Presbyterian History

Thanks for being here. I’m going to try today to make this as not boring as possible. That’s my commitment to you. Um some people naturally like history, some have a mental sort of enjoyment for learning what was and others think of history and think just, you know, tap me when it’s time to wake up and so i’m going to try my very best to make this interesting. Uh but we’re going to look at the history in the broadest strokes of how you might find yourself. Today sitting in the midst of a congregation that is in the presbyterian reformed tradition, which for most people. Uh, we spoke about this last week. We live in a moment in history in which denominational names. Even theologies are really the least important. They’ve been in 200 years, certainly potentially 400 years and we’ll talk a little bit about why that might be once we get to the end of today, that some of that will be in the spirit of trying to make this interesting. Uh, but there is value. I think there’s there’s value in at least one conversation that looks at the overview of how we got here, because it says, a few things, it says, one it teaches us about our predispositions sort of, what is our, our initial thought regarding something theological or scriptural, how do we store the initially get in that direction? They is also helpful. Because it exposes some of our weaknesses, it helps us. See, this is a blind spot that we likely have because of our tradition and then we try to be mindful of that. We try to really work into those weak spots and we try to invite other people to help us see the things that we might not naturally see ourselves. So, in that way, i think our history, uh, if we learn from it, can teach us something about what it means to be people of faith today, We’ll see if you uh feel like i accomplished that in our time together. So Presbyterianism, if you’ve not ever heard is essentially a word that describes a way of governing ourselves, different denominations, have different ways of doing that catholics and lutherans have bishops where one person is put in charge. And that person, sort of tells people what to do Presbyterians have a more democratic form of governance, which makes us a very American kind of church. In fact, lots of American government Seizures mirror presbyterian polity so much. Like you might know that we have three branches of government Presbyterians have three branches of governments, same exact thing. Um, where the methodists and Sorry where the lutherans and the catholics have a bishop of person that they put in charge Presbyterians elect representatives, who make those decisions on behalf of the body. So it’s a very representative model and this is different because This line here represents everything. So if you put jesus’s life here, death resurrection. And here. This bubble. Represents. I just blanked on it. This is bad. There we go. It’s not an s. It’s an f. Ref formation that small thing that happened. Okay, so here we forget this as protestants, uh, if you’re with me for the disciples, we talked about lots of different churches. So there there is some variation, but from jesus all the way up to the Reformation, which is A thousand plus years, right? The church is essentially functions on one governance model, whether it’s the Roman church, whether it’s the Greek church, whether it’s even the African church. It is essentially functioned on the bishop model, wherever, where you had your bishop, they were put in charge, they made the decisions and the bishops went all the way up to the head bishop, which if, you know, your catholic church, what’s the name of the head? Bishop in the catholic church. The pope right? The pope is the head. Bishop Metabolic church. So the pulp makes decisions that all of the other Uh, bishops have to abide by. Uh, Theoretically. So so it’s a very hierarchical model in that way. And that’s the way that church function from the day, jesus all the way down and you might recognize that we see that in the book of act. So when paul is going around and he is seeing the gospel being lived out amongst the gentiles. You remember who he has to go? See, he has to go to jerusalem and argue with Apostle peter, right? Because the apostle peter is the guy who’s going to make decisions. They’re going to have impacts all the way out for these Gentiles. So paul is arguing with that bishop and so that’s the model all the way up to reformation. And then there’s this guy who was sufficient to say a very big thorn in the side of the catholic church by the name of Starts with an m. Martin Luther. There you go. Martin Luther. And Martin Luther is an interesting guy. We don’t have time to sort of delve into the details of Martin Luther. But man, he’s a fascinating character, both with some dark sides and some amazing gifted intellectual sizes. It’s all bundled in to one. He’s a fascinating character but Martin Luther’s basic contention was he read the book of Romans? He heard sort of the the general context of what was happening in the church around him and Martin Luther decided. In broad broad strokes. We’ve made church about us. We made church about us making money off of people because there was multi-million dollar in that day. Multi-million dollar industries on getting people to give you money in the name of your salvation. That made Martin Luther a little squeamish, right? And he said, you know, fundamentally we are asking people to do stuff and tell them. If you do this, you will be saved. Which when Martin Luther red romans. He said seems to me that salvation’s more about jesus than it is about us. Like it seems that salvation more is about this word grace than it is about this. Kind of do this thing in salvation will come. And so he started righting about this. Of course, he had his thesis and he began this entire movement of asking questions about that propensity within the church. As you know, the pope didn’t care for that very much because that threatens the way that things should be. And so that had a falling out luther thought of himself as reforming the church, which means he thought that the church was going to get better. That the church was sick and so it needed a little bit of treatment and it would recover. Notice luther when it came to finally in the end him realizing no. That we’re not in this church isn’t going to get reformed, we’ve split from that church. We don’t get to go back when he realized that. No, notice that he went back to having bishops in the leadership structure of the church. He wasn’t trying to. Not be catholic in structure. He just thought that the catholics had given up the gospel for something else. Does that make sense? So in many ways Martin luther is a continuance of the catholic church, but with a very different theology, Practices the same. Theology is different. You’re with me.