Truth Unites - Reformation in 1400s Ethiopia: The Forgotten Story of Estifanos

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Gavin Ortlund shares about the reform movement initiated by Estifanos, a 15th century Ethiopian Christian. See Russ Ramsey's Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart: https://www.amazon.com/Van-Gogh-Has-Broken-Heart/dp/0310155576/ Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

This video is the story of a 15th century reformer in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church named Estefanos. It's a fascinating story, very rarely known today, rarely discussed, and yet amazingly relevant to current theology, especially current issues in ecumenical work, as we'll get into in this video. Many see his movement of reform as a kind of proto-Protestantism, anticipating concerns in the Reformation that took place in Europe two to three generations later. If you watch to the end, you'll get a sense of why I say that. Let's do three things in this video. First, let's just explain who was Estefanos, and we'll introduce him a bit. Second, we'll ask, what was his theology?

What was he trying to reform? What was at stake here? And third, what's the relevance of this to the church today? And I'll draw two lessons, basically. The church is fallible and needs reform, and the church is big and not restricted to one institution. So we'll get into all that. you'll see what I mean as we get there. Before we dive in, I want to do a book endorsement. I was reading this book and just thought it's such a cool book. This is Russ Ramsey's Van Gogh has a broken heart.

What art teaches us about the wonder and struggles of being alive. Have you heard about this book? Really cool book. I always love talking about books that, and I'll put a link to this in the video description, check it out. To me, what I like about it is, number one, it just introduces you to art in general. So who was Rembrandt? What's the story behind the Mona Lisa? You know, just basic stuff you're learning that I didn't, I was embarrassed how little I knew, and I'm still reading through it right now. But it also talks about what art can teach us about the world. What does art teach us about human life? How would our lives be impoverished if we didn't have any art? And I think that's so important because one of the things that happens in the modern era is we're cut off from art.

We have entertainment, but we don't have art. And that's a huge loss. So this is a great book to read to learn to appreciate art more. So highly recommended. Just came out. Check it out in the description. All right, first, let's talk about Estefano's life. Who was he? Now, typically, I would have put up a picture of him with his dates. Unfortunately, very little is known about him because he and his followers were brutally tortured and killed. The reigning Ethiopian emperor Zara Jacob is reported to have had their noses and ears cut off. We know that Estefanos himself died in prison around 1540, and his work was all burned. So we don't know much about him, but I'll at least put up on the screen a picture or his name so you can see it.

The word Abba there, meaning father, is an honorific title applied to Ethiopian monks and clergy, and the word Stephanites. They refers to his followers, those who took up his cause after him. And basically, they survived for a while, but the five succeeding emperors as well persecuted them and they eventually were sort of snuffed out. And so this whole movement of reform might have fallen away into almost complete obscurity.

There's very few texts we have that tell us about it, but one of the texts that we do have, I've been reading with great excitement to share it all with you in hopes the story is better known because it needs to be. The Ge'ez acts of Abba Estefanos of Gwenda Gwenda.

Say that fast three times. Gaez, G. G.E. dash EZ. This is sometimes it's called classical Ethiopian. That's the language it's written in. And, you know, this, I was reading this. I was thinking, part of when you read these texts, it also just makes you grateful for scholarship in general. It's like, this is why we have scholarship. So we get translations of these texts. And so grateful for its existence. It was translated in 2006 by an Ethiopian American philologist named Getichu Heil. And he's widely considered

the foremost scholar of the Ge'ez language and Ethiopian studies more generally. He died a few years ago, so God bless him for his work on this. That makes you grateful. I actually get grateful about these scholars who do these, like, really niche pioneering works, and we all benefit from it. And I hope my YouTube channel is popularizing some of this, so people know about it because it's good to know. So Estefanos is born in Ethiopia in the late 14th century, like 1380s, and then he dies in 1440. So we're here, rewinding the clock about 100 years from Luther. We're in the century of Wycliffe and Huss, for example. I'll put up a map of Ethiopia in case you have forgotten where it is. It's there in East Africa. If you start at Egypt, go south to

Sudan, and then just southeast, then there's Ethiopia. Just a little bit of background information. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is one of the Oriental Orthodox Churches. The Oriental Orthodox Church results from the split, the fourth ecumenical council, the Council of Chalcedon, over differences in Christology. So the Eastern Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, all the Protestants, we're all Chalcedonian. The Oriental Orthodox has, is comprised of six churches. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is the largest of those six. I often think that Oriental Orthodoxy and then also the Assyrian Church of the East, which splits off at the third Ecumenical Council, are neglected in ecumenical theology today, and that's unfortunate.

In fact, my next video, I'll put up the thumbnail. My next video is going to be the first ever dialogue between the Protestants and the Oriental Orthodox. Fascinating, fascinating. fascinating, fascinating. I won't even tell you anything else except that and the thumbnail. Keep your eyes peeled for the thumbnail. Hopefully that'll be of interest to you. So that'll be the next one coming out after this video. But it's amazing to get lost in history. There's a fascinating, there's so much back there we've almost forgotten about. This is a fascinating world of Christianity back in these regions of the world. So some people think that the queen of Shiba came from Ethiopia. Christianity spread there very early, but it's in the

fourth century that it really takes root there permanently. And today, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has maybe 40 million people, something like this. And they have some fascinating distinctives. As far as I can tell, their canon is the largest one with 81 books, including controversial books, like the Book of Enoch. And then there's also many other Christians in Ethiopia, like evangelical Christians there. Some of you have been commenting on my videos recently. Thanks for that. Those of you, if you live in Ethiopia and you watch this video, leave a comment. And let me know that. I'm grateful that you guys are watching. God bless you and may the Lord bless the church there. Okay, so that's some backdrop. And then let's just get a little bit of Estefanos' life.

This book is hegiographical, so it's praising him and so forth. So you have to read it critically, but we can still learn some things. As a young man, Estefanos has this burning longing to give himself to God. He seeks out a monastic life. He spends a lot of time copying and studying the scriptures. And he becomes known for his piety, for his teaching. He's eventually ordained at age 3. 30, and people start coming to him to learn from him. And two of the things he emphasizes in his teaching are scripture and the Trinity. In the Acts, that's just what I'm going to call this text, so I don't have to say the full title every time. It says, the saint taught those who came to him that they should abide by the rule of the scriptures. He also taught them the splendid belief

in the Trinity removing from their heart, the error of Sebelius. Sibelius was a third-century figure who taught basically a form of modalism, so God is single and indivisible, but manifesting himself in three different ways, this kind of thing. And Estefanus is opposing that. Estefanos is thoroughly Nicene and orthodox in his doctrine of God. There's a dispute that will later arise in Trinitarian theology. That's actually one of the issues that's being debated, and this is what he writes about that. You can see explicitly Nicene categories and language in his view of that. Over time, he's growing in stature, he's gaining an influence, and the basic dynamic is it gets to a point where the other clergy, according to the acts, are getting jealous of him.

This is kind of the fundamental dynamic. People are flocking to hear his teaching. He's having such an influence. There's jealousy, and therefore there's recurring patterns of persecution against him. Early on, he's exiled from the monastery at which he teaches, and then he keeps preaching. He's preaching, his reform efforts are a couple of different things. A lot of it is just piety. You know, you read a lot of his speeches early on in here. It's just calling for godliness, calling for monastic reform, calling for return to roots more generally. He emphasizes that salvation is a gift of God's grace. He emphasizes the death of Jesus on the cross. He emphasizes spiritual discipline and prayer. He calls people to devote themselves to godliness. So a lot of it is just like this.

his reform movement grows and becomes known throughout the region, it gets organized into these 12 groups, and it leads to further escalating conflict. And I haven't mentioned the specific points of conflict yet. We'll get to those next. But people are flooding to hear his teaching, and the other church leaders are not fans of this. Initially, he has support from one of, from the Ethiopian king or emperor, but a new king comes to power that I've already mentioned, Sarah Jacob, and he and those after him favor the established clergy and side against Estefanos and the Stephanites and viciously persecute them. They're tortured in various ways all throughout their career. Estefanos dies in prison.

It seems like the worst treatment actually comes after this a little bit on the Stephanites. They come to collect his body and they're imprisoned and tortured. According to this text, they are mocked, they're stripped naked, their bodies are covered with dirt, their hair is pulled out, they're stabbed, they're beaten. Many die under this treatment. eventually they're banished to the Muslim territories, which is even worse, because then they're just brutally massacred there. One positive is they keep preaching and they gain some Muslim converts, and those converts are themselves then martyred, which is fascinating. So that's a little bit of a

broad overview of just kind of where we're talking, when we're talking, you know, what's going on. Now let's dive in a little deeper and see what's the presenting occasion for conflict. What are they trying to reform. We've seen a little bit already the general desire for godliness and so forth. We've also seen his commitment to the Trinity and to scripture. But what are the presenting areas of conflict with the church leadership of the day? Well, there's a couple of different things. Some are smaller issues that don't come into the story too much. One of them, fascinatingly, is the millennium. You know, it's like totally an example of there's nothing new under the sun. This is what happens when you study church history. It happens over and over again. You think,

oh, we're not the first people who've talked about this. Amazing. Well, this is one of the issues. The Stephanites rejected the reigning, what we would call pre-millennialism of the day. It had some of its own unique flavors, but that's the broad view. And they affirmed something like what we call ah millennialism, though they didn't use those categories. So this is Revelation 20. I actually have a video on that if you're interested in end time stuff. But that's one of the issues of dispute. It's not the main one. Another issue is when to observe the Sabbath. on Saturday or Sunday. That's another issue. But the main presenting issue that really causes the conflict was the Stephanite's refusal to prostrate themselves before anyone or anything other than God.

They say, we only bow down and worship, bow down to and worship the Father's Son, the Holy Spirit, no one else. And the basis for this was the commandments of Scripture. They said this, the scripture, we have to follow the scripture over the traditions and leadership of the church. Let me put up how Gatichu Hyle describes this, and then we'll give a lot of examples from the text. He's basically introducing this and saying, here's the nature of the Stephanite Reform Movement. Quote, the basis of their reform movement was that monks should observe strict monastic life, as was laid down by the fathers of monasticism, and that the teachers of the church should limit the doctrine of Christianity

to what is found in the 81 canonical books of the Bible, and the observance of God's commandments found in them. As they understood it, the main commandment neglected at that time was to worship God alone, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They considered the prostration on the ground a form of worship that should not be performed in reverence even to the Holy Cross or to the icon of the Madonna and child, and in honor of and respect for the king and his name. So obviously, if you followed my work on like icon veneration, of course, you know, this is going to be relevant to some of those issues. But this is the heart of it. This is the heart of the Stephanite Reform

movement. Don't bow down in prostration before any. anyone or anything other than the Holy Trinity because of the commandments of Holy Scripture. That's basically the presenting issue, the nub of the disagreement. Here's how Estefanos articulates his position in one dispute. This is my faith. The father is the begitter, the son is the begotten, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. I prostrate myself before this and worship this Trinity, I will not add to this.

And the rationale for this that he repeatedly says is he's brought before courts and so forth and defending his views is only is scripture. Okay. Here's how it put at one point. The king said to the saint, that's Estefanos, why do you not lower your head in prostration? The saint said to him, there is no commandment in the law that we should prostrate ourselves, as you say, but it does command us to prostrate ourselves before God. Elsewhere he explicitly appeals to the second commandment. Okay. So here's another episode where you can see both his concern about idolatry and his commitment to the commandments of Scripture. I'm trying to just make this plain so his voice comes out here. One of the accusers met him on the road and said to the saint, why do you not

prostrate yourself before the king? The saint answered and said to him, I do not make a quaternity of God, for I have subjected myself to the Holy Trinity. The man said to him further, if you do not prostrate yourself before the king, in whose land are you living then? The saint said to him, the church is built on the holy apostles, not on the kings of the earth, I am living, therefore, in holy church, where Christ has built us, a house which waves cannot shake. So here we get the first glimmers of Estefanos's doctrine of the church, which is fascinating, and we'll get into this a little bit. But the primary clash seems to be here and where it really gets brutal. It is the emperor, the king, who's carrying it out. But, you know, the established clergy,

are there, they're bringing it before him. But it really comes down in their refusal to bow to the king. But another one of the concerns on the table, especially early on, there's dispute about how much this changes over time, is religious devotion to physical objects and concern about devotion to Mary. Early on, in his first major blow-up,

the Ethiopian monks are complaining to Zara Yaacob what their beef is with Estefanos. They say he condemns the rule of our monasteries introduces discord by teaching what our fathers did not teach, takes away our disciples, and contemns the prayer of Mary called Bartos, and those that are like it. He says, only the my soul magnifies God is Mary's prayer. The verb contem means to treat with contempt. The my soul magnifies God is the Magnificat, basically Luke chapter one, Mary's prayer, song of praise. And the prayer of Mary at Bartos is an Ethiopian apocryphal work that basically consists of a long prayer of Mary in the

city of Bartos, where she's interceding for a Christian who's held captive there. And so Estefanos is saying, Luke 1 is legit. This text isn't, and he's right about that. It's apocryphal. But the result of that episode is he's bound and he's flogged 46 times. So the basis of this reform, though, is constantly going back to Scripture. You see that even there in his appeal to. the Magnificat. He's basically saying, so here's an example. Early on, his opponents hold a

synod, and they accuse him of causing division and stealing their people, and introducing new laws and all these things. Here's his response. I have not taught anything but the law of God. But they say that my teaching is not the law of God. Behold, my witness are the books of the church. They question, well, what's your appointment? What's your authority? And he responds in the same way. The law of God has appointed me to practice and to teach it. So it's not hard. Now, we're going to talk about differences. You know, there's a lot of naive assumptions of kind of trying to put people in neat camps. Everything is its own, every single thing is its own particular thing, different from everything else. I've been thinking about this in my reading of philosophy lately. This is

true for historical context. We're not trying to say this is exactly like the Protestant Reformation, but it's not hard to see the parallels in what we just read in Luther at the Diet of You know, it's kind of like, wow. And some of the concerns that the Protestants have and others have had against Nicaea, too. It's like, wow, okay, we're not, it's not hard. We're not having to wonder where the points of connection might be, even while we'll warn against too neat an identification as well. Here's one last episode that's very revealing. Zara Jacob is questioning Estefanos about the question of authority. This is very revealing. Then the king said to the servant, who is your teacher? The blessed one said, the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. The king said to him further, and after God. The blessed one said to him the prophets and the apostles. The king said to him after them. The saint said to him, anyone who abides by the ordinance of the prophets and apostles, whether great or small, I do not discriminate.

All are my teachers. Again, the king said to him, and after this, the blessed one replied, saying to him, I do not have any other after this, for all are an army of Satan, a community of demons. The king said to him, is the Holy Spirit for you alone? The Blessed One said to him, it is not for me alone. The Holy Spirit abides also in all who walk according to his law. Now, do you see the chain of authority being claimed in this answer? Personally, I think it's beautiful.

He's saying, God's the chief authority. Second, the word of God, the apostles and prophets. And then third, everybody, everybody who follows God. it's not we're not having the terms in the exact same categories of like solo scriptura and priesthood of all believers and so forth but you can see the general chain of authority and there's no notion of like an infallible magisterium here or something like this he's attempting to reform christianity based upon its authoritative sources like holy scripture so we're already into question three here but let's officially enter this now how is this relevant to the church today well let's warn of the dangers here

one of the dangers is we could try to sort of draw too neat of an arrow from the 15th century to the 16th century, from Ethiopia to Germany, or try to use this in too tidy a way. There are differences in context. Because I'll have people respond and say, well, Estefanos wasn't a Protestant. Look at these differences in this way. And it's like, we agree. We have to pay attention to each thing in its historical context. But there's a danger in the other direction as well. And that is to act like these have nothing. to do with each other. But there are some fascinating parallels and lessons. So let me just highlight two lessons I think we can draw today that are relevant to our discussions in the church today. First, the Stephanite Reform Movement draws attention to the fallibility of the church and raises questions about the nature of reform needed within her. The category Sempeer Reformanda always reforming. I think this is sometimes misunderstood. This has come up a little bit in some reviews of my book. it doesn't mean that everything always is in need of reform.

So just there's nothing ever stable, like the church is just constantly bouncing around. It means that the church never reaches a kind of irreformable stasis in her doctrine or her practice. We never arrive. Just like as an individual Christian, we're continually growing, we're continually looking to scripture to measure ourselves. So with the church entirely. And it's sort of just a logical fallout of the fallibility of the church.

if the church is not infallible, then she needs to keep a close watch on herself in light of the Word of God. And the reason this is so important to me is as you study church history, you see stories like this constantly, this continual pattern of ossification and then renewal, you know, decadence and complacency, and then revival. So I pray for revival today. And I think the Stephanite Reform Movement is just one of dozens and dozens and dozens of examples of where you see is playing out. And some of the particular areas of reform in the 15th century Ethiopian reform effort do have tremendous similarity to Protestant reform. You could talk about a lot of different things, but I think probably the main two. And the reason this is relevant is because people act like

Protestantism just came out of nowhere, you know, and it didn't. Like the five solas are the eventual outcome of various struggles that have been going on for a long time in different places independently of each other. So as accretians are doing their accreting, there's continual waves of protest. The Hussites are over here. The Lollards are over there. The Stephanites are down there. The Waldensians are back this way. The Petro-Brusians are over there and so on and so forth. There's a lot of Protestant movement. So Luther is the inheritor of a long tradition of dissent. And so it's wrong when people act like, you know, the Reformation sort of came out of nowhere. the two clearest parallels between the Stephanite reform movement and Protestantism, even acknowledging

they're not exactly identical and they come in different contexts, would be Solas Scriptura and Sola Deo Gloria. The Stephanite refusal to abide by traditions that are not explicated in Scripture does have similarity to the Protestant insistence on Sola Scriptura. And the Stephanite refusal to prostrate themselves before anything other than God does have similarity to the Protestant insistence on solely deo Gloria. And those issues, together with the more general call for revitalized godliness and so forth, away from kind of complacent and established clergy that have kind of lost their way, honestly, they're important to both the Stephanites and the later Protestants. We can appreciate the parallels, even while acknowledging that there's differences

of context. Second question that this raises, the Catholicity of the church. As I've mentioned, I think we don't often factor in these Eastern traditions enough in our ecumenical vision. And when you have reform or separatist movements within them, it makes a story even more complicated. And basically, I would like to propose that the story of Estefanos should encourage consideration of the Protestant view that the church is not restricted to one institution, but is larger than any one singular institution. So let me just clarify this, by the way, people misunderstand this. When we talk about, I find these confusions out there a lot. The visibility of the church, the institutionality of the church, these different categories.

So just to be clear about this, the visibility and institutionality are different things. When we say the church is not restricted to one institution, we are not saying she is purely and only invisible. You know, have people accuse me of being incoherent when I'm trying to just make these basic distinctions. visibility has to do with what you can see. Institutionality refers to particular hierarchical structures and other mechanisms that demarcate a church and its boundaries. So we Protestants affirm, with St. Augustine and John Wickliff and others, a distinction between the visible and the invisible church.

But we are not denying either. We affirm both. It's like, you know, the distinction between the church triumphant and the church militant. By making that distinction, we're not denying one. we're just making a distinction between two. The visible church is, you could crudely define it as just everybody who's baptized in the name of the Trinity. The invisible means everybody who's actually united to Christ. And we can't, those two are not always the same. You can't see someone's heart. You don't know who is a hypocrite and so forth. And so we make that distinction. But what

distinguishes a Protestant ecclesiology, because the other churches have ways to account for that as well, What distinguishes us is we don't think the church is restricted to one institution. And that is the case with the main alternatives. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrian Church of the East. They all do say, we are the true church and our bishops are the real successors of the apostles, even if they tease that out with differing implications. And the Protestants have generally said, no, a true church with a fully valid Eucharist can be found wherever Christ and His gospel are pre-executive.

present in word and sacrament. And I think the Stephanite episode encourages a consideration of some of the implications at stake in something like this. So just to tell a not improbable tale here to finish off, suppose you're a Muslim in an Ethiopian village in the year 14, I don't know, 1430s sometime. You hear the preaching of this amazing man, Estefanos. Estephanos is preaching Nicene Trinitarianism, the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. He proclaims that God is a Trinity, but the second member of this Trinity, the son of God, became a man. And he died on the cross for our forgiveness of sins. And then he rose from the dead. And he's coming back very soon to judge the world. And, but we can be forgiven and restored to God. But we must repent and seek a godly life in response to what

Jesus Christ has done for us. You're a Muslim in the 1430s in Ethiopia. You hear that message. And you see the godliness of this group and you're saying, wow, look at the love they have for each other. Look at the courage they're exhibiting while they're being massacred and brutalized and mocked and ostracized in all these ways. And they're holding fast. And you're convicted of the truth of this message. And you conclude this is the true religion. You repent of your violence and your sin. You get baptized.

You place your trust in the Christian God. And along with your whole family, you're baptized. Eventually, you get massacred for Christ yourself along with you. your family. Okay. That is not an unlikely tale at all. We know Estefanos was exiled. We know his followers were exiled to territories that were dominated by Muslims. And we know they all preached widely and gained a following and subsisted for a long period of time before they were eventually snuffed out. So here's the questions that come up. Is this little village where you've got a community of Muslims converted into Christianity through the Stephanite influence? And they're not institutionally connected to

Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, or Roman Catholic. They're just this sort of separate entity now. Do they have a valid Eucharist when they worship? Now, different traditions are going to answer this differently. Traditions that have a very tight and regulated construal of apostolic succession might say no, or they might say yes and have some particular explanation for how to understand that. for most Protestants and for those who have a less sort of institutionally construed way of understanding the true church and sacraments and so forth, this is a no-brainer. It's like, of course they have a valid Eucharist. Christ gave himself for them dying on the cross. Why wouldn't he give his body and blood now? Why would it be restricted like that, you know?

And so we would just say, of course they have a valid Eucharist, and hooray, this is Christ advancing his kingdom, you know? And we admire these people, and they're probably our betters, and they'll be way ahead of us in heaven probably. The takeaway is just an invitation to think more deeply about the nature of Catholicity and church history can help us broaden our vision to see just how wide and beautifully diverse is the true body of Jesus Christ. Final thought, one of the questions to consider here is how many other Estefanos are there out there that we don't simply, that we simply don't know about? Because this was a huge major conflict. It shook the foundations of both church and state in Ethiopia, and yet we only know about it from a few sources

because they were viciously stamped out. So they burned all their writings, so a lot of it doesn't survive. If we barely know about this one, how many other things has the Holy Spirit done in church history that we don't even know about? Which plays to the same point, right, of keeping our vision wide for Catholicity. And I'm going to return to this subject a little bit more in my next video on dialogue between Luther and Deacon Michael in 1534. The first Protestant-Oriental Orthodox dialogue, and it went really well. Happily. Way better than his dialogue was Vingley.

Luther got along with the Oriental Orthodox better than a lot of the Protestants. Can you feel with me how exciting this is and how this has a lot of ecumenical implications? It's interesting, right? So keep your ears peeled for that. If you're interested in supporting Truth Unites, I do appreciate and need support. It means a lot to me. You can do that on the website. Only do that if it's a source of joy for you. I do get benefits of early release. I do meetings with my supporters, but I try not to hammer that too much, but I do appreciate support. You can see that on the website. There's also other things on the website that might be of

interest to you, articles I write and things like that. But thanks for watching, and please pray. Pray for revival in the church today and pray that Truth Unites is used by the Lord to advance gospel assurance. That's what each video is trying to do. Help us, help remind us who Jesus is and feel the wonder of his love. And in this case, one of the ways we do that is just, wow, we're inspired by the courage of these people who were willing to face violence for their convictions. All right, thanks for watching everybody. We will see you next time.