So would you say if you're comparing early church writing to jumping forward to Reformation time period and beyond, instead of what you believe, what's your stance on a matter, you know which list of things do you ascribe to? It's so much more about how you're living, what you're doing in the day-to-day, and less about lofty beliefs and understanding of complex ideas, if that makes sense. Would you say that's the prevailing difference or is there? Yeah.
And so many of the doctrines that we know of today, they never heard of. I mean, their statement of faith was the Apostles ' Creed, which that is so basic. If you don't hold to the tenets of the Apostles Creed, I don't even know. You certainly couldn't say you believed the New Testament, and I don't think you could deserve to have the name Christian. They're so basic. Nearly everybody agrees on those. And we fight about all of these things that they didn't even consider particularly important.
And that's been most of the theological battles have been on stuff that to them were side issues and issues where there was freedom to have more than one view. Yeah. Well, I think even when you look at someone like Origen where there's a fair amount of his writing, you can pull some of the things that he talked about that were maybe in the same stream of some of that where it was talking about something obscure.
But like you said, you pull that little statement out and you make a theology out of it where for him it was a passing thought in one of the things that he was writing that it was a minor detail in the whole of what he wrote. And even he writing about obscure things, he was pretty, it was pretty uncommon. He was a rarity of someone to write things like that. The majority of people weren't writing about those kinds of ideas. That's right.
Origen is unique in that respect in that I think it would be fair to call him a theologian. I think he's probably the only early Christian you could call a theologian as we know the term today. Yeah. But what was so different, yeah, he said all kinds of things that you know nowadays he's called a heretic in that. No one called him a heretic in his day. Yeah, it was hundreds of years later, wasn't it before they decided that they needed to retroactively make him a heretic for their new idea? Yes.
So 150 years after he was dead, first it was Jerome and some others who condemned him. Not everyone did. He was still being read and appreciated until Justinian in the 500s. Yeah. Really actually didn't declare him a heretic, just some teachings that were attributed to him, and some of them Origen never taught, actually. Yeah It was those teachings that were condemned. But once that happened, then the notion got out that he was a heretic.
And unfortunately, because Origen was probably the most eloquent defender of free will. Luther and Calvin, of course, hated Origen because, yeah, he made such good arguments for free will and explaining some of those passages in Romans and other verses that seem to give the impression that we are all predestined. So he explains that artfully. So yeah, they both call him a heretic. And that was so unjust. It's because, like you say, he was contradicting what they were teaching.
And so a lot of people through the centuries, yeah, have just had that impression. Thankfully, I'd say in the last 30 years, there's been quite a change. I notice nowadays he is widely quoted and seems to be respected in most scholarly circles who delve into church history, that they realize that he was unfairly maligned. I mean, he should be saint Origen, regarded as a martyr. You know He died for his faith, underwent horrible torture, and never recanted, and then eventually died from it.
But what was so neat in his writings is things that most people other than free will. Now that he was just defending what all of the early Christians believed. But on his other things, if you read him, you realize what he's saying. He's trying to have a discussion. He's saying, well, what about this? Right. He's not saying this is true. Yeah. You realize he says something opposite. He's trying to get a discussion. Hey, let's think about these things. Yeah. And you know maybe it's this, maybe it's something else.
And it's wonderful. Back then, you could have those discussions. You could say those things. You could ask those questions without somebody jumping up and that's heresy, you know? Yeah. You know 200 years later, you couldn't do that. I mean, you or even 100 years later, yeah, certain things, yeah, you were going to be declared a heretic. And then you had a state church that could enforce it by banning you, exiling you, putting you to death, putting you in prison.
I mean, yeah, the whole scene changed after Constantine. So when you're talking about the early church, 100 to 325, so prior to the Nicene or the Council of Nicaea, the arrival.
So when you're speaking of kind of the, and this is my language, and so if it's incorrect to use, maybe the untainted early church following the apostles before some of the control stuff kind of came in, you would say 325 and earlier is maybe the freshest look at what the church was doing, what the church believed, guys who were the disciples of Jesus ' disciples, people who knew them or knew someone who knew them. That's really the time frame.
If you're encouraging someone to read, that's the cutoff line that you would use, 325? Yeah, 325, only because the Council of Nicaea really marked, I mean, it was a big turning point in Christian history. For the first time, you have a worldwide church council, and the one who convened it was the Roman Emperor, who was not even a baptized Christian. And in fact, all of the so-called Seven Ecumenical Councils were convened by Roman emperors. And Constantine presided at the council.
Now, I have no problem with the Nicene Creed. I use it myself in explaining the Trinity. I think it is a good explanation of the Trinity. It would reflect what the Christians in the first few centuries believed. So I don't have an issue with the theology of it. I have an issue. It uses the word homoousios that is not in the Bible. Now, I think it's a perfectly fine word if you're just talking. I think it explains the nature of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So I'm not against the term.
I'm against this idea that to be an Orthodox Christian, you have to use a word that's not in the Bible. See, that was a first. You never had that before. Orthodoxy had always turned on things that are clearly scriptural language from the Bible. So now it turns on a word. And so you had Christians who were perfectly Orthodox, but said, " We're not going to use that word. That's not in the Bible. " And so they got condemned. They got labeled as Arians.
I mean, there were genuine Arians who were heretics, but then there were a lot of just innocent Christians who got labeled because they wouldn't go with the program. Yeah What's worse is Constantine at the end of the decision, he said that anyone who had the writings of Arius, who was condemned at the council and who was a genuine heretic. Yeah, yeah. That if you had his works, you had to bring them forward to be burnt. So you have the first time of Christians burning books.
And if you didn't, you'd be put to death. Now, it just astounds me that the leaders at that council didn't say, well, whoa, wait a minute, Christians don't do that. That's a Roman idea, not a Christian idea very clearly. Yeah. But yeah, they accepted that because it was like, " Hey, this is nice. We now have the power of the state to silence heretics. " In the past, we just had to keep arguing with them. And now we can put a quick end to it, you know? Yeah.
And yeah, that opened the door to all kinds of horrible things that happened in the church, you know, from that point on. So yeah, that's why I use it as a ultimate line that I see change. Now, there are fine teachers after that. I mean, one of my favorite early Christian teachers is John Chrysostom, who would have lived in or would have taught in the late 300s, you know, I don't know, 370 to 390, 95, somewhere in there.
And most of what he says is fits what the pre-Nicene Christians say, but there are some differences. You know, it's, I don't recommend him if you don't, if you haven't first read the early people. Don't start there. Start with the early guys and then... Yeah, start with the early guys, and particularly the year 200 is a boundary to me. If it wasn't taught before the year 200, then I'm a little less apt to say, OK, this was the faith handed down by the apostles.
If it was handed down by the apostles, normally you're going to see some indication of that in that first 100 years you know after the New Testament was finished. But there are not a lot of differences between 200 and 325. It's very similar. There are a few things you notice, but it's very similar to the first 100 years.
But yeah, I particularly like to rely on those first 100 years, people who knew the apostles or knew people, like you say, who knew the apostles, who were still they could honestly say, " This is the faith handed down to us by the apostles. " You can say that in the first 100 years, maybe the first 200. After a while, that gets a little tenuous as you keep going through the centuries. But I think it's such an interesting point that you make.
And I would agree, just through reading and through my research, finding the same thing, it wasn't really so much time that was the issue. It was control. It was the leadership control. That's what began to twist, because you know from 100 to 325, that's a relatively long period of time. That's a lot has happened culturally, you know from persecution to different people and leadership and influences from other area, it's really remarkable how much it didn't change in that period of time.
And then from the Council of Nicaea to 10 years later to 50 years later, the amount of change in that short period of time far outweighs all the change from 100 to 325 in my view from my reading. Oh, exactly. And that's what I saw. You know, like I say, after reading the Ante-Nicene fathers or pre-Nicene Fathers, I thought, what happened? Yeah. You know Why isn't it this way? So I had to keep reading to see what in the world, you know? And yeah, I mean, Constantine had good intentions.
I do not malign him as an evil person. The problem was he did not understand the ways of Christ. He thought he was blessing the church, but yeah, he did more to corrupt the church than maybe any single individual, but trying to do good. But like I say, he was still an unbaptized Roman. The church leaders should have stood up to him and said, " I'm sorry, you know, this isn't right. " They stood up on theological issues later on, but they didn't stand up to him on the much bigger things.
And yeah, so I'm very disappointed in that generation of leaders, but I didn't live then. You know, would I have passed the test? You know, when you went from being persecuted from being, it was illegal to be a Christian, it was the only religion not accepted and recognized by the Roman Empire. And now, suddenly, you went from that, and in a period of like 15 years or less, you went from that to being the favored religion and then eventually the state religion.
And yeah, so people like Athanasius, I mean, he had probably more power in the Roman Empire than anyone but the emperor himself. I mean, suddenly the major church leaders had enormous power, not only in the church, but in the empire as a whole. So, yeah, I haven't had to pass that test. So I'm not going to judge people who failed the test that I haven't passed myself. But I can say they failed it, you know, that what they did, they should have stood up, you know? Yeah.
And we don't have to follow in their footsteps. We can stand up and say, okay, hey, they messed up. They maybe had good hearts, whatever. But this business of combining the state and the church and this idea of clergy getting so much power. I mean, the prime example would be Augustine. And again, I apologize to any Calvin. He's a tough topic, right? I found the same thing that as you speak about him, as you talk about him, his writings, his beliefs, it's a nerve for people, I know. Yeah.
But please, yeah, I wanna hear what you have to say. So when I first read him, of course, I had started hundreds of years before him. So when I got to him, it's like, " Wait a minute, you're changing everything. " I mean, he gutted the church around the mound. He explained away every hard teaching in there. And then because of the controversy with Pelagius, and Pelagius has been so misrepresented. I don't agree with all of his views.
Fortunately, they thought they got rid of all of his writings, but some of his writings have survived because people thought they were writings of Jerome. Oh, wow. And so they got preserved. And so we have Pelagius ' commentary on Romans, and he was not saying the things that he has been accused of, that's for sure. But he did not believe in original sin. But neither did the Christians of the second century, not as we know it today. That was something Augustine largely developed and certainly predestination.
I mean, he's the guy who's introducing all of these novelties into Christianity and at the same time wanting to condemn Pelagius as a heretic, when it's like, wait a minute, Augustine, you're the guy changing everything, not Pelagius. And yet he prevailed because he had so much power. In fact, yeah, he could convene these councils and they were all his buddies. I mean, whatever Augustine said in the West, particularly North Africa, I mean, yeah. I mean, he was going to get his way.
He was just a natural-born leader and a tremendous communicator. I mean, when I started reading him, I could see why he's so influential. He communicates so well, say compared to Origen. Origen is a hard read. You know, you really have to... You gotta have a dictionary and a thesaurus sitting next to you as you read him. Yeah. Where Augustine, he thinks like a Westerner. You know Yeah, I like reading him, but yeah, it's like, I can understand you, but unfortunately, you're corrupting the faith.
And yet, you know, not because he had an evil heart. You know, he thought he was defending the right thing. But I don't know how he thought that because you've got to know you're saying something that everyone else has condemned predestination, and now you're saying we're predestined. But whatever, he was able, the councils, they're not what so many people think. It's not like you have a hundred people or 300 sometimes, 300 independent minds.
You get a herd mentality when you get a church council, and whoever the really prominent people like Augustine at those various councils in Carthage, they're going to dominate it and you get a bunch of just cows who, okay, we're going to go along, we're not going to make waves. But the interesting thing is Pelagius appealed when he was condemned at those councils. He appealed to the Pope. And the pope, he went up to Rome.
The pope heard him out, read his writings, and said, " You know, this was wrong that you were condemned. " And he told the bishops, told Augustine, " You were too hasty. Also, you're condemning him on things. We don't understand God's foreknowledge and how all of that interacts with human history. " And so you were much too hasty in condemning him.
Well, instead of accepting that rebuke, then Augustine, who also knew the Roman Emperor, they went over the pope's head to the Roman Emperor and yeah, got him to not that he would have cared about this theological issue on his own, but yeah, he wanted to have their support. So he accepted their condemnation. He put pressure on the pope then to condemn Pelagius. And so Pelagius was not only excommunicated, but then he gets exiled, you know, basically silenced. That's how things work.
So it was a very unjust hatchet job on a person and put a stain on his name that still to this day, you hear the name Pelagius and people think, " Oh, this horrible person. " And again, I don't totally agree with his views, but the things he was saying were Orthodox in his day. I mean, you know, they were not different than they were not things that anyone would have viewed as heresy. You know, they were a legitimate other view, you know, on how Adam's sin affected us. You see a lot of different views.
The Bible doesn't explain it. You know, Romans just said, " Through one man, sin entered the world and death through sin, and all men died because all men sin, not because Adam sinned. " So it doesn't really explain. You know Personally, I think somehow we have been affected by Adam's sin. I do believe I have a fallen nature. Maybe that's on my part trying to have an excuse. I don't know. But it seems that way to me. But I like that the early church didn't try to define that.
You know They just let this is what the Scriptures say. Leave it at what it says. And if you want to speculate, hey, that's fine. You can be an Origen and you can speculate, but don't turn it into a dogma. You know Origen taught original sin, but he did not make it a dogma the way that Augustine did. And so, yeah, it's just a different world 150 years after he died. Yeah. So if you're, again, someone who spent a lot of time in the early church and then you know Council of Nicaea and shortly following afterwards.
And then you take, you know and I know this is a big ask, but you take a snapshot of that writing of 100 to 325 and then you take another snapshot of the writing of, say, the last 50 years or so, what would you say are the greatest differences, the greatest changes from that time to this time? Okay, so I guess you're wanting this to be an open and honest podcast. So I will tell you. Yes, I am. You may decide we're not gonna upload this or whatever.
So what surprised me, one of the biggest surprises, you know, I was just concerned about eternal security. They did not hold to Luther's doctrine of salvation by faith alone, which Luther based that on Augustine. So that came in through Augustine's view, was never fully embraced by the Roman Catholic Church and certainly not by the Eastern Church. But they would have believed, yes, we are saved by faith, that we cannot save ourselves, that without grace, yeah, there's no possibility of salvation.
I mean, yeah, we and you could say, yeah, it is ultimately a matter of grace because no one can save themselves. But they did, the way I sum it up, and you don't see this in most modern writings, the holiness movement probably came the closest. And that was one group of churches that I visited a lot, got to know some of those people. This was back in the days when Leonard Ravenhill was still alive, if you've heard that name. Oh, one of my all-time favorites.
Yeah, so I was blessed to live like 15 minutes from his house. Oh, wow. He liked my book, " Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up. " And so he invited me to come to, they had a weekly prayer meeting on Thursday mornings. It was mainly Assembly of God pastors and himself, but others were invited. So that was a real privilege to, yeah, sit under and listen to him. And I really was drawn to the old-fashioned holiness movement, but yeah, it was dying. I mean, you know, even in his day, he was becoming a fossil.
People respected him, but they didn't really embrace what he was saying. They saw him as a little bit, eh, he's an old fogy kind of thing. I didn't look at him that way, but yeah. One of my children quotes as him, and I won't say it perfectly, but it's something to the effect of it's not that people have looked at the gospel and found it you know unimpressive or whatever.
It's that people have looked at the gospel and the gospel living and found it difficult and just said no, that there's an invitation there that people are seeing just fine and they're saying no. No, that's right. They're saying no to it. So the way I describe it, and they don't use this word, but I'm just summing up what the early Christians believed on salvation. Now, well, they see two phases, okay? So our initial salvation, which they would see at the time of our baptism. Now, today we have an altar call.
You don't really see that in the book of Acts. You have an altar call, but it's to come and get baptized. So that's all grace. I mean, you don't, you know, there's no works involved. You're saved by grace alone, faith alone, that aspect. And Paul talks about that in much of the book of Romans. But chapter two of Romans, he talks about the judgment that's going to be based on works. And so the early Christians saw, okay, there's two phases. They're the initial phase that is totally by grace.
The second phase, God's grace is there, but He wants an obedient love faith relationship with His people. Jesus is teaching about the vine in John 15, that we get on that vine. That's by grace and faith on our part. But then we have to produce fruit. And if we don't produce fruit, he says, " My Father is going to cut you off the vine and the ones cut off are going to be thrown in the fire. " So, I mean, Jesus makes it clear we have to be producing fruit. That is what he wants to see.
He's not going to give us a theological test on Judgment Day, but He is going to be looking at the fruit of our life. So, yeah, the early Christians believed in faithful, salvation by faith alone, the first phase of it. But yeah, they look at Romans 2, plus James and you know so much, all of Jesus ' teaching, that there has to be this obedient love, faith relationship with Christ throughout our life. And it's a joy. After that moment a lot. I'm sorry?
It matters a lot how you live after that moment, that there's real, yes, reward, but it's more than just a moment decision that the life is really so much of what they taught about, but what the Bible teaches about as well. Exactly. And the nice part of it is when you make that kingdom commitment and you enter into a true surrender to Christ, His power is in you. It doesn't create a miserable life. It does, as you know, my young daughter said, this is when life got good.
I mean, yeah, it makes such a fulfilling life. And you avoid so much I mean, I look at people in the world, not so much with eyes of condemnation, but they don't have to suffer the things. They don't have to live a life on drugs. They don't have to have a life broken up by divorce and you know broken homes and all of these things. If we just live by Christ's teachings, it's a blessing. He protects us from so many things we would otherwise go through.
So he is that loving shepherd that we see presented in the gospels. He is the good shepherd, but he's a shepherd who, yeah, I mean, he's got instructions that he expects to be followed. He has to be our Lord. He can't just be our Savior. Yeah And so many of the books today are centered on this easy believism that you could have Christ as your Savior, but not really the Lord of your life. And the early Christians would say, " No, you can't pick one and not have the other. You've gotta have them both. " That's good.
Yeah, I think you even referenced some of the difference between salvation experience, the baptism piece that maybe a common snapshot of what that will be represented as today is in a large room of people, you know, close your eyes, let no one look around, raise your hand and then put it back down, and then I'll pray from here and then you could pray in your head there. And it's like trying to remove any obstacle or challenge to this decision, which I don't know anyone's heart.
And so I can't speak to it, but it seems from the outside that the focus is to get as many to make some sort of decision as possible so that we can see as many of those decisions as possible. But in the scriptures in the early church, to become a Christian was not just this benefit that you got to your life. It was really, in many ways, an acceptance of challenge, of persecution, of rejection in the social circles many of them lived in. But the call was always repent and be baptized. It wasn't, make a decision now.
And then after you build your faith for a few years and really kind of get into this thing, then you'll make this public declaration of your faith by getting baptized in front of other Christians. The perspective of what we call salvation, what we call entering into the church, what we call being a part of the church today, I think in so many ways, is extremely different from what it looked like in those early days.
And I think because of that, the writing, the theology, the beliefs, the teaching almost affirm a passive, is your life hard? Accept this gift for you and your life will be less hard. Is the idea of an eternity in hell unattractive to you? You know, take this simple choice and you'll be free from, you know, that scary end. And if you make that choice, okay, thank God that's over. Now you know have at it. And as you do whatever you like, God's gonna find ways to make it cool for you. Very, very different message.
Yes, a very different message. You know, like I say, you know when I read the letter to Diognetus, and this is a Christian explaining Christianity to a pagan, and the same thing with Tertullian's apology. And it's like, number one, none of us could, you know, no church could say that today. This is what Christians, you know, are all about, because, yeah, we've watered everything down so much, but it was like, wow, they were a fascinating group of people.
I mean, I remember reading that and thinking, " That does not describe my life. " And then when I kept seeing it in work after work after work, yeah yeah then I realized, " Okay, I need to do a lot of self-examination and let God do some heart surgery on me and that. " But it's the most blessed thing that ever happened to me. I mean, I'm so glad all of that happened and the journey that it's led me on and the relationship to Christ that I wouldn't trade anything for. Yeah.
Thanks again for listening to part two of our conversation with David Bercot.
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