Why church history matters--really matters
A new book about important old things
By Jennifer Woodruff Tait
History. It’s that dry, dead stuff full of dust, right? Names, dates, and places we once memorized for tests? Things that happened in between the Bible and now that don’t matter much to modern Christians? And if we absolutely need to look something up, we can find it on Google, right?
If you’re reading this blog, it’s probably because you’re a Christian History magazine reader, and therefore already someone who doesn’t agree with that statement. But if you’ve taken a look around lately, you know that those interested in history, or more specifically Christian history, are on an increasingly small island of people interested in how the past shapes who we are in the present.
Just a year ago several secular universities (Minnesota State University Moorehead and the University of the District of Columbia) announced plans to cut up to 18 academic departments, including history, English, philosophy, physics, and even economics. Around the same time and closer to home, Christian college Bethel University and its counterpart Bethel Seminary cut ten majors and a large number of faculty, among them the Christian history department; Bethel no longer has a full-time residential church historian on faculty. My own husband lost his position in a round of cuts at Huntington University. I’ve written elsewhere on the increasingly discouraging state of American higher education today. And a writer from Slate commented : “The MSUM and UDC decisions demonstrate something crucially important and monumentally depressing about the state of the American public university: It is an immaculately landscaped corporate park with its own apparel store, full of the sound of tuition money disappearing and the fury of a thousand feet on a rock wall, but signifying nothing.”
If I stopped here, you would be quite right to assume this post is merely sour grapes (along the line of “kids today with their video games!” Or maybe “administrators today with their nice cafeterias and student centers!”) But I don’t want to stop there. I want to ask a serious question: Does the history of the church matter, or (as many might counter) is the Bible all we need to live the Christian life? Christian History readers are among those best equipped to speak to those around them—colleagues, friends, parishioners, pastors, churches and denominations—about why studying the past matters. Some of you have been doing it with us for over 30 years.
A recent book by Robert F. Rea of Lincoln Christian University, Why Church History Matters, can help us out here. Rea, a professor of church history, begins the book by describing how, long ago, as a “conservative Protestant from a free-church,Bible-only tradition” he found his horizons broadened when his doctoral examiners at a Roman Catholic university asked him to consider the value of tradition. They asked him questions that haunted him: “If the Bible is God’s revelation, why spend time studying the history of the church’s teaching and practice? Why should I care what Christians in other times and in other places believed and how they acted?” (p. 14)
Rea’s main audience for the book is what he calls “Bible-focused” believers; primarily evangelicals, but any students and scholars—whether evangelical, mainline, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox—who “hold the Bible dear and study it in order to know God and God’s truth” (p.17). His opening section deals with what tradition is. How has church tradition developed? How did believers seek to interpret Scripture in dialogue with tradition? (He notes that he idea of considering Scripture alone, without the context of church faith and practices, would have puzzled Christians in the early church). What problems arose in looking to tradition? How did the Reformation and Enlightenment, in looking to address those problems, create new ones? Why did modernity reject both Scripture and tradition as equally dangerous? What is the state of looking to the tradition today among different groups and denominations? (Rea speaks positively here of recent attempts to recover study of the tradition among Bible-focused believers; Christian History magazine even gets a shout-out on p. 55!)
But even accepting that the church throughout the centuries has “looked to the past to understand the present and to plan for the future,” (76), what could today’s advanced society learn from the church of the past? Why should we invest time in studying it, and even money in supporting its study? Christian tradition helps us, Rea argues, if we view it as a contributor to expanding circles of inquiry in sorting out theological and practical issues. We often take into account the opinions of our friends, our congregation, our faith group, and our own theological tradition, Rea says. Why should we not also expand that circle to include Christians of other places and times, and even those who have held opposing views? And there are four areas where Rea believes it is particularly important to get these opinions: as we consider our personal identity in Christ, as we practice Christian community, as we seek accountability from other Christians, and as we broaden our horizons to “fill gaps in theology that we may or may not have known were gaps” (p. 83). Rea helps us throughout the second part of his book as we seek the consensus fidelium (“consensus of the faithful”) across the centuries—and helps us with “how to have peace… when we are faced with Christians who today and across the cultures hold quite diverse understandings and practices” (p.85).
Finally, Rea reflects on how tradition can serve the church on a practical level. For one thing, it can profoundly enrich our study of the Bible, and he devotes a whole chapter to the history of Christian exegesis of the Bible down through the years. But it can also enrich our preaching and teaching, worship, spiritual disciplines, ethical practices, missionary efforts, compassion on others, and engagement with our culture. It can help us seek unity while not watering down our theological differences. Pretty much every issue facing the church today and pretty much every struggle and question in our own spiritual lives has been addressed by at least one of our brothers and sisters in Christ in the past. Rea’s book begins to guide us in finding out who those people are (not least through its excellent list of recommended resources on pp. 195-200, with some clearly marked as appropriate for beginning students).
Christian History readers know all this, I think. But in an atmosphere where the past seems no longer to be valued—certainly not in secular culture, and less and less among many Christians—you may find handing this book to your friends or prayer partners or pastors or students to be helpful. (We wouldn’t mind, of course, if you handed them your favorite issue of Christian History, too.) Christ calls all Christians to be in community; that community stretches across space and time. In a world where obedience to his call is difficult and the path of discipleship set about with many temptations to turn back, we may have no greater resource than our brothers and sisters in Christ who have walked that path before, read the Bible faithfully and interpreted it responsibly, and can tell us, over and over again, that
When the strife is fierce, the warfare long
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song
And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong. (William How)