We need to remember the constancy of human nature across time. Human beings are fallen, and we’ve always been fallen. When we look back in history, we need to avoid both idealizing the past and idealizing the present against the past. We are prone to the same kinds of temptations as our historical subjects. They were fallen just like us.

Human beings tend to idealize our favorite eras of history. It’s an easy mistake to make. Novelist L.P. Hartley once opined, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Just as we romanticize living in a foreign culture, we do the same thing with eras of history. Of course, if we were to actually plant our lives in the foreign country of our dreams, it wouldn’t take long for our naive idealism to give way to brute reality. The same is true for history. There’s never been a golden age.

For Christians, the belief that there was once a golden age for the church has long prevailed in the reforming imagination. The story goes like this: The church of the apostles was pure and faithful. However, at some point (usually coinciding with Constantine’s conversion in 312), corruption took over, and the church began a long process of decline. Ever since, various reform movements have arisen attempting to restore the church to its former pristine condition.

Now, I happen to count myself among those who believe that Constantine’s conversion introduced a new dynamic of corruption into the church. The effort to fuse Christ’s eternal kingdom to political power structures attempts to join two realms with contradictory values and goals. He told us his kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36). The church’s reliance on the word of God and the state’s dependence on the sword represent two distinct tools for accomplishing two very different God-ordained purposes. When we use the sword in service to the church and the gospel in service to nation-building, we run into all kinds of problems that I’ll refrain from listing here.

With that said, I reject the notion that there’s ever been a time in history when the church was pristine. There’s never been a golden age. Even when we look at passages like Acts 2:42-47, where the Spirit-filled church seems to have it all together, we need to balance it with passages like Acts 5:1-11 and 6:1 where that same congregation in Jerusalem clearly manifests sin among its members.

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