Latest / Clear Path Christianity / Why Church History Matters MORE THAN You Think || CPC Podcast Ep. 25
Transcript
- Cole Crone: so I was on Instagram last night and thumbing through reels. And there was one that came up that said something like at the top said something to the effect of like hey 19 hey 1987 babies or something. And of course I was like Mm-hmm, because I'm a nineteen eighty seven baby. And it was like flashing images of people frolicking and having a good time and being young and happy and and then in the middle of the screen it flashed up and said, You just had the last summer of your thirties. And and I went I went w what? I've just had the last summer of my thirties? I'm a nineteen eighty seven baby. And I started panicking a little bit and I went, No, that that can't that can't be that can't be right. I'm not even thirty nine yet. I'm not even thirty nine. How could this have been the last? And then I realized, yeah, not for people born after the summer. People born after the summer, like me, October. Well are this I guess everyone was born after August. I guess Yeah, I guess. Yeah. But anybody yeah, but all the yeah, but all the losers who were born during the summer and before. Yeah, you have just had your last the last summer of your thirties. I gotta I got a whole nother summer to go, baby, before I got a whole the last summer of my thirties upcoming. So what am I gonna do with it? Nothing. Probably nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Probably similar stuff to I did. 'Cause when this I think if my math is correct, when this episode comes out it will be it will be the week of my birthday. Yeah, so that's what got me that was kind of anyways, that was what got me thinking about. birthday coming up and yeah. But I p I did pan I legitimately panicked for a little bit thinking I've I have just I've just had have I just had 'cause I wasn't thinking about it. We were busy and, you know, moving and finishing seminary and all that stuff. I was just like Did the last summer of my thirties just really slip through my fingers? I I was legitimately panicking. So the topic the topic of this week's episode concerns church history. And I've I've titled this episode Why Church History Matters More Than You Think. when I first started considering that Christianity proper didn't begin with the group that I was a part of, didn't begin or wasn't restored in the group that I was a part of. It seemed to me that there was a a movement of people, there had been several movements of people, in fact, who pondered whether or not everyone before their time might have actually gotten Christianity wrong. s people in the sixteenth century and all the way up and through the nineteenth century, People became quite famous and renowned for telling you that the church ceased to exist for somewhere between fifteen and eighteen hundred years, and that it was their church or their movement that restored the true church once again. Now This this sounds like a bold claim, and and of course and of course it is, considering many new teaching many New Testament teachings, and yet this is the view of many t even today who claim to be part of a restored Christianity. This this version of history you may have heard called something akin to a a parenthesis theory. And that that parenthesis, it goes something building that parenthesis goes something like this. That Christianity became corrupted early on. Different strokes for different folks, there are different timelines. But so Christianity became corrupted, the true church disappeared. Eventually, someone or a group of someones recovered the truth, and this restored group represents the restored Christianity or the restored church. Now If you aren't part of a group like that, and you want to know how you might push back against that claim, or you're in a group that makes a similar claim and you would like to know if they do so fraudulently, like the group that I came from did, what might you do to test this parenthesis theory? How would you know whether this claim is true or not? The the answer to that is history. You must be willing to actually explore church history. And so in this episode, we're going to look at some of the reasons why church history matters more than you might think. Whether you were born in a Christian church and raised in the Christian church, you're a Baptist or Methodist or Presbyterian or you're Catholic or whatever, or you are someone who is from a group that claims to be a restoration church or a restoration movement to the true church, I think there's going to be a lot in this episode for you. And the first thing that we need to do is answer the question, Well, what is church history? because different churches might be using that term in different ways. if you're Roman Catholic, you're you're primarily concerned with Roman Catholic Church history. If you're Orthodox, you're primarily concerned with Eastern Orthodox Church history. Protestant, same thing. The the simplest answer is that church history church history proper anyway, is the development of the Christian faith. How did the Christian faith develop from the New Testament period until today. church history is essential to the the broader story of Christians, of Christian churches, of doctrines, the various controversies, the various you know, missional journeys, the various phases of persecution, different types of worship, the various councils that were held. The various confessions that have developed beyond those councils, all the different movements of church history are all within this umbrella that we would study as specifically church history. Now, here we need to make an important distinction, and that is this that church history is not the same thing as church tradition. Okay. Church history is like all other all other historical studies. It is concerned with describing what happened, right? It is it is descriptive, right? It is simply describing how the events unfolded in space-time. These events do not necessarily give us anything prescriptive. They're not they're not. They may or may not be prescribing for you and I anything that would effectively bind our conscience. And so that that difference, we're we're in this episode, we're just looking at what what happened and why what happens should matter to us today. We we still need to assess the thoughts and actions of our predecessors through the lens of scripture. So f even if your tradition even if your church is a scripture and tradition sort of sort of church, i.e. you're orthodox or you're Catholic, or or not, we've we filter everything through all of the prescriptive things we would glean from church history would have to coincide with the scriptures. I I prefer to think of it like this. Scripture is our ultimate authority, but church history gives us evidence about how Christians throughout history interpreted those scriptures. And so it isn't it isn't that you can totally divorce the description from the prescription. You have to try to decide which is which. But it but If you don't study church history, you can't do either. So now that I've broadly tried to broadly clarify what I mean by church history, let's look at at one objection to the study of church history and six reasons why to study church history. Okay, so so the objection the objection is commonly something to the effect of I just need the Bible. Why do I need church history when I have the Bible? And for me, there is a significant issue with this. While I want to affirm, as I already have, that the Bible is our ultimate authority, we need to recognize a biblical and historical fact, namely, that the scriptures came to us through the church. That the The Bible isn't something that came bound in a singular codex out of the sky. It it is it is something that God's people throughout history wrote and copied and circulated and preserved and collated and interpreted and and on and on, all contributing to the Bible that we have today. And we don't, we don't actually, obviously, if you know anything about the early church, getting anything resembling our modern Bible took a lot of time and there was a lot of disagreement. And so for us to just go, well, we don't, we don't need church history anymore. Thanks for doing all this work to give us our authoritative text, but we we're not really concerned about what you might have thought about that particular text. So if we we need to start by recognizing that the Bible is definitionally a communally sourced document. The Bible existed before us. There were Christians who existed before us. And so Christians have been reading the Bible for approximately 2,000 years, or the various texts that comprise the Bible for at least 2,000 years. So when interpreting scripture, we are joining a conversation that began millennia before we were even born. No one then, by definition, reads the Bible in a vacuum. Right? We're all reading it with certain presuppositions that come from our various church traditions or the part of the world that we came up in, or there there are many factors. But but given those facts, a a valid question arises, and that is this. Am I the first person in two thousand years to understand this passage correctly? Because if you come to a a a a text of scripture and you are interpreting it in a fashion that had it had not ever been interpreted before you. That that is that is what you are saying. And I think if you think about that for more than a few seconds, you'll realize that that's a preposterous claim. And yet there have been many people who have come over the last 2,000 years and have said just that. So obviously the odds are dramatically stacked against that thought. So while again, it appears to me at least that the sentiment behind the I just need the Bible is is seemingly pious, it seems that it is more indicative of ignorance or arrogance than actual godliness. So let's look at a few reasons. why church history matters more than you might think in in in a little bit more detail. So number one, church history demonstrates that we are not the first Christians. This is probably obvious on the face of it, but nevertheless, modern Christians can fall into the trap of believing that Christianity is just whatever happens in my local church on Sunday. But again, we have to remember that Christianity began with Jesus and the apostles. That has to be our starting point. So, and again, as I said before, the Bible itself provides us with the earliest history of the apostolic period, the initial spread of the Christian movement, and the accompanying persecutions. But then church history sort of Takes the story from there, and we can trace the continued spread of Christianity from beyond the scriptures themselves as something of at least for the first few centuries, something of an underground movement. And then we see the church emerge from the shadows and begin holding councils in the open and talking about theology and and determining doctrine and then. We can investigate that sort of as it moves through the medieval period to the Great Schism and to the Protestant Reformation and all the way up into modern Christianity. My point here is that church history helps us to recognize that we are part of a story that God has been telling for 2,000 years. Now, the the second reason is that church history helps us recognize doctrinal. novelty. One of the questions that I want my viewers or my listeners to ask is this Is my religion biblical, historical Christianity, or is it a recent innovation? Now, I'm not saying that because a movement is old that it is necessarily true. Instead, I'm asking if a group claims that Christianity was completely misunderstood and that Christians had fundamentally misunder had that Christians had misunderstood fundamental and essential doctrine, I want to know why. I I want that that That's a claim that needs to be supported. So some examples that we have seen throughout church history are a radically new understanding of God. That has popped up several times throughout church history, and Christians have had to go back to the scriptures and commune and decide what are we actually, what, what, what has God actually revealed? And how much does this new idea correspond with that? Or you might have a new understanding about Jesus Christ, a new definition of salvation, claims of restored priesthood, new prophetic authority, new revelations, claims about a vanished church. All of these sorts of topics are are only, we're only able to recognize the novelty of these if we understand church history. Now, novelty again doesn't automatically prove that something is false. However, extraordinary claims about Christianity's history deserve serious historical investigation. The the third reason why church history matters more than you might think is because church history helps us properly understand the early creeds. now I a couple of weeks ago I saw an obviously AI-generated video that stated something to the effect of that Constantine, the Emperor Constantine, created the Christian religion by influencing the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. That's a that's actually a very popular theory about how the Christian church came to be. Now We have to ask ourselves, well, is this accurate? Right? And again, a study of church history is the best way to find out. You're asking you're making a historic claim. And so history is the way that you would assess whether or not that claim is valid. When when I studied church history, this was one of the topics that we looked at, and I found very little evidence of such an elaborate conspiracy. But if you don't actually look, then you may not actually know. You might go, this AI-generated video is making some pretty interesting points. Maybe Constantine did create Christianity in 325 AD. What do I know, right? But r r it seems that the best sources told the story of how a group of hundreds of bishops held a council to determine what scripture actually teaches. in that case on the the nature of jesus christ it was it was they were trying to figure out what what scripture teaches about who jesus is in response to a do a doctrinal controversy now obviously church history doesn't make claims that the creeds are scripture themselves They're certainly more authoritative in my mind than the opinions of any old person sitting in a striped chair and putting stuff on the internet. but more importantly, they are a historical witness to what Christians believed about scripture and what scripture teaches. And so to to take the creeds in isolation apart. Apart from their historical context, is to is to set yourself up for failure in understanding them. How important they were, what was going on in the Christian church at the time that that led to these councils being called and these creeds being recorded. Why were was this particular issue being discussed at the time, and so on and so forth. So number four is that church history shows us how heresies develop. So l lest lest we think that significant theological challenges are something of a recent phenomenon, a study of church history shows that Christians have been dealing with theological distortions basically from the beginning. a few examples. You have Gnosticism and its teachings of its of secret knowledge and Philosophical dualism, you have Arianism, which basically denied Jesus' equality with the Father, the Son's equality with the Father. You have Docetism, which is a denial of Jesus' humanity, you have Marcionism, which rejected the Old Testament God, in favor of a New Testament God that was revealed by Jesus. And and on and on the list of of heresies goes, but if you don't understand or or know the the basics of church history, you're you're you're very likely to fall for one of these ancient heresies. and then and then from there you can reason why Christians are so particular about doctrines like the Trinity or the deity of Christ, because church history helps us to see what was at stake and what people were willing to give, to give up for those doctrines and the hundreds of people that got together to decide what scripture what scripture actually teaches. These these doctrines weren't developed because Christians like making complicated or complex theological systems. Historically, Christians have been concerned with protecting what we believe Scripture teaches. And that is a historical, not just a biblical, but a historical endeavor. So number five is that church history protects us from believing that Christianity begins with us. What should make us suspicious about a movement that says that virtually everyone who came before was wrong? We we do not need to be suspicious of people necessarily, but we do need to rigorously scrutinize the claim, that sort of a claim, as one based in history. In other words, if someone tells me that the true church disappeared be for something between fifteen and eighteen hundred years, I'm not going to look To a Bible verse to prove whether or not that is wrong, because that is that's not a a claim that's concerned with biblical truth. you might be able to go to the Bible and find passages that seem to clearly indicate the impossibility of such a thing, but if you're actually going to put the nail in the coffin, you're gonna need to look at that claim on its own terms, and those terms would be historical. So f some examples. where were the Christians who believed that claim Before the movement appeared, where are their writings? Where is the evidence? Why did nobody seem to believe this before now? Right? These are the types of questions that you should be asking when someone makes s some kind of parenthesis theory claim. Now, these are legitimate historical questions and Some proponent, whoever it might be, a proponent of the of a parenthesis theory must be able to answer these types of questions. And a study of church history helps you to be informed about whether or not you are being sold a historical farce. And then number six is that church history gives us humility. A a proper study of church history gives us humility. It should make us less arrogant as we discover a number of things. We discover brilliant Christians who came before us, Christians that understood ther certain things differently than we do. Christians who suffered enormously for their beliefs, Christians who sacrificed everything for the gospel. If if you have a shred of humility in you, you'll realize that you don't have everything figured out. And knowing church history can give you greater confidence in Christianity while simultaneously making you more humble about your ability to discover truth. So, studying church history tells us the story of how Christians have wrestled with what it means to faithfully follow Jesus. And we have 2,000 years of history to look at. So when someone says, just forget what Christians have believed for 2,000 years, because we have finally figured it out. An astute student of church history can examine that claim on its own terms, i. e. on historical terms. And actually see if that claim is true or false. And at the end of the day, we want to have the ability to ask, is this actually Christianity or is it something new attempting to disguise itself as Christianity?