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We continue in our slow-walk through Charles Colcock Jones’ The History of the Church of God in the Period of Revelation with this summary of his introduction. The introduction covers twelve pages, and in it Jones hits the following notes:
The Bible is the only authoritative source of church history, and since our Father has chosen to make a written revelation, it is thus necessarily necessary. (i)
When we don’t experience or know “the inward and spiritual experience of the truth and living power and grace of the Holy Scriptures,” then we’re open to all sort of other standards for faith and practice – and often we end up holding to deism or other forms of unbelief. (i-ii)
Many see the Bible as insufficient to teach us about the church’s constitution and government, and so they look to reason, traditions, expediency, or supposed new revelations. They argue backward in time rather than forward from Scriptural principles either expressly set down in the Bible or deduced by good and necessary consequence. (ii-iii)
In the Bible God has “revealed his Church upon earth in its origin, covenants, constitution, doctrines, ordinance, members, officers, government, and discipline.” The writings of uninspired men, as they are valuable, only teach us what they have learned from the Scriptures and from observation, and are but witnesses. The Bible is sufficient to teach us about the history of the Church – and the fact that it was revealed slowly over time doesn’t argue against its sufficiency, for “as far as [the Scriptures] were at any time composed, so far were they an all-sufficient source of the history of the Church.” (iii-iv)
Jones will begin the history of the church with its first existence, not in the middle, i.e., the birth of Jesus. Thus they overlook the foundations of the church, for just as a child attaining majority age is not a new man, just as the sun hidden behind clouds then emerging brightly into the clear skies is the same sun, so “no new Church, distinct from the old, was set up by our Lord at His coming.” (v-vii)
Jones states that history may be written in two modes: inductively (from the facts to our conclusions), or what we might term the “magnet over iron filings” method – in Jones’ words, “to elaborate our theories, and then so to collect, and arrange, and color our facts and events, as to unite them into the support of our theories.” We must reason from, not unto, facts. (v-vi)
To start with the Bible, and with the origins of the church, is to give the student a resting place for his mind and conscience. Whether we’re trying to prove that Jesus is the Messiah, or looking for the origins of the covenant of works and grace, or looking for the first organization of the visible church, or the orders of the ministry, or sound doctrine, we must go to the Bible. (viii)
Jones believes that his work is unique, even though the ideas of the true history of the church is far from being new. He aims to begin at the beginning and unfold the origin, the covenants, the doctrines, the rites and ceremonies, the ordinance, the members and officers, the order and discipline, and the progress of the church from the old covenant to the new covenant. (ix)
He adopts a threefold division: from the foundation of the church after the fall to the call of Abraham; from the call of Abraham to the coming of Jesus; from the coming of Jesus to the close of the New Testament canon. It’s as we come to rightly understand church history in the inspired Scriptures that we will be able to navigate ecclesiastical history after the death of the apostles. (x)
His practice will be to unpack the whole of Scriptural revelation of a particular doctrine or rite or office in the Church, when it is first introduced in the Bible. “The reader will consequently be able to trace truth and error to the precise time and place of their appearance in the Church, and be armed for the support of the one and for the overthrow of the other. And it will be sometimes seen that, far away in the depths of the earlier history of the Church, serious and long-established errors and exhausting controversies are met and settled with a few but effective blows of the sword of the Spirit.” (xi)
So from an authoritative and sufficient Bible, Jones will seek to unpack Biblical theology in Biblical order. It will be a fun ride, so make sure to stay with us!
