Well, good morning and welcome to Christian Life Academy. This morning is our third Sunday of the month, so we are in church history. And we're going to revisit the 8th century. We were in the 8th century once previously, two months ago, and then we took a break last month because of the weather, but we're going to be back in the 8th century again this month, and then again next month as well. The 8th century is a busy month, a busy century in the history of the church. Last time we looked at the 8th century, we talked about the iconoclast controversy in the Eastern Church. The controversy over images and icons of Christ, Mary, and the saints. But that was largely confined to the Eastern part of the empire around Constantinople. The Pope in Rome, the Bishop of Rome had some involvement in that, but it wasn't as much of a controversy in the West. In the West, however, during the 8th century, there was quite a lot going on, and so we're going to get into the religious developments in the western part of the empire this morning, and then next month we'll come back to the 8th century again and look at the political developments and the rise of what we now look back on and call Christendom, with the rise of Charlemagne, which occurred in the 8th century. This morning, though, we're just going to look at religious developments in the 8th century. And one of the things we're going to see is that these developments take place over the course of time. And so in the 8th century, we're going to see some things sort of reaching a final stage and being standardized throughout the empire, but it took centuries of development for these things to get to that point in the 8th century. So we're actually going to be diving back all the way into the 4th century to talk about some of these things. But I want to start with just discussing this. We think about our context today and what church life is like for us. And it might be a little bit different depending on whether you're in a rural setting like we are, whether you're in the city, or what size of church you're in, but we can think about what is church life like for the average churchgoer in America in 2025? Well, I want to ask the question, what was it like for the average churchgoer in the 8th century, particularly in the western part of the empire? The 8th century was an interesting time because it was in the 8th century, largely, that people began to inherit their parents' name. And that was because they began to inherit their parents' station in the community, their life in the community. Not only their home and possessions, but their job and their name as well. And so we think of names like Smith or Baker or Miller. You were inheriting the name of your parents that was derived from their occupation. And so that sort of began to be a standard thing in the eighth century. And you inherited not only your parents' name and their home and their job, but sort of their role in the community. And in the 8th century in the western part of the empire, people were really members of the community first and individuals second. They didn't have the same ideas and concepts of personal liberty, particularly religious freedom, that we have and understand as Americans today. Everyone played a part in the life of the community, and the community as a whole was very dependent upon everyone playing that part. And so the community was dependent upon the work of the farmer and plowing the fields and raising the crops, and it was dependent upon the courage of the soldier to defend them. and it was dependent upon the prayers of the monks and the priests and the life of the church and the community. And so deviation from the commonly held religious beliefs, something we might call heresy, was not just a theological error or religious error, but it was sort of viewed as treachery against the community. Because if you drifted into heresy, that didn't just affect you, it affected the whole community that you were a member of. And so they took it very seriously. And so it was in the eighth century that a lot of things began to be sort of standardized. Like we've seen throughout the development of church history, the creeds that were formulated by the councils in order to guard against heresy. But now we see a standardization not only of doctrine but of practice, particularly in the western part of the empire. At the heart of church life in the empire becomes the practice of what came to be known as the Mass. And we've talked about this before, but mass is derived from the Latin word that would be spoken at the end of the service when the congregation was dismissed. And so that began to be a sort of shorthand for the entire service. It was called the Mass. Church life revolved around the practice of the Mass, which began to be liturgically standardized in the 8th century so that everybody was doing it the same. The Latin formula was written and developed in Rome and disseminated throughout the empire. so that all of the priests were saying exactly the same words, so it didn't matter if you went to church in Rome or in some outlying region, the mass would be the same no matter where you went. You would recognize it. The formula was the same. And it involved a lot of things. When we come together as a church and we worship, We have the reading of the scripture, we have prayer, we sing together, and we take communion together. But the way that the worship service was formulated and standardized in the 8th century really appealed to all five of your senses when you came to worship. There was incense, There was the music and the chanting of the monks. There were fine robes that the priests wore and gold gilding on things in the church. And so when you came in, you could see the glory and the splendor of it. You could hear it in the songs. You could smell it in the incense. You could taste it in the communion bread. It was really sort of overwhelming to all of the senses. when you came in, and it was designed that way intentionally in order to bring the worshiper to this place of recognizing the transcendence of the God that they were worshiping. And at the center of this worship was the altar. The altar in the church was the centerpiece for their worship because that was where the Eucharist was performed as the heart of the Mass. And, you know, we back up into the scriptures. In 1 Kings chapter 8, we see the dedication of Solomon's temple, right, and this elaborate ceremony in which the temple is dedicated. And in Ezra 6, we see the dedication of the second temple under the priest Ezra. And so the church had begun to dedicate their church buildings. Fairly early in church history, Eusebius of Caesarea wrote about the dedication of church buildings. In 314, there was a dedication of a church in the city of Tyre that he wrote about. And in 335, there was the dedication of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. And he gives us an account of that dedication of the church. And over time, the process of dedicating a church building became more and more elaborate and more centered on the altar that was placed in the center of the church. In 506, the Council of Agde issued several canons and Canon 14 described the process of dedicating the church building. In 517, the Council of Epinone, in Canon 26, described how an altar was to be consecrated in the church building when it was dedicated. By the 8th century, this began to be very standardized, and so there was a book that was published in the 8th century, the Pontical, that was a liturgical book, but it recorded the exact process for the dedication of a church building, including the altar, and it specified, and this was the first time it had been specified from the hierarchy in Rome, that only a bishop could perform this rite. It couldn't be a parish priest, it couldn't be a deacon, it had to be a bishop that did this. And it was a very elaborate ceremony. And it's one that's still practiced today in Roman Catholic churches. So when they build a new church building and they put an altar in it, they go through this process of dedicating the building. The bishop blesses holy water. The archdeacon is inside the building, the bishop is outside. The bishop takes the water and he goes around the exterior of the building sprinkling the walls and blessing the building like he's circling Jericho multiple times, sprinkling the exterior of the walls. Then he comes to the front door of the church and he knocks three times. and knock and it shall be opened to you." And so the deacon opens the door and then the priest blesses the pavement from the threshold into the altar in the center of the church building. And then he sprinkles the altar, from the altar, out to the interior walls along the four compass points, north, south, east, and west. And then he sprinkles the interior walls of the church with the holy water. And then he comes back to the altar. Now the altar at this point does not have the top slab on it. It has the rest of the structure, but the slab has not been placed yet. And they would place a relic of some sort inside the altar. most of the time it was the body of a saint or a martyr. And this had been the practice since about the fourth century. And they derived this practice from the text of Revelation chapter six verse nine. When he opened the fifth seal I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And so from on the basis of that verse they decided we need the body of a martyr under the altar stone. And so they would put the body of somebody that had been martyred for their faith under the altar, and then they would place the altar stone in place. Now, they started doing this around the 3rd or 4th century. By the 8th century, the church has spread, and there's so many church buildings being dedicated throughout the Roman Empire that they're kind of running out of bodies. So they had to go back and look at some of the records they had and go back to some of those churches. And in the eighth century, the Pope in Rome issued a papal bull that instructed them on how to take the altar stone off, take the body of the martyr out, and parcel up bone fragments and send those bone fragments to new churches that were being dedicated. They still do this today, by the way. If you go in a Catholic church, the altar in a Catholic church has a bone fragment in there from a martyr or a saint under the slab on the top of the altar. And so relics sort of proliferated a great deal in the 8th century. They also developed this concept that there were different tiers of relics. You had first-class relics, which were the body part of a martyr or a saint, particularly their bone, but sometimes they would even put their heart in a little urn and put that in the altar. A second-class relic was an article of clothing or a personal book of prayers or devotions that had been owned by a martyr or a saint. And then a third-class relic was some item that had been touched by a first-class relic. It would be a sacred item, not just any common thing. So only first-class relics could be put in the altar, but second-class and third-class relics would be housed in the church building, usually in a little case designed to house them so that people could come in and bow before them and pray and be blessed by the presence of these relics. but the priest would continue with this dedication ceremony. They would put the bone fragment or the heart or whatever it was inside the altar, place the altar stone there on top of it, and then he would take the holy water that remained and mix it with myrrh, and then he would sprinkle the altar stone that had been set on top He would anoint it with this holy water mixed with myrrh in the shape of the cross and then the four corners of the altar stone. And then he would sprinkle the altar seven times around. Again, he's circling Jericho around the altar, sprinkling it. And then he would burn incense and wave the incense over the altar and then they would scrape the altar clean from all this stuff that's been sprinkled on it and then they would anoint it with pure holy oil in the shape of a cross and then wipe the whole thing down with myrrh and then incense the altar again, and then scrape and clean it, and then they would take the altar cloth that would be draped over the altar, sprinkle that with holy water, and then put it on the altar, incense it again, and then perform the Mass with the Eucharist. And of course, the Mass involved the blessing of the elements and the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. It's interesting reading a book written by a Roman Catholic called The Church's Way, a study in liturgical law. And they write and say this, the primary purpose of a Catholic church is to house the altar. And a church cannot exist without an altar. On this altar, the sacrifice of Calvary is offered in perpetuity. The altar was the centerpiece of their worship because that's where Christ was being offered to the Father for the sins of the worshipers. We have this exponential increase in relics in the 8th century as church buildings and altars are being blessed. throughout Europe as the church spreads north through Europe. And we have the Mass being standardized in Latin so that every priest is performing it the same way, saying the same things, and it's performed by a priest. The Mass is not something that the congregation really takes part in. they witness it, but the priest performs it. So the priest stands there over this altar, he blesses the bread and the wine, says the words, they're transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The laity is just watching this, they're observing it. And the priest partakes of communion. How often do you think the common lay people partook of communion during the 8th century? once a year, once a year on Easter, and they didn't even get the cup, they only got the bread. They didn't give them the cup because they were afraid somebody might spill the blood of Christ. So they were given the bread, but not the cup, and they only received it on Easter. And then if you had leftovers, because the priest is blessing this stuff, and then usually it's just the priest partaking of it, So they have a gilded gold box setting on the altar and the leftover portions of the bread and the wine, which are now the body and blood of Christ, are put into this coffer, this gold coffer. They still do that today. And so if you go in a Catholic church for a mass, you'll notice Catholic will come into the church and they'll kneel towards the altar before they sit down in the pew. That's because the body and blood of Christ are there in that gilded box on the altar. And so they're doing homage to Christ and bowing before him before they seat themselves. So this is what worship in the church has begun to look like in the 8th century. It's awe-inspiring, it's overwhelming to the senses. Christ himself is physically present, they believe, in the bread and the wine. And not only that, but the liturgy itself is becoming increasingly incomprehensible to the average person. As the Roman Empire has spread and over the course of time, fewer and fewer of the common lay people actually speak Latin. but the mass has been standardized in Latin. So you're going to church and all of your senses are being overwhelmed with the monks chanting, the incense burning, gold everywhere, fancy robes, the body and blood of Christ are there, and the priest is performing all of this in a language you may not understand. So it's all very mysterious and mystical and transcendent and overwhelming. Now, from the fifth century onward, there had been sort of a decline in education and in literacy in the general population of the Roman Empire. In fact, it had even affected the clergy. Not all the clergy even understood what they were doing. Some of them just simply memorized the Latin mass, and they didn't even know what they were saying. They were just quoting sounds that they had memorized. And the clergy, increasingly, their duties were sort of limited to the performance of the mass, hearing confession, baptizing infants, and burying the dead. This is what the clergy are largely doing during this time. And so when you come to church, there's a lot happening, and none of it is being explained. And preaching declines quite a bit by the 8th century. In fact, like I said, some of the priests don't even speak Latin anymore. They're not reading their Bible. They may not even have access to the New Testament, many of them. The bishops begin to write sermons for the priests and they keep them short because the priests, some of them, have difficulty reading. And so they begin to write these short sermons that we now call homilies. The bishop would write them and send them out and the priest would just read them. And so every priest in that particular diocese is giving the same homily each week. And it begins to be sort of standardized which texts the homily is going to address. And so we begin to have this standardized liturgical reading calendar of scripture readings and homilies. The other thing that develops and kind of takes its final form in the eighth century is the sacraments. the sacraments of the church, of which there are seven, and they kind of followed the medieval idea or concept of the stages of life. You begin with baptism as an infant, and then you have confirmation as you're reaching young adulthood and then marriage and then of course extreme unction or last rites and that was meant to strengthen the grace that was in you for your final penance before you would die. And then the last three of the sacraments are the sacrament of holy orders, that is the ordination of priests and deacons, and then penance, of course, which is there to restore your justification and the grace of your justification when you lose it because you committed a mortal sin and killed the grace of your justification and lost your salvation. Now you need penance in order to restore that grace to you. And then the final one, of course, is the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist in which the bread and the wine are transformed into the body of Christ. And so this is all very mysterious and grand and transcendent. And this is what life is like for the average churchgoer in the eighth century. And this is happening every week on Sunday, the Lord's Day. The church had worshipped on Sunday since the time of the apostles as the Christian Sabbath. In the 8th century, this begins to be enforced by law. This is a holy day. Shops are closed. Government offices are closed. The only businesses that are allowed to operate on Sunday during the 8th century are inns, which are providing a necessary service of providing food and shelter, and the transportation of military supplies. Other than that, everything is closed. on Sunday. It's a holy day. We're worshiping and you have to attend church and if you don't, and they find out that you're not, you could be thrown in prison. So this is very serious. Charlemagne, which we'll talk about next month when we come back to these entries, is enforcing this throughout the western part of the empire. And so they're taking Sunday very seriously as a day of worship. But other days begin to become important to the church. Now, for centuries, Christians had been disagreeing over the dates that ought to be associated with certain events in the life of Christ or the apostles and martyrs. Clement of Alexandria, back in the second century, had taught that Jesus was born on May the 20th and had suggested that we ought to have a worship service on May the 20th to commemorate Christ's birth. Now he acknowledges that other people didn't agree with him about that date. Some of them thought it was April 19th or 20th and so there was disagreement over what the date of the nativity of Christ was. Cyril of Jerusalem in the 4th century determined that it should be January 6th. Not because he really thought Jesus was born on January 6th, but that was a good date to sort of compact a whole lot of things. We would celebrate the nativity of Christ. We would celebrate the visit of the wise men and several other things all compacted into January 6th. Well, then along comes Jerome at the beginning of the fifth century, early 400s. And Jerome, of course, you remember Jerome, this is the guy that translated the scriptures into Latin, the Latin Vulgate that was so influential. But Jerome preached a sermon on Luke 2, the standard text of the nativity of Christ. but he didn't do it on May the 20th or April the 20th or January the 6th. He did it on December the 25th. Preached this sermon in Bethlehem on December the 25th in the early 400s sometime. And he marshaled his arguments for why this date was the date he wanted to celebrate the nativity of Christ. He claimed that Peter and Paul taught this date. Not in the scriptures, of course. He's claiming there was some sort of oral tradition that there's absolutely no record of. I want to read you a quote from his sermon because it's quite interesting. He did it on December the 25th at around 4.08, 4.10, somewhere in there. The calendars changed since then. In the 16th century we switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. Now the Gregorian calendar was meant to fix errors in the Julian calendar. The Julian calendar had been introduced in 46 BC and it standardized the calendar around 365.25 days in a solar year. The problem was it's not perfectly accurate. It's actually 365.2425 days. So the Julian calendar was off just a smidgen. And over the course of time, the calendar began to drift away from the actual solar events. So in the 1500s, they changed to the Julian calendar to try and correct those things. So December the 25th for Jerome was not our December the 25th. I think you'll see what date it was here in a minute. Here's a quote from his sermon. This is an argument for why the nativity of Christ should be celebrated on December the 25th. Even nature is in agreement with our claim. For the world itself bears witness to our statement. Up to this day, darkness increases. From this day on, it decreases. Light increases, darkness decreases. The day waxes, error wanes, truth advances. For us today, the sun, S-U-N, of justice is born. What day is he referring to? The winter solstice, which is now December the 21st, not December the 25th. But in his day, it was December the 25th. He's referring to the winter solstice, right? The point in time at which the daylight actually starts increasing from that moment forward. And he's arguing, well, see, that's evidence that that would have been the day that Jesus was born. Now if we remember back in the 4th century when we dealt with Constantine. Constantine was a pagan who worshipped the Roman sun god Sol. And Sol was born on the winter solstice. And so they would celebrate Saturnalia from December the 17th to December the 23rd. December the 24th was a day of contemplation and quietness anticipating the birth of the invincible sun. And on December the 25th winter solstice, when the daylight begins to increase, this is the birth of the Invincible Son. Constantine, when he adopted and embraced Christianity, reasoned that Jesus is the Son, he must be the Invincible Son, he is the light of God in the world, and so this must be his birthday. Constantine had begun to argue in the 4th century 75 years before Jerome, that December the 25th, the winter solstice, ought to be the day that we celebrated the birth of Christ. So that's where Jerome derives his argument. Now it's interesting, again I found a Catholic news website based in Italy and in an article about the liturgical calendar, a brief history, they say this. Over time, in addition to Sunday, feast days were added to celebrate events like the Nativity of Christ, the Annunciation, on the already existing structure of the Roman calendar which the church adopted. So this is what Rome is saying. The Roman calendar was there. There was already a structure in the Roman calendar of feast days and the church adopted that structure. Roman Catholicism has no problem admitting that because according to Roman theology, The Pope and the Council of Cardinals, they have the authority to make laws for the church and so they can institute new feast days and they have no problem admitting that that's what they did. And they did do it on the structure of the calendar. In the 8th century, the Christ Mass began to be celebrated on December the 25th, standardized. Also, the Annunciation was on March 25th, the Spring Equinox. The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist was on June the 24th, on the Summer Solstice. And the Feast of the Archangels, or the Michael Mass, was celebrated on December the 29th, the Fall Equinox. And they begin to add more and more feast days, celebrations for the martyrs and for various events in the life of Christ and Mary and over time these dates gained importance in the life of the church and in church practice and they became dominated by the word Mass and so they began to be the Christ Mass, the Michael Mass, these different feasts. Just to give you one example of how this process developed over time, August 15th is the Assumption. Now what do you think this is celebrating? The assumption, what is that about? It's the assumption of Mary into heaven. Now in the second century, early tradition held that Mary died and was buried and then someone, I forget who it was, wanted to verify that she was there. They opened the tomb and she was gone. And so she had been miraculously resurrected the way Christ had been glorified and taken to heaven. But by the fourth century, the mythology had adopted and changed where Mary didn't die. She was just assumed into heaven the way Elijah was, or Enoch. By the year 600, they were celebrating this in Constantinople, the assumption of Mary into heaven bodily. By the year 700, one of the popes there in Rome had decreed that this happened, that Mary didn't die. She was assumed bodily into heaven. In 855, this feast became official in Rome and she was given what they call an octave, that is eight days to celebrate it. You would celebrate it with one special day of worship and then for a whole week you would celebrate the Assumption and then another day of worship on the eighth day. In 867, Pope Nicholas I decreed that the Assumption of Mary was a holy day on par with Easter and the Christ Mass. So this thing developed over the course of multiple centuries. By the 8th century, there were 36 holy days in addition to the weekly Sunday that had been added to the church calendar and were enforced by law as holy days of obligation. In other words, you had to be at church on those days or you went to prison. You had to be at church on those days or you lost the grace of your salvation. These were holy days and you were obligated to worship on these days. This continued to expand beyond the 8th century and by 1917 this had gotten completely out of hand and so they had a council and they compared the whole thing back to ten holy days of obligation in addition to the weekly Sunday, which is still considered a holy day. The ten days that they still view as holy days of obligation for Roman Catholics are December the 8th, the Immaculate Conception, not of Christ, but of Mary. They believe Mary was conceived without sin, and they celebrate that on December the 8th. December the 25th is the Christ Mass. January the 1st, they celebrate a feast to Mary, the mother of God. On January the 6th, still going back to Cyril's date there, they celebrate Epiphany. And this is the revelation of Jesus to man. And so they celebrate the visit of the Magi along with Jesus' baptism and the wedding feast in Canaan where Jesus performs his first miracle. On the 19th of March, they celebrate the feast of Saint Joseph. So they had a day set aside for Mary as the mother of God. Now they celebrate Joseph, the adopted father. This gets a little complicated, but on the sixth Thursday of Eastertide, Eastertide is from the date of Easter, 50 days to Pentecost. On the sixth Thursday during that period, they celebrate the ascension of Christ. On the Thursday after the first Sunday after Pentecost, if that's not confusing, they celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi. This is a feast to celebrate the real presence of Christ in the mass. On the 29th of June, they celebrate the Feast of the Martyrdoms of Saint Peter and Paul. On the 15th of August, the Assumption of Mary into Heaven, and on the 1st of November, All Saints Day. Now they have many, many other feasts. When we lived in Boston, particularly in the North End, the little Italian district, which is very Catholic, they were constantly celebrating a feast to some saint or martyr, and it was kind of... It's somewhat fun because they had fantastic food available all through the North End there on those feast days. But these 10 days are days of obligation, holy days of obligation, which Roman Catholics are obligated to attend worship or lose the grace of their salvation. And church life revolved around the rhythms of this church calendar for the masses. The mass itself was mysterious. It was mystical. It was overwhelming to the senses. It was very superstitious, really. uneducated and illiterate commoner was overwhelmed by the glory and the transcendence of it all. It made sense to him. We have these rhythms of life, planting and harvesting and all this. We have these rhythms in our church life as well. We have these holy days that we have to observe. As we move forward through time in church history, when we get to the Reformation, we'll find that most all of the Reformers and almost all the Puritans rejected all of these holy days as extra-biblical traditions of men that should not bind the consciences of God's people. The Puritans argued that there was one feast Christians ought to keep. The New Covenant feast of what they called the Christian Passover or the Lord's Supper. That's it. That's the one feast that Christ instituted in the New Covenant. All the feasts of the Old Covenant found their fulfillment in Christ and all of these feasts to saints and martyrs were traditions of men and were not biblical. They also argued there was one holy day in the New Covenant, the Lord's Day, the Christian Sabbath. All of these other days might be something that an individual could look at and go, okay, maybe we want to have some sort of family or cultural celebration, but a day of obligation in the church? Absolutely not. You're binding the consciences of worshipers now who are to be free from the traditions of men and bound only by Christ, who is the Lord of the conscience. And so, Christians, to observe holy days other than Sunday, some Puritans even argued, was to devalue the Lord's Day in its regular rhythm of one and seven. To begin to call other days holy days on a par with the Lord's Day was to devalue the Lord's Day and to become Pharisees, laying aside the commandments of God for the traditions of men. One of the passages that the Puritans argued from for this was in Mark chapter 7, where Christ, speaking to the Pharisees, quotes from the prophet, saying, In vain do these people worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men. All too well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your traditions. So the Puritans argued you cannot obligate God's people to something that God has not obligated them to in the scriptures. And this is still something that we have to deal with for ourselves today, right? Are we truly honoring the Lord's Day, the Christian Sabbath? Are we keeping it holy? Are we observing it the way God has commanded us to? Or are we making it common by multiplying to ourselves holy days that we have obligated ourselves to and that God has not? So these things that happened in the eighth century hundreds and hundreds of years ago still have ramifications for us today and for how we worship, how we gather together on the Lord's Day. We've talked about the different views of the Lord's Supper just recently in sermons and this was standardized in the 8th century and still has implications for how we think about the Lord's Supper today. So, these things that happened centuries ago in the life of the church are important for us to understand how they developed, why they developed, what the arguments for and against them were, because these are things that we still have to think about and wrestle with ourselves. Let's close this morning in a word of prayer.