Chronological Snobbery - David Bercot

Lesson Transcript

I remember one sister saying, "It sounds to me like they needed to read their Bibles more." It's like they did read their Bibles, and they read it in the language it was written in, and they lived in the culture it was written in, and they're the ones who decided what books are part of the New Testament and not. So, yeah, they knew their Bibles. So we're going to be learning about chronological snobbery today, and hopefully by the end of it—it's not a term I invented, like you say, you can find it on the internet.

This is part one. We're going to be doing part two in, I don't know, probably December. I just realized I wanted to do it all in one sermon, but as I worked on it this week, I realized this is going to be too long. I don't think you guys want an hour or an hour and 15-minute sermon, so I better make this into two. Last year, my wife and I were visiting friends in Scotland, and we spent a week there.

We'd visited different sites in Edinburgh, Scotland, and one of them was the National Portrait Gallery, where they have portraits of a lot of their national heroes, famous people from Scotland. Of course, they would have a lot of ones that their portrait was never painted, but it was very interesting. I mean, like King James, they had the portrait of him and just, you know, other people. So, you know, we were enjoying it, and then, like I say, there's different rooms, you know, from different centuries.

So we got to the room that had people from the 1700s and the 1800s. I found this interesting, and so I saw a picture of James Watt, a portrait of him. Do you all know who he is? It's where we get the name Watts, you know, Kello Watts and all of that. Well, he was not the inventor of the steam engine. Someone had already invented a steam engine, but he changed it and made it into an extremely useful engine, and it was basically the invention that fueled the whole Industrial Revolution.

I mean, just all the changes that we have that, you know, we're not back plowing with, you know, a horse and plows unless maybe we're Amish or something, but like I say, if there was one invention, I mean, there were many, many inventions in the Industrial Revolution, but if you had to point to one, I think almost every historian would say, yeah, the steam engine that James Watts perfected.

Well, you know, I'm all interested in looking at this, and they have each one had a plaque that was explaining something about him, and, you know, I thought, well, I already know kind of the story, but, you know, maybe they have some additional information. Well, I was really surprised that the plaque, which was something very recent, is just, you know, slamming him, and it's like, what? I mean, this should be like one of your big national heroes that affected the entire world of mankind, and he's from Scotland.

Oh, well, it turned out, you know, he eventually got wealthy at the end of his life from his invention, and he invested his money in different places, and one was he bought a sugar plantation or an interest in one in the Caribbean. Oh, and they had slaves there, so like put a big X on him, you know, and I thought, wow, that's kind of a harsh judgment on somebody who was just living by the ethics of his age. Well, then the next portrait, same thing.

I don't know, a lot of these people I'd never heard of, you know, you know, it looked like someone went through a lot of trouble. So let's dig into their life, see if we can find something we can condemn them. So, you know, I went from portrait to portrait, you know, everyone, big X, you know, and it's like, wow, this is absurd. I mean, you are wiping out your own history, not because these people were cads in their age, just they live by the times.

Now, I'm not sure why this picture was in here, because everything else was a portrait of an individual, but this was showing the slave market in Istanbul. The Turks, it's not as much in our history books. It's very interesting. You don't hear very much about it. They enslaved a lot of Europeans. In fact, a lot of historians say there were more Europeans enslaved by the Turks than there were Black African slaves taken by the British and French and all of that. So you had two evils going on at the same time.

You had the one of, like I say, from Britain and some of these other countries buying slaves in Africa and taking them over to the New World, but on the other end of Europe, you have the Turks, and they invaded Eastern Europe, Hungary, what are modern-day Hungary, Romania, Serbia, all of those countries, and yeah, they just went in there, took children, husbands, wives, everybody, and it was a much more cruel slavery than even the slavery here in the United States because they would separate the families.

The wife would often become into some rich person's harem. Men often were either made into eunuchs or they were slaves in galleys, you know, rowing these ships, you know, until they died or, you know, chained there, you know, for the rest of their life. It was pretty horrible. So anyway, this, I don't even know who it was who painted the picture, you know, painted a picture of that. Well, you think, okay, if you're so concerned about slavery, well, this is good that he was calling attention to an equal slavery.

Nope, politically incorrect. You don't talk about Europeans who were made into slaves. So they ran that down. And then I finally get, we get to the end of the room, and it's a portrait of a missionary to Africa. Yeah, they were having a hard time trying to find something bad about him. He, you know, they mentioned he adopted, he and his wife adopted two African orphan children, and it's like, okay, well, you ought to be like, okay, check mark, one person did something right by your standards.

No, well, someone said they treated their children like servants. So big X on them, you know. So we walked out of the room, it's like, so you turned everybody into a villain, and none of them get a chance to defend themselves or anything like that. Well, then the next gallery, they showed a little bit on the outside. This was Scottish movie stars and, you know, modern musicians from, you know, rock groups and all that, and then they had a big sign, the real heroes of Scotland.

And, you know, Deborah and I looked at each other and it's like, I don't think I have any interest in going in there. I'm sure it's going to be, you know, whatever. If you're gay, if you're this or that, yeah, you're going to be, you know, the ones who are being hailed, and you destroy your own heroes who, like I say, were simply living by the ethics of their time. So chronological snobbery occurs. This is one form of it.

When we condemn people of another era for simply living by the ethics of their age, because we do this the same thing. Every century you have that, there might be a handful of people who question certain things in their day, but most people live by what their society considers normal and good.

And it's the assumption that our attitudes, our conception of right or wrong in our century is always right, but yeah, the people who live before us, yeah, they're wrong, and yeah, we can just slam them and kind of shove them to the side. And it's such a snobbish kind of attitude. Chronological snobbery is also called presentism. In other words, the present day, you judge everybody else who has lived through history based on the ethics of the present day.

Well, of course, it's so short-sighted because, you know, we're living in a time where every 10 years we have these, you know, huge changes. I mean, society has changed so dramatically from the time I was born, and we're silly if we think that 100 years from now, if Christ hasn't returned, that there's not going to be a whole lot of other changes, and they're going to look down on this generation and say, oh, you know, they had this or that.

And the funny thing is, these self-righteous chronological snobs who look down on people who lived in the 1700s and 1800s, if they had lived in the 1700s or 1800s, they would have acted no differently. If they were wealthy, they would probably have owned slaves or an interest at least in a sugar plantation or something like that. Any other evils, like I say, they found something wrong with everybody, you would have done the same thing.

And I know that because these same critics, they accept without question whatever our age, you know, says is, you know, the new morality, what is, you know, considered ideal or ethical today. So these same people, yeah, we should be speak out and, you know, feel terrible that the slavery that went on from Africa, but we should feel equally terrible about the slavery that the Turks did, which lasted a lot longer than the African slave trade to the New World, that is.

I mean, Africans were enslaving Africans for thousands of years. I mean, it wasn't anything new. And like I say, the Turks, as soon as they got in power, you know, grabbing slaves wherever they could, and all of that was evil. I mean, as Christians, we live by the standard of doing unto others what we would want done unto us.

But these same critics, I mean, they accept without question, in fact, they promote abortion, which, you know, every year, I don't know if it has changed recently, but at least, you know, up until very recent, and it's probably the same, you know, it's like a million babies just in the United States are murdered every year, unborn babies, you know, through abortion. I mean, far more than there were ever people enslaved from Africa, and yet our generation said, oh yeah, that's fine and good, you know.

They'll say, oh we want to be a voice for the people who don't have a voice and for the downtrodden and the vulnerable. Well, there is nobody more vulnerable, no one who has no voice like an unborn baby. I mean, they're totally at our mercy, you know. You slaughter them if they're a headache, yep, just get rid of them even if it's a day before they're going to be born, perfectly legal in many states. I think in some states you can even kill them when they're born.

I may be wrong on that, but I know you can do it a few days before their date of birth if they're still in the womb, and that's not evil. I mean, you know, when you condemn people in the 1700s, well, you know, I'm not very fair since they can't defend themselves, but if they could look at our generation, they would say we are the ones who are horribly wicked, you know, looking at the abortions that we have today as just one thing.

So many other evils that are accepted just as being normal, just like people accepted things there. Today, and this has been around for a long time, we have basically slave soldiers. I don't know how else to describe military conscription when you take men and force them to become soldiers against their will, and they have to do whatever they're told. They can't say, ah, you know, I don't know, I have no interest in attacking that hill and getting killed. No, you're a slave. You do whatever you're told.

You can't say, hey, I've got, I'm a father. I'm married. I've got a family back home. Nope, you go. We're going to ship you overseas. Now, our generation accepts that. Oh, that's fine and good. Maybe 100 years from now, I doubt it, but maybe 100 years from now, mankind will wake up and say, well, that's evil, you know, and we'll maybe look on this generation and look what they did.

Another example of chronological snobbery in the social area is today, people, the example we saw there in the portrait gallery, they also criticize people from the 1700s and 1600s because they look down on the native peoples because they were so much more advanced in technology and, you know, general, I mean, knowledge in general. I mean, a lot of the native people, you know, did not even have a written language, et cetera.

So the Europeans felt very superior and looked down on them, and they're being criticized for that. Okay, fine, but don't you realize you're doing the same thing? You're looking down on the people from the 1700s because they don't have the same ethics we do, but then you're criticizing them for looking down on the people in their age who had different ethics, who, you know, had child sacrifices and cannibalism and all that. It's such a hypocritical stance that we see today, but that's chronological snobbery.

Okay, we're mainly going to be talking today about chronological snobbery when it comes to Bible interpretation and following Christ. Now, as I mentioned, the word chronological snobbery, so C.S. Lewis is the one who came up with the term, and I heard about it. I was visiting Harry Argo. If you remember him, he spoke here a few months ago, and we were talking about how people today just ignore what the early Christians said. I mean, and he said, oh, C.S. Lewis had a term for that, chronological snobbery.

That's the first time I heard the term. That was just a couple of years ago. And so, you know, I went and looked it up, and it was quite interesting. And this is what he said. It's the uncritical acceptance. Now, when he was talking about it, he was talking primarily about the philosophy of his day that was rejecting biblical morality, was rejecting belief in God. And at the time, he was an atheist himself, or an agnostic at least.

So yeah, he was feeling there's not a God, that the Bible is outdated and all of that. And he was talking with his friend who helped him to see, hey, you're actually a chronological snob, okay? Anyway, so he defined it, this is C.S. Lewis, as the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited, okay?

So if something's out of fashion that, oh yeah, today that would be, oh, that a marriage has to be a man and a woman. Oh, that's outdated. You know, it can be two women, it can be two men. So yeah, because we've changed, we're right and whatever came before us is wrong. He says, you must find out why it went out of date. I mean, maybe it was something that was evil, like slavery needed to end. Was it ever refuted? And if so, by whom? Where? And how conclusively? Or did it merely die away as fashions do?

If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. So just because a particular view is prevalent in any given age, it doesn't make it right just because, oh, that's the new modern thing. You know, it doesn't mean that what people believed earlier is wrong unless you've demonstrated, you've been able to prove that this is wrong and all of that, which usually you can't.

One type of chronological snobbery is what Harry Argo and I were talking about when he introduced me to the term is, like I say, looking down on Christians who lived before us, like we understand more than them. And it's not just the early Christians, but it's particularly true in the case of the early Christians. I mean, when I'm talking about early Christians, I'm talking about primarily Christians who lived in the second century.

The first, you know, two or three generations right after the apostles, some of them were personal disciples of the apostles. And I'm also talking in general about Christians who lived before the Council of Nicaea, you know, all of the anti-Nicaean Christians and that. There were some changes in the third century, and you know, if I see a change that, okay, this isn't what they did in the second century, then obviously the ones closer to the apostles, I'm going to give greater weight to. There's our snob again.

So what happens is that people today, you can show them, hey, you know, how we're all trying to understand the Bible correctly, or at least I think, you know, so many Christians are. And you point out, hey, you know, do you realize that the ones who lived right after the apostles, who got it straight from the horse's mouth, this is how they're understanding the New Testament? And you think that it has some kind of weight.

I mean, they're not infallible people or anything like that, but it's like, I just dismiss them. Who cares? I mean, they lived a long time ago. Sort of like if you were saying, well, you know, in the year 125, this was their view of medicine and, you know, what causes this or that, and would say, well, yeah, I mean, yeah, but they didn't know very much about, they didn't know anything about germs, they didn't know anything about this or that.

And so, well, yeah, of course, we're not going to give much weight to that. But yeah, that's in medicine and in science, physics, things like that. But when we're talking about the Bible, we're talking about revelation. I mean, we can't sit and understand God on our own ability. We can look at creation as we were discussing this morning. As Paul points out, yeah, we can see enough to know, okay, there's a creator. We can see that he's obviously extremely intelligent, and we can see he's extremely orderly.

But beyond that, we don't know a lot about him just from creation. We're dependent on him revealing himself. And the revelation is in, of course, the scriptures is where we can find out about God, you know, what he said. So the issue comes down to interpreting the Bible.

Do we just, whatever is common today, whatever is taught in churches in general, do we just go, well, the majority view is this, and because it's the present view, then we just ignore what came before us, like, oh, we always know more than the people before us.

Again, if we're talking about medicine or science, okay, there's some validity there, but revelation from God, I mean, the further you get from revelation, you know, which would in Christianity would be the New Testament, is just the opposite of the way medicine or science would work. The further you get from the New Testament and from the apostles, the more that things get murkier or muddled.

I mean, our knowledge of Greek language as it was taught then, as it was spoken, I should say then, now we have to teach it in a seminary. That was just their native tongue. And there are very few people who can pick up a second language and speak it and understand it the same way a native speaker does. It is very hard. I was just talking on WhatsApp with a brother in Austria who's translated some of my books into German, is working on the Romans commentary right now.

And, you know, I was pointing out, he was asking me questions and I realized, you know, some of this just comes from, he's fluent in English, which is great, but he's not a native English speaker. So there's things that I say in the commentary that, yeah, we would get it as native English speakers, but someone who's learned it as a second language, it's not quite as clear because that's not how their thought patterns are. And that's just how it works.

We can read about the culture back then, but it's not the same as living in it. You don't have the same experience. The further you get from the New Testament, you're getting further away from the church's collective memory of what the apostles did. I mean, see, if you lived in the year 100, you didn't just read the New Testament, you had had, you maybe knew the apostle John, or you knew some of the other men that Paul had sent out, or one of the other apostles. Yeah, I mean, you were there.

You know how they baptized. You know how they did this, this or that. You were right there. The further you get from that revelation, well, you lose that. I mean, you're dependent on the ones who kept a record of it. Other than that, yeah, you're just having to guess. You don't know. The other thing is the further you get in time, there's always theological conflicts. You know, these started around the year 300, the bigger ones, but there were ones before that.

And every time there's a conflict and people are arguing, the faith changes. Now, of course, truth doesn't change, but what's being taught changes. What's being taught in the church changes because people polarize and they go to opposite extremes, and it ends up both sides are wrong in the debate because they've both moved away from what the original was. It's human nature. It would just seem like, you know, logically, we wouldn't want to be a snob.

We would want to say, hey, you know, I'm 2000 years removed from the apostles. How did people who lived right after them, who knew them, how did they understand the New Testament? Now, on the one hand, like I say, we just kind of throw them under the rug. And I've noticed this just in reading, you know, more academic Christian works and all that. They'll sometimes talk about the early Christians, and then they say, well, yeah, they believed or they thought such and such.

Then they just move on like, well, of course, we don't give that any weight. You know, those, you know, they lived back then just because, you know, Polycarp knew the apostle John. You know, what does he know about the New Testament? I mean, you know, it's just like, yeah, we don't even have to refute that. I mean, of course, you know, we don't give that any weight. Now, Augustine, now he said so and so. Well, now we got to really weigh this and all of that.

But yeah, the people who lived before him, you know, just forget it. It's just like, I can't believe this snobbery. I mean, just ignoring the very people, the ones who decided to a large degree what books are in the New Testament. I mean, we depend on them for our canon, and then we ignore them as far as understanding that canon of scripture. The other thing I find so just hypocritical or inconsistent, the thing I find inconsistent is it seems like everybody wants to claim that they are teaching the historic faith.

I mean, that's what got me on this journey, started me on this journey in the first place. I was on a Christian radio station being interviewed. They had heard I was an ex-Jehovah's Witness, and particularly back in the 80s, that was not real common to find former Jehovah's Witnesses. It's a lot more common now, and they may have been around quite a bit in the 80s. I'm sure they were, but we didn't have the internet yet, and so you weren't quite as aware. So yeah, they thought this was really interesting.

My wife and I were managing a nonprofit Christian bookstore, and so that's kind of how they found out about me. So they wanted to interview me, just talk about Jehovah's Witnesses and that sort of thing. And at the very end, because it was a non-denominational Christian radio station, the man who was interviewing me, after we were done, he said, now, you know, this is a non-denominational radio station. We want to reach all Christians, and we don't normally criticize, you know, any particular group.

But the thing is, Jehovah's Witnesses have departed from the historic faith. And that was his, you know, basically his conclusion. And, you know, it really made an impact on me when I was driving home. Yeah, the historic faith. Yeah, obviously that's what we should all be embracing. What did they believe in the beginning? But, you know, what is that? I mean, we can't agree, it seems like, or obviously we can't agree on what the New Testament means. Everyone's got a different teaching on it.

So yeah, what did they believe in the beginning? Yeah, what was the historic faith? So, you know, I got a set of anti-Nicaean fathers and started reading them. And yeah, a lot of things I didn't, that I found, I wasn't expecting at all. But the thing that impressed me, you know, I mean, yeah, I got very discouraged because, man, a lot of my pet doctrines, that's not what they believed. That's not what they believed. And it's like, maybe they're wrong. You know, surely I'm not the one wrong.

You know, I thought, okay, I'm going to go back and read the New Testament again. You know, I just took off a whole day and evening and just, you know, read the entire thing. I don't know when I ended one o'clock in the morning, but whatever. And it's like, you know, I realized, you know, what the early Christians are saying is the most literal reading of the New Testament. And that made a dramatic impact on me. It's like, you know, they didn't have any problem verses. They took everything at face value.

They looked at the totality of the scriptures on any subject. They didn't just take a proof text, but it's like, you know, what does the New Testament teach everywhere in salvation? Put it all together and take all those verses seriously. And, you know, they've got to harmonize together in some ways. You don't just throw a bunch of them out because they don't fit you. So it wasn't just that they were close in time. It was like, this is the most literal understanding of the New Testament.

You know, you can just read it, and it means exactly what it says. And so, I mean, this was so exciting. It's like, man, I want to tell the world. It's like, wow. You know, first of all, we can see what they believed in the beginning. We can see what the historic faith was. And the wonderful thing is, it's just right there in your New Testament. If you never read the early Christians, just read your New Testament with a blank slate and just take it literally. What does this verse say? That's what it means.

And so that was so exciting. And like I say, everyone wants to claim, you know, oh, we're teaching the historic faith. Just last week, I was reading a book about Jehovah's Witnesses. And yeah, it starts off talking about the historic faith, you know, that we want to embrace the historic faith. You know, and I keep reading and, well, this guy, he left Jehovah's Witnesses and just became an evangelical Christian. And yeah, it's just teaching what they teach. It's a step ahead. It's progress from Jehovah's Witnesses.

It's like, you know, this isn't the historic faith. But yeah, you're just confident because this is what's being taught. Well, whatever's taught in churches today, that's got to be the historic faith because they say it is, you know. Oh, I'm not going to go back and look. I'm just, you know, again, chronological snobbery. Just, you know, whatever's taught today, you know, obviously it's true.

And what is so absurd is if you put it all together, what particularly trained preachers in that who've gone to seminary are saying basically is if Paul walked into our congregation today, he'd feel right at home with everything. I'm not talking about our congregation in particular. Of course, he would here, you know, but I'm talking about all those other churches. Yeah. That, yeah, whatever church it is, yeah, if he walked in, it's like, yeah, yeah, they're teaching just exactly what I did.

If he witnessed the baptism, yeah, that's how we baptized in my day. Yeah, when if they're talking about Greek and the fine meanings of Greek, yeah, they got it right. Oh, but those guys who lived in the year 125, man, they didn't understand Greek. They didn't baptize right. They didn't get this doctrine right. Man, they had everything wrong. But isn't it nice 2000 years from now they're going to get everything right, you know? I mean, it's kind of upside down nutty, you know, that, huh?

It just, we keep understanding as the further we get from the apostles, the better we understand them. You know, again, I don't know any other way to look at it than just snobbery. I was just talking to Andre yesterday about my message, and so he was asking me, well, when did this start, Dad? Was this with Luther or when did people start feeling they understood things better than the generation after the apostles? And actually, it began in the fourth century. How many of you have heard of Arius?

Okay, a number of hands. He's the one who kind of got the whole thing, you know, started. And again, he wasn't trying to do it. It was just the result. So one of the common errors in his day that went contrary to the church, the church didn't usually excommunicate you if you held to this. They would maybe remove you from being an elder or something like that. But it was this misunderstanding of the Trinity that somehow, particularly Jesus and the Father, that somehow they're one and the same person.

That the Father died on the cross because the Father is Jesus. And I can't, it's very hard for me to understand how someone could read the New Testament and think that, that these are one and the same person. I mean, Jesus prays to his Father. He talks about his Father sending him. I mean, it's obviously two people. But anyway, it's because people understand that Jesus is divine, that he's God in the sense of his nature. And so it's very confusing. Oh, well, if he's God, that means he's the Father.

So it was a common misunderstanding. And like I say, there were, it comes up, you know, just quite a number of times. And, you know, some of the things that are written are written against that to explain what the church has always taught on the Trinity. So anyway, so this was common in Arius's day. And he came up with this brilliant idea, which is total ignorance. It's like, okay, if I can just move away, you know, what the church teaches is right here. And these people are saying Jesus is the Father.

Okay, so let's make Jesus lower in nature than the Father, that he has a different nature than the Father, that he's not eternal. I mean, he's still deity, but he's not eternal. The Father created him out of nothing. Okay. So he's trying to offset this idea that Jesus and the Father are the same, but he's changing the faith. It's like, that's not how you combat error. You combat error by just sticking to what is true and, yeah, let it take care of itself. It'll die out on its own.

But yeah, so he changed things trying to teach that Jesus is not eternal like the Father, that he was created out of nothing. Well, of course, that set off then a big argument. And I mean, it pretty soon engulfed the whole church. I mean, every congregation from, it started in Alexandria, Egypt, but, you know, it was all the way to Rome and beyond. And it led to the Council of Nicaea and the Nicene Creed, which the Council of Nicaea is where things really changed.

And that's why I want and try to look at what Christians believed before the Council of Nicaea because it's such a pivotal point in the history of Christianity. After that, you basically have a state church. You now have Christians persecuting other Christians. Within 10 years, you have Christians going to war. Everything starts to unravel. Now, the Nicene Creed is perfectly orthodox. I stand behind it. It was itself, the problem with it, it's not so much what it says.

It required for you to be considered an orthodox Christian, you had to use the word homoocean in describing Jesus. And what it means is the same nature as the Father, which is exactly correct. I mean, it is what the early Christians taught. Not very many of them, though, use the word homoocean. And that word's not in the Bible. So now you're making orthodoxy turn on a word that isn't even in the Bible, even if it's correct. That's pretty dangerous.

You know, we should be able as Christians that what we believe isn't going to be a word that's beyond the scriptures. The bigger problem, though, is, you know, a lot of people were uncomfortable with that. Wait a minute, you know, for hundreds of years, we've had a creed, what we know as the Apostles' Creed. And now you've changed it. And people started feeling uncomfortable. So then what a number of leaders in the church started saying is the Council of Nicaea was inspired by God. Those bishops were inspired.

That creed is inspired on the same level as the New Testament. So now, yeah, we want to stick to revelation, but revelation didn't end with the apostles. Now we have some new revelation. And oh boy, was that dangerous. I mean, now you've just opened the door to anything. And yeah, you start seeing all these changes in the fourth century. Now, Athanasius was trying to defend orthodoxy. He's, you know, today looked at as the champion of orthodoxy.

But I would argue that even though his intentions were good, that he did much more harm than he did good. And that's because after the council, it didn't end the controversy. So the people who were Arians, yeah, they continued to argue about things. Athanasius, he was a deacon at the time of the council, but then the bishop in Alexandria, Egypt, died, and he became the bishop. At that time, Alexandria, Egypt was the theological center of Christianity. It wasn't Rome. It was Alexandria.

And so he was basically, picture the pope. He was basically the pope of his day, a very authoritarian person, again, trying to do what was right, trying to defend orthodoxy. But he realized, okay, the Arians keep pointing to all these scriptures where Jesus talks. He says, you know, no one knows the day and hour except the Father. The Father is greater than I. I didn't come on my own accord. The Father sent me. He told me what to say. I speak the words from my Father. And these are verses the Arians used, okay?

You say, see, he's of a different nature. Well, none of those verses, he didn't say I'm of a different nature than my Father. He just said, the Father is my head. I'm under his authority. That's all he was saying. And that's all throughout the New Testament. Because the Arians were using those verses, so Athanasius comes up, you know, with this quote clever idea, which like I say, keeps happening throughout church history. Well, okay, I want to shut them down by moving away from the historic faith.

So he came up with this innovative interpretation that, oh, when Jesus said that the Father is greater than I, he only meant as a human, since I'm in a human body, he's greater than I. And when he said, I don't know the day and the hour, I mean as a human. I do know it as, you know, the divine part of me knows it, but not the human part. And you can go through everyone. Well, it was very effective in arguing with the Arians. And so everybody, oh wow, here's a champion. Here's the guy who wins the debate.

Winning a debate has very little to do with truth so many times. And yeah, Christians tend too much to orient towards somebody who comes up with a clever way of explaining things when it's not the historic faith. So now you're moving away from the historic faith in, well, your purpose is to defend it, but you're moving away from it. You're corrupting it. And what was particularly dangerous is, you know, I said the thing I liked about the anti-Nicene fathers, you could just read the New Testament.

What it says is what it means. Well, now you're saying, no, you know, Jesus said the Father is greater than I. If you think the Father is greater than him, you're a heretic. You know, he didn't mean that. He said it, but it's not really, he meant as a human. He didn't say that though. He said the Father is greater. No, you know, he said, I don't know the day and the hour. Well, of course he knows the day and the hour. Are you daring to say the Son doesn't know the day and the hour? That's heresy.

And pretty soon, I mean, anyone who didn't accept these explanations, they were labeled as a heretic, as an Arian. And it's like people who were not Arians, they're labeled that. It's like today, you know, people like to put labels, you know, oh, you're a male chauvinist, you're racist, you're a white supremacist. And some people are, but yeah, just people just because they don't fit a particular agenda. Oh, it's so easy to just stick a label on them and you smear them that way.

And Athanasius was very good at that. And so all these people who were not Arians, they got labeled as Arians because they were not accepting his new explanations. Okay, so then they didn't stop at the Council of Nicaea. So then in 55 years later, they have another council, the Council of Constantinople. Now they're saying the Holy Spirit, which the scriptures tell us very little about, but Christians have always believed the Holy Spirit is divine. He's got the same nature as the Father. He's eternal.

And beyond that, we don't know very much except the power of the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The scriptures talk a lot about that, but the person doesn't, there's not a lot of revelation about the person. So the early Christians, the Apostles' Creed just says, and we believe in the Holy Spirit. It's like, yeah, I mean, we don't have a lot of revelation about him. Oh, so this council now, oh, the Holy Spirit is put up here with the Father.

And of course, he is the same nature as the Father, but you're saying he's not under the Father's authority. And so, you know, people started saying some of the ones who were looked at as heroes of the faith, he's now called Basil the Great and some other ones. Yeah, they're now saying, well, we have better understanding. We have more of the Holy Spirit in the fourth century. Of course, it wasn't called the fourth century, but in our day and age, we have more of the Holy Spirit than they had back then.

So we better understand these things. Now, they're not heretics because that's all the revelation they had. They were just teaching what they had, you know, in the second century. But now we know better. We can look down on them as, well, we don't want to criticize them, but we know better than they were. So that's where it starts, this idea that, oh, we have better revelation. And then they start changing other things.

The Sermon on the Mount, it's like, oh boy, you know, if we're going to have a state church, it's kind of hard to have that and live by the Sermon on the Mount. You got to have an army to defend it. What are you going to do with bad people? What are you going to do with people who are heretics? You know, what about the court system? Jesus said, don't swear. He said, love your enemy. All these changes they made after Nicaea, it's like, none of this fits the Sermon on the Mount.

So then Augustine comes up, well, we just reinterpret the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said, and I know I've shared this before, you have to love your enemy. He didn't say you can't kill him. He just said you have to love him. So, you know, when you kill him, you say, hey bro, see you in paradise. You know, he said, don't swear because he said anything beyond yes and no is from the devil. He didn't say, he didn't really say you can't swear.

I mean, it seems like he's saying that, but what he's really saying is if they make you in court, if they tell you to swear, well, you can swear, but they say that's the devil making them do that. And so he goes to the whole Sermon on the Mount. He guts every hard teaching of Christ except on divorce and marriage. Augustine didn't touch that, but on everything else. Well then, yeah, this attitude, we know more than the ones who came before us.

Then Augustine, he gets into a controversy with a Christian named Pelagius, who had a view of the fall of man that I would say is kind of at an extreme edge, but it was within the realm of orthodoxy of his day. I'd say the historic faith, it was just a little bit on the edge. Well, Augustine swings to the opposite extreme in an attempt to silence Pelagius and says, you know, we have no ability as humans. You know, we can't obey any of Christ's commandments. We can't do anything good.

We can't even have faith in God. Everything is from God. Everything is predestined. We're just, yeah, I mean, we are absolutely helpless. Everything in our salvation is from God. And everything wicked is from God because he predestined the wickedness as well as the good. And this is so contrary to the faith that was handed down. And you know, some of the Christians said, wait a minute, you know, Augustine, this is not what was being taught, whatever, 100, 200 years from now.

And his answer was, which is just totally ignorant, but well, they weren't having to deal with Pelagius. Well, so you change the faith because this guy has something wrong or maybe he has something a little bit, you know, questionable. Oh, well, we got to change the faith because we got to shut him up. That's not what you do. But see, that's what kept happening as it happened and happened and happened. And you know, then Luther finally, well, it's all just faith.

You know, you can't, Christ, he gave these commandments, but they're really suggestions because even though he indicates you're on judgment day, you're going to be judged based on how you lived. It's not really the way it is. It's, did you have faith or not? Faith alone is what saves you. It's good if you obey the commandments, but they're just, they're not commandments because you don't have to do them. So it just, it has just kept changing.

Outside of the Catholic and Orthodox, and we'll talk about them in part two, everybody else, all of the non-Catholics, all of the different denominations and sects and all of that, they all agree that the early Christians were wrong. I mean, when I first heard about the early Christians, when I even became aware there were such a people, I guess everyone would think, well, yeah, of course there had to be people after the New Testament.

You know, it was as a Jehovah's Witness and you know, we were taught, oh, as soon as the apostles died, the church went apostate. You know, I never thought, is that very reasonable? I mean, Jesus said, on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. But you're saying basically it did, that they went apostate immediately because they got all influenced by Greek philosophy. Oh, so what are some of the things they came up with from Greek philosophy?

Oh, well, the early Christians taught the Trinity. Well, that's wrong. That's from the Greek philosophy. They taught we have a soul. That's wrong. We don't have a soul. That's from Greek philosophy. They said Jesus died on a cross. Well, that's from pagan religions. He actually just died on an upright pole without a cross arm. Not that particularly matters, but you're undoing, you know, all of the history and the language of scripture and so on. So, yeah, I grew up, okay, the early Christians, they got it wrong.

And yet I would notice in the Watchtower, their official magazine, if something agreed with them, well, they'll quote from Tertullian, they'll quote from Justin Martin. So I was familiar with all these names because they liked to quote from them. I thought, well, I thought all these people were apostate, but you're quoting from them if they agree with Jehovah's Witnesses. Well, after I left the Witnesses, I found out, you know, it's the exact same thing in every other church.

I attended quite a number of different churches and I read, you know, I got a book on all the denominations and read about every single denomination. And it's funny, they all agree the early Christians got it wrong. But what they can't agree on is exactly where they were wrong. So the Seventh-day Adventist said, yep, they went apostate. They started worshiping on Sunday instead of Saturday.

They quit following the Jewish, the not Jewish, the dietary laws in the Bible that are supposed to be for Christians as well as Jews. And see how apostate they went. That's the Seventh-day Adventist. Oh, United Pentecostals. So I'm reading their literature. Yep, the early Christians went wrong because they believed in the Trinity, but not the way Jehovah's Witnesses. Jehovah's Witnesses were criticizing the Trinity from the Arian viewpoint that Jesus has a different nature than the Father.

But the United Pentecostals say Jesus is the Father. They're the same person. But the early Christians, you know, said there's three persons making up the Trinity. So they're heretics because they got that wrong. It's like everybody, wherever the early Christians differ, they're always wrong. It's never, we can't be wrong. It's always them. And yet we can't agree where they're wrong. We all have a different thing. The Evangelicals, oh, they're wrong. They were into legalism. They were into works righteousness.

The Calvinists, oh, they taught free will. We don't have free will. So they're wrong there. Today, just about every denomination, oh, the head covering, either that was cultural, it wasn't really a commandment, it was just a temporary thing, or it's long hair. And I don't know how many discussions I've had with people who said, well, yeah, he may, a woman's hair is recovering if she has long hair. Okay, I said, well, the passage I could see in some places, Paul isn't real clear.

He uses two different Greek words when he talks, one when he's talking about the head covering, one when he talks about the woman's hair as a covering. It's two different Greek words. But the main thing I said, okay, Tertullian has an essay or whatever you'd want to call it on the head covering. He wrote a work on it. And you know, he had traveled throughout the ancient world and he talks about the kind of head covering that the different women wear in different parts of the world, Christian women, what they wear.

And it wasn't a uniform type of covering. But he says, now his whole point of argument was whether this applied only to married women or to unmarried women as well. And he's arguing it applies to all women who have reached the age of maturity, adolescence and above is what he's arguing for. But he says, why don't you go and look at what they do in Corinth? You know, Paul wrote to the Corinthians. Surely they understood what he was talking about. Go and look and see.

And if you go there, yeah, you'll see they're wearing veils and they veil all of the adult women, cover themselves, not just the married women. Okay. So that's his argument. So we can look at how the church in Corinth understands it. Now, this is 150 years after Paul's letter. Yeah, maybe they changed, but did the whole church change everywhere in the world? And they somehow, in Paul's day, it was just a matter of wearing long hair and suddenly they started covering themselves. I mean, is that even reasonable?

Well, you'd think not, but oh man, no, you can't. That carries no weight. Oh, well, Corinthians got it wrong then. They didn't understand Paul. We understand Paul today. Divorce and remarriage. Oh, yeah, they were ridiculously strict on that. They got that wrong. Jesus didn't mean that. And I talked to, I mean, I have a friend talking to some of these things. He said, you know, really today we understand Jewish teaching better than they did back, you know, the early Christian Gentiles.

They didn't, Jesus was a Jew and you know, he was talking to Jews. And so we have to understand what Jews believed in the first century. And we know that better than the people, the Gentiles in the first or second century. I mean, again, it's always the early Christians who were wrong. Two kingdoms, war, modest dress, entertainment. I mean, you name it. Every time I tried to share this with people, it was always, oh, they're too, that's extreme. That's absurd. You know, they didn't wear makeup. Oh, that's crazy.

I mean, it's just on and on. It's always the early Christians who are wrong. I don't mean that everybody has had that response. You guys haven't, you know, but it's just amazing. I mean, it's like this was so exciting to me. And fortunately, the first group of friends I talked to, they didn't really embrace it, but they thought it was very interesting and they wanted to learn more.

But then, you know, after that, it seemed like when we started sharing it with other people, it was always, I remember one sister saying, it sounds to me like they needed to read their Bibles more. It's like they did read their Bibles and they read it in the language it was written in and they lived in the culture it was written in. And they're the ones who decided what books are part of the New Testament and not. So yeah, they knew their Bibles.

So yeah, it comes down to everybody saying they've got it wrong, but we can't agree what's right. Now, at the same time, the early Christians could agree what was right. And Tertullian made this argument. He's talking about the Gnostics who had their own false beliefs. And he said, now if we have changed, if what we teach is not what was taught by the apostles, if we went away from the original teachings, how is it we all teach the same thing?

When people split away from it, they go in a jillion different directions, which the Gnostics, that was so true. I mean, there were so many different Gnostic groups. They could never agree. And this is what happened in the Reformation. You know, once you took away state churches enforcing uniformity, yeah, we all go in different directions. They were able to be one church. And I think that is one of the best arguments that they had it right.

If they had apostatized, if they had left the apostolic teachings, they wouldn't have all stayed in the same place. They would have gone different places. We can see that 40,000 different denominations and sects all claiming to have it right. You know, Christ's church isn't divided that way.