The value of Church history: Revd Dr Nick Needham

Is Church history just a niche hobby? Or is it something that’s worthwhile for all believers? And what lessons does the history of the Church have for believers today? These are the questions Revd Dr Nick Needham addressed when he spoke to The Christian Institute.

Revd Needham lectures in Church History at the Highland Theological College, ministers at Inverness Reformed Baptist Church and has written a number of influential books on the history of the Church.

Modern dangers

He warned that the danger of modern life is to be swamped by ‘Today’: to only read the Bible through our own cultural lenses and even, in extreme circumstances, to merely see our own faces as we look into God’s Word.

But, says Revd Needham, we can help to combat this by looking at the history of believers throughout the ages. This avoids what CS Lewis called “chronological snobbery” – viewing something old as automatically of less worth than the new.

…the Church is not simply the Church of the here and now.

After all, the Church is not simply the Church of the here and now, nor even the last 50 or 100 years but one which spans time. It encompasses Augustine of Hippo as well as whoever our current favourite Christian writer might be.

Paraphrasing CS Lewis once more, Revd Needham said the true value of Church history is “to lift the student out of his provincialism: by making him the spectator, if not of all, yet of much, time and existence in the Church’s life story”, taking him “out of the spiritual narrowness of his own age and class into a more public world”.

Messy complexity

Revd Needham acknowledged the sometimes troubling and ‘messy complexity’ of Church history: where the institutional Church has said or done things modern believers would now decry.

But in case we are in any danger of thinking the modern Church is somehow superior, he also argued that in the Early Church, the doctrine of the person of Christ was central – a focus the Church would do well to recapture.

And Revd Needham reminded us that there is the same ‘baffling blend of good and bad’ today, just as there was in the past.

In contrast to Scripture, Gnosticism elevates the mind and downgrades the body.

After setting out the issue in general terms, Revd Needham moved on to consider the specific issue of Gnosticism – a belief system taking its name from the Greek word for “knowledge”.

While its origins are unclear, what is clear is that it presented a serious challenge to Christianity in the second and third centuries and still rears its head today through the New Age movement and even through some who would call themselves Christians.

In contrast to Scripture, Gnosticism elevates the mind and downgrades the body, and Revd Needham also explained its unbiblical overemphasis on experience.

He then shone a light on some of its other dark beliefs – how it despises the Old Testament, worships a ‘goddess’ and rejects the God-given distinction between male and female.

The lecture concluded with a reminder that to combat the pernicious reach of this, and any other false teaching, we need a true understanding of the Word of God.