"Sacred Roots: Medieval Europe: The Dark Ages, or...?" by Stephen Russell

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to Strength to Strength. This morning we're going to be continuing in our series called Sacred Roots. In this series, we want to rediscover the ancient faith. Our purpose is to humbly and lovingly rediscover the history of God's people in order to reground, renew, and re-tether our faith and practice. So this morning we're happy to have with us, uh, Brother Stephen Russell. Stephen joins us from Pennsylvania, where he teaches, uh, faith builders, and he will be sharing with us this morning on a topic regarding the Dark Ages. So the topic title is called Sacred Roots, Medieval Europe, the Dark Ages, or something else. So that's what we're looking forward to hearing from him this morning.

So before we do that, we're going to just open here with a word of prayer and ask the Lord's blessing. Let's pray. Father, we thank you at this time for your blessings to us. We pray now that you would accompany us in this time together. We pray that you would bless Brother Stephen for his work, for his study, for his teaching, and pray that we may be receptive to what is true. Help us to, um, be learners, students of you, students of, um, all that you have for us, and may you bless this time and bless Stephen as he shares with us. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

All right, so, um, we're going to turn the time over to Stephen. Just, uh, keep in mind that at the end we will have a Q&A, so keep your questions to the end, and, um, we'll turn the time here to Stephen. So go ahead. Okay, thank you. Well, uh, the time period that I'll be covering is, um, roughly 600 to 1517, the beginning of the Reformation.

And, uh, there's, uh, often people look at the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages or a time of, uh, a negative time. And there is that in the, uh, medieval Europe, but there's also other things that, uh, need, need to be considered.

Before I actually start looking at the history of the Middle Ages, I would like to consider a few items that have significance for our discussion. Uh, the first one is that, um, that, uh, the nations or empires, any nation, any empire, always seeks to undergird itself with religion. As an example, notice that the United States has a vague but deistic civil religion with a religious motto on our money, a pledge of allegiance to our nation that declares our country is under God, prayers before the start of legislative sessions, and more. Even communistic countries seek this same undergirding, although they call themselves atheistic. Their communistic ideology takes the place of and acts like a religion. What else can we make of the embalmed bodies of Lenin and Mao in Moscow and Beijing, or the iconic pictures of the founders of communism in the front of classrooms in communistic countries?

We saw the same impulse in pagan imperial Rome, which sought to destroy the early church because the early church threatened the pagan imperial religious cult. Then, unfortunately, we also saw it in the later Roman Empire when Christianity became the official state religion.

Secondly, as the church began to work together with the Roman state after Constantine, Christianity eventually became the official state religion in the late 4th century. Because of this, the church changed in certain ways to conform to this, the expected pattern of support for the state.

Non-resistance was pushed into the monasteries. Infant baptism gradually became the norm, and then it became the requirement. And in some cases, bishops and abbots, the rulers of monasteries, became rulers of political entities in Western Europe, as well as judges for the state.

Thirdly, even after the church became the state church, as long as Rome was strong, the empire led in political and military affairs in the West. And my focus is going to be specifically on the West. What happened in the East with the continuation of the Roman Empire is a little bit of a different story. So our focus will be on the Western part of Europe.

From the 4th century forward, that began to change as the political and military strength of the empire failed in the West. For this, this will be a large part of the story as we proceed. Finally, the weakening of the empire and the increased necessity of the church to fill in where the state was failing led to an unfortunate development in the church. As Lord Acton, a British historian in the 19th century, wrote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when they super add this tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority." End of quote.

As the Roman Empire faded away in Western Europe, the church rose to an unprecedented power. We must keep these things in mind as we proceed. So those things are are sort of background for what we see happening. The bishop of Rome at the beginning of our time period was, uh, Gregory I. So right on either side of the year 600, uh, Gregory, Pope Gregory I, was the bishop of Rome.

Uh, he was born into a noble family in, uh, 540. During much of his life, Italy was in a state of unrest. Soon after his birth, a plague wiped out perhaps one-third of the population of Italy. The church in Italy also suffered from schisms. And in 568, the Lombards, the last German tribe to invade Western Europe, took over much of Italy. And I'm going to talk about the invasions by the German tribes in just a bit. But, uh, this this invasion by the Lombards, uh, furthered the disruption in Italy.

At the time, the emperors in Constantinople were busy fighting the Persians and were were unable to defend Rome or Italy well. In 570, Gregory became the prefect or the highest imperial official in Rome. Around 573, he established several monasteries. He entered one of these monasteries to live a monk's life of prayer and contemplation. Uh, but that didn't last. He eventually was called on to represent the pope to the emperor in Constantinople, starting in 578. One of his key responsibilities was to get military assistance in Italy against the Lombards.

Gregory was the bishop of Rome or pope from 590 to 604. Because of the state of unrest, he took firm control of Rome and its vicinity. He repaired the city's defensive walls and organized its militia. Rome at this time was home to many refugees who had fled the onslaught of the Lombards.

Gregory ably organized the administration of the church and provision of alms for the poor. Care of the poor, indeed, was a major concern for him. He also updated the liturgy of the church, and he wrote more than any pope up to this time had written. He gave special focus to pastoral care, and this is something he was known for throughout the Middle Ages.

He also promoted belief in purgatory, accepting as official teaching a suggestion from Augustine that perhaps the purging of sin was necessary by some after death. Augustine had suggested this idea. Uh, Gregory read it as, um, as a fact, and in fact, it's, um, probably from Gregory that this became a part of Catholic, uh, teaching, the the idea of purgatory.

One of his most important accomplishments was his evangelistic mission to England. He sent numerous missionaries to the pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdoms on the island, starting in 597. He encouraged these missionaries to use customs and worship sites that could appropriately be used.

There was a Celtic church already established among the non-German population of Britain. So the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes were German invaders of Britain. There had been a Celtic church, and it was still there, but it had been pushed more or less to the periphery.

So there was a Celtic church, and eventually conflict arose between the two traditions, the Celtic tradition and the, uh, Roman tradition that was introduced, uh, to the island through the work of, uh, Gregory and his sending of Augustine.

Eventually, the Roman mission in Britain became supreme. Uh, then when the Roman church was strongly established among the Anglo-Saxons, it sent missionaries out to the Netherlands and to Germany. These missionaries went to Rome first to to receive the bishop of Rome as their superior, thus extending the authority of the Roman church to much of Western Europe.

Gregory is often seen as the first pope in the modern sense. He extended the authority of the Roman church over much of the West. Interestingly, Calvin called him the last good pope. So that gives us a little bit of sense of what was happening at the head of the church in the West.

Great. Then there come some invasions and the dissolution of political life in the West, in the what had been the western part of the Roman Empire. Gregory is indicative of how the church stepped into the political vacuum left by the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and the invasion of the Western Europe of Western Europe by several people groups.

The first one was various Germanic tribes. They were the first to disrupt the Roman Empire. Their incursions into the Roman Empire began in 378 and ended with the invasion of Italy by the Lombards in 568. So roughly a 200-year period, not quite a 200-year period.

These German tribes carved the western part of the empire up into small kingdoms. Theoretically, these kings were subordinate to the emperor in Constantinople, but that was really only a pretense. They really went their own way, uh, and became the seed for the nations of Western Europe, uh, in the modern world.

Uh, several of the tribes, I'm going to mention several of the tribes and where they lived. Uh, the Franks and the Burgundians, uh, entered and conquered what we call France. Uh, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes conquered Britain and ruled Britain. They had seven, uh, different kingdoms there. The Visigoths controlled Spain and the Vandals North Africa.

The very last tribe to invade, as has been mentioned already, uh, the western regions of the Roman Empire were the Lombards, and they contended with the Roman emperor in Constantinople for control of Italy. These invasions led to disruption in trade, a decline in education, and a loss in population. And all of these things were, uh, important for the development of, uh, Western Europe.

As fewer laymen were educated and able to work for the government of these German tribe kingdoms, the priests and monks who were among the few literate persons began to take governmental posts and to serve these German kings. The next massive disruption of all the old imperial lands of the Roman Empire came in the form of Islam. And from 632 to 732, a hundred-year period, um, the, uh, the, uh, Islam spread quickly and took over large parts of the old Roman Empire. After Muhammad died, his successors, called Caliphs, began to expand the Islamic Empire very quickly. Rome and Persia had just ended a disastrous struggle for supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Both empires were exhausted, and as the Islamic armies erupted out of Arabia, they conquered, first of all, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain from the Roman Empire. The Muslim armies quickly captured all of the Persian Empire. So the Persian, the, um, the, uh, Muslim Empire became probably the largest empire, uh, up to this point in time, as they conquered all of Persia and much, maybe half of the old Roman Empire.

The Islamic invasions tore away vast areas that were thoroughly Christian, and it almost completely separated the Christians in the in Western Europe from those in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Most of the most of the contact between these two areas, the Christian West and the Christian East, was by ship, and the Muslims effectively controlled most of the Mediterranean, most of that time, most of this time. And so this led to a growing drifting apart by the two parts of the church. The Eastern church and the Western church recognized each other as, uh, part of the church, but they also started to take slightly different paths of development. The western, uh, the western part of the church would eventually become the Roman Catholic Church and the eastern part, the Eastern Orthodox Churches.

The next, uh, invasions were the Viking invasions from the 8th to the 11th centuries, and they affected all of Northern Europe, Russia, the coasts of the North Sea, the Atlantic, and the the western part of the Mediterranean. The Vikings even settled Iceland, Greenland, and temporarily a part of North America.

They established several powerful kingdoms, including Normandy in the north of France. Um, the Normans conquered, uh, England and established a Norman kingdom in England, and they also established a Norman kingdom in Sicily in southern, uh, Italy. Probably their greatest effect was to harass Christian populations and slow down the spread of Christianity to Northern Europe.

Next came the Hungarians. The Hungarians came out of Asia and they invaded Central Europe in 862. While the Vikings mostly raided and harassed the coastal areas of Europe, the Hungarians raided the interior of Europe until they were finally defeated in 955 by a German army. Soon thereafter, the Hungarians were Christianized and became a settled part of the European political system.

The Ottoman Turks were the last of the major invaders to disrupt Europe during the Middle Ages. Their first European, their first European foothold came with the capture of the city Gallipoli in 1356. By 1453, they captured Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, which ended that empire. And in 1529, they besieged Vienna, threatening Central Europe, the German Empire. Uh, Europeans were very, uh, worried about this whole thing. So, um, they were threatening Central Europe and trying to take over all of Europe.

Uh, at that time, they had conquered almost all of North Africa, and they were contending for the control of the Mediterranean with the great seafaring city-states of Italy. That would have been Venice, Genoa, um, Pisa, and, uh, Almaty. Those were the, uh, strong, uh, seafaring states, and they would have been in, uh, conflict with Islam or with the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Turks presented the most existential threat to Christian Europe since the time of the original Islamic invasions more than 700 years before.

Uh, Christian Europeans felt as though they were under God's judgment, and they had to extend, expend massive resources to fight off the Turkish threat. Obviously, Europe in the late 4th century, right into the Reformation, suffered numerous destructive invasions, setting back development in many ways, including the expansion of the church through missionary work. At the same time, there were many things happening that led to the consolidation of Europe and its institutions. So I've just talked about how the invasions, uh, were disruptive to Europe, but now I want to talk about, uh, how even during that time of, uh, disruption, there were some aspects of consolidation that were happening.

While the invasions of Europe by various groups from the 4th century until the Reformation caused the collapse of the Roman Empire and massive disruption throughout Europe, at the same time, there were religious and political forces at work reorganizing and consolidating. The first institution of consolidation was the monastery.

Widespread in east, in the eastern part of the Mediterranean, monasticism got its first solid foundation in the West around 415 when John Cassian established a monastery in southern France. It was in 530 when Benedict of Nursia, deeply influenced by Cassian, wrote his Regula, or his rule of life for monks.

In time, all monastic communities in the West adopted this rule. This rule mandated a life of prayer, study, and physical work. The vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability formed a framework for the life of a monk. The monasteries became the focal point of missionary work in Western Europe, pioneering in resettling vast areas of Europe that had been depopulated, uh, especially because of these invasions. Uh, they were innovators in agriculture and science, and they were leaders in education.

For many, the monastery was the chief source of contact with the church. One very important development that came out of this, uh, out of this development of the monasteries in Western Europe was the recognition by Christians of the value and importance of physical labor. In the ancient Roman imperial days, physical labor was something delegated to the poor and to slaves. The monks demonstrated the nobility of work, and that really, uh, influenced how Europeans, uh, how Europe developed and how they, uh, saw work as a good thing.

A further feature of the monasteries was that their repeated participation, uh, in the in the rejuvenation of Christian life when it declined into decadence. Uh, so there were times when, when, uh, the church, uh, uh, became corrupted, and over and over again, the monasteries would, um, would, um, become alive and, uh, and, uh, spread revival throughout the church.

Um, in the ancient church, all believers were expected to live their lives according to the Sermon on the Mount. So I'm thinking about, uh, in the, in the, uh, pre-medieval days. With the increasing integration of church and state, many of the more fervent Christians seeking to maintain a high standard in lifestyle withdrew from everyday life and formed the first communities that were turned into monasteries.

Gradually, those who lived outside the monasteries made compromises in their lifestyles. One aspect of the monasteries need one more aspect of the monasteries needs to be told. As the political and educational institutions of the Roman Empire disappeared in the West, the monasteries preserved not only the scriptures and the writings of the church fathers, but also the classical writings of the pagan past, such as Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and more. This preservation of the insights and learning of the past enabled the West to regain much of what might have been lost. Once the Europeans began to recover from the disruptive aspects of the Middle Ages, they had resources at hand to repair some of what had been lost rather than needing to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.

So they had these writings, even from the pagan past, that helped them, uh, uh, become, uh, revitalized, um, as, as towards the end of the Middle Ages. Another institution of consolidation was the Holy Roman Empire. It developed out of the enlarged Frankish Empire of Charlemagne. In 800, the Pope crowned Charlemagne emperor as a reward for his aid in settling a threat to the Pope. The title later fell into disuse for a few years, but it was revived in 962 when the Pope crowned Otto I emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The empire lasted until its dissolution in 1806, caused by the Napoleonic Wars.

For most of the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire was the most powerful political entity in Western Europe. Now I want to talk about the Papal States and the church lands. These were another significant consolidation of power and influence. Charlemagne's father, Pepin, King of the Franks, gave the Pope political control over Rome and part of central Italy. This became the core of what we call the Papal States, which were controlled by the Pope from 756 to 1870. The Papal States, and in 1870, the Papal States were taken over by the Kingdom of Italy.

The Papal States were reconstituted as an independent country in 1929 by Mussolini in the form of the Vatican City. So what had been a relatively large political unit in the middle of Italy, uh, was taken over by the Kingdom of Italy. And later on, uh, the, the, uh, a couple of, uh, a little bit over 100 acres, uh, in the middle of Rome were, uh, established as the independent state, the Vatican City, and the Pope, uh, is the head of that state.

Another consolidation of political power by the church involved what we call the church lands. These were political units under the rule of a bishop or an abbot of a monastery or the head of a military religious order like the Teutonic Knights.

As the Roman Empire in the West weakened, certain lands came under control of church officials. Here we see a mixture of the secular and ecclesiastical powers. This was not healthy for either one. Bishops became involved in political intrigue, and secular rulers tried to influence church affairs. The result of this union of church and state under church leaders, uh, under the church leaders' control of the Papal States became a prize sought by powerful families in Rome. From about 900 to 1046, various powerful Italian families vied for possession of the Papal throne and thus control of the Papal States. This led to a particularly low point in the history of the Papacy. As you can imagine, it was a time of corruption and political intrigue.

In 1046, the first of a series of reforming German popes reasserted the religious aspect of the papacy. However, even this effort to reform led to conflict. Both the German emperor and the pope wanted to appoint the rulers of the church lands. From 1076 until 1122, the investiture controversy raged in the German Empire.

Uh, and in the end, a compromise allowed the pope to choose the prince, prince bishop or the prince abbot of the church lands and to invest him with the symbols of his religious authority, while the bishop or the abbot swore fealty to the emperor. These church lands were mostly in, in the, the, uh, Roman Holy Roman Empire, which is really the German, a German Empire. And, uh, so it was really important for the emperor to keep these, uh, political units on his side. And that's why the, the, uh, uh, sometimes the pope and the emperor went or at odds. And so, uh, these, uh, the rulers of these church lands, um, were, could often be seen as threats to the, to the emperor.

At this time, the emperor also lost the right to choose the pope. Sometimes the emperors had imposed, uh, popes on Rome. In all of this, we see the mature outworking of the gradual intertwining of the church and the state that began with Constantine and the early Christian emperors. The state of affairs inevitably corrupted both church and state and led each to attempt to control the other. Although I don't want to dwell on this, it is significant to note that under the papacy of Innocent III, who was the pope from 1198 to 1216, almost all secular rulers of Western Europe owed fealty to the pope. Theoretically, because of this, he was able to call these princes to aid him militarily if he had need.

His reign was the pinnacle of papal power, or perhaps we should see it as the, the nadir or the low point. In the midst of the rise to, to power, in, in the midst of the rise in power of the papacy, the pope sought to assert their power over the Eastern Church. Uh, so the, like I had said earlier, the two churches were, they were still considered one church, but the, the tradition of the East and the West were, were differing, were, uh, growing apart. And in 1054, um, that is usually the date seen as the beginning of the East-West schism or the Great Schism between the Eastern Church and the Western Church. Ever since the Islamic invasion in the 600s, relations between the Eastern and Western parts of the church were strained.

The two parts of the church drifted apart not only because of this disconnection caused by the Muslim conquest of much, of much of the former Roman Empire, but also because of the cultural differences which were magnified by the lack, lack of close contact. Language differences and emphases in church life grew to be obstacles between the two sides of the church. When a delegation from Rome was ignored in its insistence that the patriarch or the bishop of Constantinople was not the ecumenical patriarch or the universal patriarch, but the bishop of Rome was the supreme church leader, the leader of the Roman delegation to the patriarch in Constantinople excommunicated him, the bishop of Constantinople, and the Eastern patriarch or the bishop, uh, in turn excommunicated the delegates from Rome.

This may not have, have had lasting results, but for the Crusades. In 1095, Pope Urban II called for Western Christians to go to the aid of their Eastern brothers who were under rule of the Muslims. The Westerners captured Jerusalem and the surrounding areas and established the Crusader States.

Western Christians controlled some of this land, uh, the, the promised land until 1291, when the last of the Crusaders were driven from the city of Acre in the Holy Lands. The Fourth Crusade was directed by the Venetians to conquer the city of Constantinople and thus to establish the Latin Empire in the eastern part of the Mediterranean. This was a complete betrayal of the Eastern Christians, along with, and along with many other complaints, it did seal the division between the Eastern and Western churches.

There are two further developments that need to be discussed: missions and the rise of the universities. At the beginning of this period of the church, of the, at the beginning of this period, the Church of the East, which is also known as the Assyrian Church, was very active in missions. They supported the small Indian church by supplying bishops, and they sent monks as missionaries to China and the Mongols. In fact, some hold that Genghis Khan's mother was a Christian. While this is disputed, we do know that some of the Mongols were Christians and that the Mongols initially treated the Christians very well when they created their vast empire.

Before the Islamic invasions, Christianity was spreading in every direction very quickly. There were Christians in Arabia. The whole length of the Nile River down to Ethiopia was Christianized. The missionary monks were moving north in Europe. With the coming of Islam, the expansion of Christianity to the south in Africa and to the east into Asia was effectively stopped. The Western European Christians continued expanding to the north, while the Eastern European Christians won the various Slavic peoples to Christianity, including, very importantly, the Russians. The Irish and the English, who had, uh, the English anyway, had been, uh, Christianized, the, the, uh, Germanic Christians, uh, sorry, the Germanic, uh, um, English had been Christianized through the efforts of Pope Gregory I. The Irish and the English provided many of the Western missionary monks.

The last major European nation to convert to Christianity was Lithuania, whose ruler was baptized in 1386. This conversion was due in part to the military pressure of the Northern Crusades, which were fought by the Teutonic Knights to force the last pagans along the Baltic Sea to become Christians.

The universities developed in the Middle Ages out of cathedral and monastic schools, starting in the, and the, the, uh, the first, uh, universities started in the late 11th century. The first universities were at Salerno and Bologna in Italy, Paris, France, Oxford and Cambridge in England, and Palencia in Italy, in Spain.

Salerno was preeminent in medicine, Paris in theology, and Bologna in law. The universities were self-governing, governing communities of scholars and students recognized by the secular and the religious authorities. All teaching was done in Latin, so students could come from any part of Europe and learn at any one of the universities.

The universities taught the seven, seven liberal arts, rhetoric, grammar, and logic, which were called the trivium, and astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music, which were called the quadrivium. Um, at a higher level in the universities, theology, medicine, and law were taught.

So we see that the Middle Ages was a time of disruption, but also a time of consolidation and the formation of many institutions that persist to this day. The union between church and state deepened, deepened, and the power and the role of the papacy grew. Inevitable, inevitably, severe conflict arose between the two powers, the secular and ecclesiastical, to the detriment of both. Despite the corruption that entered the church in this situation, the church did provide a bridge that conveyed the light of the gospel, the texts of the Bible and the church fathers, and a system of alms for dealing with the hardships of life. The church was the conduit that brought the knowledge and wisdom of the ancient world into an age when it could be used again to the advantage of the people.

The church nurtured a new flourish, flourishing of knowledge and education and pursued missions as the opportunity arose. Much of the Middle Ages deserved the name Dark Ages, but we must not miss the fact that the light that remained and eventually grew came from the efforts of the church. As G.K. Chesterton, referring to that time period, the Middle Ages, wrote in his book, Orthodoxy, the church was the only thing that ever brought us out of the Middle Ages.

Uh, so I think that's a significant, uh, thing to remember. Even so, much damage was also done to the church during this time. She lost a proper understanding of how to bring believers into the church through believers' baptism. She allowed herself to be, uh, to be the undergirding of the state and then attempted to replace or at least supersede the state in its legitimate role.

Although the monasteries preserved some aspects of the early church's lifestyle, it also provided justification for a two-tier Christianity that developed. Uh, and what I'm referencing there is that those Christians that wanted to really live the full Christian life tended to go to the, into the monasteries, and the rest of the Christians lived, uh, as well as they could.

Uh, we should neither deny the good done by the medieval church nor focus solely on the deformations that developed during this time. We can appreciate the good and try to learn from the, the mistakes that in some cases, uh, and in some cases, the downright evil that happened.

I hope to have another discussion that will focus on the ways that the medieval, that the, uh, Middle Ages prepared Europe for the renewal of the Reformation. In it, we will consider the various events that led to the Reformation and to, and we will look at the reformers who predated the Reformation itself.

So, um, I see the Middle Ages as a time, a very mixed time, a time when, um, uh, the, the advanced culture of ancient, uh, the ancient, uh, Roman Empire, um, was wiped away to a large degree, although preserved to a large degree by the church. Um, the church, uh, provided that link between the knowledge of the, of the ancient world and what's going to happen, uh, from the Reformation on. And, um, uh, so, so there's a combination, uh, a combination. The, the, the Europe was disrupted by invasions and, and the church was able to help, um, repair a lot of that, uh, damage. And then over time, uh, the Holy Roman Empire and other, uh, states arose and gave, uh, form to Western Europe the way we know it.

So that would be my presentation for, uh, today about, uh, the Middle Ages. And I would, I would say that, um, we see both things happening there, some good and a lot of bad, and that's going to be the reason for the Reformation.

All right. Excellent. And thank you very much for sharing. So quite a history lesson there. How many years, uh, were you covering there? 600 to 1517. And I did have to go a little bit before 600 because the German invasions, which are very important, started in 378.

Got it. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. So my thoughts are mostly on the, the last part of what you shared there. Um, of course, you had quoted there G.K. Chesterton saying how the church was the only thing that ever brought us out of the Dark Ages.

So if we, um, if we think about that, that's, um, you know, quite a, quite a statement and pretty, pretty amazing and encouraging. Um, like you were saying also near the beginning of the presentation that the West is very much, um, in confusion, you know, what, what the purpose is, kind of the chaos where everyone is going, it's their own way.

I guess the question I have is like, how, how can the church, um, again, do what J.G.K. Chesterton said that it did for the Middle Ages? So I'm going to go ahead. No, go ahead. Well, I was, I was just gonna suggest, uh, maybe one of the more obvious things might be if the church could remember to keep out of politics. Amen.

Yes. That is a key lesson from the early church, the Anabaptists, and I think it's something that we need to be bold and speak to our fellow Christians, some of whom are Anabaptists, who are, who see this as our salvation, getting involved in politics. It is a huge mistake. It was a mistake when the, when Constant, from Constantine on, it was a mistake during the Middle Ages when the, uh, Protestants maintained the state churches. And it's, it's a huge mistake today.

Every time that the church, uh, tried to work with the state, it came out bad. It's not gonna be any different if we do it today. It comes out bad. But I do wanna say one other thing, uh, that, that when, uh, that I wanna, that comes up from, uh, G.K. Chesterton. I really like him. And he, um, he really gave me encouragement. In one of his books, he says that the church died five times, but God is the God of resurrection. And what he meant was the church became humdrum and there comes a generation that hardly cares. And then the next generation becomes enlivened and they do things like go out into mission work and, uh, um, things like that.

They, they rejuvenate the church. And it happened during the Middle Ages, mostly out of the monasteries. The monasteries were mostly the, um, the, uh, motivator of that. But what G.K. Chesterton said was five times the church has died and each time it was, uh, raised again with more, more, um, zeal, more power. And, um, when I read that, you know, before I read that, I was kind of, um, feeling down about the, what's going on in the world today. I read that and I said, that's my encouragement. We need to hang on and one of the, and we need to talk to other people and show them that there's a better way. And it may feel like the church is going down, down, down, but I think there's going to be a, um, a real increase in vigor, you know, as people, this is the way I think about the United States.

Back when I was born in the fifties, everyone thought he was a Christian. They weren't, but they thought they were. Now Americans are saying, no, I'm not a Christian. I think that's healthier for them and it makes the church's witness clearer.

And I think that's what's, what the revival is gonna come out of. Yeah. Amen. Excellent. I think that's a great observation there. All right. So we want to open it up for questions and, uh, yeah. So if any of you have any questions here for Stephen, just unmute yourself and turn on your camera. You're on Zoom and, uh, we'd love to hear with you what questions you might have.

While they're thinking, I'll just mention that today is going to be the funeral for Francis. Uh, since I talked a good bit about the papacy, uh, et cetera, uh, today, and it may be happening now or it might be over. I'm not sure about the time frame, but, um, anyway, that's happening today. I think it's interesting to note.

Yeah. Which also sets off the, the long process of the Catholic Church finding a new pope. Yes. I'm very intrigued by this. Yeah. Francis caused a lot of, um, confusion, I think. And, um, it's, it's, uh, um, I'm intrigued to see what the cardinals are gonna do, what kind of a person they're gonna choose.

But that's not the, that's not the, um, focus of today's discussion. Sure.

All right. And, uh, what questions would anyone like to offer here this morning?

There seems to be a bit of a renewed interest in Eastern, Eastern Orthodoxy today, what I can tell. Um, can you expand a little bit more on the, uh, what led to this schism there? I think my brain just wasn't paying attention when you kind of highlighted the final, uh, schism there. Yes.

Well, um, as I said, the, the coming of the Muslims, but before the Muslims invaded, uh, the whole Mediterranean coast was Christianized and the Christians were going down the Nile to Ethiopia. Uh, you know, it's really intriguing what would've happened. They were going into, um, Asia, to India, to the Mongols, to, um, to China. And then the, uh, and then in Arabia, um, uh, Muhammad reacted. He, he was monotheistic, but he saw the Christians as worshiping three gods. And so he, he established a very, um, uh, starkly monotheistic religion and it somehow energized the Arabs and they quickly conquered Persia and conquered about half of the Roman Empire. And so that means all of the North Africa, Spain itself, and, um, what we consider the Middle East, except for Turkey, were taken over by Muslims.

And, um, and then the Roman Empire maintained Turkey and Greece. And in the, and in the West, the German tribes can, uh, the German kingdoms continued. But, um, it was extremely disruptive and most of the contact between the Eastern Christians and the Western Christians was by, uh, ship. And the Muslims eventually became, uh, very, uh, good sailors and they controlled the Mediterranean. So my point being, um, because of the coming of Islam, the Eastern Church and the Western Church, which recognized both as they recognized each other as, uh, legitimate, they started to drift apart. The, the Easterners spoke Greek and they had a special way of thinking. They were much more philosophically oriented. And that's where almost all the, uh, theological disputes happened in the early church.

The Westerners were much more pragmatic and they had to, um, they had to, uh, um, build up those little German kingdoms. And so they were very practical and, um, they spoke Latin. And so over, and there wasn't a whole lot of contact between the two. So the differences that already were there were magnified. And so, um, over time, they didn't understand each other very well. And, uh, the Eastern bit, the bishop of Constantinople called himself the Ecumenical Patriarch. Ecumenical means worldwide. So, uh, the delegation that was sent from Rome to Constantinople was to tell him, no, you're not the, uh, worldwide patriarch. In fact, the bishop of Rome is supreme. And there were just a bunch of other, uh, issues that, um, came up.

And, and so, um, and, and they were very, some of them were very small things. I'll give you one example. And, um, I don't think we should mock this, but for them, for some reason, it was important in the East. When they did communion, they used bread that was, uh, le- uh, leaven. And in the West, they used unleavened bread.

Shouldn't mean a whole lot of, make a whole lot of difference, we would tend to think. But just the fact that they were drifting apart and they were thinking about things differently, um, just about any little issue could become a, a point of friction.

Um, so, uh, those would be some of the key things I would say. But it's really, um, it's really a, a, uh, situation where the, the, um, little differences that already existed just became amplified over time because of the, because of the separation.

Uh, theoretically, or essentially, uh, both of the, both the Roman Catholic Church and the, and the Orthodox Churches believe, uh, I would guess 95% of the same things. I'm, I'm not a hundred percent sure, uh, how much you'd say, but the, the differences are not huge. Uh, they, and they're, they, um, yeah. So I'll leave it at that unless you have something else.

Question, follow-up question. Did you say the Crusades played into that separation as well? Yes. Okay. Uh, the very fact, okay, here's what happened. Um, that, uh, excommunication occurred in 1054. Um, and I said that it probably wouldn't have had lasting effects, but then the Crusades came along at the end of the 11th century. What happened is, um, Christians had been able to travel to the Holy Lands and do pilgrimages there. But then the Turks came along and they, they, uh, harassed the Christians, they took that area over and it became, uh, hard or impossible for Christians to go there anymore. Plus the Turks really made, uh, inroads, uh, against the Eastern Roman Empire. Um, the Eastern Roman Empire had controlled Turkey all the way up until 1071.

And then when the Turks came along, they, um, hollowed out that whole area. The, the, the group, the, um, Eastern Roman, uh, Empire was able to control the coastal lands of Turkey, but the interior became Turkish eventually. And, um, and, and so the, the Eastern Roman Empire was fighting for its life. And plus, like I said, the Christians were no longer able easily to go to the Holy Land and pilgrimage. And so the pope in 1095 called on the Western Christians to save their Eastern brothers. You see, they, they still recognize them as equal Christians and to make it possible to go to the Holy Lands. Theoretically, they should have given the Holy Lands back to the Eastern Emperor.

They didn't do it. They made crusader states. Plus the fourth crusade, instead of going and fighting the Muslims, the Venetians convinced them to go and conquer Constantinople, which was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. That's what sealed the fate. The, the, the, the, um, the, uh, fact that the Western Christians went to the Holy Lands and, and, and, uh, pre, um, erected their own kingdoms instead of giving that land to the, uh, to the, um, Eastern Emperor. And they, uh, and they eventually took over Constantinople and ruled it for, um, let me think here. I think it was about 60 years. The, uh, Eastern Roman Empire continued in Western Turkey and eventually conquered Constantinople again.

But they were, they were, they were at that point, they were at dagger points with the, with the, uh, with the Eastern, Western Christians. And they were also terribly weakened. And so within, um, less than 200 years, the Turks captured all of the, the, uh, remnants of the Roman Empire, Constantinople and lands in Greece and in, uh, Western Turkey.

So that's really a, uh, it was, it was, uh, that sealed it, I would say. The, the Eastern Christians saw the Western Christians as barbarians who were not, um, not really their brothers, not helpers, helpers for them.

While you all are thinking, um, I would like to emphasize that at the beginning, I mentioned some things that we should notice. And I think these really help a person understand what's going on in the world. Um, and that is the governments or kingdoms or nations or empires always try to undergird themselves with religion.

And, um, and that's going to be the reason that, um, that the Roman Empire eventually, uh, used Christianity as its state religion. And, uh, even in a country like the United States, where we don't have an official, uh, state religion, we have some kind of a, a vague deistic semi-Christian kind of thing going on. And even in the communist countries that are, um, atheistic, uh, they make, they make communism into a, an, into a kind of religion. And so there's this, there's this natural urge, it seems, for, um, political rulers to strengthen themselves by using religion. And, uh, that's a, that's a thing for us to really, that's something we Anabaptists ought to recognize as a, uh, a very negative thing.

But we need to be aware of that and, uh, become people, I think, that speak against it, um, clearly. Do you, do you think that the empire's undergirding themselves with religion? Is that a conscious choice on their part or? Definitely. In some cases, the Roman Empire, when it was pagan, said, you Christians are, are, um, making the gods mad at us. So we've got to root you out. And plus they also thought that the Christian virtues were making the Romans, um, uh, less able to defend their empire. So that was, that, that was clear. The, the, the early, uh, the pagans recognized you have to placate the gods. Um, then I, I think it was, uh, it was about a 60-year period from Constantine on when the, uh, Christian church was not the state church.

Um, so, but, but it was very much favored. And then finally, about 60 years after Constantine, it did become the state church. I think in a lot of cases, it's conscious. I don't think it's conscious in the communist countries, but they're doing the same thing. I, I do think it's an impulse we have, or at least politically in, uh, oriented people have. And, um, and I think that's the great, one of the great things, uh, uh, that Christianity has that it is distinctive about it, that it must not lose. And that is that no, we don't commit ourselves to undergirding any nation, any empire. We are universal.