Church history is a fascinating and valuable field of study. The history of the use (and abuse) of church discipline is especially interesting. Beyond the mere historical interest, it is also a practical topic to study as we can again look to those who came before and learn from them. With the greater clarity of hindsight we can often see the failures and, by God's grace, avoid the ditches that past generations fell into and see the good things that were done and follow those examples to greater obedience today.

The following message is a presentation of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where we're proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture for church and family life. More information about the NCFIC is available at www.ncfic.org. I like to collect old documents. One, it's neat to see old things. At least Americans like to see old things.

But there's an anthropology to our faith. That is, there's things discoverable. And some of the things that I find most as Scott alluded to some of the most interesting things about the history of our faith is what I find from antiquarian book dealers who don't have a care about our faith, but I have a great care about it. As well as antiquarians that have old artifacts that go way back. So since this is on church history, that is going to delve BC, I've got some older artifacts out of my collection.

And as I hear Scott and Dan talk, I say, oh, I wish I would have brought this, because they touch on some great points that I wasn't thinking of. So I'm learning quite a bit as we go. The topic, if you see on page 16 of your notebook, we can fill that in a little bit better with the development of congregational discipline in Jewish synagogues in the early church. And I'm going to stretch it out a little bit, adding the misuse of discipline in the pre-Reformation era. So we're gonna have quite a sweep of over 2, 000 years, which I'm going to try to at least touch upon here.

I love this topic, the topic of this conference for many reasons. Discipline, a word, a concept, a principle, applicable principle that's very much needed today. Discipline comes from the root word or the original word, disciples. It's the same root word as disciples. In other words, you cannot have disciples without discipline and you cannot have discipline without the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ and as we heard from what Dan was saying discipline is both positive as well as corrective or protective as well as corrective.

And I love the fact that Dan repeatedly hit on one of the things that I think are most necessary in the church today. That is when you see what is necessary in the church, You see what the church historically had, it's one of its strengths that it doesn't have today and one of the key points and I bring it out in almost every, I would say every presentation that I do, is the topic of authority. We need to get back to the idea of biblical authority. Reformation, if indeed comes, will center around the rediscovery and correct application of godly authority. There's many reasons we don't appreciate that today.

We don't have time to get into those, but one simple reason is we think we pay our pastors to entertain us rather than to hold us to God's word. So there's many problems we have that can be easily corrected if we understand biblical authority. And what you'll notice if you read older accounts of biblical exposition, is the Bible wasn't only fundamentally a truth book. It was an authority book. It was a book about authority.

The main theme of the Bible is God's authority. And we need to get in line with that. That's what the strength of the church was at one time. Roman Centurion told Jesus, just say it will be done. And he explained, I myself am a man under authority.

With soldiers under me, I say go when he goes and come when he comes. And Jesus was amazed at this man's faith. Why? Because this man understood Christ's authority. And of course, Jesus was asked many times by what authority do you do this and this.

And that was a very appropriate question to ask this man. It wasn't out of line and Jesus had an answer. On one occasion he declared himself Lord of the Sabbath, which is a very good answer. But usually he said, I do not do anything, but effectively under the authority of the one who sent me, my Father. So authority is central to everything Jesus did.

It's central to us understanding our duties. Now, the idea of authority was central to history. If I can find this. This is, I hate to hold up, something that no one can see at that distance is the first thing I hold up. This is a cylinder seal that dates back before the time of Abraham.

And the nobleman would roll this out on a piece of clay that would stamp his seal. And if you roll it out, which I've done here, it's a pretty bad copy, it's a magistrate standing in front of a deity with a human head and a beast for a body. And this is a sign of where he got his authority. The idea is you get your authority by divine right from one of the gods. And we know that Moses encountered God, and God laid his authority upon Moses.

What I have here, if I can dig down to it, is a fragment of a Torah scroll. This is the fragment that covers Exodus chapter 20 through about 23 and a half. It's detached from the rest of the scroll. This is an antiquated scroll that dates back probably five or more hundred years. It would have been part of a scroll that goes on for yards and yards this way and yards and yards this way because the first five books of the Bible were all on one Torah scroll.

That was the authority that God gave to his people Israel. That was the canonical scriptures that the people knew when they went into Babylonian captivity. And we know that the people, Israel, had problems with some of the commands in the authority of God, who says in Exodus 20, on that section of the scroll, I Am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourselves a carved image any likeness of anything That is in heaven above or that is in the earth below or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.

For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God." We know by reading the Bible, his people had a real problem keeping to that. The fact that they were not faithful another key component of scripture they were not faithful god sent them into babylonian captivity it's interesting that god sent his people into the midst of idols to purge them from idols but that's the way God works God put them in the midst of idolaters and out of that Israel came forth from captivity no longer having a problem with worshiping images and they had other problems. They had problems with pride, lust of the flesh, and those things. But they were purged amidst that. Now, if you read the historians, Johann Buxroff was a historian of the 1600s, early 1600s, and he disseminated from Hebrew sources the origin of the Jewish synagogue system.

And this was repeated in English in many parts of this. Thomas Goodwin's work on the ecclesiastical and civil rights of the Jews that was published in English. And you can learn a lot from the synagogal system. One thing you find was that although some system or understanding of synagogues existed prior to captivity, the system of synagogues was formulated while they were in captivity. And we have many texts that go to that fact.

For instance, when they were in captivity, they were compelled by their civil rulers to worship the gods of the heathen. They were compelled to do something they had done before, but now they refuse to do it. So we have Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel 3, who are thrown into a fiery furnace for refusing to bow down to an image. And of course, who appears there in their midst? The Son of God.

They come out and there's a decree by the king, Nebuchadnezzar, that says, Therefore I make a decree that any people, nation, language, which speaks anything amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego shall be cut to pieces and their houses shall be made in heap of ash, because there is no other God who can deliver like this God. What Jesus Christ accomplished in that furnace was the fact that these guys could enjoy the worship of Almighty God in the midst of their captivity. They came out and did that. We find other cases where Daniel is praying according to the dictates of his faith and he's thrown in the lion's den and God stays the mouth of the lion. Well that story is not about lions.

That story is about the power of princes being shut when it comes to your religious faith. Faith in Jesus Christ. We have the book of Esther. This is an Esther scroll that's quite old as well. This is again on parchment and ink.

This is about 10-12 feet long, it's the entire book of Esther, and this is what's called the Purim scroll, but it lays out how God delivered his people, again Mordecai was in Persia at the time, and Queen Esther was there, And through that ordeal, that is trying to snuff out God's people there, God won them even more. Recognition of their liberty to worship Him. So out of the flames came victory. And That's another principle we find in scripture. Out of trial comes something greater than what you had going into the trial.

That's how God established this thing. What happened was then, these people are still in captivity. By the time of Esther and Mordecai, many are coming back. But they don't all come back from Persia into Judea. The Jews settle throughout the Persian Empire and they go into nations.

We find an interesting statement in Ezekiel 11.16 that the Jewish people took as the authorization of their synagogueal system. Again Ezekiel is a prophet associated with captivity. Ezekiel 11.16 says, Thus says the Lord God, although I have cast them far off among the Gentiles, and although I have scattered them among the countries, yet I shall be a little sanctuary to them in the countries where they have gone. That's how the Jewish people attribute the synagogueal system. That is God's promises that they'll be with them wherever they are scattered.

And of course, the synagogue system was the forerunner of the church. We can see that by Jesus showing up in the furnace, he's setting up the forerunner of the church. That's how you look at things providentially in hindsight. God sets things up. Now the way that worked is found in documents like this.

Like I said, antiquarian dealers teach me much about scripture. This is a cuneiform tablet from Persia. It dates to 598 B.C. And it has six lines of demands for tribute to be paid. This went around captive peoples in Susa, likely, if not all, Jewish people in captivity to pay their duty to the Persian king.

Because they were allowed great freedom under Persian rule, but they did have to pay tribute. That's what makes you a slave, when you have to pay tribute. But they were allowed to keep their families and propagate as they did. And they formed themselves in the communities. Now, Persians did not send out tax forms.

You didn't go down to the post office and clock in online and fill out your tax forms, you met in a community, at a community center. So it served, that is the synagogue served as a place in which they would gather to pay tribute because your people had to pay tribute. But because of what Shadrach, Meshach, and David ago, Daniel, Esther had done, they worshiped there as well. So they had these little places that they could worship, and they could also have schools, the Jewish schools renowned at the time, because you would teach the word of God and you'd worship God. School would not be during the worship time and it wasn't school for children, it was school for families to attend.

And they established an elder system, that is, rule. And this is significant to know because though they're in captivity, their communities were governed by people among themselves. In the civil capacity, but also under them in the worshiping community. So you had two tiers, if you don't count the teachers, etcetera, who are third tier. You have tiers of elders in these communities so what you find is God is setting up that the people of Christ can be dispersed amongst hostile lands and the gospel of Jesus Christ could go out conquering into conquer but at the same time be a refuge for people to escape from that.

That is a perfect model to spread the gospel into heathen nations, is it not? Because it affords you both protection as well as promoting the church militant. That's a beautiful model. That's how the church existed. So history teaches us much.

And when they came back from captivity, this was an old map of the Persian era, obviously not dated that old, but a few hundred years old, showing the area of the Persian Empire. Jews had communities, as we know, large communities in Alexandria, Egypt by the time Jesus was born. That's why Mary and Joseph flee there. Huge Jewish community there. And there's, as we know in Galilee and elsewhere in the Roman Empire, there are synagogues that in the midst of heathenism, God's word is being read and taught amongst people.

It's a great formula. Another thing they had after the captivity period is the canonization of the prophets along with the Torah, and that's significant. We know that before captivity, the Jewish people didn't think much of guys like Jeremiah. After captivity, they saw him as a prophet of God. So although Jeremiah spoke before, and men like Isaiah, Daniel, and others spoke before captivity, was the word of God, it was recognized as so.

So you had a more complete canon of Old Testament scripture. Which I think makes a good point about canonization. Canonization is not anyone being over scripture and authorizing it. It's very much like your wedding vows or you are putting yourself under something that can't be altered. In other words, canonization is putting yourself under something of greater authority than you.

So they had the more complete scripture after the captivity period, especially in Ezra and Nehemiah and the later prophets finish their work. So, God creates something greater out of a bad situation. Is that not the God we serve? God is a wonderful God. Now, the early church then simply fell into, we heard Matthew 18 mentioned, when Jesus is saying take your grievance to the congregation.

Now, he said a lot of things his disciples did not understand until he came back and the Holy Spirit was given a lot. They had a lot of aha moments. They would not have had an aha moment on Matthew 18 because they would have understood what it was to take your grievances to the assembly or the Knesset, the assembly of the people. They would have understood that. And that codifies then the idea of a church being elder led and having many of the authority structures that were with the Jewish people before now carried in quite appropriately into the church.

And you'll notice when Paul was kicked out of a synagogue, he never questioned the authority of the elders to do that. He said, you're wrong, I'm leaving, but he was under the authority and rightly left. But we can see how the respect of authority was central in the apostles as well as the early church. One of my favorite artifacts, I've never taken it on the road because it tends to fall apart and you can see it better if it's wet. This is out of an early church from, I think dates to the second or third century.

And it's interesting because it's not done in the Roman style, it's done in the Hebrew style. It's a guy with long hair under a cap, he's got the beard, it's a side profile, so we know it's not a Roman stylization. But it was out of a church. And this was not an image, it's off the floor of a church. And it was not venerating a man, as the Roman church later did, it was venerating saints.

It was there in the church. It's either a picture of an elder, or perhaps one of the disciples. Of course, they didn't label things back then, so we don't know, but it was clearly showing the apostolic authority, whether it's a picture of an elder under apostolic authority, or whether it's an apostle himself, this idea of being under the authority of God's structure was central to the understanding of early Christians. So this idea of elder-led people among themselves, that's called presbyteriel, not presbyterian, but presbyteriel, that is elder-led congregations, was Central. Now the church was very effective culturally.

In fact, whereas they had scrolls, this, I don't know if I held this one up. This is quite rare. This is a fragment of Isaiah's scroll. There are but a handful of these that have survived. We know that the famous Dead Sea scrolls have a complete Isaiah scroll, which I think is fantastic as a Christian because before their discovery, they said the book of Isaiah was really in two pieces up to chapter 40, of course, was written in ancient times.

But everything after 40 on had to have been written by Christians because it's too explicit. Well we have a Dead Sea Scroll that dates roughly 200 years before Jesus Christ and I find that wonderful. This I bought because it contains Isaiah 53 and this is not written by Christians, this is written by Jewish people. This is part of a complete Isaiah scroll. So I'm pleased to have this in my collection because we can see clearly, those of us who know the Lord Jesus Christ, know that he's throughout the canon of the Old Testament scripture.

But the church was very proactive and they published scripture. In fact, it's believed that the Christians were the ones who went from a scroll to a book. In other words, you would, instead of having a log scroll that you rolled out, you would have leaves and you'd cut them and you'd bind them together or tie them together. So you could write on both sides and they are easily hideable or compactable. This is a very, very small One book of the Bible.

You can see how small these are. It has original boards, which is literally where we get the idea of a binding that's sewn. You can see how small the word of God is. So it can go out and it can also be hidden as needed. It was proactive.

This is a piece of a Gospel of John. It's in the original Coptic here, but I love the fact in light of events today, it has Arabic on the side. So that people that speak Arabic can read the gospel along with the more formal text. So you can see how proactive and militant, if you will, the word of God is culturally. But at the same time as they go out, you have protective as well as militant communities.

And that's the benefit of having self-contained, as need be, within a hostile environment to have churches that are both sanctuaries as well as aggressive. Now in times of peace, you don't need as much of that. But that was the success of the early church. And I think one of the most powerful miracles in all of scripture is the fact that Jesus took his band of disciples and had planted an institution that overcame the Roman Empire. I mean, that is beyond miraculous.

Because it was his word. He knew exactly what he was doing. It came on his authority, did it not? So we have his word prospering. We have the schemes of man diminishing against that.

And That's great encouragement to us today, as it was great encouragement to men such as Martin Luther, who we'll address in the next presentation. Now the church, as we know, fought against error and they held councils and they were groups of elders you would say, the Roman Catholic Church likes to call them bishops, that came together in councils. Because of the sense of protecting the church against attacks as well as preserving the truth of God's Word, you had a rise of the authority of different elders. So now we start seeing a digression, although it served good purposes, the councils were wonderful. Nevertheless, councils led to more and more centralization until you had the scheme of papal authority in the Bishop of Rome.

Totally. This is a Corpus Juris Canonicum. Dan held out the small Bible. This is the corpus of canon law in small print, by the way, as it was published at the time of the Reformation. Quite a bit bigger than the Bible because this is what man's tradition gives you.

And It's broken into sections. It was originally scribed. Of course, the original copies weren't printed. There wasn't printing yet. But the original copies by Gratian, who was a monk in the 1100s, published it in sections.

He had the councils of the early church, the antiquarian councils up to about the year 800, and then the gradual shift we see in the papal authority. So that supplants concealia or groups of bishops or elders coming together. And this is more authoritative, and then you have basically papal decrees. So we see this progression of all authority being into one man. So this is what happens to church discipline when it strays from the word of God.

It becomes authoritative, it becomes abusive, and it becomes punitive. And I don't know if I said corporal. It becomes things that biblical discipline isn't. And That's what you find in the canon laws. Centralization of authority in one man, in what they call the magisterium.

So it's not just one man, but it's the whole majesty that comes under him. And you find inconsistencies. For instance, in the 800s, Images in churches were strongly forbidden. But in the Second Council of Nicaea, a council under the popes, led by the popes, say that all churches should indeed have an image. So we flip-flop.

And that's the problem with the accretals. They can be inconsistent. This is a book, pages of a book that was published in the 1400s called Ave Maria. It shows how Saint Dominic encountered Mary personally and she pulled out beads and said you need to start praying on these. And it goes into how the church succumbed to that.

And it's a whole bit of propaganda. But what you have, certainly in the late Middle Ages, is a great sense of piety. God drawing people to have a meaningful relationship with Him more and more but they're frustrated because what they're getting is superstition and things that distract people. They're forbidding the people from reading God's word. That is, you can read it in Latin if you're a businessman.

And this is again part of the, I'm just going to conclude my part here with the precursors to the Reformation. Because things are bubbling up in Europe. You have the printing press, for instance, for the first time in the 1450s. That happens to coincide with the sacking of Constantinople and volumes of Greek texts flooding into Western Europe to evacuate Constantinople and preserve God's word from the invasion of the Turks at the time. So all these things work in the providence of God.

So you have preaching now. You have men that understand Greek or they're learning to understand Greek and they're disseminating God's word in the original, that is the New Testament in the original tongue for the first time. This is reshaping their understanding of God's word. Things that were taken in commentaries on the Bible were bent into the Roman Catholic model speak for themselves now for the first time. You have men such as Wycliffe, John Wycliffe.

This is a leaf from a Wycliffe Bible. It has Romans third. And I like the fact that it mentions righteousness by faith in Jesus Christ, being free, not through works, not through penance. Again, one of the things that were central to the Roman Catholic Church is if you sinned, you paid penance of one sort or another. This idea of paying God back for your guilt was part of that.

But when you read scripture, as we see in this Wycliffe leaf, we find freedom, that is, forgiveness that's free, rather than going through a penitental system. The Pope also wore a triple tier, a triple crown. That is, he was the spiritual leader. Again, this debated exactly what the meaning of his triple crown was, but you've seen the papal hat with the three crowns. In fact, this shows three different popes who were popes at the same time, each wearing a triple crown, which I find fascinating because we have, I'll get to this in a second, it's very fascinating document, but he was the spiritual leader, he was the ecclesiastical leader, and he was the temporal leader.

What temporal means is all things on this earth, he is the authority over that. I think the best example of that is this document, which exists in two copies. This is a decree. It's called the Bull of the Crusade. A bull is a decree by the Pope and you can say that's a pretty good description of it.

But, it's a bull of the crusade and it's granting the King of Spain, Philip II, we'll talk about him a little bit in the next session, the right to conquer America. This is forced conversion, Spain is given land ownership of America, all except for Brazil, which is Portugal's, to subjugate the people, to consider the people, their gold and silver, their women, their cattle, and their land, to be the property of the King of Spain. This is his temporal crown. Now the Roman church has been, as we know, neutered quite a bit due to the Reformation. But that's how audacious the idea of top-down authority can be when someone claims to be the vicar of Christ with all three crowns.

These, this was the reality at the time of the Reformation. Other things we had, as I mentioned, the three popes. This is a page of a book called The History of the World. That was known as the Nuremberg Chronicle. Hartman Shadel was the author.

Anton Kroeburger was the printer, who was one of the heroes of the pre-reformation, that is Anton Krowberger. But it's describing the history of the world. This goes to the early 1400s where there's two rival popes and then they hold a council to decide who's going to be the right Pope and of course they come up with a third pope. And so these anti-popes, we would say, are calling each other the Antichrist. Now I always remind my Roman Catholic brothers that when it comes to casting popes with the charge Antichrist, it was not invented by Luther or the Protestants.

It was invented by one Pope against the other. So they had a little push back there that always gets them to take back. This was also in the Nuremberg Chronicle. This is the Hussite heresy and the key villain here is a little illustration of this guy named John Wycliffe who they say is the source of all this heresy. And the heresy is he's bringing another authority into the mix which is God's word.

This affects John Hoose and it affects many, many people. What's interesting about this, this is printed, this is on the press when Columbus is across the ocean, making his discoveries. This is pre-Reformation and they're describing, they call him a heretic, they call Wycliffe and Hous heretics, but by simple description, you're drawn to these men because they're being severely persecuted for no reason. So although it's men as propaganda against them, it's useful for them. This is causing a pre-Reformation in the heart of Englishmen.

And they'd be Englishmen in all Northern Europeans. Case in point is another book printed in the late 1400s. This was first printed in 1493, again when Columbus is coming back. It's translated into Latin in 1497. These are leaves out of that.

It's Sebastian Brant, another German. His book called A Ship of Fools, and it's a parody on the church. Again these critics are out there saying they are misusing their authority. Brant in this illustration is showing some church men who are dressed in jester's hats which I find very interesting But these are members of the Roman Catholic Church throwing someone in a gunny sack representing persecution. We're trying to shut these guys up.

So we can find that the tension is in the air in the 1490s. This is a picture of the clergy leading some innocent people into a ship. Now it's called ship of fools because the Latin word is nave. Now nave can mean an idiot, which is where they get fools. There's also a nave on a ship, so it's the idea of an analogy.

But what else has a nave? A church has a nave. So it's a triple pun. A ship of fools is a church as it existed in the 1400s. So it's very sarcastical.

Anton Krowberger, who printed many of these, was also the greatest printer of Bibles in Latin. We know Gutenberg and Faust and Schofer invented movable type in the first book, thank God, that was published. I cannot imagine printers sitting around, what do you want to print for the first book? Let's print the Bible, which is like an amazing task. But they did it, and history will record the first printed book in the western world was the Bible.

Anton Kroeburger, another German, printed many, many editions. This is his smaller version of the Bible. Those Gutenberg Bibles were huge by comparison. These are carryable or usable at home. Now who's buying these?

Businessmen. Men who are conducting business that Read Latin because that was the language in which you did business. But they're reading the Bible and understanding it themselves. So you find this wealth of truth and rightful authority you find in scriptures opposing the system that's all around them. The problem is there's a frustration with that.

They don't know what to do with it. There's inconsistencies but there's no answer until God sends the men and God sent them to conduct the Reformation. This is a Bible that very few people know about. This was printed the year Martin Luther was born. It's the first printing of a Bible in the German language.

So the Bible existed in that language, again printed by Anton Kroeber, usually with pictures because you would read the Bible to people who are illiterate so they use these tools to get an increased interest in that. But I'd like to just conclude this session and we'll pick it up next time with Luther. There's a volcano under the ground of western society and its truth is ready to bubble up. I'm of the convention, as many Englishmen would. If Luther hadn't been around, it would have boiled up elsewhere.

If you think of the chronology, 1516, Desiderius Erasmus publishes the first Greek New Testament the year before Martin Luther's 95 thesis and men in England are being converted based on that scripture so it's gonna happen I look at it as a volcano. You know how a volcano will build and build and build and explode? Well it happened to explode with Martin Luther, the right man at the right time. I mean you have to have somebody as bombastic as him to conduct such a thing and stand down all opposition. But God sends various men, various women, to do His work and thank God that He does it because if you were to ask Luther, Calvin, the English, and others who conducted the Reformation who we should look to thanks, they would tell us without a doubt that God sent this thing called the Reformation to restore biblical lines of authority in the church.

Thank you for listening to this presentation of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches. We invite you to visit our website at www.ncfic.org, where you can keep up to date on what is new, as well as find articles, videos, audio sermons, and much more at no charge. The NCFIC exists to proclaim the sufficiency of scripture for both church and family life.