Blogging Theologically

Books, Theology, and Gospel-Centered Living

Church history

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Links I like (5/23)

What If I Don’t Feel Forgiven?

R.C. Sproul:

There is an important difference between guilt and guilt feelings. The distinction is between that which is objective and that which is subjective. Guilt is objective; it is determined by a real analysis of what a person has done with respect to law. When a person transgresses a law, that person incurs guilt. This is true in the ultimate sense with regard to the law of God. Whenever we break the law of God, we incur objective guilt. We may deny that the guilt is there. We may seek to excuse it or deal with it in other ways. Still, the reality is that we have the guilt.

Chris Cornell and the quest for joy

Adam Holland:

Man was created for the purpose of joy. But why is it that music, money and fame can never bring ultimate joy? Finite things will never fill the infinite hole that sin has left within a person’s heart. This quest will never find its resolve until its focus is centered upon Christ.  Saint Augustine once stated, “Our hearts will be restless, until they find their rest in thee.” The Christian narrative offers hope for those whose affections are placed upon Christ.

The Weight of Expectations Crushes the Things of the World

Michael Kelley:

This is what comes to mind when I read through the Book of Ecclesiastes. It’s a book in which the Teacher systematically examined every part of life under the sun. He held up pleasure, work, time, knowledge, and even wisdom itself, and with each one, found it wanting. That’s the recurrent refrain throughout the book after each aspect of life is examined – Meaningless! Vanity! Each and every time.

The Pastor Must Fall On His Sword Before He Wields It

Trevin Wax:

Pastors should not come to this book as if we are professional sword-fighters, putting on a show in front of an audience we hope to wow with our skills of how we can toss and juggle a sword and flip it around. That’s playing with a sword as part of a show, not wielding a sword as part of a battle.

The Dearth of Patristic Theology in Evangelicalism

Brandon Smith:

The “allegorical” readings of the Patristic Fathers, the Catholic flavor of the first thousand or so years of church history, etc. are not reasons to abandon pre-Reformation theology. And yet, so many evangelicals immediately bristle at this notion on the principle that we should care more about the five solae of the Reformation. These five truths recovered the gospel in many minds. I recently wrote a study on the five solae, so I understand this sentiment and greatly appreciate the correctives that came with it. The Reformation was an act of God—I truly believe that—but we should consider two things.

The One Who Treads the Waves

Allyson Todd:

Here’s a truth about me: waves scare me. There is no way to tame the waves of my ever-in-transition life and I am unable to control the tide. No movies about tsunamis, sea storms, or constant transition for this girl.

These waves were familiar to Job. He endured constant changes, and each one brought more sorrow than the next. His pain was beyond anything I could imagine. In Job 8, his “friend” Bildad explained all the reasons God would ease Job’s suffering.

Better to tell the truth than stories

A favorite from the archives:

A few months back, I started sharing a few stories of really foolish things I did when I was between 8 and 10 years old. Things like: jumping off a roof to see if a man (or, in this case, boy) could fly. Defying my mother and getting an ATM card for my bank account after she explicitly told me not to. Or finding all the Christmas presents during a sick day, opening and playing with them all, and then attempting to cover my tracks by “rewrapping”all the presents.

Y’know, the typical idiotic stuff you can expect an eight-year-old boy to do.

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Church History for Modern Ministry

Church History for Modern Ministry

I love church history. The story of what happened between the end of the New Testament and our day is fascinating. To see how the Church went from a handful of men and women from Judea to one of the world’s largest religions is amazing. To see how our doctrine has developed over time is intriguing. To see how corrupt people manipulated the church over centuries in a twisted retelling of Israel’s spiritual history is tragic.

But the church presses on. Heresies have consistently been challenged. The gospel never disappears, even in the darkest times. Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell will not prevail over the church prove consistently true.

History and chronological snobbery

So why do people not seem to give a rip about it? Why do we not seem to understand the value of church history to our day—that it would help us recognize that many of the issues we’ve dealt with over the last 10, 20, 100 years are ones we’ve dealt with before? Why are we surprised when universalism rears its ugly head, or false dichotomies pitting God’s love and his holiness gain a hearing?

If Dayton Hartman’s experience is any indication, it largely comes down to our culture’s affinity for what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery. When Hartman began his pastoral ministry, he didn’t see the value of church history.

“In fact,” he writes in Church History for Modern Ministry, “reflecting on my early adulthood, I had the nastiest case of chronological snobbery I’ve seen outside of KJV-only circles” (1).

Martin Luther and the Reformers were old-timers with nothing to say to us. The church fathers and the Creeds were useless since he was a Protestant pastor. It wasn’t until he was challenged by conversations with Muslims and Mormons that he truly began to delve into church history and see it’s profound impact on ministry today. It’s largely from this study and its application that Church History for Modern Ministry came into being.

An introductory apologetic on the importance of church history

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading this book. Truthfully, it wasn’t even close to what I had in mind based on the title. I anticipated a book exploring a few significant moments in history and how they still matter today. Something akin to Justin Holcomb’s excellent books, Know the Creeds and Councils and Know the Heretics.

As much as I wanted to read that, it’s not what Hartman wrote (though he kind of does in the second appendix). Instead, he goes a different direction, looking to the past to illustrate the enduring quality of a few basic but long-standing Christian practices:

  • How the Creeds act as guardrails protecting us from theological drift;
  • The importance of personal discipleship;
  • The church’s long history of cultural engagement; and
  • The place of apologetics in preaching.

In each of these, Hartman is showing readers how history has deepened his understanding of existing practices—how they have given him context for his ministry. In other words, it is an introductory apologetic on church history’s importance. And I think it largely succeeds.

The creeds and guarding orthodoxy

Among my favorite moments in the was his discussion of the creeds. This despite a horrible lie in the first sentence of the chapter (because, no Creed is most definitely not the greatest band of all time. Bro, come on…). This chapter is an encouragement for those of us committed to sola Scriptura to remember that we do still need them. Using the analogy of the relationship between Scripture and creeds as a highway (with our various traditions being the lanes on the highway), he writes:

Guardrails—the creeds—protect those traveling along the highway of biblical orthodoxy. While allowing for diversity on non-essential issues, the creeds prevent us from veering off the highway of biblical orthodoxy. Because the safeguards exist, the only way to leave the safe road of orthodoxy is to do a great deal of damage. (16)

I respect this approach a great deal as it does a nice job of concretely describing the function of the creeds. They describe the fundamentals of our faith as found in Scripture. And a knowledge of the creeds really does help us to see where teaching has gone off the rails. The creeds remind us that a teacher who describes Jesus as less than fully God and fully man, rejects the necessity of the virgin birth, or denies the Trinity is one who has abandoned orthodoxy. Thus whatever they’re teaching cannot be called Christian in any meaningful way.

A missed opportunity

Where I think I would have loved to see him focus more, would have been to explain at least one other significant error that church history guards us against—defaming God’s character in Scripture. Among the many errors plaguing the North American church today is a resurgence of Marcionism, an early heresy that played a role in the formation of the canon of Scripture. Its adherents rejected the Old Testament and God as he is depicted there, calling him a cruel and angry false god. For Marcion (the movement’s founder), only Luke’s gospel and ten of Paul’s epistles were considered true and authoritative.

Everything else had to go.

In our day, we increasingly see a practical sort of Marcionism play out. While most of us would never outright say we reject God as shown in the OT, we take a subtler approach. We just don’t read it. We treat it as unimportant. We don’t preach from it. We pit one author over another and ignore the ultimate author of Scripture, the Holy Spirit. Listen to most any sermon audio podcast on iTunes and this is what you’ll hear. But the Old Testament is rich. It is something we ignore at our peril because from it we learn much about the grace of God, the mercy of God, the love of God and the justice of God.

A good starting point, but keep reading

All this to say, I think Church History for Modern Ministry is a fine book particularly for those who realize they are chronological snobs, or as a tool to disciple small group leaders (and maybe haughty first-year seminary students). Those already interested in history but not knowing where to start should consider Bruce Shelley’s superb Church History in Plain Language. But as a starting point, I think many readers will find something of benefit from this book.

Title: Church History for Modern Ministry: Why Our Past Matters for Everything We Do
Author: Dayton Hartman
Publisher: Lexham Press (2016)

Buy it at: Amazon

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Links I like

Links

Kindle deals for Christian readers

This week’s Kindle deals from Crossway focus on some great books about Jesus and the gospels:

Also on sale is Autopsy of a Deceased Church by Thom S. Rainer ($2.99).

Ayn Rand really, really hated C.S. Lewis

This was fascinating.

How the Prosperity Gospel Hurts Racial Reconciliation

Russell Moore:

When a prophet calls down fire from heaven, it’s wise to stand to the side.

That’s how I felt a few weeks ago when John Perkins, the revered preacher and civil rights activist, brought up prosperity gospel pastor Creflo Dollar during a live interview I was conducting with Perkins at a summit on racial reconciliation. Perkins lamented that there are so few accredited African-American evangelical schools in the United States while at the same time Dollar is asking for money for a $65 million dollar private jet. “That’s almost witchcraft,” he said.

The more I’ve thought of that over the past few weeks, the more I’m convinced that Perkins is right. The prosperity gospel is a barrier to racial reconciliation.

Did the Early Church Fathers Believe in Sola Scriptura?

C. Michael Patton offers a fairly decisive answer, citing the works of the early church fathers themselves.

How Blue the Sky Was

Douglas Wilson provides some interesting commentary following his recent involuntary blogging break:

Liberals really hate freedom of speech. They loathe it. They are currently involved in far more than just trying to shut down speech that is inconvenient to this particular project of theirs or that one. They are engaged in rejecting the whole idea of free speech in toto. They have gotten to the point where they object to freedom of speech in principle. William F. Buckley once said that liberals give great lip service to the idea of hearing other points of view, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other points of view. That tendency, which Buckley observed, has now officially metastasized.

So in pursuit of gratifying this strange animus, they will employ any number of tricks to silence dissent. But I will content myself here with simply listing two or three of them.

Gospel Irony

Stephen J. Nichols:

There are many who are telling us the time is coming in our American context that might very well resemble the times of the first century for the first-century church. The opposition is mounting. The foe is formidable. Many of our brothers and sisters in Christ around the globe already find themselves in situations not unlike Paul and the first-century Christians. Their “Praetorian Guard” is a force to be reckoned with. Despite that, they preach the gospel.