What it means to be Lutheran - Week 1

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello. Okay. I don't think it's where it's supposed to be. Okay. If anybody has information about the garage key, speak with Mary bites. All right, great. That's all I know on that subject. That's it. So we're gonna move on. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. All right. Yeah. Dan back there is trying to blow you with his hands, like, sort of closer in, you know, that's trying to gather everybody in. Yes, you can let us know how it is using the table up here. Yes, I think you can do whatever you want with that table. Yeah, I don't need this much space for my papers, so feel free to fill in. All right. And would you like the table scooted in, or. No? Okay. You good? All right. All right. So we begin our series on what it means to be Lutheran. We're going to do this for seven weeks, and then on the 8th week, celebrate the reformation together and then get back to our normal routine and our normal Bible studies. Now, there are a lot of ways that we could approach this. What does it mean to be Lutheran? And so I've picked kind of seven things that'll cover. Well, some of it. I'm trying to give sort of a comprehensive look at it, provide some different. Well, look at it from some different directions. First, I should say a couple things about the structure of this. I think it'll be most helpful if we hold questions to the end. So what we're going to do is leave time for questions, and then we'll have a couple of microphones going around. So if you have a question at the end, you'll raise your hand, and then a microphone will come to you, and you can speak clearly into the microphone. Your question. And then everybody in here will be able to hear the question, hopefully. Or I'll, you know, I might repeat it anyway for added clarity. And then people watching online will be able to hear it as well. All right, so, day one, what it means to be Lutheran. I've chosen to say orthodox. Now, orthodox. Orthodox comes from a couple of greek words, really, a greek compound word, orthodoxos. But these are the words that make up that compound word, orthos, which means right or straight. And Doxa, which means belief, actually, it also means glory. So to be orthodox is to have your belief. It's just straight. It's nothing different, nothing new. It's just straight. So you might think of, like, an orthodox or unorthodox artist. If an artist is unorthodox, then they're not following the conventional rules of art. You're not going to expect a piece of art from that artist. That is what you would expect. You're expecting something different because they're not following the rules that artists in the past have followed. They're not building on the shoulders of previous artists. Instead, they're unorthodox. They're striking out a new course. Martin Luther. We'll talk more about where a name comes from. Lutheran. Martin Luther was not trying to start like, chart a new course. He wasn't trying to. He wasn't just brilliant, wasn't like, well, finally, here comes a guy who can read the Bible better than anybody else. You know, that's. That's not what Luther was trying to be, and that's not what being Lutheran is about. Being Lutheran is about being orthodox. Nothing new here. That's the goal, and that's the claim of orthodoxy. We're not the only ones who make that claim. So you got to ask, like, well, are we orthodox? And then you got to find a way to back it up or, you know, that kind of thing. I was talking one time some years ago with a pastor of a non denominational church, and I said, so where do you draw your teachings? Or what do you believe? Because non denominational means, like, we're not going to define what we teach. You know, it's kind of like we're just Christian. We'll just kind of leave it at that. And so I wanted a little more specificity to kind of know where he was coming from. So I asked, I asked him, you know, so what do you believe? And he said, oh, just orthodox christian faith. He's like, well, what does that mean? So you're thinking, this is just what it is and this is just it. And then he told me some things and I said, oh, okay, you're basically Baptist. And he was trained at a baptist seminary. So that's the challenge with just the word on its face. And so today what I'd like to do is share with you a little bit of historical context to say, this is some of why Lutherans would say that we're orthodox. Like, this is part of where we draw our orthodoxy. And one way to summarize it would be, again, to say we don't just think that Luther was the best Bible scholar ever to have lived, and so we're going to follow what he said. Instead, Luther saw himself not as coming up with anything brilliant or unique. He saw himself as standing on the shoulders of the ancient church. You could think creeds. We have these creeds that come to us from a long time ago that the entire church developed together and said together, and we say those creeds. We're living in the christian faith that the ancient church held, which itself is drawn from scripture. So we'll talk more about our. Well, where we, where we draw our orthodoxy from. But first, who's this Luther guy and why did we come from him anyway? So Martin Luther. Guess I have to press the button. This is a picture of Johann Tetzel, John Tetzel, selling indulgences. So if you're familiar at all with the Reformation, this is one of the favorite stories to tell. John Tetzel was commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church to raise money for the building of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. And he was creative and outgoing and would go out there and he's preaching fire and brimstone kind of sermons. It's just that the sermons were saying, if you buy this piece of paper that says that your dead relative is not going to suffer in purgatory for his sins before going to heaven, if you buy it, then that's the reality. He says, famously says something like, you know, in German, I suppose something like when a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory Springs. Okay? And so, I mean, even like, Roman Catholics would look at that and say, that's an abuse. You know, that's, that's kind of know, laughable. Not laughable, really serious today. And it is to Catholics, too. But this is sort of, this was, this is a serious example of the abuses that were going on at the time in the Roman Catholic Church, that salvation and forgiveness would be sold for money to build a church. So indulgences were one of the, one of the birds that, you know, that drove Luther and others to say, look, we've got to change some things. So I'll mention a few other issues. Another issue was the power of the pope. The pope said he's the sole authority. I mean, that he was even above scripture. And so that was a problem. Another was that salvation was being taught as something that you get not simply by God's grace. You know, we like to quote Ephesians two, eight and nine, you're saved by grace through faith. This not of yourselves. You know, it's a gift from God, not by works, so that nobody can boast. And at that time they were saying, well, no, it's kind of a together thing. God's involved, sure, but really you have to work out your salvation through your works. It's not just all coming down from above so you can in a sense, earn your forgiveness by works and then to bring it back to the indulgences, the Roman Catholic Church, the hierarchy, the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, the pope being at the top, believed that they contained a treasure of these good works, like extras. So many people beforehand, the saints, Jesus had done more works than they needed for themselves to make God happy with them. And all of these were sort of collected almost like in a treasure chest, so that you had more works than you needed so those could be given out by the church. And so they drew this from Jesus, saying, for example, whatever you bind on earth is bound, and whatever you bind, and you know that is bound in heaven, right? That the church has authority. And so they took this to mean that the pope and the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church could dole out these merits for forgiveness. So, like, you know, on the one hand, you gotta be doing things if you want God to be happy with you. And then on the other hand, when you sin, you can receive an indulgence, so you repent and you can receive like this gift that's recorded on paper and signed by the authorities of the Catholic Church that says, we're going to apply some of the merits that are stored up from the saints to your sins. And that's actually, that's still roman catholic belief. They do still hold, they've cleaned up some of the, like, we're going to sell salvation in order to build things that got taken care of partly, but I, but still, they have this idea that they can dole out the merits won by Christ and the saints to whomever we will as they repent. Finally, scripture didn't have as prominent a place as it should be. We believe, and Martin Luther believed that scripture, again, the power of the pope was above scripture. You couldn't hold scripture up and say, repent, pope. That's what Luther did, but it didn't work. He said, no, I'm above scripture. And then also the tradition of the church, the church fathers and such, those bishops who came before, who wrote and were famous and helpful, they were above scripture, or at least equal to scripture in weight, in terms of what we should believe and how we should practice. And so this is just, we'll talk about more of these as time goes on, but this is just to sort of, at the start, illustrate some of the problems. So Martin Luther was a monk. He was a monk and a theology professor and a pastor. And he saw these things happening and wanted to help address them. So he started bringing them up, and there were debates and then he was writing about them and he was trying to get people to see, look, this is not how we've done things forever. I was reading a treatise in which recently, in which he says, just 50 years ago, things were really different. Like, things have been changed very rapidly and we need to look at these things and reverse them. So he was. That's the famous 95 theses that he nails on the door. You know, that's. That was. Those were for debate in the university so that these things could be discussed and figured out. So again, Martin Luther saw these problems, problems to be solved. But he didn't take. He wasn't tackling these problems with a new brilliant approach. It wasn't like, look, everybody before me has read the Bible wrong, but here it is. I found it. I discovered it. Come. Believe me, Martin Luther was addressing these problems with orthodox solutions. He was just saying, look, let's get back to how we used to be. Let's reverse some of the recent changes that are causing so many problems, that are causing people to trust in themselves or despair because they can't do it. Things like that. All right, so one of the ways to sort of summarize and grab Luther's desire for orthodoxy is to say that Luther, throughout his career as a reformer, called. He wanted a council. He wanted the pope to call a council, a gathering of people to come together, christians to come together and work these issues out of. If the solutions are orthodox solutions, then we should all be able to come to those conclusions together. If we get together, we can figure this out. Call a council. He appealed to the pope, and then the pope wouldn't call a council. And so he appealed to the emperor. Make him call a council. So we usually start the reformation in 1517. We say that was the nailing of the 95 theses on the church doors in Wittenberg. In 1518, Luther said, call a council. And then again and again and again and again. And then starting in 1523, the emperor started saying, pope, you got to call a council. We've got to do this. And the calls continued in the Augsburg confession, which we'll talk about, I think, next time. In 1530, the preface to it. In the preface to it, the reformers wrote, look like, call a council and we'll participate in it sort of obediently, like, this is the way to solve things in the church. The reason that Luther saw a council as the thing to solve the problem is that that's how the church had solved problems in the past. The church had councils that solved major disputes, and they were messy. I mean, the disputes were awful. But out of the council came christian unity around the truth. That would be one way to find orthodox teaching. Like, how do you find orthodoxy? Like, just the way. And if you don't think that the church went off the rails right after the apostles or something like that, then you can find the threat of orthodoxy by following the councils. Now, there were tons of councils. Okay, but I'm talking about the seven councils that were church wide. So we're going to just run through those councils, make sure I haven't painted myself into a corner. No, we got a little bit of time to do this. Good. Okay. So there were seven ecumenical councils, seven universal councils where the entire church participated. The entire church was invited. They weren't ruled by somebody who was going to end up deciding the will of the council unilaterally. It was sort of democratic. All the christian leaders, all the christian bishops were invited from all over the empire. So let's see what we've got next here. That's not my pointer. Uh oh. It sure is. Okay, just turn this off and on. I'm flipping through them, apparently. Okay, now? Nope. I mean. All right. Okay, great. Now I try. That was me. Okay. You never know. Yeah. Okay, so first of all, just to introduce the idea of a council, if you'd like to open up, I'm going to do this kind of quickly, but I'm going to go to acts 15. This is the earliest christian council, and it's not numbered in the seven ecumenical councils. But in acts 15, we hear about a council where the church had a dispute. And so they got together and they discussed it so that unity and clarity could be restored to the church. So I'm just going to touch on this real quickly. In acts 15, the first verse, certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers, unless you are circumcised according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved. Okay, so salvation depends on adherence to the law of Moses. So verse two, this brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So they discussed it. They couldn't figure it out. So then in. I'm going to skip ahead to verse five. Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, the gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses. All right, so this is spreading, and it's causing confusion. Verse six. The apostles and elders met to consider this question. After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them. Okay. And he ends up saying, in verse eleven, we believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved just as they are, not because of circumcision, but by the grace of Jesus. So then there are more arguments, and they bring in some scripture, and then they decide on something. So then in verse 22, I'm skipping ahead. Then the apostles and elders with the whole church decided to choose some of their own men and send them to Antioch. With Paul and Barnabas, they chose Judas and Silas, men who were leaders among the believers. They sent them with the following letter, the apostles and elders, your brothers, to the gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia. Greetings. We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements. You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood from the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell. That might sound confusing at the end there, but trying to think how not to go into this more. But so there are some decrees there that don't touch on salvation, right? Like, they're not saying, like, really for salvation, you don't need circumcision. You need these four things, right? But they're saying you don't need to keep the law of Moses in order to be saved. And I think implied is that the message is what Peter said in the council, that we're saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus. And then they add a few sort of guidelines, like, you'll do well if you do these things. And Luther, commenting on this first council, says that those guidelines were for the sake of the Jews who would be offended by these things. It's like a conversation enderme. If you're just gonna, like, eat strangled things or meet sacrifice to idols in front of Jews, you want to win them over to the faith. And so anyway, all this to say essentially just that there is a model for having a council in the church when there's a dispute. Everybody's gathered together. They're gathered together in Jerusalem. They discuss, and then they say, it seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us, which sounds kind of bold, but they're doing this by faith, looking to Jesus and in conversation with one another, and then they end up saying that. So the later councils, the first council that I'm going to mention, they use the same language in what they put out. It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us that because, I mean, they're not just doing it on their own. It's not like, well, we figured it out and we're pretty smart. So here you go. They're saying, you know, the intention here is we are receiving from God by faith together, all of us working together, in order to bring a christian solution to this problem. And you could say an orthodox solution. Right. Nothing new here. That's the goal. All right, so. Sorry. You might not see my laser pointer, especially if I don't find the button. That must be it. Ah, maybe you can. You all can see it. I don't know. So where am I pointing? All right, so Jerusalem, that was where that acts council happened. All right? The seven ecumenical councils that we're going to run through mostly took place in and around Constantinople. Okay? So when you see Nicaea, it's just south of Constantinople. If I can hold the pointer right there, that's where it is. All right. Or Chalcedon. That's like, right in Constantinople pretty much today. And then there's one in Ephesus down here. So that's where we're. That's where these things are happening. This is because the leadership of the church was sort of centralized in some ways. I mean, just in terms of being organized. Like, we have district presidents, you know, we have a synodical president and such. It just. It really helps to be organized, and that's how they did it in the early church. And so there was a bishop of each city, roughly, and then the bishops of the big cities were bishops of the bishops. You know, there was this kind of a hierarchy for the sake of the good order of the church. And Constantinople was one of the major centers of Christianity. Another major center was Rome. So those two were kind of the main. The main centers of Christianity, you could say, throughout the history of the church. All right, so the first council of Nicaea in 325, the emperor Constantine saw that a presbyter, like an elder, kind of lower tier leader of the church, was teaching that Jesus was not divine like the father is divine, that Jesus was created like anybody else. He's just the best of human creatures. He's sort of the model to follow on our climb towards salvation, you could say. And so he was going around and was very creative. He made songs that he sang in the marketplace. And people were catching this and they were, they were starting to believe it. And even some bishops were following him. And so the disunity came to such a level that the emperor Constantine stepped in and said, hey, we got to have a council. Now. It's interesting that the emperor would do that. Of course, he was christian. But one of the reasons maybe that a bishop didn't do it, it's like, which one's going to call a council? You know, there wasn't a, like a pope. There wasn't a like one bishop that had a say in the whole thing, but they were all part of the roman empire. So Emperor Constantine says, all right, we're inviting all the bishops in the empire, you know, to this council. All the bishops in the church are invited, and we're going to figure this out. And so just briefly at the council, there were somewhere between 250 and 318 bishops there. Makes me think like that, you know, when did they count? How many bishops were there? I don't know. It's like at pastors conferences where everybody's out, like, talking outside and then walks in, like ten minutes after the speaker starts. That might be what happened. I don't know. I don't know. But a lot of bishops. And in the end, they put out the Nicene Creeddeh. That's why it's called the Nicene Creed, because it came from the Council of Nicaea. And that's what we still say today. All but two bishops signed it and said, yes, this is orthodox. This is the straight christian faith. Alexander of Alexandria. What a name. Alexander was the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, and he presided over that council. So they defended the divinity of Christ. Okay. The first council of Constantinople, the theological dispute was pretty much the same. It was still the, the teachings of Arius were still causing problems. And this time it had pretty well been agreed. Okay, so Christ is equal to the Father. Christ is God, like the Father is, but not the spirit. And so they put out a creed that's sometimes called the. What is it? The Niceno Constantinopolitan creed. Okay? That's actually the one. We say the Nicene creed. So in Nicaea, the creed that they put out, the third article on the Holy Spirit, it just said, and in the Holy Spirit, that was it, because it wasn't the issue, you know. Well, now it is an issue. So, okay, now we gotta. So all the Annie and the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the father. We'll talk about that later. Who, with the father together is worshiped and glorified. All of that came from the first council of Constantinople in 381. So, I mean, this, like we just mentioned this, but this represents a lot of work and a lot of suffering. All right. I put gregory of Nazianzus here because he was important. But Athanasius of Alexandria, he was the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt. And over the course of something like 44 years, he was exiled five times and had to run for his life a bunch of times and was in hiding and things like that because it was dangerous defending the divinity of Christ. It was dangerous. And the spirit, it was dangerous defending orthodoxy. So these first ones are kind of the more important ones, in a sense. The council of Ephesus in 431 was called. All of these were called by emperors, by the way, which is interesting. Okay. This one was called because of a guy named, named Nestorius, who was saying that Christ is basically two people. There's the divine and the human, because you can't mix those. You can't, like, you know. So, for example, one of the places where the rubber met the road for this was in talking about Mary, Jesus mother. Would you say that Mary is the mother of God or the mother of the human Jesus? And it can't be proper to say that a human being is the mother of God. And so get into these kinds of. Of questions, and it's like, well, you could just not think about it. But then once you think about it, then you're really making a clear choice here. Want to split Jesus into two people and say that the divine didn't really become human? No, it's important for us and for our salvation that the word became flesh, that in God becoming man, that he actually takes on human nature. And so they defended the unity of the person of Christ. Cyril of Alexandria wrote a ton toward this to try and help toward clarity, and his phrase kind of stuck. Two natures of the one Christ. So then in Chalcedon in 451, the issue flipped. So Nestorius was saying, like, he's two people. And now chalcedon was saying, there's only one nature against this kind of mixed thing now, like divine and human and such. But it was important to separate out that, well, no, he has two natures that, let's say his divinity isn't brought low by his humanity and that kind of thing. Rather, it kind of goes the other way around, that he takes up human nature into himself while remaining what he is in order to save it. All right. The second council of Constantinople in 553 AD. In this one, they basically just condemned certain writings to say, like, well, these writings that supported these past heresies that were dealt with in past councils. Like, those writings are wrong. Just for the sake of clarity. That's mostly what happened there. And so the three chapters, they represent three people's writings or specific writings. You can ask me about those later if you want. Okay. The third council of Constantinople in 680 and 81 was dealing with whether Christ has one or two wills. Similar issue here. Is he divine and human in all that that means? Okay. And then it seems kind of obscure that you'd worry about this. But the issue is there's an ancient maxim that says whatever is not assumed is not saved. Like that Christ fully took on our human nature in every way. That, for example, like, you see him out in the wilderness being tempted. Like he's got a human will there and he's winning, right? Like, he goes to the cross, he's got a human will, not just his divine will. Like, he's taken on our human nature and defeated the devil. And in him we are restored in the image of God, fully everything that it means to be human. And I'll just mention Maximus the confessor. He's called a confessor because he's not a martyr. He wasn't killed for his faith, but he did lose his tongue and his right hand for it. And then the council happened 20 years later and used his writings basically. So people suffered greatly for orthodoxy. It's not like the strong people, like, won out, you know, this is serious business. And finally, the 7th Council of Nicaea in 787 dealt with iconoclasm, the idea that you can't use images because God says, don't make any graven images right there in the ten commandments, in the giving of the ten commandments. And so they had to deal with this. Iconoclasm refers to destroying and removing images from the church, from christians and such, and saying like, we shouldn't make any representations. It's kind of, I mean, you have that in Islam. It's kind of like Islam went the other way with this kind of dispute. But the church together, you know, called together by this time an empress, actually Irene, I think Empress Irene, she was in charge for a while and she called this council. And so the church together figured out that, well, we can use images and actually should, because while God is invisible and beyond our comprehension and bodiless and all of that, the word became flesh and dwelt among us like we can see God. And actually we need images. And so it was all centered on the incarnation of Jesus. Notice these all have to do with salvation, which is wonderful. So those are the councils. Luther. Luther wanted a council. And as we've seen, there was a lot of precedent for an emperor to call a council in order to settle a dispute. But one of the problems was that the pope was saying, like, yeah, yeah, we'll do a council. But Luther and the other reformers were saying, like, no, like, we need a council, but we need a council where anybody can speak. Like, where the pope's not just gonna sort of rule it and determine the outcome, because that won't work, he says. So this is from. This is 1520. This was kind of an early appeal. For this reason, I have always said that a counsel would be neither useful nor possible unless it were a free one in which every man might speak his mind freely and without restraint, whether it were the pope or anyone else who had said otherwise. And then here's another quote. This one's from 1538. So since the pope, with his following, simply refuses to convoke a council and reform the church or offer any advice or assistance toward that end, but boastfully defends his tyranny with crimes, preferring to let the church go to ruin, we so shamefully forsaken by the pope cannot go on and must seek counsel and help elsewhere. And first of all, seek and ask our Lord Jesus Christ for a reformation. So, like, leaving the church was never the idea. Like, that was never the goal. It was. The pope is. Is not going to reform. He refuses to repent and sees himself as being above scripture. And so, all right, even though he won't call a council and we can't get a council to happen, you know, it probably wouldn't end up helping anyway because the pope's not going to be corrected. He's going to keep controlling things. And so. Well, Luther's excommunicated. They're called, not the church, but they're holding on to orthodox teaching. So what do we do? Well, they held on to Christ and they just kept being the church. And then at some point, we started being called Lutherans. So that's how I see, I guess, orthodoxy as partly defining what it means to be lutheran. And we can talk about the implications of that more in weeks to come. But I've kind of gone over what I intended to do here is probably inevitable in some sense, but let's open it up to questions. So sherry's grabbing a microphone. Two, I don't know. Does anybody have a question all right, we've got Mary bites up here. Uh oh, sorry, your mic is not. Is it on? On. Okay. What other christian churches still use the three creeds that we use in our services? Does everybody use all of those creeds? Not everybody. Not everybody uses the three ecumenical creeds. These are ecumenical because they came from ecumenical councils or were approved by them. Not all do. So the roman catholic church does and the eastern orthodox church does, and we do, and I think Anglicans do. And I read that there are some Calvinists that hold to the first four ecumenical councils, but I can't speak to how they view those creeds. So it does mark us as at least somewhat unique among Protestants that we are creedal. Thank you. [00:40:57] Speaker B: Okay, well, two questions. One, can we get handouts of what's been displayed? I can't write so fast. [00:41:04] Speaker A: Yes. Yes, I can give you the handout. Yeah. [00:41:07] Speaker B: Two, once we parted from. And I know that it was not the intention to part from the catholic faith, however, did we continue on with having these councils, like, in the Lutheran, like, when things would be brought up from the time of Luther until now? Is that something we still do? [00:41:35] Speaker A: Good question. Do we still. Have we done councils since the reformation to figure out theological disputes, or did. [00:41:46] Speaker B: Nobody ever dispute again? [00:41:48] Speaker A: Well, we've. Yeah, there have certainly been disputes. Well, that's a really good question. I've never thought about it in terms of councils. Like, we certainly had disputes and. But. But I guess one. I guess one difference, maybe, is that I. Early on, the Lutherans, this is what I'm going to get into next week, somewhat. Okay. So early on, the Lutherans compiled documents that define what we believe and those we call the lutheran confessions. And in 1580, they were compiled into what we call the Book of Concord. And so from then on, the disputes are more like, well, this is not in line with our confessions. Those confessions anchor us in a particular way of believing and articulating things and such. And next week we're going to talk about why that's helpful and important, but. So I think that probably changed the way that councils look. But good question. I'm going to think about that more. One of the largest events, at least structurally, in the christian church occurred in 1054 when the eastern and western church split. Was there a council there or did pope just make a decision? Yeah, I was going to mention that. I just kind of ran out of time. So in 1054, the church split. Before that, it was all just one church. In 1054, the east and the west split, the bishops of Constantinople and Rome excommunicated each other. So there wasn't a council to figure that out. Things had been festering for a while. One of the issues was that in the west, a few hundred years after the Council of Nicaea, well, the next council that did the article on the Holy Spirit in the west, because of theological problems going on, they added a couple words to the Nicene creed that we say because we inherit the western tradition and those are in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, they added, and the Son. And so the east didn't like that. Like, well, you can't go adding to our ecumenical creeddeh. Right. And that kind of thing. But also some tension between Constantinople and Rome. Who should we look to as the authority? And then over a few hundred years and maybe the middle ages too, you know, kind of going into the. Well, things were going downhill in some ways. They ended up splitting. So thanks for bringing that up. And no, there wasn't a council for that. We're kind of running out of time here, but we could probably have a. Another question or so. So you mentioned there's a lot of pain and suffering that was happening. And Cyril, you said, I think, is the one that. Or the confessor. Right. Lost his hand. Lost his hand. Maximus. Maximus. Lost his hand, lost his tongue. Was that within the church or was that from without? Yeah, good question. Well, there were certainly those leaders within the church who were swayed by what came to be seen as heterodox beliefs. But a lot of the persecution came from secular authorities like the emperors. So, for example, Athanasius, in the fourth century as bishop of Alexandria, kept getting exiled and reinstated based on whether the emperor agreed with Arius or the orthodox Christians. And so a lot of it had to do with power. Same for Maximus the confessor. He was subject to those kinds of political shifts. Seeing no hands for a moment, we should probably bring this to a close. And next week I want to talk about being confessional, that we are confessional, and we already mentioned our lutheran confessions, but we'll talk more about what that means for being lutheran. Thanks so much. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for all who have come before us, for all of the. Well, the diligence and faith of those who have come before us. Thank you that we get to stand their shoulders and within their tradition. As we look to you and receive from your word, please keep us in that faith. To life everlasting, in Jesus name, amen. I did not mention that we are streaming this just so you guys know and. Recording? Yep. Right?