Standing on Their Shoulders: Heroes of the Faith for Today

By Rhys Bezzant

Being a Christian means being part of a bigger story, for God has worked in the course of history to make a people for himself. There is great joy in being part of this story, because we are spared the anxiety of creating ourselves out of nothing. Rather than going it alone, we stand on the shoulders of those before us in the faith, and consequently see further.
The studies in Heroes of the Faith tell the stories of twelve great heroes of the faith from the last two thousand years of history. Sometimes their strengths drove their story, sometimes their weaknesses, but their lives left others profoundly changed. From each of these flawed but faithful mentors, we can draw courage and receive spiritual nurture as we contend for the faith today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Acorn Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780994254405

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Preface

Our world may be globalised, but human beings still feel disconnected from each other, and their own sense of self is frequently fragmented. We have a work life, and a home life, and a social life, and some of us have a church life as well. In academic circles, we cultivate studies that focus on smaller and smaller areas of research. Indeed, amongst historians it is de rigueur to take snapshots of life in ages past and to investigate the lived experience of small communities and their local concerns. In a postmodern world, it is seen to be a misuse of power and an example of hubris to construct a larger narrative, or to place immediate interests in the context of a bigger story. The particular trumps the universal.

We may live our lives in local settings, but it is no less true that constructing our identity from scratch is impossible, for there are many circumstances in our lives that we can do nothing to change. We are part of a family with all its foibles, and a nation with its own expectations of being a citizen, and we speak a language that has its own rules. It seems to me that being part of a bigger story is inevitable, and indeed is something to be cherished, for it spares me the anxiety of creating myself out of nothing. For Christians, we rejoice in the bigger picture, for we discover that despite human sin, God has worked in the course of history to make a people for himself – first the people of Israel, and from them a holy nation that has placed its trust in Christ as Lord and Saviour. We are part of the grand design of God to remake the creation, of which our own conversion to Christ is the first fruits. We long for the day when God will fill all in all, and we shall see him face to face (Rev 22:4).

The following studies, telling the stories of twelve great heroes of the faith from the last two thousand years of history, remind us that we are part of that bigger plan of God. Each chapter begins with reflection on a passage of Scripture, which launches an important theme in the life of the hero we are about to meet. We then learn about the challenges and opportunities they faced, and something about the ways they handled the trials of the faith. Sometimes it was their strengths that drove their story, and sometimes it was their weaknesses. Each study concludes with some lessons for ministry today and a series of questions for further reflection. Our heroes come from the early church, from the great turning point of the Reformation, and still others from the modern world. They represent cultures vastly different from our own, but each of them shows how faith in Christ binds us together despite geography and language. Whether you read this book on your own, or join with others in a small group or book club, my hope is that you will grow individually in the faith, learn from the Scriptures and theology, and develop skills for service. Church history is about the way real people confront real truths and make a real difference.

This book has been made possible by the unstinting support of the Mathew Hale Public Library Trust, based in Brisbane, Australia, an organisation devoted to the cultivation of leadership. Most of these studies were first delivered as talks at the Going for Growth Conference, sponsored by this library alongside a number of churches and individuals, chief amongst them Alex Crawford and Mark Fowler whose entrepreneurial spirit and energy have been an enormous encouragement. The support of the Archbishop of Brisbane, Philip Aspinall, is also noted. Apart from the Brisbane conference, these studies have grown out of talks in many other churches in Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart, Connecticut, Virginia and Bangkok. Great thanks are due to Gina Denholm, Kris Argall and Keith Weller, whose extraordinary eye to detail has made their editorial work so valuable. When surveying such a large period of history, there are bound to be mistakes along the way, for which responsibility remains mine. The Bible used throughout is the New Revised Standard Version, and other quotations name the source text though in this general historical introduction academic footnotes are not supplied. Perhaps my students at Ridley College in Melbourne would yearn for the freedom to bypass footnoting too, but in the meantime I thank them for sharpening the narrative by asking excellent questions in class when I assume details that I should not. My own hope for this book is that many more Christians in Australia and beyond learn to stand on the shoulders of the giants of the faith and develop a taste for reading church history, so that they turn to more substantial biographies of heroes of the faith for spiritual nurture and motivation to serve.

1.

Athanasius

(297–373)

The Patient Teacher

A feeling that needs no introduction

Aloneness: we all experience it sooner or later. But feeling alone is never easy, whether it is being misunderstood by our families, finding ourselves on the wrong side of the popular crew at school, or holding opinions that no one else seems to share. The Psalter contains around fifty psalms known as laments, in which individuals pour out their soul’s feelings of abandonment or grief to the God who hears our prayers (e.g. Ps 13, 88 or 142). And when, in the course of Israel’s history, faithful believers found themselves in the minority, this remnant persevered in trusting God’s promises even when the majority around them had given up. God’s faithfulness to his people could be seen when he punished the majority for their sins, but kept some set apart as his own glorious witness. Jeremiah preached for twenty-five years with barely any fruit for his labours – he was, with just a few others, a remnant in Israel (see Jer 25:1–7). The Lord Jesus no doubt felt alone and abandoned – in a sense the only believing Israelite – when he called out from the cross using the words of a psalm of lament (Mt 27:46): ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ It is hard to go it alone.

The story of Athanasius of Alexandria is a classic tale of integrity despite opposition, learning to cope with aloneness, discovering what it is like to be in the minority, holding on to the truths that all others appear to have given up. For it fell to Athanasius, a priest from Egypt in the early third century, to put his life on the line for the belief that Jesus Christ was not like the rest of us, but rather was the Son of God who had taken on flesh. Christ was to be trusted as if we were trusting in the Creator of the universe and not merely trusting in a messenger of some inferior status. He may have been born of a woman, into a human body, but he could only reveal God to us and rescue us from our sins if he was God himself, the second person of the Trinity. A creature cannot reveal the Creator without distortion. A creature cannot save another creature with any assurance of success. Whether in debates with Arius, or in church councils, or while in exile in the desert, Athanasius had the presence of mind – and the hope of heaven – to put his own body on the line in anticipation of a greater reward. We have much to be thankful for in leaders like him.

A debate that needed resolution

Athanasius was born in Egypt in 297, just a few years before the Roman Empire ended the persecution of Christians in 313. Since the days of the apostles, Christians had faced patchy opposition from the authorities, sometimes empire-wide and at other times just local, sometimes on the basis of legal proceedings and at other times on the hearsay of neighbours. Finally, because of a strange vision that he received the night before he joined battle with his great opponent, Maxentius, in October 312, Constantine painted a kind of cross on the shield of each of his soldiers, looking much like the Greek letters chi and rho – the first letters of the name of Christ – and celebrated a remarkable victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. He dedicated the victory to the God of the Christians, and declared toleration in the empire. Athanasius had lived through some of the worst persecution Christians had known between 303– 312, which was instigated by the Emperor Diocletian, but now he experienced the peace that only the leader of the empire could establish. This was a quickly changing world.

Athanasius was a Copt. He spoke the local tongue, knew the local songs, was familiar with popular opinion, and was trained from a young age as a reader and deacon in the Alexandrian church. Known as the Black Dwarf, reflecting both the colour of his skin and his meagre height, he was nonetheless a fierce theological combatant. Precociously, in 315, he wrote an extraordinary defence of Christ’s divinity in a book called On the Incarnation. He was ordained in the church of Alexandria at the age of nineteen. As in every period of the church, there were some political factions in Alexandria, whose grievances took on doctrinal shape when the priest named Arius began to argue that the Son of God is not equal to the Father, but rather is inferior to him. Arius used the Scriptures to establish his case, arguing from Proverbs 8:22, for example, that God had made Christ just as he had made wisdom, which would put Christ on the level of the created order and not one with the Creator after all. Arius also expounded Colossians 1:15, where we learn that Christ is the firstborn over all the creation. Arius took this to mean that Christ had a beginning, a moment when he was born; consequently, according to the sea shanty of the day, ‘there was when he was not’. Even if Christ was created before the rest of the world, according to Arius, he was created nonetheless. The Son was not eternal like the Father, nor was the Son equal to the Father in power and authority.

Athanasius saw how this view, though apparently biblical, was actually destructive to the Christian faith, for if this was allowed to stand, we could never be confident that we had met God in Christ, nor could we be assured that Christ’s death and resurrection were powerful enough to deal with our sins. This would then be just another creature attempting to reveal God and redeem humankind. Assurance was destroyed. Besides, if it were true, it would mean that there had been no true Christians since the beginning of the church, for Christians had always worshipped Christ as Lord. If Christ was not Lord, Christians had been committing the sin of idolatry from the earliest times. A famous etching on the wall of a catacomb in Rome depicts a person, with arm outstretched as if in worship, pointing to a man on a cross with the head of an ass. The text beneath reads: ‘Alexamenos worships God.’ Even this ridiculing and anti-Christian graffito from the early second century recognised what Christians had always believed – that worship belongs to God the Son, who died on the cross to provide for our forgiveness and offer new life.

Consequently, it is particularly galling for Dan Brown to suggest, through the mouthpiece of his characters in his book The Da Vinci Code, that it was the Emperor Constantine who first invented worship of Jesus as divine. Christians had always done just this, and it was Constantine himself who flip-flopped on the matter. Though he had ended persecution and given legal rights to Christians, it would only be a few years before he demoted Christ, agreeing with Arius that Christ was not God in the flesh but rather a messenger subordinate to the Father. Apparently, Constantine saw more clearly than most the implications for