Record.
Alright! Good evening, and oh, it's good to be back in the building after last week.
I don't I don't like teaching on Zoom.
I like seeing faces right in front of me. It's a lot easier to do so.
I'm glad that we're back here so welcome to everyone who's here and welcome to everybody who's still on Zoom.
I have to go ahead and warn you tonight. We're not going to talk about very much.
That's true. Tonight we're gonna talk about a whole bunch of heretical ideas and, as I say, if you look on the what is this landscape?
Yeah, if you look on the landscape page up at the top, it says, early heresies or why we had to do systematics.
This is, this is correct, what happens? It's mostly in the second and then early, third centuries.
But we had as a church. We had just been going along.
We had the pure, simple gospel, and that's, you know.
That's what we like. That's what we like to think about.
We don't want to sit down and do the long picky-picky work of, you know detailed stuff.
But what happens is people come along with crazy ideas, and the Christians have to be able to say, Wait a minute, and to also be able to explain why it's wrong.
So I want to look, and just to give you comfort. I am not going to cover all of this material tonight, where I'm not planning to hold it over for another week, like in the past, like, you know, the last 2, but I am not going to cover all of this material tonight.
I've given you lots of extra material, so that you know we can talk about what we do talk about tonight.
You'll have additional in case you ever wanna look at this again if you just want to burn it.
That's fine, too, but you've got extra material that I probably won't get to.
I tried to give you as much as I could reasonably, so that it would, so that it would kind of hold together on the page if you looked at it again on your own, but I wanna talk about 3 groups that arise well, the the first one really I think rises during the first century the other 2 really don't come along in
full force until probably the second century. Some of their origins get traced a little earlier than that, but I think that might be sort of in the realm of myth.
The first group that I wanna talk about. If you look on the sideways chart, are they Ebnites?
And actually, before we, before we get started in this, let's let's look to the Lord in prayer before we talk about a whole bunch of people who did not understand him.
Father. We thank you for the truth that we have in your word.
We thank you for the truth that was defended, and the second and the third, and the twentieth century by people who loved you and followed you as well as they could, and fought against and exposed false teachings wherever they were taking hold father, we pray that as we look at these tonight we will, not just look at them
as historical curiosities, but that we will recognize tendencies, ideas, trends, and that we will know how to guard against them, that we will recognize them, and that we will also be able to guard your truth in the world today in Christ's name.
We pray, I Amen.
So the first group are called the Ebnites, or the Abnonites.
I'm not sure what the best way of performing that is.
And you can think of them as sort of a hyper.
Jewish Christianity along the lines of what you see.
As I say on the page here, along the lines of what you see in the book of Galatians, and you see it in other places in the New Testament, as well.
Paul's dealing with what he calls and what we call when we're in the New Testament.
The Juda Isers, and so I would think that we don't have, you know, specific evidence.
But I would think that what we're looking at here is something that starts at that time.
The kernels of it are already there in Galatia, and in, you know, numerous other churches where you have people who come from Judaism coming to Christ, and are wanting to hold on to some degree or other of their Jewish practices now that obviously is a wide range of of
what they want to hold onto. You're going to have some who, you know.
Just say, Hey, we just wanna keep celebrating the holidays that we've celebrated for our whole lives, and we don't wanna give those up.
And then that can go all the way over on the extreme, and to people saying that Gentiles, who want to convert to Christianity, need to essentially become Jewish.
First they need to obey the law. They need to follow all of these practices, and this is, you know, the ebony nights were sort of on that extreme end of that.
They they still thought of themselves as Christians, but they understood Christianity, and they understood Christ most importantly, very differently.
Like I say on here they didn't like Paul, which makes sense.
Paul had written against even milder forms of this theology in the New Testament, but they understood Jesus differently than orthodox Christianity does.
They thought of him as a as a true profit.
He was the new MOS and and they did believe that he was the Messiah.
But they didn't understand the Messiah in the way that we would, and in the way that Paul did, and in the way that a lot of the crest around them Justin Martyr, for example, I mentioned him on your other Justin Martyr the way he understood him and the reason for this
is, they are, they're unable to accept the idea.
First of all, of anything like a Trinity, I mean, we're early enough that even orthodox Christians are really hazy on Trinitarian theology.
They they kind of have a sense of it, but they definitely can't articulate it yet.
But the are very definite, definitely able to articulate that they disagree with it.
They do not believe that Jesus was divine. They believe that Jesus was a man.
Just like Moses, just like any other prophet. He was a particularly special man, and he was as the Messiah in the same way that you know Messiah is essentially a royal term, right?
It's one that gets applied to David. It's applied in numerous places to kings, and they viewed him in that same way and in the same way that that David wasn't divine.
They did not believe that Jesus was divine, and they thought that the rest of us, saying that He was, was heretical.
So he was just a man. He wasn't divine.
They would deny the virgin birth, like, I say, there they would require Gentile converts to follow the law, and that just doesn't extra note.
This isn't particularly important to their theology, but their name comes from the Hebrew word for the poor, and I gave you one reference, and psalms.
But but if you go to your concordance and look at references to the poor and the Old Testament, this is probably the word that gets used beyond means.
The poor, and that's where they seem to have taken their name from.
Yeah, so Justin writes about them or describes groups like them, at least specifically singles them out.
And and describes them, but they weren't. He's also on your other sheet.
They are not at the center of what he's really worried about.
And hopefully, we'll get to that second sheet a little bit more.
But at this point I just want to introduce all 3 of these before I go on to Marcion.
Are there any questions about that? The nights like? Was there anything not clear? Jeff?
So I think Messianic Christianity is, is not, or at least what I've seen of it, I think, is not nearly as far out on the extreme.
I think that what I've observed of Messianic Christianity there are wanting to hold on to at least the traditions for themselves.
Some of the law, but I don't think that they would say that none that I know at least, would say that as a Gentile I have to to obey the law, even the ones who feel that themselves to be obligated to to do that so I think they're you know
they're less, they're less out there on that.
And those are the yeah I did mention on here that one of the things that that the Abnonites thought that Jesus, as Messiah came to do, was not to not to destroy everything, and certainly not to to fulfill and thus set aside Old Testament Law but to destroy the Old Testament system
of atonement. So they thought. The, you know atonement through a sacrificial system, was was passed and was gone.
They did not think that there was a sacrificial system.
Salvation was now, through this faith in what Jesus had done.
I'm not real clear on. We don't have much.
We may not have anything directly from them. There are a couple of things that we sort of tried to say. This sounds like they might have come from 2 the Abnights, or they might have just come from, you know, very Jewish influence Christians, we don't know exactly.
Most of what we know about them comes from their opponents, and so we kind of have to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt.
If you're opponents, give a description of you, it's somewhat accurate, but I wouldn't want to.
I wouldn't want to be held accountable for everything that my opponents might say about me.
So. So, yeah, there had some sort of different understanding of atonement, but they did not want to go back to a sacrificial system.
They seem to me like modern day rationalists, almost, you know, like Thomas Jefferson wanting to edit the New Testament to get all the miraculous content out.
They seem in some ways, I mean, they are by no means denying the miraculous.
They're not going that far. But they're, you know, saying, Wait, we can't have you're not gonna have an incarnation of divinity that's ridiculous.
All right if there aren't any other questions about them, and we can come back to them. If they're if you think of one later, we can move on to Marcion, who begins his activity around the year 1 44 and.
Marcion is. If you've heard of Gnosticism, if you've heard of Gnostic, Marcia is related to Nastasism, but there are some real significant differences between what we would say about Marcion and Gnosticism more properly Marcian I
say here is kind of the polar opposite of the Ebanites, whereas they want to hold on to the Old Testament law obey the Old Testament law, and you know, only set aside a couple of points of Old Testament law Marcian wants to throw the whole thing out I don't
know, how much, how much you encounter it in the regular world, but in teaching at the college level and encountering, you know, 1819, 20 year old, they have a strong sense of the different, if they have any sense of the God of the Bible at all, they have a strong sense that you know the God of
the Old Testament, and the God of the New Testament are very different.
Is this familiar, this idea familiar to people? Alright! I see some nodding, so my students would always come in, and the majority of them had this view, and Marcion had this view to the extreme.
Most of my students just thought that I don't know.
God had sort of an awakening that happened, or something I don't know, or maybe my dad describes the difference between his father when he was a boy, and his father.
When I was a boy and apparently my grandfather was much different as a father.
Then he was as a grandfather. He was much, you know, softer and gentler, and oh, Dale, he doesn't need a spanking, and I gotta tell you most of the time I I did need the spanking, but but he had not been afraid to dispense them when he was a father instead.
Of a grandfather, and I think maybe they think that's what happened with God in the Bible.
But Marcion says, Nope, that is not what happened.
He did not mature. He did not mellow, he did not soften.
These are 2 different gods. There is the God of the Old Testament is a Creator.
God, he! And so the term that gets used as a demiurge.
So if you've ever heard that term, this is kind of where that's coming from.
The God of the Old Testament creates the God of the Old Testament.
Gave them the law, he gave them Saka, the bloody sacrificial system.
He likes war. He sent Israel off to kill people all the time.
Those are all things that are associated with the God of the Old Testament.
The true, supreme God, the Father who is revealed by Jesus and the New Testament is a completely different God.
He is an unknown God prior to prior to the arrival of Christ, and this unknown Redeemer, God of the New Testament, is the one that is associated.
Then with redemption, and with all of the the grace that we see in the New Testament.
So he has a radical separation between these 2, and that's a term that actually gets used a lot in talking about Gnosticism, and also with Marcion, is radical dualism.
The idea. Not just that. There's good, and there's evil in the universe, and that you know those 2 forces oppose one another.
But that they are maybe not equal, but sort of that they are entities that are in opposition to one another, and this is these are 2 separate gods that are at war that's called radical dualism.
And Marcion is one of the first people to really organize that idea.
Oh, he's also boy, if you thought, you know, when I was talking about the the Ebnites and and Scripture, Marcion is really going editing Scripture even more heavily than that he like I say, he throws out the Old Testament.
Because that is, you know, a function of the Old Testament Creator.
God! So that's completely out. Most of the apostles, you know, or all of the apostles, the 12.
They're Judaizers as far as he's concerned, so you can.
Just you can talk all that stuff. The Gospels, except for Luke, because, you know, Luke was buddies with Paul, so we can kind of use Luke.
He did like Paul, but he thought that the 12 had.
Had like added this and pieces to Paul's letters to make them sound more Jewish, to bring in a little bit of a law.
And so anything pretty much anywhere where Paul seems to really be relying on Old Testament principles of law, and just building on them Marcion edits that kind of stuff out.
He edits Paul to get it back to what he thought was the original Paul tosses out almost everything else, keeps a heavily edited account.
A version of Luke, and that is although I think there may be a couple of things in addition that get added.
But that's essentially the Bible for Marcion, that's all he has is a somewhat edited Paul, and a heavily edited loop.
And the other thing that he does, and and you know, as we get into Gnosticism, we'll get into even some more of why this is persuasive.
But the other thing that he does is, he says, the creation itself is a work of that demiurge, that Old Testament God who's evil?
He's just mean. He's nasty. And so creation itself is a bad thing.
And so he wanted to separate from creation as much as possible.
I think it's it may be on here somewhere.
I'm pretty sure it's Marcian who communion.
They use water instead of wine, because I guess one is even more of a created material thing than water.
I don't know. They were.
They discouraged sexual relationships. There's no account of Christ's nativity because he doesn't want Jesus to, because Jesus is sent by the Father in His in His system, so he doesn't want Jesus to be too closely tied to the material so he
just gets rid of the first few chapters of Luke.
He picks up in Luke, chapter 3, he has Jesus come down from heaven.
Show up in Capernaum and the show goes on from there.
And so his Jesus is at in the very last point.
I've said that his Jesus is Dosaic, and that code that means to seam.
Jesus seemed or appeared to be, human, but he wasn't really a human being.
He wasn't really material, because you wouldn't want to contaminate.
You know the pure spirit that was sent by the Father with with material that would be gross.
Okay. So there's sort of a rundown on Marcion. He is very.
He's very text-based, right? You you can tell.
He doesn't we wouldn't wanna say that he respects the text, but he's not willing to just make stuff up Willy, Milly, and he doesn't allocorize if something would have to be interpreted allegorically to fit within his system.
He'd rather just edit it out entirely he's like a lot of a lot of New Testament scholars today.
If you have heard of the Jesus Seminar, which they're almost old news. At this point.
But how many of you heard of? All right? Several have heard of it, at least, so they go through the Gospels, and they vote on whether something, you know, is this really Jesus?
Is it? Did he really say this, or is this something somebody else put in?
And you know they are editing this really heavily, I think, to fit with their theological preferences.
And that's what Marcion is doing. But but he's only willing to do that.
He's not willing to just go often to fanciful interpretations of it.
He'll say Nope! It was added by somebody that shouldn't have added it, so we don't have to worry about it at all.
And he's also very organized. He's the only one the kind of have, you know, churches set up, but I think it's more that churches early on that were founded sort of went in that trajectory, whereas or maybe there would be splits within churches and one group would
go, and they would hold to an Abbynight theology.
Marcian is coming along new, and when he is rejected by the mainstream church, he establishes churches.
He establishes a hierarchy he's got the whole thing, and it lasts for several 100 years.
Actually, so he's organized in that way in a way that the Gnostics are not.
And several, I guess I'll just go back and forth between the pages.
Several of the people over on your other page recognize how big of an issue he is, and his theology is, and they write against him.
He features in book against heresies.
Tertullian. His largest work is us called against Marcion and Turtleian is, you know, probably 50 years after Marcy, and so he's not writing against Marcy, and personally he's writing against Marcion.
Theology, which is still, you know, still active, still causing problems, and Marcian, I don't know if I say this, okay, I don't think I told you this on here.
But Marcian is working in Rome, dirtullians working in North Africa, so I mean, there's a lot of contact between those 2.
But you know, Marcian Marcionism has sort of crossed the Mediterranean, and has gotten a stronghold enough in North Africa that Tertullian feels like he needs to deal with this, and it has a whole Eastern wing as well of in parts of the Eastern
Mediterranean.
Alright before we get into Science Fiction, or I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. Gnosticism. Does anybody have any questions about?
You know? Are you dict, liberal scholarship?
Marcian. Yeah. Bill. Okay.
He says that the resurrection is not a resurrection of the body, so we have a couple of us afterwards.
Last week, no 2 weeks ago, because it was here we're talking about people who teach even today about, I guess, especially today, about the resurrection as only having been a spiritual resurrection. Marcy.
And says that the resurrection was a resurrection of body and soul, but not a resurrection of the body.
What did I say? Thank you. That was all wrong. Scratch!
Cut that from the recording. It was a resurrection of spirit and soul, not a resurrection of the body.
Thank you for catching me. I got talking and wasn't listening.
Yeah. Response.
Yeah, Ray was just saying that. No, I didn't know they were.
Ray was just saying that Bishop Spawn was a an advocate of a spiritual resurrection.
There was a theologian who was on faculty at Marquette while I was there, who had written about the resurrection, arguing that it was a spiritual resurrection only, and he actually got shot down by the Vatican told he wasn't allowed to to talk about the
resurrection. It could keep teaching other stuff, but he couldn't teach about the he couldn't say anything about the resurrection anymore.
So it's yeah. That's still still out there.
And I think, partly because there's this.
Desire to separate from material, to not recognize that God wants to redeem the material as well.
He created the material, and He redeems us fully and wholly, not not just one aspect of us.
We're not, you know. Well, as the Gnostics would get to.
We're not just, you know, some spark trapped inside material trying to get out.
So having teased the Gnostics, there, you've probably all at least heard of nasty and nastism.
It's important to remember that this is not one organized system.
It's bunch of systems. And I think Hippolytus, I think I read that in his work against heresies.
He singles out 33 different Gnostic groups that he, like, puts a name to, and says something at least distinctive about their theology.
So there are lots of different, pretty much. There's another Gnostic group for every Gnostic teacher, and I think people just sort of liked the ideas.
So 2 2 things that I think are important to keep in mind with these systems.
One is radical dualism again, like we had with with Marcion, where you have 2 opposing principles of good God and a bad, or at least a stupid God, depending on depending on which system some of them the Creator God is evil, some of them the Creator
gods, not particularly evil. He or she is just stupid, and that's how you end up with material creation.
The other thing is just that that the material is bad, even if it was created by God, who is just, stupid, not particularly evil.
The material that they created never should have been created. In the first place, and it is bad, and you want to have as little to do with it as possible.
Now there's one question that always bugged me in this.
Why is this so appealing? Because it's not even just in Christian Gnosticism or similar kinds of philosophies, where you've got this hard separation between, you know the good, spiritual and the evil material right?
We kind of get hints of this in Paul, or hints of that language in Paul.
But Paul, when he says, You know, when he talks about warring against the flesh, when he says flesh, he's not talking about, you know all material existences evil, and therefore that's why our flesh is appropriate.
He's talking about our sin nature, and he's using flesh to describe that.
But there were a lot of systems that really thought the material universe was evil.
Was bad, and I think the best explanation for why this was so appealing the best explanation I've heard is that particularly back?
Then it's still true today, but particularly back. Then, when we didn't have as many ways to solve and address these problems, yeah, kind of through the real lived experience of life, got the feeling that your body was trying to cause problems for you, I didn't really understand that until I turn 30, at I started you know saying you
know what my my feet are trying to make it, so that the real me can't walk around to all the places that I wanna go and do all the things that I wanna do.
And it it kind of goes downhill from from 30 to some degree, and I think most of us have experienced stuff like that.
And so you feel like there's this tension between the real me who wants to go?
Do these things, and my physical body that stops me from doing them.
And like. I say, if you go back a couple 1,000 years, and you don't have the the technological and the medical and all the different things that we have to sort of avoid this.
And you really have to face it, it becomes even more real, and it allows you to take yourself out of that and say, this isn't a problem with me.
The real me is fine. It's the material me, that's the problem.
And I really am trapped in this, and I think that is why Gnosticism becomes so popular.
Now the reason I say that of why noticism, and why Platonism, which takes sort of a similar, although less extreme and frankly less fanciful view, why, that's popular, and lots of lots of philosophical schools go that way.
The the thing that makes nosticism particularly problematic for Christians, because Christian do adopt a lot of the Platonic language.
A lot of that philosophical language from the Greek world.
They do adopt a lot of that use. That Clement of Alexandria on your on your other sheet is one in particular.
He starts off as a philosopher, and moves into becoming a Christian teacher, and one of his big missions.
He's working near the end of the second century. One of his big missions seems to be to say, you know, those Gnostic refers to knowledge.
Right gnosis is knowledge. You just change the G to a K, and you can.
You can see the the verbal relationship. Even so, he says, that's not real knowledge, like the real Gnostic, is a Christian nostic.
He has Christian knowledge, and he's trying to to reclaim this terminology.
And he's using Greek philosophy and Greek philosophical language and language and structures to try to do that.
But the reason that Christians had to address they couldn't just do that.
They had to address the problems with a Gnosticism was the fact that they do this separation of God, and they have the Creator, God of the Old Testament as an evil force whose lying to Israel, who is lying about all of these things, all the way through and and then a
good God, who reveals himself through Jesus in the New Testament, and they're cutting off all of that background from the Old Testament.
They're not cutting it off in the way that Marcion does, Marcy, and throws it out.
The Gnostics tend, instead instead of throwing it out, they interpret it.
But I'm using, interpret very loosely. They interpret it all, as you know.
Sort of how coded, hidden language I don't know if truth got snuck in by like the real true God tricking the dumb god into letting some truth filter in and code, but they go wild interpreting this.
They've got, you know the true God generates beings kind of like himself, spiritual beings, and those spiritual beings, then, are trying to be like the true God.
And so they generate some more and then somebody along the way makes a mistake, and you know they shouldn't have been trying to copy the true God anyway.
And so they make a mistake, and they they produce material, and they read all this into what's going on in Genesis.
And in other parts, the Old Testament that talk about creation.
They have these really complex mythologies that read like Science Fiction.
I mean, if you if you want to read some crazy stuff, if you don't wanna watch, you know, whatever science fiction show or movie you're watching at the moment you want to read some crazy stuff, I can give you some referencences to start with because some of it is really wild and.
And it has what I kind of sometimes call, even in theological movements, or or Christian writings that I see today.
It has this kind of gee whiz, quality. And so people like it.
It's just cooler than orthodox theology.
It's just more fun than what you know. The people at church are telling you.
And so it appeals to people. And it's drawing them in.
And the Gnostics were kind of insidious.
A lot of them. They didn't do like Marcion and set up arrival. Church.
No, they stayed within the church. They stayed right within the church and spun their fanciful tales, and said, No, no, no, no!
This is this is the right way to interpret that. Here let me let me explain it to you.
It's wild. It's fun. And they they were trying to draw people into these, you know, wild ideas of of divorcing themselves from the God of creation.
And we're we're being very successful with it to the point that they are the primary targets that most of these writers that are writing against heretics.
Our targeting Tertullian Tertullian has a big one against Marcion, but he also writes against the Valentinians, and Hippolytus.
All 3 of those are doing a lot of work against these sort of mythological, these myth-loving, nasty, more so it to some degree more so than Marcion, and so they were.
They were very influential in the Church, and the reason I say at the top of this page, you know, early heresies, or why we had to do systematics.
Nobody. Everybody was perfectly happy to worship God, the Father, to worship.
When I say everybody I'm talking about, you know orthodox Christians that were listening to Paul and John and the rest of the New Testament writers.
Properly. We were perfectly happy to to worship God the Father, to worship Christ, to praise the Holy Spirit, and to to call upon the Holy Spirit, and to recognize the Holy Spirit, and not really to work out exactly all the relationships you know to do that but at the same time 30 say that
yeah, we were monotheists. We believe in one God and not work out exactly what all that meant.
But these guys come along and they're like, Oh, yeah, that's that's not one God, that's 2 gods!
They're fully opposed to each other, and it pushes us to say we need a we need a better way of articulating this.
We need to, you know, have a way of talking about God that makes sense.
Makes enough sense, anyway, that we can say No. Marcion is wrong.
Valentine's is wrong, and this is what the truth is, and not just say, no, that's wrong.
I can't really explain it to you, but wouldn't.
He's saying is wrong. We need a little bit more of a system, and that's why, for example, Tertullian, I totally told you about 3 different things that he that he writes here he writes a lot more than that guy was a prodigious writer and we've
retained most of it, but I've already mentioned against Marcion and against the Valentinians.
The Valentinians are are probably the most organized.
They're a little bit later. Valentine is at the very end of that second page.
So he right, they're the most organized of the Gnostics.
Sorry I didn't finish that thought, but he also writes another work against Praxis, where he's arguing against what we would describe as modalism, where in modalism you believe that God is one, and sometimes he looks you know sometimes he appears or reveals Himself as the Son sometimes he
reveals Himself as the Father sometimes as the Holy Spirit.
But they're not 3, you know. There's no difference between them.
It's just, you know, sort of a face that they're putting on they're in this mode or in that mode.
And Tertullian, saying, No, no, no, that's not Trinitarian theology, that's something else.
And he. In doing this he develops some of the language that 100 years later we will use to articulate.
You know the descriptions of the Trinity that we know.
You know the idea of one substance and 3 persons.
That's language that's coming from Tertullian, as he's arguing against both nastics, and as he's attempting to correct praxis, which proxy seems to be a made up name, I don't think there was actually anybody named Praxis and I think he
makes up the name, because I think who he's arguing against is basically an orthodox Christian who has, you know, in trying to argue against really bad theology, has come out with an inadequate description of the trinity you know, if you've ever heard water.
As the Trinity. Right water can be ice water can be liquid, water can be steam, and that sometimes gets used.
That's modelism. Yeah, that's but.
But we fall into these things if we don't think it through enough Tertullian was a lawyer before he became a Christian thinker.
Maybe before he became a Christian, I don't remember what the sequence there is, but to Tertullian was a lawyer, so he was practiced at thinking everything all the way through until his friends got really tired of it.
So he was able to say, Wait a minute, no, that's not right, and come out with some better language, for it.
And we had to do that at this point, because you've got you've got people coming out with allegory, you know, Gnostics coming up with allegorical interpretations that are essentially nonsensical.
But very appealing. You've also got somebody like Marcion, who's coming with a frankly, a very scholarly approach.
But it's also a radical. And then you've got the people like the Abbie Knights we're taking.
What from a Jewish perspective, you'd have to think of as a very conservative approach.
Only gonna go as far into this as we feel we need to do.
We're going to conserve, you know. Where we're coming from.
It, change as little as possible, and and that's you know, that's not what our faith is.
Right it's a radical faith. And so these theologians who, you know, they're on your second page.
They're theologians at the top of the page, and there are heretics at the bottom of the page.
Who we're not gonna get to talk about, because I need to get off stage.
But there were a lot of people coming in saying a lot of really crazy things that needed to but saying them very, very persuasively, and they needed to be shut down.
And so that was the job that that these people did. Now these people were all flawed.
Just you know, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it.
But climate was nearly as allegorical as the Gnostics himself.
He, yeah, he's from Alexandria. Sorry, Isaac. If you're listening.
But those Egyptian theologians they loved wild allegories, so he was pretty allegorical himself.
So, you know by no means would I follow him all the way, and Tertullian, I think the combination of you know, having a kind of permissive church around him, and his own legal background, and liking law and order.
He kind of becomes a legalist, he really does. He's not a heretic in that sense, necessarily, but he's kind of a legalist.
Hippolytus.
Pretty pretty hard to get along with on a lot of points and and anti some stuff that I would like.
So none of these people are perfect, but they're fighting against really destructive forces that were coming out, particularly in the second and third centuries.
When you know that the Church could easily be influenced in some very wrong directions.
If there are a couple of questions I can take a couple of questions, run a little long, but we can.
Okay, well, in that case.
Can I be heard?
Who was that?
That's Zeke.
Oh, okay, what's your question, Zeke?
Hi, my question is, did systematics?
And because of the mystery of the Trinity, do all systematics end up heretical to a degree?
Or does systematic implement basically saying, and we can't explain this part.
I think that I don't think that all systematic theology ends up going too far, but I do think that all the systematicians that I know have to fight that temptation.
There is a tendency to try to explain more than you should, but as long as there's humility in it, and most of them that not all of them, but most of them that I know there is humility there, and there's a willingness to to offer an explanation would the understanding
that it may need to be corrected. Tertullian.
No, I say that Tertullian did, except correction on a couple of things, but for the most part Tertullian was not one who was going to to offer to accept corrections if it came out of hard, and it was persuasive.
He might listen to it. But but yeah, I don't think all systematic theology is destined to end up in heresy. No.
Bill, do you think it is? Yeah, okay.
Okay, alright. In that case, then I will close us in prayer, and we can then move on to a time of corporate prayer.
Father, we thank you, or the fact that you were at work in these people who were protecting the truth within the Church in this time.
In this wild West countries of time, and the Church's history we're so grateful that we weren't just dependent on people like Tertullian, and people like Urineus, but that you were at work, and what they were doing, that they were able to do depend on you and to
look to you for their for their arguments, and for their correction when they needed it.
Father, we just pray that as we look at these these ideas tonight, that we will not, we will not look for them today in full form, but that will recognize that these are tendencies that Christians have had throughout the ages, and that we will look to curb them both in our and then the people, that we
listen, to recognize them and exclude them when they need to be excluded.
But recognize them for what they are as as a consistent, the consistent, failing father.
We pray that that most of all, as we, as we look at these, now that we do have your word, and we're able to look to that, that when we recognize questionable theology being proclaimed that we would recognize it as questionable, and then compare it against your word to understand how it is wrong, and
whether it is wrong, and that we would do that looking to you and your spirit for guidance. In Christ's name we pray Amen.