Learning From the Past

We must know about those who have gone before us:

Something far too many people today fail to do is learn history, and to learn from it. And that includes far too many Christians as well. Of course, contemporary Western education does not help in this regard. It either no longer really teaches history, or it engages in historical revisionism, rewriting the history books to reflect secular leftist ideology.

And we know that failing to know our actual history is a great way for tyrants to move in and take charge. And on a personal level, if we are not learning from history, we will be continuously repeating its mistakes. So gaining a good working knowledge of history in general and church history in particular is incumbent upon all believers.

There would be numerous volumes one can appeal to here. I want to just highlight three somewhat recent volumes that look at different aspects of the past, and what Christians can learn from it. The first one focuses on early Christianity, while the last two books examine the medieval church. I give a very brief description of each book, and then offer a representative quote or two from each one.

Bryan Lifton, Wisdom from the Ancients: 30 Forgotten Lessons from the Early Church. Harvest House, 2022.

This volume focuses solely on the early church and informs us of how knowledge about the beliefs and practices of our forerunners can greatly help believers today to live and advance the Christian message. Some of the 30 points Lifton discusses include:

-Weakness is the best witness
-Christianity is for misfits
-Prayer isn’t a moment; It’s a Way of Life
-Invest in your library; It’s a Christian thing
-Empires are useful temptations
-God refuses to be a helicopter parent
-Without the Trinity, everyone stops short of heaven

Says Liftin:

In this book you’ll meet some spiritual mothers and fathers who have important lessons to teach us… There is great wisdom in listening to the previous ages. We need to learn the lessons of history lest we miss out on a blessing, or, as the saying goes, be doomed to repeat our mistakes. But to do this requires humility. Americans in particular tend to think of the future as the best place to cast our eyes. The next best thing is always around the corner. Yet as Christians, we have to be humble enough to pay attention to our ancestors and not always be looking ahead. Think about how much history the Bible records, both in the Old and the New Testament. Surely God wants us to learn from it! Hebrews 12:1 reminds us that there is a “cloud of witnesses” who ran the race before us. Shouldn’t their experience on the racetrack of life give us something valuable?

 

When it comes to church history, each generation has something important to pass on. But the part of history I want to emphasize in this book is the ancient church period. We can also refer to it as the “early church” or the era of the “church fathers.”‘ This historical era goes beyond the New Testament period—beyond the age of the original apostles. As you probably know, those first apostolic Christians lived and wrote and evangelized in the Roman Empire of the first century AD. But Christianity, of course, continued into the second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries and beyond. (pp. 6-7)

Since I am a booklover, here is a paragraph from his chapter on libraries:

Christians have always recognized the importance of books. Our faith has a longstanding relationship with words on a page. Not every religion is like this, nor every culture. When European colonists first landed in the New World, the native people had no written language. They communicated solely through speech and folklore. Even today, many cultures in Africa are characterized more by orality than literacy. Usually, when Christianity comes to such lands, it fosters the invention of a script and the dissemination of written communication. This has been true from the beginning of church history. In fact, it could even be said that the early church was what made books become so widespread in the world. It’s an interesting story that’s well worth telling. (p. 89)

In his concluding chapter he reminds us of all that the early church has given us:

Consider what the early Christians achieved in the first five hundred years after the birth of Jesus. They withstood the fires of persecution until imperial favor came to them at last. They stamped out heresies like Gnosticism, Marcionism, and Arianism. They clarified which books belong in the canon of Scripture. They elevated the status of women from objects of abuse to heroines of great dignity. They formulated creeds whose words were so theologically precise that we still use them today. They forged a new architecture of unique beauty and timeless appeal. They evangelized not only the vast empire but the heathen people beyond. They bequeathed to later generations the proper language to speak about the Trinity and Christology. And through all this, they showed the world that the Jewish carpenter whom the Romans had executed was actually the victorious Savior of humankind. The foundations of Christianity were now in place. The church was ready to face its next thousand years. (pp. 247-248)

Chris Armstrong, Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis. Brazos, 2016.

As the title makes clear, this book examines the medieval ages, and leans on the great C. S. Lewis to help us grasp the importance of this period. Armstrong calls Lewis, who specialised in medieval and renaissance literature, a “modern medieval man”. In the book he looks at key issues such as the place of tradition, theological knowledge, morality, being human, and relating to the natural world.

Armstrong says this:

I wondered about the hole in modern popular accounts of church history, particularly the glaring omission of the story of medieval faith except as a cautionary tale. Why did my students and friends so often seem to assume that the church apostatized after it gained cultural influence in the time of Constantine (fourth century) and returned to God only after the sixteenth-century Reformation (or perhaps even only after the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century)? Why this dismissal of more than a millennium of church history—more than half of the time between Christ and today?

 

I don’t deny that the terrain of the medieval church seems alien to most of us. . . . It seems to me, however, that the chasm between us and our medieval forebears in the faith has to do less with any intrinsic oddness of the Christians of that time and more with certain philosophical and cultural presuppositions of our own. (p. 3)

And he concludes the book this way:

My exploration into medieval faith via C. S. Lewis has led us to a central truth: we have forgotten the flabbergasting wonder of an incarnate God – a God who has taken on humanity in Jesus. And because we have not properly valued the precious humanity of Christ, we have also not valued the precious humanity of humanity – of ourselves and also of our neighbors, the work we do, the culture we create through that work, our struggles and suffering, and especially our dignity and worth as unique creations of God.” (p. 233)

Jain Wright and Yannick Imbert, Reclaiming the “Dark Ages”: How the Gospel Light Shone from 500 to 1500. Christian Focus, 2024.

This book also looks at the Middle Ages, but argues that what the Reformers did and taught at the end of this period was not really novel, and that there had long been such emphases found within the church for many centuries. The authors focus on ten key figures from this period, including Boethius, Anselm, Peter Waldo, Bonaventure, Wycliffe and Hus. Early on the authors say this:

Our concern in this book is with the Protestant evangelical reading of Church history, or to be more specific, with the appreciation of our theological past. Protestants often have the intuitive tendency to identify the history of the Church by its theological errors. We are prone to see first and foremost the problems, dangers, and unfaithfulness and completely miss out the benefits, the perseverance and other faithful credal affirmations. We see the heterodoxy and miss the orthodoxy, and we pride ourselves with being on the right side of the medieval age. In doing so, we do not listen to the Christian wisdom of those who preceded us….

 

This is our goal in this book: we want to show that there has always been a thread running through history, including through the medieval age. This thread is the constant struggle for an orthodox, faithful, and glorifying theology: one that gives God due honour, that takes Scripture as the principal authority over life and faith, and that nourishes our wonder and worship. The Middle Ages also were brightened by the light of the Gospel, the same light that shines every time we remain faithful to Scripture’s “good deposit”. (xiv-xv)

And one concluding paragraph:

The main thrust of this book was that the light of the Gospel was not expunged when Constantine made it acceptable to openly be part of the Church of Jesus Christ. The King and Head of the Church had his witnesses down through the generations. The doctrines of the Church of Rome may have their proponents from an early generation, but they were only gradually adopted and were often challenged. Neither Protestants nor what is now known as Catholicism sprang fully clothed and ready for battle as Athena is depicted in ancient Greek mythology. They existed alongside one another and struggled each in turn for wider acceptance. (p. 129)

Bonus titles

As I said, there would be many such volumes as these. Let me mention just three other recent works:

Derek Cooper, Sinners and Saints: The Real Story of Early Christianity. Kregel, 2018.
Grace Hamman, Jesus Through Medieval Eyes: Beholding Christ with the Artists, Mystics, and Theologians of the Middle Ages. Zondervan, 2023.
Stephen O. Presley, Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church. Eerdmans, 2024.

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