And so, that's exactly what began to happen. As men began to more thoroughly study the scriptures and what had been taught by the church fathers before them, they then began to flesh out what are the logical consequences of those teachings. Well, if the scriptures say this, and we read about the battles that went on between the heretics and these church fathers throughout history, what does that mean for us today? What is the logical conclusion of these things? And some of the topics, and this is just to kind of give you a picture again of what was going on in the world, so you don't need to memorize this list or anything, but some of the things that were being debated was the role of icons and images. You see so famously in all of these Catholic churches and Eastern Orthodox churches, the pictures of the saints that are in the windows and on the tapestries and on the walls. Well, there began to be a lot of debate about Is that Christian? Is that allowable? Is that biblical? The role of saints in worship? Should we worship the saints? How do we deal with the saints through history? The Trinity? It seems like that debate never went away in full. The procession of the Holy Spirit. There was a great big debate that ended up splitting the Eastern and the Western Church over does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father or does He proceed from the Father and the Son. And so this was a big debate during this time. The nature of the soul, the virginity of Mary, the Eucharist, and on and on the list went as men began to look at what is the Church doing now in 800 AD. What does the Bible say about it? What did the church fathers say about this? Were they right or were they wrong? What does the Bible mean in its context? All of these things began being fleshed out and debated. But early on, the greatest controversy of all was the sovereignty of God and salvation. And a lot of times we think about that debate couched in the historical context of the Reformation, right? We think about Martin Luther and John Calvin and Zwingli and Knox and men like this and the debates that they were having. But we saw that that goes all the way back to Augustine. He was fighting the same thing. And Gottschalk was right in the thick of this debate as well in the 800s. In this century, in the 800s, the debate around the sovereignty of God and salvation centered around an obscure German monk named Gottschalk of Obey. He studied the writings of Augustine, and the more that he read, the more passionate he became for the doctrine of predestination. But for all of his passion for this doctrine, he was opposed just as passionately by two powerful men in the Catholic Church, Robanus Maurus and Hincmar of Reims. These two men held powerful positions. If you look up Rabanus Maurus, he is to this day highly exalted in the Catholic Church. He wrote a lot of books, taught extensively in his day, and he was one of the ones that was in the middle of this debate. So we think about Calvin and Arminius, or we think about Augustine and Pelagius. Well, in this century it was Gottschalk versus Rabanus Marius and Hinckmar of Reims. 700 years before another much more famous German monk named Martin Luther would affect the world with many of the same contrarian teachings, Gottschalk went head-to-head with the powerful Roman Catholic Church. Now, I don't know how many of you were in here. I think most of y'all were in here by the time I was talking to Chris about this before the lecture began. I'd never heard of Gottschalk before I started this study, and yet it's amazing the many ways that his life mirrored the life of Martin Luther, who in so many ways changed the world. But God's providence was a little bit different in Gottschalk's life. The printing press hadn't been invented yet, so there wasn't quite the same ease of dissemination. Whereas Martin Luther, you remember the story about him being kidnapped by his powerful friends and given protective custody to continue his writing and his teaching. Gottschalk wasn't afforded that. When he was condemned by the Catholic Church, he was actually All his books were burned and he was sent away and locked up in a monastery. So we'll get into all of that here in a moment. But Gottschalk is a name to remember because although he didn't have a lot of influence on the Reformation, he's just another proof that the doctrine of the sovereignty of God and salvation, the doctrine of election and predestination, wasn't something that was invented in the Reformation. It wasn't something that was invented by Calvin or Luther or anything like that. But men in all ages have read the Bible for themselves and recognized that this is what the Scriptures teach. So what about his life in particular? He was born in a town called Mainz, M-E-N-T-Z, I think is the way it was spelled at that point. I think the town there today is M-A-I-N-Z, if I'm not forgetting, if I'm remembering correctly. So today, this is in Germany. And like so many of these other men, he was born to a respected nobleman. His father was Count Berno of Saxony. And Count Berno of Saxony, remember when Rostrach was born, were still in many ways The Dark Ages. This is about the same time that Charlemagne was being crowned, so all of this upstart education hadn't actually happened at the time of his birth. And remember what we said about Isidore, was that in the midst of the Dark Ages, so much of the education that was going on was only found in monasteries. If you wanted your child to be educated, you basically had to send him to a monastery. because those were the centers of where all these books were being kept and where children were continuing to be taught to read and write and study and things of this nature. So Count Berno of Saxony sends his son, Gottschalk, at an early age to a famous Hessian convent at Fulda that he might take up the monastic life. So he sends him to this monastery, this convent, in a place called Fulda, to be a monk. And it's unclear just exactly how old Gottschalk was when he was sent there. He was very young. And there's a little bit of debate about whether his father just took the monastic vows for him, or whether he was just old enough to actually just repeat after me and didn't know what he was saying. But one way or another, he wasn't, we're not talking about a 13-year-old boy here, anything like that. He was very young, just above the age of a toddler, I guess, or something like that. And he was sent to this monastery to be taught to be a monk. At this point in time, the Fulda Monastery was the greatest center of religious and secular education in Germany. So in that part of the world, this was the best education a child could get, was to be sent to this monastery. And so his father, being a nobleman, was able to get his son in there. Gotz Chalk, while there, studied Latin, the Bible, the church fathers, and classical literature. under the head of the monastery, a man by the name of Rabanus Marus. We'll probably just refer to him for most of the time as Marus, M-A-U-R-U-S. Marus in his day, was already an influential churchman. And as I said, through the annals of Roman Catholicism, he continues to be lauded as a very astute teacher. And he was a commentator. He wrote lots of commentaries on the Bible. He was a theologian. He was a hymn writer. He wrote a lot of hymns. And so this was the head of the monastery that Gottschalk was learning under. As Gottschalk got into his teens, as he reached the age of maturity, he decided he didn't want to be a monk. And so he sought to undo the vows that had been taken, vowing him to a life as a monk. And he argued that the vows that he had been taken by his parents, or as I said, maybe he actually was able to recite them himself, but it was at such a young age he had no idea what he was vowing to. And so he said, that shouldn't be binding as an adult. Now that I've reached the age of adulthood, the vows that my parents made for me or that I was made to repeat as a little boy shouldn't be binding because I didn't know. I hadn't reached an age of ascent or mental maturity to know what I was vowing to. And his master, Morris, denied his request. He said, no, your parents gave you to us, and this is where you're going to stay. But he continued to push and push, and it was eventually taken to the Synod. So Morris took this to the Synod of church leaders in the area, the Synod of Maines in 829. this group of men actually took up the question. They said, okay, should a young boy, and its catalyst was Gottschalk, but it was not just about Gottschalk. It was about the whole process in its entirety. If a young boy is given to a monastery, endowed to the monastic life by his parents, are those vows binding if he changes his mind as an adult? So this question was taken up at the Synod in Mainz in 829. and Gottschalk was given an official release from his vows. When a young boy, this had become something that was very common among noblemen to give their sons to the monasteries. And when they would do that, they would also usually give a monetary gift. Either they would sign a piece of land over to the Catholic Church, or they would give a large sum of money, something along these lines. And that's what had happened with Gottschalk. His father had also signed over a large part of the family property to the Catholic Church to pay for Gottschalk's upbringing. And so Gottschalk said, when you release me from my vows, I want that land given back to me, because that would be my inheritance if I wasn't given to the monastery. So when the Synod at Mainz gave him an official release, they said, we'll release you from your vows, but we're not giving the money back. We're not giving the land back. That was given to us, and we're going to keep it. But if you want to be released from your vows, you can be released. So he was given his official release. Even so, Morris, remember he was the one who was the head over that monastery, he was very unhappy that Gottschalk had been given his release. And so he wrote a book and translated it into English. The title of the book was Concerning the Offering of Boys. And it was based on this debate, on this argument whether boys could be offered to the Catholic Church to be vowed into monastic life for the rest of their life. So he wrote this book to defend his position on the topic. And he appealed to the emperor directly. He sent a copy of this book and his argument to the emperor. He said, hey, the synod said that they can be released from their vows, but here's why I don't think that's a good idea. And he sent him this book. I couldn't find a copy of this book anywhere. I found one copy that had been translated into English, and it's in the Catholic Library in Washington, D.C., but I couldn't find any copies for sale or in digital form. I found a book that was written about Gottschalk's life, and it had a large section in it about this book, and it was like $70 or $80 on Amazon for a 200-page book. So I don't understand why this book in particular may be And I'm just speculating here, but maybe with all of the abuses of the Catholic Church in recent years, it's become a hot topic and they don't want it getting out or something of that nature. I don't know. I was interested to see what his arguments were in this book, and I couldn't find any excerpts from it to speak of. But he wrote this book. It's a known book. That's out there. And he appealed to the emperor, and the emperor overturned the synods. Now again, remember what I said in the beginning, we have a marriage of church and state now. So there was a church synod, there was a group of church leaders that came together and said, here's what we believe the scriptures would teach, or here's what we believe would be wise about this. And the emperor was able to say, no, we're not going to do that. I'm going to overturn that sentence. And so he sentenced to God's chalk to monkhood for the rest of his life. He said, you're going to go back to the monastery, and you're going to be a monk, and you're not allowed to not be a monk. To our free American ears, this sounds... I don't even know how to wrap my head around this, but this was the way that the world was in such a state at that point in time that if the emperor said you were going to be a monk, you were going to be a monk. There just really wasn't any way around that. Morris made one concession, though, and that was that Gottschalk could leave his monastery and moved to the monastery at Aubay in northeastern France. So he moved from, once he was sentenced back to his monkhood, he left the monastery there in Germany and he went to this one in northeastern France. And it was here that Gottschalk got his hands on and became an Adam student of Augustine. and another man named Fulgentius of Ruspe, who's not nearly as famous as Augustine, but in a lot of ways was arguing for the same things that Augustine was arguing for. And actually, Gottschalk seemed to have earned the nickname Fulgentius, because he was such an avid student of this Fulgentius. So he was studying these two men. And you remember when we talked about Augustine, we said that he had been the strongest voice among those early writers of God's sovereign grace and salvation. And Fulgentius had been an early proponent of absolute predestination, similar to Isidore of Seville. This Fulgentius had written books that God didn't only predestine who would go to heaven, but he predestined the eternal states of all men, that both the converted and the unconverted were in that state because of God's predestinating will. And so Gottschalk began to believe this. He began to enthusiastically write and preach about these truths, and he began to convince many of his fellow monks that this was true, and convince them from the scriptures and from the writings of Augustine and Fulgentius. Well, after Gottschalk had convinced several of his fellow monks, he and they, and several of his fellow monks, set out on a pilgrimage to Rome. And they traveled through Italy, through the Balkans, and through Bulgaria. And everywhere that they stopped on their journey, anywhere that they could find a willing, listening ear, they would talk about these truths. They would stir up the conversation. Hey, what do you all believe about God's predestination? What do you think about what Paul wrote in the Book of Romans? What do you think about Augustine's writings? And as they began to talk about and preach these truths, winning converts along the way. They were winning people over to their point of view on this. And similar to Martin Luther and so many of the other reformers that came after them, the higher ups in the Catholic Church began to catch wind of this, began to hear about what was going on and what was being taught. And they didn't like it at all. Well, when Gottschalk returned back to OA in 847, By this point, he had attracted quite a following, and he began to discuss his views extensively with a man named Noting, N-O-T-I-N-G. He was the bishop of Verona, and he had been corresponding with Morris. So Morris, Gottschalk's old teacher, and this bishop close to where Gottschalk was living now, had been writing letters back and forth, had been corresponding one with another. And Morris said, this guy's dangerous. You need to tell him he needs to recant his views. You need to tell him he needs to sign a statement saying that he doesn't believe in the predestination of God. So Noting did this. He went to Gottschalk and he tried to persuade him to recant these views, and Gottschalk refused. He said, no, I'm not going to do that. I believe that this is true. And so Noting wrote back to Morris and he said, you need to write a tract You need to write a tract in response to Gottschalk's teachings. So Gottschalk's teaching and writing and convincing all these other monks and people everywhere between here and Rome about the truth is, you need to write something that refutes it, that shows why what he's saying is not true. And so Morris did just that. And his argument followed the basic line of semi-Pelagians ever since Augustine's day, which was that God looked ahead in time, and he saw who would choose him, and that's who he predestined. He saw who would choose him, and he chose them. That was Morris's track on the issue. Well, Gottschalk obviously wasn't convinced by that, and apparently not a whole lot of other people were either. And so he was called again before the Synod of Mainz. Remember, this was the Synod that had given his freedom before the Emperor overturned it. Well, he was called back before them and asked to give a defense of what he was teaching and believing, and he did that. And the Synod said he was a heretic. And I said, these truths don't match up with what we're teaching in the Roman Catholic Church. And so they handed him over to Hincmar, Bishop of Reims. And they said, You've got to take this man in hand, lock him up, make sure he can't get out and continue to preach what he's been preaching. So Hinkmar called him before the synod of Tiersi. So another synod in Hinkmar's region calls Ras Chaka up on charges of heresy. And once again, he defends and stands by his belief of absolute predestination. And this synod also condemns him as a heretic. And when the second Synod condemned him as a heretic, Hinkmar had him publicly flogged, had his books publicly burned and banned, and had him imprisoned. He said, we'll make sure that nobody else can hear what you're saying and teaching, and they locked him up in a monastery. But during this imprisonment, during this time being locked up in the monastery, Gottschalk had an opportunity to write. And he wrote two confessions, a shorter confession and a longer confession. And in both of these confessions, he continued to reassert his views on absolute predestination. And while in prison, Gottschalk appealed to Pope Nicholas I, who was the pope at this time. And he said, listen, I've been treated unfairly. All of my views that I'm teaching, I can back it up with Scripture, and not only with Scripture, but with other church fathers who you all laud as saints and as fathers in the faith, and they were saying the same thing that I'm saying. And he actually included a line in his appeal that if If he was proven wrong again, he'd walk through tar and oil and hot coals, because he was just so convinced that what he was believing and teaching and preaching was true, and was so obviously true that anyone looking at it Objective I would have to agree that what he was saying was true. Well, Pope Nicholas agreed to hear his case. And he said, okay, I'll listen to your case. However, before he got a chance to hear it, Gottschalk had a nervous breakdown and died. in captivity before his case could be revisited. Well, in his last days, after he'd had the nervous breakdown and it was becoming clear that he wasn't going to live much longer, Hinkmar, this bishop who's over the precinct where he's been captured or been held in captivity, wrote up a a confession, a recantation of all of his beliefs, and he said, here, sign this. You're about to die. Sign this saying that you recant everything you've ever taught. And Gottschalk, even in his decreased mental state, said, I can't. I cannot recant what I believe the Scriptures to so clearly teach. Well, in a last, desperate, attempt to get him to recant, Hinkmar told him he would not be afforded a Christian burial unless he signed this confession, recanting his predestinarian beliefs in full. But Gottschalk did not flinch, and Hinkmar made good on his promise, and he was laid to rest in unconsecrated soil." So at this point already in the Catholic Church, if you died in the faith, they give you a Christian burial. And Gottschalk wasn't afforded the Christian burial because he'd been deemed a heretic, and he wouldn't recant what he believed the Scriptures to so clearly teach. And so he was laid to rest in this dishonorable way. So you look at his life, and it's amazing, isn't it, how it parallels the life of Martin Luther, only with very different endings. instead of being afforded protection and being able to continue teaching and writing and the printing press, getting it all over the world in speedy ways, Gottschalk, by God's providence, was effectively muted by the Roman Catholic Church. And his teachings weren't able to get out as readily, and he was killed no uncertain terms under the beatings and the imprisonment of the Roman Catholic Church. But what about his writings? Well, there were three main writings that Gottschalk was able to write in his life, and I mentioned two of them, the shorter confession and the longer confession that he wrote while he was imprisoned. His shorter confession was a zealous defense of Augustinian theology. Of the three writings, this is the one that takes the most polemic language. He's very strongly defending his views, specifically absolute predestination. Just in no uncertain terms, he lays out the argument for that in his shorter confession. His longer confession took a little bit of a more moderate muted tone. He wasn't quite as zealous as it were in the longer confession, but it's written in the form of a prayer. And in this longer confession he clarifies that he does not believe that God predestinates the reprobates to sin, but he leaves them in their sin due to their predestination to divine wrath." So he says, I don't believe that it was God the one making them sin, but rather that God leaves them in their sin because he's predestinated them to divine wrath. Then he wrote a work called On Predestination, And this work identifies the foreknowledge and predestination of God. Remember, Morris wrote a track saying that God looks ahead and sees who's going to choose Him, and those are the ones that He predestinates. Well, this work that Gottschalk wrote on predestination, basically refuted that. He said foreknowledge doesn't happen before predestination. It's not that God knows ahead of time and then He predestinates, but that they're simultaneous doctrines. That God's foreknowledge and His predestination work completely in harmony and at the same time, and God's not held to a timeline where first He knows and then He acts. But all of it is done perfectly and simultaneously, as it were, outside of time. And he defends the doctrine that the precise number of the elect and non-elect are determined by the eternal decree of God. Now, this was one of the works that was burned in that public burning of Oligarch Chalk's works after the Synod condemned him. And an extant copy of this wasn't found until the early 1900s. And so this wasn't necessarily an influential work in John Calvin's study or in Martin Luther's study for all we can tell. They didn't really even know about it, because the Catholic Church had been so effective in burning these works and scrubbing him from the record. But by God's providence, some of the works actually did remain. And I think, to date, eight copies have been found or something of this nature. So those were his three writings. So what do we learn from Gottschalk? What do we learn from his life and from his writings? One is we begin to see early on, when we were doing these church fathers, There's a lot of good, helpful things that came from the councils. So you have the Council of Nicaea, and you have these councils that were putting out statements about the Trinity, and about the truth of God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. We can look at these councils and we can see what good they were doing for the world and for Christianity. But by this point in history, the Roman Catholic Church had already been Compromised seems too weak a word, but had been corrupted, had been compromised in a lot of ways. And here in Gottschalk life, really the first time in the list of men that we've been looking at, we see the insufficiency and the fallibility of the decrees and councils of men. And so the Catholic Church holds the decrees, the synods, the councils, the canons of their councils and synods as equal with the scriptures. They say the Scriptures, yes, they are a rule, but only the church is able to interpret the Scriptures properly. So what the church councils have said, and what these synods and canons have said about the Scriptures, what we must believe about it. So really, the two sit on the same shelf for the Catholic Church. It's not that the Scriptures rule over the synods, but they work in unity together. And really, if the one interprets the other, you might even make the argument which one is really the final authority. And in a lot of ways, when you really boil it down to it, the Catholic Church would say it's the synods and the decrees of popes and councils. And Gottschalk, for I'm sure not the first time in history, but for the first time in the line of men that we've been looking at, teaches us that these are just men. And they can be wrong, and they often were wrong in history. And just because a council or a synod decreed someone to be a heretic or to be wrong, doesn't mean that they were. Only if what they're saying is in line with Scripture. Secondly, I learned from the life of Gottschalk the importance of being faithful and productive wherever providence has placed you. Gottschalk, his entire life was somewhere he didn't want to be, except for perhaps maybe that short period of time after the one synod had freed him before the emperor overturned it for about a year there. Maybe he was a free man, but except for that, as a very young child, He was put into a monastery. He grew up in that monastery under monastic vows that he didn't know anything about taking. Then he was sent back into monastic life, and then eventually imprisoned in a monastery. And yet through all of this, he continued to study, to write, to teach, In a world in which you and I are told so often, you can be anything you want to be. We don't know anything about God's choice life. We don't know anything about being stuck into a position in life and into a place where you have no choice. You don't get to leave if you want to leave. You don't get to become something else if you want to become something else. This is where you're going to be. And God's child doesn't seem... We know very little about much of his life, but we don't see a lot of bitterness. We don't see a lot of kicking and screaming. We see him doing what he can do with what God has given him. And his life was much less than perfect and ideal. When I think about him as a young man, seeking to be freed from his monastic vows, I wonder what was the impetus behind that? What was the motivation behind that? Because he seems to be a very religious man. He seems to be a very studious man. I don't think it was that he was rebelling against God or Christianity. But I wonder, did he want to marry? Was there a young woman he knew in particular maybe? Or maybe he just wanted to marry in general? Maybe he had a desire to follow in his father's footsteps and to oversee lands and properties and try his hand at business. I don't know. I don't know what the motivation was behind that. But he was denied all of that. He was told, no, you're going to be single. You're going to live in a monastery. You're going to do the work of a monk. And that's where he lived, and that's where he died. And in spite of that, he held firm to the truths of Scripture. He wrote books and pamphlets. He taught. He influenced the people around him. He did what he could do, where God had put him. And that's very convicting to me. And thirdly, when we look at God's chalk's life as a whole, I'm reminded that truth cannot be forever hidden or silenced. And this is what the Scriptures tell us as well, that that which is whispered in the ear will be eventually shouted from the rooftops. There's not one idle word that we speak, but that it will be called into account on the day of judgment. Whether in this world or the next, the faithful are always justified. Eventually, truth comes to the front. They could burn all of Gottschalk's books, and if they had effectively burned all of them to where we never knew the name of Gottschalk, he would still be justified in eternity. He would still be brought forward as one who had spoken the truth in eternity, but God in His providence kept some of those books from being burned, so that future generations could read about him and could see that men were continuing to stand for the truth in all ages, even in the midst of so much corruption and darkness. And eventually, it comes to light again. It doesn't matter that the prune press hadn't been invented yet. It doesn't matter that he was imprisoned. It doesn't matter that his books were burned. It doesn't matter that he died early. Still, the truth eventually comes to light. And this is a truth that we see spoken again and again in Scripture. And again, it reminds me that in our Christian life, we're not called to do that which is pragmatic. We're not called to do, well, whatever works. The end justifies the means. But rather, in the end, whether we did the right or wrong means will be brought to light. Morris is lauded and Gottschalk is defamed in Roman Catholic circles. And yet from the little that I know and see here in Gottschalk's life and in Morris' life, I can't help but believe that in eternity Morris will be defamed and Gottschalk will be Exalted. And so truth always, in the end, comes to light and is justified. Those are the three things that I gleaned from Gottschalk's life and writings. Have any questions or comments on that lecture before we close for the evening?