Even though the Bible closes out its time history in the context of the early church, the church continues to move forward. And so I want this morning for us to begin to look at the background of the Protestant Reformation and to think about answering some of the questions about the providential ordering of what God did. And I want us to see, first and foremost, kind of a vantage point of what was taking place in the early church. And you can note here on this map how the church grew over several hundred years. You're looking at a time space there from 185 A.D. to 325 A.D. You're seeing how the church grew. Look at North Africa. all this rim around the Mediterranean and how the church moved from the east and it moved westward and northward and it continued to grow and move. This is important as you think about church history. There's a movement of God taking forth his gospel, moving it forward in these different regions and areas. So when you look at that map, don't just think about the idea of that being land and people, but understand that's the movement of the gospel going forward. Churches are being planted. Churches are being formed. People are hearing the preaching of the gospel. It's moving in different ways and moving outward and onward. And so by the time you have 385 AD, you have a context that the church has really grown far beyond just what the ministry of Jesus was in his lifetime. Jesus's intention was for it to move forward, the gospel itself, but he in and of himself knew physically he would not be the one there doing it in that time. He had his apostles. He had his disciples and those disciples, even after the death of the apostles, continued to move the gospel forward. And we have some great men of history who preached the gospel. We have women of history who saw the gospel go forward into these realms and these places. So you can kind of see that movement there and it's kind of neat for that to be recognized in its proper context, yes. No, that's just a basic map of the movement. I got that just to give you a basic map. I don't know of any great scholar that put that together that was pinpointing churches. I'm telling you from my reading, we know that churches were planted and from the scripture, we know that churches were planted, right? Okay, so that was just a basic map to give you an idea, all right? All right, so that movement continues. Now, I wanna go to this right here. Now, this map gives you more a map of Europe, okay? And in its context, this is... the introduction to what is called the Middle Ages or the Medieval Period, or some people call it the Dark Ages. And what you're seeing here is a movement across Europe of the gospel itself. But what I want you to note is, look at the area of the Byzantine Empire, Bulgaria, look at the Seljuk Dominions, okay? That's the movement that came about of Islam, all right? So by the 600s, 600 to 700, most of Northern Europe had been taken over by the Islamic religion. All right, and you see here, there's a great movement of it all the way over towards Constantinople. So you have the Islamic religion in the East, Northern Africa, then you have the Orthodox Church, all right, there with Russia, Bulgaria, Byzantine Empire, and then you see what is considered to be mainly the Holy Roman Empire there in the purple. Now that's the context of the Middle Ages, and that's the context leading up to the Reformation period. What you have to note is there had been some great changes that had gone along And it had really taken place over 1,000 to 1,200 years. After about 400 AD, the Christian church in the Roman Empire began to struggle because the Roman Empire was struggling. Now, the Christian church wasn't struggling necessarily all doctrinally, but it was struggling because of the content, or excuse me, the context of its situation that being so closely related to the Roman empire, as the empire began to dissolve or deconstruct, the Christian church was kind of struggling to form itself all around these areas of the Mediterranean and to keep up moving forward. Some people have debated in history, you know, how much Constantine really helped the church or hurt the church. There's major historical works that have been written on that. Constantine gave credence to the church. It was no longer persecuted after his edict. And yet at the same time, sometimes the church became so closely related to the empire, the Roman empire, that it began to really struggle with its identity. Sometimes the identity of the church was no longer really about the gospel itself. The identity of the church began to be about its attachment to Rome. And people were looking for power and, you know, kind of the accolades of being one of these great church figures. And so the church began to struggle with its identity so much so that in certain places as Muhammad and the Muslim religion began by force to take over portions of the Roman empire, they began to really put a constrain on Christian churches and really oppress them and put them down. And so the Roman church in a sense began to be smaller in its context and really the Christian church began to be kind of moved out and was not as attached anymore to any form of government in that Northern African and this Eastern Mediterranean region. And so you have a big change to where what you see in what's called the Christian church in the Middle Ages is mainly this church split and eventually what is the Orthodox Church and the Holy Roman Empire, okay? And then the Holy Roman Empire becomes what is known as the Roman Catholic Church. Now the Roman Catholic Church and this Western Church that we're looking at in the purple, that's going to kind of be our focus this morning in looking at the burgeoning Reformation and how that's going to come about. What is taking place in that purple area right there? That becomes the focus. Because there are some small lights of Christianity in this eastern region over here, but very little is left. It's really been forced out or snuffed out. Not much is left. The Orthodox Church has some portions of Gospel thinking still left in it, but it's going in its own wayward condition. And you are left with Churches over here that had really a lot of gospel mindedness to them But over a period of time they began to wane and we're going to discuss some of the reasons for that that waning Okay, and a lot of that waning has to do with the takeover of the Roman Catholic Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire itself and so you can kind of see that if you have that in the back of your mind. Remember those purple areas, Poland, Hungary, of course Italy and Rome, that's your main focus, the people states there. Germany, as we get into Martin Luther. Switzerland is where you've got your Zwingli and Calvin. All right, you see these areas. Now, that area of Spain down near the Mediterranean edge down there, Aragon, Cordoba, there's some Muslim influence there. That's why it's giving you a little different color. Some of the Muslim influence is coming across the Mediterranean there in the Straits and influencing that Southern region. But you can see the Christian church has gone as far as England and Ireland up into Denmark. Okay, you see those areas there. And that's the movement of the gospel itself. Now, think about that for a minute. That's a lot of movement. over a thousand year period. Let's say from 100 AD to 1100 AD. Even if some of that Christian thinking is awkward and strange, even to think about though the idea of Christ, the gospel of Christ moving forward, that's a lot of land mass in a day that doesn't have the internet, that doesn't have cars and trucks. Okay, that's a lot of movement. So the gospel has really moved forward, but in that dark ages, in that medieval period or middle ages, there's a lot of waning that goes on. So what major providential factors led to the Reformation? Well, the Roman Catholic Church as one schema, okay? The Roman Catholic Church as one schema. One of the things that happened in this age of movement of the gospel is Rome began to form a kind of a power group in all of these churches in that purple area we were looking at. And what Rome sought to do was to unify Christianity under one banner. Now they had, in a sense, what we might think would be a good goal. You'd like to have all Christians come together, wouldn't you? Wouldn't that be nice? All Christians. Good Bible-believing Christians all over the world come together under one banner. And everybody's under this one banner. Everything's together. That's a great goal. There's nothing wrong with the goal in and of itself. The problem comes when you try to achieve that goal. How do you try to achieve that goal? The Roman church, over a period of about 300 years, leading into the 550 to 750, had already started a papal authority. And that papal authority was this one head, the Pope. So that by the time we get from 650 onward, the Pope is this huge figure. He's already been growing in his authority over this portion, but by the time you get into these middle age periods, his authority is massive over the whole of this church. One writer says, for many centuries, the Roman Catholic Church had sought to realize the dream of a united Christendom. It saw the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, as the vicar of Jesus Christ upon the earth. Since the spiritual must take precedence over the material, the Pope could claim supreme authority in Christendom. He exercised a moral rule which bound every prince and every kingdom and a succession of able philosophers and theologians. Now, I want you to think about that for a minute. You've got the land mass that we're talking about there of Western Europe, which is Millions of square miles. Okay, that landmass is under the authority of this Roman Church and the Pope is the head of that Roman Church and He is seen to be the vicar of Christ He interprets scripture for the whole of the church his interpretation of scripture According to the church is inerrant. It is infallible No one should question the interpretation of Scripture when given by the Pope or the papacy. And so therefore, with all of the clergy order under him, he begins to reign through these churches, vestiges, these monasteries, and he has rule and order in a religious sense. And then that also impacts all of the countries that have these churches and vestiges in them because the rulers, the political rulers of the day, they want to have the kind of spiritual influence they need, but they also want spiritual blessing. And they give this authority through the church. Now it becomes an interesting relationship, and we won't have a ton of time to go into all the detail of it, but that in and of itself becomes a real struggle between this church authority and this governmental authority. How are the two going to function together? Well, Rome seemed to have accomplished its plan of this one banner, this one schema. As one writer says, any visitor to Western Europe in the Middle Ages would have been impressed by the unity that had been achieved. Church architecture was very consistent in all their buildings. You all recognize some of these domes. Now, this particular dome, I don't know what it's attached to, OK? Some of you may know that. But you know that some of the architecture, some of these buildings, just, what was it, just a couple of years ago, one of the great Roman Catholic churches in France was burning. Notre Dame, and so everybody was really concerned about that. That's hearkening back to a day where all of that architecture was so very consistent. Not only was the architecture very consistent in their buildings, church buildings and governmental buildings and so forth, but the church mass, the way they worshipped, was constructed to be identical in their services. Now, that's interesting in the Middle Ages that they pushed for an identical view of worship in every one of these great edifices, these great structures. Think about, you've got all these stained glass windows, you've got all these icons and relics and all of these things put up in these big, beautiful stone buildings, and then they formulate this one way of worship called the Mass. So you can see they're trying to get this consistency to say here's the one church. This is it. It has to be done this way. Buildings, worship, even church liturgical language was consistent with medieval Latin. It wasn't just the idea of the historic Latin, but Latin over time had kind of changed and it had become this medieval version of Latin which the church used. And the church used it in every one of their worship services. Church officers and their attire were unified and recognizable. Anybody in any one of these cities could recognize one of these church officers, whether it be a bishop or a cardinal, uh, you know, or a priest, whoever it was, they could recognize them and they could see them and, and, and know who they were. Church icons and pilgrimage, uh, pilgrimages were consistent throughout the communities. When you went into one of the churches, you could see the icons. Mary was there. Certain saints were gonna be represented. They were gonna see them right before them all the time, even in the cities themselves. The churches often told them over different portions of the Middle Ages, these are the pilgrimages you have to take. All believers in the Roman church need to take these particular journeys and these will draw you closer to God. All right, so you can see what they were getting at. They really wanted to have this one banner, this one schema. Now, not only did they want that in the church, but this also included government and economic connections. Most Western European nations during the Middle Ages were sovereignly connected to the church in Rome. Most Western European nations during the Middle Ages were sovereignly connected to the church in Rome. One writer says, only slightly inferior to the Pope was the Holy Roman Emperor, who was the embodiment of the secular unity of the Christian world. Only slightly inferior to the Pope was the Holy Roman Emperor, who was the embodiment of the secular unity of the Christian world. So you have this pope who's over the church, and because he's the vicar of Christ, he's supposed to be the head of everything, because Christ is the head of everything. And so now your emperor falls just slightly, 1A, just slightly under the pope. And they become so tied and closely connected that the pope At times we'll give edicts to the Holy Roman Emperor. Sometimes the Holy Roman Emperor will give it back to the Pope. That relationship gets quite contentious in the medieval period. But you have this connectivity. So you can kind of see, this is not just about one large banner of Christianity trying to function as Christians in the world and trying to reach the world with the gospel. This is actually one large church trying to function in a way that it not only has its authority in religious matters, but it takes over the whole of the world, essentially. The Crusades show us that they want to go back and take over the world. All right. Now, Secondly in this is that most Western European nations during the Middle Ages were economically connected to the church in Rome. So we'll talk about this government connection, but we'll also talk about economic connection. Now this slide just kind of helps you see how this worked out in, this is not just a governmental slide right here, this is also an economic slide. When you see Pope, Church, and God up there, popes over everything, the king of the land is just underneath him. And underneath the king is the nobles and the lords. All right, now the nobles and the lords, these are predominantly the landowners. And the king wanted to keep the landowners underneath him and in his stead. so that the king could gain produce from the land of the landowners. All right now we'll talk about this in its economic setting but really this was a an agrarian based society in the early portion of the middle ages all the way in the middle portion and that becomes one of the points of contention that even ushers in part of the Reformation is there's a major change in the economics of the world itself. And you'll hopefully find that a little bit interesting. But these nobles and lords are very important, not only to the king, but to the Pope. That's why the idea of the indulgences, when you hear about Reformation study and the indulgences, that's why the indulgences become so important, because a lot of times the nobles and the lords, they want these spiritual kickbacks given to them. And so what the Pope does is he says, well, if you'll give lands to the church, or if you'll give produce to the church, then we'll give you blessings and titles. And a lot of times what ends up happening is these nobles and lords and even some of the vassals and the merchants, they begin to get religious titles in the church because they're giving produce and lands to the church. Now, eventually what happens is that makes Roman Catholic Church, one of the largest landowners in the whole of Europe and even really the world. So you can see how this economic situation Now, the peasants and the serfs, how many of you remember reading in History and Geography as a kid about the peasants and the serfs? Anybody remember reading that? Yeah. That was one of the big things that I remember as a kid. They spent a lot of time on the peasants and the serfs. And you're kind of like, what? Are you calling me a peasant? I mean, we spend so much time here. But you kind of realize that that's In a sense, in our own economic system, you have people on the lower side of the economic system who just kind of have to deal with whatever comes their way. And that's essentially what the peasants were. Your merchants, farmers, and tradesmen, that's kind of your middle class worker, what we would consider to be your middle class worker today, or at least we have considered that. But this functioning in this pyramid, knights are your warriors, All right, that's your soldier class. All of those things though, you see how they're underneath the church. Now that's very different from our American system, isn't it? So it's a different world, the Middle Ages. It's not something we're used to. So you have to recognize when we see the Reformation, it's not like the only thing that happened is Martin Luther just wrote some things in German, or excuse me, wrote some things in Latin on some pieces of paper and nailed it to a wall, and then the whole world just went. That's way too simplistic. You need to see the working of God in a providential manner far beyond that. Could God have used Martin Luther in that one instance to completely explode the world, and that's the only thing that did it? Yes, he could have. But providentially, that's not what he did. That's a piece of the puzzle that came out of the medieval period and the Middle Ages. Now, governmentally, that king right there, over a period of about 800 to 1,000 years, The Pope and the King, they have a rocky relationship. Sometimes it's the Holy Roman Emperor, depending on whether it's France or whether it's Italy, wherever that Holy Roman Emperor is, they go back and forth with each other and it continues to affect the whole of Europe. When we think about the Holy Roman Empire, we're talking probably just a few hundred years. And then you get into empires like the Carolingian dynasty. Some of you may have heard of that dynasty. Well, these dynasties, these different emperors, they rise and they fall, they rise and they fall. And they're always trying to figure out this relationship with the Pope. because the Roman Catholic Church, through all of this economic system, has become such a large landowner. When we think about the rise and fall of these different kings or emperors, the different places and the countries that it takes place in, and this economic connection, you have something called the feudal system of the Middle Ages, and it was highly connected to the Roman church. Now, you can read a lot on the feudal system, and a lot of people put it just in a political realm, but to give you an idea of what is feudalism, the word feudalism, according to one writer, arises from the idea of a fief or fife, the name given to the basic self-sufficient unit of land during the Middle Ages. So you would have this feudal land or this fiefdom that was a self-sufficient piece of land and you had a noble over that land. And what would take place is that noble would want to get in good with the Pope for spiritual reasons and over time no matter what happened, it would either cost that noble produce or some of the lands to get in good with the Pope. And the church, its role in the feudal system was very central to the development of medieval feudalism and manorialism. One writer says, under the feudal system, the church granted land to nobles in exchange for military service and loyalty. Now, I want you to see what's happening here. A lot of times they'll get the land because they're coming through the kingship to have some ownership of the land. Nobles then want protection They'll get land from the church, and the church will say, okay, nobles, you need to give us produce for that land, and you also need to provide us military protection. This is a system in its complicated nature that ultimately makes the pope in and of himself the virtual king of all of Western Europe. One writer says, this allowed the church to build a network of political alliances and exert influence over secular rulers. On the manors, the church was the largest landlord, renting land to peasant farmers in exchange for labor and a share of the harvest. This writer goes on and says monasteries were particularly important in the feudal economy as they were centers of agriculture, craftsmanship, and trade. Now, if you're a center of agriculture, craftsmanship, and trade in the medieval period, you're the center of what? Everything. You're the center of everything economically. It has to come in some way through the church. The church had gained so much land even by the 11th century, one writer notes, the church owned an estimated one quarter of all the cultivated land in Western Europe. 25%. Now you think about owning 25% of the cultivated land in the United States of America. That's a lot of land. You can see the power that was wielded by the church. Well, ultimately, this gave the Holy Roman Empire and the church a great advantage. Feudalism as a system gave them a great advantage in ruling the whole of the Western world. One writer says the medieval church was incredibly wealthy. The church also received donations from wealthy patrons, such as kings, nobles, and merchants. These donations could include land, money, and precious objects, such as gold chalices and jeweled reliquaries. Many people donated to the church to gain spiritual benefits, such as indulgences or prayers for their souls after death. Now, the problem is is what they're saying is with this economic system, what you have at the end of the day is people are so tied to the church that if they will not give to the church what the church wants financially, then they cannot get care for their souls. It's a little bit backwards, isn't it? Well, as this system carried on in the Middle Ages, this feudal system, this economic system, this became one of the main issues of change leading to the Reformation itself. Let's see if I've got this right. Nope. I don't have that right. I'm getting there. The Roman Catholic Church was affected so much by a transition in economic foundations during the Middle Ages. One writer says the most general economic force was the change from a natural economy, this agrarian economy that we talked about, to a money economy. That is, from a society in which payments were chiefly by an exchange of goods and services to one in which money was both the agent of exchange and a standard of value. You've gone from a barter system in the exchange of goods to now there's actual money and money is a standard of value. coin, gold, silver, that becomes a standard of value and it becomes the way in which money is exchanged. No longer does someone come and say, I'll give you five goats for two horses or whatever. No longer is somebody bringing produce to a market and they're bartering back and forth. No longer is this agrarian form of payment useful because the landowners are starting to see that they can become independently wealthy from the church. And when the landowners and some of the nobles and vassals, when they start to see they can become independently wealthy and Shipping merchants see that they can become independently wealthy. How are shipping merchants going to become independently wealthy? Does shipping change in the later Middle Ages? Exploration. As exploration unfolds, shipbuilding gets better. There's even an invention, which I'll mention a little bit later, but it's called the compass. And that's making shipping easier to where shipping merchants are saying, we can take these things all over different parts of the world now. We can now get monies in exchange from these different parts of the world. It's almost like a different perspective on what was called the Roman road that went into the Far East as a portion of trade during the Roman Empire. Now you've got these shipping merchants who can take things around. So once they're starting to see, well, you know what, I can be independently wealthy and I'm not completely tied to the church. Well, you think the church liked that? Not having that control? No. But they had a problem on their hands. The church then starts to move in a direction they can get into this money standard. As they get into the money standard, what begins to happen? The money standard in the church grows so much that now there are people who want to be tied even more to the church because they can become rich if they will have certain titles in the church. Now you've got people wanting a title from the church to gain money and power off of that, not because they actually want to serve the people of God, but because they want the money and the power. So you have people being ordained into clergy titles that really shouldn't even be ordained in anything. Now that's going to lead to one of the problems we'll talk about next week is some of the moral failure. So this money standard, as the church tries to get into that, it leads to more moral failure in the church. It's not that that issue started the moral failure, but it led to more of the moral failure because now these people are saying, you know what, I can get independently wealthy apart from the church or even inside the church. Many historians note that this economic transition connected to a broadening individualism from the changing money economy in broader society, and it began to enter the church realm. Everybody wanted a piece of the financial pie in the windfall. When you have lots of money coming in, what do people want? They want power to get to that money. They want the ability to get to that money. How can I get some of that? We see that in all different contexts today. Well, this is kind of an interesting situation because while the church in the later Middle Ages, and I'm speaking of 12 to 1300 onward, 12, 1300, 1400, While the church was losing its ecclesiastical grip, and we'll deal with some of that as we move along, it was seeking to retain its money and power hold on society. Now what begins to happen with this individualism in the culture is some of the individualism is religious-based because there are small groups that start popping up, even in the 1100s and so forth, that start going, wait a second, the pope is not over us, that's not what the scripture says. And there's numerous groups in little small factions. Doesn't mean they were all doctrinally correct in everything, but they were recognizing this is not what the scripture says. And every time one of those groups would pop up, guess what would happen? Somebody's doing this, yeah. The nobles and the lords, they would be sent out to gather the knights and say, go take care of this. We don't want these little groups around. Many of these groups honestly were snuffed out before even the early 1400s. They're not really directly related to the Reformation, but they're kind of like this bubbling undercurrent but many of those groups are completely wiped out. Well, I'll end there. Next week, we'll look at cultural development just briefly, and then I'll say some things about medieval inventions, and then we'll get on to moral failures and doctrinal failures leading to the Reformation. Okay, well, that's close. Heavenly Father, it's absolutely amazing that through all of the ways of the world, all of the technicalities and difficulties, the individuals, all the people that thought they were in power, all of the movements of societies and money, you are sovereign over all of it. There's not one thing that happened during the medieval period that you were not sovereign over. If those in the dark ages were leaving your truth behind, you never left, for you are everywhere at once. You're a God of all the ages. Help us, Lord, to remember that even with all the difficulties of our days and our times, all the moving pieces all of the parts that don't seem to match, all of the great struggles and trials, the anger, the frustration. Everything that's rising up in our day is under your complete control. You are not flummoxed for one moment. So Lord, we bow before you and praise you for your son, the Lord Jesus Christ, King of all kings. We praise you that you alone continue to gather your people, even when there's great difficulty and strife. We give you thanks in Christ's name. Amen.