Transcript

Alright, before I go on, I promised you a map.

This map is something actually a student made a year or so ago, and basically it just shows east and west.

So when I talk about the eastern church versus the western church, or vice versa, This gives you a visual on what we're talking about.

I'm just going to hand this out and I'm not really going to say anything else about it.

Okay, tonight's agenda, as it were, is I am going to take the first Lecture tonight, and then Reverend Van Slyke is going to take the second half.

And so in the first half we're going to talk about some stuff.

Do we want to start with a prayer from the early church?

Let's see what we've got here.

I don't remember what we've done.

This is on that page in the back of your syllabus.

It's the first of the pages that say prayers from the early church.

It's the fourth one down.

This is a prayer of Irenaeus.

We talked about him last week.

Let's pray together.

It is not thou that shapes God, but it is God that shapes thee.

Amen.

Now that was interesting, because that really isn't addressing God, is it?

It's addressing each other, and yet it's considered a prayer.

Okay, so.

Alright, so as you know, we are behind in the schedule as far as the syllabus goes, and it's just going to have to be that way.

So, we're sort of at week five.

It says March 2nd, even though it's March 9th.

And we're not even going to finish week 5. I'm going to talk about Montanism and the Episcopacy, and then in the second half, we're going to go back and pick up early Christian liturgy.

And then next week, we're going to do persecution and martyrdom and novation and the Baptist controversy.

And then the following week, we'll do the Great Persecution.

Your first essay is still down the road a bit.

I haven't figured out what date it's going to be yet, but it will be pushed back at least Maybe two weeks.

I'll have to figure that out and send an email out to everyone and just, you know, clarify dates.

But since we had a snow day, that's part of the problem.

The other part is just, you know, the regular stuff.

Okay.

All right.

So, we can go ahead and start if you haven't already.

Start taping.

And I guess it's not tape, is it?

It's digital nowadays.

I always say, we're taping.

There's no tape.

Okay, so we're going to talk about the episcopacy and a related subject, and that is Montanism.

So that's what we're going to talk about in the first half of class tonight.

How's the volume on the microphone?

Is it good?

Tell me if it's too loud and boomy, because that can be just as annoying as too quiet.

Okay, so...

We have already talked about the development of the hierarchy and I want to continue that discussion in talking about the Episcopacy in particular.

In other words, the episcopacy is the office of bishop.

And so we've covered this idea of the difference between hierarchical authority, or apostolic authority, and charismatic authority.

And when we get into the second and third centuries now, tension between apostolic authority and charismatic authority.

That tension is played out as the episcopacy develops, the office of the bishop, and also then in a fringe movement called Montanism.

So, first let's talk about the office of the bishop.

You already know that by the second century, we can already see in Ignatius Desire to get everybody on board with his program that there should be only one bishop per city.

And in his letters he says as much.

There should be only one bishop per city.

But the fact that he says it so emphatically should be a red flag to you and should tip you off to realize that that's not the case in every city.

He wants it to be the case, but it is not the case.

In fact, the bigger the city, the more likely that it took longer for the church to get around to one bishop at a time.

Now, if that's true, then a place like Rome may actually have been one of the last cities to get to the point where there is only one bishop per city.

And we talked a little bit about Hippolytus last time, and I know you've read one of his documents.

And I hinted at the fact that one of the issues with Hippolytus is he seems to be a bishop, but nobody's exactly sure where he was the bishop.

And it may be that he was bishop of one of the smaller towns surrounding Rome.

But it also might be the case that he was a bishop within the city of Rome, And that the term bishop at that time didn't necessarily mean that there had to be only one per city.

Clearly, if you look up, you know, you Google the list of popes, you'll get the official bishops of Rome at the time, and it'll list Hippolytus as an anti-pope or a rival bishop.

But it could be that we really haven't evolved to the point where the city of Rome has only one bishop yet, and it may in fact be the case that Zephyrinus and Callistus were the leaders of one school, one school of catechesis, one group of churches that would It could be the case that Hippolytus was the leader of another school.

When we looked at Justin Martyr, if you read the martyrdom of Justin Martyr, you may remember that at one point the Romans are interrogating him and they said, tell us where the Christians meet.

And he's like, I'm going to tell you, right?

But actually he did.

He said, well, My group meets in the room above whatever store, but others meet elsewhere.

Now, you could take that a couple of ways.

You could take that, you know, that was his house church, and since he was about to be martyred, his house church would be disbanded and the people would have to go to other house churches anyway, so if the Romans raided that space, you know, they wouldn't find anyone anymore anyway.

You could also take it that since Justin was a philosopher, considered himself a teacher of philosophy, teaching Christian philosophy, you could interpret that as that was where his school met, but there were other schools in the city of Rome.

So at any rate, the bigger the city, the more likely that it may have had not just multiple house churches, but multiple groupings of house churches under multiple overseers or multiple bishops.

So, as I said, on the one hand, Rome as a bigger city would have been one of the first churches to have, first cities to have multiple house churches, multiple pastors, and form a council of priests.

But at the same time, it could be that there were multiple councils of priests with multiple chairs of the council.

So all that is to say that, you know, in the second and early third century, it's not necessarily the case that there is only one bishop per city.

It's not necessarily the case that there was a single authority in any given city on matters of doctrine.

There may have been multiple overseers over multiple schools.

But Ignatius knew, even going back to the beginning of the second century, Ignatius knew that that wasn't going to work long term.

That multiple authorities in one city was a threat to unity.

Because let's face it, if you are, let's say you're a Christian group in a smaller city, and you have a couple of house churches with one overseer.

So you know who your bishop is.

Now you want to correspond with the Christians in Rome.

Who do you write to?

Hippolytus?

Callistus?

Who's in charge?

And what happens if there's a disagreement, which we know there was between Hippolytus and Callistus?

So again, who is the authority?

Who decides?

And so it became clear that if there was going to be unity, it was going to have to boil down to one point of authority What evolves then, at least by the third century, and of course in some places sooner, but what evolves is what we call the mono-episcopacy.

Obviously that means one bishop.

By the way, are you able to follow me with that camera?

Mono-episcopacy, one bishop per city.

Ignatius saw this already in the early second century, when he said things like, to oppose the bishop is to be disobedient to God.

We must regard the bishop as the Lord himself, and the presbyters should defer to the bishop.

Things like this.

Whoever does not meet with the sanction of the bishop is outside of the church and they've separated themselves from the church.

So this development was seen really as necessary, especially for two specific reasons.

There had to be one point of authority in a given city so that there was one Music will be omitted.

Music will be omitted.

Think about discipline this way, in terms of excommunication and then reconciliation.

So if someone does something to be excommunicated by the church, they're going to need to be reconciled to the church.

And to be reconciled to the church means to be reconciled to the bishop.

Because if there's more than one bishop in a place, if I do something, I commit some major sin, And my bishop excommunicates me and says, well, we are going to require you to go through some sort of penance in order to be reconciled.

What's to prevent me from shopping around and going to the other bishop and seeing if he's going to be easier on me?

And then you have the problem of one bishop reconciling people who are excommunicated by another bishop.

So for the purposes of discipline, they all need to be on the same page.

So you can see why that would be an issue.

So, this is actually something we're exploring in greater depth in another class I'm teaching, but it's the relationship between authority and unity.

To what extent is the development of the hierarchy, and then especially the mono-episcopacy, necessary to maintain unity?

And as you're going to find out by the end of this class, unity is going to be elusive anyway.

The other thing I guess I could put sacraments up here.

But again, it has to do with what I was just talking about.

If you are excommunicated, it means you are excluded from communion.

It doesn't mean we don't talk to you.

It means you're not admitted to the table of the Eucharist.

And so the sacraments are Guarded, if you will, by the bishop, in the sense that if you want to participate in the sacrament of the Eucharist, you need to be in communion with the church, which means you need to be in communion with the bishop.

And if the bishop excommunicates you, you are excommunicated.

But that's not all.

Burial.

Even though burial isn't necessarily considered a sacrament at this point, the bishops control the cemeteries, the catacombs.

If you want a Christian burial in the Christian catacombs, you cannot be excommunicated or you cannot be out of communion with the vision.

Who gets buried in the catacombs?

By the way, in the catacombs means close to the saints.

Who gets buried near the martyrs?

That was very important.

Alright, you get the idea.

Now, any questions about the development of the Episcopacy or any of that so far?

This is just kind of bringing us up to where we are with the development of the hierarchy, really.

Yes, question?

Well, that's a good question.

There's obviously an unlimited number of sins that one could think of, but the early church did have a sense that there were deadly sins and not-so-deadly sins.

And they weren't the traditional list of seven deadly sins yet.

But there's a passage, I think it's in one of the Johannine letters, of sins leading to death.

Let me know which one I'm talking about.

Yeah, so there's a sense that there are mortal sins or deadly sins and then ones that are not so bad.

And while they don't come right out and say this, it seems like the deadly sins are the ones that break one of the Ten Commandments.

Now, the worst sins, from the perspective of the early church, the worst things you could do Top of the list would really be idolatry or apostasy.

So to deny the faith, to save your life in the persecution, to make a pagan sacrifice, to participate in some pagan ritual, any form of idolatry would be the worst sin you could commit.

And you'll see when we talk next week, we're going to talk about what happens when people do that and then they want to come back and be reconciled to the church.

From my reading, I would say that the number two worst sin you could commit was adultery, and murder was like a distant third.

And I think it's probably because they just sort of assumed Christians weren't committing murder, so it wasn't an issue.

Apostasy was an issue because, especially during the persecution, the Romans could confront you with execution.

Adultery was an issue because, you know, humans being humans.

Murder doesn't seem to have been an issue, but then it sort of goes from there.

But those were the top three.

And so, you know, the debates over whether or not the church could reconcile someone who had committed one of these sins, whether or not the church could forgive these sins are usually the top two.

But then the question becomes, alright, if adultery is one of your top worst sins, Is remarriage after divorce a form of adultery?

And that becomes an issue.

So, you can see why these are important.

But those are the ones that seem to concern the early church the most.

Would you agree with that, Reverend Vance-Blake?

I should.

Okay, good.

Anything to add?

You know, I... But again, if we are to believe the documents, they pose the issue as Christians don't do these things.

It really isn't, and I think I can say with confidence that Part of the reason it isn't an issue is because in Roman law I think it's not allowed.

There's no polygamy allowed in Roman law.

Now that doesn't mean they don't get around having multiple relationships.

One of the pastoral epistles has the thing about a bishop should be the husband of one wife.

And the question comes up, you know, does that mean one at a time?

Or, you know, one only in terms of, you know, is this about divorce and remarriage?

And I think the early church pretty much interpreted it as that was about divorce and remarriage, so that you really shouldn't get divorced, but if you did, you shouldn't be remarried.

I don't remember very many texts that even talk about polygamy.

No, it's not really an issue in the early church.

I assume that the polygamy in the Old Testament Product of a nomadic culture.

But, you know, we're not doing that anymore.

Was there another question?

No? Okay.

All right.

So, with this in mind, I want to talk about Montanism.

And Montanism is a fringe movement within the early church that is often portrayed as a schismatic movement, as a separationist movement from the church.

You know this word, schism?

You know, you will.

I guess it's the same root where we get the word scissors.

I don't know, you know, like a separation.

But a schism is so a split, right, of the church.

And Montanism, here, let's do this.

Montanism is usually portrayed as a schismatic movement, but I think the more recent scholarship on this is saying that it really isn't. It really isn't a separationist movement.

It's more analogous to a charismatic renewal movement within the church.

That's more of a contemporary term, but you get the idea.

And one of the biggest pieces of evidence Tertullian wrote his best stuff, or most of his stuff, after joining with the Montanists in North Africa.

So you read against Praxeas, Tertullian is considered a Montanist by the time he writes that document.

And yet not only is there nothing There's nothing heretical or heterodox in that document.

Not only is there nothing unorthodox in that document, that document is part of what defines orthodoxy.

We talked about Tertullian's use of the terms person and substance for the Trinity.

Well, that stuff comes out of Against Praxis.

Clearly, Tertullian is an example of someone who associated himself with this movement and yet did not break with the Church.

It really, at the time, was called the New Prophecy.

That's what Tertullian himself called it.

The New Prophecy.

And this is a charismatic movement within the church that is also somewhat critical of the church.

So it sees itself as something of a renewal movement.

They seem to have considered themselves morally superior to the rest of the church.

With regard to sin and reconciliation, they are considered rigorous.

They tend to advocate excommunication for more things and tougher reconciliation.

They encouraged celibacy, but apparently did not require it, as well as asceticism.

So they had strict rules that they tried to enforce among their group, having to do with things like fasts and personal discipline.

Basically, remarriage to them was the same thing as adultery, so they did not want to allow second marriages, did not want to allow the reconciliation of adulterers or people who got remarried.

So you're getting kind of a picture of what they were about.

It actually goes back to the end of the second century with a guy named Montanus.

And you can see that's why it's called Montanism.

It's named after Montanus, who was a priest from Phrygia.

Now Phrygia is in Asia Minor, which is now Turkey, and there's another name for Montanism based on its origin in Phrygia.

It's called Cataphrygianism.

Like, what does that mean?

Too much Phrygianism?

I don't know.

But the idea here is that it's seen as an expression of too much emotionalism, too much enthusiasm.

And that comes from the fact that they emphasize and encourage charismatic gifts.

Apparently, Montanus, And he had two daughters as well, a Priscilla and a Maximilla, apparently that somewhere around the middle of the second century, claimed to be able to speak for the Holy Spirit.

Now, by the way, I don't expect you to memorize these dates or anything, but just so you know, a lot of times you will see the year 172 thrown around as the beginning of Montanism, And some sources point to that.

Other sources point to an earlier date of 156. And I think it's the earlier date.

I think it starts earlier, closer to the middle of the second century, because remember when Irenaeus left Gaul to go to Rome in 177? One of the reasons he was going to Rome was to speak on behalf of the Monsonites.

The Roman church didn't know whether to excommunicate the Monsonites or not.

And Irenaeus, being originally from Asia Minor, went to Rome to speak on behalf of the Montanists.

Well, if Montanism didn't start until 172, it's unlikely it got to Rome after only five years.

So I'm saying that it probably started closer to the middle of the century.

By 177, it's in Rome, the Roman church doesn't know what to do about it, and Irenaeus, true to his name, is playing peacemaker there.

Montanus and his daughters claim to be able to speak for the Holy Spirit.

They experience charismatic gifts, maybe including what we would call speaking in tongues, ecstatic trances, things like this.

Note, here is a perfect example of charismatic authority that receives authority and in fact revelation directly from God, via the Holy Spirit, without going through the hierarchy.

So you can see why this is going to be seen as somewhat threatening to the developing hierarchy.

Even though they don't seem to be teaching anything that would be considered heretical, Just simply the fact that they might someday, down the road, decide to say something that's out of bounds theologically, and they're not really under the control of the church hierarchy, nor are they getting their revelation through the established hierarchical channels.

The other thing is that Montanism is often portrayed as sort of anti-hierarchy and very egalitarian.

One of the reasons that it's portrayed that way is because here we have an example in Montanus' two daughters of women in leadership.

In truth, though, I don't see any evidence that they were outright anti-hierarchy.

And even though they did have women in leadership, what they really had was prophets in leadership and anyone could be a prophet, male or female.

But it's not as though just any woman could be a leader in their movement, you had to be a prophet.

And so it isn't as egalitarian as it appears on the surface because It isn't the case that anyone could become a leader in this movement.

The leaders in the movement were considered prophets.

So there were prophets and then there were the others.

Well, as I said, we have this council in Rome in 177 to discuss them.

Irenaeus was there and had some role in this.

And Eusebius, Early church historian tells us that similar councils had already been held in Asia Minor.

And in fact, these would be the earliest church councils that we know of.

We haven't really talked about councils yet in here.

Believe me, we're going to get there.

We're going to talk about councils quite a bit.

But at the beginning, church councils were really just local.

And a better word for that is the synod.

Because often we talk about a council as something more regional or even worldwide, and a synod is more of a local council.

So these earliest councils were over what to do about the Montanists.

So at the beginning, Apparently, Irenaeus was successful in convincing the leadership in Rome that the Montanists were not heretics.

And so at the beginning, it seems like they were in communion with the Roman Church.

And now remember, by this time, Montanism has spread beyond just Phrygia, and it's made its way into the West.

But then, remember, we read in Tertullian that this guy Praxeus, Again, we don't know if that's his real name, but whoever Praxeus is apparently was able to convince the Roman leadership to flip on this and to turn against the Monsonists.

And this seems to have been part of the reason that Tertullian himself had a falling out with the church in Rome and went back to North Africa, where there was already a Monsonist group and where Tertullian was able to join up with them.

Irenaeus and now also Tertullian are at least sympathetic towards the Montanists and their concept of charismatic authority.

And when the Roman church turns against the Montanists and excommunicates them, Tertullian leaves Rome.

Now it's unclear whether there were other issues that led Tertullian to leave Rome, but this seems to be one of the main issues, if not the main issue.

All right.

Eventually though, as the way things usually go, there's somebody who starts a movement who says certain things and takes it so far, but then later leaders of the movement take it even farther.

So that a later leader of the movement went so far as to say that Montanus, who by now had passed on, This is the embodiment of the Holy Spirit.

So here's Montanus who comes along and says, I can speak for the Holy Spirit.

When he's gone, the next generation says, no, he was the Holy Spirit.

At this point, it starts to get out of hand as far as the mainstream church is concerned.

He must have been possessed by a demon.

Almost the same question that came up about Jesus.

Is it the Holy Spirit or is it a demon?

The mainstream opponents of monotheism really pointed to their charismatic gifts, their ecstatic trances, There was evidence that it was really demonic forces that were behind what they were doing And that all kinds of accusations came up.

That sometimes you will read in secondary sources, you know, in some books you'll read that, you know, they did this and they did that and they did this and they did that.

But a lot of that just comes from their opponents making stuff up about them to make them sound bad.

And you have to keep going back to Tertullian.

Well, wait a minute.

Did Tertullian say that?

No. Did Tertullian do that?

No. Because one of the accusations, for example, is that the monotheists Gave the charismatic authority more emphasis than Scripture, so that they would believe their charismatic revelation over Scripture.

But the evidence doesn't support that, because if you look at Tertullian, he almost never quotes charismatic utterances of the Monsonites, but he quotes Scripture all over the place.

So again, you see how in the early church you have to be careful when you read something that is written by the opponent of someone.

You have to really take it with a grain of salt and be careful that you don't just automatically trust something that an early church author says, especially when they're writing against someone else, which they usually are.

Other accusations that the Montanists faced were that they were accused of enticing women to abandon their husbands and then go around and call themselves virgins.

Again, these are just a lot of attacks on the women.

They accuse the women of prophesying for money and then using the money to buy expensive clothing and jewelry.

So again, just attacking the women.

But the interesting thing about that is that this may be the first time that we see evidence in the early literature of clergy getting paid.

So, in other words, the Montanists have a stipend for their leaders.

And the mainstream church doesn't yet, at this point, it seems.

And, you know, so maybe there's a little bit of jealousy.

Wait a minute, you know, they're getting paid and I'm not, or something.

And so they get criticized for, you know, It's prophesying for money.

But again, notice where we are in the history here.

Late second, early third century.

Being clergy is not a day job yet.

Some of you were in the VFCL group that I spoke to the other day.

We talked about this.

Being clergy doesn't really become a day job until later in the third century.

And even then, it doesn't always mean you get paid for it.

It was eventually said that Montanus and one of his daughters, Maximilla, committed suicide because they prophesied the end of the world and it didn't come.

Now, we don't know if that's true, if they really committed suicide, but there is a note in one of the other early historians that Maximilla had said that she would be the last prophet, and then Jesus would return.

So there may be something to this.

In fact, just as an aside, You know that in the earliest decades of the church, there was a real sense of the imminence of Jesus' return.

People are looking at their watches instead of the calendar for when is Jesus going to return.

They had those hourglass watches like Fred Flintstone had.

So they're looking at when is Jesus going to return any time now.

By the end of the first century, People are starting to go, well, okay, maybe not so much.

You know, maybe there is going to be a second generation and a third generation of Christianity.

Mazinism, in addition to everything else, seems to have been a resurgence of this idea of the imminent return of Christ.

That he is coming back soon.

And along with that, a more, let's say, literal interpretation of the book of Revelation.

Remember that Irenaeus and Tertullian were both sympathetic or aligned with the Montanists.

Both Irenaeus and Tertullian had this dispensational literal interpretation of the book of Revelation.

Hippolytus as well, I believe, they will admit that this was not The majority understanding of that text in the early church.

But they had this particular view of Revelation that interpreted it literally and dispensationally and in terms of an imminent return of Christ.

So even though Irenaeus and Tertullian represent mainstream Orthodox writing on Christology and Trinity and stuff, they're on the fringe with regard to eschatology.

They had a, I would argue, a monotonous reading of the book of Revelation.

And as the New Testament is being compiled, And as decisions are being made about what documents ought to be included in the New Testament, the book of Revelation almost didn't make it in because of the people who were interpreting it that way and because of this monotonous, if you will, interpretation of Revelation.

So those who were against including the book of Revelation in the New Testament canon We're against it on the grounds that there were groups like this that were interpreting it in a way that the mainstream church, or apparently the majority of the church, was not.

The majority of the church, we assume, would have interpreted it allegorically and would have seen it as highly symbolic, the way most of us would probably interpret it today, at least close to that.

So that's just a little interesting aside, but you see how their eschatology is consistent with what they're doing in terms of prophecy.

Let's see, what else do I want to say about this?

The fear, I think, on the part of the mainstream church here is really twofold.

On the one hand, you already see this coming, there is a fear that charismatic authority without Hierarchical or Apostolic authority is dangerous.

Who knows what they'll teach?

You know, today they might not be teaching anything heretical, but who knows what they'll say tomorrow, you know, we can't control them.

Well, you know, you can't control the Holy Spirit, okay.

The other thing, then, is that the idea of ongoing prophecy or new revelation, I mean, look at what they call themselves, the new prophecy, right?

And so the fear for the mainstream church is that new prophecy might contradict tradition, and that somehow prophecy is antagonistic toward tradition.

Tradition being that which was handed down from the apostles, that which was believed in the previous generations.

You get the idea, right?

So there's this tension here, again, between apostolic authority, which Develops a hierarchy and charismatic authority.

Questions so far?

That all make sense?

To be fair, Tertullian would say that prophecy really just aids in the interpretation of Scripture.

Tertullian does not seem to have thought that prophecy would replace Scripture, contradict Scripture, or anything, but he seems to have believed that without prophecy, without ongoing prophecy, one ran the risk of interpreting Scripture in the direction of heresy.

So that for the Montanists, prophecy, ongoing prophecy, was necessary for the correct interpretation of Scripture.

Now, the mainstream church's response to this is to, over time, exclude prophecy From the offices of the church.

If you look at 1 Corinthians 12, Paul lists all the spiritual gifts, and one of them is prophecy.

Almost all of these spiritual gifts end up as some sort of office within the church, but not prophecy.

Prophecy goes by the wayside, and it is basically replaced by preaching.

So the exposition of biblical texts in preaching and the exhortation to the imitation of Christ's preaching replaces prophecy.

So the office of prophet is absorbed by the presider or the priest who interprets the scriptures for the gathered community.

So the scriptures are read, the presider then interprets and exhorts.

But the idea is there that it is not new prophecy because in fact prophecy or revelation is limited to the apostolic documents.

And so you see we're closing the canon here as a response to Montanism and the new prophecy.

We're closing the canon and we're also in some sense closing the door on women in leadership because of the Montanists and Because of the ancient world's assumption that somehow women are more emotional than men, and we're not going to argue whether that's true or has a grand truth, we won't deal with that now, but the point is that if you believe women are more emotional than men, then they took that To assume that therefore women are more susceptible to emotionalism and to this ecstatic, trans thing and the charismatic gifts and all of this.

Does that make sense?

In the mind of the mainstream males of the early church, It's all sort of part and parcel of the same thing.

And so we begin to close the door on women in leadership roles because of the connection between Montanism's new prophecy, charismatic gifts and female prophets within that movement.

But how do they decide which women will prophesy and which will not?

It's not clear.

I suppose if you were to ask a Montanist, they would say, well, we don't decide.

The Holy Spirit decides, and the person shows evidence of the gift of prophecy.

Whether they then tested the prophecy in any way is unclear.

I've never seen anything that said one way or the other how they did that.

Alright, so, by the time that we get into the middle of the third century or so, and certainly by the late third century, the church, the universal church, such as it is at the time, is really defined as the church of the bishops.

So to be in the church is to be under the authority of a bishop.

And in any given city, there would be one bishop, one point of authority, certainly by the mid to late 3rd century.

And we're closing the canon because the power That monotheism gave those outside the hierarchy, in terms of new prophecy, was considered dangerous.

Direct access to God without human mediators, without going through the hierarchical channels, was considered dangerous and the fear was that Music will be omitted.

Ended with the Apostolic Age and the Apostolic Documents and with the canon as we have it.

And then the office of prophecy is sort of usurped or absorbed by the preaching office.

But it belongs to the clergy so that eventually, you know, preaching is the prerogative of the bishop or those priests whom the bishop will authorize.

So we have a couple of things Closing the door on women in leadership.

The separation of a professional clergy from laity.

So that lay people aren't out there prophesying.

Clergy talks, laity listens.

Maybe I'm overstating that.

I mean, that's kind of where we're getting to.

And so the laity become excluded from participation in certain acts of ministry.

And I said this, again, when I was talking to the VFCL group, I said, you know, what ends up happening And so, we're going to talk about the persecutions and stuff next week, and that really cements what I'm about to say because we get this sort of circling the wagons effect during the persecution.

But what ends up happening is that by the end of the third century, and again, I may be overstating this, but I would argue that we make a shift from Christianity as Christians ministering to the world to Christianity as clergy ministering to laity.

See the difference?

Now again, I am overstating that.

It's probably unfair.

But that trend exists in the development of what it means to be clergy.

And so, especially after the persecution then, when the church understandably becomes more inwardly focused, the direction of ministry You see how these issues of charismatic vs. apostolic authority play out.

Obviously, what wins is the apostolic authority and the development of the hierarchy.

Questions?

Why did Tertullian think that prophecy was good?

I think that for whatever reason he was not afraid of what the prophets might say.

Which is really interesting when you think of it, because remember, Tertullian was not a bishop.

So he may have been a priest, but even that's debatable.

We're not exactly sure.

So we're not sure if he was a priest, but we know he was never a bishop.

So here's a guy who is defining the church, defining Orthodoxy.

I mean, maybe he doesn't realize he's doing it at the time, but he's writing these theological documents.

And yet he doesn't seem to be afraid that he'll be contradicted by some new revelation.

He seems to have a sense of, I mean, can we say trust in the Holy Spirit?

Does that sound right?

What do you think?

I didn't hear the question.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Do you want to say it again louder?

So the question was, why was Tertullian willing to be a part of the Montanists if he was so mainstreamed theologically?

And I was saying that he doesn't seem to have been afraid of, you know, whatever the prophets might be.

And I think his rigorism appeals to him, or their rigorism appeals to him.

I mean, I think, you know, Tertullian kind of...

Absolutely, yeah.

He's a very strict moralist.

Yeah, and their interpretation of Revelation as well.

So these things appeal to him as well.

Yeah.

You know, that's a good question, and I don't know of anything where there's any interaction between Montanism and the so-called heretical groups.

Now, there were some who accused the Montanists of being modalists.

So when we talked about modalism last time, or whenever that was, yeah.

But clearly that was not the case in the early third century because, you know, Tertullian's a Montanist writing against modalism.

So the Montanists couldn't possibly have been modalists.

But there's some, again, it might be simply confusion on the part of their enemies.

But there are one or two sources later, in later third or early fourth century, where they say that the Monsonists are also modalists.

Now, you can kind of see how that might happen if Monsonists placed such an emphasis on the Holy Spirit that they blur the lines of distinction between Father, Son, and Spirit.

But we don't know of any, I don't know of any interaction between other groups and the Monsonists.

It's a great question, but unfortunately we just may not have any documentation.

When it comes to women in leadership, there's a couple of factors working against women.

And so one certainly is Montanism, because Montanism was seen, even though it started by Montaigne, His daughters take on a major role.

And so, Montanism came to be seen as, this is what happened, now forgive me, women, this is not my opinion, I'm paraphrasing the early church.

But it came to be seen as sort of, this is what happens when you let women run things.

It gets over-emotional, over-zealous, they go into trances, they fall down, they speak in tongues, who knows what's going to happen.

Again, it's based on the idea that, it goes back to a stoic idea that true virtue is to suppress the passions and the emotions and to be guided by reason and will.

But it's really only men that can do that very well.

That was, you know, sort of the assumption.

Suppress the passions and the emotions and to be guided by reason and by the will.

Well, by reason.

And for a woman to do that, she would be acting like a man.

Remember My Fair Lady?

Why can't a woman be more like a man?

Remember that song?

I'm not going to try and sing it.

So that's one thing that we have working against the concept of women in leadership.

Another thing is other groups that were considered heretical apparently had women in some leadership roles.

Irenaeus has one passage where he talks about some Gnostics who had women participating in a version of the Eucharist.

So again, the mainstream church If the church has women in leadership, it will somehow lose credibility in the culture.

Or it will be seen like one of the pagan cults that worships a goddess and has a female priesthood.

So all of these things work together so that by the time you have a developing hierarchy, women are shut out of that hierarchy.

Now there is also a theological argument that comes into play, which you aren't going to agree with, I can tell you that right now, but the theological argument that comes into play is that if the church is the bride of Christ, Christ is therefore the groom, and if the priest stands in the place of Christ, The priest is the groom to the assembly's bride, and so therefore the priest has to be male.

That is the theological justification for it.

Didn't expect you to buy it, I'm just saying.

That was very creative.

Well, you know, I mean, it makes a certain logical sense, but it really is, I think, an argument after the fact.

It wasn't as though they came up with that argument and said, therefore, we're going to exclude women from ministry.

It was, there were other reasons that women were excluded from leadership, and then that becomes this sort of theological justification for it.

Well, the priest was becoming a woman.

She was becoming a bride.

The priest stands in the place of Christ, so he's the groom.

The rest of the church is the bride.

So it's like if you're in a worship service and the priest is standing up front and the rest of the assembly is here, it's like the assembly represents the church, the bride of Christ, the priest represents Christ, the groom, and so that eschatological picture is symbolized in the assembly of the worship service.

Now, somebody over here was going to say something?

I was just thinking that, well, if Mary is the mother of Christ, then the woman, You can certainly make that argument, but the mainstream males had counter-arguments to that.

Like, if women were meant to baptize, Jesus would have been baptized by his mother.

Or, if women were meant to preach, then Jesus would have sent women out with a 72. The story of Martha and Mary.

Mary sits at the feet of Jesus, she listens, but there's no story where she goes out and preaches.

Again, I'm just telling you what they would say.

So then, a current example of that fundamentalist movement, Gary Falwell, in his book, he pretty much does that whole thing in a whole section on women, as to why women should not be in leadership in the church.

He goes into a 30-page thing of basically all of those Well, yeah, there's some similarities there.

Fundamentalism is not the only tradition that currently excludes women from ministry, because as you know, some of the oldest Christian traditions continue to take that approach.

Some of the same arguments are still being used.

But you understand.

We're going to hear more about women in the early church, so maybe I shouldn't try to say too much, especially as a male.

But it's relevant here in terms of the development of the hierarchy and the suppression of the role of prophecy, etc. Now, what else do you want to talk about at this point?

Any other questions or comments?

No? Okay, well then we're going to take a break.

And it is almost 25 to, so let's shoot for like, you know, 10 to 8 or something like that to come back and we'll hear about early Christian liturgy, worship in the early church.

So, we'll see you in like 15 minutes.