The Rest of the Old Old Story

Today I was asked:

When did the Roman Catholic church appear as it is today?

Here’s my answer:

When the Roman Catholic Church appeared “as it is today” depends on what is meant by “as it is today.”

The first pope who had the kind of power that the popes had in medieval times (and wish they had today) was Pope Gregory the Great (pope from 590 to 604). The eastern “catholic” churches have never acknowledged the authority of the pope, not at any time in history.

Prior to Gregory, there was a buildup of power. Stephen of Rome is probably the first to claim that he had the right to tell other bishops what to do. He was pope around A.D. 250. No other bishop acknowledged that right, however. In fact, the great bishop Cyprian of Carthage (known as St. Cyprian to the Catholic Church) held a council of 87 north African bishops to specifically reject Stephen’s claim.

By the time of the Council of Nicea, A.D. 325, the pope had authority over the churches of Italy. The bishops of Alexandria and Antioch had similar widespread authority, and Canon 6 of Nicea acknowledges this and lends the council’s approval to that authority.

During the fourth century, after the Council of Nicea, Rome was the place to run for bishops being persecuted by Constantius, the emperor Constantine’s sun. That made the church in Rome even more important than it already was.

In the fifth century, the western half of the Roman empire fell. The bishop of Rome was the only important bishop with authority over a large area that was in the western half of the empire. Slowly, through the late fifth and sixth centuries, the bishop gained more and more secular and spiritual authority among the conquerors of Rome, the barbarians known as the Gauls, Franks, and Goths. This is how Pope Gregory gained authority over all of Europe, which the popes maintained (with greater or lesser success) throughout the Middle Ages until the Reformation.

The best source for this history is actually a Catholic historian. He has a teaching series on the medieval papacy that is put out by the Institute for Catholic Culture. The history he teaches is remarkably honest. His name is Dr. Brendon McGuire, and you can get his history of the papacy recording at http://instituteofcatholicculture.org/media.htm#medieval for free. He’s pretty interesting to listen to.

I got a question by email today that I think fits perfectly with what I’ve been discussing on this blog. The question reads like this:

Another question that I have had is, after studying early church history what denomination or church today do you think comes closest to what early Christians believed?

Here was my answer:

I think the existence of a denomination completely undoes what the early Christians believed, so I can’t pick a best one.

The church has several purposes. It is the gathering of those Jesus loves, who will eventually become his bride. It is the place where Jesus reigns on the earth, and thus it demonstrates to the world what the eternal kingdom of God will be like. That is why our love for one another and our unity are said to be the way the world will know that both we and Jesus himself are of God (Jn. 13:34-35; 17:20-23).

The church is also the place where we are able to grow together into Jesus’ image and learn the righteousness of God. Most Christians don’t understand the danger of having our own righteousness and how able we are to be deceived in such matters (Heb. 3:13). Our righteousness can easily turn into the Pharisees’ righteousness, and the Pharisees infuriated Jesus (and thus his Father as well). We don’t want to be like them, trying to be holy but infuriating God in the process!

Thus, I don’t care whether a worship service is liturgical, loud, quiet, or in what order it is. I look at fruit, like Jesus said to do (Matt. 7:15 or around there). Where are Christians loving one another, building one another up, and admonishing one another? There, the truth of God will descend, and if those Christians will continue together, they will grow together.

I join myself to those Christians. I don’t join myself to their meeting. I join myself to them. I become their friend, and I spend as much time as possible with them. Chances are, I will meet with them, too, no matter how good or bad their meetings are.

1900 years ago, it would have been much easier. I could also have had a meeting where the Lord’s Supper was properly understood and happened weekly. I could have found everything I describe above and had such a meeting. Today, it’s not so easy.

In the end, though, the most important thing is the fruit I describe above, and it is hard to say where you will find that. When I go to a new town, which I have done a lot, I ask God to guide me to people that I can have that kind of fellowship with.

More responses to the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article, Teaching Authority and Living Magisterium.

Definition of "magisterium" from yesterday’s post:

The magisterium is the self-assigned and self-acknowledged “teaching authority” of the Roman Catholic Church. It’s a reference to whatever authority gets to decide what is true teaching. For Protestants, then, the magisterium is the Bible, though it’s not a very successful teaching authority because Protestants feel free to interpret it any way they want, even if the interpretations are ridiculous and embarrassing. For Roman Catholics, taken to its logical conclusion, the magisterium is the pope or a dogmatic council.

Today’s post will focus almost exclusively on some points on which I believe the Catholic Encyclopedia article is correct.

The Oral Teachings of the Apostles

And as He preached Himself so He sent His Apostles to preach; He did not commission them to write but to teach, and it was by oral teaching and preaching that they instructed the nations and brought them to the Faith. If some of them wrote and did so under Divine inspiration it is manifest that this was as it were incidentally. They did not write for the sake of writing, but to supplement their oral teaching when they could not go themselves to recall or explain it, to solve practical questions, etc. St. Paul, who of all the Apostles wrote the most, did not dream of writing everything nor of replacing his oral teaching by his writings.

I’m not sure how to add to this. You either believe what they say here or you don’t. Personally, I think this is undeniable, quite obviously true.

Paul wrote but 13 letters to seven churches. A lot of those letters didn’t make it to other churches, though some did. Were those letters really Paul’s entire Gospel and all he had to teach the churches? If so, why didn’t he leave writings behind for the church in Ephesus and the churches in Crete rather than leaving Timothy and Titus to train and instruct elders there?

The things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit those things to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. (2 Timothy 2:2)

Doesn’t that seem like Paul meant to leave oral teachings, committed to a few leading men chosen by Timothy, rather than leaving writings?

It’s not just the church in Ephesus, where he left Timothy, for whom he left oral teachings:

Therefore, brothers, stand fast and hold onto the traditions which you have been taught, whether by word or by our letter. (2 Thess. 2:15)

That seems to speak for itself. Take a look at Paul’s pleading with the elders in Ephesus, with whom he would never speak again, and see if you don’t agree that he’s leaving them oral teachings to pass on to the church while they take care of the church.

Interestingly enough, he’s doing that despite the fact that he knows that some of them are going to be corrupt.

The Oral Teachings of Roman Catholicism

Back to the Roman Catholic issue for a second. My complaint about the Roman Catholic Church is not that they claim that there is oral teaching handed down by the apostles. My problem with the RCC is that they have corrupted these oral teachings into an unscriptural mess that has produced corruption, tyranny, and a vast host of nominal, unconverted Christians.

The Protestants left Roman Catholicism because of this, but since they inherited the idea that the church could be a hierarchical organization from their RC predecessors, they have the same problem with a vast host of nominal, unconverted Christians, as well as the problems that result from that problem.

We need to find the oral teachings of the apostles from a reliable source. You cannot find any oral teachings of the apostles reliably from the RCC.

Finally, the same texts which show us Christ instituting His Church and the Apostles founding Churches and spreading Christ’s doctrine throughout the world show us at the same time the Church instituted as a teaching authority; the Apostles claimed for themselves this authority, sending others as they had been sent by Christ and as Christ had been sent by God, always with power to teach and to impose doctrine as well as to govern the Church and to baptize.

Excuse me? Teach and "impose" doctrine?

That’s exactly the problem. The RCC gives lip service to the fact that all tradition must have an apostolic source (see my Dec. 20 post), but it’s nothing but lip service.

A Reliable Source: The Real Church

The apostles imposed doctrine. The elders were to preserve it, and in a church that is a family made up of Christians—rather than an organization composed primarily of weekly visitors—there is no need to "impose" doctrine. All the members love the doctrine of the apostles and help preserve it.

The loss of that church is why the RCC also lost the oral teaching of the apostles.

Whoever believed them would be saved; whoever refused to believe them would be condemned. It is the living Church and not Scripture that St. Paul indicates as the pillar and the unshakable ground of truth.

This is true, but the living church is not the RCC. That is an organization that can never be the church nor serve as a fit vessel to hold the pure wine of Christ’s teaching, which was preserved first by the apostles and then afterward by the family of God and its elders.

God has given a promise to the family of God that it can be the pillar and unshakable ground of the truth. John explains how that happens in 1 John 2:27. The Anointing will lead the church—not individuals; all the yous in 1 Jn. 2:27 are plural—into all truth, and that Anointing will be reliable.

That Anointing will lead them to understand the Scriptures—which are the writings of the apostles—correctly, and that Anointing will lead them to understand the writings of the early churches—which bear witness to the oral teachings of the apostles.

But understand, the purpose of the Scriptures is not to resolve doctrinal disputes on unimportant matters. The purpose of the Scriptures is for the correction of our behavior so that we may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (1 Tim. 1:5-7; 2 Tim. 3:16-17). Those who don’t know this swerve aside, says the KJV, into "vain jangling."

More responses to the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article, Teaching Authority and Living Magisterium.

Definition of "magisterium" from yesterday’s post:

The magisterium is the self-assigned and self-acknowledged “teaching authority” of the Roman Catholic Church. It’s a reference to whatever authority gets to decide what is true teaching. For Protestants, then, the magisterium is the Bible, though it’s not a very successful teaching authority because Protestants feel free to interpret it any way they want, even if the interpretations are ridiculous and embarrassing. For Roman Catholics, taken to its logical conclusion, the magisterium is the pope or a dogmatic council.

A good portion of that article is an attack on the Protestant’s rejection of the Roman Catholic magisterium. Some of it is good; some bad. It’s the arguments against the Protestant position of Sola Scriptura that I think we need to pay attention to and consider. History establishes that returning to Roman Catholicism is worse than the present situation, but can we not improve on the present situation?

In a similar way they show that they cannot dispense with a teaching authority, a Divinely authorized living magistracy for the solution of controversies arising among themselves and of which the Bible itself was often the occasion. Indeed experience proved that each man found in the Bible his own ideas … The exercise of free inquiry with regard to Biblical texts led to endless disputes, to doctrinal anarchy, and eventually to the denial of all dogma.

We can’t deny that each man interpreting the Bible, the Protestant "magisterium," for himself has led to endless disputes and to doctrinal anarchy.

Protestants have denied all dogma, however. They have simply extended the right to dictate dogma to thousands of competing denominations.

Hence the necessity of a competent authority to solve controversies and interpret the Bible.

The Protestants have either given this authority to their denominations, to some chosen teacher, or to themselves.

The question is, what’s the alternative? As we saw in yesterday’s post, and is amply explained by John Calvin in his letter to Cardinal Sadolet, Protestants found it impossible to leave that authority in the hands of the unspeakably corrupt 16th century Roman Catholic Church. Anything was better than that, including "endless disputes" and "doctrinal anarchy."

[The Roman Catholic] position was amply justified when the Protestants began compromising themselves with the civil power, rejecting the doctrinal authority of the ecclesiastical magisterium only to fall under that of princes.

Wow. If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black. This doesn’t even have much to do with today’s post, but it was so hypocritical as to be shocking. I don’t even know how to respond! I had to include it while I was quoting.

Moreover it was enough to look at the Bible, to read it without prejudice to see that the economy of the Christian preaching was above all one of oral teaching. Christ preached, He did not write. In His preaching He appealed to the Bible, but He was not satisfied with the mere reading of it, He explained and interpreted it, He made use of it in His teaching, but He did not substitute it for His teaching. There is the example of the mysterious traveller who explained to the disciples of Emmaus what had reference to Him in the Scriptures to convince them that Christ had to suffer and thus enter into His glory.

This is all true, but what they’re forgetting here is that the Roman Catholic Church hasn’t preserved any of the apostles’ oral teaching! Or if they have, it’s so mixed up in the midst of invented nonsense that it can’t be found. Things like bowing to statues, Mary being the queen of heaven (see yesterday’s post for the dogmatic pronouncement of the RCC that this is so), the worship of the bread of the Lord’s Supper rather than the true oral teaching of the real presence, and the creation of an ecclesiastical organization with powers so far beyond any thing apostolic that they can rightly be described as bizarre, superstitious, and despotic.

Having stated that I don’t believe the RCC has any oral apostolic teaching to pass on to us, the question remains as to whether we need it and where we would find it if we did.

The Catholic Encyclopedia has rightly pointed out the confusion and disputes in Protestant Churches. This blog is often devoted to pointing out how badly Protestant Churches are misinterpreting Scripture; so badly, in fact, that most can be accused of not believing it at all, preferring their tradition even when Scripture clearly refutes it.

I think we have to do something, and finding the oral teaching of the apostles to the churches they formed seems like an excellent solution if that oral teaching can be found.

Many people agree with me, which is why there is such a revival of reading the early Christian writings among Protestants today.

The problem is, listening to those writings and to their teachings would rip apart the entire fabric of Protestant Christianity (just as it would rip apart the entire fabric of Roman Catholic Christianity).

To me, the primary problematic issue is that the oral teaching of the apostles highlights the clearly Biblical teaching that the church is supposed to consist of committed Christians who know each other intimately. Such a church can cleanse itself of leaven, as commanded in 1 Cor. 5, by putting out not only the adulterers and immoral, but even the greedy.

The problem is, if we did that, we’d lose at least half our Protestant members and probably more like 80 to 90% of them, thus depriving most pastors and church staff of a job.

If course if the 10% to 20% left, became part of one another’s lives, and formed Biblical churches, then the pastors and church staff could keep their jobs by either evangelizing or tickling the ears of the 80 to 90% that are left.

That sounds shocking, but at this point millions of people agree with me. George Barna, in his book Revolution, argues that up to 20 million Christians have left organized churches to seek the very sort of fellowship I’m talking about.

The bad news is that even most of those don’t really want God intervening in their personal lives, and working out unity by the power of the Holy Spirit is an undertaking that requires immense self-denial that most people are not willing to give. (Think of it like marriage. It sounds great when you’re courting, but give it some time, and those that are not willing to make significant sacrifices will fail.)

Enough for today. More tomorrow.

I had never heard of the "magisterium"until I read The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. He uses it to refer to the authorities of the church in his trilogy, which was written specifically as an attack on Christianity. (As usual, it utterly fails as an attack on the real Gospel of Jesus Christ because even all atheist authors unconsciously acknowledge a divine guiding hand behind all the events in their novels.)

The magisterium is the self-assigned and self-acknowledged "teaching authority" of the Roman Catholic Church. It’s a reference to whatever authority gets to decide what is true teaching. For Protestants, then, the magisterium is the Bible, though it’s not a very successful teaching authority because Protestants feel free to interpret it any way they want, even if the interpretations are ridiculous and embarrassing. For Roman Catholics, taken to its logical conclusion, the magisterium is the pope or a dogmatic council.

Protestants don’t use the word "magisterium," which is why many of you will never have heard it. So for the definition, I went to the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article entitled Tradition and Living Magisterium. Their page prompted me to add a section to my history page on apostolic tradition.

It also prompted me to write this post.

This post is a refutation of things they say on their page, but the purpose is to teach some history that Christians need to be familiar with. I don’t mind refuting the grandiose and false claims of the Roman Catholic Church, but that is not the purpose of this post.

The Protestant Reformation: Over Doctrine or Over Church Authority?

The encyclopedia writes:

Luther’s attacks on the Church were at first directed only against doctrinal details, but the very authority of the Church was involved in the dispute, and this soon became evident to both sides.

This is an overly simplistic interpretation of what happened which hides the intrigue involved in the authority of the church becoming "evident" to Martin Luther.

Initially Martin Luther’s protest was only against the financial rape of the citizens of Germany by a huckster named John Tetzel. Luther was horrified that Tetzel was representing the church that he loved and of which he was a part. He was certain that the pope would be as horrified as he was.

So Luther posted 95 theses on the door of the cathedral at Wittenberg. These were an invitation to public debate and discussion about Tetzel’s activities.

What John Tetzel was doing was selling indulgences. These are "supererogatory merits" of Jesus and the saints that the pope and the Roman Catholic Church have stewardship of. In other words, Jesus and many of the saints did more good works than they needed, so their leftover works are in the custody of the pope to bestow on others who might need them to limit their time in Purgatory, the temporary place of suffering that the RCC says atones for sins that are not worthy of hell.

Yes, it’s ridiculous to the point of embarassment, but I’m not making it up.

Tetzel was selling these indulgences in order to collect money to build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Tetzel was good at it. By threatening the superstitious peasants with the flames of purgatory and insisting that their departed mothers and grandmothers were burning there, they would collect the peasants’ last pennies to supplement the riches of Rome.

Luther, rightly horrified, and almost certainly with the permission of his superiors at the monastery, tried to put a stop to it by calling for a public discussion.

As I said, he was certain that the pope agreed with him. Thesis 50 states:

Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter’s church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep.

Thesis 51 states:

Christians are to be taught that it would be the pope’s wish, as it is his duty, to give of his own money to very many of those from whom certain hawkers of pardons cajole money, even though the church of St. Peter might have to be sold.

Thesis 53 states:

They are enemies of Christ and of the pope, who bid the Word of God be altogether silent in some Churches, in order that pardons may be preached in others.

Every one of the 95 theses deals with the selling of indulgences, just as these three do. And Martin Luther, who may not have known that the pope would be on his side, certainly expected that a righteous pope would agree with him. He had no idea that "the very authority of the Church was involved in the dispute."

The pope at the time, however, was not concerned with the poor, and he certainly would not have given to the German peasants while St. Peter’s Basilica went to ashes. He was furious that the preaching of one German monk was stopping the sales of a phone deliverance from Purgatory.

So he sent a brilliant debater, Johannes Eck, to put an end to Luther’s arguments in front of a council of church leaders and German lords.

Eck was brilliant, and he knew that arguing positively for the extortion of the poor was not going to go over well in a Germany that had been prepped by Luther’s preaching. Instead, he turned the debate around. He did some research, found the councils that lent authority to indulgences and the sale of indulgences, and accused Luther of rebelling against the authority of the church.

Eck skillfully brought the debate to a turning point. Either Luther would acknowledge that indulgences could be sold without restraint in Germany, no matter how much the poor were scalped, or he was denying the authority of the councils and the pope.

Luther not only took the bait, but he swallowed the hook, line, sinker, pole, Johannes Eck, and the entire Roman Catholic Church. He turned himself completely around, gave up his support of the pope and of the Roman Catholic Church, and pronounced them to be doers of evil.

This is the real way that it "became evident" to Luther that the authority of the church was on the line. It was forced upon him by Johannes Eck and a council of ecclesiastical leaders. Support the extortion of the poor or deny the authority of the church. Those are your only choices.

I’ve used a thousand words already. Let’s address the other issues I want to address from the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the magisterium tomorrow.

I got carried away and wrote a long email to a young man who wrote me. It covers evolution, church history, the apostles, the Word of God, the Scriptures, the Gospel, and what is central to Christianity.

I hate to see it simply languish in my sent folder, so here goes:

All Bible quotes in this post are from the NASB.

You wrote:>>Either you believe everything in the Bible is the inspired Word of God, being completely true, and that it is the standard for which Christians should live their lives, or you don’t.<<

To me you just made two statements, not one. The first, if I'm understanding your meaning correctly, is that the Bible is completely accurate historically and scientifically. That's a bit more narrow of a definition than "completely true."

Is the Bible “Completely True”?

There is no denying that I don’t believe the Bible is completely accurate historically or scientifically. I don’t believe the world is set on pillars (1 Sam. 2:8). I don’t believe that the sky is as hard as a metal mirror (Job 37:18). I believe that the earth moves, even though Psalm 93:1 says it doesn’t.

Of course, everyone–including you, your pastor, and everyone else you know–agrees with me on the three things I just listed. Oh, they have their excuses as to why that’s different than doubting the exact scientific accuracy of Genesis 1, but it all looks the same to me.

Do we really believe that God made plants before there was a sun? Do we really believe that there is a tree that if you eat from it, you’ll have eternal life whether God wants you to have it or not? That’s certainly what the story of the Garden of Eden suggests. God had to ban Adam … No, let’s not call him Adam. His name is Man. The Hebrew word Adam is used over 500 times in the Old Testament, and it is only translated Adam in the first few chapters of Genesis.

So, God had to ban Man and Life (Life was the name of Man’s wife) from the garden because if he didn’t, then Man would eat from the tree of life and live forever; apparently even if God didn’t want him to live forever!

Maybe that was meant to be an accurate description of the very first days of mankind, but I don’t believe that. And everyone I’ve read on the subject of how the Hebrews told stories agrees with me. To the Hebrews, “true” was not a matter of historically accurate. “True” had to do with whether it communicated truth.

I believe that the story of Man and Life not only communicates truth, but it communicates God’s truth. It’s not just a saying or a bit of human wisdom. It’s a message from God.

In that sense, I do believe that the Scriptures are completely true.

Is “scientifically and historically accurate” the correct definition of true? Well, that’s for you to decide, but I believe that is a modern, western definition that doesn’t apply very well to the Hebrew Scriptures. It was certainly not their mindset, according to every Hebrew scholar I’ve read.

Is the Bible our Standard

The other part of your statement was whether the Bible is “the standard for which Christians should live their lives.”

First, let me say that I definitely believe that the Bible is the standard for which Christians should test, though not necessarily live, their lives. If our lives disagree with the Scriptures, then we are in error. With that I completely agree, but the Scriptures teach us that we are to be led by the Spirit, not led by the Scriptures. The Scriptures can provide guidance, but we are to walk in the Spirit.

Today, we think the Bible is the center of the Christian faith.

I’m pretty certain that the apostles thought that Jesus Christ is the center of the Christian faith. I think they believed that the ultimate testimony of Christianity was that the Gospel they received from Jesus was “the power of God to salvation,” and that those who believed the Gospel received a real and powerful justification, becoming new creations.

Paul describes that concerning the Thessalonians:

“You became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. For the Word of the Lord has sounded forth from you, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith toward God has gone forth, so that we have no need to say anything” (1 Thess. 1:7-8).

The Scriptures talk about the Word of God growing three different times in Acts (6:7; 12:24; 19:20). We tend to equate the Scriptures and the Word of God, but the apostles didn’t. They believed the Word of God is either Jesus or the entire message of God, in whatever form it came. One major form is that the Word of God lives in us, planted like a seed. It can grow because as the number of disciples multiply, the Word of God grows.

We can say that the Scriptures are the standard by which we must live our lives, but could the apostles’ churches say that? I’ve read all the writings of the second century church, and I can tell you–along with the agreement of pretty much every Christian scholar you want to check–that the New Testament writings were not gathered together until about a hundred years after Jesus died.

And do you know how they gathered the New Testament writings?

They were not gathering “inspired” writings. They were not gathering “New Testament” writings. They were gathering the writings of apostles and men who accompanied the apostles. They wanted all and any they could find.

It was the apostles who were inspired, not just their writings. (For example, see 2 Thess. 2:15 and verses like 1 Cor. 11:2 and 14:37.) The New Covenant has never been about a book. It has been about God pouring out his Spirit on all flesh, bringing them into the church, and making of them a family that would glorify his name by their love for God, their love for each other, and their disdain for the things of the world.

Boxing up God, the Scriptures, and the Gospel

I’m so sorry, dear reader, that writing like this is so limited. Today we’ve boxed everything up and made everything nice and tidy.

God’s never been that way. He’s always left questions and things we don’t understand. He doesn’t care about our fitting his grand plan into our limited human minds. He cares about our trust and obedience. He wants us to know him, for eternal life is to know him, not to pass a test on his plan of salvation (Jn. 17:3).

The Original Faith

My goal is not to convince you of things, but to let you look at the faith that’s been handed to us. The original faith consisted of a firm trust that God sent Jesus, Jesus sent the apostles, and the apostles raised up churches to preserve the truth. Those churches all had a basic “rule of faith” to keep them on the straight and narrow. The Apostles Creed is a 4th century “rule of faith.”

When you read the writings of the 2nd century church, it’s such a glorious thing to see the purity of original Christianity. They held firm to the foundation that “The Lord knows those who are his, and let those who name the name of Christ depart from iniquity” (2 Tim. 2:19). They demanded that Christians accept the basic truths, the sort of things outlined in the Nicene Creed, but after that, “sound doctrine” was much more like what is described in Titus 2 than the sort of things we argue about today.

They honored those who lived holy lives. In fact, one early Christian said, “We don’t speak great things; we live them.”

When they defended Christianity, they spoke of the divinity of Christ’s teachings and how the Spirit of God empowered them to be delivered from greed and lust and to live lives of good conscience. Further, they stood gallantly during persecution, arguing that the bravery of the martyrs was proof of the power of the Spirit of God in the lives of Christians.

Misusing the Scriptures

I love the Scriptures. I hope, as you can see, that I study them thoroughly. I pattern my life after them, and I quote them in defense of all I say. If what I say can’t be found in the Scriptures, then what I say can be rightly rejected.

But we’ve done something awful with the Scriptures in the modern era. As I read today in a George MacDonald book, there are too many people who are “more desirous of understanding what they are supposed to understand than of doing what they are supposed to do.”

We argue and fight over doubtful matters. We make our determinations of what is true based on our intellectual interpretations of Scripture, when in fact Jesus (in Scripture) taught us to judge our teachers by their fruit and not by their confident interpretations (Matt. 7).

The Doctrine According to Godliness

We need to relearn the “doctrine according to godliness” as mentioned by Paul in 1 Tim. 6:3. Because our doctrine is according to intellect and argument, rather than according to godliness, we are what Paul describes in 1 Tim. 6:4-5:

He has a morbid interest in controversial questions and disputes about words, out of which arise envy, strife, abusive language, evil suspicions, and constant friction between men of depraved minds and deprived of the truth.

Let us set ourselves to obeying Jesus Christ and honoring him by our lives.

Evolution and Doubtful Disputes

I have a web site on evolution. That is not because I think that Christians need to take a position on evolution, nor because I want anyone at all to agree it’s true. What I want is that men who have boxed up the Word of God and wrapped a book cover around him do not splinter the church of God into fighting factions over doubtful subjects.

The mark of a Christian is not that he agrees that Genesis one is literal … nor that it’s not literal. The mark of a Christian is that by the power of the Spirit of God he obeys Jesus Christ, living a life marked by the love of God.

We have enough work achieving that goal, but modern Christians have forgotten that it is a goal. They have become confused into thinking that Christianity is a mere understanding of and assent to the atonement.

Salvation is not a plan; it’s a Man, the Lord Jesus Christ.

First of all, I mean no disrespect to an an excellent article by Dr. Edward Sri. I’m just using it as a push off to complain about how we avoid important issues.

There’s a lot of interesting points in Dr. Sri’s article, and I don’t disagree with any of them. His article is reverent and focused on practical spirituality. If there’s anything I support, it’s practical spirituality. He’s taking the Nicene Creed and talking about how it practically relates to Christians, in this case Roman Catholic Christians in particular.

Good for him. This post is not directed at him.

When are we going to tell people the more shocking news about the Council of Nicea? I cannot possibly be the only one who knows it!

No, I’m not talking about the nonsense Dan Brown put in The Da Vinci Code, which he got from the discredited books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Passover Plot.

What I am talking about is the wording "consubstantial," a translation of the Greek word homoousios. According to Dr. Sri, the Roman Catholics are changing the translation in the Nicene Creed from the previous "one in being."

It makes no difference to me which way they translate it. Either way, the reason that the Nicene bishops used the term homoousios is because they did not believe, as Dr. Sri put it, that the son was "a distinct divine person who has existed from all eternity." Well, at least not in the way we understand the phrase.

Christians of the second, third, and early fourth centuries universally applied Proverbs 8:22 to apply to the Son of God in the beginning. They read it in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and so they read it this way:

The Lord made me the beginning of his ways for his works.

To those early Christians, Jesus was "made" by the Father. They did not understand this to be "made" in the same sense that everything else was made. The difference between the Son and everything else is that all of creation was created from nothing. Not the Son. He was "made" from the substance of God, a process normally referred to by the church as being born or generated, not made.

To those early Christians, Jesus was quite literally the "Word" of God. To them, however, the Greek word Logos was a much bigger word than "Word." It could be translated reason, mind, or thought to them as well. In fact, here’s a very interesting description of logos by Tertullian, who wrote very early in the third century:

Observe, then, that when you are silently conversing with yourself, this very process is carried on within you by your reason, which meets you with a word at every movement of your thought … Whatever you think, there is a word … You must speak it in your mind …
     Thus, in a certain sense, the word is a second person within you, through which in thinking you utter speech … The word is itself a different thing from yourself. Now how much more fully is all this transacted in God, whose image and likeness you are? (Against Praxeas 5)

To those early Christians, the Son of God was originally only the Logos of God, that "voice" inside of God. He was not the Son until, sometime before he created everything, God "made me the beginning of his ways for his works."

Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, the apostle Paul’s home church wrote the following just a century after Paul died:

What else is this voice but the Logos of God, who is also his Son? (To Autolycus II:22)

Theophilus adds:

This is what the holy Scriptures teach us … John says, "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God," showing that at first God was alone, and the Logos was in him. (ibid.)

There was a time—though before time was created—according to the early Christians, that the Son was inside the father, not yet begotten or generated or made. What word you used for what happened didn’t matter because the generation of the Son was beyond anything that man can understand.

Arius changed all that. He made terminology important. When Arius came along, he argued that the Son had not existed prior to his creation by God, and thus the Council banned the terminology "made," even though it’s used in Proverbs 8:22.

This we all know, but what we aren’t told is that the Council of Nicea did not argue in return that the Son had always existed as a distinct person. They argued that the beginning of his existence as a distinct person was not a creation from nothing but the generation of the Logos from inside of the Father. He was, literally, a Son—"begotten, not made."

Do not let anyone think it is ridiculous that God should have a Son … The Son of God is the Word of the Father. (Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 10; A.D. 177)

Just to drive the point home, let me point out that Athenagoras also said:

He is the first product of the Father, not as though he was being brought into existence, for from the beginning God … had the Logos in himself. (ibid.)

We can change the translation of homoousios from "one in being" to "consubstantial," and, as Dr. Sri suggests, it may be a good thing. I really think, however, that someone needs to tell modern Christians what ancient Christians meant by homoousios, which is that the Son was birthed, before the beginning, from out of God, and that he was not always a distinct person. There was a time when God was alone, and the Logos was still inside of him.

Note: Starting with the training school at Alexandria, a teaching began to arise that anything that happened before the beginning must have happened before time was created. Since time was not yet created, then whatever happened before the beginning had always happened. Thus, there had never been, according to the school at Alexandria, a "time" when the Son was not yet generated. The school at Alexandria was highly influential in the fourth century. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that a number of the bishops at Nicea would have concurred that there wasn’t actually ever a time when the Son was still inside the Father. That does not, however, change the meaning of the Greek word homoousios in the Nicene Creed.

There’s more information and more quotes at Christian History for Everyman, and there’s even more in my book, In the Beginning Was the Logos.

I was reading yesterday’s post at The Failed Atheist. I listened to the video on it, and I simply must repost it here.

This is a liberal, non-Christian, pro-gnostic scholar—Bart Ehrman—who really irritates me. In this case, however, I think “The Infidel Guy” was shocked to find out that his anti-fundamentalist-Christian guest thinks that only the ignorant deny the historicity of Jesus.

I’ve got more comments below, but here’s the video (which is really only audio):

The main point of the video is obvious. Bart Ehrman gives some examples of why we can be confident that Jesus was a historical figure. The Infidel Guy’s only response is basically, “Can’t we just doubt everything we don’t like?”

Embarrassing.

There’s a couple more things I should mention that are mentioned in the interview.

“Jesus Christ” doesn’t mean something put together like that, if by “mean” we are implying that there’s some Hebrew definition for Jesus Christ. Jesus is a name. Yes, it has a meaning, but it’s a name. Christ is a title. It’s the Greek word for “anointed one,” but in the context of the New Testament, it basically means king. It means God’s chosen king for his chosen people, but it mostly means king.

In this interview, Bart Ehrman is being a good historian in the matter of whether Jesus existed. The fact is that Paul’s letters, the existence of Christians in Rome under Nero in the AD 60′s, the utter consistency of early Christian letters and drawings, and numerous other things that constitute the “whole tenor” of history make it clear that one ought to trust who the Christians said Jesus was, at least in the matter of being a crucified Jewish prophet.

But on other things, he shows the stubbornness of so many people. He tells Infidel Guy that no serious historian questions the existence of a person Jesus. The Infidel Guy gives him Robert M. Price. It takes Ehrman a significant amount of time to admit he knows of him, and in fact has had correspondence with him. The Infidel Guy points out that Robert Price is a serious historian, Ehrman questions him. The Infidel Guy says he’s a professor; Ehrman insists he doesn’t teach anywhere.

Price is the professor of theological and scriptural studies at Colemon Theological Seminary. It appears to me that institution is probably not accredited, but he is teaching. Price used to be at another similar institution which offered undergraduate courses that were accredited, so he has taught.

The fact is, Ehrman went too far when he said no serious scholar questions the historicity of the person Jesus. People are people, and even “experts” are moved by their biases. You can find legitimately qualified experts denying the obvious in any field of inquiry.

For me, though, it’s like what Jesus said about faithfulness. He who is honest in little things will be honest in big things. If you can’t be honest with the little things, you’re going to miss the evidences that will prevent you from building a house of cards in whatever areas you are studying.

Note: This post ignores all the questions about what the body of Christ is. This applies whether you’re including everyone who claims to be Christian and all churches that claim to be churches or not.

Further note: While most of the details of this post are still accurate, I actually have Blastic Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cell Neoplasm (that link’s to my explanation of the disease), a particularly rare and aggressive lymphoma.

I’ve got a larger army of immune cells than you do. In fact, I probably have almost double the amount of those microscopic disease-destroying cells than you do.

And my cells are bigger than your cells.

What an army!

They’re killing me.

Those large cells are useless against the viruses they’re supposed to be fighting. They look impressive, so large and out in such intimidating numbers. But they have a couple of big problems.

They’re from the wrong source. My lymphocytes, the virus-fighting cells of the immune system, are all clones of one another. They did not come from the proper source, being made anew by my bone marrow. They have gotten their DNA–their programming and their growth–from one rogue cell, and they just march on … unchanged and unchanging.

They’re useless against the real enemies. Because they’re abnormal, they can’t recognize or kill viruses. They just tour my blood stream, looking impressive.

They’re crowding out everything else. These cells don’t like other cells being around. Neutrophils are smaller cells that fight bacteria. My blood has antibodies to destroy neutrophils. Apparently, only viruses are the real enemy now, and my white blood cell army only pretends to fight those.

Platelets are blood cells that thicken blood and join together to stop bleeding. My blood has antibodies that kill platelets. But what’s probably worst of all, that army of massive, mutant lymphocytes is crowding out the only cells that can really give life: the red blood cells. I have only 70% as many as I had 9 months ago when I was healthy.

The Body of Christ

This post isn’t about me. My problems are sent from God to open doors for ministry and to help me live by the only real life there is, that spiritual life from God which is fed to us by the blood of Jesus Christ.

But there are so many accurate analogies between my body and the body of Christ that it’s not funny. In fact, it’s scary.

Currently, the body of Christ has lots of people running around defending it. They’re large, and they are numerous. Their targets include works in any form as part of the Gospel, anything that doesn’t come from the Bible (and, in fact, anything which doesn’t come from their interpretation of the Bible), evolution and anything else they don’t agree with from science (like the earth going around the sun?), and homosexual marriage among non-Christians.

Their power is to defend a system that provides weekly speeches by professionals, a mix of professional and amateur musicians to lead singing, and a school with a few teaching positions for particularly gifted laymen. By and large, though, it’s a very small percentage of Christians that have an active role, or even an opportunity for an active role, in the system we have today.

So why does a system that is so clearly unscriptural and ineffective survive and thrive from year to year, decade to decade, and generation to generation?

Because the multitude of giant but mutant defenders of the faith are too busy opposing the works that Paul said Christians must maintain (Tit. 3:8), that Jesus died for (Tit. 2:13-14), and that James said are required for salvation (Jam. 2:14-26) to take on the real enemies of the faith.

In the meantime, the voices of true defenders of the faith are drowned out by the multitude of shouts of the cloned mutant giants. With warnings and threats, they have raised up an army of passive, ignorant, and superstitious Christians functioning as antibodies to drive out all other disease-fighting parts of the body of Christ.

The ability to fight invaders, the ability to stop the bleeding, the recognition of the real enemies, and, above all, the flow of life from the real blood of Christ are stifled.

We’re killing ourselves, led by the multitude of cloned mutant giants.

A Brief Addition on the Blood of Christ

The real blood of Christ is life-giving!

Let me tell you about the incredible difference between having life-giving red blood cells coursing through your veins and having those same cells crowded out by mutant, giant, cloned, and ineffective white blood cells, possessing no life in themselves.

In 2006, I ran a 31-mile course on a small mountain near Huntsville, AL. One of the loops, which we ran (well, mostly walked; it was littered with big rocks covered by leaves) 3 times, had a steep hill at the end of it. I ran up it the first time, but by the 3rd time around, I was happy to walk the quarter-mile or so, breathing hard at the top, loving the feel of the mountain air, and feeling alive with the trees around me.

When I got home my legs were so sore that I stopped in front of the porch to plan how to get up the two steps so I could go in the house.

But I was charged with energy; thrilled with my success; delighted with life.

I’m living in an RV right now, and without running any miles, some days I breathe hard after I climb its two steps to get inside. My legs aren’t sore, so I don’t have to plan how to climb those steps. My energy wanes regularly, and I’m thrilled with life only because I choose to be.

Friends, that’s what traditional Christianity is doing to you!!!

Can you understand that’s why John says that if you don’t keep Christ’s commands, you don’t know God?! (1 Jn. 2:3-4).

John was angry at "those who are trying to seduce you" (1 Jn. 2:27) because they were robbing the people of God of life. They were teaching the people of God to fight the wrong things.

Seeing the Problem

You can’t see my disease. If you walked in my office to see me doing barbell rows (yeah, I keep a barbell in my office) or to see me on the floor doing twists to keep my back from going out, you would think I was a normal, healthy individual.

Well, okay, you probably wouldn’t think I was normal.

It’s not until you ask me to function that you’d see something was wrong. I wouldn’t be able to keep up with you in a soccer game. If we work on a carpentry project all morning, it wouldn’t take long for you to notice that I’m resting a lot and that I don’t look right.

It’s starting to show in other ways, too. I’m growing my third plum-covered bump on my torso as of yesterday. That’s the product of my body attacking itself, my immune system doing damage to perfectly good tissue.

Are you catching the analogy?

Have you seen the plum-colored bumps on the body of Christ? Have you seen those clusters of damaged people, beat up and rejected by an immune system run wild and led by the cloned mutant giants?

The mutant giants want you to pay attention to all the good flesh. The parts of the body they have not yet damaged.

That’s as stupid as my pointing out that I can still walk many miles as long as I don’t get too fast while ignoring the massive drop in energy and endurance I’ve experienced. That’s as stupid as my ignoring an inch-and-a-half wide raised purple bump on my back and the two that have come after it. (I have to be honest and admit I ignored the bumps for weeks until the drop in energy became obvious and a friend ordered me to go to the doctor.)

Leukemia’s an excellent picture of what’s happening to the body of Christ.

Correcting the Problem

Thank you to the West Clinic in Corinth, MS and to the men and women who have devoted their lives to healing people like me.

But who’s devoted their life to healing the body of Christ? And are they gathered together in one clinic, reviewing each other’s work, and helping each other to work toward one common goal? Do they know what that goal is?

The people who are fighting Leukemia are studying. They’re researching. They’re learning all the time. They’re looking at the problem and discussing it.

But before they ever began, they made sure they knew how a healthy body is supposed to work, at least as well as humanly possible. They went to college, and they got in a degree in some medical field.

But Christians can’t just go to college. Too many Bible colleges have studied the modern body, riddled with diseases. They don’t know what a healthy body is like.

Am I being judgmental?

I don’t think so. I think it’s bizarre that we would read that the early Christians devoted themselves every day to the apostles teaching, to the breaking of bread and to fellowship, and that we would ignore the fact that we don’t even encourage daily fellowship.

I think it’s bizarre that the book of Acts would say that the early Christians had all things in common, and that we would claim that was only in Jerusalem without doing any research to see if that’s so.

I think it’s bizarre that the earliest church manual in existence says we ought to seek out the faces of the saints every day and be prepared to share everything with them, and we would act like tithing (Of all the laws that we could drag into the church from the Old Testament, why that one?) at a weekly speech to support a professional staff and a building is the same thing. Good grief, that’s morally reprehensible.

I think it’s bizarre that Justin in the mid-2nd century could talk about living familiarly with one another and Tertullian in the early-3rd century could talk about sharing everything except our wives, and that we would ignore what was obviously the normal Christian life of the 1st and 2nd centuries.

We’re diseased, friends!

No wonder we marvel at John’s statement that those who are born of God do not sin. We rightly point out that the Greek of that verse means something to the effect of “continually sin,” but that doesn’t change the fact that, really, we don’t understand the grace that takes away sin’s power any more than I can understand the endurance that would have allowed me to run the 10K I was scheduled to run with my secretary.

Help! Is there a doctor in the house?

The last post, dealing with the Nephilim of Genesis 6, ended up touching on both the creation story and on modern doctrines versus the early traditions of the church.

So, while we’re transitioning towards tradition, let’s discuss Roman Catholicism.

I got a newsletter for the Christian history section of Christianity Today that included this article on Pope Benedict XIV. It begins:

By decree on this day June 13, 1757, Pope Benedict XIV said the nations could have the Bible in their own tongues.

Wow. 1757?

So, what do you reckon happened? The pope got a sudden revelation that after 1700 years God had changed his mind, and now it was okay for Catholics to read the Bible in their own language?

Of course not. What happened is that the Roman Catholic Church was finally losing to the Protestants badly enough that it had to give up some of its more egregious errors and offenses against humanity and against the teachings of the faith once for all delivered to the saints. (Quite similar to when the Latter Day Saints had a sudden revelation in the 1970′s that God had removed the curse from blacks, and now African-Americans could be priests.)

Let’s not forget that not only did the Roman Catholic Church burn people for giving the Scriptures to common people (e.g., John Huss, but there were many others). They even dug up John Wycliffe’s bones to burn them posthumously 12 years after he died.

Nothing against individual Roman Catholics. They’re the ones that I pray will be delivered from bondage to the magisterium and hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church (which is neither Scriptural nor an apostolic tradition).

But let’s face it. To suggest that an organization which has burned people to death for translating the Scriptures is the one, true commissioned church of Jesus is just nonsense.

Yes, they’ve utterly disqualified themselves forever over just that one centuries-long bit of tyranny. But don’t worry, if you need more before you join me in rejecting them, you can study a little medieval history and grow far more disgusted with the magisterium and hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Real Church

In Scripture, and in the earliest church fathers, the churches–it was usually plural in the 2nd century fathers, not singular–consisted of all the Christians in a local area, committed together as one family, sharing each other’s lives, that interacted in a network without any hierarchy above the local church.

That’s Biblical and traditional ecclesiology—if the tradition you’re concerned about is apostolic tradition.

If that’s offensive, too bad. They shouldn’t have murdered thousands or millions of people for trying to serve God and (of all things!) for giving out the Scriptures (free of charge!) to the common people.

Oh, wait. Let’s not forget what that hierarchy and magisterium did to the Muslims during the crusades.

No sense pretending. We might as well face what we have to face.

I don’t know what you’re looking for. I’m looking for that wonderful love and unity that marked the church in Acts 2:42-47. I believe God offers it, and the place it is found is in the local church, among Christians who have been taught to follow Christ according to the Scriptures and by the Spirit.