Last week, we discussed the question “should we judge a movement by his abuses?” Yet, it’s impossible to answer this question well without a basic knowledge of church history. Indeed, as I’ve said here: “a knowledge of history and tradition can provide perspective when church leaders fall or are exposed.”
Last week, someone sent me a note asking me to to elaborate on this last statement and here’s my response:
In considering how “a knowledge of history and tradition can provide perspective when church leaders fall or are exposed,” think David and Bathsheba, Judas’ betrayal, or even early church heretics like Marcion or Arius. Marcion’s butchered collection of scripture was a catalyst for church-wide consensus on a closed canon– the Bible we have today. Arius, the unwitting father of Jehovah’s Witnesses, taught that Jesus was a created creature distinct from God. His error, however, served a larger and useful purpose in the struggle to clarify the orthodox doctrine of Christ’s divinity in relationship to God the Father. This is yet another example of how God often uses the distorted to show the beauty of the clear.
Or fast forward to the 1400’s, a time of great corruption in the Roman Catholic church. For example, Pope Alexander VI, “a wealthy Spaniard who allegedly bought the papacy by bribing his fellow electors. Alexander also saw no problem appointing many of his relatives to positions of power, or killing off rival cardinals to claim their valuable property for himself. And he was apparently quite the ladies’ man, fathering several children with his many mistresses.”[1]
In recent history, there were the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart charlatans whose lies, opulence, and fraud were exposed in the 1980’s. By the way, I was surprised to learn that Jim Bakker is still at it. And although it’s sad how people are still being duped, it was impossible not to laugh when I saw these clips! I will leave it for you to draw your own conclusions:
- Song about Jim Bakker’s Apocalyptic Buckets
- Jim Baker Bucket Taste Test (don’t watch this if you don’t have a sense of humor!)
Indeed, truth is stranger than fiction.
A myriad of other examples could be given but, despite all this ugliness, the church lives on with a much larger legacy of spreading literacy, reforming prisons, and millions of other unsung expressions of cultural enrichment, beauty, and grace.
Think of the monks and nuns during the middle ages. The late Charles Colson notes that:
“Instead of conforming to the barbarian culture of the Dark Ages, the medieval church modeled a counter culture to a world engulfed by destruction and confusion. Thousands of monastic orders spread across Europe, characterized by discipline, creativity, and a coherence. Monks preserved not only the Scriptures but classical literature as well. They were busy not only at their prayers but in clearing land, building towns, and harvesting crops. When little else shone forth, these religious provided attractive models of communities of caring and character; and in the process they preserved both faith and civilization itself.”
Charles Colson, Against the Night (Ann Arbor, MI: Vine Books, 1989), 132.
Or think of Bach, G.K. Chesterton, and champions of justice and love like William Wilberforce or Mother Teresa. Even in America specifically, as New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat points out:
“From the beginning, the existence of a Christian center—first exclusively Protestant, and then eventually accommodating Catholicism as well—has helped bind together a teeming, diverse… nation. This binding has often been tangible and concrete: The hierarchy, discipline, and institutional continuity of Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism helped build hospitals and schools, orphanages and universities, and assimilated generation upon generation of immigrants. But our religious center has bound us together in a more mysterious fashion as well. In a country without a national church, a kind of ‘mere Christianity’ has frequently provided a kind of invisible mortar for our culture and a common vocabulary for our great debates.”
Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (New York: Free Press, 2012), 7.
To help you or your family get an engaging and better overview of church history, here are the most recent video resources available at Christian Book Distributers and here’s one I used with my kids. It was put together by Dr. Timothy George and is available through Amazon.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/10/europe/catholic-church-most-controversial-popes/index.html