Guest post by Mark Rogers

I often tell people that I majored in history in college because I like stories. I still like stories, but I have pursued an ongoing study of church history because I think it makes me a better Christian and a better pastor. Here are some reasons I think you should read church history, too.

1. Theological

Millard Erickson is right: “History is theology’s laboratory, in which it can assess the ideas that it espouses or considers espousing” (Christian Theology, 28). Church history shows us our theological blind spots, reminds us of crucial topics our era ignores, provides confessional guardrails, and gives us the writings of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Edwards—among others.

2. Inspirational

If you are like me, ministry is often hard work and the fruit sometimes seems slow-growing. Reading stories of God’s work in revivals and awakenings stretches my faith and rouses me to pray bigger prayers. Also, reading about the fruits of long-term, faithful preaching and prayer helps keep me steadfast.

3. Ecclesiological

Pragmatic approaches to “doing church” are so common today that one might think that this is the way it has always been. Reading the Reformers, the Puritans, and others reveals that they asked more than just, “What works?”  They thought the Bible teaches what the church is and what it should do.  Historical discussions of the nature and marks of a true church challenge the way we think about the church in a way the latest church-growth manual simply cannot.

4. Missiological

We tend to be locally minded and even ethnocentric. Most of us envision a ministry in a place like the one we grew up in among a people that look like us. Learning what God has done to spread the gospel over the past 2,000 years helps broaden our vision.

5. Hermeneutical

Christians have not been using the same hermeneutics book for the past 2,000 years. We are now able to see some of the interpretive errors of earlier eras (for example, over-allegorizing), and we can try to avoid some of their pitfalls. However, we sometimes forget that our present cultural and intellectual context likely shapes our own biblical interpretation in unhelpful ways. Commentaries and sermons from other eras help reveal some of the errors in our own methods of interpreting God’s word.

6. Reformational

Jesus tells the church in Ephesus, “Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first” (Rev 2:5). The problem is that we often don’t “remember.” We don’t realize we have fallen because we never look back to a time when the church was more faithful in certain ways. Church history can help us realize our need for reform and call us back to faithfulness.

7. Correctional

Studying church history shows us how small deviations from biblical truth play out over time. It is helpful to know if you or someone in your church is holding a deviant or unbalanced doctrine before it infects your entire theology. Church history is one tool that will help you do so.

8. Doxological

The sheer fact of believers across centuries and continents worshiping God reminds us that our Lord is over all and everywhere. A poem scratched out by a persecuted Christian in prison or the testimony of a missionary’s communion with Christ as he faced imminent martyrdom or the story of whole peoples in Burma coming to Christ all point to the God who alone can satisfy every human heart.

This book has been over a dozen years in the making:

Gregg R. Allison, Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine; A Companion to Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011.

It’s 778 pages. And that’s the abridged version. Allison writes in the preface, “Even when I turned in the largest rough draft Zondervan had ever received, no one laughed at or chided me. Rather, a calm and simple suggestion was made that I revisit the length of the draft for the sake of keeping the book to one volume.”

The first chapter presents eights ways that historical theology benefits the church (pp. 24–29, numbering added):

1. [Historical theology helps the church] distinguish orthodoxy from heresy. . . .
2. It provides sound biblical interpretations and theological formulations. . . .
3. It presents stellar examples of faith, love, courage, hope, obedience, and mercy. . . .
4. [It protects] against the individualism that is rampant today among Christians. . . .
5. It not only helps the church understand the historical development of its beliefs, but enables it to express those beliefs in contemporary form. . . .
6. It encourages the church to focus on the essentials, that is, to major on those areas that have been emphasized repeatedly throughout the history of the church. . . .
7. It gives the church hope by providing assurance that Jesus is fulfilling his promise to his people. . . .
8. As beneficiaries of the heritage of doctrinal development sovereignly overseen by Jesus Christ, the church of today is privileged to enjoy a sense of belonging to the church of the past.

Michael A. G. Haykin gives six reasons that we should read and study the church fathers (Rediscovering the Church Fathers: Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church [Wheaton: Crossway, 2011], 17–28):

1. For freedom: “[S]tudy of the Fathers, like any historical study, liberates us from the present.”
2. For wisdom: “[T]he Fathers can provide us with a map for the Christian life.”
3. To understand the New Testament: “We have had too disparaging a view of Patristic exegesis and have come close to considering the exposition of the Fathers as a consistent failure to understand the New Testament.”
4. Because of bad press about the Fathers: “[T]hey are sometimes subjected to simply bad history or bad press.”
5. As an aid in defending the faith: “The early centuries of the church saw Christianity threatened by a number of theological heresies: Gnosticism, Arianism, and Pelagianism, to name but three. While history never repeats itself exactly, the essence of many of these heresies has reappeared from time to time in the long history of Christianity.”
6. For spiritual nurture: “The study of the church fathers, like the study of church history in general, informs Christians about their predecessors in the faith, those who have helped shape their Christian communities and thus make them what they are. Such study builds humility and modesty into the warp and woof of the Christian life and as such can exercise a deeply sanctifying influence.”

So where should you start? Haykin suggests some books in Appendix 1 (157–58, bullet-points added):

Reading the Fathers: A Beginner’s Guide

[Introduction]

Where does one begin reading the Fathers? Well, first of all, I would start with two tremendous secondary sources:

• Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale University Press, 2003) and
• Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (Penguin, 1993).

Together these will provide an excellent orientation in terms of the history of the Patristic era (Chadwick) and the spirituality of the Fathers (Wilken). [Read more…] about Reading the Church Fathers

I first learned about this book in class with John Woodbridge:

David Hackett Fischer. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. xxii + 338 pp.

Woodbridge recommended it and said that it helped give Don Carson the idea to write Exegetical Fallacies , which references Fischer over a dozen times.

Here’s how Carl Trueman prefaces his chapter “A Fistful of Fallacies” in Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 141:

In this final chapter, I want to offer a brief survey of some of the more common fallacies that historians commit. It is by no means exhaustive, and the reader who wants to read more about these kinds of issues should consult the old but still very useful, and at times very funny, book by David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. Fischer deals with so many fallacies in such a devastatingly clear and ruthless manner that most, if not all, of us will blush as we read it, recognizing our own foolishness and ineptitude at various points in his narrative.

I don’t call myself a historian in the same way that most lay people don’t call themselves theologians. But nearly everyone’s a theologian; some are good ones.

A historian is someone (anyone) who asks an open-ended question about past events and answers it with selected facts which are arranged in the form of an explanatory paradigm. (Fischer, p. xv)

So nearly everyone’s a historian. This forty-year-old book will help you be a better one.