To acknowledge indebtedness to our Christian forebears does not mean that we are engaging in ancestral worship. We should not erect shrines to the dead, but in many ways we are indebted to them and enriched by their legacy. Still, it strikes me as strange that history is used as a point of pride. It must be that those who swell their chests every time they think of their forefathers only take a glance and not a careful look; “the distance adds a halo to the view.” Shouldn’t a look back at our forefathers cause us instead to be humbled?
The failures ought to humble us. And honest souls must admit that we are cut out of the same piece of cloth. Like Elijah under the juniper tree, we confess, “We are not better than our fathers.” But we are also humbled by the victories, humbled that our great God can take instruments so weak, ignorant, and inconsistent, and still use them in astounding ways.
The backward look does little to minister to our sense of self worth, but it will stir in us the song, O God our Help in Ages Past. The more I learn about Martin Luther, the less I adore him and the more I want to worship his Saviour; the same should be said about John Knox, John Wesley, William Carey, David Livingston, C. H. Spurgeon, and D. L. Moody. “Trust not in man, whose breath is in his nostrils” (Isa. 2:22).
If we stand on the shoulders of our spiritual forebears, it is not so much a credit to them, but to the God who made them supporting pillars. The ground we stand on was, time and again, a battleground, sometimes sodden with martyr’s blood. It is also right to be thanking God for the price others have paid.
When Pope Urban II called for the first Crusade to retake the holy sites in 1095, it appeared that nothing could stop them. There was no lack of volunteers. There were eight major crusades in all and several minor ones. But lonely Raymund Lull rose up to say that we should love our enemies, not give them the broad ax. He went as a missionary to the Moslems of North Africa. His contemporaries thought Lull’s efforts were futile, but today the vast majority say he won, and won decisively.
The battle to put the English Bible in our hands was decisively won by Wycliffe (1320-1384) and Tyndale. Tyndale’s dying words were, “O Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.” Within two years of Tyndale’s death, the king made a proclamation to place the Bible in the English language in every parish church, making it available to the common people.
Luther nailed his famed 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenburg Chapel (1517), and launched a reformation. And Guttenberg’s printing of the German Bible in 1455 began the steady stream of Bibles that have been produced since then.
The battle for the “three onlys”–sola Scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide–was decisively fought by the Reformers, so decidedly that those doctrines are imprinted in every Christian vocabulary. The Bible alone is our authority. We receive redemption by faith alone, and we are saved by God’s grace alone. Can you find any Christian who does not claim these three foundation stones?
When Conrad Grebel baptized George Blaurock in 1523, these Anabaptists stated that the only apostolic succession worth having was apostolic practice. They championed a living faith evidenced by good works, and the believers’ church. They started a hard fight, and died fighting. Who today seriously thinks the Epistle of James is at odds with Galatians? Or who questions that the church should be composed of only true believers? That battle was decisively won.
The Act of Uniformity in 1662 expelled the learned Puritans from their pulpits, and by that forced retirement, gave those men the opportunity to write. The Puritans set out to purify the Church of England, but ended up purifying the body of Christ. They liked to say, “We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that is alone does not save.” They finished the fight against Antinomianism that the Anabaptists had begun, hounding that doctrine right out of the Church.
When George Whitefield was shut out of the pulpits of the state church, he leaped over his prejudices and went preaching to coal miners in the open air at Kingswood near Bristol in 1739. He did what the Puritans seemed incapable of: “unto the poor the gospel [was] preached.” Thus the Great Awakening sounded with Whitefield’s favorite text, “Ye must be born again,” and we have never doubted it since.
Men like Jonathan Edwards, John and Charles Wesley, and Whitefield believed passionately in the work of the Holy Spirit in conversion and that the evangelist is not sent on a fool’s errand. All fought this battle decisively. Today to be a Christian means that we believe in evangelism to the masses. Wesley’s unordained itinerant preachers restored the right of the common Christian to handle and proclaim the Word of God. Thus a great blow was struck at the unscriptural clergy/laity distinction. Those of us who have never been harassed–let alone stoned–for preaching openly, stand on their shoulders.
A cobbler named William Carey answered the remark that if God wished to convert the heathen, He could do it well enough without our help–by going to India (1793) and the age of world missions began. Morrison, Moffat, Livingston, Groves–all tell us that being an evangelical Christian is to be missionary minded.
In the days of the Anabaptists, books like The Dippers Dipped ridiculed the practice of baptism as an almost occult phenomena. Many of the celebrities of Church history, like Martin Luther, George Whitefield, Charles Finney, and D. L. Moody, were never scripturally baptized. But today the truth of believer’s baptism by immersion is more than in the public domain. It is the standard among true believers. Why? Because we stand on the shoulders of dear men like John Bunyan who put baptism in its proper place.
Every congregation of saints who gather in the name of Christ without some umbrella organization to validate it, stands on the shoulders of believers like J. G. Bellett and John Darby who met to simply “break bread” in Dublin in 1825-1827. At the Powerscourt prophetic conferences (c. 1830-1836), they recovered the truth that we are all one Body, and our Head is in heaven. They held that the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven could, if given room, have His way in the Church, so that we need no creed but the Bible. The prophetic passages of the Bible were opened in a way that men like John Calvin never thought possible. That battle was decisively won. For thousands of non-denominational churches, the hold of institutional sectarianism is a memory of the past.
Two California businessmen contacted A. C. Dixon to edit and publish foundational articles about Christianity. The result: a 12-volume series called The Fundamentals, edited by Dixon and R. A. Torrey between 1910 and 1915 that drew together a careful collection from the finest and soundest Bible teachers. Their fight for a pure orthodoxy came like a call across Christendom to all those attending apostate churches, “Come out from among them and be separate, saith the Lord.” A line was drawn between the false church and the true, and our landscape has never been the same. Today we understand that to be a Christian means that we embrace clearly-stated fundamentals, and we know what they are.
Why did all those battles and controversies of the past millennium occur? Because uncovering the apostolic truth after it has been buried under a heap of Philistine rubble can be nasty work.
The apostles warned that they would be followed by apostasy. Paul said, “For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock” (Acts 20:29). Even in his own day he had to say, “All they that be in Asia have forsaken me.” Peter said that as there were false prophets among the people, “so there shall be false teachers among you.” John added, “even now there are many antichrists.” And Jude has his own direct warnings.
So it was. Even while the apostles lived, there began a fearful departure from the gospel of Jesus Christ. Many of the so-called Apostolic Fathers (c. 95-150), caved in on justification by works, had sloppy thinking on the Lord’s Supper and baptism, and introduced the clergy-laity system. When there are people who have a vested interest in having the truth buried, bringing it back into the light will mean a fight.
In this millennium, when the true Church has enjoyed stages of recovery, it has always been with hard struggle. But has there really been progressive recovery? Obviously. Today we commonly enjoy truths that were once secreted among a timid minority. Does this mean that we enjoy more truth than Martin Luther did, or Jonathan Edwards did? Do we?
Of course we do. To say so is not to exalt ourselves, but it is to say that the battles these very men fought were won, and won decisively. We enjoy the spoils. “The path of the just is as a shining light that shines more and more unto the perfect day.” We do go “from strength to strength.” It may be true that what they lived without knowing it, we know without living it. Many of them lived in the spirit of true Christianity while we seem to have it only in theory. But if we do have it only in theory, the only thing that keeps us from living it is our own lack of faith. As this age closes, sin abounds, but “grace does much more abound.” To preserve and protect His Church, Christ has abounded to us by making available more truth. Things that confounded Martin Luther or John Wesley are common knowledge today to babes in Christ. Why? Because we stand on their shoulders.