Knowledge of a little history helps

To this day, I remember something I read in the preface of this book. "In my experience, most Evangelicals who have any knowledge of Church history tend to think and speak as if it began on October 31, 1517. This was the memorable day when Martin Luther nailed up his 95 Theses, thus unwittingly sparking off the Protestant Reformation...But as for what went before Luther's protest -- Evangelicals often know nothing about it, and dismiss it all as a period of total darkness. (The footnote here says, "...but with a few flickering lights here and there...including Augustine of Hippo.) Of course, this means dismissing the overwhelming bulk of the Christian story: writing off the first 1,500 years in favour of the last 500."

A few lines later I read, “Among the precious promises of God’s Word are these, spoken by the Saviour Himself: “I will build My Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). Christ’s spiritual kingdom is indestructible and perpetual; He has always had, and will always have, an uninterrupted succession of believing people on earth...”

So I asked, What happened? Did the church go wrong after the last apostle died and didn't 'get right' again until Luther? Where was the evidence of the Holy Spirit's work during the first 1500 years? Where is that church?

I had assigned the above book, actually part of a set, by N. R. Needham, to Kiernan and Jillian in high school. It was one of the first books to help me ask some new questions and get outside my little world. Over the years, the questions kept coming, and I enjoyed digging for answers. A couple of early books I read on the subject were Becoming Orthodox by Peter Gillquist and The Orthodox Church by Timothy Ware.

There are several things I slowly learned to keep in mind as I read, though. One was that, for the most part, all of the history we have learned is from a Western perspective, through a Roman Catholic grid. As much as Protestants like to think that they have separated themselves from the Roman church, everything is in reference to them. Consequently if we read something about sacraments or Mary, or even the word “Catholic,” we automatically think, "Roman Catholic." Or if we read something about Church Councils, or Bishops, we think, “Roman Catholic.”

(I'm sounding awfully anti-Roman Catholic, and I honestly don't mean to. I do believe that the RC has some erroneous doctrines, but I don't believe that they are the great evil that I have heard preached from Protestant pulpits. I am merely trying to point out that I - and I believe many others - reject learning more about the early church because, as Protestants, we automatically think it is Roman.)

Tip #1: Roman Catholics are not the same as the Eastern Orthodox.

When we read something that was written in 110 AD, we Protestants think, “But this is Roman Catholic, so it must be wrong.” Actually it is not Roman Catholic. It is Orthodox. The entirety of the Christian Church for about the first 800 years was Orthodox. If you or I became a true Christian (right-believing, Nicene-believing) in 400 AD, we would have been Orthodox. There were conflicts leading up to the Great Schism, but, according to the RC church, and most of the history of the church that we learn in the West, the break came in 1054. (The Orthodox would put the date of the break a little later, but we'll talk about that another time.)

I thought I would post some charts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ChristianityBranches.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Protestantbranches.svg

http://saintignatiuschurch.org/timeline.html

One item of significance to me about the first chart, however, is that the gray line leading up to the Great Schism split shows the red line as Roman Catholic and the blue line as Eastern Orthodox. What the Orthodox claim is that they are actually a continuation of the gray line - no changes. Just holding to the original faith passed down from the Apostles and the early Church Fathers.

Do you believe them? Does it matter to you?