So second session, Byzantine Christianity versus Roman Christianity. Of course, by Byzantine I just mean, and constant, what happened there? Did I, oh my goodness, Asia Minor, there was a sinkhole. What happened? Some kind of a natural disaster. Okay, well that's the Black Sea, but apparently there was kind of, yeah. Good enough, it's, yeah. So anyway, Byzantine Christianity, Now again, here's Constantinople. That was its former name anyway, and eventually the Empire takes that name from Byzantium. And it's the Christianity that was enforced. You know, I'm reading a book on Eastern Orthodoxy last night, and boy, if I would take this author seriously, I really like what he was saying, if he is to be believed. The problem is, much like the Anglican Church, the state kind of creates the church, at least at the beginning here. So that even if you buy the argument that the designations Russian Orthodox Church and Syriac Orthodox Church at the beginning and things like that are merely convenient ways that people have labeled it, but if you ask the pastors, there's no Pope in Eastern Orthodoxy, only patriarchs. And there really isn't a Russian Orthodox Church. These are ethnic designations that have arisen in the modern world, but it is a communion of Orthodox around these seven ecumenical councils and so on and so forth. Well, if that's what you mean, and the scriptures are your ultimate source, then, man, I guess we have a lot more in common than I thought. And I want to believe that and I want to keep studying that more and more and more and always work toward unity. That's a good thing. But the reality is that at the beginning of history, this is coming out of edicts from secular heads of state. And that's significant. With the era of the invasions now technically over, we can see that the region southeast of the Danube, and that's over here, A smiley face. Well, it's in that area. These regions over here, so it's not just coming out of here, but it's... Let me just put some colors. Yeah, that's what we'll do. These blue lines will represent, at least at this time, because don't forget, Nestorian Christianity is out here, so I'm not going to extend this too far, but definitely into Syria. And once Justinian pushes the barbarians back a little bit in North Africa, It'll flow a little bit further into North Africa. But at the beginning, that's Byzantine Christianity, that region right there. Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine. Consequently, the Eastern Church, for reasons different than would be the case in Rome, were able to get their autonomy back on its feet. This was never permanently settled by the invaders. The people that came in, Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, they settled here. They invaded here, but they were never able to finally settle in those regions, and so it was easier for them to get back on their feet with the faith that was at least coming out of Constantinople. After an initial schism between East and West from 482 to 519, the new emperor out East, Justin I, sought official reconciliation, so he struck a deal with Rome, which reaffirmed the Chalcedonian definition very much against Nestorianism, and which paid no homage whatsoever to the Roman bishops. So they were constantly snubbing Rome, even when the Pope was agreeing with them, doctrinally. The nephew of Justin would not do too much better politically, or sort of would do better politically, but not doctrinally. His name was Justinian I. Let me put his dates up. You probably have that in your notes, but if you don't, let me just spell the name up here. Justinian. He's a major player on the same order as a Constantine or a Theodosius. And his dates, namely the dates of his life, are 482 to 565, but he came to power in 527. As Zeno had previously done before him with rival theological schools, Justinian would put a final lid on the philosophical schools in Athens. Again, as a secular head of the Eastern Church, who put an end to the philosophical schools. Not anyone, church or state, from the West. It's hard to run through church history without knocking over myths, even if you're not trying to be a myth debunker. Because they're just everywhere, like land mines. Justinian would reign from 527 to 565, in other words, until his death. so that the stability of his reign alone granted to the Eastern Church a kind of momentum that the West didn't have. After a defensive check against the Persians, who no doubt sought to capitalize on the famous turmoil going on out West throughout the 5th century, Justinian was able to turn his attention to North Africa, a campaign that lasted for a decade essentially obliterated any Aryan Christianity kingdom that could have formed in North Africa. So before it could get started by 540, it was pretty much obliterated, which was a favor to the Western Church because there was still Latin speaking Catholic Christianity there, which could now get back on its feet. Okay. Now, he spent the rest of his life winning back Italy and Gaul, only to deplete the empire of its material resources to do it. So what's going on here is that Justinian and his uncle, Justin, were from here originally. So they dreamed of reunifying East and West, kicking out the Vandals, the Goths, and then eventually putting Rome back under their heads. So they still had this idea of this united empire that never really could really become a reality again. But he depleted his material resources trying to do that. So eventually his successors couldn't hold on to it. The Lombards returned to Italy, the Visigoths returned to Spain three years after his death in 565. His Byzantine Empire would last technically until 1453, when it was eradicated by the Muslim Turks. It was really a cultural fountain of what we would recognize today as Russia and Greece, modern Greece, and the Eastern European states in between them. Still, his reign gave the Eastern Church the secular cradle in which to nourish its own unique identity. I already mentioned that his wife Theodora became a Miaphysite sympathizer, and if she had gotten her way, it would have become the official state position. They had their theologians, they had their different books, which we really don't have time to get into. which again I'll be accused of covering church history from a Western perspective but we really just don't have time to get into some of that stuff. Cyril and Methodius are important though. This is not Cyril of Alexandria. These are two guys that were brothers and they were missionaries up here. One reason they're important is that in their missionary efforts They found that the Greek that was still the vernacular of the area, they began to develop a script that used Greek as its base and added other sound, syllables, signs, and it became Cyrillic, conveniently named after Cyrus. But, here's the problem. There were Latin missionaries, actually there were German missionaries, who were Latin in speech, and so they were in that same, and they were kind of competing for these people, and so Cyril and Methodius went to the Pope, I think it's fair to call them the Pope now, not because I'm recognizing the position, but now I'm, you know, they were recognized by that time, not simply the Bishop of Rome. So they went to the Pope to, and who by that time I believe was Gregory. who we'll talk about, to complain that their guys were pretty much acting like thugs and it's much more congenial. Hey, we're on the same team here. Can we please get free reign to teach this script and this language, which is much more congenial to their native Greek-like tongues rather than this Latin? Well, the Pope agreed to that, but he really couldn't do anything. He couldn't enforce it. Well, eventually Cyril dies. Methodius' attempts and his missionaries pretty much is less fruitful there, but it's extremely fruitful the more east you get. That's actually not where to draw the line, more here. Extremely fruitful to the Slavic people further that way and eventually the rest is history, you get the Russians and so on. Between the growing power of the Franks out west, again that's where the French would eventually be, and the revived power of Byzantium out east, the heretic Christianity that the barbarians had brought with them, left the playing field having brought only devastating chaos, but they were unable to change the final definition of orthodox belief. The eviction of Catholic Christianity out west was never final, and to its limited degree lasted only two generations. That was the darkness of the Dark Ages, to the extent that such a label is ever accurate about the Middle Ages. Thankfully, at this point, even Most secular historians now agree that this phrase was nothing but 18th and 19th century rationalistic sloganeering read back in the time. Now where and how is Roman Christianity different than Byzantine Christianity? Pope is the English word for Papa. You might not know that, but it is. The epicenter of Latin theology was just as much in Carthage as it was in Rome prior to the barbarian invasions, Tertullian and Augustine in particular. The best theologians that were Latin were actually coming out of Carthage, not Rome, prior to that time. When Diocletian had restructured the empire back in 290. He removed secular power from the old capital. And once Christianity was legalized, this had the effect of giving the Roman bishop the breathing room of political autonomy that the Eastern seas did not enjoy. And we've mentioned the deliberate centralization efforts of the Latin church by Victor and Damasus in the second and fourth centuries. In Rome, you didn't have a secular head of state. How do I symbolize the church and the state together? It doesn't matter. What I'll do is I'll put a star for secular power. In Alexandria, Antioch, and especially Constantinople, the church was submerged in secular authority. Now, Rome would be compromised by the same principle of secular authority, but they wouldn't actually have the centers of secular authority breathing down their neck. They would for a brief period of time when the Arians were ruling from Ravina. And so they kind of had to do battle with them and stuff like that. But for the most part, Rome had breathing room to develop politically, to develop as the, in a sense, political father of the group of people out east. And they also had less divisions. Then if you notice, all the heresies in the formative years, not before that. Before that, heresies were pretty much spread out everywhere. But from Nicaea onward, starting with Arius and Alexandria, all the heretics came from these groups, from these places. And so Rome had this building credibility, at least with the people out west, and oftentimes the people in the east as well. And it obviously reaped all the benefits of having this autonomy, this breathing room. Cyprian, in the third century, is liberally cited by Catholic apologists. He's the one that came up with that expression. He's a bishop of Carthage. Cyprian came up with that Latin Well, if you mean that in an Ephesians 4 kind of sense, there is one body, one faith, and so on and so forth, that's true. To be outside of his body is to be outside of Christ. But how that started to be interpreted, is, remember, physical catholicity, with a physical head. So outside of the Roman Church, there is no salvation. That's the way it became to be interpreted. After Damasus, the bishop from 384 to 389, another bishop, Sirius, made even more strident claims to being the universal head. But by this time it should be pointed out that so much of the sentiment justifying Rome's universality was driven by the sentiment of independence from what amounted to a state-created church everywhere out east. So one could have made the case for independence from the east on the grounds that their doctrine of the church was now corrupt. But by now, Rome... so, independence from the east wasn't what was wrong with their argument. If I was there at that time, I would have agreed with Rome on that. But it, of course, took on a different connotation well before that time. In terms of official opinion, the 6th Canon of Nicaea gave overarching power to Rome, Alexander, and Antioch equally. So in the 4th century, nobody would have recognized the Roman Church, even out West. Let me repeat that. By the 4th century, as late as the 4th century, nobody, except for the Roman bishops making the argument and strategically aligning things that way, Nobody would have recognized the Roman bishop as anything other than the Roman bishop. They would have not recognized him as the Pope, the father, the head of Christendom, the vicar of Christ. But those furthest out west would have recognized him as that. The famous proof text of Matthew 16, 16-18 had been asserted by Stephen in his clash with Cyprian a couple centuries back, which is ironic since it was Cyprian's unity of the church. that was winged upon by Catholic theologians, but in Damasus' time we find wide acceptance of the argument. Damasus went as far to say that the reason Nicaea was authoritative as an ecumenical council was first and foremost because the Pope Sylvester had given it his approval. And that's pretty ironic because Sylvester was not invited. But since he gave it his approval, and since he gave it his blessing, he blessed this thing that he wasn't invited to, but that's what gave it Now, in case you're wondering, the Catholic doctrine and idea of the relationship between papal authority and a council's authority, that'll give you a good idea that the papal authority, even in this time, is reigning supreme in their mind. Canon law is what comes out of this. And canon, as we've already seen, when Josh did the doctrine of the scripture, comes from the Greek word kanon, which is from another Hebrew word, kana, I think, meaning a reed, which was used as a measuring stick, a cane or a reed. So this idea was an official standard or authoritative measuring rod for anything, whether it's books in a literary structure, sometimes we refer to the canon of Western literature, of course we talked about the canon of scripture, or canon law has that same connotation. the official standard or rule of the church. As the Pope John Paul in 1983, in his introduction to the revised code of canon law, put it, he saw the aim of canon law was to look toward the achievement of order in the ecclesial society. So, canon law just means the rule of the church in life, practice, doctrine, the whole nine yards. All things considered, the Eastern Orthodox and Protestants have all had their versions of the same thing. But the principal difference between the canon law of the Catholic Church and policies within modern Protestant denominations is that the former are the arbiters of the meaning of scripture over the conscience of the lay people. In fact, one of their first rules that came out of Nicaea was to divide the body of Christ between church and laity. You could not be a pastor. You could not be a pastor moving from one seat to another unless you have the votes of the bishops in that area. So the church created the church, not the word created the church with that first stroke of canon law. Leo the Great, his dates are 391 to 461. I'm going to mention two popes just because they're significant at this time. Leo the Great was certainly a titanic thinker. He was attempting to draw back the East with his weighty doctrinal tomes. But he was an exception to that. Most of the Posts were not the best theologians at that time. But his tome to Chalcedon, 451, he did make a direct claim that Rome has always held the primacy. His stroke of genius is forever going to be a backroom deal that he cut with the Huns when they were invading here. A lot of Rome's prestige. How did they come out of this when the barbarians were everywhere? These guys had the power out east. How did Rome get back on their feet? And how did the Pope not get killed? How did the Roman Church not... I mean, people were getting executed, pillaged, the whole nine yards. How did they emerge immediately, still from that very day, having authority? Well, Leo was famous for raising money for bribes. And that's really the essence of it. He bribed the Huns to, in a sense, leave him alone and let the Roman... and they're thinking to themselves, well, we've never seen anything like this before, except like witch doctors in local villages. It's not really that much power. He's not a secular head of state. He doesn't have any swords. Sure, whatever. We'll take your gold. And so a lot of people... but people didn't know that. They just saw Leo, king of the hill, driving out, persuading, in some way, for some reason, kicking out the Huns. And so, again, more of a PR thing at that time. But it would begin a pattern of Rome's alliances with the enemies of Constantinople that would keep them in the religious driver's seat in all of the West. And even out to the East, in all the doctoral controversies that appealed to the main bishops, none of the heresies and factions were coming out of Rome. They were increasingly seen, even out East, as above it all. So what specifically did Leo do? Well, let me mention five things that immediately gained instant and unbroken line of prestige for Rome at this time. First of all, when the vandals swept through North Africa, the Catholics were again in the minority. They needed a strong head, which Leo promptly exploited. So even when they were vandalized, literally, Even when they were broken down in North Africa, people were still Christians, and they needed a strong head, and that's what Leo represented to them. Secondly, with Gaul under such invasion, Leo had overturned long-standing autonomy reserved for the bishop in Arles by recognizing a rival bishop, Hillary, and throwing him in prison when he arrived in Rome to protest. So he essentially just set up his own guy, and threw the guy that was protesting into prison, who thought he was just coming to the Roman bishop. Third, he further placed Emperor Valentinian III in his pocket, so that he upheld this otherwise arbitrary act with the sword. So he was still placating the guy out east, saying, alright, I'll give you that bishop, you can be the bishop over bishops over there if you give me this and so on and so forth. You're still part of our empire. So more backroom dealing. Fourth, Pretending to favor Greeks and Thessalonica against Constantinople, he won their allegiance, since he did oppose the capital city's bishop. And fifthly, the whole episode of Chalcedon advanced the Pope's esteem in eyes out east. In other words, anybody else out east that agreed with Chalcedon at least respected Leo theologically. So, let's put ourselves in the place of the Roman church leaders in the middle of the 5th century. Do you link yourself wholly to Constantinople for a military union? That would also have been seen as a theological compromise, if he would have just linked himself completely in an unqualified sense to them during this time. So he looks pretty uncompromising, at least on that point. Do you join in with the Aryan culture of your conquerors? That would obviously be a theological compromise of the faith as well. So it's easy for us in a modern evangelical context to retort that they should have looked to the scriptures above everything else, and that's always true. But we're always creatures of our culture, and they had to act fast to resist the extinction of the faith as they knew it. Now he should have been, I hate to use a secular example, but he should have been sort of a George Washington character at this time. If he had to consolidate a couple things over a six-month period, year period, whatever, do what you gotta do to do that. but then as soon as you can, establish these bishops as autonomous pastors again and don't claim that right to yourself perpetually. He didn't do that. He seized that power and he kept a hold of it at that time. Other things were going on at this time that created More and more and more momentum for Rome. Theodoric was an Arian leader of the Ostrogoths, who in 493 took control of nearby Ravenna. That's over here on the east coast of Italy. And he was a stooge of the east. Why did the east want him there? So he's an Arian and he's a barbarian. But the east, remember, has a lot of diplomatic ties. with these guys. And this guy was a Visigoth, and Theodoric I, or Theodoric the Great, became sort of this, in a sense, co-emperor, the sort of vice-regent to keep an eye on Rome, to keep an eye on the Western Church, and to subjugate them. He was strategically placed there by the Eastern Emperor Zeno. who was hoping to run the West by this local Regency. It's interesting what a pivotal year 493 was. Just when this secular Ostrogoth attempted to consolidate church and state across the board from the East, independently of that, unbeknownst to anybody to the East of that, that same year was that guy named Clovis that I very briefly mentioned, the Frankish chieftain that converted to Christianity and made these alliances to push out the Aryans from this region. So in that same year that these guys were bringing in an Aryan Christianity, and by the way, again, I'd say that's another strike against the Eastern Church in a sense, not that you want to blame them for what a secular head did, but if they had gotten their way, Aryanism would have predominated still in Europe. But that same year, providentially, God was, whether this guy's conversion, Clovis? Wow. Clovis, sorry. Whether this guy, again, just like Confidant, I don't care if his conversion was real. I don't care and neither should you. You can't, you know, intermediate for him. It's not the issue. The issue is what happened, debunking myths and holding on to truth. Those are the issues. So providentially, God was doing this out west in the same year that players on the east think that they're moving the chessboard for themselves. In Ravina, Theodoric dedicated new church buildings according to the Arian vision, one of which, St. Apollinaris, survived the deconstruction of the Middle Ages and survived the bombings of two world wars. So it's still there, a lot of Arian art in it and stuff like that. But Theodoric allowed some amount of Catholic autonomy and even employed its brightest philosophical mind, Boethius, for his own court. Boethius, his dates are 480 to 524, he was really the best philosopher after Augustine and before Anselm, in a lot of ways. He only wrote one work that survives, The Consolation of Philosophy. But evidence is that he aimed to resurrect the tradition begun by the apologists and Augustine, and that he had just the kind of mind that could pull it off. Unlike Augustine, Boethius knew his Greek well, and he sought to translate all of the works of antiquity, arranging them with commentaries and tracing out the history of Western thought to the end of showing Christianity's fulfillment of reason. With the Byzantine emperors warring against scholarship, and the religious and secular leaders out west now embracing it, the tide was beginning to turn, even under the surface, toward the eventual rise of European civilization. Again, notice this. Justinian closes down the schools in Athens. Boethius is in the courts out west, trying to revive this project of getting all the classical works from Greek, and showing Christianity's supremacy over them. Plato, Aristotle, the whole nine yards. So the West is being encouraged to philosophical inquiry as early as the early 6th century under barbarian rule. Again, we hear the exact opposite. And the East was shutting down philosophy. You hear the exact opposite. As for Boethius, he was implicated in a Byzantine plot to overthrow Theodoric and was promptly executed. His scholarly synthesis barely begun. So Boethius' project was cut short. East and West are momentarily held together by Chalcedon and by Leo, but the schism of 482-519 proved to be the real state of things. Now that we can fully use the word Pope about the Roman Bishop, Pope Galatius I, the turn of the 6th century, sent word to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I that there's two swords which rule under God's authority. and it is the bishop which is going to have more to answer for on Judgment Day. So in a sense, even the secular... So here's a pastor speaking to a monarch. We both have authority from God that is legitimate. However, since we're having this conversation, I have more to answer for on Judgment Day, to prophetically warn you, and in a sense, stand over you, than you do with that physical sword. So in a sense, even the secular head is under that spiritual jurisdiction. By no means may the secular head judge on doctrinal matters or church discipline. Now this is perfectly biblical, and always needs to be said. Perhaps this word at this time further hardened the Eastern Church against a similar view of these two kingdoms. On this point, the Pope was in line with what Ambrose and Augustine had already said. So the fact that he's a Pope, and the fact that they had abused so much already, nevertheless doesn't mean that this was wrong. This was exactly the right thing to say, and again something that, at least at this point, Western Latin Christianity had more biblical than the East did. As Justin and Justinian had so desired to reconcile the whole empire, another pope in 514, Hormidius, he exploited this aim by demanding that they, namely the eastern heads, that they acknowledge the apostolic supremacy of the Roman Sea. In other words, they were saying, we'll acknowledge the unity of the empire and we'll work with you out here if you, secular heads, acknowledge our spiritual headship. Okay, so you see the backroom, the ultimate backroom deal going on here. Their agreements, namely the East Agreement, was half-hearted, but it was good enough to have on record. And the next few popes became an embarrassment to that spotless supremacy that they had boasted of, only in order to bring the East more fully enfold. There's a classic demonstration of how this showed both sides to be corrupt. But in fact, in the 19th century, when they were debating papal infallibility, a lot of opponents in the Roman Church against the doctrine of papal infallibility cited a guy named, I can't pronounce his name unless I look at it, Okay, Virgilius. I would have totally messed that up if I didn't look at it. But he spent the years 547 to 554 in negotiation with the East and he was eventually taken captive by Justinian's court and forced to agree with a condemnation of Chalcedon. So when he's going back, he's leaving home and people are angry at him for cutting this backroom deal with them. He's taken hostage by them, even physically threatened by them, to basically become a heretic. He agrees with them. On his way back home, he dies of gallstones. That's what it was, gallstones. So if he got home after this beating over here, he probably would have been killed by people waiting for him back in Rome. But here's a guy who was both a heretic, because he had lapsed in his faith, He was going over there to condemn them, according to the people in Rome, but he accepted the secular heads telling him what doctrine it was going to be. So he was a heretic, a traitor, and I think for all those reasons he would say fallible. So obviously in the 19th century, opponents of the new doctrine of papal infallibility, it wasn't an official doctrine until then. But when it became an official doctrine, they cited this guy, Virgilius, as a pope who was obviously extremely fallible. Okay, so that kind of spots up their record right there. I won't read the specifics of that particular edict that he was supposed to agree to. It's not really that important. So fast forward past that. But once the forces of Justinian had kicked the Aryans out of Ravina, so let me just paint the picture for you. Justinian had turned back the Persians over here. He had beaten back the Vandals over here. He's depleted all the resources of the empire to do it, but now he wants to kick out the last of these people. So even though that previous emperor had put Theodoric here to sort of spy out on Rome, he just didn't want to drive out all of the Aryans, all of everybody else. So he does that momentarily, he drives out the Lombards, who were Aryan, out of Ravina. It's Archbishop, namely the new Romans, so this is the thanks he gets, he drives for the sake of Rome, for the sake of the United Empire, he drives out the last of the Lombards, who were Aryan. So the Roman Bishop, you would immediately expect when he rechristened the temple and everything, he would pay homage to people out East. What did he do instead? The Roman bishop would send the message to people out east that it would be Rome that would be the spiritual head. The West would remain autonomous and he rededicated the Arian decorated Saint Apollinaris, not to anyone out east as a thanks for the liberation, but to Saint Martin of Tours for his struggles against Arianism. So in spite of the re-entrance of Lombards and Visigoths into Italy and Spain, the Italian peninsula had been canvassed by the efforts of Rome, and the Visigoth monarchs slowly embraced the Catholic doctrine of Christ. So by the time Justinian comes to an end, yes, his resources had been depleted, and it would give you an indication of why Islam had so much success militarily coming through this region, but by the time you get to the middle of the 6th century, the barbarians are pretty much irrelevant politically. They had been absorbed into Roman culture, which remember had been absorbed into Greek and Jewish culture. So everybody was now, in a sense, colonized, subdued by this superior idea called Christianity. That doesn't mean that their faith was real. That doesn't mean that Christianity that was practiced by men was pure. But if we can, you know, chew the meat and spit out the bones and see the forest for the trees, the idea of Christianity had suppressed, had subdued these various secular civilizations. Okay? So, the barbarians are pretty much irrelevant by the middle of the 6th century, except that they created this darkness and they created this thing that could legitimately be called the Dark Ages. Divine Providence raised up a Leo here and a Clovis there, regardless of the motives on a human level. But one more figure is worth mentioning. who would rise to the stage of history and very much against some of his own theology. And I couldn't find the quotes in Calvin's Institutes, but I've read them all already, and I would refer you back to one that we did in the Calvin's Institutes class, where Calvin cited at least three and maybe as many as five quotes by Gregory, who was one of the earliest popes recognized as pope, who basically said, and I'll paraphrase, but I don't feel any, because I know when you look at the quotes, it's a faithful paraphrase, Gregory basically said that the idea of the supremacy of the Roman Bishop represents the spirit of the Antichrist. Here you have one of the first people recognized as Pope, called a saint. Calvin agreed he was one of the, if there must be a Pope, which there shouldn't be, he's certainly one of the best, in so many ways saying that there should not be a Pope, we are all pastors. In fact, Gregory came up with a phrase that was still used by Pope John Paul and by Benedict, The current Pope, a servant of servants. They'll sign their decrees, their memos, if you will, to the local cardinals and so on. Pope John Paul II or Benedict, servant of you servants. Gregory coined that phrase. I'm not a Pope. I am a servant of you servants. Now, that phrase taken up in other people's mouths might be a sign of false humility and just a convenient thing to say. But Gregory seemed to mean it. Gregory's dates are 540 to 604. He was from wealth. He was from the aristocracy of Rome. And so, you may not know this, but there was still a polity in Rome, a Senate of sorts, that the barbarians came and messed that up. But Gregory, he was part of that aristocracy. And he had a lot of romantic ideas about Roman superiority, to be sure. But like Ambrose, he would begin in politics only to have the Catholic leadership transfer his talents to the sacred sphere. So he had a lot of administrative and political and top-down kind of ability in his thinking. And he did this with a lot of doctrinal conscience, also much like Ambrose did. He left his wealth early to become a monk, so that his Christian faith was already well-informed before he performed his secular duty. When the Lombards reasserted themselves in Italy, for Gregory, this was not viewed as a tragedy because he saw the church as the head of all things, not a secular head. Much of his romance for headship could have more to do with his nostalgia for secular Rome over against the upstart Constantinople, but the historian should not be too much of a psychologist here. Gregory, by the way, wrote a lot of things, a lot of letters that survive to this day. In fact, one book at least called Pastoral ministry, what is it called? The Pastoral Letter, something like that. What's it called? Pastoral Rule, that's right. And that's still looked at as one of the formative... In fact, Josh is going to do that, summarize that work, I think next week. So, there it is. Gregory the Great on Pastoral Rule. He did see himself as a pastor in the biblical sense of the word. So he might have had a lot of romantic ideas about secular headship that came into it. and other false ideas, but his belief in his pastoral role seems to be genuine. He was Pope between 590 and 604, during which time he began to call the position the Servant of the Servants of God. He would be the first pope who had been a monk prior to this, and he was persuaded that his generation was living in the last days and therefore the best of monastic life, namely the reform of the individual soul to get it ready for heaven, and the reform of the body of Christ was something that we are to share with the church at large. In a sense, Gregory wanted to launch the first reformation. In 597, he would launch a missionary campaign to the lost peoples of former Britannia, who by now had been firmly settled by the German groups, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. I think that's how you pronounce it, the Jutes. People can't differentiate one from the other, so they just call them the Anglo-Saxons. by that time, as well as by Scots who had jumped over Hadrian's Wall essentially by that time. Once the more stable invaders had left, it was pretty much a free-for-all on the island. But this is often referred to as the first concerted effort by Latin Christendom to expand the boundaries of the kingdom of God by the pure gospel rather than by political whitewashing. It is not true that there's no cases in Europe in the Middle Ages where there were genuine missionary efforts by the gospel. It is true that in the two centuries before this, what looks like conversion is a whole lot of whitewashing, political whitewashing. In other words, forced baptisms. Hey, here's some gold and a white robe for you, signed by Emperor Constantine. Would you be baptized, please? Or we'll kill you. That's nothing personal. We're just better than you, and we're going to kill you in two seconds if you don't do it. But other than that, it was genuine. But there might have been a lot of genuine conversions in the process of that. So you have to chew the meat and spit out the bones. But this missionary campaign of Gregory, where he sent Augustine, as opposed to Augustine. That's what I'm going with. He actually, again, he was not the first to get there. Augustine was a Benedictine monk missionary who arrived to find a bishop already in Canterbury. But he was nevertheless made bishop there by orders of Rome in the year 597. Really, though, the bishop that was there was only really a local preacher to the local queen. So Augustine of Tanterbury, now he was called, won the conversion of the king, Ethelbert, who gave him a blank check to build up the church in that region. The story of the origins of British Christianity is really also the story of Rome's strategy of developing their own in an unquestioned way. Roman Christianity, again, before this time, you could confidently place its boundaries of Italy, part of Greece that they had won over, and then the North Africa that they were now reclaiming. But it was really just that. So there was an effort to ignore Constantinople and simply say, you know, there's a lot of land here, and these barbarians are weakened. We could be just the size of the East if we just won over these pagans. So their motives were so political. But again, don't be distracted. Don't be one of those easily impressed people that gets your theology from the History Channel. You still have to ask the question, so what? So what? Paul even said that in one of the Corinthian letters. Some are motivated by envy, some are motivated by this, but so long as Christ's name is preached. Okay, so remember that. Let your scripture inform your doctrine. You can find this history, which I won't get into, in a book by a guy named Venerable Bede. if that's how you pronounce his name. It was crazy English. There's three or four spellings to everything, including Wycliffe. We'll see that. There's Wycliffe, Wycliffe, Wycliffe, with an E, two Fs, and all this stuff. Same thing there. I don't know how to pronounce any of his names, but I'm confident that nobody else does either, so I'm okay with that. But he wrote a book in 731 called The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. In fact, the English, you see it in their writings, the Ss are Fs, all the way down to the 17th century. So I have no respect for their pronunciation. Because they were talking like this. They had to, because the F was there. Okay, so nobody knows how to pronounce these things, just go with it. Isidore of Seville was an interesting character. I'll mention just a little bit. He was really recognized. His dates are 560 to 636. Seville is a little place in the very southernmost province. These were divided into provinces at the time. They weren't nation states like they would become in the 16th, 17th century. There were prophecies still of the former Roman provincial Pax Romana. They still kind of thought of it like that. Well, this lowermost province, this guy named Isidore, was the bishop there in Seville. And he was generally recognized to be the most brilliant Christian thinker of his day. And that presented a problem because in his mind, he believed that no member of the body of Christ is any more unequal than another member of the body of Christ. And so, suddenly he was kind of challenging the idea of papal authority. Again, the doctrine of papal infallibility did not exist until the 19th century. But papal authority, you still had brilliant thinkers who did not necessarily agree with that. And he was made a bishop slightly independently at that time, and so Gregory's assertions that were being made did not go unchallenged. So anyway, there's a brief description of Byzantium, Byzantine Christianity going that way, Roman Christianity going this way. We're going to talk about the official split that officially happens in 1054, I believe New Year's Day. Eve. Whatever. Whatever the letter got there. But anyway, this cleavage happens at different points, and finally in the 11th century, but really, as you can see, everything we're talking about, it's already happening. The East and the West are going different directions. So what began as this struggle of four different bishops becomes this all-out, empire-defined vision of two Christianities. So let me open up questions and then we'll get to the monastic vision thirdly.