Church history rocks the party

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I don’t know about you, but the phrase “church history” used to conjur up images of eternal boredom. My neighbour recently shared the anecdote of how his younger brother, having just received a Christmas present from his grandmother, leafed through a “full-colour” hardback picture book of “gothic church architecture” with feigned gasps of interest – “oh thanks, Gran, that’s really great.”

Church history seemed like an endless lists of dates and councils and creeds, on a par with dreary pictures of empty buildings. Why check out church history, when you can get on with doing church now?

Over the last year I had the task of revising for church history exams, so the first rather less than pious answer to my question was: check out church history, or you’ll flunk bible college. However, in the process of learning about popes, princes and debates about transubstantiation, my eyes have been opened to the hordes of treasure waiting to be discovered in the more unexplored corners of the library. So here are some reasons why church history should most certainly begin to rock your party, if it hasn’t already been providing a rich soundtrack for many years of your life:

1. Church history is about lived-out faith

Spirituality is a word bandied about all over the place, be it in the church or your local yoga group. When I use the word I guess I mean “relationship and contemplative life with and under God”. The New Testament is not in the first instance a guide to spirituality. In Acts there’s a quick news bulletin: “the apostles met and broke bread”; “they sung a hymn”; “they devoted themselves to prayer and the word” - you get an idea of what sort of things went on, but you don’t get much insight into what this really looked like – there’s no MP3 recording.

I assume that the reason for this is that “spirituality” in the NT is Old Testament spirituality. The few prayers in the Gospels and Acts (Maria, Zechariah, Acts 4) are saturated in the Old Testament. The “word” that demanded devoted study was the Old Testament word – the Psalms, proverbs and other wisdom literature. “New Testament spirituality” is surely interpreted through the lens of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but it remains a “Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes” spirituality.

I find myself wanting to listen to what it means to interpret this OT spirituality through the lens of Christ. You get awesome statements from Paul, like: “I live no longer, rather Christ lives in me.” But I find myself saying – wow, great, awesome, but Paul, tell me more – what does this look like? Tell me about how you live that out!

Church history is great because it’s about people following Jesus and working out what it means to live under God in Christ. Once you get past the dates and names (which is helpful to get a grip of the scenery), the way is clear to dip into the books behind the names and soak up all the wisdom and years of experience they recorded for our benefit. You get a sense of what it could mean to continue to grow and become mature in Christ.

2. Church history means you’re surrounded by witnesses

One of the things that has struck me is that even when in every age there are Christians who get the wrong end of the stick and are unbalanced in some area of their theology (of course, we here at the coffee bible club are all perfectly “balanced” theologians, all the time…), in amidst all the fuzz, in every age, God’s Spirit is at work. There’s a sort of unspoken assumption in evangelical circles that all theologians before the reformation were apostate, apart from Augustine - he’s ok because Calvin was a fan. That is certainly unfair to some, but judging by the quotations I hear in evangelical sermons, God’s Spirit only taught truth worth hearing to Luther, Calvin, Owen, Edwards, Packer and Stott. Or if you live in Germany like me then it was only Zinzendorf, Luther, Luther, Luther, Luther and Bonhoeffer.

I’ve been discovering through my church history classes that Luther stood in a long line of theologians who had worthwhile things to say about the sinfulness and weakness of man, the wisdom, glory and grace of God, and the need for reform in the church. “All over the world, God’s Spirit is moving” was a song we used to sing in the church of my childhood. “In all generations,” I might add.

This amazing work of God in all ages in the universal church has been a great comfort to me recently. In all generations there have been believers who - saturated in the culture of their day, challenged by temptations, surrounded with philosophical challenges to their faith - have “fought the good fight” of faith and worked hard at giving an account of their faith in Christ to the world around them.

Many mourn the move towards individualism in our Christianity. I’ve noticed that I am very reluctant to learn from others “since they are only human”. Part of this may be good Christology, but another regretfully large part of it is self-sufficiency on my part. Reading about people like Augustine has shown me how “me and my generation” are not the first to have the tricky double-task of translating the gospel into the philosophical air of the age and defending the faith from the attacks of the age. Every generation of Christians has faced this challenge. And that is encouraging.

So many of the questions that these old guys were dealing with are the same questions we encounter today. It’s mostly just the same, rehashed and repackaged. We can learn from the arguments and struggles of others throughout history and it equips us for the battles we face.

I’m currently listening to….

William Placher (Editor): “Callings. Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation” is an anthology of writers on the topic of vocation, but it serves as an all-round selection of “tasters” from some of the most famous figures. Augustine’s Confessions is an autobiography with a theological end-part. It’s written in the form of a prayer to God. Henry Chadwick’s theological biography, Augustine, is quite philosophical/hard reading but remains inspiring. I followed Alister McGrath’s tip in his book about doubt to check out Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ – there is a lot of challenging wisdom – it is questioning my motives a lot. The IVP Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals is full of great short articles and shows how people from the evangelical tradition dealt with the challenges of the day – and it helps me understand more of where I come from.

Anyone else had any good cups of coffee with dead people alive in Christ that we should know about?

How Amiable!

"Those who in recent debates have questioned the doctrine of substitutionary atonement must surely be those who are not deeply-convicted and not alive to the guilt of a broken law. But the blood-drenched floor and blood-spattered walls of tabernacle and temple testify to the depth of our sin and the need for a life to be poured out in exchange for atonement... to the heart of a deeply-convicted sinner ‘how amiable’ for we see in the blood God’s love, God’s justice, God’s holiness, God’s grace, and God’s welcome."
Tim Chester reflecting on Andrew Bonar on Leviticus 7