Sorry I'm going through clicking all the little buttons that pop up so welcome to Zeke's room, which is where we've set up our studio here he's my he's my tech. Guy.
So better stay off for the mic. He's my tech guy.
So we set up in his room, and he's responsible for all the tech here unless something goes wrong.
And then it's my fault. Thank you. Hey?
Awesome, maybe something to put the tea bag on in 5 min.
Thank you. So with that little performance, what I wanna talk about tonight is the question of repentance for.
But not thank you, not initial repentance, but repentance for those who send after salvation, or, to put it in the terms that were most common in the ancient church, to sin after baptism, because they saw that as a very important marking point, and the reason, that
I'm bringing this up is that early on in the churches history, while there were lots of doctrinal, theological disagreements.
This issue is actually the one or one of the ones that caused the most real division.
When you see actual splits between 2 groups of Christians, it almost always in the early centuries has to do with this question.
Surrounding church discipline, and whether it was possible in what way it was possible and what was required for it.
As I said in the email that I sent around hopefully, everybody got that.
I don't have time to go into great detail talking about the Scriptural references themselves that that bring this up.
But I think it's important for us to at least take a quick look at them, just as one example.
I'm gonna embarrass Rene a little bit.
Here. But just as one example, when I told Renee what the subject was tonight, you know, is it possible to readmit people to fellowship if they send after they've been sent?
She said, well, that has an obvious answer. Yes, of course you can.
And I said, Well, it wasn't as obvious to the early church as it seems to us, and as I hope it seems to everybody on the zoom tonight, and there are at least some Scripture references that people pointed to or emphasized, and I would definitely be the first to
say, I think that we have very good ways of reading and understanding these references, so that they don't mean you can't, you know, once you've been saved, if you send again, it's that's it.
You know. Too late! You can't repent. I don't think that's the right way to read those, but I think if we look over these we can see that the Christians who took that view, we're not just being rigorous.
They were. They were honestly struggling with some scriptural issues, some troublesome Scriptures, just looking at.
He brews 6, 4, which is the first one that I sent around.
I'm not gonna give you time to look these up because I sent them in the Pdf.
And so hopefully, you have that. But if you want to just jot down the references, Hebrews 6, 4 is one that, says Ferguson, it is impossible in the case of those who have once been unlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift and have shared in the holy
spirit, and it goes on and then in verse 6, and then fall on away to restore them to again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm.
In chapter 10, Hebrews says, in verse 26, for if we go on sending deliberately, after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sin, and it continues Matthew, 10.
22 is the next one on my list, and it says, and you will all be, or you will be, hated for my name's sake.
But the one who endures to the end will be saved, and the the emphasis that they obviously were putting on it.
If they were still seeing this. As a you know you can only get saved once and and then, if you send it's over 200.
The emphasis that they were placing was on the idea that it is the one who indoors that will be saved.
Not everyone who has believed, but the one who has, who endures the same idea is in revelation.
2, 10, where, at the very end of the verse, it says, Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.
First Corinthians, 15, Matthew 1032, s, Peter, 2, 20.
There are those are on your sheet. I'm not gonna not gonna go through them right now, but they have similar phraseology, as the verses that I've already read.
And like, I say, well, I don't believe that these verses are teaching that if you send after you've been saved, or after you've been baptized, that you've lost your salvation, and you can't regain it.
There are plenty of people in the early church especially who read those verses, and that was how they understood them.
And that's part of what leads to the, to the issue that we're talking about tonight.
Now, before we get talking about the early Christian material, I think it's also important for us to talk about the role of the Roman world contact and the place of religion in the Roman world, yea, I think Zeke, one of that door closed so we need to talk about the place of religion in
the Roman world, because it's different in a lot of ways from how we tend to think about religion and faith in our lives.
First of all, the gods and and their religion, and in the Greek world the Roman world, Babylonian, most of the ancient world, the gods and their religion.
They didn't necessarily impose that much on your behavior.
The fact that you were an adherent to this or that God didn't mean that you had to.
You know, change your life in some sort of way, and be a moral person, and avoid bad behaviors as long as you were giving the gods the sacrifices that were required.
They were perfectly content for you to then go and live your life.
However, you wanted you could. You know you didn't have to treat the people around you in any particular way.
Now they didn't want you messing with any of their favorites.
If you know, I don't know who's on the ray.
If Ray is a, you know, just constantly offering cyrifices to, we'll say Africa because of the town that he lives in.
Maybe, and I come along and offer sacrifices to even Aphrodite.
Also, and then I do something to hurt Ray. Well, now, that's not going to be acceptable.
But it's not your rate pops up on the screen for that.
It's not gonna be acceptable, but not because, as a follower of affidity, I should behave in a certain way.
It's because, as a follower of affidity, Ray should not be harmed.
So that's the only sort of ethical imposition that the that the gods and religion in the ancient world, most of the ancient world would have made on people the second important thing to recognize is how a poly polytheistic society works.
It is not just that there are lots and lots of gods.
It? Is that all of those gods can be worshipped, and can be worshipped by the same people.
Polytheistic religion is not exclusive. I might be particularly devoted to one God, or got us, for whatever reason, but that doesn't stop me, you know.
In my last example I was saying that I was making offerings to Aphrodite that wouldn't stop me when I went to another city.
Maybe I traveled to Alexandria. It wouldn't stop me from off making an offering to Isis while I was there.
There were, you know, in Corinth, where was kind of a big deal.
There were also temples and shrines for presiding. I could have in my very own town, also made offerings to another God, and that would have been fine.
That wouldn't have that wouldn't have offended either.
God neither God expected any kind of exclusivity. I guess you could say that wouldn't be viewed either, by the people around me or by the gods.
Themselves as on Friday night, any more than your your primary care.
Doctor would see it as unfaithfulness if you went to the dentist when you had a problem with your team, you go to one kind of God for one issue.
You go to another God for another issue, they should all get their due.
That's that's the worldview of of at least the ancient polytheistic societies.
They were not exclusively devoted to one God.
Even if certain individuals might have had a particular affinity with one God or another.
Now obviously the heat is one more thing to say about that.
Then is that if your territory, if your you know, if your country were conquered by another country, then you would be expected by that conquering nation to offer sacrifices to their God, they didn't expect you to abandon your own God, they expected you to add worship to their Gods.
after all, their God had just beaten your God proven by the fact that their army had beaten your army, and so you owed at least that kind, that much respect to their gods.
They didn't expect you to leave there to leave your own and stop worshiping your own.
They probably would have thought that would be weird if you had done that, and you would have been considered probably an unreliable worshiper.
Anyway. But they did expect, and require you to give proper room to the god of the conquering nation.
Most people didn't have a problem with that, I mean, why would they?
They understood themselves to live in a, you know, spiritually full world, and and by spiritual full I mean, full of spirits, full of gods. They're gods everywhere.
And there's no reason, just because you are. You know you are an adherent to one God.
When the Babylonians come through and say you have to make a sacrifice to, there's no reason that you wouldn't do that.
Your gods aren't going to be upset about that.
It's just the way it's expected. And so you do that.
Where we run into problems, then is the Hebrew people.
Israel, of course, was not free to do that. They couldn't.
They didn't live in that kind of a society they couldn't just offer sacrifices to whatever God came along, or whatever God even had conquered their their country.
They had commanded not to give worship to any of the other gods, but only to the most High God, only to Yahweh.
So they ran into problems with this, sometimes, and sometimes they had fewer problems with it, because a lot of the conquers recognize that these people are.
These people are different. They do things differently. And it's just gonna cause problems.
If we impose our rules on them exactly by the time we get to the New Testament or to the early Church, Rome is in charge, in most of that part of the world, and Rome's policy was exactly that they said, you know what everybody has to offer.
You know, give offerings to our gods except the Jews, because they are monotheistic.
For some reason that we don't understand, but it seems to work for them.
They've been doing it for a long, long time, and so Rome allowed Israel, with a couple of couple of exceptions, roam, and the the Greeks that had ruled them beforehand.
The Persian Greeks, and the Egyptian Greeks had allowed them that that leeway they did not have to make, give offerings to Jupiter, or to whatever other gods their conquers might have wanted to and that freedom was extended all the way.
You know, not just to the Jews who are in Israel, but also to the Jews who were in, who are in the diaspora, some in Rome, some in other countries around the Roman world.
So? Which is why a lot of the early Christian apologists kind of tried to tie themselves to Judaism.
They wanted that same freedom not to have to make offerings to the Emperor, not to have to make offerings to Roman gods, and so they pointed out correctly.
I think we're really just a weird kind of bunch of Jews.
Our religion, our faith is in continuity with the Judaism that you've already given this past to.
We're just, a you know. You've got Pharisees.
You've got sidegeses. You've got sings. You've got zealots.
Zealots are a problem for different reasons. But and you've got Christians they're all just different different kinds of the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
And to one degree or another, Christians were able to take advantage of that.
Now, when, as the Christian faith then begins to spread in the Roman world where we're into well, we're really not even out of the New Testament when I'm saying this.
But as Christian faith begins to spread in the Roman world, we start to see a couple of problems.
With this the first one is that I I would call sort of the moral issue.
People in the Roman world might be attracted to the Christian gospel, but without ever really thinking about the fact that in includes and in fact, it starts with a call to repentance the culture that they'd lived in like I talked about a little bit ago had conditioned them to keep those
things, their religious practice. And they're, you know, their moral behaviors, to keep those separate.
And I think that's how you end up already in Corinth, in the New Testament you end up with some of the problems that Paul deals with there as people who are separating those too much, and not seeing that the one causes a problem for the other the second problem is comes out of sort of the second
point that I made about the ancient religious culture, and that is, that they had been conditioned to offer sacrifices to whatever gods it was needful to do that at the time.
Now, when they became Christians, they would stop doing that, or at least hopefully, they would stop doing that.
I think we see at least people with scruples about those offerings to other gods popping up also in first- Corinthians.
But but what they would generally do is they would understand.
Oh, we need to stop, but because of their cultural background, when the going got really tough, a lot of them would cave.
A lot of them would maybe a lot of them as unfair.
But people. Some people would cave, and they would make a required sacrifice.
Make a required offering, and that also is gonna cause problems for their functioning in the church.
So for a couple of reasons, those 2 at minimum Christians would find themselves in these kinds of compromising situations.
Some would fall into sin, whether it was motivated by loss.
Greed, dishonesty, just plain orneriness.
Others. They would. They would end up because of pressures from outside, denying their faith.
The, falling into sin can happen any time. Obviously the second category, the need to make offerings.
It's not as constantly available. It's not a constant threat, but it's there in time of persecution.
And as we went, moved on into a more and more Gentile world, a more and more Greco Roman world Co Roman Church.
This kind of thing came up more and more often, and I hope you can see that the religious cultural associations that that they approached Christianity with that they came with when they first became Christians, would have influenced them.
It's very easy to slip back into the world view that we originally had.
It's very easy for us to to be confronted with a situation and really be Americans.
First and Christian's second, we might not say that most of us, I think, would not say that, but that is a very real temptation that we don't even think about.
Necessarily it just happens because of you know how our thinking is built and reinforced.
Let me catch up to myself in my notes.
Another thing that is important to keep in mind is that as more and more people come to Christ, come to the Church.
You're going to see more and more people who have, who have accepted Christ without giving as much consideration to the risks that are involved, without giving as much consideration to what they're really getting themselves into and and that's also something that that I think we have to recognize.
Is not a failing of theirs, necessarily not entirely of failing of theirs.
They should have thought more about it. But it's very easy for us to function in the same way.
Think about the difference between accepting Christ becoming a Christian in America versus becoming a Christian in oh, somewhere, like Pakistan, a Muslim converting to Christianity in Pakistan or in Nigeria, that person is very aware of and has to give serious consideration to the to what they
are getting themselves into because they are getting themselves into a very dangerous situation by doing that, and it's what they should do.
I believe that, but they need to walk in with their eyes open, whereas here in America we can.
Yeah, we invite kids at Vbs to accept Christ.
And I don't think any of those kids, even though I think a lot of those are very real conversions.
They genuinely accept Christ, they genuinely are saved.
But I don't think any of those kids have probably thought about the potential persecution that would be involved.
The problems that they could potentially face the Roman Empire was pretty much the same as America.
Most of the time you could accept Christ. You could be a Christian.
You could go to church, and outside of, you know, Nero's persecution in the Sixtys, and then the DC.
Is persecution around the year 2, 50, and then again, the Emperor Diocletian has a an empire, wide persecution of Christians in the early fourth century.
Around 3 11 or so. I think, is when it starts. You could.
Get saved, and join the church, and be visibly a Christian, without worrying too much about it.
And so you had those people entering, and then, when persecutions did come, like Nero, although not as much with Nero, because it hadn't been as safe before him.
But when the DC. And persecution comes in 2, 50, or when the smaller, more localized persecutions would pop up like plenty, was writing to Trajan about that, we read a few weeks ago, you would have people who hadn't really realized what they were getting in for and would be very
tempted to to cave. As I say, to offer sacrifices, to hand over Scripture whatever was being asked of them, and when that happened, the Christians, as a whole, we're not sure quite what to do with those people afterwards, when they came back and wanted to be admitted
back into the church.
The, sacrifice issue is easier to describe, and it's easier to lay out.
But similar questions come up when you have someone who falls into, you know, serious sin, adultery, or perhaps murder, or any of these kinds of things.
When someone then wants to repent and returned to fellowship, the Church has to decide what to do about that, and the church, by and large, wasn't sure.
So now with the time that remains, I wanna look at a handful of early Christians who did have to.
Who did well, who give evidence of how the Church address some of these kinds of things.
The first one is Hermus. He's on on one of your handouts that I saw.
I guess it was one handout of 3 pages, so he's the first one after the Scripture references.
I believe he is writing, and that the Shepherd of Hermas is the work that he writes, and he writes it, I believe, over the course of about 50 years from starting around Washington 100, and I think he finishes writing it, and about 150, so I took heart.
From them from him as I was spending more years than I would have liked writing my dissertation.
He took 50 years to finish the shepherd, but it became really popular in the early church in spite of the fact that some of it's Christology is kind of questionable, and if it's not questionable, it's at least presented in a confusing way, it would not be a good
textbook for teaching about Christ to simply because several of the really important passages can be taken 3 or 4 different ways.
But in spite of that it was very popular in the early church.
Some people even traded it as as though it was Scripture, and I think one of the reasons that it was so popular is that it addresses this question of what to do with someone who is fallen into sin after baptism for him.
It was post baptismal.
So I said on your handout that he represents sort of a middle way or a sort of tries to threat a middle path because, on one hand, you can have people who say you know, they take the very strict position, and say if you send after you've been saved, then that's it
there's no you can't repent again. It's over.
You repented. You were supposed to stay on the straight and narrow. You didn't.
You're gone. On the other hand, you can have what gets called the more lax.
Approaching, and say, if you repent, you can come back.
That gets problematic when you've got somebody who's basically turning that into a revolving door.
And you know, coming in, saying, Oh, I repent! They take communion, they participate in the church, they're in fellowship.
They walk out the door, and they go back to their adulterous affair or to their, you know, dishonest business practices, or whatever they do, and they they treat God's grace simply as something to be taken advantage of Hermus tries to take us a middle path there and say yes, you
can repent after after being baptized. If you send after baptism, if you send after salvation, you can still repent.
But you can't do it over and over and over again.
That's not what we're talking about. So some people, some scholars, think that he's saying that it's only possible once.
I don't think that's what he's saying.
I don't think that he's even though some of the language sounds like he's saying it can only happen once.
I'm not sure. That's his actual point. I think his point is to protect the the holiness and the glory of the name of God, and what He's saying is that God gives people the ability to repent God grants repentance as a gift and he
grants it to those who he knows will genuinely repent.
On the other hand, he withholds it from those who would only be repenting.
Hypocritically. They would, you know, use it at like the revolving door that I described.
They would repent, fall away, repent, follow away! And that would be an affront to God's grace, and would blaspheme the name of God.
So that's that's Hermes's way of dealing with this problem.
There's no, there's no Turk split that we can point to yet.
There from here on out, we have church splits. So Tertullian, who is probably saved just before the just before the year 200.
He's hmm! I don't remember now what Yuri was born.
I think he was born around 1 61 65. Something like that.
So he's a mature adult when he comes to Christ.
He's from Carthage in North Africa. I can't remember if we've mentioned him in previous weeks or not, but he's in Carthage, in North Africa present day, Tunisia, if you're familiar with the North African coast.
There's the very low part, that's Egypt.
And then Libya and that wait anyway, there's the low part that's Egypt.
And then it comes up, and that's from there over is what gets called North Africa.
And Tunisia is right there at that corner.
So that's where we are and Tertullian come, he's a lawyer, that's his background.
He likes, he likes a legal framework to work within, and he is very frustrated with the Church because he finds it to be way too lax, and for that reason, as well as a couple of others.
He joins a group that are called the Montanaists, and I think I mentioned on the on your handout.
It's not entirely clear whether he leaves the the orthodox or the Catholic, or or the great church, which is the term scholars typically use for sort of the mainstream church at this time.
It's not clear whether he leaves the church and joins the Montenists, or whether modernism in North Africa was functioning more like a a group within the church sort of like Wesleyan as.
And so Methodism start out as a movement that remained within the Anglican Church.
During Charles Wesley's and John Wesley's Lives.
But you know, after them separated off, it's not clear exactly what the situation there was between the Church and Montanaism, but he joins them largely because he so strongly approves of their views on on rigor, on moral rigor they don't allow nearly as
much freedom, I guess, morally, as the Church as a whole did, and they also we're not at all convinced about readmitting the lapsed.
Those who had lapsed from the faith readmitting the lapsed back in the fellowship.
So that's in North Africa, he is. He joined.
He's saved. Around 1 98. He joins the Monteness around 2, 10, and.
His other than a couple of key issues. It's hard to even tell, you know, with his various writings he's left us just a huge amount of work, and you can't even tell which comes from his so called orthodox period, and which comes from his so called monotonous period, because unless
he's addressing one of the specific issues where they differ.
It's all you know. It's all very orthodox sounding.
So that is Tertullian moving across the Mediterranean to Rome is Hippolytus, who is somebody that we have talked about before couple of times even, and, as we've said, he was a presbyter, and he was a rival, bishop or an
anti Pope to to use, you know, in a chronologically inappropriate terminology in Rome he was the arrival bishop in Rome, starting around 217, and lasting until shortly before he dies, and 2 36, and this was a place
where he and a group of others in the church at Rome split from the main church, because he thought that the elected Bishop of Rome, a man named was far too lax in allowing people who have denied their faith, or who had fallen into to serious sin he thought he was too.
lax, and allowing them back into fellowship. And so he he condemned that bishop and those people who supported him recognized him as bishop, and they met separately for most of the rest of his life.
So you have a a split there that persists even after his death.
There were people in Rome who had been followers of Apollotus, who continued to resist the main church.
In Rome, a originally, at least, because it had been too lax.
Sometimes those issues fell by the wayside, but once the parties are established, as we know, from lots of lots of splits within Protestantism and lots of splits within a brethren tradition, once those parties are split, they sometimes stay split.
For the next person will go back across the Mediterranean. Don't worry.
It's not a long trip, so it's not too bad. We're back to Carthage again, where we're talking about Cyprian.
And he was the Bishop in Carthage from right around to 50.
I don't remember what year he's first elected bishop.
He's bishop there until he dies as a martyr.
In the year 2 58, and he's an interesting case.
He's the first one that we're well, I guess Hermos was sort of a middle ground.
Ciprian is also something of a middle ground, but is was treated as being part of the lax party.
So he's there as bishop. During this DC.
In persecution, and he hasn't been Bishop long when that persecution begins, and his initial response to it is that he flees the city.
He flees out into the countryside, and he does this because he knows that most of the time what the what the Roman authorities are doing is they're arresting the bishops in particular.
They'll arrest anybody else that makes themselves prominent, but they're particularly targeting the bishops.
The elders, the deacons, because those people are so visible, so prominent, and if they can get one of them to break, if they could get one of them to offer sacrifices to the Roman gods that would be a huge step in getting you know, so much more of the
church, to follow in their footsteps, to essentially step in line as far as the Roman civic authorities were concerned.
So he decides the best thing to do is not to leave the church in Carthage without leadership, but to flee off into hiding and maintenance.
Contact with the Church in Carthage by letters and messages that he would send back and forth, so that he can continue to provide them with encouragement.
During this time, and once the persecution dies down.
Cause. DC. Is DC. Is a lot is made Emperor, I think, in 2 49.
The persecution starts fairly quickly, because part of his program is to to reestablish and and get everybody back on board with.
You know, sort of fundamentalist Roman religion. And then DC.
Is killed in battle in 2 51, so he doesn't last long, and once he dies the persecution dies down very quickly, and Cyprian is able to return to the city.
But once he's there, they're having this this debate and this issue of what to do about people who had a pesticide during the persecution, who had offered offerings to Roman gods who had not this time yet handed over Scriptures that's
under Donatism. So who had made sacrifices to the Emperor, to the gods?
And all this, what are they gonna do about the same issue?
Of course, because this persecution is throughout the entire Empire.
So the same issue is going on in Rome, and the Bishop of Rome.
There is taking the more easygoing side of the debate.
There's a man in Rome named Ovation.
He's a theologian who who writes other theological material.
He has an early Trinitarian theology that he writes actually, but he represents the rigorous approach, the the very strict approach against the Roman bishop wanting to readmit people to fellow, and Cyprian joins this conversation on the side of the Roman
Bishop. Now we talked last time or may have been a couple of weeks ago about how Cyprians arguments there affected church leadership.
But here, what's key is that he's advocating a more permissive policy.
He is allowing the Laps to return to full fellowship. Eventually.
But only after they have, you know, been examined for a long, for I don't know how long of a time.
Not a long time, but an extensive period of examination and extensive period of penance.
At least that's how we translate it. Now. One thing that he does, and this is playing back into what we talked about with church leadership is that he insists that this readmission is only at the say-so of the Bishop.
The people who were called confessors, which were the ones who had, who had not renounced their faith, who had continued to confess Christ and been thrown in prison for it, and had never varied on that, and the reason that they had never been released was because the persecution wasn't very
long. But these confessors, who had eventually been released from prison, had begun on their spiritual authority as confessors, telling people that they could be readmitted to the church, giving people sort of a Here's a pass from the confessor.
You can go back to communion, and Cyprian was trying to consolidate that authority with the Bishop.
Not with just, you know. I shouldn't say just anybody, but not with just anybody who was a confessor who would survive that persecution.
He wanted that to be to be more restricted to sort of official church channels.
Right the I believe last. Yes, the last item done is, I'm combining 2 groups under one heading because they come up at the same time, and for a lot of issues they're very, very similar.
They are called the Donatists, and the Malaysianists.
So Donatism and Malidianism are both the next Empire.
Wide persecution. The same issue comes up again. Donatism is up in North Africa, sort of in the Carthage area, but not restricted to that by any means.
And Malaysianism takes place down in Alexandria.
I'm gesturing, based on a map that I see in front of me.
I reverse it. If it's wrong, I don't know if if I get reversed on screen or not.
But Egypt is east of North Africa.
Obviously. So they're just regionally in different places. But in both cases their founders found believe that they're bishops.
We're, you know, too easy, you know, have set too easy terms in being readmitted to communion, and as a result of that they both sort of rallied the people around them that preferred that stricter interpretation, and they formed rival churches.
The Malaysians were not quite as major. All they were pretty significant in the Alexandria area and surrounding area.
Donatism is actually a very significant as far as population.
Donatism is a significant part of broader Christianity in North Africa.
For quite a while. This starts in the year 311, which is before Constantine, before even the edict of Milan.
Won. When Christianity is legalized, and at least as late as the year 400, Moletianism is still in force, and Donatism is still a significant enough.
For 30 years or so later that Augustine, who is a bishop in that same North African area, finds it to be really important to write against it, and to try to.
He's writing more against some of their other theological perspectives that he is necessarily about their.
They're disciplinary perspectives. But this is not a group that can be ignored.
When Augustine begins his work, his writing is successful enough that by the time he's done by the time he dies Donatism has has dwindled quite a bit and continues to to go away it's really hard to say when either of them completely disappears.
Maybe they disappear earlier, almost certain they disappear in the 6 hundreds.
When Islam sweeps through North Africa and wipes out almost all traces of Christianity, at least in the in the major areas.
But sorry for shaking everything, but it's really hard to say how long you know.
Pockets of those groups might have perceived.
So the point to raise is that in both it, on both sides of this question we're dealing with people who are who are serious Christians.
And while I disagree with almost all of them on a lot of points of church structure and Christian doctrine, they are very serious about wanting to protect the purity of the Church, they're very serious about wanting the church to not be a cultural institution.
Like we see in a lot of churches throughout history.
And also today, but to be a true church of genuine believers, and they had.
They have very different ways of going about securing that.
And so I think it's it can be useful for us to look back at that, and to both understand.
And this is a recurring theme in this whole series.
But to understand where they're coming from, where they made their mistakes, and where, maybe they had something that, even if they executed it wrong, was useful to consider.
So, I don't know if that's all of the material that I have.
We have, you know, run over a little bit what my ideal target was I don't know.
If it's possible or advisable to open up for questions.
But somebody who's more technologies in charge can let me know whether that's something we can or should do.
Do? What?
Yeah, we can do it. Mike, yeah, we can do it.
Okay.
If anyone wants to ask a question, you can either unmute or quote unquote, raise your hand, and I can on me.
You!
How many years have we covered here, Mike?
Let's see. Well, if if we include if we only go up to the beginnings of Donatism, we're looking at maybe a little over 200 years.
If we bring it to to the end or the end of at least the end of Donatism's relevance, because I think it lasts the longest of any of these or the latest of any of these.
Maybe.
300 2,330 years something like that.
And so Augustine was again dynamism.
Augustine was against Donatism. Yes, he's hey!
That's actually one of the when Augustine's work gets broken down into categories, his writings against Donatism is one of the, you know, 6 or 7 categories.
That that his writings get broken into.
And was this these things pervasive throughout the whole Mediterranean region, or just sort of North Africa?
Would you say?
So let's see, Donatism was major in North Africa.
There were pockets of it in other parts of the Mediterranean world, but it was only really major in North Africa.
Actually start in Turkey. And it seems like the Montanus in Turkey and the Montanus in North Africa were were pretty different other than you know.
The very, very basic outlines, and I would have you know, if I had to pick one or the other.
I prefer the North African variety. They give more, they give much more priority to Scripture.
I guess you'd say. But they were. They were operative everywhere.
There. Primaries were in Turkey and North Africa, but there were mountainous all over the place.
And then the you know, the basic problem of separation.
That's everywhere. The specific groups splintering off might be more localized, but I've highlighted, you know, some prominent individuals here.
But the problem of what to do about someone who had either, you know, fallen into to some sort of gross sin, or someone who had sacrificed to pagan gods in order to save their lives, but someone who had done that, and what to do about them that was something that leaders in every church
around the ancient world we're dealing with.
Did they make a difference? Renee is asking a question.
People who were like sacrificing to leave paying gods during periods, persecution, and people who, just like general social pressure when there's not.
They didn't. They didn't talk about that, or at least none of none of this group did.
Some of the people on the lax side for people able to understand Renew's question or hear it.
Okay. I didn't know if the microphone picked it up.
Her question was whether they made a distinction between those who were, you know, as far as making sacrifices to the Roman gods did they distinguish between people who did that under threat of death and people who just did that because you know there's social pressure?
I'll just go along to get along, and some of the people on the lax side may have made that kind of distinction.
People on the rigorous side wouldn't have made any kind of distinction like that.
They were both, you know. They were both out. There might have been some distinction, as far as what kind of penance?
But at this point I'm speculating. So any others.
You could repeat well, in that area where they're persecution. Persecutions there must have been, of course, but were there many martyrs?
Oh, there, definitely, in the and even outside of the widespread persecutions, there are generally 3 periods that there were, you know, we call them worldwide, but they're really empire wide.
That there were empire- persecutions, and that's under Nero.
In the Sixtys under Dcs. Around the year 250, and then Diocletian, who was Emperor at the in the early 3 hundreds he had, he enacted a worldwide or an empire- persecution.
But even outside of those there were, you know, localized persecutions, plenty rights to tradejan.
We saw asking him what to do, and his little, you know, little area of authority, because something's come up and he has to deal with it and one of the ways of dealing with it is to execute the Christians.
The penalty would still be deaf everywhere. All the time.
It's just most of the time nobody bothered pursuing it it's kind of like, technically, you can get a speeding ticket for going 5 miles over the speed limit.
But I personally don't know anybody who's ever gotten a speeding ticket for going 5 miles over the speed limit, even though legally, you could.
Now you watch somebody pipe up and say that they actually did get one.
But that's how Christianity was usually treated.
Occasionally you would get them. A famous one is in Southern France around the year 1, 75, 1 77, and there were quite a number of martyrs.
Then, but in in those 3 big persecutions there were lots of martyrs, and there were martyrs everywhere.
And those people were.
This gets into a different subject that is not what we're talking about tonight.
But those people who were martyred for their faith.
Were some of the first people that Christians started to to view differently from the average Christian.
And that sort of forms, the seeds of treating certain Christians as having been saints in comparison to to all the rest of the rank and file Christians. Those martyrs were the first ones that get treated that way, and then it grows and develops.
Was there anything specific about those martyrdoms that you were wondering or?
Okay.
No, what would be setting up later on?
We can. We can. Yeah, we can talk about some significant martyrs at some point.
The syllabus is always in flux.
Mike. I had one question for you. This is race so, but certainly the persecution against Christians.
Oh, yeah.
Some of it was particularly cruel, and some of it was was less, I mean, certainly, during Caligula's time that was particularly sadistic.
Outright execution, or.
Yes, and that a lot of times. Boiled down to you know what was your role in the church if you were a bishop or an elder, or a leader of some sort, a teacher, then you were going to be more likely to be tortured tortured for as long as possible before actually
executing you, because, you know, they were less interested in killing you.
Than they were in getting the rest of the church to apostasize.
So they would torture leaders, and they would try to get them to to renounce, and they would execute them.
Once it became clear that that wasn't gonna happen. Just rank and file Christians, they might execute, or they might just leave rotting in prison, which is how you end up with the situation.
That that so many of these people were dealing with when the persecution ended, and those prisoners were released, and they had to decide.
You know, a what to do with them, and B. What to do with everybody else.
But yeah, things like Caligulas, persecution of Christians, come more out of colligulous personal sadism.
And that was for, yeah, it sounds terrible to say, but for entertainment value more than it was for any any policy.
Caligula was, and a couple of the other emperors also.
They were really sadists, and the one that I'm talking about with Nero, with DC and with Diocletian.
They weren't persecuting for sadistic reasons.
Diocletian actually is persecuting because he's trying to reassablish old Roman religion.
For the sake of unifying the Empire and DC.
Is doing essentially the same thing. Nero's just trying to draw attention away from social problems.
But but yeah, Caligula is just a sadist.
Oh!
Just as one more question, Mike, and that is, you were talking about the fact that if they were baptized, and then they the phone descent.
So! Oh!
Again when we say bad Hi! When we say baptize, are we talking immersion and adult behavers baptism in at this time period?
Thanks.
So this time period is that's going to depend on where, within the time period, and where within the Roman world, as far as the immersion question already in the like 90 s.
There's a document that comes out. That's basically laying out policies and procedures for for Christians.
And it says, You know the best way to baptize is in living water.
So you know. Find a river you want water to be flowing that's the best way to baptize, but not everybody's got that available.
So if you can't find living water, at least try to find cold, still water if you can't find cold, still water, you know, like a lake, then, you know, just any still body of water is, you know, your third choice if you can't find a pond, or something then poor water, is
acceptable, you know, pouring water over the person and I think I said this couple of weeks ago and I didn't go to look it up.
But I can't remember if it goes as far as sprinkling.
If there's not really even enough water to dump it over.
People. So some parts of the Roman world water was really scarce, and so they made sort of practical concessions.
There, and also, as time goes on, things change there also.
But the.
The point of baptism was that they were understanding baptism as being so closely related to salvation, because during this time, prior to Constantine, you are still mostly no, they're definitely Christian families and Christian families go on.
And you know there's generational Christianity.
I guess you know children who grew up in Christian homes and who become Christians in that way but a lot of the growth of Christianity in this period is adults.
So I would suspect that a huge percentage I don't know if there, I don't know when they begin with infant baptism, but a large percentage of baptism is going to be of adult believers, just because such a large percentage don't come to Christ until they are
adults. I don't don't even encounter Christ until they are adults.
Thank you. Study tonight. I will.
Okay.
Beginning of prayer, time.