Church History Conference Part 1 – What If Your Most Sacred Church Practices Are Pagan? | Early Church History Shocker

I think this is the largest crowd I’ve ever seen in my life gathered in one place to take an afternoon nap. I feel like if I can even keep you half awake, I will have accomplished a great deal this afternoon. Well, when they invited me to Richmond, I talked to Mike on the phone. I hung up the phone. I couldn’t help but think of a story that came out of East Texas, and every time I thought about coming to Richmond, I thought about that story again. He told me that my topic would be church history.

Back in East Texas, there was this farmer. He was very ignorant. In fact, he was so ignorant, he was ignorant. He couldn’t read or write, but his kids got to go to school. Parents’ Day came, and he decided to go. He walked in, and the teacher was showing him around. He stopped in front of the picture, and he said, “Wow, that is the most beautiful picture of Abraham Lincoln I have ever seen.” And the teacher said, “Well, sir, that’s not Abraham Lincoln. That’s George Washington.” And he said, “Really?” Now, that goes to show you how little I know about the Bible. I don’t think I need to make my point here. Steven is here, Lance is here, and you’re going to walk away from this conference this week thinking, well, Stephen, Lance knows a lot about the Bible, and they had this guy Gene Edwards. He didn’t know anything about the Bible. They gave him church history.

I want to express my appreciation for the invitation to be here. I receive an awful lot of mail, and probably the two questions I am asked most in the mail are, “Can church life be brought to my hometown, and if not, where can I go? Is there anyone else in this city I can meet with?” And I have a Xerox letter that I keep in a file. I just put it in the envelope, mail it to them, and it says, “I don’t know if there’s anyone in your town.” I don’t know if there’s any church life near you, but you should attend the conference in Richmond held every summer. Find Christians in your state, if you can, and see if there are any people near you who are experiencing church life. And I would like to say that again to all of you who are here. If you have not had that wonderful experience in your life, try to find some folks near you. If you have to choose between dying in your sins out in the middle of the desert somewhere all alone, either that or moving, then I would suggest you pack and move to Richmond, Virginia. Now, I can commercialize because it’s the first time I’ve ever been to this conference and only the second time I’ve been to Richmond.

Okay, to introduce this subject, I think I need to start with something very personal. Church history is a hobby of mine, and it has been since before I was a Christian. I majored in history in college, and after graduating, I went to the seminary, where part of my studies were conducted in Europe. Rather than taking all those theological courses, I never did know what those people were talking about; I took all the courses I possibly could in church history. That’s been way over 30 years ago. Since that time, I have kept a lifelong hobby of reading anything and everything I can find on church history. I probably owe a lot to my seminary, and they have allowed me to check out books from the seminary I graduated from all these years. And fortunately, it is one of the largest theological libraries in the English-speaking world. I’ve been finding everything I could anywhere on this subject. Consequently, I feel like I wore out the church history you are familiar with a long time ago. I started exploring other areas a long time ago. I’m going to concentrate today and tomorrow, especially tomorrow, on the first 400 years of church history. Make it the first 500, forgetting the first hundred being the first century. Then there would be 400 after that. You are acquainted with that. If you’re not acquainted with that era as it is usually described, get a good history book about the early church, and you will find it’s the same old stuff, just a different literary style. You’ll read about Origin and Tertullian and a fellow by the name Ignatius. You’ll read about Augustine and Jerome and Ambrose and all of the Monists and the Donatists and all sorts of that.

Now that’s the church history we’ve always known. I hope to crack that wide open this week. I wish to present to you some of the latest breaking developments in the study of church history, probably no more than two years old in the English-speaking world. The exciting thing about it is that, for the first time, Scholardom is having to look at church history, and it is vindicating…and this I assure you for the first time…is vindicating the position that you and I have taken from a historical viewpoint – those of us who stand outside the organized church. And as the archaeologist’s spade is turned over, the proclamation coming forth is that you and I have a historical right to be here. A historical right to be here.

I wanted that to happen. I’ve hoped it always would. I’ve always felt very uncomfortable with how church history is explained to us up to 500 AD. But in going through all of church history, I’ve also gotten very tired of reading the rest of the story all the way up to say about 17 or 1800. After that, it’s tough to find anything that’s accurate because it’s too recent. You don’t know how to write recent history. So, some years ago, I don’t know how long ago it was, but this is a magnificent obsession of mine…I hope it’s magnificent…an obsession of mine has been with me ever since I was converted. I am mesmerized by this dichotomy in our minds. Let me see if I can explain it. How is it that my mind, your mind, the western mind, the 20th century mind can open the Bible, read the New Testament, announce that we must be obedient to the word of God, that we must have a New Testament church, and say that with a choir, a pulpit, people sitting in neat little rows, filing in, doing a ritual, don’t know one another. Opening the scripture, finding something in there that was living, real, and dynamic, coming out of a true situation, and somehow turning it into something applicable to modern-day Protestantism. The leap from first-century church life to 20th-century tradition, and the mind is never bothered, never questions, and never wonders.

Do you know what I’m talking about? Here’s the New Testament. There it is. You can read it from any direction you want to. Upside down, backwards. The story is there, and our eyes are covered, and we literally cannot see it. We read that thing and see 20th-century Christianity. That will fascinate me until the day I die. So, I started asking myself: Alright, I want to really know, historically, where, living in the 20th century, did we get our traditions, and two or three things became very clear. One of them is that no one writes on this subject. No one speaks on this subject. I don’t think you can imagine how many times I’ve been reading some old dusty manuscript somewhere, and the man is saying, you know, this is where we got this particular tradition, and probably we should do more study in this area because we need to understand where we got many of our traditions. But no one has ever written a book on it. If they have, please let me know. In fact, if you know of any piece of material, some obscure writing that will give me any insight into anything that I’m talking to you about today, please don’t hesitate to tell me about it, would you? I’d like to know. I find some of the material that has allowed me to open this question up to an answer in some of the most obscure places imaginable. I’ve been very lucky, fortunate, providential. I don’t know what it is to find things that have probably been written only once or twice by historians, and sometimes a historian will tell me something, not knowing he has told me. He does it accidentally. He’s been reading some Latin or Greek manuscript, and as an aside, he mentions a tradition and where we got it.

Well, my point is this. For the first couple of days, I will be talking to you about second-, third-, and fourth-century church history as it has never been presented in a church history book. The discoveries I will discuss with you have reached the English-speaking world in less than 5 years. Most of it in the last two years. That will be the first thing. Secondly, I will be discussing with you where we got all the things that we Protestants do. Now, I warn you, dear Christian friend, some of this is going to get really embarrassing for you. You may find a little of this extremely difficult to handle, and I’m even worried a little bit about the front row down here, frankly. Probably some of you will say, “Well, Gene, you found this out. Couldn’t you keep this to yourself?” I will illustrate. I will give you one passing illustration. We’ll talk about it the day after tomorrow, and this is going to make a lot of us very uncomfortable. I’ve been doing this my whole life, and I’ll probably keep doing it. You’ve never thought about this.

The Protestant custom of walking up to a pulpit, opening your Bible, and reading a passage of Scripture out of it before you speak is a pagan tradition. Has its roots in paganism. How do you feel? Now, I hope you won’t get angry with me because I’m simply going to tell you what I have discovered. What you’re going to do with it is your own business. But when you’ve taken one, two, three, four, five, ten, fifteen, or twenty of our most sacred held practices and begin to discover their origin, you no longer have the right to walk out of this building and return to business as usual. Somewhere, dear friend, there comes the issue of honesty and conscience, and there are things we’ve got to face. I will leave the reading of Scripture at the beginning of the meeting, of our message, for Lance and for Stephen and for me and for the other brothers to wrestle with the rest of the week, but we’ve got a lot more things to wrestle with, too.

Now, I’d like to go back and talk with you a little bit, and don’t run for the door when I say this. If you don’t know what I’ll be doing for the next few minutes, I’ll give you an introduction to historiography. That’s a great big word that means the history of the writing of history. The history of the study of history, and I think this will help us understand a great deal, why you and I have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to church history as it has been written throughout the last 500 years. This should be a book entitled The Rise of Christianity. If you want a classical treatment of Christian history from AD 100 to AD 500, it is a new book. It is called The Rise of Christianity. I’ll give you the publisher tomorrow. It is exhaustive. It even begins to show a few of the more recent developments in Christian archaeology, just a few. It will take you two years to read it. I affectionately refer to it as the doorstop. It is also excellent for slowing down Sherman tanks. When you have read it, you will not understand one thing. It is too detailed. You get lost. Therefore, I recommend you do it this way.

I recommend you get a copy of a small book on the history of the first five centuries. This one is called From Christ to Constantine. Wonderful book. You should be jealous of me. You ought to own this book and read it. The problem is it’s out of print. Read this, and then you’ll be able to comprehend this, but when you have finished, you will have a classical understanding of the first 500 years of church history, and they’ve got us backed into a corner. You will read it and gain a distinct impression of the early church. You will feel very defensive, and you will feel like I, a Christian outside the religious system, have absolutely no business existing if the second, third, and fourth centuries reflect the first century. They have us on the run.