Studying the Past to Cure an Unacceptable Present

the lessons I’ve learned from teaching church history the past few years

Let me start by saying: history isn’t something we should use to proof text the arguments we’d like to prove. As far as I can tell, this is a big party foul amongst historians. It’s what they call a wrong-headed search for a “usable past.”¹

It’s a common practice, but it doesn’t pay respect to historical complexity. Historians David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig describe it like this:

Using the past is as eating or breathing. It is a common human activity. What we have in common as human beings is that we employ the past to make sense of the present and to influence the future.²

So, that said, good historians shouldn’t just cherry pick their ancestors for anecdotes to back up or illustrate their points.

Thankfully, I’m not a historian. So I can play it more fast and loose, since I’m not really in the running for conference invites from the Historians Society of Academics (not real).

This is why I end my church history course with a class called “The Lessons of Church History,” in which I try to pick out advice from the past to help inform our present.

It’s essentially inspired by the work of the historians Will & Ariel Durant. After finishing their lifelong mission of condensing human history into 11 volumes, they decided to condense history even further into a slim, 100-page book about all the lessons they’d learned. So this class follows their general cues.

For some more context, I teach church history by breaking it up into six general eras. They’re not a neat standard that you’d find in church history textbooks, but it works well for the shape of my class:

1. Missionaries, Martyrs, and Messianic Jews (31 A.D. – 312 A.D.)

2. The Imperial Church, Monastics, and Seven Councils (313 – 787)

3. Medievals, Scholasticism, and Christendom Schisms (788 – 1499)

4. The Reformation & Counter-Reformation (1500 – 1650)

5. The Enlightenment, Great Awakenings, Missionary Expansion (1651 – 1946)

6. Neo-Fundamentalism, Pentecostals, and the Digital Revolution (1947 – Present)

So for “Lessons of Church History” class, I divvy out 18 different lessons among the six movements. But for this article, I cut out half since a 45-min read felt kind of abusive. As such, the nine leftovers are my favorites.

Now, I usually have no idea how much my students enjoy my classes. I often verbally ask them, “Are you enjoying this class?” Some say, “Yes,” but the authenticity is ambiguous. But the “Yes’s” seem slightly more authentic during this class. That said: I think this is good and interesting content. And I can say that because very little of it is my own original thought—it’s a conglomeration of the best of the best thoughts I’ve found.

Withoutfurtherado: