What about church history?

Question 13008.

Church history has a reputation problem. It sounds like the sort of thing you take up once the children have left home and you have run out of hobbies, a matter of dates, councils and men in unlikely hats.

I want to argue the opposite. Church history is the record of how Jesus has kept His promise to build His church, and a believer who knows a little of it is far harder to frighten, far harder to fool, and far less likely to think that the current crisis is the worst thing that has ever happened.

Why church history is not optional

Scripture itself is largely narrative. God tells Israel to remember, to build cairns of stones, to teach the children what happened at the Red Sea. Remembering is a spiritual discipline, not an academic one, and church history is simply that discipline extended past the close of the canon.

There is also a practical benefit. Almost every error that arrives in the church today has arrived before, usually with better arguments and better Latin. When you know church history, the newest teaching on the internet often turns out to be a second century idea with a microphone.

And there is humility in it. I am not the first person to read Romans. Knowing that other believers have wrestled with the same texts under fire, in prison, in plague, keeps me from mistaking my own moment for the centre of the story.

The apostolic and early church

The first three centuries of church history are the story of a movement with no political power, no buildings worth the name, and no legal protection, growing across the Roman world. Persecution came in waves, sometimes local, sometimes empire wide under Decius and Diocletian.

This is also the period when the canon of the New Testament settled. The church did not create the canon; it recognised what it had already been reading in worship, and the sifting was driven partly by heretics like Marcion producing their own edited versions. I go into that story in whether we can trust the manuscript transmission.

The writers of this era, often called the Church Fathers, are worth meeting in person rather than through summaries, and I introduce them in who the Church Fathers were. Ignatius writing on his way to be killed and Polycarp refusing to curse his King are not dusty figures.

The imperial church and the great councils

In 313 Constantine legalised Christianity, and within a lifetime the persecuted faith had become the favoured one. Church history changed direction at that point, and not entirely for the better. A church that cannot be killed can still be corrupted by comfort.

The great councils belong here. Nicaea in 325 confronted Arius, who taught that the Son was a creature, and confessed that Jesus is of one substance with the Father, using the Greek term homoousios. Chalcedon in 451 defined how the two natures of Jesus relate in one person.

I am a Baptist, and no council carries authority over Scripture for me. But these councils were doing what Scripture requires, guarding the person of Jesus against explanations that would empty the cross of meaning. Their conclusions stand because the Bible supports them, not because bishops voted.

The mediaeval centuries

The long middle stretch of church history is the part most readily skipped, and it should not be. Missionaries carried the gospel into northern Europe, monasteries preserved the text of Scripture through centuries when nobody else was copying anything, and theology continued to be done at a very high level.

It is also the period in which the papacy accumulated power, the Bible receded into Latin, and the gospel of grace was buried beneath a system of merit. The East and West split formally in 1054, and the Crusades did damage whose consequences we still meet on the mission field.

Reform movements kept appearing. The Waldensians, Wycliffe and his Lollards, Hus in Bohemia. Church history is never a straight decline, because God always keeps a remnant, often in places no institution is looking.

Reformation and after

Then comes 1517 and the recovery I describe in what happened at the Reformation. Within a generation the Bible was in the hands of ordinary people across Europe and justification by faith was being preached openly.

The century that followed brought the Anabaptists, the English separatists, and eventually the first Baptist congregations, gathered churches of believers who had been baptised on profession of faith. My own convictions about the local church come down that line, through Helwys and Bunyan and a great many people whose names nobody recorded.

Later came the evangelical awakenings under Whitefield and the Wesleys, and then the modern missionary movement with Carey, Judson and Hudson Taylor. Church history in these centuries is largely the story of the gospel going global, often carried by very ordinary people with very short life expectancies.

The last two hundred years

The modern period brought higher criticism, theological liberalism, and a serious attempt to reconstruct Christianity without the supernatural. It also brought the fundamentalist response, the recovery of dispensational teaching, the growth of the church across Africa, Asia and Latin America, and levels of persecution that make the twentieth century the bloodiest in church history.

We should be honest about the failures too. Church history includes slavery defended from pulpits, abuse concealed by institutions, and revivals that produced heat without holiness. I have written about the credibility damage in why anyone should trust the church after the abuse scandals.

None of that undoes the promise. The gates of hell have had two thousand years to prevail and have not managed it, which is the single most encouraging sentence anyone can take from church history.

How to read it without being swallowed by it

Two errors are easy here. The first is to treat church history as authoritative, so that tradition becomes a second Scripture and the past becomes a rule. The Greek paradosis, tradition, is used both positively of apostolic teaching and negatively of human custom that nullifies the Word.

The second error is to ignore church history entirely, which usually produces a Christianity convinced that it invented everything and therefore repeating errors that were settled centuries ago. Chesterton called tradition the democracy of the dead, and while I would not go all the way with him, the vote of previous generations deserves a hearing.

Start small. Read a good short survey, then one primary source, then a biography. Augustine’s Confessions, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, and the letters of missionaries will do more for you than any textbook.

The Baptist thread through the centuries

Since I write as a Baptist, let me trace the line that matters to me. Church history is often told as a relay between state churches, Rome to Constantinople to Wittenberg to Canterbury, and the congregations that refused that arrangement get a footnote if they get anything at all.

Yet from the second century onwards there were always believers who insisted that the church is a company of the converted rather than a population, that baptism follows faith rather than birth, and that the magistrate has no authority over conscience. The Donatists raised the question of a pure church in the fourth century. The Waldensians preached without licence in the twelfth. The Anabaptists paid for the conviction with their lives in the sixteenth, drowned in mockery of their own baptism.

Thomas Helwys published the first English plea for full religious liberty in 1612, argued that even the Turk and the heretic must be free before God, sent a copy to King James with his name in it, and died in Newgate prison. The Greek ekklesia means a called out assembly, and men like Helwys took that seriously enough to be called out of society itself. Paul’s charge to Timothy to entrust the deposit to faithful men who will teach others, 2 Timothy 2:2, has run through some very obscure hands.

A caution about golden ages

Every believer who takes up church history eventually falls in love with a period, and the temptation is to treat that period as the standard. For some it is the apostolic age, for others the Reformation, for others the awakenings of the eighteenth century.

Read a little deeper and the golden ages all tarnish. The Corinthian church was apostolic and a mess. Geneva was reformed and burned a man for heresy. Revival seasons produced excess as reliably as they produced conversions. There has never been a period in which the church did not need reforming, which is exactly what you would expect from a body made of people like me.

So, now what?

Pick one century and get to know it properly rather than skimming twenty. Depth in one period teaches you more about how God works than a thin acquaintance with all of them.

Then read a biography of a believer whose circumstances were harder than yours, which will not take long to find. Church history has a way of shrinking my complaints to their proper size without ever telling me off.

And remember why you are reading. Not to win arguments, and not to feel superior to previous generations, but to see the faithfulness of God stretched out over two thousand years so that you can trust Him with next Tuesday. Whose story will you start with?

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Matthew 16:18, ESV