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Church History & Hermeneutics - How to Read the Bible E5
119 Plays2 years ago
Ugh, history. If our goal is to understand the Biblical authors, how much help is church history? Nick and Matt discuss the ways church history can help us understand the Bible, along with some of the things to be careful of.
Referenced Resources: Caesar and the Lamb by George Kalantzis, Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley
Theme Music: "Believe" by Posthumorous. More at https://linktr.ee/posthumorous
Interlude Music mixed and produced by the Re-Paradigmed team.
For more fun, check out www.reparadigmed.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 5: Church History and Bible Reading
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello again, it's the Reparadimed podcast. Today's episode 5 of our How to Read the Bible series, and we're discussing the relationship between Church history and Bible reading.
00:00:27
Speaker
Alright Matt,
How Does Church History Influence Bible Interpretation?
00:00:28
Speaker
today we're talking about history and hermeneutics. And more specifically, we're asking the question, how does church history influence our reading of the Bible? So this kind of goes along with our extra biblical context conversation.
00:00:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think when we interpret the Bible, we very much have readings of the Bible from church history on our minds as well. And we're careful to make sure that our readings of the Bible don't contradict certain people in church history or certain councils or certain creeds. We all kind of have this, I think, nascently inside of ourselves.
00:00:59
Speaker
Yeah, that stuff tends to carry a lot of weight. Yeah. So how does church history influence our hermeneutics? I think number
Faith and Mission in Church History
00:01:07
Speaker
one, a good study of church history encourages us in our mission to live out the biblical story. This isn't particular to I guess hermeneutics or how to study, how to read the Bible, but I just want to kind of trace out some of the benefits of reading and studying church history.
00:01:24
Speaker
This is probably the most powerful thing that reading church history does is it offers us these Christ-like examples of followers of Christ throughout the ages who have faithfully followed in the way of Jesus, even at great cost to themselves, depending on their time and their place.
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah, I found reading biographies or reading about people who stood really firm in their faith who went through difficult situations is super encouraging. Yeah. I think in particular of the early persecution of the Christians under the Roman Empire, first under Nero very early on, famously the Diocletian persecution and the Decian persecution. Those are
Moral Dilemmas Faced by Early Christians
00:02:02
Speaker
emperors. Yeah, Roman emperors, or just brutal and you can read about those in church history.
00:02:06
Speaker
We have folks like Polycarp whose testimony is recorded for us, many other early Christians who gave up their lives because of their faith, because they wouldn't bow the knee to the empire's demands at their time and place, and I just find that encouraging.
00:02:22
Speaker
Sure. People who were pretty dead set on their willingness to follow Jesus even to death. Yeah, exactly. This was a little bit newer to me, but the faithfulness of Christians who in that early period of church history were part of the Roman military and how they had such a difficult decision to make. If they wanted to follow Christ, the early church all agreed until basically post-Constantine or maybe post-Theodosius.
00:02:49
Speaker
that Christians should not kill. Even if they're part of the military and that's their job to kill them, they should not kill, especially in the name of empire. And so that put Roman soldiers in a particularly difficult position. If they wanted to convert to Christianity, they knew what that meant, and that meant they would have to renounce killing. The Roman military complex does not want soldiers who refuse to kill for the empire.
00:03:19
Speaker
not especially useful for its soldiers. Not particularly useful. And consider also like their colleagues, their comrades in arms, would you want to go into battle with someone who you knew would not kill that guy that's about to kill you? Sure. Obviously,
Challenges of Historical Christians in Following Christ
00:03:33
Speaker
the state has a vested interest in making sure their soldiers are all in, that they're not weak, that they're going to do what it takes to enforce law and order in the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome. Yeah.
00:03:45
Speaker
So soldiers that were part of the Roman military, they knew if they were to follow in the way of Jesus, that meant turning the other cheek. That meant not killing for the sake of empire. They for sure renounced killing and then let the cards fall where they may, which I think in some cases was probably not the best outcome for their physical well-being.
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, go have that conversation with your centurion and be like, hey, just want to let you know I've renounced violence because I'm a Christian now. Yeah, so that's just another example of just the
00:04:20
Speaker
Yeah, the encouraging example of people who sacrificed so much in their immediate lives, their well-being, the well-being of their bodies, of their careers and everything else in order to follow in the way of Jesus. George Colantis outlines this in his work, and particularly he's got a book called Caesar and the Lamb.
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah,
Church's Role in Literacy, Healthcare, and Philosophy
00:04:42
Speaker
just kind of those situations where Christians have been, the call of Christ has been very costly to people in the past. And reading about that, reading about people that have answered that call even at great cost to their lives is just encouraging. Yeah, for sure.
00:04:58
Speaker
I think reading church history also calls us to a more corporate faith. The history of the church should encourage us that God has remained faithful to his church despite all of our shortcomings. The history of the church is basically a bunch of messed up people doing messed up things all the time.
00:05:16
Speaker
And yet somehow Christianity increased literacy rates in the world. It built hospitals and schools and arguably was the philosophy that birthed modern science, modern medicine. So though there were forces within the church that pushed back against some of those things, I think it's hard to argue that it was anything other than the Christian religion that initially spawned those things, that birthed those things.
00:05:45
Speaker
The point being that
Christianity's Impact on Modern Rights and Welfare
00:05:46
Speaker
the world is a far better place today because of Christianity, though a lot of figures in church history have screwed a lot of things up and there has been a lot of violence in the name of Christ. Though that's all the case, the world is still a better place today because of it. We have modern notions of rights and of protecting the poor and of feeding the starving. None of these things existed in the Roman Empire, for example.
00:06:15
Speaker
And I'm not sure we should be very confident that enlightenment ideals and humanistic ideals like these would inevitably become the norm in our modern society if it weren't for Christianity, if it weren't for the Church of God. So it's a mixed bag because people within the Church like me and like you are so screwed up.
00:06:36
Speaker
Yet through all that, God has turned the world upside down through the church and in a positive way. And I find that encouraging, but challenging as well.
00:06:46
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. You look at specific people and events, it's easy to sometimes get down about Christianity or its effects in the world and just be like, oh, it's all just broken people, what difference does it make? But you step back and take that kind of bigger view and you start seeing the trees, or not just the trees, but you start seeing the forest and it's like, oh wow, actually Christianity has been doing amazing things and making huge advances in the world. Yeah, for sure.
00:07:23
Speaker
And we
Decoding the Bible through Church History
00:07:24
Speaker
do also think that studying church history can help us understand the Bible. So now we're getting more specific to hermeneutics. Some people throughout church history are not as removed culturally from the biblical authors as we are today. Oh, sure. And when that happens...
00:07:39
Speaker
When we are listening to people who aren't as culturally removed from the Bible as we are today, very often they're going to have particular insights into the meaning of the Bible, that original intent of the biblical author. They'll have particular insights that we wouldn't necessarily intuitively have today.
00:07:57
Speaker
So a couple examples of that would be obviously the earliest Christians. Again, to go back to that pre-Theodosius era church, so pre-380 Common Era. Sure, sure, sure. I was going to say 38080. I'll just say Common Era. Yeah, so before Christianity is the official basically state religion. Sure.
00:08:18
Speaker
Christianity was a minority group. For sure, pre-Concenting 310, 312, the edict of Milan. But Christianity was a minority group and was very often persecuted in different times and places under different Roman emperors.
00:08:32
Speaker
And that context is far more akin to even Second Temple Judaism, pre-70 common era when Jerusalem was destroyed and the temple was destroyed. The world into which Paul was born, the world into which Jesus of Nazareth was born was a world where the Jews were under the oppression of Rome.
00:08:53
Speaker
They had to figure out how to live under that yoke of that empire and they had to play their cards right and they had to be careful and they had to be peaceful because if they weren't, they got destroyed. And that's what eventually happens, obviously, not to the Jesus followers who turned the other cheek and walked the extra mile, but those who took up arms against the Roman empire. So early Christians living still under that Roman oppression
00:09:20
Speaker
They shared a common, not only experience of oppression, but also very often the same language that if Paul and the apostles and Jesus of Nazareth spoke some Greek, for example, let's assume they did, they would share a language with them, share much more culture with them, political situation, like I noted.
00:09:40
Speaker
there's a bunch of different experiences that the very earliest Christians had that put them at a closer cultural time and place to the biblical writings than we are today or than anyone else has been in church history. And so I think their writings have value.
00:09:57
Speaker
Oh, sure. Yeah. When we talk about trying to understand the New Testament in context, we try to imagine like, well, what would it be like reading this as a first century Jewish Christian convert in Rome or wherever? Like try to put yourself in that context. Well, it's cool.
Insights from Early Christian Writings
00:10:13
Speaker
We actually have writings from Christians who are in either that exact context or very close context.
00:10:18
Speaker
So where we're unable to read the Bible intuitively because we've got this big cultural barrier, well, we've got writings from Christians who did not have that same cultural barrier. So they were able to just pick up the readings or the writings of Paul or whoever, read them in their first language and understand it much more intuitively than we would be able to. So those writings have cool value.
00:10:40
Speaker
writings of Irenaeus and Polycarp, First Clements, Didache, there's a bunch of documents that we have from very early Christians. And actually, a lot of these folks claim, and I think there's good reason to think they're not lying, but claim a direct line of descent from the apostles. So the apostles would disciple someone who would disciple this person, and we've got writings from them, for example.
00:11:04
Speaker
And so you have just a closer connection when you go very, very early in church history, post-apostolic period. And to your point, we would assume that they would have a decent understanding of the meaning of the apostles, of the meaning of the New Testament writings in this case. And so I think those are probably prime, prime pieces of literature from church history to study if we're trying to understand the Bible better. Sure.
00:11:31
Speaker
I think also in all times and places actually, not necessarily only in ancient ones. Think of like Jewish converts to Christianity or people who have practiced Judaism their whole life that come to believe that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. They
Understanding Biblical Texts Through Jewish Contexts
00:11:46
Speaker
are far more familiar with the Old Testament than your average non-Jewish person that becomes a Christian today. Honestly, your average evangelical convert in the United States of America
00:11:58
Speaker
Jewish writers often have more of a shared context with the New Testament writings because they also are familiar with the Old Testament and what the New Testament authors are doing with the Old Testament meaning. Yeah, we talked previously about 2000 references in the New Testament to the Old Testament. If somebody comes in familiar with the Old Testament, they're way ahead of the game in understanding the New Testament. Yeah, absolutely.
00:12:24
Speaker
Yeah, a little bit of a caveat there. Modern Judaism has departed quite a bit from, I guess, Second Temple Judaism in that unfortunately, very early on, there was a anti-Jewish bent of the Christian community. Very early on, the church, which was kind of becoming more Gentile, started to sort of blame the Jews for killing the Messiah. And that led to this infighting.
00:12:51
Speaker
Paul is already dealing with a bunch of issues related to Gentiles and Jews trying to get together and be a part of the same covenant community. I mean, that was difficult from the beginning, from the inception of the church. Yeah, working through all those things. That only became harder. And unfortunately, I think there was a lot of bad blood between non-Jewish converts and Jewish converts. And then the Judaism that didn't accept Jesus' Messiahship
00:13:16
Speaker
reacted against the Christian movement and kind of set itself against it. And so modern Judaism is a bit different than Second Temple Judaism. And so I guess we need to be aware of that as well and make that caveat. Yeah, for sure. You can't just take later rabbinical writings and be like, oh, this Judaism is representative of the Judaism that Paul and Jesus were interacting with, for sure.
00:13:39
Speaker
Right. That's the point I'm trying to make. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Think also of oppressed people throughout different times and places in history. If you
Unique Insights from Oppressed Groups in History
00:13:49
Speaker
are an oppressed person, I think I noted this already, but if you're an oppressed person, someone who doesn't have political or cultural relevance or cachet, you are in a social situation that is far more similar
00:14:02
Speaker
to that of Jesus and the apostles and early Christians than we are today, than me and you are today. Sitting as fairly comfortable evangelicals in the United States of America, which against what some people would have you think, we actually have a ton of political
00:14:20
Speaker
relevance and cultural cache. We basically chose the former president and many presidents since the 1960s, you know, evangelicals, you know, as a voting bloc. So we've got a ton of influence in our culture. No one's out to get us, really. Obviously, we're fighting our culture wars and all that good stuff.
00:14:40
Speaker
Come on, we're comfortable. We've got a lot of status. We're just fine. We're certainly not super close culturally to the Israelites in Egypt or to even Jewish people under the boot of Rome in the first century. Jewish people under the boot of Rome and then also the early Christians under the boot of Rome as well. Yeah.
00:15:01
Speaker
Yeah. And so oppressed people sometimes give us new insight into the meaning of the biblical text, which is very often written from a place of oppression. I think personally of writers like Esa Macaulay, who has a wonderful book, Reading While Black, I recommend. Other people from within the historically black Christian tradition who have powerfully exposited themes in the Bible like exile and the meaning of deliverance.
00:15:29
Speaker
When people that have an experience like the black church has in the United States of America, not only in the antebellum South, but basically throughout United States history of second tier status and oppressed status because of systems that have been in place in our country in particular, I realized that we're not unique to the world and in oppressing people. But when people from within those groups that are oppressed,
00:15:56
Speaker
exposit texts of scripture that speak of deliverance through oppression, there's more of a weight to it. There's more intuitive insight that they have perhaps than I would have just reading a text from a position of political, cultural prominence. Yeah, they
Cultural Contexts in Bible Interpretation
00:16:15
Speaker
get it sometimes a lot more easily than somebody who hasn't been in that life experience is going to.
00:16:20
Speaker
Yeah, so I think the readings of these folks throughout church history, oppressed people throughout church history can be helpful towards understanding the biblical text and the meaning that the biblical author was trying to get to in their time and place. And then also, you know, people before, let's just say 1600s, 1700s, before the Enlightenment period tended to be less individualistic in their worldview. And sometimes that's helpful.
00:16:45
Speaker
for us because the Bible, the entire Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament is written very much within a collectivistic culture, which is nothing like our American context right now. And so reading folks from within collectivistic cultures, even today, I think they can sometimes have insight into the meaning of the biblical text that just pass over my brain and yours.
00:17:11
Speaker
Recently, I was reading some parables. They were mysterious to me. They weren't quite making sense. But then when I consciously switched all the use to second person plural, use, like you alls, which is very typical of actually the New Testament, not only in the parables, but in Paul, whatever.
00:17:29
Speaker
When I switch that and turn it into a group application, things started to actually make sense with what's going on in the parables. The same thing happens with Paul. If you try to read Paul's letter and read all the use as singular use, which they're not in Greek, by the way, usually, if we change those to singular use, things don't make as much sense.
00:17:51
Speaker
put those and read them as collectivistic exhortations and admonitions, things start to make sense again. I mean, the Bible was written to a community in a collectivistic culture. Yeah. So we have this desire because we're in this super modern individualistic culture to kind of twist scripture. We want to read it through a lens that's comfortable to us.
00:18:11
Speaker
But reading people from church history who aren't fighting through that same lens can help us to realize, oh, I'm actually misreading this. Seeing the writings of people who aren't working through that barrier and are able to read it intuitively better can be a good reminder for us. Oh, yeah, that's right. It's my modern culture that's pushing me to take this weird individualistic reading that Paul certainly didn't intend. Absolutely.
00:18:49
Speaker
I will say
Original Context vs. Past Interpretations
00:18:50
Speaker
that there are some pitfalls of studying church history. One of them is simply being in the past does not automatically make someone more authoritative or insightful in their exposition of biblical meaning. For some of us, it's easy to have this ideal of the glory days in the past, whatever the past may be. People tend to pick different times, periods of history, places in history that are special to them for one reason or another.
00:19:18
Speaker
and they'll think of that as the golden era. What I'm saying is just because an interpretation of the Bible was made in the past, let's say in 1750 as opposed to 2022, does not make it more authoritative or correct than one made in 2022. And I think we need to acknowledge that it's sort of intuitive to be like,
00:19:40
Speaker
Well, I want my readings of the Bible to be in line with an ancient tradition. And I think that impulse is actually pretty good. The only problem is, is how ancient are we talking? It's not necessarily a virtue just to go back a couple hundred years and be like, ah, this is an ancient tradition now. A couple hundred years ago in any place in the world, they are very much removed from the original culture and context of the New Testament and of the Old Testament.
00:20:06
Speaker
Therefore, if we want to value ancient readings, we should go all the way back as much as possible. The very early church, if anything, as we had mentioned, or contemporaneous writings. Yeah. If you're going to say authorial intent is the goal here, then you have to go all the way back.
00:20:26
Speaker
Also, people throughout church history have not been in as good a position as we are today to mine the context of the biblical texts for authorial intent. And here's what I mean. Today we have the technology available. Me and you both have a laptop sitting on a table in front of us with a bunch of resources and tools
00:20:48
Speaker
that allow us to, yeah, I guess the word I like to use is mine for background information that can help us get into the mind of the author, right? These electronic tools are powerful and we have like control F. Like we can search documents, ancient documents, ancient writings. You can find them on the internet or get published literature on the internet and you can find what you're looking for. This is powerful.
00:21:14
Speaker
for being able to get to learn about the context of the biblical writings. Also, we have more resources. We're going to do a whole podcast just talking about the better position we are in today than we ever have been before on just the collection of resources that we have from times and cultures similar to contemporaneous with or prior to the biblical writings, which lend insight into what's going on within the biblical writings.
00:21:44
Speaker
And to get at your point with the technology, the technology allows people not only easier access to this information, but to share it and to have this dialogue and set of conversations. So you can get 50 scholars from different parts of the world who are doing different work on this, mining these resources, as you like to say.
00:22:01
Speaker
And then technology offers a really easy way for them to share and put all this together into one shared space where they can all dialogue on this. That kind of stuff would have taken hundreds of years before technology and the internet made this all really easy to do.
00:22:16
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess the point is that there is a big technology and resource disparity between us and basically anyone else in church history. And that fact alone actually puts us in a better position if we know how to use these tools to read the Bible contextually than people have had throughout church history.
00:22:37
Speaker
So just we do need to, I think, be aware of that, that oftentimes people in church history were operating with less tools and less resources than we are today.
00:22:47
Speaker
And you're speaking specifically to people in church history who are removed culturally, contextually from the biblical authors. Which is most of them. Yep. So for the vast majority of church history, intuitive readings of the Bible are going to be off a little bit unless people have... Or at least we have reason to think that they're off because everyone's blinded by their own cultural
00:23:07
Speaker
lenses. So unless you've got the tools available to actually recover some of this cultural context of the Bible, you're going to be limited on your ability to understand it well. I think so. Yeah.
00:23:20
Speaker
Yeah, like I was saying, all figures in church history had cultural blinders on because of their context and me and you do today. The goal in Bible reading as me and you are advocating is trying our best to remove those cultural blinders to not do intuitive reading based on
00:23:37
Speaker
my worldview, my modern American Western worldview, and to try to put ourselves within the cultural context of the author as best as possible and understand what the author is trying to communicate to their audience in the biblical writings. We think that that is where the meaning of the Bible is located, and we think the Bible has relevance for us only by first understanding that meaning and then making application to our context today or at any time in history.
00:24:07
Speaker
So it's interesting if you look back at somebody from, I don't know, the 12th century or whatever, and you go, okay, this guy seems really smart. I like his understanding of the Bible. If he's not doing this work to go back and recover the context of the first century or earlier, whatever text he's looking at, then what we're really doing is saying, okay, I don't want to have my cultural understanding of scripture, but I'm just going to go take like a 12th century understanding of scripture. But I'm fine with his. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That seems problematic.
00:24:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's not great. That's why I'm just calling it a pitfall, or just like, we just need to be careful about that. Not to just prioritize people in the past, just because they're in the past. They must be better than us at Bible reading.
00:25:06
Speaker
So all
Diverse Theological Views in Church History
00:25:07
Speaker
of a sudden, reading church history challenges the questions and the assumptions that we have. I think reading church history should encourage us to question our traditions, our very particular Christian traditions that we were just born into. Now, I don't mean to throw it all out or anything, but when you read church history, you just quickly realize that everyone has thought different things about different doctrines at different times and at different places.
00:25:34
Speaker
It's kind of a crapshoot. Like, yeah, it's it's pretty hard to find like a consistent, very specific orthodoxy, let's say, on every doctrinal issue. There's no such thing. Right. There are some sort of central truths that the Western church has somewhat coalesced around, but not that many. Sure. You know, a Trinitarian doctrine is one that is pretty consistent throughout Western church history.
00:26:02
Speaker
But even that language is not used by all people who'd call themselves Christians, like the Watchtower Tracks Society. And I'm not saying all things are equal here, I'm just making the point that basically everything that we call Orthodox, someone has believed something differently. Someone who claims the name of Jesus, and who claims to submit to the authority of Jesus of Nazareth, as we do,
00:26:25
Speaker
has believed something differently. And so, I mean, I think that should just maybe push us to hold our secondary beliefs, like the ones that aren't central to Jesus' Lord and worship Him, bow your knees to Jesus, the King of the universe. Beliefs that aren't that, we should maybe hold them just a little bit more loosely. Sure.
00:26:46
Speaker
I'm very interested in church doctrine and systematic theology and things like that. I love debating it and I think I'm right about everything, as you do, by the way, as everyone does, by the way. But that being said, I think we need to just hold all those particular beliefs that aren't very much central to worshiping Jesus as the supreme authority, kind of with open hands.
00:27:09
Speaker
Sure. So maybe I don't need to want to go burn down the church across the street because they believe something slightly different than what we believe. Right, exactly. That would be one low-hanging fruit application. I appreciate that. Yeah. And I've definitely experienced that. You grow up in a church and you kind of get a very curated view of church history that
00:27:29
Speaker
you know, makes it very clear to everybody there like, hey, we're the one tradition that's held really closely to this, this truth. And then you study church history. I think while you go look at other perspectives and take a broader view and you definitely start to realize like, oh, this is just one of the many branches of church history that have branched off. And I just happened to be born into this one. It definitely led to me being more willing to say, okay, you know what? Just because the church I grew up in believes XYZ doesn't mean that that's necessarily the best path forward.
00:27:59
Speaker
It's led to me being much more willing to say, okay, well, let's go back, look at other perspectives, try to understand the Bible in its original context, and sometimes that's gonna lead to me being willing to say, okay, maybe this idea that my church held onto isn't the best possible take on this piece of scripture.
00:28:15
Speaker
And I think we should say too that everything we're saying right now comes from a particularly Protestant view of authority.
Protestant vs. Catholic Authority on Scripture
00:28:23
Speaker
We hold the Bible as the only supreme authority for religious thought and practice, and we don't invest any particular ecclesial structure or tradition with that same kind of authority. And I think the Catholics have a kind of a different view on that, so it'd be fun to maybe debate them on this at some other time.
00:28:43
Speaker
I should say that that there's traditions that wouldn't agree with our whole take here. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, studying church history should also help us to see the temptation to allow our historical moment to influence our interpretation of the meaning of the Bible. We talked around this already, but the Bible has relevance for our historical moment for sure, but it is not talking directly into our historical moment. Yeah.
00:29:12
Speaker
So that should just help us to be a little bit careful about interpretations of the Bible or theological movements, theological systems that are built largely on the historical moment of today and my time and my place. Unless that
The Influence of Historical Contexts on Theology
00:29:26
Speaker
theological belief is coming from new insight into the original context of the Bible, we should be a little bit suspect if the reading of the Bible is just based on my current experience in my country.
00:29:40
Speaker
And you definitely see that through a lot of church history. Well, look, suddenly the church starts to believe this idea that's very financially beneficial to them in this context, not because they were studying scripture and had better understanding of authorial intent, but because this idea was gonna make them a lot of money and all of a sudden this is what they start believing. That should be good evidence to us that, okay, maybe this isn't coming from a great place.
00:30:03
Speaker
Yeah, after the Protestant Reformation, the Protestant Church and the Reformers all of a sudden started believing that the Pope was the Antichrist because they were opposed by the Catholic Church and there was terrible fighting between the two. And then it's easy in that context to just be like, oh, well, the other side is obviously the most evil thing ever. They are the Antichrist. That wasn't a particularly biblical insight. It was just like, this is what it feels like to me. This is the meaning of the Bible.
00:30:32
Speaker
you get during the slave trade and suddenly specific interpretations of the curse of Cain come really popular. People start seeing the mark of Cain as being the curse that he's made black. This isn't an idea that we have seen throughout church history. It's an idea that pops up and becomes super popular all of a sudden when people are trying to justify slavery and they're partaking in slavery. It's a reading of the Bible that conveniently justifies my present action.
00:30:58
Speaker
Yeah, and you could go into... Oh, that's so sketchy though, especially in that case. Yeah. I think this is one of the places where studying church history is really helpful because you could take that idea and go into the scripture and work through it, look at authorial intent and be like, okay, I'm pretty confident here. This doesn't line
Recognizing Cultural Biases in Interpretations
00:31:14
Speaker
up. This is a bad idea. But that would take a lot of time. Sometimes studying church history, if you're like, oh, look, I see the context where this idea suddenly becomes really popular, that is a huge red flag that, oh, this idea is a bogus idea.
00:31:28
Speaker
look at why and where and when it becomes popular. And lots of times, it's pretty easy to see why something's happening. Yeah. Yeah. And those individuals, our argument is that they're doing bad Bible reading. They are employing bad hermeneutics. And reading in that way, reading these, I guess, warning examples should enlighten us to the fact that we are capable of doing the same thing.
00:31:50
Speaker
And that should even more inspire us to have a intentional, grounded reading of the Bible that is not hopefully influenced by the situation that we are currently in, by my personal ambition, by my cultural understanding.
00:32:07
Speaker
Neither me or you is saying that historical traditions or church traditions should all be thrown out and that we should have a more or less negative view of all of church history or of all of these different traditions that have tried to carry the name of Jesus through their times and places.
00:32:24
Speaker
actually
Unity and Grace in Acknowledging Church Flaws
00:32:25
Speaker
quite the opposite. So as long as we understand that we are all very messed up and that people in the past are very messed up, so are we. As long as we understand that and like that's just a given, right? Let's start there. Then I think we can actually have just a lot of grace to a lot of people that have believed different things in different times and places.
00:32:44
Speaker
And it should encourage us, just even that disparity of beliefs, on doctrinal issues that aren't central to the claim that Jesus is the supreme authority, that should encourage us to, I think, have an ecumenical approach and to really live into the desire that Jesus expresses in John 17 when he prays to the Father that his people would be one, just as Jesus is in the Father and the Father is in him.
00:33:11
Speaker
so also that his people would be one with one another, one with each other, and one in him, the Messiah.
00:33:18
Speaker
Yeah, that should really be our attitude toward all of God's people throughout history, in the past and also in the present, while understanding that we're all very flawed and shouldn't be put on a pedestal or anything like that. To wrap up, then, Church History encourages us by showcasing the faithfulness of God, working through flawed people to accomplish His purposes,
00:33:41
Speaker
And also, I think even the faithfulness of God's people who have faithfully followed God in the middle of very existential sacrifice that they've had to make for the name of Christ.
Revealing Historical-Cultural Layers in Biblical Understanding
00:33:53
Speaker
Church history can also help us better understand the scriptures if it is helping us remove some cultural layers between ourselves and the biblical authors, which sometimes it is. So we gave some examples of maybe those type of people in church history who are able to do that for us. We did say that studying church history does not necessarily help us understand the Bible better, though, just by virtue of being in the past.
00:34:16
Speaker
And then I think studying church history humbles us when we see the great diversity of theological views over the ages.