Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. Today, I want to challenge you with the seven great myths of church history. What are the seven great myths of church history and how do we avoid them? Church history is important to study because it helps us avoid so many pitfalls and errors.

And we have already begun our church history course at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. By the time that you hear this, we will have had our first lesson under our belt. And we have been meeting at Leo's Place in Idaho Falls at seven o'clock on Thursday evenings. And we met for the first time this past October 14th. And we'll be meeting on Thursday evening every week hereafter, well into the month of June.

So we invite you to come and join us for our church history course. We'll be using the book Church History in Plain Language by Dr. Bruce Shelley. Church History in Plain Language. And I encourage you to get a copy of this and begin reading it with us. And we'll be discussing it.

I've got some provocative questions for you throughout the course and hopefully help to jog your thinking in so many areas. And part of that jog of human memory and part of that jog of your thinking to provoke your thinking is to shoot down seven myths of church history that I've encountered all of my life. What are those seven myths? Seven great myths. There's many of them, but I've got seven big ones here for you.

Number one, of course, church history isn't important. Church history isn't important. What I believe here today. That's the important thing. Wow.

We dispel that myth pretty quickly. Otherwise, you end up running into the old cliché of those by George Santayana who said those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. And that's precisely what happens so often in the lives of Christians who fail to study church history. And secondly, second myth we dispelled, I can leapfrog over 2,000 years of church history and do things just like they did, like the pure, pristine church in the book of Acts. And that is the myth of primitivism.

And we dispel that one as well. And the third myth is that soon after the death of the apostles, the true church disappeared and has only been recently, excuse me, recently restored by blank. And you can fill in the blank because this myth of restorationism has been throughout the history of the church. And we, of course, treated particularly of that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The fourth myth we dispelled is the Catholic Church has only and always been one monolithic apostate church filled with funny hats, rosaries, Hail Marys, and no meat on Friday.

That, of course, is one of the myths held especially by Protestant evangelicals. And we helped to dispel that myth as well. Number five, things like creeds and confessions and liturgies, deep theology, these are all just unnecessary, complex layers of junk. All I need is Jesus and my Bible. All I need is Jesus and my Bible.

And we made short work of that one as well. These are all online. You can find all of these treatments of these five myths that I've just mentioned for you. You can find them at our website at omnisprotestas.org. O-M-N-I-S dash P-O-T-E-S-T-A-S dot org.

Omnisprotestas.org. That's Latin for all authority. And of course, all authority belongs to Jesus. O-M-N-I-S dash P-O-T-E-S-T-A-S dot org. Well, myth number six, what is it?

What is myth number six? Dear listener, listen closely. Myth number six, those people in the church of the past were so hopelessly out of touch with what I believe today that they could not possibly be saved. Oh, yes, this is the thinking that the past, the church of the past was so out of touch that it couldn't possibly be a true church. This is the thinking explicitly said or implicitly thought that one's own belief and practice of Christianity is the zenith of faith in history, the peak and the pinnacle, while all others are the nadir or the bottom of true Christianity.

What I think and believe today is obviously true, while what they believed and practiced back then is obviously in error and very faulty. Of course, this manifests itself in things like this, right? Christianity has done nothing but get in the way of progress with its religious beliefs and superstitions. That's more of a secular argument against Christianity. And that's especially true when it comes to the progress of science, they say.

Christianity is seen to have been nothing but an obstacle to the advancement of the scientific enterprise. Now, we'll deal with this myth in church history, too, and see how, in fact, just the opposite, the church and scientists in the church helped to foster the scientific spirit, not to defeat it. Or, this is a big one today, Christianity has perpetuated and approved of the sinful, evil practice of slavery. Now, because the faith was born into the pagan cultural world of slavery, there's always been slavery. Slavery is alive and well today.

But because Christianity was born into that world, it was a reality from the beginning of our race. Christianity is condemned out of hand, even though Christianity was instrumental in eliminating slavery from its domains. And we will review this, too, as well, in our church history course, how Christianity indeed has been instrumental in eliminating slavery. Or because the church had things like popes and priests and monasteries and statues and stained glass windows, rosaries and holy water. Well, that church could not possibly have been filled with true believers, right?

Now, this thinking assumes that because some of these elements were present in the church of the past, that nothing true and real and substantial about Christianity could possibly be present. No one could possibly be saved in such an environment. We can dismiss them, therefore, as serious believers. All of these and more are expressions of a major ever-present fallacy in all of society today, I submit to you. And that fallacy is that of historical anachronism.

Now, that's a technical term that historians use, but it is indeed true for those who look at church history and see nothing but darkness. Historical anachronism, because they didn't believe what I believe, right? Now, anachronism is a Greek word composed of two words, ana, meaning across, or over, and chronos, meaning time. So, we're looking at ideas dropped and placed and imposed across time. It's the practice of imposing modern judgments and values upon cultures and societies of the past.

And this is one of the most ubiquitous fallacies in America today. It's a blind spot in what passes for thinking in the modern generation, and it assumes that our values and judgments are superior, that we are more enlightened and advanced than our predecessors ever could have been. David Hall has coined the apt phrase, the arrogance of the modern. I like that phrase, because it captures the superior mindset of the modern progressive. For example, just one example, Robert E. Lee owned slaves.

Therefore, he was racist, and we must tear down his statues and vilify his name and memory forevermore. Well, of course, this type of hateful harpy pours out his vitriol atop a history that has morphed over 150 years since the Civil War and not necessarily for the better. That same progressive will also maintain that a black man does not have the intelligence or the wherewithal to obtain a photo ID, for example, with which to vote. And consequently, we must do away with those voter requirements for that poor benighted person of color, which is a situation that Thomas Sowell calls the soft bigotry of low expectations.

I love that characterization. He gets it so well. The soft bigotry of low expectations. This attitude that persons of color do not have the intelligence or wherewithal to obtain a photo ID is demeaning to people of color. It is paternalistic and patronizing.

It is racist in and of itself. And it is a racism, I might add, that not even Robert E. Lee would have engaged in. Historical anachronism fails to take into account the situation in life of those in the past and the realities with which they had to deal. Read a biography or two of Robert E. Lee, and you will find a far more complex and honorable man than the cardboard cutout caricature that progressives construct in order that they might have an object of hate and vilification. Lee faced real life circumstances and situations that would make your average progressive wet himself and cry for mommy.

And he faced them with courage and integrity. Real people are always more than one thing. And Robert E. Lee was more than a slave owner. Robert E. Lee could not have given to Black Lives Matter or joined Antifa or prostrated himself at a local Maoist struggle session and abjectly confessed his sinfulness as an evil racist like a good virtue signaling millennial does, excuse me. Robert E. Lee was a man of his own times, and it's manifestly unfair and unjust to judge him by modern standards.

That's historical anachronism. And it is also fair to ask, then, how will the future judge this hysterical, ignorant generation? When the demonic madness is exercised from our collective consciousness and sanity and biblical reason is restored, how will your generation be judged, opus unanimous progressive? Even when our children's children have checked themselves for their own historical anachronism, they will rightly lament the fear, superstition, and slavish ignorance of this generation. A generation that butchers its young in the womb as a sacrifice to Moloch.

A generation that has surrendered the constitutional republic for a few virtue signaling slogans and platitudes like diversity is our strength. My body, my choice, except when it comes to vaccines. And we're all in this together. And of course, racist, racist, racist. Oh, they will lament a generation that has succumbed to fear such that they exchange the real God-given health and well-being that is natural immunity and freedom with a certain amount of calculated risk.

They'll exchange this for sickness and death that passes for health and well-being. And that is masks, excuse me, lockdowns and kill shots. Well, historical anachronism, the arrogance of the modern, is a fallacy which has to be considered when reading church history as well. It assumes, historical anachronism assumes that what we believe in practice today is right and true and biblical. While those people of the past were hopelessly ignorant and superstitious in what they believed and practiced.

After all, they didn't have the Schofield-referenced King James Bible and all those cool YouTube videos about end times that we have today. Instead, they went around mumbling in Latin, crossing themselves and reciting Hail Marys all day. They couldn't possibly have been born-again Christians like me. But of course, this is imposing modern judgments and values upon cultures and societies of the past. It fails to consider the real-life, on-the-ground situations believers of the past coped with.

One of my favorite exercises in historical imagination is to ask a modern believer to put himself in the place of an average believer in a village in Europe in the early 9th century under Charlemagne. Let me ask you first, if you were one of these average believers in a village in Europe in the 9th century, where would you have gone to church? Consider it for a moment. There were no brick, glass, and stainless steel megachurches every few miles to choose from. There was no directory listing the various Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Pentecostal churches in town.

And even if there was such a directory, you wouldn't be able to read it. Because all through the Middle Ages, the literacy rate was a mere 2%. The only church in town was the local Catholic church. Upon it, you would be dependent for teaching and worship and pastoral care. How important would that be to you?

Most likely, a peasant believer under a feudal system. And me, my first response is, well, I wouldn't stand for it. I'd start my own house church and have family worship around our Bible. We'd sing hymns and pray. And this impulse or something close to it is usually one of our first instincts as moderns.

That's what we would do if the Catholic church was the only one in town. But remember, dear listener, you would most likely be an illiterate peasant who couldn't afford a Bible, even if you could read. Bibles were painstakingly hand-copied by monks who took anywhere from two to five years to produce one Bible. And the cost would be far beyond your abilities. An average copy of the Bible costs two to three years' wages of the average working man of the time.

The cost and wait time for your CBD order, in other words, was unbelievable. But on the positive side, there were faithful pastors and conscientious churches who loved and ministered to the flock. The historical record is clear on this, and we will unfold this in our church history course, too, and hopefully dispel some of the historical anachronism that surrounds our understanding of the past. And we will meet in that church history course at 7 p.m. every Thursday night hereafter for the year at Leo's Place, 7 p.m., and you can find us in one of the party rooms.

We'll be there studying church history using Bruce Shelley's book, Church History in Plain Language. And you will help to dispel in your own lives, perhaps, a measure of historical anachronism, or what Dr. Hall calls the arrogance of the modern. And you will find, as we study church history as well, that while there was no such thing as personal copies of the Bible in the 9th century, churches did seek to obtain a Bible as of first importance. The local prince, or perhaps a few of the wealthy merchants, would contribute generously to the church to buy a copy of a Latin Vulgate Bible.

But that was no guarantee, even then, that the local priest could even read it. If you lived in the 9th century, in Charlemagne's day, he was eventually crowned Holy Roman Emperor by then Pope Leo III, and we'll look at this as well. Well, if you lived under Charlemagne, many of the priests in his realm could barely read their own names, much less a Bible. And so Charlemagne set out upon a program of education in his kingdom, where he insisted that not only his priests and bishops, but also the princes under him, learn how to read and write.

If you were fortunate enough to live in a town or city that had a large church or a cathedral, then you probably had the luxury of things like stained glass windows and statues of biblical characters and paintings of biblical scenes all through the church. For most of the history of the church, these objects were used as teaching tools, dear listener, teaching tools, not as objects of veneration and worship. No, no, no, no. That assumption is historical anachronism, a presumption of the arrogant modern, that things like stained glass windows and statues and paintings were used as objects of veneration and worship from the very beginning. No.

Well, if you lived in the 9th century, a skilled priest would use the depiction of Noah and his ark in a stained glass window, for example, to take his illiterate congregation through the redemptive history of the flood. You would most likely have been illiterate. Remember this. And this priest would use that window in conjunction with portions that were read and translated from the Bible. And if they were fortunate enough to have a Bible, that is.

And part of the arrogance of the modern is his tendency towards historical anachronism is to impose his weak and feeble memory on the poor, benighted people of the Dark Ages, too, right? Ah, human memory. Just because the modern human memory has atrophied to a point where we can barely remember a phone number without keying it into a device, well, that's not the heritage of the human memory through history. We'll learn about this in our church history course as well. And that's meeting at 7 p.m. Once again, just a reminder, 7 p.m. at Leo's Place on Thursday evenings.

And we encourage you to join us for that. Well, the human memory is actually prodigious when it's trained and exercised. Entire books, great swathes of biblical text were routinely memorized. And the portions that were read in church were remembered word for word by those who heard it read to them. Our brothers and sisters in the past may have been illiterate, but that does not mean that they were stupid or incapable of remembering what they were taught and read.

And we'll see this brought to life in our church history course, too. Come and join us. We're using Dr. Bruce Shelley's book, Church History in Plain Language, and we'll see these things come alive. Well, as humble as these priests and bishops' circumstances and education might have been, do not neglect that many thousands of nameless, faceless pastors and priests through the centuries preached and taught and ministered sacrificially to their flocks in Jesus' name. They are nameless and faceless to us, but they are known and loved by their over-shepherd, that is our Lord Jesus Christ.

They will hear those precious words, well done, good and faithful servant, at the last judgment. So beware of this great myth of church history, dear listener, the fallacy of historical anachronism. Do not be an arrogant modern who reads back into the lives and souls of past saints, the assumptions and values of today. Don't put that on them. Take some time to learn what their lives were like and put yourself in their place before you judge them too quickly.

And we'll do this once again in our church history course. We'll be on top of this all the way through a chapter after chapter of Bruce Shelley's Church History in Plain Language. Well, the last seventh myth, great myth of church history is, I can draw one continuous line of belief through church history of those who believe what I believe. I can draw one continuous line of belief through church history of those who believe what I believe. Now, our myths begin to spill over into one another after a while, don't they?

There's a bit of the historical anachronism in this one too. Oftentimes, in an attempt to see parallels with what one believes today, an imposition of one's own beliefs and practices can be foisted on someone else in history in order to prove a point. But the impulse to find a continuous stream of belief is good, I might add. I might add that. And this becomes a myth only when the past is distorted or forced into a mold, not of its own making.

Be cautious about this, dear listener. Christianity is a monotheistic religion whose life-saving message depends upon the faith once delivered unto the saints, as Jude says, as the apostles would all assert. And Paul puts it strongly when he warns the Galatians that even if I or an angel from heaven brings you another gospel, then that which I first delivered to you, let him be accursed.

And so, the task of theology and the church is not to see how creative we can be in bringing new things and innovations in teaching and doctrine, but rather in being faithful, in being consistent in transmitting the gospel of Jesus Christ as once delivered to the saints. St. Vincent of Lorraine, he lived in the early 5th century. He puts it succinctly when he says that the mark of true orthodox teaching is, all possible care must be taken, he says, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. Ah, very succinctly put. We must hold the faith which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.

What is that faith? Held by everyone, everywhere, by all, right? Well, we will unpack that in our church history, of course, too. We'll be constantly monitoring that rule of faith. And if that's true, if you can't draw a pretty long and consistent line through church history of what you believe, for example, then odds are you've got it wrong, and you're a heretic or a schismatic or a cat with some plain kooky beliefs on your plate.

The cliche is generally true. If it's new, it ain't true. If it's new, it ain't true. Most Christians understand this principle intuitively. And so, when they do study church history, it is, in part, to justify what they believe by being able to say, see, the true church, you know, Saint so-and-so and Saint so-and-so other, right?

These guys in the past believed what I believe, so it must be true. Ah, but the other cliche also goes, the devil is in the details. Actually searching honestly for and finding and confirming what the church of history believed everywhere, always, and by all is not as easy as it might first sound. That's why we're studying church history on Thursday night at New Geneva, and we're doing it at Leo's Place, a great place to gather and to fellowship, and we're doing it by reading Dr. Bruce Shelley's Church History in Plain Language. And we encourage you to come and join us, too, for that study, seven o'clock on Thursday nights.

We know that, for example, large portions of the church at time embraced heresy, as when several of the barbarian tribes that overran the Roman Empire brought the Trinity-denying teachings of Arius with them. It almost completely supplanted the true church at one point. Are you able to identify these soul-shrinking heresies? And sometimes it's very difficult to find the true church that is teaching the true biblical gospel, as in the days of the latter Renaissance Catholic church, for example, just before the Reformation. And we'll look at this in our course, too.

That church was so corrupt and wicked that true pastors and faithful churches were hard to find. They were few and far between, but they were there. And we'll go through this in our church history course. And then there is the temptation, as well, to find a historical figure or movement in church history that kind of fills the bill for what you're looking for, but not quite. But since there's no one else around, you use it anyway.

Now, dear listener, you can put a pig in a tutu for your production of a nutcracker this Christmas because you can't find a ballerina, but she'll still be a pig and it won't be hard to hide once the overture begins, right? So it is when many of my fellow Baptists, for example, try and find predecessors in church history. The church has uniformly baptized babies. Just get over this, okay? The church has uniformly baptized babies throughout its history.

But as Ernest Pickering discovered, while tracing the so-called crimson thread of Baptist history, he seized upon the Montanists who existed in the second century, for example, who baptized only adult believers by immersion. Oh, so while he did find a stitch for his historical thesis, he quietly passes over the fact that they also prophesied quite sensationally. They spoke in tongues and they had women preachers and prophets. And all of this is decidedly un-Baptist by today's standards.

They were a group of co-religionists, maybe, who are useful insofar as they can make a timely historical point, but none of whom would be welcome in the door of today's Baptist church on the corner. No. As well, Dr. William Criswell, another fundamentalist Baptist preacher at First Baptist Church in Dallas, puts the Waldenses, and they existed in the 12th century in his line of scarlet thread of Baptist church history, successfully making another historical link with a group that practiced adult believer baptism by immersion. But once again, overlooked is the fact that they practiced seeing visions or spirit possession and prophecies.

And they also attended the Roman Catholic Mass regularly. Now, these are certainly strange bedfellows for any Baptist and certainly would not be allowed as dance partners on the dance floor of faith, would they? Oh, so if one is going to trace his beliefs through church history to see if they truly are believed everywhere, always and by all, and thus dispelling this myth, then one had better be careful and honest in his pursuit. And this we will try to be in our church history course. No guarantees, but we will try with might and main to be honest and careful in our pursuit of the truth in church history.

We invite you to join us as New Geneva launches out on a study of church history using Bruce Shelley's book, The Church History in Plain Language. And you can join us for that on Thursdays at 7 p.m. at Leo's Place. And we invite you to join us. We're having fun already. And we'll explore and dispel these myths and also find just some great nuggets in church history.

And we also meet, New Geneva Meets for Holy Worship on Sundays at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. And you can call us for more information and answer some questions or maybe register some complaints. Call me at area code 208-523-0196. 208-523-0196.