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COMING in NOVEMEBER
The Road to Nicaea:
The Church Infiltrated
Let us therefore, forsake the vanity of the crowd and their false teachings, and turn back to the word delivered to us from the beginning. —
St. Polycarp
The Road to Nicaea and the formal establishment of the church was a challenging one, fraught with controversies, challenges, martyrdom and heresies.
Through the prophetic and apostolic fire that fell on the early believers in Pentecost to the fire that burned Jerusalem in 70AD that led to the diaspora and the Gospel message being sent from Jerusalem into the farthest corners of the earth, and the fires that burned alive the martyrs of the faith including the beloved Saint Polycarp, disciple of the Apostle John, there is no doubt that the early church was forged in fire.
These fires, both precious and precarious, ignited the hearts of those early believers to obey the Great Commission in spreading the Gospel message like wildfire. In so doing, the church was born and was multiplying rapidly all over the world as the message of the Cross was turning the hearts of the lost to the heart of Christ.
Ecclesiology: In the center of this rapidly growing church were the leaders and doctrines that would establish the fundamentals of church theology, hermeneutics and church order still in place today. While establishing truth in theology was the quest for most, the lust for power and platform ignited other flames that would challenge the budding theologies, doctrines and the very Word of God itself. And as is often the case, with true doctrine also came false doctrine, otherwise known as heresy.
Christology & Soteriology: The prominent heresies circulating through the early church primarily challenged the divinity of Jesus (Christology), the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of Salvation (Soteriology) the dominate and most destructive of these being Arianism, Monarchism & Gnosticism.
Many of these heresies survived their expulsion from the church hierarchy and still exist today in small pockets of our church doctrines. Unchanged and unchallenged, these broken theologies still grab the imagination of the uneducated as well as trained theologians.
Patristics: To establish the truth in a sea of dogma, we need to first establish and validate reliable sources for truth. To do so we will first establish the Bible, our primary source for truth as a reliable historical resource using archeology and extra biblical resources. We will then consult with patristical sources, the writings of the early church fathers, to get to the simplicity of the TRUE Gospel of Jesus Christ and compare that to the creeds and doctrines established at Nicaea.
Apologetic Foundation: This apologetic journey will give us a deeper insight to the firm foundation we have in our ecclesiology today. And highlight the pitfalls that befell this fledgling faith in its formidable state. We will also be able to better understand how false doctrines have infiltrated our faith for centuries so that we can identify the tactics of the enemy and weed out any beliefs that are counter to the Word of God and sound doctrine.
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