Gaining a good working knowledge of history in general and church history in particular is incumbent upon all believers….If we are not learning from history, we will be continuously repeating its mistakes.

Something far too many people today fail to do is learn history, and to learn from it. And that includes far too many Christians as well. Of course, contemporary Western education does not help in this regard. It either no longer really teaches history, or it engages in historical revisionism, rewriting the history books to reflect secular leftist ideology.

And we know that failing to know our actual history is a great way for tyrants to move in and take charge. And on a personal level, if we are not learning from history, we will be continuously repeating its mistakes. So gaining a good working knowledge of history in general and church history in particular is incumbent upon all believers.

There would be numerous volumes one can appeal to here. I want to just highlight three somewhat recent volumes that look at different aspects of the past, and what Christians can learn from it. The first one focuses on early Christianity, while the last two books examine the medieval church. I give a very brief description of each book, and then offer a representative quote or two from each one.

Bryan Lifton
Wisdom from the Ancients:
30 Forgotten Lessons from the Early Church.
Harvest House, 2022.

This volume focuses solely on the early church and informs us of how knowledge about the beliefs and practices of our forerunners can greatly help believers today to live and advance the Christian message. Some of the 30 points Lifton discusses include:

• Weakness is the best witness
• Christianity is for misfits
• Prayer isn’t a moment; It’s a Way of Life
• Invest in your library; It’s a Christian thing
• Empires are useful temptations
• God refuses to be a helicopter parent
• Without the Trinity, everyone stops short of heaven

Says Liftin:

In this book you’ll meet some spiritual mothers and fathers who have important lessons to teach us… There is great wisdom in listening to the previous ages. We need to learn the lessons of history lest we miss out on a blessing, or, as the saying goes, be doomed to repeat our mistakes. But to do this requires humility. Americans in particular tend to think of the future as the best place to cast our eyes. The next best thing is always around the corner. Yet as Christians, we have to be humble enough to pay attention to our ancestors and not always be looking ahead. Think about how much history the Bible records, both in the Old and the New Testament. Surely God wants us to learn from it! Hebrews 12:1 reminds us that there is a “cloud of witnesses” who ran the race before us. Shouldn’t their experience on the racetrack of life give us something valuable?

When it comes to church history, each generation has something important to pass on. But the part of history I want to emphasize in this book is the ancient church period. We can also refer to it as the “early church” or the era of the “church fathers.”‘ This historical era goes beyond the New Testament period—beyond the age of the original apostles. As you probably know, those first apostolic Christians lived and wrote and evangelized in the Roman Empire of the first century AD. But Christianity, of course, continued into the second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries and beyond. (pp. 6-7)

Since I am a booklover, here is a paragraph from his chapter on libraries:

Christians have always recognized the importance of books. Our faith has a longstanding relationship with words on a page. Not every religion is like this, nor every culture. When European colonists first landed in the New World, the native people had no written language. They communicated solely through speech and folklore. Even today, many cultures in Africa are characterized more by orality than literacy. Usually, when Christianity comes to such lands, it fosters the invention of a script and the dissemination of written communication. This has been true from the beginning of church history. In fact, it could even be said that the early church was what made books become so widespread in the world. It’s an interesting story that’s well worth telling. (p. 89)

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