Today’s post is excerpted from Justin S. Holcomb’s Know the Creeds and Councils and is sponsored by MasterLectures.
Today’s Christianity is directly affected by what earlier Christians chose to do and to believe.
Obviously, Christianity did not begin when we were born. Nor did our generation invent Christian thought. We live two thousand years removed from the time of our founder, and—for better or for worse—we are the recipients of a long line of Christians’ insights, mistakes, and ways of speaking about God and the Christian faith.
The fact that Christianity developed—that the sixteenth century, for instance, looked very different from the third, and that both looked very different from the twenty-first—can sometimes lead us to wonder what the essential core of Christianity is. As a result, some people decide to ignore history altogether and try to reconstruct “real Christianity” with nothing more than a Bible.
But this approach misses a great deal. Christians of the past were no less concerned with being faithful to God than we are, and they sought to fit together all that Scripture has to say about the mysteries of Christianity—the incarnation, the Trinity, predestination, and more—with all the intellectual power of their
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