005 MUTalks - 5 Lessons From Church History For Any Ministry With Dr Daniel Scalberg

All right, you're back here. Portland, Oregon, MU talks.

You know what time it is when you hear this sound?

Time for 30 minutes of hopefully interesting content.

Hopefully here. Aline and Rob here with MU talks in the basement. Super excited about today, and I'm gonna let Rob, as there's already a tradition in MU talks.

Oh, yeah, there we go.

Introduce our guest. And, oh, we have a good one for you today.

Very excited to have Dr. Daniel Skullberg with us, who has served many roles here at the school. What are some of the roles you've served in recent years?

Oh, in recent years? Well, most recently, I served as the dean of the school of arts and sciences, about six years worth of that. And also now continuing to serve as professor of history and chair of the history department. Initially in the early days, decades ago, brought on as an instructor in history while I was completing my doctoral degree in European history from the University of Oregon.

Yeah, terrific. Go Ducks. Can I say that? Oh, go Ducks. On the block.

As far as I'm concerned, only if.

They sponsor us, you're offending. Only if they sponsor us, you're offending.

The other half of the state. Yeah.

He has a man in Jersey, so very excited to have Dr. Skahlberg here. By the way, three things we share. He's a Francophile, Loves France. Loves.

Yes. Yeah. Definitely got that from my mother's side of the family. She's French Canadian and grew up in San Francis de Momeni just outside of Quebec City.

I hope you heard that.

Number two.

I heard. You heard. You heard the pure accent.

That was beautiful.

That was beautiful place. Quebec. That's number two. Canada. And the third is the Ducks. Go Ducks. So tell us about your family, your married children.

Yeah, yeah. Married to Kimberly. She's a flight attendant for a major international carrier. I don't know if we're allowed to. On these kinds of things.

You can.

You can say United Airlines, and we're not. You know, the views and opinions expressed.

Here are not affiliated. And so this is free talk here.

We've been married for 27 years. We have two children by adoption, actually. And thanks to transracial adoption, we live in a biracial home. So my kids. Daniel is in college, interestingly enough, majoring in history with a French minor.

I wonder why.

Yeah, I wonder why. And my daughter's in your senior year in high school.

Yeah. That's terrific.

That's exciting. So my office at Multoma University is very close to Dr. Skahlberg's office, and I often pass by, and we were having a conversation, and he mentioned an idea that he was working on. And I think it's going to. We're working hard to develop that into a Multoma plus course, because I think it's a brilliant idea. But as soon as I heard it, I said, I think this should be a podcast discussion on lessons from. From History for ministry, and we're going to cover a few lessons from history. So he just told me one, and all of a sudden I was like, oh, I'm interested. Oh, there's a lot here from a. From a professor of history. I think if there's anything about. I love millennials. I still have a few toes in that millennial thing, so. And I think if there's one thing that I want us to provide to this generation coming after is things from history that. That should be lessons that are important and foundational. So I'm just gonna. We're just gonna let Dr. Scalper do his thing and walk us through a few lessons, and we're just gonna chime in and some of them, we're gonna hear them for the first time. Which, that's why I was like. I was. No, don't tell me anymore.

Right?

Just come on the show. Let's talk and keep it fresh. Talk about talk. Let's talk about this on MU talks. And we're gonna react to what we're hearing today about lessons from history.

Yeah, well, I like thinking about, you know, spending a career teaching the history of Christianity. I like to think about how the history of the church specifically can be applied for practical application in contemporary Christian ministry. And there are two areas that really come to mind as I try and think of two broad categories. And I'll get to the sort of five top lessons, but in broader categories, I feel like, if nothing else, when we study the past and the way God has worked historically in the past, that we can be grateful. I think that's kind of the primary lesson. What's the number one big one? To be grateful about what God has done through faithful Christians over the centuries who've laid a foundation that we in the contemporary church can build upon. And then there other broader category are kind of warnings, what I call the don't go that direction. The church has done that before, and it was a huge mistake. So avoid it, avoid it, avoid it. Those are kind of the two. So any kind of specific lesson will tend to fall in, you know, one of those two categories. One very inspirational and very encouraging. And the other kind of the warnings, look out, you know, so can I.

Can I, can I interject here just a little bit? Because for me, it's fascinating to hear you put in these categories. I was part of a church plant, being around other church planters and stuff, and especially with traditional churches, there's this concept that the church can fail. And I think it's so important just framing that, just talking about this. For some people, this discussion is healthy already, that there are lessons we can learn from different groups and congregations that have done things that were just not, not healthy. So that's why I'm excited that we're even unpacking.

Yeah, exactly. It's healthy for us today as Christians to realize the church is 2000 years old rather than 100 years old or it's as old as the pastor is old or whatever. So, yeah, okay. So just to prime the pump. Yes. As a kind of appetizer. One of, I think one of the more fascinating lessons from the past, specifically for pastoral ministry, is this lesson of when you disagree with other believers, and particularly important for leaders in the church, when a leader in the church disagrees with another leader, that they keep their disagreement private. Because if you keep it private, then you can work together in ministry, in unity. And I don't mean by unity, uniformity. We all have to say the same thing, dress the same way, look the same way. But in unity for the cause of Christ, we can glorify Christ, our Lord and Savior, who is the founder of the church. So an excellent lesson is that is from two very famous Christians. We all know them. It's John Wesley and George Whitefield. So John Wesley and George Whitefield were great Britain's greatest 18th century evangelists. So these are the, put it this way, the Billy Grahams of their generation. And they're not just known in the uk, but these are. They're known on the continent of Europe. They're well known in colonial America. These are major figures, household names. But they had significant theological disagreement in what today we'd call a Calvinism, Arminianism split, where Wesley took a more Arminian theological approach. Wesley, or excuse me, Whitefield, taking the more Calvinistic approach. But notice both great evangelists. So therefore get rid of the stereotype that Calvinists don't care about evangelism. So they're both committed. They were classmates at Oxford University. They both earned their MA in theology from Oxford. Both committed to world evangelism, global mission, but disagreed strongly in certain theological areas. And their correspondence to each other survives. Much of it survives. And we can read their disagreements. They don't hold anything Back they go at it privately, but publicly, they agreed in public that they would not launder their disagreements in public for the sake of the gospel, for the advance of the gospel. Really great lesson for us today. I always shudder when there's a Christian leader who takes their disagreement with another Christian leader, particularly, again, in areas where sincere Christians disagree. We do. And when they take those disagreements public, it really harms the gospel.

Yeah. And even for the regular Christian, like so many times, you're on social media and you see folks just getting really wrapped up in some little thing, and then it gets angry and the comments are going back and forth. I like. I'm a. I'm a fairly opinionated guy, and once in a while I like to type something. And then sometimes you get into it a little ways, you're kind of like, maybe. Maybe there's bigger fish to fry in the world. Maybe I should just stay to the main things and let somebody else debate that one.

You know, I actually think somebody's going to disagree with us publicly on this. Oh, yeah, that. You know, but. But what a great lesson from history. I think it's a great lesson from history. I see. I have a good number of friends on Facebook, and I see the war going on, and I think it might be that you're going to have to ask some questions, ask clarifying questions, and you might have to use. Instead of post on your wall, you might have to use your mail service in Facebook and just message the person and allow that conversation to happen there. I think it's a great lesson for msui.

I've done that. And also, by the way, if you're on Facebook, you should look up Dr. Karen Fancher's page. She had the most beautiful quote the other day of entering a new political season. But you look at what happens. You look at what happens even between Christians like the Anabaptists, the Catholics, you know, the Protestants, and some of the nonsense that happened with the fighting. And you're like, come on, guys.

Yeah. And of course, the tongue is a potentially dangerous weapon.

Yeah, right.

And the scriptures warn us of that. You know, that just think of all the wonderful things, the great gift of speech and how it can be used diplomatically, how it can be used to heal, but it can also be used to curse. And the scriptures warn us about being cavalier in our use of speech.

And. And I think of collateral, you know, I think they could. John Wesley could disagree theologically heavily on all kinds of topics if they did that publicly. I don't think a lot of people could have handled the shrapnel that would come out of that discussion. He would walk away and be like, what a great discussion. You know, it was good. It was a good exercise. But people around them would walk away thinking these people hate each other. I mean, this is. And I think this is what. That's why the whale is poisoned in our generation somehow. Because we're seeing all the discussions happening in the public forum and that is basically, this is live, but we're talking about lessons you should learn from history.

It ends up being divisive. So. So if Wesley and Whitefield had aired their grievances publicly, then it would have been, I'm a follower of Wesley or I'm a follower of Whitefield. It's not a. I'm a follower of Christ. So again, back to what they wanted. They wanted people to fall in love with Christ, not fall in love with them. So they were not big on personality driven ministry other than the personality of Christ. So if you're leading people to Christ, you need to step back.

It feels like too, in today's world, you know, the mind wants to go to the false binary, you know, like, you know, I'm all right and my opponent is all an idiot. You know, there's nothing right. And human beings seem to have a difficult time wrestling with attention. So we go into these camps so quickly and we live in our little echo chambers, you know, good lesson.

Well, that's exciting. I can think of so many, so many more questions. But they need to take Multnomah plus course in order to get the full experience of learning more from that. Let's go to the next one. Hit us with the next one.

Dr. Skullberg, this is what I call the firsts, or I should say the firsts in church history that come out of early African Christianity. I think as Amerocentric or Eurocentric Christians, we like to think of the, you know, of the great firsts or the great triumphs in the history of the church coming out of Europe. And of course it has great triumphs. And you think of the great mission, you know, global missions work and so on, coming out of that, of the pietistic revival in Europe and so on. So not to play that down, but to play up an area that we often forget. You go back to early church history and we think of that time in the, I'm talking now, the first three centuries of the existence of Christianity. Where does the church. Yeah, where does the church grow quickly in the gentile communities? We start looking at it. North Africa experiences the Largest numeric growth of any place in the Mediterranean basin. Okay, so when we get to the. So we get to the early 4th century, most Christians in the Mediterranean basin live on the North African coastline. Most of them don't live in the Middle East. Most of them don't live in Europe. Now, there are a lot of Christians there. Matter of fact, by the time period I'm talking about, early 4th century, there are 10 million Christians living in the Mediterranean basin. It's about 10% of the population of the Roman Empire has been Christianized by that time. So it's a great work of mission. It's a great rapid, amazing growth rate. When you think of, you know, from the, you know, upper room experience, the 12 to 10 million a few centuries later, a phenomenal growth rate. But again, most of that great growth takes place in North Africa. And there are what I call then the early North African firsts. And of course, the early North African first could be a whole course in and of itself, but just to turn it into one, it's out of North Africa that the first Christian systematic theology is written, and that's by Origen. He's an Egyptian Christian. The first theological college is established by Clement of Alexandria in Egypt. The first philosophy of history and integration of faith and learning curriculum is established in Algeria that by Augustine of Hippo, what today is called Anaba, Algeria. Hippo is the old Roman name, an ancient Roman name, but today it's Annaba, Algeria. And also the. The first scholarly defense of the deity of Christ from Athanasius, who was the bishop of the church in Egypt in the 4th, early 4th century.

Oh, wow.

Good point.

You know, we have a Clement, Origen, Athanasius and Augustine, all African Christians.

So we today sit on the pillars built by that part of the world.

Yes, yeah.

Ethnocentrism, too. Like, you hear, you know, you're familiar with those names and. But I assume they're all Europeans. And then to hear, you know, it's.

A good reminder we do. We assume they're Europeans. And because of, again, because of our tendency to want to make the past familiar, we try to make it in our own image.

You know, my understanding is that the heavyweight center of Christianity is moving back to Africa, South America and all that. And. And I'm actually, it might happen in our lifetime. And I'm curious to know what the world will look like when the hymns and the theology will actually be developed by that part of the world. Because right now, we're still. We're still in that field. And America is playing a very heavy role in that. But I actually look forward to. To that scent, the gravity, the center of gravity moving. Maybe in that part, because the church is growing so powerfully there. What a great reminder where the beginnings are and where the P are. And when you look, I was part of a growing up in Eastern Europe. The Orthodox Church and the Protestant and the Evangelical Church don't go hand in hand. There's great effort right now to shake some hands, but it's perceived. And it was such a powerful presentation. Somebody came and said, hey, I have a question for you. How did the Christian faith get to the evangelicals for 18, 1900 years? And it was just silence, Just like pure silence in the room. Right. It was such a humble. I mean, it was the most massive piece of humble pie one should eat. But there's. There's acknowledgment of what happened before you and who are the pillars, who really what giants you're sitting on the back of. Right. Great stuff. Okay. Anything, Rob?

No, I'm just reminded of a cartoon. I don't know if you saw. There's a little book they're teaching church history, and there's this huge chart with all these trees coming off it, and it's all the different branches of Christianity. And then the teacher's standing there pointing at this one little one, the evangelicals. And we got it. All right. And then the little kid is looking at the picture going, jesus is lucky to have us. It just sometimes reminds me of that kind of thing.

Yeah. One thing I might want to add on this one, if we have time. The tendency for the history of Christianity is it's studied in the West. And the reason why it has become so both Eurocentric and Amerocentric, to put it that way, is actually because of the rise of the enlightenment in the 16th century. Because the Enlightenment thinkers wanted to play down the role of Christianity. That is, to play down the role of and minimize the role of medieval thought and medieval Christian thought and early Christian thought. Because they wanted to remove or scrub clean the way in which we look at the world from its. What they would call its superstitious and supernatural presuppositions. But the church has always spoken directly to the idea of the compatibility of spirituality and rationality, because the God is the giver of both. God is the giver of that which is cognitive. He's given us cognitive capabilities as we are made in his image. We are like God. And that we seek to understand, we seek to know, we seek to create. So we have These cognitive abilities, but we also have these intuitive kinds of abilities as well that God has given us. And so Christianity argues for the integration of the mind and the heart, to put it maybe in a more popular way, you know, rather than the exclusion of one or the other, or the playing down of one and the encouragement of the other. So it's the Enlightenment rationalists that want to play down what they see as this negative role of early Christianity and medieval Christianity. So thus this minimizing, this forgetfulness about it of creating a kind of liberal, rational way of looking at the past through. Therefore, as moderns, we pat ourselves on the back because we know better now, we're not ignorant like those folks in. In the past.

And this is not even a lesson. This is a bonus that we're getting today. A lesson from. From the past, from our history, not just from church. Church history. That's great stuff. Okay, let's go to our third one.

Yeah, this is going to be a real surpriser. So fasten your seat belts. In our day, we often think of the liberal arts, or at least in certain Christian circles, we sometimes think of the liberal arts as being antithetical to proper Christian thought, where actually what we need to realize is that it's Christianity that is the founder of the liberal arts curriculum.

Did you hear that? Okay, let's unpack that a little bit.

And so here it is. So, Alcuin, what we think of the liberal arts in the sort of classical sense of which university curriculum in the west is based upon, you know, the foundational liberal arts subjects from which all then your majors come forth. The liberal arts are formulated by Al Kuin. He was a Northumbrian scholar. Northumbria, here's the old word. Sorry, think York, England today, okay, That's Northumbria, the ancient kingdom of Northumbria. And Alcuin, who's considered the. Again, Alcuin, a devout Christian, is hired by Charlemagne, probably heard of him. He's hired by the King of the Franks to come to the European continent from the British Isles, where Northumbria is, to design a curriculum for the training of the clergy, the Christian clergy in the Frankish kingdom. Because Charlemagne was very, very concerned about the lack of training that clergy had and was shocked by how ignorant the clergy were in the Frankish kingdom in the 8th century. So he hires the big wig scholar to come to design a theological college curriculum to train the clergy so that the clergy are much more better equipped for ministry. Well, the curriculum that Alcuin designs is what we call the liberal arts, or what in Those days was called the seven liberal arts and the old Latin terms, the trivium, the study of the three and the quadrivium, the study of the four. The three are grammar, logic and rhetoric. Well, fancy terms, but what's grammar, how to write, what's logic, how to think, what's rhetoric, how to speak. So that's what pastors future would be. Pastors need to know how to write, how to think, how to speak. They need to be able to communicate properly. Then the why do the would be pastors need the study of the four once they've had the study of the three? Well, the study of the four are mathematics, you need math because you need to be able to do accounting. You need to be able to properly establish a church budget and keep the church going. A proper accounting of this is 8th.

Century, this is 8th century.

A proper accounting of the proper counting of tithe. Okay, you need astronomy. Why does the clergy need to study astronomy? Because the clergy need to keep track of time. How do we keep track of time? What today we call Greenwich Mean time, the Gregorian calendar that we use, well, that's based upon the study of the movements of the heavenly spheres. So the clergy need to be learned in the movements of the heavenly spheres so they know when Easter is. You need to get it right and you don't need to get it wrong. They also need to know geometry. Why do clergy need to know geometry? Well, you need to know how to build a church. You need to know how to build a building, keep the roof on and make sure the roof doesn't collapse. That's geometry. And then you need music. That's the last of the quadrivium. Why? Because the clergy need to stay in tune and they need to teach the congregation how to stay in tune. So that's the liberal arts. It's a very well rounded curriculum because it equips the clergy in a well rounded way to be multitasking. You don't have this huge pastoral staff in those days. You've got, you've got a pastor of a local congregation and the pastor needs to be learned in the liberal arts to assist his congregation to be also more learned about their faith.

It seems like over history. Like I grew up on a Bible college campus in Canada and so I watched, I watched schools, you know, change and grow and be founded and all those things. And looking back on history, it seems that Christianity and Christians have been responsible for starting a lot of schools. And yet over the decades, over the centuries, they tend to, you know, move away from that sometimes become hostile to that. So we live in a situation right now where, you know, there is sort of that common thought, like science is the good guy and the church is the, you know, where the troglodytes in the back throwing. Yeah, I don't know. Do you have thoughts on that at all?

Yeah, well, that's actually the fourth lesson, is that the church not only establishes the liberal arts, and I consider that outside of the very Gospel itself, what is Christianity's greatest gift to Western civilization? Well, it's liberal arts, and with the liberal arts, the foundation for modern science. So if you argue, like Augustine, that Algerian Christian leader, that Algerian bishop back in the fourth century, the Christian era, he argued that the world in which we live is created by God, that is almighty God, the creator of all things seen, what we can measure empirically, and all things unseen, what we are not yet able to measure because we don't have a way of measuring them, but they're still there and God created them. So if you don't have a telescope, then it's hard to see, or the microscope, it's hard to see the unseen, but if you have the ability to see it, it's God still the creator it. So Christianity, both early ancient and medieval Christianity, argued that this world is measurable, this world is knowable because that's the way God created it. So if that's the case, then that's the foundation for empirical science. So as historians of science argue, and I'm not talking about Christian historians of science, but historians of science, most of them not being Christians, argue that it's the rational apologetic of Christianity that laid the foundation for the legitimate study of the world in which we live, countering Neoplatonic, ancient Neoplatonic philosophy, which was the prevailing worldview, a la the Roman Empire, that argued that this world is a fuzzy world, this world is a dreamlike world, this world is an unreal world. And Christianity, I should say, even say Judeo Christianity, argues that this world is a real world, that it's a good world, that's the way God created it, and therefore it's knowable, it's measurable, and then open to scientific inquiry. That's Christianity. I see again as the. Christianity's second greatest gift to the world in which we live today.

We've, and I correct me if I'm wrong, there's one left.

One. Okay. Yeah.

In number three and four today, we only. We only promised you five, right?

Yeah.

But in number three and four, we've settled two of the largest Debates going on, liberal arts. We've settled that.

Done.

We resolved it. And also the role of science and science and faith and integration. Because it's, it's, it's a discussion, it's an actual.

Take that Reddit.

Sorry guys.

On Reddit, if you read Reddit.

Okay, okay. You give a shout out too. Yeah, so this is actually fascinating. I'm excited. And let's land on the last one and then we're going to send people to Multnomah plus as soon as this comes out.

Okay, well, fasten your seat belts again. As a non Catholic Christian, I have tremendous respect for Catholic Christianity. I'm not a Roman Catholic Christian, but I have tremendous respect for Roman Catholic fellow believers. So I have learned to be grateful and thankful for how God used the medieval Roman Catholic Church to preserve the scriptures that I love without those monks, medieval monks doing the monkish things that medieval monks did, which was to accurately maintain the copies of the scriptures. And they took great pains to do it. And you think of that time, no printing press, no digital communication. When you need a copy of something, you have to make it by hand. So in the Middle Ages, the price of a complete Bible, if you're going to buy one, if you go in to a monastery and say I want a complete Bible, I want my copy of a Bible, and then the monastery will say, well, how accurate do you want it to be? How soon do you need it? Because if you want it soon, we can't guarantee there might be all kinds of scribal errors. Okay. But if you want it real accurate, ensure the accuracy. It's going to take a long time. It's going to take months and months and months. And what kind of quality of Bible do you want? Do you want it on vellum? Vellum will last a long time. You keep it in your family for centuries. Or do you want inexpensive Bible on cheap paper, cloth bound, rag bond, I should say paper. Well, that'll last maybe your lifetime at the most. So what do you want? But a Quality Bible, 13th century Quality Bible ensuring its accuracy in the, in the Middle Ages that time cost as much it was, it was the cost today of buying a brand new three bedroom home in a Portland, Oregon suburb.

I believe it.

Oh wow.

I think it's easier to build a.

Labor intensive cost and ensuring accuracy 1. Why? Because only a scholar can do it and ensure its accuracy and that kind of labor, very highly skilled labor. Just like today highly skilled labor is expensive. So again, the church was very careful to maintain a careful copying of the text of scripture because they're passing that on to posterity.

I don't think I could find a more suited point historical point to, to end our podcast today on. The reason I, I say this is is how much this generation dismisses scripture and the role of scripture and how, how cheap it is. We, we have it in so many ways but we don't, we don't use.

It, take it for granted.

I think, I think you're a free.

Copy today if you don't have it.

Yeah, you get a free copy. Raise your hand if you're new and here's a free copy. So we give it, we give it. You know every hotel room has one. Just a copy over there. And I can, you know some of hotels room. I see what they're doing but how, how important is. So in Eastern Europe, communism, all that. There are people that would love to have one page to rip one page of it and just cherish it and stuff. Right. But, but we don't learn that from history and maybe we're youth men. Right. We should have all, all the kids just write the Bible by hand and have their own copy written by hand in six months. That would be an experience. That would be something we learned from history, you know, different experience with it. So this is exciting. Dr. Skullberg, we can't thank you enough for coming out. Very excited about that. Now multi is going to come out soon. We'll. You'll hear more about this on you know, social media and everything and we're going to tell you actually in a few, a few new episodes we're going to talk about Multoma plus and the role that that this plays at multiversity. By the way, Dr. Skullberg is a professor at Multoma University. So if you want to come and.

Learn, come study history here.

Come study history here. Come with us. Would love to have you mult. We can give a shout out.

Oh absolutely.

Although, although we're going to play that music and you're going to help us with. You know I'm taking. Hey, this is it. Thank you for being with us. See you in the next episode. Hold on, hold on.

As always, it's been good to be with you. The views and opinions expressed on the show do not constitute beliefs of the school. We're just guys talking.

Not at all.

Thanks for coming.

Thank you. See you next time.