History

Throughout history, God has again and again, repeatedly, time after time, called his people back to scripture, grace, and holy living.

It is a cycle that we see in the Bible, and then it is a cycle that we see in God's church.

So let's start at almost the very beginning with the early church.

I think the very beginning will be Acts 2, right? But we're going to, just a little, little, little way after that, we're going to meet the church fathers.

Not all of them.

We'd be here forever.

There are a lot.

We're going to meet just a few key church fathers.

And you might have heard of them, the church fathers.

These are great Christian men of the ancient Orthodox church.

Don't be frightened by that word Orthodox.

Orthodox just means normal.

And that might seem like a silly distinction to make, but there was some pretty abnormal stuff going on at the time.

So these men who belonged to the normal church for normal people were writing about the Christian faith and defending it in the first and second centuries after Jesus.

They are essentially the next leaders of the church after the original apostles.

There are loads of them and they write about all kinds of things.

You've probably heard of some of them.

Some of the names will ring a bell, I'm sure.

There's Clement of Rome, there's Polycarp, there's Justin Martyr, there's Tertullian, Oregon, Chrysostom.

And you can get modern translations of their books online because we live in a wonderful era for that kind of thing.

And if you've never read any of the Church Fathers and you're interested in reading one of them to sort of see what sort of thing they were doing, I would strongly recommend you start with Augustine's Confessions.

It's a surprisingly good book.

It's surprisingly easy to read.

And it's surprisingly not too long.

I bought a copy on Kindle for 99p.