We need to stop and consider where our traditions in the church originate.

Take for example the Roman Catholic tradition of praying to saints. Where did that come from?

If you needed something from the emperor, you had to know somebody who knew somebody, who knew somebody.

The chances that you could go see the emperor and get anything done were nearly nil.

Well if that's the way you look at reality, it easily bleeds over, doesn't it, into the way you look at heaven.

In those early centuries of the Christian church, new ideas were presented, false concepts were refuted, and some things over time became tradition.

Hello and welcome to the Friday edition of renewing your mind, I'm Lee Webb.

And we have been pleased to feature Dr. W. Robert Gottfried series, a survey of church history.

Today we'll learn that it is not a long leap from well-meaning practices in the church to self-promoting ritual.

Last time we were looking at ideas about the spiritual life and the practice of the spiritual life in the ancient church, which has cast a very long shadow over the church,

because it continues to be very influential, and I want to return to that theme a little bit at the beginning of this lecture, and to think with you a little bit about the idea of saints.

It's not that I think you can't spell, but I write the word saints up there because it English word saint is derived from the Latin word,

Sanktos meaning holy, and saints are the holy ones. And when Paul writes most of his letters to the churches, he addresses the Christians, all the Christians, as holy ones, and usually in our English translations, it's still translated saints.

And that's right, that's how the New Testament conceives all Christians, all Christians are holy ones. We are holy because we are set aside to be Christians in Christ.

We're holy because Christ has provided a perfect righteousness for us, and we're holy because His Holy Spirit is at work in us to make us more holy.

So in a variety of ways, the Bible rightly sees us all as saints. But in the history of the ancient church, that word saint began over time to be applied more narrowly to those who had most seriously undertaken the discipline, the ascetic Christian life.

And saint began to be restricted so that it didn't apply so much to all Christians anymore, as to special Christians. And amongst those special Christians were usually first of all the martyrs, those who had died, bearing testimony to Christ, those who were willing to die for their faith.

But then also it began to be applied to some of those who had embraced this ascetic, disciplined life. And if you go back and look at what is now known as the calendar of the saints in the Roman Catholic or the Greek Orthodox churches, you'll see how many of those ancient saints were either martyrs, or monks, or nuns, or priests serving the Lord.

And then it came to be seen as a special category of particularly devoted people. And what's important to the piety of the ancient church is that over time, the church began to think that those people living or dead could pray for us in ways that would be particularly helpful.

So today, if we go to visit a Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox church, we're going to find their statues or pictures of the saints. We're going to see sometimes whole churches dedicated to the saints, or we're going to see side altars dedicated to the saints.

And the idea is that these saints can help us. These saints will hear us and aid us. And this idea is a spiritual idea that did develop in the ancient church, but not in the earliest centuries.

And we're going to talk about it now because it illustrates another very important aspect of the intellectual world of the ancient church that we can call hierarchicalism.

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