We are, this week, going to take a look at the stakes on the side of the trunk. Church history and historical theology. And the way I've conceived of them, and we didn't really indicate this thoroughly in the diagram, is when you plant a tree, you often plant stakes on either side of it to help it stay straight and to help it not get blown down and such, to help it to grow straight. And then you often don't need those stakes, but if it's a fruit tree, you frequently need stakes to hold the branches up when it's bearing the fruit. So that's the way I've conceived this, is that church history and historical theology, and again, this is not my entire conception. There's other people that have, contributed to my depiction of this whole tree idea. History and historical theology stand to the side of all of these disciplines. aiding the development of every area. So they're assisting in the development over the course of the history of the church in hermeneutics, understanding of how to interpret the scripture. They're assisting the discipline of biblical studies. They're assisting the growth and development of biblical theology. They're assisting systematic theology, for sure, and they're providing insight and they're warning against dangers. But in addition to all of that, they continue to not just aid in the development of the theology, but they continue to aid in supporting the areas of ministry that we have and see in the branches in the trunk. So, apologetics, ethics, evangelism, world missions, preaching, and such. Church history and historical theology are relevant and important for all of those. And if you're thinking, well, what's the difference between them? It's not a hard and fast difference. Church history is the actual history, the facts, the dates, the people, the movements, the political issues, councils that happened, events that occurred, schisms that happened, things like that. Historical theology is how theology developed over history. And when you take a course, usually you're going to take a course in church history and it will cover historical theology as well. So you might be learning about, for example, the historical development of the doctrine of who Christ is, the understanding of who Christ is, his person, his work, who is he, the historical development of the understanding of the Trinity, and you could talk about that with every doctrine. And that's why I say in the next set that there's a special relationship especially between historical theology and systematic theology because we can look back through the history of the church. And by history, I do mean post-Scripture. So we're not talking about, generally speaking, we're not talking about the development of things over the course of the storyline of Scripture. This is the history of the church after Scripture, after the close of the canon. We can look back and see how different doctrines have been formulated. We can look back and see what people were responding to when they began to formulate certain doctrines or began to be more explicit about them. And we do that either to be instructed and encouraged to go in a particular direction or to be warned about ways that an understanding could be contrary to the teaching of Scripture. And we'll look at that a little bit later. One of the best resources, I've got some suggested reading at the bottom, but one of the best resources in this particular regard is a book by a professor at Southern Seminary. His name is Greg Allison. And it's called Historical Theology, and it's specifically designed to go hand in hand with Grudem's Systematic Theology. The categories of the doctrines are the same. They're lined up to be used side by side, not side by side, but together, hand in hand. And his volume actually takes these categories of doctrines, and it traces their development through four major periods in the church, when it's possible to be that precise. And not every doctrine had development explicit enough to cover it in all four of these major periods. But the early church, the Middle Ages, Reformation and post-Reformation era, and then the modern era. So that's a good resource. There are many other resources that you could use in terms of church history and the development of specific doctrines. We'll get to that later. I would say one of the key concepts here for this topic is We, in our day, stand on the shoulders of a host of theologians throughout church history. There is no reason for us to consider that we should scrap everything that's been done throughout the history of the development of theology. No, we're not supposed to scrap it, we're supposed to learn from it. And I've heard James White say many, many, many, many, many times. He says, when people ask me what were the most important courses for me in my seminary career, he says, Greek and church history. Why church history? Well, just think about Ecclesiastes 1.9. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Invariably, era after era, you see the same heresies popping up again and again. Sometimes they take somewhat different forms, but sometimes they don't even take different forms. It's just a repetition of a heresy that's come up before to people who haven't paid any attention to the past. Go ahead. Well, you know, we kind of owe those heretics some credit, too, because if they hadn't come along, and said Christ is not divine, they would have never, might not have formed, formulated the doctrine of Christ's unity and all those other things that they did. Sure, everything was under God's sovereign hand. I mean, you could sort of say the same thing about Judas, right? We don't reverence Judas because of what he did, but Christ had to be betrayed. That's why in John 17, it talks about, I've lost none of them except the one who was predestined to be the son of perdition. So yeah. So that the scripture might be fulfilled. Absolutely. I guess Shakespeare was right. Every man plays his little part on the stage and then leaves. C.S. Lewis called that chronological sonopoly. To dismiss the past? Yeah. Absolutely. Something's newer. Or to think, the way I always understood the way he presented it, and maybe I just have too narrow a view of it, was the way he was thinking is Oh, those, you know, those people in the past were just all unsophisticated bumpkins who didn't know any better. And, and we're just smarter and brighter. And, you know, technologically speaking. Technologically speaking, again, that's just like standing on the shoulders of giants, right? Because what one of us could build a cell phone or an audio recorder or the general level, this relates to creation. I say this all the time. If you don't like the doctrine of creation, you're not going to like being around me very much. The idea that we are growing and growing in intelligence and capability is laughably bad. It's the exact opposite. We have technological development because of people building on the backs of people who have come before. But individually speaking, the human race is going downhill and very fast. You can see it in the genetics. You can see it in DNA mutations. You can see it in the accumulation of mutations. Absolutely. People complain that the catechism that was made for kids five and six years old, it's too heavy. We don't want it in Sunday school. Right, right. That's a term called genetic entropy, that our genes are devolving. Devolving isn't the right word. Going downhill is fast. Absolutely. Well, I mean, morally speaking, we're certainly in a period of rapid downhill progression. No, because my professors, the older professors, would talk about what they had to be able to do by the time they graduated from undergrad. And it was well beyond what masters and doctoral students would do. Exactly. I mean, they had to be able to transpose a score. I mean, all this kind of stuff was just expected. That's what you do. Everything was dumbed down. And you would say, I mean, I remember back 30 years ago when I was in college, there were things coming out at the very beginning of the internet era. So it was when I was in grad school, actually. But you start to see these things going around about, oh, this is what an, you know, you talk about, oh, my grandfather only had an eighth grade education. Well, this is what his eighth grade education actually expected him to be able to know and do. And so that means, yes, yeah. all kinds of mental arithmetic, not just can you do it, can you do it in your head. And just to end this concept here, as the sayings go, those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. That's often attributed to a philosopher, George Santayana. But then the corollary to that, those who do remember the past are doomed to sit by and watch everyone else repeat it. We talked a little bit about creeds last time and the development of the creeds and how that reflects a development. Actually, what I actually took you through last time was a historical development of systematic theology. So this is more looking at the historical development of each doctrine. This, in my mind, is the best use of these historical creeds, not to go heresy hunting or to demand conformity to every single particular, but to provide guides and fences and bounds for our theology for future generations, so that we have an idea of what's been considered orthodoxy. It doesn't mean it's always going to be exactly the same, but we have an idea of what the boundaries are. And I just heard James White talking about this again recently. He said, if you think about theology like, I've talked about it as bounds and fences. He's talking about like a building. If you think about your church or the field of people you know that are involved in Christianity, and you think about it as a building, he said, the people I worry about are the people that are at the windows staring at the outside and wondering what's out there. Those are the people that, because those are the people that are not satisfied with what scripture has provided. Those are the people that are not satisfied with the bounds that God has given. They're like, well, what's out there? What can we? And so those are the people that you expect If people are going to drift away, it's likely going to be the people that are already on the fringes looking to the outside. Yes, and they could now be credentialed PhDs in theology at seminaries. Entirely possible. And how can we bend the scriptures to accommodate the spirit of the Lord? So it doesn't even have to do with intelligence. those kinds of degrees foster that a little bit, because what's the whole point of being a PhD? You're supposed to come up with something new, right? I mean, you're supposed to justify it. Yeah. And so I see this, where my best friend was a PhD in math. And she said it was all the education PhDs that were screwing everything up, because they were trying to find new ways to teach things. And all these new methods, when they already had a proven record of how to teach certain things for 100 years, and they wanted to try all these new things that were ridiculous. And she had to teach them, because she was a DA. The new math. Yeah, yeah. And you can see, I mean, this is true across the board in academia, but it's especially unfortunately true. And I generally have a positive attitude toward the concept of seminary, because I think it's important to be well trained. But there are seminaries whose entire reason to exist is to bring in students, churn through students. And if you have a program that's constantly churning out and trying to bring in and churn out doctoral students, and the goal of a PhD specifically, now there are other kinds of doctoral degrees in ministry, like a doctorate in ministry, for example. But if the goal is to come up with something new, it fosters that. And there are simply far more students being churned out with PhDs than are ever able to have, I mean, orders of magnitude more students than there are positions available for them to fill, unless they're willing to go and teach overseas. And there's all kinds of training needs in ministry needed overseas, but that becomes then a mission where you're raising your support. And so, I frankly think I'm starting to see that more people who are involved, more individuals who are involved in seminaries are being upfront about that. And sometimes it's just the people who went through it and found out the hard way that there wasn't anything available for them on the other side. So, you know, and I'm, I'm thankful that I've already come to the point that says, all right, I'm at my age. I don't need any more of that. It doesn't mean I don't want to keep learning, but I don't need to spend any more time going through school. I've done enough of that in my life. That's her. It's got a nice, what is it called, alliteration to it. Dr. D, that means. That's something that the Lord, you know, the Lord used. I had, I'm getting way off track here, ever since I can remember when I was a very, very young child, I wanted to get a doctorate. Well, the Lord has cured me of that desire. So it took a long time. We don't need to, this is a continuation of the point, we don't need to re-event the wheel when it comes to what it says in 2 Corinthians 10, 5, destroying every argument and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. Most every false position has been heard before and countered before, and many of the arguments raised by the church in the past in defense of orthodoxy are still as useful today as they were then. So there's no, it doesn't mean we can't refine them, it doesn't mean that we can't apply them to the exact situation today in subtle ways, but there's no reason to think that we need to throw exactly what you talked about earlier, chronological snobbery. There's no reason to try to come up with a new way of defeating an old heresy. So just some examples, historically, seeing how the past can help us. Some of the Christological heresies that have been refuted since the days of the early church. I just named three of them here. Docetism, the idea that Christ only seemed to be a man. This arose out of the very latest stages of the Christian faith. The New Testament era, this is the kind of things that John was writing about in his epistles, this idea of proto-Gnosticism, that Christ only seemed to be a man, the idea that the material world itself is evil. Therefore, how could Christ have actually been a man? Because that would have been putting on a cloak of evil, not being able to discern the difference between, that's the point of the virginal conception, that he did not have a flesh of sin, he had a fleshly body, but he did not have a sin nature. So this idea of docetism was being countered as early as the scriptural writings. Arianism, another Christological heresy, that Christ himself was a created being, not of the same nature as the Father. This was being fought in the fourth century by Athanasius. He argued that Christ was of the same nature or essence as the Father. That's the whole idea between the homoousios and the homoiousios, same nature or of similar nature, of like nature. And this is what the Jehovah's Witnesses believe about Christ. He was the first and foremost created being. So it's not a new heresy. It's as old as the beginnings of the church. Well, remember how the church spread, right? The church began in Israel among the Jews. So they had the scriptures. They had the knowledge of who God was. They just needed to be taught who the Messiah actually was. But the church rapidly expanded because of Paul's calling out into the Greek world, the Roman Empire, where most of them were Hellenistic. They knew Greek language, and they knew the Greek philosophers. And these ideas crept in from Greek philosophy. That's... Yeah, I knew that the Greeks could not conceive. They could understand the resurrection better than they could understand the Word becoming flesh. God actually becoming flesh. Right, right, right. Right. Right. Right. Yes. Yeah, there are absolutely there are absolutely Aspects of the Trinity that are veiled in the Old Testament that became clearer as Christ revealed the truth. Amen. Yeah, this is another off topic. I was just reading something. I won't get too much into this because I hope to be preaching on some of these topics soon. But I was reading an excellent book that talked about if you look at the, scriptural passages from the Hebrew Bible that are read in the synagogues today, the annual, they have a calendar. Think about the Catholic church still has, and probably the Lutheran church too, they still have a catechetical calendar or a liturgy, but the liturgical calendar, that's what I mean. The passages skip from the end of Isaiah 52 directly to Isaiah 54, the most, I should have said, the clearest messianic passage there is in all of the Old Testament is skipped. Well, why is that? Well, the response from rabbis is, well, not every prophet, you know, we don't read all of every prophet. Okay. It's open to misunderstanding because that's the servant Israel is talking about. But they actually skip that passage, right? But that also happens to be what Jews who have been converted will say is the passage that converted them when they saw what... All this time in synagogue, they'd never heard this passage. So isn't it interesting how... So back on topic, sorry about that. Another Christological heresy, modalism or civilianism, the idea that the Father and the Son and of course the Spirit as well, are just different names or different modes of the same God. This was something else that was fought by Athanasius. It's one of the worst examples of trying to explain the Trinity that you'll often hear this in Orthodox churches of people trying to explain the Trinity. And they're actually, what they're doing is they're talking about modalism, which is a heresy. I could be a father, a husband. Exactly. The United Episcopal Church of Modalism, Jesus only people. Yes. Who is the big guy in that movement? T.D. Jakes. Yeah, there it is. Yeah. And they're a heretic. It is, it's really sad to say. And I, several years ago when I took a Sunday, an adult Sunday school through James White's book on the forgotten Trinity, I remember a couple asking me, because there is a Jesus only church here in Minot, a fairly prominent one. And I remember them asking me, does this mean you're saying that they're heretics? And I was not as clear then as I would be now. Absolutely, if you profess that God is not triune, you are outside of Orthodox Christianity, because that is simply the way he has revealed himself. That's the way Christ revealed the Father and the Spirit to us. So yeah, I would not be hesitant to say that, that that is a heretical belief. Oh, so yeah, I just mentioned here, it was fought by Athanasius, but it reared its head again among 18th century British Baptists. So it had to be countered again by John Gill, for example. So these heresies, they come up, they come back again. And for us today, there's simply no excuse. We have so much good access to history and documents. And I mean, you can look up, this isn't exactly the same thing, but I'm just giving you an example. Any one of you has online access to all of the papyri and parchments and documents that were ever found of the New Testament. the Center for the Transmission of the New Testament, I think it's called. I don't think I have it quite right, but it's very close to that. You can actually go online and look at them yourselves. There's no excuse for us to be ignorant of history in these days. And of course, you all have read here, have you read 1984 yet? Okay, yeah, so every one of us knows what happened in 1984 with George Orwell describing about how important it was to be rewriting history. Why? So you don't learn from the past. Wasn't it Alex Huxley? Then there's another kind of ignorance where all of this, like he said, is available. But nobody has the impetus or the desire to even look at it. So they don't confiscate your books. They don't hide things online. Culture's so dumbed down and so vain, they just don't even look at it. I've done a better job of this over the past few years, and partly it's just because I'm busier than I was, but I've done a better job of avoiding getting into every possible argument online. And I saw an old friend of mine, that I still consider a friend, but I know he's not a believer, talking about how you know, information is the key. Somebody who still thinks after 20 years of the internet, that information is still the key, simply has not understood human nature. Yeah, because, because we, we have proven, I think, without a doubt, that lack of information was not the problem with humanity over the past 25 years. I think we've proven that. So, you know, the rest of what I've got here are just more examples of how looking at history can help us address the present. Patrick, when I was preaching three years ago, St. Patrick's Day happened to fall on a Sunday, so I did a message on Patrick. And seeing his passion and his theology for missions, and Patrick was in the 4th to 5th century, very early on in the early church. And he was way over on the western edge of the Roman Empire. So you can imagine that not a lot had necessarily gotten to that area. Once he was converted, and this, I'm just really skimming the highlights here, once he was converted, he was desperately committed to evangelizing the lost, even going back to the people that had been his captors and spending the rest of his life evangelizing the people and the tribes who had kept him captive for, I think, five to seven years or something like that. So another point, he thought that Ireland was literally the end of the earth, because as far as they knew, there was nothing past, there was nothing west of Ireland. And you can imagine, right? It wasn't until 1100 years later that Europe realized there were lands farther west of that. So in his mind, he actually was fulfilling, he was obeying and fulfilling the Great Commission. And his passion for that sparked more missions on the continent by his followers and converts after his death. Not so much at the time, but after his death, it was his followers that continued to practice missionary evangelism on the European continent. He learned the language of the locals. We saw that later with Hudson Taylor in China. That was very important to him, dressing like the locals, learning their languages. He lived and suffered among them. And you see, out of that, you see later a similar heart. I just said this, I guess. A similar heart demonstrated by William Carey and Andrew Fuller, Hudson Taylor. This was the movement in evangelism in the 18th century, born out of Jonathan Edwards' theology. When you talk about missionaries like these, Carey and Owen Hudson and those, Back when I was a kid and we had day-to-day vocation Bible school, I remember one year we had a really good teacher and we studied these missionaries. It's like a missionary biography lesson. And now, I hope it's getting better, but GBBS is all about fun and games and just, you know, it's not... I just happen to think about how it's degenerated. In that context, right, we saw the similar opposition to Cary and Fuller and their plan from the, they had to create their own missionary society in order to fulfill what they thought God called Christians to do. Patrick experienced the same opposition. Nobody thought he should go back to the, he had just escaped. Why on earth would he go back? He had vision. He was saying, go back here. The voice, yes. And even this, Didn't they kind of hang on to some of the ancient languages while the rest of the modern world had forgotten them all? because he had such a passion and inflamed in the people of Ireland such a passion for the languages, right? You see that borne out again, that same post-Reformation period with Archbishop Usher. I mean, he was certainly a beneficiary of the Irish legacy left by Patrick. And as we, I think we talked about this last week, but you know, this, even this idea teaches us anyone, anyone who tells you that Calvinists are against evangelism, they just don't know their church history because most of, in the Baptist world, most of the revered heroes of evangelism and world missions were Calvinists. Cary, Fuller, Hudson Taylor, George, George Mueller. Yep, yep. And then 1100 years after Patrick, right after the New World was discovered, and about a century after that, the pilgrims in England fled religious persecution in Britain for the new world, thinking it was literally the new Israel. So this had a similar idea, right? They had a vision for what was there. It wasn't really accurate. Just like Patrick thought, this is the last land to be conquered with the gospel. It wasn't quite accurate. He didn't know. That's all right. I've got a few other things listed here, and then I'll talk about something that I didn't put on your papers, but I was thinking about today after I had printed them, so I'll mention that. Just thinking about Luther and the Reformation, I mean, Luther's knowledge of church history and just studying the documents of the papal councils and the papal bulls that allowed him to see just how often the popes and councils had disagreed with each other and helped him see there's good reason to sometimes come to different conclusions about things. what happened in Munster. I'm not an expert on this. You can listen to other people talk about what happened in Munster, but that was the original Anabaptist commune. That was their idea of, it was the location of God's kingdom on earth. It was radically anti-establishment, communal living under authoritarian control. Where have you heard that before? They're like the forerunner of a lot of the cults that we see today. Go ahead. Well, I did not know that the church that I grew up in and the church that we now attend came from the Anabaptists, the North American Baptist Church. I'm sure that's right, because most Baptists get their history wrong, so it wouldn't surprise me. I feel like we've had this discussion before. The only person in our church that I know that really studies things told us that. Sure. And that actually would be, it would be, I mean, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't surprise me if it were true. But as you said, There are, I mean, people think that all of the Baptists came out of the Anabaptist movement, which is simply not true. You can't, again, you have to ignore all of British Baptist history to think that. And even most of the colonies, the history in the colonies. They were. They were. And so were the particular Baptists. All of the Baptists were persecuted by the ones that, not only the Anglican Church, but the Scotch Presbyterian Church and the, you know, I'm sure that Geneva was not, didn't look fondly on Baptists. There weren't very many of them. Sure. Even just looking, you know, we don't have to just talk about people, but what about the idea of the concept of martyrdom? That was a commonplace concept in the early church and in many places around the world today. You can go back and read the writings of Ignatius of Antioch. You can read the writings of Polycarp. These are men that are just beyond the end of the scriptural period. Polycarp was a disciple of John. but it's uncommon, it's been uncommon in our culture. Why is that? This is a question that church historian Michael Haken asks in his church history classes. It's worth asking the question why, because you can make an argument based on 1 Corinthians 13 three, and the kind of things that Paul lists when he's talking about you can have all these things, and if you don't have love, you're nothing. And everything he lists in there are examples of spiritual gifts. And then he says you can offer your body to be burned in the fire. So you could make a pretty good case for martyrdom to be considered a spiritual gift. And normative almost. And why has it been absent in our culture? We don't need to get into that detail. Can you just not tease us and give us his name? No, he just said it's worth asking why. He never did give an answer. It's worth asking that question. I'm sure there are a lot of opinions that we could have about that. in other places in the world, absolutely, absolutely. Well, and talking to each other, like some of the early Brits that were translating the Bible into English that were burned at the stake and speaking to each other as they were under, you know. Yep, yep. Master Ridley. Yes, yes, exactly. And now something that I did not put on your sheet, because I just thought of it today after I'd printed them out, as I said. This was incredibly eye-opening for me and very helpful. I took a class a couple years ago on the Sermon on the Mount. And in that class, both the professor, his name is Jonathan Pennington, talked about this, but he also had us read a book called, I think I put it on your, maybe I haven't put it on your list. It's called The Sermon on the Mount Through the Centuries. and it's a collection of essays that simply discuss the different ways that the Sermon on the Mount has been interpreted throughout the history of the church. And we're talking at least 10 to 11 different ways that you can imagine the Sermon on the Mount has been a pretty popular passage. So this is Jesus' words to the people, you know, this, this, this, and it's quite possibly not all one sermon delivered all at once. It's quite possible it was a collation of many of the things that he said. But almost a dozen ways over the course of church history that this has been interpreted. And I just find that very, very helpful because, again, just as I was talking in our biblical theology lessons about how easy it is to get confused If you've sat under this teacher who teaches this, and this teacher who teaches that, and the third teacher who teaches all these different, we can be absorbing ideas that don't cohere together. They make our understanding of Scripture inconsistent. So just to throw out a few of these, I'm not going to go through all of this. That's one of the reasons I didn't print out new sheets for everybody. One of them was the interim ethic view by Albert Schweitzer, which was to say the true end was about to come. And so Jesus was just providing a super radical way for his disciples to live because the end was coming. Then there was an entirely future view, which is to say that Jesus' intentions were not about... Sorry about that. Nice duck. They were not about this world. They were about the spiritual kingdom to come. Skipping a couple others here. I know the other very interesting one. This was the view of monasticism. Monasticism was, Monasticism itself was a response to this idea of, now that Christianity is actually accepted and preferred in the Roman Empire, which it eventually became, and we're not being persecuted for being Christians, how does a person actually live a godly life? That was a real question. That's how monasticism arose. And this monastic view of the Sermon on the Mount was that there's a double standard for Christians. There's everybody down here that has a standard to follow. And the Sermon on the Mount is for the super spiritual. And those were the monks and the clergy. The cardinal Christian. Right, right, right, right, yeah, that leads to that for sure. You can see how some of these ways of interpreting this affect the ways we think about other passages of scripture. There was an idea of the doctrine of two kingdoms that was put forth by Martin Luther. Martin Luther said, this is, it speaks to individual morality, but it has nothing to do with public policy. Well, you can see where that attitude has gotten, look at the church for the last 70 years and think about how similar the attitude was for a while about the scripture. Well, yeah, I mean, there is a little, I'm gonna talk about another view that actually is called the Lutheran view, but this was Luther's view, yeah, that this is just about personal, says nothing, this doesn't speak to the magistrate at all. So he introduced this new dichotomy in the Christian soul that didn't exist before. And even the Reformation fought that view. There's the extreme dispensationalist view that I mentioned a little bit when we were talking about dispensationalism. Sermon on the Mount just applied to the Jews at that time because God was still, the Christ was still here presenting himself to them as their savior and they rejected him. It doesn't have anything to do with the church because, yeah, exactly. What was the church lady on Saturday night like? How convenient. Then there is the other reading called a Lutheran reading that simply says, and I know, I might call this the Ray Comfort view. This is what Ray Comfort, when he evangelizes, is what he essentially is teaching, that the Sermon on the Mount is presenting an impossibly high standard. It's to prove to you that you can't keep the law. that you are a lawbreaker. Even if you've never committed adultery, you've committed adultery in your heart. Even if you've never murdered anyone, you've murdered people in your heart. So it's simply to demonstrate that you are a lawbreaker and you need the gospel. And speaking of the gospel, there is a modern liberal reading that simply says the Sermon on the Mount is the gospel. It's all about social justice. It's all about how you give to the poor. And it's all about how that is the gospel itself. And there are ethical views. So you can see how If you, as I said, this was eye-opening for me. This helped me so much in understanding, oh, I've heard this one before. I've heard that one before. I've heard this one before. And so they're not all compatible with each other, but seeing how the history has developed helps us to then, okay, now I can assess it fresh, seeing how the church over the centuries has addressed it in the past. And you could go, I mean, as far as topics in historical theology, a solid church historian could just go on for months like this. This list could go endlessly. One of the neatest things about this, doing this series, is it really allows me to see, and you, if you're paying any attention, where my strengths and weaknesses are. Because I could go on forever about some of these topics. And some of these other topics, I'm like, well, let's see how I could beat this one up a little bit. Because otherwise, it's gonna be a really short lesson. I'm thankful that I was thinking about this on my drive today, because otherwise I wouldn't have even had this part here about the history of the thought of the Sermon on the Mount. But really, the key takeaway for me on this topic that I would want you to walk away from is whenever we're wrestling with any matter of doctrine or practice in the church, one question that we absolutely need to ask and examine is how has this been handled in the past? It doesn't mean we need to do exactly what's been done in the past, but we need to have examined how has this doctrine been handled? How has this heresy been handled? Has it been considered a heresy? How has this practice in the church been handled? And that's something that we should be definitely taking advantage of with all the information that we have. So I have a short list of suggested reading. Of course, Greg Allison's historical theology volume is, it's about as big as Grudem's systematic theology. If you actually wanted to read something that would just get you into thinking about church history, this is a little, definitely very readable book by Michael Haken, who I mentioned earlier, called Rediscovering the Church Fathers, Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church. Very readable. There's a section on Patrick in here. There's obviously sections on some others. I also, I do recommend that Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries doesn't necessarily mean they're all Orthodox. They can't all be right. All those views can't be right, but it's a helpful way of looking at the way the doctrine has, or the passage has been interpreted throughout centuries. And I also listed a four-volume set that someday I'd like to read, but I've noticed lately I haven't been reading the bigger volumes. I've been reading a lot of smaller ones just so I can get through them and get done. I mean, actually absorb what's in there. There is a British, well, he might be Scottish, I'm not sure, church historian named Nick Needham, who has a four-volume set called 2,000 Years of Christ's Power, which I've heard very excellent things about. Questions? We are done with our trunk and our stakes, and we will move into the areas of ministry that lie in the branches and produce fruit starting next week. I've been so frustrated with different pastors over the years that just refuse to speak anything about church history because they just think they're going to, you know, that the whole congregation is just going to fall asleep and, you know, they don't have any interest and it's boring. And it's fascinating, I think. And it's not that you have to have a whole sermon on church history, but little bits here and there, just the saints who have gone before us and people that just, were willing to be pulled apart, literally, in order to worship without taking Mass. You know, things that would just seem so trivial to us. Or for the sake of putting the Scripture into their own language, the languages of the common people. But I'm thinking about the Euconots that just refused to worship according to their own way. And, yeah, I mean, they were tortured and killed. They never did back down. And, you know, pastors that would be sent to the galleys or beheaded and you know the women with their wives locked up in a tower yeah or carrying their bloody corpses and still strong in the faith i mean it's just incredible what kind of things they went through and here we're just can't hardly And so willing to compromise, speaking of the church today, with John Bunyan. So that was just, he was a non-conformist. And he didn't have to do anything with Roman Catholicism. He just had to not preach as an unauthorized, non-American minister, to take care of his blind 10-year-old daughter. How many years? 11, 12 years in prison because he wouldn't do that and could have been released like that and wouldn't do it. And then we bow down to social justice, COVID and every other thing. We should be ashamed of ourselves. I'm serious. I've never even made this connection before. I've thought about this for a long time, but I've never made the same connection to just thinking about it in terms of church history. But there's never been anything in my 25 plus years since my conversion that has been even remotely as encouraging and uplifting to me as reading about martyrs for the faith. That or I'm thinking specifically about Bunyan, I'm thinking about even some of the Chinese Christians in the last hundred years, thinking about Richard Wurmbrand and Haralan Popov, you know, the people that lived in Eastern Europe when the communists came through, there's just nothing that has grown my faith like reading about the martyrs of the faith. Because it's the ultimate. So if you have that fixed, you can bear hopefully anything up to that. And when the time comes, that Or simply, I was thinking of Bunyan, but it was because I was thinking about his passage in the Pilgrim's Progress when he's talking about going through Vanity Fair and the martyrdom of faithful there. Yes. I heard a story, I think it was this morning, about some of these later heroes of the faith that kept some of the seminaries true to the gospel. And I don't, I can't remember his name, man was trying to get Bunyan out of prison and he tried everything in the world that he could do and he just never could get him out and afterwards And so this fellow said he was so glad that he was not successful in getting him out of prison. Yes. Yeah. And Jonathan Edwards wrote many of his best works once he got thrown out of Northampton. He was out there with the Indians. David Brainerd. He was thrown out of Yale for saying a professor had as much grace as a chair because he didn't believe he was regenerative. So all of these bad, dark promises turn out to be good. Amen. And then what you were saying, that should be a lesson. They thought they were at the ends of the road. So they were mistaken. Didn't matter. That's right. Absolutely. And how much, just because he was mistaken in his interpretation, it still drove him to obey the commands of God. Yes. Blessed mistake. Amen. Amen. Well, let's spend some time in prayer.