The story of the saints down through history is a story of joy lost and found, of glory smothered and shining. From the church fathers to the Reformation to our own century, we learn that true and deep joy grows dim whenever God’s glory is eclipsed. But when God’s glory shines, then the saints sing for joy.

In the last two thousand years, God has filled the history of his church with stories—of persecution and endurance, of sorrow and hope, of failure and repentance. The history of the church has been dramatic and epic. Perhaps the most important story of all, however, is the one about joy and glory. This is the story that underpins and frames the others, because it is the story of the church finding her joy in the glory of God.

The story of the saints down through history is a story of joy lost and found, of glory smothered and shining. From the church fathers to the Reformation to our own century, we learn that true and deep joy grows dim whenever God’s glory is eclipsed. But when God’s glory shines, then the saints sing for joy.

In this article, we’re going to take the long film reel of the church’s history since the apostles and zoom in on four key scenes that illumine the whole film. We will look at the early church first, at the great Augustine second, at the Reformers third, and finally at two giants in modern theology.

Scene 1: The Early Church

Let’s start in the first centuries after the apostles, where perhaps the dominating issue was this question: Who exactly is Jesus? The orthodox church had to fight for the truth that Jesus is truly God—and that he truly became human. And that was a fight for the fact that we truly see the glory of God in the face of Christ—and that his birth is good news of great joy.

Truly Human

Consider, first, the fight to uphold Jesus’s true humanity. In the early days after the New Testament, there were some who just could not believe that God himself could have become truly human. So they dismissed the very possibility and said that Christ must only have seemed to be human (they were thus known as “docetists” from the Greek word dokein, meaning “to seem”). Christ, they argued, was a spirit. Therefore, he didn’t really eat, breathe, or die; he didn’t even really leave footprints, they said. Rather, he only pretended to eat in front of his shortsighted disciples; he pretended to walk, while all along floating through the world.

It was just what the apostle John repeatedly condemned. He writes, for example, “Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist” (2 John 7 NIV). And why was it such a problem to deny Christ’s humanity? The fourth-century theologian Gregory Nazianzen summed up the church’s thinking when he answered, “Whatever [Christ] has not taken to himself he has not healed” (On God and Christ, “Epistle to Cledonius I”).

That is, Christ took our humanity in order to heal it of its sin: he would take it through death into a new life, and bring it back to God. But if Christ did not truly take our humanity, then humanity will not be healed by him. No good news of great joy without that. What Gregory had seen with limpid clarity was that Jesus’s humanity is essential for the salvation of our humanity. He simply could not be the head of a new humanity if he was not truly human. He could not be our kinsman-redeemer or the true Bridegroom of his people if we were not flesh of his flesh.

Also, it was belief in the true humanity of Christ that gave so much comfort and joy to the many martyrs of the early church. A good example is Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred about AD 110. Ignatius’s entire motivation in accepting martyrdom was based upon his belief in the real incarnation of Christ: Ignatius longed for martyrdom because then he would be copying Christ. But if Christ did not really suffer in his body, then Ignatius could not be copying him at all. “If that is the case, I die for no reason,” he wrote (Apostolic Fathers, Trallians 10.1). Instead, Ignatius wanted his life and death to proclaim:

There is only one physician, who is both flesh and spirit, born and unborn, God in man, true life in death, both from Mary and from God, first subject to suffering and then beyond it, Jesus Christ our Lord. (Apostolic Fathers, Ephesians 7.2)

Belief in such a Christ gave him the boldness to write to the Christians in Rome, where he’d be thrown to the beasts:

I implore you: do not be unseasonably kind to me. Let me be food for the wild beasts…Bear with me—I know what is best for me. Now at last I am beginning to be a disciple. May nothing visible or invisible envy me, so that I may reach Jesus Christ. Fire and cross and battles with wild beasts, mutilation, mangling, wrenching of bones, the hacking of limbs, the crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil—let these come upon me, only let me reach Jesus Christ! (Apostolic Fathers, Romans 4.1, 5.3)

Christ’s true humanity meant joy set before the martyrs.

All-Glorious God

And glory? That was the other fight for the church: that Jesus is truly the all-glorious God. At the beginning of the fourth century, in Alexandria in the north of Egypt, a church elder named Arius began teaching that the Son of God was not eternal, not God himself; he was instead a created thing, made by God to go and fashion a universe. In other words, God is not truly and eternally a Father; he does not truly and eternally have a Son whom he loves in the Spirit.

What the orthodox Christians—and especially their champion, Athanasius—saw was that Arius was throwing away the very glory of God and the gospel of grace in exchange for a steely idol who lacked any real conception of kindness. For, according to Arius, God had created the Son simply to do the hard graft of dealing with the universe for him. And so, for Arius, it was not that the Father truly loved the Son (as you see again and again in Scripture); the Son was just his hired workman.

And if, for Arius, the Bible ever spoke of the Father’s pleasure in the Son, it can only have been because the Son had done a good job. That, presumably, is how to get in with the God who is simply The Employer. But that is no fatherly God of true grace.

For Arius, you do not truly see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. For Arius, you do not see a God who is glorious and gracious at all. Thus, the Christian church gathered together at the Council of Nicea in AD 325 and there agreed forever to confess that the Son is “of one being with the Father.” God the Father doesn’t use the Son as mere hired help, and the Son doesn’t use the Father to get heavenly glory. The Son has always been at the Father’s side. He is the eternally beloved, the one who shows that there is a most loving Father in heaven, the one who can share with us more than a business understanding with God: sonship!

This was the story of the early church: fighting and bleeding for truth that brought glory to God and joy to the saints.

Scene 2: Augustine

No story of the church would be quite complete without a look at the mighty Augustine (AD 354–430). Augustine was born and spent most of his life in what today is Tunisia and Algeria. It was a provincial backwater of the Roman Empire, but Augustine would be perhaps the most influential Christian in the history of the church after the time of the apostles.

Battle of Desires

Here are the opening words of his most (deservedly) famous work, The Confessions—hear his heartbeat (translations from Augustine are my own):

Great are you, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is your power, and of your wisdom there is no end…. You arouse us to delight in praising you, for you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you. (1.1.1)

The Confessions (Augustine’s testimony) reveals that Augustine’s life was one long search for happiness, for satisfaction, for pleasure. That’s how it was for him; that’s how it is for all of us. It is a right search, but before Augustine came to Christ, he had spent all his life looking in all the wrong places for that satisfaction.

Here’s how he characterized his youth. He said to God, “I abandoned you to pursue the lowest things of your creation. I was dust going to dust” (1.13.21). Notice what he’s saying there: we become like what we love. Pursuing dirty things, he was becoming dirt.

One of his most powerful illustrations of looking in the wrong place comes in the story of his friend Alypius. Alypius hated the gladiatorial fights that were so popular then—and we should think of them as the ancient equivalent of pornography and love for extreme violence in films.

Alypius didn’t want to go to the gladiatorial combats. But, Augustine says,

Some of his friends used friendly violence to take him…. When they arrived and had found seats where they could, the entire place seethed with the most monstrous delight in the cruelty. He kept his eyes shut and forbade his mind to think about such fearful evils. Would that he had blocked his ears as well! A man fell in combat. A great roar from the entire crowd struck him with such a vehemence that he was overcome by curiosity…. He opened his eyes. The shouting entered by his ears and forced open his eyes…. As soon as he saw the blood, he at once drank in savagery and did not turn away. His eyes were riveted. He imbibed madness. Without any awareness of what was happening to him, he found delight in the murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure. He was not now the person who had come in…. He took the madness home with him so that it urged him to return. (6.8.13)

What you look at will change you. It will mold you into its image.

As the Confessions moves on, it becomes more breathless—there’s a desperation in his search for joy. Recalling it, Augustine prayed,

I was caught up to you by your beauty and quickly torn away from you by my weight. With a groan I crashed into inferior things. This weight was my sexual habit. But with me there remained a memory of you. (7.17.23)

You see then that his story—which is our story—is a love story. It’s the story of a battle of desires, a story of love turning. And for him the climactic moment happened when, walking in a garden in Milan, Italy, he hears a voice saying, “Tolle! Lege!” (“Take! Read!”)—and whatever that was, he took it as a divine command to pick up the book of Romans, which he had with him. His eyes fell upon Romans 13:13–14: “not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”

With that, he understood that in Christ was the satisfaction all his chasing had been after. “Suddenly,” he wrote, “it had become sweet to me to be without the sweets of folly [and sin]. What I once feared to lose was now a delight to dismiss. You turned them out and entered to take their place, pleasanter than any pleasure” (9.1.1). That discovery would then shape all his thinking as a Christian and as a theologian serving the church.

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