history of christianity

Why study the history of Christianity? Mark Noll in Turning Points:

[S]tudying the history of Christianity provides repeated, concrete demonstration concerning the irreducibly historical character of the Christian faith. The Bible itself is rife with explicit statements of that great truth. For instance, God gave the Ten Commandments to the children of Israel in direct consequence of his action-in-history on their behalf: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20: 2– 3). The vision of the New Testament is just as fully taken up with historical realities. The narrative heart of Christian faith, as well as its central dogma, is the truth that the Word became flesh (John 1: 14). The apostle John spoke further of the Christian faith in the concrete terms of that “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched” (1   John 1: 1). Luke wrote at the beginning of his Gospel that the Christian message depended on “the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1: 1– 2). The apostle Paul spoke of events in Jewish history that provided “examples” for believers in the first century (1   Cor. 10: 6,   11).

The message of these and many other biblical passages is summarized in the key affirmations of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 concerning the historical character of Christ’s work, who for the sake of humanity and our salvation “came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again.”

In a word, since Christianity is not captured simply in a set of dogmas, a moral code, or a picture of the universe — though Christianity certainly involves dogmas, morality, and a worldview — since Christianity is ultimately the acts of God in time and space, centrally the acts of God in Christ, then to study the history of Christianity is continually to remember the historical character of Christian faith.