that inserts itself in about this same period of time as Gregory the Great stepping into his role Islam is getting started.

Oh boy. They had no idea what was about to come upon them. Believe me. Look at this. Let me explain one thing. The Hijra, that's not going to make sense to most of you. It is the pilgrimage from Mecca to Medina. That's all that means. Muhammad moved from Mecca to Medina, and so there you go. That's what it is. The rest of this is pretty self-explanatory, but the one thing to look at See this? Here's 632, the death of Muhammad, 100 years later to the year.

They're beating back the forces of Islam in Tours, France. By the way, that's not that far from Paris. Islam just swept across Europe and swept across North Africa and swept across even farther to the east. Even to this day, you know, Indonesia is substantially influenced by Islam. They went out, just spreading with the sword, everywhere. It was finally in tourist France where they were turned back and stopped. Otherwise, their intent was to keep on going. This was to take over the world, basically.

We'll look more, at the last week we get together, we'll look more specifically at Islam from start to finish. This is just an introduction. It was a massive impact upon the Church. soon to have a much bigger impact than anybody expected. Oh, two important things. Muhammad had contact with some Orthodox Jews and some Christians who were off a couple of ticks. And that was his experience with Christians and Jews. He called them people of the book. Interesting, huh? People of the book. And that's what the Koran calls Christians and Jews, the people of the book.

The emergence of the Roman Catholic Church from this time of Gregory the Great, you see from there up until into the middle of the Reformation period, a sequence of when the various doctrines were instituted. A lot of folks will have the idea that these doctrines are always there. Peter must have said them, right? But the reality is these doctrines were added at different periods of time.

For example, the celibacy of the priesthood was only decreed in 1079. That was almost 1,000 years after the New Testament was written. So that would be one example. Transubstantiation, the idea that this wafer actually becomes the body of Christ, that didn't occur until over 1,000 years after the New Testament era. Pardon? That is fascinating. You ready? 1800s. It wasn't until the 1800s that the Pope actually said what I say is infallible.

By the way, you have a handout on that, so you can look at more detail on that if you like to, at your own. We will, as we go through the history of movements and things like that, look at more detail at this and other groups. Here's the Crusades, the Crusades in rough figures, about 1100 to 1300 in rough figures, about that period of time. And you have more detail in one of your special handouts. But the early Crusades went this way, and why?

Because the idea was to send troops over to help Constantinople, because this is where the Eastern Empire had gotten into trouble. And so what the Crusaders ended up doing is they'd go in there and just slaughter everybody. They went in and just slaughtered thousands of Jews. They slaughtered the Muslims. They slaughtered the people in the Eastern Church. It was a real confusing time. People just didn't know what they were doing, and everybody was killed. You're here. You must be an enemy. That was kind of the way it happened. Later, Crusades took this path. They would go down here, take a ship, and head in this direction.

The one that was probably most, oh boy, what's the right word, awful, it was a children's crusade. They actually sent off thousands and thousands of children, tens of thousands of children, and most of them were sold into slavery or slaughtered and died of starvation, things of that sort. It was sort of a mystical thing. Real sad, because they were somehow thinking that God was going to take care of these children. I had no idea what they thought these children were going to do. But anyway, it was a tragic thing. These are the crusades.

We have a special handout that details each one of those. Here's the first one, detailed here. And by the way, there were a few other minor ones in between, but this is the major one, so you've got that to take a look at here. And it gives you a little more detail on each one of them. It gives you the year, and it also gives you the ones who were pushing for it.

In some cases it was a Pope, in other cases there were other people involved. Next, a century after the Crusades, came this fellow, John Wycliffe, in England. At that point in time, the only Bible that people readily had available was a Latin Bible, and you weren't allowed to own one. unless you were on a special group. John Wycliffe came in and translated that Latin Bible into English and distributed that about. Of course, there wasn't any printing presses yet, so this was all hand-copying, but at least people had copies of the scriptures.

As we'll see, there were earlier copies of the scriptures in English. Some of them, by this time, were incomprehensible. English had changed that much. People said, I can't even understand this. So this was not the first attempt to put the Bible into English, but earlier versions of English were, we'll see examples of them in a week or two here, you can't even begin to imagine that that's English.

Okay, John Wycliffe, called the Morning Star of the Reformation, there was a group he was associated with, we'll take a look later, called the Lawlards. That doesn't sound very energetic, but they were. Anyway, John Wycliffe was one who moved in during this earlier time and sought to get the scriptures directly in people's hands.

The printing press, okay, this was roughly another century after Wycliffe, and the printing press, first by Johannes Gutenberg, about 1455, and we say about because the evidence that we have is not definitive, but about that period of time, He came up with this.

That hit like the internet is hitting now. It just spread like wildfire. People were opening up printing shops all over the place because people wanted things printed. There was, at the same time, a kind of a recognition. Boy, I can get this and this and this and this printed and things that I've been having a tough time getting out to people. People were printing all sorts of things. Their printing shops were popping up all over the place.

The first book printed was the Latin Bible. That's one that he could print and print legally and all those kinds of things. As we see in a little bit here, the decades after the introduction of the printing press, look at some of the things that came here. Greek New Testament, Hebrew Old Testament, Hebrew and Greek grammars. They could start looking at this stuff and studying it and more people could learn about these things and they could look up, here's what this word means. So they started printing these things. This is a first edition Erasmus Greek New Testament. He pulled together the entire New Testament. Now, note that date. It's the next year that Martin Luther nails his 95 theses onto the church door at Wittenberg. He says, hey, we've got something to talk about. Because he'd gotten a copy of this and started to look at it. And it was really turning his head upside down. And he was about to turn the world upside down. Now, next segment, 1517-1648.

We had trouble inside and outside within the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church had gone through periods of time where they at one time had three popes, and they were all excommunicating each other, and it got kind of chaotic. So there was trouble inside.

They had initiated, as you'll see on your schedule, this selling of indulgences, and that was not being well received. People could buy indulgences and after that do anything they want and people said this doesn't make sense, you know I can't buy an indulgence because I can't afford it and so I got a I got to live righteously But this other guy over here can murder people and rape and I you know, so that just didn't sell Within the Catholic Church.

Okay, and that's where the Reformers came from by and large within the Catholic Church They were saying this needs to be changed. Okay, the intent of the Reformers was not to Let's start a new movement. The intent was, let's reform the Catholic Church. That was what they had in mind. The message that they came up with was the Scriptures alone. Only by grace, only by faith. Different basis of authority than what the Catholic Church had been conveying.

And finally, the means was the printing press. Not only could they look at these Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament and print things out, they could also put out brochures quickly. Here, print this brochure out and spread it out all over Europe. Spread it everywhere.

Okay, you have the four major reformers summary. Lots of information there about each of them. There were also many others involved, but these are some of the main ones, especially impacting the European continent. John Knox going up into Scotland, particularly. The issues of the Reformation, and here's kind of the four major reformers, their pictures. What was new was the basis of authority.

Scripture alone. Sola Scriptura. It was the Latin. Sola Scriptura. And the basis of salvation. Faith. That was new. That was revolutionary. Personal Bible study and interpretation. That was new. That was revolutionary. Because it was illegal. In the 1200s it became illegal for a person to own a Bible. Capital punishment if you own a Bible. So this was a whole radical change, to actually have one in your personal possession.

It's also something that wasn't appreciated. What was unchanged? Because these reformers came in and they made some changes, but there are also some things that didn't change. Political and military aligned churches. What happened? Here's Luther starting this kind of new movement, and he got aligned with noblemen that wanted to oppose Rome. And so instead of establishing just a church movement, he established a political and military movement as well. See Zwingli down there? He died fighting the Catholics in Switzerland.

There were Catholic cantons and non-Catholic cantons, and they got battled and he died in one of the battles. The other thing that happened is allegorical interpretation of much of scripture was maintained, and they continued to teach that the church was simply taking over Israel's place. See those distinctions there? So they maintained a lot and had these uniquely new areas. But not everything was new.

What's that? On this? Okay. Hey, Roy? Battery's going shot. Okay. Maybe you'll take that. I'll try to speak up. Is it distraught? Okay. Let me just take it off and if he happens to pick it up, fine. Okay. This is the family tree of Boston Group. Your individual copy is going to be hard to read. I'm going to have later a larger size. But look at this.

1517. Here's Lutheranism starting, okay? It branches off into Lutheranism. Now did Lutheranism stay as a single group? No. The whole thing divided up. Then from 1520 what do you have? Here is John Calvin. He starts off and he starts this whole branch. Over here you have Menno Simons and actually there are others that were instrumental but their guys got killed right off so I don't have their pictures. But this is Menno Simons. That's Miniman. And this is the Anabaptist.

Anabaptist is not Baptist, by the way. It means re-baptizing. They said that infant baptism doesn't apply. We're going to get re-baptized with a valid baptism, not the infant baptism we had before. Of course, that set them at odds with the Lutheran Church and with the Reformed Church who continued the infant baptism. And so Luther and Calvin just spoke out with vile words against the Anabaptists.

Okay, then, here's John Knox, and basically instrumental in founding the Presbyterian denomination. I'll tell you, that guy was brave. He put his finger in the face of Mary, you know, Queen of Scots, and just railed that. Amazing, you know. And then, over here, the Anglican Church founded by King Henry VIII. He has an issue. He wanted to get married to Anne Boleyn, and then he went and carried this out.

And so, anyway, we're dividing from Rome. The faith is continually the Roman Church, but separately. And then, finally, here, Methodism, in the later century, and the Baptists are up here. So the Anabaptists and the Baptists are actually Now, this is real simplified, the reality is the whole thing is all caused out of the water, because there was interaction among them, and we'll look at that more later.

Excuse me. Thank you. You have on your handout these items here. The assumptions of the Reformation failed to provide a biblical basis for unity among believers. And so divisions are often based on personalities, politics, and a poor understanding of proper biblical interpretation. Here's Paul writing to the church at Corinth saying, hey, I'm of Peter, I'm of Paul, right? So what do we do? Let's start a church. Luther, Calvin, Mennonite. What do we do? We do this exact same thing and we institutionalize it for centuries. Funny, didn't they read 1 Corinthians 1? Anyway.

Now, doctrinal divide, Calvinism and Arminianism was one that happened. This was 1618 and 1619. The Calvinism established their five points founded on God's sovereignty. The Arminians makes man's free will primary and allows for loss of salvation. As it turned out, the Calvinists at this particular gathering won. because they beheaded one of the Armenians and put several others in prison and whipped another one of them. So anyway, that was the outcome from that theological battle.

It was sponsored by the, here's another government thing, it's sponsored by the Dutch government, okay? And so that was their way of carrying this thing out. I am glad that we don't have to settle things like that now among us at the church, but that was considered the right thing to do, okay? We'll be taking a further look at this when we look at the developments of different church movements. Finally, modern timeline here. The 52 years after the Peace of Westphalia, because what happened is now you've got the Protestant groups and they're battling militarily, not just sitting down and saying, what does scripture say? But they're out there with the swords and the guns and everything else.

And they had this 30 years war. And by the way, it wasn't 30 years continuous. It was kind of 30 years when you lump it together off and on, stretching out over a longer period of time. And 52 years later, this is the way Europe ended up. Catholic, Catholic, see, Catholic through this section, and then this darker tan area is Lutheran.

And it was basically a military political resolution. They said, hey, we've been killing each other so long, we forget how it all started. So they just said, let's stop, and so they did. It didn't stop governments from individually instituting religious controls within their own countries. It just stopped the fighting between the different areas. Okay.

Modern and postmodern trends. Protestantism breaks into more and more groups, including cults, now numbering 20,000 plus worldwide. I've seen other groups, I mean, numbers as much as 33,000 different Protestant and other so-called Christian groups. And that includes cults and all sorts of, you know, There's all sorts of Baptist groups. They've got Seventh-day Baptists, and Free Will Baptists, and Reform Baptists, and all these different varieties. Lots and lots. Growing movements of liberalism and skepticism in Western culture during this time. You have skeptics like Voltaire. This is all rubbish. Garbage.

Christendom has a decreasing connection with politics, military, and civil enforcement, instituted in our own Constitution. missionary activity and persecution increased by orders of magnitude into the 20th century that mentioned before we'll go through a history of persecution More Christians have died in the last hundred years than the prior hundred years all put together or prior time all put together Here's a personality that I want to make sure we cover this guy Schleiermacher. I hope I'm not butchering the name too badly How would you say that? Schleiermacher.

He's a German theology professor claiming that the substance of religion is emotions. Religion is really feelings. It's how do you feel about it. Before that, that wasn't a common idea. That wasn't a well-established, well-entrenched idea. But that is what he espoused and it caught on. Kierkegaard, of Lutheran background, he laid the foundation for both secular and religious existentialism.

What's that? That's the leap of faith idea. Ever hear anybody talk about that? You've got to take a leap of faith. This idea is not founded on historical reality or facts or anything. You just kind of dive out there and you have this experience that validates it. It's unfounded, but you just experience it.

That's what he taught. was not well received at the time, but since about the end of World War II has caught on like wildfire. Next one, John Darby. He was instrumental not in being the first one to say things that were dispensational, but in formulating it clearly. As we'll see, there were centuries of earlier dispensationalists, but he's the one who formulated it clearly and particularly said, okay, we've got Israel and the Church, they're not the same. and establishing and speaking clearly about a pre-tribulation rapture. There were others in earlier centuries, and we'll go through that later.

And this is Schaeffer and John Walvoord establishing Dallas Theological Seminary, who kind of carried on that thought in terms of establishing things and getting things taught about. Walvoord died December, just this last year, and so he's gone. Unfortunately, Dallas Theological Seminary is not what it was. One of the guys I had at Tyndale teaching had been kicked out of Dallas Theological Seminary for complaining about the progressive dispensationalism, basically a compromise teaching, and he got booted out just this last year. At any rate, this is a quick sweep through church history, 20 centuries here in a little less than an hour. We'll be continuing on with this now.

Instead of looking at everything all at once, Dividing it by subject okay looking at each of these different subjects and stepping through and in greater detail And so some of the areas you look at and say yes, there were holes yes There are holes because we can't cover it all but but we will get into further details as time goes on okay. Let's pray Lord we thank you As we we look at these things certainly are things we look at and do work Tragedies things disturbing and yet at the same time we see the preservation of your word. We see a preservation a group of believers who Put their trust and confidence in you and took your word seriously, and we thank you for that and as we continue Looking into these things Lord. We're just thank you. We just thank you for your faithfulness We just pray this in Jesus name Amen