The Church Must Not Idealize the Past

Human beings tend to idealize our favorite eras of history. It’s an easy mistake to make. Novelist L. P. Hartley once opined, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Just as we romanticize living in a foreign culture, we do the same thing with eras of history. Of course, if we were to actually plant our lives in the foreign country of our dreams, it wouldn’t take long for our naive idealism to give way to brute reality. The same is true for history. There’s never been a golden age.

For Christians, the belief that there was once a golden age for the church has long prevailed in the reforming imagination. The story goes like this: The church of the apostles was pure and faithful. However, at some point (usually coinciding with Constantine’s conversion in 312), corruption took over, and the church began a long process of decline. Ever since, various reform movements have arisen attempting to restore the church to its former pristine condition.

Now, I happen to count myself among those who believe that Constantine’s conversion introduced a new dynamic of corruption into the church. The effort to fuse Christ’s eternal kingdom to political power structures attempts to join two realms with contradictory values and goals. He told us his kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36). The church’s reliance on the word of God and the state’s dependance on the sword represent two distinct tools for accomplishing two very different God-ordained purposes. When we use the sword in service to the church and the gospel in service to nation-building, we run into all kinds of problems that I’ll refrain from listing here.

With that said, I reject the notion that there’s ever been a time in history when the church was pristine. There’s never been a golden age. Even when we look at passages like Acts 2:42-47, where the Spirit-filled church seems to have it all together, we need to balance it with passages like Acts 5:1-11 and 6:1 where that same congregation in Jerusalem clearly manifests sin among its members.

Thankfully, historian of the early church Nadya Williams has recently written a superb book, Cultural Christians in the Early Church, in which she demonstrates convincingly that Christians in every age have compromised by imbibing the values of the culture around them. Her book focuses on “cultural Christians,” which she defines as “individuals who self-identify as Christians but whose outward behavior and, to the extent that we can tell, inward thoughts and motivations are largely influenced by the surrounding culture rather than by their Christian faith and the teachings of Jesus.”

According to Williams, from Bible times on, professing Christians have been willing to publicly identify with Jesus but not always willing to do what he says. Growing up in “Bible Belt” Alabama and spending the second half of my life in more moderate “Bible Belt” Kentucky, this dynamic has long bothered me. At times in my naivety, I’ve looked in vain for examples of churches free of cultural compromise. Williams’ book helps us see that we will be waiting until the return of Christ for a completely pure church. 

Why do cultural versions of Christianity appeal so much to professing Christians in every age? Williams writes, “Cultural religion created identity without demanding excessive personal commitment.” Certain cultures throughout history celebrated Christianity to the degree that publicly identifying as a Christian bestows status. Throughout history, citizens have sought to gain the advantage of Christian identity outwardly without the inward regeneration that results in changed motives and behavior.

Williams’ book explores Christian compromise in the areas of money, food and drink, sexual mores, apostasy, gender, self-care, doctrine, and Christian nationalism. Her final chapter features those in the fourth and fifth centuries who sought to escape the corruption of the church by living ascetic lives in the desert. She concludes that escaping to the desert merely offers another form of cultural Christianity. Christianity requires the church, warts and all.

Why do we need this reminder? Williams’ book illustrates several things that help Christians live more wisely in our own age. First, we need to remember the constancy of human nature across time. Human beings are fallen, and we’ve always been fallen. When we look back in history, we need to avoid both idealizing the past and idealizing the present against the past. We are prone to the same kinds of temptations as our historical subjects. They were fallen just like us.

Second, we need to remember that every culture offers unique temptations. American culture today has largely moved past the open racism of its first few centuries, but fallen culture always offers new sources of compromise. C. S. Lewis wrote, “We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.” Books like Williams’ help us study the past for parallels and differences so that we can better analyze our own context.

Finally, we need to banish romanticized notions of the past because Christ calls us to wait in expectation for his future return. Though we pursue it now, the purity we seek has always been future. He will accomplish it in his own time, when we see him face to face.

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