I Love Church History
I love history. I love church history. I love the history of Christian pastoral care and counseling.
For over a quarter-century, I taught a course on The History of Christian Soul Care. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the history of Martin Luther’s spiritual care. I’ve written three books on the history of Christian soul care.
Studying church history exposes our modern blind spots and our arrogant assumption that somehow we alone have cornered the market on understanding and applying God’s truth. G. K. Chesterton said it poetically.
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes—our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.”
History teaches. History humbles. That’s why I encourage all of us in our 50-year-young modern biblical counseling movement to look to that great cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1) throughout 2,000 years of church history (see here and here). That’s why I describe my model of biblical counseling, in part, as “church history-informed.”
How might our modern biblical counseling movement benefit if we returned to the history of Christian pastoral care
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