Faith of our Fathers
Much like the story told in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, the Christian faith is one with a history – the doctrines, prophecies, and promises embodied in real places and people of the past. Hebrews 12:1 timelessly connects us to these men and women who have gone before us by calling them our surrounding cloud of witnesses. And the Christian church has carried on this tradition of honoring and remembering the lives of her saints with stories, images, and feast days, which connects us both to the past and the future, with the hope of resurrection. As Christians, we believe that we are truly connected to those who have come before us and to those who will come after. The tales of old, the heroes of the faith, and thoughts and writings of the men and women of the past all live on in the lives of those grafted into the Vine, who once were not a people but are now a chosen priesthood, a holy nation, a rare treasure.
The month of October is important to our school as a time to reflect on the history of our faith. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus blesses those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, adding that the prophets of old were also persecuted. The tradition of reformation in the church is not confined to the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, but is one that can consistently be seen throughout history from the prophets to Christ to the early church fathers to our present day. Early Christian and Medieval men like Anselm, Athanasius, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, and many others all marked their time as standard-bearers of what it meant to truly believe when the visible church had slipped into nominalism (i.e. Christianity in name only). And so it was at the time of Martin Luther, in 1517, when he nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Church on October 31st, All Hallows Eve, challenging the Catholic Church’s issuing of indulgences in order to fund the building of St. Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican. This event marked the beginning of what we understand today as the Protestant Reformation, a movement that included John Knox, for whom Knox Academy is named.
The Protestant Reformation had a significant effect upon the founding of the thirteen original colonies in the New World. Each state became something of a haven for certain separatist groups. New York was Dutch Reformed. New Jersey was Presbyterian. Pennsylvania was also Presbyterian as well as Anabaptist. Florida was a home for the Huguenots. A large percentage of the colonies, including most of the south, were Anglican, which included the Pilgrims and the Puritans. And the not-so-separatist states were Rhode Island for the dissenters and Maryland, which was Catholic. As you can see, the story of Christianity in America is heavily influenced by the convictions that brought about the Protestant Reformation, and those convictions can be seen alive and well when a nominal church was called back to her First Love through the preaching of Men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield in the First Great Awakening and then almost 100 years later by men like Charles Finney in the Second. The story of American Christianity certainly does not end there, and includes movements like fundamentalism, Evangelicalism, and wherever we are today.
Please consider joining us for the Reformation Celebration and any other festivities that mark this month. And may you be blessed to reflect on the saints of old and may your blessing also include suffering…for standing with conviction against the ever-present cultural pull toward a nominal faith or worse. You are in good company!
Sincerely,
Ben McReynolds
