All right, we are in this lesson 69 and we are dealing with the Great Schism and this is the sixth part, the final part of our study related to that event. We've basically been trying to share with you various events, people, theologies that have led up to this. Before we continue, let's go ahead and just review our lesson from last Wednesday very quickly. Last Wednesday, we were looking at a couple of heretical groups that had arisen in this time period of the church. We are talking about the Paulicians, and we're talking about the Bogomils. The Paulicians, who called themselves the good Christians, distinguished themselves from the Orthodox Christians. Remember, this was what took place in the East. We have been dividing our attention between the West and the East. the Roman Empire, which would eventually become, they would call it the Holy Roman Empire, and the East, that Byzantine Empire, right, under Constantinople as its capital. So we've been dealing with the East in these last couple of lessons, and we have talked about these various heretical groups that arose at that time. The Politicians derisively called the Eastern Christians Romanists, that was their derisive term for them. And they were founded by a man named Constantine. And we mentioned last week, that's not the Constantine we know from the fourth century. This is a different man by the name of Constantine. He infused Christianity with Gnostic and dualistic ideas. And so they followed him with that kind of theology. that the material world was the work of an inferior, malevolent God who was responsible for the Old Testament. And so they rejected that as well. As a result, the Poliscians believed that all material was inherently evil. Anything evil, the shirt on your back, the shoes on your feet, they are evil. The chairs that you're sitting in, the pews you're sitting in are evil because they're made of material. So that was their belief. And that's basically Gnosticism, the dualistic aspect of Gnosticism, where everything spiritual is good, everything material is evil. And that was the Politicians. They accepted only a very limited set of the New Testament writings, basically just the Gospel of Luke. I think a few may have accepted some of the other Gospels, but basically the Gospel of Luke, the Book of Acts, and the letters of Paul. That was about it. They rejected most of the rest of the New Testament canon and all of the Old Testament canon. So they had this very truncated scripture, a very pared-down selection of Bible books. It closely resembled the Marcionites that we had discussed months and months ago. And it led to their name, Paulicians, because they accepted the writings of Paul, and they were called the Paulicians. Despite the fact that they had some idealistic overlap with some of the iconoclastic emperors in the East, they still faced a great deal of persecution by the emperors in the Byzantine Empire. And Constantine even changed his name to Silvanus, a follower of Paul, so that he could be referred to as a follower of Paul or a disciple of Paul. The sect experienced periods of flourishing, before, at the very end, really just facing a great deal of persecution, even under the Emperor Theodora, and there in Armenia, a hundred thousand of them were slaughtered during one time of persecution by the Paulicians. While we disagree with their theology and their practice, we certainly would not agree with the slaughter of these individuals. Another group in the 10th century arose, the Bogomils arose, probably they arose as an offshoot of these Paulicians. So you had the Bogomils, and basically they lived in Bulgaria. The Bogomils, they also advanced a dualistic worldview, but it was a much more sophisticated worldview. I mean, they had a lot more detail to their theology related to Gnosticism, also imbuing some of Manichaeism along with their theology as well. They rejected traditional sacraments, and the rituals, they rejected the Lord's table, they rejected baptism, these were meaningless rituals in their minds, and they just favored more of a personal, kind of an inner faith, spiritual liberation, and a kind of direct communion with the divine. And I think I derisively called it last week, I think I just called it me-ism, right, that's just the way I want to, you know, I'm not a part of any group, I just love God, This is the way I'm going to do it. Both of those groups suffered severe persecution. The legacy of the Poliscians and the Bogomils continued to influence later reformed works. You'll probably hear those names again when we get to the Reformation. You'll hear some of those names because they'll come up because old heresies never die. They're just renamed and they'll come back up again. All right, I think that's enough of the review from last week. Now tonight, we want to turn our attention to the final steps that resulted in the great East-West schism. And I have this on the board to show some of the things in the West, some of the things in the East, basically just people, and to try to keep it clear in our heads who's who in these groups. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in about 410, most people 410 is about the year they'll give to the end of the Roman Empire under the various Caesars and whatnot. About 410, since that time, the eastern and western branches of the one universal church began drifting apart. They called themselves the Catholic Church, not Catholic like we understand today. but Catholic meaning universal, that you could go to this church over here in Antioch, and you could go to this church over here in Rome, or this church in Jerusalem, and you would hear the same doctrine, the same theology. They were Catholic in that sense. It was a universal church. Well, now it just began to split. It began to divide. They not only spoke different languages. They spoke Greek in the east. They spoke Latin in the west. but they also lived in distinct cultural and political climates, just completely different environments. In the East, the ancient Christian Byzantine Empire provided a great heritage, while in the West, you had this emerging Germanic and Norse kingdoms that had newly been converted from an Arianist form of Christianity and paganism, and that followed a different path. In the East, they were all under, there was all one group culturally, right? But in the West, what happened? You had all the Germanic tribes coming in. Remember we talked about the Visigoths and all these individuals that came in and they were eventually Christianized. But that's what you ended up with in the West, with these people and they were forced to enter the church. What I want to do tonight is just share some key areas of divergence between the two. All right, just very quickly touch on those and then we'll hit on the the great schism at the very end. The first of these is that you had a rivalry between Rome and Constantinople. In the Middle Ages, the prestige of Rome just began to increase. As you see the city grow and people flocking to it and bowing to the papal supremacy, it began to grow. Initially, the pope in Rome was seen to have a special honor among all the bishops of the entire kingdom, west and east. So the Roman bishop, or what we would consider the pastor of the church, was given deference because of the place and its association with Peter and the apostles. So he had a kind of a special place of honor. But that grew, that grew. That special place of honor over time grew in Rome and they, until Rome, claimed a total and unconditional jurisdiction over all the entire church. And that's what we, we'll see that, we saw that through history. In contrast to that, the Eastern Church denied the idea of a single earthly head of the church. They had patriarchs. They had, they had, you know, priests, monks, they had bishops, and there were five cities in the west and in the east that were the big, large cities. And over those cities, they placed what they called patriarchs as sort of a higher relegation of these individuals over the others for teaching purposes. You had Rome, right, in the west. You had Constantinople. You had Jerusalem. You had Antioch. And you had Alexandria, right, those five. Well, there's only one in the west. And the only one in the West was Rome. All the other four were in the East, Constantinople being the most prominent. So they believed that that should be shared among all the patriarchs, not Rome. So you had this growing rivalry between Rome and Constantinople. The second problem you had was religious practice. And I'm just going to write the word practice. between the two. Let me give you a couple of examples. Clerical marriage. In the West, the priests were required to remain celibate, whereas in the East, the priests were allowed to marry before their ordination. And most were, in fact, married, although the bishops remained celibate for whatever reason. So all the priests in East were married. In Rome, they were required to remain celibate. Communion bread between the West and the East. In the West, they used unleavened bread at the Lord's table. In the East, they used leavened bread in the Lord's table. And that, to them, was a practice that divided the two of them. So one of those practices in the West, they had unleavened bread, leavened bread in the East. And in fact, the way that they took the bread and the wine was different as well. The West separated it. You had unleavened bread and you had wine. In the East, you had leavened bread and wine, but the leavened bread was dipped into the wine and then eaten together, I think, in tincture, I believe is what they call that, okay? So that was another practical difference between the two. Baptism was different. The Eastern churches maintained the practice of immersing a person in the name of the Trinity, and it grew to baptizing them, dunking them three times, immersing them three times, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But it was a practice of immersion. As you know, in the West, they had various ways of baptizing people. They would baptize by immersion. but also by the threefold immersion, a single immersion, or by effusion. And effusion just means pouring. So they pour that water on the person. And we know that that's what grew to be the main practice in the Roman church. They practiced effusion. Pouring became the common practice. A third point of difference was theological differences. So theology was different in the West than in the East. For instance, the Eastern Church did not accept the Western doctrine of purgatory. So this became a new, not by the 10th century or the 11th century. It had already crept in. And the West began to practice. By this time, it was full blown part of their theology was purgatory, that Christ died for your sins. He justified your sins partially. you have to finish that work on earth, continuing that justification, and if you don't on earth and you die, then you'll end up in purgatory. The East did not believe that. In the West, purgatory became a central spiritual life. It was believed that sins could be partially atoned for on earth, but not fully. You had to finish it in purgatory. The Pope was thought to have the authority to release souls from purgatory by dispensing what they call the Treasury of Merits. And the Treasury of Merits is that you'll have some Christians who are a little bit better than others in their spirituality. They have earned more credit, as it were. And so they have a little treasury of their extra credit. So you have someone over here who's lived this wonderful saintly life, and this person has a hundred years worth of extra credit, and it goes into the treasury. All right? The treasury of merits. And then there are others. So this treasury gets filled with these merits. And then you can then get those merits by doing certain things or aiding the church in some way. And we know that just right at the touch of the Reformation, you could begin to purchase those merits through what we call indulgences. All right? And that's what really just threw everything into a whirlwind. In contrast to the East, the East rejected the concept of purgatory entirely, as well as the idea of anybody suffering after death, any Christian suffering, which didn't happen. Eastern thought held that those who fell short of God's standards would not enter heaven immediately, but would wait in a state of shadow and sorrow until God's mercy was bestowed upon them. So you didn't suffer, it wasn't fire, it wasn't like when you think of purgatory being a place of suffering, but still sort of like a waiting room before, and then God would eventually have mercy on you, and then you would be able to go to heaven, and eventually everyone would get to go to heaven. Language barriers further deepen that divide. We're still talking about theology, but basically it's the language of the two groups that aided in bringing about a theology that wasn't quite solid on both sides. So Greek has a very rich philosophical heritage. We always think of philosophy, we think of the Greek philosophers. We can name them all. And that allowed the Byzantine theologians to discuss the church and salvation in what we call ontological terms, in its essence, in its being. It emphasized the transformation and the union of the divine and human natures in Christ. So they talk about Christ being the God-man. But Latin is different. Latin, with its roots in Roman legal traditions, that Latin language, with its legal emphasis, led the Western theologians to view the church more as an administrative body and salvation as the remission of a legal penalty. So this is how you get something like, and we talk about penance. The Latin would be to do penance. You have to do penance. And to them, it was something that was a legal requirement. And so it became, that's why you end up with that kind of theology. And we know that they, I'm not gonna say they rejected the Greek, but what translation was the basis for their theology, right? It was the Vulgate, right? The Latin translation was their Bible for over a thousand years, it was their Bible. And they rejected the others. So that kind of led to that theological divine, So overall, the differences in language, culture, practice, theology contributed significantly to the growing separation between Eastern and Western theology and Christendom. Also, Western Christianity was deeply influenced by Augustine's theology, so it placed original sin at the center of its beliefs. So West held to original sin because of their following of Augustine of Hippo, right? The Western theologians maintain that every person is born bearing the guilt and corruption of Adam's sin. Consequently, salvation was seen as a rescue from that inherited guilt. So we're on board with that. Salvation is, I'm a guilty sinner. I'm a born sinner. I am dead in my sins, and I need salvation in Christ. Without that, I am lost, and I need that salvation. So salvation was seen as a rescue from inherited guilt. Since sin led to death, Christ's atoning work was understood as the means to defeat sin and conquer death. Sin is our final enemy. By contrast, Eastern thought acknowledged humanity's fall to Adam, but it viewed that fall primarily as an issue of death, rather than an inherited stain of sin. So, death to the East, it wasn't so much Original sin, they denied we had original sin. But Adam did cause us to inherit death. And so we're all going to die. Everyone will die, according to Eastern theology. Mortality was the true inheritance from Adam. Adam was created immortal. He sinned, became mortal. So now he's going to die. So that's what we inherited, according to the East, we inherited death, mortality. And so to the Easterners, the original sin was not the transference of Adam's guilt, not Adam's guilt, but the power of death over human nature. So that's what they were contending for. Salvation, in their eyes, was the liberation from death's hold. And so Christ's resurrection was truly serving as that central triumphant act that neutralized death, and by extension, then sin as well. So in the West, everything centered on the cross. It all centered on the cross. In the East, it all centered on the resurrection and eternity in heaven. So if you go to their worship services, if you go to their centers of worship today, you will see surrounding you icons of all kinds of saints, apostles, prophets, people that they have held in high regard who are in heaven. And they can pray to these individuals. So you've got earth and heaven together in that worship space. So that's Eastern thinking. The key doctrinal divergence between the East and the West concerned the nature of the Trinity and the filioque. The filioque. We talked about the filioque. I think we took a couple of weeks talking about that. And that's basically the additional Latin word that was added into the Nicene Creed, which became the Constantinople Creed. related to Christ and God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so they added this in, which just simply means, from the Son. From the Son. And the East never, ever, ever forgave them for putting that into their creed. The Eastern position held that within the Trinity, the Holy Spirit proceeds solely from the Father. By contrast, in the West, These theologians argued that the Spirit emerges both from the Father and the Son as a single source. And this is what we hold to that. We have that in our confession of faith, saying about the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Not so in the East. They did not like the filioque clause being put into their creed. The Eastern Church was troubled by the West's addition of the Filioque clause. And I say, it's always called a clause. It's a word, right? But in English, it's two words. But they always call it the Filioque clause. And it altered that original wording. And they just, they considered that first creed the most important of the ecumenical creeds. And they didn't like the fact that they put a mustache on it, right? With this word, you know, sticking this word in it. The papacy had been, this came along around, did I say sixth century or so? In Spain, I believe, that came in. A lot of the priests were putting it in. But Rome, they were a little queasy about putting that in. But finally, around 11th century, they finally said, okay, they made it official and they put it in. And this was more than just, one writer said, this is more than just a semantic quibble. This is more than just the way you look at it word-wise. It revealed two distinct approaches to understanding the Trinity. For the East, the person of the Father was the ultimate source of the divine essence and unity. So they started with just the Father. But in the West, they saw the divine essence itself as the wellspring of the three distinct persons. And so they didn't start with just the Father, they started with The essence. God is one essence. Three persons in one being. All right. I need to write a couple of things. I've run out of room. All right. The final breach was set in motion when Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX, That's the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine IX, allied with the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry III. So these are emperors. And Pope Leo IX. I'm going to write him in purple. And I'm going to write another name over in the east, but we need to make some comments about that first. There was a Norman threat in southern Italy. We'll talk about the Normans later. I don't have time to talk about the Normans tonight. But we'll talk about the Normans. Normans basically were the the Scandinavian, the Vikings, you know, who had made their way over and kind of bred in with some of these other individuals. I think they were over in like the western area of France and northwest area in there. They were the Normans. We'll get to 1066, all right, and we'll talk about, you know, the Normans a little bit more later. As part of this alliance, these two made an alliance, or these three, Constantine IX, Emperor of the East, Byzantine. Leo, the Emperor of the West, and Pope Leo IX, they made an alliance because they were trying to fight against the Normans. So they kind of, they're trying to, they may have their differences, but when it comes to people invading your territory, you need, you know, you'll get some of your enemies together as well to fight with them, to help you fight against them. So as part of that alliance, Constantine the Ninth demanded that Constantinople's patriarch, the bishop, the pastor of that church, his name was Michael, I think it's Michael the First, or Michael Cyrillarius. He's the patriarch. Now, be careful, because I wrote Pope Leo to distinguish him as the religious figure from the emperor. This is the religious figure, and this is the emperor, but he's not a pope. He's the patriarch. The East never had popes. They didn't look at one over any of the others, just like they did in the West. Although, the patriarch in Constantinople was given and a lot of stuff happened in Constantinople, it was the capital, but they did not look, he could not tell other people what to do in that sense. So, as a part of this alliance, Constantine IX demanded that his patriarch, Michael Sirelius, that he recognize Rome's superior authority. And what do you think Michael I did? That's something he could not abide. He would not. It was a demand that Serlarius resolutely rejected in defense of Constantinople's ecclesiastical independence. So he would not recognize the Pope as being an authority figure in that sense. So tensions escalated. Serlarius closed Latin-speaking churches in Constantinople in 1052. So he just closed them down. Any Latin-speaking churches in the Byzantine Empire? Closed them down. So in 1053, together with another individual by the name of Leo Ockred, Seralaria sent a letter to Pope Leo and Western Catholics criticizing the practices that they had, just laying them out for the things that they did. The practices we just talked about, all right, the unleavened bread, another one, Saturday fasting, eating meat strangled by animals, the omission of the Alleluia during Lent, all of these things. And so Leo gets this letter from Michael and this other person saying, you know, these are things we don't like that you're doing. So Pope Leo IX sends another individual, a fellow by the name of Cardinal Humbert, Cardinal Humbert, and they responded forcefully, laying out the papacy's supreme claims, right? Saying, no, we are the authority. And so, Serularius is trying to maintain peace because the Normans are still coming, and they're still fighting. So he's trying to figure out a way to, you know, try to keep these things together because of the Roman, the Norman invasion. The conflict took a dramatic turn when the Normans were victorious over Pope Leo IX's forces in the battle in southern Italy, where Leo was captured, and I believe he was killed. I'm not sure, but you can check on that, you can Google that and find out, but I think he was killed. And so, faced with this increasing Norman threat to Byzantine territory, Sularius attempted to reach out for peace, Pope Leo sends ambassadors to Cardinal and he sought to dialogue in Constantinople, but the meeting between these two individuals was just, was like, I think Nick Needham said it was like, you know, the irresistible force meeting an immovable object, right? They just clashed. They had no political graces. There was no bringing them together at all. And so after the news of Pope Leo's death got to Constantinople, Michael I refused to recognize Cardinal Humbert's authority to negotiate. He just wouldn't. And so Humbert and them went to, Humbert, the cardinal, went to the Hagia Sophia, the big church there in Constantinople, and there laid out on the altar there this ceremonious doctrine, a document excommunicating all these individuals. And so Cardinal Humbert, and I don't remember who the new Pope was, sorry about that, but after Leo's death, Humbert goes in and it was on July the 16th, 1054, July 16th, 1054, they entered the Hagia Sophia and very ceremoniously placed this document on the altar And it excommunicated Michael I and all of those who followed his criticisms of the Roman Church. That document was very forcefully worded. It included even names of very notorious heretics. In it, they symbolically invoked the devil and his angels, referring to these heretics. And it ends with the triumphant amen, amen, amen at the end of it. So how does Serularius, how does Michael I respond to that, that he's been excommunicated? Well, he responds by anathematizing Humbert and all those other delegates and sort of set that stage for that irrevocable split. So it's not like you've got two popes excommunicating each other, but you do have one pope through a cardinal excommunicating Michael and these others, and then Michael anathematizing the Roman Catholic Church. the Catholic Church in Rome. And really, that effectively divided Christianity into two distinct churches. You will end up with the Western Catholic Church, and you will end up with the Eastern Orthodox Church. And because each side maintained that there's only one true church, so that meant that they would not recognize each other. They did not recognize, the East did not recognize the West as a true church, East did not recognize, the West did not, I don't know how I said it, but they didn't recognize each other. For Eastern Christians, the West's actions meant that it had cut itself off from divine grace. So that's the way the East saw it. The West saw the East as having forfeited its share of grace by rejecting papal authority. So that's how they saw each other. Over time, they, The consequences of 1054 schism became starkly evident. We'll see it as it grows through history, particularly during the days of the Crusades, which we will eventually get to, when the Western Crusaders committed grievous acts against the Eastern Christians. And there have been attempts to bring the two sides together historically. The story is that back in 1965, Pope John Paul VI, And the patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Athenagoras, patriarch Athenagoras, tried to have a commitment of ecumenicalism. They were very committed to the ecumenical movement. And so they're trying to bring the two sides together. But really, they never did. They still have it to this day. So that's the Great Schism, 1054, all the differences between the two. And I know we went through that quickly, but I wanted to kind of wrap Wrap that up and put a bow on it tonight. Yes, ma'am. He did not have that. Right. The original 19 creed had a very limited statement related to the Holy Spirit. About how many years later? 581, I think was the year when Constantinople sort of rewrote that. Not rewrote it, but added some information related to the Holy Spirit, saying that it proceeded from the Father. Well, the Western Church said he doesn't proceed just from the Father. He proceeds from the Father and the Son. So it was about the 6th century that they got this idea of the Filioque. And I believe it was somewhere in the 11th century that it became official, that it was added to that creed that began in Nicaea, was reworded in Constantinople. And they had the word philioque put it, as it was translated into Latin. They've had the word philioque. In English, we would just say that he proceeds from the father. And we wouldn't say philioque, we would say and the son in English. OK? All right. Good. All right, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we are so very delighted to have been under the hearing of this lesson related to church history. And I pray that it would be a benefit to the people of God as we look back and see the various places of theological difference. Some of these we would agree with, enter into an agreement with some on both sides. But we pray, please, that you would help us as we look at these things to have our own biblical theology further solidified and affirmed in the holy word of God. Bless in the time to follow as we, as a body of Christ, lift up our petitions before you. We are careful to ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.