studying history

Mark A. Noll in Turning Points provides yet another reason to study the history of Christianity. I love the spirit of this which stands in contrast to the current zeitgeist when review the history of God's people:

[To] provide perspective on the interpretation of Scripture. In varied forms, all Christians testify to their dependence upon the Bible, yet as even the briefest reflection indicates, there are vast differences in how the Bible is understood and used. Studying the history of Christianity provides guidance in several ways for discovering the meaning of Scripture.

We may view the Christian past like a gigantic seminar where trusted friends, who have labored long to understand the Scriptures, hold forth in various corners of the room. There is Augustine discoursing on the Trinity; here St. Patrick and Count von Zinzendorf comparing notes on the power of Light over Darkness; over there Catherine of Siena and Phoebe Palmer discussing the power of holiness; across the room Pope Gregory the Great on the duties of a pastor; there the Orthodox monk St. Herman of Alaska and the first African Anglican bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther on what it means to carry Christianity across cultural boundaries; here St. Francis on the God-ordained goodness of the earth; in a huddle Thomas Aquinas, Simeon the New Theologian, and Blaise Pascal talking about the relation of reason to revelation; there Hildegard of Bingen and Johann Sebastian Bach on how to sing the praises of the Lord; here Martin Luther on justification by faith; there John Calvin on Christ as Prophet, King, and Priest; there Charles Wesley on the love of God; there his mother, Susanna, on the communication of faith to children, and on and on.

If a contemporary believer wants to know the will of God as revealed in Scripture on any of these matters, or on thousands more, it is certainly prudent to study the Bible carefully for oneself. But it is just as prudent to look for help, to realize that the question I am bringing to Scripture has doubtless been asked before and will have been addressed by others who were at least as saintly as I am, at least as patient in pondering the written Word, and at least as knowledgeable about the human heart.

Teachers of foreign languages say that you don’t really know your own language unless you have tried to learn a second or a third language. In the same way, students of the Scriptures usually cannot claim to have understood its riches unless they have consulted others about its meaning. In fact, Christians are always consulting one another about the meaning of the Bible, whether by listening to sermons, by reading commentaries, or by meeting for Bible studies of one kind or another. The dimension added by the history of Christianity is the realization that in books may be found a wondrously rich reservoir of engagement with the Scriptures from those who, though dead, still speak of what they have found in the sacred texts.

As much as church history offers this kind of direct help in understanding the Scriptures, it also offers a great caution. From the distance supplied by time, it is often quite easy to see that some biblical interpretations that once seemed utterly persuasive were in fact distortions of Scripture. When we find out, for example, that some believers once thought the Bible clearly taught that the Roman Empire was to usher in the millennium or that Christ would return in 1538 or that Africans were an inherently inferior form of humanity, then we can see the role that specific thought patterns or intellectual conventions of an age have played in interpretations of the Bible.

The benefit from noting such mistaken interpretations from the past is to raise the possibility that some of our treasured interpretations of Scripture today may be as dependent on conventions of our own era, and also as irrelevant to the actual message of the Bible as clearly deviant interpretations of former epochs were. For this problem it is difficult to provide examples from the present, since the biblical interpretations I hold most dear are likely to be precisely those that I consider to be least influenced by passing fashions. (It is much easier to see where biblical interpretations I reject are dominated by the thought forms of today!) Still, to see in the past that very godly people were able to maintain bizarre interpretations of Scripture should be a caution for us all.