Welcome back to another episode of Engage the Faith Live Q&A with David Bercot. Today, as you saw, we are going to be going over questions on Sunday Sabbath, laying on of hands, sola Scriptura, the beard, and the head covering. It's a lot to go over in a really short time, so we're going to make this short and sweet. For the Scroll Publishing viewers, we welcome you. This will not be on the Scroll Publishing website for the rest of the year. Maybe once a year at most, we'll put it up.
But we do these every month for the historic faith courses, and we can ask David anything. So next time, if you come join us, there's over 200 lessons. It's not just the Ask David anything. There's four really great teachers and many lessons going through the historic faith, and you can go check it out. There's a free seven-day trial, then it's $10 a month. I don't think anybody needs an introduction, but this is David Bercot from Scroll Publishing. Thank you so much for being here again.
Sure, it's always a pleasure. We will be having follow-up questions, so please send your follow-up questions to Matt Willis. Okay, so let's get started. The first question we have here is from David Hurst. Hi, my question was about how we as conservative Christians, Mennonites, keep Sunday here in Eastern PA. It seems like observance has changed in my 40-plus years, and it concerns me. But how does it compare with the early Christian era? How is my outlook influenced by our times?
Puritans, et cetera, probably still affect perceptions in conservative areas of America. Shopping, dining, travel, and work are all more common on Sunday, depending on where you look. Okay, we will just get right into the Scripture. So, this Scripture is going to apply to several of the questions tonight, so let's just start off reading it. To me, it's one of the banner Scriptures of the New Testament that every Christian should almost know by memory, or should at least know the gist of it by memory.
And that's Acts 15:28 through 29. Why this is so important is because the question came up of which of the Jewish regulations or any of the regulations before Christ, which of them apply to Gentiles, and which ones are Gentiles exempt from? And the big question was circumcision, but there would have been a lot of other ones in there connected with it, the dietary matters, Sabbath, things like that. And this was the decision made by the entire body of apostles.
And as far as we know, this is the only time we have the entire body of apostles speaking as one unit, plus James, the Lord's brother, is there along with Paul. And this was their decision. For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us, so it's not just some human decision, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things, that you abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourself from these, you will do well, farewell.
So that is amazing. I'm sure the Jewish Christians were expecting there would be a number of things from the law that was going to be imposed on the Gentiles. And the apostle said no. In fact, nothing that they listed there is from the law. They went back to the teachings before the law, which are not very many. And out of those things, the things they brought up, sexual immorality that was understood from the beginning as being wrong.
Idolatry, one of the things that Abraham is notable that he did not worship idols. And then back to the covenant made with Noah about not eating blood, abstaining from things blood and from things strangled. So he said," That is all we're going to impose on the Gentiles from all the legislation from the time of Noah, all the way up until the time of Christ." Those are the only things that are going to apply to the Gentiles.
Now, he's not discussing the New Testament commandments, the laws of Jesus, and the doctrines of the apostles. He's talking about all of the things before Christ. And that's it. That's all that he lists. And so it always surprises me that Christians want to keep going back to things before Christ and reimposing them on Christians. So, yeah, the Sabbath was not something the early Christians kept. I mean, the Jewish Sabbath was Saturday. So if we're going to keep the Sabbath, we would be keeping it on Saturday.
So what we're dealing with, and what you would be dealing with as a conservative Mennonite, went through, you know, a couple of stages. It's a return to the Mosaic Law, but it's not an actual return because the Sabbath was Saturday. That's the seventh day of the week. And so it goes back, and you were right in your question, did this have something to do with the Puritans?
And yes, now as far as I know in the English-speaking world, I do not know what was happening on the continent, so there may be some parallels happening in Switzerland as well. I don't know for sure. But at least in the English-speaking world, it does go back to the Puritans, and some of them began teaching that God somehow moved the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Now, the New Testament says nothing of that. There's not a single verse in the New Testament that says that. None of the early Christians say that.
That's something that, like I say, this Puritan just came up with out of the blue, and somehow that made its way into the Mennonite world. And I do not know the exact connection. So, as a conservative Mennonite, yeah, you've grown up with that understanding, which is not really scriptural, and it's not the historic faith. It's not necessarily a bad cultural thing. I'm not, you know, mocking it or anything like that. But we should be clear, it's not Scripture, it's not the historic faith.
This is something that came in with the Puritans. It doesn't even have anything to do with our Anabaptist faith. It's what we got influenced by other people. And this teaching here in the United States, in New England, then they had very strict laws of what could be done. But see, the original Puritan position at least made more sense scripturally, because what they did was literally take the Sabbath laws and move them to Sunday. So the Sabbath began at sunset and went from sunset to sunset.
So the way the Puritans originally kept the Sabbath, it started Saturday night at sundown, and it went to Sunday, sundown. And they would do no cooking. They wouldn't shave. They wouldn't, you know, groom. I mean, they did almost nothing on the Sabbath. They tried to follow very literally what it says there in Exodus and Leviticus, which is extremely strict. I mean, you do not cook. You do no kind of work on the Sabbath. You can't travel very far.
They maybe even took it further than what's set out in the Old Testament. But that was the original, if you want to be somewhat logical. But what you have in the Anabaptist world, which isn't particularly logical, is it's a Sabbath, but it's not following the Old Testament laws. Every Mennonite housewife prepares this large Sunday dinner on Sunday. She's there cooking and doing all of this work, all of which was forbidden. That was the one thing you could not do was to kindle a fire, cook, that sort of thing.
But they'll do those things, but then would view it as a sin to eat out on Sunday or something like that. Now, again, if someone wants to follow that as a cultural thing, there's nothing wrong with having a day of rest, a day of ceasing from work, and just a time for church and family, fellowship, that sort of thing. So, I noticed when I was in Israel a few years ago, I was real curious, okay, how did the Orthodox Jews celebrate or not celebrate, but how did they observe the Sabbath?
And I was staying in a hotel in Jerusalem, my wife and I. And it was very interesting on the Sabbath, which is Saturday. The hotel was open. The strict Jews use a Sabbath elevator, which I got on by accident, and it stopped at every single floor so that you didn't have to do anything. No work. You didn't push any buttons or anything. But then when I got to the restaurant in the ground floor of the hotel, where there were all of these Orthodox Jews eating. So they had no problem eating out on the Sabbath.
The law forbids cooking, you know, kindling of fire, which they would interpret as any kind of cooking. So it was fine to eat out because you had Gentiles doing the cooking. They were working, but the Sabbath laws didn't apply to Gentiles. It was only for the Jews. So I thought that was interesting. If you're going to go by the law, then you're violating it to cook on Sunday, but not to eat out on Sunday. But anyway, no, the early Christians clearly understood that we are not under the law as Christians.
Now, if Jewish Christians, they kept it for some time, because they were working with Jews, and it would have been very offensive if they had let go of all of the provisions of the law. But even they understood that these were not commandments any longer, but it was something that they did in order to be able to witness to the Jews. But yeah, Paul, I mean, he even rebuked the Gentiles. He said," This is Galatians 4: 9 through 11.
But now after you have known God, or rather are known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements to which you desire again to be in bondage?" Listen to what he's talking that he says is weak and beggarly elements that you're going back into bondage. And this is what he says," You observe days and months and seasons and years. I am afraid for you, lest I have labored for you in vain." So no, the Gentiles did not keep a Sabbath. Now, they did observe the Lord's day.
That's the day that they worshiped. Tertullian says it would be good if you can spend that set aside that day to use for prayer and that sort of thing. But there was no requirement that Christians do that. A lot of Christians were slaves. They had to work on Sunday. They didn't have a choice on that. So, yeah, it is the puritan heritage that somehow got into the Anabaptists. Again, it's not necessarily a bad heritage, but we should understand it's not a scriptural requirement. Okay, let's go to the next question.
Great. Thank you so much for that, David. Good view. So this is Simon. I cannot pronounce it. Isaacson. Isaacson, sorry. How does David view the laying on of hands for the Holy Spirit and the Ante-Nicene writings? They seem to have believed that in baptism, sins are forgiven and the Spirit received by laying on of hands. Yeah, you ask what my view is.
Yeah, my view is the early Christian view, and you've just stated it accurately, that they understood that our sins are forgiven in baptism, and we receive the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands. And the reason they believe that is they just took the Scriptures very literally. So, as far as forgiveness of sins and baptism, there's a number of Scriptures, but Acts 2:38, the first Christian baptism.
It says," Then Peter said to them,' Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, or forgiveness of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." So, that's why they believed in baptism for the remission or forgiveness of sins, is because of what is said there and a number of places in Scriptures. I have a message on the historic faith on what the early Christians believed on baptism.
It's also on the YouTube channel, I believe, the Scroll Publishing YouTube channel. So, yeah, I would encourage you to listen to that and you'll see all the scriptures and the quotations from them. And the same with laying on of hands from Acts 14. It says," Now when the apostles who were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the Word of God, they sent Peter and John to them, who, when they had come down, prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit. For as yet, he had fallen upon none of them.
They only had been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. And when Simon saw that through the laying on of the apostles' hands, the Holy Spirit was given, he offered them money to be able to get that power. So again, in the New Testament, the laying on of hands is when a person would receive the Holy Spirit in the normal course of action. And that's the big if or the big asterisk at the end in the normal course of things.
So Cornelius and the ones with him, they received the Holy Spirit before they were baptized, and no one laid hands on them. I don't know if hands were laid on the Ethiopian eunuch. We assume he received the Holy Spirit. So God is not in a box. He never boxes himself in. So normally we receive forgiveness at the time in the waters of baptism, but God isn't bound to that. He can forgive sins anytime that he wants to. The thief on the cross had his sins forgiven. He never had an opportunity to be baptized.
Likewise, people can receive the Holy Spirit without the laying on of hands, but the early Christians did things the way it set out in the Book of Acts as the normal course of things without putting God in a box. And I think that's a good practice for us to follow. So our church, we would baptize with the thought of forgiveness of sins, which, of course, is through the grace of God. The water doesn't do it. It's just the ceremony or the sacrament as some of the early Christians would have called it.
The provision God made," Okay, this is where I do it. This is what I ask you to do. This is where you receive the forgiveness of sins." And laying on of hands to receive the Holy Spirit. But God can act independently of us. And just because a human lays hands on you doesn't guarantee you're going to receive the Holy Spirit either. So we both have the scriptural example, and we should always remember God is, we can't put him in a box. Thank you so much for that, David.
From Ricky, it appears as if a great deal of what you say depends on the Protestant Reformation Doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Can you demonstrate that the Ante-Nicene fathers actually believed in that concept when they may not have had access to all the scriptures? It seems as if they may have held to a more prima Scriptura mindset. Okay, very perceptive question. And I think you're largely accurate in everything that you have said. So I would describe the position of the pre-Nicene Christians.
They look to the apostolic faith. Now, the best witness of that were the New Testament scriptures. And of course, they looked to the Old Testament Scriptures as explained by the apostles. Now, the one advantage they had over us is they received this orally. I mean, the New Testament Christians, they heard Peter preaching, they heard Paul preaching, they heard John preaching. So they were able to receive the faith orally directly from the apostles before anything was written down.
It was already there before probably maybe the first New Testament book was Matthew, and that may have been written ten, twenty years after the church was founded. So, yeah, it was received orally at the beginning, and then the Scriptures went to verify what had been taught. So the first generation, when you look at, say, Clement of Rome, who was a direct disciple of the apostles, yeah, he would have received it mainly orally, but he also had the Scriptures. And it's interesting in what's called 1 Clement.
He quotes from Scripture just, I mean, paragraph after paragraph. It's just Scripture, Scripture, Scripture, not just the Old Testament, but largely New Testament Scripture. So even at that early date, and it was probably written in like the year 97, even at such an early date, they're quoting Scripture as their normative rule for theology, for teaching, and that sort of thing. So, that's what passed into the second century.
Yes, the faith handed down, but the primary witness to that is the Scripture or the infallible witness is that of Scripture. And the further then you got from the last apostle who was apparently John, the last one who died, then the more the Christians needed to cling to the Scriptures because, yeah, memories can be fallible, and in one church, maybe they never heard this oral teaching, and some other church did, but you had the writings.
Now, you said, yes, they didn't have, they had them all, but not every church had every single writing necessarily in their church library or collection of Scripture. But I think it would be safe to say that virtually every church had the four gospels and the is it 13 letters, I think, of Paul? So they had the bulk. They also 1 John, nearly everyone quotes from and 1 Peter. So the bulk of the New Testament, yeah, all the churches had that they all looked to.
Then you had other complementary books like 2 Peter, James, Revelation, that some churches had, some didn't. And they maybe affected the understanding of certain outlying doctrines, but not the core of the faith. You had that primarily in the four gospels. And they also, of course, had acts. So, yeah, the apostolic faith is what they look to, but the scriptures, you know, was their guarantee of what that faith was.
And Tertullian, around the year 200, maybe it was 198 or so, and I don't remember the writing now specifically, but he talks about tradition in it. And he says," If you want to know what the authority is for certain things, well, the authority is tradition because you won't find any Scripture for it." But the things he lists are all what you might call ritualistic practices of praying at certain times or how they did certain things in baptism, fairly minor matters.
It wasn't any of the foundational teachings that he was saying that, you know, we have to refer to tradition on that. There are things if he didn't have, nothing would be lost. So, and that's how much tradition had accrued, you know, let's say around the year 200, which wasn't very much. So, yeah, the bulk of it is Scripture. So, back to your question, I seem to be more espousing the sola Scriptura view. And you are right to a degree, and it's through the School of Hard Knocks.
So, after I originally read the early Christian writings, which when I read them, I was just trying to find answer to theological questions, and then discovered a lot of things I never expected. And yeah, it totally turned my life around. But yeah, I saw things that, okay, this isn't in the New Testament. I never necessarily thought I should follow them or that I had any obligation to. But it was interesting to see that.
But I was mainly concerned with what was in the New Testament, that I realized I wasn't obeying, that the churches I had belonged to weren't obeying. It said you didn't need to. And that's what really got my attention and my life.
Years later, when we had a fellowship in Texas, a house church, and we sort of set off with the idea," Okay, let's take Scripture as understood by the early Christians, and then any traditions up to the year 200, then we'll follow them as well, unless they somehow clearly contradict Scripture, and there was nothing we came across that we felt fell into that category." So, we did things like the early Christians prayed three times a day at the third, sixth, and ninth hour.
I feel pretty certain that's an apostolic tradition. It was so universal. It's mentioned so early, it's in the Didache. You can see indications in the Book of Acts that this was a practice. So yeah, we followed that, but it's not commanded in the New Testament. They fasted on Wednesday and Friday. Again, I feel fairly certain that was handed down by the apostles because it's so universal, so early. And yet it's never a written commandment. But you know we felt like, let's do it.
And then, yeah, there were other ones. And it seemed like a harmless and a solid enough pattern to go by. Well, what happened? What went wrong was, yeah, so where do you cut off? Like you say, we made the artificial deadline of the year 200. In other words, a century after the apostle John died. If it's not written down there by then, if we don't have written testimony by then, then it's very questionable, could this have been handed down by the apostles? But that was an arbitrary date.
So, yeah, people said, well, what about this? Okay, maybe we see it in the year 235, but it doesn't seem to be something new in the year 235. Shouldn't we also follow that? Shouldn't we follow this? And what ended up happening was pretty soon we were going all the way to the Council of Nicaea. As long as it was pre-Nicene, then we would do it or we would maybe do it. It was hard to be consistent because sometimes there's only one witness, one you know written witness to a particular practice.
And okay, so is this really apostolic or not? And people then got so caught up in things that were not in Scripture. Well, then it spilled over into theology. And as we practiced some of these traditions from the second century, some of which I believe were Apostolic and others may have just been early Christian traditions, it brought us in more contact with like the Catholic and Orthodox churches and things they were doing.
And we could see a clear distinction between the pre-Nicene church and then the modern-day Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. But then in dialogue with them, you know they would say," Well, you know we would say what you teach on Mary, that's just not scriptural." They say," Well, Irenaeus, you know, calls her the second eve." Oh, okay. So then pretty soon people, well, Irenaeus says the second eve. So somehow he becomes authority, something that's not even in the New Testament.
It's like, well, you've got a pre-Nicene Christian from the second century. And he says this. Of course, he didn't pray to Mary. He didn't say she was queen of heaven. He didn't say she was sinless, anything. You know, he was just saying she was a counterpart of Mary. That's as far as he ever went. But yeah, as it built up, I saw this was not it was a good experiment, but I felt it was dangerous and unworkable. Where is it going to lead up? So, yeah, I came to the conclusion.
I think the safest thing is what's in the New Testament? If something was universal at an early date, like praying three times a day, then I think it's a good practice, but I would be very uninclined to teach it as a commandment, to put it as a requirement on our church. In our church, there's a few of us who practice that. I still try to practice it every day. There's some other brothers who do that with me, but it's not a commandment or anything like that.
So, yeah, it's just through the School of Hard Knocks that I've come back to that, because I'm not in the second century. It's very hard to replicate something when you weren't back there and you're just having to look at a small witness to the lenses of history. Now, as I've said in some of my books, Sola Scriptura is really a myth because nobody, nobody, absolutely nobody, uses only the Scripture as their authority.
A lot of people say that, but I think it's impossible, because even if you're just a hermit, you're up in the Appalachian Mountains somewhere, and you just read the Bible, you haven't read any commentaries, you haven't listened any sermons from anybody else, read any other Christian literature, which wouldn't be a good thing. But let's say you're doing that and you just read the Bible, well, you're still putting your interpretation on it.
I mean, there are verbal contradictions in the text of Scripture, and you have to decide," Okay, how do you harmonize this verse with that verse?" Everyone sees that and has to do it. And so you're adding something to Scripture when you come up with that harmonization. I mean, it's a logical, necessary thing to do, but the way you harmonize it isn't necessarily the way the apostles harmonized it.
So, yeah, you can add your own thoughts on it, or you can go to a theologian like Martin Luther or John Calvin, which so many people do, or Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas, you know, whatever. And the course I followed that I feel is the safest and is really just common sense is to look at how did the Christians who were closest to the apostles understand these passages of Scripture?
And particularly looking at what they believed in the second century, but on most theological subjects, there is no change between what you read in the year 125 and what you read in the year 315. There's very little change that way. So taking Scripture as the final authority and using the early church as our best commentary to shed light on the Scripture.
If we don't use them, like I say, we're going to either use some teacher we look up to, or our own minds, or some great theologian, or famous theologian, I should say, from past centuries. So, let's just move to the next question. This is an exciting one. Yeah, this is one that I've been waiting on for a while. It might not be exciting to anybody else, but I've just been curious. But this one's from Leo Ibi, a great friend of ours, and I have an audio clip of it.
And David will start to answer it after the audio clip. David, you mentioned numerous times in your books, how the Renaissance pictures misrepresent the the way the early Christians looked and dressed. And so my and I understand that. And so my question is this. Most of our literature today, Bible story books, commentaries depict the apostles and prophets and the early Christians as the men having beards.
Is that a true representation of early Christianity and Christianity itself of Jesus having a beard, his apostles having a beard, and the early Christian church fathers having beards? Or is that a misrepresentation of the way things were? According to your dictionary on early Christian writings, it seems like the church fathers all endorse the fact of maintaining the beard.
Along with the beard question, a lot of our modern day Anabaptist publishers are putting Bible teaching material, picturing the apostles with the partial beard or the peace beard with the mustache shaved off. Does that misrepresent the apostles in the early church? And also, Brother David, as a giant in Christian historical orthodoxy, why would you shave your beard off? Okay. Okay. So the question is, yeah, should a Christian wear a beard? The early Christians talk a lot about it.
So, Leo, you've asked a very good question. I think most of you who have researched it have seen the various quotes beginning, I think, with Clement of Alexandria. He's got quite a few. And then there's Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius. Yeah, they all say, yeah, we should wear a beard. A couple of them quote the passage in Leviticus to not shave around the corners of the mouth and that sort of thing.
And so somebody reading that, and I've sent them out in the dictionary of early Christian beliefs, someone reading that would feel like, well, I guess they were all in favor of the beard. All the early Christians must have worn a beard. And yeah, Leo, you asked, what about all these pictures of the early Christians? Are they accurate or inaccurate? Because they always show them with beards. Well, let's look at some pictures drawn by the early Christians.
The ones you're talking about, I think, are pictures drawn by modern-day artists, okay? If we can connect that with the PowerPoint, okay, so here's a picture. These are from the catacombs, okay? These are Roman Christians painting these. This is supposed to represent Jesus and the twelve apostles. And you notice neither Jesus nor the apostles have beards in the picture. Okay, let's go to another one. This is Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman. These are not professional artists.
They are, you know, somewhat crude. Very instructive, though. You can see the kind of dress that they're putting Jesus in the kind of dress that they wore, which probably is similar to what Jesus wore, but they're showing Jesus without a beard. Now, I'm not intimating that Jesus didn't have a beard. I'm saying this is how the Roman Christians pictured him. And these are from like around the year 200 to 300, these paintings, these particular ones from the catacombs. Let's go to another one.
Okay, this one is, well, is representing Jesus doing the miracle of the loaves and fishes. And again, not a clear picture of the faces that are much harder to draw, but you can see a beardless Jesus there. And I think we've got one final one. And this is Jesus healing the woman with the flow of blood, who touched the hem of his garment. And if you look at his face, yeah, no beard. And there are many more.
If you do a search on the internet, you will see a lot of pictures of Jesus or of early Christians and Jesus without a beard from the catacombs. Now, there are also pictures in the catacombs showing Jesus or the apostles with a beard. So, I think the ones who are a little bit more educated, you know, realize that somebody in Judea would have worn a beard. But the number of pictures we have of them and of other Christians, there's a few of just early Christians themselves, so often they show them without a beard.
Now, this is significant because, like I say, this is a nonverbal testimony that we have from drawings. And see, this is in Rome. And this is the problem when people take those quotes. The quotes are Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Lactantius, Cyprian, all of those men were from North Africa, where to this day, men wear beards. Men wore beards back then. In those countries, they wear beards today in those countries. And the apostolic constitutions are from the Middle East. Again, people wore beards.
In Rome, they didn't wear beards as a normal rule. Some men did, but generally the Romans shaved themselves totally clean. And this is how the early Christians apparently practiced things from the pictures we have from the catacombs. And the interesting thing is we go back to Acts 15. I said at the beginning that it's going to be a key verse. There's nothing mentioned there.
See, the question was put," Okay, what things in the law do the Gentiles have to follow?" And of course, a beard would have been something mentioned in the law. It would have been something Jews practiced wearing a beard. And the apostles said nothing about that. That was not one of the things mentioned. When Paul writes to the Romans, he doesn't even bring up the subject. In fact, it doesn't even come up in the New Testament anywhere that I can think of, any dispute about the beard.
So you had Roman Christians, Gentiles who didn't wear the beard, and no doubt Jewish Christians in Rome and other places did wear a beard. There doesn't seem to have been any dispute about it. So, yeah, when we had the Church in Texas I was talking about, and we thought, well, let's follow what the early Christian writings have to say, I grew a beard because there were so many writings that, you know, recommended the beard. And I actually liked the way that I looked in a beard.
And so during those years, I had a beard. Ironically, when I was an Anglican, I was wearing a beard, and then later on, I became an Anabaptist. I didn't have a beard. But it's because of the transition in between. Like I say, during those years, we were trying to follow what the early Christians, the practices that they had, and even on the beard, we were aware that it wasn't something all the early Christians followed.
But since there's so many writings that talk about it, and probably most of the early Christians in most countries of the world would have worn a beard, we felt like," Yeah, let's follow that practice." But when I saw how everything got so crazy, and pretty soon, like you say, we were missing the important doctrines of Scripture, the important teachings of how Christians should live, and worrying about these things from the early Christian practices. Yeah, when I dumped it, I dumped it all.
That's when I shaved my beard. He's like," Okay, I'm not going to fast Wednesday and Friday. I'm not going to do any of these things. I'm going to shave my beard. I'm going to just get back to what is commanded in Scripture." And maybe I overreacted on that, but that would still be my position. If it's not a commandment in Scripture, it's not a commandment. Now, it may be a very commendable and good thing to wear a beard.
I mean, obviously that is how God created man, but he didn't make it a requirement in the New Testament. So where he didn't think something was important to make it a law, then, yeah, I don't think we should make it a law today. Of course, I don't think we should forbid it as a law. You know, forbid wearing a beard. I would say that would be uncalled for as well. There's certainly no scripture warrant for forbidding it, for requiring someone to go beardless.
And then, yeah, the strange thing, you talked about the pictures that show Jesus and the apostles with beards, which would be accurate, but then without a mustache as just part of their beard being shaved off, which is forbidden in the law to cut around the corners of your mouth. And so, yeah, we have, you know, dear Anabaptist friends who teach, you must wear a beard, but you have to mar your beard. You can't wear it the way it was prescribed in the Old Testament.
But then they go to the Old Testament as their only justification of why you should do it. It doesn't make sense. I'm not belittling anyone, but it's not very consistent. So Leo, hey, if you wear a beard, my friend here, Daniel, he's got a beard. Praise God. I think it's no justification is needed. It's how you were made. On the other hand, there's not a commandment. And for some other personal reasons, I've chosen not to wear a beard. And so that's the reason why I've made that decision.
Okay, let's go to the next question. Very good. Thank you so much for that. That was very insightful. I saw some of the questions that have come in. I'm not sure. One of them definitely goes along with what we've been talking about, but one of them may not. So their follow-up questions, there's a lot of questions we're not going to get to tonight. So it wouldn't be very fair if we answer new questions that you didn't submit before.
So we may look at them afterwards, but we may or may not answer the ones you submitted depending on if they're related. And to one of the guys on the YouTube chat, we do quote the early Christians a lot on predestination. And David has a Romans series, and he has three different episodes on Chapter 9. And he goes very thoroughly through predestination and what the early Christians thought about that. So be looking forward to that on the Sound Faith Channel, and we'll keep moving on.
So if I'm understanding you, we'll try to answer the questions if they're a follow-up, if they're relating to what we've been discussing. But if it's a new question, we'll get to it maybe next month, or we will try to next month when we have another Q&A. Yep, correct. Darrell Burkeholder, what do you think about women only covering a portion of the top of their head in light of many fathers clarifying a veil to cover the face? We all know when Moses veiled himself, he covered his face.
And when Paul says because of the angels, they agree he is discussing the need for modesty due to the angels lusting after women. Shouldn't a veil both be for the purpose of authority and modesty? So perilous, a face should be hidden to retelling greed. Okay. And really, the same discussion answers this question as well. You're right, Clement and Tertullian both say that a woman should veil her face, particularly Clement, is very specific on that.
But Clement lived in Egypt, where it was the practice of women to veil their face. A lot of people think that started with Muhammad, that it's an Islamic custom because they're the only ones today who did it. But no, it was those peoples in Arabia and across North Africa that it was common for women to veil their face. So the Christians who lived there, yeah, it made total sense to do that. But you don't find the Christians in Rome or in Greece saying that women should veil their faces.
In fact, Tertullian's work, I think if I've got the right one, it's the one entitled on the veiling of virgins. In that work, he goes through a lot of discussion on the head covering. And I think it's in that one that he describes what different churches do throughout the ancient world. And it's very obvious from reading what he says that there were different types of head coverings in different cultures, that it wasn't uniform.
Now, Tertullian argues for, you know, the whole head and even the face to be covered, and he makes a good point. I mean, his point has validity to it. But when he talks about what all the other churches do, well, that's what I was looking at. What was the practice of the church, the whole worldwide church, and it would not have been customary across most of the ancient world for Christian women to veil their face. But your point is definitely correct that the veiling wasn't just a symbol.
It was also a covering for modesty, not just headship, but also modesty. And it's because of the angels come in. There were two reasons given there. So I think it's good if a woman's covering, and until, you know, two centuries ago, in the Christian world, and actually in most of the world, maybe more so in the non-Christian world, yeah, women covered their heads out of modesty, and then that started getting dropped in the 1800s.
The head covering became a symbol just in church, and then in the 1900s, it went from any kind of veil to a hat, and then mainly just at church. And then since like the 1960s, it's pretty well disappeared except among the Anabaptists. So I think that should be kept in mind that it was commanded also for the purpose of modesty. Certainly the early Christians understood it that way.
I do want to praise modern-day Christian sisters who wear a covering at all, because you're really going against today's culture, and it's not an easy thing to do. So I want to commend any Christian sister for whatever kind of covering that she's wearing. I would encourage you, yeah, to think about, is this really a covering or is it just a symbol? Does it cover much of your head?
It's good to have a symbol, but it's also supposed to be a covering, and the Greek word there, katakalupto, would give the impression of something coming down. So just something to think about. I think it's a valid point, and it's not good that what's happening in the Anabaptist world, about the last ones who've preserved the head covering, is that they keep shrinking from decade to decade. And in some places, like say, it's just a small symbol and it's not covering anything.
So, yeah, it'd be good to see the trend, I think, going back the other way to be in full compliance with what Paul is saying there in 1 Corinthians 11. Great. Thanks a lot for that. We have some questions we can't get to, or we're not going to answer because there's not really an early Christian answer for them. So we put them up here. You can go back and pause it and look at it later if you want, Nolan. Sorry about that.
The following questions we will be getting to next time, Lord Willing, one from Micah Nolt and Nolan again and Quentin Martin. And so we have a few more. ZTJ was this guy's name. And this is the follow-up questions. I'm not sure if this one actually has to do with anything, but I'd be interested in your opinion about supporting pro-life organizations financially. So we might get to that next time. Yeah, I'd say next summit, yeah.
This one, what about Paul's voluntary observance of some rites related to David's reply and to David's question? I'm not sure. Okay, yeah, no, that's a definite follow-up question. Sorry. Yeah, Paul was very careful not to offend the Jews nor the Gentiles. He would go to great lengths, he says. And from everything we see, what he said is what he did practice to become a Jew to the Jews and the Gentile to the Gentiles. So I think that's a good principle.
So if you're in the Anabaptist world, and this is the culture, like it's the world that I live in, so I'm not going to flaunt the freedom that I feel I have on the Sabbath because I know that's offensive to a lot of my brothers and sisters in the Anabaptist world. So, yeah, I'm going to respect what they feel in that matter. And the same on a lot of other subjects as well, or certain things may not offend the Anabaptists, but it might offend other Christians, or it might offend people in society.
And if it's not a law that we have to do something just because we have the freedom, I mean, Paul goes to great lengths in Romans about that very subject of just because you have the freedom to do something doesn't mean it's right to do it. And he talks about the same thing in 1 Corinthians. So yeah, we should respect the effect it's going to have on other people. And then, as I said, it's not a written commandment from the apostles to pray at the third, sixth, and ninth hour. But I choose to do that.
I think it is from them, but even if it's not, it's a good reminder to me to stay close to God in prayer. And so I think it's a very wholesome spiritual practice, whether it's something God requires me to do or not. So if it's something upbuilding and works for the good of ourselves and others, then it's always appropriate to do it. Okay, we have a few minutes here. We have eight minutes. One from the Scroll Publishing channel. We have a few. Love your work, David. This is Elvis Isaacs.
Love your work, David, huge fan. Why do you reject infant baptism? Bible has no example of second generation believers. Why not follow what the early Christians unanimously did? Okay, well, yeah, I think if they all followed that, it might be a strong argument. The problem is we don't really have any clear teaching on infant baptism. I mean, the clearest thing you get is around the year 200 in Tertullian's writings, and he is against it. He doesn't say it's heretical, but he doesn't think it's a good idea at all.
And then Cyprian is probably the strongest advocate. He's writing about the year 250. And yeah, he's in the same city, Carthage. So in Carthage, we see from Tertullian that some were baptizing infants. And then again, from Cyprian, we don't know if it was universal in Carthage. It obviously wasn't in Tertullian's day. And we certainly don't know what it was throughout the whole ancient world. So, yeah, we can't say this was a universal practice.
And since the New Testament gives us no, it never talks about what age ones were baptized. I think last week I commented," I'm slow to judge people on that issue, but I don't think it's a very good practice just because of the history of too many people I've known who were baptized as infants and never knew anything about Christ. And then they've committed horrible sins and everything. When they come to a knowledge of the New Testament, it's like," Wait a minute.
Is that a valid baptism?" So unless we're going to treat them all as valid, and then all these people are now in a serious situation, I feel a lot more comfortable treating them all as invalid and that they're not baptized. Otherwise, I say there's a lot of people who are in second and third marriages and just a lot of bad situations that, you know, they supposedly did as a baptized Christian. The other thing is Justin Martyr, in his first apology, he gives a description of baptism. And in there he makes a comment.
That to me was very, I guess, decisive for me in rejecting infant baptism. And he says," In our natural conception, in our original birth, we had no say in the matter. That was our parents coming together, and we had no say." But in the new birth, we get to decide that we want to be born. We didn't get any say in the first birth, but we do in the new birth. And so I'm thinking, now if infant baptism was common, would he be making that statement? That doesn't sound to me very likely.
And he was right there in Rome, in the, you know, the largest church in the world, the largest city and the largest church. So, yeah, I'm not convinced at all that infant baptism was the norm in the pre-Nicene church, and certainly before the year 200. So, yeah, those are my reasons for not choosing to practice that myself or to advocate it. Okay, I have one more. Are you OK with one more? Definitely. Well, I'm going to have to summarize it because there's so many comments right here.
But basically, how do you stay, how do you stay friends with people you disagree with? I know that's kind of not related, but I think it's a really good one. Well, in some ways, it is related to you know every one of the questions. I think it's learning that every one of us can be wrong. And so even though I feel strongly on a lot of issues, it's knowing I could be dead wrong. I don't mean about Jesus Christ or on that, or on the New Testament. I'm not taking it to that degree.
But yeah, just on how to work out some of these issues, like on the beard, on age of baptism, and some things like that. I look at the witness of Scripture. I look at the practice of the early Christians. And like I say, both with the beard and with age of baptism, you don't have a uniform position on it. And so from there, I make a decision of what I feel is right and best for me and my family.
But somebody else who has a different view, they might be right, or they might have a better view, or we might both be right on that. So I find I can, yeah, treat someone as a brother who disagrees with me, even on some issues that, you know, to me are very close to my heart. I mean, unless we're talking about rejecting the deity of Christ or the Bible or something like that, some of the foundational, you know, the resurrection, the judgment to come, you know, things like that, the incarnation.
If we're not talking about the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, so many of these other things are not necessarily going to affect our day-to-day walk with Christ. And in fact, most of the things we argue about do not affect our day-to-day walk with Christ other than the fact that we argue. So I recognize if somebody is walking closely with Christ, if they're loving their fellow man, I may be more accurate on my doctrines than they are, but they're ahead of me in the kingdom of God.
If their love is greater than my love, then you know I'm behind them. And so I try to always recognize that. And that way, and because of that, yeah, I don't find it overly difficult to be friends with Christians who, theologically, we would disagree, but we agree on the importance of loving God and loving our fellow man. And I think we can bind together on that. Amen. I think that'll be it for this time. We will get to those questions.
Probably the last Tuesday of the month at 7:00, it seems like what the vote was in the poll. If you have any other thoughts on the times, I think it's pretty settled at 7:00, but if enough people say a different time, we will be flexible. Thanks a lot for joining us. And thank you so much, David. Thank you, Daniel. Amazing answers and to some tough questions. And thank you again, Leo, for your beard question. Goodnight. Goodnight.
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