Why Church History Matters

An Invitation to Love and Learn from Our Past

Robert F. Rea

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830864829
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Does it matter how Christians in other times and places thought? If the Bible alone is God?s revelation, why spend time studying church history? Aren?t history and tradition more of a problem than a solution? For many Christians who believe the Bible is the ultimate authority for faith and life, questions about the role and value of the church's traditions can be difficult to tackle. But let's be honest: even those of us who admit that church history is important are often too intimidated or busy to delve into it deeply. And for students, it is sometimes difficult to see how church history matters in practical ways for future vocations inside and outside the contemporary church. In this wide-ranging book, veteran teacher Bob Rea tackles these barriers to understanding and embracing the significance of the faith and practice of our spiritual forefathers. In three parts he covers how Christians understand church tradition, why it is beneficial to broaden our horizons of community and how tradition helps us understand ministry. Rea not only skillfully explains why church history matters—he shows why it should matter to us.

Part One

How We Understand
the Tradition

1

What Is the Tradition?

What Are History and Christian History?

History is the study of the past in order to understand the present and to improve the future. Historians examine significant physical remains, such as coins, artifacts and architecture, in order to reconstruct the framework of the past. They also looks at persons, events, documents, movements, developments and teachings to help individuals understand where they came from, how their cultures developed, why they hold to key values, and what assumptions and presuppositions from the past formulate their understanding of reality in the present. Historians also examine this data to help contemporary communities understand the various factors that contribute to each group’s identity, purpose and values. In the process, history helps us understand and evaluate our worldview—the collection of basic values that drives one’s foundational outlook about everything in the world.

History is the study of the past in order to understand the present and to improve the future.

History is not merely the collection of data. We do not simply stockpile information and then call the collected data “history.” Not every person, event, document, movement, development or teaching is historic. Instead, history is the endeavor to provide accountability to the present in light of the past—to search out people, events, movements, artifacts and so on that have particular significance for the present and the future. Not all people and events carry the same relevance for history. For example, nearly every student of world history knows what happened on December 7, 1941, whereas few people know what happened on December 5, 1941. Yet both days had twenty-four hours and innumerable pieces of data. We remember December 7, 1941, however, because the attack on Pearl Harbor changed the world then and in many ways determined movements, relationships and identities for today and the future.

Christian history, or historical theology, is the study specifically of the church’s past in order to understand the church’s present and to improve the church’s future. Church historians examine artifacts that shed light on times and places. Church historians also look at significant persons, events, documents, movements, developments and teachings in the history of the church to help individual Christians and groups of Christians understand where they came from, where other Christian groups came from, why they hold particular commitments, and what assumptions and presuppositions from the past formulate their Christian worldview in the present. One major difference between history and Christian history, at least among Christian historians, is that believers also look for the presence, actions, will and heart of God in past events in order to try to discern God’s will for the present and the future.

Some have said that history never changes. This is simply untrue. The data of history—the actual artifacts, persons, events, documents, movements, developments and teachings from the past—do not change, except that new discoveries add more information or correct misinformation of the past. But how those persons and developments are understood—the identified significance of past developments—does change.

In other words, the personal or community identity and values that we bring to the data help determine what we interpret as significant. No one comes to the study of history with complete objectivity. For example, I am an Anglo, middle-class American male who grew up as a lower-class boy in a declining urban neighborhood. I will never be a tribal African woman who grew up in a small village. I will never be a disenfranchised Latino man who grew up on the outskirts of Mexico City. If the three of us were to discuss the significance of historical events, we would bring three very diverse perspectives to the historical data. Each of us would see particulars within those events that the others would not see. Occasionally, our understandings of events may conflict, but in most cases we would understand events in much the same way, emphasizing different aspects of the events.

In other cases changing times and changing cultural perspectives alter or augment the previous understanding of historical persons, events and developments. Here I offer an example from more recent world history. During World War II many American men joined the armed forces, leaving their production jobs vacant. Thousands of American women sacrificially left their homes to work in jobs previously thought to be exclusively for men. The women demonstrated competence in those positions, but when the war was over, nearly all of them, with little regret, returned to the places in life that they considered to be for women. But they told their daughters that they could grow up to be anything they wanted to be. Those daughters grew up to tell their daughters the same. Today women do not assume that their gender precludes them from becoming doctors, lawyers, plumbers, construction workers, soldiers or corporate executives. In the years immediately following World War II no historian would have considered the war a liberator of women in the realm of occupation. The significance of World War II was about political boundaries and the exchange of world power. But today we must recognize that one of the most significant developments in World War II for contemporary American life and culture was the sacrifice of those women who changed their world. The data of what happened did not change, but the interpretation of the data—the significance for today and tomorrow understood from that data—has changed. In other words, history has changed.

We could add to this a number of examples of how newly emphasized values can alter the perceived importance of characters and movements in the history of the church. Historical evaluations of fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine have moved from almost universal laud as the great Christian emperor to a variety of critical positions that take issue with his claim to Christian faith. Western Christians are currently reassessing the grace theology of fifth-century church father John Cassian—long considered a saint by Eastern Orthodox—who advocated that both God and the human individual work in every act of salvation and sanctification.

This is why it is so difficult to make lasting historical judgments until years after an event or movement. What contemporaries and those immediately after an experience think of the event’s significance may differ greatly from how their children and grandchildren see the event. Sometimes the most unpopular political leaders are later highly esteemed.

This is not to say that there is no absolutely objective understanding of history and historical theology. God, who knows all things, has all the actual and potential perspectives of every person and event of history, including church history. But only God has that objectivity, because God is infinite. Father, Son and Holy Spirit know everything and can therefore see objectively. God knows absolute truth absolutely.

We humans, on the other hand, are finite and therefore always subject to the limitations of finitude—we have limited perspective, limited experience, limited intelligence, limited understanding of reality. We have degrees of objectivity, but not absolute objectivity. We can have enough objectivity to make a fair evaluation of the evidence. We can be objective enough to understand past persons, events and developments so that we see who they are, where they came from, why events occurred, and how current groups and emphases came to be.

Actually, “objective enough” is the functional standard in nearly every field of endeavor. Human blood, for example, already has all of the elements of human blood, many of which we probably have yet to discover. Early “objective” tests of human blood determined blood type. Then we added Rh factor. Today a standard blood test can measure scores of factors that we know to relate to various aspects of health. Particular blood tests target particular pathologies or profiles. The point is that long ago, when we knew precious little about human blood, we could be objective enough to determine what we sought—blood type. Then we were objective enough to determine Rh factor. Today we are objective enough to determine blood sugar levels, lipid profiles, liver enzymes, red and white blood cell levels, blood gases, DNA and more. In the future we will discover that there is much more diagnostic information available in human blood, and we will learn to test in a way which is objective enough to make reliable decisions.

In the same way, finite human beings can never be fully objective. But individuals and groups can be objective enough to make determinations in areas of investigation. In history, as in medicine, broadly universal agreement will give us functional objectivity. But fully aware of our finite limitations, we must always approach history with humility, for we must always recognize that our perspectives are limited.

In summary, we must recognize that real artifacts, persons, events, documents, movements, developments and teachings have actually occurred. The real facts change only in that we discover more information or correct previous inaccurate reports. Real events occurred, and real people lived in real situations. Only God, who is infinite, has a fully objective knowledge of these real events and real people. God is objective. We humans are finite, and thus we are never absolutely objective. But we can be objective enough to understand the past so that it can inform the present and improve the future. Our finitude, however, requires that we learn in community, and in regard to church history this community must include contemporary Christians and historic Christians.

The way we understand the significance of the past for today and for the future does change. I must insert a word of caution here, however. In recent years some historians have proposed that the data itself is insignificant, except insofar as it can be construed or misconstrued to establish or advance what the historian wants to promote. In other words, what really happened matters most when it supports the historian’s agenda. These historians contend that since data is always subject to interpretation, and since cultural presuppositions determine the data’s meaning, we should admit our intentions from the beginning and either reconstruct the historical data to make it support our case or even invent connections that never existed to support our case.1

This intentional reconstruction of historical data should not be the intent of Bible-focused Christians at any level. We endeavor to understand what actually happened and to understand the significance of what happened for our time and for our future, though we recognize that our own ideas and culture may focus our attention on certain perspectives of history or limit our ability to see important aspects of history. We recognize that we come to these events with a finite set of values, methods and assumptions.

This leads to one of the key reasons for this book. When we consult resources to help us understand history and theology, we must be careful not to limit our resources to authors who share our cultural perspectives and intellectual commitments. We need the points of view offered by contemporaries of various perspectives and various cultures. But also, we cannot hope to approach “objective enough” unless we also consider the points of view offered by historical figures who lived godly Christian lives and who endeavored to understand the truth with open hearts in times and cultures very different from our own. Only then can we expand our own limited understandings to approach a fuller and fairer analysis of the past in order to understand the present and improve the future.

“Tradition,” “tradition,” “traditions” and “traditioning”

The words tradition, Tradition and traditions are classic terms to describe perspectives or approaches to understanding developments in the Church’s history. The word tradition is used in a number of ways. In less technical contexts it is the general category or milieu for everything that has developed in Christian history. This includes major persons, events, documents, doctrines, controversies, councils, conflicts, movements, and much more.

In a more technical sense, when church leaders use the word Tradition (note the capital T), most often they are referring to the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox view. In this view, God’s revelation through prophets and apostles is preserved in Scripture, so Scripture receives double honor, so to speak; but the Holy Spirit is believed to reveal the repository of truth further and develop scriptural revelation further through the faith and practices of the church. The collection of revealed truth, the revealed authority, in Scripture and the post-Scripture faith and practice of the church, is called “Tradition.” Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox sometimes differ on teachings that they include in the Tradition.

Some Protestants also use the term Tradition (with a capital T) when they affirm the teachings, doctrines and practices upon which believers throughout the world and over the centuries agree—a uniformity of belief and practice in the church that affirms teachings and practices in nearly every place and age. Of course, these Protestants do not include in the Tradition all of the same teachings that either Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox include. But there is much overlap, particularly in the major doctrines of Christianity, such as the doctrines of God (Trinity) and Christ (Christology). Other Protestants avoid using “Tradition” (capital T) and instead use “tradition” (lowercase t) to mean pretty much the same thing. For Protestants, this tradition, though not revelational and not nonnegotiable, has an authoritative aspect because committed believers have affirmed it across temporal, cultural and ecclesiastical lines. This common belief by the larger community of believers—the consensus fidelium—lends it credibility for all believers. To avoid confusion, from here on Tradition (capital T) will be used only for Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and only when referring to the whole body of tradition taken together, which they consider to be revealed by God.

When church leaders use the word traditions, they refer to developing teachings, doctrines, events, churches and so forth within specific centuries, specific cultures and specific church groups. These are practices that the church as a wh...