Early Church History

I have been preparing for the last couple of weeks, even during the Days of Unleavened Bread, for my annual trip to the Ambassador Bible Center to teach my little bit on early church history. So I thought I would give you a little bit of what I'm going to talk about next week. The class that I teach on early church history is to the Ambassador Bible Center students this year.

Also, I will be having 15 pastors who are going through a pastoral training program. One of them is Mrs. Welch's son, Mark. Glad to see Mrs. Welch back with us from her winter sojourn in the warmer climates of Texas and Oklahoma. But her son, Mark, has been getting trained. He's only been a minister for 12-15 years now, and he's finally getting trained.

There's a pastoral training program. They go in for six weeks, broken down into three sessions every year. Those men set in on this class as well. I have an extra class with them where we go through a little bit more of the subject. But they set in and listen to this class as well. So those are my credentials for training ministers and training our youth. I've been involved with this for all these years, and so I know the needs and want to do that.

What I want to share with you this morning is the last lecture that I've given this series on early church history. I've had the opportunity to go in for eight years now to ABC and give a section, a class, about six hours of teaching on early church history. By early church history, we are talking about the period of time from the first century to the fourth century, to about the year 386 AD. So roughly 400 years, a little less, of experience of what is church history. Now, this is history about what we would call the true church, as well as the false church that developed and overcame and pushed out and has become the false church of history. But that is a church history you can't ignore because of the issues that were involved and the matters that took place. It was a very critical and important time. This to me is the most interesting section of church history to study. The first three to four centuries through the 300s, and preparing this time for it, actually, I've come to think that I would really like to specialize on maybe the second century and just kind of expand that and talk more about that in the future. But years ago when I was studying and giving some other earlier Bible studies on this subject, it really dawned on me that this was the period of time that to me was the most interesting, because this was when the truth that Christ put within the church, this was when the truth got changed. This is when the faith once delivered, the book of Jude talks about, was changed. The Sabbath, the Holy Days, the teaching on the kingdom of God and the millennium, the teaching about the resurrection and what is man and the immortality of the soul crept in and altered things. Where you had Easter coming in and pushing out Passover. Where you had the controversies, which we're going to talk about today, over who was God and who was Jesus Christ.

This was when all of those issues were debated and settled for the rest of, you know, church history down to our modern day and set the essential teachings of Christianity that we have had to come out of and represent a different understanding than what we read from the scriptures today. This is where the Sabbath got changed. This is when the Holy Days got pushed out. And trying to sort through all of that and understand how and why, especially in our post 1995 period, where we saw so many of the arguments come into the church in 94 or 93, 95, that get away with the Sabbath, that get away with the Holy Days. I realize that the same arguments used in that period of time in our own history were not anything new. They were indeed as old as time almost, because the same arguments that you find in the second century dealing with the Sabbath and why it should no longer be kept were then were used in the second century in like the year 120 or 150 or 180 to do away with the truth as were used on you and I and our friends in 1993, 94, 95. There's nothing new under the sun Solomon Road. When it comes to heresy, there's nothing new. The same arguments that the great deceiver used then, he has used in our own day. So for me, it's been a very important area to study and to pass along to our young people, to our ministers. The reason I talk to the ministers today, and they listen to this, is because I happened to raise my hand in a ministerial meeting a couple, three years ago, and when Richard Penelli was talking about training our ministers, and he was asking us, what do you think the ministers should learn and focus on? And I said, well, I think they need to have a sense of history and where they where we came from and have at least an exposure, though they may not all everyone will be interested in it, but they should understand what happened before.

And so he said, good, you teach it. So that's how and why I have the minister setting in and listening to this, but it is important and hopefully rounds out a bit more of their training and their education. But this area and this subject has had a great deal of interest even in the theological and religious world today. I've been amazed over the years as I look at the number of books and the number of articles and the attention paid by scholars, religious scholars and theologians to the first, second, third centuries and what happened and what took place at that time. There has been a renewed interest and examination of the sources and the material that we have from that period to try to understand things. Whenever you see some big expose about some lost book of the Bible a couple of years ago, it was the Gospel of Judas. Remember that one that came out? Whenever you see those, get a lot of notoriety and discussion. It's because you're just seeing really a very small tip of an iceberg of debate and discussion and re-examination within that community, the religious community, over that period of time and the origins of Christianity and what happened. I bought a course this week, one of these online audio courses that you get from the teaching curriculum or something. You see these advertisements in the papers and magazines and there was one on the called Lost Christianity that was taught by a religion professor at the University of North Carolina in Raleigh. I know I'm aware of his writings and his thought.

It had about 12 different 30-minute sessions and the price was right, so I went ahead and bought it. Now I'm listening to it on my iPhone and starting to go through it. But the title of Lost Christianity, and I looked at the course curriculum and the titles, and it's the very same things that I talk about and have been into. Gnosticism and the Jews who would be Christians and Christians who would be Jews. These are the titles of some of the lectures. It's the very same thing that I focused on and talk about in these sessions. So these are the topics that are being discussed in religion classes, in divinity schools, and major universities on the subject as people try to understand religion, God, on all these major issues as they study them. What I want to talk about here today—I better get to the source here—is, in my course development here, where we have gone into the fourth century, the 300s AD.

And we're going to talk about the issue of God and how the truth about God that the Scriptures revealed to us was changed. And essentially we got to the point where the dominant idea, an accepted idea, was the Trinity. The idea that God is three persons and the Holy Spirit was and is a part of the Godhead. And that's part of what we're discussing. So, and when we talk about the Trinity, you've got to understand one other thing. That it's not just a matter of whether or not the Holy Spirit is God and a third person of this Trinity, this blessed Trinity and all. But the other major, really the major driving issue from the time of Jesus's death to this period we're talking about and came to a head during the fourth century was, was Jesus divine? Was Jesus God?

I've got a book I forgot to bring up.

I did bring it up. I'm sorry. It's under my Bible.

This book entitled, When Jesus Became God, The Epic Fight Over Christ's Divinity in the Last Days of Rome. And this book covers this particular period of time. It's a very good book. I've been, this is really one that really got me into this part of the story. When Jesus Became God, and the title tells it all, the idea was that Jesus wasn't the Son of God. He was not divine before his human birth. And the argument then that came to a head during this period of time was, who was Jesus? Was he the Son of God or was he just a good Jewish boy who lived a really good life and God adopted him and he became divine. But he started out just like you and I as a human being. Okay? You and I believe, as our fundamental belief, that Jesus was the Word, that he was divine before his human birth. He was both God and man after he was born of Mary, but he was fully man. He bled. He died. He was human. But he was the Son of God. And in a miracle that the Bible and God does not share with mankind, the Logos divested himself of divinity and became human.

Now how that happened, in the process for that, brethren, you and I, I have no answers to. And you don't either. And nobody does. Now philosophy and Greek thought and theological machinations have tried to figure it out, but God doesn't share that with us in his Word. We take that as a matter of faith that he was, he became human, and he went back as the glorified Messiah and is God. So we believe in two gods. We don't believe in three. But the big argument during this period of time was, who was Jesus? And that led to ultimately the definition of the Trinitarian idea during this period of time that became the orthodox teaching for the church, not God's church, but the false church, and has become then the accepted form of Christianity to this point.

This is the Trinity, the teaching of the Trinity, is the litmus paper test in modern religion today for legitimacy or illegitimacy. Okay? Understand this.

People, you know, in religious circles, people can kind of maybe go along with our keeping the Sabbath because, well, okay, Jesus was a Jew and they did keep the Sabbath. And, you know, if you kind of really work with them, you can maybe help them to understand why we keep the Holy Days as opposed to Christmas and Easter. But the one thing that any dyed-in-the-wool Christian in today's churches will draw a line at is the subject of the Trinity. Because if you don't believe in the Trinity, you are not a Christian in their thinking. You are a cult. For us in the United Church of God, to have as one of our fundamental beliefs, the idea that essentially we don't believe in, we don't accept the Trinity, although we don't say it that way, but we don't, that makes us a cult. Understand that. You go out into the Baptist Church, go down to the Catholic Church, go down to the Orthodox Church, Pentecostal Church. You don't accept the Trinity. You're a cult. You are a cult. In 1995, some of our men went to the Adventist headquarters out in Silver Springs, Maryland, as we were forming, because they wanted to understand what was taking place in the worldwide Church of God outside of the Adventist, the largest Sabbatarian group of the time. And we went through, our men went through our fundamental beliefs with them, and obviously we were not going to be Trinitarian. The Adventists are Trinitarian.

And the comment was made to our men, well, you will not be accepted in mainstream Christianity if you don't accept the Trinity. We knew that. That's what it was all about in 1995, along with a few other things. So that's the importance of this teaching in Christianity. Let me mention one other thing. As I go through here, when I say, when I use the term, the Church today, I'm not necessarily, I'm not really talking about the Church we see in the book of Acts, the Church that you and I wouldn't want to be a part of, okay?

But I will use that term to talk about the Church at this point in history, just because it's necessary. But understand that I'm not, I am really not talking about an argument necessarily that was going on within God's Church as it was and wherever it was at that time in the fourth century.

So understand that in terms of terminology, how we, how we go through this. You have to understand that during this period of time that when you talk about the Church, you and I may be thinking about God's Church, but so many of the issues from history, we are dealing with people that and ministers that some, most are not part of what we would term be the Church of God.

And yet in some cases, back in the second century, we can look at some of these individuals and realize, hey, some of these people probably were true Christians at that time, like polycarp or polycrates in the second century as they argued about the Easter Passover controversy. We're not going to talk about that today, but to understand that in terms of the term Church as I use it as we go through this.

Okay, let's go ahead. We're talking about the subject of God, what is God? And let me just look at the fundamental belief. I think Scott Moss has already covered this in his sermon series where he's taking you through the fundamental beliefs, but number one of our fundamental beliefs is this. We believe in one God, the Father, eternally existing, who is a spirit, a personal being of supreme intelligence, knowledge, love, justice, power, and authority. He, through Christ, is the creator of the heavens and the earth and all that is in them.

He is the source of life and the one for whom human life exists. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who is the Word and has eternally existed. We believe that he is the Messiah, the Christ, divine Son of the living God, conceived of the Holy Spirit, born in the human flesh of the Virgin Mary. That is our fundamental belief in the United Church of God on God. Number one. So we believe, as I said, we essentially, you could call us binitarian instead of trinitarian.

We believe in two gods, bi. We believe that Jesus, that the Father and Jesus Christ exist as two beings presently of the family of God, the Godhead, however you want to term you want to call it, but we believe there are two gods. And we also believe that they are in the business of expanding that family. That's another subject. We're not going to get into that today. But if somebody ever calls you and says, well, as you explain your belief to them, they say, well, you're a binitarian.

Technically, you are, if you believe this. But you're not a trinitarian. We do not teach the trinity. We believe the Holy Spirit. Another topic is the power of God, not a third person of the Godhead. So this essentially says that what we believe about, importantly, just to focus on the last part of it, about Jesus Christ here, that he was the the word and has eternally existed, that he is the Messiah of the Christ, the divine Son of the living God, conceived of the Spirit, born in the human flesh of the Virgin. But he has eternally existed.

That's a very important phrase to understand about Jesus. And keep in mind that this is a very... this teaching that when you then understand from other scriptures that the God of the Old Testament, essentially, that we deal with, was the one who became Jesus Christ.

That's a very unique teaching and understanding that a lot of people, most people don't have. And it's very important to the whole... the overall understanding of God as well and what Jesus was before his human birth. I think we had... used to have an article, reprint article on that subject, who or what was Jesus before his human birth, I think. But to understand that is very, very important, again, and putting together the Bible and understanding what God is doing, but that he was eternally existed.

The argument, and I'll come back to it, at this time of history was that Jesus was a good Jew, or that he somehow then was elevated to another status. And we'll come back to that. Let me just walk through a few other scriptures here. In Deuteronomy 6, in verse 4, 1 Corinthians 8, 4, and Ephesians 4 and verse 6, it says that the Lord is one.

There is no other God but one, and there is one God. Now, I'm sure Scott covered in his sermon with you that understanding Deuteronomy 6, 4, 2, is not necessarily saying that there's just one entity that is God, but that proper understanding of Hebrew there opens up the understanding of Elohim, and more than one, but that is speaking of God as a family. And this is the thought, the intent that is even carried into the New Testament with these statements and others regarding the family of God at this particular time.

Colossians 1 and verse 16 is another important verse where it speaks, speaking of Jesus, for by him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth. A key verse to show again that Jesus was the creator of the Old Testament, that he was the God of the Old Testament, and that he created what we see.

And Colossians 1, 16 is a verse that is a thought that Paul wrote to counteract an increased idea in his day that later took root and was manifested in a teaching called Gnosticism. Gnosticism in the second century became a major source of heresy that caused a great number, a deal of dissension during that period of time, and I take a whole course just or a whole hour to talk about Gnosticism in my class. But one of the ideas of Gnosticism was that this world, this physical world, was created by an evil, malevolent God. That's their idea. And that the suffering and the evil we see in the human flesh and in the world was the result of an evil God in way, way, way back in the aeons of the past that kind of rebelled and created what we see. That's classic Gnostic thought. So that when Paul wrote and writes what he does in Colossians 1, 16, where he says it was by Jesus, that all things that we see in heaven and earth were created, he is attacking an idea that this physical flesh, this physical world, is evil and created by an evil God who kind of rebelled. And that's the explanation for human suffering. And he says no. This world that we see was created by him, for him and by him were all things created. Revelation 4, 11 also says that for you created all things. As it speaks of the Lamb there. In John 1, again we know this verse, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

And in John 10, verse 30, it says, I and my Father are one, as John wrote these words here.

One of the things I've always maintained about what the Bible tells us about Jesus Christ and about God, especially as we focus on what John wrote in his epistles, the gospel and then his epistles, is this one of the things I conclude is this, that for the apostles and the earliest church of the first century, this question of who was God, who was Jesus Christ, was not a question.

It's not something they argued and debated. You don't find that in the gospels. You don't find that in any of the epistles as a major issue or major point. They came to understand after the resurrection who Jesus was. Then they believed that he was the Son of God. And John was led to write what he writes here in John about the Word and how it all came about. But there was not a debate about Jesus, who he was, what he was, or how he related to the Father. They understood it and they got on with life, as we say. It was not until the second, third, and especially the fourth century that these questions began to come in because of Greek thought inspired from some of the ideas of Plato and others and Satan's deception that crept into the church. Then you see the questions. Some of you will remember going through some of the Bible studies that were put out in 1993-94 about God from the Pasadena and getting into the Greek. Remember all those things? Some of you are smiling. You will remember that. We had a Greek scholar who was with us at the time and trying to explain all of this. But the explanations created and generated more strife and controversy than they did solutions. But it also represents the source of the questions way back at this time in history because as Greek thought came into the church, Platonic thought, that's where the source of trying to figure out how God divided himself or the idea that God could or would divide himself from this monolithic idea of the Old Testament of one God led these questions that were not based on complete understanding, generated strife, and whole schools of thought that had to eventually come to a point where they had to be resolved, as we'll come to.

John 1 and verse 41 says, we have found the Messiah, and Jesus said that as they question him in John 4.25, I am He of whom the Scripture said. So He very clearly showed who He was and what He was doing and what it was all about. Now, there's another question that's part of this discussion that is, what is God doing? These Scriptures show us that God is creating a family, Ephesians 3. Romans 8, 29 talks about the fact that there are many brethren and many sons to glory. Hebrews 2 and verse 10 is probably one of the key verses there and that talks about the fact that God is bringing many sons to glory. That's His purpose. And we are the children of God. When you put these and other Scriptures together, you come to a very encouraging picture of what God is doing.

And that is that He is expanding this family. He is a family. He's creating a family. And that human beings have the opportunity to become part of that family. In other words, become divine.

This is a key thought. We can't teach it too much. We can't overemphasize it. And there are many levels and depths and angles of understanding of this for our belief and understanding about salvation, who God is, what man is, what God is doing. And everything hinges on understanding this. It is why Mr. Armstrong spent so much time talking about it and drilling it into us. And we tuned it out. And we kind of didn't perhaps understand it fully. And maybe in some ways that needed more fleshing out. And that's our responsibility today, I think, is to make sure that the Church is grounded in this understanding. And we understand what our purpose and our potential, as human beings, really are. Because this is what these arguments came down to at this particular period in time. The heresy we're going to talk about in a few minutes, called Arianism, was just such a heresy that developed that was a very interesting heresy about the divinity and the nature of Jesus Christ. And it all stemmed from, again, a misunderstanding and this loss of understanding of what these scriptures and others tell us about our human potential and what human life is all about. The arguments and the need and the the great wellspring of life is for you and I to understand why we are. Why were you born?

And to understand why God has created human beings and what this life is all about.

That understanding gives hope, gives meaning, gives encouragement, defines life, and opens up sunshine. Just like you see, look out the windows right now and you'll see the sky's lightening up. You know how dark and depressed and moody we get after days and weeks of overcast skies and then we finally get a good day of sunshine. And it just lifts your whole countenance and your whole feeling about yourself and life and even if things aren't really bad that day or you're going through a really bad period of life, sunshine can make a big difference for a period of time. Well, that's where this knowledge and understanding is so important about what God is doing because it gives such an encouragement to our life and gives hope. And that's what life is all about. If life is lived without hope and correct understanding based on the truth of God, then it is not worth living because it is not based on that correct knowledge.

And when we understand that, then we can be free from a lot of other arguments and issues that take place. And this is what we're coming to in this period of church history that was so important that in one sense had to get settled, but it's important that we understand the issues. These scriptures and others tell us what God is doing. And the New Testament church clearly understood the nature of God. It's really just not an issue in the New Testament writings. What happened was that philosophical speculations fueled by Greek thought came into among the church and fundamentally altered the view of the Godhead. Edward Gibbon, who wrote his very classic work on history of the Roman Empire, he wrote about when he was writing about the church experience, he said of this and of this particular period of time talking about these church fathers, he said they were more solicitous to explore the nature than to practice the laws of their founder. They wanted to explore the nature of God rather than to practice His laws. And doesn't that really describe the issues of 1993, 4, and 5? What was it called? What were the sermons and the articles? The nature of God that came out. We had to go into this whole study about the nature of God, which was a subterfuge to introduce the Trinity within the church. And instead of focusing upon God's law, we focused on the nature. And in the end, we not only got the nature wrong, but we threw the law out the window. And that pretty well sums up that particular period of time, and it's a parallel to what happened back here during this particular period of time. I want to skip over this particular slide. I don't think there's a need to get into a little bit of this with you. I want to go ahead and jump to the 4th century, which is kind of we're on the threshold of that as I've brought the discussion down to this point, to discuss a particular issue that I've already referred to called Arianism, or the Arian controversy. Now, probably shouldn't, maybe by Wednesday I'll put this on the slide. Let me just spell this word to you. A-R-I-A-N. Arian controversy. Arian controversy, named after its originator, a bishop by the name of Arius. A-R-I-U-S. Arius. I have a picture of him.

Okay, I'll just go ahead and just jump to this. We'll go back to it. I think I've got these out of order. Arius was the founder of Arianism. Now, Arius was a bishop of the church in, I think he was in the area of Africa at the time, in the early part of the 300s. And he developed an idea about who Jesus was, and he essentially denied the divinity of Christ. He said that the Son, Jesus, was created, just like you and I are created. Okay, he was human. And therefore, but he became divine. He didn't deny the divinity of Jesus, just that Jesus had a beginning that was human and no pre-existing eternal life as John defines it. Okay, this is what Arius came up with. And so as a result of this, the conclusion was that Jesus was subordinate to the Father. He was on level number two of the indentation, the outline, and he was down there.

And he was, you know, not fully divine in the sense that God was, and led to a lot of these ideas lead to a lot of other speculation. But essentially, this created a big division within the Church. Now, Arianism teaches that Christ was a created being, okay, at some point. And there were various variations of the idea, but one of them was that he may have been, you know, even a created angelic type being in the past, or another variant of the teaching was as a human being who became God. Either way, it denies the divinity of Jesus in the fullest sense of Him being God. Okay. And what was interesting about parts of this particular heresy, and this is what is interesting, heresy is very attractive. Heresy always has some aspect of truth to it.

Okay. And it's kind of like a young girl floating into a room with a very, very attractive dress on, and a nice hairstyle, and her makeup is just perfect, and her figure is just right, and she just kind of glides into a room and all eyes turn where there's a classroom, an office, a dance, and they notice this attractive girl in a nice dress all made up, looking her best.

That's like heresy. Heresy is very attractive. It causes people to say, oh, that's interesting. Let's examine this a little further, because it stimulates the imagination. It offers perhaps a little bit of relief from something that may be seen to be oppressive or seems to even just open up a different understanding, but heresy and whatever the subject is always like that. And Arianism has a little bit of the truth to it, but it's applied to Jesus Christ. Let me put it to you this way. I've already covered it with you. What is your human potential? Why were you born? To become part of the family of God.

Are you a created being? Do you have a beginning that can be known? Yeah. Mine's August 25, 1951. Well, actually nine months before that. But we all have a finite point in time when we began. And by God's grace, he's called us and opened our minds to understand his truth and to show us our potential that we can become a part of the divine family of God.

Now that's climbing up the ladder, isn't it? That gives definition, meaning, gives hope, gives encouragement. All of those things that we should revel in, as I earlier said, in terms of our potential and what life is all about. That's what we understand from the scriptures regarding man. Arius essentially took that truth and he applied it to Jesus Christ in the issue and the questions about God. The idea that this created being became God. He described Jesus of Nazareth in those terms. Now that's heresy. That's wrong. But what is he really talking about when you understand the truth of the scriptures? The purpose of human life. He took it and he applied it to divine life and turned it all around and creates confusion. That's why Arianism is so important and interesting to understand. It's more than just saying, oh, that's a heresy. Yeah, it is.

But why is it a heresy? And why did it command such a draw for hundreds of thousands of people, probably during this time, and caused controversy that led to the shedding of blood? And people would line up and divide right down the middle of a room and go to war against each other because of this idea about Jesus, which they did at that time. It's hard to imagine that people killed them, killed the other people and left them for dead in a basilica because they had a different view about God. But they did. It happened all the time. This was a raging issue of this period of time. Think about the worst form of fundamentalist fanaticism we see today, and we kind of define it as Islamic fundamentalism in our world. And you and I in the Western world, we don't necessarily understand that, but they would kill us. They'll drive their airplanes into our buildings because of their belief and how opposite it is to ours. That is a defining issue of our time. We can understand that. Take that division and that blindness and that fundamentalism and that hatred that has stirred up, transfer it to this time over this issue, and understand that there would have been people who would have driven airplanes into the churches of people who held a different idea on this particular subject in the third century. Then you begin to understand how emotional it was, and it divided the Christian world and the Roman world as it was becoming Christian during this period of time. I mean, this was a hot issue. This is what they talked about on CNN and Fox News back in the fourth century during this period of time. But it all comes off of that one particular point of defining God and creating the divisions that it did. Now, there was another man you have to be familiar with named Athanasius of Alexandria. This was the opponent of Arius. He believed that Jesus was divine, that Jesus was the pre-existing son of God or Logos. And he opposed Arius. This is Olin Mills' picture that I was able to pull out of the archives of Athanasius of Alexandria. Couldn't find one for Arius. Sorry, maybe somebody can find me a picture of Arius sometime someplace. But this was who Athanasius was. He defended the faith of Nicaea against Arianism during this period of time. But he had these two folds. Athanasius, who was defending the idea. Now, Athanasius did not necessarily believe that the Holy Spirit was God.

The Trinitarian idea was not fully developed at this time. But he did believe that Jesus was the son of God and he was not a created being and he opposed the Arian thought.

Enter one other character of this time and that is Constantine, the emperor of Rome.

And he's another important character in the story. These are the three we'll focus on here for this part of the story. Constantine was the emperor from 285 to the year 337. He was the one who accepted Christianity. There's a story of Constantine became emperor and there were there was at least one other co-emperor that he had to do battle with and he defeated this man at a place outside Rome. And just prior to that battle Constantine was supposed to have seen this vision in the sky of a cross and he heard the words, by this sign you will conquer. And as the story goes he then had the cross painted on the shields of his soldiers and he won his great battle. He defeated the other emperor. He became the sole emperor of the Roman Empire and he then accepted Christianity. Even though he was pagan, he then began to be friendly toward Christianity. He didn't get baptized until he was on his deathbed in 337, but about 312 or so he began to accept Christianity, made it legitimate. And many reasons for it, but one is important to understand and that is that the Roman Empire at this particular period was crumbling. It wasn't dead, but they had some very deep systemic problems. And what he saw that the church had, by this time the false church had a level of uniformity and discipline about it, even though they were still being persecuted by Rome, they still had a level of organization that kept them together and they were growing. And he saw this that was something that he needed. And the alliance was politically expedient. And that's part of the reason as well. He became a Christian or began to give favorable acceptance to Christianity. But Christianity had these problems, especially, and they were divided over this idea of who was Jesus and who was God. And so what he did in the year 325, he convened a very famous council called the Council of Nicaea in the year 325. Now this was a very important council because it was number one. It was the very first time that a group of the bishops got together. And they did so at the request of Constantine, and that was unique in itself that the Roman Emperor would call this. But the main issue was to resolve this issue of God and Jesus and Arianism to discuss it. He called them together in a place called Nicaea, which today is in modern Turkey in the western area of Turkey. Constantine had a palace there, so it was a good place. They had good convention facilities, good communication facilities, travel, and everything was easy. Airlines flew in well to Nicaea. And so the bishops got an all-expense paid trip and vacation for three or four months because that's how long the council lasted.

All at the expense, gratis, of Emperor Constantine. He actually presided over the council and opened it and stayed for some of the earlier meetings. He didn't stay the entire time. But he wanted these issues to be resolved because he needed this church to be strong and not divided, and he wanted to get these issues settled. And of course, out of this famous council of Nicaea came a very important doctrine and teaching. I'll come up to this right here at this point.

When it was all said and done, they issued a report, and there were various sections of the report. And one of them dealt with Easter. The first effort to even deal with the subject of Easter comes out of the Council of Nicaea. One of the talking points of the Council of Nicaea was to fix Easter as the accepted observance as opposed to Passover. There were still people wanting to keep Passover even at this time. But they also came out with the, probably for our discussion, the most important item is this thing called the Nicene Creed. How many of you in your past religious life would quote the Nicene Creed every week? A few of you, yeah. If you, you know, Catholic or, you know, some other, many of these other churches, every week they quote the Nicene Creed as part of their worship service. I didn't put that up here, and you can go home and Google it, and you'll read the Nicene Creed. And essentially, it says it talks about God, Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and it affirms the Trinity. The original Nicene Creed that came in 325 didn't really settle the issue of the Holy Spirit. That was added in 381 at another council to talk about in a minute. But the original Nicene Creed that was issued by this group of this meeting of ministers sought to settle the fact that God was, and Jesus were, divine. And the wording that they used kind of summed it up on the relationship between Jesus and the Father. They thought they had it settled here, and they really didn't. Because those who held the Aryan idea came out of this council, and even the words, feeling as if that they could still accept this creed and believe that Jesus was a created being and continued their ideas about Arianism.

So Arianism didn't die. It really put a band-aid over it, and it didn't settle it. It's really an interesting lesson in wording and how if you don't, we come back to this word, consensus. They didn't have consensus on this, even on this particular subject in this worldly council of ministers then. They didn't have consensus. And on this subject, they were still divided on it. And even the wordings and the rules they came out with, one group used against the other, and they beat each other over the head for several decades after Nicaea on this issue of who was God, because they didn't have a full consensus on it and an underlying agreement on the issue. And then they used their legal tactics through the years for a number of years to settle us, because what happened, the Roman Constantine essentially agreed with Athanasius about God for whatever he believed, but once Constantine was gone, there were other Roman emperors who came in who were Arians, okay? And they sided with the Arians. And if the emperor sided with an Arian, then he installed in Constantinople, in Alexandria, and other major religious centers, he would put in a leading minister in charge who agreed like he did. He was Arian. And then if somebody, if the Nicene approach came into vogue by the emperor or the bishop, then they put in their own people. So it became very political, and it depends on who won and who was in charge at any particular time as they came down to this particular issue. I could say a few words about the Cappadocian fathers. These were three high-ranking church officials, very intelligent men, kind of theologians of the time, who invented certain Greek words and language to come up ultimately with an idea to try to resolve this particular issue. And the one thing that you and I should understand about the Cappadocian fathers, two of whom were brothers, Basil and Basil, or should I say, you might say Basil, but if you were from England, you say Basil. It's not Basil Rathbone, it's Basil Rathbone, Sherlock Holmes fans. But Basil and Gregory were brothers, and Gregory Nazianzus was their best friend. So these three were tight, they were kind of a team. And they wrote on high theology, especially on this subject of God and the Holy Spirit and everything else. And it is to these three men, the Cappadocian fathers, that we owe the invention of the word, hypostasis, or as you might have said, hypostasis. Okay, how many of you remember the word hypostasis? A few of us do. Well, it's not hypo, it's hupo, to be technical about it. I didn't learn that until a few couple of years ago myself, so I'm just passing that along. But the idea that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are a hupostasis. Essentially, that was the thought that they came up with to define the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as three separate beings, each with their own individual characteristics. These three said that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three hupostasis, or they're three beings with individual characteristics, but they have the one essence, and that is Spirit.

And they are three individuals sharing the one essence. That's as much as we need to talk about the essence of the Trinitarian formula this morning. But these men were geniuses, and in this field of theology and God and Greek words and hair-splitting over even letters. There's a story about all of this that comes down to the difference of one letter in a word defined a whole different phase of the controversy. It's an amazing and interesting story. I won't bore you with all of it today, but they essentially came up with language that presented a compromise to where both sides could come together and essentially provide a framework and a basis on the subject of God in the Trinity that could be accepted by everyone and was important. And they didn't do this until really about the 370s. So about 50 years after Nicaea, you still have five decades of controversy, which shows you that, again, councils and meetings can sometimes solve problems and sometimes they don't. You've got to, a lot of other factors are going to be involved in those things, but you come down in the story told the 370s and you still have Arians and Nicaeans or Athanasians warring back and forth against one another. And this is how history develops sometimes. It's issues that are not necessarily directly involved with the nexus or the essence of the issue that eventually create a solution. What happened was something on a battlefield.

In the year 378, a place called Adrianople, which is right in here, and this is modern-day Turkey here, in this part over here. This is the Aegean Sea. You've got Greece down here, the Black Sea up here. Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul is right there. Right here, in a place at that time called Adrianople, on August 9th, in the year 378, a battle took place. And this had a very important bearing on this question of Arianism and God. That's why I say sometimes events, apart from the center of the storm, will bring things to a head and lead to certain solutions, albeit whatever they may be. The emperor of the eastern half of the empire, by this time you had two emperors, a western emperor in Rome and an eastern emperor at Constantinople, which was the city that Constantine built, made his eastern capital because the empire was so big. This man here was a man named Valens, V-A-L-E-N-S, the eastern Roman emperor named Valens. He was, what's important about him is that he was an Arian. He sided with the Arians in this controversy, in his particular belief. But, on this day, Valens led his Roman armies in a battle against a Gothic force that had come down across the Danube because of food, and they were being pushed by Huns up in Europe, and they had to flee for their lives. The Goths were not a good group. They were not a nice group of people. When you think of Goth, you know, kind of big monster type, harry warrior type people, they were bad, and they were running from some even badder people in the neighborhood named the Huns up here. And they were, as it was at the time, they were pushing against Rome, and they needed freedom, they needed food, they needed space. And these Goths were actually Christian. They'd been baptized, they were Christian, but they were, they all had a mixture of beliefs, many of them were even Arian. But because of this battle, they came down and the Roman army came in, and they fought this major battle here on this particular day, and it was a significant battle. Now, I've got a picture up here that will be familiar to some of you, just to kind of help you to understand maybe what was taking and understand the battle. How many of you have seen the movie Gladiator? Okay. More of you than understand, what was the question I had a while ago? What was the other question I had? More of you know about Gladiator than Hupelstasis. I'm shocked. I'm just shocked. Some more hands went up about Gladiator, so you know this is the opening scene of the movie with Russell Crowe from the year 2000 of Gladiator. He's playing a Roman general. I just bring it up here just to help you to kind of get a feeling for this battle of Adrian Opel in 378, because it was against the Romans, against a Gothic tribe out in the fields, in the forests. And if you can imagine the opening scene of Gladiator, then you have a little bit of a picture of this clash that kind of took place in 378. The only difference is this. In the real battle in 378, the emperor himself, not Russell Crowe, led the charge and he died. Okay? So Russell Crowe died in the real story. All right? The emperor Valens died, and they never found his body. The Roman army was essentially obliterated at that particular point, and they never found his body. He was an Aryan emperor.

There was a shock and awe to the empire as this news eventually over the weeks and the months settled over people. An Aryan emperor had died. They took this as a judgment of God.

That's how people think. They took this as a judgment of God. God wills it, my lord, as we might say. The Aryan emperor was dead, therefore Arianism is dead as an idea.

The next emperor who succeeded Valens was this man, Theodosius I. He did not believe in Arianism. He was a kind of a nominal Christian. He took a crash course in Nicene Christianity, and he came out after a day or two after being tutored believing in the Nicene Creed, Athanasius, father, son, one. Arianism bad. Arianism destroyed. Must be wiped out. He calls for another council, and in 381 in Constantinople, there's a second, actually it's probably about a third or fourth council, but this is a major one, but he calls another meeting of ministers to settle this issue of once and for all. And they do.

They come up with a solution. They adopt what the Cappadocian fathers had brought in, and they came together, about 150 bishops. They revised the Nicene Creed. They essentially anathematized Arianism as an idea. The Nicene Creed that Scott, and I saw a couple of other hands over here, the Nicene Creed that is uttered tomorrow, I started to say today, but in other churches, is the creed that came out of this council. This council added the element about the Holy Spirit being a third person of the Godhead. They declared that those who believed in the single divinity of the Father-Son and the Holy Spirit within an equal majesty and an Orthodox trinity were the legitimate Christians and heirs and directors of the church. And this is what they came down to.

And so this marks a point in time where any dissenting opinion, even within the church as it is at this time, is now declared anathema, heresy, Arianism is defeated, and it has the force of the state behind it now. Because from this point on, the church has the power of the state to go into another church down the street where they have an Arian minister kick him out.

They change the locks on the door, and any who believe like the Arians, they have to go find someplace else to worship. This is the significance of what comes out of this council, and with the power of church and state together. Arianism is essentially defeated. Never ever really goes away. It came back in different forms in, I think it was the 1700s in England, the movement that is today known as Unitarianism kind of came in, and some of their original beliefs are Arian in terms of who Jesus Christ was. But for all intents and purposes, it was an idea that if you believed it, you weren't going to be a minister, and you weren't going to have a church to go to, and you could be killed for it. This is how it came to be. And what took place at this point in time now? You know, we talk in history about the Constantine becoming the first Christian emperor, and the church becoming legitimized, and that's a significant event. But the church was still developing, what we call the Catholic church was still developing at that point in time. And even though it began to be the legitimate religion within the empire, things didn't really get cemented with a force and full impact until we come to this event, and subsequent years beyond, where the church and the state are together in an alliance that is awesome. Because from this point on, even within their own walls of the church, dissenting ideas that are not what they call orthodox or accepted are banned, and they have the power of the state to enforce it. That's a significant marrying of church and state power in this particular story. Now, we're not talking about God's church here.

Years, you know, as the time develops, this particular machine, if we can call it that, if you want to call it a beast or system, eventually can, you know, it turns its forces upon the remnants of God's church wherever they may be within the empire. That's another story.

But they turn it upon themselves, and they read themselves of any dissenting idea.

And you see, beginning to develop within the Catholic Church.

Then, from this point on, the idea that the church is the vehicle for salvation.

Because a few more decades after this, actually, you go into the fifth century, and you've got Augustine, you've got the fall of Rome. Augustine writes a book that is called The City of God.

And Rome has fallen, and Augustine, the great church father, writes his City of God thesis, and the idea that is there, which has its origins at this point in time, is that the church is the kingdom of God on earth. The church is the kingdom of God on earth. That is an idea whose time has come. And it is through the church that you get salvation. It is through its bishops that you get forgiveness. It is through its worship of the cult of saints that you have intercessors. It is through the intervention of the virgin mother that you have an audience with the father.

And it is through the sacraments of this church, backed up with the power of the state, that you have any hope of getting out of this life with the hope of another life.

You have a system that then grows large, of church and state. This is a picture I've shown you before, I think, in another setting of the city hall in the city of Aachen, Germany. It shows Jesus on a throne and the pope, this is Leo III, on his right hand, and the emperor Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman emperor on his left hand. And it's just a good depiction of this state, the power of the state, the Roman emperor, the Holy Roman emperor at this time. And the church, wedded together, on earth, under Christ, carrying out the work of Christ on earth. This is pretty much what it symbolizes. You see what Jesus, the seat of Jesus is holding in his left hand? It's an orb with a cross on it, which symbolizes Christianity dominating the world. And its mission is to Christianize or dominate the world through the power of the state and the church.

The idea that the church, then, as the kingdom of God on earth, begins to take full flower from this point in time of the late fourth century. And you see, then, the crushing of descent and the speeding up of this system within the church that essentially trades in the souls of men. There's a scripture in Revelation 18 dealing with Babylon. And it says of this Babylon in the future that is a final end-time fulfillment of this whole system. Verse 13 of Revelation 18, part of this system of Babylon, it trades in goods and services and all, but it also deals with the bodies and souls of men. Verse 18. This system of Babylon made merchandise in verse 12 of gold and silver and precious stones and all, and it comes down to the end of verse 13, and it adds in bodies and souls of men.

Where a system, a religious system, and then a religious system with the power of the state behind it is able to deal in the business of the souls of men, it really was cemented and galvanized in this this period of time over this issue as the culminating factored and brought it down to this. So that a system whereby an organization of men thinking they are doing the will of God intervene and intercede and interpret the word of God and intervene between man and God and all of its systems. And it is a part of a system that has an overarching term called Babylon within the Bible that trades in the souls of men. And in one sense you can say that it begins in the fourth century with these events, and the events are actually dealing with the very nature of God and who and what God is and how that even relates to us as human beings. We know the truth of the scriptures. We know what God is doing. We also know that we have the hope of salvation because we have direct access to God through the intercession of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. We don't need a priest granting us absolution from sin, with a sacrament, with some other system that is there that is supposed that is twisted the truth. We don't need that whole system intervening between us. The Bible doesn't teach that. We hold this word as paramount, not the word of men. In Revelation 2 or 3 where it says to the church of Philadelphia, it says, you have kept my word. The church of God has, from the very beginning, always kept the word of God. It puts the word of God above the word of men. We hold the word of God above tradition. We don't get into idolatry. The other churches such as Thyatira and Pergamos had certain issues with idolatry that they had to contend with. That whole system, when you look at the story of the church of God in the Bible, especially as it was told in Revelation 2, 3, and 12, you see a whole different view of God's church as opposed to this church that developed at this time. So, these are a lot of ideas. I've come to the point at the end of my time here this morning and I only have 50 minutes for this on Wednesday morning, so I'm going to have to... I can't talk as much then about the subject, but you see why it's... I think it's a fascinating period of time to study and the issues that are there. And as I said at the beginning, I've come to a conclusion that maybe the second century is even more interesting than this one. But the first century is what we have in the Bible, and once we get out of the Bible, we're out of the first century, or at least by the last decades of the first century. And as we try to sift and sort it through that story of church history during those initial days, it's a very interesting detective story, a study in religion and in history and human nature, and an effort to find the truth and to study the truth and what I call the trail of truth. My approach to this whole study of church history as I teach the classes...

Look at the truth, and where you find elements of the truth through those years and through subsequent centuries, you can find the trail of the truth. You don't always know where God's church might be and what particular group represents God's church at any given time in history, but you can find people keeping the Sabbath, you can find them keeping the Holy Days, you can find some keeping the idea of the thousand-year reign we call the Millennium. You find these things. You never ever really find anybody anywhere until we come down to our time that has the whole package like we understand it. Really what has happened in our time in the church, restoring of truth, if you want to use that term, is unique from the time of the first century.

Because you don't find that same full package at any time once you leave the book of Acts, and for what little scraps we have in history. You don't find any group. I don't. One little nugget, I'll tell you one little story I found as I was preparing a few days ago. You know the story of polycarp and polycretes and how they argued with the Bishop of Rome as to whether you should keep Easter or Passover. I've told that story several times. You should remember that one. But polycarp and polycretes, what we might call two ministers of God, argued with the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, and polycarp and polycretes wanted to keep the Passover.

We know from history, no question, that they were keeping the Holy Days and the Passover. The writings very clearly show that. As I've taught this, and what we've commonly held, is that they were true ministers, and then if they were keeping that, well, they must have been keeping the Sabbath, right? And I was teaching that, and four or five years ago, some lady was watching these presentations on the internet because they're all on the internet, and she was in New Zealand, and she wrote me a real stormy letter. She says, how do you know polycarp kept the Sabbath? You don't quote any of that. We just know he kept the Passover, and by extension, the Days of another Bread. I have to admit, I didn't have an answer for her, because I had not found any historical reference that polycarp kept the Sabbath until this year. I was reading through one of my history books. There's a story that was written about polycarp was arrested and martyred, and his home church was Smyrna of all places. The church of God is Smyrna, an Asia Minor. That was his home base. After his death, that church put together a letter explaining how he was arrested and killed, and it's called the martyrdom of polycarp, and it's part of the histories. They circulated that letter, and we have the letter in history. In the letter, they go through the story. It's a very fascinating story, but there are two markers in the story.

As the church tells the story, when he was arrested, he had kind of fled into the countryside, and he was at some member's home. They said that the troops came to the house on the preparation day. What's the preparation day? Friday. And they arrested him on Friday, we'll call it the preparation day, down in the footnote, saying Friday. Okay. And then you read a little bit further down from our paragraphs, and they talk about the troops moving him on the Sabbath day.

Okay. And there's no question that that's the seventh day Sabbath, as opposed to the first day of the week. This was written by his home church after his death to explain to the other churches what happened to their leading minister. And so I read that and said, ah, there it is. The church uses the markers of the Sabbath to tell the story they weren't keeping Sunday.