Transcript

Okay, so welcome to History of Christian Thought and Practice 1. This is a foundational course.

In fact, I like to say it's the most important class you'll ever take because this course gives you a foundation for a lot of the other courses you're going to take.

In many ways, this class picks up where the New Testament leaves off.

And I know not all of you have had New Testament yet, and that's okay, because we're going to have a little bit of an overlap, because we're going to begin in the first century, which is the time when the documents that make up the New Testament were written, but we'll focus on a couple of other documents that were written during that same time period, but that didn't make it into the Bible.

So, we'll be looking at that.

As we go through the time period of this course, You'll notice we'll be going pretty quickly, sometimes 100 years or more a week.

We'll be focusing on major themes.

We'll be focusing on certain characters in the history of the Church who effect change or advance the development of the Church.

And we're going to be focusing a lot on historical theology, or the development of doctrine.

You may have noticed, but the 19th Creed, for example, isn't actually in the New Testament.

So, how did that happen?

We're going to talk about that.

We're going to talk about the development of doctrine, especially in the early church.

We'll talk about the development of the church itself, or ecclesiology.

What is it that we believe about the church?

What is it that the early Christians believed about the church?

And what made them...

What is a church?

What in fact is a church?

You couldn't walk down the street and see a church, so what is the church?

We're going to talk about that.

And in a lot of ways we're going to focus on reading those primary sources.

In other words, the documents actually produced in the early church and in the medieval church.

The documents produced by the very people we're going to be reading about and talking about.

We're going to try and learn as much as we can about how the average Christian or the average person in the early church and in the medieval church lived and worshipped.

But in a lot of cases, the documents were not necessarily written by the average person, were they?

They were written by the bishops or the theologians.

Many of the theologians were in fact bishops.

But when I say bishops, that begs another question.

What is a bishop?

Was the office of bishop in the early church the same thing that it is now?

I think you probably already know the answer to that question.

In many ways, when we read something written by a bishop, we're also reading something written by a pastor.

And so we have to take that into consideration, too.

Now, as I said before, I encourage discussion as much as possible.

And so please feel free to interrupt me.

Please ask questions.

Please make comments.

I may play devil's advocate at times, but if we can make this as much of a discussion as possible, so it doesn't feel quite so lectury, that would be great.

The nature of the course is that there's a lot of information to get across, and so this is, in fact, going to have a lot of lecture involved, but it doesn't necessarily have to be all that way.

Make sure you have the latest version of the syllabus.

I think we've covered this, but if there are any questions about the syllabus, refer them to your TAs. If there are any questions about Moodle or the online segment of this course, refer them to your tech assistant.

And for the first time, we're experimenting with something this semester.

The discussion forum is on Facebook.

So, if you haven't joined that Facebook group already, go ahead and do that.

Some of the people who have seen this lecture online already are already generating discussion on Facebook, and that's good to see, and I think that's going to work well.

So, it's also a good place to pose questions, and don't always wait for me or the TAs to answer the questions.

Feel free to jump in, and we'll create a dialogue or a discussion on Facebook as well.

That's what I have by way of introductory comment.

This course is about the history of Christianity.

This particular course covers roughly what I like to call Jesus to Aquinas.

We're looking at the early church and the medieval church.

What I want you to understand in terms of the big picture, before we get into the details, is that the history of Christianity is very much the history of the interpretation of Scripture.

The history of the interpretation of Scripture.

In other words, you may have had this experience, I don't know about you, but when I used to live in California, there was this bumper sticker that I'd see a lot, and the bumper sticker said, The Bible says it.

I believe it.

You know the last line?

That settles it.

Now, I respect the sentiment, because I'm a huge fan of the Bible.

I really am.

However, knowing what the Bible says is not the end of the question.

Because once you know what the Bible says, that then begs the question, what the Bible means.

And the gap between what it says and what it means is a little thing we call interpretation.

And if you've ever had a discussion with a fellow believer over the interpretation of Scripture.

Where the two of you are reading the exact same passage, but have radically different understandings of what it's supposed to mean, then you know what I'm talking about.

And the history of the Church, which should be no surprise, is the history of people disagreeing over the interpretation of Scripture, and sorting out what the interpretation ought to be.

We are living in a world where there are right answers and there are wrong answers, and so we're going to talk about that and how that plays out.

And so watch for that.

But there is an assumption built in that some answers are mutually exclusive, and so therefore some of them may be wrong.

There is such a thing as a wrong answer.

And the other side of that coin is that there is such a thing as a right answer.

Now there may be multiple right answers, But the point is that part of the history of the Church is the search for authoritative answers.

In other words, what are the official right answers to some of these questions?

So that's going to come into our discussion.

The other thing that the history of the Church is, is the history of the development of doctrine.

I mentioned this a minute ago, and the image I like to use is, imagine if you wanted to build a house.

And so you bought an empty lot, and you decided you were going to build a house on this lot.

So you call up the apostolic construction company, and you say, hello, I'd like to have a house built on my lot.

And so the apostles pull up to your empty lot with a dump truck full of bricks, they back up on your lot, pull the lever, and dump the bricks onto your empty lot, and then they drive away and say, see you later.

Now it's up to you to build the house.

In a way, that's kind of what the apostles did.

Because all of the building blocks for doctrine are in the apostolic doctrine.

They're in the New Testament.

They're in the writings that the apostles gave us.

But there's a brick here and a brick there.

And it was up to the early church, then, to put those bricks together.

It was up to the early church to build the house.

In other words, it's in the time of the early church when Doctrine is clarified and developed.

So we're going to talk about that.

And when you put these two concepts together, that the history of the Church is the history of the interpretation of Scripture, and that the history of the Church is the history of the development of doctrine, when you put these two concepts together, and you track it over time, you begin to get a picture of a kind of a pendulum.

You know what a pendulum is.

It's a weight on the end of a line, and it swings from side to side.

And when it swings to one side, momentum carries it out past center to a certain point, but then eventually gravity starts pulling on it, right, and slows it down until it stops.

And then gravity pulls it back towards the center.

But the momentum carries it out past the center to the other side until gravity stops it and pulls it back.

And this is a bit like what you see in the early church.

Because as the early Christians attempted to interpret Scripture and clarify doctrine, people proposed answers that many thought were too far afield from what they considered correct.

And so some answers represented a kind of pushing of the envelope toward one extreme.

But eventually, that momentum is overcome, And there's a pull back toward the center.

But what almost always happens is that in reacting against one extreme, there are those who ultimately overreact and swing the pendulum to the other extreme.

And so you have this back and forth with the gravity of time always pulling things back toward a kind of a center.

And so that brings me to what I'd like to begin this course with, And I call this Papandreou's Three Laws of Early Church History, or the Development of Doctrine.

Papandreou's Three Laws.

So here they are.

Law number one.

Heresy forces Orthodoxy to define itself.

Now I know I just threw a couple of loaded words at you.

Heresy and Orthodoxy.

And we're going to unpack these words as we go.

But let me just say this at the beginning.

Orthodoxy, that word comes from a Greek word, actually a compound word, two words in Greek, ortho meaning straight or correct, and the other parts from the word for praise, but loosely translated it means correct doctrine.

Right?

Orthodoxy, correct doctrine.

Heresy is also from a Greek word.

It means a kind of going off on a tangent, going off on your own way.

And in practice what it means is deviating from a mainstream within the Church.

The Orthodox are those who hold a position and who teach that interpretation of Scripture that is considered correct, and the heretics are those who teach other, alternative interpretations.

In spite of what you will read in the primary sources, in the primary sources, the Orthodox don't always give the heretics the benefit of the doubt.

There's a lot of name-calling things, we'll just have to get used to that.

In our world, we're going to give the heretics the benefit of the doubt.

We're going to assume that they are well-meaning believers who have an alternative interpretation, but that interpretation was determined by a majority within the church to be incorrect.

What makes them a heretic, though, is not really so much that they had a difference of opinion.

What makes them a heretic is that they continued to teach the interpretation that was considered incorrect, even after they were confronted.

So we have these concepts, then, of orthodoxy and heresy within the Church, and again, as I said, we're going to unpack these as we go.

But my first law says that heresy forces orthodoxy to define itself.

And what I mean by that is not that heresy precedes orthodoxy, but that the orthodox position is often the one that is held by most people, but kind of assumed, and perhaps even unclarified, until it's challenged by an alternative interpretation.

And so it's the challenge of the alternative interpretations that will force what comes to be called orthodoxy to define itself, to clarify itself.

So the orthodox are those who, over time, define and clarify doctrine in the church.

Now, it is in part true that these are labels that can only be applied after the argument is over.

I mean, to a certain extent, You only know who the Orthodox are until you know who won the argument.

And even then, over time, it is not always clear who won the argument.

On the other hand, though, it's also true that there is an orthodoxy in every generation.

So you'll hear some people say, well, there's no such thing as orthodoxy before the fourth century.

That's not really true, because every generation has its orthodoxy.

And the orthodoxy of every generation is based on the orthodoxy of previous generations.

And you'll find out that many times the heresies in every generation are based on the heresies of the previous generations.

So law number one was that heresy forces orthodoxy to define itself.

Law number two is orthodoxy is the middle way between the extreme alternatives.

Orthodoxy is that center of gravity, the place where the pendulum comes to rest.

I'll say it again, because I know you're writing it down.

But it's also in the book Trinity 101, so it's in there.

But rule number two, law number two, Orthodoxy is the middle way between the extreme alternatives.

This is really an observation in hindsight.

This is simply the way it plays out.

And you'll see that as we go.

Law number three, we'll get into a little bit later, but I want to mention it up front so you've got it, and then you'll see how this works too.

Law number three is this.

Christology informs soteriology.

I know I just threw another couple of big words at you, right?

So we've got to define our terms.

Christology, you probably know this, but Christology is what we believe about Christ.

Soteriology, and if you're spelling things, From the Greek soter, meaning Savior, soteriology is what we believe about salvation.

And you can see how the concept of Christology and soteriology would have to be interrelated because what you believe about the Savior has to be consistent in some way with what you believe about salvation, how salvation works.

It works the other way, too, because if you start with a soteriology, you end up being forced to back into The corresponding Christology.

In other words, if you start with assumptions about how salvation works, and what salvation is, then you back into an understanding of how the Savior saves.

So law three is Christology informs soteriology.

Does that make sense?

Any questions so far?

Yes, Adrienne?

I was just wondering, would you call them codependent or interdependent?

I would call them interdependent.

Codependent has a connotation of unhealthy somehow.

But I would call them interdependent, yes, thank you.

Christology and soteriology are interdependent.

And spoiler alert, guess what?

It's not just Christology and soteriology.

but ecclesiology and anthropology and eschatology, these things are all interdependent.

So, you know, you're beginning a journey right now that you'll start with this class and others and you'll go to your theology classes where you'll integrate Christology even more with anthropology.

And by the time you're done with your seminary experience, you will have woven a beautiful sweater of ology.

Right?

Are most of the primary sources that we'll be reading from the Orthodoxy?

Good question.

Are most of the primary sources from the Orthodox side?

The problem is that often the heretical writings or the writings of the heretics don't survive because they didn't think about seminary students in the 21st century.

So often, what we know about what the heretics taught, we only know from the writings of the Orthodox.

In other words, you will read in the writings of an Orthodox writer, well, those heretics say this, and here's our answer to it.

So, on the one hand, you'll be getting both sides of it in one document.

On the other hand, you sort of have to take it with a grain of salt.

Are the Orthodox fairly representing The teachings of the heretics.

In most cases, where the teachings of the so-called heretics were later found and then compared, in most cases it turns out it is a pretty good representation of what they taught.

So it's worth reading.

But again, when they start the name-calling and stuff, you know, take it with a grain of salt.

So it's a good question.

Okay, now there are a couple of methodological issues we need to get out of the way before we can go too much further.

And the first one, a couple of them actually have to do with language.

The first one has to do with the word God.

What do we mean when we say the word God?

Now, we throw this word around a lot, and we usually do so with the assumption that we know, that everybody knows what we mean, especially if you're a preacher, you're up there, You're talking about God, and you assume everybody knows what you mean.

The problem is, you can't assume that anymore, especially with more and more, put it this way, increased contact with people from other religions who may not even be monotheistic.

But that aside, even within a Christian context, you can't assume that everybody always knows what you mean when you say God.

For example, we will say, as Christians, that Jesus is God.

What do we mean by that?

Well, there's actually at least three different ways that we can use the word God.

And again, if you ever expect to be a preacher, I want you to pay attention to this.

Actually, I want you to pay attention to everything I say.

There are at least three different ways you can use the word God, or we generally use the word God.

One way that we use God is to talk about God in the totality of God, God in God's total sense.

I'm trying to avoid the T word yet, but I'm going to say it.

The Trinity.

When we say the word God, we often mean the Trinity.

Sometimes, however, when we say the word God, we mean specifically the first person of the Trinity.

And of course, we're going to get into later, you know, terms like person and all of this stuff, and, you know, how is God one and how is God three?

We'll get to that.

But right now, you know, when you use the word God, you might use it as a substitute for the traditional term of the Father, God the Father, the first person of the Trinity.

If you use it that way, though, clearly that doesn't mean the same thing as the whole Trinity, right?

The third way that we often use the word God is to speak of divinity itself, which in a way could be as much of an adjective as a noun.

But the point is, when we talk about God, we might mean that which makes God, God.

Divinity.

God-ness.

So you see, there are these three different ways that we can use that word God, and when we say Jesus is God, that's true.

But it's only true if you mean it in the third sense.

Because Jesus is not the whole Trinity, and the Son is not the Father.

So, to say Jesus is God assumes that you're using God in that one specific sense of divinity itself.

So, I want to advocate for as much precision as possible when we talk about the divine.

Not just in this class, but ongoing in your Christian lives.

As much as possible, I want you to think about what you mean when you say God, and try to be as specific as possible, and as precise as possible, and as consistent as possible.

By the way, as an aside, I'm going to assume you know this, but I'll say it anyway in case anyone doesn't, that you know the first verse of the fourth gospel.

John 1.1. In the beginning was the Word.

And I'm sure you know that in that context, the concept of the Word there is a reference to Jesus Christ.

So, that Word in English, Word, and I'll usually capitalize it when I'm talking about Jesus, the Word, is the Greek word Logos, which does mean Word, But it also has a range of meanings beyond that.

Rationality, rational principle, in a philosophical sense, the rational matrix that is the backbone of the universe.

All of these kinds of things are sort of packed into that word.

And we'll talk more about what we mean when we say that this describes Jesus Christ.

But I just want to make sure that you all get that that is a way of speaking of Jesus or the second person of the Trinity that is specific to the second person of the Trinity.

Also, in this class, I use Jesus and Christ synonymously with Jesus Christ.

So all three of those, Jesus, Christ, Jesus Christ, all mean the same thing to me.

Those terms all refer to both The human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and the second person, the Trinity.

We do not separate Jesus from the Christ.

As if Jesus is the humanity and the Christ is the divinity or anything like that.

We don't do that.

And so, just to be clear, when I'm talking, I will often use those terms interchangeably, but they all mean the same thing.

Don't try to read into what I'm saying that Jesus means one thing and Christ means another.

It's all synonymous.

Now, I also want to say, this is the second of the three methodological issues, that when it comes to language, the use of pronouns for God is at your own discretion within certain limits.

Because this is a class on the history of Christianity, and because we're focusing on the early and medieval church in this course, we have to deal with traditional terms.

And so I will use the traditional terms most of the time.

Now, for whatever reason you're not comfortable with those traditional terms, there are some alternatives, but the alternatives are limited, so we'll get there.

But I also want to say that I don't expect you to imitate what I do, necessarily.

So, if you hear me speaking a certain way, don't assume that you have to imitate that in your papers.

I give you a certain amount of flexibility Speak of God in ways that make sense to you.

But remember, this class is about historical Christianity and historical theology.

This class is not about what you believe.

So none of your papers are going to be faith statements or your own perspective.

You'll have plenty of time for that in other courses.

But this is about understanding the foundation So you gotta get that first before you can go on from there.

So that's why I say it's at your discretion but within certain limits.

For example, I have no problem with calling the first person of the Trinity Mother, if you like that.

Holy Spirit can be He, Holy Spirit can be She.

I am not a big fan of It, because I don't like to depersonalize.

So be careful of that.

Whatever you do, don't depersonalize God and reduce God to some sort of concept, right?

All right, is that fair?

Okay, good.

The last thing I want to say in terms of methodology or sort of a big picture overview is this.

The early church and the medieval church, I keep saying the early church, but we do the medieval church in here too, just that my primary field is the early church, so that's what I get the most excited about.

If you think it's weird to be excited about early Christianity, that's okay.

If you get excited about early Christianity, consider a PhD. The history of the early and medieval church is, at the same time, everyone's tradition and no one's tradition.

Here's what I mean by that.

It is everyone's tradition because the early and medieval church is the trunk of the family tree that we are all a part of it.

Regardless of your denomination, everything we're going to study in this class is your tradition, because this is the background of your Christianity.

I mean, this is not just Eastern Christianity or Catholic Christianity.

This is Christianity.

And so what we're going to study in this class belongs to you as a descendant, a spiritual descendant, The people you're going to be studying, the people you're going to be reading, they are that great cloud of witnesses that cheers you on in the race of faith.

On the other hand, when I say the early medieval church is no one's tradition, I mean this.

We often, when we read documents, we often try to find ourselves in the documents.

And that's natural.

I mean, if I was writing fiction, I would create a protagonist that people could identify with.

That's good writing.

And so it's natural to try to find yourself in the text.

But the problem with that is there's no one like you living at that time.

And what I mean by that is that the world was so very different from the world we live in.

that it's difficult to relate to some of these people on a level of, oh, this person is like me.

I can relate to this person.

I can put myself in their shoes.

One of the aspects of this is the issue of race.

Race in the ancient world was a very different thing from what it is now.

Because I imagine that Immediately when I said the word race, the first thing you thought of was skin color.

And there's a very good reason for that, because there's a sad history in this country and others in the last several hundred years that makes us think that way.

But in the ancient world, race had nothing to do with skin color.

In the ancient world, race was where you were from.

So my race would be the Italian race.

But skin color was not nearly the issue back then that it is now.

And, in fact, even slavery was different than what you think of when you think about slavery in the history of this country, for example.

You will read about slavery.

There were a lot of slaves in the Roman world.

But slavery was not justified on the basis of skin color back then.

Slavery was justified on the basis of the rights of conquest.

So if my country conquers your country, I can make you slave.

If your country conquers my country, then you can make me a slave.

But it has nothing to do with skin color, and it has nothing to do with assumptions that one group of people are less human than another.

In fact, it was widely acknowledged in the Roman world that Greek slaves were good for teaching your children because they were smart.

The idea is that you sort of have to put that out of your mind a little bit, as much as you can.

What that means is that when we read these documents, we have No way of knowing, in virtually all cases, they have no way of knowing what these authors or these people wrote.

Even when you read that someone is from North Africa, for example.

North Africa was a coastal area, kind of the Los Angeles of the ancient world, where most people are from somewhere else.

So, you know, you can't assume that people looked a certain way based on where you think they were from in each world.

One example is, you're going to read the story of the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas.

In the story, Perpetua and Felicitas are two Christians who were martyred in North Africa at the beginning of the third century.

Perpetua is a wealthy woman, Deliciatas is her slave.

Do not assume you know what color they were by knowing that much.

It might be the opposite of what you think.

And so, again, you just have to sort of go into this knowing that when you read these texts, you can't assume that You know what people look like, or that you can relate to certain people because you think they might have looked like you.

That brings up another good issue, and that is that those of us who are white eventually have to get used to the idea that In most of the world and for most of the world's history, white is not the default.

Those of us who are white have grown up probably thinking that white is the standard by which everything else is measured, and that's not the case in the ancient world.

So start getting used to that idea as well.

Now I'm not saying they didn't have racism in the ancient world, because they did.

It just wasn't based on skin tone.

It was based on language.

Racism in the ancient world wasn't based on how you looked, it was based on how you sounded.

If you could speak Greek or Latin, you were civilized.

If you could not speak Greek or Latin, then you're a barbarian.

So that's the racism of the ancient world, at least in simplified form.

Does that make sense?

Any questions?

Okay, then, hearing none, I am going to begin talking about what I call the Apostolic Age, the Age of the Apostles, or the First Century.

Now, let's think about the early Christians for a minute.

From the very beginning, the early Christians had problems.

If you were a Christian in the early decades of the Church, chances are good you were also Jewish.

And the foundation of Judaism is monotheism, right?

Here, O Israel, the Lord our God is one.

There is only one God.

It's a little bit like Willy Wonka's Everlasting God-stopper.

You only get one because you only need one.

Because this God covers it all.

Right?

So, there's only one God.

But imagine you're a Christian.

You're Jewish, but you're a Christian.

You've come to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was, in fact, the Messiah that your people had hoped for, and you've joined a community of his followers, and you've been baptized.

And now, every Sunday morning at dawn, you go over to Bob's house, and you gather with the Christian community at Bob's house.

But, of course, if you're Jewish, you continue to follow your Jewish traditions.

And so let's say you're at some family gathering, and maybe one of your Jewish relatives who is not a Christian asks you, well, what do you folks do every Sunday morning at Bob's house?

What are you going to say?

Well, we worship Jesus.

What?

Come on!

And, you know, at that point, Your whole family would attack you with questions like, how can you do that?

How do you call yourself a good Jew?

How can you call yourself a child of Abraham and worship to God?

And to be fair, they would have a point.

And so from the very beginning, the Christians knew that they were supposed to worship Christ.

But they couldn't quite explain it.

And so, this is the church's problem.

How do you call yourselves monotheists and still worship Jesus?

And at the beginning, the answer was...

Now, spoiler alert, eventually, the answer will be the doctrine of the Trinity.

That's the answer to the question.

But it's going to take us 300 years to get there, right?

And so, at the beginning, you know, I told you my law number one, right?

Heresy forces orthodoxy to define itself.

At the very beginning, actually, liturgy forced the early Christians to answer for this, to define themselves.

How do you justify worshipping Jesus and still say you only believe in one God?

But to that question, people posed multiple answers, alternative answers.

And the proposing of alternative answers then forced the Church to come up with what it does believe.

In fact, not only was the Church forced to define what it believes, but in doing that, the Church was forced to define what it is.

What is Christianity, after all?

And so this becomes a problem at the beginning.

The church actually had to define itself.

Is that a question?

Now, when you say church, do you mean the group of Christians?

Well, that's a good question.

He says, well, what do you mean by church?

Yeah, remember, you can't walk down the street and see a church, right?

And so, what that means is that Christians are meeting in people's homes, like Bob's home that I just talked about.

So, what does it mean for the Christians to be a church?

As opposed to individual house churches.

And we're going to get into this later, but you can imagine that, you know, at the very beginning, all of the Christians in a whole city could fit in one person's house.

That's how it starts out.

But eventually, that's not the case.

And when they all can't fit in one person's house anymore, what are they going to do?

Well, they're going to branch out.

The people on the south side of town are going to go start meeting at Betty's house.

Or perhaps the Greek speaking Christians are going to go meet at one place and the Latin speaking Christians are going to go meet in another place.

Or, sadly, perhaps the wealthy Christians are going to meet in one place and the not so wealthy Christians are going to meet in another place.

But the point is, once you have multiple church, house churches, with multiple leaders or pastors, those pastors have to get together and start meeting.

So that everybody stays on the same page.

And those sort of councils start to form.

And councils begin communicating with the councils of other cities.

And so a network develops.

And the reason why a network has to develop right away is for the sake of unity.

Because if it doesn't, you can't have, well you could, but you don't want to have the official interpretation Orthodoxy is one thing in one city and something completely different in another city.

Because then the church isn't one, then it's two different things.

So for the sake of unity, this network begins to develop.

We'll get into that more.

So when I talk about the church, capital C, I'm talking about beyond the individual house churches, I'm talking about the network of Christians that is developing across the whole Roman Empire.

So, From the beginning, from the very beginning, the leaders of the church, working from what they had learned from the apostles and what they believed from their experience with recent historical events like the life of Jesus, from the very beginning, orthodoxy, whatever that was, affirmed that Jesus Christ Had two natures.

Two natures.

And one nature is his humanity.

He was in fact a real human being.

And the other nature is his divinity.

Somehow he is the Son of God.

Now, they didn't necessarily have this all figured out, but they do that much.

Except that, as I said, when that original question became an issue, how can you call yourself monotheist and worship Jesus, people proposed alternative answers to the question.

And so we see already in the New Testament, we can see the beginnings of the alternative answers to that question.

You may remember that in the letters to the Galatians, especially the Apostle Paul was confronting a group of people who were opposing him and contradicting him.

We know of these as the Judaizers.

And these are the ones who were going around saying, well, if you want to be a Christian, you also need to follow the Jewish law.

Of course, you know the story, Paul opposes them.

In fact, he says that if you accept this, if you accept the Jewish law in addition to the cross, then you've made the cross ineffective for salvation.

If justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.

Well, these Judaizers apparently saw Jesus through the eyes of the old prophets.

In other words, they saw Jesus as one of the prophets.

And while the evidence isn't really there in the New Testament, what we know from later assessments is that these Judaizers are the beginning of a trend to talk about Jesus as a human being and to deny or downplay his divine nature.

So in other words, the Judaizers are looking at Christ as a human being, but not as divine.

He's a prophet, a mere human.

And so their answer to the question, how can you call yourself monotheist and worship Jesus, their answer to the question probably would have been, you probably shouldn't worship Jesus.

You probably should see him simply as a prophet and leave it at that.

Now, on the other side, you may also remember that in letters like Colossians and Corinthians, Paul is confronting another group of people.

People who seem to be worshiping angels, and people who seem to be practicing magic.

And in this case, what we see are people who probably would have answered the question, you know, again, remember, the question is, How do you call yourself monotheist and still worship Jesus?

They would have answered the question, well, monotheism is overrated.

What's the difference?

Worship Jesus, worship angels, worship each other.

What's the problem?

And so what you have are these two extremes.

You have on the one side Jewish Christians who are holding on to their Judaism and saying, well, we accept the humanity of Jesus.

But they probably would have denied the divinity of Jesus.

And on the other extreme, you have these probably former pagans, who are in the church but holding on to their paganism, who are saying, well, what's the problem?

Why can't we worship Jesus as another god?

Or why can't we worship angels?

They would have accepted the divinity of Christ.

They would have had no problem with that.

The interesting thing is, What they did have a problem with was dis-humanity.

Because they came from a philosophical point of view that believed that whatever was divine could not come into contact with the material world.

Some of you may have read Plato.

Remember Plato?

Plato had this idea that the things of the spiritual realm were more real The things in the spiritual realm are more real than the things of the physical realm.

Well, if you take that and push it to the extreme, some people believe that the things of the spiritual realm were good, and the things of the material realm were inherently evil.

In other words, everything that's tangible is bad.

Which means that if Jesus was divine for them, he could not, in fact, become human, because that would be saying, like, if you want to say the Word became flesh, to them that would be saying the good became evil.

Wouldn't make sense.

And so, they, again, would have been fine with the idea of the divinity of Christ.

But would have had a problem with the idea of his humanity.

So you see we have these two extremes right at the beginning.

We can already see them forming in the New Testament.

Jesus is believed by many in the church to have these two natures, humanity and divinity.

But on the one hand you have the Judaizers who would have accepted his humanity but probably would have denied his divinity.

On the other hand you have the other group which I haven't actually named for you.

We do give them a name.

It's not a name they would have given themselves.

But we call them Docetes.

It comes from a Greek verb.

The verb means to seem or to appear.

And these folks apparently taught that Jesus only seemed or appeared to be human, but was not really human.

And so we call them after this verb, to seem or to appear.

To them, Jesus was not really human, and if he appeared to be human, he was a phantom, or it was an illusion, or he was a hologram, or something.

Now, in fact, we can still see the docetics are still around in the Johannine literature, in the later literature of the New Testament, because in 1 John, where the author is talking about the false teachers, or the false prophets, depending on your translation, and here in 1 John chapter 4, the author mentions the Antichrist, And who are the Antichrists?

Those who believe, or those who deny that Jesus Christ came in the flesh.

In other words, they deny his real humanity.

When you read the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, look for him to still be battling this same issue.

Ignatius of Antioch is still dealing with the docetics when he's writing his letters around 110 or so.

So for the author of 1 John, anyone who doesn't believe in the humanity of Christ is an antichrist.

So that's what we're seeing.

So you get the idea.

We've got these two extremes.

And this is setting the stage for what we're going to see in the second century and the third century.

On one extreme, those who accepted Jesus as humanity but denied his divinity.

On the other extreme, those who accepted Jesus as divinity but denied his humanity.

And in the middle, what you have is what I call, for lack of a better term, the mainstream, the majority, who accepted both natures, affirmed both natures.

And we're going to see, as we go throughout the history, we're going to see how the early Christian writers understood that the Savior had to be both human and divine in order to be the Savior.

This is where Christology intersects with soteriology, because they believed that a human-only Savior could not save, because salvation requires some divine intervention.

Yes?

How far back do you want me to go?

Okay.

A human-only savior could not save, because salvation requires some sort of divine intervention.

A mere human could not be the savior.

But at the same time, a divine-only savior also could not save.

Or he could save, he couldn't save us, because we're human.

And in order to be the savior of humans, he had to become one of us.

So, for these reasons, and more which we'll get into, the early Christians, for the most part, believed that Christ had to be both human and divine.

Now, again, I'm giving you a sort of base here, and we're going to nuance this as we go, but this is the place to start.

Alright, with the last ten minutes before we take a break, I want to just briefly talk about the Didache.

This is one of the documents you're going to read this week.

The D.K. is probably the one main document we have, along with 1st Clement as well.

So there's two.

But the D.K. is one of them that was written during the first century, during the same time that other documents were being written that are in our New Testament.

It's not heretical, it's an Orthodox document, it was accepted by the Church, but it didn't make it into the New Testament.

So, I want you to read this, and you'll read about it in the textbook as well, but the title, Didache, The Greek word for the teaching is actually part of a longer Greek title.

The full title is The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, but we don't know who wrote it.

It was most certainly not written by the Twelve Apostles, but it was written by someone who believed that it was appropriate to attribute it to the Twelve Apostles because apparently the teaching was thought to go back to them.

So we don't really know who wrote it.

If we don't know who wrote it, we also don't know when it was written, although there's a range of dates given here from the late 1st century to the early 2nd century.

So depending on which scholars you ask, and this is something you might as well know right up front, when it comes to dating and assigning authorship to documents, there's always debate.

So, I will tell you what I think, but, you know, other scholars will tell you something else, and they'll have good reasons for that.

And, I might as well say this right up front, too, you may find that my colleagues here within this school and I, they disagree on some of this stuff, and that's okay.

So, when you're in my class, I'm right.

When you're in their class, they're right, and everybody can.

Okay.

But as far as the date on the DDoc page, I tend to go early.

In fact, I usually tend to go with earlier dating on most things.

So I'm going to say that the Didache was probably written in the 70s or the 80s of the first century, which makes it pretty contemporary with the Gospel of Matthew.

In fact, it may have even been a companion volume to the Gospel of Matthew, sort of a book of discipline for the early church.

The document is a... It's a two-part document, really, but it has a lot to do with preparing people for baptism.

So some of it is for the people who are preparing to be baptized, some of it is for the people who are going to do the baptizing, but it really is an interesting resource from the early church.

You'll notice something interesting, and you're going to see this as we go throughout, too, that when we talk about catechesis or catechism, That is, the stuff you have to learn to prepare for baptism.

In the early church, catechesis in the early church is usually a lot more about morality than it is about theology.

In other words, the most important thing you have to learn to prepare for your baptism is how to live as a Christian.

You'll learn the theology later.

That's usually the assumption here.

So in the Didache is no exception.

The author of the DDoc page seems to have known Matthew's Gospel, so again, there may be some connection here.

The two sacraments that are mentioned here are Baptism and Eucharist.

And for most of you, that's all the sacraments there are.

But what you need to know is that in the early church, each of these two sacraments is kind of two in one.

In the early church, for the most part, baptism and confirmation are done together.

They're two parts of one ritual.

And confirmation becomes a separate rite, primarily because when more and more infants are being baptized, then it becomes a good idea to postpone the confirmation until later.

Same thing with Eucharist, and that is that Eucharist is probably always done along with some sort of confession of sins.

So, confession and Eucharist are done together.

You wouldn't receive the Eucharist without confessing your sins, although in the early days, confession probably meant most likely a communal confessional prayer of some kind, or something like that.

We will actually see and talk about when private confession comes in, but that's later.

So, when you read the didactylate, you'll read some interesting stuff about baptism.

You'll find out that full immersion is the norm, but pouring is acceptable.

In fact, this is our earliest reference to baptism by pouring.

But what you need to remember, though, is before you think, oh, well, there's the answer to that question, remember that this document, like many of the documents we will read, if not most of them, are specific to a particular time and place.

So when you read, on the one hand, you might read, well, immersion is the norm.

You cannot simply assume from that that that goes for all of the whole church everywhere.

This is something that was written by someone at a certain time in a certain place.

So yeah, immersion was the norm in that person's opinion in that particular place at that particular time, maybe.

Or maybe it was just wishful thinking on the part of the author.

So again, just be careful that you don't assume too much when you read these things.

Fasting before baptism is expected of both the initiate and the clergy.

When it comes to the Eucharist, and by the way, I will tend to use the word Eucharist.

It is a Greek term.

It means Thanksgiving.

And in the early church and in the medieval church, the sacrament that we know as communion or the Lord's Supper was known as How are you defining clergy in the 70s and 80s?

You'll read more in the text about the evolution of the hierarchy.

We might get into that, let me see.

Let me say this, and then we come back from break, I'll say some more.

But for right now, in the D.K, it's a lot similar to what you find in the New Testament.

In other words, there's still an assumption that The apostolic office is a lie.

And whatever apostles are still around function as kind of overseers with authority over local pastors.

And they're probably itinerant.

And they are referred to as the prophets of the time.

So, in a sense, the Apostles are the prophets of the Church.

After the break, you're going to find a different situation.

But for now, in the Didache, we still see this.

But, you notice, I didn't call the Apostles bishops.

Because in the Didache, we still have the same situation that we have in the New Testament documents, where the term bishop is synonymous with the term presbyter or priest.

So bishops and priests or presbyters, those titles are still synonymous in the Didache.

By the way, I will tend to use the word priest as opposed to presbyter because the word priest, I think, highlights the function as Presider over the sacraments, but at any rate, priest, presbyter, pastor, elder, these are all synonymous in here as well.

So to answer your question in part, so part A to your answer, and we'll get to part B in a minute, part A is that there is a hierarchy here in the D.K that is, you have the apostles, and then you have the sort of Resident pastors who are called either bishops or presbyters.

And then you have deacons.

You have this sort of three-part hierarchy.

Apostles, pastors, who may be called bishops or presbyters, and deacons.

That's the hierarchy as we see it in the Didache, and it really has not evolved at all from the New Testament document.

The same thing you see in the later New Testament documents.

When we come back from the break, though, we're going to see an evolution.

We're going to see a shift, I think.

And we're going to start to see the beginning of the office of bishops.

Okay, I think that's all I want to say right now.

Are there any questions before we take a break?

Yes.

Well, hold that thought then.

Okay, let's go ahead and shut down.