History, and Being Doomed and All That

Most everybody knows the saying I've alluded to in my title. I believe the saying to be inherently true, and not just in terms of repeating your history CLASS, but repeating the negative lessons of history itself.

It was Chesterton, I think, who said something like, "The wit of man in insufficient to invent a new heresy." I'm not positive my wording is exact, or even that someone other than G. K. said it originally, but either way, I love the saying because it seems to incorporate truth in a very consistent manner.

If we look around at all the various weird religions, pseudo-Christian cults, and spiritualities that are around today, it seems all of them (that I've found) have a strong parallel, if not are an exact duplication, of a heresy from the first five (or so) centuries of the church.

So, with all that in mind, I constantly push my Sunday School class along with anyone else who will listen to be well-versed in the history of the Christian Church, especially where it concerns aberrant teachings. Tim Challies has started what promises to be a very useful series on the seven great church councils on his blog. The first post can be found here. I sincerely hope many will read these posts, and they will be helpful in the edification of the church.

Obviously, we as Christians should have a good command of the Bible, and the Bible should be the primary locus of our study. But one of the ways of correctly understanding the Bible is to know and understand way it has been misinterpreted in history. These posts will give a good non-seminary-level overview of these misinterpretations.

May I suggest a few good books that I've used on this topic as well (each title is a link to the book on Amazon.com):

   1. Heresies, by H. Brown
   2. Heresy, by A. McGrath
   3. Turning Points (first four chapters) by M. Noll
   4. Historical Theology, by G. Bromiley
   5. Historical Theology, by G. Allison
   6. Historical Theology, by A. McGrath

Not Creative, But Faithful

I love this paragraph from Michael Horton's The Gospel Commission:

We must never take Christ's work for granted. The gospel is not merely something we take to unbelievers; it is the Word that created and continues to sustain the whole church in its earthly pilgrimage. In addition, we must never confuse Christ's work with our own. There is a lot of loose talk these days about our "living the gospel" or even "being the gospel," as if our lives were the Good News. We even hear it said that the church is an extension of Christ's incarnation and redeeming work, as if Jesus came to provide the moral example or template and we are called to complete his work. But there is one Savior and one head of the church. To him alone all authority is given in heaven and on earth. There is only one incarnation of God in history, and he finished the work of fulfilling all righteousness, bearing the curse, and triumphing over sin and death.

Sometimes I think one of the biggest problems of evangelicalism in our culture is our own emphasis on individuality that leads us to all kinds of creative ways of expressing what we think the Bible teaches.  The problem with this is, we are fallen creatures and what we think the Bible teaches is more often than not flawed.  If we ignore the faithful witness of church history (and who even cares about church history anymore...we can't even respect a hymn if it was written more than sixty days ago!), we are not only prone, but defaulted, to err in our creativity.

We, as witnesses to Christ's kingdom, are not called to be creative, but faithful.  We absolutely cannot be faithful unless we are saturated in the Word (scripture) and diligent in the study of our history of thought.  Those who ignore their theological history are doomed to (heretically) repeat it.