This course is made possible by the Zolekin Institute, a community shaped by Christ's teaching and rooted in Anabaptist principles. Zolekin equips men and women to live out Two Kingdom theology with integrity, service, and love. Their mission is to restore what's broken, rebuild what's lost, and transform lives through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We're honored to share their teaching here on thehistoricfaith.com. To learn more or explore Zolekin programs, visit zolekin.org.
It's amazing we're here, very first day, very first class, and the intensive is a bit intense, so thank you for your patience in that, but that really is giving us a model that we can have where people can come from out of state and that kind of a thing, take the intensive and then study. Are you in that kind of, are you in the intensive and then study back, or are you a resident? Oh, good. Okay, perfect. So it'll give us the chance to do that.
So it is intensive, though, but it also will bring us an ability to bring in even teachers that can do things. Like for next semester, we're going to have the conversational Greek classes, yeah, with Joseph Neil, he'll be coming from Lancaster and giving that. So it kind of gives us an opportunity to bring in teachers like that as well. So welcome to Historical Theology. So we're also going to be recording this also for people for maybe even next semester.
So I'll try to have those online for you once I get them processed, so if you do want to review them or something like that, you can have that. If you're like, "Hey, could you not mention this or the other?" Just let me know. If there's ever something that you're uncomfortable with, I don't mind, or whatever, that's fine too. So let me know if there's any issues with that. All right, so then let's now go into our syllabus and look at that.
And so we'll kind of be on the same, again, same sheet of music and everything. So the idea with historical theology is going to be to engage in theological subjects as they came onto the church. It's not a church history class per se. I have you reading briefly in your church history book, textbook, but the idea is to engage in theological terms and subjects before a thousand years before they became silo points in the church and that kind of a thing.
You know, a thousand years before, 1,500 years before, super many of them. So that's the idea of it. And so I use an acronym, SCAR, Scripture, Church, Antiquity, and Real, and I'll go over that the next two days. Learning objectives, and then let's go down here just for the text. So the reading for this week, granted, I didn't realize that you couldn't engage with the Populi. And so, and I know it's intensive week, so don't be too stressed out about this.
But what we're going to be going over the intensive week is tomorrow will be the St. Vincent of Lérins. And if you see on my PDF that I have, I have a lot of it's truncated. Skip seven chapters, skip this, skip that. And if you can't get to it, we'll go over some of the main points of it tomorrow. Don't sweat it. The intensive week, I know, is very intensive.
But that's going to, he gives us riding around in the year 400 and so this kind of capstone of or definition of what it means to be historical, to be Catholic with a small c, and that kind of a thing. I think it's an excellent thing to kind of start with. We have the selections from Roman Imperial Text. You don't need to read that. I have that as a PDF, and I'll be going over there. The Didache, we will go through the entirety of the Didache here on one of our days here.
First Clement is where your first deep dive into some theological subjects, and that will be, we'll go through most of that as well. And then the textbook is Everett Ferguson. So for our text that I have for you to get, so this church history, definitely try to find it used on Amazon. It will be going through some chapters in this. It's pretty good. Everett Ferguson, Church of Christ in Abilene, old guy, one of the OGs on writing about church history and early church, and a very good scholar.
I think you'll enjoy this. It'll be a good resource for you of just history. So again, it's not really a church history class, but you got to have, you know, some of that to go in there with all that. So the other thing is the volume one of the Ante-Nicenes. Now, I have pretty much given every day this, the PDF that goes with it. I've actually, when I went through it last night, I think, in matter of fact, in every place. So if it's just too not accessible to you or if it's difficult, we can work around it.
But I would encourage you to try to find volume one because the whole point that I want you to get out of this class is not only these subjects that you see in the first century after the apostles, but what's not there. And it's almost more important to know what's not there than there. So I want you to leave this semester, you will have read the first century of Christians after the apostles, everything.
And so when later on people say, "Oh, in the early church, they said this and they taught that," you're like, "I don't remember that." It'll give you a sense of confidence of not only what's said in a very basic way, but also really what's not said. So I encourage you to at least get volume one. They're hard to get these days. Amazon does have a paperback version, but if it's tough, I am going to give you every PDF. And on my PDFs, I have it highlighted different things to pay attention to.
And in every one of the Populi, you'll see I have it pretty much on an audio version. There's a Catholic group that's done each of them. I don't like their introductions, but hey, it gives us a perspective to discuss, actually. But it's nicely done. And every one of the readings, you will have the opportunity to have, most likely, I think, an audio version right there on your Populi account. I personally listen to almost everything on two-time speed.
Matter of fact, when I listen to people live, I'm like, "Wow, I didn't realize they talk so slow." It's like, listen, there are people constantly on two-time speed. WhatsApp, one of the best things that ever happened to me was when WhatsApp added two-time speed on people. I'd be tempted for three times, but then I'd probably get in trouble. But this is good.
They also make this, the Apostolic Fathers, which has most of the readings, but we are doing the Shepherd of Hermas, which is a weird book, but really early and really used by the early church that we should do that. This can be, and it's not in this. Actually, it is in this, but not in this. So, but I have the PDF for that. So those are the texts. I don't know, I'm trying to get this. Nowadays, with your generation, PDFs and electronic media is getting much more everywhere. And so I use an app called Notability.
There's some different ones like that that you can take a PDF and scribble on it. And I use it all the time. And there's different ones that do that. Notability is one I use. It does note-taking. I would say if you're looking for an investment on something, all of these are going to have, you're going to have PDFs from me and for you to be able to highlight, scribble, write. I use that all the time.
Matter of fact, when I'll be lecturing to you, I'm using one of my Notability forms of the same paper I'm giving you with all my scribbling on it. And it just becomes a way to engage in electronic PDFs in a way that we typically lost with losing notebooks. So I encourage that. I'll show you mine once I get the battery charged up and how I use it. I just recommend it. You don't have to, but it's, I use a tablet. I think a lot of you have, but it works on your phone. I even do it, you know, on my phone.
Like I have a moment at work, I'll bring up my Notability and, you know, make scribbles on with my thumb, which are really hard to read. I'm bad enough, hard to read. So that's, oh, and let's get to the most important thing is the grading. All right. What I, my goal is for you, it's not just to, I don't expect you to like, you know, be a patristic scholar by the end of this, but I do want you to engage in the writings, to read them. So you'll see what I have here is, okay, where is that? There it is.
So in class participation, 25% of your grade. So what does that mean? You'll find a quiz on every day where you answer the quiz, "Did I participate in class today?" True or false? All right. And so all you got to do is ask a question or two and say, "Brother Dean, what was that?" So that's engaging. So it's trying to get us alive and talking about it. I don't mind if you think Justin Martyr is a total kook or whatever, you know, like that's ridiculous or whatever, say it. It's not going to offend me at all.
I just want us to engage in the conversation. And we're going to start talking about these theological subjects that later become, you know, big, like literally nations dividing and killing each other over that in the early church is just a simplicity that's not. And so I want you to engage with these theological subjects. So 25% is just class participation. You'll find in Populi under every lesson a lecture that says, "Did I participate in class?" You answer it, yes, no, bam. That's done.
I remember when I did this in Boston, people would say, they'd ask a question and go right there and they did. But it's just fine. I don't mind that. It gets us engaged. The other one is an essay. So this is due like, oh, you'll see it on there towards the end.
You're going to pick a theological subject and you're going to apply the Apostolic Quadrilateral, which I'll show you today and tomorrow on a subject of your choice, a theological subject of your choice and engaging in it and discussing it, and that'll be your paper. One paper, that's it. And then quizzes will be, these are on your readings. I did a lot of those last night.
And one question, and this may be the only question that that has is, "Did you read the?" So I'll tell you this, it hit as at least right now, every one of the readings I did last night, true or false, did you read the readings or listen to it at two-time speed? That's fine. And again, the one thing about the two-time speed, like when we get into Irenaeus, it's long. Justin Martyr is long.
And I have in your PDF, I've made a whole bunch of truncated it and got it down and give you hints of what to pay attention to and that kind of a thing. The whole point is, I just want you to engage in the text. Think about it, talk about it, think like the early church when you go in there. And then finally, the final exam is 25%. So that is it. My AI policy is this. All right. It's a new age. In historical theology, I think AI is incredibly important, but incredibly dangerous. Perfect example.
Getting ready for this class just a month ago, I'm like looking over the text of the Didache, and I was wanting to bring some fresh translations out of the Greek text that are under the Didache, which I did a few months ago and got into the archives of where the actual Greek was for the Didache and got a different translation. So I was traveling, my wife was driving somewhere, and I was doing it. And I said, "Can you give me all the different codexes that have the Didache and the original Greek into it?" So it did.
Popped it to me. I said, "Oh, I didn't know there was." And then, "Oh, no, this was the Clement of Rome. This was Clement of Rome." And then I said, "Can you give me the controversial passage in chapter 44 in each of those Greek?" Popped it out. Bam, bam, bam. In Greek, and then give me a little translation. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. It did it.
I said, "Those are very different." I said, "I never noticed there were different codexes and different." And I thought I'd, you know, found some patristic discovery that I was going to be famous for. The whole thing was a lie. It went on for an hour and a half. And I said, "Wait a minute. That is not in the Codex Alexandrinus. What are you talking about?" Oh, right. Sorry. I could not believe it. I wasted an hour and a half on this thing. And then, of course, my pride thinking that I had discovered something.
But so here's the policy. Here it is. It's a tool, a good tool, and your generation is going to be good. And I think what it has opened up to historical theology is crazy amazing. My son-in-law is actually getting his PhD at Ohio State, and he's looking, he's written, "I'll show you the tool for this." And he's doing this also for language learning to do Bible translation, you know, so you can learn it audibly and then find that. So I think your generation is going to be amazing of the resources.
We were under a tyranny of not having the resources. When I first started studying the early church at David Bercot 30-something years ago, he would teach something. I'd be like, "Yeah, I don't know." And then I would get in the car in Tyler, Texas, drive two and a half hours to the seminary, get the Ante-Nicenes, you know, put it on a Xerox for 10 cents a piece or whatever it costs, and then put it and then come all the way home and read it. And now, you know, it's on our phones. It's on everything.
And so that, and now we can get into the Greek text behind it and everything. All that to say, I do think AI is important, but if you don't check the sources, then I'm going to give it a letter grade off each. So if you give me a lie, and I know this material pretty good, and so I'm probably going to catch the lie, but you can use it, but I want you to make sure it gives you a source. Always ask for its source, and then I want you to go check its source.
Think of AI as a friend who's smart, but sometimes, you know, that friend can kind of make some stuff up. All right. And so you don't go quoting them in an academic paper. So I welcome you to use it, but you better, I want to put a little fear in you of using AI responsibly. Fair enough? So that's good. So that's all it. I think that's it. And I have going through the whole thing, which is also on there. So now let's go to our lessons.
So you'll see here, historical theology, each day out and the way it kind of looks, like we'll go to today, you'll see usually some picture I'll have up front here. And then this little thing, once you see winter, you'll see me always wearing this funny little sweater. So I have this here, is the slides of the day. So every lecture that I give you, we'll most likely always have a slide deck, and that's going to be your picture. You open that up and it's going to answer.
Then there's going to be your test, and let's all go to that now. If you have that, go to your sample test, and then we'll open that up. I want to make sure it's working. Let's take this test together. Start test. Oh, there we go. I read the email that was sent to me. Everyone say true. Match the terms on the left with their proper description. All right. And Michael already talked about this. Brother Michael already talked about this. Ontology.
The study of how we know what we know, the foundational truth or core belief that forms the basis of your argument or perspective, representing what you consider the essential reality of what you're professing, or the theory and methodology of interpretation. Which one do you think it is? Study of what we know, what we know. No. It's the foundational truth. So I ever put foundational truth. Your hermeneutic is... Oh, no, no. No. This is the theory and methodology of interpreting. I'm about to go over these.
So put that. And then your epistemology. This is what Michael, Brother Michael was saying here. This is how you know what you know. All right. So click that. Everyone's going to get 100 on this test. Now, drag into chronological order. So what's first? The Didache was written in the baptism of Jesus. Constantine legalizes Christianity. Moses crosses the Red Sea or the resurrection of Jesus. So you drag that. See how that works? You drag that up. And then let's put that all in order now. So we got that.
See baptism of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus. The Didache was written and Constantine legalizes Christianity. Right? Does that look good? And then this is itself grades this. This is cool. Now, I can like put words in for short answer and it actually comes up. So the document is considered the oldest surviving text of the early church apart from the New Testament is what? Very good. So write it in there. D-I-D-A-C-H-E. D-I-D-A-C-H-E. And then we will submit test and watch it go. And bam, it gives you...
Did it grade it? I guess they would, I guess a green. Is that green? Mine isn't green, so you bounce words on it. Ah, okay, perfect. Okay, perfect. And that's great. So then that's how it works. So you'll get your data back from these tests instantly like that. And it does short answer. It does, even in essays, I can put in certain rubrics that it looks for. It's a pretty impressive software. We've got this to running the whole school. We use Populi in Boston as well. I'm used to it and I actually really like it.
So that's how you take the quizzes. And then class participation quiz. Take the test. Here we go. Start test. Did you participate in class today? You're all doing pretty good. I've seen them out there. So all right, here we go. And remember, that's 25% of your grade. So talking and engaging and that kind of stuff is really, really, really important. So all right. What's going to happen when I'm doing it online? Yes. Okay. What we do for that is we have a chat room and then I will engage with you.
So anyone who can't make it, you're somewhere or people who will be going back to their community, we have a chat room and then I'll engage with you on it. So yeah, asking me a question or anything, yeah, about it will be great. Good question. Good participation there. So all right. So any questions on that? Yes, sir. The question is, are we going to use the calendar feature of Populi? Because I'm looking over here. Oh. Just. Bottom is a calendar to the left here. Okay. Yours is all on like one day. Oh, really? Oh.
Hmm. If I could figure out how to do that, yeah, it'd be cool. And then also like specific like times. Like. Like if I just pop on something, it might, I saw one that was, was that 3 a.m. in the morning or something? So like if somebody relies on calendaring features. Do you have a problem with 3 a.m.? Okay. It would be really cool if we could actually rely on this thing. Okay. If you could help me with your IT chops, I think that would help. Okay. The 3 a.m. might be, I have tests in here that are not published.
So I do have like all of those written tests. Did you read Clement of Rome is not published yet. And so that might be published at 3 a.m. It could be, but that's a good question though. Yeah, help me with that. All right. Great question. Any other questions? Yes, sir. So always asking what it is we'll be doing right after class usually or when any time in class. You should, you could go ahead and ask those before or after, but try to do it by the end of that day. What I usually find is students forget.
And then so even if when you read it, you can, I've already published all the, well, I didn't do the, I didn't do the quiz once to reading. Usually what I have that is available the morning of that day. And so when you can read it, then you can come and look at it. Open, closed, open, closed. Open. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I want you to engage with the text. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, good questions. Great. Is the final exam or whatever that is, is that in class? It's in class. Yeah. If people are here, yeah. Yeah.
Oh, one thing you can't do with AI. Don't do this. You know, because there's no way for us except for your honesty. Click. I mean, you can do that in everything now. Brain surgery. I mean, I do it, my anesthesia stuff, and it's crazy how it comes up with, you know, it's so don't do that. You know, don't go click what's the answer to this because it would give you the right answer, but it might be more right than my answer, but it might be making stuff up. I don't know. But don't do that. That's not allowed.
But everything else. But yeah, good question. Any others on the grading and how that works? And if you, even in the writing, I try to come up with, particularly if you've not been in college level and done writing yet, try to write. I understand I have my own pretty serious dyslexia when it comes to spelling and things like that. And I found ways that I had to walk through all the way up to master's level in anesthesia. But learning tools in the proper way is good for us.
And knowing our weaknesses is good for that. And so I encourage you to try to write and then let it polish. I don't mind letting it polish. I let it polish me. I let it polish my emails and that kind of a thing. But try to engage in the thinking because where AI can hurt your generation is us not thinking. And it can just spit stuff out and it's going to end up doing weird stuff. So yeah. I do have a thing.
I found it so interesting that I've used AI enough to know that it's sort of a unique thing to help you start thinking maybe, but I never let it dictate what I write. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's very helpful. And like if I'm thinking about something, hey, what do you think about this? Yeah. Yeah. It can be a tool to actually get you to start thinking. Maybe if you're like in a little bit foggy or something in the brain. Yeah. Yeah. You're right on. Exactly.
But the initial genius that you have inside of you that's asking the questions is what you want to be able to do. Not say, hey, can you write me a paper on the atonement from the perspective of Justin Martyr and the Third Century? Here, Dean. You know, it can do that. Don't do that, please. I'm asking you not to do that. So any questions? And okay. All right. So then that's it. So here's what we're going to do then. Let's dive in and get, and now we're going to open up the slides. And that's my screen test.
And all right. And then this. And we have the little clicker. Okay. Here it is. Okay. So you know the theological subjects, the Trinity, predestination, the elect of the saints, salvation, soteriology, the atonement, all these subjects become more and more as the centuries go through and become very siloed. To today, when you get people together and they're from Protestant and Catholic and Anabaptist and different ones, they hardly hear each other when they're in those silos.
What were the whole point of why I'm having you focus on first-century Christianity? I want you to get into these theological subjects even before they had titles, even before we had categories and wars over these subjects. And like Brother Michael was saying, get the focus of what early Christianity was about. Why I've ended up and stayed within the Anabaptist circles is this.
What I see in the Christianity that was handed down from the apostles is a very simple, Christ-like following of Christ with a faith in Jesus Christ for our salvation. And so when I see that simplicity, I look at the different categories and I love studying and I love geeking out on it. But at the end of the day, I want us to hold those theological questions respectfully and that kind of a thing. So let's get into it. And now my lecture on historical theology.
So here's the way I'm trying to get you to think deeply about this. So during the time of the Renaissance, anybody wants the Renaissance is that, you know, during the 14, early 14th, 1500s is where people were like rebirthed to the primary sources. They were awakened to literature and sculptures and everything. And one of the themes that I love by Renaissance paintings is they were really intrigued by the ruins in Rome.
And how like the irony that people are like washing their clothes in what was used to be, used to be like a palace, you know, and no one's like noticing. No one's noticing. So here you see it was a big theme in these Renaissance paintings. And you know, here you see they're doing their wash. And actually what they were doing, they were taking these, grinding them down for cement and making the churches that they were building there in the 1500s. And some of the artists were like, please don't.
And it's just, this is a common theme that's, that's, you know, you see in the Renaissance period. And they're trying to tell us something. They're trying to get us to say in our everyday life, we're not realizing that there's better ways to do it. There's better ways to think, you know, except in our ruined. There are all, there's tons of these. This is my favorite, the Pantheon and just, you know, the sheeps and the people walking around it.
This is the, we'll get to this as one of my art pieces that I'll show you. This one here is, you just see this whole thing just filled with all of this, including, look at this one there. And what that means to, for us as we ponder what's come before us. This one's I really like. So you're in this giant cathedral, you're living, you're having sheep. Now a lot of us may say, well, that's probably a better use than what, okay, that's beside the point.
But what they're saying is it suddenly during the Renaissance, people started looking up going, oh, wait a minute, you can build like that. And that's the aha moment I want you to get with historic theology that you're going to see a, although simplicity, maybe, but it's this deliverance from the apostles to the church of a Christ-following way of life that we can see that in our everyday way of doing church is kind of like the comparison.
Here's one, this was actually done in the 1800s, but this is Pope Julius II, the Renaissance Pope. He named himself not after an earlier Julius and the church, but after Julius Caesar. And he was considered the warrior pope who brought a lot of this art to the Vatican. This is Raphael who's seeing one of his paintings there and where they will put it in his chambers. And what they were doing, right when they were discovering all this, they found this fascinating sculpture. And it's called the Laocoön.
Let me give it to you. It's in 1506 and here it is. And the way it's pronounced in two different ways is you'll see it online. The proper way is I tried to look it up for the class is Le Ocaon, but people just say Lacaun. And what it is is they were literally walking around here in Rome after they're already doing this and they already found Nero's had this giant house underneath and then kind of sunken in the orchard here. They just bumped into this and they got all the sculptures of this.
And then they looked into it and Pliny the Elder had talked about that during the Emperor Titus in Rome had this remarkable statue. And what it is, it's from the Aeneid where this priest warned them about the Troy, you know, the Trojan horse thing. Hey, this could be bad. We shouldn't accept it. So the snakes came in and killed him. And that's what the scene is there. But the artists were like, whoa. I mean, we just find this in the ground.
And so Michelangelo, it's recorded, ran there and was like drawing it and couldn't believe it. Finally, Pope Julius, the warrior pope was like, this is crazy. So he brought it in and they brought it into the Vatican and put it in their main courtyard in first centuries. And it's still there today when you go visit the Vatican. When I take you guys to the Vatican, you'll still see this today.
And it became a symbol of that underneath here, under the primary sources, under around, there's these treasures that's deep and helps us to, in our present age, that we're not as smart as we think we are, that there was some kind of a truth that we could maybe get a hold of. And that's kind of the way I'm wanting us not just ideas, certainly not arguments. I really appreciate what Brother Michael was saying earlier on apologetics should have this real component to it.
And you're going to see that coming out in my stress. But there's something breathing and alive and real that we're wanting to tap into by going and looking into primary and early Christianity. I like this quote from Cicero. Cicero was born 106 BC, around the time of Julius Caesar. To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
And Cicero was, of course, with a famous orator. I'll talk with him, I think, on our last day during the intensive. So this idea is what we're getting to. So there's another way, another, so there's that ancient analogy I want to give you, but bringing it a little bit closer to our modern time and what's created modern thinking is what's happened during the American Revolution and the French Revolution. And that is what happened to the French Revolution here.
So, you know, all the nations are going and people have all these ideas. And the French Revolution didn't like the concept of there being churches or groups or there was so much baggage in that. You know, I mean, we have the Catholic Church, it's oppressing us. We have all these guilds and all these things. We need to scrap everything and start with these ideas. And so you end up with an era during the French Revolution that we could have a society based on just ideas.
And that if we put the right connection of ideas together, we can start fresh and divorce ourselves from everything that came before us. And that kind of was an early American and certainly a French Revolution idea that we could do this. But somehow it's always reductionist. It always makes us incomplete and that there's something deeper that we're losing in the silence, in the simplicity. And that even today within our communities, there's ideas and ideas sometimes frustrate us in our churches and in our people.
But there's a living, breathing thing that's there in our community. And one of the things I want us to try to get into early Christianity is not just a bunch of doctrines or, you know, but getting into this unspoken. So here's the chopping off of the head of Louis XIV. Crazy thing. So they did this on January 21st, 1793.
The shock of this in those days, two of the people that were watching this threw themselves in the river and committed suicide just because they couldn't handle the drama of an authority figure being killed. And so it just shows you this was like a mark of a change of way of thinking from the old world into the new world, which we've kind of inherited in our era. So they came and they had their French Revolution after our revolution. Here's one by Henri Lefèvre.
It's a painting that got rid of all religion, all the churches, and then, but then had altars to liberty, altars to, you know, that kind of a thing. And we're going to have, we still need a God to worship, but it'll be our worshiping our own ideas and this kind of a thing. They had the rights of men that we could have a society based upon my right, your right, and our constitution would be close to this. And there's a lot of good in this. And there was a lot of oppression that was happening in this.
But what happens if we end up often when we live by just this thinking that is this idea that you can have a society or even have your own being on just living on ideas with no corporate reality. So, and this was a deep thought, so stay with me here. Fighting against this way of thinking was a guy by the name of Edmund Burke. Now he was in England and he wrote his criticism on the French Revolution. And it's weird because it's sometimes really hard to argue for conservative thinking.
He becomes the father of the conservative mind. Because here's the thing, it's really easy and you can do this in your church, you can do this in your society. I mean, the pastor's doing this wrong, this is wrong, that's wrong, that wrong. What we need is these five things and I and the rest of these four guys are going to go start a church and we're going to do it based on these five things.
And yet there's somehow that tends to over and over and over and over again through the centuries create this crazy reductionism that ends up very dangerous and very weak. And that there's something deep that we miss that. So Edmund Burke was arguing in England. They all thought because he was a Whig, he was a radical, wrote against usually the kings and the establishment. So they thought, Edmund, you're going to be on our side with the French Revolution, right? No, you're missing stuff. You're messing up.
I agree with a lot of the complaints, but this throwing out the church, throwing out the society, throwing out the family, it's wrong. And so he wrote his book, Reflections of the Revolution of the French in 1790. He says, if you do this, you destroy everything and all these thoughts, you're going to end up with just a state with an antichrist leading it. And they did. And they did with Napoleon. And that's exactly what happens. And it happens over and over again.
If the state is the only thing that's unifying us together, an antichrist will lead us. So interesting. This guy here, Russell Kirk, writes on, he wrote a famous book called The Conservative Mind. Maybe we'll look at it next year or something. But he says this profound thing, and I'm going to give it to you here. It's deep. It's on your slides. Ponder it. And why I'm not just trying to get a bunch of little theologies for you to get.
This is what I want you to get is the understanding of this deposit, this apostolic deposit. I want you to understand Christianity as an apostolic deposit, not a bunch of random people's ideas and theological points. And he says this, I think it's profound. Russell Kirk summarizing Edmund Burke in his book on the Conservative Mind. He says this, human beings participate in the accumulated experiences of their innumerable ancestors. Very little is totally forgotten.
Only a small part of this knowledge, however, is formalized in literature and deliberate instruction. Catch that. It's not just what you can put in a creed or a book or a point or a statement of faith even. However, it's formalized in literature and deliberate instruction. The greater part remains embedded in instinct, common custom, prejudice. And he means that in a knowing exactly what to do in a situation, not against somebody, and ancient usage.
Ignore this enormous bulk of cultural knowledge or tinker impudently with it. And man is left awfully afloat in a sea of emotions and ambitions with only the scanty stock of formal learning and the puny resources of individual reason to sustain him. And he goes on. The common man, and think about this in our communities, think about it in our 500-year-old heritage or our 2000-year-old heritage. The common man is not ignorant, but his knowledge is a kind of collective wisdom.
The sum of the slow accretions of a thousand generations. This lost. He is thrown back upon his own private stock of reason with the consequences which attend shipwreck. Even the shrewdest of men are puffed up with vanity if they try to set the product of their reason against the consensus of the centuries. That profound, that was deep stuff. You know, and so when you look at a mountain, what makes you get that feeling? Or when you look, you stand in front of the ocean, that's something bigger than you.
It's not the drops of the water or the rocks. And it's like there's something bigger. And what happens in church history as you go through, and certainly what can happen to us, is we start to reduce everything to something that we think we can be a, put a patch on and be a banner for. And I want you to be able to embrace that big mountain, that ocean, and to understand it in a deep way. And that's what historic theology hopes you to get. So here's the point.
So I have this ancient voice and the young, the each generation trying to silence what comes before them. Not bad, that's an AI picture, not bad, huh? Yeah, I got that. They're usually cheesy, but that one came out pretty good. All right. Here was one thing you're going to hear me say over and over again when it refers to all of our doctrines that we discussed, atonement and Catholicism and apostolic succession and baptism, infant baptism, all these different subjects is this.
If an argument has lasted over 500 years, it's probably not stupid. Where we heard ourself, and Brother Michael was talking about this in your apologetics class, you wanted to kind of belittle the other opponent. Oh, Catholics stupid. Calvins are stupid. Oh, it's just stupid. They don't understand. Probably you're the one stupid. The fact that these arguments have lasted 500 years means they've got some merit in it. And I want you to understand them even as they developed.
And so understand that they have some points. Islam has some points. You know, I don't want to be devastated if any of you choose any of those, but nevertheless, to respect them and to appreciate the arguments in a deeper, respectful way, I think will be very good for you. And that's what I hope you'll get out of studying it from the early time. G.K. Chesterton, anybody read by Ray Chesterton? Oh, good. I have his orthodoxy in your, the audio and this PDF. Excellent book.
His heretics wasn't that great, but his orthodoxy is absolutely need to read. Put it on your reading. He says this about this. Great quote. John D. Martin actually just said, he called me up, he said, Dean, I got this quote. I said, yeah, I already have it. Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. G.K.
Chesterton is very cheeky with all his different things. And that's his whole point. In his book, he says this in his, he gives the whole book as this idea of this boat going into England to try to discover this land. And then suddenly they find all this stuff in London and thinking that they discover something, kind of like me with the AI thing maybe. But then they realize, oh, you just kind of did a circle and came back home. And he says this. He says, I will not call it my philosophy, speaking of the tradition.
I did not make it. God and humanity made it. And it made me. When I fancied that I stood alone, I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original, but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England. I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own.
And when I put my last touches on it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy. And that's his book on orthodoxy. So this is, by the way, if you ever heard the Rich Mullins song, Creed, it has a song in it. I did not make it. It is making me. And it's kind of before your era. But anyway, it's an old song. Anyway, that comes from reading Chesterton. So this idea then is kind of something that I want you to try to get. All right. So what does the scripture say about this?
What about, what does the scripture say about the concept of this deposit in the, that's coming from the early church and everything? We're commanded to guard the good deposit. This is something I really want you to get is this idea of this deposit, this treasure. And you're going to see that this faith that was handed to the apostles determined things that they did in the church. It determined our canon of scripture.
It wasn't that the church was given the authority to make arbitrary choices on what was canon or that we were given a King James Bible with leather or something, but this deposit was given to us, which we can now have confidence in. I'm trying when I give these things to you to give you classic Christianity, not my own little tangents or my own little thought, but you to understand the classic theology in their classic sense. If you disagree with them, you can disagree with them.
It's fine, but you'll at least know what the orthodoxy is. And then from there, we can, you can go on. So we're told that by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you. Jude 1, 3, or the only one, but Jude 3. Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you, exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith, which was once for all delivered to the saints.
This is a concept that underlies a lot of my thinking, that we are to contend for this faith, and it was once for all. That the deposit that was given to the apostles was not something that was supposed to be changed by the church or by theologians or whatever for us today. That the Holy Spirit gave this to the apostles for us and give it to us through the word of God.
Therefore, brethren, it says in 2 Thessalonians 2:15, therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle. It's an interesting passage because it actually commands us to hold on to this word that he was teaching the church and the epistles that he was writing to them. Of course, the only thing we have definitely is the epistles, but there was a deposit that it gives us an idea of the way early Christianity was looking at this.
And then not only the positive things, but the negative things of not doing it this way is pretty severe in scripture. Anathema. And we will pick this up next year in historical theology when we start, no, next semester even. We start to get to the council periods. You start to see this word thrown around real a lot with a bunch of emperors and churches coming together and they anathema to this, anathema to that. Well, the scripture actually gives us an anathema and it gives it to us like this.
I marvel, he says to the church, Paul's writing to the church of Galatians, chapter 1, verse 6 to 12. I marvel that you are turning away so soon from him who called you in the grace of Christ to a different gospel, which is not another. But there are some who trouble you who want to pervert the gospel of Christ. And then he says this, and let this sink deep. But even if we, who's we? Paul. Paul, the apostles.
But even if we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you that we have preached to you, let him be accursed. So churches who claim, well, we have apostolic succession, we can change, we have the place of the apostles, we can make changes in doctrine. Paul's saying, even if I show up and give you something different, or an angel, we have Moroni or the ones coming to Muhammad later, you know, with angels coming with different gospels. This is, let them be accursed. And he repeats it.
As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you, then what you have received, let him be accursed. But I make known to you, brethren, that the gospel which we preach by me is not according to man, for I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ. That's huge. By Christ to him. So even Paul, he's saying, does not have this authority. This is something that's given to us and we must hold to this.
In 1 Timothy 1:3-7, I urged you when I went to Macedonia, remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies which cause disputes, rather than godly edification which is in faith. Now, this is in both the primary topic, of course, with circumcision and the Judaizing and that kind of a thing that he was fighting against and law versus grace and all that, but still the principles are still the same.
We can have endless genealogies of lines of bishops and that kind of a thing. The faith deposit is what we're being commanded to look at. Now, the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith, from which some having strayed have turned to idle talk, desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say nor the things which they affirm. This reality, this life of faith, this life of Christ is what we're supposed to be looking at.
Beware in Colossians 2:8, beware lest anyone cheats you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the traditions of men, according to the basic principles of the world and not according to Christ. When we start looking at different heresies and different groups that are coming, you're going to see that they bring mix a lot of philosophies into this package, into Christianity in a way from what they had.
And I repeat, but even if we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. That needs to just be branded into our hearts about the ancient faith that we have within us. So how do we know what we know? Quick, I'm going to give you just a few little terms and then we'll take a break and then I'll start my hermeneutic. Brother Michael already was talking about epistemology. Here's a few big words that you'll have eventually on a test someday.
So here we go. I don't give, I actually shy away from, but I do want you to engage in theological terms. I kind of, it's like in the medical world, do you really have to have a Latin word for a cold, you know, or something? You know, there's got to have all these things and theologians love this stuff, but all right. The way I use the word ontology, now, ontological usually means like the very essence of all the very essence, the ontology of God, who is God, who is reality.
But ontology basically just means the essence of a fundamental principle. So the foundational truth or core belief that forms the basis of your argument or perspective, representing what you consider the essential reality you are professing. It's your argument. Okay. Epistemology is how you know what you know. And all these slides are, I can go back to. So ontology is your truth. Dean is a nerd. How do I know that? Well, my epistemology, how do you know what you know? I heard that on a website.
You know, what you use to come to your truth is your epistemology. And this is something I really we're going to, we're going to focus on and why we're going to this. A lot of people have opinions about theological arguments and we have these opinions, oops. But getting critical of your own ways of what your epistemology is, how you know what you know, and asking yourself that question, I think is really important. Then finally, hermeneutic. So ontology, epistemology, and your hermeneutic.
Your hermeneutic is just basically what's your interpretive principle? How do you, what do you do? The theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts, your hermeneutic is your approach to interpreting and applying your foundational truth. So I'll give you an example. Ontology. The earth is round, one guy says here. No, the earth is flat. That's their ontology. He has his basic argument, the earth is round.
His ontology, his earth is flat. He says, how do you know? Okay. So their epistemology is, well, look, I see the other one may take science or, you know, spaceships or I don't know. So that's the idea. Another one to bring it more closer to home. Garlic cures cancer. Okay. That's your ontology. Okay. So what's your epistemology? Well, I know that garlic cures cancer because I found a testimony on Facebook. And my grandmother has a friend on Facebook who was 100% cured of her cancer by eating garlic.
Therefore, I know that garlic cures cancer. So what is her epistemology? It was basically her personal testimonies, the people that she knows. What would be another epistemology? I don't know, medical journals, seeing statistics of how people actually survive from cancer treatments. That would be a different epistemology. Both are, oops, both are doing that. So historical theology then, how do I know what a certain scripture really means is what we're asking. How do we know this truth?
And Jesus is God is one of our ontologies. Salvation is by grace through faith. Everyone has free will. These are the kind of questions that people ask over and over again. They're debated even today and that kind of a thing. And so historical theology is one and our belt of epistemology. So there's other things. Exegetical theology you're going to be looking at when Greek, you know, when Joseph Neil comes here, you're going to be studying some Greek.
Biblical theology, Brother Michael is going to be showing you what's the story of the whole Bible. You know, what does it say from the Old Testament to the New Testament? And systematic theology does allow us to look at a particular topic and then dig out all the pieces of it. You know, how does, what's your systematic theology on how does your, if you say this about predestination, well, what does that say about God's nature? And what does God's nature then say about your view of atonement?
And thinking of how those pieces stick together is systematic theology. And we'll play with that a little bit. But historical theology argues it, what did they get from the apostles? So it kind of feeds the other systems and gives you a basis there. My argument is, okay, this is kind of, if you're going to get a drink of water, you wouldn't want to get it here from the sewer outside the municipal water. You wouldn't want to get it here outside the cow pasture.
Here's a little better, but if I'm going to get a drink of water, I'm going to probably look for getting it up towards the source. So I really think, again, they're outside of the scriptures, and I'll mention that in a minute. But nevertheless, if I'm going to get some commentary, something closer to the source is something that means to me. It also gives, as we look through history, an experiment.
So in science, in the medical world, particularly, I think of trained that way, you have pure science and then you have experimental science. So pure science is you get a bunch of guys together and they come up with a formula and they say, okay, this has got to be true. Well, okay, let's test the formula then. And then you go to tests and you're like, that's not true. Or it is true or something.
But, and so look, we have the benefit now of looking through history and say, boy, that theology came in and wow, that happened. You know, is there something we can learn from that? You know, let's say the just war theory. It made a lot of sense. I mean, when we read Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and different ones on the just war theory, like, okay, they're not stupid. They're arguments. But then you see, even in his own day, how it led to the torture and the crusades and the different things that follow it.
Church, the historical theology gives us a way to look at the experiments and how they come out as well like that. It gives us checks and balances. So, you know, when I first, when I first started looking at something to dig deeper into a theological subject, I thought, well, if I just know the Greek, good enough, that's kind of solid it, right? I mean, then I started noticing, well, every denomination has a Greek scholar.
Like Allen's have a Greek scholar, like Alex has a Greek scholar, the Orthodox have a Greek scholar, Jehovah's Witnesses have a Greek scholar. So why are they just not being honest? Or is there something, you know, something different? Everyone's saying this passage clearly means this, like this one. Dr. Green is a professor of theology and a noted Bible scholar. What do you think of that verse? He says it should be removed from the Bible. All right. Or this guy, actually the Greek word for tithe means 25%.
So people play with this, but actually when you look at the manuscripts, and again, in your generation, you're going to be able to see these manuscripts a lot easier. Like that's what our codexes look like. There's no capitals, there's no commas, there's no, you know, and so from this, we are telling our text. And commas make differences. I mean, you know, just, you know, it's like, you know, the context and just how you put things do matter. There's another one. You know, commas save lives.
I got this from an airplane book that I was. So anyway, it's a balance to language exegeticals. It's also just good godly counsel. So you're seeing some of these men and women of the faith walk through this is something. In this statement, think of this. This gets us into trouble. This one got the French Revolution in trouble. This one gets all brilliant people in trouble. And unfortunately, I'm not smart enough, but still I get myself in trouble. But you may be smarter than everyone in the room.
You walk into a room, wherever you are. You may be smarter than everyone in the room, but you're not smarter than everyone in the room. And you're certainly not smarter than everyone in every room. So it's kind of like this wiki intelligence is it allows you to have a humility to realize I can't see the whole picture. That I need my brothers, I need community, I need people around me to help me understand and that it takes that for us to know the faith.
So the hermeneutic for this class, we'll take a break right here and we have about a five minute or so break. And then I will start with mine, the Apostolic quadrilateral on this, which we'll get to. We are excited to partner with you on your journey of learning, faith, and service. Join us at Zolikan Institute, where faith and learning walk hand in hand.