Christianity Post-Constantine

this is your second lecture on the religion of christianity after christianity becomes an officially sanctioned religion of the roman empire under constantine we looked at that on the last lecture with the edict of milan in the year 313 we now have christian leaders being able to talk more openly with one another now that there's no longer persecution about what it is that christians believe and one of the earliest questions that christians are struggling with is the answer to the question who is jesus and there are some people within the church that are claiming that jesus is the first and greatest of all of god's creation sort of a superhuman and then there are others who are making the argument that jesus is actually god himself that jesus is divine and so eventually we come to a very important church council in the year 325 at a place called nicea and at nicaea the church leaders come together to listen to both sides of this debate and it is decided that jesus is one and the same with god that jesus is actually divine and so this position of historical christianity is called nicene orthodoxy it is the official teaching of the church that jesus is divine and the side that lost out on this debate is called the aryan heresy aryan is spelled a-r-i-a-n not aryan as an a-r-y-a-n which of course is the racial qualification of going back to the nazi ideology of of anglo or white superiority and that's not at all what we're saying here this is aryan spelled with an eye and again that's the position that jesus is the first and greatest of all of the creation and again that's declared heresy and nicene orthodoxy wins the day but this debate does continue throughout christian history this teaching that god has become a human in jesus christ is called the incarnation and that along with the trinity are probably the two most important christian doctrines again incarnation putting on flesh so that is the teaching that god became a human in jesus of nazareth now there will be another very important church council that takes place in 381 at a place called constantinople and it we see a very important church leader emerge here he was called by his enemies the black dwarf saint athanasius that you have pictured here i know most of our artwork within the christian religion depicts all of these church leaders as white men certainly not the case northern africa was a thriving area for early christianity and many of the early church leaders were of african descent saint athanasius very important church leader and that he is the one who is going to provide the church with its language for understanding god as one but god also is three persons of course we had as i just mentioned in the year 325 at nicaea the decision that christ is one and the same with god that they are both divine and we eventually have questions being asked over the next several decades about who or what is the holy spirit and it will be at this second great church council constantinople in 381 that we do have an official clarification and articulation of the doctrine of the trinity and this is the greek language that athanasius uses to describe the trinity uh he uses the term homousia which means same substance or same essence rather than homoey usia which means similar substance and so by using this terminology athanasius is saying god the father god the son and god the holy spirit are of the same essence not just a similar essence but the same essence but at the same time athanasius says we must distinguish between the three persons yes they are all divine but we must distinguish between the three and he uses another term for substance or essence that is later translated as person and that is hoopastosis and you can see that is the last word on this slide here and so the nicene orthodoxy the official christian doctrine of who god is is that god is one one shared essence of divinity but at the same time three persons or hupastasis in this case here with athanasius language i cannot overemphasize how important athanasius is to the christian tradition because in addition to providing this language for understanding the trinity athanasius is also the very first person to write a document a letter written on the occasion of easter to list the books that are being used by christians in their worship services and that letter written in the year 367 is the very first time that we have all 27 books of the christian new testament listed with no additional books and no omissions so athanasius letter is the very first time that we see all of those 27 books that will eventually be recognized as the holy scriptures for the christian tradition along with the hebrew bible we won't spend a great deal of time on this slide but i did want you to see a couple of depictions used to describe the trinity within the early church what we have here on the left is a western christian depiction in which we have the father eternally begetting the son and the son of course is eternally being begotten by the father so we have that relationship between the two connecting them and then from the relationship of father and son we have the holy spirit proceeding from the two together there is a distinction to be made for with eastern christianity and that eastern christianity would sort of flip this triangle a bit to where the father would be alone at the top and the son would be proceeding from the father and the holy spirit would be proceeding only from the father and not the son so just that's a distinction between eastern and western christianity what i prefer is the depiction that we have here on the right we see here the latin terms for father and son and holy spirit forming the three corners of the triangle and then we have the distinction being made between the persons as we see that the statement here is the father is not the son the son is not the holy spirit the holy spirit's not the father so don't conflate the three you need to distinguish between the three persons but at the same time you can see the lines going to the center here what all of them share in common is this essence of divinity this essence of being divine so all three are divine but we do distinguish between the three persons and you can tell this is a confusing and difficult doctrine that the church is attempting to articulate as you can see here that we have one head yet three faces as part of the artwork there so the church is struggling to know what words and what concepts to use to describe the trinity again it was athanasius festival letter or easter letter in the year 367 that gives us the 27 books that will comprise the christian new testament so let's talk for just a moment about what the books are that belong to that scripture or the better term to use here is canon canon is a collection of holy books and the term canon literally means to measure up so these are seen as the books that measure up as inspired of course the books of the hebrew bible are recognized as part of the christian bible and these books are referred to as the old testament within the christian religion we have several dozen versions of the jesus story that are called gospels but the church decides that only four of these are inspired and are accepted into the canon as versions of the gospel that measure up and then there is a one volume history of what happens in the early church and that book is called acts or the acts of the apostles and then in our previous lecture we talked about the apostle named paul and paul will travel around and he will help found many early churches and he writes letters to these churches to instruct them on what they should be doing to give them advice and then sometimes he finds out about a church being started that he had nothing to do with and so he writes a letter just to make sure that that church understands who they are and what their purpose is as a church and so these letters from paul comprise about half of the new testament and so that's an enormous part of the books of the canon and then we have some other letters that are written by some other church leaders and they're also included in the canon we'll usually call paul's letters the pauline epistles and then the other letters that are accepted are called the general epistles and then lastly there is an apocalyptic book that looks to the future of what will unfold and scholars disagree quite a bit about whether this last book called revelation is looking about what's going to take place in the immediate future with what's going on in the roman empire with the persecution that had been taking place at the time the book of revelation was authored and of course there are many others that will look at the book of revelation as a sort of blueprint for what will unfold in all of history uh revelation was a heavily debated book by the early church over whether or not it should even be accepted into the canon and throughout church history many church leaders have continued to argue about what purpose or role the book of revelation has in the christian canon but nonetheless the official decision is that it is accepted and it is the very last book of the christian new testament as you look at this slide please don't panic you're not going to be responsible for much of the information on this slide at all for your exam purposes but i do find that a vast majority of my students do come from some sort of christian tradition and i find that there's not much knowledge about what happened in the early church as far as the formation of the doctrines and the beliefs of orthodox christianity so i give this to you mostly as a tool for you to look at in the future if you're curious to know how the early church developed its earliest beliefs here is the part that you're responsible for for testing purposes only the very first two that we've already discussed on an earlier slide that it was nicea in 325 the very first ecumenical church council that said that father and son are of the same substance and then a few decades later in 381 the second church council is when we do have the official statement of the doctrine of the trinity come about okay so for testing purposes i want you to know those two dates and those two councils and then the only other thing i want you to know from this slide is to understand that these are the only seven ecumenical church councils because after the year 787 we see that the east and west the eastern and western forms of christianity continue to grow further and further apart from one another and so there never is a meeting again after the year 787 in which we have all christians no matter what their background may be uh coming together to seek common agreement you certainly will have other councils but they will be counsels of the western roman catholic church or perhaps synods or councils within eastern christianity and then of course by the time we come to the early 16th century we have the protestant reformation and then all sorts of christian denominations splinter out of that and so these are the only seven church councils in history that it all it's all christian leaders coming together to talk about these matters and again all the rest of it is just information if you want to look at look into for your own studies that's why i'm providing it but just be aware seven ecumenical church councils and then know about nicaea in 325 and constantinople in 381 and the rest of it's just all free information for you i'm going to spend some time talking about some of the early church leaders and their significance pictured here is a fellow named jerome he is referred to as saint jerome although his life was hardly a saintly one he was known for having a very fiery temper a very angry man and he would get into bait two debates with people and if he sensed that he was losing the debate which he did not lose very often uh he would lose his temper and simply call the person he was arguing with a two-legged ass and then he would walk away so he had obstinate personality a very bitter person and he struggled mightily with guilt primarily in two areas he thought that it was sinful to love philosophy so i would strongly disagree with him there i love studying philosophy but he felt that you had to either choose religion and faith or choose philosophy you could not study both and he is a very wise man was drawn to attracted to study of the study of philosophy but he felt guilty about that thought that he needed to give it up and then he also had a very strong guilt about sexual temptation he was known for being obsessed with the dancers of rome and no i'm not talking about ballerina i'm talking about what i guess we would call strippers today and so he would go to those sort of establishments and then he would be plagued with guilt afterwards that he had looked lustfully upon those women well finally he found a project to bury himself in to hopefully help overcome these temptations and it turns out that jerome was brilliant with languages and so he learned the hebrew language of of course the hebrew bible and he learned the greek language that the new testament the 27 books of the new testament were written in and the reason that jerome is so important is that he spent many many years translating the hebrew and the greek into the latin language that was being spoken in the western part of the roman empire and what is so significant about that is to this very day the roman catholic church considers jerome's translation which is called the vulgate it's v-u-l-g-a-t-e vulgate from the term vulgar meaning the common language of the people and so jerome's translation of scripture called the vulgate is considered by the roman catholic church to this very day to be the authoritative translation of scripture so any english translation or spanish translation italian translation any translation at all must be faithful to the vulgate within the roman catholic tradition the church father pictured on this side cannot be overemphasized as a matter of fact let me slow down for just a moment here so i can really make the point of how important augustine is to the christian religion if you were to try to make a chart of whose teachings have the most authority within christianity i think it would go something like this of course at the very top any sort of teaching that you have from jesus himself and the gospels would be considered at a level above everything else and so of course jesus his teachings carry more authority than anyone else for the christian religion you move down one notch and i think standing on a second level all by himself would probably be paul in the letters that he writes that are part of the new testament and now you do have some people that will argue with paul on particular points especially sometimes with what his view of women is but we do see paul because the books are in the new testament in the christian bible that paul is on a level by himself i would go down one more level and i would say here is your third most important teacher or your teacher with the most authority and influence within the christian religion and that would be augustine augustine was someone who was a teacher and his mother wanted him to convert to christianity but he just found that he could not do it because he thought the stories were ridiculous when he read stories about god walking around in the garden of eden he thought how how barbaric that you would actually have your god walking on earth god must be so much greater than that or you know god losing his temper and getting involved in in some of the wars that you see there within the hebrew bible and so augustine just thought that view of god was so ancient and barbaric and that he was too sophisticated to believe in such a god eventually his mother did convince him to visit the church because there was a new pastor a new bishop that bishop's name was ambrose and this is the very first time augustine had ever had ever heard a bishop or a teacher of the church interpret those stories symbolically or allegorically in other words augustine thought that christians had to take all of those stories that he thought were barbaric literally and when augustine heard a christian bishop proposing that the stories be understood not literally but symbolically or allegorically in his head augustine began to think well maybe this christian religion this christian faith can make sense for me even though he believed in his head he struggled to actually believe in his heart he also had his temptations primarily sexual that he struggled with he has a very well-known prayer that always makes me chuckle because i think most of us can relate to it he would pray to god grant me chastity and grant me continents but just not yet in other words i know that there are some bad behaviors in my life i need to get rid of but i do so enjoy them so let me not have to get rid of them too soon but eventually one day while augustine is having his struggles and he's reading through one of paul's letters a letter to the church at rome called romans in such frustration with his lack of ability to obey god he tosses the book aside starts walking around the garden and he hears a voice of a child on the other side of the garden wall starts shouting take up and read take up and read and so augustine picks up the book once again and he comes across a verse that says to throw off all the things that are part of you that don't belong to christ and instead put on jesus christ it's not as if he hadn't read that before but for some reason on this particular time of reading it he became convinced that he could be obedient to god not by any strength of his own will but that god could give grace to him and that grace would allow him to be obedient and so augustine we see his theology from this point forward become very important for the church and again not everyone agrees with all of augustine's teachings but he has been very influential especially on roman catholic theology and also protestant theology eastern christians have never really cared for augustine very much one thing he writes about is that the human will is held in bondage that the the human will is completely imprisoned by sinfulness and by the devil and that the only way that the human will can be freed is by grace and so he sees salvation and that freedom of the human will completely as gifts from god augustine also talks about the nature of evil and i want you to take a look at the two words in italics here and let me unpack what he's doing here because you see there's only one letter difference in these two latin terms but they both easily translate into english augustine says rather than believing in evil and evil is something that actually exists that is to grant it too much power but instead evil is what ends up taking place in the vacuum in the empty place where goodness has been eradicated so in other words all of god's creation is intended to be good and then you have humanity a sin and in humanity sinning there is a movement away from the good and only in that movement away does evil actually start to have a presence but to say evil exist in and of itself for augustine that is to make evil uh too powerful too much on the same level as god and so the kind of the picture i would like you to have here imagine in your mind a very still body of water like a pond and you take a pebble and you drop the pebble into the still water and you start to see the ripples move out from that central spot in concentric circles well this is a picture that augustine gives us for what evil is that it's not that it actually exists but it's just like those concentric circles that it's a movement away from the good so where the the pebble dropped into the still water that's the center of existence that's goodness and all evil is is any movement away from that and so here we'll return to our two words that are listed on the slide deprivatio we get our english word deprived from there so deprived means that you're missing something something has been taken from you there's an empty place a void and only when there is this deprivation okay being deprived of something is there then room for deprivatio deprivation wickedness or evil to come into that place so augustine says that the only place that evil can come into is where there is an empty place a void where goodness has been pushed away so deprivation turns into depravation of being depraved okay for the first uh three plus centuries of the christian religion there was no involvement in war as a matter of fact if you were to convert to christianity in the first three centuries and you were in the military you must automatically resign that post and get out of the military as soon as possible because you could not take up arms against another person but for augustine this seems to be impractical to have such a strict commitment to pacifism and so augustine develops what he calls the just war theory and it has three major components first of all if you're ever going to go to war your purpose of going to war has to be just uh it has to be not for your own personal gain so say that there is some other nation or country that has a resource that you want that you would simply go to war to get that resource augustine and say it's not a just purpose okay the just purpose would be that another nation is perhaps threatening your nation and that would create a just purpose okay also uh war can only be engaged by a properly instituted authority so this would be a recognized nation state and for augustine's context of course the roman empire would have been the primarily recognized properly instituted authority whereas some of the barbaric groups that would eventually invade from the north and again i say barbaric tongue-in-cheek who's to say that any of the visigoths or goths or lombards or any other group that invaded from the north was any more barbaric than the roman empire but of course uh history books are always written from the perspective of winners and for a long time the roman empire served as the winners until of course they were defeated in 4 10. but but i digress but according to augustine the roman empire would have been the properly instituted authority and then third and finally the ultimate motive of going to war must be love that you see that eventually after you would conquer the person or the nation that you go to war against that you would have every intention of of helping them get back to a place of restoration and peace rather than trying to completely annihilate them augustine is also our primary teacher of original sin that when you are born according to augustine's theology you are already sinful and this is a biological understanding of sin that not many uh hold to today but the understanding was that sin is actually passed uh through the male sperm and through the male sperm and sexual intercourse and so therefore every person is a sperm and egg coming together and so the sperm automatically makes you sinful with of course the exception of jesus of nazareth with the virgin birth because no sperm was involved there and so augustine writes the name every person is born sinful and this is why baptism as an infant is so important uh within the traditions that follow augustine because the baptism is what washes that original sin away and then two of augustine's most controversial teachings that are still debated today and some people adopt these teachings of augustine within the christian religion and others outrightly reject them but augustine taught about predestination and irresistible grace that god decides the very moment a person is conceived whether that person will be damned to hell or will be saved into heaven and if you are predestined to be saved into heaven then when god's grace comes to you you will find that grace to be irresistible and so augustine has such a view has a view of humanity as being so flawed and so broken that humanity is absolutely damned and there's sinfulness to go to hell but it is by god's grace that those who are elected those who are predestined will be brought into that kingdom of heaven and we will see these teachings uh resurface again with a very important teacher during the protestant reformation named john calvin by the time we get into the sixth century we start start to see the office of the papacy the bishop over all other bishops really rise to prominence in the in the catholic church now of course according to roman catholic tradition which is the largest of all christian traditions the world's population right now is approximately 7 billion people and 1.1 billion people claim a roman catholic identity uh making it the largest tradition and within that tradition the belief is that peter the disciple of jesus was the very first pope and then there is a list of succeeding popes coming after that looking historically because of you know persecution and the difficulties that christi the christian religion had in its first three centuries there really wasn't a prominently recognized pope even though the the list of succession there would have been a pope not one who is prominently recognized but once we have christian christianity becoming this officially sanctioned religion we do start to see the papas the popes of the church rising to more and more prominence and influence and power now leo the first is considered the very first pope in the modern sense of the word and that persecution is now finally over and everyone in the roman empire recognizes that leo as bishop of rome is bishop over all other bishops but the pope that had the greatest influence on the teachings of the church and exercised great power comes a couple of generations after leo and that's gregory the great and gregory the great was someone who was an enormous advocate of the teachings of augustine's theology and he found within augustine's writings some speculation that he turned into official doctrines of the catholic church and remain official doctrines and teachings that are very important to the catholic tradition to this very day these two are not listed on the slide so please get them down in your notes number one augustine had alluded to the possibility that when a christian person dies he or she may still have some sin that has not been cleansed away and so there would be a place of purgation a place of cleansing that the person would dwell in or reside in until here she was ready for heaven and this place is called purgatory okay purgatory as a place where one is cleansed of what sinful residue might remain upon him or her and then afterwards would be exalted into heaven so purgatory as a place of cleansing was one teaching of gregory the great and the second major teaching i want you to know about is the official system of penance and this goes to the sacrament of confession within the roman catholic tradition that when you go to the priest to confess what your sins are after the confession the priest will then assign you penance that there are particular rituals or duties or more often than anything else prayers like our fathers or hail mary's that you would recite and that practice is your penance in which you pay you show your sorrow for your sin and then after you have performed the penance the priest can then make the sign of the cross over you absolving you of your sin so that three-fold process of confession penance and absolution is a practice within the church that this great pope gregory the great brings into the teachings of western christianity well if we have the rise of the papacy in the early medieval period by the time we get to the middle portion of the medieval period we see a great decline in the papacy and we have some corrupt practices that are taking place within the office of the papacy two of the primary corrupt practices are called nepotism and simony nepotism is when you grant a very high position of authority with a lot of wealth tied to it in the church to someone simply because they are a family member okay so nepotism is keeping the power and wealth within the family whether or not a person is qualified for a particular post and simony is the buying and selling of church positions so let's say that you have the bishopric the office of bishop open in the african town of hippo well that would have been a prominent bishopric and rather than saying if a person is qualified to serve in that position as bishop you would simply grant the position to the highest bidder and as pope you could put that out there that you know whoever puts the highest bid out for that bishopric that's the person who will get that office the time period in which we see the papacy at its most corrupt comes at the end of the 10th century and early into the 11th century and it's tied to a particular italian family called the morozians and so often times this time of the papacy's called the morosian papacy at one point we have a 15 year old boy within the family who is named pope a bishop over all bishops we had uh one uh pope in a sexual relationship with one of the wealthy families in italy and we have a child born out of wedlock of course from that relationship but eventually the pope is murdered and the child that was born out of wedlock becomes now the new pope and so there's there's a lot of corruption that's happening in this time of the morozian papacy well to the north and what would eventually be known as is germany the nation state of germany hasn't officially been established at this point we have a leader named henry iii and henry iii was a devout uh christian and he wanted to see the papacy uh returned to the pristine condition that it had earlier under pope's like gregory the great and so henry iii finds a mock that is named bruno of tool that it is mired greatly for his piety and his devotion and he and his uh two of his closest friends they all come into rome together uh wearing their very humble monastic robes and walking barefoot and this is seen as the beginning of the reformation of the papacy unfortunately leo ix his life was shortened by making a decision to go out and fight against the norsemen who were threatening to invade rome and he was captured and made him very sick and it brought his life to an end much sooner than if he had probably stayed out of that conflict and so therefore his reformation was not as long lived as i'm sure henry iii had hoped it would have been and perhaps uh the mistake made by leo ix and i'm really not sure and historians really aren't sure how much you blame leo the ninth for this or how much it was his friend cardinal humbert to blame for this but leo ix did send papal documents with his friend cardinal humbert to constantinople which was the primary city for eastern christianity and the head of the church in the east was referred to as the patriarch and the patriarch was a man named michael cerullarius and cardinal humbert went forward with the papal documents and he excommunicated michael cerullarius and all eastern christians from the roman catholic church primarily because he said they were preparing their bread incorrectly for communion and also because in the east there was a word that many of the priests were marrying being allowed to marry and have a family life and we had within the west eventually developed that's not always been the case but eventually what developed during the medieval time was celibacy for those who were priests and so here we have cardinal humbert of western christianity roman catholic christianity excommunicating the eastern church and this is our very first official division within the christian religion this event takes place on july 16th in the year 1054 and from this point forward when we talk about chris the christian religion we have to say the christian religions because there is western roman catholic christianity and then there is the eastern orthodox tradition also as we move into the 11th and 12th century still in the medieval period we see what is one of the the most violent chapters in the history of the christian religion and it was initially an attempt for western and eastern christians to try to reunite against what was perceived as a common enemy we've had now further east than where eastern christianity is out in the arabian peninsula the development of the religion known as islam and islam has now been around for about six centuries and has continued to grow rapidly and has also begun to expand to the west as muslims begin moving to the west they of course come in contact with jewish persons and also eastern christians and for the most part because of economic economically pragmatic reasons it's a relatively peaceful takeover as muslims migrate to the west yes there are certainly some violent episodes when they come across great opposition but there are such strong economic struggles in some areas just to the west of the arabian peninsula and then into the area that we call turkey today that we see that some of the eastern christians and muslims live together quite peacefully but when word makes it all the way to the west about some of the more violent episodes and certainly that muslim people have taken the cities of jerusalem and antioch which were considered so historically important important to christianity uh the western christians decide that they must push back that they must now go on these crusades to fight against uh the muslims and to take back those holy cities uh the pope before the very first crusade pope urban ii ended his very fiery sermon uh demanding that the muslims be defeated by shouting over and over again in latin deus volt deus volt deus volt which means god wills it god wills it god wills it so uh certainly the tenor of the day was to view muslims as the enemy and they must be put down by whatever means necessary now you'll have some historians talk about several different crusades sometimes as many as eight crusades but really i prefer to look at the entire time period of the very late 11th and all the way through the 12th and a little bit into the 13th century as the period of the crusades realizing that sometimes there were peaks in the violence and sometimes there were valleys in the violence where things would sort of ebb and flow here sadly and tragically the very first crusade was a children's crusade while the official military was getting organized a fellow named peter the hermit just rounded up a lot of kids and use the argument that because these are christian kids god will protect them nothing bad will happen and of course as they began their migration to the east to fight against the muslims many of them were kidnapped many of them died of exposure and it was nothing but a ragtag maw by the time they even got to constantinople oh we did have some more militarily successful crusades that followed we did at one point during the crusades we see the christian crusaders with very violent means taking the cities of antioch and jerusalem back one historian writes we didn't do anything especially harsh to their children or women such as raping them we simply speared them right through and then the take back of jerusalem i think this is very much probably an exaggeration but another historian writes that there was so much bloodshed at jerusalem that it reached up to solomon's porch which was a part of what had been the temple for judaism and that port would stand about four to five feet tall so that that is probably an exaggeration but nonetheless a great deal of bloodshed during these crusades and it was also accompanied by an apocalyptic spirit whenever there is a great deal of violence and tragedy and upheaval people have tended toward the belief that the end is near that judgment day is approaching and so the book of revelation became very popular during the time of the crusades because people did think that the end of the creation was imminent eventually muslim armies became very strong in the east and pushed back and took back the cities of jerusalem and antioch and eventually even took the area of turkey or asia minor with the ottoman empire which was a muslim empire and of course muslims were also very successful in migrating through north africa and even crossing into spain at one particular point during the medieval period we also see the rise of many new monastic orders within the christian religion the example i'd like to give you here is the franciscan order pictured here is saint francis saint francis came from a very wealthy family but in listening to sermons that were based upon jesus sermon on the mount that demands that christians live a very simple lifestyle he decided he wanted to give up all of his wealth and he developed a monastic order that was based upon the practice of mendicancy and mindicocy is simply another word for begging and so here is someone who would devote his life to poverty and those who would follow francis must also devote their life to poverty and they would beg others to provide them with food or whatever else they needed and they were hoping to show others a very simple example of what it was to live the christian life and they would continue to spread the teachings of jesus but rather than doing so behind the pulpit or an altar at a church the franciscans are some of our very earliest examples of street preachers francis felt that to try to have a particular title or honor like a bishop or archbishop and have some sort of official church position where you stood behind a pulpit that that could make you arrogant that that would puff you up uh with with arrogance and so he said instead we will be simple people who live out here in the streets because again we're moving from a more agrarian society to a more urban city-centered society and so franciscans do very well in the development of these emerging cities we see not only is he very reluctant to allow his followers to have possessions but francis was also someone who frowned upon education that education could become some sort of mental possession and that could make you arrogant also on one occasion it said that one of the monks who followed francis when he was begging had been given a golden coin well they're supposed to beg for food if they were given money immediately it should be used to buy food to provide for uh who whoever the the monks were living with and community but anyway this monk was given a golden coin and he's sort of bragging to two other monks that he's got this golden coin he's holding on to it and francis sort of walks up behind him you've ever been in one of those situations where the other two can see francis coming and they're probably trying with their eyes really wide to warn him shut up shut up you know here comes francis and you know he's not going to allow you to have that gold coin but unfortunately they're too late in their warnings if they tried to give him any warning at all and francis makes this young monk place the gold coin between his teeth and he marches him out into a pasture and he finds a fresh cow patty and has the monk get down on his hands and knees and bury that gold coin into the cow patty so that's what francis thought of having possessions now even though francis thought education could puff one up and make one arrogant or prideful we do see that in the generations that follow after francis education is actually stressed quite a bit along with the virtue of humility viewing education as a gift that one can receive in order to pass that education along to others and so franciscans are known today within the roman catholic church as some of the finest scholars that the world has to offer as we come to the close of the medieval period we have two really important teachers to discuss that will demonstrate for you two very different ways that christians are thinking about faith by the time we come to the end of the medieval period these two different ways of thinking about faith go all the way back to two greek philosophers i imagine most of you if not all of you have heard these names before one greek philosopher was named plato and the other was his student named aristotle and we're going to first look at the theologian the church teacher here who followed plato's way of thinking and his name is anselm and psalm of canterbury and he thought of faith is something that was very introspective in other words whenever you want to try to learn more about faith and understand your faith more you turn inward to the realm of ideas that you try to you know logically work things out within your mind of what what one idea follows another and you sort of connect the dots in that way so again the primary thing you need to hear there is that your way of understanding faith more and anselm very much follows what augustine did here is that you turn inward okay to the realm of ideas to try to make logical connections and in doing this anselm and one of his works called the proslogion presented what he considered a proof for the existence of god and his proof for the existence of god is called the ontological argument um ontological the ontological argument turns inward to the realm of ideas and so it's this is almost what you can see yourself doing here as you're closing your eyes and you're gonna use your imagination and you try to think of the most amazing being that you could possibly think of and then you think of one that could be even greater than that and one that could be even greater than that and one that could be even greater than that and anselm says that because our mind has the capacity to continue to imagine one greater being after another that therefore we can imagine god as being that being of which no greater can be thought no greater being could possibly be conceivable and so what you see there is anselm turning inward to the realm of ideas and imagining a great being and finally coming to the end of his train of thought and and seeing that god is that being that's so great you couldn't imagine a being that could be greater than that and that is called the ontological argument for the existence of god we also see anselm writing another very important book called cordeos homo which is translated as wine did god become human and here we have anselm trying to answer the question why did the incarnation take place why did god decide to become a human and anselm answers this with what is called the satisfaction theory of atonement that god has been offended by human sinfulness and so you have to satisfy god okay if you offended god by your sinfulness then you have to find some way to satisfy god so that god will no longer be offended well here's the problem only god is actually great enough to pay for sin according to anselm okay only god is god is the only being that is great enough to pay for sin to overcome sin but god doesn't owe the cost god's not the one who sinned so according to anselm it's human beings are the only ones who should pay the price but because they're sinners they cannot pay the price and so that brings us to the conundrum that here we have one group that should be paying the price but they're unable to and then we have one being god who is able to but he's not obliged to and so what you have in the incarnation is god and humanity coming together jesus as both fully god and fully human according to christian teaching and therefore we now have one who is both able to pay for sin and by taking humanity unto himself is obliged to pay for sin not because he himself has sinned but because he voluntarily chooses to identify with sinful humanity even though he is not sinful okay so you can tell how and sounds one of these that turns inward to the realm of ideas to try to work out what he considers these logical connections let's return for just a moment to the idea that i presented to you earlier in this lecture that who's had the most influence on what christians believe today and of course we said the teachings of jesus would be at the top level and then because paul's writings are included in the new testament he's on the second level and then we had augustine it's very important at number three um aquinas thomas aquinas would probably be number four on our list as he comes to the very end of the medieval period and his teachings to this very day are considered the very best theology within the catholic church as a matter of fact there was an enormous church council that took place over 18 years from 1545 to 1563 if memory serves me correctly called the council of trent and the council of trent was a catholic council in response to what had happened with the protestant reformation and the council of trent made the official declaration that thomas aquinas theology is the official theology of the catholic church and because 1.1 billion people are catholics aquinas has had enormous influence but he's different from anselm who we looked at on the previous slide and that rather than using a platonic type of philosophy where you turn inward to the realm of ideas we have thomas aquinas turning outward using an aristotelian way of thinking so rather than turning into your mind for ideas for you could make some sort of subjective mistake aquinas would argue we look outward to the world and we use our senses to perceive objectively what is taking place and it will be in nature it will be in creation as we use our senses like sight and hearing that we start to take into our hearts who god is and what god is like his primary work is the summa theologica and he sees that you can use the capacity of human reason to take you so far okay just like anselm was using reason to take him all the way to truth but we have aquinas saying reason can take you only to a certain point and then after that we have to rely on faith so aquinas has a little bit of a different understanding of the relationship between faith and reason than folks like augustine anselm had and as he turns outward to try to understand who god is and what god is like we see him presenting what we call and please get this in your notes because it's not on the slide in contrast to anselm's ontological proof of the existence of god thomas aquinas presents what we call the cosmological proof for the existence of god that you turn out to the cosmos you turn out to the world and your experiences that you witness in the world will show you that god exists and with this aquinas presents what are called the five ways he presents five arguments that belong to this cosmological proof of the existence of god and you have to remember he does not have the advantages of modern science so i realize some of these may make you chuckle some some of them may sound ridiculous to you but for the medieval mindset these were quite relevant uh one of his first arguments we're gonna i'm gonna give you the five ways now okay number one is movement okay number one is movement and so aquinas could look up in the sky and he could see the sun moving he thought or the moon moving and he would say well if that is moving there must be someone who's doing the moving you see how he's using his senses there his sight sees that something is moving and therefore if something is moving there must be a mover and therefore that mover must be god and then a second of the five ways is we have uh the argument of existence aquinas would say just the very fact that i exist the very fact that i right now i'm looking out of my window in my office and i see a tree and i see a lot of wheat growing out in the field and just by the very fact that those things exist means that someone or something must have created those things and so therefore we would have uh existence the fact that things exist as proof of god's existence and then of the five ways the one i find most intriguing is the is the third one and this is the argument made on quality that we perceive some things as being more beautiful or better than other things when i'm done doing this lecture i'm going to go grocery shopping and i always get apples when i go to the grocery store and so if i pick up one apple and it's perfectly shiny and red and round and i pick up another apple and it's sort of lopsided and has a couple of deep bruises on it which one am i going to get of course i'm going to get the round shiny apple because i perceive it as being better and aquinas says the fact that we have this somehow wired within us to judge one thing is better than another or to see one thing or person as more beautiful than another person because we have that sort of judging distinction within us and artists would call this aesthetics what is more aesthetically pleasing and because we have that perception of quality aquinas says well someone must have put that perception of quality within us and that would be another proof for god according to aquinas uh number four is intelligent design aquinas says you if you look out at the creation and you see the way things work that there are seasons that happen so that in the in the way the weather and climate that we have so that crops can grow and that you can harvest the crops and then yet another cycle continues of planting again and just by looking at the way the creation functions and works and sustains itself we have aquinas making the argument that there must have been a god a being who designed the creation to function so well and of course that that god would be an intelligent being so intelligent design and then we will conclude with uh contingency or dependency and aquinas here used the picture of an infant nursing at his or her mother's breast and that the infant is contingent upon or dependent upon his or her mother for survival and because we see there a picture of an infant dependent upon a mother then aquinas makes the argument that there is also a being that we're contingent upon of being that we're dependent upon and that would be god and so what we see here is aquinas saying see that's that's as far as reason can take you reason by observing nature by observing these things can show you that there is a god that exists but then you have to go into faith and the teachings of jesus to understand even more about that god so reason can take you so far but then after you get to the stopping point with reason then you must go even further with faith all right that concludes this one should be another lecture up hopefully within about four or five days

this is your second lecture on the religion of christianity after christianity becomes an officially sanctioned religion of the roman empire under constantine we looked at that on the last lecture with the edict of milan in the year 313 we now have christian leaders being able to talk more openly with one another now that there&#39;s no longer persecution about what it is that christians believe and one of the earliest questions that christians are struggling with is the answer to the question who is jesus and there are some people within the church that are claiming that jesus is the first and greatest of all of god&#39;s creation sort of a superhuman and then there are others who are making the argument that jesus is actually god himself that jesus is divine and so eventually we come to a very important church council in the year 325 at a place called nicea and at nicaea the church leaders come together to listen to both sides of this debate and it is decided that jesus is one and the same with god that jesus is actually divine and so this position of historical christianity is called nicene orthodoxy it is the official teaching of the church that jesus is divine and the side that lost out on this debate is called the aryan heresy aryan is spelled a-r-i-a-n not aryan as an a-r-y-a-n which of course is the racial qualification of going back to the nazi ideology of of anglo or white superiority and that&#39;s not at all what we&#39;re saying here this is aryan spelled with an eye and again that&#39;s the position that jesus is the first and greatest of all of the creation and again that&#39;s declared heresy and nicene orthodoxy wins the day but this debate does continue throughout christian history this teaching that god has become a human in jesus christ is called the incarnation and that along with the trinity are probably the two most important christian doctrines again incarnation putting on flesh so that is the teaching that god became a human in jesus of nazareth now there will be another very important church council that takes place in 381 at a place called constantinople and it we see a very important church leader emerge here he was called by his enemies the black dwarf saint athanasius that you have pictured here i know most of our artwork within the christian religion depicts all of these church leaders as white men certainly not the case northern africa was a thriving area for early christianity and many of the early church leaders were of african descent saint athanasius very important church leader and that he is the one who is going to provide the church with its language for understanding god as one but god also is three persons of course we had as i just mentioned in the year 325 at nicaea the decision that christ is one and the same with god that they are both divine and we eventually have questions being asked over the next several decades about who or what is the holy spirit and it will be at this second great church council constantinople in 381 that we do have an official clarification and articulation of the doctrine of the trinity and this is the greek language that athanasius uses to describe the trinity uh he uses the term homousia which means same substance or same essence rather than homoey usia which means similar substance and so by using this terminology athanasius is saying god the father god the son and god the holy spirit are of the same essence not just a similar essence but the same essence but at the same time athanasius says we must distinguish between the three persons yes they are all divine but we must distinguish between the three and he uses another term for substance or essence that is later translated as person and that is hoopastosis and you can see that is the last word on this slide here and so the nicene orthodoxy the official christian doctrine of who god is is that god is one one shared essence of divinity but at the same time three persons or hupastasis in this case here with athanasius language i cannot overemphasize how important athanasius is to the christian tradition because in addition to providing this language for understanding the trinity athanasius is also the very first person to write a document a letter written on the occasion of easter to list the books that are being used by christians in their worship services and that letter written in the year 367 is the very first time that we have all 27 books of the christian new testament listed with no additional books and no omissions so athanasius letter is the very first time that we see all of those 27 books that will eventually be recognized as the holy scriptures for the christian tradition along with the hebrew bible we won&#39;t spend a great deal of time on this slide but i did want you to see a couple of depictions used to describe the trinity within the early church what we have here on the left is a western christian depiction in which we have the father eternally begetting the son and the son of course is eternally being begotten by the father so we have that relationship between the two connecting them and then from the relationship of father and son we have the holy spirit proceeding from the two together there is a distinction to be made for with eastern christianity and that eastern christianity would sort of flip this triangle a bit to where the father would be alone at the top and the son would be proceeding from the father and the holy spirit would be proceeding only from the father and not the son so just that&#39;s a distinction between eastern and western christianity what i prefer is the depiction that we have here on the right we see here the latin terms for father and son and holy spirit forming the three corners of the triangle and then we have the distinction being made between the persons as we see that the statement here is the father is not the son the son is not the holy spirit the holy spirit&#39;s not the father so don&#39;t conflate the three you need to distinguish between the three persons but at the same time you can see the lines going to the center here what all of them share in common is this essence of divinity this essence of being divine so all three are divine but we do distinguish between the three persons and you can tell this is a confusing and difficult doctrine that the church is attempting to articulate as you can see here that we have one head yet three faces as part of the artwork there so the church is struggling to know what words and what concepts to use to describe the trinity again it was athanasius festival letter or easter letter in the year 367 that gives us the 27 books that will comprise the christian new testament so let&#39;s talk for just a moment about what the books are that belong to that scripture or the better term to use here is canon canon is a collection of holy books and the term canon literally means to measure up so these are seen as the books that measure up as inspired of course the books of the hebrew bible are recognized as part of the christian bible and these books are referred to as the old testament within the christian religion we have several dozen versions of the jesus story that are called gospels but the church decides that only four of these are inspired and are accepted into the canon as versions of the gospel that measure up and then there is a one volume history of what happens in the early church and that book is called acts or the acts of the apostles and then in our previous lecture we talked about the apostle named paul and paul will travel around and he will help found many early churches and he writes letters to these churches to instruct them on what they should be doing to give them advice and then sometimes he finds out about a church being started that he had nothing to do with and so he writes a letter just to make sure that that church understands who they are and what their purpose is as a church and so these letters from paul comprise about half of the new testament and so that&#39;s an enormous part of the books of the canon and then we have some other letters that are written by some other church leaders and they&#39;re also included in the canon we&#39;ll usually call paul&#39;s letters the pauline epistles and then the other letters that are accepted are called the general epistles and then lastly there is an apocalyptic book that looks to the future of what will unfold and scholars disagree quite a bit about whether this last book called revelation is looking about what&#39;s going to take place in the immediate future with what&#39;s going on in the roman empire with the persecution that had been taking place at the time the book of revelation was authored and of course there are many others that will look at the book of revelation as a sort of blueprint for what will unfold in all of history uh revelation was a heavily debated book by the early church over whether or not it should even be accepted into the canon and throughout church history many church leaders have continued to argue about what purpose or role the book of revelation has in the christian canon but nonetheless the official decision is that it is accepted and it is the very last book of the christian new testament as you look at this slide please don&#39;t panic you&#39;re not going to be responsible for much of the information on this slide at all for your exam purposes but i do find that a vast majority of my students do come from some sort of christian tradition and i find that there&#39;s not much knowledge about what happened in the early church as far as the formation of the doctrines and the beliefs of orthodox christianity so i give this to you mostly as a tool for you to look at in the future if you&#39;re curious to know how the early church developed its earliest beliefs here is the part that you&#39;re responsible for for testing purposes only the very first two that we&#39;ve already discussed on an earlier slide that it was nicea in 325 the very first ecumenical church council that said that father and son are of the same substance and then a few decades later in 381 the second church council is when we do have the official statement of the doctrine of the trinity come about okay so for testing purposes i want you to know those two dates and those two councils and then the only other thing i want you to know from this slide is to understand that these are the only seven ecumenical church councils because after the year 787 we see that the east and west the eastern and western forms of christianity continue to grow further and further apart from one another and so there never is a meeting again after the year 787 in which we have all christians no matter what their background may be uh coming together to seek common agreement you certainly will have other councils but they will be counsels of the western roman catholic church or perhaps synods or councils within eastern christianity and then of course by the time we come to the early 16th century we have the protestant reformation and then all sorts of christian denominations splinter out of that and so these are the only seven church councils in history that it all it&#39;s all christian leaders coming together to talk about these matters and again all the rest of it is just information if you want to look at look into for your own studies that&#39;s why i&#39;m providing it but just be aware seven ecumenical church councils and then know about nicaea in 325 and constantinople in 381 and the rest of it&#39;s just all free information for you i&#39;m going to spend some time talking about some of the early church leaders and their significance pictured here is a fellow named jerome he is referred to as saint jerome although his life was hardly a saintly one he was known for having a very fiery temper a very angry man and he would get into bait two debates with people and if he sensed that he was losing the debate which he did not lose very often uh he would lose his temper and simply call the person he was arguing with a two-legged ass and then he would walk away so he had obstinate personality a very bitter person and he struggled mightily with guilt primarily in two areas he thought that it was sinful to love philosophy so i would strongly disagree with him there i love studying philosophy but he felt that you had to either choose religion and faith or choose philosophy you could not study both and he is a very wise man was drawn to attracted to study of the study of philosophy but he felt guilty about that thought that he needed to give it up and then he also had a very strong guilt about sexual temptation he was known for being obsessed with the dancers of rome and no i&#39;m not talking about ballerina i&#39;m talking about what i guess we would call strippers today and so he would go to those sort of establishments and then he would be plagued with guilt afterwards that he had looked lustfully upon those women well finally he found a project to bury himself in to hopefully help overcome these temptations and it turns out that jerome was brilliant with languages and so he learned the hebrew language of of course the hebrew bible and he learned the greek language that the new testament the 27 books of the new testament were written in and the reason that jerome is so important is that he spent many many years translating the hebrew and the greek into the latin language that was being spoken in the western part of the roman empire and what is so significant about that is to this very day the roman catholic church considers jerome&#39;s translation which is called the vulgate it&#39;s v-u-l-g-a-t-e vulgate from the term vulgar meaning the common language of the people and so jerome&#39;s translation of scripture called the vulgate is considered by the roman catholic church to this very day to be the authoritative translation of scripture so any english translation or spanish translation italian translation any translation at all must be faithful to the vulgate within the roman catholic tradition the church father pictured on this side cannot be overemphasized as a matter of fact let me slow down for just a moment here so i can really make the point of how important augustine is to the christian religion if you were to try to make a chart of whose teachings have the most authority within christianity i think it would go something like this of course at the very top any sort of teaching that you have from jesus himself and the gospels would be considered at a level above everything else and so of course jesus his teachings carry more authority than anyone else for the christian religion you move down one notch and i think standing on a second level all by himself would probably be paul in the letters that he writes that are part of the new testament and now you do have some people that will argue with paul on particular points especially sometimes with what his view of women is but we do see paul because the books are in the new testament in the christian bible that paul is on a level by himself i would go down one more level and i would say here is your third most important teacher or your teacher with the most authority and influence within the christian religion and that would be augustine augustine was someone who was a teacher and his mother wanted him to convert to christianity but he just found that he could not do it because he thought the stories were ridiculous when he read stories about god walking around in the garden of eden he thought how how barbaric that you would actually have your god walking on earth god must be so much greater than that or you know god losing his temper and getting involved in in some of the wars that you see there within the hebrew bible and so augustine just thought that view of god was so ancient and barbaric and that he was too sophisticated to believe in such a god eventually his mother did convince him to visit the church because there was a new pastor a new bishop that bishop&#39;s name was ambrose and this is the very first time augustine had ever had ever heard a bishop or a teacher of the church interpret those stories symbolically or allegorically in other words augustine thought that christians had to take all of those stories that he thought were barbaric literally and when augustine heard a christian bishop proposing that the stories be understood not literally but symbolically or allegorically in his head augustine began to think well maybe this christian religion this christian faith can make sense for me even though he believed in his head he struggled to actually believe in his heart he also had his temptations primarily sexual that he struggled with he has a very well-known prayer that always makes me chuckle because i think most of us can relate to it he would pray to god grant me chastity and grant me continents but just not yet in other words i know that there are some bad behaviors in my life i need to get rid of but i do so enjoy them so let me not have to get rid of them too soon but eventually one day while augustine is having his struggles and he&#39;s reading through one of paul&#39;s letters a letter to the church at rome called romans in such frustration with his lack of ability to obey god he tosses the book aside starts walking around the garden and he hears a voice of a child on the other side of the garden wall starts shouting take up and read take up and read and so augustine picks up the book once again and he comes across a verse that says to throw off all the things that are part of you that don&#39;t belong to christ and instead put on jesus christ it&#39;s not as if he hadn&#39;t read that before but for some reason on this particular time of reading it he became convinced that he could be obedient to god not by any strength of his own will but that god could give grace to him and that grace would allow him to be obedient and so augustine we see his theology from this point forward become very important for the church and again not everyone agrees with all of augustine&#39;s teachings but he has been very influential especially on roman catholic theology and also protestant theology eastern christians have never really cared for augustine very much one thing he writes about is that the human will is held in bondage that the the human will is completely imprisoned by sinfulness and by the devil and that the only way that the human will can be freed is by grace and so he sees salvation and that freedom of the human will completely as gifts from god augustine also talks about the nature of evil and i want you to take a look at the two words in italics here and let me unpack what he&#39;s doing here because you see there&#39;s only one letter difference in these two latin terms but they both easily translate into english augustine says rather than believing in evil and evil is something that actually exists that is to grant it too much power but instead evil is what ends up taking place in the vacuum in the empty place where goodness has been eradicated so in other words all of god&#39;s creation is intended to be good and then you have humanity a sin and in humanity sinning there is a movement away from the good and only in that movement away does evil actually start to have a presence but to say evil exist in and of itself for augustine that is to make evil uh too powerful too much on the same level as god and so the kind of the picture i would like you to have here imagine in your mind a very still body of water like a pond and you take a pebble and you drop the pebble into the still water and you start to see the ripples move out from that central spot in concentric circles well this is a picture that augustine gives us for what evil is that it&#39;s not that it actually exists but it&#39;s just like those concentric circles that it&#39;s a movement away from the good so where the the pebble dropped into the still water that&#39;s the center of existence that&#39;s goodness and all evil is is any movement away from that and so here we&#39;ll return to our two words that are listed on the slide deprivatio we get our english word deprived from there so deprived means that you&#39;re missing something something has been taken from you there&#39;s an empty place a void and only when there is this deprivation okay being deprived of something is there then room for deprivatio deprivation wickedness or evil to come into that place so augustine says that the only place that evil can come into is where there is an empty place a void where goodness has been pushed away so deprivation turns into depravation of being depraved okay for the first uh three plus centuries of the christian religion there was no involvement in war as a matter of fact if you were to convert to christianity in the first three centuries and you were in the military you must automatically resign that post and get out of the military as soon as possible because you could not take up arms against another person but for augustine this seems to be impractical to have such a strict commitment to pacifism and so augustine develops what he calls the just war theory and it has three major components first of all if you&#39;re ever going to go to war your purpose of going to war has to be just uh it has to be not for your own personal gain so say that there is some other nation or country that has a resource that you want that you would simply go to war to get that resource augustine and say it&#39;s not a just purpose okay the just purpose would be that another nation is perhaps threatening your nation and that would create a just purpose okay also uh war can only be engaged by a properly instituted authority so this would be a recognized nation state and for augustine&#39;s context of course the roman empire would have been the primarily recognized properly instituted authority whereas some of the barbaric groups that would eventually invade from the north and again i say barbaric tongue-in-cheek who&#39;s to say that any of the visigoths or goths or lombards or any other group that invaded from the north was any more barbaric than the roman empire but of course uh history books are always written from the perspective of winners and for a long time the roman empire served as the winners until of course they were defeated in 4 10. but but i digress but according to augustine the roman empire would have been the properly instituted authority and then third and finally the ultimate motive of going to war must be love that you see that eventually after you would conquer the person or the nation that you go to war against that you would have every intention of of helping them get back to a place of restoration and peace rather than trying to completely annihilate them augustine is also our primary teacher of original sin that when you are born according to augustine&#39;s theology you are already sinful and this is a biological understanding of sin that not many uh hold to today but the understanding was that sin is actually passed uh through the male sperm and through the male sperm and sexual intercourse and so therefore every person is a sperm and egg coming together and so the sperm automatically makes you sinful with of course the exception of jesus of nazareth with the virgin birth because no sperm was involved there and so augustine writes the name every person is born sinful and this is why baptism as an infant is so important uh within the traditions that follow augustine because the baptism is what washes that original sin away and then two of augustine&#39;s most controversial teachings that are still debated today and some people adopt these teachings of augustine within the christian religion and others outrightly reject them but augustine taught about predestination and irresistible grace that god decides the very moment a person is conceived whether that person will be damned to hell or will be saved into heaven and if you are predestined to be saved into heaven then when god&#39;s grace comes to you you will find that grace to be irresistible and so augustine has such a view has a view of humanity as being so flawed and so broken that humanity is absolutely damned and there&#39;s sinfulness to go to hell but it is by god&#39;s grace that those who are elected those who are predestined will be brought into that kingdom of heaven and we will see these teachings uh resurface again with a very important teacher during the protestant reformation named john calvin by the time we get into the sixth century we start start to see the office of the papacy the bishop over all other bishops really rise to prominence in the in the catholic church now of course according to roman catholic tradition which is the largest of all christian traditions the world&#39;s population right now is approximately 7 billion people and 1.1 billion people claim a roman catholic identity uh making it the largest tradition and within that tradition the belief is that peter the disciple of jesus was the very first pope and then there is a list of succeeding popes coming after that looking historically because of you know persecution and the difficulties that christi the christian religion had in its first three centuries there really wasn&#39;t a prominently recognized pope even though the the list of succession there would have been a pope not one who is prominently recognized but once we have christian christianity becoming this officially sanctioned religion we do start to see the papas the popes of the church rising to more and more prominence and influence and power now leo the first is considered the very first pope in the modern sense of the word and that persecution is now finally over and everyone in the roman empire recognizes that leo as bishop of rome is bishop over all other bishops but the pope that had the greatest influence on the teachings of the church and exercised great power comes a couple of generations after leo and that&#39;s gregory the great and gregory the great was someone who was an enormous advocate of the teachings of augustine&#39;s theology and he found within augustine&#39;s writings some speculation that he turned into official doctrines of the catholic church and remain official doctrines and teachings that are very important to the catholic tradition to this very day these two are not listed on the slide so please get them down in your notes number one augustine had alluded to the possibility that when a christian person dies he or she may still have some sin that has not been cleansed away and so there would be a place of purgation a place of cleansing that the person would dwell in or reside in until here she was ready for heaven and this place is called purgatory okay purgatory as a place where one is cleansed of what sinful residue might remain upon him or her and then afterwards would be exalted into heaven so purgatory as a place of cleansing was one teaching of gregory the great and the second major teaching i want you to know about is the official system of penance and this goes to the sacrament of confession within the roman catholic tradition that when you go to the priest to confess what your sins are after the confession the priest will then assign you penance that there are particular rituals or duties or more often than anything else prayers like our fathers or hail mary&#39;s that you would recite and that practice is your penance in which you pay you show your sorrow for your sin and then after you have performed the penance the priest can then make the sign of the cross over you absolving you of your sin so that three-fold process of confession penance and absolution is a practice within the church that this great pope gregory the great brings into the teachings of western christianity well if we have the rise of the papacy in the early medieval period by the time we get to the middle portion of the medieval period we see a great decline in the papacy and we have some corrupt practices that are taking place within the office of the papacy two of the primary corrupt practices are called nepotism and simony nepotism is when you grant a very high position of authority with a lot of wealth tied to it in the church to someone simply because they are a family member okay so nepotism is keeping the power and wealth within the family whether or not a person is qualified for a particular post and simony is the buying and selling of church positions so let&#39;s say that you have the bishopric the office of bishop open in the african town of hippo well that would have been a prominent bishopric and rather than saying if a person is qualified to serve in that position as bishop you would simply grant the position to the highest bidder and as pope you could put that out there that you know whoever puts the highest bid out for that bishopric that&#39;s the person who will get that office the time period in which we see the papacy at its most corrupt comes at the end of the 10th century and early into the 11th century and it&#39;s tied to a particular italian family called the morozians and so often times this time of the papacy&#39;s called the morosian papacy at one point we have a 15 year old boy within the family who is named pope a bishop over all bishops we had uh one uh pope in a sexual relationship with one of the wealthy families in italy and we have a child born out of wedlock of course from that relationship but eventually the pope is murdered and the child that was born out of wedlock becomes now the new pope and so there&#39;s there&#39;s a lot of corruption that&#39;s happening in this time of the morozian papacy well to the north and what would eventually be known as is germany the nation state of germany hasn&#39;t officially been established at this point we have a leader named henry iii and henry iii was a devout uh christian and he wanted to see the papacy uh returned to the pristine condition that it had earlier under pope&#39;s like gregory the great and so henry iii finds a mock that is named bruno of tool that it is mired greatly for his piety and his devotion and he and his uh two of his closest friends they all come into rome together uh wearing their very humble monastic robes and walking barefoot and this is seen as the beginning of the reformation of the papacy unfortunately leo ix his life was shortened by making a decision to go out and fight against the norsemen who were threatening to invade rome and he was captured and made him very sick and it brought his life to an end much sooner than if he had probably stayed out of that conflict and so therefore his reformation was not as long lived as i&#39;m sure henry iii had hoped it would have been and perhaps uh the mistake made by leo ix and i&#39;m really not sure and historians really aren&#39;t sure how much you blame leo the ninth for this or how much it was his friend cardinal humbert to blame for this but leo ix did send papal documents with his friend cardinal humbert to constantinople which was the primary city for eastern christianity and the head of the church in the east was referred to as the patriarch and the patriarch was a man named michael cerullarius and cardinal humbert went forward with the papal documents and he excommunicated michael cerullarius and all eastern christians from the roman catholic church primarily because he said they were preparing their bread incorrectly for communion and also because in the east there was a word that many of the priests were marrying being allowed to marry and have a family life and we had within the west eventually developed that&#39;s not always been the case but eventually what developed during the medieval time was celibacy for those who were priests and so here we have cardinal humbert of western christianity roman catholic christianity excommunicating the eastern church and this is our very first official division within the christian religion this event takes place on july 16th in the year 1054 and from this point forward when we talk about chris the christian religion we have to say the christian religions because there is western roman catholic christianity and then there is the eastern orthodox tradition also as we move into the 11th and 12th century still in the medieval period we see what is one of the the most violent chapters in the history of the christian religion and it was initially an attempt for western and eastern christians to try to reunite against what was perceived as a common enemy we&#39;ve had now further east than where eastern christianity is out in the arabian peninsula the development of the religion known as islam and islam has now been around for about six centuries and has continued to grow rapidly and has also begun to expand to the west as muslims begin moving to the west they of course come in contact with jewish persons and also eastern christians and for the most part because of economic economically pragmatic reasons it&#39;s a relatively peaceful takeover as muslims migrate to the west yes there are certainly some violent episodes when they come across great opposition but there are such strong economic struggles in some areas just to the west of the arabian peninsula and then into the area that we call turkey today that we see that some of the eastern christians and muslims live together quite peacefully but when word makes it all the way to the west about some of the more violent episodes and certainly that muslim people have taken the cities of jerusalem and antioch which were considered so historically important important to christianity uh the western christians decide that they must push back that they must now go on these crusades to fight against uh the muslims and to take back those holy cities uh the pope before the very first crusade pope urban ii ended his very fiery sermon uh demanding that the muslims be defeated by shouting over and over again in latin deus volt deus volt deus volt which means god wills it god wills it god wills it so uh certainly the tenor of the day was to view muslims as the enemy and they must be put down by whatever means necessary now you&#39;ll have some historians talk about several different crusades sometimes as many as eight crusades but really i prefer to look at the entire time period of the very late 11th and all the way through the 12th and a little bit into the 13th century as the period of the crusades realizing that sometimes there were peaks in the violence and sometimes there were valleys in the violence where things would sort of ebb and flow here sadly and tragically the very first crusade was a children&#39;s crusade while the official military was getting organized a fellow named peter the hermit just rounded up a lot of kids and use the argument that because these are christian kids god will protect them nothing bad will happen and of course as they began their migration to the east to fight against the muslims many of them were kidnapped many of them died of exposure and it was nothing but a ragtag maw by the time they even got to constantinople oh we did have some more militarily successful crusades that followed we did at one point during the crusades we see the christian crusaders with very violent means taking the cities of antioch and jerusalem back one historian writes we didn&#39;t do anything especially harsh to their children or women such as raping them we simply speared them right through and then the take back of jerusalem i think this is very much probably an exaggeration but another historian writes that there was so much bloodshed at jerusalem that it reached up to solomon&#39;s porch which was a part of what had been the temple for judaism and that port would stand about four to five feet tall so that that is probably an exaggeration but nonetheless a great deal of bloodshed during these crusades and it was also accompanied by an apocalyptic spirit whenever there is a great deal of violence and tragedy and upheaval people have tended toward the belief that the end is near that judgment day is approaching and so the book of revelation became very popular during the time of the crusades because people did think that the end of the creation was imminent eventually muslim armies became very strong in the east and pushed back and took back the cities of jerusalem and antioch and eventually even took the area of turkey or asia minor with the ottoman empire which was a muslim empire and of course muslims were also very successful in migrating through north africa and even crossing into spain at one particular point during the medieval period we also see the rise of many new monastic orders within the christian religion the example i&#39;d like to give you here is the franciscan order pictured here is saint francis saint francis came from a very wealthy family but in listening to sermons that were based upon jesus sermon on the mount that demands that christians live a very simple lifestyle he decided he wanted to give up all of his wealth and he developed a monastic order that was based upon the practice of mendicancy and mindicocy is simply another word for begging and so here is someone who would devote his life to poverty and those who would follow francis must also devote their life to poverty and they would beg others to provide them with food or whatever else they needed and they were hoping to show others a very simple example of what it was to live the christian life and they would continue to spread the teachings of jesus but rather than doing so behind the pulpit or an altar at a church the franciscans are some of our very earliest examples of street preachers francis felt that to try to have a particular title or honor like a bishop or archbishop and have some sort of official church position where you stood behind a pulpit that that could make you arrogant that that would puff you up uh with with arrogance and so he said instead we will be simple people who live out here in the streets because again we&#39;re moving from a more agrarian society to a more urban city-centered society and so franciscans do very well in the development of these emerging cities we see not only is he very reluctant to allow his followers to have possessions but francis was also someone who frowned upon education that education could become some sort of mental possession and that could make you arrogant also on one occasion it said that one of the monks who followed francis when he was begging had been given a golden coin well they&#39;re supposed to beg for food if they were given money immediately it should be used to buy food to provide for uh who whoever the the monks were living with and community but anyway this monk was given a golden coin and he&#39;s sort of bragging to two other monks that he&#39;s got this golden coin he&#39;s holding on to it and francis sort of walks up behind him you&#39;ve ever been in one of those situations where the other two can see francis coming and they&#39;re probably trying with their eyes really wide to warn him shut up shut up you know here comes francis and you know he&#39;s not going to allow you to have that gold coin but unfortunately they&#39;re too late in their warnings if they tried to give him any warning at all and francis makes this young monk place the gold coin between his teeth and he marches him out into a pasture and he finds a fresh cow patty and has the monk get down on his hands and knees and bury that gold coin into the cow patty so that&#39;s what francis thought of having possessions now even though francis thought education could puff one up and make one arrogant or prideful we do see that in the generations that follow after francis education is actually stressed quite a bit along with the virtue of humility viewing education as a gift that one can receive in order to pass that education along to others and so franciscans are known today within the roman catholic church as some of the finest scholars that the world has to offer as we come to the close of the medieval period we have two really important teachers to discuss that will demonstrate for you two very different ways that christians are thinking about faith by the time we come to the end of the medieval period these two different ways of thinking about faith go all the way back to two greek philosophers i imagine most of you if not all of you have heard these names before one greek philosopher was named plato and the other was his student named aristotle and we&#39;re going to first look at the theologian the church teacher here who followed plato&#39;s way of thinking and his name is anselm and psalm of canterbury and he thought of faith is something that was very introspective in other words whenever you want to try to learn more about faith and understand your faith more you turn inward to the realm of ideas that you try to you know logically work things out within your mind of what what one idea follows another and you sort of connect the dots in that way so again the primary thing you need to hear there is that your way of understanding faith more and anselm very much follows what augustine did here is that you turn inward okay to the realm of ideas to try to make logical connections and in doing this anselm and one of his works called the proslogion presented what he considered a proof for the existence of god and his proof for the existence of god is called the ontological argument um ontological the ontological argument turns inward to the realm of ideas and so it&#39;s this is almost what you can see yourself doing here as you&#39;re closing your eyes and you&#39;re gonna use your imagination and you try to think of the most amazing being that you could possibly think of and then you think of one that could be even greater than that and one that could be even greater than that and one that could be even greater than that and anselm says that because our mind has the capacity to continue to imagine one greater being after another that therefore we can imagine god as being that being of which no greater can be thought no greater being could possibly be conceivable and so what you see there is anselm turning inward to the realm of ideas and imagining a great being and finally coming to the end of his train of thought and and seeing that god is that being that&#39;s so great you couldn&#39;t imagine a being that could be greater than that and that is called the ontological argument for the existence of god we also see anselm writing another very important book called cordeos homo which is translated as wine did god become human and here we have anselm trying to answer the question why did the incarnation take place why did god decide to become a human and anselm answers this with what is called the satisfaction theory of atonement that god has been offended by human sinfulness and so you have to satisfy god okay if you offended god by your sinfulness then you have to find some way to satisfy god so that god will no longer be offended well here&#39;s the problem only god is actually great enough to pay for sin according to anselm okay only god is god is the only being that is great enough to pay for sin to overcome sin but god doesn&#39;t owe the cost god&#39;s not the one who sinned so according to anselm it&#39;s human beings are the only ones who should pay the price but because they&#39;re sinners they cannot pay the price and so that brings us to the conundrum that here we have one group that should be paying the price but they&#39;re unable to and then we have one being god who is able to but he&#39;s not obliged to and so what you have in the incarnation is god and humanity coming together jesus as both fully god and fully human according to christian teaching and therefore we now have one who is both able to pay for sin and by taking humanity unto himself is obliged to pay for sin not because he himself has sinned but because he voluntarily chooses to identify with sinful humanity even though he is not sinful okay so you can tell how and sounds one of these that turns inward to the realm of ideas to try to work out what he considers these logical connections let&#39;s return for just a moment to the idea that i presented to you earlier in this lecture that who&#39;s had the most influence on what christians believe today and of course we said the teachings of jesus would be at the top level and then because paul&#39;s writings are included in the new testament he&#39;s on the second level and then we had augustine it&#39;s very important at number three um aquinas thomas aquinas would probably be number four on our list as he comes to the very end of the medieval period and his teachings to this very day are considered the very best theology within the catholic church as a matter of fact there was an enormous church council that took place over 18 years from 1545 to 1563 if memory serves me correctly called the council of trent and the council of trent was a catholic council in response to what had happened with the protestant reformation and the council of trent made the official declaration that thomas aquinas theology is the official theology of the catholic church and because 1.1 billion people are catholics aquinas has had enormous influence but he&#39;s different from anselm who we looked at on the previous slide and that rather than using a platonic type of philosophy where you turn inward to the realm of ideas we have thomas aquinas turning outward using an aristotelian way of thinking so rather than turning into your mind for ideas for you could make some sort of subjective mistake aquinas would argue we look outward to the world and we use our senses to perceive objectively what is taking place and it will be in nature it will be in creation as we use our senses like sight and hearing that we start to take into our hearts who god is and what god is like his primary work is the summa theologica and he sees that you can use the capacity of human reason to take you so far okay just like anselm was using reason to take him all the way to truth but we have aquinas saying reason can take you only to a certain point and then after that we have to rely on faith so aquinas has a little bit of a different understanding of the relationship between faith and reason than folks like augustine anselm had and as he turns outward to try to understand who god is and what god is like we see him presenting what we call and please get this in your notes because it&#39;s not on the slide in contrast to anselm&#39;s ontological proof of the existence of god thomas aquinas presents what we call the cosmological proof for the existence of god that you turn out to the cosmos you turn out to the world and your experiences that you witness in the world will show you that god exists and with this aquinas presents what are called the five ways he presents five arguments that belong to this cosmological proof of the existence of god and you have to remember he does not have the advantages of modern science so i realize some of these may make you chuckle some some of them may sound ridiculous to you but for the medieval mindset these were quite relevant uh one of his first arguments we&#39;re gonna i&#39;m gonna give you the five ways now okay number one is movement okay number one is movement and so aquinas could look up in the sky and he could see the sun moving he thought or the moon moving and he would say well if that is moving there must be someone who&#39;s doing the moving you see how he&#39;s using his senses there his sight sees that something is moving and therefore if something is moving there must be a mover and therefore that mover must be god and then a second of the five ways is we have uh the argument of existence aquinas would say just the very fact that i exist the very fact that i right now i&#39;m looking out of my window in my office and i see a tree and i see a lot of wheat growing out in the field and just by the very fact that those things exist means that someone or something must have created those things and so therefore we would have uh existence the fact that things exist as proof of god&#39;s existence and then of the five ways the one i find most intriguing is the is the third one and this is the argument made on quality that we perceive some things as being more beautiful or better than other things when i&#39;m done doing this lecture i&#39;m going to go grocery shopping and i always get apples when i go to the grocery store and so if i pick up one apple and it&#39;s perfectly shiny and red and round and i pick up another apple and it&#39;s sort of lopsided and has a couple of deep bruises on it which one am i going to get of course i&#39;m going to get the round shiny apple because i perceive it as being better and aquinas says the fact that we have this somehow wired within us to judge one thing is better than another or to see one thing or person as more beautiful than another person because we have that sort of judging distinction within us and artists would call this aesthetics what is more aesthetically pleasing and because we have that perception of quality aquinas says well someone must have put that perception of quality within us and that would be another proof for god according to aquinas uh number four is intelligent design aquinas says you if you look out at the creation and you see the way things work that there are seasons that happen so that in the in the way the weather and climate that we have so that crops can grow and that you can harvest the crops and then yet another cycle continues of planting again and just by looking at the way the creation functions and works and sustains itself we have aquinas making the argument that there must have been a god a being who designed the creation to function so well and of course that that god would be an intelligent being so intelligent design and then we will conclude with uh contingency or dependency and aquinas here used the picture of an infant nursing at his or her mother&#39;s breast and that the infant is contingent upon or dependent upon his or her mother for survival and because we see there a picture of an infant dependent upon a mother then aquinas makes the argument that there is also a being that we&#39;re contingent upon of being that we&#39;re dependent upon and that would be god and so what we see here is aquinas saying see that&#39;s that&#39;s as far as reason can take you reason by observing nature by observing these things can show you that there is a god that exists but then you have to go into faith and the teachings of jesus to understand even more about that god so reason can take you so far but then after you get to the stopping point with reason then you must go even further with faith all right that concludes this one should be another lecture up hopefully within about four or five days

Transcript for:Christianity Post-Constantine

Transcript for:
Christianity Post-Constantine