7. The Brokenness in Church History: Conclusion

A thoughtful Christian could reasonably object at this point:

All right. Christians were terribly wrong about religious coercion. They were wrong about slavery. They mistreated Jewish people. They treated women in ways Christians today would condemn. But none of that proves that the Church was wrong about the Trinity, the nature of Jesus, eternal punishment, or any other major Christian doctrine.

There is an important truth in that objection.

The historical examples in this section do not prove that the Trinity is false.

They do not prove that Jesus is not God.

They do not prove universal salvation.

They do not prove that the Holy Spirit is our divine Mother.

Those questions must be examined on their own evidence—above all, Scripture.

But I do not think it is accurate to place the Church's historical “moral errors” in one category and its doctrines about God, judgment, salvation, humanity, or gender in an entirely separate category.

Christian history contains examples in which serious moral error became embedded in theological interpretation and Christian institutions.

Christians did not merely behave badly while their theology remained untouched somewhere above the problem.

Christians used Scripture to defend slavery.

Christians used theology to justify religious coercion.

Christians developed theological arguments for women's natural subordination and supposed intellectual inferiority.

Christians sometimes interpreted their faith in ways that contributed to hostility toward Jewish people.

Christians could even come to believe that killing another Christian for theological error was consistent with serving God.

The moral error and the theological error were often intertwined.

That matters because doctrine itself can have profound moral content.

What Christians believe about God is not morally neutral.

If Christians represent God almost exclusively through masculine personal language for century after century, that shapes how Christians imagine divine authority, leadership, holiness, parenthood, and the relationship between men and women. If women truly bear God's image just as fully as men do, then whether the Church has obscured or neglected the feminine within God's self-revelation is not merely an abstract question about theological vocabulary. It has moral implications for how women understand themselves and how the Church understands women.

Likewise, what Christians teach about God's final judgment is not merely a technical question about eschatology.

If God truly keeps most of humanity in conscious suffering forever, then that must somehow be consistent with God's goodness, justice, mercy, and love.

But if Christians have wrongly attributed endless punishment to God when God's actual purpose is ultimately restorative, that error would hardly be morally insignificant. It would mean that Christians had presented God for centuries as eternally doing something profoundly different from what He actually intends to do.

I am not saying that the moral difficulty of a doctrine proves that doctrine false.

If eternal punishment is genuinely what God revealed, then Christians must ultimately accept that God's judgment is righteous even if we struggle to understand it.

And if Scripture truly reveals God through exclusively masculine personal identity, then that conclusion must also be taken seriously.

But these are moral questions precisely because they are questions about the character of God.

What we believe about Jesus affects whom we worship and how we understand humanity.

What we believe about judgment affects how we understand justice, punishment, mercy, restoration, and our enemies.

What we believe about human nature affects how we view ourselves and other people.

What we believe about men and women affects how Christians structure families, churches, education, authority, and leadership.

And what Christians believe God does to people can profoundly influence what Christians believe they themselves may justly do to people. The history of religious persecution demonstrates this particularly clearly. Christians did not imprison, exile, or execute people for heresy while believing theology was irrelevant. They did these things precisely because they believed theological truth mattered enormously. If theological error could lead a person to eternal destruction, suppressing that error could begin to look like an act of protection. If heresy endangered souls eternally, punishing a heretic could appear more justifiable than punishing someone who merely harmed another person's earthly life. Thomas Aquinas's reasoning illustrates exactly this connection. He argued that corrupting the faith was more serious than counterfeiting money because spiritual life was more important than temporal life. Within that theological framework, killing persistent heretics could be made to appear reasonable. This is horrifying.

Doctrine does not mechanically cause every act of persecution. Political power, fear, culture, economics, prejudice, and many other factors were involved. But theology mattered.

Ideas have consequences.

And ideas about God, salvation, judgment, humanity, men, and women have especially profound consequences. A doctrine producing troubling moral consequences does not automatically prove that doctrine false. But neither is bad fruit irrelevant. Jesus himself warned about false prophets and said: “You will know them by their fruits.” — Matthew 7:16 He continues: “Every good tree produces good fruit, but the corrupt tree produces evil fruit.... Therefore by their fruits you will know them.” — Matthew 7:17, 20 Jesus therefore gives Christians a reason to pay serious attention to fruit.

That principle must be used carefully. A professing Christian with bad fruit can believe something true. A professing Christian with good fruit can believe something false. Human behavior has many causes, and it would be irresponsible to blame an entire historical evil on one doctrine without demonstrating a real connection. But when a theological idea repeatedly produces—or helps justify—fear, cruelty, dehumanization, coercion, despair, inequality, or violence, Christians should not shrug and say: The fruit tells us nothing about the theology. According to Jesus, fruit matters. Bad fruit may not provide mathematical proof that a doctrine is false. But it is an indicator.

And when the connection between the doctrine and the fruit can actually be demonstrated, I believe it can be a very serious indicator that something within the theological framework deserves serious caution and re-examination. At minimum, bad fruit should make Christians examine a doctrine more critically, not less.

A teaching surrounded by humility, love, mercy, truthfulness, freedom, hope, reconciliation, and genuine Christlikeness reasonably gives us greater confidence than a teaching that repeatedly becomes intertwined with cruelty, fear, despair, domination, dehumanization, or violence. That still does not allow us to replace Scripture with our judgment about consequences. But it does mean that moral fruit belongs among the evidence that should send us back to Scripture asking whether we have understood it correctly. Doctrine is not morally weightless. It shapes how we understand God. And how we understand God shapes how we understand one another.

What, Then, Does Christian History Prove?

History does not prove my conclusions on this blog. But it does seriously weaken one response I have repeatedly encountered when discussing these theological conclusions with other Christians:

“Christians have believed this for centuries. That should make us extremely hesitant to question it.”

I understand that response. I was personally, as I share in "My Testimony", extremely hesitant to question orthodox teaching about God, Jesus, and eternal punishment. Longstanding Christian consensus deserves serious consideration. It should make anyone proposing a different interpretation—including me—humble, cautious, and willing to listen.

But Christian history also shows why consensus cannot be allowed to end the discussion.

We know that enormously respected theologians could be seriously wrong. We know that major Christian institutions could normalize serious error. We know that interpretations defended from Scripture could survive not merely for years, but for centuries. We know that serious moral error could become embedded in theological systems, ecclesiastical structures, canon law, preaching, biblical interpretation, and Christian culture. And we know that later Christians could return to the same Scriptures and conclude that some of what they had inherited was wrong.

So when a Christian raises the weight of historic consensus against one of my conclusions, I think the appropriate response is neither to dismiss that consensus nor to treat it as decisive. It deserves a hearing. But a serious biblical argument against that consensus deserves a hearing too.

If I am arguing from Scripture that an inherited Christian doctrine may be wrong, the fact that the doctrine has been considered orthodox for centuries cannot by itself answer the biblical argument. The question still has to be asked: What does Scripture actually teach?

Someone may respond that God allowed the institutional Church to remain seriously wrong for centuries concerning slavery, coercion, Jewish people, women, violence, and other matters, but specially protected it from comparable error concerning certain doctrines—perhaps the Trinity, the deity of Jesus, eternal punishment, or another theological formulation.

But that is, in my view, not the most natural conclusion to draw from the historical evidence.

Once the first claim has been established—that God permitted extraordinarily widespread and longstanding Christian error—the burden of argument changes.

We can no longer simply reason: The Church taught this for centuries, therefore God must have protected this teaching from error. We already know from history that longevity, institutional acceptance, theological sophistication, and enormous Christian consensus do not indicate divine protection from error.

God allowed Christians to defend slavery from Scripture.

God allowed Christians to persecute one another over theology.

God allowed major Christian institutions to treat Jewish people terribly.

God allowed deeply mistaken ideas about women to become embedded in Christian theology and practice for centuries.

God allowed brilliant, prayerful, Bible-reading theologians to reach conclusions that Christians today overwhelmingly reject.

Once we acknowledge all of that, it does not follow that God must have drawn an invisible protective boundary around some other set of post-apostolic doctrines.

If anything, the historical pattern gives us reason to recognize that God permits His people to make serious mistakes and then calls them to repentance, correction, and reform.

That does not prove that any particular disputed doctrine is wrong.

But it makes the assumption of selective doctrinal protection much less persuasive unless Scripture itself gives us a reason to make it. I do not think it does.

And by biblical evidence, I mean more than general promises that God will be with His people, guide His people, or preserve His Church.

Those promises can be true while Christians still make profound mistakes—as history itself demonstrates.

To establish that God specifically protected later institutional Christianity from major error concerning particular post-apostolic doctrinal formulations, we would need biblical teaching that actually warrants that conclusion.

For example:

Does Scripture promise that after the apostles died, the institutional Church will be prevented from reaching serious doctrinal error?

Does Scripture teach that ecumenical consensus will become infallible?

Does Scripture promise that a doctrine accepted by most Christians for a sufficient number of centuries must be correct?

Does Scripture identify particular later councils, creeds, bishops, theologians, or institutional structures as specially protected from theological error?

If Scripture clearly teaches something like that, then it should be taken seriously.

But it cannot simply be assumed because a doctrine became dominant.

In fact, the New Testament repeatedly warns Christians about error arising inside the Christian community.

Paul told the Ephesian elders that distorted teaching would arise even “from among your own selves” (Acts 20:30).

He warned that some would depart from the faith (1 Timothy 4:1).

He warned that people would gather teachers who told them what they wanted to hear rather than enduring sound teaching (2 Timothy 4:3–4).

John told Christians to “test the spirits” because many false prophets had gone out into the world (1 John 4:1).

Jesus himself repeatedly warned his followers about religious deception and about allowing human tradition to override the Word of God. In Mark 7:8–13, he rebuked religious leaders for “making void the word of God by your tradition” (Mark 7:13). His warning was not against tradition merely because it was old. It was against tradition being treated as authoritative when it displaced what God had actually said. That warning remains relevant for Christians today. A belief can be ancient, widely accepted, and deeply embedded in religious institutions and still need to be tested against Scripture.

Scripture does not teach Christians to assume that every theological consensus reached after the apostles will therefore be correct.

It tells us to remain watchful.

So the question cannot finally be:

What did Christians eventually agree upon?

The question has to remain:

Does what Christians agreed upon actually correspond with what God revealed?

What Christian History Is—and Is Not—For

Christian history still matters enormously.

It can show whether an interpretation really is new.

It can show us the diversity of early Christianity.

It can trace how theological language developed.

It can reveal when doctrines became formalized and when boundaries of orthodoxy hardened.

It can show which passages Christians emphasized and what philosophical, political, and cultural assumptions influenced their reading.

It can show us remarkable faithfulness.

It can also show us terrible mistakes.

And it can show us the fruit that grew alongside particular theological systems.

That evidence has to be handled carefully.

A doctrine should not be declared false merely because sinful people behaved badly while believing it.

But if a theological assumption itself repeatedly appears within the reasoning used to justify cruelty, coercion, inequality, fear, or dehumanization, that connection deserves serious attention.

Jesus told us to pay attention to fruit.

So when a doctrine or theological framework repeatedly produces—or becomes demonstrably intertwined with—deeply troubling fruit, I do not think Christians should remain completely neutral toward that evidence.

At minimum, it should lower our confidence enough to make us ask harder questions.

It should make us hold our inherited interpretation more cautiously than we otherwise would.

It should send us back to Scripture.

And where the fruit is repeatedly and demonstrably connected to the theology itself, it may provide significant evidence that something in the framework has gone wrong.

That is how I understand the historical studies elsewhere on this website concerning Jesus' deity, universal salvation, and the feminine and maternal understanding of the Holy Spirit.

Those studies do not establish truth merely because some early Christians believed something similar to what I now believe.

Early Christians were fallible too.

Their importance is different.

They demonstrate that the Christian past was more diverse than later presentations of orthodoxy sometimes suggest.

They show that some positions now dismissed as radically modern have ancient Christian precedent.

They help us understand how later doctrines and theological boundaries developed.

That leads me to a simple historical principle:

Early Christian history can show that alternative interpretations are ancient.

Later Christian history can show that Christian consensus is fallible.

Neither can finally determine what is true.

For that, we have to return to God and His Word.

But the Earliest Christian Witness Still Matters

None of this means Christian history is irrelevant to questions of truth. In fact, there is another important historical principle that should be acknowledged: All else being equal, the closer a Christian witness is to the apostolic period, the more historical weight it may carry when we ask what the earliest Christians believed.

That does not mean “earlier automatically equals true.” Christians could misunderstand Scripture in the second century just as Christians could misunderstand it in the fourth, sixteenth, or twenty-first. An early Christian writer is still not an apostle. An early Christian text is still not Scripture. But historical proximity matters. A Christian writing around A.D. 150 lived much closer to the world of the apostles than a theologian writing around A.D. 350. That earlier writer may have inherited traditions, language, interpretations, and memories circulating within Christian communities much nearer to the generations that actually knew the apostles.

So if we are asking:

What did the earliest Christians understand about Jesus?

or:

How did early Christians understand the Holy Spirit?

or:

Did Christians close to the apostolic period believe God's judgment would ultimately restore everyone?

...then evidence from the second century can sometimes carry particular historical significance.

It does not outrank Scripture.

But neither should it be treated as though it has exactly the same historical value as a theological formulation that appears several centuries later.

Earlier Does Not Always Mean Better

This principle has to be handled carefully.

A fourth-century theologian may preserve an older tradition faithfully.

A second-century writer may simply be wrong.

A later author may possess sources that an earlier surviving author did not.

And one early Christian text cannot establish what “the early Church” as a whole believed.

That is why the strongest historical evidence is not merely early.

It is early and substantial.

Early and geographically widespread.

Early and independently attested.

Early and consistent with evidence from several Christian communities.

The more of those factors we have, the more seriously the evidence deserves to be taken.

So I would not argue:

A Christian believed this in A.D. 150; therefore it is true.

I would argue something more careful:

If an interpretation appears among significant Christian witnesses close to the apostolic period—and especially if it appears independently in more than one place—that increases the historical probability that the interpretation belongs to early Christianity rather than being a modern invention.

And that matters.

The Direction of Development Matters Too

Historical chronology can also help us ask another question:

Which direction did Christian theology move?

Suppose an idea appears in early Christianity but later becomes marginalized.

Or suppose early Christian sources contain several competing understandings, while centuries later one position becomes institutionally dominant.

The later consensus does not automatically tell us which earlier interpretation was correct.

It tells us which interpretation eventually won. Those are not necessarily the same thing.

That distinction becomes especially important when major doctrinal definitions emerge through long periods of controversy. A fourth-century consensus may represent genuine theological clarification. But it may also contain concepts, terminology, philosophical categories, and institutional boundaries that became more developed over time. Therefore, when asking what the apostles themselves most likely taught, it is reasonable to pay especially close attention to Christian evidence nearest to them. Not because the second century is infallible. But because it is closer to the source.

That Is Why My Early-Christian Studies Matter

This is the purpose of the historical studies that follow.

I examine early Christianity concerning three questions that are central to this website:

1. How did early Christians understand the Holy Spirit?

2. How widespread was belief in universal salvation or ultimate restoration?

3. How did early Christian belief about Jesus develop into the later doctrine that Jesus is God?

I am not going to argue:

Some early Christians agreed with me, therefore I am right.

That would give Christian tradition an authority I have spent this entire section arguing it does not possess. But neither would it be reasonable to say that early Christian agreement means nothing. If Christians relatively close to the apostolic age understood the Spirit in feminine or maternal ways, that matters. If significant early Christians expected God's judgments ultimately to result in restoration, that matters. If the language Christians used about Jesus changed and developed between the earliest generations and the theological formulations of later centuries, that matters too.

It does not settle the biblical question. But it changes the historical question. A belief cannot fairly be dismissed as a modern invention if Christians were discussing or affirming something similar within the first centuries of the Church. And when earlier Christian evidence differs from later Christian consensus, the earlier evidence deserves particular attention precisely because it stands closer to the apostolic world.

So the historical method I will use in the following studies is neither:

“The early Church believed it, therefore it must be true.”

nor:

“Christian history is fallible, therefore Christian history tells us nothing.”

Instead:

Generally, the earlier and stronger the Christian witness—especially when independently and geographically attested—the more historical weight it deserves.

But Scripture remains the standard by which every Christian witness must finally be judged.

The Most Hopeful Lesson of Christian History Is Reform

There is another way to look at everything in this section.

We could read parts of Christian history and despair.

I do not.

One of the most hopeful things about Christian history is that Christians can change.

Christians defended religious coercion.

Other Christians challenged it.

Christians defended slavery.

Other Christians fought slavery, sometimes at enormous personal cost.

Christians produced horrific anti-Jewish rhetoric.

Christians have also repented of antisemitism and worked toward reconciliation.

Catholics and Protestants once killed one another over theological differences.

Today Christians from those traditions regularly work together, study together, serve together, and recognize one another as fellow followers of Christ.

Christian institutions have reconsidered assumptions about women that once seemed completely ordinary.

Churches have publicly confessed wrongs committed by earlier generations.

A Catholic council belonging to a Church with a long history of religious coercion could eventually affirm religious freedom and acknowledge that Christians had sometimes acted in ways contrary to the Gospel.

A Protestant denomination whose history was deeply entangled with slavery could publicly acknowledge and repent of that history.

That is hopeful.

Reconsideration is not betrayal of Christianity.

Sometimes reconsideration is how Christianity reforms.

Sometimes admitting that Christians before us were wrong is not an act of contempt toward them.

It can be an extension of the very thing many of them were attempting to do themselves:

seek God,

understand Scripture,

and pass the faith to another generation that could continue learning.

The Church is fallible because the Church is made of fallible human beings.

But God continues to work through His people.

Christians are capable of extraordinary love, courage, sacrifice, repentance, learning, and change.

That gives me hope.

And That Is Why I Am Asking These Questions

The doctrines examined throughout this website are not morally insignificant.

1. Who is God? Has Christianity represented God almost exclusively through masculine personal language while overlooking the Holy Spirit as our divine Mother?

2) What is God's plan for the world? Will most of humanity remain under God's punishment forever, or will God's judgments ultimately result in the restoration of His creation?

3. Who is Jesus? Is Jesus God Himself, or God's uniquely chosen and exalted human Son?

4. Who are Christians? What does it really mean for human beings to become like Christ?

These questions affect how we understand God's character.

They affect how we understand humanity.

They affect whom Christians worship.

They affect how Christians view people outside the Church.

They affect how we understand punishment, mercy, restoration, men, women, and one another.

They matter.

I know I may be wrong about some of the conclusions I reach on this blog, and I welcome thoughtful feedback. My desire is to understand as faithfully as I can what God has revealed in Scripture regarding these questions. But if what I am arguing is true, the implications are difficult to overstate—for how Christians understand God, salvation, Jesus, and one another.

Most Christians disagree with several of the conclusions I reach on this website.

That should make me humble.

It should make me willing to listen.

It should make me willing to be corrected.

But the number of Christians who believe something cannot make it true.

Neither can the age of a doctrine.

Neither can the reputation of the theologians who defended it.

Neither can the authority of a denomination.

Neither can my own certainty.

God's Word is the guide.

That is why, after studying Christian history, I do not primarily want Christians to become better followers of Augustine.

Or Aquinas.

Or Luther.

Or Calvin.

Or any modern theologian.

I want Christians—including myself—to become better followers of Jesus, who himself treated Scripture as truth and warned that religious tradition can be deeply wrong.

Again, he accused religious leaders of: “making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down.” — Mark 7:13

We should read Christian history.

Learn from it.

We should be grateful for faithful Christians who came before us.

Listen seriously to theologians and scholars.

But we should not surrender to them the responsibility God has given us to seek truth.

The Bereans were praised because they received teaching eagerly while still “examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11).

That posture remains necessary.

Listen.

Examine.

Pray.

Ask questions.

Remain humble.

And return continually to God's Word.

If something Christians have believed for seventeen centuries is truly what God revealed, careful examination of Scripture will not destroy it.

Truth does not need to fear investigation.

But if Christians have been wrong, the age of the error cannot transform it into truth.

History deserves our attention.

Christian tradition deserves careful study.

But God and His Word deserve our allegiance.

And the willingness of Christians to reform throughout history gives me hope that our theological story is not finished.

We can continue learning.

We can continue asking.

We can continue returning to Scripture.

And we can continue praying that the Spirit will lead us into all truth.

That is why we now turn from the long history of Christian fallibility to the earliest centuries of Christianity itself.

What did Christians closest to the beginning actually believe?