In a recent statement regarding some of the cultural turmoil in North America, fellow historian Owen Strachan made an observation about church history that I found quite surprising. He noted that “Epic stands for truth…are usually taken alone, so high is their cost.”

I found it quite surprising because my own study of church history, now stretching back to the fabulous courses I took at Wycliffe College in the 1970s under men like John Egan, Eugene Fairweather, Michael Sheehan, and then teaching full-time from 1982 to the present at a variety of seminaries and colleges, has given me a fundamentally different perspective.

It is one that I have learned inductively from church history (be it the Apostolic era with the Pauline circle, or the Cappadocian Fathers, or the Celtic Church, or the Reformers, or the Puritan brotherhood, or the Evangelical revivals of the 18th century—all of which I have studied in depth), and it is namely this:

God never does a great work in the history of the Church except through a band of brothers and sisters. This is true of the Ancient Church, the Celtic Church and its powerful missions, the Reformation, the Puritans, and the Evangelical Revivals of the 18th century.

The idea of one lone figure standing for Truth against the minions of evil and the failure of like-minded men to stand with him is the product more of a reading of church history shaped by a “High Noon” culture than the actual facts.

And in some ways to assert otherwise is to make church history a narrative of “celebrities” when the reality is better expressed in these concluding lines of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” (albeit she would have meant them quite differently):

“That things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

The “Great Man” Way of Doing History

Prof Strachan’s remark “Epic stands for truth…are usually taken alone, so high is their cost” is redolent of the “great man” way of doing history. In contrast, I am concerned to affirm that in church history and in the church there are no small people.