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So trying to find something just to put it in a practical way, well, how do you read the early church? One of the books I love is called Made to Stick, and it's a book that I'll show you later. It's one of my top books that I recommend when you're giving lectures, when you're giving teaching. You'll see me, I typically come up with slogans or acronyms, and it kind of gives you, try to give the students, try to give you something that you can kind of grab a hold of.
And so I was trying to get something that could kind of get us a concept of a rule. You don't have to accept this rule, but you'll be taught this rule of how I look at historical theology to interpret Christian doctrine. And it's this. So I use the scar, the idea I think of Thomas, doubting Thomas, looking at Jesus, and he sees the scar in his hand. And so S-C-A-R, scripture, Christocentric, antiquity, and real. So it goes like this from most absolute to the most fuzzy. And so the first that I have is scripture.
And here's the, this is mine. It doesn't have to be yours, but this is my bedrock one. The Bible is received as the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice. End of story. And I can't tell you, whenever you try to make it your 100, your 150, your 325, after this council, that council, the other council, then all it does is move the canon debates and everything to that century.
Back in the day, I remember back when we were first reading the early church 30 years ago with David Bercot and all that, a lot of us young guys were really like, okay, 150, we could trust everybody to 150. No, then everybody's just arguing about the Didache and the Clement of Rome like they used to, you know, Galatians and Corinthians. Really, the only thing, and the early church themselves claim, one of the things I really want you to pay attention to is what are they relying on for authority?
It is the Word of God. It is the scriptures. That's, you'll see that over and over and over in the early church. They're not arguing for church councils. They're not, they're arguing that a deposit was given to us that we have the confidence into the Word of God, and this is it. So scripture, the Bible, is received as the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice.
I like Justin Martyr, but when he thinks that David's concubines are just an allegory because he couldn't handle the idea of King David having concubines, I said, no, I think you're wrong, Justin. He had concubines. So the scripture is the only one. Okay, Christocentric reading of the scripture. So when you read the Old Testament and the New Testament, the way you'll see early church and what I think is a bedrock of Anabaptist theology is Christocentric.
We read the Old Testament looking at Christ as the interpreter. We read the New Testament as Christ. Christ is the Bible, the Logos of God, that it's about Him. It's about Jesus from the beginning to the end to all through. And all of our scripture is bringing out Christ, and we're going to see that coming out of the patristics in a beautiful way. More on that later. Doctrine and practice should be supported whenever possible by the testimony of the early church, and that's my antiquity.
So since it was a deposit, since we were commanded to hold fast to the traditions, whether by word or by epistle, excuse me, it matters to me what the early church said. I don't agree with everything they said, but it matters. And I'm going to try to have my faith built on a historic faith that I can put my feet on the bedrock and I can say, no, I'm going to stand here. And it's given me a strength through my life when all the different doctrines and people are going off and becoming this and that and the other.
No, just a historic faith. That's what antiquity means to me. And then real. This one's the fuzziest of them all, but I think still very important. It's that thing that Chesterton and Burke was talking about, the. It's living. Doctrine and practice should endeavor to be rooted not only in theory, but in the living witness of faithful communities across time. It's real. It should be real. It should be in a community. It should exist. I have so many coffee table revivals.
We get together and think we have all the, you know, thing, but is it real? And we'll get to that later as I describe each point of that. So the scar is what we have. So I'll start with this and I'll end it tomorrow before our introduction to Saint Vincent. But let's do the ones and then we'll finish. We'll go through the first two and our scar. So again, what are they again? Scripture. What's the C? Christocentric. What's the A? Antiquity. And what's the R? Oh, you guys are great.
So scripture, Christocentric, antiquity, and real. Do I hold them all at the same level? No. They start the most non-movable and they get fluffier because the topics get fluffier. Scripture, bedrock, Christocentric, antiquity, and real. All right, let's go to the Bible. And why we can confidently trust the Word of God. What you tend to say in like Roman Catholic apologists, Greek Orthodox all over the internet is, um, the church gave you the Bible.
And so you need to listen to what the church says about everything else. You didn't have a Bible. And so it's a valid argument. It's not stupid. The truth is, no, both are wrong. The Regula Fide, the rule of faith, the deposit of faith that they had in the early church judges both the scripture and the church. And both were like, this isn't what we got. So when you start reading about the heretics of Marcion, and we'll get to him, who didn't believe the Old Testament with the New Testament, this isn't what we got.
When you get to the different heresies that are coming, this is what we got. But you did not have, okay, let's get together and have a church council, and the church council then is going to dogmatically decide. That's not what they had. They were pointing, and they submitted themselves to what they thought they could definitely prove was apostolic writings or apostolic men who knew the apostles. That's the Word of God.
And you'll see that through all the first century and up to the third century, constantly arguing about this is our source of faith. So what does the Bible say about itself? Again, 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.
Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you are taught, whether by word or by epistle, 2 Thessalonians 2:15. This one in 2 Peter 1:16, for we did not follow cleverly contrived myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Instead, we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. That's the reverence of how we receive the Word of God. And it gives us exhorting this.
Until I come, 1 Timothy 4:13, Paul's telling Timothy, until I come devote yourself to public reading of scripture, to preaching and to teaching. Another one, in Acts 2:42, they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Another one, 2 Peter 1:19.
And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart, knowing this first, that no prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation. For prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. This is from God, the breath of God. And we have the sure word of prophecy.
All scripture, 2 Timothy 3:16, all scripture, and he's referring particularly to the Old Testament. You know, they're arguing for the Old Testament. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. Isaiah 40, the grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of God stands forever.
Romans 15:1, for whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that through the patience and comfort of the scriptures we might have hope. Hebrews 4:12, for the Word of God is living and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit and of joints and marrow and the discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart.
And then 1 Thessalonians 2:13, and we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the Word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the words of men, but as what it really is, the Word of God, which is at work in you believers. So you don't get that kind of vocabulary for anything else in the early church. I want you to have a, I want this study to really grow in your, in your, in your just your awe about what we're giving in the Word of God.
And you'll see them constantly arguing, even all the way up to the Council of Nicaea in 325, when Constantine is setting there, they're debating. They really felt because of Arius, they had to come up with this word, homoousios. We'll get to that word. And but it's not the Bible. How can you require people to be a Christian to have a non-biblical word? And you see them wrangling over that. After that, they don't wrangle so much. But the Word of God has to be our foundation.
Okay, so what are some interesting, cool external evidence about the Word of God? I think this is impressive and I love this. The Bible is the most surviving copies of any ancient document to put its text to the test of variance or for corruption. There are around 24,000 manuscripts from all over the ancient world, some as early as the second century. One of the treasures that we have is the Dead Sea Scroll. And I just love the Isaiah Scroll. Matter of fact, I have this thing online.
I'll try to share it where you can see the Isaiah Scroll and touch on it. It'll give you a literal translation and you can kind of read the Isaiah Scroll straight from the Dead Sea Scrolls. But we found, we've had these treasures and they're powerful. And if you think about it, so in the history world, let's say nobody doubts that Homer lived or Demosthenes or Caesar lived, you know, Thucydides that wrote his histories. But would you compare Thucydides, Tacitus, Homer, to New Testament discoveries?
I mean, it's a crazy comparison. The academic world doesn't doubt any of these guys existed, but they want to be all doubtful that Jesus existed. And we have this kind of a textual, external textual proof to what we have to the Word of God, confidence in what we have in the scriptures, the early church themselves. So when you take their writings, someone said you could almost come up with a New Testament just from their quotes alone. Look at some of these. Justin Martyr has 268 quotes from the gospel.
You're going to be reading him. You know, in Acts, he has 43 from the epistles. And Clement has 1,107 gospel quotes, 44 from the, you know, that many quotes that they're quoting the Bible, the Bible, the Bible, the Bible. And you're going to get that from reading the early church. I think it's powerful. I think it's a testimony. So pay attention to this. The early church does not reason from church councils or even from great teachers. They reason and they argue from the scriptures.
They have councils and they do decide things sometimes. But it's not like that has an authority that usurps the scriptures. It is, they're trying to wrangle out how do we live this practically like the date of Easter was one of the first conflicts. Well, these guys over here, they got it that we do on this date. This is over here on that date. So they came together as one of the first councils they had was to decide on that.
But the idea that they could actually make decisions and truth would be just anathema to them. Prior to the expression. So this is important. So every covenant, Michael Horton says this, and I think it's good. Every covenant has a canon, meaning a rule. And every community is defined by its constitution. As the word suggests, such a document actually constitutes a nation or company. There can be no covenant without a canon or canon without a covenant. In fact, the covenant is the canon and vice versa.
Good five-point Calvinist, Michael Horton, but good statement. The scriptures is our covenant. It is what we live by. It's our rule and what we go for. So what came first, the church or the canon? And neither one of them did. Again, they came from the faith and then that was determined. The faith gave us both the church and the canon. But then what happened while we got the canon, the actual canon that we ended up with was people started to challenge it. The first challenge is this guy, Marcion.
Up in the northern part of Turkey, he was a wealthy ship owner, ship builder, and got real popular and was able to finance a lot of his thinking, came into Rome, started teaching there in Rome. And he was really bent on, ain't no way the God of that Old Testament is the same God as this New Testament. Ain't no way. And we're going to read some of his writings on how he tries to prove it. And so the church then started saying had to defend themselves against him.
Now, later Montanism was sort of like a modern charismatic movement where they said, we're continually reading, receiving revelation. And so Tertullian himself, some think that, or most think, they got into Montanism. To be fair to the Montanists, they never changed doctrine. It usually had a lot of applications. It usually very ascetic, very, I don't know, very conservative, you know, type of rules that they made. But they had the weight on it. It said, this came from the Holy Spirit.
So like let's say, I don't know, you had a church standard that had the backing of, by the way, the Holy Spirit gave us this church standard and you're going to do it or you're against the Holy Spirit. It was that kind of vibe. So the church had to deal between, no, the Old Testament is part of this canon. That is true. And that's all those arguments you read about what was written before our four times was written for our good was kind of those kind of arguments.
And no, we have the sure word of prophecy in the scriptures. And yes, the Holy Spirit can be in a community and give us guidance and does give us guidance. We're not going to put that on the level of scripture. And so the church had to find their way between this. And that was what gave us the church canon and what we have. I have the earliest canon that's closest to us by Athanasius in the extra file on your thing today, which is a good one to read for extra credit or extra.
So new revelation, no, we have a more sure word of prophecy. I'd say you should have Holy Spirit-inspired reading of scripture, but it has to be tethered. It has to be anchored in the sure word of prophecy, which is the word of God. You know, I haven't shot a rifle in a long time, praise the Lord, but I remember back in my M16 days, you know, you have two sights on a rifle, okay? And if you only have one, you could be way off.
Like if you only had that one, you know, you can be lined up and, you know, it could be anywhere, okay? If I have just this, I can still line up, you know, and hit different people. But if you got two, sorry about the target, Caleb, but if you have it lined up, then that's your sure, that's your sure shot. I think the word of God, it should be spirit-inspired. It's alive. It's living. It's supposed to be alive. But it's also locked into what we have as the sure word of prophecy from the word of God.
And I think this is important. The church had to wrestle through that. And we have the prophetic more fully confirmed, but the sure word of prophecy is the King James translation there. Like there, 2 Peter, knowing this first, that no prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but by holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. So here was the candidate of Marcion.
He was the guy who thought, get rid of the Old Testament and get rid of only, he only liked Paul and didn't like some of them. And then he threw out all the rest of them. And so that was one of the big fights. This is the canon of Athanasius, which is in the extra file there on your thing today. And it gives us our books that are closest to us. Esther is a little sus to him, but also puts the Apocrypha in an interesting place.
We'll read that later, but he says this is good to read and received by the church for good instruction, but he put it on a slightly separate level than the rest of canon. He also in that same, he also put the Didache and the Clement of Rome, interestingly enough. So experiencing the real presence in Holy Scripture, we talk a lot about in sacramental theology. And we talk about, we're going to be talking about the communion and how we kind of miss sometimes the spiritual meaning of communion and baptism.
And we're going to be getting into that. The reformers and their sacraments, they actually have one of their sacraments is the reading of the gospel. And it's kind of a cool sacrament. So I took this picture actually in, actually Thieleman Braght, the writer of the Martyrs' Mirror, is buried in this reformed church in Dordrecht. I took this picture because it just really gave me this thought. The reformers have this sacrament that Christ is present in the reading of the gospel. And they're right, right?
I mean, it says that, you know, when the word of God comes, it will not, you know, get returned back to him until it's accomplished what is given. And that kind of gets thrown under, I don't really see it in the early church written like, well, I'm about to show you a quote. But the word of God is powerful and alive. And I think that seeing it more in this sense that I like the way the reformers make this point. I asked the, my doctrinal advisor is a Presbyterian Calvinist.
And when he did a tour of the Gross Münster, which is where Anabaptism started, he was told that in the Gross Münster, so you're looking at the church going this way and the altar is up here. And this is where Felix Manz would have been, you know, from and all that kind of stuff. So he was told on a tour that the altar, when they were under the Catholic Church, was torn down and used to build the pulpit that was to be read, you know.
When I was there, the actual head elder of the Gross Münster was giving us a tour just recently when I was in tour over there. And I asked, I said, is that true? He said, it's a nice story. I doubt it's true. But it's a great story. And it kind of focuses on the reformed concept that the Protestants brought the challenge, the word of God is alive. And that it is a good argument and that it's not a stupid argument.
And we'll see that when we get to the Reformation, that unfortunately the church kind of split with a Catholic Reformation and a Protestant Reformation. And a lot of these subjects got siloed. But the reformers have a great point. It's the word of God is alive. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has this to say about the scriptures. And he says, Christ himself walking through his congregation as the word. Through the word, the world was created. The word became incarnate.
The incarnate word continues to exist for us in the scriptures. Through the Holy Spirit, the incarnate word comes to us from the scripture and in the sermon. It's very reformed theology there. And it is one and the same word. Get that? And it is one and the same word. The word of creation, the word of the incarnation, the word of the Holy Scriptures, the word of the sermon. It is the creating, accepting, and reconciling word of God for whose sake the world exists.
I guess a strong point that I think the Catholic side tends to diminish. Origen puts it this way, right around the year 225. We'll get to Origen next semester. We believe that it is possible in no other way to explain and bring within the reach of human knowledge this higher and diviner logos as a Son of God than by means of those scriptures, which alone were inspired by the Holy Spirit, the gospels and the epistles, and the law and the prophets according to the declaration of Christ himself.
You see the emphasis that he puts on that. With respect to certain matters, the same teaching can be found among the Greeks as in our common scriptures, let's say a certain teaching. However, they do not possess the same power of attracting and disposing the souls of men to follow them. Again, this is about the power of the written word of God. And so I just really want to bring up this idea. So you see the early church, and it's this interesting way commentators later will speak of this.
Greeks think with the eyes. They see their way up to higher realms where the Jewish way is with the ear. This guy, John Lamasson, wrote on his on the Jewish Bible, and he says, there is a considerable truth in the generalization that whereas the Greeks thought with the eye, the Hebrews thought with the ear. They receive the word. So blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it.
Verily I say unto you, he that hears my word and believes is him that sent me, in him that sent me has everlasting life and shall not come into condemnation but is passed from death unto life, John 5:24 and John 8:47. He that is of God hears God's word. So that idea of scripture is just very powerful.
All right, now in my last 20 minutes here, antiquity, which will be the heart of the, but I really like to stress scripture and really give a, because we're going to be talking a lot about antiquity, but why I park so hard on scripture is because I want you to pay attention to how the early church uses scripture and speaks scripture as we go into antiquity. Oh, no Christocentric, we'll go to antiquity tomorrow. Christocentric, good. Scripture is interpreted through the person and teaching of Jesus Christ.
All right. Anybody ever, when you were a kid, of course you did, you took your binoculars and you moved it the other way, right? So, you know, and what that does is, you know, it what makes something that should be large makes it real small, right? This is the way too often we read the Bible. And Christ should be what we're focusing on in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, in the early church. It is Christ. It is him. Our salvation is the person of Jesus Christ.
This passage, if you get the binoculars right on, God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in the past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds, who being the brightness of his glory and the expressed image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become so much better
than the angels, as he has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.
Our focus is on him. It used to be you could maybe compare it in other things. You'll see some of the early church said, even to the Greeks, you had the philosophers to instruct you, but they are bringing you to Christ. They're bringing you, he is the focus, what we bring it on. Hebrews 8:3, in Hebrews 8:13, in that he says a new covenant, he has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.
We have in Christ the fulfillment and the focus of the Bible goes on his teachings on what it looks like. Six times in the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, we have Jesus prefacing with words like, you haven't heard it, it had been said, or you have heard that it had been said in them of old time. Six times. So we know that he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law. And in that fulfillment, he's giving us a way of life, a blueprint for humanity, a blueprint for the church.
And what you're going to get in the Didache, what you're going to get in the Apostolic Fathers, you know what it's going to sound like? You're like, this sounds like Jesus. It's a summary of the Sermon on the Mount. It's a practical teaching. Their faith looked like simple followers of Jesus Christ. It wasn't a salvation by knowing certain theological points. It was Christ within them living out as his body on the earth, living out the teachings of Christ. That's what you're going to get in the early church.
Jesus challenged people in their interpretation. He wanted them to see that he was what it was about. So the New Testament must be read also through the life of the teachings. I look at it like the soundboard. Have you ever run a soundboard at church? It's all true. Whole Bible is true, every verse, but there's one solo, right? There's one solo in the whole story of the Bible. And that solo is Jesus Christ. You'll see Ignatius when we start reading the Ignatius letters.
He says, the archives, meaning the Old Testament, the archives is Jesus. It is him. It is, that's the solo that we're bringing all the other accompaniments to that. So you don't interpret Paul, you don't interpret Jesus through Paul. You interpret Paul through Jesus. And you don't interpret, and you interpret Moses. It all, Jesus is the interpreter. It all comes through him. And we read through a Christocentric way. And you're going to see this in the early church. I like this guy, Robert Friedmann.
It's a good book, a little nerdy, but a good book called Mennonite Piety Through the Centuries. And he has this about Anabaptism, why at the end of the day I end up in Anabaptism was over this point of Christocentric theology. He says, it was the Anabaptist shift in the point of view from which the Holy Scriptures itself was read.
The shift of focus from the doctrine of justification, the doctrine of justification, as it is to be found in the epistles of that of the Apostle Paul, over the doctrine of the kingdom of God, which the gospel itself proclaimed. Certainly, both belong together, keep that in mind. But nevertheless, they are decisive differences which arise as a result of this difference in focus. The question is, is the gospel to be understood through Paul or is Paul to be understood through the gospel? That changes everything.
You know, you have Paul saying things and every word of God is true. We've made that really important to understand. We can't throw Paul out. We can't throw the Old Testament out. But Jesus is what it's all coming to, in which we interpret it through. Paul used this hermeneutic himself. And when he was talking about divorce and remarried, and in Corinthians chapter 7, he made some commentaries that he does tell us he thinks he's inspired by the Holy Spirit on divorce and remarriage.
But he also interestingly spells out where he got it when he got it from Jesus. Example is this. 1 Corinthians 7, now to the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord. So this is actually from Jesus, I'm saying. A wife is not to depart from her husband, but even if she does depart, let her remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband. And a husband is not to divorce his wife. But to the rest, I, not the Lord, say. And he goes on to discussing those who are not married, to the single and such.
And verse 25, he says, I have no commandment from the Lord, yet I give judgment as one whom the Lord in his mercy has made trustworthy, according to my judgment, and I think I also have the Spirit of God. So it's interesting, but just to hear Paul thinking Christocentric is very important. Christ needs to be the everything as the touchstone of our doctrine, faith, practice, and life. Our salvation is not in a theology. Our salvation is not in a creed. Our salvation is the person of Jesus Christ in every way.
So we get our binoculars on the right thing. Consider the words of Jesus in this way. Jesus cannot be removed from his word any more than he can be removed from his attributes. Here's a deep thought. I wrote this down once. Okay, so we get a lot. It may be already, what's his name, Tozer's book, The Attributes of God. It's a great book. And it's really, you know, the thing about an attribute of God, it's not like God tries to be good or tries to be just or tries to be merciful. He is good. He is.
It attributes of God, God is unchangeable. And so these attributes are something that are part of his being, his ontology, his character. Jesus, when he came and gave us the Sermon on the Mount and his teachings, it's not like he does like I do and cram Saturday night for a teaching the next day. It comes from the logos of God. And so the teachings of Jesus need to be a fundamental point for us that we interpret everything else from. And you'll see this in the early church. I like to ask this question.
What if Jesus really meant every word he said? And when I was, my wife and I were soldiers in the army, and I read to Tanya from the Sermon on the Mount, and I said, what do you think of that? You know, and she said, you know, it sounds pretty clear to me. I said, yeah, but we're like in the army. So how do you love your enemies? How do I, how do I, how do I practice these teachings in the kind of theology that I was given? And I had to make the choice that Jesus meant what he said.
We read in the Sermon on the Mount, this fundamental teaching, marriage is permanent. We read that lawsuits are wrong. We read that a radical use of money, which is like challenging, you know, for any of us. We read that in our life, we're supposed to seek first the kingdom of God in our pursuits. We read that we're supposed to love our enemies, not just our neighbors, but our enemies. So that's the core, the Christocentric.
Scripture is the infallible use of faith that would be required from us, and we must read that scripture in a Christocentric way. I have 1 Corinthians 1:30, but of him, you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. The very person of Jesus Christ is our righteousness. The very person of Jesus Christ is our sanctification. And the very person of Jesus Christ is our redemption. Christ is the center of our faith.
He is the image of the invisible God, Colossians 1:15, the firstborn over all creation. For by him, all things were created that are in heaven and that are on the earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, principalities or powers, all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him, all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church, who was the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things, he may have the preeminence.
Wow, what a powerful passage, Colossians 1:15. He is that. 2 Peter, grace and peace, 2 Peter 1:2, grace and peace be multiplied to you. This is what digging into this does. Through the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ, as his divine power has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by glory and virtue, by which he has given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these, through what?
Through the promises, you may be partakers of the divine nature. There's your real presence, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.
And so we have the prophetic and word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light shines in a dark place, and to the day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart, knowing this first that no prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy came by, never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved of the Holy Spirit. So that's the first two. So we'll do the last two tomorrow. So scripture, Christocentric, antiquity, and real, and then that's the end.
So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. So all right, so tomorrow we're going to do the last two, which is the other two, and then we're going to get into our first text, St. Vincent of Lérins, which is a 400-year-old monk, but he wrote this really cool thing that talks about his definition of what it means to be Catholic, which is to believe all things. That was something, a belief that was everywhere, all place in, at all times.
So if you do anything in the text, you'll go tomorrow, you'll see I have the PDF on there. You'll also see the whole, his whole work, and but don't waste your time. I mean, you can, but I have in the PDF, I highlighted moments in high, and if you just even just went through and caught the highlight, we'll go through those tomorrow. He brings up some interesting point. What is Catholic? So it's always in, it's always existed.
Then he even gets into some point, well, what do we do with guys like Origen that got kind of weird at the end of their life? They were brilliant, but they got weird. And he talks about that, and he gives us sort of a Vincent's rule, which I think is very good, and we'll start our whole text by, so it'd be great for you to dialogue it on Vincent's rule if you have time to read that. But I understand it's intensive, so a lot, a lot you're getting fire hosed through all this time. But anyway, thank you very much.
It's been amazing. It's great to start this time with you. So see you tomorrow. 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.