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We wouldn't be treated to a solo
when we were singing, which would not have been a pleasant experience
for you or for me, I have to say. Back home at my home church,
unfortunately, most of the people in charge of the sound on a Sunday
are young men under the age of about 30. And I discovered some
six months ago that they'd been secretly recording my singing
from the pulpit. Solos in order at some point
they said to put out as a CD of my greatest hits so you can
expect that I want to talk this morning about the importance
of church history. Clearly, there's a certain amount of self-serving,
self-justification in this. My primary salary and my benefits
come from the fact that I teach church history. So I have a vested
interest in persuading people of the value of church history.
But I also want to argue this morning that church history has
usefulness for all Christians. And I want to make four fairly
simple, I hope fairly simple, points. Pointing to the usefulness
of church history for all Christians, no matter what your profession
is, Monday to Friday, no matter at what stage you're at in your
Christian pilgrimage, how long you've been a Christian, I think
church history fulfills numerous functions and I want to pull
out just four of them today. I would preface this by saying
we live in a very anti-historical age. There's very little in our
age that would cultivate us naturally towards the study of history.
And I think that's peculiarly the case in the United States
of America. America was a country really
built on a future vision, an expanding frontier, a nation
where the best things were always just over the next horizon in
the future. Americans of all people that
I've met in the world seem to be the most future-oriented,
and therefore to have little concern for the past. Perhaps
that's slightly different in the South, because of the history
of the Civil War, or, as I noticed it was called yesterday, the
Pink House, where I went for lunch, I think the War Between
the States, maybe the War of Northern Aggression is another
term. Perhaps in the South, there's a little bit more sensitivity
to history than one typically finds in the North, because of
the tragic history of the United States on that front. But by
and large, we live in an era and a nation where history is
not something particularly important. We might say history is something
to be ignored or even to be overcome when you see all of the campus
protests of the last year with attempts to erase history from
the United States. History that perhaps is not particularly
flattering, but nonetheless exists. And there are attempts now to
have that erased. We live in a world, in a nation,
which does not think highly of history. I would also say that
history suffers from another, perhaps more material disadvantage,
and that it is often taught very badly at schools. It's amazing talking to students
at seminary. Very, very few students come
to seminary to study history. I think that it's useful that
I have the accent I have, which Americans always say gives me
a 20% advantage when I'm speaking in public, because I have at
least a 50% disadvantage because of the subject I teach. which
is church history. Very few people go to seminary
to study church history. They go to learn the Bible better,
they go to learn theology, they go to learn practical theology. Church history is often the thing
that people do at seminary simply because it's part of a compulsory
curriculum. And therefore, I think as a church
history professor, I have to work in some ways that little
bit harder to get people to see the usefulness of church history. And I want to do that this morning
in four ways. I want to suggest that church
history is useful, and my first point will be my simplest, and
probably the most easy to grasp, and that is church history is
useful because it provides inspiring examples of Christians of the
past. That's a very simple, simple
point. The second reason for studying
church history is it allows us to understand why the church
speaks and thinks the way she does in the present. That's a
more subtle, but also in some ways I think perhaps an even
more important purpose of church history. Thirdly, I think church
history, as in all history in fact, fulfills a useful function
because it relativizes the present. We get very concerned when Christians
talk about relativism. But I think there is an important
point to be made that we need to relativize the present. We
are not as important as we think we are. And the days in which
we live are not as unique as we think they are. And that's
useful because that can actually be a very encouraging thing,
particularly in times of setback. It's useful to be reminded that
the meaning of history does not depend upon the present moment.
And finally, and then I'm going to go to a particular writing,
I'm going to suggest that because human nature remains the same
throughout history, we can learn from the great writings of the
past. And if I have time, I want to end by talking about a brief
passage from a book written at the end of the 4th century, The
Confessions of St. Augustine, where he talks about
an incident in his childhood that I think is remarkably helpful
to Christians today. I'm just going to use it as an
example of how one can read an ancient text written in a very
different world many, many hundreds of years ago, and yet find useful
insights for how we live today. So the first point then is a
very, very simple one, and that is, I think, that church history,
at its most basic level, provides encouraging examples from the
past. One of my favorite books of church
history, is the first volume of Ian Murray's two-volumed biography
of Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones. He became
a Christian in the early 1980s in Britain. Dr. Lloyd-Jones was already dead,
but his influence dominated the landscape. I happened to be converted
into a non-conformist tradition, not an Anglican, not the established
church. But the evangelicalism of my
late teens and early twenties was profoundly shaped by the
life and teaching and thought of Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones. And
the first volume of Ian Murray's autobiography of Martin Lloyd-Jones
was one of the first books I read about Christians of the past.
It was the recent past. But it was a very inspiring story.
If you were to ask me as a professional historian what my concerns about
that book would be, I would say, well, it's odd to read a book
of three or four hundred pages on a Christian leader and to
find virtually no criticism. And for many years that sort
of disturbed me. Reading this book, I think, well,
you know, Lloyd-Jones must have made mistakes. We're all totally
depraved. So there must have been things
that he did that were wrong. Why aren't they there that we
can learn from them? But over the years, I've come
to appreciate that book more. I think we live in a very cynical
age, and sometimes it's good to read a book that doesn't dwell
on the faults of the great saints of the past, but offers encouragement
and inspiration. The first point, then, is really
a very, very simple one, and that is, I think it's good for
Christians to be acquainted, particularly with Christian biography,
but also with the broader currents of church history, because it
can be inspiration to us. Even, I think, the faults and
mistakes of the church can be an inspiration to us, because
we realize that the Lord is able to subvert wickedness for the
greater good, as He promises to do in Scripture. The Lord
is able to take the mistakes of His people and use them. I
would also suggest that the Lord is able to use the mistakes of
His people to encourage us by reminding us that even the greatest
saints make mistakes. Some of the, you go back to the
19th century and you read some of the biographies of the great
churchmen of the 19th century or the biographies of earlier
churchmen that were written in the 19th century, they're soul-destroying
in some ways because these guys are so perfect. You can never
measure up, it seems to me. They were so great and so wonderful.
So sometimes it's good to be reminded even of the faults of
the great men and women of the past. That can be an encouragement.
It reminds us that they're human. I'm going to end by talking about
St. Augustine. I love St. Augustine's confessions.
Why? I would put it provocatively,
it's because he's so mediocre in them. I read the resolutions
of Jonathan Edwards and I come away thinking I can just never
measure up. I read the confessions of St. Augustine and I think,
wow, he's a pretty mediocre guy. I think I can do that. I think
that's within the realm of possibility for me as a human being. So the
first point then is that Christian biography, particularly,
but church history in general, can just be useful for inspiration
and encouragement. reading about the great saints
of the past, both their strengths and their weaknesses. Luther,
I've talked on this weekend, is a good example of both huge
strengths and tremendous weaknesses. His tremendously courageous stance
at the Diet of Worms in 1521 or in Wittenberg in 1522, remarkable. But then he writes terrible things
about the peasants in 1525 and terrible things about the Jews
in the 1540s. And even that, I think, can be not an encouragement,
but a lesson to us, because there's a sense in which the thing that
enables Luther to stand so heroically in 1521-1522 is his absolute
confidence in his own correctness at that point. Tragically, it's
exactly that same character trait that leads him to write such
terrible things about the peasants and the Jews. So it's both an
encouragement to us to see the courage of Luther, but it's also
a reminder to us that courage and strong will can, in certain
circumstances, prove very dangerous to the cause. And to me, that's
a reminder of why it's always important to surround yourself
as a Christian with people who are not yes-men, people who are
willing to tell you the hard truths, but do it because they
care for you. Second point, church history,
and I hope to end by about quarter past twenty past to throw it
open for some questions. But the second point is, knowledge
of church history helps us understand why the church is the way she
is in the present. I think without wanting to be
a sort of radical postmodernist, most people accept these days
that stories are extremely important for personal identity, both individually
and corporately. Who we are as individuals is
intimately related to how we understand our lives. I think
one could say that the current Crisis is an overused word, but
certainly the current difficulties in American society seem to me,
as an outsider having come here 16 years ago, to be intimately
connected to the breakdown of any agreed narrative of American
history. Americans no longer seem to know
who they are as a united nation. And that's when you start to
get problems in a nation. I've seen it back in Europe,
in Britain. We see it in Britain, where we
lose that sense of a strong, unifying, national history, and
things start to fall apart. It reminds us that history, that
stories are vitally important. It's why every culture in the
world tells stories about itself. It's why every culture in the
world has a mythology. The Norse myths, the Greek myths,
the Roman myths. Every culture in the world tells
stories that reinforce, constitute its identity. And the people
of God are no different. One of my favorite passages in
the Old Testament, for various reasons, occurs in Exodus chapter
11. Found out a year ago I have to
wear glasses. It's a, you know, eyesight is
a great caliber. I run a lot and getting slower
year by year and heavier even though I'm exercising the same.
It's a great calibration of getting old. So is losing your eyesight.
I was trying to review a book and I was struck by how small
the publisher was making the print these days. Put my wife's
glasses on for a joke and the print seemed to just expand before
my eyes. So anyway, Exodus chapter 12,
one of my favorite passages in Scripture, where Moses is instructing
the people of Israel on the Passover. And it comes to verse 25, and
he says this, And when you come to the land that the Lord will
give you, as He has promised, you shall keep this service.
And when your children say to you, What do you mean by this
service? You shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover.
For he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt,
when he struck the Egyptians, but spared our houses." It's
a wonderful passage. There's an awful lot I could...
You know, I make my argument justifying creeds and confessions
in part on that passage. But what does that passage say
to us? Well, Moses is aware that when, at some point in the future,
the children of Israel have had children who were no longer there
in Egypt, when it all went down on the night of the Passover,
and they're performing this meal, and their children say to them,
you know, why do you do this thing? What he does not do is
what I would call the... If you go on holiday in Europe
and there are British people there, British like the Americans,
we don't learn other people's language as well. And you'll
see an English person trying to order something in, say, a
German restaurant or an Italian restaurant, and the waiter may
not speak the language and he doesn't understand what's being
said. So the English person's response is to speak louder and
slower. because we have this innate national
belief that somewhere in every human being there's this substructure
of the English language and if we just shout loud enough we
will break through this foreign ignorance and get to it. What
Moses does not say here is, well what you need to do is you need
to do the ceremony again with more exaggerated actions until
finally they get it. What Moses says is, you need
to tell your children the history of your people. That's what he's
saying in a nutshell here. You need to tell your children
the history of your people. If you want them to make sense
of the religious practices that you're engaged in, then you need
to tell them the history. You need to tell them the story
of why this came about. And I think that's a vital lesson
for the church. When you think about the Bible,
how much of the Bible is telling a story? The biggest part of
the Bible, the single largest form of literature in the Bible
is narrative history. Narrative history. Why? Because
it's so important to understanding who the people of God are. And
I don't think it stops with the book of Acts. I think it continues. Now obviously, history since
the book of Acts is not written by men who are divinely inspired.
But it's still important for understanding who we are. Doctrinally,
it's important for understanding who we are. One of the things
I like to trick students with early in the ancient church class,
Tim may remember, you did ancient church with me, you may remember,
maybe I pulled this one year, in order to try to demonstrate
the importance of history, is I'll ask the question early on,
how many wills does Jesus Christ have? And most students will
instinctively respond, He has one will. To which the answer
is, that is heresy. You are denying the reality of
the Incarnation if you hold that. To which the response is, well
where did you get that from in scripture? To which my response
is, ah well you need to understand the debates of the first three
or four centuries in order to understand why you've given the
wrong answer and I've given the correct one. Doctrinally, why
the church thinks the way she does is intimately connected
to understanding the history of the doctrinal discussions
the church has had. It's also, I think, important
for understanding the emphases within our churches. I'm a big
believer in people learning their denominational history. I'm a
minister in the OPC. I have to say, I am not inspired
by my denominational history in the way that some of my OPC
colleagues are. But I think it's important to
know that history, to know why the church thinks the way she
does on some crucial issues. And that can be important regardless
of whether those issues are ultimately of the essence of the faith or
not. Being a member of a denomination is like being a member of a nation.
Sometimes it's important to understand the history of your nation to
understand the distinctives. Things that in some ways are
indifferent in the universal story of things, but are very
important to the people who are involved in the denomination,
so you know how to talk to them, how you know how to interact,
how you know what mind feels to avoid. History is very, very
important for understanding the identity of the people of God
in general, and the identity of the people of God in particular,
denominations and congregations. Terry on Friday Lunchtime was
explaining to me why this church is an independent Presbyterian
church. That's an important part of your
history. That history does not mean that the OPC is wrong by
being not independent in terms of its Presbyterianism. But it's
an important part of the church's history here. It's important
to know the community of whom you're a part. And it's also
important to know history, I think, in order to pass the gospel on
to the next generation. I use this analogy a number of
times, but I get... one of the British magazines
I get each week in order to keep up with what's going on back
in my homeland is The Spectator. It has some of the best British
writing, British journalism. But it also carried an advert,
or used to, I haven't seen it for a couple of years now, for
Patek Philippe watches. And there'd be a good looking
guy there with a Patek Philippe watch, and the byline underneath
was, you never really own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after
it for the next generation. And I remember one Christmas,
Katrina, my wife, said to me, you know, what would you like
for Christmas? And I said, you know, there's Patek Philippe watches that look really
nice. Maybe one of those. I was thinking, you know, maybe
they're like 200 bucks a pitch. I think the entry level was $70,000.
I think, wow, I could buy half my house for that. You know,
I'm not going to walk around with a 70 grams worth of watch
on my arm. I'd be terrified to leave the
house. But then I understood the buy line. You know, you don't
buy a Patek Philippe to wear a Patek Philippe, really. You
buy a Patek Philippe as an investment for your children, as you might
buy a painting or a rare vase or something like that. I think
that the church is tasked with looking after the gospel for
the next generation. That's our primary task. Our
primary task is not our own. Our importance, if you like,
is entirely derivative on the past, that which we've inherited,
and on the future, that to which we pass the past on. We have
no intrinsic importance whatsoever. And I think Paul captures that
beautifully in his letters to Timothy. I love all the books
written on church growth and how to do church. Paul, which
I hate that phrase by the way, how to do church, but I use it
because it's a convention. Paul manages to put down pretty
much everything he wants Timothy and Titus to know in three really
short letters. And at the start of his second
letter to Timothy, he says this, follow the pattern of sound words
that you have heard from me in the faith and love that are in
Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells
within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you. Take that which
has come from the past and been given to you and guard it for
the future. second important strand of church
history is it's important because it helps us to understand who
we are, what our task is, and what we are to transmit to the
future generation. Third point, and this is not
even a distinctively Christian point, but I think it is peculiarly
helpful to Christians, particularly in times when we seem to be suffering
great setbacks, and that is a knowledge of history relativizes the present. I've already done that to some
extent by saying the present has no intrinsic value other
than as it connects to the past and connects to the future. What
other ways does church history relativize the present? I think
all human beings have a tendency to absolutize their own time. You go back, I spent a lot of
my time in the late Middle Ages, in the 16th and 17th centuries,
and the complaints that are being made about the days in which
those men lived, that we now look back on as a kind of glory
time in some ways, are exactly the same as the complaints that
are being made today. Why? Because everybody seems to think
that the whole meaning of history absolutely hinges on their day
and generation. I compare history, history to
emigration. Not many people have the privilege
that I've had of emigrating and living in a foreign country for
a significant part of their life. What happens when you emigrate
is interesting. You see things in the country
that you've come to that people who've lived there all their
lives just don't notice. Because to them, their culture
is nature. It's natural. Everybody thinks
this way. I think the disconnect becoming
as an English person to America is perhaps greater because we're
deceived by the common language and the fact that we watch the
same movies into thinking that we're essentially the same. But
actually, America is very different to Britain. Very, very different.
And an English person in America spots things an American wouldn't
necessarily spot, because it's the air they breathe. The other
thing is, you learn about the place you've left, and you begin
to realize that things you did back there aren't nature, but
they're actually culture. The other oddest thing is, of
course, back there, keeps changing. But in your mind, it never does.
People say to me, you know, where's home? And I say, well, I really
don't think I have home anymore because I never quite fit in
America. But Britain is frozen. I love the 1980s. Britain's kind
of frozen in the late 1980s for me. That's a long, long, long
time ago. But history allows us to do that
without the expense and the inconvenience of emigration. I've used the
phrase a couple of times in the seminars this weekend that history
involves leaps of imagination. That you have to go back to a
different time and a different place and learn to think differently
in order to understand what's going on. And so much of the
campus problems, I think, that we're currently seeing are reflective
of a poverty of imagination. in the contemporary generation
that is incapable of thinking of the world in any other terms
than those in which they themselves think of the world. If you don't
think like them, you are wrong and you are immoral. History
done well requires that we go back into the past and learn
how to think differently about things. And the great thing about
that is it has that knock-on effect on the way you think about
the present as well. As I now think about Britain
differently to the way that I would have thought about her 20, 25
years ago, so as you do history well, you learn to think about
the present differently. you begin to realize that ideas
don't just come out of vacuums that people think the way they
do because of their historical roots and their historical backgrounds
you develop the ability to be a kind of cultural critic in
some ways and you begin to realize how much actually is the same
with the past I've already used an example of that today I said
the complaints about people in the past just the same as the
complaints we're hearing today So the third use of history,
I think, is the culturally useful one. That it allows us to be
self-critical and to be wary of absolutizing things ourselves
in our own time. And it allows us, therefore,
to free ourselves up from the shackles of the eternal present,
if I could put it that way. So my first three things then
for studying history. One. It provides inspiring stories. Two, it enables us to understand
how the church thinks, theologically, and we might say culturally,
about herself today. And thirdly, it allows us to
think critically about the world in which we now live. The last
point I want to bring out is the fact that human nature remains
the same means that texts from church history are often peculiarly
helpful to us in understanding ourselves. Big debate goes on,
of course, in the literary world about what constitutes a great
book. I don't think it's an entirely naive definition, but the way
I would define a great book is this way. A great book is one
that when you read it, you understand yourself better. And the more
often you read it, the better you understand yourself. It's
perhaps a somewhat personal definition, but I think it carries a lot
of weight. There are certain poems, for
example, one can read again and again, and every time you read
them you see something different, you understand something different
about the world. And there are certain texts in
Christian history that do that. Tim, guess what text I'm about
to read? The Confessions, and which passage
of the Confessions? Not book 9, actually book 2,
the pairs. The other one, the other passage.
I'm going to read a passage from Augustine's Confessions. Augustine,
probably the greatest Christian theologian who ever lived. Late
4th, early 5th century. Remarkable individual. And early
in his Christian life, he wrote an autobiography. He wrote a
reflection upon how he'd come from paganism. to Christian belief. Westminster, it's a compulsory
book. Every student doing an MDiv at
Westminster has to read the Confessions because there's a compulsory
question on it in the examination. I have been known to say that
you cannot have a credible profession of faith if you have not read
Augustine's Confessions. I won't go quite that far this
morning, but I would say it will massively help your credibility
as a Christian if you read this book. And in Book 2, Augustine
recalls an incident from his childhood. One of the things
everybody knows about Augustine is that he got a downer on sex. Well, it's interesting that in
the Confessions, it is not his sex life that he uses as the
sort of the narrative account of his fall. It's something very,
very different. So I'm going to read you the
passage. Unfortunately, it's from a slightly quaint Victorian
translation, so bear with that if you can. Surely thy law, O
Lord, punishes thievery. Yea, and this law is so written
in our hearts that iniquity itself cannot blot it out. For what
thief does willingly abide another man to steal from him? No, not
a rich thief, him that is driven to steal upon necessity. Yet
I had a desire to commit thievery, and I did it, compelled neither
by hunger nor poverty, but even through a desire of well-doing
and a pampered attitude to iniquity. For I stole that of which I had
enough of my own and much better. Nor, when I had done it, did
I enjoy the thing which I had stolen, but rejoicing in the
theft and the sin itself. There was a pear tree in the
orchard next to our family vineyard, well laden with fruit. It was
not tempting either for its color or its taste. I and a group of
young friends went late one night, according to our pestilent custom,
and we carried away a huge pile of pears, not to sate our own
hunger, but to feed to the pigs, and maybe we did eat some of
them. And all this we did because we would go where we should not
go. Behold my heart, O Lord, which
you had pity on in the very bottom of the bottomless pit. just to
summarize what Augustine's describing there. He's describing what we
in the West Country of England would call scrumping. And every
child in the West Country is scrumped, and that is stealing
fruit from a neighbor's garden. If you're into the Who 1960s
rock band, which I am, they refer to scrumpy at one point. It has
the same point of origin linguistically. Scrumping is stealing fruit. And Augustine uses this account
to then go on and explore the psychology of human sin in a
way that I think has never been equaled in Christian literature
since. And I want to just pull out a
few aspects of this. First of all, I want us to notice
the kind of sin that Augustine has chosen. First of all, he's
chosen a very trivial sin. First time I read this passage,
I'm laughing to myself and thinking, yeah, I remember doing exactly
that. The incident I'm thinking of, we clambered over a railway
bridge with some friends, broke through a person's fence, and
then stole some of his potatoes. Raw potatoes, we threw them away.
We didn't eat them, you can't eat raw potatoes, that's disgusting.
We threw them away. So I'm reading this and I'm thinking,
yeah, I remember just what that's like, that's great fun. If Augustine
had written, let's say, about an armed bank robbery, would
not have had the same effect on me. I'm reading Augustine
say, yeah, one night, a couple of friends and myself, we got
hold of a couple of sawn-off shotguns, and we went and robbed
the local bank. I'm reading that, and I'm thinking,
well, that's pretty exciting stuff. But I'm not being drawn
into the story, because I never committed an armed robbery when
I was a child. I don't recall ever doing that.
So I'm somewhat distanced from the story. The fact that Augustine
has chosen an utterly trivial sin draws me right in. Draws me right into the story.
The second thing that Augustine does is he goes out of his way
to say that there was no intrinsic rationale in the sin being committed. These were foul pears that they
fed to pigs. He didn't steal them to eat them.
Notice what he's doing there. That's quite clever, because
if Augustine had said, some friends and I were absolutely starving,
we were fainting with hunger, and we broke into a neighbor's
garden and stole some fruit, we'd respond to that by thinking,
well, it was wrong for him to do that, he should have asked
for permission. It was wrong, but there's a logic to the sin.
He's dying of hunger and he needs to be fed. In the same way that,
you know, an armed robbery, well, we could turn around and say,
you know, armed robbery is wrong, but I could understand somebody wanting to
make six million pounds easily. The sin itself has a rationale,
has an end that I can understand. Having lots of money is a good
thing. You're going about it the wrong way, but I can really
understand. But Augustine cuts that off. And what he's doing
there, I think, is demonstrating to us something very, very important
about sin. Sin doesn't have, ultimately,
a logic or rationale to it. It's an irrational thing. And
then Augustine, also, just almost as an aside, he emphasizes the
fact that he was with a gang of friends. I had two sons, and
the interesting thing is, they're both good lads, I never worried
when my sons went out on their own. My wife and I worried when
they went out with their friends. And their friends were all, they
were good guys too. But it's somehow the case that
the moral sum of a gang of young men is less than the moral sum
of the parts. When young men get together,
the moral bar drops dramatically. Dramatically. Augustine's touching
on that in this passage. And then of course, he goes on
to ask the question, so why did I do it? If I didn't eat the
fruit, if I got no intrinsic benefit from the sin, why did
I do it? And the answer that comes up
with this is this, I did it because it was wrong. I did it because
it was committing the sin that gave me the buzz, to use modern
language. And you'll go on to think then
about, well, why is that the case? Well, the one to whom law
does not apply is the one who stands above the law. Who stands
above the law? God. Why did I commit this sin? Because in the moment of committing
that sin, I was God. I felt like God. But the problem
is, of course, that a little bit like a drug-induced high,
the effect wears off. Therefore, I need to do it again,
and again, and again. It's always fascinating, isn't
it? When people are done for serious
crimes, generally speaking, it's not a one-off. A few years ago,
I was very interested with a case of a woman in New York. She was
a high-flying attorney, and she'd run up massive credit card bills
on buying things on the Internet. And when the warrant officers
broke into her home, They found all of this stuff she'd bought
on the internet still in the boxes, unopened. And I thought,
what an Augustinian moment. Because we naturally think she
was buying this stuff because she wanted to have stuff. But
no. She was buying stuff because
she wanted to buy stuff. In the moments of the purchase,
she felt like God. What Augustine does here is he
takes this very trivial incident and he explains the psychology
of sin. Sin is done because sin makes us feel like God. When
we break the law, we feel we are independent of God. We are
God-like. That's why we do it, and that's
why we keep doing it. And yet, there is even more brilliance
to what Augustine does here, and the last point is this. What
is the sin he describes? Stealing fruit from a tree. stealing
fruit from a tree, without wanting to sound disrespectful. What is the first great act of
scrumping? Genesis 3, the stealing of the
fruit in the garden. As you read this passage, and
I'm laughing away to myself thinking, yeah, I remember doing that,
I remember stealing fruit from trees, from neighbors' houses
without permission, getting, I got a kick out of that. and
suddenly my mind goes back to the garden. And what Augustine
is doing here is springing that trap. Yes, I'm enfolded under
Adam's sin. I'm condemned in Adam. It's the
most brilliant paragraph. The most brilliant literary paragraph
in many ways. And I use it to try to persuade
people that old Christian books, even really old Christian books,
written at the end of the 4th century, are worth reading. Because
when I read that passage of Augustine, I see myself reflected. And for
all the talk about diversity, And for all of the truth in some
ways, that Americans are different from the British, and they are
different from the Japanese, and they are different from the
Dutch, for all the talk about diversity, there's also a fundamental
unity of human nature, which in the great historical stories
of the church, and the great historical texts from the past,
are reflected in a way that allows us still to learn from them.
So four reasons for studying church history. Most simple. Inspirational. It's great to
read inspirational stories about church history. The same as it's
great to read inspirational stories about your own nation. It's great.
I love to read stories of the Second World War and Churchill
and things like that. It's great to read those stories.
It's great to read them about church history as well. Secondly,
it's important to read church history to understand who you
are and why you think the way you do in the context you find
yourself. Thirdly, it's important to read
church history, and I would say history in general. in order
to know how to think about the culture in which you live in
in the present. And fourthly, it's important to read church
history because the Lord has provided great thinkers throughout
church history that we are able to benefit from. I had the pleasure,
it's slightly odd, but I interviewed the other week the Roman Catholic
Archbishop of of Philadelphia has written a very good book
on the contemporary state of society. And at some point I
sort of said to him, where do you get this all from? And he
said, I get it from Saint Augustine. And he said, I love living in
the present day, he said, because Augustine thought it all out
for me and I just have to go back and read Augustine. And
I thought, yeah, it's great, isn't it? We live in an era where
we have hundreds and hundreds of years of Christians who've
thought about what it means to be a Christian in the world that
the Lord has given us. that we can now build on in order
to be better Christians in the present. That's not all I have
to say, but it's all I'm going to say. I'll throw it open now
for any questions.
Why All Christians Should be Interested in Church History
Series The Reformation's Reforms
| Sermon ID | 3261715165 |
| Duration | 40:28 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday School |
| Language | English |
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