I am not sure we do the message of the Gospel any favor in our traditional approach to “church” history. Recently I conducted a Sunday evening review of the era from the time of the apostles to the present. This time I allowed myself to ask this question: How much baggage is carried by the Christian community as a result of guilt-by-association with the sometimes very dark history of the "church”?
The more I pursued that question the more convinced I became that the Church’s real story is being written by God’s Spirit moving on the waters and will be unfolded for us to see long after the footprints of the great have vanished from the sand. That is not to say the great men and women of God were not used by Him; but it is to say that, like the history of Israel in the Old Testament, those great men and women did not always represent God well. Where they did not represent Him well they left baggage (or garbage) which we must take into account.
Someday I hope to develop this thought. In the meantime, I am considering the possibility that we ought to describe the post-apostolic era as Jesus described it: “The Times of the Gentiles [Nations]” (Luke 21:24). If we followed that paradigm we could back away from trying to trace the family tree of the church. Instead, we could look at the struggles of believers in a world where the mystery of evil and the spirit of Antichrist (Mordor, if you will) are moving resolutely toward the unveiling of the man of sin. Thus, we would be free from the need to defend any particular “church.” Rather, we would evaluate each claimant on the basis of what truth it embraced and what error gripped its soul in the darkening storm. Such an approach to history would neutralize the crippling influence of so-called “heritage” and demand a constant awareness of the Word of God and our relationship to it. In fact, I suspect that only in such an approach would Sola Scriptura (the Scripture alone) be effectively demonstrated.
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