The Protestantism they founded has since had a rich history of confessions. The very existence of these witnesses to the fact that classical Protestants understand that Christianity is not reinvented every Sunday when the minister opens his Bible and begins to preach. That being the case, it is critical that in educating the rising generation within the Church, there is proper acknowledgment of the role of history in the formation of Christianity and a proper appreciation for the richness of the Christian heritage.

Many years ago, one my academic mentors told me that the task of the historian was to make things more complicated. There are hints of that over at Scot McKnight’s blog. In a post yesterday he commented on recent observations by Albert Mohler on recent conversions of Southern Baptist twins to Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism respectively. In addition to the entertaining ambiguity of the title of the piece, McKnight concludes by suggesting that some of such conversions might be precipitated by the discovery of church history:

[M]aybe their pastors were wise and pointed each of them to the great tradition of the church, a great tradition often ignored by Baptist approaches to theology. My own research (in Finding Faith, Losing Faith) on why evangelicals become Catholic revealed some crises were created when evangelicals discovered the minefield called church history and, in particular, the patristic era.

McKnight puts his finger on one of the key problems faced by those evangelicals who tend towards a no-creed-but-the-Bible approach: It is not quite Protestantism as the Reformers conceived of it. They delighted in the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian Creeds. The Protestantism they founded has since had a rich history of confessions. The very existence of these witnesses to the fact that classical Protestants understand that Christianity is not reinvented every Sunday when the minister opens his Bible and begins to preach. That being the case, it is critical that in educating the rising generation within the Church, there is proper acknowledgment of the role of history in the formation of Christianity and a proper appreciation for the richness of the Christian heritage.

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