Modernism likes to see itself as interested in only ‘objective facts’. For modernism, the keys to understanding the world are a good microscope, telescope or any other instrument that can record objective facts about the world. If we collect enough of these objective facts from the sciences of physics, chemistry, geoscience, astronomy, genetics and the like, we will understand reality, it reasons. None of those subjective values and personal judgments about morality, ethics, beauty or truth are to be considered. Those are not testable, verifiable or measurable in a laboratory, therefore they are simply statements of human preference or desire, but do not represent reality. If we want to know reality and understand ultimate questions such as who we are, how we got here, where we are going, what we are here for, we must turn to the ‘objective’ sciences. Knowing reality then, becomes an exercise in fact-collecting. Supposedly, collect enough of these autonomous, scientific facts, and you will know reality.

Most modern school curriculi reflect this modernist thinking. Reality is a collection of raw, uninterpreted facts, and therefore a child must collect as many of these as possible, as unrelated or eclectic as these facts might be. Math facts, history facts, geography facts, chemistry facts, biology facts, language facts, and social sciences facts (the most laughable of all) – if a child completes a good twelve years of this kind of fact-collecting, then he is ‘educated’.

The problem with this whole endeavor is that is incredibly conceited, and blind to its own arrogance. The idea that facts exist by themselves was never believed before the advent of modernism, and is now being abandoned again in post-modernism. It was a conceit of the Enlightenment – that we are capable of perfect objectivity, even though we are perceiving subjects. In truth, all ‘facts’ are known by subjects – us. We understand those facts only by relating them to other facts. We understand one thing by placing it in context of other things. A microscope might record objective data, but it is a subject who looks into the scope and interprets the data. We understand the significance of the facts under consideration, the value of the facts we’re seeing, only by connecting them with a much bigger grid of understanding. That grid is the imagination.

In other words, though objective reality exists outside of us, we only know that reality as perceiving subjects. We perceive that reality through a pre-existing grid which interprets the facts. The grid, or the imagination, determines how we will understand the raw data of the world that is given to us. If the grid is wrong, it will misconstrue what it sees 100% of the time. The telescope might be flawless, but that’s not the point. Humans use those telescopes and decide what the data means.

Romans 1 makes this idea this fairly clear. Once the grid of ultimate devotion to God was abandoned and replaced with a grid of idolatry, mankind became increasingly deceived in his perceptions of the world.

because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools (Ro 1:21-22).

Man’s fact-collecting mission would now always arrive at the wrong conclusions, because his grid was now idolatrous.

Why all this discussion of knowledge and objectivity in a conversation about child evangelism? Because many Christian parents have embraced the modernist idea of collecting objective facts, when it comes to educating their children. Theirs is identical to a secularist’s approach, except that to the list of algebra facts, economics facts and art facts, they add Bible facts. They believe that their children must be exposed to as many good, objective Bible facts as possible, and all will turn out well. Years later, their children, now young adults, announce that they no longer believe what they were taught in Sunday School. What happened? Did the Bible facts change in their content? Did the child discover that those facts were not objective?

What happened is that the child’s interpretation of those Bible facts changed. His feeling towards the biblical data changed, which in turn, changed the meaning, the interpretation of those Bible facts. And it changed because of what was going on behind the facts – in his imagination.

The imagination is the faculty which God gives humans to make sense of reality by analogy. We learn of one thing by comparing it, or contrasting it, or connecting it, to another. This is like that. Without these comparisons and analogies, nothing in the world would make sense, not the watch on your wrist, not the colour red, not the face of your spouse. Nothing would be recognized, because nothing could be related to anything else. In truth, there are no brute facts. Everything is understood as the imagination relates it, weighs it, and understands it in light of the whole.

For Christians, the shaping of the imagination becomes particularly crucial, because not only do we want our children to interpret the raw sensory data of the world according to God’s view of reality, we need them to understand many things that cannot be seen – God’s attributes, grace, justice, nobility, holiness, judgement, to name just a few. They will only understand these ultimate unseen realities through the imagination – through the analogies that explain the unseen with the seen. If their imaginations are filled with incorrect analogies, they will misconstrue and misunderstand unseen realities that are critical to the gospel and the Christian life. Worse, they will respond to those realities wrongly, treating them differently to what they are.

A parent’s role is far more than entering facts into the child’s CPU. A parent has twenty years or so to build up a storehouse of analogous knowledge. He or she is a crucial part of putting together a child’s internal mental map, using all kinds of analogies: “This is how we understand that as we relate it to this.” As we build these analogies, we are not only shaping a child’s grid, we are teaching him how he ought to feel about the facts he will encounter. Before the child’s vocabulary has even filled out, we are providing him with a sense of proportion: this is like that, and deserves this kind of response. I say again, many parents think the goal of training is the imparting of cognitive knowledge. However, if you would like your child to rightly interpret the knowledge he encounters, you must shape his imagination through analogous knowledge.

How do we build analogous knowledge? There are several ways that emerge from Scriptural example and from the world that God has created. We will begin to examine these next week.

All kinds of reasons have been proposed for this phenomenon: the age-segregation of the church, shallow youth ministry, inconsistency of Christian adults, lack of spiritual leadership in the home, lack of serious discipleship in the local church, and proliferation of unwholesome media. Any or all of these may be contributing factors. However, it seems what is missing in these conversations is how a child’s disposition towards Christianity is shaped long before he or she encounters the truths of the gospel, or the demands of discipleship.

Before the child is able to weigh the propositions that explain the gospel, or consider the validity of biblical teaching, he already has prejudices for or against the claims of Christ. He either has a disposition, a sensibility that Christianity is true and good and beautiful and ought to be embraced, or he does not. As he grows, this sense increases or decreases in either direction, and largely shapes how he interprets the facts of Christianity as they are placed before him.

In other words, a child is no tabula rasa. He arrives with a set of faculties that immediately begin to make sense of the world by interpreting the raw data of the world through an ever-growing ‘grid’ of interpretations, sensibilities and dispositions. No fact he encounters is understood on its own; it is understood through a network of other facts, feelings and desires. This includes ‘facts’ like Jesus is the Son of God, hell actually exists, and Jesus deserves your total allegiance and ultimate love. How the person responds to those statements, both when he is five and twenty-five, are largely a result of this grid.

Another term for this grid is the imagination. How a person imagines reality in totality, how he pictures ultimate things that make sense of the raw data of his life, how he places value on things and orders them, is his imagination. This imagination can either be Christian or non-Christian. It can be religious or secular. And it is shaped long before the child can read or answer catechism questions.

J. Gresham Machen put it this way: “…[I]t would be a great mistake to suppose that all men are equally well prepared to receive the gospel. It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel.” (Christianity and Culture, 7).

It’s my belief that many of the evangelical dropouts we witness today are abandoning the faith because they grew up with a fundamentally secular imagination, with a thin evangelical overlay. Over time, or as a result of some life circumstance, the underlying grid pushes the person to re-evaluate his beliefs and align them more consistently with the grid. Since the grid is essentially one that views God as a weightless, if not non-existent concern, at some point the thoughtful person recognizes that his Christian faith is a wrinkle in his worldview, an error in the program, an extraneous digit that does not belong. Consequently, he announces that he “no longer believes”.

The question for Christian parents becomes, how is that grid shaped? How does one shape the imagination so that the child has a prejudice towards Christianity’s truths, both before and long after he has embraced them?Parents need to think long and hard how to shape those prior conditions of the mind. Our goal over the next several posts will be to consider some ways that the Christian imagination of a child may be shaped.

So completely are we carried away by the excitement of this midwinter festival that we are apt to forget that its romantic appeal is the least significant thing about it. The theology of Christmas too easily gets lost under the gay wrappings, yet apart from its theological meaning it really has none at all. A half dozen doctrinally sound carols serve to keep alive the great deep truth of the Incarnation, but aside from these, popular Christmas music is void of any real lasting truth. The English mouse that was not even stirring, the German Tannenbaum so fair and lovely and the American red-nosed reindeer that has nothing to recommend it have pretty well taken over in Christmas poetry and song. These along with merry old St. Nicholas have about displaced Christian theology.
We must not forget that the Church is the custodian of a truth so grave and urgent that its importance can not be overemphasized, and so vast and incomprehensible that even an apostle did not try to explain it; rather it burst forth from him as an astonished exclamation:
And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory. (1 Timothy 3:16)
This is what the Church is trying to say to mankind but her voice these days is thin and weak and scarcely heard amid the commercialized clangor of “Silent Night.”

It does seem strange that so many persons become excited about Christmas and so few stop to inquire into its meaning; but I suppose this odd phenomenon is quite in harmony with our unfortunate human habit of magnifying trivialities and ignoring matters of greatest import. The same man who will check his tires and consult his road map with utmost care before starting on a journey may travel for a lifetime on the way that knows no return and never once pause to ask whether or not he is headed in the right direction.
The Christmas message, when stripped of its pagan overtones, is relatively simple: God is come to earth in the form of man. Around this one dogma the whole question of meaning revolves. God did come or He did not; He is come or He is not, and the vast accumulation of sentimental notions and romantic practices that go to make up our modern Christmas cannot give evidence on one side or the other.
Certain religious teachers in apostolic times refused to believe that Jesus was actually God come in the flesh. They were willing to exhaust the language of unctuous flattery to describe His glorious manhood, but they would have none of His deity. Their basic philosophy forbade them to believe that there could ever be a union of God and human flesh. Matter, they said, is essentially evil. God who is impeccably holy could never allow Himself contact with evil. Human flesh is matter, therefore God is not come in the flesh.

Certainly it would not be difficult to refute this negative teaching. One would only need to demonstrate the error of the major premise, the essential sinfulness of matter, and the whole thing would collapse. But that would be to match reason against reason and take the mystery of godliness out of the realm of faith and make of it merely another religious philosophy. Then we would have rationalism with a thin Christian veneer. How long before the veneer wore off and we had only rationalism?
While faith contains an element of reason, it is essentially moral rather than intellectual. In the New Testament unbelief is a sin, and this could not be so if belief were no more than a verdict based upon evidence. There is nothing unreasonable about the Christian message, but its appeal is not primarily to reason. At a specific time in a certain place God became flesh, but the transcendence of Christ over the human conscience is not historic; it is intimate, direct and personal.
Christ’s coming to Bethlehem’s manger was in harmony with the primary fact of His secret presence in the world in preincarnate times as the Light that lighteth every man. The sum of the New Testament teaching about this is that Christ’s claims are self-validating and will be rejected only by those who love evil. Whenever Christ is preached in the power of the Spirit, a judgment seat is erected and each hearer stands to be judged by his response to the message. His moral responsibility is not to a lesson in religious history but to the divine Person who now confronts him.
“Everywhere, everywhere, Christmas tonight.” But Christmas either means more than is popularly supposed or it means nothing. We had better decide.

(“The Meaning of Christmas”, chapter 22, The Warfare of the Spirit)

The hymn was translated by Ludolph Schlicht, and can be sung to the hymn tune “GERMANY”.

Immanuel, to Thee we sing,
Thou Prince of life, almighty King;
That Thou, expected ages past,
Didst come to visit us at last.

For Thee, since first the world was made,
Men’s hearts have waited, watched and prayed;
Prophets and patriarchs, year by year,
Have longed to see Thy light appear.

All glory, worship, thanks and praise,
That Thou art come in these our days!
Thou heavenly Guest, expected long,
We hail Thee with a joyful song.

Word of the Father! Light of light;
Eternal praise is Thine alone;
Strong in Thy uncreated might,
Sweet with a holy fragrance all Thine own.
The dark beginnings of creation
Had their first rise and spring in Thee;
The universe, Thy habitation,
Which art, and evermore shalt be.
Word of the Father!

Word of the Father! Truly God,
And truly man by incarnation,
Born to endure the thorns, the rod,
The shameful wounds for our salvation.
Our sins, our woes come all before us,
We have no friend, no friend but Thee;
O spread Thy saving mantle o’er us,
And set our mourning spirits free.
Word of the Father!

Word of the Father! Hear our prayer!
Send far the evil tempter from us,
And make these souls Thy tender care
Lest sin and Satan overcome us.
O conquering Christ! Deep hell, despairing,
Must bow and own Thy right to reign,
When Thou, with joy beyond comparing
Shalt bring Thy ransomed ones again.
Word of the Father!

Inhabitants of a decadent culture feel themselves to be living among the scraps and fragments of something that must have made sense to a previous generation but which now seem more like a pile of unrelated items. Decadent cultures feel unable to articulate the reasons for connecting things to each other. They spend a lot of time staring at isolated fragments, unable to combine them into meaningful wholes. They start all their important speeches by quoting Yeats’s overused line, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Decadents either fetishize their tribal and party distinctions or mix absolutely everything together in one sloppy combination. Not everybody in a decadent culture even feels a need to work toward articulating unities, but those who do make the attempt face a baffling challenge. At best, the experience is somewhat like working a jigsaw puzzle without the guidance of the finished image from the box top; at worst, it is like undertaking that task while fighting back the slow horror of realization that what you have in front of you are pieces that come from several different puzzles, none of them complete or related. Evangelicalism in our lifetime seems to be in a decadent period. In some sectors of the evangelical subculture, there is not even a living cultural memory of a classical period or golden age; what we experience is decadence all the way back.

Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 109.

If what it means to be truly Christian is not only to believe the gospel and some doctrines, but to worship and love God ordinately, apply His Word effectively, and honour both past and future Christianity, then consistency means we must care about these things and pass them on.

Unfortunately, the current climate in Christianity tends to portray such things as extraneous to Christianity. Pastors who pursue them are accused of everything from elitism to cultural imperialism, from Gnosticism to disregard for sola Scriptura. This is not surprising. The thinking is, if the Christianity represented by the celebrity preachers or pastors of ‘successful’ churches does not pursue these things, then they cannot be necessary to healthy Christianity. All those people can’t be wrong, right?  This leads me to a concluding plea to my fellow-pastors: love people, not populism.

Populism is that species of thought which thinks that in order to be true, useful or good, something must be uncomplicated, immediately accessible, and transparently practical. Populism assumes that all that is true and good and necessary to life can be understood equally by all and accessed or perceived immediately, without specialised training or instruction. Recourse is made to texts about receiving the kingdom as a little child, and this is supposed to end the discussion. Consequently, populism views higher learning with suspicion. Populism views consulting experts with suspicion. Populism views advanced studies with suspicion. Populism views tradition with suspicion. Populism views authority with suspicion. Populism views intellectuals with suspicion. The upshot is a roll-your-own-at-home Christianity, where sincerity and an open Bible will supply all we need.

If we embrace populism, we almost certainly cannot be conservative Christians. We will sneer at discussions of ordinate affection. We will dispense with complex discussions of theology or philosophy. We will dismiss the matter of the moral imagination. We will reject the notion of reading unbelieving experts in their fields. We will be impatient with tradition. We will tend to make judgements pragmatically. Most ironically, we pastors will become anti-clerical and anti-ecclesiastical, like the cartoon character sawing off the tree limb he’s sitting on.

Pastors are usually men with a practical bent and a heart for people. This is as it should be. But this need not become a reason to embrace populism. Before the triumph of populism in the 19th century, thousands of faithful shepherds laboured effectively in churches, loving people without loving populism. Because populism is such a dominant attribute of modern culture, it is hard for practical men with a heart for people not to be wooed by its pragmatic and democratic character. Nevertheless, we do our people no favours when we deny them essential parts of Christianity, simply because such things require patient and lengthy explanations, or because such things require disciplined and intense study.

A love for people means supplying them with what they need most and what will help them most: an undiminished Christianity. This will mean teaching them things that they may initially reject, or misunderstand, or fail to grasp. It may mean enduring charges of elitism, Gnosticism, or authoritarianism. Yes, many of our people are populists, and expect us to be too. But as any parent knows, love is not merely meeting the expectations of your children all the time. Love is patient, love is kind, love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

May God grant the church the gift of faithful shepherds who will do their utmost to teach, conserve and propagate a full-orbed, undiminished, and biblical Christianity.

First, our sermons can arouse interest in the Christian past when we quote from, or refer to the lives of Christians from the past. I have often seen how one quotation or illustration has resulted in some Christians tracking down a biography or the devotional work in question.

Second, we can teach church-level courses in church history. Some kind of broad overview of the major movements, developments, and personalities within broad Christendom is hugely beneficial to most Christians. Simultaneously, we might teach some points from historical theology, emphasizing the flow of Christian thought through the ages. This helps Christians to see the jagged line that was providentially used by God to bring them the gospel and the Word of God.

Third, we can teach the occasional biographical study of someone from church history. This might not be Sunday morning fare, but there can be a place for an interesting study of the life of a well-known Christian. In line with this, we can stock our church libraries with biographies and more popular-level church history books. Recommendations from the pulpit will also help. We should not forget to find biographies or historical works written for younger readers, to foster their appetite for historical Christianity.

Fourth, we can conduct a study of some of the better known creeds, confessions or catechisms. Not only would such a study increase the doctrinal literacy with the church, it is also enormously helpful in connecting Christians with their doctrinal heritage. The use of creeds in corporate worship may not be acceptable to everyone, but this practice certainly underlines the Christian doctrinal tradition.

Fifth, we can teach on the history of hymnody, and the history of liturgies. This will afford us the opportunity to study some of these liturgies and hymns, and allow our people to see the craftsmanship that went into much of Christian worship before the slap-dash era. Helpful books on the nature and history of hymnody can be placed in our church libraries or turned into a mini-study.

Sixth, and mentioned before, recommending the devotional classics of the church is helpful. Including some of them them in your church library is important. Perhaps even a study through one of them might be effective for discipleship purposes.

These suggestions are aimed at doing more than giving the occasional nod to church history. They are ways to create a climate in which historical Christianity is part of the air that the church-members breathe. Everywhere they turn, there can be some reminder of what Christians in history have thought, sung, prayed, believed, taught and died for. An atmosphere like this fulfills the eighth mark of a conservative Christian church: a love for and right view of the Christian tradition.

First, any ostensibly Christian writing must be judged for its allegiance to the biblical gospel. Just as we would not recognise a contemporary writing as Christian if the author denied the gospel, so we cannot recognise writings from the past as Christian if they do the same. That is not to say that such writings become useless to us. It simply means we would not accord them status as genuine parts of the Christian tradition. We would read them with the same interest we might read the modern commentaries by critical or liberal scholars. Of course, in judging the ancients according to this test, we will not expect them to articulate the gospel precisely as contemporary evangelicals do. (Perhaps that is a good thing.) Instead, we will look for confession of the fundamentals of the faith: the triune God, the full deity and humanity of Jesus Christ, the death and resurrection of Christ for sinners, His ascension and return, the need for salvation by grace through faith, the existence of the church, the reality of judgement and resurrection after death. These essential doctrines were defended in the earliest creeds, and orthodox Christianity has always affirmed them.

Second, we must understand doctrinal turning points. In the progress of Christian thought, there is often a point at which controversy causes a particular doctrine to be carefully defined by Christians. Chalcedon was a turning point for Christology. The Athanasian Creed was a turning point for Trinitarianism. Luther was a turning point for justification by faith. Calvin was a turning point for the atonement of Christ. These turning points mark off important distinctions we must make in evaluating tradition. The writings on a particular theme or doctrine before the turning point must be judged differently from those written after it. Often, before the turning point, a doctrine is assumed, or it has not been come under the careful scrutiny it will in later times. After the turning point, dissident views are self-consciously so. When Irenaeus offers us the recapitulation view of the atonement, or when Anselm offers his satisfaction view, these are not necessarily denials of orthodox Christianity. There is truth in them, though penal substitutionary atonement is at the very heart of the doctrine of atonement. When Calvin articulates penal substitution, we have reached a turning point. Writings after the sixteenth century that attempt to use other theories of the atonement to deny penal substitution are now in a very different category to the writings of the early church Fathers that emphasise other aspects of the atonement. The Council of Trent is a denial; Origen not necessarily so.

In teaching how to evaluate tradition, we must teach that a fair judgement of tradition must consider these turning points. Critics of inerrancy who claim such a concept is absent from church history misunderstand that the doctrinal turning point for inerrancy was the 19th century, perhaps captured in the Chicago Statement a century later. Similar situations prevail for many other doctrines. We often fail to grant the necessary charity to writers before the turning point (or perhaps, the necessary severity to writers after it).

Third, we must look for catholicity and enduring value. If a particular hymn, prayer, treatise or book has tended to find favour with Christians across the ages, it probably represents something permanent and enduring. It will more than likely continue to speak to Christians today. Ironically, these are probably easier to spot in today’s Christianity than ever before. Given the modern intoxication with novelty, works which still remain on the fringes of Christian consciousness are likely those with just such enduring value. To keep its head above the deluge of contemporary Christian writing, a work needs the buoyancy of its catholicity and timelessness.

In the next post, I would like to suggest several ways that a right appreciation for and interest in the Christian tradition can be fostered in the local church.

Once a person comes under the sound of the true gospel and believes it, he is struck by the sad irony of having attended a church for decades in which the gospel itself was never proclaimed. Inevitably, this new-found knowledge of biblical truth tends to produce a desire to distance himself from anything and everything connected with the former church, including any allegiance to tradition. Since such churches often rely on and turn to their traditions, the new Christian concludes that tradition must be part of the problem that caused the gospel itself to go into eclipse in such churches.

The truth is, tradition is indeed a double-edged sword. When tradition preserves the truth, it is a reliable record that comes to a newer generation without that generation having to re-invent the wheel. When tradition preserves untruths, it becomes the guardian of a lie that will not die. It is an accomplice to deception, using its antiquity to give credibility to its spurious beliefs and practices.

In reaction to gospel-eviscerated traditionalism, it is possible to make tradition itself the problem. This would be a mistake. If a museum keeps something worthless, this does not invalidate the value of museums. Clearly, what matters is what tradition preserves. A gospel-eviscerated tradition is a bad one. A gospel-centred tradition is a good one.

Pastors who wish to have churches in which the Christian tradition is rightly viewed and used must help their parishioners to see just this. Tradition is neither pure evil nor unmitigated good. Traditions must be judged for the truth of what they preserve. To help Christians overcome either an unhealthy antipathy towards tradition, or an unquestioning deference to tradition, I suggest pastors teach several things.

First, we must teach that tradition is biblical. One of Paul’s instructions to Timothy is to teach faithful men who will be able to teach others also. This command is nothing less than a command for a tradition. The truth is to be taught to others, who will teach that same truth to others still. Since each generation receives the truth from teachers who heard from others, this is tradition at work. Simply because each generation holds to sola Scriptura does not mean that they were not helped, influenced or enabled to understand the truth by former generations. When we train leaders, and encourage people to disciple others, and disciple their children, we are perpetuating a tradition. We want the truth passed on. We want right practices passed on. We want ordinate worship passed on. This is only right, and it is the biblical idea of tradition.

Second, we must teach that we all depend on tradition. One way of pointing this out is to ask how people came to faith. They will often mention a person who shared the gospel with them. The question then becomes, who shared the gospel with that person? And with the person before that? Soon we find a line of Christians who preserved and taught the gospel stretching back through the centuries. We would not be saved had Christians before us not preserved and passed on the gospel. This is true not only of the gospel, but of doctrine. We do well to help our people understand that we ourselves did not invent the categories of essence and persons when it comes to explaining the Trinity. Rather, we have received these categories after centuries of debate and theological refinement. Were it not for the work done at Nicea, Chalcedon, Augsburg and so on, we would be wallowing in a mass of biblical data, taking on the gargantuan task of figuring it all out on our own. Fortunately, we do not have to do the pastoral or theological equivalent of swimming the Pacific, but we can and do receive the baton of orthodox doctrinal categories from centuries of Christian work.

Third, we must deny that tradition is a straight or unbroken line. While it is tempting for some to style themselves as true heirs of an undiluted orthodoxy that never wavered from the days of the apostles, church history simply does not bear this out. Church history is a time-line of doctrinal combat, a series of reactions and overreactions to heresy and hypocrisy, with corrections, over-corrections and corrections-that-never-were. Church history is a very crooked, jagged line, with many branches veering off into denials of the faith. In order to rightly value tradition, we need not try to find ourselves with our combinations of beliefs and practices in the pages of church history for some form of self-validation. Rather, we can rejoice in the providence of God in bringing what we now have through the twists and turns of church history.

Fourth, we must teach how to evaluate the Christian tradition. Not all traditions are equally helpful. Not everything calling itself Christian today is so, and the same is true of the past. We must help our people to evaluate what they read from the Christian past to judge its worth. We will consider this next.