Theology Thursday: Don't Forget

For the past year, instead of practical life lessons in Sunday school, we’ve given that time over to looking at the past, specifically, the history of the church. We’ve done that for several reasons: one, to understand where we are and how we got here. There’s nothing that will make you susceptible to fads as not knowing your past. Second, we want to be grateful for what other before us have done. From Paul’s imprisonments to the deaths of Latimer and Ridley, we’ve seen suffering and struggle for the sake of the church, and we reap the blessings.

A third reason we study and know the past is a challenge. It’s now our time to pass on what we’ve received. We can’t drop the baton (and we’ve seen what happens when a generation does that.) Part of the joy of being a part of the church, and something bigger than ourselves, is knowing that we are building something, or preserving something, that will bless generations to come.

Last Sunday we looked at the Puritans in New England. We saw that we don’t agree with all their theology and practice. But we have received a wave of blessings from their efforts. Here’s what Dr. Mark Kalthoff of Hillsdale College says about the Puritans and their relationship to the ideas of America.

The Puritans have, in many ways, gotten a bad rap. They weren’t stodgy old people with tired blood, but, instead, they were up-to-date, highly educated, and their community in Massachusetts Bay was one of the most highly educated the world had seen before or since.

Yes, their ideas were old. They had a heritage. So they taught us to listen to our heritage. They listened to theirs. Theirs was drawn from the Greco, Roman, and Judeo Christian tradition. And from those things, they learned and passed on to us the importance of civic mindedness, the importance of the cardinal virtue of justice. They upheld the ideas of education. They were about the business of founding Harvard right after getting here, and they passed the first public school act ever in North America. They wanted to have a well-rounded, educated, pious people who ordered their lives according to transcendent moral truths.

The freedom of religion and thought, the blessings of education, a civil society, the vast amount of materials we have on theology and Christian living; this was given to us; we are not entitled to it, and it is our duty to study and pass it on. When we disagree with people in the past, then we are doing our job of preserving the best and discarding what needs to go.

Thank you for going on this journey with me. It’s our privilege to be. part of this story in Brooklyn, New York.