Now I'm going with more coffee. Okay, so we're still in England. I'm going to bounce around today, just because I want to keep the chronological thing going. So I'm going to do a little review of England, going from Elizabeth to James I to Charles I, and then I'm going to bounce over to this thing that is... I'm not going to treat the Thirty Years' War as significant in itself. This is not the Western Sith history class. I'm just going to talk about what was going on religiously at the time, and then we're going to bounce back here to see the Puritans briefly for a period of time, take over and all that went on with that. So just as a little bit of review, Elizabeth died in 1603 and James I took over. He was already James VI of Scotland. And he took the throne and a lot of people just assumed that he was, you know, he's from Scotland. He'll be a good Presbyterian. And of course, at that time, Presbyterian was just a synonym for Puritan and vice versa. For the most part, you weren't a Puritan unless you were a Presbyterian. There were a growing number of Congregationalists as well, Independents and so on. But the Puritans were pretty much at that time Because of popular, the works of Shakespeare and Johnson and others that really were not big fans of the Puritans, they really got a bad name and they were blamed for everything. Every conspiracy theory, every assassination attempt, everything was blamed on the Puritans. And as I mentioned last time in 1588, when the Spanish Armada was crushed by that storm, A lot of people, there were insignias and plates and like commemorative type things all over the empire that were saying it is a verse in Exodus 15 where God smashed them with his ways or something to that effect about Pharaoh. And people basically thought, well, man, if, if God is going to treat England like this and cast out the Catholics, well, then he must not be as bent out, you know, out of shape about the state of the English churches, those crazy Puritans are. And so everything really went against the Puritans. So, turn of the century, the Tudor dynasty was out and the Stuart dynasty was in, and as I said, they were pretty surprised when James had not been the friend of the Puritans that they thought he was going to be. He held a conference at Hampton Court in 1604 that really set the tone, where he stacked the deck with prelates and other enemies of the Puritans. And he, in his words, he peppered them soundly. He gave the Puritans basically the terms of the way it was going to be, and it wasn't in their favor. And of course, he threatened to imprison them and stuff if they preached any sermons to him. He actually One more point of review, just to give you an idea of what James was all about. He wrote a letter to his son in 1598 where he spoke of, quote, the preposterous humility of those proud Puritans claiming to their parody and crying, we are all but vile worms. And yet who will judge and give law to their king, but will be judged or controlled by none. So clearly, James confused himself with God, whom sinners were to give primal obedience to. In fact, James even said before Parliament in 1610, quote, if you will consider the attributes of God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a king. So historians actually even debate whether or not he was singing in the choir, so to speak. He was dressed very effeminately from a very early age, and he didn't really have any interest in girls. Of course, he did get married, but a lot of people thought that was just for political purposes. But it was even said in the streets of England at that time that Elizabeth was king, and now James is queen. And so it gives you an idea of a little bit about his makeup. So he appointed three bishops in Scotland to bring their Presbyterianism under control in 1610. He actually considered himself a Calvinist because in his view, Calvinism was all about the divine right of the king. The king, the earthly king, was God's chosen vessel and God's chosen man to represent him on the earth and so on. And he would be very much involved in the business of the Synod of Dort in 1618. But his masterstroke annoyance at the Puritans came by his writing of a declaration of sports that opposed their strict view of the Sabbath, and he even tried to force them to read it in the churches from their pulpit. That wasn't very successful, but his point was that he was going to be a menace to Puritans in every one of their beliefs. Now, he's most famous for issuing the King James Bible in 1611. often called the authorized version ever since, even though it hadn't really been officially authorized by any secular government. But in spite of having the best scholars of the day at their disposal, there was a debate over that in the battle. There's a debate down to our day about that, where people will say, well, they didn't have the manuscripts available that Tischendorf in Germany and Westcott and Hort did in the 19th century. And others, in return, will say, well, those guys were heretics. And they were sure they had more Greek manuscripts at their availability, but they did that in the context of 19th century liberal criticism and stuff like that. But anyway, I'm not going to solve that debate for you right now. King James is a perfectly good Bible. I personally prefer the ESV and one of us just for you know, not to be a stumbling block, if it's an accurate translation as the NASB and the ESVR, then I'd rather. I personally wouldn't recommend, now that we're on the subject, I wouldn't recommend really anything else besides those couple of translations. The NIB is fine, but You ever hear somebody say that they... I heard this a couple of years ago. It was one of the King James only type people who said, don't run to NIV because there's so many S sounds in it, the sound of the serpent. What are you talking about? I mean, there's shortcomings with the NIV, but at any rate, that's a rabbit trail, the King James. I mean, God blessed the translation, for sure, because the best missionary efforts in the modern world were from the English world, where the King James was very much useful in that sense. So, enough of that. James' final indifference to the Reformation came in his lack of desire to support the Protestant resistance in the Thirty Years' War back on the continent. Interestingly, it was his son-in-law, the King of Bohemia, who first fell to Catholic forces. So his affection was, in fact, his daughter was held hostage in the Hague and he sent her his love in letters, but didn't really send any other support. So just to give you an idea of who James, what he was all about. He was less interested in religion than Elizabeth was, but certainly he was more involved in it, really sticking it to all the people that would have been his best defenders for political purposes. His son, Charles I, took the throne in 1625, and he promptly married the daughter of Henry IV of France. So James married Anne of Denmark. It was a Lutheran country, and she was Lutheran. and she actually had Catholic sympathies and eventually converted to Catholicism. This gives you an idea that James and then Charles are very much in the Catholic camp pretty much right away. So really the only thing that's keeping England from going right back to Rome right away is their Protestant majority. So the rulers had to be careful how they set about that. Charles dissolved Parliament in 1629, beginning a period that was called his personal rule, and as I mentioned, he had even less interest in doctrine than James. So there's a regression from Elizabeth that's complete. Elizabeth, in my opinion, had the wrong-headed view of the Reformation, but she was at least not irreligious. James devolved even more, and then Charles, by the time you get to Charles, he doesn't care about religious matters at all. The shift was pragmatic and political. As one historian summarizes it very well, he said, to them, namely to the higher-ups in the country, Armenianism offered a suitable inspiration for a working partnership of kings and priests against Puritan troublemakers. So stop right there. For James, Calvinism was good, but only because God had his chosen man, the king, in society. But you still have this top-down approach. Well, what they were starting to see, there was a theological development that was being... So this mirrored kings and priests, as in, for example, the priesthood of all believers. So their theology was very much mirroring what they thought the ideal government was. So this historian continues, to believe in free will as a theological theory meant to accept the king's will in practice. That was why George Morley, sorry, Morley, a future Bishop of Winchester, quit. The answer to what do the Armenians hold was that they held all the best bisphorics and deaneries in the kingdom. Okay, so that's all that mattered to theology is politics. Perhaps the most important such appointment for Charles that defined the religious history of the English world after that was Charles' appointment of William Laud in 1633 to the position at Canterbury. And just so you know, Canterbury is a bit like the English Rome. The person who's in charge of the Anglican Church is pretty much the Archbishop of Canterbury. Now this placed the first Armenian at the head of the Anglican Church. So whatever Elizabeth's shortcomings, she at least put a Protestant as the Archbishop of Canterbury, and they weren't always good. They were mostly apologists for the Elizabethan settlement. But they weren't Armenians. Well, because, first of all, there wasn't Armenianism until the turn of the century. But they weren't necessarily committed Calvinists either. Well, this guy, William Laud, was an archenemy of Calvinism. In fact, in 1629, in resistance to this movement, one member of Parliament, most of them were Calvinists, Francis Roos declared that, quote, an Armenian is a spawn of the Papists. So right around the time that among the Dutch they were getting ready to oppose the remonstrance in the Synod of Dort, which we covered on Wednesday, in Britain they also understood that Arminianism represented a significant step back to Rome in the concept of synergism, which they were working out in their political theory. This, God helps those that help themselves. Synergism, erg meaning work, work, or unit of energy, and sin, meaning with, as opposed to monergism, the work of want. So here salvation is a cooperative effort, namely the work of grace is a cooperative effort. began in what he regarded to be the beautification of the churches. Not only was he an Armenian, but he was pretty much a Romanist in every single respect. But he really made a big deal of the beautification of the churches. To him, the churches had fallen into disrepair because those Puritans were simplifying everything. They were just clearing all the relics and all that beautiful stuff that makes for worshiping in the splendor of holiness. In fact, he even made his big verse that he promulgated all throughout the empire was Psalm 29.2. Let's worship him in the splendor of holiness. Now, in order to do that, you needed ornaments, you needed relics, you needed stained glass windows, and all these different things. But he also added this. He reinstituted the rail separating the clergy and the laity, as it was in the Roman practice. And that's something even Elizabeth's people did not do. Now, that naturally outraged the Puritans. And that's not all he did. The ministers would also be called priests once more. They had not been called priests in the generation prior. Now they're going to be called priests again, in a capital P sense, to separate them from the laity. So this guy, Law, was a lot like Charles. He had few friends due to his widely recognized pride. But he influenced the academic life of the whole realm as much as he influenced the immediate church. Charles also threatened to repeal what were called recusancy laws, which restricted the liberty of Catholics in the realm to dissent. And so now he made it possible for Catholics to have total religious liberty, and really didn't make much of a difference, because the difference between an Anglican church and a Catholic church at that point was they were speaking in English. It's pretty much the only difference. So what this did, you see this on the board, is really, Even the people that had the same views of them. Nobody liked them. Certainly nobody likes Archbishop Law. What that did is it forced a lot of Puritans to say, we've been in this for a generation now. We were trying to show our unity and the superiority of our doctrine by staying in the church and believing, in a sense, in the church and sticking with her. But now we can't even do that. And so you know the rest of the story. We'll talk about it this coming week in 1620. And then again, a decade later, what was it, 20,000 or 30,000 Puritans went with Jonathan Winthrop to the New World. We'll get to that. I want to do a separate week on that. So we'll kind of be going parallel. But for whoever did not go with the separatists and the pilgrims, what happened on the streets was that a lot of people who had been blaming the Puritans for everything, suddenly, even if they didn't organize with them, suddenly started to see that they were actually pretty reasonable. And they at least had a common enemy in Laudianism. Well, let's interrupt that for just a second, we'll come back to it. What's going on in the continent during this time? The Thirty Years' War was between 1618 and 1648. And like any other, it was motivated by secular principles through and through. And like any other, the most religious elements are blamed. That's usually a secular tactic of war. And what you see in the historians is that all of this stuff is a religious war. In fact, it's known as a Protestant versus Catholic war. Now, it is true that their rulers were either Catholic or Protestant. What you might not know is that half of them converted either to Lutheranism or Catholicism or to Calvinism on the eve of war for the purpose of getting their troops behind them. And so true religion and true faith had little to do with it at all. This is a, you know, really this struggle physically is the story of an outward shell because what you already saw in the previous weeks was that the actual ideas of the Reformation that were confined to Geneva and Zurich and Western Germany and the parts of France that were snuffed out with the Huguenots, and then of course Scotland, it was successful, but by and large, and of course among the Northern Dutch, But aside from those few epicenters, what Lutheranism had become out east and then up in Denmark and Sweden and Finland became what became the state churches of those places. It was immediately a compromise. And so what you're fighting over here is like the dead shell that's coming off the living thing. The living thing is moving on, as you're going to always see this in church history. Revival and the pursuing of the Spirit, pursuing of the Word, pursuing of further Reformation goes on, and then the majority of the body, the outward shell, is left to fight over the scraps, the secular scraps left on the table. So it's important to remember that the people did not decide to go to war prior to the modern era. since transportation and communication precluded such popular notions. It was usually the royal families utilizing propaganda at a snail's pace to their advantage that went to war. Really, the main war was the propaganda for the people, and that's one of the reasons why these leaders converted to these faiths, is to make it a holy war against these guys or against these guys, or they would just hire mercenaries from the Swiss or from whoever else. In reality, something like the Thirty Years' War was a natural consequence to the new pillars of church and state that were replacing the old base of land as the foundation of every bond. Before this time, fighting was rooted in the knights' subservience to the Lord, to the land, in feudalism. Now, larger armies were compelled to repel still larger armies based on nation, so that the arms race was inevitable. May 23rd, 1618 was the date of a Protestant armed uprising in Prague. And so you're going to see two epicenters that start this war. And after that, I'm not going to talk about the war at all. I'm just going to go to after it because we're not, again, this isn't a class in Western civilization. It's just what's going into this and what's coming out in terms of the church. That's what we're concerned about right here. OK, so it's this day that's generally regarded to be the outbreak of the war, Bohemia. was not a great land, but there was an open seat to be gained back by the Habsburgs. Sorry. Over here on the right, I have a key to the ruling families of Europe. So yes, Europe was being ruled by these families. So if you want to make a leap from this just about another 100 or 200 years to conspiracy theory, was Europe, is the world being run by a handful of families? Well, yeah. I mean, that's just history. It always has been. So, the most dominant, by this stage of the game, was the Habsburgs. So you can see, by this color, you're talking about all the German lands, all the way to Prussia, all the way to the French border, down to Switzerland, and then down through Bohemia and some of these other electors. There were seven electorates, that's not the term I'm looking for, but there were electors who were in charge of having their king in Germany, like Saxony, and my brain isn't working, so I don't remember all the other ones, but I remember Saxony because that's where Luther is from. But Bohemia wasn't really a German place, so to speak, but they were involved in this. And so the Habsburgs, if this guy died, would have immediately just got that back, and that was slated to happen in 1618. Well, 1621, there was a peace treaty between the Spanish and these guys, the Netherlands, that was about to run out. And so they figured when these things are running out, boom, we're going to go to war. So really, the reason they go to war is because the Bourbons and the Habsburgs are against each other. France didn't want to be surrounded on both sides by those guys. So why did the Thirty Years' War develop? This is a Catholic nation. This is a Catholic nation. These guys are Catholic now. Lutheranism is infinite. So Rome is trying to take over Europe again. So is there a religious war going on? Sure it is. Rome is trying to take back over all of Europe. Do the Protestants religiously have a stake in defending that from happening? Of course they do. But to say that therefore the problem was religious conviction is typical of secular historians. So let me fast forward a little bit here. Now, it should be clear that the movements on the board, when you study this, are entirely secular and temporal, even when Rome's trying to do what they're doing. Are they acting in concert with the Christian faith? No. They're imposing on your conscience by force what is essentially a military conversion, not a genuine conversion. So the policy from the previous century, let me write this down, in 1555, there was a peace at Augsburg. So within the German lands, they had decided that where you live, which territory, is the way you'll worship. If you don't like that, you can go that way and worship with the Protestants, up to a point. But it was pretty good for the late medieval world, a certain amount of religious freedom, but at the same time, it pretty much guaranteed that there wasn't going to be any missions works going this way or this way or this way. Private conscience was out. The problem with that policy is that religious conviction, when it's genuine, when it's a real new birth, or even when it's a wrong idea and you're really committed to it, can't be contained by human legislation. And so naturally, within a generation, there was increasing numbers of Calvinists and Lutherans and Catholics in territories where they were not in the majority. And that naturally caused trouble, riots, suspicions, and so on. But if you're going to blame that for war, then you might as well blame private conscience or free thought for the fighting, since those are just modern phrases which mean the same thing as religious conviction. So modernists who write history talk about having the utmost conviction as the cause of war. But they would never say private conscience or free thinking caused that war. Nobody would ever say that at all. But those are just modern synonyms which mean the same thing. So another misunderstanding of the modern secularist, which parallels the role of faith in war, is the simplistic nonsense about the relationship between faith and reason. So one historian, C.V. Wedgwood, in his book on the Thirty Years' War, positions the Church to modern society before and after the war in this way. So listen carefully to what he's saying was at stake and what was accomplished. He said, never had the churches seemed stronger than in the opening decades of the 17th century. Yet a single generation was to witness their deposition from political dominance. The collapse was implicit in the situation of 1618. The fundamental issue was between revealed and rationalized belief. But the sense of danger was not strong enough to bring the churches together. In other words, they had a real enemy, namely the modern view, rationalized faith, if they could only see it. But the sense of danger was not strong enough to bring the churches together, namely Catholic and Protestant together. The lesser issue, listen carefully, the lesser issue between Catholic and Protestant obscured the greater, and the churches had already set the scene for their own destruction. You can hear that today among some people, some people that convert back to Catholicism or ecumenical, because we have a bigger enemy, secularism, not realizing that secularism is a creation of bad theology at the root level. It reminds me of the sentiment of Edward Gibbons in the 18th century. He said the same thing about Islam, about the Muslims, the Turks coming in at that time. If these guys wouldn't have been fighting, these guys, then these guys wouldn't have gotten as far as to Vienna. So what they're saying is, you silly Christians, you could have had a world empire, which is an odd complaint from a modernist who doesn't really want a Christian empire at all, but they're giving us advice in retrospect. You silly Christians, you're fighting over one iota, Arius versus Athanasius. One little iota. Let the Muslim world do what it did for centuries. The problem is that one little iota changes the whole religion. It changes the worldview. One says Christ is most like God, but not God himself. The other says he is God. Same in substance. Well, the same thing is going on here, and historians, of course, don't believe that. Naturalists don't believe that. Guess who else doesn't believe that? Most evangelical Christians. Most evangelical Christians don't believe anymore that what Catholics and the Reformed were fighting over should have been fought over. They don't believe that. And as a result, they wouldn't say it like a historian would. A historian says, in doing that, you've allowed secularism, the bigger enemy, to come in. And so what did you have after this time? You had a whole sea of intellectual activity. Montaigne in France, Bacon in England, Hugo Grotius among the Dutch, all laying the groundwork for a new Christendom united by the project of reason. So theological rationalism had philosophical rationalism beat by a century. In fact, if Schaeffer was diagramming this, he would say that in the beginning of the 17th century, You had Calvinistic Orthodoxy, where God is the measure of all things. And you had a creeping back Arminianism and Romanism, placing man back at the top, so that you don't have a philosophical theology, but you have a You have a humanistic philosophy masquerading as theology, affecting your doctrines of God, your doctrines of man, and then everything else follows that. Your understanding of science, and whether or not nature is a closed system, and you wind up with Isaac Newton's closed system by the end of the century. You have John Locke's theory of natural rights, which is And so, we have a lot of people using a lot of true words, but it's disconnected from natural theology for the most part. And so, Arminianism leads to the slide in all of the other bad ideas that come in the English and the German world in the 18th and the 19th century. Where does this happen? It happens in early 17th century Europe. Arminian theologians, or people with the same sentiments, whether it's Grotius in the Netherlands, Don, the poet, John Dunn, I think he's how to pronounce his name, Dunn, spelled like Dun Dun, doesn't matter. He's kind of an ecumenicalist in his poetry. Even Milton, even John Milton, who's put a lot of times as a Puritan, was very much sympathetic to Armenianism, and a lot of people debate this. There's a line in Paradise Lost that sounds a lot like Arianism. It sounds a lot like the sun is being created, and I'm not enough of an expert on poetry to tell you whether or not he really meant that or not, but there's a debate about that. Even Isaac Newton, who said that the task of the scientist is to think God's thoughts after him. And guys like Locke and Newton at least had more respect for the Calvinistic system at the end of this century, the 17th century. But those guys were debating whether or not the Trinity was a rational doctrine. So rationalism first attacks in theology in an attempt to escape Calvinism. The root cause of every other bad idea after this is somebody trying to escape or refute Calvinism. Throw away a God-centered worldview, and you throw away worldview. You throw away the cohesiveness of any rational worldview or order. So, let's fast forward a little bit. I would say there's some people that stood against this rationalism, obviously the Puritans, which we'll get to. But you had guys like Blaise Pascal, in France, who was fascinated by another French school that was interesting, but I'm not going to have a chance to get into, the Jansenists. There was debates in England, the Mullinists, and in France, who was the guy in France that was popularizing this, I can't remember right now, but people that were wrestling with predestination. And of course, they wanted to they knew that Calvin had a point from scripture, but they wanted to soften it up. And so Melina and it's called Mullinism for that reason, advanced this idea of middle knowledge. And guys like the Jansenists in France were pretty much trying to be this kind of Catholic, these Catholic Calvinists, but they were trying to soften it up and make it respectable for Rome's view. Well, Pascal's dealing with all this stuff, and his dates, by the way, are 1623, he doesn't live very long, to 1662. But he's a mathematician, a philosopher, and pretty much everything else. And he writes this, what is going to be a dispense of the Christian faith, a much bigger book, but in French. I've heard people, I think I'm going to impress you with my French today. unless these people are lying, and I don't know. But I'm pretty sure it's pronounced pon-say, and that actually is ha-ha at the end. No, I don't know. But anyway, here's what it means. It just means basically excerpts or, I don't know how to best, better to say it than excerpts, but what it is, if you look in it, is just these, some are longer than others, but almost some of them are just the size of a proverb. But what it is, they're just excerpts that were meant to be constructed into a larger big apologetic of the Christian faith. And one of the most glaring features of Pascal's theology, and you can categorize him actually as a fideist, but not a mindless fideist as you'd find in the 19th and 20th century or among some German pietists. But this is an idea that really makes a solid wall between faith and reason. but then participates in both of them. There's a sense in which they're unified. But Pascal said, reason's last step is in the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. And he said the heart has its reasons that reason does not know. Now, there's a way to take that that's poetic and right, and it's representing something that's true, and there's a way to say, okay, but if it has a reason, then Reason, capital R, knows it, even if we don't yet, or ever will, but he wasn't going there. We don't know all the places he was going to go, because he died, and he didn't draw this out. But it's worth your getting one time, just to read a lot of these statements about faith and reason. But he was reacting against rationalism. He was reacting against the guys in his day in France that were trying to set up as an authority reason over divine revelation. Okay? So that's just one guy besides the Puritans that were reacting against this in a very high octane intellectual way. Anyway, as far as the war itself. It's not important how it was fought or any of that stuff, but pretty much everybody gets drawn into it. The English really don't have too much interest in it, but really even these countries get drawn into it. The Peace of Westphalia is just a series of little peace treaties that basically cemented national determination, drew up boundaries that are with us to this day. And Rome, of course, didn't want to have anything to do with it. Rome said basically, or the Pope said, it's an act of the devil, basically. Why? Because now Rome can't so easily take over Europe. It pretty much ended Rome's ability to take over Europe again, except by secret means through the Jesuits and stuff like that. But that was in 1648. Let's see, what do I need to skip and what do I not need to skip? What it basically did is it enforced that German policy from the century before at Augsburg. It said that where you live is how you worship. So now the last hopes of any Protestant insurrection in France and Spain was pretty much over. The Netherlands were divided up, where you had the North, what was called the United Provinces, made the Netherlands, and down here was Belgium. And so that stayed Catholic. These guys made peace, so Spain wasn't going to invade them anymore and stuff like that. That's pretty much all you need to know. And you still have the papal states down there and all that good stuff. One other development from this, and this is probably the most important thing to take from the 30 years war. After this time, one other thing happened that always happens when there's fighting. Everybody checks their brains, not at the door, but on the battlefield. People are sick of fighting. And the one thing that you shouldn't blame gets blamed, and that's truth. And so just when Puritans were reacting against Elizabeth's compromise over there, in Germany, a school develops that has a lot of similar things on the surface with Puritans. They're very much concerned with spiritual, individual vitality, revival, the spirit, the spiritual disciplines. Like the Puritans, they instituted small groups. That's not just a modern development. That's something that they did because they thought that that was the best place to exercise spiritual gifts and the means of grace that God gives in the Church. So they're very focused on, pastorally, working on the individual for their sanctification and stuff like that. So on those points, Pietism and Puritanism were saying the same things. But under the surface, The pietists didn't believe in something under the surface. That's what's under the surface. They didn't believe in an objective truth that stood over everyone or undergirded everything. Pietism, and very much coming from Luther and then Melanchthon's compromise, but even some of the really over-exaggerated statements that Luther would make about reason and revelation, that divorce between them, led to pietism. Pietism just takes the word piety namely personal pipe, namely individual pipe, and it seals off everything else from it. So, what is godly is me, myself, and I. Now, nobody would ever say it like that, and I'm sure they wouldn't have meant it that way if you held up a mirror to them and said, you know, here's the consequences of this. There's two things you can't do if you reduce the Christian life to individual piety. You can't hold a truth over anyone and you can't say that those things are bad. And what do you see in Germany after this? Liberal theology cut off from truth and Adolf Hitler cut off from somebody. That's exactly what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in the 20th century, that this all comes from that pietism in the Lutheran tradition that eventually comes home to roost in 19th century liberal theology. So what does the war have to do with this? Well, what was the cause of the war? It didn't take a 20th century materialistic historian to tell them the cause of the war was too much religious conviction. People willing to die or kill for their beliefs, because you're so sure you're right that you're going to impose that on everyone else. And history tells the exact opposite tale. It's people, the higher your conviction, the more you're bringing a martyr, but you don't impose it on others. And it's always people using religion and using people's superstitions that commands armies out of them. But that's why that's important on the mainland. Piety. All right. Do I have even time to get into Cromwell and the beginning of this stuff? I'll just give you a couple, just give you a timeline. And then we'll fill in the blanks a little bit more on Wednesday. But here's the timeline. Because of Laud, the people that did stay, there was revolution. It wasn't just revolution in England. There was revolution in Ireland. There was an attempted Catholic coup there and in Scotland. Strangely enough, the Scottish people actually Once all this had gone down, sorry, I'm fast forwarding a little bit, but they actually allied themselves with Charles II, right about here. Not everybody, by the way. There was a group of people in Scotland called the Covenanters who were around already, but they signed a national covenant saying, sorry, let me tell you what that is before I just write this. So just put the Irish and Scottish, what were the names of the wars? The wars were called the Bishop's Wars. So while England was in upheaval, namely the main part of England, they actually also had to do battle with the Scots and the Irish. The Scots had come down into England originally to impose Calvinism. By the time they got there, they were being allied with Charles II. This shows you some of the weird things that go on in life. But at any rate, 1642 is what starts the Civil War. Long story short, Oliver Cromwell, he's a member of Parliament before that time, he's a military general, he does so well, he goes up through the ranks, that by the time you get to the 1640s, there's a short Parliament that's dissolved, and there's a longer Parliament, he dissolves them because they're a bunch of radicals, and people pretty much are ready to have him be what's called the Lord Protector. Sounds very totalitarian, but really, It's just a name within British constitutional law for someone who stands in lieu of the king. And of course, the Catholics didn't accept this at all. At the time, and among later historians, this period of time from what eventually is 1653, this is when the parliaments are totally dissolved and it's just this commonwealth. It's called the Commonwealth of England. The Puritans are running it. It's considered a republic, but Catholics don't consider it a republic or a kingship. It's a joke. And so they'll call Cromwell's rule the interregnum, from the Latin regnum for reign. And so that period of time, it's just a little parentheses in between the real rules of Charles and the restoration of Charles II. Well, naturally, during this time, Puritans were in charge. Cromwell was a Puritan. He was a bit of an ecumenical Puritan. He let other people do what they do, as long as they weren't Catholics. And he was a Congregationalist, so he wasn't a Presbyterian. So again, the Presbyterian Puritans didn't get their way, and this meeting of English church leaders at Westminster Abbey did not deliver to them a Puritan kirk like they had in Scotland. And so Cromwell oversaw this and the Westminster Assembly meeting from 1643 to 1646 gave us the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Shorter Catechism and the Children's Catechism and a book of orderly, what do they call it, public worship. Okay. And so that was the Westminster Assembly and when it happened and why it happened. There were some Puritans that, big-name Puritans at the time, that didn't show up, couldn't show up. I'm trying to think of what else is important in that timeline. I'll just open it up to questions and then we'll just talk about what was going on among the Puritans, who were the Puritan theologians at this time, what did they really believe, what did they do, and then we'll show how Charles II is invited back in 1660. It all comes crumbling down, and the Puritans are thrown out, and a bunch of other bad things happening at that time. Any questions at all? We've got 10 minutes left, so I might as well open it. Could you elaborate a bit on the difference between piety and addiction, as you said? Well, piety, my definition of it is piety just means godliness. Some people will use it to mean religiousness, religious uprightness. But really, from a Christian point of view, the best synonym for it, I think, is godliness, which obviously is not only a good thing, but it's the point of the Christian life. The way, what you mean when you say, the point of the Christian life, becomes all important. Because if I say, godliness is the point of the Christian life, and you say, so it's the point of my life too? Oh no, no, no, I don't want to tell you what to do. It's the point of the Christian life, my Christian life. It's probably your point too, but I can't speak to that. Nobody would ever say that, because they would realize how silly that sounds and self-contradictory. But that's what it comes down to, is you lose objective truth. Any time you put an ism on the end of a word, you have to watch that and say, OK, how is that thing functioning at the center of everything else, as the lens that you look at everything else through? So anti-intellectualism was rabid, it was already latent in Luther's theology, but was rabid by the time you get to the next century. And you have movements in Lutheranism, Spenner, Jacob Spenner, and who's the other guy, Count Zinzendorf, am I pronouncing that right? Zinzendorf? And there's one other guy, I can't remember the guy's name. But they would be regarded maybe by some as mystics, evangelical mystics, which is always an abusive term. Some people call Jonathan Edwards a mystic. Really, I mean, it can mean a subjectivist or somebody who really draws out the spiritual me and God dimensions. If you put a guy like A.W. Tozer back there, they would consider Tozer to be a mystic, depending on who you're asking. Here's the way I make the main division. I don't know how to draw it out, but anyway, there's a subjective mysticism and an objective mysticism. But then I wouldn't call that a mysticism, I would just, Christians, man, my goodness, if you don't make any distinction here, you can call all of the Puritans mystics because they focused on the vertical dimension of God and the soul. So if that's the definition, then all Puritans were mystics. But here's the distinction, a true gospel-centered, objective, truth, biblical, concentration is not even going to be mysticism, it's just going to be a focus on the God-word dimension of the soul, experience with God. It won't be divorced from truth, submission to Scripture, and so on. A subject of mysticism will just be sort of this floating in the clouds, where you're having private revelations, That's pretty much it. Private revelations. You said, you mentioned they installed the rail. Can you talk about the Canadian rail? Yeah. And the Lutherans have that there. No, I haven't gone into a Lutheran church. I don't know. I know there's three divisions of the Lutherans here in the country. Missouri, Wisconsin, and whatever the other one is. They're synods. I don't know how they differentiate that, but they probably, because I know their view of Both sacraments is too close for most evangelicals because of Luther not making a distinction about the real presence. But they would tell you that it's not the same thing as transubstantiation either. That's the way the English Calvinists reacted to the prayer book in a lot of stuff. They pretty much said, that's pretty much the mass. You're just reading the mass at this point. And I have not studied it that much to tell you whether or not I... I would just not... I'm going to be evil now. I would just not go to those churches or recommend those churches just in principle in general. I think if you're even going in that direction, there's already a bad theology of God and a bad theology of salvation in those churches to even not draw clearer lines. Right. Well, there are some good Lutheran theologians who who will be useful in that regard, but that is interesting. Right, you are drawing attention to yourself if your mysticism is drawing attention to your experience, and that's as far as it goes. Yeah, you're actually exhorting other people to do the same because God tells us all to do that while we're here, yeah. Oh, here, go ahead. One of the good things that came out of the case of Westphalia was the concept that it was the individual's prerogative to be free to worship God according to the dictates of the self-conscious. Yeah. I think there were a lot of territories. So, yeah, I don't think they imposed on every territory that therefore this is a Lutheran colony, therefore this is a Calvinistic territory and so on. I think there was a lot that the it was self-determination was the point. And a lot of those princes wound up allowing for more religious liberty than others. So, yeah, it did paved the way for it. And certainly it makes it easier to do that if there's peace from outside your borders and you can cultivate that kind of an atmosphere. There was lot of that particularly in England but in other places too.