During my Philosophy of History class a few years back we spent some time discussing Nietzsche’s famous quote “A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers.” It’s an interesting quote, whose merits can be debated for I’d like to, for a moment, not apply it to philosophers but to evangelicals. A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all evangelical.
Now of course there will be some who break the mold on this one, but when you look at the evangelical movement could you honestly say that most evangelicals have a grasp of church history? Protestant history? Even their own evangelical history? The church history that most evangelicals I know goes something like this; “After the book of acts things in the church began to get really bad. The Roman Catholic Church rose up and the land was without a pure gospel until Luther came and left the Roman Catholic Church. Now today we are continuing on sharing the gospel from the Reformation.” Ok, maybe it’s not quite that bad, but there is no denying their grasp of church history is lacking.
You would think that at minimal evangelicals would want to know their own history well. But how many take time to learn about the activities of the Wesleys, Whitefield, Edwards, and the others who began the movement during the First Great Awakening? What about what happened during the Second Great Awakening and Charles Finney? DL Moody? Charles Spurgeon? Billy Sunday? Evangelicals can usually remember back about 50 years with Billy Graham, but before that they are drawing a blank.
Why is this? Why do we (I am including myself in this as well. This is an area of study I’m growing into) not know our own history, not to mention the history of the church as a whole? Go into a typical evangelical church and ask how many Early Church Father’s names most people know? St. Augustine, St. Jerome? I think it has to do with the belief that evangelical history is a-historical.
The evangelical understanding of scripture, being a perfect inspired text that can be read and understood by anyone anywhere, has turned it into an a-historical document. History doesn’t matter to scripture becasue the bible’s message is outside of history. Once this is understood then history doesn’t matter to the Christian becasue their faith is based on an a-historical document. What past saints have said about it, fought over, died over, doesn’t matter becasue I have the truth in my hands and an examination of the past will not add anything to it’s truth.
We need to begin to understand that although the truth of scripture may be outside of history God entered into history to deliver it, and we are historical beings reading it. The truths of scripture may be timeless, but the people and culture they are applied to are not. An understanding of how other people in other times and places understood the bible and dealt with it can add to our own understanding of scripture.
Besides this, evangelicals need to accept that they are only part of the body of Christ. By cutting ourselves off from the past we are severing our connection with the past saints who are just as much part of that body as we are, which adds to the isolation and lack of community that is a problem in our independent evangelical mindset today.
I’m not saying I have all the answers, or that I am not effected by this problem myself, but it would seem to me that we all should go and read an old book written by some Christians who have past into glory long ago and learn from them a bit more then we now do.
Convicting. This blog just might motivate me enough to purchase fox’s book of martyrs. My methods so far have only produced good intentions to learn more about church history, but no actions. Thanks Bryan.
Does A Purpose-Driven Life not count???
I would ask one serious semi-rhetorical question. Where would you suggest that evangelicals find out more about their history? To my knowledge, churches do a very poor job of bringing up church history since even the most conservative, scripturally-based pastor has to keep his sermon topics relatively shallow to appeal to all walks of Christianity. Adult Sunday School classes could do it, but again, I’m not sure if that is the best medium. So that brings me to individual study… while I do believe that this is the ideal way for evangelicals to learn their history, I also think that Christians are about as well-read as their non-Christian counterparts. In my view, it’s not so much that evangelicals don’t care for their own history, it’s more that people in general don’t care for history at all, spiritual or secular. In my young couple’s class at church, I would bet that out of the 20 or so people in it, less than a quarter of them have read anything in the last two years in the church history genre or books written by important past church leaders (and most of that would primarily be written by C.S. Lewis). Furthermore, I doubt that many of them have recently read anything older than 30 years old of any genre. It’s a symptom of the society at large. The Prayer of Jabez or Harry Potter are very popular, but who reads anything by Jonathan Edwards or Thomas Hardy?
I would start by reading secondary histories of a time period of the church your interested in, and then read primary sources by people in that period that you find interesting. I’ll use the First Great Awakening as an example here since it’s the beginning of the evangelical movement and I find it fascinating.
There is a very good book on that period that came out not to long ago by Mark Noll called “The Rise of Evangelicalism” It’s actually the first part of a series of books on the history of the evangelical movement put out by IVP, this particular one covering the First Great Awaking with Wesley, Whitefield and Edwards as the main participants in this telling of it. So if you were to read something like that it would open up a lot of understanding into not only those three figures but the movement in general. From there you could look into a more detailed biography of one of those people. For Whitefield I would recommend Arnold A. Dallimore’s biography, for Edward’s Ian H. Murray’s (although I’m not quite finished it), I haven’t read a biography of Wesley yet although I have one by Tomkin’s on my shelf waiting. If you interested in what happened on the English side of the revival J.C. Ryle has a wonderful book called “Christian Leaders of the 18th Century” that covers what were in his estimation the major leaders in the Methodist movement.
Or once you have an idea of who you would like to study go right to some of their works. Edwards’ sermons are freely available online, and many have been republished in small collections (The pure Gold series put out by Bridge Logos has a book of 11 of his most famous ones). His famous book “Religious Affections” has recently been republished with a new title (Faith Beyond Feelings) with updated English. So it is not that hard to learn about church history from my experience, you just need to know what you want to study and why.
Personally, I became interested in the 1700’s becasue on a message board I was frequented it was suggested that everyone should pick one theologian from history and know his thought well. I decided to look at Martyn Lloyd-Jones. His background was Calvinistic Methodist and spoke well of revival and Edwards. I didn’t know what a Calvinistic Methodist was at the time so it took some study, which lead me to Whitefield and then to other Calvinistic Methodist leaders and eventually the First Great Awaking as a whole.
Now if you look at that time period, there are a lot of lessons that can be applied to the contemporary church. Thats the other thing, you may be right, Christians and most people in general may not see the benefit of studying history. I like history so I may be an oddity but even in grade school when Canadian history was taught it was often presented in a boring way disconnected from the present (This is the fur trade, it was important for the nation…) we need to show Christians that Church history is interesting, relevant, and important for community.
I think it’s because we’ve made our faith a purely individual thing. We rarely admit we need other people, much less that we could use insight from previous generations.
I believe it is Christianity’s attempt at globalization. We see this in Islam through groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, and the Taliban. As Muslims immigrated to non-Muslim lands, later generations had less and less of a cultural and historical root. As a result, they began to re-imagine Islam as an ahistorical faith. Through doing this, they ignored history for their own ideology and theology (think of bin Laden’s interpretation of the Qur’an). Olivier Roy worked through this development in Islam in his Globalized Islam. I recently sketched out a view of the Evangelical Christian form in an essay recently. Carl Raschke posted on this also recently at the Church and Postmodern Culture blog (link).
I believe that this is Christianity’s response to globalization, especially from the Evangelical side. As Evangelicals move away from the fundamentalism of the early 20th century, they have re-imagined themselves in an ahistorical role. I believe this began as Christianity spread in the Americas and there was less and less emphasis on theology and more on preaching and feeling (for example, look at the multiple Great Awakenings, Asuza Street, etc). It was a move that distanced what became Evangelicalism in America from the more scholastic and theological focus on the continent. Further, it doesn’t help that Americans became obsessed with Schleiermacher in their seminaries.
I think you just wrote another blog Bryan.