Lessons From Church History

Over the past 6 months I’ve been teaching a Sunday School class in church history.  When we step back from the specific details of God’s work in his church through time there are some repeated trends that one notices.  I want to think through some of those I’ve noticed as I’ve taught this class.  Rather than give a list I want to examine some specific trends and I’ll dedicate a separate post to each one.

Today, however, I want to lay my presuppositions on the table.

One presupposition that I have in reading history, including church history, is the old saying that “history is His [God's] story.”  I believe in Providence.  I wouldn’t make a very good process theologian and probably a worse Open Theist.  I believe not only in an eternal purpose, but an Eternal Purposer.  I don’t believe the future is open.  I don’t believe God has simply guessed at the final outcome of all things.  I believe that God has been and is actively at work, in ways only He knows, to bring things about in a certain way and to a certain end.  I am not a fatalist, but I am a Providentialist, and I believe there is a difference.

Because of that belief, when I look back on church history I see more than the random self-determining acts of people, but I see the Providential-determining acts of God.  God has given His Spirit to His church and I believe that Spirit has been busy these past 2000 years (and more) in things like the preservation of Scripture, the formulation of doctrine, the direction of God’s people and the final victory of His church.

Of course, we must acknowledge that the fallenness of the world and the lack of full sanctification among God’s people is a part of that ongoing drama we call church history.  The work of God’s Spirit has not fully overcome our sin…..yet.  So the drama continues to include stories of brokenness, failure and at times outright rebellion.  I would even go so far as to say that the history of the church includes a great many contributions by those who likely did not know God at all.  Yet God has still been pleased to work in and among his people.

Another of my presuppositions is that there is no such thing as a “golden age” in the life of the church.  The Protestant Reformation, while having a powerful impact on the church (for the good, in my estimation), was still not a golden age in the church.  Thus, our goal is not to “return to the faith of the Reformers.”  The Patristic era was not a golden age in the life of the church, and for that matter the New Testament era was not a golden age in the life of the church.  I grew up under preaching which advocated being a “New Testament church.”  But does anyone really want their church to be like the Corinthian church?  The Galatian churches?  The Laodicean church?  No.  Even those times were less than perfect.

Because of that our goal should not be to return to something we find in the past, but to seek to be faithful in our own day, hopefully avoiding many of the mistakes of the past.  Certainly we can learn from the good things of the past, but there simply isn’t one time in the church’s history where we can say, “They finally got it all right.”

Lastly, I come from a Baptist background.  That means that my perspective will have a certain slant to it.  However, you can add to my “Baptistness” a strong appreciation for some other historical Christian groups such as the Anabaptists, but also the Orthodox Church.

So there are my main presuppositions.  In the following posts I’ll look at some broad trends I see running through Christian history and some of the things we can learn from those trends.