Transcript

Hello and welcome to History 1. This video is highlights from Unit 1. And I just want to say again up front that if you've stumbled on this video and you are not a registered participant in one of my classes, that's okay.

You are welcome to watch the video and the little outro at the end is for you.

So hang around and watch that.

That outro is not for my students registered for the class.

Also a reminder, the primary textbook for History 1 is this book, Reading the Church Fathers, from Sophia Institute Press, 2022. Don't get the old one.

Make sure you get this edition.

And the secondary textbook for this class is my Trinity 101. Okay, so now, in John's Gospel, in chapter 18, verse 38, Pontius Pilate asks the question, what is truth?

And so when we begin in this class, we are actually going to be tackling that question.

What is truth after all?

With a capital T. And we're going to be laying the groundwork for everything that comes after in this class.

And as always, I'm going to be doing some myth busting.

For example, one of the myths that The myth that has held on for a long time is the myth that original Christianity was something more Jewish and less Greek but then it was ruined by Greek philosophy.

This is the myth of the Hellenization of Christianity.

Hellenization means to become Greekified, right?

And so there's this myth that somehow Christianity was one thing and then it became Hellenized and that kind of ruined it and put the church off track.

That's not true.

That is a myth.

The truth is that Christianity is a kind of a marriage of Hebrew and Greek thought.

But in no sense did the early Christians take Greek philosophical thought uncritically.

The reality is that they only accepted those aspects of Greek thought that were already consistent with Hebrew thought.

So all of those attributes of God that are found in Greek philosophy So, the conviction, for example, that God is immutable, that is, unchanging, and that God is impassable, that is, that God doesn't suffer, These are simply a given, not only in Greek philosophy, but also in Hebrew wisdom, right?

And so these are things you can find in the Old Testament in one way or another.

And then when the early Christians also saw them in Greek philosophy, they realized that there was a consistency.

And so what we have in early Christianity is this overlap of finding the truth that exists in both Hebrew wisdom and Greek philosophy simultaneously.

Now I want to say a few things about the immutability of God because this is important and it's all in the beginning chapters of Reading the Church Fathers.

But this is important that God is immutable.

God does not change.

In the Old Testament this is usually expressed as God's faithfulness or God's steadfast love.

This depends, of course, on the translation that you get into English.

But this is all in contrast to the pagan gods, the Greco-Roman gods, which were considered to be sometimes tricksters.

They could be fickle.

They could be capricious.

They could be mischievous.

They could engage in immoral behavior.

So at the end of the day, they were not trustworthy.

But what Hebrew wisdom, and then what we get in these philosophical concepts as well, is the affirmation that God is trustworthy.

precisely because God does not change.

God doesn't change his mind.

God doesn't renegotiate covenants.

God does not change.

And so this is one of those things that Judeo-Christian theology assumes, because a God who can change is a God who cannot be trusted to keep his promises.

And so when we say that God is unchanging, What we mean is that God is faithful.

And again, this is expressed in the Old Testament in these concepts of God's faithful love, God's enduring love.

The refrain in the Psalms, His mercy endures forever.

Now, sometimes in the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which was, of course, the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles, sometimes this also gets translated using concepts like truth.

And so again, we're back to this idea of what is truth, right?

The immutability of God is connected to truth because Since God doesn't change, God is unchangeably, eternally true.

God is Truth with a capital T, and truth that changes isn't truth.

And so, in order for truth to be Truth with a capital T, it also has to be unchanging in a certain way.

The immutability of God is connected to this idea of truth, which is also related to God's perfection, because God's perfection also requires that God be unchanging.

If God could change over time, Then God could not be perfect, because either God would be perfect and then change into something less than perfect, or God would be less than perfect and changing into something more perfect.

But all that is to say that both in Hebrew thought and then in early Christian thought that borrows from Greek philosophy too, a being, God, cannot be perfect if God changes.

A God who changes, well, that change would negate perfection.

But because God is perfect, God is also unchanging.

And this is the principle, that truth does not change.

Truth is received, you don't make it up for yourself, and it doesn't change over time, because change would negate it as truth.

And so, again, in the book, I talk about how all of these These aspects of God's immutability are interrelated.

And so you can see that in more detail in the book.

But just to give you an example of one place in the Old Testament where we start to hear about these attributes of God.

What is God like?

This is Psalm 89, 14, and 15. And the psalmist is speaking directly to God.

You have a mighty arm.

Your hand is strong.

Your right hand is ever exalted.

These are metaphors.

The right hand is a metaphor for God's power.

God is omnipotent.

This is an attribute of divinity, that God is all-powerful.

Justice and judgment are the foundation of your throne.

God is always just, always righteous.

Mercy and faithfulness march before you.

God is always merciful.

God is always faithful.

And again, that concept of God's faithfulness depends on God's immutability, because a God who is not immutable, a God who can change, is not a God who is faithful.

Faithfulness depends on us being able to rely on God as a God who keeps his promises.

We get these attributes of God expressed in Hebrew wisdom and then confirmed by Greek philosophy in those places where Greek philosophy and Hebrew wisdom overlap.

And then when we get into the New Testament, we see these same attributes of divinity expressed as well, even to the point of, in 1 John, God is love, right?

So again, love is an attribute of God's very divinity.

It doesn't simply mean that God is loving or that love is something God does, but that love describes who God is in God's very essence.

Okay, now I want to talk for a minute about some of the language that we use when we talk about God.

And in some ways this is getting a little bit ahead of ourselves because we're going to be seeing sort of how this language emerges in the early church.

But just so that we get ourselves starting on the right foot and that we don't create any bad habits, I want to talk about this a little bit right now.

I mentioned a second ago that when we talk about the attributes of divinity or attributes of God, we are speaking about the essence of God, what it is that makes God, God, and what it is about God that sets God apart from everything else.

Because there's only two categories in the universe, creator and creation.

God is creator and everything else is creation.

So if you look at it that way, what is it that makes God creator, capital C, and sets God apart from everything else, which is creation, which is created?

These are the attributes of divinity.

These are the things that we use to talk about not only who God is, but in a way, what God is.

And so I use the word essence.

What is the essence of God?

What is the essence of divinity?

Now, that word, essence, you kind of instinctively know what that means.

It has a lot to do with what defines something as being what it is.

And the word essence is a Greek concept, but there's a Latin concept that's the equivalent, and that's the word substance.

Now, it's tricky with the word substance.

Of course, substance is the English translation of the Latin word substantia.

When you hear substance, you might be tempted to think of material or tangible substance, but it doesn't mean that at all.

The substance of a thing is what makes that thing what it is, right?

It is the essence of a thing in the way we would use the word essence.

And so the substance of divinity is precisely these attributes of divinity that we use to describe God.

God is omnipresent, everywhere at once.

God is omnipotent, all powerful.

God is omniscient, all knowing.

God is omnibenevolent, all good.

And then we go from there.

God is immutable, unchanging.

God is impassable, which means that God is unable to suffer Now, that doesn't mean that God is unable to have compassion, but it means that God cannot be acted upon by an outside force that affects God in a way that forces God to do anything, right?

So God cannot be a victim.

So when we say God is impassable, it means God cannot be the victim of any outside force, any other force or being in the universe, right?

So God is impassable.

And so all of these things and all the others that I describe in the book, these are all attributes of God that describe who God is and that tell us something about the very substance of God, the substance of divinity.

That is, divinity itself, with a capital D. Now, when we talk about the substance of divinity, we are talking about something that is shared and owned in common by all three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

There is only one substance of divinity because there is only one God.

The one God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together.

But, The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not identical.

The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit.

So there are distinctions between the three persons.

And we use the word persons to describe the three, let's say, manifestations of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And I bring this up now at the beginning, even though we're going to cover it later.

I bring it up now so that we don't get into some bad habits like, for example, we do not want to call the three persons of the Trinity Three parts of God.

Because that would imply that God can be divvied up or divided.

The persons of the Trinity are not parts of God.

God doesn't have parts at all because God is simplex, meaning God is one thing through and through.

And so you can't divvy up God like three people sharing a pizza.

It doesn't work that way.

So we don't refer to the persons of the Trinity Precision of language.

We want our language to always Precisely convey doctrine correctly.

There are ways to be incorrect as well.

We want to avoid those.

This is going to get us started.

I want to mention something about God's immutability and impassibility.

Again, all of this is covered in the book.

But for now, let me just reiterate something.

The fact that God is immutable, unchanging, and the fact that God is impassable, that God does not suffer.

These do not mean that God is static or aloof or that God lacks compassion.

These are all misunderstandings of the concept.

The immutability of God means that God is immutably, unchangeably, and eternally at maximum love, maximum compassion, And at maximum creative activity, God never rests because God is always at maximum creative activity.

So God is not more active on our behalf on one day and less active on our behalf on another day.

God is not more loving to us on one day and less loving to us on another day.

God is loving and creatively active To the maximum at all times.

And if it were any other way, then that would be a problem because it would either mean that God was less loving and then became more loving or was more loving and then became less loving or something like that.

And all of that would just chip away at God's perfection.

And so the understanding of the early Christians is that God is immutable precisely because or so that you can trust that God is absolutely faithful Absolutely loving and absolutely compassionate toward you without any decrease at all.

Okay, now let's talk a little bit about methodology and about how we are looking at the history of the early church and what we call the development of doctrine.

So first of all, just a little bit of definition of what do I mean when I say that doctrine develops?

Because didn't I just say that truth doesn't change?

And now I'm saying that doctrine develops.

So what's up with that?

Well, when we talk about the development of doctrine, what we mean is that in each generation there is an orthodoxy that becomes the foundation for the orthodoxy of the next generation.

And so that in each generation The development of doctrine means that doctrine is clarified, it gets fleshed out, it gets elaborated upon, and it becomes clearer and clearer over time as details are worked out or questions that nobody thought of before are finally asked or whatever it is.

But the development of doctrine does not mean that what was orthodoxy in one generation or in one century could be no longer orthodox in the next century or could be heresy in the next century.

It doesn't work like that.

It also doesn't go the other way.

Something that's heresy in one century does not become orthodoxy later on.

It only means that Orthodoxy itself is kind of expansive over time and it becomes more and more clarified.

And so you'll see how this plays out as we go.

And to nuance it a little bit, you know, there are a few things that people sort of get away with at one point that aren't going to fly later once things become further clarified.

And, you know, an example of this would be, you know, by the end of the second century or so, beginning of the third century, we have the church father Tertullian.

He actually does call the three persons of the Trinity three parts of God.

But very quickly, the consensus is, no, that's not going to fly because God is simplex, God doesn't have parts, so you can't use the word parts to talk about the three persons of the Trinity.

So even though you will, when we get there, you'll read in Tertullian where he sort of gets away with that, but it doesn't last, so don't do it yourself.

There are a few little things like that.

But for the most part, what is orthodoxy in one generation never becomes heresy later.

It becomes the foundation for later orthodoxy.

And so there is an orthodoxy in every generation.

And so here's another myth that I need to bust for you because one of the myths that was around for a long time in the study of early Christianity, and you still see it sometimes, some people still insist on this in the books that they write, is this myth or this idea that there was not just one Christianity in the early church, but there were many Christianities, or sometimes referred to as Christologies in terms of many different ways of understanding Christ.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are different ways of understanding Christ, and we're going to look at them, but there's only one way that's correct.

There's one orthodoxy, and in every generation, what you see is the development of doctrine is Building on the foundation of the previous generation's orthodoxy.

So there's no such thing as a kind of what some people will call proto-orthodoxy, as if there was a world where Christianity existed, but orthodoxy didn't exist yet.

There's no such thing.

There's no time before orthodoxy.

Sometimes this myth gets expressed to such an extreme that people will claim that orthodoxy was invented in the fourth century after the Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity.

None of that is true.

It's all a myth.

There is, in every generation of the church, an orthodoxy for that generation, and that orthodoxy will become the foundation for an expanded Remember that there is always a mainstream church, which is the majority of Christians who are holding on to the Orthodoxy of that time, and that is the tradition that is passed down from one generation to the next.

And of course, in each generation, there's more study, there's more prayer, there's more people writing about it, and so it becomes expanded upon, it becomes further clarified.

But never forget this, religion, every religion, but especially ours, religion is tradition.

If there's no tradition, there's no religion.

In fact, you could go so far as to say that religion is conservative by definition because religion Conserves or preserves a tradition that's handed down from one generation to the next.

Preserving something down through time, just like the way Kung Fu is transmitted from teacher to disciple.

And so the assumption of the early and medieval church is always that the tradition is valuable And anything that deviates from the tradition is going to be suspect.

And so the burden of proof is on whatever deviates from the tradition to prove that it deserves to exist alongside or in replacement of something that came before it.

So as we study the church and the history of the early church and the development of doctrine, I have what I call three laws.

Now, these laws are not really laws.

They're more like observations because it's not as though the early Christians wrote these laws down and then obeyed them.

These are just my observations of how it always worked out throughout history.

So here are the three laws of the early church and the development of doctrine.

And this stuff is all in the textbooks.

Now, law number one.

Heresy forces Orthodoxy to define itself.

Heresy forces Orthodoxy to define itself.

That means that Orthodoxy is something that is just sort of assumed until an alternative comes along, until someone proposes something else that either contradicts or opposes Orthodoxy.

That heresy It is proposed and that is what forces the development of doctrine because that is what forces those who defend orthodoxy to further define orthodoxy in opposition to the heresy.

So very often we actually don't get a lot of clarification on the orthodox doctrines until they are challenged by alternatives, by heretical doctrines.

And so what we read a lot of times in the Church Fathers is the debate that is going on between what has been received from the previous generation and something else.

So heresy forces orthodoxy to define itself.

The second law, Orthodoxy is the middle way between the alternatives.

And what we find, and I talked about this in the intro video with the whole concept of the pendulum, what we find, and again, this is simply an observation, this is always the way it plays out, what we find is that the alternatives, what will come to be called heresies, exist kind of on the conceptual fringes, on the extremes.

They are extreme views that go too far in one direction or that emphasize one thing so much that they diminish something else.

And so orthodoxy then is this place of balance between the extremes.

So let me give you a quick example.

There were those in the early church who proposed that Jesus was a human but not divine.

That's one extreme.

Human, not at all divine.

There were also those in the early church who proposed that Jesus was divine, but not at all human.

And that's the other opposite extreme.

All divine, not human.

What's the orthodox middle way?

It's the both-and answer to the question.

It's that place of balance that holds both his divinity and his humanity in tension, and which refuses to emphasize one so much that it diminishes the other.

The orthodox middle is that Jesus Christ is both human and divine.

Okay, so that's kind of to give you an idea of how this plays out.

And again, you'll read it all in the text, so you'll see it.

The third law is that Christology informs soteriology.

Christology is what we believe about Christ, that he is both human and divine.

That's where it all starts.

And soteriology is what we believe about salvation and how salvation works.

The other word for this is atonement.

Atonement is kind of the nuts and bolts of how salvation works, right?

And so the point of all this is that what we believe about Christ influences what we believe about salvation.

What we believe about the Savior will drive us to one belief or another about salvation.

And it works the other way too.

If you start with a certain belief about salvation, That will drive you to one belief or another about the Savior.

And so the idea is that Christology, soteriology, and atonement are all interrelated.

And you will see how that plays out as well.

And so that kind of brings us full circle back to the concept of truth.

What is truth?

Pontius Pilate's question, right?

Is truth something that you make up for yourself and one person's truth can be different or even contradictory to another person's truth?

Is truth something that evolves over time?

Does truth change and something that was true today can be false tomorrow or vice versa?

Or is truth something that we don't make up but we receive and something that is unchanging over time but simply needs to be preserved and handed down from one generation to another?

Well, the answer of our ancestors in the faith and the universal assumption of the early and medieval Christians is that truth does not evolve and we do not get to make it up for ourselves Truth is something that we receive.

It comes to us primarily through revelation, the scriptures, etc. And it is something we must receive and embrace and preserve and hand down to the next generation.

And that's how they understood truth.

And that is actually how most Christians to this day understand truth.

And so that's the sort of worldview, the epistemology, you might say, Okay, now the first primary source document that you're reading for this class is a letter called First Clement.

First Clement is written by Clement of Rome.

Now Clement was the Bishop of Rome towards the end of the first century and this is a letter that he wrote to the Christians of Corinth In about the year 95 AD or CE. And so that means that this letter was written at about the same time.

Well, I would say within the same year, within a year of the writing of the book of Revelation, right?

So it's still within the time period of our New Testament.

And so you're reading, if you haven't read it already, you're going to be reading first Clement.

A letter that the Bishop of Rome writes to the Christians in Corinth now some 40 years after St. Paul has written his letters to the Corinthians.

And notice that in that span of 40 years now, by the year 95, They are already reading Paul's letters, including the letters to the Corinthians, and also including the Hebrews, the letter to the Hebrews, because a lot of people assumed that Paul wrote that.

But they are reading these as Scripture.

They are reading these and holding them up next to the Old Testament as equally inspired divine revelation, right?

And in fact, Clement himself writes In such a way that we can see that he assumes that he is writing under the influence of divine inspiration.

Now, this has more to do with his office as the Bishop of Rome than with him as a person.

Clement is not claiming to be infallible himself.

But writing in his role as the Bishop of Rome, he assumes that he has the authority to write on behalf of God And sort of in the name of St. Peter, his predecessor in that role, he has the right to tell the Corinthian Christians what to do, the Christians in a completely different city.

And so, you know, we see this and we see in this letter that there's already an assumption that Rome has some sense of authority over Corinth.

Okay, so you're going to read 1 Clement, and so I'm not going to spend a lot of time going through it point by point.

You'll notice my annotations in the course pack, and make sure that you read the section on Clement and 1 Clement in reading the Church Fathers first, so you get all the background.

Right now, I just want to point out one thing that I want to make sure you notice.

Notice how Clement, as the Bishop of Rome, refers to himself as the High Priest, right?

We are in a transition point here toward the end of the first century.

In this letter, as in the New Testament, as also in the document known as the Didache, which you will read later, there are two words that are used for pastors or presiders over the worship, the liturgy, and the sacraments.

These Greek words are presbyteros, which is usually translated elder or priest, or presbyter sometimes, and episkopos, which is translated either overseer or bishop.

That's the Greek word for bishop.

The problem is that in the New Testament, And in the Didache, these words are basically synonymous.

And so we don't yet have a situation where the word episkopos has come to mean that higher level of authority.

The higher level of authority exists because the first bishops are the successors to the apostles, but they aren't actually called bishops yet.

And you can see in this moment with Clement, They are experimenting with what are we going to call these guys who are the successors to the Apostles.

It seems as the hierarchy is emerging that they tried out the idea of using words from the temple religion to describe the hierarchy.

For a while, they tried out the possibility of calling the clergy high priest, priest, and Levite.

So a bishop would have been called high priest, a priest would be called priest, and a deacon would be called a Levite.

They experimented with that, but it didn't stick.

But here in this moment, we can see Clement referring to himself as the high priest.

Now to be fair, It's not really clear whether he refers to himself as the high priest, meaning I'm a bishop and other bishops would also be called high priest, or whether he's referring to himself as high priest because he's the bishop of Rome specifically and the successor of Peter.

We're not quite sure.

But the point is that that way of designating the clergy, high priest, priest, and Levite, did not stick.

And they eventually went with bishop, priest, and deacon so that these Greek words that were once basically synonymous, presbyteros and episkopos, now get separated out so that episkopos becomes the word for the regional authority who is in succession from the apostles who has authority over multiple churches, either in that city or in that region.

And we're going to talk about this more as we look more closely at the hierarchy.

But I wanted you to see that right here in First Clement.

And the point is that ordination, the choosing and commissioning of clergy, This is the conferral of authority from one generation on the next, right?

And so you can see it already.

You can see in Acts chapter 6, deacons are ordained by the laying on of hands.

And in the pastoral epistles, priests are also ordained by the laying on of hands.

And look, no one can be self-ordained.

You can't ordain yourself.

You can only receive the authority And it's understood to be the gift of the Holy Spirit, kind of analogous to the confirmation of a baptism where a person receives the Holy Spirit.

Ordination is the reception of the Holy Spirit for the task of ministry.

And so this is what is already going on in the first century.

This hierarchy is developing with this ordination by the imposition of hands, which is the conferral of authority from one generation to the next.

Now, for more on that, if you want to see a little bit more detail on the early development of the hierarchy and this concept of what are we going to call this office of bishop, check out my original church video, episode number four, Did the Original Church Have Bishops?

I'll go into it in a little bit more detail in that.

But the point is that in Corinth, In about the year 95, something is going on, somebody is causing some drama that prompt the Bishop of Rome to write them a letter to try and settle things down and sort it out.

Now, Clement of Rome says that he's going to be sending some negotiators to Corinth, and so he doesn't tell us nearly as much as we wish we knew in the letters because he's going to sort things out in person, not himself, but by his negotiators.

And so we don't really know how things played out.

We don't really even know exactly what the problem was.

Although I suspect, and this is speculation on my part, but I suspect that it was a question of whether ordination would be for life, because there seems to be conflict in Corinth between older members of the church and younger members of the church, and perhaps, I wonder, whether what's going on there is there are younger members saying, hey, those guys have been clergy long enough, Let's get them out and give some new people a chance.

But of course, as you know, as things played out, it was determined that no ordination was for life.

It's not kind of, you know, an elected position where you serve for a certain amount of time and then step down.

If you're ordained, you can never be unordained.

And so ordination was for life.

And so that position in the church of servant through presiding, that is for life, or at least it's supposed to be.

And so that's kind of how it plays out.

But again, we don't know nearly as much as we wish we did about the situation in Corinth.

But what we do know from this letter is that the Bishop of Rome So, that is what I wanted to say as far as highlights from Unit 1. We'll pick this up right where we left off when we look at Unit 2. Thanks for joining me, and I'll see you next time.

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