Transcript

Hi folks, I'm Dr. Papandrea.

I am the professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Garrett Evangelical Seminary, and this is your orientation and introduction video to the course The History of Christian Thought and Practice 1, or as we like to call it, History 1. Now, if you're not in my course and you've stumbled on this video, well, you're welcome to watch it.

I hope you watch it all the way through to the end, and at the end there will be a short little outro video for you to tell you how you can connect with me, interact with my community online, and, you know, ask me questions and things like that.

But if you are a registered student in my course, That little outro video is not for you.

You can ignore that because obviously you will interact with me through the course.

So, welcome to History 1, where we practice Kung Fu for the Soul.

Now, why do I call it Kung Fu for the Soul?

When I go into my Kung Fu school to train, the first thing you see when you go in is a row of pictures on the wall.

And my Sifu, my Kung Fu instructor, The only way that particular style of Kung Fu is preserved Christianity is like that and what we're going to learn in this course is exactly what was handed down from Jesus to the Apostles and from the Apostles to their disciples and on down through the generations to us.

The delivery of content for this course is actually mostly through reading.

You're going to read the books, and you're going to read the primary sources, which are the actual documents preserved from the history of the church, from each time period in the church's history.

I'll have more to say about that in a little bit, but the point of that for now is that all of our interaction, whether it's online, over Teams, or whether it's in person, All of our interaction is really going to be about debriefing what you've read.

So it's all going to be about Q&A and discussion, and it's going to give you a lot of opportunity to really work through the material.

But here's what you need to know.

There are courses that you will take in your seminary experience that have no wrong answers.

And those courses are great, but this is not one of those courses.

There are courses you will take in your seminary experience where you get to talk a lot about what you believe.

And those courses are great, but this is not one of those courses.

This course is not about what you believe, and it's not even about what I believe.

This is the class where you learn what the original Christians believed.

And this is important because they were the ones who defined what Christianity is.

And we, no one living now, is in a position to redefine it.

We only receive it and we learn it.

So this class is not about what you believe or about what I believe.

And I'm not necessarily teaching you what I believe.

So don't assume that I personally believe or accept or practice everything we talk about.

Having said that, I am an advocate for the tradition in general, which is why I'm the one who teaches this class.

But I'm not teaching you what I believe.

You'll learn what contemporary theologians believe in your contemporary theology classes.

I am passing on to you what was handed down to me and to all of us from that great cloud of witnesses who came before us.

And the point of this class is for you to be able to not only learn it, but turn around and teach it, to articulate the faith and teach it to the next generation.

Now, in order to do that, we all have to understand that we are not the center of history.

Our point of view is a limited and off-center vantage point.

And so we need to approach history with a bit of humility and patience The humility to accept that we are smaller than the history and the church, and when we say we are members of the church, we are entering into something greater than ourselves.

And the patience to accept that some questions will just not be answered to your satisfaction, at least maybe not in this class, maybe not at this point in your life, maybe not ever in this life.

We need to have the humility to accept the fact that our satisfaction is not the criterion of truth.

And we need to have the patience to listen to the voices from the past without dismissing them.

And I always say that if your seminary experience were a pizza, this course is the crust.

It is the foundation on which everything else rests.

And you may take other courses, you may take electives that would be kind of metaphorically like the toppings on the pizza.

And some of you will have different toppings than others.

But we all need a crust to our pizza, and so we all need this foundation.

Now, you should know that I've changed this course drastically over the years, and especially in more recent semesters.

And so again, as I said, this means that the content delivery of the course is going to be primarily by you reading, not by me lecturing.

Now, I have cut the amount of reading way down from when I inherited this course from my professor, and even from when I first started teaching it.

And so, you're welcome.

The reading is a lot less than it used to be, and I've edited it down to focus on the most relevant sources, and I have annotated the primary sources, and I've edited them to update the archaic English translations and make them easier to understand.

And I've done all that, but I'm not gonna lie to you, there is a lot of reading for this course.

So get ready.

Get ready to dig in and really immerse yourself in the early and medieval church through the very documents that were produced at that time.

Now, I've also edited the primary sources for inclusive language as much as possible, right?

And so what that means is that I've done my best to edit for what I call inclusive anthropology.

In other words, inclusive language regarding humanity.

But when it comes to God language, we are learning the tradition.

And it is impossible to learn the tradition without traditional language.

So you're going to have to learn the traditional language.

Wax on, wax off.

That's how you begin.

Now, that doesn't mean you are expected to imitate me and the way I say things at every turn.

I often use traditional language because It's more precise.

And so you don't have to imitate me, but imitating me is better than getting it wrong.

So if that's how you have to start, that's fine.

But the point is, eventually you will be able to find your own voice to articulate the tradition and the faith faithfully, but also in a way that will resonate with people today.

And so there are going to be some expectations, like I do expect everyone to capitalize certain words like God, Trinity, and Father, Son, and Holy Spirit when you're talking about God.

Now, you're free to use language that you find more comfortable as long as you don't sacrifice theological accuracy, and there's going to be something that I'll ask you to read that's going to help you with this, but you'll see as we go along the way.

Now, I want to take a moment to read a bit of Scripture here.

This is from the Old Testament book of 1 Kings, chapter 19, verses 7 through 12. The angel of the Lord came back a second time, touched him, Elijah, and said, Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you.

He got up, ate, and drank.

Then, strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.

There he came to a cave, where he took shelter.

But the word of the Lord came to him, Where are you, Elijah?

He answered, I have been most zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, but the Israelites have forsaken the covenant.

They have destroyed your altars and murdered your prophets by the sword.

I alone remain, and they seek to take my life.

Then the Lord said, Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord.

The Lord will pass by.

There was a strong and violent wind rending the mountains and crushing the rocks before the Lord.

But the Lord was not in the wind.

After the wind, an earthquake.

But the Lord was not in the earthquake.

After the earthquake, fire.

But the Lord was not in the fire.

After the fire, a still quiet voice.

Now, you live in the storm.

Your life is an earthquake.

And if it isn't already, it will be once you get into your seminary experience.

And the problem is that you are already online too much.

God is not online.

God is not in the earthquake, God is not in the fire, God is not in the wind, and God is not online.

God is in the spaces between all that stuff.

Or for you musicians, God is in the rests between the notes.

We all need to be off-grid more.

And so what I'm going to encourage you to do throughout this semester is to try to take this class as a kind of monastic experience.

To try to go as low-tech as possible.

And use this class to slow down, get out of the storm, and listen for that still, quiet voice.

And that means that I am not going to ask you to go online very much.

And I know you're watching this video online, and there may be a few other videos that I'll ask you to watch on YouTube.

But for the most part, I am not asking you to do very much at all online.

And I don't want you to do any research online because Quite frankly, you can't trust your sources online.

So I want you to learn to read from the page.

And you may be reading on a screen if you need to, but if at all possible, even get off the screen and read from a page.

And so when you read, You need to understand something from the very beginning or you're going to fall behind in this course, and that is this.

There is a great difference between reading for interest and reading for learning.

Now, I'm not saying that the reading for this course won't be interesting, but if you're used to reading things online where you click on something because it seems interesting and you get a very short article and you don't even read to the end of that, and what you do read you skim, that will not work for this course.

Partly because you don't know yet what's important and you don't know what you can skip over.

So the reading for this course is not the kind of reading that you can skim.

You need to read for depth, for understanding, for retention, for learning.

You cannot skim this stuff.

Now there may be some times when you're not sure why you're reading something.

You'll want the author to get to the point.

but I need you to try and slow down and absorb not just the words but the whole vibe of the document.

Try to be as much like a monastic as possible.

Be low-tech, off-grid and off-screen as much as possible.

Turn off your email and your phone while you are reading this stuff because God speaks to you when you read from the page and God speaks to you in the silence between the things that you're reading.

If you never give yourself any silence, you're not going to hear that still, quiet voice.

And I want to emphasize this.

I cannot emphasize it enough.

Multitasking is the enemy of all things good.

I guarantee that you will not learn if you are multitasking, and that goes for reading.

If you need to train your attention span to have more patience to read, then do that.

Because someday it's going to be really important that you can focus on one thing for a long time.

So for example, if you need to read a document and it's longer than you want it to be, put away everything else until you're done.

If I send you an email that's longer than you want it to be, read it carefully and read it all the way through.

And if you feel like you can't do all the work for this course, I guarantee you it's because you're trying to multitask.

It's because you're trying to do the work for this course while you're doing other things.

And that is not going to work.

Now this course is meant to give you the essence of, let's say, pre-reformation Christianity, the early and medieval church.

And as I mentioned before, that's because that is when Christianity itself was defined.

And so the course is actually going to be heavily weighted toward the early church because that's when most of the development of doctrine took place.

And you will see that as we track through the trajectory of the journey of the early and medieval Christians.

Now if your whole mindset is post-reformation and post-enlightenment, you're going to need to try to Strip some of that away to understand your ancestors in the faith.

Now don't get me wrong, pre-enlightenment does not mean unenlightened, right?

It just means a different worldview that existed before the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, right?

So, as an example, The idea that the Christian faith is a very individualized kind of thing, where I, as an individual, make a personal decision to become a Christian, that is much more of a modern understanding of the faith than what Christianity was originally.

Originally, Christianity was much more of a communal faith, and whole families Pre-Reformation, Pre-Enlightenment, Post-Reformation, and Enlightenment Conversion was never thought to be an event that happened.

No one ever said, I got saved on a certain date in my past.

Conversion was always understood to be a process.

It's the process of sanctification that leads us towards salvation.

So again, a very different worldview.

And finally, one really important thing that you need to understand is that in the ancient world, in the Middle Ages, What is really important and what is really understood to be truthful is whatever has stood the test of time.

Which means older things are more valuable than newer things.

Now we live in a world, in our modern world, newer things are more valuable than older things and it's getting worse all the time because When we think of computers and software, they get updated and people always think the newer version is better than the older version.

And so we're caught in a mindset where newer is always better than older.

But that is the exact opposite of the way that our ancestors in the faith thought.

Older is always better than newer because older has stood the test of time.

Or at least the newer thing, the burden of proof is on the newer thing to prove why it should replace the older thing.

And so in order to understand our ancestors in the faith, and in order to understand the documents that you're going to read, to get behind this mindset of the Enlightenment, humanism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, you got to get back behind that.

You're going to have to think of this course as a kind of cross-cultural immersion, where you're going to be reading documents written by people who, on the one hand, are very much like you, but on the other hand, have a very different worldview.

There's a great quote from a novel I read.

The novel begins with these words, The past is a foreign country.

They do things differently there.

You're going to need to treat this course like you're learning about how another culture thinks, like going back to a mother country you've never been to, right?

But the way those folks think, they are our ancestors in the faith.

They are the original Christians.

So in this course, you're going to learn about the mysteries of the church.

But mystery does not mean something that's impossible to understand.

It means something we will never completely understand because these are God's mysteries and God is infinite and we are finite.

But we can significantly understand God's mysteries as they are revealed to us.

So we don't simply throw up our hands and say, well, it's impossible to understand these mysteries.

No, we can understand them to a certain extent and we can even learn how to teach them to others.

But because they are mysteries, They can only be understood from the inside, that is, by experience, by the kind of evidence that you know you have, but it's very difficult to share.

So, for example, I've had debates with atheists who try to tell me there is no God, and I know there is a God because I have experience in my life of the presence of God, and yet I can't really give them that experience.

I can't prove it to them.

And I always say it's a little bit like if you tried to prove the existence of palm trees to an Inuit, someone who has lived close to the North Pole all their lives and has never seen a palm tree, they may insist that palm trees don't exist.

But the atheist trying to tell me that God doesn't exist is like the Inuit trying to tell the Jamaican that palm trees don't exist.

And yet, here we are.

You have to believe it before you can understand it.

You can't try to understand it first and say, well, I'll decide whether to believe it once I understand it.

Doesn't work that way.

First you believe it, then you can learn to understand it.

And sometimes faith requires believing what you don't yet understand.

So for this course, I'm going to be going on the assumption that we are all believers, we are all Christians of one stripe or tradition or another.

If that's not true for you, I would invite you to let me know that, or at least feel free to speak up with your questions that you might have coming from a different place.

You're certainly welcome in the course, but the course is taught on the assumption that we are all Christians.

Now, the history of the church, and when I say the church, I'm talking about the universal church, Christianity in general.

The history of the church is like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to another.

And as it swings far to one side, gravity overcomes the momentum and pulls it back toward the center.

But then the momentum drives it past the center to the other extreme.

And the reason why the history of the church is like that is that there will always be people in the church who want to push a doctrine or a concept to an extreme.

But it eventually gets to a point where the majority of the church says, ah, now you've gone too far, and gravity pulls it back toward the center.

But there will always be someone who will react so strongly to one extreme that they actually overreact and drive it to the other extreme.

And then once again, the majority will say, well, now you've gone too far in this direction, and gravity pulls it back toward the center.

And there is a place of balance, what I call the middle way, but not middle way in the sense of a compromise, middle way in the sense of this center of gravity, this place of balance.

It's like the way the Earth orbits the Sun, right?

If that orbit were any larger, the Earth would fly off into space.

If the orbit were any smaller, the Earth would fly into the Sun.

But there's this perfect balance that the Earth orbits the Sun and stays in its orbit.

It doesn't fly out into space and it doesn't fly into the Sun.

The history of the church is all about figuring out who God is, who Jesus Christ is, what is the relationship between the two, and all of this doctrine becomes clarified within this context of the pendulum and finding that place of balance.

Now, I personally believe that the Holy Spirit was guiding that process throughout.

Now, in actual practice, The history of the Church is actually the history of the interpretation of Scripture.

The Church at the beginning, of course, inherited the Old Testament, which at that time was actually the Septuagint, the Old Testament in Greek, and that was the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles.

But then, of course, the Church also had to interpret not only the Old Testament, but the life, And then, of course, the New Testament was written based on the church's interpretation of those events.

And we'll talk about all of these things as we go through the course.

But the point is that those interpretations of the church become the church's tradition, which guides ongoing interpretation.

And so the interpretation of Scripture becomes our tradition, And that tradition helps us continue to interpret Scripture and later tradition.

Now, you might be thinking, well, where do you draw the line?

Because there is tradition with a capital T and traditions with a small t. And which ones are really important and which ones are less important?

And you may be familiar with a quote and It gets attributed to different people.

I'm not exactly sure who said it first, but the quote goes something like this.

In essentials, unity.

In non-essentials, liberty.

In all things, charity.

So in other words, the quote advocates unity in those essentials of the Christian faith, the capital T tradition.

And then liberty, And charity, in terms of the non-essentials, the traditions with a small t. But that does beg the question, how do you draw the line between the essentials, traditions with a capital T, and the non-essentials, tradition with a small t? Well, guess what?

We're going to do that in this class.

And this class is all about the essentials.

It's about the core of the essentials of our Christian faith that literally define what Christianity is.

Things like Christology, who is Jesus Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, ecclesiology, what is the church, soteriology and atonement, what is salvation.

We're going to talk about all these things throughout this course.

But I want to emphasize This is all based on the assumption that the tradition is good.

It is good to be a traditional Christian.

And I am here to give you permission to be a traditional Christian.

Whether that comes out as evangelical, high church Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, or some other expression, I do not believe that we have to tear someone's faith down first We are going to be building our faith on the solid rock of the foundation of the early church.

And along the way, I'm going to be doing some myth-busting.

I'm not going to be trying to dismantle your faith, but I am going to be bursting some bubbles if you have believed in some of the myths about early and medieval Christianity or about Christianity in general.

And so you will learn in this class what Christianity is and what it is not.

Now you might be thinking, depending on the tradition or the angle that you're coming from, you might be thinking, well, wait a minute, aren't we supposed to critique the tradition?

Well, not really.

We are supposed to critically analyze everything.

And so we will critically analyze the tradition.

Now, In some classes that you will take, you probably will critique the tradition.

But in this class, you're going to start by critiquing the critique.

In other words, you have to learn the tradition with an open mind before you can ever critique it.

So if eventually you get around to critiquing the tradition, at least you will know what you're critiquing from this class.

And so we will accept neither an uncritical acceptance of tradition for the sake of tradition, nor an uncritical acceptance of all the critiques of tradition that come from atheist and secular and skeptical sources.

So this is where we are.

We're going to be learning the tradition of the church.

But I want to be very clear.

The early and medieval church is everyone's tradition.

It belongs to all of us, no matter what expression of Christianity we belong to, no matter what denomination or tradition or communion we're in.

The early and medieval church is everyone's tradition.

And it's also no one's tradition.

It belongs to all of us, but no one owns it.

It is our common tradition.

And I hope that when you read the primary sources that you will see your faith In the face of the early and medieval Christians.

But don't be too quick to see your face in the faces of the early Christians.

Because in terms of what we now call race or ethnicity or culture, they were not like any of us.

And so when we look at the early and medieval church, we are looking at what we might call the trunk of the family tree.

Let's say the roots of the tree are Judaism, and then we've got the trunk of the family tree, the early church, the medieval church, before it branches out.

The trunk of the family tree belongs to all of us, no matter what branch we live on now.

But at the same time, they exist in a different culture and a different worldview, and we have to learn to see them on their own terms and to get behind our own modern assumptions and read their documents in a way that is charitable and in a way that is open-minded to their worldview.

On that note, if you've ever done any reading, especially in the early church, you may have seen a kind of dichotomy between Eastern and Western Christianity.

And I've given you a map in your course pack to show you where the dividing line is between Eastern and Western Christianity, so that when we talk about the East versus the West, you'll know what we mean.

But I want to say up front that that dichotomy is way overplayed.

And the earlier you are in the history of the church, the less it matters, partly because a lot of the best Western theologians were from the East or traveled to the East.

And there is communication between the East and West.

And so in a very real sense, the early church is global Christianity, at least for the known world at that time.

Like no other time in history and, you know, again until about the fifth century or so, many of the best theologians of the West were from the East.

Many of the best Western theologians had studied in the East.

And so the point I want to make here is Christianity is not a Western religion.

Christianity is An Eastern or Middle Eastern religion that migrated West.

Now, when you get to the Middle Ages, there are, at that time, more specifically Western expressions of Christianity.

And because we currently live in the West and our context is in a large part informed by the West, we're probably going to focus more on the West once we get to the Middle Ages.

But that's really only the last couple of weeks of the course.

For the most part, We are in a world that is really interesting because you've got the global language of Greek and then the developing global language of Latin, thanks to the Roman Empire.

And so, like no other time in history, Christianity is a global religion.

So, keep that in mind.

Finally, before I close, I want to define a few terms that we're going to be using throughout this course.

The first one is the word mainstream.

Now first of all, don't confuse this with mainline.

The word mainline refers to modern, usually the larger Protestant denominations.

So a mainline denomination would be like the Methodists or the Lutherans or the Presbyterians.

That is not what we're talking about because of course everything in this course takes place before the Protestant Reformation.

So there are no Protestants yet.

I'm using the word mainstream, and the mainstream church is the majority of the church.

It is the church for whom the early theologians and bishops are speaking when they articulate the consensus on doctrinal matters and interpretations.

The mainstream is, for the most part, the majority.

And so there will be times when we will talk about factions or other groups on the fringes of the church, but there is a mainstream Christianity in every era of the church's existence.

There are some who will say that this is not true, that there were many Christianities.

That's one of the myths we'll be busting in this course.

There really is a mainstream church, capital C, a universal church, In every era of the church's existence.

We're going to see what that looks like in each of these eras.

So the mainstream church means the universal church in whatever century we're talking about.

Now the word orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy, usually with a capital O, refers to the traditions or expressions of Christianity in the East.

So you've got the Greek Orthodox, the Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox.

Again, these are more modern distinctions, and it's usually not what we're talking about in our class.

When I use the word orthodox or orthodoxy, usually with a small o unless it's at the beginning of a sentence, orthodoxy means correct doctrine.

It is a compound Greek word that actually means correct praise, but we use it to mean correct doctrine as opposed to incorrect doctrine.

And yes, There is such a thing as correct doctrine and incorrect doctrine, right?

And so orthodoxy means correct doctrine.

Orthodoxy is the noun.

Orthodox is, without the Y on the end, is usually an adjective.

So we would say orthodox theology means correct doctrine, or we would say orthodoxy is a good thing, right?

As opposed to orthodoxy, there is this word heresy.

Now, This is another Greek word, and it basically means to sort of go off on a tangent, to stray away from the straight and narrow, which is precisely the point, right?

Because if there is a mainstream church in every era of the church's existence, and there is, heresy is that which deviates from the mainstream.

So we're not making a value judgment on those who accept or teach heresy, but we are saying that their doctrine is incorrect in relationship to or in comparison to the mainstream.

So the mainstream is where orthodoxy is.

Heresy is where something that isn't orthodoxy is.

So heresy is the noun.

The adjective would be heretical.

Heretical theology is incorrect doctrine.

And the word heretic is used to describe someone who teaches a heresy.

Now, to be clear, just being wrong about something or even believing the wrong thing doesn't really make you a heretic.

A heretic is someone who is teaching an incorrect doctrine and who is confronted by the mainstream church, by some authority in the mainstream church, and who then rejects that authority and continues teaching the incorrect doctrine because they're then leading people astray and away from the mainstream.

That's who a heretic is.

And by the way, no one is getting executed for heresy in the early or medieval church during the time period of our course.

If you've heard about people being burned at the stake for heresy, well, unfortunately that happened, but it happens later.

It's outside the scope of our course.

So no one's getting killed for heresy.

The penalty for heresy is excommunication, and you'll see that as we go.

Finally, one more term that I want to define, the term Catholic.

Now, you may know that the word Catholic means universal, in the sense of the Catholic Church is the universal church, and that is correct.

So if you look in your Methodist hymnal, for example, and you see the Nicene Creed, and it says we believe in the Catholic Church, you'll see a small c, Catholic, and an asterisk, and it will say this means the universal church, and that is what it means.

However, from the very beginning, when Christians use the word Catholic to describe the Church, it has both an inclusive and an exclusive meaning at the same time.

The inclusive meaning is that this is the universal Church.

The Catholic Church is the universal Church.

But it's used in a sense that has an exclusive meaning as well, because it's used in order to say to the heretics, We are the Catholic Church and you are not.

So, in other words, to teach Orthodoxy is to be Catholic, to be in the Universal Church.

To teach heresy is to be outside of the boundaries of the Universal Church and to be something else, something that is not the Church.

And if all of that makes you think, well, why do we need those boundaries?

And even if we do need those boundaries, Who gets to decide where those boundaries are?

If that's what you're thinking, then this class is for you and welcome to it because that's exactly the kind of thing we're going to be talking about in History 1. One final note.

This is the textbook for the course.

It's called Reading the Church Fathers by me, published in 2022 by Sophia Institute Press.

This is the one you need.

So this is the textbook for the course.

And with that, I think we're ready to begin.

Welcome to History One, and I look forward to seeing you at our first Q&A. Hey, thanks for watching this video all the way to the end.

I really appreciate that.

Please share this video with your friends.

And please join me in the original church community on Locals.com.

Don't forget that if you join the original church community on Locals.com,

you can join me each week for a live, in-depth, chronological Bible study.

It's livestreamed every Saturday, but you can watch it later if you're not available.

So join me for that, and I'll see you there.

I hope to see you there.

I hope to see you there.

And I'll see you there.