 Would anyone be willing to open us in prayer? Jesus, our Lord, we thank you for this day, our Lord Father. We thank you for this new week, O Lord God. Jesus, as we are going to start our classes, O Lord Father, Holy Spirit God, we ask you, O Lord Father, to be present, O Lord Father, give us your guidance, give us your wisdom, O Lord Father, to learn, O Lord Father, and to be equipped with everything that you are teaching and that you are imparting into our lives, O Lord Father, to help us, O Lord Father, not to be distracted. We just surrender our minds, our thoughts into your hands, O Lord Father, God, you come and you take control over our lives. In Jesus, my depression and we pray, amen. Okay, since we have the presentations today as well, maybe we won't go into the recap for last week. We'll just continue from where we stopped. So we stopped with Constantine coming into power and there being a sudden shift in the way the church was viewed. So before then, Christians were persecuted and those who were coming into the church were coming in with a lot of struggle. But now what happened was the church was actually favored by the government and so people wanted to come into the church because there were benefits for them as they were coming in. So there was actually both social and political benefit because you were aligning yourself with what the emperor himself was supporting. So people started coming into the church. All of the Roman citizens started joining the church in large numbers. But the problem now was that the strength of their belief was not great because they were not really experiencing Christ or believing the gospel and coming in. They were just coming in because they knew that there was benefit to them joining the church. And so what happens then is there needs to be more discipleship happening within the church because people don't have the kind of teaching they had before they joined the church before. Now they were just coming in and then once they joined the church, they had to start understanding what it meant to be a Christian. So we also see that the churches before were meeting in houses and were meeting in smaller numbers. But now there were actually buildings that were being made for the church to meet in and a lot of the old pagan temples were then converted to church buildings for the congregation to meet in for services. So it was quite a big shift in the way Christians experienced their faith but as well as what the church was. The church completely changed through this time. So around this time there came a question about the divinity and humanity of Jesus. So people were still trying to understand all of these things like how is Jesus divine? How is he also human? How does he relate to the father? Are they the same person? Are they two people? All of these different things. And so there was someone named Aries who was an elder in Alexandria in Egypt and he talked about Jesus divinity and how he's related to the father but his explanation for that relationship was not something that the church accepted. So he was taken out of the church and then it started from there to become a big debate about how is Jesus related to the father. Another person in 323 AD so that happened in 318 AD where Aries starts to talk about that Jesus and the father and then 323 AD is the father of church history, Bishop Eusebius. So now that there was so much support from the outside there was a lot more scholarship that started to happen in the church. So Eusebius is one example of that. So he was very learned in scripture itself and so he wrote a lot of what we know of the church of the early church. So it's because of his records of the early church that we can talk about church history. He records a lot of different things about the church and how the church progressed under Constantine's leadership. But he was also influenced by Constantine because Constantine was a supporter of the church. The way he looked at Constantine's role within the church was also influenced by that. So we have here a list of different things that he wrote. I won't go into it but a lot of texts, a lot of books about what was happening in the church at that time. So 325 AD was the first official council of the church. So we see in Jerusalem there was a council of the leaders in Jerusalem in Acts 15 which we read about where Paul and Barnabas go to Jerusalem to ask about whether the Gentiles need to be circumcised and so they go to the council of leaders in Jerusalem. But this is the first council that means across church leaders from different places and this happens because Constantine is basically sponsoring all of these leaders coming in to meet in this place. So he's covering all of their costs, making it possible for them to come and it's the first time all of these church leaders from all over the place get to meet face to face. All this time it's more like there's letters, they know of each other, there is some correspondence but first time they're all meeting face to face. And one of the major things they talk about is the person and nature of Christ. So that Arian controversy that we talked about is something that becomes a big topic that is debated in this council. Now Constantine was also in a battle over the empire at that time and he had just fought a battle and won it. So he was very particular about trying to keep the unity within the empire. So his calling for this council was to encourage the churches to be unified so that there wouldn't be any split within the empire because of the church. So it was both a political as well as it was sort of like a political move on his part. So they all came together and they are basically talking about, okay, how is Jesus related to the father? Is he of the same, does he share unity with the father in a way that there are only one person or are there two different people? And then if there are two different people, how do they relate to each other? So it's all of the major theologies that support our faith now in Christ as a church but some things that we've never had to question or think about because all of these battles have already been fought early on. So this was a huge debate. A lot of these theological questions became huge debates within the church early on. Sorry, I'm just trying to find my notes. And it was based on these things that then we established the doctrine of the Trinity and all of that. So it was held in Nicaea. I think I have that on the map. I'll just share it. Yeah, so 325 AD is where the Council of Nicaea met and that's right here. Okay. So very close to Constantinople. And this is where all of the major decisions were made by the church leaders. So even though in this Council they met and they condemned what Ares was teaching, they still continue to be something that was debated within the church. Who is Jesus? And how do we understand the nature of Jesus? It was only in 381 which is like 55, 56 years later that they fully established the nature of Jesus. Like what is the doctrine of the church? What do we believe about the nature of Jesus? Was at the next Council, which is a Council of Constantinople in 381. Another thing that was approved in this Council of Nicaea was the role of patriarchs, which were like bishops of all of the different regions in the Roman Empire. So each bishop would kind of oversee churches in a specific province. And so they started to become very, very powerful because the church was growing and the church was growing under Constantine's kind of support with becoming richer and richer, getting more property, all of that. And so finally we see that the bishop of Rome is the one who becomes the pope over all of the whole church. We also see that patriarchs continue to be a role that the Eastern Orthodox Church. So eventually there was a split within the church between the East and West. And the West is what is comprised of the Roman Catholic Church. But the Eastern side became the Eastern Orthodox Church. And so we continue to see patriarchs even till today in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In AD 330, Constantine moved... So in this same map you can see where Constantinople is, right? Constantinople is right here. So Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome from here to Constantinople. So he established a new city called it Constantinople and this became the capital city. So this was also a political move so that a lot of the old people who had power who lived in Rome kind of lost some of their power because the new capital had been established in another place. And so although Rome lost its power from a political standpoint, the church in Rome continued to be very powerful and that's why we see the pope coming from there, leading from there. What do I have there? Yeah, so it moves right here to Constantinople. 361 to 363, there is another emperor called Julian and he opposes what Constantine was doing. So Julian is actually a nephew of Constantine and he is not in favour of Christianity in the empire and so he tries to re-establish paganism but he doesn't succeed in doing that. 367 is when the New Testament so what all books would be included in the New Testament are given some recognition. So all of these like we talked about earlier all of these letters were already being passed around the churches they were already recognised as authoritative for the Christian life but there's a letter that Athanasius wrote in 367 and later on some councils that met recognised that these are the books that we're going to include in the New Testament and so that was called the canon of the New Testament all the books that were included. So it was not that they created new scriptures but what already was being circulated was recognised as these are going to be authoritative for the church. In 381 was when Christianity became the official religion of the state. So far it was only Constantine who had said okay we will accept this as one of the religions within the empire and actually at that time the emperor was viewed as the head of the of the pagan religion there. So Constantine even though he had done that continued to be the head of the pagan religion. So it was a very while he was supporting Christians he had not fully he had not become a Christian himself he was only on his deathbed that he got baptized. So this is when the first time that Christianity becomes a religion of the state of the Roman Empire. And 381 is where this council of Constantinople is held and this is where that controversy about Jesus' nature and the person of Jesus is fully settled for the church in 381 although Arianism continues so there are people who follow that but from the church leadership perspective passing on to this is what the church believes it's established at this council. Okay so the my... Okay yeah. So in this council is where the divinity and humanity understanding both of that those aspects of Jesus is accepted here. 384 is where Jerome translates the Bible into Latin so it had been previously translated in AD 150 but they had used the Greek Septuagint that time to translate it but this time Jerome uses the original Hebrew and the translation into Latin is done as he's commissioned by the Pope at that time. 386 there's someone named Augustine has anyone heard of Augustine? Yes? Okay so there's a reason why we've heard of him right because he did contributed a great deal to the church's theology and so he comes to faith in 386 and becomes one of the most... Yes one of the most important theologians in church history even quoted till today. AD 393 is the council of Hippo so there's another council where the church leaders meet and this is where they finally close the canon of scripture so they say that no more books will be added we finally defined that these are all the books that are going to be there in the New Testament and this is in agreement with what they had already agreed before but this is just where they say that we are finally going to agree on this and 397 at the council of Carthage they close that canon of scripture AD 400 is where the old Syriac New Testament was written so actually in the second century there was a Syriac translation of the Bible it's called the Peshita and that was used because that was a common language people spoke Syriac in trade in international relations communication Syriac was used so that translation actually contributed to the spread of Christianity because most people knew Syriac so even though the Old Testament was in Hebrew lots of Jews didn't understand Hebrew because they had been under Greek leadership so Greek had become the common language similarly for those who were in Syria Syriac was the common language so they couldn't understand their own scriptures in Hebrew which is why the Bible was translated into Syriac so that people could understand it and so that Christianity could easily spread to other places in a language that people understood so sadly by the end of this century is where the church that was being persecuted now starts to persecute others because there is so much power within the church there is so much political power within the church that it starts to oppress or come against anyone who doesn't come into agreement with the church whether it's a theological agreement or submission to the leaders of the church all of those things they start to go against it and then we read about the Crusades all of those things so this church that was the weak church the church that was suffering now starts to do all of that to other people it starts to cause suffering to other people and so we go into the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages because what we see as a powerful move of God in the start like in the early church where God was moving in power where there was people coming to faith because they were experiencing the Holy Spirit it was not for any other motives in fact they were entering into this faith knowing that they would suffer for it so where there was so much conviction so much power of the Holy Spirit all of that suddenly becomes completely disappears from the church and it becomes very institutionalized so there is a lot of hierarchy there's a lot of power with the leaders today people don't even have scripture so people in the church couldn't read the scripture for themselves there's a lot of rituals that are prescribed by the church that are not even in scripture there's political power in the church so they are influencing the politics of that day because there's so much authority given to the church leaders and so there's all of that corruption within the church there's a lot of money in the church so all of these things kind of take the church away from why we truly exist we see lots of beliefs that came into the church that were completely not from scripture so there was praying to the saints belief in purgatory which is like for someone who believed in Jesus but was not fully sanctified when they die they go to a place where they have to pay for their sins before they can go into heaven so this was one of the teachings of the church another was indulgences so that was a payment of money to pay for your sins to prove that you are repentant for your sins and to kind of as a way to safeguard yourself from going into purgatory so instead of going into purgatory you pay this thing and your sins will be absorbed by the church leaders yeah then there was worship of relics so things that body parts or pieces of cloth or things like that that were related to saints within the church who had died started to be put inside the church and people would worship those things so all of these things came into the church and we had also talked about the monks before so the monks were connected to the church and the monastic movement also was affected because it continued to be a part of the church so the monks would function under the leading of the pope so in 596 that's almost 100 years later there was the first monk who was also a pope that's Gregory the Great and he sends a team of missionaries out under the leadership of someone named Augustine who is not the same Augustine we talked about earlier so they go to England with the gospel and the gospel had already been introduced in England but they're going back with the objective of reaching them for the gospel, like taking the gospel back to them and about 10,000 people are baptized within that year so I'll just... because are they being sent from Rome? yes yeah so the pope himself so this monk Gregory was also the pope at the same time so he sends them to establish the church so in this time it was a little bit because the church was involved in politics even if they were doing this kind of work there was political motive also behind it because with the spread of Christianity was also the spread of the church's influence so the church could still influence England because the pope was ruling over all the church okay so... what's that sorry? so this is England and here on the left where is my... can't see my mouse here yeah on the left the English Channel is in between here and Canterbury is where they go so they go to Canterbury and they begin to do their missions work okay so... and then in AD 635 is when we see the first Christian missionaries going out so from Asia Minor and Persia missionaries who go into China now China it's believed that the Apostle Thomas also went to China when he came to India but this is where the missionaries are sent out to China and so these people were called Nestorian monks they were actually from the eastern side of the church so Rome and always the western side of the church the Nestorian monks were from the eastern side so they go to... they go to China so they're from Asia Minor and from Persia they go to China with the Gospel uh... yeah 15... sorry 1150 to 1270 there's a merchant named Peter Waldo and he is from southern France so he reads Matthew 10 5 to 13 if someone wants to read that for us Matthew 10 5 to 13 universe 5 to 15 5 to 13 okay these 12 Jesus sent out and commanded them saying do not go into the way of the Gentiles and do not enter a city of the Samaritans but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and as you go preach saying the kingdom of heaven is at hand heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead cast out demons freely you have received, freely give provide neither gold nor silver nor copper in your money belts nor bag for your journey, nor two tunics nor sandals nor staffs for a worker is worthy of his foot now whatever city or town you enter inquire who in it is worthy and stay there till you go out and when you go into a household greet it if the household is worthy let your peace come upon it but if it is not worthy let your peace return to you okay so he read this and he was inspired by this by Jesus instructions for them to go out without taking any anything with them but to fully depend on the people who they were preaching to to support them and so inspired by this he starts to encourage the church to return to the teaching of scripture and then he also rejects the idea of purgatory and the infallibility of the church so the infallibility of the church was to say whatever the church says is authoritative and there is no error so whatever the church institutes is correct and you should not oppose it and then he also said that Christian laypersons could preach selling one's goods and giving to the poor were acts of consecration so encouraging encouraging sacrifice and poverty for the sake of preaching the gospel so this was where so even in this time we see there are glimpses of people starting to recognize that there is something in the church that needs that has gone away from scripture so even before the Reformation we see a few people who start to address these things okay I think we just have a few minutes so maybe we can go into Nina's presentation Nina you can go ahead okay I think we'll be going kind of fast where we are right now aha okay but since you're prepared to share today we'll just go ahead alright no come again you said that we will go fast in the sense of what we are doing in the lesson yes because we haven't yet reached your presenting on William Tindale right that's right so we haven't yet reached William Tindale on our as we are going through church history but since you're prepared to share today we'll just go ahead and have your presentation no it's okay I mean I could wait like whenever it would be the right time I have no issues I'm prepared but there is no issue then we probably go into tomorrow is that okay is tomorrow okay absolutely fine no problem okay sure thank you not at all no one chose John Wickliffe right for presentation I don't think anyone yes so William Tindale is a bit later so then we'll just continue where we are okay so we'll see we'll just look at whether y'all can do tomorrow I'll check depending on how much we have to cover okay so we'll continue then so 1200 the Bible is now available in 22 different languages okay so even though officially from the church the Latin Bible was being used and which is why the lay people didn't have access to the Bible there were translations that had been made and so these Bibles were available in 1266 there is in Mongolia a leader there who sends if y'all have heard of Marco Polo so Marco Polo his father and uncle were merchants who were trading from Venice Mongolia and so they would travel through the Silk Road that was the route for trade they traveled from Venice to their to China trading and so they come across this Mongolian leader who sent them back to Europe and asked the pope that sent 100 Christian missionaries to Mongolia but only two people actually got the presentation and on the way as they're returning one of them dies on the way to Mongolia so only one person actually goes back in 1382 John Wickliffe does the English translation of the Bible now John Wickliffe was born in Yorkshire I don't know if I have that on the presentation no I don't okay so he was born in Yorkshire in England around 1324 he studied at Oxford University so a lot of scholarly work was done in this time he received his doctorate in theology and although he lived almost 200 years before the Reformation his teachings and his beliefs were very close to what the reformers taught to what Luther, Calvin and other reformers taught so because someone who taught so early on on these things he's called as the morning star of the Reformation it started with the things he was talking about so some of the things he talked about was that every Christian has the right to know the Bible so it was not only a right that the priests had to teach and to explain what scripture said that the Bible within scripture we can see that Christ alone is sufficient for salvation we don't need anything in addition to that and then you didn't need pilgrimages you didn't need works, you didn't need mass to be saved Christ alone was sufficient so Wycliffe translated the Bible to English using Jerome's Latin Vulgate and so Jerome was the one who translated from Hebrew to Latin okay so he used the original language to translate to Latin whereas the previous Latin translations had used the Greek Septuagint so now Wycliffe uses the Latin translation because Latin was well known right so even if they didn't know Hebrew or they didn't know Greek they could still use the Latin to translate to other languages so he uses that and translates to English but after Wycliffe's death there were people following him known as the law lords and they are people who are kind of seen as the people who were before the Reformation that kind of started that work of the Reformation 1415 there's someone named John Huss I'll just share my screen as well sorry okay so John Huss was born in a country called Bohemia which is now Czechoslovakia and he was born to poor parents so they were peasants so to get out of poverty he trained to become a priest so he got his master's degree in Prague okay you can see Prague there on the map as well so he studied there and he was he later on became a professor of theology he was ordained and he became a priest he then got a bachelor's degree in theology and he was the preacher at the church called Bethlehem Chapel which was one of the most influential churches in that region of Prague so he reads the teachings of John Cliff and some of his writings and is inspired by that and he starts to kind of preach some of that so that the church is not supreme the church is supreme not the pope and then he recognizes the need for reformation to remove corruption from within the church to remove the abuse of the church over the people who are in the church he believed that each person should have a bible in their own language and he preached before Luther could preach it he preached for justification by faith supreme authority of scripture and because he starts to preach all of this in a very influential church obviously this then goes up to the leaders of the church and they are very angry about it they tell him to stop preaching he doesn't stop preaching and so he is excommunicated from the church which means he is sent out of the church and he was finally handed over to the government to be burnt to death in July 6th 1415 so this is how we see that there was so much power within the church 1429 has anyone watched Joan of Arc the movie sorry John Mcliff yes yeah okay okay so Joan of Arc was from France and she again was from so she was a peasant girl and she saw heavenly beings so she saw visions with heavenly beings she heard voices and what her understanding of all of those experiences was that she wanted her to deliver France from the English domination there over France so she went against the English rulers in a place called Orline and she won that battle and established another French ruler in place to rule the rule France um but eventually she was captured by the English and that French ruler kind of distanced himself from her because now she was someone who was in prison right so with that he didn't come to her aid and the English authorities then bring charges of witchcraft against her and she is also put to death but during her while they're putting her to death she holds a crucifix in her hand and throughout that time she's calling on the name of Jesus till she dies so there is a movie I've not watched it I'm not sure how close it is to history but there is a movie Joan of Arc okay so any questions or anything I want to share until now yeah it is it's also sad to see some of the decline in the church when you read all of the amazing things that were happening and then how a lot of politics a lot of corruption comes into the church so that is also something for us to be aware of right be careful against that yeah maybe now we are maybe now we are just speaking about them but then in the church out of the church they would have spoke very badly about them yeah so once you were taken out of the church it was like you'd lost it was almost like you had become nothing because the church was only like body of Christ that there was right because all of the churches came under that one leader so if you're not in that then there's no other church that you can go join there's no other place so sometimes you see that the church also adopted wrong teaching and if someone was trying to bring in right teaching like we'll see with Luther and all of them they were put out of the church even though finally later on the church accepted that teaching ma'am do you think like this the at what is what's happened in these days like how they are doing like sending out people from the church it's same like see this low caste people they were just not allowing them to come to temples so that's what happened then and now in India I mean it's actually the same like if we see in this perspective it's same right the exclusion of some people here the exclusion was based on if you're willing to submit to the leadership authority right the pope's authority if you're willing to accept everything that they're saying then you're welcome into the church but if you challenge anything they say then then you will be sent out so yeah so it's because there was so much power and they were maybe it came initially it was to protect what yes protection of power and authority yeah yeah and we see also in the crusade there was so much because the church I mean because those political places were growing they were taking religion there but they were religion was used also as a way to like bring death to people like so the religion and politics were like hand in hand yeah so there's no difference so christianity was being taken but there was also this thing of getting getting power and so it's a little confusing of like what are the methods we are using are we going in just preaching the gospel or are we using that kind of political power to take the gospel yeah I think a lot of things have changed definitely that political power doesn't exist as much but there is still like a lot of authority with the pope and that the practices of purgatory I mean the belief in purgatory indulgences I think has changed a bit but there is still like you confess your sins and you like the father there will kind of hear your sins and declare pronounce forgiveness and all of those things so yeah yeah yeah yeah I took a lot to stand up to the church because they had so much power so when you're going against them you're just one person going against such a big institution it was a lot of courage it was a lot of courage on their part yeah okay thank you all of you online for joining as well we'll see you tomorrow