Recently I heard someone lament about people who make a "quantum leap" over the many centuries of Christian history to go back and recapture the early church. They refuse to acknowledge that the living Christ who built his church upon the fact of his own divinity, promised that the gates of Hades would not prevail against it, and rules continually as its only head has, over twenty centuries, guided and refined his church to a state, not of perfection, but of considerable maturity. Do we want to discard all that we have learned, all the costly victories, all the benefits of endless struggles with ideas, over these many years to go back to the infantile, confused, and frequently misguided days of the early church? Surely not, when we know there is so much we can learn from these two millennia of Christian history.

And then there are those who insist that the path to knowledge and enlightenment is to read the Bible as though it had never been read before, to let it fall open, to look for totally fresh insights. That sounds good, but unfortunately, the results are often disastrous as religious leaders come up with all kinds of strange doctrines that are subversive to people's joy and well-being in Christ. It is so easy to latch on to some idea, perhaps right in itself, and then isolate it from context, exaggerate it out of balance and proportion, and wind up with a different gospel.

The heritage, the glorious tradition of Christian scholarship and discipleship, has learned to seek balance. It has tested ideas in the crucible of careful Biblical scholarship. The decisions of church councils, the many confessions of faith that have been composed, are worthy of our careful notice. They can be highly instructive.

These words I write as a committed Protestant, deeply grateful to God for raising up men like Martin Luther, Martin Bucer, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards to name only a few. However, I am also extremely grateful for the patristic writers who used their good education acquired in pagan settings to defend so well their new-found Christian faith. I am grateful for church councils which defined theology, and for brave missionaries who risked their lives to evangelize Europe. I am also deeply grateful for razor-sharp and incisive theologians of the High Middle Ages who advanced the cause of Christian theology immensely, and precursors of the Reformation like John Wyclif and John Hus who bravely pioneered the doctrines of grace.

As a good friend of mine said once to me, the answers to the problems of today are so frequently found by looking into the past!