Episode 27
Navigating the Church Ages: Insights from TS Wright Part 8
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The discussion in this podcast episode centers on the significant transition from the fourth age to the fifth age of the Church, highlighting the erosion of the Church's influence over society and the subsequent rise of humanistic ideologies. Scott Wright elucidates the pivotal events that contributed to this transformation, including the Great Famine, the Black Death, and the advent of the printing press, which collectively undermined the Church's authority and led to a burgeoning individualism. As we explore these historical developments, we recognize their implications for the modern Church, especially in light of contemporary societal challenges. The conversation also delves into the ramifications of the Protestant Reformation, particularly Martin Luther's actions, which catalyzed significant shifts in religious and political dynamics throughout Europe. Ultimately, this episode serves as a profound reflection on the past, encouraging listeners to consider the lessons gleaned from the Church's history as we navigate the complexities of faith in today's world.
Transcript
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Speaker B:Welcome to the Kingdom Crossroads Podcast with Pastor Bob Thibodeau.
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Speaker B:Now here is your host with today's interview, Pastor Bob Thibodeau.
Speaker A:Hello everyone everywhere.
Speaker A:Pastor Robert Thibodeau here.
Speaker A:Welcome to the Kingdom Crossroads Podcast today.
Speaker A:We're so blessed that you are joining us.
Speaker A:Scott Wright is back with us today.
Speaker A:Scott's been teaching us about the different ages of the church and significant things the Bible and history has to say about them.
Speaker A:And last time we studied the fourth church age.
Speaker A:I'll let Scott give a brief summary of what we discussed last time, but he's here to help us understand each of the different ages of the church, why they're so significant, especially as we look at the modern day church age with all the societal problems we're facing today.
Speaker A:Scott does this by helping us to understand the the process process the Word of God and it gives us an opportunity to draw closer to him.
Speaker A:And he's also published a great journal called the God Centered Concept Journal Making God's Word My Ways.
Speaker A:Scott has a goal of launching this series on a large scale, reaching churches and organizations with this curriculum that change their churches from simple institutions into a movement.
Speaker A:Praise God.
Speaker A:He's also a podcaster, has a truly great podcast called the God Centered Concept as well.
Speaker A:You need to listen and subscribe to this podcast.
Speaker A:It is amazing.
Speaker A:But more than that, he's also a huge student of the end time scenarios dealing with the Book of the Revelation, the end Days and the seven ages of the church.
Speaker A:I've asked him to come back on the program Today, as we continue the discussion of our interviews discussing these church ages, help me welcome back to the program, Scott Wright.
Speaker A:Scott, thanks for coming back on as we continue this fabulous discussion of the different church ages.
Speaker C:Well, hey, it's great to be back on with you, Bob, and look forward to our, our discussion today.
Speaker A:Amen.
Speaker A:Last time we discussed the fourth age of the church and found out that it was probably one of the most important ages that we've studied so far.
Speaker A:I mean, it covered a thousand years of human history.
Speaker A:But, you know, share with us some things that help transition us from the fourth age and take us into the fifth.
Speaker C:You bet.
Speaker C:So if we really look at about the last 200 years of the fourth age of the Church, what we see, and the major concept here that we need to understand is that we see the erosion of the confines of the church over society.
Speaker C:And, and eventually we're also going to see the breakdown of feudalism as well, which kind of went, coincided with all of this.
Speaker C:They, they kind of worked hand in hand.
Speaker C:In many ways, feudalism helped the church develop these constraints on humans, on human beings, from a sociological, cultural standpoint.
Speaker C:It just did.
Speaker C:And, and that was across most of Europe.
Speaker C:Now, that does not mean it was some perfect straight line and everything just like stayed in those parameters every single minute.
Speaker C:But for the most part, most of European society during this time stayed in those confines.
Speaker C: ne that happened in the early: Speaker C:But that was the, the worst part of it, was those seven years.
Speaker C:Yeah, basically that started that erosion because people started losing faith in the church, thinking, well, the church isn't doing.
Speaker C:It can't do anything about this.
Speaker C:Their, their connection to God isn't taking care of this problem.
Speaker C:And, and it also eroded just numbers, just basic numbers, and it completely just changed society anyway.
Speaker C: , the Western schism and from: Speaker C:And then we have the printing press, which I still believe has got to be the, the most important invention of that era other than, and also you could say the gun as well.
Speaker C:But that's probably a topic for another time.
Speaker C:But this is going to Be this is going to be the, the invention that leads to all these other things.
Speaker C:I mean, we eventually were gonna get Martin Luther posting the 95 thesis, which shows a total erosion of the church.
Speaker C:And really what it is, is if you think about this, think about it like this.
Speaker C:Anytime you get institutions like corporations and stuff, and they just get bigger and bigger and bigger and they get more powerful and they get stronger, they always put in more rules, they always put in more layers, they always put in more boundaries.
Speaker C:And what eventually happens is those boundaries don't work because they stifle things way too much.
Speaker C:They, they, in some ways, they'll enslave their people.
Speaker C:And that's exactly what happened.
Speaker C:And then eventually that breaks down.
Speaker C:And the printing press is a major piece to that.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:And I believe that the timing of the printing press was God's ordained plan right after this great famine, Black Death.
Speaker C:You know, it happens less than 100 years after the Black Death.
Speaker C:And now all of a sudden, society is starting to unravel.
Speaker C:They need a few more events.
Speaker C: the fall of Constantinople in: Speaker C:And we talked about this a little bit in the last episode, but it shuts off trade from the east to the West.
Speaker C:And when it does that, it forces these European powers to start looking for another way.
Speaker C:Well, they don't turn to the Church.
Speaker C:It turns to the Age of exploration.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:And the Age of Exploration is how Christopher Columbus finds America.
Speaker C:1492, you know, or I should say the Americas.
Speaker C:It also leads to a lot of other discoveries, the ocean gyres, all these other things.
Speaker C:During the Age of Exploration, there's other areas that are explored as well.
Speaker C:And Europe expands itself, especially the Western powers of Britain, France and Spain.
Speaker C:And they are going to put a grip on the world that is going to show that the Holy Roman Church has.
Speaker C:Its power has eroded.
Speaker C:Not that it still won't have power, but not like it did.
Speaker C:And Great Britain will become the most dominant force out of this.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:And so the, the final straw, so to speak.
Speaker C:And is not Martin Luther's 95 thesis the final straw that flips the age of the Church?
Speaker C:This helps it, because what this does is the Protestant Reformation lays the ground for Great Britain to break away and set up its own functioning church to break away from the Roman Church.
Speaker C:And that is the key event.
Speaker C: lot of back and forth in the: Speaker C:And now the Church of England is completely on its own because he's declared himself the head of the Church.
Speaker C:And instead of the English people necessarily revolting against him, they followed him.
Speaker C:Yeah, because.
Speaker C:And what it showed is that Britain had become too powerful for that to happen.
Speaker C:They were.
Speaker C:It was just.
Speaker C:It would become too strong.
Speaker C:And of course, we see through this time period, you see how Great Britain expands its dominance.
Speaker C:And in the fifth age of the Church, that dominance is going to explode.
Speaker C:And so is France and Spain, obviously, but Britain, more than anybody, the.
Speaker C:And eventually the agricultural revolution is going to take hold during this fifth age of the Church.
Speaker C:And that's going to allow the abundance of food and resources and allow people to focus their time on other than daily survival.
Speaker C:And that is going to change Great Britain.
Speaker C:And of course, the Industrial Revolution will be born out of this, and Britain will become the dominant force in the world.
Speaker C:They'll be the first to really surge forward and they'll.
Speaker C:They'll be the most powerful of all these.
Speaker C:Now, the other ones will benefit from this as well, but they're going to colonize.
Speaker C:They're going to establish that their Christian beliefs in these other places and they will spread out more than any other country in the world.
Speaker C:And their Christian beliefs are going to spread out.
Speaker C:These Protestant beliefs of the Church of England will be shared in other places.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker D:Amen.
Speaker C:And that is a big deal.
Speaker C:And that will be more prominent than any other faction that held power during that time.
Speaker C:Great Britain is the key to this, and they are the key for the fifth age of the Church.
Speaker C:Their power will reign supreme.
Speaker C:And it's also called the Dead Church, if you want to read it.
Speaker C:Revelation, chapter three, verses one through six.
Speaker C:And a lot of it is, is because now humanistic ideas and nation building are the focus, not necessarily spreading God's word, even though that becomes for some people, like the Pilgrims, and for other.
Speaker C:For some groups of people, small groups of people that want to escape the Church of England, they want to escape the Holy Roman Church that still had some prevalence in, you know, in Europe and some of these other countries that established their own systems of belief.
Speaker C:They wanted to escape that.
Speaker C:They wanted to be able to do it their own way and worship their own way.
Speaker C:So that will also be a part of this age of the Church, where they will spread out across the globe, obviously into the Americas, and we will eventually see Christianity spread all over the Americas.
Speaker A:So what is the fifth Church age known for, as far as biblical history goes?
Speaker C:So the fifth.
Speaker C:The fifth age is known for.
Speaker C:It's called the Dead Church.
Speaker C:And that's because it was being driven by human ideology and human endeavors.
Speaker C:It was not being driven in the spirit.
Speaker A:Okay, so explain that humanistic thinking for our audience.
Speaker C:Well, I think, first of all, if you dial it back to the Renaissance, the Renaissance is going to have a major impact on this because it's a rebirth of thinking.
Speaker C:It really is.
Speaker C:You can go back, look, the arts, the culture, all these new things, and in.
Speaker C:In that day and age that would have been New age ideas start to expand, and we have that rebirth of old Roman and Greek culture that is taking off a stronger focus on individualism, and that's a big part of it.
Speaker C:And it's also nation building.
Speaker C:Well, let's face it, when you're nation building, that means you're using military power and you're using force is probably a better way to put it.
Speaker C:You're using your technology, you're using what you have produced to gain more.
Speaker C:And it's really a time of greed in many ways for these nations.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:And.
Speaker C:And you can see that.
Speaker C:I mean, you, you can see that.
Speaker C:And so that impacts the church because when you have the monarch in control of the church, which is going to become the most powerful nation on earth here, and you have these other monarchs now controlling a lot of these churches and who's in those churches and what they're doing.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker C:And there's a lot of events that go on through this time period outside of England as well.
Speaker C:But when you have that happening, then there's going to be political wrangling that goes on, and there's a lot of it during this age.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think we're witnessing basically a resurgence of that today, don't you think?
Speaker C:Oh, yeah, in many ways we are.
Speaker C:And it's, you know, we're kind of in a reset right now, as is the way I like to put it.
Speaker C:You know, I feel like the.
Speaker C:The last five years have kind of been an announcement.
Speaker C:Some people are wondering what that is, you know, how they're.
Speaker C:I hear all these descriptions of what happened, you know, what Covid was and is it a warning or whatever?
Speaker C:I actually think it's an announcement.
Speaker C:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker C:What that looks like and, and how that's gonna.
Speaker C:Each piece is gonna put itself together.
Speaker C:You can kind of see it.
Speaker C:I mean, it's.
Speaker C:I don't think I'm saying anything that's crazy or off the wall here, but I believe it kind of was an announcement, and it's an announcement of showing what could be coming.
Speaker C:And so, but if you go back to this time period when, when King Henry VIII has basically has made himself the head of that church, the monarch.
Speaker C:And we saw that even with King Charles, you talked about that the other day with his inauguration or when basically him being coronated, I should say.
Speaker D:Right.
Speaker C:Him being coordinated.
Speaker C:Well, guess what?
Speaker C:I mean, that's.
Speaker C:You have a monarch, a political power in control of a church.
Speaker C:There's going to be intermixing of politics and church theology.
Speaker C:It's just going to happen.
Speaker C:There's no way.
Speaker C:It's not.
Speaker C:You can say that it isn't it, but it, it is.
Speaker C:And so that happens.
Speaker C:That is happening not just there, but in all over Europe.
Speaker C:You got, you got all these revolutions that are going to be coming up that you're going to see during this time period.
Speaker C:And these revolutions are going to lead eventually to more individualism.
Speaker C:And what we're going to eventually see is an eroding of governmental power because you already see the church walls eroding, the papacy being in control.
Speaker C:Now you're seeing, you've got these monarchs in these nation building.
Speaker C:Well, eventually we will see that erode and that will come all the way down into World War I.
Speaker C:Eventually this will all lead to World War I.
Speaker C:In World War I we will see the collapse of just about every monarch.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:Amen.
Speaker C:You're going to see that monarchy thinking is probably the best way to say it die.
Speaker C:And what we're going to see come alive after World War II is it's all going to be.
Speaker C:And it had already started with communism and democracy and it already been building and it had been there, but now we're going to see it completely take grip over.
Speaker C:The monarchical thinking is political systems, systems are going to take over.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker A:And we covered a little bit last time when in discussion of the fourth Church age, that's where that tribalism and feudalism came into being.
Speaker A:You know, laying the foundation for the slave trade today as it relates to America.
Speaker D:Absolutely.
Speaker A:You cover this for us as it relates to the fifth age of the church.
Speaker C:Sure.
Speaker C:So, you know, feudalism really, if, if you want to look at slavery, you can look, look no further than feudalism because the slave trade will increase during this age.
Speaker C:And again, I kind of find ironic it's the dead church.
Speaker C:So again, it's all about profit.
Speaker C:It's all about expanding these companies and these nation states.
Speaker C:And slavery becomes a backbone of that.
Speaker C:Not just in the Americas, but everywhere.
Speaker C:I mean all over Europe.
Speaker C:And they're you know, we've got African tribes working with Europeans to enslave other Africans.
Speaker A:Right, exactly.
Speaker C:And, and then they even had a process that we don't even talk about called indentured servitude.
Speaker C:And that became a big thing during this time period.
Speaker C:But it was really about utilizing human resources, actual humans, to gain financial and political advantage.
Speaker C:And that will happen.
Speaker C:That will expand in a tremendous.
Speaker C:It'll just explode is probably a better way to say it.
Speaker C:It's going to explode during this dead age of the Church.
Speaker C:The fifth age of the Church and slavery had its roots in feudalism.
Speaker C:Yeah, It's a very feudalistic way of thinking.
Speaker C:You know, you got the dominance on top kind of the, the aristocracy and then it kind of all filters down all to the people who work for them that are controlling the slaves and then eventually to the slaves themselves being on the bottom of that hierarchy.
Speaker C:And, and really what you're seeing here though is that, believe it or not, during this fifth age, when we start to move into the sixth age, and I'll talk about this in the next episode, we're going to see how that erodes, how this, how the hierarchical thinking erodes.
Speaker C:But I'm going to say this, and it's, this is a tough thing to say.
Speaker C:It's a double edged sword because when you remove the constraints of church, it can lead to other things.
Speaker D:Oh yeah.
Speaker C:And we're seeing that today.
Speaker C:You can, you know, there's, there's some there.
Speaker C:Not every part of the con having constraints of the church is bad.
Speaker C:Not every part of that is bad.
Speaker C:The problem is, is the church become too powerful that it became corrupt, it stopped following.
Speaker C:It didn't follow the word of God, it made its own rules.
Speaker C:I mean, you can dial it all the way back to the Justinian codes and they were kind of playing really fast and loose with what, how they interpreted the Bible and how they put law into place.
Speaker C:So you can go all the way back and that's in the 500s.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker C:And that will, that will continue to develop and grow.
Speaker C:And of course we're going to have all kinds of little empires form during that fourth edge of the church.
Speaker C:And I didn't cover all that.
Speaker C:And if you're a historian, listen to this.
Speaker C:You, you know that because you know there's lots of events where this type of stuff happened, but that feudalistic thinking about being, fighting to be the one on top and then making society follow you and stay there where it can't move up and down and controlling each of those levels of the hierarchy became a big deal.
Speaker C:Well, that continues here in the fifth age of the church.
Speaker C:But now we don't even have the church in control now.
Speaker C:Control of the.
Speaker C:I guess the spiritual side of life is now the monarchs.
Speaker C:It's now the people running these countries.
Speaker A:Hey, folks, Pastor Bob here.
Speaker A:We're all out of time for today's portion of this great interview with Scott Wright.
Speaker A:Oh, man.
Speaker A:Every time Scott comes on, it just gets better and better as we're diving into the different church ages that's listed in the Bible in the book of Revelations, chapters two and three.
Speaker A:Folks, can there be any doubt that we are living in the last of the last days?
Speaker A:I mean, praise God.
Speaker A:This stuff's getting ready to wrap up.
Speaker A:And Scott's been sharing some deep, deep information with us about the various church ages, and we can see these things happening right now in today's church age.
Speaker A:Nothing's changed.
Speaker A:It's just that each age of the church brings us that much closer to the soon return of Jesus.
Speaker A:Amen.
Speaker A:Don't shut me down when I'm preaching.
Speaker B:Good.
Speaker A:Praise God.
Speaker A:Be sure to come back for the conclusion of this interview in the very next episode, because Scott is.
Speaker A:If you like today's episode, you're gonna love what he's gonna share tomorrow.
Speaker A:Amen.
Speaker A:Be sure to come back for it.
Speaker A:Till then, this Pastor Bob Romania.
Speaker A:Be blessed in all that you do.
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