 Greetings, friends. My name is Philip Campbell, and you might know me from the story of civilization series from Tan Books. Today I am thrilled that you are going to be joining me for the story of the church, which is a fascinating journey through the history of the church from the time of the apostles right up to the current age. So I think you're going to find this very interesting. I know I really loved writing this, and I'm very excited to start guiding us through all this material. So we're just going to dive right into this here. In the introduction to our text, we discussed the idea of symbolism, how things in our lives symbolize other things. Like, let's take a birthday cake. A birthday cake, what's it made of? It's made of things like eggs, flour, sugar, frosting. But of course, a cake is much more than just the things it is made out of. It has a symbolic value. It symbolizes something far beyond its ingredients. There's more to it than meets the eye. It calls to mind all sorts of things. If you're celebrating your birthday or a sibling's birthday, this calls to mind the joy of them in the family, the circumstances of their birth, celebrating all that person is. So we can see that the cake is a symbol for something much greater than just what it's made out of. Now, the church is like this as well. It's more than just the sum of its parts. It's very easy to see the visible structure of the Catholic church. If you walk into any Catholic parish, you're going to see candles, you're going to see sacred books, the priest alters, the church has buildings, property, parking lots, everything that many other human organizations have. But the question isn't about what is the church made up of materially. What is behind these realities? What is the what is the essence behind all these things? The catechism of the Catholic church says the church itself is like a sacrament of God's communion with man. What is a sacrament? Well, without waiting too far into theology, I think we could say that a sacrament is a kind of symbol, but it's a very special symbol. Sacraments are symbols that bring about the things they symbolize. Let's use baptism as an example. So in baptism, we know the person being baptized has water poured on them or sprinkled or sometimes they're dunked. Now, what does this water symbolize? The water symbolizes the washing away of original sin, but here is the important distinction. The water does not merely symbolize this. The water, the right of baptism actually does the thing it symbolizes. Baptism actually cleanses from original sin. So a sacrament is a symbol that affects the thing that it symbolizes. Now, the church is very much like this. It's not only a symbol of God's communion with mankind, but it actually makes that communion possible. Because God did not call us individually. He calls us in through and with a community, the community of the church that He Himself founded when He sent His Son to earth. This is why the church exists. Now, if this is a little bit heavy on the theology, I apologize, but it's very essential because this book is a story of how the church has fulfilled that mission throughout the ages. How that original mission that Jesus Christ was sent to earth to accomplish to make all people of every race, men, women, slave-free, Greek, Gentile, the whole nine yards, everybody, to bring them into the family of God. So how can the church bring about God's communion with men? That is really the crux of this book, the story of the church fulfilling this mission. Now, this story actually begins on Pentecost with the coming of the Holy Spirit. You're probably familiar with the story. You can read it in the book of the Acts of the Apostles in chapter two, but we'll summarize it here. After the ascension of Jesus, the apostles were commanded to wait in Jerusalem and pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit. And after they had been praying for nine days, the Holy Spirit comes to them in the upper room. There's this rushing of wind and tongues of fire appear over their heads and they start praising God and everybody that's there in Jerusalem that hears this, hears them speaking in their own languages. The people from Parthia hear it in Parthian. If you're Roman, you hear it in Latin, Greek and Greek, Jewish and Hebrew. It's a miracle, the miracle of tongues. And this Holy Spirit that is given to the apostles on this day was called by Pope Pius XII, the soul of the church. And this is really the best way to understand the giving of the Spirit. What did Pius XII mean by calling it the soul of the church? Well, just as your soul animates the body, so the Holy Spirit animates the church. When the Holy Spirit was given to the church on the day of Pentecost, this became the source of the church's power. This enabled the apostles to carry out their mission and it's the source of the sacramental ministry and power that the apostles and their successors, the bishops and the priests have to this very day. Now, this power given by the Holy Spirit is demonstrated remarkably in the early church. We see it in the book of Acts and also in some of the very early Christian writings from the apostolic age, miracles of tongues, various healings, mass conversions of thousands of people. The book of Acts says that on the day of Pentecost at Peter's preaching, thousands of the hearers were converted at his preaching and witnessing the miracle of tongues. By the way, if you ever go to Jerusalem, you can still visit the upper room where this miracle of the day of Pentecost happened. The upper room in Jerusalem today is like a Gothic structure dating from the time of the Crusades. The original upper room had been refurbished and worked over during the Crusader Age as a way to honor the events of such importance that happened there. So you can still go to the upper room today. It's called the Seneca, which means the dining area in Latin. But at any rate, the early Christian community that grew out of an after Pentecost was a very extraordinary movement led by the apostles who were the witnesses of Christ's resurrection, the ones Jesus sent to preach his message of salvation. The Holy Spirit worked through and with the apostles to build up the church. And they went about initially just through the cities of Palestine, Judea, preaching largely to a Jewish audience. Of course, that would later change and spread to the Gentiles as well. The apostles would be the first bishops. And in Greek, this word bishop is episcopos, which means overseer, the one who's in charge. They were helped by elders who were called presbyters. And this is where we get the English word priest from presbyter. And then we are told in Acts, I think seven, how the early apostles instituted the office of the deaconate and deacon means servants. This is because the church was growing so much. They had so many poor to take care of and widows and so much ministry that they needed help. And so they ordained the deacons. So the apostles go and they preach all over the Roman world. The text talks about the various missions of some of the apostles that we know about the places they went to. St. Mark going to Alexandria, Egypt and St. Thomas to India and so on and so forth. Now Christianity might have remained a Jewish movement had it not been for the conversion of St. Paul. Paul, of course, began as a Pharisee who was persecuting the early Christian movement, but then he was converted by a profound encounter with Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. And Paul received from Christ a special mission to take the gospel to the Gentiles. That is to the non-Jews, to the pagans of the Roman Empire. And so Paul not only brought the gospel to the Gentiles, but also through his theological writings, helped explain the Christian faith in a profound way. And St. Paul made more contributions to the writing of the New Testament than any other apostle. Of course, we have the book of Romans, 1st, 2nd Corinthians, all the various letters of Paul to like the Galatians, to Thessalonica, all these different letters than the pastoral epistles to Timothy, Titus. So Paul, a lot of the New Testament is the development of Paul's theology as he's writing to these different churches. Now the testimony of these apostles was sealed with martyrdom and all of the apostles underwent some sort of trial. All of them suffered death except for St. John. But this was especially true in the Church of Rome where Peter and Paul both suffered as part of the persecution of Nero. Rome had caught on fire and there was a great terrible destruction through the city. The emperor Nero was looking for scapegoats to blame the fire on. And so he settled on this little sect of the Christians and they were both executed as part of the persecution of Nero. Peter crucified upside down. Paul, because he was a Roman citizen, was granted the privilege of being beheaded. Wasn't that kind of them to let Paul be beheaded? Very kind of the Romans. But so everywhere we look, the church is sealed with the blood of the martyrs and this in turn leads to the growth of the church. Now we're going to see more of this as we go, persecution, issues between Jews and Gentiles. All these themes are going to be revisited in subsequent chapters. But I think that's enough for now. In our next lecture, we're going to take a look at some of the important persons and events in the church in the first generation after the apostles. So I hope you'll come on back for more.