Truth Unites - How to Study Church History (And Why Every Christian Should)

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

In this video Gavin Ortlund shares 5 reasons why Christians should care about church history and then 4 steps for how to engage it. Muller and Bradley book: https://www.amazon.com/Church-History-Introduction-Research-Resources/dp/0802874053 Article about curiosity: https://hbr.org/2014/08/curiosity-is-as-important-as-intelligence The ATLA religion database: https://www.atla.com/research-tool/atla-religion-database/ JTOR: https://www.jstor.org/ Library Databases: https://library.princeton.edu/ Open Access to Theses and Dissertations: www.oatd.org Proquest: https://www.proquest.com/index Tips on Writing: https://truthunites.org/2014/09/10/tips-on-writing/ Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

In this video, I'm going to give advice for how to learn about church history. We'll also talk at the beginning about why this is valuable for every single Christian. All Christians should value church history. So I'll make a case for that briefly, and then the meat of the video will be how we go about that. If you watch to the end, what you can expect to get is advice on how to search for a topic beyond just using Google. There are actually other websites that you need to access and that aren't that hard. You know, you just need to know what they are. how to identify a particular period or topic or text or figure for you to focus on personally.

I'll give some comments on how to get published, what it means to be published in an academic journal or other context, and basically just an overall framework for what the study of church history is, why it's valuable, how to go about it. Why am I making this video? Someone suggested this, and I thought, that's a great idea. A lot of people are fascinated by church history, but don't know where to begin. And I think right now in our culture, there is this ache for rootedness. People are, and this is a healthy thing. We want to be connected to something grand and transcendent. And church history is healthy to be connected to, but a lot of people don't know where to begin. So I hope this will help people. This actually is related to the

purpose of my channel, which is about gospel assurance. Church history is a great resource for that goal. And it's also important because the internet and the proliferation of self-publishing actually make it a lot harder to distinguish legitimate scholarship between and pseudo-scholarship. Scholarship is very imperfect, but it's still important to be able to kind of tell the difference between something that is a legitimate active scholarship, and there's a lot of stuff out there. You need to be able to have good discernment in recognizing it for what it is. The content of this is basically coming out of a historiography seminar in my doctrinal, I can't talk today, historiography seminar,

in my doctoral work. I'll have to ask for patience in this. I'm filming this at the end of a long day here. So my PhD was in historical theology, which is a subset of church history. And historiography is basically about the methods we use in studying history. So basically what I try to do here, I try to make my videos as valuable as possible for people to take others time seriously and not waste time. So basically I'm just condensing down all the things that helped me the most from that seminar into a video format. I'm skipping over some more technical issues and getting more to what is most practical from that course. If you want to go deeper, this book I'll put up on the screen is a great text from which that seminar was designed. Basic table of contents will have two

sections. First, I want to give five reasons for why Christians should study church history. And then I want to give basically four steps for how to go about it. Feel free to skip around in the timestamps as you want. By the way, the third. thumbnail for this video is supposed to be a joke. I have a wonderful friend who does my thumbnails. We both love humor. We think it's kind of funny. So please never take the thumbnails that seriously. We just find them funny. Okay. First, why should anyone care about church history to begin with? I don't want to assume this because many evangelical Protestants, especially, don't value church history as much as we should. And that's unfortunate. Sometimes we think,

well, because we don't believe as Protestants that church history is infallible, therefore it's not valuable, but something can be deeply valuable, even if it's not infallible. I wrote a whole book about how much value there is in studying church history as from a Protestant perspective and studying all of church history. You can see that for the full case. Let me just give five really quick reasons right now why every Christian, inasmuch as they're able, and leaving room for differentiation from one person to another, you know, I don't want to be unrealistic, but every Christian should be interested in church history, and we should care about church history. Five reasons real quick.

Number one, Christianity is a historical religion, more so than other religions in many cases. So this means that history has a very particular kind of meaning since it is progressing unto something. This would be different, for example, from some Eastern religions, which have a more cyclical view of history. So history is really meaningful from a Christian standpoint. Something, it's leading somewhere. But more basically, Christianity itself is historical. The basic Christian doctrines touch history. If you recite the Apostles' Creed, you talk about Pontius Pilate. It's amazing. This is not a religion of timeless truths. It's a religion of events that have happened in a particular

place, particular time. If you open up the Bible to the table of contents, you know, you see roughly about 75% of the material is narrative. And the portions that are not narrative arise only in tight relation to the narrative backbone. So you think of the Exodus and the exile, these two significant historical events at the beginning and later part of Israel's history in the Old Testament. A lot of the non-narrative passages, whether law or prophecy, arise in response to those, even the wisdom literature. you can't understand without knowing the story of Israel. Then in the New Testament, the first five books are about historical events. The rest of the New Testament is a commentary responding to those.

So basically think of it like this. Narrative is the skeleton of the Bible. Things like epistle or psalm are the organ and tissue. Final point that's so interesting about this is the narrative goes on. One of the most fascinating things about the book of Acts is how abruptly it ends. You know, you're reading along in the book of Acts, it starts very broad, kind of gets focused in on the Apostle Paul. Luke is a travel companion to the Apostle Paul. So you're getting more and more specific as you go, and then it just ends. You know, Paul is in Rome. He's preaching. The last word of the book is boldly

without hindrance. He's preaching boldly in the center of the Gentile world in Rome and then just, boom, the story is over. And the implication seems to be the story goes on. Clearly, the book of acts is not wrapping up history with a neat bow. You know, it clearly, it's going forward. And what that means is this wonderful, happy thought that as we study church history, we are studying the work of God. The eternal God works in history. It's amazing to think about. So when we study church history, we're learning, we're seeing how the story goes forward. A second reason every Christian should care about church history is our humanity. As human beings, we are traditioned creatures. That just means were profoundly influenced by the past.

Every generation of human beings inherits a huge mass of assumptions from previous generations that we often simply take for granted, and yet they fundamentally shape our life. There's an old Arab proverb that states, men resemble their times more than their fathers. That's a fascinating statement when you think about it. We're profoundly shaped by the time in which we live and the culture in which we live. And so the only alternative to conscious engagement with the past is an unconscious relation to the past. You know, if your church service says, oh, we don't care about liturgy, we don't care about church history, we don't care about how other Christians have done worship, we just want to do our own thing.

Well, the five songs and a sermon with some announcements sprinkled in that you'll probably default to is itself a tradition and a kind of liturgy, arguably not the best one. In other words, the only alternative to studying history is to be sort of blindly shaped by history. So it's good to study history. The third reason is the doctrine of the church. When we study church history, we're studying about our brothers and sisters in the faith, our fathers and mothers in the faith. This is our spiritual family. We should care because we're united to these people through our common union with Christ. Think about it like this.

If somebody said, I only want to have a relationship with North America. Christian. I'm not interested in having a relationship with South American Christians, or name any other place. We would all recoil at that and say, that's a prejudice. You know, why? Those are your brothers and sisters in Christ, too. Well, there's a similar dynamic when someone says, I only want to have a relationship with 21st century Christians. I'm not interested in Christians of other times. That also reflects a prejudice, not of place, but of time. And we need to reflect upon this that this is our spiritual family. We stand on their shoulders.

You know, I often get emotional when I talk about the martyrs of church history. You may have already seen my video on the Christianization of Scandinavia. The courage that some of these Christians displayed, and the benefit that we receive from that is so powerful. So summing up so far, three reasons why we should care about church history. number one is what Christianity is. Number two is what we are as human beings, the doctrine of humanity, and number three is what we are as Christians, the doctrine of the church.

Here's the fourth and biggest reason for me personally and maybe for others, and that is it's an incredibly fruitful way to learn. Studying church history helps expose and challenge the blind spots of the current moment. C.S. Lewis stated this so well. Every age has its own outlook. it is especially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all therefore need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. Skipping down a bit, he says,

none of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it and weaken our guard against it if we read only modern books. Where they are true, they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false, they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries flowing through our minds, and this can only be done by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer than than they are now.

They made as many mistakes as we, but not the same mistakes. In other words, while Christians in church history surely made many errors, they usually don't make our errors, and so they can help challenge us in ways that the present often won't challenge us. Edward Carr wrote this fascinating book about church history. One of the things he says in here, quoting another historian, is a great quote, History must be our deliverer from the tyranny of environment

and the pressure of the air we breathe. I like that phrase, the tyranny of environment. So he's saying, in other words, we're going to be enslaved to the prejudices and blind spots of our own culture unless we learn from other ways of thinking. Now, that is always true. But it is especially true for those of us in the modern West, because the modern West is a particularly eccentric time in history.

There are certain things we take for granted that almost everybody thought was strange throughout history, certain things that everybody else took for granted that we few today in the modern West think of as strange. And so it's all the more important to get perspective and historical context for those of us who live in the modern West. Let me just share personally how that played out for me doing my doctor work on St. Ansel, and he has a whole book called Why the God Man, he's answering the question, how can God forgive sins? I'll never forget when it dawned upon me that Anselm is not just giving a different answer to the questions that we ask today, but he's asking a totally different question.

Because so many times, the question for us today is how can God judge? Why would God send someone to hell? The problem is of divine judgment, not of divine mercy. Anselm's problem was divine mercy. And as you spent several years soaking in the instincts of someone like Anselm, it's so healthy to be challenged by the sheer God-centeredness of his vision. He had this huge view of God. You know, we tend to start with our concerns and then build outwards to God. Anselm started with God and build outwards from there.

It's such a helpful corrective to modern ways of thinking. It doesn't mean that the pre-modern voices will always be right and will always be wrong, but it's so healthy to be challenged in our presupposition. Fifth reason, kind of a fun one, is that history is just so interesting. It's just absolutely fascinating. There's this fascinating book by Mark Block called The Historian's Craft. I'm going to be recommending a lot of books throughout this video. He was a French historian. He wrote this book during World War II. If I recall, he was something like 53 years old and he went back to fight in World War II. I think he had like six children. He'd already fought in World War I. And he was a historian. He was eventually captured, tortured, and killed by the Nazis. But he wrote this book during the war. And one of the themes is that history is not an ivory tower, remote, academic discipline. He's emphasizing that history has a vital relationship to the present. To be a good historian, you actually need to study the contemporary world, just as to understand the contemporary world you need to know the past. There's this dynamic relationship between the past and the present. And so he's saying all history is interconnected.

He says the only true history is a universal history. So you really get the sense of just how lively and relevant studying history is from that book. Really interesting book. But one of the things he says that I love is even if history were judged incapable of other uses, its entertainment value would remain in its favor. I start off my book Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals with that quote because I really think it's true. Truth is stranger than fiction. No one could possibly write so strange a work of fiction or so strange a novel as we discuss.

cover in actual history. And you get into history and you realize this is just so intricate and complicated and counterintuitive and the way little details come down. You know, for example, I went through a phase studying American political history and I'm reading through the letters back and forth between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson at the end of their career. And I come across this little fact. Did you know this? Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, both died on the same day, the same day, which also happened to be the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1826. Just like if you were writing a story, you know, no one would ever make that up, you know,

just such a fascinating little detail. There's so many things like that. And then what you come across is the butterfly effect, this fact of contingency, you know, these tiny little details that affect so much. And over and over as you study history, you realize if this tiny little thing had gone differently, maybe everything else would have been affected. I like watching documentaries on World War II. So, you know, you think about how much weather was a factor. Like so many times, if the winter had come later or if the weather had been better, the whole war would have been different. You know,

you think especially like the Nazis attacking the Soviet Union late 1941, the way winter affected that. But there's so many of the little tiny details. This hit me the most when I was reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and I was just coming to terms with the fact of historical contingency. things that I'd always assumed as are fixed and settled like the rising of the sun, like that the union was preserved and slavery was abolished. Just that's the world I always knew. And suddenly, I'm looking at it through Lincoln's eyes and through the perspective of 1862 or something like that.

And I'm realizing that looked really improbable at times. You realize how easily it could have gone differently. So it's just fascinating to get into that as you study church history. So Christians, we should care about church history. So let me share now four ways. If you're, I assume a lot of the people who watch my videos would like to study church history, but sometimes you don't know how, you know. So to study church history at an academic level, or at least to do so as a layperson

who's kind of informed somewhat by academic disciplines. Let me just give four suggestions. Some of these are more basic. The last one will be more detailed. You might want to skip ahead to that one if that's really what you're interested in. But to start with this, the first step of four. is identify a topic that you're curious about. Curiosity is the best place to start.

So, you know, the first step is to ask a basic question. As opposed to just what do I think I should study? What am I passionately curious about? Curiosity is a great starting point because it's such a powerful stimulus for sustaining the hard work of digging down because it's a lot of hard work, you know, getting into things. Albert Einstein famously said, I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. I'm going to link to an article in the Harvard Business Review that explores how people with a higher curiosity quotient learn much more over time.

They can tolerate ambiguity better. They can come up with more original ideas. Over the long haul, they have such a, curiosity makes such a difference. And the good news is you can influence your curiosity. You can cultivate your curiosity in various ways. Spending all your time on the Internet is not the way to do it. So to flesh this out, people often ask me about reading habits, you know, how do I read more? What are our goals?

And oftentimes they're looking for some specific practice that will make the difference. Now, there are particular practices that I have cultivated and others might recommend others, you know, for me, writing in the back of books what I'm learning. You know, pretty much every book I have, I just write a lot in the back in order to make notes. So I come back to it later and I can actually have this like little distillation of what I learned. getting up early and working knowing when in the day you're most productive. There's lots of habits you can cultivate. But the basic advice that really, I think, comes before anything else is to cultivate your curiosity and focus on what you're curious about.

Because if you're curious, all those other things will just naturally fall into place. To give a metaphor, let's suppose that you love playing tennis and you dream about tennis and you're doing it all the time. You know, you're the kind of person where after practice is over, you're still out there playing more. You just can't get enough of it. you know, and someone wants to come along and say, how do you work so hard or how many hours a week do you have to practice? Or, you know, what did you do? How do you practice the specific aspect

of your serve and that kind of thing? And you might just say, I really don't know. I don't count the hours. It's not really something I'm working at. I just like playing. It's just fun, you know, because if you have fun and you're enthusiastic about it, you're not going to think of it as work. And that's an incredible, powerful tool for productivity is if it doesn't feel like work, but you're just curious, you know. And so that's the thing I like to, and we can influence our curiosity. We can increase it in various ways. So that's the first thing is there is a place for goals and discipline and all that.

But before anything else, ask yourself, what really do I really want to know? What do I find absolutely fascinating that I'm just ready to really pour energy into it? Okay, second thing, this also is a little more basic, but it's to try to hone and narrow your interests. So try to get more specific. All learning starts off like this where you're starting off very broad and then you're getting gradually more and more granular and specific and focused. And the reason this is so important is there's so much to church history. At times you'll feel overwhelmed.

By the way, feeling overwhelmed is okay. That's a part of learning. Times where you feel completely overwhelmed, that is actually a part of the process for learning. But there's just so much out there to learn. If you take like Eastern Christianity, for example, I remember growing up in the West, not knowing as much about the East, just being amazed at just how much there is to learn. During the high Middle Ages, the city we call Constantinople, today Istanbul in Turkey, was the greatest city in all of Europe. And within that one city alone, there's a whole world of emperors, theological disputes, political intrigue, missions efforts to India and China, advance and retreat,

death, recovery, death again. You know, they're facing the Muslim onslaughts and so forth. You could get lost in that one little slice of history and never touch bottom. There's so much there. And that empire stood, the Byzantine Empire stood for more than a thousand years. So you look at that and you say, you know, there's just so much to discover. And so what you have to do is try to break things down, kind of hone where you're interested in. So one of the most basic ways to break things down is by time period. You can do it in other ways, too. You can look at a certain location or you can study, you know, a certain aspect of history. You might be interested in social history versus intellectual history or something like that. When I say historical theology was my focus, that's a

subset within church history. And then there are further subsets within historical theology. You could study the history of dogma, or you could just study the history of Christian thought, much more general category. So there's all kinds of ways to break it down. One of the most basic ones to start with might be the time period that you're interested in. So to give four categories to start with, these are very broad and inexact and kind of clunky, and they also reflect a Western perspective somewhat, but you got to start somewhere. You can think of church history in four broad phases. The patristic era, that word comes from the word for father. This is talking about the time of the church fathers. You might think of the first five to six to seven hundred years of

church history somewhere in there. Secondly, you might think of the medieval period. This is about a thousand years, 500 to 1,500, very broadly. You can think of these terms, there's not a hard cutoff for these. Then you think of Reformation church history in the 16th century, in a little, little from there. Then you think of modern church history. You might think of like from the time of René Descartes, for example, again, tough to give a hard cutoff start point. So then what you're basically trying to do is kind of hone from there. Like, you know, you can't just say, well, I'm interested in the church fathers. Well, okay, great, but you got to get a little more specific to really drill down, because that's going to lead us to my third step in just a second. So you've got to

kind of narrow it down. Maybe you're interested in the apostolic fathers. These are the Christians immediately after the apostles are off the picture. Maybe you're interested in really recent church history. Sometimes we think that to be a historian, you have to be interested way in the past, but actually studying like 20th century church history is fascinating. My personal passion is the medieval era, because I think that's an often neglected era. And oftentimes this old caricature from the Enlightenment of the medieval era as the Dark Ages is still very much alive in people's imagination, and we see the medieval period as this time of, it's kind of stagnant, ignorant time, not at all. Marcia Colish, who's a fantastic historian and theologian and

scholar, has written this fascinating book, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition. I'll never forget reading through this. Her basic argument is that West medieval Christianity laid the foundations for the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. And she's basically showing, and this is, G.K. Chesterton and others have said this. Actually, the Middle Ages, the medieval era, is a very rich and fertile time. This is the time that gives us universities, for example. Another fascinating book is Andrew Luth. He's just an amazing. He's an Eastern Orthodox scholar. Just an amazing historian. His book, Greek, East, and Latin West is another book that was significant for me in getting me interested in medieval

church history. And this book is what got me on to the Christianization of Scandinavia, which I've done a video about. And basically it was just a throwaway comment of his about how the 10th century is the most neglected time period in all of church history. Then he's talking about that a little bit. And that was an entry point for me to say, well, why is that? I was curious. And I just felt this deep curiosity. What was it like? So my interest started honing from just, just medieval Christianity in general to the early medieval period, especially. Some of these especially neglected times. I mean, if you take a church history survey class, for example, a lot of times you're going

straight from the end of the church fathers and you go pretty quick to like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas and so forth. And like seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth centuries go pretty fast. They really are neglected, but that's an important time. So the point is you're trying to hone. You're trying to focus down. You know, you're trying to get a little bit more specific. here's a metaphor for what it's like. You have these broad labels at first, and you're trying to get

more and more granular. It's like when my wife and I moved up to Washington, D.C. I had always lived in the South and the Midwest before that, at least in my older years. And so I thought of Washington, D.C. in my mind, in very generic categories as a city in the northeast. It's up there with Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. So it's up in that region, one of these northern cities where the culture is a little more progressive, things move a little faster, there's lots of universities, you know, you have these very broad impressions from a distance. And then you get there and you start to see how distinct and particular each little place is. And the mid-Atlantic region is really different from New England. And within Washington, D.C. itself, there's so much variation and particularity,

you know, same thing when we moved out from Washington, D.C. to California. You know, you have these broad stereotypes that I hear a lot about California, but you get to California and you realize one region is extremely different from another. You find all these different extremes here, you know. And same with church history. The more you get close, the more you get granular, you realize how different each era is. And so what you want to try to do is as you're curious and as you're reading, you want to hone more and more specifically. Then here's the third thing that I encourage, and this is the most important one, is to do a deep dive into the primary resources. So primary resources, this is a basic distinction in historical research is primary and secondary

resources, or sometimes people will say secondary and tertiary. This is a little bit artificial, but basically a primary resource is going to be a text or an artifact or something from the time in question that you're studying. It's going to give you more direct knowledge. Secondary resources would be like contemporary academic writing about it or something that's more removed. And so what happens is people focus on the secondary resources because it feels easier to get into. And the, if you hear nothing else in this video, my main encouragement is don't be intimidated to dive in to the primary resources. You can do it. It's often easier than you expect. And it's a lot more enjoyable and profitable than the secondary literature most of the time. I'm going to put up

this quote from C.S. Lewis. I won't read through the whole thing because you can pause the video and read it yourself. I'll just read a portion of it that you can see emboldened here. He says the simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said, but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. Very true, and you can read the rest of that quote, the entire essay. It's called On the Reading of Old Books. It's, if you buy the popular patristics edition of Athanasius's on the incarnation of the word, it comes with that at the beginning of that fantastic little essay that he's written, about reading old books. And he's, I think he's totally right here that the older material are

often easier to read, even as they are more profitable. So they're often shorter. They're often more vivid and honest. Sometimes they're written under duress, like Boethius is the consolation of philosophy. He's writing it, you know, as he awaits his execution. They're often intended for catechis, like Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica. That was intended for teaching people. So they have a vividness and a concreteness to them that a lot of these contemporary books are a little more complacent and meandering and abstract and they don't have that vividness, you know. And the older books are really worth diving into. What I like to encourage people is to take one particular text or one particular area and really do a deep dive. Don't worry about trying to get this broad, comprehensive scope of something at first.

just focus somewhere in the primary literature and then really drill down deeply. In preaching, there's a statement that the particular is the universal. And the idea is when a very concrete illustration is effective, it itself establishes the abstract principle that it is illustrating. Similarly, in the study of church history, drilling down into one particular area often opens up a whole era. You know, people sometimes are afraid to go real deep into one thing because they're afraid they're going to miss out. But if you spent just a couple of years really drilling down, it's worth it, you know? So, for example, you know, if you really drill down into just the life of Augustine

and you start reading biographies of Augustine, you're going to learn all kinds of things about the Roman Empire and all kinds of things about early church government and theology and all these things will come with it. If you read the fantastic book by George Mark, on the first two decades of Fuller Seminary, you will get a window into the whole drama of 20th century American evangelicalism. And why is historic premil versus dispensational premil such a battlefront and all these things? Because the particular is a pathway onto the universal. And that one little place in time, Fuller Seminary, and it's in her founding, I think like 1947 or 1946 into the 60s, it's a window into the, you know, everywhere. If you read David McCullough's

biography of John Adams, he's a great writer, you'll get drawn into the whole American experiment and what democracy itself is. You know, so you get, you get specific and it opens up the pathway. When I wrote theological retreatable for evangelicals, which is what I was trying to do there, just give a few snapshots. I quoted this passage in Joseph Ellis's book Founding Brothers, which is a great book. And basically, he's trying to tell us about the revolutionary era by looking at these six particular episodes as a window into the broader story. And he quotes this amazing passage from another historian that describes this method. I won't read the whole thing. I'll skip around. You can pause and read it. But this quote says, it is not by the direct method of a scrupulous

narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epic. Skipping down a little bit, he says he will row out over that great ocean of material and lower down into it here and there a little bucket, which will bring up to the late of day some characteristic specimen from those far depths to be examined with careful curiosity. So you get the idea, the metaphor is like if you're going out to explore the ocean, you don't try to look everywhere. That's too overwhelming. You get one spot and you take it as a sample and you really get specific with it. Another example of engaging history like this is Mark Knowles' turning points. Fantastic book that looks at these particular episodes to try to tell a larger story from this

specific advantage point. Now, this could be overstated. This is not an absolute contrast. Maybe for your purposes, you really do want to be more of a generalist. But I just find so many people benefit from diving down deep into the primary sources. If you're wondering, well, what primary sources should I dive into? I don't have any curiosities yet. I'm brand, new. Well, I have some videos that might be of interest, five books to start with with the Church Fathers, and then five books to start with with the Puritans. That might be of use to you. I also have a video on Gregory the Great specifically. He's a fascinating person to engage. I also am going to do a video on Boethius, whom I just mentioned a moment ago. Gregory the Great

and Boetheus are two of the most influential figures throughout all of church history who are no longer as influential. So in the medieval era, it's like the Bible, Augustine, and then Gregory and Boethias right after them. Huge influence, and yet their influence has receded in more recent centuries, so they're really interesting to engage. The good news is if you choose a classic text, it's hard to go wrong, you know. Okay, here's the fourth thing and kind of the more, the most, hopefully the most helpful and specific part of this video is how to is basically learn to engage

the secondary literature. This is the hardest thing where you just need to know a few things. Now, first, let me give an aside on academic scholarship in general because I've discovered that some people are very negative about scholarship. So let me explain why I think it's useful to engage scholarship. It is true that academic scholarship and historical scholarship in particular has some downsides. One of them is over-specialization. So one of the things I love about church history is it kind of pulls you out of these, you know,

segmented little fields or disciplines because you realize like all. all the great theologians were also philosophers. So you can't study, whereas today, like theology and philosophy are more split up. But in the pre-modern era, they had much more context. So over-specialization is a weakness, and of course there is a liberal, skeptical bias that is present in a lot of academic contexts. But it's not universal. But that is there. So certainly we need to engage academic work critically. But what I found is a lot of people who are very negative about academic historical studies still rely on it, sometimes unconsciously, and often they end up kind of trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to just some basic research methods. And a lot of the dismissals of scholarship are just

too wholesale. You know, we actually need scholarship. If someone says, don't read the scholars, just read the primary sources. You know, if someone watching this video is saying, just do step three, you don't do step four. My response to that is one of the ways we have access to the primary sources is through scholarship because critical additions are an active scholarship. That means getting as close as we can to what the author, the original text actually was. And translations are a work of scholarship. And so I think it's kind of naive to try to get around scholarship. We all benefit from scholarship. No one can just get around scholarship. So reading scholarship is helpful. We really need it. It's really both. You know, there should be a kind of dialectical relationship

between the primary and secondary sources. You really need both. You want to do a deep dive, but it does help to come back to the secondary literature and kind of see where the gaps are. You know, see, see, it will help you see things that you wouldn't have already seen. So generally speaking, if you want to get into doing like academic research on a topic, you can't just do Google searches. You need to engage academic writing. And my basic advice would be, and this is not going to be completely comprehensive, but to try to be helpful. There are basically three different genres of academic writings that are good to engage. The first is dissertations and then monographs and then scholarly articles and then essays within a scholarly book would be included as in that latter category of artists.

So we could say articles or essays. Just to define those, a dissertation is a long form piece of academic writing, typically about the length of a book, sometimes longer, based upon original research. It's usually submitted as the final step of finishing a PhD program, whereas a master's thesis would be distinct from that and shorter from that for a master's degree. And you submit this, basically the goal of a dissertation is to demonstrate that you have the ability to make a unique contribution to scholarly research in a field. Monographs then are just academic books, a lot of dissertations. You might try to publish it as a monograph. And then articles appear in an academic journal. These are just shorter formats.

So think of like the length of a chapter, maybe 5 to 8,000 words, something like that. And you'll want to know what are the leading journals in your field that will be published periodically, maybe four times a year, a few times a year, something like that. And then basically you want to try to look at journals and books that are published by presses that are peer reviewed. So this means that nothing comes out except what is sent off anonymously to other experts in the field for evaluation. Now, that is not to say that you can never find something valuable in a different context, nor is it to say, as I'll come back to in a moment, that the peer review process

is perfect, certainly not. It's a very imperfect kind of process, but it's still useful, and it's still good to be mindful of. Oftentimes, I find it actually helpful, most helpful to start with dissertations, because a lot of times they're the most neglected, and then you can branch out from there because those are often the most specialized form of writing you'll find on something. So that means you have to do more than just searching around on like Google or Yahoo. Let me give a few databases where you can actually locate scholarly writings. And I'll put all these in the video description as well. First, the ATLA religion database is an index of academic journal articles and other writings

in the area of religion. This is very much standard for church history. and it just includes a huge body of writings. And, you know, if I'm trying to ascertain whether a theological journal I've discovered I haven't heard of before is credible, I'll often check to see if it's ATLA indexed. And that's a pretty good index for it. Because there's lots of new online journals popping up that may not be peer reviewed. So the downside to this is you do need to get access through a library or through some other way.

If you're a student at a seminary or a university, you can do it through that way. I still have mine through Fuller. So sometimes if you're a former student, you can still access it through that way. But once you get access, you can just basically do searches and maybe you type in something like Jonathan Edwards, Trinity. And you're just off to the races. You can find all kinds of academic works that have been written on that. A good complementary resource is J-Store, which I'll put a link to as well.

And then you can also use library databases like library.prinston.edu, one example. And a lot of times those will yield results as well. Sometimes you'll need access to actually get access to the writings. You'll need to get access through a library or institution if you want to have the full range. But you can even just without that, you can still become acquainted of some of the things that have been written. Whereas if you just search Amazon for books and Google, you're not going to know what's out there, you know. If you're specifically looking for dissertations, open access to theses and dissertations, which I'll put the URL for on the screen, you can see. see and I'll put it in the video description as well, and then also ProQuest. Those are both

helpful resources to consult. ProQuest is probably better. It has a lot more. And then two resources I especially want to mention for church history are Patrilogia Latina and Patrologia Greica. These are from a 19th century compilation of texts from a scholar named Jacques Paul Migney, and basically they've been digitized. So you can search in these texts. So, you know, for example, patrilogia Latina, it has basically from around the time of Turtullian in 200 AD to the death of Pope Innocent the 3rd and 1216, you have this enormous body of writings in Latin. And so you can punch in a Latin word and do a search for all the places that word appears. It's just an incredible resource, you know.

And again, it's all online. You just have to find access to it through a library or something. So, you know, when I'm studying Augustine and I'm wondering, well, how did he use the phrase Solar Ratione by reason alone. And then you can just punch it in. It's amazing what you can do in the age of the internet. So that's a really helpful resource. It doesn't have critical editions of a lot of the texts, but still, it's still really useful. Okay, so those are just some places you can do some searching. Now, let me give a few comments about academic publishing. If you don't have an academic degree and you don't function in any contexts that are academic and your sole motive is ego,

you just want to say, oh, I publish something. You know, you need to know, this is, a lot of work to try to get into the publishing world and it's really hard to break into it. So don't just do it for that reason. But if you're really interested in engaging scholarship and in writing and in contributing, that's great. And I'll just give a few pieces of advice. The basic idea with academic writing as opposed to popular level writing is it's not about just, you know, popular level writing, you're just wanting to write something that will sell. And so the publisher wants to know it'll sell and people will read it. academic writing is a completely different goal.

The goal is to find a gap or an area of relative neglect within the research. And then it could be a new discovery completely, or it could just be an area of under-emphasis or something like this, and you're wanting to make a unique contribution to the advancement of knowledge. And so, you know, you can think of academic writing as a good metaphor would be you're joining a conversation. You're not just working on your own. You're entering into this conversation that's been happening for a long time.

And so one of the most important things you have to do is make a distinction between material that is new to you and material that is new in the field. Something might be really interesting to you, but it's just completely already been covered by others. And this is where, again, I'm part of my, actually, my motive in this video is there really is just this massive disconnect between what's generally known at the popular level and then what generally is worked through. at the scholarly level. And, you know, that, that, it isn't, in saying that, I'm not saying that, like, one or the other is entirely good versus bad. Scholarship has lots of weaknesses, but it is good for there to be more connection and communication between the two and knowledge between the two.

One other thing I want to say is that it's good to study, if you're seeking to publish something, one of the best tips I would give is to simply read in that journal. So if you're wanting to publish in a particular journal, read the articles that are there, see the conversations that are already happening. There's so much more that factors into whether your piece will be accepted than just the quality of the work. It also has to do with kind of the goals and the culture of that journal. So you kind of have to know, like, what are the kinds of things they're interested in? And there are a lot, the peer review process can be kind of quirky.

I mean, there definitely are personalities involved, you know. I'll put up this quote from the James Bradley and Richard Mueller book. They say the quirkiness of some evaluations remains absolutely baffling. take the rejections in stride and turn immediately to other publishers. And so you have to kind of, you know, not take it personally if your stuff gets rejected. There's so many stories of famous novels like Gone with the Wind, so many other novels that got rejected dozens of times before they were finally accepted and then became a big hit. So sometimes you have to persevere in your efforts to get something published.

And that's true for academic work as well. Even CS Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in the Space trilogy, Tolkien had to help him get it published because the publisher didn't like it at first. So rejection doesn't mean it's bad. You know, you have to persevere a little bit. But those are just a few thoughts. I do have another blog post that's entirely about writing and getting published. I'm going to put a link to that in the video description. You can check that out if you're interested in that. So those are my basic thoughts. Just to kind of recapitulate and summarize for the how-to section of this. Basically, you want to find something you're curious about and you want to stare at long enough and read enough about it that you're starting to hone

and get more specific about what really specifically am I, what's my unique angle on this? And then you just do a deep dive into the primary sources. And then after you've done that and in combination with that, then you're looking at the secondary literature and looking what's already been said. And then from there, it's just a lot of hard work and thought. And the last thing I'll say, and this just comes to me and it's not in my video script here, is just talk to other people who are scholars in the field or who are interested in the topic. It's amazing to stray conversations and the way that can influence you as you're on your way. All right, that's it. I hope that'd be helpful to people out there. This is not a comprehensive video, but those are just some genuine, my genuine opinion about what can be a helpful way to get started to engage church history. And I'll keep doing videos on my channel to help people with this topic as well, because I hope my channel kind of encourages people to read church history. What do you think? If you have things you'd add on, let me know in the comments and we can keep this conversation going. And let me know if you found this video helpful, or if this was too far afield from the normal things you watch my channel for. All right, thanks, everybody.

Have a good day.