I knew I would spend the rest of my life in ministry after I led my first Bible study in May 2014. I loved working at a summer camp where working from sunrise to almost midnight meant I had the privilege of making Christ known. In church camp terms, we often call this spiritual thrill a “mountaintop experience” — the things of earth seem strangely dim when every waking moment is flooded with gospel conversations.
But the things of earth rarely stay dim. Life always resumes. Whether it’s after a week of being a camper or serving for a summer as a staff member, we cannot escape the concerns and questions we encounter as “elect exiles” (1 Peter 1:1). My descent from the spiritual peak of camp almost knocked me completely off the mountain. The words of one student remained with me as I made my way back to a secular university.
“How can you know any of this is true?” a high school senior asked me as the summer closed. “I don’t feel anything when I pray.”
I had never met an atheist. At least, not an atheist who was smarter than me and had a response to everything I had to offer in response. As I returned to college that fall semester, I had to wrestle with whether the Jesus who felt so near to me at camp was actually there or if I had just been caught up in the moment.
I started with apologetics. The books, articles, and videos produced by Christians defending the reliability of the Bible, resurrection of Christ, and the proofs for God’s existence impressed me. But a means the Spirit used to keep me from despair was, ironically, the arguments of atheists themselves.
The talking points of the “New Atheists,” like Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, and most significantly for me, Richard Dawkins, came riddled with errors. Reading Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) thoroughly unimpressed me. Was this really the best the other side had? I have since learned that the so-called “New Atheists” have likewise been rejected by more fair-minded skeptics. But as a college sophomore, even I began to recognize the gaps in these popular works.
Dawkins famously wrote, “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
Did belief in the Christian God really amount to believing in Zeus or Athena? A simple internet search of Christian interaction with paganism reveals how early Christians like Justin Martyr (d. 165) distinguished the God of the Bible from religious cults. For all the claims of the atheists I read, my research kept pulling me back to church history.
It caught me off guard when the student challenged me to offer reasons for why I believe, but I quickly learned Christians of the past had been there before. Just because Dawkins and Hitchens droned about the problem of evil did not mean Christians had never considered it. Church history introduced me to centuries worth of Christians responding to the charges atheism brought against the truth claims of Christianity.
Apologetics helped lead me down the corridors of church history, but now I stay in past for reasons outside of defending my faith. If I did not know what these great figures like Augustine, Anselm, and C.S. Lewis had to offer regarding the modern questions I was trying to answer, what else could I be missing?
After strengthening my foundations for belief, I also had to make sense of what kind of Christian God had called me to be. I had no shortage of questions. How could I make sense of the Trinity? Did my time in the Catholic church or my time in a Baptist church have a more faithful celebration of the Lord’s Supper? I ask a lot of questions. It thrilled me to recognize our spiritual ancestors had the same drive. We all want to faithfully understand the Bible to know God truly.
When we approach the study of church history, we are not just learning about dead men and women. We learn of a living God. Ecclesiastes 1:9 teaches us “there is nothing new under the sun.” How inspiring it is to know God left us with His Word — faithful witnesses from all times and places who help navigate us through its deepest questions.
The benefits of studying church history remain numerous, but I always return to my struggle with atheism when asked why I became a church historian. There is real wisdom in the past. Once we realize our ancestors were not mere simpletons, but that they thought and wrote carefully, over 2,000 years of Christ’s power in the life of His church is opened to us.
No author in church history had it all right. The best representatives of our Christian faith would be the first to remind us of their sinfulness. When read as a whole, however, we encounter the truth of Jesus’s words when He declared the gates of hell would not overcome His church (Matt. 16:18). Church history is the tale of the Holy Spirit’s triumph over Satan. By studying church history, we can find joy in this tale, gain wisdom through this victory, and actively live it out as recipients of Christ’s promise.
I don’t know if the atheist I met at camp ever came to trust in the living Christ. As for me, even if I do not want to relive the mountaintop experience of camp, I am still on the mountain. I did not tumble all the way down into atheism. When I want to ascend higher, I can read God’s Word. To get the most out of that Word, I can read the saints who lived it so well.
— Travis Hearne (Ph.D., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is lead pastor of Providence Baptist Church, adjunct professor at Boyce College, and historian of American Christianity. He lives in Sparta, Ky., with his wife Jordan and their three sons: Dawson, Lewis, and Elliott.
