Shabbat shalom chaverim and welcome. As this is the last assembly before Shavu'ot (Weeks) when we will be having meetings on three consecutive days starting on Sunday, I thought we'd take a break from what we've been doing since we started this new 11th series without completely severing ourselves from the flow we're on. Consider this an exercise in 'exercising the phronema'!

So sit back, relax, and join with me this morning as we collectively seek take an historical journey and ride the waters of the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit). We're going to go back in time again and our first port of call is the 16th century and the Reformation in Europe. This is a hundred years before the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, England, to seed what would one day become the United States in September of 1620, which was four centuries ago - we're going back a century before that, to 31 October 1517 when the Reformation began in earnest through Martin Luther, when he nailed his 95 Theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral challenging the Catholic Church's hegenomy. (I am not going to include the abortive attempt by Jan Hus a century before Luther in what's now the Czech Republic.)

Now the Protestant Reformation didn't arrive fully blown in 1517, it took over a century to become established. Traditionally we describe it as arising between 1517-1648. Before Martin Luther and Protestantism crashed in on the scene, Europe was a very, very different world indeed to the religious one we see now. From Finland in northern Europe and moving south along the eastern border of what is now the Baltic States and old Poland, along the eastern Hungarian border in Transylvania and Slavonia (now Croatia), and the heel of Italy down past Malta and to the North African coast, was an invisible 'red line' dividing Roman Catholicism from Eastern Orthodoxy. That's all the Christianity were was in Europe. Go back another 500 years and there is essentially only one Christian Body, before the Rome and Byzantium split, and then back another 1,000 years to the days of Christ and the apostles.

The history of Christianity in Europe has been long, complicated, and at times (for the one who isn't an avid historian) very confusing. When I started the Phronema study our goal was to reconnect to the first century Messianic Community (Church), to the roots of our faith. Sometimes we forget that the Protestant Reformation was separated from those days by a staggering 1,500 years, which is as long as the time between Christ and the birth of Moses, or the entire Tanakh (Old Testament) minus Genesis! Look at any historical timeline and you'll discover that an awful lot can happen in 1½ millennia. I've brought a couple of chronological timelines along for you to see, one of which condenses 6,000 years' worth of history in a mere 6 meters of card!

Those of you who come from Protestant backgrounds, as mine is in the Church of England (or Anglican Church), brought with you a ready-made picture of life and of the Besorah (Gospel) that has been constantly reshaped for five centuries since Luther. Our forefathers who converted to Protestantism, which was a break-off of the Roman Catholic Church, brought along with them another 500 years of developping tradition from the time of the West-East Church split that took place in 1054. And then for another thousand years before that, the Christian Church had already passed through many changes and developments, and evolved, influenced by all sorts of events, people, traditions and ideas.

I've brought with me today this enormous leather-bound Lutheran family Bible. It's nearly 100 years old. Back in those days births, deaths and marriages were recorded in such volumes and in some places these Bibles were actually legal documents when, for example, husband and wife signed their names in them, the nearest thing to a Christian ketubah before the state started getting involved in such things. Marriage licences began to be issued in the Middle Ages and before that all that was needed were the couple to be wed and two or more witnesses. Usually marriages were private contracts between the two families involved. The 'Church' didn't start getting involved until the 16th century, around the time of the Reformation. The Catholic Church was even more liberal than the minimum biblical requirements up until this time: if two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows, even without witnesses, Rome accepted that they were validly married. This particular Bible I am holding was owned by the Berg family, the couple being married on 25 March 1930. I think it's sad that one of their descendants doesn't own this as it is a priceless piece of family history. I had a second one like it which I gave as a wedding present to another couple living in France.

You'll excuse me, I'm sure, if I swap over to a smaller Bible as the Lutheran family Bible one is very heavy! This one here is even older (the oldest one I own, incidentally), a Swedish Bible dating back to 1812 when Napoleon was still running around Europe on horseback causing havoc and destruction. Unbelievably, someone had thrown this out, presumably when some old person had died, and I found it in lying in a container or skip. Today people don't care much about old things, let alone Bibles which few believe in anymore anyway. But to someone alive in the 16th century, owning a Bible like this would have been an immense treasure. The first Bible had been printed by Gutenberg in Germany, in Latin (the Vulgate), where the Reformation would start, in the 1450's, a little over half a century before Luther nailed up his Theses. Before then, all the way back to the earliest times, Bibles, and individual Bible books, were all hand-written, took an age to produce, and and cost a fortune to own.

If you look around my library you'll find hundreds of Bibles in dozens of languages and in multiple translations. These days you can call up nearly all of them in an instant online, like this one in Hungarian from 1921. Today, in the 21st century, we have a glut of printed and electronic resources that we don't think twice about. When I was a new convert in the late 1970's, the Internet wasn't around for the general public before 1983, so I started collecting hard copy editions in earnest early on so I could evangelise in the multi-ethnic city of Oxford, full of international students, where I lived. But really the Internet as we know it didn't start until 1990, after I had moved to Norway. Everything has changed. Today we take an abundance of free information for granted.

Like I said, the first printed books had been around just under 70 years when Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation, the printing press becoming essential in the spreading of his message. And it spread like wildfire. Printed books became almost holy things in and of themselves, for they were still scarce and expensive in spite of the availability of printing presses. The masses were still largely illiterate and so relied on hearing the Word read to them by their priests. The Protestants, who were initially a protest movement against corruption in the Catholic Church whom they hoped to reform rather than start their own organisations, at length found themselves on their own without a Pope (or the Eastern Orthodox equivalent - a Patriarch) and in need of a rallying authority, around which the newly formed 'Protestants' could muster. Accordingly, they invented an article of faith or doctrine, which you will hear a lot about among them, called 'Sola Scriptura, which in the Latin means, 'By Scripture Alone'. This doctrine teaches that the Bible alone is the only infallible source of Christian Faith and Practice, becoming their replacement 'Pope'. Remember, Protestantism was a reaction to the corruption of the priests in the Catholic Church and all their invented traditions over a millennium or more. Protestants teach, therefore, that the Bible alone contains everything necessary for salvation [1].

I don't want to get into a long discussion on the history of the Bible canon today but to get you instead to think in, and meditate on, broad categories. The Eastern Orthodox Church, which never went through the shake-up of a Reformation as the Catholic Church did, therefore looks upon the doctrine of Sola Scripture - 'Scripture Alone' - with some surprise, if not horror. Indeed, they regard it as a heresy. If that surprises you, then we at least need to understand why they believe that.

Put yourselves in the Reformers' shoes. What are your options? You can believe in tradition (like the Catholics) or you can believe in the Bible. It's obvious to you that the Latin tradition has become corrupted - remember one of the things that rightly horrified Martin Luther was that the Pope was selling indulgences, that is, issuing documents that you could buy in order to get you, or your deceased family, out of Catholic Purgatory, which in a nutshell, means the Pope was selling for money forgiveness from sin and the punishment thereof. Luther was upset with lots of other things too, again, rightly so. So you are faced with a choice between Tradition and Scripture, more-or-less, though in practice a lot of Catholic tradition carried over into the newly forming Churches of (principally) Luther and (a little later), Calvin (it was more complex that that as they disagreed amongst themselves about many doctrines).

And just to make things even more complicated, you need to know that Sola Scriptura was understood in different ways by different Reformers - Luther understood it one way, Zwingli understood it another way, the Radical Anbaptists understood it a different way, and the Church of England and Reformed (Calvinist) folk understood it yet another way! What was the measure of these differences? The measure was how the Scriptures differed in relationship to sacred community and tradition in the Church. Luther was very much more conservative (within the scheme of Protestant reformers) and was criticised by Reformers like Zwingli who didn't think Luther took the principle of Sola Scriptura far enough. So within Protestantism there has always been a lot of controversy over how Sola Scriptura would work out in practice, and that's a big reason why there are so many Protestant denominations.

To my way of thinking - and in this I agree with the Eastern Orthodox - the Protestants shattered the divine phronema into tens of thousands of competing parts (there are over 30,000 Protestant denominations) consisting of a spectrum all the way from the very conservative Anglo-Catholics (who are virtually Roman Catholic) to the wild ultra-charismatics (who are more gnostic and occultic than Christian).

The Eastern Orthodox teach that if you do not respect the tradition of their 1,000+ year-old Church (which in their minds includes all resolutions or creeds of the various ecumenical councils over the centuries) then you have failed to respect the conscience (and indeed by that they mean their particular evolving phronema) of the church family or community. To a certain extent the Eastern Orthodox are right but their position itself contains a fatal weakness: it assumes that the Ruach haQodesh - the Holy Spirit - always and infallibly guided these councils over the centuries from the very first one. They're also are right for another reason: because in adopting the Protestant Sola Scripture position of 'Scripture Alone', Luther opened a Pandora's Box making, in effect, every man and woman his or her own interpreter of Scripture and therefore his or her own 'pope'. And as Protestant denominations continue to multiply in number, with increasing numbers of Christians not associating with any denomination at all, or even with a local congregation, what you end up with is potentially an infinite number of mini-popes, traditions and denominations, which is, of course, a form of anarchy. And that is essentially where Protestanism stands (or rather, falls) today.

So how are we to resolve this? Where did Christians go wrong? Following the Torah, which Messianics insist is a solution to the problem, works only so far, and what you eventually end up there with (as we have witnessed in the brief history of the modern Messianic Movement) is yet another string of Protestant-like messianic denominations and independents, because there is no central messianic 'tradition' or 'phronema' to speak of. Most Messianics may therefore be said to fall within the Protestant umbrella. A few, though, opt for a Catholic/Orthodox-type 'solution' by investing in a central tradition (usually Orthodox Judaism) which often leads to an even worse mess because Orthodox Jews are rabidly anti-Messiah - hence so many Messianics go down the fatal path of denying Paul, then denying the deity of Messiah, and eventually ending up as some fringe Jewish sect that accepts Yeshua as some mortal 'prophet' and effectively denying the atonement, which is an even worse heresy than traditional Christianity. So what to do?

Protestants end up playing word games with their Sola Scriptura doctrine because they claim through it the authority to judge every tradition - and particularly ecumenical councils - by their particular interpretation of the Scriptures. It's a dilemma they can't resolve. They can 'agree' to accept this particular Doctrine (like the Trinity) or that particular Creed (like the Athanasian Creed) as 'inviolable' but when they do that, they are in effect turning those creeds into more Scripture and end up breaking their own Sola Scriptura dogma! Not only that, but they are making an assumption - quite a big, assumption, actually - that those doctrines and creeds, formulated in various councils over the centuries, nearly all of them Catholic, are infallibly accurate because they were inspired. How do they know? And it is those creeds and doctrines which they then end up investing their eternal security in. They are in a quandry - a dilemma - but then so are the Catholics and Orthodox who also accept and heavily invest in these creeds!

There is only one Council pronouncement that is actually scriptural (because it's in Scripture itself) and that is the First Council of Jerusalem mentioned in Acts 15. It sets out what few parts of the Torah gentile converts are expected to obey immediately upon conversion. The hypocrisy of Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christians is that they don't even obey these earliest instructions - they hop over the one scripturally recorded apostolic council resolution, refuse (for example) to observe the re-iterated kosher rules concerning blood and strangled meat, and expect Christians to instead obey the decrees of post-apostolic, Catholic councils! Why was this first council convened? Because radical Yehudi (Judahite, Jewish) converts were following Paul around and trying to force gentile converts to adhere to man-made rabbinical rules (as many Messianics sadly do today) as well as to compell them to undergo the ordinance of circumcision required for admission into the former, first or Old Covenant in addition to New Covenant baptism. The Council agreed with Paul, overturned the rabbinical Judaisers, and declared:

"For it seemed good to the Ruach haQodesh (Holy/Set-apart Spirit), and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessities: that you abstain from what is offered to idols, and blood, and what is strangled, and whoring. If you keep yourselves from these, you shall do well. Be strong!" (Ac.15:28-29, ISRV 2009e)

There is a two-fold basis for the Council's legitimate authority:

• 1. It was directed by the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit);
• 2. It was unanimously agreed upon by the original apostles who walked with Christ.

Recall also that Paul, who was not an original talmid (disciple) of Yah'shua (Jesus) but was converted after the Saviour's resurrection, brought doctrine that he had received by revelation independently to the original apostles to make sure it had their stamp of approval before resuming his teaching. No other apostolic counsel directive was ever made with the authority of scripture so once the original apostles had died, there was no further basis for issuing any more such authoritative instructions, and that is why they never appear in Scripture.

The Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant claims that subsequent, post-apostolic councils had authority to issue such commands carrying the weight of apostolic tradiion cannot therefore be made. Yes, there are presumptuous messianics claiming to be 'apostles' who are issuing such directive and changing the canon, just as the Mormons have done, but they have no authority. Will Yahweh call apostles again at the very end? Absolutely. How will we know they are genuine and not appointed by men? Because they will bring forth the same signs as the first apostles and adhere strictly to the revelation already agreed upon as minimum canon, namely, the Protestant Bible [2].

Finally, they will possess the original phronema of the first century believers and their immediate successors, and will then, if required by Yahweh, convene similar councils directed by the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) as opposed to the imaginations of men to which inspiration en par with Scripture becomes erroneously ascribed.

For me personally, the claims made for high level inspiration by post-apostolic Christendom frankly inspires little confidence. Likewise I am unimpressed by the claim made by the Eastern Orthodox Church, for example, that that Church has historically come together in the same manner as the First Council of Jerusalem, and that we can, therefore, be confident, as they are, that her decisions are guided by the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) which the gates of hell will not prevail against. Well, like the Western Roman Church, the Eastern Church is steeped in man-made traditions, some of which are idolatrous - its leaders have an arrogant 'one-and-only-true-church' attitude, like the Mormon Church, the New Apostolic Church, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and others. The Orthodox Church imagines that it has sole authority to administer saving sacraments and imagines that it alone has the Ruach (Spirit). That kind of nonsense does not fool me because I have encountered it so many times. This attitude is of another spirit. The Calvinists have a similar attitude in regard to doctrine. I personally experienced this back in the 1990's when I sat with some of the Bylgarian Orthodox Church's leaders in Sofia, Bulgaria, and had a very one-sided discussion with them. I found them very arrogant and condescending. What that the 'Holy Ghost' they claim to possess? No it wasn't. It was counterfeit.

Equally, I have Greek, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian Orthodox friends whom I have found perfectly aimiable and relaxing to be with. I have also found some of the writings of their 'saints' inspiring at times. So in criticising the hierarchs, I am not saying the Ruach (Spirit) has not, and still does not, operate through many of its devoted indivual members, but for the hierarchs to claim their organisation is the same as the original apostolic body is plainly unsupportable. The Orthodox tradition has many things right, to be sure, from which we can learn, but just as many that are wrong. It is full of unbiblical superstitions and it certainly is not Torah-compliant. It definitely does not observe the kashrut rules confirmed by the first Council at Jerusalem - in the Bible - anymore than Catholics and Protestants do! If you can't obey the ruling of the Messianic Community's First Apostolic Council, what are the chances you are in rebellion and listening to other spirits when you advance the claims of post-apostolic councils? How can you claim to be in any sort of 'apostolic' tradition when you spurn the apostles own spiritually-directed instructions? That is not a 'phronema' I can trust - can you?

The Catholic and Orthodox Churches are right to point out the necessity of an apostolic authority which the Protestants do not have, although the odler, traditional denominations olike the Lutherans do claim to be in apostolic succession. Unfortunately they show little or no evidence that they have such an apostolic authority. Apostacy in the older Protestant denominations is rampant. Equally, the Protestants are right to lay such a strong stress on the Scriptures but without apostolic authority, every Protestant must inevitably end up as his or her own 'pope' to some degree or another.

So what are we to do in the meantime? Indeed, what has Yahweh's purpose been during the last 1,700 or so years? These are not easy questions to answer to be sure. In spite of an apostolic authority being absent, the Messianic Community (Church) has always been here. As Yah'shua (Jesus) prophesied, it has not been overcome and has never been absent from the earth, at least on an individual and, to a lesser extent, congregational level. Many individuals are being spiritually regenerated, born again, turned into new creations in Christ, even when they are doctrinally off on many things. It can't be denied. But when these people have organised into anything bigger, they quickly become has become authoritarian and not infrequently dangerous as priestcraft sinks its fangs into the the Body.

For Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, tradition is the ultimate authority, far more so than Scripture. For Protestants, it is the other way round. Messianics just have a different set of traditions rooted in Judaism but just as corrupted. This is why we need a new Shavu'ot (Weeks, 'Pentecost') anointing to restore what was lost (and to boot out the fake, lawless 'Pentecostal'/Charismatic one) and - for the Remnant - we need the final Sukkot (Tabernacles) anointing for the equipping of the firstborn qodeshim (saints, set-apart ones). But I think before the latter can happen, and to a lesser extent the former, we need to be aware of, and acknowledge as true, the importance of the original, first century apostolic tradition and to correctly identify the Torah-compliant spiritual life or phronema that was the hallmark of that first century community of believers. As most of my viewers and readers are Protestants, I am going to finish by primarily speaking to them.

I am now going to show that Sola Scriptura or 'Scripture Alone' was not the phronema or way of the apostolic Messianic Community (Church) of the first century but is a more modern 16th century idea. Quite apart from the fact that the Messianic Scriptures or New Testament did not exist as a compilation until a couple of centuries after the apostles, even though individuals gospels, letters, etc., were in circulation early on (so no one had any idea what the full compliment of the 'Word' was), consider this. In the Messianic Community (Church) of the first century (as well as, to a lesser extent, the second and third centuries) there was an oral and a written tradition both of which were authoritative and were integral to the spiritual life or phronema of that time. [3]

So let's get into our time-machine and take a journey to Thessaloniki in Greece around AD 50. Paul wrote multiple letters to the congregation in that city, only two of which have survived which were written about 20 years after the death and resurrection of Yah'shua (Jesus). These are Paul's oldest writings and are amongst the earliest writings of the whole New Testament so they are important to historians and theologians alike. Now consider carefully what the apostle wrote in the last letter:

"So then, my dear family (brethren), stand firm, and hold on tight to the traditions which you were taught, whether through what we said (by word of mouth) or through our letter" (2 Thes.2:15, KNT).

So what is the instruction to the qodeshim (saints, set-apart ones), both the original Thessalonians and to all believers in all generations? Hold on tightly to the TRADITIONS, both the oral and the written. So here is the big 'tent', as it were - the apostolic tradition - which has been given by mouth and by letter. What percentage of these do we have in our hands today? What Paul wrote by letter to the Thessalonians was probably considerably more than what has survived today because we know he wrote many letters. Would those letters have been included in the canon had they survived? Would they then be considered a part of the Sola Scriptura collection? You see, those who advance this doctrine are forced to assume, without any sort of evidence, that what survived was providentially arranged to be the complete revelation of Christ.

What about the oral teachings? What does their existence tell us? What sort of volume of oral teachings are we talking about? Well, how long did Paul live among these believers? About 1½ years - that's a long time, friends! Imagine how much can be said and taught in about 18 months! This wasn't just some short one day or even one week visit such as public speakers make today, in a host city one day and out the next. We're talking 70 to 75 weeks, or 500 to 530 days. A man as busy as Paul would do a lot of teaching in such a space of time.

We're told in Acts that Paul taught day in and day out. He was relentless and passionate in evangelising and discipling. Think of the education you would have got sitting at the feet of the apostle Paul, day in and day out, and doubtless at night too, listening to him for spiritual guidance, theological training, pastoral instruction, and so on. Yet all we have from this period time is two short letters, one with 5 chapters and one with 3! Therefore, most of what you would have received from Paul has you lived in Thessaloniki, would have been oral - by word of mouth - wouldn't it?

Now imagine Paul going away on his many trips to finally be martyred in Rome. Protestants would have us believe that the moment Paul died at the hands of Nero, the only apostolic teaching that is now binding from Thessaloniki are these two little letters. According to Protestant Sola Scriptura dogma, nothing else - the other letters and the thousands of hours of oral instruction - are relevant because they say we are limited only to what has been collected in this little book called the New Testament. Put that way, the notion is absurd.

Look, if you were living amongst the Thessalonian Messianic/Christian community and you had been spiritually formed by the apostle Paul who had taught you many other things not necessarily found in those two short epistles, or even in his later ones to different congregations, what would you say if a modern Protestant visited you in his time machine from the future and told you that the only authoritative teachings of Paul are those which have been collected in this little volume of Messianic Scriptures (New Testament)? You would rightly laugh at him. You would have hundreds of hours of memories, and maybe you would have committed some of them to paper even if you were wealthy enough and literate (one thing Christianity did was to raise the levels of literacy). Would they be any less inspired or authoiritative? Even if we had all of Paul's letters (and who knows, many more may be hidden somewhere like the Vatican Library because what they say contradicts Catholic teaching), you would never accept that that what had come from Paul's own lips were any lesser in authority than what he had penned.

This leaves us with some very difficult questions to answer that we can't possibly address this morning because we don't have the time. For one thing, those who heard Paul are long since dead and we can't go and speak with them, nor have any of their records survived that we know of. But what is the possibility that those traditions were circulated and passed around to the next generation, who then passed the teachings to subsequent generations? Where might we find these?

Well, some may have been written down, and indeed some have been, by the Church fathers, and particularly by the first generation of post-apostolic fathers. We have the writings of Clement of Rome, Ignatius and others, for instance, and those to whom they passed on the Pauline, Johannine and other apostolic traditions. And what they taught is very upsetting not only to Protestants and even Catholics, whom they contradict, but to nearly all modern Christians and Messianics too!

As I detail in my extensive website, for the first 500 years, the vast majority of the fathers taught the doctrine of universal reconciliation which runs totally contrary to the Augustinian tradition, which Calvin so adored, of eternal hell. And as you immerse yourself in these teachings, giving primacy to the New Testament, of course, you become aware of an Elohim (God) who has been hideously distorted by Roman Christianity and its Protestant offshoots, and you can rejoice in a gentler, kinder, more loving Besorah (Gospel) than the horrible one conjured up in the imagination of the ex-Manichean and his disciple from Geneva. You begin to sense the original phronema and become increasibly aware of just how loving Yahweh really is. That is why these original truths, long suppressed by the terror-based religion of Catholicism, have to be restored. The Remnant cannot exist or thrive without them. And so you begin to understand why Yahweh chose so many of those gentle Greeks to carry His Besorah (Gospel) to the world before the militaristic Latins got their hands on it and turned it into an instrument of Empire and State.

Sola Scriptura is a hard nut for Protestants to crack. As Messianic Evangelicals, we too are passionate about the Scriptures, but we are not prepared to be squeezed entirely into such a tiny space when there is so much more. We seek the phronema, the self-sacrificial, daily, consistent, repeatable and verifiable mindset, outlook or overall spirit of the authentic, biblical Messianic Community (Church) through both its faith (trusting) and practice ('the faith' or 'Torah-faithfulness'). We live in a time when it is now possible to break into the greater Ruach (Spirit) whilst riding the Scriptural truth-vessel. We are at the very edge of a new revival at a time of terrible judgment and in six days' time we will be assembling for Shavu'ot (Weeks, 'Pentecost') to pray for such an awakening and endowment. I look forward to seeing you again then at what is a very exciting time in history. Yahweh bless you. Amen.

Endnotes