There Is No Golden Age
What’s your ideal place or time in history? Maybe you’d enjoy the slow pace and small town charm of a place like Mayberry where things seem simpler and people seem kinder. Or maybe you’d prefer a more exotic setting like England during the age of Shakespeare. The past may not be your thing. You might prefer some time or place in the future when transportation is easier, cancer has been cured, and poverty has been greatly alleviated. It’s natural, one might say supernatural, to long for a Golden Age.
However, the reality is that every generation and place has its own unique blessings and challenges. I like the way Mark Noll puts it in referring to Church history: “The golden ages of the past usually turn out to be tarnished if they are examined closely enough. Crowding around the heroes of the faith are a lot of villains, and some of them look an awful lot like the heroes.”[1] With closer and more honest inspection, “the good ol’ days” are often not quite as good as we might have led ourselves to believe. And that ideal place (even if it’s in the future) always has its less-than-ideal features.
The truth is that there is no golden age. Rather, there is something golden in every age—something worth holding onto, worth retrieving. We can learn to embrace the past, appropriate some of our forbearers’ wisdom, all the while lamenting their sins and learning from their mistakes. We don’t have to idealize the past or be “stuck in it” to realize that God works in every age and that every age, even distant ones, can instruct us in the present. If we look carefully enough to the past, we’ll find fellow sinners and saints, but we might also find that ours’ isn’t a golden age either.
Learning Not to Idealize (or Demonize) the Past
I like the past. As I write this sentence I’m in the midst of several research and writing projects, which require me to explore and analyze historical places and figures. I enjoy imagining what it was like, and what some of my favorite figures were thinking or how they’d deal with modern problems. But it doesn’t matter what or whom I’m researching; I eventually find some major flaw or conflict in the age or person I hold in high esteem. Like coming of age, studying the past helps us realize the world is more complex, and sometimes more broken than we’d imagined.
But even if the past were perfect, there would be no need to idealize it in order to recognize its beauty and value. There’d be no need in wishing we could go back or forsake our age for some better place or time. God has called us to this age and time. He’s called us to engage our neighbors, children, and enemies with the Gospel in this age. The real danger in idealizing the past, or becoming unnecessarily nostalgic about it, is that we might neglect the world in which we inhabit right now, or fail to acknowledge the shortcomings of our heroes in the faith.
Yet it’s probably safe to say that most people under 40 years of age don’t struggle much with looking back nostalgically, lamenting the loss of a bygone era. For many, the past is the past, with little or no significance for the present or future. This notion has been deeply ingrained within us as politicians confidently assert that their policies aren’t concerned with the past, but only with moving us forward. That history is utterly unimportant has been implied for decades as high school classrooms, where history is supposed to be taught, we find under-qualified sports coaches showing John Wayne movies. And as soon as any town or school realizes that the historical figure after which they are named was less than a saint, petitions begin circulating for the name to be changed so that the present can be cleansed of the past.
Unfortunately, what underlies this approach is the assumption that we are the smartest generation to ever live, and are without need of the past. Additionally, we feel we are immune to its errors. In some cases, we have so demonized the past by acting as if it were filled only with white, woman-hating, minority-hating, bitter men that it has (if these things are true) become utterly offensive. This is what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” and what Chesterton called “the tyranny of the living” over the dead. We’ve effectively silenced the dead by refusing to let them speak.
Learning to Treasure and Appropriate the Past
We can learn to treasure and appropriate the past in the present, though. We can do so through thoughtful investigation of the life and writings of those who have come before us. In them we might find models for ministry and practice, or applications of New Testament principles that we might’ve never come up with on our own. Furthermore, we might find that believers have dealt with similar (and sometimes nearly identical) theological and ethical issues. As one wise preacher of old said, “There is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9).
In other words, you can learn wisdom through decades of personal trial and error. Or you can look to those who have come before you, asking all along, how they applied Scripture to their personal lives, the life of the church, and their engagement with the world. The technical term for this is “historical theology,” but it really is just a way of understanding the past on its own historical and theological terms, and critiquing it where necessary. I really like the way the Baptist historian Thomas Nettles explains it:
Realizing that we have entered a flow of discussion far downstream means that we use the documents that constitute historical theology to catch up with the dialogue. We enter it respectfully but with frankness. Where we can detect missteps, we seek to point them out and help provide corrective; where we see change that is more clearly in a biblical direction, we admire with joy the providence of God and the clarity of Scripture; where we see decline, we look for reformers.[2]
In what follows, I’d like to provide just a couple of ways we can use the past in the present. First, we can recognize and reply to theological error by being familiar with the writings of earlier theologians and pastors. For example, a Jehovah’s Witness may come to your door or visit your church claiming that Christ was the greatest of God’s creation, but was certainly not the divine Son of God in the same sense that the Father was divine. This might sound foolish to you, or inventive, but it certainly isn’t new. Early church theologians such as Athanasius and theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth century dealt with nearly identical claims. They quickly countered such claims by pointing out: if the Son is not fully divine and fully man then He did not effectively die for our sins as Scripture claims. They realized that the payment for sin had to come from God, but had to be done in the flesh for men. Put another way, they knew that if Jesus was not fully God and fully man, then we are still dead in trespasses and sins.
Second, history, particularly church history, reminds us about God’s faithfulness and deepens our confidence in the surety of our faith and the Church’s future. By looking at Christian history, much like looking at biblical history, we are strengthened by seeing how God has preserved the Church in the face of error and persecution. This is an invaluable help when we become concerned that the Church is ailing or on the verge of default. We know that God preserved the Church in the apostolic age. We see the way in which he preserved the Church amongst modern missionaries even when many lost their lives. We see the way in which Protestants like the English General Baptists thrived even in the face of government opposition. And we can be sure that God is doing just that today and will continue to do so.
Conclusion
I have many dear Calvinist friends. But I have noticed that some of these friends are hesitant to admit that John Calvin, or Jonathan Edwards, or John Owen were wrong on some important issues—issues on which they clearly disagree—for fear that it might do damage to their heroes in the faith. Arminians, Lutherans, and others are open to the same charge. But a right understanding of the past teaches us, as in the Nettles’ quote above, to praise God’s work in the past, learn from it, and use it in the present. But we can—in fact we must—identify theological and ethical errors of our forefathers and theological heroes. This is no disservice to them or us. It’s simply recognizing that there is no golden age, but that there are golden things in every age, which, by God’s grace, we can learn from and live in light of today.
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[1] Mark Noll, Turning Points (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic Press, 2012), 9.
[2] Thomas J. Nettles, “John Calvin’s Understanding of the Death of Christ” in Whomever He Wills: A Surprising Display of Sovereign Mercy (Cape Coral, FL, Founder’s Press, 2012), 293.
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