When Christ sent the Holy Spirit to His followers on the Day of Pentecost, He did so promising us “another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever,” (John 14:16), and He “will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you” (John 14:26).

The Work of the Holy Spirit

The Spirit, just like the Father and the Son, works in the field of time.  I once heard a scholar, I can’t quite remember who, who defined the History of the Church as “the life of the Spirit in the Church.”  This is true.  The Holy Spirit works in humans moving them to repent, to watch, to pray, to preach Jesus, to serve others whether in hospitals, or orphanages, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, impoverished countries, to become priests serving the flock of Christ, and to teach the faith to those who already believe in order to deepen their faith.

The Writings of the Early Christians: Tracing the Work of the Holy Spirit throughout History

When the Christians of the past wrote, especially the earliest Christians who did so only to preach Jesus and to deepen other Christians’ understanding of their faith and did not receive anything in return, their work was the result of their reflection on the Holy Spirit’s work in their lives and in the Church.  So, their writings are also the result of the work of the Holy Spirit, but not in the sense of the inspiration of the Scriptures because the Scriptures lay out God’s plan for salvation and how it happened.  The writings of the earliest Christians are a reflection on that plan and how it was fulfilled.  This is the distinction.

To give an analogy in order to explain what I mean: The Scriptures are a river, but the writings of the early Church are like trees planted by the river.  The river is one and flows of its own accord, but the trees differ depending on whether they are healthy or not and how far their roots go down, and if we look at the trees from far away, we can determine how and where the river runs by seeing the direction of the trees as they grow along the river.  The Scriptures were directly inspired by God for the communication of His plan to all who would ever believe.  Thus, the Scriptures are one and flow of their own accord.  But the trees, that is the writings of the early Church, can be deep-rooted or not. This is why we cannot look at only one or two of the writers of the early Church, but we have to look at all of them together (that is to look at the trees from afar) because then we can understand the big picture and what the dogmas, the general way of thinking, and the practices of the early Church were, and we see that they are dependent upon the Scriptures (the river).  They grow along the Scriptures.  The writings of the early Church were also closer to the Apostles, so they interpreted the Scriptures in context and delivered Apostolic practices of worship to their readers.  They are the most well-nourished of trees and should be sought before anything else.

Image from Pixabay

We live in a culture (especially in America) that is largely ignorant of the past.  This is the result of the great travesty of American education which, among other things, results in students not learning the skills of historical thinking.  They are taught facts and dates and told why they were important, but they are not taught how to determine whether or not an event or movement was important.  Further, they are not taught about how the past was truly qualitatively different from the present, and the layers of history (theological, spiritual, social, institutional (the church), and governmental) that led to the quality of life we live today.  Simply being told why something is important, and from only one or two points of view (governmental or military) in secondary schools does not lead to an adequate or even appropriate (especially for an informational civilization) understanding of the past and how it directly influences the present.

In addition, most people do not invest in their own memories.  I have met people that have told me they intentionally try to forget most of their work experiences, but they do not understand that in their memories they have the library of their own souls.  If they do not reflect and remember what they went through, the bookshelves are empty, and life is a vicious cycle full of stagnation and no growth.  Our memories make us who we are, and also the lack of memories make us who we are.  We can be mature people with rich personalities as a result of our reflections and remembrances of our lives’ experiences or we can be brutes simply waiting, for what we perceive to be something, but never quite knowing what it is that we are waiting for.  The mature who reflect have direction in their lives.  Those who do not reflect have no direction in their lives; they are like feathers tossed about by the wind.

When these two factors come together (ignorance of history and intentional forgetfulness of one’s own experiences), the result is deadly as can be seen from above because life will be a set of vicious cycles happening over and over again.

The same holds true for Christians living today who are ignorant of the writings of early Christians.  They never develop a deep and mature faith.  They can get stuck in arguments and discussions and be deceived by false teachers of the faith.  The earliest Christian writings provide a corrective for so many errors. It is an interesting phenomenon that demands reflection (and one that produces fear) that Christian leaders who are most ignorant of church history revive ancient heresies without knowing it.

The Christians of at least the first seven centuries valued the writings of the Christians who lived in the past as the treasure box where the correct teaching of their faith was stored.  This was due to the fact that God became man and entered into historical time thus history was seen to be of the utmost value.  In addition, He sent the Holy Spirit into historical time to continue with those who have believed in Him, and the reflections and writings of early Christians revealed the work of the Holy Spirit.

Before the New Testament was canonized as part of the Bible, it was referred to as the memoirs of the Apostles, that is their memories.  You find that the earliest Church writers refer back to these writings even though they did not yet understand theoretically that these writings were on par with the Old Testament, but they returned to them because of the idea that one must go back to the believers who lived before Him to ensure a correct understanding of the faith, and with these texts especially so, because they bore direct witness to Jesus and the fulfillment of God’s plan of salvation and the generation that first believed in Him.  Then, beginning in the late 2^ndcentury and even more so in the 3^rdcentury, you find Church writers referring back to the writers who wrote before them but after the Apostles.  By the 4^thand 5^thcenturies, the Church Fathers were consistently and as a matter of good taste referring regularly to the ancient Christian writers.

This is part of the Apostolic Tradition that holds fast what was faithfully delivered to the Church as the Apostle Paul commanded his churches (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

The Past Meets the Present: The Apostolic Tradition

The great orator Cicero said it beautifully, “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” This is what happens when we live in total ignorance of the Christian writings of the past; we are children, and this is not something to be celebrated but something to lament over and to repent from.  The Apostle Paul compared these types of people to those who still drink milk and not solid food (1 Corinthians 3:1-2; Hebrews 5:12-13).  This is what happens when we ignore early Christian writings whether they be the history of the church, the lives of the martyrs and saints, or spiritual and theological writings.  We continue living off milk never maturing.

The Christians who came before us are our ancestors whether we are physically related to them or not.

We live in a time, perhaps the first time in centuries, where apologetics has returned to the forefront of the Christian faith.  Apologetics was also at the forefront of the Christian faith in the first five centuries when multiple apologetic works were written due to the attacks of critics of Christianity whether nonbelievers or heretics. If we only read those writings (some Christians don’t even know that apologetics existed from the very beginning), I believe we would not be in much of the mess we see today with being unable to answer skepticism, relativism, postmodernism, philosophical arguments, the faith/science debate, modern heresies, and all the resulting issues that come out of these “-isms.”

But, for many, they have chosen to live in ignorance of the Christians of the past whether intentionally or by habit.  The point here is that it is not simply the Christians of the past that today’s Christians are ignoring, but it is the work of the Holy Spirit through the generations of the Church that they are ignoring, and it is no wonder that such Christians should get lost.  It’s the logical result: if one believes they can follow the Holy Spirit yet ignore His work, then they are ignoring a large part of who He is and what He has done and continues to do.  They have only accepted some of His work, not all.  That is not following the Holy Spirit.

Modern Christians have become trees without roots. And this is perhaps where we should leave off.  God is the Lord of History; history is the field in which He works.  All three Persons of the Trinity work in, through, and throughout time.  He works through His followers through all times, and we can learn from those followers even if we have never lived while they were alive on the earth.

The invention of writing has allowed minds across time to communicate with each other and for those who lived in the past to impart to us their wisdom, and this is especially true when we read their writings which show us the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives, and for that reason, they will always have something to teach us and we will always have something to learn from them.  When we familiarize ourselves with these works and let them deepen our understanding and practice of our faith, then our lives will be transformed, and we will transform the lives of those around us, and the result will be that we will live according to the plan of God’s Salvation, which He also communicated to us through writing.

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