Let's begin by going back to ancient church history. I have two handouts. If you didn't get one, they're on the back table. There's one that has the schedule that's been updated for the rest of the quarter, and I also have a handout that follows this particular lesson, Lesson 4 on early church fathers. I promised that I would give an updated schedule and I finally have done it after we lost roughly a month worth of classes. So I've collapsed things, I've tweaked them, I've reworked them. This is the best that I could come up with as far as the topics and the dates. I did receive permission to run through February, that gives us a little bit more margin for The only other notes on the classes that remain, I'll be teaching all of the lessons except for one. On February 3rd, I'll be doing Pulpit Supply in Lynchburg, Virginia, and on that date, our very own Joseph Balding, who has a lot of teaching experience, will be teaching. lecturing on Constantine and beyond giving him some resources, my only real bit of advice was as long as you talk about Constantine and why he's important, you can do whatever you want. So I'm sure you'll be in good hands and enjoy his lecture quite a bit. Beyond that, I've added some resources. These are not exhaustive, just indicative of some places you can go as we continue on this course. Gonzales' Narrative History of Christianity. We disagree with some of his presuppositions, but it's a helpful overview of the whole period. Harry Bohr's book on ancient church. David Calhoun's free lectures from Covenant Seminary. And then I've added two more, the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, which is a massive, work, but it will allow you to look at a particular book like Joshua, Deuteronomy, Epistles of Paul, and see what did Augustine think about that verse, or Jerome, or Origen. It gives you an inside look at how church fathers interpreted the Bible. And then the last resource that I've added is Shawff's Antonicene, Nicene, and Post-Nicene Fathers. If this class has whet your appetite and your interest for these kinds of men, there's a very helpful annotated, collected, curated list and set of original sources that you can dip into and get firsthand acquaintance with the fathers. That's enough for the schedule. Let's now begin with today's lecture on early church fathers. You were here last week. We talked about heresy and orthodoxy. I thought it might be helpful to get beyond the abstracts of canon and creed and church government, Montanism, Marcionism, Gnosticism, and look at the flesh and blood people, the real men, the real women, The real human beings who fought these fights, who refuted these heresies. And so we're going to turn to the early church fathers. And I'll make one more announcement. If anyone did not get the two handouts who just trickled in, they're on the back table if you'd like one. One's the schedule, the other is the handout for today's lesson. I want to begin by making you all work. Because it's early in the morning, and you possibly had coffee. some sort of injection of caffeine. So I'm going to assume you're ready to go. Just to get you rolling, a few questions. Why do we call them early church fathers? Why do we call them the fathers? Any ideas? Don't all jump up at once. Why do we call them the fathers? The beginning, they come before us. You can think of it this way, there are spiritual fathers in the faith. We're their spiritual ancestors. We learn from them. We respect them. We study their writings and we, in some way, stand upon their shoulders. They're the pioneers and we benefit from what they've done. I think Ann's right. Another question. We're not done yet. Who was the first church father? Without cheating and looking at your handout, who was the first church father? And you might be tempted to say Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob, and that would basically be right. But the first father after the Apostles, roughly speaking, is Clement of Rome. If you look at his dates on your handout, he's born in the year 90, which is right around the time when John the Apostle writes the Revelation and soon thereafter dies, probably in exile in Patmos. With Clement, we have someone who dovetails with the last apostle and is continuing his legacy. One final question. This is actually more controversial. Who is the last church father? When does this end? We have Clement right after the apostles. We're going to look at a number of them today, but when does it end? Any ideas? Machen. The OPC. We finally made it. The full realization of all truth. The only perfect church. No. That's good. That's a good political answer. But I'm going to say no, that's wrong. That's probably too much into the recent days. A popular choice is Augustine. And that's the one I'm going to functionally use as a transition between ancient church and medieval church. He lives right up to the fall of the Roman Empire, and he's a helpful watershed. There's been other names suggested. In the Eastern Church, John of Damascus in the 8th century. If you skip ahead a little bit more, Isidore of Seville in Spain, the Venerable Bede in Britain, and there are even some people who say that Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century could be called a father. But for our purposes, we're going to end with Augustine, and that will actually be the final lecture of this quarter. We'll look at that great church father from Hippo. With that in mind, before we read our scripture reading, you might think these are dusty, musty, dead, white males, and there's no reason to read them at all. But if you think that there is no value, I want to encourage you that these men are very important and actually quite relevant. Let me tell you a little story. Anyone ever heard of Thomas Oden? Thomas Oden is actually listed on the other handout for the schedule. He is the editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary Series on the Bible. And Oden is fascinating. He studied as a scholar in a secular university, and he was a liberal, Marxist, relativist, doing theology, but doing so through the lens of unbelief, cut-dried liberal. Then in God's providence, something remarkable happened with Thomas Odom. He started to read the early church fathers. He started to read scripture with some new insights and a new perspective. And through this process, somewhere along the line, from what I can tell, the Lord converts him, and he moves from being a liberal theologian to an evangelical scholar. He embraces Jesus Christ, and he says, I became a theologian for the first time. And in God's providence, he used Odin's study of these men that we're going to look at today. So, they are important, and they are relevant, and their voices reverberate up into the present. With that in mind, let's read a passage of scripture that hits home this idea of spiritual fatherhood. Chapter 4 and verse 14. This is the Word of God. I do not write these things to shame you, but as My beloved children, I warn you. For though you might have 10,000 instructors in Christ, yet you do not have many fathers. For in Christ Jesus, I have begotten you through the Gospel. Therefore, I urge you, imitate Me. For this reason, I have sent Timothy to you, who is my beloved and faithful son in the Lord, who will remind you of my ways in Christ as I teach everywhere in every church. Let us pray. Father, we come to you through your Son, and we thank you that we are sons in the Son, that we call you Father, And that in Your grace and in Your mercy, You have given us earthly fathers, spiritual fathers, to reflect Your ways. O God, as we study them even this morning, we pray that we would have grace and discernment to imitate them as they imitated Christ. To honor them in the Lord and to learn from them. Praying this in Christ's name, Amen. Well, my thesis for this morning is that God raised up fallible but faithful men to pastor the church and defend the faith. God raised up fallible and faithful men. They weren't perfect, but by and large, they were faithful to the scriptures. And he did so for a twofold purpose, that they might pastor, shepherd the flock of God, defend the faith against heretics. There's a couple of categories we can explore when we look at the church fathers. There's a lot of them. So how do we classify them? Well, one way we can categorize them is by time. You have the anti-Nicene fathers, Nicene, and post-Nicene. Really, we're using 325, using the Council of Nicaea as a watershed, and there are some people who minister before that council, some during, and some after. In today's lecture, we'll look at the Antonicene fathers, those who ministered prior to Nicaea, basically the second and third centuries. Another way you can classify them is by tongue. A lot of the earliest ones write in Greek, which as you know is the language the New Testament was written, the Hellenized Mediterranean. Beyond that, we have an increasing number who write in Latin, and eventually, up into the Middle Ages, Latin will be the language of choice for the scholars and for the churchmen. These men are very prodigious. If you took these early fathers and lined up all their works line by line, they'd probably fill around 400 volumes. That's more than your Encyclopedia Britannica. 400 volumes over 100,000 pages. Prodigious output. Massive body of work. These are men who are ministering all over the known world. I mentioned that they're in the Hellenized Mediterranean. They're in Rome, center and capital of the empire. They're in North Africa. They're in Asia Minor, which is modern day Turkey. They're in the Far East. all over the place, writing all sorts of works. How in the world do we wrap our minds around these men? I want to mention a few key issues that come up with the early church fathers. First is apologetics. I mentioned a few weeks ago with the rise of heresy that the church has to defend the faith. With apologetics, there's a couple opponents. On the one hand, they are doing battle against Jews. who call Christianity an unbelieving splinter sect. On the other hand, they're also doing battle against pagans and against heretics, people like Marcion and Gnostic philosophers and other heretics with their false teachings. That's one key area of energy for the church fathers. Second is Christ and culture. How does the church relate to the world? The Apostle John relates to Plato. We're going to see that there are two poles that develop. On the one hand, you have Clement of Alexandria, who's very warm to secular philosophy. And you have Tertullian of North Africa, who's very cold and harsh in his condemnation of secular philosophy, Christ and culture. The third issue that comes up is the view of history, the view of covenant history. Where is the world going in time and space? And here we'll see that Irenaeus of Lyons presents one view, which is a more linear view of history. And then you have Origen of Alexandria, who presents an almost cyclical eastern view of time. Fourth issue is the church, ecclesiology. With the persecution of the church, a number of people lapsed from the faith. What do we do with those people? Novation gives one answer. Cyprian of North Africa gives another. Two more issues, trinity. With the church fathers, we see an amazing development in trinitarian terminology. They're coming to terms with how do we speak about the triune God. At the same time, as we'll see, it's still incipient. This is prior to Nicaea. And so often they fall prey to what we could call subordinationism, where they want to affirm the Trinity, but they speak of the Godhead in such a way that the Son almost seems subordinate to the Father. And He's not equal in power and glory. That's a problem. The final issue is salvation. If you read these guys, don't think that it's going to be like reading John Calvin or Martin Luther. They have a doctrine of grace. They believe in the gospel. There is times where it seems like the emphasis is a legal tone that can become moralistic. A lot of emphasis on good works, baptismal regeneration, and that becomes a problem later on in the medieval church. With those issues in mind, with those categories in mind, Who are these men? I'm going to split it up into two categories here. We have the 2nd century church fathers. I'll give you four of them. Then we'll have 3rd century church fathers. And I'll give you four of them as well. Again, this is just a selection out of a vast multitude of people we could talk about. But four for each century should do it. For the 2nd century, the first person I want you to look at on your handout is Clement of Rome. Clement of Rome. I already mentioned that he is the first official church father after the Apostles that we know of. He dovetails with John the Apostle. And what we really have from him is a letter. First Clement, written to the church in Corinth, the same church that the Apostle Paul wrote epistles to. Clement had a pastor's heart. He was a shepherd of the church. And one helpful thing to know about Clement He's a pastor in Rome, but if you read his letters and you read about his life, he's clearly not a pope. He's not the bishop of Rome or the pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church as Roman Catholics would like to make you believe. Just realize that early on, this is just a faithful shepherd, local pastor in Rome, not a pope. That's a much later development. Second church father, we've already mentioned him in the lecture on persecution, is Justin Martyr. Justin Martyr was a searcher. He was looking for answers in every philosophical system imaginable. And finally, He discovered Christianity, or rather, God, through his son, by his spirit, laid hold of him and he was saved. And in Christianity, he found what he called the true philosophy, the Christian philosophy. This is what he'd been looking for. He sets up shop in Rome and begins teaching. And Justin Martyr is helpful because he, as an apologist, answers, on the one hand, the objections of the Jews, in a work called Answer to Trifo, He also answers the objections of pagans in two works, his first and his second, Apology. He's a good example of an early apologist, a defender of the faith. And his basic contribution is an emphasis on the Logos, that when we see truth, relatively speaking, in unbelievers, that's because Jesus is the Logos who lightens every man who comes into the world. He defends the faith, and eventually we know that one of his rivals accuses him of being a Christian, he's brought before the authorities, he refuses to recant, and he is executed. Third church father from this time period, this second century, is Tatian. Cetacean is interesting because we often have a very Eurocentric view of church history. Cetacean is from Assyria, and he writes and he speaks in Syriac. He's really the first Asian church father. And more than that, he writes the very first harmony of the Gospels, the Diatessaron. I just realized that early on, we're not just dealing with Eurocentric people. This is Asia Minor. This is Syria. And you think about what's going on there today, that here we have a man in that part of the world proclaiming the gospel. A fourth church father, and really my favorite from this second century, is Irenaeus of Lyon. Irenaeus of Lyon lives all the way up till 200. So he's right on the cusp of the third century. And this man is particularly interesting. We mentioned in an earlier lecture that Polycarp was a disciple of the Apostle John. Irenaeus is a disciple of Polycarp. We have this link. John, Polycarp, Irenaeus. He grows up in Smyrna. Polycarp is his pastor there. And then Irenaeus does something remarkable. He goes on a missionary journey to Gaul. Which, what is modern day Gaul? France. He goes to modern day France and he has to learn a new language. He learns Gaelic. So he can speak to the Gaelic tribes in their own tongue and he becomes a missionary, church planter, evangelist. And similar to Jonathan Edwards, who was a missionary to the Indians, he also begins writing theological works, even as he does missions. Irenaeus has two major works that we have today, and they reflect the twofold function of the fathers. On the one hand, he has a polemical work called Against Heresies, which attacks the Gnostic philosophy head on. That's that apologetic impulse. On the other hand, Irenaeus wrote a work called The Demonstration of Apostolic Fathers. And in that, he tries to recount and articulate and declare the Orthodox faith. And just to give you a little bit of an idea of what that work is like and some of its importance later on in church history, we could almost think of this work as the first book of covenant theology. Obviously, covenant theology is in the Bible, and it doesn't really become codified the way we understand it until the 17th century, but even here, in the 2nd century, Irenaeus moves in this work from Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus. He sees God as a shepherd, shepherding his creation for an eschatological goal, from immaturity to maturity, from glory to transfigured glory. And in this work, he really sets forth a vision for redemptive history in Christ Jesus. Well, that's the second century. Now let's look at the third century, and hopefully in this time period I'll have more questions. Just be aware that I'm going to ask you some questions and put you on the spot, so be ready for that. The third century, the first figure I want us to look at is Clement of Alexandria. Clement of Alexandria, David Calhoun says, is the gentlest of the church fathers. Some of them are quite rough. quite harsh even in their condemnation of their critics. But with Clement, we have a very gentle, sophisticated man who probably would have been enjoyable to talk to and to sit down at tea with. He wrote a hymn, which does anyone know where that hymn is in the Trinity Hymnal and what it's called? We have one of his hymns. It's from the year 200. In fact, it's probably the earliest known Christian hymn that we have. It's on page 160. the shepherd of tender youth. A beautiful hymn speaks not only of God's covenant mercy toward us, but also toward our children. Well, Clement, however kind, gentle, and a good hymn writer he was, had some problems. And part of that, you have to understand, is context. Clement's born in Athens. And Athens, as you know, is the academy. It's Plato. It's Aristotle. It's philosophy. He moves from Athens to Alexandria in Egypt. And much like Athens, Alexandria is an intellectual center. You have the museum with the adjacent library of Alexandria. And in his time, that library was still standing in volumes and volumes of books in the ancient world. This is the place where the Septuagint was translated by Jewish scholars from Hebrew into Greek. This was the place where Platonism the predominant philosophical influence that was just in the air. Here is where Clement sets up shop and begins to teach. This is where the Christ culture thing comes into clear, stark focus. With Clement, we have one pole. of polarization on this issue. And he sets forth what we could call a Christ above culture paradigm, where Christ is above culture, but we have full freedom to engage with culture, to appropriate it, to use it, to have philosophy as a very active, energetic handmaiden to theology. You can think of things like this, this kind of bumper sticker theology. All truth is God's truth. common grace, natural revelation. Let's plunder the Egyptians. If Plato has a good idea, let's use it. If Aristotle has a good idea, let's appropriate it. Faith is predominant, but faith is also the ground for reason. And we should use our reason to engage creatively and constructively with the world around us. Clement goes so far to say this. what the law was for the Jews, and leading them to the truth. Philosophy is to the Greeks, and leading them to the same truth. He loves Plato. He loves philosophy. With this, he develops a really wild, fantastical allegorical method where he uses his doctrine of the Logos to say, OK, that's what it says literally in the Old Testament. What does it really mean? But here we have that allegorical method that becomes codified in the Quadriga later on and really expands in the Middle Ages. So Clement's big figure, really important later on in the church, influences Origen, Eusebius, and a whole host of others. Now we come to someone very important. Tertullian. They're both ministering roughly around the same time and in roughly the same place, North Africa. But whereas Clement is in Alexandria, Tertullian is in Carthage. Tertullian was trained as an attorney. And my father's an attorney. And I won't say anything about him, but attorneys in general tend to be very argumentatively driven. They have arguments. They make cases. They win battles. They're logically tight, analytical minds. And Tertullian is exactly like that. learning from the Roman legal system and applying that to theology. He's converted around the age of 40 in Rome, so it's later in life, and what he learned in law school now applies to theology and the school of Christ. Tertullian's important because he's the very first Latin church father. Up until this point, most of these men are writing in Greek. Tertullian writes in Latin, and with that, He coins an unbelievable number of terms. Similar to Shakespeare in English, Tertullian, it's hard to imagine what theology and discourse would be like without him. According to Alistair McGrath, he coined 509 new nouns that didn't exist before. One of them you might recognize, trinitas. He's the first person to use the word, though not the concept, of trinity. He also coins 284 new adjectives and 161 new verbs. He's a wordsmith. If he needs to have a word to describe something that he's seen in the Bible, he creates one. It's very convenient. So with Tertullian, beyond just language, he has a number of very important contributions. And as I've mentioned, Trinitas, the first is to Trinitarian and Christology. Trinitarian theology and Christology. In his work against Praxeas, he sets forth the doctrine of the Trinity, and he uses words that we take for granted. At the time, these were revolutionary developments in terminology and in language, and emphasized that the concept of the Trinity is in the Bible. All the early church fathers believed it, but Tertullian gives us a language to describe it. He uses words like this, God is one in substance, three in person. that Christ has one person, but that one person is in two, he would say substances, we would say two natures. So this idea of substance and person, person and nature, Trinity itself, these are terms that we derive from Tertullian. The other area of contribution is one where he is in stark conflict with Clement of Alexandria, and that is Christ and culture. said Clement could ably be described as Christ above culture. Well, Tertullian is Christ against culture. Radical antithesis. So much so that he's very famously quoted as saying this, what hath Athens to do with Jerusalem? What hath the academy to do with church? What do heretics have to do with Christians? We receive this from the porch of Solomon, not what he calls miserable Aristotle. So Clement loves philosophy. Tertullian hates philosophy. Clement loves Plato. Tertullian hates Plato. There's no need for this. I've got the Bible. He says things like this. It's not faith leading to reason. It's faith against reason. He even says this. I believe because it is absurd. Christianity is absurd. That's why I believe it. I don't need to have a reason. Very different than Clement. Now my question comes. Clement, Napoleon. You love Athens. What does Athens have to do with you? Who's right? You're the jury. You got Clement on one stand. You got Tertullian on the other. Who's right? We're the church. We live in the midst of a culture. Some of you go to Clemson. Some of you go to Bob Jones. Some of you go to high school somewhere. You live in a world with movies and fashion and photography. You've got to deal with this. So who's right? Any ideas? Where's Brian Bassett? He would have an argument. Yeah. I think Clement would say that ultimately faith still has the ground for you. But he wouldn't say that. He pushes it. He definitely leans in that direction. Dr. McGraw? Very judicious answer. Before I comment on that, Brian Bassett just called me. I think he's listening to the webcast. Brian, do you have any words of wisdom to tell everybody? Brian? You were shouting at your screen? What did you say? That's good. Okay, well I will, thank you, I will pass that on. Thank you, Brian. I gotta have to go. I have to teach a class. So, I think what Brian was saying is that God created Athens, God created the world, we can't ignore it. I think he's probably trying to say in some way what Dr. McGraw has already said. We're in the world, we're not of the world. Principally, In principle, we're against unbelieving philosophers. But at the same time, though they're in some ways absolutely wrong, they could be relatively, more or less, right. And so I think the answer, at the end of the day, is this is a cop-out. Balance. There's balance. In the world, we're not of the world. We believe in the antithesis between the seed of the woman and the seed of the devil, and that cuts through all of life, all of culture, everywhere. There is no neutral ground. On the other hand, there's common grace. Our confession uses language like this, the light of nature. Christian prudence that are governed by general rules of the Bible. Or as Calvin puts it, we can look at natural revelation, but we do so through the lens, through the spectacles of Holy Scripture. We have special revelation. We also have natural revelation. And if you really want to have, I think, the best perspective in the early church, Augustine has a wonderful way of expressing the intention of believers living in the world but not of it. He says, by grace, citizen above, by grace, a pilgrim below. So we engage without compromise, and we strike the antithesis without retreating into a Christian ghetto. Answer is balance, in which we take what's best from Tertullian, antithesis, but also what's best from Clement, the commonality, the common grace of living in God's world with his antipharism. But I won't answer the question. I'll just say you have to wrestle through this issue and then come to some way of applying it. Yes. Consider the first Latin scholar. My understanding is he's creating new Latin words that did not previously exist in the language. Often, for instance, when Christianity comes into a culture, they will use words that already exist to describe Christian concepts. Tertullian, from my understanding, is crafting and creating new words in his native tongue that were not previously used before. Trinitas, he invents that. He coins that fresh. I hope that's helpful. Maybe. Anyway, at the end of the day, Bison culture is a big issue. We can't solve all the problems right here. Somehow we have to strike a biblical balance. But I think looking at the polar extremes of Clement and Tertullian gets our mind working, and it provokes us to think through these issues. All right. Let's continue. Clement, Tertullian. Third, let's look at origin. One interesting thing about both Tertullian and Origen, neither of them are called saints in at least the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. Any ideas why that might be the case? Why is Origen and Tertullian, why are neither of them called saints? You never see Saint Tertullian, Saint Origen. Any ideas? Yes, Nolan. Did you call it a Christian Catholic church? Right. Right, often they go looking for ways to help people meet qualifications. Melvin, what was? I think the reason why the Roman Catholic Church doesn't try to make them into saints is, on the one hand, Tertullian was honestly kind of irascible at times. He was difficult to work with. And eventually, he became a Montanist later in his life. So he has some real issues. Interestingly, he wrote a book on patience. And he said he wrote a book on patience because he was not very patient and didn't understand it. And so in humility, he wrote a book on the subject he wasn't very good at. With Origen, Melvin's already said this, there aren't real problems. Origen goes in some rather, we would call heretical directions at times. And he's actually declared a heretic at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. You don't make saints out of heretics. That's a strike against him, and it was just too much to overcome. All right, with origin, he's a fascinating and very engaging. Origen, he's born to Christian parents. He's living in North Africa. And when he's a young boy, there is persecution that breaks out. Septimus Severus starts to put the heel of the Roman Empire on the throat of the church. And during this time, Origen's father is imprisoned and is persecuted. And Origen as a young boy says, I want to be martyred. I want to be imprisoned. I'm going to go out and tell them I'm a Christian. And his mother says, Origen, that's stupid. It's one thing to be faithful to Christ, but you don't have to go get your head cut off. He says, no, I'm going to do it. So she does something what I think most mothers would do in this circumstance. She hides all of his clothes. So he can't find them. He's looking around, he's like, where are my clothes? And he's like, well, I can't go out. That would be embarrassing. And so he stays home, and he's saved. His mother saved him by hiding his laundry. So that's what Origen, as a young boy, that's his spirit, his demeanor. He's very zealous. Later on, he becomes a catechetical instructor. He's instructing people who want to become Christians, want to convert to Christianity. Eventually, he sets up his own school and is teaching in Alexandria. And this school is very prominent, very influential. It's said that the mother of the emperor came and listened to Origen lecture. You have Queen of Sheba coming to Solomon. The mother of the emperor comes. The governor of Arabia travels to Alexandria to hear the lips of Origen speak on Christian philosophy. Well, after 70 years of service and writing some what we'll see rather fantastical things, Origen is imprisoned under the persecution of Decius, which is empire-wide. He's tortured severely. He's let go and entire after he's tortured as a 70-year-old man, he dies of that experience. With Origen, not only a colorful character, but a very original thinker. Origen is, if anything, he's the mastermind, the intellectual genius of the early church, which often gets him into trouble. He writes all sorts of works. It's said that he was so prodigious and so productive because he would dictate everything or most everything that he wrote, often to different scribes. So he would multitask. He'd have various people writing things down and he would simultaneously dictate for one book over here and another book over there. I think we have a hard time with texting and email, but he was able to simultaneously dictate different works to different scribes. He wrote Contra Kelsum, which is his apologetic work, attacking paganism. He wrote the Hexaplum, which is a six-volume textual criticism of the Old Testament, where he has Hebrew and then five other Greek translations, including a Greek transliteration. He writes tons of homilies and exegetical works on the Bible, full, as you might expect, with a lot of allegorical method. He also writes First Principles, which is the first real systematic theology the church has ever seen. And he writes, interestingly, a very profound devotional book on prayer. If you're looking for something that gives you something of his heart, His manual on prayer is actually quite useful and practically helpful. So he writes on everything under the sun. And as I mentioned, some of his views got him into hot water. Just to give you a little taste of his problems and his allegorical interpretation, when Origen looks at Genesis, in Genesis 1, he says, that is a spiritual creation. Genesis 2 is a material creation. They're different accounts of different things. Originally, God created all of our souls, the pre-existence of the souls in heaven. And they were created to contemplate the divine. But some of those souls had their gaze go awry. And they turned their gaze from God, and they fell. And God created a material creation and those souls were then trapped into bodies. And so physical creation is actually tied up with the fall. From there... Christ comes, but he comes to ransom us from the devil, because he has to pay a price to the devil to let us go. At the end of the day, Origen believes that everyone will be saved, that the love of God is too great, it will melt everyone's hearts, even post-mortem, even the devil. Origen believes that even Satan will be saved at the last day. So when you read things like Love Wins by Rob Bell and some of the more current emerging church books on universalism, realize this bad idea goes far back in the church, even to Origen, the church father. The really sad thing is, even at the end of the day, when the devil is saved and everybody is redeemed, he believes so strongly in free will. that the devil could fall again and start the whole process over. So for origin, we get to the end of history, the devil's saved, everything's redeemed, and then it starts all the way back up again because man falls and it could just go on like that, eternal recurrence. Hopefully you see that origin, however brilliant and helpful in some ways, is a very problematic thing. Yes. Oh, well, let me balance out what I said. OK, well, let me try to backpedal and try to undo what I've done. Origin, this might be helpful. To be charitable to origin. He made a distinction between orthodox settled doctrines that the church taught that were ecumenical and were a consensus. And he never touched those. Trinity, the incarnation of Jesus, those are orthodox, set in stone, I would never question them. He believed there were other areas like creation, and whether or not Satan could be redeemed, that he thought were up for speculation. So he views these as tentative, exploratory speculations that he doesn't think impinge upon that settled body of orthodoxy. I think he's wrong, but in his own mind, he thinks this is fair game. On the other hand, because he wrote so much, there are a number of areas where he did produce helpful material. For instance, his manual on prayer. And beyond that, remember that he was willing to be tortured for the name of Jesus Christ, and even be martyred if it came down to it. And so there does seem to be something genuine in his stance for Jesus. Dr. LeBron. Also, one thing that's really interesting That's very helpful. Thank you. I have seen some work done that shows that the Magisterial Reformers and their view of the Quadriga, for instance, would be much different than a lot of us standing on the other side of the Enlightenment and being affected by historical critical methodology. For instance, I know there's some work done on Jerusalem. Well, there's a literal city of Jerusalem, but it does remind us of Jerusalem above It reminds us of Jerusalem of the last day, descending. And it should remind us that we should live as kingdom citizens. And so even within the quadriga, there's an element of truth that we should connect. As you said, every text of Jesus, we should apply it in our lives. The quadriga. Well, I'm hoping to actually, I have a lecture. In Augustan, we're going to deal with that more extensively. And there we have a more developed version. I might hold off on that. OK. Yeah, the quadriga is a method of interpretation that develops. You have traces of it here. It develops more with Augustan into the Middle Ages, where there's four senses that they try to look for in every text. You have the literal sense, so Jerusalem is a city in Palestine. Eschatological sense, I think the tropological, where it's pointing toward the Jerusalem of the last day. You have the anagogical sense. I'm going to start. My mind's going to blank. You can help me out. I switched them. Right. There's one sense, but there's different applications or significances. But hopefully, that's not too confusing. It was a four-fold sense in their attempts to interpret Scripture. I think the helpful thing is here when you read fathers like Boris, that helps you get to some of the things. It makes them more intelligible. It's not right. I don't mean right. I'm just saying it helps us understand why they come up with Scripture. That's very helpful. And I think that's part of reading them charitably, too, to understand their context and their time. Well, thank you for filling in those details. We probably better keep going if we're going to finish on time. Very quickly, a fourth figure in the third century is Cyprian. Might spend a lot of time on him. Probably deal with some of the things he raises later in this course. But Cyprian, like Tertullian, is in North Africa. And his big contribution is on the doctrine of the church. There's a big debate that rages, what do we do with lapsed Christians who want to be readmitted to the church? During times of persecution, they denied Christ. They've lapsed. Now they're repentant in a time of peace, and they want to come back in. What do we do? We're not going to deal with this in detail because really this is taken up again with the Donatist controversy, which we'll hopefully look at later. But in general, Cyprian disagreed with Novation. Novation thought you couldn't readmit these people. And Cyprian says, no, we can't. From Cyprian, we have two big Expressions that we still hear today. We hear it, for instance, with John Calvin. If you call God father, then you should be willing to call the church mother. He also has the expression, the church outside of which there is no salvation. a very high view of Mother Kirk, Mother Church. If you want to know more about that and why the Westminster divines say essentially the same thing, but they say the visible church outside of which ordinarily there's no possibility of salvation, I would direct you to Dr. McGraw's book, The Arc of Safety, which deals with that exact question. What do the Westminster divines mean by that phrase, ordinarily no possibility of salvation? Later on, both Adonatus and Augustine will try to use Cyprian to defend their cause. Well, we're out of time, practically, but really fast. The legacy of the Church Fathers. The legacy. Two things happens to the Church Fathers. On one hand, they are overemphasized. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox theologians basically put them on par with scripture and see these men as inspired. This is the apostolic tradition ongoing. In fact, the Eastern Church basically says, the era of the Church Fathers has never ended because we are the Church Fathers. Patriarch of Constantinople. On the other hand, I think in our circles, they're usually under-emphasized. that we don't know these men very well, or we attack them, we attack people like Origen without maybe understanding all of what he's trying to do in context. I would recommend that we take a third way, and it's the way provided for us by our own fathers in the faith, the magisterial reformers, people like John Calvin and Martin Luther and Heinrich Bollinger. Just a few things that Calvin said. And in general, what these men are doing is they're saying we should respect these men, learn from them, but realize they were fallible. They could make mistakes. Here's what Calvin says. Calvin speaks of the consensus of the first five centuries, that God is doing a work in these first five centuries of church history and we would be foolish to ignore the importance in areas like Trinitarian theology and even our doctrine of the church. God is doing wonderful things. Calvin, in fact, titled his service book in Geneva, the form of church prayers and hymns with the manner of administering the sacraments and consecrating marriage according to the custom of the ancient church. He sees his worship and his liturgy in line with these earliest church fathers. Bootser has a book called Ground and Reason, where he roots his Reformation theology in many precursors of the early church. Heinrich Bollinger wrote a book called The Old Faith, where he says this, the Reformed faith is nothing other than the old Catholic faith of the scriptures and Christian tradition. The Reformed faith, which teaches that believers are saved by grace alone, through the work of Christ alone, is the ancient and Catholic faith of the Holy Christian Church. God raised up fallible but faithful men to pass through the Church and defend the faith. Let us learn from them, and as they follow Christ, let us imitate their example. I think our time is gone. So rather than having a time for questions, I apologize. We're going to have to close in prayer. Let us pray. Father, we confess that we stand on the shoulders of giants and that although it mixed with sin and error, your church has truly been the pillar and bulwark of the truth. that in every generation you raise up men to proclaim your truth. We pray, Lord, that we would be faithful to the Scriptures, that we would commit unto faithful men who will be able to teach others also. We pray this in the name of your Son, the Lord Jesus. Amen.