History without God is a chaos without design or end or aim. Edward Gibbon, the great historian of the Roman Empire, said, “History is little more than the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” Gibbon, a skeptic, did not see the the right pattern in history, but the Christian through the Bible perceives a plan and purpose to history. To the Christian, Jesus Christ, as revealed in the Scriptures, is the point of reference for all history. The clue to the perplexing and paradoxical human drama is to be found in His Incarnation, Death and Resurrection, which is God acting in history. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “In its profoundest insight the Christian faith sees the whole of human history as involved in guilt, and finds no relief except in the grace of God. The Christian is freed by that grace to act in history.” Indeed, we can act righteously in history, because “the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
The Apostle Paul reminds us that whole world of the created universe groans and travails waiting for the revealing of the sons of God, the sons of whom Christ is the first born, and God’s purpose is to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and earth, and to put “all things under His feet. "
For good reason historical chronology is divided as B.C.—before Christ—and A.D., Anno Dommini, the year of our Lord, that is the Lord of history. Modern historians with anti-Christian prejudices, or in what they would claim is merely an attempt to be religiously neutral, are replacing these traditional abbreviations with BCE and CE, meaning before and after the "common era.”
But they really cannot get away from Christ, because he is the one who brought into reality the common era. Even with the Bible, we “still look through a glass darkly” as we study the human drama. For we only know in part; without the Bible as a guide the whole of history seems like nothing but sound and fury. What has often been called the philosophy of history is in fact the Theology of history, but disguised and hidden to men without a knowledge of Jesus Christ. History is spiritual drama developing and moving toward the Kingdom of God, which will not be fully realized until the end of history, when good finally triumphs over evil. At the same time, history is a process which has meaning and value as it unfolds. The great conflict of the ages is between faith and unbelief; this conflict is the theme of history, and of greatest concern to the Lord. Jesus asked his disciples, “When the Son of Man comes, shall he find faith on the earth (Luke 18:8)?”
It is often said, that history is not about dates. In fact, history is all about dates, personalities and events. Knowledge of dates is essential to an understanding of history. Alzheimer’s disease gradually destroys the memory, until the man reaches a point that he no longer knows his closest relatives; finally he no longer knows himself. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years no longer mean a thing, nor do people or events. When Christians have little historical knowledge, the church suffers a debilitating disease and loses her sense and her mission. The Bible is the churches' anchor; and history is the churches compass telling Christians where we have been and where we ought to be headed.
God does not primarily reveal Himself through doctrinal statement and theoretical studies, but events and action, small men and great men. God speaks through war and peace, floods and earthquakes, famines and pestilence, dreams and visions and the natural and the supernatural. He reveals Himself through good men and bad men, both Moses and Pharaoh. The prophet conflicting with the priest or king, the Devil tempting Jesus, Paul rebuking the Jews, the Romans martyring Peter, Arias challenging Athanasius, or Luther standing against the papal legates at the Diet of Worms, God reveals Himself in it all, both through tragedy and triumphant, human failures and human successes.
After the Almighty parted the waters of the Red Sea, then the Jordan for the people of Israel, Joshua instructed the fathers to take twelve stones out of the river bed, representing the twelve tribes. Joshua set up the stones in Gilgal for a memorial. “And he spake unto the children of Israel, saying, When your children shall ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean these stones? Then ye shall let your children know, saying, Israel came over this Jordan on dry land. For the LORD your God dried up the waters of Jordan from before you, until ye were passed over, as the LORD your God did to the Red sea, which he dried up from before us, until we were gone over: That all the people of the earth might know the hand of the LORD, that it is mighty: that ye might fear the LORD your God for ever (Josh 4:21-24)."
Stones from Church history are all around us. What do the stones mean? These are memorials of God’s dialoguing with man who is in pilgrimage. They are found everywhere in ancient libraries, museums, monasteries, cathedrals, castles, baptismal records and archeological digs. The stones include the marvelous historical record which fills in the gap from the end of the Bible, to the Age of the Martyred Church, to the Triumphant Church, then the Church in the Conflict during the Reformation and finally right down to what some regard as the Apostate Church of our generation. Through all these periods there has been the Remnant, the Faithful, some staying within the established church of their era or location, and some remaining without, and others being cast out. Through it all men, walking with God, and sometimes wrestling with God, were trying to work things out, and often fight things out. The names and movements are countless, but each, in their own way, hopefully the right way, were striving to establish God’s Kingdom and do His will “on earth as it is in Heaven.”
Who were the Church Fathers, What was the Dontanist Controversy? What did the investiture controversy mean? Who were the Iconoclasts? What was the objective of the Crusades, What was the Great Schism, Who were the Waldensians, What was the problem with Indulgences? Why did Henry VIII have so many wives? Why the Reformation and then the counter-Reformation? Or does it even matter?
Apparently not, for most Christians could not begin to answer these questions and countless others, that have troubled believers down through the Church age. Yet, never in history have we had more resources available to us to answer these question with but the punch of a few letters on one’s computer keyboard.
Christianity is essentially a historical religion, The Bible does not tell legends but historical events. The birth of Christ is a supernatural event, but within a historical reference, “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus…” The Apostles’ Creed reads, that Jesus Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” who is referenced as a check-point for the authenticity of an essential Christian doctrine.
God works out his plan of salvation in dramatic confrontations not just between Christian and Pagan, Christian and Jew or Christian and Muslim, but through different personalities and movements, popes and emperors, bishops and laymen, scholars and tinkers, soldiers and pacifists, monks and priests, the orthodox and the heretics, high churchmen and low, the well-known and the obscure, Easterners and Westerners, Romans and Greeks, hermits and knights, rich and poor, inquisitors and martyrs, Catholics and Protestants, and Calvinists and Arminians. The Holy Spirit has made history through them all.
No Christian would deny the importance of Biblical history, but a great eclipse exists in the minds of most believers between the end of the Apostolic era and their own generation. Most Protestants are unfamiliar with the history of what the Apostles’ Creed called, “the holy catholic (meaning not Roman, but universal) church,” but they are also ignorant of the history of their own denomination. Too often especially in respect to the mainline historical denominations their clergy and layman, no longer even hold to the historical confessions of faith, or the particular points of view of Luther, Calvin or John Wesley and others, who founded great movements and promoted revivals of religion in their generation. Whereas Catholics and Orthodox have a greater appreciation for tradition and the history of the church; they usually have less knowledge of Biblical history than the Protestants.
As the patriot considers knowledge of his homeland’s history his civic duty, the Christian should consider knowledge of church history to be his sacred duty. Sacred history is not restricted to the contents of the Bible, sacred history is an on going process and progress. History is made as men respond to the Divine will and purpose, either in unbelief and rebellion or in faithful obedience.
Christians have faith in the Bible as the Word of God and therefore as the true history of the race through Adam, the flood, the patriarchs, the exodus, the kings and prophets, and through the life of Jesus and the Apostles. The problem in studying the history of Christianity beyond the apostolic era is that we have no historian, who is writing with absolute truth and accuracy. Not only is there disagreement over the interpretation of the facts, there is significant disagreement on the what actually happened concerning people and events. Since we cannot study everything, there is the problem of whom and what we should study. Who and what in history do we need to know?
God has graciously given us the Holy Scriptures, not only to learn about Biblical times, but He also sent the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost to witnesses to every generation and give Christians guidance for understanding time and events after the ascension of Jesus and the passing of the apostles. “Back to the Bible” is a popular slogan among fundamentalists. But let us not ignore two millenniums of church history after the closing of the Biblical chronicles. To neglect history is to lose solidarity with Christ’s Church down through the ages, and results in the hardening of sectarianism. The Acts of the Apostles has often times been appropriately called the Acts of the Holy Spirit. There have been countless chapters of Acts added since the passing of the apostolic age; “back to the Bible,” yes, of course, but “onward with the Spirit,” as He has revealed Himself down through the Church Age and as He is revealing Himself to this generation.
Too often, the professional, academic historians in their attempt to be objective, forget that no one is truly objective. We are all influenced by our language, culture, experiences, training, genes, etc., when it comes to recording and interpreting past events. This is not a problem when recognized and acknowledged. The professional historian is pressured by his academic environment to find a natural explanation for what the Bible or the faithful of history have recorded as supernatural. Or they tend to give psychological, sociological or economic explanations for the actions of men and de-emphasize the religious motivation; or if the religious is acknowledged, it is too often the religion of the hypocrite.
Few historians could survive in a state university if they promoted a Theology of History in which God’s providence plays a dominant role as events are unfolding. True history is not merely the direction of history by God; it is the belief that God intervenes in the life of mankind by direct action at certain definite points in time and place. Not merely in Biblical times, but down through the Church Age to the present. Recognizing the hand of God in events and understanding the will and purpose of God is a daunting task, which is best accomplished by a subjective whether than an objective approach to the past. That is by throwing one self into the event, getting under the protagonist’s or antagonist’s skin, walking in his shoes. When we stand back and attempt to be detached or indifferent to the person or event or the outcome, that history can become dry bones. But we can put flesh and blood back on the bones by entering into history, making ourselves as if we are part of the event, that the outcome is as important to us, as it was for the actual participates. We need to put ourselves into the drama, then history lives again.
Arnold J. Toynbee wrote, “The course of human history consists of a series of encounters between individual human beings and God in which each man or woman or child, in turn, is challenged by God to make his free choice between doing God’s will and refusing to do it. When Man refuses, he is free to make his refusal and to take the consequences. When Man accepts, his reward for willing what is the will of God is that he finds himself taken by God into partnership in the doing of God’s creative work.”
Studying and writing history is an art, more than a science. It is recreating the past. God has given us the twin tools of the Bible and the Holy Spirit, now we must recreate the picture, God and man has been in a pilgrimage making the stuff of history, man must work with God as he prayerfully attempts to recreate history by reliving history. I challenge us all to take the journey into the past with me, leave the present behind for the time being, when we return, if you have learned your lessons well, then your faith has increased and you are a more rounded man. Learn the greatest of all the arts, the art of living at once in both time and eternity. In learning church history, find yourself a good history book, and pray over the book. Why not start with Eusebius, "the Father of Church History," after all he was there at the sunset of Ancient History and the dawning of the Middle Ages, which we shall be stepping into.