For the growing sect of people who believe that Biblical Christianity must change or compromise or emerge or morph into... well, something else in order to survive in the current marketplace of ideas, let this be a simple reminder to you that history does not support your thesis.  True Christianity has been tested and tried and marginalized and attacked and banned for centuries only to stand strong and unchanged in the face of compromise and error.

And the same holds true for today.

The Year 2010:  Christianity's Rich History Fortifies Us Going Forward

January is named after Janus, the two faced Roman god who looked to both the past and the future. It thus seems appropriate as we look to the coming year with all its uncertainties to remind ourselves of what has happened in our past and what we can learn from it for the upcoming year.

• 1700 years ago, the Roman Emperor Diocletian was presiding over the Great Persecution, a savage attack intended to exterminate the Christians in the Empire. Three years later, Christianity was legalized.
• 1600 years ago, the Visigoths under Alaric sacked the city of Rome, an event which inspired St. Augustine to write his most important work, The City of God, a book which would define the self-conception of the Western world for over 1,000 years.
• 1425 years ago, at a time when the church on continental Europe had lost any sense of its spiritual mission, St. Columbanus founded a monastery at Luxeuil in Burgundy, at what had been a pagan holy place. Luxeuil Abbey would rapidly become the leading monastery in Gaul and a major center for learning and church reform under the leadership of Columbanus and his successors. Unfortunately, Columbanus had a falling out with Brunhaut, the Frankish Queen Mother, and was forced to leave kingdom.
• 1420 years ago, Agiluf, the Arian king of the Lombards, married Theodelinda, an orthodox Christian. Under Theodelinda’ influence, Agiluf converted to orthodox Christianity and invited St. Columbanus to Italy. Columbanus established a church and later a monastery at Bobbio. The Abbey at Bobbio would become a center for missions and an anchor for orthodox Christianity against the militant Arian Lombards in the area. Like Luxeuil, Bobbio would also be a major center for education and would build one of the largest libraries in the Christian world.
• 1300 years ago, Muslims in North Africa were invited across the Straits of Gibraltar to intervene in a succession crisis in Visigothic Spain. The following year, the Muslims conducted a full scale invasion and in short order overran the entire Iberian Peninsula. They soon crossed into Gaul and pushed far north, among other things massacring the community at Luxeuil. Twenty-one years after invading Spain, they were defeated a few hundred miles short of Paris and were driven back across the Pyrenees. It took another 760 years to push them out of Iberia itself.
• 1100 years ago, in another period of severe corruption in the church, the monastery at Cluny was founded. Cluny would become a major leader in the church reform movement over the next two centuries under a succession of remarkably talented and long lived abbots.
• 800 years ago, Stephen Langton, the elected Archbishop of Canterbury, had been exiled to France by King John. Five years later, due to Langton’s energetic leadership, John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, guaranteeing the liberties of the English church and people.
• 500 years ago, the doctrine of justification by faith alone was for all practical purposes lost. Two years later, it appeared in the writings of French scholar Lefèvre d’Étaples; five years after that, it featured in Luther’s 95 Theses, and two years later in the writings of Huldrych Zwingli. Justification by faith alone became one of the key doctrines of Protestantism.
• 325 years ago, Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had allowed limited rights to worship for French Protestants. Louis claimed that there were no more Protestants left in France, and thus that the Edict was no longer needed. 400,000 Protestants fled France in the wake of the revocation, and those who remained went underground. They used secret routes and hidden rooms in their communities to smuggle pastors in and out from Switzerland.  When Protestantism was again legalized, it was discovered that there were about 1 million Protestants still living in the country. Later, when the Nazis controlled France, those still secret routes that had been used over a century earlier to smuggle pastors in from Switzerland were re-activated to smuggle Jews out of France to safety.
• 200 years ago, England controlled the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Three years later, William Wilberforce’s twenty year campaign to abolish the slave trade succeeded. Twenty three more years would be required before slavery itself would be abolished in the British Empire.
• 30 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, Lech Walesa led a strike in the Gdansk shipyards against the Communist regime in Poland, leading to the founding of Solidarity. Ten years later, he was president of a free Poland as a result of the movement which he started and the inspiration and encouragement of Pope John Paul II, whom Walesa himself credited with rallying the Polish people.

What is the point of all this? We are living very uncertain times today, and it is tempting to throw up our hands and give up. But in the past, the church has faced persecution and pressure, ignorance and heresy, corruption in church, government and society, anti-Christian ideologies controlling culture, even invasion and massacres. Things did not always go well in this world for those who had the courage to stand for the truth.

Yet despite this, Christ’s followers changed the world. Sometimes it took years, sometimes decades, sometimes even centuries, but God honored the steadfast faithfulness of believers who, like the men of Issachar in David’s day, understood the times and what needed to be done. What our world desperately needs today is people like that, who will work to see the world with God’s eyes and bring the biblical worldview to bear in every aspect of our lives and culture. The only question is, who is it going to be?

How about you?

This article is from Dr. Glenn Sunshine and was posted at www.colsoncenter.org

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