One purpose of this blog is to engage in detail primary sources of Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation history from a classical Protestant perspective in order to foster the re-growth and spread of the original, warm, world-embracing humanism of the Reformers themselves.
In a more humane and civilized age than ours, Theology was considered “the queen of the sciences,” and other disciplines, including history, were thought to be extremely useful “handmaidens” to theology (ancillae theologiae). Theology, because its focus was on the God who created all things, was thought to be able to unify all the other disciplines, and all the other disciplines, studying various aspects of God’s world, could shed very useful rays of light on Theology.
I believe that in our age, which has deparated from the beaten path of our fathers (not just our fathers in the Faith, but our fathers in the human race generally considered), we need to take care in asserting the primacy of “Theology.” To assert such a thing today would be to use the same words as were used in the past while imbuing those words with a drastically different meaning. For in our Modern context, where vast sectors of intellectual life are ruled by institutionalized unbelief, Theology has been downgraded from “Queen of the Sciences” to “No Science At All” (many today speak of Mathematics as the real Queen). In reaction to this assault, Modern Protestants have not merely re-coronated Theology, but have become desperately and disproportionately focused upon Theology as the only reliable source of Truth. Theology for many Modern Protestants is not considered just the Queen of the Sciences, but rather the Only Science. Thus, in our Modern Protestant context I would not want to call history a mere ancilla theologiae, for in our Modern Protestant context “theology” is usually defined extremely narrowly as a preoccupation with the details of the doctrines of salvation, with the nuances of how individual souls can commune with God and go to heaven when their basically useless bodies die.
As Modern Protestants, we tend to devalue history – we’re much more interested in Systematic Theology and Biblical Exegesis conceived of as the coldly rational, purely abstract activities of brains – brains that think of the past as useful only in relation to whatever “Truth” we are vigorously fighting for right now. We tend to downplay, if not entirely ignore, how history has shaped us, how it has taught us to think about God, the world, the Bible, ourselves, and other people. This is not how the Bible itself wants us to think – something like two-thirds of it is history, after all!
As Modern Protestants we also tend to accept the idea that the fundamental truth of Protestantism is deliberate separation from what came before followed by a “reboot” of Truth from scratch. This is not how the Bible itself wants us to think – throughout the Old Testament God repeatedly calls His people to remember the past, and the New Testament tells us that the past was written for our instruction (Rom. 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:6).
Lest someone object to my overall thesis in this post, the Bible is not just telling us to remember the biblical past, to focus on history as it is recorded in the Bible. It is intriguing that in the great hall of faith in Hebrews 11, there are references to people and events that do not seem to be recorded in the Scriptures (who in the Old Testament was “sawed in two”?). 2 Chronicles 20 and 27 imply that the reader should consult more information found in other books about the kings – but these have subsequently been lost to us. Jude 1:14-15 directly cites the apocyrphal Book of Enoch, which shows that Jude not only had read the book but that he approved of that part of its contents.
Returning to our practices as Protestants, an odd feature of some very influential sectors of the Reformed world in particular is a marked disdain for pagan antiquity and the Middle Ages – eras (falsely) thought by such men to be largely devoid of God’s Truth, and useful to us only as examples of how foolish sinful men can be when they “don’t take the Bible seriously enough.” Thankfully, say such men, we take the Bible seriously enough, and that is why we disdain the study of the classical and Medieval worlds and instead fixate our minds inside the cracks of our “Reformed Theology” and “Reformed Apologetics” books, there never to be troubled by the silly, self-defeating buzzing of “unbiblical” and “autonomous” thought.
Against this extreme and distortive tendency, it is noteworthy that the Reformers themselves were very conscious of the labors of Christians – and non-Christians! – who had come before their own time, and although they often criticized many of these people they nevertheless demonstrated thorough acquaintance with their works. Not merely Luther and Calvin, but their heirs over the next few generations deliberately studied the classical past and interacted with it very substantively, believing not just that Protestants had nothing to fear from extra-biblical studies but that extra-biblical studies did, in fact, make the Protestant case far stronger.
History, then, is the stage upon which God has been for millennia telling an incredibly fascinating story about all kinds of different things – among them salvation, but not only salvation. As the old hymn goes, “This world is not our home, we’re passing through,” but as the other old hymn goes, “This is my Father’s world,” and all the seemingly mundane things in it are things He has put here, things to which He expects us to pay attention because they are His. The most fundamental fact of our whole religion – the Incarnation of the Word – is buried deep in history: “In the time of Herod king of Judea…In the days of Caesar Augustus…when Quirinius was governor of Syria…,” and so forth. And as the Creed says, “He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate…” History is not dispensable; it is the warp and woof of our whole Faith.
In sum, then, Protestants have nothing to fear from – and no justifiable reason to avoid – serious, sober-minded, thorough study of history. Indeed, such an activity is an essential part of our identity first as Christians and second as Protestants. I hope you’ll join me in the posts on this website as I seek to do just that: to tread the beaten path of our ancestors, both Christian and non-Christian, in an effort to remember the past and creatively appropriate its lessons for the present.