Alright, so I'm just loosely calling it, which I changed the name, I'm calling it Barbarians, Missionaries, Monarchs, Popes, and Monks, just to cover all the different people, you know, during that time. And it might be that era of church history, in fact, world history, that, you know, I know it's not covered in high school, and it's not because it's boring, because there's so many of our movies, like even Lord of the Rings, which isn't about this era, Yet it uses this kind of backdrop, even though it's fantasy writing. It doesn't bore anybody. It's not that. It's that we don't want to cover this era. For two reasons. Number one, the Enlightenment started to call this the Dark Ages. which you can really only call about two centuries during this time. Legitimately, we call it the Dark Ages. That was a bit of rationalistic modernist propaganda that secular historians generally regard to be just a bunch of PR for the Enlightenment. And the other reason is, I already covered this last week, the first through the fourth century is an inconvenient bunch of information if you're not a Christian. And in the 19th century, especially in the 1830s and 40s on the American frontier, that ignorance started to create a bunch of new Christianities, where if you go to your phone book in the church section now, 90% of the churches are going to come out of the frontier of the 1830s, where the cry was to get back to the Bible beyond all the different centuries of Popedom and Constantine-ism and creeds and confessions and systematic theology. In other words, everything that's abusive and embarrassing about church history because, of course, in the fourth century at Nicaea, there's the smoke-filled room where Christianity was created and stuff like that. And all that mythology about, we don't know what happened in the first three or four centuries, that's why it's not covered, beginning with the whole scene in the first century and the empty tomb. That's not covered because it's embarrassing for the seculars. There's a lot to hide. And then because they hide that through the magic of self-fulfilling prophecy, there's a lot of things that are hidden because they hid it. they saw fit not to cover it. And then you have a whole race of people in the West that are wondering what happened and saying, well, it's hidden. Well, you chose not to look at it. So by that, we don't really know what happened in the first couple centuries because it's something we simply don't study. It's something that's forced on us in the plantation school system and in fact in the churches as well. They're not very helpful because that theology fits their theology. So We're covering it, and obviously there's some things here that you might find interesting, but that you realize you've only really ever heard of once or twice and you didn't really look at it. As I said, it's really the only era that can rightly be called the Dark Ages, namely the 5th and 6th centuries, and a little bit into the 7th. But during this time, I have this in your big idea, the light of God's providence was reorganizing the map while sinful man's politics, so man's politics are in a collision course with God's providence. From a Christian perspective, God's providence is the thing that's moving the chessboard. From an unbelieving historical perspective, it looks like man's politics is moving the chessboard. Certainly, we're going to talk about a bunch of players, as we have been, that see this as their chessboard moving pieces, but from a Christian perspective, God's providence is reorganizing the map that's under their feet. So while they're doing things according to sinful motivations, really redefining the definition of the church by a secular, physical, nationalistic, eventually, nationalism really isn't there at this time, but by secular kingdoms, they're moving these pieces around, but really God is still showing himself to be the Lord of his church by moving the much larger ground beneath their feet. So the first few centuries after the coming of Christ are conspicuously missing from our history classes. and perhaps it would be helpful to fill out the landscape of the people groups in these territories. We already know about the Romans, we've covered them to death, and they do get covered in history and college and wherever else. But to the far north, we see the first Celtic people dominating the whole of the north as far east to the Rhine in the centuries before Christ. So if you look, if this map was before Christ, the first three centuries, the Celts would be all the way to here. Sometimes the Gaelic people, and in fact the Galatians, who wind up over here. A lot of people believe that they migrated during that time. They dominate the map at that time. After Christ, the Germanic peoples. In fact, everything, all the different barbarians that you hear about, with the exception of the Hans, they're all Germanic peoples. And they come from this whole area around the Baltic Sea, the southern tip of the Scandinavian peninsula. They start migrating in the first century after Christ and they diffuse into all those different barbarian groups. So before Julius Caesar had marched his forces to Britannia in the first century before Christ, the Germanic people had driven them back to the British Isles. Then by the turn of the second century, the Celts would be beaten back to Ireland and then eventually you have Hadrian's Wall in the second century, kind of dividing the map here. so that you have sort of a Roman outpost over there at that time. But anyway, after Christ, you see these people are absolutely beaten back this way and the only people over here are the Germanic people. What's happening in the first two centuries is the Roman... it's not the Romans trying to be a bunch of imperialists anymore, they would if they could, but at this point they're just beating back the barbarians coming in. And we call them barbarians loosely, they did have a culture of their own. uh... there was a bunch of people eating turkey legs out of the tent you know uh... not bathing themselves, I mean just have this idea that uh... Of course, they have their own mythology of how wonderful they were, and every people group does, but they weren't barbarian in the sense that they didn't have tools. Obviously, they had tools of warfare. It wasn't just that they were outmanning the Romans. In fact, the Roman armies, most of them, by this point, the Roman armies here, here, and here, they were mercenaries from these people groups. So, they're not just a bunch of cavemen that were just, you know, in complete hair until the Romans got there and shaved them. I mean, that's just a bunch of mythology. But anyway, by the middle of the 5th century, you have all these different groups. Again, they're German people groups. Alamans, Burgundians, in fact, Burgundy right here comes from that name. The Lombards, the Franks, the Vandals and Goths, and then eventually when the Goths come here, they split into the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, just for your you're listening to Enjoyments, that's where they came from. The Ostrogoths were more the people that were closer to the Russian frontier, what would now be Russia, and the Visigoths were the ones that migrated into Spain. So I tried to keep that, I didn't put every migration because it's obviously starting to look like a John Madden telestrator after a really bad play here. So I just put the Goths and the Franks coming here and the Vandals, what we've already seen when Augustine was the Bishop of Hippo, they came in and organized the map in northern Africa with their Aryan Christianity. And that's crucial, is that this people group was Aryan. Because not only had Arius been exiled over here, but a guy named Ulphia who had been sanctioned by, you may not remember, Eusebius of Nicomedia, one of the main players for Constantine, had sent Ulphia up with his own Aryan Bible. So he translated into their Germanic tongue and it became known as the Ulphian translation of the Bible, but it was pretty much Aryan. And I don't know if that means that they had study notes that were, you know, Aryan doctrine and stuff like that, but they became the Aryan Christians. So naturally, when they came down, they brought their Aryan brand of Christianity with them. But they encompassed what was left of the Roman Empire by that time. The Goths had the strongest political structures and actually had diplomatic relationships with Constantinople. In fact, one of the reasons they were kept at bay as long as they were because, who was it? Was it Theodosius? Yeah, Theodosius had a Germanic wife. So there was already what you would have written, you know, eventually, you see it everywhere in world history, people intermarrying with other people. So if I marry your sister, at least you'll stay off my back because we'll have an alliance with this kingdom. And that's pretty much what happened with Theodosius, is he took this wife who was Germanic, and they had diplomatic relationships. so that they didn't come down. But that whole time that we've been looking at from Diocletian, before Christianity became legal, all the way to Theodosius, the beginning of the 5th century, the Germanic tribes were making inroads. They were winning victories. They were already here and here and here. And what was happening in that whole century is that they were beating back these German forces and they would often take towns and they only left because they needed more forces, their supply lines were were low and stuff like that. So if those armies by Diocletian and Constantine and Theodosius, if they had not beaten these guys back and they had invaded a century earlier, Christianity would be totally different. It might be Aryan. throughout the Middle Ages because these Aryans would have defeated them before Nicaea, before Constantinople, before all these different councils, Ephesus. A lot of those councils may have never happened, a lot of those alliances in the church may never have happened, and theologians may not have been writing that theology because the Aryan tribes would have inhabited that land a century earlier. So again, more of the providence of God there. But in this period, history shows us yet again that the Word is what conquers physical steel. As, for example, the Franks suppressed the Roman peoples out there in what would eventually become France. They suppressed Roman structures, Roman political things, and yet these people of Germanic origin became Roman in their cultural norms. And we're going to talk about a guy named Clovis in just a second, who's their chieftain who converts to Christianity. But you see this again and again. The Romans conquered Greek and Jewish people groups and political structures, but Rome eventually or immediately became Greek and then eventually the Judeo-Christian worldview inhabited it. There was never any Roman civilization apart from Greek civilization or Judeo-Christian civilization. Rome came in with their steel but immediately was converted by the people they were converting. So everywhere in history you see this. The people who are barbarians that wind up beating other people are eventually, pretty quickly actually, conquered by the superior idea. The superior idea is what conquers and shapes the next civilization, not the steel or the political structures. That's crucially important. That's a Christian idea and it's an idea that the church has largely abandoned, especially in the last 10-20 years. So it's important to see this in church history, to see this is what moves people. But anyway, this Frankish chieftain Clovis, let me write his name down, he's important just because he's an example of this happening. He conquered the Roman provinces of northern Gaul and this is early turn of 6th century here, and he saw that in order to move south he would have to strike an alliance with the Catholic Church, and many in the West at least believed that he experienced a genuine conversion to the faith in 493. But the alliance with the Church of Rome was something that was whispered in his ears by many advisors in and out of his circle. And so he formed this alliance by marrying a Catholic princess, having his men baptized, and projecting the cause of suppressing the Alamans and Visigoths as a war against Arianism. So he had to conquer all these different groups in here, including the Visigoths. They were Aryan. And so he got a lot of this support from all the different Catholic tribes and people groups by saying that we have to defeat Aryanism. And eventually all the different groups that came from him in his dynasty were anti-Aryan. So, you see alienism come in here, but the reality is they got defeated culturally and militarily pretty quickly throughout the next century. So, alienism as a dominant majority really only lasted for a hundred years in most of these places. But it marks the beginning of how Catholic Christianity preempted an Aryan Europe only by making itself increasingly secular. You're going to see this throughout these middle centuries, is that Catholicism wins a lot of these battles, a lot of shrewd leadership, but in doing so they make Catholicism increasingly secular and tied to the state. So in this moment of darkness, this is what you can legitimately call the Dark Ages. Late 5th century, to early 6th century. At this moment, alien Christianity and a lingering paganism still predominated. So again, consider how different church history would be if the likes of Diocletian, just before Christianity was legalized, and Constantine and Theodosius had not held the northern tribes back for a hundred years and more prior. Most of the military campaigns throughout the 4th century were meant to do just that. I've talked about a little bit of that already. One more barbarian group that came in, and these are the guys that brought all these other guys together. The one group that all the barbarians recognized as more barbarian than themselves were the Huns. And historians are not exactly agreed where they even come from. The dominant view is that, you know, sort of Mongolian, the outer group of people that were, you know, didn't really succeed in conquering China. So they eventually migrated this way and came from this area in here. And so they would band together to try to stop them. And they didn't really ever eventually take over Europe, but there was a lot of destruction and they were, by European standards, even at the time, they were genuinely barbarian. But they migrated into Europe around 370. They pretty much became irrelevant by the 6th century. And they're worth mentioning only because there was a barbarian group that was not Germanic that came in that everybody banded together to keep them out. But here's the pattern. Barbarians were moving in and missionaries were moving out. That's not just a historical fact, that's a phenomenon. And you see it go all the way back to biblical times. This is not a fundamentally different reality than we've already seen in the early persecution of the church. The Christian faith and its faithful are pressured, and that refinement scatters the seed. You see that going back to Acts chapter 8 with the Jerusalem church. They're persecuted, scattered, and therefore they do their evangelism. You see it in the centuries of martyrdom and that statement by Tertullian that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Well here we are in this era that's post persecution, except it's not. Everything we're seeing is persecution against the true church. And oftentimes, not oftentimes, but the majority of times the church ever does anything real and scatters and spreads its message is that God seems to use the enemy bringing pressure on the real church to make them scatter. And that is exactly what's happening here in these barbarian invasions of largely Aryan or completely unbelieving groups that come into the church. Before I get to missions, I know that was only a little bit, but I thought it was worth setting up the scoreboard there. Any questions at all about the barbarians or these centuries or the Dark Ages? Stuff like that. Alrighty then. So, let's talk about the light that comes out of that darkness. Because God is, in a sense, using darkness, using this pressuring, coalescing, internally moving darkness that is real darkness. I don't mind the expression Dark Ages as long as you can find it to the barbarian end. So let me be specific here about what the Rationalists and the Enlightenment were doing when they started to call this the Dark Ages and you see historians even as early as Will Durant who was a total enemy of Christianity So 1930s and 40s already correcting this idea of the Dark Ages. I remember reading this in Will Durant's story of civilization. He made the point that the Dark Ages, you really, the impression that was given ever since the 18th century, that the Dark Ages was like not even 410, but we'll just call it that 410, 450, these two very particular invasions of Rome all the way to if you ask them, 1799, you know, the French Revolution, but I'll just put that in there. I mean, the impression is given, or at least, at least the 1500s with the Renaissance. In other words, the whole age of reason is what brought us what this civilization prior to this and this civilization after this, modern European civilization and Greco-Roman civilization, classical civilization, what they had in common is the quest for reason and the age of faith. In other words, The Dark Ages is a synonym for the Age of Faith, i.e. superstition, mysticism, and witchcraft, and burning people, because that's what that leads to immediately. Okay, so the impression is given that the Dark Ages, the essence of the Dark Ages, the essence of the darkness, was adherence to Christianity. And you're still sort of given that on a popular level, that impression still lingers, even though secular historians, as early as the 20th century, as they studied the Middle Ages more and more, realized that the only darkness there was, was the burning of libraries and the destruction of classical civilization that was brought about by, A, these barbarian invasions, than the Persians before the Muslims. A century and a half before the Muslim invasions you had Persian invasions who heard about all this discord in the West and immediately started attacking and Justinian had to put them down and we'll get to that. But then eventually the Muslims in the 7th century burning the library in Alexandria advancing here advancing all the way here by the 13th, 14th, and 15th century but at least toppling the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Anyway, that's what led to darkness. It had nothing to do with Christianity. It was Christian monks, as we'll see, that preserved that civilization in their scriptoriums and in their monasteries in general. So that's just an idea of what's at stake in this whole Dark Ages mythology. How far did the gospel travel east? There's legends, there's always been legends, that Thomas, or Thomas and Bartholomew, established the church in India. But what began as a groundless legend is usually dragged out today by conspiracy theorists and is motivated by a debunking campaign that sort of wants to say that Gnostic Christianity, because when you hear Thomas, now you think of Gnosticism, the Gospel of Thomas and so on, and that's what was brought to India and therefore real Christianity, that was suppressed by the evil Westerners, was brought to India. The reason you don't see it there is because it was just perfectly coalesced with Hinduism and real humble human thinking anyway, so of course you wouldn't see it. It just perfectly went with India. But more likely, around 190, Pantheists of Alexandria planted the Indian Church. Those churches came into their own by the fourth century. And Alexandria also exported to India a man named Cosmas, who rejected his bishop, we mentioned Theophilus last week, the Bishop of Alexandria, who was in a line of very intolerant bishops, but he rejected his hard-lined monophysitism, in other words, his doctrine of Christ that really stressed the one nature, monophysis. He rejected that idea and tried to emphasize the humanity of Christ, and he took that idea with him to India. So he really put the stamp of what is today referred to as Nestorian Christianity, Nestorian Christology. Last week we mentioned that the difference between Nestorianism and Monophysitism is that Nestorianism really emphasizes the humanity of Jesus, the full humanity, so much so that these two natures are always in parallel lines to be kept distinct forever. Well, if you use the word distinct, that's absolutely true. But if you say that one doesn't have priority over another, then you're really not talking about two distinct natures so much as two persons. And so Nestorianism divorces the two natures of Christ, and that is rightly a Christological heresy. But in any event, that became the dominant idea of Christ that showed up in the Arabian Peninsula and in India. By the way, Islam is a Christian heresy. Most of what came from, they were taught by Christians, namely Nestorians, who Christ was. When you listen to, and we'll talk about this more next week, but when Islam, in their own scriptures in the Quran, talks about Christ, they talk about him in Docetic terms and Nestorian terms. So they were taught by heretical Christians that moved south to explain to them what Christianity was. So that's just a little more mythological debunking for you. The great spearhead missionaries to the north were St. Patrick in Ireland. These I listed out in your notes. Patrick in Ireland, Columba or Columbanus in Scotland, And actually he got a lot of mileage. He kind of planted Christianity in a lot of different places going all the way to Italy. So he was an impressive guy. We'll talk about him later. Boniface in Germany, Ansgar in Scandinavia, Cyril and Methodius among the Slavic races. All those we're going to see by the time Gregory the Great sends out his famous mission of Augustine. In fact, we'll call this Augustine, Augustine, just because it'll help us. Because I always call Augustine, Augustine. So this Saint Augustine of Canterbury was a different guy altogether who we'll talk about. But he wasn't really the spearhead of Christianity in England. There was already a bishop there in Canterbury. And of course, Patrick and Columbanus and another guy named Adrian, before Patrick, had already been in Ireland spreading Christianity. So, he wasn't the first guy to get there. So, we'll talk about him when we talk about monks. What became of the movements of that most ugly 5th century split that we talked about last week? Namely, the split between Monophysites and Nestorians. And all the troublemakers were in Alexandria, and Nestorius came from Antioch, and Constantinople is right here. the capital of the empire and the council in Chalcedon in 451 that put the smackdown on both extremes and gave us the doctrine of Christ that all evangelicals are supposed to agree to now and yet there's a neo Nestorianism that is given platform by people like InterVarsity Press in the writings of N.T. Wright and others It really comes out of 19th century liberal theology and the quest for the historical Jesus, so pressing the humanity of Jesus. It's more of a deconstructive effort to accuse the whole church that came out of Chalcedon of making Jesus into this demigod that strolls through the world never wrestling with his vocation, his humanity, never questioning who he is and stuff like that. And so it's more of an accusation against Christendom that the Christianity that came out of Chalcedon makes him a divine figure that's not human in any sense. That is a caricature so dumb. that you have to wonder about the scholarship. I don't believe that they... well, I think you become so deluded in your academic delusion that you actually do believe stuff that's obviously that dumb to people who read the record and read the theologians coming out of Chalcedon that very much always stress the humanity of Christ. But at any rate, those are the two different extremes. Monophysitism, those that believe, especially in Alexandria, that Christ is one nature, so that in the incarnation the humanity is pretty much eradicated, pretty much sucked up into the divine, versus the Nestorians that, as I already told you, the humanity pretty much is so emphasized that they're divorced to natures. Chalcedon was saying he's fully divine, fully human. He's a divine person, eternally, that takes on flesh and there's a communication of his attributes to the whole person of Christ. Okay, but they're two distinct natures. The doctrine of the two natures is the kind of Christianity that came out of Chalcedon. It was already there, but they had to answer these two different extremes. Okay, so there's the players and there's where they were at this time. What became of those two kinds of Christianities? Because when you hear people complain today, I think of a book by Philip Jenkins called Jesus Wars and another one called Lost Christianities. Philip Jenkins is very much, he's a British church historian, I think he's a good historian, he writes a book called The Next Christendom. Piper, among others, has recommended that book. I think it's a good book, and I think Jenkins is a good historian, but Jenkins does sort of jump on the bandwagon of those who want to plead with us to consider those two other Christianities, Asian Christianity and African Christianity. It's a good enough plea, they were there, they were wiped out, but the impression is given that Western Christianity is the one that wiped them out. In fact, Islam is what wiped them out, and heretical beliefs that their patriarchs embraced that diffused their ability to stick together. So yes, there were vibrant Christian communities, as we'll see, in Africa and Asia, but there were reasons that have, in a sense, nothing to do with Latin Christendom that they were wiped out. So, there is a Nestorian Christianity which survives to the present day. After Nestorius himself was condemned and died in 350, the movement... 350? It's 450. I'll write that in my notes even though I'll never read this again, but I don't know why I put that. Anyway, 450, the movement focused mainly in Syria and then spread southeast into Persia. with movements also running eastward to India and China. So there's a lot of inscriptions in China at this time of a Nestorian Christianity that moves eastward very rapidly. And so we're supposed to give them kudos because they stretched over so much land. Well, that's great. That's fine. But again, Latin Christianity didn't wipe them out and come and kill them and stuff like that and steal their children. It's just sort of suggested that that's the kind of thing that was going on. When the Byzantine Emperor Zeno, and he was right before all those Justinian in the 6th century, but what he did is he shut down Nestorian schools in 489, but the Nestorians simply moved further east and were more able to carry out a program of persevering, or sorry, their texts and training priests from that place. It doesn't really matter where it was, but it was a guy named Severus that pretty much became their main monk. I've already erased stuff. Why does it look like that? Huh. Let me draw that back up. Anyway, so here's Constantinople. It's the capital of the East. The Nestorians are going this way. Why are the Nestorians going this way? Because they are being persecuted by the Monophysites, who the West has condemned. So are the Nestorians being driven out by persecution? Yes, but not by the Orthodox. Now, how do they have the power to do this? Well, because the court, after Theodosius, are, and by this time they start to be called, the mia pleistocene. It's a nicer Greek word, because now you're not focusing on one nature only, and I'm not that stupid to think it's just one nature and the human nature has nothing to do with anything, but mia is the Greek word for exclusively one. Okay, so it's a more subtle, it's a more complimentary title for them. So they started to go by that word. And, not Theodosius, Justinian's wife was a neophyte sympathizer. And she funded missions, and she funded this one guy in particular, Severus, to train bishops throughout the land. and they have this school here, and they kicked out the Nestorians, and they just kept moving further and further and further east. Okay, so again, let me stress this, these are the two heretical extremes that didn't have any ground anywhere, not just in the Latin West, but in Alexandria, and oftentimes in Antioch, but Antioch and east and in Syria, in that region, they were predominantly holding on to this Antiochian Nestorian divided Christ kind of Christianity. So these are two heretical extremes warring against each other. Latin Christendom, what came out of Nicaea, and Chalcedon had absolutely nothing to do with that whatsoever. There's also a Miaphysite community in Ethiopia, which basically returned to much of the Jewish traditions. Miaphysite, again, became a more suitable word than the condemned monophysite for public relations purposes. I already explained to you why. And oftentimes they would refer to their opponents, not just as Nestorians, but diophysites, D-Y-O, physites, who in their minds were sellouts to the emperor's state religion. I talked about some of these other people already, so I'm not going to go into them again. Egypt, this whole region in northern eastern Africa, which pretty much runs off the chalkboard here, once you get below Egypt here, there was a kind of Nubian Christianity from Ethiopia, Sudan, that whole region in there. They spoke in a different language, Coptic, and a lot of times, again, some of these languages they were holding out because they were rebelling against Latin. Latin had pretty much taken over everywhere, and so if you were still speaking Punic or Coptic or Syriac. Oftentimes that would be, well that was because that was what your vernacular was, but it would become a form of rebellion against the official Latin language that was becoming the language of the church. Skip, skip, skip. That's not really that important. The cultural origins of these different Christianities, Asian and African, were eventually swept away by the Muslim invasions, not by any Latinized Christian imperialism. Under the Caliph Omar, the great libraries were torched in 640, and Coptic Christians have been bitterly persecuted down to the present day by the Islamic majority. As Christians pushed further east, they were more harshly persecuted by Zoroastrian heads of state before Islam ever came around. This was the case for the church that attempted to live in what is now Iraq. So they were persecuted from the beginning by pretty much everybody except for Latin Christians. If you hang around cemeteries or watch the History Channel today, the impression is given that they were driven out to their deaths by Latin Christians who were kind of over here. At any rate, this miaphysite form of the faith found its strongest expression across Syria as one Jacob Baradius aggressively raised up churches and pastors throughout the Middle East in the mid-6th century and began to spread the usage of the title Syriac Orthodox Church, claiming virtually all the great bishops of the East and seeing Chalcedon as the great lie that presumed to usurp true Christianity. In the geographical middle of the Miaphysite faith that dominated to their west in Nubia, present Egypt down to Sudan, and to their east across the sea in Arabia, Ethiopian Christianity could claim to go back to the eunuch spoken to by Philip. And it naturally followed the trend that followed from Alexandria through the Syrian missionary efforts. And its cardinal doctrine was the union of Christ into one nature. So again, you had Neophysites throughout this region downward and at the core, and then further out east you had the more split nature of Christ. But what eventually became the Eastern Orthodox Church, which we'll talk more about in a future week, was this one nature monophysite church, which eventually, of course we'll talk about that, how they spread eastward and northward to Russia and Greece and all those different places. I was going to do a separate section on this. Well, I guess I am after the break. Maybe I will do three sections today, because I was going to raise the question about Eastern Orthodoxy, but let's just do that. Let's just take a break and I might just do three shorter sessions. So, let's take a break and we'll come back and just ask questions for a second.