C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 71 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Why is there a church on every corner, and why do the churches on the corners not know each other? This session traces the family tree: Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism, each telling church history its own way. In keeping with irenic theology, Patton argues each position from inside it, putting on the collar for Rome and letting the strongest case be heard, so listen for where you find yourself persuaded, and why.
The disunity of the church is one of the standing objections of the age, and one reason people drift toward communions that look most unified and most anciently rooted. Most of us cannot draw the line from our own congregation back to the beginning: we are Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox mostly because our parents were, and only later, faith seeking understanding, do we ask why. The three great traditions claiming Christ and Scripture are Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism, and by the figures the lecture cites, Rome counts near a billion, Protestants some three hundred fifty million, and the Orthodox roughly two hundred million, heavily concentrated in lands like Russia and Romania.
Argued first from Patton's own side: for the Protestant, the gospel defines the church, never the church the gospel. Wherever the gospel is, there is the church. The first five centuries are the formulation, the articulation of the gospel and of who Christ is; lose the gospel and the timeline itself breaks, whatever institution continues.
Why does corruption begin creeping around the five hundreds? Because the persecuted church became the imperial church. Christianity was legalized under Constantine and soon made the empire's religion, partly, the lecture notes, because the Christians had the best infrastructure in the empire. Now everyone was Christian: baptized on the sixth day, entered at once into church records and tax rolls, Christian by citizenship. Not that no one believed, but the definition blurred until no one could say who the believers were. The teachers draw the uncomfortable modern lesson: the Christian state we sometimes root for is the very arrangement that corrupted the gospel, and being born in America still tempts people to answer, of course I'm Christian, look where I live.
On the Protestant telling, the Eastern church did not lose Christology, it shares the great confessions about Christ and the Trinity, but lost the gospel's emphasis: worship grew mystical and apophatic until there was no positive way left to say who God is and how a sinner is made right with him. Ontologically high on Christ, functionally silent on justification. The judgment falls on the institution and its confession, the teachers stress, never on every individual within it, just as not everyone in a Protestant pew is a believer: in every communion the true church is the faithful within.
The Reformation's spark: Johann Tetzel arrived near Wittenberg selling plenary indulgences to fund St. Peter's Basilica, promising absolution of sins past, present, and future, and springing souls from purgatory for a coin, for oneself or a departed loved one. Luther, an Augustinian monk whose study of the Psalms and Romans had already convinced him that righteousness is not imparted through sacraments but imputed freely, an alien righteousness given by God apart from works, posted ninety-five theses for debate on October 31, 1517, the church door being the town's bulletin board, and the printing press did the rest. Among them a dagger: if the pope can free souls from purgatory for money, why not free them all for love? No answer came; Rome excommunicated him in 1521, and at Trent the universal church took the name Roman, loyalty to Rome now defining membership, while the reformers were handed the name Protestant by the institution powerful enough to do the naming. For Luther the whole contest was justification, the doctrine on which, he said, Christianity stands or falls, and which Calvin called the hinge.
Behind the excommunications stood a doctrine: extra ecclesiam nulla salus, outside the church there is no salvation. Through the medieval definitions of the sacraments, in Lombard's Sentences and in Aquinas, the church became the administrator of saving grace, so that expulsion from the institution meant, on its own terms, the loss of salvation itself. The church's weapon was never military, the lecture observes; it held your salvation.
Then Patton puts on the collar and argues Rome's case in earnest. You Protestants define the church by the gospel, and the gospel by Scripture; very well, who told you which books are Scripture? No inspired index closes Revelation. It was the church in council, at Hippo and Carthage in the three nineties, that recognized the canon you stake everything on, the same conciliar authority whose trinitarian confession, one God in three persons, every Protestant in the room recites. The church, as Paul says, is the pillar of truth. Read Matthew 16 as it stands: Simon confesses, and Jesus says, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and hands him the keys; the most natural reading makes Peter the rock, and Matthew 28's commission goes to the apostles Peter led. And without a church to define the gospel, you get what a Protestant magazine found when it asked twenty-five leading theologians what the gospel is: twenty-five answers. The Counter-Reformation conceded the moral corruption and reformed the practices; the visible church, on this view, is how God guards the invisible one.
The reply, given honestly: the exegesis of Matthew 16 as Peter does not trouble him, and many Protestant exegetes allow it. What he cannot find is the whole elaborate system, papacy, magisterium, sacraments as the channel of salvation, built from that single passage. As for the canon, the Protestant trusts not an institution's establishment but God's sovereign guidance, by which the people of God recognized the books God had given. Rome's warning that private interpretation breeds endless division was true, and Luther knew it; the Protestant answer, then and now, is that it is worth the risk, because the alternative was losing the gospel.
The East agrees with Rome that the church defines the timeline, but for Orthodoxy the church is defined by the seven ecumenical councils, of which Protestants heartily share the great early ones: Nicaea in 325, whose homoousios every believer echoes in saying Christ is fully God; Ephesus in 431; Chalcedon in 451, confessing Christ fully God and fully man. Where the West, Catholic and Protestant alike, does theology cataphatically, defining, writing systems, holding classes like this one, the East basks apophatically in mystery: you enter an Orthodox church and find no pews, for the congregation stands to worship, high ceilings, icons on every side, and a piety aimed at theosis, becoming like God. To Orthodox eyes, Rome and the Protestants are two sides of the same Western coin, and a class like this one is beside the point: the infinite is not for defining but for worship.
Early Christianity gravitated to five great bishoprics: Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, equals, with Rome honored as first among equals where Peter and Paul died. The Islamic conquests of the seventh century swept away Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, leaving two hens in the henhouse, and Rome and Constantinople fell to quarreling: the filioque added to the Nicene Creed in the West, leavened against unleavened bread in the Eucharist, shaved Western faces against Eastern beards, Latin against the Greek of the New Testament, real differences of theological temperament compounded by distance and honest misunderstanding. On July 16, 1054, each excommunicated the other, and since each held the keys of salvation, the wound would not close; the mutual excommunications were not lifted until December 7, 1965, and even that changed little. In 1453 Constantinople fell to Islam, Orthodoxy's weight shifted north to Russia, and Rome stood without rival, on the very eve of the Reformation.
Within the dotted lines of the gospel, Protestantism divides first over the will of man. The Reformed tradition, from Luther and Calvin, holds that fallen man's free will is limited by his ability, and his ability does not include choosing God: God must grant both the ability and the desire, opening the heart, as Romans 3 says that no one seeks for God, no, not one. The Arminian tradition, from Jacob Arminius, once a follower of Calvin, answers that God has restored to all the ability to choose or refuse him, else why command, choose this day whom you will serve. Broadly, Lutherans, Calvinists, Presbyterians, the Reformed churches, and most Baptists flow from the first stream; Methodists, Wesleyans, Free Will Baptists, Churches of Christ, Pentecostals, and Nazarenes from the second, whether or not any given congregation still knows its own ancestry.
The nineteen hundreds brought liberal theology, which kept Christianity's ethics while denying its supernatural heart, no deity of Christ, no inspired Bible, and so, on the chart, exits the gospel's dotted lines entirely, taking seminary after seminary with it. The reaction is told through an Old Testament parable: the postexilic Hasidim, pious guardians sworn never to lose the faith again, became in time the withdrawn Essenes, the integrating Sadducees, and the wall-building Pharisees. So the fundamentalists of the 1920s, rightly defending fundamentals like inspiration and the virgin birth, hardened into walls against everything the culture did, smoking, drinking, movies, and gave the word its bad sense; the charismatic tradition likewise pulled back from the contested text to the Spirit and his gifts; and the withdrawal from the universities surrendered the culture wholesale, a mistake the teachers name plainly. Evangelicalism seeks to keep what fundamentalism meant to keep without the walls: unity in the essentials, liberty in the non-essentials. Patton even risks the aside that to the Pharisees of his day, and to some churches of ours, Christ, who ate with tax collectors and sinners, would be called a liberal. And the postmodern tradition, still in development, is the reaction now being written.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all sixteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. On the Protestant timeline, what defines the church?
2. How did the empire's embrace of Christianity blur the definition of a Christian?
3. On the Protestant telling, what did the Eastern church lose in its drift toward 1054?
4. What was Tetzel selling near Wittenberg?
5. What dagger did Luther's theses aim at the pope's power over purgatory?
6. Why was excommunication so devastating a weapon?
7. What is the Roman Catholic canon argument that Patton argues in Rome's own voice?
8. What does Patton concede about Matthew 16, and why does he remain a Protestant?
9. How does the Protestant account for having the right canon without the church establishing it?
10. What defines the church on the Eastern Orthodox timeline?
11. How does Eastern Orthodoxy view Rome and the Protestants?
12. What reduced the five bishoprics to two rivals?
13. When were the mutual excommunications of 1054 finally lifted?
14. What question first divides the Reformed and Arminian traditions?
15. Why does liberal theology exit the gospel's dotted lines on the chart?
16. What does the Hasidim parable explain about fundamentalism?
All sixteen correct. Lecture 7 is complete.
Patton argued Rome's case well enough to risk persuading the room, because irenic theology represents opponents at their strongest. Which tradition's case did you feel the pull of, and what does answering it honestly require of you?
Trace your own line: which tradition and which Protestant subtradition raised you, how much of that did you choose, and what would it mean to hold it now as faith seeking understanding rather than inheritance?
Where do you see the fundamentalist wall, the good guard turned Pharisaic, in your own instincts or your own congregation, and what would unity in essentials with liberty in non-essentials change first?
The confession of Matthew 16 that every tradition claims: you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, and on this rock, however the traditions read it, Christ builds his church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.
The lecture's own pointers: the statistics on the world's churches came from Operation World, which repays a look for anyone curious about the global body; the timelines and the subtradition chart will be referred to throughout the remaining courses, so keep them at hand. The course turns next to the sources of theology: where the stage of truth gets rebuilt.