Thanks! Tom. Yeah, that'll work. I can still see everybody.
So it's not in the way. So we had thought that this was going to be the final installment of Church history.
But I was asked Sonnday to extend it by a week.
So this is again the penultimate session, so I'll be doing tonight, and next week I have a feeling that that Fred figured if they gave me all the way to Sunday to be mostly ready with what I was gonna do tonight.
And then they gave me 2 weeks to do it, that I might manage to finish on time.
I have a feeling that was at least part of the motivation.
I'm not sure but I'll show him I'm gonna squeeze in some extra stuff.
So my plan tonight I am going to at some point I don't know if it'll be tonight, or if it'll be next week.
But I'm going to pick up and do a little bit of additional information on the Council of Chelsea and and the controversy is coming up to it when we get to that point, and the sort of grand Sweater.
But my plan is to do more of a grand sweep of church history will be sort of reviewing the things that I've talked about over the last 12 sessions.
I guess reviewing a lot of those, and also talking about particularly how some of those controversies, some of those events over the well, I would say 2,000 years.
But I'm not gonna cover the full 2,000 over somewhere between 1,100 1,500 years.
How those have affected even the churches that we see around us today, and some of the, you know, different groups and everything, partly motivated by questions that I frequently get when people find out that I do, you know, early Christianity, they asked you know when did the Roman Catholic
Church start, or what's going on with these Greek Orthodox? Who are they?
Where did they come from? So hopefully? We will get to to that. And even beyond just those groups.
So like, I say, I wanna start out by reviewing what we have done.
And then layout that broad history of the period and something that I've tried to emphasize as we've talked about all these different issues.
And and individuals in church history. Is that what has happened has largely been development, and I don't necessarily mean development as a positive thing.
I just mean it, you know I'm not saying that what develops is necessarily better.
I'm saying that there's not been typically some sort of you know innovation and take over by somebody who's wanting to do something completely different from the inside or somebody from the outside.
Even that most of the changes that we see the evidence of even today happened progressively.
So that's something that I want to to re-emphasize again tonight. As I go through some of this.
So Christianity, as it begins, obviously begins, and the context of the Roman Empire, it Israel or Judea, is within the borders of the Roman Empire.
When Christ is born, and that context has a continual impact.
You know we see it throughout the New Testament. Jesus is born in Bethlehem because a Roman governor is, is holding a census of the area.
And so Joseph has to go back to Bethlehem.
He, Jesus family flees to Egypt because a a king kind of a Jewish king, but a king who was actually put in place and propped up by the Roman Emperor, is trying to find him and exterminate him, and so they leave town and at the end of his
life. Jesus is actually executed by the Roman government. Right pilot is the primary representative of Roman government in Judea, and the surrounding area, and so the fact of the the Roman imperial context for Christianity is important right from the beginning that Roman context continues to be important when we get to
the Book of Acts we see one of the earliest divisions in the church is among people who are Jewish, but among between Hellenists and and the Hebrews, as they get called basically Greek speaking widows in the Church, et Jerusalem and Hebrew speaking, Widows, at the
church, in Jerusalem. The reason you've got Greek speaking widows.
There is because there were so many Jewish people who had gone to other parts of the Roman Empire and Greek, not Latin.
Latin was the common language of, you know, the working guy on the street in Rome, Greek was the universal language of the Roman Empire.
If you wanted to get by you at least had to speak kind of a broken, common Greek, and that common Greek is the language that the New Testament has written in so right there in Jerusalem.
The fact of Roman context is is important in setting up that distinction and even tensions within the Jerusalem Church Act.
Then follows Paul's ministry, and it focuses on the Greek speaking Roman world of the Roman Empire.
Mostly his mission is to the west of Jerusalem.
He goes a little bit. That's east of Jerusalem.
But most of what Paul is doing is actually west of Jerusalem.
In, you know, in Eastern Asia, and even into Europe.
Then, and acts as concerned with with that mission, with the expansion of Christianity in the Roman world, in the Greek, speaking part of the Roman world, it is much less interested in the expansion that does in fact take place into the the Aramaic and Syriac speaking areas that are East
of Israel and Judea. It's, you know, for reasons that we don't really need to get into it, doesn't it?
Doesn't take as much interest in that, particularly once you get to the second half of the book where it's focused on Paul's mission.
So it, the church also being in Greek speaking Roman imperial context, is also far more interested in what's going on in the Greek speaking world within the Roman Empire, and gradually it loses contact with the Christian the Christians
and the Christian churches that are expanding in places like Syria, Persia, and India.
They are there from very early on, but we in the West and I have to, you know, with my own background, I have to put myself into that context.
We in the West really lose context with them.
So getting back into some of the the sessions that we covered early on, we looked at a couple of 2 subjects starting from the New Testament and moving forward with them, both of which were developments like I talked about a little while ago, developments that took place in the churches corporate worship on the one
hand, and developments that took place in church governance. On another week, when we talked about elders and bishops and decades didn't really talk about deacons.
We basically talked about elders and bishops, but both of those follow similar trajectories.
Worship develops from what we see in the New Testament of a very, a very free and open kind of atmosphere.
In a Christian worship, service to something that's a lot more almost scripted right?
A lot more regimented. You know exactly what's gonna happen.
You know, when it's gonna happen, and to some degree, you know what they're gonna say, that development takes place over a couple 100 years and parallel to it, you have a development where authority for church governance is more and more consolidated into a set person just one man serving
as and he gets distracted as the Bishop, as opposed to the rest of the presbyters, even though in the New Testament those terms are pretty much interchangeable.
But that governance is consolidated to one person.
Both of those moves are motivated by the same basic concern.
It's a concern to keep error out, so that people aren't taught things that are wrong in worship or in teaching, in a worship service.
If you have opportunity for anybody to teach, it's very easy for somebody to get up and say something.
That's just wrong. And you've got to catch it after the fact, or you've got a notice.
It, you know, in real time, and put a stop to it.
And so both saying, You know what we're going to do.
The service like this, so that we don't get off track and identifying one person.
One man among the leaders of the Assembly who can be the soul for the chief authority within that meeting.
Both of those were moves to to sort of secure the congregation against error, against heresy coming in.
I don't know if they're the right decisions.
It's a little bit harder to do the other way, but I tend to prefer not to make the moves that they did but I think it's important for us to understand why they're doing that right.
What's motivating that if nothing else, so that we can understand it, and then guard against similar tendencies ourselves?
Oh! And I would say that it did not. Those those methods were both attempts to keep error out to keep heresy out didn't fully work right even early on.
They still were dealing with some of these things, but both of those things provided sort of a vehicle for opposing that error now some of the errors that we talked about were that we saw in the very early centuries not gonna spend much time on them tonight, because they don't
come into the sort of grand suite trajectory that I want us to look at, but a couple of some of the early errors that we talked about were Gnosticism.
Marcian, who's very similar to nasticism, but a little bit different.
Those are both of Harris that are what we called radical dualism.
And so you have the good God opposed to an evil God.
The evil God typically is associated with material creation. And so these forces are constantly in tension or in opposition.
And Marcian actually identifies that evil material God with the God of the Old Testament, and so he throws out the entire Old Testament along with most of the New in his attempt to to separate himself from those kinds of tendencies.
Those were a couple of fairly early examples. Another thing another early example of a an error or a heresy, that the Church dealt with were the Ebanites kind of an extreme Jewish Christianity that was the polar opposite of Marcion, instead of throwing out the Old Testament and throwing
out anything in the New Testament that sounded Jewish.
They actually wanted to preserve Old Testament law, preserve as much as they could.
They have a problem. Seeing Jesus as divine, they recognized him as a profit from God.
They recognized him as the promised Messiah, but not as God.
So that's another group that the early Church is having to deal with and having to find ways of of keeping those teachings separated from, you know, particularly the the young new Christians who didn't necessarily know all that much.
And when you're getting into the, you know, the Greek speak world when you're getting farther away from Israel, they don't even have an Old Testament background to start from.
So these are the kinds of things that are being opposed, like, I say, those are not the ones that I want to spend as much time on tonight.
The first one that I wanna talk about, that impacts the trajectory as I wanna lay it out is the conflict that we.
So it's a conflict that's inside. I don't wanna talk about these others, because the Gnostics, the Marcianites, the Eb Andites.
They end up outside of what we would have considered. You know the Christian Church.
This next one is a conflict that takes place within the Christian Church, and that's the conflict between people who want to adopt a very rigorous position on any number of issues, and people whose position is more of a position of laxity.
Largely they're in conflict about who can and can't be in fellowship in the church.
If you have, send, if you send in a particular kind of way, if you have under pressure from the government, denied Christ, is it possible for any of those kinds of things to confess your sin and be restored into fellowship, those are the kinds of things that the rigorous and the lacks
were, and conflict over. And we're in a somewhat brother in context. Here.
So any of us that are familiar with brethren. History know that the question of who can and can't and will and won't, and under what conditions be accepted into fellowship, has ended up with it looks like a shrub.
The family tree of Plymouth Brethren. History looks like a many branch shrub, and it's largely because of those kinds of issues.
So we should be familiar, and also careful about some of these.
You know, and I say that we're talking about people who are rigorous and people who are accused of being lax.
The rigorous would probably describe themselves as being concerned for the purity of the Church, and a proper separation from sin.
And I don't think they're really wrong. It's just a question of where you're looking at it from those people who are accused of being lax right?
The rigorous look at the lax party, and they're going to say, y'all just let anybody back in under any conditions.
Well, the lax would describe themselves as defending the grace of God, the power of the grace of God, and our forgiveness in Christ, and yeah, we can come back, and and there is ongoing forgiveness.
It's not like some of them wanted to say. And you know, once you're forgiven if you mess up again, that's it.
No, no, no, that's not, that's not the gospel of Christ, and I think both sides have a point.
I think both sides have to be careful about pushing it too far, but that that issue led to some really serious splits between believers whose theology was otherwise basically orthodox.
They didn't have significant disagreements for the most part on questions of salvation.
Questions of the identity of Christ, those kinds of things. It was disagreements about.
You know what is required for church purity and church fellowship, both in Rome and in North Africa.
These become really serious issues, wrong manages to put things back together.
A little bit more quickly, ultimately they're able to to bring the leaders of the rigorous position pretty much back into fellowship, you know, and it only takes 50 or 60 years for that to happen.
Maybe a little less, with some, and they're able to pretty much restore fellowship.
I should say that outside of Rome and North Africa, where these issues were really hot in the examples that I've given you, all the rest of the churches largely sided with those parties that were accused of lack city the rigorouss were pretty uniformly condemned as
condemned might be strong. But we're told that you guys are being way too harsh on this.
And so they were maintaining fellowship with those people who did want to readmit, you know fallen Christians back into fellowship.
Both those people in North Africa and in Rome. So in that sense the the lax party wins in Rome.
They win a little bit better, I guess, by being able to restore fellowship between the 2 groups, for the most part there's always somebody who's, gonna you know, dig his biggest heels in and refuse to compromise on anything.
But for the most part they were able to restore. Follow up North Africa was a little different.
I get the impression from my reading of Church history that the cultures of North Africa they didn't compromise very happily.
So on. This they didn't compromise very happily.
Their biggest division came over the response, to, and we are at this point right at the beginning of the 3 hundreds end of the 2 hundreds, beginning of the 3 hundreds, Diocletian is the Emperor, and Diocletian's persecution of the this is one of the very few
genuine, empire, wide persecutions. Some people didn't enforce it as strictly as it would have been liked, but for the most part this did get, you know, at least on paper.
Everywhere, and in North Africa there was a group that were referred to as the Donatists, named after one of their leaders, and after the persecution was over, their position was that those church leaders, those Christians, anybody who had denied Christ under pressure from the Roman government who had handed over Scriptures to the
Roman soldiers who were come and demanding them, because that was one of the things that they did, they would come and demand the Church's Scriptures, be given to them.
And some of the elders and bishops handed over those Scriptures in order to avoid being executed.
The Donatists said that they could never be allowed back into fellowship.
The more lax Stanitists would allow for it.
At the very end of their life they could be allowed back into fellowship just before death.
Kind of thing, and the.
In a whole Empire, sense. Main line position was that they could be received back into fellowship.
So I'm not a hundred percent competitive with the terminology.
But I'll I'll use it, and I'll tell you how I'm using it.
I'm gonna call the Donatist Stamatists.
That's easy. But the main line, like I say, I think we can call Catholics not really in the modern sense of Catholic, but Catholic in the universal sense.
In that they were the ones who were in fellowship with the rest of the Universal Church.
The Donatists were not. They didn't really want to be.
They pretty much condemned the rest of the church, as also being a bunch of wishy-washy black Sis people, but so we've got essentially 2 groups here.
Donatists, and since I can't come up with anything better I'll go with the standard Catholics.
Catholics is, who eventually Augustine will be part of in this controversy.
So. The reason, I say that Donatism in North Africa is different from how it is and how you know these same sorts of conflicts go on, and wrong is that the Donatists, who are the rigorous party in North Africa that is a much more compelling position to the majority of the
people. So the Catholics are sort of in a better position, because they're in fellowship with the rest of the Church all around the Roman world.
But the Donatists are actually the majority of the people, and the Donatists, unlike a lot of schismatics and heretics throughout the centuries the donors has set up a full church structure.
They have bishops, they have churches. The Donatist and Catholic churches exist in parallel in North Africa.
You can. You know you can go to any significant town, and you can find both of them, and you'd probably say that Donna says we're in a little bit better position because they had more people, so hold that thought.
That's the situation in North Africa and I haven't given you your timeline.
I'm sorry. That is also still the situation. Remember, Diocletian's persecution is at the beginning of the 3 hundreds, when Augustine becomes bishop and Hippo in 3 95, if I have my date right at the end of the fourth century.
That is still the situation. The Donatists are still the majority party.
The Donnotists and Catholics both have a competing parallel church structures.
So, and they are still very much in tension with one another.
Agustin has a whole body of his writing that is, him attempting to persuade Donatists that they are wrong in.
Their understanding of ecclesiology, and that they should reunite with the rest of the Church.
He's reasonably successful because he does have imperial support.
But still there's a lot of tension, and that is the situation in North Africa.
At the end of the fourth century.
So before we go on with that story anymore, we have to step aside and look at the fourth century from a different perspective, and that is what's going on with the Trinitarian controversies.
That's what we've been talking about up until we got to Calcedon.
That's basically what we've been talking about for the last 3 or 4 sessions.
The Donatists and the Catholics would have been pretty much in full agreement on these Trinitarian questions that we've talked about.
Both of them are going to acknowledge the divinity of Christ.
That's not going to be a point of contention between them.
But we need to look at that, because it has effects in the rest of the Christian world.
So between Nicaea in the year 3, 25, and the Council of Constantinople at the end of the fourth century, in 381, the balance of power between a nice scene Christology that sees the Son of God has truly God co eternal co-work with the
father, that's what's that's what stated at Nicea.
But for the next 60, some years, 50, some years, my math's not so good.
The bounce of power goes back and forth between that position and the people who want to in some way to some degree diminish the dayity of Christ, to express a Deity of Christ.
That is, that is noter. Those people sloppily.
All get called Aryan's. If we wanna be technical.
If anybody's got their old worksheets from weeks ago, they're more Hawaiians.
By this point the real Aryans are pretty much gone.
Its area is probably the only real area in, but there are still a significant group.
We call them, and they still what they share with areas is that they still want to put Christ on a much lower.
Put the Son of God on a much lower level. Then God the Father.
And that theology, like, I say, goes back and forth, and, in fact, there are a lot of times when the Emperor's favor that position, and since the emperors are favoring that position, they're favoring bishops who favor that position, and if you've got the bishop you've usually
got the teaching and it usually doesn't take long before you've got the people we generally, you know, particularly in Evangelicalism and in a world here it is in a world or in a country where every one of us has a Bible, you know, before I came tonight, I was Choosing
among several we want to say, you know. No, it's just if if you read the Bible you'll get it.
We have to remember that 9 times out of 10 we understand the Bible, the way it was taught to us.
We try we should try to set that aside.
But most of the time most people interpret Scripture the way they've been taught.
That's why we put so much energy into Sunday school right it's why the elders put so much thought into who's gonna teach Sunday school right?
And if somebody wants to, you know, Neil was at the annual meeting, Neil was saying.
You know, if you wanna teach Sunday school if you wanna be involved, talk to me, and we can talk about it I don't remember his exact phrase, but basically it's not automatic right?
Not just anybody. We have to be careful about this, because if you're in there teaching those little kids what you say is going to affect how they read Scripture, maybe for the rest of their lives, it's hard to unite so the point of all that is to say, it is important to get the
bishops, and now see, Fred, I can. I can run long, no matter what.
Now I've got to pick up the pace, so.
Yeah. So all of that to say, there were a lot of times in this time period between 325 and 381 where Aryans or Hamoons, or whatever you want to call them, do have a lot of influence and a lot of positions within the Christian church particularly with
the boundaries of the Roman Empire.
Outside of theology. In that time period some other things were going on, and now we can turn our attention to the pretty pictures that I'm going to start putting up on the screen.
Alright, and Zeke taught me.
Turn on the laser. Pointer. Watch this and that cool seek taught me to do that this afternoon.
You're not.
Did I not? Something loose, Neil? It was projecting at the beginning.
Wasn't it?
Okay.
For those of you at home who didn't hear Neil's joke.
Neil just said that I could just drag what I've got onto that screen.
Alright! Let's see, are they side by side, Neil?
Whoa! Everything's going there. Here it comes! Here it comes!
Alright! Now somebody oh, I can't see it!
There wide. Show right.
Alright, and I'm gonna have to do the thing.
There it is!
Alright here! Where is it? There? It says, now this is what I think is so cool.
Alright. Now I understand why you wanted me up here, not down there.
I didn't realize I was gonna need to see alright.
So what we've got here is a map.
Of the Roman Empire. It says that it.
Telling the positions of the northern barbarian. It's kinda don't trust it too much.
What I like with this map is that it just?
Well, it has 3 colors, but it distinguishes very much between what is the Roman Empire and what's not so the green and this sort of pink, red.
I don't know. Light red is different from pink, so maybe it's light red.
These are the Roman Empire, the Greens, the Western Roman Empire, the Reds, the Eastern Roman Empire.
But for all intent and purposes this is the dominion of Rome, rather optimistic about how far into the Saharan desert they get, but you know we'll excuse that the important thing to note there are a couple of rivers in Europe that are super important they were super important then and
they're super important. Now, I don't know how much geography you got when you were in school.
The older you are, the more you probably got or if you happen to grow up near one of these rivers, then maybe you know all of.
But the 2 rivers that are really important are pretty easy to pick out on this map.
They are the Ryan, which is sort of right along through here, and then the other one.
That's really important is the Danube, which flows from amazingly.
These 2 rivers start not very far apart, but the Danube flows from around the same area all the way down here, and finally comes out into the Black Sea right there.
These 2 rivers pretty much form the boundaries. The northern boundary of the Roman Empire.
Every once in a while some emperor or some general would be feeling his oats, and he would go charging across those rivers, and he would take some territory over on the other side, and he would hold it for a little while, and it was never a good idea, the best idea was always to stay
on your own side of these 2 rivers. It was just much easier to fortify.
On the other side of the rivers is where you get the Germans and all the different Gothic tribes. And all this.
Now I'm gonna assume if I just click. Yeah.
So here I'm clickicking over to a map that shows the diffusion of Christianity, and for up in the top you get the the journeys of Paul which we're all pretty familiar with.
But other than the you know. The interesting point of seeing that.
Yeah, we're Paul journeyed is also where the church sprung up earlier.
The darker areas here or where the church is already strong.
In 3 25. So at the time of the Council of Nicea, not long after the leagueization of Christianity, it's not.
It's not even the official religion yet, or anything like that.
But it's it is tolerated and endorsed by the Emperor.
And so at that point, you've got these random little, not entirely random, but you've got these little isolated areas where the Christian church is strong already in 3 25, the the more yellow areas is where it expands to and it says 600 you could probably other than you know i'm sure
there are a handful of spots that really do take all the way to 600.
But it makes a lot of that expansion very quickly.
After 3, 25, and if you'll notice I don't know if there's a way to go back.
But if you'll notice and we're what you saw on the previous map.
Those borders!
Look and awful lot like the Ryan and the Danube.
That's also because that's the Roman Empire.
That's also where Christianity was very quickly, and I wouldn't say easily but successfully able to expand to from fairly early date.
The the arrows not off at the top, but the arrows that you see I have a laser pointer.
All of these are showing essentially mission. You know, missions that are sent to new peoples that have't heard the Gospel.
Yet, and unfortunately they're not labeled here.
Maybe that in the text on the facing page in this book that it tells you more about specific arrows.
But almost all of these arrows take you to other places inside that safe Roman Empire territory by 600.
It's formerly Roman territory, right? But inside that Roman territory that's safe where you don't have to worry about crazy people.
Because you've got the Roman military keeping order. There's one exception.
Right over here.
You've got a mission that does go across the Danube.
Here's the problem with that mission. The problem is not that it isn't successful.
It's a very successful mission across the Danube. Very successful evangelization.
The guy's career reads like something that you talk about at new tribes or ethnos. 3, 60.
Now I guess he's actually he's from over in this area.
Well, his sorry, his family.
I don't have as much time to expand on the story as I want to, but his family is from that area of Cappadocia, and they were taken captive by the Goths.
He's actually born somewhere up in this Gothic like among Gothic tribes.
Culturally, he's largely Gothic, but his family was Christian, and so that is the faith that he's raised in.
He doesn't follow the the pagan religions of the Goths.
He follows a Christian faith, but he either follows, or some people say he converts to when he comes back into the Roman Empire.
A Hawaiian or an Aryan theology.
His name is Ufilas Wolfellas.
In some some texts I don't know which one's more common, or if anybody's ever heard of them either way.
But he comes back down here and he's back in the Roman Empire during a time when the Emperor and the Bishop of Constantinople and the powers that be our Homoon are Aryan, and so when they send him to the Gothic Tribes, the reason I
say, it's almost like, you know, new tribes.
He's the call. He grew up up there. He doesn't even have to learn the language.
He knows the language of an unreached, illiterate people, group.
So he creates a written language for them, sounding from familiar.
He creates a written language for them. He translates, or maybe he's the like head guy on the committee.
Some scholars say it reads more like a committee translation, but he's responsible for the translation of the Bible into the Gothic language.
The Gothic people by the way, are sort of a Germanic people, and and he is successfully both before he comes to to Rome, to Constantinople, before he comes back into the Roman Empire, and then, again, when he is sent on this mission.
He's very successfully converting the Gothic tribes, and in particular the Gothic chieftains, because that's the easiest way to get a whole bunch of people get the boss.
He's converting them to Christianity, as it's not at that moment inside the Roman Empire, which is Aryan.
3, 81 comes around by that point the Aryan Homoian theology has pretty well been squashed inside the Roman Empire.
The Council of Constantinople condemns it again.
As time goes on it really doesn't have any more significant swing in the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire is all Nicene Trinitarians, basically after constructionople.
But outside, where there's no influence from the Empire, there's very little attention from the church.
The nice thing church, those German tribes are all Aryans.
One of those German tribes.
Are the Vandals.
This map. The next map that I'm going to show you.
I think it's the next map doesn't do quite as good of a job with the migrations of the Vandals, but I wanted to show you this, and I kind of like that.
It's on a conference map, because, you know, you guys have heard of Poland, you might not have heard of Swabia and Swabby is even.
That's medieval. That's not even what it would have been called.
Now, I don't even know what it would have been called.
Now the Vandals are getting pushed out by other people right?
Other Germanic groups come in and they get pushed, and the Huns come sweeting across Eurasia, and everybody gets pushed a little bit.
But the Vandals become sort of a migrating group, and it doesn't take them long to become a conquering group.
This is not a like. They did not set out on this and start with, walking, and not stop until they got to their destination.
They start out, up, here they come down here and they're settling in this area.
And some of them actually subtle in this area. But there, they're settling more down in this southern region.
They're settling in that region between the years of 3, 25 and 3 81.
And so when they are also along with the the Godhic tribes, which they're all just Germanic tribes, they're all being converted to an Aryan form of Christianity, where they do not accept the divinity of Christ, or at least not the complete divinity of Christ right
the Haoians said, he's similar. He's just not quite the same disagreement with the theology that you would have from the church inside the Roman Empire, condemned by that Church.
Alright to refresh your memory on the sorry.
Danube.
Oh, what did I do?
What happened while I was thinking. Did anybody see?
Alright. Well, we'll just talk, no matter.
Just jingle the cable.
Alright! Well, anyway, to hey! Here it comes to refresh your memory on the Danube, even though there's not a picture coming back yet.
They were settling just north of the Danube, and and then, when they were traveling again.
I've got that little space. I don't even know what you're tell you what you do that, and I'll step to the side.
Just call it so. The point is, they've been accepting this area in form of Christianity, and then, when their migration begins again, cause they're there for a while, and then they get pushed out, and this basically Germanic group goes back up north again, and then
we're back on screen. Alright! Good!
Say what? Maybe I should have had a couple, did I top it several, anyway?
I don't know how to go back either, so it wouldn't help to know that.
I'm technologically brilliant. Thank you. Okay.
So they come back north again into more of something where they're dealing with tribes that they might be familiar with.
But then they decide that they want more, different, better, whatever they're on the move they come through.
Call pretty quickly, present day France. At this point they're coming into conflict again when they get around here.
They're coming into conflict again with the Roman Empire, because this side is wrong.
This side of the Rhine is not wrong. That Rome doesn't care what you're doing over here.
But over here your enrollment territory, and they were winning.
They were doing very well. This is all late fourth century that this is happening.
They sweep through, call, they sweep through present day, Spain, Hispania, at the time there setting up some of their different, some of the different groups that were with them were setting up kingdoms along the way.
There are couple of Vandal kingdoms here on the coasts of Spain and Portugal, but then the a large body of them come across the straights of Gibraltar and begin sweeping across Christian North Africa.
And you may remember I told you when they got all the way out here.
So the Carthage area to the Hippodrigius area.
When we were talking about Augustine, we said that at the end of his life we're in about the year 4, 25, or so at this point.
By the end of his life they were banging on the doors of Hippo Rigius, where he was.
The Bishop, and it was one of only 3 Roman cities left in North Africa that had not been completely overrun by the Vandals.
From that point on the Vandals, not the Romans rule North Africa.
Eventually the wrong, you know the after quite a while the the Roman emperors would be able to retake and re-exert authority in North Africa, but the Vandals established kingdoms, and and our ruling, and they while I think that religious faith wasn't necessarily the
most important thing. They did not have any patience for this nice scene.
Trinitarian theology. They had been persecuted by over that all along the way.
That was something that they were very much in conflict with, so as they're setting up their governance, they're oppressing both the Catholic Nicene's and the Donatist nice scenes you had to be a Vandal.
You had to be non-nine in order to take over any administrative type positions.
You know I'm calling them Germanic. By the time they get to this point they've adopted a fully Roman lifestyle.
Fully, Roman systems. It's really, indistinguishable from most perspectives that you're now being rolled by the Vandals instead of by the Romans.
Except for in this area. So now remember, and we'll, we'll basically have to close on this because it's already 80'clock.
But remember when we, when we stepped aside from what was going on in North Africa, we had these 2 groups, the Catholic, for lack of a better term, and the Donatists that were in conflict now, we've added a third, that actually has a theological disagreement with them
and is actually the one in power. And so, by the by, the middle of the 4 hundreds, you've got Christianity going by a variety of different names and identifiers in North Africa, Christianity is completely an upheaval.
I. This continues to be the case, and this, like jumps around Kelseedon, and we'll come back to Calcedon next week.
But this continues to be the case for the rest of the time that Christianity holds sway in North Africa, and as fractured as it is as fractured as Christians are, and as much an opposition to one another as they are.
It's little wonder that about 200 years later, in the mid 6 hundreds or late, 6 hundreds, when Islam comes from, you know, a little off screen here.
But when Islam Islam enters into North Africa and sweeps across North Africa, it deals with very little opposition.
It's very easily, very successfully able to sweep right across and North African Christianity, which in the third and fourth centuries was the absolute bastion of Christian dialogue.
And you were not going to convince them to compromise on anything North African Christianity folds immediately.
So one of the warnings that I think we can take from all this is to be very careful how how heatedly we disagree, and how heatedly we divide, because we have.
We have to maintain truth we have, but we also have to, particularly in the case of the Donatists and the Catholics.
If we divide over secondary and third level kinds of issues, and are spending all of our energy fighting each other, then when something comes from culture or something comes from another, faith, we don't have the unity to resist it any more.
And I think that's to a large degree, and on a very large scale.
What happens in North Africa in the late 6 hundreds like, I say, we will see a few more conquests next week, but for this week that's as far as I want to go.
I'm almost afraid to ask if there are any questions, since it's already 80'clock.
But but are there any questions that I can clear up before next week?
We have into. I guess the 4 hundreds. So we're the Vandals.
I would not consider them to be Trinitarian, but they would have said, I'm assuming they would have said that they were in some sense tryinginarian, but their within their trinity.
God. The Father was the through God. The sun's divinity is derivative, and.
I don't remember for sure if they would have given him an actual like starting point and time.
Certainly classical Aryanism would, but his divinity is not of the same nature as the Father's divinity.
So does that. Yeah. So that have a trinity. But it's an insufficient trinity.
Alright!
Stopping just a little bit late.
Let me close in prayer.
Father, we thank you for your preservation of your church, that even through these things that we've seen tonight, even as we have divided ourselves and our runners have divided themselves, that even in that, even in the destruction that that eventually comes in the North African Church, that you're gospel is preserved
there's a there are places around the world where the truth does continue, and and where it is being taught, and eventually where it can grow again.
By the way, thank you for preserving that we thank you for preserving your word.
We thank you that we have had the opportunity to learn that either we pray that we would be slow to divide as they should have been slower, and we pray that we would be faithful to your word and to your gospel in Christ's name, we pray Amen.