History is critical to faith.
History is critical to faith.
Jason Duesing and historical theology’s game of chess.
In Dr. Jason G. Duesing’s Introduction to Historical Theology for the Church, which he co-edited alongside Nathan A. Finn, a penetrating illustration is used to highlight the significance of historical context when studying theology. Dr. Duesing describes a scene in which a person approaches a table where a game of chess is already underway (4–5). The players have exchanged maneuvers and revealed strategies for several moves, forcing the observer to assess the board without any context for how the players had arrived at that juncture. In this scenario, the observer’s appreciation and understanding of the game are largely diminished since they are deprived of the tactical milieu that had previously unfolded. This knowledge becomes increasingly pivotal should one of the original players leave the game and request the observer to take his place.
In a way, this is precisely where the church finds itself today — engaged in a match full of prevenient successes and mistakes, which, if they remain unknown or uninvestigated, deprive the Christian of the ability not only to make sense of what has already occurred but also to anticipate what might happen next. Consequently, the most trenchant issue plaguing the modern church hails from the colloquial way in which the Christian faith is often apprehended as though in a vacuum. That is to say that one’s engagement with Christian doctrine is done largely without the necessary context for how that doctrine has developed or has been passed down throughout the successive generations of the church. “The discipleship that comes through the study of historical theology,” Dr. Duesing attests, “can aid the onlooker in understanding her new surroundings, what has taken place before, and how to know what should take place next” (5). Failure to understand the dynamic historical context throughout which the body of Christ has been preserved results in a forfeiture of biblical insight and doctrinal wisdom that safeguards the church from error.
For example, according to the 2022 State of Theology survey conducted by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research, 43% of respondents who identified themselves as “evangelical” agreed with the statement that “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” This, of course, is not a novel theological assertion. Rather, it is a descendant of the major heterodox errors that threatened Christ’s church in the first, second, and third centuries. The opposition to “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3) manifested in such movements as Docetism, Ebionism, and Gnosticism, each of which sought to segregate Christ’s divinity and humanity, is thus understood to be a decrepit threat that has already been grappled with by the church’s pastors and theologians of the past. No new arsenal is, therefore, needed to combat this threadbare revisionism of Jesus’s identity. Instead, the student of historical theology understands that the best weaponry is derived from a faithful adherence to Scripture, which is bolstered by a faithful retrieval of the theological verdicts of Christianity’s historic faith.
Grace and peace.
Works cited:
Jason G. Duesing and Nathan A. Finn, editors, Historical Theology for the Church (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2021).