"Sacred Roots: Panel Discussion with Q&A on Church History" by four panelists

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

Welcome to Strength to Strength. This afternoon, we are excited to be getting into our eighth, eighteenth talk here in our Sacred Roots series. And basically, this is a Q&A on church history on the first 1,500 years of the church. Our vision for this series, for the Sacred Roots series, goes like this: to humbly and lovingly rediscover the history of God's people in order to reground, renew, and re-tether our faith and practice. And for the last eight months or so, we've had the privilege of having numerous presenters share on different aspects of this part of our church history. And it's been a real, real blessing to do that. There's this really great quote that I heard Stephen Brubaker say, and it goes like this: "The divinely resourced organism for withstanding tsunamis of moral denigration is the Church of Jesus Christ.

A church anchored in 2,000 years of faithful doctrine and practice. A church receiving with it gratitude, the wisdom that precedes it. A church building on the grace of the past is in the best position to not only withstand but turn back the shadow of evil and injustice to prevail against the gates of hell."

And we know that Jesus said that upon this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. And so the burden with this series, the burden with this talk today, is to continue to look back and remember those teachings, those things that have been given to us.

You know, looking at the apostolic church and then also into the early church up to the 1500s is our focus for this afternoon. So before we get started, let's just bow our heads for prayer. Father, we thank you for today. We thank you for the opportunity that we have to be workers in your kingdom.

And Father, we feel inadequate many times. Father, we sense a deep need for your Spirit, for your power. And Father, also we know that without understanding the teachings of the New Testament, the doctrines have been given to us, and also looking at the practices and the way the early church lived, Father, we need all these different graces to stand true in our day today. And so Father, I ask that you will bless the panelists in a special way, David, Stephen, Finney, and Philip, as they share here this afternoon, Father, and that this talk could be a talk that would challenge us to continue on, to press on, to not give up, to press on in this work of seeing your kingdom come, seeing your will be done on earth.

So Father, we ask that you would bless this time, and we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Okay. And so the way this is going to work, so we're going to have the four different panelists share just a short introduction or a short kind of recap to maybe their particular emphasis that they've given in this Sacred Roots. I'm not sure how they're going to do that. I feel bad to only give them five minutes, especially when you think about Mr. Russell or Mr.

Anderson, who've spent hours in teaching here so far in this. But somehow, they're going to kind of distill that down and give us a little bit of an overview, maybe a couple areas that they don't. If we forget everything else, don't forget these two things.

So we'll begin with David, Brother David, and then we'll go to Brother Stephen, and then to Brother Finney, and then to Brother Philip. And after each one of these panelists share, I'll open it up for any other panelists to ask any questions they would like or comment, and then we'll move right into the next one. And so we actually also have had a lot of questions come in already. And so we were able to kind of comb through those and create some themes.

And so we'll be presenting those questions then after each of the panelists share. If you have any questions or thoughts that come up for our listeners here, feel free just to put that into the chat button. And Glenn and I are kind of watching that. We'll try to, if we can, we'll try to get to your question.

At least we'll consider it, maybe add it into some of the different themes that we have already going. So again, thank you for joining us here today. And Brother David, we'll look to you here if you could just give a couple minutes overview of what you've shared so far. Can you guys hear me? We can hear you well. Awesome. Well, as always, it's an honor to be here. Thank you guys for having me again. So I'm just going to briefly walk through some of my talks just kind of as a reminder, but then I really do want to focus on kind of those one or two, like what should we take away from this. So near the beginning, or at least sequentially, we talked about why even study church history.

We have the scriptures, we have the local church, why study church history. And I gave several reasons, but I think one of the important reasons is to put us into the broader story of God's people. That as cliché as it sounds, stories are actually really important because we all are in some sort of story, whether we realize it or not.

And so the question is, are the stories that we are presenting our children and our converts and our churches, are they compelling and are they true? Because if they're compelling, but they're not true, people might get disillusioned if we say, like, we are identical to the X church or we're the one true church or whatever, and people start to realize, hey, there's some cracks in this, and they start to get disillusioned. And also, if it's a true story, but it's not compelling, we're going to have a hard time reaching out to people because we aren't just brains on a stick. We desire beauty and substance. And so there's a lot of reasons to study church history, but I think to put us into the broader story of God's people is really important.

I shared some about early Christian practices and some early Christian conflicts, especially around church discipline. And I think in both of these, we can learn what did the early Christians value, and especially that some of the same issues that we wrestle with today have been wrestled with since the beginning of the church. What do we do with church discipline? What do we do with a world with lots of different religions and lots of different worldviews? And we're not the first to wrestle with some of these.

And then went into some of what may seem more abstract, kind of these Trinitarian and Christological thoughts, but I hope to have been able to communicate the importance that these aren't just kind of head games. These ideas that if Christ wasn't actually fully human and fully God, then we aren't actually fully saved, at least not in the way that the scriptures talk about it. I don't just want the penalty for sin to be wiped away. I want the power of sin in my life to be abolished. I want to be refashioned, not even just into the innocence of Adam, because he was a type of the one to come, but into the fully human one, into Christ himself.

And we realize when we look at him that we are not actually what we are made to be. We are made to be in Christ. And so because of who he is, Christ lifts our humanity into the life of God.

Similarly, the Trinity, it's not just a puzzle to be solved. It's actually the heartbeat of our faith. Ephesians tells us that before the creation of the world, he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ. But the mystery hidden for the ages is Christ in us, the hope of glory. And because of who God is and because of what Christ has done, we get to have fellowship with the Father. We get to have the indwelling of the Spirit, and we get to call our Lord Christ Jesus. We get to call him brother. And so in this, this is actually the heartbeat of what it means to be a Christian, to be a son of God.

I shared some about monasticism, and again, this might have been some kind of alien territory, and I hoped to have communicated that at least in its best form, it wasn't just about an escape from the world, but again, in its best form, it's kind of a resistance movement against distraction and hurry and shallow love. And so for all better and worse of what this movement produced, I think that these men and women took seriously Christ's call to stay watchful. And so for the humble, I think that there's a lot to learn from them and how to reorient our lives and how to truly focus on God, especially today in the world of distraction. So kind of the two points that I want to get from all of this is one, theology shapes our lives, whether we realize it or not.

The things that we believe about God, the things that we believe about the church, even if we don't realize we believe it, it's just kind of our default, they actually do shape the way that we live. And so I think it's important to explore these ideas and to press into them, to enter into conversation with the early church, with our local brothers and sisters, with various people to be able to flesh this out.

And also that, I think I've had to put it, genuine Christianity, it can get lost in the midst of all of this talk and doctrine and heady stuff, but Christianity isn't about believing the right things or even doing the right things left to itself. It's about being drawn into the life of God and being transformed. And so if we actually give everything that we have to the Lord, if we comprehend all the mysteries of the faith, if we give our bodies to be burned, the Apostle Paul says, if we have not love, it profits nothing.

And so if we realize this, I think it's helpful for us to reorient our priorities, our prayer, and it can reorient the way that we live our lives. And so in all of these sessions, at least, I hope that we can take seriously the question that Christ gives to his disciples, who do you say that I am?

And to enter into centuries and millennia of people trying to answer that question and live that question out. And as we do that, and as we behold Christ in all of his mystery and all of his profundity and all of his simplicity, as we do that, we're transformed from one degree of glory to another. So I hope that these haven't been abstract tangents. I hope that it leads us into worship. And I think I'm running past five minutes, so I'm going to go ahead and stop.

Okay, good job. If I would have had my, if I would have been muted, you would have heard my timer go off about five seconds ago. All right. So yeah, thank you, Brother David. And a couple of your talks that stood out to me were your talks on the Trinity, very powerful and beautiful.

And also maybe the one that was most impactful to me, though, was your talk on the practical distinctives of the early church. And I'll encourage anyone to go listen to that if you haven't heard that. So yeah, I'll just pause here. Any questions or comments from the panelists, Stephen, Finney, or Philip, for David here? I just wanted to give a hearty amen to what he had to say.

There's value in the whole of these 1500 years, both the weaknesses and the strengths. But the key thing that he mentioned was being drawn into the life of Christ. And you know, even our people who don't get interested in history, they can be drawn into the life of Christ.

Amen. Brother David, thanks for that opening. One of the things that is always a challenge for people who want to get into history and church history is first the question of, do you do primary sources versus secondary sources? A lot of people say you got to read the primary sources, but they're often much more difficult to read. They're much more of a slog. The translations are often stilted, not in easy English.

For somebody who pragmatically said, all right, I buy it, what do I do next? And do I go down the primary route, the secondary route? And I'm talking about just the average church person, somebody who's maybe not a scholar or inclined towards heavy reading.

Yeah, it's a great question. I've thought about this. I think that both have their place. I would not necessarily recommend just cracking open the ANF series from page one and going to the end. I think there is value for people who choose to do that. I also think there's going to be a lot of irrelevant material, a lot of confusing material, a lot of material that's not contextualized. And so I'm hoping, at least it's like I'm hoping with my life, but for everyone else out there to be able to find people who aren't interested in church history that are trusted to be able to make at least some recommendations. It's like going into the woods for the first time.

Without a map, you're going to get lost and confused. And so I think there are some really helpful secondary sources, and I think there are some very helpful primary sources that I think every Christian should read, but it's not just everything. And so I can give some more specifics on what those texts are either now or later, but I would recommend a combination of both, but starting off with one or two secondary sources from someone you trust and then maybe some other perspective as well.

Yeah, I think you should. I think you should give that list. I think that would be really helpful for a lot of people. Yeah, give me return to that. I want to make sure I get a few good ones, but at the very, yeah, get back to you this talk. I'm going to make sure I don't forget anything.

Sure. And maybe that could be something we get a list on the website for the description for this talk or something like that as well.

Good. Okay. Any more questions or thoughts there for Brother David?

Okay. Brother Stephen Russell, all yours. Okay. The first two talks that I gave were on Gnosticism and then the second one, Neo-Gnosticism, which is really jumping into our present day. But anyway, and then I also talked about how the relationship between the church and state developed and what the Middle Ages was like. And sometimes we look at it as a dark time. And there is darkness there, but it was also, it had good things as well. I think all of church history has both good and bad. And part of the strength of getting to know church history is finding out what was done well and what was done badly and learning from both of those things.

And then the last two that I've done were on, oh no, I'm sorry. The last one that I did was setting the stage for the Reformation. So looked at some events that primed the pump and also several people that were significant as far as indicating that there was a need for change. And once everything came together, a big part of that was the printing press. Change could happen. And when I was looking at the talks that I gave, it seems to me that I have a concern for the things that can undermine the church, but they seem so normal to us. So Gnosticism, that was an attempt to bring in the way that pagans thought in the first and second century and mix it together with the church.

And in Neo-Gnosticism, which is, I think, the big struggle for the church today, it's also this kind of mixing together of what seems so natural to our world today and kind of bringing it in with aspects of Christianity. Both of those, Gnosticism and Neo-Gnosticism, rejected part of God's truth. And interestingly, Gnosticism rejected the physical world, and Neo-Gnosticism says that's all there is, the physical world.

So anyway, those are, I'm really concerned that we recognize the things that don't seem unusual to us, but how they can undermine the truth of the gospel. And I suppose the other three that I talked about sort of deal with the same thing.

You know that the church and state became entangled with each other over a long period of time, but it was gradual. And sometimes it seemed like this is what has to happen. And so it's good for us to look back and see what did happen, why it happened, and should it have happened, should we have done, or should our forebears done something differently? And so anyway, I just think that there's so much we can learn from all of these 1500 years.

But for me, one of the key things was what can undermine the church and just almost seem normal or natural because of the setting we're in. I think that's basically what I'd have to share right now.

Okay. Thank you, Brother Stephen. All right. Any questions from the panelists?

Brother Stephen, I love history, so I always enjoy listening to your presentations. Thanks so much for all the effort you put into them. And just have a question on the idea of Gnosticism, Neo-Gnosticism, and how it affects us. So I've read or engaged a fair amount with N.T. Wright's material and enjoy it. I've learned some things from him.

But he has a big concern that there's this kind of platonic idea among a lot of Christians that sort of sees heaven as a disembodied place, not connected to this world very much. And I almost feel sometimes like he pulls the pendulum back too far to where I can't remember exactly where this came from, but it's almost like you're doing kingdom work if you plant a tree. I'm just wondering if you have a comment on that.

Well, first of all, this has been a concern of the church right from the very beginning. Irenaeus, he saw what was happening, and I think he might have agreed with if you feel like this is doing a good thing, planting a tree might be part of what God really wants at this moment.

I haven't read N.T. Wright much lately, so I'm not really sure where he might be going too far, but I would just say this: that a lot of our conservative Anabaptists, I think, do have a little bit of Gnosticism in them and don't recognize the importance of both the physical and the spiritual. I think that one of the neatest and greatest honors that God's given us is that humans, as far as we know, humans are the main thing that brings together the physical and the spiritual. And that's going, when we die, that gets disrupted, but at the resurrection, that's going to be brought back together. And I do believe that we're going to be on a renewed earth.

So I would agree with Wright on a lot of things. I don't know if there's a specific aspect that you'd have to bring up, but I wouldn't even disagree with him necessarily on planting that tree as part of God's will in your life and that it will carry over.

In 1 Corinthians 3, it talks about our works being judged by fire. And I think that those things that we do that fit in God's will will pass through the fire, and those that are not part of his will will be disintegrated, so to speak.

So do you have anything else on that?

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that.

One more thing I'll say. I've had a number of students get very excited about life when they've seen that it's not just the so-called spiritual part of my life that matters, but the things that I do here, what I do with my family. And I know that's spiritual too, but the things that I do here on this earth, the physical things, those matter too.

Amen.

Okay. Any more questions or thoughts for Stephen?

Okay, Stephen, I really enjoyed your talks and your very helping us see that these were people, and they were dealing with issues, and they were big issues.

And they weren't perfect, just as we aren't today, and in a compassionate way, kind of pulling back the curtain and looking at some of the things they faced, honoring them, but also pointing out to where they erred as well. So thank you for all your hard work the last while. All right. And so next, we'll turn to Brother Finney.

It occurred to me as we got started here, Finney, that maybe we should have had you go first since you were looking at the Apostolic Church. That was your two talks, but here we are, number three. So go ahead. Yeah, thanks. Happy to be here with you all. Yeah. So to summarize my portion, I concentrated on the book of Acts and devoted quite a bit of attention to even how we think of it, even what the title should be. And the best way of summarizing the first 15, 20 minutes of the talk that I gave is that Acts volume two follows Luke, which is volume one. So Luke is the author of both. And volume one is really about Jesus' ministry on earth.

Volume two is about Jesus' ministry in heaven. And I used some language from John Stott, who proposes that the best title for the book of Acts is, "It's the Acts of Jesus, the continuing words and deeds of Jesus by his Spirit through his apostles."

The dividing line between volume one and volume two is Jesus' ascension. That's how Luke closes the Gospel according to Luke, and that's how the book of Acts opens. And so that's an important way to first conceptualize what Acts is about. The first sentence of the book of Acts and the last sentence of book of Acts contained the expression, "The kingdom of God." So that's obviously intentional that we are watching the kingdom of God, which you could make the case is the theme of Jesus' preaching, finally manifest on the earth. And we see this in a number of different ways. We see the Holy Spirit move from, in the Old Testament, a wish. Remember when Moses says, "Would that all God's people were prophets," and he wants more of the Spirit to be distributed among God's people, to prophecy, to finally reality.

And we see the theme of prayer, which is in the first 14 out of 15 chapters of the book. That's clearly the instrument by which the kingdom is brought down. We see so many Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in the new. So we see, for example, the ugliness of Babel and the confusion of Babel, where they're speaking many different languages. We see that reversed at Pentecost. We see the multi-ethnic kingdom, which is prefigured in the Old Testament, manifested in the book of Acts. We see, for example, the union of Israel and Judah that was prophesied in the book of Ezekiel. We see that happen in the book of Acts with, for example, the Samaritans rejoining the people of God as they get the Holy Spirit as well.

Isaiah talks about eunuchs coming into the kingdom. And of course, we have Ethiopian eunuch. We see Paul and Barnabas apply the servant songs of Jesus to themselves, and they see themselves as the extension of Jesus' ministry. We see the temple motif. All kingdoms have a temple. We see the temple collide, if you will, the old temple collide with the new temple.

And there's themes of temple purity, i.e., Ananias and Sapphira, themes of money, themes of suffering. And then I spent in the second talk some time on the theme of, is Acts descriptive or prescriptive, as they say? And I made the case that it's a false dichotomy that everybody thinks that Acts is, at minimum, a description of the history of the people of God, but that you don't need to pit those as opposing forces there. So, for example, one of the things that I drew on was how the epistles will use this language of imitation or memetic discipleship. And how do you know what to imitate? Well, it's, of course, the examples that we see in the book of Acts.

And we have to really fight for that because we live in a time when people are trying to make more and more of the Bible descriptive. They're trying to take even prescriptive passages, like, for example, the head covering, and make it, "Oh, that was just a description of the first century. That's not for us today." Talked about covenantal warrant and how to read properly the Bible in the context of its covenants and how really there's people who will say the Great Commission, "Oh, that was just for the apostles. That's not for us." But even in the Great Commission in Matthew 28, he says that, "I will be with you to the end of the age."

That obviously hasn't happened yet. And so we ought to see ourselves as the heirs of that apostolic mandate. And then we talked about the whole theme of continuationism versus cessationism. And I gave an outline of that in the early church, as well as in the 1500s among the early Anabaptists. And then finally concluded with the power of story and narrative as formative devices that each of us has some kind of a story that is animating us, that's powering us. So for some people, it's, "My dad was a farmer. My dad was a doctor, and I'm going to be a doctor." Well, one of the things that we ought to be doing as we go through the scriptures is we ought to be able to have a story transplant, if you will, to be able to say, "My father was a wandering Aramean.

My father is Abraham." And the whole story of the Old and New Testament becomes our story. And when we have that story transplant, and I showed a very powerful diagram that I think is one of the most valuable diagrams that you'll ever encounter in your whole life, you see that if you change your story, then you change your identity, you change your values, you can change your morals and your actions. And so Acts has a tremendous role in reconfiguring our very story and what powers us. So that would be a summary of my first two talks.

Thank you, Brother Finney. And those were two talks that you gave, talk two and talk three in this series, and I'll attest to them being very powerful. And I agree the diagram there with how you change and the story being the center of that of change for us as humans.

And also the idea of Acts being our story today, to live that story out, to take that abrupt ending there in Acts and continue that God's kingdom work as Apostle Paul was doing is very meaningful and challenging for us today. So thank you for that. And I'll just pause again. Any questions or comments from the panelists here?

Okay. All right. So next we have Brother Philip. Philip shared a talk here towards the end of this time period. Actually, it would fall into the time period of 100 to 300 on the canonization of the New Testament, a very central part of this series, the Sacred Roots series. And so Philip, go ahead and share.

Yeah. Well, I suppose that I grew up, like many of us did, just taking the Bible for granted. You open the Bible, you've got books. They have names: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And I just accepted at face value that gospel writers wrote down the scriptures, and here they are, the words of God. And that's a good way to grow up. Not everybody does. It doesn't take very long of engaging with skeptics or people who are challenging Christianity until questions about the canon come up. How do you know that these books are inspired? How do you know that they're not just the books that the church selected? What about other books, other gospels which the church didn't accept as legitimate gospels?

How do we know that we have the right books? So there's several different models for how we got the canon. There's the extrinsic model, and that's basically a skeptical view that it's a natural historical evolutionary, quote-unquote, "process" without divine operation, just humans creating this as they develop their religion. There's the magisterial model. That's the idea that the institutional church sort of ratified which books are canonical. And there's the intrinsic model, which is the model that I defended in my talk. And that is that the authority of the New Testament is inherent in the books, that they're a God-inspired scripture. And any book in the canon is there because it is authoritative and the result of divine activity.

So some people, those holding the magisterial model, might think of the canon as an authoritative list. In other words, the church decided that these are the books that are authoritative. That's why they're in the canon. But another way to think about it is the canon is a list of authoritative books.

These are the books that happen to have been written by authoritative persons, namely apostolic men, and therefore they're prescriptive for us as God-inspired scripture. And that's how the intrinsic model thinks about it. So I presented in my previous talk that there were a group of people in the early church and then his apostles, and these people were considered to have special authority.

Paul's a good example of that, where he writes that, "The things that I write to you are the commandments of the Lord." He's appealing to his apostleship. There are a couple of authors of the New Testament that we can't specifically demonstrate that they were considered apostles, namely Mark and Luke. However, it's clear that they were so closely connected to apostles that their writings doubtless had the ratification of people who were apostles. Luke was connected to Paul. Mark was connected to Peter. And so their writings were accepted on the basis of their connection to apostolic authority.

I defended that all the works that survived and can be attributed to the apostles are apostolic scripture and considered to be canonical. This developed in the early Christian era as collections. There were a collection of gospels, four-gospel collection, a Pauline letter collection, a collection of Acts and the general epistles, and then the book of Revelation.

And it was some time before all these different collections were gathered together into one book considered to be the New Testament. But from the beginning, they were considered scriptural books. There were, of course, some writings that were contested.

Not all were universally accepted from the beginning. And the main reason for this, or really the only reason, was not all were sure that the men who wrote a few books either had apostolic authority or that the books were genuinely from them. And these were Hebrews, James, Second Peter, Second Third John, Jude, and Revelation.

However, as the early church discussed this, eventually the consensus emerged that all these works should be included and considered scripture. There was an early writing called the Muratorium Fragment that listed 22 books as authoritative. By the time we get to the early third century, Origen is referencing basically all of the books that we consider New Testament canon today, all 27 books.

However, the first actual list that we have of all 27 books in one place is in the year 367 by Athanasius. And when he lists these books, he says, "Let no man add to these, neither let him take off from these." So he felt like these were sufficiently attested, and the consensus had emerged that these books were considered canonical.

Some people feel like the New Testament canon was the result of church activity, church councils. And although it's true that several local councils produce canon lists, they're not generally given in the sense of being decisive or informative, but rather they're stating what is the general practice of the church.

Therefore, the best evidence is that the canon emerged as a consensus that developed over time, not as any sort of official church decree. And that's why the Roman Catholic Church made a formal decree in 1546 about which books were canonical. It had not really been done in quite that form until that time.

Of course, as in most topics, there were some controversies about this. The Syrian church, for example, only accepted 22 books initially, and they disputed some of these books into the sixth century. However, we have a list of books today that has been accepted by all Christians pretty much everywhere for a very long time. And I think all the evidence points toward that these are inspired scripture and the books that God wanted us to have.

Thank you, Philip, for sharing. And so the remaining panelists, if any of you have any questions or comments on what Philip had to share, go ahead. Yeah, thanks for that. This is a very important topic that I think is underrated in its importance, not just for apologetics, but also even for, for example, the claim of a lot of the, let's call them high churches, Orthodox and Catholics, would be, "Oh, well, the Bible was functionally created by the church, and so you should listen to the church when it speaks about how to interpret the Bible." You hear that argument a lot. And I've not been persuaded by that argument at all. I am in favor of your model that you advocated there, the intrinsic model.

It seems like people struggle to grapple with the difference between recognition and creation. In other words, that I can recognize something to be divine or have all of the marks of what is miraculous. And I think that's a fair way to describe what scripture is because it is both divine and human versus my being the one who is the determiner of that, that I'm the one who says, "Okay, this is a miracle, and that's not a miracle." I mean, that's obviously a fallacious way to think about, say, Jesus's miracles when he multiplies the bread for the thousands of people. So I'd love to hear your comments on that in terms of just that basic differentiation between recognition and creation.

I think that's a huge difference between the two. And then secondly, I think this is a huge area of underplayed thought, which is that covenants come with documents. And just like the Old Testament is born with documents, when, for example, Moses is at Sinai, there's documents there that are read aloud. It's only natural that there would be documents at the birth of the New Covenant with Jesus and the apostles. And so I'm completely persuaded that it's so intrinsically bound, even with the soteriology, if you will, of what it is to have a covenant.

And that rarely comes into the discourse about canon. So I know that was a lot, but I'd love your comments on both of those. Yeah, I appreciate that. So I mentioned in my previous talk that in Isaiah 2, there's a prophecy that out of Jerusalem will go forth the law, speaking of the Messianic kingdom. And obviously, a law is not something that you want to trust to oral transmission for very long. You want it to be written down. And obviously, the first law, God wrote it down from the beginning. He thundered the ten words from Mount Sinai, but he put them on tables of stone immediately. And so you would expect that if Jesus comes to bring a new law, that that would be written down.

If you believe that Jesus started a church that was too he expected to endure for a long time, and the message to get passed on, it would obviously be put in written format as soon as possible. And I believe that's what the evidence shows that I appreciate what you said there. There was an expectation of a written transmission. And so it simply remains to find out which books are written and read them and learn from them. You said you had two questions there. I think I answered the first one. What was the second one? Well, it's the, yeah, you did on the expectation of documents being associated with covenants.

The other question was around the line of differentiating between recognition and creation. So to me, it's a very arrogant claim that someone would make that a group of people, even the church, would say, "These books are canonical. These ones are not."

It's like saying that it takes the church to recognize Jesus fed the 5,000 here, and it was a miracle. And over here, he was just hammering some wood and building a chair, and that wasn't a miracle. I mean, you can tell what a miracle is, and it's not dependent on the church in the sense that the church only has a value in terms of recognizing what was divinely inspired as opposed to being an adjudicator of it. As if the church could have said, "Hebrews was not in the canon or this other book should be," and it wasn't. You know what I mean? I think it attributes far more power to human authority than is warranted.

Yeah, that is a very interesting topic. So I do think that the writings of the New Testament do carry an intrinsic connection to the Holy Spirit. I mean, you think of the number of testimonies you have of someone reading scripture and they were just convicted and changed their life as a result of it. I suppose that could happen with a book like Mere Christianity or something like that. But the testimonies outside of scripture are just much fewer, I'm convinced.

However, there was an earlier speaker on Strength to Strength who made the point, which I appreciated, that there's 20 books that were never disputed by anyone anywhere that was Orthodox Christian. Of course, that's the gospels, the Pauline letters, and all the doctrine that we need as a Christian church is contained in those books. So I learned a lot of beneficial things from the ones that were disputed, the seven books that some had questions about. And I think they're canonical. I think they're written by apostolic men, inspired scripture.

But there's nothing that's essential to my Christian walk that's in them, a lot of valuable things. So if I get to the end of the road and I discover that Third John was written by somebody other than the apostle John, not expecting that to happen, but that really wouldn't affect my Christian faith.

I did listen to your talk. I think you just talked about the New Testament, right? That's correct. Do you have anything to say about the Old Testament? It was the Bible of Jesus and the apostles before they wrote anything.

Do you have anything to say about that? And I'm thinking, for instance, about there, there are pretty big differences among the churches. Yeah. As far as which books, maybe I shouldn't say really big. Almost everybody agrees on the big chunk. And then the Apocrypha, there's some disagreement. Do you have anything to say about that?

Well, if you want to know, I can give my opinion. It might be a controversial one. So Jesus said to the Pharisees, "Scripture cannot be broken." It's in the context of referring to a Psalm. And to me, that says that Jesus recognized that there was a body of scripture. And this body of scripture that's recognized by the Jews as scripture is something that you can't break. Now, that doesn't mean that a scribe can't corrupt it. That happens. It doesn't mean that someone couldn't willfully change it. But it means God's word stands fast. So the people that he was talking to, how did they interpret that statement? Well, I really feel like the best evidence we have for how they would have understood it is probably given by Josephus.

He lists a number of books that the Jews of his day, which would be around 80, 90, considered inspired scripture. I realize it's 60 years after Jesus, but I doubt there was a significant change. He specifically states that other books that are valuable have been written after these. He basically felt like there was a period when there was no longer a clear succession of prophets around the time of Malachi and the books that were written after that, which would be the Deuterocanonical books, did not rate to the same level as what he considered to be received scripture.

So I would say scripture cannot be broken. And I consider that to be the 66 books of the Protestant canon. I'm not saying that maybe some prophet didn't write the wisdom of Solomon. There's an interesting prophecy in there that could be inspired. But I don't think that just because something is inspired, that we have to consider it to be canonical. Now, there is one difference between Josephus and the Protestant canon, and that is he probably didn't include the book of Esther in what he was considering scripture there.

I accept the book of Esther as canonical, but it doesn't really affect my faith one way or another. And I also would make the point to people who wish to accept the Deuterocanonical works of scripture that there's a great many things through the Old Testament that are not prescriptive because Jesus has changed them. They're good historical data. They teach us about God. But what difference does it really make if we're going by the words of Jesus primarily to determine how we live our life?

I do believe that the letter that you referenced from Athanasius, I think he also mentioned the Old Testament books, and I think they are pretty much what we would see as canonical. Am I right on that? He did reference them.

I believe he also expressed his doubts about the Deuterocanonical works, and I don't remember if he includes them. Yeah, no, it's Athanasius' Festal letter. And he says that the actually, maybe just make a quick comment here before explaining the Festal letter. There's a recurrence of the number 22. So in so many of the early Jewish and early Christian sources, they say that there's 22 books in the Old Testament. And you might say, "How does that 22 relate to the 39 that we're accustomed to?" It's the same. For example, the minor prophets are all considered there's 12 minor prophets. That's considered one book. First and Second Kings is one book. First and Second Samuels is one.

When you collapse them all down, you get to 22. And what Athanasius does is he says that those 22 are to be held as fully canonical. And he actually does mention the Apocryphal books. And he says they're useful and should be read, but they're not at the same level. So I think that's actually the healthy medium position where it's not to disparage the Apocrypha, which a lot of people will do who don't accept the Apocrypha as canonical, to say that they're good and useful and profitable, but they're not at the same level. That was the position that Athanasius took. And Athanasius is one of many who have this 22 list. Origen has it. Meletus has it.

Josephus has it. So many people have it. And coincidentally, people say that because there's 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, that's why there's 22 letters in the Old Testament. Now, that's admittedly speculative, but you do see that come up a lot. And I'll also point out one other thing here, which is a fun little tidbit that I like, which is that there's 27 books in the New Testament. 22 plus 27 is 49. 7 times 7, that's a pretty awesome number, pretty great number. 66 is not. And you think like, "That's kind of 666 or something like that." That's man numbers. So in the original numbering, I think that's the correct way to think about it, is that the canon has 49 books, 7 times 7, which is the mark of perfection.

Thanks for that clarification. Do you have a comment about the book of Esther and how that fits in? Yeah, no, I think the book of Esther is in the canon. I think that's right. And I think it depends on how you break down this 22, but I think the most reliable list of the 22 would include Esther in there. And I know Esther has been disputed for a long time, but it is for good reason, I think, to be part of the canon and something that we should gladly accept.

Amen.

Do you have anything to say about many of the first Anabaptists quoted from the Deuterocanonical books as it looks like as scripture? Do you have anything to say about that? I'm highly weak in Anabaptist history, so I can't comment about that.