1400 years

I’ve been asked twice now in the last week what people believed prior to John Calvin, or more specifically I was asked what happed in the ‘1400 years’ before Calvin instituted his beliefs and influenced the world with them.

 

That, I must admit, was a question I didn’t know the answer to. It was a question that didn’t bring about much interest in me the first time it was asked but the second time…it sent me looking for the answers.

 

Let me first say, that as I understood the question, the person asking it was saying that what I believed was based off what John Calvin taught and that ‘men’ were where my beliefs came from.

 

Before I go into what happened before Calvin I want to explain what happened for me. I’ve written numerous times of how ‘the light was flipped on for me’ so that I was able to see what I was believing, to see what had been hazy before I understood what exactly it was that I was seeing. But let me explain where ‘what I was seeing’ came from.

 

The truth is…if I look only at the world and what’s in it…I have no idea. I wasn’t reading books on Christianity, wasn’t watching movies, wasn’t talking to other people. Truth be told I wasn’t even reading the Bible all that much. I had read it all the way through, cover to cover, but I did it for the sole purpose of being able to say that I had read the entire Bible, and so I simply read it…I studied nothing in it. I did read it from time to time for enjoyment or because I felt the need to do so, did study it sometimes, but I wasn’t doing so daily and I wasn’t doing so to look for any certain thing.

 

Where and how did my beliefs become what they are now?

 

I have no idea…except that they came from the Lord. And Scripture backs that up.

But back to what I used to know and not know…I had no idea who Calvin was before I understood what it was that I believe. I didn’t know anything about the reformation or church history. Not only did I know nothing of those things but I had no interest in them.

 

How then could my beliefs have come from any man?

 

They didn’t.

 

And yet I gained those beliefs anyway. The only explanation I can give is that they came from the Lord and had little, if any, influence from the thoughts, teachings, or theologies of man. In fact I had zero interest in anything labeled as theology. If someone had tried to get me to discuss the subject I would have quickly exited the conversation. I said often that I believed the Bible and only the Bible.

 

I still hold to that belief.

 

I do, however, now understand what it is that I saw in Scripture. As a result I now understand what labels are put on what I believe. Which means I know how to go looking for others that share the same, or similar, beliefs that I have.

 

But knowing all that now only means I know how to find people of similar beliefs if I want to listen to, or read, something by someone that believes as I do. It doesn’t mean that my beliefs came about because of the beliefs of any man (or woman).

 

And it sure meant I couldn’t answer the question of what happened in the 1400 years before Calvin and his beliefs. As I pondered the question I realized that I couldn’t answer it and not just because I didn’t know the information. The thing is I have no interest in knowing what happened before Calvin…be it one year or 1400. The more I thought on the question the more I realized that …for me…the question wasn’t what happened before Calvin but what happened after Paul and the apostles.

 

The question may be the same but…for me…it’s vastly different. Since my beliefs didn’t come from a theory written by any man…even a theory taken straight from Scripture…but from the Bible itself, I don’t want to start with that man and work backwards but start with Scripture and work forward.

 

And so…that’s what I’m going to attempt to do. I don’t mind in the least admitting that it’s a task I feel ill equipped to tackle. But I’m going to try.

 

In so doing I’m going to start with Christ…that is, after all, where all of Christianity should start and end. Around the year 30 Ad Christ instituted a new covenant with His people. This covenant completely overturned the law and the old covenant. The Lord’s people were no longer under the law but under grace…under Christ.

 

This new covenant is the whole of how we are to believe and follow Christ today. Because we live under the new covenant we are no longer bound by the old covenant. Which means the Old Testament holds different meaning for us today than it did before Christ brought in the new covenant.

 

I had someone tell me once that 2 Timothy 2:15…

 

…rightly dividing the word of truth.

 

Is the dividing line between the old covenant and the new covenant. It’s the difference of whether we live under the law of the Old Testament or the grace of the New Testament. We must…as that verse says…rightly divide Scripture. We must know where the line between the two is and we must be able to see the difference. Now, the person that told me that went on to point out exactly when and where that dividing line came into play. I don’t think it’s so important that we understand exactly when it happened so much as we must understand that it did happen and that we are either on one side of that divide or the other.

 

Do we live under the law or do we live under grace? Do we live under the Old covenant or do we live under the new covenant?

 

The line has already been drawn. We need do nothing but understand that it’s there and know that there’s a difference in the Old Testament and the New.

 

That line was drawn by Christ Himself somewhere around the year 30 Ad. With the drawing of that line He instituted a whole new life for all believers.

 

The disciples understood that. The apostles understood it. They lived on one side of the line and referenced to the other side as the need arose.

 

Scripture takes us only so far on the new covenant side of that line. Sadly…it ends with Revelation. Our ability to see life through the words of Scripture ends with the final book of the Bible. From there we are forced to view life…all of history…through the eyes of Scripture as we are able to apply our understanding to time. In other words we cease to be able to look at time as the Lord laid it out for us and we begin to have to look at it through the understanding we gain through reading the Scriptures.

 

We know from Scripture…from Paul that there were men in the Bible days that were ‘peddling’ Christ. They were using the gospel to line their own pockets. They were trading it for what they could get out of it, making it work for them instead of them working for it. In other words they were making Christ serve them instead of them serving Him.

 

For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ. 2 Corinthians 2:17

 

That is a very important thing to take note of because it shows us that even in the days when the apostles walked the earth, teaching and preaching of Christ, that there were men that were changing…distorting…the truth to make it what they wanted to make of it. I have a blog post where I wrote on the subject of ‘it preaches good’. Today, so many preachers preach what sounds good, what hits their target audience with the best impact. They are twisting the truth and filling in the holes as they see fit so that it preaches good. Paul told us that men of his time were doing the same thing. We don’t know exactly what they were preaching but we know that they were preaching…peddling…God’s word not out of sincerity as Paul and the others were doing but as a ways of selling it…or making it work for them.

 

So even as the apostles walked the earth earnestly….sincerely…passionately…proclaiming the word of God, there were men that were twisting that very word into something that was insincere. This isn’t a new concept. It didn’t start with the prosperity gospel mega ‘churches’, it didn’t start with the catholic ‘church’, it started with men in Paul’s day.

 

At the last page of the Bible we can no longer look to Scripture to tell us what was happening. We lose the best history text we will ever have and we begin to have to look to history as man has recorded it. The Bible takes us through time until about the year 100 Ad.

 

We know that while the apostles walked the earth we had Christianity as the Lord designed it. And…per Paul…we know we had it as he did not design it.

 

From what I was able to gather we then have a time lapse of about 100 years. I don’t know what happened in those years. If I had to guess I would say that most likely both sides continued to grow and flourish. From my own understanding of how mans minds work I’m inclined to say that the closer we are in time to when Christ was on earth the more likely we are to have the gospel being given…and therefore having people believing…in it’s truth without men’s ideas added into it.

 

It’s like with anything else. Our minds remember things more accurately the closer we are in time to when something happened. Time has a way of fading the details. There’s a popular children’s game that would better explain this. It’s called telephone. A group of kids sits in a circle and one of them whispers something in the next child’s ear. Each child takes a turn whispering to the child beside them until it gets to the last child. Now the first child may have said ‘I love ice cream’ but by the time it makes it down the line to the last child it very well could be ‘I like ivy and dreams.’ The thing is…the more people the story goes through, the greater the chance that it will be distorted from the original version.

 

The Lord retained His word, His truth, through all of that. He has preserved His word through the ages for His people. But how many people handled that word that weren’t His and therefore mangled it to the point that it looks little like the Truth as it was originally spoken.

 

And so…even though I can’t prove it…I would assume that…as with today…the Truth of Christ was passed from person to person, sometimes it stayed Scripturally accurate and sometimes it was probably mangled to the point where we couldn’t recognize truth in it if we tried.

 

I’m not referring to the written Scriptures here but of what was taught from person to person.

 

As Scripture ended and time without Biblical record began I had to look to the records kept by man which took me to what is referred to as the ‘church fathers’. I won’t go into why I believe labeling these men as ‘church fathers’ is wrong. Instead I wish to turn to the beliefs they held. Starting with Augustine.

 

St. Augustine is called, rightly, the Doctor of Grace…Augustine showed very well our total dependence on God…Every good work, even good will, is the work of God:… For not only has God given us our ability and helps it, but He even works [brings about] willing and acting in us; not that we do not will or that we do not act, but that without His help we neither will anything good nor do it"—

 

That is a very brief excerpt on Augustine’s beliefs from…http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/AUGUSTIN.HTM

 

I read elsewhere that Augustine believed in predestination. For anyone that wishes to say predestination is not in the Bible please look to what Paul teaches in Ephesians 1, particularly verses 4 and 11.

 

There are men that claim to be Calvinists….or reformed…that have said they are Augustinians.

R. C. Sproul is one of these men. He has written that he is in fact an ‘Augustinian.’ I point this out only to show that Augustine would have to have held the same basic beliefs as what is known as Calvinism today.

 

The fact that those beliefs weren’t written out until Calvin did so does not mean that no one believed that way before Calvin, nor does it mean that Calvin invented that way of believing.

 

Clement is another ‘church father’ that lived about the same time as Augustiheld to similar beliefs.

 

Clement (A.D. 80-140): So all of them received honor and greatness, not through themselves or their own deeds or the right things they did, but through his will. And we, therefore, who by his will have been called in Jesus Christ, are not justified of ourselves or by our wisdom or insight of religious devotion or the holy deeds we have done from the heart, but by that faith by which almighty God has justified all men from the very beginning. To him be glory forever and ever. Amen. (Clement, Clement's First Letter, 32.3-4)

 

Now, I understand that there are those that will say that until Augustine there was no such Biblical truth as predestination taught. I have no idea what happened from the end of the Bible to what it written of Augustine. But I would again point anyone that wants to say that there is no predestination in Scripture to Ephesians 1. And just to be on the safe side I’m going to post them here from the Greek text…

 

Vs 4… just as he chose us in him before [the] foundation of [the] world to be for us holy and blameless before him in love

 

Vs 5…having predestined us for divine adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to himself according to the good pleasure of the will of him

 

Vs 11…in him in whom also we have obtained an inheritance having been predestined according to [the] purpose of the [one] –all things working according to the counsel of the will of him

 

That is the English wording of the interlinear Bible where it translates those verses from Greek to English. The word predestined is in not only our modern translations but it was in the Greek translations.

 

Let me pause for just a minute to say that in my research on the ‘church’ fathers I’m coming across some differences in times for some of them. I’ve seen dates on Augustine that put him around 100 AD and around 300 AD. I can’t know which is right and since my purpose is to gather together what they believed and not an exact on when they lived I’m not going to delve deeper into their time frames. For that reason I may give a time on someone that may be inaccurate but if I do so it’s because I found that date in an article on that person.

 

As I understand it the early ‘church fathers’ had certain terms that differed from those of the people during the reformation. Those differing terms made them, at times, seem to have different beliefs than the reformers…or those labeled as Calvinists. For instance regeneration to the early ‘church fathers’ meant ‘the entirety of the Christian life’. Whereas today it means the first step of conversion…or salvation.

 

            This difference of terms may make it seem that ‘Calvinism’ wasn’t around until Calvin coined the belief but that isn’t how it worked. As I pointed out above both Augustine and Clement held ‘Calvinist’ beliefs. So much so that today’s Calvinists sometimes claim to be Augustinians.

 

            The fact is that Christ was a ‘Calvinist’ if we must put the term on each person that holds to those beliefs. He said ‘those that the father gives me’. He didn’t say ‘those that choose me’. Paul was a ‘Calvinist’ that openly spoke of predestination. He spoke of the elect. He spoke of the chosen.

 

Even in the old testament we see many times where Scripture talks of ‘my people.’ It’s all laid out there before us if we can only see it.

 

The early ‘church fathers’ saw it and taught it. They taught the same gospel that Christ taught. The same gospel that Paul taught. Whether we’re talking about Augustine, Gottschalk, Luther, Calvin, the Puritans, or those that are labeled as ‘Calvinists’ today.

 

Here are some of the beliefs held by what is called the early ‘church fathers’…

 

Total depravity

 

Barnabas (A.D. 70): “Learn: before we believed in God, the habitation of our heart was corrupt and weak.”


Justin Martyr (A.D. 150): “Mankind by Adam fell under death, and the deception of the serpent; we are born sinners…No good thing dwells in us…For neither by nature, nor by human understanding is it possible for me to acquire the knowledge of things so great and so divine, but by the energy of the Divine Spirit…Of ourselves it is impossible to enter the kingdom of God…He has convicted us of the impossibility of our nature to obtain life…Free will has destroyed us; we who were free are become slaves and for our sin are sold…Being pressed down by our sins, we cannot move upward toward God; we are like birds who have wings, but are unable to fly.”


Origen: “Our free will…or human nature is not sufficient to seek God in any manner.”


Augustine (A.D. 370): “If, therefore, they are servants of sin (2 Cor. 3:17), why do they boast of free will?…O, man! Learn from the precept what you ought to do; learn from correction, that it is your own fault you have not the power…Let human effort, which perished by Adam, here be silent, and let the grace of God reign by Jesus Christ…What God promises, we ourselves do not through free will of human nature, but He Himself does by grace within us…Men labor to find in our own will something that is our own, and not God’s; how can they find it, I know not.”


 


Unconditional election:


Clement Of Rome (A.D. 69): “Let us therefore approach Him in holiness of soul, lifting up pure and undefiled hands unto Him, with love towards our gentle and compassionate Father because He made us an elect portion unto Himself…Seeing then that we are the special elect portion of a Holy God, let us do all things that pertain unto holiness…There was given a declaration of blessedness upon them that have been elected by God through Jesus Christ our Lord…Jesus Christ is the hope of the elect…”


Barnabas (A.D. 70): “We are elected to hope, committed by God unto faith, appointed to salvation.”


Ignatius: “To the predestined ones before all ages, that is, before the world began, united and elect in a true passion, by the eternal will of the Father…”


Justin Martyr: “In all these discourses I have brought all my proofs out of your own holy and prophetic writings, hoping that some of you may be found of the elect number which through the grace that comes from the Lord of Sabaoth, is left or reserved [set apart] for everlasting salvation.”


Irenaeus (A.D. 198): “God hath completed the number which He before determined with Himself, all those who are written, or ordained unto eternal life…Being predestined indeed according to the love of the Father that we would belong to Him forever.”


Clement Of Alexandria (A.D. 190): “Through faith the elect of God are saved. The generation of those who seek God is the elect nation, not [an earthly] place, but the congregation of the elect, which I call the Church…If every person had known the truth, they would all have leaped into the way, and there would have been no election…You are those who are chosen from among men and as those who are predestined from among men, and in His own time called, faithful, and elect, those who before the foundation of the world are known intimately by God unto faith; that is, are appointed by Him to faith, grow beyond babyhood.”


Cyprian (A.D. 250): “This is therefore the predestination which we faithfully and humbly preach.”


Ambrose Of Milan (A.D. 380): “In predestination the Church of God has always existed.”


Augustine (A.D. 380): “Here certainly, there is no place for the vain argument of those who defend the foreknowledge of God against the grace of God, and accordingly maintain that we were elected before the foundation of the world because God foreknew that we would be good, not that He Himself would make us good. This is not the language of Him who said, ‘You did not choose Me, but I chose you’ (John 15:16).”


 


And a few more quotes by a few of the ‘church fathers’…


 


Clement Of Rome (A.D. 69): “It is the will of God that all whom He loves should partake of repentance, and so not perish with the unbelieving and impenitent. He has established it by His almighty will. But if any of those whom God wills should partake of the grace of repentance, should afterwards perish, where is His almighty will? And how is this matter settled and established by such a will of His?”


Clement Of Alexandria (A.D. 190): “Such a soul [of a Christian] shall never at any time be separated from God…Faith, I say, is something divine, which cannot be pulled asunder by any other worldly friendship, nor be dissolved by present fear.”


Tertullian: “God forbid that we should believe that the soul of any saint should be drawn out by the devil…For what is of God is never extinguished.”


Augustine: “Of these believers no one perishes, because they were all elected. And they were elected because they were called according to the purpose–the purpose, however, not their own, but God’s…Obedience then is God’s gift…To this, indeed, we are not able to deny, that perseverance in good, progressing even to the end, is also a great gift of God.”


 


As we can see by the quotes I’ve given the ‘church fathers’ not only believed in predestination and election, they also believed in the Lord’s sovereignty and not in man’s free will.


That brings us to around 350-400 AD…and shows that ‘Calvinism’ did exist before Calvin coined the theory.


 


That brings us to the dark ages when the Roman Catholic church dominated so much of the world’s beliefs. There were pockets of true believers that held to the same beliefs as the ‘church fathers’ and today’s modern ‘Calvinists’.


The Waldensains were a group that held to at least some of those beliefs. They’re the first group I came across specific information on their beliefs after the ‘church fathers’ and before the reformation era. Without going too deep into what they believed (see that here… http://journeyingtochrist.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-waldensains.html) a French man experienced a dramatic conversion…so much so that he gave up his business and threw his money into the street…and began to follow the teachings of Jesus from the Gospels.


 


I was unable to find anything that said for certain whether or not this group was actually ‘Calvinist’ in their beliefs but the fact that they were persecuted and killed for their beliefs would indicate to me that they held something of those beliefs. The Waldensains covered the time between 1100’s and the 1500’s which brings us to the time of the reformers and  to Calvin.


 


That is a quick history of the ‘Calvinists’ beliefs. Calvin didn’t invent the beliefs, he only wrote them out. The beliefs behind Calvin’s doctrines weren’t man-made but Biblical.


 


I went into the time between Scripture and Calvin because I wanted to be able to answer the question of what happened in those ‘1400 years’ but for me…I don’t need to know the answer to that question. I need only to know that John said…


 


But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in him. 1 John 2:27