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Transcript

How the Church Became What It Is Today · 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. Everyone, welcome to the Cultivate podcast.
• 0:38
  I'm Charlie Loften, lead pastor at The Grove Church, and we are here with... I feel like you wear more coffee hats than I ever see you drink coffee.
• 0:50
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. I... It's funny because I used to drink coffee all the time, and then I I don't know if I saw just collect the hats? No. I still drink coffee.
• 1:00
  I just don't drink as much coffee. So by the time I see you, I'm usually done with coffee for the day. Unless we went to a coffee shop, I would get, like, a latte, but, like, my one cup of black coffee usually is done by the time I would see you.
• 1:13
  Charlie Loften: I have another question. Yeah. Maybe I'm... I think I'm observing, but maybe I'm not. Do...
• 1:18
  Have you always kinda just rocked that carabiner?
• 1:21
  Abigail Boone: Oh, yes. Ever since high school. Yeah. I mean This is like... I need to actually get a new one because it doesn't stay shut.
• 1:27
  Like, the spring I feel like has...
• 1:29
  Charlie Loften: Like, I have my... In my mind, like, I look over there at you. I don't I don't see a carabiner.
• 1:33
  Abigail Boone: I definitely usually take it off because that's That that helps.
• 1:36
  Charlie Loften: That helps.
• 1:37
  Abigail Boone: Usually, when I'm walking around, it starts rattling too much, and it drives people crazy, but I would take it off before we started. And I guess I I just forgot.
• 1:47
  Charlie Loften: They're rocking the carabiner. No. I've Watch on
• 1:49
  Abigail Boone: YouTube to see Abigail's carabiner. Carabiner.
• 1:51
  Charlie Loften: And Abigail's coffee hat.
• 1:52
  Abigail Boone: Yes. And I always have my OpenL knife. Oh. So I have my random gadget things. I used to have, like, all of my gear stuff for my camera.
• 2:01
  Mhmm. I have, like, a little Swiss army knife up for camera gear stuff. So it just clanks all around and drives my roommate crazy.
• 2:08
  Charlie Loften: Guess I didn't technically introduce you, but I guess if your people I'm out of gate. 9% of the people, they don't need... No. No. This is not their first...
• 2:15
  This is not gonna be their first podcast.
• 2:16
  Abigail Boone: Could be. Well, you're Abigail Boone.
• 2:19
  Charlie Loften: Yes. Creative director. Yes. Entrepreneur, business leader. I
• 2:25
  Abigail Boone: accidentally became an entrepreneur. I don't
• 2:27
  Charlie Loften: know that much. Your own website.
• 2:29
  Abigail Boone: I do. I do. Because of the type of work I do, I would say that's, like, the easiest step a person could take, but there's a lot of people that that's hard for, so I get it.
• 2:39
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. So we are doing your dream series.
• 2:43
  Abigail Boone: Yes.
• 2:44
  Charlie Loften: We spent two weeks talking about why it is important to church... To study church history. Yes. You wanna... You got any summary?
• 2:51
  You remember you remember what the
• 2:52
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. The main one that has stuck with me is humility.
• 2:56
  Charlie Loften: Mhmm.
• 2:57
  Abigail Boone: That it has come from such a long lineage, but, also, we're gonna see the things that have persisted throughout every generation and see, like, nah. There's actually some really solid stuff here that really can't be knocked around because it's gone through so many hands.
• 3:12
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. We spend so much time. We we do sometimes, like, talking about what the nonnegotiables are Yeah. In Christianity. And every now and then, people will put a list of nonnegotiables together that would exclude 95% of historical Christians.
• 3:29
  Right?
• 3:30
  Abigail Boone: Really? Yeah.
• 3:30
  Charlie Loften: I mean, like, you don't... I mean, like like, they hadn't even necessarily even thought of this yet. Mhmm. Or, you know, although this is actually the
• 3:38
  Abigail Boone: the Oh, like it's a newer Yeah. Type. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha.
• 3:41
  Charlie Loften: And so, you know, to understand really kind of what the core essentials are and then also to help guard against all the things that are attacking us.
• 3:51
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. The... You know,
• 3:53
  Charlie Loften: I mean, we think we hear some new idea, and then it turns out it's an 1,800 year old heresy.
• 3:59
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. Yeah.
• 4:00
  Charlie Loften: So... And then we were kind of working our way through these The overview. The overview of kind of these main historical periods. So Yep. Yes.
• 4:11
  Abigail Boone: One thing over the last week since we had started the overview, I was like, what do other people include if they did a history of the church podcast? What would they include? And so I was scrolling through, and one looked kinda interesting, so I started listening to it. And after a couple of minutes, I was like, they can't... They're just so focused on Joseph.
• 4:31
  Do you know what happened there? Joseph? Yeah. I was listening to the history of the Mormon Church. Oh my word.
• 4:39
  And then I hopped over to another one and started listening to that, and that was just the the Roman Catholic history church. So then I gave up because I felt like I couldn't accurately bet in the short time span that I had to find a legit... Not that maybe Catholic would not be legit, but not necessarily what we're doing.
• 4:59
  Charlie Loften: Right.
• 5:00
  Abigail Boone: Right. But Joseph was definitely not who I was looking for.
• 5:03
  Charlie Loften: Joseph Smith, he will not play at all into our Which is great. History of the church. I mean, I guess maybe we start talking about, you know, the eighteen, nineteen hundreds Right. History of the church in America. Cults.
• 5:16
  We can talk about the cults that have that have popped up from from time to time.
• 5:20
  Abigail Boone: But the title of the podcast was history of the church. Yeah. And then just kept all the titles were, like, when the church x, y, and z. So there is no, like, red flag glaring at me that
• 5:32
  Charlie Loften: Until they said that the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri.
• 5:35
  Abigail Boone: I didn't get to them.
• 5:36
  Charlie Loften: Didn't catch that one. Didn't catch that one. Have mercy. Okay. So these major categories we're talking about, we just kinda...
• 5:42
  What... I I think it's gonna be really important for us to think about this overview, and then we're gonna dive in to kind of the most with each... Within each category, kind of the most significant characters and the most significant kind of events or councils or things. But I think it's important. So you think about the Bible era.
• 5:59
  Mhmm. It starts with Pentecost, kinda some rapid spread from Jerusalem to the surrounding areas. You got the the calling of Paul Mhmm. Who kinda really becomes the first Gentile... Missionary to Gentiles.
• 6:16
  You got the stoning of Stephen, which is important because then a big persecution amongst the Jews to Christians came, which kinda caused... Which kind of led to a lot of the spread. Do what? Jews persecuting Jews persecuting Christians.
• 6:30
  Abigail Boone: Okay.
• 6:31
  Charlie Loften: They killed Stephen, and then they'll kinda... And then Paul's kind of in on that, and that that kind of led to a spread. And as they spread out, Christianity spreads. Then you've got Paul coming to faith and becoming this real... Just kinda first dedicated missionary to the Gentiles, which then goes to the council of Jerusalem where they kind of decided, okay.
• 6:53
  We gotta kind of decide what are we gonna do with this old... The the... What we would call the Old Testament law. And that is just kind of a a crazy significant event to figure out how can we incorporate Gentiles into what we've considered to be mostly a... Really kind of a fulfillment of the Jewish faith is kind of how they
• 7:10
  Abigail Boone: thought it. Question. Yep. The people that would... The Jews that would have been persecuting the Christians, were they they just didn't believe that Jesus was the Messiah, and so they were a different religion at that point.
• 7:23
  Yeah. Maybe believe something different.
• 7:25
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. Mean, I mean, the the Christians would have thought, well, this is the fulfillment of everything. And it's like, no, this isn't the fulfillment of anything. Jesus is in fact, know, what we would call Jesus as a cult leader.
• 7:36
  Abigail Boone: Okay.
• 7:36
  Charlie Loften: And so we we need to purge our religion of this cult was how
• 7:41
  Abigail Boone: they But before that, they would have been the same people and then
• 7:44
  Charlie Loften: half of the deceased then becomes a decision decision point.
• 7:48
  Abigail Boone: Okay.
• 7:49
  Charlie Loften: Alright. So we'll walk through the book of Acts, which we'll just kinda call that the apostolic church. Mhmm. Then from there, you've got the early church, which has, again, your boy. Irenaeus.
• 8:00
  Irenaeus. Yes. And there's just some really... The kind of the the... Really the disciples of the disciples.
• 8:07
  And we kind of see kind of the the the... Really, theological foundations really being established there. It's it's a it's a point in history. It's just marked by a lot of persecution Mhmm. Not only just by religious Jews, but they began to believe the Roman Empire.
• 8:25
  This was just kind of a dangerous group of people, and we just... And and needed to be tamped down. And so there was widespread all throughout the Roman Empire persecution, both religious and political persecution. And the crazy thing is that it... Even in that environment and even probably because of that environment, it spread like wildfire.
• 8:49
  Yeah. We talked about this a few weeks ago. We talked about the the Streisand effect. Did we talk about that? Yes.
• 8:54
  Abigail Boone: We did.
• 8:55
  Charlie Loften: We did. Yeah. Same sort of deal. You you ban something Uh-huh. And you're just gonna make people infinitely more curious.
• 9:01
  Abigail Boone: Right. Then you go kind of love that. And you go
• 9:04
  Charlie Loften: from there to the era of Constantine and the imperial church,
• 9:08
  Abigail Boone: and
• 9:08
  Charlie Loften: we talked about that. We're gonna spend a lot of time there.
• 9:11
  Abigail Boone: I am ex... So I was an art major, and so we had to take, like, four sections of art history throughout. And I had always... Like, the cure... No.
• 9:23
  What's the sign that he did on the show? The chiro. Chiro.
• 9:26
  Charlie Loften: X... It looks like XP.
• 9:27
  Abigail Boone: Yes. We studied that agnosium, like, so much, but I had just never known the story behind Yeah. Where that came from. So, like, I know that simple well throughout art history, but I had never known, like, the reason why that came to be Yeah. Or why it was so prolific in history once that point story, but really,
• 9:46
  Charlie Loften: it is it is the time that Christianity became mainstream. Right. A guy who was about to become the the emperor says... At a minimum, said he converted to Christianity and and then at least ended the persecution
• 10:02
  Abigail Boone: Right.
• 10:03
  Charlie Loften: And which set the table for his son to most assuredly be a convert to Christianity, and he ultimately made Christianity the the national religion. His son did?
• 10:16
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm. Okay.
• 10:17
  Charlie Loften: And so during that period, you see this...
• 10:21
  Abigail Boone: What was his son's name?
• 10:23
  Charlie Loften: Let's see. It is George. No. It is... I'm sitting here going to blank on it.
• 10:29
  It's it's something... It's it's so close to Constantine that I... It it slips my mind. It's like constant... It's constant...
• 10:36
  Yeah. I mean, it's something... It is something like that.
• 10:39
  Abigail Boone: Okay. But when we k. We'll dive into it.
• 10:42
  Charlie Loften: I'll have I'll have
• 10:42
  Abigail Boone: it locked in. Okay.
• 10:44
  Charlie Loften: And so at that point, now we're switching from Christianity being a a persecuted faith Mhmm. And and thriving under that, and now a complete shift to acceptable to mainstream to essentially national religion. Mhmm. And so
• 11:03
  Abigail Boone: What time period is this? I wanna look up what the Roman Empire looked like geographically.
• 11:07
  Charlie Loften: Well, the the essential battle there of the the... Where Constantine, you know, puts the chiro on all the things, that was in 03/12. So we're... This period, we're kinda looking at for this from three twelve AD to about five hundred AD.
• 11:25
  Abigail Boone: Okay. 03/12.
• 11:29
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. And so then the Edict of Milan is in 03/13 where Christianity becomes legal. And then also in here is one of the most significant periods of really just kind of putting down a lot of offshoots and what we would now call heresies and really kind of establishing what the church is really as a political entity, and it moves from just kind of this underground catacombs movement to, like, a a, like, a major player in politics and power Mhmm. Which allowed it to be mainstream and be spread a different way and allowed you to be safe, but you begin to see kind of the initial corrupting influences that churches
• 12:12
  Abigail Boone: have when it blends. Happen.
• 12:15
  Charlie Loften: And here too during this period is when really political power and religious power for the first time are, like, all centered in the city of Rome
• 12:25
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 12:26
  Charlie Loften: Which really, for at least non Catholics, this is considered kind of the the start of what we would call the Roman Catholic Church.
• 12:35
  Abigail Boone: Okay.
• 12:35
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. Before that, there was just the church, and Catholics would be like, if it was just the church,
• 12:39
  Abigail Boone: it was the Catholic church, bro. Right. Which is fine
• 12:42
  Charlie Loften: which is fine for them to say, but really kind of what we think of, like, the Roman Catholic Church as an entity and an organization really has its origins here.
• 12:51
  Abigail Boone: And
• 12:52
  Charlie Loften: so you go from there to the medieval period. We'll say studied a ton. About five hundred AD to 1054. And I'll tell you what significant thing happened in 1054. But with the the medieval church...
• 13:08
  And, again, the the word medieval
• 13:11
  Abigail Boone: It's... It can be confusing.
• 13:13
  Charlie Loften: Well, we we make it sound like that it has become a a word that just means
• 13:21
  Abigail Boone: Yes. You know? Gargoyles and
• 13:23
  Charlie Loften: Well, it just... And what it means, like, sort of barbarians or anti science, anti progress. Really, it's just... It really, guys, it's just a time period.
• 13:34
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. What you feel about
• 13:35
  Charlie Loften: that time period is up to you. But now
• 13:38
  Abigail Boone: My... The whole class I did in art history was over medieval history, art history, and majority of it was art within churches.
• 13:48
  Charlie Loften: Mhmm. Mhmm.
• 13:49
  Abigail Boone: That was like... And that's where we studied the Cairo so much. Right. But it was like majority of it... Majority of art at that point, that was something like the earliest, like, actually displayed art, and it was all in church cathedrals.
• 14:01
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. So now you've got this well established religion that is mainstream, is considered the religion of the Holy Roman Empire. Mhmm. And so you are supposed to be a Christian. And so now they're having to deal with that.
• 14:17
  Abigail Boone: Like mandated supposed? Yeah.
• 14:19
  Charlie Loften: It's it's it's the state religion. Okay. Yeah. That doesn't mean that everybody is, in their heart, a convert, but now that's that's a problem that they didn't have before. Mhmm.
• 14:29
  So we've got to deal with the problem of what we would now call casual Christians or, you know Yeah. I inherited my Christianity as opposed to I made my confession of faith under duress.
• 14:42
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. See, I feel like that's one of the more confusing things as an American to fully understand. Like, I know there's the most, like, prominent Christian in America, but I've never lived under, like, a state religion.
• 14:54
  Charlie Loften: Right.
• 14:54
  Abigail Boone: So it's hard to comprehend what that would even mean.
• 14:58
  Charlie Loften: And so what we'll see in that medieval period is the upsides and the downsides of that. When you've got political power behind you, you've got the money and the resources you need to really have a pretty widespread missionary movement to spread. But it's also... It's like, you know, the swords come first Right. And the Bibles come right behind you.
• 15:18
  And so even even as Christianity is spreading throughout Europe, it is often, again, it's not being led like we're Christians coming to conquer you. We're Romans, and we've conquered you.
• 15:31
  Abigail Boone: And now you have to be Christians. Yeah.
• 15:34
  Charlie Loften: And and in that, there... You'll see groups of people who are like, I want to get back to real, raw faith, which is where the monastic movement comes from. The monks. Yeah. And so you'll...
• 15:53
  You see in monastic is kind of the adjective form of the word monk. Mhmm. So in these monks, this kind of this real fervor to get into kind of real authentic faith. And if you look at the the words of Jesus and you take them at their most literal, you're gonna see, like, poverty is a value, denying yourself is a value, separating yourself from the world is a value. And so they took a very narrow approach to what Jesus was calling people to, and it really becomes kind of this counterbalance to Excess.
• 16:25
  This excess religion that if, you know, if if the if, you know, if the the emperor is good with your religion, are you really are you really living authentically? I mean, Jesus was simple and humble and fought against power, and now we've just become this mainstream, and we've become soft, we've lost our edge. And so, you know, these these monastic movements really kind of become the counterbalance and really were more than anything kind of the driving force behind a lot of the missions movements. Some of them were very reclusive, and it was just like, there's just there's just the 15 of us. And if you wanna join us, you can find us.
• 17:14
  Yeah. But a lot of them also just kinda had a real, we want to spread authentic faith in Jesus out there. Again, counterbalancing this mainstreaming blend of
• 17:25
  Abigail Boone: Were they actually monks, or did monks name themselves after those people?
• 17:32
  Charlie Loften: I'm not sure You understand my question? Understand that question.
• 17:35
  Abigail Boone: Like, would they self identify as monks and they went to the monastic movement, or did the monks later be like, we're modeling after these people that went out into the desert?
• 17:45
  Charlie Loften: No. They they would have been monks.
• 17:46
  Abigail Boone: Okay.
• 17:48
  Charlie Loften: And different groups had different founders, and so they really kind of identified themselves by their by their boy. Like, we're we're we're we're Byzantine monks, which is coming from a guy. So there's a leader that would start a movement, and they would become monks, and they would identify them. So there'd be... Rivals isn't the right word, but there'd be different groups of monks that had different pry...
• 18:14
  Different pry... Different sorts of priorities. But, yes, they would have referred to themselves as monks.
• 18:18
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. Okay.
• 18:19
  Charlie Loften: So then the other thing that's happening as as the Roman Empire is getting bigger, it's becoming significantly more diverse, And now you've kind of got Rome over here on the western end of it, and all of this power is concentrated over here. Meanwhile, over here in what is now Istanbul, but was eventually... It was named Constantinople then. Constantine moves power over here and names this city after him. And we've got these two very different groups of people
• 18:52
  Abigail Boone: Like, they
• 18:52
  Charlie Loften: live different two very different political centers, and they just have significant cultural diversity. And we have our first ever real, what we'll call church split there in 1054. It is called the Great Schism, and we'll spend a decent amount of time talking about that too. If you've ever been driving around and say, Oh, that's an Orthodox church. I wonder what that is.
• 19:16
  Greek Orthodox. It's Russian Orthodox. Ukrainian Orthodox. Right? That is where this happened.
• 19:22
  And it really was, more than anything, there political... There were were some some religious theological disputes amongst them, and we'll get into those. But they're so seemingly insignificant that if... When... At the moment, when I describe it to you, you're gonna be like
• 19:38
  Abigail Boone: That was more of a political split. What? Oh, okay.
• 19:42
  Charlie Loften: I I don't even know if I know the difference between these two ideas, but it was significant enough to them. But really, the core of of the beef was the political influence of Rome versus the political influence of Constantine. Just how vastly different, say, people that live in Italy and people who live in Turkey
• 20:02
  Abigail Boone: They're gonna... They're just wildly different planets.
• 20:05
  Charlie Loften: And so we have the great schism.
• 20:07
  Abigail Boone: A part of the Roman Empire. So how much agency? We'll get into it later, but it confuses me how much agency they would have had to actually split.
• 20:15
  Charlie Loften: Right.
• 20:16
  Abigail Boone: Because the Roman Empire was, like, mighty powerful. Right?
• 20:19
  Charlie Loften: Right. So, I mean, this... Again, there is a there's a lot of there's... Again, the... You're asking a really good question because it is politics and religion are so enmeshed.
• 20:31
  Mhmm. You know, they're not choosing to not be Christians. Right. But we're choosing to disassociate ourselves with
• 20:38
  Abigail Boone: This larger
• 20:40
  Charlie Loften: This... To to say that people who... Romans, ethnic Romans from Rome Mhmm. Get to dictate who and what
• 20:49
  Abigail Boone: we do. We have
• 20:50
  Charlie Loften: to send all our money to them, and they get to tell us what to do. You don't even know us. You don't even understand us.
• 20:55
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 20:56
  Charlie Loften: And so it was really more of a cultural
• 20:58
  Abigail Boone: Yeah.
• 20:58
  Charlie Loften: Political split even though theology played a part in it. And so now we've got these two churches, what we would call the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. And because we are Protestants, we really tend to follow the thread of, okay, what was happening here with the Catholics?
• 21:15
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 21:15
  Charlie Loften: Because our movements were birthed out of that. Right. So now you've got this window from 10:54, the time of the great schism, to the fifteen hundreds, kinda your late medieval period, which... It's really it's really kind of a dark time in the church. This is maybe where, like, medieval kind of gets some of its some of its yuck.
• 21:36
  Yeah. I mean, just a significant amount of corruption begins to embed itself in in the church. Mhmm. Where who gets to be pope was not a who's the most religious? Who loves Jesus the most?
• 21:51
  Who has the best character? But it was it was the kind of it was the kind of thing that you could buy, and it was just kind of passed around from Yeah. The richest, most noble families in Italy. And so you would take one of your sons, and you would raise him to be one of the competitors amongst the other
• 22:11
  Abigail Boone: To be a pope.
• 22:12
  Charlie Loften: Wealthy families to hopefully one day get to become the pope. Interesting. A lot of influence peddling. It was really more about the acquisition of wealth and power, and it just became... It was a real corrupting influence.
• 22:25
  And during that time, there were all sorts of people, again, like monks and others, who were just like, this is not authentic Christianity. We need to reform the church in a deeply significant way. Long before guys like Martin Luther or Zwingli or Calvin or any of these guys, you know, emerge onto the scene, the people that we know the best, There was a lot of call for, we've got to fix this. We have lost our way significantly. But, again, corruption gets so bad, it kinda then sparks in what we would call, you know, the Protestant Reformation
• 23:06
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 23:07
  Charlie Loften: Which is the the fifteen the fifteen hundreds. I was trying to remember
• 23:11
  Abigail Boone: what it like. Yep. That's what I prefer.
• 23:12
  Charlie Loften: And now I gotta start thinking, wait. I'm about to say that wrong.
• 23:14
  Abigail Boone: If you would have said the century.
• 23:15
  Charlie Loften: Not sixteenth century.
• 23:17
  Abigail Boone: The 15 hundreds. 15 hundreds.
• 23:19
  Charlie Loften: And so, again, that was not a desire on Martin Luther or Zwingli or Calvin, Knox, Tyndale. Those are the kind of the big names. It was not a desire to... We're gonna start our own religion. We're not trying to split off like the Eastern Orthodox Church did.
• 23:33
  Abigail Boone: They're trying to, like, reclaim.
• 23:34
  Charlie Loften: I mean, it was it was it was a reformation movement. We are trying to be reformers.
• 23:41
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 23:42
  Charlie Loften: And we want the church to to to get back to what it's supposed to.
• 23:48
  Abigail Boone: Which is kinda crazy because, I mean, up until Martin Luther, it's not like they had at home Bibles to reference.
• 23:55
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. We will we will spend a lot of time talking about the significance of the invention of the printing press Mhmm. That happened in the fourteen hundreds Yeah. That really kind of sparked
• 24:07
  Abigail Boone: all Martin of Luther.
• 24:09
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. It it... Yeah. Martin... It it it come...
• 24:11
  Abigail Boone: It Okay.
• 24:12
  Charlie Loften: It is... Martin Luther is he's a product of this. Okay. Yeah. A guy
• 24:18
  Abigail Boone: named Gutenberg. And again It's a fun name.
• 24:20
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. Gutenberg. The the Gutenberg press is what it was called. The Gutenberg Bible was the first book that was... That's why he invented this thing so he could mass produce the Bible.
• 24:30
  Oh, fourteen hundreds.
• 24:32
  Abigail Boone: Specifically for the Bible. He wanted Not just for, like, news.
• 24:35
  Charlie Loften: Wanted the Bible to be
• 24:38
  Abigail Boone: Okay. Yeah. That's interesting.
• 24:41
  Charlie Loften: And so he wants to mass produce the Bible so that people can have it. And so... And some people, it was it was kinda controversial.
• 24:48
  Abigail Boone: Okay.
• 24:49
  Charlie Loften: Like, we're just gonna let we're just gonna let anybody read the Bible, and we're gonna let we're gonna let them read the Bible in their own language.
• 24:56
  Abigail Boone: That was like a power trip.
• 24:57
  Charlie Loften: Well
• 24:58
  Abigail Boone: Or was there other things?
• 24:59
  Charlie Loften: Sort of. I mean, have you ever heard somebody say, like, hey. You should be carrying around your paper Bible. You should not be just looking at the Bible on your phone. Yeah.
• 25:09
  Why? Why do people say that?
• 25:11
  Abigail Boone: Because they think it's not the natural pure way to do it,
• 25:16
  Charlie Loften: I guess. Some people are just tech... Technologically. This is how we've always done
• 25:20
  Abigail Boone: it. Analog.
• 25:21
  Charlie Loften: Well, but for fourteen hundred years of the church
• 25:23
  Abigail Boone: It was red.
• 25:24
  Charlie Loften: No one could carry a Bible around with them,
• 25:27
  Abigail Boone: and you had it read to it was gonna taint.
• 25:30
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. And I... You you, just random person, are gonna be able to read the Bible and understand it. You need someone to explain it to you, or you're gonna come up with some really crazy ideas.
• 25:42
  Abigail Boone: Do what? There could... Like, a holiness factor. Like, could you actually interpret this correctly?
• 25:47
  Charlie Loften: Right. And so the the good part of it would be... Well, you you just in the Bible by yourself could come up with some crazy ideas. You need the the traditions and the history and the education of the church to help you understand what you're reading.
• 26:04
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 26:05
  Charlie Loften: Kinda like, you know, the story of Philip and the Ethiopian guy Mhmm. Where he's reading a scroll from Isaiah, and Philip's like, hey, so what are you reading? He's like, I don't know what I'm reading. I don't know what this...
• 26:16
  Abigail Boone: Who is he?
• 26:16
  Charlie Loften: Who are they talking who are they talking about? Mhmm. And so Philip explains it to him. Mhmm. The same sort of idea.
• 26:21
  Okay. Like, who is this and what what what? I go, it must mean this. It must mean this. And so you could just...
• 26:27
  You could start any random church based on your one misunderstanding of
• 26:32
  Abigail Boone: Had the can... The canon had already happened.
• 26:34
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. So what the Bible was, which books was already established.
• 26:38
  Abigail Boone: Okay.
• 26:38
  Charlie Loften: But was limited to... The ability to just read it was really limited to the priests. Mhmm. And so they were the keepers of the knowledge, which is really good
• 26:53
  Abigail Boone: if Both sides have bad outcomes.
• 26:57
  Charlie Loften: But what was happening with all of the religious and political and financial power being accumulated over here, them being the gatekeepers to God's Word was a problem. Yeah. But they say, if you're gonna open this up to everybody, you're gonna have this problem where just you're gonna have thousands of different types of Christianity, and cults are gonna pop up everywhere because people think they can just decide for themselves with the
• 27:23
  Abigail Boone: Bible. Mhmm.
• 27:25
  Charlie Loften: Which... Good call. That that is exactly what happened. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that what was happening was good.
• 27:34
  It wasn't. It needed to be reformed. Right. And so these guys come up and reform it and are trying to reform it and talking really just about what we would call the authority of Scripture, that everything we believe has to come from Scripture, not from tradition. Everything, you know, it's by, you know...
• 27:53
  I think the way Luther would say it, by Scripture alone, by faith alone, by grace alone. Right? Those those were kind of these big points. Seems like that
• 28:01
  Abigail Boone: would truly be controversial. It was very controversial, which is why
• 28:06
  Charlie Loften: ultimately he got kicked out of the church.
• 28:09
  Abigail Boone: Okay.
• 28:10
  Charlie Loften: But there had been such, not just with him, but with everybody else, there had been such a stirring of this desire for reform that even after they kicked out all these guys that we would call the reformers, there was just kind of... And the crowd would be like, wait. But they made some good points, though. And they had a thing called the counter reformation Mhmm. Where they did kind of change a few things, not go so far as what Luther was saying, but changing enough things to kinda be like, no.
• 28:39
  We we see their point,
• 28:41
  Abigail Boone: and Yeah. We've we've changed. At the same time? Yeah. Well...
• 28:45
  Yeah. After. Right?
• 28:48
  Charlie Loften: Luther's causing all the trouble. They kick him out, and then we have a counter ref. We're we're gonna... We we gotta get we gotta get rid of these heretics Yeah. Who do not believe enough in the authority of the pope.
• 29:00
  Mhmm. Gotta get rid of them. And now we will, by our more structured, appropriate processes Yeah. Put reformations together.
• 29:09
  Abigail Boone: See, it's interesting to me because it feels like there's such a large category of things that a lot of time when I'm thinking, like, why do we do it that way? Why did these traditions come? And so often it comes down to, well, there's a lot of people, So we had to, like, put some, like, structure.
• 29:27
  Charlie Loften: Yeah.
• 29:28
  Abigail Boone: And it's like, well, there's not like a scriptural reason for that. The number was just increasing, so it became easier to have neighborhood churches or it became easier to do a structure or meeting a certain way because there is this many people there now.
• 29:43
  Charlie Loften: And now we've got 10 churches, and we got a 100 churches. We got
• 29:46
  Abigail Boone: 100 churches to have, like,
• 29:47
  Charlie Loften: local representatives. And how how do we how do we maintain Yeah. Unity Yeah. When there's so many of us
• 29:55
  Abigail Boone: right a lot of times you want a more satisfying answer, but really it is just because, well, we needed some sense of order because it was getting really big. And it's like, though that served a really good purpose, but it's not like in the scripture somewhere. It said, do this this way. They're trying to maintain control of growth. Yeah.
• 30:12
  But power has a corrupting influence on people.
• 30:15
  Charlie Loften: So you create these structures, and within these structures, there are authority figures. And with authority becomes power. And, again, if you're also enmeshed with, you know, the biggest, baddest empire of the age Mhmm. Then corruption becomes inevitable. Yeah.
• 30:35
  And so all of this internal desire for reformation comes. I had to kick these guys out, then they did finish the reformation. So we'll spend some time... Spend a lot of time talking about what we would call the Protestant reformers, but then we'll spend some time too talking about this counter reformation because it really kinda set the foundation for what, you know, the church still is over the last five hundred years and really carving out its distinctives from what we would call Protestantism.
• 31:04
  Abigail Boone: Okay.
• 31:05
  Charlie Loften: So, you know, from there, kinda you get to the sixteen hundreds, seventeen hundreds where really kind of Christianity now is becoming more of a global movement. Or right now, we're really talking about, up until this point, we've been talking about your... You know, what we would call Europe, Western Asia, Northern Africa, but as the ability to travel over oceans, right, begins to become widespread and the discovery of all of these other places, now Christianity is becoming a global movement and really becomes kind of really one of the one of the peak times of missions. And we will spend some time during this talking about the Great Awakening.
• 31:47
  Abigail Boone: Yes. George Whitfield.
• 31:49
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. So the Great Awakening where it was just kinda like, again, Christianity had become kind of stale, and there was all of sudden this powerful movement of just like, wait a second, Jesus is real and the Holy Spirit's real and what are we doing with this casual nonsense? And there comes this great spiritual fervor, which then leads to this missions fervor that spreads Christianity all over the
• 32:10
  Abigail Boone: world. Mhmm.
• 32:11
  Charlie Loften: Which then leads us to number eight, kind of the eighteen hundreds, where they're kind of the modern missions movement. Mhmm. The second great awakening
• 32:19
  Abigail Boone: Yeah.
• 32:19
  Charlie Loften: Which is a really interesting period too, William Carey, Hudson Taylor, Charles Spurgeon. Yeah. Now we're now we're kind of looking at what happens in Christianity in America. And, again, if we were, you know, Kenyans, we would be taking a different approach to
• 32:38
  Abigail Boone: Of where it led. Yeah.
• 32:40
  Charlie Loften: We're we're, you know, we're not really that interested in the history of the Orthodox Church after it splits off. Yeah. Because we're talking about, you know, the Roman Catholic Church because that's where Martin Luther and those guys came from, and we find our
• 32:51
  Abigail Boone: We're looking at our lineage.
• 32:52
  Charlie Loften: We're looking at our history. We we call it church history, but it's really how did
• 32:56
  Abigail Boone: Church history that leads to the American church.
• 32:59
  Charlie Loften: We're kinda narrowing it to the point of, like, how did we get to where we are? Yeah. So the eighteen hundreds, we're looking at the second great awakening, which is an American movement. And, you know, and all of this in the, like, in seventeen hundreds, your boy, the Wesleys.
• 33:13
  Abigail Boone: Yes. My boy. Yeah.
• 33:15
  Charlie Loften: Boys, John and Charles.
• 33:17
  Abigail Boone: Charles. I've never heard of Charles. Charles Wesley? No. We always learned about John.
• 33:22
  Charlie Loften: He wrote most of the hymns in your hymn book.
• 33:25
  Abigail Boone: Charles did? Mhmm. Interesting. Yeah. Do have a Methodist hymn book at home.
• 33:29
  I can go check that out.
• 33:30
  Charlie Loften: Check it out.
• 33:31
  Abigail Boone: At my home, not even my parents' home.
• 33:33
  Charlie Loften: And then we'll wrap it up just kinda by looking at, like, the nineteen hundreds to today, kinda what all the different challenges that we face. I mean, the the rise of fundamentalism, the rise of Pentecostalism, the rise of kind of liberalism, Mormons, Jehovah's Witness, you know, just all these different movements, and then how we are trying to integrate Christianity into just a radically different culture than even we had
• 34:00
  Abigail Boone: We don't have a state religion.
• 34:01
  Charlie Loften: A hundred years ago.
• 34:03
  Abigail Boone: Right.
• 34:03
  Charlie Loften: I mean, we didn't officially have a state religion, but, really, until about a hundred years ago, wink wink, we did.
• 34:09
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. We're very homogenous.
• 34:11
  Charlie Loften: And now we've become a a significantly more diverse secular nation. And how does the church... How has the church grown, changed, and thrived since then?
• 34:21
  Abigail Boone: If you're watching this episode, we have two obnoxious flies circling us. From me to you. I know. And it's about to drive you crazy.
• 34:30
  Charlie Loften: It's me to you.
• 34:31
  Abigail Boone: They keep landing on the edge of my hat, and I can see it.
• 34:34
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. So some of the people from from the from the kind of the last hundred years, Karl Barth, you know that name?
• 34:39
  Abigail Boone: I've heard that name.
• 34:40
  Charlie Loften: Dietrich Boonehofer? Yes. He was... He...
• 34:43
  Abigail Boone: We'll talk about this. World War two. He was the guy...
• 34:45
  Charlie Loften: He he he he was involved in a plot to kill Hitler.
• 34:49
  Abigail Boone: Which feels crazy that that would be a Christian story, but okay.
• 34:52
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. I mean, because that was... I don't know how much time we can spend on it, but but, like, I mean, the Christian response to Nazism was a really big thing. And they were really kind of a group of them that was kinda like, well, I mean, God seems to be behind him. We'll we'll, you know, we'll we'll join him.
• 35:07
  And then guys like Boone are like, we gotta kill this guy.
• 35:11
  Abigail Boone: Was he... Did he know CS Lewis?
• 35:13
  Charlie Loften: CS Lewis, Billy Graham.
• 35:15
  Abigail Boone: But would have they known each other?
• 35:17
  Charlie Loften: Well, look that up. I mean, they would have they would have overlapped.
• 35:20
  Abigail Boone: Yeah. Because I know it is... This could be wrong. I would assume it's probably more recent that, like, John Mark Comer and Tim Keller knew each other.
• 35:30
  Charlie Loften: I would be surprised. My my gut says I would be surprised because, I mean, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he spent a he spent a decent amount of time in prison.
• 35:38
  Abigail Boone: Oh, really? Mhmm. For plot to kill?
• 35:41
  Charlie Loften: Yeah. I mean, he was he was not willing to submit himself to the governmental authority.
• 35:47
  Abigail Boone: I have the book Boone Hofer at my house that somebody gave gave me, and it's huge. And so I've never been motivated to read it, but maybe I
• 35:55
  Charlie Loften: wrote a book that's also huge called Cost of Discipleship.
• 35:58
  Abigail Boone: I have seen that too at my brother's house, I think.
• 36:01
  Charlie Loften: But we'll talk about C. S. Lewis, Billy Graham, Martin Luther King Junior.
• 36:05
  Abigail Boone: We should get up to Tim Keller because he's kind of a national treasure, in my opinion. There's times where you look at history and it's like... Or even I hear my parents talk about and they're like, I remember when Kennedy died or I remember when so and so died. And I feel like I haven't had very many people in my lifetime that I'm like, oh, I'll never forget when so and so died. But that is how I felt when Tim Keller died.
• 36:29
  Charlie Loften: There you go. So just to sum up as fast as I can. It starts with this small movement in Jerusalem
• 36:36
  Abigail Boone: Mhmm.
• 36:36
  Charlie Loften: Spreads out to the region. They get... It gets spread out into the Roman Empire mostly through persecution. It becomes the official state religion, and then we see over the course of centuries the political corrupting influence of that that ultimately leads to the great schism, the Catholic Church and the Orthodox church. That kind of corruption continues.
• 37:02
  The church tries to reform. It won't. Kicks these guys out. Finally does reform. And now we've got the Catholic church, and you've got these reformers starting all of their traditions, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism, and then Christianity is starting to spread all throughout Europe and then spreading all...
• 37:22
  Then start spreading all over the world into America. And the primary denominations that make it over here, Methodism, Anglicanism, which is now Episcopals, Lutherans, Presbyterians
• 37:35
  Abigail Boone: Baptists.
• 37:36
  Charlie Loften: Baptists. And we'll we'll see the development of all of that all the way to the point to where now, mean, again, there are
• 37:42
  Abigail Boone: just hundreds, if not thousands of guy named, like, Bill Baptist? The
• 37:51
  Charlie Loften: Baptists are named after an act. Baptism.
• 37:55
  Abigail Boone: Oh, okay. I guess we're not called the Wesleys.
• 37:59
  Charlie Loften: Right. Yeah. They were... The Wesleyan movement was called Methodists because they were so Okay. And so you could always tell a Methodist because they had
• 38:13
  Abigail Boone: Scrapes on their knees
• 38:14
  Charlie Loften: for their knees for praying all the time. They were they were they were known at the time as kinda being the most
• 38:19
  Abigail Boone: I come from good people.
• 38:20
  Charlie Loften: Most devoted ones. Oh, yeah. The the early history of Methodist Church is really, really cool. And so we'll kind of go all the way from this little small movement to spread, to splits, all the way to how... Why are we doing what we do
• 38:34
  Abigail Boone: Right.
• 38:35
  Charlie Loften: And all the challenges that got us there.
• 38:36
  Abigail Boone: And so
• 38:37
  Charlie Loften: we'll see how long it takes.
• 38:39
  Abigail Boone: Forever, hopefully.
• 38:40
  Charlie Loften: Forever, hopefully. Yes. So are are... Have we done enough where we need to do a q and a, or do we wanna just start diving into the book
• 38:46
  Abigail Boone: of Acts? Start in because all of my questions would be filled up, Usain. We're gonna get to that. Okay. Perfect.
• 38:52
  Charlie Loften: Well, we'll spend the next couple of weeks talking about the important events in the book of Acts with regard to church history. Everything in the book of Acts is important Right. Theologically and personally. But as far as, like, the landmark events that shaped the
• 39:08
  Abigail Boone: Is that... No. The Peter conversation was in the gospels.
• 39:12
  Charlie Loften: That that I will build the Yeah. That's... That was in the gospels. Okay. We'll we'll...
• 39:15
  So we'll look at Pentecost, the stoning of Stephen, the conversion of Paul Mhmm. And the and the council of Jerusalem.
• 39:24
  Abigail Boone: Okay. I'm excited.
• 39:25
  Charlie Loften: I don't think that's four weeks. That's probably two weeks.
• 39:28
  Abigail Boone: Oh, you always count four like that?
• 39:32
  Charlie Loften: So I very often start one this way. I was at one That's interesting. One, two, three.
• 39:37
  Abigail Boone: Okay. Okay.
• 39:38
  Charlie Loften: It's usually because you're gonna end up at five. If I knew I was gonna end up at four, I would saw here. Okay. Anyways.
• 39:46
  Abigail Boone: Thank you. Most important thing
• 39:47
  Charlie Loften: to end up at. For joining us. Thank you as always, Abigail. Thank you for joining us, and I hope you will come back as we kinda dive deep into these different eras of church history starting with the book of acts. The eras tour.
• 40:04
  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. 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.