Lecture 1: Why Church History, and the Church’s First Two Years

The lecture, section by section

1. The caricature, and why most Christians are clueless

   Most evangelicals, especially in North America, have almost no concept of the first fifteen hundred years of church history, the first three quarters of it. The popular version runs: John died on Patmos, the church instantly became Roman Catholic, nothing happened but Augustine, Aquinas, and Constantine, and then Luther nailed his theses to a door and saved everything. Busenitz promises a line of faithful men in every generation before the Reformation, and a heritage that belongs to Bible believing evangelical Protestants more than to any other branch of the Christian world.

2. God is at work in history

   Past the first century we are outside biblical history, yet the Lord has kept working in his church: convicting sinners, conforming believers to Christ, carrying the gospel toward the ends of the earth. Church history is not a pile of dates and dead people but a testimony to God's sovereign providence, his gospel promises being kept generation after generation.

3. Christ said he would build his church

   In Matthew 16:18, a text Busenitz says Rome badly misreads, the rock is the content of Peter's confession, not Peter himself. To study church history is to watch the promise unfold: the gospel challenged, oppressed, its people persecuted and killed, and the church never overrun by the gates of Hades. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of God stands forever.

4. It is our history

   The church's history is the history of the bride of Christ, and we are part of that bride. Church history runs from the day of Pentecost to the return of Christ, and we are inside it, not observers after it. Men training to serve local churches should understand the history of the thing they are attempting to do.

5. The truth was preserved and passed down

   The Lord authorized the apostles to give the New Testament through the Spirit, and the apostles entrusted their teaching to faithful men who would teach others also, the pattern of 2 Timothy 2:2. The course will name some of those faithful men in the first centuries. This is providential preservation, not miraculous preservation, and it is illustrated especially in how the canon was collected and defended.

6. Warned by the history of error

   Nearly every ancient heresy has been regurgitated as a modern cult. Gnosticism, the exaltation of human wisdom over God's revelation, resurfaces in New Age thought, Word of Faith teaching, Mormonism, and Christian Science. The legalism of the Judaizers reappears in groups like early Seventh day Adventism. The Arian denial of Christ's deity returns in the Jehovah's Witnesses. Knowing where the errors came from equips you when the doorbell rings.

7. Learning from the faithful

   The first three hundred years inside the Roman Empire were marked by persecution, detailed famously in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and every generation shows believers eagerly awaiting Christ's return and staying faithful under pressure. Athanasius, whom Busenitz calls the saint of stubbornness, never once gave in to Arianism through a lifetime of harassment.

8. Learning from those who failed

   Paul treated Israel's wilderness generation as recorded examples, including negative examples, for believers who came later. Church history works the same way: men who knew better defected to heresy or gave in to practices they knew were unbiblical, and the wreckage that followed stands as a warning for future ministries.

9. A faithful apologist is a good historian

   Elders are charged to hold fast the faithful word, to exhort in sound doctrine and refute those who contradict, and every Christian is called to give a defense for the hope within. A little church history lets you stand your ground with Greek Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Islam, and the American cults. Busenitz refuses the common notion that church history belongs to the Catholics: the Bible is ours, and so is the history.

10. A right perspective on our own moment

    We are not the first generation to get it right, and earlier generations lived far closer to the apostles. Every generation is shaped by its culture in ways it cannot see: the fathers by Platonism, some reformers by violence, and, Busenitz argues, the modern church by evolutionary science, which he calls the same old move of bending Scripture to Greek philosophy, only now the philosophy is materialist and renamed science.

11. Selection, objectivity, and humility

    No one semester can cover everything, so the course selects the recognized turning points, while granting that God may measure significance by faithfulness rather than impact. Pure objectivity is impossible, so Busenitz states his grid up front: Scripture as the ultimate authority, and the gospel as faith alone in Christ alone through his work on the cross alone, principles the Reformation recovered from Scripture rather than invented. He also commends a lifetime habit of reading biography, the way Piper reads Edwards.

12. Church history in the pulpit

    Four uses for the preacher. Illustrations: inferior to biblical ones but both timeless and fresh, since almost no one has heard of Athanasius fleeing into the Egyptian wilderness. Old commentaries: Chrysostom preached verse by verse through much of the New Testament, and his conclusions almost always match careful modern exegesis. The history of doctrine: the Trinity, the canon, baptism, and eschatology all involve history, and Busenitz claims every church father known to us was premillennial until about AD 250, when Clement of Alexandria, father of the allegorical hermeneutic, became the first amillennialist. And apologetics: he argues Islam works like a Christian cult, appealing to prior true revelation, Moses, David, the prophets, and the gospel of Jesus, to lend credibility to falsehood, so that Mormonism is in a sense the American Islam of the nineteenth century.

13. Pentecost, AD 30

    The church begins in Acts 2, ten days after the ascension and fifty days after Passover, when the Spirit came on the hundred and twenty. Busenitz dates it to AD 30: Herod the Great died about 4 BC, Jesus was about thirty when his ministry began around AD 26 (Luke 3:23), and three and a half years of ministry put the crucifixion and resurrection in AD 30. The date also works backward: the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15 sits around AD 49, and Paul's own arithmetic in Galatians 1, three years plus fourteen, places his conversion near AD 32, which only fits if the church began in 30. The tongues of Acts 2 were authentic foreign languages, listed in the text itself, not gibberish; Augustine took the many languages as a sign the gospel was for all nations.

14. The first two years of the church

    Acts 1:8 outlines the whole book: Jerusalem and Judea, then Samaria, then the ends of the earth. Peter preaches, the church grows through arrests and threats, and Ananias and Sapphira fall as a deceitful contrast to Barnabas's genuine gift. Gamaliel counsels leaving the Christians alone lest the council be found fighting against God, advice his own student Saul refused until the Damascus road. In Acts 6 the apostles devote themselves to prayer and the word while deacons take up the daily administration, a pattern Busenitz presses on future pastors. Stephen's martyrdom scatters believers as far as Antioch, the empire's third largest city, where Gentiles begin to believe. All of this, through Acts 8, happens within roughly the church's first two years.

1. Busenitz says every generation is shaped by its culture in ways it cannot see. What pressures of our own moment might future believers look back on and ask how the church ever gave in to them?

2. He argues church history belongs to Bible believing Christians rather than to Rome. How would knowing that heritage change the way you answer a Catholic friend, or a visitor from a cult at your door?

3. The apostles gave themselves to prayer and the word while deacons carried the administration. Where does our own congregation's service load sit against that pattern, and where do you fit in it?