Polycarp Ministries

I said earlier that there were 3 things that would be my undoing. The 3rd of the three was my History minor. I had bar-none, the absolute best history professors in the world. Not only were they intelligent, but they were also dynamic in their presentations. To top all that, they were approachable and ere genuinely interested in making an investment in my life. Their example made me want to become a teacher. So I picked up the double so I could minor in Greek AND History. The course load was difficult, but it was worth the effort. I especially liked studying the history surrounding the Church, and we spent plenty of time there. I was amazed that my professors were good about pointing out the events of history but not trying to reinterpret it. I learned to look as objectively as possible. And there was the Church: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I knew there had been some scoundrels in Church leadership before, but I had no idea how severe some of their errors went. But what was more amazing is what I DIDN’T see. The myths I had learned from certain fundamentalist tracts were obliterated from my mind as I saw the real Church dealing with real issues. I saw that the Church took its time in speaking and did so mostly when a long-held belief was challenged. So where were all these man-made additions? If the Church was responding to a disagreement, then the Church must have already had an established belief. This begged the question which would pursue me for 8 years: What did they believe?

Of course, being at a Baptist school, we didn’t spend all our time talking about Catholic history. We did spend a large amount of time dealing with Protestant history, especially in the Americas. This fueled my desire to “Calvinize” the University. If they could just see that modern baptists have it all wrong. If they could just go back to the beliefs of the baptist founders - back to the beliefs of the reformation, then they would be changed. Then all the silly church issues would be put to rest. Almost every chance I had, in pulpit or on paper, I spoke about “going back” to the way things were supposed to be. My problem was that I didn’t go back far enough (back to 33 AD when Christ started it all), but that will come later. At this time I was making two critical presuppositions re: history and ecclesiology.
1.) The Church was universal and invisible.
2.) The Catholic Church left the teachings of the Apostles during the middle ages (I came to find out later that most people claim the Church fell away prior to Nicea. Hmmmm [he grins]. I wonder why they say that?).

Now I had an unsatiable appetite for history. This passion would fuel my desire to teach and to study history in graduate school.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 1st, 2005 at 12:54 am and is filed under My Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.