Podcast: Why Church History Matters (Justin Taylor)
This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.
The Past Matters
In this episode, Justin Taylor, co-editor (with Stephen Nichols) of the Theologians on the Christian Life series, reflects on the immense importance of church history, highlighting why it’s important to make time for it alongside our study of the Bible, responding to the criticism that many modern Reformed folks have a shallow understanding of the past, and offering advice for thinking about the sins and blindspots of our theological heroes.
The Theologians on the Christian Life series, which provides accessible introductions to some of church history’s greatest teachers, exploring their personal lives and writings, especially as they pertain to the walk of faith, and gives insights into how each one viewed the Christian life. Organized around themes that characterized their lives and teachings, these portraits of famous theologians are more than biographies—they are wisdom from the past for life in the present.
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Full Transcript
Welcome
Matt Tully
Justin, thank you for joining us on The Crossway Podcast today.
Justin Taylor
My pleasure, Matt. Thanks.
A Question for a John Newton
Matt Tully
So if you could spend 10 minutes with any one person from church history—like a prominent figure from church history—who's had a lasting influence, who would it be and what question would you want to ask that person?
Justin Taylor
I think I always have the same answer to this question as I've thought about it through the years because it's kind of an interesting sort of parlor game if you're a theological nerd to ask people that question or to think about that question; but I think that I would probably choose John Newton. The slave ship master turned pastor in Olney, in England. The reason that I would is because I'm not an expert in all aspects of church history I don't know all of the lives of every man and woman who's ever made any impact, but from all of my reading he strikes me as the most spiritually healthy sort of person. And such a contrast to his former way of life which we can kind of think, "Oh yeah, he was bad or he did this job he shouldn't have." But he really meant it when he said that he was a wretched man and he was a vile blasphemer. But the Lord did such an amazing work in his heart, in his soul, and of course we can't go download audio and hear what he sounded like, the tone of his voice, but we do have his letters and to read the sort of ways in which he talked to people, and he understood his own heart, and could draw things out from other people. So he wouldn't be at the top of my list for asking the most profound theological questions. You might choose a Calvin or Augustine for that. Or no one, that I know of, says that he was one of the great preachers even of his time. So he's not a Charles Spurgeon sort, but in terms of somebody who could sit down with me and peer into my own soul and apply my fears, and sin, and insecurities, to the Word in light of the gospel, I just don't know of anybody better than Newton. So I don't know if there's one particular burning question that I would have for him, but I think I would just want to sit down with him, get to know him, have him get to know me a little bit and just hang out for a while. Some of these guys are—you know the Theologians on the Christian Life series that we did—they're brilliant guys but they might not be the best conversation partners. I remember John Piper saying one time as much as he loves C.S. Lewis, they probably would not have gotten along all that well or had that great of a dinner conversation. But I think Newton would have been one of those guys where it would have been an evening well spent.
Personal Story of Discovering the Riches of Church History
Matt Tully
When it comes to church history and you think about your own life and your own growth as a Christian, is there a moment that you can remember when history came alive to you and you first caught a glimpse of the fact that this is important, this is significant and actually matters to me as a Christian?
Justin Taylor
That's a great question, Matt, and I don't know that I have one sort of "A-ha!" moment. I'm not the sort of guy that grew up reading a ton of history. I read a lot, but even as I got into my first years in academic study at seminary I kind of gravitated more towards biblical studies, New Testament studies in particular, systematic theology, and church history was kind of hovering in the background but it wasn't a driving thing for me. I wasn't one of these guys who spends all of his spare time reading not just church history but just general history. I don't know why that is but there was a certain point, I think, in taking some courses on Edwards and on Evangelicalism that I saw that this is sort of like reading your own family history. So theoretically somebody could sit down and read a history of somebody else's family. You may not be a Smith, but you could sit down and read everything there is to know about the Smith family. But that's just sort of marginally interesting unless there's some sort of pay off. But when you read about the Puritans, the Reformation, or Evangelicalism, you're reading at some level family history. And I began to see new connections, and new insights, and corrected certain simplistic narratives that I had, and I kept reading. I wanted to keep reading more and get a little bit deeper. And I think maybe, in a tangential way, hanging out with somebody like J.I. Packer—this is not through any brilliance of my own—but I got assigned to be his host once at a three day conference where I just had to drive him from place to place and make sure he got from his hotel to the conference center. And he's such an interesting person—and he's one of the people in our Theologians on the Christian Life, I think the only living author who's the subject of one of the volumes—but he's just such an embodiment of church history. He knows the tradition himself, but I think of anyone that I know of he's as close to just . . . if you pulled him out of the 1940s and 1950s you'd pretty much have the same person today. Whereas some people could be in their 80s and 90s and they've just changed with the times, they've adapted everything from the style of speech, the style of clothing, to everything. He's as much like going back into the past as there is.
Matt Tully
Because he doesn't have email, right? Maybe not even a phone?
Justin Taylor
The most advanced technology he's ever had, I think, is a fax machine. Which broke a year or two ago and he just never ended up fixing it. So yeah, no cell phone, no personal computer. Yeah, typewriter is about the highest form of technology, besides the fax machine, that he uses. But you sit down with him and you read in history books about John Stott vs. Lloyd-Jones. And Packer's still alive and so you could say, "So what were you doing that night when they had this split? How did you find out about it?" You can ask him, "What was Lloyd-Jones like—I know what he was like as a preacher—what was he like one-one-one in terms of counseling you if you talked to him about your sin, or a struggle, or a fear? Did you get along well with Stott? What did they think of you?" Those sort of things and the guy has an incredible memory. I think for me personally he was a sort of bridge between the present and the past because he lived in both worlds where it's really easy just to read a lot of church history and think something happened 50 years ago that's ancient church history just like if it happened 500 years ago or 1,000 years ago. I think maybe another turning point for me at some point along the way and again, it wasn't some sort of Damascus Road experience, but reading Augustine. And apart from the Bible, he goes back about as far as most of us do in terms of our reading and he's an early church father. But anyone who has read him who has any sort of spiritual heart beat realizes this is a guy who struggled like I struggle. He sees things that I see. He's articulating things that I'd never be able to articulate. It's very easy—at least for me, maybe others aren't like this—but I can think of people from the past as almost like a movie star that you know that they're real people in real life, but all you've experienced in terms of seeing them and hearing them is through this medium and they don't seem like real, normal people. It almost seems like they live off on some other planet. And church history figures have been kind of like that for me. But you get an Augustine and you realize this was a guy who was a real person. Flesh and blood, sin and grace, all mingled in one person and you start to see new insights about yourself, and about the gospel, and about the nature of God through reading him. So again, he goes back centuries upon centuries. He's different from J.I. Packer though. You know, Packer's still alive and he's experienced these things just 50 years ago. Augustine, we go back thousands of years and you realize he's just another sinner saved by grace—a brilliant one—who changed the world. But that gave me a lot of interest, I think in church history, and just wanting to know some of these folks better.
The Importance of Reading Primary Sources
Matt Tully
That's interesting that reality that . . . I've heard that before from those who are passionate about history, whether church or not, just the realization that these figures are real people and they were very similar to us in a lot of ways. And one of the things I know as I think about my own life with Martin Luther, for example, it was only after reading his own works—his actual own words—that I started to get that sense. Speak to that—the value of actually reading these historical figures in their own words, rather than merely settling for biography or some kind of overview volume of sorts.
Justin Taylor
I assume that most people who are listening to this will be familiar with C.S. Lewis' introduction to Athenasius' On the Incarnation. You can Google it online I think Phil Johnson's website has a version that's readily accessible, but that is worth reading and rereading again and again because he points out there that—and his work is a literary critic and as a don professor—he found it easier to teach Plato from Plato's actual words than it was for students to grasp secondary literature of people writing about Plato. They get obscured and complicated in a way that the original master didn't. And there are some reasons for that. Maybe sometimes it's legitimate. But it is a discovery to go back and really read the original people for yourself. And you quickly realize you may not get everything. There may be all sorts of nuances you're missing in your first reading, but there's a reason they've endured decade after decade, century after century, sometimes millennium. They're brilliant people and they were able to write in such a way that expressed itself with clarity, and with grace, and with lasting truth and power. And so I think that's another thing that perhaps tends toward this movie star not-real-people sort of thing is you're not actually hearing from the person but, you're just reading about the person. Maybe I shouldn't keep doing movie start comparison; but if you've only read about somebody in the gossip magazine, that's a huge difference from actually sitting down and watching them be interviewed for them to be able to tell you in their own words what they think and how they feel. Sometimes the secondary literature might match up and sometimes it doesn't. Or sometimes somebody might get the kind of formal principles right, but they don't really get the tone and the heart of it right. Think about somebody like C.S. Lewis. Try to describe C.S. Lewis to a friend, or to a younger colleague, or a teenager. You could do a great job of kind of here are three or four things that made him a powerful apologist, or an insightful Christian. But no matter how great you are at that, it can't compare to having them read Lewis for themselves. There's just a unique power and authenticity that comes through Lewis's own voice. So, we want people as much as possible to return to the sources. You don't know if the secondary person is getting it right, if they're complete, if even the sentence they're citing is accurate, if they're leaving out other sentences that might qualify it, so that would be a wonderful thing, I think, if the church just committed to let's go back and read these guys for themselves and not just read about some of these people. I'll just say one other thing about . . . think of Tim Keller and John Piper. I don't think too many people would dispute that they are in the upper echelon of influencers, especially in the Reformed Evangelical world. I fear sometimes that we have people who are only listening to Piper, and Keller, and others, rather than modeling, imitating what Keller and Piper have modeled for themselves. Those guys are primary source readers. Go online and find Keller talking about just a few years ago taking an entire year of reading a little bit of Calvin's Institutes everyday. That's just how he spends his spare time. Piper's always going back and dipping into Edwards and Owen. So I think it's great to quote Piper. I quote Piper a lot. I quote Keller as well, but those guys are going back to the sources and I think if we did the same we'll be more authentic, and more rich, and have a better understanding than if we just followed the secondary guys.
Do We Have a Shallow Understanding of Church History
Matt Tully
Related to that and even to something you said earlier about how there was a time where maybe you had a simplistic understanding of church history, and I think one of the critiques of Reformed circles—the circles that we often run in—is that our understanding of church history is actually pretty shallow. That we look at Paul, we look at Augustine, maybe another couple early church fathers, and then essentially jump over thousands of years of church history and reflection on God and go right to Luther and the Reformers, and then maybe jump again a little bit to the Puritans, and Spurgeon, and then we get to the contemporary guys like a Piper or a Keller or even a Packer. Do you think there's any truth to that criticism that the Reformed Evangelical crowds in which we run kind of have their heroes, and they stick with them, and don't really have a broader grasp of church history beyond those figures?
Justin Taylor
Yeah, I think that's probably true. And I don't know that it's specifically a Reformed-ish problem. It's probably true you know, if we were two Wesleyan guys sitting here they might have their own little narrative of you go from Jesus to Paul, maybe throw in Augustine, and then something something, Wesley! You know, where ours might be Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Edwards, Billy Graham! And then that's my timeline for church history. So I do think there's validity in that. I think it's changing certainly to some degree. I'm always leery of just being too sweeping. It's hard for me. You know, if somebody were to say, "Well, 90% of us do that." Well, probably. But I don't know any way to quantify that. I do think within a certain academic circles that trajectory is changing and there's a rediscovery of the fathers. I think there's a gradual rediscovery of Medieval theologians. Certainly Richard Muller and others have helped us rediscover the scholastics. I see more talk about Aquinas these days than I have in a long time. I do think it takes a long time for things to filter down to the pews, and sometimes I guess it never happens. And I think that's one of the perplexing things about how to make those connections between what guys are getting excited about at seminary and what they're talking about at conferences vs. what's actually happening on the ground in the church. But yeah, I think you're right. We gravitate towards what we know, or what we think we know, and what sort of fits into nice, neat categories. And you get some of the church fathers and they're saying weird things. They're saying things we don't' agree with, we don't understand how they got from A to B. You know, sometimes it might not even be so much that I disagree but I don't understand how, as a rational person, you could even see that. When I look at the text and I don't see that. It seems faciful. It seems strange. It seems like you're clearly taking some unbiblical tradition there and thinking it's obviously true. So that's one of the challenges with church history is that there's some parallels to visiting another country—and I'm not the first, obviously, to make that comparison—but you visit another country there's a different language. You might not know the language. And as many courses as you can take, if you memorize all the vocabulary words, you still don't know all the cultural cues and the sort of things that are just normal there that you think are totally normal coming from your culture. So there's . . . we have to remember that I think when visiting other countries not to bring our own values and assumptions to it. It's not to say we don't have those or we need to put aside what we believe to be true, but we need to try to understand why does somebody else think that way? And I think that's hard work. It's not easy work. It's not always something that can be captured in a quick easy chart or graph. Evangelicals can tend to be impatient people. Like, give me the pay off. Church history doesn't always work that way.
Guarding Against Idolatry
Matt Tully
Speak to the way that we often view some of the theological, the historical figures that we do know that we do appreciate, how do we guard against idolizing our theological heroes rather than simply appreciating them for what God did through them?
Justin Taylor
I think there's probably a couple of different ways we can do that. One, just remember our doctrine. We have a doctrine of man, and we have a doctrine of Christ, and we have a doctrine of God, and a doctrine of sin that applies to all people at all times. So there are no people in church history who just walked on water other than one. They were all flesh and blood people who had blind spots and failures, sometimes very serious failures. And so we have to just kind of remember our theology and not think, "Well, this one guy was the great exception to that rule. Yeah, maybe he sinned here and there, but by and large he was just, you know, every time he was up to bat in terms of a moral thing he was just hitting grand slam after grand slam." It didn't happen. Secondly, just in terms of historiography, we have to remember that even though we can go back and read the primary sources, we don't have unfiltered access to anybody's life. You take somebody like John Owen who I've studied a fair bit and has meant a lot in my life, at the end of his life all of his personal journals and letters were destroyed. So we have a slim volume of his letters, we have none of his personal journals. He lost 10 children who died in infancy. One survived to adulthood she died before he did. So just a lot of tragedy. We don't know how he processed that. He probably processed it in very holy, mature ways and he also probably had unrighteous anger mixed in there. But I can't cite any chapter and verse from his corpus because we don't have it. So no matter what figure we have, we have so much from Luther. He's maybe the closest exception to the rule because he was sitting around the dinner table with students and they're writing down what he's saying. But we still don't have access to when the students left, and the doors shut, and he's talking to Katie at night, we don't know what kind of things came out of his mouth. So we have to remember we have limited access. Those are two things. We keep our theology and we remember our limited position in terms of what we have. And then I think we need to not just have one or two sort of pet projects from our heroes. So let's just say that you like Martin Luther and you've been affected by his Introduction to Galatians—which, you know, has some brilliant gospel truth in it—if that's the only thing you ever read from Luther you could think this guy, again, hit the gospel grand slam every time he was up. If you don't ever get around to reading what he was saying about the Jews and some of the ways in which he acted, then you're not getting a complete picture. So that's an example where we do have a lot of incriminating evidence and it's vile stuff. It's perplexing how somebody could see so much light and yet remain in darkness, which creates a humility in us of what sort of things are there in my life that are blind spots that I'm not aware of? When you take the greatest theologian the English world perhaps has produced—Jonathan Edwards—Edwards didn't see what we see today with regard to slavery. How could he have missed something like that?
Matt Tully
Because he had slaves for I think most of his adult life. Is that right?
Justin Taylor
At least a couple of them. Again, we don't know everything that he thought. We have to rely on some fragmentary evidence, but there are things that are incompatible, I think, with the full biblical witness and Edwards was not clear on them at the very best. If that's true with one of the great Christians in church history, how much more so is it true with a messed up sinner like Justin Taylor?
The Failures of Church History Heroes
Matt Tully
Do you think there's a—Edwards is a good example—where there's a lot of conversations happening in our culture right now about the topics of race, and racism, and the legacy of racism in the U.S.. How do we think about some of these theological heroes—or maybe a better word is just "influences"—that God has raised up? What's the line between honoring the things that God did through them and even the important witness that they have been to the gospel and various points of important Christian doctrine; is there a certain point though when other things in their life, other failures, or sins, or blindspots, render them sort of off limits to us, or out of bounds, and therefore no long particularly helpful for us?
Justin Taylor
I think it depends on what you mean by "helpful" because there are going to certain contexts, perhaps, where someone has said enough things from a certain perspective and said them in a certain way that they cease to be helpful for certain points of communication. So, you know, a slave-owning theologian—it might not be wise or helpful to be bringing their name into certain conversations. They could still say certain things and have taught certain things that could be helpful for me personally in terms of formulating and doctrine. So I'm thinking of a certain theologian who had some very insightful things to say about God's moral will vs. his decretive will and made some distinctions and some definitions that we could still cite today; and yet was also a defender of slavery. And not just biblical Old Testament slavery, but the application of cattle slavery and the American context involving kidnapping and breaking up of families. So can he be helpful to me? He can be helpful to me theologically. There is a certain point where it may not be wise or helpful apologetically, or in terms of evangelism to be bringing in their name. So I think it's a judgement call, I think. I don't think we can sit down on our computers and come up with kind of a perfect list of criteria of if somebody says this or if they believe this. I think that there are certain people who would probably want to move in that direction. I'm sure that there are people out there who are who are orthodox, Bible-believing Christians who would say we should not read Luther or recommend Luther because of his anti-semitic expressions. I'm not prepared to go there. I think there is probably some line at which that could be crossed and you just say I'm not even going to ever reference that guy. I don't want to read that guy. But with Luther it's a contradiction, right? He wasn't all bad. He had moments of just absolute brilliance and insight. And so I think we need to read discerningly and carefully. Try to understand why he believed what he believed. So many people are on this hare trigger to condemn, which I think we need to get to condemnation. But I would like us to understand first. I mean, condemnation's easy. I mean, I've got a two year old at home and I could get her to condemn Martin Luther if I wanted to. To understand why he believed what he believed. That's not to try and say let's be empathetic with anti-semites. But again, if you jump too quickly to the critique—that's still gotta come—but you will miss out on understanding, I think, some of the context. So in the series that Steve Nichols and I edit, Theologians on the Christian Life, Carl Truman did the volume on Luther and doesn't sugar coat anything that Luther said, but you read the book and you understand more why Martin Luther said those sort of things. And I think that's insightful. So, to answer your question, Yes, I'm sure there's a line. I'm not sure exactly where to draw it. I think we want to kind of steer this middle course between people who say Aren't you just focused on the good things that these guys taught and not even discuss the bad things or their failings? That's the kind of hagiography view. And the other view is, I don't know what the opposite word from hagiography would be, condemnatography or something like, that where all you want to do is to crucify them and to kind of have the pinata effect of I'm gonna hold this person up just so we can all come take a whack at them for a while.
Matt Tully
Or just ignore them completely.
Justin Taylor
Yeah. You know, write them off as if they had nothing to contribute whatsoever. I just don't think that's the most mature, careful way to handle things. These aren't people in our church where we've got to think about church discipline issues. They're dead. They can't sin anymore. They said some really good things. They said some things better than anybody have ever said them. They saw some things that no one else has quite seen in the same way. And they messed up pretty badly. They sinned against God, and they sinned against their neighbor, and we need to learn from them. But I think there's a balanced way to approach that issue.
Matt Tully
It strikes me that that kind of thinking does require maturity and a humility recognizing, not sugar-coating blind spots and areas of sin and weakness, but also recognizing that that's true of us as well and if someone were to study us 100 years from now and see our email accounts, things that we wrote and said, they would probably have many things to critique as well there.
Justin Taylor
Right. And not even just what I've just written on texts and written on emails but the secret thoughts in my heart. If that could somehow be projected onto a movie screen and somebody could see everything that I've ever thought or said, I think those who are always inclined to condemn would pause and say Who am I to condemn? We're all in the same boat here. We're all sinners. We all need grace. None of use get through this life and die having achieved perfect sanctification.
To the Person Wary of Church History
Matt Tully
So how would you respond to the Christian listening maybe right now who is maybe a little bit wary of church history, feels like the emphasis is on studying human traditions and human reflections on God and what God has said, and they would instead simply rather spend their limited time studying the Bible. What would you say to that person?
Justin Taylor
I might ask them if they go to church. And the reason I might ask that is because if they do—if they don't, then they're not reading their Bible very carefully, right?—but if they do, then they have already acknowledged in their heart, and at some level in their mind, that they need community and that they need teaching. So somebody's a radical just me and my Bible, that's all I need, God speaks to me through his Word and I don't need anything else. Well, that's maybe a consistent position, although the Bible itself undermines it. But if you read the Bible, you know that God has appointed teachers and he has designed us to live in community. And if somebody acknowledged that, then I just want to say Why do you only value teachers who happen to be alive or—we're recording this in 2019—why only 2019 teachers? Why only community of those who are still living? We can't commune with the saints as Bible-believing protestants. We don't believe we can do that in some sort of unbiblical way, but there is a way in which we can hear from the John Owens' of the world, and the John Bunyans of the world, and the Jhhn Newtons of the world, and the John Calvins of the world, and other guys not named John.
Matt Tully
There are a few other ones, I suppose.
Justin Taylor
Yeah, there's maybe some. But, you know, those guys spoke certain things and why not hear their teaching? It's been captured for you and many people have found it to be encouraging and edifying and chances are that your preacher who's preaching to you—teaching to you from the Word—99.99% of the time it's not just been him and the Bible with no church history. He's reading commentaries. He's listening to what others have said, what they have said. I don't have the quote right in front of me, but Spurgeon one time said, "Why is it that some people pretend as if the Holy Spirit has only spoken through people who are still living?" If he uses the Holy Spirit in the lives of your friends, and your family, and your teachers, and your leaders, maybe he's done that in the past too? And you can benefit from that. Going back to that Lewis essay then, Lewis said that there will be cool breeze flowing through your mind when you go back to other centuries and you see how they thought and how they processed things. We're in a very challenging time culturally. Have there been other challenging times in church history where things have seemed like they're falling apart? How has the church respond poorly? How has the church responded well? That's another thing is it's not just didactic, positive teaching. You could look and see ways in which the church has inappropriately respond to the culture. We can learn from their mistakes as well as from the positive things that they have said. So I would hope that in a sit down conversation we could help somebody kind of walk through why that sort of perspective is just not really intellectually coherent and from a biblical perspective God tells us in the New Testament through his Word that we are to consider our leaders. We're to imitate them. We're to watch the faith of others. And why not do that over 2,000 years versus some limited span like 20 years?
The Impact of Church History
Matt Tully
I'm also struck by it's not just the potential impact that these dead guys and women could have on us, but also it's a recognition of the impact that they've already had on us. None of us, as you were saying, very few of us could really reasonably claim to approach the Bible as a blank slate. We're all formed and we're in church traditions that have a history to them that has kind of helped shape where we're at today.
Justin Taylor
Yeah, absolutely. It's just, there can be a very naive sense of me and my Bible and you don't realize this Bible didn't fall out of the sky. Jesus wasn't speaking English, neither was Paul, neither was Moses. Somebody had to capture that. Somebody has to decide what the original wording is. Somebody had to translate that into English. There's all sorts of ways I mean everywhere you look in which theologians, and teachers, and scholars have been affecting what you think. So even if you could sight read the New Testament in Greek, it's still not like you've escaped the influence of theologians upon what you're reading. It's just it's an inescapable fact of life and once you acknowledge that then you come around to saying like, "OK, am I going to be an informed Christian or an uninformed Christian? Am I going to know how to discern who's a good teacher from the past and who's a mixed teacher, a bad teacher, a false teacher?"
Edwards and Slavery
Matt Tully
Well Justin, thank you so much for joining us today on the show and for just sharing a little bit more about your own love of history and the ways that God has used church history to help form your faith today.
Justin Taylor
Thanks, Matt. A pleasure to sit down with you. You're welcome into my office anytime.
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