Speaker 1not long ago i found out that some of my church members were having a poker night and that they were gambling at that poker night well i didn't like that very much i was talking about this with one of my pastors when i realized that i didn't actually have a biblical argument against gambling i just had more of a feeling a moral intuition well that's a problem because as christians we're supposed to examine all things in light of scripture we're supposed to be bereans so i went back to the drawing board i examined the scriptures to see what they had to say about betting about gambling that was a little tricky because the word gamble isn't anywhere in the bible but that doesn't mean that the scriptures don't have anything to say about the practice of gambling to the contrary they have much to say about things closely connected to gambling like wealth acquisition wise stewardship luck and providence greed and so much more so after many conversations with my local church pastors we cobbled all of the data together into a little resource for you called you want to bet from courier publishing it's out now and i would highly recommend that you buy a copy for yourself and for a christian friend or even use it in your small group or sunday school class as a means of discipling one another in the truth of god's word as it pertains to gambling all right we're back with another episode of the room for nuance podcast i'm sean demars here with my special guest nick needham hi hi there would you mind open us in prayer brother oh
Speaker 2christ our god risen from the dead we give you thanks for your multitude of blessings both temporal and eternal we ask now as we speak about things that are important to us things perhaps things of an eternal nature that your blessing may rest upon us and that you may prosper your kingdom and we ask this for your glory's
Speaker 1sake amen amen well i we interview different kinds of people for different reasons but i want to just unashamedly say at the outset of our interview today that the reason why i wanted to interview you brother is because uh your five volume work is there a sixth volume the
Speaker 2sixth volume is being written okay not
Speaker 1even
Speaker 2as we speak but it's being written
Speaker 1it's being written yes your five volume series two thousand years of christ power i think is a tremendous gift to the church and my hope and prayer is that every person who watches or listens to this episode will immediately go out and buy all five volumes and set to work on reading them and sharing them and promoting them because i believe that they are a true gift to the church well for a
Speaker 2fee i can sign them yes yes
Speaker 1yes it's a rare thing to have a work on church history that is uh and i don't mean this i mean this in the best possible way entertaining accessible yet rigorous and i think that's what you've given us
Speaker 2yeah do you know the genesis of those volumes no sir um i taught for a while in a nigerian seminary and i was very hard pressed to recommend books to my nigerian students because i found that the books tended to fall into one of two categories on the one hand you've got the rigorous and scholarly books but they weren't very readable or accessible not for my nigerian students whom english was a second language and on the other hand you had the books that were readable and accessible but they lacked the scholarship and the rigor so when i got back to england i contacted a friend of mine in in publishing and i said look i think there's a gap in the market here uh somebody ought to be able to write a church history series which combines these attributes it should be scholarly and rigorous but it should also be relatively easy to read and relatively accessible and my friend john appleby who's now passed into glory said yeah that is an excellent idea nick and you're going to write it oh right so that that's how that began uh when
Speaker 1did you start working on them
Speaker 2oh this would have been back in the mid-1990s volume one appeared in roughly 1998 ish wow so steady as she goes huh yeah and then slowly yeah the other volumes have appeared and i'm working on volume six at the moment which is on the 19th century volume six of two thousand years of christ well sorry
Speaker 1excuse me six of seven what's the total count yeah i'm
Speaker 2not going to go beyond the 19th century in this six volumes so in theory yes there will be a seventh god willing yes how old are you that's a kind of rude question oh i'm sorry i'm
Speaker 1american so that's kind of the language i traffic in no
Speaker 2i'm only joking gotta get used to my sense of humor oh i'm excited yeah
Speaker 1i'm excited to figure it out you're in your 60s okay oh there's plenty of time to finish you could do 40 volumes i bet tell me a little bit about the title uh 2000 that was john appleby
Speaker 2um the fellow who was the inspiration behind it all um the pub that he worked he headed up this publishing house um grace publications which in theory is in fact still my publisher although the books are now printed here at christian focus so he came up with the title and i just i just went with it so to to demonstrate that over the past two thousand years christ has always been at work there has always been in some shape or form a church so then that was the idea behind the title and as i say i just
Speaker 1ran with it yeah how did you come to
Speaker 2know the lord right well um i had a kind of loose anglican upbringing in my childhood um my parents took me to the local parish church this was in london uh i don't remember an awful lot about it to be honest uh i know enough about it to know that it was anglo-catholic so i remember the the overpowering smell of incense and this huge complex ornate altar and all this kind of stuff um but when i was about seven the family moved out of that area and for some reason which i i've never been able to get the to the bottom of my parents just stopped going to church at that point and so so did i so at that point i was a kind of a a very very young lapsed anglican um then when i went into my teenage years and my mind began to awaken i started to to to think about all the great questions you know does the universe have a meaning do i have a meaning is there a god is there is there an objective morality and all that kind of thing um and i quite soon became an argent theist i remember arguing with my atheist friends about the existence of god but the god in whom i believed at this point kind of a deist god a non-interfering far-off sort of deity who left me dead in sins and trespasses of course there's no redeeming power in a deist gospel um but then i discovered the writings of c.s lewis uh remember it's three three books i read uh the screw tape letters screw tape proposes a toast and other essays and the great divorce and these just revolutionized my whole way of looking at reality i would say lewis christianized my intellect and then very shortly after reading those three books i read a book called the great divorce and i read a book called the great divorce the intellectual conversion penetrated down into my heart and i became not just an intellectual believer but a heart believer and i was at the age of 16 when that happened um and thereafter the first thing i did was i this is in the days this was in the days before the internet before amazon you know this is the 1970s so i just went scouring the bookshops trying to find everything c.s lewis had written and you know he built up this collection of c.s lewis books uh i remember once i was in a seaside coastal town looking at their collection of books in one of their bookshops now i found a c.s lewis book and i was so overwhelmed with enthusiasm i picked it up and ran away with it without paying for it because i was trying to find my parents so they would give me the money to pay for it and then when they gave me the money i ran back to the shop with the book and paid for it but that almost became an act of theft yes but not quite um and then not long after that i began serious bible reading although it wasn't a particularly good translation i read at that time uh and interestingly all of this happened outside the context of any any connection with a church this was all very individual at this point but then eventually it was borne in upon me that you know i really should be associating with other christians and so i start reluctantly i would have to say i started church going as well so this was the nine the mid-1970s we're talking about here yeah so that's how it all happened did
Speaker 1you end up in the anglican church
Speaker 2again at first yeah yeah um because our local parish church did have uh in the church of england you've got this system whereby the the senior pastor is called a vicar and the assistant pastor is called a curate and our local parish church had an evangelical curate who ran the church's youth group so i mean i was young at that point believe it or not So when I went to this church, I, of course, gravitated to the evangelical youth group with the evangelical curate.
Speaker 1Was the vicar not evangelical?
Speaker 2Well, to this day, to be honest, I don't really know what he was. I think he was a bit of everything. Very, very eclectic. That sounds not evangelical to me. I don't think you would say he was a card-carrying evangelical. Although occasionally he would preach a sermon, which you would say, well, that's evangelical. But after a couple of years of that, I kind of got rather disillusioned with it. And by then I discovered the reformers. And I remember reading Luther's Bondage of the Will. I started reading Calvin's Institutes. And I thought, well, this is really the kind of Christianity that I want to experience in terms of church life. So I forsook that Anglican church and began trying to find a local reformed church, which I did. It was a local reformed Baptist church. With an excellent minister, a great preacher. And so I attached myself to that congregation. And that then coincided with my coming up to Scotland to study at university, which was in Edinburgh. And I attached myself to an evangelical Church of Scotland congregation, which again had a very, very fine expository preaching ministry.
Speaker 1And then how did you get into writing history?
Speaker 2Yeah, well, writing history, well. Teaching history. Okay, the teaching began first. When I was doing my PhD at Edinburgh University, for some reason, there were difficulties getting all the classes covered by the lecturers. So they asked some of their PhD students if they would step in and help. So I ended up teaching a semester, I think it was a one semester course, on Zwingli and the Reformation in Zurich. And then a few years later, when I was at the Scottish Baptist College in Glasgow, something similar happened. I was there doing vocational training to become a Baptist minister. The principal of the college fell ill and he asked me to step in and teach the systematic theology class. But because of my historian's training, Okay. the systematic theology class was cancelled. So the systematic theology class was half systematic theology and half historical theology. And then the friend I mentioned earlier, John Appleby, of Grace Publications, they were running this series of books where great Christian classics would be translated, as it were, into modern accessible English, although they had been written originally in English. And so I did a couple of those. I did Jonathan Edwards' Treatise on Religious Affections, which was published as The Experience that Counts. And I did Benjamin Morgan Palmer's book on prayer, that was called What Happens When I Pray, I think. And then shortly after doing those books, that was when I went off to Nigeria to teach in a denominational seminary out there. And that was the genesis of 2000 Years of Christ's Power.
Speaker 1Did you live in Nigeria or was that just— No, no, I lived there.
Speaker 2For how long? I was there for one semester. It was a seminary that served the denomination, the Kwa-Ibo denomination. It's in the south of Nigeria. Nigeria is divided up into three kind of religious blocks. So in the north, it's largely Islamic. And in the south, you've got a Protestant block and a Roman Catholic block. So the Kwa-Ibo denomination is obviously Protestant. An interesting denomination, actually, because it has a Presbyterian form of church government, but practices believers' baptism. So it's kind of half and half. And that was because the founder of the denomination, Samuel Bill, was a Presbyterian. But as I understand it, on his journey out to Nigeria, he gave up believing in infant baptism. So when he arrived in Nigeria, he found himself to be still believing in Presbyterian church government, but he's also a Baptist. So he founded this half and half denomination. Yeah. Which is
Speaker 1kind of the inverse of many congregationalists who baptize infants, but don't hold to a Presbyterian form of government. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then did you pastor?
Speaker 2Yes. When I got back from Nigeria, I became an assistant pastor in a Reformed Baptist church in London. And I was there from 1996 to 1999. And then I got this invitation from Highland Theological College, or as it was in those days, Highland Theological Institute. Which was in Elgin at that time, and they'd just created a new chair of church history. So they invited me to come up for an interview, and I came up. I was interviewed, and then immediately after the interview, they offered me the job. So I became the church history tutor in Highland Theological College, and I did that full-time for five years. And then I went part-time, which happened at the same time as being called to the church. And then I went part-time, which happened at the same time as being called by my own church to become their pastor, because our pastor had stepped down. And in fact, I was doing virtually all the preaching. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, they asked me to fill in, to help out, and then they just kept on asking me to help out. Because, you know, they asked me to fill in, to help out, and then eventually it wasn't it. How do you feel about doing this every Sunday? So full-time pastor at that point, and part-time still teaching in the Highland College.
Speaker 1Yeah. And then is that how you spent the rest of your career, pastoring and teaching?
Speaker 2Most of the rest of it, but then I became quite ill about five or six years ago. I'm sorry, brother. So I stepped down from the pastorate, and I increasingly stepped back from my various commitments in the college. And I increasingly stepped back from my various commitments in the college. So I don't actually do any of the lecturing at the college anymore. I'm now a supervisor. So I supervise dissertations, projects, and PhDs. Yeah. But I don't actually lecture any longer.
Speaker 1And then you write when you have the time.
Speaker 2And my energy is given over to 2,000 Years of Christ's Power. But I do have another job. I work for the Christian Institute in the north of England, which is an organization devoted basically to defending religious liberty.
Speaker 1Hmm. That's important.
Speaker 2I can't remember what my job title is. I'm some kind of researcher. It's a grandiose title. It's something like researcher and theological consultant or something bizarre. But yeah, I work for them three days a week from home. Okay. If I'm allowed to plug them, great organization.
Speaker 1Yeah, you are allowed. Thank you. Yes. When you step back and look at everything that you've worked on thus far in the five volumes, what surprised you the most? Was there anything new that you discovered as you were synthesizing? That's a good question.
Speaker 2Has anything surprised me or really stood out to me? Maybe one of the things is finding individuals outside my own tradition, outside my own religious trials. Who I really resonate with and think, yeah, you know, he's not a man of my churchmanship or my religious tradition at all. But he seems to have had the root of the matter in him. This was a man of faith and godliness. And so I've got to tip my hat to him and give him a good write-up. Yeah. So, for example, when I was doing volume five, there's a great Russian Orthodox figure, Tikhon of Zdonsk. And I really warmed to Tikhon. I thought he was fantastic. So I gave him a good write-up in volume five. Certainly one of the heroes of the faith in my estimation. Interestingly, he'd been deeply impacted by Lutheran pietism, which is rather unusual. But in the 18th century, you get this to-ing and fro-ing between Lutheranism and Eastern Orthodoxy, which you don't get anymore. But the boundaries were much more porous in the 18th century. And Tikhon was one of the beneficiaries of that. He read Lutheran pietist literature. And was kind of bowled over by how good it was. And then tried to reproduce it within the Russian Orthodox context. So, yeah, that kind of thing has happened. Unexpected heroes of the faith. Yeah. I was
Speaker 1surprised, pleasantly surprised, to find that your work did deal quite significantly with the church in the East. It seems like that's often lacking.
Speaker 2I agree. I wanted to try as far as possible to give parity of treatment between East and West. It hasn't quite worked out as parity of treatment because it's partly a problem of historiography. So much has been written on Western church history. And comparatively, at least for an English speaker, so little on Eastern church history. And the story of Western church history is so much more diverse. I mean, the story of Eastern church history is just the Eastern church, really. In the West, you know, you've got Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, the Reformed Church, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Anabaptists. It just becomes very, very diverse. So you're trying to write half a dozen different stories. And that means that the space you're giving to them expands in order to accommodate. So what's happened now is that from the 16th century onwards, there will always be one chapter on the Eastern church where I do try to say everything I think is worth saying. worth saying about what was going on in the East.
Speaker 1What do you think is the most important thing to say about the East?
Speaker 2Don't dismiss it casually. Take it seriously as an expression of Christianity, even if you don't agree with it. Because not only is it old and venerable, it continually renews itself and sometimes produces amazingly good theologians or spiritual writers like Ticon.
Speaker 1Does the East deny justification by faith alone?
Speaker 2Well that's another good question. They've never really had a controversy over that. It's usually controversies that produce clarity. Correct. There's never been a controversy in the East about justification by faith. So you actually find different attitudes to this doctrine, just depending on where you're going, who you're talking to, which sources you're using. So today, if you speak to a representative of Eastern Orthodoxy, he might be kind of quite indifferent about justification by faith. I remember a friend of mine down in England, a Reformed friend, he went to speak to his local Eastern Orthodox priest as an exercise in sort of gracious but cautious ecumenism. And he obviously asked him about justification by faith and he explained it fully. And the priests response was, "Yeah, if you want to believe that, that's fine. But the important thing is to worship the Trinity." So just a completely different way of looking at things. But then some Eastern Orthodox, especially converts, can be quite polemical against justification by faith. And then some Orthodox, without using the language, will actually teach it. I was once present where an Eastern Orthodox abbot was preaching. And I sat there through his sermon doing endless double-takes, thinking, "This guy's teaching justification by faith. He's not using the words, but this is what he's teaching. This guy's been reading Luther." It was an amazing experience. One of the most beautiful expressions of justification by faith I've ever heard, but he didn't actually say "justification by faith." By faith alone.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. I seem to remember reading somewhere, during the time of the Reformation, Lutherans tried to extend an olive branch out to the Church of the East. And I think that was actually the main sticking point, the thing that kind of stopped everything dead in the water, justification in conversations.
Speaker 2Yeah, this was the Lutherans of Tubingen University. And they had a quite lengthy exchange of letters with the then-patriarch of the Church of the East. And they had a quite lengthy exchange of letters with the then-patriarch of Constantinople, whose name eludes me. And you can get this correspondence today. It's all been translated into English, and it's all been put into one volume by an Eastern Orthodox figure, whose name also eludes me. His first name's George. That's not very helpful, is it? But, I mean, they did discuss justification by faith. But actually, interestingly, that wasn't the sticking point. Okay. Because what happened was, the Lutherans very quickly, came to the conclusion, "Well, you guys may not use this language, justification by faith, but you actually are teaching the same thing, because you're saying that the mercy of God in Jesus Christ is our only hope of salvation." And the sticking points proved to be the bondage of the will, so monergism versus synergism. That was a big sticking point. And things like the veneration of icons and the invocation of saints. Mm. So eventually that exchange of views did break down. Yeah. But it's always fascinated me that the area where you would have thought it would break down, justification by faith, wasn't the area where it broke down. It was on these other issues. And that's always been one of my big sticking points with orthodoxy as well, is monergism. Yeah. Because I'm a fairly convinced monergist, and orthodoxy is quite synergistic.
Speaker 1Yeah. Chatting with Ian Hamilton last night, and— Good man. Good man. Good interview. Great accent. He said that you tend to lean more into the Eastern view when it comes to the filioque clause. Can you explain what that is and how you think through that?
Speaker 2Yeah. Well, the original wording of the Nicene Creed, when it came to the section on the Spirit, simply said, "who proceeds from the Father." Now, a couple of hundred years later, the phrase "and from the Son" began to be inserted into the Creed in various parts of the Western church. And then eventually, around about, I think it was in the time of Charlemagne, so you're talking about the kind of eighth, ninth century, that was made kind of official, that the Western version of the Creed is going to be "the Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son," and in Latin, "and from the Son" is filioque. So that's why it's called the Filioque. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So that's why it's called the Filioque clause. Now, the East protested against this for two reasons. One, one portion of the church, vis the Western, has no right unilaterally to alter an ecumenical creed. Least of all, the Nicene Creed, which is the great ecumenical creed, it's the creed of creeds. Mm-hmm. So if there's going to be any alteration, it has to be done by the whole church, not by the Western half of the church. Mm-hmm. And then second problem, this alteration's false anyway. The Spirit does not proceed from the Father and from the Son within the ontological Trinity. He proceeds from the Father alone. And I agree with both of those reasons. But not because I'm wedded to any kind of theology of tradition, it's just I've been convinced by biblical exegesis that the Spirit, well, the way I would put it, the Spirit proceeds from the Father to the Son. That's what we see. In the incarnate Christ, the Father anoints the Son with the Spirit, which is why he's called Christ, the Anointed One. So the Spirit proceeds from the Father to the Son, and then from the Son to the Church. That's the pattern I see. So I think that the Eastern view on that specific point… Yes. …is more biblical. But I've got problems with Eastern theology in other areas. Sure, sure, sure. Which is why I haven't crossed, what'd they say, I haven't swum the Bosphorus.
Speaker 1When… When this was happening, was it equal parts theological disagreement and political stuff, or was it more political, less theological? On this specific point? Yes, on this specific point.
Speaker 2No, well, it was theological, but it didn't just involve what is the correct interpretation of the Bible. It also included how does the church relate to its creeds, which if you like, that's ecclesiopolitics. Rather than secular politics.
Speaker 1When the church in the West decided upon the Filioque Clause, was there a council, or was it just sort of, it had just become universally adopted organically over time?
Speaker 2At first, there was this process of organic adoption. And then in the time of Charlemagne, who was the first of the Holy Roman Emperors, it kind of became official. And then in the early 11th century, can't remember which pope it was, one of the popes finally agreed that yes, we should recite the Filioque Clause in the Nicene Creed. So this is, this isn't just the greatest Christian political power saying so, this is now the papacy as well saying so. So it was a long, slow process, really, whereby the West was converted to this belief in the Filioque Clause. And, and… It was one of the main issues whereby in 1054, the East and the West went their separate ways. They just fellowshiped each other in 1054, the great East-Westism. And that was one of the major issues. The other major issue was the power of the papacy, which the East has never been that fond of, to put it mildly.
Speaker 1They had their own, what's the guy called in the East?
Speaker 2Well, they don't have an equivalent of the pope in the East. No, not an equivalent, but… The most important patriarch historically would be the patriarch of Constantinople. But that's only because Constantinople was the political capital of the Eastern Empire, the Byzantine Empire. But he's not actually a pope, you know, in terms of the theory of church government. The theory of church government in the East, classically, was that there are five patriarchs: Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. And the five patriarchs should collectively and jointly offer leadership to the church. So they didn't like it when one of them said, "Well, it's me, you know, I don't want to blow the other five. I offer guidance to the church, i.e. the patriarch of Rome." And they arrived
Speaker 1at those five patriarchs for historical and maybe somewhat theological reasons, but more probably historical and political?
Speaker 2There was a historical process whereby the bishops of those five cities were slowly elevated above all other bishops. So they acquired this title of patriarch. Which is like, sort of, the ultimate bishop kind of thing. But there were five of them, not just one of them. And the patriarch of Alexandria, interestingly, was also called pope so you've got the popes of alexandria there's all of the popes of rome which can be very confusing when you first come across it yeah and that's still true today the the head of the coptic orthodox church in alexandria is a pope it's just not the roman pope it's the coptic pope
Speaker 1so speaking of developments yeah when i was reading through the first three maybe four volumes uh i would just i had a red pen yeah and i would uh mark or underline somehow and then put rca next to any point in the in the work where it felt like this was a significant contribution to the accretions what does rca mean uh roman catholic accretion ah okay yes yes yes sorry i should have spelled that out so um you know the roman catholic church some some evangelicals think well you know and 500 you know and 500 a.d somebody just snapped their fingers and then you had all these things in place well no it actually took you know a thousand years of correct this error on top of that error on top of the third error yes but here's the question that i've never really been able to figure out like exactly when was the first pope in the modern sense
Speaker 2of in the modern sense of the term
Speaker 1not just whoever
Speaker 2has the bishopric in rome well the first pope officially to designate himself as the vicar of christ was innocent the third in what year uh 1198 to 1214 i think were his dates um prior to that the normal title for a pope was the vicar of saint peter the pope stands in the place of peter now innocent upped the stakes as it were and he actually said quite openly no i'm not the vicar of peter or any man i am the vicar of saint peter i am the vicar of saint peter the vicar of christ himself so at that point the claims become far more sweeping and of course for us far more objectionable um i wouldn't object so much to the vicar of saint peter i mean i would still object to it but it's not right it's not something that would send me into cosmic paroxysms but you know the vicar of christ that really is a step too far isn't it do we know who the first
Speaker 1one to claim to be the vicar of peter is or is that kind of lost to history
Speaker 2well that's probably much older actually um that might go back i'd need to check on this i've got a feeling that that might even go back to someone like leo the great who's one of the early church fathers who happened also to be the bishop of rome so vicar of peter is much older yeah um but even then uh um when you're talking about someone who's who's maybe claiming that title in in say the fifth century it still doesn't have the resonance that it came to have later yeah because you know that term accretion it it did begin to gather to itself more and more notions of power authority and jurisdiction so by the time you get to the the great east west schism in 1054 which is before the popes were claiming to be the vicar of christ uh it's still vicar of saint peter at that point but but the popes are claiming a kind of uh imperial universal dominion over the whole church um which they they hadn't done originally so there's been a growth yeah the title is the same but but the growth in the conception involved in that title right just expands and expands and expands yeah so it's not surprising really eventually that they decide well actually i'm not the vicar of peter and i'm the vicar of
Speaker 1christ i remember reading augustine on the donna during the donna controversy and some uh some bishops from rome came down bishops or some some authority figures from rome came down and hobnobbed with augustine about the issue and augustine basically wrote and was like they i mean they can come and share their opinions but they don't have any binding authority over us
Speaker 2and well augustine didn't take the what what became the traditional papal exegesis of you are peter and on this rock i will build my church um as i recollect i think he probably interpreted the rock as being peter's faith peter's confession of faith which in fact that's the much more normal exegesis among the
Speaker 1fathers oh among the father i thought you were just gonna say of the bible that's just the way
Speaker 2to read it but it's also the correct biblical interpretation in my view but but just to take it within the the context of the fathers the majority report is that the rock is peter's confession of faith right um so you find you know john chrysostom takes that view and i can't off the top of my head but you know that that is the majority report among the fathers it's peter's faith which is the rock on which the church is built that's not to say the other view wasn't present sure but it was the minority report but but in the west that then became not just the majority report eventually but the universal report yeah so again you get this expansion yeah of claims earlier you
Speaker 1brought up the coptic church i feel like we don't hear a lot about them and i'm not sure that you're a subject matter expert but is there anything what did you find as you studied them in their history well the coptic
Speaker 2church are what is known as they're one of the what is known as the meophysite churches so they christology to to to us to the eastern orthodox and to roman catholics meophysites hold that christ now there's a lot of semantics here okay okay i'm giving you a crude destination meophysites hold that we would hold christ has two natures it's got a human nature and a divine nature which are united and bound together in the unity of his person person of the trinity now the meophysite churches which includes the cops they were told no when the two natures were united in his one person the natures themselves were so fused together they became a single nature so in greek physite physis that's nature and mia is one so one nature an earlier tradition called the monophysites but for some reason they don't like that so the politically correct term is now meophysite so it's the idea that christ has one nature which has a human and a divine aspect but it's one nature not two natures that's quite quite different from what is confessed in the creed of calcidon or the formula or the definition of calcidon so what what distinguishes the meophysite churches creedally is they reject calcidon not two natures one nature a divine hyphen human nature at least theoretically that's still what the coptic orthodox church would hold although at grassroots level it may not be what your average coptic orthodox believer holds because he might i don't know he's probably not
Speaker 1thinking much about the nature
Speaker 2yeah i don't want to be patronizing but you know he might not be thinking about these possibly abstruse theological issues i don't think
Speaker 1the average member of my church yeah he's thinking about these things
Speaker 2yeah and in egypt of course the great thing they're really thinking about is how do we just survive in a country where we're perpetually subjected to harassment and persecution yeah but that's what differentiates the coptic church from the rest of the eastern tradition so there are other meophysite churches in the east so for example the ethiopian orthodox church is also meophysite and the armenian orthodox church as i recollect is meophysite and so that group of churches are not called eastern orthodox because eastern orthodoxy holds to calcedon as we do so they're called oriental orthodox now when i first came across that i thought well that's a bit silly because oriental means eastern you know so we've got the eastern orthodox and the oriental orthodox but that's it's just a way of differentiating so you've got these oriental orthodox churches in the east which don't hold to calcedon
Speaker 1uh rome and well rome does hold to calcedon sure sure sure but i'm thinking okay roman catholicism eastern orthodoxy do they view themselves in any way in communion with these oriental orthodox churches well
Speaker 2historically no yeah um but with the advent of the modern ecumenical movement um perhaps i mean officially and theoretically roman catholics if they're going to be a part of the modern ecumenical movement they're going to be a part of the modern ecumenical movement they're going to be a part of the modern ecumenical movement they're going by the second vatican council they should look upon us protestants as just separated brethren not heretics right and i assume the same would apply to the mea physites they would say they're separated brethren rather than heretics that's not been the normal historic latitude until the advent of modern ecumenism roman catholics would have regarded the mea mea physite churches as heretical bodies um or at best schismatic but probably heretical as i say ecumenism has made a huge difference here and that applies to so many eastern orthodox world those who were involved in the world council of churches would now take a much softer line i think towards the mere physites yeah whereas the east those eastern orthodox who are not involved in the world council of churches i think would maintain the old more hard line attitude no this this is heresy yeah what is your favorite
Speaker 1era of church history well i
Speaker 2don't really have one um i've kind of grown to like all of them really um but if i look back on my own personal history uh the era which shaped me was the patristic era because almost immediately after my conversion um i discovered these two books in my school library the early christian fathers and the later christian fathers by a scholar called bettanson and these two volumes go through all the major fathers of the early church one by one and provide extracts and quotations from their writings under topical headings so you get like a mini systematic theology of each father's writings and i read both those volumes uh when i was about 16 17 so i was reading c.s lewis on the one side i was reading bettanson on the other so i was plunged into all these early church controversies about the Trinity and Christology, and that really just, I think, fundamentally shaped my mind. So in terms of influence and impact, I would say the patristic era is the one that has meant the most to me. You were quite the precocious 16-year-old. This was in the day when
Speaker 1people used to read books. Yeah, that's so funny. Okay, if someone reads all five, soon to be six, volumes, what do you hope to, hmm, let me ask it this way. Yeah. What do you hope they understand about church history that perhaps they didn't know before?
Speaker 2That we were not born yesterday. It's so easy to fall into a mindset whereby, if you're an evangelical, at best, your view of church history is it began in the year 1517, when Luther posted up the 95 Theses. At worst, it began when your church was founded. Right. About 40 or 50 years ago. Now, if I can just get people to see that that's basically wrong, and it falsifies God's promises that the gates of Hades will never prevail against his people, I don't identify the church necessarily with one specific institution. The church is the people of God. Sure. The people of God have always been there for 2,000 years, in one way, shape, form, or another. God has always had his people on earth, and if we want to, in any sense, have, you know, a perception of who we are, it involves a perception of where we've come from, and we haven't come from the year 1517. We haven't come from when our congregation was founded. We've come from when Christ and the Apostles founded the church, and everything that followed: the early church fathers and the Middle Ages, as well as the Reformation and the Puritan era and the Revival era, and so on. So, I'd like people to get that much wider understanding of what constitutes our history as a people.
Speaker 1Hmm. What was the most difficult era to write about as you were doing your research and writing? Well, actually, maybe, in some ways,
Speaker 2the volume in the 18th century, which was, you know, any Evangelical would understand the 18th century. Yeah. In terms of—in Britain, it's the age of the Evangelical Revival, which you call the Great Awakening in America, but it's the same thing, just different names. Because I've always had mixed feelings about the Revival and the Awakening. I mean, on the one hand, I think that it would be—it is undeniable that myriads of people who wrote about the Great Awakening in the 18th century wrote about the Great Revival. I mean, on the one hand, I think that it would be—it is undeniable that myriads of people were truly converted and the Holy Spirit was at work. I mean, to me, in that sense, these were the great works of God, but there were just some elements about the Revival and the Awakening which kind of, at least potentially, I mean, on the one hand, I think that it would be—it is undeniable that myriads of people were truly converted and the Holy Spirit was at work. They put a kink in people's vision and understanding of Christianity in the sense that—well, put it this way. The great temptation became that the preacher, rather than being fundamentally a proclaimer of truth, which is how it had always been understood, now became an agent of experience. He was facilitating experience. I think that's quite wrong and quite dangerous. Yes. So I hold the older understanding that the preacher, no, he's a proclaimer of truth. Even if nobody ends up experiencing it, well, that's up to them. It's their unbelief. Correct. But that's his role. He's not a facilitator of an experience. He's a proclaimer of the truth of God in Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1Who is the most underrated and overrated character that you wrote about?
Speaker 2Oh, boy. Underrated and overrated. Well, maybe I can answer it this way. Okay. Because I don't want to diss anybody. If you think about the Reformers and everything that flowed out of the Reformation, clearly in many ways, the Reformation was a great critique of medieval Christianity. But there was one figure in the medieval church who almost universally— was spared the criticisms, or at least the major ones, and was looked upon as being largely, if not wholly, a fountain of great wisdom and truth. Bernard of Clairvaux. So Luther and Calvin, it would be true and fair to say, in significant senses, they were disciples of Bernard. They were Bernardine in their theology and spirituality. Bernard himself was an Augustinian. I don't mean he belonged to the Augustinian order. He didn't belong to the Cistercian order, but in his theology. Predestinarian justification. He believed in monogism. And, in fact, there is a vein of teaching in Bernard which does lean towards what you would say was a kind of justification by faith kind of theology. So, what I—this might be controversial. You can edit this out. It's too controversial. Okay. That— A lot of Reform people today seem to want to canonize Thomas Aquinas as the great theologian of the Middle Ages. And I would say, well, yeah, Thomas was a great theologian, but if you go back to the Reformers, who was the great theologian for them in the Middle Ages? Well, it wasn't Thomas. I mean, Luther had a very bad opinion of Thomas, and Calvin doesn't quote Thomas much, if at all, but it's Bernard who was the great theologian and the great devotional writer. For Luther and Calvin. So, let's not, you know— Yes. Let's not lose the proper perspective here. If we want to be loyal sons of the Reformation, we really ought to—I mean, I don't think we should canonize any particular theologian, but if we're going to canonize a medieval theologian, it's got to be Bernard, lads, not Thomas, okay? And I've said that.
Speaker 1That doesn't strike me as particularly controversial.
Speaker 2Depends who you're talking to. But— I have said that, so it's out there. It's out there, yeah.
Speaker 1Well, can you tell us a little bit more about—I want to say Bernard, but the way you say it sounds so much better. No, it's just the American and British pronunciations.
Speaker 2Yeah, we would say Bernard, typically. He lived in the 1100s. He wasn't the founder of the Cistercian Order of Monks, but he was the one who made that order. And during his lifetime, Western Christians, Catholics, looked much more to Bernard than to the Pope as the great leader and articulator of true faith and true spirituality. So, I mean, he had a huge impact. And he wrote works of theology and devotion, which are still studied today. Mm-hmm. So, for his Augustinian views on grace, there's a treatise called On Grace and Free Will. And for his, if you like, more devotional works, you know, spirituality, rather than strictly theology, I suppose, there's his On the Love of God. Still widely studied today and worth—both of those books are worth reading and studying. And there are—I mean, that's two. There are multitudes of others. Now, not so long ago, I trawled through Bernard's works. Trying to find purple passages, you know, great quotes from Bernard, about 300 words long. for each quote, and I amassed these quotes. And then afterwards, I looked at them, and I thought, you know, if I was being mischievous, which I am, I could give these quotes to somebody and ask them, you know, read this. And then, who do you think wrote that? Yeah. And I bet a lot of people would say, oh, that's Luther. No. It's a medieval monk who wrote that. That's Bernard of Clairvaux. It helps us to understand why Luther loved him so much. There is such a resonance between the two men. Now, that doesn't mean that Bernard, in all senses, was a proto-Protestant, because in some senses, he wasn't. I mean, he was an ardent devotee of the papacy, and he had a very ambiguous attitude towards Mariology. You know, the. The Catholic practice of how Mary functions in your faith. Because on the one hand, he did believe in asking for Mary's intercession. So that, you know, the typically Catholic view. He's not a proto-Protestant on that. But on the other hand, this is where it becomes ambiguous. He was an extremely outspoken critic of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, that Mary was conceived without sin. I mean, he really. He abominated that doctrine and went into print against it and spoke against it vehemently. Because at that point, it hadn't been canonised as a dogma. That didn't happen until 1854, was it? In the 1850s. That's when the Immaculate Conception actually became set in stone as something you have to believe if you're a Catholic. So in the medieval period, it's an opinion which you can hold, or if you like, you can not hold. Right. And Bernard was one of those who not only did not hold it, he kind of blasted those who did hold it. Because he thought it was a novel doctrine which was easily refutable from reason and scripture. So that's why I say that he's kind of ambivalent from our perspective on Mary. Yes. But when it comes to things like grace, human freedom, human salvation, works and faith, even to some degree justification, and in general piety in all of these areas, you would say Bernard's one of us. Or more correctly, we are of Bernard.
Speaker 1What do you think of the modern retrieval efforts that are going on?
Speaker 2Well, what are they trying to retrieve? Everything prior to the 20th century. I mean, define that a bit more closely. If it just means, there are lots of things we can learn from the theologians of all ages. Well, that's true. And that's part of what I hope to give to people in my church history writings. A lot of this retrievalism today, well, I'm going to end up banging a single drum here. So much of it seems to be, let's retrieve Thomas Aquinas. I said, well, yeah. See, my view is not Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas was the greatest theologian who ever lived. He was just one of the great theologians. And yeah, let's give him a place at the table. But he's there with Athanasius, the Cappadocian fathers, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Luther, Calvin. Let's have a much more collegial attitude towards the great theologians, not elevate any of them, Thomas or any of them, as the greatest theologian who ever lived. Yeah. I like something. I'm not allowed to quote Karl Barth. I like something Barth once said, there are no great theologians, there are only little theologians. And a great God. A great God, yeah.
Speaker 1You know, I think, brother, I'm no expert here, so feel free to, I'm going to throw something out and you polish it up and make it look better. It feels like, though the church has so many great theologians, it feels like few of them come with as much dangerous baggage as Aquinas. Treasury of Merit, you know.
Speaker 2Well, he does defend a lot of Catholic distinctives which were rejected by the reformers. In fact, I can only think, well, you see, I'm not, now, I'm not going to put myself forward as a Thomas expert, but the only Catholic distinctive I can think of off the top of my head that Thomas did not defend was, again, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. He rejected that. Which is interesting, isn't it? Here you've got Bernard and Thomas walking hand in hand. Neither of them thought much of the Immaculate Conception. What Thomas, now, this goes back to this question on retrieval. I guess, one of the fundamental things a lot of people, a lot of Protestants want to retrieve is something they call the Great Tradition. And included in the Great Tradition is something called the Great Tradition. It's something which is called classical theism. Now, and Thomas is a great exponent of classical theism. So aspects of classic. Get your false teeth back in. Aspects of classical theism would include things like these rational arguments for the existence of God, the way Thomas treats the Trinity. So he kind of bifurcates his treatment of God into the one God and the one God. And the threefold God. What's it? De Deo Uno, the one God, and De Deo Trino, the triune God. So first of all, you begin your treatment of God by talking about the one God. The one God who is demonstrated by the works of creation. So if you study creation, it makes you a monotheist. But there's a monotheism of the monad. Your one God is just one in every sense. But then, Revelation comes along, De Deo Trino, and shows you that this one God actually has three ways of being himself. His Father, Son, and Spirit. But this is a secondary tier of doctrine. Now, on the grounds both of Scripture and patristic theology, I would reject that approach. I think God is triune from the word go. You never begin with a one God who's not triune. The moment you, you have God, he is triune. And I would defend that from the Bible. I think in the Old Testament, there are abundant illustrations and indications that the Old Testament writers did not think of God as being a unitary monad. There's plurality in the Godhead in the Old Testament. And I would defend that from things like Genesis chapter one. We've already got some kind of distinction between God and the Spirit of God. I would defend it from things like Theophanies. We have the angel of the Lord who's clearly distinct from the Lord, God, and yet he is himself treated as God. Like he's worshipped, for example, by Joshua. And he appears to Joshua. Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament sometimes clearly attributes divinity to the Messiah. And so on and so forth. So I would say that spread and scattered through the whole of the Old Testament, there's this notion of plurality. There's this notion of plurality. in the Godhead. So no, God is never simply and simplistically one. The Old Testament, prior to the incarnation of our Lord, is already giving us this vision of a mysteriously plural Godhead. And in the New Testament, the nature of that plurality is made a lot clearer. That we're dealing with Father, Son, Spirit. So I don't like this twofold structure of the one God and the three gods. The three gods. Whoops. Well, that's what it ends up as, maybe. Sorry. Scratch that. The one God and the triune God. Yes. And you find that the idea that you deal with God as triune from the word go, I mean, that's quite patristic. I was recently meditating on a passage in Gregory of Nazianzus where he says this. It's in one of his orations where he says that, this is a loose paraphrase, I'm not quoting him here. We give our reverence to monotheism but not a monotheism restricted to one person. So for him, monotheism does not mean God is one person. For him, monotheism means a plurality of persons who all share the one essence. So it's a plural monotheism. It's not a Unitarian monotheism. So for Gregory, that's who God is. It's fundamental. So I've rabbited on a bit more about that.
Speaker 1You used the word meditated just now. You said, I was meditating on this passage. I recently saw you post on Facebook, which I enjoy. I like your. So you're like a crazy super genius but you also make really funny Facebook posts. But on a more serious note, you were talking about people who try to power through the institutes. Really, it's meant to be read slowly and meditatively.
Speaker 2Well, I think so, yes. That came out of, I can't remember which discussion board it was now. There was some refinement. forum discussion board where people are saying oh it's easy to read the institutes now you can read it in a few weeks you know i read the institutes in three weeks now and i was thinking well i'm sure it's possible to read the institutes in three or four weeks but what's the point this is speed reading and how much of that did you really absorb how much of that did you critically reflect on because the institute isn't the bible you meant to be continually to and fro calvin would have wanted this between the institutes and the bible to see the biblical basis what's being said um and so yeah it requires not speed reading but meditative reading if it's to be profitable reading that's what i'm sorry reacting
Speaker 1against there's uh sorry go ahead no no that's it that's what i was reacting against there matthew bingham has recently released a book through crossway on spiritual formation which i i love love love right and he says the reform his whole thing is like listen you don't have to go to roman catholicism or eastern orthodoxy to get the spiritual formation stuff you need it's it's all there in the good reform tradition and he talks about the reform triad uh scripture reading prayer meditation right right don't just read it turn it over in your head and work it down into your
Speaker 2heart yes and i guess that's
Speaker 1true not just of reading the scriptures but of really any meaningful
Speaker 2reading yeah one way i find helpful of doing that this is for um i suppose this is really for things that were not originally written in english uh so you're dealing with a translation um i've done this with the fathers quite a lot is um take a passage from the fathers and rewrite it yourself and put it into a much more modern and accessible form of english because that really helps you to think yeah about what you're reading to chew it over and then to express it you know if you can express it in modern english that probably shows you've understood it right i do that but just to speed power your way through it and i've
Speaker 1read it you know yes i do that with my kids when we're doing devotionals you know you you read you read a passage from ephesians and you're about to explain it to your 10 year old yes it shows you do do you really understand this that's right
Speaker 2yeah well it didn't see s lewis make remarks about that somewhere but um if you can't restate something you've read in your own words in clear english it shows you didn't understand it something to that yeah that makes sense what do
Speaker 1you think is the most misunderstood aspect of the reformation
Speaker 2most misunderstood aspect of the reformation well um in the 19th century one of my heroes john williamson nevin and his co-worker philip schaff by the way shout out to schaff's history of christianity eight volumes brilliant um they made a case that the reformation was not a bolt from the blue it wasn't a miraculous restoration of true christianity sent down from heaven it grew organically out of medieval soil now i agree with that um you can see all the ingredients of the reformation there in the middle ages and then they were all crystallized together in the 16th century now i can't remember who said this um i thought it was either nevin or schaff who said this and then someone else said no it was you who said it um the reformation was everything that was best in the medieval church correcting everything that was worst i think that's a much better way of understanding what was going on in the 16th century um it was like all the evangelical elements of medieval catholicism correcting all the non-evangelical elements yeah uh so i think one of the great misunderstandings of the reformation is that kind of the middle ages was all pure darkness and then suddenly in the 16th century the heavens opened and god miraculously recreated true christianity out of nothing well that just isn't true and it's not even true if you read the reformers because you know as i said who are they constantly quoting bernard of claire who's your favorite reformer uh well either luther or calvin i guess um luther's like bottled lightning so i like him for that reason um calvin is a kind of much more calm and judicious and capacious and spacious thinker uh and i like the way he he takes time to tease out what he's saying and what he wants you to believe and what the biblical basis is when
Speaker 1you read it when you read a good book more than once yeah you you find things in there that you hadn't seen before the same thing with watching a movie i think you can expand that idea out to when you study church history yes when you read the story 2 000 years of christ power when you read that 2 000 year long story over and over again you begin to see things that you missed patterns perhaps begin to recur oh did you experience any of that in your studies of church history like oh i never noticed i'm sure there
Speaker 2are things i never noticed the first time around which i later noticed uh the influence of bernard as one of them yeah um patterns well there does seem to be at least in the western church um maybe not so much in the east in the western church there does seem to be a recurring pattern of reform you get these waves of reform which just keep coming again and again and again um so it wasn't just you had this single uneventful line of development from the last of the apostles up to 1570 and then you had the first attempt at a reform it's like the book of judges things are bad things lord raises up yes yeah so it's a biblical pattern as well as a church historical pattern at least in the west i don't really see it so much in the east why is that do you think i don't know um i once heard this quotation i can't remember which eastern thinker said this now that for you in the west the holy spirit is the one who changes things for us in the east he's the one who stops things from changing wow so the east has a much more conservative traditional attitude um which is helpful in some ways because it means it rules out all the weird and wacky innovations not so helpful in other ways because it means you have to read back into the second century a.d the present paraphernalia yeah of orthodox life and worship oh we've never changed i mean all that was going on in the second century i don't think so they
Speaker 1didn't have church pews back then yeah yes this may be this may be too weird of a question but i'll go for it and if you don't have an answer we'll just cut it weird answer yeah there you go um who's somebody that you changed your mind about as you studied their life and doctrine in church history somebody perhaps that you liked and then came to like less or somebody that you loathed and came to appreciate i mean bernard sounds like one of them but i don't know that you loathed him um
Speaker 2okay samuel taylor coleridge uh usually today it's simply thought of as a romantic poet so you know he wrote kubla khan and he wrote the rhyme of the ancient marion and that's about it you go back to the 19th century he was regarded as a top flight philosopher and a theologian and almost everybody's being influenced by him um so now that i'm writing up the volume on the 19th century i'm going to go back to the 19th century and i'm going to go back to the 19th century and i'm going to go back to the 19th century and i'm going to go back to the 19th century and i'm going to go back to the 19th century century one of the things i want to do is try to communicate what uh an important and influential theologian coleridge was so in my section on oops i'm knocking the microphone over there in my core original enthusiasm uh when i when i'm in my section on english christianity in the 19th century first person i deal with the coleridge uh and i'm not the first to have done that there's a really great late 19th century work by someone called tullock uh so he was a scottish church historian and he wrote a really fantastic book on um 19th century scottish not scottish british church history it's currents of religious thought my memory has gone it's fine anyways tullock currents of religious thought um the first person he deals with in the opening chapter is coleridge because he thinks, got to begin here because this column Coleridge is so seminal for the whole of the 19th century. So my estimate of Coleridge as a theologian as well as a poet has become really hugely expanded. I already, to be honest, I already knew he was a theologian because when I was a theology student back in the age of the dinosaurs, I read one of his great theology books, which is called Aids to Reflection. But what I now realise is that everybody was reading it. This wasn't just something Nick Needham was doing when he was 20 years old. So I've changed my mind about Coleridge in the sense that I've come to esteem him as one of the great creative theological influencers of the whole 19th century. And here's an interesting point. When Coleridge's collected writings came to be gathered together, I think it was seven volumes, who was it who presided over that exercise and collected them all together and edited them? WGT Shedd, great 19th century American Reformed theologian, one of the greatest. And in the volume that collects together Coleridge's theology, he wrote a brilliant introductory essay on Coleridge the theologian, which I would advise everybody to read, if I may do so. You may. So that's just one example of somebody. Yes. Somebody where my perception really changed.
Speaker 1Yeah. It's very interesting to hear about people. So, for example, I'm certainly no expert, but I like to think I know more about church history than the average man. Yeah. And I've never heard that name. So there can be this person who's this seminal figure. I mean, just massively influential for an entire century. And then a generation passes and never heard of him. Do you mean Coleridge or Shedd? Coleridge. Coleridge, right. Yeah, yeah. You must have heard of him as a poet, shouldn't you? No. No? No. Oh, my goodness. I was in my small group. We were talking. No, no, no. I was somewhere with some young Christians, very young, 19, 20, 21. And I told them about John MacArthur passing. Yes. Isn't this a shame?
Speaker 2Well, I don't tell them they'd never heard of him.
Speaker 1They said, who is John MacArthur? Oh, no. So just that fast, you know. No. Yeah. Okay, so that's someone who you've gained an estimation for. Is there anyone through study you go, actually, no, overrated. I don't appreciate you as much.
Speaker 2No one immediately springs to mind. That's just because I'm so large-minded and generous. Obviously, yes. As we keep talking, I might think of someone.
Speaker 1Okay. Well, let me ask you this. If you could sit down with one person from each volume and pick their brain, who would it be?
Speaker 2Okay. So volume one is essentially the early church fathers. Who would I like to sit down with among the fathers? Oh, it's got to be Augustine, I suppose, because he had such an impact on me as a young Christian. One year after my conversion, I read the Confessions. Augustine's Confessions absolutely electrified me. I mean, I couldn't believe what I was reading. And the sense of, he is a man who died, what, 1,600 years ago. He knew the same God that I know and knew him with such a reverence and an intimacy that it's just, as I say, electrifying. So, of course, it'd have to be a translator, the English-Latin problem. From the medieval period, Bernard of Clairvaux. Because I've come to understand just how impactful he was, not only in his own day, but looking ahead to the Reformation era. Volume three deals with the Reformation. So who would I like to sit down with? My difficulty there is that because I'm a Baptist, if I sat down with any of them, they'd probably hustle me off to prison or. Throw you in a river, yeah. Or have me drowned in the river Limat. Yeah. That's what Zwingli did to the Swiss Anabaptists. If I could disguise myself as a magisterial Protestant who believed in infant baptism, maybe, who would I like to spend time with? Well, this is a purely personal thing. It doesn't necessarily reflect greatness of theology or anything, but John Fox, who wrote the Book of Martyrs, which was so influential on the development of English Protestantism, just because I like the man so much. He has such a lovable personality. And one of the things I really appreciate about Fox was his principled opposition to all religious persecution. So he obviously was chronicling the way that Catholics persecuted Protestants in the reign of Queen Mary Tudor. When Mary died, and Elizabeth, the Protestant, now gains power, comes to the throne, and Protestants now have their hands on the levers of power, he made a plea, let's not behave towards Catholics as they behaved towards us during the reign of Mary Tudor. Unfortunately, it fell on deaf ears, but he's one of the first great proponents of genuine religious liberty. Very outspoken about it. And I like that. That then takes us. That then takes us on to Volume 4 in the 17th century. Wow, I mean, the 17th century is so rich in Christian characters. Richard Sibbes, maybe, the Puritan, because I've benefited so much from his writing. There was a time when I was reading, you know, it's not the bruised reed, it's the soul's conflict with itself, which is very similar to the bruised, bruised reed, his more famous one. And I was reading that, maybe a page a day, so I wasn't speed reading that. And it was like, you know, his nickname is the sweet dropper, because sweetness just seemed to drip from his mouth, the sweetness of encouragement, trying to build believers up. And I found that to be the case when I was reading that particular treatise. It just, it filled me with sweetness and honey. Great. Yes. That then brings us on to the 18th century. The last volume we've written so far, it's got to be T. Conn of Zodonsk, I guess, from the 18th century. He just, he's just so, such an amazing character. Lovable for different reasons from Richard Sibbes, because T. Conn could be a bit of a curmudgeon, but he's kind of a lovable one, you know?
Speaker 1Yeah. There's one book of his, translated into English, you would recommend our viewers check out, which, what would it be?
Speaker 2Well, there's a book which has been given the title, this wasn't its original title, but the English title is Journey to Heaven. It's in one volume. Yeah. It's a good translation. Okay. And I remember when I first looked at it, many, many, many, many, many years ago, I thought, this could have been written by a Puritan. It's great stuff. Yeah, Journey to Heaven. The original title is, Extremely Long and Clunky. So I'm glad they changed that.
Speaker 1Okay. What, I think we know that a lot of battles in church history are absolutely essential. We have to contend for the Trinity, we have to contend for justification by faith alone, so on and so forth. What battle do you think we might, we might could have avoided? Much Ado About Nothing.
Speaker 2I think most of the controversies of church history have had some genuine reason for them. Okay. Okay, here's one. I've got Calvin on my side here. Okay. It's always good to have Calvin on your side. The breakdown of relations between Lutheran and Reformed over the Lord's Supper. Yeah, Zwingli's crying to Luther, please. Yeah, well, I'm not a great fan of Zwingli. I'm not a big fan of Zwingli. I'm not a big fan of Luther. Yeah, well, I'm not a great fan of Zwingli's view of the Supper, but later on, very quickly, the whole Reformed movement went way beyond any concept of mere memorialism. I don't think even Zwingli held that. Right, yeah. It became much richer and deeper in people like Calvin, Peter Martyr, Martin Busser. Calvin held, yes, there are real differences between Lutherans and Reformed on this subject, but it does not justify separation, and we should welcome Lutherans at the Lord's table. Yeah. And interestingly, in France, Huguenots, French Calvinists, they practiced that, and they welcomed Lutherans to the Lord's table. So it wasn't exactly much ado about nothing, but it was far too much ado about something that could have been considered a secondary matter.
Speaker 1Mm-hmm. That's a good answer. How should we think about the role of institutions throughout church history? Necessary structure, do they lead to inevitable drift?
Speaker 2I don't know. buzzing noise you know yeah but i
Speaker 1bet it won't show up on the thing yeah
Speaker 2it's some institutions listening in on us um well institutions are necessary aren't they um even the church whether you like it or not is going to take on an institutional aspect and then you've got things like you know what we would call seminaries but they might not have been called that in other times and other places but i think they are necessary um and i don't know i mean those are the two obvious institutions that come to mind as institutional church life and within the church institutions designed to um pass on the faith particularly to those training for for the ministry they're both necessary now i know that if you take seminaries for example i mean everybody knows that for some reason they do tend to drift um but that's just it's a sad feature of human life and existence it doesn't it doesn't mean we shouldn't have them um even even if they drift they can produce by way of reaction something that that is good yeah you know it's out of old princeton when it drifts comes westminster oh right with jay grass and machen and so on um what are the kind of institutions are we thinking of here
Speaker 1my mind's going i don't know we just move on to the next question uh this one's going to be a little cheeky see how i'm doing british stuff now a little cheeky who's your favorite heretic
Speaker 2my favorite heretic how are we defining heresy because i mean i i myself hold this view of heresy that it means um a false a false theology so seriously false and that person can no longer be considered a christian yes that's my view of heresy yes so we're talking about someone like pelagius or arias you know yes and you know i don't like either of them but the reason i don't like them is because they were heretics um so is there a lovable heretic somebody who passed beyond the bounds of genuine someone who passed beyond the bounds of small o orthodox christianity okay okay john milton i mean he had a kind of a high arian christology really or something something like that it wasn't an orthodox yeah trinitarianism he held but paradise lost but yeah his poetry of such a magnitude um but i have to i have to be charitable to milton and give thanks to god for those mighty works of of poetry that he wrote where none of his strange views appear really yeah so i mean you know paradise lost paradise regained samson agonisties the sonnets i mean these are just mind-blowing poetic masterpieces in my view who is your favorite martyr well if i can include him among the ranks of the martyrs i would say john chrysostom because if i can include him among the ranks of the martyrs i would say john chrysostom effectively he was put to death by um the emperor and the empress of the time the empress was eudoxia can't remember the name of the emperor he was under eudoxia's thumb anyways he was a kind of puppet emperor but uh they sent chrysostom into exile and they had they deliberately marched him from place to place exposed to all the elements and it killed him and i think that was quite deliberate so i would say chrysostom was a martyr and he was put to death by the emperor yeah and to me he's one of the the bright shining stars among the early church fathers
Speaker 1why did they do
Speaker 2that to him he had offended the empress eudoxia by his preaching um he he had subtly compared her to jezebel in the old testament for her obnoxious moral behavior and he had condemned the erection of a statue of eudoxia close to his church the rest of it is around which had disturbed the worship so once he'd earned the wrath or wrath of eudoxia that was that was his death sentence sealed who's your
Speaker 1favorite female from church
Speaker 2history yeah well there's a few i i think i admire greatly uh one of them one of them is a slave girl called blandina who was martyred in the year 177 a.d in lyon there was a storm of persecution in that year which ended up martyring many of the believers in the church of lyon and if you go to eusebius's church history there's a very lengthy eyewitness account of those martyrdoms and one of the central figures is blandina the sufferings she endured and the faith with which she endured it um i can't read that account without tears to be honest it's remarkable and then there's monica or justin's mother yeah another remarkable mother of tears uh how can the son of such tears perish yes who else i've got i've got a fondness for luther's wife katie in the sense that she's a very endearing attractive personality i think who helped to
Speaker 1humanize luther yeah my favorite story there is when she comes out in the funeral dress when luther is in the throes of depression do you remember this story he's in the throes of depression again she comes out in her garb black garb funeral dress and luther's is there a funeral i didn't know about and she goes well i guess god is dead so we might as well just for the occasion snap luther right out of it
Speaker 2then in the 18th century there's um the countess of huntingdon selena hastings um one of the great evangelical forces in england in the 18th century she was a great woman so there's
Speaker 1a few yeah that's a lot who is your all-time absolute favorite woman in the 18th century who is your all-time absolute favorite woman in the 18th century absolute superlative number one favorite theologian i don't have one oh you can't do it huh i have a collegial
Speaker 2approach can you do a top five well i can tell you some of the ones um i really like um so from the early church uh athanasius the cappadocian fathers so that's they're all they're always treated together so that's basil of caesarea his brother gregory of nyssa and his best friend gregory of nazia um and augustine from the middle ages anselm and bernard of canterbury maybe uh and thereafter well i've already said i like luther and calvin yeah um if we go beyond the reformation um great theologians as opposed to great devotional writers um about the seventh uh well i i enjoy reading tarleton from the 19th i'm talking about from the 17th century there's three volumes of his institutes of ellenctic theology uh published by pnr uh i don't always agree with tarleton but i always appreciate reading him because he's he's so clear he's so calm there's no ranting and raving about him um he seems to me to be extremely fair-minded and i like the way he he not only appeals to scripture but i like the way he tries to enlist the early church fathers in support of various positions particularly against roman catholicism so yeah what does ellenctic mean uh i've forgotten it's sometimes called socratic rather than ellenctic the socratic method uh based on socrates which is um socrates method was he would get you to state what you believe your position and then he would probe what you have said with very sharp questions if you if you if you say that does it mean you also believe this because this seems to follow from that and i noticed you said that but 10 minutes ago you said this now how do these two things match up with each other and he would always succeed in showing that what you've just said is the right thing to do and what you've just said is nonsense because in some way you're contradicting yourself or being incoherent and that's kind of the now he wrote that's the method of turret in the ellenctic method so that means his systematic theology deals with specific questions yeah uh he's not he's not writing like here's my treatment of creation here's my treatment of the fall he's dealing with disputed questions yeah here's this dispute about this question here's the question and here's what some people say
Speaker 1let's have a look at that yeah so who's your favorite modern like living theologian
Speaker 2that's a tough one most of my favorite modern theologians have died modern living theologians i quite like listening to um what's it called there's a series by rc sprawl i think it's called renew your mind yeah i like that well he's dead though so i know but for me living enough he's a modern
Speaker 1theologian sure okay um we can move on who's your favorite pastor from church history um these questions are
Speaker 2getting tougher okay all right let me think about it okay my favorite pastor um pastoral wisdom tact and genius well not luther i'm not just preaching that's part of pastoring but it's not the whole of it isn't um what about john newton i like the way he he dealt with william cooper and cooper's suicidal literally depressiveness he handled him very very gently and lovingly yeah all the
Speaker 1while maintaining a very uh busy yeah ministry in the local church and writing and writing fantastic hymns the only hymn
Speaker 2uh and writing a lot of good devotional material have you read jonathan
Speaker 1aidkin's biography of newton luke recommended to me i think it is
Speaker 2fantastic no i've lost i can't remember what i have read of uh source material newton i just know i've read enough yeah right now that he's
Speaker 1appealing yes who is the most underappreciated character in church history oh not bernard of claire verga again okay okay yeah we covered that favorite story from church history
Speaker 2there's quite a few of those um well there's a couple of stories from the early church that's my favorite funny story okay let's let's start there which is uh during one of those periods where athanasius was being persecuted um i think it was by the pagan emperor julian the apostate i think he sent troops into alexandria to seize athanasius i think it was julian it was one of the bad emperors anyway yeah so athanasius was fleeing for his life and he was fleeing down the river nile on a boat and imperial troops were pursuing him on another boat and uh do you remember this story he came to a bend in the river it was evening by now so that the sun was going down it wasn't quite so bright and when he came to the bend in the river he turned the boat round and went back and so he passed the imperial soldiers who were still rowing towards the bend and they shouted to him have you seen athanasius because they didn't recognize him in the gloom and he said yes you're quite close to him so i thought that's a brilliant way of deceiving someone by telling them the perfect truth and then you mentioned the other story it's um when augustine became caught up in the cult of the manatees you know his mother monica was at her wit's end and she happened to know there was a catholic bishop this is catholic in the early church sense right he was a converted manatee so she went to him and sort of poured out her heart to him you know asking for his advice was that ambrose no so i think it was someone else okay um and he kept giving responses that didn't satisfy her yeah because i think it was someone else who was trying to convince him that he was going to get rid of the manakee and he was going to get rid of the manakee and he was going to get rid of the manakee and he was going to get rid of the manakee and he was going to get rid of the manakee yeah because i think she wanted him to say well you have to say this and say this and if you say this and this it'll be converted and he he wasn't having any of this sort of easy believism kind of way of rescuing someone from the manichaeism and she was weeping and eventually he said to go it cannot be that the son of such tears will perish yeah and of course he didn't and and monica's prayers and tears not her arguments brought about his conversion if a
Speaker 1pastor or a church leader takes anything away from two thousand years of christ power what do you want it to be
Speaker 2well a that perception that the church is much bigger and has been around a lot longer than we might think but b also i know people might not be aware of this but at the end of each chapter i give quotes from primary sources to illustrate what i've been talking about and hopefully i would be able to give you a little bit more of an answer to what i've been talking about and hopefully i would be able to give you a little bit more of an answer about what i've been talking about and hopefully i would be able to give you a little bit more of an answer hopefully i would i hope that my books will hopefully i would i hope that my books will hopefully i would i hope that my books will stimulate people to go and read the stimulate people to go and read the stimulate people to go and read the primary source material only some of it primary source material only some of it primary source material only some of it you know just read what i say about luther you know just read what i say about luther you know just read what i say about luther read luther don't just read what i say read luther don't just read what i say read luther don't just read what i say about bernard read bernard yeah so i hope about bernard read bernard yeah so i hope about bernard read bernard yeah so i hope something of that would come out of it
Speaker 1something of that would come out of it something of that would come out of it as a busy pastor i want you to know as a busy pastor i want you to know as a busy pastor i want you to know i have not done that and i actually i have not done that and i actually i have not done that and i actually appreciate the end of this interview appreciate the end of this interview appreciate the end of this interview okay okay okay now we get to uh well i don't know this now we get to uh well i don't know this now we get to uh well i don't know this whole interview has been fun but uh an whole interview has been fun but uh an whole interview has been fun but uh an even more fun part of the interview a even more fun part of the interview a even more fun part of the interview a little more light-hearted we do rapid little more light-hearted we do rapid little more light-hearted we do rapid fire questions
Speaker 2fire questions fire questions things haven't been rapid fire
Speaker 1things haven't been rapid fire things haven't been rapid fire uh we're doing great i've got to fortify uh we're doing great i've got to fortify uh we're doing great i've got to fortify myself myself myself we're almost done brother coffee yes um we're almost done brother coffee yes um we're almost done brother coffee yes um tea or coffee tea or coffee
Speaker 2tea or coffee i mean which do i prefer yes sir i drink i mean which do i prefer yes sir i drink i mean which do i prefer yes sir i drink a lot more coffee than tea but in a lot more coffee than tea but in a lot more coffee than tea but in certain moods i've got to have a cup certain moods i've got to have a cup certain moods i've got to have a cup of tea yeah of tea yeah of tea yeah but normally coffee in the morning sure but normally coffee in the morning sure but normally coffee in the morning sure first thing is coffee favorite tv show first thing is coffee favorite tv show first thing is coffee favorite tv show classic doctor who 1963 to 1989 yeah not classic doctor who 1963 to 1989 yeah not classic doctor who 1963 to 1989 yeah not the
Speaker 1modern woke rubbish yeah exactly the modern woke rubbish yeah exactly the modern woke rubbish yeah exactly trapped on an island with the sermons trapped on an island with the sermons trapped on an island with the sermons of only one preacher who do you choose of only one preacher who do you choose of only one preacher who do you choose did you say i'm on a desert island did you say i'm on a desert island did you say i'm on a desert island trapped on the island the sermons of trapped on the island the sermons of trapped on the island the sermons of only one preacher only one preacher only one preacher and you can do print if you like and and you can do print if you like and and you can do print if you like and audio
Speaker 2john chrysostom in print john chrysostom in print john chrysostom in print what about audio oh uh what about audio oh uh what about audio oh uh you mean i can't have john chrysostom in you mean i can't have john chrysostom in you mean i can't have john chrysostom in audio maybe with ai audio maybe with ai So this is someone from the last roughly 100 years. Well, maybe I would choose a preacher I sat under for nostalgic reasons. And there was a great Church of Scotland evangelical preacher called James Phillip, whose sermons were out of this world. You would sit there for 45 minutes just agape listening to James Phillip's sermons. And when it finished, you'd think, oh no, he's finished. I've got to wait a whole week for the next installment. So the sermons of James Phillip.
Speaker 1I love to hear about that. Nobody knows about him, no books, fantastic preacher edifying local churches. Lewis or Tolkien, although I think I know the answer. It was C.S. Lewis. Now, Luke, what's the count? Six people for Lewis, none for Tolkien.
Speaker 2Yeah, of all the Brits. Yeah, but Tolkien didn't write theology really, did he? Maybe it's not fair to ask theologians that question. No, it's fair. Favourite novel? Don't have a favourite novel, but I've got a favourite short story. Okay. It's called The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft. A masterwork of psychological horror. That will give you nightmares.
Speaker 1Yes, well. I'll avoid that then. Mountains or beach?
Speaker 2Oh, the beach, anything.
Speaker 1Would you go swimming out here in this water that's right behind us?
Speaker 2I can't even walk these days. Well, not now, but. No, actually, I gave up swimming in 1975 after watching Jaws. Yes, there you go. Champagne or wine? I don't like alcoholic drink. Yeah, same. Least favourite candy. Candy, what, sweets, chocolate kind of? Well, again, I would have to delve into my memory because I'm not allowed to eat them anymore. So, like black licorice. Least favourite. I liked all of them. I can tell you my favourite one because I don't do it anymore. Okay, sure, we'll do that. It was similar to a Mars bar, but it was different and more exotic. It was called an Aztec bar. I used to idolise those Aztecs in my childhood. Unless the rotters stopped making them, then. Bummer. Okay, drive or fly? I get travel sick really easily, but if I had to, if it was a choice, I can't drive, but I would go in someone's car driving.
Speaker 1Yes. Morning person or night owl? Night owl. Take a risk, play it safe.
Speaker 2Life in general? Mm-hmm. There's aren't two board games, then. No. Play it safe, anyway. Play it safe.
Speaker 1Mayonnaise or mustard? Mayonnaise. Yes. Aluminum or aluminium? Sorry, that was a little. Well, this is Britain, so it's aluminium. Text message or email? Email. Dog or cat?
Speaker 2Depends whether the animal's friendly. Let's assume they're friendly. I don't know. If it was a really friendly dog and a really friendly cat, that would concentrate my mind. I'd go for the dog.
Speaker 1Yes. Good. I think we're also six out of six for dogs. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Night out or night in?
Speaker 2Well, these days. If people invited me to go out for a night, or I could stay in on my own. Is that the idea? Sure, yeah. I'd stay in on my own. Okay. Burger King or McDonald's? I don't like either of them, but the one I've been to most often would probably be McDonald's. To be honest, I don't recollect anything bad about the experience of McDonald's. Okay. Kindle, hard copy,
Speaker 1or audio book?
Speaker 2i've got a fourth option uh which is i i download material into my laptop and get it to read it out to me i find that to be insufferable not you doing
Speaker 1that the the way that it's read when you have it read to you it's in the year 1940 it's so monotone and robotic it's either that or i don't
Speaker 2read it at
Speaker 1all okay all right uh uh mexican italian or asian
Speaker 2food um so asian that would include indian sure yeah yeah asian okay i like i like asian curries like gel freezes and that
Speaker 1sort of thing okay chinese takeout or sushi oh chinese i need to cut stand all this uncooked fish yeah cold or hot which would you rather be
Speaker 2uh cold uh when you're cold it's easy to warm up but when you're hot it's quite hard to cool yourself down i think classical or jazz um well that's a hard one not really um well i do i do like you're about
Speaker 1to say the right answer no
Speaker 2if it's really good classical music and really good jazz i'll go for the classical i just don't know that i've ever encountered the latter not even dixieland
Speaker 1trapped on an island with only one systematic theology which one do you choose calvin's institute trapped on an island with only one church history resource philip schaff yeah yeah well well guessed i was about to say my own works well that's too egotistical i knew you were too humble to say that what hymn would you like to be sung at your funeral oh
Speaker 2boy this is a really like favorite hymns i quite like um i really like luther's easter hymn uh which i've now i've now forgotten um christ jesus lay in death's strong bands that one okay how come why do i like it why do i forget
Speaker 1why would you like it at your funeral well it's a hymn on the resurrection well there you go okay last question most important question don't drop the ball here how many holes does a straw have what how many holes does a straw have do you mean a kind of straw is there another kind of straw if
Speaker 2it doesn't have two you're jiggered really i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i'm gonna suck it in it's gonna have a hole at both ends okay well
Speaker 1we'll end the interview there uh nick what
Speaker 2was the purpose of that last one come on can't leave me hanging a
Speaker 1straw has one hole it's an elongated hole oh come on luke do the thing come on it's got a ring you know
Speaker 2how many holes would you say a straw has two holes well
Speaker 1most people aren't that smart uh brother this has been fantastic thank you so much for giving us so much of your time and i think it's going to be a blessing to the church can i pray to that end of course okay father god we thank you for every good thing that you've given us in christ jesus including teachers in the church who study your works of providence throughout the ages and who help us better understand how your grace is always alive and active in our midst how you're always building your kingdom saving your elect glorifying your name among the nations we thank you so much for nick's life and every aspect of it that led him to this point today where he has been able to faithfully and fruitfully serve the church we pray that the five volumes already written and published of 2000 years of christ power will spread even more widely that we put in church libraries that lay people in the church will take up and read these very good and accessible works that pastors will continue their education and refresh their understanding of church history by reading them we pray that seminary professors will assign them in their classes we pray that they will endure in an age where so many books come out today and are forgotten tomorrow after having sold only a few dozen copies we pray that this series will have an enduring legacy if only for a generation but but longer than that if you should tarry lord we pray for nick as he continues to write volume six lord help him to stay happy in jesus to pursue holiness and to do all of his academic research and writing from a place of sweet communion with you we pray that you'll be a blessing to his local church through his ministry there and we ask that you'll bless this interview not just in what we do but in what we do and we ask that you'll bless this interview not just in what we do but in what we've done so far but in the people that it finds in the way that it equips them to follow you more faithfully we pray this all in the name and for the glory of jesus amen
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