Church History

Church history is not merely what has happened among Christians — it is the story of God preserving and reforming his church across two millennia. Historic Christianity reads its own story with careful attention to continuity: the Reformation was not a break from the historic faith but a recovery of it. Augustine's doctrine of grace, Chalcedon's christological settlement, and Nicaea's trinitarian confession are the common property of the Reformed.

The 16th-century Reformation recovered the material principle (justification by faith alone) and the formal principle (sola Scriptura) that the medieval church had compromised. Luther, Calvin, Knox, and Zwingli stand at its head. The Puritans, the Great Awakening, and the 19th- and 20th-century Reformed theologians (Bavinck, Kuyper, Vos, Van Til) continue that inheritance into the present.

These questions treat key figures (Calvin, Luther, Edwards, Spurgeon, Sproul, Augustine, Knox, Bavinck, Kuyper, Vos, Van Til), defining events (the Council of Nicaea, the Protestant Reformation, the Great Awakening, the modern missionary movement), and broader eras (the early church, the medieval church, the Puritans, the persecuted church). Know the past and you will be harder to deceive about the present.