Church History Conference Part 2 – Early Church vs Modern Christianity: The Constantine Turning Point

Well, are you with me? One day in the post-Constantinian era, that’s after Constantine, three or four or five of the greatest orators of that day, and I’m going to forget the others, and I’m just going to tell you about Chrysostom, bless his heart. I’d like to take that guy and plant him somewhere on an island in the Pacific. I think that man did us about as much damage as any human could. He has been made a hero of all preachers. In the seminary, he was lauded. You don’t know how, and I’m going to use the word brainwashed. You don’t know how we were brainwashed in the seminary to preach the word of God. You know that medical doctors say that one case, one cure, does not prove a cure. We would hear this one story about how some preacher back in some other parts of the states did something that turned the community around, by preaching the word fearlessly from the sacred desk. I’m not demeaning the proclamation of the word of God, but I want you to listen to me. I hope I’m not going to be…I’m not going to be misunderstood.

We were infatuated. We were awed by this thing that we are preachers of the word of God. Sometimes it was called hermeneutics. Sometimes it was called homiletics. In my seminary, it was called Preaching 101, and we were taught Aristotle’s…I didn’t know it…We were taught Aristotle’s view on how to give a speech. We were taught that Demosthenes…the very writings of those men have inseminated themselves into the bloodstream of the Christian faith. We were taught rhetoric without even knowing it. We were taught the best of rhetoric. You have a clear introduction. You have a conclusion. You have three points. You have a poem and a deathbed story, or something like that. We were taught to enunciate and to do this and to do that. I want you to know that I had to give a 15-minute talk with all my peers grading me. They finally took me off the platform after 25 minutes. I made an F across the board. We were taught how to sit on the platform, how to hold our Bible, how to dress, and all of this stuff, which comes directly from the Greek rhetorical tradition. I have read the messages…some of the messages of Chrysostom…and they are so eerily like our own preaching today. It’s just downright spooky.

I read a message by him in which he said, “Oh, I am so heartsick, that when I speak before the incomparable beauty of my Lord, you demean the message by standing and applauding me.” He was using arrogance and rhetorical conceit to present a false humility. I don’t know if you follow that. He was using his oratorical skills to exalt himself by humiliating himself when all of these people were applauding him. He had one of the greatest egos of any man who ever lived. He fed it through oratory, and he’s not the last “Chrysostom” who ever lived. Brothers and sisters, you take the Christian prophet, who in turn came from the Jewish prophet. You take the church planter. You take the teacher, whoever he might have been. He spoke in urgency. He spoke in an emergency and for a single purpose: to build the church of the living God.

You see coming up over here, emerging as a man of incredible oratorical skills, a man with all sorts of science and art in the business of words, and you have those two meet, and you come out with something that is neither pagan nor Christian. You come out with a modern-day preacher, and what you come out with is a sermon. Those of you who preach the gospel, I wish you would take this and read it. It is a very clear, though not exhaustive, understanding of how our present-day concept of the sermon came to be. Now listen, folks, if anything has got to go in the restoration of things to come, the sermon has got to go. Neither you nor I nor any other man living can understand how addictive that thing is and how it again and again and again destroys the functioning of the body of Christ. Say something.

Throughout my life, and I am no longer young, I am like Lance. I’m getting older. I’m older than Stephen, and I’m older than Lance because Lance has no wife and Stephen has no children. (laughter) I have watched the power of the sermon destroy life again and again and again. I have watched the living experiences of the body of Christ, submerged in our addiction to preach to you and preach to you and preach to you and preach to you and preach to you without it ever ending… never ending, never growing. The first-century speaker didn’t speak every Sunday pre-functionally. He was not like Pavlov’s dogs. 11:30 a.m.: You preach. They preached to build. Then they stopped preaching so that God’s people might experience, and when they got through experiencing, if there was a need, they preached again. They preached so the body itself might function, and even function without the preachers present.

My job is to preach myself out of the job of preaching, and I ought to make swift work of it. I consider the sermon to be one of the great curses perpetrated against the Christian faith. Make do with that what you will. You have got to face it, brother. The tradition of it, the way we do it, is not Christian. We ought to still be preaching urgently, emergently, to the basic present need, not to something that always comes with every Christian gathering. You in silence and me talking: this thing has got to be ripped out at its roots. I don’t know what cataclysmic work of God that will take because this thing is literally in our bloodstream.

Did you hear me? Did you hear me well? Someone asked a sister here, “When Gene was in California with y’all, did y’all support him?” And she said there were about a hundred of us, all college students or holding ragtag jobs, and we couldn’t make ends meet. Gene and Helen were the only two people who worked for a living. They supported all 100 of us. I don’t know why I brought that up, except to say, we’re going to need some radical young men to come forward who will not do things the old way. Now, someone will probably say to you, I don’t believe the practices are important; as long as the Holy Spirit is there in power, it doesn’t matter how we meet or what we do. I don’t agree with that. I don’t think that practice is the heart and soul of our problem, but I believe practice can kill. I believe practice and ritual, and these problems that we’ve got, like the everlasting eternal sermon, are basic problems that we’ve got to get past.

But now I come to one “yay and amen” greater than the sermon. He is in your blood, and he is in your body, and he is in your gray matter. He is the pastor, and he is not scriptural. There are two things I could never find. I could never find where the pastor came from, nor where seminaries came from. The only reason I’ve never spoken about this subject before is that I only found out about both of them this year. And boy, did I get my mind blown. I’ll tell you where I found where the modern-day pastor came from. I got it from reading some ancient letters from Anabaptists who had previously been with Martin Luther in Wittenberg, telling the story of their experience there. I would never have known if I hadn’t been rummaging through those old manuscripts.

Now, this is the story. I want you to hear it. This is where the pastor came from. Are you still here? Are you still with me? Are you interested? Please be interested. Alright, thank you. Here’s what happened. Martin Luther had been a Catholic. Frederick the Wise had kept that man from being burned at the stake, good and proper, and he had just sealed off Saxony with his army. He had the largest army in Europe. He said to Luther, whom he never met…by the way, “Do whatever you want to do.” Well, the Catholic churches got emptied. The Catholics fled many places. The Lutheran church was becoming the state religion. Luther had considerable power at this time in the religious world. He was sending people who had become Protestants, a lot of them ex-priests, he was sending them back to these empty church buildings and these empty cathedrals.

Now you and I have always heard of the seven sacraments of the church, haven’t we? You’ve heard of that. You’re a good Catholic. Did you, and I did not, that at that time there were seven pastoral duties of the priest – they’re almost the same – but there’s the sacrament, and the other is the doing of it: the pastoral duties of the priest. I can never remember all seven, so I’ll probably leave one or two of them out. One is burying the dead, another is blessing the babies, and another is counseling; in their case, it was the confession. Another was to attend to the proclamation of the Roman Catholic faith through some form of teaching or speaking. And I guess because there are so many of you here, I’m running out of others. Another one was to bless the social functions of that day.  And what’s another one? To marry, to marry people, and baptism. I don’t think this was one of the pastoral duties, as I recall it being listed, but it is one of the sacraments.

Now then, here’s what Luther said. He said, “Forget the sacraments and forget the priest’s pastoral duties. I will give you seven new pastoral duties.” They were not, per se, called pastors at that time. I want you to listen to where they come from, what they basically are. They are marrying, they are funeralizing, and they are visiting the sick. They are blessing community exercises in the community, and they are for us today, Christian counseling. There is the preaching of the word of God, and that other one I can never remember.

Now then, brothers and sisters, out of that developed the work of the Lutheran priest who came to be known as pastor, and these were his functions. And as it grew, the word “pastor” became used everywhere. It has gotten into the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Baptists. Whether the Brethren or not won’t admit it, they’ve got one. I don’t know. Well, I guess the Quakers still don’t, but it is universal, and I will tell you this, and I’m old enough to tell you. Those of us who leave the religious system, when the church of the Lord is not founded well, or it flounders, somewhere along the line, if you live long enough, you’re going to end up with one of those bird dogs.