Latest / The Grove Church / Standing on 2,000 Years of Faith

Transcript

Standing on 2,000 Years of Faith · The Grove Church

• 0:05
  Charlie Loften: The questions we wrestle with as Christians about who God is, how do we live out our faith, what is the Bible, what is the truth of the Bible, what are we supposed to believe? How are we supposed to live? There are really big deep questions that we ask each other, that we ask God, that we wrestle with ourselves. And that's why the Cultivate podcast exists, to help us go deeper in our understanding of who God is, his word, and the way that he's called us to live. Hi, everyone.
• 0:36
  Welcome to the Cultivate Podcast with Grove Church. Charlie Loften, the lead pastor there, and I am here with hat designer, Abigail Boone. Big Gail. Big Gail?
• 0:48
  Abigail Boone: Still You don't like
• 0:50
  Charlie Loften: still still never. I was trying to get both the word haberdashery. But what is Haberdashery. What does that mean? Like a place that sells hats.
• 0:56
  But what is the person that makes... Is a haberdasher?
• 0:59
  Abigail Boone: I never heard of any of these words.
• 1:01
  Charlie Loften: But really, you're just kind of a graphic design. You're just an incredible graphic
• 1:03
  Abigail Boone: designer. Why they called it a mad hatter or where that term came from?
• 1:10
  Charlie Loften: Alice in Wonderland?
• 1:12
  Abigail Boone: Nope. That is one of the times where that word was used, but it was because... I can't remember. I don't think it was lead, but it was something that they're using in the material to create hats and hat factories, and they would always be testing the hats out on their head. Mhmm.
• 1:32
  And the chemical was really dangerous for people, and it made them... Some people go crazy. Okay. And so they became the Mad Hatters.
• 1:40
  Charlie Loften: Oh, there you go.
• 1:40
  Abigail Boone: And that's where the term comes from. No.
• 1:42
  Charlie Loften: I did not know that.
• 1:43
  Abigail Boone: Did not that. Right?
• 1:43
  Charlie Loften: It is interesting.
• 1:44
  Abigail Boone: And then found his way
• 1:45
  Charlie Loften: in Dallas and Wonderland. All sorts of history. This is a... This is now... We are now a history podcast.
• 1:50
  Yes. History of the church and history of hats. Anything random that
• 1:54
  Abigail Boone: you can possibly do. Yeah.
• 1:57
  Charlie Loften: So we are now two. This is episode two. We... This is kind of a little two part miniseries within church history talking about why it is important, and I feel like I wanna go back. And if you are a regular listener and you listened last week, you may have googled this in the time between the first episode and this episode, Yeah.
• 2:16
  And some. Were you right? I was. Eleventh century, a thousand years ago.
• 2:22
  Abigail Boone: Nice.
• 2:24
  Charlie Loften: Finger guns. It's it's it's interesting. Like, I've I've joked that my brain is like a really complex series of file cabinets.
• 2:32
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm. It's like SpongeBob.
• 2:33
  Charlie Loften: And there's a whole episode where Marginally better than SpongeBob's brain. Unless... I don't think they were running around... Weren't they running around crazy in his brain? Like, a whole
• 2:42
  Abigail Boone: bunch of little SpongeBob? Couldn't find the file. Okay.
• 2:45
  Charlie Loften: Anyways. So I feel like that this this file cabinet is there in the corner. Oh, okay. Other file cabinets there in front of it. Mhmm.
• 2:54
  But as we start moving them around and getting to it and blowing the blowing the dust off Yeah. Next thing I know, I'm just I'm pulling Anselm out of the... Just out of the dome somewhere out of nowhere. Mhmm. So, anyways, so we're talking about why it's important, and you kinda talked about, like, why it's really important.
• 3:12
  You just love history in general and then church history specifically. And then the three things that we talked about is, like, our our our view of ourselves and the church and what does it mean to be unified with the church. It's too small, and this helps us move from it's just me to a small group to a church to a community of churches to the worldwide church to worldwide church over two thousand years, which is a number that you can't even put your mind around. You you go to... I said, you go to you go to Rome, you go to Athens, and they start talking about the histories of these buildings, you're like, well, that just can't...
• 3:52
  It doesn't even doesn't even feel real. And I think that's... We have such a limited narrow view of history that we think, well, if it's that old, it can't be important. But it's just not how it works.
• 4:03
  Abigail Boone: Can we set a precedent for this series of this podcast?
• 4:06
  Charlie Loften: Mhmm.
• 4:07
  Abigail Boone: So you know how it's confusing if you say, like, we're in the twenty first century or whatever? So the 1,000...
• 4:13
  Charlie Loften: The the 11 hundreds, 12 hundreds, 13 hundreds? Do me say that?
• 4:15
  Abigail Boone: Yes. Okay. No whatever century. Is that just
• 4:20
  Charlie Loften: because Anselm was from the eleventh century, but that would be the
• 4:24
  Abigail Boone: 10 hundreds? The 10 hundreds.
• 4:26
  Charlie Loften: Like, that's just weird to say. So I
• 4:27
  Abigail Boone: don't know. Yeah. But we're gonna say it.
• 4:29
  Charlie Loften: We're gonna say 10 hundreds?
• 4:30
  Abigail Boone: Yes. K. Yes. Just gonna we're just
• 4:33
  Charlie Loften: gonna skip that century altogether so I don't have
• 4:35
  Abigail Boone: to say 10 hundreds, zero through 10 or whatever it would be or a 100 was one instead of it being zero and then one? Is that why that confusion happens? Yeah. The first Like, why are we not in the twentieth century right now?
• 4:55
  Charlie Loften: What what was the very first century?
• 4:57
  Abigail Boone: Zero It's or zero two.
• 5:01
  Charlie Loften: So it started with year one. Yeah. That is the first century. And that's a zero zero '0 one. So the year 100 was zero one zero zero, and so that's the first century.
• 5:13
  Okay. You wouldn't say it's the zeroth century.
• 5:16
  Abigail Boone: Right. I guess it's kinda like a kid's first year. Like, in some... Like, isn't it, like, maybe in China, like, your first birthday is the date you're born? Or maybe it's Korea, South Korea.
• 5:30
  One of them that, like, counts it different.
• 5:32
  Charlie Loften: How it's ridiculous that first grade is your second year in school.
• 5:37
  Abigail Boone: Well, does kindergarten really count? It's kinda like a preschool.
• 5:40
  Charlie Loften: And what's... It's not that one.
• 5:42
  Abigail Boone: It's No?
• 5:44
  Charlie Loften: No. Is it not? I mean, it... That's a... It's at the same place.
• 5:48
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. So I guess you're saying by the end of it, you do How... Do you finish with sixteen years?
• 5:57
  Charlie Loften: Wow.
• 5:58
  Abigail Boone: No. Fourteen years.
• 6:00
  Charlie Loften: I feel like we just witnessed... You need to go back and watch this on YouTube, guys.
• 6:03
  Abigail Boone: Me trying really hard.
• 6:04
  Charlie Loften: Hill's brain just stalled out.
• 6:06
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. Twelve years. If you can't, it's down to
• 6:10
  Charlie Loften: kindergarten, that's thirteen, then plus four years of college would be seventeen.
• 6:14
  Abigail Boone: Okay. See, I was gonna guess eighteen, but then I realized I was guessing that because I graduated in 2018, and that has no implications.
• 6:21
  Charlie Loften: Did you take a victory lap, or did you finish in four years?
• 6:23
  Abigail Boone: No. Actually, it was only one of my siblings that did so.
• 6:26
  Charlie Loften: Oh, congratulations.
• 6:27
  Abigail Boone: To point of pride.
• 6:28
  Charlie Loften: Thank you.
• 6:29
  Abigail Boone: Saved my parents the most money. Alright.
• 6:31
  Charlie Loften: So three things that we talked about before. Again, it makes us... Gives us just a broader sense, gives us a bigger picture. It also establishes kind of what the real foundational truths are, what really defines Christianity. Because sometimes we can add something, this is essential.
• 6:50
  If you don't believe this, you're not a Christian, and it turns out it is a relatively new concept. Mhmm. And and there's some things we think that we can throw out, and as it turns out, no, that has been foundational to the church from day one without exception. And then with that, number three was the guardrails. We think that we're coming up with new creative ideas when really they are 1,500 year old, 1,700, and some 2,000 year old heresies.
• 7:18
  Like, the... First John dealt with that one. I mean, I I just recently studied through first John with a group of guys, and we spent a lot of time talking about Gnosticism. The more we talked about Gnosticism and the things that they believed, you could just see what the guys is like, Wait a second.
• 7:36
  Abigail Boone: It's popular today.
• 7:37
  Charlie Loften: I think I know people who talk like that. Yeah, you do. It's helpful to know that.
• 7:44
  Abigail Boone: It's a heavy book that y'all studied. Do what? That's a heavy book to study.
• 7:48
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. We're work... We're working our way through all the letters.
• 7:51
  Abigail Boone: Oh, okay.
• 7:52
  Charlie Loften: We've been we've
• 7:52
  Abigail Boone: been at this for a while now. We're in chapters. Slap. Slap. Slap.
• 7:57
  Charlie Loften: Slap. It's all it's all very slap slap. Alright. So now we get to number four, And I think this kind of... Is kind of a...
• 8:05
  An implication of the first three.
• 8:07
  Abigail Boone: K.
• 8:09
  Charlie Loften: It just give you a little bit of humility.
• 8:11
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 8:13
  Charlie Loften: Like, you you you you don't know it all. You didn't figure all this out by yourself.
• 8:18
  Abigail Boone: You inherited pretty much all
• 8:20
  Charlie Loften: of it. Everything. Yeah. Like I said, we talked about this. You go to the Bible by yourself and you feel like, I can figure this out, when in reality, I mean, they got you 95% of the way there just by the way that you even think about life.
• 8:37
  Have you ever seen that it's a meme it's a meme from The Simpsons where Homer Simpson is asleep essentially on this toboggan going up the snow capped hill, and, like, the the Asian guides are, like, pulling him up the hill. And then he wakes up at the top and he's like, I climbed all the way up to the top of this mountain, and I'm not even tired.
• 8:58
  Abigail Boone: I have not seen that.
• 8:59
  Charlie Loften: Right? And I think that's where a lot of us are. Mhmm. I I got to this world class a plus theological system
• 9:07
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 9:08
  Charlie Loften: All by myself, and I'm not even tired. When I was like, oh, man, for centuries, this has been has been battled. Mhmm. And deep, deep amounts of thinking and reckoning and philosophizing and and debate and all sorts of things got to this point that now you think that this truth is intuitive.
• 9:32
  Abigail Boone: And you're reading a synopsis of a deep discovery Right. In an article. Right.
• 9:39
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. So we're we're not the first Christians to read the Bible. We're not the first Christians to wrestle with these sorts of things. And, again, a very a very common thing is, like, the whole the whole world misunderstood this all the way up until I figured something else out. Yeah.
• 9:57
  And I'll I'll put one thing in this category, and I've already kind of mentioned it in jest last time, which was, you know, we come from now a long tradition of what we call believer's baptism. You know, baptism is something that you do after you come to faith. And there are plenty of people out there that say, man, if you don't do that, and again, fully immersed post post conversion, if you don't get baptized like that, then you're not a believer. We'll think, man, that we are at least a, man, a thousand year window
• 10:37
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 10:38
  Charlie Loften: Of essentially zero believers. If you... Like, mean, it's it's just... Well, that's that's... It's gonna be tough.
• 10:45
  Mhmm. But... And so, again, we just... We we need we we need a lot more humility. Yeah.
• 10:54
  I mean, some people just struggle even just sitting at a church listening to some one person tell them something. Again, much less what does what's Thomas Aquinas have to say?
• 11:05
  Abigail Boone: Right. Well, I think it's not just humility of realizing that people have discovered this before, but there's people that devoted their adult life to studying some of these concepts to whatever degree they did. Right. And you're walking in at whatever point, like I said, reading a summary on some article and doing your first take and going with it. But, like, these people didn't just think about it and haphazardly write it down.
• 11:37
  Right. They studied it and battle tested it against however many panels, and then the next generation studied it and debated your take on it, and you're not even alive to still... You know? Like, it's passed down from
• 11:50
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. Which then leads to, I think, which is... I think this is gonna be a thing that you're... I think you're gonna enjoy Okay. Is it really helps to understand how certain Christian doctrines developed.
• 12:03
  Yes. Because, you know, you... Again, you've got 95% of the way there, and you think that you figured it out in the last 5%, but there's gonna be something to be like like a Trinitarianism is far and away the the biggest one where you're just kinda like, how how did they get here? Because it would be it would be difficult to start from scratch to get there on your own, but you think that you can. So what I mean?
• 12:30
  John one says that Jesus was God. Mhmm. And it also says here that Jesus isn't the father, and it also says here that the spirit is God, but it also says here that they're distinct, but it also says here there's one God. It's actually pretty obvious.
• 12:45
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 12:46
  Charlie Loften: First of all, the the the fact that those verses all say that and you have categorized them as being around the Trinity, One, that was handed to you. Mhmm. And even still, there are other ways of kind of... You could theoretically, logically put those Yeah. Ideas together.
• 13:02
  Yeah. How how did they how did they get there? There?
• 13:05
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 13:06
  Charlie Loften: And I think it's really gonna be fascinating too because we will spend some time talking about this. When we think about did the church get who Jesus is wrong? We wanna make him more of a dude. Mhmm. He was he was actually just a guy.
• 13:22
  Mhmm. And divinity was something that we put on him after the fact. Mhmm. I mean, that's what the Jesus Seminar, we'll talk about them when we get to modern developments kind of in church history, which I don't know, maybe seven years from now.
• 13:38
  Abigail Boone: No. I'm not sure if you're say, did I... If I've heard of it. Was like, no. No.
• 13:42
  Charlie Loften: I would not expect that you have heard of, you know, or even Jehovah's Witnesses or just kind of a modern day kind of liberal. And when I... By the way, if we're gonna have have a thing where we say, I can't say twelfth century, I have to say 11 hundreds. Mhmm. When I say liberal, I do not mean in a a political context.
• 13:58
  I'm not talking about whether or not someone votes Democrat or not. I'm just talking about a particular theological camp. So a theological liberal will overemphasize the humanity of Jesus and take away the fact that He was fully God. It will surprise most people to learn that the deity of Jesus was almost completely taken for granted in the early church. The big question that they spent most of those first couple of centuries wrestling with was, are we sure
• 14:31
  Abigail Boone: He was a person? Right.
• 14:33
  Charlie Loften: Are we sure that it wasn't just God in disguise, God pretending to be a man? And that was probably the thing they spent more time talking about. Probably the most significant battle that the church had was after that was already established with a guy called Arian or Arius, And I... It's always confusing because this thing called Aryanism
• 14:57
  Abigail Boone: Right. Very different.
• 14:58
  Charlie Loften: Which which sounds like Nazis.
• 15:00
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 15:00
  Charlie Loften: But that's two different... It's two different spellings. Mhmm. Well, r a r I a n is this theological contrast. Put a y in there for Nazis, It but was about whether or not...
• 15:14
  This guy said that Jesus was not fully God, but that had already been well established in church. It was again, it was kind of one of these things like right now, it's like three hundred years later, this guy's like, hey, wait a second. Maybe Jesus was just a guy. You're like, man, we did not spend the last three hundred years refining this for you to come in here with this supposed new idea that we shot down two hundred and fifty years ago.
• 15:39
  Abigail Boone: Which is why I think we need to study Irenaeus because homeboy saved us from a lot of those heretical things.
• 15:47
  Charlie Loften: Oh, yeah. Yeah. We we
• 15:48
  Abigail Boone: will Protectors of the faith. It's kinda like the Avengers.
• 15:52
  Charlie Loften: Arius versus Irenaeus. Yeah. We will... I I hope that we can contain that to one episode. Okay.
• 15:59
  We may not be able to because, I mean, it just that that issue right there and the way the church split, it also had... Constantine was around during that time, and it was it was it was wild. It was it was wild, these things that happened in the three hundreds
• 16:15
  Abigail Boone: Thank you.
• 16:17
  Charlie Loften: That radically shaped everything that we believe Christianity to
• 16:22
  Abigail Boone: be. Right.
• 16:22
  Charlie Loften: I mean, almost everything that we think about in terms of what the Christian church is and becomes and and especially the Catholic church specifically was shaped in like this sixty year period that we look back and say, well, that was all very political. Well, yeah. And on on the one hand, was. I mean, I guess if the politics had gone a different way, the church would have become something different. But the reality of it is is that God is God and is gonna make sure his church gets preserved, so he's not particularly worried about that.
• 16:53
  So, anyways, I think there is something to understanding how these doctrines came to be Yeah. That will just help us understand what we believe better and just be better thinkers.
• 17:08
  Abigail Boone: Well, I mean, that's... You said it'll be one. I'll enjoy that one. I do. That's definitely how my brain thinks of, well, where did we get this idea?
• 17:18
  Why did this theory come to be? What was the thinking at that time? But I think it loops you back to the humility spot that if you look at the early church and the things that they're concerned about, you might be like, well, they were missing all these other big picture things and, like, how silly of them to not blah blah blah. But it's like, you really need to understand their culture and what was actually prevalent conversations happening in the church at the time. Right.
• 17:46
  And, like, they're... It's not like Jesus came, the church happened, they erased the slate, and now took on this new doctrine. It's like, well, you came from something. And they had these previous beliefs, and not all of it or majority of it probably doesn't have a ton to do with science, but there are, like, just nations developing and human life developing that brought better understanding to things or better understanding to the literature or, like, there is periods of the time that they didn't have the writings that we now have. Right.
• 18:22
  And post the canonization of all those things, you can kinda compare a lot more to it to what we have. But there's just so much development that had not happened yet that, like, your assumption that they handled that this way or that way incorrectly or correctly is like, well, they didn't have every Google search availability that you do right now. And based off of the, like, maybe they're an honor shame culture rather than the way ours is, or maybe they didn't have the justice system that we had, or maybe there was this people group in the society than this class system. And it's like understanding all the forces that were at play at the time massively, kinda like my example last episode saying that me as a five year old hearing my parents say something and then as a 30 year old being like, well, I guess it was good that you considered our family's finances. Five year old Abigail would have been like, that's lame that we're not taking this vacation.
• 19:20
  Right. But then 30 year old Abigail is like, yeah. I couldn't have afforded that either. Right. You know?
• 19:24
  And it's just so much more nuanced, and you just can see more of the forces at play that it wasn't just, like, randomly decided, and it wasn't without influence of the culture that they're inside of.
• 19:39
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. I mean, it's it's crazy to think this, but I honestly believe that it is true. If you take out... If we're just only talking about the period of time, you know, the nineteen hundred plus years since the last letter of the Bible was written.
• 19:54
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 19:55
  Charlie Loften: Probably the two most significant events that happened that has shaped Christianity into what it is are the emperor Constantine conquering Rome and being declared emperor of the whole of the whole Roman Empire. And we'll talk about all the history and stuff about that and the invention of the printing press.
• 20:19
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 20:20
  Charlie Loften: I mean, with with that... Without a doubt, I mean, you take either of those two things or just modify either one of them even just a little bit. Mhmm. And everything that is... Everything that we think that we know about the Catholic church, I mean, they want us to believe was true from the time of Peter, but really what we know as the Catholic church was really kind of shaped in that moment in the three hundreds with Constantine.
• 20:46
  And everything that we understand about Protestantism and Lutherans and Calvinists and Baptists and everything that's happened post Reformation, all of that happened because now people could just read the Bible for themselves. I mean, for fourteen hundred years, what you understood the Bible to say Yeah. Was told to you by someone else.
• 21:12
  Abigail Boone: And that changes the game.
• 21:13
  Charlie Loften: Now all of a sudden, now everybody can go to a direct source Mhmm. And that is gonna have a lot of downline consequences to the positive and the negative.
• 21:22
  Abigail Boone: Oh, it didn't... Well, it's literally last week. I was reading a book to my niece, and for the first time, she corrected me.
• 21:31
  Charlie Loften: Mhmm.
• 21:32
  Abigail Boone: And I was like, you know what that word says? And she was like, well, that's not how you said the story wrong. And I'm like, okay. It's no longer me just making up words and you listening to them. You can correct me because you also know what the words on the page say.
• 21:45
  Charlie Loften: Right.
• 21:46
  Abigail Boone: So I can't skip any of these things. I just summarize. I can't abbreviate the things on the page, anything like that. And, like, that changes it.
• 21:54
  Charlie Loften: Right.
• 21:54
  Abigail Boone: So, like, now I'm being held to accountability of reading frog and toad to its full accuracy. Right. You know? But, like, that happened to the church that, like, no longer can... I mean, they could still take their pastor's word for it or whatever, but, like, they could actually think for themselves.
• 22:10
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. And if we were and if we were a more Catholic podcast, then we could look at it from the other perspective too where it's like, I have... I spent years training and studying and learning the original languages. Mhmm. And my training and study has been built and developed over the course of hundreds of years.
• 22:33
  And now some clown with a German Bible is gonna tell me what the Bible says. You're tell me? You're gonna tell me? And a Catholic would look back and say, Would you say that everything that happened, you know, from taking us essentially from one, really maybe two, maybe three churches in the 15 hundreds to all of this division and stuff we have right now, would you say that that is a net positive? Right?
• 23:02
  I mean, so that that will that will be a question that we will we will answer. I cannot even begin to... I can't even begin to imagine. Abigail, like, right now, seriously.
• 23:13
  Abigail Boone: Yeah.
• 23:15
  Charlie Loften: This series either need... We needed to make a commitment to it is going to be 15 episodes
• 23:22
  Abigail Boone: Or it could go on for a year. 150
• 23:25
  Charlie Loften: episodes.
• 23:26
  Abigail Boone: I'm not gonna be the one to pin us down at that. You're gonna have to make that call.
• 23:29
  Charlie Loften: I really I really... I could talk about Constantine all day. Yeah. We could we could we could do four weeks we could do four weeks and all we talked about was Constantine. And in talking about the Protestant Reformation, we could spend three weeks, and we haven't even gotten to it yet, just talking about all the cultural influences that led up to it, the printing press being one and some of the developments that were happening in Catholic Church at the time and all these...
• 23:58
  I mean, I don't know. Don't know. Don't know. Don't know. I don't
• 24:02
  Abigail Boone: don't know. But, like, Tommy Nelson did a eight week series on the sixties alone. Yeah. And it's one of my favorite sermon series of all time.
• 24:11
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, there's there's a part of me that's like both with the systematic theology series that we did.
• 24:19
  Abigail Boone: Yes.
• 24:20
  Charlie Loften: Like, after a while, even though it is probably one of my favorite things to talk about, I'm like, okay. I think I'm done. Mhmm. And I think I came up about seven weeks short in my heart on the parables. I was like, I mean, are we still doing this?
• 24:34
  Yeah. And, again, not that the parables aren't good, but, like, even I who goes
• 24:37
  Abigail Boone: It's going on for a
• 24:38
  Charlie Loften: long to the same place every day and does the same things every day
• 24:41
  Abigail Boone: every will be interesting because we'll be entering new cultures and countries and ideas.
• 24:47
  Charlie Loften: Guys. Systematic theology is interesting. Parables... Each parable. Each parable...
• 24:52
  Jesus said
• 24:53
  Abigail Boone: it, Abigail. True. True. True. True.
• 24:55
  But I I do think that a cool thing for everybody to get out of this would be the humility piece. Yeah. Just because we've talked multiple times about how I don't think I would survive if I was a part of, like, industrial revolution. Or I would have survived. I just wouldn't have added anything.
• 25:14
  Charlie Loften: We need to make a list, and maybe maybe some of our regular listeners can help us. A regular list of just like... And and Granny Boone Uh-huh. Of, like, random things that just keep coming up. And one of them is is your your aversion to a crazy sewer society.
• 25:34
  Abigail Boone: But there's a lot of things like the wheel. I never would have come up with that. The, like, printing press never would have been... Like, there's so many inventions that, like, I'm humble enough to know I would have not been a major player. I'm a better inheritor of those things than I am a contributor of those things.
• 25:53
  But the people that really did lay this foundation of a lot of the beliefs that have been passed through from each iteration of historical point we will go through, they were processing this without email, without Internet to search it. They'd only had, like, local somewhat small library resources, but it's not like it was like, oh, I'm just gonna go to this library in this city over here to see what they're debating about on that thing. Like, you may not even travel outside of your city. And so I think that's even a humility point to get to of, like, they hash this out in a very, like, painstakingly process Right. And did it to the best of their ability, and then it was just picked up by the next generation.
• 26:44
  They didn't, like, start over the wheel every single time. But these people that were as close to the source as possible being the people who wrote these books, who were in contact with Jesus or, like, saw this being built. We have that, and then you're just, like, slowly getting up to the point where we're at now where we could just ask ChatGPT to lay out any of these things. But, like, I basically never thank you for myself. I'm just reading about what other people think.
• 27:08
  Charlie Loften: Right.
• 27:09
  Abigail Boone: I... I'm willing to admit that at any time. There's very... I mean, I have opinions on things, but, like, most of the church history that I'm looking at is me taking in things that people spent their whole lives Right. Figuring out on their own.
• 27:23
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. And we put these little snippets together
• 27:25
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 27:26
  Charlie Loften: Of these little... Oh, this is what I think, and you say this little snippet, and you're like, man, you haven't even begun to scratch the surface. Yeah. Volumes have been written on this. When you begin to discover that the way that their brains worked and how deeply they thought about it will become significantly less dismissive of them as being old fashioned.
• 27:49
  Abigail Boone: Right.
• 27:49
  Charlie Loften: Right? Yeah. But I think ultimately the end goal of all of this will be the more I understand where we came from, the foundation that was built, the guardrails that have been put up, how big things are, I mean ultimately the end goal of this is I'm going to understand God better Mhmm. And I'm going to understand His Word better. Mhmm.
• 28:12
  I think it'll just help us to, again, have both the appropriate guardrails and foundation as I'm coming to the Scripture. But I don't have to feel bad about the fact that I'm coming into it with presuppositions and knowledge about God and Jesus already. I know what those things are. These are the well established, firm truths of Scripture that have been handed down to us for almost two thousand years. Now I take these things and based on that, now I study this passage, now I can build on...
• 28:46
  I can build my house on that and stay out of these guardrails, and in a humble way realize, okay, well, now I can confidently and with humility understand the scripture. Mhmm. Because I think we have a false confidence and no humility. Yeah. But there's a different different confidence that can come from a humility and a deeper understanding of how we got to where we are.
• 29:12
  Mhmm.
• 29:13
  Abigail Boone: And we're gonna go back to those firstly from the yesterday... Last week's episode Mhmm. Of the three main things of there being the guardrails, respect for how much has come up. But I think it... I really think one of the most mind blowing things is gonna be the stuff that was consistent for every single iteration of history that we look at, of seeing, like, how bulletproof it is once you've seen it stood the test of time going through all those different iterations and seeing that there's things that are...
• 29:42
  That stand outside of cultural implications and whatever people group it might be with or anything like that. And there's just not a lot of things... I mean, I guess you'd have to look at other religions maybe, but there's just not a lot of things that you can see pass through some so many different worlds, countries, people.
• 30:04
  Charlie Loften: And even some of the older world religions are very culturally narrow. Yeah. There's a lot less diversity, say... I mean, Islam is a newer religion compared to Christianity or some of the other ones, but it... I mean, there's a there's not a lot of ethnic diversity there and not a lot of cultural diversity there.
• 30:29
  I mean, certainly what we call Hinduism certainly is not. I mean, I just... There's there's not a lot of, you know, ethnic Russian
• 30:38
  Abigail Boone: Right.
• 30:39
  Charlie Loften: Hindus or Mhmm. Brazilians. Right? I mean, but, like... And again...
• 30:44
  And then... And some of these, like Islam, are relatively new and have not had the ability to kind of move beyond, know, again, a very particular sort of cultural base. But yeah, Christianity over time has just been exposed to so many different types of people over such a long period of time that what those kind of firm foundations are, I mean, you can really kind of... You can trust and rest in that.
• 31:17
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm. People are mowing our lawn currently. One thing that I think will be... You may have to rein me in more often than I'll rein you in, but my temptation will be looking through all of this and having to remember that we're talking about church history, not Christian history.
• 31:34
  Charlie Loften: And what was the difference?
• 31:36
  Abigail Boone: Well, I think there's a lot of interesting things that we could look at. Maybe what happened to the temple before. You were saying that starting in, like, Pentecost and things like that, but then also going to these other time periods or different countries or when it first came to America and stuff like that to where, like, there's Christian history, but we're always rooting it back into, like, the church history and the movements of those points. It's, one way to look through Christian history is through the church.
• 32:04
  Charlie Loften: Mhmm.
• 32:04
  Abigail Boone: But, like, I think I had seen you that I would like to talk about the Maccabean rebellion or, like, they're the ones that protected the temple.
• 32:12
  Charlie Loften: Okay. I know. Okay. Okay. I I think I I now get what you're saying.
• 32:14
  I was not I was not catching your distinction between church history and Christian history. So you mean you're talking about things that that happened during the time of the bible? Correct. Okay. Yeah.
• 32:24
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. Well... And I think there's just some things that, like, we could talk about one specific iterate. Like, if I had mentioned talking about the French Revolution, and we could just talk about what happened to Christianity at that time. But you can also just look at what the church was doing at that time.
• 32:44
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. I mean, we're... But the thing the thing is, one, we will definitely not cover the Maccabees because that does not influence church or Christian history much at all. It's fascinating story. It's fascinating story.
• 32:54
  The destruction of the temple definitely has major impact because, I mean, that that happened at a very significant time and really contributed to some very significant developments in history. And so... And the fact that it was Rome that sacked and then built the Colosseum both with Jewish slave labor and the riches they took from the temple. Essentially, the Colosseum is what is left of the riches of the temple from Mhmm. From Jerusalem, which is, in fact, fascinating.
• 33:27
  And then Rome's cultural dominance at the time obviously is going to play a factor in where the center of power of the church is located. Mhmm. You know? That is not random that church... That that that the church's center of power has historically been Come
• 33:46
  Abigail Boone: from there.
• 33:47
  Charlie Loften: In Rome. Mhmm. And some people wanna tie it to, well, Peter Peter went there. Like, there's there's there's some there's some stretching of history that we have to do to make Peter the first pope.
• 34:00
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 34:00
  Charlie Loften: All due respect. And, really, it was more of the things that unfolded after that that really kind of made all of that happen. So we'll spend some time talking about that. But a pod where we're talking about significant moments in world history
• 34:15
  Abigail Boone: Yeah.
• 34:15
  Charlie Loften: And how they affected the church. Mhmm. I I mean, I don't know. Right?
• 34:19
  Abigail Boone: But that could go for years, truly. No.
• 34:22
  Charlie Loften: Then then then we could just talk about anything.
• 34:23
  Abigail Boone: I'm reading a book called Dominion. I've been reading it forever. It's a very thick book, but it's history of Christianity, and I have even
• 34:31
  Charlie Loften: It's not it's not GRU.
• 34:32
  Abigail Boone: No. And I... No. No. Would never casually be reading that.
• 34:37
  That's way too nerdy. No. This guy is
• 34:39
  Charlie Loften: I'm talking about the minions. Despicable me.
• 34:41
  Abigail Boone: Oh, I thought you meant Grudem. No. Gru.
• 34:44
  Charlie Loften: No. The guy who was the minions.
• 34:46
  Abigail Boone: No. No. No. No. No.
• 34:49
  But it's just vignettes of Christian history, kind of, but I haven't even gotten to the church. Yeah. And I feel like I've been reading that book for a whole year, and I haven't haven't even gotten to the church.
• 34:59
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. We will we will... Our our focus in the way that we do, we'll talk about significant moments in history, but really more in either how they shaped what the church became Mhmm. Or the things that have shaped what we believe. Yeah.
• 35:12
  And so there are obviously... There are a lot of significant historical events. I mean, the way that the church in Germany responded to Hitler is an incredible, important thing. You got... Because you got Dietrich Bonhoeffer on one side who was plotting a way to assassinate Adolf Hitler
• 35:31
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 35:32
  Charlie Loften: To some parts of the church were just like, oh, I guess this is what we're doing now.
• 35:37
  Abigail Boone: Is what we do now.
• 35:38
  Charlie Loften: This is what we do. And and so, I mean, there's interest... So we'll we'll catch we'll catch glimpses of those. But really, when we think about historical events, it will be things that really were... Had a had a big major impact
• 35:50
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 35:50
  Charlie Loften: On the development of the church. Otherwise, most of what we'll... We will spend a lot of time talking about individual people Mhmm. And theological controversies
• 36:01
  Abigail Boone: k.
• 36:01
  Charlie Loften: And councils. That's what we're gonna spend a lot of lot of time there.
• 36:05
  Abigail Boone: K. So you'll just have to rein my interest in everyone. So I may ask a question that you're like, well, that
• 36:11
  Charlie Loften: Marco Polo doesn't have anything to do with this, Abigail.
• 36:15
  Abigail Boone: Kinda like the difference of, like, if something happened in Fayetteville as opposed to if the church put on an event in Fayetteville. Yeah. Yeah. Like, are we gonna study the church's response to something that happened in Fayetteville, or are we gonna study what the church did in Fayetteville?
• 36:31
  Charlie Loften: Well, I think we just have to figure out, like, what what are the things that had the greatest Yeah. The greatest sort of impact. Yeah. Which is great. Obviously, in our brain, the French Revolution is way more significant than Constantine's conquest of Rome.
• 36:48
  However, one Impacted the church more than the other? Infinitely more than than that. This is just like... This is a significant historical event. How did the church react to it?
• 36:59
  That's an interesting thing. That's an interesting case study.
• 37:02
  Abigail Boone: Church separation, state separation started. Right?
• 37:08
  Charlie Loften: Well, I mean, there's there's glimpses of it. I mean, you get get it a little bit before that. I mean, the Anabaptists coming out of the Protestant Reformation, I would say that's really where it's got a lot more of its... That's that's where the momentum for it really started to kick in. Mhmm.
• 37:25
  And then you see it kinda culminate. But, again, the separation of church and state, was that was that a theological development, or was that just, you know, a violent takeover and we're gonna burn everything down? Again, maybe maybe we... Maybe maybe you can talk me into it. Maybe you can talk me into it.
• 37:45
  Abigail Boone: I just need to send you to France. No.
• 37:47
  Charlie Loften: No. What you need to do what you need to do, we... You will just... Every now and then, when we get to certain periods Uh-huh. At the end of the period...
• 37:55
  Like I said, we're we're we're... This... We'll talk about this next week, these kind of these major historical periods. And then when we finish one of them, we can have a q and a Okay. Where you can be like, here's some other things that happened during that
• 38:08
  Abigail Boone: time period, and I wanna talk about it.
• 38:10
  Charlie Loften: Okay. How's that sound?
• 38:11
  Abigail Boone: That's a fair compromise.
• 38:12
  Charlie Loften: Okay. Okay.
• 38:13
  Abigail Boone: We'll work on it.
• 38:13
  Charlie Loften: Alright. Alright. So thank you for joining us. It's kind of a little two parter here on why this is important, and then we'll spend the next couple of times, again, just kind of doing a a bird's eye view of kind of the history of the church, these kind of these major time periods. And then after that, we will just start
• 38:31
  Abigail Boone: Going wild.
• 38:32
  Charlie Loften: Going... Yeah. Just going for it and see how long it takes.
• 38:35
  Abigail Boone: A long time. Long time. Alright.
• 38:37
  Charlie Loften: History unite. As always, thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to the Cultivate Podcast. Our hope is that you are taking steps to go deeper in your faith, that you are asking big questions and you're looking for answers.
• 38:53
  We hope that we can be a resource for you through our podcast and any other way that we can help you. You can find all our episodes anywhere that you can find podcasts including YouTube. And again, thank you so much for joining us.