Needed: A New Way to Meet #1: History of Church Meetings – Why Do We Meet This Way?

I don’t know if you can comprehend this, but if the Ionian school had survived…I’m going to make an outrageous statement: man would have gone to the moon around 500 A.D. From the time of Francis Bacon to the time Armstrong set foot on the moon was about 500 years. The steam engine had already been proposed. The understanding that the Earth was round and that it went around the sun was already proposed by the Ionian scientists. All that died, and mankind’s ability to think, rationalize, or conceptualize froze in Aristotelian Platonic teaching. If the Christian faith was to do anything, it had to find rational reason for its existence within the Platonic-Aristotelian framework given to it through a man named Augustine and later lifted to greater heights by Thomas Aquinas, who has always been called the man who baptized Aristotle.

The Roman Catholic Church has two ways of doing things: the Aristotelian way and the Platonic way. Ninety-nine percent of all it does is Aristotelian; the other one percent is Platonic. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? It doesn’t matter. My point is this is the atmosphere in which the Christian faith got its first way to meet. I’m moving toward that point. Now, understand that everything is frozen in time under the great, almost godlike influence of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates and their followers.

Now come back to the growth of the Christian mind. Now, a combination of philosophy and theology on one side, and among the people of Christianity, mostly in terms of paganism in practice, and its way of apprehending, basically, superstition with the dark, deep shadows and the mysterious. Now we introduce to you a gentleman who had his finger in every one of those, and he is the gentleman who gave the Christian faith its concept of meeting.

I’d like for you to go to the city of Rome. The year is approximately 500 A.D. The city is almost totally covered in dirt. The seven hills, the Forum…all of the wonderful things there…are under dirt. It’s the past; people are literally grazing their cows and their sheep in the Roman Forum. The town has been invaded, vandalized, and “Visigothized.” Can you help me with some other words here? “Barbarianized.” It has been burned and pillaged and burned and pillaged and burned and pillaged and burned and pillaged, but I’ll tell you this: the Christian faith is still taking its orders from Rome.

A man has been called the first pope, and I don’t really agree. Damascus or Sylvester should have that title, but the man who was called the first pope wrote voluminously. I mean, he just wrote and wrote and wrote. He said…here comes his pagan mind: we should save parts of the bodies of anybody we can find who is a great person in the past because it has great, great powers. That’s right out of the pagan mind. In every temple, they kept some sacred relic, like a meteorite, and they’d say, well, that came from Mercury, or some piece of cloth that Jupiter once touched. Maybe a piece of dirt from an earthquake they thought Zeus had done. He says, “Let us go and find these portions of the people from the past. They were the saints; we are not. There will be very few saints. Let us take these parts of their bodies and build big temples over them.” Pagan mind.

Then he…and this has been growing for about a hundred years; he could not distinguish between miracle and magic. So instead of someone being healed, now you have people who are dying, and they die, and they go to bury them, and their chest opens, and 15 doves come flying out. Now, that’s the pagan mind. You all look at me rather strangely. The whole Christian faith is filled with those kinds of stories. Miracle has turned to magic, and they are indistinguishable. Something strange happens; it’s a miracle, or it’s magic. The word magic should be superimposed. Don’t you think that mentality still exists today? Then you have never been a real dyed-in-the-wool, rock-ribbed Pentecostal. The concept of miracle blends in with magic.

I remember when I was a little kid; I remember so vividly. I was sitting in a Pentecostal church, scared to death, and this guy walked up to the platform and said, I got here tonight on an empty tank of gasoline. There was no gasoline in that tank. I drove this. It was past empty, and there was no gas in that, and God got me here. That’s not a miracle. That’s magic. Somebody should have told him that all the manufacturers leave three gallons of gasoline in your tank past the empty mark if the empty mark still works. There was gasoline in that car.

Now, I’m back to this gentleman named…do you know his name? Do you know who I’m talking about? Gregory the Great. Gregory is writing about relics and about dark things and about shadows and about magic and about God turning bread into the body of Christ and wine into real blood. Now, he’s producing new stuff here, folks—the need for relics to worship. And then, by George, if that guy doesn’t sit down and write out and pen out, and because he’s living in Rome and because he is using Latin, he puts it in Latin. He puts an order of service together on a sheet of paper. He doesn’t realize what he’s doing, but with his mind of magic, he sees the bread coming out with candles lit and words being said. “Hoc est corpus,” and with that… the bread turns to flesh, and the wine turns to blood. You know who we got the word “hocus pocus” now.

Well, it’s really weird, but this shows you our problem. Your problem, my problem, our problem. How can anybody invent a way of worship in the year 500 A.D., and no one ever questioned it nor changed it for 1,500 years? It hasn’t changed one iota…in your lifetime and mine, they’ve allowed it to be spoken in a language besides Latin. This solidified the mentality of the classical, and everything from about 300 B.C. in philosophy to 500 A.D., and in the Christian faith, everything from 30 A.D. to 500 A.D., is considered classical, and it cannot be changed. There is no difference between Scripture and the traditions of men up until the year 500 A.D.

Are you aware that men could not build buildings except by using textbooks written by architects before the year 500 A.D.? Are you aware that man could not receive any idea or concept about medicine, anatomy, or healing after the year 500 A.D.? Do you know that they burned men at the stake who proposed that you and I had blood in our bodies that circulated because it did not fit classical teaching? Knowledge froze…and worship froze…in one of the darkest hours of the Christian faith. That man did not know what he was doing, but the way of meeting together froze in 500 A.D.

Now, sympathize with me a minute; agree with me for a second. Is it not incredible that people would sit for 1,500 years and never question how they met, and do the same thing over and over for 50 or 60 years in their lifetime, then die and leave it to somebody else to do again and again, and that keep on going for 1,500 boring, unbelievably boring years? Is that not outrageous?

Ha! Then why have you Protestants been doing it for 500 instead of 1,500 years? You walked into that one. We do not have a different mentality as Protestants. We have exactly the same concept. Martin Luther and John Calvin gave us something, and it hasn’t moved for 500 years. It may never move, but this weekend it’s coming under attack.