Transcript: Episode 0049

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This is going to be real loose there.

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Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Moeller, and I'm still woe.

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Today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the Reformation. As many of you probably know,

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next week is the Reformation anniversary of what is observed as Reformation Day,

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also known as Halloween or All Hallows Eve. The recognized first Reformation Day, the day that's

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being commemorated, is of course Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses in 1517. That has been

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marked as the beginning of what became the Reformation. Obviously, at the time, Luther didn't

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know quite what a firestorm he was going to be lighting by posting that, and we'll talk about

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that in a little bit. Today's discussion is going to be mostly historical. Basically, you want to

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the Reformation and what leapt into it and what came out of it. The books that have been written

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could easily fill multiple libraries, as Corey said before we started recording. They're men who

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have spent their entire lives dedicated to studying a small portion of the history of this.

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In a couple-hour podcast, we're only going to barely even scratch the surface on just the high

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notes. The specific overarching theme that I hope we can tease out of this, and the second reason

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that we're doing a Reformation episode this particular week, is that this is also the

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one-year anniversary of Stone Choir getting started. A year ago last week was the first

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episode that we dropped. When we had decided that we wanted to begin doing a podcast together,

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Corey and I talked about the reasons for it and what we hope to accomplish.

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One of the things we'll be talking about towards the end that we wanted to do was

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not to be an overtly Lutheran podcast just for Lutherans. This isn't all about Luther. This

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isn't all about Lutheran doctrine. We do talk about it sometimes. As we've said before, when

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we are discussing something that we know Lutherans believe one thing and others believe something

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different, we try to lay that out clearly and say, here's the case for why Lutherans have

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historically believed this thing. Then maybe here's why you guys believe this other thing.

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One of the things that we often talk about is that it's okay for grown men to say,

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we disagree. I think you're wrong and you think I'm wrong. That's a starting place for a discussion.

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It doesn't mean to need to be a starting place for finger pointing or

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whining or pouting or name calling. Logically, at least one of us has to be wrong. Maybe both

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of us are wrong. For one denomination to say another denomination is wrong about something,

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can in some cases be the beginning of a fruitful discussion. Now, in the case of many of the things

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that went into and then came out of the Reformation, there hasn't really been much in the way of new

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disputes among us for five centuries. Pretty much everything important got hammered out in the 16th

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century. The second part of the episode, the latter portion, is going to be discussing

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the ecumenical nature of the audience of Stone Choir, how what it means that we have Methodists

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and Baptists and Lutherans and Reform Guys and Presbyterians and Roman Catholics all listening

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to the same podcast and also, incidentally, a lot of people who have either never had any church home

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or had left church a long time ago found Stone Choir and almost immediately start going back

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to church. The fact that we can all find any common ground on any of these issues is itself

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interesting. That's one of the reasons we want to do this episode is to talk about how is it that

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we can agree on this stuff when we disagree on so many other things. As we lay the historical

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framework for the disagreements in the past and how they shaped the various denominations today,

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I want to do it specifically in view of the fact that we can still have agreement on things today

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means that there is still common ground among us, even among Lutherans and Roman Catholics who have

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basically no shared priors apart from Scripture. That'll be part of what we talk about down the

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road today. How is it that a Romanist who derives his beliefs from the authority of the Pope in

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the Magisterium and tradition? How can such a man reach the same moral conclusions as a couple

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Lutheran guys who reject all that stuff? All we have is Sol Scriptura. How do we reach the same

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conclusions? There's something going on there that I think sidesteps a lot of the 16th century

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doctrinal arguments we've had. At the end of the episode, we want to just kind of talk about where

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does this leave all of us today? Why is it that people from different denominations are listening

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to some random little podcast about theology and history and science and all these seemingly

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disparate subjects? I think we're going to lay out the case at the end that the one thing that

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is binding us together, apart from adherence to Scripture and belief in the one true God,

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is the fact that all of our bodies, all of our church bodies, are being attacked by Satan in

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the same way with the same subjects. That's a reason that Stonequires had an eclectic set of

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subjects that we've tackled, things that have upset a lot of pastors who really have no business

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talking about those subjects because they're not equipped, they're not intelligent enough,

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they're not informed enough, and they don't have either the spiritual or the intellectual grounding

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to deal with these subjects because they're completely outside of their expertise and

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outside of their abilities. They get really mad and say, you can't talk about that stuff because

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we're the experts, and I think what we're all realizing in our own denominations is that

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the men who have been erected to be the experts for us are in all cases failing to some degree,

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and it's usually failure from the top down. We're seeing the heads of virtually every church body

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today capitulating to the world religion, to the views of this modern age in opposition to scripture.

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The trick is that they're not doing it by saying what some of the very liberal denominations have

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done in the last 50 years. They're not going full-blown universalist, not yet, and they're

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not going full-blown rejection of scripture, not yet, but what they're doing is they're saying,

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yes, our church body has a shameful past that is tainted by racism and sexism and slavery,

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and write down the list of all the histanisms that every HR department in the country is also

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preaching. The church bodies from the top down are all preaching the same things, and they've

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all capitulated every single one of them. If you are listening, the people at the top of your church

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nomination are doing those things, and some of you object to it to some degree, maybe not to the

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degree that we do, Corey and I on Stone Choir, but at least some of it really has you nervous,

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if not angry, because you can see that there is a departure from the Christian faith, from the faith

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that we have all inherited from our fathers. As we go through the history of what led into the

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Reformation and what came after it, it is in view and part of all of those things being our

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inheritance as Christians. That's another point that I hope to get across in this episode. It's

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something that came up on Twitter this past week. A Protestant follower was arguing with me that we

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must credit all the cathedral building in the 11th and 12th centuries to the Roman Catholics,

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that somehow that belonged to the Pope. We're going to make the case today that that's

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completely nonsensical. It was not the Pope. It was not Roman Catholicism doing that. It was

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Christianity doing that. Yes, Roman Catholicism was the only Christianity in town, but they're

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not synonymous. That's one of the chief problems that Roman Catholics have today, because there are

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faithful Christians in Roman Catholicism. Quite a few of them listen, and I'm very grateful

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to be reminded that there are still Christians there, because on paper it doesn't look like it.

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And yet, if there are men who can agree with us that these moral issues are

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afflicting all the denominations in the same way, we at least have some spiritual predicate and

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actual grounded common faith of some sort. That's a place, if not for complete doctrinal uni, at

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least for mutual respect and recognition. And historically, I think it also calls into question

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some of the claims that Rome in particular is made. I've said in the past on Twitter, and we've said

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on here, it's tragic to me. It makes me deeply sorrowful that when someone from Rome decides

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that the pope is a demon, and the Vatican II was a wicked overthrow of something good before.

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Because of the doctrines that Rome teaches, they think that their choice is either apostasy

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or pope, this pope, whatever whoever the current pope is. And so if you don't go along with the

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current regime, you just have to leave the church. And the rest of us in Protestantism aren't faced

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with that. If the Lutherans betray you, maybe there are other denominations that you can at

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least agree with some about, or vice versa. Roman Catholics, I think, are uniquely placed in a position

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where they're told, unless I am fully on board with what the papacy does, I'm no longer Roman

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Catholic, which means I'm no longer Christian. And that's the reason we're doing this episode

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fundamentally. There is a Christianity apart from any particular church body. I'm not making some

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sort of pan denominational appeal to, like, let's all get along. I'm saying that where scripture

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is preached, where it is taught faithfully, even if the speakers are saying false things about some

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of the teachings, God's word is still efficacious all by itself. You can have Satan himself standing

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in your pulpit, and if he reads from the Bible, God is going to use scripture, God's words,

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even through the voice of the devil, to affect faith in believers and to cause faith to come to

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those who hear, because the speaker does not have control over what God does with his word.

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That's why we have such a crazy audience. That's why probably less than half of our audience is

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Lutheran. It's not that we're bad Lutherans, and it's not that we don't talk about the Lutheran

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approach of these things, because frankly, we believe that this is the historic Lutheran approach

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to Christianity. I think it's consistent with what has been done, rolling to the last 100,

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120 years or so. And it's important for us to talk about these things today, because

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the future for all of us is uncertain. If our denominations are going down the tubes,

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we're all facing the same question that the Roman Catholics do. If you have Bergoglio,

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if you have a demon pope, a Jesuit monster in charge of your church, and you're told he's it,

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it's him or nothing, that puts them in a bad place. The rest of us are in the same boat.

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We all have our Bergoglios. We all have them in the headquarters of whatever our denominations are,

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even if it's not a top-down thing, even if it's just some boomer sitting there saying,

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actually, we need to worship the Jews as they are, that is going to do damage that will be

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insurmountable to those denominations. And so we're all faced with the task today of,

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I must remain Christian, even if my denomination is losing its marbles, losing its bearings,

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maybe taking a departure from its historic confessions, and maybe, in some cases,

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those historic confessions had errors that precipitated the current circumstance. And while

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they seemed like they were okay historically, when push came to shove today, they fall apart.

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And so I want this to ultimately, as we wrap up at the end, to be hopefully an optimistic message,

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because the unity of at least some agreement on some of these things across these denominations

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that we have with our listeners is the product of us agreeing about Scripture, agreeing about who

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God is, and what he says he should be doing, and what he says he does for us.

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So we're going to begin by talking about the events that led up historically to the Reformation.

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We're going to talk about what happened during and after the Reformation,

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and then where it leaves us today. So for the history portion of this episode,

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we are going to go over five main controversies in the history of the Church

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that essentially form the chain leading from the ancient Church

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up to and into the period of the Reformation. And those five controversies will be the

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Monophysite Controversy, the Photian Schism, the East-West otherwise known as the Great Schism,

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the Investiture Controversy, and then the Avignon Papacy otherwise known as the Western Schism.

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So starting with Monophysitism. This was a controversy in the Church relatively early on.

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This is in the 400s, essentially, is when this is happening. On the one side you have Utikies,

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Cyril of Alexandria, and a number of other men, but those are the two big names. And then on the

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other side you have Nestorius, and later on Leo the Great, who is at this point the Bishop of

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Rome. And I think it's worth mentioning here, just as sort of an aside, he is called Leo the Great

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with sufficient warrant. There were good Popes. He is one of them.

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Lutherans and others, particularly other Protestants, this is not as much of a problem in

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Lutheranism, but there's a tendency among certain Protestant groups to think that all

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of the Popes were always corrupt and horrible and they weren't Christian and all these other things.

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That's just not true. For a very long time, for centuries, we had faithful men leading the Western

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Church. They weren't perfect. They had problems. Some were better than others. Some were not good men,

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but there were good men in there. And it's important to keep that in mind. And Leo the Great

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is one of them. He is appropriately named in history, otherwise known as Leo the First,

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since he was the first of that name. Worth remembering the name because Leo the Tenth,

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of course, is the one who is Pope when the Reformation starts. He is the one who excommunicates

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Luther. But anyway, dealing with this particular controversy, this controversy is over the nature

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of Christ, specifically the relationship or the nature of the divine and human in Christ.

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So the players again, Utikis was the Archimandrite in Constantinople. He was condemned and deposed

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at the Council of Constantinople. He was eventually reinstated. There's a lot of that that happens

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in this controversy. Cyril of Alexandria was sort of the one of the theological powerhouses behind

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this particular side. He claimed that Christ had one nature, a divine human nature. So

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not necessarily a mixed nature, but one nature. This is the controversy here. On the other side,

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you have Nestorius, who claims that Christ has two natures. He overemphasizes the distinction

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ultimately. The resolution says that both are wrong, and that is the stance of modern Christianity.

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But he was correct in asserting Christ had two natures, the human and the divine.

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Nestorius, for his part, his short biography as it were, he was the Patriarch of Constantinople.

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He was put at that position in 428. He was condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431,

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banished to Egypt in 436, and he died in Egypt in 451. He was eventually, of course,

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somewhat vindicated during the outcome of this, although his views again went too far.

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Leo the Great, again, Pope. He authored the Tome of Leo, which really formed

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a lot of the theological basis for what would be the resolution of this controversy. He

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is credited with pushing through the Chalcedonian definition and then getting churches to adopt

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that, and that is the resolution of this controversy. It's called the Chalcedonian

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definition or the Chalcedonian Creed. And so the councils that are relevant here,

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first the Council of Ephesus in 431, that was called by Emperor Theodosius II,

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that is the one that condemned Nestorius, promulgated monophysitism, and was plagued by

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political and other corruption and intrigue. Then we have the Council of Ephesus, another one,

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in 449. This was dominated by monophysites. This is largely historically referred to as the

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Robber Council and seen as not legitimate for a number of reasons. It is largely rejected

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by the Church and ultimately completely rejected by the Church. Then we have finally the Council

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of Chalcedon. This is the one that resolves the controversy. This was called by Emperor Marcian

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in 451. And this is what gives us the Chalcedonian definition. Now, you may not have heard this

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before. I'm going to read through it because it is a creedal statement of Christianity, of what

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you and I believe as modern actual Christians, as Western Christians. Incidentally, the Eastern

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Orthodox can agree with this creed. This is before the schism between the East and the West.

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Those who would not agree with this would be the Oriental Orthodox. They are the ones who split

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as a result of this and they remain in schism today. Although notably, they are more meaphysite

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than monophysite. The difference between the two is the difference between the Greek words

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manas and mia. Both mean one, but manas implies alone or solitary. It is

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a more extreme sense of one. It carries a connotation that meaphysite does not,

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and so calling them monophysites may be a little uncharitable. It's probably unwarranted.

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They're still wrong, but they're not as wrong as they could be. But to read through the Chalcedonian

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definition, or the Chalcedonian creed, whichever one you want to call it.

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We then, following the Holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son,

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our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead, and also perfect in manhood,

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truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body, consubstantial, or co-essential,

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with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the manhood,

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in all things like unto us, without sin, begotten before all ages of the Father according to the

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Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary,

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the Mother of God, according to the manhood, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten

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to be acknowledged in two natures, in confusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably,

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the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of

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each nature being preserved, and concurring in one person and one subsistence, not parted or

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divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus

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Christ, as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning him, and the Lord Jesus Christ

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himself has taught us, and the creed of the Holy Fathers has handed down to us.

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Now, as you can see, this is just a statement of Christian belief, and this is another place

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where we can emphasize the nature of creeds and how they come about in the history of the Church.

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We have creeds as a response to heresies. We don't just make creeds because we feel like

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making a creed. Historically, the creeds in the Church have been created specifically in response

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to a number of heresies, usually it's not just one, usually multiple heresies are addressed.

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For instance, here in the Calcedonian creed, Arianism is addressed,

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Apollinarianism is addressed, Uticianism, and obviously Nestorianism as well.

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These are all addressed in this creed.

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That is the point of a creed. It is the rejection of false teaching and the affirmation

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of correct teaching. That is why we have them, that is why it is important to retain them

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and to use them. Now, we don't recite this one because we have the Apostles' Creed,

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the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, particularly the Athanasian Creed dealing

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more extensively with the Trinity, and so we use those creeds. You could still recite this creed.

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This creed is still correct. It is a statement of Christian belief. I would like to pull out

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one more thing from this before we move on to the next controversy. You may have noticed that it says

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Born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. The reason that we have that in there, the Greek word

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being Theotokos, is that there was some agitation by certain parties to use the word Christotokos,

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which is Mother of Christ, which is not incorrect in itself, but is incorrect in emphasis. And the

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reason that it is incorrect in emphasis is because it creates a division between God the Son and God

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the Father that is not there and that we should not teach. It is in essence a denial of the full

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Godhood of Christ by saying, well, no, Mary is the Mother of Christ, not the Mother of God.

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When you say Theotokos or Mother of God instead of Mother of Christ, you are affirming the full

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divinity of Christ. And that is the reason that is in this creed. It is a rejection of those who

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try to minimize or teach falsely about the Godhood of Christ.

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As you're listening to these disputes among Christians in church history, I don't want people

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to take the message, oh, no, I need to go back and have a strongly held opinion on the monophysic

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controversy. You don't. The important illustration that these are providing as we go through what

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happened prior to the Reformation is consistent with what God records in 1 Corinthians 11,

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where it says, but in the following instructions, I do not commend you, because when you come

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together, it is not for the better, but for the worse. For in the first place, when you come

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together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and I believe it in part,

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for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you

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might be recognized. Now, in this letter to the Corinthians, he was specifically dealing with

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the circumstances surrounding their communion practice, but I think that the principle clearly

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holds more broadly. If within one congregation, you can have such divisions, and God says that it

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must be necessary for there to be factions, that those who are genuine might be recognized,

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how much more so will it be the case when you have collections of congregations or what? Today,

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we could call denominations. There are different names for it at the time, but these were functionally

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national churches coming together with their leaders, discussing things on common terms as

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Christians, and working through disagreements about Scripture. Today, we appeal and some appeal to

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the so-called authority of the church fathers. These are all church fathers. Nestorius was a

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church father. He goes way down the list because of his heresy, but the determining factor was

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Scripture. It was not his seniority or his lack of placement or his lack of erudition. It was that

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he was a father who erred severely. It has always been the case within the church that there are

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disagreements that are permitted by God so that these things can be hammered out, so that when

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the creeds were inherited by successive generations from these early disputes, we no longer have to

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worry. Every Sunday today, in many congregations, one of these creeds is going to be recited,

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and it is not only an important public confession of faith that we are all in agreement within a

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congregation that we are in agreement across congregations. The apostles and Nicene creeds

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are spoken by many different denominations because although we have some disagreements,

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we also at least have unity on who God is and what God has done as it is recorded in the creeds.

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Again, putting to bed those ancient controversies, but they were very live at the day. In the day,

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it wasn't as though the creed just appeared and then everything was magically fixed. The creed

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was hammering out the dispute to the point that they could say, this is what the church teaches.

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Importantly, the ultimate authority in those cases did not rest on the opinions of the men who spoke

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them and handed them down, but on their appeals to Scripture. As they made these arguments,

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they were appealing to Scripture and to what earlier apostolic fathers had written and said

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about Scripture. Ultimately, all of these arguments were always reasoned from God's word.

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As we get into the Reformation, you see the same thing happening. As you listen to this art,

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just keep in mind that these are historical quibbles because they were put to bed,

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but the fact that there were fights among Christians, I don't want to say it's a good thing

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because we should all be on the same page. There should be no disagreement, and yet God says that

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there will be disagreement so that the genuine will be recognized. How are they recognized? Not

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by the authority of a man, but by the authority of Scripture because all the arguments that they

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made were ultimately rooted in Scripture, which is why everyone accepts them today. If the arguments

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for these creeds were made based on the authority of the men who wrote them, Lutherans wouldn't

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accept them. Most Protestants, probably no Protestants, would accept them today. They're accepted

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because they are in accord with Scripture. When these fights occur, it lets us, as men who are

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trying to be faithful to God, hammer out the disputes that is Satan trying to divide the body

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of Christ, which is the church capital C. As we go through this episode, we're going to try to be

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very particular when we say the church of always meaning all believers, the elect, those who are

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living today, who have faith. That is a superset of who's in any particular denomination. One of the

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historical side effects of the consolidation of Rome is that as things go further on, the Western

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Church becomes synonymous with the Roman Catholic Church. When we speak today, if we confuse the

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two inextricably, we create a situation where Protestants suddenly have to say, well, I used to

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believe the Pope, but now I don't, so maybe I should still believe the Pope. What we're trying to

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get across is that nonsense. What we believe today is what Christians hammered out based on

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Scripture. It still accords with Scripture, but it wasn't based on what these guys thought. It was

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based on Scripture and then their application of God given reason to derive truthful, defensible

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things about what God has said about himself. That's the case in all times and in all places in

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the church. Ever since Pentecost, there have been disagreements among Christians. There will always

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be disagreements. That's not a source for panic. It's a source for sorrow. We should all be in

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agreement, and it's good when we can agree about anything because hopefully it means that we can

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build a foundation to agree on more things. But the question in the Reformation is, who's the

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tiebreaker? As Corey said, it is important to have someone in charge. That was never

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not the case at any point in church history leading up to the Reformation. James was the

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first bishop of Rome, Jesus' half-brother. Incidentally, it wasn't Peter. Yet when Peter

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was obviously a very important apostle, Paul opposed him to his face publicly because he

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falsely rebuked him. Peter repented. They got on the same page because Paul corrected him,

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and they agreed. That is part of the Christian life. If Peter and Paul can disagree, we can

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disagree too, and we can get past it by rooting those disagreements in Scripture and then figuring

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out who is being genuine. There's even a bit of irony, perhaps, in the parties involved in this

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initial dispute and this particular controversy, because Cyril of Alexandria is a very respected

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church father. His writings are still widely read and cited, and yet he is the one perhaps most

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strongly condemned by this council for his incorrect teaching. Just because a man is a church

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father or is particularly orthodox or staunch with regard to the faith in one or even many respects,

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does not mean that he cannot err. There are, really, there is not a single writer in church history

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who has not erred. Now, of course, I don't mean those who actually wrote Scripture. Scripture is

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without error. Scripture is inerrant. That is what Christians believe. But outside of Scripture,

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it is possible for all authors to commit error, and virtually all authors do.

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That doesn't mean there are errors in every single work. There are works that are free from error.

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But if you read the entire corpus of an author, particularly a prolific author,

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he is going to state things that are either untrue or at least unwisely stated.

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That doesn't mean he's wrong. That doesn't mean you can't read him. It means that you are to read

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him and compare him to Scripture, because Scripture is the standard by which we test

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all other theological doctrinal dogmatic works, because Scripture is God's word,

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and God's word is supreme over all else. The next two controversies are really related.

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They're distinct to some degree, but the one flows into the other, and they are

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related in so far as the one is sort of the prototype of the other.

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These two controversies are the Photian Schism and the Great Schism, otherwise known as the East-West Schism.

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The Photian Schism is named after a gentleman by the name of Photius,

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unsurprisingly perhaps. This occurred in the 9th century. It was between the East and the West,

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as you can probably tell from the fact that it leads into the Great Schism.

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This occurred for a number of reasons, but it was not a simple matter of theological differences.

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There were theological aspects, cultural, political, and you will notice as we go through these.

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Culture always plays a part, because there are national differences between peoples.

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One nation is not identical to another nation. The French and the Germans are going to disagree

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on certain things. The Germans and the Italians are going to disagree on certain things.

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We're going to see that specifically, actually, in some of these controversies.

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The British and the Italians will disagree. Because nations have a national character.

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Nations have a culture. You're going to have differences. And just because you have those

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differences doesn't mean that one is more correct than the other when it comes to worship.

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You can have national differences in how you worship, and that's fine.

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God made the nations. He made them different. They are going to behave differently.

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A German church service is not going to be the same as a French church service.

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And that's fine. If you are teaching the same doctrine, you are holding the same dogma,

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by all means, have different hymns and different customs that is entirely fine.

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But back to this controversy, which, again, part of it is cultural.

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The leadership would be Photius on the side of the east, who was the patriarch of Constantinople,

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appointed to that position in 858, and then Pope Nicholas I is obviously the leader of

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the Western Church at this point, also appointed to his position in 858.

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And so this schism was initiated in part by the elevation of Photius to Patriarch of Constantinople.

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This was after the removal of Ignatius' predecessor.

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This was supported by the Eastern Emperor, but it was opposed by the Pope.

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Because this is where the politics comes into it.

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The Pope actually did the right thing. He attempted to resolve this controversy.

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He sent legates to Constantinople in an attempt to investigate and resolve.

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They determined it had been done incorrectly. That is, the removal of Ignatius in the installation

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of Photius. Unfortunately, this was not resolved peaceably in the sense of, without conflict,

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not in the sense of violence in this case. And so Photius and Nicholas mutually excommunicated

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each other. One of the first times that this happens historically, not the only time.

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The Eastern Orthodox, we can now properly call them this at this point in history,

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called the Council of Constantinople. Notably, the West did not participate in this,

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so you can hardly call it ecumenical. This reaffirmed the appointment of Photius

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and anathematized Nicholas I. Part of the controversy here, and part of how this leads

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into the Great Schism, which is next, is that there was some controversy over the Filioquois.

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Now, the Filioquois had actually been added in the sixth century. This was against Arianism

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and also, incidentally, against Nestorianism. So this is centuries after the fact.

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This is notable, but I will get into that more in the next controversy, which we'll get into now,

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which is the Great Schism. This is the Schism between the East and the West.

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This culminated in 1054, so not that long after the Photian Schism. The culmination was the

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estrangement of the Western Church and the East and, of course, mutual excommunications.

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The primary factors for this were theological differences,

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although this should perhaps go last, the Filioquois, the disagreements over papal authority.

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Historically, the position had been that the Pope was first, not the Pope at the time,

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the Bishop of Rome, was first among equals, and around this time and a little before,

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the Pope had been asserting his authority more vigorously, and so there were disagreements

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in the East with regard to this. Partly theological, but largely political. And,

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of course, there are also the liturgical and cultural differences which always play into these conflicts.

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Now, the aftermath of this, which is worth noting here, is that eventually the East falls.

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Constantinople is sacked and destroyed, and part of the reason for that

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is the breach between the East and the West. Now, here I'm not saying necessarily that God

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was punishing them for what they did. I have advanced arguments along those lines in other

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places. That's not the point here. The issue is that because of the breach between the East and

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the West, the East no longer had the full support, ready at hand, that it once had from the West,

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and so when you have Muslim hordes invading, they get overrun. Would this have happened

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without the great schism? Probably not, because they would have had greater support from the West,

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because they would not have been at odds with one another, and so they would have viewed each other

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more as brothers than as adversaries. But I said I would talk more about the Filioquois,

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and that's going to go here, because it's very relevant to this schism.

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The Filioquois, as I mentioned, was added in the sixth century, and I should say what the

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Filioquois is for those who are not familiar with the term or familiar with Latin. It just means

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and the Son. It's talking about the procession of the Holy Spirit. The Western Church rightly

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teaches that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. This is part of the Creed.

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In this case, I mean the Nicene Creed. And so this was added in order to teach

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right doctrine against the Arians and against the Nestorians. The East initially objected on

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the grounds that it had not been added via an ecumenical council, and so they were objecting

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on procedural grounds. It would be the equivalent of today if you were in some deliberative or

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legislative body objecting to the way a vote was conducted. You're not objecting to the outcome or

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the ultimate decision. You're objecting to the procedures that were used to arrive at that

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decision, at that outcome. And so the East did not initially object on theological grounds.

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Today they object on theological grounds, because over time they entrenched themselves

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on their objection and in order to distinguish themselves from the West denied the Filioquois.

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It is not that the West added the Filioquois, because yes, the West added the literal word

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to the Creed against these heretics. But that is what Scripture teaches. That is what Christians

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believe. There are scriptural verses on this. We've gone over it before.

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Let me read those verses here. You can look up the specific verses, but it's John 15, 26,

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Romans 8, 9, and Galatians 4, 6. So when we say that they added words to the Creed,

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just like every other word of the Nicene Creed, it's quotations from Scripture itself. So they

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were making, again, a theological argument from Scripture in opposition to an emergent heresy.

41:23.980 --> 41:29.820
As Corey said, the initial objection to Filioquois was entirely procedural. And then later on,

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they reckoned it into being somehow religious, which means it is not scriptural, because

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they're now rejecting Scripture by rejecting the Filioquois. I think this is an important

41:40.700 --> 41:49.580
illustration of the nature of creeds. It's not that the Nicene Creed was a complete confession

41:49.580 --> 41:53.740
of everything that could possibly ever be said about the Christian religion, and therefore it

41:53.740 --> 41:58.380
could never be tampered with. They had an objection. I think it was a reasonable objection to the

41:58.380 --> 42:05.020
procedural manner in which the Filioquois was added. But in terms of doctrine, there can be no

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doubt that it is correct. And this is the only time that words have been added to an existing

42:11.100 --> 42:17.500
Creed, as far as I know. But they had a choice. They could either make up a new Creed to combat

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the heresy, or they could add, and the sun, three words, one word in Latin because it's a compound.

42:24.380 --> 42:30.060
So they added the smallest possible amount to an existing Creed. They didn't change its nature.

42:30.060 --> 42:35.500
They combatted a heresy, and then others came along and complained about the paperwork,

42:35.500 --> 42:39.180
and then said, we don't actually believe what Scripture says to begin with. So

42:40.220 --> 42:45.740
it's not the case that there's something wrong with a Creed, or with the specific Nicene Creed,

42:45.740 --> 42:51.180
either before or after. The Creed was correct before this was added. It wasn't it was wrong,

42:51.180 --> 42:55.260
is that it didn't address a controversy that emerged. And so when they found that there was a

42:55.260 --> 43:01.020
hole in the specific statement of faith, the confession of the Nicene Creed, they plugged it

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with one word in Latin, three words in English, and that solved anyone possibly agreeing with the

43:07.420 --> 43:15.260
heresy. And so I think it's a great example of the function that creeds practically serve within

43:15.260 --> 43:22.540
the church. It is to define what we believe. Creed, credo, is, I believe. That's all it means.

43:22.620 --> 43:25.820
It's the first words of the apostles in the Nicene Creed, I believe.

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When a church adopts a Creed, when a church says this is what we believe,

43:32.540 --> 43:38.860
it is not adherence to the teachings of men. It is saying this is what Scripture says about God,

43:38.860 --> 43:44.140
and this is what the church has taught about God ever since there were men disagreeing about what

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God was. The arguments were made, we side with the historic Christian church in these terms.

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And it's valuable because it is a benchmark against which all preaching can be measured.

43:56.700 --> 44:01.580
One of the great things about the way the Creed is said, usually either right before or right

44:01.580 --> 44:07.740
after the sermon, is it is like a mirror being held up to the preacher. Whatever he just said,

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if it disagrees in any way with one of the creeds, there's a good chance that somebody's going to

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notice. And that particular preacher on that particular Sunday may well be called to account,

44:17.980 --> 44:25.900
hopefully privately, by the man who said, I don't understand what you said in view of the Creed.

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Now, it's an opportunity to pause and teach. Hopefully the pastor got it right, and the

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intentional listener misunderstood something that was said. But in the case where the pastor is

44:38.380 --> 44:44.060
stepping outside of this historic Christian faith, it's right there. It's a big glowing sign sitting

44:44.060 --> 44:49.660
next to whatever the pastor is preaching, saying, well, the historic Christian faith is this.

44:49.660 --> 44:54.300
This guy is saying this other thing. You people in the pews need to be paying attention, and you

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need to hold the man in the pulpit account because he does not get to say whatever he wants. He is

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not up there speaking for God ex-cathedra. He is up there speaking in the stead of God. And the

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preacher who disagrees with the Creed, by the smallest degree, is not speaking for God but

45:11.500 --> 45:15.580
speaking against him. So that's the reason that these confessions have been preserved within the

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church. They provide an invaluable function, and they protect the common man in the pews.

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The man who doesn't know the history of this stuff, doesn't know about Phodias or any of

45:25.820 --> 45:30.700
these other old dead guys, doesn't care. But he knows that if a pastor says something that

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disagrees with the simple words of the Creed that a child can memorize and should,

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that is an occasion for the Christians in that congregation to take it closer. It's what's going

45:42.380 --> 45:47.100
on. And again, maybe the pastor is faithful, and it's just something that was confusing. Maybe he

45:47.100 --> 45:52.460
should have said it better. Maybe the man in the pew doesn't have sound doctrine. Maybe it's an area

45:52.460 --> 45:57.500
where the pastor needs to help him. But if there's a disagreement, that's a good thing, is a Christian

45:57.500 --> 46:03.500
thing. For a man to ask another man, this does not seem to be consistent with the historic

46:03.580 --> 46:08.300
teachings of the church. Help me understand what's going on here. It does need to be an accusation.

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Initially, it shouldn't be. It's like, Pastor, I don't get it. The Creed says this, and you said

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this, help me understand how those are in accord. And they should be. And if they're not, then that

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congregation goes on to the next steps. So these are the inheritance of the entire Western church,

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the entire church. It was a case until these rejected to the Nicene Creed, at least that portion

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of it, in an act of recalcitrance. These are the preservation of the faith that we inherit.

46:39.340 --> 46:45.500
And I think an overarching theme of what led to the Reformation, what leads us to this today,

46:46.140 --> 46:51.580
is that we are all inheritors of the Christian faith from our fathers. And where they have

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erred, we need to get things straightened out. Not to be antagonistic or disrespectful to them,

46:57.420 --> 47:02.380
but we have to get this stuff right because it's God's. And if the inheritance that we have received

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has been tampered with, these guideposts help us get it back in line. And if it turns out that

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our inheritance, in some cases and some denominations, was at some point earlier on corrupted,

47:14.380 --> 47:18.460
those are discussions that individual Christians and their congregations need to have,

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to figure out where was the error introduced, and then what do we as Christians

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trying to be faithful to God's word, what do we do with it? So these are continuous discussions

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every Sunday, every year, every century, because the goal is always to

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act and to believe and to speak in accord with God's word. And the inheritance of sound doctrine

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must be preserved and defended at all costs, because when you lose sight of this stuff,

47:44.700 --> 47:51.340
you very quickly lose everything. If you stop believing what's in the creeds, you will lose God

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because it is a confession of God. So these are treasures. And if you're in a body that

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rejects the creeds, find out why, take a look at the history of the creeds. And I hope that you'll

48:02.620 --> 48:07.180
find that there was an error that was made in your church body long in the past. And that's

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going to be in the Reformation where to talk about some of those errors. But if you're in a place

48:12.460 --> 48:17.900
where your church is rejecting some of the historic Christian teachings, not Roman Catholic teachings,

48:18.860 --> 48:23.900
when Rome and the East agree, that means it's not Roman Catholic, by definition. It must

48:23.900 --> 48:29.020
necessarily be Christian. When all Christians and all times and places have agreed with this,

48:29.020 --> 48:36.780
it's Christian doctrine. I believe that your statement was correct. That is the only time that

48:36.780 --> 48:43.580
we've had a revision to the creed that was just the insertion of a word like Filioque. However,

48:43.580 --> 48:49.740
before the handful of Eastern Orthodox listeners, we have rejoice over my statement. The creeds have

48:49.740 --> 48:56.620
been revised a number of times, usually for the sake of clarity or to expand a particular point.

48:57.340 --> 49:01.980
And that is the case, both with the creeds as they are used in the Western Church,

49:02.700 --> 49:11.580
and as they are used in the East. Notably, the East uses a version of the Nicene, actually the

49:11.580 --> 49:19.340
Nicene Constantinopolitan creed that was promulgated in 381. That's obviously not the first Nicene

49:19.340 --> 49:25.340
creed, because the first Nicene creed was promulgated at the Council of Nicaea in 325.

49:26.460 --> 49:35.100
And notably, even the section on the Holy Spirit. The first version of the creed as it was promulgated

49:35.100 --> 49:42.620
is very simple. Which is very simple, just means and in the Holy Ghost. That was it.

49:43.260 --> 49:48.060
That was all there was to that section of the creed, which says nothing about procession.

49:49.100 --> 49:57.020
That was added later on, in both cases, in the West and in the East. And so the very thing,

49:58.300 --> 50:04.300
the East complains about the West having done, the East did at other times. The East did with

50:04.300 --> 50:08.620
the creeds as they recite them, and they were certainly not done according to ecumenical

50:08.620 --> 50:15.980
councils, because the West was not present at those councils. I'm tempted to read through

50:15.980 --> 50:20.140
the Nicene creed, just because we have some listeners who are not going to be

50:20.140 --> 50:25.740
familiar with it, so I think I will go ahead and, well, read, recite the Nicene creed.

50:26.540 --> 50:33.340
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things

50:33.340 --> 50:40.140
visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten

50:40.140 --> 50:47.820
of his Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten

50:47.820 --> 50:52.780
not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made,

50:53.340 --> 50:58.300
who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the

50:58.300 --> 51:04.380
Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius

51:04.380 --> 51:10.380
Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the scriptures,

51:10.380 --> 51:16.060
and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father, and he will come again with

51:16.060 --> 51:21.820
glory to judge both the living and the dead, whose kingdom will have no end. And I believe in the

51:21.820 --> 51:27.340
Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son,

51:27.900 --> 51:33.020
who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets,

51:33.660 --> 51:39.100
and I believe in one holy Christian and apostolic church. I acknowledge one baptism

51:39.100 --> 51:43.820
for the remission of sins, and I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the

51:43.820 --> 51:53.420
world to come. Amen. And so as you can see, that is simply a brief statement of the Christian

51:53.420 --> 52:00.940
religion. Now, we have shared elsewhere and before citations to scripture for each one of

52:00.940 --> 52:07.420
these statements in the creed, because the creeds, as mentioned, come from scripture. They are a

52:07.420 --> 52:14.700
simple statement of scripture meant both to teach Christians the faith, and to affirm what

52:14.700 --> 52:20.060
Christians believe, because when we come together and we recite the creeds, we are giving our

52:20.060 --> 52:24.940
confession of faith before men, and also before God, because God is always present.

52:26.140 --> 52:33.100
That's important. That helps us affirm not only that we are one in Christ, but what we believe

52:33.100 --> 52:38.620
about Christ, what we believe about scripture, what scripture says to us. The creeds are a vital

52:38.620 --> 52:44.700
part of the Christian life. This is also true incidentally of things like the small catechism,

52:44.700 --> 52:53.900
which is just a statement of the Christian religion. It is a very brief summary of Christianity.

52:53.900 --> 52:57.980
It is a great introduction for someone who is new to the faith or for children,

52:58.620 --> 53:06.460
and I'm not just shilling it as a Lutheran, so to speak. There are Roman Catholic missionaries

53:06.460 --> 53:13.100
who will go out and hand out the small catechism, because there is no better brief statement of the

53:13.100 --> 53:19.740
Christian religion. Yes, the creeds as well, of course, but the small catechism goes into

53:19.740 --> 53:24.540
more detail on certain things. The small catechism includes the Ten Commandments,

53:24.540 --> 53:30.860
and also incidentally the creed. And so even those who are not from the Lutheran tradition

53:30.860 --> 53:36.380
will hand out the small catechism, because it is the best thing available to teach people

53:36.380 --> 53:42.060
the basics of the faith. And it was, of course, designed for fathers to teach their wives and

53:42.060 --> 53:46.300
their children, primarily, of course, their children, because hopefully their wives would

53:46.300 --> 53:53.180
have been taught as children by their own fathers. To move on, though, to the next controversy,

53:53.180 --> 53:59.260
we have two more controversies, and really this one leads into, again, because these are all

53:59.260 --> 54:04.540
leading one into the other, they form a sort of chain. This one leads into the next one,

54:04.540 --> 54:10.300
and the next one leads directly into the Reformation. And so the first of these two is

54:10.300 --> 54:15.740
the Investiture Controversy. If you know what the term means, you already know what the controversy

54:15.740 --> 54:21.260
is, and really that's the summary of it. This was, during the 11th and the 12th centuries,

54:21.260 --> 54:27.340
the key figures involved in this. Obviously, more than just these two given the span of time,

54:27.340 --> 54:32.140
these men were not alive for 200 years. But the two key figures, on the one side,

54:32.140 --> 54:38.300
Pope Gregory VII, he sought reforms in the church. However, in this case, the reforms were an assertion

54:38.300 --> 54:44.780
of papal authority with regard to appointment of bishops and church officials. On the other hand,

54:44.780 --> 54:51.100
you have Emperor Henry IV. He resisted papal authority. He insisted that the emperor had

54:51.100 --> 54:56.140
and should retain, because notably the emperor did have at this time this authority, and write,

54:56.140 --> 55:01.820
to appoint and invest church officials. Now, for those who are unfamiliar with the term,

55:01.820 --> 55:07.420
Investiture simply refers to the formal granting of the symbols of authority to a bishop or other

55:07.420 --> 55:13.660
church official. This is extremely important politically, culturally, and with regard to the

55:13.660 --> 55:24.700
church. The result of this was subsequent to the issuance of a papal bull, Dictatus papi,

55:24.700 --> 55:29.980
which is just the dictate of the pope, in which he asserted that he had exclusive authority to

55:29.980 --> 55:38.540
appoint bishops. He excommunicated Henry IV and Henry capitulated. He did penance, otherwise known as

55:38.620 --> 55:45.500
the Walk to Canosa. In 1077, he went and asked the forgiveness of the pope, recognized the authority

55:45.500 --> 55:52.300
the pope had asserted. This was officially made the policy of the empire recognized

55:52.860 --> 55:58.300
at the Concordata Forms in 1122. And you may recognize the city name, because it becomes

55:58.300 --> 56:04.220
relevant later on in the Reformation. If you aren't familiar with German pronunciation,

56:04.220 --> 56:11.500
you may call it Worms. This was where the authority of the pope, as it was at the time

56:11.500 --> 56:18.380
of the Reformation, really took form. So 1122, it takes some centuries before the Reformation

56:18.380 --> 56:24.460
takes place. But this is where it begins. The consequences of this. Obviously, the pope is

56:24.460 --> 56:31.580
strengthened. However, the emperor and the empire were both weakened. This becomes relevant politically,

56:31.580 --> 56:36.780
culturally, and in a number of other ways as well. Obviously, it's relevant to the Reformation.

56:37.500 --> 56:44.300
This saw an increase in the feudalism or the basically proto-federalism of the Holy Roman

56:44.300 --> 56:51.100
Empire. It also saw an increase in church state tensions, which obviously grows over time and

56:51.100 --> 57:00.940
feeds into the Reformation. Now, this largely affected the secular side of things, the left

57:00.940 --> 57:08.220
hand kingdom. The next controversy largely affects the right hand kingdom. Although,

57:09.020 --> 57:14.540
as in this previous one, the left hand kingdom primarily affected, the right hand kingdom also

57:14.540 --> 57:19.740
affected, so the inverse is true here. The right hand kingdom is primarily affected, but the left

57:19.740 --> 57:26.060
hand kingdom is still deeply involved. And this, of course, is the Avignon papacy, so called, or the

57:26.060 --> 57:36.780
western schism. In 1309, Pope Clement V, a Frenchman that is notable here, was elected. He moved the

57:36.780 --> 57:43.740
papal court from Rome to Avignon, France. Somewhat unsurprising for a Frenchman, perhaps. However,

57:44.380 --> 57:50.380
this meant that the French monarchy exercised a significant degree of control over the papacy.

57:51.340 --> 57:57.340
Now, you can see how this would be a problem, because earlier on in the previous controversy,

57:57.340 --> 58:03.340
we have the pope exercising authority over the empire. Well, now we have specifically the French

58:03.340 --> 58:09.420
monarchy exercising authority over the pope, which means that the French monarchy is, in essence,

58:09.420 --> 58:16.300
elevating itself above the emperor. And that is what the political aspect of this is. That's why

58:16.300 --> 58:23.740
you have these problems here. Now, over the course of 67 years, there are seven popes who reside in

58:23.740 --> 58:30.540
Avignon. Eventually, the papal court is moved back to Rome. That is under Pope Gregory XI.

58:31.500 --> 58:38.940
Gregory dies in 1378. And that's where the fun begins, as it were. There's a conclave,

58:38.940 --> 58:45.740
as there always is. Pope Urban VI and Italian is elected. Of course, he wants to keep the

58:45.740 --> 58:54.940
papal court in Rome. There is another conclave, a rival conclave, because some of the bishops

58:54.940 --> 59:03.260
do not like Pope Urban VI. And so they instead elect Pope Clement VII. Notably, not a Frenchman,

59:03.260 --> 59:09.500
as you may have been expecting. Still an Italian, but a Medici. That's relevant for a number of

59:09.500 --> 59:14.940
reasons. Historically, you may be somewhat familiar with the Medici's. One individual you may not

59:14.940 --> 59:20.140
know was in fact a Medici. We'll probably get into this more in the latter part of this episode.

59:21.180 --> 59:28.620
Pope Leo X, who excommunicated Luther, who published the Talmud, also a Medici. But anyway,

59:28.620 --> 59:35.260
now you have two popes. You have Urban VI and Clement VII. Different regions in the empire

59:35.980 --> 59:41.980
recognize one or the other. At one point, they attempt to resolve this by appointing,

59:41.980 --> 59:47.500
electing a third pope. The other two don't step down. Well, now we have three popes.

59:48.780 --> 59:52.460
So there are councils, other attempts to resolve this, the emperors involved,

59:52.460 --> 59:58.140
nobilities involved, some of the kings are involved. It's a very real mess that lasts for a very long

59:58.140 --> 01:00:05.580
time. Remember, this began in 1378 in earnest, as it were. It began earlier than that with the

01:00:05.580 --> 01:00:11.500
move of the papal court to Avignon. But it is not until 1414, when the Council of Constance begins,

01:00:11.500 --> 01:00:17.420
it lasts for four years to 1418, and they elect Pope Martin V that this schism ends.

01:00:18.780 --> 01:00:24.540
So this is a generation of chaos caused by these dissensions in the church.

01:00:26.700 --> 01:00:32.860
The authority of Rome and the unity of church and the unity of the church are both irretrievably

01:00:32.860 --> 01:00:39.340
damaged by this. That is vitally important to recognize because that is part of what sets

01:00:39.340 --> 01:00:45.340
the stage for the Reformation. This is a mere 100 years before the Reformation begins in earnest

01:00:45.340 --> 01:00:52.140
in 1517. And so keep in mind, that is the stage on which the Reformation plays out.

01:00:52.780 --> 01:00:59.100
However, there is another extremely notable event here, and a man who should not go

01:00:59.820 --> 01:01:07.180
unnoticed, who is condemned at the Council of Constance, and that man is named Jan Hus.

01:01:07.900 --> 01:01:14.860
Jan Hus was a Czech reformer. He criticized the corrupt practices of the Roman church,

01:01:14.860 --> 01:01:20.780
primarily financial and moral practices. He advocated for the use of the vernacular,

01:01:20.780 --> 01:01:25.580
which is to say the common language in readings of scripture and in church services,

01:01:26.460 --> 01:01:28.860
and he advocated for the supremacy of scripture.

01:01:29.100 --> 01:01:36.220
So the scripture, as we would call it, and do call it today. Again, notably that's

01:01:36.220 --> 01:01:40.780
ablative, not nominative, but we've gone over that previously. At this Council,

01:01:40.780 --> 01:01:47.180
he is excommunicated and declared a heretic, and acting with perhaps uncharacteristic speed,

01:01:48.060 --> 01:01:56.300
the Roman church burns him at the stake in July of 1415. And so I will end this section

01:01:56.300 --> 01:02:00.780
on the controversies in the church with a quote from Jan Hus.

01:02:02.380 --> 01:02:08.140
The Duke of Bavaria, who was present at the burning of Jan Hus, asked him if he would abjure,

01:02:08.780 --> 01:02:14.540
as they were actually literally building the pyre below him. And Hus responded,

01:02:15.180 --> 01:02:20.380
No, I never preached any doctrine of an evil tendency. And what I taught with my lips,

01:02:20.380 --> 01:02:25.180
I now seal with my blood. He then turned to the executioner and said to him,

01:02:25.980 --> 01:02:30.780
You are now going to burn a goose. But in a century, you will have a swan,

01:02:30.780 --> 01:02:37.740
which you can neither roast nor boil. Now, for those of you who are not Lutheran,

01:02:37.740 --> 01:02:43.340
and even for some Lutheran listeners, you've probably not necessarily encountered an explanation

01:02:43.340 --> 01:02:50.860
of this quote before. Part of what you have to know is that Hus in the Czech dialect

01:02:50.860 --> 01:02:55.820
means goose. He is referring to himself as the goose that is being burned. You may have

01:02:55.820 --> 01:02:59.340
got that just from the context that he's being burned and he's talking about a goose being burned.

01:03:00.060 --> 01:03:07.660
But the swan has been interpreted historically as essentially a prophetic statement

01:03:07.660 --> 01:03:14.140
that Luther would be the one who would come along and take up this banner of reformation in the

01:03:14.140 --> 01:03:21.580
church and carry it forward and try as they might. The popes and others would not succeed

01:03:21.580 --> 01:03:30.220
in burning Luther because Luther died a natural death. He was not burned at the stake. He was

01:03:30.220 --> 01:03:37.900
not executed. He lived out his life, yes, at many times in hiding, essentially in captivity,

01:03:37.900 --> 01:03:44.860
house arrest as it were. He lived under the constant threat of being taken in chains to

01:03:44.860 --> 01:03:50.220
Rome and executed all of these various things because the most powerful men in the world wanted

01:03:50.220 --> 01:03:58.780
him dead. But God kept him alive to die a natural death after writing his final confession.

01:04:00.300 --> 01:04:06.060
And so that is the reference there to that swan. That's Luther. And they managed neither to roast

01:04:06.060 --> 01:04:13.740
nor boil him. And so as we finally get to the kickoff of what's called the Reformation proper,

01:04:13.740 --> 01:04:19.260
it was just important for us to set the stage that anyone who says, well, the Western Church was

01:04:19.260 --> 01:04:25.500
in perfect harmony and everyone agreed and there was no doctrinal disputes until this Luther guy

01:04:25.500 --> 01:04:29.100
came along and he started causing all this trouble. And he was a revolutionary and he

01:04:29.100 --> 01:04:34.780
wanted to burn the church down. No, Luther was a doctor of the church. When he posted the 95

01:04:34.780 --> 01:04:44.220
theses we're about to get into, he was doing his job in addressing controversies in the church.

01:04:44.220 --> 01:04:50.620
He was doing his job. Even if he was in error doctrinally, even if maybe procedurally it wasn't

01:04:50.620 --> 01:04:57.340
perfect, he by his vocation was supposed to be doing theology public. And the posting of the 95

01:04:57.340 --> 01:05:03.580
theses was a challenge to debate. The point was that those theses were to be discussed in the

01:05:03.580 --> 01:05:11.820
future in that place. It was a public notice that let's go. These are what I consider to be matters

01:05:11.820 --> 01:05:18.300
of dispute. Even if he was a heretic, he was according to his office in the church supposed

01:05:18.300 --> 01:05:25.180
to be doing theology. He wasn't a peasant. He wasn't some random guy who vandalized the church door.

01:05:25.900 --> 01:05:33.100
And so it's important to lay that out historically because as we look back on the beginning of the

01:05:33.180 --> 01:05:39.500
Reformation and the outcome and the aftermath of the Reformation, that's usually particularly what

01:05:39.500 --> 01:05:44.220
the Roman Catholics will say, but others say that as well. They won't say everything was just

01:05:44.220 --> 01:05:50.540
hunky dory because they know the councils prove what an absurdity that is, but they will lie about

01:05:50.540 --> 01:05:57.020
the degree of equanimity that occurred within the church. For example, one of the most common claims

01:05:57.020 --> 01:06:03.500
is that Luther removed books from the Bible. He changed the canon. The fact is that there was

01:06:03.500 --> 01:06:10.140
no canon of scripture in the West until Trent declared it three decades later. And I believe

01:06:10.140 --> 01:06:16.140
I wait until after he was dead. So it wasn't until Trent that there was an official canon

01:06:16.140 --> 01:06:23.420
when Luther discussed which books should be in scripture. He was again doing his job. He was

01:06:23.420 --> 01:06:30.380
doing what theologians had been doing since the earliest days. There was a generally accepted

01:06:30.940 --> 01:06:37.500
list of books that for some it included the Apocrypha and for others it didn't. When he engaged in the

01:06:37.500 --> 01:06:43.020
theological debate as a theologian saying, I think that there's a good argument for these books and

01:06:43.020 --> 01:06:48.780
I think there's a good argument against these books, he was doing his job. And so I hope that

01:06:48.860 --> 01:06:55.020
that context will be carried through everything that happens after because if you portray him as

01:06:55.020 --> 01:07:01.020
a renegade and a rebel and just a bomb thrower, then yeah, he caused a bunch of trouble. If,

01:07:01.020 --> 01:07:09.980
on the other hand, you view him as a Roman Catholic priest who was doing his job by discussing theology

01:07:09.980 --> 01:07:17.740
according to his vocation, then what happened afterwards takes on a different tenor. And all

01:07:17.820 --> 01:07:23.100
this has to be couched in, as Corey said, the political terms of the day. One of the disputes

01:07:23.100 --> 01:07:29.100
that I mentioned earlier, somebody was arguing about cathedrals on Twitter, the difference

01:07:29.100 --> 01:07:35.820
between a 12th century cathedral built under Roman Catholic authority and, for example,

01:07:35.820 --> 01:07:43.100
the Basilica that was also built by Rome is that when the Basilica was built, it was built with

01:07:43.100 --> 01:07:49.500
money that John Tetzel was extorting from the German people on behalf of the Italian people

01:07:49.500 --> 01:07:56.540
to build a new giant cathedral specifically for the pope. So it wasn't a cathedral in a city or

01:07:56.540 --> 01:08:02.940
region, it was a new throne for the pope and it was being used, it was being built with extortionate

01:08:02.940 --> 01:08:10.940
money derived from an ethnic target. That's what literally happened. So I don't know if you've

01:08:10.940 --> 01:08:18.220
ever been on a civil jury before, but when you decide civil liability versus criminal liability,

01:08:19.100 --> 01:08:26.540
if you say that the defendant is guilty of X whatever, you also assign a percentage of guilt

01:08:26.540 --> 01:08:32.780
that they bear for whatever negative outcome there was. So I was 18 years old, I was on a jury

01:08:32.780 --> 01:08:40.140
for a civil trial that involved a woman involved in a car accident. She caused injuries to someone

01:08:40.140 --> 01:08:48.140
else and the dispute before the court was, was she guilty of causing the car wreck negligently

01:08:48.140 --> 01:08:57.420
and what degree of remuneration did she owe to the victim? And so as a jury, we found both that

01:08:57.420 --> 01:09:03.100
she was guilty and I think we found that she was like 50 or 60% liable, which meant that the total

01:09:03.100 --> 01:09:09.420
amount of the bills that were presented, we held her liable for about half of it. That sort of

01:09:09.500 --> 01:09:16.220
percentage allocation is something that I think is a useful idea, kind of a Bayesian approach to

01:09:16.220 --> 01:09:22.780
take to when you're looking in history prior to the Reformation, how much of what Rome was doing

01:09:22.780 --> 01:09:29.980
was attributable to the pope, to the magisterium, to tradition, and how much of it was attributable

01:09:29.980 --> 01:09:36.300
to them simply being the Western church. Because remember, Catholic means of the whole. Catholic

01:09:36.380 --> 01:09:41.740
is a small C word. It's why you'll never hear me call someone a Catholic as best I can help.

01:09:41.740 --> 01:09:47.900
I will always call them Roman Catholic or if I'm being more brief, Romanist or Papist. Those are

01:09:47.900 --> 01:09:53.500
slightly more biting terms, but they're not meant hostily. I'm just not going to call you Catholic

01:09:53.500 --> 01:09:58.140
because that means universal. That means that you're the only Christians and by definition,

01:09:58.140 --> 01:10:04.300
I can't be Christian because I don't have the pope. So if Catholic means Roman Catholic and I am

01:10:04.300 --> 01:10:11.740
outside of the whole, then that means I'm outside of scripture. I'm outside of the church. I must

01:10:11.740 --> 01:10:16.940
necessarily reject that because I reject the pope. The good ones were in line with the Western

01:10:16.940 --> 01:10:22.860
tradition. The bad ones, I don't have to worry about because they weren't my pope. They were men

01:10:22.860 --> 01:10:29.180
who were in a position who made heirs. As Corey says, we're going to get to Leo the 10th, really

01:10:29.260 --> 01:10:38.060
bad pope, terrible pope, evil pope. When he did things, Roman Catholics must by definition

01:10:38.060 --> 01:10:41.180
say, well, yeah, I have to side with Leo the 10th because he was the pope.

01:10:42.300 --> 01:10:47.180
The point of the reformation is you don't have to side with a man. You have to side with God.

01:10:47.180 --> 01:10:52.300
If the man who's put in charge doesn't side with God, then you get a new man.

01:10:53.020 --> 01:11:00.140
That was the entire premise of the reformation, not overthrow, not revolution, but when we are

01:11:00.140 --> 01:11:07.740
faced with controversies, let us be faithful. When the edifices, when the dominant forces

01:11:07.740 --> 01:11:15.020
in the places of high power say, no, we will not relinquish control, we insist on being evil,

01:11:15.580 --> 01:11:21.580
then that puts us today in the same boat that Luther is in. If the pope is evil, he's still

01:11:21.580 --> 01:11:26.780
Christian. If that means he doesn't get to be Roman Catholic anymore, well, he's still Christian,

01:11:26.780 --> 01:11:30.460
and it doesn't really matter what the label is. It matters what scripture says.

01:11:32.380 --> 01:11:38.860
As the reformation kicks off, that is ground zero. What is a man supposed to do when he's

01:11:38.860 --> 01:11:44.620
being a faithful Christian, even in the face of false teachings or disputes? The false teaching

01:11:44.620 --> 01:11:51.660
emerged after the dispute was rejected with threat of execution. They made him an outlaw,

01:11:51.660 --> 01:11:56.060
so they're going to kill him. That's a pretty good indication of which side they're on,

01:11:56.060 --> 01:12:00.380
and that was an appeal to their authority, not an appeal to scripture. Of course,

01:12:00.380 --> 01:12:06.540
Luther was arguing from scripture, and that was the problem. We see that in our churches today,

01:12:06.540 --> 01:12:13.820
and for exactly the same reason. The history of the reformation, the timeline of the reformation

01:12:13.820 --> 01:12:22.780
really is a timeline of Luther's life beginning in 1517. His early life is less relevant, although

01:12:22.780 --> 01:12:27.420
obviously there's some importance as to why he became a monk, what he encountered as a monk,

01:12:28.060 --> 01:12:35.180
etc., but we're going to start in 1517. This isn't to discount that there were other reformers,

01:12:35.180 --> 01:12:38.620
particularly the reform tradition was also taking shape at this time.

01:12:39.020 --> 01:12:45.180
But Luther began the reformation in earnest, and Luther is the one who carried it forward. God

01:12:45.180 --> 01:12:57.980
used him as his tool in this particular task. And so, 31 October 1517, he post the 95 theses,

01:12:57.980 --> 01:13:06.380
as was mentioned. Notably, he posted them in Latin. These were not something that he intended for

01:13:06.380 --> 01:13:11.980
the common man. These were not something that he intended to be taken and published everywhere.

01:13:11.980 --> 01:13:19.180
This was an invitation to debate, to discuss theological problems, to discuss doctrine and dogma,

01:13:19.900 --> 01:13:25.260
and he even invited, in the wording of the theses, the pope to respond to these, should he care to

01:13:25.260 --> 01:13:31.900
do so. But again, they were in Latin. They were not in the vernacular. They were rapidly translated

01:13:31.900 --> 01:13:36.940
into the vernacular, although not by Luther, they were translated by others. And so, that is part of

01:13:36.940 --> 01:13:42.860
what sparked the reformation, because these spread far and wide. Not Luther's original intent,

01:13:44.060 --> 01:13:50.940
but God had other plans. And so, we have the spark of the reformation here in 1517.

01:13:51.980 --> 01:13:57.340
In 1518, things moving actually fairly quickly here, although they move much more slowly later on,

01:13:57.900 --> 01:14:05.820
in April of 1518, Luther meets in Augsburg with Cardinal Cajetan, who demands that he recant,

01:14:06.620 --> 01:14:10.380
presents him with a bunch of his works. Luther, of course, says that he cannot recant,

01:14:11.260 --> 01:14:14.540
unless something can be shown to disagree with the word of God.

01:14:15.500 --> 01:14:27.740
In 1520, Luther is excommunicated. And that is with the papal bull of Xerge Domine. That's

01:14:28.380 --> 01:14:36.060
when Pope Leo X condemns Luther's teachings. Xerge Domine is a rhizolord. He's invoking God

01:14:36.060 --> 01:14:40.620
as saying that God is on his side, because he claims to be the vicar of Christ on earth.

01:14:40.940 --> 01:14:48.540
Luther, for his part, in that same year, publishes three of his key treatises with regard to

01:14:49.420 --> 01:14:53.260
a Christian doctrine, but what Luther specifically is teaching, and those are to the Christian

01:14:53.260 --> 01:14:58.860
nobility of the German nation, the Babylonian captivity of the church, and on the freedom of

01:14:58.860 --> 01:15:06.300
a Christian. In the following year, in April, on the 17th, we have the Diet of Vorms. We mentioned

01:15:06.300 --> 01:15:13.180
that city earlier. Here is where it comes up again. This is where Luther most famously, before

01:15:14.460 --> 01:15:21.900
both church and empire, makes his statement, here I stand, I can do no other. You may have

01:15:21.900 --> 01:15:30.860
heard it in German. In May of that year, the Edict of Vorms is issued. This is where Luther is

01:15:30.860 --> 01:15:38.460
officially declared an outlaw and a heretic. Now, here I have to note something historically. I

01:15:38.460 --> 01:15:45.820
was tempted before to mention some legal niceties with regard to comparative negligence, but it's

01:15:45.820 --> 01:15:51.820
not really the place for that. Here, however, we have to make a legal comment, because outlaw

01:15:51.820 --> 01:15:58.860
means something specifically in the historical context. A man who is declared an outlaw is

01:15:58.860 --> 01:16:05.100
outside the law. This is something that was carried over from ancient law, particularly in this case,

01:16:05.100 --> 01:16:11.500
of course, Roman law, perhaps not surprising for the Holy Roman Empire. A man who is outside the law

01:16:12.460 --> 01:16:18.140
has no legal protections. He may be killed by anyone. That is what it means. And in fact,

01:16:18.140 --> 01:16:22.460
it heavily implies he should be killed by anyone who encounters him who can do so.

01:16:23.420 --> 01:16:29.340
This is a death sentence on Luther. That is what this Edict actually says.

01:16:31.420 --> 01:16:35.420
Thankfully, for those of us who are Protestant, thankfully, for the Church,

01:16:36.540 --> 01:16:42.060
Luther has some friends in high places, and so he is whisked away to Vartburg Castle,

01:16:42.780 --> 01:16:50.700
where he is held in safety as Junker Jorg, Knight George, and he translates the New Testament while

01:16:50.700 --> 01:16:56.300
he is there. So he is being very productive. He, in fact, does that in a rather short period of time.

01:16:57.580 --> 01:17:02.460
And so this, of course, protects him from the Emperor and the Pope, both of whom at this point

01:17:02.460 --> 01:17:10.060
would like to kill him. Because the Emperor, in this case, a Spaniard, sides with the Italian Pope.

01:17:10.060 --> 01:17:16.620
Again, remember, Leo the Tenth is a Medici. And so Luther, in hiding for three years in

01:17:16.620 --> 01:17:23.900
Vartburg Castle. In the meantime, you have objections from some of the primarily Germanic

01:17:23.900 --> 01:17:29.580
princes with regard to the treatment of Luther, the way that Lutheran doctrine is being handled,

01:17:30.140 --> 01:17:35.180
the way the Church is addressing these doctrinal disagreements, and all of these various related

01:17:35.180 --> 01:17:45.020
things. This eventuates in, there was an earlier declaration at the First Diet of Speyer.

01:17:47.100 --> 01:17:52.700
Basically, early on one of the solutions, the timeline doesn't matter as much, but

01:17:52.700 --> 01:17:57.980
it's important to keep in mind what happened and the order in which they happened. So

01:17:58.620 --> 01:18:04.620
the timeline in that sense, but not the specific years. Earlier on, there was an attempt to

01:18:04.620 --> 01:18:11.340
compromise. And this was partly driven by the fact that the Emperor needed the German princes

01:18:11.340 --> 01:18:18.940
on his side, and the electors and others in the Holy Roman Empire, because he was currently attempting

01:18:18.940 --> 01:18:24.220
to thwart Muslim invasions. And so there were considerations of a political nature. And so

01:18:24.220 --> 01:18:31.740
he needed these men on his side in order to send him troops. And so one of the early interim solutions

01:18:32.700 --> 01:18:41.420
was what we today would basically call the religion of the head of state is the religion

01:18:41.420 --> 01:18:49.180
of the state. How that worked was a particular prince who controlled a particular area could say,

01:18:49.820 --> 01:18:56.940
I'm Lutheran, my territory is Lutheran. Or I'm Roman Catholic, my territory is Roman Catholic.

01:18:57.500 --> 01:19:01.900
And those who did not want to be part of that church could move to the next territory over.

01:19:05.020 --> 01:19:11.980
That was the initial compromise. The Emperor went back on his word, which was both obviously a

01:19:11.980 --> 01:19:18.300
breach of his word and against imperial law. But he went back on his word. He affirmed the

01:19:18.300 --> 01:19:25.980
Edict of Worms, the condemnation of Luther, and basically said that no, the entirety of the empire

01:19:25.980 --> 01:19:31.180
is subject to the Sea of Rome is subject to the Pope. You may not have your religion and your

01:19:31.180 --> 01:19:39.980
territory. And so in 1529, at the second diet of Spire, that is where we get the term Protestant,

01:19:41.100 --> 01:19:48.940
because a handful of German princes protest against this mistreatment at the hands of the Emperor.

01:19:49.820 --> 01:19:55.260
They protest against the Emperor going back on his word and not permitting them to have their

01:19:55.260 --> 01:20:04.700
own churches in their own lands. The next year, 1530, this is sort of where things start to get

01:20:04.700 --> 01:20:11.100
formalized. Yes, we have edicts and we have excommunication and papal bulls and all of

01:20:11.100 --> 01:20:15.820
these various things flying back and forth. But where things start to really take solid form

01:20:16.780 --> 01:20:22.540
is 1530. And that's with the Augsburg Confession. This is where the Lutheran princes, and yes,

01:20:22.540 --> 01:20:30.140
it was the Lutheran princes, written, of course, by Melanchthon and obviously a great deal of help

01:20:30.140 --> 01:20:36.780
from Luther, but written by Lutheran theologians and then presented by Lutheran princes to the

01:20:36.780 --> 01:20:45.100
Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Fifth, at Augsburg. This was presented as a formal statement

01:20:45.100 --> 01:20:50.380
of what Lutherans believe. There were other confessions also presented at this time. There

01:20:50.380 --> 01:20:56.300
was an exchange, the Roman Church responded with the Confutation. Notably, they would not

01:20:56.300 --> 01:21:02.700
initially give the Lutherans a copy of this again against Imperial law. The German princes happened

01:21:02.700 --> 01:21:07.660
to have scribes who were very good at shorthand, though. And so we have several copies of it,

01:21:07.660 --> 01:21:12.700
word for word, which was convenient because we responded to that, in this case, I mean, we as

01:21:12.700 --> 01:21:18.540
Lutherans responded to that with the apology of the Augsburg Confession, which was in large part

01:21:18.540 --> 01:21:22.780
a refutation of the things that the Roman Church had put forth in the Confutation.

01:21:24.140 --> 01:21:29.020
Notably, the Confutation is so bad that Rome doesn't even really speak of it these days. It's

01:21:29.020 --> 01:21:33.660
kind of been shoved under the rug. It was not a good document. It was poorly written. It said

01:21:33.660 --> 01:21:38.780
things that were clearly heretical. It was just Rome doing everything they could to condemn the

01:21:38.780 --> 01:21:46.860
Lutherans, these upstart German princes who would not obey the Sea of Rome. But 1530, Augsburg,

01:21:47.820 --> 01:21:55.100
with the Augsburg Confession. That is really where Lutheran doctrine, where the statement of

01:21:55.100 --> 01:22:00.620
the Lutheran faith is formalized, and the first real statement of what it means to be a Protestant.

01:22:01.740 --> 01:22:07.500
What it means to be opposed to what the Roman Church had become, not the Roman Church per se,

01:22:07.500 --> 01:22:12.620
because frequently in our Confessions as Lutherans, we affirm that we would prefer to retain Church

01:22:12.700 --> 01:22:19.100
government as it stood, if only the Popes would be open to reform, open to listening to the Word of

01:22:19.100 --> 01:22:26.700
God. But this is the statement of what Lutherans believe. This is the initial statement of Protestantism.

01:22:28.300 --> 01:22:35.500
Now, it's worth noting, historically this was not called just for the sake of religious issues.

01:22:35.500 --> 01:22:41.900
It was partly that. But it was also called because, again, the Muslims were invading Europe at this

01:22:41.900 --> 01:22:47.020
time, as if that wasn't the case basically for centuries, but they were doing it in earnest.

01:22:47.820 --> 01:22:53.500
And so the Emperor had a very real problem on his hands. He could not have this kind of

01:22:53.500 --> 01:22:59.500
disagreement at home, and also have to wage wars abroad, or really not even abroad at this point,

01:22:59.500 --> 01:23:07.260
but on the fringes of his own empire. And so he wanted, for his part, to resolve these issues.

01:23:07.260 --> 01:23:11.820
He was hoping that there would be a resolution at Augsburg so that they could move forward

01:23:11.820 --> 01:23:18.780
together. That is unfortunately not what happened because Rome was entirely unwilling

01:23:18.780 --> 01:23:24.860
to hear anything, to discuss anything. It was 100% they simply wanted to burn Luther at the stake.

01:23:26.300 --> 01:23:30.860
And so that led to increased dissensions, this would lead to later political strife,

01:23:31.420 --> 01:23:35.980
and in fact the Thirty Years' War and other things, but that's not the point of this episode.

01:23:36.860 --> 01:23:42.860
The last two points on this particular timeline would be 1534 is when Luther completes the

01:23:42.860 --> 01:23:47.900
translation of the entire Bible into German. Earlier he had completed the New Testament,

01:23:47.900 --> 01:23:53.020
he did that very quickly. The Old Testament took a little longer. It's a lot longer,

01:23:53.020 --> 01:24:00.940
so of course it did. And then in 1546, Luther dies in Isleben, dying a natural death after

01:24:00.940 --> 01:24:09.420
suffering a stroke, shortly after preaching his last sermon. And as mentioned, Luther dies in 1546.

01:24:10.460 --> 01:24:17.500
Trent does not finish up until after Luther is dead. They wait until he is dead

01:24:18.220 --> 01:24:21.260
to make their response, as it were, to his doctrine.

01:24:21.260 --> 01:24:28.140
And notably on the subject of the Apocrypha and the Canon,

01:24:28.940 --> 01:24:35.580
Luther's translation included the Apocrypha. He simply put it where it had been historically

01:24:35.580 --> 01:24:40.220
at the end of the Old Testament before the New Testament. He translated every word of it because

01:24:40.220 --> 01:24:45.980
it was an important part of church history. What he believed it was not and what many believers,

01:24:46.060 --> 01:24:52.700
going back to prior to the days of Christ, was that the Apocrypha was not inspired. Incidentally,

01:24:52.700 --> 01:24:57.660
the Apocrypha itself says it's not inspired. One of the early things it says is that all

01:24:57.660 --> 01:25:02.140
the prophets were dead. Malachi was the last prophet. There were no more prophets until John

01:25:02.140 --> 01:25:10.060
the Baptist. So the inter-testamental period was a period of silence from God. But that didn't mean

01:25:10.060 --> 01:25:13.820
that the Jews stopped existing or that they stopped recording their history. And that's

01:25:13.820 --> 01:25:18.860
exactly what the Apocrypha was. It was recorded in Greek because, again, they'd forgotten Hebrew.

01:25:18.860 --> 01:25:25.740
It was a testament of their life and times. It is a largely almost completely accurate historical

01:25:25.740 --> 01:25:32.140
record. There are a few errors. There's a bit of false doctrine, but it is generally commended

01:25:32.780 --> 01:25:38.140
by Christians to this day as something that is useful. And I think one of the

01:25:38.140 --> 01:25:50.060
needless matters of antagonism between those who hold to the 73 books and those who hold to the 66 is

01:25:50.060 --> 01:25:59.100
that, hey, it was a matter of historical dispute. The Jews in Jesus' day did not recognize the

01:25:59.100 --> 01:26:05.100
Apocrypha as inspired. It is quoted in Scripture because it was part of their life and times,

01:26:05.100 --> 01:26:11.340
just as their pagan poets and philosophers quoted in Scripture that does not accord them the station

01:26:11.340 --> 01:26:17.740
of inspiration by God. It means that it was a historical record. So those quotations don't

01:26:17.740 --> 01:26:22.620
automatically elevate something to Scripture, or the Bible would be way too short because there's

01:26:22.620 --> 01:26:28.540
a lot of stuff in there that is incorporated by reference because it existed at the time,

01:26:28.540 --> 01:26:35.420
not because God breathed it out. I think that when, particularly Roman Catholics and Lutherans,

01:26:35.420 --> 01:26:42.300
and then others are viewing these things, the tough part about looking at the time of the

01:26:42.300 --> 01:26:50.220
Reformation is that when you distill it solely down to the doctrinal disputes, you leave out

01:26:50.620 --> 01:26:59.660
the men. You leave out the human beings. You leave out the princes and all these men of power,

01:27:00.300 --> 01:27:06.860
some of whom are trying to be faithful Christians, some of whom were being power hungry. When is that

01:27:06.860 --> 01:27:12.780
not the case? That's such a tepid statement because even more so than Muslim invasion,

01:27:12.780 --> 01:27:18.140
that is true in every time and place. But when such things are occurring, when history is

01:27:18.220 --> 01:27:24.700
continuing to play out as it always does, that has an effect on what's happening. When Corey

01:27:24.700 --> 01:27:30.700
seamlessly slid into calling them Lutherans, they were called Lutherans as a disparaging

01:27:31.340 --> 01:27:38.060
term of derision. Basically, they were treated as a cult. They were said, these Lutherans,

01:27:38.060 --> 01:27:42.220
they're garbage, they're completely outside the church, this is a cult that has emerged,

01:27:42.220 --> 01:27:45.900
they have nothing to do with the Christian faith. It was branding, it was framing.

01:27:46.780 --> 01:27:53.260
The Reformers on the Lutheran side went along with it. They basically gave Rome the finger,

01:27:53.260 --> 01:27:57.980
said, you want to call us Lutherans? Okay, we're Lutherans. What now? What next? Because they

01:27:57.980 --> 01:28:07.180
didn't have much else. I think it's important to look to those days in those terms because the,

01:28:08.940 --> 01:28:15.660
going back to the problem of papal primacy, when you talk to Roman Catholic, they will have

01:28:15.660 --> 01:28:21.980
all sorts of outs for explaining why a pope can be evil, but then things can still go right.

01:28:22.540 --> 01:28:27.180
I can agree with that. I think any Christian can agree with that. I think the cope is that it's

01:28:27.180 --> 01:28:34.300
very difficult for an internally consistent Roman Catholic to deal with their own history

01:28:35.260 --> 01:28:41.020
because I don't think it's possible to be internally consistent as a Roman Catholic.

01:28:41.020 --> 01:28:51.500
As we start looking today at the body of folks who listen to stone choir and agree with someone,

01:28:51.500 --> 01:28:55.180
we say, again, we have a lot of Roman Catholic listeners. I very much appreciate it.

01:28:56.460 --> 01:29:03.500
One of our listeners who has a big podcast was tagged on a, I was tagged on a thread he was in,

01:29:03.500 --> 01:29:08.140
where he had said something disparaging about Saul's scripture, basically just the standard

01:29:08.220 --> 01:29:13.900
Catholic view of scripture alone. Somebody else who listened, probably to both of us,

01:29:13.900 --> 01:29:17.900
tagged me in to get me to argue with him. I didn't take the bait. I wasn't interested in arguing

01:29:17.900 --> 01:29:23.340
because why would I argue with someone who's well-informed? He's a smart guy. I'm not going to

01:29:23.340 --> 01:29:31.020
change his mind. I thought about for a while, what can believers do today when we have such

01:29:31.020 --> 01:29:38.380
disagreements? I'm not going to change anybody's mind by at least someone who's well-informed,

01:29:38.380 --> 01:29:43.820
by going back to the 16th century well of arguments because they have already

01:29:44.700 --> 01:29:49.260
inherited all of the counterarguments to the arguments that I've inherited and vice versa.

01:29:50.060 --> 01:29:56.300
These are 16th century fights. They were hammered out. Here you go. Pass down through the centuries.

01:29:56.300 --> 01:30:00.620
We have to be a bitter enmity with each other forever. That's our inheritance.

01:30:02.060 --> 01:30:06.060
I don't want that to be the case. I don't think anyone really wants that to be the case.

01:30:06.860 --> 01:30:12.940
The question is, what is the workaround for the post-Reformation world where we have

01:30:13.660 --> 01:30:20.940
these wild disagreements? As I was thinking about, if I were going to respond on that thread,

01:30:20.940 --> 01:30:25.100
which I didn't bother because I don't need to defend Saul's scripture, but I thought,

01:30:25.900 --> 01:30:31.820
what is an end run that I can do rhetorically around any argument that someone's heard before?

01:30:32.700 --> 01:30:39.900
I realized the case is stone choir because here's a guy who is Roman Catholic. He's very knowledgeable,

01:30:39.900 --> 01:30:46.300
very intelligent, very devout, agrees with some of what we say. How is that possible for a Roman

01:30:46.300 --> 01:30:53.820
Catholic to agree with two Lutheran guys who have nothing but enmity for the pope today? I'm sure he

01:30:53.820 --> 01:31:00.860
does too. Certainly, Bergoglio is cancerous by almost everyone's estimation. Those who like him

01:31:00.860 --> 01:31:05.900
are not Christian, full stop. You cannot be Christian and think that Bergoglio is

01:31:07.100 --> 01:31:14.700
Christian. Never mind a pope. He is so far beyond the pale, but he's such a Jesuit viper

01:31:14.700 --> 01:31:19.020
that he's moving the ball much further than anyone has before. That's why Satan sent him.

01:31:19.980 --> 01:31:29.900
I really feel for Roman Catholic listeners because the doctrine that Rome teaches puts them in a

01:31:29.900 --> 01:31:36.620
situation where there's almost no possibility for someone who is Roman Catholic to cease to be

01:31:36.620 --> 01:31:43.500
Roman Catholic without ceasing to be Christian. There are lots of former Lutherans and former

01:31:43.500 --> 01:31:51.100
Baptists and former pretty much everything. The only former Roman Catholics you find are

01:31:51.100 --> 01:31:56.140
men or women who married someone of another faith and adopted the other person's faith.

01:31:56.700 --> 01:32:01.580
Those are the only former Roman Catholics I've ever met in my life or ever heard of.

01:32:03.020 --> 01:32:09.980
Everyone else is not a former Roman Catholic. They're a lapsed Catholic. The reason for that is

01:32:09.980 --> 01:32:17.740
one of the key teachings that on paper, it's actually defensible, becomes indefensible

01:32:18.380 --> 01:32:24.700
when it is twisted. That is extra ecclesiom nullis allus, or outside of the church there is no

01:32:24.700 --> 01:32:32.860
salvation. This is either true or false depending on how you define the church. I absolutely agree

01:32:32.860 --> 01:32:37.980
that outside of the church there is no salvation. What I disagree with is how we define the church.

01:32:38.700 --> 01:32:43.820
I believe that scripture teaches and I believe in most of history teaches. In fact, you can look

01:32:43.820 --> 01:32:51.500
at the Wikipedia article for this term and find many of the arguments that are made inside Rome.

01:32:52.380 --> 01:32:58.780
I can agree with for the most part because they're talking about the capital C church in terms of

01:32:58.780 --> 01:33:05.100
all believers, all Christians, regardless of denominational affiliation. I don't say that

01:33:05.100 --> 01:33:10.300
lightly. I don't say, oh, you're just affiliated with a domination. We are all inheritors of whatever

01:33:10.300 --> 01:33:15.260
our denominations teach, so it's important to be in a good one because if you're in a bad one,

01:33:15.260 --> 01:33:20.220
you're going to inherit crap and you're going to believe crap and you'd be a situation where suddenly

01:33:20.220 --> 01:33:27.420
push comes to shove and you're not equipped to deal with tough issues. The problem that I think

01:33:27.420 --> 01:33:32.220
is unique to Roman Catholics today is when they look at a wicked pope like the current one,

01:33:32.700 --> 01:33:38.940
they are effectively Protestant. They effectively have to say, well, not this one, but there's

01:33:38.940 --> 01:33:43.660
still Christianity elsewhere in Roman Catholic history. I agree with that, Cory agrees with that.

01:33:43.660 --> 01:33:49.980
I think one of the key differentiators in the Reformation that we'll get to briefly is that

01:33:51.580 --> 01:33:56.780
things kind of went in four basic directions. They're kind of four large groups that exploded

01:33:57.340 --> 01:34:04.300
out of the Reformation. One, you have those who remained Roman Catholic. Two, you have the Lutherans.

01:34:05.020 --> 01:34:10.300
Three, you have what are today mostly called the reform. That's how we refer to them as Lutherans,

01:34:10.300 --> 01:34:17.900
and you have the Anabaptists. Those four groups disagree with each other mutually, internally,

01:34:18.700 --> 01:34:24.940
on a number of things, but they can all be boiled down to the sacraments. There is no mutual agreement

01:34:24.940 --> 01:34:34.700
about both Communion and Baptism among those four groups. One of the things that came out of the

01:34:34.700 --> 01:34:40.700
Reformation is that, in particular, the Anabaptists, and then some of those that we would categorize

01:34:40.700 --> 01:34:47.820
in the reform body, although they don't necessarily call themselves that, basically adopted the view

01:34:47.820 --> 01:34:56.060
that if it was inherited from Rome in 1520 or whatever, pick your date of Reformation explosion.

01:34:56.700 --> 01:35:01.900
If Rome was doing it on that date, we reject it out of hand, because it's Roman Catholic. That

01:35:01.900 --> 01:35:08.460
means it's bad. Pope bad. It's all bad. It's all evil. We won none of it. That's a strain. I don't

01:35:08.460 --> 01:35:14.060
know the history of it from that point to today, but it's very common today in American Christianity,

01:35:14.060 --> 01:35:18.380
and it's a disaster because, again, it goes back to the question, what is the Church?

01:35:19.740 --> 01:35:25.420
The Western Catholic Church was synonymous with the Roman Catholic Church. To what degree was the

01:35:25.420 --> 01:35:31.020
things that they did, and to what degree were the things that we inherited Roman Catholic,

01:35:31.580 --> 01:35:36.860
and to what degree were they Christian? What percentage do you attribute guilt,

01:35:36.860 --> 01:35:41.980
if you want to look at it that way, but simply put, how much of what they were doing in 1300,

01:35:41.980 --> 01:35:48.540
1400, 1500, were they doing because of Roman Catholic distinctives, and how much of it was

01:35:48.540 --> 01:35:55.260
simply the inherited faith of the Western Christian Church? As Corey said earlier,

01:35:56.140 --> 01:36:03.020
it's perfectly fine for church bodies in different times and certainly in different places

01:36:03.020 --> 01:36:10.860
to have varying customs of worship practice, of liturgy. I think it's also important when

01:36:10.860 --> 01:36:18.620
you're discussing things in those terms, not to disregard the inheritance. I use that term

01:36:18.620 --> 01:36:23.980
advisedly because Rome will call it tradition with a capital T, and say that this is tradition,

01:36:23.980 --> 01:36:28.300
this was inherited, this holds the same way to scripture because we've always done it.

01:36:29.900 --> 01:36:35.900
As non-Roman Catholics, we must necessarily reject that, or we'd have to be Roman Catholic.

01:36:35.900 --> 01:36:43.340
That's a clear dividing line. If tradition is your binding key, then we're on the outside.

01:36:44.300 --> 01:36:52.780
If, on the other hand, tradition can be viewed as both advisory and hopefully salutary, then

01:36:54.220 --> 01:36:59.900
you will do what the Lutherans did. When you look today at a confessional,

01:36:59.900 --> 01:37:06.940
conservative, liturgical Lutheran church service, there are a lot of Roman Catholics who are envious

01:37:07.500 --> 01:37:14.700
because if they're a novus ordo, if they're Vatican II crap service, we are still doing

01:37:14.700 --> 01:37:21.020
what their ancestors were doing 80 years ago. Not in Latin, obviously, we're using the vernacular,

01:37:21.020 --> 01:37:26.860
but we're preserving the same liturgy by and large that existed in the 16th century.

01:37:27.740 --> 01:37:31.100
It wasn't because it was binding upon our consciousness as Christians,

01:37:31.100 --> 01:37:36.780
it's because it's the Western Church. If we had split instead from Eastern Orthodoxy,

01:37:37.900 --> 01:37:43.180
we would have gaudy colors and big hats and whatever, and if it's inherited, I guess you

01:37:43.180 --> 01:37:50.220
got to be cringe, I don't know. It's one thing to say, we got to throw this thing away because

01:37:50.220 --> 01:37:54.620
a bad guy did it. It's another thing to say, well, unless we have a reason to change this,

01:37:54.620 --> 01:38:01.820
let's leave it alone. That was 100% the approach the Lutheran and the Lutheran reformers took to

01:38:01.820 --> 01:38:07.420
the inheritance from a Roman Catholic tradition. We didn't see it as binding,

01:38:07.420 --> 01:38:13.900
we saw it as a treasure as much as possible. We didn't want to lose any of it, and wherever

01:38:13.900 --> 01:38:20.700
there was something that was set aside, it was only for a doctrinal reason. It's one of the key

01:38:20.780 --> 01:38:25.820
differences among Reformation denominations is that many of the other denominations

01:38:26.940 --> 01:38:32.220
became iconoclastic. Some of them, the Anabaptists, were murdering people,

01:38:32.220 --> 01:38:36.700
they were burning down churches, they were destroying art. It was truly demonic. I completely

01:38:36.700 --> 01:38:41.820
sighed with the Roman Catholics in hating that. That never should have happened, it was purely evil.

01:38:43.020 --> 01:38:49.020
It was done because they confused Roman Catholicism with Christianity. They thought, well, if

01:38:49.020 --> 01:38:53.020
that's what Christianity is, I don't want any part of it. If that's what Rome was, and I know

01:38:53.020 --> 01:38:59.660
Rome is bad, I can't do any of it. It's a category error, it's a framing error, and it's a catastrophic

01:38:59.660 --> 01:39:06.620
one because much of what Rome was doing wasn't wrong. Some of their teachings were wrong,

01:39:06.620 --> 01:39:12.780
some of the practices were wrong. For example, the Lutheran Confessions described the mass

01:39:12.780 --> 01:39:18.780
on one hand as the abomination of the mass because they take a different view of what is happening

01:39:18.780 --> 01:39:25.500
in the sacrament of the altar. They do different things with it. We view that as an abomination,

01:39:25.500 --> 01:39:30.860
not because communion is an abomination, but because there were abuses that were downstream

01:39:30.860 --> 01:39:36.380
from errors that crept into Rome that we necessarily had to reject based on Scripture.

01:39:37.100 --> 01:39:42.780
And so some of the disputes on the sacrament of the altar among Rome and Lutherans in

01:39:42.780 --> 01:39:47.660
baptism reformed specifically have to do with what's going on in communion.

01:39:48.300 --> 01:39:51.980
We already did an episode where we talked about what goes on in baptism. We'll probably do some

01:39:51.980 --> 01:39:55.820
point about communion because a number of people have asked, and it's an important question.

01:39:56.460 --> 01:40:01.580
And as we've said before, we don't want stone-quired just to be us teaching everything

01:40:01.580 --> 01:40:07.820
the Lutherans believe about all this stuff. On the other hand, we accept and receive that

01:40:07.820 --> 01:40:12.780
teaching gladly. And it's important, certainly, if nothing else is a part of the historic

01:40:12.780 --> 01:40:18.860
conversation. And I think that one of the weaknesses that especially a lot of reformed

01:40:18.860 --> 01:40:25.580
guys have is that they know a little bit about Lutheranism, but because they simply see him

01:40:26.220 --> 01:40:33.020
as one among a whole bunch of 16th-century reformers, the rest of whom they side with

01:40:33.020 --> 01:40:38.780
on most things. They just see him as kind of one voice among many. And so it's very telling that

01:40:38.780 --> 01:40:46.140
most of the 500th anniversary reformation celebrations in movies and things that were

01:40:46.140 --> 01:40:54.780
produced in 2017 were produced by the Reformed because they see Luther as part of the Reformed

01:40:54.780 --> 01:41:01.660
tradition to some degree. I think it varies by individual denomination. But as Lutherans,

01:41:02.220 --> 01:41:09.180
we find that just insane. I don't get it. I'm thankful. I don't get me wrong. I'm not saying

01:41:09.180 --> 01:41:16.220
stop doing that. But when a Reformed guy sees Luther as part of his tradition, I have to believe

01:41:16.220 --> 01:41:21.100
that he's never actually read what Lutherans believe about this stuff because the Book of

01:41:21.100 --> 01:41:27.900
Concord initially, what was compiled between 1520-odd and 1580 in the Book of Concord,

01:41:27.980 --> 01:41:35.500
beginning with the Augsburg Confession, what began as arguments with and against Roman Catholicism

01:41:36.140 --> 01:41:42.860
soon ended up in a three- and a four-way fight with also the Reformed and the Anabaptists.

01:41:42.860 --> 01:41:50.140
So we had to dispute what everyone was saying simultaneously because the pope wanted to lump

01:41:50.140 --> 01:41:54.380
the Lutherans in with Reformed and the Anabaptists saying, well, you're the ones murdering and

01:41:54.380 --> 01:41:58.780
pillaging and burning down churches. And Lutherans were like, we're not doing any of that crap. We

01:41:58.780 --> 01:42:05.340
hate it as much as you do. And so it was falsely attributing everything about the Reformation

01:42:05.340 --> 01:42:09.740
to the worst aspects of it and then losing sight of what the differences were. And so

01:42:10.540 --> 01:42:15.020
if you are Baptist or Reformed and you care about church history, you really owe it to

01:42:15.020 --> 01:42:19.500
yourself to actually just read the Book of Concord. We'll put the link in the show notes. It's the

01:42:19.580 --> 01:42:25.260
book ofconcord.org. The whole thing's there. It's out of copyright. It's free. You can read the whole

01:42:25.260 --> 01:42:31.820
thing. Those are the arguments that were made in the 16th century. So as we look at the state

01:42:31.820 --> 01:42:37.820
of the church today, capital C, all believers, believers in Rome, in the Reformed and Presbyterians

01:42:37.820 --> 01:42:46.460
and Baptists and Methodists, I had someone talk to me on Twitter earlier today and she mentioned

01:42:46.460 --> 01:42:54.620
that in her small town, the local Methodist congregation has just left the UMC because

01:42:55.660 --> 01:42:59.820
they're going down the tubes. Now, from my perspective on the outside, I find it a little

01:42:59.820 --> 01:43:05.260
bit astonishing that there are any Christians left in Methodism because all I know is like the

01:43:05.260 --> 01:43:13.420
big ticket whores, the absolute abject, terminal Protestant apostasy that is held out as like,

01:43:13.420 --> 01:43:21.500
here's the end stage of the Reformation. You know, fake rainbow flags with six colors, not seven.

01:43:21.500 --> 01:43:26.540
All the usual hallmarks of total apostasy. When I think Methodist, that's what I think. I've

01:43:26.540 --> 01:43:31.740
actually used as a punchline in an earlier episode. When I hear from her that there are churches

01:43:31.740 --> 01:43:38.140
leaving in Methodism or leaving at least the UMC specifically because of those abuses,

01:43:38.940 --> 01:43:44.300
it's heartening. She mentioned that the Baptist churches there are probably going to be leaving

01:43:44.300 --> 01:43:49.740
the SBC for very similar reasons. As I said at the beginning, all of the church bodies,

01:43:49.740 --> 01:43:55.500
no matter how liberal or conservative, are all under the same attack today, almost verbatim.

01:43:56.300 --> 01:44:01.820
I mentioned last week the quotes from Giles Corey's book, The Sword of Christ. He had quotes

01:44:01.820 --> 01:44:08.860
from Russell Moore in the SBC in 2017 talking about racism and anti-Semitism and their battle

01:44:08.860 --> 01:44:14.060
with it. It was virtually verbatim what Matt Harrison, president of the LCMS, said about

01:44:14.060 --> 01:44:20.620
Stonequire earlier this year. How's the Baptist and the Lutheran presidents? He's the president,

01:44:20.620 --> 01:44:25.420
but he's very influential. I don't pay much attention to this stuff. I apologize when I'm

01:44:25.420 --> 01:44:30.300
ignorant of other denominations. I historically never paid that much attention. When I did

01:44:30.300 --> 01:44:35.420
start paying attention, I quickly realized how much trouble my own was in. I'm not going to

01:44:35.420 --> 01:44:40.940
worry about other people's dirty laundry and baggage when my own house is not in order.

01:44:42.940 --> 01:44:47.820
Sometimes I'm ignorant of this stuff. It's me allocating my scarce resources as I see fit.

01:44:48.940 --> 01:44:56.460
When Russell Moore and Harrison are in agreement on things that you will find in your HR department

01:44:56.460 --> 01:45:02.860
talking about DEI requirements, that's the world religion. That is the new global religion

01:45:02.860 --> 01:45:09.100
that is being pushed down the throats of all the churches simultaneously. See, the SBC and the LCMS

01:45:09.100 --> 01:45:15.500
have major doctrinal differences on historic stuff, on the 16th century stuff, just as we have

01:45:15.500 --> 01:45:22.300
major disagreements with the Methodists. Yet today, when the attacks come, they're not

01:45:22.300 --> 01:45:27.580
simply a replay attack of what happened in the 16th century. They're new attacks. They're attacks

01:45:27.580 --> 01:45:36.940
on sex, on headship, right down the line, racism, slavery, all these things that on one hand you

01:45:36.940 --> 01:45:43.420
have guys like MLK and Bonhoeffer as the patron saints of the new global religion who are 100%

01:45:43.420 --> 01:45:49.180
on board with Russell Moore and Matt Harrison across the board on all these things. And by the way,

01:45:49.180 --> 01:45:54.780
your HR department, they all have the same religion. And on the other side, you have Christians

01:45:54.780 --> 01:46:01.420
remaining in the pews saying, what on earth is going on here? One day, I feel like my church

01:46:01.420 --> 01:46:06.540
just left me and I don't know what happened. I don't think I changed what I believe. And that's

01:46:06.540 --> 01:46:12.860
the case for a lot of us is we're looking around, Roman Catholics, chief among them. When you were

01:46:12.860 --> 01:46:18.060
born, if you're listening today, Bergoglio wasn't Pope when you were born. He's the Pope now.

01:46:18.060 --> 01:46:24.620
You're stuck with him. And so what do we do as Christians as we're looking at

01:46:25.340 --> 01:46:33.340
these problems? And as I said earlier, I take solace in the fact that so many people from

01:46:33.340 --> 01:46:38.540
different traditions are listening and agreeing with at least some of what we say, not because I

01:46:38.540 --> 01:46:43.420
want people to agree with me, but because we're making arguments from Scripture. And so if you

01:46:43.420 --> 01:46:47.020
agree with our argument from Scripture, you're agreeing with Scripture, you're agreeing with God,

01:46:47.020 --> 01:46:51.660
you're not agreeing with two random podcasters, you're not becoming Lutheran automatically because

01:46:51.660 --> 01:46:57.580
you agree with us. And one of the important things that I want to emphasize as we

01:46:58.860 --> 01:47:07.020
talk about where do we all go next is that I've said before, it's very important to us that

01:47:07.020 --> 01:47:13.980
people are not fickle about their beliefs. If you are Roman Catholic, I don't want you to stop being

01:47:13.980 --> 01:47:18.380
Roman Catholic because you listened to Stone Choir, not automatically. I would like for you to stop

01:47:18.380 --> 01:47:23.100
being Roman Catholic because you agree that Lutheran doctrine is sound. But again, the problem

01:47:23.100 --> 01:47:29.580
with the teaching of Rome is that if you leave Rome, if you lose the Pope, you're not a Christian

01:47:29.580 --> 01:47:35.740
anymore. And that's why you're either Catholic or your laps Catholic, because no one ever escapes.

01:47:36.380 --> 01:47:41.180
Your choice is either the Pope or hell. And that's a complete oversimplification. There are

01:47:41.180 --> 01:47:47.980
all sorts of outs, but that is the bottom line in practice. Forget what you find in the doctrinal

01:47:47.980 --> 01:47:52.300
treatises explaining how, well, yeah, the Pope can do this and then we're okay and everything's

01:47:52.300 --> 01:47:59.740
hunky dory. When the rubber meets the road, when a Roman Catholic believer ceases to be a believer

01:47:59.740 --> 01:48:05.660
because of the hypocrisy and the wickedness in the administration of Rome, they don't change

01:48:05.660 --> 01:48:10.620
denominations, they lose their faith. And above all things, I don't want that to happen. And so

01:48:10.620 --> 01:48:14.460
that's the reason I specifically sing all Roman Catholics say, I don't want you to stop being

01:48:14.460 --> 01:48:19.260
Roman Catholic because the odds are almost 100% that you're going to stop being Christian, which

01:48:19.260 --> 01:48:23.500
is the last thing I want. If you're a Roman Catholic and you agree with some of what we say,

01:48:23.500 --> 01:48:28.140
it means you're a Christian. Not that we're the benchmark of Christianity, but that the only

01:48:28.140 --> 01:48:36.380
common ground that we share is scripture is the word of God. And the beauty of God and of his word

01:48:36.380 --> 01:48:41.660
is that it is efficacious in all times and in all places. And the fact that we have people

01:48:41.660 --> 01:48:46.540
in all these different denominations who agree with some of what we say when we argue from scripture

01:48:47.100 --> 01:48:51.820
is that it means that scripture is being preached among you as well. Even if your pastors are

01:48:51.820 --> 01:48:57.980
getting some things wrong or your priests, even if there are doctrines that are in error, if you're

01:48:57.980 --> 01:49:03.340
in agreement about what scripture says with us, it means that you have the Holy Spirit and that

01:49:03.820 --> 01:49:08.940
there's something there for God to work with. And in some cases, he's using our voices. In other

01:49:08.940 --> 01:49:15.980
cases, the ripples of what we have done already in the first year of Stone Choir will last for a

01:49:15.980 --> 01:49:21.580
very long time. I can say that with confidence because we know for a fact that there are hundreds

01:49:21.580 --> 01:49:27.260
of men who brought their families, children and baptized for the first time specifically because

01:49:27.260 --> 01:49:32.460
of hearing the things that we say. That's not us doing it. We did the baptism

01:49:33.340 --> 01:49:40.300
episode recently, but we haven't talked a whole lot about baptism until just a couple of weeks ago

01:49:41.260 --> 01:49:47.100
when someone hears what we're arguing and says, yeah, that's the Christianity that I want. You're

01:49:47.100 --> 01:49:54.380
not adopting our views. You are realizing that there's something in scripture that in a very

01:49:54.380 --> 01:50:01.500
real sense goes beyond every denomination. Now, I'm not the man in my Bible under the tree person

01:50:02.220 --> 01:50:07.820
that's a disaster. The Reformation in large part was a disaster, but it wasn't a disaster because

01:50:07.820 --> 01:50:13.580
of the Reformers. It was a disaster because of the persecution of Rome against faithful Christian

01:50:13.580 --> 01:50:21.260
men who wanted to straighten things out. So for everyone who listens to Stone Choir who

01:50:22.140 --> 01:50:26.380
is getting back into reading scripture, maybe reading it for the first time, who's, you know,

01:50:26.380 --> 01:50:30.220
if you're in a church and you're looking at your church and you're finding some of the things that

01:50:30.220 --> 01:50:36.060
they teach aren't constant with what you're seeing in scripture or what you're hearing in sound

01:50:36.060 --> 01:50:41.740
arguments from us or from others. There's an infinite supply of theological argument for these

01:50:41.740 --> 01:50:49.660
positions, most of them anyway. If you look around, for example, the lady on Twitter who said,

01:50:50.620 --> 01:50:55.420
she's SBC, probably it seemed that way. If you're an SBC church or you're in a Methodist church or

01:50:55.420 --> 01:51:03.020
Presbyterian church and you're seeing that your leadership, not locally, but your leadership

01:51:03.020 --> 01:51:08.620
nationally is doing something that is tending towards apostasy or certainly towards what you

01:51:08.620 --> 01:51:16.380
find to be intolerable, false doctrine. Honestly, I don't know where we go from here as Christians,

01:51:16.380 --> 01:51:20.860
like not just like a podcast or anything, but I don't know where we as Christians in

01:51:20.940 --> 01:51:25.420
current years were looking at the state of the church across denominations,

01:51:25.420 --> 01:51:31.020
seeing the same cancer spreading in so many places in the same way, at the same rate, and to the same

01:51:31.020 --> 01:51:39.180
end. I hope that everyone who looks at their own church and says, well, I don't actually agree with

01:51:39.180 --> 01:51:46.700
this anymore. Maybe in some cases, the only suitable thing that you can do is to find another

01:51:46.700 --> 01:51:52.940
local church that teaches something closer to what you now believe. In some cases, maybe

01:51:54.060 --> 01:51:59.100
the first thing that everyone probably should do when it can be done charitably and without

01:51:59.740 --> 01:52:05.580
stirring up strife is to talk about it. If the other men in the congregation say,

01:52:05.580 --> 01:52:10.780
I've been reading, I've been thinking about this, I think we should take another look at

01:52:11.740 --> 01:52:19.820
this church teaching. Now, the Roman Catholic will scream, well, that's every man a pope. Well,

01:52:20.460 --> 01:52:26.060
we're individually accountable to God for our confession. The president of the Missouri Senate

01:52:26.060 --> 01:52:31.580
or the president of your denomination or your pope is not going to answer on your behalf,

01:52:31.580 --> 01:52:36.540
on Judgment Day, you are. Now, he's going to answer for the lies that he told you,

01:52:36.620 --> 01:52:41.020
but that doesn't get you off the hook. If you believe the lies, you're accountable for that,

01:52:41.020 --> 01:52:45.660
too. And so it's important for us as we're looking at this stuff is to figure out,

01:52:45.660 --> 01:52:51.020
how can I be faithful to God? Honestly, I think in some cases, in particular, frankly,

01:52:51.020 --> 01:52:54.940
I think there are a lot more Christians and Presbyterianism today than there are in Lutheranism,

01:52:54.940 --> 01:52:59.180
just based on the behavior that I've seen. I think that a lot of guys in the Presbyterian

01:52:59.180 --> 01:53:03.980
and Reform space don't agree with us about everything, but they don't hate us. They don't

01:53:03.980 --> 01:53:09.260
think we're not Christians. They don't need to call us Nazis, even if they think that we're wrong

01:53:09.260 --> 01:53:15.100
about stuff or we go too far or whatever. That is much closer to Christianity than the man who

01:53:15.100 --> 01:53:21.020
doxes me and tries to kill me. That's a simple basic thing. If you disagree with a man, you don't

01:53:21.020 --> 01:53:28.060
try to kill him. I think that if you are a Reform Presbyterian, wherever you are, wherever God has

01:53:28.060 --> 01:53:33.660
placed you in your congregation, if you're looking around and you're seeing, I think that there's

01:53:33.820 --> 01:53:37.900
mistakes perhaps that have been made in the past and our denomination,

01:53:39.740 --> 01:53:44.700
be honest about confronting how you got there. It's going to differ for every denomination.

01:53:45.420 --> 01:53:51.180
For Rome, I think the line from Bergoglio back through Vatican II,

01:53:52.060 --> 01:53:56.700
honestly, I would hope that you would go all the back to Trent. I think a lot of things went off

01:53:56.700 --> 01:54:01.660
the rails at Trent. It's something that doesn't get discussed a whole lot in Roman Catholicism

01:54:01.660 --> 01:54:07.820
today because it's a given. You have five centuries of history built on top of it, but

01:54:08.940 --> 01:54:13.260
if you have already become Protestant, if you're already willing to say,

01:54:13.260 --> 01:54:17.500
yeah, that's not my pope, he might technically be a pope, but the man is a demon,

01:54:18.300 --> 01:54:24.780
if you're there, then you have a duty to God, not to the pope, not to the magisterium,

01:54:24.780 --> 01:54:30.220
not to tradition. You have a duty to God to figure out where did things go off the rails.

01:54:31.180 --> 01:54:34.460
Frankly, most people aren't equipped to answer that question by themselves, but

01:54:35.180 --> 01:54:38.780
collectively, Christians should be discussing those things. The answer is going to be different

01:54:38.780 --> 01:54:44.140
in every denomination. The denominations that trace back to the Reformation will have

01:54:44.860 --> 01:54:50.300
varying degrees of disagreement and certain inflection points. We broke down to those four

01:54:50.300 --> 01:54:57.820
basic categories, which is somewhat of an oversimplification, but not much. I don't mean to

01:54:57.820 --> 01:55:02.140
be offensive by saying that, but pretty much everyone listening falls into one of those four

01:55:02.140 --> 01:55:08.700
buckets. If you think that you're this special little tiny thing, great. I hope you get everything

01:55:08.700 --> 01:55:16.220
right that everybody else got wrong because there's a lot of baggage. I want us wherever we are

01:55:16.220 --> 01:55:23.100
in our churches to work through this stuff out loud, and hopefully cooperatively as much as

01:55:23.180 --> 01:55:27.900
possible. I don't know what's going to happen in the next five years, but when we have listeners

01:55:27.900 --> 01:55:35.340
from so many different denominations agreeing on some big ticket stuff, even the baptism episode,

01:55:35.340 --> 01:55:41.100
there are a number of people who join Lutheranism because we describe baptism to them correctly for

01:55:41.100 --> 01:55:46.060
the first time. If you disagree with that, I don't mean to just pop smoke on your church and say,

01:55:46.060 --> 01:55:51.340
I'm out of here. I don't want anything that we say to so doubt in people's minds.

01:55:52.700 --> 01:55:59.260
I hope that our word's so faithfulness. If in growing faithful to scripture, you find that

01:55:59.260 --> 01:56:05.980
your own particular church and congregation has issues, hopefully they can be fixed. Honestly,

01:56:05.980 --> 01:56:11.100
for me, I think the best case scenario is that there are a bunch of Presbyterian guys who are

01:56:11.100 --> 01:56:15.500
listening to Stone Choir in their church and almost everyone is like, yeah, this is actually

01:56:15.500 --> 01:56:21.340
pretty good. I don't care if you start calling yourself Lutherans, but if we've gotten all these

01:56:21.340 --> 01:56:27.260
things right, maybe look at what the historic Lutheran teaching is on the sacrament because if you

01:56:27.900 --> 01:56:32.220
get the sacrament right, guess what? You're basically Lutheran at that point. I don't care

01:56:32.220 --> 01:56:36.620
what you call yourself. Call yourself Presbyterians for all I care. It doesn't matter. The label isn't

01:56:36.620 --> 01:56:42.780
important because the label, it means whatever you want it to mean or nothing or wherever your

01:56:42.780 --> 01:56:48.300
opponent wants it to mean. The belief, the confession is what's important. If you don't

01:56:48.300 --> 01:56:53.340
confess the ecumenical creeds, start there. As we said earlier, we tried to make the case that

01:56:53.340 --> 01:56:59.740
the creeds themselves are a big deal. If your church body is predicated on rejecting them,

01:57:00.700 --> 01:57:06.380
find out why and find out if you consider that to be tolerable. Maybe it's something to be fixed

01:57:07.260 --> 01:57:12.300
because it's not just mouthing the words every Sunday. It's just, do I believe this or not? Forget

01:57:12.300 --> 01:57:17.660
saying it, forget confessing it or anything that formal. When you look at those words, do you believe

01:57:17.660 --> 01:57:23.980
them? If you do, why wouldn't you join 1700 years of Christians in saying them out loud?

01:57:25.260 --> 01:57:30.220
I think that's the predicate. That's the basis for a lot of the conversation that we hope we can

01:57:30.220 --> 01:57:35.740
start in many different places. Not to be disruptive. There will be some disruption.

01:57:35.740 --> 01:57:41.500
It's not the intent. You need to be mature about this stuff. Don't go picking fights. Don't go

01:57:42.220 --> 01:57:45.740
mean or mean or boo boo. You're doing all this wrong suddenly because you heard some

01:57:45.740 --> 01:57:52.220
podcast or tell you something. Do some research. Do some study. Prayerfully consider what it is

01:57:52.220 --> 01:57:58.540
that you believe and what can be done within your church. If the best thing for you and your family

01:57:58.540 --> 01:58:02.220
is to find a different church, a different congregation, a different denomination,

01:58:02.220 --> 01:58:06.940
and God's blessed you with one who's available, then you should do that if that's what your

01:58:06.940 --> 01:58:11.580
conscience convicts you of. I would never tell anyone to leave a Lutheran church. I would never

01:58:11.580 --> 01:58:16.700
tell anyone at this point to join a Lutheran church because we've told you what they've done to us

01:58:16.700 --> 01:58:21.100
and yet people are still streaming into Lutheran churches as a result of Stone Choir. I'm not

01:58:21.100 --> 01:58:24.860
going to argue with any of them either. I can't tell you're doing it wrong. There are other people

01:58:24.860 --> 01:58:28.700
who listen to us and say, I would never go to a Lutheran church because of what they did to you.

01:58:28.700 --> 01:58:34.460
I'm not going to argue with you either. You need to look to your circumstances and see what's right

01:58:34.460 --> 01:58:41.180
for you and see none of this is a capitulation on doctrine. I'm not saying that I disagree with

01:58:41.180 --> 01:58:48.060
baptism or communion or anything else the Lutheran doctrine holds. I'm saying that all of us need to

01:58:49.020 --> 01:58:53.740
try to get our own houses in order and if that's possible and it can be done in a way

01:58:53.740 --> 01:58:57.980
that doesn't harm consciences or drive people away, that should be our task.

01:58:58.620 --> 01:59:03.500
I would much rather that all the different denominations become more faithful and frankly,

01:59:03.500 --> 01:59:07.820
if that were to happen, we believe doctrinally, you're all going to turn Lutheran. I don't know

01:59:07.820 --> 01:59:11.580
what you guys are doing. Why aren't you Lutheran to begin with? Well, part of it's a Lutheran has

01:59:11.580 --> 01:59:16.300
been incredibly terrible about telling people, A, that we exist or B, what we believe or C,

01:59:16.300 --> 01:59:22.380
why any of it matters and that stuff does matter. This approach does matter, but there's no one

01:59:22.380 --> 01:59:28.060
simple direct solution for any of this. Apart from, read your Bible, go to church,

01:59:28.060 --> 01:59:32.460
go to the best church you can find, talk to other Christians, hammer these things out,

01:59:33.260 --> 01:59:37.580
keep your head up, look out in your community and look out in your congregation and what's going on

01:59:38.140 --> 01:59:42.620
and don't be surprised if the new fights don't look like the old fights.

01:59:43.660 --> 01:59:48.620
And the crucial thing there is that if there's a new fight, that means that we need new arguments.

01:59:48.620 --> 01:59:53.660
That's another reason that we started so inquire is that a lot of what we're dealing with, they

01:59:53.660 --> 01:59:58.140
no one's ever dealt with and frankly, the overwhelming majority of pastors are utterly

01:59:58.140 --> 02:00:02.940
unfit to tackle these subjects. They're simply not. They're not smart enough. They don't know enough

02:00:02.940 --> 02:00:08.780
about scripture. They don't have the right approach to do anything other than spout platitudes that

02:00:08.780 --> 02:00:15.180
they learned in seminary. They were handed a toolbox for fighting 16th century fights and

02:00:15.260 --> 02:00:19.020
they bring that toolbox wherever they go. And when Satan changes direction,

02:00:19.580 --> 02:00:24.300
they attack it with the wrong tool because they're not smart enough or they're not faithful enough.

02:00:24.300 --> 02:00:30.140
Some of them are just patently evil. We need to figure the stuff out for ourselves and I want

02:00:30.140 --> 02:00:35.180
the pastors who can get this stuff right to do so. In some cases, that's going to mean following

02:00:35.180 --> 02:00:40.060
to listening to men who can do a better job at this stuff than you. And I hope that we reach the

02:00:40.140 --> 02:00:46.140
day where churches are raising up men to be fit to do that in their own context. Pastors, elders,

02:00:46.140 --> 02:00:51.180
presiders, whatever you want to call them, I want those men to be faithful. They should have nothing

02:00:51.180 --> 02:00:56.780
to do with any particular man teaches. It should have everything to do with what scripture teaches

02:00:56.780 --> 02:01:01.660
because that was the point of the Reformation. Luther opened his Bible, he read it and he says,

02:01:01.660 --> 02:01:06.860
hey, what I'm reading here doesn't match with what the church is doing. One of them is wrong and I

02:01:06.860 --> 02:01:12.940
know it's not scripture. I believe God. So we need to do something about the church. Every one of us,

02:01:12.940 --> 02:01:17.900
whatever denomination you're in, has some problems today and they're getting worse. I can say that

02:01:17.900 --> 02:01:24.140
with absolute certainty. So I don't want to see a massive flight from one denomination to another.

02:01:24.140 --> 02:01:30.300
I would like to see us get our own ducks in order, sort this stuff out and we're going to find that,

02:01:30.780 --> 02:01:35.260
well, I think if you diagnose correctly where the air is crept in,

02:01:36.060 --> 02:01:42.060
more of you will naturally become Lutheran. It's my sincere hope, but at the same time,

02:01:42.060 --> 02:01:47.740
it's not a goal, if that makes sense. I want us to be faithful and I believe that being faithful

02:01:47.740 --> 02:01:53.100
means adopting Lutheran doctrine on some of these big ticket items. But frankly,

02:01:53.100 --> 02:01:57.900
the Lutherans are doing worse than some other denominations today when it comes to the new fight

02:01:58.460 --> 02:02:05.340
because we have been so complacent, so set and resting on our laurels about 16th century fights

02:02:05.340 --> 02:02:13.740
that there's no one left who's actually competent to engage forcefully and clearly with the current

02:02:13.740 --> 02:02:19.020
issues. There are a few who are trying and some are doing an okay job, but frankly, even the best

02:02:19.020 --> 02:02:24.060
of them are kind of making a mess of a lot of it because they're either too afraid or they're still

02:02:24.140 --> 02:02:28.380
too wedded to some of the very things that need to be toppled because they're false doctrines.

02:02:29.020 --> 02:02:33.420
So those are discussions for other days and a lot of it's from past Stonequire episodes, but

02:02:34.940 --> 02:02:41.420
I personally am very thankful that after a year, we have such a varied audience. I think it's a

02:02:41.420 --> 02:02:47.820
remarkable testament to me to the power of God's word. I'm thankful that where the Bible is in

02:02:47.820 --> 02:02:52.620
the pews and it's on people's lips and in their hearts, they're still Christians and we can

02:02:52.620 --> 02:02:58.620
recognize each other's voice even across the ether or the internet simply by virtue of the fact

02:02:58.620 --> 02:03:04.540
that we're speaking the same language. That's part of scripture when we're called sheep and God is

02:03:04.540 --> 02:03:11.260
our shepherd and we're told that God's sheep recognize his voice. When we speak from scripture,

02:03:11.260 --> 02:03:16.620
that is God's voice. That's not our voice. The word of God is from him. It is our master's voice.

02:03:17.580 --> 02:03:21.420
When there are sheep who recognize it across denominations, forget whatever

02:03:22.460 --> 02:03:29.020
vertical segmentation has occurred among different Christian groups. If we recognize the same voice,

02:03:29.020 --> 02:03:35.020
we're on the same team, not completely. Obviously, we don't recognize the same voice on every matter

02:03:35.020 --> 02:03:41.260
or we would have complete doctrinal harmony. But insofar as we agree, we need to work together,

02:03:41.260 --> 02:03:46.220
even as just supporting each other to try to make our own churches more faithful.

02:03:48.060 --> 02:03:53.420
I think that's one of the emergent hopes and properties of Stone Choirs to help us all wherever

02:03:53.420 --> 02:03:59.740
we are. I said, if you're Roman Catholic, please keep being Roman Catholic and just figure out where

02:03:59.740 --> 02:04:06.140
things went wrong because it wasn't with Bergoglio. It wasn't with Vatican II. When you unwind the

02:04:06.140 --> 02:04:11.500
heirs, you're going to get back pretty much to where Luther and the other reformers were.

02:04:12.060 --> 02:04:17.660
Things went off the rails a long time ago. You can find St. Peter Damian quotes,

02:04:17.660 --> 02:04:25.420
they're 1,000 years old, decrying the sexual abuses in the Roman Catholic Church. 1,000 years ago,

02:04:25.420 --> 02:04:30.060
long before any of the scandals in today's headline, those behaviors were already rampant.

02:04:30.620 --> 02:04:37.340
That is the fruit of a sick tree, not a dead tree, but a sick tree. The things,

02:04:37.340 --> 02:04:43.020
the abuses that occurred then that occurred today have a spiritual root. It wasn't simply

02:04:43.020 --> 02:04:47.740
that those behaviors naturally exist, as Corey said in the past episode. There were things that

02:04:47.740 --> 02:04:54.540
Luther refused to even talk about because they were unknown in Germany. It was only Italian monks

02:04:54.540 --> 02:04:58.780
that were bringing that crap into Germany. He didn't want his own people thinking about it,

02:04:58.780 --> 02:05:03.900
because it was too depraved. Those things don't naturally arise. They arise when Satan can take

02:05:03.900 --> 02:05:12.780
hold through abuses, sometimes small ones, much of it lies at the feet of monasticism. The vows

02:05:12.780 --> 02:05:17.660
of celibacy, they were forced on men against their will because it's an unnatural thing.

02:05:17.660 --> 02:05:23.980
I'm descended from bishops, Roman Catholic bishops and nuns because they didn't have vows of celibacy

02:05:24.060 --> 02:05:30.460
until much later. Then the abuses crept in. If you're Roman Catholic, I like for you to be

02:05:30.460 --> 02:05:35.980
Lutheran, but honestly, I would like even more for you to clean up Rome, because if the Western

02:05:35.980 --> 02:05:40.780
Christian Church all got back on the same page, there wouldn't be any more Lutherans either.

02:05:40.780 --> 02:05:43.980
We would all just be Christian. As we said at the beginning, that's never going to happen.

02:05:43.980 --> 02:05:49.820
Not more Jesus come back. It's an impossibility. Nevertheless, it should be our goal to figure

02:05:49.900 --> 02:05:54.300
out where we're getting things wrong and to try to get him right. Anytime you open the Bible,

02:05:54.300 --> 02:05:59.740
first listen to God's word and test your own heart against it. What are you doing right?

02:05:59.740 --> 02:06:04.700
What are you doing wrong? It's a blessing from God for him to teach us, and he is teaching us

02:06:04.700 --> 02:06:10.140
through scripture. Thank you to everyone who has churches where scripture is being taught,

02:06:10.140 --> 02:06:15.020
because you would hate us if that weren't the case. The people who hate us, their churches

02:06:15.020 --> 02:06:21.020
are not teaching scripture in the same ways you are. I hope that in the future Stone Choir can be

02:06:21.020 --> 02:06:25.740
something that is a blessing to everyone who listens. Even when you disagree with some things we say,

02:06:25.740 --> 02:06:33.020
these should be points of discussion that will make all of our faith stronger, all of our churches

02:06:33.020 --> 02:06:40.620
stronger, because the new attacks are going to continue. They're going to continue to escalate.

02:06:40.620 --> 02:06:46.780
They're going to get worse. They're going to become more horrific. If we don't have a foundation

02:06:47.500 --> 02:06:53.500
that's based on, in some cases, new arguments, not based on new principles. There's a fundamental

02:06:53.500 --> 02:06:58.780
difference between a new argument and a new principle. The principles are 100% scriptural,

02:06:58.780 --> 02:07:04.380
but the arguments sometimes need to be made anew. It's okay for us to do that, but we have to be

02:07:04.380 --> 02:07:10.540
very careful, because you don't want to be inventing new doctrine. It's a terrible position for us to

02:07:10.540 --> 02:07:17.580
be put in. That's exactly the position that Satan's putting us in, to have to tackle new subjects

02:07:17.580 --> 02:07:23.340
without the benefit of wise men who came before us who just handed us a book. We have an inheritance

02:07:23.340 --> 02:07:29.260
of faith, but we don't have an inheritance of some of these arguments. Together we need to work

02:07:29.260 --> 02:07:33.100
through those arguments so that we can get to the point that we can make sure that the Western

02:07:33.100 --> 02:07:39.740
Christian Church survives. Period. I don't care what it's called. I just want to survive. Everyone

02:07:39.740 --> 02:07:46.540
who's listening is going to be a part of that. I would like to make a comment about something

02:07:46.540 --> 02:07:52.620
that is rampant, particularly on the right wing, but just generally in the West, because it is

02:07:52.620 --> 02:08:01.900
something to which human beings are prone. That is the elevation of the concept of a denomination

02:08:01.900 --> 02:08:09.500
or a tradition, whatever term you happen to use for it, into essentially a sports team.

02:08:11.500 --> 02:08:18.220
We have this tendency as human beings to turn whatever sort of conflict we're in,

02:08:18.220 --> 02:08:27.260
even if it's minor, into a hard line, black and white, us versus them. That's not always wrong.

02:08:27.260 --> 02:08:31.660
Sometimes that is the right way to view things, particularly say if you're in a war,

02:08:31.660 --> 02:08:35.660
because that's the only way to view things in a war, certainly anything else is going to harm your

02:08:35.660 --> 02:08:43.660
efforts. But when it comes to religion and matters like this, when it comes to doctrinal

02:08:43.660 --> 02:08:48.700
disagreements or disagreements on dogma, theology, whatever it happens to be,

02:08:48.700 --> 02:08:57.980
we need to view things less as if we are opposing factions, each waving our flag,

02:08:57.980 --> 02:09:01.980
and we're going to fight regardless of what the underlying truth happens to be,

02:09:02.780 --> 02:09:07.580
and more as brothers in the faith who are looking for the truth.

02:09:08.620 --> 02:09:13.820
Now, I know that some are going to say that it's ironic that I'm the one saying this,

02:09:13.820 --> 02:09:19.980
as I've been particularly polemical at times, particularly on social media. But as I mentioned

02:09:19.980 --> 02:09:26.940
before, you interact with people in different ways, in different contexts. I am one of the few

02:09:26.940 --> 02:09:32.220
remaining people who still holds to the ancient belief that you comport yourself in a different

02:09:32.220 --> 02:09:38.620
way, in a different place. And so you don't behave the same if you are having an audience with the

02:09:38.620 --> 02:09:46.860
king, or if you are crafting a tweet, or if you're recording a podcast. That doesn't mean that you're

02:09:46.860 --> 02:09:51.980
inconsistent. It doesn't mean that you're hypocritical. It means that different places call for a

02:09:51.980 --> 02:09:57.740
different tone, a different approach. And so on Twitter, yes, I'm going to be polemical,

02:09:57.740 --> 02:10:01.180
because quite frankly, it's the point of Twitter. If you're on Twitter and you're not polemical at

02:10:01.180 --> 02:10:06.620
all, you're doing it wrong, unless you just happen to be reading it, in which case, it's not a

02:10:06.620 --> 02:10:14.060
particularly bad source of news if you follow the right people. But as a more important, more general,

02:10:14.060 --> 02:10:20.700
more salient matter, right now what we are facing, and what I think we've made very clear over the

02:10:20.700 --> 02:10:26.620
course of the past year, is the complete and utter destruction of Christendom. And Lutherans alone

02:10:26.620 --> 02:10:33.980
are not going to be sufficient to save the church. There aren't enough of us. And quite frankly, that

02:10:33.980 --> 02:10:40.060
is the case for every single denomination or tradition. And you may think, well, there are

02:10:40.060 --> 02:10:44.780
a billion of us in whatever this happens to be. And I know, for instance, that certain of the

02:10:44.780 --> 02:10:49.500
Roman Catholic listeners will be thinking that. The issue is that there are not a billion of you,

02:10:50.620 --> 02:10:54.460
because the ones who matter are the ones who are still true, the ones who are still faithful to

02:10:54.460 --> 02:10:59.580
Scripture who are true to God. And there are not a billion of you, because there aren't a billion

02:10:59.580 --> 02:11:06.700
Christians in any denomination. We are going to have to work together across denominational,

02:11:07.340 --> 02:11:11.740
across traditional lines, if we are going to make any sort of progress

02:11:12.860 --> 02:11:18.620
in saving the church from what is being done to her. This is going to be challenging for some of us.

02:11:20.220 --> 02:11:28.780
I am again inclined toward the polemical. Working across lines will take effort. It's

02:11:28.780 --> 02:11:34.380
something that does not come naturally. And this is going to be particularly so for a certain subset

02:11:34.380 --> 02:11:40.300
of listeners to this podcast, because there's probably a good five to 10% of you who are inclined

02:11:40.300 --> 02:11:48.300
toward the polemical, who have read more about your particular tradition, those who are steeped in

02:11:48.300 --> 02:11:53.260
the arguments, those who have engaged in these materials and so are very staunch in what they

02:11:53.260 --> 02:11:58.220
believe and are going to defend even minutia. I'm not saying that minutia are unimportant,

02:11:58.220 --> 02:12:05.020
because they are important. The minor matters count, because truth matters. And as Woe said earlier

02:12:05.020 --> 02:12:11.500
in this episode, if two men disagree, at least one man is wrong. But again, of course, we can both be

02:12:11.500 --> 02:12:20.700
wrong. But the point is that we have to work together. And so we have to find some sort of common ground.

02:12:21.100 --> 02:12:27.100
This is going to be particularly challenging for some traditions, some denominations, much more so

02:12:27.100 --> 02:12:32.860
than others. And as Woe mentioned, that is going to be particularly you, our Roman Catholic listeners,

02:12:33.500 --> 02:12:39.340
because you have the challenge of centuries of inertia behind the false doctrine that has

02:12:39.340 --> 02:12:45.740
been brought into your church. That is very hard to overcome. I don't know that it necessarily

02:12:46.700 --> 02:12:57.100
can be overcome at this point. And so whether you stay in a Roman Catholic church, or you leave

02:12:57.100 --> 02:13:02.860
for a church that is truer to God's word, that does not have those centuries of inertia behind

02:13:02.860 --> 02:13:08.220
false doctrine, that is a matter of conscience that is between you and God. I know what I would do,

02:13:08.220 --> 02:13:11.020
and I don't think I have to say what I would do, because, well, you know.

02:13:11.980 --> 02:13:19.260
But we all face particular challenges. They're similar in some ways. They're unique in some ways.

02:13:20.460 --> 02:13:24.540
The Reformed are not going to face the same challenges as we Lutherans face.

02:13:25.100 --> 02:13:30.140
Lutherans will not face the same challenges as the Roman Catholics. And the same is true

02:13:30.140 --> 02:13:33.340
of everyone else, Methodist, Baptist, whatever you happen to be.

02:13:33.660 --> 02:13:41.580
But fundamentally, there are a handful of things about which we all agree.

02:13:43.100 --> 02:13:47.740
I would hope we can all agree, and quite frankly, we can all agree because anyone who

02:13:47.740 --> 02:13:52.940
does not is outside the faith in the true sense of extra ecclesiom outside the church.

02:13:53.980 --> 02:13:58.060
I would hope that we can all agree that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior,

02:13:58.060 --> 02:14:02.540
and that he's the only way to the Father. That's our starting place.

02:14:04.220 --> 02:14:07.260
We can squabble about Scripture, I wish that we wouldn't, but we will.

02:14:08.700 --> 02:14:14.060
We can squabble about all these other things. But if we can have some sort of core on which

02:14:14.060 --> 02:14:19.740
we agree, we can at least work together against the enemies of the church and Christendom.

02:14:21.180 --> 02:14:25.900
Yes, inevitably, we are going to be back at each other as soon as those enemies are out of the way.

02:14:26.940 --> 02:14:31.740
But I would much rather be fighting intellectual battles, because we should not resort to force

02:14:31.740 --> 02:14:38.460
of arms against our Christian brothers. I would much rather be fighting intellectual battles

02:14:38.460 --> 02:14:45.740
against other Christians than fighting the hordes of pagans invading us from the Third World.

02:14:47.900 --> 02:14:52.540
And we will not get there from here unless we work together.

02:14:52.860 --> 02:14:59.660
We've mentioned the creeds repeatedly. And the creeds really are the basic,

02:15:00.460 --> 02:15:05.580
the basic foundation, the basics of the Christian faith. If we cannot agree on the creeds,

02:15:05.580 --> 02:15:11.260
then there is probably no hope of us working together. Now agreeing on the creeds is going

02:15:11.260 --> 02:15:16.300
to be particularly challenging. And in this case, I do not address myself specifically to the Roman

02:15:16.300 --> 02:15:21.820
Catholics, but to the Baptist listeners. Because there are going to be parts of the creeds that

02:15:21.900 --> 02:15:28.460
you will find are very difficult to fit into your framework. Particularly for some of you,

02:15:28.460 --> 02:15:33.980
there will be the issue in the Nicene Creed of I believe in one baptism for the remission of sins.

02:15:35.500 --> 02:15:39.580
That is the teaching of the historic church. That is what we went over in the episode on baptism.

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That is what Christians have always believed. That is not entirely consonant with what your

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church has historically taught. You are going to have to resolve that for yourself, because you

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will stand before God and give an answer for why you believed one way or the other. Why you believe

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what the church has historically taught and is in fact in line with what Scripture says. I invite

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you to go back and read every single verse on baptism and then read that line in the creed

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and see if they agree. We never call you to believe us blindly, or even to believe the

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creeds blindly. You are to believe Scripture, compare everything against Scripture. Scripture

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is very clear. Test the spirits. And this is the case with all teachers. Regardless of how highly

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esteemed they are in church history, you are to compare them to the words of God in Scripture.

02:16:32.300 --> 02:16:39.100
It doesn't matter. If it's Cyril of Alexandria, if it's Nestorius, if it's Origen, if it's Luther,

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or Calvin, or Zwingli, it doesn't matter which man. You are to compare his words to God's words.

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If they are consonant with God's words, then they are true,

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because he is speaking God's words after him. If they are not consonant with what God has said,

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then that man is a false teacher, at least insofar as what he has said disagrees with what God has

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said. And then you are left with the decision of whether or not you can follow that man. It depends

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on whether or not the errors he has made rise to the level where you cannot follow him as a teacher.

02:17:15.900 --> 02:17:20.700
Well, when I don't agree with Luther on everything, Luther never jettisoned the belief

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in the perpetual virginity of Mary. Neither one of us holds to that.

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It's not in our confession, so we aren't bound by it notably, which is good,

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because we are in fact both Lutheran. I am unapologetically Lutheran. I believe everything

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that is written in the book of Concord. That is what I mean when I say I am a Lutheran.

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My subscription is Quea. It is because the book of Concord is true.

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And so I agree with it because it agrees with Scripture. I agree with it because I have read

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through it and assessed every line in the confession, in every document in that book,

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against what Scripture says, and I have not found a contradiction. If I did, I wouldn't be Lutheran.

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And that is why my confession is Quea subscription to the book of Concord. That is what I mean

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by Lutheran. And that is the point I want to make here.

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Our subscription, what we mean, what we declare, what we profess and confess as Christians,

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is a matter of doctrine. It is a matter of truth. It is not a matter of saying that I am Lutheran,

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and so I'm going to wave this particular flag. Thankfully, we don't have one because it probably

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would look as terrible as the so-called Christian flag. Someone should make a good one.

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That's not the point. We're not cheering. We're not cheerleaders for a team.

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I believe and say I am Lutheran because that is shorthand for saying I subscribe to and agree

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with the doctrine that is in the book of Concord. I agree with the historic Lutheran faith. It doesn't

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mean I agree with any Lutheran body. Insofar as the body agrees with the book of Concord,

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the body is Lutheran, and then we'll agree. But just because they call themselves Lutheran

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doesn't mean they are. And I will extend the same charity to any other Christian.

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Just because the ELCA say that they're Lutheran doesn't mean they are. They're Satanists.

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I'm not saying they're no Christians in ELCA, but I am questioning why they haven't left.

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The same thing is true for other denominations. PCUSA, as I'm sure our Presbyterian listeners

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and other Reformed listeners know, is apostate. That doesn't mean that the OPC is.

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The same thing is true of every denomination. There are faithful Christians across denominational

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and traditional lines in basically every body of Christendom. And I'll say that even of, say,

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the Oriental Orthodox. I am sure there are staunch Christians in that tradition. I am less

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familiar with them so I don't know as much, but I am sure they have Christians there as well.

02:19:51.900 --> 02:19:58.060
And the reason for that is simple. Where God's word is read, where God's word is spoken,

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where God's word is proclaimed from the pulpit, it will not return to him void,

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because that is his promise in Scripture. And every one of God's promises is true.

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And so where God's word is read, there will always be true Christians.

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And so even at the height of the problems of Rome in the Middle Ages around the Reformation,

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Europe was Christian, and Europe was Christian because the word of God was still read.

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And so what we have to do is move forward together as Christians. The challenge that

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I would raise for any of our listeners is go over the creeds. See if you agree with every

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statement in the creeds, because that's what the historic Church has always taught. That is what all

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of your forebears in the faith have believed. That is what the men who came before you,

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many of whom quite frankly knew Scripture better than those of us in the modern world,

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that is what they believed, taught, and confessed. And so go over the creeds, see if you can agree

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with what the creeds say, and if you can't, figure out why. Because quite frankly your

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soul is in danger if you're disagreeing with anything in the creeds, because you are probably

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in a church that is teaching something falsely. Because you didn't get that idea from nowhere,

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that idea that disagrees with the creeds.

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And as Christian brothers and sisters, if we can manage to agree at the bare minimum

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on the content of the creeds, then surely we can set aside the other distinctives

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at least insofar as they would cause conflict and work together in order to rebuild

02:21:46.780 --> 02:21:53.420
Christendom, because that is our ultimate goal. Our ultimate goal is to make sure that we salvage

02:21:53.420 --> 02:22:00.220
the Church, this shipwreck that has been created by previous generations, many of whom, over a

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course of decades, basically a century at this point, were largely faithless. That is the challenge

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ahead, and that is an incredible task. It's one that quite frankly we cannot achieve on our own.

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We can achieve it only if God is with us. But certainly God is going to be there,

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to support us, to see us through this. But we have to do our part. I'm not saying that it's works,

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so I invite those who are a little more inclined to the works side of things to not get too excited

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about my words. Yes, we affirm works, because works are necessary insofar as they necessarily

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follow and flow from living faith. But works will not save you, and works will not save the Church.

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But as Christians we have to do them, and that is obedience to God, and God blesses those

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who are obedient to His will. And so the bottom line is that regardless of whether or not we are

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polemical at certain times about certain things, and regardless of whether or not we have these

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disagreements, and I'm not saying set them aside, don't. You can still disagree, but there's a time

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and a place. You don't argue with your wife in public. You may have a disagreement with her in

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private, and that's fine, that's where you have that disagreement. Families when they have disagreements

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have those in private. You don't air your dirty laundry. We should be doing the same thing as

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the Church, and in this case I mean the Church Universal. All believers regardless of denomination

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or tradition. Don't air the dirty laundry publicly. Have the disagreements. And yes,

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by publicly I don't mean that you can't use Twitter. Obviously that's one of the ways we

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communicate these days. I am saying that we set those aside when we move into the public sphere,

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which is to say when it comes to the political, when it comes to the left-hand kingdom,

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if we are cooperating in those endeavors, we set aside these denominational and traditional

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distinctions that do not, or at least should not, hinder Christian cooperation. And I think

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that we have to found that Christian cooperation on the creeds, because that is the bare minimum.

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That is a summary statement of what God says in Scripture. It is a summary statement

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of what Christians have always believed. And it is a summary statement of the foundation on which

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we can rebuild Christendom. And then of course we can get back to bickering,

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as we will inevitably do until Christ returns.