Why Study Church History?

During my theological apprenticeship, I was introduced to patristic and medieval primary sources. I expected to encounter a theological world largely foreign to the convictions I had received within American evangelicalism and the Protestant Reformation. Instead, I found the opposite. Reading Augustine, the Cappadocian Fathers, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, I discovered that many of the doctrines I cherished (robust Trinitarianism, careful Christology, a serious doctrine of sin and grace, and a vision of the Christian life ordered by love for God), these were present from the earliest centuries of the church and substantially preserved through the Middle Ages.

Rather than weakening my Protestant convictions, this strengthened them. Figures such as Augustine, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards, along with the Cappadocians, exhibited a shared concern for the sovereignty of God, the centrality of the gospel, and a theology that addressed not only the intellect but the affections. They helped me see that orthodoxy and piety belong together, and that deep doctrine is meant to form faithful worship and holy lives.

This exposure also clarified my understanding of the Reformation. The Reformers did not see themselves as innovators severing ties with the past. They repeatedly argued that they stood closer to the theology of the early church than did the papal claims of their own day. Their appeal was not to novelty, but to catholicity rightly ordered under the authority of Scripture.

As a Baptist, this proved especially formative. To be truly Baptist is not to be historically isolated or sectarian, separate from other Christians, but to be deeply Christian, to be small “c” catholic and big “C” Christian. The Baptist tradition, at its best, understands itself as a renewal movement within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, committed to the supremacy of Scripture while receiving the wisdom of the church across time.

Church history has therefore served me as both anchor and guardrail. It anchors theology in the triune God revealed in Scripture and confessed by the church through the centuries, and it guards against the assumption that faithfulness requires novelty. Studying church history has taught me that to be rooted in Scripture is not to stand alone, but to stand with the communion of saints, past and present, bearing witness to the same gospel of Jesus Christ.

Why study Church History? Why should we today, when we have access to so much current information spanning the globe, the ability to understand any place and people, choose to give our time and attention to such a small subset of humanity? This question is downstream from two prior questions. Why study, and why study history? 

In short, we study because God is intelligence par excellence, all he has made and done is magnificent, and we are made in his image, so we fail to image him rightly when we ignore and disregard the life of the mind. And, we study history because God created place and time, and within both he created his crowning creative achievement, the human race, made in his image, and thus the vast majority of what God has done is behind us, and we devalue and disagree with God’s opinion of things when we live only in the present and think only of the future. 

Now we can properly approach the question of why to study church history. G.K. Chesterton once wrote, 

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

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 aboutAll democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our [butler]; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”

I could propose dozens of reasons why, but I will limit myself to those I find most important that I can fit into a limited space. So, here are fifteen reasons why we ought to study the history of the Church. ¹

Remembering What God Has Done

The most basic reason to study church history is that Scripture commands us to remember.

Again and again, God tells his people to call to mind his mighty works, to remember what he has done, to tell the next generation, to refuse the amnesia that leads to pride and unbelief. Forgetting, in the Bible, is never neutral, and it is never forgetting in the common sense, but an act of deliberate failure to remember, and it is a spiritual danger.

Church history is simply obedience extended across time, a long obedience in the same direction. It is the church remembering not what we have done, but what God has done, through ordinary, flawed people, over centuries.

Loving the Household of Faith Across Time

Jesus tells us to love our neighbor, and Scripture tells us that we are to love especially those of the household of faith. But love does not stop at the borders of our own moment.

If I only love Christians who worship like me, vote like me, or live in my century, then my love is thin. Church history stretches our understanding of the Christian family. It forces us to encounter believers who feel unfamiliar, sometimes uncomfortable, yet who trusted the same Christ and confessed the same gospel.

In some ways, I may be more like my non-Christian neighbor than I am like a sixth-century peasant Christian. And in other ways, that peasant Christian may be closer to me than anyone on my street. Church history trains us to love across difference without denying difference.

God Did Not Start Working When We Were Born

Church history humbles us.

It reminds us that the Holy Spirit did not arrive with our denomination, our movement, or our favorite theological author. God has been at work, faithfully, patiently, powerfully, long before we entered the story.

This does not diminish our moment; it situates it. We are not the center of the Christian story. We are participants in a long, ongoing work of God.

History Is Stabilizing in Times of Upheaval

One of the quiet gifts of church history is stability.

The challenges we face, cultural hostility, doctrinal confusion, moral compromise, often feel unprecedented. Church history tells us otherwise. The church has faced persecution, corruption, marginalization, and internal division before. And Christ has remained faithful through all of it.

This does not make us complacent. It makes us steady. We learn to resist panic and to trust the promises of Christ that have already been tested by time.

Charity Across the True Church

Church history also trains us in charity.

When we step back and see the church across centuries and cultures, we realize that the most important thing about any true church is what it shares with every other true church: one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

This does not erase doctrinal differences. It places them in proportion. Church history teaches us to contend for truth without mistaking our particular expression of the faith for the whole of it.

Everyone Has a Tradition

Many Christians like to say they have no tradition, only the Bible. Church history gently reminds us that everyone has a tradition. The question is not whether we have one, but whether we recognize it.

Studying the past helps us distinguish between Scripture itself and the habits, assumptions, and emphases we have inherited. That awareness does not weaken biblical authority; it strengthens our humility as readers of Scripture.

Resisting Expressive Individualism

We live in an age that treats the self as authoritative. Authenticity is prized above faithfulness, and personal conviction often outruns communal confession.

Church history presses back against that instinct. It reminds us that the faith was received before it was felt, confessed before it was customized, and guarded by the church rather than invented by the individual.

The communion of saints is not a metaphor. It is a reality, and it includes the dead.

Evangelism and Apologetics

Church history also strengthens our witness.

Christianity is not a private spirituality or a modern invention. It is a public faith rooted in real events, confessed openly, and lived across cultures and centuries. The questions skeptics raise today about miracles, authority, power, and hypocrisy, are not new. And the church has not been silent in the face of them.

Church history does not replace Scripture in evangelism or apologetics, but it gives depth and credibility to our claims. It shows that faith in Christ is intellectually serious, historically grounded, and globally enduring.

Learning from Suffering Christians

Much of church history was written under pressure.

Most Christians who have ever lived did not inhabit comfort or cultural dominance. They teach us how to pray honestly, how to endure without bitterness, and how to hope without triumphalism.

Their faith was forged, not in ease, but in endurance.

Discernment Through Repetition

Very few heresies are new. They reappear with different language, new emphases, and updated vocabulary.

Church history gives the church pattern recognition. It teaches us when to stand firm, when to be patient, and when to refuse the temptation to overreact. Wisdom grows when we realize we have seen these errors before.

The Humanity of the Saints

Church history is also deeply human.

Councils were messy. Tempers flared. Saints were sometimes difficult people. Saint Nicholas punched Arius during a theological dispute. That is not a model to imitate, but it is a reminder that doctrine mattered enough to provoke real passion.

The point is not to mock the past, but to humanize it. God has always worked through imperfect people.

Doctrine Lived, Not Merely Debated

For earlier Christians, theology was not an academic exercise. It shaped worship, prayer, preaching, and life itself. Convictions had consequences.

Church history reminds us that orthodoxy was costly, and worth the cost.

A Broken and Glorious Church

The church’s history includes both holiness and hypocrisy, faithfulness and failure. Church history refuses naïveté and cynicism alike.

Christ has not abandoned his church. He has been faithful to her again and again, despite her flaws.

Gratitude for What We Have Inherited

When we know the cost of what we have received from our spiritual ancestors, like Scripture, doctrinal clarity, freedom, and faith, we grow in gratitude.

And gratitude leads to worship, not of those who have gone before us, but the one God we share in common. 

The Story Is Still Being Written

Church history does not end in a textbook. It continues in us.

One day, if Christ tarries, future Christians will look back on our moment. The question is not whether we will be remembered, but whether we will be faithful.

We study church history not to live in the past, but to live well in the present, trusting the same Christ who has been faithful to his church in every age.

Conclusion 

We opened with a word from a recent historical figure in Chesterton, encouraging us to be fully democratic, listening to our fathers. I will close with the words of another recent historical figure in C.S. Lewis, who encourages us in the study of history and the reading of old books.

“Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.

Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the book written in the future would be just as good a corrective as the book written in the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at the future.

Now this is where the reading of old books is important. If you read only modern books, the errors of the modern mind will be strengthened, not corrected.

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take down the Republic and read it. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about ‘isms’ and influences and only once in ten pages telling him what Plato actually said.

The student is thus at the mercy of the modern writer. Whenever the modern is wrong, the student will never be able to detect it. In every age it has been the mark of a disciplined mind to resist the influence of the dominant fashion.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement among us.

To be sure, the old books will not tell us all we want to know. But they will tell us what we need to know: what we are likely to forget, and what we are likely to mistake. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” ²

1 Chesterton, Orthodoxy 

2 Preface to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, written by C. S. Lewis