One of the things that makes these false religions and these cults so obviously false is their recent start-up. So we look at the Mormons, and there weren't any Mormons until the 1800s. Joseph Smith supposedly came forward with this new revelation. And he told us, well, this truth isn't new, the truth has always been around, but just nobody knew about it until now. And now we all know the truth. So fortunate us, we live in the age where we have this new revelation and now we can know the truth. And I believe it's one of the weaknesses of Protestants that we cede C-E-D-E, we give over all of church history to the Roman Catholics, it seems like. It's like they claim them, and we just say, okay, you can have them. And we don't combat for the truth. We don't say, no, God's always had his people, his church has always stood, it's always been there combating the gates of hell. And just because you claim that Peter was the first Pope doesn't make the Apostle Peter Roman Catholic. They can claim him all they want, that doesn't make it true. And so hopefully what we're going to do this semester is we're going to look at some of these men throughout the ages, between the time of the Apostles until the time of the Reformation, and see some of what they wrote, some of what we can learn from them. I was thinking about this topic as I was preparing for this lecture, and I thought, this is a hypothetical, but what if there was someone who knew nothing about Christianity? And they asked me, hey, can you recommend an author or a book for me from the first 1500 years of Christianity? What would you say I should read to kind of get a good grip on the first 75% of church history to really kind of get a grip of its founding? I wouldn't know where to start. I wouldn't know what to tell them because we're so focused on some recency bias. And this isn't to take anything away from Luther and Calvin and Knox and Zwingli and we're grateful for what those men did in bringing some of the truth to light. But we need to beware of the temptation of thinking that it started with them. That Christianity lay dormant for 1500 years and didn't come back to light until the Reformation. That's just not the case. Now the other thing that I want to say as we look through the lives of these men is that it's unfair to judge history by today's standards. And what I mean by that is it would be unfair to say, well, Martin Luther must not have been a very strong Christian because he never wrote about the dangers of transsexualism. And he didn't talk about why men shouldn't become women and women shouldn't become men. So he must have just been a wishy-washy Christian. No, that's not the error that he was combating in his day. He was combating the error of the papacy and of false views of justification, things of that nature. And so, in the same way, it's unfair for us to look back at someone like Clement of Rome, who we're going to be looking at tonight, Augustine, Athanasius, Gregory, some of these men from the early periods in church history and say, well, because they didn't talk in very clear and concise terms the way the Reformers did about maybe the doctrine of justification, that must mean that they were Roman Catholic. Well, no, that wasn't the errors that they were combating in their day. They were speaking very clearly about issues like the Trinity, about the person of Jesus Christ, about the work of the Holy Spirit, about the Church. They were dealing with issues like when Christians left the Church during persecution and then wanted to come back and say, oh, sorry, I shouldn't have left, When times were good again, what do we do with people like that? Do we accept their repentance? Do we say, no, if you couldn't stick it out in the hard time, then you're not really truly repentant? We're dealing with the use of images, and statues, and pictures, and worship. Is that allowable? Is that usable? So you have these men writing about these issues, debating these issues through their works, holding ecumenical, that is, universal councils on these issues. And so it would be unrealistic for us to expect them to have written clearly, sapiently, expressly about issues that weren't at the forefront of religion and theocentric debates until hundreds if not thousands of years later. So every age had its own error that it was combating, had its own problems that it was trying to defend the truth against. So we don't want to judge the Reformers by today's standards, and we don't want to judge the early church fathers by the Reformers' standards. Rather, we want to look at what they were saying that was true, what errors and heresies they were combating that were false, and how they helped the church to grow throughout the centuries. The Reformation wouldn't have been possible unless the groundwork had already been laid on all these other heresies and errors that had been gotten out of the way. And so now nobody was really, in a large sense, debating or arguing anymore the Trinity. Nobody was really debating anymore the person of Christ. Even the Roman Catholics of that day were in agreement on those areas. So now, truth went forward. Well, now let's go on. Leaving behind those fundamentals, let's deal with some other issues that are still being treated. wrongly. And so, we're going to look at each era, hopefully, as well as we can, within its own context, and yet also realize that truth is eternal. And so, just because the early church fathers may not have been writing specifically about justification, and how it applies, and how God works, and all of these things, doesn't mean that they believed the opposite about it either. They didn't believe that they were in error, in heresy. And so we can read their writings, when they're writing about the work or the person of Jesus Christ, we can see, you know what, I think they would have been in agreement with us, and with Calvin, and with Luther, because some of the statements that they made, even though that's not what they were talking about, are in line with the truth that we know today to be true. And so you can go back, to use my first analogy, you can probably go back and read Luther, and read Calvin, and what they said about God creating man and woman, and realize, okay, he was on the same page as us. He wouldn't have stood for this transsexual nonsense that's going on in our culture today. And so we can go back and we can read Clement and Augustine, and we can say, you know what? He wouldn't have stood for the error and the silliness that was going on in Roman Catholicism during the time of the Reformation. He would have been on the side of the Reformers, I believe. So just try to keep that in mind as we go throughout this semester. Number one, these men weren't perfect. Number two, they were dealing with their own contexts and their own era. And number three, I just kind of touched on this briefly, but don't allow, as I said, don't allow the fact that the Roman Catholic Church claims some of these people to say, oh, well then they're in full agreement with what the Roman Catholic Church says that they believe today. Well, no, that's just not the case. In fact, Clement of Rome... I did some reading and some books I had of Clement. I read the one extant work of his that we have still today. And then I Googled him. I just did a Google search. I wonder what's out there on the internet about this guy, you know? So I Googled Clement. All the initial responses are Pope Clement I. He wasn't Pope Clement! There was no idea of the papacy in the 90s A.D., in the 100-120 A.D. when Clement was living. There was no pope. But now, posthumously, the Catholics have gone back and said, well, he was one of our popes. So don't let them have that. That's not true. They're lying. And so just because they want to go back and claim him and say, well, he's one of us, don't let that scare you away from saying, well, I don't want to read anything Clement had to say. I don't want to read anything Athanasius had to say because the Catholics call him a saint or a pope or something like that. That's nonsense. That's foolishness. That's not what was going on in their day. It's just hundreds of years later, the Catholics wanted to claim these famous men who wrote good and solid works and say, well, these are some of our fathers, when that's just not the case. In chapter 5 of this book, it deals with the topic of justification. And all we think about, all I think about, is I think the whole doctrine of justification was formed around And that was the thing, there was no question in their mind. It wasn't what was being debated at the time. How deeply it had gone into error through one line. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's an important point to note. That book deals, long before Luther, deals specifically with the Reformation doctrines of justification. So if you get that book, I'm going to try to take maybe a a larger bird's eye view of these men, but that book really hones in on what did these men believe about the doctrine of justification, about the Reformation doctrines. So I really recommend that book if you would like to dig deeper into the history of Christianity even before the Reformation. particularly on those issues. So the first group of men that we're going to look at, and as we look through history, once again, they didn't realize they were going to be called this or they were in this age. But now, looking back on history, we kind of group some of these men together. And we say, these men lived during this time, and these men lived during this time. And that doesn't mean that they were all big buds and living in the same community and agreeing on everything 100%. That's not what we're saying. We're just saying, kind of based on the culture that they lived in and the time frame that they lived in, here's how we group them. And the first group we call the Apostolic Fathers. The Apostolic Fathers. These were men who were contemporary with the Apostles. These were men who had maybe met the Apostles face to face. Many of these men were disciples of the Apostles. They'd learned under the Apostle John, the Apostle Peter, the Apostle Paul. And so they'd actually learned from these men directly. They weren't inspired. The church, the work that we have from Clement that's still extant today, it was actually found, kind of put as an appendix on the back of a Bible when they found some of these extant copies of it, and they were commonly read in the church. But it's like us reading the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith in churches. Here's something else that some other men have said that were right. It's not the Bible. It's not inspired. The Holy Ghost didn't move this man to write it. When you read this work, it's called the First Epistle of Clement to the Christians, if you'd like to read it. He talks about some things like the phoenix that supposedly every 500 years rises out of his own ashes and flies back to Egypt. Some of these more fantastical legends that you really don't see in the Bible. But in some of these extra-biblical works you'll see some of these things referenced as analogies or illustrations for something else. So don't get caught up in the fact that these men were disciples of the apostles. That must make their work inspired. That must mean everything they said is true. No, that's not the case. They were men. And they were bound by the errors of men and the weaknesses of their own mind and their own flesh. And yet, because they were taught by the Apostles, that kind of kept them closer to the truth. Then as each passing generation became that much further separated from the original truth, they had to learn to go back to that inspired writing and those apostolic writings. So we call them the Apostolic Fathers, and they were contemporaries with the Apostles. Their ministry, kind of as a general, generally speaking, the ministry of the apostolic fathers, these men who lived around the same time as the apostles, was largely pastoral and practical. So, when you go back and you read some of the writings of Clement, of Polycarp, of some of these apostolic fathers, you're not going to find them digging down into the intricacies of theology, and what was going on in heaven when this happened. It wasn't like that. It was very similar to many of the epistles that we read in the New Testament. They were writing to the churches, and they were saying, hey, here's what you all need to keep in mind. Here's what you need to be working on. You need to remember the words of the apostles. Remember the words of Jesus. Remember what was left to us in the Old Testament. Act this way. Do these things. So that was their ministry largely. What came after them began to be a lot more of the apologists, the men who gave a reason, an apology. Some of the men who were more into debating, writing books. One of the more famous ones written by an early church father was called Against Heresies. I think that was written in like 170 AD. That was more the apologists. But that's not what was going on here with Clement. These first group of men that were living from, say, as early as 30 A.D. We believe Clement was, we don't really know much about his early life, but probably was born sometime around 30 A.D. So he was probably born around the time that Christ died. Somewhere in that time frame. And then he died around the turn of the century, around the same time the Apostle John died. We believe Clement died. He died around, depending on which story you read somewhere between 99 and 101 AD, right there around the turn of the century. Someone has a Bible and wants to read for us, turn to Philippians 4, 3. Whoever gets there first can read that aloud for us. Philippians 4, 3. I entreat thee also, true yoke-fellow, help those women which labor with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and with other my fellow laborers, whose names are in the book of life. It is believed, it's not expressly stated here, but it is believed that the Clement, who is Paul's fellow laborer in the Gospel, is what he calls him, is this Clement of Rome, who later on actually became a pastor there at the church at Rome, a bishop there. We believe that this Clement that Paul references was that same one. Clement was believed to be a disciple of both the Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul. We see he's writing to the church at Philippi, there in Philippians chapter 4 and verse 3. Apparently, Clement was there at that time. We know Clement later was in Rome, and there's stories of Peter and Paul both being in Rome at one time or another. He's called a laborer in the Gospel, a fellow laborer. He's called one whose name is in the Book of Life. And so, it's not a far stretch to imagine this is the same Clement. He would have been maybe a little bit younger than Peter and Paul, maybe by 20 or 30 years younger than these men. And he would have certainly been a fellow laborer with them as he was learning the ropes, as it were, to become a minister. Yes, sir? I don't know if you can fill this in now. From what I can see, Peter was never in Rome. Right. The Catholics would love to place him in Rome, the Roman Catholic Church. They want him to be the first Pope there in Rome and we don't have any sure... There's a little tidbit I'll give you. In ancient Roman history, they have these legends. One of them is Juan Willis and Remus. And then they tried to translate Romulus and Remus. So it's pretty colorful. Yes, it does. And you're right, there's no scriptural foundation for us to say Peter ever was. And Paul, you'll read some legends, some stories that say he was, and others that say he never did. But one way or another, let me see if I can find it here since we're talking about this. Well, I'll get to it. One of the early writers said that Clement had learned from Peter and Paul. But we knew he got around too. He didn't stay in Rome his whole life because the church in Philippi apparently was aware of him and so he probably traveled around with Paul and maybe even Peter at one time or another. So what do we know about Clement's life? As I said, we know almost nothing, really we know nothing about his early life, about his childhood and even as a young adult. an account that he was actually raised in the emperor's household. His father was some sort of a minister, not in a religious sense, but in a political sense, some kind of secretary or minister or something like that in the emperor's household. That account is from hundreds and hundreds of years after Clement's life that we first get that account. So you can take that or leave it. We don't really know where that came from or if that's true or not. The first time we really hear of him in history, the first bits and pieces we get of his life from men like Eusebius and Irenaeus and people who mentioned him later on, is when he's appointed as one of the bishops in the Church of Rome. Now, from what we can gather, and again, the Roman Catholics love to twist history and try to make it fit their narrative, and so when you look at some of the lines of papal succession, you know, who was the first bishop of Rome, they can't even agree where where Clement falls in that. He's listed anywhere from the second right after Peter, which we don't think Peter was ever a bishop in Rome, to as late as the fourth. But he was one of the first. He was right in there, the first few pastors there in Rome. The best piecing things together that we can get is that when he first was appointed as a bishop there in Rome, he was appointed as a co-bishop, as a plurality of elders, with a couple of other men named Linus and Cletus. Linus and Cletus, so he was kind of the the youngest of the three, maybe, that was being appointed there as part of a plurality of elders in the church there at Rome. There's a couple of other historical hints that we get that there was a plurality of elders when the church in Rome there was first established. Around 107 AD, so this would have been just somewhere between eight and six years after Clement died, Irenaeus wrote six I'm sorry, seven letters to six different churches. Irenaeus, he was another one of those earliest fathers. He writes seven letters to six different churches, and to five of those churches, he specifically makes it one of the common themes of his letter to exhort them to honor the authority of their bishop. to cling to their presbyter, their elder, their pastor, and to honor him. And he never mentions that in the church to Rome. And one of the theories is, is because the church at Rome was ruled by a plurality of elders. And so since there was what was called a college, or a group of elders there, that it wouldn't have been as much as to some of these smaller, more outlined churches that maybe only had one pastor. And it would have been telling them, really, you know, look out for that man and honor him and take up for him. But in Rome, perhaps they had this plurality of elders. Now that's, again, that's just a theory based on the fact that that was the only church that Irenaeus didn't specifically mention honoring and clinging to their single bishop. But more Specifically, there was a famous book called The Shepherd of Hermas, written in Rome around the end of the first century. And in that letter, there's this statement. He says, write two little books and send one to Clement. and one to Grapte. So Clement shall send to the foreign cities, for this is his duty, but thou shalt read the book to this city, along with the elders that preside over the church." So it seems as though there is an indication that there were elders. There was a plurality of elders there in Rome. And from what the best we can understand, Clement was the third. When he was first appointed there to the church at Rome, he was the third elder. Now, as time went on, he became the first among equals, was the phrase that was used. The first among equals. And so these three men, these three elders, they were all bishops, they were all elders, pastors there in that church, but he kind of rose to the top. He became the one that everyone started to look to, perhaps because of his connection to Peter and Paul, perhaps because of his wit and ability to write clearly and understandably. We don't know why, but for some reason he became the first among equals. Now that's not a difficult concept for us to grasp, but I think we could pretty clearly say in this church, Pastor Michael is the first among equals. I mean, it doesn't mean that we're not both pastors here, but he's the one that's full-time. He's the one who's been here longer. And so we understand the concept there. You can have an equality among a plurality of elders, and yet there's one that kind of takes the forefront, who rises to the top. And that was Clement. And then as he continued to age, as he continued to get older, apparently, once again, this is kind of speculation, but apparently those other two pastors, Linus and Cletus, passed away, whether it was under persecution, whether it was just old age. And Clement was left as the bishop there in Rome. Now based on the geopolitical importance of the city of Rome, when we think of the Roman Empire, Rome. So it's at the center of it, right? It wasn't the saying, all roads lead to Rome. Everybody kind of looked to Rome based on its geopolitical and economic importance in the world at that time. Couple that with the fact that Clement was tied to both the apostles, Peter and Paul, at one point or another in his life, and his status was one that was respected and honored by churches all over the Christian world. The Roman Catholic Church today, and in succeeding centuries, loved to say, this is where the beginning of the papacy started. All these other churches recognized that Clement was the one in charge, but Clement never claimed to be in charge. It was simply based on those two things. Think of it this way. This is a really poor analogy, but it's the best I could come up with in our day and age, which is very different, as I said, from this day and age in which they were living. There's a pastor by the name of Mark Deaver. I don't know if y'all are familiar with him or not. I don't agree with everything he's ever done or said. But he pastors a church in Washington, D.C. and he's written a best-selling book called Nine Marks of a Healthy Church. And he said some good things through the years. If he were to write a letter to us and to say, hey, I want to remind you what the Scripture says about being a true biblical church, how God expects His church to be run, and he just quoted lots of Scripture to us, I would hope we'd kind of take notice. You know, wow, here's this man who's really well respected, who lives in an important part of the country, who pastors a big church, who seems to be wise, and he's writing us and telling us that. Now, again, he didn't learn from the apostles. Washington D.C. is not Rome. That's a stretched analogy, I understand, but that's kind of the closest thing I could come up with. That's what was going on here when Clement wrote to these other churches. He wasn't saying, I'm the one at the top of the food chain, you all have to obey my authority. He was saying, let me remind you of what the scripture says. As one that you ought to respect and honor and consider as someone who's wise and tested in the faith, let me remind you of some scriptural facts. According to various historical accounts, he was banished to the peninsula of Crimea during the reign of the Emperor Trajan, awful Roman emperor who fiercely persecuted Christians. And during that time, Trajan had him banished to this peninsula of Crimea on the Black Sea to work in the marble mines. There were some marble mines there in the Crimea. And so Clement probably at this time is a fairly old man, in his 70s by most accounts. And the emperor thinks, I know what I'll do to him. and send him to work in these hard mines. Well, Clement gets to these mines there in the Crimea, and he finds over 2,000 Christians there serving the same sentence, who from around the empire had been sentenced to work in these mines. And Clement starts, again, his pastoral work toward them and evangelistic efforts to the surrounding communities. Again, over time, there's been all kinds of crazy legends that Clement worked these miracles or totally unsubstantiated claims that we don't have any reason to believe. But one way or another, his work there among the Christians, as well as his evangelistic efforts to the others around him, caught the ear of the Emperor Trajan once again. And he thought, wait a second, I thought I was going to send this guy to the marble mines and he was going to die in short order. And instead he goes there and just continues his work. as a pastor and a Christian, and more people are coming to Christ. So Trajan then sent a messenger to Crimea to take Clement two miles out into the Black Sea, tie an anchor around his neck, and throw him overboard. And that is how he was martyred. That's how he died. Now once again, there's all kinds of fantastical tales about how angels came and built a building to him in the middle of the sea. All this stupid stuff, you know, that obviously, just reading it, it reeks of falsity. and untruth, but those are some of the facts that we know. He served originally as a co-pastor there in Rome, eventually becoming, from what we understand, the only pastor there in Rome. He was exiled to Crimea to work in the mines, and finally was martyred by being thrown overboard with an anchor tied around his neck into the Black Sea, and thus he was martyred. So that's what we know about his life. Now, what do we know about his writings? There's only one extant work that we know of Clement. We call it First Clement, and you'd say, well, doesn't that mean there's a Second Clement? And there is. But from all accounts, Second Clement is what we call a pseudepigraphal book. It was written much later, and somebody said, this was written by Clement. But we don't have anything to back that up to make us think this was actually written by Clement. But 1 Clement is universally recognized as actually being written by this first bishop there in the church at Rome, and it was written to the church at Corinth. Now, this work called 1 Clement is a letter and it doesn't bear his name anywhere. Nowhere in it does he say, I, Clement, write. The whole thing is written in the plural tense. He says, we. We therefore exhort you, brethren. And at the end of the letter, It says, the Church of God living in exile in Rome to the Church of God exiled in Corinth. So it's written as church to church, once again watering down and weakening this idea that Clement had some idea that he had some papal authority, because that wasn't how he was writing at all. He was simply saying, the Church that's here in Rome is writing to exhort the Church that's there in Corinth. And we want to help you by reminding you of what the Scriptures say. Um... Whose translation is it? Are you looking at Lightfoot? That's who I read. When I read the entire book, I read Lightfoot's translation for no other reason except I know Gil quotes him all the time. And so that was a name that I recognized. That's what I thought. Yeah, I read it. He must be a great scholar. I guess so. So yeah, there's several translations out there of it. But if you'd like to read it, I read Lightfoot's translation. I'm not telling you that's better or worse than any of the other ones. I'm just telling you that's the one I read. Now an excerpt from a man named Dionysius of Corinth, that was written in the early 170s, so probably 70-75 years after Clement wrote this book to the Corinthians. A man there in Corinth named Dionysius wrote to the Romans, wrote to the church at Rome, and he says, the church in Corinth still reads the letter which Clement wrote on your behalf. So, 70-75 years later, it's attributed to Clement. So, there's pretty significant historical documentation that this epistle was written by Clement, even though he doesn't claim any authority or even authorship of it. He just talks about the church writing. And we guess that there was probably help from his other elders there, if there was still a plurality of elders at the time that that letter was written. We don't know exactly when the letter was written. He speaks of some recent persecutions. And so maybe that was as early as like 70 after the fall of Jerusalem and things of that nature. Some people have suggested perhaps it was even as late as the 120s or something like that, but we don't think Clement lived that long. The most accepted date for this letter is around 96 AD. It's not gospel, but that seems to be the most widely recognized date for this letter written to the church there in Corinth is around 96-97 AD. Now, why did he write this? I thought this was so interesting. This was my favorite part of this whole study. Why Clement wrote the church in Corinth? From what we can gather from reading the letter, and if you read the letter under this presupposition, you can see that's what's going on here. There had been a youth movement in the church, where the young people in the church wanted to get rid of the older people in the church, particularly among the elders. And they wanted to get rid of these elders who more than likely had been appointed by the apostles. Yeah, just a few. 1,000 years ago. I know, isn't it crazy? I mean, man doesn't change. And so they wanted to kick out these older elders that had been there for the last 40-50 years probably, appointed by maybe Paul, Peter, John, whoever it was that went there to Corinth and helped appoint these elders there, and they wanted some younger contemporary pastors. And so they booted the old folks and implemented the young folks. Clement writes him to say, y'all know better than this. You can't do that. God called us to humility. God called us not to envy. God called us to honor our elders. You know that those who were appointed there were not appointed lightly. They were appointed with good reason. They've served your church well for all of these years. So that's why he wrote this letter. The letter is long, it's 65 chapters, but the chapters are similar to chapters like New Testament books. We're not talking about a 400 page book here. It's about twice as long as Hebrews, I think is what I read one reader said. So if you want to read it, you can do it fairly easily. But for an epistle, for a letter, it's a pretty long letter. And yet, there's over 150 different references to the Bible. in this book. Over 25% of the letter is nothing but direct quotation from both the Old Testament, the words of Jesus, and the words of the Apostles. I think one person counted and said there were like 11 different books quoted in there. He quotes Hebrews, he quotes from the Gospels, he quotes from James, he quotes from Peter, He quotes from Proverbs, he quotes from Isaiah. So he just extensively leans on the Scriptures. He's not trying to give them something new. He's not trying to tell them some new doctrine or some new twist on something. He's simply saying, remember what the Scriptures said. Remember what Jesus said. Remember what the apostles said. Remember what the prophets said. Remember what the psalmist said. Over and over and over again. It's written in the same pattern, the same kind of layout as 1 Corinthians, which would make sense. You'd think if he's writing to the church at Corinth and he knew Paul that he probably was familiar with that letter that Paul had already written to this church. Its doctrine and its foundation, the way that it constantly quotes Scripture and leans on Scripture is very reminiscent of the book of Hebrews. which we understand Paul to have written. And yet its practicality and its teaching style reads very similar to 1 and 2 Peter. So you can see that this man was, number one, immersed in scripture. He knew the scriptures, he believed the scriptures. And number two, it's easy to see, yeah, I can see that this man was probably influenced by Peter and Paul directly. Because you'd think that his writing style and things of that nature would lean on them. Yes, sir? I'm getting ready for some of the other church fathers. Is there a reference to him being able to speak Hebrew and Greek both? That's a good question. I didn't come across that one way or the other. That was a church father that didn't know all the languages. Yes. That can hurt your case in being... Well, we won't go there right now. It is over 25% direct quotations of Scripture with over 150 different references to the Old and New Testaments, the words of Jesus, the Apostles' writing. Irenaeus, who wrote this work called Against Heresies that I mentioned earlier, he said in there, Clement had seen the apostles and associated with them, and still had their preaching sounding in his ears and their tradition before his eyes." And you can feel that when you read his letter, when you read his epistle. You can see how heavily influenced he was specifically by Peter and Paul, but you also see that he wasn't bound to Peter and Paul. It wasn't like simply because he had some association with them, that's all he quoted. He extensively quoted the Scriptures. So what do we know about Clement's beliefs based on this writing, and what can we learn from him? Remember I said in the beginning, if somebody asked you, you know, hey, who could you recommend that I read in the first 1,500 years of church history? And you kind of go, I have no idea. Well, here's a couple of topics that if someone said, hey, what does the church believe on this topic? You could probably say, hey, you should read what Clement wrote to the church in Corinth, and you might be able to be helped on this topic. Number one. is that the Old and New Testaments are authoritative. Clement, again, didn't lean on his own authority. He didn't say, I'm the bishop of the Church of Rome, I have primacy in the Church, you need to do what I'm telling you to do. He said, remember what the prophet said, remember what the psalmist said, remember what Jesus said, remember what James said, remember what Peter said, remember what Paul said. He built all of his arguments and teachings on the Scriptures. He calls them, I think the translation that I read by Dr. Lightfoot was, the holy words, is what he called them. So he leaned on that. And we can glean that very easily from his work there, from that letter. If someone were to say to you, well, I think Clement was the first pope, and his epistle tells us that. You might say, hey, have you ever actually read that epistle? Because actually, he doesn't lean on that at all. He actually leans on the Scriptures to be authoritative, and not his own position or person. Secondly, he taught that honor is due to elders and deacons in the church. It's not a popularity contest who gets to be the preacher or the deacon. And particularly with deacons, it's become a bit of a joke in the world that that's who becomes a deacon. It's whoever's got the most money or the most influence or the most popularity in the community. And that's not scriptural, and that's not at all... And Clement was teaching the exact opposite of that. That's what he was saying. He was saying, listen, you can't kick these guys out just because you want somebody new. We'd like somebody contemporary. We want somebody a little younger. We want somebody with a little more pep in their step. You don't get to do that. That's not scriptural at all. But when these men have been appointed, and they're walking faithfully, and they're doing their duty, and they're not caught up in some scandalous sin, you don't get to just kick them out. That's not the way it works. If someone says, hey, what has the good, godly, faithful man ever said about the position of pastors and deacons? You might point them to the works of Clement. He taught that orderliness and humility are to be practiced in the church. He once again leans so heavily on what Paul taught about that, that it's not about going to the world to be judged, but rather we take it to the lowest member of the church. That we don't just get to willy-nilly decide what we do in church, but there's to be order. We're to follow the tradition of the apostles. We're to do things the way that the Scriptures lay them out for. And so much of the craziness and youth movement in the world today would be helped if they would read Clement's epistle. And they would recognize, no, that's not the way the church has done this, even from the beginning. They taught that there was to be orderliness and humility. And lastly, that he taught that our obedience to the apostolic tradition, and when I say apostolic tradition, I'm talking about what we know in the scriptures from the apostles, the words that they left for us, our obedience to that, is not dependent on culture. And this is another argument you get today. Well, I know Paul said that the women should keep their silence in the church, but the culture in that day was so different, and now that it's changed, we can do things the way that we needed. So, he had a way to take care of widows, and if they were under a certain age, they should remarry, but that was culture. Cultures change, we get to do things differently in this day and age. And apparently, that's where Corinth was at. Our culture is changing, we need some new people. And he said, wait a second, the apostles appointed these elders. And you think because culture has changed, you get to just throw that out the window? No, that's not the way that it works. Culture doesn't change what the scriptures have left us, what the apostles left us in their tradition, divinely inspired and canonized in scripture. So that's what we know about Clement's beliefs and what we can learn from his work. And that concludes my lecture. Are there any other questions or comments before you take a short break? Yes sir? Yes, I believe so. Oh good, I look forward to that. Any others? Alright, Papa Scott, would you mind closing us in word of prayer? And then you'll have about 7 minutes to take a break.