Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're going to be talking about the Nestorians. This is the third message in the series," Kingdom Christians Through the Centuries." Now, unlike the Novatianists and the Donatists that we've already spoken about, the Nestorians were not a reform or a restitutionist movement that came out of the established church. They were simply the continuation of the original church that had been planted in the East in the first century.
In fact, the history of the Nestorian Church begins about 400 years before Nestorius. That's why it's a bit absurd to even call these people Nestorians. In fact, Nestorius was not even a member of their church. The more accurate name, and the name by which they call themselves, is the Church of the East. Now don't confuse this with the Eastern Orthodox Church. That's an entirely different body.
But because so many history books refer to these people as the Nestorians, it's why I'm using that name for the title of this message, even though it's a terrible misnomer. Well, as I said, their history begins in the first century. According to their history, and this is backed up by the testimony of Eusebius in his historical record, King Abgar, the ruler of the small kingdom of Edessa, heard about Jesus during the lifetime of Jesus, and wrote him a letter.
Now, Edessa was the capital of this small kingdom lying east of Damascus between the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire. At times it was a small independent kingdom. At other times it was forcibly annexed into the Roman Empire or into the Persian Empire. Now, to our Western ears, it sounds a bit hard to believe this king writing a letter to Jesus. But that's only because we haven't read about it in the Scriptures. I mean, a lot of things happened that aren't written in the Scriptures.
John ended his book saying if I wrote about everything that happened with Jesus, perhaps the world could not contain all of the books that were there. Yet even in the Gospels that we have, we do read about a Roman centurion approaching Jesus and asking Him to heal the centurion servant. So non-Jews were aware of Jesus Christ, and His fame had spread beyond just Judea.
The historian Eusebius says that a copy of this letter from King Abgar to Jesus was still in the official archives of the Kingdom of Edessa during Eusebius' lifetime. This is in the early fourth century. In fact, Eusebius said that he saw this letter in those archives, that he made a copy of it, and then had it translated word for word from the Syriac. This is what the letter says as recorded by Eusebius." Abgar, the King to Jesus, the excellent Savior who has appeared in the region of Jerusalem.
Greeting:" I have heard about you and the cures you accomplish without drugs or herbs. Word has it that you make the blind see and the lame walk, that you heal lepers and cast out unclean spirits and demons, and that you cure those tortured by chronic disease and raise the dead. When I heard all these things about you, I decided that one of two things is true. Either you are God and came down from heaven to do these things, or you are God's Son for doing them.
For this reason, I am writing to beg you to take the trouble to come to me and heal my suffering. I have also heard that the Jews are murmuring against you and plot to harm you. Now, my city-state is very small, but highly regarded and adequate for both of us. Well, Jesus, being sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, was of course unable to do what the king asked. However, he did send a message to the king saying that he would send one of his disciples to him.
And after Jesus' ascension, Thomas, the apostle, sent the disciple Thaddeus to King Abgar. There, Thaddeus, who is known in Syriac as Addai, preached the gospel to the king and converted him. And that was the beginning of the Church of the East, the branch of Christ's Church lying east of Damascus outside the Roman Empire.
Now before I go any further, let me say the history of the Church of the East, the church that's been wrongly labeled as the Nestorians, doesn't depend upon the authenticity of the letter from King Abgar. Eusebius was an educated man and a fairly astute historian, and he definitely believed it was genuine. But whether it was or not, there's certainly no historical reason not to believe that Thaddeus brought the gospel to Edessa.
There's plenty of oral tradition in addition to the writings that were there in the official archives of that kingdom. And there from Edessa, either Thaddeus himself or one of his disciples took the gospel to Persia. Now, at this time, Persia was still a strong empire, probably second only to that of Rome. And the gospel spread quickly throughout the Persian Empire, such that by the time of the Council of Nicaea, the Persian Church, or the Church of the East, was a considerable body of believers.
Now at times they were severely persecuted. Often it would be the Magi, the Zoroastrian priests, who would stir up persecution against them. But the persecution of the Christians in the East didn't perfectly coincide with the persecution in the Roman Empire. Often they were at peace when Christians in the Roman Empire were being horribly persecuted and vice versa. To some measure, the Church of the East was unaffected by the Constantinian era.
If you've read my work, The Kingdom That Turned the World Upside Down, I talk about how Constantine poured out monetary gifts and privileges and salaries to the church and the church leaders there within the Roman Empire. But there was nothing he could do for the Christians in the Persian Empire. There, Christianity never became a state religion. There was never a merger of church and state. Christians there never persecuted anyone. There was never an Inquisition.
And the Church of the East never burned anyone at the stake. As a result, the Church of the East carried on a kingdom witness even when the established church in the west had lost it. This is not to say that the era of Constantine had no effect on the Church of the East, because they were in touch with their fellow Christians in the Roman Empire. Of course, since they were living under pagans, they thought it was absolutely marvelous that the Roman Emperor had embraced Christianity.
They didn't see the trap that was there any more than the Christians in the West. They just weren't as affected by it. And they sent delegates to the Council of Nicaea. Now, after deciding the issue concerning the divinity of Christ, the Council of Nicaea set up a worldwide government of the Church that was modeled after the Roman system of government. And it was set up with bishops ruling over various diocese, and then patriarchs or archbishops governing various bishops under them.
In fact, the whole word diocese was a term of Roman government. Now when you hear it, you think of something within the Catholic Church, or one of the other hierarchical churches, but it was originally a term of government in pagan Rome. Now, at the Council of Nicaea, the bishops there from the East, they agreed to come under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Antioch, because that's what Constantine wanted.
So even though many of the changes in the Western Church never reached them, they still were affected to some measure by the Constantinian hybrid. They did adopt the hierarchical patriarch system that had been instituted in the West, and one of their bishops acted as the patriarch over the rest of the church. Now he was still under the Bishop of Antioch at that time. That was a voluntary thing. I will serve under the Bishop of Antioch.
At the same time, Constantine's conversion ended up causing the Persian Christians to be severely persecuted, because the rulers of Persia were afraid that the ties the Persian Christians had with the Christians in Rome would cause them to rebel against Persia. They, of course, didn't realize that in Jesus' kingdom, his followers don't take up swords. They had never done it against the Roman Empire, and they would never do it against the Persian.
But because they were afraid, the Persian rulers instituted a severe persecution against the Christians under their jurisdiction. And as a result, many of the Persian Christians fled into India. Of course, like the Christians at Jerusalem who fled from Jerusalem back in the first century, they took their Christianity and spread it as they fled from persecution. The same thing happened with these Persian Christians.
They took Christianity into India, and they joined up there with the indigenous church that was already there that had been planted there by Thomas in the first century. Anyway, the Church of the East continued to work with the Western Church, and they sent representatives to what is sometimes called the Second Ecumenical Council, the Council of Constantinople, which was in the year 381. Now, while all of this was going on, the Roman Empire itself was crumbling.
Just as Christianity was taking over, or at least a hybrid form of Christianity, was taking over the Empire. The Empire itself was crumbling. Germanic tribes were overrunning the frontiers, the Roman legions that had to withdraw from Britain. But while all of this was going on, the church, instead of being able to be of some help, the bishops were embroiled in bitter rivalries.
In particular, the bishops of Antioch, Constantinople, and Alexandria were jostling with each other, each trying to get the ascendancy over the others. Well some of this rivalry was addressed in that council because one of the canons of the Council of Constantinople gave the bishop of Constantinople the second place of honor right after the Bishop of Rome.
Well, this particularly irked the bishops of Alexandria, who until that time had had a de facto place of the second place of honor in the church next to the Bishop of Rome. So the spirit of rivalry didn't go away. In fact, it probably increased at that point. And so what you have are the bishops of Alexandria plotting against the bishops of Constantinople trying to make trouble for them and to unseat them and to a degree vice versa.
In fact, the next several decades after the Council of Constantinople were marked by various intrigues involving those three bishops, including the Bishop of Antioch, as each one tried to jostle for a superior place over the other one. Of course, all of this reveals the low stage that Christianity had reached in less than a century after Constantine had created this hybrid of church and state.
The whole operation of the Western Church had become extremely political, with the emperors and empresses heavily involved in the affairs of the Church. Alexandria had broken off communion with Constantinople, but later on it was re-established. Christianity in the West had sunk so low that Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, actually encouraged Christians in his city to plunder the Jews. So it was a blessing to the Church of the East to be largely insulated from what was going on in the West.
They were still able to maintain a high measure of kingdom Christianity, teaching and living by the teachings of Jesus Christ, rather than all of these political movements for power. In the year 427, the Bishop of Constantinople died, and because of all the political factions involved, the Imperial Court decided to choose a successor from outside of Constantinople. See, now it was the emperors and the court who were deciding who these main bishops would be.
Well, they chose a man named Nestorius, who was an abbot in a monastery in Antioch. So this is where Nestorius first comes on the scene. Like I say, for 400 years, there's been the Church of the East. It had no connection with a man named Nestorius. Well, as I mentioned, Nestorius was from Antioch, a place where a large percentage of the population still spoke Syriac, related to the language that they spoke in the East, Aramaic.
And even though he was from Antioch, he was made the bishop of Constantinople, primarily because of all the political intrigues. Well, he wasn't there very long before he noticed that a lot of the members of his congregation were referring to Mary as the Theotokos, which is usually translated in English as" Mother of God." Well, he began immediately preaching against this title, saying that they should refer to Mary as the" Mother of Christ." Because he saw that people were very close to deifying Mary.
Now, Nestorius fully believed in the divinity of Christ. In fact, he was a strong opponent of the Arians, and to his discredit, he actually encouraged the emperor to persecute the Arians. So the problem was not one of theology involving the divinity of Christ. The issue was mariolatry. Well, of course, the people of Constantinople were upset at Nestorius' preaching. Remember, he was an outsider having come in from Antioch.
So they would even interrupt his sermon shouting," Mary is the Mother of God." Well, soon quite an opposition party arose against Nestorius, and they dishonestly began accusing him of not believing in the deity of Christ. Well, before long, Rome got involved in all of this, and that created a rift between Nestorius and Pope Celestine. Now Celestine is the same pope you may remember we spoke of the other night, who had confiscated all of the buildings of the Novatianists in Rome.
Well, naturally, all of this was too much for Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, to resist. I can picture him almost rubbing his hands in glee as he realized that the bishop of his hated rival seat that was Constantinople was getting himself into hot water. Pretty soon Cyril was denouncing Nestorius and stirring up his monks against him. Well, before long, the whole issue of Christology was drawn into this, which really was not the core issue. The issue was Mary and veneration to Mary.
It had nothing to do with Jesus Christ and His divinity. Well, once they made the issue into Christology, it created a big problem because the theological framework of Antioch, where Nestorius was from, had always been different from that of Alexandria. Alexandria represented the speculative, allegorical Greek way of thinking. Antioch had always represented a more literal Eastern Syriac way of thinking. Although both camps essentially believe the same things about Christ, they express them in different language.
Nestorius explained to others that theologically, yes, he could accept the term Theotokos since Jesus was divine. But he felt it was a term open to grave misinterpretation, and thus it was better not to use it. Well, the sinful thing in all of this is that no one wanted to try to understand one another. They were more interested in catching their opponents in some kind of theological error, so that they could get a jump of power over that person.
Well, as was typical of the Church of this period, the emperor then got involved in the dispute, and he called for a council to be held at Ephesus. This was in the year 431. Now again, please remember that all of these disputes I've been talking about, this was all happening in the West. The Church of the East was not involved in any of this in any way, but they were invited to attend the council.
Now calling a conference in those days, a church council wasn't something," Oh, let's meet this weekend and discuss this." You were talking about a period of months for everyone to be able to arrive, sometimes as long as even a year. So the delegates began arriving in Ephesus at different times, and they soon divided into two opposing camps. This is before any sessions got underway.
The Bishop of Ephesus, where the council was being held, had a personal grudge against Nestorius, because Nestorius was trying to bring Ephesus under the authority of the Bishop of Constantinople. So the Bishop of Ephesus, together with Cyril of Alexandria, well, they soon got together and began to plot how they could unseat Nestorius and bring disrepute on the whole bishopric of Constantinople.
The Bishop of Antioch sent a letter to Ephesus saying that their delegation had been delayed because of the long distance, but that they would be there and to please wait for them. Now remember that the Church of the East still had no involvement in any of the things that were going on. But as I mentioned, they had voluntarily put themselves under the authority of the Bishop of Antioch. And so they were sending delegates to this council as well.
Well, now Cyril realized that once the Antiochians arrived, they would almost certainly support Nestorius, because he was from Antioch. I mean, you see this whole thing is political. No one's dealing with what is really true, what's a godly way to handle it. It's how can I jockey for the greatest position of authority? Well, and so instead of waiting for the delegates from Antioch and from the Church of the East to arrive, they decided, well, let's just convene the council now.
And so Cyril did that and he presided at it. Well, Nestorius, even though he could have been there, he refused to attend such a sham council. Well, so the council hurriedly convened, and then they quickly condemned and excommunicated Nestorius before the delegates of Antioch even got there. Well, after they had done this, then some weeks later, the Bishop of Antioch and the various bishops from the Church of the East, and the churches attached to Antioch, they finally arrived.
Well, when they got there, they were told the council had already met, and it had already condemned Nestorius without any of their input. Well, quite indignant at this, they held their own council, and they excommunicated Cyril and the Bishop of Ephesus both for calling together this sham council. Well, finally, a representative from the Emperor arrived, and he tried to reconcile all these parties. But he couldn't do that.
Well finally everyone agreed," Let the Emperor make the final decision." And he did, and he decided to depose Nestorius. Well, what was the fallout from all of this? Well, first of all, I think it reveals just how utterly low the Catholic Church. And I'm saying Catholic Church, this would include what's today the Eastern Orthodox as well as the Roman Catholic.
By giving the official stamp of approval to the title" Mother of God," the Council of Ephesus unleashed a wave of devotion to Mary, ultimately leading to her practically being deified. And I think history has really vindicated Nestorius on this point. The use of the term" Mother of God" or Theotokos is very dangerous, and it has definitely worked to the detriment of the churches that use that title. You find so many people who are far more devoted to Mary than they are to Jesus Christ.
The Council of Ephesus also marked the end of the Church of the East, the Church in Persia, trying to work under the authority or with the bishops in the west any longer. They could now see firsthand what a spiritual mess the Western Church was in, and they wanted no part of it. And so a few years after the council, the bishops of the Persian Empire sent a letter saying that they would hereafter manage their own affairs, independent of both Constantinople and Rome and Antioch.
But because they had supported Nestorius on the issue of Mary, the Pope then labeled them as Nestorians, even though Nestorius wasn't even part of their church. They simply agreed that giving Mary the title" Mother of God" is not the faith handed down by the apostles. They had never used that title, and they could see how it could so easily be misused. Well, unfortunately, Rome prevailed, and because it labeled these people as Nestorians, that label stuck with them thereafter, at least in the West.
Well, it actually worked to the benefit of the Church of the East to be cut off from the Roman and Eastern Orthodox churches. There were detriments to it. They were separated from any monetary help and support since they were living under a pagan government. But for the most part, it worked to their benefit, because Mariolatry never took hold of the Church of the East.
Later on, when both Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox began worshiping and venerating icons and statues, that never went over into the Church of the East. They were totally insulated from that. So it worked to their spiritual benefit, this sequence of events involving the Council of Ephesus.
And even though the Church of the East was definitely a post-Nicene church at this time, in much of its outlook and the way it was organized, it still better preserved the original doctrines of the church than any of the churches in the West, other than the kingdom groups like the Novatianists and the Donatists who lived during this same time period. Well, now jumping back to the West again, just very briefly.
After the Council of Ephesus, we said Nestorius was deposed and excommunicated, and his supporters were severely persecuted, being thrown into prison and all sorts of things like that. So many of them fled eastward out of the Roman Empire, and they settled at the city of Nisibis, which was part of the Persian Empire, but is right in the western edge of the Persian Empire.
So they still weren't too distant from the church there in Antioch, where they had a measure of allegiance, but they were outside of the reach of the bishops of Rome and Alexandria who wanted to persecute them. Now earlier in the year 409, the Persian rulers had signed an edict of toleration, giving freedom of worship to the Christians in the Persian Empire. And so Persia was an ideal sanctuary for the persecuted supporters of Nestorius.
They could flee from the Roman Empire where they were persecuted and live under the authority of the Persian Empire where they were not persecuted. And they were welcomed very warmly by the Christians there in the Far East. In fact, the arrival of these Nestorian supporters, we'll call them from Syria, led to an intellectual and spiritual flowering in the Church of the East. They opened a number of schools, both spiritual, as well as secular, such as schools of medicine.
Now, one of the aspects of the Kingdom of God is that it can't be kept quiet. Jesus had foretold that the good news of the kingdom would be preached throughout the inhabited earth before the end would come. Now the two kingdom groups that we've already spoken of, the Novatianists and Donatists, were somewhat turned inward. They were fighting spiritual battles with the Catholic Church of their day and trying to maintain their own spiritual purity.
And although they did have some witnessing to others, they are not noted for any missionary or evangelical activity. Like I say, they were in a survival mode. Let's keep the church pure mode. But it was different with the Church of the East, the ones who are called Nestorians. They could simply ignore Rome and Constantinople and go on with their spiritual lives. So they didn't waste any time arguing, trying to overturn the decision of Ephesus. They just went on their own way.
And they knew there was a huge world to the east of them that needed to hear the gospel. So now they began sending out missionaries to the Far East. And imagine the incredible faith of these missionaries who they sent out. These were men who went out on foot. All they had was one change of clothing, and their feet were clothed only in sandals. They didn't know the language of some of the places they went to, like India and China, but they had faith that God would open the door for them.
They always carried a basket on their back, sort of an old-time backpack, and in it they carried a few provisions, together with a copy of the scriptures and a simple cross. Armed with these few things, coupled with an indomitable faith, they took the gospel where it had never been heard before. And think for a moment how difficult their task was in comparison to the evangelism of Europe after the time of Constantine.
In Europe, nearly all of the tribes who lived there had heard of Christianity because it was now the official religion of the Roman Empire, and they had all heard of the Roman Empire. It affected their daily life. They all looked to Rome as the center of Western civilization. They weren't people who hated Rome, these Germanic tribes. They were people who wanted to live within the Roman Empire.
And a lot of their invasions later were caused by the fact that they were double-crossed by the Romans or were not allowed to settle within the Empire when they wanted to. But none of them wanted Rome to disappear, because Rome had provided them with an important trade link, which supplied a lot of their livelihood. So then when the Roman Empire began sending out missionaries, these missionaries went to these Germanic tribes, representing a considerably more advanced civilization.
And there were considerable economic, political, and military advantages in Europe for a Germanic king to convert to Catholicism. It meant that he would be linked with Rome and with the more advanced kingdoms, such as what we know today as the Byzantine Empire. The Roman Catholic missionaries also had an easier task because most of them were never too far geographically from their mission home church or monastery.
They could easily communicate back with the church that sent them and obtained provisions and things like that. It was totally different for the Eastern Christians, the ones who have mistakenly been called Nestorians, who took Christianity to the Orient. Some of the kingdoms they went to, like in China, were as advanced or even more advanced than the Kingdom of Persia. So there was no political, no social, no economic benefit that flowed to the converts of these Eastern Christians.
The Western missionaries could say, well, we come in the name of Rome. We represent the Roman government. The missionaries going to China and the Far East, they couldn't say they represented the Persian Empire because they didn't. And they were very distant from their home base in Persia. They couldn't just quickly get supplies, get material support, get more workers from back in Persia. I mean, when they went, they were there often alone. Maybe it would be one or two of them at the most.
And they had to start an indigenous church without very much help from a home base. Yet because of their faith in God and because of this kingdom zeal, let's get the gospel out to the whole world, they were extremely successful and God blessed their efforts. Before long, these missionaries were establishing churches and monasteries throughout China, way up into Mongolia, into Central Asia, which until recently was part of the Soviet Union. They went into Turkestan, Manchuria, as far north and east as Siberia.
Other missionaries went down into Korea, into Southeast Asia, and crossed the ocean over into Japan. And so by the 9th century, after several centuries of this missionary activity, the geographical area that the Church of the East, the church that was called Nestorians there in the West, then the geographical area that was encompassed by the Western Church, what we would know today as both the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox combined.
So what happened to these Eastern Christians, the ones the West called Nestorians? Well, the answer is that God blessed them, just as He promised. He not only blessed them with growth, He also blessed them with persecution. You know, often we're so accustomed to looking at things through human eyes, instead of kingdom eyes, that we forget Jesus' words, where He said," Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven." You see that values of God's kingdom are often upside down to the values of the world and to the values of worldly Christians. Just what Jesus said would be a blessing is exactly what happened to the Christians of the East. They were persecuted by the Chinese government, by the Mongolians, by the Indian government, wherever they went.
The Persian government, they were persecuted. And all kinds of evil was set against them by their fellow Christians in the West, even giving them this false name of Nestorians, refusing to even acknowledge them as Christian brethren. But again, this isn't anything unusual. It's the same pattern that we see all throughout the Scriptures, even in the Old Testament times. Notice this description that is given to us in Hebrews about the people that God favored during the days of the Old Testament.
We read," Women received their dead, raised to life again." Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. Still others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yes, and of chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goat skins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented, of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth.
Hebrews 11:35 through 38. Now if that was the treatment of God's servants in Old Testament times, how much more so would that be true in the New Testament era and beyond with the upside-down values of God's kingdom? At least in the Old Testament times, there was an earthly kingdom where God had authorized the use of the sword and had given a measure of worldly power. But all of that was taken away with the Kingdom of God.
So when we look at these kingdom groups and evidence that God blessed them, we shouldn't be looking for the kind of things that the rest of the world would be looking for, such as power and majesty. In contrast, God's kingdom people are generally destitute, afflicted, tormented, wandering in deserts and mountains, just as the writer of Hebrews describes. So the Church of the East prospered spiritually and was blessed by persecution.
And like so many movements of God throughout history, they were persecuted out of existence in many parts of the world, such as Japan and Southeast Asia. We must remember that in no place in the Far East did Christianity ever become a state religion. And that's good, that's the way it should be. But that's in sharp contrast to the West, particularly Europe, where Christianity from the time of Constantine was always a state religion, wherever it spread. And it always had the power of the sword behind it.
So we're comparing apples and oranges when we compare a kingdom movement with an earthly movement that uses the world's means to establish itself. The Christians in the Orient were always vulnerable to extreme persecution, and extreme persecution did come. For example, in China, under the Ming dynasty in the 9th century, Christians were labeled as a foreign religion and Christianity was outlawed. And so much of the work that had been done in the previous centuries in China was wiped out by this persecution.
Now that doesn't mean that no Christians survived the persecution. It just means that they were driven underground and that they disappeared from the historical records. How long they continued after that? We don't know. There may have been remnants around as late as the 18th century when Western missionaries finally reached China once again. But even after the missions in China were driven underground or destroyed, the eastern missions in Central Asia remained.
When Marco Polo traveled to the Far East in the 13th century, he came in contact with many of these Eastern Christians. They were still around at that late date. But then in the 14th century, a Muslim warrior from Mongolia, named Tamerlane, swept through a vast area from Mongolia down to India and across all the way west to Damascus, massacring whole populations. Now his conquest was not aimed at Christians, but Christian settlements all over the east were entirely obliterated by his conquests.
And the Church of the East never recovered from this horrible onslaught. Now the Church itself did survive all of this, but it was now cut off from its far-flung missions, and eventually most of these missions disappeared from the historical records. But they had lasted for nearly a thousand years. And it was only a few centuries later that God rekindled the mission work to the Far East. But you may be wondering, well, why did God allow this to happen?
If these were kingdom Christians, why didn't their work prevail? Why was it that the state churches, that they're the ones who prevailed? Well, again, this has almost always been God's way of working. Genuine movements of His Spirit typically grow, they blossom, and then they're snuffed out, or they lose their original fire. But God always raises up other people in their place. For example, in the Old Testament, look at the sons of the prophets who are spoken of in Second Kings. What happened to them?
They disappeared. But they were the ones who God was anointing and blessing. What about the 7,000 who refused to bend the knee to Baal that God mentioned to Elijah? They disappeared as well. When Assyria ravished the land of Israel and took all of the people in the Kingdom of Israel, the northern kingdom, captive, the faithful ones were taken along with the others and disappear from the records of history. Perhaps they planted seeds in the far distant places where they were taken. We don't know.
But I can assure you that not a single one of them was ever forgotten by God. And it was the same with all three of the kingdom movements that we've spoken about up to this time, the Novatianists, the Donatists, and the ones falsely labeled as Nestorians. However, unlike the Novatianists and the Donatists, the Church of the East never disappeared. Most of its missions were wiped out, but the Church of the East has continued on to this very day.
The center of this church is still there in the ancient Persian Empire in what is modern day Iraq and Iran. So you can imagine what sort of hardships these Christians experience today. I've been told by some of their members that a month doesn't go by without at least one of them being martyred there in Iraq or Iran. The sad thing is that most Christians in the West don't even know they exist. In fact, the 19th century Protestant missionaries to the Middle East were surprised to run upon these Christians.
They didn't know they existed. None of the history books they had said anything about Christians in the East and Far East. And so many of these missionaries set up schools and hospitals among the Church of the East and did a lot to help them in a physical way and to some degree in a spiritual way. About ten years ago, when I first learned that this church was still in existence, I was quite interested in trying to meet some of their leaders.
I was curious if they still maintained Kingdom Christianity, not just the doctrines of the early Church, but the whole lifestyle, the commitment to Jesus Christ, the desire to spread the gospel of the kingdom throughout the world. Do they still live by the Sermon on the Mount and the other teachings of Jesus? I was real curious to know these things. Because here was a church that had existed now for nearly 2,000 years. It had never been a state church. Its people have never prayed to Mary or the saints.
They've never had statues and icons. And so they had avoided two of the big traps that the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox had fallen into. That is veneration of Mary and the Saints and Veneration of icons and statues. Well, I found out through a long circuitous route that there was a large church of these people in Chicago. It was composed mainly of refugees and immigrants from the Middle East. So I flew out to Chicago to meet with some of the leaders and learn more about them.
In fact, over a period of about six months, I met two of their bishops, several of their presbyters, and I corresponded with one of their presbyters and one of their deacons. What I found is that their doctrines have hardly changed at all from the 4th century. They have kept that quite pure. And being a Semitic people who use Aramaic in their liturgy, whose home language was Aramaic for so many centuries, they bring a very interesting perspective to the Scriptures.
After all, Jesus and most of His apostles were Jews, a Semitic people, and they probably spoke Aramaic as their native tongue. But I also learned at the same time that the Church of the East is in a very fragile state spiritually. They've almost totally lost the missionary zeal that they had had centuries ago. They've lost the commitment to living by the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, today they're more in what I would call a survivor mode. They just want to exist.
They want to grow stronger as a body, but not necessarily spiritually stronger. They want to make connections with the Roman Catholic Church and other established churches who can give them financial and political help. They're not particularly interested in making converts or even having outsiders join them. And yet these people are very loyal to their church, to Christianity. They're quite willing to die for it.
As I mentioned earlier, that several of them told me that their people back in Iraq and Iran are martyred all of the time. Yet there's not much knowledge of the Scriptures among their people, nor a strong spiritual life.
So what I saw was a church that has existed in its framework all of these years, never was wiped out, never changed theologically very much, and yet a church that greatly needs spiritual renewal, because the kingdom of God doesn't exist so much in doctrine as it does in a relationship with Jesus Christ.
And my prayer is that God would bring renewal there and that these people who preserved kingdom Christianity for so many centuries and were so zealous in taking the gospel to the Far East that they could regain the spiritual zeal and love for God and their fellow man that they once had. Before closing, I want to touch briefly on the supposed Nestorian heresy.
If you read older church history books and they don't have to be that old, even ones from the 1980s, will typically talk about this group of what they'll call heretics, the Nestorians, who supposedly believed that Jesus Christ was actually two persons, a human and a divine person, but almost two different beings. Well, I doubt that any scholar today who is at all familiar with the Christians of the Church of the East, with this whole issue, would say that.
Because I think nearly all scholars now, whether Roman Catholic, Church of the East, or Protestant, realized that there was simply a problem in communication. And this was exacerbated by the fact that the parties who were having these discussions spoke three different languages. I don't mean that each of the people could speak three languages. I mean that these people did not speak the same language among themselves. You had the Bishop of Rome who spoke Latin.
You had the Bishop of Alexandria, who spoke Greek, and then you had the Bishop of Antioch and these Christians in the Church of the East who spoke Aramaic, or Syriac, a form of Aramaic. And the issue centered around this Greek word" person" that was being used in the Christological discussions. The problem was that the Church had turned away from its first love for Jesus Christ, a zeal for His kingdom, and had become so entwined in theological discussions that generally went way beyond what the Scriptures reveal.
And in this instance, the issue turned on the Greek word that's usually translated in English as person. Now to begin with, this isn't even a scriptural term. As I said, they were trying to define things more exactly than what the Scriptures define things. And they imagined that the decisions they made were on the level of Scripture. So it didn't bother them that they were going beyond Scripture because they felt like the church could speak just as authoritatively as the Scriptures do.
Well anyway, this word" person" was something that had been created in all of these theological controversies, and it meant different things to different people. The Greek term for person didn't even have an exact equivalent in Syriac. So even though I think now we can look back and realize all of these people believed essentially the same thing, it sounded to each other that they were saying very different things and that they had heretical understandings.
And what helped all of this to cause these deep divisions and accusations is because none of the sides were interested in helping the other one. The bishop of Alexandria wanted to unseat and demote the bishop of Constantinople. He wasn't interested in helping him. He wasn't interested in, boy, let's talk this out in love and understanding and see if, after all, maybe we do all believe the same thing. I mean, the simple truth of it is Nestorius himself was not a Nestorian.
That is, the doctrine that the history books call Nestorian doctrine, that Jesus was two different persons. No Nestorians believe that Jesus was one person, but He had two different natures. And this is what the Christians in the Church of the East had always believed. I think this is what most Christians believed everywhere. But see, the Scriptures just don't define it so carefully, and we get ourselves into trouble when we go beyond the language of Scripture.
Well, most of this has now been cleared up, at least at the high church and scholarly levels. In 1994, a very historic event took place. Pope John Paul II met with the patriarch of the Church of the East, and they cleared up this ages long misunderstanding. In fact, the two of them, they issued a joint statement on the nature of Christ, that He had two natures, both divine and human, combined in one person. Yet the two natures are not commingled. And this is what both sides had always believed.
In short, Nestorianism was a heresy that never existed.