Still looking for the next place to plant myself in Chicago, I’ve been staying temporarily in Park Ridge with a church friend and his two children—ages 8 and 11.

Walking through their basement the other day, my eyes lit up at the sight of a bookshelf full of old Bible studies on VCR tapes, including some from Shorewood’s summer family conferences when they were held at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill.

Popping in one of the tapes last night (dated July, 2001) Jordan made mention of Trinity, calling it “one of the premier institutions in the world for evangelical theology.”

He then said, “You can take systematic theology courses here, and read all the systematic theology textbooks, and yet there’s one thing always missing. They talk about theology. They talk about anthropology, the study of man. They talk about angelology, the study of angels and the spirit world. They talk about soteriology, the study of salvation, and ecclesiology, the study of church. They talk about escatology, the study of last times.

“But there’s one thing that’s never there. You know what it is? It’s Israelology. I’ve never been able to figure out why somewhere, somebody didn’t say, ‘You know, you can’t understand the Bible if you don’t understand the nation Israel, so why don’t we add to our theology some Israelology.’

“You can come with me into my study and I’ve got a dozen different authors, different schools of theology with the systematic theology books. Look through all of them—

from Lewis Sperry Chafer, who’s the most voluminous, to Charles Baker, who would be in our camp, all the way over to Dabney and Strong, or to the modern guys—and they won’t have ANY—or very little—about Israel.

“Paul says, ‘I don’t want you to be ignorant about Israel and the mystery (program for the Body of Christ).’ You see, Satan’s policy . . . it’s to the Adversary’s advantage to get you to confuse the two so that you’re trying to be somebody you’re not.

“And Paul said, ‘Boy, you better not do that; there’s something right up early on in your Christian life you need to get ready for.’

“What about Israel? What happened? Pastor J.C. O’Hair from here in Chicago used to say this all the time—‘You can’t understand the Bible unless you understand Israel.’ ”

*****

It was with the 5^th Century controversy started by Pope Cyril of Alexandria, targeted at Nestorius of Antioch, that literalists forever lost the battle of, ‘Are we going to take the Bible literally or allegorically?’ and the people who hold the institutions of the Church are allegoricalists.

As Jordan outlines this monumental turning point in church history, “Cyril got into a conflict with Nestorius, who was archbishop of Constantinople, about whether Mary was the ‘mother of God.’

“It’s a long detailed issue and they got arguing about what some words mean and Cyril wanted to take it allegorically. Nestorius says, ‘We take it literally,’ and they wound up with a great controversy. Cyril said Mary’s the mother of God. Nestorius spoke of Mary as the mother of Christ but thought it improper to speak of her as the mother of God.

“The fact that Nestorius was trained in Antioch, and inherited the Antioch zeal for exact biblical exegesis, and insisted upon the recognition of the full manhood of Christ, is of first importance in understanding his position.

“In Antioch, they emphasized the humanity of Christ. Cyril says, ‘Because you’re emphasizing the humanity of Christ, you’re denying His deity.’ Strange, isn’t it? Nestorius wasn’t; he was just emphasizing His humanity. And Cyril says, ‘See, you’re denying the deity of Christ because you don’t think Mary is the mother of God. You only think she’s the mother of the humanity, so you believe Jesus is only a man.’ ”

Now, Nestorianism itself, as a theology, developed the idea that Jesus was two people in one person, but Nestorius didn’t believe the heresy.

“Nestorius was exactly right and Cyril was wrong, but you know who won? Cyril. And that controversy . . . by the way, the Nestorians gave out the gospel as missionaries in China in 7^th Century. They took it all over Africa, Persia, and India and all the way to the Pacific Ocean in China. They were heretics, named that way, but they had a zeal. You know what they were? They were outside the camp.”

*****

Jordan says the hardest thing you’ll ever do is to be a heresy hunter.

“Being a heresy hunter is a dangerous thing because it breeds into you an innate sense of your own rightness and an innate ability to always tell everybody else what’s wrong and consequently what’s right,” he explains. “It’s, ‘There’s this heresy that must be stomped out—let’s all get together!’ and it’s going to be what you say is right and what you say is wrong. And you will take a humble demeanor to it, but that will be what the underlying seed is and it’s very, very dangerous.

“It’s much easier to do that than to take the time to build truth. It’s easier to tear down than it is to build, and so it’s very dangerous to be in the mode of just being that error-hunter in defense of truth.

“And so, as the church was persecuted with its vigor, it begins to slide into institutionalism. But they did it rationalizing, and rather than it being the life of Christ, now it’s the institutional things.

“You develop an organization and without that organization—‘We’re going to put you out.’ All of a sudden you get the hierarchy. That’s where the false church came from.

“But then you’ve got the true church out there, underground from the visible church, putzing along.”