The Cathedral of Church History

Over the course of the last year, I’ve taken on the labyrinthian task of dipping my toes into the murky depths of church history. I began this study out of a growing realization that I spent my first few years as a Christian in a sort of naivety on the topic of church history—a general malaise characterized by ignorance and caricatures. Perhaps you can relate, as I did, to these words by Burk Parsons:

“In our day, many Christians have a view of church history that is a popular, but unfortunate, caricature. They believe the church started in the first century, but then soon fell into apostasy. The true faith was lost until Martin Luther recovered it in the sixteenth century. Then, nothing at all significant happened until the twentieth century, when Billy Graham started hosting his evangelistic crusades. Regrettably, we form caricatures of history on account of our ignorance of history. Too often, our historical awareness is sorely lacking. What’s more, we don’t fully know where we are, because we don’t know where we’ve been. We might be aware of certain historical figures and events, but we are often unacquainted with what our sovereign Lord has been doing in all of history, particularly in those periods that are less familiar to us.”

This naivety of mine did not end at church history, either. Flowing from my lack of historical literacy sprung several general misconceptions about those belonging to the Catholic and Orthodox church in particular. It was about a year ago that I began to have, all of a sudden, a number of in-depth and challenging conversations with some close friends of mine who recently converted to the Orthodox church—a growing trend among young Evangelical Protestants in the West, to say the least. While I felt competent in my defense of the Gospel from a Biblical perspective, I must admit that my knowledge of historical Christendom during these conversations was a sorely lacking blind spot.

It was in and through these conversations that the Lord challenged my understanding, urging me to pursue Him and the study of His Word with greater diligence and, of course, prayerful humility. While I can safely say that after studying church history I am more reformed than ever before, I am nonetheless thankful for the stretching of my soul over the past year. In a genuine effort to better understand the theological positions of my Catholic and Orthodox friends, I found myself falling more deeply in love with Christ, His Word, and the truth of the Gospel that His Spirit has preserved throughout the ages, irrespective of the foolishness of men. Just as “we don’t fully know where we are, because we don’t know where we’ve been,” so too must we familiarize ourselves with the church’s fight for truth throughout the ages, lest we forget it ourselves.

Reflecting on this past year of on-and-off study on the topic of church history, I’ve come to three chief conclusions. The first is that, as Socrates once said, “I now know that I know nothing.” Perhaps that is an exaggeration, but there is a very real sense in which the study of church history is merely the study of history itself—and history is nuanced, complex, and not always immediately clear. The moment we become overly confident in our evaluation of history is perhaps the very same moment we’ve begun to make a caricature of it.

This brings me along neatly to my second point. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis considers the legacy of human history in this way: “All that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

Unfortunately, I think a similar accusation can be leveled against church history as well. In the many conversations I’ve had over the past year with my Catholic friends in particular, my study has routinely brought me back to pivotal moments across church history—councils, trials, executions, and movements that to this very day mark the seemingly seismic divide between Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox theology. In all of these historical happenings, I am at once disturbed by the disposition towards sin and cruelty that marks many so-called Christians throughout history, while at the same time amazed at the patience and longsuffering of the Lord without which “no human being would be saved” (Matthew 24:22).

Lastly, my study of church history has made this third and final point abundantly clear: the Lord is building His church, and He’s building me as well. When I consider my own need for daily correction, the wandering nature of my own heart, and the plethora of shortcomings in my own theology that I am not yet even aware of, I see a picture of Christ’s church.

Indeed, in our own walk with Christ and through the sanctifying work of His Spirit bringing us from dust to glory, we see a microcosm of church history. In Matthew 16:18, the Lord Jesus Christ directs our gaze forwards, up and through history, that we may find comfort in His sovereign leadership: “I will build My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Christ is building His Church in and through history, no matter how dark and bloody, and He is building us in spite of our sin-stained history.

The Spirit who hovered above the primordial waters in Genesis 1:2 is the very same Spirit of Christ who built His church from antiquity into the present day. And, this is the very same Spirit who resides in you and I if we know God and are known by Him, having been washed in the precious blood of His Son, chosen from before the foundations of the earth. Just as the Spirit of God brought order out of chaos on that first day of Creation, so too is the Father bringing His people out from the kingdom of darkness and into the Kingdom of light, the Kingdom of very own His Son.

I love how this reality is unfolded in Ephesians 2:19-22:

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In Him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”

Without an eternal, Biblical perspective, human history quickly becomes a rather nasty portrait. But we do not lose heart. History is, after all, His story—is it not? The Lord knows what He is doing. Even as I reflect upon my personal history, it’s tempting to think only in terms of my own blunders, buffoonery, and blatant sin, altogether forgetting the fact that I am forgiven, redeemed, and being sanctified “from one degree of glory to another” after the image of Christ my Creator (2 Corinthians 3:18).

And when we shift our gaze from ourselves and onto the history of the church, we should see a similar trajectory from disgrace to grace, from dust to glory, from sin to salvation. Through even the darkest days of the church,—when the truth of the Gospel seemed veiled under the Catholicism of the Middle-Ages, when hell itself was howling at the very gates—the Lord was at work and in complete control, building His church year after year, soul by soul. At another point in Mere Christianity, Lewis picks up on this point:

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

Indeed, the Lord is building His church, and He’s building you and I—from cottages into cathedrals. Generation after generation, billions of souls have been redeemed and woven into this grand tapestry of the church. Even as the gears of history gnaw onwards to His definite end, the great Shepherd of the sheep has been spreading His arms out wide throughout all the earth and throughout time, drawing His people unto Himself through the proclamation of the Gospel—eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ alone. The church is no mere building or institution, nor is it some abstract amalgamation of ideas rolling through the ages, but rather a living, breathing cathedral of sons and daughters of the Living God, “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone” (Ephesians 2:20).

“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God’” (Revelation 21:3).

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Photo by Dario Veronesi, Unsplash