Church History Course with Dr. White

The Value of Learning from Church History

Christians, down through the ages, have shown tremendous interest in those who came before.

Them.

And it makes perfect sense. If we believe Christ has been building his church for the past almost 2 ,000 years, then wouldn't it make sense to go, hmm, the Spirit of God has been working in the lives of men and women in all sorts of different positions of authority and economic situations and facing warfare and famine and disease and everything else, we might be able to learn something from them.

That is not the attitude of the modern American evangelical. The modern American evangelical thinks it's me and my Bible in the woods. That's good enough. I don't need to worry about anybody who came before me.

They didn't have iPads, so how could they really have known much in comparison to me? I can Google things. And as a result, we keep reinventing the wheel. We keep going back over the same controversies over and over again without growing in our wisdom because we're not bringing the wisdom of the past in.

Reading the Church Fathers Honestly

Now, one of the reasons that Protestants do this is because Roman Catholics have lost the balance on the other side. That is, as we saw in the Reformation, the Reformers knew church history. The Reformers argued from church history.

But they recognized that you had to allow the early church fathers to be who they were and not to turn them into something else. It's going to be one thing I'm going to emphasize in this series however long it is, is that if you're going to do history truthfully, then you have to allow those who came before us to be who they were and not who you want them to be.

If you're here trying to look back into the past and find yourself staring back at you, you're here for the wrong reasons because that's not what you're going to get. Even when you look at someone that we can admire greatly, like a John Calvin or a Martin Luther or Gottschalk, anybody ever heard of Gottschalk?

Any Gottschalk fans out there? We've got one Gottschalk fan here. Got a tattoo of Gottschalk right there, right?

Okay.

And, of course, Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria or a man we call mathetes, which just simply means disciple. We're going to look at something he wrote tonight going all the way back to the second century.

When we look at each one of these, and we may have much more information about one than we have about the other, but we have to let them be who they were, not who we want them.

To be.

Why Roman Catholic Appeals to History Are Different

That's one of the major problems, one of the major differences between ourselves and Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholic Church says when it comes to certain of its dogmas that this has been the unanimous consent of the church.

The church has always believed this. So by dogmatic authority, when modern Roman Catholic defenders, apologists, look back in the church history, they have to find in church history what Rome has told them was in church history.

And so they have a dogmatic reason to pick and choose what they're going to believe from what you would find in the early church fathers. I can let the early church fathers be who they were. I'm not sitting here saying they were a bunch of reformed Baptists because they would have no earthy idea what on earth I was talking about.

And just how honest we are about that, not quite two years ago, when I led a group of folks through Alpha and Omega over to Germany prior to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the first night in Berlin, when I lectured to the folks, I said, look, I am well aware of the fact that many of the men we'll be studying would not so much as have extended the hand of fellowship to me.

Many of them would not have acknowledged me as a Christian. Some of them would have had me banished and a couple of them wouldn't have minded if I was checked in a prison until I croaked. Well, the look on some people's faces, I sort of figured everybody knew that.

But some people were like, really? And when I talked to the folks who put on the tour, they said, we've had all sorts of church history people in here doing this same tour. None of them had ever said that before.

I'm like, what? How can that be? And so all the way through the trip, I would point out places where Luther did things and others did things that would today leave us somewhat breathless because they were who.

They were.

This was the context in which they lived. And if you don't do that, then you're presenting a cartoon version of church history. I don't want a cartoon version of church history. I want to know what Christ has actually done.

God Uses Imperfect People to Build His Kingdom

And I also am extremely encouraged by the fact that God has used imperfect men to build his kingdom all the way down through church history. Aren't you glad about that too? Because if it was a matter of needing perfect guys and perfect gals, I haven't met one.

You know, the old saying, if you ever find a perfect church, don't join it because you'll ruin it. Well, that's what history tells us. And yet using these imperfect vessels, God continues to accomplish his purpose.

When we have the proper understanding of what's been happening, when we understand history, it's incredibly comforting. If we think we're the first persons who have ever faced what we're facing now, that can be pretty scary because I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to figure it all out.

But when you realize that believers down through the ages have encountered persecution in the exact same way as us, well, okay, not in the exact same way. I mean, I was watching a bit of a documentary on what's going on in China right now with the massive, you know, the social credit score type thing and the everywhere you go, everything you do is being watched to where if you're pushing a shopping cart through a grocery store, if you put diapers in your shopping cart, plus if you put alcohol in your shopping cart, minus.

They're doing that. That's the level of observation. It makes big brother from 1984 look like an amateur. It really does. And it's happening right now in China. And if you think it's gonna stay there, I've got some land over in Lake Havasu I'd like to sell you because it's coming, it's coming.

And so is that somewhat different than whatever we faced before? Okay, yeah, the technological aspect does introduce things, but the issue of the relationship of Christians to the state is something that every single generation of believers has had to face.

And that means we can learn things from those who came before us because it's the same spirit who is working in them who's working in us. And so I think this subject of church history is vitally important.