The story of the history of the Church is a drama, a powerful drama. Why study it?

1) It gives you understanding. How did we get the way we are? A study of the drama answers that. The study of history can make you wise without gray hair and wrinkles (though one certainly cannot say the same    about the writing of that history!)

2) The study of history introduces you to new friends. How else could you meet Augustine, John of the Cross, Martin Luther, John Wesley or Charles Finney? Only as you investigate the drama can you meet them.

3) You learn the price that was paid for you!

4) You avoid the pitfalls and the land mines of history. It has been said that he who is not a student of history is condemned to repeat it. The study of history is not done to exalt tradition.  In fact, tradition can be enslaving. As Richard Halverson noted, "Tradition can be dangerous. It can not only modify the truth; it can replace it altogether." A study of history teaches us which traditions are suffocating and need to be avoided and which are so crucial that they must be preserved at all costs.

5) Studying history increases your effectiveness. You see what worked, what was effective. Mark Shaw said it all in the title of his book, Ten Great Ideas from Church History.
6) History enhances your endurance. When you see what those before you endured, you will be encouraged to persevere.

7) History will inspire you. Information may guide you, but inspiration keeps you going. A study of history can inspire. Hopefully, this one will.

8) History makes the dead come to life. My friend Harold Ivan Smith says "no person is dead as long as someone keeps saying their name or telling their stories." By telling this     drama, the historical figures live once again.

9) The study of history humbles you by helping you to understand that there was life before you were born. John Wesley once said to Adam Clarke, "If I were to write my own life, I should begin it before I was born."

Copyright 2002, JimGarlow.com all rights reserved, used by permission

      Our "Heroes" page is a biographical timeline with samples of their writings included so you may experience their wisdom firsthand.

      The list of names to your left could be called "Heaven's Hall of Fame." They are apostles, willing martyrs, reluctant bishops, reformers, scholars, and people not so unlike those found in many pulpits and ministries today. Some have amazing stories though: heroic hermits like Anthony who only wanted to be alone in the desert with the Lord but had to contend those who wanted healing prayers, would be disciples and, of course, demons.  Read about  Athanasius 'contra munda' who even ambushed the Emperor to get in a word, and other preachers so passionate for God that they ruined their health through fasting but  took thousands of souls with them to heaven. Or the Celtic monks who converted their would be killers through gentle friendship while their brothers were home keeping western civilization's library open. We have the other  missionaries to the Picts, Franks, Freesians and Vikings, the founders of universities, those who came before and after Francis who gave away all so they could gain everything, mystics, street preachers and preachers to kings, a string of reformers, some burnt at the stake, all staking their all, taking their stand, puritan, pietist, Hernhutt's 100 year prayer meeting , Moravian missionaries and Halle heroes, Jonathan Edwards (was it his preaching or did Freylinghuysen usher in the Awakening? What about the Second, and the Third!), SPCK and the modern missionary movement, Evangelical Moody, Spurgeon, Murray, Keswick, Holiness, Pentecostal, charismatic,

whew! let's take a breath...

     What we have here is a timeline of apostles, men and women sent...

     The same Holy Spirit who sent Jesus into the desert after his baptism (Mark 1:12), sent these figures from the past, and the Spirit still sends today, in the dramatic and the routine situations of life.

     Why? With a message, that in Jesus of Nazareth the Kingdom of God has come near.

     So, in bodegas, malls and casbahs, over a coffee break in the lunch room or a pint in a pub, in waiting rooms and funeral parlors, in the halls of power and soup kitchens, in troop carriers and peace marches, disciples are making disciples, the Word breaks in, penetrates the world, retakes ground from the demonic, transfers our citizenship, regenerates, takes the futile and makes it fertile, turns wrong upside right, outside in, insiders out,  the lowly are raised as heavies fall, grown men are reborn, the whole world is turned upside down (and isn't it time to do it again and do it right this time?)

     Besides all that, if you want to know where you are going you will be reflecting on where you've been, and if you get tired of reflecting on what you know and want to study what other people think, before too long you will be studying church history because if you go back far enough it was only the monks who knew how to read! Maybe we should read them?

    Seriously, if you are concerned about where we are going, and doesn't it seem like we are going somewhere awful fast, doesn't it seem like we should take a long, slow look at where we've been?

     If you agree that it would be good for you to become better acquainted with your forebears begin with the first apostles, then Ignatius, Polycarp and Irenaeus, and follow the red thread up unto our present multicultural tapestry of voices, perhaps thereby seeing the  magnificent, panoramic sweep of Christ's constant call to come, follow.

    Disciples making disciples. Christ, his cause and his Church, using methodical mystics to reform His Church.

     We want to thank all the scholars like James E. Kiefer (up to the Reformation the bios are nearly all his work) for being generous with their scholarship and helping me put together a modest teaching tool for anyone with a similar curiosity.

    Take your time and return often. We'd love your feedback: ericswe@regent.edu

Here is an essay from one of our favorite writers of last century, C. S. Lewis. It is actually an introcuction to Athanasius's On the Incarnation

         
     There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about "isms" and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.
This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

    Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o'clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why?the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity ("mere Christianity" as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook; even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united, united with each other and against earlier and later ages, by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century, the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

    I myself was first led into reading the Christian classics, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor and Bunyan, I read because they are themselves great English writers; others, such as Boethius, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, because they were "influences." George Macdonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity. They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading them. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think, as one might be tempted who read only con- temporaries, that "Christianity" is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages "mere Christianity" turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognise, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe?Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed "Paganism" of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet?after all?so unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life:

      an air that kills
      From yon far country blows.

We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them. They are bad, but such people do not know what it looks like from without. Seen from there, what is left intact despite all the divisions, still appears (as it truly is) an immensely formidable unity. I know, for I saw it; and well our enemies know it. That unity any of us can find by going out of his own age. It is not enough, but it is more than you had thought till then. Once you are well soaked in it, if you then venture to speak, you will have an amusing experience. You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan, a Pantheist when you are quoting Aquinas, and so forth. For you have now got on to the great level viaduct which crosses the ages and which looks so high from the valleys, so low from the mountains, so narrow compared with the swamps, and so broad compared with the sheep-tracks.

     The present book is something of an experiment. The translation is intended for the world at large, not only for theological students. If it succeeds, other translations of other great Christian books will presumably follow. In one sense, of course, it is not the first in the field. Translations of the Theologia Germanica, the Imitation, the Scale of Perfection, and the Revelations of Lady Julian of Norwich, are already on the market, and are very valuable, though some of them are not very scholarly. But it will be noticed that these are all books of devotion rather than of doctrine. Now the layman or amateur needs to be instructed as well as to be exhorted. In this age his need for knowledge is particularly pressing. Nor would I admit any sharp division between the two kinds of book. For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.