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Evangelical Sanitation

Nervous Evangelicals Sanitzing Church History

Posted Friday, November 03, 2006 by Charlie Trimm

American evangelicals do not like church history. Part of this stems from the fact that Americans in general do not like history, but there is more to it than that. The main problem is that church history is not the same as evangelical history. When you look at church history, you see a lot of people who are not like you. And if we are right, how could so many in church history be wrong? So the response of a few evangelicals is to revise history so that it comes closer to our view of Christianity today. A primary example of this is the trail of blood, where we can supposedly trace the Baptists back to John the Baptist, which is a ridiculous idea. Trying to make the Donatists Baptist is just grasping at straws.

But a more subtle example comes from the history of the atonement. Our modern view of the atonement as penal substitution dates only from Anselm in 1200 and from the further refinements of the Reformation. Most of the church before this held some kind of ransom view or comsic victory view, where the focus was not on Christ taking our place and appeasing the wrath of God, but on Christ conquering Satan. But how could so many in the early church not take our modern view, which seems to obvious? Well, it was pointed out to me recently that a few evangelicals say that the ransom view was limited to only a few people. This includes Grudem's systematic theology and Unger's dictionary. While I often turn to Grudem, I was disappointed with this comment. We cannot simply change history to fit in with our views. We must grapple with the fact that people in the past were different than us. We may not necessarily change our views, but we do need to evalute often and make sure that we are correct and that we do not have blind spots of our own. As far as the atonement, one helpful aspect to the ancient view is the inclusion of victory over Satan. In the modern view it seems that Satan gets left out of the loop as far as atonement goes, but we have to remember that Satan was defeated at the cross, as Colossians 2:15 talks about. If we do not look at the history and struggle with it, then we are opening ourselves up to losing an aspect of the biblical teaching on the atonement.

Friday, November 03, 2006 1:30 PM

Brian wrote:

You mention the atonement as a demonstrable example of how our doctrine differs from that of the early (and not so early) church, but it is not limited to the atonement. We do this with any doctrine. We as human beings have a common, arrogant tendency to believe that we are improving human understanding from generation to generation. In Christians, though, this belief is humbled when confronted by the heroes of the faith. We have a reverence for the church fathers and other renowned men such as Anselm, Calvin, and Luther. Unfortunately we do not like church history so we have little knowledge of the doctrine actually believed by these men. We have little knowledge of the history of the argumentative development of doctrine in general. So to fill in this gap in our knowledge, the assumption is often made that their doctrine agreed with our own.

The danger of this is that when our doctrine goes awry, any corrective teaching is first perceived as heretical. This is a powerful incentive to sit down and stop rocking the boat.

Sunday, November 05, 2006 6:55 AM

Josh wrote: history doctrine change

Brian, I think that you are correct in noting the progressive perspective we tend to take toward the past. There is a good Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin observes to Hobbes something about his ancestors and there children all leading down to him. He concludes that this must mean that he is the focal point of history. So there is no doubt that we take a too-dismissive view of the past.

I do think that some degree of caution does need to be exercised though with maintaining continuity of doctrine and so forth. Doctrines held by individual church fathers or figures or even other doctrines that seemed to have widespread support are not necessarily possessed or intrinsic correctness. With respect to more widely held doctrines, the eternal generation of the Son, the eternal procession of the Spirit (filoque anyone?), or the descent of Christ into hell (which made it into a document unusually popular with evangelicals - the Apostle's Creed) would be examples of doctrines which have generally fallen on hard times among evangelicals. So we are caught between recognizing the much closer proximity of the early church to the NT and acknowledging the ultimate supremacy of Scripture. I suppose it should at least lead us to be cautious about divergence without locking us into a Protestant version of Sacred Tradition.

Monday, November 06, 2006 6:32 PM

Brian wrote:

Question:
How can we tell if we're locked into a Sacred Tradition?

Answer:
When we reject an interpretation of Scripture based upon systematic theology rather than based upon methods of valid interpretation.