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Why Study Church History? · 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. Hey, everyone.
• 0:36
  Welcome to the Cultivate podcast with The Grove Church. I'm Charlie Loften, and I'm the lead pastor there. And I'm here with Abigail Boone with
• 0:45
  Abigail Boone: a new hat. The best hat I've
• 0:47
  Charlie Loften: ever had.
• 0:48
  Abigail Boone: That hat. Oh, you know, a pretty talented artist somewhere
• 0:52
  Charlie Loften: in town. Young local artist
• 0:54
  Abigail Boone: Yeah.
• 0:54
  Charlie Loften: Just up and comer.
• 0:56
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. Right?
• 0:57
  Charlie Loften: No one's heard of her. Also a great podcast producer.
• 1:00
  Abigail Boone: Thank you.
• 1:00
  Charlie Loften: No. No. I'm talking about the person that made the hat.
• 1:02
  Abigail Boone: I'm not sure about you. Yeah. Not me.
• 1:03
  Charlie Loften: Not me. Hat. Like, it's just like Yeah. Multimedia artist
• 1:07
  Abigail Boone: Yeah.
• 1:07
  Charlie Loften: And also podcast. I mean
• 1:09
  Abigail Boone: And hat designer and T shirt designer.
• 1:11
  Charlie Loften: Is this somebody you look up to?
• 1:13
  Abigail Boone: Definitely. Okay. First, do do you watch Saint Dennis? No. Absolutely hilarious and would totally fall into your category of humor shows.
• 1:22
  Mhmm. But there's a trauma surgeon in it. It's like an ER setting. And multiple times throughout the show, the trauma surgeon is talking to people, and he's like, well, I respect myself the most, so I gotta listen to what I say. He says crap like that all the time.
• 1:40
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. You made some really cool merch. Thank you.
• 1:42
  Abigail Boone: It does feel like the kind success
• 1:44
  Charlie Loften: listening to this. I don't know what people are listening to, but for us, it was this last Sunday when it debuted.
• 1:50
  Abigail Boone: And I think it went good. Yeah.
• 1:51
  Charlie Loften: A lot of people liked it. Yeah. A lot of people liked it.
• 1:53
  Abigail Boone: It was a crowd favorite.
• 1:54
  Charlie Loften: My my wife looked at the whole crowd and was like like our our family.
• 1:59
  Abigail Boone: Sure.
• 1:59
  Charlie Loften: It was like, I'll buy one of something
• 2:02
  Abigail Boone: for everybody.
• 2:03
  Charlie Loften: It was not... So not counting me. It was She didn't include you. Me. I I I take what I want.
• 2:12
  Yeah. Heidi, three daughters, and a and a boyfriend.
• 2:17
  Abigail Boone: Did he get something?
• 2:18
  Charlie Loften: So it was three shirts and two hats. Wow.
• 2:20
  Abigail Boone: He was a hat. He was a hat. Okay. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of hat lovers, not just me Right.
• 2:26
  Within the church.
• 2:27
  Charlie Loften: But there are a lot of comfort color tee fans in the church.
• 2:31
  Abigail Boone: Yes. So that was a huge hit.
• 2:33
  Charlie Loften: Yeah.
• 2:33
  Abigail Boone: That's not my preferred shirt, but for the people. You know? Right.
• 2:37
  Charlie Loften: I wore I wore... I would I would've worn it today, but I really... I wore it yesterday, actually.
• 2:40
  Abigail Boone: Well, actually, when you walked in, I thought that was it, but then you got closer.
• 2:43
  Charlie Loften: I thought... I, like, I I lost track of the day, and I was gonna look at, oh, yeah. I wore the shirt today. So now that was yesterday. This is just the same color.
• 2:50
  Alright, Abigail. Here we are.
• 2:53
  Abigail Boone: We finished we
• 2:54
  Charlie Loften: finished the parables.
• 2:56
  Abigail Boone: I actually... Before we move on to how much I love this new series we're about to do, I genuinely did love the parables.
• 3:03
  Charlie Loften: What did you like about it?
• 3:05
  Abigail Boone: Well, I think I spent... We were talking before this actually, my past of a lot of the faith setting that I grew up in. I read Paul and the other letters so much that I just completely neglected the gospels.
• 3:20
  Charlie Loften: Right.
• 3:20
  Abigail Boone: And so I don't think I had ever given the the true, like, look into them and really given the understanding they're worth. And you said at the very beginning that you would assume that it would be, like, totally my type of teachings and, like, type of literature, and I wasn't positive about it. But now I'm like, yes. You're right. I love the parables.
• 3:45
  Right.
• 3:47
  Charlie Loften: But
• 3:49
  Abigail Boone: I had just never given it that much time. I had... One time was challenged to read the book of John, and then I don't think I ever really revisited unless it was, like, Christmas time, and I wanted to find where those verses were. But beyond that, I just hadn't spent much time in them. And there wasn't...
• 4:06
  I'm sure there is a lot of material out there that can guide you through the gospels. I was not privy to a lot of those, and so the gospels are kinda just like stories you read.
• 4:16
  Charlie Loften: So
• 4:17
  Abigail Boone: once we finally did it, I was like, no. I... These are really, really cool.
• 4:20
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. I don't like necessarily quoting myself. But
• 4:23
  Abigail Boone: But you might respect yourself the most.
• 4:27
  Charlie Loften: Yeah, but I think the thing that I was saying where it's like when we realized what Jesus was doing, which was kind of like a theological bridge between real big misconceptions about the Old Testament to what was about to happen with the death and resurrection. We think of him in kind of that theological bridge. What he's saying in these parables start to make sense. Because they don't necessarily make like, Paul wouldn't say that.
• 4:55
  Abigail Boone: If you're just reading it, it's like,
• 4:57
  Charlie Loften: everything I know about the resurrection and where you put your Jesus and putting your faith in the cross, that doesn't make sense. Well, that hadn't happened yet, but it's something he is saying that is preparing them to rethink their world and come into an... And so I think I think it is a really good key to kind of unlock some of the more confusing or difficult to understand.
• 5:21
  Abigail Boone: Well... And it's like, who better to talk to than the most direct source? Right. You know?
• 5:28
  Charlie Loften: Like I wanna wanna learn more about Jesus. I should I should read Paul.
• 5:32
  Abigail Boone: Or just like, I wanna learn more about God. Well, who spent the most time with them?
• 5:37
  Charlie Loften: Well, there you go. You know? Eternity guys.
• 5:40
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. So I... It just... It was really interesting. And I I had said, and I don't know if I've said this to you, but I've read The Alchemist.
• 5:49
  Mhmm. And that was like... I don't know why I read it out. I was an adult. There wasn't a school reading that I did or anything, but I was like, more stories need to be like an allegory.
• 6:01
  And it just really hit me, and I was like, that's why I don't think I enjoy reading the Bible because it's not just like a large allegory that I can come back to, but I wasn't reading the parables.
• 6:10
  Charlie Loften: There you go. Now you've got it.
• 6:11
  Abigail Boone: So now I read it, and I'm like, it wasn't crazy for me to wish that type of literature
• 6:16
  Charlie Loften: would be there. You should read Revelation.
• 6:20
  Abigail Boone: We'll see.
• 6:22
  Charlie Loften: Alright. So now we are on. We're moving on. New topic. Church history.
• 6:28
  Abigail Boone: Yes.
• 6:28
  Charlie Loften: How long have you been, for lack of a better word, pestering me about this?
• 6:34
  Abigail Boone: Well, it feels like forever, but I just realized I needed to get you to go to another country, like a historical biblical place.
• 6:41
  Charlie Loften: Oh, okay. Just needed me to to Rome.
• 6:44
  Abigail Boone: I didn't realize that that would so quickly... Like, you you would kinda like, yeah. We may do that. We may do that. And then you went to Rome, and you're like, we should do this.
• 6:54
  And I'm like, yeah, we should do that. So I've been asking forever, but next time I wanna do a series that you may not be interested in, I gotta figure out something.
• 7:05
  Charlie Loften: I wanna I wanna talk about the missionary journeys of Paul.
• 7:09
  Abigail Boone: Should go to Ephesus for him. Anyways. Okay. I'm glad it's here.
• 7:15
  Charlie Loften: So here we are talking about church history, and let's just get just a quick definition of kind of what we meant, is kind of the history of the Christian movement. And really, when we talk about church history, we're not really talking about from Acts two, the moment of Pentecost on, even though technically church history starts there. Really, it's like, what happened to the movement of Jesus post the events of the Bible? We will, of course, start some with Pentecost and what we learned from the book of Acts because it does launch us into that. But it is this idea of like, how has the church grown and developed over the course of its two...
• 7:58
  Almost two thousand year history starting approximately ninety AD to now?
• 8:04
  Abigail Boone: See, that is one good part about it being history of the church that you can pretty easily whittle down what year range it started in. Right. You're not guessing, like, well, this war was in, like, 18 Psalm Psalm. Right. Like, no.
• 8:17
  Just think back to the beginning of zero.
• 8:21
  Charlie Loften: Start with zero and work your way forward. Okay. So why, though? Why for you? We're gonna we're gonna talk today about why...
• 8:30
  Because we've gotta we've gotta sell some people on this, I'm guessing. Yeah. It's one thing to study theology, which people intuitively understand why that's important, walking through the teachings of Jesus and the parables, right, and you don't really have to sell people on that. But now we are essentially gonna step out of the Bible. We're not gonna be like, okay.
• 8:50
  Well, now today we're gonna be talking about first Samuel. No. We're not gonna talking about first Samuel. We're gonna be talking about, you know, these events that happened and these people that mattered during different periods of church history. So I think we're gonna have to sell some people on this.
• 9:04
  And so that's what we're talking about today and probably today and next week, which is why studying church history is important. So I'm gonna start with
• 9:14
  Abigail Boone: you. Okay.
• 9:15
  Charlie Loften: You tell me why you're so stoked about this.
• 9:18
  Abigail Boone: Well, I don't know that this would be the textbook definition, but this is why I enjoy it.
• 9:24
  Charlie Loften: That was the question.
• 9:25
  Abigail Boone: Okay. Okay. Not just I
• 9:26
  Charlie Loften: didn't ask why they should enjoy it. Why do you why do you... Why you
• 9:30
  Abigail Boone: are so excited Sure.
• 9:32
  Charlie Loften: About this.
• 9:33
  Abigail Boone: So before we started recording today, I was talking about a poet from... When was the World War? Second World War?
• 9:44
  Charlie Loften: 1939 to 1945.
• 9:46
  Abigail Boone: Okay. Yeah. And so listening to someone's personal writings about their understanding of God can somewhat be confusing, but then you go into the historical take on it of like, well, what were people's views on God and the church at that time? Well, that's influenced by what war was happening. What was the financial state at that time?
• 10:08
  Who was in power? Was there certain wars happening that was influenced over a certain belief system? Is that influencing why they think God is this way? And it's just more than... I mean, we're complex human beings.
• 10:22
  That is true. You can't just give someone a sticky note that says the answer and assume that's gonna stick for the next thousand years. So you can't... I think it's just interesting. It's not just one answer of, like, why or how do we view church?
• 10:38
  How do we view baptism? How do we view... Even how do we view God? Like, people just learned over time, but then not only learned, was impacted by different influences, whether it be... I mean, it could even be, like, who owned the religion at that time?
• 10:55
  Was it people in poverty or people in power? And what different churches? Was there different laws that gave churches different authorities and sometimes not? And how did that influence theology? And it just is, like, passed through so many different hands, but each time period that you're looking at it through is just, like, radically influenced by the current circumstances.
• 11:15
  Charlie Loften: K.
• 11:16
  Abigail Boone: And so it's it's not... It does influence my own faith of, like, learning from writings from those times. But when I'm reading those things, I'm like, well, why did they think this? Was this a prevailing theory at the time, or was it not? Or did this splinter off from a different sect, and why did they splinter off?
• 11:34
  That has a reason behind it. And so I like what they call bottom up history.
• 11:39
  Charlie Loften: Okay.
• 11:40
  Abigail Boone: And so, Dean, are you familiar with that? It's... So I started learning it whenever I was in college. I was a history minor, and we did the French Revolution class. It was only about the revolution.
• 11:53
  And instead of starting from, like, what was going on from power structures and what laws did they implement and what things happened, we started reading fairy tales.
• 12:04
  Charlie Loften: Okay.
• 12:04
  Abigail Boone: And it was like, you could completely come to an understanding of how society viewed leadership, the laws that were passed, the different food shortages and stuff because of the fairy tales they told their kids when they were going to sleep. Okay. And so you understood the society, and you're like, oh, I understand you guys now.
• 12:22
  Charlie Loften: I understand. I know who the villain... Based on the villains of this fairy tale.
• 12:25
  Abigail Boone: Yes. I can understand it. And why are you using that imagery to describe them? What did that thing represent to you guys at that time?
• 12:31
  Charlie Loften: It's interesting you say that, but the very first time I took a church history class, I did a research paper on myths of the apostles,
• 12:39
  Abigail Boone: which
• 12:40
  Charlie Loften: was stories about what the apostles were up to outside of the book of Acts that don't appear really to be historical. And based on the myth itself, when do you imagine it was written and by whom? Because based on what that apostle is doing and either what he is advocating or what he's doing implies or whatever shows that it really comes from the time period in which this particular theological issue was controversial. Well, actually, you won't believe this, but when Peter blah blah blah, he did this, which makes me right and you wrong. And there were just a lot of stories like that that came about, about all the apostles and different things that they did and didn't do, and you can attach them to certain time periods based on what was controversial at the time.
• 13:44
  A little bit kinda like we suddenly were trying to figure out if Jesus is a socialist or not or a libertarian. Right? And depending on your background and the way you look at the Bible, you really can't... You can make a case for a socialist Jesus or a libertarian Jesus
• 14:04
  Abigail Boone: if you Whichever way you
• 14:06
  Charlie Loften: take it. Yeah. Right? But in reality, that is not a question that has been asked Until until, you know, yesterday.
• 14:13
  Abigail Boone: Right.
• 14:14
  Charlie Loften: Right? And so, you know, if if, you know, the books that are written now about Jesus along those lines
• 14:20
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 14:21
  Charlie Loften: Will be very, very dated. And you take them and you run them back a thousand years and be like, hey, Why don't you read this? And you're like, well, this is garbage. Yeah. Now I'm really gonna check at some point between now and then to see when I said go back a thousand years.
• 14:36
  My brain went to Ancelum, and now I'm gonna have to go check at some point to see if that's actually the guy. I think it is that was around 1100. So anyways.
• 14:48
  Abigail Boone: So I... Yeah. I think it just gives more... It's kinda like if you learned something about your parents when you were five, and it was like, that's weird or that's confusing or I don't like you for that or whatever. And then you go back and you ask the question again at 30 and you're like, oh, you didn't just do that.
• 15:05
  You also had just lost your job and your parents had done this and you had moved to a new city and you had to start a mortgage and it's like, well, there's like 50 more pieces that influence why that thing happened, but I had to study more beyond to understand now at 30. Do I actually agree with that or do I not actually agree with that? So there's just... I... That's why I love...
• 15:26
  It's not objective or subjective. Yeah. I don't know which is the right word, but, like, if you study chemicals, it is always gonna be what it is. Right. But you're studying objective.
• 15:38
  Okay. So if you're studying history, you have to learn so many facets because, like, we're in September. You learn about September. So many of them are learning it. Crazy to me now that there's a bunch of...
• 15:50
  My sister's a high school teacher. None of her kids were alive
• 15:53
  Charlie Loften: Right.
• 15:54
  Abigail Boone: When that happened. But if you just learned about gas prices in the early two thousands, you'd be like, that's incredibly random. And it's like, actually, it's not.
• 16:02
  Charlie Loften: It's actually not.
• 16:03
  Abigail Boone: There was a bunch of cultural things happening that influenced this belief system that came out.
• 16:09
  Charlie Loften: I think for me, one of the things that I think is of real importance when it comes to this is we imagine ourselves, at least kind of from the faith tradition that you and I come from. And for those of you... If if somebody... I guess I should say this. If you have stumbled upon this randomly, which happens sometimes, you know, 90 plus percent of our listeners are Grove Church members, but you may have accidentally googled something.
• 16:37
  We are a nondenominational evangelical Protestant church. We're not gonna We're not Catholic, we're not trying to hate on Catholics, but we're gonna be really honest about the bulk of our church history, which was when there was only Catholicism. So just to kinda put that out there. So in the tradition that you and I come from, we have this idea that, hey, just you and the Holy Spirit reading the Bible and you learn the inductive method and you learn how to study the Bible, just you by yourself can glean the answers to this and know what is true. And on the one hand, that is sort of true, but where that is also just, like, so naive to think that somehow you are not being influenced by 2,000 generations
• 17:32
  Abigail Boone: and generations and generations.
• 17:34
  Charlie Loften: Just even the idea of inductive study Yeah. Is a historical concept that is developed in a particular period of time, and that being the primary way that you learn and understand and attack a text is a relatively new idea and we don't know that. And also, we have no idea how our upbringing, whether we grew up Christian or not, has been shaped by two thousand years of Christian thinking. And so we are so narrow that we can think, me by myself, I can figure this out, and I don't need anyone. But no, someone else like that, I need to at least be in a small group so that when I study the Bible, I can talk about it with other guys.
• 18:27
  Well, and your small group needs to be a part of a church, but like our church, we're not a part of a larger denomination. Right. And you can kind of imagine yourself being like, well, we're sitting here on an island, and we know better than all these other people, and we should just come to this church because we just have this perspective, and it is, quote, the right perspective. And then it is a very novel teacher that comes out and is like, Hey, actually we're kind of in partnership with churches all over our community, and that's just like, What? Blows my mind.
• 19:02
  Even the ones that baptize babies? Yeah. Right? And you're just kinda like, I mean, and that feels like I just have a really big, open minded perspective on Christianity because I can be kind to a Presbyterian. And that's still small because it is not only churches in our community, but we need to step out of that and be like, regardless, we all still live, depending on your perspective, an amalgamation of the South And Midwest of The United States Of America.
• 19:46
  Okay? Well, are there Christians in China and Kenya and South Korea all over the world experiencing what it means to follow God from a completely different perspective, and that is still small because the church has been around
• 20:05
  Abigail Boone: for two thousand years. And has lived through many different hands.
• 20:09
  Charlie Loften: Right. And I don't think that we have any real deep sense of how culturally limited our perspective is.
• 20:20
  Abigail Boone: Well, and I also think, I mean, we've we've said multiple times now how doing a church history approach, you're gonna see so many different angles that maybe you weren't aware of or influences that had a bigger impact than you realize, things like that. But I think once we do that view of how many generations we're going through or how many different countries or different people groups that the church has gone through, but there's a lot of things that are have remained true and have not changed over time
• 20:49
  Charlie Loften: Right.
• 20:49
  Abigail Boone: That you're gonna be able to see. Oh, CS Lewis' sermons that he was doing to people during wartime is a totally different context than what I'm living in, but this thing is still true.
• 21:01
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. I mean, so I'm trying to keep I'm trying to keep rant down. Okay? Okay. Right?
• 21:08
  So we we start with really kind of the first thing, which is it just helps us think beyond ourselves.
• 21:14
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 21:16
  Charlie Loften: The second thing is, kind of what you were saying, it helps us to know that there are certain things that the church has believed everywhere, all the time. No matter what's happening. There has to be some limit to our ability, and I I do not think that there is anything wrong with challenging the presuppositions of the particular Christian movement that you're a part of.
• 21:40
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 21:40
  Charlie Loften: And to really kind of to read and to study and to and and to talk to other people to really make sure, hey. Like, this this is what we're gonna be doing this whole time. We need to expand our worldview here a little bit, but there are certain things that all Christians always, all the time have believed. And there are certain things that just really, when it comes to talking about what does or doesn't make someone a Christian and what is an essential Christian belief, there are certain things that just are nonnegotiable. Mhmm.
• 22:17
  Abigail Boone: And it's not even like they discuss those nonnegotiables of, like, we don't wanna be connected to those people from our past, but I think this is important. It's like, no, that just was a prevailing thing that stuck that is foundational to belief in God.
• 22:31
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. I mean, we wanna decide, woah. Maybe Jesus isn't who the church says he is. Okay. Well, go and find a time when someone said anything other than Jesus being fully God.
• 22:51
  Abigail Boone: How long did it last?
• 22:54
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. There are certain things that are culturally narrow and some ways that we talk about Jesus and parts about Jesus that we ignore, all because of our particular cultural perspective. But there are some unifying truths that just really, except for very narrow windows of time, there's some truths that have never really been up for debate. You know? We we said, well, the Bible doesn't even use the word trinity.
• 23:23
  And so it's like, prove that to me. And I'm like, part of me is just gonna be like, read a book, bro. Mhmm. Well, it doesn't say it in the Bible. Well, read any other book.
• 23:32
  Yeah. This is... This was not just something that some random guy made up somewhere. Mhmm. This was hammered out over generations of kind of like, okay, wait a second.
• 23:44
  Here it says this, and here Jesus said this, and here Paul said this. How do we put all of this together? That doctrine was built over, again, decades of people with incredible hearts for God, deep amount of learning and understanding, and you coming in here on your own is like, well, don't don't... Come on. I mean, there's just certain things like that, like the divinity of Jesus, the humanity of Jesus, born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, he's coming back.
• 24:23
  I mean, there are just certain things that are that are anchors. Mhmm. And I think in a... I don't use... We don't seem to use this word much anymore.
• 24:30
  I saw it again the other day, so I'll bring it back. Right? In a deconstruction kind of world
• 24:35
  Abigail Boone: Oh my gosh. Someone said that to me this morning, and I was like, I have not heard that. Bring it back. Bring I it mean,
• 24:41
  Charlie Loften: there... I've said this to so many people as they are trying to reimagine their faith. Maybe they grew up in an unhealthy environment. I've said this every time. I was like, man, there's nothing wrong with what you're doing, but you need to have some anchor points.
• 24:55
  Yeah. There are certain things that have to remain in your foundation. And if you wanna look for what those things should be, and we've talked about this before. Right? What are the non negotiables, the soil in which you build your house, the foundation of your house?
• 25:09
  Ask yourself, did a second century Christian believe this? Did a fourteenth century Christian believe this? And if the answer to that is yes, yes, and we still believe it now, then you should keep that important. Keep it as an anchor. Yeah.
• 25:23
  And then you can still critique that the church has become too commercial or not sacred enough or is bound by this and bound by this, and the way you talk about this is unhealthy. Like, great. Great.
• 25:34
  Abigail Boone: But Jesus is God. Yeah. Which I think a lot of a lot of the things that if you took, like, 10 different historical time points of church history and you see, like, different themes maybe in each one, you could probably go to those foundational points, and those would all still be there. There just happens to be a current circumstance 's making one thing more animated than another. But it's like, well, it's just because this was going on.
• 26:06
  So they were more focused on serving the poor. Like, if you look at the church in the depression compared to the church in the eighties. Right. Like, yeah. But there was...
• 26:16
  They still believed in these foundational things. Those did not change. They just happened to be flexing to different muscle based on current cultural events that were happening. Right. And so, like, things change, but also they don't.
• 26:30
  Right. You know?
• 26:32
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. And if and if we if we if we lose sight of that, I mean, you're just... You're... What you've got... You're not gonna have anything left.
• 26:45
  Now essentially, you are doing what you are accusing the church you grew up in a being of just like, well, you get to make up your own rule. And you don't get to do that. You don't get to make up your own religion. I guess you can.
• 27:03
  Abigail Boone: You can.
• 27:04
  Charlie Loften: We call that a cult. And you don't you don't get to decide who God is.
• 27:10
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 27:11
  Charlie Loften: God gets to decide who God is, and you don't get to decide what is a core church belief. Really, one of the one of the more objective things that we can study over the next several months is what are the core true principle beliefs Mhmm. That make someone a Christian? If you if you believe these things, you are a Christian. If you don't believe these things, you're not a Christian.
• 27:38
  That can be objectively studied over the course of just looking at church history. We act like that idea became... That makes you a fundamentalist if you think that you have. Well, first of all, we misuse that word fundamentalist all
• 27:59
  Abigail Boone: the time. Men.
• 28:00
  Charlie Loften: Do you know why? Because it is actually a historical term. There are, in fact, if we're gonna be the most precise you can be, there are no fundamentalists left because it is a limited historical term. Yeah. It is not simply...
• 28:16
  It's not a theological belief. Anyways, regardless, the idea that there are clearly defined belief systems that one must believe in to be a Christian, I mean, act like we're coming up with something brand new here by saying, Well, no, it's not. It's blah blah blah blah blah. And really, that kind of gets to what I would say is number three of why it's really important to start about this. We think we're coming up with new ideas all the time.
• 28:47
  Mhmm. But really what we're doing is reinventing heresies.
• 28:51
  Abigail Boone: Sure. Yeah.
• 28:52
  Charlie Loften: We are we are rebuilding 2,000 year old heresies
• 28:57
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 28:57
  Charlie Loften: From first principles.
• 28:58
  Abigail Boone: Yeah.
• 28:58
  Charlie Loften: Hey. Guess what? You're not the first person that had that clearly erroneous idea. Yeah. In fact, there's a guy's name, and we will learn that guy's name over the course I
• 29:07
  Abigail Boone: mean, I legitimately said that to you right before we started filming that I was reading this poet that during World War two time period Mhmm. Had this belief about God. And Abigail in 2021 Mhmm. Had those thought processes. Right.
• 29:25
  And I read a poet that had the exact same thought process.
• 29:28
  Charlie Loften: You see some clown on TikTok or YouTube or whatever talking about how, well, yo, Jesus in the New Testament is very different than the God of the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament is this, this, this, this, and this, and Jesus is all these things, and really, we need to kinda separate those two things. Like that that's something that was birthed out of the hippie movement from the 1960s, when in fact And a
• 29:52
  Abigail Boone: lot of people do think
• 29:53
  Charlie Loften: there is a name for that, and it is Marcionism. And we will talk about our boy and where he came up with that, but that is not a new idea. Again, a thousands year old idea. And we think that we're inventing new things, and I was talking to somebody the other day, I was talking about something the other day, and I was like, that's just Gnosticism with new words. And I don't know what Gnosticism is.
• 30:21
  It's like, guess what, bro?
• 30:22
  Abigail Boone: You're doing it.
• 30:23
  Charlie Loften: You're about to find out because I'm dominate about you right now. And I think there's just a lot to that too, where it's just like it helps us have this foundation... Of course, if I was to keep reviewing, it keeps us from having a small Christianity. It's just me, God, and the Bible. Nope, it's not.
• 30:42
  It's two thousand years of church history. It helps us understand what the key foundational planks are.
• 30:49
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 30:51
  Charlie Loften: And it also puts up some very significant guardrails.
• 30:55
  Abigail Boone: Yeah.
• 30:56
  Charlie Loften: Some guardrails that when they get lost, next thing you know, we're inventing Mormonism. Next thing you know, we're inventing Jehovah's Witnesses. And all of these different ideas that someone's like, what... A second. And you've unlocked some great truth, and somewhere, Saint Augustine is going, I thought we killed this seventeen hundred years ago.
• 31:18
  Abigail Boone: Well, and I think it's not just starting a religion. They're just, like, tiny little micro movements. Yeah. And people are like, oh, this is what that passage was saying, and then you see something crop up in
• 31:30
  Charlie Loften: some states. Some smug person wearing some sort of fancy sweater in a TikTok video Mhmm. With a bunch of books behind him. Oh, he must be smart. He has books behind him.
• 31:41
  Abigail Boone: He's unearthing something really.
• 31:42
  Charlie Loften: His voice is very soothing.
• 31:44
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 31:45
  Charlie Loften: And here's something that your church won't tell you. Mhmm. Let's look at this passage. And they act like that they're saying something new when, again, it's docetism, Arianism, Pelagianism. Mhmm.
• 31:58
  And you're like, I don't know what any of those things are. I was like, guess what, Abigail? You asked for it Yeah. And you're about to get a lot Mhmm. Thrown at you because I think, honestly, of my...
• 32:09
  I've got several more, we'll pick this up next week as I knew we would. To me, I think the core three for me are those three. It helps us have a bigger picture idea of this movement that we're a part of, which just has lots of tangible and intangible benefits. It helps us understand what our foundation are. And I think number one for me, honestly, even though it was three in the list, is the more we understand classical heresies, just the better guardrails that we have.
• 32:40
  Yeah. I mean, there's just so much so much like, what? You know? What if this Christian morality, it seems too restrictive and... I was like, oh, okay.
• 32:54
  Antinomianism. We should talk about when the church was battling that and these sorts of ideas that somehow in Jesus, now there is no moral code. That's not a new idea. Mean, the number of times that I'm just like, Man, sorry, it's not a new idea. That is not a new idea.
• 33:15
  That is not a... And people smarter and more deeply connected to God determined a long time ago that that was outside of the borders of what makes a healthy follower of Jesus, and we should have a measure of respect for that. Because if you come to a point to where in 2026 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, you can't really be... This is what a Christian is, and they're... And for two thousand years, people didn't believe that?
• 33:51
  Really unlikely that you're right. I mean, it's just... I mean, because God has been preserving his church, and we should be able to trust in these core truths and then have these
• 34:04
  Abigail Boone: fences available. Yeah. So Well, and I think with the understanding the guardrails, I mean, right now, our youth of America is going through a horrific crisis of dressing like the early two thousands. I don't know if you've noticed. It's a tragedy.
• 34:23
  Tragedy. I wish it would stop. They're gonna look at photos years from now and being like, wow. That's so ugly. And we're like, yeah.
• 34:30
  I know we did it, and we thought we would never repeat it, but here we are.
• 34:33
  Charlie Loften: Here we are.
• 34:34
  Abigail Boone: But I That's how
• 34:35
  Charlie Loften: I felt when bell bottoms came back.
• 34:38
  Abigail Boone: That was... I thought, well, maybe I'd have to see how long this has lasted. But I feel like bell bottoms is a little bit shorter than what's going on right now.
• 34:45
  Charlie Loften: Okay.
• 34:46
  Abigail Boone: It's just really disappointing that I'm like, y'all are all dressing intentionally ugly, it feels like.
• 34:52
  Charlie Loften: But I feel like bright patterns and tight rolled jeans never came back.
• 34:55
  Abigail Boone: No. The eighties No. It did not.
• 34:58
  Charlie Loften: The eighties, I think the... I think eighties fashion may be dead forever.
• 35:02
  Abigail Boone: Possibly. That was a lot of saturation and a lot of stuff. But I think I think I've talked about it on here before, the Decadent Society Mhmm. That you kinda... It's not related to this at all, but talking about different societies that you could track when they're gonna collapse based off of what stage of decadence they've gotten to.
• 35:20
  Mhmm. And a lot of these theories or heresies that get get brought up, I feel like maybe you as a pastor from seeing so many different iterations of this. You could be like, I see you're now in your retirement phase. Right. Because you have the leisure to think these theories up or the...
• 35:38
  You've finally gotten to this stage of like, oh, now this issue is important to you, and you think you've created this thing. But every person, once they get to that point in their life, starts thinking those things.
• 35:49
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. I mean, helping helping people figure out... Kinda like, I under... I understand why you're thinking this. I understand why it is attractive to you.
• 36:00
  But you need to understand that you... You're not unlocking a door Right. That has been locked, that that that has been an... Unknown about. That that door was intentionally locked Mhmm.
• 36:13
  Eighteen hundred years ago, sixteen hundred years ago, whenever it was intentionally locked. And we need to keep it locked.
• 36:19
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 36:20
  Charlie Loften: And it used to be guarded. And I think, hopefully, what this podcast can do is to help those of us who are listening to it to have better guards Mhmm. Watching over certain doors. Mhmm. Because there there there are lines of thinking that are just dangerous.
• 36:40
  And have been declared dangerous by church leaders for almost two thousand years. And not every idea is a good idea. Not every new thought is a good thought, and some things have proven to be dangerous. I mean, I've had this conversation with all my daughters and I've started using that terminology more than wrong because I think it lands a little bit better where it's like, hey. Your your friends are experimenting with this sort of sexuality or they're trying to express their sexuality in these sorts of ways.
• 37:16
  I'm not asking you to judge your friends or to or to think that they're wrong per se, but I can tell you from experience, these ideas are dangerous.
• 37:25
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 37:26
  Charlie Loften: And there are such a thing as a theologically dangerous idea. Mhmm. That is is a dangerous way to think, Abigail
• 37:35
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 37:35
  Charlie Loften: Because it leads to here, and this is... There's real danger here. Right now, you're just... You're... I'm just talking.
• 37:42
  I'm just thinking. I'm just talking out loud. Yeah. Okay. But you've unintentionally gotten on a boat, and that boat is in a river, and it's taking you here to St.
• 37:50
  George, you need to get off of that boat. And I don't think that we're doing a really good job as a church, big picture, of guarding. And you think, well, I mean, the larger denominations are, and honestly, the larger, more mainstream denominations who used to be the guardians of particular branches of theology have become significantly looser. I mean, when the United Methodist Church can break up, I mean, you got united in your name.
• 38:19
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. And you.
• 38:20
  Charlie Loften: And the branches of Presbyterian, I mean, just every... Everything. I'm like, there's no guardians, and this is where a pro Catholic person comes in and says, that's why everybody should be Catholic. And I'm like, you think the Catholic church has done a good job over the last hundred years
• 38:36
  Abigail Boone: Yeah.
• 38:37
  Charlie Loften: Of putting up really good guardrails against the important areas of doctrine and
• 38:43
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. Church. Well, and I think that is... And I don't know if there's more on your list that maybe would be next episode, but plenty of people out there study church history without also bringing the Bible along with themselves. Right.
• 38:58
  And so I think if you know there's those doors that are locked or you are not even taking it from that perspective, if you're looking at certain things today that you're thinking this is a new issue, this is whatever, assuming the Bible cannot be relevant to whatever you're looking at. It's like, well, those type of issues that we think are unique to our culture right now, there actually was versions of that happening at that time. But you're trying to study Christianity without letting the Bible speak into it.
• 39:28
  Charlie Loften: Now now you're about to get me on a different ramp, but we're gonna have to close it off. Like, we imagined the Bible land that those people lived in nineteen fifties Southern America. Yeah. Like, just a real uptight sort of Suburban. Suburban, racist
• 39:46
  Abigail Boone: Yeah.
• 39:46
  Charlie Loften: Uptight culture. Yeah. And you're like, and we don't have anything in common with that. And so when you see something restrictive in the Bible, oh, that's because they were puritanical. That's about as far back as we can get.
• 39:57
  We don't even realize that's 400 years old, but like
• 40:00
  Abigail Boone: Oh, like, you'd be blushing to no end if you walked into Ephesus. Yeah. You would Like, you wouldn't know what to do with yourself.
• 40:07
  Charlie Loften: Right.
• 40:09
  Abigail Boone: And we think we're bad, but, like... But I don't think people can really wrap their minds around that thinking that way.
• 40:13
  Charlie Loften: We have such a... We we have such a narrow view of history. It's the last thing I'll say because you you brought it up. What we think of as old Yeah. Versus you walk around London, and you're like...
• 40:29
  They start saying, yeah. And this and this building was first founded during the Norman conquest, which was the the eleventh century. Mhmm. And then all of a sudden, then you'd hop over to Rome, and you're like
• 40:40
  Abigail Boone: But
• 40:41
  Charlie Loften: First century. Like, in a really old building here in ours. Mean, this Uh-huh. This was this was built in the eighteen hundreds. Like Yeah.
• 40:48
  Man, that's old. And we we think of eighties fashion as old. Right. Yeah. And we just have such a narrow view of the world and the Christian world in which we live that I think this can be real mind expanding for us.
• 41:02
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 41:02
  Charlie Loften: And really helpful. We'll we'll keep... We'll con... We'll continue that conversation. I can already tell
• 41:10
  Abigail Boone: That you're gonna love this too.
• 41:11
  Charlie Loften: I'm gonna get into a lot of rant. Okay. Great. So I hope you're ready. Hope you're ready.
• 41:17
  And, again, as always, Abigail, thank you for joining us. And, again, kudos to the hat.
• 41:21
  Abigail Boone: Thank you.
• 41:22
  Charlie Loften: And and we look forward to seeing you next time. We'll continue talking about, all the reasons why it's important for us to study church history. Thanks for joining us. 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.
• 41:42
  We hope that we can be a resource for you through our podcast and any other way that
• 41:46
  Abigail Boone: we can help you.
• 41:47
  Charlie Loften: You can find all our episodes anywhere that you can find podcasts including YouTube. And again, thank you so much for joining us.